If Your AI Strategy is the Headline, You Don’t Have a Strategy

Over the holidays I did a proper digital detox, if you can make the time, I recommend it.

I’m back, recharged, and still oddly intolerant of lazy narratives, especially when it comes to AI.

AI will replace humans is one of them. It’s short-sighted. If you’re using it as a strategy, you’ll pay for it later, in rework, mistakes, churn, and lost trust.

A better question for 2026 is this: what gets replaced, what gets reshaped, and what do we need to learn so we don’t automate ourselves into mediocrity?

I’ve seen this movie before. I was in my early twenties in 2000, not the beginning of the internet, but the moment it went mainstream. The moment it stopped being niche and became the default. Money rushed in, and then reality arrived..

Leaders either freeze, or sprint into decisions that looked modern but were operationally reckless. A classic example is Webvan, it tried to scale online grocery delivery fast, building expensive infrastructure and expanding before proving the model, it raised about $800m, lost roughly $830m, and shut down in 2001.

That’s the bit most people forget. The internet didn’t arrive neatly. It arrived loudly, messily, with hype, scams, clunky products, and bold claims that didn’t survive contact with customers. Sound familiar?

AI now feels like the internet in 2000 here is why:

• A new interface makes powerful tech feel for everyone Back then, the browser became the doorway. People didn’t need to understand the tech, they just needed to click. Now, chat is the doorway. You don’t learn a tool, you describe what you want, a plan, a draft, a summary, a decision memo, code, a proposal, sometimes even actions inside systems. When the interface becomes natural language, adoption stops being a technical decision and becomes a behavioural one.

• Adoption is real, but outcomes are uneven The internet in 2000 was everywhere and still clunky, slow, confusing, insecure, full of junk. AI now is similar. People are using it, teams are experimenting, organisations are rolling it out, and we all know someone who got a brilliant answer that was completely wrong. So the question is not are we using AI? It’s are we using it well?

• A new literacy gap opens overnight In 2000, the new literacy was search, judgement, safety, and knowing what not to click. In 2026, the new literacy is not prompt tricks. Prompting helps, but it’s not the point. The point is judgement, knowing what you’re trying to achieve, giving the right context, spotting weak logic, checking the output, and knowing when to stop. In other words, you need to be proficient at your job to steer AI towards the outcome you want, faster. If you don’t have that judgement, AI doesn’t just make you faster, it makes you wrong faster.

• The real value is in the plumbing The internet’s value came from the unglamorous work, broadband, payments, security, better design, mobile, and the slow craft of making services reliable. AI’s value will come from the same kind of unglamorous work, governed knowledge, good data flows, evaluation, security controls, integration into workflows, and clear accountability. The shiny layer gets attention. The foundations change the world.

• The bubble isn’t the point, the sorting is The dot-com crash didn’t mean the internet was a fad. It meant the market stopped rewarding vague promises and started asking, what is the product, who pays, what is defensible, what is real? AI is heading for the same sorting process. Some tools will look incredible and deliver little. Others will be quietly transformative because they’re designed around real work, real constraints, and real outcomes.

• Trust becomes the battleground Back then, the tax on the internet was trust, spam, phishing, malware, dodgy payment pages, privacy breaches. Now, the trust tax is different but just as real, hallucinations, data leakage, IP uncertainty, deepfakes, and errors that look convincing. Trust is not a policy document, it’s a product experience.

• The runway is shorter this time The early internet had a long stretch where norms and regulation lagged behind behaviour. AI is getting less of that runway, especially in Europe. Love it or hate it, it changes the game. Governance, transparency, and literacy are no longer later projects, they’re part of doing it properly now.

The Million Dollar Question: Will AI replace humans?
Here’s my honest take: AI will change the work, not erase the worker. The winners won’t be the companies replacing people to cut costs, they’ll be the companies growing capable teams who know how to use AI to raise the bar.

AI is a force multiplier for people who understand the work. It rewards judgement and makes clarity valuable again. Critical thinking, proficiency, and the courage to redesign what good looks like will matter more. If you’re leading a team, the job is to redesign work so speed doesn’t come at the cost of quality, safety, trust, or the team itself.