Aligning and Integrating Strategy, Technology, and Market Growth with AI
Digital transformations can go awry, but all is not lost. Here's a practical AI application that can help get things back on track – and drive innovation and reinvention forward.
Eric Feige is Managing Director, Strategy at VShift and a CMS Critic contributor.
Digital transformations are about business reinvention. Success requires aligned leadership, cultural adaptation, implementable strategy, and constant evolution. Disconnect between functional leaders (e.g., CFOs, CIOs, and CMOs) and their consultants, systems integrators, and agencies is a key reason why digital transformations fail.
Often, we find that organizations are unable to quickly launch new sites or digital products required for growth and prioritized as urgent by leadership. Their content supply chain is bottlenecked and incapable of supporting personalized content experiences. And their customer data is just not usable despite years of marketing technology investment.
If only there were a magic cure that could turn back time and ensure that strategies are implementable, digital technologies flexible, and campaigns effective – and able to drive growth at scale.
Strategies created by management consultants with little to no digital program implementation experience yield “pie in the sky” roadmaps. Digital ecosystems implemented by global systems integrators and shaped by outdated IT principles deliver monolithic technologies that make business stakeholders dependent on vendor-certified consultants. Go-to-market (GTM) campaigns deployed by marketing specialists can only be launched by using non-enterprise MarTech (aka “shadow tech”) that circumvents blockers.
Many organizations struggling to execute are increasingly self-aware that misalignment and lack of integration between strategy, technology, and marketing have left them with what developers call “a ball of mud” – a mess of an operating model that is hard to understand, difficult to maintain or evolve, and resistant to change.
Can AI magically address organizational and third-party consultant dysfunction? Could a team of skilled AI agents, instead of humans, possess enough depth of specialized knowledge to seamlessly develop implementable strategies, flexible digital platforms, and winning GTM campaigns?
No. AI will not be a magic cure – particularly if it is divorced from people, culture, and processes.
That said, AI-enabled and integrated strategy, technology, and marketing will deliver business reinvention outcomes and will help course-correct transformations that have gone awry.
AI-enabled organizations will lead the way
According to IDC, $3.9 trillion will be spent on digital transformation by 2027. Now is an opportune time to utilize AI – along with the right team of associates and consultants – to AI-enable and align key aspects of digital strategy, technology, and marketing so these four key issues are addressed:
- Lack of leadership support
- Ineffective cross-functional governance
- Stakeholders not being “on the same page”
- Expanding the scope broadly rather than narrowing the focus
Instead of executing a traditional management consultant strategy, AI-enabled organizations can shorten expensive multi-month strategy projects into mere days by systematically conducting competitive analysis, by ingesting stakeholder feedback and other relevant input into large language models, and by leveraging synthetic users for CX research and solution validation.
Furthermore, AI tooling can render transformation roadmaps along with solution models to help stakeholders and cross-functional governance team members develop a common, aligned vision.
The benefits of a composable AI approach
Rather than putting all your IT investments in a single vendor's digital technology, AI tools can help compose and intelligently assemble diverse digital experience modules. This way, the aligned vision can be progressively launched into production, with the more important aspects of the roadmap taking priority.
Modularity and componentization are key in this new world of AI-supported development and integration. GTM leaders can more easily and flexibly trial-run digital technology using AI while platforms are not yet in production – a clever way of eliminating “shadow” systems.
Lastly, by using AI to match customer profiles and critical needs, creative team members can more quickly fill the content supply chain with relevant copy/messages, images, videos, and tools to increase open rates, click-throughs, time-on-page engagement, and ultimately campaign conversion.
AI can bridge the divide between strategy, technology, and growth, which are currently major impediments to successful digital transformation. By integrating AI enablement into these domains, sustained business reinvention is made possible while rewarding functional leadership for collaboration and for driving innovation and reinvention forward.
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