AI Strategy Capstone Exercise
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- Apply skills from across this course in a single realistic professional scenario
- Produce a concrete, role-relevant deliverable using AI tools
- Self-assess your output against professional quality criteria
Board-level AI briefings are a different genre from internal strategy documents. They must be written for non-technical readers, grounded in honest organisational history, and focused on the decisions the board can actually make. Getting the tone wrong, either overselling AI or being vague about failure, destroys credibility with exactly the audience you need to persuade.
You are on the strategy team at a 500-person professional services firm. The CEO has asked you to produce a two-page board briefing on AI strategy for next month's quarterly meeting. Three pilots failed in the past 18 months and the board is sceptical. You will use AI to help research, structure, and draft the briefing, but the strategic judgment of what to include and how to frame it remains yours.
Capstone Exercise
Write a Board AI Strategy Briefing After Three Failed Pilots
Context
The firm is a 500-person professional services firm operating across management consulting, financial advisory, and human capital practices. Three AI pilots over the past 18 months have failed: a document automation tool abandoned after six weeks due to poor adoption, a client-facing AI summarisation feature that was pulled after a hallucination incident, and an internal knowledge management system that was never properly integrated with existing workflows. The board approved the pilots and is now sceptical of further investment. The CEO wants to present a credible path forward at next month's quarterly meeting, not a repeat of the previous optimism.
Your Task
Use Claude or Perplexity to assist with research, and Claude or ChatGPT to assist with structuring and drafting. Produce a two-page board briefing with four clearly labelled sections: (1) The current AI opportunity landscape for professional services firms, written in plain executive language with two or three specific use cases relevant to this firm's practice areas; (2) An honest assessment of why the three previous pilots failed, using the failure mode framework from this course to categorise each failure, without diplomatic vagueness; (3) Three prioritised AI use cases for the firm with a one-paragraph ROI framing for each, grounded in the firm's actual practice areas; (4) A recommended governance structure for responsible adoption covering decision rights, risk oversight, and success measurement. End the briefing with a brief reflection paragraph, written in your own voice, identifying which sections required strategic judgment that AI could not supply and why.
Your notes (optional)
Deliverable
A two-page board briefing of 700 to 900 words with four clearly labelled sections written in plain executive language, plus a reflection paragraph identifying where strategic judgment overrode or substantially revised the AI output. The briefing is ready to present to a non-technical board audience.
The capstone identifies the failure assessment section as the place most strategy documents lose board credibility. What exactly costs the credibility?
Select one answer.
- Board-level AI briefings require a different register from internal strategy documents: plain language, honest assessment of prior failure, and focus on the decisions the board can make rather than the technical details they cannot evaluate.
- The failure assessment section is where most strategy documents lose board credibility: diplomatic framing of real failures signals to the board that the team has not understood what went wrong, which makes a new proposal feel like a repeat of the previous ones.
- AI can compress the research and first-draft work on a structured strategic document significantly, but the three elements that require human judgment are: selecting what is relevant to this specific firm, calibrating whether the ROI claims are credible, and determining what the governance structure must explicitly prevent based on the firm's actual failure history.
- The reflection paragraph practised in this capstone is a transferable habit: any strategically important document produced with AI assistance should include a clear internal record of where human judgment was applied and why, even if that record never leaves the strategy team.
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