Your AI strategy is already out of date

A scaling drinks brand we've worked with told me they were holding off on AI until they'd nailed down a proper strategy. Sensible enough, on the face of it. A few weeks later they were back in touch, because everything had moved on and the strategy was stale before anyone had signed it off.

This pattern shows up again and again. What AI can do changes month to month, sometimes week to week. Spend three months building a strategy and you've built something that's out of date by the time it's finished.

This isn't a skills gap. People working in food and drink are some of the smartest, most resourceful and strategic out there. People who've developed five year plans before, executed on them and had them work in other contexts. The tool just moves faster than the document can keep up with.

So don't create a strategy. Build a set of operating principles.

This isn't a boring policy pack. It's a live overview of how you as a team decide to work with AI, which holds up even as the tools underneath keep changing. From the businesses I've worked with, three of them matter most.

Step 1
Set your limits
Step 2
Free up your team
Step 3
Scale and embed what works

The obvious pushback is that principles are just a strategy with fewer pages, which is fair to an extent. The difference is what happens when the tools change. A strategy has to be rewritten. Principles don't, because they're about how you decide, not what you buy.

1. Set your limits

Before anyone on your team touches a tool, get in a room and agree a handful of things. You don't need a policy document, just an agreement on five questions.

Inputs. What are you comfortable putting into an AI tool, and what's off limits? Does that change depending on the tool?
Brand safety. Where's the line on what AI can and can't touch in your name?
Customer data. What actually happens to it, and have you got real guardrails or just an assumption?
Risk appetite. How much are you willing to get wrong while you learn?
Ownership. Who owns the AI budget and decides which tools you pay for? How much discretion do individual team members have to experiment?

Give the questions in advance and nobody needs to go away and research it. Everyone in that room already has a view on most of these questions. Gather opinions, write down the answers as your principles and pop them in a shared doc.

2. Free up your team

Freeing up your team isn't just permission to try things. It's time. Real time to test and to learn, whether that's a proper course or an afternoon messing about with a tool. Not something people are squeezing in at 9pm after work.

Then pair it with two things: a way to check whether what they're trying is actually working, and a way to tell each other about it.

One brand I work with does this really well. Each person picks one thing to focus on, tests a few options, and once they find what works they spend two to three weeks properly embedding it before moving on. They're not running five experiments at once and losing track of all of them. Elin Roberts, CEO of Better Nature, wrote a really good LinkedIn post recently about how she focuses on embedding one thing at a time before she moves on to the next shiny new thing.

The sharing matters just as much. Another brand I work with has set up a Slack channel just for AI wins, so everyone can see what's working for each other. It's a low effort thing that does a lot of work, because the alternative is three people solving the same problem separately and nobody finding out.

3. Scale and embed what works

That Slack channel isn't just for the team. It's a live feed for leadership on what's actually working, which is how you spot the thing worth rolling out to everyone rather than leaving it with the one person who found it.

Once you've found it, make it the standard way of working, not a nice-to-have one person does. Give someone clear ownership of keeping it maintained and checking the ROI still stacks up six months on. Tools change, and what worked in March might need a tweak by September.

What it adds up to

The brands that get stuck aren't the ones that moved too fast. They're the ones that spent the time writing the plan and then had nothing left over for the part that's genuinely hard, which is getting people to change how they work. You need principles that are clear enough that everyone knows the boundaries, but flexible enough to give the team latitude to experiment and embed.

Set your limits, free up your team, scale what works. Then keep cycling through it, because the tools underneath will keep moving whether you've written anything down or not.

One thing to do this week

Put an hour in the diary with whoever needs to be in the room, and answer the five questions. Write the answers in one shared doc where anyone can find them, and revisit them regularly.

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Sanjay Sood-Smith

COO & Co-founder, Pesto