An AI strategy is a set of decisions about where the business will and will not use the technology. A vendor list is a set of logos a procurement team has been told to evaluate. The two are not the same document, and one of them is much more expensive than it needs to be.
On the Mercurial engagement, we evaluated eleven vendors. Ten were eliminated in the first week — not because they were bad, but because they answered a question the business wasn't asking. The eleventh shipped a single co-design pilot that sold out a capsule in a week.
No platform rebuild. No transformation programme. No two-year roadmap with a colour-coded swim-lane chart. One pilot, scoped to a single product line, with a kill switch the CFO controlled.
The strategy was the kill switch. Everything else was a vendor decision dressed up as one.
