# Strategic Planning for AI Investments

Over the past two years, many companies have launched artificial intelligence initiatives with the goal of creating or maintaining a competitive edge. As they prepare for 2025, executives are taking stock of whether their initial AI investments delivered the expected value.

In general, executives are finding two things to be true:

  1. Returns on AI investments have underperformed expectations, and
  2. AI strategies were often isolated to specific functional areas, limiting the opportunity for a value-creation multiplier across the organization.

As executives contemplate the changes required to fully capture AI's value potential, the four Vs—Vision, Value, Viscosity, and Velocity—can provide a strategic framework, ensuring AI investments translate into measurable outcomes. When these principles are kept at the heart of AI strategies, AI turns from a buzzword into a true driver of progress.

Related Content: How Top Businesses Shape Their AI Strategy

# Maximizing ROI of AI Investments: The 4 Vs—Vision, Value, Viscosity, and Velocity

Maximizing value realized from AI investments requires a deliberate and holistic approach. The 4 Vs serve as guiding principles to help organizations navigate the complexities of AI strategy and ensure meaningful, organization-wide impact. Here's how to consider and apply these principles to turn AI into a driver of measurable progress.

# Vision

AI has the potential to revolutionize industries, companies, and individual jobs, but organizations must ensure that their AI efforts are anchored in their organization’s vision. As the articulation of an organization’s long-term goals and aspirations, a clear vision provides essential direction and informs where and why AI investments should be made.

Over the past year, many companies dove headfirst into AI without tethering these initiatives to their vision. The result? Misalignment, missed opportunities, and investments that failed to live up to their potential. Yes, AI delivered some impressive technical feats. However, a consistent problem was that the results achieved through AI often did not move companies closer to their stated vision. While the results had a high “wow" factor, they lacked real business impact.

To ensure your AI strategy is aligned with your vision, leaders should ask their teams these three simple questions before greenlighting an AI project:

  1. Do you fully understand the vision of our organization? (While this may seem obvious, you might be surprised by the lack of clarity in many teams.)
  2. How will this AI investment accelerate the realization of our company vision?
  3. What is your plan to ensure everyone involved or impacted understands how this investment contributes to realizing our vision?

Far too many AI investments have failed to deliver their intended benefit because they didn’t serve the organization’s vision, or employees did not understand how these investments contributed to that vision. Answering these questions early can help align efforts and set the foundation for a cohesive AI strategy.

# Value

Next, to maximize the return on your AI investments, it’s essential to understand value through the perspectives of both customers and employees.

Customer Perspective

From a customer standpoint, organizations need to understand:

  • What customers truly value about their products or services—not just assumptions.
  • How they create this value today.
  • How AI is likely to impact the defensibility of their competitive advantage.

AI enables competitors to replicate differentiators more rapidly, increasing the urgency for organizations to adapt. The bar is rising quickly when it comes to customers' expectations for efficient, personalized, and proactive solutions, requiring businesses to continuously assess what their customers truly value. Companies must leverage AI to anticipate needs and deliver products and services with speed, precision, and adaptability to remain the preferred choice. By doing so, they safeguard their competitive advantage and ensure lasting customer loyalty.

Employee Perspective

Understanding how employees derive value from their roles is equally important. Today, many employees believe they create value by completing specific tasks, often discreetly spelled out in their job descriptions. But the truth is that AI is getting very good at completing tasks and will only continue to improve. So, if an employee believes it’s possible that AI could take over their tasks (and the way they perceive they create value for the company), resistance is almost guaranteed.

Helping employees reframe their internal narratives around AI and to recognize how they contribute to organizational success beyond task completion can alleviate concerns about workforce impact and foster a culture where employees see AI as a tool for enhancing their contributions.

Leaders should consider asking:

  • How do our employees derive personal value from their jobs?
  • Do employees see how their work aligns with our organization’s mission and vision?
  • Are employees concerned that AI may replace their roles and, if so, how can I help them see AI more as a teammate than a competitor?

Answering these questions can uncover barriers to adoption and shift employees’ focus from task-based value creation to broader contributions aligned with the company’s vision.

An example of gaining value from contributing to a vision is perfectly illustrated in this story from the 1960s space race. A visitor was walking down the hall of NASA’s facility in Houston and encountered a worker mopping the floor. The visitor asked them, “What do you do here?” The worker quickly replied, “Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m helping put a man on the moon!” This simple response personifies the power of alignment with a vision. Every individual, regardless of role, is first and foremost focused on contributing to realizing a greater goal.

When employees feel their efforts are central to achieving the organization’s goals, they’re more likely to see AI as a tool for amplifying their impact rather than as a threat to their roles.

Related Content: How to Make the Most of AI to Manage Change

# Viscosity

For many organizations, AI investments have failed to deliver the desired ROI. While there certainly have been technical reasons for these challenges, the more prevalent root cause has been an unwillingness or inability of the people and processes to evolve alongside the technology. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise as we all know change is difficult. However, as AI capabilities rapidly advance, organizations must adapt with equal speed—or risk falling behind.

Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, notes we need to embrace the reality that "the AI systems we use today are the worst we’ll ever work with." The era of major technology implementations creating value for the next 5-10 years is behind us. With many current AI solutions likely to become outdated within a year, organizations must adopt a flexible mindset that embraces the reality that the “shelf life” of AI investments will be exponentially shorter than the technology of years gone by.

To succeed, companies need to lower the internal viscosity of their people and processes. Simply put, companies need to behave less like peanut butter and more like water. Organizations with high viscosity experience significant resistance when faced with new ways of working, while those with low viscosity encounter low internal friction to change. The rapid evolution of AI capabilities will create scenarios where companies invest time, energy, and cost to introduce a new AI-enabled way of working, only to have to replace it in 12 months because a much more impactful AI solution is available. Peanut butter-like organizations will resist this change during the initial implementation and replacement effort. Water-like organizations, on the other hand, will flex, allowing for quicker time to value at both points in time.

Leaders who build low-viscosity companies will embrace past AI investments as sunk costs and enable their teams to adopt new and more effective alternatives quickly. They will implement “right now” solutions instead of waiting for the elusive “perfect” solution. In contrast, highly viscous organizations will struggle to keep pace with customer expectations and competitor capabilities, losing critical competitive advantages.

# Velocity

Before making significant investments in AI strategies or solutions, it seems logical that organizations should spend considerable time ensuring alignment with their vision, having clarity around customer and employee value, and building an overall operating model with low viscosity. But here’s the paradox: you must also get moving on AI right now. That’s where velocity comes into play.

Success in a rapidly evolving AI-enabled world requires leaders to execute two competing strategies simultaneously:

  • “Do not pass go” until you have your vision, value, and viscosity fully dialed in, AND
  • “Blow past go” with high velocity to take advantage of AI's benefits for your organization today.

Successful leaders have accepted this reality. Waiting for greater than 70% certainty on many AI investments risks putting their company at a competitive disadvantage. These leaders are focused on advancing their organization's AI capabilities and actively adjusting course when needed, rather than waiting for the single “right” path before proceeding with AI investments.

One way to maintain this balance is by identifying low-risk business processes for experimentation. For example, instead of overhauling an entire customer service system, a company might pilot an AI-driven chatbot for a specific product line or department. This approach allows teams to move forward with velocity while minimizing risks to core operations.

The pace of AI evolution is relentless, making speed matter. Companies must move quickly yet thoughtfully. Remember, it's about maintaining velocity even when facing uncertainty.

Related Content: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing a Winning AI Strategy

# Harnessing AI for Lasting Value in 2025 and Beyond

The last few years of AI advancement have taught us that technology alone isn’t the answer. The true test lies in how well organizations align their AI investments with their short- and long-term business goals. As you prepare your plans for 2025, focusing on the core principles of vision, value, viscosity, and velocity will help your organization to harness AI to enable the realization of your corporate strategy.

Not sure where to begin with your AI strategy? Propeller’s AI experts can help you align your investments with your business vision and drive measurable outcomes. Schedule a personalized consultation today to discover how AI can elevate your organization and create lasting value.