AI won't wait for your strategy. But good strategy still matters

Your team is getting 10% faster at tasks that might not exist in two years. That's not a strategy. But it might be a distraction from one. In our latest Collective Thoughts post, Digital and AI consultant and Charity Change Collective co-founder Nick Scott explains why strategy is the foundation of your organisation’s transformation.

For the past two years, I've been part of the Charity Change Collective – a group of consultants working to understand and drive change in charities. This year we interviewed 50+ charity leaders about how they make strategic decisions when resources are tight.

We weren't asking about AI. We were asking about strategy.

But here's what struck me reading through all the responses to create the toolkit on Strategic Decisions and Leadership: the patterns we found explain exactly why our sector is struggling with AI… and why getting strategy right has never been more urgent.

The ground is already shifting

We should start by being honest about what is happening. Today. Now. AI adoption has been faster than the internet was. It's now hard to avoid generative AI in any workplace. And the evidence of how it's changing stakeholder behaviour is mounting daily.

Consider this. 24% of 18-24-year-olds have already used AI to complete job applications. Over 60,000 scientific papers published in 2023 likely used AI – 1% of all scientific articles. Government departments are analysing submissions through AI. Funders are starting to use AI to evaluate applications.

Your audiences, service users and stakeholders are using AI more and more, creating expectations you can't ignore. AI is replacing search engines – what do people see when they search for your cause with AI? The ground is shifting while many charities are still debating whether and how to engage.

The same mistakes, compressed timelines

When we asked leaders about strategic decision-making, clear failure patterns emerged. Incomplete or missing analysis about how the changing world demands a response now. Many charities stuck between analysis and action: studying problems without committing to change. Others making "strategic decisions" that don't actually shift resources, trajectory, or behaviour.

Sound familiar?

These are the patterns we're seeing with AI adoption so far.

Some charities are doing no analysis at all. They’re either ignoring AI entirely or tinkering with ChatGPT prompts without thinking what the widespread use of ChatGPT by staff will mean for them. Others are locked in analysis paralysis – waiting for clarity that will never come, perhaps hoping AI will "settle down" before they engage. I’m getting the sense that’s a vain hope.

And many are making decisions that may look strategic but aren't. Rolling out Copilot licences. Creating AI policies. Talking about AI at board meetings. Activity that is useful, but alone doesn't add up to actual organisational change.

As Lynn Roberts, formerly of Action for Children, told us: "There's another juggernaut [AI] coming down the line and we haven't even sorted the first one out."

COVID showed us what's possible – then we forgot

The charity sector demonstrated remarkable capacity for rapid transformation during COVID-19. Decision-making accelerated. Bureaucracy fell away. Teams organised around outcomes. Silos broke down.

Then, as James Plunkett of Nesta told us: "we functioned much more responsively and adaptively during COVID... and then almost all of that fell away after."

The lesson isn't that a crisis enables change. It's that we can change when we choose to. The question is whether we can build our capacity to adapt before the next crisis forces reactive scrambling.

With AI, the crisis won't arrive as a single dramatic event. It's arriving gradually, unevenly, and often invisibly – and the complexity of what AI can do is increasing rapidly. Not only are more people using AI, but AI is handling increasingly complex work that would take humans much longer to complete.

Why this demands strategic thinking, not just tactical tinkering

Here's what makes AI different from previous technology shifts: it doesn't just change how you do things. It potentially changes what's worth doing at all.

When AI can generate content, your value shifts from production to judgment. When AI can analyse data at scale, your value shifts from processing to interpretation. When AI can personalise communications, your value shifts from volume to strategy.

This is why "getting 10% faster" misses the point. If AI fundamentally changes what creates value, optimising yesterday's activities is wasted effort.

And yet many charities are approaching AI exactly this way – looking for efficiency gains on existing processes rather than asking the harder strategic questions. What should we stop doing entirely? What becomes possible that was previously impossible? How might we reimagine our mission to take advantage of AI? How do we maintain impact as society transforms around us?

These aren't questions you answer by giving everyone a Copilot licence. They require genuine strategic analysis, real choices with real trade-offs, and the organisational capability to adapt as you learn.

Our five tests for strategic decisions – and what they reveal about AI

Based on our interviews, we developed a diagnostic framework to help charity leaders assess whether they're genuinely making strategic decisions – or engaging in strategic theatre. Try to apply these to your organisation's AI approach. Be honest.

Test 1: The Analysis – Is your reasoning grounded in evidence, expertise, and mission?

Have you actually assessed how AI is changing your operating environment? Not the technology itself, but how your stakeholders, beneficiaries, funders, and competitors are using it? And how might they soon?

This means tracking how stakeholder behaviours are actually changing. Understanding how your audiences are using AI. Working out where expectations are shifting. If other organisations are using AI to offer support, scale volunteer training, or personalise communications, do you need to keep pace? Or if deepfakes are undermining trust, do you need to reinforce human connection instead?

Test 2: The Choice – Have you made a genuine choice with uncomfortable implications?

Or are you hedging, running pilots without commitment, waiting to see what happens?

As Sacha Deshmukh, CEO of Amnesty International UK, told us: "One of the things that happens in charities is we end up with wishy-washy strategy and then we end up with wishy-washy plans because we haven't been clear enough about the choices we're making."

Real AI strategy requires deciding what you won't do. It means identifying opportunities to do things previously impossible – and stopping activities AI makes less valuable. If everyone is comfortable with your AI approach, you probably haven't made real strategic choices yet.

Test 3: The Buy-In – Do stakeholders genuinely understand why, in language that connects?

The evidence suggests many staff are using AI in secretive ways, anxious about whether it's acceptable. In surveys, 61% of employees using AI at least weekly don't find it very trustworthy – yet 40% of those would still use it for important decisions anyway. This gap between behaviour and belief indicates people aren't getting the clarity they need.

Communication that happens once isn't buy-in. As Tracey Pritchard at RSPCA discovered, persistent engagement – "embarrassing" levels of stakeholder communication – made the difference between resistance and ownership.

Test 4: The Trajectory – Are resources actually shifting?

Research shows individual productivity gains from AI aren't yet translating into organisational returns. One study found employees saved 3% of their time with AI chatbots but reallocated over 80% of that to other work tasks – with "no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours."

Getting results requires more than giving people tools. It requires investing in training, redesigning workflows, and shifting leadership attention. If you've announced an AI strategy but budgets, roles, and attention remain unchanged, you've announced an aspiration, not a strategy.

Test 5: The Learning – Are you treating this as a hypothesis to test?

AI capabilities are changing so fast that yesterday's impossible is today's standard. Skills taking years to build are being changed because AI can support them – and sometimes directly do them. Best practices become obsolete before they're documented.

The organisations that will thrive aren't the ones with the best initial AI strategy – they're the ones building capability to continuously adapt. As Owen Valentine Pringle, Vice-Chair Elect of CAF, told us: "Fixed ideas about expertise will give way to adaptive capabilities. So-called soft skills will become the new hard skills over time because of the increasing rapidity of change."

Indecision is a decision on AI

Here's the uncomfortable truth: not deciding what to do about AI is still a decision. It's a bet that you can survive while everything around you changes. That's a risky bet to make.

COVID proved the sector can transform fast when forced. The question is whether we can build that capability proactively.

Our new Strategic Decisions and Leadership toolkit offers a diagnostic framework to help you identify where your strategic decision-making breaks down – and practical tools to address the gaps. It won't tell you what AI tools to adopt. It will help you make better decisions about AI, about digital transformation, and about everything else your organisation needs to navigate.

Because getting 10% faster at tasks that might not matter in two years isn't a strategy.

But making better strategic decisions? That's a capability that will serve you whatever the future holds.

Nick Scott is a member of the Charity Change Collective. As a consultant he focuses on digital and AI strategy. He runs projects and learning programmes for charities, think tanks and trade unions to help them engage with AI and is the Director for the Centre for Responsible Union AI at Unions 21. To discuss how these frameworks apply to your organisation, contact him on LinkedIn.