Your AI strategy is a group chat.
A Slack channel and a Notion doc titled "AI Strategy" is not a strategy. It is a way of performing commitment while continuing to hedge.
The hook
I joined a company's #ai-strategy Slack channel last quarter as an advisor. 340 members. Average messages per week: forty-seven links to blog posts, twelve "interesting" reactions, zero pull requests. The channel had been active for nine months. I scrolled to the top. The first message was from the CEO: "Excited to kick off our AI journey." The most recent message was a link to an Anthropic press release. Between those two bookends, not a single line of production code had been discussed.
सांगतों तें तुह्मीं अइकावें कानीं · Listen: Do Not Dance Our Dance
सांगतों तें तुह्मीं अइकावें कानीं । आमुचे नाचणीं नाचूं नका ॥ १ ॥
जोंवरी या तुह्मां मागिलांची आस । तोंवरी उदास होऊं नका ॥ २ ॥
तुका ह्मणे काय वांयांविण निंद । पति ना गोविंद दोन्ही नाहीं ॥ ३ ॥
This abhanga names a specific state: performing a commitment while still hoping for the old option produces the appearance of movement without any of the actual work of moving.
What I keep seeing
A leadership team announces at an all-hands that AI is now a top-three priority for the year. Someone from the exec team creates a Slack channel. Someone from the product team creates a Notion doc called "AI Strategy 2026." The doc has seven headings, three of which are placeholders. Every senior engineer has been added to the channel. Every senior engineer has muted it.
Six months later: no new AI-specific hires, no killed projects to free up capacity, no team reorganised around AI work. The doc has grown to fifteen headings, four still placeholders. The exec who created the Slack channel is now framing the channel itself as evidence of investment. I have watched this play out at four companies in the last year. The script does not vary.
The mechanics
A real strategic commitment is measurable by what it displaces. If AI is a top-three priority, three other things got demoted to make room. Which three? In every company I have talked to that runs an AI-strategy Slack channel alongside zero reprioritisation, the answer is: none. Everything the company was doing six months ago is still on the roadmap. AI has been added on top.
This is not a strategy. It is a Slack channel. The distinction matters because the two produce different outcomes. A real strategy causes the org chart to change, the OKRs to change, and the hiring bar to change within a quarter. A Slack channel causes people to send each other links. I would know; I have started both kinds.
Where Tuka comes in
The abhanga has a line I would print on a poster if I could: जोंवरी या तुह्मां मागिलांची आस / तोंवरी उदास होऊं नका -- "as long as you still hold hope for what you left behind, do not pretend to be free of it." Tuka is not being cruel. He is being accurate about a specific pattern: the ritual performance of a commitment, done while still holding the option of the old life, is the worst of both states. It gives the person the exhaustion of committing without the freedom of having committed.
An AI-strategy Slack channel that does not reallocate budget is exactly this state, at company scale. Hundreds of engineers half-paying-attention to links they will not read, while the exec team gets the emotional reward of "we are doing something." It produces nothing shippable, because the resources needed to produce something shippable have not been moved.
What I would actually do
Delete the Slack channel. Kill three specific projects to free up specific engineers. Move those engineers, by name, onto a small AI-focused team with a written six-month goal and a budget line item. If leadership cannot agree on which three projects to kill, then AI is not actually a top-three priority; it is a top-eight priority being marketed as top-three, and the honest move is to say so. Half the time, when I have watched a company go through this exercise, they discover the AI initiative was defensive PR rather than strategy. That is a useful thing to discover. The company that stops pretending gets to spend the pretending-energy on the two real priorities it was neglecting.
Chetan Dhandal