Francis Wade The ‘Wait-and-See’ AI strategy

You have some doubts about your company’s approach to AI. The leadership team has decided to wait and see rather than move too fast. However, it’s been almost a year in which nothing has happened. Was that the right call?

At the time, the choice felt responsible. No-one knew what to expect, and the 2000 dot-com bubble reminds you that not doing anything was the best decision for many firms.

But so much has changed in the past year that you are having second thoughts. In this new context, is prudent caution a predictor of disaster? After all, you have found examples worldwide of innovators in your industry doing amazing things with AI.

You question some of the hype., but you suspect some of it is true. The innovators you’ve noticed (maybe even direct competitors) are moving ahead. Meanwhile, to add fuel to the fire, companies that dragged their feet on AI are already going bust.

Is the real risk the one nobody’s named: standing still while the available runway shrinks every quarter?

By contrast, in a 2016 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos called for the “eager adoption of external trends” and warned that fighting them meant fighting the future. Embrace them, he said, and you’ll get a tailwind.

It’s a decade later, but very few organisations have built a ‘Tailwind Strategy’ designed to catch weak trends and exploit them. What happens to companies that never do?

Freezing and panicking: the same failure

Kodak, Blockbuster and Xerox PARC all froze when the early warning signs were clear. Each is a shadow of its former self.

Sears looked like the exception; it eventually acted. But, by the time it did, the moment for real change had passed. The panic it fell into isn’t the opposite of wait-and-see – it was the same failure a few years later.

Fake activity

Even a team in wait-and-see mode has probably tried a few things in response to generative AI.

There’s the Pilot Program, the AI Task Force, the Chatbot Bolt-On, the Dashboard, maybe even a Reorganization. Each one exists, each one is visible, but none of them changes how the company actually decides anything.

It’s called Deck-Chairing. The name comes from those poor souls who busied themselves reshuffling the chairs on the Titanic. Your busywork may not be entirely useless, but it’s far from catching the tailwind Bezos described.

If none of these count as a decision, what does?

Real decision-making in 2026

During the Dot-com era, waiting actually worked for a lot of companies. Why? Waiting used to cost, at most, a year. Slow-moving markets gave you a cushion to make it up. If you missed a cycle, you could catch the next one.

In today’s world, that cushion is gone. AI is changing things fast enough that a year of wait-and-see won’t come back. The longer you delay, the shorter the runway gets.

The answer isn’t to freeze, but it isn’t to panic either. Instead, consider Big Picture planning – moving deliberately, at whatever speed the moment calls for, toward a horizon decades out.

By most estimates, we’re living through the lowest-impact phase AI will ever have on business. That impact will only grow from here – and long-term thinking is what lets you meet it instead of getting run over by it.

It’s harder than waiting. It’s also the only way to let a trend like AI work in your favour instead of against it.

Case: A cocoa mindset

A recent report showed that Jamaica’s cocoa industry has been halved. But the main culprit was neither hurricanes, fungus, nor thieves.

Unfortunately, farmers failed to plan around a basic fact of cocoa trees: they take three to five years after planting before they start bearing pods, and reach maximum production in about 10 years.

The result of delayed action? Nine out of every 10 cocoa trees on the island are more than 40 years old. That’s four times past their prime producing age.

The timing is particularly poor. The decline comes as the world price of cocoa has tripled from US$2.43 per kilogramme in 2021 to US$7.80 in 2025.

Fixing it now takes plans that span several decades, not merely quarters. When I try to explain such scary arithmetic to CEOs, they balk. Surely the cultural transformation their organisation needs should only take a few months?

Big Picture strategy is the antidote to wait-and-see thinking. It’s what lets a company catch a tailwind like AI instead of getting flattened by it. The details of the plan will change along the way. The horizon you’re planning toward shouldn’t.

Francis Wade is the author of ‘Perfect Time-Based Productivity’, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to [http://columns@/]columns@fwconsulting.com.