Avoiding Common Pitfalls in AI Strategy Execution: The Crucial Role of Employee Engagement

Cameron van Orman—the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer and GM of Automotive Solutions at Planview—explains employee engagement’s critical role in successfully executing an AI strategy. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Organizational success can be measured in many ways. It is often defined by linking strategy and planning to business execution. However, for organizations undergoing digital transformations, likely accelerated by AI, bridging that gap can be complex. Unraveling the intricacies of strategy execution must include identifying the root causes of strategy failures. Research reveals that an overwhelming majority of executives surveyed (86 percent) indicate that their organization lacks a critical element of strategy implementation—accountability. As such, employee engagement is essential to bridging the gap between AI strategy formulation and execution.

Leaders who fall into the trap, sometimes unwittingly, of prioritizing employee busywork over tangible outcomes negatively impact engagement and impede organizational success. Disengaged employees hinder productivity and innovation and pose a significant obstacle to achieving business objectives.

Four Actions to Improve Engagement Across an Organization

To tackle this challenge head-on, there are four practical strategies leaders can implement to enhance employee engagement and optimize strategy execution:

• Making strategy social
• Building two-way communication
• Adopting a single source of truth
• Acknowledging failure as a steppingstone

It’s no secret that, historically, business strategies don’t always achieve their intended outcomes. Studies have found that roughly 60 to 90 percent of strategic plans are never fully launched. AI is poised to prove its value, but if enterprise leaders want their AI investments to pay off, strategy implementation needs to be transformed from an organizational liability to a core competency.

According to a global study on why strategies fail from Economist Impact, the research arm of The Economist, leaders face common challenges and pitfalls related to strategy implementation. The research found that it is equally crucial for executives to shape a company’s strategy as it is for them to direct the course of strategy implementation through leadership, guidance, oversight, and support. However, directing the course of a strategy does not entail overemphasizing employee busyness and losing sight of outcomes. If the productivity mindset goes into overdrive, the resulting “output myopia” will undermine employee engagement and the pursuit of business outcomes.

Employee Engagement and Strategy Execution

Strategy and execution work in tandem to accomplish objectives, like the two hemispheres of the brain. Both are necessary for humans and companies to excel, and neither can function optimally unless they are connected. In the brain, the connection is bridged by the corpus callosum; for strategy and execution, the bridge is engagement.

The Economist Impact report also found that more than four out of five executives surveyed acknowledged the need to improve employee engagement, suggesting it’s a common detriment to strategic plans. The performance of disengaged employees who lack productivity and motivation often falls short of their potential in multiple areas.

In contrast, engaged employees demonstrate strong self-motivation and productivity, even in remote work settings, and their efficiency supports a company’s competitiveness. This contributes to innovation, customer service excellence, job satisfaction and retention, and a deeper connection to the organization’s mission and values. Leaders, especially executives, can use the following recommendations to set expectations, direct policy creation, and build a companywide culture that fosters higher engagement to achieve business outcomes.

Make Strategy Social: Communication and Collaboration

Strategies cannot succeed in silos, but many companies haven’t taken steps to avoid this pitfall. When developing a strategy, over 80 percent of executives in The Economist survey acknowledged weaknesses in their companies’ internal communication and cross-functional collaboration efforts. One way to avoid making plans in ivory towers or focusing too much on financial returns is for leaders to take a social approach to strategy.

By crowdsourcing customer needs and operational challenges to inform strategy, leaders remain grounded in their organization’s reality, middle managers have a voice in the process, and team members can visualize that the strategy is created by exchanging recent, relevant knowledge. Early involvement and alignment among key stakeholders drive stronger buy-in and ownership of strategy implementation, which in turn leads to higher employee engagement.

Ensure Knowledge is Shared

Another element that companies tend to overlook when making strategy social is fostering two-way communication. According to Harvard Business Review, employees who get enough information to excel in their jobs are nearly three times more likely to be engaged. When they get daily feedback from their manager, they’re over two times more likely to trust leadership. Bestselling author Rita McGrath, a strategy professor at Columbia Business School, says leaders should be “in constant touch with the edges of the organization, establishing an ongoing system rather than a one-time interaction.”

Given the adage that knowledge is most powerful when shared, organizations must provide regularly scheduled updates during implementation to maintain the standard set when the strategy was created. By reciprocally exchanging knowledge, leaders and their teams can more fully understand risks, barriers, and changes that impact the market and customers.

Connect People and Work Through a Single Source

Within the strategy framework and its execution, the software enables everything from running scenario-based planning around OKRs to interfacing with AI copilots and managing routine implementation tasks. The software connects people to their work, but it also comes with a caveat—to optimize its value, the software must be connected. Among the issues that can arise from disconnected or fragmented systems is the lack of visibility created by siloed data. Data siloes leave leaders without the information they need to make informed decisions and develop uncertainties for teams about what course of action is best or if the information they have is accurate.

In contrast, connected data serves as the foundation of enterprise AI value realization because it enables AI systems to leverage comprehensive, integrated, and contextually rich datasets. This, in turn, enhances the accuracy of AI models, drives deeper insights, improves decision-making, and supports organizational agility and scalability. As such, a single source of truth is critical to connect people, their tools, and their work with accurate, real-time information to drive higher engagement.

Failure Isn’t a Brick Wall; It’s a Stepping Stone

Corporate culture plays a significant and often overlooked role for companies that strive to embrace winning strategies. In this context, a critical element is how a company views failure. In the early 2000s, LEGO acknowledged and rectified its failures to reverse itself from the brink of bankruptcy. As of 2024, it’s the world’s largest toymaker by revenue. For Pixar, before its $7.4 billion purchase by Walt Disney Studios, failure was viewed by its executives as a necessary element in the pursuit of creating something completely original.

Although it’s debatable whether a company’s culture falls upstream or downstream of policies, research shows that frameworks such as performance management, reward programs, and skills development initiatives shape employees’ commitment to an organization. These factors also impact how employees view accountability and their propensity to discuss risks or issues they’ve identified. Cultures that acknowledge failure as a stepping stone tend to have higher levels of engagement than those that don’t.

Successful AI Strategies Require People

Like any other strategy, capitalizing on an AI strategy is just a vision until the work is done. However, when united by the proactive action of leadership, a result that goes beyond nominal output is when an organization’s workforce gets the right work done at the best possible time. This distinguishing characteristic of a business focused on outcomes is impossible without highly engaged employees.