Vol. 8, Issue 1, Part A (2026)

Tactical projects, which are critical in terms of organizational change, continue to experience high rates of failure, most of which have been due to cognitive biases, faulty assumptions, and strict adherence to execution. The introduction of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an instrument of strategy represents an attractive yet inadequately comprehended possibility to alleviate these traditional traps by improving the data-based decision-making. The paper is the post-implementation, comparative case study analysis which aims at exploring the exact role of AI in identifying the outcomes of strategic initiatives. Using two historic, real-world industrial changes, the failed General Electric strategy of Digital Industrial (based on the Predix platform) and the successful John Deere strategy of AI-supported precision agriculture, we decipher the difference between AI-as-accelerant-of-failure and AI-as-enabler-of-success.

As our analysis believes, the very existence of AI technology is inconclusive. Rather, the results are determined by the philosophy and its intensity of inclusion into the strategic lifecycle. The failure of GE is an example of a technology-push strategy, in which AI was implemented to prove a conceptualized, general platform vision, which worsened strategic overreach, a lack of understanding of the intricacies of data integration, and organizational siloing. On the other hand, the success of John Deere illustrates a problem-pull model, in which AI was repeatedly used to address individual, high-value problems of customers, using proprietary information, and with an integrated and cross-functional development.

Based on this comparison, we obtain a prescriptive model of AI-augmented strategic management, describing how AI is to be systematic deployed in four stages: (1) Problem Definition, to sense opportunity in data anchored; (2) Planning, to de-risk it through simulation; (3) Execution, to monitor real-time and corrective control; and (4) Review, to learn to be causally. The findings of the study arrive at the conclusion that AI is one of the potent moderators, which can increase the overall soundness or imperfections of a strategy. The point of strategic resilience in the digital era is not to acquire AI capabilities in themselves, then, but to develop the leadership ability and organizational discipline to use it as an official member of the human decision-making process, and thus, alter the very process of strategy formulation and implementation.