Opinion
Strategy planning in the age of AI
Moving fast is easier than ever in the AI era, but the companies scaling into giants are the ones that didn't skip the strategy work.
We're truly in an era where everything is changing and technology is moving at a faster pace than ever. Some of the young companies we're seeing are taking an approach of charging ahead and paying less attention to the planning and strategy they started with, with the main thing being to release a product or updates before everyone else.
The Israeli ecosystem has a proven, successful track record when it comes to startups, but it wasn't always just the core technology that made the difference. An excellent user experience like monday.com, an innovative business model like Lemonade, or scaling to millions of users like Wix – these are the products that got them into the market, but it was the strategy that turned them into giant companies. The need to build a strategy that's right for the product you're building and the industry you're operating in is sometimes more important than presenting another feature, even if in your eyes it's a game changer.
We're seeing second- and third-time entrepreneurs succeed in building trust with investors and raising large sums, not because they succeeded with AI the first time, but because they've already gone the whole way before. They know the challenges at every stage: the move from MVP to a fully developed product, building a business model and updating it based on user feedback, acquiring first customers, scaling within a primary country, and international hyper-scaling. For someone who has gone the whole way before, it's easier to plan, and that makes a big difference. Companies doing this for the first time should first of all make use of the advantage the Israeli ecosystem offers: consulting, getting help from someone who has done it before, and planning ahead for the stages they see in front of them.
Building strategy at this time does indeed require shorter intervals than before. Processes that used to be at the core of a company's journey (like building the product) are becoming faster and enabling parallel testing and shortened timelines, but the bottom line is: artificial intelligence shortens processes, not business shortcuts.
The main stages a company needs to go through as a business haven't been affected by AI: the company still needs to provide a solution to a real problem in a way that's convenient for the user, convince [users] that it's good and reliable, and deliver the goods so users come back. Once you have that at the micro level, you grow both fast and right.
Seffi Tsarfati is head of strategic partnerships at Google Israel.
