Last week, our planning team hosted a roundtable dinner in Dublin, bringing together senior leaders from across the life sciences, construction, and food and drink industries. The conversation centred on a challenge that many organisations are now grappling with, how to move from AI enthusiasm to tangible business value
The discussion quickly surfaced a common theme. Most organisations do not have an AI roadmap problem. They have a decision clarity problem. AI is gaining momentum, but many leadership teams are still not clear where to start because they have not yet defined the decisions they actually need to solve to drive value.
Here are our key takeaways from the discussion:
- Planning is shifting from optimisation: the traditional view of planning as a purely optimisation exercise is giving way to a broader challenge: designing how decisions are made, owned, and executed across the organisation
- Significant investment in systems, but value is still under-realised: many organisations have invested heavily in planning platforms and tools, yet are still struggling to unlock the full potential of those investments
- Many organisations are stuck between pilot and scale with AI: there is growing recognition that the gap between running an AI pilot and embedding it at scale requires more than technology. It demands clear governance, ownership, and alignment
- The move to continuous, event-driven planning is happening, but operating models haven’t caught up: Organisations are increasingly embracing real time, responsive planning approaches, but the structures and processes around them have yet to evolve at the same pace
The overarching risk discussed throughout the evening was that without designing how decisions should work, AI simply automates yesterday’s problems faster, accelerating complexity rather than reducing it.
The organisations making real progress are not starting with use cases. They are starting with the fundamentals: what decisions matter, who owns them, and how to execute them at speed.
Thank you to our speakers who facilitated a thought provoking discussion, and to all attendees for their contributions.
If you’re thinking about how to move from planning to true decision intelligence, get in touch below.
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