AI Adoption Without Strategy Spells Disaster for Businesses

A recent panel discussion at Growth Summit Sydney warned against the dangers of adopting AI without a clear strategy. Amy Boulter, regional vice president at Salesforce, emphasized that building a solid foundation is crucial before implementing advanced autonomous layers like Agentforce.

Boulter noted that companies often fall into the trap of 'hacking tools together' to automate isolated instances of ChatGPT or other large language models, creating an unstable foundation that will crumble under scale. She likened building AI to laying a solid foundation for a house, what's the first thing you do? You build it right from scratch.

Before adopting advanced autonomous layers, leaders must define clear commercial goals and implement only after they've set strategy. Without clarity, companies are simply burning resources with zero return on investment and not allowing human teams to pivot toward high-value, relational work.