AI is producing more intelligence but leading to less clarity

As 2025 draws to a close, one question echoes across boardrooms and government offices alike: what should we do next year? What strategy should we follow? What bets should we place? And how do we win in a world that feels increasingly unstable, accelerated and uncertain?

For many leaders, this has been the year of everything AI. Artificial intelligence moved from the periphery to the centre of decision-making, quietly rewiring how work gets done across business and government. White-collar productivity jumped by an estimated 20 to 40 per cent in roles that adopted AI properly, not because people worked harder, but because routine thinking disappeared.

Tasks that once took days now take minutes. Strategy decks that previously required weeks of analyst time can now be outlined in an afternoon. Financial models that took teams days to build can be stress-tested in hours. In many functions, one person can now do the work of a small team. Hiring slowed across large organisations in 2025, yet output did not, because AI absorbed incremental work.

However, for all this progress, leaders feel less certain than before as strategy itself is changing.

The frameworks that guided leaders for decades were built for a world where information was scarce, slow and unevenly distributed. That world no longer exists. Today, leaders operate in an environment of radical abundance: of data, analysis, scenarios and options, arriving faster than organisations can process them.

At its simplest, strategy has always been about two enduring questions: where to play and how to win. It is about building a competitive edge, a moat that allows an organisation, a government or a nation to outperform others over time.

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