In a nutshell
As organisations increase their investment in AI, knowing where to focus is becoming more challenging. Alphero's Futures Director, Will Anderson, uses rally driving as an analogy to explore why clear strategic direction matters in uncertain conditions. He argues that strategy shouldn't be a static plan, but something that evolves alongside delivery, informed by experimentation, continuous learning and changing circumstances. The goal is to help organisations make better investment decisions while staying focused on long-term outcomes.
Execution got cheap. Direction didn't
Every organisation is racing. Some to get ahead. Most to avoid being left behind.
The race we have been sold sounded like Formula One. Best-in-class machines. Intelligent systems. Smooth surface. Telemetry on the pit wall. Champagne at the end. That seems to be the track in most presentations about the potential of AI.
The race we are in feels more like a dirt track rally. Gravel, fog, and a surface that changes without warning. Cars routinely leave the road. Ruthlessly unpredictable terrain, with surface and weather changes between one car and the next.
To navigate this uncertainty, two people sit in the front. A driver and a navigator.
Rougher roads ahead
When conditions keep changing, navigation starts to matter a great deal more.
The uncertainty bites hardest in digital investment, though not in the old way. Marketing and digital budgets used to be first against the wall. This time the money is still flowing. BCG has IT budgets growing 5.8% into 2026, the strongest outlook their survey has recorded. But buyers expect net spending to fall in most technology categories. The exception is AI, where 66% plan to spend more, up 21 points in a year.
So the pot is bigger, and almost all of the increase has one destination. In Australia and New Zealand, 39% and 43% of organisations have no dedicated AI budget, so it comes out of what was already there. That leaves teams balancing existing digital commitments against emerging capability. And only 14% of Australian CEOs report any revenue gain from AI so far, against 30% globally.
Spending is going up. Confidence about where to point it is not.
So you cannot pull over until the road settles. You read it as you go. That is the job of the front seat.
Navigating from inside the car
The driver holds the wheel. The navigator calls the corners before they arrive.
In this analogy (that I'm gleefully dragging out) the driver is the team doing the work. Designing, building, delivering, improving.
The navigator is the strategy. It does not have to be a strategist. A designer can read the road. So can an engineer. Often the team can do it themselves, if someone has given them something worth navigating by.
Good strategy gives people a shared direction. It helps teams make decisions in light of progress, even when conditions change.
For that to work, we need navigators in the front seat. Present as it unfolds, adjusting the plan in line with the overarching strategy along the way.
There is a commercial edge to this as well. In the same survey as referenced earlier, the most mature AI adopters reported around 19% return, against 9% for those lagging behind. The ROI is yet to be validated, which makes direction the thing that protects the budget you already have and earns the next round of it.
The longer-term goal for us is always to help our clients navigate for themselves.
Reading the road
A rally championship has many stages. You need a plan for each one and a plan for the season, and the two have to stay connected.
Strategy works the same way. A long-term vision that also directs clear decisions today.
We connect them by making things. Roadmaps. Experience concepts. Prototypes. Proofs of concept. Stories people can see and argue with. When the future is tangible, people can respond to it, test it against what they know, and change it.
The genuinely tough problems, or white space nobody has mapped yet can sometimes resist all of that. That’s why we sometimes flip into Lab Mode. Our outcome-focused R&D capability that buys real intelligence quickly, without the project losing pace.
A rally navigator sees no more of the road than the driver does. They read from pace notes written on a reconnaissance run days earlier, driven slowly, often in different weather. Every corner they call describes the road as it was.
Strategy has a version of the same problem. We do plan ahead, but we build the picture from the road we have just driven. A roadmap written in March carries March's assumptions. A business case describes the market on the day the numbers were run. Recency bias is built into both.
At the Monte Carlo Rally, teams send ice-note crews through each stage shortly before the cars. Their only job is to mark where the road has changed since the notes were written.
That is the discipline worth borrowing. Strategy as a living thing, rewritten as the road reveals itself. Outcomes held firmly, routes held loosely, and small experiments run to find out what is actually out there.
Who in your organisation is driving ahead to check? And how relevant are the notes you are racing on?
References
- Boston Consulting Group. With Confidence Restored, IT Buyers Concentrate Their Spending on AI. 2026. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/it-budgets-ai-spending-priority
- PwC Australia. PwC Australia's CEO Survey: Confidence surges, AI delivery gap emerges (29th Global CEO Survey). 2026. https://www.pwc.com.au/media/2026/pwc-australia-ceo-survey-2026-confidence-surges.html
- Omdia, reported in Australia, New Zealand AI boom lacks data foundations. SecurityBrief AU, 2026. https://securitybrief.com.au/story/australia-new-zealand-ai-boom-lacks-data-foundations
- Lenovo and IDC. 2026 CIO Playbook. 2026. https://smbtech.au/news/lenovos-2026-cio-playbook-finds-95-per-cent-of-anz-enterprises-plan-to-lift-ai-spending-as-focus-shifts-from-pilots-to-production/