Facing economic headwinds with a strategic advantage: using AI to play a different game

For many leadership teams, 2026 has not started with the positive economic momentum we were all expecting. Costs remain stubborn in some parts of the system, demand is uncertain, and the usual playbooks are not always relevant in our current context.

Across New Zealand, most large organisations are no longer asking whether AI matters. They know it does. The more important question is whether their investment is changing anything that matters commercially. In most cases, the answer is not yet. There has been experimentation. There have been pilots. There have been some wins. But for most part, the promised gains in productivity, margin, or growth still sit out of reach.

The reason is simple. AI has too often been treated as a technology initiative when it should be approached as a strategic shift.

If all AI does is help your people draft documents faster or summarise meetings, you have improved ease, not competitiveness. In some cases, we are seeing this ease of producing content in particular is actually ADDING additional noise and complexity to organisations…not the other way around. The real opportunity is larger than that. Its redesigning workflows, how you make decisions, and how you serve customers so your organisation can create more economic, customer, people and planet value from the same inputs.

That matters in an environment that looks even more uncertain than it did at the start of the year.

Leadership teams are currently managing two opposing forces. On one side are the real world costs they cannot easily control: supply chain pressure, rising fuel and electricity costs, and the prospect of rising interest rates on the horizon. On the other side is the opportunity to remove friction from the system through better use of data, automation, and AI enabled workflows.

The strategic job to do is not to pursue AI because everyone else is doing it. It is to use it intentionally to offset the costs and complexity that our external environment keeps throwing at us.

There is also a leadership discipline required here. Productivity should not be reduced to a headcount conversation. Businesses that use AI simply to cut deeper may find they weaken capability, stall execution, and damage the very customer experience they need to protect. The stronger play is to enhance or reinvent business processes that create efficiency, raise decision quality, and free up capacity for work that creates real economic value.

The organisations that will pull ahead are unlikely to be the ones with the most pilots or the loudest AI narrative. They will be the ones that connect AI to strategy, operating model, and measurable business outcomes. That is where the advantage sits.

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