The deck is the problem.

The pattern is consistent enough now that we will write it down.

A company gets serious about AI. A senior person, often new in seat, commissions a strategy. The strategy comes back as a forty-page deck. The deck identifies twenty initiatives, scored on a 2x2, with a recommended portfolio of six. Sponsors are named. Owners are not.

Twelve months later, two of the six initiatives are still alive, in the sense that someone is still listed as the owner. None of them are in production. The deck is the artifact everyone refers to when asked “what are we doing about AI,” and the deck is the reason nothing has happened.

The deck is not a symptom of the problem. It is the problem. It is too long to be read by anyone who could kill an initiative. It is too vague to be acted on by anyone who could ship one. It exists to be referenced, not to be executed against.

The fastest way to unstick an AI portfolio is to throw the deck out and replace it with one page per initiative, written in plain English, that an executive can read in fifteen minutes and a builder can act on in a week. A verdict per page. An owner per page. A date.

If you have a deck like this, you do not need another strategy session. You need someone willing to write the one-pagers and put a verdict on each one. That is most of what we do.