An executive says "we need an AI strategy" and asks you to come back in two weeks. How do you handle the ambiguity?

Do not go away and produce a strategy document

A document answering a question nobody has articulated will be received politely and shelved. The brief is ambiguous because the underlying question has not been formed, and forming it is the actual work.

Find the trigger

Something prompted this. A competitor announcement, a board question, a vendor conversation, a customer request, a cost concern. The trigger tells you what the executive is actually worried about, and it is rarely "we lack a strategy".

Ask directly, and ask what a good outcome would look like in six months. The answers scope the work more than any framework.

Then narrow to decidable questions

• Which business problems are candidates, ranked by value and feasibility.
• What we would need that we do not have — data, skills, platform, governance.
• What it would cost to prove the top one or two.
• What obligations apply given the use cases, which for consequential decisions about people is a constraint rather than a footnote.

Come back with a recommendation, not options

Two weeks is enough to interview a handful of stakeholders, assess two or three candidate uses and cost a proof of concept. Return with: here are the plausible uses, here is the one worth proving first and why, here is what it costs and what it would tell us, and here are the two things we must fix regardless.

Say what you are not recommending

Explicitly. An executive who asked for a strategy and receives a focused recommendation needs to see that the wider ground was considered and deliberately set aside — otherwise the recommendation reads as narrow rather than as decided.