Your strategy probably contains a sentence along the lines of: "within the current framework we can set up this process however we want." That sentence was correct at the moment it was written down. Regulation around AI does not stand still. Regulators publish guidelines, sector-specific requirements shift, and what was a grey area last year is a requirement or a prohibition this year. The strategy itself does not change along with it. It remains on paper exactly as it was adopted, while the assumption behind it quietly lapses.
That is the difference between revising a strategy and letting a strategy expire. No one withdraws the assumption, because no one has the task of doing so. The rule changes, but the meeting where that should be discussed is not on the agenda.
Regulation here follows something that is already happening: AI is taking over work, in parts, with varying degrees of oversight. For some tasks the system can produce the outcome itself. For others a human still approves or rejects the outcome, for a reason. For yet other tasks nothing substantive changes and it remains human work. Regulation responds precisely to that division: the more a task moves toward full takeover, the sooner requirements appear regarding explainability, oversight, and liability.
That explains why one company experiences a new guideline as an obstacle and another as confirmation. A company that had already set up a task with human oversight that approves or rejects often already meets what the rule asks. A company that had fully handed the task over without that intermediate step still has to adjust the process. The difference lies not in the sector and not in the size of the company, but in how the task was set up beforehand.
A new requirement means that a specific assumption about a specific task must be checked: does it still hold, under these conditions, for this process. That is a factual question with a factual answer. It also means that the moment of the last review matters. An assumption last confirmed two years ago is a different matter from an assumption that was still correct last month.
It does not automatically mean that a process must be turned upside down, and it does not mean that a personnel decision follows from it. Whether and how an employer adjusts the deployment of people in response to a rule is up to the employer, together with the employer's own applicable legal requirements. What we track is the fact: does the rule change the status of a task, and if so, which one. The choice that follows from that lies with the executive board.
Regulation is one of several external signals that undermine a strategy without anyone noticing. What customers themselves start doing with AI also changes an assumption, see what customers doing things themselves with AI means for the demand for your services, as do competitor announcements, worked out in what competitors announcing AI means for your positioning, and the way suppliers build AI into their own product, as described in what suppliers building AI into their product means for your dependency. Regulation does not change daily, but the cycle is shorter than most strategic planning. A quarterly rhythm to check whether an upcoming or amended rule places a task in a different category is sufficient for most executive boards. Waiting for the annual strategy session is too slow for this signal.
The decision is not "do we comply with the rule", that is a legal question with its own track. The decision here is: does the strategy still fit what this rule says about this task, and if not, which assumption must then be explicitly revised. That is exactly the kind of outside-in thinking that is often missing when a strategy is updated internally, explained in what outside-in thinking means in practice for strategic decisions. And because a revised assumption may be up for discussion again later, it is important that the reason the choice was made at the time is recorded, as described in how to record why you made a strategic choice.
The underlying question with every regulatory change is the same: which work in this company can genuinely be taken over by AI, and to what extent. That question is answered per task with the work scan from FTE TO AI.
You can start by laying the assumptions that touch on regulation side by side: which task, which assumed freedom, and when it was last checked. For those who do not yet have that overview, there is the free assumption check, a short round in which you name your most important assumptions and see, for each one, when it was last confirmed. The full proof press, with sector data, regulatory clocks, and the executive team's self-plot side by side, is under construction.
Stel uw vraag. Vaak zit de echte vraag een laag dieper — daar mag ik naar vragen.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.