Strategy is no longer an annual exercise or a controlled process with a beginning and an end. It sits permanently on the board table, constantly challenged by forces that move faster than corporate cycles. Among these forces, one has become utterly inescapable: artificial intelligence.

What changed is not only the technology itself, but the parameters of the world in which we operate. When new interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot made intelligence universally accessible and computation globally scalable, the competitive landscape shifted in a way that many companies still underestimate. AI is a fundamental rewiring of how businesses are built, how brands are discovered, how decisions are made, and how power is distributed.

In the future, brands will not primarily live on websites, campaigns, or controlled touchpoints. They will live in conversations. Not only the ones between people, but in the dialogues happening inside large language models — the “thinking substrate” of the AI era. Consumers and investors are already asking these models questions like: “Why do people choose this product?” “Is this company trustworthy?” “What are the alternatives?” If your brand is not part of those conversations, in the right context and with the right information, it effectively does not exist.

This applies equally to consumer brands and to B2B companies, professional services, and listed companies. In a world where people no longer search but converse, discoverability becomes conversational, not algorithmic. Traditional SEO is being replaced by something more fluid: the ability to be found, understood, and recommended within AI-driven dialogues.

Leaders need to internalize that this is not a communication issue; it is a resilience and competitiveness issue. Corporate thinking has been shaped over decades — in some cases, half a century — with assumptions built for a linear, often predictable world. But AI introduces competitors who didn’t exist before, markets you’ve never looked at, and dialogues you cannot control. It produces narratives about your company by reading everything: disclosures, earnings calls, consumer reviews, Reddit threads, academic papers, news cycles, and thousands of micro-signals across languages and regions. And often, unfortunately, also hallucinates the answers. 

For a listed company, this creates a new governance challenge. Disclosures are regulated. AI conversations are not. Yet they shape investor sentiment, consumer perception, employer reputation, and strategic positioning. What happens when your carefully crafted regulatory announcement is reduced to a single sentence by an AI model that interprets it differently from your intention? What happens when the model draws conclusions from unofficial sources and merges them into one narrative? And how do you govern something that spreads across languages, markets, and platforms without boundaries?

This is why the board must now ask: Are we truly AI-ready as a leadership body? Readiness is not about whether the company has pilots, models, or dashboards. It is about whether the board understands the implications of autonomy, speed, scale, and non-linearity. Some boards have already limited the use of tools out of caution. Others have leaned in and allowed automated transcription, analysis, and model-assisted briefings in their governance processes. The next step will be deciding how much autonomy to give to agents. This discussion will change industries.

A brand in the age of AI is not a visual identity or a messaging framework. It is a living information system that moves through global models. It is shaped as much by earned media as by AI-mediated interpretations. It does not respect borders or linguistic limits. You may suddenly find your company referenced in a university case study in a country you’ve never operated in, simply because the model connected your data to a theme.

Boards and leadership teams must therefore understand that the relationship between formal and informal information has changed. People trust AI tools even when they have not followed every link or verified every source. This creates a responsibility for companies to ensure that the data feeding these systems is correct, coherent, and strategically aligned.

We have reached the moment where AI must be brought into the core context of the company: brand, reputation, disclosures, marketing, sales, stakeholder networks, internal processes, and governance. It is not enough to talk about what AI could enable. The question now is what AI will do if we do nothing, because the world around us is already shifting.

In the end, the board’s responsibility is not to predict the future but to prepare the organization to operate in it. That preparation begins with clarity, courage, and a shift in mindset.

And it ends with three unavoidable questions that belong on every board agenda:

1. How will our brand be found and understood in AI-driven conversations?
   
   

2. How do we ensure our data, disclosures, and narratives remain accurate as models interpret them?
   
   

3. How much autonomy are we willing to grant to AI agents, and where does responsibility lie when they act?

These questions define the next era of brand leadership. They also define which companies will remain relevant in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce, but universal and instantly accessible.

About Kati Sulin:

Kati Sulin is a Nordic business leader with experience in digital transformation across companies such as DNA Oyj, Terveystalo, Ifolor, and Fazer. Her work covers digital operations, e-commerce, data use, and customer processes in multiple industries. 

Sulin has held leadership roles in strategy and digital development and has worked with projects involving brand development, AI deployment, automation, and operational renewal.

Sulin serves on the boards of Apetit Oyj, Madara, LähiTapiola Henkivakuutusyhtiö, and Viestimedia Oy, and has previously served on the boards of Pihlajalinna, Witted Megacorp, and Kalevala Koru Oy.