AI is the Corporate Haka

On Saturday morning, I had one of those ridiculously satisfying dad moments on the side of a rugby field. AJ is just seven, and Jan van Riebeeck is not a rugby powerhouse school, but you know what? It was magic.

His tough little team of overfocused seven-year-olds were playing a visiting bunch of tough Afrikaner farm boys from Dirkie Uys in Moorreesburg, and late in the game one of them broke through with what looked like an almost certain try. The kid has wheels; he found space, and it looked like a done deal down the line. Then AJ trained in from the left, took aim, and launched into a magnificent try-saving tackle.

The other parents and I were delighted with the winning result, but I was probably a little more delighted than everyone else, for obvious reasons. There is something wonderfully irrational about watching your own child make a tackle that makes absolutely no difference to the trajectory of civilisation, yet briefly leaves you convinced that the Springbok selectors should probably start taking notes.

More importantly, though, the tackle triggered a very old rugby memory.

In 1994, George Gregan chased down All Black winger Jeff Wilson in the dying moments of a Bledisloe Cup Test in Sydney. Wilson looked certain to score. Gregan somehow got across, tackled him as he dived for the line and dislodged the ball. Australia won, and one of the great international rugby careers was suddenly announced to the world.

It remains one of the finest try-saving tackles I can remember, partly because it captured something important about sport, business and life. Momentum is not destiny. A game can look lost without actually being lost. Sometimes the most decisive contribution is not creating something spectacular, but stopping something damaging before it happens.

That thought stayed with me because, at a much broader level, it also describes something fundamental about South African rugby.

The Springboks have rarely built their identity around being the prettiest attacking team in the world. Our rugby DNA has traditionally been shaped by defence, set piece, physicality, territory, pressure, and the slow accumulation of discomfort for the opposition. The scrum that removes your will to live. The maul everybody in the stadium knows is coming and somehow still moves forward. The relentless defensive line that forces you to make one more pass than you wanted to.

The great All Black teams have certainly had all of those qualities too, but their mythology has been built around something different: attack, flair, space, broken-field running, and players appearing in places they really have no right to be. And standing in front of all of it is the Haka, perhaps the perfect metaphor for New Zealand rugby itself. Aggressive, coordinated, intimidating, beautifully choreographed, and designed to seize the emotional initiative before the whistle has even blown.

This Saturday, we'll launch into the first of four test matches that will beautifully showcase this contrast, and it's going to be glorious. But this is not a diatribe about rugby, per se. Nah, I think there's a line here to be drawn to my other obsession (a close third behind my family and the Boks): AI.

Why, you ask? Because I increasingly think AI is the corporate Haka.

It is pretty, it is compelling, everyone knows about it. And other teams wish they had it. Now, every conference needs an AI speaker. Every software platform appears to have discovered that it was an AI company all along. Consultants have AI frameworks, banks have AI propositions, accountants have AI roadmaps, and somewhere a 23-year-old is explaining how his new agent will make half your organisation unnecessary by Thursday.

The noise is extraordinary, and because everyone else appears to be doing something, leaders understandably develop the uncomfortable sense that perhaps they should be doing more as well. The danger is that organisations start standing on the corporate touchline watching somebody else's Haka and conclude, "We need to do that."

That is where the strategic mistake begins.

The correct response to the Haka has never been to perform a better Haka. We apparently had a Zulu war cry back in 1937 (Michael Charton, I can't wait for your talk next week), but Apartheid and division politics put paid to that idea. These days, it's long gone, and we have our own rituals. These days, the Springboks don't watch the All Blacks and conclude that what South African rugby really needs is more synchronised thigh-slapping. We understand what we are good at, where we are vulnerable, how the opposition wants to play and how to construct a game plan around our own strengths while deliberately neutralising the strengths of the opposition. And yes, we can dance (better than Genesis). But we leave it for the sokkie dance floor.

And isn't the Haka and AI in the same wheelhouse? Sexy, compelling, in your face, and those that have it swear by it? And like the Haka, AI can be an extraordinary enhancement, but it is not a strategy. It's not something to adopt, slap on, or appropriate. No, it's something to be carefully used to support a system, a culture, a value proposition.

Your strategy, like the Boks and the Bomb Squad, should start at first principles. What is actually happening in your market? What are your customers starting to expect? Where are competitors getting better? Which parts of your operating model are becoming vulnerable? What are you unusually good at already, and which parts of your value proposition must be protected rather than accidentally automated away?

Only after those questions are answered should the AI conversation begin.

Many organisations are doing this precisely backwards. They discover a shiny piece of technology and then go hunting for somewhere to deploy it. Someone attends a conference and hears about agents, someone else comes back from a board meeting asking why the company doesn't have an AI strategy, three pilots appear, six subscriptions get purchased, and a committee is formed. Before long, a slide appears with the words AI Transformation Roadmap across the top, and everyone is nodding seriously, even though nobody has fully established what problem is being solved.

It is the corporate equivalent of watching the Haka, becoming thoroughly intimidated and deciding five minutes before kickoff that you should probably change your entire game plan.

The better response is much closer to what AJ did on Saturday. Understand where the threat is coming from, get yourself into position, stop the thing that can hurt you, and then play from your own strengths.

This is also why I remain fascinated by the way the Springboks themselves have evolved. For years, South African supporters complained about referees. We had a reputation for physicality and confrontation, and quite often we seemed to find ourselves on the wrong side of important calls. Under Rassie Erasmus, the response was not simply to complain more loudly. The Boks became better at understanding the system around the game. They studied protocols, improved communication, worked more deliberately on discipline and built better feedback loops with officials.

In other words, they did not abandon their identity. They adapted the environment around that identity, embraced data technology and narrative focus... And the All Blacks, in this same period, went from a no red card record to receiving more than the Boks. Their identity is mostly intact, but replays and video referees have shattered their reputation as no-foul competitors. Technology has shifted; the world is a different place, and the All Blacks, in keeping themselves isolated, have steadily been left behind.

Technology should not replace what makes your organisation valuable. It should amplify it. If your competitive advantage is extraordinary human service, AI should help your people provide that service more consistently. If your advantage is specialist knowledge, AI should make that knowledge easier to access and deploy. If your advantage is speed, use AI to remove friction. If your advantage is trust, be very careful not to automate the very interactions that create that trust in the first place.

And if your problem is poor accountability, please don't build an AI agent that simply lets you automate poor accountability faster. This is central to the EOS+Claude starter kit I am deploying in my September workshop.

The Haka analogy becomes even more useful when you look underneath the spectacle. Modern All Black versions are choreographed, practised and controlled. Every movement has purpose, every person knows their role, and beneath what appears to be raw emotion sits an enormous amount of structure and repetition.

The flash sits on top of substance.

That is how organisations should think about AI as well. The visible bit is easy: generating the email, building the chatbot, creating the image, deploying the agent. The harder, more important work sits underneath it: your data, processes, people, governance, customer understanding, and strategic priorities.

Without that foundation, AI merely gives you the ability to create chaos at significantly greater speed. And perhaps this is where South African rugby offers us its most useful lesson. You do not have to become the All Blacks to beat the All Blacks. You have to become a better version of yourself.

South Africa's strength has not come from trying to imitate New Zealand's attacking mythology. It has come from taking our own characteristics, physicality, depth, set piece, defensive organisation and increasingly sophisticated coaching systems, and evolving them into something incredibly difficult to beat.

Businesses should approach AI exactly the same way. Don't begin by asking how you become an AI company. Begin by asking what kind of company you are trying to become, what you need to defend, what you need to strengthen, and where new technology could meaningfully improve the way you already create value.

Because the real danger is not that somebody else has better AI than you. The real danger is that you become so mesmerised by the spectacle that you forget what game you are playing.

PG's Pro Tip

Before your next AI strategy discussion, start with the business rather than the technology. Identify the biggest external shift that could undermine your current model, then get very clear on the two or three things customers genuinely value about doing business with you. From there, ask where AI could make those strengths faster, cheaper, more scalable or more valuable without eroding the human element that made them valuable in the first place.

AI Prompt

Act as a strategic advisor. Help me design an AI strategy from my business needs rather than from available AI tools. Start by asking me questions, one at a time, about changes in my market, customer expectations, competitive threats, operational constraints, and our existing competitive strengths. Help me identify what we need to defend, what we need to improve and what we should deliberately preserve. Only once those are clear, recommend where AI could enhance our existing value proposition. Challenge any AI initiative that appears to be technology looking for a problem.

Join the AI Enneagram Workshop - 25 August

This is exactly the philosophy behind our AI Enneagram workshop on 25 August. Rather than beginning with tools and asking where we can force them into the business, we start with human problems, business constraints, and real operating needs, then use AI to help solve them. If that sounds like the conversation your team needs to be having, you are very welcome to join us. Register at www.pgtops.com/ai-tools

AJ didn't need to become Jeff Wilson on Saturday. He just needed to understand where Jeff Wilson was going.

Sometimes strategy is attack. Sometimes strategy is stopping the try. And sometimes the smartest response to a magnificent Haka is simply to respect it, understand it, and then play your own game.

Watch the Haka. Respect the Haka. Then play your game.