For most industries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds substantial potentials. In the last decades, the extent ofdata created worldwide is exponentially increasing, and this trend is likely to continue. However, despite theprospects, many companies are not yet using AI at all or not generating added value. Often, an AI projectdoes not exceed its pilot phase and is not scaled up. The problems to create value from AI applications incompanies are manifold, especially since AI itself is diverse and there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. Oneoften stated obstacle, why many AI projects fail, is a missing AI strategy. This leads to isolated solutions,which do not consider synergies, scalability and seldom result in added value for the company. To create acompany-specific AI strategy with a top-down approach, a generic but holistic framework is needed. Thispaper proposes a strategic AI procedure model that enables companies to define a specific AI strategy forsuccessfully implementing AI solutions. In addition, we demonstrate in this paper how we apply theintroduced strategic AI procedure model on an AI-based flexible monitoring and regulation system for powerdistribution grid operators in the context of an ongoing research project.