Is Strategy immune to AI charms?

I am a big believer of automation, it has become an essential tool for enhancing productivity and quality in various industries but can we automate strategy development? The quick answer will be NO but then as a strategist I am seeing the tremendous value AI/Analytics tools brings in my everyday decision making, so why are we not using more AI in the strategy building process? Or how can we adopt AI in Strategic development?

Adoption of AI in areas of marketing, supply chain, operations is growing but comparatively very few are using AI in strategy or financial planning. I believe there is a big misconception when we visualize the future of? AI in less popular areas, we imagine AI telling us what is right for business or not in place of a business leader and hence the slow adoption.?

We all are familiar with these 3 type of intelligence which we use on a regular basis to understand how our business is working:

1. Descriptive Intelligence : Most heavily used, examples like dashboards for competitive analysis or to study performance in the business that are automatically updated.
2. Diagnostics Intelligence: More of baselining by looking backward at the business and understanding root causes and drivers of performance.
3. Predictive Intelligence: Helps to anticipate certain scenarios and the value of things in future based on momentum from the past as well as signals picked in the market.

AI can be used to improve the diagnostics intelligence at a fraction of cost or resource requirement while having a more granular performance analysis in minutes whereas I will not solely depend on AI for predictive intelligence . Though as a business leader I would like to evaluate the prediction and try to understand the why behind the predictions.?

Every business is trying to explore their opportunities to use AI more than what they are using today, for example if you are a company who faces a lot of volatility or limited data for decision making then using AI in your strategy may not be as beneficial as you would want to. AI is better utilized in controlled portfolios for better prediction accuracy. In my last article I discussed being iterative in strategy, we should not build the 3 to 5 years strategy and forget about it. Companies need to regularly revisit big decisions as the assumptions may have changed with time. AI can be a valuable tool in change management to deploy resources here to meet the shift.

As strategists we all know the annual drill, gather data, identify trends, set goals and develop functional plans. This process is time consuming and resource intensive, we can introduce AI tools to generate business scenarios and complete strategic planning processes in less time and with fewer resources. These are some of the ways Generative AI will change the strategic planning process in future:

1. Uncover market insights by using right prompts and generate specific actionable insights in less time.
2. Calculate thousands of potential scenarios for strategic planning with a single prompt. We can use its creativity to increase productivity in everyday brainstorming.
3. Create virtual focus groups in minutes, it can assume any role and can provide valuable insights for strategic planning.?
4. Digest and summarize large volumes of customer and market data to assist in the strategic planning process.

I am aware that there is a limitation on available talent currently to implement AI/ML in all companies but there are different platforms to access AI that need very less resources internally to set up. AI is becoming the driving engine of the great transformation in business to make the world economy more productive and efficient. And I believe AI will eventually change the strategic planning process, we just have to trust our data and the tool.