Can AI do strategy?

Travis Corrigan -
This post originally appeard on Linkedin in Jan 2023.

Can AI do strategy?

  1. short answer: not right now
  2. long answer: yeah probably, but not for the reasons you think


**disclaimer**
the strategy department at the UofU business school has invited me to talk about strategy in an age of AI next week - this is a sneak peek.

so.. can AI do strategy?

answering this question requires teasing out a couple of things:

  1. the current state of human vs machine intelligence
  2. strategy's current state-of-the-art (in theory and practice)
  3. comparing AI's trendline with strategy's state-of-the-art

1) human vs machine intelligence
AI is advancing quickly it is doing a lot of things we didn't think it could do, and much better than humans. what's driving the trendline and what human-level tasks is it coming for next?

2) strategy's current state-of-the-art (in theory and practice)
what is a strategy? how do you create a strategy? or execute one? are humans good at it? does it matter?

using both the strategy literature and case studies from my career in both startups and corporations, we'll walk through each step of the strategy formulation process to answer each of these questions.

3) compare AI's trendline with strategy's state-of-the-art

see if there's some future intersection where AI is "doing" strategy - in whole or in part - what that would look like, and what it would take to get there.