Can AI be used for strategy?
At the time of writing AI is the great “regurgitation” machine. It doesn’t think, it uses examples of things it has seen before and re-uses them in an attempt to be helpful.
From the outset this does not look like a great fit for strategy, where creativity and ideation are required to set meaningful goals and come up with novel ways to achieve them. But let’s look at the strengths of AI as a tool and see what value we can get.
It has scraped large volumes of information (books, articles etc) so you have access to a lot of information at your fingertips - but in a way that allows you to more quickly scan for interesting insights than traditional search. You can ask it to look for information from different sources and compare - something that would take you a lot longer manually. It probably won’t have access to your individual business data - but you can add that in.
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. - Mark Twain
This concept of ideas simply being combinations of other ideas also appears in books such as “Borrowing Brilliance - David Murray” and “Where good ideas come from - Steven Johnson”. This is something we can definitely start to use AI for - looking at solutions to tangential problems and using our own creativity to see if we can combine the ideas of others to create a solution to our own problems.
In the book “Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt” one of the core ideas is the ability to identify known pitfalls of your journey ahead of time, to prevent you from making mistakes earlier. This is easier if you have large domain knowledge and have done similar things before - but what if you haven’t? AI can be used to search for documented pitfalls to help you prepare for them. Which will save you a lot of time compared to learning all the pitfalls the hard way.
AI is probabilistic - so it can get answers to questions wrong. However in the search for new and innovative ways to combine ideas these mistakes can lead to interesting results. Combining ideas that you might never have thought about by accident.
Summary
- Use AI to its strengths - not as a generic tool to do everything
- Use AI as a research partner to quickly find ideas that can be combined to help you solve your problem
- Use AI to boost your domain knowledge and look for know pitfalls to quicken your route to success