Can AI do strategy?

Alexander M. Nick Professor and Chair of Strategy at Michigan Ross. I study how AI changes the cognitive work of strategy: search, representation, and aggregation.

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Felipe Csaszar

The Big Question

Strategy has always been shaped by the cognitive limits of the people doing it. Teams can generate only so many options, work with only so much information, and deliberate for only so long before time, attention, and politics force a decision.

Artificial intelligence changes that starting point. It expands how organizations can search for alternatives, represent markets and competitors, and aggregate judgment. The important question is not whether AI replaces strategists. It is how strategy changes when the cognitive bounds that shaped the field begin to move outward.

I study that shift. My work asks what AI can already do on strategic tasks, where human judgment remains essential, and how leaders should redesign organizations and decision processes for an AI-augmented world.

What I Work On

Unbounding rationality

My recent work argues that AI is a fundamental issue for strategy because it relaxes the bounded rationality on which so much strategy theory depends. The argument is developed in Unbounding rationality: Why AI is a fundamental issue for strategy and translated for a broader audience in AI is revolutionizing strategic decision-making.

Search, representation, and aggregation

I organize much of this research around three cognitive processes at the heart of strategy: search, representation, and aggregation. The empirical starting point is Artificial intelligence and strategic decision-making, which studies how AI performs on strategy generation and evaluation. Related work examines strategic foresight, external representations, and distributed representations.

Organizations as decision systems

Long before the current wave of AI, my research focused on how organizations structure cognition: how they aggregate preferences, distribute attention, and discover strategies. That line of work runs from organizational decision making and organizational structure as a determinant of performance to realistic aggregation of preferences and organizations as artificial intelligences.

Recent Work

Background

I am the Alexander M. Nick Professor and Chair of the Strategy Area at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Before joining Michigan, I taught strategy at INSEAD. Before academia, I was head of research at an asset management firm and founder and CEO of an internet startup.

I serve as Senior Editor for Strategy Science. Earlier, I was an associate editor for Management Science and a senior editor for Organization Science. I co-edited the Strategy Science special issue Can AI do strategy? and the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and Strategy. In 2025, Ross named me Researcher of the Year.

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