AI is revolutionizing strategic decision-making

Abstract:

This forthcoming Harvard Business Review article argues that AI changes strategic decision-making by expanding three cognitive tasks at its core: search, representation, and aggregation. AI can generate and screen far more alternatives than human teams, replace static strategy frameworks with richer and more dynamic models of markets and competitors, and enable structured forms of challenge and deliberation that are less constrained by hierarchy, fatigue, and time pressure. The article then addresses a central strategic objection to AI adoption: if many firms can access similar models, where does advantage come from? Its answer is that durable advantage depends less on generic model access than on the proprietary data, embedded processes, and speed of organizational adaptation that firms build around those models. The piece closes with a practical playbook for leaders who want to redesign strategic decision-making and shift the strategist’s role from analyst to architect of an AI-augmented process.