Strategy Making Gets an AI Boost

The Insider is a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter where our managing editor curates HBR stories, research, and ideas that senior leaders shouldn’t miss. Think about the tools your company has used when crafting strategy: SWOT analyses, growth-share matrices, Porter’s five forces, etc. According to University of Michigan professor Felipe A. Csaszar, executive teams have historically needed these contained ways to map out complex business decisions because of a concept called bounded rationality: “the idea that human decision-makers, however capable, are constrained by finite attention, memory, and processing power.” But AI has changed these parameters, argues Csaszar in a new article: AI can generate and screen thousands of strategic alternatives where a human team might be able to consider a mere handful. It can build and continuously update models of markets, customers, and competitors that are far richer and more dynamic than any static framework. And it can test ideas through simulated deliberation—synthesizing diverse perspectives and challenging assumptions without the groupthink, hierarchy, and time pressure that distort real-world strategy meetings. As a result, strategy-making is unbound—AI can help you find better paths forward, identify more opportunities and threats, and make decisions that are more resilient in the marketplace. So, before your next strategy offsite, consider using AI to: Widen your strategic options before narrowing them. Replace static snapshots of your customers, competitors, or forecast with a dynamic model. Design rigorous ways to test and challenge ideas. Redefine the strategist’s role from analyst to architect. According to Csaszar, you’ll likely find that “the conversation in the room is sharper, the options are stronger, and the time that used to go to basic analysis now goes to the questions only humans can answer: What do we believe? What are we willing to risk? What kind of company do we want to become?” Related: Once you’ve decided on a strategy, assess your team’s readiness before rolling it out. What Career Arc? There are two career shifts many senior leaders are experiencing today: “Longer working lives mean many of us will spend 50 or 60 years working,” writes London Business School professor Lynda Gratton. “At the same time, artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace at which work itself is changing.” This means “careers are becoming longer just as it is becoming harder to predict what those careers will look like.” Gratton, who studies work and longevity, has some advice for this moment. Based on a workshop she conducted to learn more about how experienced professionals respond to changing career arcs, Gratton uncovered three rules that can “help you make good choices when the future cannot be predicted.” Prepare before you need to. The people she talked to weren’t planning for a specific role or next step, but were running small, low-stakes experiments to be ready when a new opportunity appeared. “They stopped asking, ‘What’s the right plan?’ and started asking, ‘How do I prepare for a future I can’t yet see?’” Commit to what lasts. When the next step in your career depends less on the next performance review or promotion, developing deeper, more enduring capabilities and relationships is important. Ask, “What will still matter 10 years from now?” Then, invest in people and skills that will compound over time. Protect time for judgment. When so much about business is changing quickly, deciding what your next step should be can feel impossible. Further, this faster pace can make whatever decision you make more reactive. But you need to protect time to actually reflect and consider new possibilities. Gratton notes that many workshop participants embraced what she refers to as calm: “the mental space needed to exercise good judgement.” Doing so gave them the ability to navigate uncertainty and pressure. Related: It’s not just people in later stages of their careers experiencing turbulence. New research shows that early-career employees are having difficulty getting hired because remote job descriptions require more skills, work experience, and credentials than in-person ones. Last Chance to Share Your 2026 Development Goals We’ll be closing our current Insider Insights survey Tuesday evening. If you have a moment to answer the following questions, we’d love to hear from you: Looking ahead, what do you think will be your biggest leadership or career challenge over the next six months? What’s a specific leadership challenge you’ve struggled to find good advice on—even after using AI or other resources to help solve it? If HBR could publish one article next week that would make your work noticeably easier, what would it be about? Take the survey here. I’ll share some of the results in a few weeks. More Must-Reads and Listens What you can learn from a competitor’s job postings. Algorithmic shopping is here. Is your company ready? Why family businesses lose control. Is “leadership drift” stalling your AI strategy? The innovation strategy most companies miss. (Our latest IdeaCast episode with Dartmouth’s Vijay Govindarajan and MIT’s Amos Winter.) Our new HBR interview with Verizon CEO Dan Schulman: “Losing doesn’t work for me.”

Strategy Making Gets an AI Boost

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