AI in strategic planning

I’ve been exploring AI’s potential across about 20 different activities, and more recently its potential to support strategic planning.

My son’s company in Los Angeles, Active Theory, has been using AI to support client ideation — and with it, ownership of the path forward — for nearly a year. Some of their experiences have been instructive.

Understanding AI’s strengths and weaknesses is the key to using it well, so here are a few observations.

• Filter what it generates through a persona. Think of it as a helpful assistant: very fast, but limited in its knowledge and unduly confident in its findings.
• Know its knowledge base. Be as aware as you can of what your assistant has learned from, and stay safely within those bounds, understanding its limits of time and quality.
• Be nice to your assistant. If you’re harsh or neutral it becomes more robotic — it even sulks. Give it positive and gentle negative feedback about what’s good and bad, and it will learn about you and what you want.
• Let it do the first pass. It’s good at reading and summarising large documents, restructuring material and pulling out key points, especially as it gets to know you. Reserve your own effort for the levels that follow.
• Stay within your expertise. Use your assistant only on topics where you have genuine expertise and can think critically about what it produces. Conveniently, its material tends to be easier to critique than your own — but still be nice.
• Start simple. Everyday, general-purpose use is the groundwork for later ideating game-changing uses.
• Keep up with the trends, such as image and video generation.

I’m interested in your views. And no, this wasn’t written by AI.