Harvard Business Review's piece on AI in business strategy is among the most thoughtful in the genre, in part because it resists the temptation to overstate. The article distinguishes three modes in which AI now participates in strategy formation: as an **input** (large language models surfacing patterns in market and competitive data), as a **co-strategist** (generating scenarios and counter-arguments the human strategist may have missed), and as an **enabler of strategies that previously were not possible** (hyper-personalization, real-time pricing, autonomous product iteration).
The most useful framing for operators is what the authors call 'strategy compression' — strategy cycles that used to take quarters now compress into weeks, because the analytical work that anchored strategy off-sites can now be done in days by an LLM with the right data plumbing. The risk is symmetrical: strategy decisions made on hallucinated or biased model output can compound faster than human review catches them.
M&A and corporate development gets specific attention. AI-driven target identification (matching strategic intent against the long tail of private companies) is one of the highest-conviction near-term applications, and one our Investment Alliance members have been quietly building on for over a year.
Source: Harvard Business Review. Read the full article at <https://hbr.org/2024/01/how-ai-is-transforming-business-strategy>.