How CEOs Are Using Gen AI for Strategic Planning

Harvard Business Review (Sep 11, 2024) by Graham Kenny, Marek Kowalkiewicz and Kim Oosthuizen examines generative AI as a strategic-planning input through two disguised case studies. The finding: gen AI surfaced challenges and opportunities that managers had missed and helped overcome certain human biases, yet missed possibilities rooted in the company's specific capabilities because its forecasts were entirely rooted in historical data. Clever prompting recovered some of the missed questions. The takeaway is to use gen AI as a tool that augments rather than replaces strategic thinking and judgment — useful framing for SEA mid-market CEOs trialling LLMs in board strategy work.