Artificial intelligence (AI) is a part of today’s business world, whether or not business organizations accept it. As a strategic business leader, you must remove the traditional constraints and rules in the strategic planning process and work to apply AI in the planning process itself. In our time, AI and strategic planning are essential factors in the development and growth of organizations, as they contribute to the future foresight. AI is enhancing several strategies and changing business practices and organizations’ competitive landscape. So every organization can make use of AI in different ways to create efficiencies and improvements within it.
Strategic Planning Areas
Strategic planning aims to prepare an organization for the future by defining goals and the process for achieving them. It requires gathering data and ideas into a specific strategic plan. There are four main areas for This data:
- The resources and competencies provided by the organization
- Markets and customers served by the organization
- The competitors that the organization competes with
- The environment in which the organization operates
Traditional Strategic Planning
The vast amount of data available for the above areas is more than any average strategic planning team can analyze and synthesize. Moreover, traditional strategic planning tools cannot integrate and synthesize this amount of data.
So, traditional strategic plans often rely on very little data to enable business leaders to make sound strategic decisions. Often the problems are identified and described primarily through reports provided by the organization’s strategists and management consultants. The problem is when the strategic team makes assumptions about what will happen in the future based on outdated, incomplete, inaccurate, and biased data that does not cover all the issues needed.
And when the data is weak, strategic planners rely on gut feeling and experience that is not so valuable in a changing world like ours, which leads to wrong strategic plans and potentially harms the organization.
Moreover, in the era of rapid innovative changes and transformations, traditional strategic planning does not always consider changes and market trends that can occur suddenly, negatively affecting the organization’s strategy. Thus, in most cases, the result is that organizations cannot cope with rapid and sudden changes effectively with a lack of available and appropriate data. Data analysis and synthesis are also ineffective and result in the business being unable to continue and grow realistically.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is the Solution
AI depends on big data, and through it, many industries and businesses have access to this data. All data in any format can be combined and analyzed using AI applications. And this intelligent technology can use this data to make predictions with much higher accuracy than humans can do on their own. Moreover, the strategic planning process will be automated and will not require much human time. At the same time, it is a knowledgeable and accurate process that contributes to increasing the organization’s productivity.
Applying artificial intelligence in the strategic planning process will change business rules concerning operational excellence and the competitive imperatives of organizations. Integrating and integrating AI and strategic planning will not only fix many issues related to the current process but save human time and produce much better results.
Advantages Of Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) In Strategic Planning
- Full automation running 24/7 without human intervention
- Import big data, data analysis, and strategic conclusions so that can implement immediate responses to market events or competitor strategies
- Continuous automated search for data whose types that human element will determine it
- Automatic review of the data process and constantly updating of actual data, so there is no outdated data
- Automated data validation and disinfection
- Automatic and continuous review of data relationships, inference, conclusions, and assumptions behind strategic decisions
- Ongoing automated reviews to monitor, implement, and effectiveness of the strategy to analyze and adjust results for faster progress
- Evaluate and develop managers’ ability to think strategically and guide them to the right strategies
- Generate a comprehensive strategic vision and suggest competitively focused strategies
- Analyze and suggest an adaptation method for maximizing strategic objectives
- Quantitative assessment of strategy risks and recommendations of strategies to achieve competitive advantage
Revenue of Investment (ROI)
Maximizing ROI by applying AI in strategic planning is not just about money. Instead, it is about giving future business leaders and managers more confidence, ideas, and time to improve business performance to raise the level of managerial performance and operational excellence for the entire organization.
Can check two cost areas in return on investment. The first is the cost of traditional strategic planning in terms of time and HR, as well as data costs and external costs (advisors, off-site meeting costs, etc.). The other is the incremental gain after execution compared to the regular income. It combines quick enabling strategic decisions, successful predictions of profitable new sectors, correctly forecasting competitors’ actions, and maximizing gains and profits.
In our time, traditional strategic planning methods cannot foresee the future as accurately and clearly as AI-powered strategic planning does. Therefore, applying advanced technology in planning processes has become necessary. As well as long-term thinking to achieve complete intelligent transformation strategies in organizations.