The Integrated Strategy Machine: Using AI to Create Advantage

This is an age of techno-utopianism. Topics like big data, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence are at the forefront of the CEO agenda, a sign that companies see technology as a potential answer to many or even most of their challenges. We have good reasons to be excited: an explosion of data and advances in analytics have enabled technology to perform well-defined but complex tasks like recommending movies and diagnosing cancer--not only independently of humans but in many cases better than people can. So it's not implausible to think that technology could also address broad, open-ended, and ambiguous problems like developing and executing a business strategy. In fact, we've spoken to business leaders who believe in such an outcome--and companies such as Amazon and Alibaba are already beginning to make it a reality.