Imagination or validation? Using futuring techniques to enhance AI’s relevance in strategic decision-making

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly impacting the work that organizations conduct by either automating or augmenting tasks historically done by humans. With technology capable of exploring larger information environments, a natural question emerges for one of the most complex tasks in organizations-will artificial intelligence impact strategic decision-making? We argue that this is unlikely. In most organizations, well-established processes for defining and selecting important strategic issues constrain artificial intelligence to validate managerial intuition, which leaves strategy-making relatively unimpacted. Despite this, a narrow path emerges in some organizations where artificial intelligence can have an enormous impact on a classical challenge in strategy-making: the consideration of time. Through a series of techniques that we label as futuring, artificial intelligence houses the necessary elements to support future-oriented imagination in strategy-making if certain conditions in strategic decision-making processes are met.