How To Manage Your Corporate Strategy Using Artificial Intelligence
- Nauman Khan
- May 18, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 10, 2024
'AI Strategy from Mission Vision Values' video
Table of contents
To effectively use Artificial Intelligence to manage corporate strategy, plan for human interaction by using AI to get the best KPIs for your objectives, and expect and plan for cultural changes.
The modern corporate landscape is characterized by a rapidly changing business environment, fierce competition, and a need for quick decision-making.
To succeed in such a business environment, businesses need a data-driven strategy that can respond to market changes while aligning with the business objectives. This is where software that uses AI to define corporate strategy can prove invaluable.
But how do you manage your corporate-level strategy using AI? This article will answer this question.
The role of Artificial Intelligence in corporate strategy
Defining a strategic roadmap for business success involves defining goals, identifying the most relevant areas to focus on, and outlining action plans to achieve goals. This is a complex process that requires gathering vast amounts of information from multiple sources (like books, blogs, search engines, infographics, etc.), then analyzing and understanding all those recommendations and best practices, and then, overtime, with experience and trial and error, becoming skillful and more efficient at using all that to create your strategic plan.
Many businesses using traditional methods struggle with this because the methods are time consuming, require skill and experience, require a particular mindset to look at things from a strategic lens (and not an operational lens), overcook or undercook the detail with which things should be tracked, and ultimately fail to provide accurate and actionable insights.
This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in.
AI gives businesses a game-changing approach to defining and managing their corporate-level strategy.
Every company can benefit from using AI in the building blocks of corporate-level strategy. AI tools can help company executives avoid biases, extract insights from oceans of data, and make strategic choices more quickly.
Kippy is the only platform - the world’s first - that helps executives make strategic choices using the power of AI. The platform uses AI and machine learning algorithms to draw insights and recommendations from vast amounts of information to help business executives optimize their strategies.
Identifying and tracking Key Performance Indicators is crucial for success. KPIs are metrics that provide insight into how well a business is performing and are used to guide decision-making, identify areas for improvement, and measure progress toward goals. However, identifying the right KPIs can be a time-consuming and expensive process.
Traditionally, identifying KPIs involves a lot of manual work. Executives and senior managers need to review data from multiple sources, including financial reports, customer surveys, website analytics, and other sources, to determine which metrics are most important for tracking performance. This process can take weeks or even months.
There is also the learning curve. Forming KPIs correctly takes skill, experience, and a lot of research. Industry-standard KPIs are usually difficult to find, generic, and irrelevant to your industry, organization, team, objective, and context.
Moreover, manually identifying KPIs can be expensive. Business analysts and managers are highly skilled professionals whose time is valuable. The more time they spend manually identifying KPIs, the less time they have for other important tasks, such as developing strategies or analyzing trends.
Even if each member of your C-Suite or Head of Department spends just a week selecting the right KPIs, it can cost you $1k - $2k per person per year. If you have 10 people doing this, it translates to $10k - $20k. That’s good money that the company could be spending doing much more important things than selecting the wrong KPIs and making a hash of the whole strategy execution process.
While engaging external strategy consultants is an option, these professionals are usually very expensive.
The use of AI can significantly reduce the time and cost associated with identifying KPIs. AI and machine learning can quickly analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources to identify the most relevant metrics.
These algorithms are designed to learn from previous decisions and improve over time, ensuring that the most relevant KPIs are selected and tracked.
It is similar to how AI simplifies content creation. Writing a university thesis would ordinarily take a lot of time and effort - researching, typing, formatting, etc.
But AI-powered tools today would furnish you with excellent content in seconds. By literally typing a single sentence into the tool, AI will give you a quality thesis on any topic, in any style of writing, with any formatting, with correct references, etc. No need for trips to the library, trawling through rows of books, hours of note-taking and typing, etc.
Kippy makes this same quantum leap. It integrates your strategy and objectives as inputs into a highly-trained AI model that combines all human knowledge to suggest the best KPIs for your strategy in seconds.
How to use Artificial Intelligence in corporate strategy?
"AI will not replace you. A person using AI will." That is why it is crucial to learn how to use AI when implementing your corporate-level strategy. Here is what you can do:
Plan for human interaction
Artificial Intelligence cannot completely automate strategy development.
AI can only improve certain aspects of strategy development. Human input is still required. So, successfully implementing AI in corporate strategy requires planning for those human touchpoints.
AI algorithms may not understand the nuances of the business or industry, making it challenging to identify KPIs that accurately reflect business objectives.
In contrast, people have in-depth knowledge of the business and industry, which is essential to identify KPIs that accurately reflect business goals. People can use their intuition and experience to identify KPIs that may not be immediately obvious or typical.
Thus, effective AI models have the humans defining the strategy and objectives and the machines suggesting the most relevant KPIs to measure that objective. Moreso, selecting the right KPIs and fine-tuning them still needs the human touch.
The diagram below highlights where Kippy uses AI into a typical annual performance cycle.
Kippy integrates into the journey on the Strategy screen. For each objective, the user can request suggestions to augment any existing KPIs (by clicking on the blue light bulb).
This takes the user to the KPI Suggestions screen, which shows the existing KPIs for the current objective - and allows additional (AI-generated) KPI suggestions to be generated, which are based on the existing set - plus any additional context provided or inferred from your setup.
The additional context is provided as hints in plain English. As this is AI and not a database search, an infinite number of KPIs could be suggested, depending on the context (e.g. industry, organisation, strategy, country, currency, financial environment, budget, mood, word length, formatting, etc.).
The user can edit those suggestions and Add them (as unapproved) to the team. Then, like the existing KPIs, they can be augmented with other information, assigned to the appropriate owner, reviewed, approved, have targets set, etc.
A process that could have taken days or weeks - can be done in seconds. As well as saving valuable time in identifying the best KPIs, the increased quality of KPIs means that the output of the performance process is also more accurate.
Expect cultural changes and adapt
Implementing Artificial Intelligence at any level will change your organization. Thus, successfully implementing AI in corporate-level strategy requires anticipating changes and adapting.
Using AI to manage your corporate strategy should not stop collaboration between team members.
Know that using AI to manage corporate strategy is synonymous with inviting the world’s best authority strategy consultant into your corporate strategy definition meetings. You’ll get useful suggestions based on the individual’s vast knowledge and experience.
Thus, most often than not, using AI in corporate strategy leads to process deviations as the organization begins to do things differently. The new ways will create new experiences for employees, resulting in a new company culture.
Instead of a reactionary approach to organizational changes, anticipate and plan for them. Defining core values, realigning people with priorities and values, and ensuring accountability help in this regard.
Example key performance indicators recommended by Kippy artificial intelligence
The following illustrates how Kippy helps you use AI to manage your corporate strategy by automatically furnishing you with the best KPIs to measure if your objectives are being met.
Time to market
Consider an organization that decides on a growth corporate-level strategy and sets the business objectives of launching a new product into the target market.
Identifying what to measure to know if those objectives are being met can be difficult.
For example, the “best time to market KPI” search on Google will give you definitions, unhelpful articles, people-also-ask suggestions, etc.
From Google:
However, rather than spending hours trawling through all that info, in seconds, Kippy generates a list of accurate and actionable KPIs that can help you measure real objectives. These include product development cycle time, lead time, time to first prototype, time to market for new features, product launch success rate, etc.
From Kippy:
Improve customer satisfaction
In the same vein, if your business objective is to improve customer satisfaction, you’re better served using Kippy to find the best KPIs.
A Google search of the objective will generate a lot of articles that you need to sieve through, and links to the same books, to unearth KPIs.
From Google:
However, Kippy points you to the best KPIs for your objective (in this case, to improve customer satisfaction) in seconds. Some of the KPIs recommended by Kippy in this case are Net Promoter score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score, repeat purchase rate, customer retention rate, etc.
From Kippy:
Takeaway: Use AI to manage corporate strategy for better business outcomes
Every successful business follows a strategic roadmap. However, strategy development and implementation is a complex process that requires gathering and analyzing vast amounts of information and gleaning insights from the analysis.
Thankfully, AI improves many aspects of strategy development and implementation, helping executives implement corporate strategy better to gain a competitive advantage.
To effectively use Artifical Intelligence to manage corporate strategy, use AI to get the best KPIs for your objectives, and plan for cultural changes.
Kippy is a fully integrated AI strategy software that helps businesses use the power of AI to manage strategies and drive better business outcomes.
With Kippy, you can easily define your strategy and cascade it to all levels of your organization, get excellent KPI recommendations for measuring objectives, automate many processes, and reduce weeks of efforts to seconds, thus saving tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Ready to use the power of AI to supercharge strategic management for business growth? Book a demo and see how Kippy can help.
'AI Strategy from Objectives' video
