What if you had a top-notch strategist available to you and your team at any moment, helping you define and continuously refine your corporate strategy, without paying McKinsey fees? Imagine an AI-driven strategy design system that, through simply having conversations with all stakeholders, gathers the right insights and produces a living strategy map. You bring the domain expertise, and your AI strategist guides you to a comprehensive strategy, understood and carried by all.
Designing a good company strategy that doesn’t fall apart the moment it faces reality is hard: all business functions must be involved and on board, and the strategy space has to be comprehensively explored. This is an enormous intellectual challenge, and many organisations fall back on top-down directives which miss important details and inevitably lead to costly mistakes.
The difficulty isn’t just that strategic thinking requires a certain talent, although it does. The real challenge is to gather insights from stakeholders and then manage the iterative process of turning insights into calls for solutions which, once they’re out in the open, can lead to further insights. A dynamic emerges between global directives and local solutions, where discovery of what is possible locally needs to be able to influence what is desired globally. This interplay drives exploration of the strategy space, and when it works the outcome is a strategic option that is more certain.
Coordinating such a collaborative effort is prohibitively time consuming and cognitively demanding, but AI can help make it more efficient and more effective. The upside is immense: continuous better decision making has a compounding effect which directly impacts the bottom line.
We do not advocate for letting AI make autonomous strategic decisions, although hype would have you believe it could replace just about any human thinker. What does work is to employ AI as a promoter of human judgement and goals through natural conversations, while it automatically explores various strategic options and builds a strategy map. The domain knowledge and judgements come from the people in your business, but the strategy design process is guided and driven by AI.
The technology that enables this is the TenFive multi-agent framework. With it stakeholders specify an AI agent per business function, each driven by their human counterpart and minder. Each agent, through conversation, helps their counterpart think through their goals and ideas as a critical friend. Through this the agents learn the goals they should represent in the strategy exploration process. All agents, as part of a structured network, then explore strategic options and create a map of potential strategies. This map can be visualised and refined by the people in the driving seat.
The TenFive framework embraces the inherently linguistic aspect of generative AI, and leverages one of the things that language does best: communication about goals between multiple parties. Rather than try to smash through complex problems and fuzzy logic with huge amounts of opaque computation, our framework is grounded in the idea that a set of cooperating agents that don’t necessarily need to each be doing anything too complicated can communicate using language to work towards an emergent solution. Because reasoning happens between multiple agents rather than inside individual agents, the pathway towards a solution is plainly visible, and so up for further discussion if desired.
We think strategy design – be it in the face of a complex corporate challenge or a departmental quarterly plan – is a great example of the type of problem-solving our system is designed to handle by deploying not one AI but a network of AI agents working together with people to coordinate company-wide action.
We’re looking for a partner in the form of a pilot customer, willing to team up with us to provide the seminal AI-enabled application for a new type of strategy design practice. We think the product we’re developing would be a great fit for a large provider of project management tools, and it would allow their product to be extended into the fuzzy frontend of project management.
Please see our deck here to find out more about TenFive. Please click here if you’d like to schedule a chat with us.