The Impact of AI on Strategists
Discover how AI redefines strategic planning and decision-making, with insights on salary trends and strategic education pathways for leveraging AI.
How AI Intersects with Strategy
The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI (GenAI), is ushering in a new era for strategists, fundamentally transforming their approach to business strategy, market analysis, and decision-making processes. This transformation is not just a leap forward in technological capability but a comprehensive shift in the strategic landscape, providing both remarkable opportunities and raising important concerns.
The Evolution of AI
The journey of AI within the realm of strategy has moved from rudimentary data analysis to the advent of GenAI, capable of autonomously generating insights, identifying trends, and offering strategic recommendations. This evolution marks a shift from AI as a tool for enhancing existing capabilities to a foundational element that redefines the strategic process itself.
How GenerativeAI Changes the Future of Work
GenerativeAI is poised to revolutionize the future of work, with the potential to automate at least 10% of tasks currently performed by 80% of the workforce in strategic roles. This shift towards automation and enhanced analytical capabilities allows strategists to transcend traditional limitations, dedicating more time to strategic thinking, innovation, and stakeholder management.
Unprecedented Opportunities for Strategy
GenerativeAI offers strategists unprecedented opportunities to refine and enhance their strategic approach. By automating the extraction, cleaning, and analysis of vast industry datasets, strategists can swiftly uncover hidden trends and consumer sentiments, enabling rapid adaptation to market demands. Advanced predictive analytics and simulations transform complex datasets into clear, actionable strategies and compelling visual representations, facilitating a deeper understanding of market trends. Furthermore, leveraging historical data, AI algorithms can continuously refine strategic recommendations, ensuring that strategies evolve with increasing precision and relevance over time. These capabilities allow for the incorporation of renowned frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, and the 5 Whys into the strategic process, allowing strategists to call and contextualize them on demand.
Explainability and Data Management
Despite these opportunities, the integration of GenAI into strategic planning introduces significant concerns, particularly regarding explainability and data management. The ability to understand and interpret the rationale behind AI-generated recommendations is crucial for strategists, who must serve as the bridge between AI insights and business objectives. Moreover, effective data management is paramount, as the integrity and quality of the data underpinning AI analyses directly impact the validity of strategic recommendations. In this context, strategists must leverage their expertise to ensure that AI tools are continually refined based on outcomes and feedback, thereby maintaining the relevance and effectiveness of strategic initiatives.
Summary
The impact of AI, especially GenAI, on the field of strategy represents a significant paradigm shift, offering new avenues for strategic analysis, decision-making, and planning. While this evolution promises to enhance the strategic capabilities of organizations, it also necessitates a careful consideration of explainability and data management challenges. By addressing these concerns, strategists can fully harness the potential of GenAI, ensuring that strategic planning remains both innovative and grounded in the realities of the business environment. In navigating these changes, the role of the strategist evolves, becoming ever more critical as the human element guiding the integration of AI into the strategic fabric of organizations.
AI Use Cases in Strategy
Market Data at Your Fingertips
By automating the extraction, cleaning, and initial analysis of specific industry datasets, strategists can uncover hidden trends, gauge consumer sentiment via social media insights, and swiftly adapt strategies to meet emerging market demands.
Strategic Recommendations & Visualizations
Transform intricate datasets into clear, actionable strategies and compelling visual representations. Utilizing advanced predictive analytics and simulations, this approach enables strategists to visualize and foresee market trends, thereby refining the strategic planning process.
Autonomous AI Fine-tuning
Leveraging historical data, AI algorithms can continuously refine and enhance strategic recommendations, ensuring they become increasingly precise and tailored over time. This iterative learning process empowers strategists to craft superior, evidence-based strategies that dynamically evolve with the business landscape.
AI Job Trends
Strategists exploring AI? Our interactive graphs offer insights into how AI in strategic analysis could shape your career path.
Source: Kaggle, AI/ML Salaries 2020 – 2023
Looking for the Perfect Remote AI Job?
This interactive chart showcases the relationship between continents and work arrangements. If you are looking for a remote, or work-from-home AI job, this visualization will help you make informed decisions.
Source: Kaggle, AI/ML Salaries 2020 – 2023
Key Insights in AI Jobs
The analysis of in-demand AI roles across continents reveals a significant variation, with Data Engineering roles exhibiting the highest demand in several regions. Specifically, South America, North America, and Europe report the largest proportions of Data Engineering roles, accounting for 38.89%, 24.44%, and 22.87% respectively. This indicates a robust need for systems that facilitate efficient data collection and highlights the critical importance of data infrastructure in the AI landscape.
Furthermore, the data suggests a geographical concentration of AI roles, with a predominance of opportunities stemming from North American employers. This regional skew is also reflected in salary distributions, where North American AI professionals command the highest median salary at 150,000 USD, suggesting a premium on AI expertise within this market.
Contrastingly, while Asia exhibits a lower median salary compared to other continents, the upper quartile of earnings is notably competitive, aligning closely with senior-level and CXO roles in European and North American contexts. This disparity may indicate a more pronounced salary progression for AI professionals in Asia, emphasizing the value placed on experience and higher-level expertise within the region’s AI sector.
Senior AI roles in Asia show a distinct trend concerning working arrangements and remuneration. There is a marked preference for ‘On-Site’ work, which is associated with significantly higher salaries compared to ‘Work from Home’ arrangements, with figures reported at 417.9k USD and 300k USD respectively. This contrasts with the salary structures in Europe and North America, where maximum salaries are maintained with negligible differences between ‘Work from Home’ and ‘Hybrid’ work settings. This indicates a more flexible approach to working arrangements without a substantial impact on salary levels, potentially reflecting a cultural or organizational shift in work dynamics within the AI industry in these regions.
The findings from this data set underscore the complexities and regional nuances within the global AI job market, highlighting the interplay between job roles, geographical locations, and working arrangements in determining salary expectations and professional demand.
Furthermore, the data suggests a geographical concentration of AI roles, with a predominance of opportunities stemming from North American employers. This regional skew is also reflected in salary distributions, where North American AI professionals command the highest median salary at 150,000 USD, suggesting a premium on AI expertise within this market.
Contrastingly, while Asia exhibits a lower median salary compared to other continents, the upper quartile of earnings is notably competitive, aligning closely with senior-level and CXO roles in European and North American contexts. This disparity may indicate a more pronounced salary progression for AI professionals in Asia, emphasizing the value placed on experience and higher-level expertise within the region’s AI sector.
Senior AI roles in Asia show a distinct trend concerning working arrangements and remuneration. There is a marked preference for ‘On-Site’ work, which is associated with significantly higher salaries compared to ‘Work from Home’ arrangements, with figures reported at 417.9k USD and 300k USD respectively. This contrasts with the salary structures in Europe and North America, where maximum salaries are maintained with negligible differences between ‘Work from Home’ and ‘Hybrid’ work settings. This indicates a more flexible approach to working arrangements without a substantial impact on salary levels, potentially reflecting a cultural or organizational shift in work dynamics within the AI industry in these regions.
The findings from this data set underscore the complexities and regional nuances within the global AI job market, highlighting the interplay between job roles, geographical locations, and working arrangements in determining salary expectations and professional demand.
Attrition & Growth of Jobs Due to AI
In the strategy sector, the ascendancy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data-driven methodologies is reshaping the value and demand for various roles. The imperative for strategic professionals to integrate AI and data analytics into their decision-making processes has never been more critical. This shift is markedly disadvantaging those whose roles are entrenched in less quantifiable, creative, or purely domain-specific expertise without leveraging AI and data insights. Social media strategists, accounts and auditors, organizational development specialists, and even some strategic advisors are facing job vulnerabilities as AI automates and enhances low-level strategic functions and data analysis tasks.
Conversely, digital transformation specialists are experiencing unprecedented demand, positioned at the forefront of growth within the strategy domain. Their expertise in weaving together technology (data, AI, process automation) with strategic planning equips them to drive organizational change and innovation. This growing dichotomy underscores a broader trend: the strategic sector’s future will be dominated by professionals who can harmonize AI and data proficiency with strategic acumen, leaving those who cannot at a competitive disadvantage.
Select top 3-5 impacted jobs functions, use a mix of positive and negative (growth vs loss)
- Social Media Strategists
- Accounts and Auditors
- Organizational Development Specialists
- Strategic Advisors
- Digital Transformation Specialists
AI Reskilling & Upskilling
As AI reshapes the workplace, companies are strategically prioritizing upskilling to foster high-level cognitive and emotional intelligence skills, which remain indispensable in the AI-augmented future. Analytical thinking tops the upskilling agenda, designated to receive 10% of training initiatives, highlighting the critical need for professionals to interpret and leverage the complex information produced by AI. Creative thinking follows, reflecting the demand for innovative problem-solving that transcends AI’s capabilities.
Despite their current standing, AI and big data skills, along with leadership and social influence, are being prioritized more significantly than other skills in corporate upskilling strategies, with a notable investment of 9% in reskilling efforts dedicated to them. This suggests a strategic emphasis on developing expertise that not only utilizes AI but also steers its direction and integration within organizations. Companies are recognizing the necessity of these skills to navigate the intricacies of AI deployment and drive technological advancement.
In contrast, despite the recognized present importance of self-efficacy skills following recent disruptions, such skills are projected to receive less emphasis in future strategies. Instead, there is a clear shift towards technology skills, particularly in AI and big data, which underscores the strategic need for technical fluency amidst advancing automation.
This recalibration towards technical upskilling, alongside the cultivation of high-level complex skills, underscores a dual-focused approach. Professionals are expected to command both the nuanced, human-centric skills that AI cannot replicate and the technical acumen to effectively collaborate with AI systems. The corporate upskilling trajectory thus reveals an acute awareness of the evolving symbiosis between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, with the goal of harnessing the best of both to drive innovation and competitive advantage in the workforce of tomorrow.
AI Courses for Strategists
Develop your strategic acumen with AI and data proficiency. These courses can help you better understand how to integrate AI into sales leadership to foster innovation, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage in the evolving sales landscape.
Fast Track to Mastering AI
Fast Track your understanding of AI with our Founder, Jonathan Chew. This course will cover how Generative AI Works, the effective use of LLMs and Prompt Engineering, LDMs and Image/ Video Generation, Productivity Tools and GenAI Limitations.
UBI Msc in AI & ML Management
An accredited program with Middlesex University (UK), UBI’s MSc in AI/ ML Management is one of the few existing management focused postgraduate programs in the world. Learners will benefit from a HyFlex program, allowing for both on-campus and online learning for a full or partial on campus experience.
AI Strategy and Governance
AI and the strategies that are used in transforming business in order to gain a competitive advantage. You will explore the multitude of uses for AI in an enterprise setting and the tools that are available to lower the barriers to AI use.