Replays from the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026 (LTSP26) are now available, along with four earlier conferences.
Consider a head of strategy with three weeks until the board retreat. She does what many strategists now do first. She asks an AI tool to draft scenarios for the next fifteen years.
The scenarios arrive in minutes. They are well organized, confident and easy to read. They are also familiar. A peer at another company, in a different industry, showed her an almost identical set a month earlier: digital disruption, sustainability pressure, talent shortages and a closing call to become more agile.
Researcher Angelo Romasanta and his colleagues have a name for this pattern. In work published in Harvard Business Review, they describe large language models returning similar, socially acceptable strategy advice whatever the organization’s circumstances. They call it trendslop.
So she sets the scenarios aside and turns to the part of the job she can control: the board deck. Two weeks go into rewording, reformatting and aligning slides. AI helps at every step. The deck gets sharper. The strategy stays where it was.
At LTSP26, this second pattern had a name as well: “Deck-chairing.” It describes applying AI to a stage of the strategy process that was never the constraint. Trendslop is the right stage with a weak output. Deck-chairing is a strong output at the wrong stage. Both leave the real bottleneck untouched.
In her case, the bottleneck sat earlier. Her leadership team had never agreed on what the organization needed to become by its target year. The stakeholder conversations that should have come before the retreat had not happened. No tool was going to supply that agreement for them.
This problem sat at the center of LTSP26. Over three days in September, strategists, consultants and planners from a number of countries examined where AI helps strategy creation and where it adds speed to the wrong activity. The program included a conversation with Angelo Romasanta on the research behind trendslop and live sessions with AI personas such as Interview Inez, built around the stakeholder interviews that come before a planning session.
The recordings are now available. For about a year, you can watch a single session before your next planning cycle, share one with a leadership team that is about to lean on AI for scenarios, or work through a full conference over several weeks.
For the strategist in this story, the lesson came after the retreat. Next time, she will begin with the questions her team has avoided, and bring AI in where it removes a real constraint.
Your next planning cycle does not have to repeat hers.
Get the LTSP26 replays, now with a limited-time discount → https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com/ltsp26-conference-replay-edition/