What has AI Already Changed About Long-Term Strategy Creation?
The short answer: more than most executives have seen firsthand. Less than the loudest voices are claiming. And faster than anyone’s planning cycle has caught up with.
The Conversation Has Already Moved
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, the strategy conversation shifted. Not loudly. Not with an announcement. It shifted the way most important things shift — gradually, then suddenly, in rooms you weren’t in.
The executives who were in those rooms didn’t come back with a new framework or a longer subscription list to AI tools. They came back with something harder to describe and more valuable to possess: a visceral sense of what is actually possible now that wasn’t possible before.
If you haven’t had that experience yet, this page is for you.
What the Serious Thinkers Are Actually Saying
The loudest voices in the AI conversation are not the most reliable ones. Before you absorb another LinkedIn warning about strategist obsolescence or another vendor promise about automated insight, it’s worth knowing what the economists who study this for a living are finding.
Daron Acemoglu — Nobel laureate, MIT economist, and one of the most rigorous analysts of technology’s impact on work — offers a useful corrective to both the panic and the hype. His research suggests AI’s near-term economic impact will be considerably more modest than either camp claims. The jobs-apocalypse scenario is not the trajectory. Neither is the productivity miracle.
What concerns him is something quieter and more insidious: the current direction of AI development favors automation over augmentation. It favors replacing human judgment rather than sharpening it. And it is moving fast enough that the choices being made right now — by firms, by developers, by the executives in strategy retreats — will shape which version of the future arrives.
Strategy is exactly the kind of human judgment that should not be automated away. The question is whether the people responsible for it are close enough to the technology to know where that line is.
Most aren’t. Yet.
The Trendslop Problem
While serious thinkers are urging careful navigation, a different phenomenon is spreading through strategy boardrooms at considerable speed.
Call it “trendslop”. (Harvard Business Review did.)
Generic AI outputs. Push-button strategy tools that produce the same internet-averaged analysis for every company regardless of industry, history, or competitive position. Confident strategic visions generated in forty seconds that sound authoritative and contain almost nothing specific to the organization that commissioned them.
Trendslop is not a fringe problem. It is the default output of AI applied to strategy without sufficient understanding of what strategy actually requires. It is what happens when the tool arrives before the thinking does.
The danger is not that AI is too powerful. It is that the easiest version of AI in strategy is also the most misleading one — and that it is difficult to recognize unless you have already seen what the better version looks like.
Three Things That Have Genuinely Changed
Beneath the noise, three real shifts have occurred that every strategist needs to understand firsthand:
The speed of environmental scanning has changed fundamentally. What previously required weeks of analyst time — synthesizing competitor moves, regulatory shifts, technology signals, customer behavior changes — can now be done in hours when the right tools are applied correctly. The organizations doing this are not waiting for your planning cycle to catch up.
Scenario generation is no longer a two-day offsite exercise. The ability to construct, populate, and stress-test multiple futures simultaneously — and to do it against your specific competitive context rather than a generic industry template — has moved from expensive and slow to accessible and fast. The constraint is no longer time or budget. It is knowing how to ask the right questions.
The gap between organizations using these capabilities and those that aren’t is already structural. This is the shift most executives underestimate. It is not a gap that closes by itself. It widens each planning cycle.
What Nobody Can Honestly Sell You
Here is the position this conference takes — and it is an unusual one for an event in this space:
Nobody has the complete picture yet. The field is moving too fast for any methodology, any vendor, or any consultant to offer a definitive answer about how AI should be incorporated into your strategy process. Anyone selling you that certainty is selling you trendslop with better packaging.
What that means for you is not paralysis. It means the most valuable thing you can do right now is get close enough to the latest thinking, the most advanced tools, and the practitioners working at the edge — so you can form your own informed view rather than inherit someone else’s.
That requires first-hand experience. Not a white paper. Not a webinar. Not a podcast episode on the drive home.
What LTSP26 Actually Delivers
(LTSP26 = Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2026)
Three days of structured encounters with tools and ideas at the edge of what is possible right now.
Not lectures about AI in strategy. Experiences of it.
The practitioners and tools at LTSP26 are not there to tell you what to think. They are there to show you something you haven’t seen before — to create the specific moment of cognitive surprise that resets your personal reference point for what is possible.
Most executives who engage with a well-designed AI strategy tool for the first time don’t say “that was useful.” They say “I had no idea that was possible.”
That moment is what we are designing for. Repeatedly. Across three days.
You will not leave with a certificate or a framework. You will leave with a visceral, first-hand sense of where AI fits in strategy creation and where it doesn’t — built from your own experience rather than someone else’s explanation.
In a field moving this fast, that is the most honest and most valuable promise any conference can make.
One Question Worth Sitting With
Before you move on: when was the last time something genuinely surprised you about what was possible in strategy creation?
If you can’t remember, that’s the gap LTSP26 is designed to close.
What separates the strategists gaining ground from those losing it? →