When More Intelligence Makes Strategy Harder

Editor's Note: This is the first essay in Strategy After Intelligence, a new four-part Founding Fuel series by Debleena Majumdar and Arjo Basu exploring how AI is reshaping strategy, governance and leadership. In this opening essay, they examine a striking paradox: as intelligence becomes more abundant, strategy itself may be becoming harder.

Imagine shaping the strategy of a company a few years ago. Take, for example, an asset management company.

The planning horizon would have stretched comfortably across three years, sometimes longer. Teams would assemble enormous amounts of information on mutual fund portfolios, customer segments, market trends and competitors. Quarterly earnings calls of listed competitors would be dissected with almost forensic attention. Analysts would look for clues about where capital was flowing, which products were gaining traction and what emerging patterns might matter in the years ahead.

The process was rigorous, but it was also organic. When meaningful shifts began to emerge, organisations usually had time to absorb them. The rise of passive investing, for example, was not a sudden event in this sector. Signals accumulated gradually as portfolio performance patterns became visible. Customer preferences evolved and new competitors began attracting attention. By the time the implications became critical, firms still had the opportunity to rethink products, reposition capabilities and build a strategic response.

Competitive advantage often came from seeing those shifts a little earlier than everyone else.

The challenge was discovering the signal early enough.

Today, that challenge feels almost quaint.

Most organisations are no longer starved of information. They are submerged in it. Market signals arrive continuously. Customers generate data continuously. Competitors reveal themselves through product launches, hiring patterns, partnerships, acquisitions and digital footprints. Research that once required months can often be assembled in hours with AI. Analyses that once demanded specialist teams can increasingly be produced at the click of a button.

The challenge is no longer discovering information. It is deciding what matters—and what to do about it.

The Strategy Paradox

Despite this extraordinary expansion in visibility, many leaders we work with today describe a growing sense that strategy itself has become harder.

At first glance, that seems counterintuitive. If organisations have access to more information and better analysis than ever before, shouldn't strategy become easier?

Below a certain threshold of systemic complexity, information and comprehension move together. More information produces better models. Better models produce better strategies, which produce outcomes whose relationship to the decisions can be traced, evaluated, and learned from.

For decades, this was the operating logic of strategy.

But beyond a certain threshold, that relationship begins to break down. Today, the system is generating more information than any human or model can integrate into coherent strategic choices.

The paradox today is that while information volume has increased beyond imagination and its collection and synthesis have become dramatically faster because of AI, strategic choices have become more confusing amid rapid technological shifts. Leaders are being asked to make consequential decisions in an environment where the number of possibilities is expanding far faster than organisations can absorb them.

This creates a comprehensibility cliff. Complexity is increasing rapidly, driven by the largest wave of capital formation in AI. Yet for many leaders, comprehension of the broader business ecosystem is actually declining because the underlying technologies remain black boxes.

Even the world's largest platform companies, which only a few years ago appeared almost unassailable, are scrambling to understand what AI means for their future. The fear of being left behind is increasingly becoming a strategy in itself.

This isn't as surprising as it first appears.

As Lawrence Freedman argues in Strategy: A History, strategy is the process through which individuals and institutions navigate circumstances they cannot fully control. Strategy exists because uncertainty exists. AI may have transformed the economics of information and analysis, but it has not reduced uncertainty. If anything, it has expanded the range of choices leaders must make—and with it, the complexity of making the right ones.

The challenge is no longer simply gathering better information. It is exercising better judgement.

When Strategy Meets the Organisation

What does this mean for leaders?

One consequence of this shift is that smaller firms can now access capabilities that previously belonged only to larger institutions. Challengers can learn faster, experiment faster and adapt faster. That is changing the nature of competition in real time.

It also makes the work of making the right strategic choices harder.

Leaders need to assess changing competition and rapid shifts in technology investment without becoming captive to them. They still need to make the right decisions for growth based on customer needs, inherent strengths and long-term ambition.

A manufacturing leader we spoke to recently put this dilemma succinctly:

"I know there's too much talk about AI. But does my company really need to do any of this right now?"

But making the right strategic choice is only half the challenge.

The second challenge is ensuring that those choices translate into action across the organisation.

Strategy has never been merely an analytical exercise.

Organisations act because enough people believe the insight matters—not simply because strategic intent has been stated and tracked through OKRs and KPIs.

What changes behaviour is a shared understanding of what those things mean and what should happen next.

Between strategic intent and execution lies something organisations often underestimate: shared interpretation.

Which is why strategy has always depended on something that feels surprisingly old-fashioned in an age of intelligent machines: storytelling.

In her seminal article, Strategic Thinking: Can It Be Taught?, Professor Jeanne M. Liedtka asked leaders to imagine writing the cover story of their business five years into the future—to tell the story of where they were and how they arrived there.

That exercise may be even more relevant today.

Every successful strategy eventually becomes a narrative about the future. It explains what is changing, why it matters and how the organisation intends to respond. Without that shared narrative, even the most sophisticated analysis struggles to create movement.

This may prove to be one of the great strategic ironies of the AI era. As intelligence becomes more abundant, the need for shared meaning may increase exponentially.

Why Strategy Still Matters

For all the change AI has unleashed, two leadership responsibilities remain unchanged.

The first is making the right strategic choices. No matter how much synthesis AI enables in shrinking time cycles, the decisions about where to play, how to win, what margins can sustain growth and what ultimately becomes an organisation's moat remain profoundly human ones.

The second is ensuring those choices translate into coordinated action across the organisation. Unless strategy is understood, interpreted and communicated effectively—especially during moments of transition—information abundance alone cannot create alignment.

That widening gap between strategic intent and execution may well become one of the defining management challenges of the AI era. Many organisations continue to operate through structures designed for a world in which information and interpretation were scarce. That world is disappearing.

Which brings us back to where strategy has always begun—and perhaps always will.

Helping people make sense of change.

Helping them move in the same direction.

Ultimately, strategy succeeds when it becomes a story an organisation can tell itself—and one that people can tell each other, beside a fire.

What Comes Next in the Series?

Essay 2 | Built to Last in an Age of Continuous Change

What should leaders preserve when everything else is changing?

Essay 3 | Governance After AI: Why Reviews Need a Baseline

How do leaders ensure strategy survives the journey from intent to execution?

Essay 4 | The Cognitive Organisation: Leadership When Facts Become Abundant

What becomes the role of leadership when intelligence itself becomes abundant?