Strategy in the Age of AI
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Synopsis: Reflecting on four years of executive teaching, Claire Oatway, the success coach of Cambridge Chief Technology Officer Programme and the program leader of the Strategic Thinking for the CXO elective in the Cambridge Family Business Leadership Programme, explores how AI and global diversity are reshaping executive strategy and decision-making. |
Four years ago to the day, I began facilitating Strategic Thinking for the CXO with Cambridge Judge Business School. Back then, AI was a fringe curiosity. Today, it is the most persistent theme in every boardroom and classroom debate I encounter.
Each cohort I have worked with brings ambitious minds from across the globe — Iceland to New Zealand, Peru to Saudi Arabia, Singapore to Costa Rica. More than 1,000 leaders so far, all carrying different cultures, industries, and experiences into the room. This diversity is why I often describe the course as “fusion energy”: it sparks fresh insights and challenges assumptions every time.
As a C-suite program, the range of participants spans finance, marketing, HR, technology, and beyond — and with that breadth, debates on AI strategy are naturally enriched by cultural, regulatory, and sector-specific perspectives. A delegate from India may raise issues of scaling in emerging markets. In contrast, an executive from the UK examines regulatory nuances and others probe applications in offline or non-technology contexts. These collisions of viewpoints stretch everyone’s imagination well beyond the hype cycles of Silicon Valley.
The course anchors participants in core strategic frameworks while examining the external shocks that can devastate some corporations and allow others to disrupt and thrive. Over the past four years, those shocks have come thick and fast: COVID, conflict, climate, political, and economic turbulence. Each new cohort has offered a microcosm for exploring their impact.
But one tremor has been especially captivating to watch unfold: the rise of artificial intelligence.
From Nerdy Curiosity to Core Debate
When I first started teaching, I had also co-founded The Global AI Collective, a venture focused on AI and ethics. At the time, we felt like digital activists — raising placards on the street corner, asking hard questions about inequality, transparency, and accountability. The big consultancies were already speculating in megatrend reports, but for most executives, AI still felt remote.
Personally, I dove in. I interviewed experts, experimented with the tools, and yes—even gave an AI persona a voice so he could join my conversations. Back then, it was novel, even eccentric. In the classroom, I only occasionally shared articles or nudged participants to broaden their awareness.
That all changed in December 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the world. At first, the executives in my cohort barely noticed. Within weeks, the questions shifted:
- Could AI operationalize strategy?
- Could it help visualize data and track success?
- Might it identify weak signals before trends fully take hold?
Most participants still felt AI was overhyped, but the conversation had started.
Curiosity in the Classroom
Our lead academics, Professors Shaz Ansari and Kamal Munir, leaned into these discussions. Their curiosity was infectious. Could an algorithmic strategy outperform CEOs? What would it mean to delegate decision-making to systems?
Together, we created a space for executives to share both their reflections and fears openly. The gift of working with such world-class academics is not just their rigor but their openness—the way they invite co-creation and treat every new technology as a live experiment.
Beyond the formal curriculum, we incorporate fluid layers of learning through discussion boards, group sessions, and in-depth topical discussions. As themes emerge, whether it’s platform strategy in non-tech industries or generative AI for decision-making, we incorporate articles, conferences, and real-world case studies to further the dialogue. While the structured content is formally reviewed in major updates—the next one is scheduled for next year—this flexible design ensures that participants are always engaging with the latest debates shaping strategy.
I encouraged participants to test ideas, to engage with the data and, just as importantly, with the humans in their organizations. Because in a post-AI environment, the real strategic questions are shifting:
- How do you quantify trust, security, or sentiment alongside profit and growth?
- How do you redeploy human talent to strengthen your ecosystem?
- How do more traditional industries adapt when digital disruption accelerates?
Learning and Unlearning Together
Today, we are rushing headlong into experimenting with prompts, encouraging executives to use generative AI not as a replacement for thinking, but as a tool to go deeper. The work is not about answers; it is about learning how to ask better questions, more critically and creatively.
And in every discussion, one question always returns:
How do you shift towards more agile thinking that embraces change as a constant?
For me, that has been the lesson of facilitation itself. Each cohort creates a collective learning environment—candid, curious, energized—where we make sense of complexity together. It hardly feels like “teaching” anymore. It is a shared discovery.
We revisit timeless fundamentals such as Porter’s Five Forces, sometimes intentionally “red-teaming” frameworks to break and rebuild them stronger. Alongside that, we surface uncomfortable truths—such as why mergers and acquisitions fail more often than they succeed—and then explore how AI might reshape those odds in practice.
Looking ahead, AI has transitioned from hype to habit, and the strategy classroom has become one of the best places to observe this shift unfold. The future of strategy lies not in textbooks, but in the conversations we are having right now—blending theory, practice, and experimentation in real-time.
We are not just teaching strategy theory anymore; we are co-creating it, together, and with AI as our newest collaborator.
(Claire Oatway is a success coach for the Chief Technology Officer Programme and program leader of the Strategic Thinking for the CXO elective in the Cambridge Family Business Leadership Programme. All views expressed here are her own.)
