AI Aided Strategy
Au Revoir 2025! What A Year It's Been.
Happy New Year, everyone! As we kick off 2026, I wanted to share some thoughts on where AI and strategy intersect and where they don’t.
Here’s something we keep seeing that’s worth addressing head-on: AI isn’t going to make your strategy for you. Not in the short term, probably not in the long term either.
What it can do brilliantly is augment your strategic thinking. But expecting a machine to understand what you, your firm, and your customers truly care about? What you’re genuinely good at? That’s asking for something that simply isn’t there yet.
The field is getting more crowded, which is to say, it’s no longer entirely empty. We welcome that (competitors: reach out to us at info@vstrat.ai - we’re friendly and don’t bite)! Competition validates the market we’ve been building for nearly 25 years. But I do notice two trends that make me scratch my head: companies claiming to be “management consultants in a box” and others claiming to be “first” in this space.
Look, the only management consultant that fits in a box is... well, let’s just say it’s one that’s six feet underground. And unless someone’s got a time machine that goes back a couple of decades, the “first” claim is just historically inaccurate. It’s like showing up to a party and announcing you invented recorded music. You might have great tunes but don’t pretend you’re Edison.
That said, many of these newcomers have genuinely interesting technology. Some are even our former students, which makes me proud! And I get it. We literally uprooted our entire lives and moved across an ocean for this field. The passion is real, and it’s infectious.
What We’re Building
Our north star has always been augmentation, not replacement. Think of it like architecture: an architect designs a house, then people use machines to lift the beams. We’re building tools to enhance human thinking, not to replace it.
Most of our system was actually built before the current wave of agentic AI coding, what people call “vibe” coding. Like most experienced developers, we’ve been incorporating more of it lately to supplement and expand our capabilities. But here’s the thing: if you’ve been coding for a while, you know there are real limits to what these tools can do without some serious rework. They’re helpful, absolutely, but they’re not magic.
Well, strategy is way more nebulous than coding. So those constraints? They’re actually tighter in our world, not looser. The biggest change people will see is our new collaboration module because strategy is about people working together, not machines grinding away.
The PowerPoint Question
You might notice that most of our tools don’t export to PowerPoint. It’s not because we can’t. Our deck-making module works great. It’s because we choose not to lean on it heavily. We don’t want to build presentations for people; we want to augment thinking.
There’s a meaningful difference there.
Looking Forward
This past year was huge for us: we secured our IP rights from INSEAD, made the big move from France to Austin, Texas (yahoo!), and continued advancing both our technology and our business.
For the new year? We’re hoping to see advances that absolutely blow our minds. The field is evolving fast, and we’re excited to be part of pushing it forward thoughtfully, authentically, and with the kind of substance that actually helps people think better about strategy.
Here’s to augmenting human intelligence, not replacing it. And here’s to a year of genuine innovation over marketing hype.
Cheers to 2025!
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
- Dylan
