From Admin to Advantage: The Real Impact of AI on Strategic Planning

AI for Strategic Planning, Part 1

The Hidden Cost of Planning

Every year, planning season starts with energy and ends with exhaustion. Teams spend months chasing data, fixing formulas, and building models that are outdated before the off-site even begins. By the time the deck is ready, your best strategists have spent more time managing process than thinking strategically. 

This is the hidden cost of planning: the people best equipped to shape the future are buried in administration. Weeks vanish into data collection and formatting. The real work of strategy, including testing assumptions, exploring scenarios, and making tough choices, gets squeezed into whatever energy remains. 

When Admin Work Devours Strategy 

Strategic planning has always required discipline, but the scale of administrative work has become unsustainable. Teams lose weeks chasing numbers and reformatting slides. The work is necessary, but it starves planning of what it needs most: strategic capacity. 

When your best thinkers are buried in administration, three things suffer: 

Creativity disappears. Imagination needs space, and that space vanishes when someone is still chasing quarterly actuals at 11 p.m. Breakthrough insights do not come from tired minds staring at spreadsheets. They come from rested ones asking, “What if we tried something completely different?” 

Bias compounds. Exhausted teams default to familiar assumptions instead of testing them. Copying last year’s playbook feels safer than asking whether you are still solving the right problem. 

Execution weakens before it begins. Plans built by tired teams often lack the clarity needed for alignment. When strategists are drained by mechanics, they struggle to build conviction around difficult choices. The strategy deck looks beautiful, but nobody can remember why option B beat option C. 

AI Gives Your Team Back Its Thinking Time 

This is not about automation. It is about liberation. 

Research from McKinsey & Company identifies five ways AI enhances strategy work: researcher, interpreter, thought partner, simulator, and communicator. Each removes a long-standing constraint on planning capacity. 

As researcher, AI scans millions of data points and connects insights across sources in minutes. An AI-powered engine can evaluate more than 40 million companies across languages and generate a prioritized list based on strategic fit. What took analysts months now takes hours. 

As interpreter, AI converts raw data from reports, patents, reviews, and purchasing patterns into usable growth insights. It detects patterns humans miss simply because the volume exceeds human capacity. 

As thought partner, Harvard Business Review found that CEOs using generative AI uncovered alternatives managers missed by overcoming human bias. AI can pressure test strategies against established frameworks and flag pitfalls insiders overlook. 

As simulator, McKinsey & Company explains that AI supports scenario analysis. Teams can explore the impact of macroeconomic shifts, competitor moves, and stakeholder reactions. During execution, the technology can monitor early market signals, simulate their effects, and alert teams when conditions warrant course correction. 

As communicator, AI helps craft narratives for different audiences. It adapts complex concepts for regions, regulators, or analysts, keeping the message consistent while addressing each group’s priorities. 

These capabilities free people to do what they do best: make judgment calls, challenge assumptions, imagine what data cannot, and build conviction around bold choices. 

How the Planning Process Actually Changes 

AI does not erase the work. It changes who does it and how much energy it consumes. 

Consider a typical mid-sized organization with a 12 week strategic planning cycle: 

Before AI (12 weeks) 

• Weeks 1–3: Collect and reconcile data from multiple systems 

• Weeks 4–6: Manually build scenarios, debug formulas, fix inconsistencies 

• Weeks 7–9: Iterate as leaders request new cuts and assumptions 

• Weeks 10–11: Format presentations and materials 

• Week 12: Final alignment meetings 

Time on strategy: about one week 
Time on mechanics: about eleven weeks 

With AI (6 weeks) 

• Days 1–2: Validate AI-synthesized data 

• Weeks 1–3: Explore scenarios, test assumptions, debate implications 

• Weeks 4–5: Refine strategy around constraints and dynamics AI cannot fully grasp 

• Week 6: Build alignment and commitment 

Time on strategy: about five weeks 
Time on mechanics: about one week 

The pattern holds across industries. Mechanical work still happens; you just stop doing it manually. And no one stays late fixing broken formulas. 

Your team’s energy shifts from data wrangling to strategic judgment. The bottleneck moves from “When will the model be done?” to “Are we asking the right questions?” 

A Short Window to Build the Advantage 

The shift is already happening. 

In September 2024, Harvard Business Review documented CEOs experimenting with AI for strategic planning. By February 2025, McKinsey & Company showed AI moving from pilots to core strategy infrastructure. Organizations that embed AI into planning are gaining an “insights edge” over competitors still relying on manual processes. 

According to PwC's 2024 AI Business Predictions report, nearly half of technology leaders now integrate AI into core business strategy, with companies seeing 20 to 30 percent gains in productivity, speed to market, and revenue. 

The advantage is not only speed. It is the cognitive reallocation that speed enables. 

When AI handles the heavy lifting, strategists can finally focus on the questions that decide success: 

• What assumptions are we making that others ignore? 

• What customer needs are emerging that our model cannot yet serve? 

• What bold moves would create disproportionate value if we had the conviction to commit? 

• What execution risks could undermine even the right strategy? 

These questions need human judgment, pattern recognition, and courage. AI cannot answer them, but it can finally make time to ask them. 

Your Data Becomes Your Edge 

As AI makes generic insights widely available, proprietary data becomes the true differentiator. Companies using generic inputs will generate generic strategies and achieve generic performance. It is the strategic equivalent of everyone showing up with the same McKinsey deck from 2019. 

In its February 2025 research, McKinsey & Company, highlights that access to curated proprietary data ecosystems now defines competitive advantage. That means quantitative data from internal systems, qualitative insights from customer interactions, and stakeholder input AI cannot generate on its own. 

Organizations that build proprietary data networks will see what others cannot. Those relying only on public data will blend into the noise as AI democratizes the same insights for everyone. 

AI Supports Strategy. People Still Decide.  

AI sees patterns in noise, weak signals in data, and second-order effects in scenarios. 

Humans see possibilities rooted in capability, judgment built from experience, and context that defies the numbers. 

McKinsey's analysis emphasizes that process quality, how teams debate options, handle uncertainty, and remove bias, matters more than raw insight quality. As AI accelerates analysis, it gives strategy teams more time to strengthen these human processes. 

AI reveals the patterns. People decide what to do with them. 

The RightSeat Approach 

At RightSeat, we believe the future belongs to organizations that master the partnership between human ingenuity and AI capability. Not one or the other. Both. 

We work with leadership and teams to uncover where AI adds the most value to their planning process, strengthen the routines that turn insights into action, and equip the people who move strategy forward every day. 

The result is a planning process that feels lighter and sharper. AI handles the heavy lifting. Your teams think clearly, act decisively, and focus where it matters most: on the strategy itself. 

Coming up in Part 2, we’ll explore how AI helps strategic plans come alive so they stay relevant, evolve with new data, and adjust as markets shift.

 Sources: 

McKinsey & Company. (February 5, 2025). How AI is transforming strategy development. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-ai-is-transforming-strategy-development 

Harvard Business Review. (September 11, 2024). How CEOs Are Using Gen AI for Strategic Planning. https://hbr.org/2024/09/how-ceos-are-using-gen-ai-for-strategic-planning 

PwC. (2024). 2024 AI Business Predictions. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tech-effect/ai-analytics/ai-predictions.html  

Coming up in Part 2, we’ll explore how AI helps strategic plans come alive so they stay relevant, evolve with new data, and adjust as markets shift.