
Infusing market intelligence into corporate strategic planning
Market intelligence is a vital input to corporate strategic planning. It provides the essential context — market growth forecasts, competitive landscapes, and industry trends — in which a company conducts its business. For strategic planners, this intelligence is indispensable.
So, it stands to reason that a company’s market intelligence platform — the knowledge management system used to store and mine all market intelligence assets — is a critical tool for strategic planners. (At Northern Light, we’ve seen this firsthand: strategic planners in our client organizations are some of the most enthusiastic users of their SinglePoint™ platforms.) IT analyst Gartner echoes this in a recent report that highlights technology’s role in supporting the strategic planning function.
The GenAI factor
A Harvard Business Review article about using generative AI (GenAI) for strategic planning underscores the importance of having reliable and robust market and competitive intelligence content available for strategic planners to mine for insights. The HBR article includes an anecdote about a commercial agricultural research organization that embarked on a strategic planning exercise by seeking suggestions from a GenAI query for a broader perspective on key issues the team ought to consider. The author writes:
“The [GenAI] response contained nine headings. Under each were two action points. Was there anything new? Yes. But there were also omissions… ChatGPT’s underlying large language model [LLM], though trained on vast data, lacks access to company-specific information, explaining some omissions.”
And that’s where an enterprise market and competitive intelligence platform, populated with company-specific information and well vetted external information sources, becomes indispensable. To inform their thinking, strategic planners need access to authoritative resources: business news, market forecasts from reputable research firms, government and industry databases, and corporate financial reports, especially executive presentations from key competitors that often reveal rich strategic insights. These assets, curated and stored in a well-constructed market intelligence portal, provide the content foundation that commercial LLMs like ChatGPT cannot.
GenAI thrives on quality source material
Armed with those sources, GenAI can be put to meaningful work. It’s now well understood that GenAI (including ChatGPT) output is only as good as the content it draws upon. That’s why Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the gold standard for GenAI-enabled enterprise tools, like a strategic research platform. By controlling the source material GenAI draws from, organizations can dramatically increase the accuracy and reliability of insights while virtually eliminating the risk of AI “hallucinations”.
Strategic planning: A forward-looking approach
Strategic planning is not about simply extrapolating from the past. It’s about envisioning the future — anticipating technological shifts, market disruptions, and new competitive forces —and charting a course to get there. After all, strategic planning isn’t an exercise in geometry; you don’t plot a few points and draw a straight line (or curve) to connect them and voila, there’s your answer!
While no one can predict every twist and turn, strategic planners can improve their odds by leveraging the right tools and information. Marrying GenAI with a rich repository of market and competitive intelligence elevates the strategic planning process, transforming data into actionable insights. By tapping into their company’s intelligence platform and embracing the synergy of GenAI and high-quality market intelligence, strategic planners can transform complexity into clarity and possibilities into actionable plans to chart an informed, confident path forward.