Lisa Carlin on AI in strategy execution, participative strategy, cultural intelligence, and AI’s impact on consulting (AC Ep27)

2025-12-17 · Source: Humans + AI · Field: Business & Management — Corporate Strategy & Leadership, Consulting & Professional Services, Project & Product Management · Depth: Intermediate, extended

Summary

Lisa Carlin, founder of Strategy Execution Group and Future Builders Group, discusses the transformative role of AI in strategy and consulting. She highlights AI's ability to significantly reduce project timelines and enhance creativity, citing examples like an EdTech firm's product strategy where AI synthesized customer pain points and suggested decision criteria. Carlin emphasizes balancing human judgment with AI, particularly in open and participative strategy processes, and using AI to accelerate human workshops by providing pre-generated solutions. She also details AI's utility in reviewing information for flaws, performing complex analytics like clustering survey data, and generating reports, saving substantial time. Carlin further explains how AI aids in diagnosing organizational culture and predicting communication effectiveness, such as email open rates.

Key takeaway

For product managers and consultants aiming to accelerate strategic planning and execution, integrating AI into your workflow can dramatically reduce project timelines and enhance output quality. You should leverage AI for tasks like ideation, customer feedback analysis, and data clustering, but always maintain human oversight for framing, decision-making, and nuanced insights. This approach allows you to achieve more efficient and effective strategic outcomes.

Key insights

AI significantly accelerates strategy execution and consulting by augmenting human creativity and analytical capabilities.

Principles

• Work within culture to change culture.
• Human framing is critical for AI context.
• Strategy is not democratic; leaders make final calls.

Method

Integrate AI at specific process points for ideation, data synthesis, and solution generation, while humans set parameters and make ultimate decisions, ensuring control and richer outcomes.

In practice

• Use AI to synthesize customer pain points.
• Prompt AI for decision criteria suggestions.
• Employ AI for clustering survey data.

Topics

• AI in Consulting
• Strategy Execution
• Generative AI
• Cultural Intelligence
• AI-driven Analytics

Best for: Product Manager, Consultant, Executive, AI Product Manager

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Humans + AI.