After more than 30 years supporting leadership teams in Ottawa and across Canada, I’ve facilitated my fair share of strategic planning sessions. While the language, trends and models used have shifted with the times, the essential process elements remain the same: environmental scanning, directional elements (mission, vision, values), strategic objectives and desired outcomes, followed by operational planning.
AI use in a shifting context
What has changed is the context in which organizations are operating. Many leaders we work with are under increasing pressure to deliver stronger results with tighter resource constraints while navigating growing complexity and expectations.
When generative AI tools entered the scene, we at Intersol were like many: cautious adopters. Is the hype warranted? What are the risks? Where can this apply in the inherently human work that we do?
With time, discernment and experimentation, our team has developed an approach that uses practical, guard-railed AI alongside proven facilitation techniques to achieve the same or better outcomes with fewer staff hours, shorter cycle times and higher reporting quality.
Technology strengthens the process, but human judgment and skilled facilitation remain at the core.
Here’s how we’ve been using AI to give our clients more relevant, representative, and actionable strategic plans, faster, and how you can adopt AI tools in your own strategic planning efforts.
1. Environmental scanning
All good strategic planning efforts consider the realities, trends and possibilities in the landscape within which an organization operates. Depending on the client, we would apply a structured analysis of these factors, such as PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal). This phase sets a baseline for further engagement with stakeholders, providing points of entry to the strategic conversation.
How AI helps:
AI accelerates and improves environmental scanning by synthesizing large volumes of data from the organization’s operating environment, surfacing trends, risks and signals that might otherwise be overlooked. This creates a strong, evidence-informed starting point. We then test and validate these insights with the organization to ensure they reflect its lived reality, context, and priorities before moving forward.
2. Preferred futures
Informed by what we learned through the environmental scan, we facilitate a conversation about what the future could look like. This often includes exploring a small set of realistic scenarios, for example an optimistic case, a more neutral path and a more challenging or pessimistic outlook. This helps leaders and teams think through potential risks and opportunities and clarify the direction they want to pursue.
How AI helps:
AI tools, including generative platforms powered by leading providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, help us quickly develop a range of plausible scenarios, including optimistic, neutral and pessimistic views of the future. This allows teams to consider a broader set of possibilities without spending weeks gathering and synthesizing input.
In addition, AI enables us to expand the organizational context by incorporating relevant external perspectives, such as international trends, emerging issues, and cross-sector insights that may not surface through internal analysis alone.
These scenarios are not treated as answers. They are used as starting points for discussion. We then facilitate a structured conversation to test, challenge and refine them with stakeholders, ensuring the final direction reflects the organization’s context, values and priorities.
3. Project administration and documentation
Any strategic planning effort requires thoughtful preparation, clear documentation and consistent communication. It often also involves coordinating multiple inputs, aligning stakeholders and managing a significant volume of information across the process.
How AI helps:
We incorporate practical, guard-railed AI to support documentation, synthesis and reporting, significantly reducing time spent on manual, administrative tasks. This allows our team to focus more fully on facilitation, analysis, and insight generation.
We also use structured digital workspaces to support collaboration, enabling participants to contribute ideas, validate inputs and stay aligned throughout the process, whether working in-person or remotely.
To support implementation, we help translate strategic priorities into clear, trackable actions and performance measures. This ensures that plans remain active and actionable, with ongoing visibility into progress and outcomes, rather than becoming static documents.
4. Consulting key stakeholders
A robust strategic plan depends on engaging the right stakeholders at the right level, and at the right time. These often include decision-makers (board of directors, senior leadership team), regional or functional representatives, clients, beneficiaries and subject matter experts, among others.
How AI helps:
By leveraging AI for documentation, analysis, and structuring information products, we and our clients have more time, energy and attention to devote to listening to stakeholders and soliciting their views and positions on key issues.
By integrating AI, our clients not only receive a comprehensive and actionable strategic plan, but they also benefit from a process that strengthens relationships and builds alignment across teams.
What about when AI adoption is part of the strategy?
Strategic planning is just one area in which AI is beginning to reshape the way organizations operate. Increasingly, leaders ask not only how AI can support their strategy, but how it should be adopted more broadly across their organization. Getting this right requires more than selecting tools. It requires creating the space for the right conversations with the right people.
We typically begin by taking a step back and understanding how work is currently done, identifying where there are opportunities to improve, and where AI can realistically add value. From there, we facilitate structured discussions to explore what responsible and effective adoption could look like in practice, aligned with the organization’s context, capacity and priorities.
Done well, this approach not only leads to better decisions, it also builds shared understanding and confidence in the path forward.
If you are exploring how AI can strengthen your strategic planning or broader operations, we would welcome a conversation to help you move forward with more clarity and confidence.
About the Author:
Marc Valois is a Senior Consultant and a Principal at the Intersol Group. Over the past 30-plus years, he has led hundreds of projects, facilitating strategic and business planning, participative public consultation and conflict resolution processes, among others.
Marc continues to serve clients at the most senior levels of government, national associations and the private sector. Increasingly, he combines his expertise with cuttingedge generative and agentic AI to drive sharper insight, faster decisions and superior outcomes for clients.
Reach out to Marc at mvalois@intersol.ca or by completing the form on www.intersol.ca
