Even in the best of times, strategic planning is a challenge for business leaders. When global uncertainty and volatility rise, the task gets even more difficult—and more integral to business success. When the world is in flux, an organization’s optionality grows in importance, as does organizational resilience. In fact, as research has repeatedly shown, resilience is now a substantial driver of corporate outperformance.

But building resiliency and optionality into a strategic plan challenges humans’ cognitive (and financial) bandwidth. The seemingly endless array of future scenarios, coupled with our own human biases, conspires to anchor our understanding of the future in what we’ve seen in the past. Generative AI (GenAI) can help overcome this common organizational tendency for entrenched thinking, and mitigate the challenges of being human, while exploiting LLMs’ creativity as well as their ability to mirror human behavioral patterns.

One potent approach to incorporating GenAI into strategic planning is coupling it with agent-based modeling (ABM) that is already in use to simulate complex, dynamic scenarios. Instead of relying on ABM’s deterministically coded agents of yore—still constrained by the boundaries of human imagination—modern LLMs can make simulations much more flexible, human-like, and (fruitfully) unpredictable. What’s more, they can achieve this at a fraction of the time and cost of in-person planning workshops, providing a powerful tool to explore a wider range of futures and prepare for the unexpected with greater agility.