How AI is Transforming Scenario Planning from a Function into a Core Skill (Ep 1 blog)
Geopolitical volatility, climate risks, and the speed of AI - all is impacting our work reality. For leaders and strategists, the familiar sense of stability that defined recent decades is giving way to a new reality of continuous and rapid uncertainty.
As David Evans, founder and CEO of ArcSyne and a veteran of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), CoStar, and the White House, discussed on the Workestration Podcast, this shift requires a transformation in how we approach strategic planning. ArcSyne was created precisely to help organizations navigate a chaotic world where the ability to make good decisions, fast, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Why Strategy Departments Struggle in the New Normal
David Evans’ extensive background, including his time designing best practices sharing forums for top executives at CEB and later formalizing similar structures in the government through the Office of Executive Councils in the GSA, gave him a unique view into the structural challenges of strategic planning.
He notes that strategy, as a dedicated corporate function, often struggles with inherent instability. Excluding the rare "visionary genius strategists" who have the ear of the CEO, most strategy teams fall into two camps: M&A dealmakers or internal process managers. The latter group is highly vulnerable, as their role as "glue" in harmonizing business units can be easily eliminated if they don't own a core, non-negotiable process like revenue or finance.
Ultimately, Evans contends that strategy is a skill set that those at the helm must possess, not a siloed function that can be easily delegated. The most brilliant strategy, exemplified by leaders like Andy Florence at CoStar, often comes directly from the mind of the founder or CEO.
ArcSyne: Deciphering the Near-Horizon Future
Evans’ motivation to launch ArcSyne was twofold: the urgent need to decipher a world facing extreme policy uncertainty (like "Trump 2.0" and tariffs) and the explosive productivity gains offered by AI. He realized he could “orchestrate chats the right way” to generate sophisticated analysis equivalent to having "10 round-the-clock PhDs who work at four times the rate of a normal human".
ArcSyne is designed to tackle near-horizon futures—changes that are coming upon us much faster than historically expected (within 6 to 18 months). The platform’s analysis is built on two core components:
1. Superpowered Scanning: A news reader scans credible sources for over 150 macro factors (plus 30 client-specific factors).
2. Synthetic Analysis and Pattern Detection: Synthetic personas interpret these factors, providing both the default "conventional wisdom" view (e.g., a Brookings macroeconomist) and insights from specialized experts who lack institutional bias.
Critically, the platform uses neural networks and large language models (LLMs) to detect patterns and relationships among factors that the human mind simply cannot see.
The result is the generation of three to five major scenarios with assigned probabilities, alongside actionable playbooks tailored by functional role (CEO, CFO, etc.). The primary objective is to gain the confidence of knowing “what are the few things we can do that will work in any scenario”.
Trust, Sentiment, and the Chain of Reasoning
In an era where trust in AI outputs is constantly questioned, David Evans prioritized transparency by designing ArcSyne as a high-trust, wrapper AI built on a foundational model. The entire process is auditable: a single cycle of prediction involves 1,200 inference passes that are databased sequentially. A user can query any decision or action and trace the linear reasoning back through the covarying factors, the synthetic analyst interpretation, and finally to the original news source.
Furthermore, ArcSyne excels where conventional models often fail: by focusing on sentiment about data. Evans notes that in a complex economic system, sentiment—the human overlay on data—is the driving force. The platform tracks the meaning of the data, not just the data itself, recognizing that things like challenges to the integrity of independent statistical agencies do not always trigger the conventional market reaction, highlighting the importance of changing market sentiment.
The Power of Co-Augmentation
The most profound opportunity presented by tools like ArcSyne is not replacement, but co-augmentation—the human in the loop working with AI to make better decisions.While AI can access all documented human knowledge, it cannot access the dynamic, emergent, and undocumented knowledge that comes from human experience, gut instincts, and heuristics.
David’s biggest concern is that senior leaders often anchor to assumptions that are no longer true, effectively operating with blind spots.ArcSyne serves as an intelligent alerting system to potential turbulence. Just like an aircraft pilot seeing a storm ahead, the system warns leaders "just in time" about two seemingly unrelated things that are, in fact, combining to signal a significant supply or demand shock. This empowers leaders to make good decisions faster than competitors.
For HR and talent leaders, the message is clear: if AI begins replacing junior staff functions (like paralegals in a law firm example), organizations risk losing the pipeline where human experience and good judgment are traditionally developed. The mandate for leadership is now to cultivate the uniquely human skills—experience, judgment, and dynamic expertise—to work constructively alongside AI.
Check out the full discussion with David here.