Aligning Business Strategy for AI Integration

Overview

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Explores how artificial intelligence (AI) empowers businesses to enhance competitiveness. Examines how AI integrates with business strategy. Offers students an opportunity to recommend business solutions through the integration of AI capabilities. Focuses on leveraging machine learning techniques like unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning for data-driven insights. Examines the intersection of managerial practices and AI capabilities through real-world case studies. Students also have an opportunity to gain practical insights into implementation and ethical considerations and navigate the dynamic landscape of AI-driven business transformations.

Syllabus

The Value Chain and Competitive Strategy/Dates

The value chain is a powerful way to determine how companies compete. The value chain method structures the firm into distinct activities and enables us to clearly identify how a firm pursues a business strategy. By focusing on how companies individually execute and collectively coordinate primary and support activities in the value chain, you will be better-equipped to examine how effectively a firm operates to serve market needs.

The External Environment: General and Industry

In this module, we introduce the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) framework as a tool to formulate firm strategy. A firm’s external operating environment is systematically considered to identify opportunities and threats. The general environment is examined using the PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Environmental, and Legal) framework and the industry environment is examined using Porter’s Five Forces model of industry competitiveness. These factors in the external environment are the W and T of SWOT.

The Internal environment: Resources, Capabilities, & Core Competence

In this module, we cover how a firm’s internal environment is considered using the Resource-Based View (RBV) to identify strengths and weaknesses that correspond to the S and W elements of SWOT.

Strategy Formulation: SWOT Matching & Strategy Recommendation

Once we have all S, W, O, and T factors identified, we relate S factors to the other three W, O, and T factors. This SWOT matrix method assists in identification of firm capabilities that can lead to competitive advantage in the form of a special capability that is called a core competence.