On April 10th till 12th, a group of Competitive Intelligence professionals gathered at The IntelliSummit 2019 in Stockholm to exchange best practices. Our founding partner René Rohrbeck was invited to talk and host a roundtable discussion about “How will AI change the intelligence work”. In case you could not join the 80+ guests at the conference, we summarized a short review and prepared a video.

The fundamental questions for any organizations
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus rightly said that ‘the only thing that is constant is change’. Future markets will have changes which corporates are busy preparing for. The fundamental questions for any organization to answer range from “Which new competitors might be entering my industry in the future?” “How will the boundaries of my industry change?” “What actions might my current and future competitors utilize to gain a competitive advantage?” “What kind of innovations are my competitors working on to gain a competitive advantage?” to “How to capture and sustain a superior position in future markets?”.

Watch the video of his talk here here

The IntelliSummit 2019 in Stockholm was attended by more than 10 expert speakers and close to 80 guests, with a focused theme Creating Competitive Advantages in a Complex Future. Six special roundtables covered topics such as: How do you increase the value of IT tools for CI in the future? Where to find content? Getting the right data into your system so that you can get the right results. Managing expectations in a changing CI world. ‘Lead me, follow me’ – The pros and cons of recommending actions. Unconventional Market Intelligence Methods – Best Practices and Possibilities. How do you increase the value of IT tools for CI in the future? And how will AI change the intelligence work? moderated by Rene Rohrbeck.

The 3 most impressing key take-aways from René’s talk:

The emphasis in the intelligence work is shifting from backward to forward-looking.
In our vision, Corporate foresight permits an organization to lay the foundation for future competitive advantage.
Corporate foresight is identifying, observing and interpreting factors that induce change, determining possible organization-specific implications, and triggering appropriate organizational responses. Corporate Foresight involves multiple stakeholders and creates value through providing access to critical resources ahead of the competition, preparing the organization for change, and permitting the organization to steer proactively towards a desired future.

Impactful intelligence creates shared future outlooks in the forms of scenarios, radars or trend audits. 
Scenario planning is important for competitive analysis. Scenarios are defined as challenging descriptions of alternative future states. Competitor scenarios have been used to identify and test plausible competitor strategy alternatives. They map out industry opportunities and link them to anticipated competitor actions. They serve as mental models that form the basis for strategizing, and they allow an organization to assess its responses to competitors’ moves and select a strategy that is viable under a variety of competitive conditions. In doing so, scenario planning serves as an organizational radar, allowing decision-makers to develop an early warning system for the potentially devastating market.

We move towards real-time participation in decision-making processes. 
Organizations need wargames, monitoring and dashboards for real-time decision making. They will have to combine scenario planning and business wargaming to better anticipate future competitive dynamics. Scenario analysis that leverages deep foresight based on key external factors is often too weak in proposing clear organizational actions in regard to competitive dynamics. You have to up the game. Typically, business wargames are directly linked to strategic decisions concerning the competitive positioning of an organization.

The content of this article is inspired by Professor René Rohrbeck’s talk at The IntelliSummit 2019 and his recently published paper in 2019: Combining scenario planning and business wargaming to better anticipate future competitive dynamics.