Unable To Plan In 2025? Use AI To ‘Leave No Scenario Behind'
Why are businesses unable to plan?
The global leaders provided several concurrent challenges that make planning difficult:
Said one senior executive recently, 'We used to have a core scenario in place with a handful of back-ups, but now we need to have literally hundreds of options on the table and know which one to follow at any given time. And the answer can change daily or weekly and vary by product line or country.'
The role of scenario analysis: Rehearsing the future
Peter Schwartz, a pioneer of scenario planning and author of The Art of the Long View, likened the use of scenarios to 'rehearsing the future.' Similar to rehearsing a theater production, the process of scenario development historically required a collaborative effort of numerous individuals and several days, weeks, or months of refinement before the scenarios were ready for their intended audience. This traditional approach to scenario development generally was time-consuming and resource intensive.
The role of AI in scenario planning: 'No Scenario Left Behind'
Recently in Silicon Valley, PruVen Capital Managing Partner Ramneek Gupta shared the concept of 'no scenario left behind.' He and his colleagues have been studying advances in scenario planning and funding solutions that could enable business leaders to leverage advanced AI such as large language models (LLMs) and large geotemporal models (LGMs). LGMs use frameworks that analyze and reason across both time and space to exhaustively simulate virtually any and every event and scenario. These AI models provide dynamic risk modeling and real-time simulations for a vast array of business scenarios, allowing business leaders to address the inability to plan.
WTW's Jessica Boyd and Cameron Rye explain in a recent article that advances in generative AI tools have enabled the rapid generation of numerous scenario narratives across a wide range of disciplines. These models accelerate the traditional, resource-heavy process of scenario development, streamlining the steps while introducing novel perspectives that might be missed by human analysts. They help overcome the limitations of human imagination that occur when people overlook or underestimate potential risks that have not yet happened in historical data. This can reduce potential blind spots that otherwise leave organizations vulnerable to highly disruptive events.
Already, AI breakthroughs have enabled the next stage of scenario planning using advanced language models in areas such as weather forecasting, including hurricane landfall predictions, as well as political and economic modeling. These models provide the opportunity to expand beyond the traditional exploratory scenarios that most businesses currently use. For example, normative scenarios (similar to a reverse stress test) can add significant value when they are built around specific business objectives.
Further, within the UK and Europe, new regulations focused on financial institutions have sparked considerable attention on scenario testing (in the U.K.: Operational Resilience 2025 and in the EU: Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)). These rules have further increased the importance of well-developed and defined scenarios, including scenario testing with third parties.
How to start scenario planning and conducting an impact analysis
Recently, WTW's Laura Kelly explained how scenario building and impact analysis have become a crucial part of business planning and risk management. She suggests three key steps in scenario planning and impact analysis:
Effective leaders are not halted by uncertainty but rather mobilize around it. They identify the broad range of scenarios that might occur in a given set of circumstances, prioritize the greatest risks as well as the solutions that can mitigate these risks, and enable the company to thrive.
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