A lot of accounting firms are already experimenting with generative AI for things like data analysis, communications, and other routine tasks. A February survey of 275 accounting firms by AICPA & CIMA found that over a quarter of respondents had experimented with generative AI to improve efficiency.

Far fewer firms use generative AI for strategic brainstorming, but it can be a powerful tool to help balance workloads, create marketing strategies, and optimize resources. While AI shouldn’t replace decision-making altogether, the right prompts can help you reach faster, more nuanced decisions than you might before.

GenAI management insights: getting started

Using generative AI to help make decisions is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it shouldn’t be trusted to place things into context as well as a human can – but on the other hand, its objectivity can add new perspectives in scenarios where social dynamics and bias might otherwise cloud your judgement.

As Yuval Atsumon from McKinsey notes, “When executives think about strategy automation, many are looking too far ahead—at AI deciding the right strategy. They are missing opportunities to use AI in the building blocks of strategy.”

When you design AI prompts for strategic decision-making, it’s important to:

Add context: the more context you give the AI, the more nuanced its output will be. That’s especially critical in high-level decision-making where there are a lot of key details.

Be specific: without going into detail that puts your data at risk, be as specific as you can about the situation. That might mean adding information about the persona you want it to inhabit as it makes a decision, the outcomes you want to achieve, or details about your practice.

Use multi-step prompts: an iterative process can help refine the output if it doesn’t quite hit the mark. You may realize that you need to add detail to the prompt, make the response more in-depth, or otherwise steer the output in a slightly different direction.

You can also start with your own strategic insights as a prompt, then request additional feedback or insights on a specific idea.

A few examples of strategic use cases for generative AI

There are a number of ways you can use generative AI for strategic insights – these are just a few examples to help you get started! Regardless of the prompt you’re using, make sure to anonymize the data first to protect the security of your business information.

1. Marketing strategy

Generative AI can help suggest marketing tactics such as the best social media platforms to post on, what marketing tools you should look into using, and what types of content you could post across your marketing channels.

It can even help you set up multi-channel marketing campaigns – you’ll just need a prompt with your value proposition and ideal customer profile. 

To get the right data, you can start by searching through your client notes in ProCharted to help you get a sense of what questions clients are asking about, what services they want, and what concerns they have.

2. Business strategy

AI can also help you come up with new strategic insights for the direction of your business, including narrowing down a niche or branching out into new services.

It can also help you determine what KPIs and performance milestones to hit. For example, you could use insights from your dashboard to determine how you want to quantify the performance of individual team members, then ask ChatGPT to suggest some performance indicators for those outputs.

3. Financial strategy

Should you invest in new tools given your current financial health? Should you make a new hire and when? How can you increase the ROI of projects?

Generative AI can help you answer these questions, although financial strategy will take some finessing to come up with the right prompt. In ProCharted, you can take a look at your billing reports for a big-picture summary of earnings per client, period, or team member and then use that as a starting point for a strategic path.

Generative AI can’t decide your path, but it can show you your options

When you use generative AI for strategy, think of it like a map—it can’t tell you where to go, but it can help clarify what directions are possible. While it won’t replace your management decisions, it can help you broaden your perspective and see possibilities you might have overlooked. You’ll make informed, innovative decisions that not only keep you competitive but also push the boundaries of what your business can achieve.