Where AI Belongs in Strategy — and Where It Will Wreck You

Where AI Belongs in Strategy — and Where It Will Wreck You

From Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle Podcast by Francis Wade

June 15, 2026 · 13 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the pitfalls and potential of using AI in strategic decision-making, highlighting historical forecasting failures and the concept of 'trendslop'.

In the early 1980s, McKinsey told my employer at the time, AT&T, that the global market for mobile phones would top out at roughly 900,000 subscribers by 2000. The actual number was 100 million. A decade later, AT&T paid $11.5 billion for McCaw Cellular to claw its way back into the market it had walked away from. Hundreds of America’s brightest minds had read the same report, nodded at the same conclusion, and missed by two orders of magnitude. The forecast was polished, confident, and built entirely on data from the past. It was, in today’s vocabulary, trendslop — and it predated AI by half a century. If you sit at the top of a company anywhere in the world, you are now being asked to make similar bets with a tool that produces trendslop on demand. A recent Harvard Business Review article, “Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got ‘Trendslop’ in Return” , called out the pattern directly. Ask a large language model for strategic advice and you get confident, polished output that sounds insightful — until you look closely and realise it could have been written by a competent intern in an afternoon. The good news: your instincts about AI are right. It can…

People in this episode

Host: Francis Wade

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: McKinsey, AT&T, McCaw Cellular, Harvard Business Review

More episodes of Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle Podcast

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle Podcast podcast page.