Aligning Business Strategy for AI Integration

Northeastern University via Coursera

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Overview

"Aligning Business Strategy for AI Integration" is a strategic-level course designed for business leaders, managers, and decision-makers seeking to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their organization’s long-term goals. The course bridges the gap between technical AI capabilities and business value, offering a practical framework for aligning AI initiatives with core business strategies. You’ll learn how to assess organizational readiness, identify high-impact AI opportunities, and align AI adoption with key objectives such as operational efficiency, customer experience, innovation, and competitive advantage. The...

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 firms 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 Porters 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 firms 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.