Strategy often looks flawless in the playbook. But on the field, others have a say. Competitors respond—or even act first. Customers react, regulators intervene, and conditions shift in ways that are hard to recognize, let alone predict. Organizations need a way to stress-test their strategy before decisions become commitments.
This is where war gaming earns its keep. An immersive learning experience, war gaming helps organizations challenge assumptions and hypotheses as scenarios unfold. By observing how different players act and react, leaders gain a clearer view of the motivations, tradeoffs, and possible consequences that drive real-world outcomes. Crucially, war games can uncover unexpected vulnerabilities and opportunities. They test strategy before reality does.
At its core, war gaming is powerful because it is human, unscripted, and dynamic: participants step into the roles of competitors and other stakeholders, make decisions under pressure, and reveal the incentives, biases, and blind spots that shape their behavior. These factors are often hard to anticipate from data alone.
AI amplifies the human core of war gaming. Exercises can go broader and deeper, spanning dozens of scenarios instead of just a handful, with hundreds of permutations and thousands of simulated actions. Hybrid games, where roles are played by both humans and AI agents, expand the number of stakeholder perspectives, more accurately simulating complex networks.
Organizations make better use of time in live workshops, going more in depth into interactions and decisions. That’s key, as the best war games surface not only what happens (so leaders can understand and plan for the impact of their actions), but also why it happens (so leaders can recognize the cues and early warning signs that should trigger actions going forward). This is the pay dirt of war gaming, and AI helps organizations dig deeper for richer insights.
Already, leaders are using AI-enhanced war gaming to prioritize near- and medium-term actions and build conviction in those choices. They’re drawing on the exercises to prepare for major shifts, better understand competitor responses, and identify opportunities for diversification. But, just as crucially, they understand that AI is more than an efficiency engine for war gaming. Used wisely, it’s a force multiplier, helping leaders leverage more data and perspectives as they shape decisions.
How War Gaming Strengthens Strategic Foresight
The most successful organizations turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. They do this by mastering strategic foresight. But strategic foresight isn’t simply anticipating the future. It’s a process of preparing for what lies ahead: envisioning the worlds one might be operating in and determining what winning looks like. It also means assessing risks—both challenges and opportunities—as well as identifying decision points and tradeoffs, pressure-testing plans and hypotheses, and continuously monitoring signals to make timely if-then decisions.
War gaming is a powerful step in this process, a way for leaders to try out ideas and see what works, what breaks, why it breaks, and how to adjust. In our experience, organizations often underemphasize the moves and countermoves of competitors, either because they’ve fallen in love with their own plans or because they place too much faith in their models. The ability to view the same scenario from different perspectives is one of war gaming’s greatest strengths.
The ability to view the same scenario from different perspectives is one of war gaming’s greatest strengths.
Deploying this tool creates value throughout the strategy life cycle. Early in strategy development, war gaming helps pinpoint where to play and what matters most. It can highlight key adjacencies and shifting power dynamics, for example. Conducting war games can also help organizations prepare for specific challenges, such as regulatory shifts and high-stakes negotiations. (See the exhibit.)
Across an array of applications, war gaming helps organizations gain clarity around critical choices: the no-regret moves that create value across multiple scenarios, the conditional moves that depend on certain paths and triggers, and the big bets that, if placed today, could reshape outcomes tomorrow. War games also shine a light on risk appetite and how it shapes and informs—and sometimes constrains—strategy. Often, the greatest value comes from trying to break a strategy, revealing gaps to address and, crucially, opportunities to exploit.
Human First but AI Enhanced
AI doesn’t replace human judgment but rather reveals more of it by handling the more labor-intensive aspects of war gaming (for example, by running pregame permutations). This frees up more time for analysis and enables deeper executive discussions about actions, tradeoffs, and implications. Indeed, AI enhances war games at every stage: before, during, and after the live session.
Before the Live Session. In traditional war games, the upfront work can take weeks. Organizations must choose the plot lines that will guide the game interactions and discussions; gather and synthesize market data, competitor intelligence, and regulatory developments; and create the fact base and briefings that help teams take on their personas. While humans still must verify these elements, AI can dramatically compress the preparation timeframe.
Critically, AI expands the feasible scope of analysis. Whereas traditional analog war gaming considers a handful of key scenarios, AI can generate dozens of additional future worlds and explore the many moves, countermoves, and decision paths they may contain. This upfront, wide-ranging permutation exploration tightens the focus for the live workshops, spotlighting the plotlines that tee up the most critical strategic dilemma and force the most impactful decisions. As a result, participants will be able to spend their time on the questions and possibilities that will make the most difference. In essence, this agentic enhancement to the war-gaming process gives organizations the best of both worlds: a broad scope during the preparation phase (reducing the likelihood that anything vital will be omitted or overlooked) and a curated playlist for the workshops (so every minute counts).
AI can generate dozens of future worlds and explore the many moves, countermoves, and decision paths they may contain.
But not all AI is equal: architecture matters. In our work, rather than relying on a single AI model to simulate every perspective, we use a multiagent tool in which separate agents represent different stakeholders. Roles might include competitors, customers, vendors, or regulators, for example. Because they operate with distinct viewpoints and objectives, these agents better capture the friction and competitive dynamics of real-world interactions.
For a leading heavy equipment manufacturer, we built distinct agents to represent the company, top competitors, channel partners and dealers, regulators, and customers. The multiagent approach produced a more precise—and more revealing—picture of ecosystem reactions to bold strategic moves versus a status-quo baseline. This helped us identify winning plays that generated value across scenarios. It also uncovered high-impact contingent moves: opportunities for the company to pursue only when preestablished trigger criteria were met. Tellingly, the war game revealed that the company’s baseline strategy consistently underperformed more ambitious moves. This strengthened the case for more decisive action.
During the Live Session. The AI-enhanced pregame enables workshop participants to start with sharper questions and a clearer view of where challenges and opportunities lie. The live sessions become a richer, leaner, faster experience, as participants focus on the moves and countermoves that matter most, testing how strategies evolve as conditions shift and identifying signals that might provide advance notification of the shifts.
This laser focus lets human players more effectively wield their own superpower: judgment. War games are not just about what decisions are made; they are also about the “why”—the motivations behind those calls. Participants bring context, experience, and intuition as well as fears, assumptions, and apprehensions. This helps reveal incentives, risk appetite, biases, and blind spots that AI cannot fully replicate.
Understanding the interplay between human and AI—and how to bring out the best in both—is important. AI can support the process in real time, introducing new information and simulating additional actors, but it remains an assistive tool. The core dynamic stays human: teams stepping into the roles of key competitors and stakeholders, making decisions under pressure, and reacting to one another in real time.
The result is a more probing, consequential exercise, one that builds conviction not only in what might happen, but also in how to respond if and when it does.
After the Live Session. The value of war gaming ultimately lies in what follows: connecting the “so what” to the “now what.”
Following the live session, an AI tool can run additional simulations, test proposed moves across a wider range of scenarios, revisit decisions that did not play out as expected, and explore paths not fully developed in the live game. Leaders can move forward knowing their strategy has been tested across a broad set of possibilities and that their decisions are grounded in rigorous exploration.
For a global health care company, we used the post-workshop period to test each result from the live session individually and then in bundles across an expanded set of scenarios. This helped us identify which combination of moves held up best under the widest range of possible outcomes. In all, we modeled more than 50 scenario permutations, performed more than 350 simulation runs, and tested more than 11,000 actions—a scope only possible with agent-based modeling. Indeed, AI allowed us to employ more than 400 versions of agent stakeholders, a stark contrast to the four stakeholder groups represented in an earlier, pre-AI workshop that we conducted with the same company. That previous engagement sparked valuable insights, but the depth and breadth that AI enabled, and the analysis it performed behind the scenes, led to deeper conviction on whether and when to act.
Getting the Most from AI-Enhanced War Gaming
The strongest and most incisive war games have always shared certain success factors:
- One pivotal decision or issue in focus, with a small set of relevant stakeholders
- Multiple scenarios and variations tested, to identify key dynamics and decision points
- Leadership time concentrated on the insights and decisions that matter most, rather than on working through more scenarios
- Executive ownership of the implications, and commitment to action
These practices remain essential. But as AI-enhanced war gaming takes greater hold, organizations should complement them with three new pillars. Together, the following concepts can help leaders use AI innovatively and responsibly, while building the experience, capabilities, and momentum for more ambitious future efforts.
Embrace “always-on” war gaming. War gaming’s value doesn’t come from a single one-off session. It comes from continuous learning.
The most effective organizations treat war gaming as an ongoing capability, regularly revisiting scenarios, updating assumptions, and refining strategies as real-world conditions evolve. Central to this is identifying and monitoring the signals that matter: competitor moves, regulatory developments, patent filings, and shifts in customer behavior, among others. AI makes this feasible by continuously scanning and synthesizing information that would otherwise be lost in the noise.
Over time, this creates a powerful advantage. Organizations move earlier, adjust faster, and build strategies that evolve with—or even help shape—the market rather than reacting after the fact.
Over time, AI helps organizations move earlier, adjust faster, and build strategies that evolve with the market rather than reacting after the fact.
Test assumptions early. The most effective war games are anchored in a clear focus: a specific move under consideration, a defined source of uncertainty, or a critical decision point. Vague objectives (such as “improve performance” or “reduce costs”) lead to unfocused analysis and limited insights. AI can help teams test different assumptions early, making it easier to identify the most important questions and frame them effectively.
At the same time, teams should avoid narrowing the scope too quickly. The goal is not to confirm a preferred or predetermined outcome but to explore a range of plausible paths. Organizations that strike this balance—clear objectives, open exploration—are far more likely to uncover the most valuable insights.
Hold on to the keys. AI strengthens war gaming, but organizations should resist the temptation to let it control or even own the exercise. War games are designed to maximize human capabilities: interpreting motivations, weighing tradeoffs, challenging assumptions, and deciding how to act in the midst of uncertainty. AI should enhance those strengths, not replace them.
War gaming is one of the most powerful methods for navigating uncertainty. It pushes organizations beyond static plans and forces them to confront how competitors, customers, and other stakeholders actually behave.
AI is expanding war-gaming capabilities. It makes exercises faster to set up, broader in scope, and deeper in insight. But perhaps AI’s greatest power is how it amplifies the human judgment that makes war gaming so valuable. Organizations can stress-test more ideas and assumptions and uncover stronger, more informed strategies. Those that build this capability now won’t just be better prepared. They’ll make decisions with greater clarity and conviction.
