Towards a Generation of Artificially Intelligent Strategy Tools: The SWOT Bot

Strategy tools are widely used to inform the complex and unstructured decision making of firms. Although software has evolved to support strategy analysis, such digital strategy tools still require heavy manual work especially on the data input and processing levels, making their use time-intensive, costly, and susceptible to biases. This design research presents the ‘SWOT Bot’, a digital strategy tool that exploits recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) to perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. Our artifact uses a feed reader, an NLP pipeline, and a visual interface to automatically extract information from a text corpus (e.g., analyst reports) and present it to the user. We argue that the SWOT Bot reduces time and adds objectivity to strategy analyses while allowing the human-in-the-loop to focus on value-adding tasks. Besides providing a functioning prototype, our work provides three general design principles for the development of next-generation digital strategy tools