Strategic Decisions: Survey, Taxonomy, and Future Directions from Artificial Intelligence Perspective

Abstract

Strategic Decision-Making is always challenging because it is inherently uncertain, ambiguous, risky, and complex. By contrast to tactical and operational decisions, strategic decisions are decisive, pivotal, and often irreversible, which may result in long-term and significant consequences. A strategic decision-making process usually involves many aspects of inquiry, including sensory perception, deliberative thinking, inquiry-based analysis, meta-learning, and constant interaction with the external world. Many unknowns, unpredictabilities, and environmental constraints will shape every aspect of a strategic decision. Traditionally, this task often relies on intuition, reflective thinking, visionary insights, approximate estimates, and practical wisdom. With recent advances in artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) technologies, we can leverage AI/ML to support strategic decision-making. However, there is still a substantial gap from an AI perspective due to inadequate models, despite the tremendous progress made. We argue that creating a comprehensive taxonomy of decision frames as a representation space is essential for AI because it could offer surprising insights beyond anyone's imaginary boundary today. Strategic decision-making is the art of possibility. This study develops a systematic taxonomy of decision-making frames that consists of six bases, 18 categorical, and 54 elementary frames. We formulate the model using the inquiry method based on Bloom's taxonomy approach. We aim to lay out the computational foundation that is possible to capture a comprehensive landscape view of a strategic problem. Compared with many traditional models, this novel taxonomy covers irrational, non-rational and rational frames capable of dealing with certainty, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, chaos, and ignorance.