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Starts 6 June 2025 13:28

Ends 6 June 2025

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Aligning Business Strategy for AI Integration

Gain insights into integrating AI with business strategy, from value chain analysis to SWOT frameworks, while mastering machine learning applications for competitive advantage.
Northeastern University via Coursera

Northeastern University

21 Courses


Northeastern is a globally recognized research university with campuses in Boston and globally. It provides an experiential learning system that encourages students to learn from real-world experience.

9 hours 5 minutes

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Overview

Explores how artificial intelligence (AI) empowers businesses to enhance competitiveness. Examines how AI integrates with business strategy.

Offers students an opportunity to recommend business solutions through the integration of AI capabilities. Focuses on leveraging machine learning techniques like unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement learning for data-driven insights.

Examines the intersection of managerial practices and AI capabilities through real-world case studies. Students also have an opportunity to gain practical insights into implementation and ethical considerations and navigate the dynamic landscape of AI-driven business transformations.

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.
  • 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 firm’s 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 Porter’s 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 firm’s 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.

Taught by

Kwong Chan


Subjects

Business