Back on active duty I served as the S-2/3 Officer in Charge (OIC), Protocol and Public Affairs Officer for a unique wartime battalion sized organization comprised of military service members, active, reserve and retiree recall, GS civilians and Department of Defense contractors. During my 24-month tour of duty, officers get rated annually and in this rating our supervisors have an opportunity to recommend several future career path opportunities to continue service in uniform.

Alongside human resource officer I was being encouraged to go into a very specific functional area called 59, or an Army Strategists. According to the regulation:

  • These officers deliver winning, innovative solutions to address the complex challenges of the contemporary security environment.
  • Through specialized education, training, and experience, Strategists develop expertise in creating, implementing, and articulating strategies and become adept at leading operational and institutional campaign planning.
  • They utilize formal and informal procedures and processes to develop strategy and plans in a trans-regional, all-domain, and multifunctional environment. Strategists integrate joint capabilities with other Services, US Government agencies, and allies and partners in pursuit of strategic objectives.
  • They understand how to synchronize military power with the other instruments of national power to achieve advantage across the broad spectrum of competition and conflict.

According to the reg: An FA59 Strategist is a decisive leader in senior headquarters that organizes, designs, guides, and directs multidisciplinary, joint, and coalition teams to develop military courses of action to resolve complex problems.

  • Strategists think in the context of time, plan on multiple horizons, and are comfortable with ambiguity and tension.
  • Strategists enable senior leaders to make fully-informed decisions by creating and communicating products that tell a story, while applying sound logic and compelling evidence, resulting in clear, coherent options to achieve a desired aim

Thus it came at total surprise, maybe not, reading that several INSEAD MBAs were tasked to develop a strategy for a complex problem and compete with a machine. Guess how close the strategy these new MBAs were to the strategy developed by a Strategy AI?

So very close. Developed in about the same amount of time. This year we heard a lot about AI, and what this tells us is 2024 will be the year more companies will be hiring Heads of AI in order to integrate open source and regenerative AI into their flow.

One of the first in the queue? The federal government of course.

David Molina is an American entrepreneur, founder, and blogger. A son of Mexican immigrants, a former farm worker and high school drop-out, he went on to be the first in his family to attend and graduate from a university and earn an Officer Commission in Infantry. Molina has been a founder, co-founder and launched a wide range of companies and organizations including a veterans nonprofit, featured in multiple news outlets including The Bend Bulletin, Portland Business Journal, Univision KUNP-TV, Humans of Tech, and The Seattle Times.