The Strategic Foresight of LLMs: Evidence from a Fully Prospective Venture Tournament (23 Apr 2026)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:00:00 GMT

ODC WEBINAR

The Organizational Design Community (ODC) invites you to the following webinar:

The Strategic Foresight of LLMs:

Evidence from a Fully Prospective Venture Tournament

Felipe Csaszar

Alexander M. Nick Professor and Chair of the Strategy Area

University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business

--- 23^rd April 2026, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET ---

Prof. Csaszar will share with us insights from his research on LLMs’ strategic foresight:

Can artificial intelligence outperform humans at strategic foresight—the capacity to form accurate judgments about uncertain, high-stakes outcomes before they unfold? We address this question through a fully prospective prediction tournament using live Kickstarter crowdfunding projects. Thirty U.S.-based technology ventures, launched after the training cutoffs of all models studied, were evaluated while fundraising remained in progress and outcomes were unknown. A diverse suite of frontier and open-weight large language models (LLMs) completed 870 pairwise comparisons, producing complete rankings of predicted fundraising success. We benchmarked these forecasts against 346 experienced managers recruited via Prolific and three MBA-trained investors working under monitored conditions. The results are striking: human evaluators achieved rank correlations with actual outcomes between 0.04 and 0.45, while several frontier LLMs exceeded 0.60, with the best (Gemini 2.5 Pro) reaching 0.74—correctly ordering nearly four of every five venture pairs. These differences persist across multiple performance metrics and robustness checks. Neither wisdom-of-the-crowd ensembles nor human-AI hybrid teams outperformed the best standalone model.

About the Speaker:

Felipe Csaszar is the Alexander M. Nick Professor and chair of the Strategy Area at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. His research examines how decision structures—including managers’ cognitive frameworks, organizational processes, and artificial intelligence—influence outcomes such as innovation and overall firm performance. His work appears in leading journals, including Management Science, Organization Science, Strategy Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. He serves as Senior Editor for Strategy Science and previously held the same role at Management Science and Organization Science. He is co-editor of the upcoming Handbook of AI and Strategy and Strategy Science’s special issue on AI and strategic decision-making. He has held leadership roles at INFORMS, SMS, and the Academy of Management. An award-winning educator, he has taught executives and MBAs worldwide. Previously, he was an assistant professor at INSEAD. He earned his PhD from The Wharton School and earlier served as head of research at an asset management firm and CEO of an Internet startup.

Registration closes on 22^nd April 2026 at 9 am EST

The live webinar is open to the public. The recorded webinar is only available for ODC members.

Come join us!

Arianna Marchetti

Assistant Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Singapore Management University

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The Strategic Foresight of LLMs: Evidence from a Fully Prospective Venture Tournament (23 Apr 2026)