“Reporting is the bane of my existence.”

A direct quote from a Chief of Staff… and one I’ve heard echoed in nearly every conversation with Strategy Leaders.

Before starting Elate, Abby and I lived this reality every week. Reporting on strategy isn’t just time-consuming. It’s a coordination nightmare. 👻

Through our own experience, as well as working alongside hundreds of Strategy Leaders, we’ve seen it all.

From unstructured email threads containing updates from all Department Leaders every week, to 300+ page monthly slide decks, it's an absurdly intensive process that needs revisiting for most organizations, but can’t be due to the time required to just keep the train on the tracks. 🚋

But by the time the necessary information is finally collected (often days later) it still has to be summarized, formatted, and shared with leadership.

And by then? The data is already outdated.

Yet that’s what decisions are being made from.

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💸 The Opportunity Cost of Reporting

Here’s where the time really goes:

• Gathering updates from every team
• Chasing leaders down for responses
• Rewriting, formatting, and reformatting reports

All that effort, and you’re still making decisions with outdated information.

So while reporting might look different for every organization, one thing that’s clear is that for most, it’s static.

Meetings turn into status update check-ins, or sessions focused on what’s most urgent, rather than most important.

And it’s a shame, because far too many hours go into reporting for the little return on value many organizations realize.

AI changes the game for reporting.

From how reports are built to the insight they provide, AI can serve as a thought partner for Strategy Leaders to surface the right questions and drive intervention.

As we shared in the last edition of The Pulse, the unrealized gains AI creates through time savings is amplified when action is taken. So let’s dive into how that comes to fruition…

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😩 Reporting Gets Done. But at What Cost?

Reporting will get done. It’s the cost of doing business.

Most organizations feel the pain of reporting. But few understand the true cost behind it.

One of the biggest challenges we see Strategy Leaders face is communicating to other Executives the tradeoffs required to simply maintain their existing reporting function.

Based on what we hear during onboarding, teams between 200–2,000 employees spend an average of 80+ hours per month building reports.

The problem isn’t just the hours lost. It’s that all this effort is spent looking in the rearview mirror: reactive, backward‑looking work focused on yesterday’s news instead of tomorrow’s decisions.

Making the leap from reactive to proactive starts with a foundation built for action.

When organizations focus on creating a unified view of their strategic plan and how it is being executed throughout the organization, they enable reporting to be a living and breathing process.

Rather than being reliant upon human action, AI layered over your strategy not only helps surface risk, it also helps drive reporting.

For today’s best Strategy teams, they’ve made the shift from assembling every necessary report manually, to automation through AI.

From pre-built templates that can be implemented in seconds, to autogenerated reports created by prompts of what users are looking to report on, we are seeing Leaders shift their time spent building reports to acting upon them.

Because reporting, done right? It’s collaborative.

✨ Collaboration that Sparks Action

Saving time is great, but without action, we’re right back where we started.

AI can help us autogenerate reports or even recommend reports to implement into our operating cadence. But it can also provide direction.

In particular, there are three use cases for how AI is solving this challenge:

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1) Recommendations

What happens when the status update is in conflict with what the data is telling us? Or, what if the root cause to an Operating Outcome being behind lies three layers deep within our strategy?

Domain-specific AI, built for strategy leaders, by strategy leaders, can help identify and recommend best practices to take intervention or at least start the conversation.

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2) Autogenerated Status Updates and Summaries

How many hours have you spent chasing down updates from stakeholders only to spend more time providing additional commentary on what those updates mean in relation to the overall strategy?

AI can solve this. With the support of AI automated status updates, the timeliness and overall quality of updates from team members is greatly enhanced, while summaries highlight the greater implications across the business.

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3) Collaborate with Team Members

Have you ever looked at a report and wished you could directly ask someone a question about an update or a KPI?

Now you can. AI is bringing reporting to life in a way that allows for users to directly comment on reports with security that isolates those comments to only the individuals that should have access.

In addition to specific features that amplify reporting, AI workflows now help teams schedule meetings, automate report sharing through tools like Slack and Teams, and even adjust tone to match the audience.

These capabilities shift reporting from static to dynamic. But seeing this come to fruition starts with a unified view of strategy that empowers team members, creates visibility, and ultimately drives results.

It’s a reimagining of what reporting can and should be.

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👌 The Reporting Assistant Every Strategy Leader Needs

Reporting isn’t going anywhere.

But advancements through AI should have every Strategy Leader, rethinking how they go about reporting.

At Elate, we’ve been encouraging Leaders to stay ahead when it comes to reporting for a while now.

Our most heavily used feature, Advanced Reporting, has reshaped how hundreds of organizations approach their weekly Leadership Meetings, Monthly Business Reviews, and Quarterly Board Pre-Reads.

But AI is taking that to a new level.

When built to identify the right pressure points in your strategy, highlight opportunities for growth, and leverage best practices to distinguish signals through the noise, AI can take that context and translate it from notifications to action.

Which is why we view AI as the Reporting Assistant every great Strategy Team needs in their corner.

Saving time is just the start. Strategy-focused AI does more. It can help you see around corners, surface the right questions at the right time, and transform meetings from status updates into collaborative, action-oriented sessions.

Reporting has always been a necessary evil that Abby and I have spent countless hours on in the past.

Now, the technology has finally caught up with the needs of Strategy Leaders. We’re proud to help shape the future of reporting, and with it, the future of strategy execution.

And this is just the beginning of how AI will transform the way Strategy Leaders work.

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Introducing Elate's AI Strategy Webinar Series

Built for Strategy Leaders. Designed for What’s Next.

We’re excited to announce a new three‑part virtual series exploring how AI is transforming strategic planning and execution. Hosted by various team members here at Elate, these sessions will share real‑world insights on how forward‑thinking organizations are using AI to drive clarity, alignment, and results.

Whether you’re just beginning to explore AI or already applying it to your planning process, this series will help you lead with more confidence and stay ahead of what’s next.

You can join one or all three - they are open for all strategy and operations leaders.

🚀 First Up: How AI is Reshaping Strategic Planning and Execution

• 📆 Date: Thursday, October 9th (Next Thursday)
• 🕐 Time: 1 PM EST
• 🎟️ Register: Save your spot

AI isn’t coming for strategy — it’s transforming it. In this session, Abby Parker (Co-Founder, COO) and Shannon Keedy (Director, Solutions Consulting) will share how Strategy and Operations leaders are integrating AI into their planning and execution processes to move faster, catch risks earlier, and build more adaptive, resilient strategies — without sacrificing clarity or control.

You’ll walk away with:

• Macro trends accelerating AI adoption in strategic planning
• Pitfalls to avoid when implementing AI without a clear use case
• Practical examples from Elate’s Strategy Advisor, including report automation, real‑time risk surfacing, and smarter plan modeling

👉 Click here to reserve your spot!

Seats are limited to 100 attendees. All registrants will receive the recording.

And to view the other sessions, click here.

That's all for today, have a great rest of your week.

-Brooks

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