Business acumen in the age of AI

Business acumen used to come with the job

For decades, your leaders built business judgment the same way. They took harder assignments, worked beside experienced leaders and made mistakes small enough for the business to absorb. Then their scope widened and the cycle started again.

AI now handles more of the analysis and execution work where this learning happened. Cutting entry-level roles also shrinks the base that justifies mid-level management, so the loss moves up the ladder. The decisions left to your leaders get harder. They arrive faster, cross more functions and ask leaders to judge machine output as well as human advice.

You own where your next leaders learn to make good decisions. This white paper gives you a clear way to build business acumen on purpose.

The gap

• HBR research on 523 early-career professionals at KPMG describes routine tasks as the on-ramp to expertise, and AI is starting to take those tasks over.‍
• 6x: how much more decision process quality explained performance than analysis quality, across 1,048 major corporate decisions.‍
• 38%: the average score of a representative sample of U.S. managers on a 21-question test of basic financial literacy (2009).‍
• 88% and 39%: the share of organizations using AI in at least one business function, and the share reporting EBIT impact at the enterprise level.

Analysis is becoming abundant. Judgment is not.

From calculation to navigation

AI produces analysis fast. Accountability stays with your leaders. They decide which assumptions matter, what the analysis left out and when to move despite uncertainty.

Business acumen is the ability to see how value gets created and the judgment to act across functions, time horizons and ecosystems. Your leaders build it through practice, not lectures.

Scope, not title

Seniority does not give someone scope. Picture two leaders at the same level. One carries wide accountability with thin fundamentals. The other has strong fundamentals and a narrow view. The first needs stronger fundamentals. The second needs wider decisions to practice on.

The white paper maps five scopes of judgment, from Business Decision Fundamentals to Ecosystem Thinking. You also get a sharper development question: which decisions does this person handle well today, and which larger ones must they be ready for next?

What’s inside

• How leaders used to build judgment on the job, and why the system is breaking
• The five scopes of business acumen, each framed as a question
• Five moves to build judgment by design: decisions, assignment, rehearsal, debrief and role
• Where business simulations fit, with a meta-analysis of 65 studies and nearly 6,500 participants showing gains in knowledge, retention and confidence
• How to put AI in the loop and debrief the decisions which follow

Get the full white paper

Darshan Shrestha, BTS Partner and SVP, wrote this for leaders who build leaders. Download the white paper to see the five scopes, the five moves and the evidence behind them.

Business judgment has to be built.

Sources: Berman and Knight, Harvard Business Review (2009). Lovallo and Sibony, McKinsey Quarterly (2010). Singla et al., McKinsey (2025). Sitzmann, Personnel Psychology (2011).