Lara Yasmin Horstmann — Independent Advisor

Strategic decision-making in the era of AI and emerging technologies

I work with governments, multilateral organizations, security institutions, and political and operational leaders on how emerging technologies affect strategic decision-making in international peace and security, including in crisis settings.

I bring close to a decade in the United Nations peace and security system, including co-leading the Secretary-General’s first system-wide Data Strategy and building the first global monitoring framework across fourteen UN peace operations.

AI and other emerging technologies are changing how institutions assess threats, verify information, establish responsibility and identify possible responses. Adapting to these conditions requires more than better analysis or new technical capabilities.

What institutions commission

Strategy, evaluation and institutional adaptation A clear view of how technological change affects an institution’s analysis, its decision points and its available responses, and of what has to adapt.
Scenario design and wargaming Decision thresholds and coordination gaps tested before a crisis rather than during one.
Executive education and curriculum design Senior leaders and the staff who prepare their decisions equipped to act while evidence is still contested.

Areas of work Discuss an engagement

Three questions behind my work

What happens when institutions are technologically outpaced?

In some peace and security settings, institutions responsible for observation, mediation or protection are less technologically equipped than the actors operating around them. This affects what they can independently verify, how their impartiality is perceived and which decisions they can credibly defend.

How do institutions act without a shared factual basis?

Verification and shared situational understanding remain essential. But institutions also need procedures that allow responsible action when evidence is incomplete, attribution is disputed and a common factual picture cannot be established in time.

Who shapes the options before a decision is made?

Strategic choices are shaped before they reach senior leadership. Information access, analytical assumptions, institutional dependencies and judgments about feasibility all influence which options are considered. Emerging technologies increasingly affect these earlier stages of decision-making.

Working together

Strategy development, advisory, commissioned scenario exercises, executive education, speaking and moderation.

Discuss an engagement