Research Partner and AI Workspace for Duke Strategies

The Challenge

Duke Strategy & Corporate Affairs exists to make business strategies stakeholder-proof. The firm advises boards and executives through the moments where corporate strategy meets political, regulatory and public scrutiny, the points at which a company earns or loses its licence to operate. Its edge is judgment: reading stakeholders, anticipating opposition, and shaping a position that holds.

But judgment runs on intelligence, and intelligence is slow to assemble. A single client question can absorb hours of gathering before the thinking can begin. Who are the stakeholders around an energy-transition project? How is a reputation moving across the media? Where do Dutch ministries, parliamentary committees and regulators actually stand on a technology-regulation file? Then the tax repeats at the other end. Once the analysis is done, turning it into a board-ready proposal, a messaging framework or a briefing takes another block of senior time.

Duke needed two things from a partner: deeper intelligence delivered fast enough to act on, and a way to produce branded, client-ready output without the manual grind. Both had to clear the same bar, good enough to put in front of a board.

Our Approach

Stromy works with Duke as their data and research partner on an ongoing basis. The engagement has two layers.

Intelligence on demand. Duke sends a research request: a stakeholder landscape, a reputation or media question, a regulatory or parliamentary read. Stromy runs it through a composed pipeline rather than a single prompt. Cloud-based research skills handle gathering and structuring, AI orchestration chains the multi-step analytical workflows, and a dedicated Dutch-government data connector pulls live from parliamentary records, legislative calendars and ministry positions. What comes back is a structured, sourced briefing in Duke’s voice, scoped to the question and ready to build on.

A branded AI workspace. Stromy also built Duke their own AI workspace, a private brand-aware environment where the team produces their own deliverables. It carries Duke’s identity and Duke’s processes: proposal generation, messaging frameworks and press releases, with one-click rendering to polished DOCX, PDF, PowerPoint, spreadsheets, charts and video. A shared editorial canvas keeps a person in the loop on every draft, so speed never costs control. Stromy installed the workspace and trained the team on-site, in their office.

The division of labour is deliberate. Stromy builds and runs the technology: the skills, the document automation, the data connectors and the orchestration. Duke keeps the client relationships and the strategic judgment that make the work valuable. The best AI tools for professional services come from exactly this split, where domain expertise and technical execution are each applied without compromise.

The Outcome

Duke now treats intelligence as something they order and receive in hours, not assemble over days. Senior people spend their time on interpretation and advice rather than collection and formatting, the part of the work clients are actually paying for.

Output is more consistent too. Because the workspace applies the same brand standards and structural discipline every time, a proposal or briefing reads like Duke regardless of who runs the skill. And the partnership compounds: each new research pattern becomes a reusable workflow, and each new deliverable type becomes a skill the whole team can use within days. The capability keeps deepening without the firm building or maintaining any of the underlying technology itself.