With most information hidden, the game Stratego

Researchers have now cracked Stratego, a long-standing benchmark for AI in imperfect-information environments, by combining self-play with a belief model that predicts hidden state before each move. For CIOs and technology leaders, the strategic takeaway is that AI is moving beyond fully observable, rules-based problems and into complex decision environments with uncertainty, bluffing, and long time horizons—capabilities that could reshape planning, forecasting, cybersecurity, fraud detection, and other enterprise use cases. It also signals that relatively modest compute and novel model design can outperform far larger efforts, so IT organizations should watch for smaller, more specialized AI systems that deliver outsized results in hard-to-model domains.