Where Strategy Begins and Ends with AI

Dare I say it – AI isn’t a solution engine. And only average strategists use it this way.

Last year, I pivoted back into the creative agency world after some time as an independent contractor. My freelance stint was spent deep inside of individual projects and business challenges, using soft skills and strategic exploration as a slow yet intentional burn to set a foundation for smaller brands. Gen AI was just a clerical tool at that point.

Moving back into the agency world, I began to see a stark contrast of the Claude Boys mentality– AI being used to answer any and every curiosity for quick decision, but not solution making.

It’s clear that Gen AI is in its abundance era, where unearthing zettabytes of information feels like a use case for immediate action. But if nothing is tailored to the businesses we work with and the problems we have yet to solve, is an AI-generated response really a solution?

Information is now infinite, ideation is currency, and attention is selective, so strategists can’t only rely on finding golden nuggets within AI’s ocean of intel. There’s more of a role for strategy now than ever before with access to such a powerful resource, we just have to define it.

Soft skills take time – let them

If your focus is only to speed up your strategy development, you have fallen into an illusion of AI’s efficiency. As client budgets tighten and demands increase, adaptability and creative thinking are some of the most coveted soft skills in this AI-flooded landscape. This means that as strategists have more dots to connect, they will need to get comfortable digging deeper to identify unique creative opportunities.

AI can and should create efficiencies in any strategic workflow, but these should translate to more rigor, and higher-quality insights. Our team at ATTN: has become fond of Waldo.FYI’s workflows to help sort out our data pulls, which then lets us focus on asking the bigger questions.

Roleplay with Gen AI

A mentor once told me that the hardest part of our job as strategists is the “people chasing”. As culture continues to evolve, unhinge, and fragment online, I believe strategists are best suited to do the chasing with AI’s support.

Say you have a data-backed set of audience personas and some light definition. Feeding these along with important trends or audience conversations, to your AI tools is the first step to operationalising your emotional intelligence. From there, you can develop a set of prompts to pressure-test creative ways in, develop persona narratives that creative teams can ideate against, or even validate if a message articulation might resonate. AI becomes your workspace for roleplay, turning the people chasing into insight mining.

I have found that this roleplay comes in handy particularly in the early stages of concept development. This is one area that we are working to develop a full agentic workflow for Strategy. After initial concepts are on the table, I create a prompt listing audience truths and a strategic opportunity. “My audience has 3-5 key attributes and 1 key barrier. If my task is to resolve said barrier with a creative campaign, how will I need to adjust the messaging of this concept?” What the AI shares back will be an extensive list of considerations to refine the creative further, and rationale to support or disprove the overall approach.

You can unlock authenticity

60% of people have been questioning the authenticity of online content more than ever before, especially now with AI. If trust is at a deep low, there are bigger business problems to solve to alleviate this feeling. It starts with auditing brand actions and content, using AI to crawl sentiment and provide an objective readout. Brandwatch AI’s Iris Insights has been handy to pull summary readouts, particularly for social media response, to any given brand action. We have found that the Iris hones in on specific trending conversations and articles, providing deeper context into how people engage over a given brand.

But a readout alone won’t draw fresh human truths or reveal a true opportunity. Leaving human beliefs to Gen AI’s interpretation is a Claude Boys tactic that creates unsustainable solutions for businesses, and average strategies for brands. This is where I believe AI ends in the current workflow of strategic planning. It is a powerful resource that has made our work more valuable, but until it can unravel human emotion while evolving with business challenges – strategy begins and ends with us.

We still have to synthesise, interpret, and find use cases for these tools, and I’m most excited to define where agentic workflows can come into play for strategists. As long as this all means that we get to be the solution engine.