𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝘀𝗲𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗔𝗜?

Like many people, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI recently. And experimenting with new ways of using it, because pretending it doesn’t exist is not a solid career plan.

I’ve written before about how AI has picked up a lot of the entry-level work that Junior Strategists used to learn on the job by doing – desk research, simple data analysis, image sourcing, deck tidying and so on. So there’s less opportunities for them to understand the job and less entry-level jobs in the first place.

But even with the strategy work a rung up at Strategist level, I’m hearing that some clients are DIYing it with AI, rather than handing the problem over to their agency. Which is not great news for Strategists, but also bad for the poor creatives who have to work with the resulting bland insights that lack, as they put it in Dr Who, “That little bit of human, that gut instinct that comes with Planet Earth”.

We’re going to end up with Strategists who are brilliant at prompting (or whatever follows prompting). But will they be any good at actually thinking? Because if they’ve not built the muscle memory, how are they going to think and act instinctively? They won’t spot the random nugget hidden on slide 12 of a debrief, or that weird thing that connects everything together and makes it all make sense.

I think the answer for current Strategists is to become brilliant at the weirder, edgier stuff. At reading between the lines, spotting what no one else would notice, taking a brand down a path that no logical AI would consider. At saying the unsayable and understanding an audience so well that you can imply more than you ever actually say.

Look for opportunities to work on bigger, hairier problems, for braver clients and braver agencies. The kind of problems where learning from the past isn’t going to help much. Where big swings are required. I’m lucky enough that those kind of problems and briefs now tend to find me and I love working on them. But, in any agency, there will be a smaller but equally hairy client problem that no one really wants to wrestle with. Make it yours and start building your confidence and experience with the edgier stuff, without a framework or process in sight.

And, obviously, find a way to make AI work for you. Find a balance between it doing the time-consuming stuff for you and you missing the good stuff that’s hidden away. There are some big-name strategists building AI tools for themselves to support their thinking, not do it for them, or stress-test their own original work, and some of them will be coming to market. Personally, I’ve kept it simple and built a bank of all my writing and thinking IP, that remembers what I wrote years ago better than I do and nudges me to connect the dots with more recent stuff I’m working on.

But basically, be braver, edgier, a bit more shouty in your work. Be more human.

_{(photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash)}