AI & The Augmented Strategist
Artificial intelligence looms over every industry, but marketing is a uniquely tech obsessed field. Sitting between art and science, ours is uniquely positioned to leverage and be impacted by innovation. AI is already changing how we do our day jobs beyond its natural hype. However, marketing isn’t uniform in its roles and responsibilities and AI will impact different disciplines in different ways. So what does it mean for today’s strategists?
The Impact of AI on Strategy: Change, Not Destruction
For strategists and wider marketers, AI may feel as if the conversations normally seen in other industries from cleaner tech to automation have finally come for us. The feeling of being a London black cab driver as Uber launched feels strangely familiar now. However, while technology disrupts and changes, it can also create as much as it destroys. With change being inevitable, the question isn’t what we can do to stop it, but if we can stretch to seize the opportunity being created. We may feel a bit like Appalachian coal miners trying in need of a Silicon Holler style pivot, but the reality may not be as dramatic.
The Superpower Fallacy
Strategy, as is the more frequent belief with wider creativity, is often talked about as a superpower. When this is the case, anything that democratises access to it is a threat. As a LinkedIn post speaking about creativity and AI referenced, from the animated movie ‘The Incredibles’ – ‘When everyone is super, no one will be’.
The reality though, is that creativity, and strategy, isn’t a rare superpower, it’s something we’re all capable of, some just wield it more effectively than others. It’s not that a few can fly like Superman, it’s that some can fly faster or further as they’ve honed their potential.
AI won’t make everyone creative or strategic, because everyone already can be. It will however, make everyone more creative, or at least more able to create. In the inevitable wave of content that will come, exceptional ideas, strategies and creativity become valuable.
We need only consider that Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy didn’t put web developers out of business, instead it gave everyone access to a base level of website development while simultaneously making those designed with advanced skill more noticeable and valuable.
AI will augment talent and skills in a way that empowers generalists to go deeper into skill sets, experimentation and work. This truth is transferable in many sectors in and out of marketing, but it has a unique impact for strategists within advertising, communications and the wider sector. AI won’t destroy strategy as a craft, instead the opposite is true. It will enhance the skills that strategists already have, how we interact with the creative process and how we answer the challenges that were already facing the discipline.
The Ever Changing Strategic Discipline
To pretend that before artificial intelligence, strategy was static, ignores some of the massive shifts and challenges facing the discipline across both agencies and client side organisations. Strategists have faced an increasing shift in the number of skills required to do their job well.
A 2023 survey by the APG in the UK found an array of skills are required to future proof a strategic career. From data analysis, cultural trends, behavioural understanding, research, brief writing, comms planning, brand planning and any number of other tactical challenges, we’ve been asked to do more with less. Strategists are expected to make the complex into the simple and actionable, with increasing complexity and shorter time frames.
In the face of these varied skills, the labels we have applied to ourselves as a discipline don’t work as well in isolation. ‘Brand’ strategy works best when it learns from how the world responds to it, no when it is disconnected from its application. ‘Creative’, ‘Data’, ‘Communications’, ‘Media’, ‘Digital’ or ‘Social Media’ strategists don’t work best in a bubble, instead combining a specialism with complimentary skills and understanding – both individually and through team collaboration. The problems strategists are being asked to solve often don’t have clear labels, so we can’t either. While it may make strategic resourcing and hiring more complex, good strategists don’t fit in one bucket. However, in a world of less resource and wider remits, building a wide and relevant skill set is a challenge.
The T-Shaped and V-Shaped Strategist & AI
The ideal strategist has an assortment of skills at varying levels of refinement. The thinking of ‘T-shaped’ and ‘V-shaped’ employees touches on how these assortments can be built, despite being naturally reductionist. ‘T-shaped’ individuals have a deep knowledge in one skill, complimented by a shallow base. ‘V-shaped’ individuals have a deep knowledge in one skill or area, complemented by a decreasing base in adjacent skills.
The pressure on strategy was already pushing towards ‘V-shaped’ strategists, with more being asked to be done with less. However, AI looks to only push this further – by making it riskier to be ‘T-shaped’ and easier to be ‘V-shaped’. While this may seem at odds with the web design analogy we saw earlier, it’s worth qualifying that web design isn’t one area of expertise, it’s instead several specialisms – ranging from UX and design to coding and development.
Having a singular, ‘T-shaped’ specialism, such as in UX is still valuable, but it is more likely to be disrupted than a UX designer that also codes or implements part of their designs. In isolation, expertise is always valuable, but when market forces and limited resources are applied, this changes. V-shapes leverage different adjacent skills in a way that mirrors creativity, connected related and unrelated ideas to make something new and more valuable for less. AI struggles with this type of multi-modal thinking in a way that creates an opportunity. Similarly in strategy, solving problems and building strategy is best done in a multi-modal fashion, running down both sides of a strategist’s ‘V-shaped’ skillset. Breadth and diagonal thinking are becoming more valuable. Repeatable action and processes more automated.
The Augmented V Strategist
The ‘V-shaped’ opportunity between strategy and AI is a matter of augmentation. AI looks to create ‘Augmented V’ strategists – or the opportunity to expand the width and depth of ‘V-shaped’ skill set through using AI. It can close gaps in a strategist’s skill set. It can shore up the ‘V’ by allowing strategists to access data in new ways, engage and execute deeper, faster research or create more evocative stories through speaking and briefing in more creative ways.
AI will make ‘augmented’ strategists able to interrogate data faster. No matter one’s quantitative background and skills, an increasing ability to ask questions conversationally of data, combine it or generate new views into it makes every strategist a better analyst. Advances in conversational data analysis just from ChatGPT and others like it, unlocks a new way to analyse data quickly to find obvious answers, moving beyond towards deeper understanding.
A lack of standardised knowledge bases in strategy has always limited the holistic thinking a strategist can draw from. The ability of AI to coalesce, analyze and report large datasets can help to give greater context and industry knowledge. Without being an experienced analyst, AI can make a strategist more contextual and tapped into a richer perspective.
AI will give ‘augmented’ strategists more research options and the ability to bring research to life in new ways. From how research is conducted, to how it’s verified and delivered, AI is already impacting the research industry. Research opportunities to conduct qualitative work at a larger scale for less, draw more insights from open data or create research composites are just some of the opportunities emerging. . Without being a research specialist, AI will make research more accessible and useful for strategists.
AI will make an ‘augmented’ strategist more creative in how they express themselves. If strategy is based on words, the ability to make those words instantly into something more evocative, understood and tangible is immensely powerful. It creates new ways to collaborate throughout any type of creative process.It allows for ideas to come to life as we discuss them or implications to be explored earlier on. It allows the bridge and brief to other parties to be more evocative.
Generative AI tools don’t just bring ideas to life, they can help give greater understanding of the creative process. In the last year, through just Midjourney experimentation, I’ve personally managed to write and publish a children’s book and create a promotional campaign for the agency. Both were personal achievements, but they also created a greater appreciation of the craft others have by highlighting the gap in what I could create on my own vs. others. The gap between ‘Goodnight Moon’ and ‘Queso’s Cheesy Christmas’ (get it early for the holidays 2024) is pretty defined, but so is the gap between my artwork with AI vs. my attempt at drawing before(in an NFT experiment that is priced to move!). Without making strategists into creatives, it will put strategists closer and more aligned with a creative process.
The Strategist’s Natural Advantage
AI technology is suited well for strategists to leverage because it matches the way we’ve always worked. We’ve always had to break down complex problems and ideas to actionable briefs and discussions, which is an integral part of getting the most out of AI technology for the near future. It may be able to generate increasingly complex strategies on its own, but that rising tide should also pick up our proverbial boats to go higher through getting the most out of it. The skills we’ve honed in getting creatives, clients or others to buy into a solution and idea can be transferred to do the same with artificial intelligence.
For that reason, the ‘Augmented V’ strategist looks a lot like the one you are or you work with today. However, they’re more able to tie together different disciplines, skill sets and ideas. They’re more likely to be able to go deeper and deliver more – hitting harder targets. I may be famously wrong on this, and if I am we’re all out of jobs anyway – but I believe that AI may be the answer to more of the challenges already facing strategists vs. the source of new challenges and barriers.