Fish Food 661: The Future of Strategy in the Age of AI
How strategy and AI can become friends, workslop, journalism actually making money, and the magic of marginalia.
This week’s provocation: Strategists as conductors of AI intelligence
This week I ran a session with a large agency strategy team focusing on integrating AI throughout the planning workflow. It reminded me of how much I love working with strategists - naturally curious and open people. Towards the end of the session we had an interesting discussion around where this is all heading. What might the practice of strategy look like in an era of advanced, agentic AI?
I’m going to try and articulate some overarching themes in answer to this question but let me begin by saying that I truly believe that the fundamentals of good strategy are just as important as they’ve always been (if not more so). But there can be little doubt that the practice of how strategy gets done is going to change radically. The strategic planning discipline stands at an inflection point. The future will likely emerge in a myriad of ways but here I’m going to highlight just four areas which are likely to underpin a huge amount of change.
From solo thinking to augmented intelligence
I think the best planners have always known that good strategy often emerges from conversation - the back and forth with fellow planners, the discussion, debate and healthy disagreement from which genuinely great ideas can emerge. The big difference now of course, is that the role of intellectual sparring partner can be played not only by other strategists but by an AI.
Using AI in the right way can help us to think differently, challenge our assumptions, reveal bias, and open up new routes to explore. But in the era of agentic AI this will be taken to whole new level. Imagine being able to orchestrate a network of specialised AI agents that have each been trained in different strategic schools of thought which can assess context and juxtapose different potential options or routes to consider. AI would not only become a permanent intellectual drill partner but a way to harness the best strategic thinking and an unparalleled breadth of perspective.
In this world, strategy development becomes conversational - iterative dialogues between human creativity, intuition and AI analytical power, producing outputs that neither could achieve independently. The planning skillset shifts toward AI collaboration literacy (knowing when to lead AI thinking, when to follow it, and when to ignore it entirely), and the effective orchestration and judgement of a diverse set of perspectives and options. Superagency for planners is about the compounding effect in scope, scale, and speed that can happen when AI is truly augmenting individual but also organisation-wide strategic capability.
From tool to autonomous strategic partner
Agentic AI will support planning through both productive and generative learning. The former relating to ‘find-it-out’ use cases, or conveying existing knowledge to achieve specific, known outcomes. The latter relating to ‘figure-it-out’ use cases, or generating new insights, exploring the unknown, and addressing new and untapped opportunities. In both cases it’s up to the strategist to decide how AI can best support what planners have always been good at - bringing a unique perspective and people-driven insights to understand context, position, ambition and advantage.
AI agents will be able to independently execute multi-step planning workflows, from analysis to brief generation to scenario planning to presenting options. But the role of the strategist should go far beyond oversight in this scenario. They should be the conductors, the arrangers, the facilitators, the synthesisers, the architects that create the conditions in which autonomous agents can deliver maximum impact. They define the outcome, and ensure that we’re not climbing the wrong hill.
Strategy as living system
I’m a big believer in balancing a focused and well-understood vision and direction with an ability to be highly adaptable in how you achieve that outcome based on evolving contexts (or what Jeff Bezos once described as being ‘stubborn on vision, but flexible on details’). In fast-moving or rapidly changing environments static long-term plans become out-of-date very quickly. So the opportunity here is for AI monitoring systems to continuously scan for signals of change (initially weak perhaps), flagging when context shifts require adaptations in tactics, execution or even strategy if foundational assumptions are starting to crack.
The skills of the planner here relies on adeptly defining the contexts to track, on establishing appropriate triggers for adaptation, deciding when to pivot and when to persevere, and maintaining coherence as tactics flex. In this world, strategies evolve into dynamic frameworks that adapt to market shifts while preserving core strategic intent.
Synthetic intelligence networks
I’m already a fan of using synthetic personas and research to open up new thinking or challenge assumptions but I think we’re only really scratching the surface of what will become possible. As synthetic research scales in use and application the role of AI in simulating potential strategy scenarios, predicting cultural and behavioural shifts and stress-testing strategic propositions will become much greater. It will, I think, take real strategic skill to design simulations and orchestrate AI in a way that maps viable scenarios accurately and simulates the outcome of strategic moves in the real, messy world. We’re on the cusp of something that will change the practice of strategy quite fundamentally.
So there you have it. Four ways in which the practice of strategy will change quite dramatically. I think it’s a mistake to believe that AI can completely replace human strategists. The fundamentals of good strategy will not change, just as the need for good planning instinct and judgement into what will resonate and work in the real world will not change. AI may own pattern recognition, scenario generation, and continuous monitoring but human strategists will still own meaning-making, ethical judgment, and the messy art of organisational persuasion.
The strategists who thrive won’t be those who resist these tools, nor those who blindly embrace them, but those who develop something entirely new - the ability to dance between human intuition and machine intelligence, knowing exactly when to lead, when to follow, and when to break away entirely.
Rewind and catch up:
Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners
AI, creativity, and lived cultural philosophies
How AI supercharges strategy and planning
Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash
If you do one thing this week…
Word of the week was definitely ‘workslop’, defined in this well-shared HBR piece as: ‘AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.’ Like John Willshire, I appreciated the description of ‘pilots’ and ‘passengers’ as a way to describe how people use AI at work:
‘Pilots are much more likely to use AI to enhance their own creativity, for example, than passengers. Passengers, in turn, are much more likely to use AI in order to avoid doing work than pilots. Pilots use AI purposefully to achieve their goals.’
There was also this pretty significant study into the impact of AI on human thought (PDF). The TL;DR of the study is that rather than unequivocal benefits or harms it is a nuanced continuum…’where AI acts as an amplifier of our abilities while posing the challenge of permanent cognitive vigilance on our part to avoid becoming intellectually dependent.’ The thesis in the paper is that harmonious coexistence with AIs will depend on ‘revaluing cognitive diversity, designing interfaces that foster reflection, and making AI an augmentative partner of human thought, not its replacement’. Hard to disagree with that.
Photo by luthfi alfarizi on Unsplash
Links of the week
The Guardian’s latest financial results were heartening to see. Like the FT, and the New York Times, they seem to be actually making money from journalism in the digital world. Digital revenues are now 72% of total, and a focus on going global is really paying off with 38% of total revenue coming from outside of the UK (HT Dave Tallon)
The first findings from Springboards new Creativity Benchmark (an evaluation benchmark for LLMs in marketing creativity) have just been published. The results seem to show a tightly clustered performance across the different models but interestingly that AI judgement still can’t substitute for human judgement
Thought provoking read of the week went to James Marriott’s post on the dawn of the post-literate society
And finally…
This post from The Culturalist is helpfully titled ‘How to Remember Everything You Read’ and it makes the case for the benefits of scribbling in the margins or ‘the magic of marginalia’ (‘Studies in educational psychology show that annotating a text dramatically improves your retention of its contents’). One of the reasons that I’ve largely gone back to reading physical books from my kindle is exactly this - not being able to make physical notes on the book as I read it just became annoying.
Photo by Haley Parson on Unsplash
Weeknotes
This week has been a bit full on (hence the late arrival of this slightly shorter than usual newsletter). I ran an AI workshop for an agency strategy team, then a session with a client on critical thinking in the age of AI, then a session with my client Astra Zeneca and finally two days workshopping in Venice with a group of Brazilian CEOs (sending this from the airport). Whilst in Venice I got to visit the H-Farm campus, a huge startup incubator/tech school/consultancy. It was a properly amazing place. They incubated Depop which was then sold for $1.6Bn.
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My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.
And remember - only dead fish go with the flow.
Someone needs to explain to me what a strategist is and what they do.