Fish Food: Episode 634 - The Future of Strategy

The future of strategy in the age of AI, brand experience in an agentic world, the shamrock organisation, learning like an athlete, zero-click search and the anti doomscrolling club

This week’s provocation: On the future of strategy

In my ‘manifesto’ for Agentic AI I ended up going down a rabbit hole into how strategy (and the role of the strategist) is likely to change in the age of AI. But the future of strategy in this moment of rapid change deserves a deeper examination.

At a surface level you may be forgiven for thinking that the days of strategists and planners are numbered. When an AI agent can conduct research into a market, competitors, consumer needs and audiences, cultural shifts, and when it can define goals, recommend, set out and then deliver a strategy, and even measure progress as well, surely there will eventually be no need for humans to input to this process?

Yet I believe at a deep level that this is a time of opportunity for strategists everywhere to carve out a new, and potentially enhanced role. I believe that whilst the process of strategy and the tools that strategists use will see significant change, fundamental strategic skills will remain essential.

First, a bit of context on the current state of strategy. WARC’s Future of Strategy research (based on a global survey of over a thousand agency, consultant, independent and client-side strategists) revealed a number of areas where strategy seemed to be losing ground. Almost half the respondents disagreed that clients paid for strategy fairly, suggesting that it is systematically undervalued (a situation made worse for agency strategists by the persistent billable hour remuneration model). Feedback also seemed to suggest that many felt that the role of strategy itself often lacked some definition, and that the expansion of specialist areas of focus within the discipline risked a decline in ‘whole strategy’ thinking and a splintering of strategy into specialisms (one strategist called this ‘death by prefix’). This, coupled with a lack of training and the risk of a decline in fundamental strategic skills, seems to paint a picture where strategy and planning is at something of an inflection point. And the significance of this point of change is heightened by the impact of AI which holds the potential to shake things up in a pretty fundamental way.

So it’s a red pill blue pill moment for strategy. One way leads to the over-reliance on AI agent-driven planning and a de-prioritisation in the role of human strategists, the other leads to AI being an opportunity to fundamentally evolve strategic planning and execution in a positive way, an opportunity to sell strategy differently, and AI becoming an essential ‘co-strategist’ that will change how strategists add value.

So I thought I’d go deeper than I did in the Agentic AI presentation to look at what AI really means for the future of strategy, focusing in on a number of significant shifts.

AI agents in strategy formulation & execution

Let me start with this because, if for no other reason, I believe that while AI will bring significant change to how strategy is done, traditional strategy skills are still going to be essential. The true opportunity however, is for AI tools to augment strategy at multiple stages of the planning process.

For me, this is about both technique and process. The latter is about truly integrating a habit of working with AI at each critical stage of the strategic process (answering the classic questions: where are we? Why are we here? Where do we want to get to? How do we get there? And how do we know when we’ve got there?). I wrote up some thoughts on using GenAI in the strategy process here. But it’s also about technique. Understanding when to use reasoning rather than standard models, for example. Using Deep Research or specific AI research tools for assimilation, grouping, but also for exploring. Curating the right source material and data for the AI to work from. Using voice mode to riff with an AI engine when looking for new ideas.

Used well, AI engines can be like the best research assistant you’ve ever had, useful for summary and assimilation, data analysis, synthetic research (replicating human responses to surveys), writing, organising your thinking, flagging risks, tracking performance and linking strategy to action. In short, AI can help us to do strategy better.

It’s worth saying here that there is a real risk that businesses will degrade the value of human inputs over time at just the time when they have arguably never had more value. Just as all of us risk cognitive outsourcing to AI tools and and a consequent long term decline in critical thinking, so businesses risk an over-reliance on AI agents and ‘black box’ simulations in strategy. Strategists need to be the champions of the value of critical thinking and human orchestration in planning.

Simulation as strategy

In the most recent episode of Google Firestarters, PHD’s Worldwide Chief Experience Officer Rohan Tambyrajah talks about ‘simulation as strategy’ - the idea that new applications of AI-powered digital-twinning techniques can create virtual business models to test strategies in risk-free environments.

There’s obviously a lot of assumptions here about the availability and quality of data inputs but when you can test scenarios, or courses of action and get almost realtime feedback on strategic options why would you not want to do that? Strategists have the potential to fulfil a hugely valuable role here in getting the most out of AI agents in simulation and scenario planning - defining goals to go after, defining variables and scenarios to test, defining source data, interpreting AI analysis and outputs, turning those outputs into actionable plans, originating ideas and options that the AI has not even thought of. Scenario design, assessing variables for simulations, strategy validation using AI will become an important part of what strategists do.

Scenario planning to anticipate disruption

The predictive capabilities of AI will not only enable simulations of particular courses of action but also the analysis of huge datasets to anticipate potential shifts and disruptions. Tracking economic trends, consumer behaviour and market shifts will give strategists much greater fidelity on trends, forecasting demand, identifying new demand spaces, potential nonlinear disruptions. Using simulations for competitive war-gaming and stress-testing will (hopefully) facilitate greater organisational and market preparedness and planning.

Predictions are never easy of course, but this changes the emphasis of what strategists do from more static planning to continuous scenario refinement, managing probabilistic planning and ‘what if’ scenarios.

The AI-augmented strategist

With the potential of AI-driven simulations, synthetic research data, and competitive war-gaming, the process of strategy is up for significant change. Yet I still think that there is no substitute for the kind of understanding that good strategists can get from immersing themselves in people’s lives and culture. I will die on this hill - that there are subtleties to customer insight that you can only get to by talking to people, observation and immersion, and good old fashioned qualitative research.

We are in for a lot of change. Not least because strategy is becoming a far more continuous and adaptive process. In my agentic AI deck, I talked about how strategists will become AI-augmented ‘orchestrators’, harmonising the application of AI agents to support greater understanding and a coherent, innovative and advantageous performance. It will be humans and machines.

AI commoditises and will become commoditised. When everyone is using the same tools it will be people like strategists that will be a source of real advantage. Through the ability to get the most out of the tools. Using their understanding to determine outcomes, variations, and constraints. Using their creativity and sensibility to break open assumptions, ask more challenging questions, open up new possibilities and find new ways to solve complex problems.

That’s what human-in-the-loop really means for strategy.

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash

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If you do one thing this week…

A brand new episode of Google Firestarters is now LIVE, featuring Rohan Tambyrajah , Worldwide Chief Experience Officer and EMEA CSO at PHD, talking about brand experience in the era of agentic AI.

Some fascinating insights in this episode from Rohan - we chatted about media fragmentation, the changing ways in which people are experiencing brands, and how marketing teams need to set themselves up around three layers - data, capabilities and orchestration.

We also dived into the new world of AI agents, and how these are likely to upend the way in which marketing gets executed - AI becoming the new UI, which use cases are likely to see the biggest impact, and how brand persona and the idea of brands as enablers is becoming more and more important. It was an absolutely fascinating episode to record, so my thanks to Rohan for some brilliant insights.

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Links of the week

• Ezra Klein’s latest podcast focuses on some pretty major questions raised by the prospect of AGI (which he believes to be 2-3 years away), in a conversation with Ben Buchanan, White House advisor on AI to Biden. Kind of related - OpenAI have launched NextGenAI, a consortium of research institutions ‘dedicated to using AI to accelerate research breakthroughs and transform education’.

• In my recent deck on Agentic AI, I introduced the idea of the shamrock organisation - the need for workforce planning across three major areas: FTEs, freelance and contractors, and AI agents. This is a big change, not least because we need to take an intentional approach to putting people at the centre of designing organisations. So I’ve gone deeper on it in this post.

• Speaking of agentic AI, Zoe Scaman had a good deck on the topic which I think is nicely complementary to my own, and Absolutely Agentic have produced a useful report on agents, covering types of agent, application and existing tools (PDF download)

• I’m a fan of lifelong learning. In this post David Perrell suggests that knowledge workers could benefit from learning like athletes (with a strict and scheduled approach to learning). My own approach is somewhat more haphazard but I’m a big believer that systems trump goals, and so I wrote a short post about how developing habits around learning can be fantastically useful

• AI engines, and Google’s introduction of AI Overviews into SERPs is leading to what many are calling ‘zero-click search’ (where people expect to get the answers on search results pages rather than clicking through to content to get it). According to Bain, 80% of consumers now rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%. This is a pretty major shift.

• ‘The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.’ Henry Farrell on why the bigger problem isn't disinformation, but degraded democratic publics HT Kincso Biro

• Related - a good counterpoint to all the bad news every time you look at your phone at the moment - I’m currently appreciating the Anti Doomscrolling Club over on TikTok

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Quote of the week

‘The question is: What kinds of non-fiction writing will continue to last? Here’s a heuristic: The more a piece of writing comes from personal experience, the less it’s likely to be overtaken by AI. Personal writing, like biographies and memoirs, aren’t going away anytime soon. That's because people have data about their lives that LLMs don’t have’. David Perrell

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And finally…

‘I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.’ There’s something really powerful about Kim Liao’s idea of why writers should aim for 100 rejections a year. It flips your approach, flips how deal with push back, and gets results. Lots to learn from this about life, and not just writing.

Weeknotes

This week I did some sessions on getting the most out of AI tools with the Canon marketing team and I also moderated a roundtable on the future of eCommerce at the Richmond Digital and AI forum (which I also curated). I did a fair bit of writing this week as well - my brain feels like its fizzing with everything going on with AI right now and it’s so interesting how things will change. Next week I’ll be running another IPA workshop on the application of AI in advertising and there will be more writing, and prepping stuff before taking a week off (yay).

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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.