Speed is cheap.Judgement isn't.

The two-day strategy

There’s a new breed of startup promising strategy in 48 hours. Purpose, positioning, values and tone of voice, all boxed up and delivered before the weekend. I’ve read a few. They are fast. They are also some of the most obvious, jargon-stuffed work I’ve seen in years.

That isn’t because the people behind them are lazy. It’s because of how the tools work. AI learns from everything that already exists. Ask it what a brand should stand for and it hands you back the average of every brand that came before.

Clean, plausible and completely forgettable.

And clients are buying it. I understand why. Any strategy feels better than no strategy, and a fast, cheap one feels like a bargain. But a platform built on the average will produce average work for years. That isn’t a saving. It’s a cost you pay slowly.

Human top spin

Most of these outfits will tell you there’s a human involved. There usually is. Someone reads the output at the end and puts a bit of top spin on it. A sharper headline here. A local reference there.

That isn’t the same as making the work together. There’s a big gap between AI writing the strategy while you give it a once-over, and AI working beside you the whole way while you make every call.

One is a review. The other is a partnership.

Clients often can’t see the difference in the deck. They feel it a year later, when nothing has changed.

The pull to the middle

I use AI every day, and it has a habit. Leave it alone and it drifts towards the safe answer. It’ll recommend an approach that’s technically right but strategically dead. Too familiar. Too safe. The kind of thing a competitor could put their logo on tomorrow.

Spotting that is the job. It takes experience to know when something is correct but not distinctive. AI can’t feel that gap. It doesn’t know what your category already sounds like, what the client tried three years ago, or what made the CEO wince in the last meeting.

The cliché and the flip

One of my favourite ways round it comes from the strategist Julian Cole. First, ask AI for every cliché in the category. The parodied lines, the tired phrases, the words every brand in the space hides behind. Get them all on the table.

Then ask for the flip. The opposite of each one.

Somewhere between the cliché and its flip, there’s often an idea hiding. It’s never the finished thing. It’s a seed. But it’s a seed that wasn’t generated by AI. It was found with it, then grown by someone who knows the difference.

Taste is the job

Strategy, like creativity, comes down to taste. Taste comes from experience, from years of seeing what works and what quietly falls apart. It’s personal. That’s what makes it valuable, and that’s what makes it so hard to automate.

Speed is everywhere now. Everyone has the same tools and the same two-day turnaround. What they don’t all have is someone who can look at a page of plausible answers and say: that one. Not that one. Definitely not that one.