Is AI a strategist's friend or foe?

0:09Hello and welcome to the Warwick podcast. I'm Ann Marie Kerwin, America's editor, and today we're digging into why the AI boom is making human judgment even more important in marketing strategy. This episode is part of our mini-series covering the future of strategy. Wark recently published its annual Future of Strategy report, which is based on a global survey of marketing and advertising strategists and examines the trends and themes shaping their daily reality. And it will likely come as no surprise that AI and its impact is reshaping how they work. Our survey told us that 80 % of strategists are using AI tools more in their daily workflows, but anxiety about the technology is also surging, with 56 % of planners citing AI replacement as their single biggest professional threat, up 15 percentage points from the 2025 survey.

1:00So herein lies the challenge. How should strategists navigate a landscape where AI accelerates work, and how can they avoid the trap of automated mediocrity while holding on to the essential human elements of what they do? Today, I'm joined by two strategists who are both great advocates for human intelligence and skills that aren't going to be replaced by AI. We talked about why being political can help your career, as well as why beauty is a legitimate business advantage. So in a few minutes, I'll be joined by Nikita Walia from Unnamed and also Joe Burns from Quality Meets Creative. But before we meet them, a quick word from our sponsor.

2:09This is the sponsor. to find out more.

2:17And we are back and ready to dive in. So hello, Nikita. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Emory. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's great to see you. And hi, Joe. Good to have you here too. Hi, always a pleasure. So lovely. So we are talking future of strategy and we did our annual survey this year And what we found, nobody's going to be super surprised about this, is 56 % of respondents, a majority of respondents, fear AI tools will commoditize or replace their roles. So Nikita and Joe, why do you think AI is triggering this anxiety and how should planners reframe their relationship with AI?

2:58That is a really great place to start. I think as long as I've been a part of this industry, I think strategists have sort of had a little bit of either a chip on their shoulder or been sometimes, you know, referred to dismissively as like, oh, that's just words. We don't need that. We want to see the creative. And then a few years ago, ChatGPT goes live and all of a sudden it's really easy to generate things that look like the trappings of strategy. You know, there's maybe some of the right sentiment there. It's, you know, picking at some of the right like strategic elements, like you get a mission and vision that perhaps looks OK at first blush, like the words are arranged in the right order.

3:42But ultimately, you try and go use it. It makes no sense. And so, you know, businesses are often looking for efficiencies. One way to find efficiency is to automate strategic output. And ultimately, this is really just commoditizing the output of strategy, you know, the process of like what might be a good deck. But what a strategist really brings to the room is that human insight, that understanding, that looking at that one stakeholder who's getting a little squirmy and trying to understand what their role is in the business. And I don't think you speaking with chat or Claude or model of your choice is ever going to replace that.

4:23And so I think it behooves you to sort of figure out a way to use AI to maybe make parts of your process easier. Maybe there's something you really resent. Maybe it's nice to have a little bit of a knowledge base for a project where a stakeholder has plugged you maybe like 70 separate documents. Now you don't have to manually read them. But I think ultimately the value you bring is being a flesh and blood person and that's never going to go away. And just really double, triple down on your human skills. yeah i can understand why people are you know worried about the way that ai is going to completely change the job i think maybe all of the creative agency functions and media agency functions everyone's job if you work in the knowledge economy it's fundamentally going to change because of ai i think as a strategist i actually find it extremely exciting you know Rather than worried, I'm really excited.

5:26I think the reason for that is the bit of the job I've always enjoyed has been making the decisions. The bit of the job that I've not enjoyed is explaining to someone else why I've made the decision. And I think, Dan, that's not true of everyone who works in strategy. And sometimes I'll talk to other strategists and they'll be like, oh i kind of see my job as being scaffolding to sit around creativity and you know they'll say that okay my job is to help rationalize and explain to clients why the creative decisions that have been made have been made the way they've been made and i'm like why don't you make the decisions that seems more interesting to me like because i would you know what i mean like i enjoy the debate and the interplay and the riffing that you get with creators because they make different decisions to you and i think like i i think like your job as a strategist is to make decisions but you're you're aligned to a different objective you know your your job is i think you do kind of sit in the middle between where clients are which is i think clients are probably looking for high degree of certainty that what you're going to do is going to work creatives on the other end of the spectrum where they're incentivized because the way portfolios work and the way awards work creatives are incentivized to doing something extremely novel and original and new and different and unfamiliar and your job as a strategist is to go okay creatives we want to do something unfamiliar but don't worry clients we're going to do something that works and is better than doing the familiar thing so i think like in a in a way you should be making decisions that are going to kind of get to a place where you're doing something that is new and original but also better i think where ai really helps is it's very good at helping you understand whether or not something is better and it's very good at generative ai that is creating kind of prototypes of what that new thing might look like so i think where you end up as a strategist is in this really empowered place by ai where it's like you're able to both rapidly prototype new unfamiliar original ideas whether you've had them or anyone else's but also then kind of stress test and validate them against this contextual mass of knowledge that exists in in ail and so i can understand why people are worried because i think if you've if you've pegged your role as being validating other people's decisions and not bringing originality into what you can do, then you kind of have a little bit been replaced by AI.

8:08So I think it's a time for strategy to move into a bit more of a confident posture where it is kind of taking on more of a decision-making role rather than just a validation role. Yeah, it seems like the validation role almost is a little backwards. Like, how can we get me to the answer I need as opposed to what answer should we be putting forth, right? 100%. And AI is really good at the validation. You'll get a lot of yes, you're absolutely right. I know. It's true. It really does want to agree with you, doesn't it? 100%. I'm going to ask the question, yeah. So Nikita, in your work piece, you write about the idea that strategy can appear deceptively transparent.

8:53I think anything that's very well done always seems like it was easy because it makes so much sense that it was so well done and people don't see the work behind it. And you put it as mistaking articulation for insight and that that's dangerous. So if AI can generate a deck or a brand framework, what should the human strategist be leaning into? Yeah, I think what's really interesting that I've observed is when I started my career, there were a handful of digital spaces where people talked about strategy. But in the last 10, 15 years, there has been such a proliferation of not only strategy communities, but it feels like the act of strategy and the act of marketing are very public.

9:45And that almost everybody, like consumers are smarter. And so they have an opinion on marketing. You see all those. comments that are like, you know, give the marketing team a raise or the marketing girly sort of meme. And so I think it's become this thing that was in these conference rooms that's now become a very like publicly sort of litigated and like talked about thing. And that, you know, the person with the slickest articulation of how you get there, like, you know, if I was working with Alex Earl to launch this brand, here are the five steps I would take. But ultimately, Alex Earl launching a skincare brand is actually maybe 30 to 60 micro decisions, right?

10:22It's not making just a beautiful deck. It's making that beautiful deck and then finding the supplier that can, you know, bring the right ingredients. And then there's a geopolitical conflict and you have to restart. So it's never as linear. It is all about, you know, sequential decision making. And to sort of Joe's point, like it's about being decisive, but also I think being diagnostic of looking at those like sets of realities, especially now looking at sort of like second and third order implications, you know, not just what sort of things are trending or emergent today, but like what might this world be in six months in this geopolitical landscape that we live in and being able to be decisive and sort of bring those underdefined problems or phenomena that, you know, something that was trained on maybe the latest of the internet six months ago could never bring as well as a human could with lived human experience and the ability to have conversation with people in the world and have empathy for them.

11:27Yeah, that's great. I was thinking about, Joe, your piece when you were writing about how AI can sort of flatten reality, and you draw on James C. Scott, who is an anthropologist, who talks about how large systems will flatten reality into what can be measured by a spreadsheet so ai is worsening this legibility trap so what is your advice to strategists how to sort of break out of that yeah i think this is this is the classic um the fish doesn't realize it's wet problem you know a little bit it's like you've got to be a bit of a frog a bit amphibious i think to be a good strategist and be able to take yourself out of and this is a theme i think i think maybe last year or the year before i did the future strategy and i talked about the importance of edge kind of comes back to that it's like i think people forget that a lot of these tools are going to be shared by everyone in your competitive set so if you're using the same tools as other people and you're not deliberately bringing in information and inputs into what you're doing and handing over a lot of decision making to ai in that process you're probably going to end up in a place that's similar to the competition and therefore there's no competitive advantage from doing that so like in an objective measurement you might think like oh yeah we're doing good right now but what people aren't doing necessarily is going like oh actually but then we're sharing the same territory with five other brands in our category and you get this you know this flattening across brands and And agencies always talk about the importance of distinctiveness.

13:13And I think one thing that often we're guilty of doing as an industry is we kind of focus on the deliverables and the media assets and the ads and the executions that go out the door. We're like, OK, that needs to be really original. That needs to be really breakthrough and really distinctive. but if it's like five brands in the category who kind of like i've got similar packaging talking to a similar audience you know targeting similar usage occasions and like the only thing that's different is like yours is a talking you know dashund in your ad and everyone else has got a talking bird it's like that might you might think you might think oh yeah we're doing something really distinctive but like that's because you work in advertising and you think advertising is important but like normal people don't i think if you look at brands that have really been disruptive it's been coming from a place where there's a degree of creativity applied to parts of the business that aren't traditionally that great like grasa olive oil they're people we worked with not too long ago ironically on a campaign about now doing glass bottles um but they were so disruptive in cooking oils because the packaging was different the way that you used it and the physical ritual of using the product was very very different and yeah there was a provenance story about single origin olives being used to make the oil but like ultimately they found a way to put creativity into a bit where no one else was putting creativity in that category and like there's just so many places outside of executions and deliverables where you can apply creativity to your marketing or to your brand or business and i think that's kind of like those spaces are not going to be the obvious answer that gets spat out of an AI do you know what I mean if you if you're an ad agency and your strategist working you get a client brief and the call comes in you're going to get to a very similar place for like okay let's say this to these people in this way and we'll just make the coolest script we can around that but like you're just really limiting the aperture of like your ability to be distinctive you know so So that flattening, I think, is most prevalent outside of the advertising.

15:23And that's where the biggest upside potentially lives. Yeah, I think what's also really interesting to build on what you're saying, Joe, it's also a couple of factors. I think one thing is a lot of people are getting their trends from the same place. They're not maybe going out and talking to somebody that like maybe wouldn't be their first order consumer. Maybe it could be like a reach or growth market. And that's how you see, like, I think it was like three or four brands launched these eye patches in this packaging unit that you can twist and like peel off a little like eye mask and put under your eye in the last week.

16:02If one of them did, it would be innovative, right? But now we have five or six people doing it. And I think the second thing is as budgets get smaller, as there's these like faster and faster timelines, there is such a fear and a focus on we have to have the right answer. But then you look at the work that we've all historically celebrated. That's a really beautiful breakthrough creativity. It is actually kind of the wrong answer that is winning and like being the interesting work. And I think we need to get braver and more human by being able to make the decision and be like, OK, well, yeah, if you want to get to lowest common denominator, you can do this.

16:39But if you actually want to be an elf or like with death, you have to make some choices that are different than the five other people in your competitive set. Yeah, I think that's such a such a brilliant point. It's like there is there's a right amount of wrong to put in everything you do, you know. Is it a Persian flaw? Is that the thing I'm thinking of here? In those beautiful Persian rugs? They're not perfect. These artists and rug makers would always add in something, an imperfection, in order to show that they're so good at doing this. You know what I mean? I think it's like the idea that only God can achieve perfection.

17:18So they would put in deliberate flaws into it. And I think there's always a right amount of randomness and wrongness that over the long run you will get something better you know what i mean if you've got like this room for for magic in the thing um that you do and that that's never going to come from doing the thing that's right objectively on paper that the ai told you to do it has to come from like well i just wanted to put that bit in and it might seem up to everyone else but like i think it I think it's a good idea. Yeah, you're leading me to my next question, which I wanted to bring up was the idea that upstream strategic thinking is becoming more and more important where clients are looking for that.

18:09And it's that thing that you're saying that, like, if I'm in a competitive set of five and they all look the same or we've already all reached the same customers. Where's our next growth market coming from? What's the thing that's going to make our product break through? But a lot of agencies aren't really using their strategists for upstream business thinking. So how do we get to a place where strategists could be pushed into that business-level decision-making? and uh is there a way that ai can be either helpful or harmful when we're trying to do that this is really good because i think like this is this is something that we're wrestling within our couple of clients at the moment and i think one of the challenges one of the big challenges is clients never come to you with that brief you know is the truth like clients will be like hey we're going to be launching this thing and then you kind of put in this position as a strategist where you're like the best thing i should do is as if i want to be true to myself as a strategist i should be saying and we're talking to a parents and babies brand at the moment it'll probably be done by the time this podcast goes out so i can talk about it on it but like we're talking to someone this week and the truth is there is a international decline in babies being born.

19:36So I'm going to walk into this meeting in a day's time or two days time, and I'm going to say, or one of my strategists is, because they had this insight, but we're going to say, look, if you want to succeed in the long term, your brand needs to do more than what it's currently doing, because your source of growth is shrinking. And I think it takes a lot of bravery. I don't love that word, because it's not like we're doing anything that brave. you know what I mean we're just going to say something that's true to some people who maybe aren't thinking about it right now but like you guys would be brave in a business sense and go in and say like look okay you've got this brief on the table but like let's look five years ahead this is where the brand needs to be so let's go on that journey and see how what we're doing for this campaign can take you there and do you think like without being old man shouts at cloud I think that skill set's been eroded over the last 20 years.

20:29And I think a big part of that is because the role of strategy has become increasingly to kind of... You can kind of see the causal chain of effect that's gone on, which is strategy needs to find very zeitgeisty trends and memes and things to give to creatives so that creatives can come up with an idea so that that idea can get earned media and lots and lots of impressions and shares online. And I think that focus within the industry has become so dominant that we've kind of got to a point where everyone's forgotten that that's meant to be moving your brand in a specific direction in the long term.

21:10And I think it does take a bit of bravery and boldness to kind of jump in at the start of a pitch or to say to a client, hey, look, you need to think about this differently because in five years time, the world's going to be a very different place and your brand needs to set itself up in this way to do it or whatever that might be. I also think, you know, Joe, I have a slightly different vantage point where I sit because I had up the strategy function at a branding agency where, you know, if we, you know, I've in the past been in more like comms focused roles or social focused roles where you're often on the receiving end of a decision that was made 18 months ago and you have to bring it to life somehow.

21:49and you're ultimately solving a problem that is a deep business problem through an Instagram carousel. And you're like, awesome. Would have loved to have been brought in 18 months ago when I could have told you, young women do not think this. Please go speak to someone other than your children about what young people want. But, you know, being in sort of a branding agency environment, I think at least we have a seat at the table when some foundational decisions are being made, where even recently there was a client that wanted a brand system for a new entity they were spinning up within a larger institution.

22:25And we were like, great, we can do that. But look at all these, you know, 30, 40, 50 software solutions you have under this new portfolio. How does it sit relative to your parent brand? Like what sort of leadership, what sort of, you know, enterprise decision makers are you going to speak to in the future if you make this move? So we were able to have that intervention, but we were also at an earlier part in the process. You know, I wasn't the PR person that had to go PR this now. Right. And I also think it's kind of interesting where things are getting all muddled together. So many of these management consultancies are spinning up creative services because they see themselves being maligned as like spreadsheet crunchers.

23:05And they see that there's some hook in creativity that appeals to like big business leaders that They just maybe can't crack it because of their default mode of being. So it is such a funny world of like all this nebulousness around like where somebody's remit starts and begins. But I think as a strategist, ultimately get out of the habit of being like, oh, my job is just to make the deck and deliver the deck by this date. And be it like, how can I be a better like partner and advocate for my client and actually meet them at the table? Ultimately, like especially if you're in a smaller shop, you're only as good as your last project.

23:45So it also kind of depends like your success depends on your client's success. So like you're on the same side of the table ultimately. So meet them there and really be responsible as much as you can. I think I've always been glad that I said to do the responsible thing rather than just saying, OK, well, my job was to produce a campaign. I did that. I've washed my hands of it. Next brief. I think it's really cool that you brought up IATs there. I think there's one strategically, and I mean this strategically not as in the strategists are doing it, but I just mean I think if there's one malnourished component of the marketing ecosystem, it's the IAT.

24:26I think I've worked on a lot of IATs. I'd say the majority of them are only as good as the talent that's around the table. And I think that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I'm yet to work on an IAT where there's been a really clear model for how people should work together and how to bring people together and like a ways of working and a process that's like an IAT way of working and process rather than agencies have all got their individual ways. And like one thing that's interesting about QM where I work is we work really well with clients who've got internal creative studios and internal creative people because our creatives can kind of integrate and they form like a writer's room with the client-side creatives.

25:13But I think for whatever reason, maybe it comes down to misaligned incentives. Actually, brand agencies are the easiest, I think, to integrate with as a creative agency. I think if you look at media agencies and PR agencies, their KPIs, and they've often got different clients to the clients that you work for who might be a head of brand. their clients and those agencies can really often have KPIs that literally contradict what you're trying to do you know like actually contradict your role and then you have a really politicized IOT so I think you know may I know we're taking the thing off on a tangent here away from AI but I do think I'm increasingly seeing IAT being an important thing for clients I don't think anyone's yet cracked to like okay here's a way for agencies to come together and I genuinely do think strategists should be playing a huge role in that shaping an IOT and how they work building the process around it but where AI perhaps can play a really powerful role is to create shared context around the decisions and the work that's happening across that IOT and like it can remove some of those barriers and act as almost like a operating system i guess for information to pass between different agencies and it'll be interesting to see i wouldn't be surprised if publicists or wpp who tend to go in on those kind of big integrated responses to big client briefs are building platforms that allow different agency teams to come together around it but if anyone's listening to the podcast and they've got a software thing that allows you to just kind of set up a please give me a message on LinkedIn because I'd like to chat.

27:04Well I think it's actually not going off on a tangent because one of the things about what do we do about AI is like what can strategists do that AI doesn't right so being that human connection being the one who can pull the teams together direct work all of that is, that's something that's not going to come out of Claude, right? You're going to, that's going to come from relationships, that's going to come from understanding the business pressures and responding in the moment. So I think that's very much something that only humans are going to be able to do. Yeah. And you actually brought that up, Nikita, in your piece talking about that strategy doesn't happen in theory, it happens inside human political structures.

27:50So maybe this is a good time to talk about what sort of those political skills are needed to actually do a strategist job well. Yeah. You know, what's funny is I think when you start your career as a strategist, there is sort of an undue importance put on finding like the perfectly articulated insight in X number of words of formatting your deck in the right sort of like sequence and narrative. And all of those are very important skills to have. They're absolutely the craft skills you should have. But you can have the right answer and just not have people ready to listen to that answer because you haven't done the, you know, job of, you know, taking 15 minutes with your client and saying, hey, I saw this thing.

28:41And then it inspired me to think about our brief together in this way how is that you know tracking with you is that feeling right is that inspiring you in a similar way like those small bridges that's what you can do right if they wanted just a singular answer they could have left you alone for two weeks to go find it or they could have just uploaded every document into clod or chat gpt and been like well like i have this problem with the business how can I get to xyz and I think also as you sort of grow as a strategist get increasingly sort of bigger titles and remits depending on where you are I'm in a smaller environment I still do a lot of the actual practice of writing the strategy but sometimes when you're the head of a department some of you so much of your role is really focused on like going and like getting coffee with the CMO and building that bridge.

29:37And like I alluded to earlier, you know, strategy happens in these organizations. And right now I'm working on a lot of tech companies. And what a crazy time to work in tech. There's such an undercurrent of fear. You could be working on a product for six months, get let go tomorrow. You could be working on that product for six months. And then a fringe lab comes out with the exact same thing. You lose your job again. So there's so much fear and anxiety. And until you understand and empathize with that and help people, you know, achieve whatever objective it is, of course, they want to launch a campaign, but maybe they also want to get a promotion and look good internally with their CMO.

30:14Like, how can you also help them achieve some of those somewhat selfish, but human goals? Like, that's what you can uniquely do as a person in the room and not a large language model.

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31:11Yeah, that's great. And Joe, you had another sort of human killer app that you alluded to in your piece, which you wrote that optimization is not strategy and that we should look for beauty in the age of slop because beauty actually has value. And I thought you had a very interesting way of thinking about it. How do you define beauty in a business context and why is that a good commercial strategy? I mean, my belief about beauty is it's the value you place on something beyond its utility. and i think from that you can kind of draw it's like it's basically the the little je ne sais quoi that something has you know what i mean it's like beauty is the thing that like appeals to you deeply but you can't put your finger on why it's just like i can't explain why like the there's i think a really good example of this would be like if you look at victorian you know steamworks and factories and stuff people turn them into houses now and like they i live in brooklyn and there's like beautiful old factories that probably made like i don't know pipes or something 150 years ago but now they're beautiful office buildings and apartment blocks and i think the idea there is just like when they were made they were obviously designed and built in such a way that they had beaches and things that didn't really serve a purpose, but they're just little aesthetic touches that made it look nice and appeal to people.

32:50I think humans have a desire to see and be around and be surrounded by things that they like that don't do a job. Do you know what I mean? One thing that business is extremely guilty of is it prioritizes usefulness over everything else. I think if you look at companies that get acquired by you know vc firms and stuff like that there's often the complaint like oh all the little things the details that i loved about this product have now gone and it's using cheaper materials and it's all the all the things that didn't really serve a purpose but created that uniqueness and that individuality are gone and i think like that's that's why beauty is valuable to business because it makes you more likely to endure i think beauty creates endurance you know if you create and And there's this thing that's like, if you make something that's designed only to be useful, as soon as someone's finished using it, they will just discard it, right?

33:49And you can kind of prove this. If you look at, you know, you've probably seen them all over the streets, but like disposable vapes, right? The ultimate, like, they're designed to be used. Then they're colorful to catch people's attention and make them look appealing, but then they just get thrown away and the streets are covered in vapes. contrast that with like a nice wooden pipe that's been crafted by someone out of like nice wood and people keep that stuff for generations even though no one in that family smokes tobacco anymore and like that's a silly example but i think like people want things that are beautiful to keep around and they'll find new uses for it you know anyway the point the point of getting at is but making something that's got a static appeal it gives it uh endurance to it and it makes it durable and people want to keep it around and i think that's an incredibly powerful thing for brands to do you know what i mean if brands can create ideas and communications and bits of advertising or whatever it is that people want to keep around just because it's nice to be around it it you're creating value you know what i mean and you don't have to do any innovation or npd to do that exactly yeah i was thinking when you said people we we like things just that that make us happy i was like think of how many of us own pets they don't really have a lot of use but mostly they're just cute and we like them um so anyway this has been really um such a great conversation um i just want to have one last question which is the obligatory if you had one piece of advice for strategists who are building their careers this year and beyond what is it that you would tell them to focus on i would tell them to please consume as little marketing content as possible and to go for a walk and look at the beautiful details on buildings like joe pointed out like go look at the etchings in your local brownstone uh you know like read anthropology like read about you know why cities are made read some fiction please do not just you know go and scroll a bunch of marketing thought leaders, please know your fundamentals, like please read Byron Sharp, and then maybe don't watch 50 TikToks about branding.

36:14That would be my advice. Just get curious about things outside your field. You just never sort of know what, you know, thought that might spark next.

36:28So, I mean, mine is kind of related to the AI point, but I don't think it's ever been as easy is now to start a business. I think the best thing, one of the best things you can do is just like start a business. You can probably with Claude, you could probably start a business doing something this afternoon. And it could be anything, but like apply your mind and your strategic skill set to something that maybe you're passionate about or better than passionate about. Apply it to something where you think you've got an idea that's better than the current ideas that are out there and just go and like, okay I'm gonna start a little business that does this thing and we'll see how it goes because I think you you'll probably learn a lot from doing that that you never learn just doing it for other businesses that's true yeah you'd really get into the mind of your clients then right understand exactly yeah well thank you both so much for for joining us and for helping us with the future of strategy report this year and uh we're really looking forward to seeing what uh what comes out of all of your endeavors going forward.

37:34Thank you, Nikita, and thank you, Joe, for this great talk today about how strategists can take on the challenge of AI. Wark subscribers can download and read the Future of Strategy report on Wark.com. Be sure to follow and subscribe to the Wark podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes, and thanks for listening.