Last Wednesday, a company called OpenAI released something called ChatGPT. By Sunday, it had over a million users. By today, approximately everyone I know has used it to write something, and approximately half of them are convinced their job will not exist in two years.
I've been playing with it for five days straight. I asked it to write brand strategy for a fictional sneaker company. I asked it to draft social copy in the voice of different brands. I asked it to explain positioning theory to a five-year-old. I asked it to write a Seinfeld episode about brand purpose.
When Yvon Chouinard gave Patagonia away to fight climate change, he didn't just make a donation. He made every other CEO's 'sustainability commitment' look like what it was: a press release.
The results range from genuinely impressive to hilariously wrong. And that range is exactly why I think the panicking is premature and the dismissing is naive.
Here's my honest assessment as a brand strategist: ChatGPT can do the commodity parts of my job. The first draft of a creative brief. The initial brainstorm of tagline options. The summary of a research report. The meeting recap email. It can do these things faster than me and often as well as a junior team member would.
What it cannot do, at least not yet: figure out what the actual problem is. Understand the political dynamics in a client organization. Know that the CMO's real concern isn't market share but their relationship with the CEO. Sense that the stated brief is wrong and the real brief is something nobody has articulated. Read a room. Have taste. Know when to kill an idea that's technically correct but emotionally wrong.
Sense that the stated brief is wrong and the real brief is something nobody has articulated.
Strategy is not the production of strategic-sounding documents. Strategy is the discernment to know what matters and what doesn't. And that discernment comes from experience, intuition, and the kind of pattern recognition that requires having been wrong a hundred times before.
But. And this is important. I think the strategists who will thrive are the ones who figure out how to use this tool to eliminate the parts of the job that aren't actually strategy. If I can generate a first draft in seconds and then spend my time on the thinking and refining rather than the typing, I'm a better strategist. If I can produce ten options in the time it used to take to produce two, I have more raw material to apply judgment to.
The threat isn't to good strategists. The threat is to people who produce the appearance of strategy without the substance. The deck-builders whose value is in formatting, not thinking. The consultants who sell process, not insight. ChatGPT can replicate the surface. It can't replicate the depth. But a lot of what gets sold as strategy was already just surface.
For brands thinking about how to use this: the early movers will gain an efficiency advantage. But the advantage won't come from using AI. It will come from using AI well. Knowing what to ask it, how to evaluate its output, and when to ignore it entirely. That's still a human skill.
I'm excited. I'm slightly terrified. I'm definitely not going to pretend I have it figured out yet. Nobody does. We're all five days into something that might reshape entire industries. The correct posture is curious, not certain.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go ask ChatGPT to write a better version of this blog post so I can feel appropriately threatened.