A confession: I have sat in four meetings this month where someone presented an "AI Strategy" that was functionally a list of AI tools they found on Product Hunt, reformatted into a slide deck with the word "leverage" on every page.
We have entered what I am calling the AI Strategy Doc Industrial Complex. Every agency has an AI practice now. Every brand has an AI task force. Every CMO has been told by their board to "have a point of view on AI." And the result is an avalanche of documents that say very sophisticated-sounding things while meaning almost nothing.
Here is what I think is actually happening strategically with AI in marketing right now, stripped of the hype:
The real shift is not creation. It is curation. Yes, AI can generate copy, images, video, audio. Everyone knows this. But the brands actually gaining advantage are using AI to curate and personalize at scale. Stitch Fix just rebuilt their entire styling algorithm. Spotify's DJ feature is genuinely changing how people discover music. These are not "we used ChatGPT to write emails" plays. These are fundamental business model evolutions.
The creative quality bar just moved up, not down. I keep hearing that AI will commoditize creative work. I think the opposite is happening. When anyone can generate a decent ad in thirty seconds, decent is no longer good enough. The premium on genuinely original, culturally resonant creative just went through the roof. The brands winning are pairing AI efficiency in production with human brilliance in concept.
The biggest risk is not falling behind. It is losing your voice. I have seen three brands this quarter whose social content became noticeably blander after they "implemented AI workflows." The content is grammatically perfect, posted at optimal times, and utterly soulless. Their engagement is cratering because audiences can feel the absence of a human point of view, even if they cannot articulate why.
My actual strategic advice, which I give to every client who asks and which no one wants to hear: before you build an AI strategy, get crystal clear on what makes your brand irreplaceably human. What is the thing that no model can replicate because it comes from your specific culture, history, relationships, and weirdness? Protect that thing at all costs. Automate everything else.
My actual strategic advice, which I give to every client who asks and which no one wants to hear: before you build an AI strategy, get crystal clear on what makes your brand irreplaceably human.
That is a two-sentence AI strategy. It will never be a forty-page deck. Which is exactly why nobody in the AI Strategy Doc Industrial Complex will ever write it.
The work is not in the tools. The work is in knowing what to protect.