Does AI replace strategists? It replaces some strategic labour.

Start with what strategists do

A strategist might spend a day reading research, interrogating a brief, looking at competitors, analysing data, talking to account management, developing hypotheses, building an audience profile, writing a positioning, discussing ideas with creatives and turning all of it into a presentation.

Some of these things require considerable judgement. Others require less. AI makes the distinction harder to ignore.

Give a good model a clearly defined analytical task and decent information and it can already do remarkably good work. Ask it to find patterns, compare competitors, structure research, identify contradictions or produce a first analysis.

Drafting is probably the most obvious candidate for substantial automation because so much of the preceding work is baked into it. To create a useful first draft, the system has already interpreted information, made a first analytical pass and structured what it found. Starting from a blank page becomes difficult to justify as the default.

The valuable part was never typing the deck

Imagine AI gets very good at the first 70 or 80 percent of strategic groundwork. The strategist now receives something reasonably intelligent instead of an empty PowerPoint page.

Someone still needs to decide whether the diagnosis is right. Someone has to recognise that the client's preferred answer is probably wrong and decide whether this battle is worth having. Someone needs to spot that two sensible recommendations contradict each other. Someone has to understand why a strategically correct direction produces utterly boring work. Eventually, somebody has to choose.

These skills are different from producing a competent first draft.

Competent production becomes cheaper

First-pass analysis, data interpretation and drafting will become faster. Producing a competent strategic answer will require less time and, in some cases, less experience. The people who mainly produced that first answer are exposed to real substitution.

The remaining premium sits in diagnosing the right problem, recognising a weak answer, making trade-offs, working with creatives and helping clients act on uncomfortable conclusions. Agencies may employ fewer strategists for the same volume of work while depending more heavily on the judgement of the ones who remain.

“It does not feel right” matters

Can you explain the task, explain what a good result looks like and verify whether the result meets that standard? If so, AI can probably take on a substantial part of the work.

Things become more interesting when an experienced strategist looks at a plausible answer and says, “It does not feel right.” That sounds unscientific. Sometimes it is. Experience often shows up before explanation.

You may have seen enough brands, categories, clients, ideas and failures for something to trigger before you can articulate why. Perhaps the positioning is differentiated and culturally dead. Perhaps the audience insight is true and useless. Perhaps the campaign logic works perfectly and still feels like something the competitor would do.

You can ask AI to challenge these things and teach it criteria. You should encode as much accumulated practice as possible. Some experienced judgement will remain difficult to specify completely.

The strategist becomes more human

If I were hiring a junior strategist for an AI-heavy agency, I would not be particularly interested in whether they are brilliant at prompting. Prompting can be learned and tools will change.

I would look for what I might have looked for in 2000: curiosity, an ability to understand systems, a genuine interest in people and the instinct to ask why something is happening instead of describing that it is.

As people become more senior, I would add the ability to work with humans. Strategists sit between clients, account management and creative teams. They need to inspire creatives without doing the creative work for them, challenge account management without becoming obstructive, push clients when it matters and occasionally accept something they disagree with. Winning every argument is not the same as being a good consultant.

There is a problem for juniors

Senior strategists developed judgement by doing much of the work AI can now accelerate. They read the research, built charts, wrote first drafts, made bad recommendations and watched experienced people tear them apart.

If AI takes over much of the first-pass work, agencies need to think about how juniors develop the experience required to judge its output later. Making someone do repetitive work because previous generations had to is not a compelling development programme. Letting AI do everything and expecting judgement to appear at 30 is not one either.

The job will need new ways of learning. I do not think we know exactly what those look like yet.

The role that remains has more value attached to knowing what to do with the first answer: consulting, decisions, collaboration and judgement. After all the new tools, the strategist of the future may be hired for many of the same qualities as the strategist of the past. There may simply be fewer people paid mainly for producing the first draft.