AI for Strategists

In 2024, the APG led a huge initiative, cross-border and across agencies to consider the specific impact of GenAI on the strategy community. Our aim was to keep abreast of developments, provide resources and training to support strategists, and bring the community together in working out how to make the best of these profound changes and mitigate the inevitable downsides. It was by the community, for the community.

You can see below the research we did and how we worked together as a community to create resources to support planners and strategists. It’s an object lesson in working together for the greater good.

What is the APG doing now?

Our perspective is that it’s critical that planners learn to use the tools to support their work. At best, we can regard AI as an opportunity to speed up and expand our thinking, and create more time to do the parts of the job that make us truly influential and useful.

Coming out of the community work, we have developed training workshops and talks to support learning and adoption at all levels.

AI Workshop: 1st July 2026

You can sign up for this now. Led by Christina Lemieux and Ruairi Curran, it’s a hands-on masterclass in how to use AI to respond to client briefs.

AI 'How To' talks with Oliver Feldwick

Oliver Feldwick is recognised as the leading thinker on AI in our community. He generously gives up his time to create up-to-the-minute talks on what's happening with AI and how it is likely to impact the strategy community. The talks are super popular and the best shorthand for increasing your expertise.

Look out for more sessions in summer/autumn 2026.

APG AI Initiative: A Plan for Strategists

This was an idea by the community, for the community. That is the whole point of the APG.

Led by Tom Roach and Sarah Newman, 200 planners and strategists from around the globe were consulted. Then a wonderful and diverse gang of strategists were chosen to work on the topics that seemed most salient and important for us all.

They split into 4 groups working across borders and agencies that are normally in competition with each other. Over 6 months they tussled with the issues, put research into the field, thought deeply about consequences, and came up with a thoughtful and practical set of recommendations for everyone to use.

Stage 1 was debriefed in late November 2024. In 2025 we moved to stage 2 and we are now building on those recommendations as conditions change and we engage in a project of radically imagining different futures and possibilities.

See our research from 2025 below:

2024 Research: What do strategists think of AI, how are they using it and what impact is it having?

Big Picture: No surprises. AI is here to stay. We’re using it more and more. It’s both useful and sometimes underwhelming. We are allowing it ride roughshod over our critical faculties at times and it may be causing trouble for junior roles and underrepresenting women. But in the main we’re hopeful about our future with AI

APG issued an open invitation to the strategy community to tell us how strategists are using AI, what they think of it and what its impact will be now and in the future.

We got 230 responses. The sample was somewhat biased towards older men although we tried to mitigate against this when the survey was in the field. Three quarters work in brand or creative strategy. 95% are using AI now; mostly ChatGPT.

Broadly, strategists are positive about AI. They believe that it augments key strategy skills of understanding people and empathy and that these are relatively protected from its impact.

The skills it is replacing are desk research and analysis and copy and content creation. They think it’s great at understanding data, and use it for insight mining and creative brief starters.

They are generally stimulated by and interested in what AI tools have to offer and almost ¾ of us are using them at least weekly and many, far more frequently. But there's a degree of cognitive dissonance in our engagement. We are concerned about the quality and reliability of the output (and often find it underwhelming) but we’re not doing much about it. Only 37% always check facts and 13% always check for bias.

Despite these downsides people feel under pressure to use it more and more and 90% think they will be definitely using it more next year.

You can see the full deck of responses below.

APG Thought Leadership on AI Event - The Recording

21 November 2024

APG Thought Leadership on AI Event - The Presentation

21 November 2024