New Strategy Alchemy

On Tuesday night the APG hosted a brilliant Noisy Thinking event featuring four very smart, very human and very AI-forward strategy minds exploring the ‘New Strategy Alchemy’, answering the question ‘How can we best combine our unique human skills with AI to help make us all better, not worse?’

It was a breath of fresh air to hear practitioners who have gone beyond the fear, insecurity and uncertainty we heard from strategists a couple of years back. There was no Luddism on display. There was little or no talk of job losses, of industry decline or tech bubbles. There was positivity and energy. There was a high level of confidence and optimism in our own unique skills and value as strategic humans who can use the tools we now have, to push our thinking further and faster than before. And a more precise understanding that can only come from personal, practical experience of the superpowers that this new technology brings to the table, and how we can harness them to our clients’ advantage.

For those who couldn’t make it, I thoroughly recommend reading this full transcript of the evening too (link here, thank you Claude), but here are some brief summaries of each of the four short talks as well.

Shaun Barton of Davies+McKerr views AI as a vitally important ‘adrenalin shot to the heart’ for the insights industry. It has the potential to reawaken the radical curiosity that defined the qual research world's mid-20th century origins. He argued that AI can automate the drudge work brilliantly, and whilst it can’t replicate the emotional heart of lived human experiences, he uses it to generate ‘hyperhuman insights’, spotting patterns at scale while pushing for messier, more revealing fieldwork with real people. Ultimately using AI as a springboard to get beyond the obvious, rather than as a shortcut to flat answers.

Killer quotes from Shaun to steal and share: 

"AI isn't the death blow that lots of people talk about. It's been more like a shot to the heart."

"It's really clear that AI is going to keep getting better — probably in an almost exponential way. The question is: will we?"

"We can either use AI to continue a drift towards hollow, lifeless strategy...or we can use AI to reclaim radical curiosity about people."

Saskia Jones of BBH delivered an impassioned but surgical strike on the dangers of outsourcing real human understanding to the new tools and forgetting the importance of the stomach flip - that intuitive feeling of finding an uncomfortable but true human insight or idea that we have to prioritise and protect. She railed against the ‘intelligent answer’ which AI gives us instantly and for the ‘interesting answer’ which requires human creativity and risk. In her view, AI is useful for the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but strategists must protect the ‘who’ to maintain their value. 

Killer quotes from Sas:

“The fundamental thing for me is that the intelligent answer and the interesting answer are absolutely not the same thing. If you reach for the intelligent answer every time...you will never build the muscle of interesting”.

“Use AI for the ‘what’. Use it for the ‘how.’ But please don't use it for the ‘who’."

“Intelligence is the floor and interesting is the ceiling. The tools will keep getting better at the floor - but the ceiling is still all ours.”

Nick Hirst of adam&eve/TBWA cautioned that we shouldn’t bet against AI's rapidly doubling capabilities. He suggested that instead of looking for AI's limitations, we should embrace our negative emotions of ‘hatred and boredom’ as surprising but vital creative superpowers. Because while AI never gets bored, our ability to say ‘I hate this’ is a creative filter that AI can’t replicate. And it’s these negative emotions that drive humans to tear up the status quo, seek novelty and push for better ideas in ways that amenable AIs tend not to do.

Killer quotes from Nick:

“Humans...get bored and they hate stuff and they don't like things, for relatively subjective reasons. And I would argue that is our superpower.”

“Don't ignore the voice in your head that says 'It's boring' or 'I hate this'...that is the bit of you that cannot be replicated.”

“We shouldn't look for the value that we bring in the limitations of AI‘s capabilities, we should look for it in the specific qualities of our own humanity.”

Oli Feldwick of T&P, went one step weirder, discussing the need to see this new stuff as a form of Alien Intelligence that we should embrace, rather than squashing it into human-shaped boxes and personalities. He argued that the ‘finishing school’ of conversational design often strips away the most interesting, raw power of AI models. So we should stop trying to make AI think like a human, but treat it as a weird alien mind, and to find value, strategists should use adversarial or ‘disagreeable’ agents to push thinking into unexpected and unusual directions and get to more interesting and non-obvious creative springboards.

Killer quotes from Oli:

“[Ask] how do we tap into the brilliance of this weird wonderful brain, rather than how do we squash it into pre-existing boxes of how it should operate?”

“We take this weird model...and we send it to a finishing school where we get it to be a good conversationalist. And that finishing school takes off a lot of the interesting."

“A fool with a tool is still a fool. Asking boring questions will get you boring answers.”

It was a fab evening and a real breath of fresh air to hear four super-smart strategists apply the critical thinking they use on their client work to the tools we’re all using. 

There was positive scepticism in abundance. No doom-mongering dystopianism. But not a lot of utopianism either. Just a sharpening of what strategists are, what we can do for our clients and the value we bring. 

What we saw and heard was strategy on the front foot.

Tom Roach

APG Co-chair and VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish