The Home for Planners & Strategists
AI for Strategists
In 2024 the APG have been investing considerable time in considering the specific impact of GenAI on the strategy community. Our aim is 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.
We’ve run workshops on Critical Thinking in the age of AI. We had an extensive series of masterclasses in the different aspects of GenAI and how to think about and use the tools with Oliver Feldwick. We put out a major survey to understand how the strategy community are actually using the tools and embracing the impact. And most important, we created an APG AI Initiative where we brought together strategists from around the world to work together on understanding the impact for strategists in specific ways, and create practical policy ideas that can be shared by everyone.
APG AI Initiative: A Plan for Strategists
The idea of this is that it should be 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 is debriefed late November 2024. In 2025 we will move to stage 2 where build on those recommendations as conditions change and we engage in a project of radically imagining different futures and possibilities.
Role of the Strategist
What is the value of the strategist in this new world? Best practice and guidelines for Planners at different levels of experience.
Effectiveness
How effectiveness as a discipline for planners has been influenced by the arrival of GenAI advertising and a practical model for thinking about how AI could make advertising more effective (or not..)
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking encompasses bias, knowledge, and practical recommendations about how we should be thinking differently tomorrow and in the future.
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 full deck of responses below.