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.
