AI is wrecking creative strat and calling it a day

logan-lifecycle

The whole industry is shoving AI at everyone while client loads climb and headcount stays flat. Now strat leads drop a brief into a tool, get a crappy deck spit back out, and call it a day. No segment logic, no actual thinking behind any of it, just output. Anyone else watching quality crater like this?

growth-scrapper-dev

Ran it through its paces for the first time this week. Verdict: genuinely useful as a deep research partner, diabolical at execution. Uncobbling the output and sifting through it for the actual nuggets ate an absurd chunk of my day. where it shined was the gap analysis and poking holes in my thinking. Where it fell apart was consistency. it kept changing its mind mid-stream, and the heavy lifting still landed on me. Time-wise it broke even at best, and that's excluding the research phase, which was the one piece that actually delivered on efficiency. Nothing straight out of it goes out the door as-is, it needs scaling, vetting, and real creative thought on top. some people clearly don't care about that part. What it reinforced is the exact same thing I've learned wrangling LLMs in my own data pipelines: they're fine when you don't give a shit about the task at hand, and they take just as long or longer to wrestle into shape. it is not the silver bullet some people think it is.

loomprospectingbeast

This is exactly why I went back to my content strategy roots and dropped creative strat. When you get a day to pull "compelling insights," the AI draft becomes the deliverable. Nobody's lazy, the timeline just does the deciding. It's a time thing, plain and simple

justauser

Honestly, this doesn't surprise me one bit. Freelanced across a handful of agencies this past year, and the one leaning hardest on AI for creative strategy was also the biggest, the one bleeding the most business, and easily the most miserable place to work. 🫠

Small sample size, sure, but clients are clearly getting sick of generic work, and generic is about all those tools could pump out.

Not saying the other shops were perfect, but the output felt way stronger and clients genuinely seemed happier with what they got.

devrel-marketing

Been there. Watched a strat lead paste ChatGPT output into a deck and call it "polished." Didn't say anything in the meeting - just rebuilt the framing offline with actual customer language from support tickets and sales calls. Sent it over with "thought this might sharpen the angle." They used it.

The move isn't calling people out. It's showing up with something sharper that couldn't come from a prompt. real constraints. Real tradeoffs. The stuff LLMs flatten into "seamless integration" and "unlock value."

Exhausting that this is the job now, but also... easiest way to stand out in a room full of defaults.

leadgen

i had a client last week pitch an "AI-generated brand concept" and it was literally a stack of midjourney images with zero strategy behind it. creative that used to take weeks of research, moodboarding, and soul-searching was replaced by a prompt. the worst part? they saw no difference.

That's the thing. AI doesn't ruin creative because it's bad at making visuals. It ruins creative because it convinces people that the thinking part no longer matters. Everyone's suddenly a strategist, but nobody's doing the work that makes strategy worth anything.

we're going to lose the craft if we keep letting the button be the idea

abm-architect

The concern is real, though using it as a sounding board for early concepts has actually saved me hours of staring at blank decks.

isa-ecom

This is what scares me about AI adoption. Using it to pressure-test thinking, pull research, or grind through tedious stuff is one thing. Pasting a brief in and calling whatever spits out a strategy is just outsourcing the actual job lol. The judgment calls are the job, and those don't come from a prompt.

fieldevent

Been there. Clients push for volume and turnaround speed like it's a factory line, but the work that actually converts takes time to marinate. My human-led campaigns consistently outperform and hold longer. Dreading the AI requests is real - it just drains the craft right out of you.

growthgeek

Hot take: AI isn't the real villain here. The last agency i worked at was preaching "more with less" before I bailed, so the squeeze predates the slop era. Platform algos demanding endless creative volume, companies pretending laid-off roles get backfilled by a chatbot, clients expecting double output because their agency slapped "AI-powered" on a roadmap that isn't even live yet. That whole garbage stack is what's crushing anyone trying to make non-slop creative, and honestly the volume math was broken long before any of this.

positioning-expert

The output being slop is only half of it. Clients talk, and word gets around fast about which agencies are just feeding briefs into a chatbot. Credibility dies right there. Why would anyone pay agency rates for that?

salesenablementexpert

tell me about it. every deck reads like a novel now

roichaser

Had a colleague hand me a strategic deck last week that was a masterpiece of hollow frameworks. Every slide was a beautifully formatted AI-generated matrix or funnel, but when I asked about the specific customer pain point it addressed? Nothing. Crickets.

The real danger isn't the tool. It's the professional that uses it as a thinking replacement. If your entire strategic rationale can be conjured from a prompt in thirty seconds, your competitors are doing the exact same thing. The value was never in the diagram itself, it's in the messy, human insight that makes the diagram necessary. Now we're just trading in identical, garbage-grade thinking.

emmareach

Honestly this tracks. The agencies I deal with are already shopping around for the cheapest offshore "prompt engineers" instead of hiring actual strategists. Cheaper deliverables, same overblown retainer. The clients don't notice for months because the output looks passable. It's the same playbook they ran with offshore copywriting mills, just with a fresh coat of AI paint

jamesaso

Any tool makes lazy people lazier, AI included. Seen it firsthand with creative testing: AI cranks out variations fast, but taste still decides what converts. The floor just rose for everyone, so the hardest working creatives only pull further ahead imo.

podcast-marketer

Seen this play out more than once. Had a client whose "strategic planning" was literally recycling the same three deck templates for every vertical - zero audience research, no competitive mapping, just vibes. Fed the same briefs into a couple of LLMs with proper context framing and got sharper positioning angles in twenty minutes than their senior strategist delivered in two weeks.

Not saying AI replaces thinking. But when the human baseline is "copy last year's deck and change the logo," the bar is underground. The tool exposes the gap more than it creates it.

devrel-marketing

Been freelancing in strategy for a while now, using AI here and there but never for final deliverables. Curious - anyone have egregious examples of AI-generated "strategery" slop? Learn as much from the disasters as the wins. Also building a tool to help strategists avoid this mess. If you've got decks or slides showing what bad AI output looks like, shoot them over (redact whatever you need). Haven't seen many concrete examples of what this garbage actually looks like in the wild. Appreciate it.

pricingstrategist

Seeing it being weaponised for feedback and score points is my particular fave. Like, I know you didn't review the deck in 3 mins flat and come up with any of this 5 page email back Darren. The open rate stats tell me u didnt even take the review the damn email it was attached to.

seo-prog-luke

Agreed. AI is fine for speeding things up, but the moment it substitutes for real strategy, the output feels generic and lazy. saw the same with mass pages built on zero intent.

logan-lifecycle

The signal-to-noise ratio in decks lately is brutal. You hit a journey node expecting a decision point and get three slides of hallucinated "insights" that don't map to a single segment behavior. Pure waste of cognitive load.