What AI will do to strategy people by 2030.

I once worked at an agency where the partners would handwrite slides and give them to their secretaries to create PowerPoint presentations.

We used to have desk phones. People would leave voicemails. We would listen to them. Like, carefully.

Lotus Notes was a thing.

In retrospect, new technology has made all these behaviors obsolete, quaint-- hilarious, even.

Similarly, by 2030, AI will render many of the things we, strategy people, do today equally ridiculous.

And, as a consequence, AI will change the nature of the discipline itself.

The first thing AI is going to do by 2030 is eliminate most of us.

More precisely, it will eliminate most of us in the middle.

It will polarize strategy talent. Ruthlessly.

The top 5% of strategy people will be fine—they will use AI to do exciting, new, unknown things.

The bottom 20% will also be fine—they will use AI to do old, existing, known things that used to require a mid-level strategy person, but at a significantly lower cost.

AI will also commoditize specialized strategy tasks.

Writing a survey questionnaire, analyzing raw data, researching a category, social listening, crafting multiple versions of a manifesto—AI will do it all in seconds and it will do it better than we ever could.

Strategy people will still need to know how to judge and prompt-revise these specialized tasks, but we will no longer be paid to do them.

Ultimately, by 2030, the majority of strategy people’s value will be finding and connecting dots. Often, hidden dots.

To find opportunity, solution, and advantage at the intersections of disciplines and datasets. Buried in those intersections.

And then tell a story.

Imagine a far future where AI (and AI-powered robots) do all jobs—knowledge work and physical work alike.

Humans will still spend time and sweat entertaining each other.

Creating, telling, sharing stories will be the final human endeavor.

AI will make tasks easier, but it won’t make implications clearer.

It will find any stat you want, but it will still struggle to put it in a fresh, unexpected context.

It will become exponentially more accurate, but only marginally more interesting.

If there’s one defining limitation of AI, it’s that everything it can do, everything it knows, everything it will ever know, comes from one place. The same place...the past.

All its herculean compute is aimed and trained on everything that has already happened.

It can't imagine an truly original future (or thought, for that matter) because it's obsessed with extrapolating the past.

At its core, all strategy is an imagination of a desired future coupled with a POV of what's required to actualize it.

And all good strategy people tell a story of how to leap from known past to unknown future.

AI won’t change this by 2030.

Or ever.

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