The research phase of brand strategy used to take months. Category analysis. Consumer interviews. Competitive audits. Survey design and fielding. It was thorough. It was slow.
What's changed
AI compresses the research phase dramatically.
- Category mapping: days → hours
- Competitive analysis: weeks → a day
- Consumer insight generation: months → days
- Pattern recognition across thousands of data points → minutes
What hasn't changed
The judgment phase. Looking at all that research and deciding what it means. Choosing the one space to own. Having the conviction to recommend it.
That's still slow. That's still human. That's still the hard part.
My workflow now
I use AI to get to the judgment phase faster. I don't use it to replace judgment.
The insight might come from a machine. The decision comes from a strategist with a whiteboard and a point of view.