The Future of Strategy Boils Down to the 'Minimum Viable Dose'

AI can't originate. It never invents

AI can now do almost everything a strategist does. Research. Decks. Synthesis. Visualization. Prototyping. Faster. Cheaper. Often well enough.

That last part is the problem.

The industry’s first instinct was predictable: use the machine to do more of what we already do, just quicker. Crank out more decks. Run more audits. Produce research at a pace that would’ve required a team of six only eighteen months ago. And it works. The output looks right. The structure holds up. Clients don’t always notice the difference.

But “clients don’t always notice” is a dangerous foundation for an entire profession.

Here’s what AI can’t do: originate. It’s a machine of the past, built from everything that already exists. It recombines. It never invents. It can survey an entire competitive set in seconds. But what it hands you is a map. A map is not a way through. It has no intent. It can’t look at a situation and decide everyone else is wrong. It can’t want anything for your brand.

Originality is what creates advantage. An advantage is an original position, a way of seeing or acting that no one else has taken. A creative act, full stop.

And that creative act is the strategist’s only distinct job. We do plenty of things for plenty of people. But the one thing we can do for a business is find an original way to win.

As Easy as IDAE: The Four Moves You Need to Make

That job sounds complicated, but it can now be broken down into four moves:

1. Interrogating the strategic landscape to build a current, true point of view about the world.
2. Distilling that into a core insight, tension, or unexplored territory. 
3. Articulating a strategy that creates distinct, real-world advantage for a client. 
4. Expressing that strategy as a story and a system that creates directionality.

AI handles moves one and four well. Interrogating and expressing are about speed and craft. However, distilling and articulating are about seeing something new and turning it into a way to win. AI can’t do the creative part of strategy.

But here’s the real tension: most strategists can’t, either. Not because they lack the ability. Because they lack the time. We can flex into everything, so we get pulled into everything. AI hasn’t freed us. It compressed timelines and raised expectations that everything should happen faster.

The Minimum Viable Dose Strategist

The real opportunity is using AI to protect time for the work that matters.

Compress moves 1 (interrogating) and 4 (expressing) to a minimum viable dose. Let AI handle the research scaffolding, the deck production, the competitive scans. The time that opens up goes to moves 2 (distilling) and 3 (articulating). The goal is sharper strategy, not just faster strategy.

I’ve started calling this the Minimum Viable Dose Strategist. The strategist who wins does less of everything except the one thing only they can do.

This creates five new rules for strategists to live by:

1. “Perfection” holds strategy back. Find a direction worth exploring, then bring people along as you sharpen it.
2. Be brutally honest and critical. AI accelerates the ass-kissing paradigm. Every tool is trained to validate you. Weaponize your intuition instead. It’s probably right.
3. Go deep after AI goes wide. Let the machine map the territory. Then go where it can’t follow.
4. “Good enough” is the new bad. Good enough is a prompt away. A paid-for strategy is only worth it if it produces something never before seen. That’s the new premium.
5. Rare information is your new advantage. When 95 percent of the world’s info is instantly gettable, the other 5 percent becomes gold. And it’s hard to find: IRL meetups, niche community boards, conversations that never got indexed.

This leaves us with questions worth sitting with:How do we protect time for insight work? How do we make the creative act itself faster and sharper? How do we use AI to produce more original strategies, not just blander, faster strategies?

The strategists who answer that won’t just survive the compression. They’ll be the ones still worth paying for.