A few months ago, I asked AI to help me draft my newsletter strategy. The output was 14 pages: some good, some bad, some just unnecessary. The sheer length made it virtually unusable and required an excessive amount of time to edit. The core focus was gone. Eventually, I scrapped the whole thing and started with a blank page.
AI tools enable seemingly unlimited production. We can create endless analyses, reports, articles, posts, graphics, and decks. According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing Report, 71% of marketers say AI helps them create significantly more content. So, we produce more and more stuff.
At a company I used to work at, the CEO promoted his growth strategy of “reaching more consumers, in more parts of the world, more completely.” Employees jokingly nicknamed it the “more-more-more” strategy because we all knew that “more-more-more” isn’t a strategy. It doesn’t require choice.
Just because we can produce more doesn’t mean we should. All this output has hidden costs. One of the most significant ones is the erosion, or unconscious dismantling, of strategy.
By strategy, I mean the specific set of choices we make to achieve a goal. This can be “big S” Strategy, like the total company strategic plan, or “small s” strategy, like the approach you take in an email campaign. Whenever you have a goal, you have options for achieving it.
Strategy is the path we intentionally choose—and the alternatives we reject—to reach our goal.
Why AI is Eroding Strategy
Strategy feels essential when resources are scarce. When capital for infrastructure, equipment, or inventory is resource-constrained, we recognize that we must make difficult choices about where to invest and where not. For many marketing decisions, those choices have become fuzzier. Now that we can dream up any request and get a well-researched, well-designed output from digital tools, we feel we have more options. Production that was previously resource-constrained is no longer.
Today, I see several specific ways companies are making fewer intentional choices when it comes to their growth and marketing:
More customer segments: Pursuing all (or just more) segments that a company can serve for fear of missing out on potential revenue.
More benefits and messages: Distributing more content with a broader set of features, claims, positioning territories, and messages because we can experiment more to see what resonates.
More marketing channels: Activating a huge number of outlets across social media, email, paid advertising, influencers, events, community building, cold outbound, partnerships, and podcasts, because production to support these channels seems “free.”
The Costs of Fuzzy Strategy
The rapid proliferation of possibility comes at a cost. AI is increasing production without necessarily increasing effectiveness. Some costs are quite apparent, while others are hidden.
Lack of alignment: When a brand doesn’t have a clear growth strategy for its audience, product, or content, employees and agencies prioritize different things. This stalls progress, creates rework and confusion, and results in allocating resources to the wrong priorities.
Worse creative quality: A massive increase in volume means less time to review and edit content, whether images, posts, videos, packaging, emails, collateral, ads, or presentations, resulting in commoditized execution. I see quality erode in brands that clearly use AI to generate their marketing because they lack clarity on what makes them distinct, and likely haven’t evaluated the output before publishing.
Lack of depth and Mastery: When efforts are too fragmented across different channels, when brands deliver higher content volume, and when there’s an emphasis on speed and efficiency, the understanding of the customer, the market, data, and channels becomes superficial. Teams become jack of all trades and master of none, losing out on what could be distinctive and truly excellent.
Consumers and marketers believe AI is eroding quality
Why Clear Growth Strategy Gives You a Competitive Advantage
Defining your marketing and growth strategy in an increasingly AI world can set you apart in three important ways. Strategy can:
Sharpen differentiation: Identifying where you sit in the market, what differentiates you, which messages you prioritize, and how you brand shows up through tone of voice and visual identity creates major opportunities to become memorable and distinctive. Because AI tools aggregate the average of what’s in market, they are inherently generic. Brands must establish specific points of differentiation that are limited in number, consistent, and resonant with customers.
Force validation: When we try to do everything, we don’t have to justify why we chose what to pursue versus what to cut. But being forced to wrestle with scarcity (even a somewhat arbitrary scarcity such as only funding “3 strategic priorities”) requires us to look for proof, data, and value to inform better decisions.
Create consistency: Brands that are most creatively consistent show 27% more “very large brand effects” (such as awareness and differentiation) and 28% more “very large business effects” (such as sales, profit, and market share gains) after 5 years compared with the least consistent brands. Having a clear strategy doesn’t guarantee creative consistency, but constantly testing messages and positioning across multiple segments can certainly dilute it. Plus, creative consistency was also linked to higher creative quality.
Only Humans Can Provide Judgment
There is one question that AI can’t answer for us, even though it thinks it can.
“Which is the best option?”
If we pose this question, we get a confident answer from ChatGPT or Claude. But provide a bit more context, and the LLM changes its recommendation. These tools lack complete information about our business. AI can’t access our personal experiences or know when to apply expertise to different situations. AI can’t evaluate taste or quality in the same way we can. Sometimes their recommendations are great. And sometimes they are not. And humans are needed to tell the difference. Humans need to be the final strategic decision-maker.
We can’t or shouldn’t outsource our judgement to AI, especially when the stakes are high.
A critical challenge in this new era of AI production is to consciously choose what we are not doing and stay the course. This will protect us from distraction, improve quality, and force us to pursue the path with more potential. This doesn’t mean we can’t use AI to experiment, but experimentation works best within the confines of a clear growth strategy. We must resist the easy path of “more” and embrace the struggle of making and sticking with hard choices.
A few months ago, I asked AI to help me draft my newsletter strategy. The output was 14 pages: some good, some bad, some just unnecessary.