Can AI help you be more strategic?

I’ve always been fascinated by the ambiguity of the word ‘Strategy’.

It’s known to be a nebulous concept, but it still amazes me how often attempts to define it cause confusion. Its mixed up with goals. Or tactics. Or even a vision statement. And so much more. And if you go further and ask someone what constitutes a strategy, things get even more blurry.

One of my favourite business books of all time tackles these questions head-on. In Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Professor Richard Rumelt of UCLA Anderson & Harvard Business School asks what makes a strategy good? And, what makes it bad? In the case of strategy, defining ‘low quality’ certainly makes ‘high quality’ even clearer.

Rumelt cycles through many different definitions, but one of great resonance for me is that bad strategy is not miscalculation. Rather, it is the avoidance of the hard work of crafting a truly good strategy. And choosing avoidance is often due to ‘the pain of choice’. When a strategy works, we tend to remember what was achieved. Not the options that were set aside with much discomfort.

So, it got me thinking:

In the Age of AI, what do these musings on the difference between ‘good strategy’ and ‘bad strategy’ mean for commercial life sciences?

Engaging healthcare professionals has never been more complex. AI assistants have been born into a world where they need to support humans overwhelmed with too many options. This pain of choice is relevant to both commercial leaders in life sciences, as well as the healthcare professionals served. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the brand strategy and content development space.

The life sciences industry leaders of today must figure out the most effective brand strategies and tactics, whilst demonstrating more impact — all with less resource. And the healthcare professionals of today have much higher expectations when it comes to the content that emanates from these strategies. Its not just millenial doctors that assert the information they need should be accessible on-demand, in the channel and modality of their preference. They simply don’t have the time to make the hard choices of how to spend that time. And they certainly don’t have the time for irrelevant or ill-timed communication attempts.

This is a space of personal meaning. My career started over 25 years ago within global creative agencies in big communication networks. I joined as a digital-first advocate in the early days of the web revolution, with university training on how to blend system design with commerce. It was not easy to fight for the digital cause of relevance in traditional agencies. We were black sheep in a field of linear, non-personalized communication. We’ve come a long way since those days when campaigns most often spoke to a broad audience with a single message, rather than adapting to individual needs and behaviours.