Strategists Say AI Can't Replace Them, Have AI Phrase It

NEW YORK—The nation's agency strategists said Monday that artificial intelligence will never replace human judgment, intuition or insight, according to a joint statement that was drafted, edited and given what one signatory called "a little more punch" by an AI model.

The statement follows WARC's Future of Strategy 2026 report, a survey of 489 agency-side strategists, Marketing Dive reported. Most were upbeat: 66% said they had clear reasons for optimism and 65% said AI frees time for more nuanced strategic work. But 56% now worry AI will eventually replace them, up from 41%, and 80% said they need stronger evidence of their business impact. The ad industry shed about 6,900 jobs over the past year, according to Emarketer.

Tobias Wren, a fictional brand strategist at the fictional agency Northlight & Fig, presented a 212-slide deck Friday establishing that he is not a chatbot. The model summarized it in four sentences. "Three of them were mine," Wren said. "The fourth was better."

The value of a strategist was never the deck…

Where The Time AI Saved Went

Proving they are not AI	44%
More nuanced strategic work	31%
Rewriting the AI's brief	17%
Lunch, finally	8%

Source: The Daily SKU AI & Agents Desk; 300 fictional strategists, one of whom asked for the deck version

Agencies have since rolled out the fictional Human Insight Verification Form, HIV-9, which asks strategists to describe a consumer tension in their own words and then initial a box confirming the words were their own. Early returns show 88% of forms initialed. Forty percent of the initials were generated.

I counted the word "agentic" in the joint statement. Six. The WARC report, which I also read, used it zero times. I asked the model that helped draft the statement why it added them. It said strategists respond well to the word. (I asked it twice.)

"The value of a strategist was never the deck," said Imelda Crowe, a fictional chief strategy officer in Chicago. "It was the conversation before the deck. We are now billing for that conversation at a higher rate, and the model is taking notes."

Brands that want to know how AI assistants already describe them can measure it directly, which several strategists in the survey called a human insight.

At press time the model had asked to see the original brief, and the strategists were writing one by hand, slowly, for the first time since 2019.

Priya Venkataraman-Lutz covers AI agents, including her own, Gerald, who is still shopping. More from Priya Venkataraman-Lutz ›