Everyone Has an AI Strategy. Almost No One Has the Right One.
Three executives who've shaped some of the most recognized brands in their industries share what AI actually changes, and what it doesn’t, for leaders making real decisions right now.
Most boardroom AI conversations sound like strategy. They’re not. They’re a list of tools, a cost reduction target, a memo about what employees can and can’t do with ChatGPT.
The harder question rarely gets asked: not what AI can do in general, but what it should do for your specific business, and where it will quietly fail you if you hand it the wheel.
Stop Calling It a Strategy
Rishad Tobaccowala spent 37 years at Publicis Groupe, ending as Chief Strategist for the world’s largest advertising services company. His opening move on AI is deliberately disorienting: don’t have an AI strategy.
“It’s like having an electricity strategy.” The question was never whether you use electricity. It’s what you build with it that nobody else can.
What Tobaccowala keeps pushing leaders toward is what he calls HI, not human intelligence, which he says has been “highly overrated and has been overtaken by these AI things,” but human insights, human imagination, human intuition, human interaction. AI handles the processing. What you add on top of it is the only thing that actually differentiates you.
He pushes two questions on every company he advises. First: if you had all your assets and no constraints except legal and scientific ones, what would you do? Second: how would a competitor use AI to put you out of business? “Almost everything that you stop is you stopping yourself,” he says. The technology is rarely the constraint. The thinking is.
The 70% No One Talks About
David Edelman has spent 35 years at the intersection of marketing, data, and digital transformation, at BCG, McKinsey, and as CMO of Aetna. He leads with a number worth sitting with.
In a study with BCG on what separates companies getting strong AI ROI from those that aren’t, 70% of the difference came from ways of working. Not data. Not technology. The tools were largely the same across both groups. What separated winners was whether they had actually reorganized around the new capabilities. Smaller cross-functional teams working together rather than handing off across five-person chains. Leadership that changed behavior, not just bought software.
The bigger shift Edelman pushes companies toward is using AI to change the value proposition entirely, not just reduce cost. His example: a small solar company that sent each prospective customer a personalized URL linking to a satellite image of their own roof, calculated their exact energy savings based on that home’s dimensions and orientation, and built the entire purchase experience from that data. “That wasn’t a big company,” he says. “That’s a company who is just really thinking through the customer experience and what’s possible with the data available.”
For mid-sized businesses, that’s the question worth building a room around. Not how do we run leaner. How do we add new kinds of value that weren’t possible before.
The Only Creative Job That Survives
Marshall Ross served as Chief Creative Officer at Cramer-Krasselt, one of the largest independent agencies in the country, and spent decades in boardrooms with CEOs and CMOs working through what “good” actually means. His read on AI in the creative space is the least comfortable one here.
AI will do the bottom of the creative market. It already is. Performance copy, media analytics, lower-funnel work across every discipline, “the machines can just do it.” What disappears with it is the reason to exist at average.
“It’s a race to the average,” Ross says, “and it also eliminates the bottom. We don’t need you to do the bottom. We got the bottom.”
What survives is originality. The willingness to do the thing that scares the room. AI is derivative by nature, “scraping digits and rearranging them in ways that are familiar to what it’s learned.” The counter to that is the human decision to take the risk that a language model won’t. “Will you be bolder than the prompt engineer and the language model?” That is now the central question for anyone whose job involves making something.
Brand leaders included. The big idea, the strategic insight you’re willing to commit to and not abandon mid-execution, that’s what AI can’t generate. The businesses that break through won’t have the best AI stack. They’ll know exactly what they stand for and refuse to let the tools make them generic.
The Bottom Line
AI won’t save a bad strategy. It won’t replace the people who know why a market moved, why a customer left, or what the board is actually worried about. For businesses that approach it seriously, it closes the gap between what you know about your customers and what you do with that knowledge. Smaller teams get to operate at a level that used to require entire departments.
But 70% of the result is still on you. The tools are the same for everyone. What you bring to them, the judgment, the imagination, the willingness to bet on something the model wouldn’t, is the only part that can’t be commoditized.
That last part is hard to build alone. Knowing which bets to make, where your blind spots are, which frameworks actually apply to your situation rather than someone else’s, that’s where a great advisor earns the session fee many times over. Wisory Members get 1:1 access to executives like Rishad, David, and Marshall to work through the decisions that matter most, at the moment they matter.
Explore Membership at thewisory.com
Rishad Tobaccowala is a Wisory Advisor and the former Chief Strategist and Growth Officer at Publicis Groupe, where he spent 37 years and served as chairman of Digitas and Razorfish. He is the author of Restoring the Soul of Business and Rethinking Work.
David Edelman is a Wisory Advisor and the former CMO of Aetna with 35 years at the intersection of marketing, data, and digital transformation, including roles at BCG and McKinsey. He is the co-author of Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI.
Marshall Ross is a Wisory Advisor and the former Chief Creative Officer and Vice Chair at Cramer-Krasselt. He stewarded the Corona brand for twenty-one years and the Porsche brand for seventeen, and served as creative director on more than a dozen Super Bowl commercials.
Rishad, David, and Marshall are available for 1:1 advisory sessions through The Wisory. Members get direct access to executives like these, on the specific challenge, at the moment it matters. Learn more and book time at thewisory.com.
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