AI is strong at parts of brand strategy that humans do slowly and inconsistently. It is weak at the part that makes strategy strategy. Knowing which is which matters more than a general opinion about the technology.
Start with the strengths, because they are real. Reading an entire competitive set is work a machine does better than any strategist. Ten competitors, every website, every campaign, every claim, held in view at once and compared without fatigue. Humans sample; machines cover. The same goes for volume of customer language, for keeping a decade of brand expression in working memory, and for producing the fifth draft with the same patience as the first. A strategist who claims this coverage adds nothing is defending a billing model.
The weakness sits somewhere specific. A language model is built to produce the most plausible next sentence. Plausibility is the opposite of positioning. A position is a bet against the plausible: a claim your competitors could make but chose not to, defended with evidence, at a known cost. Ask a general model for a positioning and it returns the statistical centre of every positioning it has read. The centre of the category is precisely the territory a strategy exists to escape.
The model also has no stake. It agrees with the brief, flatters the founder, and produces a confident case for whichever direction the prompt leans. Strategy work involves telling a client the market disagrees with them. A system tuned for helpfulness finds that conversation structurally difficult.
And it cannot see inside the company. The distance between what a brand claims and what its people believe decides whether a position will hold. That evidence lives in interviews, surveys and rooms, and no amount of public data substitutes for it.
So the honest question about any AI strategy tool is what sits between the model and the answer. What evidence was it required to gather. What method forces a choice instead of a summary. What makes it able to say the daring route is wrong for this company, this year. Raw intelligence with none of that produces fluent category average at remarkable speed. Intelligence with method and evidence is a different instrument. The technology was never the question. The discipline applied to it is.