Business Strategy in the Age of AI: Why the Fastest Answer Isn’t Always the Best One
We have more access to answers than we’ve ever had.
If you’re wondering how to grow your business, you can open ChatGPT and have twenty suggestions in seconds.
Launch a new offer. Narrow your niche. Start a newsletter. Raise your prices. Create a lead magnet. Post more on LinkedIn. Build a course. Change your website.
And some of those suggestions might be perfectly good.
But increasingly, I believe the value of good strategy lies somewhere else. Because when I talk to women who have already built successful businesses, a lack of ideas is rarely the problem. Usually, they have too many.
The problem isn't finding another answer
An established business accumulates things. Services that made sense five years ago. Clients you took on because they came through referrals. Offers that sell reasonably well but aren't particularly profitable. Work you're very good at but don't particularly want to keep doing.
Alongside all of that are the ideas for what could come next.
Perhaps you could create a programme. Move into consulting. Work with a different type of client. Package your expertise differently. Build a team. Become more visible. Charge more. Do less delivery.
There are plenty of possibilities.
The difficult part is deciding which ones deserve your attention.
And that's why asking, "What should I do?" isn't always the most useful place to start.
Sometimes the question itself needs interrogating.
Strategy happens before the answer
This has been on my mind because I've been doing a lot of market research recently, talking to women about their businesses and what they want from the next few years. What interests me most in those conversations isn't always the direct answer to the question I've asked. It's what happens around it.
Someone says she wants to grow, but as we talk, it becomes clear she doesn't want a bigger business at all. She wants a better one.
Someone has half a dozen ideas for new services, but what she really wants is to stop being pulled in six directions.
Someone else talks about getting more clients, then lights up when she describes a particular piece of work she wishes she could do more often.
Someone says she needs better marketing, when the real issue is that she hasn't yet decided what she wants the market to know her for.
You don't necessarily discover those things by going directly from question to answer. You discover them by staying with the problem for a while.
We tend to think of strategy as a neat process.
Problem → analysis → answer → action.
In reality, the middle can be much messier:
You talk to customers.
You look at what has sold and what hasn't.
You examine where the profit actually comes from.
You notice which work energises you and which work you've quietly started to resent.
You look at competitors.
You revisit something you dismissed six months ago.
You realise two apparently separate problems are actually the same problem.
You change your mind.
You ask a better question.
Eventually, patterns begin to appear. That apparent detour wasn't wasted time. It was how you found the thing worth acting on.
Strategy needs detours too.
This matters even more in the age of AI
I use AI regularly. It's extraordinarily useful. But one of its greatest strengths can also tempt us into skipping an important part of the thinking process: it gives us answers incredibly quickly.
That's brilliant when the question is already clear.
It's less useful when the real work is figuring out what question we should be asking.
You can ask AI:
"Who should my target market be?"
"What should I sell?"
"How should I position my business?"
"What should my brand say?"
And you'll get an answer. It might even sound convincing.
What AI can’t hear or see
There’s another limitation that becomes particularly apparent to me when I’m working with someone one-to-one.
AI only knows what you tell it.
A conversation with another person contains much more information than the words being spoken.
I notice when your voice changes as you start talking about the work you genuinely love doing.
I notice when your energy drops as you describe the part of the business you think you should keep doing.
I notice when you light up at an idea — and then immediately give me three reasons why it probably isn’t practical.
And I notice when your body language changes because I’ve challenged an assumption you’ve been treating as fact.
None of those things gives me the answer on its own. But they’re clues, they give me something to investigate:
Why did you sound completely different when you talked about that client?
Why are you planning to grow a service you don't seem to want to deliver anymore?
Why did you dismiss that idea so quickly?
Is that really true, or has it simply become one of those things you've told yourself about your business for years?
That’s where human judgement still matters enormously.
AI can give you extraordinarily good answers. But unless you give it all of that context, it can only work with the version of the problem you have presented to it.
A good strategist is listening for the story underneath it. And sometimes the most valuable thing I can do isn't answer the question you asked. It's notice that we might be asking the wrong question.
Your experience is part of the strategy
This is particularly important when you've been in business for years.
You're not starting with a blank sheet of paper. You have evidence.
Years of client conversations. Work you've loved. Work you never want to do again. Offers that succeeded unexpectedly. Things you tried that went nowhere. Skills you've developed almost without noticing. A reputation that may have evolved beyond the way you currently describe yourself.
All of that matters. And so the questions become more interesting:
What do you want this business to become?
Which work are you exceptionally good at but don't want to spend the next ten years doing?
What are clients already coming to you for that you may have underestimated?
Where is your greatest value now?
What deserves to become the centre of the business?
And what are you willing to leave behind to make room for it?
Those aren't questions designed to generate more possibilities, they're designed to help you choose.
Sometimes you need fewer ideas, not more
There's a lot of advice available to business owners about doing more.
More marketing. More content. More offers. More visibility. More channels.
But once a business is established, growth can require something quite different…decisions!
What stays
What goes
What you want to be known for
Who you most want to work with
And what you're building towards
The answer may not appear in the first five minutes and that's okay. Because the purpose of strategy isn't to reach an answer as quickly as possible. It's to make sure you're answering the right question before you build the next phase of your business around it.
AI can give you more ideas. Sometimes what you need is someone to help you decide which ones are actually right for you.
If you’re at that point in your business, book a Brand Clarity Session. We’ll look at where you are, where you want to go, and the decisions standing between the two.
