What will being a Creative Strategist look like in 12 months?

Hey guys,

Creative strategists won’t be replaced by AI. They’ll be replaced by another creative strategist using AI better than them.

This is a tweet I wrote a couple of months ago and it’s a concept I’m becoming even more bullish on as time goes on.

But if this is the case, then what actually does it look like to be an “AI-first” creative strategist?

Here are some of my thoughts on how this role develops as AI gets better and better.

But first, here’s what’s I’ve come across in AI this week:

• Higgsfield AI just brought out Higgsfield Steal, which allows you to recreate any picture from anywhere on the web

• Owen from Snoozy dropped one of the best Veo examples I’ve seen so far

• This isn’t AI, but Shaun Eng had a really interesting conversation with DTC Midas about testing strategy on Meta

What will the strategist role look like in 12 months?

Historically, new technology doesn’t eliminate roles, it changes them. And I think this is exactly what will happen to the creative strategist position.

It evolves into creative directors of AI agents - managing an army of tools that conduct research, generate concepts, and monitor performance around the clock.

Imagine logging in on a Monday morning to a message like this:

How much time spent crawling through tedious research would this free up to focus on higher leverage tasks (e.g. actual strategy).

It’s going to increase every strategists’ potential output tenfold.

So, what will I be doing?

Great question. And it’s hard to know exactly what it’ll look like, but here’s my guess…

You’ll spend your time focusing on telling AI what to create, rather than creating it yourself.

This is why Prompt and Context Engineering is becoming so important, and something that Jimmy and I have spent hours going through in the AI Creative Strategist Blueprint. This will be the difference between a good and a great creative strategist.

Here’s what I think the creative strategists of tomorrow responsibilities look like:

Note that even with AI becoming the executor, there are still many areas for value to be created:

• Quality of direction (strategy/focus)

• Quality of feedback (taste)

• Quality of systems (agents)

• Quality of context (training)

What can I do to become an AI-first strategist today?

While we're not quite at the infinite ads machine button yet (in fact, we’re probably pretty far from it lol), there are definitely tools that you can start using today to become an AI-first creative strategist. Here are a few of my favorite:

Reddit Answers - This dropped a couple of months back and it's incredible. Instead of scrolling through Reddit for hours, you can ask direct questions like "What emotive language are people using to describe dandruff?" and get real phrases from real people across multiple threads.

ChatGPT Deep Research - Give it 8-15 minutes and it will crawl the entire internet to find buyer personas, pain points, or whatever research question you have. It's like having a research assistant that never gets tired.

Poppy - I’ve spoken about Poppy SO much recently but incase you haven’t heard- Poppy is an AI wrapper that lets you add context like YouTube videos, PDFs, customer reviews, and websites to your prompts. I've built workflows where I can drop any static ad and it creates a brief to recreate that ad for our brand.

I’ve also spend a decent amount of time in Gumloop building workflows that can scrape ad libraries, analyze competitor strategies, and even pull insights from organic TikTok content.

💡 If you want some more info about these tools, Jimmy and I did a video on how to 10x your ads with AI few weeks back.

How to Make the Transition

To summarize, here's the four-step process to make the leap into becoming an AI-first strat:

1. Add AI tools to your existing workflow - Don't try to replace everything at once. Find areas where AI can enhance what already works.

2. Become an A+ prompter - This is honestly becoming as important as copywriting. The quality of your AI output is directly tied to the quality of your prompts.

3. Build simple workflows - Start with tools like Gum Loop to automate repetitive research tasks.

4. Scale it across your team - Get everyone using AI through shared prompt libraries and regular experimentation.

Remember, the value is going to come from knowing what to create, not the skill of creating ads itself.

Sidenote: it’s for that reason that I’d recommend becoming a relentless hoarder of top performing ads this year, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway - let me know what AI tools you've been testing…I'd love to hear what's working for you!

Announcements:

I’m super pumped to be speaking at Commerce Roundtable in San Diego this September, along with Gary Vaynerchuck, Taylor Holiday and a LOT of others. If you want to learn from some of the best on how to operate a DTC brand in 2025, get your tickets here!

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See you next week,

Alex

P.S. If you're spending $100k+ monthly on paid social and want help implementing systems like these, my team at Adcrate is accepting applications to work with us. Check out our case studies at adcrate.co.