Watching ChatGPT undo 48 hours of strategic work
Had an interesting call with an AI Copywriting Pro subscriber last week...
This individual’s company just went all-in on AI. New leadership came in and day one was like "we're an AI-first company now." They've got KPIs around AI productivity, bringing in experts, whole nine yards.
Which honestly I love to see it. That kind of commitment to evolving is rare.
But then they told me what happened at their offsite and I was very disappointed.
They'd spent two days doing deep strategic work on their positioning. Really getting into the weeds of their market opportunity, their capabilities, all that good stuff.
Then their CEO whips out his phone, throws a quick prompt at ChatGPT, and is like "what about this instead?"
(You already know what happened next...)
Back came the buzzword soup. Every possible SaaS jargon term crammed into three generic paragraphs. And the CEO ate it up.
I'm probably the last person who's going to tell you NOT to use AI. I literally write about this stuff every day. But there's this wild pendulum swing happening right now where people are going from "AI is scary" to "AI will do everything" with zero stops in between.
The sweet spot (as always) is somewhere in the middle.
Ideal flow is -
- Do the actual strategic work first
- Feed that thinking TO the AI
- Use AI to refine and pressure test your ideas
- Not expect it to replace the hard work of understanding your market
My favorite part of this story is the person I was talking to was like "I've invested so much time understanding our market position... and ChatGPT just threw that out in 5 minutes."
Quick prompts = quick answers. But quick answers aren't always good answers.
Brooks
P.S. Are you a growth stage B2B / SaaS / AI company? I write conversion copy and develop messaging strategy for growth-stage software companies. I work directly with marketing, sales and leadership teams to gather VOC data through customer interviews and internal conversations, then turn that research into high-converting copy for websites, email sequences and case studies.
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