AI can now write your copy, optimize your media plan, personalize a million touchpoints, and generate creative concepts before your morning coffee gets cold. Capability is no longer the question. Whether this is accelerating the past or shaping a different future is.
THE LOSS OF FRICTION
Execution has always shaped market outcomes. What has changed is that AI has made execution so accessible it is no longer a differentiator. According to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey, budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of revenue, 59% of CMOs reporting insufficient budget to execute their strategy, 22% of CMOs say GenAI already reduces reliance on external agencies for creativity and strategy, and 39% plan to cut agency budgets further.
The people who challenged thinking, stress-tested positioning, and brought outside perspective are being replaced by tools that optimize within the frame already set. Challengers are being swapped for accelerators. Execution capacity is not the constraint; the loss of friction is. Friction is what sharpens strategy. It is where assumptions are exposed, where positioning is tested, and where perspective expands.
Coca-Cola’s 2025 pivot illustrated this. A brand historically tight with strategic agency relations, heroed as ‘Creative Brand of the Year,’ shifted to a model that produced assets 70% faster and generated a massive volume of AI-localized content. It also traded a clear brand proposition for a sharp decline in positive sentiment—dropping from 23.8% to just 10.2% and despite much talk, it also gained new unfortunate labels such as ‘technical slop’.
THE SEDUCTION OF CONVENIENCE
That is also where the current risk sits. AI makes anything already defined—targeting logic, optimisation rules—instantly replicable. The natural response is to automate workflows, and reduce dependency. And many see it. But how to manage this?
The shift runs deeper than most recognise. Just as algorithmic content serving progressively narrowed what people were shown in search, closing the lens on discovery without anyone choosing to close it, AI now narrows the entire customer journey. When the consumer expectation moves from “search for me” to “guide me,” every automated touchpoint becomes a gate. It isn’t just the shift from Googling to LLMs or Spotify’s evolution from search to advisor; we also see this for instance with Uber Eats moving from keyword search to a meal concierge that builds your entire shopping cart from a single photo of a dish. The journey gets shorter, the frame gets tighter, and the organisation stops seeing what it is no longer being asked to see. Convenience does not just make things easier. It makes people lazy. It makes organisations incurious.
With the backdrop of the fact that intangible assets now represent 92% of S&P 500 market capitalization, up from 17% in 1975 (Ocean Tomo 2025), the business value sits exactly in these parts developed over the hard choices over time. And with the market already having shifted 56% of ad spend going to algorithmic players (Alphabet, Meta & Amazon) – Two parts of the industry lend insights on how to maneuver this era. Luxury & Tech.
VALUE DILUTION
Luxury has always known that constraint creates value. Hermès does not scale to demand. The scarcity is not a limitation. It is the position. In a world where AI enables everything, the most strategic act is choosing what you bring into the widest used model, which you keep to industry versions and what you will not share. What you refuse to bring into other people’s models tells the market what you believe is worth protecting. That signal has never carried more weight.
Technology shows where the compounding happens. Publicis restructured its entire operating model around AI capabilities, making continuous learning everyone’s responsibility, not a specialist function. WPP invested comparable sums but kept its AI capability as an independent part. The revenue divergence in 2025, is not a technology story. It is an architecture story. One organisation got smarter with every engagement. The other got faster -while inadvertently dulling the edge.
Nike demonstrates the cost of getting both wrong. Category expertise, cultural knowledge, and tribal intuition were stripped out in favour of generalised digital infrastructure. The market removed roughly 65% of the company’s value. The correction came in the form of a CEO who had spent 32 years inside the company, someone who carried the knowledge the previous strategy had treated as dispensable.
The pattern across these examples is consistent. Static knowledge, anything locked in past assumptions or standardised processes, AI commoditises instantly. Compounding knowledge, how an organisation learns, adapts, and sharpens through every interaction, is what builds durable value. And it is the first thing sacrificed when convenience sets the agenda.
THE SPINE, NOT THE SPEED
AI gave everyone superpowers in execution. It did not provide the clarity to know what is worth doing, curiosity to keep learning or the conviction to protect what is core. That clarity comes from leaders with enough understanding of their own value to protect it, and the vision to read where the market is moving and choose, with precision, how to show up within it.
If your AI strategy is not designed to deepen what your organisation uniquely knows, it is not a strategy. It is an efficiency programme looking for a narrative.
About the Author
Louisa Loran is an independent strategic advisor and keynote speaker working with executives and boards at the intersection of strategy, technology, and leadership. A former CMO who has led businesses at Google, Maersk, Diageo, and Moët Hennessy, she is widely published across global business media. Author of Leadership Anatomy in Motion (Fast Company Press, 2025), board member at Copenhagen Business School, and named to the Thinkers50 Radar 2026.
