Once, I had just come back from a client briefing and asked a Junior Planner to research the category and competitors. The next morning, I received their deck… which had actually been sent the night before. Wow. Surprisingly fast.
Even more surprising, it was a polished 20-slide deck. The English mostly read like it had been written by a native speaker, there were plenty of impressive management consulting-style frameworks, and there was a lot of information. I sat down and carefully went through every slide. Then I typed a question into our chat: “Forget whether any of this is right or wrong for now. In your opinion, what is the one thing the client needs to know after all of this analysis?”
And “seen” was the only answer I got for the rest of that day, despite the deck being packed with information Claude had laid out for them. Why couldn’t they offer a single point of view or judgement?
Let’s stick with category and competitor analysis as an example. Whether I do it myself or assign it to another planner, the process usually involves three steps: Sept 1 - Review competitors’ communication activities. Step 2 - Map their communication territories. Step 3- Draw conclusions about the opportunity for the brand.
To complete Step 1, a planner needs to identify direct and indirect competitors, go through different platforms to review their major communication and advertising activities over the past three years, understand their brand propositions and campaign ideas, and identify the communication territory each brand occupies.
Take just 10 competitors. If you open six pages for each one (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, and their website) and then add a bunch of articles and other sources, you’re already approaching 100 Chrome tabs. Eventually, every tab becomes so tiny you don’t even know where to click anymore. Then you spend hours going through KVs, TVCs, music videos, other videos, social posts, and whatever else until your brain turns to mush. And after all that, you still have to synthesise everything into something another person can actually digest.
It’s exhausting. It’s tedious. It’s boring.
All you want to do is jump straight to Steps 2 and 3 because they feel more important. But without Step 1 as your input, you might as well show yourself the door because there won’t be any output for Step 2 and 3. No matter how boring it was, you still had to grit your teeth and do Step 1.
Until late 2022.
Then ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and the rest arrived and kept getting smarter. Now, a Junior Planner can switch on Deep Research, throw the entirety of Step 1 at AI, and not even bother checking the work afterwards.
From now on, if AI isn’t going to do the boring work, then who is? Life suddenly seemed much easier.
Until you found yourself permanently stuck at Steps 2 and 3. Because you had deprived yourself of the opportunity to do the boring work - the work that gradually builds your intelligence, which in turn strengthens the mental muscles you need to develop judgement. I wrote about intelligence and judgement in my article Predicting the Future of Planners & the MarCom Industry With AI, which you can revisit if you’re interested.
The idea is actually very simple. It’s the same as practicing martial arts, playing a sport, or learning a musical instrument. That one precise, powerful kick that knocks down a door so you can rescue the princess in distress is the result of practicing the same kick thousands of times until you’re completely sick of it.
Step 1 of category and competitor research works the same way. Doing it over and over again is incredibly boring. But have you noticed what happens when you stick with it long enough? Somewhere along the way, you become more sensitive to what is happening in the market. You start recognizing patterns faster. Competitors’ communication territories become easier to identify. And all of that gives you better inputs, allowing you to spot sharper opportunities for the brand.
So here’s the question: Now that AI is doing all the boring work for you, who is going to train your brain?
