Artificial intelligence has been installed in the work of strategists and it has done so accompanied by an apparent contradiction. It is the transformation that is most altering its function and, at the same time, the threat that worries professionals the most. However, its progress is also reinforcing the value of essentially human capabilities such as judgment, intuition, asking the right questions or understanding the people behind the data.

This is stated in “The Future of Strategy 2026”, the new Warc Strategy report, prepared from a global survey of 489 strategy professionals carried out in August 2026, mostly belonging to agencies. The study analyzes the evolution of the discipline and detects a recovery of optimism after several years marked by the consolidation of the sector, staff reductions, the departure of senior talent and the emergence of artificial intelligence.

66% of strategists consider that there are clear reasons to be optimistic about the future of their profession. “Last year’s report painted a gloomy picture for agency strategy. Twelve months later, the mood has changed”explains Lena Roland, Content Director at Warc Strategy.

One of the reasons that explain this improvement in expectations is in the relationship with advertisers. The percentage of strategists who consider that their discipline has influence on clients has risen from 41% in 2025 to 50% in 2026. On the other hand, their influence within the organizations themselves remains practically stagnant at 46%.

Warc interprets this progress as a sign that the strategy is expanding its scope of action. Faced with a context in which finding growth is more complicated, professionals are stopping working solely around the brief to get involved in broader business problems and get closer to the issues that directly concern CMOs.
In fact, 83% expect their role to evolve towards defining business strategy and not be limited to communication. Among the emerging areas is what the report calls the “problem of the two audiences”: brands need to be relevant simultaneously for people and for machines, a reality that takes strategic thinking towards areas such as customer experience, public relations or agentic commerce.

But expanding influence also requires better demonstrating what the discipline contributes. Nearly 80% of those surveyed consider that the profession needs to develop stronger arguments and evidence to prove its impact on the business, while 57% believe that the strategy needs a new value proposition in a context in which remuneration models must also evolve.

For Warc, one of the keys is to link strategic recommendations with specific business results, explain what problem has been solved and use understandable language at management levels. Stacy Taffet, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer of The Hershey Company, points out in this sense that “The ROI of the strategy is very high because, when the preliminary work is done to clarify the fundamentals of the brand and the business problems, the continuous creation of content becomes simpler and more cost-efficient.”

Fear of AI grows, but frees up time to think

Artificial intelligence concentrates a good part of the tensions that the profession is currently experiencing. 56% of strategists consider that the replacement of strategy positions with AI is the main threat they hope to face, compared to 41% who expressed this concern in 2025. The increase of 15 percentage points places it as the risk most highlighted by those surveyed.

But practical experience with these tools offers another reading. 65% claim to be allocating the time freed up by AI to strategic work of greater depth and nuance.
This shifts the discussion from which tasks technology can automate to which capabilities acquire greater value precisely because they are more difficult to automate. The report notes these include judgment, intuition, the ability to determine which questions are worth asking, and understanding what people might want next.

Warc also highlights recurring limitations of AI, such as the generation of poorly differentiated results and the lack of cultural nuances or emotional resonance. In this context, 55% of strategists believe that artificial intelligence will return the focus of strategy to human perspectives.

The graph reflects, specifically, that 20% completely agree with this statement and 35% agree. Regarding them, 26% maintain a neutral position, 15% disagree and 5% completely disagree.

Paradoxically, this vindication of the human coincides with a retreat of one of the tools that allow us to know it directly. Only 23% of respondents conduct in-person qualitative research at least once a month, compared to 35% in 2025, a drop of 12 percentage points.

Elizabeth Paul, Chief Brand Officer of The Martin Agency, warns precisely against this trend: “AI should not give strategists permission to do less human research. It should give us time to pursue more extraordinary truths and in greater depth.” And it proposes a specific orientation for strategic work: “Ask the question the algorithm couldn’t ask. Find the strange behavior, the unresolved tension, or the cultural shift hiding in plain sight.”

From brief to business problems

The report thus points towards a redefinition of the value of the strategist. Nikita Walia, partner at UNNAMED, distinguishes between only knowing the visible part of a brand – the message, insights or positioning – and also understanding what happens behind it: how products and services are created, how they are distributed and how their performance is measured.
“The strategist who only understands the ‘scenario’ of a brand will quickly reach his ceiling. The strategist who understands what happens behind the scenes, how things are made, distributed and measured, will become indispensable”he points out.

The scenario that Warc draws is, therefore, less that of an immediate disappearance of the strategy in the face of automation than that of a growing pressure to redefine where its value lies. If artificial intelligence can speed up the collection of information, synthesize data or take on certain tasks, professional differentiation shifts towards interpretation, judgment and the ability to detect what systems do not know they should look for.