Beyond efficiency

In the age of AI, the future of strategy isn’t speed, it’s curiosity.

When we move beyond efficiency, we can leverage AI to make us think more, not less. The true power of AI doesn’t lie in accelerating our output, but in amplifying our most powerful human skill: curiosity.

The productivity trap

Here’s the question that should terrify every strategist: What if we’re optimising ourselves out of the very thing that makes us valuable? While the industry celebrates AI that saves time, automates tasks and speeds up processes, we’re quietly surrendering our greatest strategic asset. We’re losing the ability to ask questions no one else is asking.

Most agencies are treating AI as an operational upgrade. Research summaries in minutes, social calendars in seconds, presentation templates at the click of a prompt. A productivity hack at best, but in most cases just a turbocharged admin assistant.

Useful? Yes. Transformative? Not even close.

MIT’s recent report on the GenAI divide confirms this: high adoption but low disruption. We might see some efficiency gains, but the client delivery remains largely unchanged. Perhaps even slightly less original than before.

A luxury brand recently asked us to “refresh their positioning for younger consumers.” Within hours, AI delivered personal profiles, competitor analysis and cultural trend mapping. Textbook efficiency. However, the real questions never got asked like:

• Why do young people increasingly reject traditional luxury signalling altogether?
• What if exclusivity itself means something different to a generation raised on authenticity?
• How might luxury need to completely reinvent its relationship with status?

AI helped us optimise the brief. Not interrogating it. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is the impact it has on us as strategic thinkers. When we reduce the role of AI, we also end up diminishing ourselves.

The hidden cost of progress

Our insistence on framing AI as merely automation doesn’t protect our relevance. It undermines it. The efficiency-first mindset creates a dangerous cycle. When we treat AI as only a shortcut, or an input field with predetermined output, our questions get smaller. Smaller questions lead to smaller answers. Soon, we’re not just limiting AI, we’re limiting our own strategic thinking, making ourselves intellectually complacent. If curiosity is our driving force, how do we make sure it is nurtured and not killed? The answer doesn’t lie in optimising our processes but in expanding our questions. Curiosity thrives on the unexpected, the contradictory, the not-yet-known. It’s fueled by “what if?” rather than “how fast?”.

When we limit AI to acceleration rather than exploration, we’re starving our most valuable strategic asset: our capacity to wonder.

AI as a curiosity partner

Instead of seeing AI as a tool to help accelerate specific tasks, we need to see it as a curiosity partner helping us expand our thinking. As a strategist, I’ve often worked alone. Not by choice, but because one strategist per brief is the norm. Researching alone, thinking alone and debating alone. Now I no longer have to. I can tap into adjacent skillsets I always wished for: The cultural strategist who spots emerging tensions, the foresight analyst who connects weak signals, the quantitative researcher who finds patterns in the noise and the creative who turns data into stories.

Suddenly, curiosity has no boundaries.

When treated as an intellectual multiplier, AI can generate new insights, surface unexpected connections and unlock fresh perspectives. It can act as a sparring partner that provokes new thinking, a horizon scanner detecting early shifts, or a scenario generator simulating strategic futures.

With this approach, you don’t just ask AI to solve problems, you ask it to help discover better questions. Each answer breeds more sophisticated questions, creating a virtuous cycle of curiosity.

Orchestrating a team of agents

The shift for strategists from solitary thinkers to orchestrators of ideas didn’t happen overnight. It began with simple prompts and requests but evolved into something far more profound: intellectual partnership. What started as a tool to speed up mundane tasks has become a constellation of thinking styles and approaches that complement and challenge our own. AI has evolved from being prompt-driven to participating, delegating, initiating and engaging in dialogue. Not just with one augmented intelligence partner, but with a team of agents. It’s not about engineering the perfect prompt anymore but about orchestrating a team. Similar to any team, AI agents need clear briefs, guard rails and objectives. Roles within the team matter too: divergent AI can be provocative; convergent AI must be responsible.

A good team of AI agents can be divergent and convergent simultaneously. They can explore possibilities and ensure predictability, allowing you as the orchestrator to mix human intuition with machine learning precision. On a campaign brief, one AI agent might provoke wild scenarios, while another filters ideas against brief and audience fit. Their interplay creates richer starting points and better work, faster.

Curiosity flourishes in this environment. When one line of questioning reaches its limits, another AI perspective can take over, pushing exploration in new directions. The result isn’t just efficiency, it’s solutions that question their own assumptions and continually seek new territory.

Breakthrough thinking in practice

Here’s an example of how it works in practice when we orchestrate specialised agent teams to work with us on a client brief. Our foundation starts with four expert agents, each with distinct knowledge bases and objectives:

• The brand guardian - Trained on brand strategy, guidelines and equity. Ensures every insight stays true to brand DNA.
• The audience expert - Immersed in target audience attitudes, behaviours and cultural nuances. Spots opportunities others miss.
• The category analyst - Loaded with competitor intelligence and category drivers. Identifies white space and differentiation opportunities.
• The project specialist - Focused entirely on brief specifics, constraints and business objectives. Keeps exploration commercially grounded.

Above these experts, we can also deploy orchestrating agents that synthesise their knowledge:

• The strategy validator - Cross-references insights across all four expert agents, ensuring our thinking is authentic to brand, relevant to audience, differentiated in the category and commercially viable.
• The creative provocateur - Deliberately pushes against conventional wisdom, asking: “What if the opposite were true?” or “How might we approach this if we were a challenger brand?”

When these agent teams interact, validator questioning provocateur, brand guardian challenging category analyst, new thinking emerges.

A simple question like “How do we increase brand awareness?” evolves into “What if awareness isn’t the problem, but the way people think about the problem our brand solves?”. That transformation from efficiency-driven questions to curiosity-driven exploration? That’s where breakthrough thinking lives.

The beauty of this system isn’t just the quality of insights; it’s the level of compounding curiosity. Each interaction between agents and humans generates new questions, and those questions reveal assumptions we didn’t know we were making. What started as brief optimisation becomes genuine strategic discovery.

The human edge

In this team of AI thinkers, the human isn’t replaced. They’re promoted to conductor. AI can explore endlessly, but only humans can decide which ideas are culturally resonant, emotionally truthful, or simply beautiful. That act of choice, grounded in taste and judgment, is our irreplaceable edge.

The best thinking happens when human judgment works alongside machine exploration. When we use AI to ask more questions but rely on our uniquely human ability to understand people, make ethical calls and take creative leaps.

Tomorrow’s agency worker isn’t competing with AI but developing a new skill: knowing which questions need computational power and which need human wisdom and having the courage to act on insights that feel risky but right.

The future of creative work won’t be defined by who uses AI to work faster, but by who uses it to ask braver and bigger questions. Those who thrive will be the ones who stay obsessively curious, not about what AI can do, but about what we can imagine with it.

All opinions expressed throughout this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AKQA or its affiliates.