AI WoN’T FIX YoUR PoSITIoNINg.

There's a big, hairy, digital elephant in the room: AI is everywhere. 

Everyone’s playing with prompts, spitting out content and thinking they’ve hacked their way to strategic brilliance. But when it comes to positioning and messaging - the real guts of your brand - AI isn’t your shortcut. It’s a factory for second-hand ideas.

If you're serious about standing out, not blending in, here’s the inconvenient truth: AI won't save you. It’ll sink you into mediocrity. 

Here’s why:

1. AI doesn’t get your market because it lacks lived experience

AI doesn’t sit in sales calls. It doesn’t hear real objections, feel the tension in a founder meeting or read a buyer’s body language when your offer hits flat. Positioning requires a feel for buyer psychology, market dynamics and business nuance - things AI can simulate, but never fully understand.

At TGO, we once had a consultancy client stuck in “transformation language soup” - saying everything and nothing. We didn’t ask ChatGPT to tidy up their homepage. We embedded ourselves into their world, spoke to their buyers, dissected deals they won and lost. That’s where their sharp, ownable angle came from.

AI reads data. We read between the lines - and we live in your market until the truth surfaces.

2. It’s derivative by design

You want to zag while the market zigs?

AI’s quite literally built to crawl the web and spit out more zig. It’s built on what’s already out there. And what’s already out there is the opposite of differentiation. If you want to sound like everyone else? Be our guest. But if you’re aiming to own a sharp, bold market position - parroting the crowd won’t cut it.

When we co-created a growth firm’s positioning last year, we deliberately steered into language that made their competitors uncomfortable. It worked. Their win rate doubled.

3. It reflects your blind spots right back at you

Positioning is a mirror - but AI holds it at the wrong angle.

Consultancy leaders are often too close to their own offer. AI tools, when fed vague prompts or misaligned inputs, simply reflect back that vagueness. It doesn’t know what to ignore or what to dig into - which is the real skill in positioning.

• Strategic for whom?
• Operational excellence in what?
• Why does it matter, now?

We blew it up. We challenged what they really did. Found the fire. Then helped them say it in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

4. It can’t push you - and that’s the problem

Great positioning isn’t polite. It interrogates, provokes and exposes.

It challenges your sacred cows and rethinks what you've taken as gospel. AI can’t question your logic or call your baby ugly. It just nods and generates.

We’ve had founders butt heads. Seen teams debate for hours. Politics. Egos. Energy. Resistance. We've seen them rethink and downright tweak and trim their value proposition in response to achieving a more stark understanding of their position. There can be tension, and breakthroughs live inside that tension. Your positioning expert needs to push you to the edge of discomfort. That’s what makes it real. And sticky.

5. Zero accountability or implementation support

Even if AI spits out a halfway decent message, who owns it? Who rolls it out? Who stress-tests it in client conversations? Our work doesn’t stop at the positioning statement - it lives in decks, sales calls, proposals and conversations. AI doesn’t stick around to embed and validate.

6. Speed is not a strategy

AI promises speed, but strategic clarity takes time. It takes iteration, discussion, synthesis and sometimes deliberate tension. Rushing to an answer might feel productive, but it rarely leads to a differentiated position that holds under scrutiny.

The bottom line

If you’re aiming for impact, AI won’t get you there. It’s unoriginal, unnuanced and unaccountable. A decent tool for execution? Maybe. But for strategy? For positioning? For standing the hell out?

You need clarity with teeth.

Not second-hand noise.