The research was never the hard part

There has never been more good advice available, and it has never been cheaper to get. Ask a model for a pricing strategy and you’ll have twelve of them before your coffee’s cold, each one coherent, each one probably fine. The research that used to cost a McKinsey engagement is now basically free.

A lot of people are quietly panicking that the machines are coming for the thinking. That fear is mostly nonsense. They came for the looking-things-up, and in a $10M to $50M business that was never the bottleneck. It never even made the list.

Watch what happens when a business stalls. The information is usually all there. What’s missing is judgment about which lever is yours this quarter, somebody who owns the number and carries the cost of being wrong, and an outside eye willing to say the true thing. The model agrees with your premise. That’s most of what it does. You wrote the prompt.

The number was sitting right there

A $20M brand I looked at had an agency reporting 11.7× on ad spend. A banger of a number. The whole company believed it, and the CEO wanted to put the ad budget on steroids and get more of it. Nobody was short on data. The dashboard sat right there.

I reconciled the “winning” campaign against what actually hit the bank. $918 in net sales against $600 in spend. Call it 1.5×. The 11.7× was dead wrong. The email flows that should’ve caught the buyers who bounced had been switched off during a migration two years earlier and never turned back on. What it took was someone willing to distrust the number everyone trusted and go check it against the money. You don’t prompt for that.

So no, I’m not worried about the models. The more of them there are handing everyone the same hundred frameworks, the more the game comes down to what they can’t do. That part gets rarer and more valuable. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am.