How AI is Cutting the Time and Cost of Customer Strategy
Written by Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is the CEO and founder of Sway Outcomes, a global customer engagement consultancy, and the former leader of The Loyalty People. He has advised brands including Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
A proper customer strategy used to mean a nine-month project, a big consultancy and a six-figure invoice. For most mid-sized brands, that put it out of reach. AI is changing the maths, and here's where it genuinely helps, where it still trips up, and what that means for your next strategy.
Why has customer strategy cost so much?
Most of the cost of a traditional strategy project isn't the thinking. It's the legwork.
Before anyone writes a recommendation, someone has to read the annual reports, map the competitors, review rival loyalty programmes, trawl through reviews and pull it all into something usable. That's weeks of skilled people doing patient, repetitive work. And you pay for every hour.
That's exactly the type of work AI is good at. McKinsey's 2023 research estimates generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy every year, and that 75 percent of that value is concentrated in four functions, including marketing and sales.
The evidence from strategy work itself is even more direct. In a 2023 Harvard Business School working paper, researchers tested GPT-4 with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants. On tasks within AI's capabilities, consultants using it completed 12.2% more tasks, finished them 25.1% more quickly and produced results rated more than 40% higher quality than a control group, according to the study on AI and knowledge worker productivity.
Those are consultants at one of the world's top firms. The same tools are now available to everyone.
Curious what an AI-assisted view of your brand looks like? Email me at tom@swayoutcomes.com and we'll send you a free Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA) report.
5 ways AI speeds things up
Earlier in this series I wrote about fixing the foundations before reaching for new technology. The same rule applies here. AI doesn't replace the strategy. It removes the drudgery that used to sit in front of it.
1. Desk research in hours, not weeks
Ask a good AI tool to pull together a brand's public footprint and you'll have a first pass in an afternoon. Company reports, press coverage, product ranges, pricing, app features, loyalty terms and conditions.
It won't be perfect. But it gives your team a starting map, so their time goes on checking and questioning rather than collecting.
2. Competitor benchmarking at scale
Most brands benchmark against two or three obvious rivals because that's all the budget allows. With AI, you can look at ten or fifteen, and include brands outside your sector.
That matters. Your customers don't compare your app to your nearest competitor. They compare it to the best app on their phone.
3. Reading every review, not a sample
Customers tell you what they think every day, in app store reviews, Trustpilot comments and social posts. Historically, someone read a sample of a few hundred and made a judgement.
AI can work through thousands, group them into themes and flag the ones that keep coming back. Delivery complaints. Confusing rewards. Staff who go the extra mile. The patterns that used to be buried become obvious.
4. Joining the dots faster
The hardest part of strategy is connecting what you've found. Why do reviews praise the product but complain about the app? Why is the loyalty programme busy but the repeat rate flat?
AI is a useful sparring partner here. Feed it the research and ask it to find the tensions. It will often spot a link a tired team would have missed at 6pm on a Thursday.
5. A first draft worth arguing with
A blank page is slow. A draft set of recommendations, even a flawed one, gets a room talking. People are far quicker at improving something than inventing it.
The key word is draft. It's a starting point for experienced judgement, not a substitute for it.
Where AI still gets it wrong
Here's the part the hype tends to skip.
AI can be confident and wrong. It will state a market share, a membership figure or a programme launch date with total certainty, and sometimes it's simply made it up. Figures are where this bites hardest, because a wrong number in a board paper does real damage.
The same Harvard study found this too. On a task deliberately set outside AI's capabilities, consultants using it were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those working without it. The tool made them faster and more confident. It didn't make them right.
So the rules we work by are simple:
Every statistic gets traced back to its original source before it's used. If we can't find it, it goes.
AI findings are treated as leads to check, not facts to repeat.
A person who knows the sector reads every output and asks, "Does this actually make sense?"
The final recommendations are made by people, because people are accountable for them.
None of this is a reason to avoid AI. It's a reason to use it with your eyes open.
What this means for mid-sized brands
This is the bit I find most exciting.
For years, proper customer strategy was something large brands bought and everyone else improvised. A mid-sized retailer or hospitality group might have great instincts and a loyal customer base, but no budget for a nine-month consultancy project. So decisions got made on gut feel and whatever the platform vendor recommended.
AI changes that. When the research legwork drops from weeks to days, the cost drops with it. Strategy built on real evidence becomes affordable for brands that were never in the market for it.
At Sway Outcomes, that's the thinking behind our CEA. AI does the research heavy lifting: the desk research, benchmarking and review analysis. Our team then verifies the findings, scores the brand across our six-level maturity model and decides what really matters. It takes days or weeks, not months, and costs a fraction of a traditional project.
It's not magic, and it doesn't replace a deep, inside-out audit. But it gives a brand an honest outside view, fast, which is often exactly what's missing. I talk more about why that outside view matters in my interview on why customers stay and what brands often get wrong.
If you're planning your own approach, it's worth reading about using AI for business strategy and growth, and this wider look at how AI is changing the business world.
A few practical steps to get started:
Pick one question you've never had the budget to answer properly, such as how you really compare to the best in your sector.
Use AI to gather and organise the evidence, then have someone check every number.
Put the draft findings in front of people who talk to customers every day. They'll tell you quickly what rings true.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI replace a customer strategy consultant? Not fully. AI is excellent at research, benchmarking and spotting patterns, but it can be confidently wrong and it doesn't know your business. The best results come from AI doing the heavy lifting and experienced people verifying and deciding.
How accurate is AI for market and competitor research? It's a strong starting point but not a finished source. AI can misquote or invent figures, so every statistic should be checked against the original source before it's used in a decision.
Is AI-led strategy affordable for smaller brands? Yes, and that's the big shift. Because AI cuts the time spent on research, the overall cost falls sharply, which puts evidence-based customer strategy within reach of mid-sized brands.
Start with the evidence
AI hasn't made strategy easy. It's made the evidence cheaper to gather, which means more brands can afford to make decisions based on facts rather than hunches. The judgement still matters. There's just more time for it.
If you'd like an outside view, my team at Sway Outcomes runs a free Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA). It uses AI to do the research heavy lifting, then our team checks the findings and shows you where your brand stands, where the gaps are and your quickest wins.
To get your free CEA report, email me at tom@swayoutcomes.com or message me on LinkedIn.
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Tom Peace
Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is a customer engagement strategist who helps brands turn transactions into lasting relationships. Under his leadership, The Loyalty People became a globally recognised brand within the loyalty industry, with a rapidly growing and highly engaged following. He went on to found Sway Outcomes, a consultancy that goes beyond loyalty programme strategy to cover every aspect of customer engagement. Its maturity model has six levels and shows brands exactly where they stand and what to do next. By combining deep sector expertise with diagnostics enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), Tom delivers strategic clarity in weeks rather than months for brands such as Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
