Judgment is the part you cannot automate
Imagine going to a doctor who takes your symptoms, types them into a chatbot, and reads you back whatever it says. You'd probably ask why you paid a consultation fee for that.
Let us tell you what's happening across personal branding right now. Most agencies get on an intro call with you. They record it, transcribe it, upload the transcript to ChatGPT, and ask it to build a strategy for you, based on what’s been discussed.
The result? An organized document that covers the right categories, headline, content direction, posting rhythm. It reads like something a strategist would have produced themselves.
Nothing about it is technically wrong…
But being correct isn't the same as being useful
A transcript only contains what you already know to say about yourself. When you’re asked to describe your own positioning on a call, what comes out is your current self-understanding, nothing further or deeper. You're too close to your own story to see what's actually distinctive about it, and that's not a failure at all. But this becomes the only material the agency is feeding the machine.
So when the agency asks the chatbot for a strategy, the output is a well-organized version of your own blind spot. The document looks thorough but it stops exactly where your own understanding stops.
Nobody's lying to you here or cutting corners on purpose. What's happening is that: agencies are handing back a tidier version of what you walked in with, and charging for the tidying.
What the agency should actually do
An agency’s job is to see something you couldn't see from inside your own story. That takes sitting with the material long enough to notice a thread you mentioned once and dropped, or a contradiction between how you describe your work and what actually makes you good at it.
So the missing piece here? Judgment.
A transcript can't supply any of that, but a good agency can, by paying close attention, disagreeing with the obvious read, and arguing for a direction you hadn't considered before your conversation with them.
AI still plays an important role in strategy work. It's useful for research, for drafting, for organizing scattered thinking into something structured. It supplies organization and structure. But what it can't supply is judgment that can only come from someone willing to push back on your own perspective of yourself, and on AI’s results.
By Romy Abdallah