Paul Deraval, Cofounder & CEO of NinjaCat, is a software veteran with 20+ years driving innovation in martech, AI and agency growth.
If AI could automate every repetitive and monotonous task on your plate today, where would you focus it next?
Most of today’s AI conversations revolve around automation and time savings. From reporting to modeling, AI is streamlining high-effort tasks across functions. But once that low-hanging fruit is cleared, the real question becomes: Where can AI create new value?
The next leap won’t come from better execution. It will come from better awareness. Not just what we told the AI to look for, but what it tells us we missed.
Executive decisions are defined by what’s not on the dashboard.
Dashboards compress data into manageable summaries, but they rely heavily on the judgment of the person reviewing them. Knowing which metric matters most, or spotting the absence of a metric that should be there, isn’t always obvious.
Humans bring valuable intuition. But we also bring blind spots. AI sees only what it’s trained on, and that clarity can work to our advantage when paired with human context. If we want AI to go beyond automating what’s already routine, we need to design it to surface better questions.
For example, a marketing team sees steady lead volume and assumes all is well. But an AI agent flags a drop in high-intent branded search traffic. That metric isn’t tracked on the standard dashboard. The team digs deeper and discovers a competitor is outranking them for critical brand terms.
The alert didn’t come from what was monitored. It came from what was missed. With many dashboards reflecting yesterday’s focus, this kind of blind spot is more common than we admit.
AI should function like a strategic analyst, not just a task bot.
The success of any AI system starts with its data. But structured inputs and defined outputs only go so far. While generative technology has enabled AI solutions to become even more dynamic, they are often still tasked with a specific purpose.
Strategic work, on the other hand, often lives in gray areas, with unstructured and ambiguous asks that may have a different response depending on any number of unknown factors, such as the time of year or an upcoming holiday.
Instead of waiting for perfect prompts, what if agents were trained to explore data probabilistically? Let them roam datasets, run comparisons and flag what seems unexpected, even if it hasn’t been predefined as an anomaly.
The most valuable questions in strategy aren’t tied to minor shifts in numbers. They’re about recognizing when something doesn’t line up or when a signal contradicts expectations. Agents trained with this in mind won’t just mimic workflows. They’ll pressure test them.
The concept of giving AI agents more freedom may cause uncertainty, as headlines about AI failures and mistakes have had a significant impact on enterprises over the past few years.
In reality, this approach doesn’t mean handing the keys to the company over to AI. Agents can operate with boundaries and still work outside legacy assumptions. You don’t need to program the exact question for the AI to bring back something useful. Just give it a purpose broad enough to uncover what others aren’t looking for.
Gathering those kinds of questions early is how strategists get ahead of change. AI can accelerate that timeline.
Smarter questions drive cross-functional awareness.
AI built into a single workflow can improve speed. AI connected across departments can improve foresight.
Take a spike in new customer signups. Marketing celebrates the growth. But a connected agent also sees that onboarding times are slipping. Support tickets are rising. The campaign succeeded, but the system downstream is straining. These aren’t isolated insights. They are signals that carry more weight when viewed together.
The overlooked power of AI is how it moves insight between functions. A unified data cloud turns AI from a local tool into a connective infrastructure. It can ask better questions because it sees the ripple effect in real time.
This shift doesn’t just improve awareness. It builds organizational agility.
Rethink AI’s role in strategy.
The next generation of AI will create value by helping leaders see the right questions faster. That’s where strategic clarity comes from: insights that challenge what’s assumed and highlight what’s missing.
To get there, organizations need to rethink how they deploy AI. Moving past task-based automation opens the door to agents that discover unexpected patterns and relationships. That starts by loosening overly rigid instructions and letting systems explore.
Humans have never had a perfect view of what to ask. AI doesn’t need to either. When both work together—with humans applying judgment and AI surfacing anomalies—the outcome is faster decisions and deeper understanding.
AI needs to deliver value today. But it also needs to be positioned for what’s next. The companies that design for that flexibility will be the ones ready to adapt before the market forces their hand.
AI that asks sharp questions isn’t a layer of optimization. It is the foundation for better decisions at scale.
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