Al Ries and Jack Trout said it well in their book Positioning:

…positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

In other words, positioning is about getting your prospects to think of you. Best case: they think of you first. Even better, they think of you only.

That’s easy when you’re in a space with no competitors. But most agencies don’t have that luxury. Most agencies sell the same things a lot of other agencies sell.

To get a prospect to think of you first or only, you have to do something different from your competitors. But different isn’t enough by itself. You could offer to do the work standing on your head. That’s different, but nobody wants it. The bar is higher than that. You have to be different in a way a specific prospect actually wants. Different and better and wanted. That’s a small target to hit.

This is the opposite of how AI works. Deep down, an LLM does one thing: it guesses the next word. You give it some text, and it looks across everything it has ever read and asks which word usually comes next. Then it picks that word, and does it again, and again. It’s a really good version of autocomplete, trained on a huge amount of human writing. It isn’t reaching for the most original word or the word only you would use. It’s reaching for the most likely one: the answer that the most people writing about your topic would probably give.

AI is a pattern recognition engine. It’s built to find what’s common. Positioning is the opposite. It’s about heading somewhere the patterns don’t exist yet, while still being familiar enough that your prospects get it. That’s the conundrum.

Asking AI to position your agency is like a kid asking you what they should be when they grow up. You can name every job there is. You can tell them which ones pay well and which ones fit what you’ve seen them be good at. What you can’t do is want it for them. AI is the same. It can lay out every option in your category, but it can’t want to be one of them on your behalf. And an agency owner who doesn’t want a position won’t stick with it long enough for it to take hold.

The real reason AI can’t help you with positioning is that data isn’t the main thing you need. The things you need most to build a position that’s yours are courage, patience, vision, and sacrifice.