Welcome to September’s Strategy Pulse.

August was about reading the customer. September is about reading the balance sheet. Whitbread just closed all 106 Beefeaters in one week, and the reason isn’t really about restaurants. It’s about what a business decides it’s allowed to keep doing when costs are up and returns are being scrutinised line by line. This month’s tension is about when focus becomes the strategy, who decides what gets cut, and what happens to the people standing in the part that doesn’t survive.

Big Shift: The Focus Tax

Every UK business is paying a version of the same bill right now. Business rates are up. National Insurance costs have climbed. Petrol’s over 160p a litre. Small firms are sitting on £26bn of overdue invoices they can’t chase fast enough. None of this is new information on its own, but stack it together and it changes the question boards are asking. It’s no longer “what should we grow” but “what can we actually afford to keep running.”

That’s the focus tax. Doing five things adequately costs more than it used to, and doing one thing well is starting to look like the only defensible option. Whitbread is the clearest UK example this month, but it’s not alone. The pattern is the same across sectors. Strip out the parts of the business that dilute margin, even if they’re recognisable, even if they’re loved, and put everything behind the part that’s actually working.

For strategy teams, this changes the job. Less “where next” and more “what stays.” That’s a harder conversation to have well, because cutting a division is also cutting a team, and the people who built that part of the business are usually the last to be asked whether it should exist.

📌 Takeaway: Focus isn’t free. Someone in the business is paying for it, and it’s rarely the person making the decision.

Brand in Focus: Whitbread

All 106 Beefeaters closed on 10 September. Brewers Fayre, Table Table and Whitbread Inns are going the same way. This isn’t a struggling brand being wound down quietly, it’s a profitable group deciding a whole category of its own business no longer earns its place.

The numbers explain the logic. Whitbread’s plan targets around £250m in savings, a cut of more than £1bn in net capital investment, and £1.5bn recycled through property disposals, all in service of becoming what the company calls a “pure-play hotel business” built around Premier Inn. Roughly 600 of the closed restaurant sites are being converted into extra hotel rooms. Around 3,800 roles are at risk, with a consultation process running and redeployment offered where roles exist elsewhere in the group.

Shares dropped nearly 7% on the initial announcement back in April, which tells you the market wasn’t fully convinced the short-term pain would pay off fast enough. That’s the real story here. Cutting to focus isn’t a popularity contest with investors either. It’s a bet that a simpler business, with fewer things to manage and fewer places for capital to leak, is worth more than a bigger one.

The talent question is the one that gets skipped in most coverage of this story. Whitbread is trying to redeploy kitchen and front-of-house staff into a hotel-and-dining model that barely resembles their old jobs. Whether that consultation process actually results in people staying employed, rather than a line in a results presentation, is the part worth watching.

📌 Takeaway: A pure-play strategy is only as good as what happens to the people who were part of the impure version.

Consulting Corner: Bain & Company

Bain & Company‘s 2026 Global M&A Report makes a point that lands directly on the Whitbread story: capital allocated to M&A hit a 30-year low through the back end of 2025, even as overall deal value climbed. Companies are putting more of their cash into dividends, buybacks, capex and R&D instead. When that much capital is tied up elsewhere, the businesses that do want to move have to fund it by selling something first.

More than half the companies in Bain’s survey are actively prepping assets for sale in the next few years. Not because those assets are failing, but because the parent company wants the focus and the cash more than it wants the diversification. Bain frames it as leaders being forced to “revisit foundational strategic assumptions” and “rethink portfolio boundaries,” which is consultant language for a blunter question: what do we need to own, and what can we just access instead?

That’s a genuinely useful frame for anyone running a strategy or transformation function right now. Ownership used to be the safe default. It isn’t anymore. It’s an active decision with a cost attached, and boards are starting to ask for the justification rather than assuming it.

📌 Takeaway: The strategic question of the year isn’t growth versus efficiency. It’s ownership versus access, applied to almost everything a company runs.

🔔 Final Thought

Cutting to focus reads well in a five-year plan. It reads very differently to the 3,800 people whose jobs sat inside the part that got cut. The businesses that get this right this year won’t be the ones with the cleanest portfolio slide. They’ll be the ones that treated redeployment as seriously as they treated the capital allocation model. That’s not a compliance box, it’s a workforce planning capability, and most companies going through this right now don’t have one.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly. In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own proximity play.

Welcome to August’s Strategy Pulse. Most of the country’s on the back-to-school run and retailers are gearing up for one of the busiest spending windows of the year. But the interesting story this month isn’t about total spend. It’s about who’s spending it.

PwC‘s latest Retail Outlook describes it as a K-shaped recovery: one group of shoppers has headroom and is starting to loosen up, another is still watching every pound. Same shop, same shelf, two completely different customers. That’s not a demographic footnote. It’s a strategy problem, because most retail operating models are still built for one customer, not two.

Big Shift: One Shop, Two Customers

The K in K-shaped recovery isn’t new language, but the shape of it has changed. PwC’s 2026 outlook found consumers are firmly in control of their spending, shaped heavily by the cost of living, with a clear split between those who have financial headroom and those who don’t. Retailers who move quickly on that reality, using value, experience and technology to reach each group differently, are the ones PwC expects to gain ground this year. (Retail Bulletin)

Here’s the bit that makes it a genuine strategy problem rather than a segmentation exercise. National Retail Federation‘s research with Bain & Company‘s Pyxis unit found the 2026 K-shape looks different to 2025’s. Where the 2025 data showed falling spend across most lower-income segments, the first half of 2026 shows none of the cohorts actually cutting back. The bottom of the K is holding up. The top is still pulling ahead. Which means retailers can’t treat this as a temporary squeeze to ride out. Both ends of the market are staying, and they want different things at the same time.

This is where it stops being a marketing question and becomes an org design one. Serving a value shopper and a premium shopper well requires different supply chains, different store formats, different pricing logic, and increasingly, different people running each of them. A buying team built to negotiate the sharpest possible unit cost isn’t the same team you want curating a premium range. Retailers now need both, inside the same P&L, reporting to the same board.

📌 Takeaway: The K-shaped consumer isn’t a forecasting quirk. It’s forcing retailers to run two different businesses under one roof, and most org charts haven’t caught up.

Brand in Focus: Tesco

Tesco is a decent illustration of a retailer trying to play both ends at once. On the value side, it’s launching on quick commerce platforms Uber Eats and Deliveroo, with shoppers able to access Clubcard prices and earn points through either app. That’s a bet on convenience and immediacy, not just price.

At the same time, its main rival’s moves show how tight the margin for error is here. Asda‘s shift from its Rollback pricing campaign toward what it’s calling the Asda Price strategy is entering its final stages, with heavier use of multibuy promotions, a sign that headline low prices alone aren’t pulling in the sales growth needed, and that basket size now matters as much as unit price. (Retail Sector)

Tesco’s Clubcard and quick commerce push is really an attempt to hold the value shopper close while giving the retailer new terrain (speed, delivery, app-based loyalty) to compete on with everyone else. The interesting tension is whether one loyalty scheme and one brand can credibly serve both the shopper counting every pound and the one adding a Deliveroo order on top of their weekly shop, without either one feeling like an afterthought.

📌 Takeaway: Loyalty schemes built for one type of shopper are being asked to stretch across two. That’s a harder job than it looks from the outside.

Consulting Corner: Advising the Bifurcated Business

Retail strategy consultancies are increasingly being asked to build two playbooks per client instead of one. PwC UK’s retail lead, Jacqueline Windsor, put it plainly: retailers are navigating competing investment demands, reinforcing value credentials in the short term while transforming their business models in the medium term, and those who adapt quickly to a K-shaped reality will be best placed to gain ground.

That’s consultant language for: don’t pick a lane, build two lanes and staff them properly. The firms doing well here (Bain, McKinsey & Company, and specialists like OC&C Strategy Consultants and Simon-Kucher on pricing) are the ones treating this as a workforce and capability question, not just a pricing model. If a retailer needs a genuinely different operating rhythm for its value tier and its premium tier, that shows up in headcount, in hiring briefs, and in who reports to whom. Recruitment for retail strategy roles is starting to reflect that split too, with briefs asking for either sharp commercial efficiency thinking or premium brand and experience thinking, rarely both from the same hire.

📌 Takeaway: Advising a K-shaped retailer means building two operating models, not tweaking one. The firms winning this work understand it’s a people problem as much as a pricing one.

🔔 Final Thought

Retailers have spent years being told to know their customer. August’s question is sharper: which customer, on which day, buying which basket. Two shoppers, two sets of expectations, one org chart trying to hold it all together. The businesses that work this out first won’t just price better. They’ll hire better, because they’ll actually know which team they’re building and why.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly. In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone trying to build one team for two very different customers.

Six months ago, most leaders were still calling hybrid work the settled question. It isn’t.

WPP now expects four office days a week including two Fridays a month. Barclays has moved 85,000 staff from two office days to three. John Lewis & Partners has mandated three days for buying and merchandising teams. JD Sports Fashion UK head office staff have been back four days since last year.

None of this is being sold as a productivity fix. It’s being sold as culture, coaching, and collaboration. Worth asking why the sudden urgency, several years after the pandemic supposedly settled this.

Big Shift: The office is back as a control mechanism

For a while, remote and hybrid work were treated as a talent retention tool. Now they’re being treated as a risk to manage. The shift in language is the tell. Barclays talks about “balancing flexibility… with the importance of working together.” WPP‘s memo leaned on collaboration and creative culture.

What’s actually changed is confidence. When hiring was tight and attrition was expensive, flexibility was a lever companies pulled to keep people. Now, with several sectors seeing looser labour markets, that lever matters less. The return to work (RTO) wave isn’t a discovery that offices work better. It’s a signal that the balance of power has shifted back toward the employer, and offices are the most visible way to demonstrate that.

For hiring and org design, this matters more than the policy itself. A company’s stance on where work happens is now a genuine differentiator in the market for talent, not a footnote in the offer letter. Candidates are reading these announcements as signals about trust, not just logistics.

📌 Takeaway: Watch what a return-to-office mandate says about confidence in the labour market, not just about where people sit.

Brand in Focus: WPP

WPP announced its four-day office policy back in January, effective from April. Staff pushed back hard: a petition calling for the CEO to reverse the mandate picked up more than 18,000 signatures. Employees in London reported the offices simply weren’t built for the volume. Not enough screens to connect laptops. Missing cables. No spare desks. Patchy wifi. Morale, by most accounts, dropped rather than lifted.

The irony is hard to miss for a company that sells culture and creative collaboration as its product. WPP is one of the world’s largest marketing services groups, built on the pitch that bringing people together produces better creative work. When the internal reality of “coming together” turns out to be a scramble for a free desk, the policy undercuts the exact brand story it’s meant to reinforce.

📌 Takeaway: If your product is culture and collaboration, your own office experience becomes part of the pitch, whether you plan for that or not.

Consulting Corner: The mid-market squeeze

Away from the office wars, consulting itself is being reshaped by the same underlying force: AI capability changing who needs how many people. AI-native boutiques can now run research, modelling, and analysis that used to require a bench of junior analysts, letting small teams take on scopes that once needed a much bigger team. At the other end, the largest firms are scaling through acquisition and platform investment to keep pace.

Caught in the middle are mid-sized firms with neither the balance sheet to compete for enterprise transformation work nor the lean cost base to match boutique pricing. Several analysts now expect that segment to shrink meaningfully over the next few years, leaving an industry split between global scale players and specialist boutiques.

The talent consequence is worth noting. If junior analyst work is increasingly automated and mid-market firms (traditionally a training ground for that talent) are shrinking, the traditional consulting career ladder starts to look shorter and steeper at the bottom. Firms that figure out a new apprenticeship model, rather than just cutting junior headcount, will have a real hiring advantage in a few years.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting talent pipeline is being squeezed from both ends. Firms that solve for junior development now will be the ones with a bench later.

🔔 Final Thought

Two structural stories running in parallel this year: where work happens, and who gets to do the work at all as it gets automated. Both come back to the same question for leaders. Mandates are free. Career development isn’t. Most companies picked the free option this year.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own proximity play.

Welcome to June’s Strategy Pulse.

May was about execution: whether companies can actually deliver on their strategies. June is a harder question. Before you can execute, your structure has to allow it. And right now, a lot of organisations are discovering that it doesn’t.

The decisions landing this month, from Meta’s wholesale reorganisation to the Big Four cutting in some places and hiring in others, all point at the same underlying problem. The shape of the organisation itself has become the obstacle. That’s a different kind of challenge from capability or planning. You can upskill people. You can hire better. But if the structure is wrong, none of it moves fast enough.

Big Shift: The Org Chart Is the Strategy

For years, restructuring was shorthand for cost-cutting. Leadership would announce a “strategic realignment,” a few hundred roles would disappear, and the business would carry on in roughly the same shape. The language was strategic. The intent was financial.

What’s happening now is different, and Meta is the clearest current example of why.

Meta announced it was reassigning 7,000 employees into four new AI-focused organisations, structured around what its chief people officer described as “AI-native design principles.” This ran alongside plans to cut roughly 8,000 jobs and freeze 6,000 open positions, with the moves affecting close to 20% of the company’s total workforce.

The restructuring involves flattening management layers and creating smaller, faster-moving teams organised around autonomous AI tools and agents, with staff internally referring to the reassignment process as being “drafted.” It’s not subtle, and it’s not primarily a cost story. It’s a structural bet: that the organisation built for social media at scale is the wrong shape for what Meta needs to become.

The strategic logic is real even if the execution is uncomfortable. Meta’s moves signal how aggressively large technology companies are reallocating resources toward AI product development, concentrating specialist talent and trimming functions seen as less central to future growth. For everyone watching from the outside, the relevant question isn’t whether Zuckerberg has called it right. It’s whether their own structure could support a move like this if they needed to make one.

Most organisations couldn’t. And that’s the problem.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey (Deloitte Insights), drawing on more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries, found that 7 in 10 business leaders now say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be fast and nimble. Only 28% believe scale will be their main differentiator. Scale built the last generation of market leaders. Speed is what the next one is being organised around. But wanting speed and being structured for it are two very different things.

📌 Takeaway: The org chart is no longer just an operational document. How you’re structured is a signal of whether you can compete. Companies still running on 2019 hierarchies are making a strategic bet they may not realise they’ve made.

Brand in Focus: KPMG and the Consulting Identity Problem

The Big Four are not having an easy 2026. But KPMG‘s recent moves are worth examining more carefully than the headline numbers suggest, because they reveal something broader about what professional services brands are now selling, and whether that matches what clients are actually buying.

KPMG laid off around 400 consultants in its US advisory division in late April, with cuts concentrated in regulatory risk, customer operations, and financial services consulting. Two converging pressures drove it. Regulatory demand dropped sharply after the US government’s rollback of financial oversight, reducing client spend on compliance-related advisory work. At the same time, post-pandemic over hiring caught up with the firm as attrition slowed and teams remained larger than the available work required.

But the cuts are only half the story. KPMG was explicit that parts of its advisory business are still growing, specifically in transactions, strategy, and AI services. Same firm, same quarter, shrinking in one direction and investing in another.

That’s a brand and positioning challenge as much as a workforce one. KPMG, like all the Big Four, built its market position on breadth: the idea that one firm could handle everything from tax compliance to transformation strategy. The firm now expects employees to demonstrate how they’re integrating AI into their client work, with the emphasis shifting from generalist consulting to specialised, technology-driven expertise. The pitch to clients is quietly changing. So is the pitch to candidates.

The firms that navigate this well won’t just be the ones that cut in the right places. They’ll be the ones that tell a coherent story about what they’re for now, in a market where “full service” is no longer sufficient as a positioning.

📌 Takeaway: The Big Four’s restructuring is a brand story. When you cut compliance and grow AI strategy in the same quarter, you’re making a public statement about what consulting is worth paying for in 2026. The question is whether the brand is keeping up with the strategy.

Consulting Corner: The Fragmentation Problem

The consulting market isn’t necessarily shrinking. It’s sorting.

Compliance and regulatory advisory, which drove enormous volumes of work through the 2010s, is contracting as a demand category. Strategy, AI integration, and transactions are growing. The firms built wide, across every service line, are now having to make choices about where they actually want to compete. And the firms that haven’t made those choices yet are carrying the cost of both.

For clients, this is more consequential than it might appear. The consulting market of 2026 looks less like a set of full-service generalist firms and more like a landscape of specialists with generalist branding. Knowing which firm has genuinely built capability in the area you need, rather than staffing it from a stretched bench, has become a more important procurement question than it used to be.

Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital research identifies organisational agility as the defining competitive differentiator, with organisations leading on it around twice as likely to report better financial results. But only 8% of business leaders say their change management and learning initiatives are highly effective. That gap between ambition and infrastructure is exactly where the most valuable consulting mandates sit right now. Not AI implementation. Not change management in the traditional sense. Operating model redesign: who decides what, how work flows, and whether the structure can actually support the strategy on paper.

That’s harder to sell than a technology project. It’s harder to deliver. And it requires a different kind of consultant than the ones being cut, not a generalist who can cover a service line, but someone who can read an organisation’s design and diagnose where it’s blocking itself.

📌 Takeaway: The consulting market is fragmenting around specialisation. Generalist capacity is being cut; specialist capability is being competed for. For anyone hiring or being hired in this space, the question has shifted from “which firm?” to “which practice?”

🔔 Final Thought

The consistent thread across everything this month is the gap between knowing and doing. Most leaders agree the structure needs to change. Most organisations are still built in ways that make change slow, expensive, and politically complicated.

AI isn’t closing that gap. If anything, it’s widening the visibility of it. The companies moving fast look further ahead than they actually are, because the baseline has dropped. The ones that haven’t moved yet aren’t just behind on technology. They’re behind on the organisational conditions that would let them catch up.

The question worth sitting with going into the second half of the year: if you had to redesign your team from scratch next month, would it look anything like what you have now? And if the answer is no, what’s actually stopping you?

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own execution gap.

Welcome to May’s Strategy Pulse.

For the past two years, strategy has been dominated by one question: are you using AI? Boards asked it. Investors asked it. Consultants made good money helping people answer it. But a different question is starting to matter more: can you actually deliver on what you’ve planned?

The gap between strategic ambition and operational reality is widening. Organisations are sitting on well-formed strategies, refreshed roadmaps, and freshly approved budgets. But are still struggling to execute. Not because their thinking is wrong. Because the infrastructure, the people, and the organisational muscle to deliver aren’t there.

This month, we look at what’s driving that gap, what it exposed at one of the UK’s most recognisable retailers, and how the consulting industry is quietly rebuilding its entire model around the same problem.

Big Shift: The Bottleneck Has Moved

Ask most senior leaders where strategy breaks down, and they’ll point to the usual suspects: unclear priorities, misaligned stakeholders, budget constraints. Rarely do they say “we had a good plan and simply couldn’t build the thing.”

But that’s increasingly what’s happening. The strategy bottleneck has shifted. It’s no longer about the quality of the thinking. It’s about the capacity and capability to execute at pace.

A few forces have converged to create this. Leaner teams mean fewer people to absorb the operational load of transformation. AI has raised expectations dramatically: boards want faster cycles and higher output, often without proportionate investment in the people or structures needed to deliver them. And years of planning heavy, delivery light consulting has left many organisations with sophisticated roadmaps and limited institutional muscle to act on them.

The capability gap showing up most acutely is the one between people who can design strategy and people who can operationalise it. Translators, essentially. Professionals who can move fluently between a boardroom ambition and a working system, who understand AI-augmented workflows not in theory but in practice, and who can manage the messy, unglamorous work of actually shipping things.

That profile is in short supply. And organisations that haven’t started building for it are already behind.

📌 Takeaway: The strategy problem most organisations have right now is delivery. The question to ask isn’t “do we have a plan?” It’s “do we have the people and structure to execute it?”

Brand in Focus: M&S and the Cost of Execution Debt

In April 2025, Marks and Spencer was hit by a ransomware attack that became one of the most disruptive cyber incidents in UK retail history. Online orders were suspended for weeks. In-store payment systems partially reverted to manual processes. Fresh food supply chains were thrown into chaos. Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimated around £30 million in immediate profit losses, rising by roughly £15 million weekly until systems were restored, with the total hit eventually landing at around £300 million in lost operating profit. (BlackFog)

The headlines focused on the hackers. The more instructive story is what the attack revealed about M&S’s infrastructure beneath the surface.

The same hacking group hit Co-op just days later using near-identical tactics. Co-op detected the breach within minutes and suffered minimal disruption to customer-facing services. M&S endured weeks of operational shutdown. Same threat. Completely different outcome. The difference wasn’t the sophistication of the attack. It was execution readiness.

At M&S, legacy systems and tightly coupled infrastructure meant that containing the threat required bringing down broad swathes of the environment. Even though the company claimed over half of its systems were unaffected, the interdependencies made targeted containment extremely difficult. Pre-existing execution debt, accumulated over years of under-investment in infrastructure modernisation, made visible by a crisis. (MTI Technology)

What happened next is worth noting. Rather than treating recovery as a return to normal, M&S condensed a planned two-year digital overhaul into six months, rephasing investment and prioritising the infrastructure simplification it had been deferring. By 2026, M&S had partnered with Microsoft to build what it describes as an “Agentic Retail” ecosystem, deploying 11,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licences across its workforce and targeting £100 million in cost savings through AI-driven efficiency. (InfotechLead)

The M&S story is a useful frame for the execution gap more broadly. Most organisations carry some version of execution debt: deferred infrastructure decisions, legacy dependencies, organisational structures that haven’t kept pace with strategic ambition. It rarely becomes visible until something breaks. So, the question isn’t whether your organisation has execution debt. It’s whether you’re choosing to address it, or waiting for a crisis to force the issue.

📌 Takeaway: M&S’s cyber crisis was the trigger, not the cause. The execution infrastructure wasn’t built to absorb disruption. Building it after the fact is possible, but far more expensive than building it in advance.

Consulting Corner: McKinsey and the End of the Advice Model

For decades, consulting’s value proposition was relatively simple: hire smart people, get smart answers. The work was structured around expertise, delivered through slide decks and workshops, and billed by the hour or the project. Clients paid for thinking.

That model is under serious pressure. And nowhere is the shift more visible than at McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey now has around 20,000 AI agents supporting its internal work, up from 3,000 just 18 months ago. CEO Bob Sternfels has been explicit about what this means for the firm’s model: McKinsey is moving away from pure advisory work toward an outcomes-based approach, tying fees to the impact delivered rather than the time spent delivering it. (Fortune)

Around a quarter of McKinsey’s global fees now come from outcomes-based pricing. Clients are increasingly coming to the firm not with a scope, but with an outcome, and asking McKinsey to underwrite the delivery of it. Pure strategy advice, the thing people traditionally associated with McKinsey, now accounts for less than 20% of the firm’s work. The majority is implementation: multi-year transformation programmes, AI integration, operational redesign. (Yahoo Finance)

The firm has also started testing candidates on its internal AI tool Lilli during the hiring process: a signal that what McKinsey values in a consultant is changing. It’s not enough to be analytically sharp. You need to be able to work effectively within AI-augmented workflows, manage outputs that AI generates, and focus your own energy on the judgment and client management that agents can’t replicate. (Fortune)

The talent implication is significant. If consulting firms are shifting from advice to implementation, from billable hours to outcomes, from analyst pyramids to AI-augmented delivery, the people they need look different. Less about raw analytical horsepower, more about the ability to translate strategy into working systems, manage human-agent teams, and hold clients accountable to the results they commissioned.

That’s a different hire. And it’s one a lot of firms, consulting and corporate alike, haven’t fully worked out how to make yet.

📌 Takeaway: Consulting is rebuilding itself around execution. The firms winning the next decade will be the ones who can actually deliver the transformation they sell.

🔔 Final Thought

There’s a version of the execution gap that’s always existed. Strategy has always been easier to produce than to deliver. But something has shifted. The gap is wider, the stakes are higher, and the organisations that haven’t built genuine delivery capability are starting to feel it in ways that are hard to hide.

The M&S story, the McKinsey pivot, the growing premium on people who can bridge thinking and doing… they’re all pointing at the same thing. The next competitive advantage isn’t a better strategy. It’s the operational infrastructure and the people to execute one.

The organisations closing the gap fastest aren’t necessarily the most innovative. They’re the most honest about where their execution debt actually sits, and disciplined enough to do something about it before a crisis does it for them.

Want to stay on top of this? The Strategy Pulse continues monthly.

In the meantime, if you found this useful, share it with someone navigating their own execution gap.

The Big Shift: Automation Arrives Quietly… Then All at Once

What began as “experimentation” in 2023 has become a full-scale reset by Q4 2025. AI isn’t just augmenting work. It’s absorbing it. And suddenly, everyone from HR leaders to brand strategists is being asked to rethink what roles, teams, and capabilities look like in the next three years.

• Amazon is preparing up to 30,000 corporate job cuts. The automation wave is targeting ops, HR, AWS and devices, especially non-technical middle-tier roles.

• Microsoft announced 9,000 job losses (4% of workforce) to align operations with its AI-first future.

• Accenture, even as a key AI transformation vendor, cut 11,000 jobs this year.

• Layoffs across the tech sector now exceed 180,000 in 2025, according to OpenTools.

But here’s the twist: many of these companies are still hiring. Just not for what they used to.

1. AI engineers, prompt strategists, automation leads and talent designers are in.

2. Traditional generalist roles are being thinned out or merged with AI-enabled systems.

3. Brand, innovation, and people teams must now build strategy around capability gaps, not just market gaps.

📌 Takeaway: It’s no longer “AI vs jobs.” It’s “AI vs stagnation.” The talent strategies that win will be the ones that evolve fastest, not just react loudest.

Brand in Focus: Amazon’s Talent Rebuild

Amazon‘s layoffs aren’t just a cost-cutting play. They’re a talent reset. Internal sources and analysts suggest the company is moving from “people-heavy” operations to “platform-heavy” logistics, powered by its own AI tooling and internal LLMs.

Over 14,000 roles across devices, HR and AWS have already been confirmed for redundancy. Yet Amazon is actively hiring for thousands of automation specialists, robotics leads and prompt engineers.

According to a recent Forbes piece, Amazon’s “automation imperative” is now core to its cost-of-delivery model and future logistics dominance.

Why it Matters

• Internal capabilities are being rebuilt to match external strategy. Fast.

• Employer brand is being tested. Messaging now has to juggle “AI ambition” with “human responsibility.”

• Teams who once ran day-to-day ops are being retrained (or replaced) to manage the platforms instead.

📌 Takeaway: Brand trust now extends to your own people. If your automation play doesn’t feel like a talent strategy, it might just become a PR problem.

Consulting Corner: Deloitte Builds a Digital Workforce

While some consulting giants are pulling back, Deloitte is doubling down. Their Global Agentic Network, launched this year, aims to help clients not just “use” AI, but restructure their entire operating models around it.

In August, Deloitte released a framework for workforce evolution, centred on AI‑human collaboration, internal reskilling, and agile org design. Their services now include embedded AI strategy teams focused on people architecture, not just tech integration. Notably, Deloitte is hiring AI leads and workforce architects at a faster rate than traditional strategy consultants.

Why it Matters

• Consulting is becoming embedded, not external.

• Clients want speed, integration and transformation. “Advisory decks” alone won’t cut it.

• Talent agility is being sold as a service.

📌 Takeaway: Strategy firms are no longer just fixers. They’re builders. And the product is often the org chart itself.

🔔 Final Thought

The layoffs are real, but so is the opportunity. This month proves that “strategy” isn’t just about goals or markets anymore. It’s about how your teams are designed, what skills you’re investing in, and whether your internal narrative can match your external promise.

“By far the most frustrating thing I’ve found recently is how bad the ‘front door’ application route is Vs recruiters or network. I’ve applied to around 20 jobs by applying cold in response to a job add. Almost all have required intense effort to tailor CV, write a cover letter and transcribe loads of information into their job system. Not a single one has resulted in an interview. By contrast, using network has resulted in an interview every time. I can’t work out how initial HR screens seem so random when evidence suggests I’m at the level to at least interview for the roles. They also provide no feedback, just an auto generated ‘we’re sorry …’ mail, sometimes within minutes of applying.”

Why does this account seem familiar?

When you apply for a job online, whether through a company’s careers page or a job board like LinkedIn, Indeed, or Monster, your CV is typically parsed electronically by an Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). These are software applications used by recruitment teams to manage and streamline the recruitment process.

ATS algorithms serve as gatekeepers, scanning CVs for specific keywords and qualifications deemed essential by employers. They either rank your application for further review by human recruiters or filter it out if it doesn’t meet the predetermined criteria.

According to a report by CareerBuilder, 75% of hiring managers use an ATS.

With such a high proportion of CVs filtered out before human eyes lay upon them, failure to align with the required criteria will result in your CV being consigned to digital oblivion. Understanding how to optimise your CV is paramount to success.

8 Tips to Improve Your CV for ATS

1. Keyword Optimisation: Tailoring your CV with relevant keywords is key to beating ATS algorithms. Ensure your CV includes industry-specific terms, skills, and qualifications found in the job description to increase visibility.
2. Format for Clarity: Simple, text-based formats are preferred by ATS algorithms. Avoid complex graphics, tables, or unconventional fonts that may confuse the system. Stick to standard fonts and layouts for optimal readability.
3. Utilise Standard Section Headings: Categories such as “Professional Experience” and “Skills” help ATS algorithms categorise information effectively, enhancing your CV’s chances of passing through filters.
4. Avoid Extraneous Graphics: Graphics can hinder rather than help. Stay clear of unnecessary images, charts, or text boxes that may confuse ATS algorithms. Stick to a clean, text-based format to ensure compatibility.
5. Proofread Diligently: Errors are CV killers. Spelling and grammar mistakes can lead to automatic rejection by ATS algorithms.
6. Tailor for Each Application: Customisation is key. Craft each CV to align with the specific job requirements, incorporating relevant keywords and skills.
7. Stay Informed and Adapt: Knowledge is power. Stay abreast of ATS trends and best practices for CV optimisation through industry publications, webinars, and workshops.
8. Leverage Networking: Connections count. In addition to online applications, network with professionals in your industry and seek referrals. Many companies prioritise candidates referred by employees, bypassing ATS filters altogether.

By implementing these strategies, you can enhance your CV’s effectiveness in navigating ATS algorithms. You can swerve the black hole and increase your chances of securing job opportunities.

The cogs of the data world are perpetually turning. Data never sleeps. Brace yourself for an exciting overview into some of the top data news stories that have been gracing our screens over the past month.

Supermarkets Are Selling Loyalty Card Data to Third-Party Advertisers

You’d be hard-pressed to find a wallet in the UK that didn’t have either a Nectar or Clubcard in it. So many of us depend on loyalty cards to save money at the supermarket – but did you ever think about what happens every time you tap it up against the pay screen?

Turns out that Tesco and Sainsbury’s make around £300m per year by selling customer data acquired through loyalty cards to third-party consumer goods advertisers.

While both supermarkets have been met with a tidal wave of backlash in light of this news, Sainsbury’s chief executive, Simon Roberts, defended the company’s decision to sell customer data. Roberts told The Guardian that the anonymised data of Sainsbury’s customers was in safe hands, and that it would ultimately benefit consumers by tailoring ads to be more relevant to them.

We’re Entering an Era of AI News Anchors

It’s no news that AI is beginning to infiltrate nearly every facet of our modern lives. Whether we’re watching robot comedians perform at the Edinburgh Fringe, or asking ChatGPT what to eat for breakfast, AI is quickly becoming inextricably tied to the real world. But what’s the next big thing that AI is set to conquer, you may ask? The answer, it seems, is news broadcasting.

A new startup LA-based television network called Channel 1 is set to launch news broadcasts featuring AI-generated anchors. And these computer-generated anchors could be gracing our screens as early as 2024.

The news has stirred up a flurry of emotion on social media, with some ushering in this new era of technology, and others expressing fear and concern over the prospect. Is it an exciting and inevitable development or does it signal the end of human-led journalism? And, most importantly, will you be tuning in?

Boots is Expected to Launch an AI ‘Personal Shopper’

Buying a new lipstick can be more daunting than you might expect. Walking into the shop, perusing all the different shades on offer, trying to navigate the endless sea of brands on display – it’s easy to find the experience overwhelming. And more often than not, going online is just as arduous – you have to trawl the internet for hours, comparing reviews and prices. If you’ve ever faced this dilemma, you might just be in luck: Boots has announced plans to launch an AI ‘personal shopper’.

This ‘personal shopper’ is still in its testing stages, but if launched, it would use a chatbot software that would permit consumers to ask questions and receive product recommendations.

If approved, this AI tool could be about to make life a lot easier for the beauty obsessed among us.

Netflix Data Reveal Tells Us a Lot About Our Viewing Habits

If you spent countless hours decaying in front of your laptop screen this year watching reruns of Selling Sunset, you weren’t the only one. Netflix’s new engagement report reveals user trending habits for this year – and they might just surprise you.

According to the new report, users spent hundreds of millions of hours watching their favourite series between January and June this year. The Night Agent came in at first place, with users spending 812,100,000 hours watching. And perhaps unsurprisingly to some of us, shows like You, Love is Blind and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story proved to be particularly popular with Netflix’s audience.

One obvious takeaway from this new report is how much we collectively love a throwback – whether we’re rewatching our favourite series or tuning into an old-school classic for the first time. Breaking Bad Season 2, released in 2009, and Suits Season 1, released in 2011, both received over 100,000,000 views in that particular 6-month period.

Love it or loathe it, social media has undeniably infiltrated practically every facet of modern life. Planning a last-minute weekend getaway? You undoubtedly take to TikTok to see which destinations are trending, flicking through countless videos which sum up the benefits and setbacks of every city under the sun, from Marrakesh to Morecambe.

If you’re finishing school, there’s no way you’d contemplate applying for a university these days without scouring forums, chatrooms and tweets for insider info. And if you happen to be thinking of going to a restaurant for a special occasion, there’s no way you’d just book somewhere, cross your fingers and hope for the best, blindly trusting the marketing material on their website alone. You’d trawl the internet for reviews, taking them as gospel. These days, an influencer – or anyone with a phone and an opinion for that matter – holds as much sway as a top food critic.

And it turns out that the working world is no different. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that the vast majority of jobseekers are using social media in their job search efforts: 96%, to be exact. Meanwhile, according to LinkedIn, nearly 40 million people search for jobs on the professional networking site every week. The traditional job application process, which saw candidates applying for roles through clunky job board websites, is a practice that now belongs to a bygone era.

As technology inevitably evolves, is it any wonder that recruiters and hiring managers will have to seek out new and innovative ways to find and engage top talent? As it stands, it seems that many companies are catching on and beginning to harness the power of social media: 71% of US hiring managers believe that looking at a candidate’s social media profile is a good method for screening job applicants.

But how exactly can recruiters make the most out of their social media presence to attract top talent? Spoiler alert: There’s a lot more to it than posting job ads to LinkedIn.

Strong employer branding

We’ve already covered the power of meaningful employer branding in another article, but it’s worth rehashing here, because a strong employer brand is one of the most effective tools in your company’s arsenal when it comes to finding and engaging talent.

According to McKinsey, strong brands outperform their competitors by a whopping 96%, while research from Beamery found that 69% of candidates who are active on the job market are more likely to apply to a company that proactively manages its employer brand. LinkedIn reports that 49% of professionals currently follow companies that they’re interested in on social media to stay up-to-date with job opportunities.

But what exactly is a strong employer brand? Well, as we mentioned in our dedicated article in more detail, it basically entails having a strong sense of brand personality: What makes your company unique and what can you offer to potential candidates that other competitors cannot? Your company needs a powerful and convincing EVP (Employer Value Proposition) – which is basically an elevator pitch, aka the messaging that is funnelled into all of your marketing material. 

Consistency is key: Engage with the latest social media trends and provide your followers with tailored, value-add content in order to garner attention from the right audience.  It’s important for recruiters to work alongside marketing teams in order to ensure a streamlined approach to engaging talent.

By crafting a strong employer brand, you’ll be playing the long game of building the talent pipe-line when hiring in the future, not just in the here and now. You’re cultivating a meaningful relationship based on trust by regularly engaging customers and candidates – even those that may not be looking for a job right now, but will have your company at the front of their minds when they do ultimately embark on a job search.

Individual recruiter branding

Taking this one step further, we introduce you to the concept of personal branding. While having a strong employer brand is all well and good, ultimately there’s no denying that people buy from people – more so than companies – and this is where the value of a strong recruiter social media profile comes in.

Around half of adults (51%) with a bachelor’s or advanced degree use LinkedIn, so you really want to optimise your presence on this platform as a recruiter to ensure that you’re dipping into as much of this rich talent pool as possible. Promoting jobs and showcasing your personality on LinkedIn is a crucial means of getting yourself in front of top talent. LinkedIn can often feel like an echo chamber, full of recruiters and companies vying for the attention of an elite echelon of talent. You really want to optimise your chances of engaging these candidates, and to do so you need to be posting on your individual profile, not simply depending on the company page to do the work for you, in order to broaden your reach as widely as possible.

Proactive recruiters and employees who post on their own social media profiles are powerful advocates for the company who can draw in top talent.  Employee advocacy adds another layer of insight to potential candidates who may be researching your company already, with Gallup reporting that 71% of candidates use referrals from employees currently working at the company to inform their decision when it comes to choosing a role.

Look beyond LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is likely to be your first port of call when it comes to attracting talent, it’s important not to dismiss other social media platforms where top talent may be dwelling. As part of your employer branding, it’s important to ascertain which platforms your unique audience and desired talent pool are using, so that you can be more targeted in your approach when it comes to engaging potential candidates – it’s better to focus on a limited few platforms rather than aimlessly using many of them.

For example, if you’re advertising for a more interactive or artistic role it might be a good idea to leverage a visual platform like Instagram, which boasts 2 billion users, while if you’re looking for fresh talent to fill more junior roles it could be worth showcasing your business by uploading quirky, fun and engaging videos on TikTok. Meanwhile, Twitter can be a great tool for engaging candidates, thanks to hashtags and the focus the platform places on communication – which make it a great place to share industry news and valuable insights, as a means of staying involved in the conversation happening among the wider community you’re recruiting in. This is one way of organically growing a valuable following of individuals who are genuinely interested in their specialism.

It’s not a one-way street

There’s no doubt that social media is an efficient, immediate and cost-effective tool when it comes to presenting your company in the best possible light. When used correctly, companies can provide top talent with an insight into what it’s like to work there, promoting jobs while simultaneously providing candidates with valuable resources.

Social media also allows recruiters to look at how candidates present themselves in their personal lives, on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. However, if you really want to leverage social media to its fullest potential, you need to open up the conversation and allow potential talent to truly engage with you…Even if that can be uncomfortable at times.

Your company’s social media platforms need to be more than just glittering, carefully-curated online brochures that reek of superficiality. These platforms need to be safe spaces that allow employees and job seekers to get vulnerable and candid about their questions, concerns and expectations – where open communication is valued above all else. This element of meaningful authenticity is ultimately what sets your social media presence apart from old-school, outdated recruitment methods.

The cogs of the data world are perpetually turning. Data never sleeps. Brace yourself for an exciting overview into some of the top data news stories that have been gracing our screens over the past month. 

Wired: Pornhub under investigation for illegal data collection

Pornhub is no stranger to controversy. In March of this year, Netflix released a documentary called Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, which explored the dark undercurrents of the adult streaming platform. Three years prior, The New York Times published an article entitled The Children of Pornhub, an exposé on the child exploitation that took place in plain sight on the platform.

And earlier this summer, Pornhub experienced a fresh new wave of criticism when Italy launched a legal complaint against the website due to its failure to comply to strict European GDPR data laws. According to activists, Pornhub does not sufficiently warn users about how their data is being stored by the website, even though every video they watch is being logged onto their phone, which the platform uses to assign sexual preferences to users, thus informing the videos that pop up in their recommended feed.

And Pornhub isn’t the only adult website coming under fire for its misuse of user data. An analysis of over 22,000 porn website revealed that over 93% of them leak data to third-parties. But the main problem with Pornhub in particular is its inability to be transparent with users – in layman’s terms – about how their data is being used. Users aren’t given a straightforward way to ‘opt-out’ of cookies, which is proving to be the main issue activists take with the website.

Wired: Pornhub is being accused of illegal data collection

Sky News: AI comedians set to take the stage at Edinburgh Fringe

After watching Mo Gawdat’s episode on the Diary of a CEO podcast, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see the funny side to AI. However, the terrifying technological developments taking place under our noses are being confronted head-on by a number of comedians, who consider it the ultimate fodder for dark humour.

One such comedian is LA-based Clown Courtney Pauroso, who invented Vanessa 5000, a robot who is set to perform at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Alongside Vanessa, a whole host of human comedians will become mouthpieces through which jokes that have been conjured up by AI are funnelled. Their job will simply be trying to get a laugh out of the audience using AI jokes, despite the fact that robots are notoriously unfunny.

Humour is a fundamentally complex, inherently human skill: From comedic timing to reading audience emotions, there’s so much that comes into play at a stand-up show. Even when you ask ChatGPT to tell you a joke, something about it feels a little…off. I think it’s safe to say that comedians are safe from the clutches of AI…for now.

Sky News: Is this the future of comedy? The AI acts taking to the stage at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Guardian: Will AI replace architects?

It’s no secret that AI is becoming more and more sophisticated as the days and seconds go by. To some, this may be exciting news, but for others choosing to look at the matter more critically, there seems to be an unspoken tension simmering beneath the surface. The more advanced AI becomes, the more many of us feel like we’re suffocating in a stifling atmosphere of uncertainty. And those among us who feel like AI is on the verge of taking their jobs are undoubtedly feeling it the most.

Writers and actors already feel like they’re on the chopping block (thanks to ChatGPT and advanced CGI) but are architects the latest profession on the firing line?

Using image-making AI tools, it’s now possible to create images of buildings that don’t actually exist – think Gaudi-esque high rises covered in algae and swarming with every colour of the rainbow – simply by describing it and letting the software do the hard work of rendering it.

However, many people don’t realise that AI is already having a tangible impact in the real world, too. Many architecture firms are using AI in real projects, often streamlining the design process by employing different tools for functionality purposes: To optimise the placement of plug sockets and electricity units, or predict the amount of daylight a building will get. Meanwhile, other architecture firms are using AI to brainstorm ideas or put forward multiple design options for a client at the click of a finger – AI is able to create many rough sketches of different design options that the architects themselves can then work from.

Understandably, there are concerns about these developments. Firstly, the issue of intellectual property and data laws is a minefield in and of itself that could be cause ethical issues down the line for many architects depending on this technology. Furthermore, with AI already performing many of the mundane, practical tasks that junior architects do, how long is it until the technology replaces the entire industry point blank?

The Guardian: ‘It’s already way beyond what humans can do’: will AI wipe out architects?

Gov.uk: Every criminal court now part of a single data system

Any true crime buff knows that one of the main reasons it can take so long to bring an offender to justice is the inefficient bureaucracy of a criminal justice system. It’s a tale as old as time: When police officials, lawyers and the courts aren’t united under the common flag of a single system where all case information can be accessed, frustration and chaos inevitably ensues.

A promising new government initiative launched this month promises to resolve this dilemma by gathering all criminal data across England and Wales onto one single digital platform, known as the ‘Common Platform’. Every piece of information relating to a criminal case is now to be stored there, from the beginning of the case – starting with arrest – right up to prison release and probation.

Prior to the launch of this new plan, the criminal justice system still relied on archaic remnants of an outdated system: Namely piles of paperwork and ancient computer systems. This new endeavour looks set to make the criminal justice system more seamless, resulting in a smoother and faster process for all parties involved.

Gov.uk: Every criminal court now connected to single data system for the first time

Sky News: AI is judging your Tinder profile

For many people, there’s nothing more daunting than the prospect of putting together a dating profile. Carefully curating a detailed portrait of yourself to present to potential suitors is no small feat – but luckily, AI could be coming to the rescue.

Tinder is currently testing a new AI tool that promises to sift through a whole album of photos in a bid to pluck out the five best snaps that have the highest chance of securing more matches – according to the Chief Executive of Match, the company that owns Tinder as well as other dating apps, such as Hinge and OkCupid.

This is set to be just one new feature in a series of changes being made by the dating app using AI, that is seeking to improve user efficiency. Tinder already uses an algorithm to increase the chances of users finding a match in fewer swipes, but the app is now planning to have a feature that explains the reasoning behind these decisions to the user. It looks like AI is about to make the minefield of online dating a whole lot simpler.

Sky News: Tinder tests AI as new way to pick your best photos