Most marketers wouldn’t know John Boyd if he jumped out of a strategy deck and tackled them. However, his OODA loop brainchild leverages the power of AI to turbocharge tactical marketing effectiveness.
Boyd, a maverick US Air Force fighter pilot and strategist, understood that survival in combat came down to one thing: speed of decision-making. The OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, then rinse and repeat was his insight that gave him the nickname of ’40 second Boyd’ He was never beaten in flight simulator dogfight combat. He understood that whoever cycles through that loop faster reshapes the contest and forces the opponent into reactive mode. In air combat, this meant living. In business, it means winning.
OODA is a mindset. AI is changing the tempo of that mindset in ways even Boyd could not have imagined.
AI can Turbocharge tactical Tempo
Until recently, the bottleneck in decision-making wasn’t data, or insight, or even creativity. It was people. Our slow, deliberate committee meetings, our weekly WIPs, the reviews that drag on longer than a Sydney DA approval.
AI doesn’t suffer these constraints. It observes more, faster. It orients by processing billions of data points in real-time. It proposes decisions with options and probabilities baked in. And it acts immediately when allowed, not months.
What used to be a quarterly campaign development cycle can now happen in an afternoon. And that changes everything.
The limiting factor is the siloed org chart.
The challenge isn’t getting AI to do the work. It already can. The real challenge is getting organisations to leverage the power of speed AI can deliver.
Too many CMOs are caught in the headlights, stuck in outdated governance and fear of missteps. They’re playing the game like it’s 2012. Time as a constraint is rapidly being removed. AI can produce a full marketing program overnight. Then it is handed to the organisational approval processes, often as decisive as my Aunt Mimi.
Meanwhile, your competitor, the one who slashed the approval chain and taught their AI what “on-brand” means, has already launched, learned, and iterated.
Leadership Is the Bottleneck
The real AI revolution is not technical. It’s cultural, and it is leadership.
Speed has become the underrated competitive edge. Not speed for its own sake, but speed to consider, learn, adapt, execute, and then repeat the cycle. This means leaders must rethink their role. They are no longer approval gatekeepers; they act as tempo setters. The conductor of a real-time orchestra where instruments never sleep and tempo changes every hour.
Reclaim the OODA Loop
Every time a decision is delayed, it hands the advantage to the opposition.
In Boyd’s world, if you could stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop, responding to changes faster than they could comprehend, you won.
AI lets us do that not just to competitors, but to markets, media shifts, consumer moods, even cultural trends.
But only if we let it.
As AI becomes embedded in workflows, the question becomes: who trains the AI?
Who owns the “brand brain” that defines tone, style, and judgment?
Smart brands are reclaiming that brain. They are training AI on their own assets and experiences, not renting a brain from their agency. That brain learns, evolves, and becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
Marketing to succeed in this new world must become an adaptive system.
In a world moving at AI speed, Boyd’s old dictum is truer than ever:
Decide fast. Act faster. Or die slow.
If you are not already building your AI-accelerated OODA loop, your competitors are. By the time you notice, they’ll be on to the next loop, and you may be headed for oblivion.
