Mini-AI-Con / 10 June 2026 edition

Force × Direction

what AI actually amplifies in strategy work.

my writing, incl. this talk's essay
lucas-portfolio-pi.vercel.app

Lucas Zhu · Ikigai AI Ventures

force × direction · Ikigai AI Ventures01 / 13

who am I

Who am I?

01 · McKINSEY

What great looks like

Seven years of strategy, corporate finance and PE diligence — understanding how good businesses and systems work, and what great strategy looks like.

→ the mechanic

02 · HELLOFRESH ANZ

Strategy from the inside

Running strategic planning and building inside a multinational — where the plan meets the organisation that has to live it.

→ the driver

03 · NOW

Building with AI, daily

My own business, and discovering what it means to be an agentic engineer — Ikigai AI Ventures: consulting and AI-strategy services.

→ the builder

the full essay → lucas-portfolio-pi.vercel.app/writing/mechanic-driver-dad-builder

So this isn't a prediction. It's what changed under my own hands.

force × direction · Ikigai AI Ventures02 / 13

01 · the frame

Every strategic problem
is a vector.

How you solve this equation is what an engagement is for.

DIRECTION

what's the problem we're solving? what are your hypotheses — and your prioritisation?

FORCE

how much analytical horsepower behind it?

DESTINATION

have we answered the client's — our business's — questions?

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02 · the economics that broke

UNTIL 2023

Force was the bottleneck.

Smart, expensive humans took weeks to gather, model, synthesise and present.
The reason consulting cost what it did is that raw analytical force was scarce.

weeks of grind a team of analysts force = the whole invoice

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02 · the economics that broke

SINCE 2023

That bottleneck is gone.
Force is almost free.

So what is left? The direction.
And direction does not get cheaper with AI.

If anything it gets more expensive — because you can now move at full speed in whichever direction you happen to point at.

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03 · the failure mode

More force,
faster,
confidently wrong.

The output looks polished. It moves. It compiles. It even reads well.
But if the question underneath was wrong, all that polish does is make the wrong answer easier to ship.

force × direction · Ikigai AI Ventures06 / 13

04 · a true story · 2018, my first due diligence

How a human got to the answer.

A medical-AI company reading millions of chest x-rays. A client paid us to answer one question: which country should it sell in first? I ran that work. No AI — just iteration.

The thick line was earned through days of Excel, dead ends, and being told it was wrong. That is how judgment and taste get built.

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04 · same job · day one with AI

How AI gets to the answer.

Thirty polished pages by lunch. Six markets at once: US, China, Japan, all of it — thick, convincing arrows, every direction at full force.

AI fluency arrived before direction discipline. They automated the wrong half of the job and called it productivity.

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05 · the work, in two layers

One layer AI replaces.
One it can't reach — yet.

LAYER 01 — FORCE

AI replaces this

Research synthesis
Benchmarking
Model templating
First-draft decks
Data gathering
Not augments — replaces

LAYER 02 — DIRECTION

AI doesn't own this

Which question to ask
Reading a room
Telling a CEO what they don't want to hear
Earning a scared client's trust
The judgement call when the data is genuinely ambiguous

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06 · what makes you distinctive

Three circles. The job is the overlap.

Domain expertise — knowing the detail, and reading the room.

Taste — the right answer, and the story that lands it. AI is an execution engine, not a taste engine.

AI fluency — knowing what it can do, and more importantly what it cannot.

Drop one and there's a gap: taste + fluency without expertise is just beautiful arrows into the air.

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07 · what to do Monday morning

Three things,
starting tomorrow.

Do these and you're ahead of 95% of people on what AI can actually do for you — and for your business.

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07 · the takeaways

Build the half AI can't.

01

Ensure human-AI content discipline

Challenge your associates to explain what they built vs what AI did for them — in all their writing. And everything you review should carry an outcome: approval, information, or a decision.

→ provenance + purpose in every review

02

Earn the right to a direction

Go deep before you go fast. Not TikTok news — the ecosystem: reports, operator calls, investor calls. Understand which industry you enjoy, and why they do what they do.

→ depth, not headlines

03

Start building actual things

Lock yourself in a room. Pick a real use case you care about. Solo-build it with an agent. Ship something. You'll learn more in a weekend than in a year of reading about it.

→ accelerate your taste

The operator's test: audit one workflow you just sped up — was the question right, or did you just ship the wrong answer faster?

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the takeaway

Force is free now.
Direction is the whole job.

A wrong vector at full force just gets you to the wrong answer faster — and now with better typography.

Before you fire up the AI, ask the only question it can't ask for you:
am I sure I'm pointing at the right destination?

Lucas Zhu · Ikigai AI Ventures · Mini-AI-Con, 10 June 2026 · thank you

scan → the essay + more writing
lucas-portfolio-pi.vercel.app

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