When ChatGPT Glitches, Does Your Strategy Hold Up?
When ChatGPT (Partially) Goes Down: What Today’s Outage Reminded Me About Strategy
This morning, I opened ChatGPT on my desktop to get a few things moving, only to be greeted by a tiny, red error message. No big deal, right? Except it wasn’t just me. Slack messages started rolling in. Other folks in the marketing world were seeing the same issue. Old chats were there, some mobile versions were fine, but the pattern was clear: OpenAI was having a rough day.
If you’re someone who builds content, drafts strategy docs, or just uses AI tools as part of your day-to-day workflow, it’s an uncomfortable feeling when it stutters. Because even if you don’t rely on it entirely, you get used to having it in your back pocket.
So here’s what today reminded me, and what might be worth keeping in mind before the next outage hits.
AI Is a Tool, Not a Strategy
ChatGPT is great at structure, synthesis, and helping you get unstuck. But it’s not a plan. It’s not a positioning exercise. It’s not a marketing brief. And it definitely doesn’t know your voice, your audience, or your goals the way you do.
When the tool goes offline, the thinking still has to happen. The work still needs to be done. If AI is your only engine for content or ideation, a glitch like today turns into a full stop. That’s a systems problem, not a tech one.
Good Workflows Have Fail-Safes
At HDIC, I use tools like ChatGPT the same way I use dashboards, notebooks, and caffeine: regularly, but not exclusively. A good workflow is designed to keep moving, even if one piece of the machine goes offline.
This is the part most teams overlook. We build processes that depend entirely on tools with no backup, and then wonder why our timelines crumble the moment something breaks.
Use AI, sure. But also:
Save prompts and outputs in shared docs
Keep core brand messaging documented somewhere accessible to humans
Know how to write a paragraph without an autocomplete engine
It’s not about being analog. It’s about being resilient.
Good Content Doesn’t Start With a Prompt
The truth is, ChatGPT can’t tell you what you mean. It can only remix what you feed it.
If you’re not already clear on your perspective, your audience, or the problem you’re solving, AI can make you faster, but not better. That’s why so much “AI content” is easy to spot. It doesn’t truly grok your reasons for animal-saving charity work, or what you get from that tattered copy of Walden that you turn to when things are overwhelming, or the fact that Wu-Tang is for the children. Efficiency becomes the tradeoff for intentionality.
The best content still comes from people who know what they’re trying to say. AI can help shape it, but the signal has to come from somewhere else.
Outages happen. Platforms break. API limits get hit.
But your strategy, your actual strategy, should still hold up.
Today was a good gut-check for me. If it was one for you too, maybe it’s time to look at what parts of your workflow are helping you grow, and what parts are just filling space.
Want help building a marketing strategy that doesn’t fall apart when a tool goes dark? Let’s talk!