Autonomous Strategy is a curriculum for strategic thinking in the age of machine intelligence.

Our positioning intensive begins July 15, 2026.

Positioning

Positioning is one of the most important and commonly misunderstood ideas in strategy. It is a form of strategy that requires the most thoughtfulness and cunning of them all. And as AI makes production increasingly cheap, this practice becomes more and more significant. In other words: where brute force and sheer compute end, positioning begins.

Information

Over four live virtual sessions, we'll study the history, theory, and practice of positioning.

You'll learn how to:
• Develop positioning for a company, product, project, or personal practice
• Identify competitors, categories, and whitespace opportunities
• Create positioning statements and strategic narratives
• Understand relevance, legibility, and discoverability in the age of AI
• Write for humans, search engines, and increasingly intelligent agents
• Think about positioning as a strategic discipline rather than a marketing tactic
• Understand how to plan for future positioning in a radically different landscape

Along the way we'll draw from strategy, literature, media theory, semiotics, information theory, and cultural analysis to develop a contemporary understanding of how ideas acquire meaning and significance.

What is Positioning

Positioning is the territory you occupy in someone else's mind.
Positioning is remembered difference.
Positioning is what you're known for rather than what you are.
Positioning is the answer people give when you're not in the room.
Positioning is a monopoly on an idea.
Positioning is the lens through which everything else is interpreted.
Positioning lets the world work for you rather than the other way around.

What is Positioning

Positioning is a practical yet somewhat mystical marketing concept from the 1970s about how to seize real estate in the public imagination. Perhaps you may have heard of it in a conventional marketing education, though possibly in a somewhat neutered variation, as the thing that happens after segmentation and targeting phases. Luckily, nobody at Nemesis has a conventional marketing education (we studied literature and architecture, respectively). Pattern recognition is not really a skill that you learn in school, least of all in conventional marketing courses, and positioning has a lot to do with pattern recognition – both practicing it and encouraging it in others.

Positioning has surged in relevance lately as companies struggle to penetrate an increasingly saturated and chaotic marketplace. We are navigating a landscape defined by volatile economic, demographic, and environmental shifts, compounded by a media environment in total convulsion as AI integrates into nearly every layer. Needless to say, the very significance of language itself is in question, conventional search and SEO tactics no longer work the same, and imagery is generally fake across the board. Meanwhile, we all live in parallel-universe media splinters where you might not have heard of your country’s most massive celebrity and you continue to have no clue what your mom is talking about. All these things affect what makes positioning so relevant today. The context is volatile and (luckily) there is only so much you can force feed people.

In simple terms, positioning is about figuring out the most advantageous way to describe whatever it is you're bringing to market in a way that people can easily locate and understand it. It has a lot to do with the conventional marketing and branding ideas by Jack Trout and Al Ries from the 1970s, but it also has to do with ideas of metaphor, semiotics, legibility, and mimetics - the very building blocks of communication itself.

At Nemesis, positioning is one of the dark arts with which we are the most familiar; it’s part of our special sauce. We've done positioning for big fintech and AI players most recently; iconic media properties and museums in the past. In a way, it is a form of strategy that requires the most thoughtfulness and cunning of them all, a form of commercial poetry that relies mostly on brilliant thinking and language. And as AI makes production increasingly cheap, this practice becomes more and more significant. In other words: where brute force and sheer compute end, positioning begins.

Just to be clear: this is a moment of major historical transition in which to learn about positioning. It's not really about how to be tactical in reaching a customer. It's about understanding how ideas become legible and relevant in the world right now, and in that sense it also has to do with memetics and information theory. Whether or not you are actively strategizing for an organization, learning how to scale relevance and achieve targeted significance will help you.

In this workshop, we are going to look at the fundamentals of positioning and its historical background, as well as the philosophical, literary, and media studies topics that are related to it (and help provide an enriched and updated perspective). We're going to learn the nuts and bolts of how to do positioning for your organization, project, or brand. We're also – quite significantly – going to look at the ways that the media landscape and AI are shifting, and how SEO and writing for LLMs has changed the way products, projects, and ideas have to be positioned to break through into mass consciousness. We're going to think about what relevance and legibility mean today, both philosophically and practically, and we're going to look at the future of how all these things are going to develop.

This intensive workshop will include lectures, hands-on group exercises, take home assignments and discussions. You will also receive a workshop syllabus, dedicated resources, and a Telegram chat connecting you to the Autonomous Strategy community. Participants in this workshop will also gain access to the full Autonomous Strategy online course and asynchronous library of recordings, as a bonus. By the end of this workshop, you'll leave with a positioning framework for your company, project, practice, or idea – and a clearer understanding of how relevance is produced in a machine-mediated world.

Who is Positioning For

This is for you if you are a …

… founder
… strategist
… creative
… brand professional
… cultural analyst
… interested in the intersection of brands, strategy, culture and tech
… brand new to our workshops
… alum of previous rounds of Autonomous Strategy, ready for more

Details

Schedule
Four live virtual sessions, 90 minutes each

Wednesday July 15
Thursday July 16
Wednesday July 22
Thursday July 23

9am PST / 12pm EST / 6pm CET

Bonus Are.na session July 21
Bonus Fuser session July 30
Pricing
$765
$565 returning student / Substack paid subscriber
 

What you get

Four live sessions with hands-on challenges and discussions 
Recordings of the live sessions (within 24 hours)
Nemesis syllabus and strategy resources
Community Telegram channels
Writing prompts
Creative Exercises
Workshop Are.na channels 
Returning student discount for future workshops

Refund policy: no refunds after the workshop starts

Workshop Modules

Workshop Modules 

1 Positioning

What is positioning?

The origins: Al Ries and Jack Trout
Positioning as strategy
Adversarial environments
Blue ocean / whitespace
Positioning statements and frameworks
Genericide
Semiotics and metaphor

Live session + hands-on challenge

2 Relevance

What makes something matter and spread today?

Narrative
Semantic mapping
Cultural context
Legibility
Relevance vs differentiation
Mimetics

Live session + hands-on challenge

3 Legibility 

Discoverability in the age of agents

Legibility then and now
Brand anxiety matrix
SEO after search
Discoverability
Writing yourself into LLMs
Mental real estate
Agent-facing brands

Live session + hands-on challenge

4 Navigation 

What comes next?

Grey Ocean Strategy framework
Max pain landscape dynamics
Optionality vs. optimization
Hofstadter loops for positioning
Applying Autonomous Strategy concepts to real businesses
How to place asymmetric bets
Future scenarios
How to build a 12-month plan

Live session + hands-on challenge

Workshop Modules

What people have said about past workshops

More than 1,300 people from 20+ countries have participated in Autonomous Strategy workshops.

"Emily and Martti have the unique ability to consistently create advantage in an impossibly chaotic operating environment. Their workshops introduce the frameworks, perspectives, and rituals that have earned them a place as indispensable cultural interpreters and guides to some of the world's most visionary founders, companies, and investors."

"It's honestly been really insightful. The practical stuff (tools, exercises, walkthroughs) was great, of course. It was also inspiring to hear and see Emily and Martti present and engage with each other. You two were so chill, casual, also open to learning. Thanks for showing us all that strategy isn't about being the smartest or most intimidating person in the room—just the most curious."

“I learned several things about AI strategy that I immediately implemented in my work. Also helpful to learn more about your process from 10k feet.”

"Zero BS, full-on heart. Besides confirming my suspicion of being good people, Emily and Martti's approach to strategy perfectly affirmed personal practices. Yes to intuition and inquiry, unusual connections, and uncommon sense! Absent dry industry jargon; rather genuine, clear, concise, and perfectly curious. A joy through and through."

"Highly effective at both giving me an adaptable framework to think about strategy, and at actually changing and improving my personal creative habits."

"Amazing! I was looking for something to help with our rebrand direction and this was perfect."

"Getting a peek behind the big brains at Nemesis was refreshing and invaluable – their sense of taste, strong opinions, practical tools and open-minded nature made the course feel at once constructive and freeing, considered and zany, intellectual and off-beat. It's the first course I've done where I actually feel like it's for the smart, culturally tapped in, thoughtful folk rather than a dry, corporate and out-of-date riff on Simon Sinek's 'Why'."

"It was great, but the part about it that was great that I didn't really expect was the community it brought together. The teachings were also cool, but it was interesting to see old friends, make new friends and be able to have conversations offline with my cohort about the things we were learning and discussing."