Most AI content tools know what LinkedIn likes. They don’t know what you are trying to build.
That distinction matters more than most people realise — and it’s why the same tool that generates impressive-looking recommendations for one user can produce content that feels slightly off for another. The posts look polished. The topics seem relevant. But they don’t quite sound like you, don’t quite serve the audiences you’re trying to reach, and don’t quite advance the commercial outcomes you’re working toward.
The problem isn’t the AI. It’s the absence of strategy context.
The gap between what AI knows and what you need
A content AI without strategy context is operating from two inputs: your past performance data and general platform intelligence. It can tell you that posts about AI get strong engagement, that founder stories outperform company updates, and that posting on Tuesday mornings tends to land better than Friday afternoons.
That’s useful. But it doesn’t know:
- Which of your content pillars is underrepresented and needs more weight
- That one of your audience segments is a commercial growth target, not just a follower category
- That your current priority is building credibility in a specific sector, not maximising general reach
- That a particular tone or framing is off-brand, even if it would perform well
Without that context, an AI optimises for engagement. With it, an AI can optimise for your strategy — which is a fundamentally different thing.
Connecting strategy to Lexi
We solved this by building a strategy brief in Notion and connecting it to Lexi, ProPresence’s AI analysis layer.
The brief is a single page that consolidates everything Lexi needs to make genuinely useful recommendations: content pillars, target audience profiles (including their frustrations, goals, and the hook language that resonates with them), tone of voice rules, current commercial priorities, and guidance on what good content looks like versus what to avoid.
In ProPresence Account Settings, you paste the URL of your Notion strategy page. ProPresence fetches that page and injects it into Lexi’s context whenever she generates a recommendation — article suggestions, post ideas, content analysis, or her weekly digest.
The result is that Lexi’s recommendations go from “here are topics performing well on LinkedIn” to “here is content aligned with your research commercialisation pillar, written for your deep tech founder audience, that follows your four-beat narrative structure.”
That’s a meaningful upgrade.
Why Notion, not a form inside ProPresence
We deliberately kept the strategy brief outside ProPresence, and it was the right call.
ProPresence serves multiple clients with different strategies. A strategy brief that lives inside the product as a per-user settings form gets stale, because it requires you to remember to update it inside a tool rather than in the place where your thinking actually happens.
Notion is where strategy lives for most teams already. Keeping the brief there means it stays current — because you’re updating it as part of your actual strategic work, not as a separate maintenance task inside a publishing tool. When the brief changes, Lexi’s recommendations change with it. No rebuild, no re-import, no duplication of effort.
The reinforcement learning loop
The real value compounds over time.
Lexi doesn’t just read your strategy brief once. Every recommendation she makes is shaped by it, and every interaction — which suggestions you act on, which posts you write, which angles you develop — feeds back into a richer understanding of what works for your specific strategy and audiences.
This is the difference between a tool that’s useful from day one and a tool that gets more useful the longer you use it. The strategy brief establishes the intent. The usage data establishes what’s actually landing. Together, they create a tightening loop between what you’re trying to build and what Lexi recommends.
Generic AI tools optimise toward the platform average. This approach optimises toward your strategy. Those are different destinations.
What this looks like in practice
In our own use, the shift was immediate. Before the strategy brief, Lexi surfaced content ideas that were broadly relevant to our industry intersections — marketing, technology, innovation. After connecting the brief, her suggestions specifically referenced our thought leadership pillar, pointed toward angles suited to our executive leadership audience, and flagged when a proposed framing was closer to announcement than insight.
She also became useful for something we hadn’t anticipated: accountability. When Lexi flags that a particular pillar hasn’t been touched in two weeks, or that recent output has skewed heavily toward one audience segment, it’s a prompt to rebalance — not because the algorithm wants it, but because the strategy requires it.
That’s the kind of recommendation worth acting on.
Getting started
If you’re a ProPresence user, setting this up takes about an hour: write your strategy brief in Notion, connect it in Account Settings, and let Lexi refresh. The brief doesn’t need to be perfect from day one — it just needs to exist. You’ll refine it as your strategy evolves.
The most common mistake is trying to make the brief comprehensive before connecting it. Don’t. A brief that covers your three core pillars, your two primary audiences, and your current priority is enough to shift the quality of Lexi’s recommendations immediately.
Start there.