The tool is tactics. Deciding whether you need the tool at all is strategy.
Michael Porter’s 1996 Harvard Business Review article “What Is Strategy?” drew a line the field still uses: operational effectiveness — doing the same things as competitors, just better or faster — is necessary but not sufficient, because it’s copyable. Real strategy is choosing a distinct, defensible position and building a whole system of activities around it, one a competitor can’t cheaply imitate piece by piece. That’s a macro-level judgment, sitting above any individual tool or tactic a business happens to be using this year.
This essay draws that exact distinction when it compares AI automation to “graphic design tools in the 90s or social media management in the 2000s” and concludes “the real value remained at the macro-strategy level” — the specific tools were replaceable and eventually commoditised, but the businesses that won were the ones that made the right calls about what to build a strategy around in the first place, not which tool to use.
Source: Porter, M.E. (1996), “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.