The AI Club Sandwich: Where AI Really Belongs in Strategic Planning

There’s no shortage of discussion about how AI is going to change marketing. But after completing the Wharton AI in Marketing program and, more importantly, putting what I learned into practice across several rounds of strategic planning, I’ve become much clearer about where I think AI genuinely adds value.

What role should AI play in Strategic Planning?

I don’t believe we should be handing strategy over to AI. The most important strategic decisions still require human judgement, experience and an understanding of the organisation that AI simply doesn’t have. But between those moments of human judgement, I’ve found AI can dramatically increase the breadth and depth of thinking available to us.

I’ve started thinking about it as the AI Club Sandwich.

The bread is human intelligence. AI is the filling.

And the order of the ingredients matters.

·         Human intelligence: Define the challenge

·         AI: Assess the situation and surface the options

·         Human intelligence: Make the strategic choices

·         AI: Expand the possibilities for action

·         Human intelligence: Choose, prioritise and execute

What I like about this analogy is that it puts AI in what I believe is its rightful place. It can do an extraordinary amount of work between our decisions, but responsibility for the strategy and the choices you make remains firmly with the humans.

We, the humans:

·         define the problem we are trying to solve,

·         decide where we have the right to win,

·         set the priorities

·         and ultimately choose what we are going to do.

In fact, the more powerful the technology becomes, the more important it is that marketers are clear about which parts of the process require judgement, context, experience and accountability.

The AI Club Sandwich is a strategic planning framework developed by Via Marca that puts AI between moments of human strategic judgement. Humans define the challenge, AI explores the strategic options, humans make the choices, AI expands the possibilities for action, and humans ultimately decide what to prioritise and execute.

Slice 1: Use human intelligence to define the strategic challenge

Before opening ChatGPT, there is a critical job for the strategist to do. Define the Challenge the plan needs to solve.  I call this setting the sandpit before we dig.

There is usually no shortage of signals. Sales may be slowing, penetration may be down, a competitor may be gaining share, customer demands may be shifting, innovation may not be delivering, or the team may simply feel that growth is becoming harder to find. The strategist’s job is not to take the loudest signal at face value. It is to get under the hood, connect the evidence and work out what is really going on.

That diagnosis requires context and judgement. It means separating symptoms from causes, deciding which evidence matters, recognising what the organisation may be overreacting to, and identifying the problem that is genuinely worth solving. This is the work that defines the sandpit for everything that follows.

I have found that this matters even more when AI enters the process. AI is exceptionally good at investigating a problem once you point it in the right direction. But if the challenge is poorly defined, it will simply explore the wrong territory with impressive speed and confidence, to the point that you might inadvertently think it is right!

This is why I still start my Options to Action process with Define the Problem. Before asking AI to analyse the market and uncover available opportunities, the human needs to be clear about the challenge, the strategic questions we need answered and the boundaries of the investigation. Those choices create the sandpit in which AI can then do its best work.

The better we define the challenge, the better the investigation that follows. And that is where the first layer of AI investigation starts to become genuinely powerful.

Filling 1: Use AI to assess the market and identify growth opportunities

Once the challenge is clear and the sandpit is set, this is where I've found AI can become incredibly powerful.

Give it a clearly defined sandpit, the right information and, most importantly, the right strategic questions, and AI can conduct a much broader and deeper situation assessment than would previously have been practical within the time and resource constraints of most planning processes.

It can interrogate the market from multiple angles, identify patterns across large amounts of information, explore emerging consumer and category dynamics, assess competitors, surface potential growth opportunities and market threats, and help identify organisational capabilities and barriers that might affect our ability to win.

The important distinction is that I am not asking AI to write me the strategy. I am asking it to make sure we have explored the strategic landscape properly and surfaced all possible growth options before we make choices and write the plan.

The output from this stage should not be a neat answer. It should be a richer option set. A clear view of the opportunities, threats, capabilities and barriers that could plausibly solve the challenge we defined at the start.

And then the sandwich needs another slice of bread, because having more options is not the same as having a strategy.

Slice 2: Use human judgement to make strategic choices

One of the things AI is very good at is giving us more possibilities. One of the things strategy requires is the discipline to choose between them.

Once the situation has been assessed and the credible strategic options are on the table, I bring the process firmly back to human judgement. This is where the team needs to assess each opportunity against the organisation’s right to win.

·         Which opportunities are attractive in the market, but also genuinely play to our strengths?

·         Where do we have an advantage, capability or permission that makes success more likely?

·         What barriers can we realistically overcome?

·         Which opportunities are worth concentrating resources behind?

This is the point at which strategy stops being an interesting collection of observations and becomes a set of choices. The big bets are made, strategic priorities are set and objectives are written. Just as importantly, the team decides what will not be pursued.

I think this human role becomes more important, not less, as AI makes it easier to surface more options. A long list of plausible growth opportunities can create the illusion of strategy, but strategy is not having options. Strategy is making choices about which options matter most and committing the organisation behind them.

In my Options to Action framework, this is the bridge between Assess the Options and Make Choices. AI can make the first part much richer by helping us uncover opportunities we may otherwise have missed and challenging us with evidence we may not have considered. But the second part still requires experience, commercial judgement, organisational context and accountability.

AI expands the option set. Human judgement narrows it. I think that is one of the most useful distinctions we can make about the role of AI in strategic planning.

Filling 2: Use AI to generate growth ideas and initiatives

Once the strategic choices have been made, I bring AI back into the process for a second time. This time, the job is very different. We are no longer asking it to explore where we could play. We have made those choices. We are asking it to help us expand the possibilities for how we might win.

This is where the innovation tournament idea I took from the Wharton program has changed the way I approach tactical ideation. In a traditional workshop, the number of ideas a team can generate is naturally constrained by time, energy and the collective capacity of the people in the room. Even very good teams can converge too quickly on the first few ideas that feel sensible, familiar or achievable.

AI changes the economics of that process. Once you give it a clear strategic priority, a defined objective, a consumer tension and strong guardrails, you can generate and explore a much broader range of initiatives than would previously have been practical. You can look across different territories, borrow inspiration from other categories, combine ideas in unusual ways and deliberately push beyond the most obvious answers.

That breadth matters because the more high-quality options you generate, the greater the chance of finding the idea that genuinely moves the strategy forward.

But the strategic constraints matter just as much. Without them, AI simply produces more ideas. With them, it can help produce ideas that are creative, commercially grounded and relevant to the ambition you have already chosen.

The final slice: Use human judgement to prioritise and execute

There is one final piece of bread.

AI might help us generate fifty potential initiatives, but we shouldn't execute fifty initiatives.

Someone still needs to decide which ideas have the greatest potential, which are genuinely differentiated, what the organisation can realistically deliver, where resources should be allocated, where the risk lies and what doesn't make the cut.

That requires human diversity, judgement and taste.

It also requires discipline. One of the biggest challenges I see in planning isn't a shortage of ideas. It's an unwillingness to prioritise them. Organisations add initiatives rather than make choices, spreading resources more thinly until the strategy becomes a collection of activities rather than a clear plan for growth.

AI potentially makes that problem worse because it makes generating more things to do extraordinarily easy.

Which makes the final human decision even more important.

What are we actually going to do?

And just as importantly: What are we going to choose not to do?

Can AI write your brand strategy?

After several rounds of applying AI within real planning processes, I've become much more optimistic about what it can contribute. But I've also become more convinced of the importance of the human strategist.

The parts of planning that AI is increasingly good at are substantial. It can investigate at a scale we couldn't previously contemplate, synthesise information quickly, challenge assumptions, expose us to different perspectives and dramatically increase the number of ideas we can explore.

But the most important moments in strategy remain moments of human judgement.

We define the problem. AI helps us explore it. We make the strategic choices. AI helps us expand the possibilities for delivering them. And then we decide what actually gets done.

That's my AI Club Sandwich:

Human judgement → AI exploration → Human choice → AI ideation → Human selection.

The right ingredients, in the right order.

Bon Appetit

About Anne Ricci and Via Marca Brand Strategy

Anne Ricci is a marketing and brand strategy consultant and founder of Via Marca Brand Strategy. She helps marketing teams make sharper strategic choices through brand growth planning, brand positioning and marketing capability development. Her Options to Action framework helps marketers move from defining the real growth problem, through assessing strategic options and making choices, to creating focused plans for action.