A two-part check for deciding whether AI belongs in a Product Strategy at all:
Both questions should be answered explicitly, per candidate problem, before committing it to the strategy — including what role a probabilistic (AI) solution plays and what guardrails constrain it.
A related risk sits one level up, in how the strategy itself gets made: AI tools can sharpen a team's strategic thinking (pressure-testing an argument, surfacing gaps) or can substitute for it entirely (generating the strategy outright). "Can tools help bring clarity to thought? Yes. Can tools also be a substitute for thinking? Unfortunately, yes." Product strategy is described as fundamentally a thinking exercise — "the primary tool is the brain" — so AI's legitimate role is sharpening a strategy already reasoned through, not producing one.
Chandra Janakiraman locates AI's current usefulness inside Present Forward: A Five-Phase Process for Problem-Focused Strategy's Preparation phase: competitive-stack research and synthesis, and generating a comprehensive-but-unfocused "mock strategy" draft. The human job that remains is forcing the down-select — cutting a wide AI-generated draft down to the handful of pillars that meet the Good Strategy's Three Components: Pillars, Non-Focus, and Why bar. He speculates about a near-future of coordinated multi-agent systems that handle strategy, roadmap, and engineering execution together, but treats that as speculative rather than current practice.