For crafting product strategy itself, the primary tool is the brain — strategy work is fundamentally an act of thinking clearly about tradeoffs, not an artifact-production task. ('For something like product strategy, the primary tool is the brain. That's the primary tool because product strategy is all about thinking, thinking clearly.')
AI tools can sharpen that thinking — surfacing alternatives, structuring arguments — but the same tools can just as easily substitute for the thinking itself if a leader offloads the actual reasoning to them. The risk is specific to strategy work: unlike execution tasks where AI output can be checked against ground truth, a strategy's soundness depends entirely on the quality of the reasoning behind it, which can't be outsourced without being hollowed out.
This is a companion caution to AI-Fit Framework for Product Strategy (whether AI belongs in the strategy's content) — this concept is about whether AI belongs in the process of producing the strategy. It also reinforces why Written Narrative Strategy Artifact (Amazon Six-Pager) favors writing a six-pager: the writing process itself forces thinking that a tool cannot substitute for.