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Through a series of hands-on exercises, provocations, and guided frameworks, participants will learn how to use AI engines not just as a tool, but as a thought partner that can accelerate research, reveal hidden assumptions, simulate outcomes, and open up new creative possibilities.
The course draws on real-world strategy use cases and is grounded in emerging practice from the field, including synthetic research, AI engine workspaces, scenario generation, and more.
Who is it for?
- Advertising strategists and planners
- Brand strategists
- Marketing strategists working client-side or in consultancies
- Innovation and insight leads
Participants should be familiar with core strategy principles but do not need to have advanced technical knowledge of AI.
Key learning outcomes
By the end of the session, delegates will be able to:
- Apply advanced prompt engineering techniques to produce high-quality, relevant outputs for research, summarisation, and content generation.
- Set up and manage AI “project spaces” to maintain continuity, structure, and depth in ongoing strategic work.
- Create and interrogate synthetic personas to rapidly explore audience mindsets, motivations, and behaviours in early-stage planning.
- Use AI as a thought partner to challenge assumptions, reframe problems, and surface unconventional opportunities.
- Employ AI for scenario thinking and simulation to anticipate strategic options, test decisions, and inform customer-back strategies.
Content
Welcome and context setting: AI as a strategic planning partner
- Introductions and overview of the day.
- Why AI matters now in advertising and marketing planning.
- How planning teams can integrate AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) throughout research and strategy development, rethinking the strategist’s role with AI: augmentation, not automation.
- Debunking AI jargon – defining AI, machine learning, Deep Learning and Generative AI.
Effective prompt engineering in strategy
- Principles of clear, structured prompting – a framework to lift AI outputs from mediocre to exceptional.
- Exercise: Summary and Content Generation… Delegates apply the prompt engineering framework to use AI to summarise an industry trend report, then generate a short, insight-led content piece from the summary.
Project spaces and AI for strategic research and synthetic insight
- Setting up project spaces in AI engines for continuity, context and organisation, using AI for multi-source research aggregation.
- Creating synthetic insights from multiple inputs. Analysing data and building rich synthetic personas using reviews, transcripts, cultural insights and trends.
- Crafting research questions that generate depth, not just summaries. Interviewing synthetic personas to explore tensions, unmet needs, and emotional drivers. Limitations and safeguards. Techniques for triangulating synthetic and real-world insight.
Exercise: Interviewing synthetic personas and analysing data
- Create synthetic personas from a given brief.
- Use AI to interview and explore motivations, barriers, and attitudes.
- Reflect on credibility and value of insights.
Thought partnering and creative thinking using AI
- Framing prompts to challenge assumptions and stretch thinking. Laddering up/down, switching frames, and provocation engineering.
- How to use AI to help you think differently, not just faster. Prompt patterns for reframing and provoking.
Exercise: Stretching strategic thinking
- Use AI to surface alternative framings, unseen risks, and lateral opportunities.
- Group discussion on the value and limits of AI’s provocations.
AI for scenario thinking and strategic simulation
- Exploring AI’s role in generating alternative futures and a workflow for AI-driven scenario planning.
- Strategy simulation and stress-testing using AI.
Exercise: Scenario simulation
- Delegates select a strategic challenge.
- Use AI to generate multiple plausible futures and stress-test strategies.
- Share key insights in pairs or small groups.
AI in CX: Customer-back planning
- Brief overview of using the Value Proposition Canvas with AI.
- Mini-exercise: Identify unmet needs, pains, and gains from AI-simulated customer feedback.
The future of AI in planning
- Agentic AI and planning automation, building an AI augmented strategy workflow
Final reflection
Timings and location
This course will run virtually across two sessions. You will need to attend both:
- Monday, 8 December, 9.30am - 12.30pm
- Tuesday, 9 December, 9.30am - 12.30pm
Your trainer: Neil Perkin
Neil is a renowned writer, keynote speaker and the founder of Only Dead Fish, a consultancy that specialises in applying strategic understanding of digital and emerging technologies to help businesses and leaders optimise their effectiveness within the new, digital-empowered business environment.
He has run global leadership programmes and consulted on transformation and marketing with a broad range of large, multi-national businesses and is a regular keynote speaker across the globe on business and marketing transformation, agile strategy and leadership. He’s been named by BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) as one of the most influential people in the UK digital industry, and by SAGE as a TOP 100 Global business influencer.
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