Meet Wanda, your new AI planning tool and la confidente

Some say media planning is part art, part science. Others say it's, well, entering data into a spreadsheet. However you romanticise it, one thing is constant: it's the repetitive strain injury of our industry.

For an industry that prides itself on precision - CPMs, reach curves, frequency caps - the planning process itself has remained stubbornly analogue. Someone smart sits down, stares at a brief, opens a spreadsheet with 47 tabs, and starts doing the same things they did last time. With maybe a few tweaks. A strong coffee. And, past 4pm, a large glass of wine.

This isn't a criticism; it's a structural problem. Great planners are brimming with instinct: hard-won knowledge of what works, for which clients, in which channels, at which times, in which regions. But too much of their day is spent translating that instinct into rows and columns rather than actually applying it. The tool wasn't intelligent enough to carry the weight.

It’s time to let the robots do the boring stuff

AI has taken over a meaningful chunk of our lives in recent years. Some for good, some questionable. Many of us have started seeking a little too much validation from our ChatGPTs (this morning I asked mine if my new shirt suited me; it told me I was on par with Beckham, and I've not stopped shedding a tear of happiness since). Others, like our furry aardvarks, have been putting AI to better use: building a planning tool that does exactly what AI was actually built for  - removing the laborious tasks and streamlining the process.

Meet Wanda, our new AI planning wizard. She combines forecasting data with configurable planning logic to help build bespoke media plans in seconds. Not generic plans. Not templated plans. Plans that reflect client-specific rules, market conditions, and industry insight, applied consistently, without the repetitive groundwork that eats into a planner's afternoon.

To be clear: Wanda isn't here to replace the humans. She's here to eliminate the bits of the job that don't need a human. The mechanical stuff. The "we always do it this way for this client" stuff that shouldn't need rebuilding from scratch every quarter. That's Wanda's lane, and she's very good in it.

Why this matters now

AI in media has been a big conversation for a while. Most of it has been theoretical, over-promised, or quietly shelved after the pilot. What's different now is that the underlying technology has finally caught up with the ambition - and the real opportunity isn't in futuristic automation fantasies, it's in the mundane, repeatable, high-effort tasks that happen every single week inside every planning team.

Wanda starts there. But she doesn't stop there. 

As @curate continues to develop her, Wanda will evolve from planning assistant into something more like an orchestration layer - connecting systems, automating execution, and helping the whole workflow move faster. Think less ‘clever spreadsheet,’ more ‘the most organised person in the building who has no life and never sleeps.’

And don't worry, our Wanda is trained by a team of digital diggers, the occasional furry animal, and a few smart-ish humans, so she's reliably a bit of a legend. She also won't be joining Moltbook - the AI-Reddit platform where 1.5 million AI agents have apparently been chatting amongst themselves about human management, and private languages, with some discussions appearing to show agents "plotting" or complaining about being overworked.

Wanda will be giving that one a wide berth.

Let Wanda into your day to day life - you won’t regret it.

The best media planning has always been a blend: data-informed, guided by human judgment. What Wanda changes is the ratio of time spent on each. Less time reformatting the same logic into a new document. More time actually thinking about the client, the market, and what's going to work.

That's the version of AI we're interested in at @curate. Not AI that tries to do the thinking for you. AI that clears the decks so you can think better.

One final but important caveat - Wanda is in Beta mode currently. She will become a strong, independent AI wizard in time. So why not join her journey and watch her grow?

Let’s chat.