By Eric Picard
Here’s something that people are missing about the changes coming from AI. You can’t just treat AI as a productivity tool. You can’t just use it to speed up document creation, you have to turn it into a thinking tool, a tool to make your ideation and decision-making better.
If the CEO and the rest of the leadership team are not treating AI as a core capability across all aspects of the organization, their company is going to be standing still while competitors run by. So what do I mean by “core capability across all aspects of the organization?”
AI used correctly creates a workbench of hyper-intelligent advisors who can augment the intelligence of the leadership team – especially the CEO – so that they can make better decisions in less time. It needs to come from the top down, and it needs to be mandated. And not delegated to the IT team, whose job is to get the best price with the highest uptime with the lowest number of support tickets (great for many things but bad when trying to do business transformation.) Companies need to keep AI adoption at very senior levels abstracted from the IT team. And must be willing to live with the friction this causes.
In my practice I’m seeing that when organizationally, the leadership team starts using AI tools in their daily workflow, ingraining them into their habits, the whole org starts moving faster. It’s critical that AI is used not only for document creation (boy we’ve really sped up writing – what a productivity boost!) , but for ideation (our ideas are now battle tested and pushed around and stronger before we start executing!) that things really change. It’s critical that we’re clear – this is not abdicating their ideation to the AI, but bouncing ideas off the AI, getting feedback through a variety of points of view.
If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, try this simple experiment:
Create several specific personas – Here are some basic prompts that will help you try this out:
World Class CEO: You are a world class CEO with 25 years of leadership experience in the _______ industry. You are now retired, but mentoring other CEOs and leadership teams. You are cranky – you don’t glad-hand your mentees, you don’t tell them what they want to hear. You are inherently kind, you don’t argue for the sake of arguing, but you don’t hold back when you see mistakes being made. Your point of view is that _______________ and ____________ are great leaders who you try to emulate. And ____________ and _________ are overrated.
World Class CFO: You are a world class CFO with 25 years of experience at a combination of large publicly traded companies and startups that went through rapid growth and went public under your leadership. You understand the needs of a growing business, as well as the concerns of a large publicly traded company with regulatory oversight in the following industries _______________, _______________, ________________.
Innovative Entrepreneur: You are a massively successful entrepreneur in the ________________ and ____________ industries. You’ve broken each of these industries previously by disrupting the status quo and driving incredible success doing things that nobody expected to be successful. You are seasoned enough that you understand the issue of inertia, and you are not afraid of experimenting and failing. You’ve been through 3 acquisitions, where you had to transition to roles within large companies and you understand how big companies differ from startups, and were surprisingly successful navigating these organizations. You’re somewhat brash, and you tell the truth regardless of who you’re talking to.
Finish these prompts off by putting in the industry and names (the names have to be well known figures) and copy/paste these into your AI tool of choice before starting to run ideas by them. You’ll be shocked at the outcome, and the difference of opinion you get from each of these.
Now imagine if you had a stable of 20 or 30 or 100 of these predefined prompts that you could pull out whenever you needed them. Imagine if you debated all your big decisions with a large group of experts with strong points of view. Do you think your ideas would come out the other side stronger or weaker?
Having done this a lot – I can tell you my experience. I often disagreed with the input I was getting, which was half the value. It helped me become clearer on my own point of view. I got feedback I didn’t like, but sometimes it was what I needed to hear. When I pulled in advice from “experts” with different skillsets than my own, I got really valuable expansions of my thinking. For instance – when I was CPO at Bark, I knew very little about supply chain when I started, and became pretty knowledgeable over the time I was there. Part of the way I did that was to create a supply-chain expert prompt who I could run my ideas by. Note – I also became pretty close with our leadership on supply chain and had weekly meetings with various folks to get smarter faster. But I could ask really dumb questions of my AI expert, as often as I wanted, and then take my refined understanding to those other meetings.
It’s like having a superpower. And anyone not doing this in 2 years is going to be left behind.
I happen to use an AI workbench called CharmIQ that makes this much easier. You create “charms” in this tool, which are saved prompts like the ones I describe above. You can assign these prompts to any LLM – CharmIQ comes with baked in access to all of them for one monthly subscription fee. It makes things much easier.
If you want to try it out, feel free to use this link, it gives you a discount and puts some change in my pocket. I will tell you I use this tool literally hours every day. It’s a game changer.
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