I use AI to stop me wasting energy on the wrong things.
You can make anything with it now. Doesn’t mean you should. So forget image generation, forget the design and layout tools. The most valuable thing AI can do for a brand is act as a filter. In other words, disagree with you.
LLMs allow us to tap into the consensus of the entire planet and decades of thinking at the click of a button – and be able to apply that brain power to your business. That’s nuts.
But it’s only as good as the thing you’ve set it up to do. Most businesses have a strategy deck. Very few have it written in a form you could hold a decision up against, which is why most people end up with an AI that butters up everything they say and calls it genius.
The practical version is building a skill in Claude, or a gem in Gemini, or whatever your tool calls it, and creating a permanent set of instructions or standards it loads before it answers. Ours hold the fit filter for new business, the standards work has to clear, the rules for how we write and the principles any strategic decision gets measured against. It sits where anyone in the business can use it.
“This is going against everything you’ve deliberately been moving away from” is the most useful push back and holds me to account on even the smallest decisions.
Written once, properly, as a team. Applied every time since. That’s the point it stops being a clever writing tool and starts being a mentor that’s awake at all hours.
Up at night with a thought, run it past your digital counsel and it’ll lay it out plainly – forget it, delegate it, or build it in. Back to sleep.
AI is not making decisions for us, rather it’s a voice that raises questions and challenges our thinking against the strategy we’ve given it. It has to be set up to argue, though. An AI that agrees with you is a yes-man that steadily fills you with hot air and is worse than having nothing. “Tell me where this breaks the plan” needs to be in there explicitly.
The hard part of leading isn’t having ideas. It’s knowing what to cut, what to leave alone, what not to follow, especially when a plan takes years to come into shape and the pressure to change course arrives weekly. Almost every bad call I’ve made came from somewhere other than the plan. Fear of a quiet quarter, or a competitor’s campaign landing in the inbox at 7am and everything getting reshuffled by lunchtime. Fear and novelty both make a very convincing case at the time.
Every one of those pulled real energy off the plan and put it somewhere that couldn’t compound. That’s the actual cost, a fortnight of energy spent in the wrong place.
A prospect landed on my list a few weeks back that I really wanted to work with. Great brand, right sector, name I’d have enjoyed telling people about. Ran it against the fit filter I’d written down months earlier – no fresh trigger, spend nowhere near the threshold – failed on both. Two years ago I’d have spent days drafting a proposal that wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
The same thing happens at every scale. I nearly adopted a blanket rule about never competing, because someone I rate holds it. Tested against what we’d actually written down, it fell apart – turning down a pitch and entering an effectiveness award aren’t the same act at all. And copying a rule because you admire the person holding it doesn’t hold up against the strategy. AI reminded me of that fact.
The rules were already written, I just needed something to hold me to them.
It won’t tell you whether your strategy is right. Only whether you’re still on it and where you haven’t looked.
