How To Think Like An AI Leader

As the co-founder of Women Defining AI, a community dedicated to making AI breakthroughs understandable and actionable to more people, my mission is to empower business leaders from all industries with practical AI insights. I chose this mission not only because AI is creating massive shifts in technology (it clearly is), but because of the extraordinary opportunities it unlocks for innovation, growth, and leadership in business today.

AI, and in particular generative AI, is remaking roles and industries, from automating customer service interactions to enabling a new generation of technology builders with AI agents. By creating an AI-first mindset and understanding how, when, and where to integrate AI,  leaders can transform the way organizations do business, including streamlining operations, driving innovation, and getting a competitive edge in their industry. 

Companies leading the way have already shifted from “We’ve tried ChatGPT” to “Everyone is expected to use AI effectively.” But for most business leaders, whether you’re leading a small team or a global organization, the mix of AI hype and overall volume of AI updates in the news might have you or your team wondering: 

• How do we actually use this technology effectively?
  
• What should we really automate? What about hallucinations or data security?
  
• And what else can AI do beyond generating answers?

The companies getting AI right have one thing in common: leadership. Not just from the C-suite, but from every team lead who’s willing to learn, get hands-on, and guide others through change. Is this you?

To start thinking like an AI leader, you need to level up your knowledge and experiment, experiment, experiment. Explore practical applications that can help 10X your own workflows. 

As one well-cited 2003 Harvard & Wharton study on the effects of AI on knowledge worker productivity states, “The unpredictable nature of the AI frontier means that AI might excel at one task and utterly fail at another, even if both seem equally straightforward.”

Only through using AI a lot can we all truly build a deeper understanding and intuition about where this technology can have the greatest impact at scale across our teams.

And, once you’ve seen what these tools can do, you’ll start thinking differently, noticing more opportunities about where AI fits in your teams’ workflows, and where it can create real value.

Try these 3 AI experiments & use cases

Use these ideas to move quickly beyond using AI like an advanced Google Search or question-and-answer machine.

1. Write emails in your voice & tone faster
2. Perform a competitive analysis with AI
3. Have AI summarize and extract key information 

Use AI to write emails in your voice & tone faster

While you might already know how to use an AI tool like Claude to write an email first draft for you with a simple prompt, you might often find that this first draft is overly generic. 

Experiment with a bit of prompt engineering here and instead of “write me a welcome email for new employees of {my company or team},” this time add a sample email or memo that you’ve written for this same audience. Give your AI more context about what your voice and tone is. The new draft should emulate your style and sound a lot more like you. 

Now, change it up. Give your AI more context about the purpose of the email or who the audience is (examples: new grad hires or people managers across the organization) that you’re sending the note to and see how that changes the draft you get. Play with it, and give it context to get the best results.

Perform a competitive analysis with AI

In the past, you might have searched for who the top competitors are in a particular market. With AI, instead of replicating this question, consider designing your AI prompt as a competitive analysis task for a more in-depth research response.

For example, ask ChatGPT for a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for your top 5 biggest competitors. 

Here’s an example of how you could phrase that question or prompt:

This time you’ll go beyond search-style results and get more detailed, valuable, and actionable information in an easy-to-digest format.

Have AI summarize and extract key information

How often are we as leaders overwhelmed by the mountains of reports or information that we have to catch up on at the start or end of our days? 

Experiment instead with uploading that PDF file or long status report that you have to process, and ask Claude to highlight important takeaways or action items for your team. (Sidenote: Business leaders who are also parents of school-aged kids, I have found that this works great for lengthy school emails that often have too much information and key dates that often get lost!). Take a tedious task from hours to minutes. Once you have mastered this you can then move on to creating an AI agent to automatically perform a task based on the information or required actions. 

Developing your AI intuition starts with experiments in your day-to-day workflow like these. But only in doing so can we find the AI use cases that will have a serious impact on our work. And don’t stop there. Encourage team-wide AI experimentation by setting up a dedicated time for it. It could be an hour a week or even a day a month. Make a call to action for employees to share their results on a Slack or Teams channel. Or try a hackathon. Do what feels right for you to get the ideas flowing and your teams actively engaged. 

Think like an AI leader by starting small and building a culture of experimentation for yourself and your teams. Make it clear to everyone at your organization that they’re expected to use AI, and the results won’t be perfect at first. If they keep experimenting, they’ll find incredibly valuable and impactful use cases.   

To go deeper, take my new course!

In my new AI for Business Leaders course, I walk you through real, practical applications using core tools from model providers themselves (like Claude and ChatGPT) to expand your AI workflows. Go beyond smarter searching and getting answers to using AI in more innovative use cases like:

• Analyzing voice recordings
• Analyzing data and quickly generating business insights
• Building your own internal AI assistant
• Transforming screenshots or photos into usable data
• And more

I cover frameworks for how to continue to build and expand on these use cases , along with how to think strategically about responsible experimentation, data, and security implications that come along with AI usage in the enterprise. All of this and more will help you develop a solid AI foundation and strategy which you can then apply in a variety of contexts and to the wealth of new AI tools that are appearing everyday. 

The most effective leaders aren’t just preparing for AI, they’re actively engaging with it. To stay ahead, figure out where AI can give you superpowers and integrate that into your operations and work. The real question isn’t if you need to enhance your skills but how quickly you can begin the journey.

Start Here. Start now. Let’s shape the future of your organization together.