Your instinct is worth more than any AI answer
Let AI help with the smaller jobs, and keep the strategy for yourself.
I was on a call with a client today, and for what felt like the hundredth time I heard it. “Well, ChatGPT said this.” “ChatGPT thought we should do this.” “ChatGPT thought that.” And I finally lost it: “I don’t care what ChatGPT thinks. What do you think? What does your instinct say?”
Yeah, I yelled at a client. But I meant it. The intellectual property with the greatest value in that whole company was their instinct, and they kept trying to supplant it with a robot. That is a horrible, horrible mistake.
After I got off the call, I kept thinking about it. This problem isn’t going away. It’s only going to get worse, because the more AI rolls out, the more people depend on it.
The intellectual property with the greatest value in that whole company was their instinct.
I catch myself doing it too
I’m not above this. I’ll catch myself 45 minutes into a fight with AI and go, wait a minute, wait a minute. Stop. Just think. Just think.
I haven’t met many people who use AI more than I do, and I still struggle with it. If I’m struggling, most people are too, and they’re trusting it way too quickly anyway. We’re outsourcing our brainpower too often and too fast, to a system that isn’t actually good at the job we’re handing it.
We can’t outsource the instincts of the founder or the CEO, or honestly anybody in leadership. I mostly work with crazy visionary CEO types, so they’re who I’m thinking about, but it goes for everybody. You can’t hand your thinking to something that doesn’t have even the remotest amount of context your own mind has.
AI can’t do your strategy
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of smaller things AI does quite well when it has enough context, especially with agentic workflows. But higher-level decision making? No. Strategy? No, absolutely not. Think about it yourself.
Context is always the problem with any AI model. You have to understand your business well enough to give it context before it can even try to help with some smaller thing. It can’t do the larger overall strategy. That’s not how it works. It doesn’t know your market, your customers or your team the way you do.
AI is also trained on everything, so what it hands back is the average of everything, and every one of your competitors has the same tool. Ask it for your strategy and you’ll get the same average answer they got. If you want anything better out of it, you have to put what makes you different in first. (It’s part of why we write a Brand Codex, so a company’s team and its AI can both work from that.)
And even if you could give it every bit of context in a CEO’s head, you still wouldn’t get a result as good as you’d get if that CEO just stopped farming out their brainpower and used their own brain.
We’ve got to stop farming it out
What really worries me is the cognitive decline I’m seeing across business. I think the people who can use AI and their own higher-level thinking at the same time are the only ones who are going to survive and thrive in the AI age. The ones who hand it all over have given control of their business to Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai and whoever else runs the AI models, and they’re giving it up freely.
And we’re doing this now, in the early days of these tools. They’re only going to get better, which means we’ll keep farming out more and more of our thinking and handing more of the power over our companies to somebody else. Use AI as the tool it is, and keep the thinking for yourself.