10X Yourself as a CEO with AI

There is a lot of talk about leveraging artificial intelligence to transform companies. I think many CEOs are starting in the wrong place, because before you ask your organization to use AI differently, you should first learn how to use it yourself.

For most small and mid-sized businesses, the CEO is still one of the most leveraged people in the company. Your decisions affect capital allocation, hiring, customer strategy, pricing, culture, execution, and growth. The better you think and prepare—and the better you communicate and follow through—the better the organization tends to perform.

That is why I think one of the most important early uses of AI isn’t simply automating the work of employees. It is increasing the leverage of the CEO.

I am not suggesting that AI will literally make you ten times smarter or ten times more productive. Leadership doesn’t work that way. Judgment, courage, empathy, experience, trust, accountability, and relationships still matter enormously.

What AI can do is materially increase the amount of useful thinking, preparation, analysis, learning, and follow-up a CEO can accomplish with the same finite amount of time. That is the kind of 10X opportunity worth paying attention to, because the goal isn’t to work ten times harder. The goal is to multiply your leverage.

Start with the CEO’s Real Constraint: Attention

Most CEOs I know have a lot going on. Their problem isn’t a shortage of things to do; it is a shortage of sustained attention, and the demands on that attention are nearly endless.

A typical week might involve:

• Leadership team meetings.
• Customer problems.
• Hiring decisions.
• Financial reviews.
• Sales challenges.
• Operational surprises.
• Strategy questions.
• Employee issues.
• Vendor decisions.
• Board preparation.
• Family obligations.
• A constant stream of emails, texts, calls, and interruptions.

Information is seldom the problem. More often, the problem is exactly the opposite: there is too much information and too little time to think about it properly.

AI can help by reducing some of the lower-value mental effort required to gather, organize, summarize, compare, and prepare information. That matters because the CEO’s highest-value contribution is rarely being a faster typist or producing more documents. It is thinking better, asking better questions, and making better decisions.

When I talk with CEOs about AI, this is where I think the conversation should begin. Don’t start by asking how many tasks you can automate. Start by asking where technology can free up your attention for the work only you can do.

1. Leverage AI as a Thinking Partner

One of the most useful changes a CEO can make is to stop thinking of AI as simply a writing tool. It can be much more valuable as a thinking partner, particularly when you are facing a difficult decision or trying to challenge your own assumptions.

Important decisions almost always come with blind spots. We all have our own preferences, biases, habits, and assumptions, and the problem is that we often don’t see them precisely because they are our own.

Before making a significant decision, AI can help you:

• Identify assumptions you may be making.
• Build the strongest argument against your preferred option.
• Offer several alternative explanations for what you are seeing.
• Identify possible second- and third-order consequences.
• Create a pre-mortem explaining how your decision could fail.
• Identify information you may still be missing.
• Surface risks you could be underestimating.
• Suggest questions you should ask before deciding.

The point is not to let AI make the decision for you. The idea is to make sure you have thought deeply enough before you make it.

Good leaders don’t outsource judgment. They improve the quality of the inputs that inform their judgment, and AI can be a very useful way to pressure-test your thinking before you commit yourself and your organization to a course of action.

2. Use AI as Your Research Department

Very few CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses have a strategy department sitting down the hall. They don’t have a team of analysts standing by to research a competitor, analyze a market, benchmark acquisition targets, or assemble a detailed industry briefing whenever the CEO has a question.

AI can help close some of that gap by allowing you to explore issues much faster than you could in the past. You can use it to investigate:

• Competitors.
• New markets.
• Industry trends.
• Customer segments.
• Acquisition opportunities.
• Pricing models.
• Economic developments.
• Regulatory changes.
• Emerging technologies.
• Business models.
• Strategic threats.
• Potential partnerships.

Research that once took days can now often be framed and explored much more quickly. That doesn’t eliminate the need to verify important facts, and it certainly doesn’t replace subject-matter experts when real expertise is required.

What it does is allow a CEO to get smarter about an issue before walking into the room. That can make a big difference in the quality of the conversation and, ultimately, in the quality of the decisions that follow.

I think this is particularly powerful for the mid-market CEO. You may never have been able to justify maintaining a large internal research staff, but you can now have access to a level of analytical support that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago.

3. Use AI to Ask Better Questions

One of the most underappreciated skills a CEO can have is the ability to ask good questions. The quality of your questions often dictates the quality of the thinking around you, and good leaders know how to move people past symptoms and into the real issue.

AI can help you prepare better questions before a leadership meeting, customer meeting, interview, strategy session, or difficult conversation. It can help develop:

• Questions that uncover assumptions.
• Questions that test accountability.
• Questions that challenge a proposed strategy.
• Questions that expose financial risk.
• Questions that clarify priorities.
• Questions that reveal whether someone truly understands the issue.
• Questions that move a team from symptoms toward root causes.

This becomes particularly useful when the CEO is entering a conversation outside their strongest area of expertise. A CEO doesn’t need to know everything, but a CEO does need to know enough to ask intelligent questions and recognize when an answer doesn’t make sense.

I have always believed that leadership is often less about having the answer and more about knowing which question needs to be asked next. AI can help you get to that question faster.

4. Use AI to Become a Better Meeting Facilitator

Meetings eat up a huge amount of executive time, but the real problem isn’t simply the number of meetings. Too much value gets lost because people show up poorly prepared, decisions remain unclear, and follow-up becomes inconsistent.

AI can help improve both ends of the meeting. Beforehand, it can help you prepare:

• Background summaries.
• Key decisions that need to be made.
• Important unresolved issues.
• Previous commitments.
• Relevant financial context.
• Questions that need to be asked.
• Areas where disagreement is likely.

Afterward, it can help identify:

• Decisions that were made.
• Action items.
• Owners.
• Deadlines.
• Unanswered questions.
• Required follow-up.
• Issues that were discussed but never actually resolved.

This brings discussion, decision, and execution closer together. That is where a lot of leadership value gets lost, and AI can help bring more discipline to the process.

The goal isn’t to use AI so you can have more meetings. It is to get more value out of the meetings you already have and reduce the amount of organizational energy that gets lost between talking about something and actually getting it done.

5. Use AI as a Communication Multiplier

A significant part of the CEO’s job is communication. The challenge is that different audiences often need different versions of the same basic message, and what works for your leadership team may not work for employees, customers, board members, or outside partners.

AI can help you take one core idea and adapt it to different audiences without losing the underlying meaning. For example, it can help you:

• Simplify a complicated strategy.
• Convert a long memo into talking points.
• Turn a board-level message into something meaningful for employees.
• Prepare for a difficult conversation.
• Test whether a message is clear and logical.
• Identify where your language could create confusion.
• Adapt a message for a different level of the organization.
• Consider how different audiences may interpret what you are saying.

This isn’t about sounding polished simply for the sake of sounding polished. It is about making sure people understand what you are trying to say, why it matters, and what you need them to do.

As leaders, we sometimes assume that because we have said something, we have communicated it. Those are not always the same thing. AI can become a useful tool for testing whether the message in our head is actually the message other people are likely to hear.

6. Use AI to Build Stronger Decision-Making

CEOs make decisions all day long, and not every decision gets the attention it deserves. Some get rushed because the urgent crowds out the important, while others sit for too long because nobody has created a clear decision process.

AI can help create more discipline by organizing your thinking around:

• The objective.
• Available options.
• Assumptions.
• Risks.
• Trade-offs.
• Financial impact.
• Reversibility.
• Timing.
• Effects on key stakeholders.
• What information would cause you to change your mind.

It can also compare alternatives side by side, challenge whether you are overweighting one factor, and help distinguish between a decision that needs more information and one that simply needs to be made.

AI isn’t the decision-maker, and I would never want it to become one. But it can help you avoid lazy, rushed, or incomplete thinking, which becomes particularly valuable when the stakes are high and the consequences of a bad decision multiply throughout the organization.

7. Use AI as Your Personal Chief of Staff

This may be one of the highest-value applications for a CEO because most CEOs have too many moving parts in their heads at any one time. Priorities, commitments, people issues, strategic initiatives, customer concerns, and unresolved decisions are all competing for attention.

AI can help build a more disciplined personal operating system around:

• Your top priorities.
• Important commitments.
• Key relationships.
• Strategic initiatives.
• Major decisions.
• Next steps.
• Emerging risks.
• Upcoming meetings.
• Questions that still need answers.

A useful weekly review might include questions such as:

• What are my top three priorities this week?
• What important issue am I avoiding?
• Which decision has been sitting too long?
• Who am I overdue in responding to?
• Which initiative is beginning to drift?
• What have I promised that hasn’t been completed?
• What conversation do I need to have?
• What am I spending time on that someone else should own?

That kind of discipline isn’t glamorous, but it can make a CEO significantly more effective. The value of AI here isn’t that it replaces a talented chief of staff; it is that it can help create some of the structure and rigor a good chief of staff would provide.

For many small and mid-sized business owners who don’t have that position on the organizational chart, this may be one of AI’s most immediately useful applications.

8. Use AI to Learn Faster

One of the greatest assets a CEO can develop is the ability to learn faster than the environment around them is changing. AI can significantly accelerate that learning curve, particularly when you are entering a new, technical, or unfamiliar subject.

If you are trying to understand something new, you can ask AI for:

• A very simple explanation.
• A deeper explanation once you understand the basics.
• The major debates surrounding the subject.
• Common mistakes or misconceptions.
• Important terminology.
• Useful frameworks.
• Practical examples.
• Questions an expert would ask.

Then you can keep drilling deeper until you understand the issue well enough to have a meaningful conversation with someone who knows far more about it than you do.

The CEO who learns faster can navigate unfamiliar territory with greater confidence. That matters because technology, markets, regulation, customer behavior, and talent expectations are all changing quickly.

You don’t have to know everything, and pretending that you do is usually dangerous. You do need to become good at getting smart fast, because the ability to learn quickly is increasingly becoming a leadership advantage.

9. Use AI to Challenge Your Own Leadership

This may be one of the more uncomfortable uses of AI, but it may also be one of the most valuable. AI can help you examine your own behavior, particularly after a difficult conversation or when a relationship is not going the way you expected.

You can describe the situation and ask questions such as:

• What might I be missing?
• How might the other person interpret my behavior?
• What role could my ego be playing?
• Am I avoiding conflict?
• Am I being too controlling?
• Am I failing to delegate?
• What assumptions am I making about this person?
• What would a better conversation look like?

AI won’t always be right, and it should never replace trusted advisors, peers, coaches, or people who know you well. But it can provide another mirror, and good leaders need mirrors.

One of the hazards of leadership is that success can gradually reduce the amount of honest feedback you receive. People become more careful about challenging you, and over time it becomes easier to believe your own version of events.

Anything that helps you look at your behavior more objectively can make you a better leader. The key is being willing to ask questions where you might not like the answer.

10. Don’t Use AI to Skip the Difficult Parts of Leadership

There is an important boundary to all of this. AI should increase your effectiveness as a leader; it should not become a tool that helps you hide from leadership.

Some parts of the job remain deeply human, and trying to automate them may make you more efficient while simultaneously making you less effective. AI should never become a substitute for:

• Tough conversations.
• Personal accountability.
• Building trust.
• Listening.
• Making hard decisions.
• Developing people.
• Owning mistakes.
• Showing empathy.
• Being visible.
• Exercising judgment.

The best use of AI is to reduce friction around the work so you have more time and energy for the aspects of leadership that matter most. It should give you more capacity to lead, not give you an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable parts of the job.

In some ways, that may be the real test of whether you are using AI well. If the technology gives you more time but you spend that time avoiding customers, employees, difficult decisions, or strategic thinking, you haven’t created much leadership leverage at all.

A Simple CEO AI Operating System

If I were sitting across the table from a CEO who wanted to become more effective with AI, I wouldn’t start with 50 tools or a complicated technology strategy. I would start with a simple routine that helps build better habits around thinking, preparation, learning, communication, and follow-through.

Daily

Use AI to help you:

• Prepare for your most important meeting.
• Think through one difficult decision.
• Improve one important communication.
• Clarify your highest priorities.

Weekly

Use AI to review:

• Significant commitments.
• Major open decisions.
• Strategic initiatives.
• People who need attention.
• Potential emerging risks.
• Problems you may be ignoring.

Monthly

Use AI to step back and ask:

• What am I missing?
• Where does the business keep getting stuck?
• What has changed in our market?
• Which assumptions should we challenge?
• Where am I spending time that isn’t generating enough value?
• Where could AI create more leverage for me or the company?

That is enough to begin because you don’t need a complicated AI strategy to start improving your effectiveness. You need the discipline to use the tool consistently in the places where it can help you think, prepare, learn, communicate, and execute better.

Over time, you will develop your own instincts about where AI adds value and where it doesn’t. That personal experience will also make you a much better leader of AI adoption throughout the rest of the company.

The 10X CEO Is Really a More Leveraged CEO

I am increasingly convinced that one of the most important questions for leaders isn’t simply, “How can AI make my company more productive?” We should also be asking, “How can AI make me a more effective leader?”

As a CEO, even relatively small improvements in decision quality, preparation, communication, learning, and follow-through can have outsized effects because your work sits near the top of the organizational leverage chain.

A better question can improve an important meeting. A better decision can save millions of dollars, while a clearer message can align hundreds of people around a common objective. A faster learning cycle may help you spot a market shift sooner, and stronger follow-through can prevent a critical initiative from drifting for months.

That is why I like the idea of becoming a 10X CEO, provided we define it correctly. It isn’t about doing ten times the work or filling every minute of your calendar with more activity. It is about generating significantly more value from the same finite amount of leadership attention.

AI can help you research faster, think more broadly, challenge your assumptions, communicate more clearly, prepare more thoroughly, learn more quickly, and follow through more consistently. But the technology still requires something from you, and that something is judgment.

AI can expand your thinking, but it cannot tell you what deserves your attention. It can generate options, but it cannot own the consequences. It can challenge your assumptions, but it cannot give you courage. It can help you prepare for the conversation, but you still have to walk into the room and have it.

That is why the real opportunity isn’t AI replacing leadership. It is artificial intelligence amplifying the power of good leadership, and for many CEOs, that may be the best place to start.