Last year, Boston Consulting Group, Harvard Business School, and Wharton released a study that compared two groups of BCG consultants ; those that used AI and those that did not. The results show that consultants with AI completed 12% more tasks and did so 25% faster. They also produced results their bosses thought were 40% better. According to Scott Galloway “Consultants are thought partners, and AI is Super Soldier Serum.”
In a recent post, Scott talks about how to put AI on your board of directors and use it as a thought partner. Here are some of his suggestions:
I prompt the AI: “I’m the CEO of Section. This is the board meeting pre-read deck. Pretend to be a hard-charging venture capitalist board member expecting strong growth. Give me three insights and three recommendations about our progress and plan.
Claude and ChatGPT-4o’s performance was breathtaking. AI returned 90% of the same comments or insights our human board made (we compared notes). They were able to suggest the same priorities the board did (with the associated tradeoffs) — including driving enterprise value, balancing growth and cash runway, and taking on more technology risk.
Here are other suggestions from Scott on how to use AI as a thought partner:
Ask for ideas, not answers. If you ask for an answer, it will give you one (and probably not a very good one). As a thought partner, it’s better equipped to give you ideas, feedback, and other things to consider. Try to maintain an open-ended conversation that keeps evolving, rather than rushing to an answer.”
More context is better. The trick is to give AI enough context to start making associations. Having a “generic” conversation will give you generic output. Give it enough specific information to help it create specific responses (your company valuation, your marketing budget, your boss’s negative feedback about your last idea, an MRI of your ankle). And then take the conversation in different directions.
Ask AI to run your problems through decision frameworks. Massive amounts of knowledge are stored in LLMs, so don’t hesitate to have the model explain concepts to you. Ask, “How would a CFO tackle this problem?” or “What are two frameworks CEOs have used to think about this?” Then have a conversation with the AI unpacking these answers.
Ask it to adopt a persona. “If Brian Chesky and Elon Musk were co-CEOs, what remote work policies would they put in place for the management team?” That’s a question Google could never answer, but an LLM will respond to without hesitation.
Make the AI explain and defend its ideas. Say, “Why did you give that answer?” “Are there any other options you can offer?” “What might be a weakness in the approach you’re suggesting?”
Give it your data. Upload your PDFs — business plans, strategy memos, household budgets — and talk to the AI about your unique data and situation. If you’re concerned about privacy, then go to data controls in your GPT settings and turn off its ability to train on your data.
Scott concludes:
The hardest part of working with AI isn’t learning to prompt. It’s managing your own ego and admitting you could use some help and that the world will pass you by if you don’t learn how to use a computer, PowerPoint … AI. So get over your immediate defense mechanism — “AI can never do what I do” — and use it to do what you do, just better. There is an invading army in business: technology. Its weapons are modern-day tanks, drones, and supersonic aircraft. Do you really want to ride into battle on horseback?
Invite AI to your board of directors. You will be amazed as to how much it can help.