The Opportunity Hidden in Plain Sight

Most conversations about AI focus on efficiency: doing the same things faster, automating routine tasks, cutting costs. And yes, those benefits are real.

But here is what I find most exciting, and what most leaders are missing entirely: AI can make you a better leader.

Not by doing your job for you. By enhancing your thinking.

For the first time in history, you have access to what amounts to a PhD-level thinking partner available on demand, around the clock, with infinite patience and zero ego. An intelligence that can engage with the full complexity of your challenges, push back on your assumptions, and help you see what you might be missing.

Let me give you a concrete example of what this looks like in practice.

AI as Your Thinking Partner: A Practical Example

Imagine you are facing a significant decision: a major investment, a strategic pivot, a key hire, a difficult restructuring. The kind of decision that keeps you up at night.

Typically, you would process this alone (not ideal), bounce it off a trusted colleague (helpful but limited perspective), or bring it to your board or executive team (valuable but constrained by politics, time, and everyones own agendas).

Now consider a different approach:

Open a conversation with a frontier AI model. Tell it: "I'm facing a significant decision and I'd like you to help me think through it. Interview me about this decision until you have enough context to truly understand the full situation—my constraints, my concerns, what I'm weighing, what I might be missing. Then challenge my thinking."

What happens next is remarkable.

The AI asks you questions. Good questions. The kind of questions that make you realize you hadn't fully articulated something to yourself. It probes your assumptions. It asks about stakeholders you might not have considered. It wants to understand not just the facts but your reasoning, why you are leaning the way you are leaning.

This process alone is valuable. Just articulating your thinking to an intelligent listener clarifies it.

But then you ask it to challenge you.

And here is where it gets interesting: unlike a human advisor, the AI has no stake in the outcome. It is not protecting its relationship with you. It is not worried about being wrong. It is not angling for anything. It will tell you what it actually sees in your reasoning - including the weaknesses.

"You seem to be assuming that the market will respond a certain way -what's that assumption based on? Have you stress-tested it?"

"You mentioned three stakeholders who support this direction, but what about the ones who will resist? How are you accounting for that?"

"There's a potential second-order consequence here you haven't addressed..."

This is not about the AI making decisions for you. The decision - and the responsibility -remains entirely yours. But you are making it with sharper thinking, tested assumptions, and a clearer view of what you might be missing.

This is just one example among countless possibilities. But it illustrates something crucial: the most powerful use of AI for leaders is not automation: it's augmentation of your own intelligence.