How Leaders Should Actually Use AI

AI is an amplifier, not a replacement

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00:28Bill Gallagher: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etcetera, are not here to replace you or anyone on your team. They are here to help you scale. They're here to amplify you. It's a big difference to what people are thinking about and the fear and the anxiety about and around it. In our world, there's excitement as well, but it would be misplaced if you followed that. So here's the thing. Years ago, when I was very young, I worked as a research assistant at a local university and I was helping this professor with a new thing he was working on in political science. And I would go to the library, I would get the books, I would read the things, I would make notes on citations, I'd put them on cards, that kind of thing. I'd go and get more books, I'd cross reference things and I'd do my research. I had to grab physical books. I had to read through them. I had to find page numbers, create citations, pull out quotes, do all that kind of thing in there. It's very, very time consuming. Right?

01:27Bill Gallagher: I just started a PhD thesis now around business and I'm very excited about it. I can go right to AI. Pick your favorite tool. I'm using Claude right now. I also will use ChatGPT. I'll use some of the others sometimes depending on the situation. But mostly, I'm going and I'm saying, what are the studies? What are the articles? What are the papers on this? Pull them up for me. Help me find them. What's the through line? So I'm able to ask AI to go find me information that's relevant and to pull specific ideas and to give me citations. And from that, I can build stuff. I can pull it together. Right? It's fantastic.

02:13Bill Gallagher: Also, when I do drafts today, whether it's writing an article or summarizing competitive research for a client, I am using AI to do that and then to distill it down. When I write something today, I can do the thinking in my own head and how I think the main ideas are, organize them maybe with some bullets or notes, and then I can speak them out. AI can clean up my words, my own words. Right? Take the dictation that I've done, narration, clean it up, fix the language and the grammar and the stuff a little bit and then even help me spot problems or identification of organizing it like restructuring it slightly to make it more effective. But still my words, my thinking, my ideas.

Using AI for research and drafting

03:03Bill Gallagher: If you just go to AI and say, hey, give me like whatever on this, it's gonna create this undistinguished, undifferentiated kind of nonsense that isn't very helpful. AI doesn't save you from a lack of thinking, from laziness, from having no ideas. It just adds to you and speeds that kind of thing. So let AI turn your ideas into a draft. Let AI run some research for you. Let AI find the through lines or some of the insights from it. Let it format things. Let it analyze and summarize. But the wisdom, the call, the true thing, that's human being. That's you. That's your advisors. That's your leadership team. That's your peers. All of that is what makes the difference. Right?

03:49Bill Gallagher: And this is I think the key mistake is if you just try to turn it all over to it and we see this again and again, we like do competitive research, we survey teams, and then it gives us back something that is only a starting point. Now, the speed with which it does that is breathtaking. Right? The ability to get things done and not to chew up as many cycles with it, but it's still a human. So whether you give it to somebody on your team whether you're doing it yourself, you're still human in the loop with this whole thing. And you're not just going to a, hey, tell me what to do today kind of thing.

AI gets better as you use it

04:34Bill Gallagher: So that's the first thing. I think the next thing is like, it gets better with using it. So you get smarter and smarter at using it. You learn different approaches to the query, refining things, things that you couldn't do. You know, I was chugging along one day like a year ago, and somebody said, Why are you doing that? And I'm like, Well, we have to do this in this way. And they're like, Yeah, I can read your handwriting. I'm like, Oh, it can? That was about a year ago I realized that. AI can understand your voice. It can read your handwriting. It can look at pictures. It can identify things. There's all kinds of things. One of my friends just said, oh, he hummed a section of a song that he didn't know what it was that was on his mind, and AI helped him find the music.

05:18Bill Gallagher: So again and again, depending on the tool, whatever it is, it can do a lot of things for you. But that core thing, like where did the melody come from and what was the relationship, you know, that's the human part of it. Just like the idea for what I wanna study, what I'm writing about, where I'm going to look for the research, all of that is it begins and ends with some humanity. So figuring out how to use AI as a lever, not a crutch. How to use it to make you better, not replace you. How to make your team better, not replace them is really, really important.

Why teams are nervous while leaders are excited

06:02Bill Gallagher: And at the same time, you will notice some you and some of your people may be both excited, but especially the people nervous about AI. They're nervous that they may be not competent with it. That other people will be more competent or that it'll be better than them. And so they resist things. And sometimes, I noticed one client company recently say, take a line in the sand, we're not going to use AI. AI is the opposite of what we believe in. I don't mean replace it, I mean not use it at all. So they said no, and that company has since gone out of business.

06:34Bill Gallagher: So I think you want to be careful that you neither try to replace nor avoid entirely, you strike that middle balance. And keep in mind that while you may be more excited than nervous, and you may be nervous about competitors doing it better, that kind of thing, but probably most of our CEOs and execs are pretty excited about this new tool. Your team is not though. They are worried that they may be less competent, that they may not learn it well, that it may be too hard for them, that it may replace them. There's a lot of like fear of being found out and incompetent and you wanna just kind of encourage everybody to kind of come along together. To use it, to use it every day, every hour, across almost every job, but to be thoughtful and creative. Look, we're not done. This is the very beginning of something. This whole thing's gonna change a whole lot. Right?

Create informal AI user groups

07:28Bill Gallagher: And I think that this is where we wanna use it and be using it every day. So here's a practice or a thing that I think that would make a big difference now. It'd be really great if in your companies and all around depending on the size of your company. Right? Some of you I know we have solo producers in here and then we have very small teams and then we have some very large teams that listen or watch the show. You wanna start to create like little user groups of people, like support groups where there's freedom to talk about, hey, what are you doing? What am I doing? You wanna create informal discussion groups. I wouldn't go hiring

08:08Bill Gallagher: AI experts and gurus to just get you doing the basic things. And I wouldn't be worried about that some esoteric tool out there is better at this or that than the other thing. All the basic tools that you're aware of and that you're using right now are probably fine for an awful lot of what you want to do, or they'll get fine. So I don't even think the tools matter, but just starting to find different uses for it and then lean into that. Look, I had a client recently and they're all using and familiar with AI, but they weren't using it on the everyday things. It wasn't until I as a coach said, "Hey, why don't you use this for your estimating and proposal writing?" And I don't just have one like that. I have lots of companies like that that are doing that now. So multiple steps of proposal writing and drafting and researching and core things they didn't think that they could get involved with. Estimating, measuring, research, on and on and on. So take the notion that even if your people are doing it, they're not looking for everywhere to do it yet. And if you could just create some groups, discussions, some things like that that help bring it—like make it top of mind and make it safe, easy to help each other. You don't have to hire consultants to do it. You don't have to hire, but it could come through everything that you're already doing if you'll start to lean in a little bit more and make it safe to play, to talk about it, to not be perfect about it, to experiment with things.

Make it safe to experiment

09:38Bill Gallagher: The kind of people that experiment and play with things and try things is not everyday rank-and-file people that run the operations in most companies. That's entrepreneurial kinds of people. Entrepreneurial, innovative kinds of people, probably like you listening or watching right now. It's also a handful of people maybe in your companies depending on the size, but it's not the everyday. And there's a lot of people at the operational level, the frontline, back end of your business that need some encouragement, some help, some permission to play with a thing because it's not their nature necessarily to do that and feel safe in bringing that then into the day-to-day work. And at the same time, you and they should not be deluded into or feared into thinking that it is here to do a good job replacing you. You're still central to the whole thing, right? So let's find and expand ways. The things that I do today—transcripts, meeting notes, to-do lists, synthesis, surveys, competitive research, what-if scenarios around the sale of a company, who we could draw investment from, companies we could go buy, how to buy them, researching them, down to very small levels. All of these kinds of things were things that we weren't even thinking of a year ago. Well, maybe a year ago, but not much more than that. Like, they're very new kinds of things. And they only happen not because I have the background in myself personally, technically, and my family with AI, but because I like to try things. I like to play and experiment with things. And that might be true for you also, but I would bet that until you push and work with other people and support them, it isn't true or safe for everyone on their team. So that's your task really, is to convene some regular recurring sessions where you try things and you encourage each other to try things. You make it safe to work on these things together.

Where Bill uses AI every day

11:45Bill Gallagher: Hope that's been helpful. I'd love to hear what you do with this, where you play with it, and where you help make it safer and easier for all of your team to try and level up and play with this powerful, powerful new tool. This is an important time that we're sitting at right now as an emergence of a new tool, very much like when the personal computer first came and was widely available and went beyond the smaller systems and the mainframes that once were pervasive in business before most of you can remember. My name is Bill Gallagher. You'll find our Scaling Up assessment, our workshops, our cohorts, coaching, that kind of thing, at scalingcoach.com. Or wherever you're getting this right now, like, subscribe, turn on your notifications, share this with somebody else. It'll help them and us, and you'll be a hero for them. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, and to my production team for getting this out every week. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.

12:47Announcer: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.