Reader ,

This is the second in our kickoff series on AI and how it impacts your leadership. What is your relationship to AI today?

• You've tried AI for writing. It gave you something generic, off-voice, and maybe even made up facts that never happened.
• You've heard the hype. Productivity gains. Time savings. Competitive advantage. But when you tried it yourself, you wondered what you were missing.
• You've written it off. "AI isn't for me" or "Maybe in a few years when it's better."

If any of those describe you, here's what you're missing.

You reached for the wrong tool.

The Hammer Problem

Working with business leaders on AI adoption, I've noticed a pattern. Most people start in the same place. They ask AI to write something. An email. A blog post. A social media caption. Marketing copy.

And most people get similar results. Generic. Lifeless. Sometimes factually wrong. Definitely not their voice.

So they conclude AI doesn't work. Or it's not ready yet. Or it's fine for other people but not for the kind of work they do.

What if the issue isn't AI itself? What if it's approaching AI as a single tool when it's actually a toolbox?

There's an old saying often attributed to Abraham Maslow: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What happens when people approach AI with one hammer—content generation—and wonder why it can't do finish carpentry?

AI is not a tool. It's a toolbox with at least four distinct tools. And picking the right one for the job makes all the difference.

Four Tools You Didn't Know You Had

After months of experimentation, failure, learning, and finally some real wins, I've come to see AI capabilities in four buckets. Each bucket serves a different purpose. Each requires a different approach. And each produces different results.

• Bucket 1: Research — synthesizing information from hundreds of sources
• Bucket 2: Process Efficiency — automating what you already do
• Bucket 3: Content Generation — creating written content in your voice
• Bucket 4: Expertise Extraction — mining knowledge you didn't know you had

What would it mean for your work if you knew which tool to reach for? What if choosing the right bucket could solve problems you've struggled with for months? I'll walk you through each one; what it does, when to use it, and what it looks like in practice.

Bucket 1: Research — The Hidden Gem

This is the bucket most people don't even know exists.

Yes, Google has added AI features to search. But using a dedicated AI tool in research mode is another level entirely. Have you experienced the difference between skimming headlines and having a research assistant synthesize hundreds of sources into a coherent answer?

A simple example from my own life.

Last Christmas, I received a new car radio as a gift. Nice upgrade. One problem: phone calls had a persistent echo. People couldn't hear me without a headset. For nearly a year, I worked around it. Did Google searches. Found nothing useful. Assumed I'd eventually buy an external microphone and hope for the best.

Then I tried AI research mode.

I described the radio, the symptoms, and the problem. I asked for solutions that had actually worked for other people. What would normally take hours of forum-diving happened in twenty minutes. I had a five-page report synthesizing over 600 internet sources.

The surprising finding? An external microphone wouldn't fix it. The radio had an internal circuitry issue that keeps the built-in mics active even when an external one is plugged in. No forum post I'd found on Google mentioned this. But AI found it buried in technical discussions across multiple platforms; including which specific models on Amazon to avoid and which ones might actually work.

Twenty minutes. Six hundred sources. A year of frustration resolved.

That's the research bucket. Not asking AI to fabricate information. Asking it to find, synthesize, and summarize what's already out there; faster and more thoroughly than you could do yourself.

When would you use this? Anytime you're gathering information before making a decision. Market research. Competitive analysis. Technical troubleshooting. Understanding a new industry. Preparing for a difficult conversation.

What decisions are you facing right now that would benefit from deeper research? What questions have been sitting on your someday list because the research feels overwhelming? What would become possible if you could access 600 sources in twenty minutes instead of spending weeks trying to piece it together yourself?

Bucket 2: Process Efficiency — Automate What You Already Do

This bucket isn't about adding new capabilities. It's about doing existing things faster, more consistently, and with less cognitive load.

The best entry point? Something you already do repeatedly that takes more time than it should. What tasks drain your energy week after week? Where do you feel the friction of repetition? What would you do with an extra three hours every week?

For me, that was coaching session notes.

Before I discovered this bucket, I took notes manually during and immediately after each Zoom call. I was concerned about forgetting important details, so I split my attention between listening deeply and capturing everything. Neither happened well. Have you ever tried to be fully present with someone while simultaneously documenting the conversation? How did that work for you?

In early 2025, I tried a vertical market AI tool designed for coaches. It was... okay. It transcribed and summarized. But it didn't grow to understand my context. Each session seemed to start from zero. No memory of the client's history. No understanding of my frameworks. Just generic output that required heavy editing.

Now the workflow runs almost automatically. Zoom recording becomes transcript. Transcript gets anonymized. Content formats for our coaching software. Session notes export as HTML and paste directly into our client management system.

My assistant Carissa estimates this saves three hours per week. At her rate, that's roughly $100 weekly; over $5,000 per year from one workflow improvement.

But what excites me more than the time savings is what happened next. Carissa took ownership of the system. She didn't just run my prompts; she improved them. She connected the workflow to ClickUp so it auto-generates tasks and subtasks with due dates. She made it hers.

That's what I find most valuable about the process efficiency bucket. You're not replacing human judgment. You're freeing human creativity to focus on higher-value work.

Where do you have repetitive tasks that drain time and mental energy? What would it mean to get those hours back? What could you create, build, or develop if the administrative burden lifted? And what would it look like if the people on your team took ownership of the systems instead of just following instructions?

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