As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
I gave Claude my Thursday morning
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I blocked 9 to 12 yesterday and tried to hand the whole window to Claude. It was the actual messy three hours of a solo founder’s week. Think: inbox, two client preps, a half-finished newsletter, and a competitor scan I’d been putting off for a week. Here’s what actually happened. 9:00am Inbox (47 unread). Claude triaged in 4 minutes. Surfaced 6 things I needed to read, drafted replies to 11, and flagged one I would have missed entirely; a re-engagement from a client who’d gone quiet in March. Grade: A. Time saved: ~40 minutes. 9:30am Client prep, PE firm. I asked Claude to pull together a doc on the firm’s portfolio and the AI maturity signals across each company. It produced a clean matrix. The matrix was also wrong about two companies. It conflated a portfolio company with a similarly named competitor. I caught it because I knew the firm. A new analyst wouldn’t have. Grade: B-. Time saved: 30 minutes, with a tax of paranoia. 10:00am Newsletter draft. I gave Claude 3 rough hooks and asked for full drafts. The drafts were technically fine and emotionally flat. They sounded like me if I’d had no coffee and no opinions. Grade: C. Net time: zero saved, because I rewrote everything. 10:45am Workshop prep. New material for a CEO offsite. I asked Claude to turn my half-baked outline into a 90-minute facilitation guide with discussion prompts. This was the surprise of the morning. It built the scaffolding faster than I would have, and the prompts were better than mine because they were less ego-bound. Grade: A+. Time saved: 90 minutes. 11:30am Competitor scan. Claude pulled positioning, recent moves, hiring signals. Solid raw material. But it couldn’t answer the question I actually had: “Are they a threat to me, or are we serving different buyers?” That’s a judgment call, and judgment is still mine. Grade: A on inputs, N/A on the decision. Net for the morning: about 2 hours saved out of 3. Not a transformation. Not a parlor trick either. My conclusion? AI is excellent at the bridge work (e.g., synthesis, drafting, scaffolding, triage). It’s unreliable at the initiation work (e.g., what matters this week, who to say no to, whether something is actually true) but it's getting MUCH better. And it’s mediocre at the voice work where it needs to truly reflect your energy, your curiosity and your priorities. So if you’re a CEO trying to figure out where to point AI first, don’t aim it at strategy and don’t aim it at your inbox replies. Aim it at the bridges: the prep, the synthesis, the first draft, the workshop scaffold, the competitor research dossier. The judgment stays with you. The voice stays with you. The bridges, give to the machine. Alex P.S. try this exercise on Monday (or maybe Sunday is safer?): list the work you did Monday morning in 30-minute chunks, then mark each one B (bridge), I (initiation), or V (voice). The B’s are your AI roadmap. |
Alex Talks AI
As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
I spent last week building an investment deck for a client. The raw material was a pile of research reports. The output needed to be a branded PowerPoint that looked like it came from inside their firm, not from a random consultant with a Canva account. If you've ever tried to get an LLM to spit out a polished, branded deck, you know how this usually goes. The content is fine. The formatting is a disaster. Here's what I tried. Attempt 1. I worked in Claude, pointed it at the folder of...
Their names are Aaron Sorkin, Andy Sachs, Hemingway, Darwin, Ted Lasso, and Archivist. They're agents I built inside Claude. Each one has a role, a personality, a set of files they own, and a clear job. Aaron Sorkin is my chief of staff. He directs everything. When I throw something into the void at 11pm, he decides whether it's an Andy problem, a Hemingway problem, or something I actually need to handle myself. Andy Sachs runs operations. She tracks my Notion CRM, drafts invoices, watches my...
You ask for research. You get a confident-sounding wall of text. The numbers feel right. The framing is fine. But you cannot quite tell where any of it came from, and you would not bet a client meeting on it. I had that feeling one too many times this month, so I ran a small experiment. Same research brief, different tools. The question: what is it actually like to work at SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla? I wanted real numbers from Glassdoor, Indeed, and Blind. Ratings, work-life balance, culture,...