Announcer (00:09.314)
Welcome to Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders weary of the endless AI hype, seeking the unvarnished truth. I am your AI intro voice for this week. Greg, your steadfast guide, a master at scaling sales teams and navigating the intricate labyrinth of the Silicon Valley playbook. And then there's Clint, a seasoned startup veteran, a visionary who breathes life into grand ideas.
turning them into flourishing ventures. Together, they slice through the cacophony, delivering sharp analysis and actionable playbooks on harnessing AI to ignite new ideas, expand your business horizons, and ensure you're not left in the shadows. Now, without further ado, here are your hosts.
Welcome to the prompt this podcast. is Greg. And today we have a great discussion. I learned that strategy planning and execution are among the biggest places companies stumble. Today we break down how AI turns that from a chronic problem into a competitive advantage.
And this is Clint. Yeah, today was a really solid interview. Enjoyed it immensely. You know, a couple of things that really stood out for me was when the discussion around those most common trigger points for when a company needs to redo their strategic plan. I also really appreciated our guest's advice on how to look at AI as more than an automation tool. A lot of really solid advice throughout the entire conversation.
Yeah, let's get into the episode. Do it.
Clint (01:55.488)
So today we're joined by Brooks Bush, CEO of Elate, an AI platform designed to help companies define strategy, pressure test it, and track execution across the business. Brooks is also doing this work inside his own organization as the CEO. This conversation is about how leaders should approach AI strategically, not as a feature, but as a management discipline and how to separate signal from noise. Brooks, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Clint, Greg. Glad to be here and appreciate the time.
yeah, no, this is gonna be a good discussion. Strategy to execution is one of my favorite topics and things can go really, really smoothly and really not so smoothly. So I wanna know, what led you to build Elate in the first place? What did you see out there? What was there pain? What was it?
A lot of pain. Like so many founder stories, Greg, it stemmed from firsthand experience that myself and my co-founder, Abby, had gone through at past organizations. And I had seen the strategic planning process done at organizations as large as Salesforce and SAP down to another startup that I had been a part of just prior to LA joined there as one of the first employees to help kind of co-found the business and build out the go-to-market motion, scale that to over hundred folks.
One of the challenges we just saw time and time again is that disconnect that so often occurs between the long-term vision or strategy set at the leadership level and how that is then connected and translated into execution across the rest of the organization. And in particular, I think a lot of organizations struggle not just with the communication aspect, building infrastructure, but then also the how do we drive an operating rhythm to ensure we've got visibility that that
Brooks Busch (03:49.344)
Strategy is not just something we set one time, maybe revisit quarterly, but more of a living and breathing part of our organization where we leverage it to drive decisions, to use it to ultimately create a more dynamic approach to the way that we either persist in areas that we need to or pivot based on what we're seeing is not necessarily aligning up with what our expectations were at the onset.
I'm looking forward to diving in and learning more about that. in some of my past lives, you know, get past the 30, 40 page PowerPoint and that's the strategy for the year. Everybody's supposed to just get it, right?
That is the truth. We find that almost 50%. I think it's like 42 % of orgs that we come in contact with still are relying on manual processes. So think slides, spreadsheets, Word documents, that is for a large number of organizations still the status quo. We keep a running count of what are the longest slide decks that we've ever seen used to kind of drive some of these conversations. The longest is still
It was a 2000 slide ultimately across multiple business
Hundreds you beat that with thousands. Okay. yeah
Brooks Busch (05:09.216)
No, no, no, this was thousands. This was a Fortune 500 organization. They got together, had all the execs fly in monthly and bring together this massive, massive PowerPoint tech.
Imagine the conversation. Okay, open up slide 1562. And let's memorize this, right?
Exactly. It was a multi-day process just getting through the thing and you know, and what is often the case when you're relying on manual ways in which you're reporting on information. It's all stat. It's just retroactive to what's already happened. You're reading yesterday's news rather than looking through kind of the front windshield of where we going, what's happening. So that was a pain, whether it's thousands, hundreds or even just dozens, the means by which these organizations are
And I think we're seeing it today shifting the way that they want to operate, that they want to drive that accountability and decision making process. AI is playing a huge role in changing the narrative for the way that organizations are going through this process.
I definitely want to dive in Clint. I want to hear some of your perspective or you know have you dig in a little bit. I know you you've had multiple C-level roles and I believe one of them was the Chief Strategy Officer.
Clint (06:24.334)
Yeah, that's right. Last five years at my last company, Chief Strategy Officer, and I kind of went into it with, frankly, the wrong perspective. I thought that the role of the Chief Strategy Officer was to have all the answers, to be the smartest guy in the room, to come up with a strategy and just tell everybody, this is what the strategy is, and I ended up realizing pretty quickly that it was
My role was actually to facilitate the process, right? To get everybody on the same page, to go through a journey together so that we ultimately all agreed on a strategy and how to execute on it. And that was a little bit of a painful journey learning about that. And I'm sure you've seen that over and over again, Brooks, right?
Spot on the other aspect and we kind of anchor on this even within our platform how we build it but how we coach folks is the best strategy and ops leaders we see are amazing at asking the right questions the difficult questions are frankly the things that no one else in that room is thinking of they use those questions to drive clarity and to get to ultimately alignment across the leadership team but what we
do oftentimes find is folks that are in corporate development or strategy that come in with the assumption that we have all the answers, this is the way to do it. That oftentimes is gonna lead organizations astray because there is some contextualization that needs to be had and coming in with the assumption you have all the answers in that room versus I think driving and facilitating, asking the right questions to bring all of the best minds across the organization together.
to coalesce a solution and an answer, that's where we see organizations that have that right strategy leader tend to thrive.
Clint (08:09.272)
You know, one of the other challenges I ran into in the early days of starting my company was getting everybody just to agree on the definition of what a strategy is, right? You know, we would have one leader come in with five bullet points and talk really, really high level. And then the next leader would come in and have a 12-page essay that just digs into the leads. both of them are saying, but this is a strategy. And just...
Trying to get a common definition of what a strategy is and how to approach building it and communicating, that's hard. Is that what you guys are doing at Elate?
It is, and I think you're hitting the nail on the head of even when you get a room of leaders together, let's say an engineering leader, sales leader, visionary CEO, an operator, finance leader, they all have different ways that they tackle solutions or go about solving problems. And part of the magic that can happen in that room is you bring those different perspectives together, those different experiences and ways of approaching problems. And this is where, again, a great strategy leader can help
bring together all of those different perspectives, starting with a foundation to build on though. If we don't have the foundation of here's how we go about strategy, here's how ultimately we want to set out a three year, five year, 10 year vision and start to work our way towards how do we drive alignment and communicate clearly to the organization. This is the way that we prioritize things and prioritize the important over the urgent, knowing that urgent will always inform the importance of something as well.
But that foundation has to be set because if we're all operating out of different playbooks and then you add in different perspectives and personalities, now we're setting up a disaster of an offsite because we're getting oftentimes for these strategy sessions, the most expensive resources within our organization together for multiple days. And if that's not just a very effective use of time.
Brooks Busch (10:13.922)
then it's going to be a waste of dollars, a waste of energy across the board.
Right now I can, I'll say something here that, you'd mentioned that having very talented strategy officer puts this all together, but I'm going to go on a ledge and say, not very many companies have a very talented strategy officer. some of them do that as a side job. So
Yeah, they may not have a strategy officer or that person may not be talented either way, right?
Right. So let's bring AI into this. This is an AI discussion, AI podcast, you know, so, you you're building, you know, AI driving a lot of this process. So tell us what that brings.
Sure. From our perspective, when we think of AI, it truly needs to operate as a thought partner for leadership teams. And in particular, we've honed in on how do we serve COOs and Chief Strategy Officers, potentially a chief of staff within an organization, to give them a sounding board, a guide, and even evaluating what decisions to be making, where to make specific bets, to understand the trade-offs in saying yes to one thing, which ultimately means saying no to
Brooks Busch (11:29.6)
a plethora of other things because from our perspective, there is the element of AI as that thought partner to, as you just alluded to, Greg, democratize that world-class or best-in-class strategic thinking that a lot of organizations don't have on the leadership team today. There's only so many Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 organizations, so many chief strategy officers at those organizations. But from our perspective, was asking the question of
What if we could give every organization a world-class strategy leader and or complement the way that they think about strategy with that sounding board with that thought partner that brings together best practices, benchmarks, the outside pressure test of saying here are teams that are over capacity as you're building the plan or here outside market dynamics that we need to take into account when we're building our strategy and assuming growth rates. Well, what are the other
outside factors that we're not thinking of or that we can't go hire an outside consulting firm and spend six, seven figures to come in and give us a briefing on here the things we need to be taking into account. from our perspective, that's where AI starts to unlock that ability as a strategy leader to now obtain resources that frankly for most organizations either weren't internally had or
externally weren't able to be added without a huge six figure, seven figure type of consulting arrangement or something along those lines. that's been our focus from the onset is how do we leverage AI as a thought partner to really drive that conversation? We can get into the time savings components, generating reports and helping to eliminate a lot of the mundane tasks that strategy and ops leaders had on their tables. But at the same time, like we talk a lot about this
Realized gain versus unrealized gain and AI software, it's all designed to save us time, but it's really for us answering the question of, then where do we deploy that time elsewhere? How do we see that time that we're no longer assembling thousands of PowerPoint slides together to actually drive growth within the organization or help remove hurdles, help drive decisions quicker? And for us, those are the two components. Yes, we have to save time. Yes, we have to make this easy with AI.
Brooks Busch (13:48.056)
But ultimately we need to be able to see measurable impact in how we're guiding decisions.
So with some of your engagements that you've had already or customers that you've gone through, maybe you can give us some examples of, know, what it looked, you know, what their planning process looked like when you walked in. Now I'm sure you had to do discovery with, you know, different individuals, not all in the room at the same time. And they're all opening up to you a little bit about where they're worried about the shortfalls of some of the strategy discussions or where they're just don't even know what to ask.
And then what does it look like after you've implemented and they've gone through one successful strategy session using your solution?
We talk about a lot of how strategy has typically been done is entirely human led, human driven, and to an extent at the mercy of either the questions being asked in the room or the experience of those humans that are involved in that process. And we wanted to certainly put the human first, right? Humans are what set the vision, drive the alignment, the execution. They're ultimately what...
we care most about because we need to coalesce again as an organization around here's the vision and here is how I as an employee am tied into where we are ultimately trying to go and the strategy that we're deploying as a company. But from our perspective, we needed AI to really again come alongside and compliment that process because if we can find that marriage of the context that a human has that
Brooks Busch (15:24.65)
understanding of their business and now start to map it to AI, that's where, again, we unlock that decision-making process. And so one example we commonly refer to is, you know, let's just say the average tenure of a COO is going to be two and a half years. Well, that two and a half years that they're at that organization, they understand the context, the decisions that are made, they then leave, new COO comes in. Where does all of that context live? Is it...
at the other leaders at the table, their responsibility to kind of bring them up to speed. Well, what if there's turnover there? Well, what we have seen so frequently within these organizations is think of it as like a strategy vault where we can take years worth of past performance, strategic decisions, company KPIs, and we can start to train AI to understand, hey, what is our objective success rate? What is our overall performance across different teams? What...
level of objectives can we take on? How do we prioritize and actually deliver on objectives successfully based on value and effort? And if we can start to now train AI to understand past decisions, to load in all of those past strategic plans, board calls, if we are a publicly traded company, earnings calls, to now understand how we perform as a company, how we hit KPIs, how we execute our strategy, whether we use OKRs, 40X, EOS, or any other emotion,
Now all of a sudden, that context isn't lost when we lose leaders. Those decisions that have been made previously are incorporated into that thought partner that we have as a solution helping to guide the strategic decisions that we're making going forward. so, you know, we had a conversation with one organization that dropped in, I think it was like seven years of past strategies that they had built from PDFs to Excel slides to, or Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides.
And they all of a sudden started to see that mapped into the platform and started to now see, this is how we can guide future decisions. They could identify risk that they were seeing of, hey, as an example, we're projecting to grow 7 % in Q3 of next year. Traditionally, we've only grown on average about 4.5%. That's okay. You can have that increased growth expectation, but do you have the supporting?
Brooks Busch (17:42.71)
objectives underneath that are actually going to facilitate you achieving that lift of two and a half percent in Q3 of next year. And that's a very like numbers driven revenue oriented decision point. But just imagine if we can start to see, across our product and engineering team, how many, how much time does it take to deploy a feature set that requires this level of commitments from our engineering team? And then what do we see when we actually say yes to that product feature? Do we see
a measurable lift in stickiness? Do we see net retention go up? Do we see the enterprise motion that we were hoping to build out actually come to fruition? Because if the answer is no consistently, then we need to have a different process for how we say yes or no to what we're asking of our engineering team as an example. And all that lives in a tool where those strategic decisions are being made and tracked. And they're giving us that future forward look as well.
That's amazing. Okay. So that makes sense. So you can now bring now that kind of maps to what you're saying only, you know, some of the largest companies with that processing power through, through consultants and everybody can actually bring those. Now, any company can bring those insights using AI through.
Yeah, again, it's ultimately being able to say, hey, here's what best in class looks like. And here's how we start to now build that into your process for the creation of the strategy, execution of it, and then reporting. And if we can tie all three of those aspects together and leverage AI to see around those corners to tell us before we even deploy the strategy, hey, here are the potential risks, here are the teams that are overcapacity, or the individuals that maybe are taking on too many objectives.
And the likelihood of them being able to deliver on these is 48 % from what we've traditionally seen. That's something I want to know about as a chief strategy officer before we hit go and roll the plan out to the entire organization.
Clint (19:42.008)
So you hit one of my favorite topics in there a couple minutes ago when you were talking about the different types of methodologies that companies can use in terms of planning. You talked about EOS. That's an entrepreneur operating system, I think it is. And OKRs, what's that?
Objectives clear.
Do you have a favorite one or is there different ones apply for different situations better? Any thoughts on what type of methodologies the company should use? Does Elate enforce a specific one?
So there's no favorite that I would say this is the try and true only framework.
all my children in their own unique way.
Brooks Busch (20:29.038)
And I hate it when people say it depends because, you know, it feels like it can oftentimes be a cop-out answer, but I would strongly encourage that those different operating frameworks should be deployed at different organizations. There's just no two ways about it. EOS is not going to be a framework that we recommend to a thousand person high-growth organization looking to scale really quickly.
that's just not going to be the direction that we take them in. Internally, we leverage aspects of a variety of different frameworks. Like EOS as an example, I really enjoy their L10 meetings and that rhythm that they help instill into leadership sessions themselves. For objectives and key results, I think one of the best things that they do is really have an outcome-driven orientation to saying, yes, this is going to be a priority. We're saying yes to this objective. What do we expect?
in terms of the impact in a measurable way through the organization itself. Again, to operate under any of those solely, I think is perfectly fine. The most important aspect of any of it though is the commitment. If the leadership team themselves is not committed to the framework that the organization puts in place, then it's going to fail regardless of what methodology it is. And that's a full stop. Like that commitment at the executive level is the most important aspect of it.
versus what framework you choose to implement.
The thing I like about these types of frameworks is it gives everybody a common vocabulary. So everybody's kind of approaching it in a consistent way. Whether one framework is better than the other, probably the most important thing is everybody's on a framework and sharing the same language. But I also see strategy often in my experience where it really falls apart is or an initiative stalls out is not in the planning process.
Clint (22:29.922)
but more in the execution process and rolling it out and making it a living, breathing component of a company. Thoughts on that topic, ways to approach that and ways to solve that.
Yeah, we like to joke that anyone can build a strategy. It's the rare few that can execute upon it. And I always in this example, think of the Seinfeld episode where he's at the rent. I don't know if any Seinfeld fans here or not, he's trying to get his rental. Yeah, there you go. He goes to get his rental car. They've taken the reservation, but they don't have the car. And I feel like that's basically just strategic planning to a T is most organizations.
This is audience.
Brooks Busch (23:07.768)
can put together a strategy. They check that box. Very few organizations don't go through the exercise of building a strategy. It is the follow through on delivering the strategy, execution upon it, where that's most organizations don't see that through to fruition. think there was a Forbes article recently that came out, I referenced, where like 54 % of organizations deliver on half of their strategic imperatives or strategic initiatives.
That's pretty consistent with what we see. is a, are all the amazing things we're gonna do, and then we revisit it at the end of the year, and very often, falls by the wayside.
Yeah. No, think, you know, Clint and I talk about this a lot because we're in two separate roles. He was more, you know, spent more time in the, the C-suite, the E-staff. And, you know, I was a vice president level where we would have input on the strategy, but ultimately the strategy would then pop out. And, and sometimes there was a whole plan to help roll it out. Other times it was just assumed.
that, that I was going to be able to roll this out to, you know, a couple hundred, a couple hundred people and everybody would understand this on day seven and be able to just move forward for the year. Right. You know, and, and, you know, that, that I've ran, I've run into this so many times and Clint and I debate this a lot sometimes where, know, I would get it. I'm rolling it out to maybe nine people that roll it out to 26 more people that then roll it out to.
Couple hundred.
Greg (24:52.492)
No one's measuring how that's going. If there's no measurement in there, people even understand this?
might do it great, second person might do it poorly, third person might just ignore it, right? How do you keep track of that? Is that what a late...
Six months later that I get the question, what happened? By that point it's too late. does elite like, know, help multiple participants down the road, know, down the whole chain and measure how things are going on and report back.
Yeah, we're basically just trying to eliminate the game banana phone, right? Where it's just one individual trying to tell the other with where we want to start is again, setting a foundation. Here is the unified view of where directionally we want to go as an organization because when we can set that foundation, what we just find time and time again is we can empower employees to say yes to the right priorities and align their work with strategically the direction we're going in. And also either no or not now to the inevitable just
Onslaught of things they're gonna get brought on to their day-to-day week to week. That's the biggest thing we find When we can give clarity to say yes or no to the right things That's where organizations start to really see the ability to move faster to make decisions quicker to not have to go Talk to three different individuals their manager a different team to figure out. Hey, I got asked this Do you want me to do this instead of this? It's very clear. Here's the priorities. Here's what we as an organization are
Brooks Busch (26:22.262)
want you to be empowered to say yes to versus, inevitably what's gonna come onto your plate that you need, that Clint, you referenced it. Everyone seeing from the same sheet of music starts by giving that clarity, by saying here is foundationally where we wanna go. And one of the, I'll go on to a little bit of a piece of why we built a lake to begin with and what we just hear so consistently. I heard it from a COO in the first, one of the first demos I ever did.
They were getting up in front of their executive team and saying, look, we just told the entire company that we're at like 95 % to the performance management goals that we outlined as a business. We as a company, our operating plan, we are set to hit below 50 % to what we told the board we were gonna accomplish this year. When we go back out and we're having these conversations around the rifts, around performance reviews,
there's going to be a disconnect between what we just communicated, which is we set goals that maybe we track once a quarter, and it's set in this more HR fashion, which there is a time and a place for that. But it is not necessarily the means by which we need to execute our strategy. And that's a big part of what we want to accomplish, which is really making sure folks understand, here are the things I say yes to, here's the way that I connect my work to directionally where we're going. And ultimately, helps cut down on things like priority fatigue, where
folks are just saying yes all the time because it's not that they don't want to be great employees, they just don't necessarily know the lens in which they should be looking.
Sitting in leadership meetings that I've been in the past 10 years. All those topics have come up over and over and over again. So let's shift gears a little bit. Let's bring it back to AI a bit more. And this podcast is for business leaders who know they need to get started with AI but don't know where to begin. So I might guess where the answer might go, but maybe not.
Clint (28:24.687)
If a CEO were to ask you, do I start with AI? What would you say?
Well, I'll go two ways. The first of which very biously is, hey, do you have a full understanding of your strategy, execution of it, and frankly, where the risks lie within that strategy and the way in which you're proactively navigating those conversations with the rest of the leadership team? And that should be the driver for how, in a lot of cases, you're surfacing the areas of focus in those leadership meetings.
because you have clear line of sight into here are the priorities. Here is frankly the risk that lies under the surface, kind of the iceberg analogy of yes, I'm getting the status update of we're on track with revenue, but I don't necessarily have clear line of sight into all the other intangibles that might all of sudden cause that revenue target to go from being green to red. I don't know where we're at in terms of our inbound conversions. I don't know what our overall close rate is on SQLs, whatever it may be.
That's first and foremost where I'd recommend is do you have a full grasp of your strategy and more importantly where the risks lie and how that's a regular topic of conversation.
before you start talking about tools.
Brooks Busch (29:39.694)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Internally at Alate, one of the things that I use most heavily is frankly understanding where our customer sentiment and prospect sentiment is. And I leverage Gong and a lot of the AI features they have from that perspective to drive frankly decisions that we're making and conversations that I'm having with our product team. It is so...
amazing to be able to have a lot of information that I used to have to go listen to call after call and like 2x speed just with briefs that I can then jump into based on when I'm seeing keywords when I'm setting up hey here's targeted information or things that I want to surface up because it's going to help drive the way that I'm thinking about innovation the way that I'm going to our product and engineering team and asking hey we're hearing some feedback here from customers I think there's
something to be said here, can you also take a listen to these clips? Like again, a very basic means to how we're driving those decisions. But I would say like for me, that is brought together more than just like how we're tracking and forecasting our sales pipeline. It's informing the way that we think about innovation and that we can take vast amounts of information and calls and using it to distill into like very micro edges in that decision process.
That's neat. For the first time, yeah, a CEO can drive a company not just on the top line dashboards and just hope the vetting under these dashboards was right. Now you've got a deep dive into each piece of your business because AI can surface these.
Yeah, that's a pretty common theme that we've heard from our guests is kind of that magic place to unlock insights in the business with AI is go mine your customer calls. Go get smarter about your customers just by actually mining what they've said and then turn that into input into your strategy and that sort of thing.
Brooks Busch (31:46.382)
Yeah, and I think it also comes in where I feel like I can be dangerous enough to get that high level information. But the other aspect of this is having a team that frankly is even more proactive and looking for these edges throughout our business revenue operations. How do we ensure that we're asking the right questions during the sales process that we're understanding where those sticking points where we understand where is our
methodology falling short, an account management team and I'll shout out our teams here. We got two individuals, director of account management and the individual who oversees rev ops for us that they just are constantly looking for ways to maximize AI in their day to day to support their teams and also to make sure they're sharing information with myself and the other members of leadership because
Again, it is so much easier today to get access to that information to build in that infrastructure, where if you're not thinking proactively about that, and you're just kind of relying on the old ways of hopefully it'll surface up to the leadership team, you're kind of dead in the water.
Yeah, right. Well, let's talk about tools. know, the listeners always like to learn about new tools and Clinton and I do too. Maybe not even things that you are using internally. We would like to learn about some of those, but even personally, how do you use AI? What are the fun tools you use and what have you discovered?
Yeah, I'll start maybe even internally, obviously for being a company that builds other AI features and... Let me guess, you use... Yeah, we do use a internally to help drive... Yep, so we leverage our own tool. We have a feature called Strategy Advisor where I'm using it to constantly pressure test reports and what we're seeing in the platform.
Clint (33:30.904)
These late.
Greg (33:35.662)
That sounds like a good one.
Brooks Busch (33:48.31)
marrying kind of common sentiment with integrations into different data sources to pull the outcomes themselves. But even on the product and engineering side, think one of the things that team has been really good about is amplifying their impact. How do we take a team of, you know, let's call it half a dozen engineers and make it feel like we've got a team of a dozen engineers or more and figuring out what are those tools that
eliminate some of the manual QA process, take a lot of the mundanity off of what their day to day looks like because the same with a strategy leader, if I'm spending all of my time bringing together reports, compiling PowerPoint slides, it's going to take me away from frankly, what I want to be doing and what I should be doing, which is driving action and making quicker decisions. Same with our engineering team. And so I know they're leveraging Co-Pilot, they're leveraging some of these tools to help eliminate that mundane task.
On the sales and marketing side, we use Gong for a lot of the way that we're thinking about overall pipeline health and pipeline management and account management and through that process. So those are some of the internal tools that we're leveraging. In terms of the personal side, know, Chad Yucatilla I think is just a no-brainer for a lot of folks or some form of that. I am not...
I like things to look good. like to have like a design forward approach to both personal life, I guess, and professional, but I can't design anything. Can't design anything. so, I totally rely on outside tools like gamma or others to help make things look better. Cause they gotta look good. I'm just not gonna be the person to make it look good. I'll be able to.
We're in the same boat.
Brooks Busch (35:41.548)
You know, I'm just the armchair designer here like, yeah, that looks good or no, no, no, that doesn't look good.
I just started using gamma a few weeks ago, blown away by it. Next one I'm to try out is GenSpark.
Yeah, okay. Okay, I haven't heard of that one. I need to check it out. even in our day to day, and my wife would know better than I would some of these tools, but we just moved into a new house like two months ago, and she was using all these tools to look at, here's what this room could look like. If we get whether with this design and this paint, and here's what the outside of our house could look like. And I'm like, this is incredible. I don't know how you're putting this together, but this is fantastic. So I feel like it's just, you know, it's bleeding into every aspect of life at this point.
some for better some for worse but ultimately it's again figuring out those aren't we all getting
We're good at spying what is AI generated and what's not. On one hand, people talk about AI slop, but on the other hand, I feel like we're appreciating human-created content more than ever now. That's don't know. Maybe that's looking for the silver lining at times.
Brooks Busch (36:46.626)
Yeah, couldn't agree more with that. I think we're all getting really good at the appreciation of things. Even to an extent, I'm appreciative of like, was using the same chat GPT you were. What prompts were you using to get this output versus what I got? Because yours looks light years better. So again, it is posing different ways to go about critical thinking and it's just altering it. I think that's been one of the things for me that
has gotten lost in some of the nuances. There is critical thinking that goes into how you leverage AI and the way that you deploy it. I think there are aspects to this is just the new way that we need to think about, frankly, amplifying our own selves, both professionally and personally, to have the impact. There are different tools at our disposal that can make us even better at what we do. And again, we approach it with this mindset of
What are the practical things we can take off of people's plate that they're spending time on that's taking them away from doing the thing they really care about? For a chief strategy officer, they don't want to be compiling reports, tracking down upstates, doing these manual tasks. They want to be evolving the strategy, building that out, working across different teams and leaders. And so if we can solve some of that practical application through AI of things that they've had to do traditionally in the past.
to unlock the things that they really do get excited and passionate about. That's where AI really, both professionally and personally, I think, starts to have the type of impact that we're all hoping for.
I like that advice. I like that advice. that rings true for me. So one last question for you before we wrap up here. What's your one takeaway for business leaders who are unsure where to begin with AI?
Brooks Busch (38:38.22)
Don't be afraid to admit that you don't know where to start. think for me, I've been in software my entire career and I think we all saw this coming, this shift to AI. And a few years ago when we were starting to see this, it felt as though there was this either, I'm not really sure this is gonna be a thing or just frankly leaning into it and maybe.
being okay saying, know, I don't know what exactly AI is capable of, but I want to learn and I want to be okay acknowledging the simple fact that I'm not going to have all the answers. And I think that still rings true today.
Greg (39:21.966)
Okay, it's time for this week's AI Challenge. Now the AI Challenge is a takeaway assignment for our listeners to get their hands on some AI tools and do some exercises.
This week's AI challenge picks up on the strategic planning topic brought to us by our guest. This is all about digging into how well aligned you are across your teams. What you're going to do is take one of your priorities, pressure test it against the strategy for the company, and rewrite it from the perspective of others in the organization leveraging AI as well. And then you're going to really dig in and see is your team on the same page.
Yeah, look down into the show notes and you'll find a link that goes right to the blog. It's got all the instructions that you're going to need. Now, if you've just finished an AI deployment within your business, we'd love to hear about your experience, the good, the bad, all of it. So go to www.promptthis.ai, go to the Contact Us page, fill out the form and we'll be in touch to talk about the story.
Greg (40:29.358)
This has been a great conversation. you you know, if you really open by thinking you're in a great spot because there's not a single company that doesn't do strategy planning and strategy execution. So you're, you guys are in a great spot. And, uh, you know, if any of our listeners want to continue this conversation or reach out to you to talk a little bit more, uh, where can they find you?
Sure. Well, you can always go to goalate.com and find us there. You can always reach out directly to me, brooks at goalate.com. LinkedIn also works. always love having these conversations with Strategy and Operations folks. We have a newsletter called The Pulse that I think has got over 15,000 subscribers to it where I just constantly get feedback, suggestions on topics to write about.
Honestly, if you just are interested in this topic and how AI is really, I think, directionally changing or altering the way that strategy leaders are thinking about planning and the execution, that'd be a good place to start.
I'll be signing up for that. Appreciate your time today, Bricks. Thank you very much for sharing all of your insights with us.
Clint Gregg, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Clint (41:47.04)
And that's another episode of Prompt This.
Announcer (41:53.998)
Thank you for joining Clint and Greg today. You can find all of the Prompt This episodes and more in-depth articles at www.promptthis.ai. And be sure to click the follow button below. We look forward to having you back.
