How to Use AI to Improve Your Personal Productivity as a Senior Leader

Senior leaders typically face an information overload problem at the start of each week: accumulated emails, news, reports, and briefings that need to be processed before the first significant meeting or decision.

A useful Monday morning AI workflow: paste the week's key reports and briefings into Claude or ChatGPT and ask 'Summarise the most important things I need to know from these documents for this week.' This produces a digest that you can process in 10-15 minutes rather than spending an hour reading in full.

For sector news and competitor intelligence: use ChatGPT's web browsing to ask 'What are the most significant developments in [sector] in the past week that I should be aware of?' This gives you a current briefing without manually checking multiple news sources.

A 30-minute Monday morning AI-assisted briefing session can replace 60-90 minutes of reading and still give you better situational awareness, because the AI surfaces the most material information rather than leaving you to find it in the volume.

One of AI's most underused applications for executives is as a structured thinking partner for decisions.

When facing a complex decision, outline the situation and your current thinking to Claude or ChatGPT: 'I need to decide whether to [decision]. Here is the situation and the factors I am considering: [summary]. What considerations am I missing? What are the strongest arguments for each option?'

This externalises the decision structure in a way that often reveals gaps or assumptions you had not articulated. The AI does not need to be right about the answer; the process of structuring the decision and having it reflected back is useful regardless.

For high-stakes decisions, ask: 'What could go wrong with the option I am leaning towards? What would a well-informed sceptic say about this decision?' The pre-mortem exercise (imagining the decision has been made and has failed, then asking why) is one of the most effective decision quality tools available, and AI makes it faster to run.

A significant proportion of executive time is spent writing: emails, reports, presentations, briefing notes, and communications of all kinds. AI can reduce this time substantially without reducing the quality of the output.

A practical workflow: capture your thinking in rough bullet points rather than prose ('key points: we are behind budget by 8%, primarily driven by volume shortfall not pricing, management is putting in place [actions], my recommendation is [X]'), then ask the AI to draft this as the appropriate format (board paper section, email to the chair, briefing note for the NED).

Drafting from bullet points is typically 60-70% faster than writing from scratch. The AI draft then requires editing, but editing is faster than initial drafting, particularly when the structural and factual decisions are already made.

Keep a running notes document where you capture thoughts, decisions, and information throughout the week. At the end of the week, ask the AI to 'Draft my weekly leadership update to the board from these notes,' extracting the most significant points in the appropriate format.

AI tools are most valuable when applied to the tasks that consume disproportionate time relative to their strategic value. The tasks most worth delegating to AI are: routine drafting (standard emails, meeting follow-ups, recurring reports), information synthesis (reading and summarising incoming materials), and research for background context (preparing for meetings or decisions).

The tasks least suitable for AI delegation are: relationship communications where personal quality is the point, judgement calls where your specific contextual knowledge and experience is what the decision requires, and creative or strategic thinking where the value is in the original thinking, not the synthesis.

A useful personal productivity principle: use AI to compress the time spent on tasks that need to be done but do not require your best thinking, so that you have more focused time for the work that actually does. The executive who uses AI well is not the one who uses it most; it is the one who uses it on the right tasks.