Start Leading with AI: A Week-Long Experiment for Busy CEOs

Severin Sorensen
5 days ago
3 min read

AI is reshaping how leaders operate, but seeing its potential and understanding how it could meaningfully fit into your day-to-day leadership are two different things. The leaders who adapt fastest won’t be the ones who know the most about AI; they’ll be the ones who experiment earliest. Competitive advantage is shifting toward executives who can use AI to widen their field of view, challenge their assumptions, and accelerate their clarity.

To broaden your perspective on the practical integration of AI into day-to-day operations, we’ve developed a concise, accessible guide you can implement in one week. It requires no technical background, large initiatives, or complex implementation. Instead, it offers a structured framework to help you recognize what’s possible and what can deliver value immediately.

What This Week Is (and Isn’t) About

AI leadership isn’t about handing decisions to algorithms or outsourcing judgment. It’s about learning to use AI as a thinking partner, one that sharpens your reasoning, reveals blind spots, and expands your perspective on how strategic questions can be framed.

This week-long experiment is intentionally lightweight. You’ll need:

Two hours of focused time
Access to a modern AI assistant
A willingness to challenge your own assumptions

By the end of the week, you’ll understand not just what AI can do, but what it can do for you in your specific leadership context.

Three Actions You Can Take This Week

1. Audit Your Decision Architectures (Tuesday Morning)

Block two hours. List your five most important recurring decisions (market entry, capital allocation, M&A, product strategy, key hires). For each, map out:

What information currently informs these decisions
What assumptions guide how you gather and interpret that information
Where AI could stress-test assumptions or surface blind spots
What judgment calls only humans can make

Don’t change anything yet. Just observe the gap between how you currently decide and how you could decide with AI augmentation.

2. Run Your First Strategic Prompt (Wednesday Afternoon)

Pick one strategic question you’re grappling with. Draft a prompt that asks AI to:

Challenge your current framing
Identify assumptions you might be making
Generate alternative hypotheses
Stress-test your logic

Example: "I'm considering entering the European market [enter additional details]. What assumptions am I likely making about this decision? What questions should I be asking that I'm not? What historical parallels might inform this decision, and where might those parallels mislead me?"

Compare the AI output to your internal analysis. Look for divergence, not confirmation.

3. Start Your AI Leadership Routine (Thursday-Friday)

Commit to one week of daily AI engagement:

Each morning: Ask AI to brief you on overnight developments in your industry
Each afternoon: Use AI to prepare for one upcoming meeting
Each evening: Reflect on where AI added value and where human judgment prevailed

Document what you learn. After five days, you’ll have concrete data on where AI strengthens your leadership, where its limitations show up, and how your decision-making architecture could evolve.

What Happens After This Week

With just a few hours of structured experimentation, you’ll have a personalized, evidence-based understanding of where AI fits into your leadership model. From here, you can:

Systematize the practices that worked
Delegate or automate low-value tasks
Identify where your team needs AI fluency
Refine your own leadership routines

The Main Takeaway

As AI systems become more autonomous, more contextual, and more integrated into enterprise workflows, your role will evolve from decision-maker to decision-architect, designing the environments where humans and intelligent systems work together. Your ability to coach your teams toward AI fluency will become a core leadership responsibility. And the habits you build now—structured prompts, decision audits, daily engagement—will compound into a durable strategic advantage.

The future will reward leaders who stay curious, experimental, and adaptive. The activities above are just the first step. Keep going. The organizations that learn fastest will win, and so will the leaders who guide them.