Before You Set Up an AI Team, You Should Probably Do This First

I find that tension interesting from a being human perspective.

Because underneath every stalled AI initiative, every postponed integration meeting, every “we’ll get to it next quarter” there’s a question surfacing that I suspect many aren’t saying aloud: What does my judgment even mean when AI can process faster than I can think?

That question only feels threatening if you’re operating in survival mode. Reactive. Overwhelmed. Scattered. The very one word check-in’s I hear most often working with teams or 1:1 with, let me add, high-functioning humans. They are not immune to this and many are running the business on autopilot while the world shifts underneath them.

The real problem isn’t AI. It never was.

The problem is that most innovator, leaders and builders haven’t stopped long enough to think about what they actually need AI to do. They’re trying to solve a strategy question from inside the chaos the strategy is supposed to fix.

Before you hire anyone — before you implement anything — you probably need to do something that sounds almost too simple.

You need one day to think.

Every great thinker and innovator I’ve ever studied had one thing in common.

They prioritized time to think. Not react. Not execute. Think.

Einstein used to take long, aimless walks around Princeton — sometimes for hours. He wasn’t exercising. He was creating distance between the noise and the next insight. He once said that he did his most important work not at a desk, but on those walks — letting his mind wander until it found what it was looking for.

We’ve lost that.

The modern builder’s calendar is a monument to reactivity. Back-to-back calls. Slack threads that never end. A to-do list that regenerates itself like some kind of productivity virus. And somewhere inside all of that, you’re supposed to figure out how AI fits into your business (and life)?

That’s more of a prayer than a plan…

Most people are trying to make AI decisions from inside the very autopilot that AI could help them escape. But they can’t see it — because they never step outside of it long enough to look.

So here’s what I’d suggest. Before you spend another dollar, before you sit through another vendor pitch, before you let the urgency of the moment push you into a decision you haven’t actually thought through — Take what I call a THINK DAY.

One day out of the business dedicated entirely to thinking.

First rule: physically leave.

Go somewhere that changes your thinking. A cabin if that’s your thing. A library with no WiFi. Or one of my personal favorites — the fancy hotel lobby hop. You know what I’m talking about. The places you probably wouldn’t stay given the nightly rate, but nobody’s stopping you from sitting in that beautiful lobby with a coffee and doing the deepest strategic work of your quarter.

And if the nightly rate doesn’t bother you — book the room. One night in a different environment where you can fully disconnect and think? That will pay for itself faster than you think.

Here’s what you do when you get there.

Step 1: Map your entire business on one page.

Every function, every role, every system, every bottleneck. Get the whole picture visible in front of you — because you can’t strategize what you can’t see. Most haven’t looked at their business as a whole system in months, or years.

Step 2: Ask the questions you’ve been avoiding.

This is where the real work happens. Sit with these:

• Where are my actual bottlenecks — not the ones I talk about, the ones I work around?

• If I could hire a world-class [name the position] tomorrow, where would I invest first? What problems would I put them on?

• What am I pretending not to know?

That last one is the question I share with audiences when I’m speaking at events or inside companies. It’s the one that always lands the hardest. Because we all have an answer. We just haven’t let ourselves say it yet.

Whatever comes up — that’s where AI could go first.

Step 3: Feed the entire day into AI.

Take everything you mapped and give it to a tool like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Don’t ask it a vague question. Give it the full picture and let it work.

Here’s a prompt you can copy and paste directly. It’s designed to interview you first — pulling out the details you might have missed before giving you a real and customized AI strategy:

Copy and paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

You are a senior AI strategy consultant working with a high-performing founder/CEO who has just completed a full-day business audit. Your job is to help them build a practical AI integration plan — but first, you need to understand their business deeply. Start by interviewing me. Ask me one question at a time across the following areas before making any recommendations:

1. Business overview — What does my company do, how many people are on my team, and what does a typical week look like operationally?

2. Bottlenecks — Where am I personally spending the most time? Where does work slow down or pile up? What tasks do I keep doing that I know I shouldn’t be?

3. The dream hire — If I could hire one world-class person tomorrow, what role would they fill and what would I put them on?

4. The honest answer — What am I pretending not to know about how this business runs

5. Current AI usage — Am I using any AI tools today? What’s working? What have I tried that didn’t stick?

6. Vision — Where do I want this business to be in 12 months? What would need to be true for that to happen?

After you’ve finished the interview, provide:

• A prioritized list of the top 3–5 areas where AI can have the biggest impact based on what I told you

• For each area: describe what the AI solution looks like, what it replaces or augments, and how it helps my existing team

• A 30/60/90 day implementation roadmap I can actually follow

• A candid assessment of what I — as the leader — might need to shift in how I operate (and think) to make this work

Start the interview now. One question at a time.

Step 4: Ask the identity question.

This one’s easy to skip, but don’t do it, it’s THE most important question you’ll ask during this day.

Who do I need to become to operate at this upgraded level?

Who do I need to be? What beliefs need to evolve? What habits need to go? How do I need to show up differently tomorrow?

Be kind with the answer, but be honest.

Because the AI plan you just built is only as good as the person executing it. And if that person is still running on last year’s operating system — still reactive, still avoiding the hard questions, still spinning on the hamster wheel — then the plan stays on paper.

The builders who win the AI era won’t be the ones who moved fastest. They’ll be the ones who used the most powerful tool they already had. Their own mind.

Sources: BCG AI Radar / World Economic Forum (January 2026), MIT Sloan (March 2026)

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