A briefing grounded in your priorities
Look for changes and decisions that deserve attention.
Start with explicit goals, current priorities, and relevant project and relationship context.
Get Better Work From the AI Tools You Already Have
You may already have Gemini, Claude, or Copilot, along with email, calendars, spreadsheets, and company documents. Setting up an appropriate AI tool to work with relevant approved information can make it much more useful around your responsibilities.
That takes some setup: connecting the right information where supported, explaining what matters, and giving the system clear instructions. Once it works, you can automate suitable steps so you spend less time repeatedly preparing, checking, and chasing.
I help you identify where that could make a meaningful difference, get a practical setup working, and help your team use it.
Three practical outcomes
These are illustrative uses to configure and test with the capabilities available in your organization.
Meeting intelligence that supports follow-through
Identify commitments and unresolved questions against the meeting’s purpose.
Supply the objective and meeting material; have people confirm actions before they become assignments.
Company knowledge usable in decisions
Bring strategy, research, and previous decisions into evaluating a proposal.
Curate relevant sources and explain their authority, freshness, and where judgment is needed.
An illustrative connection: A briefing could prepare you for a customer conversation. People confirm the resulting commitments, approved information enters a shared record through an authorized update or a person’s normal process, and a later briefing draws on that record.
Find your starting point
Is there a better way to do this?
Start with your goals and where time and energy are going. What feels overwhelming? What does the team repeatedly create? What information does someone assemble every week? What would make a meaningful difference now?
Then ask what the activity is for. Who uses that report? Which decision does the deck support? Does the output need to exist in its current form?
You may find something to accelerate. You may also find something to consolidate, redesign, or stop.
A simple opportunity map
List a few candidates and work through these questions with the people closest to them.
| Consider | Ask |
|---|---|
| Purpose and value | What goal does this support, and what would improve if we changed it? |
| Existing capability | Could approved tools, overlooked features, or better instructions support it? |
| Information | Are the relevant sources available, dependable, and suitable for this use? |
| Dependencies | Can we act directly, or do we depend on another team, an agency, a vendor, or an integration? |
| Effort and risk | What would it take to test, and what could go wrong? |
| Evidence of improvement | How would we tell whether the new approach is better? |
Choose among three practical outcomes:
Try it now: useful potential, manageable effort, and a proportionate way to test.
Investigate first: important dependencies, uncertain capability, or unanswered questions.
Defer or drop: weak value, excessive risk, or technology that cannot reliably do the job.
I have used opportunity-mapping exercises with enterprise clients and senior marketing leaders. Part of my contribution is distinguishing a useful improvement from an appealing demonstration: what serves the goal, what depends on someone else, and what is worth the effort. Sometimes a better connection to existing knowledge is enough. Sometimes the report or process itself needs to change.
If a workflow depends on an agency or vendor, establish what they control and what you need to ask. That dependency may warrant investigation while you make progress on something within your team’s control.
Give the system what it needs
Once you have chosen an opportunity, configure a small, testable setup around the responsibility. Establish:
Goals: what you want to accomplish and what deserves attention.
Context: the people, projects, responsibilities, relationships, and constraints that matter.
Sources: which information to use, what it represents, and who keeps it current.
Functions: what the system should retrieve, compare, produce, or help coordinate.
Boundaries: what it may access and do, what needs approval, and when it should ask.
Feedback: how you will identify and correct unhelpful results.
Start with reusable instructions, relevant reference material, available connections, and a saved workflow where suitable. The configuration should reflect how the work moves between people and systems. Add automation after establishing which steps are useful and repeatable.
A prompt asking for “my priorities” cannot replace an agreed record of what those priorities are. Likewise, connecting a source does not establish that it is current or authoritative.
From individual support to shared team capability
Leadership can make company and team goals, standards, and boundaries explicit. Guidance for a particular role then helps each person apply that direction to their responsibilities.
People should also have room to experiment and share useful discoveries. Shared context should support better thinking and creative use of the technology.
A personal setup and a shared team system need different decisions about access, ownership, and coordination. Decide which knowledge should be shared and which context should remain personal. Someone must own the shared guidance and approve changes to it.
Pilot it with the people doing the work
Start with a small group who understand the work. Test it on real work without breaking existing delivery, and ask them to record:
- What is working?
- What is inaccurate, missing, or creating extra effort?
- What should change?
Compare the result with the current approach. Depending on the goal, useful measures might include preparation effort, missed commitments, repeated corrections, decision usefulness, or confidence in the supporting evidence.
Refine the workflow with the people using it, including guidance or training they need to operate it well. Expand as both its usefulness and its fit with the team’s work become clear.
Once a process proves useful and sufficiently reliable, automate suitable repeatable steps where the tools and access support them, such as a scheduled briefing or reminders. Keep human review for decisions that need attention.
Make improvement part of the week
Make room in an existing team meeting to discuss the systems and workflows you have tried, what you learned, what to stop, and new ideas worth exploring.
The executive remains responsible for the north star goals and for creating a culture that values experimentation and learning. The people using the system supply the feedback that makes it better.
This is where culture, strategy, and technology need to align. A feature becomes useful when it fits the goal and the way people actually work. Continued improvement needs time, ownership, and a place in the regular week.
Examples and possibilities
These examples illustrate the practical choices behind a useful setup. Adapt them to your responsibilities and the capabilities available in your organization.
01
A briefing that knows what matters to you
At the start of the week, establish your priorities in relation to your bigger goals. Give your AI system the relevant context about projects, people, commitments, and deadlines.
Now a briefing has something to work toward. It can look for developments that affect those priorities: a dependency that has slipped, a customer question that needs attention, or information worth reading before an important conversation.
A useful instruction might be:
“Against these three priorities, identify what changed, what needs my attention, and what decision or action may be required. Link to the supporting information and flag what you couldn’t establish.”
Start by running it yourself. Check what it misses and what it surfaces unnecessarily. Once the result is useful, consider scheduling it.
02
Meeting intelligence aimed at a specific outcome
An automatically generated summary may tell you what was discussed. You can also ask a much more purposeful question.
For a customer meeting, the system could examine the transcript for commitments, unresolved objections, dependencies, and decisions affecting the next stage of the relationship. For a project meeting, it could identify what changed in scope and what now needs a decision.
A useful instruction might be:
“Review this meeting against our objective. Separate decisions from suggestions. Identify explicit commitments, owners, dates, and unresolved questions. Mark missing ownership or timing rather than filling it in.”
Have the people involved confirm the action items before they become assignments. Connect the approved result to the place the team already manages its work.
03
Knowledge you can put to work
An executive or team may already have the necessary information across strategy documents, customer research, account notes, previous decisions, and reports. Repeatedly finding and assembling it consumes time and limits what people consider.
Curate a useful set of sources around a responsibility or decision. Explain what each source is for, where it is authoritative, how current it is, and where judgment is required.
Then ask questions across the material: What do we already know? Where do the sources disagree? What supports this recommendation? What is still missing?
A useful instruction might be:
“Use the approved strategy as the statement of our goals and the customer research as evidence about audience needs. Compare this proposal against both. Cite the support, preserve disagreements, and distinguish your suggestions from established facts.”
How these functions could work together
Consider a customer conversation. AI extracts suggested commitments from the meeting material.
The account owner confirms what was agreed, who owns it, and what may be shared.
The approved commitments and relevant context are then recorded in the team’s account knowledge, through an authorized update or a person’s normal process.
A later briefing can draw on that record to highlight an approaching commitment or prepare the owner for the next conversation.
This is an illustrative workflow to configure and test. It connects preparation, follow-through, and shared knowledge without assuming that every tool integrates or that AI has permission to update records on its own.
What this can look like
Beyond those starting points, consider the possibilities:
Rehearse an important conversation. Challenge a proposal against a customer’s stated priorities and previous objections before you present it.
Ask what your organization already knows. Find earlier work, decisions, and relevant experience outside your immediate team.
Connect what customers keep saying. Explore recurring questions across research, sales, and support material, with links back to the evidence.
Turn reading into a conversation. Listen to a briefing drawn from selected documents, then ask questions or request another explanation.
Revisit work with fresh context. Compare previous research or creative work with a new brief or market development.
Prepare around the relationship. Bring together prior commitments, shared interests, and relevant work before reconnecting with someone important.
Some possibilities need only a focused setup; others require more connected information and testing. An AI rehearsal offers possible responses, rather than knowledge of what a person will actually think.
Find the right starting point together
I help executives and teams identify worthwhile improvements and configure suitable approved tools around real responsibilities. The work includes helping people use the setup and improve it from feedback.
We would examine the purpose, information, tools, handoffs, and dependencies, including whether work should change or stop. Then we would test one practical improvement with the people involved. Scope follows what would make a meaningful difference in your situation.
Bring something you think there must be a better way to do. We can work out where to start and how to make it useful.
Capability references
The examples depend on the specific account, license, connections, permissions, and organizational settings. These references describe supporting capabilities:
- Recurring briefings: Gemini schedules and Copilot scheduled prompts.
- Meeting intelligence: Microsoft distinguishes assistance during a meeting from access afterward. Teams meeting guidance.
- Connected account context: Glean documents a handoff workflow drawing on CRM records, calls, correspondence, and notes. Account handoff.
- Interactive audio: Google documents source-based Audio Overviews with interactive questions. Audio Overview guidance.