Reclaim Your Judgment

AI is getting so smooth that it can feel like “help” even when it’s quietly replacing your instincts. After a Vistage workshop with executives and business owners, we walk through a simple idea that keeps showing up in real organizations: reclaim your judgment before you scale anything with AI.

We talk about what we’re watching leaders do day to day with ChatGPT and other frontier models, how a few quick prompts can send you down a totally different path, and why that’s dangerous when you’re making high-stakes calls. Your experience, your failures, your wins, and your client context are not “nice to have” extras. They’re the asset. That human wisdom is what keeps AI from turning into generic advice that makes every company sound the same.

A standout story brings it to life: a business owner who nearly always wins proposals loads her work into an AI model for “a quick opinion” and almost edits away the very choices that make her proposals effective. We unpack why AI can be super confident with super limited context, and how leaders can set the tone so teams use generative AI responsibly without losing craft, voice, or customer understanding.

If you care about AI leadership, executive decision making, and building an AI strategy that actually creates a competitive advantage, this is a practical mindset reset. Subscribe for more, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review with your answer: where do you draw the line between AI help and AI control?

Enjoying the show? Subscribe, share this with a leader in your organization, and leave a review with the biggest AI question your team is wrestling with.

I'm Craig Francisco, CEO of AI23. I help privately held and family businesses turn their hard-earned domain intelligence into an advantage AI can't hand your competitor down the street. If your team is wrestling with where to start, the best place to begin is a conversation: www.craigfrancisco.com 

Transcript

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Cleveland Workshop And The Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hey everyone, I just wrapped up a vistad session today in Cleveland where I had a chance to speak with a group of executives, business owners in the greater Cleveland area, really focused on this new kind of workshop that I've developed, some thoughts that I've been putting together over the last several months of talking with different leaders and learning more about their journey with AI. And really the gist of it is, you know, I talk about reclaiming your own judgment. So reclaim your judgment is a movement that I just believe so strongly in. I'm watching leaders just give in to AI, like on a on a regular basis, like asking questions more frequently, and then the answers coming out, and they're just doing it. They're doing what they're being told, and they don't even realize it, which is just fascinating. It happens to me, and it happens at times when you you're going to ask a question to your favorite frontier model, and next thing you know, several minutes have gone on, have gone by, and you're just going down a completely different path, or thinking about something

Reclaiming Judgment In The AI Era

SPEAKER_00 1:20

else, or maybe making a decision that normally you wouldn't have made based off of your experience. So the message I delivered was you know what? We're all in this room, we're all leaders for a reason. We all have the knowledge that we've gathered for our time being leaders, the failures we've gone through, the successes we've experienced, all of that is real and it can never be replaced by a machine. It just can't. An example that we we discuss would be uh one of the vistage members, not in this group, but one out west, where she is in a business where she does a lot of proposals. And she's like, I am so good at the proposals, I love doing them. I really can't tell you when I've sent out a proposal that I didn't win. She's like, then one day I decide to load it into Chat GPT. You know, her that's the model she used, and just to kind of get an opinion on her proposals. And of course, it comes back with all these ideas and suggestions on changing it. So, you know, fast forward a few minutes, she's she caught herself. Luckily, she was beginning to make changes that

The Proposal Story And The Trap

SPEAKER_00 2:33

would have been not hers, you know, not even purposeful for the client. Like she knows what the client wanted. That's why she's so good at what she does. AI was just gonna again use whatever information it had, which is super duper limited, you know, based on what she was trying to do, and say, hey, this is what a pro a great proposal should look like. Doesn't mean it's it's something that she should do. So back up again, great conversations with this group of folks about being in charge of AI, your experience with AI as a leader, not allowing this to just run rampant in your organization without having control, not not to where you're telling the users how to use it, but making sure you remember what got you to where you are today. Because you didn't wake up successful, right? It takes hard work, it takes time, it's that wisdom that you've you've earned. You've earned it. Lead with that. If you can be grounded from the beginning, grounded

Staying In Charge Of AI At Work

SPEAKER_00 3:41

on who you are, grounded on your judgment, grounded on your own gut and experience, and then you use AI to amplify it, that's when it's extremely powerful, and that's where you can win. Win in a big way. Win meaning maybe you want some free time back in your life. Maybe you want to grow your business, maybe you want to expand. I mean, it could be all different reasons of what that means to somebody, but use AI in a way that you're in control. Do not let it control you. Otherwise, you're gonna be just like a company down the road. Everyone's gonna look and feel the same.

Use AI To Amplify Your Wisdom

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Don't allow that to happen.