I want to introduce you to five specific AI use cases that will upgrade how you think, communicate, and make decisions.
I’m convinced that most people want to learn how to use AI but don’t know where to begin.
I wrote about this problem a few months ago when I laid out an AI “Boot Camp.” Another common complaint I get from my executive coaching clients is that they appreciate the technology but struggle to find concrete ways to incorporate AI into their natural workflow.
Here are five practical, high-impact tools to add to your personal AI Operating System. I use them every day to save hours a week and produce better outputs and outcomes. At least one of these will immediately upgrade the way you work.
5 Upgrades to Your AI OS
1. Extract “Meeting Intelligence” with Granola
I wrote a whole post (below) this past spring on how to leverage AI notetakers beyond mundane meeting transcription. It’s worth revisiting for the best practices I’ve discovered, but since then, these tools have added some great features worth incorporating.
I used to rely on both Zoom’s AI Companion and Granola, in keeping with my dictum that it’s smart to wear a belt and suspenders; there have been instances when Zoom didn’t record the meeting for some reason. Now, I rely solely on Granola. Zoom’s tool is fine, but it’s actually too granular to be useful. Granola strikes the right balance between detail and brevity.
It also has a superpower Zoom currently does not: you can “chat” with all of your meetings (either within specific folders or all the ones you’ve ever conducted through the app). This allows you to surface insights, trends, and forgotten action items easily.
This ability to transform your transcript into data, then intelligence, is a game-changer. I’ve used it to spot patterns in my executive coaching sessions, such as highlighting areas where we’ve made progress and pinpointing the objectives we’ve under-indexed on. It’s helped me understand my interactions in a way that wasn’t possible before.
Key Benefits:
- Save time taking notes
- Gain new insights across your meetings.
Cost: Free (Granola offers a free tier with 18 meetings per month before you have to pay).
Executive Move: Conduct a deep dive into all your one-on-ones with direct reports and identify recurring problems.
Power Prompt: What are the top 5 issues that keep coming up in our Senior Leadership Team meetings?
Before tools like Granola, your meeting history lived as fragments in your memory. Now it becomes a searchable, analyzable dataset — a living archive of decisions, insights, and accountability.
Once you’ve built meeting memory, the next frontier is idea intelligence — upgrading how you test, sharpen, and evolve your thinking.
2. Gain a Brilliant Co-Founder with ChatGPT
One of my mantras now is “always ask AI.” For only a few seconds (to type in a query), and a few cents (if you’re even paying for a model), and with a bit of prompt and context engineering, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can provide data, analysis, examples, analogies, and even contrarian perspectives on any idea you have.
This is how I use ChatGPT, my go-to model and AI swiss army knife. I have co-thinking sessions where I ask it to stress-test concepts and evaluate the novelty and persuasiveness of my arguments. I wrote a whole post on how to turn Chat GPT into your own Tyrion Lannister to expand on this use case (below).
Key Benefits:
- Better outputs and outcomes
- Access to an always-available strategic advisor and thought partner.
Cost: $20 / month
Executive Move: Use ChatGPT to red-team the new marketing plan you want to pitch to your boss.
Power Prompt: Use this extra cognitive resource to spot vulnerabilities in your business case: “Flag the three assumptions most likely to be wrong; suggest how we can verify each one.”
Most people use AI as a souped-up search engine. High performers use it as a thought partner.
Thinking better, however, is only half the battle. In a world of infinite information, speed matters.
3. Get Smart Fast by Creating a Super-Index with NotebookLM
You can use Google’s NotebookLM to quickly assimilate large amounts of source material — such as entire books, long reports, or large PDFs — by generating briefings. These reports consolidate vast swaths of content into a single or two-page summary, allowing rapid consumption of key insights. Best of all, it minimizes fabrication risk by quoting your sources and linking back to them.
If NotebookLM is the best AI tool you’re not already using, its mind maps functionality is the best feature you’re missing out on.
Mind maps visually represent the hierarchy and content of a massive document or dozens of sources, serving as a visual table of contents or assets that can be dropped straight into presentations.
You effectively create a super-index, similar to the one at the back of a non-fiction book, incorporating the range of information sources you’ve provided, and combine it with a word cloud that transforms the data into a revealing image. Not only can you see the big picture of how the ideas connect, but you can also zoom in on any of the map’s “nodes” to dive into the details.
The ability to link disparate documents across media into a coherent, comprehensive, visual map is something our minds cannot do. This is a genuine instance where AI is extending your brain rather than shrinking it.
Key Benefits:
- Save time getting smart on a topic
- Spot hidden connections
- Unpack complex ideas
Cost: Free
Executive Move: Do this for your Reading Pack in preparation for the upcoming Board of Directors meeting or to get up to speed on a new industry for an investment opportunity you’re evaluating.
Power Prompt: From these sources, produce a one-page brief with: top 5 insights, three red flags, three open questions, and page-linked citations.
This isn’t cognitive offloading; it’s cognitive scaffolding. Offloading replaces memory. Scaffolding extends reasoning.
Once you can rapidly ingest information, the next challenge is communicating it crisply, persuasively, and in multiple formats.
4. Communicate more effectively by converting ideas into different content formats with Claude Gems or CustomGPTs
Instead of manually preparing long presentations or lengthy documents, Claude and ChatGPT can automate content transformation for internal and external communication.
If you plan to do this regularly, I recommend building a Claude Gem or CustomGPT. Once built, this agent automatically converts a blog post or memo into a condensed note, a LinkedIn Carousel, or a slide deck for that upcoming meeting.
Incidentally, NotebookLM can do this as well. In addition to audio summaries (essentially podcasts on demand), reports, and mind maps, you can now create infographics and 10 to 15-page slide decks in mere minutes.
Here’s an example of an infographic I made of this post:
Key Benefits:
- Quick content creation
- Effortless content conversion
Executive Move: This is a cool tool for communicating the 2026 strategic plan to your leadership group, sending a weekly message to your sales team, or broadcasting a memo to frontline staff.
Power Prompt: On NotebookLM: create an infographic from this strategic memo. Include direct quotes and figures with source call-outs.
Think of this as a content-translation engine: blogs → decks → briefs → carousels → memos, all generated from a single source and force-multiplied.
Finally, once you’re producing more insight, you need a way to capture more intelligence. That’s where the last capability comes in.
5. Metabolize podcasts more effectively and more efficiently with Snipd
I listen to a lot of podcasts. I consumed 431 episodes in 2024 and am on track to smash that number this year. Some of those are purely for pleasure, but increasingly, I view podcasts as sources of valuable insight that I can apply to this newsletter and in my work as a strategic advisor.
But who has time to listen to hours of content, even if one is doing it time-efficiently (like during a long commute or while making lunch)? Enter Snipd (see my full review here).
Billed as a podcast player, it’s much more: you can save moments you want to remember from any episode and has an AI chat interface, making it an even more helpful knowledge-capture tool.
Snipd turns podcast listening into a methodical idea-capture system. It transforms the inefficient process of listening to a podcast into something akin to reading a book: You can read the executive summary, consult the index, skim the transcript, and skip directly to what interests you. Finally, the app lets you interact dynamically with the podcast rather than passively listen.
Key Benefits:
- Save time
- Retain more information
- Capture facts and data effortlessly and import them into your personal knowledge management system.
Cost: $8/month for Snipd Premium.
Executive Move: You don’t need to be holding your phone to use Snipd. You can tap your AirPods to save a section when you hear something interesting. Snipd saves a “smart” selection, including the moment right before and after your tap. I use this to “highlight” audio that caught my ear while I’m moving around or even while driving. The app will collect all those snips and email them to you later.
Power Prompt: Before listening to the podcast, ask Snipd to “provide the five best insights from this episode” to ascertain whether or not it’s worth listening to in its entirety.
Snipd turns podcast listening into a high-bandwidth learning system — more like reading a book and saving the insights and highlights.
🏆 The 60-Second Shift:
Your new AI OS should now include:
- Meeting Intelligence (Granola)
- Thinking Partner (ChatGPT)
- Accelerated Learning Engine (NotebookLM)
- Content Conversion System (Claude Gems / CustomGPTs / NotebookLM)
- Insight Capture Mechanism (Snipd)
Each one brings you one step closer to becoming an AI-Enhanced Executive.
🛠️ Your Next Step
💬 Still unsure where to start, or how to get to the next level?
I train leaders to build their personal AI operating systems—a set of tools, prompts, and neuroscience-backed habits that protect attention and enhance judgment in the age of AI.
Let’s chat about developing your personal AI strategy.