How Leaders Can Use AI to Bring Business Objectives to Life

This is part of a special leadership series on how you can use artificial intelligence (AI) to boost your productivity, make smarter business decisions, amplify your communications, and enhance your impact.

There’s a shift happening today. Employees want to feel like they’re active participants in their company’s evolution, not just bystanders. They want to understand the larger context that can give them a deeper connection to their work like they have “skin in the game.” Exceptional leaders know how to provide that translation.

But, let’s be honest, it takes time and energy to help your team feel connected to the big picture. If you’re like most leaders, your plate is already full—so “vividly illuminating our business objectives” might consistently fall to the bottom of your to-do list.

That’s where AI can help. Tools like ChatGPT can bridge the time gap by generating narratives, metaphors, analogies, and visual suggestions that can resonate with your team members, giving meaning and context to your corporate initiatives and team goals.

Let’s look at an example.

I worked with a leader named Caroline, who was in charge of expanding her company’s virtual mental health services. She needed to sell this expansion concept to numerous teams within the organization, so she prepared her pitch and invited all the decision-makers to a meeting. As she started her presentation, she could sense the skepticism in the room.

Thankfully, Caroline was able to grab everyone’s attention by kicking things off with a heartfelt story.

A once-vibrant college freshman—her daughter—had started battling feelings of depression during her first year at school. The waiting list for campus counseling was extensive. That’s when they turned to online therapy and immediately found help. It made all the difference in the world.

As Caroline explained, their company had a huge opportunity for growth in this niche market. By expanding their services and targeting this group, they could become a lifeline for all college students and establish themselves as a go-to resource in the academic world.

Caroline then unveiled a map that showed all U.S. colleges, each one represented by a pulsing red light that signified students in need of counseling with no options. As she talked about the strategies the team would implement, the red lights started to fade one by one. And by the end of her presentation, all the lights were off—indicating that every student in America could have instant access to the mental health support they need.

Talk about bringing a vision to life. Guess where Caroline got the idea to use the flashing red lights along with a territory map? You guessed it: ChatGPT.

Caroline’s prompt: My company offers virtual mental health services, and we have an opportunity to expand by targeting college students nationwide. In my presentation to sell this idea to others within my organization, I’m going to tell a personal story about my daughter. She needed mental health support during her first year at college, but the school didn’t have the resources to meet the high demand of students seeking counseling. I want to show my team that we have the ability to fill in where universities leave off by expanding our virtual services. How can I anchor this story with a bold visual?

Here are a few additional examples of how you might use AI to bring your objectives to life:

• Business Objective: By Q4 2024, transform our customer service approach from a reactive model to a proactive one, enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing service-related issues, and improving operational efficiency.

Leader Prompt for ChatGPT: I want to inspire my team to adopt a proactive approach in their work, emphasizing the value of human insight and initiative in identifying and addressing potential issues before they arise. How can I use the story of a proactive company successfully preventing a crisis to make this strategy really resonate with them?

• Business Objective: Enhance customer satisfaction and trust by simplifying our complex product concepts, making them easily understandable by the end of Q2.

Leader Prompt for ChatGPT: I am speaking at a kickoff meeting with our sales team, and I want to discuss our goal to make complex concepts simple for our customers. How can I demonstrate the value of that objective in a way that is meaningful and serves as a useful example?

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• Department Goal: Increase engagement at quarterly employee meetings.

Leader Prompt for ChatGPT: I want to get employees more involved and engaged during our quarterly meetings. Attendees lose interest when presented with the usual spreadsheets and graphs. How can I transform the reports into something compelling, unexpected, and impactful?

When you can clearly explain why business objectives and team goals are important (and how they are possible), you’ll get more ideas and buy-in from your teams. Plus, your impact as a leader will be even more significant. Don’t let a lack of time keep you from pursuing this impactful leadership opportunity—just team up with AI to get it done.

Until next time,

Sara