A great many businesses are using an extraordinarily powerful technology for very small jobs.
They summarise meeting notes. They tidy emails. They rewrite a paragraph. They ask AI to produce a slightly cleaner version of what was already on the page. None of that is useless, but it is a very modest return from a tool with much greater strategic potential.
The highest-value uses of AI for business leaders are not search or summarisation. They are scenario analysis (exploring what could happen next), customer insight mining (finding patterns in qualitative feedback), and strategic decision support (stress-testing plans from multiple perspectives). Research by Brynjolfsson et al., published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, found AI embedded in workflows produced a 14% average productivity gain — but only when used beyond basic tasks.
“A lot of businesses are using a ten-billion-dollar machine for ten-pound tasks, then acting surprised when the return feels underwhelming.”— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
This is where many senior leaders get stuck. They use AI in what might be called admin mode, save a few minutes here and there, and then quietly conclude that the technology is overhyped. The problem is not that AI cannot do more. It is that many leaders and teams never stretch themselves far enough to discover where the real value sits.
What are the highest-value uses of AI for business leaders?
Used properly, AI is not there to replace leadership or make decisions on your behalf. It is there to improve the quality, speed and structure of your thinking.
That distinction matters. The real value of AI for a senior leader is not in shaving five minutes off an email. It is in reaching better-informed conclusions faster than you could through manual digging alone.
EY’s 2025 Work Reimagined Survey, which surveyed 15,000 employees across 29 countries, found that 88% of employees use AI at work, but most usage remains limited to basic tasks such as search and summarisation. Only 5% said they were using AI in more advanced, transformative ways. That gap is the opportunity.
“The real value of AI is not in tidying your notes. It is in helping leaders think better, test harder, and reach stronger decisions faster.”— Larysa Hale, Expert Circle
- AI for scenario analysis and stress-testing
Instead of asking AI to summarise what already happened, ask it to explore what could happen next. Feed it market signals, internal performance data or customer feedback and ask it to surface likely risks, tensions or second-order consequences. This is where AI starts to become strategically useful rather than merely convenient.
- AI for customer insight mining
Most firms are sitting on a mess of qualitative data: sales objections, feedback forms, call notes, support conversations, survey comments and lost-deal reasons. AI can help identify recurring patterns in that material far faster than a human team working manually. Done well, that sharpens positioning, improves messaging and helps leaders see what the market is really saying, rather than what the business assumes it is saying.
- AI for strategic decision support
This is where AI becomes a useful sparring partner. A leader can feed in a current strategy, proposed offer or growth plan and ask AI to challenge it from different angles: as a sceptical board member, a competitor, a disillusioned client or an operational realist. The point is not to let AI decide. The point is to force better thinking before decisions are finalised.
If you are only using AI to summarise notes or polish text, you are using it well below its commercial potential. The more interesting value comes when AI is used to improve judgment, expose blind spots, accelerate pattern recognition and support better strategic decisions.
Our briefings and programme are designed for senior leaders who want to do exactly that: move past the basics and build a more commercially valuable way of working with AI. Because the real opportunity is not in asking AI to do small jobs faster. It is in using it to support better thinking at the level that matters most.
Larysa Hale is the founder of Expert Circle and creator of the AI-Driven Marketing Growth Programme, a structured series of briefings and masterclasses for managing directors and senior leaders in professional services. She has spent over 15 years helping founders, marketing directors and business leaders build commercially grounded growth strategies.
