A CEO’s Journey into Augmented Intelligence
As we drive our AI@CI programme through Consumer Intelligence, I have realised something uncomfortable and straightforward. If we are serious about embedding augmented intelligence into every part of the business, it has to start in the one place that often changes the slowest. The CEO’s office. In my case, with me.
This is not about looking clever with new tools. It is about whether we, as CEOs, are prepared to change the way we think, write and decide. In public. In front of our boards and our teams.
Living With Three Digital “Children”
I work with three AI assistants every day. It feels surprisingly like having favourite children. One of them gets an upgrade and, for a week or two, becomes the golden child. Then another leaps ahead and steals the crown. It is exciting. It is also a little tiring, because you find yourself constantly revisiting the question. Who is my best thinking partner today?
For the past month, Claude has been my primary collaborator. Its writing capability has been excellent, and the Projects feature has changed the way I work. When we produced our recent pet insurance analysis, it pulled through data points from reports we had written months earlier and stitched them into a coherent story. That sense of institutional memory matters when you are in the business of market intelligence. It is the difference between a single clever report and a cumulative body of work that compounds in value.
Then ChatGPT released 5.1 Pro. Overnight, the favourite child had serious competition. The new model aligned with what I valued in Claude and added new dimensions I am still exploring. As a CEO, you quickly find the question is not “Which system is best?” The question becomes “How do I get these systems to make my thinking better?”
Creating Productive Tension Between Tools
That is where the idea of creative tension comes in. I no longer try to anoint a single winner. I set them up to challenge each other. I will draft a strategic narrative with one assistant, then pass that draft to another and ask it to critique, refine or even disagree. Each round of tension raises the quality of the thinking.
It is rather like a strong executive team. The point is not harmony. The point is a constructive challenge that leaves the decision stronger than any single contributor could manage alone.
Avoiding the Ghostwriter Trap
This is also where a contrarian note is helpful. There is a real risk that we, as CEOs, become overimpressed by the fluency of machine-generated prose. A well-written paragraph can feel persuasive even when the underlying reasoning is weak. I have already had moments where I thought, “That sounds impressive”, then realised it did not quite answer the question the board would ask.
The discipline is to treat AI as your sparring partner, not your ghostwriter. It can stretch your thinking, but it must not replace your judgement or your voice.
A New Partnership Model for the CEO
In my own role, I think about this as a partnership model. I do not believe AI will replace me as CEO. I do think it can make me a better one if I let it in early enough and honestly enough.
In practical terms, that now looks like morning work where I ask an assistant to synthesise overnight market and regulatory developments into something I can act on, not just something I can read. It looks like rapid prototyping of client proposals, drawing not only on my own notes but on the entire Consumer Intelligence knowledge base, so that we are not reinventing the wheel with every brief.
It also means testing strategic narratives before they ever reach the board pack, by asking, “If you were chairing this meeting, what are the three hardest questions you would ask about this story?” And it means turning dense regulatory or supervisory material into structured, actionable intelligence, then turning that intelligence into specific implications for pricing, product design and communication that will stand up to regulatory.
Trust, Governance and Augmented Intelligence
Underneath all of this sits something central to my career. Trust. Charles Green writes about trust as a mix of credibility, reliability, intimacy and low self-orientation. Augmented intelligence touches all four.
These systems can boost our credibility if we use them to ground our views in better data. They can improve our reliability by giving us consistent access to our own institutional memory. They can damage intimacy if we let them create distance between us and our people. Or they can enhance it if we use them to free up time for real conversations. And they test our self-orientation every day, because the temptation to use AI to look smart is very different from the choice to use AI to serve customers and colleagues better.
Leading From the Front, Not from a Policy Document
If we want our organisations to embrace augmented intelligence, we cannot lead this from a safe distance. Policy documents and AI principles are not enough. Our people are watching what we actually do.
When your CEO can show, in real work, how AI amplifies strategic thinking rather than replaces it, adoption follows more healthily. It becomes less about fear of replacement and more about curiosity and craft.
Playing the Infinite Game
There is also an infinite game element here. In financial services, and especially in intelligence and benchmarking, AI is not a one-off investment. It is an evolving capability. This week’s “best model” will be overtaken. The idea that we can freeze our approach for three years and call it a strategy is no longer realistic.
The durable asset is not the specific tool. It is the organisational habit of augmented thinking. Tools will come and go. The culture that knows how to use them well is what endures.
Reframing the Question
This is why I have started to reframe the question for myself. It is no longer “How can AI help Ian?” It is “How can Ian, working with AI, better serve Consumer Intelligence, our clients and ultimately the end consumer?”
Some weeks, the answer shows up on better board papers. Some weeks, it appears in a sharper piece of regulatory analysis, or a more compelling story for a client who needs to navigate a complex market.
Where This Leaves Us as CEOs
What I can say with some confidence is that augmented intelligence is already making us collectively smarter, not individually redundant. It is helping me challenge my own assumptions faster and with less ego. It is exposing weak arguments earlier, before they land in front of a regulator or a client.
It is also reminding me that, as CEOs, our job is not to know everything. Our job is to build systems, human and digital, that help our organisations learn faster than the markets we serve.
My hope that this would be the case is now giving way to something firmer. I see enough progress, week by week, to believe that this partnership between human judgement and machine capability is becoming part of how we lead. The real question for each of us as CEOs is whether we are prepared to step into that partnership ourselves, before we ask anyone else to follow.