Generic use cases fail to persuade leadership. To get genuine AI investment, build a custom tool that solves a specific, tangible pain point for an executive. An example is an 'AI board member' trained on past feedback to critique board decks before a meeting, making the value undeniable.

The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson turns hours of meeting prep into a single hour using AI. He prompts it to pull bios of attendees, suggest relevant questions, create digital flashcards with names and companies, and then quiz him. This specific workflow ensures he arrives fully prepared for important networking events.

Leverage AI to conduct comprehensive research on a prospect's company, industry, and the specific individuals you're meeting. This allows you to bypass basic discovery questions and dive into more relevant, informed conversations, making the sales call more efficient and valuable for the customer.

An Executive Assistant at Zapier built an AI agent that automates her weekly meeting prep. The agent researches external attendees, checks the CRM and internal comms for context, and delivers a digest and tasks. This saves hours of manual work and ensures thorough preparation.

For rapid meeting preparation, simply screenshot the guest list and input it into a vision-enabled AI model. The AI performs OCR to extract names, then triggers an agent to automatically search the web and LinkedIn for each attendee, generating a comprehensive prep document with minimal manual effort.

Use AI connectors like Claude's to link your email directly to a presentation tool. This allows you to forward a prep email and instantly receive a visual slide deck summarizing the attendees, their backgrounds, and key talking points, making meeting preparation faster and more engaging.

An executive created a custom AI agent to handle repetitive tasks like meeting prep, calendar triage, and email. This "chief of staff" provides analysis, suggests delegations, and even offers blunt feedback, demonstrating how AI can be personalized to augment executive functions.

Before engaging expensive experts like lawyers or accountants, use AI to do preliminary work. You can draft initial documents, analyze data, or formulate questions. This prepares you for a more productive conversation, saving time and money while ensuring you still rely on the human expert for final verification and strategy.

Hoffman argues companies should immediately start recording all meetings and applying AI for summaries and action items. He sees this as a low-hanging fruit for productivity and predicts that within years, not having an AI in your meeting will be considered strange and inefficient.