“You’re using AI to generate solutions for ideation. Once you’ve got the ideas, you can do an initial cull with AI, or you can do it via humans.”

–Lisa Carlin

About Lisa Carlin

Lisa Carlin is the Founder of the strategy execution group, The Turbochargers, specializing in participative strategy, cultural intelligence, and AI’s impact on consulting.

Website:

theturbochargers.com

LinkedIn Profile:

Lisa Carlin

What you will learn

How AI is transforming strategy development and execution, leading to faster and more creative outcomes
Practical methods for integrating AI into workshop processes, ideation, and customer feedback analysis
Balancing human judgment with AI input to ensure effective decision-making in strategic planning
Techniques for using AI in diagnosing and working within an organization’s culture for successful transformation
Ways AI is boosting consultant and client productivity, reducing operational time, and increasing self-sufficiency
Real-world examples of AI-driven analytics, including clustering survey data and generating management insights
The outlook on the future of consulting, including why AI may reduce the number of consultants required
Tactical uses of AI for ideation, communication effectiveness, and predicting customer engagement metrics

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Lisa, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Lisa: Thanks, Ross. I love chatting with you.

Ross Dawson: So you’ve been spending a lot of time over many, many years in strategy and strategy execution. I’d love to start off by hearing how you are applying AI in the strategy process.

Lisa: Well, it’s made things so much easier, made things take a shorter amount of time, saving huge amounts of time. And I feel like my work has gotten more creative. Let me give you some examples of how that plays out. One example is working with an ed tech early-stage business, a small business, and they wanted to basically build AI-native products for customer education. I can actually mention the name of the company because the CEO posted after we worked together and is building in public, so it’s HowToo, an Australian ed tech firm that’s funded mainly out of the US, but also locally in Australia.

They’ve been providing education products for ages and are moving towards customer education embedded into technology products. We went through an iterative process of workshops, starting with some of the board members and some of the senior folks in a small group with an ideation session, and then iterating through to everybody in the business. Normally, that process would work where we would do some research with the customers first, then bring that research in, do some analysis, and then put it into the context for the workshop, work through what that means, come up with some ideas in the workshop, take it to the second workshop, and there you go.

What we’re now able to do is iterate with AI. So we’ve got the notes from the meetings captured with AI—this is from the customer meetings. Then we’re able to pull out the pain points of customers in a really deep way, using AI to iterate through and synthesize the client feedback, and then also apply human insight into that, coming up with a really clear list of pain points. Then we ask AI to be virtual customers, and they can add to that process, so you get a very rich set of pain points.

As we go through the process of product strategy and implementation, we’re able to use AI at every step of the process. For example, when we look at decision criteria for prioritizing, we can go to AI and say, “These are some of the things we’re considering. What else have we left out?” As we iterate with people in workshops and then with AI, we just get a much richer solution in the process.

In fact, we came out with some really amazing insights about how you provide customers with learning about how to use these products to onboard them quickly, how you provide them with personalized contextual information so they can learn and get value from the product much faster. It’s led to a number of significant deals that HowToo has negotiated as a result of that work.

Ross Dawson: So is this prompting directly with LLMs?<...

Lisa Carlin on AI in strategy execution, participative strategy, cultural intelligence, and AI’s impact on consulting (AC Ep27)