AI for Executives: 7 Practical Ways to Save Time
I’ll just say it: I’m not interested in becoming an AI expert.
That’s why I have people around me who are much better at that than I am.
What I am interested in is being focused on what only I can do and building an organization that’s as effective as possible. And over the last several months, I’ve noticed the same thing coming up again and again in conversations with leaders I coach.
They feel scattered.
They know there are tasks they’re doing that could probably be automated or made more efficient, and they know AI could help. But figuring out where to start, what tools to use, and how to actually get everything set up feels like one more thing they don’t have time for.
I've felt this tension myself and have found that starting with a few small AI automations is the way to go for busy executives. With the help of my team, here's what I did to let AI do the repetitive, tedious tasks so I can stay focused on running my business.
Before You Start Adding Tools, Start With Your Reality
One of the temptations we have as leaders is that as soon as we see a problem, we want to jump down and start solving it.
Before I started adding more tools or automations, I came back to three questions:
How am I currently measuring success?
How am I supporting that goal and moving it forward?
And how do I want the people around me to experience me?
That last question came from a coach who asked me the same thing during a really difficult leadership season. My downline had gone from about five people to 40 almost overnight, and I said I wanted people to experience me as calm, consistent and confident.
Then I had to recognize that I was leading pretty much the opposite way.
I was frantic, I was carrying a lot of anxiety, and my team could totally feel it.
That’s part of why this conversation about AI matters so much.
This isn’t just about doing things faster. It’s about creating enough margin that you can actually show up the way you want to as a leader.
Where AI Has Actually Helped Me
For my team, the most helpful uses of AI have been pretty practical. We've set it up to help with the things that tend to eat up hours of a leader’s week.
Here are a few places it’s helping me right now:
Email: AI can give me a first draft of emails that need a response, so I’m editing and adding the personal context instead of staring at a blank screen.
Meeting prep: Before a client call or one-on-one, it can reference previous conversations and help pull forward what we talked about, what we committed to, and what I need to come back to.
Meeting follow-up: After a meeting, it can take the notes and help turn them into a follow-up email with decisions and next steps while the conversation is still fresh.
Calendar context: Instead of just seeing another meeting on my calendar, AI can help pull together who I’m meeting with and the context I need before I walk into the conversation.
Communication: Sometimes I’ll go on a walk and verbally process what I’m trying to say, then use AI to help me organize my thoughts. This is especially helpful when I’m communicating a change or having a harder conversation and want to make sure what I’m saying matches how I actually want to lead.
Slide decks: We used to spend hours building presentations from scratch. Now we can take a conversation or an outline, turn it into a first draft, and spend our time improving the thinking instead of formatting slides.
Organizing information: So much important context lives across emails, meetings, documents and conversations. AI has helped us pull that information together instead of relying on someone to remember where everything lives.
Basically, the goal is to spend less time on work that technology can help with so I can spend more time on the things that actually require me.
If you're just dipping your toes into AI, I'd start by looking at your week and asking yourself where you’re repeatedly doing work that doesn’t necessarily require your judgment, leadership or relationships. Pick one of those things and start experimenting with how AI could make it easier.
By the way, you don't have to figure all of this out by yourself. My assistant helped me set up several of these automations. If you have someone on your team who is strong in tenacity, understands how you work, and already has access to the tools and accounts you use every day, pull them in. They may be the perfect person to help you get started.
Even getting AI to help with one manual process can free up a surprising amount of your time.
You Don’t Need to Become an AI Expert
I’m not trying to become an AI expert, and I'm not suggesting every executive needs to become one.
But the low-hanging fruit here is understanding where your time is going, identifying the work technology can support, and building a few systems that make your leadership easier rather than more complicated.
If you want to go more in depth, we put together an on-demand AI Productivity for Executives webinar where my team and I walk through the tools we use, how we’ve set them up, and practical examples of how we’re using AI inside The Ready Network.
And if you watch it and think, This is exactly what I need, but I do not have time to set all of this up, that’s where our AI consulting comes in.
We help leaders and teams look at how they’re currently working, identify where AI can actually make things more efficient, and build systems that support the way they already lead.