Growth Partnership Experiment - Month 1

In January, I set out on an experiment: using AI as a growth partner to enhance my leadership and communication. The goal was simple—could an AI assistant help me process ideas, refine my messaging, and make better decisions?

After a month, the answer is clear: AI hasn’t replaced my leadership, but it has made me better. It has sharpened my thinking, refined my communication, and helped me prepare for higher-impact conversations. At the same time, working with AI has surfaced an important reality—context management is a challenge. However, instead of seeing this as a flaw, I’ve learned that the friction AI introduces can actually create better leadership practices.

The Power of AI as a Sounding Board

One of the most immediate benefits was how AI improved my ability to structure thoughts before bringing them to my team. Instead of walking into discussions with half-formed ideas, I used AI as a low-stakes sounding board to challenge my assumptions and refine my thinking.

The result? More focused, productive conversations. My messages were clearer, my intent was sharper, and I could devote more attention to reading the room—picking up on nuances, adjusting based on reactions, and strengthening connections.

AI also helped me become a better real-time decision-maker. By processing multiple angles of an issue beforehand, I was faster at recognizing patterns and implications in live discussions. AI wasn’t making decisions for me—it was helping me build a stronger mental model for approaching challenges.

The Context Problem: A Challenge That Became a Strength

As the experiment continued, I noticed a key challenge: AI’s ability to retain long-term context is limited. Unlike a human colleague, AI doesn’t have persistent memory over weeks of conversation. At first, this seemed like a frustrating inefficiency—I found myself frequently re-explaining ideas.

But something interesting happened. Instead of treating AI’s forgetfulness as a flaw, I started seeing it as a leadership advantage.

The need to reset context each week became a built-in reflection point. Instead of blindly continuing down a path, I had to step back, reassess priorities, and articulate them clearly again. In doing so, I caught overlooked items, reinforced key takeaways, and ensured stronger follow-through.

So what seemed like a limitation actually became a forcing function for better leadership. It made me more deliberate, more structured, and more intentional.

Discovering Unexpected Value: The Power of Reflection

This experience raised an important question: In a world obsessed with automation and perfect memory, could intentional friction be a good thing? Does having to restate ideas force us to think more critically about them?

I found that regularly revisiting context actually strengthened my leadership.

It forced me to clarify what truly mattered.
It made me more disciplined in tracking priorities.
It ensured I stayed accountable to my own decisions.

AI didn’t solve all my challenges—but it made me a more effective leader by forcing me to operate with more clarity and rigor.

Building a Better System for Context Management

As I enter month two, my goal isn’t to eliminate the weekly context reset entirely, but to make it more intentional and efficient. Here are a few approaches I’m exploring:

Structured Context Checkpoints – Instead of relying on AI to “remember” past discussions, I can create weekly recap templates that capture key themes and decisions. These would serve as quick refreshers for both me and the AI.
AI-Assisted Summaries – Leveraging AI to generate end-of-week summaries could streamline the reflection process while keeping my insights centralized.
Designated Reflection Time – Instead of relying solely on AI for context tracking, I can dedicate short weekly sessions for structured review—using AI as an input rather than the entire system.

The goal isn’t to replace leadership judgment with AI—it’s to use AI to amplify my ability to lead.

AI and Leadership: The Bigger Takeaway

This first month reinforced an important lesson: AI is not a substitute for leadership intuition—it’s a tool that enhances it. AI’s strengths—pattern recognition, rapid iteration, and structured processing—are incredibly useful. But its limitations can be just as instructive.

The key isn’t just to overcome these limitations, but to leverage them. Constraints create better systems. Friction forces reflection. And the real power of AI isn’t in doing the thinking for us—it’s in sharpening the way we think.

AI has made me a more structured, more thoughtful, and more intentional leader. And that’s exactly the kind of partnership I hoped for.

As I continue this experiment, I’d love to hear from others who are using AI in their leadership journeys:

👉 How are you tackling the challenge of context management in AI-assisted decision-making?
👉 What unexpected lessons have you learned from AI’s limitations?

Let’s compare notes. 🚀

This is the the second article in a series documenting my experiment using AI as a strategic growth partner in 2025. Subscribe to follow the journey and join the discussion about intentional leadership development in the AI era.