The Executive Decision Edge | Plus: Your Weekly AI News & Tools Digest

A new executive inherits a major portfolio. The previous leader left six months ago. PowerPoints everywhere. Strategy decks. Reports. But no one can explain why the regional expansion was paused, what drove the Q3 pivot, or which board member had concerns about pricing. Information exists. Reasoning is gone.

The Four Executive Traps

Today’s leaders face greater pressure but have more solutions when approached strategically. **1. Decision Fatigue: **Executives make 35,000+ decisions daily. By 4 PM, your decision quality drops 23%. (Sources: HBR, CBS) **2. The Emperor’s New Clothes Problem: **50% of CEOs feel isolated; 61% say it hurts performance. You’re surrounded by people who’ve learned disagreement is career-limiting. 78% of business leaders admit their teams justify decisions already made rather than challenge them. (Source: HBR) **3. Knowledge Loss: **When a senior leader leaves, 42% of the skills and reasoning needed for their role walks out, not just data, but the why behind decisions. Nearly half of knowledge workers can’t find information relevant to their jobs. One in three admit to making poor decisions due to lost institutional memory. For mid-market companies, that costs up to $2.4M annually in re-created knowledge. Employees spend 6 hours weekly duplicating work someone else already solved. (Sources: HBR, Gartner) **4. The AI Fluency Gap : **You can’t lead what you don’t understand. Only 8% of business leaders are AI-fluent. Your staff are using AI 3x more than you realise. How do you evaluate their work? Coach them? Spot risks? You can’t. (Sources: Lantern Studios, Generation AI) Sound familiar?

Solution (SUPER SIMPLE)

Three tools, built in under 5 minutes. They’ve been around a while, but I don’t know many leaders who understand their power or simplicity. **Custom GPTs (OpenAI) **Launched late 2024, look for “Explore GPTs” or “Create.” Upload templates, playbooks, policies, and spin up an AI assistant tailored to your team’s workflows. If you can build a folder, you can build a Custom GPT. **Gemini Gems (Google) **Released this year, Gems are right inside Google Workspace. With a couple clicks, create live assistants tied to Drive, Gmail, and Calendar. Macquarie rolled this out to 3,000 employees within months. It’s the newest route to making daily operations frictionless. **Claude Skills (Anthropic) **Launched October 2025, these are reusable, task-specific bundles that automate and standardise complex, multi-step workflows. Rather than waiting for a prompt, they activate whenever Claude detects you’re working on something they cover. When a trigger event happens, report deadline, deal closing, process kicking off... Skills execute instructions, run code, format documents, route updates, or follow up as you’ve taught them. Like having a specialist watching 24/7 who steps in before you ask.

Here’s How I Use It:

Stop Chasing Files

My team spent 25% of their day hunting for information. Files buried in Drive. Email threads from three years ago. Docs everyone knew existed but nobody could find. I built a Custom GPT and indexed everything - files, emails, key docs. Proposals that used to take three days now take one. Search time cut in half. BUT the first two weeks were chaos. Wrong files got indexed. Team ignored it because responses were garbage. Nobody trusted it. Week three, I rebuilt it. Created clear categories. Added query examples. Trained the team on what to ask. Now it’s the first place they go.

Stop 25 Years Knowledge Walking Out The Door

My long term EA was retiring (25 year tenure!) Before she left, I captured her emails, files, and workflows into a Custom Knowledge Project - effectively bottling 25 years of process intelligence. Now, when I ask, “What did she do three years ago on May 5th to solve that procurement issue?” I can find it in seconds. Institutional memory, automated. When the new hire starts, they’re not guessing. They’re supported by decades of documented know-how, searchable, shareable, and permanent. This doesn’t just apply to an EA. It’s the same principle for any executive, manager, or expert.

Making Sense of Chaos

I took over a national brand with a product portfolio all over the place. Dozens of sub-brands. Hundreds of SKUs. Market data scattered across Drive, performance reports in different formats, pricing strategies buried in email threads. Three different teams managing related products with zero coordination. I built a Gemini Gem connected to our Google Workspace, pulled everything from Drive, Gmail, Sheets into one view. Now when I ask “What’s driving growth in premium segments?” or “Which products are cannibalising each other?”, I get answers from across the entire portfolio in real-time. It cut strategic planning from two weeks to three days. Identified over $1m in cost out with different pricing in similar markets. I made portfolio decisions with actual data. The opportunities were always there, scattered across spreadsheets nobody had time to cross-reference.

Stakeholder Simulation: Training for the Difficult Conversation

This is one of the strangest and most effective things I’ve tried. Stakeholder management is messy, you say yes, they say no. You change approach, they still say no. We’ve all got one. I had a stakeholder like that, critical to my work, impossible to read. So I tried something new. Pulled together every email, message, and note I had from them and uploaded it into our secure Gemini Gems environment. Then I built a persona, a simulation of that person’s tone, habits, and objections. Before sending a proposal or request, I’d run it past that simulation. The AI would push back just like they would, same language, same concerns, same pattern of objections. I’d refine my approach until it landed. Over time, my results transformed. Conversations got easier. Approvals came faster. Outcomes improved. I wasn’t just managing that stakeholder better, I was training myself to handle difficult people with precision. Started noticing their patterns before they surfaced. Anticipated objections I would’ve missed. Framed proposals in language that resonated with how they actually think, not how I wanted them to think. It’s crazy how effective this is. Works for board members. Works for clients. Works for your own boss.

Your Weekly AI News & Tools Digest

Top Story: Claude Skills

Anthropic launched Claude Skills, fundamentally changing how organisations embed institutional knowledge into AI workflows. Instead of loading everything upfront, Skills work like a chef prepping ingredients. Claude only touches what’s needed when it’s needed. One skill can contain massive context because it loads just what’s relevant, ignoring the rest. Commonwealth Bank spent 12 weeks on governance before deploying Claude. Skills automate months of that work: package compliance requirements, brand guidelines, and approval workflows into folders Claude navigates autonomously. Box and Canva already deployed Skills for branded document generation and compliance workflows. 30% of IT budgets are spent compliance (Privacy Act, data governance, sector regulations). Skills encode governance once, then auto-activate across every interaction.

Quick Wrap Up

Google Veo 3.1 launches “Ingredients to Video” - Upload 3 reference images (character, object, background), add text prompt describing interaction. Veo generates video maintaining visual consistency. Solves character consistency problem plaguing AI video. Available via Gemini API and Google Flow. Marketing teams maintain brand character consistency across video campaigns without reshoots. OpenAI turns ChatGPT into operating system - New protocol lets third-party apps (Booking.com, Spotify, Figma, Zillow) run inside ChatGPT conversations. ChatGPT becomes a hub where customers complete purchases without leaving the chat interface. Platform control shifts. If customers buy inside ChatGPT, who owns the relationship—you or OpenAI? Revenue flows where transactions happen. Australian AI adoption: startups sprinting, enterprises stalling - AWS research shows 81% of startups use AI vs 61% of large enterprises. Only 22% of large enterprises have comprehensive AI strategy. Leading barrier: 39% cite lack of skilled personnel. Startups move faster because their governance risks are lower. Large enterprises wait for regulatory clarity that may never come. Google DeepMind AI discovers cancer therapy validated in lab - Large DeepMind model identified drug combination increasing antigen presentation ~50% in cancer cells. Yale scientists experimentally confirmed the prediction. Scaled AI can reason through problems and generate genuinely novel solutions, not just pattern-match existing data. That reasoning capability applies to strategy, not just science. Treasury: No AI-specific consumer legislation needed - October 2025 review concluded existing Australian Consumer Law “fit-for-purpose” without AI-specific rules. Contrasts with ACCC position. Short-term regulatory clarity (no imminent changes), long-term uncertainty as Treasury and ACCC positions diverge. Deploy now under current frameworks, but build governance that survives future regulation.

Tool Of The Week: Lindy AI CMO

Three collaborative AI agents build marketing campaigns from research to creative assets in days. Your marketing team can scale campaign volume 10x without headcount. Research Agent: Market analysis, competitor positioning, messaging frameworks Analysis Agent: Scans thousands of sources for trends, high performing ads, ROI angles Creative Agent: Generates multimedia assets via Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Imagen integration $20K/month agency retainers become subscription fees. Florent Crivello (CEO) calls it “the first time agents take a chunk out of an entire org” - not just tasks, but organisational functions.

If this sharpened your strategy, forward to your exec team. The fastest advantage is the one you share. Connect: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | www.appliedaiaustralia.com.au