What Great CEOs Teach Us About Using AI
The teacher sets the vision. AI supports the work.
There’s a quote that gets passed around in business circles that sounds insulting until you really think about it: a good CEO should be the dumbest person in the company.
Not dumb as in incapable. Dumb as in they intentionally surround themselves with people who are better than them at very specific jobs.
A CEO who insists on being the smartest person in every meeting is a bottleneck. A CEO who hires people who can out-design, out-analyze, out-write, and out-execute them builds something that can actually grow.
That idea is the cleanest way I’ve found to explain how we should think about AI.
Why CEOs don’t “do the work”
A CEO doesn’t write every email, design every slide, crunch every spreadsheet, or schedule every meeting. Not because those tasks are beneath them, but because their time and thinking are better spent elsewhere.
They hire someone faster at drafting communication, sharper with numbers, or more organized with logistics.
The CEO still decides what matters. The CEO still sets direction. The CEO still owns the final call. The assistants simply make the work lighter, faster, and cleaner.
That’s exactly where AI fits.
Where we get AI wrong
A lot of the fear around AI comes from flipping the hierarchy upside down.
When we ask AI what we should teach, write, or think, we’ve accidentally promoted it to CEO. We become passive. We wait, accept, and stop refining. No good leader does that.
AI is not the boss. It’s the hire.
The right question isn’t, “Can AI do this for me?” The better question is, “Is this a task I should be delegating?”
If the answer is yes, AI can be a great hire.
- AI is good at: drafting first versions, summarizing information, brainstorming options, rewriting for clarity, and speeding up repetitive thinking.
- AI is bad at: knowing your students, understanding your values, making judgment calls, and deciding what actually matters.
That’s your job. That’s the CEO role.
The teacher as CEO
Think about your day. If you had an assistant who could draft lesson ideas in seconds, rewrite parent emails more clearly, turn rough notes into polished plans, or generate examples, practice questions, and rubrics, would you feel replaced? Or would you feel relieved?
Using AI well doesn’t make you less thoughtful. It gives you more space to be thoughtful about the parts that matter most.
The rule I use
And if I would hire someone to do it better or faster than me, AI is a perfectly reasonable assistant.
AI doesn’t need to be the smartest voice in the room. It just needs to be good at the job you hired it for.
If I wouldn’t hire a human to do this task for me, I don’t ask AI to do it either.
You’re still the CEO.