Demand Friction

How I currently use AI to accelerate my thinking

AI is not my ghostwriter. It’s my editor, idea challenger and sparring partner.

It wasn’t always this way, but that single shift changed how I work.

Instead of making me faster, AI made me clearer. It helps me pressure-test ideas that used to live comfortably in my head, think through complex concepts at speed and execute on ideas that once took months.

Once you start sparring instead of delegating to it, your understanding of what AI can do changes as quickly as the technology itself.

The most important rule I’ve learned to date is simple: don’t ask AI to help. Ask it to push. Otherwise, it will politely reinforce whatever you already believe.

Over time, I’ve landed on three distinct ways I use AI as a discipline. Each one creates friction in a different place: how I think, how I behave and how I execute. Together, they form a system that sharpens judgment instead of outsourcing it.

One of the most valuable ways I use AI is as a private sparring table. It’s what I think of as my Founder’s Council.

When I’m working through a decision, an idea or a draft that matters, I don’t ask AI what to do. I ask it to pressure-test how I’m thinking. I want friction and rigor, not reassurance. And I get this through the lenses of people whose judgment and standards I trust.

My council is made up of a few familiar voices if you’re a regular reader of RHB: Peter Drucker, Jeff Bezos, Frank Slootman and a couple of writers whose standards I respect, like Robin Givhan and Charles Bukowski. People I wouldn’t ever have the chance to think alongside daily.

Instead of asking for a single answer, I put my thinking in front of multiple perspectives and ask where it breaks.

I’ll ask questions like:

What comes back isn’t an answer. It’s resistance and that resistance trains judgment instead of replacing it.

Used this way, AI doesn’t replace judgment, it trains it. It forces me to slow down certainty, confront blind spots and notice where I’m optimizing for comfort instead of truth. It surfaces objections I’d rather avoid before they show up as consequences.

This is especially valuable in senior roles, where the cost of being wrong isn’t embarrassment, it’s momentum, trust or time. By the time an idea reaches other people, I want the soft spots already exposed and the thinking already tightened.

That’s the pattern I’ve noticed again and again: the more willing I am to challenge my own thinking early, the less clean-up is required later.

Another way I use AI is to track myself over time.

Once a week, I give AI a short set of observations about how I operated that week. The decisions I made. Where I felt friction. Moments that stood out. Where something felt off, effective or harder than it should have been.

As opposed to the Founder Council, with this one I’m not asking for advice. I’m creating a record.

Over time, AI has become my pattern detector. It looks across weeks instead of moments and reflects back what I can’t see while I’m inside it.

That’s where the value shows up.

It will surface things like:

None of this feels dramatic in the moment. That’s the problem. Patterns hide inside competence. They show up as “this is just how I work” until you zoom out far enough to see the shape they make.

Used this way, AI doesn’t tell me what to do next. It helps me see what I’ve been doing all along.

The Pattern Detector helps me catch that drift early.

The final way I use AI is the least flashy and the most important.

I didn’t set up my newsletter as a writing habit. I set it up as a system.

Before AI ever touches a draft, the standards are already defined. The voice. The audience. The bar for what qualifies as an idea worth publishing. There are things I will say plainly and things I won’t say at all.

That work lives in a set of memos I wrote up front and loaded into the project. They function like an operating manual for the newsletter. Anything that needs to remain consistent over time lives there: what Right Hand Brief is, who it’s for, how it should sound and what “good” actually means.

AI executes inside that operating manual.

When I sit down to write, I’m not starting from a blank page or a vague prompt. I’m working inside a set of constraints that reflect my judgment. AI helps me tighten language, challenge weak ideas, surface repetition and pressure-test whether a piece actually meets the standard I’ve set.

At the beginning, I noticed that AI can flatten your voice and blur your thinking. Used inside a clear system, it reinforces consistency and protects the work from drifting into something “bland” as I have in my memo.

This is what makes the newsletter sustainable without lowering the bar. The time savings don’t come from outsourcing thinking. They come from locking the thinking in once and letting AI help enforce it every week.

The result isn’t more content. It’s better content, produced with less friction and more clarity.

It’s easy to blur where the human stops and the machine starts. That’s why a clear framework for human–AI interaction matters.

Purpose is human. It’s deciding what matters, what’s worth building, what’s worth saying and what’s worth standing behind.

Judgment is human too. It’s knowing when to push, when to wait, when to simplify and when to let something go. It’s earned through experience, not information.

Execution is where AI belongs as a force multiplier for thinking.

Every way I use AI maps back to this distinction. The Founder’s Council sharpens judgment. The Pattern Detector protects it. The newsletter system preserves it. AI accelerates execution inside those boundaries, never deciding the boundaries themselves.

AI doesn’t make you less human at work. It makes the human parts matter more.

The technology is accelerating faster than your hesitation. If you use AI to delegate your thinking, you’re missing the point. Use it to sharpen your mind and change how you behave under pressure.

The tools are here. The discipline is still yours to enforce.

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