How can AI help me make better business decisions faster?
AI helps you decide faster by structuring the decision, surfacing options and risks you'd miss, and running pre-mortems, without you outsourcing the judgment. Use it to classify decisions (reversible vs. irreversible), lay out structured pros and cons, and stress-test your plan against failure modes. For reversible "two-way door" calls, let AI help you decide quickly and move; for irreversible ones, use it to think more thoroughly.
Match rigor to stakes. Jeff Bezos's two-way-door idea is a useful frame: most decisions are reversible, so speed matters more than perfection, ask AI for a quick structured pros/cons and just decide. For irreversible decisions, slow down and use AI to widen your option set and expose assumptions. The 70% rule helps too: if you have roughly 70% of the information, decide, AI can quickly tell you which missing 30% actually changes the call.
Two techniques punch above their weight. First, the pre-mortem: tell the model your plan and ask, "It's six months later and this failed badly, what most likely went wrong?" It surfaces risks you're motivated to ignore. Second, force alternatives: ask for five different paths to your goal ranked by cost and likelihood, which breaks the false binary of "option A vs. option B." Feed in your real constraints so the reasoning is grounded.
The caution: AI is confident even when wrong and has no stake in the outcome. It's a thinking partner that helps you reason, not an oracle to obey, treat its recommendations as inputs, not verdicts. The biggest speed gain isn't the answer; it's that structuring the decision clearly often makes the right choice obvious, and removes the analysis paralysis that slows founders down.
Prompts to try
Copy these into ChatGPT or Claude to go deeper.
Build a decision framework (e.g., 70% rule, reversible vs. irreversible) with AI assistance.
Help me decide between [option A] and [option B] for my business using structured pros/cons.
Run a pre-mortem on [planned initiative] using AI to surface risks I'm missing.
Generate 5 alternative paths to my goal [describe] and rank by likelihood and cost.