Advanced LLM Usage for CEOs and Executives Series
This short article series is designed to help owners, entrepreneurs, and senior staff use AI LLMs far better. As a past CTO and VP of Engineering and someone who has used AI every day in many ways for several years now, I have found most do not understand its limitations or its most powerful features either. These eight articles reveal not just tips and tricks, but major traps in using AI—especially when it gives confidently stated, credible-sounding answers that are wrong.
The Week of Work Hiding Inside a Two-Minute Prompt
Article 5 of 8
Small businesses are still using the shallow end
The 2025 NFIB technology survey found that small-business AI use was concentrated in communications and marketing, while process automation remained far less common. That makes sense. Writing is visible, easy to try, and requires almost no process change. It also means a large part of the opportunity is still untouched.
The real productivity breakthrough comes when AI changes the economics of an entire workflow. Tasks that once required a subscription, a researcher, an analyst, or hours of copying and sorting can increasingly be completed inside the major AI platforms with files, web research, structured outputs, and multi-step task execution.
The prospect-ranking experiment
I uploaded a protected prospect list into an AirTight project that already understood our offers, ideal client profile, revenue range, buyer types, and what makes a company attractive for coaching or a Leadership Operating System engagement.
I asked the system to research the companies, add classification fields, score each prospect from 1 to 10, and explain the score. It returned a spreadsheet I could sort and give to a sales assistant. The file did not close a sale. It eliminated hours of low-value calling and made the next human action far more intelligent.
The experiment also exposed the next loop: test outreach, compare actual conversion with the AI ranking, adjust the criteria, and run it again. The first output was useful. The measured feedback is what can make the system valuable.
Click the image above to learn about Bob’s Trusted Adviser program for SMBs that want to scale.
For a free business assessment Zoom call on what is holding your company back that you may not see, click here. Bob Norton does all these personally. Offer good for CEOs and owners at companies with at least $500K in revenue or 6+ employees. A complete written report is available to anyone for $1,200.
Find the work that was previously uneconomic
- Researching and enriching a long prospect or vendor list.
- Comparing every contract, proposal, review, or support case for recurring patterns.
- Turning meeting transcripts into decisions, owners, deadlines, and follow-up drafts.
- Creating a first-pass analysis across many documents, locations, products, or customers.
- Producing personalized preparation briefs before important calls.
- Checking work against a rubric, policy, SOP, or acceptance standard before human review.
The prompt is not the workflow
A production workflow must define the source data, instructions, allowed research, output fields, human review, approval, logging, handoff, metric, and feedback loop. Without those pieces, the company has an impressive demo. With them, it has an operating capability.
ADVANCED MOVE – COPY/PASTE PROMPT Map this workflow from trigger to measurable outcome. Identify each manual step, delay, handoff, decision, approval, data source, error point, and repeated judgment. Mark which steps AI can draft, research, classify, compare, or monitor. Then design the human review gates, system-of-record update, and KPI that will prove whether the redesigned workflow is better. |
Do not automate confusion. Running a broken process faster only produces broken results faster. Start with one expensive bottleneck, make ownership explicit, and measure the before-and-after result.
ADVANCED LLM WEBINAR
COMING SOON
Most owners never get beyond prompts, drafts, and occasional research. This fall, AirTight Management will host an Advanced LLMs for CEOs live series built around real business work: better decisions, faster research, smarter workflows, stronger management systems, and more than 100 practical moves you can use—with some tools and models available nowhere else.
The launch price is $29 for the complete live, four-webinar series, recordings, and downloadable tools. Click here to register.