Book meetings with your AI. Real ones, in your calendar, every day. Research on executive education keeps finding that most leaders use AI as a basic version of Google, a place to type a question when they are stuck. The CEO who gets value from ChatGPT or Claude every day does something completely different: they treat it as staff, with standing meetings, real documents and real work assigned.
Put the AI meetings in your calendar
Set aside 30 to 60 minutes in your calendar, ideally between every two or three internal or external meetings you have. If your day will not allow that, hold one longer session plus 30 minutes in the middle of the day: the midday session reviews the first half of your day and prepares you for the second. The format matters less than the fact that the time is booked. If it is not in the calendar, it will not happen, and you will be back to typing questions when you are stuck.
The debrief hour
In that meeting, give the AI everything from the meetings you just had: the PowerPoints, the documents, the details, the minutes. Someone captured minutes, and most likely an AI captured them anyway, with every bullet point and action point. Feed it all in, on your company-approved business account, not a private one.
Now you will see the last two or three meetings from a different perspective. You will produce better action plans. You will draft the emails, the phone calls, the follow-ups, even the contracts, and assign the work while the meetings are still warm. Think about what this replaces: the work you normally do in the evening, after everyone goes home, when you finally have time to evaluate your day and you are too exhausted to do it well. That work is now finished in daylight. Your employees are already compressing their days this way. This is the CEO version.
Then prepare the next three
The same hour flips forward. Give the AI the agendas and papers for your next two or three meetings and work through them: what you want from each, where the risks sit, which questions you should ask that nobody expects. You walk into the afternoon prepared at a level that used to require a full evening, and this daily counsel is exactly what the strongest CEOs are quietly building around themselves.
Bring your executive assistant into the meeting
Look at what this hour really is. It is the old-school session where you called your secretary or executive assistant into the room: follow up with this person, contact that one, here is what I need before the next meeting. So do the natural thing: call your executive assistant into the AI meeting, and let the three of you work together, you, your assistant and the AI.
Your assistant will feel uncomfortable at first, honestly so, because the AI can draft the emails, book the meetings and prepare the contracts. But what happens next is what matters: the assistant finds a new way to help you that only complements the AI, the human judgement, the relationships, the things a model cannot do. The result is that you get two extremely professional executive assistants for the salary of one plus 20 dollars a month.
How this matures
Start working this way and you will find your own unique path, better week after week, meeting after meeting. You will have epiphanies. You will find cracks in the paint: cracks in the system, in your review model, in contracts nobody has re-read in years. You will also find that the biggest limitation was never the tools. And you will find opportunities, to grow the company, to increase employee happiness, and to hand yourself back time for the personal side, the hobbies, the family. All it costs is the assistant you already have, plus 20 dollars a month. Have fun with it. This year is a lot of fun.
Frequently asked questions
What should a CEO use ChatGPT or Claude for every day?
Hold scheduled meetings with it. Debrief your last two or three meetings by feeding it the documents and minutes, produce action plans, draft the follow-up emails and contracts, then prepare for your next meetings in the same session. Treat it as staff with booked time, not as a search box.
How much time should a CEO spend with AI daily?
Between 30 and 90 minutes, booked in the calendar. Either short sessions between every two or three meetings, or one longer session plus a 30-minute midday review that closes the morning and prepares the afternoon. The booking matters more than the format.
Should my executive assistant work with the AI too?
Yes, in the same meeting. A three-way session between the CEO, the executive assistant and the AI turns the traditional debrief into something faster: the AI drafts and organises, the assistant adds judgement and relationships, and the CEO effectively gains a second professional assistant for around 20 dollars a month.
Is it safe to give an AI my meeting documents and contracts?
Use your company’s approved business account, where your data is not used for model training, rather than a private consumer login. With that in place, feeding in presentations, minutes and drafts is exactly how the tool becomes useful at CEO level.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organisations including IBM, the WHO, the World Government Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.
If you are leading your organisation through this, I work with a limited number of senior leaders each quarter. Get in touch at Anglero.com.