Loic Potjes spent years running companies before becoming the coach other CEOs call when they’re stuck, and in that time he’s watched leader after leader hand off the one part of AI that was always meant to be theirs, the strategic thinking, while treating a tidier meeting summary as proof they were already ahead.

“You cannot delegate that to your CTO. As a CEO, it’s your job to work on that frontier stuff.”

What Loic means by frontier stuff is the strategic thinking that used to require hiring outside help. Nearly every company already has the easy layer covered, tidier meeting notes, a faster first draft, a quicker video, but none of that changes how a business competes. The layer above it, where the CEO sits down and does the actual thinking, is where Loic spends his time.

Loic’s own example is concrete. In the fuel commodities business, mid-size operators run on thin margins and get squeezed every time the big suppliers change prices, something that happens roughly twice a month with no warning. One of Loic’s clients used AI to predict those changes before they landed, then adjusted stock and pricing just ahead of each one. The result was a five percent swing in margin, enough to double the company’s profit.

That kind of strategic thinking used to take weeks, cost real money and CEOs are used to paying for it with a few consultants and time. The result was a deck full of clever looking slides in the company’s brand colors, and an invoice for $50K. Now a CEO can sit down with their AI and achieve the same result in 90 minutes at no cost. The key here is that it has to be the CEO doing strategic thinking, the work can’t be handed off.

Loic has labelled this approach as dancing with AI, a back and forth with the tool the way you’d work with an advisor who never tires of your questions. His advice for actually starting is almost annoyingly simple: stop reading and open the tool.

“You can’t be an expert by having read the whole library. You need to jump in.”

The practical version of that is picking one real decision you’re currently stuck on, opening the tool yourself, and thinking it through out loud before you hand it to anyone else on the team.

Melissa’s Take

I’d frame it the same way I frame risk in cybersecurity: the danger was never the tool, it’s the false sense of coverage. A faster deck feels like progress the same way a firewall feels like security, it’s real, but it’s not the layer where the actual exposure lives. The real question is which parts of your job you’ve quietly stopped showing up for, just because AI made it easy to stop.

Here’s the gateway action: this week, pick one thing you’ve fully handed to AI, and ask honestly whether it used to take your judgment or just your time. If it took judgment, that’s the one to reclaim, not by doing it by hand again, but by sitting inside the tool yourself instead of routing around it.

There’s more in the full conversation, including how Loic decides what a leader should stop doing entirely, and a story about rebuilding a business from nothing after discovering the model he’d built it on was no longer legal to run.

The Full Executive Brief goes deeper into every conversation on the podcast, with the context and the follow-up you won’t get from the audio alone. Subscribers also get access to the Maverick Test, a short diagnostic built to show you where your own leadership has gaps you haven’t named yet.