10 Unconventional Ways To Use ChatGPT This Week

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Every entrepreneur has 168 hours per week. But winners squeeze more value from each minute. While others use ChatGPT to rewrite emails, you could leverage it as your strategic partner, therapist, and business analyst all at once. Stop wasting its potential on tasks any AI could do.

These unconventional approaches will transform how you work and give you an unfair advantage.

Unexpected ChatGPT strategies for ambitious entrepreneurs

Run a "future you" strategy session

Leaders get caught in day-to-day fires and lose perspective. You might be making decisions that your future self would question. Get clarity by having a conversation with the version of you who already solved today's problems. Get guidance on your current challenges and improve your decisions.

Say: "Imagine I'm five years into the future, and my business has grown beyond expectations. What advice would future-me give current-me about my biggest decisions this week?"

Find hidden profits in your business

Money sits on the table in your business right now. You walk past it every day without seeing it. Get fresh eyes on your pricing and packaging. Analyze your current offerings and find ways to make more money without adding extra work.

Say: "Ask me about what I currently sell and how I price it. Then, help me find the hidden profit opportunities I haven't explored."

Get instant smart notes from podcasts and meetings

Information without implementation equals zero. That podcast you listened to yesterday? Those conference notes from last week? Unless you extract action items, they're just entertainment. Turn passive consumption into real changes by refining key points into a clear action plan, a to-do list, or even a concise LinkedIn post.

Say: "Here are my notes from a meeting/podcast. Turn this into three key takeaways and an action plan: [paste notes or upload image if using paid ChatGPT]"

Draft a "hard email" you've been avoiding

That difficult message sitting in your drafts folder costs mental energy every day it remains unsent. Stop procrastinating on tough conversations. Get a polished first draft for negotiating a contract, addressing a team issue, or pushing back on a request.

Say: "I need to send an email to [person’s name or description] about [situation]. It needs to be [tone: direct, diplomatic, firm but fair]. Draft something I can tweak and send."

Create a "company culture audit" in 5 minutes

Your team knows things about your company that you don't. What they won't say to your face, they might share anonymously. Culture problems grow in the shadows. Shine light on them before they become costly exodus events by generating insightful questions for an anonymous team survey.

Ask: "What 10 questions should I ask my team to assess our culture and find improvement areas? They’ll be surveyed anonymously to maximise honesty."

Turn customer feedback into a competitive edge

Your customers tell you how to win if you actually listen. Their complaints contain roadmaps to better products. Their praise reveals your unique advantages. Smart founders mine reviews, testimonials, and support tickets for patterns and unmet needs to turn into new offers or standout features.

Say: "Here are recent customer reviews and feedback. What common themes do you see? How could we use this to improve our product/service? [Paste or upload the information]"

Sharpen your thinking with "devil's advocate mode"

Echo chambers kill businesses. When everyone agrees with your idea, you miss critical flaws. The strongest plans survive brutal criticism. Stress test big decisions by getting a competitor's perspective on your assumptions and identifying weak spots before investing real money.

Say: "Challenge this idea as if you were my biggest competitor trying to outmaneuver me. Where are the flaws? [Explain your idea]"

Speed-read a book without reading it

Books contain wisdom but demand hours. Extract the core lessons in minutes and start applying key insights to your business today. Take a summary and pull out the essential ideas, apply them to your work, or turn them into actionable steps.

Say: "Here's a summary of a book I want to absorb. Pull out the top three ideas and explain how I can use them in my business. [Paste the summary]"

Gamify your to-do list

Motivation fades. Discipline requires enormous willpower. Games create sustainable engagement. Transform boring tasks into challenges with stakes, rewards, and achievements. Make mundane work addictive by reframing it as a game with levels and challenges.

Say: "Turn my to-do list into a high-stakes challenge with levels, rewards, and a storyline. [Include your to-do list]"

Write your own "AI-generated memoirs"

Your journey contains powerful lessons and stories. Potential clients want to see how you think and what you value. Structure your experiences into compelling narratives that sell without selling. Craft a compelling origin story based on your experiences for your personal brand, updated bio, or next keynote speech.

Say: "Based on what I've told you about my work and journey, write a one-page biography like it's part of an inspiring memoir."

Leverage ChatGPT like the strategic asset it is

Stop asking ChatGPT for basic content and start using it as your strategic partner. Run a future-you session for clarity, find hidden profits, turn passive learning into action, and face difficult conversations head-on.

The gap between average and exceptional entrepreneurs grows wider every day. These ten approaches put you firmly on the winning side.

Access all my best ChatGPT content prompts.

4 ChatGPT Features You Can Use for Free on Microsoft Copilot

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1Access ChatGPT's o1 Model

Microsoft announced that it now offers free, unlimited access to OpenAI's powerful o1 model through Copilot's Think Deeper feature. This is the same advanced AI model that ChatGPT users have to pay $20 monthly to access.

To use Microsoft Copilot's Think Deeper, go to copilot.microsoft.com or open Copilot on your PC and click the sparkle icon next to the microphone button on the search bar. You'll notice that responding to prompts takes a few seconds longer than usual, but the wait is worth it for the improved reasoning capabilities.

You must sign in to your Microsoft account to access Think Deeper. Without signing in, you'll only have access to Copilot's standard features.

I tested Think Deeper with a complex prompt; it took some time and thought before responding. For example, when I asked it to "Create a detailed 30-day training plan for a half-marathon that adapts to a busy work schedule," it produced a thoughtful program with contingency options for missed workouts rather than a generic template.

What makes this particularly valuable is o1's superior reasoning ability. Unlike basic AI models that sometimes hallucinate or provide superficial responses, Think Deeper delivers more subtle, accurate analysis. The model excels at tasks requiring critical thinking.

While you might experience slightly longer waits during peak times compared to Copilot Pro subscribers, free users have no usage caps.

2Access to Advanced Voice

Microsoft

Advanced voice interactions with AI used to be a premium feature in most AI chatbots. However, with Microsoft Copilot, you can use unlimited advanced voice chat, removing the previous usage restrictions that made the feature less practical.

I've been testing Copilot's voice chat against ChatGPT's advanced voice feature, and both are somewhat similar now. According to Microsoft, you can now speak naturally to Copilot in over 40 languages.

What really impressed me was Copilot's ability to pull in real-time information during voice chats. Try asking, "What happened in the news today?" and you'll get current events rather than outdated information—something ChatGPT's voice chat can't match without a subscription.

Copilot has also improved the voice transcription feature. To try it out, tap the microphone icon in the Copilot app or on the Copilot website. For the best experience, speak clearly and try complex prompts like "Help me plan a weekend trip to Chicago with a focus on architecture tours and local cuisine."

3Get Real-Time Information Without Any Restrictions

While you can now use ChatGPT search for free, it has limited real-time web access. Microsoft Copilot provides unrestricted access to current information. This means you can ask about recent events or product releases and get up-to-date answers.

When I tested this with prompts like "What are today's top news headlines?", Copilot consistently provided accurate, current information. Unlike ChatGPT's free version, which sometimes presented two-day-old news as "latest," Copilot's responses were genuinely current by default.

This real-time access extends to Copilot's voice feature, too. When asked about the current weather, it pulls fresh data.

Never make financial, medical, or other important decisions based solely on information provided by any AI chatbot, especially for sensitive data like stock prices or medical advice.

The feature isn't perfect, though. I noticed that while Copilot consistently provides current information, its referencing can be hit-or-miss. Sometimes, it links to a publication's homepage rather than the specific article it's referencing—an issue I've seen with ChatGPT Search as well.

For the most current results, explicitly mention timeframes in your prompts, such as "this week," "today," or "most recent."

4Copilot Has a Larger Context Window

Microsoft Copilot offers you free access to GPT-4o with its full context window capabilities, giving you a distinct advantage over ChatGPT's free tier. While both provide GPT-4o access, ChatGPT places usage limitations and switches back to other free models.

Related

GPT-4o Brings GPT-4 to Everyone, and This Is How It Works

OpenAI's new model steps it up once again.

The context window—an AI's working memory—determines how much information it can process in a single conversation. Think of it as the amount of text the AI can remember and reference when responding to you. Copilot's implementation allows for the processing of approximately 128,000 tokens (roughly 96,000 words) without hitting any free tier restrictions.

This expanded context makes a noticeable difference when working with lengthy documents. For example, I pasted a 40-page document into Copilot and asked it to analyze specific sections while referencing earlier parts.

This expanded memory is handy for coding projects, research analysis, and document reviews. For now, you can upload one file per prompt, discuss it in detail, and maintain that context throughout your session.

Download: Microsoft Copilot

While a ChatGPT Plus subscription still offers advantages, Copilot has narrowed the gap between free and premium AI experiences. For most everyday tasks, the free version of Copilot now provides everything most of us need.

Whether you're a student, professional, or casual user looking for the best AI tools for any job, Copilot's free capabilities make it worth adding to your productivity toolkit—even if you're already using other AI assistants.

6 key abilities of strategic thinkers

 

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6 key abilities of strategic thinkers (you can learn them)

“I’m often asked: “Are great strategic thinkers born, or are they made?” And my answer is always yes. Like so many human capabilities, it’s a mixture of nature, nurture and experience.”

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MICHAEL WATKINS: I'm often asked, are great strategic thinkers born or are they made? And my answer is always yes. It's like so many important and valuable human capabilities, a mixture of nature and nurture and experience. You're not going to become a world-class marathoner if you don't have the right physiology, the right muscles, the right lungs, but you still need to train very hard, and it's very similar with strategic thinking. You certainly are born with an endowment. Some people are naturally better that it than others, but there's so much you can do to develop yourself. And I always tell people, don't worry about the endowment. Focus on the improvement because my research shows definitively that you can get much better at being an effective strategic thinker.

I'm Michael Watkins. I'm a professor of leadership and organizational change at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. My book is "The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking." Strategic thinking has always been a critical skill at the top. Leaders must be able to recognize emerging challenges and opportunities, establish the right priorities to focus their organizations, and critically mobilize their people to do what's necessary to adapt to the many changes that are going on today.

In the research I did on strategic thinking, I identified six key mental disciplines that underlie your ability to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize. Pattern recognition is a foundational discipline of strategic thinking. The ability to find the signal, the important information in what can be a sea of noise. Not just absorbing what's happening, but thinking about why, thinking about connection. When grandmasters look at a chessboard, they don't just see pieces. They don't just see the layout of the board. They see the most important patterns that exist in that configuration. They see opportunity. They see concentrations of power. They see potential vulnerabilities.

At the heart of your ability as a leader to navigate complexity is the discipline of systems analysis. It's absolutely essential, of course, that systems models capture the most important features and dynamics of the system that you're talking about. But given the very, very high levels of complexity today, no human being and indeed, so far, no computer is able to flawlessly model the entire set of variables and interactions that constitute a complicated system. One example I use is climate, where today we have very good models of climate, but they're absolutely simplifications of reality. They model large chunks of the atmosphere, for example, in ways that are really kind of, crude almost. But they do capture the most important features of the overall climate system in a way that lets you make good predictions.

As you focus on the discipline of mental agility, it's important to understand this idea of level shifting. There's a CEO I work with who describes this as cloud-to-ground thinking. The ability to move from a high-level perspective, to be in the clouds, to see the big picture of what's going on, but also to drill down into the detail when necessary. The great strategic thinkers I know are able to move between those levels of analysis and do so fluidly and also intentionally.

Structured problem-solving is what you do with teams to help them engage in rigorous processes of framing and solving the most consequential problems that the organization faces. The structured part is really essential because it ensures that you're doing a good job of truly solving the right problem, that's the framing part, and then generating and testing the right options so that you end up with a robust solution. There can be many stakeholders involved that have an interest in what happens. And so it's essential, therefore, to establish a process that moves people through that, you know, framing and solving of problems such that at the end of the process, they're in alignment, if not enthusiastic, about what happens going forward.

At its core, visioning is about identifying the future to which you are trying to move your organization, a compelling portrait of where we are going to go together and why we should feel excited about getting there. There's a core tension you need to manage between ambition and achievability. Err too far on the side of ambition. You're creating something that's unrealistic people won't feel like they can really accomplish, and ultimately does exactly what you're trying not to do, which is to demotivate people. Err too far on the side of achievability, it's too easy, it's not ambitious enough, it's not exciting for people, It doesn't really fundamentally motivate them.

And finally, politics is an essential part of every human organization, and there's simply no avoiding it. There are certain tactics that you can use that will help you influence people. A classic example of this is what's known as sequencing strategy. This is really about being thoughtful about the order in which you communicate with people and how you engage in order to build momentum in the directions you want the organization to go. I'm going to talk first to Christian, and then I'm going to talk to Stephanie. And if I have Christian and Stephanie on board, then getting Robert on board is going to be easier. And I need to be careful in the process not to overplay things in a way that causes Trudy to feel threatened by what I'm trying to do and start to do things to mobilize potential opposition. Just think about this process of moving people step by step to a place that they wouldn't have gone in a single leap.

The people making the decisions about leaders' futures are more and more weighting the importance of strategic thinking capability in their decisions about whether you will advance or not. And this just amplifies the importance of focusing as much as possible on building your strategic thinking capability. It really is the fast track to the top.

Agents of Change These forward-thinking companies are driving ROI with Copilot and agents—and illuminating the path ahead for every organization.

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Using GenAI in strategy, research and insight

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This week’s provocation: Using GenAI in strategy, research and insight

This week I ran a virtual version of the Advanced Application of AI in Advertising course that I put together for the IPA. One of the key topic areas is about how to use GenAI tools in the strategy and planning process which I think is an endlessly shifting but fascinating topic. I genuinely think that integrating these tools into the planning workflow can be game changing, particularly for research, so I thought I’d write up some techniques that I’ve found especially useful. Many of you seemed to have found my recent post on using LLMs to challenge your thinking beneficial, so this is a build on that.

It’s important to say that this post is not about synthetic research, or data and performance analysis, or using the bespoke tools that have been created (shout out to Adaily, Springboards, Magnolia who are all doing interesting things) but more about how LLMs can help you with everyday research. The context of this is the advertising planning process, but I think these tips are useful for any situation where you want to understand something better.

Academic Ethan Mollick has made the point before now that many people use LLM tools as they would a search engine, which doesn’t necessarily get the best out of the AI. But framing the answer to this as a need to learn complex prompt engineering is also not that helpful. To paraphrase Mollick, it works best to treat the AI like an infinitely patient research assistant who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. There’s no one way (so the best advice is to try stuff out, and keep trying) but these are some techniques that I’ve found consistently useful:

• Diversity of insights: The first thing to recognise is that LLMs can support a diverse set of research contexts. I’ve always liked Julian Cole’s way of navigating a brand’s strategy and positioning by looking at key insights across the 4Cs: company, category, customers and culture:

  • Company: you can use LLMs for classic analysis like PESTLE, Porter’s 5 forces, and SWOT but also for market positioning, financial performance, leadership and customer perception insights.

  • Customer: they can do a pretty good job of supporting persona generation, journey mapping, and understanding consumer trends, behaviour and sentiment.

  • Category: Alongside the usual analysis like market positioning, competitive scenarios, and emerging trends, LLMs can be good for understanding risk and opportunity, value and supply chain issues, acquisitions and scenario planning.

  • Culture: they can help cultural segmentation, anthropology, local nuances, as well as cultural symbols and artefacts, and cross-cultural analysis.

• Breath of application: Google’s prompting guide for strategists and creatives (PDF) sets out four main ways in which strategists can use LLMs, which is a good starting point:

  • Condense: Break down complex information into digestible insights

  • Expand: Generate new ideas or dive deeper into topics.

  • Iterate: Refine existing ideas and content by exploring variations.

  • Finesse: Polish for clarity and impact.

• Starting prompts: many people seem to begin with vague, unspecific prompts and are then unimpressed with the mediocre outputs they get. The quality of responses is generally directly proportional to the quality of inputs. More context = better outputs, and beginning with good context gets you off to a good start. Personally I’m a fan of the RISEN framework (originated by Kyle Balmer) which stands for Role, Instructions, Steps, End goal, Narrowing (or novelty). This gives the AI a persona to follow, specific instructions and a goal, context on how the information will be used, and details on how you want it to be presented.

• Going deeper: in her deck on Strategy in the Era of AI, Zoe Scaman said that ‘AI is not a Q & A platform…it doesn’t simply retrieve information. It learns from data, making connections and recognising trends to offer insights and potential answers’. And she’s right. The real value comes after the initial prompt, when you’re going back and forth human-AI-human-AI-human to dive deeper, explore, and finesse. Treating the AI as a tool for exploration rather than as a search engine takes outputs to a different level.

• Opening up new lines of thought: Summary and assimilation seem to be one of the main ways that people currently use LLMs but there is so much more you can do to help you unlock different ways of thinking about a topic. As an example, this strategist used Notebook LM to capture key trends from this folder with over 100 trends decks for 2025 in it. But she also went further and asked questions such as examples of where unexpected industries are teaming up, or what were overlooked insights that could create an edge. When I tried this, the summary trends were pretty uninspiring and generic but these follow up questions revealed some interesting new thoughts. I also did a bit of norm switching, asking how trends from one industry could apply to another and that was useful too (ref my previous post on using LLMs to challenge your thinking for more on this)

• Use a diverse set of tools. I inevitably have my favourite tools that I use but sometimes it can be useful to deliberately go beyond habit and use a wider range of agents. One of the ways in which AI’s are quirky is that different tools give different answers, so just as human cognitive diversity helps to solve problems faster and better, so diverse inputs and perspectives from different tools can help. Alongside the main multi-use GPTs like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, here are a few tools that I use quite a lot:

  • Unstuck: great for summarising and drawing out key points from lengthy videos (like lectures or talks)

  • Google’s Notebook LM: wonderful for analysing/summarising multiple inputs such as research studies, reports, videos, and also making connections between topics

  • Globe Explorer: Great at structuring a topic at a high-level, particularly when you don’t know much about it

  • It’s also worth shouting out the Custom GPTs available in ChatGPT. There’s a good range in there that can support research - the one I probably use most is AskYourPDF Research Assistant. I’ve also created my own Custom GPT, trained on my 3 books and 16 years of blog posts which is pretty good, though in truth I probably need to put a bit more work into finessing it.

• Get the LLM to check its own homework: I will almost always ask the AI to finesse and improve it’s answers. It often results in much better outputs. I read somewhere (I’ve forgotten where so forgive the lack of a link) that asking the LLM to rate it’s answer on a scale of 1-10 against your criteria helps in the improvement process. If it comes back with an 8 out of 10 (which it often does) you can challenge it to improve it to a 10. There’s something about using a numerical grading which really works.

• Using the LLM as a sparring partner: I liked this idea of asking the LLM to play the role of the audience that you are about to present to and using it to critique your pitch/presentation/idea (HT Shane O’Leary for that one). You can give it context like what’s important to them, how they respond to information or the kinds of questions they ask. But it’s an excellent way to prepare, and seems to be able to anticipate questions or challenges very well.

A final point on this. As I’ve written about before, one of the reasons that I don’t use the Custom GPT which I’ve created for writing posts like this is because writing is how I think. Going through the writing process helps me to understand a topic, make connections, learn, and form an opinion. Getting an AI to do this for me means that I don’t get any of this, and I miss out on the real value of writing in the first place. It’s worth reflecting that in a strategy or research process LLMs are no substitute for human judgement or consideration but they can help you to think faster and better. They can be so much more than summarisers. They can be thought partners - critiquing, improving and finessing but also opening up entirely new lines of thinking.

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If you do one thing this week…

Every year Tom Whitwell collates a list of 52 of the most quirky but fascinating things that he’s learned across the year. It’s always a brilliant read and this year’s collection is no different. One of my favourite facts was that the London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito (Culex pipiens f. Molestus) which is genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and which has been present since the 1940s.

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Links of the week

• OpenAI launched the public version of their text-to-video model Sora this week (to the US, not UK or EU just yet for compliance reasons). This will likely mean a dramatic ramping up in the volume of AI-generated video content

• In related news, this week I spoke on a webinar for the Advertising Producers Association on the topic of how AI is changing commercial content production. The other speakers were fascinating - shout out to Future Creatives from Common People who are doing some amazing AI-content generation work. One other example of the work I saw on the webinar was the Pedigree Adoptable case study which is genius.

• Lots of Spotify Wrapped being shared this week (it’s become it’s own cultural event). Thanks to Google Notebook LM you can now get your own Spotify Wrapped personalised podcast (in the Spotify app) with the two hosts doing a deep dive into your Year in Music (HT Ben Malbon)

• This was a smart piece from Tom Roach on how big advertising is now a collection of smaller things

• If you’re short on present ideas here’s The Guardian’s best books of 2024, and here’s the FT’s list, and here’s Waterstones’ list

• I liked this idea, from a Switzerland based Software Designer who keeps an updated and public list of people he’d like to meet (HT Swissmiss)