This article was based on the interview with Featuring insights from Greg Shove, CEO of Section by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
AI is no longer just about productivity hacks or marketing automation. It’s fast becoming a true partner in strategic thinking—and executives who treat it like a simple efficiency tool are setting themselves up to be left behind. Greg Shove, CEO of Section and a seven-time founder, has a front-row seat to this shift. After helping pivot his company from an online business school to a global leader in AI education, he’s trained thousands of mid-career professionals on how to use AI not just to move faster, but to think smarter.
In this conversation, Shove offers a direct view into the future: how executives should treat AI as a collaborator rather than a crutch, how “cognitive offloading” to a few tech giants could quietly reshape power dynamics, and why the greatest risk isn’t artificial intelligence (AI) replacing jobs—but humans failing to level up alongside it.
AI as a Board Member: The New Playbook for Leaders
Shove’s breakthrough moment came when he stopped using AI simply to draft documents or summarize data—and started using it to think. Six quarters ago, he began sending his company’s board deck not only to his human board members, but to AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT. He instructed them to assume roles—such as aggressive investor, cautious CFO, or conservative strategist—and asked them to critique his plan.
The results? AI matched or exceeded 85% to 93% of the insights that human board members provided. And unlike humans, the AI didn’t require scheduling meetings, managing personalities, or dealing with politics.
“I can’t imagine any entrepreneur or CMO going into a high-stakes meeting without first role-playing it with AI,” Shove says.
For business leaders, the takeaway is simple but profound: AI isn’t just a drafting tool; it’s your pre-meeting, pre-decision co-strategist.
Ask it to poke holes in your plan. Challenge it to give you perspectives you might not naturally consider. And crucially, assign it a persona—otherwise, you’re just outsourcing shallow summaries instead of gaining deeper insights.
Cognitive Offloading and the Big Tech Gamble
While Shove is excited about AI’s potential to accelerate individual and organizational thinking, he’s sharply concerned about the concentration of power. Today, a small handful of companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft—control the frontier AI models. Shove doesn’t mince words:
“We’re outsourcing cognition to a few companies. What could be more important to humanity than how we think?”
He compares this moment to what happened with attention (Google) and consumption (Amazon)—but even bigger. Cognition is more foundational. And today, there’s little meaningful government oversight slowing that race.
Agents—AI that can string together multi-step tasks autonomously—will only accelerate this dependency. While agentic AI will remove friction for consumers (“book me the best flight, hotel, and restaurant for my trip”), it will also make people increasingly reliant on unseen algorithms. This could lead to a level of intellectual laziness and trust without verification that society is barely ready for.
Shove’s advice? Stay conscious. Stay critical. And when possible, diversify your AI inputs and providers.
Winning in the Age of AI: Adaptation Over Anxiety
One of the most important insights Shove shares is that the biggest obstacle to AI adoption isn’t technical—it’s emotional. Anxiety about job loss, fear of irrelevance, and a false sense of invulnerability (“AI could never do what I do”) are the real barriers to progress.
“The bottom 50% of knowledge workers are at risk in the next five years,” he says bluntly.
But the good news? Anyone can move into the top half. And the single best way to do that is to embrace AI as a co-worker, not an adversary. Shove recommends small, practical steps:
- Use AI for grunt work like summarizing documents, drafting basic communication, or surfacing research.
- Use AI for brain work like strategic planning, risk analysis, and creative brainstorming.
- Treat AI as an ongoing conversation. Set up a dedicated AI workspace—whether a second monitor at your desk or daily “talk time” with AI tools like ChatGPT’s voice mode.
- Adopt a co-intelligence mindset. AI isn’t a tireless intern anymore—it’s becoming a junior analyst, a research assistant, and a second brain you can tap into at will.
And for organizations? Redesign workflows with the expectation that employees will expect near-zero interface friction. The standard for user experience will become the fluidity and immediacy of interacting with a smart AI.
Conclusion
If you think AI is just another marketing automation tool, you’re already behind. The real competitive advantage in 2025 and beyond belongs to those who can treat AI as a strategic thought partner: a way to expand cognitive capacity, uncover blind spots, and accelerate the right decisions faster than humanly possible.
As Greg Shove shows through his leadership at Section, this isn’t about surrendering critical thinking to a machine—it’s about strengthening it. It’s about stepping into meetings not hoping for the best, but armed with the sharpest, most diverse insights you could possibly have.
The future isn’t man versus machine. It’s man plus machine—versus everyone else who didn’t bother to adapt.
Your move.
