Research
Once leaders have identified potential areas where their organization could improve, it’s important they conduct further research to validate the direction they’re heading, such as synthesizing industry benchmarks to understand what realistic numbers are for their teams to hit.
Without AI, this kind of deep research is very time-consuming. With AI tools like Gemini or ChatGPT, leadership teams will have pages of relevant notes to review in less time than it typically takes to even find the right resources to begin research.
Or, if the executive wants AI to get deeper into industry analysis and not just surface information about industry benchmarks, they could use a market or competitive intelligence platform.
Refine
Once the brainstorming phase is finished and an executive needs to hone in on which proposed objectives will create the most impact for their business, AI can also help prioritize and specify objectives. Lucid can help with its sort ideas feature. Select a handful of ideas to sort, and Lucid’s Collaborative AI will automatically group the ideas by common themes so you can see patterns.
Another way an executive could prioritize and specify objectives would be to use a solution tailored to their specific use case—in this case, determining OKRs. OKR management platforms with AI capabilities allow users to perform what-if scenario planning, predict OKR achievement, and more.
An AI chat tool, such as Gemini or ChatGPT, could also write the final OKRs to make them more specific.
No matter what AI tool someone chooses, the goal is to automate the work that doesn’t require an executive’s expertise.
Automate
Later, as teams work on OKRs and managers gather data and report on performance, an executive could use AI to synthesize and interpret results to determine the success of each OKR.
Business intelligence platforms with AI capabilities, such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau, allow users to ask questions about their data and instantly receive an answer. For example, “How much has our lead-to-opportunity conversion rate increased since last quarter?”
Some of these platforms can even recommend actions based on the data analyzed.
Managers
Managers will likely spend a fair amount of time using AI to ideate, research, refine, and automate because they have to bridge the gap between leadership’s strategic vision and individual contributors completing the day-to-day work that rolls up to that vision.
Ideate
Using the OKR example, once executives have determined the Q2 OKRs and share those goals, managers can start high-level planning and figure out what actions their teams need to take to meet the OKRs.
A manager could plug an OKR into a generative AI tool and ask how to go about reaching that OKR. For example, a prompt might look like this: “How can a mid-sized sales team reach an OKR of enhancing sales efficiency and productivity by increasing the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate by 10%?”
AI will list a variety of ideas, and the manager will use their expertise to narrow down those ideas and determine which are applicable to their team.
“When you use generative AI to help brainstorm, think of AI as a thought partner. It should offer you different perspectives and help you to further develop your own.”
—Patrick Saul, solutions consultant at Lucid
Research
Once the manager has chosen which ideas to pursue, it’s helpful for them to understand their team’s current state, and AI can help!
Semantic search is an AI functionality that will go beyond keywords to find documentation, and if a user’s apps are integrated, it can often surface results from different apps in one place.
AI-powered note-taking assistants, such as NotebookLM, allow users to upload documentation and then ask questions about that documentation so that they don’t have to read an entire document to find the information they need.
Along with helping managers find documentation, AI can also automatically generate visuals of a team’s current state for a process. For example, you can generate a diagram in Lucidchart by typing in a prompt for what type of diagram you want and giving some details of what you’d like it to show. Managers can use this functionality to speed up the process of visualizing their current state.
