The Unexpected Impact of Handing Your Decisions to AI (It’s Not What You Think)

There are hundreds of potential use cases for AI.

But would you trust it with making decisions?

I would not.

And to be clear, despite the title I still do not.

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

I do not ask AI what I should do. I do not let it decide for me.

However, for the past couple of months, AI has become a part of how I work through decisions. By no means as a (final) decision maker, but as a tool that helps me think more clearly.

I use it like a personal assistant. I give it my notes, my ideas and other input. Then I ask it to structure everything so I can actually see what I am dealing with.

And as generative AI is really good at mainly one thing: working with text, it works exceptionally well with this use-case.

What actually helps a lot is that I write down a lot - which can become the main input for this kind of workflow. That started a couple of years ago, when I came across a simple idea that stuck with me.

If your thoughts start circling around and instead of things becoming more clearly, they actually become more messy the longer you think about them. The solution to the problem?

Write down your thoughts.

I did that.

And I started writing.

A lot.

This blog actually grew out of that habit. At work, writing quickly became something I relied on whenever things felt unclear.

If I had to make difficult decisions or was unsure how to proceed, I opened a blank document and wrote everything down that came to my mind. Ideas, concerns, arguments, doubts, …

Typing fast helped because it kept me from overthinking every sentence.

Most of the time, this worked well. Writing forces you to turn vague thoughts into something concrete.

But over time, I ran into a limit.

I would end up with (many) pages of notes. Everything was there, but it was too much information for a clear picture. I had words, but no structure. So I had to iteratively work through the loads of information, filter out the essence and summarize it into a big picture. This often took much longer than writing everything down.

However, I started experimenting with generative AI for summarizing texts.

At first, the use-case was very basic. I copied my messy notes into an AI tool and asked it to organize them. Sometimes I asked it to look at the text like a business coach. Other times more like a mindset coach. Mostly, I just wanted a clearer overview of what I had already written down.

I did not expect much.

Maybe a summary.

Maybe a couple of bullet points.

What surprised me was how helpful the output was.

The AI did not add new ideas. It worked with what I gave it (as it actually should). But it grouped my ideas and made patterns visible. It reflected my own thoughts back to me in clearer language. It was even able to read between the lines and expose assumptions I had not noticed and questions I had not explicitly asked myself.

That made a real difference.

The unexpected impact was not AI making better decisions than I could.

It was it helping me seeing my own thoughts more clearly.

I still do the hard part.

I still write everything down.

I still take responsibility for the final decision. But AI helps to reduce the noise. It gives me distance from my own thoughts, which is often the hardest part when you are deeply involved in a problem.

Writing will always be a powerful tool for structuring thoughts. I do not see that changing.

But combining writing with AI has taken this process one step further for me. Not because AI is clever, but because it’s a great assistant for summarizing text.

And that was the unexpected part. Or is it really that unexpected?