Informed i’s Weekly Business Insights

Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Of course, teachers can often tell when a student is using AI—models make mistakes that most humans don’t, and some teachers say that AI-generated text has simple giveaways like too many em dashes. 

Nevertheless, the generative AI boom increased the burden on teachers, who were already working long hours to plan lessons, make homework assignments, and grade exams, and now needed to adapt to a new technology. For many, it still feels like there’s no clear path forward. Organizations ranging from OpenAI to UNESCO encourage AI use in the classroom, but many teachers feel confused about how exactly to handle it.

The article discusses the case of an academy that adopted techniques to make educators aware and students to reflect on their own use of AI. The educators there are trying a patchwork of programs, including general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity as well as more specialized tools like MagicSchool, an AI-powered platform meant specifically for educators.Assignments are now labelled like traffic lights, with green meaning AI is fully allowed and red banning any AI use. Yellow, then, lets the teacher permit some tools while banning the rest, like allowing students to use spell-check but not message a chatbot.

As generative AI was becoming mainstream, the academy previewed MagicSchool to its staff.   For many, MagicSchool’s main strength seems to lie in the sheer amount of offerings it provides in one package. It can generate questions and assignments of all kinds, from quizzes to worksheets, across many subjects and grade levels. It has a specialized grading rubric generator, which outputs a ready-to-go table that teachers can use to score assignments. It can make presentations and lesson plans and administrative reports, too. 

All of this is done through a single platform where educators enter specific prompts tailored for each task. For example, to make an assignment, a teacher can specify the students’ grade level, number of questions, the types of questions (such as multiple choice or short answer), and more, and include documents to align the questions with.

Not every teacher feels comfortable using LLMs to generate student-facing text, whether because they don’t think an AI can produce effective teaching materials or helpful feedback, or because they’re concerned about accuracy. MagicSchool, which has free and paid versions, does offer tools on its platform for other tasks like lesson planning. If teachers want unlimited access and complete records in the system, though, they need to pay just under $100 per year for an individual plan. Alternatively, many of the general-purpose generative AI tools (think the chatbots on offer from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and more) seem suited to administrative tasks, as well, attested by the fact that many of the teachers at Cheshire Academy use those instead. Some of these companies are even rolling out features tailored for schools, to mixed results.

How to apply this

1. Meet students where they’re at. Students will be tempted to try AI, and there’s no way to entirely police this for take-home assignments. The internet and social media can spread a lot of misinformation as to what AI can and can’t do, and it’s critical to counter these narratives and teach healthy strategies and relationships.
2. Model best practices. AI is very good at automating tasks, but it struggles with precision and voice. Keep this in mind, especially when generating any text that anyone else may see. Impressionable students who see those in authority using AI in a lazy way could internalize this as an excuse to cut corners in their own work.
3. Refine and replace. AI is great for brainstorming lesson plans and extra problem sets, especially for teachers early in their careers who don’t have a big problem bank already built up. However, because it can make mistakes (called hallucinations), using it for final drafts can result in assignments that confuse students and impair learning. Be sure to check every citation, equation, and statement an LLM makes.

For years, performance in industrial manufacturing, in sectors from aerospace to power generation, rested on engineering excellence, installed base strength, and long-standing customer relationships. Commercial models evolved gradually. Sales teams relied on deep personal networks, applying pricing strategies shaped mainly by precedent. Growth came primarily from existing accounts.

Today’s conditions are fundamentally different. Powerful AI tools and improved access to data have raised the bar for both competitors and customers. In emerging industrial growth sectors such as data centers, customers need solutions that are far more tailored and integrated than was typical in the past. Yet margins remain under pressure as geopolitics redraws supply chains and input costs remain volatile.

This new environment is stretching the limits of relationship-driven sales models, which can deliver tailored solutions for known customers but struggle to do so consistently across new segments, geographies, and product categories.

According to McKinsey research, industrial manufacturing leaders that comprehensively overhaul pricing, growth strategy, and sales productivity can unlock 5 to 20 percent revenue uplift and 5 to 10 percent EBITDA improvement within two years, with substantial gains realized in the first 12 months.

AI is accelerating this shift, not by replacing commercial fundamentals but by codifying institutional knowledge, integrating analytics into day-to-day decisions, and expanding coverage without a proportional increase in head count.

Industrial companies have long competed on technical excellence. To outperform—and to sustain this level of performance—will depend on pairing technical excellence with commercial excellence and deploying AI where it matters most: focused on the few domains that drive disproportionate value, codified, scaled, and continuously improved.

The Iran war exposed just how much the world relied on a narrow 20-mile-wide waterway. Soon after the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, the latter threatened to strike ships trying to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, the channel for much of the Middle East’s oil and gas exports. The threat of shortages pushed countries across Asia to impose export bans, cut import duties, and start rationing fuel to maintain supplies. 

Six months since the onset of the war, doomsday scenarios—price spikes, long lines at gas stations, power outages, and grounded flights—haven’t quite come to fruition, as increased production and hefty stockpiles blunted some of the damage. It seems that normality, in some form, could be returning to the Strait. On Wednesday, Iran announced a new revenue-sharing agreement over the waterway, though a military spokesperson blamed the U.S. for “obstructing this process.”  Yet the revelation of how easy it was for Iran to block, and continue blocking, one of the world’s most important waterways is pushing governments to diversify their sources of energy.  And now, with the prospect of a U.S.-Iran deal in the near-term on life support and Iranian control of Hormuz now looking secure for years to come, what previously saved the global oil market in the first half of the year might not work for a second time.

Before the war, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil trade passed through the Strait of Hormuz, which sits between Iran and Oman. More than 80% of that cargo was bound for Asia, primarily China, India, Japan, and South Korea.

“Before this crisis many market observers would have told you it would be impossible to block or completely close the Strait of Hormuz, because a country like Iran did not have the capabilities. They tried in the 1980s, but they did not succeed,” says Carole Nakhle, CEO at Crystol Energy, an energy consultancy. 

Yet the conflict has shown “how easy and inexpensive it has become to threaten very expensive energy infrastructure,” she added, with relatively cheap drones capable of putting refineries, pipelines, ports, and other multibillion-dollar facilities at risk.

“This has been the big wake-up call for the entire global energy industry. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift of the last 50 years of the energy industry,” says Kavonic. “We’re moving from just-in-time supply chains to just-in-case supply chains.”

Energy importers are starting to diversify. Before the war, the Middle East accounted for 90% of Japan’s crude oil imports, and roughly 11% of its liquefied natural gas. “Japan found it was more vulnerable than expected, particularly when it comes to LNG—it imports 100% of its energy,” says Kavonic.  “In Japan, if the LNG doesn’t arrive, the lights go off and the country shuts down.”  Now, Tokyo is investing elsewhere to shore up future supplies. Japan’s Inpex, for example, formed a joint venture to expand its LNG investment in Australia’s Northern Territory. 

“It’s boomtime for Woodside and Chevron, two big LNG players who aren’t too concentrated in the Middle East. The oil majors are now also rapidly ramping up their investment in LNG,” Kavonic says, spotting an opportunity for buyers to diversify their sources of gas away from the Middle East. 

Exporters, too, are diversifying. For oil exporters, the major lesson has been the need to invest in alternate supply routes. That includes ploughing billions into building out ports in ports on both the western side of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf of Oman, effectively bypassing the strait entirely. Oil producers are also investing in pipelines, like Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline. If all these additional investments pan out, only 10% of the world’s oil will need to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, down from 20% before the war. 

Gas, far more than oil, could become the key energy commodity hurt by a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. While crude oil can be carried via pipeline–perhaps from oil producers in the Persian Gulf to ports on the western side of the Arabian Peninsula–gas can’t, meaning there are no alternative routes to get LNG to Asia if Hormuz is blocked.

Qatar, one of the world’s leading producers of LNG, is trying to find some way to keep its export routes open, through diplomacy, finding new customers, and taking rare opportunities to get their product through Hormuz. It has also set up a fast recovery timeline so it can restart production once the strait reopens.

Things didn’t collapse as analysts feared at the beginning of the conflict. In April, for example, the head of the International Energy Agency predicted that flights may soon need to be grounded in Europe due to jet fuel shortages.

While oil prices did surge to as high as $126 per barrel, they didn’t hit the $150 to $200 a barrel level that some analysts feared. And while several Asian countries imposed emergency measures to conserve fuel, a lengthy and catastrophic shortage never materialized. “The global market is proving to be more resilient to major supply shocks than many thought,” Kavonic says.

But how long this will last is unclear, particularly now that tensions between Iran and the U.S. have flared up again, and a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz now looks likely.

The bottleneck in strategic decision-making has never been a shortage of possible directions. It has been the limited capacity of the human minds doing the work. We can hold only so much information in our heads, evaluate only so many alternatives in a strategic-planning cycle, and process only so many perspectives in a meeting before fatigue, politics, or the clock forces a decision. Scholars call this dynamic bounded rationality—the idea that human decision-makers, however capable, are constrained by finite attention, memory, and processing power.

These constraints are so fundamental that we rarely notice them, but they have quietly shaped every tool in the standard strategy playbook. The reason a SWOT analysis has four quadrants, a growth share matrix is a 2×2, and Michael Porter’s most famous framework has exactly five forces is not that the competitive world is actually so simple. It’s that the frameworks had to be simple enough for a human team to map them out on a whiteboard in a few hours.For decades, those frameworks were the best we had. That’s no longer the case.

The current generation of artificial intelligence tools—particularly large language models (LLMs) and the multiagent systems being built on top of them—are not just additions to the planning tool kit. They’re technologies that directly relax the cognitive constraints that have shaped how companies make their most important decisions. AI can generate and screen thousands of strategic alternatives where a human team might be able to consider a mere handful. It can build and continuously update models of markets, customers, and competitors that are far richer and more dynamic than any static framework. And it can test ideas through simulated deliberation—synthesizing diverse perspectives and challenging assumptions without the groupthink, hierarchy, and time pressure that distort real-world strategy meetings.

Three Ways AI Expands Strategic Thinking:  To understand what changes with AI, it helps to think about what your organization has to do when making strategy. At its core, any strategic decision involves three cognitive tasks: searching for possible courses of action, representing the environment in which those actions will play out, and aggregating the judgments of the people involved in the decision. AI has expanded a handful of options to thousands, it has made static frameworks to living models, and it has moved us from groupthink to structured challenge.

None of this means AI outputs should be taken at face value. LLMs can produce confident-sounding analyses that are subtly wrong, internally inconsistent, or built on fabricated evidence. Synthetic deliberation can surface useful challenges—but it can also generate plausible-seeming objections that miss the point entirely. The quality of AI-augmented strategy depends on the quality of the data fed into the process and, critically, the human judgment applied to its outputs. That isn’t a reason to avoid these tools, but it is a reason to design the process carefully, and it’s precisely why the role of the human strategist becomes more important, not less, in an AI-augmented world.

Building Advantage When Everyone Has AI If your competitors can buy the same AI models that youI have, how does any of this become a source of competitive advantage? The models themselves are increasingly available. The advantage lies in what you build on top of them. Three approaches stand out:  make AI smarter with your data, deploy AI in processes that only you have, and move to the new frontier faster than your rivals.

AI can compress months of analysis into days, reveal opportunities that were invisible, and stress-test decisions that would otherwise go unchallenged. Firms that adopt those capabilities operate at a fundamentally different level of strategic quality. The advantage may be temporary in theory, but in practice it just keeps compounding: Better decisions lead to better positioning, which generates better data, which improves future decisions. The frontier will keep moving, so enduring advantage comes from the ability to reach it again and again, gaining strength each time.

The bottom line is this: As a technology, AI is becoming ubiquitous. But as a capability—embedded in your data, your processes, and your speed of execution—it is not. The companies that treat AI as a commodity to be purchased will find that it raises the bar for everyone without distinguishing them. The companies that treat it as a platform for building proprietary strategic capabilities will find that it is one of the most powerful sources of competitive advantage available today.

A Leader’s Playbook for the AI Era:  If you want to redesign how your organization makes its most important decisions, the playbook is straightforward:  widen the option set before narrowing it, replace static snapshots with living models, institutionalize structured challenge, build creator-critic-competitor workflows into every major commitment, and redefine the strategist’s role from analyst to architect.

All of those shifts demand a new talent profile: the hybrid strategist. Leaders who fit this profile know how to frame a strategic question, can design an AI workflow to answer it, and, above all, understand where the machine must yield to human judgment.

To become a hybrid strategist, you’ll need to change what you demand in the room where decisions are made. Before any major strategic proposal reaches the leadership table, require three things: the AI-expanded list of alternatives that were considered and rejected, a current model of the competitive environment, and the results of a structured critique. When the executive committee raises the standard for what a credible recommendation looks like, the rest of the organization will follow.

Many companies around the world have made significant progress in adding a higher proportion of board directors from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as women and people of color. But despite the increased diversity, many boards lag on inclusivity — that is, ensuring that diverse voices are actually heard and that all board members are able to contribute to decision-making.

In authors’ interviews with more than 25 board and committee chairs and 20 nonchair board members, a contradiction emerged: Chairs overwhelmingly believed that they led inclusive boards, but many board members disagreed.

Five Ways Board Chairs Can Act More Inclusively.  The board members we interviewed repeatedly highlighted a consistent set of behaviors that shaped their feelings of inclusion, but the board chairs overlooked, underestimated, or misunderstood those behaviors. Here are the key ways chairs can ensure more inclusive board meetings:

1. Use pre-meeting calls to understand perspectives, not to control them. What happens before the meeting itself matters. Pre-meeting calls with individual directors ahead of board meetings are de rigueur for many chairs. But the purpose and format of those calls vary widely — and matter greatly.  Pre-calls can better promote inclusivity when they are used to review the upcoming agenda to ensure that, based on the directors’ perspectives, nothing is missing. They may also be helpful in mapping the landscape of opinions and, in particular, to surface “quiet voices” and then encourage the more reticent to speak up in the actual meeting. Finally, they are also helpful in building relational trust, especially with newer members who might need to socialize certain ideas before putting them in front of their peers.  For such pre-calls to enhance inclusivity, board members need to be confident that the calls occur with all members, not a select few. 
2. Frame agenda items for discussion, not presentation. How chairs introduce agenda items shapes who speaks, what gets surfaced, and whose voices carry weight. Board members described two typical approaches — one oriented to presentations, and the other to discussion.  In the former scenario, the chair walks through a topic, outlines key considerations, and only then asks for input. This structure tends to bias the group toward the presenter’s framing, limit dissenting voices, reinforce hierarchical dynamics, and reward directors already aligned with the dominant perspective.  A chair who is oriented toward discussion will introduce the topic, state why it matters, and open the floor to the others before offering a personal perspective. This invites more diverse viewpoints, encourages questioning and constructive disagreement, allows lower-status members (those with a non-CEO background) to speak without contradicting the chair directly, and signals that the decisions are not predetermined.
3. Demonstrate hearing, not just listening.  One important way of doing this is to call on directors based on their expertise.  At the same time, chairs should avoid confining directors to their perceived expertise.   Likewise, chairs should signal that everyone has their full attention. The most exclusivity-building behavior that directors cited was chairs appearing to favor certain board members by giving them more time to speak, asking them more follow-up questions, making more eye contact with them or smiling at them, and making more frequent references to them.
4. Ensure that seating arrangements reflect equal distribution of power. Physical space, especially in a boardroom, communicates status and relationships. When it came to creating inclusive board environments, the chairs often had one thought about what led to inclusive seating while the directors had another. More than three-fourths of the chairs we talked to said that they explicitly think about where they sit relative to the other directors. Specifically, they said that they are careful not to sit at the head of the table — a position that denotes power and authority. But when we talked with board members, they mentioned that it was where others sat (relative to the chair) that made the difference.
5. Ensure that all members have access to the same information and people. Inclusivity extends beyond meetings. The board members we spoke with also highlighted the importance of equal access to internal stakeholders and information.  Some chairs grant members unfettered access to company executives and employees, whereas others require directors to route all interactions through them. Directors did not express a preference for one model over the other. What mattered most was consistency. Boards became less inclusive when some directors had informal access and others did not; certain members were quietly gatekept. 

Beyond the five core behaviors mentioned above, chairs and directors described two additional practices — neither of which occur around meetings — that meaningfully strengthen inclusive boardrooms: explicitly measuring board inclusiveness and providing board members with opportunities to receive training to fill knowledge gaps.

Empowering employees as a leader can be as easy as showing you trust them and believe in their capabilities, even when they don’t. Rather than an initiative, challenging conversations or an overhaul of your management style, it just takes small, consistent actions that demonstrate positive assumptions about your team members to elevate their performance.

For business leaders, taking some basic steps every day can help strengthen employees’ confidence and trust in their own abilities, encouraging a greater sense of ownership that drives individual performance and fuels collective excellence. Here, Forbes Coaches Council members explore simple leadership behaviors that can have a major impact on employees’ confidence and performance.

Remember People’s Names. Do you know how “seen” they feel when it comes from a leader? People seek belonging, and recognition from a leader is the start of that journey.

Create Safety To Foster Learning.  A simple leadership skill is creating a safe space where trust is the foundation for building this relationship. People feel capable when they have a space suited to their abilities. Genuine connections with others foster learning. Even when they fail, they learn together and improve.

Ask What Others See That You Don’t.  Ask, “What are you seeing that I may be missing?” and genuinely listening. It signals trust, invites contribution and reveals intelligence beyond hierarchy. This is central to our approach to leadership: The leader does not hold all the wisdom in the system.

Check People’s Capacity Before Demanding More.  The simplest behavior: Naming what people are carrying, out loud, before asking for more.

Share What Failed To Promote Adaptability.  Being vulnerable and sharing what failed in their journey is an effective leadership behavior. It shows ownership and sends a message for the company to try, learn and adapt. It builds the organizational resilience needed for the current environment.

The others are:  Use Feedback Systems As Scaffolding.  Walk The Floor To Build Connection.  Listen Deeply Before Offering Answers.  Challenge Teams To Solve Problems.  Ask Instead Of Telling.  Clarify Decision Boundaries.  Encourage People To Trust Their Own Thinking.  Let People Represent Their Own Work.  Give Ownership Without Intervening.  Provide Context For Better Independent Judgment.  Adapt Your Communication Style To Each Person.  And Show Up Visibly And Consistently.

Gap created a chief entertainment officer role to expand the company’s storytelling beyond traditional advertising, and recently hired a Walmart marketing alum to drive original content. Dick’s Sporting Goods launched its own production studio to create documentaries and original sports content. Starbucks has Starbucks Studios, an initiative focused on stories about coffee, culture and community.

These companies sell very different things, but their investments point to the same shift. Brands are no longer relying solely on advertising, influencers or traditional media coverage to reach consumers. Increasingly, they’re building the teams and infrastructure to create their own content.

For years, brands were encouraged to behave more like creators. They developed personalities, jumped on trends and tried to make their accounts feel less corporate. Some became very good at it, like Duolingo, Ryanair, and Wendy’s.  But creating content that earns attention consistently requires something different from creating an occasional viral post. It requires brands to start thinking more like publishers.

Publishers have always had to solve a problem that brands are increasingly facing on social media, which is, “How do you create something people actively choose to consume?” The answer isn’t simply producing more content. It’s understanding an audience well enough to know what they value, developing formats they want to return to, and building a system capable of delivering that consistently.

For companies investing more heavily in content and social, that’s an important distinction. The goal shouldn’t be to make a brand look more like a creator. It should be to build an audience that eventually wants to become a customer if they aren’t already.

Build for the audience, not the algorithm.  Traditional brand content often starts with what the brand wants to say. There’s a product launching, a campaign going live, or a message the company wants consumers to hear. Social media becomes another place to distribute it.  Publishers work in the opposite direction.  They have to start with what their audience wants to know, watch, or understand because there’s no guarantee anyone will pay attention otherwise.  Brands often misunderstand what operating like a publisher actually requires.  What it actually requires is treating content as its own craft with its own mandate, not as product marketing.  The first question isn’t how a piece of content ties back to the company’s customer platform. It’s whether the content is valuable enough to be worth someone’s time.  

Build franchises instead of chasing viral moments. Going viral isn’t the end goal here, a flash in the pan doesn’t serve any brand or creator in the long run.  Instead focuses on developing intellectual property and repeatable formats that can build an audience over time.   A publisher thinks in franchises, not moments.   Brands shouldn’t be asking ‘how do we go viral,’ they should be asking ‘what’s the thing our audience would miss if we stopped making it. 

Change the way content gets made.  Thinking like a publisher also requires more than changing the content itself. It can require changing the team behind it. Many companies still operate around a campaign model. They develop a big idea, spend weeks or months producing it, launch it and eventually move on to the next one.  But social media operates on a much faster cycle. Brands need to move from a campaign-led model toward an always-on production model.

More content isn’t the goal.  Brands should focus on creating the most valuable content they can for their audience, not simply the most content. The goal should be “more relevant content,” with organic social serving as a real-time feedback loop for what deserves greater investment.

According to the author, from the outside, his career may look like he kept changing lanes. He has built and operated businesses in hospitality, real estate, construction, home inspections, healthcare and digital marketing. People sometimes ask how he moves between industries that seem so different. The truth is, he deson’t begin with the industry. He begins with the problem.  A hotel guest, a homebuyer, an urgent care patient and a small-business owner are not the same customer. But each wants clarity, consistency and confidence. Each wants to know what happens next, whether the company can be trusted and whether the experience will be worth the money.

The greatest advantage of working across industries has not been diversification alone. It has been pattern recognition.

1. Look for the emotion beneath the transaction.  Customers rarely buy only the product or service listed on the invoice. A hotel guest is not just paying for a room. After a long day of traveling, that guest may be buying rest and reassurance. A patient visiting urgent care wants answers, relief and confidence that someone is paying attention. A homebuyer ordering an inspection wants more than a report. The buyer wants to feel informed before making one of the largest financial decisions of their life.  This is similar to the jobs-to-be-done approach developed by the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen: Focus on what the customer is really trying to accomplish. According to the author, in every business, he asks three questions: What is the customer worried about? What would make the experience easier? What must happen for the customer to trust us?
2. Transfer principles, not procedures.  When you see a successful practice in another industry, don’t copy it word for word. Identify the principle underneath it, then adapt it to your customer, team and operating environment.
3. Treat repeated friction as market research.  According to the author some of her best business opportunities didn’t begin in a brainstorming session, they began with a problem he kept seeing.  For 30 days, keep a friction log. Record recurring complaints, delays, outside services you repeatedly purchase and manual workarounds. Then ask who else has the same problem, what it costs them and whether they would pay for a better solution.
4. Validate the pattern before building around it.  Seeing a recurring problem doesn’t automatically mean you’ve found a viable business. Because you understand the problem, you may assume others value the solution as much as you do. Before committing significant time or money, talk with potential customers. Test a limited version. Ask customers to pay rather than simply asking whether they like the idea. Set a budget, a deadline and a clear result the test must produce.  Not every frustration deserves a new company. Some are operational problems that should be fixed inside the existing business. The goal is to distinguish between an inconvenience and a market.
5. Build a leader, not another job.  A new opportunity becomes dangerous when it depends on the founder for every decision. Before entering another business or market, I consider who will lead it, what authority that person will have and which measurements will show whether the operation is healthy.  If every customer issue, employee question and financial decision comes back to you, you have not built another business. You have created another job. The common thread across my businesses is not a particular industry. It is solving real problems through service, systems and trust.