OUR INTERNAL INSIGHT ENGINE
The making of the AI Business Council
the reboot
Would you trust AI defining your consulting business?
Our true AI journey started with a complete business reboot. What if we had the chance to build a business with AI representing our potential market and clients?
Not as a one-off or bolt-on solution, but as an integrated advisory group, influencing everything from services, brand fundamentals, go-to-market and constant learning? And at the same time, making us invest the time needed to truly capture the potential of a technology, claiming to have a profound impact on both society and business?
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
The Client-in-the-Loop
For over two decades, we've navigated the trenches of the consultancy industry, witnessing technological shifts.
Each technology presented as the next big thing, often leaving businesses grappling with the human element.
With AI, the narrative is familiar, yet the potential depth and financial impact are fundamentally different. This made us push the question: How can AI genuinely elevate consulting at its core?
We realized the answer lay in solving a classic industry flaw – where knowledge often exit the organization with the consultant. By designing a central insight engine, we would finally capture and compound decades of market logic, allowing us to truly understand and continue to serve the decision makers shaping business today and tomorrow.
This led to our Client-in-the-Loop philosophy – an evolution of the traditional AI human-in-the-loop concept, where our ideal Clients are represented by AI-generated decision maker archetypes.
By applying the Loop, we would be able to leverage data and insights far beyond our own human capability and experience.
How can AI genuinely elevate consulting at its core?
With each interaction, we have systematically used the insights to help define a consultancy and brand the archetypes would consider in 2025 and beyond.
But one crucial question remained: To fully validate the output and insights, how could we get to a more human centered user interface?
TRUST THE TECHNOLOGY
Find your voice
The first hurdle wasn't the data: It was the user interface.
THE LOOP
We found endless prompting, tweaking and typing often led us back to the same problem: Outputs that felt like just another echo of what countless other consultants and brands produce.
The breakthrough came when we shifted to Voice interaction as our primary input, guided by a system for dialogue and output – our Client-in-the-Loop philosophy in action.
Like a live advisory group, this lets us truly challenge the AI's responses and dive deeper.
Our own domain knowledge, combined with the nuances of voice and tonality, means we can quickly spot inaccuracies and guide the conversation back on track.
This experience is backed by research; auditory processing often triggers higher cognitive alertness than reading, making logical inconsistencies and hallucinations easer to detect in real time.
The Council
Pains & Gains
Personalities
VOICES OF THE MARKET
The members of the Council
The archetypes of our Business Council members are crafted with precision: Each possesses distinct profiles, experiences and areas of expertise, influenced by our decades of real-world professional experience.
PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGES
Role and industry
The Council simulates professional challenges that influence the way we tailor our partnerships. By using established strategic frameworks, we quickly adapt our propositions based on specific industry challenges.
PROTOTYPE & STRESS TEST
The decision makers
Our Council help us bridge the gap faster between internal stakeholder structures, personalities and business decisions.
The Council
Pains & Gains
Personalities
The archetypes in the Business Council are crafted with precision: Each possesses distinct profiles, experiences and areas of expertise, influenced by our decades of real-world professional experience.
VOICES OF THE MARKET
The Council members
The Council simulates professional challenges that influence the way we tailor our partnerships. By using established strategic frameworks, we quickly adapt our propositions based on specific industry challenges.
PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGES
Role and industry
Our Council help us bridge the gap faster between internal stakeholder structures, personalities and business decisions.
PROTOTYPE & STRESS TEST
The decision makers
TRUST THE COMPETENCE
Let's ask Frank
The AI Business Council archetypes aren’t just theoretical models. They represent deep domain expertise and personalities inspired by our own professional experience.
The Council is based on five professional decision making archetypes – spanning Management, Entreprenurship, Business strategy, Sales, Brand & Marketing and Digital development, each with distinct personalities and viewpoints.
It’s a crowd that demands rigor. Their synthetic knowledge—drawn from thousands of real-world consultancy relationships, procurement processes and high-stakes pitches—minimizes human biases and ensures our human-driven insights are always challenged and refined.
Through voice interaction and roleplay, we have found an almost natural way to communicate, debate and trade insights.
Our experience is confirmed by cognitive research: when you label an AI (like Frank or Pixie), your brain moves past the technical "syntax" of the machine and begins to focus on the social context and intent.
This reduces cognitive load, allowing us to treat the AI not as a shortcut, but as a true, always-available advisory board.
Once the commercial challenge has been battle-tested by the Council, it is ready to be mapped into our core frameworks. We move from the
Debate
to the
Architecture, ensuring that every insight is translated into impactful, market-aligned actions.
The AI Business Council becomes a force multiplier adding both
speed and depth to our expertise.
THE LAUNCH
Proof of value
Since the spring of 2025, we have spent hundreds of hours with the Council applying our Client-in-the-Loop concept.
The Voice interaction made us confident that by applying a phased development framework, using the making of Bearing 45 as the case study, we would also be able to create a model for future innovations.
The keys have initially been the Guiding Pillars, each a strategic principle based on the individual iterations with each of the archetypes.
The Pillars, together with more detailed output, significantly impact the definition of our brand fundamentals, capabilities, partnership models and the overall customer journey.
THE CONCEPT
market VALIDATION
Business Council Guiding Pillars
REFLECTIONS
Just the starting point
So the takeways so far? What started out as a tissue session turned out to be a truly radical and transformative experience. Despite AI's early stages, the future for adaptive, client-centric businesses has never been more promising.
1. Trust the technology
Our Business Council demonstrates technology is now becoming a true amplifier of human capabilities and knowledge. Our Client-in-the-Loop approach leverages AI's reasoning, debating and role-playing to gain deep, domain-specific insights.
To get there, your personal commitment is key to moving beyond the echo-chamber.
2. The Human as catalyst
While AI technology is evolving, Voice input as our primary interface—combined with the distinct personas of the Council—significantly lowers cognitive load and the barriers to entry.
By simulating a nearly natural human-to-human interaction, we more effectively steer output towards
actionable insights
and
strategic directions.
3. Enter consulting 2.0
Is less actually more? Our Business Council is a powerful example of AI bringing endless possibilities in innovating, mitigating risk, building structural capital and scaling.
For non-legacy consultancies and leaders ready to adapt, this is rapidly redefining business concepts and operating models.
Author
Daniel Askergren
BUSINESS INNOVATION & GROWTH |
SENIOR ADVISORY & LEADERSHIP
For over two decades, Daniel has partnered with more than 50 diverse brands–from global industry leaders to local entrepreneurs. He advices and leads management and teams on shifting business strategies, emerging technologies and evolving customer behavior.
THE AI BUSINESS COUNCIL
Common questions
Business & value
Is the AI Business Council (AIBC) a software product or a consulting service?
Neither; the AIBC is today our proprietary insight engine that powers the precision of our advisory and embedded leadership models. It ensures our consulting advice is grounded in synthesized market reality, transforming complex data into actionable advice for our different Partnerships.
Technically, our platform is a structured orchestration layer built on top of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). We have digitized established business and management frameworks to guide the AI's processing. By combining these proven logic models with cross-industry data and behavioral experimentation, the AIBC generates outputs that are structurally sound, psychologically nuanced and specifically tailored to different markets, industries and functions.
How does the AIBC impact the accuracy of your services?
The AIBC acts as a strategic accelerator by rapidly synthesizing market data and market archetype mapping. We compress months of traditional research in favor of more prototype driven and iterative methodologies. This enables us to validate insights in real-time with our stakeholders, using rapid feedback loops rather than static reports.
If you don't use client data for training, how do you provide value?
Our engine focuses on pattern recognition across market behaviors, industries and functions. By having the AI working on established frameworks with massive volumes of external market signals and industry trends, we identify opportunities and risks that are often invisible to traditional research methods.
Is the AIBC engine limited to B2B, or does it apply to Consumer markets?
The principle of the Council is applicable wherever there is complex decision-making friction.
While we natively focus on the multi-layered stakeholder landscapes of B2B, the engine is equally effective for high-consideration consumer journeys. Whether simulating a Boardroom meeting or a Consumer profile, the Council uses the same structural logic to de-risk commercial initiatives by predicting how different decision makers and behavioral styles will potentially respond.
Technology
Does the AIBC use standardized business logic?
Yes, we believe in traceable intelligence. Our engine architecture is built upon industry-standard frameworks such as the Value Proposition Canvas. Used by thousands of management and innovation teams globally, these are immediately recognizable to leadership teams.
The input for the AIBC is also fully adapted to different professional roles, functions and industries.
The Value Proposition Canvas is a copyrighted tool of Strategyzer AG (Strategyzer.com)
How does the AIBC simulate buyer behavior and decision-making?
Our engine utilizes the DISC behavioral framework—a global benchmark used by over 75% of Fortune 500 companies—to model stakeholder logic.
By layering psychological profiles onto our archetypes, we simulate the specific decision-making friction between different leadership styles. This allows us to move beyond what a market "thinks" and uncover how a Dominant CEO or Conscientious buyer will potentially respond.
This simulation capability is applied across high-stakes scenarios—including investment cases, product and service innovation and targeted marketing and sales strategies—to ensure commercial initiatives are resilient to stakeholder friction.
Why use frameworks instead of just asking the AI for an answer?
A raw AI response lacks commercial accountability. By directing the AIBC to operate within established frameworks like the Value Proposition Canvas and DISC, we anchor the output in proven methodologies. Because the AI already has been trained on millions of data points for these models—including the world’s leading research and professional content—we secure results are not just generic guesses.
They are structured, strategic, and grounded in the same high-level logic used by the world’s most successful businesses.
Trust & data
Is client-specific company data used to train the AI?
No, this is a foundational principle of our governance. We never use client-specific data to train or teach the underlying AI models. Your internal data remains strictly within your organization’s own domains. We utilize a closed-loop environment where the AI acts only as a processor, never as a permanent learner of your proprietary information.
What is the role of the consultant in this process?
The AI handles the scale of the data, but the consultant handles the nuance. We validate every AIBC output to ensure it aligns with your specific market, stakeholder landscape and long-term brand goals. The AIBC-engine provides the data; we provide the commercial leadership to turn that data into market-aligned results.
HOW WE PARTNER
The Pivot
