VOICES OF YOUR MARKET

The making of the AI Business Council™

the reboot

What happens when you trust AI to guide your business foundations?

Our journey started with a complete redesign. What if we built a business with AI simulating the challenges of our market and clients?


Not as a bolt-on tool, but an integrated, always accessible advisory board inspiring our strategy, partnerships and go-to-market.


In doing so, we realized the concept we built to challenge ourselves was just as powerful for our clients—evolving from an internal prototype into a human-led, AI-powered solution.

One-week innovation sprint

VALUE PILOT

One-week innovation sprint

THE STARTING POINT

The Client-in-the-Loop™

For over two decades, we have advised leaders through major market and technological shifts.

With AI, the narrative is familiar, yet the potential impact is fundamentally different. This led us to rethink the very basics of advisory and consulting: how to create lasting value for our clients beyond automation and speed—building a human-led hybrid model.


By fully integrating AI alongside human expertise, we could amplify strategic judgment with continuous, real-time market simulations, adding scale and depth to our partnerships.


To make this real, we captured our decades of personal experience into decision-maker archetypes—establishing our Client-in-the-Loop™-methodology.


Through stress-testing strategic directions against the archetypes, we found a way to directly target the root cause behind the failure of 70%+ of strategic initiatives and new ventures.


By grounding decisions in market reality, we challenge internal bias, risk aversion and legacy perspectives.

Green circle inside two concentric circles, resembling a target.

How can AI elevate  business innovation?

Digital twin technology

THE INTERFACE

Find your voice

How we transform raw AI-output to a nearly human-to-human experience.

Sara is one of the archetypes in the AI Business Council

THE LOOP

Lime green infinity loop with arrowhead, stylized as a continuous flow symbol.

Initially, we found endless prompting, tweaking and typing led back to the same hurdle: surface-level insights that merely echoed standard industry thinking instead of solving complex strategic challenges.


The breakthrough came when we shifted to voice as our primary interface, guided by a model for dialogue—our Client-in-the-Loop methodology in action.


Like a live advisory session, spoken dialogue lets us truly challenge the AI's responses and dig deeper, while visual stimuli provide the precise context needed to sharpen our analysis.

Our model turns a basic prompt into an active loop: we Challenge assumptions, Verify facts and Amplify strategic value to uncover dimensions static prompting rarely reaches.


By blending natural voice dialogue with visual context, we guide the conversation—helping uncover critical commercial blind spots through a more intuitive, human-like exchange.

Conversational AI

VOICES OF YOUR MARKET

The members of the Council

Our decision-maker archetypes are crafted with precision—each possessing distinct profiles, domain expertise and perspectives grounded in real-world leadership experience.

Team members displayed in a dark setting, with individual profiles and group photo.

Our decision-maker archetypes are crafted with precision—each possessing distinct profiles, domain expertise and perspectives grounded in real-world leadership experience.

VOICES OF THE MARKET

The Council members

Team members grouped by name, with headshots and details, dark green background.

REAL-TIME SIMULATION

Let's ask Frank

The AI Business Council™ archetypes aren't just theoretical models. Simulated personalities like Frank, Pixie and the rest of the Council represent distinct professional perspectives and decision-making styles, built on real-world business experience.

 

The Council is structured around five core decision-maker archetypes, spanning Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Brand & Marketing and Digital Development—each pressure-testing commercial initiatives through a specific professional lens.


The AI-powered knowledge layer brings market, industry and business context to each simulation, allowing the same archetypes to explore challenges across different roles, industries and markets.


While commercial challenges reflect business logic, they don't account for human dynamics. By testing strategies against distinct decision-making styles, we also simulate real-world friction early on — such as how a high-influence entrepreneur navigates a compliance-focused buyer, or how a consumer reacts to a brand relaunch before market exposure.

Four-quadrant chart labeled Dominant, Influencing, Compliant, and Steady with four profile photos on the sections

Pattern recognition

THE LAUNCH

Proof of value

Since the spring of 2025, the AI Business Council is a central part of our operations, applying the Client-in-the-Loop methodology.

With our three-step innovation approach, we daily engage in iterations with the Council archetypes. Through continuous prototyping and simulation, the interactions are distilled into guiding pillars—strategic insights capturing real-world pains, gains and market opportunities. 


Combined, the pillars have a fundamental impact on our business strategy, partnerships and how we go to market.


Built on the insights, our rapid innovation sprints today calibrate the Council's architecture for real client challenges—securing high-stakes commercial initiatives through simulated market responses.

THE VALUE

market VALIDATION

Business Council guiding pillars

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Green positioning chart with “Lead by inspiration” and “Don’t try to outsmart us” pillar label

CLIENT-IN-THE-LOOP

Human-led, AI-powered Innovation

Market intelligence · Visualization · Simulation

Black speech bubble logo reading “Let’s ask Frank,” with “Frank” in green.
Green circle inside two concentric circles, resembling a target.

Synchronize

Narrow the challenge

Build a shared understanding of the challenge to identify the greatest potential.

  • Actions

    Combine internal knowledge, AI-powered market intelligence and established management frameworks.


    Goal

    One strategic direction for further exploration

Concentric circles, green center and middle ring, white outer ring, black borders.

Refine

Make the idea tangible

Make the direction tangible to explore its potential in the market.

  • Actions

    Prototype, simulate market perspectives and stress-test critical assumptions.


    Goal: A tested direction backed by market insights

Three green concentric circles with black outlines.

Activate

Shape the next move

Turn market findings into a clear direction aligned with your business planning.

  • Actions

    Refine the direction, address key considerations and define what is needed to take it forward.


    Goal: A decision-ready playbook for your strategic move.

REFLECTIONS

True market-centricity

What started out as a strategic experiment is today our human-led, AI-powered solution for streamlining complex decisions. As technology evolves, the opportunity for adaptive, market-driven businesses has never been greater.

Brain graphic combined with circuits, representing artificial intelligence.

Trust the technology

The AI Business Council demonstrates how technology can amplify human capabilities and knowledge. Our Client-in-the-Loop approach combines market intelligence with multiple perspectives, rapid visualization and simulation to challenge assumptions and explore alternative directions.


Continuous iteration is key—turning ideas into something that can be seen, questioned and progressively refined.

Laboratory flask with bubbles, marked by a checkmark symbol.

Human as orchestrator

Strategic decisions demand human context and judgment. AI can broaden the view, surface patterns and challenge assumptions—but deciding what matters, what deserves further exploration and what should be taken forward remains a human responsibility.


This shifts expert guidance toward where it matters most: framing the right challenge, navigating trade-offs and turning learning into strategic direction.

Signpost with three arrows pointing in different directions.

Enter consulting 3.0

What becomes possible when AI is paired directly with human expertise? By compressing research, analysis and ideation, technology challenges the traditional consultancy model and opens new ways to turn individual expertise into collective intelligence.


This creates opportunities beyond faster strategy: to productize knowledge, accelerate internal innovation and build reusable capabilities that can ultimately strengthen enterprise value.

Partner

Daniel Askergren

MARKET 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 advises and leads management and teams on shifting business strategies, emerging technologies and evolving customer behavior.

THE AI BUSINESS COUNCIL

Common questions

Business & value

  • What is the AI Business Council™ (AIBC)?
    The AI Business Council architecture infographic with layered gray-green sections and small team photos

    The AI Business Council™ (AIBC) is our human-led, AI-powered solution for market innovation and validation.


    Built around our Client-in-the-Loop™ methodology, it uses established management and behavioral frameworks to simulate thousands of virtual decision-maker perspectives. 


    Combined with client knowledge and AI-powered market intelligence, this allows us to explore, stress-test and refine business-critical ideas from the outside in.

    View the AIBC Architecture >
  • How does the AIBC impact strategic decision making?

    Short term, by replacing static reports with real-time, prototype-driven simulations, the AIBC stress-tests your assumptions across thousands of market variables. This compresses months of traditional research into continuous validation, eliminating blind spots and increasing precision. Long term, the AIBC potentially transforms how you innovate, make business decisions and go to market—inspiring your teams to rethink what is possible.

  • Is the AIBC a software product or a consulting service?

    The AIBC is a human-led, AI-powered consulting solution, not a standalone software product.


    It combines senior human expertise with AI-powered market intelligence, simulation and established management frameworks to explore and validate business-critical decisions. 


    The technology multiplies what a senior consultant can explore, while human judgment guides how it is applied, interpreted and turned into action.

  • Can the AIBC be used for B2C industries?

    Yes. While we initially focused on complex, multi-stakeholder decision processes, the underlying simulation architecture is easily calibrated to consumer markets. By modeling behavioral patterns, target archetypes and decision-making friction, we help consumer brands test positioning, product launches and messaging against realistic consumer responses before capital commitment.

Methodology

  • How does the AIBC use proven business logic?
    Black slide with “Value proposition” funnel and “Customer segment” circle connected by arrows to a profile

    We ground our AI-generated insights and simulations in industry-standard management frameworks for strategic directions, positioning and commercial development, reflecting the unique challenges of our clients. 


    One central model is the Value Proposition Canvas, used by numerous innovation teams and global enterprises to ensure new products and services are based on the needs of the customer, before investing development capital. 


    The Value Proposition Canvas is a copyrighted tool of Strategyzer AG (Strategyzer.com).    

  • How does the AIBC simulate buyer behavior and decision-making?
    DiSC style chart with four colored quadrants: Dominant, Influencing, Compliant, and Steady, with five profile icons.

    We build on the DISC behavioral framework—a benchmark used by over 70% of Fortune 500 companies—to introduce distinct decision-making styles into our simulations.


    DISC is part of the underlying architecture of the AI Business Council, providing a structured behavioral lens for exploring differences in risk appetite, communication preferences and decision criteria.


    For each challenge, we adapt the simulation to the relevant industry, product or service, market context and target group. This allows us to explore how different decision-making perspectives could respond to a proposition, concept or strategy—without having to build complex buyer personas from scratch.


    Combined with relevant market intelligence and client knowledge, this gives us a practical way to stress-test commercial ideas against different reactions, objections and priorities before taking them to market.

  • Why use established frameworks?

    Raw AI prompts often produce generic, uncalibrated answers. Grounding your commercial challenges in trusted frameworks like DISC and the Value Proposition Canvas avoids the limits of narrow, custom approaches.


    Because these frameworks are widely recognized and deeply documented, the AI draws on extensive real-world context—including countless published business cases, research papers and textbooks—to evaluate your inputs accurately and cut through surface-level noise.

  • Does the AIBC replace my market research?

    No, it builds on what you already know and adds another layer of intelligence and validation.


    We combine relevant client knowledge and existing research with AI-powered market intelligence to bring more of the outside world into the decision. 


    The AIBC helps us explore, stress-test and refine business-critical ideas against current market context and different decision-making perspectives.

Trust & data

  • Is client-specific company data used to train the AI?

    No, your proprietary data is never used to train or fine-tune the underlying AI model.


    When the AI Business Council architecture is activated, all client materials are strictly anonymized before entering the simulations, ensuring your data and company identity remain entirely protected.

  • What ensures the quality and relevance of the AIBC output?
    Three-step process graphic with green target icons: Synchronize insights, Simulate & stress-test, Decide & activate

    The AIBC solution synthesizes thousands of market data points into simulations of opportunities and risks, while our senior consultants provide the orchestration, strategic judgment and guidance to internally align your team. 


    Our clearly defined innovation process also ensures a structured briefing from start, combining internal client insights with identified targets.

    View innovation process >

Note:  Client-in-the-Loop™, AI Business Council™ and AIBC Labs™ are proprietary concepts of Bearing 45. All rights reserved.

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NEWS

INTRODUCING AIBC LABS™ 

Applied AI for market innovation

Powered by the AI Business Council, AIBC Labs is our advisory and innovation practice, combining human expertise and AI around business and market challenges.