We added over 30,000 subscribers to our AI Strategy Brief community in 2024. We also spoke with more than 50 experts about how they’re getting value from AI. So this week, we analyzed the data from our 50+ posts this year to see what resonated most with you.

Our top 10 posts highlight three themes and they do a surprisingly good job illustrating the journey most of us were on to AI adoption in 2024.

Step 1: Building the case for AI

Three of our top 10 posts focused on the ‘why’ – should I invest in AI and how do I unlock that potential?

The top Strategy Briefs:

1. Joining the AI class should be your top priority – Section’s CEO, Greg Shove, walked through why AI is a career-defining skill and worth getting in on early (p.s. this is from January 2024, and it’s only gotten more true).
   
2. How to become a Chief of AI – A lot of you wondered “could this be my job?” and Taylor answered with a talk track and job description you could steal to make your case.
   
3. The hidden reasons you’re not using AI every day – By the end of 2024, a lot of you hit the same wall most AI power users have: if AI is so good at X, what does this mean for me?. Greg & Taylor talked about how to push past this cognitive friction in their newsletter, Personal Math, and we loved it so much we shared it with you.

Step 2: How do I actually use it?

Once you make the case to invest in AI, it’s all about getting hands-on. Many of our top posts were practical tool guides, reviews, and step-by-step overviews on how to use AI.

The top Strategy Briefs:

1. Perplexity AI: What You Need to Know – Our Lead AI Consultant, Chase, broke down Perplexity’s AI search capabilities and why anyone using Google (aka everyone) should at least try Perplexity’s free version.
   
2. ChatGPT Canvas: OpenAI's Trojan Horse for Enterprise Domination – Shouted out on Linkedin by the Head of Go-To-Market of OpenAI herself, this is Chase’s explainer for why ChatGPT’s answer to Claude Projects is key for teams on a ChatGPT plan.
   
3. How to build a custom GPT – Section’s COO, Taylor Malmsheimer, shared a step-by-step guide on how to build custom GPTs – the next step to unlocking collaboration with AI beyond prompting.

Step 3: Nailing down use cases and optimizations

Once you’re bought in and upskilled on the tools, you have to find your AI use cases. This defined our final set of top posts – operators sharing their AI use cases.

The top Strategy Briefs:

1. How we used AI to improve course quality by 20% – Kyra Atekwana from our education team wrote about the three custom GPTs she designed to streamline and improve every stage of the course creation process (and our students agreed).
   
2. ChatGPT’s unhelpful responses might be your fault – Stanford’s Jeremy Utley joined us to share his research, recently published in HBR. The core finding: AI makes you more creative, if you don’t want it to keep you mediocre.
   
3. Our Guide to Building Enterprise AI Applications – Machine & Partners’ Ed Ortega shared his framework for finding viable and valuable opportunities for building AI products and services into your offering.
   
4. How to Build a Business with AI – AI Workforce Alliance’s Ashley Gross shared how she uses AI to run her one woman business with use cases that span from finance to customer delight.

We’re excited for another year of AI insights

Thank you for reading our AI Strategy Brief. In 2025, we’ll focus on the final (and hardest) step: finding high-value and high-impact AI use cases. If you have an AI use case you think our audience could benefit from – submit it here.

We also want to hear from you – what did you find most insightful, impactful, and useful from this year’s Strategy Brief? Share your thoughts, and we’ll work them into this year’s posts.

And if you’ve gotten a lot of value out of this newsletter, share it with a friend!