10 Best Ways to Use AI as a Business Advisor

A few months ago I was stuck on a pricing decision. Not a small one. The kind that would affect every customer relationship and revenue projection for the next year. I needed advice, and I needed it at 11pm on a Tuesday.

My actual advisor? Asleep. My co-founder? Also asleep (and also doesn't exist, I'm a solo founder). My wife? Sympathetic but not super interested in debating the merits of lifetime pricing versus monthly subscriptions at 11pm.

So I opened Claude and spent an hour talking through the decision. Not asking "what should I price this at" (AI doesn't know your business well enough for that), but walking through the tradeoffs, stress-testing my assumptions, and pressure-testing the arguments for each option. By midnight I had a decision I felt good about.

That's what using AI as a business advisor actually looks like. Not "tell me what to do" but "help me think about what to do." Here are ten ways to make it work.

Use it as a thinking partner for decisions you're too close to. When you've been staring at the same problem for days, you lose the ability to see it clearly. Describe the situation to Claude or ChatGPT like you're briefing a smart friend who knows nothing about your company. The act of explaining it often reveals the answer, and the AI's follow-up questions surface blind spots you didn't know you had. I do this for almost every significant business decision now.

Build an expert-grounded advisory board with Adviserry Boards. I built this (so yeah, I'm biased), but the use case is genuinely different from generic AI chat. Instead of asking ChatGPT generic questions, you ask questions that get answered based on content from the specific experts you follow. "What would Hormozi say about this pricing model?" gets an answer pulled from his actual newsletters and YouTube content, not a generic response. It's the difference between advice from anywhere and advice from the people you've chosen to learn from. Core plan is $99.99 lifetime.

Create a "CEO briefing" prompt for weekly strategy sessions. Set up a recurring prompt (I do this on Monday mornings) that feeds in your current metrics, top priorities, and biggest blockers. Ask the AI to play the role of an experienced board member reviewing your update. What questions would they ask? What would concern them? What opportunities are you potentially missing? This won't replace a real board, but it's a surprisingly useful structured thinking exercise.

Pressure-test your messaging and positioning. Before you ship that landing page copy or send that investor email, ask AI to poke holes in it. "What would a skeptical SaaS founder think reading this?" "Where are the logical gaps in this pitch?" "What questions would a VC ask after reading this deck?" I've caught several weak arguments this way that I was too attached to see myself.

Use it for competitive analysis in real time. "I'm building a newsletter management tool. What are the top 10 competitors, what do they charge, and where are the gaps?" This kind of research used to take a full afternoon. Now it takes five minutes and you get a structured analysis you can actually work from. Always verify the specifics (AI sometimes hallucinates product features), but as a starting point, it's incredibly fast.

Roleplay difficult conversations before you have them. Firing someone, renegotiating a contract, asking for a raise, having a tough feedback conversation with a partner. Have the AI play the other person while you practice your side. It feels silly for about 30 seconds, and then it becomes genuinely useful. I've done this before three separate difficult conversations this year and each time I went in more prepared and less anxious.

Ask it to review your processes like a consultant would. Describe your onboarding flow, your sales process, your hiring pipeline, or your customer support workflow in detail. Ask the AI what a $500/hour consultant would recommend improving. You'll get at least 2-3 suggestions you hadn't considered. Some will be obvious. Some will be surprisingly good. All of them are cheaper than the consultant.

Use it for financial modeling and scenario planning. "If I raise prices 20%, what churn rate can I sustain and still grow MRR?" "If I hire two engineers at $X, when do I need to hit $Y revenue to stay profitable?" AI is pretty good at building quick financial models, running scenarios, and helping you understand the math behind business decisions. It's not your accountant, but it's a great first pass.

Get feedback on your writing like you have an editor on call. Blog posts, emails to investors, customer communications, LinkedIn content. AI can review for clarity, tone, and persuasiveness in seconds. I don't publish anything important without running it through Claude first, not to rewrite it, but to catch the parts that are unclear, too long, or not saying what I think they're saying.

Summarize books, articles, and podcasts for just-in-time learning. When you're about to make a decision about pricing, and you vaguely remember that Hormozi had a framework for it, being able to pull that up in 30 seconds is more valuable than having read the book six months ago and forgotten the details. This is where Adviserry really shines for me. But even without it, pasting a transcript into Claude and asking "what's the key framework here and how would I apply it to a SaaS business?" gets you 80% of the value in 1% of the time.

Here's what all of these have in common: they work best when you bring specifics. "What should I do about my business?" is a useless prompt. "I'm a solo founder running a $3k MRR SaaS tool for newsletter readers, my trial-to-paid conversion is 4%, and I'm trying to decide between lowering my price or improving onboarding" is a prompt that gets genuinely useful thinking back.

The more context you give, the better the advice. That's true of human advisors too, by the way. The difference is that AI doesn't charge by the hour and doesn't judge you for asking the same question six different ways at midnight.

Use that advantage. Ask the dumb questions. Explore the edge cases. Revisit the same decision three times from different angles. That's what good advising looks like, and now it's available to everyone, not just founders who can afford a $500/hour coach.