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The biggest problem in thought leadership today isn’t necessarily the quality of writing—i

5 Ways To Ideate With AI:
From Concept To Thought Leadership

REPRINTED with permission

By Rhea Wessel

The biggest problem in thought leadership today isn’t necessarily the quality of writing—it’s the scarcity of fresh ideas.

With AI, we’ve already reached a point where creativity must focus less on the articulation of words and more on how well ideas are framed and which narratives are captured.

In other words, the place to put your creative energy is now in the early stages of the idea-production process – in the inception and framing of your ideas.

While it’s true that ideas abound, the problem is the scarcity of “big” ideas that drive new thinking and reshape how we view whole topics. That’s where ideation—a structured habit of reflecting and generating new concepts—comes in. And now, with AI’s assistance, this process can move faster and go deeper.

I’ve spent years guiding professionals through the ideation process in workshops and through my book, Write Like a Thought Leader. Today, I’ll share five techniques you can use to transform ideation with AI into a powerful method for discovering fresh insights.

1. Get Interviewed, Then Ask the AI

Getting interviewed is a great way to externalize your expertise and gain a new understanding about your own ideas.

Select a skilled and professional interviewer who knows how to dig deep and show you your own contradictions and layers of thinking. This type of interviewer will get you thinking more creatively and exploring areas of your expertise that you may not have articulated before.

Once the interview is done, take a transcript of it and start querying it with an AI. If you’ve built a custom model with your own writing style and audience personas, upload this transcript into that model and start asking questions like:

  • Where was I veering off?

  • Where was I getting into new and interesting territory with my ideas?

  • In what way is what I’m saying supporting an emerging narrative in [insert your niche subject area]?

The goal is to distinguish emerging narratives from dominant ones in your field. Thought leaders trade in ideas – in emerging narratives to be specific.

The ability to capture these is what allows you to serve your audience by providing insights into what’s on the horizon.

 

With AI, it’s kinda like working the way Hollywood screenwriters did in the early days – with both a writer and a talker. The bot becomes the talker and you, as the writer, remain the primary editor.

Before Gen AI: You had to get interviewed, pay a human to transcribe it, and then sort through tens of thousands of your own words to pull out the nuggets.

After Gen AI: You record it, it’s translated almost instantly, and you can copy it into an AI for direct querying and analysis.

2. Freewrite, Then Ask the AI

Freewriting is one of the most effective ideation techniques we use in our thought-leadership incubators, like those we run for Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs.

I often start sessions with a prompt—something broad but designed to elicit deep thinking, such as “Thought leadership is a state of mind. Write about how your vision can make the world a better place.” Participants go on mute and write as quickly as possible without stopping and without self-editing. This process allows them to access unfiltered thoughts that might not emerge otherwise.

Freewriting widens the search space for new ideas. You can stumble across your best thoughts this way. Sometimes people are shocked at how much word volume they can produce in a 5-7 minute session.

 

You can freewrite alone or join a freewriting session. From there, like being interviewed, put the text you wrote into an AI and begin to query it. This is pure creativity. The ideas came from your depths. AI then becomes a sparring partner to see how far you can develop what originated within you. Ask questions like:

  • What are the underlying themes in this text?

  • The writer (me) is an emerging thought leader serving [insert audience]. How can what I wrote be used to inspire this audience?

  • Take this scenario and build it out one or two more steps. What might the future look like if this trend continues?

 

Before Gen AI: You had to review your freewriting manually and try to extract insights yourself.

 

After Gen AI: You can instantly transform your text by querying it, and then using AI to exaggerate or evolve ideas. You can also build scenarios out further.

3. Query for Whitespace Ideas

With AI, you have the opportunity to research not only what is being said in your niche but, more importantly, what’s not being said.

Whitespace is that gap.

Ask the AI what’s missing in the conversation around your area of expertise and what your specific audience needs that is not being addressed by competitors. This technique helps to identify novel areas of thought leadership you may be able to occupy.

Here’s how to approach it. Query the AI:

  • Who is writing about [insert your subject-matter niche]?

  • What are they saying?

  • My audience is [insert audience description]. What are these other people not saying that is important for my audience?

The AI can identify gaps in the market and areas that are underserved, giving you a clear direction for your next article.

 

Before Gen AI: You’d manually scan industry reports and competitor content, piecing together where there might be room for your voice.

 

After Gen AI: AI tools quickly aggregate and analyze industry content, providing you with actionable whitespace insights.

4. Upload Recordings and the Chat from Your Trainings, Then Ask the AI

Your training sessions are a goldmine for story ideas and themes, since they represent the questions and concerns of your audience in real-time. Upload the transcripts of these sessions and ask the AI to perform sentiment analysis. What are the participants’ pain points? Which topics elicited the most interest?

Get into their minds and ask the AI to help you understand what they need from you as the instructor. Then, come up with new story ideas that meet those needs by sharing your knowledge. Don’t forget the chat from your training sessions—upload it too, and mine it for story ideas. Ask questions like:

  • Where is the audience really struggling?

  • What was the most common question or concern raised by participants?

  • What new story ideas can I create that address these concerns and share my expertise?

 

Before Gen AI: You’d have to manually sort through training transcripts and chats to glean insights.

 

After Gen AI: AI can summarize, extract key themes, analyze sentiment and highlight participant concerns in minutes.

5. Build and Query Audience Personas with AI

One of the best ways to ensure your ideas resonate is to build detailed personas of your audience, using AI to refine and deepen those personas. Start by mapping high-level issues your audience faces and then progressively narrow down to very specific problems.

Once you land on a very specific problem that you know about, drill down and consider how you can help solve it. In these solutions lie new story ideas. This is the way The Story Framing System I created works. Although I hate to admit it, with AI, it’s easier to work faster and go deeper when applying the The Story Framing System.

 

Keep asking the AI questions, as if it were a 360-degree interview of one of your audience members. My suggestion is to focus on only one audience at a time. Ask the AI:

  • Who in which firm/job is struggling to [insert your solution area]. Then select one of the options generated.

  • What are their high-level problems?

  • What are their more specific internal and external problems?

  • With this understanding, write a psychological profile of my audience.

 

Then, if you’ve trained the AI about your own expertise, you can ask it what one very specific problem you can solve for this audience.

Before Gen AI: You’d build audience personas manually, based on limited research and assumptions.

 

After Gen AI: AI tools help you iterate personas quickly, going from broad to highly specific pain points, uncovering new story angles along the way.

For me, these are some of the best ways to make the human-machine collaboration fruitful. Let the machine generate, and you get to have all the fun and ideate!

Of course, you do this with a grain of salt, using your editorial and story smarts to filter through the nonsense, half truths and full-on misinformation that can be generated. By incorporating AI into your ideation process, you can explore new territories, frame your ideas in unique ways, and maintain a fresh and impactful presence in your field. Let me know how it goes for you.

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