Be What It Takes
AI STRATEGIST
Everyone is talking about AI right now. Agents, prompting, copilots, automations, prompt like a pro. It all gets a lot clearer the moment you watch it do one of your own jobs.
Based in Chicago, working with clients anywhere.
The honest part
It can feel like learning a foreign language
New technology is intimidating before it is anything else.
You have done this before. A platform lands with a login, a dashboard and forty settings, and somewhere around the third try it goes from hard, to frustrating, to not worth it. The tab gets closed. The tool gets written off. Not because it was a bad tool, but because learning it felt like learning a language nobody offered to teach you.
AI is technology like anything else. It has its own vocabulary, its own logic and its own ways of being wrong, and it takes understanding, learning and navigating, same as every platform you have ever adopted.
Why an AI strategist
Most people meet AI as a better search bar
The first thing almost everyone does with AI is ask it a question. It answers, the answer is pretty good, and that's where it stops. An elevated Google search.
The shift happens when AI stops being something you ask and starts being something that works. On your data. On your schedule. In your voice. Doing a job you'd otherwise hand to a person you haven't hired yet. It becomes your personal executive assistant, and you talk to your platform just like it is a person.
Nobody explains that part well, because explaining it doesn't land. Seeing it does.
So we skip the theory. We take one real job out of your week and I build it. You watch it run on your own numbers, with your own customers' names on it. That's usually the moment it stops being a concept and starts being a decision about what to hand off next.
The whole difference in one picture. A search bar answers. An assistant finishes the job and tells you it is done.
What I do
What does an AI strategist actually do?
Six things, in this order. The first two are usually the ones people skip, and they're the reason the rest works.
Find the work worth automating
We walk through your week and name the jobs that repeat, the ones that get dropped, and the ones eating your best hours.
Translate the language
Agents, prompts, models, context. Plain English, in the context of your business, so you're making decisions instead of nodding along.
Connect what you already pay for
Email, calendar, CRM, phone, files. Nothing new to buy, except the platform level/usage, and nothing to migrate.
Build the dashboard
One screen where the work actually gets done. Your data, your steps, your team's names on it.
Watch the jobs get done
Your new AI executive assistant does the jobs you told it to do and sends you updates all along the way. The call list built before you sit down. The report written Friday. The presentation ready when you need it.
Train the team, and keep building
Adoption, not installation. I train whoever touches it, then stay on to change it as the business changes, bring in the next workflow, and get new people up to speed. You're not alone in this.
The vocabulary
AI, in plain English
Here's the vocabulary without the mystique. You don't need any of it to work with me, but it makes every other conversation about AI a lot easier to follow.
- Model
- The engine underneath. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are models. They have different strengths, the way two good hires do. Which one you use matters far less than what you ask it to do.
- Prompt / prompting
- What you ask for, and how you ask it. Good prompting is good delegating: say what you want, who it's for, what finished looks like and what to leave out. The same brief you'd give a new hire.
- Context
- Everything the AI knows when it answers — your files, your numbers, your preferences, the conversation so far. Most disappointing output is a context problem, not an intelligence problem. It answered well. It just didn't know your business.
- AI agent
- An assistant that acts instead of only answering. It takes several steps on its own, uses your tools, works through a list and comes back when it's done. The difference between asking someone a question and giving them an assignment.
- Automation / scheduled task
- Work that runs on a clock instead of on somebody remembering. Your call list at 6am. Your pipeline report Saturday morning.
- Dashboard
- One screen where a whole workflow lives: what's due, what's waiting, what you did, what's next.
- Integration / connector
- The wiring that lets AI reach a tool you already use — your inbox, your calendar, your CRM, your files.
- Skill
- Instructions saved once so a recurring job gets done your way every time. Your format, your voice, your rules, without re-explaining them.
- Hallucination
- When AI states something confidently that isn't true. It's real, it's manageable, and it's the reason the next row exists.
- Human in the loop
- The rule that a person approves before anything leaves the building. Nothing sends itself. Your name stays on your business.
Proof
Two you can open right now
The fastest way to understand any of this is to look at one. Both of these are live. Both run on made-up companies and people, and you can click anything in them.
THE HUB
An executive job search run as an operation. It finds the roles that fit, drafts the outreach, tracks every application and keeps the whole thing moving daily.
Open THE HUB →The Pro$pecting Engine
A sales floor on one screen. It builds the call list by tier and callback date, searches the news for a reason to call, logs every attempt and files the weekly report Saturday morning.
Open the Engine →“The workflow dashboard Dana architected for my company and my clients connected curating what the client needed, doing the paperwork, connecting and networking with the right people, follow-ups, task management. She took my entire offering for my clients and built a dashboard so it all lives and works in one place. Amazing.”
Kelly White
Where it fits
Where this shows up in an ordinary week
You probably already know which one of these is yours.
- The Monday report you rebuild by hand every week
- Speed to lead, and the inquiry that sat overnight
- The follow-up that quietly stops at week two
- Onboarding a new hire or a new client the same way every time
- Quotes and proposals that eat an afternoon each
- The content calendar nobody owns
- Month-end numbers you don't fully trust
- The job that lives entirely in one person's head
None of this needs anyone to remember it.
The offering
How we'd work together
No workshop, no sixty-page assessment. One job, built and running, then the next one.
- 1The walkthrough. One call, free. You bring the jobs that keep slipping. I ask questions. By the end we both know what's worth building first.
- 2The map. Week one. I write down the workflow the way it actually runs today, name every step, and mark the ones that shouldn't need a person. Yours to keep whether or not we go further.
- 3The first build. Weeks two to four. One dashboard, one workflow, running end to end on your real data, in your language, with your approvals in the right places.
- 4Adoption. Weeks four to six. I train whoever touches it, sit with them while they use it, and fix what real life breaks in the first few weeks.
- 5The next one. Most businesses have more than one of these. We keep going, one at a time.
Rules I build by
Your name, your business, your call
Nothing sends itself
Every message waits for a person. The system drafts, you decide.
You own it
Built on your accounts, with your data. It runs fine on its own. Most people keep me on anyway, because there's always a next one.
No new software you don't need
We start with what you already pay for.
Plain English, always
If I can't explain what something does in one sentence, it doesn't go in.
Adoption is the finish line
Go-live is the beginning of the transition, not the end of the work.
Your data stays yours
Nothing moves anywhere you haven't approved.
Questions
Questions about AI
Do I need to understand AI before we start?
No. That's the job. You bring the business, I'll handle the vocabulary, and you'll pick most of it up watching your own work run.
Is this going to replace someone on my team?
In my experience it does the opposite. It picks up the jobs nobody owns, the ones squeezed in around the real work. Your people get those hours back for the parts that need a person.
We already pay for tools with AI features. Isn't that the same thing?
Those features make one tool faster. This is about the work that runs between your tools, which is usually where things get dropped. The two sit together fine.
How is this different from hiring a developer?
A developer builds what you spec. I work out what's worth building first, build it, then make sure your team actually uses it.
What if the technology changes in six months?
It will. That's why we build around your workflow rather than around one tool, and why you own what we build.
How long before I see something real?
The map in week one, a working build inside a month. Small, specific and finished beats big, strategic and ongoing every time.
Do you build it, or just advise?
I build it. Then I train the team, and I stay on as people get used to it and the work keeps changing.
Be What It Takes
Let's find the first one
The Q&A call is free and it isn't a sales process. Bring the job you'd hand off tomorrow if you could.
bewhatittakes.com · 312-446-3578