Speaker Recap: Kathy Wheat on AI, ChatGPT, and Generative AI

Most AI conversations in the business world fall into one of two traps: too technical to be useful, or too vague to be actionable. Kathy Wheat avoided both.

Wheat brought her program, “The Power of AI, ChatGPT, and Generative AI: Unleash Productivity and Profits,” to our CEO peer group and delivered exactly what the title promised. No jargon, no theory, no hype. Just a clear-eyed look at what AI can actually do for a business right now and how to start capturing that value without getting lost in the complexity.

The room walked away with a working understanding of generative AI and its real productivity implications, including documented cases of companies achieving over 100% productivity gains across functions like customer service, content creation, sales forecasting, and project management. Wheat walked through a live Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout as a case study, showing the preparation required and the measurable outcomes on the other side.

For our members, two themes landed hardest. First, prompt engineering matters more than most leaders realize. How you talk to AI tools directly determines the quality of what you get back, and getting good at it is a learnable skill, not a technical one. Second, knowing where to start is half the battle. Wheat’s framework for identifying quick-win projects gave CEOs a practical on-ramp rather than another reason to keep waiting.

Members also completed an AI Readiness Assessment, which gave each of them an honest baseline for where their organization actually stands, not where they assume it stands.

This is the kind of session that moves people from “we should probably be doing something with AI” to having a specific next step on the calendar.