What The Tech: Creating an AI virtual board
BY JAMEY TUCKER, Consumer Tech Reporter
I’ve told dozens of people about this trick. Not one of them had thought of it before I mentioned it. Every single one of them is using it now.
Here’s the problem it solves: most of us use AI like a search engine with better manners. We type in a question, we get an answer, we move on. One voice, one opinion, one point of view. Even though the whole promise of AI is that it can think from a thousand different angles if you just ask it to.
So instead of asking one AI assistant for one opinion, build yourself a virtual board of directors.
How It Works
Let’s say you own a flower shop.
Instead of asking AI, “How do I grow my business?” and taking whatever generic answer comes back, you build a team of advisors, each with their own lane of expertise, their own personality, and their own opinion. Open your AI assistant and start a new project. Call it “My Virtual Board.” Then assign the seats around the table.
● Entrepreneur Mark Cuban as your CEO, thinking big-picture strategy and growth.
● Marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk is handling promotion, social media, hustle, and getting the word out.
● Branding expert Seth Godin focuses on what makes your flower shop different from the one three blocks away.
● A florist with 30 years of experience who knows what’s actually practical on the ground.
● Two loyal customers (maybe a wedding planner and a real estate stager) who tell you honestly what would make them buy.
That’s your board. Six seats, six perspectives, all built inside a single AI project.
Call the Meeting
Now, instead of typing a single question into a blank chat box, you call a board meeting. You ask the whole table at once:
“How can I increase Valentine’s Day sales?”
Here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of one tidy paragraph of advice, your advisors start talking to each other. The marketer pushes for a social media push. The branding expert argues for standing out from every other flower shop running the same Valentine’s Day promo. The florist points out the practical challenges: supply costs, staffing, and what actually fits in a walk-in cooler two days before February 14th. The customers weigh in on what would actually get them to click “buy.”
The famous names: Cuban, Vaynerchuk, Godin? AI draws on patterns from publicly available material about that person. Interviews, books, articles, tweets, and speeches that show up in AI’s training data.
You’re not getting an answer anymore. You’re getting a debate. And that debate forces you to think about your own business from angles you’d never have considered on your own. You can make it even more realistic by telling AI to have the board members push back on one another.
It’s Not Just for Business Owners
This works for teachers building lesson plans, realtors prepping for a listing, small business owners of every stripe, even hobbyists, and readers. Say this is finally the year you’re going to read The Odyssey. Build yourself a board of
professors and literary reviewers, and ask them to check in on you as you go, ask questions, keep you honest, keep you engaged all the way to the last page.
The format bends to whatever you’re trying to figure out. The only real requirement is that you assign real expertise and real personality to each seat, instead of asking one flat, faceless assistant to be everything at once.
Which AI Should You Use?
All the major AI platforms can technically do this. But in my own testing, I’ve found Claude handles it the most naturally. It gives each advisor a distinct name and voice, lets them genuinely debate back and forth instead of just listing bullet points, and, this is the part that surprised me, it will actually stop and ask you questions before it answers, the way a real advisor would if they needed more information before weighing in.
In describing it to my friends, I’ve found myself saying “Mark Cuban told me this,” or “Here’s what Gary Vee suggests”. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between reading a memo and sitting in a real meeting. It’s almost like your advisors are sitting around a big table in your own living room, arguing about your flower shop.
The Takeaway
Most people ask AI one question and take whatever it hands back. But you’ll get sharper, more useful answers if you ask six people instead of one. Even if all six of them are virtual.
