How a CEO used AI to reclaim 25 hours a week

Executive overview

Leaders get consumed by operational work — scheduling, hiring admin, feedback loops — leaving little time for people and strategy. Georgie Holt, CEO of Flight Story (home to Diary of a CEO), ran a 60-day experiment to hand every operational task in her role to AI tools.

She built two custom GPTs without a programming background: one that automates interview preparation and candidate feedback, another that acts as a virtual writer's room to challenge her communications. The result was 20–25 hours reclaimed per week, redirected entirely to people and future planning.

The core insight: AI is most powerful when it handles operational load so leaders can double down on the irreducibly human work — emotional intelligence, storytelling, and galvanising teams.

Building the Scout hiring tool

• Hiring consumed up to 50% of Georgie's schedule, with 20–30 hours a week lost to interview admin
• She built a custom GPT called Scout, fed it company culture, values, and the traits she looks for in candidates
• A pre-interview "culture test" surfaces candidate alignment before the first conversation, reducing ambiguity for both sides
• Before each interview, Scout ingests the CV, culture test results, and any referrals — then generates four targeted questions in 45 seconds
• Post-interview, she dictates feedback into Scout; it produces a consolidated candidate summary including bias checks (e.g. flagging time-of-day effects on her assessments)
• Built iteratively through conversation with GPT, validated with a data scientist — no code written by hand

Building the AI writer's room

• Her concern: AI writing for leaders risks eroding the human skill of distilling and communicating complex ideas
• Modelled on Hollywood writers' rooms — multiple personas attacking a narrative from different angles simultaneously
• Built a GPT with eight writer archetypes: format expert, disruptor, emotional arc specialist, jeopardy writer, and others
• She writes first; the writer's room challenges the draft — it does not write for her
• Feedback surfaces gaps like weak emotional arcs, missed jeopardy, or formatting opportunities
• Can be called from any GPT chat with a single prompt: "writer's room, check this"
• She remains alert to hallucinations and treats the tool as an ally, not an authority

How she uses the recovered time

• All reclaimed time goes to two things: people and future planning
• The company operates on an in-person-first principle — face time with teammates is treated as irreplaceable
• Twenty years of in-person leadership shaped her view that being present with people is the highest-leverage thing a CEO can do
• Freed from operational load, she now has capacity to build out a 2030 vision for Flight Story
• Her framing: a company is a group of people; leaders who don't spend time with people will not succeed

AI as an amplifier for emotional intelligence

• AI handling logic, operations, and frameworks lets leaders focus on what it cannot replicate: human and emotional intelligence
• Leaders who are strong on empathy, persuasion, and 4D thinking (seeing second-order effects across teams) can double down on those strengths
• The leaders of the next decade will be defined by social IQ, galvanising ability, and purpose-setting — not operational throughput