How We Used ChatGPT to Turn Two Hours of Planning Into a Month of Progress

Here's a real-world case study in how AI can dramatically accelerate business planning—and potentially save you thousands of dollars in the process.

Marketing AI Institute recently used ChatGPT to tackle a challenge every business faces: turning big ideas into actionable plans. The results were eye-opening.

Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer broke down what we did on Episode 123 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.

The Planning Challenge

It started with a familiar scenario: 

Paul had a promising business idea for scaling our content operations. But we were staring at a blank page when it came to building out the idea and creating a plan to execute it.

"To go from idea to action is really hard," says Roetzer.

Roetzer and myself spent over a decade creating strategic briefs at the marketing agency that Roetzer owned. And even though we’ve done this hundreds of times, it still takes a lot of work.

“Someone has to commit the time to build the brief, do the research, do the initial planning, so that you can then react to that together."

Traditionally, this kind of strategic planning might take a talented professional 10-20 hours of deep work. 

Instead of going that route this time, we tried something different.

The AI-Powered Solution

The day before a scheduled planning meeting, Roetzer turned to ChatGPT (specifically, a custom GPT he built called "Co-CEO") to develop initial plans. Here's what he did:

1. Outlined the business idea
2. Asked for a task list for planning and content production
3. Requested strategies for identifying and prioritizing verticals and personas

The result? In just three minutes, ChatGPT produced about 2,000 words of structured planning documents.

So, instead of starting our planning meeting with a blank slate, Roetzer and myself immediately kicked things off with a comprehensive strategic brief to react to—complied by a custom GPT specifically designed to mimic Roetzer’s own strategic thinking. 

It was like a very smart colleague had already prepped us with everything we needed in advance to get the absolute most out of our strategy session. That gave us the bandwidth to focus on the most important aspects of the strategy, rather than spending a ton of time and energy simply getting ideas and thoughts on paper.

As a result, we quickly saw some benefits. We quickly discovered some ideas and insights we hadn’t thought of. We quickly generated actionable plans and steps. And we were able to take a big step back and see the bigger picture of how this all fit into our plans for 2025.

In fact, the approach was so valuable, Roetzer estimates we accomplished a month’s worth of progress in just a couple of hours. That value is easily worth thousands of dollars to him—and we got it just by using a $20 per month ChatGPT license in a smarter way.