Bias: Build a Machine That Thinks Like You
Generic AI doesn’t know your leadership bias, but REDEGADES.AI’s bespoke and private AI is trained on your judgment, priorities, and strategy.
Bias
The term bias is bursting with negative connotations, but when we use the term bias, we are talking about something positive, your worldview. We are talking about the way your business operates.
Each business has a unique way that it interacts with customers and makes itself distinctive. At REDEGADES.AI, we refer to the DNA and characteristics of a business plan as its bias.
For example, what’s your company’s bias about employees who are underperforming in their current roles?
a. Retrain people rather than fire them.
b. Find a different role for these people in the organization.
c. Fire people, but give them a severance package.
d. Fire people without a severance package.
Your company’s bias toward firing may not be the same as other businesses, but the impact of your bias will determine how your business makes decisions.
One example of an easy bias is: What business methodology do you use?
- Scaling Up methods by Verne Harnish
- Jim Collins’ principles (e.g., Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, Flywheel)
- Great Game of Business by Jack Stack
- Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)
- Patrick Lencioni’s principles (e.g., The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Death by Meeting)
Some companies use one business methodology while others combine positive aspects from a few different ones. To provide the most advantages, your AI system needs to know which business methodology you use.
For example, if you enter the book Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 into AI as a bias, then AI will make suggestions that align with the principles in this book.
Inputting bias into AI will keep your business trending the way you want it to go, but what way do you want it to go? It’s important to take time to discover what aspects of the business are critically important to you. An outside company, such as REDEGADES.AI, can help you define how you want to manage your business and help you with the process of self-discovery.
Once you have an idea of how your business should operate, you can train AI around that bias. However, you must use some moderation because you don’t want AI to be an exact copy of you. AI should be aligned with your thinking, but it should still challenge you and give you an appropriate level of counterbalance.
As we developed this bidirectional communication plan or rhythm with AI, we noticed that we needed to introduce a bias and a mindset into AI. (When REDEGADES.AI refers to bias, we are not talking about bias against people. We are referring to a worldview where you insert your values and ideals as a company.)
To insert the bias and mindset into AI, we asked ourselves, “What’s the history of the organization?” Many times, a company’s history will dictate where we go next. AI needs to know where a company has succeeded and failed, so it can refine its output to best meet the strengths and weaknesses of the company. When AI knows a company’s history, it becomes a much more compatible partner.
What information does AI need to know about the structure of your business?
- Business history
- Core values
- Business culture
- Frameworks from business leaders, such as Jim Collins
- Company’s purpose
- Brand promise
- One-page plan
- BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal)
- Flywheel
Once AI understands the structure of your company, your company’s past strategies should be inputted into its system. However, this old information should be weighted so AI knows how much emphasis to put on it. Inputting old strategies is for historical context only. In the future, when AI makes recommendations and processes data, it will have this background information. However, the data should be weighted so AI will realize that this information does not have to be part of the current recommendation.
AI must also know information about the leadership team, such as who has strong leadership skills and who doesn’t. Plus, it needs to know about the challenges team members have. That’s the bias we are building in. If you don’t add a bias, the answers from AI are too generic.
Bias also involves industry trends and customer preferences. When AI has this data or bias, it can make better recommendations. AI must have this information about people’s preferences, strengths, and weaknesses because it is dealing with humans. It’s important to give AI the necessary data so it can work more effectively. To prove my point, if you think about the bulk of a CEO’s job, it’s dealing with humans and their problems.
How Can AI Achieve Better Results for You and Understand Your Bias?
- Through reinforcement and corrective feedback
- Use of RAG, retrieval-augmented generation
- Inputting business documents into the RAG
- Updating and structuring information inputted into the RAG
The Day You Build a Machine That Thinks Like You
There’s a moment, and every CEO knows it, when you whisper to yourself, “If I could just clone myself…” We say it in the late-night hours when the inbox has mutated into a monster. We say it during those meetings where half the room speaks in circles while the other half stops speaking altogether. The whispered desire to clone yourself turns into a shout when the decisions pile up. Whether it’s strategic, financial, or people decisions, the company waits for us to think, decide, and move.
For the longest time, that wish to clone ourselves was nothing more than a fantasy. A joke we made in the break room. A wistful sigh on the drive home. Now that AI has crossed the threshold, that desire can become a reality.
How does this become a reality? AI becomes an amazing asset to your company when you build a machine that thinks more like YOU than any employee ever could, because it can ingest every doctrine, every preference, every bias, and every pattern that makes your leadership yours. How do you achieve an AI that thinks like you? Train it on the right things, weight the data correctly, and feed the right data in the right order.
With this type of AI model, you’ll get a machine that doesn’t think generically or merely offer “best practices.” In other words, it won’t be a machine that thinks like Google Search with a necktie on. Instead, it will be a machine that thinks like you.
The Myth of “Bigger is Better”
When AI first hit mainstream consciousness, everyone chased the biggest models they could find. They wanted more parameters, tokens, and power. All of these are very important things, but a private AI system that thinks like you provides the biggest win.
The best AI model doesn’t try to think like the universe. Instead, it tries to think like you, in your universe.
Most people assume they have to use ChatGPT or Claude straight out of the box. They don’t realize customization is nearly limitless and far more powerful than people know.
An AI model trained on the right doctrinal inputs becomes your most valuable technological asset. Why? It’s because alignment matters, especially when it’s aligned to your business.
Doctrine: The Soul of Your AI
All leaders have doctrine, even if they’ve never written it down. Some CEOs are “rip the Band-Aid off” people when it comes to performance problems. Others will nurture an underperformer for eighteen months, hoping potential finally becomes reality. Some think in EOS language or in Scaling Up language while others speak the “my gut never lies” language. Doctrine drives every meaningful leadership decision.
Your doctrine (your real doctrine, not the one you claim) drives how you lead, how you make decisions, and how you run a company.
If you don’t capture your doctrine, your AI will default to the doctrine of the internet, which is the doctrine of “everyone else.” Once again, you’ll be stuck with something that thinks for you instead of with you.
Private AI models enable you to build doctrine directly into your AI. You can encode:
- how you hire and fire,
- how you handle risk,
- how you think about money,
- how you weight certain people’s opinions,
- how you challenge yourself,
- what your values are, and
- what you never compromise on.
Encoding your doctrine into AI isn’t optional. Rather, your doctrine is the soul of your AI. This is how the machine starts thinking like you.
Custom AI Learns Your Patterns
Most leaders think of AI as a giant machine that pulls answers out of a magic cloud. Custom AI is an entirely different model focused on alignment with your business philosophy. Custom AI tries to understand you, and that’s why it’s powerful. What makes your business unique, your DNA, lives in the tiny corners of your decisions, not in the “standard operating procedures.”
A private AI model learns your unique way of thinking, and it begins to understand:
“Why did you pick that?”
“Why do you always avoid this?”
“Why do you trust that?”
In other words, AI models can be trained to learn your bias. This is why REDEGADES.AI encourages leaders to begin implementing AI models with the leadership team. Instead of wishfully thinking, “If I could only clone myself,” why not do this now? Start with the C-suite.
Your AI should be trained first and foremost on your way of thinking, before it ever touches the rest of the company. This is the essential first step.
The Step Most Leaders Miss
Here’s the thing most leaders don’t see coming. Once your leadership team each builds a great AI, you have a new problem. Every person in the room is now more confident than ever, armed by a machine that told them they were right, reasoning from different data. You walk into your most expensive meetings with a room full of better-armed arguments. Decisions don’t stick. Disagreements get sharper. And you, as CEO, can no longer tell a real strategic debate from two people fighting over whose AI had better inputs.
Building AI that thinks like you is the foundation. It is not the finish line. The next step is making sure all of that individual intelligence connects into one shared brain. When every leader on your team is drawing from the same sandbox, the same context, the same company DNA, the false disagreements disappear. What’s left is the real conflict, the kind worth having. That’s what REDEGADES.AI calls the Decision Alignment Layer, and it’s where individual AI becomes organizational intelligence.