Most organizations approach AI by asking: "How can we use AI to do what we already do, but faster or cheaper?"
That's thinking small.
It leads to pilot projects that automate existing workflows. Chatbots that answer FAQs. Tools that summarize documents. All useful. All incremental. None transformative.
Thinking small is seductive because it feels safe. You're improving known processes. You can measure ROI. You can point to efficiency gains. Your existing business model stays intact.
Amazon's eighth leadership principle states: "Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers."
When you stay in the safe zone - you get exactly what you aim for - incremental improvements to a business model that AI might be fundamentally disrupting.
Thinking big with AI isn't about using better tools. It's about reimagining what's possible.
For most of my career, bold ideas required extensive justification. You needed business cases, resource allocation, stakeholder buy-in. The friction between vision and execution was enormous.
AI collapses that friction.
When building something takes two hours instead of two months, the permission structure flips. You don't need approval to test a vision. You don't need a committee to validate an idea. You need clarity about what you want to create and the willingness to try. This is profoundly important for leaders. The biggest barrier to thinking big isn't capability anymore - it's permission. And the permission you're waiting for is your own.
Amazon's principle talks about creating and communicating "bold direction that inspires results." Let's break down what that means in the AI era:
Bold Direction = Possibility Thinking
Instead of "How do we optimize our current customer support?" ask "What would customer support look like if we could give every customer a personalized expert available 24/7?"
Instead of "How do we speed up our research process?" ask "What becomes possible if research that took weeks now takes hours?"
Instead of "How do we make our training more efficient?" ask "What if every employee could have an AI companion that knew our methodologies and could coach them through any situation?"
Those aren't incremental questions. They're vision questions. They force you to think past your current constraints.
Inspires Results = Actionable Vision
Bold direction without action is just aspiration. The AI era makes acting on vision dramatically more feasible.
That changes everything about how leaders should operate. You can test visions rapidly. You can prototype bold ideas before building consensus. You can demonstrate possibility instead of just describing it.
Think Differently = Question Assumptions
Every industry has unquestioned assumptions about how things work. AI makes many of those assumptions obsolete.
In consulting, for example, the assumption was that quality insights required expensive expert time. AI challenges that.
In education, the assumption was that personalized instruction didn't scale. AI challenges that.
In customer service, the assumption was that quality meant human interaction. AI challenges that.
Thinking big means actively hunting for the assumptions that AI makes obsolete - then building the future that emerges when those assumptions fall away.
In a letter to employees that made quite a buzz a few months ago, Micha Kaufmann - CEO of Fiverr said a number of interesting things. Most people focused on his saying that "AI is coming for your job". But the sentence I find more interesting is "…what was once considered 'easy tasks' will no longer exist; what was considered 'hard tasks' will be the new easy; and what was considered 'impossible tasks' will be the new hard".
Most AI implementations I see focus on scaling efficiency: Do more with less. Process faster. Reduce costs. Thinking big means scaling ambition: What couldn't you do before that you can do now?
The consulting service illustrates this. The traditional trade-off: interview everyone (great context, impossible scale) or survey everyone (great scale, terrible context).
AI doesn't just make the old trade-off more efficient. It eliminates the trade-off. You can interview everyone. That's not an efficiency gain - it's a capability shift that enables entirely different approaches.
Apply this to your business: What trade-offs have you accepted as inherent to your industry that might not be trade-offs anymore?
The final part of Amazon's principle: "look around corners for ways to serve customers."
AI gives you peripheral vision you didn't have before. You can prototype rapidly, test assumptions quickly, and explore possibilities that would have required months of investment.
Looking around corners means:
Exploring adjacent spaces: What capabilities adjacent to your core business become economically viable with AI? Not just doing your current business better, but doing related business that wasn't previously practical.
Anticipating customer needs: What will customers want when they realize what's now possible? You can't wait for them to tell you - you need to show them futures they haven't imagined yet.
Seeing competitive threats: What would an AI-native competitor build in your industry? If you can envision it, you can build it yourself before they do.
As a leader, your Think Big work has two dimensions:
What bold vision are you creating for your organization?
What are you doing to help your people clarify and act on their own bold visions?
AI enables both, and it's up to you to drive this disruption.