Our May 2026 CBSL Onyx Members’ Day was one of those sessions I’ll be referencing for a long time.
We had Guy Levine, founder of return.co, in the room. And what he delivered wasn’t a lecture about AI. It was a challenge. A well-structured, slightly uncomfortable, and genuinely useful challenge to every leader in the room.
That’s exactly what CBSL Onyx is designed to create.
Guy opened by asking everyone in the room to place themselves on a spectrum — from Curious, through Experimenting, Applying, and Scaling, all the way to Transforming.
It was a simple question. But the answers in the room told a story. Some leaders were already building AI workflows into their businesses. Others were still finding their feet. And a few — honest enough to admit it — were still at the “I’ve heard a lot about this and I’m not sure what to do next” stage.
No judgement. That’s the point of Onyx — you can be honest about where you actually are, not where you feel you should be.
Guy introduced the ICE framework as a practical way to cut through the noise and decide what actually deserves your attention. Impact — does this materially change cost, speed, or decision quality? Confidence — do we believe it will work based on our data and reality? Ease — can we actually run this in the next 30 to 90 days?
Score each idea from 1 to 5 on each dimension, multiply them together, and the highest total wins. As Guy put it: “Don’t overthink it.”
It sounds almost too simple. But in a room full of leaders who are juggling a hundred competing priorities, simple and repeatable beats sophisticated and abandoned every single time.
Guy wasn’t interested in theory. He laid out a timeline that every leader in the room could take home and act on:
Tomorrow — Personal Leverage. Make better decisions, faster. Use AI as a thinking partner, a research tool, a first draft generator. This is the low-hanging fruit, and most leaders are leaving it on the tree.
30 Days — Team Leverage. Reduce wasted effort and repeated conversations. Stop having the same briefing three times. Build prompts your whole team can use consistently.
90 Days — System Actions. Turn usage into capability. Build workflows and agents that work for you around the clock, automating the repeatable, and freeing your team for the work that actually requires human judgement.
The session covered a lot of ground — prompting frameworks, the difference between Generative, Predictive and Agentic AI, real-world examples of AI workers handling HR tasks, content creation workflows, and more.
But the line that caused the room to go quiet came right at the end.
“The AI Leadership Challenge: guiding your team to build the systems that may replace their own tasks.”
That’s not a comfortable sentence. It’s not meant to be. But it’s the honest reality that every leader in the room is going to have to navigate — and the ones who get ahead of it now will be in a very different position in three years’ time.
I’ve said before that Onyx isn’t a networking club or a seminar series. It’s a space where leaders can have the conversations that are hard to have anywhere else.
A session like this one, with a speaker of Guy’s calibre, doing what he does at the highest level with growth-focused businesses every single day, is exactly the kind of thing that moves the needle. Not just in terms of knowledge — but in terms of confidence. Confidence to act, to experiment, and to lead your team through a genuinely significant shift.
Members left with a clear framework for prioritising AI opportunities. They left with practical prompting techniques they could use the next morning. And they left with the honest reassurance that wherever they are on their AI journey right now, there is a clear next step.
If you’re reading this and thinking “I wish I’d been there” — that’s exactly the feeling I want to leave you with.
CBSL Onyx events are intentionally small. The conversations are better that way. But we do always welcome guests who want to experience one before deciding whether it’s right for them.
