Build Your Own AI Advisory Team: A Playbook for Smarter Decisions
What if you could have access to a world-class team of advisors—strategists, creatives, and financial experts—all without the cost of hiring them?
For small business owners and entrepreneurs, every decision counts. Whether you’re figuring out how to allocate your marketing budget, deciding on pricing for a new product, or planning your next move in a competitive market, having the right advice can make all the difference. But building an advisory team isn’t always feasible—leaving you to make tough calls on your own.
What if there was a way to simulate those perspectives using AI?
If you’re someone who wants to build (or are just curious about what’s behind the scenes), we’ll walk you through exactly how to create a diverse and collaborative team of AI advisors. And if you’d rather skip the work and just enjoy the benefits, try Ella—a marketing team-in-a-box. As a special offer, we’ll even build a custom team of AI business advisors (similar to what you see here) tailored to your business—for free.
Let’s dive in.
Why Decision-Making Is Harder Than Ever
As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you’re constantly making high-stakes decisions—but rarely with the resources you need.
Should you expand into a new market? Adjust your pricing strategy? Spend your limited marketing budget on ads, content, or partnerships? These questions demand input from multiple perspectives, yet many small businesses lack a team of advisors with the expertise to weigh in.
Here’s the problem: When you’re wearing all the hats, trade-offs get tricky. You might focus too heavily on short-term gains and miss long-term opportunities, or over-prioritize cutting costs and underinvest in growth.
The solution: AI simulations that act as your advisory board. With the right tools, you can bring perspectives like Strategist, Creative Director, Financial Planner, or Customer Advocate into your decision-making process—making your insights broader, sharper, and more actionable.
Why Most AI Use Falls Short of This Approach
Most of us have used tools like ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas or get quick answers—but the way we usually interact with AI doesn’t create the diversity of thought necessary for better decision-making.
Here’s what’s missing when we use AI tools the usual way:
AI tools like ChatGPT tend to average everyone’s opinion. When you ask for advice, it often tries to find the “safe” middle ground. While this can be helpful for neutral answers, it misses the richness of diverse perspectives or deliberate disagreement.
You get a single response, not a team discussion. Most AI outputs are one-dimensional and lack the depth or nuance you’d get from a structured debate between multiple perspectives.
What makes an AI advisory team different?
With an AI advisory team, you’re simulating a group of diverse advisors—each with their own expertise, behavioral style, and priorities. These advisors can disagree, debate, and push against your assumptions, helping you see blind spots you might have overlooked.
One of the most powerful aspects of this approach is that you can intentionally design team members to challenge you. They’ll surface risks, probe weak points, and provide honest feedback—without the fear of being "fired" or judged. This creates an environment of robust, unfiltered discussion that leads to better decisions.
10 Key Reasons Why You’ll Want a Team of AI Advisors
Here’s why having an AI advisory team is a game-changer for small business owners and entrepreneurs:
Diverse Perspectives = Better Decisions. An AI advisory team gives you multiple tailored viewpoints, whether it’s a visionary Strategist or a cautious Financial Planner.
See Your Blind Spots Clearly. Advisors can be designed to challenge assumptions, uncover risks, and surface overlooked opportunities.
Unfiltered, Honest Feedback. AI advisors will tell you what they think—no politics, no sugarcoating, no fear of consequences.
Simulate Debate to Resolve Conflicts. When advisors disagree, you can simulate structured debates to weigh trade-offs and align on the best path forward.
Tailored to Your Business and Leadership Style. Build a team that complements your strengths and fills your gaps as a leader.
Scales with Your Business. Add new advisors or refine roles as your business evolves.
Cost-Effective Expertise. Gain high-value insights for a fraction of the cost of hiring real-world consultants or full-time specialists.
Customizable for Any Industry or Need. Whether you’re a SaaS founder, solopreneur, or agency owner, your AI team can be tailored to fit your challenges.
Bridges Strategy and Execution. Advisors don’t just brainstorm—they deliver actionable outputs like plans, frameworks, and metrics.
Encourages Creativity and Innovation. By integrating diverse viewpoints, your AI team pushes you to explore unconventional ideas and new angles.
What Is an AI Advisory Team?
An AI advisory team is a group of simulated personas, each representing a specific area of expertise, designed to provide well-rounded, balanced advice for your toughest business challenges.
Each persona has a unique role and perspective. Examples include:
Strategist: Focuses on long-term growth and opportunities.
Creative Director: Ensures emotional resonance and innovative storytelling.
Financial Planner: Maximizes ROI and budgets.
Customer Advocate: Centers the voice of your audience to ensure alignment.
Ethics Advisor: Balances decisions with integrity and compliance.
AI tools simulate their responses based on your business context, problems, and goals—and can even facilitate debates between these personas to align on actionable recommendations.
How to Build Your Own AI Advisory Team
Building an AI advisory team involves more than just asking for advice—it’s about crafting a diverse group of “voices” that simulate the expertise, perspectives, and behavioral styles you need to tackle both challenges and opportunities. By following this five-step playbook—and iterating along the way—you’ll create a dynamic team of AI advisors uniquely suited to your goals.
Step 1: Share Your Business Context
What to Do
Start by providing an AI tool (like ChatGPT) with a detailed overview of your business stage, goals, and challenges. Instead of focusing on a single decision, describe the typical decisions you make and the overall environment in which your business operates.
Example Prompt
"I am a B2B SaaS company providing marketing software for AI. We currently have hundreds of customers paying $249 per month. We sell to fractional CMOs, marketing specialists, marketing agencies, business owners, and entrepreneurs. We want to grow to one thousand customers as quickly as possible. What roles do I need on my advisory team to succeed?"
Why This Matters
Lays a Foundation: By giving the AI a broad sense of your industry, goals, and constraints, you get advisory roles that actually fit your situation.
Prevents Generic Output: The AI won’t just propose “one-size-fits-all” advisors—it’ll tailor them to your unique needs.
Sets a Baseline for Ongoing Iteration: You can refine or update this context as your business evolves.
Step 2: Add Insights About Yourself as a Leader
What to Do
Your leadership style and tendencies set the tone for your advisory team. Provide the AI with insights into your strengths, blind spots, and preferred working style. This helps ensure your advisors complement your approach, rather than duplicating your strengths (or weaknesses).
What to Include
Your Strengths: Are you a visionary, a natural closer, or a data-driven strategist?
Your Frustrations/Blind Spots: Which tasks drain you? Where do you struggle to maintain focus or momentum?
Your Style/Frameworks: Share details from DISC, Enneagram, Working Genius, etc., to help the AI build personas that fit or challenge your natural tendencies.
Example Prompt
"I am a founder and CEO of a SaaS company. Based on the Working Genius framework, my areas of strength are Invention and Discernment—I’m great at creating new ideas and evaluating them strategically. My blind spots are Tenacity and Wonder—I struggle with completing detailed tasks or stopping to reflect on possibility. I’m also an Enneagram Type 3, meaning I value efficiency, productivity, and achieving goals. Based on this, please modify and tune these advisors to balance my team and provide maximum benefit to me while fulfilling my business goals."
Why This Matters
Ensures Compatibility: Advisors are more likely to mesh with you, improving trust and buy-in.
Fills Your Gaps: Strategically selecting advisors offsets your weaknesses.
Prompts Balanced Thinking: Having diverse DISC or personality types ensures you aren’t stuck in an echo chamber.
Step 3: Build Each Advisor with Context and Depth
What to Do
After the AI identifies the key roles you need, create detailed personas for each advisor. Give them context about your business environment, goals, and constraints so their advice remains grounded in your reality.
Example Prompt
"Build me a detailed AI advisor persona, named [NAME], with the following characteristics:
Purpose & Role: (growth strategist, finance guru, etc.)
Tone & Style: (bold, cautious, empathetic, etc.)
Relevant Expertise: (technical skill set, domain knowledge)
Training/Influence: (experts or thought leaders they emulate)
Interaction & Participation Style: (triggers to speak up, how they debate, etc.)
Unique Value: (how they complement or contrast other advisors on my team)
The output should include a short background story or credentials, a bullet-point list of behaviors, and a summary of how they’ll communicate with other advisors. Provide me with a final, cohesive persona I can drop into my multi-advisor environment."
Repeat for each advisor you’d like.
Pro Tip: Consider creating a “Master Orchestrator” persona (sometimes called a conductor) to ensure each advisor is consistently called upon, so no single advisor dominates discussions.
Why This Matters
Avoids Shallow Advice: Giving depth (motivations, specialized knowledge, etc.) makes AI outputs more realistic and specific.
Encourages Role Clarity: Each advisor understands their lane, reducing overlap or confusion.
Promotes Diversity: Varied DISC profiles or personalities yield richer debate and more nuanced recommendations.
Step 4: Simulate Collaboration and Resolve Conflicts
What to Do
Once your advisors are built, simulate how they collaborate on real decisions. Encourage them to debate each other (especially if they have different viewpoints, like short-term growth vs. long-term scalability). If the AI doesn’t spontaneously surface conflicts, ask it to identify potential trade-offs or friction points.
Example Prompt
"Here’s my current challenge: [describe challenge].
Simulate a debate between all my advisory team members. Each advisor should share their perspective, identify risks, and align on a recommendation. If they disagree, simulate an ongoing debate until they can reach consensus—or highlight the assumptions or data they’d need to move forward."
Why This Matters
Mimics Real-World Dynamics: Real executive teams rarely agree 100%—debate surfaces deeper insights.
Catches Blind Spots: Conflicting viewpoints can reveal hidden risks or overlooked opportunities.
Generates Clarity: By either resolving the debate or identifying a stalemate, you’ll know where to gather more data or revisit assumptions.
Step 5: Translate Insights into Actionable Outputs
What to Do
After your AI advisors align on a recommendation, transform their collective insights into execution-ready outputs. That might be a bullet-point plan, a timeline, success metrics, or even a short presentation deck to share with your team.
Example Prompt
"Based on the advisory team’s recommendation, please provide:
A step-by-step action plan to implement the strategy.
Key metrics to measure success.
Risks and how to mitigate them.
A concise summary or bullet-point deck for internal sharing."
Why This Matters
Bridges Strategy & Execution: Good ideas are worthless without a plan to carry them out.
Facilitates Internal Communication: A ready-to-share summary or deck helps align real human teams quickly.
Encourages Iteration: If results differ from expectations, you can easily revisit and refine your advisors’ outputs or assumptions.
Additional Tips
Emphasize Ongoing Iteration. Your business evolves—so should your AI advisors. Update prompts, revise personas, or refine instructions whenever new challenges, data, or strategy shifts arise.
Nudge the AI for More Specifics. If outputs feel generic, probe deeper:
"Provide more granularity about the timeline, projected costs, or necessary roles."Use a “Master Orchestrator”. A conductor-like persona can ensure each advisor is consistently heard, calls out conflicts, and synthesizes a final recommendation.
Encourage Contrarian Views. If the AI merges everyone’s views into a single happy path, push it to identify risks or potential pitfalls:
"Which advisor might have a concern we’re overlooking?"
Conclusion: Smarter Decisions, Made Simple
Following these five steps (with continuous iteration) will help you build an AI advisory dream team that aligns with your business context, leverages your leadership strengths, and challenges you in the right ways. By simulating collaboration, resolving conflicts, and translating insights into actionable outputs, you’ll be able to navigate decisions more confidently—and with a lot more creative input than flying solo.
Here's to smarter, more confident decision-making!
Curious about Ella?
Ella is your marketing dream team, with hundreds of experts trained in each marketing role you’ll ever need. If you’d like to bring high-impact AI experts onto your team immediately, we offer a free 14-day trial so you can put them to use immediately. And if you decide to purchase Ella, we’ll even build you a custom AI advisory team to support all of your business decisions.
Credits: The idea for this was inspired by an example generously shared by Isar Meitis in an AI Mastermind being led by the wonderful John Jantsch (“Mr. Duct Tape”).
