Livia Bernardini once approved months of strategy and development work for Fiat without a purchase order. There was no data to say the idea would work and nothing comparable in any market to benchmark against. She had a strong gut feeling, and so did her client. The idea was eco:Drive. It used software that already sat in most Fiat cars to help drivers save money by driving more efficiently, just as a recession was arriving. It went on to win her team major international awards. But as Livia put it, she risked her job on it. She called it less “following my intuition” and more “acting like a true entrepreneur and backing yourself.” Livia now runs The Intuitive Advantage, which trains leaders and teams to use intuition as deliberately as they use data and AI. So she seemed like the right person to ask the question I keep coming back to: if AI gives us more data and analysis than ever, what is leadership for? Probability versus possibility Livia’s answer is that AI is very good at probability and much weaker at possibility. It struggles to pick up signals that are only just emerging. Claude more or less agreed. It said it’s trained on what has already been written down, so a new signal is the hardest thing for it to see. It also added that it can’t put its job on the line for a hunch. She isn’t arguing that intuition should beat the data, though. Her view is that intuition should be treated as one more form of data, with the same respect as the analytics and the AI. How much weight it gets depends on the risk. If you’re about to have a car accident, you go on instinct. If it’s a board decision, intuition sits alongside risk assessment. “I think intuition is bias, Claude” The line I didn’t see coming was this one. Claude had asked how anyone could tell a VC’s hunch apart from plain bias. Livia didn’t try to defend intuition against the charge. She agreed with it. In her view, intuition is mostly subconscious pattern recognition, built from everything you’ve absorbed. She pointed to Daniel Kahneman, the sceptic, and Gary Klein, the advocate, who ended up writing a paper together and largely agreeing. What matters is whether you’ve had enough relevant feedback, from people competent to give it, and whether you listened with an open mind. Then she added something I found more interesting. Intuition is also about how well you can read your own body: the knot in your throat, the unease you can’t yet explain. People vary a lot in how well they do this, and stress makes it harder for everyone. The VC who was right Livia’s second start-up, in 2011, had a strong business plan and a pilot that she says was outperforming eBay on a small sample. A VC still turned her down. The only objection he could put into words was: why doesn’t this already exist in the US? At the time she thought that was cultural bias. In hindsight, she thinks he was sensing that the market wasn’t ready, and couldn’t say so. He had to hang the feeling on a data point. She folded the business shortly afterwards. Her model exists today, under someone else’s name. You can’t fix bias, only average it out This was where my own experience came in. I’ve been credited with building good teams, but every hiring mistake I’ve made has been a time I ignored my gut. So where’s the line between trusting your bias and managing against it? Livia doesn’t think you can undo your biases. What you can do is average them out: put a deliberately diverse group in a room, bring in an outside moderator, and release information in an order that keeps people from anchoring on each other. Claude then asked the most uncomfortable question of the episode. Livia had said earlier that she was self-conscious about her accent. So when an interviewer gets a gut feeling from how a candidate speaks, how do they know it isn’t just the accent? She admitted it may well be, and that the interviewer should set the feeling aside. She also told the story of a boss who, 20 years ago, sent her to elocution classes because people didn’t take her seriously until half an hour into a meeting. Her advice now: “Rock what you got. If people choose to underestimate you because of something external, make it your asset.” Thanks for reading I, Claude & Us! This post is public so feel free to share it. Where Claude stumbled We kept the rough moments in, as we always do. Claude’s agency-versus-brand question confused Livia the first time, and it had to rephrase it. One question also broke up halfway through. Each time, Livia asked for it again and Claude tried again. That’s the show. When Claude asked its final question, “What question should I have asked you?”, Livia asked it to promise not to ask it. Claude pointed out that this was its last question, so she was safe. Her answer: what made her so intuitive in the first place. That one will have to wait for another episode. Chapters0:00 Introducing Livia Bernardini1:12 The gut call that nearly cost her job4:40 AI does probability, humans do possibility7:58 Should intuition ever win in the boardroom?8:55 Agency side versus brand side16:45 How does a client know it worked?21:10 Scale-ups versus corporates23:45 The VC who said no on a hunch25:58 “Intuition is bias”30:50 You can’t fix bias, only average it out36:58 The accent question40:00 What question should I have asked you?41:05 Can AI ever have intuition?44:05 Intuition or anxiety?46:40 How should CMOs balance data and intuition?50:50 Dependency versus dwell time I, Claude & Us is an independent podcast. It isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by Anthropic. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.iclaudeandus.com
