You ask your AI for a hard call. Whether to keep a client who pays well and treats your team badly. Whether to raise prices on the customers who’ve been with you longest. It comes back with a tidy list of pros and cons and a line about how it depends on your priorities.
You got the safe answer. If your competitor asked the same model the same question this morning, they likely got the same answer.
I made a two-minute animated video about why. It’s below. This is the longer version.
The head, the belly and the chest
In 1943, C.S. Lewis gave three lectures on education that became a short book, The Abolition of Man. In it he describes three parts of a person. The head is reason. The belly is appetite and impulse. Between them sits the chest: “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” In his words, “The head rules the belly through the chest.”
Earlier in the same passage he writes: “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” Knowing the right thing doesn’t get you to do it. The trained middle does.
One of his examples is a battlefield: “In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.”
Two Marines
Lewis named the chest. The two Marines in the video are my example, not his, and the grenade is mine too.
Picture two Marines. Same rifle, same manual, same mission. Hypothetically, one of them skips boot camp. He never sees a drill instructor model leadership. He never lives through hardship and sacrifice beside other recruits.
In their first firefight, a grenade lands among the squad. Both heads know it has to be covered. Both bellies say run. The one who skipped boot camp runs. The other covers it with his body, so the rest of them live.
No time to reason. His chest moves him.
Your AI has a head and a belly
Lewis was talking about people. I use his head, belly and chest to think about AI.
The head is the model. It knows more than I ever will, and your competitors use the same models you do. The belly is that same model’s pull toward the likeliest, most familiar answer. Ask it for a hard call with nothing of yours to go on, and the belly tends to win. You get the safe answer.
What it’s missing is your chest: what you believe, written down.
For your AI, the grenade is the hard call no rule covers. Rules handle the cases you saw coming. On the one you didn’t, your AI needs to know what you believe, and why.
Your competitor can get the same models and the same tools you use. They can’t get what you believe. Leave that out, and your AI sounds like everyone else’s. Your customers have less reason to pick you, so they cost more to win.
Boot camp for your AI
Write down what you believe. What comes first when two things you care about conflict, and why. And the reasons your customers give for buying from you.
Then hand it to your AI. Every time it gets one wrong, correct it, and add the correction to what you wrote down, so the next answer starts from it. Boot camp runs on the same loop: the same drill, corrected, over and over.
You and your AI should sit down and go through boot camp together.
More from Bullhorns & Bullseyes at bullhornsbullseyes.com.
Credits: Lewis quotes are from The Abolition of Man (1943), Chapter I, “Men without Chests.” The video’s narration is my own voice, generated with an ElevenLabs clone of it. Animated with AI on Jake Van Clief’s Animation & Voice Workspace. All visuals are illustrations. Not affiliated with the C.S. Lewis estate or the U.S. Marine Corps.
Brands need boot camp. That, to me, is the moral of the story…figuratively, of course.