Fifth Quadrant is a Sydney-based market research consultancy. The business helps clients understand change, make sense of market trends and plan for what comes next.
When AI adoption began to accelerate, Fifth Quadrant saw an opportunity to use AI as more than a research tool. The team wanted to use AI to strengthen leadership thinking, improve decision-making and make strategic frameworks easier to use across the business.
Strategic decisions often rely on the experience of senior people.
For many businesses, access to board-level advice can be costly or out of reach. Even when strong frameworks exist, it can be hard to apply them consistently across teams, projects and decisions.
Fifth Quadrant wanted to make its strategic thinking more scalable and repeatable. The team also wanted to help people test ideas before taking them to clients or making business decisions.
The opportunity was clear: use AI to bring structured challenge, different perspectives and stronger strategic thinking into everyday work.
Fifth Quadrant started with its own business strategy.
The leadership team joined Growth Busters, an eight-week strategic scaling program, that helped the team clarify its core purpose, long-term goal and economic engine.
This process led to an idea: could AI help capture these strategic frameworks and make them available on demand?
Fifth Quadrant built a virtual board of AI advisors using custom GPTs. Each advisor was designed to bring a different perspective to business decisions.
The virtual board includes:
Each GPT was developed using Fifth Quadrant’s internal methods, frameworks and past project experience. The team then refined the tools through supervised prompt engineering.
The virtual board is used when the team is considering new markets, products or methods. It helps surface different views before people make a final decision.
“AI helps us pressure-test our thinking before it reaches the client. It gives our team access to different strategic perspectives, but people still make the decisions.”— Steve Nuttall, Director, Fifth Quadrant
The virtual board has helped Fifth Quadrant improve the speed and quality of strategic work.
The team has seen benefits across proposal development, client work and internal decision-making.
Fifth Quadrant has used the virtual board to:
The biggest shift has been in how the team thinks. Instead of relying only on instinct, people can now ask the virtual board to challenge an idea, test an option or explore another point of view.
This has helped the business make decisions with more structure and confidence.
Fifth Quadrant has taken a clear governance approach to using AI.
Its work with the National AI Centre on the Responsible AI Index helped guide how the business uses AI safely and responsibly.
Each AI advisor is managed using 3 key principles:
For Fifth Quadrant, responsible AI is not just about the tools, but how the tools are governed, reviewed and used by people.
Like any board, diversity of thought matters. So does clear oversight.
Hello, I'm Steve Nuttle. I'm one of the directors at Fifth Quadrant. Fifth Quadrant is a Sydney-based strategic market research consultancy.
We’ve been using AI in the business for at least three years, but we really noticed at the start of 2025 that AI is starting to accelerate and its capabilities are increasing exponentially.
We began to look at AI not just as a research tool, but as a disruptor in our industry. Yes, it has strong capabilities as a research tool, but we wanted to think about AI more as a leadership capability. We started to rethink our business so we could grow and develop in a way that both harnesses the benefits of AI and helps us achieve our growth goals.
We asked ourselves: why not create a virtual board? In an ideal world, we would tap into some of the best minds, the world's leading business experts, and bring them into the room to guide us, provide advice, and challenge our thinking. But as a small team of 15 people, that level of expertise is beyond our means.
Imagine being able to tap into the expertise of a Fortune 500 CEO, an Ivy League business school professor, or the author of bestselling business books. We found that AI can help fill that gap.
So we started to design our virtual board. We created five roles.
First, a strategic business advisor. We combined the personas of different leaders and experts into a business strategist GPT.
Second, a chief provocation officer. This GPT’s role is to challenge consensus thinking.
Third, a competitive intelligence officer. With so much change happening across markets, products and global trends, this GPT helps capture and stay on top of innovation and change.
Fourth, a chief revenue officer. This GPT ensures that strategy aligns with our economic engine, including profit per project, and keeps us commercially focused.
We are clear about how each GPT is built and what its limits are. There is always a human in the loop. AI advises, but humans decide. We also maintain strict data integrity. No client data is fed into these systems. Instead, we take the insights and apply them to client work.
As a result, our win rates are improving. We are delivering work faster and at a higher level of quality. Importantly, we are seeing a strong impact on our people. This is not just about leadership operating at a higher level. It is also about building a teaching system, so our team can use the same tools and frameworks we provide to clients.
This means clients get consistent advice and thinking, not just from senior staff but also from middle and junior researchers.
Looking ahead, we know this will continue to evolve. We can’t just stop with the virtual board. We’re starting to think about creating virtual business units.
For example, bringing together leading healthcare experts in one unit, and leading technology experts in another. But rather than keeping them separate, we would look at how they can work together. The opportunities often sit at the intersection, such as between healthcare and technology.
These virtual business units could collaborate to help clients unlock those opportunities.
A further aspiration is AI agent orchestration. That is, agents working together more autonomously to explore problems, generate ideas, and return with solutions. At the moment, everything is human-prompted and human-driven. But over the next 12 months to two years, we expect more advanced orchestration to become possible.
Where this leads us today is that we have systematised our way of thinking and are starting to scale our strategic thinking. For a small business, scaling strategy has always been seen as difficult. But we are now doing it.
The next step is amplifying that strategic thinking across the entire business.
Start by thinking about who you would have on your board. If you could choose anyone, who would it be?