Transforming AI from Admin to Strategic Partner | Geoff Woods

Geoff Woods, the Founder of AI leadership, tells us to stop thinking of AI as an assistant a note taker or an editor. Instead, put yourself in the role of thought leader and use AI as a strategic partner in his guest episode today, Geoff tells us how to do that. You'll enjoy his real case study examples and learn from the types of prompts we discuss to harness the full power of AI to augment your strategic thinking. I'm glad you're here to listen in.

Welcome to the Courage of a Leader podcast. This is where you hear real life stories of top leaders achieving extraordinary results, and you get practical advice and techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous action. I'm so glad you can join us. I'm your host. Amy Riley, now are you ready to step into the full power of your leadership and achieve the results you care about most? Let's ignite the courage of a leader.

Geoff Woods, thank you for your time today.

It's my pleasure. Amy, thanks for having me.

I'm so glad you're here on the courage of a leader podcast, and I'm excited about this conversation that we're going to have. We are going to talk about, how do we get started as a leader with AI and harness it to think more strategically, to make better decisions. And I would like to start with mindset, because I think so many when I'm talking to leaders that are not in tech, the idea is that AI can help me with admin tasks. It can help me summarize notes. It can analyze data from the past, and now you're talking strategically. What kind of mindset Do you encourage leaders to have regarding their relationship with AI?

I want to repeat Geoff some of the things that you just said, because I think they're important to underscore. So not using, or certainly not just using AI for the 80% of the task, but really harness the power and use it for the 20% that can get us 80% of our results. And I heard strategic thinking. I heard use it to grow. I heard use it to enhance, not replace enhance. And I heard as a thought partner, as a coach, as a guide. Yes, I think all of that is important. I think that word enhance, not replace, is important, though.

Let me make this really simple, that people will understand. Amy, how many books do you think you've read over the course of your life?

Oh, goodness, I'm bad at estimating these kinds of things. Hundreds. Okay,

hundreds. What percent do. Of the collective knowledge that you have acquired. Do you think you can recall and apply now this moment, 1.5% maybe, and you've been really successful on the ability to harness, frankly, the minority of what you've learned that's normal.

That's a great point.

That's how up until now, we have solved problems. We have led our companies. Now I want you to think of AI as a thought partner. It has been trained on 200 million books, wow, worth of data. Now here's what's crazy. That's only 2% of the information of the world so far, and it's just gonna get more and more and more of that 200,000 books worth of data. Amy, guess what percentage of it? It can recall all of it? 100% 100% Guess how long it takes it to comb through 200 million books worth of data for your unique use case,

seconds, less than a second. Wow.

So if you think of yourself as the thought leader, and with the right leadership, you can tap into AI as your thought partner, you can start to harness intelligence in a way that is so powerful, but it requires you to stop looking at as an assistant and to start looking at it as a thought partner, to elevate your strategic thinking and to help you make faster, smarter decisions.

Excellent, because I've got to think of it as a partner. So I can tell it. What do we need to pull from all of those books and knowledge,

can I share a real story of what this looks like? Yes, because I guarantee you people listening is like that sounds cool. What does that mean? I believe I actually don't care about AI, even though I wrote a book about it. I don't care about AI. I care about leaders building better businesses and better lives. That's I want you to I want you to accelerate growth, and I want you to build a defensible competitive advantage in the future. AI is a phenomenal tool. It can accelerate your growth or it can distract you from it. The difference is the leader and whether they are strategic in its application. So when I sit down with leaders, I was with a group of CEOs, and I asked the question, I always ask, what are your biggest problems that you'd like to see if AI can help you solve? And one of the guys looked at me, and he said, I run a manufacturing company. I leased a whole bunch of equipment from this company in Japan. Things have shifted in my market, and the debt structure is now killing us. We will go bankrupt if we do not get the debt restructured. Okay? And I looked at him, I said, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. What have you done? And he said, I've done this and this and this and this and this. None of it worked because this is a publicly traded company in Japan. It's gone all the way to the board, and they are refusing to restructure the debt because they're worried it will make them lose face in Japanese society. Okay, I have no next step. I've tried everything. I'm probably going out of business.

I'm up against a wall. Okay,

Yay. Gives me goosebumps. So

let's fly up to 10,000 feet as a leader. There are things you face on a daily basis that require you to think strategically. They require real processing power. You know, AI is the future, but you don't know where to start, and you think you're falling behind. I'm going to tell you that using chat GPT to write a better email is a waste of your time, but your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. The old way is to do this based on your own human processing power. The new way is to own your role as the thought leader and harness AI as your thought partner so you can make faster, smarter decisions. Love

it. Jeff, I want to double click on this, and I have some other scenarios for us to consider. Oh, yeah, but first, I want to tell listeners more about you. Geoff Woods is the number one International Best Selling Author of the AI Driven Leader, host of the AI Driven Leader Podcast, and the founder of AI Leadership, where he empowers leaders to harness AI escape operational overwhelm and think strategically to accelerate growth. You have already heard that from him. As the former chief growth Officer of Jindal Steel and Power, His guidance helped their market cap grow from 750 million to over 12 billion in four years. He also co founded the training and consulting company behind the One Thing, where he coached and advised companies with annual revenues from 10 million to $60 billion Geoff, I'm excited to have you here for this conversation, and I hope that light bulbs are lighting up for all the listeners right now. So let me just recap what you said. Going to use AI. We want to focus on a top 20% priority, is it? And we want to go in with that question. I have a question for AI, will it work? Yes, and then assign a role or a persona to AI and ask them to play that role, come with that knowledge and that perspective, and then to ask you interview you with questions, to learn more about the situation. And then give me five non obvious approach, ideas or strategies, but we could ask for three, or we could ask for all your or we could ask for your, your top idea. So in preparation for this conversation, Geoff, I made note of a few conversations that I've been having with leaders over the past week, and you know, questions that they had. So one had like, how do I get more visibility in my organization? Pretty new to her role, and she is identifying ways to provide value in her new internal partners and with her new internal relationships, but she wants to talk to senior leadership about that. You know. Here's what I'm trying. Is this aligned? Like, hey, is this good, right? And we know those are busy folks, so applying this does it seem like a 20% priority?

It could. It absolutely could. Now, when, when you say she wants more visibility, what does that

mean more awareness, that she wants her senior leadership to have more awareness and ensure alignment with what she is experimenting with

excellent so part of the shift I think people are going to go through when they make a commitment to becoming an AI driven leader, is to shift away from operational overwhelm and towards strategic clarity. We all know what it feels like to have too much to do, not enough time to be busy every day and look up at the end of the day and wonder, when did I get done? Yes, and we all also understand what it feels like those moments in your life when you are so clear on what matters most, and you are so focused like you are operating with strategic clarity. I want to, I want to tip the scales away from operational overwhelm towards strategic clarity. Here is what sounds like a talented, ambitious leader who says, I want more visibility into what the priorities are for the organization, and I want to make sure that the actions I'm taking on a daily basis actually align with it. Fantastic. The old way of doing this is to ask, How can I get more visibility, I'm going to challenge you to shift the question. Instead of asking, How can I do this, I want you to start asking, How can AI help me do this? And for those of you who are listening, I'm literally holding up a sticky note right now where I wrote the question, how can AI help me do this? Actually, if you only do one thing from this whole episode, I want you today to grab a sticky note and write with a Sharpie. How can AI help me do this? You put that on your computer, because if you look at that once a day and you ask that question, you will automatically gain awareness of a use case, you'll take action by writing a prompt. And if you focus on good communication ingredients, like we talked about, giving it context, assigning a role, asking it to interview you so it can accomplish a task, you will find yourself getting results which will just inspire you to ask the question, how can AI help me do this again? So in her case, she could literally say, context, I'm a leader in an organization. I genuinely want to make sure that the actions that I'm taking on a daily, weekly, monthly basis are making the biggest impact toward the business. The challenge is, I don't feel like I have the visibility into what really matters for the organization. For more context, here's the role, here's the type of company that I'm involved in. Notice I didn't even have to say the name of the company, if you're worried about privacy, here's my position, here's the types of people I have relationships with. I want you to act as an expert leader who's adept at navigating internal politics and leading up the chain of command, interview me by asking me one question at a time, up to three questions, four questions, five questions. You choose how many questions you wanted to ask, and then I want you to outline the top five strategies I could deploy to get that visibility and also position myself as an as a rising star in our organization. Awesome.

Thank you for applying this to real example, Geoff, because in that you gave us some more syntax right, some more ways that we can language, that we can use in our prompts with AI context, we could just put context colon and bingo,

writers, I actually around those prompt ingredients. I do what's called a delimiter. So I'll do a hashtag, and I'll put context in all caps, and then another hashtag, and then I'll give all the context, and then I'll do a new paragraph, and I'll do hashtag, your role in all caps, hashtag. And the reason I do that is because I write, as you can hear, these are pretty detailed prompts. It helps create more structure for the large language model to read it and understand it,

so we got context. We can include challenge it. Challenge is part of it, your role, and that's telling AI what its role is. You can also say more about my role? Yes, in this situation, the persona you're assigning here was an expert leader with specific skills, right? So we can tell them what kind of persona, what kind of knowledge, what kind of skills you have that we want you to pull from your massive database, AI, and then bring me solutions. So let me take the questions and then bring me solutions. Yeah, so

let me give you a fun use case. When I was finishing my book, I literally took the PDF of the jacket for the AI driven leader, yeah, and I pulled the PDF into chat. GPT, okay, and I. AI to act as my ideal reader and give me feedback on the design of the book. And so I said, attached is the PDF file of the jacket for my book, the AI driven leader. Your role is to act as my ideal reader. You're a CEO of a $50 million a year company. You're bullish on AI, but you're sick and tired of charismatic thought leaders who promise that technology will change the world only to over promise and under deliver. Your task is to review the jacket and give me feedback on what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and the top changes I could make so that you would not only buy the book for yourself, but you would buy it for every person in your company. And it literally used optical character recognition to review the cover. And as that CEO with that mindset, it told me what it liked, what it didn't like. And the top changes, I sent that to my designer. He made the changes that I agreed with. Notice I did not copy and paste. I'm the thought leader. AI is my thought partner. I exerted editorial control and discernment on what I agreed with. Some of it I didn't. I sent it to Pete, and said, Pete, can you make these two changes? He sent it back. I ran it again. Amy, yes, of course, I ran it four times until AI came back and said, I like your book.

Okay, I love this example. First of all, I love that it worked great for the design of your cover. And also you're telling us that the role we're asking them to play can be that thought partner, person, but it also could be our prospect, our client, our reader. What's their mindset? What's their situation?

Are you sitting down? Do you have your popcorn? You want some more? Yeah. Okay, a company I've been advising for a few years, CPG company, they sell their products in Whole Foods. They get a call from Whole Foods corporate saying, we've been looking at sales. They look awesome. Jason Bucha, our CEO, would like to meet with you to discuss expanding our partnership with you and you potentially getting more shelf space. Great. That's the call every vendor wants, right? So the executive team for weeks rallies to create a tight two page PDF document that they're going to present to Jason, yes, and the CEO, the week of the presentation, pulls me aside and says, Can AI help me do this, or help me make this better? And I right question, right shift away from, how can I do this? Can AI help me do this? And so I went to perplexity.ai, which is a AI tool specifically for research. It will cite your sources, so that's super important when you're researching. Oh, great. And I said, I want you to research everything Jason Bucha has publicly said as a priority for Whole Foods, that would warrant expanding our partnership for context, this is our company. This is our product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, tell me the things that Jason will care about. Cite all your sources and avoid making anything up. Oh, okay, because AI makes things up. People very concerned about that. Yes, it makes things up. So it literally tell it not to. I literally told it not to Okay, and and it generated six high level things with a hyperlink to every single source backing it up. I fact checked every single one validated that the six things were correct. I then went to chat GPT, pulled in the PDF that they were going to present to Jason to chat GBT and said, You're Jason Bucha, the CEO of Whole Foods. These are the six things you care about that would warrant expanding a partnership with a vendor. As Jason review our deck and tell us what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and the top changes we should make to get the partnership expanded. As Guess how long it took it to read everything on a two page PDF as Jason compare it to those six priorities and do a full analysis of what it likes didn't like in the top changes.

Is it seconds this time, one second, one second,

one second. And one of the things that called out was, I care about fair trade and sustainability. This is a 10 out of 10 for your brand. It's nowhere to be found on the deck. Here's what I would say, and here's where I would place it lovely. And I looked at the CEO, and his eyes get huge, and he starts fumbling for his cell phone, and he calls his chief revenue officer, his chief marketing officer. Suddenly they're in my Zoom waiting room, and the CMO has Adobe Acrobat open, and they're making the changes on the fly.

That's amazing. What a game changer that this could be for our technical subject matter experts. Right? I work with many leaders about you know, how do I present a. How do I present to my executives? How do I slim down all the things that I know about subject x into what my executive level audience is most going to care about?

You want another one in the spirit of presenting to an executive audience? What about actually doing the presentation to the executive audience? So I had a large company that was interested in engaging us in a consulting basis. I prepared the full deck an hour before the meeting with the executive and their chief of staff. I thought I found I was doing prep, and I found myself asking how my AI helped me do this. And so I drug the PDF into chat, G, P, T, and I said, I want to role play my pitch with you. You're going to play two different personas, one the executive, the other the Chief of Staff. Here's what you need to know about the executive. Here's what you need to know about the Chief of Staff. I'm going to, after you confirm, I'm going to switch over to voice mode, so instead of being on desktop and typing, I'm going to go to the app on my phone and enable voice mode, where I'm going to legitimately give you the presentation. Your task is to role play with me as those two personas. But instead of being nice to me, I want you to be tough. I want you to be a 10 out of 10 in throwing objections and challenging me. I want you to make this difficult so that I'm really ready to pitch this, and that I could anticipate all the curve balls that maybe I'm not seeing confirm you understand. And when I say all done, I want you to know that the pitch is over, and I then want you to give me feedback on what you liked about my presentation, didn't like about my presentation, and the top changes I could make to my presentation. So we get the deal done. And I sent it, and it said, I understand awaiting your instruction, and I switch over to chatgpt on my phone, went to that thread and clicked voice mode and literally started presenting. Thanks so much for the time here today, here's what we're gonna cover, and I'm going through the pitch, and it's interrupting me. It's asking me questions like they would. It's throwing curve balls, it's giving objections, and I'm handling all of them. And at the end I said, all done. And said, Great. Based on this, here's my feedback on what I liked, what I didn't like. In the top changes, I stopped voice mode, went back to my desktop, clicked refresh, and the whole feedback was there. One of the things that called out Amy was, well, I loved the pitch. There was no return on investment that was outlined, where's your RO and it suggested that as an area of improvement. And I thought to myself, I agree. And then I thought to myself, oh, shoot,

I don't know what it is. How can AI help me determine the ROI

Yes, and I have

my post it note here. Geoff, so.

Amy, actually, for those of you listening. Amy, literally, when I said earlier, was writing the on the buzzer note and put it there. Amy, yes. And I said, How can AI help me? And so I said, I actually don't know what the ROI is. Give me five creative ways to solve this. The pitch is in 20 minutes. And one of the things it came back with was it said, How about you turn the tables on the executive if it's going well, and make them defend the investment. So they tell you what the ROI is. And I went, That's awesome. So I literally created a slide, and all it said on it was, defend the investment, yeah. And when we got to that point, he was super excited. And I said, All right, you're excited. This is awesome. I want to turn the tables on you. Who are you going to have to sell this to to get it funded? And he said, the CFO. I said, Okay, great. I'm going to role play with you as though I'm the CFO, and you have to defend the investment. He said, Oh, interesting idea. I said, Okay, imagine you just pitched me. My answer is, no go. And he literally started going, and I'm throwing curveballs and objections at him all along the while, Amy, my AI, note taker, is in zoom, taking notes, transcribing every single word. Yeah, I told him, all right, I got this. Let me update the deck with a clear ROI. I'll send it to you and you can roll it up the chain. Excellent. I got off zoom, downloaded the transcript, pulled the transcript into the same chat GBT thread, and said, I want you to go to the transcript, to the section where we talked about defending the investment based on that. I want you to create the content for a focus. Slide that's going to go to the CFO of this company, make it compelling, so that they would say yes to funding this investment. And it immediately spat out a draft, fantastic. And I just I looked at it, I agreed with almost all of it. I copied and pasted it into the slide deck and reformatted some things, changed a few things that I thought I could make it better. Yep, sent it to the executive. The deal got done.

I'm excited about what happened in all these use cases that you're sharing with us. I'm also excited about what it tells us about our process and how we interact with AI, right? Avoid making things up. We can tell AI to do that doesn't

mean it will listen, by the way, okay, this is where you still have to challenge it and exert your thought leadership.

Think of all the ways that voice mode could be used a role play a presentation. Right now, you're telling us that we can have AI play two roles simultaneously, right? So we're checking how our messages are gonna land with multiple individuals at once. We can tell it to play that role and be tough. You might practice your presentation once and then go, Okay, now be tougher. Be a 10 out of 10. And you told it to give you feedback, and you told it the instructions for giving you that feedback. Give me the top three things that work, the top three things that didn't work, and your top X suggestions for improving it. So I love that you are giving us the how tos around the prompts and the interaction so that we can harness the most from all of this knowledge that's sitting out there.

Want another one?

I'm not gonna say no.

So you talked about being able to have a conversation with two people at once. What if I told you you could have a conversation with an entire board? So another company I've been advising they were working toward an exit in the next 24 months. Their number one barrier is a hostile board. Every quarter is a bloodbath. And six months ago, the CEO came to me and said, the board meeting went terrible, and the board basically said, You've got six months to turn this around or you're

all gone. That's in the top 20% that's

in the top 20% and then he asked, Can AI help. And I said, let's see. Okay, I sat the executive team down, and I turned AI into an HR professional with deep expertise in creating personality profiles, and instructed it to conduct an interview of the executive team about one board member named Susan, and for the the for it to ask enough questions to understand Susan on a deep enough basis that it would then create a personality profile of Susan. It conducted the interview, it spat out a personality profile. The exec team looked at it and said, that's about 80% right. They made some changes and saved it. They repeated that for every single board member. Okay, yep, I then created a custom AI model where I fed it the personality profiles of every board member and told it that its job was to act as our AI board. Specifically, I wanted to be able to upload our deck to the AI board in advance of the meeting, and have the AI board simulate how every board member would review every slide and spotlight the landmines in the deck that we had failed to sweep. We uploaded a past deck so we already knew the results

of this meeting. Yeah, uploaded

it, and one of the things that called out said on slide eight, Susan's going to get distracted by the granularity of the details on the slide. This will lead to a 30 minute detour, which will derail your conversation, instead of saying all of these details. Say these three points because they're what matters most, and it'll align with what she cares about. And I just looked at the CEO, and he goes, Oh my goodness, that's what happened. That's what happened. So we now take the new deck that has yet to be presented, and we feed it to AI, and the board calls out things that were missed or things that will go wrong. The executive team sweeps the minds. They go have the meeting, because the meeting there's one director that's always virtual. They're on Zoom. They have their AI note taker taking notes, meaning the entire meeting is transcribed, meaning we can download the transcript and pull it back into the AI model and say, I want you to compare. Here's the notes from the real meeting. Compare this to what you thought each director would say versus what they actually said, and improve your personality profile so that you could have simulated this. Yes, after six months. It's just two board meetings. I get a call from the CEO. I knew it was the Do or Die meeting. This was the six month mark. The phone rings, and I answered and I said, was the verdict? And he said the board said it was the best meeting they've ever had and the best deck they've ever seen, and they wanted to know what how we change so much,

we're working with a new thought partner. Yeah, yeah, I've

created my own AI board, specifically designed to bring strength to the table that I don't have, that I will need to scale this company. My son was at La Crosse the other night, and I was walking the track around the field for an hour while he played lacrosse, where I literally had my air pods in. It was on voice mode, and I had a full blown conversation with my board about a specific partnership that I'm looking at and understanding. Is this something I should be prioritizing, or should I be delaying it? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? What are the non obvious risks or solutions based on that? What would it recommend and why? How would I structure the the theft table, I had that conversation while I was walking your

dad's over there talking to himself, yeah,

yeah, that's awesome.

Let me underscore this. We can make the personality profiles for real people that we interact with, right? We can do the research and find out all the quotes that Jason ever said was most important to the organization. We can create a person personality profile for Susan, our board member. We can also simulate where we create fake people, right? That this is our board and these this person has this expertise, this person has this expertise and deep knowledge and experience, and now I'm going to use them as my advisory council. Yeah,

the I have 14 people on my board. Steve Jobs is on the board for vision and and product design. Tony Shea is on my board for customer experience. Jeff Bezos is on my board for operational scalability, Warren Buffett's on my board for long term thinking and risk mitigation. Got some

great minds working for you. There.

Can we pause real quick? I think this conversation has evolved so naturally, I want to go back to where we started. Okay, people are using AI to write a better email or for marketing copy? Yeah. Do you see the difference between what we are talking about now for using this for strategic thinking? Now you understand why I say this is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. One

of the questions, the question I was going to end with today, and I do want to end with it today, because you've been very generous with your time. Geoff, how do we foster our relationship with AI over time? Well, first of all, we have our post it note. And this is so funny. I love this. Geoff, I tell people that often, a post it note can be transformational, right? If we have a reminder building a new mindset and behavior for ourselves, right? And then I'm also seeing like, every time we try this, we say this person, oh, now be tougher. Now try this like we're gonna learn and evolve as we start with this really simple yet robust framework that you're giving us about setting it up to play a role, having it ask us questions and letting it know exactly what we're expecting it to try to give us

Correct, correct I'll show an image, and I'll describe the image for those of you that are just listening. It's, it's an image of a flywheel. Okay, so the at the top of the flywheel, it says, it says questions, then awareness, action, communication, results. It all starts with the questions you ask. I am challenging you to shift away from asking, How do I do this? To start asking, how my AI helped me do this. If you ask that question once a day, you will automatically create awareness of a use case. You'll take action by writing the prompt. Communication is about using good communication ingredients when you are writing the prompt. Did you give it context? Did you assign a role? Did you ask it to interview you with one question at a time? Otherwise, it'll ask you five questions at once to then accomplish a task, if you follow that framework of context, role, interview task, you will get a result which will just inspire you to ask the question again. This flywheel spins faster and faster and faster, and it's what powers you through the learning curve to the point when you just become an AI driven leader. Let

me repeat that one more time for the listeners, questions to awareness, to action, to communication, context, role, interview, task,

to results, results, results. It all starts with you putting a sticky note on your computer once a day asking, How can AI help me do this? I

love it. I love that. You've also shared with us some use cases where we're doing it step by step, right? We're researching or we're building the personality profile, and then we're role playing with that. Take it step by step. Geoff, you shared a lot of valuable information in a short period of time with some exciting use cases. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise on the courage of a leader podcast.

It's my pleasure.

Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please reach out to me through the courage of a leader website @ www.courageofalleader.com I'd love to hear from you. Please take the time to leave a review on iTunes that helps us expand our reach and get more people fully stepping into their leadership potential. Until next time, be bold and be brave, because you've got the Courage of a Leader.