Welcome to this week's episode of the Using AI Network Podcast. My name is Chris Daigle, and I'm your host. Very cool episode today. A friend of mine from Austin, Texas, Jeff Woods, has recently released his book, The AI Driven Leader. And in that book, there's some real wake-up calls for those of us who think we're using AI the right way, especially for those of us who are business executives, leaders, decision makers in industry. If you're not using AI the way that Jeff describes in this podcast interview, I would suggest that you're a lot like me. You're missing out. I'm going to suggest that this is probably going to be one of your favorite episodes this year. So, with that, let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay, everybody, welcome back to Using AI at work, and this is gonna be a pretty cool episode. Uh our guest, Jeff Woods, I'm gonna allow him to introduce himself in just a moment. But Jeff and I had the opportunity to hang out last night uh because he just launched his brand new book, AI Driven Leader. And we're gonna be talking about that today. And um, Jeff, why don't you uh you shared a little bit about yourself last night when everybody was there at the book launch party, but I'd love for the audience to know a little bit more about not just who you are, but what what got you to this stage of your career, especially with the AI angle?
SPEAKER_00Sure, sure. So it it started actually back in college, my senior year. I was doing an internship. And right before graduating, Chris, I sit down with the CEO and I asked him what I thought was the right question, which was, what job do you think I should get after school? And he looked at me and he said, Jeff, you're asking the wrong question. You should be asking what are the skills I can master that are so valuable they'll serve me no matter where I go. And what jobs will help me develop those skills? This is the best advice I've ever received in my career, Chris. And that led me to getting into sales, which ultimately led to me moving to Austin, Texas in 2015 to start a training and consulting company behind a really popular book called The One Thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The when the book took off, there was a problem because Gary Keller, who was the lead author on the book, his one thing is Keller Williams, largest real estate company in the world. His co-author, Jay Papazan's one thing, is writing books with Gary. And Gary looked at Jay and said, I guess we need somebody whose one thing is the one thing. And that became my opportunity. So I moved to Austin to partner with Gary and Jay to turn their book into a training and consulting company. That led to me going into companies from growth to the Fortune 500, facilitating strategic offsites and just creating immense clarity and focus on the one thing that if they just focused on that, everything else would be easier or unnecessary. The company was very successful. I had a chance to sell in 22. And so I had a two-on-compete. I get a call from a guy named Naveen Jindle, who's the chairman of Jindle Steel and Power, giant steel company out of India. I had been his coach when I was with the one thing and I had been coaching his executives. When he found out I left, he said, Would you come in-house? And I thought, maybe. What's the job? And he said, You tell me. So the way where this got interesting, the way Jindle is structured, it's like a family office. They own tons of companies. Jindle Steel is the public company. Everything else is private. I stepped in as the global chief growth officer. And my job was to sit with the Jindle family at a group level to understand their vision, but then to work with the executive teams of every operating company, focusing on what I call the four drivers of growth: strategy, execution, people, and technology. Strategy is about building a competitive advantage. Execution is about a focused strategic plan that you execute. People is about having right people in right seats doing right things. And tech is about harnessing technology to make your people better, operations more efficient, or products and services more valuable. While I was there, Chris, ChatGPT hit the world.
SPEAKER_01Nice.
SPEAKER_00When it came out, I saw it as the next skill to master. And I think what a lot of leaders have done right now is they see AI and they think, I'll get to it later. Or they're daily, they delegate it to someone else. I didn't do that. I said, I may not be the person that owns AI in this company, but as the person responsible for growth, I have a responsibility to have a foundational understanding of the technology to be able to say, should we use this or not? I realized pretty quickly that using it to write a better email was a waste of my time. But something that was a great investment of my time was using it for strategic thinking and decision making. The moment I started viewing it as a thought partner rather than as an assistant or another Google, I started to get pretty disruptive results. And I made the case to the chairman of the board that we drive this through all of our companies, which for context, we had about 100,000 people globally. And he looked at me and he said, I agree. And I said, I think you should own this at the board level. And he said, I disagree. And then he suggested that I own it. The problem, while I was really excited at the opportunity, like essentially a default chief AI officer, if you will. Sure. I didn't have the competence. I didn't know how. And so I realized I was missing a person. And so I picked up the phone and I called a little company called Google. And I told them I was the chief growth officer for Jindle Steel. And they know exactly who that company is. It's a behemoth out in India. And they they said, Would you like to partner? And I said, Sure. So now when I'm flying to India every quarter, I'm living at their headquarters and they're teaching me what is this technology. They're teaching me how to identify use cases and to tune models. And Chris, I saw the future. While I was with Jindle, we took their market cap from 750 million to 12 billion. That was just one company. I can't say how the other companies grew because they were private. They all grew. And none of them are small. And that's when I realized I was thinking and playing too small because I was doing this inside of one group when I could be taking this to the world. And so that led me to resign and start AI leadership and write my book, The AI Driven Leader, because I realized that AI adoption is not your goal. Growth is. But there was a void of strategic guidance for leaders on who they'd have to become to lead their organizations into the AI-driven future. And the journey began.
SPEAKER_01This is fascinating. So obviously, early in, obviously you saw very quickly beyond just the novel, you know, what we call the candy, the, ooh, that's cute, that's interesting, that's funny. You saw immediately that it had strategic impact. What part did AI play in the development of the framework that you describe in the book?
SPEAKER_00Some. I focus on the 20% priorities that drive 80% of the results. I carry that same mindset into AI application. I find that most people who are harnessing generative AI are applying it to 80% tactical use cases that only drive 20% of the value. Because that's what the majority of their time is being spent on. I'm doing the exact opposite. I'm saying if we are going to go through the learning curve to figure out how to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, whatever it is, we need to focus it on something that's going to deliver huge results for the organization. And so when I also realized in building this company, it's moving, technology is moving so fast. I didn't want to create something that was outdated the moment it was created. So I'm focusing on what's timeless. Strategy is timeless. So for example, one of my frameworks for driving growth of companies is a quarterly strategy review. Where on a quarterly basis, we as an executive team revisit what is the competitive advantage we're building in the long term or strategy? How are we executing against our strategic plan? Where have priorities changed? What are we saying yes to that we need to say no to? What are we saying no to that we need to be saying yes to? People, our goals or our priorities have shifted. Have we changed people's job descriptions? Have we reallocated our human capital to focus it on what matters most? And now let's look at technology and ask how might we harness technology to make our people more productive? Are operations more efficient, or are products and services more valuable? That is timeless. Sure. For 10 years, I've done that by being the guy who asks the executive teams these questions. This is where AI changes things. You ever read the book 10X is easier than 2X? Yeah. Okay. For those who are not familiar, the high-level premise is that you can double your growth by holding on to 80% of what you currently do, and you only have to change 20% of what you do. But if you want to 10x your growth, you literally have to let go of 80% of what you currently do, hold on to the core 20%, and move the balance 80% to a completely higher level of capability. So, Chris, here's where I've gotten clear. For the last decade, driving growth required me to be the one to ask executives questions. I now look at generative AI and ask how can I harness that to ask all the questions to completely free me up to move to a higher level of capability. Okay. So for example, if you go to my website, aileadership.com, at the top it'll say AI Thought Partner. If you click it, it'll just drag you to the bottom of my homepage. I have created an AI model tuned on the manuscript of my book and lots of custom instructions, including a full page prompt that gets AI to act as me in facilitating the quarterly strategic review. You literally, right now, could go on it and say, do my quarterly strategic review and it will behave as me in facilitating it. I never have to ask the questions again because now AI can do it. I just bought back 80% of my time.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so I agree with you 100%. I think that you would probably say that your experience is that people that aren't following your framework, they're enamored with the technology first and they're leaving all of the stuff that's really going to make a difference. They're leaving that behind because they're chasing shiny. Bingo.
SPEAKER_00Your goal is growth. AI can either accelerate your growth or distract you from it. The question is, are you making it a tool in search of a problem, or are you focusing strategy first, technology second?
SPEAKER_01And what are you seeing? It seems like what I'm seeing is that most people are like, let's figure out the tool and then we'll circle back on strategy.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Well, that's one of two reasons. All the tech companies are pushing it as a solution, looking for a problem, selling you features and benefits, saying, look at this is the future. And if you don't do this, you'll be out of business in six months. That's just hype. Or it's executives who feel like they're behind and feel like they have to do something with AI in order to be ahead of the curve. I mean, I won't say the name of the company, but there is a Fortune 500 company that I know extremely well, where I talked to two executives that when I asked, what have you done? They said nothing. In fact, we are blocked from using any type of large language model internally. And the very next week, the CEO went on an earnings call and talked about how much they're harnessing AI.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Yep. You've got to, I guess. One of the things that was interesting, the first time that we met, you shared with me that you had been doing kind of some ad hoc research with your very high-level executive connections, asking them three particular questions about AI. Yeah, do you mind sharing that information? Because I found that was like Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So the the way this happened, right when I was starting, I had made the commitment to start AI leadership and I had made a commitment to write a book. I couldn't tell you what the company was going to be about or the book was going to be about, but I had made the commitment to doing it. And I talked to a buddy who's in the famous tech incubator Y Combinator. Yep. And he asked me the same, or he gave me the same advice that the Y Combinator folks gave the founders of Airbnb. Go interview 100 ideal customers, then come back and tell me what your business is. So I started calling. And I'm talking execs from growth to Fortune 500. And I asked the same three questions. Do you believe AI is the future? Will you adopt it? What have you done? Now, Chris, I had a hypothesis that the answer would be yes, it's the future. Yes, we will adopt it. And here's what we're doing. 100% said it's the future. 100% said they would adopt it. Less than 5% had done anything. The reason why was because executives are too busy and they don't know where to start. And so this was very enlightening for me because I was ready to build a company and write a book about how to transform your organization with AI at the center and your people's interests at the center. But very quickly, 200 plus executives told me that was not their problem. Their problem was knowing where to start. And so I ended up completely pivoting and writing the book about how do I help an executive understand what this technology is and go from zero to one in a way that brings real value to them, which is using it for strategic thinking and decision making.
SPEAKER_01So can you kind of walk us through what your approach would be? Because it sounds like, and I'm going to get on the website as soon as we're done with this, and I'm going to start tapping into that knowledge using that um uh bot that you've got on the site that's trained on your uh your approach to things. But can you kind of walk me through? Let's say I was the the executive, we were able to get your attention. I'm here in Austin, so it's easy for me to meet with you. I sit with you and we start talking about this. And I say, Jeff, what do we do? Where do we go from here?
SPEAKER_00My question, I asked the same question in this case. And real situation. 30 days ago, I was sitting in front of a room of CEOs, uh, a YPO forum, and I just asked, What are your biggest problems? Not necessarily AI, just what are your biggest problems? I don't care about AI. Yeah. I care about helping your business grow. AI is a tool, is a tool I have to help your business grow. It's a damn good tool. It's not the only tool. Yeah. And one of the CEOs looked at me and said, that's easy. I own a manufacturing company. I leased a whole bunch of capital equipment from this company in Japan. The debt structure is now killing my business. I will go bankrupt if we do not restructure the debt. I thanked him for throwing the softball at me. Yeah. And I asked what he'd done. And he said, he started walking me through all the things he had done. The whole time he's talking, I am typing everything he is saying into good old Chatchi PT. And so he's saying the various strategies he had they had deployed, why they didn't work. And he says, you know what? It really comes down to the fact that this is a publicly traded company in Japan. It has gone all the way to the board and they are refusing to restructure the debt because they are worried they will lose face in Japanese society. Interesting. And then he looks at me and goes, show me how AI can help with that. You're like, hold on. Now, in this, in these moments, anytime I approach a use case, I approach with curiosity rather than an expectation of a result. And I already had all the context in there. And then I said, okay, this is the context. I want you to act as an investment banker with deep expertise in restructuring debt. Interview me by asking one question at a time, up to three questions max, to gain additional context. And then I want you to accomplish the task of generating five non-obvious strategies I could deploy to get the board to restructure the debt. I sent it to ChatGPT. It immediately asked, Do you have relationships with any other influential executives in Japan that this board would respect? What a great question. That's a great question. And I look at the CEO and he goes, Holy crap, I do. And I would have never thought to have asked that question. And so we put the answers in. Yeah. And then it asked two more questions around Japanese society and how he had navigated it historically. And then it came back and said, Here's your five non-obvious strategies. Number one, Chris, it called the Saving Face Consortium. It said, You have enough relationships with other influential executives in Japan. Approach them to acquire the debt with really favorable terms. Your debt will get restructured and the board will save face. I look at him, Chris, and he's emotional. Yeah. He goes, Jeff, I haven't slept in 90 days. I literally have had no next step and every day watching my business die. And in less than 10 minutes, here's a strategy I actually think could work. I texted him last week, Chris, and asked what's happened. And he said, The ball is moving, and I actually think this is gonna get done.
SPEAKER_01So you know, somebody that that just casually reviewed the just say, Oh, he just used Chat GPT. But it's more than that. It's the it's the approach to doing it.
SPEAKER_00What's the difference? What's the difference between McDonald's and a Michelin star meal? The the packaging, the delivery, the the ingredients you use and how they're prepared. It's the same thing with AI. When I think what's the difference between an extraordinary marriage and divorce? Quality of communication. The difference that makes the difference is not the technology, it's the leader who wields it. Which is why the AI-driven leader is not an AI book, it's a leadership book. It's about you and how you wield this to accelerate growth, build a competitive advantage, and win in an AI-driven future.
SPEAKER_01This is interesting because you don't have competition. There's a lot of books out there that are competing to teach you AI. You're not competing to teach us AI. You are delivering something that has a you know multi-decade, multi-century track record, and that is develop a strategy, follow the strategy, make sure you get the resources. You're just introducing AI as an advisor, an accelerant, uh uh a force multiplier for the strategic side. Aha. Okay. So I don't even know where to go from here because that that really kind of skews the whole conversation from an this is an AI conversation, but it's not. It's now a conversation about um how people are really, especially executives. So let me let's go back to that 100-105 scenario. Okay, you had talked to all of these executives, they all said, yeah, we believe it's gonna have major impact. Um we want to use it, but we don't know where to start. In in that environment, you're not doing really anything differently. You're just coming in with I mean, you're not doing anything differently than you shared in this YPO example. You're coming in and you're helping them get back to the basics, which is where the real leverage is. The tool's not the leverage necessarily. It's knowing, like you said, the ingredients, the quality of the communication. So when you're working with uh clients in this manner, is there some sort of AI education that you're doing?
SPEAKER_00Yes, there has to be. Because I have to. Whatever their strategic plan was, whatever their long-term strategy was, just got outdated. Tell me about that. Because AI just changed the game. What used to be impossible might have just become not only possible, but probable if you know how to use AI inside your organization. So I still have to establish a baseline understanding of what the technology is and how they can wield it to build a competitive advantage. Then we get straight back to, but it's all anchored in the context of strategy first, technology second. I will show them use cases designed for executive teams. All of them are 20% priorities that could drive 80% of the growth of their business. None of this is how do I write a marketing message? None of this is how do I generate an image. None of that matters at an executive level. 100%. So let me give you another one. A company I've been advising for a few years, consumer package goods. Company. They have a hostile board. Every quarter is a bloodbath. And six months ago, the CEO came to me and said, I need your help. Things are not going well with the board. Half of my time is spent on a monthly basis dealing with board shenanigans. We're working toward an exit in the next 24 months. We got to be focused. And the board is just throwing landmines constantly in the way. And oh, by the way, if things don't turn around, the CEO and most of exec his executive team are going to be fired. Okay, this is a problem that we need to solve. And he said, can you help me solve this? I don't immediately go, let's shoehorn AI into the solution. I ask, what are the tools within our tool belt that we can use to solve the problem? In this case, AI happened to be a great tool. So I called the executive team together and I sat them down and I wrote a prompt where I had literally Chat GPT. Adopt the persona of an HR professional with deep expertise in creating personality profiles to interview the executive team by asking one question at a time to gain deep context and understanding about one board member. And once it felt it had enough context to generate a personality profile for that single board member, and I hit enter and it began to conduct an interview. And didn't take long before it spat out a personality profile. And the exec team looked and said, wow, that's pretty good. They made a few changes because they're the thought leader. AI's just the thought partner. They still have editorial oversight. So they made some adjustments, saved it, put it into Word. We repeated the process for every board member. When that was done, Chris, I then created a quick custom AI model and I called it the AI board. And I said, Your job is to simulate our board. Here are the personality profiles of each board member. Study them and confirm you understand how they behave. Enter. Guess how long it took them to read all of the personality profiles and study it. Moments. One second. Yeah. And then I said, Great, here's how this is going to work. We are going to upload our deck for an upcoming board meeting, and you will simulate each board member in reviewing the deck and identify the potential landmines that we have missed that will cause the bloodshed in the next board meeting and summarize it for us. And we upload the deck and we hit enter. It scans the entire deck and instantly starts generating this response. The exec team then uses that to then say, okay, here's how we have to clean up slide eight. Here's what we need to do to slide 12. Wow. Then they go, oh, oh, we're not done yet. Then we go and have the board meeting. There's always at least one board member that's virtual, which means there's over Zoom, which means their AI note taker is taking notes. We take the transcript from the real board meeting, feed it back into the AI model, and ask it to compare what it simulated versus what actually happened. And based on that, to improve the personality profile of every board member.
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SPEAKER_00Now, back to the episode. Here's where this gets wild. The CEO called me yesterday and said, Jeff, we just had our second board meeting. I go, how did it go? And he said, The board said it was the best board meeting they've ever had and the best deck they've ever seen. That was in six months. Two iterations.
SPEAKER_01So this is incredible. Like as you're saying this stuff, I'm like, understanding, yes, it is AI, but it's but it's the strategic application of it on what matters. Yes. So are you in in the book, are you teaching executives and leaders how to think this way?
SPEAKER_00Heck yeah.
SPEAKER_01Dude, hold on. Because I just got my copy last night. I haven't had a chance to do that. Yeah, you did.
SPEAKER_00So, like, again, this is this is a leadership book. So, like, I walk through five specific use cases at a leadership level. How do you use AI? Five very specific use cases where I also give prompts and tell stories of real companies that actually deployed them. I walk through how you like what is the high price of asking the wrong questions and how do you learn to ask the right ones? Because that's the difference here. How do you collapse the time to turn data into decisions? I give decision-making frameworks. I walk through how you 10x the value of every employee. Like there is, it's all tactical leadership stuff that's enhanced by AI.
SPEAKER_01I am going to start using this right away. I was, I didn't know what to expect because I, you and I, we we'd spoken and um I knew that you were, I thought you were maybe kind of like the AI whisperer for executives, but this is more like helping tune them up on understanding it, but it's not the case at all. This is more um brilliant application of a powerful model into something that really has nothing to do with AI. You're just using that to support something that they all should be doing anyway, and that maybe they're doing, but they're not doing it as effectively because of their own bias or box that they live in. And when you introduce you as kind of that third party who doesn't have the emotion attached to it, who knows how to use these tools and ask the questions with the ingredients with the questions, kaboom.
SPEAKER_00I'm approaching a timeless problem with a timely solution.
SPEAKER_01How do you when people ask you, what do you do? What do you like an executive says, hey, I you know, I was playing golf and my friend said I should reach out to you. We've got some issues with our business, but they didn't tell me much about you. What do you do, Jeff?
SPEAKER_00I help leaders think strategically about how to accelerate growth, build a competitive advantage, and get more done in less time by harnessing AI as a thought partner.
SPEAKER_01When you introduce the AI angle into that conversation, what is the is there enthusiasm, skepticism, concern? Like what are the executives? Curiosity. Okay.
SPEAKER_00I always ask, what does that look like? Which is that's all I need, that's all they need to do. And then I usually will tell them a story, whether it's of the Japanese board, whether it's of the AI board. I've got, dude, I got stories I could go on for days about stuff like this. Um, and it's it's just showing real stuff that execs face all the time. But here's what's different. Chris, how many books do you think you've read in your lifetime? Over a thousand. Okay. What you you are very well read. Yeah. What percent of that collective knowledge can you recall and harness instantly? One tenth of one percent. One tenth of one percent. And you have been very successful on that. Everybody who's listening to this is probably in the same boat, whether they've read more or less books. The the the whole point is you can remember probably one percent, if not less, of what you've learned in your lifetime, and you've gotten to where you are on that. AI, these models currently have been trained on 15 trillion tokens. That is the equivalent of 200 million books. It can recall 100% of the information instantly. So this is where it becomes valuable. Stop viewing AI as your assistant and start viewing it as your thought partner. As the thought leader, you give it direction on the task or goal you are trying to achieve. But then you get to tap into the knowledge of 200 million books, and in one second, it shun it down to the data that is relevant to your situation and like a laser beam, uh focuses it and applies it to what you are trying to do. You are the thought leader, AI is your thought partner. That is where this becomes incredibly disruptive from a results standpoint without actually disrupting the organization itself.
SPEAKER_01In the book, do you teach leaders how to think that way? Of course. Okay, then I am uh I'm gonna be dog earring and flipping pages immediately.
SPEAKER_00Well, the test for me will be if you come back and tell me, yes, it does. I believe it does. I've put it in front of people that scare the crap out of me, and they've come back and said, This is mind-blowing. I can't wait.
SPEAKER_01So where where do you go from here? Because I I I see that you now, like you're walking in the room with an army of intelligence behind you, even though it's just you and your iPad, even right. But where where do you go with the business uh of this capability now that the book is launched?
SPEAKER_00Before I built anything or wrote anything, I was very clear that the thing I love doing is driving strategic thinking with executive teams, because I believe your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. I am not interested in implementing AI technology into companies. That's tactical. I'm not interested in what's the latest tool. I want to drive strategic thinking that drives helps build better businesses and better lives for people. I'm also clear, I don't like being the guy with all the answers. I want to be the guy standing in the flow of knowledge and learning and harnessing that to bring more value. So there are three things that we do. We do workshops to show executive teams how to go from zero to one to get the flywheel spinning and give them a roadmap to keep it spinning. We also facilitate strategic offsites to align an executive team around their strategy, their long-term competitive advantage, and their short-term strategic plan. Whatever they had in the past, they're thinking too small because AI just made what they could achieve way bigger. I stretch them to think bigger. That's the workshops. Then there is the AI-driven leadership collective. This is the heartbeat of the company. I am building an executive network highly curated of executives who are AI-driven leaders, where we get off site several times a year to actually have space to think. We sit and we think. And then we get in the room and we challenge each other on what we thought and push each other to think bigger. And then we share how each of us is harnessing AI so that we can learn from each other. Because Chris, like there are things I can learn from you in this conversation. You are learning things from me. If we can partner up and share what we are learning, we collapse the learning curve and we get to take all that intelligence and deploy it into our companies and build a competitive advantage. And we also identify the problems that we face and we partner to form solutions to them and deploy it into our company. And all of this is collective knowledge that becomes more valuable over time. That's the collective. And then there's some companies that we will consult for. I'm not building a huge consulting company. We have a high bar for who we work with, but we become the advisors to the executive team where we understand the strategic plan on a quarterly basis. We do discovery, we show them where we think the highest impact use cases are, and we've got the partners to link them to who can do the implementation or who could who have the SaaS products that we can just plug and play and go.
SPEAKER_01This is so interesting. So you're you're you don't need to be the AI expert. You need to be the expert at the growth side, like you were talking about, and the the thinking stuff. You just happen to have something in your back pocket that allows you to do it better, faster, stronger, the 200 million book access instantly. That's how that okay, wasn't expecting this. I didn't really understand the paradigm here. But that you don't have to make a pivot. This is what you've already been doing for companies. You just now have a workforce that is 20 bucks a month that has all the like this is incredible. Um I kind of want to hustle off of here so I can go open the book and start reading it, honestly. Like, this is timely, not just for my business, but for I would imagine any business because the introduction of certainly you know the data side of AI, but generative AI into the new paradigm of business. It's got leaders of all strata of business a little concerned because they are that 100-105 you were talking about. Heck yeah, we know it's gonna change. Heck yeah, we want to do it, but we don't have time. We don't have that resource we can tap into to help us do this. So this book is um gonna shift the way that they're doing. I think there's a lot of people out there who think they have to get tactically skilled with an AI tool stack, which at some level of business, sure, you need those people, but the business owner does not need to be signing up for hey gen and you know, all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00When people ask me, like, what's the best tool for image generation and how do I create an avatar? And I stop back and I step back and I say, before I answer that, tell me, what is the competitive advantage you are trying to build in the long term through the actions you're taking in the short term? If they can't clearly answer that, then their current questions are irrelevant. I would rather shift their focus and say, how about I show you how to write a prompt so you can turn ChatGPT into me and have it interview you to pull context out of your head and then serve up a defensible competitive advantage for your future. How about we start there?
SPEAKER_01It's very impressive, Jeff. I again I just got the book last night, haven't had a chance to go through it. You and I had had some conversations. I knew that you were operating at a, you know, a strategic, a C-suite, a board level within companies, but I really didn't understand what you were doing until now. And I think that it's brilliant that you don't need to be the AI expert to use AI to transform these companies.
SPEAKER_00This is because if I look at what companies have done that's worked and what has not worked, again, there's only three ways AI can bring value: put in the hands of your people to make them more productive, weave it into operations to make them more efficient, put in your products and services to make them more valuable. Most of the big companies have been racing to shoehorn it into their product or service so that they can say they're an AI product or an AI company, or they're immediately trying to use AI to automate things, much of which don't need to be automated. They just should be eliminated. They should just be done, just gone. And I the reason they're making the wrong investments is because the people making the investments don't have a foundational understanding of the technology. Leaders go first. You have to become an AI-driven leader yourself. To understand what this technology is capable of, then you can intelligently and strategically identify should we even be looking at our operations yet? Have we earned the right to yet? Have we earned the right to look at weaving this into our products or services? The answer very well may be yes, but now it is a strategic decision rather than a reaction.
SPEAKER_01And this is an interesting positioning. So AI-driven leader, but leaders operate at all levels of the business. They're not all the CEO, right? So there's gonna be individuals who are, I don't need, even team leaders. But if they show up into the organization and this is the way that they're thinking, they're zigging when everybody else is zagging, right? Like everybody else is trying to use the tool to do something like, like you said, productivity or or whatever. And this individual is gonna come in and say, I've got a better way to do it, right? Like I've got a more effective way to use the way.
SPEAKER_00So for executive teams, this is a way to build a competitive advantage in your market. For leaders who are not the C level, yeah, this is a way to gain a competitive advantage in your career. Yes. What I have noticed from coaching a lot of executive teams, we are still operating with the industrial mindset going back to the industrial revolution in the 1900s. You show up to work, you wait for direction from your boss, you focus on getting your work done as fast as possible with as few errors as possible. That is the industrial mindset. But let's be really clear when you have a question, people go to their boss for the answer. What they don't realize is they just gave their boss back a piece of their job. My very first day starting the company behind the one thing was November 1st, 2015. The first words out of Gary Keller's mouth to me were welcome to Austin. Good luck, you're going to need it. I said, Hi, thanks, why? And he said, Jeff, do you know what the best part about your job is? I said, No. He said that it's your job. And if you try to give me back pieces of your job, you will no longer have one. Because if you need me, then I don't need you. So go succeed without me. Wow. I kid you not. That was our first conversation. Nice to meet you. Um, but I learned a valuable skill because then my partner Jay said to me, Jeff, my job as a leader is to teach you how to think. I learned this when I walked into his office the next week when I asked him a question and he looked at me and said, Jeff, remember what I said? My job as a leader is to teach you how to think. I could give you the answer, but I would be doing your job, which thinking leverage is part of your job. If I answer it, you gave me your job. What do you think you should do? I gave him the answer and he said, That's exactly what I would have said, but now it's your answer. You own it. Get it done. The next week, Chris, I walk into his office, I asked him a question, and he said, Jeff, my job as a leader is to teach you how to think. What do you think you should do? I thought about it. I gave him my answer, and he goes, That's one way you could do it. What might some alternatives be? It was like he was the bumper rails in bowling and he was keeping me from going into the gutter. And I came up with a different answer. He goes, That's a great idea. Go try that. Third week I walked into his office with a question, and before he could even respond, I went, Ah, I know, I know. Your job is to teach me how to think. Here's what I think, here's the situation, here's what I think we should do. Coach me on that. For you, there's why this matters to you. Most people in an organization have been trained to go to their boss for direction. Don't go to your boss. Start using AI as your thought partner and maybe describe your boss in vivid detail to AI and ask it to adopt the persona of your boss to simulate what your boss might say. And then you can approach your boss and say, here's the situation. I think we should do this. Do you see something that I'm not seeing? Or you're a mid-level manager and you're trying to get something approved. You can ask it to simulate your CFO. And as CFO, tell it what it likes about your plan, doesn't like about your plan, and the top changes you'd have to make to restructure your plan so you would get it funded. You don't have your own to have to rely on your own skills and experience. You can now simulate the experience of any person in the world and harness it toward your use case so that you can be far more effective in your company. How about them, apples?
SPEAKER_01This is, I'm having a major aha, right? Because the the trans the this transformation that people are thinking, I think they're looking at it the wrong way. They're thinking about the tool coming in and pushing buttons on their behalf and you know, automating and things like that. And yes, that's gonna happen, but they will be doing the old way just by you they'll just be using tools. And the new way is really using these tools. To think about a new paradigm and then bringing the tools along, not letting the tools lead.
SPEAKER_00You are the thought leader, AI is your thought partner. It is here to enhance you, not to replace you. If you are leading with AI, you're asking it to replace you. If you lead with yourself and your strengths and harness it, it enhances you.
SPEAKER_01I've got a lot of uh reflection to do. Thanks, buddy.
SPEAKER_00You want me let me give you let me give you another one. I got more. Yeah. Another CPG company sells their products into Whole Foods. They get a call from Whole Foods saying, Jason Buchel, our CEO, would like to meet with you to discuss expanding our partnership with you as a vendor. Hollow. Good opportunity. So the board, the exec team takes several weeks to put together a deck and they focus it down to two pages to present to Jason. And the CEO comes to me and says, Can AI help us make this better? And I said, Let's find out. I approach with curiosity rather than expectation. I went to perplexity because it's great for research. And I said, I want you to research everything that Jason Buchel has publicly said is a priority for Whole Foods or would warrant an expansion in a partnership with a vendor, cite all sources, avoid making anything up. And it instantly generated six things with sources. I checked every single one, Chris, to make sure it was fact, not hallucination. I then went to ChatGPT, uploaded the two-page deck, and said, I want you to act as Jason Bouchel, the CEO of Whole Foods. These are the six things that you care about for the company and in a vendor to expand the partnership. Review our deck. And as Jason, give me feedback on what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and the top changes we should make to our deck so that you would expand the partnership. And it came back instantly and said, I care about fair trade and sustainability. These are a 10 out of 10 for your brand. It's nowhere to be found on your deck. Here's what I'd say, and here's where I'd place it.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00I'll give you another one. But wait, there's more. I hope you guys are paying attention to this. This is and by the way, the reason that I can speak this way is because I live and breathe this. Yeah. As you can figure out pretty quickly, I'm not somebody that said, I'm gonna write a book about AI and become an AI thought leader. I am an AI-driven leader. Yeah. I had a presentation scheduled for a very large medical device company to pitch them on a scope of work. And I was gonna be presenting to an executive and their chief of staff. And I had the full deck ready to go. And an hour before the meeting, I remember I was asking myself, how might I finish and prep? And then I thought, wait, I'm asking the wrong question. It's not how might I do this, it's how might AI help me do this. And so I wrote a prompt where I fed it the deck. I gave it all the context on the sales funnel and said, I'm about to present this to you. I want you to adopt the persona of the executive and the chief of staff. Here is how I would describe them. And I described both of their personalities in vivid detail and said, In a second, once I send this, I want you to study it and confirm that you understand it. I'm gonna switch over from desktop mode to voice mode, where I will actually present the deck to you as though you are the customer. And I want you to role model both the executive and the chief of staff, but I want you to be a 10 out of 10 difficult on me. I want you to throw curve balls. I want you to make me practice like I am about to play in the toughest game of my life. And when I say all done, you will know I'm done with my pitch. And I then want you to give me feedback on what you liked about my presentation, what you didn't like about my presentation, and the top changes I should make to my presentation so I get the deal. Confirm if you understand. I sent it and I said, I understand, awaiting for you to start. And so I went from desktop mode, Chris, fired up ChatGPT on my phone, found the thread, clicked the little headphone icon to switch it to voice mode, and said, I'm so excited for this today. Here's what we're going to be outlining. And I literally went into the full-blown pitch for 15 minutes. We are going back and forth, and it is throwing curveballs, it is jousting with me. I'm handling them. And at the very end, I said, All done. And it said, Great, here is my summary of what you did well, what you didn't do well, and the changes you can make. I stopped the voice mode on my phone, went back to the browser, hit refresh, and the entire summary was there. It called out one of the things I could do better. I had no return on investment justified. And I went, you've got to be kidding. How did I miss that?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00It's tough to read the label when you're inside the box. That's the idea. Here's the problem, Chris. I didn't know what the ROI was. So I asked it. I said, I actually don't know what it is. What would you recommend that I do in this situation? The call is in 30 minutes. Yeah. And it said, How about if the meeting's going well, how about you ask the executive to defend the investment? I went, that's brilliant. So I created a slide. And at the title, I put defend the investment. And when we got to that point in the presentation, this exec was so fired up. He was so excited. And I said, I really want to help you get this done. Can I coach you on this? And he said, sure. And I clicked and the next slide went over and it said defend the investment. And I said, Who are you going to have to sell this to to get this funded? And he said, the CFO. And I said, Great. I'm your CFO. Sell me on it. And I'm going to role play as him and I'm going to push you. Let's go. And so he starts selling it and I start acting as a budget conscious CFO, throwing curveballs at him and lots of objections. And I'm listening to him talk the whole time. My AI note taker is taking notes. When we and I we wrapped it up and I said, You feel I feel very confident in your justification. Let me update the deck. I'll send it to you. Let's meet next week. I then downloaded the transcript, fed it into Chat GPT, and said, Go to the section about defending the investment. And I want you, here's the deck. I need a slide on the ROI. Use his words to create an executive summary in one slide that would defend the investment to the CFO. And it generated the content. I looked at it as thought leader. I did not copy and paste. Yes. I had editorial oversight. I made some adjustments, plugged it into the slides, converted it to a PDF, sent it. Deal got closed.
SPEAKER_01Man, I'm getting chills. These are fantastic stories. I uh, you know, most of the people that I talk to, the podcast is called Using AI at work, and we talk about that. And we we intend to get into tactical so that the average user can understand, like, oh, I didn't know it could do that. Oh, I didn't know it could do that. But that's not where my happy place is. I don't, I love educating, but that stuff doesn't fascinate me because it's I'm not gonna say it's boring, but it's not that difficult, right? This is the part where there's truly like another layer to what's possible with this stuff. It's not that I can make an avatar and not have to do the intro to this podcast anymore. It's that like I could walk into with this framework of the AI-driven leader, I could seriously go into any boardroom in the world and be able to bring value if I knew to think this way.
SPEAKER_00And that is when I was with Jindel Steele, I had our business in Australia reporting to me. And this business was in turnaround mode, and the CEO sent me the deck for the board meeting an hour before the meeting. It was 66 pages long. I fed it to ChatGPT and said, act as an aggressive, growth-minded board member, review this deck. The company's not doing well, it's in turnaround mode. We gotta, we've got to get this thing turned around stat. What would be the top three questions you would ask the CEO? We only have an hour, rank them in order of priority. And it came back and said, you know, your production target for last month was X million tons. You did Y million tons, leading to a loss of X. Um, help me understand why this happened and what strategies you're putting in place to mitigate it so it never happens again. And I was like, holy crap, that's one question. The other two questions I already had. Yeah. But that one I didn't see. Because it was like buried on page 37 on the production targets. And we fired up the the conversation and I thanked him for the deck. I asked for more advanced notice in the next, in the in the future. I said, we got a lot to do. The most important question I can ask you is last month production was X. You delivered Y. That led to a loss of Z. Why did this happen? And what are you doing to mitigate this into the future? And he literally looks at me and goes, Wow, you really did read the deck. You're like, hell yeah. Dude, this is um wow.
SPEAKER_01This is this is fantastic. I can't, I seriously, I can't wait to dig into the book. It's sitting in my car right now. Um I'm going to be using some of these frameworks tonight. So, man, like obviously you have the opportunity for a limited number of people to engage with you and your team directly. You've got the off-sites that you're going to be doing, and that's you've obviously got the uh ability to interact with a digital version of you on the website. The book is now out, and I'm sure they can find it at uh physical bookstores as well as online. Um what else would you recommend that somebody who wants to dive into this more?
SPEAKER_00You have to gain a foundation on how to use this. If you go to aileadership.com on the homepage, there is a crash course that is free. Like I'm playing a completely different game. Other people are charging you to learn how to do this. I'm just giving it away for free. Yeah. So download the crash course. I've got a prompt library in there with strategic prompts specifically for executives. You can just copy the prompt. You can paste it into the thought partner right there and engage with it. Use that. The thought partner has been trained on the manuscript of the book so that you don't just read the book, you ask questions to the thought partner to understand the book and help you live it. Nice. And if you are an executive, like, yes, we can do a workshop for your executive team. If you are an executive with decision-making authority around budget and you are committed to being an AI-driven leader, I would encourage you to apply to look at the collective. We do not accept everybody, but that is going to be the backbone of this company is working with the decision makers in companies where we get off site to think strategically, to share how we are using AI and to solve the problems we are facing around AI. So we are always ahead of the curve and never behind it.
SPEAKER_01And all these resources are on the URL again.com. AIleadership.com. Fantastic URL. Man, uh honestly, dude, thank you so much. This was I if nobody else listens to this, I don't care. I just learned a whole lot myself. This is fantastic. Of course, we're going to be getting this out. I'm going to make sure that all the community knows this. And um, I would love to anything that we can do to support you. Uh this is very exciting, what you've done. And I'm I'm let's let's meet again.
SPEAKER_00Let's meet again at the Redfridge Society. And sounds good, man.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we got stuff. Thank you so much, everybody. I hope you got as much out of this as I did. Please go get the book and use the resources on the website. I'm gonna be probably doing future posts about my interaction with all of that stuff on AI um aileadership.com.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and um a huge favor to me when you're listening to a podcast, I also have the AI Driven Leader podcast, which you can subscribe to. And the the biggest favor you can do to me, if you get the book, take a picture of you holding the book and leave a review on Amazon. Because if you upload the picture with the review, Amazon loves you. This helps me reach more people. And if you then post that on LinkedIn and share it with your world, like I am trying so hard to get this flywheel spinning. I will literally, if you tag me on LinkedIn, I will personally comment on every single post. It would mean the world to me.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, dude, congrats. And I know that the future is going to be very bright with this approach to AI and leadership, man. So again, thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we will see you next week. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. Well, thanks to our producer, Evan DeSonnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at Work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.