Geoff Woods is the Founder of AI Leadership, a company helping leaders harness AI to make faster, smarter strategic decisions. He is a true visionary in artificial intelligence and its applications for enhancing leadership. With prior experience as the Chief Growth Officer at Jindal Steel & Power, he was instrumental in the company's market capitalization growth from $750 million to over $12 billion in just four years. Geoff also co-founded a training and consulting company and has impacted businesses with revenues ranging from $10 million to $60 billion with his coaching and advice. As the author of The AI-Driven Leader, he aims to empower business leaders to think strategically and accelerate growth through AI.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:25] Geoff Woods discusses how AI Leadership transforms leaders into strategic thinkers
[3:10] The impact of generative AI beyond content creation
[5:04] Where we are in the AI adoption cycle and what to expect going forward
[9:19] The necessity for leaders to enhance their AI literacy
[10:39] Geoff shares insight into the importance of detailed communication with AI for effective results
[14:50] Real-world application of AI in solving complex business challenges
[21:52] AI model recommendations for making AI your thought partner
[27:24] The power shift with AI-enhanced work quality and productivity
[32:14] The importance of mentorship
In this episode…
In the race to outpace competitors, artificial intelligence is the secret weapon that will redefine leadership and business strategy. AI could be more than a convenient tool, transforming average performers into strategic powerhouses. However, how does one navigate and harness this tidal wave of technological advancement?
Geoff Woods, a thought leader in AI, discusses harnessing AI to accelerate strategic thinking and company growth. He provides insights into the true potential of AI, sharing his expertise on using AI as a thought partner for leaders and how he leverages its immense knowledge database for strategic advantage. With a background in leading substantial growth for businesses, Geoff now directs his efforts toward showing leaders how to employ AI to streamline operations and foster disruptive results without disrupting their organizations.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Geoff Woods, Founder of AI Leadership, about utilizing AI for strategic leadership. Geoff discusses how AI Leadership transforms leaders into strategic thinkers, the necessity for leaders to enhance their AI literacy, the importance of detailed communication with AI for effective results, and AI model recommendations for making AI your thought partner.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods
"Harnessing Fractional Workforce for Business Success With Praveen Ghanta" on The Customer Wins
"Transforming Financial Services With a Customer-First Approach With David Crow" on The Customer Wins
"The Value of Creating Personalized Financial Services Experiences With Valarie Vest" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"The difference between growing your business or going out of business is your ability to think strategically as a leader."
"AI, specifically generative AI, can become a very valuable tool for strategic thinking and decision-making if you harness it as a thought partner."
"We are going to be living in a fundamentally different world in the next five years."
"I believe that a leader's job is not to predict the future, but it is to understand that there are a variety of potential futures, and you have to prepare your business to survive them and thrive in spite of them."
"AI will not replace you, it will enhance you."
Action Steps:
Hone your AI communication skills: Since the effectiveness of AI hinges on your ability to communicate, improving this skill will maximize your results with AI.
Incorporate AI into your strategic thinking: Start viewing AI as a thought partner to explore new strategies for business challenges and opportunities.
Empower your workforce with AI: Encourage your team to utilize AI in their roles, enhancing productivity and quality of work.
Stay abreast of AI advancements: Update your understanding of AI technologies regularly to lead your organization confidently into the future.
Explore AI applications for customer engagement: Investigate how AI can be used to improve customer experience on your website and in your services.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win, and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Praveen Ghanta of Fraction, David Crow of Axos Clearing, and Valerie Vest of Cambridge Investment Research. Today is a special episode in my series on AI, and today's guest is Geoff Woods, founder of AI Leadership and author of The AI-Driven Leader Book.
And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik!. Using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get that clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started. So before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Andy Cox of Cox Consulting Network, where they provide consulting and recruiting for finance and accounting. Go check out their website at coxnet.work, coxnet.work.
All right. Geoff Woods is the author of The AI-Driven Leader and the founder of AI Leadership, where he empowers leaders to harness AI escape operational overwhelm and think strategically to accelerate growth. As the former chief growth Officer of Jindal Steel & 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 upwards to $60 billion. Geoff, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Geoff Woods 2:07
Thanks for having me Rich. Pleasure to be here.
Richard Walker 2:09
I'm excited to talk to you. If you haven't heard this podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Geoff, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Geoff Woods 2:25
So your ability to think strategically as a leader Rich is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. The problem is, there are all these things that stop us as leaders from thinking strategically. We help leaders become more strategic thinkers and decision-makers so they can accelerate growth, build a competitive advantage and get more done in less time.
Richard Walker 2:49
Man, I love that you said it that way Geoff, you didn't just say, oh, we deliver AI, right? You didn't talk about the how you talked about why, why this is so important, which is one of the things I love, because you're right. As a leader, we get stuck in the whirlwind. Oh, I got to answer this email, I've got to take this call, I've got to be on this trip. So when do we find the time? How are you giving people back that ability to be strategic thinkers in their business?
Geoff Woods 3:10
That's right, that's right. Is that a question? Yeah, how? Oh, gosh. So I think you have to unpack what stops us. First and foremost, one is we just don't have enough time to do it. We all know what it feel like to have too much to do not enough time. Second, we have oftentimes biases and assumptions that can lead us in the wrong direction. We don't always have access to the right data to make the best decisions, and we all feel pressure to deliver results yesterday. And this is a timeless problem, but now there's a timely solution, which I have found, artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, can become a very valuable tool for strategic thinking and decision-making if you harness it as a thought partner.
Richard Walker 3:10
And I thought we were just using it to generate content.
Geoff Woods 3:23
No, and this is where, I mean, a lot of people who have started using it treat it like a Google or they're trying to use it to create better emails or social media copy, which that's fine, but you read my bio, I've helped a lot of companies grow really big. I didn't do that by focusing on everything. I did that by focusing on the most important things that would drive the greatest growth. And so even when I started doing research for my book The AI-Driven Leader, I knew that leaders didn't know where to start. Me showing them how to write a better email with chatGPT is a waste of their time, right? But I had to figure out, what are those 20% use cases that if I sit down with a leader and show them a simple way to use AI to do that better, it actually leads to disruptive results without disrupting the organization, and that is strategic thinking and decision making.
Richard Walker 4:47
So, man, these generative AIS came out at the end of 22 and we spent all 23 hearing new product after new product coming out with AI. Where do you think we are? I mean, going into 2025 where do you think we are in the AI cycle, and how are people adopting it or not adopting it?
Geoff Woods 5:04
We're finally getting in the car to head to the stadium to watch the game. We haven't even started driving to the stadium yet. We're so early. We're so early.
Richard Walker 5:15
So is that the reason people are not thinking of it the way you are and using it the way you have?
Geoff Woods 5:22
Great question. When I was researching the book, I wanted to make sure that it would hit a bull's eye for an executive in terms of value. And so I started by just interviewing executives. I ended up sitting down with over 200 one on one. And we're talking growth companies to the fortune 500. Every one of them, literally, 100% said AI is the future. 100% said they would adopt it. But when I asked what they had done, Rich, less than 5% had done anything. At first, this blew my mind and scared me, frankly, because I had just resigned from my chief growth Officer role to start this company and write this book, and I'm talking to my ideal customers, and they're saying this is not a compelling problem because they haven't taken any action.
But when I asked a very powerful question, why, it became very clear to me, one they're already too busy, and no one had shown them where to start. Because if you already have so much that's on your plate, and you know AI is the future, you know you need to figure it out. But if it's not very clear and simple for you to take action in a way that will actually drive a result, it's just too easy to focus on the other fires that are burning in your business.
Richard Walker 6:35
Well, don't a lot of leaders think they should just delegate it to somebody else to do it on their team.
Geoff Woods 6:39
That happens too, and I have a different approach to this. I think it is 100% okay to delegate and ask somebody else in your company to be the champion, but it is not okay to abdicate your knowledge around AI. Here's why, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google shared on a video that he believes that we are going to be living in a fundamentally different world in the next five years, not 10 years, five. Everything we know about the way we do life today will be different in five years or less. That is remarkable. I believe that a leader's job is not to predict the future, but it is to understand that there are a variety of potential futures, and you have to prepare your business to survive them and thrive in spite of them. We are all staring at AI. It's a tidal wave. You can't miss it.
You have to at least develop a level of competence and literacy to understand what it is, how it works, and how it might be able to bring value so you can lead your organization into the future. Otherwise, it would be like an ostrich just sticking your head in the ground with the internet saying, I'm just gonna ignore this thing and it'll pass over. Thing and it'll pass over. No, if you don't understand the Internet, I'm not gonna tell you you're going out of business, but I will say you are fortifying a competitive disadvantage.
Richard Walker 8:15
I got to tell you, back in the 90s, I worked at Arthur Andersen. I left in 1999 and at that same moment, one of my peers who had started alongside me, was commissioned on a project by a partner to figure out, is the internet real, is it going to stick around? They were so far behind in thinking, and I was leaving to go join an internet-based company, because I saw it. And I think, at my age, I had the hindsight of having been through those types of experiences to look at AI and say, no, this is the next big, big thing. We've got to do something about it, and then to try to take action.
So going back to the leaders, one of the things I'm a very hands-on person, as a leader, I would think most leaders are, and I said, I've got to figure this out and set the tone for my company. And I asked everybody at the beginning of 23 figure out how to use AI in your job. Make your job easier, better, faster, higher quality, something, buy a tool. I don't care. Figure it out, but then I had to do that too. Do you think that is part of it? Are the leaders just not getting into the weeds and doing it? Is that necessary for them too?
Geoff Woods 9:19
Think of an adoption curve. Big change happens over time. If you look at your workforce, you can spread them out across different categories. There's the innovators, that's about two and a half percent of the workforce. You Rich are an innovator. Then there's the early adopters, that's about 13.5% of the workforce that once the innovators have kind of figured out which way it's going, they'll jump on because they want to play with it, but the at least the path has been laid out for them. It might be still grovel it's not paved, but they're ready to go. Then you've got your early majority.
That's 34%, once it the path is paved, they're going to get on and they're going to start going. Now we're halfway through the adoption curve. Then you got the late majority and the laggards. You are an innovator. So you naturally said, hey, I see this. We need to go. I'm going to leave from the front, and I want all of you to come with me. You are the exception, not the rule.
Richard Walker 10:14
Yeah, yeah. And I understand why. For the last two weeks, all I've done is spend time in chatGPT every single day. Because now I'm like, I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. And I've been playing with for 19, 20 months, and I'm still saying, oh my gosh, there's so much more it could be doing. So I want to go back to what you wrote your book about, and how do you help a leader, then use AI differently and not just treat it like Google search.
Geoff Woods 10:39
Sure. So at a high level, there's three ways AI can bring value. Put in the hands of your people to make them more productive. Put it in your operations to make them more efficient, or weave it in your products or services to make them more valuable to customers. The mistake, I believe, is to try to look at your products or services or your operations before you, as a leader, have the competence and intelligence around AI, which is why I always recommend start with making your people more productive. And let's start with the most impactful people, which is the leadership team, the executive team, that's who I focus on. And the use case is strategic thinking there, because that's what's most valuable.
But if I had to go specifically down that niche, if I want to put generative AI in the hands of a person to make them more productive, you can use it for strategic thinking. You can use it for making decisions. You can use it to create content. You can use it to generate ideas. You can use it for analysis of data, content or ideas. Those are the top five use cases that can supercharge your impact. For a leader, specifically, though I'm going straight to strategic thinking and decision-making, because that is the difference that makes the difference. So I'll give you a real use case. I sat down, I think I shared this at the forum that I presented at for you. I sat down with the CEO.
We're going on maybe three, four weeks now. This guy owns a manufacturing company. He leased a whole bunch of capital equipment from a Japanese company. Things have shifted with the business. The debt structure of that equipment is now killing his company. It's going to bankrupt him. And he has tried all these different things to get the company to restructure the debt. It's gone all the way to the board of this Japanese company, but because they're publicly traded, the board is refusing to restructure the debt because they're worried they will lose face in Japanese society. And if he doesn't solve that, he's going out of business. That's a pretty tough problem. And so he asked me, he said, can I solve that? I was like, I don't know. Let's find out. And this is important.
When I approach a use case, I approach with curiosity, not an expectation. I have no expectation of a result. I'm curious about will it work? What might I learn? And so I wrote the following prompt. I'm the CEO of a manufacturing company. We leased all this equipment from a Japanese company. The debt structure is killing us. If we don't get it restructured, we're going to go bankrupt. It's gone to the Japanese board, but because they're publicly traded, they're refusing to restructure it, because they're worried about losing face in Japanese society. All of that was context that it needed. I then said, 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, to gain additional context.
And then I want you to generate five non-obvious strategies I could use to get the board to restructure the debt for additional context. Here's the things we've done in the past and why it didn't work, and sent that. So let's pause, if anybody listening to this has been thinking that AI is another Google or if you just thought you have to put short questions in there, this right there, just made you realize the game has changed. This is a processing powerhouse, so I wrote a very detailed prompt the very first question it asked...
Richard Walker 11:03
Well, hold on, I want to make a point about this, Geoff, because this is what's helped me become more and more successful using these large language models. If I had a team member who had this expertise, wouldn't I have to give that team member all this context? Wouldn't I have to give them the background. So that's the thing is, like, if you think of it like somebody on your team who needs to be trained a little bit on what you're trying to do, you can feed it information about your company, your finances, all sorts of stuff. And therefore it's better informed to work with you. Fair?
Geoff Woods 14:09
That's right.
Richard Walker 14:10
So keep going. So the first question.
Geoff Woods 14:40
So first question it asked was, do you have relationships with other influential executives in Japan that the board would respect?
Richard Walker 14:49
Wow, good question.
Geoff Woods 14:50
Good question. And the CEO almost fell off his chair because he actually did. And so he's telling me about it, and I'm literally is he's talking I'm tied. It into chatGPT, and I sent it, and then it asked another question about Japanese society. We answered it, and it asked the third question around Japanese society. Answered it, and it came back and it said, here's five non-obvious strategies you could consider. Number one, it called the Saving Face Consortium. It said you actually have enough relationships with other influential executives, my recommendation is that you approach them and offer them to acquire the debt with extremely favorable terms, so that it would be a huge win for them, and then your debt would get restructured, and the board would get to save face.
The CEO looks at me and he says, Geoff, for 90 days, I have been hitting my head against the wall trying to figure this out with no end in sight, and it was going to kill the company, and in less than 10 minutes, here is a strategy I would have never considered that I actually think could work. So here's why this matters, Rich. I want you to think about all the things you have learned over your lifetime, from school, failure, books, mentors, networks you've been a part of, all that knowledge. What percentage of that do you think you can source and harness now?
Richard Walker 16:21
Less than 1%.
Geoff Woods 16:21
And you have built a very successful business on the ability of harnessing less than 1% of what you have learned. Now let's look at these AI models. They've been trained on 15 trillion tokens to make that understandable. That's 200 million books worth of data. Imagine what you could do if you had read 200 million books about anything, and you could recall 100% of it and harness it in fraction of a second. That's what AI is, if you view yourself as the thought leader and it as your new thought partner.
Richard Walker 17:06
So we did meet prior, and you did give a presentation to a group I'm in, and that's what really caught me, you gave clarity to this, what we're doing with AI, that it is a super powerful thing, but you've got to harness it, and when you treat it like your partner, to help you figure it out. And so I'm going to point out something else you did in your script of how you prompted it, you gave it a persona. You told it you are an investment banker with restructuring debt as a expertise, right? Because out of that 200 million books, which ones apply to your need,
Geoff Woods 17:39
Bingo, and that's why assigning a persona is a powerful ingredient when writing prompts is because of the 200 million books, and it immediately goes and shuns it down to the books that are most relevant to that. And like a laser beam, it goes and heart focuses it on the task that you give it with your right thought leadership. That's why this is powerful.
Richard Walker 18:06
Yeah, all right, so let's use a different perspective here. Have you had it you said you start with curiosity, which I love, by the way, because when we started searching for the first time, we did it with curiosity. Today, we do it with expectation because we know search works so well, we lost that curious mind. So I love that kind of mindset. How many times have you harnessed AI and it came back with answers that didn't help you? It didn't get a good result, it wasn't actionable?
Geoff Woods 18:32
At the beginning, a lot, over half the time, my realization, though Rich, was it actually wasn't AI's fault. It was my leadership. Like when I said I'm going to build a company called AI Leadership. Tell me the top five things that I should consider to grow the company. And it gave me, it's designed to please you. It's just going to predict the next word. So it's not trained to stop and say, hey, I don't have enough information. Let me ask you some questions here. It's going to make something up. And I would read them and go, this is garbage. Well, time out. What does AI Leadership mean?
What does the company do? What are the problems we solve? What are the fears and emotions that people have that we want to alleviate, like it has none of that context. And so when it gives me options, it's just average or garbage. So if you prompt AI and don't give it context or put it in the driver's seat of interviewing you to gain the additional context, you are on a path to mediocrity.
Richard Walker 19:40
Yeah, and this happens in microcosms. As an example, we built a custom GPT on the API guide for our product. So it's a very small subset of data, 300 pages or something, right?
Geoff Woods 19:53
Let me simplify what the heck you just said, though? ChatGPT is a AI platform that you can go and you can use. Within it, you have the ability to build what's called a customGPT, which is almost like a little app that sits inside of chatGPT. That chatGPT powers that focus on a very specific use case. In your case, your API guide so that people can interact with it and ask questions and query it, and it will give it answers. And you are able to build that with no coding experience whatsoever, just by saying, this is the purpose of the app or of the GPT, and it will build it.
Richard Walker 20:28
It's amazing, totally amazing. So, yeah, that's what we did. We harnessed its power, but we said focus only on this body of content, very small body of content. So this is what's interesting, if you query it with a single word. So we have a partnership with DocuSign. If you just give it DocuSign is the prompt. It's going to come back with a summary of how we integrate with DocuSign. But is that really what you're looking for? You have to start asking it more specific questions. How do I connect my account to DocuSign? How do I leverage the draft mode feature in DocuSign? And it narrows down and narrows down and gets to much, much finer results. So anyway, that you're doing that on a much grander scale, and I was trying to help people see it from a minor scale.
Geoff Woods 20:28
This is where I'm curious, how are you giving customers access to that? Do they have to be on chatGPT? Or how do they access it?
Richard Walker 20:49
So to be fair, we're not using chatGPT or the open AI version. We're using a product called customgpt.com so you can point customgpt.com add a source of information, the URL of our API guide, for example, it crawls it, it gathers all the data, ingests it all, and then it gives you an embed code to put that right back into your website.
Geoff Woods 21:35
Website. So it's embedded on your website and it's powered by them. Okay?
Richard Walker 21:39
It's right inside the guide itself, that's the first thing we say. Don't search, ask chatGPT instead.
Geoff Woods 21:44
And what model powers that? Do you get to select which LLM powers it?
Richard Walker 21:48
It's a chatGPT model, I believe, but I'm not a spokesperson for that company.
Geoff Woods 21:52
But you don't get to, and I just used fancy language, large language model, LLM is what chatGPT is. It's a AI model that allows you to use natural language like talking to it, and it will do things based on it. But there are different models from chatGPT to Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. These are all different ones, and the models are constantly changing and improving. And so I was curious if you were able to select which one is the engine that will power the GPT.
Richard Walker 22:21
So I can't recall specifically, and they may have flexibility that, but you bring up a different question. So if you want AI to be your thought partner and help you, which model should you use?
Geoff Woods 22:33
Here's the answer. Currently, you can use any of them if you know how to talk to it. So if you know, and I can give you the specific ingredients that make it really simple for creating a good communication recipe for AI, you can use any of them. I will say, though, this is my recent realization, even since you and I last spoke, Rich is, I think the average person, or you tell me, think about all the people that you know in the world, if on a scale of one to 10, where one is really poor communication and 10 is world-class communicators, they should write a book. Where would you say the averages?
Richard Walker 23:15
Oh, boy. I hope nobody's offended. I think the average is closer to a four or a five on the scale.
Geoff Woods 23:20
So this was my aha as well as I think most people are average when it comes to communicating effectively, but your ceiling of achievement with AI currently hinges on communicating effectively with it. So we're asking somebody to become someone that they may not already be. And so I'm already asking the question, did I show you my AI thought partner?
Richard Walker 23:44
Yeah, I saw the image with, see if we can link to it from that.
Geoff Woods 23:48
Yeah. So and I'll share this with everybody. If you just go to my website, which is aileadership.com, the initial use case was you've read a book and said, I'm gonna implement that. And then life gets in the way. I wanted to create a way for you to actually implement and live the book. So there is on my website, it says AI Thought Partner. And it literally, kind of like you have on your website something embedded. I have an AI model embedded here, but what I've done is I've actually written the custom instructions where it's trained on the book, so you can query it to interact with the book. That's just the lead Domino.
Where this is going is there is, for example, the core framework that I've used to help drive growth. I call it the four drivers of growth, strategy, execution, people and technology. Strategy is the competitive advantage you're building in the long term through the actions you're taking in the short term. Execution is your strategic plan and how you're prioritizing and where you're looking at operations, people, do you have the right people in the right seats, doing the right things, growing in the right direction? And then technology. How are you harnessing your technology to either make your people more productive, operations more efficient, or products more valuable? I have used a quarterly strategic review to get leaders to think straight.
Strategically to drive massive growth, I have written a prompt so that AI can become me in facilitating that for you. That prompt is about a page long. Me teaching every person listening to this podcast how to write that is not scalable. You won't be able to do it. So what I did is I went here, if you literally just put do my quarterly strategic review. It's been trained that when it says that it knows to execute that prompt, and it's saying, great, we look at strategy, execution, people and technology. We can start with the first driver. What competitive advantage are you building in the long term through the actions, through your current actions, like it will interview you and facilitate it.
So I am using this more and more for strategic thinking, because ultimately this is going to become a product that I will pipe into a company's large language model so their LLM now becomes an executive team member for strategic thinking. So that's where this is going.
Richard Walker 26:03
This is powerful. Wow.
Geoff Woods 26:05
Out of curiosity, why do you think that's powerful?
Richard Walker 26:07
Well, actually, I think it's powerful for two things. One is, you've helped people frame it. You gave them the quarterly review strategy to look at. But there's a second reason, you've just demonstrated what I think the future of websites is going to be. And a friend of mine kind of turned me on to this, interactive, chat-based websites. So think about it. You go to a website today like mine, and you're like, what product do I need? Well, first of all, what persona Are you that you fit into, which kind of funnel or something, and you search and search, and you read and read, and do you get what you want? The chatGPT or a customGPT we put on our API guide is so amazing. I'm thinking, why don't we have that on our website now?
Geoff Woods 26:43
Yeah, why can't you ask that? Now I'm going to take you up one level. The guy who built my site, his vision is that ultimately you could get to the point where you ask it a question and it will regenerate the site based on suggestion. That is the future.
Richard Walker 26:58
That is, I think you're going to have sites that completely morph to match your needs based on your inputs and the questions that's asking you. I mean, think about it, we already have sales chatbots that qualify you and try to help you find, are you this type of person or this type of enterprise versus small business, whatever? So yeah, I do think in the next couple years we're going to see these models turn into generating graphics and on demand documents, and it's incredible.
Geoff Woods 27:24
So in this is why, again, your job is not to predict the future, right to prepare your company to survive a variety of futures. Already, in this episode, we have shared things that most people are probably going what did they just say? I need you to understand how significantly the cheese has moved. And you're not feeling it in your business yet, because it's so early, but the moment a key competitor latches on to this and uses it in a powerful way, you will now find yourself so far behind, it's like they're driving a Ferrari in the race and you're on a tricycle.
Richard Walker 28:05
Yeah, we used to be worried about whether we had the right product features to keep up with our competitors. Now we're talking about these types of tools that enable us to communicate better, engage our customers, better serve them, better. And I mean, I just read yesterday there's a product coming out that is so advanced in writing code, you just talk to it, and you don't have to be a software engineer anymore, product designer talking to this chat model where it builds the product on the fly.
Geoff Woods 28:31
This is actually really important. There was a study done between Boston Consulting Group and Harvard. They took 784 of their consultants and split them into two groups. One group they said, keep doing your work as normal. The other group they said, here's chatGPT. And they gave them like 10 minutes of training on prompting and said, now go do your work using AI. The results were staggering. The group that had used AI had a 40% increase in quality of work. They got it done 25% faster, and they got 12.2 times 4% more tasks done.
That's not what I found most interesting, though, Richard. When they looked at their consultants, you have the top of the class to the bottom of the class. What was interesting is that it made the best better. But what it did is it took the bottom and middle groups and instantly raised them up to the level of some of their best, because now you are not executing based on your 1% of knowledge. You now have so much data that you can harness that things that are not your skill set can now become your skill set.
Richard Walker 29:39
You have just demonstrated proof of the two things I've been talking to other leaders about. There's a consensus on finding among other people, whether you're in AI or not, that AI is not going to replace your job. It's people who built the skill with AI that are going to replace your job. And the second thing I want to mention is that it's going to take lower-skilled. Workers and make them higher skilled workers. And you just demonstrated that. That's amazing.
Geoff Woods 30:04
Yeah, yeah. I went back. I believe history repeats itself. And so the moment I looked at this, I'm like, have we been here before? And so I went back in time and researched the printing press, the steam engine, the assembly line, electricity, the internet, five of the most disruptive technological innovations. What I found was that technology changes the skills that we apply and the processes that we follow. That's all a job is, is skills you apply and processes you follow. So you might be a CFO, you might be a CFO today, and you might be a CFO in five years, but the skills that you use and the processes you follow as a CFO will be different, and this is why my fundamental belief is that AI will not replace you. It will enhance you. What you do might be different, but it doesn't replace you.
Richard Walker 31:11
Man, I want to talk to you all day, and we can't do that for our audiences. Expect a four-hour episode. So before I wrap it up and have my last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Geoff Woods 31:23
Yeah, so the website is aileadership.com I would strongly encourage you to pick up the book, The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI To Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. It is written for leaders. It's extremely practical. I have prompts in there. I constantly give you a QR code to take it to our thought partner so you can implement it. It is designed to make an impact in your business immediately.
Richard Walker 31:48
And I'm going to pitch this out. I'm getting it for every person in my company, because I want everybody to be a leader in my company, even if a small, little leader for themselves, and not big leader VP or executive, because I think we can all benefit from thinking this way.
Geoff Woods 32:03
I appreciate that.
Richard Walker 32:04
So here's my last question and total shift of gears, who's had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Geoff Woods 32:14
I have to give credit to Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, my former partners when I was building the company based on the one thing. Gary is the chairman of Keller Williams, largest real estate company in the world, multi-billion dollar company now. Jay's been as co-author in all of their books together, they were my partners. From Gary, I got the gift of learning to think bigger. It's amazing how we put ceilings of achievement over what we perceive to be possible. And he showed me what it looks like to think bigger. And every time I thought I was thinking bigger and made progress, I realized I just needed to go bigger again.
And I'm continuously finding, even right now with this book, in this company, how much bigger I can be thinking. And for Jay, I learned what it meant to be a leader. I learned what it meant to teach people how to think by challenging them to think strategically. Because the old way of work is task-focused, and that's the industrial way of take direction, just do it right. But that's going to be different in the AI-driven way. It's no longer about task-focused, operational overwhelm. It's about leading with strategic clarity, which means that we as leaders have to own our thinking leverage.
No longer can we go to the boss with questions, because now we have a tool in our hands that can give us access to the information of the world applied to our specific use case. We need to become more strategic thinkers and own the thinking behind our roles.
Richard Walker 33:50
I love this, and I'm not trying to come across as flippant or anything else, but should I now hang a sign outside my virtual office for my employees to see that says, did you ask chatGPT yet?
Geoff Woods 34:01
Honestly, so really funny. I used to have a coach. This is way before AI. He would put a sign on his door when he would close the door, if you had a question you had to answer, it was a sign, and it had spaces for you to answer, and it was, what's your question and what are three potential solutions? And you couldn't knock until you answered them. Shockingly, people stopped knocking because he just drew a line in the sand that said, I'm not going to do your thinking for you. I will collaborate with you. I will coach you. I will give you my perspective after you've proven that you've done the thinking leverage side of it. So I actually think that's a great idea.
Richard Walker 34:49
Yeah. Have you asked chatGPT yet?
Geoff Woods 34:52
Have you asked chatGPT yet?
Richard Walker 34:52
Oh, this is awesome, man. All right, I got to wrap it up, so I want to give a huge thank you to Geoff Woods, founder of AI Leadership and author of The AI-Driven Leader book for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Geoff's website at aileadership.com. You get the book on Amazon, right? Yeah, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make processing forums easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Geoff, thank you so much for joining me today.
Geoff Woods 35:25
It's my pleasure Rich. And one more thing, I am launching a podcast to go with the book as well, called The AI-Driven Leader, where I'm going to show actual use cases of us doing strategic thinking with leaders. So you can check that out too.
Outro 35:36
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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