"Every Leader Knows AI Is the Future, But They Don't Know Where to Start."

Geoff Woods was a C-Level exec at a multi-billion dollar steel company, which he helped lead from a $750m market cap to ~$12B+ within four years.

That alone makes him different from most of the people trying to teach you about AI right now.

But there’s something else too. He comes at it from a different angle.

“I’m not going to show you how to write a better email with ChatGPT,” he told me in a recent interview. “That’s a waste of your time. But if I can show you how to think more strategically or make better decisions, that’s a game-changer for your business.”

His new book, The AI-Driven Leader, is full of stories on exactly this, taken from his own experience as well as interviews with hundreds of other leaders, and he’s bringing the lessons to c-suites all over the country.

“I literally give them the prompts, designed toward specific use cases for an executive. They actually type the prompt in and have AI work with them as a thought partner, and it blows their mind.”

Let me give you an example…

Not long ago, Woods was called to consult with the CEO of a manufacturing company that was facing bankruptcy.

They’d leased a bunch of equipment from partners in Japan, but the debt structure was killing them, and they’d hit a wall trying to get it changed.

“Bottom line,” the client told him, “this is a publicly listed company in Japan. It’s gone all the way to the board. They’re refusing to restructure the debt because they’re worried they’ll lose face in Japanese society. How can AI help?”

Woods started where he often does – with a ChatGPT prompt designed to help the client think outside the box. He typed a summary of what the CEO had told him, then he added these crucial lines:

The first question ChatGPT came back with: Do you have relationships with other influential executives in Japanese society that this board would respect?

The client was stunned. He did, of course. He just hadn’t thought about the role they might play.

A few more probing questions, then the computer offered what it dubbed the “Saving Face Consortium”:

Three months’ sleepless nights solved with a ten-minute conversation.

Of course the AI didn’t invent that solution, it was right there all along. The client just needed help seeing it.

That’s what Geoff means when he talks about AI as an executive thought-partner.

“Your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business, and going out of business,” he told me. “But if you’re doing it on the less than 1% of information you can recall, you’re playing too small.”

In writing the book, Woods interviewed hundreds of executives to learn how they are and aren’t using AI inside their companies, and found that, while many agreed AI was the future, less than five percent have done much to embrace it so far.

“A lot of them feel guilty or like they're actually being irresponsible for not understanding it,” he said. “But they're just so damn busy with all the demands of the business… So it just kind of weighs on them.”

Luckily, big change can start with small action.

When faced with a challenge, rather than wondering, ‘How do I do this?,’ leaders should train themselves to ask, ‘How can AI help me do this?’

That small shift is the lead domino that tips over all the rest, kickstarting what he calls the AI Empowerment Flywheel.

Asking it makes you aware of possible new use-cases.

As you take action on those, you hone your ability to communicate with AI, which delivers better and better results, which gets you asking the question more and more often.

That skill of communicating with AI is crucial.

To teach it, he encourages leaders to think of prompting the same way they think of cooking – with different ingredients you can choose from based on what output you want.

You won’t use every ingredient every time. And some recipes call for more of one than another. But knowing the basic options puts you in control.

“You should always describe the task,” he says. “And give it context.”

Then there are options, like having the AI interview you, establishing limits on a reply, or asking it to explain its reasoning, all of which you can include as-needed to dial in the response you’re getting.

A particularly powerful spice is to assign the AI a specific persona.

“AI has been trained on 15 trillion tokens,” Geoff said. “That’s the equivalent of two hundred million books worth of data… It can recall near 100% of it, and apply it to your task.”

Tell the machine to act as a CFO, or a branding expert, or your ideal customer, and it can help you uncover opportunities you would have missed otherwise.

A great example comes from one of Geoff’s clients, who currently sells their product in Whole Foods.

“They had a meeting lined up with Jason Buechel, the CEO of Whole Foods, to discuss expanding their partnership,” he told me. They were wondering if AI could help.

Answer: Of course it can.

He started with Perplexity, a tool that specializes in researching sources from the internet.

It came back with six key items, and sources, which he fact-checked and found to be correct.

Then, he went to ChatGPT, uploaded the previous output along with the client’s pitch deck, and prompted:

A few seconds later, Geoff says, it replied, ‘Fair trade and sustainability are priorities for me and Whole Foods. It's a strength of your brand, and it's nowhere to be found on your deck.’

Now, you see stories like these about ChatGPT or Perplexity, and it’d be natural to ask yourself which tools your company should be focused on. But Geoff says the question actually starts much higher up.

“Strategy, execution, people, technology,” he told me. That’s the order.

As Chief Growth Officer at Jindal Steel, he was helping steer a multi-national, multi-billion dollar behemoth with a hundred-thousand people.

Most of his work started at a strategic level, defining their competitive advantage, casting a ten-year vision, and working to create alignment on that amongst the board.

“Then it was about execution,” he said. “Do we have the right strategic plan? Where are operational bottlenecks that we need to release?”

After that, he looked at people – trying to ensure they had the right ones, in the right seats, doing the right things, and growing in the right directions.

Only then did they look at how AI could add fuel to the fire, and ended up spotting a few key opportunities around employee productivity, reducing raw material defects, and dramatically shortening order times.

But it never would have worked without the strategic vision as a foundation.

“AI adoption is not your goal,” he said. “Growth is. AI is a tool that can drive growth. Or it could distract you from it…

“My job was to understand vision and have a level of competence around what AI could do, what could be a valuable use case, and what might be a distraction.”

Of course, sometimes the strategic priority is just to make it through the next board meeting without the company imploding, and it turns out, AI can help there too.

“Another company I advise has an activist board,” he told me. “Every quarter is a blood bath. 

“They're working toward an exit in the next 24 months, and the board is a legitimate distraction to the executive team. So they came to me and said, can you help us?”

An upcoming meeting had to go smoothly.

To help the team prepare, he set them up with a prompt designed to get ChatGPT to interview them about each board member and write an in-depth personality profile on them.

Then, they fed those profiles into a custom model, uploaded the team’s quarterly deck, and told the model to simulate how each member of the board might respond, spotting landmines in the deck that needed to be cleaned up so the meeting runs well.

They iterated on this several times, refining the deck as they went.

By itself, that’s already helpful. But here’s where it really gets wild…

When it came time to present to the actual board, they recorded the meeting, and transcribed the audio.

“We feed the transcript back to the AI model,” he told me, “and say, ‘Study what you simulated versus what actually happened.’ And we actually have it train itself to better mimic each board member.”

Strategy before technology. When you know your strategic priority, the possibilities of AI become magnified.

No technology is all up-side, and Geoff is clear about that too.

In writing the book, he studied past technological revolutions – from the printing press, to the steam engine, assembly line, electricity, and internet.

What he found was that, rather than replacing people, technology changed the skills that were valued and the processes followed to get results.

We’re transitioning from being task masters to conductors, orchestrating a symphony of people and AI tools to work towards a certain outcome.

As we do, the new skill that’s going to be most valuable is also one that has long been most human: Applying good judgment.

“Don’t abdicate your leadership,” he said. “Don’t ask it to be the oracle. You stay squarely in the driver's seat. You're telling it where to go. You're deciding if what it's gonna give you is accurate.

“Technology is neither good nor bad,” he said. “It doesn't change your business. It's the leaders who harness it that do. That's why this is actually not an AI book. It's a leadership book.”

The AI-Driven Leader is coming out September 16th. You can pre-order here, or join Geoff live in Austin for his book launch event by RSVPing here