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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, before we start today's show, if you want to accelerate your AI learning, I have a solution for you. Become a member of our AI Business Society. You'll join me as we go deep with live AI training each and every month. Imagine crafting more persuasive content, creating stunning images, and automating those time consuming tasks. It's all possible when you join the AI Business Society. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com AI and join today. Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Today, I've got a great show lined up for you. I'm going to be joined by Jeff woods and we're going to explore something that I think is going to be absolutely fascinating. If you are in a leadership role inside of a business, either you're the founder, the CEO, or you had a specific division of the business, and you want to figure out a way to employ AI across the business in a way that's going to have a massive strategic advantage for you. You're going to love today's guest. Jeff and I are going to explore some really awesome frameworks and systems that will allow you to very easily employ AI in the workforce. Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Jeff woods, helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's Exper Guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Jeff Woods. If you don't know who Jeff is, he's the author of the AI Driven Leader, Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. He's also the founder of the AI Driven Leadership Collective, a network of executives collaborating to harness AI in business. Jeff, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:22]
Jeff Woods
Delightful. Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
- [02:24]
Michael Stelzner
I'm super excited that you're here. Today, Jeff and I are going to explore how leaders can use AI to accelerate their growth. Now, before we go there, Jeff, how the heck did you get into AI? I would love to hear your story. Start wherever you want to start.
- [02:36]
Jeff Woods
We're going to go back to college.
- [02:37]
Michael Stelzner
All right.
- [02:38]
Jeff Woods
My senior year, I'm doing an internship right before Graduating Michael I sit down with the CEO and I ask him what job he thought I should get after school. And he looks at me and he says, Jeff, you're asking the wrong question. This is the first time in my life that I realized there's power around asking the right questions, which will become a central theme of our conversation today. He said, you should be asking what are the skills I can master that are so valuable they'll serve me no matter where I go? Then go find jobs that will help you build those skills. So based on my personality, he said, you should go into sales. So I went into sales, had a really great career but wanted to get into entrepreneurship. I moved to Austin, Texas in 2015 to partner up with a guy named Gary Keller. He started a company called Keller Williams multi multi billionaire now. He wrote a book called the One Thing, one of the highest rated business books of all time. They wanted to turn the book into a company but Gary's One thing was running Keller Williams. They needed somebody whose one thing was the one thing. And that became me. So I had never been a CEO before but he and his co author Jay Papistan said we'll teach you to think and act like one. And a lot of it came down to learning how to ask executive teams the right questions to go from all the things you could do down to the one thing you should do. And so a lot of what I did was going into companies from growth to Fortune 5 500, facilitating strategic off sites by asking them the right questions. This became a superpower. I sold my interest in 2022, had a two year non compete, went in house with a giant steel company out of India called Jindal Steel and Power. This is a huge company like hundred thousand people around the world. I had been the coach to the chairman of the board and his exec team when I was with the One Thing and he had me come in house as chief growth officer over everything. And my focus was really for drivers strategy which is about making sure every operating company understood the competitive advantage they were building. Execution of a focused strategic plan. Then people which this is interesting. The purpose of your people is to achieve your goals. Your goals change every year but your job descriptions don't. So you have an inherent lack of alignment in your organization. I wanted to realign the workforce and then technology. How do we harness technology to do all of was wildly successful Michael the market cap went from 750 million to $12 billion in four years.
- [05:07]
Michael Stelzner
Crazy.
- [05:08]
Jeff Woods
And during that journey ChatGPT hit the world. And when I Saw it. I think, like a lot of leaders, I was like, I'm so busy. I'll get to it later, or maybe I'll delegate this to my tech team. But then there was that part of me that was thinking, jeff, focus on the skills that are worth mastering. They'll serve you no matter where you go. So I really dove in. But pretty quickly, I realized using ChatGPT to write a better email was a waste of my time. And so I started asking myself different questions. What matters most for me? Strategic thinking. How might I use AI to elevate my ability to think strategically or make faster, smarter decisions? That question changed the game because I realized it wasn't about asking AI questions. It was actually turning the tables and have AI ask me questions. Once I tapped that code, I made the pitch to the chairman of the board. We drive it through the whole company. He asked me to head it up. I had no idea what I was doing. There was a quote I got from Gary Keller. Anytime you're hitting a ceiling of achievement, you're just missing a person. So I asked a better question. Who am I missing? That, if I could get into a relationship with, would actually empower me to drive this through our organization? That person's name is Google. So Google became a partner. When I'm in India, every quarter, I'm at their headquarters in Delhi. And they taught me everything from how the tech works to how do you identify use cases, how do you tune models? And as I started to drive it through the company, I saw a much bigger problem, which is all these consulting and tech companies have been pushing AI as a solution in search of a problem. It's completely backwards. AI adoption is not the goal of any company. Building a better business and better lives is. But nobody was talking about the difference that made the difference, which was you, the leader. It's never been about the technology. It's always been about the people who wield it. And so I resigned in 2024. I said, I'm going to write a book about this. I'm going to build a business about this. Published the AI Driven Leader. It quickly hit number one in the world and then launched AI Leadership, which is a company focused on the intersection of you as a leader, how you have to think strategically, and how you harness AI to do it.
- [07:18]
Michael Stelzner
First of all, you are a really good storyteller. I got to give you kudos for that.
- [07:22]
Jeff Woods
Thanks.
- [07:22]
Michael Stelzner
Secondly, you said the solution was Google. Now, I'm assuming you don't mean Google Search. I'm assuming you mean Alphabet the company.
- [07:30]
Jeff Woods
Google. The company.
- [07:31]
Michael Stelzner
Yes, the company. Does that mean you started working with their AI division or their teams because you were working for such a big division?
- [07:38]
Jeff Woods
Exactly.
- [07:39]
Michael Stelzner
Got it. And you got access to some of the tools, presumably at the enterprise level that maybe we're starting to see coming out right now. Is that kind of what I'm.
- [07:47]
Jeff Woods
You nailed it.
- [07:47]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Excellent. Okay, so for of all, love the story, you have a track record of working, obviously, with leaders. There are people listening right now that are leading divisions of companies. Maybe they're the director of marketing, maybe the director of sales. There are entrepreneurs listening to this podcast who have employees that listen to them. Why should leaders pay attention to AI? What do you want to tell them? Because I know a lot of them here, at least on this show, are in the discovery phase.
- [08:16]
Jeff Woods
Sure. And I ended up interviewing over 200 leaders, one on one for the book. I'm actually well over a thousand now. Since publishing it, 100% said it was the future and that they would adopt it. Less than 5% had done anything. And the reason why is you're busy. You got too many things to do and not enough time already. And it's easy to look at this and say, I'll get to it later, or I'll delegate this to my tech team. The mistake is thinking that this is a technology challenge, not a leadership priority. And I. A great quote from Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. He said, everything you know about your business is going to fundamentally change in the next five years, not 10, five.
- [08:57]
Michael Stelzner
And when did he say that? Was that recently?
- [08:59]
Jeff Woods
A year ago? Okay, that was the right question, Michael. When I saw this, I went, oh, my gosh. As a leader of a business, if I was told that there is a tidal wave coming that is literally going to change every aspect of my business. Every. And I've got now, at the time of this recording, four years left, and I think that's even too long. It's going to happen way faster. When would you want to start prioritizing, gaining some foundational knowledge around this? For a guy who wrote a book about AI, Michael, I do not care about AI. I care about you. Building a better business and better lives. AI is a tool that can absolutely help you do it. It is also a tool that can distract you from it. It is you and how you think strategically. Strategy, technology, second, that matters. This is not about the technology. This is recognizing that whatever you thought your competitive advantage was for your business, you have to ask if it's still valid. Whatever your goals were for your Business. I'm just straight up going to tell you they're too small. Whatever your job descriptions were for your people, I'm telling you you're paying your people to act like machines instead of acting like humans. And a machine is better at acting like a machine than your people are. There is a leadership gap that needs to be filled. Those that step up as AI driven leaders are the ones that are going to win.
- [10:21]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so what I hear you saying is, hey, everybody, AI is coming much faster than we all realize. We're not doing enough. We're just dabbling with it. And the reason why we're not doing enough is because we're improperly prioritizing things that matter to us and we need to get on board and we need to get all of our people on board. Am I hearing you right?
- [10:43]
Jeff Woods
Yes. To add more clarity.
- [10:44]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [10:45]
Jeff Woods
I'm not saying that you need to add 20 hours of work to your plate every week. I'm not even saying that you need to become a technical expert. You are not supposed to be the chief AI officer of your company unless that's what you aspire to. But part of leadership is casting a vision for the future, defining your strategy or your competitive advantage and aligning your team around a focused strategic plan for the year to march toward that competitive advantage. AI has to be on that roadmap, effective immediately.
- [11:18]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, love it. And fully concur. So where do we begin? For those that are listening right now that are probably just maybe personally dabbling with it, but they haven't actually started figuring out how to get the adoption across their division or across their company, what are some of the first steps we ought to take?
- [11:36]
Jeff Woods
Imagine, Michael, if your entire life you have only seen black and white and I asked you to describe color, you couldn't do it. This is what leaders are doing right now. They've only seen black and white, which is a non AI driven world. And they're trying to declare how they're going to drive AI into their company. Step one is not delegate this to somebody else. It's actually become an AI driven leader yourself. Which means you have to start using whether it's ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, doesn't really matter to me as long as it meets your privacy and security provisions. You have to start using this yourself so that you can actually understand what the technology does and does not do, because then you'll be able to actually cast a vision for what the business looks like in the future. You'll be able to define, where is your current protective moat still strong? Where is it being challenged? You'll be able to understand what are the 20% AI priorities that are going to drive 80% of our results? And how do we weave those into our strategic plan versus getting distracted by all the noise? It literally starts with you. And I can nail it down to one very simple action. I want you to grab a sticky note and a Sharpie and write, how can AI help me do this? And put it on your computer or your desk. Let me tell you why most people are asking themselves the wrong questions.
- [13:07]
Michael Stelzner
They're saying, what can I do with AI? Right?
- [13:09]
Jeff Woods
Or they're going through their day asking, how can I do this?
- [13:13]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [13:14]
Jeff Woods
When a better question would be, how can AI help me do this? So, real world example, I was, I got so many, okay, we're going to go sales one first. I was preparing to give a proposal to a large company for a scope to help them drive this through their organization. I'm literally looking at the deck and the proposal myself an hour before the pitch. And I looked down and I saw the sticky note, how can AI help me do this? And in that moment I'm going, how can it help me prepare for the pitch? And then I said, okay, well, I've got a great framework for 99% of my prompts. And this was on another sticky note. Context, role, interview, task, crit, context, role, interview, task. You give it lots of context, you assign it a role, so tell it who you want it to act as. Then I have it turn the tables and interview me to pull additional context out of my head so then it can accomplish a task. And so I literally said context. I'm about to give this proposal to and I gave the company name. Here is the proposal and I drug it in the full deck in PDF form. I'm about to meet with the executive and their chief of staff. We have an hour allocated for this. I want to be able to role play with you as them so that you can give me feedback on what I do well, what I don't do well, and the top changes I can make. Your role is to act as both people. Here's the executive and how I would describe them. And I described the executive's personality in vivid detail. Here's their chief of staff and here's how they think and act. And I described in vivid detail. When I confirm, I'm going to flip over to voice mode. I'm going to give you the proposal, but I want you to challenge me. I want you to ask questions. I want you to throw objections, and I don't want you to be nice. I want you to make this a 10 out of 10 tough. Because when I say the words all done, your task is to understand that the pitch is done and you now need to give me feedback on what I did well, what I did not do well, and the top changes I need to make to my pitch so that I get the deal done. And I hit enter. That was one prompt and it goes, great. I'm waiting for you to flip to voice mode. And so I went to my phone, opened up Chat gbt, hit that little button to turn it to voice mode, and said, all right, folks, thanks so much for the time today. And I just started giving the pitch.
- [15:35]
Michael Stelzner
Wait, you went through the whole deck?
- [15:37]
Jeff Woods
The whole deck.
- [15:39]
Michael Stelzner
So with using ChatGPT advanced voice mode, essentially, yes.
- [15:42]
Jeff Woods
And over a 15 minute period going from slide to slide, it's interrupting me, it's asking me questions, it's throwing objections. And eventually I went all done. And it went great. Here's my feedback on what I liked, what I didn't like in the top changes. I stopped voice mode, went back to my desktop, clicked refresh, and everything was there. Michael. One of the things that called out was that while the pitch was strong, I had not outlined a return on investment. And I went, duh, how did I miss that? And then I remembered, yeah, it's tough to read the label when you're inside the box, right? And this is where engaging AI, not as a Google or as an assistant, but as a thought partner. It's really good at helping you see what you don't see. And then I went, oh, I don't know what the ROI is. And I literally looked down at my desk and saw, how can AI help me do this? And so I said, I actually don't know what the ROI is. Give me some ideas. And it came up with an idea of defending the investment. It said, if the pitch is going well, turn the tables on them and make them outline the roi. And so I literally put a slide in the deck that said, defend the investment. And when we got there, I turned the tables on him and said, who are you going to have to sell this to to get the funding? He said, the cfo. And he is super budget conscious. And I went, okay, great, I'm your cfo. You just pitched this to me. My answer is no. Tell me why it should be a yes. And the whole time my AI note taker is taking notes. And I said, okay, I got this, I'll update the deck, I'll send it to you. And I literally took the transcript, pulled it straight into the same thread in ChatGPT and said, Go to the section of the transcript where I had it defend the investment and use that to create a tight one page slide for a budget conscious CFO that would get them to say yes. And it created the content. I did not just copy and paste because I understand I'm the thought leader. AI is just my thought partner. I made some tweaks, but I put it in there, I sent it, I got the deal done.
- [17:40]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, we got a lot of deconstruction here to talk about. Maybe not a lot, but a little bit. First of all, love all these examples. So what I'm hearing you say is because you had the sticky note on your computer or somewhere nearby that asked the question, how can AI help me do this? As you're in the midst of preparing, you know, this deck that you needed to give, you decided to creatively go into, in this case, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And you asked it a series of questions. You gave it your framework. We're going to break down that framework in just a second. It very quickly allowed you to basically modify the deck so that you could increase the likelihood that you get the deal done. First question, did you close the deal?
- [18:22]
Jeff Woods
Yes.
- [18:22]
Michael Stelzner
You did close the deal. Okay, cool.
- [18:24]
Jeff Woods
Yes. And this was a big number.
- [18:25]
Michael Stelzner
That's really cool. So the big question I asked is, where do we start? Right, if we're a leader?
- [18:31]
Jeff Woods
Sticky note.
- [18:31]
Michael Stelzner
You start with a sticky note and you just start basically figuring out ways to use it for yourself. What if people aren't sure where to start?
- [18:41]
Jeff Woods
This is the thing, you're asking the wrong question. Yeah, if you ask, where do I start? You might hit a gap.
- [18:47]
Michael Stelzner
You just ask that darn question.
- [18:49]
Jeff Woods
Constant versus throughout your day, whatever you're doing. If you have that sticky note on your desk, like, I'm reviewing my financial statements, this is a real use case. I look down, I see the sticky note, how can AI help me review my financial statements? And then there's the second sticky note that says context, role, interview, task. And so I literally open ChatGPT, write context, few lines down, role, few lines down, interview, few lines down, task. And now it's just about filling the blank context. Here's our financials drag and drop roll. You're a strategic CFO who's world class in telling a CEO the top five non obvious insights about their business based on their financials that they don't know that they should know. Interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context task. So you can accomplish the task of giving me the top five non obvious things about my business that I should know as a CEO. This is now a monthly rhythm because I looked down and saw a sticky note. So don't ask, how do I use AI? Go through your days and when you see the sticky note, ask, how can AI help me do this? And then go context role interview, task and try it. The goal is not that you hit a home run every use case. The goal is that you get comfortable following that kind of a framework because that's going to blast you past 99 of the people in the world in their communication. And, and if you're doing it on stuff you're already doing, it's probably more important work, which means it's going to deliver more value to you and you're going to figure out where does it work really well? Where does it not work as well. I don't use AI for everything, but I sure use it for a whole lot more than I did a year ago.
- [20:35]
Michael Stelzner
On the interview side of your framework context role interview task, what I heard you say, which I think is really important, is to ask up to five questions, one question at a time. How compliant are these AI systems?
- [20:48]
Jeff Woods
Very.
- [20:49]
Michael Stelzner
They are. Okay, very.
- [20:51]
Jeff Woods
If you say interview me, ask me one question at a time. Up to three questions, up to four questions, up to five questions. I almost always give it a limit. Three if I want it to go fast, four if I want it to go a little deeper, five if I want it to be pretty deep. Very rarely do I say, you get unlimited questions. And in that case I got to be in the driver's seat as the thought leader to cut it off when I think it has enough to get it to give me the task.
- [21:16]
Michael Stelzner
Once you feel like you've given it enough information, does it just automatically execute on the task or do you have to tell it to execute?
- [21:22]
Jeff Woods
Sometimes, but sometimes I have to say, all right, you've asked enough, give me the result.
- [21:25]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, cool.
- [21:26]
Jeff Woods
Now, real quick, by the way, you asked, how compliant is it?
- [21:29]
Michael Stelzner
Yes.
- [21:30]
Jeff Woods
Sometimes it's not compliant.
- [21:31]
Michael Stelzner
Right.
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Jeff Woods
And in that case, this is when you have to remember you're the thought leader, it's your thought partner. I've absolutely had times where I said, interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to three questions. And it asked me three at once. And so I said, go back to my instructions, ask one question at A time. And it goes. Oh, I'm so sorry. You're right. Here's my first question.
- [21:50]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I love it. Okay, so stepping back to the overall theme of helping businesses figure out how to get AI deployed across their teams. We're now, let's say everybody's followed your directives, your instructions, we've received your prompts. Right. How can AI help me do this? We've got the context role interview task. Now, we've been doing this for maybe a couple of weeks or a couple of months, and we're ready to begin now to start to employ it across a team. What's the next part of the process?
- [22:21]
Jeff Woods
Big changes start with small actions. Here's what I don't want you to do. I don't want you to run and train everybody on this because not everybody's an early adopter. Some people are going to be late adopters or laggards of this technology. And you only get one first impression. I want to start with you at a leadership level and your key leadership team because if you get the top of the org chart to embrace this in the 20% areas that matter most, that alone is a game changer. But then you get all the momentum you need behind you to drive the change management way harder. If you don't start at the top. So you just start with you and some of your key leaders. Then once you've kind of gotten some value, then you expand to who would be the next group of people that I think will be innovative or excited to try this, and how do you show them how you're using it? Get the sticky notes on their desk. Start weaving this into your weekly team meeting where people show up and they have to share a win they had in the last week with AI, a failure they had last week with AI in a place that they need help with AI And I'm being very strategic with those questions. It's not just about celebrating successes. It's also making failure feel safe and the ability to ask for help feel safe. None of us know how this is going to ripple through the companies. None of us. So how do we create psychological safety with teams where we can talk about it and support one another? That's what's really important. You start there and you kind of expand that over time while that's happening. This is all just about making people more productive.
- [24:05]
Michael Stelzner
Real quick, you said wins failures. Was there another one in there I missed?
- [24:08]
Jeff Woods
Help. Where you need help.
- [24:09]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, got it. Okay.
- [24:10]
Jeff Woods
That's just about making people more productive.
- [24:12]
Michael Stelzner
Got it.
- [24:13]
Jeff Woods
Just using ChatGPT or Copilot. Then there's also the skill of how do we identify an operational use case and use the technology to make operations more efficient or our product and service more valuable. That's another skill where whether it's building a custom GPT to doing some workflow automation to maybe you're actually building something from scratch, or you're bringing in a piece of technology from the outside that's already been created, you haven't earned the right to go there yet. This is again, there are so many mistakes leaders are making. A lot of leaders are trying to shoehorn this into their products or service or drive operational efficiency before the leadership have even become AI driven and have gotten any vision around this. Which is why the AI Driven leader is not an AI book. It's a leadership book. It's about you and who can you become to transform your company.
- [25:06]
Michael Stelzner
When we were prepping for this, we talked about building an AI board. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
- [25:13]
Jeff Woods
Yeah, sure. So again, I don't really care about AI. I care about you building better businesses and better lives. I am not interested in 80% of the AI use cases because they only drive 20% of the results. I care about the 20% priorities that will drive 80% of your results. So if you ask me like, what's the latest tool or plugin, that question is the wrong question. It's likely not a 20% priority that drives 80% of your results. So oftentimes where I focus with leaders is on what are the biggest problems you're facing that if we could solve them, would unlock a new level of growth. And one of the guys who's in my AI driven leadership collective, which is, this is the pure executive network we have built so that we centralize our knowledge so we move faster and kick the crap out of the competition. He calls me and he says, I got a problem. We're venture backed. We are working toward an exit in the next 24 months. Our biggest problem is that we have a hostile board. Every quarter is an absolute bloodbath and 50% of my exec team's time is gobbled up with board shenanigans and distractions. I just got a call from the chairman. He said, I got six months to rehab the relationship or we're all fired. Can AI help? That was the right question. And so I pulled the exec team together on Zoom. And how many of you already are like, how can AI help you do this? Well, wait and find out. Grab your popcorn, folks. I Pulled the exec team on zoom, pulled up chat, GBT context, role interview, task context. I'm the CEO of this company. We have a hostile board. Every quarter is an absolute bloodbath. And 50% of my exec team's time is getting gobbled up by board shenanigans and distractions. We've been working toward an exit in the next 24 months, but I just got a call from the chairman saying if I don't rehab the relationship in the next six months, we're all fired. Your role is to act as an HR professional with deep expertise in creating personality profiles. Interview me, ask me one question at a time. You get to ask as many questions as you want until you understand one of our board members named Susan on a deep enough level so you can accomplish the task of creating a personality profile for her. That was the real prompt. And I hit enter and it started doing an interview. And the exec team is giving me their feedback. And I'm literally just typing in word for word what they are saying. And after a pretty short period of time, it spat out a personality profile. And the exec team knew their job was to be thought leader. So they didn't just copy and paste. They said, here's what I like about it, here's what I don't like about it, here's the top changes we need to make. And they polish it off. We then repeated that for every director. Now here's where things get fun. With a few clicks of a button, I created a custom GPT, pulled in the personality profiles we had created for every director and gave it the instructions. Your job is to be our AI board. Every quarter. We're going to give you our deck before the meeting. Your task is to review every slide as every director and simulate how you think they will react and summarize the 20% landmines that are likely to blow up in our face and cause all the bloodshed in the real meeting.
- [28:23]
Michael Stelzner
I love this.
- [28:24]
Jeff Woods
To test it, we take a deck from the past. We know what happened in that meeting, Michael. We pulled it in and we said, give us your feedback. Guess how long it took it to read over 60 slides as every director and start giving feedback?
- [28:39]
Michael Stelzner
Like seconds is my guess.
- [28:41]
Jeff Woods
Seconds. One of the things that called out, it said on slide 8, Susan's going to get distracted by the granularity of the details of the slide. This is going to lead to a 30 minute detour. It's going to derail your whole agenda. Instead of all the details, say these three things. It's what she cares about most. And I turn and I look at the CEO and he goes, that's exactly what happened. This is where it gets more interesting. To make it better, we, with the board's permission, started having an AI note taker taking notes in the real meeting. So we actually have a transcript of the conversation. We're able to tag who said what so it knows, like by name. This is what Susan said versus what Jake said versus what Ben said. We pull the transcript back into the AI board and said, compare what you simulated to reality and adjust the personality profiles so you could have simulated reality. It only took two board meetings for the board to tell the CEO, these are the best decks we've ever had and the best meetings we've ever had. What changed?
- [29:43]
Michael Stelzner
That's really cool. That's really cool. I love it. I also know that you have another example where you were using it for a competitive advantage, if I'm not mistaken. Let's talk about that one.
- [29:54]
Jeff Woods
Yeah. So for you, who's listening to this, if I said, tell me, in fact, write out on paper the competitive advantage you are building in the future through the actions you're taking today, could you do it?
- [30:07]
Michael Stelzner
I could probably do it, but I know most people couldn't.
- [30:10]
Jeff Woods
Most leaders can't. Yeah, most leaders aren't that clear. And if you do have a sense of what your advantage was, I would challenge you to ask if it's still relevant.
- [30:19]
Michael Stelzner
Correct.
- [30:19]
Jeff Woods
This is something I got from Gary Keller. This was written on my whiteboard in Sharpie. What's the business that'll put you out of business? How can you build it first? It's all about asking the right questions. So we did this at one of our off sites for the collective. We had 55 C level execs in the room and I designed a prompt. There was about a page and a half long that turned AI into me, had IT interview them first and foremost, what their vision was for the business that could put them out of business. They typed all their info in. Then it had them envision what it would look like for them to build it first. And then it asked a series of very pointed questions to help them identify the internal capabilities they have that are rare, valuable and costly to imitate because that is your source of a sustainable competitive advantage. Most people think AI is going to be their advantage. That's like saying, I use Microsoft Excel and the Internet and that's why we have a protective moat that's going to be AI for most companies. But using AI to enhance what already makes you you. That is where you have a source of competitive advantage. So AI conducts this exhaustive interview and based on all of that, it then turned it into a big opportunity statement. So essentially like a rallying cry that you could cast throughout your organization to align your entire workforce on the competitive advantage you want to build for the future. So every C level exec did this. I had one that went as far they gave that prompt to every single person on their executive team and had every exec do it individually. We then pulled all their answers into a centralized Google Doc and tagged by like title of each person so AI would understand the context of this person's head of marketing vs head of growth vs head of brand vs CFO vs COO vs founder CEO pulled it into a single prompt and had AI ask five more questions so that it could create a holistic one for the entire company. The founder looked at me and said, we did this years ago. It took us over a day to get this done. Michael. It took me under an hour and the quality of output blew the previous one out of the water.
- [32:43]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, I want to ask a question that I bet is on the minds of some of our listeners, which is the reasoning models. As you know, a lot of the large language models have come out with reasoning models that are a little more thoughtful than the older models have. You found for this kind of strategic stuff, it's better to use their reasoning models or does it really not matter? What's your professional opinion? As of we're recording this in early March of 2025, I'm going to talk.
- [33:09]
Jeff Woods
To the top of the class first and then I'm going to bring it down to the top of the class. For those of you who are advanced. Yes. So like even creating that page and a half long prompt, I actually went to chatgpt4o, told it like context, role interview, task, told it the kind of prompt I wanted it to create. But its task was to create a training guide I could then put into O1 where O1 would follow the training guide to spit out the prompt. And I had tested it both ways. The prompt I got from 4.0 versus the prompt from 0101 was night and day better, specifically just in terms of how it brought structure to the prompt and delimiters. That was really, really, really strong. That's for you who are super, super, super advanced. Now, for your average normal leader, that question is a distraction because what tool should I use? What model within? Like should I use 4 oh. Or 4.5 or 01 or the 3 series? Or should I be a Claude or should I be on Gemini? Is that question a 20% priority that's going to drive 80% of your results? If your answer is yes, awesome. Search for the answer. If the answer is no, stop searching and focus on what matters. For most people, there are three skills they need to acquire to be successful with AI. And until they acquire acquire these three skills, everything else is a distraction.
- [34:39]
Michael Stelzner
And what are those?
- [34:40]
Jeff Woods
Number one, you have to be able to identify a strategic use case.
- [34:45]
Michael Stelzner
Got it.
- [34:46]
Jeff Woods
The 20% that drives the 82, you have to be able to communicate effectively with AI. Context, role, interview, task three, you have to learn how to stay in the driver's seat as the thought leader with AI as your thought partner. Until you can do those three things, everything else is a distraction.
- [35:05]
Michael Stelzner
So what I'm hearing you say is use the model that you have accessibility to. If you're using Claude, use Claude. If you're using Gemini, use Gemini. And don't worry about the model.
- [35:13]
Jeff Woods
Once you start getting.
- [35:15]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, once you start getting into it, then you can start experimenting and see whether you get better output, as Jeff did. But I love what you said. First of all, identify that strategic use case. That question. Right? That question that will ultimately yield that big difference. And then communicate effectively with AI utilizing the framework that you already mentioned. Context, role, interview, task, and stay in the driver's seat. We didn't really spend a lot of time on this, but Jeff multiple times said, don't let AI take you down a rabbit trail. Is that really what I'm hearing you say by that?
- [35:44]
Jeff Woods
Yes. And I actually think this is one of the greatest risks of AI that people are not talking about. A lot of people are lazy, and they are going to allow AI to replace skills that you should be holding on to. If you ask AI to interview you and you just copy and paste its results without any human oversight, you just made AI do the thinking. Your thinking muscles will fatigue. You will become less valuable as a human. The shift is to say, no, I'm in the driver's seat. I'm the thought leader. I'm going to have IT interview me, or I'm going to have it do research, and I'm going to have it generate a draft of certain content. But then I'm going to apply my judgment. I'm gonna ask, what do I believe is true? How do I know this is true? Let me fact check for hallucination. Or maybe I want it now to adopt the Persona of a devil's advocate. Or a challenger and have it interview to bulletproof my thinking and stress test it and tell me alternative ways of seeing it that I haven't considered yet. You can use AI to enhance you or you can use it to replace you. The difference that makes the difference is your ability to think strategically.
- [36:56]
Michael Stelzner
You are the king of quotes. You got it? That one was just like a tweetable moment right there. Okay, so I know you've got these five levels of getting AI through an organization. Let's kind of do a flyover of all five of the levels because at this point, here's where we are right? So far, what we know is we as the leader have adopted AI. We put the sticky notes on our computer, we're learning your framework, we're beginning to get a small maybe team, maybe our leadership team on board with it so that you get kind of key decision makers kind of aligned. You know, we've, we've used it to do some deep strategic thinking. That's kind of where we are right now in this conversation. So how do we get it to the point where we ultimately have transformation?
- [37:39]
Jeff Woods
I'll tell you why we created this first and then I'll tell you what it is. The problem we are solving is that every leader knows it's the future. They don't know where to start and they think they're falling behind. They are. The mistake is to suddenly think that you have to become the AI expert of your company. That's not your job. Your job is to drive growth, is to build a better business and better lives. And then you can engage the right technical people or the consultant to take it further. But you cannot delegate vision, strategy or leadership. You have to become an AI driven leader. So we needed to create a solution to help people, specifically in our AI driven leadership collective, understand where they are in terms of level of maturity with the organization. And based on that, what steps do they need to take next? It's not about everything you need to do. It's like the next three things you need to do just knock those dominoes down. So we did a ton of research and found there are five levels of maturity. Level one is just foundational competence. Can you put AI in your hands, in the hands of your key leaders and get foundational competence, meaning they know how to identify a strategic use case, they can communicate effectively with AI, and they know how to stay in the driver's seat as the thought leader. Can you get an LLM approved and in place that's going to meet your security provisions? Can you get Your policy in place, just do that. You knock that domino down. You now go to level two, which is early adoption. Now that you've got the core framework and support in place, this is about now expanding this to early adopters throughout the company, helping them get the foundational competence. But this is when you're also starting to put a roadmap in place of what it looks like vision to drive it into the company and then go, here's the 20% we're going to focus on for the next 90 days. And can we start to build the capability of identifying and implementing use cases that drive operational efficiency or value to our customers? That's just level two.
- [39:38]
Michael Stelzner
Real quick. On level two, do you recommend, like, starting with a small team or starting with a department to just kind of have it as an experiment and a hypothesis?
- [39:46]
Jeff Woods
100? Yes. So this is where I'm looking at, like, who's going to be my Navy SEAL team? And I'm going to probably go cross functional and I'm going to pull in key leaders that are going to be innovative and excited to test this out. I'm not rolling it to everybody because people are busy. You only get one first impression. I want to go to the people that are going to feel comfortable and excited to start and are going to be okay when they fail. When they get their hands a little bit dirty, it's not going to stop them. They're going to push through. That's level two.
- [40:12]
Michael Stelzner
Real quick. Are we going to be documenting their story? Because we're going to use that to drive the remaining levels, you know, as like, okay, good.
- [40:19]
Jeff Woods
The reason you start foundational competence with you and your key leaders is so that then you can go to the early adopters and say, let me show you what I've done. I mean, I'm going to place a bet. Those of you listening to this heard use cases today that you were like, holy smokes, I didn't know it could do that.
- [40:36]
Michael Stelzner
Right.
- [40:36]
Jeff Woods
The way you lose with AI is to think that you have to know everything about AI. The way you win is by surrounding yourself with other people, asking the right questions, and harnessing collective knowledge. It's not about you knowing all the answers. It's about you surrounding yourself with the right people and asking the right questions. So, yeah, you gotta go first. So level two, we've worked the kinks out with our early adopters. Then you go level three, which is where we strategically start to expand. And this is what I'm looking at. How do we get about half the. The company up and running in terms of using this proficiently. How do we ensure that cross departments, people can identify, use cases, implement solutions and get a win? How do we start to look at our data and actually make sure that data is not just something that we collect, but something that we centralize and harness? Once you can work those kinks out, you then earn the right to go to level four, which is where we start to optimize the existing organization. And for some companies, that's going to be good enough, they're going to stop there. Some will then go to level five, which is how do we transform? Do AI driven transformation. That's what's the business that'll put us out of business. How do we build it first? And it all starts with a sticky note.
- [41:52]
Michael Stelzner
Talk to me about what AI transformation might look like just because I want to get people excited about that.
- [41:57]
Jeff Woods
So the chairman for Domino's Pizza for China is in the collective. He shared a use case. I can't share all the details, but he shared a use case about how they're going from the time to open a store in China by harnessing technology has gone from four months to two weeks. That's a game changer when you're opening like more than a store a day. So how do you harness technology to completely change the game instead of it taking you four months from here's a potential site, let's sign the lease, let's get a contractor in place, let's build, let's do everything to literally two weeks they are open and serving pizzas.
- [42:43]
Michael Stelzner
That's a competitive advantage, I would imagine, behind the scenes. What role did AI help in that regard?
- [42:48]
Jeff Woods
That's the stuff I can't share publicly.
- [42:50]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. But I can imagine we could reverse engineer that. It helped them see inefficiencies in the way they were doing things, obviously, and it allowed them to look at a new way of doing things. Jeff, you're amazing, first of all, and I wanted to say thank you. I could listen to you all day long. Is your book available in audio? Because I think a lot of audio.
- [43:09]
Jeff Woods
Yeah.
- [43:09]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, good. And it's me and it's you. Good. Well, if people want to connect with you on the socials, do you have a preferred platform and if they want to work with you?
- [43:17]
Jeff Woods
LinkedIn.
- [43:17]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, LinkedIn. J eo f f woods. G e o F. I'm sorry, I'm dyslexic. You're right. I see G G O F F woods on LinkedIn. And then if they want to work with Your business, where do you want to send them?
- [43:30]
Jeff Woods
AI leadership is the URL.com. yeah, aileadership.com My realization is your competitive advantage with AI is not in knowing everything about AI, but in surrounding yourself with the right people, asking the right questions and harnessing collective knowledge. This was a very strategic decision. So instead of building a consulting company or a tech product, I wanted to create the world. So most valuable network of AI driven leaders like you've heard me share, some of the types of people that are in this, everybody is C level. We've got companies that are small to mid size all the way to the Fortune 500. What unites us? Very few people are actually technical. What unites us is that we believe that we cannot delegate vision, strategy or leadership and we want to surround oursel with the right people where we can get in the room, ask the right questions and learn from each other. What was crazy is like, you know, Domino's is a case study for harnessing technology for a competitive advantage. There were things that a small business shared in the room with that chairman that blew his mind, that gave him completely new perspective and vice versa. And so for me, my mission is to create a new category of leader, which is the AI driven leader. This is a group of people where we will harness AI to enhance our strengths as humans, not to replace them. And ensure that we drive this through the organization to build better business businesses and better lives. So if you're somebody who is C level in your org, you are innovative, you are hungry, you are humble, you are collaborative and you know you can't do this alone. I would strongly encourage you to check out the collective. It is not for everybody, it is application only. We very tightly curate this thing, but this is a global network and you have access to the centralized knowledge of every member so that you know way more than your competition and you always move faster.
- [45:21]
Michael Stelzner
Jeff woods, author of the AI Driven Leader thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.
- [45:25]
Jeff Woods
The pleasure was mine.
- [45:27]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com A47. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app. And would you do me a favor and possibly consider giving us a review? We would love that. And also let your friends know about this show and do check out out our other shows, the social media Marketing podcast and the Social Media Marketing talk show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.