You’re Using AI Wrong (Do This Instead) Geoff Woods on ChatGPT and AI with Jeff Dudan #226

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "You’re Using AI Wrong (Do This Instead)"

Unemployable with Jeff Dudan, Ep. #226 (November 11, 2025)

Guests: Host Jeff Dudan (Founder, Homefront Brands) and Jeff Woods (Author – The AI Driven Leader, CEO of AI Leadership)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the strategic use of AI for business leaders and entrepreneurs, disrupting the common view of AI as a tactical assistant. Jeff Woods challenges listeners to stop “majoring in the minors” by misusing generative AI for menial tasks and instead leverages it as a high-level thought partner for strategic growth, transformation, and competitive advantage. He introduces actionable frameworks for deploying AI, shares client examples, and discusses the broader implications for leadership, organizations, and even personal development.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Strategic Leadership in the AI Era: How AI, when harnessed as a thought partner (not a replacement), can elevate leadership and business strategy.
• Rethinking AI Adoption: Why learning every tool or feature is a distraction—focus instead on the “20%” of use cases that create 80% of results.
• The CRIT Prompt Framework: A practical, repeatable way to unlock AI’s full potential for executives and teams.
• Cultural & Organizational Shifts: Why C-suite buy-in and modeling AI usage sets psychological safety and precedent throughout organizations.
• The Human Side: Reinforcing that distinctly human skills like creativity, strategic thinking, and communication will only become more vital as AI evolves.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Are Today’s AI Skills Already Obsolete?

• Woods asserts that while much current AI “how-to” will become obsolete, what endures is using AI to enhance strategic thinking, not just tactical tasks.
• Quote: “Right now, people are using AI... for 80% use cases that only bring 20% of the value... The real game changer is using AI as your thought partner.” (Jeff Woods, 02:35)

2. Major vs. Minor – The 80/20 Rule

• Dudan and Woods agree most professionals remain stuck in unimportant work, a pattern now repeated with AI as they use it for low-value tasks like email or scheduling.
• Woods advocates identifying the “one big problem” whose solution offers disproportionate value, focusing AI efforts there.

3. CRIT: The Prompting Framework

• Context, Role, Interview, Task – CRIT transforms generic prompting into a collaborative, context-rich process where AI acts as a strategic advisor.
  • Example Prompt:
    • Context: (e.g., “Attached are my financial statements…”)
    • Role: (“Act as a strategic CFO…”)
    • Interview: (“Ask me up to five questions to gain deeper insight…”)
    • Task: (“Tell me the top five things I might not see in my business.”)
• Quote: “The interview part is the real game changer. I don’t ask AI questions. I make AI turn the tables and ask me the right questions to unlock deeper context.” (Jeff Woods, 06:38)

4. From Peripheral Brain to Boardroom Partner

• Dudan describes his IT partner as a “peripheral brain”; Woods parallels this with AI used for thought, research, and especially strategy, not just automation.
  • Memorable analogy: “It’s tough to read the label when you’re inside the box.” (Jeff Woods, 05:05)

5. Real-World Transformation Examples

• Woods shares a story of using AI to help restructure debt for a manufacturing CEO facing bankruptcy:
  • AI identified novel solutions based on deep contextual interviewing.
  • CEO: “In less than 10 minutes, I got hope.” (Story near 24:30)
• Woods’ “AI board” (including personalities of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, and his future self) to analyze his keynote talks—leading to a doubling in conversion rate. (48:00)
  • Quote: "Now, you tell me, did that replace my creativity or did that enhance my creativity?" (Jeff Woods, 50:49)

6. The New Model for Meetings & Strategy Sessions

• Old offsite, sticky-note brainstorming sessions are “dead.” Instead, teams use a pre-built prompt, each team member is interviewed by AI, and results are aggregated instantly, surfacing true alignment (or lack thereof), focusing subsequent discussion.
  • “The CEO stood up and goes, ‘That would have normally taken us three months. We did it in one hour. Every voice was heard, and we are actually aligned.’” (Jeff Woods, 32:15)

7. Overcoming Barriers – Why Leaders Resist AI

• Less than 5% of executives had adopted AI despite universal belief in its future importance.
• Main barrier: Not knowing where to start.
• Woods says showing AI as a tool for strategy rather than pure productivity “turns the lights on” for executive teams and breaks old adoption bottlenecks.
  • Quote: “If you show them how to use it for that [strategy], they realize they've been living their whole life in black and white and you just showed them color for the first time and they're never going back.” (27:19)

8. Bias, Collaboration, and Human Judgment

• Be explicit about assumptions and use AI to challenge not just confirm your thinking.
• Woods demonstrates he uses the CRIT methodology to have AI both create ideas and then play “challenger” or take on the persona of a skeptical customer.
  • “I’m recognizing I’m no longer the player of an instrument... I’m now the conductor.” (Jeff Woods, 36:57)

9. AI Will Not Replace Artistry – But It Will Democratize It

• In response to the question about the “last author or screenwriter,” Woods believes AI will create new categories of creators: “It's probably going to be the person you never heard of who's sitting at a computer at home, knowing how to wield AI to create something truly remarkable.” (54:00)
• Predicts future movies and content created bespoke for individual viewers.

10. The Human Skills That Matter More Now

• “The ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to create…” are described as the skills that will skyrocket in value, even as ‘robotic’ work goes away. (Jeff Woods, 45:04)
• “Isn’t it ironic that it might actually be a machine that returns us to being human?”

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Focusing AI Efforts:
  “Most of the tools, most of the information is a distraction. Your filter is: if I focus on this, is it going to unlock 80% of my results? If no, why are we talking about it?” — Jeff Woods (10:13)
• On Speed of Change:
  “People are grossly underestimating how seismic this is because they are failing so slowly, they think they're succeeding.” — Jeff Woods (18:41)
• On Strategy vs. Tactics:
  “AI adoption is not the goal of any leader. Building a better business and better lives is, but it is strategy first, technology second.” — Jeff Woods (15:41)
• On AI in Meetings:
  “We have completely disrupted how we even hold meetings now… No longer do we show up for a meeting where the person running the meeting asks a question and starts to drive the meeting.” — Jeff Woods (32:16)
• On Education’s Obsolescence:
  “The problem with our current education system is that it was literally manufactured by John D. Rockefeller to create industrial workers… Is memorizing all the information for a test a skill that's going to matter in the future? No, it is not.” — Jeff Woods (69:15, 70:06)
• On Leadership Adoption:
  “If you, as the leader, are using this and you're going to people saying… ‘Did you use AI to do this?’ and they go, ‘No.’ And you say, ‘Then this meeting's over. Go bring it to AI...’” — Jeff Woods (59:44)
• On What a Creative Can Do with AI:
  “This time I took the last five transcripts from speeches that I had done, put them to my AI board… asked it how to improve… It doubled our conversion rate.” — Jeff Woods (49:15)

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Practical Framework: The CRIT Prompt

Context | Role | Interview | Task

• Use whenever prompting AI for complex, high-value work.
• Ensure AI interviews you (or your team), drawing out context that otherwise remains “inside the box.”
• Always clarify your assumptions and ask AI to challenge your thinking.

Sticky Notes Exercise:
Put two sticky notes on your desk:

1. “How can AI help me do this?”
2. “CRIT: Context, Role, Interview, Task”
   (Woods, 05:05–06:38)

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Segment Timestamps

• [00:43] – Intro and 80/20 Rule on AI use
• [03:27] – “Peripheral brain” analogy and strategic AI adoption
• [06:38] – Introducing the CRIT framework for prompting
• [13:22] – Real-world example: AI identifies strategic cracks in a business plan for a steel conglomerate
• [24:30] – Manufacturing CEO bankruptcy case, solved with AI’s “outside the box” questioning
• [32:16] – How AI fundamentally transforms meetings and strategic alignment sessions
• [36:57] – Detecting and countering bias using AI as a “challenger”
• [45:04] – Why human skills gain in value as AI grows
• [48:00] – Jeff’s “AI board” (Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, future self) critique his own speeches
• [53:14] – Future self generating end-game insights and implications for executives
• [59:44] – How the leader’s AI use shapes organizational adoption culture
• [65:23] – Example: Executive assistant using CRIT to 10x and 100x her value and create new systems

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Actionable Takeaways

• Adopt CRIT Prompting: Make CRIT your default for any significant work you do with AI—unlocking strategic rather than tactical value.
• Start Small, Focus on the 20%: Ask, “What is the biggest problem in my business right now?” and aim AI at it.
• C-suite Must Lead: AI culture and adoption must start with the executive team modeling and requiring strategic use.
• Challenge, Don’t Just Confirm: Use AI to pressure-test, red-team, and question your assumptions—not just to generate outputs.
• Embrace Messiness: Don’t attach to perfect grammar or structure; stream-of-consciousness works best with AI.
• Create a ‘Peripheral Brain’: Treat AI as an extension of your leadership thinking, not just a robotic assistant.

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Resource Links

• AI Leadership (Jeff Woods' company, software, collective, and services)
• Book: The AI Driven Leader
• Podcast & Newsletter: Found at AI Leadership website

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Memorable Closing

On Growth and Possibility:
“We often set goals based on what we think we can achieve, but none of us actually know what we're capable of achieving… Set a goal that's so big, it makes you uncomfortable and requires you to rediscover who you are and, more importantly, who you can become.”
— Jeff Woods (71:43)

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For leaders ready to “get unemployable” and build for the future, the episode offers both a mindset and a toolkit for integrating AI not as a threat, but as a multiplier for human creativity and strategic impact.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Unemployable Podcast. I'm Jeff Dooden. If you left a lucrative career in sales to join forces with real estate mogul Gary Keller of Keller Williams and Jay Papasan, and with them founded the consulting company the One thing. If you became the chief growth officer at India's largest steel conglomerate, Jindal Steel and Power, and there realized that AI was not only going to change the future, but could become a significant strategic thought partner to executives. And you are the author of the number one book in its category, the AI Driven Leader. Your name can only be Jeff Woods. Welcome, Jeff.

[B]

Thanks so much for having me, Jeff.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Excited to be on with you. You were introduced to me by somebody in a strategic coach group, and I had made an initiative to be an AI leader before I ever heard about your book and heard about you. So I'm excited to share this time together. Here's my opening question for you. Considering the rate that AI agents are evolving, how much of what we are learning today will be absolute tomorrow? And do we need to learn anything at all?

[B]

Do you need to learn anything at all? Yes. How much of it will be obsolete? I think that depends on you.

[A]

What does that look like?

[B]

You Familiar with the 8020 rule, Jeff Pareto's law? Yeah.

[A]

No, clearly.

[B]

So it's the idea that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. This is a lot. It's true. Like gravity, it applies to all things. The problem is, most people go through their days majoring in the minors. They wake up, they check their phone and they check email until they show up to the office or their home office, fire up their computer, and they check email until they have to go to their first meeting. They get out of their meeting, they have five minutes. So they check email, and then somebody swings by or calls and says, hey, you got a minute? And because they're a team player, they say, sure. They get to the end of their day knowing they were busy questioning what the heck they got done. That repeats over the course of a career, which leads to a life of regret. That is what it means to major in the minors. Nobody listening to this got to their level because they were the best email checker in their organization or the best meeting attender yet it dominated, dominates their calendar. Now apply that to AI. Right now, people are using AI and when I say AI, I'm referring to generative AI like Chat, GPT, cod, Claude, Copilot, Gemini. Either like Google, where they're asking it questions and getting answers, or they're treating it like an assistant to help them with tasks. But These are the 80% use cases, Jeff, that only bring 20% of the value. So how much of that's going to be valuable in the future? I don't know. Especially as agentic AI comes into the flow and takes over calendar, takes over, email management, takes over almost all those task based roles. What's the 20% that could drive the 80? This is when I discovered the idea of you being the thought leader, Jeff, and AI being your thought partner. Because I deeply believe that your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. Most people have not considered using AI to elevate how they think. I think that's timeless and is only going to go up in value.

[A]

I had an IT partner who was extremely talented. One of these guys that slept all day and worked all night. So when I was building a business, I was able to build technology at night with him. And he would say that I, I'm your peripheral brain. So basically I would download my thoughts, my creativity, my business needs, my strategy to this person and then they would come back and they would design technologies to help me achieve those goals. And it's kind of what AI is. It's, it's a peripheral brain and even better than that, peripheral brain for tasks, peripheral brain for thought. It's a peripheral brain for strategy, it's a peripheral brain for research and. But changing our habits to not get caught up in the email and not get caught up in the, in all of the things and letting other people dominate our time is, is really the challenge. And I've struggled with it because even before hearing about your book, the AI Driven Leader, I wrote on my goals for 25 to become an AI executive and to incorporate it. And I'm in, I'm in. I, I do spend time out in groups where there are thought leaders and I, I get immersed in AI and how people use it, but then I come back and I implement it, maybe 20%. How does, how do you coach executives to really go cold turkey and get the benefit from AI that's possible and decoupling themselves from the habits of the past?

[B]

I believe big changes start with small actions.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We can help leadership teams completely transform themselves. And we're really good at identifying the tiny, tiny little actions that if you just do those, it unlocks the entire chain. And for me, I'm holding these up right now, I have them put two sticky notes on their desk. How simple is that? Literally. And everybody doing this can go Home. Grab two sticky notes and a Sharpie. On sticky note number one, write, how can AI help me do this? Here's why that matters. It is tough to read the label when you're inside the box. You're in your own box on how you're operating. You can't see what you can't see every single day. You are doing a ton of things that matter for your business, for your personal life. But you're doing it the old way, where you're relying on your own human processing power. You need to create awareness of the moments when you might be able to engage AI as a thought partner. So that's what this first sticky note does. It just says, hey, how can AI help me review my financial statements? Which is exactly what happened to me, Jeff. I was reviewing my financials, I look down and I see this first sticky note and I'm like, okay, well, what would that prompt even look like? That's the second sticky note on it. I have my prompt framework called crit. C R I T stands for context, Role, interview task. That's what's on the sticky note. Context, role interview task. Every prompt I write adheres to this prompt framework. What I'm about to share with you is the single most important thing we're going to share today. It's like a marriage, Jeff. If you can't communicate effectively, your relationship is not that good. Same thing with AI. If you give AI lots of context about your situation, that's the start role is where you tell AI the kind of expert you want it to act. As for this specific use case, the real game changer, though, is the interview. I don't ask AI questions. I make AI turn the tables and ask me the right questions to unlock deeper context out of my head that I would have never thought to have communicated. So I give it lots of context, I assign it a role, I turn the tables and make it interview me. Also, it can accomplish a task. So here's the actual prompt I wrote when I was reviewing my financials context. Attached are my financial statements. Drag drop. Your role is to act as a strategic CFO who's world class at telling a CEO who doesn't really know how to read financials the top five things about their business that they should know about their business that they probably don't know about their business. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context about what's happening inside the organization. Then your task is to tell me what those top five things are.

[A]

Okay, that sounds like an effective conversation with my CFO is. Yeah.

[B]

And one of my greatest realizations in becoming a an AI driven leader, Jeff, is this didn't transform my relationship with AI, this has transformed my relationship with people because I now think in terms of crit and I am now aware of how much in the past something might have been crystal clear in my mind, but it was as clear as mud coming out of my mouth because I didn't give sufficient context up front. I wasn't clear about the role I wanted to play. I didn't proactively give them permission to ask me clarifying questions. I wasn't clear on the task I wanted them to accomplish. Like go do the thing. What thing? The thing. Right, exactly.

[A]

So I had been reading the book and I read it when I first got it, which was three months ago. And then I was referencing back to prepare for our conversation today. And then I, I. So our goals for this podcast is to build authority next year into 20. And so I need to write a business case because our budgets are due for 26, so I need to. So I, I have to turn in. So I made a spreadsheet. I said, here's all the things I think I want to spend next year and I've got to turn that in in four weeks. And I said, now I need to write the business case for why it would benefit Homefront Brands for us to X our followers, our subscribers, our content, our. All of that kind of stuff. And I started and I. So I went to chat and I don't know what your. Are you a chat, Claude?

[B]

Chat's my primary.

[A]

Is it use genspark?

[B]

No.

[A]

You familiar with it?

[B]

Ish.

[A]

Ish. Yeah. So it'll, It'll. I was just at the Genius Network conference and Mike likes to use. Mike Koenigs likes to use genspark because it will go to all of the other ones and get their. And then synthesize all of the large language models feedback back into a single.

[B]

So here's where I take a provocative view on this.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Is spending the time to learn these different products and tools and staying up to date with them a 20% priority that's going to drive 80% of you achieving your goals?

[A]

Probably. It's probably a no.

[B]

Then I think it's a distraction.

[A]

Yeah. So go.

[B]

That's literally how I see the world. When everybody's like, how do you stay up to date on a. I'm like, I don't even try.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because most of it I stay up to date by surrounding myself with the largest network of AI driven leaders. And they tell me how they're applying this and I filter down to what's the 20% that's worth focusing on? Because it's going to unlock 80% of the value. This is what I mean when I say I think most of the tools, most of the information is a distraction. Your filter is. If I focused on this, is it going to unlock 80% of my results? If no, why are we talking about it?

[A]

Right. So maybe I need Gamma to make a presentation and I need this. And I, you know, I focus on going deep in chat and personal on my phone. I like to use Grok. My experience was, and this is where most leaders like me probably fall down was I knew I had made notes about all the reasons why we needed to do what we needed to do. And then when I went to chat and I said build me a business case. It was a mess. I gave it a mess of instructions, but I didn't have it interview me.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because I knew, I knew what I wanted. So what did I end up doing? I ended up just writing it and sticking it into chat like a proofreader and an enhancer. So which, which was, which means it's, it's a substandard piece of work because.

[B]

It'S out of my brain and you put yourself in an echo chamber. AI just wants to please you. It's gonna, whatever you, it's never gonna come back and say, I don't know, it's gonna come back and it's gonna tell you something and it might be making it up, it might be lying to you. So if you say, here's my business plan, help me make it better, it's going to make it incrementally better. And you might have the wrong plant, you're optimizing the wrong thing versus I'll give you a real example of how I've played with this. This is when this is one of my first use cases. So we have to go back in time. I am chief growth officer of Jindal Steel and power giant steel company out of India. I'm responsible for the growth of a company of about 100,000 people. I'm flying to India every quarter. I'm at the chairman's house and I am showing him how I am using AI for strategy, not for tactics. So perfect example. We had a business plan that we were executing and there were lots of places that things were breaking and we were under, under delivering. We have our quarterly earnings coming up. I am at his house and I Fire up my computer and I write context. Here is our current business plan, drag and drop. Here's our goal versus actuals. Drag and drop, meaning I literally drag and drop to the files. In your role is to act as an aggressive growth minded board member with deep expertise in the steel industry. I want you interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context about where our plan is insufficient. Then your task is to tell me all the places there are cracks in the foundation and the plan is insufficient and how we can plug the gap in the next 30 days so we deliver to the market. And AI in that moment leverages its immense data and processing power, which for context, like Jeff, how many books do you think you've read in your life? Thousand.

[A]

Two thousand?

[B]

Thousand to two thousand. Like think of all those pages, all the words on every single page across thousands of books. What percent of that collective knowledge can you recall and apply right now?

[A]

Oh, very little.

[B]

Right. And this is all of us in context. These books so far have been trained on anywhere from 200 to 500 million books worth of data. Take a wild guess what it can recall and apply.

[A]

All of it.

[B]

All of it. In under a second. AI had read through 200 to 500 million books to understand how an aggressive growth minded board member with deep expertise in the steel industry, it had read the entire business plan, the goal versus actuals. And it turns the tables in under a second and starts firing off extremely specific questions that only an insider could ask. Five of them, one at a time. And every question it's asking us, we're giving it an answer, which means it will dynamically use that context to ask a better follow up question. And it lays out a full blown plan of all the places our strategic plan was insufficient and how we could close the gap in the next 30 days.

[A]

What was the CEO's reaction at that moment?

[B]

Chairman? He goes, this is incredible. And I go, yeah, it's the future. He goes, I agree. And I said, I think we need to drive this through the whole company. And he goes, I agree. And I said, this is so important. I think you need to own this as chairman of the board. And he goes, I disagree. Why don't you do it? And this was a moment, Jeff, where I'm like, holy smokes, he's asking me to head up AI for a company this size. One problem I know nothing about, AI but then I realized something I learned from my old business partner, Gary Keller. Anytime you're hitting a ceiling of achievement, you're Just missing a person. If you're asking how can I drive this through a company, are you asking the right question versus asking who not how, who can I get into relationship that could enable me and for me that I just committed, I said yes, I'll figure it out. Partnered with Google, they became my who started going to their headquarters every quarter, learned a lot about the tech and started to drive it through the company. And that's when I realized most leaders are asking the wrong questions about AI. They're asking how do we use AI or what are the right use cases. They're the wrong questions because AI adoption is not the goal of any leader. Building a better business and better lives is, but it is strategy first, technology second. But most people are treating tech as though it's their goal when it is not. And that was my realization that caused me to write the AI driven leader and build a company around it called AI Leadership.

[A]

This revolution of technology, why is it different than every other technology revolution that's happened before now?

[B]

In some ways it's different. In some ways it's the same. I went back and I studied all the majors in the past from printing press, steam engine, assembly line, electricity, Internet. Because I found myself thinking, Jeff, we've been here before. This is not the first time tech has really changed things. We can learn from our past.

[A]

What's the name of that book? Is it the Big Shift that walks through everything that you just said and talks about how the world changed when they started building power plants and factories and then when they, they, they started on the river for power, you had to build a factory near the river and then they started building. Each factory had their own power generation plant. And then when they created the ability to create centralized power plants, that's when the industrial revolution took off. I'm actually, yeah, it's, I think it's called the Big Shift. I read it years ago and then it went through the Internet the same way it went through each technology revolution. But it was written a while ago and it was even mention AI.

[B]

So I'll tell you what's the same. In every single, single major technological disruption, people feared about job loss. Every one of them true wailing. In every one of them up to date, more jobs were added than were displaced. In every single one, in every one, there was a group of people that embraced it early that had disproportionate opportunity and those that really resisted, eventually life got really hard until the pain was so great that they adopted that is consistent throughout history. The other thing I Figured out. When people talk about job displacement, you have to unpack what a job is, Jeff. And if you think of it like an algebraic formula, a job equals the skills you apply times the processes you follow. Job equals skills applied times processes followed. Throughout history, tech has made the value of certain skills and processes skyrocket. And it's also made the value of certain skills and processes plummet. The difference that made the difference was never the tech. It was the leaders and their mindset around it. Those that recognized the opportunity and said, hey, I may have mastered skills that are. I should be shorting in the market. They're about to plummet in value and started investing in developing the next skill. Huge opportunity. Those that clung to the way things used to be. Life got real, real hard. Here's where I think this one is different. One, it's bigger than all of them. Two, it's happening faster. It's not linear, it's exponential in terms of how fast this is happening to the point people. People are grossly underestimating how seismic this is because they are failing so slowly, they think they're succeeding.

[A]

Do you think that there is a correlation between the rate of change and the rate of recovery?

[B]

What do you think? I have not thought about that at all.

[A]

I don't know. I just thought of the question.

[B]

But it's a great question.

[A]

If I'm thinking about it, which I am. The faster you rip the band aid off. And because AI is evolving so quickly, agentic AI is evolving so quickly, it's easier to adopt this technology than it has been to adopt other technologies. For example, infrastructure with the Internet. Well, okay, we were on dial up next thing. But it was. We were on dial up for a long time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then next thing you know, you get on. You get the dsl modems coming in, and you don't. Now you've got to have. Do you have copper wires? Next thing you know. Well, now, now we're building fiber optic, right? So there's infrastructure that. That the rate of change, of their ability to deliver enough bandwidth. Now, okay, now you can have streaming. You know, the Netflix story, Right. It's, you know, so. So that was. That was. So you think about it. At the time, we thought it was an incredible rate of change, but if you look back on it, it's like dinosaur land, Right? How long did it take Blockbuster to. To fail to Netflix and to streaming and then ultimately to YouTube and all that in 10 years? This is happening overnight. It's happening every quarter, and it's accelerated in an accelerating rate, so. And it's not harder to do because there's no addition. Well, we gotta build the power plants. Like, this stuff takes massive. So the people that are making lots of money right now are the people that are building data centers and finding a way to get them energized to be able to do all of this, all of this number crunching and on all of these, you know, everything that it's doing. So but at the end of the day, that's happening quick enough. And our ability to understand and to use the technology, I mean, is like you just said, People can take the CRIT methodology that you just mentioned, and if they're paying attention and if they wrote it down and if they go and buy your book, they will be 10 times better tomorrow than they were.

[B]

Today if they do one additional thing. Okay, because you can have crit, which is a proven framework for you. This will work in any use case. But if you aim it at the wrong use case, it doesn't matter. You write the best prompt in the world for the wrong use case, it still will not bring value.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

You gotta learn how to focus on the 20% that drives the 80% of the results. So here is a question that I can offer to you. Who's listening to this? What is one of the biggest problems that you are facing in your business or your life, period, that if you could just solve, would unlock a new level of value? This is the question I ask anytime, myself or anybody on my team. If we speak on a stage, that's the question we ask. And we will literally pull somebody live out of the audience blind, having never met them. They will describe their problem and we will write CRIT and solve it. Real, real story. One CEO says to me, okay, I got a problem. I run a manufacturing company here in the us I leased all this capital equipment from a company in Japan. Things have shifted in the market. The debt structure now is killing us. We are on path to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured. And I just ask him, okay, what have you done? And he goes, honestly, I feel like I've done everything. And he lists five very specific strategies that he had deployed. Jeff none of it had worked because the company that holds the debt in Japan is publicly traded and the board was refusing to restructure it because they thought they would lose face in Japanese society. He looks at me and he goes, I have no next steps. We're going bankrupt. Can AI help? I literally pull up ChatGPT on the screen and I Type in context, role, interview, and task. And this is vertically structured like a ladder. So context. And then I hold down the shift key and hit enter three times. So you, you have a few lines down. Context, role, interview, task. And I just wrote the following prompt. Context. I'm a manufacturing CEO. I leased all this capital equipment from a company in Japan. Things have shifted in the market. The debt structure is killing us. We're going to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured. I feel like we tried everything. And I listed all five strategies. Jeff. None of it has worked because this is a public company in Japan that holds the debt and the board is refusing to restructure it because they think they'll lose face in Japanese society. I have no next steps and I fear we're going out of business. That was the context section. Role. Your role is to act as an investment banker with deep expertise in restructuring debt. Interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to three questions to gain deeper context. Then your task is to generate five non obvious strategies I could deploy to get the board to restructure the debt. AI turns the tables. It reads through 200 to 500 million books worth of data to identify how an investment banker with deep expertise, expertise in restructuring debt, who also knew 2000 years of Japanese culture and history would think and asked a question which was, do you have any relationships with any other executives in Japan that the board would respect? Jeff. I turn and I look at the CEO and he goes, holy crap, I would have never asked that question. Oh my gosh, I do. Tough to read the label when you're inside the box, right? AI asks two more questions just like that. And then it turns the tables and says, okay, here's your five non obvious strategies. Number one on the list, the Saving Face Consortium. It said, you have enough relationships with all the right people in Japan. Why don't you just approach them to acquire your debt, give them super favorable terms, Your debt will get restructured. The board will save face. Jeff. I look at him. His whole body language has shifted. He's actually holding back tears. He turns and looks at the other people in the room. All Pierce CEOs from different companies. And he admits, I have not slept in 90 days. I have been making peace with the fact that we are going out of business, but in less than 10 minutes, I got hope. Two months later, my phone rings and it's a text from him. And it said, the ball is moving. I actually think this is going to get done.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

What if your ability to think Strategically was the difference between growing your business or going out of business. How might it shift how you view your time? Might it change what goes on your calendar? And just might it shift how you start to view AI?

[A]

That's a powerful example. What is the biggest resistance that you get from companies that you engage with? Is it the people that they're hanging on to? Is it a different. Does it come to the fact that you need more creatives? You need people that are going to think differently?

[B]

Nope. Simpler. Simpler than all that.

[A]

What is the biggest holdback that people have about submitting to your process and changing their business?

[B]

When I was writing the book, I interviewed over 200 executives. One on one, 100% of them said AI was the future. 100% of them said they would adopt it. Less than 5% had done anything. Why? Because the number one problem that's giving them resistance is they don't know where to start. And even today, you know, the companies we talk to, everybody has chat or copilot like they, they have some large language model inside that is sanctioned, but people don't know how to start. So they default to doing what they've done historically, which is treat it like a Google or focus on using it like an assistant to help them write better emails. And it's. While it does bring some value, it's not that valuable. So it feels like a waste of time. And then they question, is this even bringing me value? To the point that OpenAI and Microsoft have trillions in future enterprise value that is at stake because they have licensed copilot or chatgpt and the companies aren't using it. And so for us, what we realize is one of our greatest strengths is we are the best in the world at turning the lights on for the executive team. Because a lot of C level leaders think, oh yeah, it will figure this out or we'll hire a consultant, they'll do it. But you know, this is for people in the middle of the organization. It's for them. They don't realize that this is a tool for the C suite to drive strategy, to elevate strategic thinking, to collapse the time, to make faster, smarter decisions or to solve your most complicated problems. If you show them how to use it for that, they realize they've been living their whole life in black and white and you just showed them color for the first time and they're never going back.

[A]

Let me give you a use case. I'm going to bring. We have five franchise brands at home, front brands. I'm going to bring in the entire brand support team, which is between six and nine people per brand. And I was going to do a four hour Blue Ocean strategy session just to check in on strategy, run through all of the Blue Ocean processes which I've used since the late 90s to build businesses and to identify niches in the marketplace. I could throw all of that away. I could put chat up my chat, which I have the advanced chat and I've been building inside of it. So it's getting to know me and has been getting to know me and I could use this CRIP methodology and just work as a group and be interviewed by chat to come up with the strategy and just use that as a basis for the entire meeting.

[B]

So I'll tell you what we've done with this. This is crazy. You think about the old way of doing off sites.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, you pull the team off site, you get your Sharpies, you get your sticky notes. You might even have a facilitator. They ask the is our Blue Ocean strategy and everybody's writing their ideas down on sticky notes and they're getting them on the wall and you see everybody's thoughts super fast and you have a con about the alignment.

[A]

Guilty, guilty, guilty.

[B]

Yeah, that's dead. That's dead. That's the old way. Here's what's, here's the challenges with that model. And by the way, I used to be the guy facilitating those things for the last decade of my life. That was me.

[A]

Well, you still have the sticky notes.

[B]

Different, different use case though. One, you end up with way too many ideas and not enough focus and not enough alignment. Two, it's the loudest voices that dominate and sometimes the smartest voices and ideas remain dormant. And three, the planning process just takes forever. So I was looking down at my sticky note one day and I saw how Kinei helped me do this. It started with us writing crit in the room and we have evolved it significantly to the point we've built our own AI model for this that we've even patented. Here's what we did for a company, same use case. They wanted to define future competitive advantage, like future Strategy. We had 40 leaders in the room. This is for a Fortune 500. And we pre architected the prompt with all the legacy information about the company. What the executive team had been thinking was the Blue Ocean strategy, like all that stuff. And then every person just opens up their computer and just click the button which executes this complex prompt that was about five to six pages long on the back end. That we had architected. They didn't even need to write the prompt. They just clicked the button. AI interviewed every single person in the room, Jeff, for 15 minutes, pulling every piece of additional context out of that individual's head. And then it spat out a detailed report of that person's thinking about the future strategy of the company. That alone is way more robust than you could ever do voice to voice, just like interviewing one person at a time. But here's what's crazy. I then clicked one more button, and AI read all 40 reports simultaneously and collapsed them. And on the screen, it starts to generate. Here's where you're aligned. And it started to list all the places the people in the room were aligned. Here's where you are not aligned. And it started to show all the disparate ideas. And then it said, here's the elephants in the room. We really need to surface. Then AI started to drive the meeting. It asked one question to the whole room. Based on that, for the next 30 minutes straight, AI is asking one question, and the microphone is flying around the room. People are speaking their minds. AI is capturing every single word. And after 30 minutes, I hit a button and it goes. It processed all of that data and then said, great. Based on this, here's the future strategy of the organization. The CEO stood up and goes, that would have normally taken us three months.

[A]

Three months, months.

[B]

We did it in one hour. But every voice was heard and we are actually aligned. So we have completely disrupted how we even hold meetings now, Jeff, because off site is just fancy word for meeting. No longer do we show up for a meeting where the person running the meeting asks a question and starts to drive the meeting. And one person talks at a time. Nope, that's dead. The person running the meeting architects a prompt that everybody. We take the first five to 10 minutes of the meeting where everybody just clicks a button and AI interviews that person to pull all their knowledge out of their head that normally would have been shared over the course of a meeting. So that by the end of five to 10 minutes, everything's on the table. AI aggregates all of it and then says, great, here's where you're aligned. Here's where you're not aligned. Based on that, here's what we should be talking about. And we move the ball into execution.

[A]

Are they talking, talking, or typing? Everybody's got their laptop.

[B]

Everybody's got their laptop. The thought partners, we call it our. It's called a thought partner. That's our AI model. It interviews them. They could be typing back or they could be doing speech to text back on their computers and then they all submit it and then we aggregate it and then it shows on the screen where we're aligned, where we're not aligned. And then it starts asking the questions that it needs to be asking to help us move the ball in the meeting.

[A]

Talk to me about bias. Large language models are bias creating serve you what you're looking for because it goes out to the universe and it gets what it thinks you're looking for. Sure. And just like with social media, we, we create our own echo chambers.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How do you make sure that you're not biasing the results?

[B]

Few things. One, you have to recognize that a AI already is biased by the information that it has in it. Like there is a, there is a bias to grok vs chatgpt just based on what they've trained it on and what filters they do or do not have in place. That is a bias of the large language model to begin with. So he got to call that out. Then there's when you write the prompt like if you say we want to grow our business by 30% this year and we believe our number one strategy is to do X, show me how I can do that better. You have brought a bias to the table that the, the pri, that the lever you were planning to pull is the right lever to begin with. So one of the things that you learn when you start to become an AI driven leader is you become more aware of when you're leading with bias. And so if I ever say like here's how I'm thinking about solving this problem, but this is just my bias and my assumption. Like I actually say this is my bias and my assumption. I do not want you to blindly agree with me. I want you to be a challenger and help me see what I'm not seeing that I should be seeing. So I make sure I'm focusing on the right thing.

[A]

And you put that in the role section.

[B]

Yeah. Or even in, or even in the context or sometimes what I'll do is like the CRIT framework we'll use CRIT to get to. My favorite task is generate three high impact non obvious strategies I could deploy to accomplish X that's very particular three for a reason. I want it to be focused. High impact automatically makes it a 20% non obvious, makes AI go outside the box instead of just giving confirmation bias. So that's very particular and I'll read them and then I as thought leader will tell it three things which I would write down if I were you. I tell it what I like about it, I tell it what I don't like about it. And then I tell it the top changes I want made to it. That, that right there will take your results to a whole new level. Because they give you the three high impact, non obvious strategies, you don't blindly accept them. You say, here's where I think this is strong, here's where I think this is weak. Here's how I think we can make this better. And then it revises it and makes it really good. That's when you realize now you're doing the best that you can do. Now I want to explore the best that can be done. And that's when I'll say, great. And I'll be the challenger. You're world class at stress testing and finding the insufficiencies. As the challenger, I want you to give me feedback on what you like about this, what you don't like about this. The top changes we should make to this and it will go red team on that thing and go crazy calling out, here's where it's strong, here's where it's weak, and here's how we make it better. Oh my gosh. The impact that this makes to any goal you're trying to achieve or any problem you are trying to solve, then I'll flip it. Great. Now act as my ideal customer. And I've already built in customer profiles of my icp. Or you could just describe them in vivid detail. Now be my customer and tell me what you like about it, what you don't like about it, and the top changes you should make to it. The shift here, Jeff, is I'm recognizing I'm no longer the player of an instrument in an orchestra like a violin. I'm now the conductor. I wave the baton and I can move AI to harness infinite amounts of data and intelligence for my very specific use case. And I get it to play against itself so I'm not stuck inside the box. So I spot the biases and assumptions and I help myself see what I can't see. So I make the best decision possible.

[A]

If I'm working inside a chat, how do I set up something like your, your thought partner meeting situation there?

[B]

That is. Yeah, you won't be able to do that one.

[A]

That's a customized tool that you've built.

[B]

And we patented and you patented. Yeah, that's, that's actual software now that we're licensing to companies.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But a simple way is you could just start and this is how it started for me, we'd be in a team meeting and we'd be hitting a problem and I just write crit context. I'm in a team meeting right now. We are trying to solve X and I would describe it in vivid detail. Your role is to act as our thought partner. I want you to interview me and the whole team by asking one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context. Then task give me the top three high impact, non obvious strategies we could deploy to solve this problem. And AI would ask one question question and the team would just start talking. And at first I'm literally just typing like a.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Just the legal. The person in the courtroom. Stenographer, I think that's what they're called. Now you have speech to text functionality where you can just click a microphone and AI can listen and transcribe everything that's being said. We use speech to text all the time.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

That's how we do it now a lot is speech to text to capture all that additional data that alone will make. That will transform your meeting. Just right there.

[A]

Yeah. Well, so I had to write a specific piece of content. So I was actually driving in this morning and I was thinking, I need to do this when I get in. And I said, screw it, I'm gonna do it right now. So I just hit. I sent myself an email and I just talked the entire thing through. As soon as I got in, I pasted it right in the chat and I said, give it this, give it that. I wanna do this, I wanna. Because I was, I knew I was talking to you today.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So that was, it was on my mind and I gave it context. I didn't go any farther than that. And it gave, gave me back a perfect first draft of what I needed, which I sent out to the team and they're gonna give me their feedback on it. It was a staffing employee type thing. But you know, so. But you know, you know you can, you can. Because it doesn't have to be perfect grammatically or even in flow. As long as you get everything in speech to text and you get all the content in there, it'll sort out it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think you don't have to clean it up.

[B]

This is one of the mistakes that people are making when they're using AI. They are attaching themselves to constraints of the past. If you're using Google, it's a short question. If you're typing an email or a paper, like you better have proper sentence structure, paragraph form, punctuation, like you got to really think through how you organize your thoughts. I throw all that out the window. That's, that can be your Achilles heel. Can be not is can be your Achilles heel with AI because what you're going to do is you're going to edit yourself and you're going to limit yourself. One of the things that you have to break is the perfectionist tendency and start to just embrace this idea that if you just go stream of consciousness and start giving it lots of context even if it's not well structured or organized, not a big deal, it can handle all of that. So I mean literally you can just, just do speech detects and just start talking for 5, 10 minutes. Stream of consciousness all over the place. You might think you're a hot mess. And I've done this where like I am so unclear and I like just literally go and I'll talk for 10 minutes and then I'll say, okay, role is to be my thought partner. You're really good at taking my hot mess that I just gave you and structuring it really well. Interview me, Ask me one question at a time. Up to three questions to gain the context. You need to get this done and then task. I want you to restructure this so that it's well organized and something I could actually coherently share with my team. Team. So good.

[A]

I have to ask, and it's for me and as far as everybody else out there, how do you currently work with companies? What is your company doing? Yeah, how do people, how do people engage with you? You've got some software that you, that you've patented. Tell me what you're doing and how you're deploying your business model.

[B]

Yeah. The company's called AI Leadership Websites aileadership.com here's the problem we solve. Every leader knows AI is the future. They do not know where to start or what to do next. And they all think they're behind. We show you where to start, what to do next, make sure you always have the resources to do what you need to do in a way that actually delivers an roi. And you will never feel behind. How we do that, we do training for executive teams. We have a peer network called the Collective. So we pull certain C level leaders from a company into a community where we got guide you on how to drive this. But we surround you with peers. So it's not what you learn over the course of the year. You're accessing hundreds of years of intelligence because there's hundreds of C level execs Doing this simultaneously and sharing everything they know. And then some companies, we actually get full blown advisory where we actually step in as a partner to the C suite and almost become that chief AI officer to fully drive the strategy and implementation throughout a company.

[A]

All right, so you can do it, company. A company can engage you and you also have a collective. Is that similar to a mastermind? Is it a monthly meeting? Is it in person events? How are you running that?

[B]

It is. We come together two times a year for off sites, for deep strategic thinking and collaboration. But then we are guiding you throughout the year on where do you focus, how do you deploy this, Connecting you to the right technical partners to make things real.

[A]

Okay, do you have any visibility into how the university system is tracking with this? I know there's a group of franchise executives that have been working with three or four people at mit, for example, who have an AI workshop that they're doing. And you know, where is the university system with AI? Are they keeping up or are they just a distraction?

[B]

Now are you talking about the universities trying to teach on AI or in terms of universities, actual harnessing AI to optimize their business model?

[A]

I would almost say the latter.

[B]

It's a spectrum. There are some where I've literally had conversations with the dean where they're like, we need to embrace this. We've got to be teaching this. We've got to be telling our students to use AI and we've got to be actually inspecting what their prompts are to really start to ingrain this all the way to. Nope, AI is not allowed whatsoever. I mean, so you've got the full spectrum and they're still playing to win a game that doesn't exist anymore.

[A]

Right. My thinking is this education is about creating a foundation starting all the way from the beginning and this formula built on that formula built on that formula built on this formula. But people really don't need to know that anymore. Or do they? Do you need to know how the sausage is made even though you're never going to have to make the sausage? Do you know have to know how to code even though you're never going to have to code?

[B]

Depends on the skill. But I think overall so many of the skills that we exhibit today, Jeff, come from the Industrial revolution where we were taught to show up, to work on time, take direction from a boss, do something repetitively with minimal air, with maximum efficiency so that you can make more money in one day, live a good life. You had to know the basic step by step by step to lead somebody to do the step by step by step. The thing is, we stopped acting like humans and started acting like machines. Last time I checked, I think a machine's better at acting like a machine than a human is. Well, all those tactical do this, send this message, generate this report, do step one, then two, then three, that's going away. AI is going to take those tasks, not jobs, tasks or processes, away from humans. And you, you know what I say to that? Hallelujah. Because why in the world should we go through our career acting like a machine, feeling depleted, feeling unfulfilled, doing work that's not aligned with who we are? And isn't it ironic that it might actually be a machine that returns us to being human? Here's the skills I think that matter moving forward. The ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to create. These are distinctly human skills that are going to skyrocket in value. Do I necessarily need to know how the sausage is made? And step by step by step, I don't know. But what I do need to know how to do is think really strategically and wave the baton and engage a team of humans and AI agents to get things done. I need to know how to think discerningly and skeptically to tell it what I like about it, what I don't like about it. The top changes I need made to it. This is what we do as leaders. We already lead teams this way. Now it's about leading teams in technology.

[A]

What's your profile? You're obviously curious. Are you more analytical or more creative?

[B]

Creative.

[A]

I think it's the rise of the creatives. This is the rise. This is the rise of the creatives, man. It is about the question. It is about the curiosity. It's about. I mean, I can't tell you how many ideas I've had over my career. And then three or four years later, they were, I didn't patent it, I didn't do anything with it. I didn't have the bandwidth to do it. Next thing you know, there it is. It's out there in the world and I saw it coming today. You can harness those things within an hour.

[B]

And here's the thing, one of the groups that's actually most resistant to AI right now are the people that identify as creatives.

[A]

Why is that?

[B]

They think, they think I'm a creative. AI can't be creative or they think it's going to undermine them. They're making an assumption they are biased and they are assuming that is going to undermine them. But they're Asking the wrong question. If you ask how my AI undermine me or replace me, I promise you, you will find an answer. You can also flip it and ask how my AI enhance me and make me irreplaceable. And you can find an answer. It's the questions you ask that determine the way you see your life and determine your fate. I mean, just real use case. I'm a fairly creative person. Like I wrote a book. I turned the book into trainings like do select speaking engagements. Now I record every engagement that I do. Speaking engagement. I do transcribe every single word with an AI note taker. I found myself wondering, Jeff, Okay, I've spoken X number of times and I know exactly how many people were in the room. I track it. I know how much business we've gotten. If I get off stage, I track it. And I found myself wondering, do I have the right keynote? Do I have the right workshop? Well, the old way of me optimizing would be able to. I would ask like, what can I do better? And I'd come up with my own answers. I'd deploy them and I'd test it. I didn't do it this time. This time I took the last five transcripts from speeches that I had done, put them to my AI board. This is a true advisory board that I have built in AI to augment my strengths and weaknesses as a CEO. Steve Jobs is on my board for vision, product design and storytelling. But he is not allowed to give me advice on being a husband, a father or a leader. I am dead serious. By the way. Warren Buffett is on my board for long term planning and risk mitigation. My future self, 30 years in the future is on my board so I can have the man I want to become advise me today. I pulled those transcripts and gave it to my AI board as well as the conversion data and said, help me identify how I can where I might need to restructure my delivery to improve conversion rate. The AI board, there's an orchestrator that decides what personality profile to call on based on the situation. It called on Steve Job and it literally said, Steve Jobs walks to the center of the stage, the lights dim while leaving his face illuminated. He nods his head, but he does not smile because he thinks your pitch is unremarkable. And then AI Steve Jobs started to ask me questions and these questions were like, holy crap, it sounds like him. And they were tough. And I'm going back and forth with Steve for like 10 minutes and finally like, he asks me a question that Stumped me and I went, steve, at this point, I think you have enough context. How about you pitch me my pitch, but make it so damn good that it puts the release of the iPhone to shame. Steve Jobs turns the table and literally pitches me my pitch. I did that while I was sitting on an airplane waiting for it to take off. That was a 15 minute use case. Those became my updated slides. It doubled our conversion rate. Now, you tell me, did that replace my creativity or did that enhance my creativity?

[A]

Yeah, this is how Dr. Evil got started. I'm pretty sure your future self.

[B]

But honestly, man, that's.

[A]

That's brilliant. That's. That's just brilliant. I've. I literally. You're telling that story. I got. I got goosebumps.

[B]

Hold on, I got to read something to you. You. We had a board meeting recently, and the guy that I have hired to play the chairman of the board role, from a coaching standpoint, asked me, jeff, what do you want? I said, what do you mean? He goes, what do you want? What's your end game? What are you optimizing for? And I didn't have an answer, Jeff. And I walked out of that meeting going, I really need to understand what my end game is. I went back to my AI board. I fed it the transcript from the board meeting, plus our updated strategic plan, like, lots of extra data. And I had it interview me to ask one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context. And then the task was to create a draft that would reflect what my end game is that I can share with my team to make sure we're in alignment with me building the kind of life I want to be living. Living. Let me read to you some of the things that my future self called in. Here's the critical insight you've been. You've been pursuing scale to feel safe, not because it's what you actually want. You fear that if the business depends on you, it's risky and not real. But complexity is what actually threatens your freedom, not simplicity. You don't want to escape being the face of your company. You want to design it so that your presence is a multiplier, not a prison. Here's what you need to hear. You don't need to scale bigger to be safe. You need to scale simpler to be free. You're not actually afraid of being the product. You're afraid of being locked in a grind where you lose your freedom. If you keep doing what genuinely expands possibility for powerful people, the well will not dry up. You will always be in Demand your deepest mode is trust and transformation, not tech, not defensibility, not ARR Structure. Stop thinking like private equity. The fastest way to everything you want is to build an elegant business that matches your design, not private equities. So here's the question. Are you willing to build something that optimizes for freedom now, not validation later?

[A]

Powerful.

[B]

My future self generated that for me. Spot on. Spot on. Spot on. Bullseye. I gave that to my executive assistant, and now she has turned that into a custom project that she is using to restructure a model for my time. Time.

[A]

Right. Brilliant.

[B]

So let's fly up to 10,000ft.

[A]

All right.

[B]

You have one.

[A]

Can I ask a question?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And this is, has the last author, screenwriter, or actor been born?

[B]

No, absolutely not. I think a whole new category will be born. It's just not going to come from the people that have had the connections and had the money and the backing. It's not going to be those people. It's probably going to be the person you never heard of who's sitting at a computer at home, who's knowing how to wield AI to create something that's truly remarkable.

[A]

But will anybody read it?

[B]

Yeah, it'll be better. And eventually where I think it goes is that it'll. It'll be able to dynamically create the movie just for you, Jeff. And if you and your wife were sitting on the same couch watching the same movie, you'd actually be watching a different series of things unfold because it would be customized, bespoke for you.

[A]

I have things that I look for when I want to watch a movie. It's very specific. I know that there's certain actors or actresses that will tend to have those types of movies. And it's something very specific. And I know it when I see it, and I seek and I find it. I should be able to just. Just create it.

[B]

Yeah, that's coming, huh? That's coming. So few things. One, let's five to 10,000ft. You originally asked me one of the questions, like, what matters? Like, is any of this stuff even going to matter in a few years? And I said, I think most of AI is a distraction. Most of the news, most of the different tools, most of the way you can use it is a distraction action. I said, what really matters is you knowing how to identify a 20% strategic use case. Aim it at the 20%, then communicate effectively with it, which crit does, and then stay in the driver's seat as the thought leader. AI's not your thought Leader. You're the thought leader. It's a thought partner. You're in the driver's seat. It's in the passenger seat. Listen to the use cases that I have described. Saving a company from bankruptcy, creating an AI board, harnessing Steve Jobs to double our conversion rate. Using my future self to help me optimize my end game so I can hand it to my assistant so she can build a new model for my time. This is all with chat GPT, I'm just writing crit and I'm just harnessing my own creativity and my own strategic thinking, which is a superpower of mine with a tool that everybody has access to. So is the tool the difference that makes the difference or is it the leader who wields it? This is the opportunity for people to become AI driven leaders. Now to my second point, what I just described around movies or content creation being created bespoke for you, I think people are misunderstanding what the opportunity is here. Here people think if I fully adopt AI, every employee is using this and we've totally used this to streamline our operations and drive cost to the bottom line. And we're using it to deliver more value to our, to our customers and we have a competitive advantage. Then we win the game. No, that's your ticket to the game. That's the ticket to the game. Before the Internet, you could not have imagined. Uber, Facebook, Zoom, Waymo. Everybody's trying to predict what their, the future of their business is going to look like. But they're tying themselves to legacy ways of thinking in a reality that just, it's no longer our reality. You learning how to harness and adopt AI is how you get into the game. Then we really start to play. And here's why I think there's tremendous urgency around this now. Eric Schmitz, the former CEO of Google, I'm paraphrasing him, but he basically said everything you know about how your business operates will be different within five years, not 10. 5. When did he say that? Over a year ago. I don't know about you, Jeff, but if I hear there's a tidal wave that's coming, it's named AI and it has the capability to change everything I know about how my company operates. Is that something that you say, you know what, I'm going to delegate that to IT or I'm busy, I'll get to it later. Can I just hire a consultant to do it for me? No way. But what if you didn't have to become an AI expert, you just had to become an AI Driven leader, meaning you know just enough about the tech to cast vision for the future, to define strategy for how you're going to win, and to start to lead the change in your company. And then when you hit that ceiling of achievement, you ask, who am I missing that if I could get into relationship with could take me the rest of the way? And that's what we do for company now.

[A]

It's a great model of thought, and it gives me great comfort because I have felt lost, I have felt overwhelmed, and I have delegated and hoped that somebody else in the organization would lead it. And at the end of the day, you can't. It's just too important.

[B]

There's. This may arguably be the greatest technology ever created, but if it's not led from the top, it can be the technology that nobody uses. You look at so many SaaS, platforms that are amazing tech that never gets adopted because the tech is not the hard part. Changing the hearts and minds of people is the hard part. And people are afraid. They're afraid it's going to take their job. A lot of people feel like they're cheating if they use this or that. Their boss will think they're less valuable if they find out they're using AI. But if you, as the leader, are using this and you're going to people saying, you pull up ChatGPT in the middle of a team meeting and write crit and you use it, what you do is you give people psychological safety to lean in. And when your people bring you their work, if you say, hey, have you. Did you use AI to do this? And they go, no. And you say, then this meeting's over. Go bring it to AI and have AI act as the challenger and stress test this, bring that back to me. And they're gonna go, I'm expected to use AI. When they're praised for using AI, it changes the game. Can I give you a real example?

[A]

Please.

[B]

Marianella is my executive assistant. Four months in, she was crushing her job. Ten out of ten on every single metric that I asked her to be scored on, where it was her job to ask me to score her every week on every single KPI. And if it wasn't a 10, she had to ask, what can I do differently next week to make it a 10? We're four months in, she's a 10 out of 10 on everything, which meant it was time to raise our goals. Because I want to create opportunity for her. I want her to grow. So if she's killing the role today, it's time to make. Give her a bigger role. Here's what I said to her, Jeff. I said, marianella, I want you to use AI and write crit to cast a vision for how you can bring 10 times to 100 times more value to the company. That was it. That's all I said for context. Before working with me, she knew how to spell AI. That was it. She read the book, she sat in one training where I taught people how to write crit. That was her total training. And she comes back the next week and she goes, I'm ready. And I went, for what? And she goes, with my vision, I'm like, oh, let's hear it. And she goes, okay, for me to bring 10 times more value, here's the 20% things I'm doing that I think I need to double down on because they could bring ten times more value. Here's the things I'm not yet doing that if I started doing, it would bring 10 times more value. And here's a list of all the things I'm currently doing, long list that I need to stop doing doing to bring ten times more value. And of that list, here's the stuff I think we should just stop doing. It doesn't matter. It's a distraction. Here's the stuff I think we can look to AI to augment or automate. And here's the stuff that still needs to be done by another person. Based on that, I'm asking for permission to hire my own assistant. Here's their job Description, here's the 20% they have to do that's going to drive 80% of the results. Here's their 90 day onboarding plan, and here's their comp. Do I have your approval? I was blown away, Jeff. And I was like, approved. Way to go. What's next on our agenda? She goes, oh, we're not done yet. What do you mean you were not done yet? What else could there be? She goes, you asked me to cast a vision to bring 10 times to 100 times more value. That's my 10 times. I'm like, oh, come on, what's the hundred? She goes, well, here's my realization. In order for me to deliver a hundred times more value, I actually have to make you 100 times more valuable. So here's a prompt I've architected for you, Jeff, where AI is going to interview you to help you identify how you can bring a hundred times more value. And I go, I can't wait. And she goes, oh, no, you'll do it now. I'LL wait. And she literally waited, Jeff, while we're on Zoom and I am hammering away at AI for about 10, 15 minutes, and it spits out out a vision. Here's the 20% you'd have to double down on. Here's what you're not doing, that you'd have to start doing. Here's what you're currently doing you'd have to stop doing. But it did something different. It then created a system that it called Bright Line Rules. These are the rules you will have to install in your company so that you bring a hundred times more value. I look at her, Jeff, and I go, okay, this is one of the most valuable prompts I've ever done. Done. And she goes, good, but there's a problem. What's that? She goes, well, who's your. Who's your worst enemy, Jeff? Myself. Who loves to break the rules? I do. She goes, exactly. We can install these rules, but you're just going to break them. So here's another prompt I've architected where AI is going to interview you to create a defense process. So anytime you want to break one of your own rules, you're going to have to go through AI first. And it's going to interview you to really pressure test your thinking, and it's going to show you the economic impact to the company if you break the rule. That happened. All of that happened because I told her, we are an AI driven organization. When you come in, you will learn to be an AI driven leader. You are expected to use AI not to replace you, but to enhance you. You are the thought leader. It is your thought partner. When you are doing your work. I want you to engage AI to help you see what you don't see. I want you to engage it as a challenger to pressure test your thinking. I want you to have it simulate me so that I can ask you the questions I might ask in advance. So you've already anticipated them? Like, I onboarded her into a culture of this. And every time she'd me work, I'd ask, did you use AI for this? And if the answer is no, why not? Do you need training? Do you want me to write crit with you right now? Like, let's go to the point that now she's doing stuff like this.

[A]

That's amazing.

[B]

Boom.

[A]

Absolutely. Yeah. That's amazing. And did she get her assistant?

[B]

Yes. And that person has just wrapped their first week and they're failing. And I asked Marianella, what have you done? And she said, well, here's what I'VE done. I have built a custom project in ChatGPT where I have felt it our business, I fed it our business plan, our culture, document the person's resume, their Colby, their working genius. And I gave it lots of context about last week about what she did well, but the things that she's not doing well and the flags that I'm seeing and I had it interview me and the thing it just called is I hired her without giving her personality assessments in advance and I hired her for a job that is not aligned with her personality.

[A]

Time to make a change.

[B]

She thinks so and I said keep looking for the next person and put her on a pip. Let's, let's be really clear about what the standards are and let's be clear, like give her the opportunity to be successful. No person personality profile is right 100% of the time. Like, but you have to ask her, tell, show her what's required for the job and ask her if she believes she can be successful and give her very clear KPIs that she's got to hit every single week. Otherwise it's just not the right opportunity.

[A]

Yeah, she won't hit her number. Jeff, I think it's time to start. Start. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tug on the reins and, and turn this podcast towards the barn. But this has been incredible. More people need to be exposed to you. When is your next event.

[B]

For the collective is going to be in January.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

January of 26 and I've got a.

[A]

Curveball and a fastball to finish. But before we do, please tell people how to get in touch with you and the best ways that they can get exposed to your content. Content and your company.

[B]

Yeah. Thank you. So aileadership.com is the website. You can find the book the AI Driven Leader there. You can find our podcast the AI Driven Leader there. We have a newsletter that's killer. I write it for CEOs that don't read email. And we have a 66,0% open rate every single week because every week we're sharing a real problem. The CEO face the actual prompt they used to solve it following crit. It's pretty awesome. And then you can learn about the trainings we do. The collective. If you are a C level exec wreck of a mid market company and you don't want to navigate it alone, it's great. And then if you just want us to come in and essentially do it for you, that's advisory.

[A]

All right. Awesome. Aileadership.com yes sir. All roads lead Home. We'll go right there. All right, here's a curveball. And I actually don't think you're going to have an answer for this, because if I were you, I wouldn't be doing a darn thing other than what you're doing right now. But the question is this. It's about market opportunity. If you were going to start. If Gun to your head. No, gun to your chat. AI thought leaders head, you had to start a new business in the next 30 days that you're not currently active in, what would you do?

[B]

AI driven private equity. Okay, H. No, that's not true. I don't really care about that. That's. That's.

[A]

I'm for somebody else.

[B]

Well, no. Impact's a core value for me. Like, yes, I want to make a lot of money in my lifetime, but it's just. I view it as a vehicle to magnify impact. I don't care just about making a bunch of money just for making a bunch of money. Then I'm not doing. Do I have financial freedom already?

[A]

Of course you do.

[B]

I'm reinventing the public education system.

[A]

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

[B]

Yes, I'm reinventing the public education system.

[A]

Oh, man, we've lost it there.

[B]

By the way. My senior year of college, I was doing an internship and I asked the CEO what job he thought I should get after school. Jeff. He leaned in and he goes, jeff, you're asking the wrong question. You should be asking, what are the skills I can master that are so valuable they will serve you no matter where you go? Then go find jobs that will help you build those skills. It's not about the job. It's not about the test. It's about learning the skills that are going to appreciate and value and they will serve you no matter where you go. The problem with our current education system is that it was literally manufactured by John D. Rockefeller to create industrial workers.

[A]

Which is why it build capabilities. It doesn't build capabilities that people. People really need.

[B]

It literally manufactures you to become an industrial worker. And look, it's gotten us to this point, and I'm grateful to it for the purpose it has served. And we have to ask, is memorizing all the information for a test a skill that's going to matter in the future? No, it is not. In school, you are taught to have the answer, not to ask the right question moving forward, it's about asking the right questions, not having the right answers. If you collaborate with another person in school, it's called cheating. Well, collaboration is going to be a skill that's going to matter in the future with teens and technology, you know, it's.

[A]

It's not so much just a technology revolution, it's a thought revolution.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It's re. It's re. Imagining the way our relationship, the way our thoughts interact with the outside world.

[B]

World.

[A]

It's incredible.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. What a great time to be alive, man.

[B]

Dude. What a great time to be alive.

[A]

Can you imagine. You imagine the people that saw the first cars? They're like, this is incredible. Brains would have exploded today. Okay, last question, Jeff. And by the way, this has been incredible. You've been very generous, super generous today. So I really want to thank you for that. I know people listening have probably are sitting in their cars waiting to go in their house. They didn't want to get out before they heard the end of this. Last question for you. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

[B]

We often set goal. One sentence.

[A]

Anything you want.

[B]

Okay. We often set goals based on what we think we can achieve, but none of us actually know what we're capable of achieving. So instead of putting a ceiling over what you think is possible, why not ask a question and set a goal that's so big that it makes you uncomfortable and requires you to rediscover who you are and more importantly, who you can become?

[A]

Perfectly said. We'll end on that. Thank you for being Andrew, Jeff.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

I'm Jeff Duden. Been here with Jeff woods on the unemployable podcast. Thanks for listening.