You've Been Implementing AI WRONG All Along. Learn How to Make it the Thought Leader in your Business with Geoff Woods

Here with Jeff Woods. Super excited to have you with us, sir. A brand new book coming out, the AI Driven Leader. You just came off stage, man. That was an intense, was a three and a half hour session teaching our clients all about business. AI. Welcome sir. It's good to see you my friend.

Thanks for having me.

So one of the things that you and I were talking about kind of green room time, how everybody is adopting or talking about AI, trying to be part of AI but nobody's really doing it strategically. They're not doing it, I'd say, the right way. What's your thoughts on that?

This was a surprising insight for me. When I was writing the book, I sat down and interviewed 200 executives one on one. I asked them all the same three questions. Do you believe AI is the future? Will you adopt it and what have you done? 100% said it's the future. 100% said they would adopt it, but less than 5% had done anything. And at first this was kind of demoralizing because I was going to start a business on this.

What am I going to do?

What am I going to do? The market is saying this is not a problem. But when I peeled back the onion to understand why, it was actually pretty simple. Everybody has too much to do and not enough time. Leaders have so much that's on their plate and no one has shown them the simple way they can use it at a leadership level that would deliver a huge impact for the organization. And so I said that's the problem I'm going to solve. And that became the book the AI Driven.

And it's kind of funny because, you know, we just had a room of, you know, 200 plus small business owners. What we in our world manage, service provider owners to watch these technology and keep in mind these are technology minded, cyber security focused business owners to watch them. Like as you're going through things, I don't think it's, you know, to me it's not that I. AI isn't available. We know it's available, we know it's there. They don't understand how to use it the right way.

Correct? Yeah, they just haven't been shown the way. But that was where, you know, I've been a startup CEO, I've scaled companies, I've sold companies and I've helped companies scale and I understand what it feels like to be in their shoes. And then I also understand AI at a pretty deep level. So figuring out what are those core use cases that in an executive can use this, that will deliver Literally results same day and as fast, speed to value, that's. That's where the focus is.

Yeah. So a couple, couple of tips you might have for our audience that watches. You know, let's start with one or two things out of the box. What can you do? Obviously not seen been to one of our events, or potentially you have, but didn't see this session with Jeff. What's a couple of things that a business owner can do right away?

So the first thing that I would say is AI will enhance you. It will not replace you, because your job is nothing more than the skills that you apply and the processes that you follow. I will change what those skills are and what those processes are, but as a result, you should actually be able to do way higher quality work in a fraction of the time.

So it's kind of like having an employee but thinking like you. You can't just drop somebody in and expect them to be amazing.

Well, think of it this way. We talked about this on stage. Your job is to be the thought leader, and AI's job is to be your thought partner. It's not an assistant, it's a thought partner. And kind of like if you've ever stood at a whiteboard with a thought partner, you shared an idea and they went, yeah, and what about this? And all of a sudden, one plus one was equaling 11. That's what happened with AI, and that's what happened in the room when people learned how to use it as a thought partner. So. So at a high level, there's really only three ways AI can bring value to your company. Put it in the hands of your people to make it more productive, Weave it into your operations to make it more efficient, or weave it into your products or services to make them more valuable to customers. The place to start is putting it in the hands of your people. And the number one person that should start is the leader. Because speed of the leader, speed of the pack. The number one way that they can use it is as a thought partner. So here's what this looks like. I want you to think of one thing this week that's going to require you to think strategically. It could be a problem you need to solve, or it could be an opportunity you're trying to tackle. You literally go to the AI model of your choice. ChatGPT Quad.

I was just gonna ask which one to go to.

I have one on our website@aileadership.com. you literally say, here's the problem I'm trying to solve this week or the opportunity I'm trying to tackle for context. Here's what you need to know about my business. I want you to be my thought partner. Interview me, ask me one question at a time to learn what you need to learn. And then I want you to accomplish blank and be very clear about what you want it to do. That is a very simple framework for a strategic thinking prompt. Suddenly, AI will start asking you great questions and you will feel it learns.

On the fly too, right?

It does. But it will ask you great questions and you will feel like you're having a dialogue almost with like an executive coach. And it will help you clarify your thinking and it will also shine a light on your blind spots. It'll help you see what you don't see.

Yeah. And I think so much of this is people dabble in it, but they don't necessarily know what to do. So I think the thought partner thing is so critical because this is you actually embracing this as part of you, but you need education. Now. You mentioned your website right there. Yeah. Can you drop that?

Yeah. It's aileadership.com and on there I have a free course that will show people literally how to get started and specific use cases and prompts they can use to get results same day.

Yeah. I think that's so powerful. So, so many of our members in my coaching program have dabbled in AI, done all these different things. So I think from, from our standpoint and coming out of your session, I added a open office hours. And if you heard me say that on stage, but we're doing that, one of our employees is going to do that, I'm really excited. He's super passionate about it, like always trying to dabble in it. So any final tips that we can potentially and any thoughts, and I'd love to see everybody that's watching this reach out, take your free course. But any, any final words that we.

Can drop, I think AI is the future. It's here. Developing a level of literacy and understanding how to use it is really important because there's massive advantages that can be had by the leaders that learn how to harness this strategically. So it's really easy to get consumed with all the other things that are on your plate. I would invest the time, it's literally once a day asking how my AI helped me do this and taking a task that you would have tried to solve on your own. Now bring your thought partner in and have it try to solve it with you just so that you get a level of AI literacy that would probably be the most important thing That I would say to people. And the other is you have to remember what's the purpose of AI. AI adoption is not the goal of your organization. Driving growth is. And so this is where I firmly believe you have to go. Strategy first, technology second.

You have to have a strategy. Complete strategy.

Exactly.

Just like doing copy or you know, small things but actually having a full.

So when leaders sit down with me and they ask how can we use AI, Say well before we can do that, how clear are you on the vision you have for the future of the company and the competitive advantage you're trying to build?

I love that.

Based on that, can I see your strategic plan? Show me how that lines up with.

How many actually have that.

Less than you'd think.

Yeah, I'm not surprised.

Or, or when I look at, everybody has a strategic plan but when I look at it, there's massive opportunities and then we talk about people and then once I see those things it's pretty clear. I could say here's the three places that we should start with AI that will not distract you from growing your business but accelerate the growth of your business.

I got one more thing actually that just kind of came up in my, my head here. Had somebody during your session walk up to me and say I'm in this telegram chat. I got all these guys talking about this stuff. They think AI is going to blow up and go away and die. Similar to how you know, you think about that. That's what they said about the Internet back in the day. Where's your head on that? I think my side, I think like you have to embrace this because I don't think that's going to happen.

No, I don't think that's the case. I think it's too valuable. And I, I mean I have seen the impact it's made in my life and I'm seeing the impact it's making in other leaders lives. Makes us better at what we do here. It helps free people up from the low value tasks that consumes the majority of their days. It's literally going to change every part of the world as we know it.

So I think the real big message is I know it's different, I know it's maybe uncomfortable, but you're better off to have a strategy and embrace it than just pretend it doesn't exist and think it might disappear.

And the thing that makes it uncomfortable is a lack of knowledge.

Yeah, absolutely.

People just don't know what it is or how it can be used. And if they get a little amount of AI literacy, where they start using it as an AI driven leader. I think that's where you start to realize very fast how powerful this is. And then you become very smart about how you can use it in your business.

Yeah, I love it. All right, so can hit your website, AI leadership.com Also, the AI driven leader can find us on Amazon bookstores. Okay. Love it. Jeff woods, thanks so much for being with me. My name is Chris Weiser. We'll see you guys later.