Editor’s note: Geoff Woods will lead a session on The AI-Driven Leader at Chief Executive’s Leadership Conference, November 4-6 in San Antonio. Also on the program: Keith Ferrazzi, San Antonio Spurs CEO R.C. Buford, former Home Depot and Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli and former Senator Phil Gramm, plus pre-conference workshops on AI, sales strategy and strategic planning. Learn more and register here >
Ask most CEOs how their company is doing with AI, and you’ll hear about productivity gains and streamlining workflows and what the finance team is doing to accelerate the close each month, maybe. Ask how every member of their executive team uses it—personally every day—and the answer, says Geoff Woods, is almost always a variant of “better, faster emails”.
That’s because, as he’ll tell you, plenty of leaders have delegated AI. But very, very few have figured out what it can do for their own thinking.
Woods has spent the past few years working on that gap with leadership teams. He is the founder of AI Leadership and the author of The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. Before that, he was chief growth officer of Jindal Steel & Power, where market capitalization grew from $750 million to more than $12 billion in four years. He argues that AI’s real payoff for executives isn’t automation. It’s better strategic thinking, and getting there takes a reversal most people haven’t tried: Instead of asking AI questions, you make it question you.
I spoke with Woods ahead of his session in San Antonio about where leaders are falling short, why mid-market CEOs may have the most to gain and the simple framework he says will put you in the top 1 percent of AI users. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You talk to a lot of CEOs, you talk to a lot of teams, you help them bring in AI. What are you finding they’re doing right, right now? And what are you finding that they’re not really getting now that we’re three and a half years into the generative AI revolution?
I think what companies are doing right is they’ve woken up to the fact that this is not IT’s job, and this is not something you can just hire a consultant for. This is something that does require leadership. And with that, I think, comes their greatest gap and opportunity: They think because they’ve delegated AI or mandated AI, they are doing their job.
The problem is that leaders lead by example. Every leader is now demanding productivity increases and operational efficiency increases. But if you ask a CEO or a C-level exec, “Is every single person on the executive team personally harnessing this technology daily to make themselves more valuable before they look at anybody else?” almost always the answer is no.
Why is that? Why do you think that this far in, it’s good for the team, but not good for me?
No one has shown them how they can personally wield it in a way that matters. They’re using it to write better emails, or to do some research, or as a search engine. That’s not harnessing the technology to truly make yourself more valuable.
That’s why The AI-Driven Leader has been so successful. It shows leaders at the highest levels how to use this to elevate their strategic thinking and solve the biggest problems in their company. When you give them something really simple that is also significant, the behavior changes very fast.
Given the resource constraints but the complexity challenges of an upper-mid-tier, mid-market business, it would seem this would be particularly applicable in that area. If you’re CEO of Bank of America and you have a problem, you outsource it to a hundred-person task force. But if you’re Bob running a $100 million company, you have the same problems, but you don’t have the team. Talk about using AI in that kind of circumstance.
It’s realizing that your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business and going out of business. We’ve always known this, but in the past we leveraged our brains and the brains of our team. Think about all the books you’ve read in your life. You can only recall and apply a minority of what you’ve learned, which is itself a minority of the information in the world. Now you’ve got this amazing technology at your fingertips that lets you tap into the information of the world in under a second.
So part of this is learning how to step into your role as the thought leader, with AI as a thought partner. Not to replace your thinking, but genuinely to enhance it. So you ask, “What’s the biggest problem we are facing in our company that, if we could just solve it, would unlock a huge level of growth?” You don’t have to go to McKinsey to figure that out. You just go to AI.
It also helps to have a framework for communicating with it, which I teach. It’s called CRIT: context, role, interview, task. If you follow it, it’ll take you to the top 1 percent of people in the world using this for strategic thinking.
You give AI lots of context about the situation. You assign it a role, meaning the experts you want it to simulate for your use case. And the game changer, Dan, is that you don’t ask AI questions like it’s Google. You turn the tables and make it ask you questions, to elevate how you think, to shift how you lead and to pull non-obvious context out of your head. Then, with all that context, what’s the task? What do you want AI to do? That’s a game changer.
That seems to me to be really the big difference, and I haven’t seen a lot of other people talk about it is getting AI to ask you the questions. What do you see happen to people in the way they lead, in their mindset, when they do start to apply this? What can we expect a month, 60 days out, if we really do make this a discipline?
They’ll be playing in a completely different league. And that is not hype. It is fact, from the work that we have done. They will be thinking much more strategically. They will be challenging their biases and assumptions. They will be coming up with high-impact, non-obvious strategies they can deploy to solve their biggest problems or achieve their most ambitious goals. They are playing at a different level strategically.
