Are You Qualified to Challenge Your Team on AI? - with Geoff Woods, Author of The AI-Driven Leader

0:00I want to create such a profound, transformative experience that they deeply internalize that this is not IT's job. This is my job. I do not have to become an AI expert, but I do have to become an AI-driven leader. Meaning I personally use the technology every single day to elevate the impact that I make in the organization. And as a result, I'm qualified to now cast a vision for the future. I am qualified to define strategy for how I'm going to win, and I am qualified to lead the team from practice, not theory. I'm Jeff Woods. I'm the author of the number one bestseller, The AI Driven Leader.

0:39I was on the show 18 months ago when my book first came out, and I'm back again as my updated book is now being released. And we are talking about what has changed over the last 18 months and why I still believe AI is here to enhance you, not replace you. Can I start with a question? There's this architect called Pyakin Engels, who I used to serve in his board. He's a good friend of mine. And we were at this cool conference last week called Brilliant Minds. And I've been working on this manifesto because I think the world needs basically more positive versions of what could a future look like when AI kind of like rolled through.

1:15And so I show him this manifesto and he takes on his glasses and he looks at it and goes like, did you write this yourself? And I replied, of course not, because I don't write anything fully myself anymore. And then he looks at me and he goes, well, if you can't be bothered taking the time to write it, I can't be bothered to take the time to read it, right? Which then kind of obviously started, I mean, it wasn't like meant in a harsh way, right? It's just, you know, like I, you know, we're sitting having conversations and obviously I've spent a lot of time on this document, right? You know, I've spent endless amount of time.

1:46I've had like different modules that I brainstormed with Cloud on and I created an obsidian folder with all the background research. And then together when Fable was out, Fable helped me write some of it. So this was good writing. And so it started this, I think, very interesting conversation for me is when the length of copy is no longer the proof points of effort that you put into it. What is? How do I know if what you send me is AI slop that you just kind of did one prompt and you just sent me whatever random long text that you got back? or that you spend like six to eight hours actually really working through this document.

2:24And I don't have a good answer for it. So I'm posting it to you guys. Do you need one? Ah, you know what? I think I do because I also get AI slob and I find it to be annoying when somebody sends me something and I get halfway through and it clearly is just kind of like their first shot. And I also want to be respectful. Have I sent something to you, Jeff? I would want you to feel that I value your time. And if you for a second felt that I didn't, I would feel embarrassed by that. I have thought about this. And again, the role of the human is to be the thought leader. AI is your thought partner.

3:04As thought leader, you're in the driver's seat of the car. As thought partner, they're in the passenger seat. I write every word, but I use AI to write every word. And so for me, it's I can tell when somebody has just one-shotted it and sends it across. Josh, you're right. That does not leave a good impression. The question that I find myself asking is, did they as thought leader review this and approve this? Did they put their stamp of approval on this to say, this is my voice. This is the message I'm trying to deliver. Do I believe this is the appropriate length? Did they apply judgment and discernment to the message?

3:42When that happens, I love it. When that's void, that's when I judge them. Part of the challenge is this bias. I mean, yes, I agree. Of course, everything you said, yes. Bjork's problem is his bias. And I don't think Jeff has, no one, none of us have a chance to give a well-reasoned, you know, that implies that he's willing to engage. There's something interesting, Henrik there, which is he sees the document. It sounds like he didn't read it, right? He doesn't read it. And instead he asks you whether you wrote it. And then he decides whether he's going to read it, which is that's a pre-consumption hesitation, bias, et cetera.

4:27I wonder. I think it was because it was, it was a long document. What this wasn't like a few paragraphs. This is something. Oh, it was the length that he was reacting. I think it was the length of you. And I think he also, I think he's expressed after, I mean, like if A, I didn't answer his question. If I said, I spent a lot of time on this, he would have read it immediately, right? Like, and so this was not like a contentious conversation. This was just kind of like one that kind of became, I think, just interesting because of like the way it played out. I also have another friend when I call him, I said, am I calling a bad time?

4:58And he says, yes. And I go, should I call back later? And he replies, you don't have to. So there is the nice bender there. But I think what he was just reflecting on is that he now often get these long documents that somebody have one-shotted. And because that you kind of wasted your time when you're halfway through it and figure out it. I think he, we didn't talk about this, but I imagine what he's kind of looking for is some kind of qualifier that this is something that is now kind of not worth his time. That sounds so pretentious, but like something that he has to really spend real focus on.

5:37And I think actually that's a fair thing. Like if you send me something and it was like a one shot thing, I also feel like, hey, man, I just spent 20 minutes reading this. And like, clearly it was just the first thing that Claude spit out. I agree. the message I deliver with my team because I do still get some documents sent to me that I can tell are AI generated or feel off and I will just call that person and I'll say walk me through what your process was from the output to you refining it to putting your stamp of approval on it and I'm looking for the holes there and I'll even go to sections and say do you agree with this Do you stand by this wording?

6:13Do you stand by this thinking? And then they say, no. And I go, okay, this is a coaching moment. Never again. Send me anything unless you are saying, this is my stamp of approval. So this is me making the investment in you as your leader. This is now a standard because moving forward, you will be wasting my time. I won't tolerate that. We'll all end up being politicians. It'll be like, I send you something and I'll have to end with, My name is Henrik Wordlin, and I approve this piece of coffee. And I approve this message. But I think it's actually, it's an interesting point. There's the managing of the AI, which is the, call it, employee's responsibility.

6:50But then as leaders, there's the management of people who've now been given a new managerial job. You know, and you actually, you still have to take responsibility for your team's work. And in a way, what I hear you saying, Jeff, is I'm going to teach you how to be a good manager, team member, for lack of a better word, right? And I think that the bummer, if you're a CEO or you're a leader of an organization, is what you want is for these people to know how to be good managers. And what you're realizing, probably what a lot of people are realizing is these folks have never had new manager training like we used to do when all of a sudden Jeff was given a team.

7:25We invested in his ability to get exceptional work out of them. Now we hand Jeff co-pilot and are disappointed he's not a good manager. Right. Correct. It's a training gap. I do think I just want to make sure that we mentioned this also. Jeremy, I think, was asked a question a little bit like this at one point. And I think you said something to the extent of, I almost find it to be kind of like criminal liability if people have not used AI. Like in the same way that if you go to an operation, the doctor say, you know, I didn't use a microscope because I wanted to eye it with my own natural eye.

7:59You know, you would be very uncomfortable with that. The interesting thing there for you and B.R. Kenrick is to say, to stand by your statement, of course. The most interesting part of that conversation to me is your willingness to say, of course, because most people in that moment go, no, no, no, it's all me. It's all my handcrafted artisanal cognitive labor there. Trust me, right? And I like that you took a principle to stand. Then the conversation I think should be, why did I say, of course? Let's talk about that. why do I now think it's a it's an abdication of responsibility to do it without augmentation and that's like that to me is a really interesting place to take that conversation yeah and I mean we've spent a long time at this but like I then wrote a Lincoln post about it today and the commentary is kind of interesting because I also think that there are some people that use writing to formulate their own thought now I do that in voice more than I do that in text.

8:54It's better for me to talk it out than it is to write it down. And so having AI then to be able to take the conversations that I have, and then after having many of them constill that and put it into something that is thoughtful and short is something where I have, you know, get a lot of help from AI. But for other people, I think the way they get to that point is by sitting and actually putting the fingers on the keyboard. So maybe it's also just a little bit individual. Okay, Jeff, we have to know, switching from Henrik's fascinating Bjark moment, we have to know what's changed. Okay, we had you on the show.

9:29What is it, 18 months ago? I just thought that'd be a fun place to start with you, talking about your expertise, what you've learned in the rooms that you've been in. What's changed in the last, has it been 18 months? Is that approximately it, two years? I don't even know. Well, the book came out, Andrew and Leader came out September of 24. So we're... nearly two years. Maybe a little under 18. Yeah. Yeah. So here's what's interesting. If I look at the things that have changed, I kind of put them into two categories. There's what's changed that's been timely. Like, well, this model came out and now you can upload a PDF.

10:02Now it can generate a PowerPoint. And there's what's timeless. For me, I think most of the changes that were timely were distractions. Now, I had this theory when I was writing the AI-driven leader that most of the news, the tools would be distractions. Because for me, I don't believe the goal of any company is to adopt AI. I think they want to harness this technology to create a better business and better lives. So that's my bar. When a new model comes out, is this going to help me build a better business or a better lives or a new functionality? Is this going to help me build a better business or a better life?

10:37If I build this GPT, this project, this agent, is it going to help me build a better business or a better life? That's a very high bar. Most things don't qualify for that. So there are so many things that have shifted into technology. What has not changed is using that. I didn't realize how profoundly impactful it would be if you just started using AI to elevate how you think as a human. That hasn't changed, you're saying? That has not changed. And I think where the market is overall, I mean, if you go back 18 months, Every leader knew AI was the future, but they had not started. And they felt like they were falling behind.

11:20If I look at where the market is today, they know it's the future. They think they've started, but they're confusing access with real adoption. Yeah, that's a really cool characterization, Jeff. I totally resonate with that. 18 months ago, it was on the list of things I need to do. Maybe a different way of saying it that's kind of punchy is now it's on the list of things I've already done. But it's a false sense of confidence. Exactly. Exactly. Because anybody who's really deep in AI goes, I'm not done with the internet. Does anybody think of internet? Go, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm done with that.

11:56You go, no, it's now an integral part of daily life. And I think the leaders who maybe 18 months ago thought, I need to do that. Maybe now you're saying now they're in danger. I'll say, oh yeah, I've done that. I rolled out co-pilot licenses, right or something like that right correct correct kiff how do you then tackle with the feeling that you're so ahead of this and i'm sure your own organization has the autonomous agents and the deals for things and then meanwhile we go into organizations i'm sure you do that and then you get the sense that they're just getting like co-pilot rolled out and it almost seems that we You're now getting fascinated by this next level game that you can play with AI where people are still playing the first version.

12:44Do you think that people that are advanced are kind of almost losing kind of like the majority of people that would like to go on this journey? Because we're already thinking about autonomous agents. So how do you compute that? Not necessarily. I mean, I remember I was studying adoption curves when I was writing the AI driven leader. And it's like, you know, you got three and a half percent of your innovators. Then you got your early adopters, early majority, late majority laggards. I knew that the adoption was going to follow that curve. And that's just proving to be true. I'll still, we do a lot of sessions for executive teams of companies.

13:20And more often than I would like to say, when I say, all right, open up chat or copilot or clot, there's a C-level executive in the room who hasn't logged in before. Who doesn't have it on their device, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. And it's their first time. And for me, I know my job, and this is just a timeless leadership principle. Your job as a leader is to meet people where they're at, not where you think they ought to be. So if where they're at is I need to help them log into ChatGPT, great, let's do it. I'm going to help them do it remarkably well. But now let's get them on the fast track to using it.

13:52So that is still where the market is. I also question, Henrik, how much of it is really going to matter over time. Say more? Well, imagine if a company today said, we have a competitive advantage because we use Microsoft Word or because we use the Internet. I think most of AI is going to become a source of competitive parity. They'll be competitively disadvantaged if they don't use Word. A company would never brag, we're an anti-Word shop. Exactly. Exactly. So there will come a day where just AI's table stakes. It's like electricity. It's like Internet. And at that point, it's competitive parity.

14:29Real competitive advantage doesn't come from AI. It comes from using AI to enhance your internal capabilities that are valuable, rare, or costly to imitate. Those are the raw ingredients of a competitive advantage. So even when I look at companies that are slower to adopt right now, I do question how much of that matters. Now, specific industries, it does. Because if you're in an industry like the accounting industry, I was with a firm, a big one. and they're all playing this game of chicken. Like they all know whoever gets rid of the billable hour first, everybody else is going to follow. And there's a real opportunity.

15:10There's a real opportunity to gain market share. And I'm on stage in front of their 450 partners. And I said, I'm going to be a velvet hammer. I feel like you guys are all on the Titanic. You can see the iceberg and you're celebrating the meal that you just had. That doesn't seem too velvet. there's no okay there's no they loved it by the way but it's like they know they have to do something yet they're still debating it's like dude you're saying you want to win but you're not thinking and acting like you want to win like you have a legit window in time to move right move so that's why henrik like the i think most companies depending on what do you think's going on there why i mean and again this speaks to kind of timeless whether it's leadership innovation, et cetera.

15:56Why the reluctance to move? Do you have any reflections on that? And again, this is kind of apart from AI, but why is the default? Let's stand on the sidelines and wait and see. Is it a question of where folks are in their kind of careers? I see three buckets. One is they don't know how to. So it's a genuine, they know they need to move, but nobody has shown them how to and made it simple enough that they can start. Two is you've got industry or personality types like accounting, legal, like they're risk averse by nature. The construction, they just tend, they tend to be laggards when it comes to technology adoption throughout time.

16:39And then there's strategy. I think Apple had a strategy. They've never won by being the first adopter. they've won by letting everybody else spend billions in r &d and then they just step in and do it better and then instead of spending billions now they're going to get paid billions to use somebody else's ai model i'm hesitant to give too many organizations the benefit of the doubt that oh y 'all are the apple here and by the way if you think you're the apple let's assume you're not Yeah. I think that's a safe. That's just a convenient excuse. Okay. So you get in these executive sessions, like you get an executive team saying, Jeff, I mean, you just mentioned that where I'm with executives and I love that phrase, meet people where they're at.

17:26So if it's log in, great. What are you hoping? I mean, if you don't have to deal with log in issues and you get a team of executives in a room for whatever, 90 minutes. Yeah. What are you hoping to accomplish in your ideal world? what would you do to help unleash possibility there? Galvanize them to become AI-driven leaders. For me, I want to create such a profound, transformative experience that they deeply internalize and commit to this idea that this is not IT's job, this is my job. I do not have to become an AI expert, but I do have to become an AI-driven leader, meaning I personally use the technology every single day to elevate the impact that I make in the organization.

18:14And as a result, I can now, I'm qualified to now cast a vision for the future. I am qualified to define strategy for how I'm going to win. And I am qualified to lead the team from practice, not theory, because I'm seeing a huge gap dream. And I know you see it too, which is every executive team now has said, we're going to become an AI driven organization, but they're talking the talk but not walking the walk. They then delegate it and say that's everybody else. That means tell other people to do something. Yeah, and you're saying, what it sounds like you're saying is get folks to stop telling others what to do and get them to start elevating their own game.

18:51Do it yourself. Do it yourself. That's hypocrisy, not leadership. I realize that I'm just the slow person in the room now, but like I finally just got what you've been talking about here and I think that is very profound. I mean like that All right, let me just mansplain back. What do you think I'm talking about, Henrik? Yeah, no, but I think when you talk about the AI-driven, leader AI-driven company, I have been like, oh, you know, like, but then you also say that it's not really about AI, but everybody on this podcast has gotten. So let me just mansplain it to everybody who listens. No, this is good.

19:22You're just saying, and I think this is very profound and very true, that this has nothing to do about making sure that your organizations use AI per se. It's about you using the tool that's available to you to figure out what is the next step function? What does your company want to be when it gets old or older? And a lot of people just haven't asked that question to the Zim for a long time because we've been going through the trauma of just having to deal with COVID and then this new thing kind of like landed. And the only way to really be having an Ironman suit on and move at the speed that you need as a professional business person today is to understand these tools profoundly so you could use them for yourself to build an organization of the future that is probably going to use AI, but that is not the point of the whole thing.

20:07I get it. I'll go home now. Thank you. And I realized this myself when I was an operator. Before AI, when I was a chief growth officer for a public company out of India. And when I saw AI, I started using it myself. And I realized very quickly I was using it for all the things that didn't matter. I was using it to write better emails. I didn't get to that level by the quality of the emails I wrote. I got to that level because of my ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to create. And I found myself wondering how can I stop asking AI questions and start getting it to ask me questions instead to elevate my thinking and my leadership.

20:46And the chairman saw this. He puts me in charge of AI for a company. We have 100 ,000 employees. This is a big freaking company. He says, go figure out AI. Partner with Google. Learn a lot from them on the tech, how to identify use cases, train tuned models. We're driving it through the org. And I'm realizing, and Jeremy, this is when we met. I'm realizing it is not technology first, strategy second. It is strategy first, technology second. Everybody has, and they're still asking, what's the right use case? I think it's the wrong question because you're, it's like you're holding AI as a hammer and you're looking for a nail versus what are the biggest problems that we have that if we could solve them, it would unlock a new level of growth for us.

21:31Now, how do we solve that and recognize that AI is a tool to help you solve those problems? So my realization is focusing on what's timely, like how do we use AI in our sales process? Or how do we use AI in customer service? I don't think that's the right question versus what is timeless? What is timeless when it comes to building and growing a great business? And how do we use AI to supercharge those processes? it. That's where all my focus is. Can I give you an example, which I think, Mike, so I'm still involved with BarkBox, you know, like it's a$400 million turnover, treats and toy business for dogs.

22:14And the way that we've seen our strategy and how the world have evolved in that space is that it's thought about you bought your dog toys in the supermarket, then you went to Petco, and then you went to Bark because we kind of like, we niche down, right? And so one of the things we're working right now is how do we niche even further down to a breed level? Because if you have a golden doodle, then you probably just want to be served by somebody who just do golden doodles. And it also worked with like the conversion funnels of like influencers being more powerful. So there's a more elegant thread between somebody who talks about your partner.

22:45Now there's 360 breeds in the US. And if you want to do mixed breeds, you have to do 360 by 360. That's 116 ,000 different permutations of this thing, right? There is no way you could solve that with humans. I cannot make a business where I have 160 ,000 different storefronts, except with AI. With AI, I can make this thing, right? And so I think for me, as you're saying, that is an articulation of like the strategy is niching. The way that you can get that and the reason why you need to understand AI is because you didn't know that that was even possible to do if you didn't understand AI. You couldn't implement that.

23:20Yeah. And that to me is where I would put, I don't know if the right word is pushback Jeff but I'm scrolling up on my notes because you said something earlier and I wanted to kind of think about it uh the idea is and it gets at what Henrik's saying the the strategy we can now imagine of niching down it was previously outside of the realm of possibility so there's something about a familiarity with the capabilities of AI that's actually required to ratchet up what you imagine. And so, oh, I remember what you were saying, timeless. Sorry, I forgot for a second brain fart, but small language model here.

23:59What you were saying about timeless changes versus timely changes. And you said, Jeff, that I don't think model developments really matter that much or some version of that. And where I would push back respectfully in the spirit of kind of collaboration is they do matter when they fundamentally change what the kind of strategic possibilities are. And so I don't think that someone can be oblivious to what the best in class models can do. But again, not because they need to be techie, but because it redefines what is the kind of strategic possibility set that we need to be discussing as a leadership team.

24:35And here's my own experience. People will always ask me, how do you stay ahead on AI? And my answer is I don't try to. Because I think most of the latest things are distractions. I don't study the latest model release. I'll hear that it'll come out. I don't spend half a second investigating what its capabilities are. I don't. When it matters, it surfaces. Like when Claude Cowork came out, I started to hear about it. And anytime there's a significant model that changes real capabilities, I hear about it. Then I dive in. So I don't waste my time with the latest tool, the latest this, the latest that.

25:22The true 20 % that drives 80 % of the results, the cream rises to the top. Then you focus on it. How do you think, and maybe it's a different way of asking the same question, but I do think it is complicated for most people that of doing strategies today to make a strategy that is AI native in the way that we just talked about it with the niching down. So how do you think a business leader that, yeah, like is not as in tune with what's going on, even if it's only the 20 %? Correct. Even have the ability to formulate the vision for their business without having that insight. I can tell you how we do it.