How to Use AI to Make Money, Grow Your Business, and Be More Productive | Geoff Woods

27:06So like you look at your job here at Contrarian Thinking, there are certain skills that you apply and certain processes you follow. I can segment those into two groups, the 20 percenters that drive 80 percent of the value and everything else. What I'm interested in is how do we build an agent that either allows you to do the 20 percent better or to take something annoying that's 80 percent off your plate. And in that case, you're looking at what skills need to be documented, what processes need to be documented. Crit is actually phenomenal here because you could have it. You could give it context about what that skill or process is.

27:40The role is to be the perfect agentic AI builder, have it interview you to gain deeper context. And the task is to create the markdown file. Markdown is the format that AI loves. The markdown file that it could save so that an agent could replicate that without you being there. And it's just about recognizing that any knowledge you have in your head for how you do your work that is not documented is an opportunity to document. Use AI to interview you, to create that documentation in Markdown format. You save it in a file folder. Then you give an agentic AI platform like Cloud Cowork the ability to tap that.

28:17And all of a sudden it can replicate you. It's so good. Also, when you realize all you have to do is just talk to your computer. You just talk to it. All right. I would like to build this thing. I don't know how. What would be the next steps? Can you walk me through it? I don't know what a terminal is. What's a terminal? And it'll literally take you through every single step. That's literally how I built my AI CF. I was like, here's my vision for what I want this thing to do. Assume I know nothing about how to build this thing. You're like my eighth grade teacher. You need to walk me through this.

28:43Like I'm an eighth grader. Just step by step. Help me do this. Yeah, it's so good. And that way I think it doesn't have to feel so overwhelming for so many people. Because sometimes if you go on the internet these days, everybody's an AI expert all of a sudden and everybody has 400 Asians doing all their work and they've made$10 ,000 in 20 minutes. And by the way, that's all BS. That's all BS. If you really, yeah, if you pull all those things apart and ask, number one, did you build things that actually matter. Most of them, no. The number of people I talk to who go, oh, I save six hours a day with AI.

29:12And I ask, so what do you do with the other six hours? Oh, I study new AI tools. They've actually gained no business value from what they are doing. So the real opportunities, are you using this in the things that matter? Is it showing up in revenue? Is it showing up in profit? Is it showing up in better retention or better CSAT scores? How are you using this in a way that matters? So let's get tactical. What would you do as a framework to determine what your 80 % is that you're doing as opposed to your 20 % that you're doing? So how do I know I'm doing the highest value tasks with AI? Let's start with the 80 and the 20.

29:50You can literally get a piece of paper and a pen. I'd go analog here. I would not go AI. I would write down everything you have to do this week. Everything. meetings, email, phone calls, Slack, proposals, board report, like I'm literally thinking through all the things on my plate this week. And once it's all on there, I would start with the first one. And I would ask, does this single item represent a 20 % priority that's going to drive 80 % of the results in my business? That is an incredibly high bar. If the answer is no, just skip to the next one. When you get to a yes, just put a star next to it.

30:31Very fast. You go from all the things you could do down to the focused things you should do. And then I ask the question, if I can only do one of them this week, what is the one that is actually going to deliver the most business value? And I put a number one next to that. That is literally how I prioritize my life. That's how you quickly identify the 20 % from the 80. AI throws a bit of a curveball because what we do as humans is going to change. If you study technology shifts throughout history, it didn't take jobs. Remember, a job is just skills you apply and processes you follow. What it did is it made the value of certain skills and processes skyrocket in value and the value of certain skills and processes plummet in value.

31:19If one of the 20 % things you're doing is something that AI can do better, you should not be doing it anymore. In fact, if AI is 50 % as good as you right now, you should start working to have AI replace it because within 12 months it will be as good as you and then it's gonna run away with it. The things that I think are gonna matter from a human skill standpoint moving forward, the ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate with people and machines and to create, to be creative. Those are the areas where you will see this become a massive enhancement, not a replacement.

31:58But most people, frankly, their job is so focused on outputs, do this report, send this message, generate this proposal. That's machine-based work. In the Industrial Revolution, it required humans to do that kind of work, not in an AI-driven world. What do you think are the first jobs that go away with AI? um customer service frontline customer service paralegals and maybe you'll still have paralegals but document review document generation that type of stuff that goes away um i think a lot of entry level work goes away and this is actually a bigger problem because you have to get the entry level job to develop the context to move up the ladder.

32:45And this is going to be one of the bigger gaps in the workforce is how do we bridge that gap? When kids coming out of school, we're not going to hire somebody to do this work because an agent can do it for basically free. How do you leapfrog somebody to this level of performance when they haven't had the reps? Yeah. Let's say you have kids that are like of the age of going into the workforce. What jobs or skills would you absolutely never let them do because of AI? I am very skeptical. I'm not saying you don't do this. I'm very skeptical of the number of people going into law, mostly because most of them go to law school because they lack direction, not because it's what they actually want to do.

33:32I think that industry will absolutely remain. the skills are going to be fundamentally different. I don't have a strong opinion on that. Where my opinion is, is if you are going into applying for a job where they still operate in a traditional hierarchy where you report to a boss, you show up to work, take direction from a boss and do something repetitively, I would not work for that company. And here's why. That's how we had to work in the industrial revolution. In an AI-driven world, AI-driven organizations are far more like networks and swarms rather than this hierarchy of top-down. It's far more, can leadership cast the vision for where we're going and the strategy and clearly communicate it?

34:22And this is about a company that's going to say, Cody, what are your God-given superpowers? What is it that makes Cody Sanchez, Cody Sanchez? And this is not a long list. This is probably three things. that truly make you you? And how do we actually get clear on what is it that makes you you? And how do we harness those strengths and then focus you on here's the 20 % things of this role that these two things got to match up with. Here's how it lines up with our mission. And now I'm going to give you agency to harness AI, to build agents so that you can surround yourself with technology as well as human teams to go deliver more value than you would have ever thought possible.

35:02Yeah. Yeah, we call them daycare employees versus department chair employees. And I think historically, you could have a lot of daycare employees. They need activity time. They need to be told what to do. They're there from a certain hour. It's not really about what the outcome is. It's about time in seat. And that existed for a long time. But now I think you're going to move to everybody becomes a department chair. I don't think you have to be an entrepreneur or a founder. And most shouldn't. Yeah, but you do have to have your own center of gravity. And if you don't, if you're waiting on somebody else to tell you what to do.

35:36You're literally acting like a machine.

35:38Geoff Woods:I know. It's very problematic because we humans forget we don't put it on our calendar. And we think it's okay to be reminded multiple times. Machines don't think like that. So I used to be partners with Gary Keller. Yeah. We started Keller Williams. I forgot about that. Yeah. The very first thing he ever said to me was on November 1st, 2015. He said, welcome to Austin. good luck you're gonna need it and i said hi thanks why and he asked me jeff do you know what the best part about your job is and i said no he goes that is your job if you try to give me pieces of your job you will no longer have one that was the very first thing he ever said to me i like now right yeah now he and j they hired me to turn their book the one thing into this training and consulting company and he said look you're gonna want to get me on podcast me on stage me on video.

36:32But if you need me, then I don't need you. So go succeed without me. Cody, this was extremely valuable for me because how often do we look for our boss to tell us what to do? How often do we bring our work to our boss for their approval before we can submit it? We are allowing them to own pieces of our job. The best part about your job is that it's your job. You need to own 100 % of your job, which means thinking leverage. If your boss has to follow up with you to ask if you got something done, you are not owning 100 % of your job. It's very true. It also worries me for a lot of employees today.

37:17And I've been there. I'm sure I was at some point in time when I was younger and starting. But right now, if you are waiting for somebody else to tell you what to do, I mean, my little funny line is I always like to say when somebody brings me something like, well, what do I do here? I say, I'm really excited for you to figure that out. I believe in you. This is why you have the role. This is where, you know, why the AI driven leader is about leadership more than it is AI. There are things you can do as a leader to start to create this culture. So, you know, it is part of our culture. It is your job to identify what you believe the 20 % priorities are that you need to focus on this week to be on track for delivering what you need to deliver by end of month.

38:00So you're delivering what you need to deliver by end of quarter. So by end of year in alignment with business plan, I'm not going to tell you what to do this week. You're going to show up to our one-on-one and you're going to tell me, you're going to show me your plan for what you think the 20 % is. That's thinking leverage. Then it's my job to help you see what you don't see so that we can bridge those gaps. So week after week, after week, we get to the point that you can truly prioritize your work independent of me. how do you change somebody's mindset who thinks that that is like toxic culture?

38:37Like, I think a lot of people today would say, well, your boss should help you and tell you what to do. You shouldn't be expected to do that. You're not running the company. That's like a common thread in society today. How do you flip that switch? Well, one, I didn't say that. My job as the leader is to be clear on what our goal is. My job is to be clear with you on what your 20 % is and the results I'm expecting from you by end of year. But it's your job to show me how you're going to get there. It's your job to look at all the things that are on your plate and to ask yourself, what is the 20 % that's going to drive 80 % of that?

39:13And I don't expect you to do it in a vacuum. That's why you get the opportunity to bring it to me. Show me your thinking. Show me you've done the work to think this through. You're not alone. We're locking arms. We're on the same team. staring at the same goal. I'm going to help you see what you don't see. Today, my executive assistant goes, all right, our agenda for today is one, two, three, four, five. And I immediately stopped her and said, are those in order of priority? And she goes, no, they're not. Did she roll your eyes? No, no. She goes, they're not. It really should be four, three, five, two, one.

39:47I said, good. Run the meeting that way. Because we may not get past the first item. Let's make sure we're investing in the things that matter most. She's in her first 90 days. That's me training her every single week. But she's getting to the point where she used to show up and wait for me. Like first time we meet, she looked for me to drive and said, this is your meeting. I'm going to give you five minutes to think about what do you think the most important thing is. I'm going to go get a new coffee. When I come back, you're driving the meeting. That was our first conversation. And by the way, that's me empowering you.

40:20That's me saying, I believe in you. You're talented. You are capable. And I believe that you can think this through and you're not doing it alone. I'm going to be there to coach you and to guide you. I could tell so many stories of how people have grown inside my orbit as a result of this. It's crazy. That's really the only way to grow is the unfortunate things that I still don't think society thinks that this is the way that you get better. I think. I have also found myself asking, who do I want to serve? I've realized that with our company, AI Leadership, if we have to convince you that AI is important, you're not our customer.

41:03We're for the people that know that they need to become AI driven and they're running into the wall. They're taking such massive action. They're running into the wall. My job is to take away the wall. What about people who say that AI is bad and it's kills creativity and it's bad for the environment? And why are you guys even talking about this? Creativity is a big one that I hear often. I would ask them, might it be possible, would you change your stance if you found that this could help you become more creative? I can't say no to that. And then we do something together. I mean, this is such a creative enhancement.

41:44I was with this last week, one of the biggest brands in the world. I'm in the boardroom with the C-suite. They gave us the biggest problem that they are facing. I mean, you're talking billions of dollars at stake. we wrote a crit on how to solve it totally came up with viable solutions that alone was worth billions of dollars for them that was a 20-minute use case but it requires massive change massive mindset shift and i said i had a i flip it and i said great now i want you to be steve jobs Imagine you got to come back and deliver not a message, but a manifesto that I could deliver as the CEO of this company to our workforce that would ally all fear, all anxiety, and would galvanize people to run through walls with excitement.

42:43And this thing would be so damn good. It would put the release of the iPhone to shape. And it lays out this manifesto that could be delivered in a minute. The CMO of the company goes, can we put that on letterhead? I mean, that is the creativity is not your ability to create the draft. Your creativity is the ability to cast the vision for where you want to go, to be descriptive with AI on the types of things you're looking for, to be creative in terms of the roles that you pull in or the type of tasks that you wanted to do. The difference is people who are creatives have been creative with design, creative with this specific type of art, creative with writing.

43:22Like you were the player of the instrument in the orchestra. You're no longer the player of one instrument. You're now the conductor front and center who's waving the baton and creatively engaging AI as a business analyst, then transforming it into a world-class communication expert with deep expertise on your IACP, and then turning it into an aggressive growth-minded board member who identifies all the non-obvious growth levers that you could be pulling that you're not pulling. like even listening to me talk like my brain is firing on such a higher level right now even thinking about how i could use this thing let's say that somebody's listening right now and they want ai to help them become uh more prolific in their writing you know they want to write way more but in their voice the way that they do it just a very tactical use case like what would you do to go in, what would you upload?

44:15What would you include in order for somebody to turn their AI into their little mini version of that? First, I would feed it 20 to 50 emails. I would feed it past writing samples of what you would say is your work. And I would include all of that as the context. The role would be you are an expert prompt engineer, but also communications expert whose true superpower is actually creating a writing persona. I want to have a style guide of my voice that I can embed into AI in your world class of figuring out how to do that. Interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to five questions to unlock deeper context that you need to do this thing.

45:00And then your task is to create the file in Markdown format that would be my voice. That if AI ever were to write anything on my behalf, it would nail this. I have that, by the way. I have that. So - How many em dashes does it put back in there that you don't want it? Oh, see, I have it in my global custom instructions to never use. Hyphens are okay when they're appropriate. Yeah. Em dashes are not. Yeah. And so it still doesn't. Mine's still sneak them in. I still got it. I still got to keep my eyes on that size there. It's not perfect. I feel like there's still a 10 to 20 % failure rate. Yeah.

45:36Even with the best prompt that is the best thing ever. And you still go in there and go, that's an em dash. that's a it's not x it's y like what i mean i'd be curious your take what are some obvious things that you see that you go that is ai and not in the good way m dashes is number one yeah um there are certain things that opens a paragraph like in the ai era in this transformation like Like it's almost, it's a little verbose, hypey, inauthentic. Yeah. I can also just tell when I'm reading and there's a lot of words that aren't delivering a message. Yeah. It's just too much. It's a lot of fluff.

46:19Yeah. It's a lot of fluff. And all that says to me is, by the way, I want people to use AI. Yeah. I want you to use it to get to a draft faster. But all that tells me is that they allowed AI to become the thought leader. Yeah. That really comes back to your point. Because for me, I'll lose my mind on myself and my writing or the team if there's the ever-present M-dash, that it's not X, it's Y. What nobody else will tell you, says that line a lot, in the era, uses the word era a lot. There are a few things that must be just so prolific in human communication that it assumes we do that constantly.

46:54And I think sometimes I think employees are scared a little bit to sound robotic in that way. but the cure is really just remember that you have to keep leading from the front remember whatever draft whatever it gave you is just the first draft and before i even look at it i just tell myself this is the bad answer yeah i don't care how good it sounds this is the bad answer i'm about to make it better and then i review it and i literally tell it here's what i like about what you gave me here's what i don't like about what you gave me here's the top changes we got to make and then it creates an updated draft and then i do it again and i keep doing it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until I like where I'm at.

47:30Yeah. What about, um, you have an AI board, you know, your AI board has a bunch of members. Yeah. I'm curious. Do you think everyone should have an AI board? And if they should, who's on it? You should have an AI board if you are in a position where it's lonely at the top and you would like to have advice on demand from people that will, or personas that will have your best interest at heart that are custom designed, to augment your weaknesses. So I am the founder and CEO of a company called AI Leadership. I self-funded this thing. I have no investors. I have no board. At the end of the day, the buck stops with me and it's lonely at the top.

48:13And I see the value in boards because I'm inside a lot of public companies and I see the role that that thing plays. So one day I wrote a 10-year vision. I fed it our business plan, culture documents. I fed it my personality profiles. I told it in the context section, everything that I thought were my strengths and weaknesses, but also called out. Those are just the ones I'm aware of. And the first crit, it had to interview me to identify what my other strengths and weaknesses were that I was unconscious of, that I needed to be conscious of. And based on that, to identify the skills that I was missing that if I were to assemble an actual board, I would want to attract those skills to the board to get me to where I want to go over the next 10 years.

49:05And it gave me this list of skills. I didn't trust it. I applied judgment and I called it down, but like one was vision, one was product design, one was storytelling, risk mitigation, finance. And I said, great. now research famous people, world-class business people or leaders who exemplify these skills. Well, three of those skills were taken up by one guy. Vision, product design, and storytelling, who better than Steve Jobs? So I literally built a personality profile for Steve Jobs, but custom augmented to me. So he has rules on what he can do and he has very specific rules on what he can't do.

49:45He is not allowed to give me advice on being a husband, a father, or a leader. I'm dead serious. I'm not interested in his advice in those three categories. Warren Buffett is on my board for long-term planning and risk mitigation. Jeff Bezos is on my board for scale and operational efficiency. My most valuable board member is my future self. I created a persona of the man I want to be 30 years in the future so that that version of me can advise me every single day. This is actually wild. We've taught 1 ,500 business owners how to increase their revenue inside of one quarter by anywhere from 26 % to 100%.

50:22How? Well, we stole the playbook from private equity. We use something called the 12 Ps, which is the framework that takes you from whatever your revenue level is now to a higher level plus more profits. You see, the thing about private equity is they don't guess how to grow a business. They know every single time. It's just never been applied to normal everyday businesses. We stole the homework, integrated into the 12 Ps and deliver something called the owner score. Your owner score in our boardroom is what helps you move your business forward. So if you right now are wondering, how do I make more profit in my business?

50:56How do I grow my revenue of my business? Why is this one problem continuing to happen? Maybe it's hiring the wrong people. Maybe it's not having enough sales. Maybe it's not having enough leads. I can almost guarantee you it is one of the 12 Ps holding you back, except no one's ever taught you this. If this is you, I want to meet you. And if you're a fit for our contrarian thinking boardroom, I may invite you out to our headquarters in Austin, Texas, to learn more about how we help small business owners double, triple their revenue with just one of these 12 P's. You can click the link below to see if you are a fit for the contrarian boardroom.

51:29So you say that AI could lead to cognitive decline or decay. What's happening there? How do we know if that's happening to us? I think this is the greatest risk with AI that is not being talked about is unfortunately, a lot of people are lazy and they're not realizing it. But your brain, your ability to think is a muscle. If you stop using it, it's going to get weaker and weaker over time. Most people are using AI in a way that it is replacing their ability to think. Anytime you ask AI a question, get an answer. And you just accept it. You made AI do the thinking leverage, not you. You can absolutely flip that though in a way that this requires more thinking on your end.

52:21And this is where crit has been really good because when you describe the context, you have to think like, what's all the stuff that I need to tell? And you're recalling all these different things. Your brain is working more. When you describe the role, you're getting really creative about the kind of experts that your brain is working more. When the AI turns the table and starts to interview you, it asks questions that you would never ask yourself. Your cognitive demand goes through the roof. And with all of that, it then accomplishes the task, which you then still apply judgment and discernment.

52:55And then you're thinking more about what do I like? What do I not like? What are the top changes? So if you actually look at when you write crit, how much more you use your brain, it goes through the roof. In that case, it is enhancing me. Unfortunately, most people are allowing it to replace them. So how do you know if you are allowing it to replace you? If all you do is you take the answers, you don't allow it to ask you questions. That is the biggest indicator? I think, well, one, those people aren't even aware that they're doing it. So there's a lack of awareness there to begin with. For me, the thing that I pay attention to is when I try to solve problems, can I still do it without AI?

53:38I think about this a lot. And it's a dance, Cody, because there are times where I'm just, I'm so clear on how inferior my human brain is to solve things without being augmented by AI. I know what it feels like to have superhuman powers. And when you suddenly can't fly anymore, you know what it feels like to not be able to fly. It's a really good point. And it's hard to have patience with it. You know, I was with our mutual friend, Charlie, the other day. And he's like, well, we can just upload this into Claude and Claude can give us. And I was like, no, we have these sticky notes on the window.

54:16I said, I want us to think through this critically first. Then we can take pictures of it. We can feed the whole thing through AI. But I actually want us to just make sure that we like the output before we take an output. it and and i can see how we actually would get it's annoying because it it could be so much faster if you allow the computer to do the thinking for you yeah and so it can feel dumb actually to not do it well i mean i in my office at home i have a a nice leather chair that is my thinking time chair this is very manly of you i like this very yeah um i only sit in that chair when I'm doing strategic thinking.

54:55Really? And I'm talking pen and paper strategic thinking. So the guy who wrote the book about AI uses pen and paper still because I sometimes need to sit down and really process my thoughts. And it's not a one-shot thing. Sometimes I need to sit there for an extended period of time to really think through what am I missing? What am I not thinking about? And I get all that context on the page. then you better believe I'm bringing in my computer and going, here's the question I just asked myself. Here's the, all my notes from the result of my thinking time. And I'm talking to this thing, dumping all that context into AI, and then having it play a very specific type of role to ask me deeper questions, to pull even more out of my head to then do whatever tasks that is, whether it's creating files that I'm going to build into an AI agent, whether it's using it to harness that against our strategic plan, whether it's communication that's going to go to the company.

55:49That's what it looks like. Top three AI tools to use in 2026. Claude. That's fair for everything. Sad. No, we need some competition. We can't have another Google that owns everything. But yes. Okay. I agree with you. That's the one I go to. Although, you know what? Actually, I don't agree with it all the way because you know what I still like ChatGPT for? ChatGPT does a really good job of very short, prompted image creation. I still find even with Claude Design, Claude Design has a design that looks like Claude. And you have to beat that design out of it still. I'm sure that'll be gone at some point.

56:29But chat actually does not have a specific chat design, which is interesting. And that's where I can give you the high level answer. And then there's, what's the problems that you're facing? You know, my videographer will have a different answer in terms of the AI tools that he's using for that. Yeah, versus, you know, if you're in graphic design space, like you're going to be using something very different. If you're focused on research, you're going to be focused on something very different. But I think just broad based across the board, Claude. By the way, even the way you described that use case was your brain working more or less.

57:02Oh, yeah, more. I have to. Yeah, exactly. Like I watched your eyes. You started looking up into the right and you're visualizing this thing. Your speech started talking faster. Your brain was firing. How many AIs do you use at once? Do you ever have like Claude over here working on an issue, chat creating an image for you, Higgs field rendering a video simultaneously? Sometimes, but that's not the 20%. Really? And this is, this is again, where I really focus on the 20 % that's going to drive the 80. For most people, can we just identify a 20 % priority that matters, write crit really well, and then apply our thought leadership to the situation.

57:43That's going to take you so much further than what tool and how many can I use somewhat? Like that is so what most people are focusing on. That's not going to transform the EBITDA of your company. That's not going to change the competitive positioning of your company. Now, when you do this really well, and then you start to build agents, do I have Claude running different things at different times? Sure. But that's not the goal. It's can I focus on one thing that matters right now and do it really well? And if that's a repetitive task, can I turn it into an agent so it starts to run on itself?

58:19And can I focus on making that thing really good so that it actually does bring me 100 % leverage? Otherwise, it's not that valuable. And then I can move on to building the next one. What do you think about having centralized AI brains and companies? This is a little bit 202, but having a centralized brain in your company or having decentralized brains per division and also having decentralized agents in each division. How do you see companies doing that today? Let's call it companies that are doing anywhere from one to 100 million bucks. They aren't. They aren't. Less than 5 % are doing that.

59:01Less than 0.01 are doing that. And in most, the vast majority of companies, people are still using this to write better emails or to be their Google. They say they're building agents. They're not. They're building a project or a GPT. True agent that can do things independent of you. Now, the smaller companies that are startups, like I do believe that they are starting to go down this. I would really challenge how much of that is the 20 % versus the 80%. I think a lot of people are doing a lot of things that aren't actually delivering results. So I'm not even worried. Most companies shouldn't even be worried about that yet.

59:38If you are, that is a high level of sophistication. And my guidance to them is step one, I want as much data centralized as possible because it's a massive, massive asset. The question is what access to what data, which is that's when you can look at divisional stuff like that. And then the question is, how is the data structured? Is it actually in the right file format, like a markdown where these models can actually talk to it? And more importantly, can you give your people agency to start to use AI to document what they do so it can do that for them so it can liberate them to deliver more value inside the company?

1:00:13Yeah. I mean, I think the one thing we found with the centralized, overly centralized AI database bases are they really need sub-agents for the most part. And those sub-agents, you're right, you have to have a data lake and then that data lake

1:00:28Geoff Woods:needs to have protections for all the individual, you know, subsets that you need to have. But I think inside of a business, what we're seeing, at least with our businesses that we talk to, is there's usually one, this is probably your 20%, there's one part of your business, usually sales, because that's where the money makes. And inside of sales is like the first place where agents make sense or, and I don't mean agents that are going to go do your sales even. I mean, is there an agent that can comb through all of your phone calls that your salespeople have to determine what are the most common objections, feed you the best solutions for the clients that were actually closed, and then help you train your salespeople without having 30 minutes?

1:01:11I got two cool use cases here. Voice of customer is super important to us. So we want to understand what's on the hearts and minds of our people. Every conversation we have with a customer, there's an AI note taker there. and we ended up creating something where with the note taker, if a customer says something that we think is voice of customer worthy, we click a highlight button. AI rewinds to the beginning of that customer talking for that segment, records until we say stop, built it so that snippet gets sent to a voice of customer channel on Slack. Once a week, an agent goes in that Slack channel, finds everything our customers have said over the last week, sends that to another application where it's turned into a podcast.

1:01:53When I wake up Wednesday morning by 5 a.m. when I'm at the gym, I'm listening to an actual podcast of everything my customers have said over the last past week. That's how I prepare for our product market fit meetings. Well, that's cool. That's a good idea. So that's just voice of customer. Yeah. We hired a new salesperson and I asked the guy who I was promoting him. She was backfilling him. I said, how are you going to train her? He's like, well, you know, I got my scripts. We're going to role play. I'm going to listen to some calls. I go, nope. And he goes, okay, you clearly see something I don't see.

1:02:23What do you see? And I go, hasn't every sales call we've ever done in the company been recorded by an AI note taker? He goes, yeah. Don't we have conversion data on what's happened with every single prospect? Yes. Why don't you feed AI the last 100 sales calls and the conversion data, as well as what you think your script is, write a crit and have it come up with what the ideal sales script is based on conversion data on that volume. Turn that into custom instructions for an AI sales coach so we can build an agent so that when this person gets off a sales call, that note, the note taker automatically sends the transcript to the sales coach who compares that against the best that could be done and slacks them on what they did well, what they need to change within the next five minutes before their next sales call.

1:03:15Yeah. That's what we do too. We take all the data from Avoma and actually feed it into something that in real time can give you feedback on these objections. And it sort of voice triggers based on what you say on the phone call. It's been a game changer, especially for, we had an underperforming sales rep that I love. He's a great jet and traditional training just wasn't working, but this iterative real-time training is so much more sophisticated that now he's one of our top closers. Yeah. And he was the one that he was, you know, speaking of being an employee, he was one of the guys that came up with the V1 of this as a non-technical person because he was struggling.

1:03:52He was going to get fired. And then he showed it to the team and now we're like, okay, let's roll this out across a bunch of it. It wasn't even top down. That's awesome. So it's really cool what you're doing. So for somebody listening today, if you had to give them one thing to do with AI right now, what is it? once a day, every day for the next 30 days. Write crit in a strategic way. That's it. Pick something that you're doing once a day that matters. Write crit, context role, interview task. And when you get an answer, don't trust it. Say, here's what I like about it. Here's what I don't like about it.

1:04:27Here's the changes I want made. That will blow your mind. If you do that every day for the next 30 days or the next 30 business days, you won't even recognize recognize yourself. And here's what's going to happen. Cody, it's really tough to describe color if you've only seen black and white. Most people are living in black and white. I mean, even the use cases we were just sharing, people are like, I could never come up with that. Yes, you could, but you haven't seen color yet. And when you start writing crit on the 20 % every single day, you start to see color. Then you start to look at a process and you're like, why the heck are we doing it that way?

1:05:06And you will be so much more creative about how you can approach something, not by bolting AI onto the way things used to be, but by truly imagining from first principles, how might we do this if I was an AI-driven leader or this was an AI-driven organization? Jeff, you're the man. I love how you take AI, make it really simple but profound. And I always push you. I'm like, what about this hack? What about this hack? You're like, No, no, no. It's this. It's nothing else. Do this one simple thing. And if you do it, AI does not have to be so scary and in fact can really be life changing. That's it.

1:05:40All right. Thank you for coming. Thank you. It's everywhere. And I love AI driven leadership, AI driven leader, the book. And I liked it so much. We bought it for all the employees. I told you that last time you're here. Thanks for being here, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you. Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.