E87- Interview with Geoff Woods: The AI Driven Leader

Welcome to the Land to Lots Podcast powered by launch development finance advisers and now your host Carter Frolic. Hello everybody, it's Carter Frolic and welcome to the Land to Lots Podcast. And today I'm really excited to welcome to the podcast Jeff Woods. And for those of you that may not be familiar with Jeff, Jeff is the founder of AI Leadership. Based out of Austin, Texas, he's also the author of the AI Driven Leader. He hosts the AI Driven Leader podcast and he also leads the AI Driven Leadership Collective. And I'm going to refer to that as a collective. Jeff, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining. It's my pleasure. Good to see you. And before we get started, how did you, you know, maybe you could just start by telling me a little bit about yourself. I know that you and I had gone to the same school you see Santa Barbara and so we'll plug that. And, but how did you get into the whole aspect of artificial intelligence and developing AI leadership? And Carter, I'll preface by saying for a guy who wrote a book about AI, I really don't care about AI. Okay. And the reason I say that is I don't think AI adoption is the goal of any company. Building a better business, creating better lives, yes. AI is something that can help you achieve your goals or frankly it can become a massive distraction. And I think for most leaders, that's where it is. There's so much information. It's overwhelming. They know it's the you know where to start. They think they're falling behind and they are. And I found myself positioned in a way to help guide them to harness this in a way that actually grows the value of your company. But separates all the distractions from what actually matters. And how I got here, we have to go back to college at UC Santa Barbara. Let's go. My senior year, I'm doing an internship. And I sit down with the CEO right before graduating. And I asked him what job he thought I should get after school. He leans in and says, Jeff, you're asking the wrong question. Carter, it's the first time in my life that I was even aware that there are right questions and wrong questions. And he said you really should be asking what are the skills that I can master that are so valuable. Those serve you no matter where you go. Then go find jobs that will help you build those skills. Greatest career advice I'd ever received little did I know that one of those skills would become the power of asking me right questions. I ended up having a good sales career. He said go into sales master that had a good sales career but wanted to get into business ownership. I partnered up with a guy named Gary Keller who started Keller Williams, which your audience may be familiar with. He wrote a book called The One Thing. They wanted to turn their book into a company but Gary's one thing was running Keller Williams. His co-author Jay's One Thing was writing books with Gary. My One Thing became The One Thing. And in that role, I had to master the ability to ask leaders the right questions to get them to think more strategically to unlock new levels of growth. This became a huge superpower of mine. And I ended up selling my stake in the business back in 2022. Got pulled in house by a client called Gindel Steel and Power. This is a giant steel company out of India, about 100,000 people. I had been the coach to the chairman of the board and his whole C-suite. So when he found out I left, he said, "Will you come in?" I said, "Maybe what's the job?" He said, "You tell me." So think of it like Alphabet is to Google. They're a parent company and they own a bunch of operating companies. My job was to sit at a parent company level and figure out what are the processes that we could put in place that if we drove through every operating company would unlock enterprise value. Strategy, execution, people, and technology. So I would work with the C-suite of every op-co to define their strategy, meaning what's your future competitive advantage? Then execution, what's a focus business plan that you're going to stay focused on? And then people, I had this realization one day Carter, the reason we hire people is to achieve our goals. How often do goals change? All the damn time. How often do job descriptions change? Not that often. And this was like a whole, look at how many people we have that may or may not be aligned with what actually matters. And I asked a question, which was, how might we dynamically realign a workforce of that size? Well, you'd have to look the technology. This focus on those four drivers was really successful. Over four years, we grew the market cap from 750 million to $12 billion. Wow. It was December of '22 when I saw Chatchee BT for the first time. And when I saw it, I think I thought the same thing that a lot of people listening to this thought, which is, that's cool. I'm busy. I'll get to it later. Or IT will figure that out. Or can't I just hire a consultant to do it for us? But then in the back of my mind was that idea of focus on mastering the skills that are so valuable, that serve you no matter where you go. And so I just made a commitment to use it once a day. The problem is Carter, I was asking myself all the wrong questions. Back to that again. I was asking how do I use this to write a better email. And I wondered why it felt like a waste of time. And I was like, is it the tech? Or is it how I'm choosing to use the tech? Yeah. And that's when I went, oh my gosh, my career has been defined by asking leaders the right questions to unlock new levels of growth. Here I am asking AI questions. Could I turn the tables and get AI to ask me the right questions? Interesting. That was a game changer. I started using it for strategy, like giving it our business plan and saying your role as to act as an aggressive growth-minded board member with deep expertise in the steel industry. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time. Up to five questions to gain deeper context about where our plan is weak or insufficient. The things we can't see that we should be seeing. And then your task is to tell me where our plan is insufficient and how we can plug those gaps in the next 30 days. So it becomes bulletproof. So it is becoming a thought leader. And you two are collaborating? It becomes the thought partner. Partner, thought partner. You become the thought leader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a whole new game for me. And I was flying to India every quarter. I'm at the chairman's house. And I'm showing him how I'm using it for strategy. And he goes, this is incredible. And I said, "Uh-huh, it's the future." And he goes, "I agree." Now let me ask you a question, Jeff. And this is something that I had further on. But how does one take what might be very sensitive company information, drop it into chat, perplexity, you know, all the different tools open AI? And still protect that. Are you building your own? No. Okay. We are for something different. Is there any concern related to that because I don't mean to diverge a little bit. Yeah, the answer is advanced. What you're referring to is called training on your data. First, we have to clarify what that actually means. It does not mean if you feed it your business plan that all of a sudden you can find it on Google. Okay. That's not what it means. If it's training on your data, it means that it's one of a trillion data points that when these companies go to improve their model, they look for patterns. Yep. So you have to ask the question, what's the real risk there? Now let's say you say, "I still think there's risk." Awesome. Get a model that doesn't train on your data. You've got two options. You can go off the shelf, meaning you literally sign up for an account with one of these companies. Yep. You just make sure you have a level of provisioning where it doesn't train on your data. Or if you're a larger company, you go enterprise, which means you physically host ChatGBT, or Copilot, or Claude, or Gemini, or Proplexity, on your AWS, or Azure Server, and you have an IT team that builds a walled garden around it, so it's locked down. That's ultimate security. There are two models right now that will not train on your data if you just go off the shelf. ChatGBT teams. Mm-hmm. And Copilot. Okay. Both have to be paid. If you are just paying 20 bucks a month for ChatGBT, it is still by default training on your data. You can turn it off. But if you just Google ChatGBT teams, you will see that one doesn't train on your data by default. Okay. Good. Sorry, and I didn't mean to digress. Oh, good. And I could just hear everybody that's listening going, "I don't want to give it by all of my secrets and loss." Yeah. The bottom line is there are solutions for that that exist now. Great. Basically, let's go with the thought partner. Yeah. So while I was at the chairman's house, he basically said, "Why don't you lead this for the company?" Mm-hmm. And I found myself sitting there going, "This is a career-defining opportunity." And then I went, "Oh, crap. I know nothing about AI." Mm-hmm. But something I learned from Gary Keller, is any time you're hitting a ceiling of achievement, you're just missing a person. Yeah. If you're asking, "How can I do this?" Maybe you're asking the wrong question, "Who am I missing?" Mm-hmm. "Who not how?" "Who am I missing that if I got into relationship with could enable me to drive this through the company?" And that led to me partnering with Google. So that was a unique collaboration. And I started to learn a lot about the tech. But as we drove it through the company, I began to realize that all the leaders around the world are asking the wrong question. They're asking, "What's the right AI use case?" That assumes that AI adoption is the goal. Yeah. That you should adopt it. Mm-hmm. Should you depends? Is it going to help you build a better business and better lives? There are ways that answer is yes. And there are lots of reasons that answer can be no. The difference that makes the difference is not the tech. It is the leader. But nobody was focusing on the leader. And that's when I saw the opportunity. It said, "Okay, I'm going to burn the ships." Literally quit, resigned, and said, "I'm going to write a book about this. I'm going to build a company based on this. The AI-driven leader is now the number one book in the world for its category. And our company AI leadership is just exploding, helping companies, uses to grow enterprise value." So what is the premise of the book? And it is, "How do you harness AI to make faster, smarter decisions?" As a leader, I think Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google said it best. And I'm paraphrasing him. But he basically said, "Everything that you know about your company is going to change in the next five years." Not ten. Five. So let's dig into that. Why that comment? Why that. Well, if you really understand what AI can do, you realize that everything that a person does today is mostly reflective of what machines do. It's tactical, output-based. Generate this report, send this email, do this task. AI is going to take all of that away. Which means the skills that people have to harness are going to completely shift. The processes that they follow are going to completely change. How your operations run are completely going to change. How you deliver value to customers through your product and service is completely going to change. When I heard that card, I'm going, "Okay, I could visualize this tidal wave coming." Yeah. And I'm thinking as a leader, if I know the tidal wave is coming, when would I want to at least gain a little bit of knowledge to figure out how to cast a vision for the future? How to define my strategy for how we're going to win because AI is going to change all your competitive-- whatever you think your competitive mode is, you need to question if it's still going to be competitive. And how do I just know enough to start leading the change so that then I can ask, "Who am I missing in my world that if I could bring in, could enable me to take it the rest of the way?" And that's when I was just, "Okay, the AI-driven leader is about how do you have to change how you think and lead to win in a world that's AI-driven?" But very clearly, I knew that every leader, because I literally interviewed over 500 of them for the book, 100% of them said, "As the future, 100% said they would adopt it, less than 5% had done anything." Yeah, yeah. Why? They didn't know where to start, so that's what the book shows you. And what does that mindset, between those that are successful, willing, and to some degree, I think you would have to get back to what you said. You were doing a little habit stacking. I'm going to use this every day. Okay, nobody really knows what this thing is, but I'm going to make that effort to figure out and explore, discover what it can do. Is it as simple as having that mindset and being open to, I'm going to stick my toe in and slowly walk it way into the water? What is the mindset that this AI-driven leader needs to exhibit? An AI-driven leader is somebody who harnesses the technology to create better leaders, better businesses, and better lives. That's important. It's not just about profit, it's about humanity. So there's an intersection of those two. Otherwise, if you're just saying, "Hey, I want to use this to cut heads," you're not an AI-driven leader. Yeah. And I think you're playing too small. Well, and I'm not sure who said it, but if you want to make a billion dollars, add value to a billion people. Correct. So what is value? It can be a lot of different things, but would think bigger. Yes. Now, how do you do that? It's recognizing that every person in your company, including you, has unique strengths, that they may or may not be harnessing it all in their job. Yeah. What are those strengths? And how do we get them to harness them and then focus them like a laser, not on everything they could do, but the 20% priorities that drive 80% of the results that are in alignment with the goals of the company and then use AI to turn those strengths into superpowers. What you're going to witness with this podcast today, you're going to see that what happens when I took my natural strengths as a human and amplified them with AI. Because the stories I'm going to tell you, you're going to go holy smokes. I've never heard that before. It's because it's the superhuman version of me. Yeah. So how did you discover the superhuman version of you using AI and then amplify that? Let's just jump into that. Well, it was, it was, I mentioned it earlier, that defining moment was like, oh my gosh, I'm not getting value from this, but one of my superpowers is asking leaders the right questions to unlock new levels of growth. And I literally asked, how could AI help me do this? Yeah. And that's when this idea of AI interviewing me. And then I naturally, like, I see the world through 80/20. Yeah. I see 80% of the stuff that drives 20% of the results and I immediately set that to the side because it does not drive value. And I focus on the 20% priorities that drive 80% of the results. So I naturally just started using AI on the 20%. So like when I said bulletproofing my strategic plan, perfect example. I had it act, I have built an AI board. Like an actual board custom built to augment my strengths and weaknesses to guide me to where I want to go over the next 10 years. I value mentorship. So like that's a reflection of me getting creative there. I had my AI board conduct an interview of me to do a performance review as though my contract as CEO was up. And tell me the top things I'm doing that actually should scale to get us to where we want to go over the next 10 years. The top things I'm not doing or my weaknesses that I'm unaware of that could stop us from getting to where we want to go. And if my contract were up, would they give me a raise? Keep me where I'm at. Put me on a pip or fire me and why. Yeah, I had that conversation while I was at the gym working out because I was literally just talking to it. So like I'm a strategic thinker. Yeah. These use cases are just reflections of me. Yeah. And for your AI board, did you set it up with mentors or people that you value their opinions or their thinking? And then train AI. You know, you're I'm just making up names. You're Warren Buffett. You know, or, you know, so on and so on. So I'll get a little more tactical. Yeah. I have a framework for how I communicate with AI called crit. Okay. Context, role, interview task. What I'm telling you right now is the single most important thing. I'll tell you in this whole episode you better pause rewind and take notes. Okay. If you just start communicating with AI with this structure, I'll take you to the top 1% in the world. Context. You give AI lots of context about the situation. While it's been trained on the information of the world, it's not you. You got to feed it lots of detail. Yeah. Role, this is where you tell AI the kind of expert you want it to become for your use case. Because you can tap into expertise of the world now. Yeah. Interview is where you turn the tables and say interview me. Up to three questions to gain deeper context. The reason that matters is we are terrible at giving sufficient proactive context. And when it asks you questions, you're going to go, oh, that's a great question. I would have never thought to tell AI that. And you gave it more quality. The more quality you put in, the better quality you get out. And that sets up the task, which is whatever you want AI to do. So I literally wrote crit in chat GPT. Context. Here's my 10 year vision for the company. Here's our business plan. Here's my personality profiles. Here's what I know to be my strengths and weaknesses as a CEO. And I find myself wanting to build an AI board that would be custom built. As though I were attracting all the skills and capabilities I'm missing. That I would need to get us where we want to go over the next 10 years. Your role is to act as an expert organizational psychologist who is also an amazing recruiter of the best boards in the world. I want you to interview me, ask me one question at a time. Up to five questions to gain deeper context. And then your task is to lay out what are the top skills I would want to recruit if I were to assemble a real board. Yeah, unbelievable. And it conducts an interview and it spits out a list of skills. I did not trust it Carter. Yeah. I applied my judgment and told it what, based on this, here's what I agree with. Now go research famous people who exemplify these skills. So example, vision, product design, storytelling. These were some of the skills that it thought would be really important. Well, there's one person and there's one person who's very famous for doing those really well. Steve Jobs. Yeah, yeah. So I built a personality profile of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is on my AI board for vision, product design and storytelling. But he's not allowed to give me advice on being a husband or a leader. Yeah. Warren Buffett is on my board for long term planning and risk mitigation. Here's a wild one. My future self 30 years in the future is on my board. Wow. So I can have a conversation with the man I want to become today. That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, this really just kind of blows your mind. I mean, when you get into this and look at all of the various capabilities that we have we have access to, you know, PhD level, you name it. Yes. But the only way we're truly going to be able to bring that to our benefit to our usage is to what you're saying is asking better questions, providing that better context. And here's the thing. Everything you just said with Craig. Flap to 10,000 V. I don't care about AI. Yeah. If you're sitting here listening to this going holy smokes, I've never thought of this. Yeah. It's not about AI. This is all about helping you think more strategically because I believe the difference between growing your business or going out of business is your ability to think strategically. Yeah. I am just looking at use cases at a leadership or a sea level. How do we think more strategically and how can we harness AI to do it? Yeah. And let's just talk about that right now. So we've got, you know, our audience is, you know, land developers and home builders primarily. So what if there is a AI driven leader in the industry that's really embracing this stepping into AI, using it as a thought leader, using the crit principles that you outlined in your book is attending the collective. We're going to talk about that because I see that just the huge synergies that are created. We have one builder that is using it, one that is not. What is the difference three years from today between the two organizations? I think anybody that can say here's what I think it looks like in three years has no idea what they're talking about. Here's what I can tell you, the difference is not linear. It's not like Carter, if you and I both got into cars and we were going to go on a race and we're both at the starting line, but you hit the gas and you get up to 60 miles an hour and you drive for a solid 60 minutes. You're 60 miles ahead of me. It's not linear like that because AI compounds. You might be 180 miles ahead of me, but here's the difference. When I start accelerating, it's not that over the next hour, you're at 360. You might be at 720 or 1000, whatever. The lead compounds when you start to understand how fast you move with this and so does your disadvantage. The longer you wait, the further you fall behind, and I'll be pretty direct. You likely are behind. You likely are because I do have some companies in the collective that are in your industry. When I look at how they are harnessing this just for strategic thinking, one of them wrote Cret about the business that would put them out of business and what it would look like for them to be the one to build it first and then had them interview them about what internal capabilities did they have that were a source of a sustainable competitive advantage in a world that's AI-driven. They are hyper-clear. By the way, this was the first workshop that we did together. They are hyper-clear on what their competitive advantage will be in an AI-driven future. They have aligned their business plan with it. They have shunted all resources and focus of the entire company to aligning with those things and stopped doing things legacy ways. Their drop the amount that they're dropping to the bottom line, just in terms of efficiency and multiply that times your multiple in terms of enterprise value, that's like the first 90 days. Yeah. Mike dropped right there because that's the difference. As somebody super focused, it's the quality of the thought. At the end of the day, that's what moves businesses forward, is that kind of critical thinking, but not just the critical thinking, but then taking the action on that critical thinking to a correct value. Now let's look at the people in your company. This is where it starts at the top. We firmly believe you've got to start at the top. We talk to CEOs and sea level teams because if we can get them just thinking more strategically, that's a true game changer. What happens once they start doing this is they empower their people to do it. There are people in your company using AI right now. They just may not be telling you because they think that you'll think they're cheating or that you'll value them less. When the leaders become AI-driven leaders, it becomes praise. I'll give you real example, I have an executive assistant. She's a virtual assistant in South America. Carter, when I say I have a virtual assistant in South America, what are some of the common stereotypes that you might think of? Oh, jeep. It doesn't probably speak really good English, you know, but what about quality of work? Depending upon the educational level, don't know. Does where they were born have really anything to do with how smart they are or how capable they are of work ethic? No, not a chance. In fact, they might kick our butt there. I'm an AI-driven leader, so there is a standard in my company. You must use AI. You don't ever get to do anything in your job without running it through AI first. I challenged her. She started 90 days in. She was fully 10 out of 10 on her current job description, which meant it was time to raise the goals. So I challenged her to go right, crit, to identify a vision for what it would look like if she were to bring 10 times to 100 times more value to the company. Based on that, to come back saying, "What are the things she'd be focusing on? What would the job description look like? What are the things she'd have to stop doing and bring it back to me?" A week later, she brings it back and she says, "Here's the things that are my superpowers that would allow me to bring 100 times more value. Here's exactly what I would be focusing on. This is what the job description would look like. Here's the stuff that I would have to delegate. Here's the job description for the person that I'm seeking approval to hire to free me up from that. Here's the transition plan as a development plan that I'm going to put in place to transition me to doing this role at a really high level in the next 90 days. Here would be the compensation I would love to be able to earn if I were able to do this new job description at that level." How did that conversation then go with you? I almost did a back flip, but I thought we were done and she goes, "I'm not done yet." And I said, "Go on." And she goes, "Well, in order for me to deliver 100 times more value, you have to deliver 100 times more value, so I have created the same prompt for you to do it." And like that sounds great, she goes, "No, you're going to do it right now. I'll wait." Yeah. So did she save the settings and then give them to you, and then you kind of drop them? She architected a prompt. Oh, yeah, yeah. So then she gave it to me. I put it into my AI tool, AI starts interviewing me about what are the things, if I were delivering 100 times more value, I'd have to be saying yes to one of the things I'd have to be saying no to. And like I laid this thing out and she goes, "That's so great. There's your next prompt." I go, "There's another one." She goes, "Well, we need to put rules in place because your worst enemy is yourself. So we need to put rules in place for what you're not going to do." Yeah. And it literally interviewed me to create what we call bright line rules of what Jeff will say yes to and what I will say no to. And then it even included a defense process. So if I ever want to break one of my own rules, I have to go through this defense process to stop me from breaking my own rules. Which probably happens from time to time, daily. This was based on me just telling her, "Go show me how you can bring more value." So now let's come back to your question of what happens if we wait three years or what of companies look like in three years? Yeah. I'm talking about with one employee in four months. Yeah. If you had a whole company that had that mindset that that was wanting to transform itself. And not only it's not only the individual, but also the other co-workers and leaders. Where does that, I mean to your point, it is exponential over, and I'm saying it could develop that framework. I'm seeing it because one, we are that company. Yes. Everybody in my company does use it this way. Yes. But I'm also watching hundreds of other companies that are in the collective, which is an executive network for C-level execs. Let's get into the collective. Tell me about the collective. I explained it to our audience. I had a fundamental premise that if you try to navigate AI alone, you've already lost. Because it's just moving so fast. And I found myself asking, "How can this be a massive collaboration versus a competition?" And I also, I never want to be the guy with all the answers. I want to be the guy surrounded by the smartest leaders, asking them the right questions and unlocking collective intelligence. So we have formed the world's largest network of AI-driven leaders. Everybody is C-level. Every company is over 10 million at least in revenue. None of these people are technical. But they're all committed to learning just enough to cast vision, define strategy, and lead the change. And we give them the guidance, it's like that prompt on like the business that will put you at us. We just gave it to them. And he went and did it. We guide them on how to use this strategically. They deployed in their companies, but they share everything that they know. Now imagine that cross hundreds of companies, cross industry, the type of things that you learn. So we have a direct line in the site into hundreds of companies that are doing this across industries and seeing, I mean, if I tell you, in under 90 days, companies are adding seven figures to their enterprise value, that's not hyperbole, it's fact. Yeah. Yeah. And are you meeting in person, or are you meeting over Zoom monthly? We come together a few times a year in person for a few days at a time. It's space to think, it's time to connect and also to learn from thought leaders in the world. But then they go and they deploy it in their companies, and we give them guidance, we give them technology. There are, we do trainings that can even extend to their teams, so that their teams go on the journey with them. There's lots of resources. We give them to drive this throughout the year, and then we come together at key moments throughout the year. Well, that's incredible. And just for everybody, and Jeff, I have to make sure I have all the proper show notes. But all of this information will be in our show notes, so that should you care to reach out to Jeff, should you care to join the collective, we will have the links in the show notes for you to get a hold of Jeff. I truly believe, and just so you're aware of what we're doing here, we're using AI. We're trying to use AI better. We're building our own in-house proprietary system with land advisers where we're just going to be training on our own information, because we just have to. And we've got 40 years of intelligence that I want to be able to pass on to our consultants for them to take all of our learning experiences. Yes. And there's a lot, so we have wins of learning experiences, we have lots. And then 40 years of contracts, you know, great language, great things that we can do to help our clients finance infrastructure, reduce cost, mitigate risk. But a lot of that stays the same, you know, here's the same language we can utilize this continually, but the thing that's changing so fast is the questions. And how do I ask better questions, because things are changing so quickly, and if we're not able to have that AI-driven leadership mentality, we're going to be behind. And we always want to be the leader of the hero for our client. I love that. So if you were just thinking of our space for land development, home builders, there's a lot of information in everything from demographics to land values, to new home prices, to cost information related to, you know, what it costs to build roads, entitlements, zoning regulations, title reports, a lot of these things that have to be done over and over and over, somebody's got to read a title report. Some of the tasks that relate to a developer looking at a piece of land deciding where they want to buy the analysis is the same. It may be different because we're in Tennessee or we're in Austin or we're in California. There are some of you're off the, you know, just, I'm kind of surprising you, but how would you see AI in that AI-driven leadership mindset freeing up and growing the efficiencies and allowing the developers to make better decisions? There are three ways you can use AI in a company to bring value. Only three. Make your people more productive. Make your operations more efficient. Make your product or service offering more valuable. Every use case falls within one of those three buckets. The mistake I'm seeing companies make is they are racing to put it into product or service or to drive operational efficiencies so they can drive costs out of the business. But imagine Carter, if your entire life you've only seen black and white, and I asked you to describe color. Yeah. You can't do it until you become an AI-driven leader. And it transforms you. You can't see really how it can drive operational efficiency or the product or service. Like the things that I've shared here today, I'm going to make an assumption that you might have not heard of before. Yeah. I'm going to say most of our audience has not heard it. Right. Yeah. It's just because I started with myself and I started thinking really strategically with it. So I don't care what the industry, including yours, let's start with using it to make you more productive. And at a leadership level, it is all about strategic thinking. So here's the question. And literally every one of you will be able to pause the episode and apply this. What is the biggest problem you are facing in your business right now that if we could solve it, it would unlock a new level of growth. Let's just go there. Because by default, it becomes a 20% priority. And then the question is, how can AI help you solve it? Well, what would that prompt even look like? Crit. Context. Describe your problem in vivid detail. And when you think you've given it enough, give it more. Because quality and quality out, then say, role, your role is to act as my thought partner and you have deep expertise in my industry, interview me, ask me one question at a time. Then task. Your task is to give me five high impact, non-obvious strategies to solve this problem. You can literally pause the episode, rewind, put it at 0.5 speed and type out exactly what I just said into chat GBT, into co-pilot, into any LLM, and it will start to interview you. I'll bet money that that's going to blow your mind. And Jeff, I got to tell you. So when I first heard you talking about this, that's strategic coach. I've been using it and implementing it and we use perplexity primarily. But it has completely changed everything. And just listening to you again today, I'm just like, oh, this is just mind blowing. As it relates to how we can, at least I'm thinking about me, how I can become a better AI-driven leader and it's all about the questions. And it's all about, it has to start with you first. Absolutely. Then the story. Period and the story. Yep. This has been incredible. We're starting to get close to our time period. The question that I have, what else should I have asked you that I didn't that you would like our audience to know as it relates to AI-driven leadership moving forward with a better leader? I think what are some of the biggest misconceptions or mistakes leaders are making? Yeah. One is, is a big one, is thinking that this is an IT initiative and not a leadership imperative. Yeah. This is not about the tech at all. This is about your vision for the future because might it be possible that your vision is now too small? Yeah. It's about strategy for how you're going to compete and win. Because is it possible that whatever you thought your mouth was just evaporated and you just didn't know it? Yeah. And it's about learning how to lead the change. You're the leader of your company. You know you have to adopt AI at some point, shouldn't you know just a little bit to start leading the change because this is not a tech problem, this is a people problem. How do you navigate the psychology of your people when there is so much fear, so much anxiety, you can't be an ostrich with your head buried in the sand. You got to have your head up and you got to know at least a little bit about what you're doing to start guiding the company and then you can ask who are you missing that if you could bring into your world, could guide you the rest of the way. Yeah. Huge. Well, and I just think about when you're talking about adding enterprise value, I think one of our most underutilized resources is the people. And if we cut them loose to develop their unique abilities and to become their best future self continually, what that and give them the freedom to do that within an organization, what that could do to the organization. You know, I want to be around that kind of company. I want to be around those kind of people that are continually and blossoming and growing. So it's amazing in anything else you'd like to close with Jeff. On my journey to becoming an ad driven leader, one thing that really stands out to me Carter is how little this has to do with the tech and how much it has to do with the human. When I was a kid, I was bullied pretty significantly and most of my life, I grew up hating myself. My way of overcoming that period and that kind of trauma was to achieve because I thought if I was more successful than my peers, they would respect me. Yeah. And it really did drive me, but it wasn't until I sold my last company that I woke up the next morning deeply depressed because I made a mistake, which is I had attached my identity to my title. And when my title was no longer my title, I actually had no idea who I was or my sense of self-worth. And I learned something really important, which is that you are you. You are not what you do. If you look at technology throughout history, it has changed what we do. How we do it, the skills we apply, the processes we follow, we learn new skills. We learn to follow new processes and some people even had the same job title with the same company, but how they did their work changed. And some people got different jobs with different companies. Employment overall goes up, by the way, through these things. I'm not sure if that'll be the case with AI or not and I'm not going to pretend to know that answer. What I do know is that you're the one who's actually in control. Will it take your job? I actually believe that's up to you because if you're waiting for a company to teach you the skills to be valuable, then you just surrendered your control. You just got in the passenger seat. I'm here to say, get in the driver's seat. What are the skills you can master that are so valuable they will serve you no matter where you go? And if you could be harnessing AI just a fraction of the way you've heard me talk about it today, do you think you'd become more valuable or less valuable to your organization? Yeah, exactly. And it gets in like anything. Anytime we're exposed to something that could be scary, I don't know anything about this, I remember and I'm going to go back to UC Santa Barbara thing. We were the first guys that did computer programming that didn't have to use punch cards. So I'm dating myself when I was in public accounting. They dropped this big sewing machine on me and said, I go, what's this thing? And they said, well, it's an Osborne computer. And I go, what do I need to do with the computer? And they said, well, we don't know. We think you can add things up with it, swear to God. And I said, I don't need, I've got a 10 key, I don't need a computer to add things up with. So this is the level of tech you're dealing with, right? Correct. But, you know, for anybody out there listening, I truly believe, and you've heard Jeff talk about how it transformative AI and being an AI-driven leader can be for your organization. So I really encourage you to reach out, to get the book, to look into the collective. You know, Jeff, I have heard you talk and it's just completely changed everything that we look at and what we think is possible. And for me, getting back to my tech story, I'm going, okay, I'm going to learn this AI stuff. And it took the commitment, and then it took the courage to get in and do it. And, you know, with that came the capability, and I'm still learning, and now more confidence. And we're just like the four Cs, and Dan talks about where, you know, we just keep on reinventing ourselves. That's right. I think that this is just an absolutely transformative tool. And if you enjoyed what Jeff said, which I think this has been one of our most valuable podcasts to date, because this can change your world, your personal life, your business life, your life, period. What you do next is a defining moment for the future of your life, your company, your career. If you treat lists like any other podcast where you just kind of go on to the next episode or go into your next meeting, and you don't take action, you are committing to lose the game. Yeah. If you hear this and you're going, whoa, okay, this is way bigger than I have ever thought around AI, take a step. Maybe it's get the book. Maybe it's you, you go and you write crit, do something forward moving with this, because I'm telling you there are people in your industry who are listening to this right now who are and your disadvantage compounds. Get going. Absolutely. And to that, Jeff, I'm going to put a link to your podcast, to the book, to your company, to the collective, and I'll just make it easy, the website's aileadership.com. There we go. I love it. That's great. Guys, get busy, and get growing with AI. I want to say thank you to everybody for taking the time, Jeff. Thanks for taking the time to speak with our listeners. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, please subscribe to Land to Lots, and we look forward to chatting with you again. Thank you. You have been listening to the Land to Lots podcast with Carter Frolic. Follow us wherever you find your podcast to never miss a new episode. [MUSIC]