12. Shifting the Mindset of an Enterprise Workforce with Geoff Gilmore

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to the AI driven leader. The podcast and dedicated to helping use a leader, harness AI to build better leaders, better business and better lives. I'm your host, Jeff Woods. If you're like most leaders, you know AI's the future. But you may not know where to start, what to do next, and deep down maybe you think you're falling behind. This is exactly where today's AI driven leader was at the time. He's from the steel manufacturing industry. And when he first saw AI, he thought this has no place in steel manufacturing. This is a 65-year-old company we've been wildly successful. This is just going to be another spat. But there was something different in this company. He had a direct report who genuinely believed in his bones. That AI did have a place. And then in fact, if this company didn't adopt it, the future of the company itself could be a sea. And so he became persistent. And going to the CEO consistently talking about how this could be used. His persistence paid off because in under six months, this CEO went from AI has no place in steel manufacturing to making a bold declaration. We're going to be an AI driven organization, and I'm going to lead it. The expectation he set, this is going to be a standard, not a suggestion, meaning that every employee, 6,000 of them, would be required to start using the technology. The purpose of today's episode is to walk you through what did his journey look like, the lessons that he learned, the things that he would do differently if he were to start all over again, and the advice that he has to you to help you go on your journey of driving this within your organization in a way that actually delivers value. With that, let's get into this conversation with the president, CEO, and director of Worthington Steel, Jeff Gilmore. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you. It's been a little bit. I know, I know. And I'm excited to have the conversation because I was looking through the prep talk my team put together and I was just saying, it seems like you've really moved the ball internally when it comes to AI. Yeah, we most definitely have. I mean, I'm sure you've seen this at multiple companies, but just once you start getting everybody's hand, you start getting the pilots going, they start to see the success. It's just really the flywheel gets going and it's been no different here. Yeah. And I'm excited to dive into what you guys are doing, tactically, before we dive into what you guys are doing today, I want to go back in time. Where were you? Or how long ago was it when you first heard about AI, Jeff? Oh, geez, I probably started hearing about AI consistently, Jeff, well over two years ago. And that's just really side talk. I may read an article here about AI on the news. But I mean, over two years ago, probably. What went through your mind when you first started hearing about it consistently? Yeah, not applicable for a Worthington steel and steel processing and art type of business. Probably, you know, something that for retail or health care makes a lot of sense, but just more than likely, not going to be applicable in a manufacturing setting. What changed things for you? Yeah, so full transparency here. We have our director of analytics and business intelligence. He's an employees named Steve Bartos. And Steve and I would me and have various conversations. And really it was about analytics and trying to cascade that across the organization, which he did an excellent job of doing. And Jeff ultimately the goal was how do we get more predictive with that? And so Steve was overseeing analytics and business intelligence. And he had come to me a few times on AI. And, you know, Steve was talking and he thought I was listening. And I'd shake my head. And then Steve would leave the office. And he clearly was passionate about it and felt like there was something there. So he continued to bring it up to me. And it was probably the fourth or fifth time. And he tried to provide me with some specifics. And here's what it is. And here's what others are doing. And that peaked my interest a bit. And then Steve suggested, "Hey, Jeff, you know, maybe it's just you're not comfortable with it because you just don't know enough about it. You're generally a pretty curious person. I wanted to take the time to learn a little bit more about it." And Jeff, in fact, he bought me my first book. And so it was actually co-intelligence by Ethan Mollick. And anybody who's listening, it is a grade 101. I think it just exposes you to what is artificial intelligence? What is a large language model? How does it even work? What can you use it for? And how do you use it? And how can you be better because of it? So I got through that book. And I'll tell you, I got from A to Z pretty quickly. I peaked my interest. I wanted more. And so sure enough, Steve had already. I mean, he was probably on his tenth book. He told me it was his second. And that was the AI-driven leader. And that's your book. And that was very beneficial for me to start really with that 101. Yours took it up another level. And gave me the ability to look at that from a leadership perspective. And that's really where I started to acknowledge there is something here. And then of course, it was one opportunity after another coming through my head. So from there, you know, Steve and I continue to collaborate and learn. But that's absolutely what peaked my interest and got me go in the direction that the whole organization's going today. Well, it's interesting to me. One, I love that you started on the side of, yep, not applicable. Not even going to think about it. And Steve kind of has to hit you over the head with it several times. You go from that end of the spectrum to, I mean, in what? Under six months declaring that Worthington's going to be an AI-driven company. Yeah, 100% and you're right about Steve. That's probably a great leadership lesson for a lot of folks about leading up. It sometimes may take four or five times for you to talk to the leader or your manager. But if you feel strongly about an idea, you know, push it and thankfully he did. But Jeff, the momentum from start to now has been significant. You have an energized workforce. And I think what helped us was that communication piece followed by education. And we made a choice early on. Hey, look, why don't we reach out to Jeff Woods? We like his background. We clearly have a lot of faith in what he's trying to teach. And he's been in the business world. He's used these tools. If we really want to get the leadership excited about this, why don't we have him come in and work with the group? And we did that. We had to come in. And we spent a good part of the day just talking about what AI is, what is the large language model, how does it work? But if you recall, we quickly got to, we had hands on. Everybody was working through. We had co-pilot, you had chat GPT at the time. But we really turned the conversation. And in fact, downloaded or uploaded our strategy. And we started looking at, hey, what is this sound proof? Are there slots? What are they? How could you mitigate them? If you started from scratch today, what would that company look like? And that really helped reinforce something else that you often discuss. And I do as well. At any CEO, you should have this top of mind. We don't want employees spending 80% on their time on waste, on trying to prepare reports to analyze. You know, we want them to spend 80% of the time on the 20% that's tied to our strategy. It's going to drive shareholder value. And so it was clear to me, there was an aha moment for the entire group. And I was pleasantly surprised. I thought we'd have some buy-in. I didn't know to that extent. And then, you know, we left that session. And it wasn't, hey, good job, everybody. We'll talk again in a month. We had four pilots identified. More than wanted to volunteer. And so those pilots are active today. And we're working on them and making significant progress. Let's go to the moment when you realized that as CEO, you had to come out and make a bold declaration that we are going to become in an ad driven company and that you adopting AI is not optional. It's a standard, not a suggestion. What went through your mind to come out and say that? And by the way, this was before all these other CEOs were going out on social media and saying, you were before them. You know, we knew, I knew we were going to embrace this. I felt this is transformational. This will kickstart the next S-curge for this company. And we have to embrace it, but it's a change. It's in a lot of different ways. Culturally, you're embracing new tools and technologies. That can be a heavy lift. And so I knew immediately I had to own this. The CEO has to own this. I can't delegate it. I'm going to have to roll my sleeves up. I'm going to have to learn. I'm going to have to get educated. I need to be articulate. And the group needs to feel confident that I'm confident in artificial intelligence. And I know why I'm confident. And what it means to them and the organization. But part of that was making it very, very clear to the organization. I'm not suggesting that you're going to use artificial intelligence. It is my expectation that you use artificial intelligence. This needs to become part of your daily standard work. Whatever you do, how can AI help? And for the employees that embrace it, you're going to level up and your potential just got that much greater as a professional at Worthington Steel. And I guess more importantly, you're your personal life. And what you're able to use this for just got that much better. Those of you that don't embrace it, you're going to get left behind. You're not going to be able to keep up with what our expectations were. And so I think that gave the group a lot of excitement, just passionate about this. But Jeff, it's as simple as that was almost permission to start using it. It's not like we probably didn't have a hundred people using it already. And I wasn't that naive. Yeah. And I think the other thing is, if you were being honest with yourself when you made that declaration, how competent did you actually feel of your mastery of the technology? It being a hundred percent honest, not. I'm early on and I'm learning every day. But Jeff, you know what? I really don't think anybody's going to master it. Everything that I'm using right now will be the worst version I ever use in my professional career. And so this is ongoing education. And I've accepted that. But that's why the education piece is so important to me and for an organization. And it means to be K through six. And that program needs to be dynamic. Because as things change, the education will need to change. And the tools are going to change and they're going to change pretty, pretty rapidly. So, that's right. I was very early on. I think I've come a long way. But there's so many in our organization that have already surpassed me. I'm sure. I think that's such an important message to hear, Jeff. You didn't have to feel like you were the expert to see the writing on the wall and say, this is the future and we're going to lead. So, we're going to be an AI driven organization. You must use AI. It's an expectation. It's a standard and I'm using it. And you didn't have to be a technical expert. You're not an AI techie, but you are on the journey of becoming an AI driven leader. No, I think that's just a great point. And that probably gave a lot of comfort level to our employees as well. Because, you know, I was vulnerable. I believe in this. I'm using it. I see the opportunities, but I'm the furthest thing from a tech expert. So, it probably was a sigh of relief if Jeff can understand this and utilize it and add value, then I'm going to hit a home run here. That's right. Now, let's talk about adoption. How many employees are there, total? So, we have 6,000 employees. Okay. Now, that's globally. And in the office, about 350. Great. You say, we're going to do this. Walk me through what it looked like. Did you literally give everybody a co-pilot license and give everybody training? Or did you start smaller? Yeah. So, early on, we truly started with some pace level trading. Few books everybody read that I had already mentioned to kind of get everybody aligned on the same page. And then we did roll out co-pilot. And we rolled that out to more or less the senior leadership team, Jeff, and a layer down. And as we got through our session with you, then the discussion started to move towards something a more robust such as chat GPT for a lot of different reasons. Co-pilot was, it's a great product. But you know this as well as I, you have to be very careful about what's most applicable for your business and chat GPT was the right fit. So we went from 25 employees to probably 275 and adding licenses every day for chat GPT. That's how quickly things have been moving forward. When you think about your journey, your own personal use cases. Where do you find yourself getting the most value with AI these days? Yeah, great question. Early on, this is not going to surprise you was, okay, help me write a really good email. I need to send the board on memo or report. Help me put that together. But that's evolved greatly. And you know, I'm in a role as the CEO. I'm responsible for 6,000 employees. I'm responsible for our vision. I'm responsible for the strategy. So there's a lot of different things that are crossing my mind on a daily basis. Sometimes it could be an idea a minute. And where it's benefited me most is truly a thought partner. That's where, if I have an idea, I think I probably have done that historically. And I look back and think about how many ideas were left incomplete. It was forgotten about the next day, or I just didn't dig as deep as I probably could have. I'll call lazy thinking, not on purpose, but it was lazy thinking. Now I have something to really spur that conversation on. And you know, I think about the importance of prompting and grit. It is the acronym that you have taught us that we all use here. But that interviewing piece of it is critical in my role, because when I'm able to use AI for that function, it's really getting me to think critically. I'm more creative when I'm thinking. My empathy is there. Something that took four weeks to put together takes a day to put together. And so that's where it's benefited me most to date. That's amazing. And for those who are new to the idea of the ad dreaming that a crit is our problem methodology stands for context role interview task. You give AI tons of context about your situation. Assign it a role for the expert you want AI to act as. And then you turn the tables and you don't ask it questions. You have an interview you to unlock deeper context out of your head by asking one question at a time, then it accomplishes a task. Is there a specific use case chef that you used AI as a thought partner and wrote crit? Where it just blew your mind. Yeah, I think looking at a pretty sizeable opportunity. And you know, our team has obviously worked on it. We're analyzing it from every angle and trying to understand different risks. And it helped me a great deal with keeping me focused on people. You start looking at deals at times and you're thinking about synergies, the integration process, all the risks. But it reminded me of you win with people. And the recommendation was you need to dive into the people that are going to be part of this deal. And you need to assess the talent. And you need to do that earlier than later is the strategy now going to change because you are a different company. And so that was very beneficial for me. And then that was something I was able to quickly take back to the team and say, Hey, I don't know that we looked through this necessarily in the right lens or we didn't switch the lens out as often as we should have. And so that just to help us do more due diligence, better due diligence. And then you have a better plan. That's awesome. Has it shifted how you do board prep? Yeah, most definitely, we're not yet to the point. We will have everybody on the board's persona loaded up and therefore we're familiar with what's everybody's hot buttons? What's their background? And so that'll certainly help better prepare us whether it's a regular board meeting or we're pitching a big deal or an organic growth opportunity that's going to require significant capital. It'll definitely help with that. Right now, though, Jeff, it's been more of post board uploading notes and having that summarized highlighting some of the key areas. But that's for earnings calls as well. We're using it for prep earnings call and then post earnings calls. Do we answer that question right? Wow. Would you have answered that question? That's good. What did I miss? Those are little things that we would have missed. Are you feeding the transcripts from the earnings calls in? Yes. I mean, it forces us to go back and really dig deep. Oh, man. I did an offsite two days ago. And the first day with the ELT with their permission, we had a note, take a running the whole time. The second day, they expanded beyond the ELT to the top 45. And I took, we're going to talk about culture in terms of how do we have to shift our culture to become AI-driven and to lead. I took the transcript from the previous day, fed it into the AI thought partner and said, I want you to review every word that was said by the ELT. And I want you to compress it to the words or statements that were made that you think would serve as amazing source ingredients to inform what about our culture has to stop? What about our culture has to continue? What about our culture has to start? That's great. Oh, it was so good. It was so good. So yeah, I mean, when you start getting into the game of harnessing notakers and pulling actual transcripts from this stuff and using that to then quarry the personas. It truly is. And it's just, it goes to show you, I mean, the importance of prompting. And yeah, that's a fear of others as well. What if I can't prompt well? And my answer there is you're going to improve just because you're practicing. If you're using it every day, that's practice. And you're going to start getting better responses and feedback. That's going to make you more creative. And it just really feeds on it. So, and then, you know, most people just don't know what to say. And that's where honestly, I didn't realize that crit was going to become such a big deal. I had no idea. But that's the thing that kind of took off like wildfire because it was just so simple. And it's something that people could remember. Like, Hey, if I'm going to talk to it, I'm going to say context and describe it. Roll. Here's who I want you to be. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time, up to three questions. Task. Evaluate everything the analyst said from our earnings call and look and compare that to the transcript of what we said. And I want you to tell me the top five things that we could have done better that would have led to a better earnings call. 100 people. Exactly. And you know, you think about a side benefit to this, which is really been a highlight. And so using crit, using AI and prompting and getting it in everybody's hands, you know, there's a lot of employees that were coming in and they were doing their job and probably not asking a lot of questions, not able to use their creativity, obviously. But the fact that you got a critical mass of employees that are using crit, they're getting better at prompting, they're developing a leadership skill. They're learning how to ask questions. It forces you to be curious where you would not have been maybe otherwise. So I think from a leadership perspective, wow, I mean, this is really going to help you get ahead of the game where you're thinking more strategically. You're looking three, four, five questions ahead. And that's an exciting side benefit. Thank you for sharing that. That's I hadn't considered that. Walk me through the mindset of people because you have enough people in the org that I'm making a bet not everybody when Jeff comes out and says, we're going to be AI driven and you're going to use this said, hooray, I've been waiting for this day. Walk me through how you've handled the fear and anxiety inside. You're right. It's any situation, any change, you got the group that can't wait, the group on the fence and the group that this is the worst idea that I've ever heard of my life, right? And I'm sure this was no different. And a lot of fear around AI is what's going to happen to my job. What does this mean to me and the company? And so I think first off, having me come out and vocalize why I'm behind it and why it's good for a company and good from them. Good for them. Great, great icebreaker. Following up with some education makes people feel a little bit more comfortable. But Jeff, it's really what gets people over the edge is successfully launching a pilot and having success with it. Quick wins. Just quick wins. You have some failures. Highlight it. Why? Did you fail fast? Good. We learned and we moved on. We're going to celebrate wins. We already are and we're going to highlight failures and the great job and thanks for being brave and trying something new and we're going to learn from it. And old by the way, we're not trying to replace jobs. We're trying to make it better and the company better, allowing you to be more creative, think more critically and be empathetic. Those are things that humans have that AI doesn't necessarily have. Or I would say not as good as a human being. So we meet a human in the relationship. And it's things evolve. I've been up front. You know what? There probably are workflows that will change or certain jobs that maybe we don't need as many of them or maybe you're combining jobs. But here's what I know. Any transformation, digital or not, new jobs are created and that's going to be the same thing here. And it's important that we acknowledge that we keep training our employees and they feel confident that this is a long termed place for them to work. I think that settled anxiety greatly. That's good. That's good. Let's talk use cases. So you know, I remember during our session, we we used AI to interview each member of the executive team to gather their context. And then the AI aggregated all that data and compared it to the actual business plan of the company. And was able to score ideas based on impact of the business, speed to value, capital intensity, level of risk. And based on that was able to come out with a roadmap. And you guys walked out the door saying like, these are four that we want, we know we want a green light. Walk us through what some pilots have actually looked like. Where have you had wins? Where have you had failures and learnings? Let's talk about this. Yeah, absolutely. I think for starters that and I have some notes here, actually, because it started with four and it's expanded. And these are the ones that are on my, these are on my radar. These are the one thing you're aware of. That's right. There's been a lot of singles and even some doubles. Actually, before you go into them, talk about your thoughts on what you want. Empowering people to make decisions to green light initiatives independent of the ELT approving it. Yeah, so we are really giving a lot of autonomy and empowering the managers work. Golden rule company. Treat people as you'd like to be treated. We trust our employees. I trust our employees. They're in their, their jobs for a reason. Look, we have specific tools that they should use and you need authorization to go outside of that. We have guidelines in place. We have guardrails. The group is aware of those and I have confidence. They're going to work within those guardrails. And then from there is you have this tool. And I want you to use it. And if you have a really good idea and you and your manager are aligned and it makes sense, it's high ease. It's probable that we get to a great outcome. Let's go with it. Now, if it's a bet the company risk, I probably don't go with it. And I'm teasing. I think common sense has prevailed in this area. And they're staying within the guardrails. But they feel comfortable. Our employees were going with their managers. If they think they can adjust to workflow, take out a staff, they're going to move forward and they're going to pilot it and they're going to do it. We're going to communicate it and we'll cascade it across enterprise if it's a win. Awesome. Awesome. So let's talk about what some of the pilots have been. Some of the pilots. So AI powered demand forecasting. Demand forecasting is huge in our business. It's working capital intensive. Inventory is the most expensive asset we're working with and customer forecasts. Mill lead times and we're in the middle. So there are a significant amount of data sets that you're trying to gather and match up to be more predicted. So that's something the analytics team had been working on for quite some time and specifically at one of our largest facilities in that's an area where we're now utilizing artificial intelligence. And we're just now starting to pilot some things that are making progress and I'm confident that it's one that I'm going to be able to get on an earnings call and they can analyze and investors. Here's what we did and I've quantified that for you. Here's what that means to the business. That's a big meaningful opportunity for us. Which by the way, I was at a spoken another public company. I won't say which one they had an analyst from JP Morgan there and somebody asked him about AI and he said, I am not aware of a single public company that's not a tech company to start with that has used AI to move their stock price. Well, that's gonna change. Let's go Jeffrey. It's good. It's gonna change and I think that's what comes down to being vocal that you're using it. And I am our analysts are very aware of how I feel about AI as well as potential investors. And the most important thing we can do though is communicate the wins and quantify, you know, what that means. That's what's needed. And we'll continue to do that. Another was predictive inventory optimization. And having the right inventory at the right times. And again, what is the strength of AI right now and a large language models. They're very predictive in nature. It ties right into the first pilot. So wonderful opportunities there. Machine reliability, custom GPTs have been made. And so the group is getting much better at predicting downtime, reason codes. Why is that important predictive maintenance? The more that we are able to predict, keep machines operating less downtime, better quality, less overtime, it adds up. It's significant. Yeah, you're through put as massively impacted when the machines required to finish the goods is massive, massive impact disruption. Automated EDI uploads. A lot of this was a manual job. And you know, if you're not handling electronic data invoicing properly for your customers, that's a headache. Now we're wasting our employees time and now the customer experience backing. And everything is about the customer experience. And so utilizing AI, you're going to eliminate a lot of those issues or those reason codes. And therefore, your customer experience benefits. That's how we grow as a company. Contract risk analyzer. We have a lot of contracts. A lot of different things we're looking at. We buy products. We sell products. We have legal agreements with customers and suppliers and others. Again, we don't have somebody ripping through a thousand pages over over two weeks. We're able to get through something in a couple days. And I don't want it scary, buddy. We're still the human in the relationship. We're going to audit. We're going to understand what the output is and does it, does it make sense? That's important. We'll continue to do those things. Is that just a custom GPT that you've trained? We've got several custom GPTs at this point in the back office and in the shop floor. The thing is like when you say these words, it sounds highly technical. It sounds highly sophisticated. And I can imagine somebody who's not technical going, we can't do that. I mean, you're literally talking about some of these being straight up custom GPTs inside of chat GPT. Then instead of a legal team pouring through an agreement for weeks, you run it through the GPT. It analyzes it in seconds based on the things your legal team would look for. Anyways, they have things they look for. They just trained the GPT to do the initial pass through and collapse probably 80% of the time. So then they can surgically go in and apply their human oversight. Exactly. And it sounds highly technical, as you said. But you know what? Probably the bigger lift is, is just making sure you understand your own workflows and standard operating procedures and standard work. Because if you know those things, which we do, that makes me that much easier to build out a GPT. I think it's this. I've been investing a lot of time thinking about what a person's job is and whether what they do professionally is actually a reflection of who they are. So many people are afraid of this taking their jobs. And that's when you break it down. Well, a job is just skills you apply and processes you follow. But is what you're doing for the vast majority of your life, even a representation and an expression of you and your greatest strengths? And I think for some people, the answer might be us and I think for some people, the answer is no. But it's a, it's a chance. One of the things that is core to us as humans is we evolve. We grow. We adapt evolution. Who we've been in the past is not who we will be in the future. And this is just a massive catalyst and accelerator to say, okay, this is what you've done in the past. And there are things that you do. There's a 20% that drives 80% of the value. How do we liberate you from the 80% that's playing below your potential and free you up to get creative into evolve and grow and figure out how you're going to deliver more value in the company. Can we give you the clear roadmap for what that is? No. But this is where the creativity is. And I can scare some people, but some people it is massively exciting. I think so. And you know, I think about our workforce, our people, that's the most important thing to me, period. And I want them all to reach their potential. I want the company to do wonderful. I want to see this stock price sore and our investors are happy. But I don't want to do it at the expense of our employees' happiness. And work-life balance matters to me because I care about the people. But Jeff, it also matters greatly from a business perspective. A lot of companies can have one great year. Some can have five great years. And then they don't have a six. And then you never hear them again. And often it's culture and their employees are burned out. They don't feel like they're taken care of. They don't have work-life balance. Okay, this is a tool that is certainly going to create opportunity for you to do more things outside of work. It doesn't have to be your sole purpose and what you're self-consumed with. There's other interests. You might not even know today, but with more time and we're able to reflect and process what you want to do, you're going to pursue them. And employees are just, they're going to be happier. What's your advice for leaders who are still on the fence or who maybe have resisted? Learned. You have to do what I did. Just make yourself a little bit vulnerable. Put yourself out there and learn. Really try to understand where we are today with artificial intelligence and what is a large language model. What's it best used for? How does it think? Then you're going to start recognizing the opportunities in your company. But I think many, Jeff, still today leaders speculate and they think they know what it is and how you use it. And they just don't. They just don't understand it. And so you got to roll up your sleeves. You got to get into the weeds a little bit. And by doing that, if you do want to adopt it, embrace it, it is going to build your credibility right from the start. Yeah. I had this realization one day where I went, oh my gosh, it's like trying to describe color when you've only seen black and white. That's just a good point. And that's what a lot of leaders are doing. They're saying where it can or cannot bring value or trying to identify how it will create a competitive advantage or drive growth or make a better product or service or drive operational efficiency when they have not actually used it themselves and understood how it works, what it can do, what it can't do. But once you do when you start becoming an a driven leader, you have the light bulb moment, you start to see the color. And then like you said, you see the opportunity everywhere and it doesn't stop. What? Now for the leaders who are already in motion. Yeah. They're going, you're preaching to the choir, Jeff. Yep. Knowing what you now know, if you can get in a time machine, go back in time and start over, what would you do differently that you think could have taken your acceleration and trajectory to an even higher playing field? The easy answer is I would have embraced this sooner. I kicked myself over that often. What if Steve Bartos didn't come back to me the fourth or fifth time? Where are we today? And you know, my advice to any leader and I'll continue to remind myself of this is you have someone in your senior leadership team and they have an idea. Probably what I should have said is rather than just listen to him, hey, Steve, why specifically, why is it applicable for here? Can you go back and give me, put together some examples of where it could set and why I should get as excited as you? But you know what, I didn't do that because I was busy with a lot of different projects and ideas going on. And now I have AI. So I won't be as busy with all these different things going on that I'm trying to keep track of. I can use it as my thought partner had this discussion with the senior leader. Here's what he's suggesting. Here's what he thinks. What do you think I should do? So I would tell those leaders go back in time and brace it, just start using it and use it as a thought partner. That's good. That's good. They had our conversation with Jeff Gilmore, the president, CEO and director of Worthington steel. I just love how he went on this journey from being a skeptic where he's thinking AI has no place in steel manufacturing. To literally saying to his executive team and to all leadership, it is my expectation that you use AI. And what I deeply respect is how he did it with vulnerability, being willing to say, I'm not an expert, but I'm going to lead it anyways. And I think it's that willingness to dive in when you're a leader to say, hey, I'm just going to do this and not to say that you're an expert to be perfect at it. It gives people permission to go on the path with you. The result, people are using it. And then they strategically started to identify use cases that they firmly believe can help move the stock price like predicted inventory optimization, machine reliability, and even contract analyzer. But the thing that really stands out to me that I hope stand out for you is how much this really doesn't focus on the technology. It's adopt the people and how we harness this to create better leaders, better businesses, and better lives. Just at it himself, work like balance matters more than just the stock price. This isn't just about efficiencies, about creating happier, more healthy employees. My hope is that you recognize that this is what it means to be an AI-driven leader. To harness this inner way that keeps our humanity at the center so that we move ourselves forward, not backwards. And another key message is that you don't have to have all the answers on how to drive this throughout your organization. You just have to make a commitment to start and then be willing to ask yourself the right questions and surround yourself with the right people. Being willing to ask for help and guidance for others because this is not an individual sport, this is a team sport. To help you on your journey, I have three things that can guide you. First and foremost, in our next episode, you are going to hear me turn the tables on Jeff. And I'm going to ask him what's the biggest problem that you are facing in your company right now that we could just solve it. It would unlock a new level of growth for you. And we dive into how do you win the hearts and minds of a workforce of his size at scale? When there's fear and resistance about AI, you're going to watch, actually pull up my chat GBT account and harness it as a thought partner to help him come up with a full-blown playbook, including a manifesto that Abraham Lincoln will write, that he will share with his entire organization. It's an incredible use case. I got goosebumps from it. Make sure you are following the show or that you've hit the subscribe button so that that episode automatically comes to you because you do not want to miss it. Second, if you have not yet read the AI driven reader, it's become the go-to guide for executives in harnessing this strategically and getting their people on board. It works. And finally, if you are a sea level executive like a Jeff and you want to drive this in your company, but maybe you're not quite sure how. Head over to AILeadership.com. You can learn about how we can help be that guide for you, whether it's training for your executive team, to pulling people like you into our executive network called the collective, so you can be in the room with the Jeff Gilmores and the world and understanding how they are using this so that you stay ahead of the competition, all the way to our advisory services where we actually partner with the organizations to drive this in a way that grows your enterprise value and your competitive advantage. But online, it's time to start thinking differently because the future doesn't wait and neither should you. We look forward to being with you in the next episode.