236: Why Most Founders Are Using AI All Wrong with Geoff Woods

Today I’m talking with Geoff Woods, author of The AI-Driven Leader and founder of AI Leadership, about why so many founders are using AI on the wrong problems.

Geoff helped drive Jindal Steel & Power’s market cap from $750M to $12B in four years, and one of his points really stuck with me: you don’t get beyond a million because you write great emails. But that’s exactly how a lot of entrepreneurs are using AI right now. Writing emails, cleaning up inboxes, building random agents, and mistaking activity for leverage.

That’s the trap. AI can make you feel productive while you point all that horsepower at work that doesn’t actually move the business forward.

Geoff walks through what it looks like to flip that: using AI as a strategic thought partner instead of an errand boy, why most leaders are skipping steps they haven’t earned yet, and how to think about AI in a way that improves decision-making, focus, and team performance.

Geoff also shares what he learned helping scale a multi-billion-dollar company, why letting the right fires burn is part of leadership, and the move his assistant made to rewrite her own job description and 100x her role.

If you’ve been treating AI like a faster Google, this conversation will reframe what it can actually do for you as a founder.

Mic Drop Moments

• “I don’t think AI adoption is the goal of any company.” – Geoff Woods

• “Don’t ask what’s the right job. Focus on mastering skills that are so valuable they will serve you no matter where you go.” – Geoff Woods

• “When I was 20, I viewed relationships through a transactional lens, and now I think I look at it through a transformative lens.” – Geoff Woods

• “I look at everything through a lens of what’s timeless and what’s timely. I think what’s timeless is timeless for a reason, because it endures.” – Geoff Woods

• “How many people are you surrounded by who are already living the kind of life you want to be living?” – Geoff Woods

• “The stuff that actually matters kicks and screams and finds its way into your calendar.” – Geoff Woods

• “There’s a difference between delegation and abdication.” – Geoff Woods

• What Founders Get Wrong About AI
• Scaling From $750M To $12B
• The 4 Timeless Drivers Of Growth
• AI Won’t Take Your Job (But THIS Will)
• Relationships As Competitive Advantage
• Building An AI Marriage Coach
• Get In The Right Rooms
• Why Founders Struggle With Focus
• The ONE Thing Framework
• Strategy, Execution, People, Technology
• Letting The Right Fires Burn
• Don’t Become an AI Expert
• AI Mistake Founders Keep Making
• The Truth About AI Privacy
• The Assistant Who 100x’d Her Role
• The 3 Types Of AI Leverage
• Delegation vs. Abdication
• Advice For New Entrepreneurs
• The AI-Driven Leader

Brad Weimert: Geoff Woods, former Chief Growth Officer at Jindal Steel, which your bio says you helped take from $750 million to $12 billion in four years. I know you from building The ONE Thing. And today, you wrote a book that we’ve got front and center here, The AI-Driven Leader. So many things to cover, but I want to start with, you went from The One Thing, which is a philosophy about focus, to AI, which feels like infinite distraction. What do most entrepreneurs commonly misunderstand about AI and losing focus, or maintaining it?

Geoff Woods: Yeah, I think most people are focused on all the distractions around AI instead of the priorities. First and foremost, I don’t think AI adoption is the goal of any company. But if I look at the number of companies that we’re inside of, the way they talk about AI, they treat it like it’s the goal of the company when it’s not. It is something that you now have access to that can help you achieve your goals, which might be creating a better business, creating better lives. But I think so many people are using it for the things that really don’t matter. Vast majority of people are using it like Google or writing better emails. Last time I checked, you didn’t get Beyond A Million because you wrote great emails.

And people are really majoring in the minors. And my last few years has been really focused on, how do we major in the majors? How do we harness this technology in a way that matters when it comes to building a better business while also keeping human interest at the center?

Brad Weimert: So, speaking of strategic decision-making as opposed to the tactics, which fundamentally is the idea of, like, how can I use AI to do something quickly versus how do I think about it? You made an interesting choice, which is you moved from The ONE Thing to Jindal Steel. And you were the Chief Growth Officer there. You helped them go from 750 million to 12 billion. What were the high-leverage strategic decisions at that scale that smaller entrepreneurs wouldn’t see?

Geoff Woods: So, Jindal Steel, think of it like a family office. They own a bunch of companies all rolled up into the Jindal group. I had been the coach to the chairman of the board when I was with The ONE Thing, and I coached his whole executive team. When I sold my stake in The ONE Thing, Naveen called me and said, “What are you going to do next?” And I said, “Honestly, I’m prepared to take a few years off.” And he says, “Well, why don’t you come in-house?” And I asked him, “What’s the job?” And he said, “You know our business. You tell me,” literally. And the thing that I realized is they had all these operating companies, all individually pretty large organizations, but they weren’t playing as one cohesive team, one cohesive group.

And I found myself wondering, what are the timeless things that drive growth of a company, that if we could create those processes at a group level and then drive them through every operating company, might that unlock growth of the whole portfolio? And for me, it is strategy, execution, people, and technology. So, strategy is your future competitive advantage. What’s the AI-driven business that’ll put you out of business? What would it look like if you built it first? That’s a question I would literally fly all over the world, sit down with the executive teams, and ask questions like that to shape, what’s the moat that we’re building in the future? Can we be clear and aligned on that? That’s step one. Step two is execution. Can we have a focused business plan we actually stay focused on? But then three is people. And I had this realization, Brad. Why do we hire people in a company?

Brad Weimert: I don’t know. I’d prefer not to.

Geoff Woods: To achieve our goals.

Brad Weimert: Yes, exactly.

Geoff Woods: But how often are goals and priorities in a company changing?

Brad Weimert: All the time.

Geoff Woods: All the time. When’s the last time you formally updated the job description of every single person on paper to realign them with the shift in priorities of a company?

Brad Weimert: Well, I personally just did it, which is a whole another conversation, related to AI specifically, but your point is very well taken.

Geoff Woods: And in our case, we had 100,000 employees spread across the world.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Geoff Woods: And I’m going, “Oh, this is a problem. These are talented people. They’re running enthusiastically in the wrong direction, and it’s not their fault. It’s our fault.” But how do you dynamically realign a workforce of that size? You’d have to look to tech. And so, for me, the focus on those four core drivers of growth, of strategy, execution, people, and technology, that eventually led to AI. I saw ChatGPT it was December of ’22. It had been out for literally two weeks, and when I saw it, it was kind of a life-defining moment for me because I remember being blown away by its capability and thinking, “I really should lean into this.”

But I had all the initial limiting beliefs that I think most leaders had, which was, “Cool, I’m busy. I’ll get to it later,” or, “I’ll delegate this to IT,” or, “I’ll hire a consultant to do it for me.” But I was reminded of a piece of advice I was given my senior year of college, which is, “Don’t ask what’s the right job. Focus on mastering skills that are so valuable they will serve you no matter where you go.” I saw AI as the next skill, and I just made a commitment to using it myself, which set me on the journey.

Brad Weimert: Man, for the frequency with which I give that advice to teenagers and young entrepreneurs, I do not evaluate it myself as often as I need to.

Geoff Woods: And I think as leaders, it’s highly relevant for us. Because the thing I learned in studying all the past technological disruptions and writing The AI-Driven Leader, technology does not take your job. People think AI’s going to take their job. It will not. What is your job? Your job is just skills you apply and processes you follow. You could literally write it on a chalkboard. Job equals skills applied times processes followed. Throughout history, technology has made certain skills and processes skyrocket in value, and it has made certain skills and processes plummet in value. And this is where we just have to look in the mirror and say, “What are we currently doing where frankly we’re acting like machines?”

Focusing on outputs, send this email, generate this report, do this task. A machine is better at acting like a machine than you are. That is going away. I get that that can be scary, but how might that also be an opportunity? How might it be an opportunity to liberate yourself, to focus on what truly distinguishes you as a human, and turn your strengths into superpowers, and what are the skills you haven’t even acquired yet that you’re bound to acquire as a result of this?

Brad Weimert: Well, speaking of humanity, let me back out, because you started, or when I noticed the beginning of your journey, you had a podcast called The Mentee Podcast. And one of the sort of catchphrases of that was the Jim Rohn quote, “You are the five people that you spend your time around.”

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: How do you approach relationship building today in the era that we’re in now, in the age that you’re in now, 40-something, I think maybe looking at you, unless you’re 70 and just look really good, versus when you were 20?

Geoff Woods: I think when I was 20, I viewed relationships through a transactional lens, and now I think I look at it through a transformative lens. I view it as one of the greatest investments that I can make, not something that I can get from. And I think about, because now I’m at the point where relationships I’ve had for over a decade or multiple decades are opening unique doors that could never have been possible before, or I’m also viewing relationships as capabilities. You know, if you have a capability in your area of business, I have a capability in my area of business. If we were able to merge our unique geniuses, we could create something that’s truly disruptive in the market. And so, I’m also looking at it through the lens of competitive advantage.

Brad Weimert: Interesting. Yeah, one of the things that I didn’t see about relationships, until more recently, is just the power of the story of being connected to somebody for so long. So, like, very often, the most common ones for me are like Hal Elrod and Justin Donald, I’ve both known for 25 years. And so, when we are anywhere, and there’s an introduction happening, and one of them says, or I say about them, “I’ve known him 25 years,” there is a completely different transfer of trust in that introduction, like radically different. And forget the actual depth of the relationship, which obviously is significant over that period of time. Just being able to have that story changes the way that that relationship gets positioned, amongst others.

Geoff Woods: I agree.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that’s fascinating. Do you think that the fundamentals of relationship building have changed in the era of AI or digital, or do you think that the principles are the same?

Geoff Woods: I think principles are the same. Also, I look at everything through a lens of what’s timeless and what’s timely. I think what’s timeless is timeless for a reason, because it endures. It’s the 20% that drives 80% of the value. I think a lot of what’s timely in terms of, well, how can I harness AI to build a relationship faster, to connect with other people? I feel like it’s a fad. It’s just, it’s here now, it’s not going to matter that much in a year, two years, three years. So, I really try to focus on what’s timeless.

Brad Weimert: I mean, I fundamentally agree with that. I mean, we’re kind of dipping between AI and relationships, but at the same time, the timeless versus timely conversation, people made a sh*tload of money with Google AdWords when it first came out. It was timely. Now, it turns out there is some timeless nature to that. Well, not timeless, but it endured for a couple of decades. Will it be gone shortly? Maybe. But the question is, where’s the balance within that?

Geoff Woods: Well, and I can give you real-world examples. So, I’ll use the relationship with my wife, arguably the most critical relationship in my life. The deeper I’ve gone in AI, the more I realize how inferior I am when it comes to understanding my wife and effectively communicating with her. And so, I found, it was January of this year, we were staying at the Austin Proper Downtown, doing a couple’s goal-setting retreat. So, nanny’s watching the kids. She and I get the hotel room, and we spend the weekend talking about our goals and what we want to focus on over the course of next year. And I remember there was this point where she was venting about something, and I did what I always do, which is I tried to solve it.

She got really upset with me, and I found myself wondering, how could AI help us here? So, I opened up AI, in this case ChatGPT, and I wrote a prompt following a framework that I cover in The AI-Driven Leader, called CRIT. It stands for context, role, interview, task. And I said, “Context: my wife and I are at this couple’s goal-setting retreat. We’re having this detailed conversation. My wife was just complaining about something. I naturally started to step in and to try to solve it. She got super frustrated. And I’m just realizing I would love to have a better way of communicating with her. And I cast this vision for building a marriage coach that could understand each of us on a deep level. And I assigned it a role where your role is to act as an expert prompt engineer with deep expertise as a relationship therapist as well.”

The I is interview. “Interview us. Ask us one question at a time, up to five questions. You’ll ask one question, Amy will answer, then Jeff will answer, and you’ll segment our answers so you can also build a psychological profile for each of us based on what you learn. And then your task is to create the custom instructions that I could feed to a project in ChatGPT that would have the full-blown psychological profile, so you could become a marriage coach.” That was the whole prompt. It started to conduct an interview of us. And when it asked this question, we’re using speech-to-text, I mean, we’re talking about talking for five to 10 minutes each of us. This thing interviewed us for 90 minutes, and I’m realizing the depth that this thing has, of knowledge and context it has acquired about how each of us thinks is remarkable, and it turned that into a marriage coach. And I remember literally giving it the prompt.

I’ll read to you what it says. This is crazy. So, the issue of why is it that when I try to solve her problems, she gets upset. Here is what it said to us, because I described the situation, my initial prompt to the marriage coach. I’m speaking on behalf of my wife. “Why is it that when I’m expressing my feelings about something that’s not going well in my life, and my husband tries to solve the problem, it frustrates me?” Here’s what it said. “It’s not about him being dismissive of you or too emotional. It’s a nervous system mismatch. When you’re expressing pain, you’re seeking regulation and connection. When he hears pain, his nervous system hears a call to perform and fix. So, the moment he moves to solutions, your body experiences it as, ‘You didn’t see me. You skipped me.’ And that’s why your frustration shows up.

What’s actually happening underneath the surface, without villainizing either of you, for Amy, speaking your feelings means you’re asking to be held in experience. The need is to stay with me, to land with me. Solutions too early means the containment was bypassed, and that means that you, anger, starts masking grief and loneliness. For Geoff, hearing distress triggers his responsibility and action. Solving is how he loves you and demonstrates competence. He’s trying to reduce the threat and restore stability. He doesn’t realize that speed feels like abandonment to you.” When I read this out loud to her, we both looked at each other and went, “Oh.”

So, let’s 5,000 to 10,000 feet. There’s what’s timeless in the relationship. How do we get to know each other better? How do we compromise? How do we communicate? Then there’s what’s timely in terms of how might I harness AI as a tool to understand my wife on a far deeper level than I ever could, and be able in these situations to use it to help bring the temperature down in moments that are tense? I’ve built a family therapist for some stuff we’ve been going through with one of my daughters that has quite literally been lifesaving. And then I think about, in a professional sense, I have built AI boards to actually overcome a hostile board that was ready to fire an executive team and saved all their jobs. So, there are all these different ways you can use it.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Thank you for pulling it back to the business side of it, too. The depths of the personal side are super relevant and very selectively applicable.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, 100%. I mean, these are all individual use cases. I really like the independent board. The genesis of this was the podcast and sort of networking and surrounding yourselves with the right people. What do you think the fastest way for a 25-year-old entrepreneur to connect with or surround themselves with higher-powered people is today?

Geoff Woods: Get into the room that they are in. That’s what I did. I realized proximity is power, and I started investing my money to get into masterminds, to attend events, because if you’re in the room, there’s a level of credibility that just happens. And have the confidence to go up to people, not to be interested in yourself, but to be interested in them. I would often research people, and I’d go up and say, “Hey, I’m really aware that you’re focused on this. I’m curious, out of everything you’re focused on there, what are the biggest challenges that you’re facing with it?” And I would try to get to what’s the pain that they’re having and how could I potentially be a resource to them, realizing that I didn’t have to be the guy that could help them.

I might be able to know people that I could connect them with, or if I didn’t, I would scout for them. I’d say, “Hey, I’m not the guy who can help you with that, and when I’m thinking about my Rolodex, I can’t think of anybody, but what I would love to do is to scout for you. If I come across a person that I think might be able to help you, could I connect you with them?” They’re always blown away by that, and they say, “Sure,” and then it’s like, “Great, what’s your cell phone?”

Brad Weimert: What rooms are you trying to get in today? So, you’ve got sort of like the physical rooms, then you’ve got the digital rooms.

Geoff Woods: Yeah. Me personally?

Brad Weimert: No, if you’re a brand-new entrepreneur. Well, you personally also.

Geoff Woods: Mine has been more getting into the rooms of where C-level execs from big companies hang in. So, like today I was invited to a room where you had 100 of the CHROs from the Fortune 500 companies that I’m not in, because I chose to honor this podcast and the other podcast I had today. But, like, that’s a room that matters to me. If I’m asking, “Who do I want to become?” I believe success leaves clues, and if you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, how many people are you surrounded by who are already living the kind of life you want to be living? And then I would ask, where do those people hang out? What conferences do they attend? What masterminds are they a part of? And those are the rooms I’m trying to get into.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Okay. So, let me push the clock up a little bit. Mentee Podcast, you built a significant brand around The ONE Thing. I have in my office these giant letters cut out in script with the word ‘focus.’ My experience is that entrepreneurs love the idea of focus.

Geoff Woods: And they suck at it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, but they often still run 47 priorities. What do you think makes focus so hard for entrepreneurs after they start the company? And actually, this is perfect, because just before we got in here recording, we were making espresso in my lovely espresso machine.

Geoff Woods: Which is a priority.

Brad Weimert: Which is a priority. And you were talking about the phases of the current business.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: And how focus has changed.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: And sort of the waves of it. So, what do you think it is that makes focus so difficult and makes it hard to find that one thing?

Geoff Woods: Yeah, I think we all have too much to do and not enough time. And Parkinson’s law says that work will expand to the time that you allow it. So, it’s like people tell me all the time, “Oh, I just need to get rid of, like, all the 80% stuff. I just need to get rid of that. Then I can focus on the 20%.” They don’t realize that when you knock one of the 80 percenters out, they just spawn two or three more. It’s never-ending. I think the other side of it, Brad, is I don’t think people were taught the skill of prioritization. I don’t think they were taught how to ask the right questions and develop the habit of asking those questions enough that the result is you are the type of person who is clear on what the priority is, and that you stay focused on that priority.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And one of the fundamentals of The ONE Thing is what’s the lead domino functionally?

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Right? What’s the one thing you can be doing that will knock out a whole bunch of other, make a whole bunch of other things irrelevant?

Geoff Woods: Correct.

Brad Weimert: What is that framework? How do you think about finding the one thing and finding the priority item?

Geoff Woods: And this is what I learned from my time with the guys who wrote that book, is there’s a big one thing and a little one thing. Your big one thing is your overall life’s purpose. Why am I here, and how is what I’m doing lining up with that? And then there’s the one thing that matters most right now. I think there’s a huge misconception. People would read the book and say, “But I have more than one thing.” We all do. I’m not saying you only do one thing. It’s right now, what is the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? And those words are very strategic, because it’s like if you imagine a line of dominoes lined up, you don’t just reach and knock the 30th one down.

If you stood them up and line them up correctly, you just tap the first one, and they all fall. And it can be the same thing in business. So, for you to understand, like, if you really sat and asked this question and searched for the answer, based on my goal for this year, what is the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? What’ll probably happen for most people watching or listening to this is they’re going to say, “I don’t know.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah, for sure.

Geoff Woods: That’s where your brain stops. Don’t allow it. Continue to search for that answer. Close your eyes. Search. I guarantee you will come up with something. Whether it’s the right thing or not is actually less important. Start executing toward it, because kind of like you get in the car in the middle of the night, you can’t see all the way from where you are to your destination. You might be able to see a few hundred feet ahead based on your headlights, and you cover the ground, and then you can see a little bit further. And that’s what it’s like in entrepreneurship. When you’re going from nothing to a million, you’re focusing, you’re executing, you’re learning.

When you get to a million, and you’re trying to get to 10, it looks very different. 10 to 100 looks very different. 100 to a billion looks very different. One billion to 10 billion looks very different.

Brad Weimert: To that point specifically, you’ve worked with $10 million companies and $10 billion companies. What is a common focus issue that persists regardless of the size of the business?

Geoff Woods: This is what is timeless. We go back to strategy, execution, people, and technology. I find that people are not clear and aligned on what the strategy of the company is. Here’s how I can tell. Go ask 10 people in the company what the strategy of the company is. Will you even get an answer? That’s a problem. That’s your future competitive advantage. That’s the North Star. How do you make sure that the direction you’re running is the right direction? It’s not your annual plan. Your annual plan can still run you in the wrong direction. So, that’s step one. And then step two is once you’re clear on where you’re going over the long term, what is your focused business plan for this year?

And I see more companies than most, their plan is all the things they think they need to do inside the organization. I believe that is an incorrect approach, because it’s capturing 80% of the stuff that only drives 20% of the value. I want to flip it on its head. I want a short, focused plan that shines a spotlight on the 20% that drives 80% of the results. And then how do you break that down to an individual level where every single person understands, “What do I personally need to do this week, not everything I need to do, the 20% priorities I personally need to do this week, so I’m on track for delivering what I need to deliver by the end of the month, quarter, year, in alignment with company plan?” I think that is just timeless.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I agree with you. I think one of the difficult things, probably at all levels, but specifically for small companies and entrepreneurs, is making the choice to allow fires to burn.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: So, that 80% doesn’t go away, right? It’s still there. And some of them you feel the urgency or the importance, and sometimes you’ve got to let them burn.

Geoff Woods: Yeah, and Gary and Jay talk about this in The ONE Thing. It’s the inability to say no, and they have an image of a submarine. And the thing about a submarine is the deeper it goes down into the ocean, the higher the pressure is that’s built around it. And the deeper you go into your 20%, the more the 80% starts to pile up. The pressure builds, and certain 80 percenters, they start to kick and scream and fight for your attention. And what I realized is, I mean, I’ve been living this for over a decade now. I live it at a really high level. I’ve made peace with letting the 80% burn, because a lot of it is a straight-up distraction. If you never touch it, it doesn’t matter. The stuff that actually matters kicks and screams and finds its way into your calendar.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, some bullsh*t does too. You just have to say no to that stuff, guys. So, you jumped from The ONE Thing, and you told us at the beginning, but you just were made an offer to jump into Jindal Steel.

Geoff Woods: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: What did you learn from that experience that is applicable to the SAS companies, the coaches, the digital marketers, the e-com brands that are several million, not several billion?

Geoff Woods: The strategy, execution, people, and technology. What became so clear to me is regardless of if you’re just starting or you’re at a million, or if you’re in the billions, every company needs to be clear about what’s the advantage they’re building toward. They need to be clear on what their business plan they’re executing this year, and they need to look at their people as a huge asset and ask the question: How do we align our people and keep them aligned on the 20% things that drive 80% of the results? Then you can look at technology and ask, “How do we use that to supercharge our people and keep them focused on the 20%?” That’s it. That’s it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. Well, let’s talk about how to use technology to do that. So, talking about it is impossible right now at this curve in this technical adaptation to avoid discussions around AI. But a lot of what you have said just now is we can be talking about the task execution, which is timely, maybe, or just irrelevant and filling space, or we can talk about the timeless stuff. You have largely taken a stance around the timeless stuff.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about implementing AI inside of an organization today?

Geoff Woods: Yeah. So, when I think about weaving AI into a company, there’s only three ways it can bring value. It can make your people more productive, it can make your operations more efficient, or it can make your product and service more valuable so you can hopefully build a longer-term competitive advantage. The gap that I saw early, though, I interviewed over 200 leaders when I was writing The AI-Driven Leader. 100% of them said AI was the future. 100% of them said they would adopt it. Less than 5% at the time had done anything. And when I peeled back the onion and asked why, and these are all C-level execs, I realized they didn’t know where to start.

And where I see, now people think they’ve started, but what they’re not realizing is that if the leaders, every leader is saying, “We’re going to become an AI-driven organization. We will use AI.” But if you ask the executive team, “How are you personally using this to elevate the impact that you make in the company?” they’ll tell you they’re using it like Google or to write better emails. And that is what I call the leadership gap. My realization is that as a leader, your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. This is timeless and especially relevant for those who are at that million and trying to go beyond it. Your strategic thinking skills matter a lot.

Instead of using AI as an assistant, we focus on showing leadership teams how to start using it as a thought partner for strategy instead of tactics, where, I mean, you give me the biggest problem any company is facing, and I can write a CRIT and solve the problem in about 20 minutes. That’s wild. That shifts people’s perspective, and it’s like they realize they’ve been living in black and white their entire life, and they’re trying to describe color. They can’t do it. But if they can become an AI-driven leader who uses this to elevate how they think, they start to see color. Then now, when they’re meeting with their team, they can start from a place of credibility, say, “Hey, here’s how I think you could be using this within your daily workflow.”

They’re able to look at the operations and go, “Why the heck are we doing it this way when we could just pull an agent in and do it here?” Or, “Why are we delivering our product or service this way when we could truly put AI in the core and enable this type of capability that could build a competitive advantage?” You don’t have to become an AI expert. You just have to become an AI-driven leader.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s talk about the tactics behind that and the actual strategic execution. So, there is certainly a big gap between using ChatGPT.com to write emails.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Or using a desktop agent platform like Claude Code or Claude Cowork or whatever or going layers deeper in that.

Geoff Woods: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: So, if you want to, let’s say, just integrate AI to be able to make those decisions inside the organization, how do you think about structuring it and data concerns and privacy and permissions?

Geoff Woods: So, go back to the domino example. If we stand them all up correctly and line them up all correctly, you knock the first one down, the rest fall. When we start talking about agents, data structuring, governance, that’s like somewhere between domino 25 and 60 in the chain, and this is the mistake that leaders are making. They’re trying to go straight there when they haven’t earned the right to yet. Step one: Can you even identify a 20% strategic use case? I can give you the most powerful tool in the world. If you aim it at an 80% priority of the business, it does not matter. It will not help you grow a better business or create better lives. So, step one, can we actually choose something that matters?

Step two: Can you communicate effectively with the technology? Because let’s be clear, this is a relationship, and just like a relationship with a human, communication is critical. Same thing with AI. People are treating it like Google, asking it short one-sentence, two-sentence questions, versus having a framework that if you followed it, would take your communication to top 1% of the world. That’s what CRIT does. And then once you’ve identified a 20% use case, you’re communicating effectively with something like CRIT. Three: Can you remain the thought leader with AI as your thought partner? One of the greatest mistakes I am seeing is people are abdicating their responsibility as the thought leader.

They’re asking AI questions, and they are trusting the result when it is literally making it up, versus you being in this driver’s seat as the thought leader, viewing everything you get back from AI as a draft. And let’s just assume that it’s wrong. And instead think, “What do I like about this?” And tell it. “What do I not like about this?” Tell it. “What are the top changes I want made to this?” Tell it. Can you lead the technology instead of letting the technology lead you? That is the foundational competence that I think every person needs to start with. When you can master that, you see color so vividly that then you start to understand, now, maybe let’s look at Claude Code or Cowork or Codex.

And let me start to dissect a part of my job and build the skills and the markdown files and the agentic workflows that enable me to either supercharge the 20% or augment or automate the 80%. Most people have not earned the right to go there yet.

Brad Weimert: That’s interesting. I mean, I think that I don’t disagree with the fundamentals there. Also, when I think about the capacity for any of these tools to make decisions, you talk about assuming it’s wrong, which I think is a great fundamental assumption.

Geoff Woods: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Right? What do I like about this? What do I not like about this? Let’s get feedback on it. Also, there’s no way for any of the tools to have intimate awareness of our ecosystem until we handle the data pipelines, privacy concerns, etcetera.

Geoff Woods: Correct. And I think you earn the right to get there. So, a lot of companies, for us, can we just train people to use this as a thought partner, focus in on the 20%, communicate effectively, and teach the human how to remain the thought leader? Can we establish that as a foundation? That alone delivers remarkable results. Then once that’s knocked down, yes, the company naturally starts to go, “Oh my gosh, our data’s a hot mess. It’s everywhere. It’s siloed. It’s unstructured. It’s not clean.” Great. That now becomes a 20% priority in terms of how do you make it centralized, accessible, clean, where now these AI models can sit on top of it, and you can leverage the context of the organization to do way more than you could have ever thought possible.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I like that. How do you think about privacy with AI relative to frontier models versus local models, etcetera? And for anybody that doesn’t know what the fu*k I’m talking about right now…

Geoff Woods: Ask AI.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. That’s fair. But you have the capacity today to buy functionally a computer, buy hardware in your office, and run a local version of AI, of an LLM that’s open source.

Geoff Woods: That’s not tied to the internet. I think for most people, that’s not the 20%.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Geoff Woods: And this is where I have a fairly staunch belief that 80-plus percent of the news on AI, the tools, the latest whatever, is a distraction. And here’s my filter. If I focus on this, is this going to help me create a better business and a better life?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Here’s my filter. Yeah, I think that was going to be my question. I think that one of the questions when we talk about privacy concerns or whatever your concerns are, has to be, and you just had one, the other has to be, what happens if I don’t do this?

Geoff Woods: By the way, let me clarify. That’s on local versus non, not the privacy side. The privacy side is a 20% to me. But, like, am I going to go download an open source model and host it on my own server and wall it off? Not a priority. Am I going to think about my data and make sure that these models are not training on it? Yes.

Brad Weimert: Where is your limit with that?

Geoff Woods: Here’s the limit. People ask, “How do I get this to not train on my data?” I think people misunderstand what that even means. They think that that means if they upload their strategic plan or their financials, suddenly their competitors can ask ChatGPT, and it’s going to teach it to them. That is not what it means. It means that if it’s even training on your data, it becomes one of a trillion data points that these models look for patterns across, and then they evolve the models to optimize the patterns. That itself may shift your perspective on the risk of a model training on your data. I’m still going to say get a model that doesn’t train on your data.

You got two options: off-the-shelf or enterprise. Off-the-shelf means you sign up for ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot, and you pay the $30 or whatever it is a month, where it says it’s not training on your data. That’s per their terms of service. You have to ask if you believe them. Then there is enterprise, meaning you physically host that model on enterprise servers. Your IT team establishes a walled garden that walls it off from the rest of the world. Minimum investment for that is $100,000 a year, and it just goes up. For us, we do not do enterprise. We use Chat, we use Claude. Both are versions that, per their terms of service, say they do not train on their data, and that’s good enough for us.

For us, like, that’s where we stop. I’m not going to worry about it further than that because that’s no longer the priority for our business. I’m not going to say that should be. That’s a decision you get to make for yours.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, that’s great to hear, and that’s great clarity. That’s specifically the item that I was talking about when I said for most people, you have to ask. If you don’t believe the checkbox, which is, “You won’t train on my data,” with a $20, $30, $200 a month version of ChatGPT or whoever, which I do not believe. I do believe that they’re training on all that data. But even with that assumption, you still have to think, “Are you getting in your own way?” What are you actually benefiting from by drawing this hard line? Is this the hill you want to die on?

Geoff Woods: And that’s where your next question of the cost of inaction. I look at risk-reward.

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Geoff Woods: Let’s say I use one of these models. They say they’re not training on my data, and they do. What do I stand to gain from leveraging AI? It’s immense. What do I stand to risk? In this case, I’m not a public company. My sh*t’s not that sensitive. It’s not that high. I’m taking that deal. The opposite is if I choose to not use it, as a result, it’s obsolescence for me.

Brad Johnson: Yeah. You’re way behind.

Geoff Woods: Versus the potential risk.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that that’s a really, really, really important consideration for people. One of the things… So, I have drawn the line and said, “We are hosting in-house.” We are running our own models in-house for all of our own internal sensitive data. Now, it’s important to recognize with us that I also have a metric fu*k ton of personal identifying information, Social Security numbers, EINs, bank statements, et cetera, et cetera. So, it’s, first off, we have all sorts of security considerations just around payment data. But then I’ve got all this other stuff. So, we’ve drawn the line and said, “I’m not sharing any of that, enterprise or otherwise, with anybody. It’s not going to a frontier model.”

Now, because even though I made that decision, I know without a shadow of a doubt that a tremendous amount of our competitors are sharing all that data because they’re not as careful as we are. So, like that’s the other thing to think about, is like, what is the marketplace going to be doing? And then a stage beyond that is like you don’t think that this data’s already in the LLM somewhere, right? You don’t think the banks are using the frontier models?

Geoff Woods: Honestly been in enough of the big banks, I question it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, right. Right, exactly.

Geoff Woods: They are laggards.

Brad Weimert: Well, that’s a whole another rabbit hole. One of the things that I think is really important, back to your sort of strategic questioning or narrative around how to implement AI into your business, is you talked about having people that were really focused on analyzing and interacting with AI and being sort of the thought leader and the thought partner of AI. What that leads me to, oh, you actually opened with this. What that leads me to is realigning all of your job descriptions. So, it occurred to me maybe six months ago, it was really the advent of, I think it was Opus 4 or 5 or something. It was this critical moment in maybe November of 2025, where there was this shift into agentic. And it became clear that AI was going to be able to do a bunch of stuff.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Where I thought, “Oh, if we are interacting with things in this way, and it can actually execute, then what I need from the people that are on our team is now different.”

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: Right? Not just from a skill set perspective, but from a value perspective in who they are. I need somebody that’s persistent, that’s creative, right? And there are some other things in my head, but how do you think about the different traits that are needed for that new employee?

Geoff Woods: Yeah. I come back to what are the core human skills that make us us? It’s the ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to create. These are skills that some people have built a career mastering, and some have not. I’m going to tell you those are skills that are worth mastering. They will serve you no matter where you go. I’ll tell you a story of what this looks like in practice. Marianella is my former executive assistant. When I hired her, I gave her her job description, and I said, “These are the KPIs that really matter for you to do your job extraordinarily well.

It’s your job to hunt me down every week and have me score you on a scale of 1 to 10 on every KPI, and if I don’t give you a 10, you have to ask, ‘What can I do differently next week so you get a 10?’ I will never proactively come to you. It is your job to own your development, because I know in an AI-driven world, agency matters. It is not top-down, it’s bottom-up. You be in the driver’s seat on your growth and your role. Hunt me down, get the feedback. I will give it to you. And make sure you’re always running an AI note-taker when you do it.” Four months go by. Every week, she’s hunting me down with an AI note-taker, asking me to score her week after week after week after week.

And I’m just telling her, “Make sure you’re putting those transcripts in a centralized location.” We fast-forward four months. She is killing it. She’s 10 out of 10 across the board, which means time to promote her. Give her more responsibility. And I said, but I did it differently. I didn’t come to her and say, “Here’s your new job description and here’s your new comp.” I said, “Marianella, I want you to use AI and write CRIT, context, role, interview, task. And I want to have it interview you about what it thinks your greatest strengths are, plus the data of all these transcripts, and have it interview you to cast a vision for how you can bring 10 times to 100 times more value to the company. Bring me that job description.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome.

Geoff Woods: She goes, “Okay.” Next week she comes to me, and she goes, “I’m ready. In order for me to bring 10 times more value, here are the 20% things I’m currently doing that based on my strengths, I need to double down on. But based on my strengths, here are the 20% things I’m not doing, that when I look at the company goals, I really should be doing those things. They’ll bring 10 times more value. But if I’m going to go deep here, here’s all the other stuff I got to stop doing. I’ve actually segmented those into three groups. Here’s the stuff we need to fully stop. They’re distractions. Here’s what we can use AI to augment or automate. Here’s the stuff that still needs a human.

Based on that, here’s a job description for my replacement, their 20% priorities, their 90-day onboarding plan, the compensation research. We should pay them X. Do I have your approval?” I’m blown away by this. And to be clear, before working with me, she knew how to spell AI. That was it. She had never even used ChatGPT. Like she started from nothing. She read the book, learned how to write CRIT. The end. I tell her, “I am blown away.” And she goes, “I appreciate that, but we’re not done yet.” “What do you mean?” “Well, Geoff, that’s my vision for 10 times impact. That’s not what you asked for. You asked for 10 times to 100 times.” I’m sitting back, Brad. I’m like, “Okay, is it my birthday?”

And she goes, “My greatest realization is I can’t bring 100 times more value unless I make you 100 times more valuable. Here’s a prompt I’ve architected so that AI will tell you how you can bring 100 times more value.” I go, “I can’t wait to do this.” She goes, “Good. You’ll do it now. I’ll wait.” And she literally waited. It cast this vision, but also created a series of rules that she would have to embed inside the company. And she looks at me and goes, “This is great, but you love to break the rules, and I knew this was going to happen. So, I’ve architected another prompt where AI’s going to interview to understand every way you’re going to wiggle out of these rules, and it’s going to create a defense process. So, if you ever want to break a rule, you’re going to have to go through AI first.”

This has completely transformed the allocation of my time, completely transformed her job description, completely transformed her pay. So, when I think about the value of humans in the workforce, I realize there’s the 20% they’re doing that drives 80% of the results, and there’s 80% that only drives the 20. The 80% stuff is them acting like machines. That’s going away. I first care about let’s get clear on what’s the 20% and what are their unique strengths. The intersection of those two is where I’m interested. How can they cast a vision for how they can harness AI to become 10 times to 100 times more impactful to the company? Can they cast that vision and bring it to me, and then can I shape a job description in alignment with them? It’s transformative.

Brad Weimert: You do a good job of bringing things back to concrete points after a narrative.

Geoff Woods: Thank you.

Brad Weimert: I appreciate that. Normally, that’s my job in these interviews, and it’s mentally taxing at times, so this feels very good.

Geoff Woods: I’ll edit myself.

Brad Weimert: That’s fantastic. So, look, largely, I mean, the through line with this seems to be that I could ask you the punchy, what do founders get wrong when implementing AI? What are the two or three things that they should implement first if they’re at $10 million or $50 million in revenue? But the fundamental is just strategic over tactical.

Geoff Woods: Yes.

Brad Weimert: And it’s how do you get really clear on your mission, vision, values, direction you’re going functionally? And then what is the biggest lever or the biggest levers that you can point AI at to transform the business?

Geoff Woods: And I’m going to tell you one of the most underrated ones that is also the simplest and most accessible is raising the strategic thinking of your people. Instead of an industrial mindset, which most people are operating by today, where they show up to work on time, take direction from a boss, do something repetitively with minimal error, with maximum efficiency, that was literally designed to work at the assembly line. How do we flip it on its head, where it’s not top-down boss telling you what to do? You are able to demonstrate thinking leverage because you have AI as a thought partner, where you’re looking at the company goals. You’re looking at your role. You’re identifying what you think the 20% priorities are and the biggest bottlenecks.

You’re using AI as a thought partner to solve those bottlenecks or to execute on those priorities smarter, faster, better, and you’re using AI to communicate that up the chain of command, so they understand what you’re doing, and you’re asking for feedback to ensure alignment.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about empowering different levels of staff with AI? Because what you just said basically was have everybody empowered to allow them to make the choices or allow them to think. But there are varying roles in companies, right? And some of them are there to be responsive to customers, right, to pull levers right now.

Geoff Woods: Well, let’s speak. When I think about when you hire people, it’s called leverage. You hire people to give you a lever to achieve more. There are three types of leverage. Most people think of leverage in the form of execution leverage. To me, that’s the lowest level of leverage. Can you get it done? You do that well enough. You then are asked to bring leadership leverage. Can you lead people to execute it to get it done? I think the most valuable form of leverage is thinking leverage. Can you own 100% of your job, meaning the strategic thinking and problem-solving and creativity, so that when you hit a snag or a challenge or a problem, you’re not coming to me and asking, “What do I do?” because now you’re asking me to think for you. You’re asking me to do your job.

I want to empower you to do the thinking, then bring it to me and ask for my feedback. So, there is still hierarchy. As the CEO and the founder, I still have overall say of things within the company. But if people ever come to me and just ask me a question, I’m going to ask them what they think. And then I’m going to ask them how they used AI to help pressure test it. And if they haven’t done it, I kick them out of my office because now they’re wasting my time, and I don’t allow that to happen. And that only needs to happen once before they get the message, and then they start showing up saying, “Here’s the situation. Here’s what I thought I should do about this. I engaged AI. Here are the things it helped me see that I didn’t see. Based on this, I recommend I do X. Is there anything you see that I’m not seeing?”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that’s great. I think I know the answer to this, but are CEOs who delegate the implementation of AI to their staff analogous to CEOs that ignored the internet in 1999?

Geoff Woods: Yes and no. There’s a difference between delegation and abdication. I think a lot of CEOs have been abdicating their responsibility by saying, “IT will figure this out.” “We’ll hire a consultant to do it for us.” “Oh, my team is figuring that out.” “That’s not my job.” I believe that is incorrect. But I do not believe that as a CEO, you have to become an AI expert. I do believe you have to become an AI-driven leader, meaning you know just enough, because you’re using it yourself daily, that you can cast vision for the future, you can define strategy on how you’re going to win, and you can start to lead the team from practice instead of theory. And then you hit a ceiling where you go, “Okay, beyond that, it’s not my job as a CEO.”

Like for me personally, I do not really build agents. I have done it so that I know how to do it. I have done it enough that I can cast vision and define strategy and lead the change. It is not my job to build an agent and ship it to production. It is not my job to manage it and to maintain it. Absolutely not. But I can look at any person’s workflow in my organization and be deadly enough to know that I can cast vision for them on how they can use it in ways that they’re not seeing it.

Brad Weimert: Love that. What advice do you have for brand-new entrepreneurs starting out today?

Geoff Woods: I think those people are naturally going to AI. It is so tempting to dive into the 80%, and I’m going to ask you to resist that urge. The number of founders that I have talked to that brag about all the agents that they have built, and I ask them, “What has it actually done for you?” “Oh, well, I don’t have to check my email anymore, and it does…” What has that done in terms of your ability to drive revenue? What has that done in terms of your ability to build a competitive advantage? What has that done in terms of your ability to attract and retain top talent? What are the things that are timeless in a company? They can’t answer that question. They may free up a bunch of hours, but they’re just reinvesting it in the sh*t that doesn’t matter.

Stop doing that. Stop doing that. What’s the 20% that’s going to drive 80% of your results? And for most people, I’m willing to venture they have not yet engaged AI as a thought partner, where you don’t ask it questions. You make it turn the tables and ask you questions to pressure test how you think on the most important parts of your business. That is so simple. It’s what The AI-Driven Leader is all about. Just start there. Once a day, every day for the next 30 days, use AI in a strategic way. That will change your life.

Brad Weimert: Where do you want to point people?

Geoff Woods: Easiest thing you can do is read The AI-Driven Leader. And, as this is going out, it’s been the number one book in the world for AI, but I signed a publisher agreement, and we’re in the middle of doing a giant New York Times push.

Brad Weimert: Nice.

Geoff Woods: So, if this episode has brought value to you, it would bring a tremendous amount of value to me if you did buy the book, and share it with your friends, share it with your team. I can’t think of a better way to help you than the book as a starter. And check out aileadership.com. You can learn about everything that we do from the training to how we actually help companies implement this.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. Geoff Woods, so good to see you, man.

Geoff Woods: Likewise. Thank you.