Teach AI to Think Strategically & Scale Your Business with Geoff Woods – EP 204

Justin Donald: What's up, Geoff? Good to have you on the show.

Geoff Woods: Thanks for having me.

Justin Donald: Well, it's good. Actually, I should say it's good to have you back on the show. It's rare that I have someone come back for a repeat episode but what's going on in your world, your story, your career trajectory, it all warrants just a revisit on all the cool stuff you've been up to.

Geoff Woods: I appreciate that. It's been a wild journey.

Justin Donald: Yeah. It sure has. So, last we spoke, you were crushing it. And by the way, for everyone else, Geoff and I are actually friends, and so we speak a lot. So, when I say, "Last we spoke,” what I'm saying is the last time our audience has heard from him. He was the Vice President of The ONE Thing and doing some big things there at that company. And so, it was a big transition away from that. And so, I would love to hear what led to you deciding to move on and how you transitioned because you moved on bigger and better. And I think at first you were really concerned, were you going to find something bigger or better or did you just settle? But you found just an amazing landing spot.

Geoff Woods: Yeah. I think a lot of people who start a company, you start a company hoping that you can build this up and it can either provide the kind of security long term or that you can have an exit. I had the opportunity to exit the business and sell my equity back to my partners, and I wasn't 100% clear on what the next chapter was going to be. In my heart, I felt like something great would come from it. I wasn't 100% clear on what it was but it was also the right time to move on. And I remember this was actually probably one of the lowest moments in my life, Justin. I've heard plenty of people talk about how they exit the business, and then they hit this low point because they don't know who they are.

But I experienced this because for the longest time, I mean, ever since I was a kid, I was bullied as a child. Success kind of became my way, it was my coping mechanism. I used to think if I was successful then you would respect me or like me. The problem was when I started to build this company and it's a fairly well-known book and brand, it fed all the parts of my inner child that had never healed, and I made the mistake of attaching my identity to being the face of The ONE Thing, rather than aligning my identity with what I did. And the moment I was no longer the face of The ONE Thing, I realized I didn't know who I was, actually.

And that began a six-month journey of inner discovery and honestly, a lot of healing. And I just felt that something good would come. And I got a call from a guy named Naveen Jindal, who's the Chairman of Jindal Steel & Power. I had been coaching him for several years, him and his executive team, Giant steel company out of India. If anybody's familiar with UT Dallas’ Business School, his name is on it. He called me when he found out I left and said, "Hey, would you come in-house?” And I said, "Maybe. What's the job?” And he said, "You tell me.”

Justin Donald: That’s fun.

Geoff Woods: Yeah. That was fun. So, blank canvas. Long story short, I stepped in as their Global Chief Growth Officer. They operate like a family office. They have a whole bunch of companies. One is listed, which is Jindal Steel & Power, a bunch of private. My job was to work really closely with the Jindal family to understand the vision for the future, and then work closely with the executive teams of every operating company to drive growth. And wild ride because in just a few short years, we took Jindal Steel from 750 million to 12 billion.

Justin Donald: Yeah. That's huge. That is massive. You know, it's funny. I remember when you had kind of like this self-image, this ego crisis, which, by the way, this is super common. We see this all the time in our community. We see this with people that sell their business or move on or have a breakup with their partners or whatever it is. We see it all the time. And it is so common that people will hitch their ego and identity onto being the founder of this company or the C-suite of this company. Totally normal. Not that it's good. Not that it's healthy, but it's very common.

But I remember having a conversation with you, having gone through something similar myself, and telling you right now, you may feel like you're at a crossroads and this is a crisis. But in time, this is the best thing that ever happened. It's the best decision that was ever made. Like, this is going to define you and/or redefine you in a way that's going to be pretty powerful. And you did amazing things with Jindal and I've got to imagine that there are a lot of pros to working there. I think it was probably really tough on the family to have to travel to India once a quarter for an extended time, right?

Geoff Woods: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at first, it didn't seem that bad but I was traveling for three weeks every quarter and I would hit India, the Middle East, and Africa in a three-week sprint. But what I realize is two weeks leading up to the trip, my wife is nervous and it took two weeks after the trip to reintegrate. So, all of a sudden you realize there's a material portion of every quarter that my family dynamic was being thrown off, and that's what was not sustainable.

Justin Donald: Yeah. You know, it's tough. And I remember at one point you guys even had considered moving for this opportunity, moving to London.

Geoff Woods: Yeah. They were going to move us there. We were all in but then they pulled the plug last minute and said, "Just kidding. Stay in the US.”

Justin Donald: Hey, blessing in disguise because it would be a way easier transition here in the US already than to be transitioning back home from London.

Geoff Woods: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Justin Donald: So, ultimately, you have basically a client from when you were doing coaching and consulting with The ONE Thing who was so impressed with you and your skill set and your ability to problem solve, but also see the big picture. He brings you on. You're in-house with his company. You work there for close to a couple of years, I think. And by the way, I think it'd be fun to even just share with people like this isn't just some normal family. Like, this is a family that was crushing the game of life, the game of business, the game of everything.

You had your own quarters when you stayed there. You had your own person that waited on you hand and foot. You drank the best wine. You ate the best meals. You had food prepared at each meal for you if you weren't eating out. I mean, you had a pretty exciting and cush experience. Not to take away from the fact that I know you worked hard, right? I know that you earned it, but the perks seem to be pretty incredible.

Geoff Woods: My very first trip out there, I mean, you imagine how billionaires live. And when I would fly out there, I would stay at Naveen’s house, which is outside of the Prime Minister's house, the second largest house in Delhi, a full-blown compound. I remember a few days in, waking up, I mean, I had a personal trainer there, private chef, personal driver, laundry done every day. We flew private everywhere. I remember after a few days thinking to myself, "This is what it feels like to have everything.” That doesn't matter because the truth is, as great as it was, my family wasn't there to share it with me. And I was very aware of how appreciative I was for the experience and yet how fast the novelty can wear off and how quickly you can normalize a certain standard of living.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And by the way, that's the danger because sometimes it's those experiences, if you're not careful, that can own you, right? So, when your possessions own you, your money owns you. So, I can see that. I can see the grip. I can see the allure. But yeah, it's not as much fun when you don't have your friends and family there. I mean, it was fun for me getting some really cool pictures of bottles of wine that you were having. You would always share these epic bottles because I love good wine. But, yeah, I mean, if you're not sharing it with the people you care about the most and you get to do this all the time, then it becomes less exciting.

Geoff Woods: Yeah.

Justin Donald: But I still think you should have brought home some of those really nice bottles and we could be toasting to one of those right now on this podcast, Geoff.

Geoff Woods: He wasn't parting ways with those.

Justin Donald: Well, I love it. He had a fun collection. Now, talk me through. Share with everyone what you actually did with Jindal.

Geoff Woods: Yeah. So, my job was to drive growth. And like I said, there was a ton of companies. One was listed Jindal Steel. The others are private. My realization was they all operated as their own entity. But I saw an opportunity to play a bigger game at a Jindal group level. And so, I asked the question, "What are the processes or things that we would need to focus on across every operating company that needed to live at a group level that we could solidify, but then allow some personalization to drive through each entity?” And I came up with four drivers of growth: strategy, execution, people, and technology.

Strategy is the long-term competitive advantage you're building through the actions you're taking in the short term. Execution is what is your strategic plan? Are you actually focusing on what matters most? Are you reprioritizing throughout the year? People, your strategic plan changes, but do the job descriptions of your people. How do we make sure that the people that we have are constantly aligned and rowing in the right direction? And then technology, how are we harnessing technology to better help our people achieve their goals or create better efficiency? And while, I mean, we had a ton of growth just by focusing on the first three: strategy, execution, and people.

November or December of 2022, I had pulled together the executive teams from every company around the world into Delhi for a CEO offsite to talk about the future leader in the Jindal world. I wanted to create real alignment around what that future leader would look like. In the morning of the offsite, a guy leans over to me and says, "Hey, have you heard of ChatGPT yet?” And I said, "No.” And he showed me and he walked me through a use case. And I watched it start to generate text in mind-blowing speed. And, Justin, this brought me back to my senior year of college. I was doing an internship with a startup tech company. Right before graduation, I sat down with the CEO and I asked him, "What job should I get after school?”

And he looks at me and he says, “Geoff, you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking, ‘What are the skills that I can master that are so valuable they will serve me no matter where I go? And what are the jobs that will help me develop those skills?’” Best career advice I've ever been given. When I saw AI for the first time, I saw the next skill. And so, I just made a personal commitment to start learning how to harness this and figure out where might it be able to bring value. And after going down the rabbit hole pretty deep, I sat down with the chairman and said, "This is the future.” And he said, “I agree.” I said, “I think we need to drive this in all the companies.” He said, “I agree.”

I said, "Well, you're the chairman of the board. You need to own this at the board level for it to happen.” And he looked at me again and said, "Why don't you do it for me?” So, overnight, I'm finding myself going, "Okay. We have 100,000 people across the world. What does it look like to drive AI systematically through an organization of this size?” I partner with Google. So, every quarter I'm flying to Delhi. I'm living at their headquarters. I'm looking at use cases, I'm tuning models. And after doing that for a little bit, I realized that I was playing way too small because I saw the impact this could make but doing this inside one business was limiting.

And so, this year I resigned. I knew I would start a company about at the intersection of AI and leadership. I knew I would write a book about it. I had no idea what either would be about. And so, I just started interviewing executives. Two hundred conversations in, one-on-one conversations, it became abundantly clear. 100% of leaders know AI is the future. 100% of the people I interviewed said they would adopt it. Less than 5% had done anything. And it was simply because they didn't know where to start.

And so, I wrote the book, The AI-Driven Leader, to help leaders understand what is the simple path to start using AI at their level that will bring value because me showing you how to write a better email is not business value. But your ability to think strategically, that's the difference between growing your business or going out of business. And using AI as a thought partner is a powerful tool. That's what the whole thing's about.

Justin Donald: Oh, that's well said. Well, it's actually interesting because I remember when you were figuring out after The ONE Thing what you were going to do, and we even talked about having you work with me at the Lifestyle Investor and help build out a bunch of the stuff that we were doing there. There is ample opportunity. But I also knew some of the things that you had kind of cook in some of the options. And I still think that you and the moves that you made, like this was right, and it all worked out. But I can't help but think how much fun it would have been to build something together and even to like get into the weeds on all the AI stuff, which you and I will do anyway. And we're actually big proponents of AI.

In Lifestyle Investor, we have adopted all sorts of AI competencies and enhancements, and we've built out a bunch of things just for Lifestyle Investors. So, for inward facing, we have our own like Justin AI for everything we've ever done that is only available to the masterminds, like 600-plus hours of content. We have an outward-facing Justin AI that lives on the website for anything external that has ever been done, from book to speeches to podcasts. And that's just the start of it. We have several other iterations. We got a due diligence AI that we're in the process of building out. And so, we're huge fans, and you and I, we're going to geek out on this for years and years and years. I just know it.

But what I would love to do is just talk for a moment. And by the way, I still feel like we're scratching the surface. Like, we've actually been pretty innovative. We've been pretty quick to adopt on a lot of things. And there are several other areas that we use AI as well. But I still know we're scratching the surface of what's possible with it and where we're ultimately going to go. So, my question for you is, what does it look like for other executives running their businesses and the way that they can or should or at least could consider incorporating AI?

Geoff Woods: Sure. So, I think the first thing you have to understand is that AI is a tool to help you achieve your goals. Its adoption is not your overall goal. And this is really important to understand because one of the holes that I saw in the market, which really compelled me to write the book, The AI-Driven Leader, and launch AI Leadership as a company, I saw all the authorities in the space were tech companies pushing AI as a solution, looking for a problem. That's backwards. Your goal is to drive the growth of your business. You then have your people and your technology as tools to help you achieve your goal. But you have to think strategy first, technology second.

If somebody asks me, "How do I use AI?” I'll say to them, "You're asking the wrong question. You should be showing me the competitive advantage you're trying to build in the long term. Show me the strategic plan you plan on executing in the short term. Tell me the challenges that you are having in executing your plan in alignment with your vision and the competitive advantage. And then let me talk to you about how you can better align your teams and your technology to help you get more done in less time.” So, that's the first thing.

There's really only three use cases for AI. One, put it in the hands of your people, make them more productive. Two, weave it into your operations to make them more efficient. Three, put it in your products or services to deliver more value to customers. The mistake I see is a lot of companies are running toward how do we create a disruptive product for customers when they don't have a high level of AI readiness, where they're trying to streamline their operations before the executives who are even making the calls have a level of intelligence to understand what's even possible or where they should start, which is why, for me, I don't care where your company is. I think you start by putting it in the hands of your people to make them more productive. And my recommendation is you start with executives because if they can develop a high level of AI literacy and understand this, it will make them better leaders.

Justin Donald: I love that. And I can't remember who I was talking to about this. Maybe it'll come back to me, but someone I was talking to has a company and they weren't sure exactly how to like get AI going. And they just said to all of their employees, "Hey, you now have a budget. You're able to spend X amount per month or per year. Trial and error. Have fun. Try some tools out. See what works.” And I just thought that was brilliant. And a bunch of their people came up with awesome stuff that have revolutionized the company.

Geoff Woods: I love that. And the only thing I would do to enhance that is to say, one, that's a fantastic start. What would make that even better is if the executives said, "Hey, you have a budget, I want you to come up with these disruptive use cases that you think could add value to the company. Let me show you what I've done.” Because if the leader can be a practice leader of the technology, they can better lead their people through the adoption curve and help them navigate the challenges that they're going to have. Because, one, there's just a challenge of learning how to adopt it. Two, there's a true mindset challenge here because there are so many fears and potential risks around AI that again, as a leader, you have to be really intelligent and articulate about this to lead the transformation.

Justin Donald: Now, what about with so we've talked a little bit about entrepreneurs and businesses, but what about for investors and family offices? Because we work with a lot of them. And I'd be curious to see just what some of your use cases are, what you're seeing transpire in these financial arenas.

Geoff Woods: I've got two. And both of these happened within the last 30 days. One, I sat down with a fund. They do commercial real estate. So, they syndicate and then they go and they acquire commercial real estate. They help raise the NOI and they either hold it or then they sell it off. I asked them, I literally sat down with the executive team and I said, "We need to start with developing a level of AI literacy at your level and the place I want to start is with strategic thinking and decision-making because that's the use case that if you can do this better, it takes your business to a whole new level. I'm not going to show you how you create content or write social media posts or write a better email. I'm going to show you how to think more strategically at an executive level.”

And they said, "Well, we have our new investment memorandum for the fund we're about to raise.” I said, “Great. Show it to me.” They pulled it up. It was 66 pages. And I said, "What was your process to make sure that this would achieve the stated goal of fully subscribing the fund?” And they walked me through it and I said, "Well, how do you know that your investor is going to actually like what's in here or if there are potential landmines or gaps in here that need to be filled?” They looked at me and said, “I really don't know.” I said, "Great. Watch this.” And I opened up AI, I took their subscription document, and I loaded it into my model, which has all the privacy provisions in place so I felt good putting it in there.

And I said, “I want you to act as our most discerning investor.” And then I looked at them and said, "Describe this person in vivid detail.” And they told me the age, the level of education, likely a former Fortune 500 CEO or startup founder who's had a very successful exit. They care about X, Y, and Z. These are the types of risks they're looking to mitigate. So, I just described that person in vivid detail and then I said, "Your task is to review this document and then tell me what you like about it, what you don't like about it, the top questions that need to be answered, and the top changes we could make to the document so that when you would see this, you would invest.” And I sent the prompt. Now, think about, Justin, how long it would have taken the team to have gone through the 66-page document and answer those four questions?

Justin Donald: Oh yeah, I mean our best case probably, though, more like days.

Geoff Woods: If not weeks, because then they got all the other things and all the other appointments that are on their calendar. It was generating an answer in one second.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Geoff Woods: And it fully read the entire document and was already answering my prompt within one second. And I just scrolled and watched the executive team's eyes get big as they looked at this because it called out very specific things around the way you've described this structure or the fees doesn't actually make sense. Here's how I would restate this so that it would be more clear to me as your ideal investor. In less than five minutes, we had credible, valuable feedback that helped them make the document better. That's one use case. Let me give you another one.

Lone Ranger, who were both investors in, I sat down with them for one call and just kind of gave them a very high level of, here's AI, here's how you talk to it. Here are some potential use cases. Nick and Zach took that use case, and they looked at one of their people who when they get budgets to come in for a flip. So, these guys, they raise money and they… Would you say it's hard money lending for fix and flips?

Justin Donald: Yeah. Hard money lending fund, yeah, for fix and flips. Same with family homes.

Geoff Woods: So, when a person doing a flip wants to borrow money from them, they have to send a budget of what’s required, but they know by the zip code how much a flip should cost. And this one guy’s job is to manually review every single budget by zip code and say, “Did they price it too low and they don’t know what they’re talking about? Are they pricing it too high? And maybe they’re trying to skim some money off the top.” I showed them how they could use AI to do 90% of that work. They literally, in two weeks, freed up 90% of that guy’s job and moved him to a higher impact priority. They saved $60,000 in two weeks.

Justin Donald: Wow. Yeah, that’s incredible. I love that. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of use cases in the world of investing, in the world of finance. We’re using AI on our real estate side of things, in the real estate business. We’ve used AI now to create invoices. We’ve used AI for billing. We’ve used AI for bill payment. And there’s a number of other iterations of things like that, that we’ve been able to do, even for keeping track of hours. I mean, there’s just so many use cases. And I read an article, a JPMorgan article, here recently that just– it was a new article they put out that just walked through kind of the positions that AI is likely to replace. And it’s actually, more likely to replace white-collar positions than blue-collar positions, which I thought was fascinating.

Geoff Woods: So, I went into this because I knew fear of job loss was one of the biggest concerns. So, I went back in history, because I thought, we’ve been here before. This is not the first major technological disruption. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller is running Standard Oil Company, largest company in the world, wealthiest man in history. Factories are booming. And with that comes the need for industrial workers, but he realizes there’s a problem.

Our education system at the time was producing thinkers, and he went on record, saying, “We do not need a nation of thinkers. We need a nation of workers.” So, he started the General Education Board, seated it with $1 million, which is $37 million today, with one sole purpose, to reshape the public education system so that people would learn the skills and the processes to succeed in an industrial era.

Here’s the challenge, that is still our education system today. And my realization is prior to the assembly line, products were made by craftsmen. There was a lot of pride. You owned it from start to finish. There was creativity. There was strategic thinking. There was problem solving. But the moment the assembly line came in, we actually had to set aside the very strengths that make us human. Our ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to be creative, to be collaborative, to communicate, to really learn to show up on time, take directions from management, do a task consistently, and make limited mistakes. And if you do a good job, you will climb the ladder, and one day, you can be happy.

AI is going, technology does not take people’s jobs. It changes the skills that are valued and the processes that are followed. AI will change the skills that are valued of white-collar workers. It will change the processes that we follow as white-collar workers. This is a good thing, I believe, because most of people’s time is spent in meetings and triaging low value tasks. But I believe this can free us up with the right leadership to a world where we actually invest most of our time, harnessing our strengths, focused on the most important priorities of our role, aligned with the goals of the company, and then supercharged with AI.

Justin Donald: So, let me ask you this. And this is going to be potentially tough to answer because it’s going to be broad, but I also think that with your knowledge of AI, you should have some good solid answers. And I know it’s better to understand the company and assess where you want to go, just like you said before. But for someone listening that has not implemented AI, or maybe they just started using a few things, maybe they’re using Perplexity, maybe they’re using ChatGPT, what are a few things that you would recommend they start doing now that can have massive impact?

Geoff Woods: So, here’s what you need to realize. AI will enhance you, it will not replace you, but those who become AI driven, those are the ones that will have the jobs of the future. So, you need to understand that this train has left the station. If you’ve kind of been on the sidelines on developing this as a skill, I’m going to very powerfully encourage you to get off the sidelines and start learning this. And I’m going to show you how right now. Justin, you’re married.

Justin Donald: Yes.

Geoff Woods: How important is communication in your relationship with Jennifer?

Justin Donald: It is the most important thing.

Geoff Woods: And what’s the quality of your relationship like when you do not communicate well with Jennifer?

Justin Donald: It falls apart really fast. It creates a lot of friction.

Geoff Woods: It’s the same thing with AI. Most people don’t know how to communicate with AI. So, when they try to use it and they get a bad or an average response, they think to themselves, this is a waste of time. It’s not. It’s just that you have not yet learned how to communicate with AI. So, think of your communication or a prompt as like ingredients to a recipe. I will share some of my most commonly used ingredients in communicating with AI.

One, you should always describe the task. I’m amazed at how many people I will watch write a prompt for AI and not clearly tell it what they want it to do. You must clearly describe the task. I even go as far as to say your task is to, insert the answer, context. AI is a processing powerhouse and it just predicts the next word. It does not have your intelligence. It does not have your experience. You must give it context, which is why with that investor example, I described the customer in vivid detail because with that, it can process to accomplish the task.

Third is assigning a persona. Just like in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves did not know kung fu until they pushed the button, harnessed a bunch of data, and Keanu Reeves knew kung fu, same thing here. This is actually a huge deal because you have expertise in your area. This becomes an equalizer because I’m not a CFO, but I can ask AI to act as a CFO in accomplishing a very specific task with the context that I give it, and it will harness data around what a CFO might know and accomplish my task for me, or I can ask it to act as my ideal investor, or I can ask it to act as a board member, an aggressive board member. You assign the persona, it will behave that way. So, give the task, give context, assign the persona.

And then my favorite ingredient of all, and this is different from what anybody else may have told you, is asking AI to interview you. When it comes to strategic thinking, we’re not always great at communicating everything that’s in our head. So, I love saying, “Hey, AI, here’s the task I need you to solve. For context, here’s what you need to know. I want you to adopt the persona of being this person. Interview me by asking one question at a time,” because otherwise, they’ll ask you 5 or 10 questions at once. “And when you have enough information, do the task.” You’ll be blown away at what it looks like.

So, let me help structure this for you. I want you to think of something this week that you could use a strategic thought partner on, something that you just need to think through, and you will literally say, “I want you to act as my strategic thinking partner.” You just assign the persona. For context, tell it everything it knows. “Your job is to interview me by asking one question at a time. And when you have enough information, complete this task.” Do that, that will blow your mind.

Justin Donald: I love it. Yeah, so much opportunity out there. I mean, I was listening to a podcast with Sam Altman, and he said that he wonders how long it’s going to take. He said this is inevitable, but he wonders how long it’s going to take for the first one-person billion-dollar company, which now can exist because of AI.

Geoff Woods: I fully believe it.

Justin Donald: And I thought, wow, that is mind boggling. My brain had not gone there, and it just opened up my eyes to the possibilities of what’s going to come here in the coming years and decades.

Geoff Woods: People can’t truly appreciate how game changing this is until they experience it. Justin, think about every book you’ve ever read, which I know how many books you read a year and all the lessons you’ve learned in school combined, what percentage of all that knowledge do you think you can recall like that?

Justin Donald: Oh, I mean, probably 1%. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a little more.

Geoff Woods: Right. Now, that’s just based on the data you’ve been trained on. Now, let’s compare it to AI. I told you, it’s a processing powerhouse. AI has been trained on 15 trillion tokens. A token is a unit of measure. So, if I said, here’s a paragraph of text and here’s an image which is more data, you couldn’t answer that unless you had a universal unit of measure. That’s what a token is. To put that into terms you would understand, that’s 200 million books worth of data. The AI has been trained on, that it can recall all of it, 100% of it, on the spot.

So, now, imagine saying, okay, it’s tough to read the label when you’re inside the box. I’m in the box with my own experience, the data that I have access to that I can even recall, I’m going to now have– I’m going to be the thought leader, but AI is going to be my thought partner, and I’m going to harness its processing power to accomplish a specific task. That’s where the real synergy is.

Justin Donald: Well, I love it. I love the boom that is happening right now with AI. I actually find it kind of comical though, because AI has been around for a long time. I’ve been investing in AI for about a decade. So, a lot of people are like, well, AI just came out. No, it did not just come out. It’s been out for a long time, but I also think...

Geoff Woods: Machine learning has been around since the 60s.

Justin Donald: Yeah, totally. But I also think that we’re going to see really soon and we’re starting to see already who these outlier companies are. And so, for me, I just want to be investing in as many of the top 10 that are out there. So, I’ve been doing my homework to figure out who I want to invest in. And I’ve invested in, Cohere, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity. Like, to me, those are your four kind of leaders. There are going to be others that emerge. But I’ve got to imagine, one of those companies, if not all of them or if not the majority of them, are going to be monstrous in the long haul. I mean, they’re already multi-billion-dollar companies, but I think that AI is one of those revolutionary game changing, like re-establishment type of scenarios where people, like, whatever your life was, it can be way different by not only the utilization, but also the investment in, like, this technology can transform someone’s life from being a pauper to being incredibly wealthy. And it’s neat.

There are very few things out there that I think are going to do that. I think Blockchain is another one. I think Bitcoin is another one. But there’s not a lot of things, throw AI in there. There’s a few other things, areas. I mean, I’m pretty bullish on industrial port towns, border towns, onshoring. There’s going to be a lot of ways to be able to create wealth.

And the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world is going to happen over the next 20 years. And it’s already starting from baby boomers to millennials. And you think about what millennials do, how they spend their time, what they do for recreation. And now, you add in the fact that they’re way more technology savvy than most other people and they’re adopting AI at a level of speed that is much different, much faster, much more impressive than the older generations.

Geoff Woods: And this is why, for me, technology is not what makes the difference. It’s the leaders who harness it. My realization, though, Justin, was that most of the leaders at the helm of these companies are not literate. You don’t have to be an assassin when it comes to AI. But having a foundational level of knowledge of what it is, and you being a practice leader of it so that you can at least speak intelligently about it, you need to have that to lead all these people in your organization that can really harness it and embrace it.

I’ll give you one example of how disruptive I think this can be. Medtronic, giant medical device company, I was working with them. Grady Davis was the VP of their marketing division, and when he and I sat down, he had been playing with ChatGPT for marketing purposes. But when I asked him about using it for strategic thinking, he looked at me. He goes, “Well, what would that even look like?” And so, I said, “Great, give me your biggest problem that you are trying to solve.” He said, “Oh, I could do that.” We have been tasked with finding every US adult that had a heart murmur as a kid, but between them moving, changing their names when they get married, and oh, by the way, this thing called HIPAA, it’s not only trying to find a needle in the haystack. The haystack is constantly moving.

And I went, “Holy smokes, that’s a big problem. What have you done?” They said, “We took five of our best people and we put them on this team for two months. They focused on it full time, and despite all the roadblocks that they had, they finally came back last week with five potential solutions.” “Oh, wow, that’s amazing. Can I show you something?” He said “Sure.” So, I showed my screen and I wrote a very strategic prompt. And I hit enter and instantly, AI went, brrr, and gave five potential solutions.

And I watched Grady’s face as his eyes just got huge. And he looks at me. He goes, “Geoff, these are really good answers. I want to compare this to what my team came up with, and let’s meet again.” Two weeks later, we hop on Zoom. He’s got his chief of staff with him this time, and he goes, “This is crazy. You generated the exact same answer. A team of five took hundreds of hours to do, but you’ve literally collapsed that amount of work into two minutes.” Now, I want to be really clear, this is a talented team that had faced insurmountable odds and got the job done. And if you do it the old way of working where we are relying on our human processing power, that took two months. But Grady’s realization was, “Holy smokes, if we can harness AI’s processing power with our context and our thought leadership, we could have gotten, what took us two months, we could have been there in two minutes. What might we have accomplished over the next two months?”

Justin Donald: That’s right. Yeah, that’s incredible. I love it. I mean, the opportunities are endless. I get excited thinking about it. I get excited just hanging out with people, brainstorming and ideating on all these different strategies or possibilities. So, this is so fun. Where can people learn more about you, Geoff, and more about The AI-Driven Leader?

Geoff Woods: So, the book is up. It is The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions. It publishes on September 19th, and it’s on Amazon, and it’ll be in all forms – hardcover, e-book, and audio. And the website is AILeadership.com. And that’s where you can learn more about how we actually work with leaders to help their companies become AI driven.

Justin Donald: I love it. Well, this was an absolute blast. Had a fun time talking to you about all the cool stuff you’re up to. And I just feel like, you wanted to have major impact on the world. You’re doing that, my friend. You really are. And I love this new move that you’re making where you’re saying, “Hey, I was doing this for this multibillion-dollar company, and I want to get all this information out to the world.” So, thanks for sharing. Thanks for spending the time with our community.

And I just like to close every podcast episode we do with a question for our audience. That question is the same every time, but I’m going to ask it every time because it’s that important. What is one step that you can take today to move towards financial freedom and move towards the life that you truly desire, one that’s on your terms, so a life that is by design, not default? Ironically, I actually wonder what it would look like if you prompted AI with that question.

Geoff Woods: Can I give you the prompt?

Justin Donald: Yes.

Geoff Woods: And again, any AI tool, it could be ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, you can go to it and say, “Here’s what I do currently, professionally. Here’s how I feel about my job. I like it, I don’t like it. I wish I had more financial freedom. I would like you to interview me as my strategic thinking partner by asking one question at a time to help me think through the one step that I can take to help me move toward a life that is on my terms and is by design and not by default.”

Justin Donald: That is powerful.

Geoff Woods: Watch what will happen there.

Justin Donald: I love it. Yeah, thank you for that prompt. And I just want to encourage everyone to pick one thing. Maybe this is that one thing, but pick one thing and tribute to your old company that you’re going to do to move towards financial freedom. One piece of AI, one piece of advice that Geoff said. So, thanks so much for joining us, Geoff. This was awesome. And I’ll look forward to catching up with you soon.

Geoff Woods: Thanks, Justin.