80% of AI use cases drive only 20% of the results, so start with the strategic use case

It's like they see color for the first time and realize they've been living in black and white. Nobody got promoted because they were the best email checker in their organization. He's actually holding back tears. And he very vulnerably admits to the other CEOs in the room, I have not slept in 90 days. I have been making peace with the fact that we are going out of business, but in less than 10 minutes, I got hope. Now you look at these AI models. They have been trained on anywhere from 200 to 500 million books worth of data so far. Guess what percent it can recall in a play neck? In my experience, 100%.

What does it look like when people flip into using AI as a thought partner instead of a glorified assistant? So I have a very simple framework to engage AI as a thought partner called CRIT. It stands for context, role, interview, task. The real game changer though, Nick, is I don't ask AI questions. I turn the tables and I make AI interview me. This morning, started with the context, role, interview, task. It is firing question after question at me. It was a completely different interaction. I think they went through 15 iterations. It was drastically different. That is 10x better than what it was.

This is where you get in the driver's seat as the thought leader. You're the driver. It's just your thought partner. I tell AI, here's what I like about your response. Here's what I don't like about your response. Here's the top changes I want made your response now revise it. And it will take deeper context out of my head to take it to another level. I'm not done yet, Nick. I'm here with Jeff Woods, author of the AI driven leader. If you felt like AI is useful, but shallow, this is the episode that will flip the switch. Jeff, welcome to the show. Nick, thank you so much for having me. Oh, what does it look like when people flip into using AI as a thought partner instead of a glorified assistant?

It's like they see color for the first time and realize they've been living in black and white. It's true. That's accurate. Yeah. Well, you tell me, I mean, you've gone down the path after reading the book. So I read the book. We're going to get to the prompting after I let you answer this question, but it has blown my mind what I was missing before. Yeah. Yeah. So one, and here's a simple way to think about this. How many books do you think you've read in your life? A lot. I mean, I think that is the bedrock of our ability to think critically. So 100, 500,000 thousands. I don't know. Let's go somewhere around 500 probably at all.

I have time. I want you to think of all the pages across 500 bus every word on every page. What percent of that collective knowledge can you recall and apply right now? Not much of it specifically. I mean, it's it's it's baked in there somewhere. Yeah. But to call a specific line, very, very challenging. Here's my list. So those books are gone. Yeah. The way that we lead today, the way we grow businesses, the way we lead our personalized comes down to our ability to recall and apply. The minority of the information we've learned, which is the minority of the information of the world. That's how we are making decisions.

Now you look at these AI models. They have been trained on anywhere from 200 to 500 million books worth of data so far. Guess what percent it can recall and apply, Nick? In my experience, 100 percent. One hundred percent. How long does it take AI to read through 200 to 500 million books worth of data when you send it a prompt for your specific instance? It feels instantaneous. Under a second. This is why it's so different. Now, if you treat this like a Google that you ask questions to and get answers or if you're treating it like an assistant to help you write better emails, you aren't even scratching the surface because you're using it for all the things that really don't matter.

Nobody got promoted because they were the best email checker in their organization. But if you instead raise your standards for your relationship with this technology and start using it as a thought partner to elevate how you sync and you're able to tap into the information of the world and unlimited expertise instantaneously, you have superhuman abilities. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was really struck by the framework that you laid down and talked about using AI as a thought partner because they're really aligned with many other experts that I've spoken to recently on the show who were involved in creating these things in the first place.

And they often talked about how what blows their minds is that these intelligences that first of all, they refer to them as intelligences and that they're grown, not programmed. And he said, you've got to, I mean, Chris Summerfield was one of the people, he was one of the founders at DeepMind that Google eventually acquired and became the heartbeat of their AI program. And he said, you've got to shift how you're thinking about them in order to understand what's really possible. And then I feel like your book comes in with the specific tools on how to leverage those things in what you are doing.

Yes. So I have a very simple framework to engage AI as a thought partner called CRIT. CRIT stands for context, role, interview, task. Every prompt I write today adheres to that structure. I give AI lots of context about the situation. I assign it a role where I tell AI the kind of expert I wanted to act as for my use case. The real game changer though, Nick, is I don't ask AI questions. I turn the tables and I make AI interview me. I make it ask me questions to hold deeper context out of my head that I would have never thought to have proactively shared. And it takes all of that and then it can accomplish a task, which is whatever I wanted to do.

Here's a real use case. What is the biggest threat to your business? Wasn't even your competition. But instead it was how you were thinking. I'm sitting with a group of CEOs and I ask them all, what are the biggest problems that you're facing right now? Period. That if we could just solve them, it would unlock a new level of growth. One CEO looks at me and he goes, okay, I've got a really big problem. I run a manufacturing company here in the US. At least all this capital equipment from a company in Japan, things have really shifted in the market. The debt structure is now killing us. We are going to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured.

Nick I ask him. What have you done? And he goes, Jeff, I feel like I've tried everything. And he lists five very specific strategies he has deployed. None of them have worked because the company that holds the debt in Japan is publicly traded. It has gone all the way to the board and the board is flat out refusing to restructure it. Why? They think they'll lose face in Japanese society. He looks at me and goes, I have no next steps. We are going out of business. Do you think AI can help? Now, this is something that most people would never think that AI is the right tool for this situation. But this is where I realize let's engage it as a thought partner.

Here's the actual prompt I wrote. Context. I'm a manufacturing CEO. At least all this capital equipment from a company in Japan, things have shifted in the market. The debt structure is killing us. We're going to go bankrupt if we can't get it restructured. Here's the five strategies we've deployed. One, two, three, four, five. I listed each in vivid detail. None of it has worked because the company that holds the debt out of Japan is publicly traded. It's gone all the way to the board. They are refusing to restructure because they think they'll lose face in Japanese society. I have no next steps and I fear we're going out of business.

That was the context section. Role. Yeah. Your role is to act as an investment banker with deep expertise and restructuring debt. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time. Up to three questions to gain deeper context, then your task is to generate five non-obvious strategies I could deploy to get the board to restructure the debt. That's crit context role interview task. Now what happens next? The moment we send the prompt, AI reads through 200 to 500 million books worth of data to assimilate how an investment banker with deep expertise and restructuring debt who also understood 2000 years of Japanese culture and history would think and act turns the tables and asks, do you have any relationships with any influential executives in Japan that the board would respect?

I look at the CEO and he goes, whoa, what a great question. I would have never asked that. Oh my gosh. I actually do. Like bulb moment. AI asks two more questions like that and turns the tables and goes, here's your five non-obvious strategies. Number one on the list, the saving face consortium. It said you have enough relationships with all the right people in Japan. Why don't you just approach those people to acquire your debt, give them really favorable terms. You get restructured the board says face. Nick, I turn and I look at him. He's actually holding back tears and he very vulnerably admits to the other CEOs in the room, I have not slept in 90 days.

I have been making peace with the fact that we are going out of business, but in less than 10 minutes, I got hope to enslave our tax message from him and it said the ball is moving. I actually think this is going to get done. So the strategy worked. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I have and here's the thing. I've done this so many times now. If me or anybody on my training team, we're always doing keynote workshops. We will literally, this is part of it, we will ask the question to the entire audience, what's the biggest problem that you are facing right now that if we can solve it, it will unlock a new level of growth and we will pull a random person out of the audience that we have never met before.

We have no idea what they do. We have no idea what their problem is and we will bring them up on stage and write context, roll, interview, task into chat GPT or co-pilot. I don't care what model it works in all of them and we will literally say, tell me everything that I need to know about the problem and we will type everything or we'll use speech to text where it'll actually capture their voice at everything that they say about the situation. People, who's the ideal type of experts you want to advise you here and it doesn't have to be one? List a bunch while I want you to be this person and you have expertise in this and you've also done this and they'll just go crazy and then we'll type in, interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to three questions to gain deeper context, then your task is, my favorite task is, give me the top three high impact, none obvious strategies we could deploy to solve this problem.

But on stage, AI will interview this person, pull deeper context out of their head and solve their problem. It is remarkable. We have now done this at the highest, literally the C suite of Fortune 500 companies like brands, some of the biggest brands in the world. We've asked this question to the CEO. They have given us their biggest problem for a Fortune 10 and I will literally pull up AI and solve it in 10 minutes. Yeah, I like it because you've taken a corporate workshop and it's turning into an entertainment spectacle. Oh, yeah. It happens in real time. It's like a magic trick. It is a magic trick.

I did this with one CEO. It saved them $300 million in 10 minutes with chat GPT. Right. Right. Yeah, I speak to the framework. So I think it that crit again, context review, interview, context roll, interview tasks. Oh, yeah, sorry, context roll, interview tasks. I'm going to say it a few times so that everybody gets it. It's meeting this intelligence where it's at so it understands concretely what you want it to do. I was almost late getting over here because I was with the team. We're trying to whip up a thumbnail for an episode we're about to release and I normally check in with chat GPT on, hey, this is the idea we've got for the thumbnail and the title because we know everybody judges and book by its cover.

And if nobody likes that initial image and title, they don't ever check out the interview at all. And it normally is somewhat useful in that process. Sometimes the ideas are bad. Sometimes they're not so good. And it's mostly us doing the work and it's like a it's like an intern kind of help it us out. This morning, I think I started at 9 a.m. Maybe 8 a.m. It started with the context roll interview task and it is firing question after question at me. It's a completely different interaction. We drew up the thumbnail, sent it back to it. Now it's got more questions and more ideas. And I think they went through 15 iterations.

And when we got to the end of it and compared it to where we had began, which by the way, we thought was a really great thumbnail to begin with. It was drastically different. And everybody in the room agreed, wow, that was a really long process. But that is 10x better than what it was. Obviously, not as dramatic as solving the debt crisis for your company there. But it was just a use case that happened this morning. And it actually became the YouTube engagement expert that I had always dreamt that it might become. I just want to share that one from a first person perspective, like this framework really works and it will drastically change the way any listener interacts with the models.

Well, think about it this way. If you've ever been in a romantic relationship ever, you understand how important communication is in a relationship with another human. It's everything. If you do not communicate effectively, your relationship is terrible. Why do you need to be the same with AI? This is truly a relationship with the technology. And if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. If you put quality and you're going to get quality out. And the thing that has made crit so helpful for people and why the AI driven leader has just done so well as a book is because it gives you a simple framework to talk to AI.

If you just literally tell people, well, when before you even write the prompt, I literally write in all capital letters, context. And then I hold down shift and hit enter three times. So it skips lines. That's how you skip lines without sending the prompt. And then I'll type roll hold down shift, hit enter three times, interview, hold down shift, hit enter three times and then write task. Now you've got the high level structure in the context window. Now just go fill in the gaps context. What do I need to tell AI about this situation? All it has been trained on the information of the world. It does not know you, your business, your problem, your personal life, the way that you do every time you think you've given it enough, you have not given it, give it more and do that three times in the context section.

Like you're literally going to write a half page for the context section role. Tell AI the kind of expert you want it to be. And it doesn't have to be one person. Like I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about one I wrote this morning. I'm having dinner tonight with a CEO of a big company. We're talking about a strategic partnership. And I said, your role is to act as a world class business development expert and chief growth officer who's super power is structuring partnerships where one plus one doesn't just equal 11, it equals 100 and 11, where integrity and trust is at the foundation. And like literally I'm just going off the cuff.

So writing the type of expertise in vivid detail versus your role is to act as a marketing expert. I'm not doing that. I'm being vivid and detailed about this. And then interview asked me one question at a time up to three questions, game deeper context task, give me the top three high impact non obvious strategies I can deploy to get this partnership done. That was, I mean, that conversation back and forth, because I didn't just stop there. I mean, that probably was an half hour. Half hour. The quality of the output that I generated from that was remarkable. And here's where, so step one, if you only take one thing from this episode, start writing for it.

It'll change everything for you. When I get an answer, here's next level stuff. When I get an answer, Nick, most people think it's incredible. I'm going to tell you that's the bad answer. But I'm going to make your ceiling my floor. Yeah. I then immediately know that AI just used all my context to create something that sounds amazing. That's the bad answer. This is where you get in the driver's seat as the thought leader. You're the driver. It's the, it's just your thought partner. I tell AI, here's what I like about your response. Here's what I don't like about your response. Here's the top changes I want made your response.

Now revise it and it will take deeper context out of my head to take it to another level. I'm not done yet, Nick. When I say act as the person who's going to be watching this YouTube video that you were creating or act as the CEO I'm about to have dinner with. I'll describe them in vivid detail and then say, give me your feedback. What do you like about this? What do you not like about this? What are the top changes you want made to this? It will simulate my ideal customer and give me feedback from their perspective and make it better. Then my favorite, I did this this morning. I said, great. Now imagine I sit down with him and I have to walk him through this structure.

I can't make dinner. You're stepping in as Steve Jobs in my stead. I want you to lay out a one minute pitch that casts the vision and it's so damn compelling that it puts the release of the iPhone to shame. What it generated there was so moving. I actually emailed it to him. It was amazing. Yeah. Well, you mentioned communication is the bedrock of a good relationship. Yeah. I think that crit and getting it to ask you questions so that it has the context it needs to give you real substantial answers is like learning how to speak someone's love language. Some people want love showing to them through telling them that they are wonderful.

Some people want love showing to them by things that you do for them. Chad GPT wants you to show it love by using crit. This guy, one of the hidden values here of crit is not how it transforms your relationship with AI. It's how it transforms your communication with humans. I have realized it became so clear to me how my communication in the past, it was crystal clear in my mind. But what I was saying was as clear as mud. It's like, go do the thing. What saying? Versus, I know when I talk to humans, I literally think context. What context do I need to give them about the situation? Well, what role am I looking for them to play?

Interview. I want you to take a few minutes. Ask me probing questions to pull deeper context out of my head or to challenge different things. And based on all that, I then want you to do this accomplish this task. That's how I literally talk to humans now. It's transformative. Yeah. Well, and along the lines of learning something about yourself. So I don't know. This was a wild idea that you had and such an interesting one. AI board. Let's talk about the AI board and the idea of putting your future self on the AI board. Yes. So where this came from? I was working with a company. And the CEO said, we got a really big problem.

We are venture backed. We've been racing toward an exit. We never miss a number. Every quarter, we crush it. Every year, we crush it. Despite that, we have a hostile board. Every quarter is an absolute bloodbath. 50% of my executive team's time is wasted throughout the quarter with distractions from the board. The chairman just called me and said our relationship is so dysfunctional. He's going to give me six months to turn around. But by the second board meeting, I have not rehabbed the relationship. He's going to fire me, my whole executive team and bring in a new C suite. Yeah. And I asked him, what are you going to do?

And he goes, honestly, I have no idea. I swear it's not us. I swear it's them. It's like these guys have all this childhood trauma they've never healed and they think we're going to be punching bag. And then he asks me, do you think AI can help? And this is when I had this idea of an AI board. And I asked him, you know, can we get your exec team on zoom right now? And he goes, yeah, what do you have in mind? I said, well, I want to get AI to interview every, but your entire exec team about one board member until it understands that member on such a deep level that it can create a personality profile for them that we can embed into a custom GPT or project to create an AI board so we could feed the AI board your deck before the meeting and it could simulate everything the board would say before they ever say it.

Long story short, we built it. It worked totally. It transformed their relationship, saved their jobs. That got me thinking about myself. I don't have a board and you've all you've heard is lonely at the top. I went to AI one day and I wrote crit. I under context, I gave it my 10 year vision for the company. I gave it our business plan. I gave it our culture documents. I gave it my personality profiles. And I gave it context on what I was aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a CEO role. I had to act as an organizational psychologist whose world class and creating personality profiles who also is a world class board recruiter whose superpower is attracting board members with the skills that you don't have but need to get to where you want to go.

And I had an interview me asking me one question at a time to gain deeper context in the task. Was it had to tell me the strengths and weaknesses I have that I was unaware of that I needed to be aware of? And when it highlighted that I said, great, now give me the list of skills that you think I need to attract if I were to assemble a real board. And it gave me a list of skills that it thought I was missing that would be essential to get to my 10 year vision. I didn't agree with all of them. And so I shunted it down to the ones I agreed with and then said, great. Now do research on famous people who have exemplified these skills.

I'll review your list and then we'll build personality profiles for the ones I approve. For example, it knew that I needed one on vision, one on product design, one on storytelling. Well, there's one person who was a master of all three of those. Steve Jobs. Yeah. They knew that long term planning and risk mitigation was something I needed. They called out Warren Buffett. And then I realized what if I built a personality profile of my future self 30 years in the future so that the man I want to become could advise me today. And I literally have built these personality profiles and I have weekly conversations with my AI board.

The most strategic things that I am working on in our company, I bring to the AI board and it helps me see things that I don't see. I mean, recent one, I was asked a question a few months ago. What am I optimizing for? What's my end game with with AI leadership or company? Nick, I didn't have any answer. And I went to the AI board and wrote crit and it called out some stuff that I totally hadn't seen before, but that was truly right. I could basically said that you have resisted to be the product because you fear that if you become the product of the business, then your business becomes a prison.

And as a result, you're optimizing for scale. But what you're not seeing is that scale actually means complexity and complexity is not actually what you want. What you want is an elegant and simple business with high cash flow and high impact. And it totally repositioned the role that I could play as the face of the brand. And it actually transformed what my org chart is going to look like. It's transforming what our product offerings are going to look like. And it generated an output called GW's Endgame, Jeff Wood's Endgame. I've shared that with my executive assistant who has turned that into her AI, Jeff.

So she has conversations with as she architects how my calendar needs to shift so that my calendar is in alignment with the kind of business I want to optimize for. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is what you're looking for with a board of advisors. Correct. People who will ask the right questions that help you figure out where you want to go and how to get there. Yes. It's a wild hack to have Chad GPT or whatever your favorite battle is. Now let's fly up to 10,000 feet because I'm going to make an assumption here, which is for you who's watching this or listening to this, your head's probably spinning right now.

Yeah. I want to make this really simple for you. I'm only doing three things that are different from what most people are doing. I'm only three. Number one, I am identifying a 20% strategic use case. This is the 80 20 rule. 80% of the use cases for AI only drive 20% of the results. I call those distractions. Why are you going to waste your time majoring in the minors? I don't do that. I've built a career on asking leaders the right questions to focus on the things that matter most. I am picking. I'm not asking how do I write a better email. I'm asking how do I optimize, how do I get clarity on my end game so I make sure the business that I'm building is in alignment with the life I want to be living or how do I create an AI board custom augmented to my strengths and weaknesses to advise me to where I want to go or how can I build an AI health coach who's a blend of a nutritionist, a psychologist whose expertise is rewiring your identity with your longevity goals and a personal trainer.

I'm going to be doing 25 pounds in 90 days with that thing. I'm focusing on 20% priorities. That's step one. Step two, when I am aiming at the right target, I'm communicating effectively with crit. And third, when I get a result, I stay in the driver's seat as the thought leader. I do not trust what AI gives me. I don't blindly accept it and submit it as my work. I give it feedback. I tell it what I like about it. I tell it what I don't like about it. I tell it the top changes I want AI to make to it. And that updated draft, that's the best that I can do. Then I have it act as the challenger and have it stress test and find the insufficiency and make it better.

Then I have it act as my ideal customer and make it better. I mean, I literally get AI to adopt different personas to come at the work from different angles to elevate the quality. This is how I use AI. This is something you can do right now. That is a big problem that you are facing right now that matters. If you could solve it, it would unlock a material level of growth or impact for your life. Identify that, then open up your large language model of choice and write context, roll, interview, task, fill in the sections. And then when you get a result, you're going to be amazed. I'm going to tell you that's the bad answer.

Tell it be the thought leader. Tell it what you like. Tell it what you don't like. Tell it the top changes and then have it make it better. Then play the game. Can you do the follow up? Do you do crit again? So if you say that. No, at that point, it has so much context. I don't need another interview. This is also where you're learning how to wield a new tool. There are some times you'll gain a sense of when AI may not have enough context. I might later in the conversation go to, hey, do another interview. Ask me another three questions one at a time to gain deeper context over here. But I'm really thinking through, have I given it enough foundational context on the situation so that it can actually process it and take it to another level?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was struck in trying it myself on the level of detail it went into because I have before said, hey, if you're Warren Buffett, how would you respond to this financial situation? And in this framework, because I was trying to go through your playbook and create an AI board. And now when I was asking, he said, okay, let's build out the Warren Buffett piece of the board. Now it said, oh, do you want the early in his career Warren Buffett, who was a value investor? Or do you want when he met Charlie Munger and became a growth investor? Or do you want the latest version that's kind of this folksy wisdom type of Warren Buffett?

Or would you like a combination of all of these? And you would have never proactively said, I want you to be Warren Buffett and I want you to be 25% early Warren Buffett, 60% later Warren Buffett, or and then 15% most current Warren Buffett. And I want you to aggregate those person. You would never have thought to have spoken that way. No. You mentioned a personal or an executive assistant a little while ago. Oh, this is a game changer. Now, since most people are using AI like an assistant, what would you how would you advise any executive assistant out there who's like, man, look it around and just go on, I don't know if my job is going to be around very long.

One of the steps they take. So two answers to this one. Anytime somebody says, it's going to take my job or will it take my job? My initial response is what is your job? A job is just skills you apply and processes you follow. It's a formula. Job equals skills applied times processes followed. Technology is going to do what it's done throughout history. I literally studied every major technological disruption in history to find the patterns that we can learn from and apply in our leadership lessons today. Technology is going to make the value of certain skills and processes skyrocket. That's going to make the value of certain skills and processes plummet.

The skill and process of opening your email inbox and checking email and replying is a skill that is going to plummet in value. The skill of scheduling time on your calendar is going to plummet in value because AI agents will take that away. It doesn't take your job away. Your job just evolves to different skills and processes. So that's theoretical. Here's real world. Mary and Ella is my executive assistant. Nick, after being with me for four months, she was crushing it. Ten out of ten on every KPI that she had, which meant my goals for her were too small. She was already crushing them and eclipsing them time to raise the goals, time to create more opportunity.

Here's what I did. I said to her, I want you to use AI and write CRIT to cast a vision for how you can bring ten times to 100 times more value to the company. That was it. Now let's be clear. Before working with me, she knew how to spell AI. That was it. Yeah. She read my book. She sat in on one of the workshops. She learned how to write CRIT. That's it. She's not really have enough knowledge to run with this prompt. She comes back to me the next week and she goes, all right, I'm ready. I go with what? And she goes, my vision. I go, all right, let's go. And she goes, okay, for me to bring ten times more value to the company, here's the 20% things I'm currently doing that I need to double down on.

They can drive ten times more value if I give it more oxygen. Here's the list of all the things that I'm not currently doing that I think I need to start doing to bring ten times more value. And here's the list of all the things I'm currently doing that I need to stop doing. They will stop me from bringing ten times more value. And of those things, I've segmented them into three groups. Here's the list of things I should stop doing. They don't matter. We should kill them. Here's the list of things that I think AI can augment or automate so they still get done just not by me or a human. They get done by AI.

And here's the things that still need to be done by another human. Based on that, here's a job description that I have prepared for the assistant that I want to hire myself. Here's the 20% things they have to focus on. Here's their 90-day onboarding plan. And here's the research I've done on their compensation. And based on this, I'm recommending we pay them X. Do I have your approval? What? Yeah. I'm blown away. I approve it. I'm like, wait a go. Okay. What's next? And she goes, we're not done yet. What do you mean? She goes, that was for me to bring 10 times more value, Jeff. But that's not what you asked.

You asked for how can I bring 10 times two? A hundred times more value. And I sit back in my chair and I'm like, oh, this is going to be good. Yeah. And she goes, well, here's my realization. In order for me to bring a hundred times more valuable, more value, there's no way I can do that unless I make you 100 times more valuable. Here's the, here's the prompt I've architected so that AI will interview you, Jeff, to cast a vision for how you can bring a hundred times more value to the company. Yeah. Nick, I'm like, is it my birthday? I go, I can't wait to get this done. She goes, good, you'll do it now.

I'll wait. And she literally sits there on zoom and waits while AI interviews me for about 10 to 15 minutes. And it spits out a vision for how I can bring a hundred times more value. And it also created a system called Brightline Rules of rules that we would have to embed in the company to transform my time allocation so that I would deliver a hundred times more value. I look at her and I go, this is the most valuable prompt I have ever done. She goes, I'm glad you think that, but we have a problem. What's the problem? She goes, you, you love to break the rules. You just created rules and you're going to do everything you can to weasel out of them.

So here's another prompt I've architected where AI is going to interview you to identify every way you could try to wiggle out of these rules and it's going to create a defense process. So if you ever want to break one of your own rules, you're going to have to go through AI first and it's going to show you the economic impact of you violating your own rules. Whoa. So let's be clear. I still have an executive assistant, but her role has changed. I doubled her salary based on this. I promoted her. Her new title is executive multiplier because now her job is literally multiplying me. Oh, yeah, that's somebody who's not going to lose their job.

No, no. And here's, are there, is there going to be job displacement? I believe so. Throughout history, there was always job displacement. There was also new jobs created. Six out of 10 jobs that exist today did not exist in 1940. Now will that be the case with AI? I don't know. I don't focus on what I can't control though. You know what we can control is our mindset and I do believe that humans will still work in the future. I believe the skills we apply in the processes we follow will be different. Do I have a crystal ball where I can tell you what those things are? Not with perfect clarity. I have a sense.

But what matters is that you not resist this technology, but that you embrace it and that you become an AI driven leader where you can understand that you have human strengths. The machines cannot replicate that if you harness those strengths and you focus them on the 20% priorities of your role that are in alignment with the goals of the company. And then you figure out how to use AI to turn those strengths into superpowers. You can ask how can this replace me? I guarantee you can find an answer. You can also ask, how might this make me irreplace a bull? And I guarantee you can find the answers.

The difference is you have to ask the right questions. This episode of the next daily show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks. Zapier has always been the tool that fixes that. It connects over 8,000 apps, Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Gmail, MySpace, you name it, so your tools can finally play nice together. But here's the big shift. Zapier now lets you create AI agents with their chat GPT integration. Think of them as tireless teammates who never complain, never take lunch, never get bored of doing the boring stuff.

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So if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution and make a little automation magic of your own. By the Zapier Chat GPT integration using the link below. Yeah, because you've taken a executive assistant who had a traditional role, it sounds like. And now she is a leader within the company. And it seems like, oh, yeah, go ahead. Let me add one more dimension to this. She's actually a virtual assistant from South America. So when I say VA from South America, what immediately went through your mind? Not a leader in the company. A lot of people think of not that I should have not that I should have thought of that.

Right. But that there is a stigma that virtual assistants offshore are lower quality and cheap labor, just because they're born in a different country does not mean anything about their intelligence or their capability. I even know that because the gentleman who edits this show is in the Philippines and he is incredible. I couldn't find somebody better anywhere. And he just so happens to be an offshore virtual worker. But that is, yeah, the stigma still hit me. Do we have an opportunity to raise our expectations for ourselves and the people inside? Our world now that this technology is at our fingertips.

I like that. And by the way, I mean, I'm making the assumption that I'm sharing things that you've never thought of before when it comes to AI. I might be wrong on my B not. All you're seeing is me using AI to turn my strengths into superpowers. I have a super power of asking leaders the right questions to unlock new levels of growth. No wonder I wrote a book about how to use AI to ask you the right questions. It's an enhancement of me. I'm an incredibly strategic thinker. All of these use cases are incredibly strategic and creative. I'm also very creative. It's me just turning my strengths into superpowers.

Every single one of you watching this or listening this has strengths that make you you. That you may or may not even be harnessing in your day to day work. And this is a chance for you to go on a journey of rediscovering. Who are you? What makes you you? And how do you use AI to enhance you? Because it can never replace you. It might replace certain skills or certain processes you will remain. And for a lot of people, they're still going through their days acting like machines, checking email, bouncing from meeting to meeting, saying yes, when somebody asks, hey, you got a minute, you are literally acting like a worker on the assembly line going through your white color day.

Is that you actually actualizing who you are in your work? And isn't it interesting that maybe it'll be a machine that returns us to being human? Yeah, because you're not going to outrobot the robots. No, no, but we literally from the Industrial Revolution, were taught how to act like machines. We set aside our human strengths to learn how to show up to work on time, take direction from a boss, do something repetitively with minimal error, with maximum efficiency so you can make more money in one day live a good life. We stopped acting like humans and started acting like machines. That is how people are still acting today.

So this is an opportunity to reclaim our humanity, but what is required here is leadership. Realizing that this is not something you delegate to IT, this is not something that you wait to hire a consultant from the outside do it for you. You got to get into game. You got to become an AI driven leader, not an AI expert, an AI driven leader, meaning you just use the technology enough that you can cast vision for the future. You can define strategy for how you're going to win in your market and you can start to lead the change. Then you can look externally at what resources do you need to bring in house to take you the rest of the way.

Yeah, and you can. You need Tony can jump in and amplify their strengths through these tools. Along those lines of how people are conditioned in the workplace to act like machines, a lot of that comes back to our schooling system. What tweaks, if you could make some tweaks to how we learn and come up through the schooling system, would you make so that it's near oriented towards someone who will thrive in this new landscape? I have a lot to say all this. We have to go back in history. In 1900, we're in the middle of the industrial revolution. Factories are booming everywhere. And John D. Rockefeller is running standard oil.

He sees a huge problem. With all these factories, there was the need for factory workers. The problem is the kids coming out of school didn't have the skills that would be required to win in an industrial world. In 1902, he partners up with a guy to start something called the general education board. For 20 years, he invested $100 million with one purpose, to reshape the curriculum of public education so that kids coming out of school would have the skills required to win. What were those skills? Shoped to school on time. Take direction from a teacher so you can do something repetitively with minimal air, with maximum efficiency so you can get a good grade and one day get a good job so that you can do what?

Shoped to work on time. Take direction from a boss. Do something repetitively with minimal air, with maximum efficiency so you can make more money and one day live a good life. That is still the education system today. Yeah. All kids are being manufactured to act like industrial workers when we are no longer in the industrial revolution. It's broken. I support the idea of public education. I support the idea of teachers. I am a, I want to be a champion for it and we have to be willing to let go of the way things used to be and reimagine who we can become. Let's talk about the future, which is the present.

My kids are shifting school to an AI first school. Here's how it works. They are able to accomplish eight hours of learning of a traditional school day in two to three hours where they have a, an AI system that knows all the curriculum and instead of teaching you what the schedule said needed to be taught this week, it understands where are you and your skillset and let's meet you where you are at and work with you on the next building block and we don't move on until you've mastered that building block. They found that even kids who are straight A students in public education are usually actually three years behind because there are so many cracks in the system that the, the public education system just blasted them past.

So this will actually take you back to where you have the cracks and fill the cracks. You actually have a strong foundation. So you've got all your traditional learning around math science reading history done in two to three hours. What do you do the rest of the day? You focus on building the skills that will matter in the future. The ability to think creatively, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to think strategically. That's what they're going to do. That's what they're going to do. I heard this when I was a senior in college. I asked a CEO I was interning for what job should I get after school?

And he said, Jeff, you're asking the wrong question. You should be asking, what are the skills I can master that are so valuable they will serve me no matter where I go. It's not about the jobs. It's about the skills. Go find jobs that will help you build those skills. The future of education is teaching kids the skills that will matter in their future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. It kills my spirit. Just a year you describe the current educational system with the bell schedule and conditioning kids to... They just told my 12-year-old that she's three years behind in math. And you know what they did?

After they did that, they moved on to next week's curriculum. Right. And in a get-it, you're dealing with constraints. They don't have enough teachers, humans to go one-on-one to meet my child where she is at. AI can do that. I mean, we are maybe one to two years away from a world where AI can dynamically teach you any subject through any frame of interest. So example, there's one kid at this school who's obsessed with the idea of public speaking and another kid who's obsessed with the banking industry. Imagine it being able to teach any lesson to the kid who's obsessed with public speaking through the lens of a public speaker and the kid who's interested in the banking system, teaching it through the lens of the banking industry.

Like it being able just to meet you where you are at and adopt a certain persona and certain context so it meets you where you are at versus where the schedule says you should be. This is not fictitious. This is coming fast. Yeah. It's exciting. Yes. Because it's so silly when you've got a kid who wants to better themselves but isn't that interested in mass and okay, they're never going to go be an engineer and need to understand calculus to the point to put a rocket on the moon. And yet it's like, well, I got to take calculus because that shows everybody that I'm a sophisticated student and so these colleges will want me and they spend so much time and energy going down a path that's really just trying to make somebody or something else happy.

In fact, we could be amplifying their strengths and this is the tool that could help unlock that if we can let go of how things have been for a long time and lean into where they could go. Well, think about this way. If in school on a test, you collaborate with another person. What's that called? Cheating. But how do you actually win in the real world? Collaborating. It's collaboration. Exactly. There's a mass matching skills. My kid got an assignment. He had to pick a person that he thought was a hero and write a paper about why that person was a hero and had to answer very specific questions.

I said, great, let's use AI. I went on his computer and it was blocked by the school. I emailed the teacher and I said, hey, I want to understand what are the skills that you're hoping he's going to learn from this assignment. Here's why I'm asking. I wrote a book about AI. He is going to use AI. I noticed it was blocked on his school computer, so we're going to use mine. I'm being transparent with you, but I would need you to tell me what are the skills that you're hoping he's going to acquire through this exercise. That way I can make sure we honor those, but let's be clear. Your job as an educator is to prepare him to succeed in the real world.

AI is part of his future. He will use AI. I'm not asking. I'm telling you he will use AI and I will honor the skills that you think matters. Please reply with those. She was a team player. She was like, hey, I get it. We want him to be able to make a compelling argument. We want him to be able to express his thoughts in paragraph form. We want to make sure he has proper sentence structure and punctuation and all this stuff. I'm reviewing that. I'm going, okay. I agree with some of those skills and some of those skills. I don't think are going to be as valuable in the future. We used AI. We did not say write a paper on this.

We wrote context. My son was given this assignment. We drag and drop the assignment. He wants to choose the person who started YouTube. Here's why. He's literally talking to AI explaining why this person is a hero to him and how YouTube makes such a big impact in his life and how much he loves it and how much he learns. Roll. I said to him, who do you want to be your helper? He was like, I want this person to be my writer helper and I want them to be my research helper. Great. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time. Up to three questions to gain deeper context. Ask is to generate a draft of the paper and ask for my feedback so you don't do my work for me.

It generates a draft and then I taught him how do you give it feedback? Don't just blindly copy and paste. Tell it what you like about it. Tell it what you don't like it. I'm like, dude, do this sound like you? He was like, no, it said this. I would say this and said, great. Tell AI that. He's reacting to the draft and then getting it into his own words. That's the skill. It's not sitting there and typing every single word in the email or the paper. You are no longer the player of the instrument in the orchestra. You are the conductor waving the baton and moving an orchestra in a symphony. I'm teaching him how to wield the technology.

Yeah. Yeah. We went deep down the school rabbit hole. I told you. I told you. Yeah. Worms on out. What? It was a great candle open. It was that moment like for you when you first glimpsed what was possible. It was happening. What was going through your head? Yeah. I was the chief growth officer for a public company out of India. I was responsible for the growth of a group over about 100,000 people. I had called every executive leader across every operating company to Delhi, India, for an offsite where we were going to cast a vision for the future of leadership inside the group. It's the morning of the first offsite.

I'm sitting outside at a table with a bunch of my colleagues and the personal trainer to the chairman of the board leans over in a very thick Polish accent says, have you heard a chadgy petite? They did been out for less than two weeks. That's how early I saw it. I said, no. He wrote a prompt. When I saw what it did, I had a light bulb moment. I knew this was going to be something. At first, I had all the limiting beliefs, which is I'm really busy. I'll get to this later. I've got a huge IT department. I'll just delegate this to them. I'll just hire a consultant. I can hire McKinsey. I can hire a band.

I can hire anybody. We got capital. But then I thought back to that moment in college, what if this was the next skill worth the mastering? What if this would serve me no matter where I go? Nick, it was just it was like I struck the perfect court. I knew this was the future. Shouldn't I be a part of it? So I just made a commitment. I was going to use it once a day. The problem is I was asking myself the wrong questions. I was asking how do I use this to write a better email? It felt like a waste of time. I have built a career on asking leaders the right questions to get them to focus on the growth levers that will drive exponential growth.

It's a superpower. It was so clear. I'm sitting here asking AI questions. Why? Could I tune the tables and get it to ask me the right questions? One of my early use cases, I was flying to India. I met the chairman's house and I wrote a crit. This is really before crit was crit. And I said, here's our, attached to our annual plan and I drag and dropped our business plan into AI into a secure instance, meaning it wasn't going to train on the data. Role I had it act as an aggressive growth minded board member with deep expertise in the steel industry. Had it interview me, asked me one question at a time up to five questions to gain deeper context about where our plan was insufficient to deliver the results.

And the task was to tell me all the places the plan was insufficient and how we could plug the gaps in the next 30 days so that we would deliver to the public markets in our next earnings call. I did this in front of the chairman, Lice. And he looks at me and he goes, this is incredible. I go, yeah, it's the future. And he goes, I agree. And I said, I think we need to drive her through the whole company, like a hundred thousand people. He goes, I agree. And I said, I think this is so important. You got to own this as chairman of the board. And he goes, I disagree. How about you do it? One problem, Nick.

I know nothing about AI. I'm not a technical person. I'm a growth guy. But something I learned from an old business partner of mine named Gary Keller, he started Keller Williams. He said, anytime you're hitting a ceiling of achievement, you're just missing a person. If you're asking, how do I drive AI? Are you asking the right question? What advice did you ask? Who can I get into a relationship with that could enable me to drive it? And that led to a partnership with Google. I started flying to their headquarters every quarter in Delhi. I'm learning a lot about the tech and how it works. And as I started driving through the company, it just became so clear.

The technology is not the difference that makes the difference. You are. But nobody was talking about you and how you would have to evolve your thinking and your leadership to win in an AI driven world. And so that's what caused me to resign and write the age driven leader, which is now the number one book in the world for AI. That is an inspiring story right there. Here's just to put the nail in the coffin here. With that time, that was December of 23. We are now here in December of 25 as we record this. Two years ago was the first time I ever saw AI. Yeah. And two years and I'm not technical.

I don't know how to write a single line of code. I went from knowing nothing to being one of the global experts on it. Here's why this matters to you. Might it be possible that you are putting a ceiling over your possibilities? You have a sense of identity and you are shackling it to who you've been in the past, but your past does not determine your future. You're not technical. Good. You know nothing about AI. Awesome. Get in the driver's seat. Start to use this once a day, every day. Identify a 20% strategic use case. Communicate effectively with crit and when it gives you an answer, stay in the driver's seat as the thought leader.

Give it your feedback. Make it act as the challenger. Make it act as your ideal customer. And how to wield this technology and transform how you show up in what you do and what you will figure out is that AI cannot replace you. It can only enhance you. The question is who are you and who can you become? I love it. I love it. That is how we all need to be approaching us. Yosh. It works my friend. It's really been an honor to see the impact that this thing has made in a very short period of time. Well, I appreciate the impact you are making with the work you're doing, the book you've written. Anybody who wants to go deeper with this, the book is the AI driven leader by Jeff Woods.

There's going to be a link to it down there in the description along with well, and where else can people find you and learn more about you? Yeah. So there is a podcast. We have a season one out that is on YouTube as well as any podcast platform. Same name, the AI driven leader. We took six CEOs. And in one interview, we interview them about what their journey was like to become an AI driven leader. And in interview number two, you actually watch me live, ask them, what's the biggest problem that you are facing in your business right now that if we could solve it would unlock a new level of growth.

And I actually write, crit and solve their problem on the show so you can see just how accessible this is. That's another great place to go. Our website is ayeleadership.com. We've got a killer newsletter written for leaders who don't read emails. And we have an over 60 60% open rate because every week we are sharing a real case study and the actual prompt that was used just to get you going. Our whole business is around three things. We do training for executive teams and boards. We have an executive network called the collective. If you are a sea level leader of a mid market enterprise company, you're going through the greatest change in human history.

You're going to do it alone, or would you benefit being surrounded by other CEOs and CXOs who are driving this in their companies? So you get the short track. That's the collective. And then we have an advisory practice where we actually harness AI and embed it inside these companies to drive speed to alignment, speed to clarity, and overall increase the speed of the organization by embedding AI into it. Jeff Woods, thank you so much. This was a real pleasure. It's my pleasure, Nick. Thank you. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.