1: Author and entrepreneur Geoff Woods was a senior in college.
“I was interning at a startup technology company, and I asked the CEO what job I should get after graduation,” Geoff Woods writes in The AI-Driven Leader.
The CEO paused for a moment and looked at him.
“Geoff, 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? And what jobs can help me develop those skills?'”
Reflecting back, Geoff believes it was the best career advice he’s ever received.
2: Fast forward to 15 years later. Geoff was the Chief Growth Officer of Jindal Steel & Power (JSP), a global steel powerhouse out of India with a market valuation of $12 billion.
“It was on one of my quarterly trips to India that I first discovered AI” shortly after its launch.
“When I saw it, the question from my senior year in college began echoing in my head,” he remembers: ‘What are the skills I can master that are so valuable they will serve me no matter where I go?'”
Geoff set a goal to master AI and drive it through the JSP.
“The more I began to understand it, the more confident I was that this was the future,” he recalls. “Eventually, I had a conversation with company Chairman Naveen Jindal, where I said just that: ‘This is the future. As chairman, you need to own this at the board level so we can drive it through all our companies.’
“He looked at me and asked, ‘Why don’t you do it for me?'”
Geoff got to work. He asked, “What might it look like to drive AI throughout our business and 100,000 people?”
With time, he began asking himself a simple question: “Instead of asking, ‘How might I do this?’ I started asking, ‘How might AI help me do this?'”
He embraced this mindset and began learning to communicate with AI, accelerating his progress.
“It started delivering better results in less time,” Geoff writes. “It was like a flywheel started spinning faster and faster. Suddenly AI was enhancing my decision-making and strengthening my ability to navigate complex challenges.”
Once Geoff experienced AI’s power, he began focusing on the company’s operations. “Every quarter while I was in Delhi, I traveled to the Google headquarters to sit down with their team, reviewing use cases and tuning models. I felt like I was seeing the future.”
3: He then had an epiphany: “I realized the simple path to go from 0 to 1 with AI wasn’t weaving it into products or services or boosting operational efficiency. . .
“It was putting AI in the hands of leaders,” he explains, “so they could experience its incredible value firsthand.”
Because once a leader experiences AI’s potential, they can then champion its adoption throughout their company.
The power of AI is not in writing a better email.
The power is in using AI to enhance strategic thinking and decision-making.
“Now, that’s a game changer!” Geoff writes. Which is where his idea for AI Leadership was born.
“Eventually, my entrepreneurial spirit called me to pursue it full time,” he writes. “After a conversation with Mr. Jindal, I resigned from my role as chief growth officer to start AI Leadership, an organization that empowers ambitious leaders to harness AI, escape operational overwhelm, and think strategically to accelerate growth.”
When we as thought leaders embrace AI as a thought partner, we shift from operational to strategic thinking and unleash AI’s power to achieve high-impact priorities with superhuman abilities.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How can I shift my mindset to see AI not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a thought partner that amplifies my strategic thinking and decision-making?
Action: Experiment with using AI as a thought partner this week by assigning it a real business challenge and prompting it for strategic insights, then reflect on how it changes my approach and results.
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