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@ Mr Meadow
2025-04-14 00:28:18There’s no shortage of hype around AI. But beneath the buzzwords, Geoff Woods lays out something much more grounded—and frankly, more useful—on his recent appearance on The What Is Money Show. Geoff, who wrote The AI Driven Leader, isn’t here to pitch you a prompt template or a new tool. He’s here to talk about leadership, responsibility, and how to actually get value from AI.
His argument is simple: AI is no longer optional. It's a leadership imperative. And yet, despite nearly every executive claiming to believe in its future, less than 5% are doing anything meaningful with it. Geoff’s take? If you’re delegating AI to the tech team, you’re missing the point. This is about vision, strategy, and leading your people into a new era.
But here’s the rub: you don’t need to become an AI expert. You just need to become what Geoff calls an AI-driven leader—someone who knows how to spot valuable use cases, communicate clearly with AI, and stay in the driver’s seat as the thought leader. It’s not about handing off decisions to a machine. It’s about using the machine to sharpen your thinking.
To do that, Geoff leans on a framework he calls CRIT: Context, Role, Interview, Task. It’s dead simple and wildly effective.
CRIT Framework: Geoff’s Go-To Prompting System
Write every AI prompt using:
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Context – the background situation
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Role – what persona you want AI to take (e.g., CFO, board member, therapist)
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Interview – have AI ask you questions to pull deeper insights
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Task – what you want AI to do after collecting enough context
Give the AI rich context, assign it a role (board member, CFO, therapist—whatever you need), have it interview you to pull out what’s really going on in your head, and then define the task you want it to execute. That flip—getting the AI to interview you—is the difference between mediocre results and strategic breakthroughs.
He shared some standout examples:
- Using AI as a simulated board to test strategy decks and predict which slides will blow up in a real meeting.
- Having AI draft executive emails in a tone blend of your own voice, plus a dash of Simon Sinek and David Goggins.
- Creating AI-generated personas of your kids’ strengths to show them how to use tech to deepen—not replace—their humanity.
That last point matters. Geoff’s raising his own kids to be AI-native, but not tech-addicted. His daughter used AI to explore business ideas. His son used it to work through emotional challenges. In both cases, the tool was secondary. The focus was helping them grow into more aware, capable versions of themselves.
He’s honest about AI’s limitations too. It hallucinates. It’s bad at math. It can’t replace deep human judgment. But if you use it right—if you treat it like a thought partner instead of a magic 8-ball—it becomes an amplifier.
Geoff’s challenge to all of us is to stop anchoring our identity to who we’ve been, and start leaning into who we could become. Whether you’re running a company, managing a classroom, or figuring out your next move, the opportunity is the same: use AI to 10x the things that make you most human.
And it all starts with one sticky note: How can AI help me do this?
If you’re interested in diving deeper, check out aileadership.com or pick up his book The AI Driven Leader. But more importantly, start experimenting. Get your reps in. Think bigger.
Because a year from now, the version of you that’s already doing this work? They’re going to be very hard to compete with.
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