At the 2025 Marketing AI Institute Conference, I was lucky enough to hear Geoff Woods speak about how to collaborate with AI to become a better leader. As the bestselling author of The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions and the founder of consulting firm AI Leadership, he would know. In his keynote, he spoke about the various ways he’s used AI to help business leaders. For example, he once helped a CEO avoid bankruptcy by strategizing with AI—after five previous plans failed. Between sharing his experiences, he created custom GPTs live on stage. He ended his talk with a persuasive call for us to think differently about the meaning of our work. 

According to Woods, AI’s real opportunity comes from its ability to be a strategic thought partner, so long as humans stay in the driver’s seat. In our chat, we discuss people’s fears about AI, what might be holding leaders back, how Woods personally uses AI to achieve his goals, and what he tells his kids about this new technology. He also shares his framework for creating prompts that can help leaders in any field use AI to drive better results for their organizations. 

You’ve said that for a guy who wrote a book on it, you don’t really care that much about AI. So what prompted you to write the book?

I care about people achieving their goals personally and professionally. With AI, you can ask, “How does this help me achieve my goals? How might AI distract me from achieving my goals?”—and you can find answers to those questions. Your goal is not AI adoption; your goal is to create a better business and to live a better life.

What prompted me to write the book was seeing that leaders around the world—without realizing it—were making AI adoption their goal when it's not. Everybody was talking about the tech, but the tech is not the difference that makes the difference. It is you as a leader and how you wield it that makes the difference. It's not about AI. It's strategy first, technology second. 

When prompting AI, you specifically ask for “high-impact, non-obvious” responses. What are the high-impact, non-obvious ways people, especially leaders, should be using AI?

The best high-impact, non-obvious use case is to engage AI as a thought partner, with you as the thought leader. Your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business. Your thinking drives your actions; your actions drive your results. If you want to achieve different results in your life, you have to shift your actions, and that starts by shifting how you think.

But how do you shift how you think? It comes down to asking the right questions. The problem is most people don't know how to do that. In school, we were taught to have the answer, not to ask the right question. If you engage AI as a thought partner—if you make it AI's job to use all the data that it's been trained on to ask you the right questions—it will automatically elevate how you think. 

In your book, you share a simple but effective starting point for creating successful AI prompts. Can you give a brief breakdown of the CRIT™ framework? 

CRIT™ stands for Context, Role, Interview, Task.

Context means you give AI lots of context about your situation. While AI is trained on all the knowledge of the world, it does not know you or your business the way that you do. This is not a simple Google search. You've got to give it the context.

Role is where you tell AI the kind of expert you want it to become. Because AI has access to so much expertise, it can become a chief marketing officer, your ideal customer, or an aggressive, growth-minded board member with deep expertise in your industry—whatever you want, it can do it. You just have to be clear on what role(s) you want it to play. 

Interview is the most profound part of CRIT™. I don't ask AI questions. I turn the tables and I make AI interview me by asking me one question at a time—to pull deeper context out of my head that I would have never thought to share. That then sets up the large language model to complete the task.

Task is simply whatever you want AI to do. These four steps will get you stronger answers every time. 

You write about a CEO who used AI to improve his standing with a hostile board of directors. Are there similar ways AI might help K-12 leaders have better relationships with board members?

In sports, you practice before the game so you learn how to make the best play. But when you talk about relationships with a board in an educational environment, where's your practice? How do you prepare to show up and play with a board that can sometimes be contentious?

With a prompt framework as simple as CRIT™, that preparation is entirely possible. Give AI context about a board member. Assign it the role of an HR professional with deep expertise in creating personality profiles. Have it interview you by asking one question at a time—up to five questions—to gain even deeper context. Assign it the task of creating a personality profile for that person.

Now you can say, “Simulate that person, and I want to practice having a conversation with you.” You can put AI into voice mode—so you can actually talk to it and it can talk back to you. Once the conversation is over, you can say, “I want you to give me feedback on what I did well, what I didn't do well and the top changes I could make in the real conversation to be more influential with them.” You could probably build that in ChatGPT right now, in under 10 minutes. 

Speaking of boards, you created your own AI-generated advisory board populated by personas of famous figures. How did you choose your board members and what do they help you achieve?

I went to AI and used CRIT™ to give it lots of context: about my 10-year goals, my current business plan, my strengths and weaknesses, and deeper context about my company. Then I had AI interview me to help me discover strengths and weaknesses that I wasn’t even aware of. 

Based on that, I had it identify the skills that I would want to attract to an advisory board if I were to assemble one. It gave me a list, which I then reviewed—I didn't blindly trust it. Then I narrowed it down to the ones I thought mattered most to have on my board and asked AI to research famous people, alive or dead, who exemplified those skills.

As a result, Steve Jobs is now on my board for vision, product design and storytelling. But he's not allowed to give me advice on being a husband, a father or a leader. Warren Buffett is on my board for long-term planning and risk mitigation. A version of myself 30 years from now is also on my board—so I can have a conversation with the man I want to become.

If AI really has the potential to be so many things—a thought partner, a coach, a sounding board, a strategist, a mentor—why are so many leaders still resisting it?

When I interviewed over 200 executives for my book, 100% of them said AI was the future; 100% of them said they would adopt it. However, less than 5% had done anything with it at that point. When I peeled back the onion to find out why, it was because they didn't know where to start.

These leaders are so busy. They already have too much to do and not enough time. No one has shown them a simple, impactful way to use AI. Using AI to write a better email is not valuable. Using it as a Google search is not valuable. This is why The AI-Driven Leader has become so popular—because it shows leaders how to use this as a thought partner. It should be a top 20% priority that drives 80% of the results. 

What would you say to people who are worried that AI is coming for their jobs?

I would ask them: What is a job? You can look at it as an algebraic formula: Job = (Skills Applied) x (Processes Followed). Technology is going to do what technology has done throughout history. It's going to make certain skills more valuable and others less valuable.

None of us were born knowing the skills required to do our jobs. Six out of 10 jobs that exist today didn't even exist in 1940. You may be with the same company five years from now and have the same title, but I promise you the skills you’ll apply and the processes you’ll follow will be different.

Here's the good news: One thing that's unique to us as humans is the ability to learn, to grow and to evolve. So this is an opportunity to tap into what actually makes us human. What are the skills that are going to be so valuable that they will serve me no matter where I go? How do I start developing those skills so that my future is bigger than my past? I believe those come down to the ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate, to create.

You’re not just a leadership expert; you’re also a parent. What do you teach your children about AI? Do you have rules or boundaries that you think schools might learn from? 

I have three kids, ages 12, 9 and 3. My 12-year-old, Daphne, recently asked me what job she should get when she grows up. Instead, I suggested that she ask AI what skills are so valuable that they will serve her no matter where she goes. 

Using CRIT™, we put in context about her passions, the things she thought she was good at, and the things she thought she wasn't good at or that she didn't like. She assigned AI the role of an expert career coach to help her identify skills she should focus on developing, especially in an AI-driven world.

We had it interview her by asking up to five questions, one question at a time, to gain deeper context. Then the task was to lay out what skills Daphne could focus on and how they might apply to career opportunities. It found communication would become even more important—particularly the ability to speak in public—and suggested she join me onstage sometime to practice. So now Daphne will come open up for me when I speak, and she will give a three-minute keynote in front of hundreds of C-level executives.

When Daphne talked to AI for the first time, I found myself wondering, How do I know what this model has been trained on and if it aligns with our values? She was blindly trusting the answer. How do I teach her to be discerning and to challenge what AI is giving her, whether it's factual or a hallucination? How might I help her to understand that the real richness in life comes from relationships with humans? But also how to have a relationship with machines, because that is our future? 

We can’t blindly trust AI. We have to wonder what biases it might have because of the data it's been trained on. When it gives us answers, we have to ask it to cite its sources and fact-check it to make sure that it's real. We can’t outsource our thinking. We need to view it as another opinion and then ask ourselves what we think about it—so that it actually enhances our cognitive ability rather than undermines it. These are the conversations I'm having with my kids.