#565: Becoming the AI Driven Leader, with Geoff Woods (Remastered)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 5 65 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today we’re re-releasing a remastered version of Stephanie’s conversation with Geoff Woods about his book, the AI Driven Leader. We don’t generally re-release episodes so quickly after ones that we’ve done, but this one’s a little special. We’ve been sharing this one all over. We’ve been getting a lot of really, really good feedback on the depth of the conversation that Stephanie has been having in this with Geoff Woods. So we wanted to clean it up a little bit, create a little bit sharper of an intro, and then re-release it to everybody so they could listen to it again. I keep thinking about you’re going to get something new out of this, whether you’ve heard it before or whether this is new for you. This is one of those episodes that when you listen to it again, something else, there’s another aha moment. And so we thought it was important to remaster it and rerelease it.

Stephanie Everett:

That’s kind of the fun thing about these gen AI tools. I feel like almost every day that I use it, I have another aha moment where I’m like, cool, it can do this. I didn’t think about that. And it’s fun to approach these tools with a beginner’s mind that curious

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I get the idea that we, on this podcast, and I’ve actually had some feedback in our podcast meetings that we talk about AI a lot. We have been talking about AI a considerable amount, and in our podcasts, in our emails, in our articles, in our webinars, all those things that we put out there for people. But it’s important. We’ve been here before. We have been. We’ve been on the, Hey, this thing is changing for you lawyers before.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I mean, I was thinking back to when the company first started and Sam and Aaron were out there beating the drums of lawyers. You need to move to the cloud and you need to go paperless. When we started first talking about those ideas, that was crazy talk and people wanted to throw pins at us and say, why would I ever trust that cloud thing with my data? You crazy people.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Lawyerist was selling the scanner like hotcakes. People were going and getting the Fujitsu scan snap. That was the scanner that I got. That was one of the first introductions to lawyers and it, it seemed out there to people. Now it is table stakes for you, your office, law, practice management software, everything. You couldn’t imagine not being in the cloud, really.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, and I think that there will be a time where everyone’s going to look back at this moment and be like, oh yeah, that’s why you guys were pushing this narrative. But even more so I think our job is not just pushing the narrative, but really training and helping lawyers, the practical applications of these tools, which is

Zack Glaser:

Why

Stephanie Everett:

I’m excited about this conversation with Geoff, but also what we’re doing day in and day out with the people that we’re working with. We’re not just saying, Hey, this is a cool tool, you should use it. But we’re writing prompts now that we’re using inside of our sessions. I mean, I had a lawyer just tell me yesterday that over the weekend she rewrote 85% of her website copy based on the prompts and the work that we did together last week to identify her ideal client profile. And we’re really working on her whole business model and messaging inside the AI tools.

Zack Glaser:

That has been kind of the lawyer’s pedigree because again, going back to the, you should be going to the cloud, it would’ve been easy to just scream at people, you should go to the cloud, you should go to the cloud, you should go to the cloud. But we still have videos on our YouTube channel that do extremely well that talk about literally how to go paperless. And that’s where we are again with AI, is how do we use ai? Not just that you should not just that, Hey, you need to learn to be a prompt engineer or anything like that. One of the real reasons that I like this specific episode is because it gets into how to think about artificial intelligence as a helpful tool, but then specific ways to use it. So I really like this conversation, Stephanie.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I feel re-energized honestly in my work sometimes. I think we said once I read that every 10 or 12 years you kind of get tired of your job. Let’s just be honest. We probably all feel that at times where you’re like, I’ve been doing this for a while. I have this thing figured out

For me. The gen AI tools that we’re using now, they have just reignited me, excited me. And now like I said, I love getting in here and working with clients. This morning I had a breakfast where I sat one-on-one with a client and was like, how can we make your work easier? And let me show you how you can leverage these tools to do that. And it’s exciting and it’s important, and it is, I don’t know, groundbreaking. Yes, but I mean it is. It’s more fun. It’s a more fun way to work. Yes, you have to use the right tools for the right jobs, and I know all the pushback all the people are giving me are thinking right now.

Zack Glaser:

And

Stephanie Everett:

I would just say yes, and we have a solution for that. We can show you how to work around that. And I think if you give us a chance, the prompting, the way we approach the tool is very different. And I would just say that if anyone’s curious, that’s what we’re doing right now inside of our community and it’s super exciting.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Well, and you can always connect with our [email protected] pretty easily, but also [email protected]. Send us something saying, Hey, I heard your episode. I want to know more. That’d be great. Or anywhere on the socials. We’re on Instagram, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook, we’re everywhere. Well, without further ado, let’s jump into this episode. We’ve gotten everybody excited about it. Stephanie,

Geoff Woods:

I am Geoff Woods. I’m the author of the AI-driven leader and the founder of AI Leadership and the AI-driven Leadership

Stephanie Everett:

Collective. Hey, Geoff, welcome back to the show. It’s exciting to have you here to talk about your new book. I’ve got it right here. As everyone knows sticky noted up in your new book, you argue that leadership skills that got us here aren’t going to be enough to get us where we need to go. And I was hoping you could maybe kick it off by breaking that down and giving us some more background there.

Geoff Woods:

Sure. So chapter two of the AI driven leader, I found myself thinking when I was writing the book, we’ve been here before, this is not the first technological disruption in mankind. We’ve gone through this. And so I wanted to go backwards and look at history from the printing, press, steam engine, assembly line, electricity, internet, and figure out what were those patterns that were universal throughout all past technological disruptions that can actually guide us as leaders to move forward today. And what I found was that a job is nothing more than skills you apply and processes you follow. So if you think about in an algebraic formula, job equals skills, applied times, processes followed. There’s so many people who have fear that AI is going to take their job. I’m just going to quickly say, I don’t think AI will take your job. I think someone who’s AI driven will. I don’t believe AI replaces you. I think it enhances you in every technological disruption in history, technology changed the skills that we applied and the processes that we followed. At one time there was a group of people who were paid money to walk through the streets with fire and light lanterns of oil on fire to give light. Well, then the light bulb and electricity came along. That skill became irrelevant.

What happened to the person? They acquired new skills, they got different jobs. And my realization when I look forward is you may be with the same company in five years. You may still be a lawyer or an attorney in five years with the same firm. I promise you the skills you apply and the processes you follow, that will change. And so this is where we have to be in the driver’s seat as AI driven leaders and say, okay, how do I acquire skills that are so valuable? They’ll serve me no matter where I go.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I love it. And when you think about what those skills might look like, especially for our business owners, what kind of comes to the top of the list there that they may not be thinking about today?

Geoff Woods:

Well, at a high level, you have to realize that there are the things that are strengths of us as humans, and then there are the things that are strengths of machines. Who’s better at being a machine, a human or a machine? Machine a machine? The problem is most people today are acting like machines, and this started in the industrial revolution when we were taught in school to show up to school on time, take direction from a teacher, memorize a series of steps and do ’em as efficiently and as effectively as possible so you could get a good job so you could show it up to work on time, take direction from a boss and do something repetitively as efficiently and as effective as possible. We are still acting like industrial workers, which we had to set aside our humanity in the industrial revolution to meet the needs of the machine. I think AI is not the great disruptor. I think it’s the great liberator. It’s going to liberate and return us to what makes us us. I see five core skills that humans have that we need to double down on and harness the ability to think strategically, the ability to solve problems, the ability to communicate, to collaborate, and to create. These are all strengths we have as humans. Some of us harness them more than others.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, fair. And so then when we think about bringing AI into the conversation, I think most of us, probably many people I know that I talk to probably still think of AI as a tech tool, and I think you’re trying to reframe that thought that, I mean, it’s not about just creating blog ideas obviously can do that, and it’s not just about checking and editing your work. It really can transform you and be a thought leader for you, and I would love for you to explain that.

Geoff Woods:

Sure. Most people are using, and when we’re talking about AI in this conversation, we’re talking about generative AI like chat, GBT copilot, Claude Gemini perplexity. Most people are using AI one of two ways. They’re either using it like a Google, that they ask questions and get answers, or they’re treating it like an assistant that they can delegate tasks to help me write a better email. Do those ring value Stephanie? Sure they do, but I would say people are focusing on the 80% tasks that only drive 20% of the value. I have built a career on getting executives to move from tactical to strategic instead of focusing on the 80%, focusing on the 20% priorities that drive 80% of the results. So you can use AI to write a better email. You can use it to help you come up with social media copy. You can also use it to evaluate your strategic plan and interview you as an aggressive growth-minded board member and have it highlight the top three areas of insufficiency in your plan and how to plug the gap in the next 30 days. Now here’s something interesting. Do you have a business plan for your business this year? Do you currently have a process to review your business plan and make sure it is bulletproof and that it has absolute sufficiency to deliver the results?

Stephanie Everett:

I mean, I’m not going to give us a plus on that, but I’m also not going to give us an F and because I mean to be fair, because everyone on our leadership team has read this book and we’re adopting it, I can give you examples, but we now have our AI for the leadership teams named Finn. We named him Are it? We gave it Finn Carter and it now participates in our meetings like never before. So it’s review. So it’s doing that.

Geoff Woods:

So you’re down the strategic rabbit hole most people, which by the way, massive high five for you, Stephanie. That’s super cool. Most people would not have an answer to that question if I said, how many of you have an AI tool that can do that for you? Most people would say they don’t, but it’s a trick question every single one of them does because if you’re using chat GBT, so am I, the difference that makes the difference is not the technology, it’s the leader who harnesses it. People just haven’t realized that they can use this on a far more strategic level.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think a lot of times people kind of go in there, maybe they did ask it to write an email and said, this sounds like a robot and gave up, and really you got to work with it. I work with Lexi. That’s the name of my chat tool that we named it. It’s a daily conversation that I’m having and I go in there and because of some of what you taught us, I’m having conversations with this tool and I’m asking it to push me and challenge me and have me think differently and build and write and explore. And I think that’s what I was so excited to have you on for because this is a whole new way of thinking about using this tool. It’s unlocking so much.

Geoff Woods:

Yeah, so I’ll share a real use case from this morning in terms of how I use this, and again, folks, you and I, we have the same tool. We’re using the same thing. The difference is how we use it and it’s kind of like in a marriage, the better quality communication you have, the better quality of the relationship. You have to learn how to communicate effectively with ai. So the core of my business is an executive peer network called the AI driven leadership. So my vision, I think if you try to figure AI out alone, you’re going to lose. But if you can surround yourself with the right people, ask the right questions and tap into collective knowledge, you always stay ahead of the competition. So I’m assembling this network of execs where we share our knowledge on how we’re using it so that just we’re ahead of the curve. We have an opportunity to go global in the next 12 months.

This and I want to do it, but there’s something that’s giving me pause and this is a big strategic decision. Do we stay focused domestically or do we expand? And so I now understand the value of having a thought partner and I’ve turned AI into a world-class one. So I even went as far as assembling my own AI board of advisors. So I gave it my strengths and weaknesses as a founder and CEO and had it identify, I told it my 10 year goals and said, based on that, I want you to tell me the top strengths and skills I would want to recruit to a board if I were to assemble a board so that board could advise me to achieve my tenure vision. I then created personality profiles for those skills. So Steve Jobs is on my board for vision and product design, but he’s specifically not allowed to give me advice on being a husband, a father or a leader.

Warren Buffet’s on my board for long-term planning and risk mitigation. Geoff Bezos is on my board for operational scalability. My future self 30 years in the future is on my board so my future self can advise me today. So I built this board a while ago. This morning I went to the board and I said, Hey, here’s the situation. I’ve got this opportunity to expand to London to expand to Singapore, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s all my thoughts on why I want to say yes, but here’s my thoughts on the things that they’re giving me. Pause, I want you to figure out whoever on the board should ask the questions. It’s fine, but I want you to interview me, ask me one question at a time to really stress test my thinking as to why do I want to expand? What do I stand to gain if I do, but what do I also stand to lose if I do? And based on that, I want you then to outline the pros of expanding and the cons of expanding and then make a recommendation on what you think I should do and why. And then I had a conversation with it, literally actually talking to it back and forth while I walked around my neighborhood and this was a 20 minute long back and forth dialogue and it’s giving me real pause right now on expanding before it was like gungho. That is a strategic use case.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I mean that’s exciting. There’s a part of me as a business coach that is like everybody else. I’m like, okay, why will people? That’s a lot of what I do, but I still feel, I mean I’m still excited. I get to teach people how to think differently because I think that’s one of the things you stress is that thought process you went through is so hard, and that’s the piece taught us a lot of business owners struggle because no one actually taught them how to approach a problem in a strategic way or to even think strategically about their business.

Geoff Woods:

You ever read the book 10 x is easier than two x? Yeah. Okay, so I’ll summarize for people who haven’t. Dan Sullivan, here’s the high level. If you want to double your growth or double your income, you can keep doing 80% of what you currently do. You only have to change 20%, you can double, but if you want a 10 x your growth or 10 x your income, you have to stop doing 80% of what you currently do, hold onto the core 20% that brings the most value and move that balance 80% to a completely higher level of capability. Stephanie, the last 10 years of my life, I’ve been a coach or an advisor. I had clients, I asked the questions that was 80% of what I did, and when I figured out how to use AI as a thought partner, I realized I could train AI to ask every question that I have asked as a coach, if not better, once at first, that scared me a little because I was like,

Stephanie Everett:

Right, it’s going to take my job. That’s our thought.

Geoff Woods:

But this is when I realized the most powerful thing in the world is your mindset. You can choose to view this as a threat or you can choose to view it as an opportunity. Why is this happening to me versus why might this be happening for me? I chose to ask the second question and I realized here was an opportunity for me to 10 x, I could now release myself from 80% of what I’ve done historically, hold onto my core 20%, which are different skills and then move that 80% to a higher level of capability. I’m going to tell you the version of me that you’re talking to versus the version of me even just a year ago, not even in the same universe. Yeah,

Stephanie Everett:

No, same. And I appreciate you reminding us that because I feel like lawyers especially are feeling that threat right now of wait, these generative AI tools can give people advice or give people strategy or tell them the law, and that feels scary at first. I think that’s a natural reaction, but at the same time it’s that flip and how do we get excited about now what it’s going to unlock and how you can use this to really drive your business in a whole new direction.

Geoff Woods:

Sure. Well, once upon a time people were afraid of the internet and they really resisted it and now you’re like, you’d be crazy if you didn’t use the internet. That’s how AI is going to be as well. I have found most lawyers to be a little bit skeptical. Fair. I think that’s a good thing and being skeptical about this is great, and it’s not a justification to not start using the technology to actually gain some understanding of what this can and cannot do. It cannot do everything, but I think a lot of people are saying, well, AI can’t do what a lawyer can do maybe. How do you know? Have you tried? Have you figured out where you can use this to enhance what you do? I’ll give you an example. We got a mutual NDA sent over from a client and my assistant messaged me.

I was playing golf with a customer and she said, Hey, you need to review the MNDA and I said, no. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to pull it into ai and then my framework for 99% of the prompts is crit context, role interview task, CRIT. You give it lots of context, you assign it a role or an expertise you want it to have. Then you ask it to interview you by asking you one question at a time to gain deeper context so it can then accomplish the task. And I said, use crit for context. I want you to tell it the relationship with this client, feed it all the stuff about our business and tell it why they’re asking us to assign this thing roll ask it to act as our general counsel with deep expertise in NDAs. Ask it to interview us by asking one question at a time up to three questions to gain deeper context.

And then the task is to tell us the top areas that it would want us to double click on the language and specifically in terms of where it’s heavily slanted and if it doesn’t like the language to actually make suggested alternative language. This is my virtual assistant in Argentina. I sent this to while I’m playing golf, she does this and she comes back and it said, here’s the top three areas that it called out and it called out the sections. It said why it didn’t like the language and it made suggested language with the context of my business with that expertise. I then went in and reviewed that and found that it was actually correct. I then said, great, now have it turn that into an email that we will send to my actual attorney, but we want the attorney just to look specifically at those three areas, review the suggested language and see if they can make it any better.

And based on that draft the response, we collapsed the billable hours by 90%, folks, so this is where you can say what you want about this, but I’m telling you, the billable hour is dead because as a client, my tolerance to pay you to not use the tools at your disposal, that patience is officially gone. That statement could have either triggered you and turned you off or it could have just ignited a fire in you and motivated you actually has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with you. That tells you right there where you stand on the mindset curve and there’s no judgment in this statement. I want to raise your awareness to where do you naturally fall? You get to choose when you get on the horse and the bandwagon, but trust me, you will get on it.

Stephanie Everett:

The people listening have heard me beat this horse for quite a while, years, so this shouldn’t be new to them and it’s just more apparent now than ever that we’ve got to change our business model. So

Geoff Woods:

Yeah,

Stephanie Everett:

I agree.

Geoff Woods:

Can I give you another one? Can I give you another one? I’m in the process of putting together some partnership agreements and the business has value and I don’t want the people who are going to be coming in to get a tax liability, and so I wanted to figure out what the valuation of the business was. So context, role interview, task context. I’ve had a ton of context about the business, the current performance, revenue, profit, scale, assets role. I told it to act as an attorney who specializes in conducting valuations of businesses, had to interview me, ask one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context about the business, and then its task was to tell me what it thought the low end of the valuation was, what the high end of the valuation was and what it would settle on and why I did that while I was chopping onions, making dinner for my family. Once it gave me the valuation, I then said, great, now I want you to act as opposing counsel that my partner would hire, and they are so hard-nosed, they’re going to bulletproof everything and they are going to nickel and dime everything and make this valuation as low as possible as that person interview me and stress test every assumption and try to rip it, rip our argument to pieces and based on that, tell me what you think the valuation is.

I did that while I had moved on to chopping carrots. Then I had to act as a third person and say, now I want you just got the arguments of the person on my side, the person on their side. Based on this, your job is to find what you think is fair and balanced between the two. What would you come back at? Later that day I sat down with a friend of mine who owns a private equity company and I asked him for his help on how he would value my business. He literally said the number that the third person said. Same logic.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, and I love that example too of the audience knows, I do think there are certain tools trained in legal models that are a little bit more reliable than using chat GPT. So that’s my disclaimer for everyone, but the idea of stress testing your arguments and your analysis, how would this play to a jury? There’s so many different ways we can use these AI tools that we’re just scratching the surface on and people are thinking about.

Geoff Woods:

So let’s go there. I have done this for role playing a sales pitch, which is all closing arguments are you could totally context, role interview, task context, I need to practice my closing argument for this case. Your role is to act as a member of the jury. In hearing this, I’m going to give you the full pitch and when I say all done, know that I’ve concluded my closing arguments and then as the jury, I want you to give me feedback on what I did well, what I did not do well and the top changes I could make so that I could be even more influential and make sure that I win the case. And then you could flip it to voice mode and literally give the closing argument. This could be a 10 minute long monologue and then you say all done, and it will literally summarize and give you feedback.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I mean then here’s the beauty of this thing for everyone listening, you keep going with it. So then from there my head flips to now I want to say, okay, based on this, what quality should I be looking for when I’m picking a jury? Who do I want not to be on my jury? It’s not that you just ask it a question and get a response. You have this ongoing conversation where you just kind of keep building. And to me that’s so fun.

Geoff Woods:

You nailed it. And here’s the thing. We’ve all experienced in real life having a thought partner. Maybe you were standing in front of a whiteboard where you’re like, Hey, I got this idea, and the other person was like, yeah, and what if you did this? And you were like, oh my gosh, that’s a great idea. What if I did this and all of a sudden one plus one equal to 11. We all understand that when you surround yourself with the right people, you can expand what’s possible. It’s the same thing with ai. Now you just have it at your fingertips or voice where you now have a thought partner that if you know how to communicate with it, if you know how to set up the prompt correctly, you can unlock a new level of possibility. And I’ve literally given you the framework for it. Context role, interview task. You do that, you’re going to blast past 99% of the people in the world using this technology.

Stephanie Everett:

I love it. For the folks who are still maybe new to using it, what would you say is the first habit they should build into their routine? If they’re ready, they’re listening, they’re like, okay, this sounds good guys, but where do I start?

Geoff Woods:

You have to learn to ask the right questions. Most people are asking themselves, how can I do this? My encouragement is to start asking how can AI help me do this? And the smallest domino I can give you to knock down, I want you to grab a sticky note and a sharpie and literally write, how can AI help me do this? I’m literally holding it up to the camera for Stephanie to see. This sticky note has been on my desk for two years, by the way, and the reason adopting AI is not your goal. Every person listening to this already has way too much to do and not enough time. So I’m not giving you another thing to do. I’m giving a better way to do what you’re already doing. So for me, I literally practice what I teach. This sticky note is right here on my desk and next to it is one more sticky note that says context, role, interview task.

And then I’ll be doing my normal work and I will naturally glance down and see the neon green sticky note that says, how can AI help me do this? And in that moment I go, what am I doing? I’m reviewing my financial statements. How can AI help me review my financial statements? I have no clue. But then I see the other sticky note context role interview task. This is a real use case. So I open chat GBT. Now I have a version of chat GBT that does not train on my data, so I feel comfortable doing the use case. I’m about to explain context. Here’s my financial statements, and I dragged and dropped my financial statements into chat GBT role. You’re a strategic CFO, who’s world-class at telling the CEO, the top five non-obvious insights about their business based on their financials that they probably don’t know about their business that they should know about their business interview.

Interview me, ask me one question at a time, up to five questions to gain deeper context task. Then your task is to tell me the top five non-obvious insights I should know about my business. And I hit enter in two seconds, Stephanie, it had read my balance sheet, my income statement and my cashflow statement and started asking me questions. And after a few minutes of it asking me questions and me giving it answers, it said, great, here’s your top five non-obvious insights. And it called out some amazing stuff and I went, oh my gosh, I’m doing this every month now. That literally happened because I had a sticky note on my desk. So the simplest thing that somebody can do is put that sticky note on their desk because that will create the habit of you asking a better question.

Stephanie Everett:

I love it and I think it’s great advice and like I said, once you kind of open this door and get really curious, I think it just keeps flowing. Now when I have a problem, I mean based on your book and the prompts in your book, if I have a problem, I just go to my chat and open it up and I also have one that doesn’t train all my information and I’m like, here’s the problem I’m having and using that format and it just takes me through a whole process that then helps me figure out how I can next approach that problem. I do it.

Geoff Woods:

Which are you using?

Stephanie Everett:

Which what?

Geoff Woods:

AI models.

Stephanie Everett:

Oh, primarily chat. GPT is my favorite. I’ve been using it the longest. I sometimes then flip into perplexity. I kind bounce around and will sometimes just use different tools to do different things.

Geoff Woods:

Now are you doing a pro account at 20 a month or are you doing the Chay GBT teams?

Stephanie Everett:

We have teams.

Geoff Woods:

Okay, cool. So I’m speaking over people’s heads chat. GBT is one of these models. If you’re using a free version of chat, GBT, it’s training on your data. If you are meaning anything you put into it hypothetically could go out into the ethos. Doesn’t mean it will. If you’re paying 20 bucks a month for a pro account, it is still training on your data, but you can go into the settings and the data controls and turn off, improve the model. You can turn that off. It will no longer train on your data. But if you upgrade to a chat GPT teams account, which is 30 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month annualized it now establishes an instance for your company where its terms of ServiceNow state, it does not train on your data by default. Now you get to ask the question, is that sufficient enough for you? For some companies, they’re like, I don’t trust that company. That’s not good enough. Fine. Then go an enterprise account where you’re pulling chat GPT into your own Microsoft Azure or AWS instance and you have an IT team that can protect the security around it. Most people listening to this podcast, I’m going to assume are not going to do this. So chat GBT teams becomes a good

Stephanie Everett:

Option. And for the folks wondering, some of the advice that we’ve been giving is because of the ability for workers to come in and if certain content can flag a personal review, even if you’re in chat and it gets locked down. So you just got to be careful with privilege and confidential. I mean lawyers obviously, we have so many different duties to protect attorney-client privilege and confidentiality. You can still use the tools, but you just need to be extra sensitive about your settings and what you’ve got set up. And there are some legal specific tools that you can also use that have those protections built in because they know that we have to protect against that. Obviously the work I’m doing is not privileged and I’m using it to help train my sales team. I’m okay, but it’s a good reminder for everyone when we’re using these different tools.

Geoff Woods:

But think of me, I understand that side. I’m asking will attorneys use Google Drive to store docs on a client or where do they store the information?

Stephanie Everett:

They will, but we also advise, that’s part of what we try to teach them is why Dropbox and these type of tools. You got to just, we have whole things on data security that are not my expertise. That’s why I have Zach and other people on the team that can do that. I know enough to be dangerous and to tell people, Hey, go check that

Geoff Woods:

There’s inherent risk in using the technology. There’s biases. It makes things up. It’s called a hallucination. You got to fact check things. There’s also risk to not using it. And the risk of inaction, I’m going to tell you is significant. A quote that used to be written on my whiteboard in Sharpie was What’s the business that will put you out of business? How can you build it first? I have asked that question for the last decade and I would encourage you to ask it. I’m not saying you’re going to be put out of business, but I’m asking you to ask what would be the firm that could put us out of business? What would they look like and what does it look like for me to build it first? Based on that, you get to decide are you going to make any changes or not? There are some people, there are absolutely people in the legal profession that I know are taking massive action on this, that view this as an opportunity to create a disruptive model that’s way more valuable to clients, deliver a higher level of service in a fraction of the time. And I know plenty of attorneys that are absolutely resisting this right now, and that’s okay. They get to choose. I just personally focus on the people that are getting into the action.

Stephanie Everett:

I think that’s a great reminder and if people want to learn more, obviously I think the book is so approachable. It’s an easy read. Like I said, we’ve required everyone on our leadership team, all of our team leads actually across the organization have this book and have been reading it and using it. It’s not just about obviously reading it. You’ve got to actually go apply it. It’s caused us, we’re really, I don’t know what the right word is, tripling down on AI on our team and how we’re going to help lawyers use it. We think this is so critical. So I would recommend the book to everyone. Any other resources you want to shout out if people are curious?

Geoff Woods:

No, I appreciate that. So the book is called The AI Driven Leader. Get it on Amazon. If you’re an audible person or a Kindle person, it’s available there as well. It is me reading the actual audio book, but I would strongly encourage the physical as well. There’s pictures in there, there’s actual prompts, like visual prompts that you can just apply right there. And I also created an AI thought partner, so my own AI agent that has been trained on the book to be me. So you can literally have conversations with me as the author about the book in terms of how to drive it through the AI model. And then our website is ai leadership.com. From there, I would strongly encourage you to get on the newsletter. I write emails for executives that don’t read email and every week we share a story of a real exec and how they used AI strategically and the actual prompt that they used just to expand your mind in terms of what’s possible.

I think you would get a lot of value from that. And then you can learn more about the workshops we do. And then I mentioned the core of our business is that executive network, the AI driven leadership collective. If you are a partner or a C-level executive who you don’t need to be the AI expert and that’s not your goal, by the way, but you need to understand that you cannot delegate vision, you cannot delegate your strategy and you cannot delegate your leadership. And if you want to learn how you actually think strategically and lead your company in a world that’s AI driven, I would encourage you to check out the collective.

Stephanie Everett:

Awesome. Thanks for being with me today, Geoff. This has been amazing.

Geoff Woods:

Thanks for having me, Stephanie. I really appreciate it.

Continue Reading