Jul 15, 2026 · 1h 5m · bigdeal
How to Use AI to Make Money, Grow Your Business, and Be More Productive | Geoff Woods
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Author and executive advisor Geoff Woods joins Codie Sanchez to break down his signature CRIT framework, demonstrating how leaders can move beyond basic prompt engineering to use artificial intelligence as a strategic thought partner. Through real-world case studies and the 80/20 principle, the discussion outlines practical methods for simulating high-stakes business scenarios, automating complex workflows, and elevating human leadership.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Codie holds 23.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Codie as informed peer 4.6 Guest teaching 6.2 Guest disagreement 1.8 Codie pushing back 1.8
speaking balance: gold is Codie, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 25:25 Geoff dismisses agent mania as pure BS
Geoff forcefully challenges the prevailing online narrative that people need dozens of autonomous agents, calling it a distraction and declaring claims of effortless agent wealth to be complete nonsense.
Hardest push from Codie ▶ 55:27 Codie pushes back on single-tool simplicityWhen Geoff names Claude as the single broad-based answer for 2026, Codie directly refuses the framing and argues that ChatGPT provides distinctly better short-prompt image output without forced stylistic templates.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:07 Geoff explains simulating hostile board dynamicsGeoff walks through the exact mechanics of feeding executive interview answers into customized personality profiles, showing how strategic prompt architecture can anticipate hostile meeting dynamics in seconds.
Codie holds their own ▶ 1:02:46 Codie outlines their custom Avoma sales coaching pipelineCodie demonstrates superior hands-on enterprise technical execution by explaining how her team feeds Avoma transcription data into real-time voice-triggered coaching bots to turn struggling reps into top closers.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Codie as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Codie pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Case Study: Simulating a Hostile Board with AI | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Codie asks Geoff for a concrete, jaw-dropping case study of high-level AI usage. Geoff details how his team simulated a hostile board of directors using HR profiling and quarterly board deck transcripts to coach a CEO. | |
| The CRIT Framework for Strategic AI Prompting | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | When Codie asks for a rapid-fire list of use cases, Geoff redirects focus to the single framework delivering 80% of value: CRIT (Context, Role, Interview, Task). Geoff breaks down why making the AI interview the user unlocks deeper strategic context. | |
| Eliminating AI Slop and the 80/20 Principle | 6 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Codie introduces the concept of AI slop and shares an anecdote about a job candidate disqualified for submitting a generic ChatGPT brief. Geoff connects this to the 80/20 rule, explaining that treating AI like a search engine wastes its strategic potential. | |
| Case Study: Saving a Company 300 Million Dollars | 1 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Codie listens as Geoff recounts saving a US manufacturing company $300 million by using ChatGPT to roleplay a debt-restructuring investment banker versed in Japanese cultural dynamics. | |
| The Three Fundamental Skills of an AI Leader | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Codie summarizes the mechanics of the prompt framework, which Geoff reframes into the three foundational skills of an AI-driven leader: identifying 20% priorities, communicating via CRIT, and remaining the skeptical thought leader. | |
| Advanced AI Tactics: Speech-to-Text and Adversarial Roles | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Geoff advocates speech-to-text to capture unstructured context and explains how to pit AI personas against each other as adversarial red teams. Codie contributes her observation that default models are excessively agreeable. | |
| The Sticky Note Trigger and Building an AI CFO | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Geoff shares his practical trigger habit of placing sticky notes on his desk to prompt AI usage, leading to the creation of an automated AI CFO. Codie shares her own technical hurdles and realizations when setting up terminal agents. | |
| Documenting Processes with Markdown for AI Agents | 4 | 7 | 4 | 2 | Geoff dismisses the internet hype surrounding complex multi-agent systems as a distraction, arguing agents are the 18th domino rather than the first. He explains how to document business processes using CRIT and markdown files before deploying agents. | |
| The 80/20 Prioritization Method and Future Skills | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Codie asks for a tactical prioritization framework. Geoff outlines an analog weekly task audit to isolate the top 20% leverage tasks and explains why strategic thinking and collaboration will outlast machine-based output generation. | |
| Job Automation, Entry-Level Gaps, and Network Organizations | 6 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Geoff identifies paralegals and entry-level review roles as prime targets for automation, warning of an apprenticeship gap. Codie builds on this by contrasting daycare employees who require supervision with self-directed department chair employees. | |
| Ownership Culture, Extreme Leverage, and Leadership | 6 | 7 | 3 | 4 | Geoff shares a lesson from Gary Keller on full operational ownership. Codie challenges him to explain how this style differs from perceived toxic culture, prompting Geoff to clarify how high standards empower rather than abandon employees. | |
| AI as a Creative Amplifier: Player to Conductor | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Codie raises common objections regarding AI stifling human creativity. Geoff counters with a boardroom case study where a simulated Steve Jobs manifesto aligned an executive suite, reframing the creative role from single instrumentalist to conductor. | |
| Crafting Authentic Writing Personas and Eliminating Fluff | 7 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Geoff outlines his method for training AI on authentic writing styles using 20 to 50 sample emails. Codie demonstrates strong expertise by naming recurring linguistic tells of raw AI writing, such as em dashes and overused transition tropes. | |
| Assembling a Virtual Board of Advisors and Future Self | 3 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Geoff details how he assembled a personalized virtual advisory board including Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and a 30-year future self, complete with explicit behavioural boundaries for each persona. | |
| Mid-Show Promotion: Contrarian Thinking Boardroom | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Following a mid-roll boardroom promo, Geoff warns against cognitive decay from relying blindly on AI outputs and explains his dedicated analog thinking chair routine. Codie shares her own preference for working on physical sticky notes before consulting Claude. | |
| Tool Selection Debate and Avoiding Tool Overload | 7 | 4 | 4 | 6 | Codie asks for top tool recommendations and pushes back against Geoff's sole endorsement of Claude by defending ChatGPT's superior prompt handling for image generation. Geoff pushes back against obsessing over tool stacking rather than high-leverage business problems. | |
| Enterprise Data Strategy and Real-Time AI Sales Coaching | 8 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Codie asks about centralized company data lakes and division-level sub-agents. Geoff outlines automated customer feedback podcasts and real-time sales coaching prompts, while Codie matches his examples by describing her company's Avoma-integrated real-time sales objection bot. |
Statements from this episode (30)
Woods: The greatest AI use case is as a strategic thought partner
“The greatest use case I have found is not using AI as an assistant, but using it as a thought partner. Because your ability to think strategically is the difference between growing your business or going out of business.”
Woods: Apply AI to existing problems instead of seeking new use cases
“I think one of the greatest opportunities for people is to realize, don't go looking for an AI use case. Realize whatever problem you're solving right now is the AI use case, if you know how to approach it correctly.”
Woods: Treat AI outputs as first drafts rather than final results
“This is another one of the mistakes people make with AI. They're getting an answer, and they're choosing to believe it as the final result. They're judging it. View it as a first draft.”
Woods: Prompt AI to interview you instead of asking it questions
“The most important part is the interview. I just don't ask AI questions anymore. I make it turn the tables and ask me questions to pull deeper context out of my head than I would have ever thought to have shared, but also to elevate how I think and to shift ho…”
Sanchez rejected a senior job candidate for submitting an obvious ChatGPT brief
“Guy must have gone to ChatGPT, you know, listed out a few questions, and wrote me the most obvious AI ChatGPT brief of all time. And because of that, didn't get the job.”
Woods saved a company $300M in 10 minutes using ChatGPT interviews
“I saved one company, three hundred million dollars in 10 minutes with ChatGPT. Cause I knew how to get it to ask me the right questions.”
Woods: AI prompt quality matters little if applied to trivial tasks
“If, I don't care how good your prompt is, if you aim it at something that doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. You can use this to write a better email that is not going to change your results. You use this to solve your biggest problems or to help you achieve y…”
Geoff Woods predicts typing will eventually become obsolete
“I don't know this to be certain, but I think typing's gonna go away.”
Sanchez: Computers will be entirely re-engineered and look completely different
“I think they'll re-engineer the computer entirely. Like it won't even look like this.”
Woods built an agentic AI CFO to automate financial email analysis
“I have now gotten to the point where I have built an actual agentic AI CFO. That literally is in my email every single day. If I get anything from my finance team, it reads it. It opens up the Excel files. It is got probably 10 pages of instructions on how to …”
Woods: Building AI agents is a distraction before mastering foundational skills
“People hear about building agents, like, oh, I gotta build an agent. For most people, that's a distraction. I really think of AI adoption like dominoes. If you stand them up and line them up correctly, How do you knock them all down? You just tap the first one…”
Woods: Documenting tacit knowledge via AI interviews enables agentic replication
“Any knowledge you have in your head for how you do your work that is not documented Is an opportunity to document. Use AI to interview you, to create that documentation in markdown format, you save it in a file folder, then you give an agentic AI platform like…”
Woods: Tech shifts historically repriced skills rather than eliminating jobs
“If you study technology shifts throughout history,
It didn't take jobs.
Remember, a job is just skills you apply and processes you follow.
What it did is it made the value of certain skills and processes skyrocket in value and the value of certain skills and p…”
Woods: AI at 50% human capability will match humans in 12 months
“In fact, if AI is 50% as good as you right now,
You should start working to have AR replace it, because within 12 months it will be as good as you, and then it's gonna run away with it.”
Woods: AI will enhance rather than replace strategy, communication, and creativity
“The things that I think are gonna matter from a human skill standpoint moving forward, the ability to think strategically, to solve problems, to communicate, to collaborate with people and machines, and to create, to be creative.
Those are the areas where you …”
Woods: AI will eliminate frontline customer service, document review, and entry-level jobs
“Customer service, frontline customer service, paralegals and maybe you'll still have paralegals, but document review, document generation, that type of stuff, that goes away. I think a lot of entry-level work goes away, and this is actually a bigger problem be…”
Woods: AI-driven organizations function like networks and swarms, not top-down hierarchies
“In an AI driven world, AI driven organizations are for far more like networks and swarms rather than this hierarchy of top down.”
Woods: AI shifts creativity from drafting content to casting strategic vision
“The creativity is not your ability to create the draft. Your creativity is the ability to cast the vision for where you want to go, to be descriptive with AI on the types of things you're looking for, to be creative in terms of the roles that you pull in, or t…”
Woods: Workers must shift from single instrument players to AI conductors
“You're no longer the player of one instrument. You're now the conductor, front and center, who's waving the baton and creatively engaging AI as a business analyst, then transforming it into a world-class communication expert with deep expertise on your IACP, a…”
Woods: Treat every initial AI output as the 'bad answer'
“Remember whatever draft, whatever it gave you is just the first draft. And before I even look at it, I just tell myself, this is the bad answer. I don't care how good it sounds. This is the bad answer. I'm about to make it better.”
Woods: Leaders facing isolation should build an AI board of advisors
“You should have an AI board if you are in a position where it's lonely at the top, and you would like to have advice on demand from people that will, or personas that will have your best interest at heart that are custom designed to augment your weaknesses.”
Woods uses a 30-year future self AI persona as his top advisor
“My most valuable board member is my future self. I created a persona of the man I want to be 30 years in the future so that that version of me can advise me every single day.”
Woods: Most people use AI in ways that atrophy critical thinking
“I think this is the greatest risk with AI that is not being talked about. Is unfortunately a lot of people are lazy and they're not realizing it, but your brain, your ability to think is a muscle. If you stop using it, it's going to get weaker and weaker over …”
Woods still uses pen and paper for strategic thinking before AI
“I only sit in that chair when I'm doing strategic thinking. Really? And I'm talking pen and paper, strategic thinking, so the guy who wrote the book about AI uses pen and paper, still, because I sometimes need to sit down and really process my thoughts, and it…”
Sanchez: ChatGPT outperforms Claude on short-prompt image creation
“ChatGPT does a really good job of very short, prompted image creation. I still find even with Claude Design has a design. That looks like Claude. And you have to beat that design out of it still. I'm sure that'll be gone at some point. But chat actually does n…”
Woods: Claude is the best broad-based AI tool
“But I think just broad based across the board, Claude.”
Woods: Under 0.1% of $1M to $100M companies use true AI agents
“Less than .one are doing that. And in most, the vast majority of companies, people are still using this to write better emails or to be their Google. They say they're building agents. They're not. They're building a project or a GPT.”
Woods uses AI to generate weekly podcasts summarizing customer calls
“Once a week, an agent goes into that Slack channel, finds everything our customers have said over the last week, sends that to another application where it's turned into a podcast. When I wake up Wednesday morning by five AM when I'm at the gym, I'm listening …”
Sanchez uses real-time AI objection coaching to level up sales reps
“We take all the data from Avoma and actually feed it into something that in real time can give you feedback on these objections. And it sort of voice triggers based on what you say on the phone call. It's been a game changer, especially for, we had an underper…”
Woods: Effective AI adoption requires first-principles redesign over legacy patching
“And you will be so much more creative about how you can approach something, not by bolting AI onto the way things used to be, But by truly imagining from first principles, how might we do this if I was an AI driven leader or this was an AI driven organization?”