At an AI conference in Cleveland not long ago, I listened to a keynote from Geoff Woods, an entrepreneur, business coach, and author of the international bestseller, The AI-Driven Leader.

His talk revolved around the distinction between a thought leader and a thought partner, and the magic that happens when you get this relationship right. The premise is that you, the human, are the thought leader and your LLM of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) is your thought partner. And this pairing, where AI acts as your interrogator or interviewer, is the real unlock for the AI transformation you’ve been seeking.

In the book, Woods writes, “Most people use Generative AI in one of two ways: as a smarter Google to answer questions or as an assistant to help with tasks like writing better emails. Both can be useful, but they barely scratch the surface of what's possible…Instead of using AI for 80% of the tasks that drive only 20% of your results, harness it for the 20% of priorities that drive 80% of your success as a leader. That is your ability to think strategically and make faster, smarter decisions.”

What’s interesting here is that thinking strategically, or, put another way, developing actionable strategy based on what you think, isn’t what most people use AI for. Instead, they delegate low-level tasks that can certainly make work more efficient, but rarely move the needle for the organization in any meaningful way.

But as Woods made clear in his keynote, and then again in his book when I read it, when you reframe your role as a thought leader and your AI as your thought partner, you realize that thought leaders don’t arrive to a technology with the solution to their problem already known.

Instead, they arrive with context —the years of accumulated experience, institutional knowledge, intuition, scars, instincts, half-formed ideas, and the particular pressures of the present moment. The AI’s responsibility, then, as the thought partner, is to interrogate that context, to ask the questions you're not thinking to ask because you’re mired in the constraints of your reality.

Woods makes a compelling case that if you want AI to be a genuine thought partner, you first have to let it ask probing questions that force you to articulate what you actually think. I can attest that’s the real unlock. Not the AI’s output. Not the speed. Not even the ideas it comes up with. It’s the interrogation of what you think, which is always infused with your individual (data-rich, experience-informed) context, that makes all the difference.

The Real Unlock

As soon as you give AI the permission to interview you, to ask you exploratory questions, it begins to surface the context you didn’t know you were withholding, and the assumptions you didn’t realize you were making. You discover, in real time, that your understanding of the problem wasn’t as complete as you thought—and that your scope of possible solutions was narrower than it should have been.

In strategy work, we often talk about divergent and convergent thinking. Divergence is the expansion phase—the part where you push past your assumptions, entertain competing possibilities, and allow the problem to become bigger, stranger, and more complex than it first appeared. Convergence is the journey back—the narrowing, the decision-making, the moment where you apply judgment and commit.

AI’s real value is in the divergence, in its ability to challenge your framing, to widen the aperture, to force you into the uncomfortable but ultimately necessary work of clarifying what you know and how you think. It’s a practice of cognitive refinement, if you use it in the right ways, and I’ve come to believe it's the most important emerging skill of modern leaders. Not simply using AI, but learning to think with it—learning to surface the context only you possess, and then letting the AI push your thinking into places you wouldn’t have gone alone.

You’re the thought leader. AI is your thought partner. And when you use that partnership well, you don’t just get better answers—you become a better thinker. That’s the real transformation. Not what AI can do, but what it makes possible in you.