Cameron Herold predicts AI adoption will match websites' trajectory, becoming ubiquitous in five years. Companies split into two camps: those dismissing it as just ChatGPT versus those experimenting rapidly. Falling tech costs and expanding internet access, from Starlink to mobile pay in Africa and India, are opening entrepreneurial opportunities globally.
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20 years ago, it was, like, cool to have a website for your company. Every company has a website now. The small, tiny little mechanic shop in northern Idaho has a website. But that wasn't so 20 years ago. Correct. I think leveraging AI is going to be exactly the same thing in five years.
What is right now happening in the market?
I've seen two things. One is the cohort, the companies who have said, oh, AI is just chatgpt. We played with it, we tried it. Yeah. Our marketing team's using it, we've moved on. They Forget there's another 8,000 tools out there. Right. And the other companies are the ones that are literally adopting as fast as possible. They're letting their employees play with it very similar to how Google has, like one day a week where they allow employees just to do their skunk works and play with stuff. I think the good companies are letting your employees play with all these different AI tools. Report back on the AIL tools. They're bringing an AI speaker in every month over Zoom. They're literally immersed in playing with it and learning it. They're watching YouTube videos on it and sharing it with their teams. And they recognize that this rate of change is massively different. And I've seen that split happen over the last six months. Twelve months ago, all companies were thinking about AI. Now it's only about 30% that are thinking about it and 70% have said, oh, it's just for marketing.
What are your thoughts on how this is going to impact creation, how it's going to impact solving meaningful problems?
I think we're starting to see now it's Moore's Law, right, that the amount of capacity doubles and the cost actually cuts in half every single year. So Internet access, right. Starlink. Right. The ability to have WI FI access in African villages or in the small Indian towns, or in Northern Africa, Wherever. Or in small remote towns in Canada, the United States. It's giving access to the Internet on mobile and on smaller tech devices and on outdated devices that can still surf the web. I think there's an amount of technology that's now trickling down. Like mobile pay in Africa is way bigger than mobile pay is in Canada, the United States. Massively different. Everyone pays with their cell phone in Africa. Everybody does. There's so many different mobile pay apps. Twenty years ago, when you drove through villages in Africa, you saw Coca Cola signs everywhere. Yeah. Right. Now what you see is all the signs for the mobile pay apps. They're everywhere. That hasn't taken hold yet. In North America, we're still using our credit cards, we're still using cash. So I think what's happening is that data and the, the access to data is trickling down. I think we're going to see a huge, huge growth. That's why we're seeing the growth of the middle class in India. The growth of middle class in Africa right now is they do have way more access to that than they had 30 years ago. Andy Grove from Intel said only the paranoid survive. It's a little bit of that. The, the ones who are a little bit paranoid of what's happening with AI that are going to embrace it or the ones that realize that rate of change outside the business is happening very quickly. I need to embrace it. They're going to do well. And I think it is trickling down. Yeah.
And by the way, when you made that statement about the rate of change inside the business, I had goosebumps because it was so apt. I've never heard it before.
I've been saying it for 20 years.
It is so on point.
Yeah. The reality is that I saw another T shirt years ago and it was a Nike T shirt. It said somewhere right now someone is practicing and when they meet you in head to head competition, they'll beat you. And I've always subscribed to a little bit of that. And I think that's why the good leaders and the good companies are embracing everything about AI. They're playing with it, they're learning about it, they're asking about it. They know that it's more than just retyping a marketing message. Right. It's like 20 years ago it was like cool to have a website for your company. Every company has a website now. The small, tiny little mechanic shop in northern Idaho has a website. But that wasn't so 20 years ago. Correct. I think leveraging AI is going to be exactly the same thing in five years.
You've seen different cultures, you've seen different things. From a lens of freedom and a lens of creation and a lens of an entrepreneur, I would love to know what stands out.
What.
Have you seen that right now? You go, oh, yeah, that was pretty cool. That was something interesting.
I've seen a few things. So the three that come very quickly, top of mind are I feel like there's four hubs in the world that are these entrepreneurial hotbeds. We're sitting in one of them, Dubai. Right. Everyone in Dubai is opportunistic. They're optimistic, they're entrepreneurial, they're cool and they're building something Right. Portugal is another one. Bali in Indonesia is a third and Austin, Texas is a fourth. There's lots of cities that are technology, but those four tend to be this, like, vortex of entrepreneurial. So there's something about when you, you know the saying of, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you plug yourself into one of those four vortex, your cycle is like this. No one in these, in these areas is sitting talking about social media or the sports team and how they played. All they're doing is talking about what they're working on. And it could be social issues, it could be causes, it could be entrepreneurship, it could be crypto, it could be whatever, but everyone's building something. So I feel that. The second thing that I started to feel was the digital currency happening, whether it's with crypto or whether it's digital pay. But now, like the tapping of a phone, that's still not a big thing in North America. But people in Denmark, as an example, when you pull out cash to pay at a coffee shop. No, no, we don't take cash. Like, they don't even take it. I started feeling that with my kids about two years ago. They don't want physical paper or coins. That's a strange thing that I hadn't seen. So mobile money and the conversions, I think, is starting to happen there. And then the third one is a little bit weird because I'm not a fan. People in like 20 or 30 countries think Trump was amazing. Like, they actually really like him or respected him as a leader. I don't like him as a human being. I wish he was a nicer person to people. Have you studied why Brexit happened? No, please. So the Cambridge Analytica. I actually saw the woman who was the CEO of Cambridge Analytica speak at TED and she talked about what actually happened. So they were a marketing agency that understood the analytics of data. They understood there were nine different personality profiles in the uk. And then they found that in this one section of uk, Wales, if they took those nine segments, the three middle groups, the level four, five and six, were the influenceables. They could be switched to the right or they could be switched to the left. So what they did was they started buying ads and driving traffic and driving stories to that group of people, and that 50,000 person swapped over and actually swung the vote. So it was the manipulation of humans and the manipulation of humans through marketing, which is how elections are won. Yeah. So, yeah, that was really intriguing to me and it's something that I don't like about Trump is there's a lot of what he'll say isn't true. Right. He's being up on so many different indictments and crimes. Whether you're on the left or the right. It a little bit of, as our grandma would say, whether smoke, there's fire. Yes. There's a little bit of something that doesn't quite feel right to me, but somehow people are okay with that. Maybe it's because we all feel like all politicians are crooked. So let's go with the one that we see momentum with. I don't know what it is, but what I understand from this is marketing is powerful. Messaging is powerful. Putting your messaging and your marketing in front of the right group of people that you want to influence is powerful. And hyper targeting your message instead of trying to target everybody. Like what I'm targeting is the coo. Yeah. The reason is there's hundreds of groups marketing to the entrepreneur. I market to their second in command, which means all of those groups that target entrepreneurs can be partners for me or they can be referrals for me. Right. So I'm just hyper selective with the group that I'm targeting.
