This is a recorded conversation (YouTube) featuring Cameron Herold and another speaker on business and AI adoption. Herold argues businesses have split into two cohorts: ~30% actively embracing a broad set of AI tools and experimentation, and ~70% who treat AI as only a marketing shortcut. He recommends hands-on employee exploration, internal sharing, and external speakers as ways to adopt AI. The conversation also connects faster, cheaper compute and broader internet/mobile access (Moore’s-Law framing) to the spread of digital services (mobile pay growth in Africa), highlights four entrepreneurial hotbeds (Dubai, Portugal, Bali, Austin), and discusses targeted political marketing (Cambridge Analytica case — a 50,000-person swing in Wales) as an example of the power of hyper-targeted messaging. The video closes with a call-to-action about "Vivid Vision" for businesses.
Questions this video answers
70% (he contrasts 30% actively thinking/adopting vs 70% that say it's just for marketing).
Dubai; Portugal; Bali (Indonesia); Austin, Texas.
About 50,000 people were persuaded and swung the vote.
Chapters
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.
What are you seeing right now? That when you look at your clients, very successful CEOs and CEOs businesses, what is right now happening in the market?
I'm seeing two things.
Yeah.
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. 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 is play with all these different AI tools. Report back on the AI 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. 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.
I did see that even at the start that most people were thinking artificial intelligence. Let's I don't need it for content. I'm a really good copywriter and I would say, well, what are you not good at? Why don't you give AI to do? Because again, as founders, as entrepreneurs, we are like I like an entrepreneurship to. I believe mothers are the original entrepreneurs. They've got to be, you know, the hug giver, the chef, the homework person, everything.
The planner. Yeah.
They do it all for this child to be of value to the planet. And entrepreneurs are no different.
Right.
We are the graphics designer, the sales.
Personally delivery person for this business to.
Be of value to the planet. And I feel like this is like electricity. I believe it's not fair that everyone doesn't have equal access to it if it ever gets to that point. What are your thoughts on how this is going to impact creation, how it's going to impact solving meaningful problems? Especially because, you know, most of us, I hope as entrepreneurs get into business to solve 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, 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, you know, northern Africa, wherever. Or in small remote towns in Canada or the United States. It's giving access to the Internet to and 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, in Africa, everybody does. There's so many different mobile pay apps. 20 years ago when you drove through villages in Africa, you saw Coca Cola signs everywhere. 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 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 out there, I had goosebumps because it was so apt. I've never heard it before.
I've seen it for 20 years.
It is so on point.
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. 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. 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. That was pretty cool. That was something interesting. What have you seen?
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. Everyone in Dubai is opportunistic. They're, they're optimistic, they're entrepreneurial, they're cool and they're building something. Portugal, there's 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 vortexes, 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 what. 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, this 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.
And we could easily take that as an example to see that, okay, that's the way we're going to be as leaders, to.
To prosper. I don't know.
But if you see Brexit, you see, like, Australia just had a vote after all these years about allowing an indigenous voice in Parliament. Just like it was just a referendum. It was a vote that all Australians had to, you know, go to the polls to make. And it was a box of yes and no, and over 65% of the population said no. Yeah, it blows my mind. But the people around me were like, that sounds crazy similar to Brexit. A lot of people that I knew were like, oh, this is never going to happen. Same with Trump.
Well, have you studied why Brexit happened? No. 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. 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 marketplace marketing, which is how elections are won. 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. But here he's being up on so many different indictments and crimes. Whether you're on the left or the right, a little bit of, as our grandma would say, whether smoke, there's fire, 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 in 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. 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. So I'm just hyper selective with the group that I'm targeting.
What are you talking about is so important, especially for something someone like myself, Because I realize, you know, a few years ago that me helping people use their voice was part of my mission. And one of the reasons for that is my ancestors did not have the opportunity to switch on a microphone and say whatever they wanted to say, whenever they wanted to say it. And there's such power in that, because data is everything. And if the data that has been captured is not what we want to see, then we might have a responsibility to capture the data that we want to see, like having the conversation that we really care about. That's why podcasting is so powerful.
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