Your AI Strategic Thought Partner

AI is technically here to augment us, not replace us. But if we ignore what happens, we'll be replaced. We'll be one of those people that are just completely displaced and we'll have to figure something else out. For everybody else, this is an opportunity to think about how can I refocus my efforts on more strategic aspects.

If you're a business owner and you are looking to deploy AI in your business, I think you are in the right spot. This is my hot take. I think what you should do is find AI experts from each of the different business departments. Marketing, sales, operations, finance, hr. Look at what they're doing, discover the use cases. That'll just help to open your mind about what's possible. And then you'll start to look for your own AI opportunities inside your business. That's what we're going to be doing today. We're going to dive deep into the world of marketing and how AI is revolutionizing that part of business and the way that work is done. I'm joined by Mike Alton. He's from Social media hat he's the author of AI Marketing Primer, which is a comprehensive guide for marketing and artificial intelligence. So perhaps maybe even just to start, just before we hit record, I learned that Mike and I go away back. So it's awesome to be able to catch up today and we probably haven't seen chatted for well over 10 years now. And yeah, it's just great to be able to reconnect maybe. Yeah. To start, Mike, if you can just tell us a little bit about what you're working on these days and a little bit about your business.

Well, I love where you started and how you framed the conversation by encouraging those listening to seek out trusted voices in specific areas of AI that they can start to learn from. Because that's exactly what I did. Although I don't recommend people do it the way I did. I started a podcast. I started a podcast about AI, AI specifically so that I could interview tremendous people. And I say right from the outset, I'm picking their brains. And by the way, you get to listen to as the audience member. So as a result, that's certainly been a focus of mine. I started the podcast in early 2024. I started leaning into AI late 2023, and as of the time of this recording, I've now interviewed over 90 experts on AI. And we're talking folks who work for Nvidia, Google, LinkedIn, I mean, tremendous, tremendous organizations and pioneers in AI. And to say that I've learned a lot from Them would be an understatement. So I've been able to really reevaluate and readjust and pivot the work that I'm doing. On the side, I work full time for agorapulse. I'm the chief storyteller there. But on the side, I love to help businesses and. And I decided about a year ago I really need to help businesses and marketers wrap their brains around this fourth industrial revolution and see how they can use AI themselves. And that's what I'm doing all the time now.

What got you to go all in like, and go, hey, this is something that is worthy of your attention.

I mentioned this is the fourth industrial revolution. I just kind of dropped that in there. I'm actually a historian by trade, and so I understand that this is literally the fourth time a new technology has come into place that is going to completely transform all of society. This isn't a new social network like clubhouse that we can just keep at arm's length and we don't really have to pay attention to it. It's not like artificial reality where. Or augmented reality or virtual reality where we could say, yeah, you know, that's not really my thing, and that's fine, I don't have to touch it. It's not like that. This is a technology like electricity that's fundamentally reshaping all of society, every business, every department within the business, everything that we do. And when I came to that realization, which was not early, I'll be the first to admit I am not a first adopter or first mover when it comes to AI. It was, it's, it's been around for years. It was finally late 2023, I was listening to Paul Raitzer talk about a quote from Sam Altman, who said that within a few years, 95% of marketing will be handled by AI. And that literally stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink how I was approaching AI. And in that process, I realized everybody around me say, for one person was not talking about AI, they were keeping it at arm's length. One guy was sending me reels every single day. He was, I thought he was a nut job. He was the voice of reason at that moment, say, hey, Mike, you really need to pay attention to this stuff. So that was the moment that I said, all right, I need to figure this out. And I want to help the people around me figure it out as well.

Another thing I recently heard Sam Altman say, which got my attention. He said, all of the products that have been created up until this point have been created pre AI without thought of what AI can do when it's built into products. So I didn't even start to think of that. Like as we start to introduce robots and just any technology that we're using, when it can start to get better context and understand its surroundings and then make better decisions based on all of that extra data. Like I can see, as you said, how, I mean this is as pivotal and will be as electricity. Like this is an absolute game changer. And it's funny how it still feels like a lot of business owners and people are still just sleeping on this. Like it's so obvious to me you kind of want to shake them. And I know you said you don't feel like you're early, but I still feel like in the grand scheme of things, it's probably because you're right in the thick of it and you're chatting with all of these experts and you're like, wow, everybody's moving. But I still feel like this is a very small percentage of everybody thinking about what AI is going to do.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. In fact, I would say any SaaS product today, and still in even many service based business.

They'Re at an existential crisis moment because to your point, to Sam's point, they weren't created with AI in mind. And so now the forward thinking ones are rushing to infuse AI into their product, into their processes. Think of like Salesforce, HubSpot, big CRMs like that, they're all rushing to infuse AI because whether they realize it or not, a startup today that starts with AI first and they build a new CRM around that AI functionality, they're going to be able to catch up to the big players in the industry overnight and overcome them within a very short amount of time because the technology is just so much further advanced and the capabilities are so profound.

That it's a problem if you're not paying attention to that.

I would love your take on a thesis that I have because I went through that moment of going, oh shit, my business is about to change. We as part of our business we used to have this documentation team that would document process for our systemologists. You know, they'd meet with clients, they'd record them doing tasks, they'd send the recordings in and then we do the documentation and we'd send it back. And that was a great thriving business. We had about 10 team members in that little division. Saw ChatGPT and I was like, wow, this Whole part of my business is just going to disappear almost overnight. We could now take the transcript of one of those videos loaded into ChatGPT, ask ChatGPT to do the draft, and it would do it at the speed of AI. And I shared it with my systemologists. Within three months, that entire part of the business just disappeared. I replaced a couple of the team members, but very clearly we were overstaffed. I had to let go of 17 members. That, for me, was that oh, shit moment. And then I started to ask the question, what. What else is at risk here? And what other parts of my business potentially could stand to be disrupted? I came back to this idea around process, because that's the core of what I do, and because you're so deep in this, I think you'll have a good take on it. I came to the conclusion that I feel like process will still always play a part because the process is the programming for the machines. The machines still need to be told what to do. And the, the real way to approach this as a business owner is to go, what are we doing and how does AI help us do this faster, cheaper, better? And that's probably for existing businesses. Obviously for brand new businesses, you might look at it in a different way. But that idea of process in a world where AI can do everything, then you need to get very clear on what you actually want it to do. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

To some extent, I would absolutely agree with what you're saying. We always have to have a human in the loop. That's one of the things I teach that we want to make sure that we're keeping human judgment and ethics and decision making as part of our processes and we're finding ways to use AI to augment our humanity and not replace it. But the cautionary tale here is it's really hard to predict what AI can and can't do because it's evolving so rapidly. And it's really important that folks listening understand that when you open up ChatGPT, other than like the name and the position of the elements on the screen, very little else was literally programmed in the traditional sense of programming. These artificial intelligence systems are not programmed. They're given training. Like an intern, right? And if you've got an intern working for you, they may respond the way you think they might respond, or they may not, but they're certainly going to learn and they're going to change and they're going to adapt and they're going to do, frankly, what they choose to do. And they're going to respond to commands according to their own internal values in sense of right and wrong and sense of, you know, job and duty and that sort of thing. Which is a real challenge when you want to think existentially about artificial intelligence. Because we don't know their values. They're not programmed. They really aren't. They're given all this information and they're asked and then they respond in certain ways. And I say all that because.

The more these systems evolve, the more they're able to function autonomously.

We're already seeing evidence of this with our AI agents. OpenAI's operator, for instance, you're able to give it access to a web browser and ask it to do something for you, and it'll go off and it'll try to accomplish what you asked it to accomplish. And it might try several different ways to accomplish that completely independently. It's not going to come back and ask you, hey, you know, you wanted a dinner reservation. I couldn't find anything on OpenTable. Is it okay if I check Yelp? Is it okay if I check Google? It doesn't ask you that. It just goes and does it. And it checks websites and if 6:45 is not available, it looks at 7pm and it, it goes through these permutations. And this is just a really silly, simple example. What happens when these systems are able to do much more profound tasks on behalf of our business and we ask them to, because it sounds strategic and time saving and they're able to come up with more efficient processes, for instance, than we even imagined. Right. They're able to create all the documentation, they're creating the SOP and the instruction sets, and they're interacting with other AI agents, either internally or externally. It's going to get a little crazy the next few years. And so I've found myself stopping just before I say, oh, AI will never do that.

Yeah.

Because six months ago I was saying, you know, I have four podcasts at AgoraPulse. AI can never do podcasts. AI could never do what we're doing right here. Yeah. And then Google dropped Notebook LLM, where you just feed it some PDFs and boom, you've got a five minute podcast with two very human sounding guests. And they're progressing to the point where now you can control them and you can give them different voices and directions and you can interact with them. And man, six months from now, yeah, maybe he can do a real life podcast.

Yeah. I think the only thing that we know for sure.

Is that things are going to change, which means the business owner must start evolving and adapting now. Like, you have to learn what's possible, test. And yes, it might move, but standing still is not an option also. So with your specific, like, I know you got deep experience with marketing, specifically, I know great with the AI. And then if we channel that down just into the marketing space. You mentioned the podcast and that's something that you thought, oh, well, we're safe there, and maybe now we're not safe.

What.

What are like some of the applications that you're seeing in the marketing department that are really starting to change how marketing teams are getting work done?

Well, the things that are changing, certainly for marketing, revolve around content creation and automation. Obviously, it is incredibly simple to open up a new chat with ChatGPT or Gemini and say, hey, write me a new blog post and it will happily write you a blog post. Now, it may not be a great blog post. To have it do a great blog post that requires, to your point, familiarity with how these systems work, familiarity with how do I customize the AI so that it sounds like me and it adheres to our brand values or my personal values or, you know, our goals and our target audiences. I've got an AI chief of staff that understands who I'm trying to talk to, what I'm trying to accomplish this year, what are my key pillars, thought pillars, in terms of my own organization, the AI hat. And at that point, it's really amazing because now when I'm working with this system that's been trained that way, we can decide together that we're going to write about XYZ topic. Like, just today, Midjourney, we're recording this. On June 19th, Midjourney released its own version of an AI video generator. It's been famous for generating images, but unlike some other platforms that hadn't released video. And so one of the things I like to do is newsjack and say, okay, this is the AI news that's happened. Is this relevant to my audience? And if it is, how do I show them why this particular thing is relevant? So I have a conversation with my AI chief of staff and it's constantly reminding me to do things like talk about my framework for AI adoption called the human framework, something that as a content creator, I would either forget or feel like, yeah, I've talked about it too much. I've said it a million times. Do I need to say it one more time? And the answer is yes, I do need to keep repeating that frame and coming back to that pillar. So it's really good for that. It's really good for that strategic partner. It's fantastic for analyzing data and reports. And it's pretty cool because either it's something you're already doing and you can turn to AI to help you streamline that process, instead of spending a couple of hours poring over charts and graphs, drop it into a CSV and drop that into a chat and now you can have a conversation with it and streamline and expediate that process. The other side of the coin is you've got many businesses that just aren't doing those kinds of activities because it traditionally took a couple of hours. How many people are really spending time looking through their Google Analytics or their social media reports or trying to marry the success or failure of social media content as compared to website traffic as compared to further on down the journey, sales, leads and conversions. A lot of businesses, you know, and the smaller you get, the harder this becomes because you're just so time crunched. A lot of businesses aren't doing that. And what today's AI tools, they're bringing a lot of that capability down to the point where it's no longer an excuse, it's no longer optional. Any business owner could take 20 minutes and have a conversation with Gemini or ChatGPT or the LLM of choice and say here's what happened last week, help me understand.

The good, the bad, the trends. You know, what questions should I be asking about this data, whatever that data is.

You mentioned one idea which I'd love to tease out and I almost think it's one of the best places that a business owner could start is this thinking partner and choosing something like chat GPT, setting up a project, uploading your avatar, getting it to crawled your website, loading in your marketing plans for the next quarter, for the next year, doing client testimonials and case studies and uploading them in. Basically just building this highly trained marketing cmo AI right hand person and then using that as a starting point, then add in that extra layer like I've just been playing around now with ChatGPT integrating into HubSpot and it's getting so much better now at literally natively reaching into those platforms, pulling all of that data that you never find the time to look at, pulling it back, adding it into its context window and then you ask questions, wow, like we are. This feels like a fantasy land, right?

Yeah. And it started with me being a solopreneur. I work full time for Agorapulse and you know, and I'm part of a team there, but on the side, it's just me. I've got dogs hanging around, but they're not very helpful. So I. I'm the only one here that I can turn to and ask questions and think about strategic direction and whether or not something would be a good idea. And so I started turning to AI as that. Your point, a creative partner, strategic partner, and so on. And I said, I need to create and build out, to your point, all the instructions, all the details that it would need to know, as though it was somebody that I was working next to in a corporate environment. And I could just lean over into the next cubicle and say, hey, Todd, what should we do about this? And even though Todd might have different responsibilities because he's in the same team in the same room, he understands who I am, he understands what I'm doing. He understands the overall work environment and the industry and the whole situation. So I developed the AI Chief of staff. And he knows. He knows I'm a solopreneur. He knows everything about the AI hat. He knows I'm bootstrapped. Right. So when I'm asking him and we're brainstorming on a marketing plan, he's not going to talk to me about a $5,000 ad budget because he knows I don't have an ad budget. So we're not going to talk about a paid campaign. Right. He knows I'm focused mostly on helping St. Louis area businesses. I'll work with anybody in the world, but I'm really focused on my community here in St. Louis. So he's always trying to weave St. Louis into our marketing plans and that sort of thing. And as I developed it, I realized, okay, this is something a lot of other people need, and it's a great first step. With AI, you don't have to come up with a lot of processes, and there's zero integrations initially. So my AI chief of staff and I started working on a prompt. I was just going to write a blog post and put a prompt, copied and pasted in the blog post that people could work from. And the more we worked through it, the more we realized there was so much I had poured into it that a simple prompt just wasn't going to cut it because there's so many questions that I wanted the AI to ask you, like if you, David, were going to go into a fresh chatgpt and try to build your AI work body, I had like, 25 questions that I thought it should ask you from who you are and who you work with and that sort of thing all the way down to how do you prefer to communicate both with your own audience and with the AI itself? I mean, this is going to be your work buddy, like somebody you'd hired as an executive assistant. You're going to pay attention to how they talk to you during the interview process and hire them or not based on that. And so what I developed, and we can give this for free to everybody, is a PDF that has all those questions and the instructions for the LLM. And the prompt is now just a simple paragraph that you just copy and paste and say, hey, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever you want to use, we're going to create an AI work buddy. It's going to be an executive assistant that knows everything about me. Use the attached PDF and follow the instructions in the PDF to ask me questions and then output the response. And then it'll look at the PDF, you just attach it to that prompt and it'll start asking those questions, just one at a time. Anything it doesn't, if it knows something about you, it'll fill that in. Because if You've been using ChatGPT for a while or Gemini, you may have stored some stuff in memory, like your name and the name of your business and so on, but it'll ask you, who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to accomplish?

What are your goals for the year? And so it'll get to the end and then it'll output a complete set of instructions that you can just copy and paste into your own custom GPT or GEM or project, depending on which LLM you're using. And I've got a course in a Facebook group if folks want to know more about how should I be thinking about these questions? How can I use this new AI work body? Or what's a custom GPT? I'll show you all that in the course, but you guys can go to theaihat.com aiworkbuddy all one word and get that PDF and that prompt for free.

Oh, hey, I know you're tuned in right now, so I'll keep this super quick, but you like awesome YouTube videos, don't you? Well, there's not really that many YouTube channels that create great content about how to systemize your small business. So I want to make sure that you catch every video that I publish. So if you haven't already, firstly give this video the thumbs up and then go ahead and subscribe to my channel. You can even hit the bell notification to make sure that you're the first to know when I publish anything. So go ahead, do it right now, I'll wait a sec and then I will transfer you back to the video.

Yeah, love it. And that same thinking you can apply to every role inside your business. Like this whole idea of building out these AI.

Department heads effectively that you can bounce these ideas off and really every team member in your organization, you know, or if you solopreneur, well, they're your team members. If you've got a small team then they should all have these buddies that is trained for their roles. We do something very similar and we're exporting out.

Everything from our SOPs to do with specific departments and using that to program into the machine. We're taking Staff handbook, we're taking those strategic plans all depending on what the role is. And then you, you train up these AI agents and it's incredible the output that you get once that AI has the full context, I feel like that's the key. Once you've got that full context, what are some of the things that you're asking these AI buddies to do? Like what? How do you think about that?

Yeah, and the one thing that I always tell people to do is in the instructions for your AI work buddy, give it two or three additional points. One, tell it to always ask clarifying questions because even the best prompts, we're gonna miss out on some details. You might be working on an email marketing campaign and you might tell the A.I. look, you're a world class email marketer and we're gonna build out this campaign and you forget to mention which target audience segment you're targeting. And if you don't tell it to ask you questions, it won't. But if you tell it to ask you questions, it's going to be like any co worker who's going to be thinking along the lines of the thing that you want to accomplish and you're like, oh yeah, but David, who are we targeting with this email or how many emails do you want to send? You know, these kinds of things. So always give it permission to ask questions and always, always, always give it permission to challenge your assumptions because if you don't, it's going to be your best yes man and it's going to tell you every idea is a great idea. But once you do those two instructions, it's is this incredible unlock because now the AI will ask you questions and it will push back. So to answer your question, an example, I've been doing digital marketing for almost two decades and so I've got a large email list, 45,000 subscribers, but two thirds of them haven't opened an email in probably a year or more. You know, they're very unengaged. And that's normal with, you know, an old email list. You're going to have a lot of old addresses that have moved on or whatever. You've pivoted, they didn't. And that's normal. But I wanted to try to re engage as many of them as I could. And I had this idea, I've got a course for $47. What if I offered that course to this audience for a dollar? And I thought, oh, that will pique their attention, get them interested, get them opening the email, get them clicking through the website and kind of re engage them in what I'm talking about and maybe make a few bucks, right? So I, and this is one things I do all the time. I have the idea or challenge or problem or whatever and I bring that to my assistant, I bring that to my AI chief of staff or your AI work buddy, whatever you want to call them. And I don't have to do a huge prompt because it already knows me, my business, my target audience. And so I laid this out, say this is what I'd like to do. And my chief of staff's like, mike, have you thought about how you're devaluing your product if you offer it for a dollar? I was like, oh, you're right, that's not a good idea. Old ChatGPT or Old Gemini would have said, yeah, Mike, that's a great idea. Here's the email. You know, it would have just taken it and run with it. But when you, when you set it up right, you give it all the background, all the context, all the information and you give it those permissions. Now it truly is a trusted advisor that you can really lean on for important decisions and know that it's going to give you the best possible advice. For solopreneurs, this is gold because I'm telling you, most of us out here don't have time and resources to pay for a 24,7 business consultant that we can just pepper with all of our questions. Very few people have that ability. You don't need it now. Sorry for the coaches out there who are doing this kind of stuff, there's still a role for you in society. But for the day to day stuff, I've got AI now.

Yeah, yeah. I think.

The people that are going to stand to gain the most from this, it's someone who adopts technology and is in, is comfortable, but then also has enough knowledge and skill set to know patterns and systems and things that they've done in the past and what's worked and so that you can spot that output. Sometimes AI, you know, it can push back, but then other times, like you said, it's like it just serves up this thing. It serves up what it thinks you want to hear. And if you don't know any better, if you don't know how to re ask the question or push back or say that's not good enough, then you can't really spot the difference between good and bad output. So I actually feel like the sweet spot is, is for the business owners that adopt this technology that are already quite accomplished and then they can pattern recognize and they go, oh, I want to do this now, but I can do it at the speed of AI rather than the speed at which we used to move at. So that's, you know, for the right person listening to this, I think they'll hear that message and you are in the sweet spot. What do you think is some of the biggest challenges or the blockers that get in the way of like taking on this new way of working?

The first thing is that fundamentally it's a technology, not a tool.

And it's fine if people want to refer to AI as a tool, but they're missing that fundamental fact, which is that it's not like Canva, where if you'd never used Canva before, and I say, hey, let me show you Canva. It's a tool that you use to create images. You don't even have to see it at that point. And you instantly now understand what Canva is for. It's a graphic design tool that's easy to use. That's it. AI doesn't have that. I can't tell you exactly how you can use AI. It's like electricity, right? It's just a fundamental thing and it's therefore a little bit challenging because we don't have electricity. Strategy. How do you have an AI strategy? Well, you really don't. It's about identifying the specific challenges in your unique business or your unique day to day. And how can you weave AI in to help you overcome those challenges or overcome them faster. And so that's where a lot of people get stuck. They just don't know where to begin because it's different. So certainly having something like an assistant is a good place to start. Other places to start would be start to use a tool like Perplexity. I don't Know if you've talked about Perplexity in the show, for folks listening, if you've not used Perplexity, this is the new Google. Rather than going to Google and getting a list of search results, which, by the way, they're also changing because they've seen how effective Perplexity is. If you ask Perplexity a question, it simply gives you the answer. Yes, it gives you websites if you want to learn more. But for most of us, most of the times that we're googling things, it's not because we want to do a deep dive into a website and research, and we're certainly not a potential customer of any site that we go to. We just want an answer. That's all we want. And we want to move on with our day. So Perplexity is incredibly good at giving you really good, insightful answers to whatever questions you have. So for a lot of people, that's where I recommend you start. If you're not familiar with AI, you're not comfortable with AI, okay? Instead of using Google, the next time you have a question, use Perplexity and see how the AI thinks. See how it can, first of all, understand your natural language without having to put in the perfect search query. You just, you know, vomit out what you want to know and the AI will understand it. It'll interpret it and give you back a really concise answer that you can then have a conversation back and forth with. You know, I use it for, you know, fixing things around the house, all the way to evaluating website code. I mean, I'm. I'm building my own websites here, and every once in a while, there'll be something that I want to do. I want to customize the theme. I know css, I know HTML, but I'm putting in a CSS identifier and putting in some code, and it's just not working well. I'll turn to Perplexity. Perplexity can see all that and say, hey, what am I missing here? Why can't I change this section and make it the background blue or whatever it is I'm trying to do? And Perplexity will give me instantly three ideas to try. Oh, you know what? You could try this CSS action or this CSS identifier. Whatever. It's an incredible tool, and the more you use it, the more you start to realize, wow, AI is really powerful, really helpful. It's not replacing me. I'm still the one who's got to fix a toilet or fix a website. But AI is augmenting Me and helping me and saving me time.

Yeah.

It's.

Again, it's obvious for you and I. I'm wondering for someone listening to this.

Hopefully it's come across very clearly what the cost of not embracing this technology is going to be like. I kind of feel like I'm hoping that we lit a little fire in someone today to go, yes, I'm gonna do this. And we gave them a great idea. And I think running with that AI assistant, I kind of want to put a little bit of fear in them as well, to kind of go, and you've got to do this now.

Yeah. And that's the thing. I don't like to fear monger. I never have. But I'm also a pragmatist.

Yeah.

And I see study after study after study. We're talking about Harvard, we're talking about Ethan Mullock at the Wharton School of Business. We're talking about Delaware and other companies that are studying how businesses are actually implementing AI and comparing them to the businesses that don't. And it's stunning. You're talking about not just 5, 10% increases in efficiency and productivity, 30, 40, 50% increases in productivity. And some of you listening may be thinking, oh, okay, that sounds nice. I might like that. Okay, cool. Here's the fear factor. If you don't and your competition does, then what are you going to do in 12 to 18 months? Your competition, who is implementing AI today are doubling their employees without doubling their headcount.

They're using AI work buddies. Not mine per se, but Ethan Mullock and Harvard did a study, and it wasn't just any old school. It was business. It was a study of Pfizer, and they were looking at employees that had an AI assistant. They were trained how to use it, and the AI system was trained on what the employee did. And they were acting as two employees. They were doubling their output and productivity. So imagine if your competition is doing that today for $20 a month per head.

Yeah. I think this is an opportunity for everybody. It's almost like those that move quickly, this will become an opportunity. And for those that move slowly, this, you know, you'll become the next Blockbuster or Kodak or something like that. Just getting left on the vine for not innovating.

Yeah. Every business should be thinking about.

Three things. One, how are we individually using AI? The individuals within the company, every department, every employee, how are they using AI? Are we streamlining? Are we giving them guidance? Are we giving them a license to Copilot or chatgpt or Gemini if you're a Google workspace company, frankly, there's no excuse. You're already paying for Gemini, so use it. Make sure everyone's got the same LLM and they all have some training. Number two, you should be thinking about how we are working AI into our actual company products and services like we talked about earlier, how are we using AI within our company to help our customers and our target audience? And then third, and this is the critical part, how is AI disrupting our industry? And that's hard. It's a hard question because nobody really knows. It's changing every single day. And, and I'm not. That's not hyperbole when I say that it's literally changing every single day and evolving quickly. But it's incumbent upon us as business owners and leaders to think about, well, how is this going to impact my industry and therefore my business in three to five years? Not decades, but years, maybe even sooner for some of us, quite frankly. Here's an easy example. When you can go to now, any of the LLMs, you can open up ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, or you can go to a specific other tool like midjourney and ask it to create an image. Like, I can go into my Gemini tool. I'm a Gemini user. I can go into Gemini today and say, hey, we're working on a piece of content now generate an image that reflects this piece of content. And the image it generates is fantastic. It now has words and sentences that are spelled correctly, not gibberish. It's able to understand letters and now put them in there. Like I said, earlier today, I wrote about Mid Journey doing AI video. And I just asked Gemini to give me an image that shows that reflects this article. It created an image of an assembly line with little image cards going into this box that said Mid Journey AI Video generator on the top. And then out the back of it was this flood of videos is amazing image. I couldn't have dreamed that up. I certainly could have created it myself. I have no, like, real design skill. I can manipulate canva, not a Photoshop guy. Beautiful image, perfect verbiage given to me in seconds. In that world, why would I pay for stock photography?

Yeah.

So as an example, the stock photography business, from my perspective, is dead. They're dead. There's no way that they can come back from this because I can create any stock photo I want. And it can be perfect, it can be diverse. They can be wearing what I want in the exact scene that I want. And I can do the same with 5, 820 second video clips. What do I need Shutterstock for?

You mentioned there were a few points all the way through. And I like to surface this one because you mentioned about the Human in the Loop piece as well, because there's all this, okay, well, the robots are moving in and they're going to take over. And then you look at someone like, there's a company you may have come across called Kalana that's like a customer service company. And they ended up, oh, yeah, laying off. I don't know, it's like 700 or 7, 000 customer service employees. They're a listed company. And it was kind of sent news headlines, shockwaves through, oh, the robot's coming. And then now they've had to reverse a little bit and kind of go, oh, maybe we moved a little bit too quickly here. You know, it wasn't quite delivering the outcomes for the clients and the clients weren't as happy. This still, this bit and for how long, I don't know. But this Human in the Loop piece that you're. You talked about and referenced a couple of times. How do you think about that and see that playing out? Where does human, like, where do we play a role in this?

I'm so glad you brought this up because it's a really critical topic that a lot of people are afraid of, and rightly so. A lot of people are trying to ignore it. And that is not a good idea either. This is the fourth industrial revolution and that means society is being transforming. And I keep repeating that because when we look back to the first, second and third industrial revolutions, people lost jobs, people lost careers because the thing that they were doing previous to the revolution was just no longer necessary. Prior to electricity, if you went in any major city in the world like Paris, London, whatever, they lit their streets with gas lamps and they paid men to walk around at dusk with long poles that basically had little bits of fire on the end to light the gas lamps in the evening, to light the streets. Well, as soon as all those lamps were replaced with much safer, by the way, electrical lights, those people had to find new jobs. That's just the reality. The World Economic Forum has projected that by 2030, approximately 90, 98 million jobs are going to be displaced or impacted by AI. These are people that are going to need to upskill or reskill in order to continue their careers. Now, they also say that 170 million new jobs will be created, so there'll be a net gain of 72 million jobs. Plenty of jobs for everybody. But we should all not have blinders on and think, oh, you know, I just. I'm just going to ignore it and everything will be fine. No, no, no, no. We should be thinking about what are we doing? Where is our skill sets, how are we learning about AI? How are we working with AI? Which means the second part of your point. How does we keep that human in the loop? What does that look like? And this goes back to one of the fundamental things that I always teach, that AI is technically here to augment us, not replace us. But if we ignore what happens, we'll be replaced. We'll be one of those people that are just completely displaced, and we'll have to figure something else out. For everybody else, this is an opportunity to think about how can I refocus my efforts on more strategic aspects? For the Klaviyos and other companies of the world, they're realizing that.

Relationships are a fundamentally human requirement and a fundamentally human task. So we can't maintain customer relationships if we don't have humans involved now. Absolutely. There are wonderful uses of AI in customer service. As an example, where if I just need my password reset, I don't need to talk to you, David, to get that done. I just want it done in the fastest possible way. And an AI robot can do that efficiently and quickly, and we can be on, on my way in seconds. But if I'm going through a profound change in my life and I need help navigating that and navigating all the documentation and permutation that goes along with, you know, healthcare providers and that sort of thing, that's when I need a human being to help me understand and to show empathy and that sort of thing. So there's going to be needs and opportunities for both. And this is where, again, it's really incumbent upon business leaders to have these conversations and carve out time to think about how AI is going to impact their industry and their business, not rush to fire a bunch of people to save some money? Because you read that Copilot can do this, don't do that. That's a bad idea. But can we implement Copilot in a strategic, thoughtful way that helps our people become better people and helps our customers become better at what they're trying to do?

Yeah, I love that. The final thing, it kind of made me think as well, what is the role of the leader and having those conversations and not sitting and waiting on them when I let go. Those seven staff I mentioned at the start of the interview, one of the team members I held off as long as I could. And then I waited until after Christmas and then I had the discussion with her and it was like she was asking the question, oh, you know, because I said I'd been thinking about doing this for a while. And her response was, I wish you had let me know sooner. I wish you had given me more time to adjust and think and see what's happening. I think that's the best thing a leader can do to their teams is to come to them and saying, this is happening. The genie is out of the bottle. We all need to get on board with this right now and start adjusting. You're not doing anyone a service by sitting on this. I think. Yeah. And I feel like, yeah, it wasn't exactly dialed in on the marketing because I feel like your knowledge on this topic is a lot broader. So I feel like we went in a few different directions. But I think the big takeaway from the marketing perspective is setting up that, that buddy, I'm going to pop a link through to your website social media hat and people can grab a copy of that resource as well.

What's that?

Best URL. If you. You mention that one again about the.

Yeah. So all my AI stuff is now on the AI hat. It started off on the social media hat and I realized with Gemini's help, we had this long conversation. I was, I was driving from St. Louis, Missouri to Southern California just before Christmas last year. And for those who aren't familiar with geography here, that's a 25 hour drive. It's me and my family. They all had their headphones in half the trip. So I'm just driving and I was talking back and forth with Gemini through the car and we talked through how I've been putting all this content and the podcast on the social mediahat.com and it wasn't really related to social media at all. And we thought, you know what we need a new, new business, new model, new branding. And then over the holidays, Gemini helped me build it. I mean, over Christmas I'm building a website. So yeah, it's. All my AI stuff is at theaihat.com the work buddies at theaihat.com forward slash aiwork buddy.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Mike. It's been great.

My pleasure. Thanks, David. I hope everyone learned something and took something from today.