Eric Siu and Neil Patel debate whether companies should hire AI-native talent or give experienced people AI tools. They cover Single Grain's training approach and the legal risks of aggressive AI use in business.
Chapters
This guy posted, Davie Fogarty. Fogarty. So I have a friend who runs a very successful company. I'm curious to get your reaction to this, Neil. So I have a friend who runs a very successful company and he said, Davie, I don't care about hiring for talent anymore. I'm just hiring AI people. He thinks that with AI, talent isn't the true moat anymore. I'm not sure I totally agree, but he could be right. By the end of 2027, a $20 million e-com brand built from scratch could realistically have zero employees. Look at OpenClaw, literal proof of concept. Nobody's going to be manually structured campaigns because it's going to be an interface where you approve creative angles, formats, and the AI executes. For customer service, you'll spend 30 minutes approving high-risk tickets, the AI flagged, and that's it. Influencer outreach will be an agent that contacts 20 creators, sends proposals, and handles responses. You will just approve. A $100 million company might just need one CMO, COO, and CTO who can handle what used to take an entire team. This sounds like doom, but there's actually opportunity here. So, um, so he said, look, talent is still the moat because it's the talent that's going to create the edge with these tools. There will be new roles we can't even predict. You just need to build from the foundation up and be prepared for whatever comes your way. So what do you think about this angle, this whole, I don't care about hiring for talent anymore, I'm just hiring AI people?
I think that's really wrong. I think what you want to do is hire amazing talent and give them the AI capabilities. I think if you do that, you're going to have a much better output. than if you just hire for AI, because if you just hire for AI and they lack the other skills that are needed to be successful in that role, you're screwed. And I think it's easier to teach the AI part than it is to teach all the other stuff.
So my opinion on this is I think talent is going to be the moat for the next couple years at least. I think if you— true talent is good at the AI stuff. That's my personal opinion. If you're really that damn good, you're pretty on top of this stuff for the most part, I think. And you will know how to commandeer and you also know how to bring other people with you. So I think you're very much going to need people. Now, the discussion around are companies going to be a lot smaller? I'm a little more like, yeah, I think companies are going to be a lot smaller. So we'll see. I think this plays out in the next 1, 2 years or so, Neil. So we'll see very quickly how it goes. But I think humans are still very much the moat. I think There's going to be more organizations, maybe smaller organizations, and I think that's how it'll play out.
Yeah, and I agree organizations will be smaller, but nowhere near what the person on X is saying is going to be smaller. I don't see $100 million companies being the norm with just a CEO, CMO, CFO, and very few people underneath. I'm not saying you need 1,000 people. I'm not saying you need 500. Maybe you're able to do it with half or a third or a fourth, but I don't see it being where you're building amazing companies with only a few people for the norm, right? Maybe you're going to see some outliers, but I don't think that's going to be the norm. And I think I disagree with Eric on that good people have AI skills. I know a lot of amazing salespeople, BD people, operating people, financial people that don't have AI skills, and they're amazing. And there's a lot of people in those sectors that are great at AI. And what I say is when you pair them with those amazing people that have been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, those people end up becoming much better. And a lot of those senior people, they're not going to know AI as much as some of these young kids who are starting off with it, but their experience for doing it in one space for 20, 30 years, In my opinion, that's not easily replaced by AI.
Yeah, so my take on it is, and we'll probably just agree to disagree here, but this is for everyone to think about here. My take on it is, you know, with the experience, experience definitely is valuable. You need to have that. There's a lot of context you have in those 10, 20, 30 years of doing things. But at the same time, if you're not on top of it and somebody else is, they're just that damn good. They're like so much better than you because I'll look at people, right? I'm not going to name names, but I'll look at people, be at people's companies, and they'll talk about, you know, one of their salespeople used to be like, there used to be a killer, really well, like really well-versed, but the other person has the same amount of experience, also enabled AI, is crushing that person, right? And, um, you know, I'm seeing that in multiple organizations, and I just, I, that, that's why I try to push all my friends around. Like even when I was talking to Bernard today, we're like, we're trying to push all our founder friends. Some are resistant, but the ones that once they see it, they open their eyes up. it's game over, right? But there are a ton that resist right now. But once they see it, then they see it, there's like, holy crap. Like, that's why I posted earlier this week to Twitter. I was like, I've never been more excited to work, but I've also never been more enraged. And the reason I'm enraged right now is because I'm trying to shake my friends. I'm trying to shake my team members to fucking wake up, right? Because the things I'm able to do now, like, I'm compounding so much faster every day and I'm just like, good luck fucking catching up with me, right? And so, I think that's where I'm coming from, and I don't want that to happen to people listening right now. I don't want that to happen to people's organizations. I want them to feel— that's why I'm like, you need both. You need both ideally. If, okay, if you're new in your career, fine, but if you have experience, you've got to have the AI piece. I think that's non-negotiable in my mind. I'm so passionate that I cussed twice on this podcast about it.
Yeah, so what we found is the ideal structure is to go hire the people with a lot of experience. They may not have the AI capabilities, You go put people underneath them who understand the technology and can bring them new ways of doing things. Now, we found that model to work better, but the key with the leadership there is the leadership has to be open to new ideas and change. Sometimes when you bring in people who are really experienced, have been doing things for 20, 30 years, they're set in their ways. So when you're going through the interview process, if they're set in their ways and they're not going to adapt, I would not hire them. My philosophy is, is it's better to hire the experienced people, and most good experienced people are open to change. And then you put underneath them the young kids who are just using this technology, are moving so much faster and bringing to organization. And when you pair them together, we're seeing much better results.
Quick break. I want to tell you about something that we've been building for years at Single Grain. We've been doing SEO and content for clients, and the biggest problem is always Everyone knows what to do, but doing it at scale is brutal. So we built ClickFlow. It's an AI SEO product that creates content that actually sounds like your brand, not just generic AI garbage. It also helps with other areas such as internal linking, creating FAQs, and more. We use it ourselves. Our clients use it. One user reported saving over 90 hours a month alone. If AI SEO matters to your business, you can try it for free for 14 days at clickflow.com. All right. Back to it. I'll use the mutual friend again. I was texting him a couple days ago, right? I'm gonna see him next week. So, um, so I was like, you know, sometimes I just look at people and I'm just like, it's like literally deer-in-the-headlights syndrome where you try to tell them something where like you're trying to get them to understand we're trying to train people on AI, right? And they just look at you like, right? And then I text him that. He's like, it's funny you say that because his CEO, who's a killer, you know his CEO, right?
Yeah.
Done really amazing for himself, but he's like, Amazing biker.
Amazing biker.
Is he amazing biker? I don't know.
Peloton biker.
Oh yes, amazing Peloton biker. Yes, yes, yes, always number one. So, but the crazy thing is he literally said the same thing. He's like literally deer in the headlights across the board, right? So I think maybe the key takeaway before we move on to the next thing here, 'cause I have another interesting topic, but I think Neil's right. You have to bring people with you. You have to enable some type of AI transformation in your company. That's why we're teaching everyone Claude code right now. We're doing these hackathons, but even then, I still don't think that's quite enough. I think our hiring process has got to change quite a bit and we've got to tighten that up quite a bit more. So, we're going to do what we can internally, but hiring is going to get a lot tougher to join us. At the very least, if you want to hire— if you want to see that test, by the way, go to singlegrain.com/apply and then you'll see what it looks like. But Neil, so remember when the internet first came out?
Before you go, 2 more things, okay? And I think the second one is a very important caveat. So the 2 things is when you're going through this process, just be careful and really pay attention to who you're hiring. In big organizations, it is going to be hard to scale with a ton of AI-forward talent because there's not a lot of good talent out there. Good talent, even in bad economy, They're not looking for a job. They have jobs. You have to go and poach them. And to get really good people, it's going to take a lot of effort. You're going to have to convince them, and you want to surround them with other amazing people that fill in the gaps, at least on the AI side. And you're going to have to go find them, right? So you may get some people applying or whatnot, but Eric and I don't wait for just people to apply. We go search and look for people that we think is amazing. The second thing, and this one's really important, I don't want anyone to forget this. When we hire the younger people or I interact with companies all over the world and I interact with these young kids who are hotshot AI kids and leveraging all this cool stuff and they show me some of the stuff they're doing, you have to make sure you're watching them not in a creepy way, but you're putting some limitations on them because we see some of these kids willing to do things And it'll cause multi, multi-million dollar lawsuits. And they're like, who cares if we don't do this? We're going to win. Like, screw it. Let's just go. You have to be careful. If you have a company generating $50 million, $100 million, and it's bootstrapped, or you're publicly traded and you're generating $5 billion in revenue, you can't let a kid do whatever they want, even if you think it's the future, and increase or cause it where you're most likely going to get a lawsuit for $100, $200 million.
Yeah.
Like, you need to be very careful. And we see a lot of these kids tell us, like, one of the guys who left me for marketing, he was telling me, he's like, I always wanted to do this stuff and you wouldn't let me. And I'm like, dude, my clients would get sued if you wanted me to do some of this stuff. And he's like, yeah, but because you're not doing it, your clients are going to fail. And I'm like, straight up, this is going to create some legal issues in certain European countries. I get what you're trying to do and I understand it, but you got to figure out a framework that works for both ends. And yes, that is harder and that's some more tapes.
Yeah.
But that's reality and that is business.
Yep. And by the way, guys, that's why I don't teach my team OpenClaw because there's too many liabilities tied to it. Yeah. Like any, like they're going to start connecting customer data sources and all these like passwords and things like that. Then the device gets compromised and like everything blows up. Right. You can't, like, you got to think about the second and third order consequences. And the good thing is when Neil and I took that personality test, Neil like had 95% practicality. Same for me too. So you got to think about that. But the thing I want to call it, Neil, so interesting, in the last 7 days or so, I've had a couple agency owners reach out to me, right? One was a holding company agency, smaller ones, PE-backed, around your size, I'll just call it that. And he's reaching out. And another one was like, dude, what do you think is going to happen to the agency model? I was like, what do you think is going to happen to the agency model? He's like, I think it's dead, right? He's like, I think the traditional model is dead. What are you doing right now? I'm like, He's like, what are you going to do? I'm like, I'm going to keep doing what we're doing right now. Mission control. I'm going to keep working 20, 30 years or so. And I think it's going to be for deployed marketers. I'm going to go down that route, right? Now, the other one is like, oh, you know, I really want to talk about agentic transformation and all these things. I'm like, oh, AKA, you have no idea what to do right now.
Yeah.
So he's been watching my content and all that. I'm like, oh, because we've hired some people from his company before, right? And I talked to people on my team, they're like, oh yeah, They have no idea what they're doing right now, right? So I'm just like, dude, um, just— I thought that was interesting to bring up because, um, there are— I think this stuff all comes from the top, right? I think Neil's pushing his team on it. His co-founder Mike's really on top of it too. So, um, and then the founders I talked to that are eating it up right now, I'm getting— we're texting each other every single day. So I think this has to come from the top in some way, shape, or form. Um, and to Neil's point, it's not just, you know, AI YOLO, right? And do whatever you want. It's You need to couple good experience and good judgment. That, by the way, that 2x2 again, good judgment plus AI win. And that all comes down to talent management.
Yeah. And one thing that we've been doing internally that we found to work really well, so we had some of our executives who are just like, man, I want to go take a few weeks and just go learn more about this AI stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want you to, we don't want you to take a few weeks or even weekends. And they're like, what?
They want to do it.
Because some of them during their weekends, no joke, I have quite a few executives who literally just reach out and try to build up more pipe, even though that's— they're not in sales. So I was like, we're gonna hire— and we did this a while ago— I'm like, we're gonna hire people underneath you who are gonna explore all the AI stuff that can make your life better and more efficient. And just like the example you gave with OpenClaw, I don't need my executives to learn how to use it. I'd rather go put people underneath them that learn how to use it and then enable them to do their job better versus them wasting their time to learn how to use each and every single one of these things. And I'm not saying it's a bad use of time to learn AI, but when people are rainmakers and bringing a lot of revenue, like someone's bringing in 8 figures a year, you have them focus on bringing in the money. And you can put other talent in that's not that expensive that can fill in all the gaps. And the reason I want to bring out that example is every organization I meet, they all talk about how do we get everyone to learn AI and use it super efficient? And I agree, the majority of people in an organization better learn how to use it and get better, but it doesn't mean that everyone in an organization needs to be 100% proficient at it. I think for some roles, you need to have them focus on what they're best at versus them learn every single new piece of technology. And the other reason we do this, just like you guys see OpenClaw or any of the new technology that comes out, every month there's something new. It's too hard for us to take our A players and be like, cool, every time there's something new, drop everything and go and learn it. It's better to have people in our organization who are starting to test out new things and then bringing their learnings to other people. It's just, it's too hard to keep up with every single thing every day.
Yeah, you know, actually what I'll bring up here that's related, and then I want to talk about the internet trend here in a second. So let me show you this. So we have a baseline level of proficiency that's required at Single Grain. So let's say it's for SEO, for example. Okay, so I have a table pulled up over here and basically what I'm showing— oh, damn it. Okay, so what I have highlighted over here, this is the SEO function. Okay, so we have 4 levels of AI fluency at Single Grain. We have unacceptable, we have capable, we have adoptive, and then we have transformative. Transformative is the highest level you can get to, okay? Unacceptable would be AI used only for generic outlines, no SOPs. Capable would be uses AI for briefs, outlines, and scripts, right? I don't know why Claude Code is in here, but it should say ChatGPT. I'm not sure why it says Claude Code. Adoptive would be implements 2 documented automation SOP upgrades per month. You know, they show AI-powered internal linking. You know, automated meta description, whatever, right? It just shows that they're a little more sophisticated here. And then they're showing that they're saving time, like 20% time or whatever it is.
Grammarly thing's freaking annoying.
And then transformative would be they run SEO production system. So internal linking, refresh, QA reporting, 30 to 50% output at same headcount or pipeline, SEO hour lift. So this is at least what our fluency table is right now. This is going to change probably every 6 months or so. But to Neil's point, We don't need everyone at transformative. We probably need everyone at least at capable or adoptive, and that's what we're getting them to. And we believe that on the cloud code side of things, we have to get people that at least baseline capable, or else we're really going to be in trouble as an organization.
And with some of this stuff, you can actually just build so you don't even need to learn. Eric's just using generic stuff, like just as a general outline on what he's looking for for his team to help them out. But for example, like with the internal linking, With that kind of stuff, a lot of organizations like ours, we've already automated that NPD, so we don't personally care if someone comes in with the AI understanding of how to do that because it's already done for them. So what we want to do internally is when you get people who learn stuff or who get good at things, we expect them to productize it so it adapts to the rest of the organization where the rest of the organization May need to understand what's happening, but they don't need to learn it because it's just being done for them. And then that way you can create efficiencies. So then that way you don't need as many people and hopefully you can get clients results faster.
Yep. And I think this was created, this table was created quite some time ago. I'm looking at the date for it, but I'll try to dig it up. But to Neil's point, yes. Now—
I'm going to go with your table was created a few months ago or modified a few months ago because of the Cloud Code.
Probably. No, Cloud Code's been out for a while.
Your team's been using it heavily for a while or no?
I don't know why Claude Code's in there, but I know that we've been using it since the last— since the year started, January 5th. Um, that's when we mandated everyone has to learn Claude Code. So I don't know how old this is, but Claude Code itself, like, it's been around for over a year or something like that. All right, see you guys. Goodbye.
