In this podcast episode, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss which parts of a company should be rebuilt from the ground up if AI were native from day one. They argue that non‑AI‑native functions—especially IT, product, and engineering—are the biggest bottlenecks and often need to be replaced. They dive into concrete AI‑driven transformations: (1) recruiting/talent acquisition, where AI creates custom landing pages, automates outreach, and shortens screening; (2) corporate development, where AI scrapes public financial data to generate lists of target agencies in Europe, automates email outreach, and reduces reliance on expensive corp‑dev staff; (3) acquisition strategy, detailing the specific revenue, profitability, and client‑logo criteria for performance‑marketing agencies in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. The conversation uses a dentist/hygienist analogy (and a chef/Ratatouille reference) to illustrate a future where strategic "dentist" work remains human while routine "hygienist" tasks become robot‑automated. The episode then shifts to observations from MozCon: Moz’s brand strength, its recent focus on local SEO, its acquisition by Ziff Davis, and the heavy sponsorship by Profound (a Sequoia‑backed company). Eric critiques the SEO tooling market as lagging in product innovation and questions the value of Profound’s large sponsorship spend. Throughout, the tone is conversational, enthusiastic about AI’s potential, but critical of legacy processes and cautious about marketing spend. Key takeaways: - Rebuild or replace non‑AI‑native teams (IT, product, engineering) first. - Leverage AI to automate recruiting and corporate‑development workflows, dramatically cutting time and cost. - Use data‑driven AI criteria for agency acquisitions across Europe. - Expect a future work model where strategic roles stay human and routine execution is robot‑assisted. - SEO industry may be behind AI adoption; sponsorships like Profound’s raise questions about ROI.
Chapters
What part of the company would you rebuild from scratch if AI were native from day one? And almost everybody gave the same answer. What do you think the answer is, Neil?
My guess is customer support or engineering. It's one of those two.
IT. IT. Everyone would cut their IT team because their IT teams are the ones that are non-AI native right now that are blocking a lot. So they're kind of digging in and you're kind of seeing a version of that with engineering. But whether it's IT, Or in a sense, it's whoever's non-AI-pilled on the IT side, even on the product side as well, because we have a mutual friend where the interns are running circles around the product team. The product, they like that. I think they fired their product leader and then another one of them quit. And so the product team is in like flux right now. And then you have the younger people right now running circles around them and he's actually doing it from scratch right now.
So. Yeah, with a lot of those departments, you have to end up rebuilding. Like we let go some of our product people because they were just slowing things down and they were— had a different viewpoint on how things were should be done. And I'm like, this isn't going to work out. And we made changes. And you know what, product's gotten better, it moves way faster. And I'm not saying product's bad. If they're just not willing to adapt, and they want to do things in an old school way when everyone else is changing, it's either adapt or die. I hate to say it, but that's reality.
So another one is actually the recruiting team, the talent team, the— you can call it the people team, the HR team. So someone had hired this super senior person. And and built out a talent team, he sacked the entire team. I said, so what are you doing now? And he's like, oh dude, so what I'm doing is we are, let's say Neil, let's say Neil's an A-player. I want to hire Neil to my company, okay? So usually what would have to happen is I would have to reach out to Neil, Neil would respond, we'd get on a phone call. Those screenings take a long time, right? But the difference now is I would research Neil. I'd say, oh, okay, I sent a message to Neil Patel. Neil Patel responds, okay, hey Neil, I made a custom landing page for you. It shows all the people that you'd be working with, all the projects that you'd be working on. And then instead of forcing you to go through a screen, which takes up a lot of time, they'll say, hey, here's just a couple of questions I have for you because you went the extra mile to make that landing page. And then therefore now you feel a little obliged to maybe send a couple responses, right? So he's trying that right now to save a lot more time on the sourcing piece because they can't hire fast enough. And so I thought that was interesting. And, you know, I think recruiting itself is going to change because the screens take forever.
It's not just recruiting. We use the same tech or AI in this case for also corp dev. And we're trying to do a deal right now in the Americas. I don't know if it'll close or not. That'll help us expand and have more depth in the Americas. for specific service items. And then I'm trying to do 4 more deals in Europe. All right? So if you look at Europe specifically, we have Claude creating lists of agencies that have a certain amount of employees, certain amount of revenue, certain amount of profitability. And here's the kicker. Instead of having a human do this, and paying for some random software. A lot of these countries require companies to report revenue and profitability publicly. So then it's just scraping all the data. We're then using the data to then figure out the right agencies, their contact information, sending out emails, and then boom, we're going from there and doing outreach. And then instead of having a massive corp dev team fielding all the calls, we're having AI field a lot of this stuff. Sending out the emails. It then goes to my co-founder and I because we believe we're going to have better luck pitching the companies we want if him and I pitch it. Doesn't mean our team's bad, but we think founder to founder just works better. And then pass it over to our team once we get interested parties for them to do the diligence. But like, I'm trying to acquire 5 businesses or 5 types of businesses right now that are on our list that we're trying to get done ideally within a year and a half, 2 years at the latest. But we're just using AI. Before, we used to use corp dev people and they're some of the most expensive employees.
You should tell people what you're looking for on this podcast because someone might know someone and someone might know another person.
I'm looking for agencies in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany that do performance marketing and are ideally at scale. The smallest we're looking for is like $3, $4, $5 million in revenue. That would be on the small end. Ideally, we're looking for agencies that are doing at least $10 million in revenue. And when I say revenue, we're not looking for revenue to include media. So if you subtract that out, what is your real revenue? Ideally, we're looking for $10 million or more. If you don't have $10 million, we'll take smaller. And we're looking for ones with enterprise logos. So working with big brands that are massive, that are global, because the model here is if I buy a France agency that has tons of logos and I buy an Italian agency and you get the point and keep doing this across all the major regions, I can then just cross-sell the clients, right? And it just makes it easier and easier to grow faster.
Yep. So by the way—
And we would just merge their agencies with ours and we would have a bigger agency within that region.
Yep. So by the way, before we move on to the Moz piece, Neil, I came up with a new analogy this week. I quite like it, so I'm going to keep using it for a while. So Neil, when's the last time you went to the dentist? All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and and answer to public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.
2 weeks ago, maybe.
Okay. Who did you spend the most time with at the dentist?
The lady cleaning my teeth.
The dental hygienist, correct?
Yes.
Okay. And how long did you see— I don't know what the title is, but yeah. That's exactly— it's dental hygienist. And how long did you see the dentist for?
I didn't see the dentist at all. It was just a regular cleanup. I get a cleanup roughly once every 3 months. I see the dentist probably once to twice a year.
Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. So my point is, I think a lot of the work that's happening right now, when you look at agency side, is you're going to want to have people and you want— you don't want most people doing dental hygienist work. It's very important work, right? It needs to be done. But a lot of this stuff can be handled by robots with human oversight right now. The other thing is, When Neil sees a dentist or when I see the dentist, for example, the dentist might come in, the dentist is very strategic. He'll look at your x-rays, she'll look at your x-rays, right? Oh, okay. Do X, Y, and Z. Oh, you need this over here. Do this over here. Okay, bye. See you next time, right? They might not see you for another 6 months or something like that, right? And so, but they're very busy, right? There's a lot of work to do. And so I think the future of agency work, you're going to have, it's going to be kind of like that model where you're going to have more and more people that are strategic that can be like the dentist. And you still have, you know, maybe there's some hygienists that are maybe, you know, humans, but most of the hygienist work is going to be done by robots. It's no— it's kind of similar to when you look at a chef in a kitchen. I don't know if you've seen that movie Ratatouille, uh, Disney, where the chef is just going around like sprinkling salt and like tasting this and moving around. And I think, um, that is the taste and judgment that a lot of people are talking about. Um, and so that's what I think. It's a dentist model that's gonna— um, we're gonna see more of.
Yep, dude, I totally agree with you on that. But going specifically with the dental hygienist one, I don't know if I want a robot cleaning my teeth.
Me neither. Not for right now. Yeah, but here's the thing.
Not for right now. I'm open to it, you know, years from now. Just not right now.
When it's there. Like, if you're like William, for example, maybe if that's all you knew, you'd be down for a robot to clean your teeth. Bye, Jazza.
Bye. I love you. Enjoy your day at school.
Oh, look at that. Neil has a heart. All right. So, but to Neil's point, you wouldn't want to be the first wave of the robots cleaning, but maybe in 5, 10 years, once the accidents have all gotten over, like, then I'm down.
Yes.
Yeah. You nailed it.
I'm like, oh, when does the accidents start over and when is it better than a human? And then I'm down.
Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, going to Moz. So Moz, just so everyone knows, Moz, They're still a big brand when it comes to SEO. And, you know, they were like the pioneers, like they competed with Semrush back in the day, you know, and then Ahrefs came out. And so I didn't even know that they still had a conference. My AI actually reached out to Moz and it's like, oh yeah, okay, you're welcome to speak. I happened to be in New York at the same time. So they had about 400 people there, which is a good chunk. And their marquee sponsor was this company over here. Which is, by the way, there's a lot to say about Profound because they raised a lot of money from Sequoia and, you know, they go heavy when it comes to sponsorships, sponsoring events and like having speakers there, they're having a big presence there. So they're— if they're not sponsoring MozCon, you know what they did when I spoke at Ahrefs? They sponsored trucks driving around telling people to stop using Ahrefs, right? So anyway, that's something that's interesting. So what do you want to know about Moz?
What did they mainly discuss? Have they adapted or is it just mainly SEO software still?
So here's what I'll say. I was at the dinner, like, it was like more of a happy hour the night before the conference. And there's people that attended, but many people aren't actually using Moz. So one of the salespeople came up to me and he's like, do you use Moz? I'm like, nope. And then he went to the person next to me. So do you use Moz? And she's like, nope. Right. And so I think he's like, you know, I was like, so what's unique about Moz right now? He's like, oh, we have a very strong brand. I was like, okay, but like, what about your product? Nobody gives a poo-poo about your brand if your product ain't good, right? So apparently, I think they're doing more local stuff right now. And I think they're probably partnered up with Profound a little bit on the data side, but they have a very strong GM. I met their GM, Willow, who's great. Their team's pretty awesome as well. So I trust that they'll figure it out on the product side because they were acquired by Ziff Davis. Um, and they have about 200 employees right now.
So, okay.
Yeah. So we'll see. I think time will tell. I will just say this. It's not even just the Moz thing. I think, I feel like the SEO space in general is kind of lagging behind when it comes to product development. Um, again, I haven't used Moz for a while, so I don't know if someone can prove me wrong here, but even looking at the other products that are out there, even the, even the ones that have raised a lot of money, I'm just like, you know, you look at what people are building on X right now and you look at kind of the SEO space and I feel like the SEO space is kind of lagging.
Yeah. So yeah, yeah, they have AI visibility dashboards. I don't know. So unless they have a partnership with Profound, I'm not sure why they would, you know, let them sponsor.
I don't know. It's a good question, but they were a marquee sponsor.
So number one, because I'm just looking at this, most popular, $179 a month, all SEO features plus AI and GEO features, 2 AI visibility dashboards, 100 tracked prompts. 3-tracked AI models. So I'm confused why they're letting them—
I think it's local, Neil. I think, um, the, like, the, the, the larger contract sizes that they're doing right now are just companies buying a bunch of— could be local listings, but I think those are the ones that are adding up for them right now.
So I just Googled Moz and Profound partnership. There is no direct software partnership or business merger between Moz and Profound. This could be off, but I think someone made a mistake to accept the sponsorship. That's just my 2 cents.
Yeah, I don't know. It's also with that sponsorship, they had a speaking slot for that too. And the Profound guy I met was really smart. I think his name is Josh. So anyway, here's the other thing I'll say though. Profound, I think it's a great product. I will say this too, when you raise a lot of money, you're inclined to spend that money too. So the amount of heads they had there, I think it had to be 6 to 8 people or something like that for a 1-day event. I think that's quite a bit. They had a sponsorship booth. They were the marquee sponsors for that. They had a speaker there as well. I think that's a lot of resources that they have outputting for these things right now just to maybe own the mindshare of the SEO space. But that's my take on it. I think it's, you know, you want to be frugal even though you've raised a lot of money. And, you know, I like how aggressive they are, but I'm not sure it's the best use of money. That's just my opinion.
So dude, I'm with you. So, but when you raise that kind of money, you nailed it. You have no choice but to figure out how to burn it and just try to grow faster. That's it. Thank you guys for listening in. We'll see you tomorrow.
