Time to chat about AI!
Chris and George B. Thomas discuss how AI is reshaping workflows and client work. They share a story of a sales call where AI templates left clients mind-blown, explain how AI handles CRM updates and note-taking to free humans for relationships, and introduce the 5P framework for structuring AI-human collaboration. A key insight: context engineering beats generic prompts because context varies by situation.
Chapters
Good morning, LinkedIn friends. Value First Nation, welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Friday, March 27th, 2026. How the hell are you, George B. Thomas?
I am doing good, brother. Um, a little bit tired. Glad it's Friday. Uh, ready to take a rest tonight. So that I can wake up tomorrow and knock out some things that I'm excited to explore and kind of work on, uh, AI and creativity and that kind of stuff. But, but it's, it's been a good week and doing good, my friend.
It's been an amazing week, and, and the, the feedback is picking up as far as just people picking up this stuff, trying it out, and, and just like having their minds blown. Like, would you start a call and like a part of the how you're doing is like, well, my mind's just been blown. Like, that's, that's happening like regularly now.
Yeah. Chris, can I, can I dive— I didn't even think about this until you just said that. Yesterday I had something that was one of the strangest yet coolest probably moments of my life happen. Um, I have a standing 30-minute call with a client and it's with their sales team and we talk about sales and sales things. And yesterday I can tell you that we maybe talked for about all of 5 minutes about sales. And then I said something to which they're like, can you show us that? And we talked about AI and Echo and building and A/B testing and creating templates and like what they could do or use. Um, and, and halfway through the call, the, the leader of that group was like, thank you for this, because I think they think I'm a crazy person, and now they see that I'm listening and watching about 20 people like you, and this is what's possible. And it was just mind-blowing the way that that team was activated to like what they could build for themselves to achieve the goals that they— anyway, nothing to do with HubSpot, nothing to really do with sales, but everything to do with both.
Yeah. And again, like we're no stranger to in HubSpot land, like mindset is first. And if you don't have that, like nothing else is going to come. It's the same deal here. And the switch, like, the difference is like once you get there, like those people on that call, they're not questioning it. They're unlikely to question the path forward.
Right.
Like ever again. And not only is it not that where it's like, okay, we'll try it out. It's like, oh, wow. Like, yeah. Let's go. Like, we're about to have more fun, more valuable, like, things people have never experienced. Yeah, right. And in the most enjoyable ways. And when you bring those things together and you watch that happen on the call. Yeah, right.
Like, oh, they're—
measure that.
Oh my God. Their face when I showed them storing MD files in Obsidian with easy edits. The mind-blown emoji should have been just pasted on every one of their faces.
Right. And just imagine once we have our AI friends watching the videos, like they can listen to the transcript. Yeah. We're going to start to like all the traditional scoring and any metrics that go out the window and new ones come in that are AI-based and be like, Oh wow, this person, they said this, but their face looked like this, right? And that's how we're gonna start thinking about, you know, and create the space for the humans, not building scores and infrastructure and rules and all the stuff that we've not been good at. And now we can focus on the humans, more than ever before, right? And not have to sacrifice the data, the CRM maintenance, the note-taking, like all that stuff where it's like either I got to be present or I got to do my job. Like you won't— you don't have to pick anymore. Yeah, right.
And you can do both.
Yeah, right. And, um, as we, as we talk about that, You know, an example, yesterday after our Wake Up Customer Platform show, I was talking to you and Casey about doing some kind of webinar campaign AMA for the Value First Collective. And we started talking about the campaign and, you know, and just the style of signing up for a webinar and like, how are people going to interact? Where do you think I went after that? At some point during the day?
I mean, with you, it's hard to tell, but I imagine that you went to your assistant and you started to, like, build out a plan for creating a thing that could be launched quicker than anybody ever thought. Yep.
So, uh, one of the challenges of doing things like this were either like the difference between webinars, webinar platforms, and like meeting platforms. And everybody's got to use Zoom meetings because they like the flow of signing up and being on the calendar, but then it creates a bunch of awkwardness that you really need a webinar platform for. And like, it's been, we've been here like, is anybody gonna figure this out? Like, and it like, it's been like 10 years. We haven't figured out how to kind of bring these things together. Some have gotten close, but often they're like lots and lots and lots of money to do that. Already doing things like this on the website where we've got live streaming and click on here, you can see us.
I know those guys.
The one thing I hadn't figured out yet was the messaging and the chat. But since this already exists, I know it's possible to bring it just directly into the website. And so then we start to talk. I do take it into, you know, Marquis, who's in charge of the media business unit, and start talking to him about this events thing that I haven't been at in a while. We kind of do something like that with office hours. But this concept that I learned from Chris Walker and Refined Labs, DemandGen Live, that started right when COVID hit, like March of 2020, he wasted no time to try and create this human space for people to still meet up and talk to each other. And then they've been running that weekly since then, like 6 years, right? And it's built their podcast motion and just all like And, but it's not like there's a bit of, you know, maintenance and management that comes with that. And, and, but the motion is pretty clear, right? And people understand the value of, of doing it, but the execution, right, has been a challenge at times. So I started talking to, um, to Marquis and like two things here.
Yeah.
Not only do— so I'm a believer that I could actually build this if I want.
Yeah.
Right. First of all, because I have AI and this capability of using AI in this way. Um, second of all, following somebody like Christopher Penn.
Smart dude, by the way.
Very super smart. Yeah. And just his weekly newsletter has been very instrumental in me staying like staying leveled up. Yeah, right. Like not just going to build but also learning better ways to build. And, and like one of his recent newsletters, he talked about his 5P plan. And like PRDs, right? A couple skills like how to do projects and like product development in a better way, product management, things like that. Right. So at the end of this, you know, Marquis is like, all right, do you want me to start the 5P plan or do you want me to start building? Right.
Yeah.
And I said, let's do the plan. And so purpose, people, process, all these layers in here, platform, performance. And this comes from a skill because I was reading a newsletter. I bring the newsletter into the team and say, hey, I think this is a good idea. I want to build a skill around it because I don't know, and I don't really know. I've never done it before, but I think it's a good idea. Sounds like a good idea. Right. What do you guys think? Okay. Let's build the skill. Yeah. Right. Then at the end of that comes a product requirements doc, like the PRD. There's 33 pages and like stuff where, when we think about why agency models are being forced to change is like the necessity of a document like this. When you are working with somebody outside of your organization to understand exactly what you want and why you want it, and then you're going to come back and tell them exactly how you're going to do it and why you're going to do it that way. When you cut any corners there, everything takes longer, everything costs more, adoption is less, all of our issues. The fact that I, as somebody who's never operated in that space, I'm focused on customer experience, can spin up a doc like this to support this process. Even if I'm still going to build it myself, now there's this foundation of understanding of what's about to happen to make it easier to collaborate with AI. In the middle, and something you're going to continue to hear more about it, this happened where As he's— and this is the part where I didn't have to prompt this, this piece, right? The 5P plan. The second P is people, right?
And the humans. Yep.
Normally the humans So when, when he first drafted this, I'm gonna bring it up from the IDE, right? First version. And he said, let me map the who's involved, right? And this touches almost every org inside of our organization. Look at the who. There's two human names.
Yeah.
On here, right? Chris and Ryan.
Yeah.
And all these other people are the named agents in charge of the business units that have roles and job descriptions and— right? And I didn't prompt that part. I didn't say make sure you use named agents for the people section. Right, right. It's, it's built in, and that's where we're here saying, like, you can get here. The hard part— and anybody that's saying, oh, we're going to come in and implement a brand new OS for you, like, and it's just gonna be ready, right? We've got all these agents and they're going to come in— like, if you don't get consulting and coaching and support. Like, the hard part is the change management of understanding why this is a good thing happening that we're seeing on the screen right now, that we're involving agents in this way. Otherwise, okay, yeah, we'll implement the new agentic platform for you, or OS for you, or new tools, and you'll be fine, right? Right. That's not how it's going in the real world. The build— this part is easy. And I say that because you can take this transcript from the show and start to build something yourself. You can, you can, you, I could share the Google Doc with you about exactly how we're going to build out the webinar, you know, platform. But without all this context working together, it can be very hard to you know, make it a reality and usable and like valuable for everybody. Not to mention my context is different than your context, whether you're an individual or a business, right? And the one thing I changed here, cuz this is always interesting, even though it, we're, we're in AI, I'm building with AI every day. George and I were just talking about changelogs and like how easy it— like, AI understands what it's doing, and if you just ask it to document it, it will document the hell out of it.
Yeah, changelogs is my new best friend, right?
We get here, question for you: is Ryan the primary builder here, or is this AI built with Ryan reviewing? And it's like, come on, like, of course we're building with AI. Like, what are you talking about, bro? Like, But even there, it's like, no, it's going to be AI built and AI reviewed. Humans will test by using the platform. That small change, so I'm happy that he's asking the question. But that question of, is Ryan building this or is AI building this, dramatically impacts the plan. And these moments of just these planning phases and understanding what's happening on the screen and figuring out when it makes sense to put humans in a loop, that's all the skills and the learning curve right now. But yeah, to where we started, it's like, as I start talking about it with with George and Casey yesterday, it was like a burden. As I— like, I, I don't think you would— you would disagree with— that's how I was presenting to you guys. I was like, how long has a campaign need to be? Like, what? Like, I guess it's got to be a webinar, but we really need to do an AMA. And like, Zoom doesn't make sense. For that.
Yeah. And I wasn't making it easy on you either. Like, I was kind of giving it to you on the whole topic. But yeah, it's— but that strategy, right? That's figuring out— that's collaboration, which this might be like a masterclass in human and AI collaboration if people pull the threads that are possible for them to pull.
Right. And but like the difference between I'm so excited to do it now. Like, yeah, because— and that's like the challenging thing to describe. And when you talk about it in terms of organizational dynamics, and again, not different from how software's always been, just because we were sitting at the same table, saw the same thing on the screen, clicked the same buttons, in front of us, I'm— I might be 100% more adopted and on board than, than you are, right? And we all just experienced the same exact thing, right? I was coming at that conversation yesterday, even though we have built all these amazing things into the website, I was still thinking in terms of, okay, I got to set up a Zoom, I got to do this, right? Instead of like the default, okay, yeah, we'll just build for that now. It still took me like almost the whole day to have the realization of, oh, maybe, maybe let me just ask. Let me ask if we can just do that.
Yeah.
Right? Because, because that friction that I'm feeling in having to use the tools that really weren't built for this activity. Yeah, I don't have to deal with that friction. I don't have to accept that anymore.
I go back to, and I've been saying this for months, if not years at this point, there is a true power of curiosity and asking questions. And the one question that I keep coming back to for me is Is it possible? Can I do this thing that I'm trying to do? And when I find that I can, then it goes into now, what do I need to iterate on the original question? What do I need to— what do I need to fix? What do I need to tweak? What? And the good thing is we're not doing it alone.
Yeah. And Well, like when you can do it in the context of the other ideas that you're having, because that chat that I was just showing started with, hey, Marquis, new business leader of— new business unit leader of the media network. Before you joined the team, I was working on a plan with V to move away from StreamYard for LinkedIn Lives and building out our own media execution platform locally. Do you have visibility there? I am looking for an HTML file that was walked through for my setup. In true just-in-time value fashion, I need to get this done this weekend before the April 3rd cancellation deadline. Thanks for your help. That's how it started.
Yeah.
So he finds it. Here's what you're looking for. I said, can you put this into the, the My Value Path Command Center as a true published page so I don't have to go hunting for the HTML file? You know, later this weekend he finds the command center, right? Puts it there. Then as this session is open, I can say, what would it take to build a webinar-like experience into our website platform? And all of a sudden, like, it's like the right— this is the part where it's like, the right amount of context.
Yep.
With the right expertise. In this case, I've picked a very specific agent who knows the plan and knows the strategy of media and things related to the topic. It's not just some, hey, Claude, right? It's not that, right? Like, this combination of things is what everybody's trying to learn and figure out right now. This is why it's different between prompt engineering and context engineering. My buddy Bill Barless put together like a, a really, really good, like from a technical perspective, trying to help clients he works with and people on his team to just onboard a little faster into these, you know, terminal-like experiences, manline experiences. And his second page was called Prompt Engineering. And it had a bunch of prompt templates. And I was like, I like it all except for that part. I think like prompt templates and engineering are traps because if you just try and copy paste and your context is completely different, you're gonna have a different experience. And he's like, okay, well, like what does the redraft look like? And I said, like, just go back to AI and, and frame it. This needs to be a context engineering page. Like, that's the framing we want. And that's probably all you need to do to make the page, like, instantly better.
Yeah.
Right. And that's what I think. That's one of the major differences right now between like high value and high success with AI and, you know, just a little bit extra that, that people are getting when you just, you know, try and copy paste prompts and not really understand or learn how this stuff works together.
Yeah, I've, I've said this, um, again a lot. I'll say it again. Everything you learn about AI shouldn't be definitive like we've learned that that's red, that's blue, that's one, that's two. Little Dr. Seuss on the AI show, by the way. It should be a thread that you're pulling. A learning should be a thread. So like, if I go watch a YouTube video on Claude and Obsidian and Second Brain, it's not because I want to completely read duplicate the thing that I just watched. It's because I need to take the learnings and build it for me and my assistant, or you and your assistant. Like, you got to start to think about this thing of threads that you're pulling.
And when you get help with AI, it will help you pull apart the threads, uh, manage the threads, bring the threads back together, document all the threads. So that you could just keep pulling new threads in a way that's always within the context that you already have. So that like all this, like the idea of focus, right, has shifted dramatically. Like you can pull a thread, decide that it's not relevant and leave it where it's at. For now and then come back later and be like, oh, what do you think, um, you know, V, is that thread relevant? I think it's relevant now. Like, this thing just happened. It's like, yep, let's bring it back in. Let's keep pulling that thread, right? And that is the most amazing feeling for anybody that has challenges with, with focus. Um, like the ideation and the creativity related to this stuff. Yeah, it's been fun to watch just, you know, mere mortal humans just access this, access this level. When they said like the week before, it's like, now, yeah, that's not gonna work, right? And then next week it's like, oh, something happened, there's some friction point, some piece of pain. It was like, let me try it. And boom, all of a sudden I can. And there's not much better feeling in the world for me than, than helping that, that moment, that shift. Yeah, I can't do— I can. Like, man, every consultant and coach out there, I think that should be like your North Star. Like, if you're trying to work and build a relationship with somebody and you get there, and that's the moment, like, and so much becomes possible. Like, oh, so yeah, it's amazing.
Um, bro, like, it's funny because this whole conversation is putting me in a reflective moment of like— because I just showed you some stuff in the green room that I'm like, we're not going to talk about this yet. And to think that 4, 5, maybe, maybe 6, but I think it's more around 4 or 5, 4 or 5 months ago, I hadn't opened Terminal 5 times in my life, 6 times in my life. And now sitting here seeing what we can build and how we can build it in the way that my brain works differently, even in the idea of building based on this journey with AI and the unlock that you're talking about that I recall like a Saturday for 3 hours with Chris and Nico and then boom, this is where we're at now. Again, 4 months, 5 months, and we have things We have things that would have historically taken people years to even think about getting to these types of builds or levels. Yeah.
Yeah. And things that I don't know that anybody conceived prior to us getting here, right?
Yeah.
That's the fun part, uh, among the many fun parts. Um, so it's been a fun week. And, uh, I appreciate, uh, being on this journey with you and sharing that story. And hopefully this was helpful for folks, and we'll see you on Monday. Thanks so much.
You bet. Bye.
