Time to chat about AI and your business... and other things.

Sa. Good morning, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Monday, February 23, 2026. How the hell are you, George B. Thomas?

I mean, Chris, the fact that in just a few quick days we're gonna say March 2026, my goodness. I'm doing good though. I'm super excited this week to see what we can get done in a with AI. I only have four days this week that I'm gonna get to play with AI, so I'm gonna probably do a couple evenings here and there because on Friday I'll be driving to Ohio. And the reason I'm sharing this on this podcast is I think that it's, it's very important for us in this world of AI, in this world of getting things done, that we also take real world moments. And so this weekend is my mom and step, or my stepmom and my dad's 50th anniversary. And so I'm going to drive to Ohio, we're going to have an anniversary party and then I'm going to zoom on back to North Carolina probably sometime Sunday. And my wife said, why don't you fly? And Chris, this was my response. I just am in the mood for a road trip. I'm in the mood to listen to some podcasts, to listen to an audio book, to get away from my computer. And I don't need this time to feel fast. I need this time to feel slow.

That is profound to say the least. So true. It does feel like, I don't know as we're going to talk about what we shipped over the weekend.

Yeah.

Since Friday, it does feel like we're getting closer to that in terms of as we continue to build this foundation of really like high quality digital experiences coupled with automation, agentic workflows, like there's an element of ease beyond what we, what I felt at least in terms of just being able to go talk, to talk to cloud code or in my case, V or Sage or you know, PAX in terms of can we do this? And then it just happens. Right. And that as we get there, it's like creating the space for humans to be humans. Like if that is not on your roadmap, why you build AI in to the infrastructure of your business or your personal workflows. Like find a way folks. There's so much opportunity there for all of us.

Yeah, it, it's so funny that you bring up this like this kind of an addition and almost into a business level of like Humanness and being human. And I had a very other interesting thing happen over the weekend, other than shipping. Chris. I went over to some friend's house. We had some questions about something that we're thinking about doing. He had some questions about a business that he's starting or thinking about starting. And during the conversation, we actually started to talk about kind of the. The state of America. And we got into a little bit of a religious conversation, not anything deep. And I said, oh, his name's Chris, by the way as well. I must just like to be friends with Chris, as I'm telling you, but his name is Chris. And I said, oh, brother, you, you should probably check out this thing I've building for the last couple months, because you're getting ready to go into business and you're, you're a man of faith. Like, if you ever get bored over the next couple days, just check this out and let me know. Chris. That's the first air quotes normal human that I've actually shared. You know what I mean? Not in the marketing space, not a LinkedIn, friend, fan, follower, whatever, like you want to call it first. Just Normal Human where I'm like, hey, like maybe you want to check this out? So I'm interested and very kind of pleasantly surprised on how serendipitous that was in the moment for the thing that had been being created for a while now.

Yeah.

On a human level, of course.

Yeah. And there's going to be that convergence, I think, because it's. We're kind of built to figure things out. Right. Um, even if we don't say that we want to, there's. Right. Like the curiosity is in there somewhere, the creativity is right there alongside it. And you just gotta. It oftentimes requires the serendipitous moments like.

Yeah.

To bring it out. And with that, I'll give you a chance to say hey to Sarah here.

Yes, Sarah, one of my favorite humans on the interwebs. Hi, Sarah.

Good morning indeed. And where do we start? Well, I've got an idea. Like maybe a little, little. Like big, big and little kind of format here.

I feel like that should be a country band if it's not already big and little. Yeah.

I want to say big, little and small. Yeah.

Right, right. It's kind of the two of those are the same. Which one does not belong?

Yeah. Oh, man. So on the little side, I remember when we first started working together, after I lost my last job, we started working on some AI, like just making blogs. Yeah. And right away you could tell Like a part of the power is being able to take things that already exist and just put a new lens on there, make a new point of view and either make it your own or just add a little bit of your flavor. And over the weekend, I got the idea of like turning the. The Statue of Liberty poem, you know, bring us your tired. You're. You're weak and weary, right as it. And like, try to relate it to what we're trying to do with value first in, you know, helping people with some of their SaaS baggage that they've developed over the years in terms of, you know, how it doesn't usually go their way in terms of adoption and spending a lot of money on things that don't necessarily create value. And so I went over to Gemini and said, hey, that Statue of Liberty thing, I don't even know how it goes. It's like a welcome message or something like that. And he's like, oh, yeah, that poem is by this person. And this was the first version and this was the second version.

Yeah.

And then I ask, yeah, I'd like to do a version of that for the Value First Team. And this time I didn't give my website like I might usually do, I think, because I was on my phone and it found three prominent organizations that go by Value first or Value First Team. Luckily, mine was option one.

Hey, there we go.

But also showed me a couple other ones which I kind of knew about, hence the dash that I have in Value first because of these situations. But some option one. Excellent choice. And here we go. Keep ancient playbooks, your pushy sales funnels, cries she with a unified view. Give me your frustrated, your siloed, your fragmented data yearning to sink free the artificial pipelines of your teaming tech stack. Send these the disconnected, the funnel tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the value path door. Oh, man. And then it's like, this is where you might put it over here. This is where you might put it on the homepage. This might be in a client onboard. Hard to imagine this being a use case for this. But just in case, here's an email. And this was just looking at the website, not in a gem, not built out for the Value first team. One thing I'm learning to like about Gemini is that it doesn't seem to have memory across chats. And so I get a fresh perspective. And he just went, looked at the website and then gave me these options that were dead on, like dead on accurate. So again, some confirmation that messaging is good on the website and Right. You know, and would you like me to help you find one of these specific. Help you draft a LinkedIn post to announce the new. Right. Like, so just the little idea of, hey, you know, this thing, can you make that for us? Right? Like, what we're trying to accomplish.

And I think this is an interesting piece that I've been playing with for a long time, Chris, and. And I try to teach this to people of, like, look, there's the concept that you're trying to teach, but there's the construct that you can put it in based on the context that you can also give it. So, for instance, you mentioned a while back starting to create content with AI. I'll never forget the first time I showed a couple people an article and they read the article and they're like, dude, there's so much in here and it's so dope. And I'm calling back to the Navigate your life's grid. Powerful lessons from Tron Legacy to lead, grow and flourish. And it literally is like a pillar page, almost style blog article. But it was like, here's the things that I want to teach. By the way, I want to pull in Tron Legacy because I'm a big fan of the movie and I can see where some things might align, and I need to do it from the George B. Thomas perspective of X, Y, Z. And when you can think of that content in a construct based on your context, man, can you get to some really dope places when it comes to creative content creation with AI assistance?

Yes, indeed. So you got something, Something little, or you want me to go go with my baby?

No, no, no. I think something. And again, I might call this little. Somebody else might call this huge. Again. When I went to the friend's house, Chris's house, who's thinking about starting a business, he was like, hey, can you help me build a website? And I go, bro, I can probably have the website that you need in less than a day. Like, you need five pages. And. And he goes, I said, I'll need copy, though. And he goes, well, I'll work on that, but it'll take me a while. I go, okay, screw that. I don't need copy. Here's what I need from you. I need some bullet points. How long have you done, xyz? What services do you want to offer? Who are the type of people you want to offer them to? I said, just spend the next couple hours. Send that to me. I'll create your copy. I'll send the copy. You can then tweak the copy that I give you so that it's like a day instead of a while, because I don't need you to slow the process down. He goes, dude, you can do that? I'm like, dude, I can do that. Just send me bullet points of those things. And so while that feels small to me, that's probably huge for him, right? It buys him a week, maybe two weeks of painstakingly as somebody who doesn't build websites, who doesn't deal with copy, who doesn't use AI. Like, I may have just relieved him of a painful, you know, week. Two, three weeks of agonizing like, oh, I just want to get my website up and get my business going. But for me it's like small.

I'll.

I'll have one conversation with Echo talking about a friend who wants to do these things. Give it context, tell it to think about how this person can best serve the humans that they're trying to serve in these XYZ ways. And magic will come out the other end for my friend. So small, but maybe big.

Yeah. Ah, so much opportunity.

Yeah, let me finish that sentence for you at least. For me. This might not be everybody. There is so much opportunity to help humans.

Yeah. Yes.

That's how I look at this.

Yeah. And that's the man. That's the difference. And AI is like, this is the democratization of this. I know. If George was in a position that I've heard many other agencies might find themselves in, he might be like, oh, let me work on a scope for you and we can do like a month long project the way we used to and it'll be 5k, 10k, whatever.

Well, yeah, by the way, by the way, let's just go right there. Because literally the conversation was like, bro, I'll host it for you. I'll build it for free. I know. You know what I mean?

Because you can.

Yeah, I can. All the infrastructure is in place. I know how fast I can do it for him. I know how good it's going to be for him. He's a friend. I own a business. Heck, I may own two businesses if I'm being completely honest with people. Just one is still in its like infancy, like in the womb to time frame. But it's like, I'm not. No, no. Just because I own an agency doesn't mean I need to make a dollar every day. Like come on. Anyway.

Indeed. Because that dollar might not be around for very much longer.

Hey, come on now.

All right, well, I've got on the other end of the spectrum. Yeah. I started talking about this on Friday again, coming from a Gemini chat that I opened while on a walk listening to a podcast. And the words recursive self improvement came up for like, I don't know, tenth, twentieth, hundredth time.

Yeah.

In the last couple months. And I was like, maybe it's time to build that into the stack. So before the show on Friday, I had worked with Gemini to build a research paper and then I gave it to cloud code. And then, you know, my AI leadership team turned it into what they thought it would look like for value first team. And we started building.

Yeah.

And we started building it into the system. And then something interesting happened on Saturday. Ryan Ginsberg shared this wonderful coaching assessment that he got from our AI infrastructure. Because we have all of our transcripts in there.

Yep.

And it went through over 100 transcripts and gave this one of the most in depth coaching assessments I've ever seen about how somebody communicates. And it was dead on. And he, he felt so much value in the moment of just seeing that. And I was like, hey guys, I realized I was forgetting about the humans in this, in this whole recursive self improvement project. And really we want to build it for a system of AI and humans improving together because we gotta continue to work together.

Yeah.

So Saturday was AI only Sunday. Humans plus AI. And this was, you know, amongst many other projects. So it wasn't like all day Saturday. All day Sunday, actually. Got to play Minecraft with, with the nephew for five or six hours on Saturday. So had my morning, morning with AI and then, you know, went over and, and had some fun there.

Yeah.

And so one team, one feedback loop, how we built the system where. Oh, by the way, then this morning I was like, oh man, we should, we should talk about this on the show. It'd be cool if we just had a web page to show exactly what we built. And that happened in the last like 30 minutes before the show started. Right. Again, easier because there's already a website to put it on. And so core insight. Most teams treat AI improvement and human development as separate concerns. AI systems get optimized through prompt engineering and fine tuning. People get developed through coaching and training. The two never touch. We discovered something different when we analyzed 150 plus session transcripts across eight months. We found that same signal recognition that improves AI operations also improves human performance.

Yeah.

An AI leader using outdated language and a human contributor defaulting to old patterns are the same class of event. Both represent methodology drift. Both get logged. Both get analyzed. Both improved so we stopped building two systems and built one. Right. We've got the team here. Team knowledge, curation, performance feedback, self healing, infrastructure, operating agreement, evolution, full team convergence. And what that led to was I wanted a coaching assessment myself.

Yeah.

And so we built that. And that page also got made in anticipation of this episode 15 minutes before we started as a. As in a. Like a companion to my founder profile, which is very, you know, open and transparent about the way I operate and all these things. Right. But this was interesting because I got. And this is where the human domain expertise part still super important.

Yeah.

Because I said, hey man, look at Ryan's. I want one of those. Right. Same, same folder, repository of transcripts in there. And on the first pass, and I think he actually talks about it in here, the first version of the assessment came back and I challenged it. Not because the findings were uncomfortable, though some were because the evidence base was too narrow. It relied too heavily on session summaries instead of raw transcripts.

Yeah.

And it drew conclusions from one client engagement that applied broadly. Right. And while Ryan's example said over 100 transcripts reviewed, mine had 15, plus a bunch of session summaries. So I challenged, said, hey man, how much coaching insight are you likely to get from a session summary? And of course, like Claude usually does, like, you're absolutely right.

Yeah, yeah. Not much, buddy.

Right. And so it was a couple of passes to get to my version. Right.

Yeah.

And. But now we have a self assessment with this many conversation terms. So like going back and forth in a conversation with a client, it's like that humans can't do that. Like 14,000, you know, moments evaluated.

Yeah.

What the numbers say five modes on a dial. Thought leader, coach and strategic advisor, philosophical co creator, patient activator.

Yeah.

Started pulling stuff like this from some of the unboxing prep conversations that I have with people like coaching. Also a huge opportunity for folks if you give AI your data. HubSpot's starting to do a lot of that stuff natively with some of the calling tools. And you know, I think there's even like a sales management workspace where some of this stuff is built in. So that's on the big side. And there's like. And honestly folks like this whole list of things like on the right side here. Right. That's all the stuff I was working on over the weekend. So those projects alongside like five to 10, you know, other ones, some of it converging, some not. I'm not saying you gotta give up your weekend to do this, but what are you doing during the week that might, might benefit from some build. Some build time?

Yeah, well, some evenings, some early mornings, some weekends. By the way, sometimes when you're working on things that you love, it isn't about giving it up. It's about. And I had this whole conversation with my family. My daughter figured out a pattern. She's like, mom, when dad's standing at this desk, he's working on Sidekick strategies and clients. When he's sitting at that desk, he's working on something that he's in love with now. Like he's, he's, he's his passion project. His, his video games. His hobby is like, you know, when he's at that computer, that's what's happening. And so it feels different. And Chris, I'm going to just tell a little bit of a story as fast as I can. I know we might go a little bit over, but listen, one of the things that I've been working on is the spiritual side of leadership.com website and probably about 30 days ago, I listen, I've talked about the superhuman framework from HR perspective with you, Chris. I've talked about Superhuman frame from marketing perspective at Inbound and, and you know, like 30 days ago, roughly, maybe 45 days ago, I actually asked Claude at that time a question of like, hey, look at my superhuman framework and tell me like, how many scriptures, by the way, don't check out if you're not spiritual or spiritual? Like, listen to the lesson for this for a second because this is something a human couldn't do. But, but a I was able to do. I said, how many scriptures aligned to the superhuman framework? And Chris, it came back with 350 plus scriptures. And immediately in that moment, I was like, well, first of all, I need to give context of a scripture mapping to whatever I'm going to do in the future. But I immediately said, wow, that really feels like it might be a yearly devotional for leaders. And so I finally had the chance to get to a point. I'll share my screen, but where over the weekend we built this page, which is the legacy leader journey and it's the 365 day devotional journey. 365 days of faith driven leadership devotionals built on the superhuman framework. Start your morning with purpose, lead your day with wisdom. And so the way that this process went is like, I got to this point where I was like, hey, I want to create these as individual monthlies as well. Because if somebody wants to just focus on love or purpose or human or holistic, but also I want to be able to have the whole thing if they want to get the whole thing. And so then I was like, well, I had all these MD files that I had worked with my assistant to actually get to the like the kind of thing. And I had tweaked it and I had read them. I sat and listened to like a whole year's worth of devotionals and like did some stuff. And then I was in this perplexing place where I was like, well, I'm a historical designer, I could design these. I don't have time for that. I have a friend who's an award winning designer, I could get them to him, but it's going to cost me thousands of dollars. This is in its infancy. I don't know if I can invest that. And so on a wild whim and a prayer I go, let me try Cowork, since it's now out for PC and see if I give it some information, some context, like the SSL ol brand, if it can design the PDF, the MD file into a PDF that would be downloadable. And I about poop myself because all of a sudden this PDF came out like perfectly done. And so what I created over the weekend. And by the way, I gave two free. And here's another lesson, spiritual or not, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know that I gave my two most important ones free. I didn't give like a pillar or two pillars, I gave love is the most important thing from a leader's perspective. Trust me, moving forward. And the purpose is important. So I gave these two free. Fill out a small first name, last name, email, you download the PDF, I don't spam the crap out of you, I leave you alone, you get the devotions, you can start to do the thing. But then we created the rest of the page. That is all of the devotional PDFs that you can download and you can purchase them $4.77 per one. Or you come down here, Chris, and you can actually get the whole 365 day devotional for $37.77. Or you can actually become a transformation member of what we're building here. And then all of a sudden these just all turn into download buttons. You can download everything because now you're a member. But this, the PDF creation, the page creation, the E commerce solution to it. The idea like from 30 days ago was built, built, built, launched in like a weekend. And like the fact that you can go from idea, first time, value, love, purpose, additional low cost resources for people who Are in that place is absolutely amazing to me.

And clearly you had. A month ago, you had that page.

Yeah.

Clear in your mind.

Yes.

Created a creative brief and you specked it all out.

No.

And this is. Oh.

Oh, no. So I'll tell you what this looked like, is it looked like on one screen I had Echo and Claude code working together in agent teams and plan mode. And so I was planning and then launching agents. Planning and launching agents. On the other screen, it was literally me working with cloud coworking of like, now let's do this MD file into a PDF. Now let's do this md. Right. And so it was, it was a. I had this idea, didn't know exactly what it would look like other than I wanted it to be on brand. I wanted to have a little bit more E commerce feel than the rest of the site because of purchasing the things. And then it was just this collaborative multiple hours and different sessions, by the way, because I did go like grocery shopping with the wife and went and talked to friends and like, things like that. Like lived real life, but multiple hours over multiple sessions to be able to give birth to now this page and multiple resources. And here's what's funny to me is like the amount of organizations that couldn't launch like multiple campaigns in 30 days. I literally just launched basically 14 campaign, like for what, 1314 PDFs, two downloadables, two conversion points, like in. In a day, two days. If you combine the, you know, time together, maybe day and a half, maybe less than that even. So, like just the fact of like ideation to collaboration, to creation, to launch, like, if you're, if you're doing it right. And again, you've thought about the context, the construct, the, you know, the creativity, the curiosity, the collaboration. If you're using all those C words, what you can do now is it's just stupid.

Yeah. And don't lose the fact that Claude, cowork one month ago.

Yeah.

Did. Was not available. We didn't know when it was going to ship for Windows.

Nope.

And that was a central piece of getting this done.

And.

Yeah.

And let me actually, let me do this. Let me show you real quick because I want people to realize, like, I'm not being like, it's not like I was like, hey, let me, let me put out a like half piece of crap. Like when I tell you, hang on, I got to find the share screen. When I tell you that it like designed it. I mean, it designed it. So like, if I share my screen, Chris, this is the COVID right? Love. It's got a nice grid. It's all laid out. It's centered. Like, I didn't. I didn't ask it to do this. Gave a dedication. It actually gave, like, how to use this devotional. And so each day has, like, the devotion and the scripture reference, and then it has its own page with a leadership challenge, a prayer and reflect and response section. And then, boom, day two. And then day two's leadership challenge prayer. Like, and it did all, like, the footer. It put that in there. I didn't ask for that. Like, the blue background with the blue border. It knew the brand, so just put that in there. Like, I didn't ask for any of that. And so it literally was like, a one shot. And then, by the way, all. What would it be? 14. Because then the main one, too, right? So it's 10 pillars. No, 40, 15. So four cornerstones, 10 pillars. And then the main. 365. Day one. Like, it stayed consistent across every single one, and I didn't have to ask it to be consistent.

Powerful. I see my canva invoice in the inbox this morning. Yeah. Maybe this is finally the moment. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for sharing that build. We're gonna try our best to keep showing building and shipping that we're doing so that hopefully that can help spark some ideas and some mindset shifts. And you guys will be back tomorrow morning to do more of that. Until next time. Have a great Monday, everybody.

Peace out.