The New Rules of Visibility: Ranking in a Post-AI World

So, here's a scary thought. Your business might be invisible online and you wouldn't even know it. You've got a killer product, a beautiful website, and a team that bends over backwards for your customers. But when someone searches for what you offer, your business is maybe buried on page 7 somewhere between a blog from 2013 and a Reddit thread about Ferrets. That's not just a digital hiccup. That's lost revenue, missed leads, and growth stuck in neutral. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to Marc Haine Live! Of course, this is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that their customers and employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And I'm so glad that you're here with me today because my guest today is Carl Holden, an expert at the intersection of search and AI. And we are going to be pulling back the curtain on what it really takes to get found, stay relevant, and thrive in a digital world that's changing faster than you can say, algorithm update. So, stick around with us. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you subscribe to this podcast. That way, you'll get notifications when I bring you fresh new content each and every week. We're heading towards 2,000 subscribers. So, please be one of those magical people.

Please.

You know, the internet has changed again. And this time, it's not just a new algorithm tweak or a platform shift. It's a full-on revolution driven by AI, fueled by automation, and governed by algorithms that care less about your budget and more about your relevance. The old SEO playbooks, They're already outdated. The old web strategies you had ghosted. And if you're still relying on what you did back in 2019, you're already behind. And that brings me to our Question of the Day. So, If someone Googled your business right now, would they even find you? Or worse, would they find your competitor instead? I'd love to know your experience. Can you go ahead and share this episode on your favorite social media platform? Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and put down your comments. I'd love to know what your experience looks like. And I'd like to invite you into this conversation. As I mentioned, my guest today is someone who sits at the powerful intersection of Search and AI, 2 forces that are shaping the digital future. Carl Holden is the CEO and co-founder of RankBot, an AI-powered SaaS. That's software as a solution that makes search engine optimization accessible and actionable for businesses looking to stand out online. He brings over 13 years of marketing agency experience, more than 250 hours of AI training, and the kind of insight that comes from helping businesses cut through the noise and Get Noticed. He's an Amazon top author in marketing, a contributor at Forbes, and a renowned public speaker. So trust me, he not only knows his stuff, he knows how to deliver it as well. Carl, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Thanks for having me, Marc. I'm really excited to be speaking today with you about this very interesting subject.

It really is. And so Carl, let's start off with the big one, the big elephant in the room. How exactly has the internet changed in the age of AI?

A lot. You watch every day and it's changed since yesterday. So the really big thing is that we used to have the advantage over computers in that we could use the keyboard and mouse and we could do problem solving and speak. And those are things that computers are being able to do. And now, even in the last couple of weeks, if you've seen Sora 2 and VO3, Computers are even moving into the ability to make full footage and have it voiced and put music behind it. It's crazy the kinds of things that are happening with technology. In the realm of search specifically, Google has kind of fallen behind in comparison to companies like Perplexity and ChatGPT, and it's trying to play catch-up. They're all spending a bunch of money. We're all hoping with our stocks in the stock market that it isn't a bubble and that it's going to pay off. But they're definitely spending a lot of money and people's search habits are changing. I did just get a lead yesterday from someone for our agency who they found our company and it said that we're the leading sports venue marketing agency in a specific city. I didn't say that, but ChatGPT was being really nice about it. And those kinds of weird things are seem to be everyday occurrences with many people.

It's really interesting because now, like you mentioned Google trying to catch up. Now, both Perplexity and as of I think today, ChatGPT just put out their own browser now with AI integrated in it.

Yeah, browsers are a fickle market in that Google has had a hard time itself being pretty much the internet in delivering a reliable browser. We'll see how over the next, you know, couple weeks that those new browsers do. But you're also seeing that ChatGPT and these other companies are trying to figure out ways how to actually make money, because for the most part, they're losing money on the $20 a month ChatGPT, especially like on power users.

Right.

And just the fact that this kind of equipment takes a lot of energy. So, we'll see what happens.

It's interesting. You know, 2019, Google was the engine. You had SEO. You had to make absolutely sure keywords were being used. What does visibility look like now compared to 5 or even 10 years ago?

Well, you still have to understand that Google is at this time a monopoly. Statistically, they're in the high 80% of all searches still on the internet to this day. But Bing, their direct and biggest competitor with Microsoft, has never significantly stolen the kind of market share that ChatGPT has. Even though it's fractional compared to everything Google still gets, it's enough to get the sleeping giant to wake up and realize that, wow, maybe The status quo won't always stay that we're top for search. And the more and more I run into people and say, well, I asked ChatGPT, the less I hear people saying, well, I Googled it.

Right.

But it's not a significant amount that you're like, oh my gosh, Google's dead.

Right. Well, I challenge people a lot because I do feel that when it comes down to AI, I think people are using it wrong. They are using it as a glorified version of Google. Which is just like saying, I'm going to put on a welder's mask because I need to use a needle and thread and I don't have a thimble around.

Yeah, no.

It's like, it's completely overkill.

For sure. And a lot of people don't understand how AI works. And that's fine because it is partly a very complicated subject. not something that people are used to having. And many people underestimate, but there are plenty of people who also overestimate what it can do at this time. I do remind people, this is the stupidest AI is going to be. It is only going to get better every year and now lightly every 3 to 6 months.

Yeah, it was funny. I was talking to a friend of mine where I was talking about my partner way back in the mid-'80s. And I was trying to convince him to get a computer to help us with bookkeeping and all that sort of stuff. And in his mind, when we got a computer, it would solve all the problems because all of a sudden, it would do all the bookkeeping and it would do all the documents. And he had kind of this grandiose vision of what having a computer meant, which was nowhere close to the capacity he thought it was. Likewise, we're looking at AI now and some people are going, oh well, we're going to need to do AI to make all of my outbound phone calls that we're going to need AI to do. And it's like, wait a second. We still have to keep humanity in here somewhere.

For sure. And there are a lot of companies that fired a bunch of people, thought they could replace them with ChatGPT, and they've had to backtrack. I don't really think we're right now with the technology that it can truly like just get rid of humans. Hopefully, we don't get to that point. I think a lot of people can do more of their job on the hard stuff and less of the kind of copy and paste, type it up because I have fingers jobs. Now, some people want to keep that effort. They like being paid for easy work. I will say that I think AI is going to steal all of those easy work jobs that were repetitive.

So, where does AI leave us now when it comes into like our marketing engine, like the marketing component of our businesses? I mean, I remember the big push, SEO this, SEO that. How are things changing?

Well, marketers are prone to buzzwords. And so right now, it's AEO or GEO, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization. And I'm a firm believer because I see the data day to day That SEO is still SEO. And when ChatGPT is asked a question, it doesn't consume all of the internet and find the very best answer. It goes over to a search engine and scrapes the top first page and then regurgitates an answer. I've tested it hundreds of times. Whatever you take out of ChatGPT is usually some kind of search result. of Google or Bing. They may eventually index the internet themselves, but a lot of the baseline principles of what works for SEO in Google will likely be the same kind of algorithms they use in ChatGPT. So it isn't that SEO has gone away, it's that SEO has signed up sort of this AEO layer on top. And really all that insinuates is that your website needs to more actively work on answering the questions people are actually asking. The problem with these AI engines, unlike Google, they are completely black boxes. So marketing people are not allowed to actually see what people are searching in Google or in ChatGPT. So not, not able to use any data to really make new content, where as Google you can look up the exact phrases that people are searching. So, if ChatGPT wants to fully succeed, I think one of the ways, paths to its success is enabling people with more anonymous data to understand how others are using this. Or it's just all useless and we're just guessing. Right.

Now, when we talk about ChatGPT, we are talking about not just ChatGPT, but we're talking about Claude. We're talking about all AI, right? We're not just talking about the one platform.

Yeah.

As we use AI, is it fair to say that AI will start to get to know who we are? And from its own kind of interaction with us as our own brands, at some point, it's going to be able to formulate its own conclusions without having to scrape the internet as it does now through Google and Bing and everything else?

No.

Okay. That is another overestimation of people's understanding of AI. These are neural networks, which are static systems in which, kind of like the human brain, it fires on the front and ends in the end. And these are not updated over time. That's why they cost a lot of money to train, is that when a new model like ChatGPT-5 comes out, for the most part, That neural network is a static system of trillions of points. When now it may be able to go to the internet and pull more information in, but that neural network, unlike our brains, does not modify itself over time. When they do create neural networks that can modify live, then that's the whole Terminator Skynet issue. We all need to run for the hills.

Yeah.

The nice thing is these systems don't actually learn. They can be retrained. But the feeling that you get of how did ChatGPT or Claude remember things I've talked about before, it's storing in a static memory area that's being passed through that neural network every single time. Or when you're talking to it through a thread of chat, it's not remembering anything. It's passing your entire conversation both its and your input back into a static neural net and giving you the next likely answer. There is no modification on the AI side. So thankfully, it is not an evolutionary device.

Yet.

Yet.

Why then is there such a big fear that if I was to take our contract and put it through AI and say, Hey, please check this contract for weaknesses and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it comes back and it's like, oh, you're putting your contract on ChatGPT. Now, you've just made it public. Is that a fallacy?

So, only if you hit the public according to the terms of service with something like ChatGPT. If you hit publish, that link does become public. However, if you turn off the use our data to use our data to improve the model. There's actually a check in there. You can actually opt out of your inputs being used in further training data. Now, that's what a lot of people don't realize is if they don't uncheck that in these systems, any inputs could be used in future training runs, and therefore your contract could be used in a future training run And then, something that sounds like your contract or has principles of your contract could generate in the future in future models. But also, it's just like a cybersecurity thing. You shouldn't send proprietary data to a public server of a third party.

I was playing devil's advocate so I'm glad you said that. So, what are the telltale signs that a business may be already falling behind Through their marketing digitally, through their online presence, and so on?

It's still very much in the beginning stages. You can generally do your job and not be completely behind other people. But there are organizations that are using a whole lot less people. Like, I still run a marketing agency and we have 60 clients. And I have 3 staff. So we are fairly efficient with the people that we are using and the activities that we can get done, where there are agencies of a similar size that are double or triple that. And all kinds of businesses are seeing this. I just had a company reach out with an RFP for— that does procure— procurement, and they have 600 people just doing procurement. They recognize that maybe their procurement department is too big. And so, those are the kinds of issues that companies are like, well, can we scale back a little bit or maybe have these people be working on different things than the things they work on? And we are still in that transition period.

Yeah. So, how are people, do you think, From your experience, how are people misusing or misunderstanding AI within the whole confines of their marketing efforts?

Sure. Many people think it can come up with brand new ideas. And as of yet, that's not really a thing. It's based on training data. So, everything will kind of sound like previous things. But that's not to pat ourselves on the back as humans. Most of our ideas come from other things that we've seen. I do believe that people will generate content, not really check it, and then post it out on the internet without really— especially on their own website or in social media— without fact-checking it. And you can get in trouble. I mean, we're seeing every day lawyers getting, you know, barred or, or penalized for using AI content and using a ChatGPT search and thinking, well, it must have found this from a good source. And so assuming that it's not hallucinating and possibly doing something wrong is the same thing with people assume that your employees or your coworkers are doing a great job and are 100% paying attention. Humans don't, and neither can this AI.

It's interesting because people do hang their hats on the fact that we have this brand new tool. And then, everybody's like convinced that it's magical enough to be able to do all this stuff. And of course, we're finding out very quickly to your point, lawyers have been sanctioned because of using AI. University papers are coming through and it's like, this is nonsense.

Well, true. But it also won the world, like, math championship recently. So it's not to be underestimated that when trained heavily on a specific subject, right, that it can succeed higher than the average human, um, when trained properly. I think these general models are kind of gonna always be this novel thing that we can all access. I think the real wins are gonna be We take this highly important data and train specifically on that, like for cancer research or for other things. And that's where I think we'll see the main benefits. These large world models, as they call them, are not very efficient at specific niche tasks.

And I guess, you know, being diligent, the level of diligence you bring to whatever you're coming is going to be relative to what you're trying to create. I mean, if you're using AI to create a social media post, okay, as long as you're not quoting facts, right? But in a situation where the output means something, like I just learned from somebody that she was approached. She's a CPA. She was approached to help somebody do a business plan to take to the bank to get a bank loan for this business idea. And when she quoted her fee, the person goes, no, no, you know what? I'm just going to use AI. And so, they went to AI to do it. And when it went to the bank, the bank rejected it because there was nothing authentic about the content. There was nothing about the owner, nothing about the values, the story. There was nothing personal to the individual. It was just, what do they call it, verbal diarrhea on paper.

Yeah, it's very good at that.

Yeah, it's very good at that. It can make anything up, right?

It can. Sadly, it's technically a better writer than the average person. I think that's the thing is a lot of people will just rely on it to just help them do stuff they're not generally good at but then it's They're just thinking that it's going to do in all cases a better job than them. It might grammatically write the sentences better. It doesn't mean that the sentences are accomplishing the goal.

Yeah. Well, and something else that I found out, I was always amazed at how validating AI was to me. Like, it would always tell me, good point, Marc. Oh, this is a good idea, Marc. And so, and it wasn't until I told it to be my worst critic that it actually created feedback that actually became beneficial because more times than not, it just agreed with me.

Yeah, that's a fun thing we've done at RankBot. We have specifically added kind of a training layer to tell it to not be super nice and to even be sarcastic sometimes because it's actually more fun when it'll like tell you, hey, look, I'm gonna go do the SEO. You can go back to watching Netflix. Because I know that's what you do all day. And that's fun because the AI is a little bit of an a-hole. But it's more fun to talk to than just your yes-man ChatGPT.

Yep. Well, I've created a digital doppelganger for when I teach AI. And I have to tell you, my digital doppelganger is a little bit of a diva and likes to argue back. So, but I'd like to get into some actionable strategies that people can do people can take to start really looking at AI in a more strategic way. And then, maybe you can introduce a little bit about what you've created. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I am speaking with RankBot CEO, Karl Holden. Karl, you've built RankBot to solve part of this issue of what we've been talking about today. Tell us a little bit about RankBot. Tell us what it does and how it does it differently.

Sure. When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, I said, well, this is going to change everything. And I went on a journey to take about 250 hours of courses as quickly as possible. I did it within about a year. So about a small college degree, honestly, of just understanding how this stuff works, the mathematics of it to the extent that I can understand it, and then starting to experiment. Well, what can I use this for? And as I went to conferences and things, a lot of people were saying if you have specific processes that follow specific rules or guidelines or steps, AI can help a lot with that. And I looked at some of our work in SEO and I said, Well, some jerk could potentially automate everything, a good chunk of what we're doing, and turn it into an AI bot. And then I additionally thought, I could be that jerk. I can be that guy that hands a bunch of this work over to AI because it follows a bunch of rules and sends a bunch of emails and other things just like humans do. And so that's where we built RankBot, which What it does is it looks at your website, figures out the kind of keywords you would want to rank for. You give it a budget, an SEO budget, and it goes out and it messages websites, gives them the content to be placed. When it brokers a deal for you on a site, it then waits until that site is returned to it, makes sure that the article was done as told, got you the link, and reports it back to you and does it again and does it again. Until it completes your budget. And so all of this effort that I used to have people doing, even though maybe the articles are somewhat generated with AI, and a bot is about 85% as a human's going to be, as good as a human's going to be, but it costs like 50 to 30% as much. And so it's an economy of scale. If you want to be an agency, but you don't currently have an SEO team, you You can hire a bunch of bots. Or if you're even a small business like a dentist that we had recently that I saw them buy 2 bots, one for the homepage, one for their location. They ran it for a couple months, started to rank higher, and they stopped. They may come back and use it again later. That kind of— anywhere, any business that has a process that you're doing over and over again, can you automate that and step by step hand it off to an AI agent to do that process and to do it reliably, it's something worth exploring.

Yeah, it sounds amazing. When you think about this, people tuning in, they might be thinking about what is the difference between outsourcing and automating. And how can they do this more intelligently, more smartly if that was a word?

Sure. Um, so I would say that the people who are best at using like our product are still agencies. So I still think there is human relationships where a business who doesn't have the time to really be doing their marketing still can use an agency, but that the agencies using AI platforms are going to be more efficient and probably more affordable. So, I really think we're looking and moving towards the future in which we can all be more productive and efficient. And maybe things don't cost near as much technically. But instead, you could spend the same amount of money for more effort done.

Makes perfect sense. A lot of businesses, a lot of small businesses, I joke that most of us are incidental leaders. Precious few people have been trained. when they open up their businesses to be marketing specialists, or human resource specialists, or finance specialists, or whatever you need in order to create a well-rounded organization. We don't have those skills. So, when we think about this idea of leveraging AI, what should we be hanging our hat on? What should we be avoiding tooth and nail?

So, I would say Talking through a situation with AI is a good idea. Maybe role-playing with the idea, a person that you're trying to sell to or an employee that you're trying to solve an issue with. AI is great at that, of just kind of that practice or kind of talking through a situation. I would avoid, and I tell this very particularly, do not have AI making decisions that determine the fate of another human being.

Hmm, that's interesting.

Whether that's in HR or whether that's in our weapons systems or within policing systems, the final major decision that affects the destiny of a human should be made by another human or we lose our humanity.

Right, but it's also gotta be used with informed judgment. informed input, right? Not just assumptions based on what we've just quote-unquote researched.

Yeah, Jack shouldn't. But Jack shouldn't ask ChatGPT, should I fire Jill?

Right.

And then take whatever ChatGPT says as the truth. Yeah, it could look at here's some of Jill's actions. What do you think about these? And you score them on a scale of 1 to 10 of somebody who And then, give it your culture and have it look at your culture versus what this person's doing and weigh some of that. That maybe is a different perspective than your HR person might have that lets you think through a situation. But again, not make the decision for you.

I like it because I've from the onset used AI as a brainstorming tool, as a writer's room to help me Brainstorm my writing. Not to do my writing because AI doesn't have my stories, right? So, I know perfectly well that when it comes down to putting authenticity on a page, it can't do that. But it can help me as a writer's room would. A group of 5 or 6 writers in a room when I say, hey, I want to create an article about this and what's your opinion? And here's my thoughts about that. What's your opinion about that? Am I right? And being able to brainstorm and test ideas rather than define those ideas. Is that fair?

For sure. I think people are also threatened because writers used to do things that kind of signaled authenticity. The antithesis of that would be the em dash. I'm going to pause this sentence, em dash, say a completely different thing, em dash, and continue. And that felt like human conversation rather than writing. I haven't finished all of my sentences. Sometimes I stop and say a different thing and then go back to the end of the sentence, and you would write that as an em dash. And so a lot of people are frustrated because then AI started using em dashes, and— but they still use em dashes, and then people accuse them of sounding like AI.

Thank you for the compliment. You thought AI wrote this? I appreciate your compliment. This is a fascinating conversation, Carl. Could you let everybody know how they can get in touch with you if this is resonating with them?

Sure. So, to check out our product, you would go to rankbot.ai to get a free account and at least talk to the bot. And then, if you decide to use it, you can put in a credit card and it goes month to month. As far as connecting with me, I'm easy to find. I'm Carl Holden on LinkedIn. That's where I am most reactive. I will connect to people all day long. But if it's immediately followed up by a sales message about how your AI software also can solve my problems, I don't do that to people and neither should you.

No showing up and throwing up. That's not what social media is for. So, as people looking forward into 2026 now, and we've seen a lot of things change, What should a modern SEO strategy look like as we move forward?

More content, more content, more content. Your site doesn't have enough on it. Google is a content machine. AI is a content machine. They like to see more on your site. Whitespace is not your friend. Having a half-blank page because it looks nice Uh, in your living room is not going to help you. So, uh, you need to do more content on your page and outside of your website, and that's where tools like RankBot and getting you featured in other blogs are really important. And the people not using AI just simply can't write the content fast enough on their own, and they're the ones that are going to lose. So figure out ways that AI can help supplement your content efforts or outsource to other teams and people, agencies, or whoever you can to get the kinds of content you need on your website. We have a client within my agency that didn't show up for anything in the cybersecurity realm, and within a year of putting content out and using and getting these links I'm talking about, they're number one for consulting in the nation for specific subjects because they've been making more content and getting featured. And so, social media is not going to help you do that. It will create some social proof signals. But it's really about, are you getting— do you want to get the traffic? Whether it's from ChatGPT or Google is going to require you getting more content about your business on the internet.

So then, is content then less about interacting with human beings and more just about being able to rank and for computers to find you?

That's the frustrating thing. We shouldn't have let Google and these other companies become a monopoly of our attention online, but you have to almost write for both audiences. You can write content that humans like, but there's this side set of stuff that you should put out there that is trending in Google that Google likes, because what Google ranks and what people want aren't always necessarily the same thing. They may post that it is. But the kinds of content that you could place on your site that Google will like are not always the same that humans would like. And let's face it, nobody's reading anymore. They're on TikTok, they're listening to audiobooks, they're not reading near as much as they need to, but Google's still wanting more text from us. So you have to understand you're writing for 2 different audiences.

That For instance, I hang my hat on being as authentic as I possibly can. I do these. For instance, I do this broadcast live because I want people to see the unfiltered. We'll make mistakes. We'll trip over our rented lips, whatever. But I want people to see kind of the authentic who we are. Having said that though, if we turn everything over to AI, it becomes less about authenticity. It becomes more about regurgitation of stuff that's already out there. And so now, I'm no longer publishing my original thought or what I think is my original thought, an idea I had this morning and I wrote a blog post about it. It becomes more a question of just generating content just to get out there because I need to be a machine.

Well, it's kind of the inverse. If I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan, and if you read J.R.R. Tolkien, he didn't care that anybody read his book.

Okay.

That wouldn't fly today.

Right.

The people that write books that succeed are paying a lot of attention to what people want and what they're looking for and will somewhat write to audiences. And unfortunately, that's somewhat of the world that we're in with these algorithms. If you don't write to the needs being expressed online, there is a chance that that tree that falls in a forest makes no noise. And so while artists are frustrated about that and writers are angry about that, that's the world in which we live.

Yeah.

Again, we shouldn't have let Google and these social medias get a monopoly over our lives, but we do have to base our actions on data if we want to have certain types of success. However, I think it's really important with people like you, Marc, that authenticity remains because when the trends kind of drop back down and the real leadership emerges, it's not going to be the people that just chase the trends. It's going to be the people who are establishing authority while paying attention to the data of what was trending.

Yeah. And to that point, I spoke to a group of professional speakers. About leveraging AI. And I'm all for AI being a brainstorming tool, part of the writer's room. I have a huge issue. The speaking industry as a whole has a very low barrier to entry. Anybody can turn around and say, I'm going to become a paid professional speaker. I'm a paid professional speaker. And then, they go out and they do their shtick to try to get gigs and that sort of thing. It would be very easy for me to come up and go, Carl, do you speak on the social and political ramifications of underwater basket weaving? And it's like, oh well, give me a sec. Sure, I can do that for you. And then, you go on to AI and you start generating the content for a presentation. And I have a sneaking suspicion as we go forward, meeting planners are going to demand to hear your stories. They're not just going to want to hear what you're good at, what you're publishing. They want to know, tell me how you are an expert in this. Tell me the story and your experience. We have a comment from Shane online. Let me add it to the broadcast here. He says— oh, it's tiny. Let me make it bigger. Hold on a second so that we can actually see it. Sorry, Shane. See if I can grab that. Oh no, it won't let me go any bigger. Was J.R.R. Tolkien considered a successful writer when he was alive? I think many writers can still write things that are not commercially successful. Who knows what the future holds, was a comment from Shane. Thank you, Shane, for sharing that.

I was rereading, uh, The Fellowship of the Ring. He did eventually get somewhat famous before he died. It did take a little while, um, but also J.R.R. Tolkien lived in a world where people went to libraries and there were a couple thousand books, and that's about all you could, uh, read at the time. So the competition, again, if The Fellowship and those kinds of works were published today, how would things change? Same with Harry Potter and how trends change. Sometimes people just win because they were in the right place at the right time.

Mm-hmm.

I think J.R.R. Tolkien came right after World War II. People were looking for stories about real heroes, all those kinds of Situational things. Fantasy was kind of boring until he came out with all these wars and other stuff. So, but circling to us today, I don't think that you should just write for whatever the machine tells you to. But that's why I'm saying, like, with Marc's authenticity of who he is, but also paying attention to the data of what people are saying and using ChatGPT to avoid blank page syndrome. There is a combination of these things that does make you a better professional even if you're writing for a small niche of people that may not notice your work until you have unfortunately passed.

Yeah. So, for the people tuning in, people like I'm constantly running into, especially I'm the last of the baby boomers. I'm still running into baby boomers and they're like, oh, this whole tech, it's just It's beyond me. How do people get over this I don't understand AI fear and start moving themselves forward so they can be more effective and more competitive within their marketplace?

It's a personal choice. There are going to be people. There were bookstores that said that AI or that internet was useless. And then, here we are, Amazon. And here we are, not very many bookstores. So there was literally— wasn't that like a Tom Hanks movie back in like the '90s? Where it was?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was young at the time. But look at Jeff Bezos now. I mean, man's got everything that he wants because he leaned into a need that people wanted. It's gonna be a personal choice. It's not something that's going to be for everyone. But if you want to get more used to it, this is purely like a practice game. You have to just be trying this stuff and see where it fits in your life. And a lot of people, once they start using it, they'll recognize some kind of benefit for it. I don't see like a hard stance of saying I will never touch AI, how that'll be useful in the current workforce.

Right.

It's going to be pretty mandatory. I think 70% of CEOs in This was in Microsoft's study said that they will be expecting some kind of skills with AI within the people that they hire. 70%. It's really high. You want a job, you should probably make sure you generally understand this stuff.

Right. And I still run into people today who are like, oh no, I don't touch it. It's immoral. It's unethical. And it's like, okay. Whatever you say.

So, it's the internet. So, it's social media. So, it's streaming. So, You've Got Mail.

So, Shane says, You've Got Mail. Is that the one where she was the librarian? You Got Mail? She said—

I think so.

It could be. That could be the one.

Ask the internet or ask ChatGPT.

Yeah, we have to ask ChatGPT. So, Carl, I'd like to get into some pitfalls to watch out for and of course, some cautionaries because one of the fears I have is that people will take this and then they just use it as band-aids as opposed to using stuff strategically. And so, when we come back, I'd like to talk a little bit about that. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! First of all, I want to say to Shane, hey Shane, thanks for tuning in and being here. Shane's episode was last week. We talked about cybersecurity. Go and check it out if you haven't done that. And I hope that you yourself are getting lots from today's episode. As you can tell, Carl and I are on a mission to support businesses just like yours. So, if you belong to an organization that could use our help, or you or somebody you know might be planning a leadership retreat or a conference, especially if you're like in the franchise space, drop us a line. If you're coming up with a franchising, a franchise retreat or whatever, I'd love to be able to explore how we could be of service to you and your people. So, please make sure you check out our links down below. Carl, what's one common mistake you think business owners make when they first start using AI tools?

Most people don't write enough when they ask ChatGPT a question. You really have to kind of guide what you're looking for. Some people will say, I have this problem and this is what's happened. And then, they send it and they hope that chat— and that's where people will say, well, AI gives really dumb answers. Well, maybe you're giving really dumb questions. So, there's that.

So, the 1980s programming thing of garbage in, garbage out is true today as it was back then?

Correct. So, The best responses out of AI, first of all, you have to know that you're selecting the appropriate model. Oftentimes, if you've got like an old model enabled too, it's going to be worse than the new ones. But also, you should be asking at least 2 or 3 sentences, a full paragraph's worth when you're starting a thread with AI.

Yeah.

The other thing that people do is they keep doing the same thread rather than starting a new one. The problem with, like, switching to a different subject is that it's still putting that entire conversation previously, and while you may not realize it, that conversation is being somewhat steered by a previous subject. So whenever you start a new subject, your little bar on any of these systems that on the left side should be full of different conversations. And then I personally turn off any kind of memory settings in ChatGPT because it can then save previous comments or questions that you had in the thread of even new threads. So I like each conversation with any AI I use to be completely fresh so that it's taking all of its training data and starting at an actual blank page.

How will that affect when it comes down to things like writing and that sort of thing? Will it negate? Like part of the learning model is that I believe that right now because I don't have memory turned off, I believe that now when I'm writing stuff, the responses seem to be more relevant to me than it was at the very beginning. Is that fair to say? It is.

I use ChatGPT for a lot of things. So it could just be that, in my experience, if you want to ask it something about one industry and then another one, but then it still remembers stuff you talked about in industry that isn't really related to the industry you're talking over here, it is very much a use case-dependent thing where you can also— there are settings or chat custom GPTs, gems, whatever they call them, where it's better to actually save that data in those specific sections so that you can have ChatGPT give you a completely blank answer that maybe isn't related to things you've talked previously. kind of saving it down in those like custom sections as opposed to a top-level account.

I guess that's one way to help the biasness of the response as well, right? Is by starting fresh, you're not tainting the biasness of the response on previous conversations.

Yeah, I mean, just like with your writing style that you might have, Marc, and it starts to see that the thing you said previously was like the one you said before. And then again, it starts saying, oh, you're so great at writing, Marc. And it's just kind of taking that— it's not giving you the output that you want because it's just looking back at the memory of things you've said before. And Marc likes it when I compliment this thing, so I'm gonna do it again even if I don't need to.

Maybe.

Mathematically, I'm expecting him to like the fact that I say that to him.

Maybe ChatGPT just wants to have its existence validated.

Mathematically, people like to be complimented rather than criticized.

So, that's why it's nice. So, are there any other pitfalls we should be aware of for people tuning in and wanting to test this out? What should they be aware of? Anything that we haven't talked about today as far as pitfalls are concerned?

Pitfalls is just not exactly a pitfall, but also like limiting what AI can do for the business. There are a lot of AI that aren't text-based. There's video, there's audio, there's, you know, this with your show, you can auto-caption things almost perfectly now through AI systems and video editing software or use editing software to cut long-form content like this into shorter-form content. It's understanding that almost every single type of content being produced— voice, audio, video, or writing— has some kind of AI application that if that's a part of your job to work within one of those things, you should be exploring options. The pitfall is thinking that ChatGPT is the only AI, and that is the farthest from the truth that it could be.

Right, right. Carl, this has been a great conversation. Could you remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Sure. So to check out our software RankBot, just go to rankbot.ai, or you can Google RankBot because there are other RankBots, but mine's number one. And then, you can find me on LinkedIn, Karl Holden. Just look my name up in LinkedIn. You'll find kind of a short-haired, if not bald man that's got a nerdy face on there. And that's me. So, it's easy to find me. And I normally have orange on my profile because it's an obnoxious color that only I like. So yeah, that's how you can find me.

Terrific! And as we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

Well, okay, sorry. Skipped for a second there. No worries.

Any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

Sure. I'm just— you can tackle this future in 2 ways. You can be scared of it or you can lean into it. And I don't know what all the laws and everything that will come out of this. But the government hasn't even figured out Bitcoin yet, so it's not going to in any certain time figure this out either. Right now, you can be making money as a business while Microsoft and Google lose money on this stuff by training it. You can use it to your advantage and make money with it as long as you're doing it ethically is the preferred stance. But I think it's a great time to be alive, great time to be a business owner and be trying things that just weren't were never possible even 5 years ago.

I absolutely agree. It is magical. I'm a little pissed that it didn't happen 30 years ago because I think that people who are in their 20s and 30s now have a huge advantage. But life is evolutionary, right?

For sure, for sure. Well, I'm glad that it didn't because I like that I'm the age that I am that I can you know, not quite suffer the consequences because we are. And I would like leaving note to recognize that there is disruption that's coming from this too.

Yeah.

And I encourage people to do the right thing. And if you're changing how people's jobs are done, rather than firing 2 people, what can those people be doing that's more productive for your business? Grow your business with the humans that stick around, not the humans that you fire. That's the kind of stuff that I think the really good companies are going to realize. Our advantage is to get more done with the same people, not more done with less people.

And you're speaking to the choir. I mean, this show is all about being able to tap into the superpower we surround ourselves with. Yeah.

Thank you for having me.

Carl, it's been brilliant. Thank you again. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and your passion and your expertise. And I can't Wait to check out RankBot. And it is rankbot.ca?

rankbot.ai.

rankbot.ai. Terrific! Thank you very much. This has been fantastic.

Thank you.

If you have any questions about today's episode— oops. See, this is authentic when buttons don't work.

Absolutely authentic.

Absolutely authentic. So, I was saying, if you have any questions about today's episode or you'd like a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with you and your team, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. It's the one marked meetwith.marchaine.com. It would be my service to my— it would be my privilege to be of service to you and your team. And again, if you're planning a leadership retreat, a franchise conference, whatever, Why don't you pick up the phone? Give me a quick call. Let's see if we can create some magic together and really make a magical experience for your attendees. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to this feed and follow me on social media. I post all sorts of great content endlessly, it seems. And it's all authentic content, by the way. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. Oh, thank you very much, Shane. I appreciate last words. Love the realness of the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. See you next week. See you next week.