The AI Gold Rush Problem: Big Investment, Unclear ROI with Naomi Liu and Mike Rizzo

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by, well, you know who, marketingops.com and all the MOPROs out there. This is going to be an interesting one. Uh, we, this is a, we've got special guests, like my 2 co-hosts, Amber Liu, Mike Rizzo. We don't get to do this very often.

I always feel very special.

It's, uh, you're, you're, you are special. Yeah, that's the best way to say that.

Tell me more.

Tell me more. Tell me how special I am today. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I want to feel special today.

That's what I want to feel. Yeah.

No, I was thinking about all you listeners. You're special, just so you know.

Yes, absolutely. Or watchers, you know.

Or watchers, right? Because we do the video now.

Yeah, right. Um, now I was thinking about like, I, I think, I think by, by just happenstance, not really planned, we end up doing this about once a quarter, it feels like, or once every 6 months. I think it would be good to like, let's do this like that. Like make sure we do it.

Yeah. We need to be a little bit more intentional with that. The use of the Three Amigos time on the pod and just reflecting on things. I agree.

I agree. We need to have some of the, uh, you know, Three Amigos, the, what was it? Was it, was it maybe Three Amigos? Right.

I think so. I think there's also a tequila.

We could do that too, right?

We could do that too.

So we're recording this the first day of Q2, so that would be April Fool's Day, but we're not going to— We have no jokes to share. No jokes to share. I only know a handful of really bad dad jokes anyway, so.

Likewise.

Yeah. But a couple days ago, we saw the announcement about OpenAI getting massive funding. I don't know, like crazy. And then like you had recently posted some stuff about asking people if they wanted to hear about, you know, what others are getting in terms of ROI from AI initiatives. And you thought I could start there, like, which I guess those 2 things kind of coming together, it's like, it looked like there's a massive interest in seeing like what—

Yeah.

What are other people getting out of AI? Which makes me think, are others not getting that? Are they just not sure how to measure it?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Let's start, let's start with the news for those of you who may have missed it. Uh, OpenAI announced an incredible amount of funding. I don't think, I honestly don't know if it's ever been as high.

That's crazy.

As high as it has been for these folks. So they announced $122 billion raised in their round on an $852 billion, with a B, folks, valuation. And so I only grabbed the first part of the message to send it to a few of my friends, and I was just like, this is insanity. And And the opening of the post from, I think their CFO or whoever posted on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Said, hey, OpenAI was the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users, the fastest to 100 million users, and soon the fastest to 1 billion weekly, weekly folks, active users, a billion weekly active users. That's insanity. And then they said, within a year of launching ChatGPT, we reached $1 billion in revenue. And by the end of 2024, they were generating a billion per quarter. And they are currently, as of the post that went live yesterday, which would've been the 31st of March of '26, they are now generating $2 billion in revenue per month. That's insane.

Crazy.

And valuation is approaching a trillion dollars.

Like, I mean, I was like, My initial gut response to that was to try to figure out like as a percentage of GDP of the just US, like what, where are they at relative? Like this is nuts. Like that's the scale of revenue that these folks are having. And then, you know, like I said this to somebody else yesterday or earlier today, I don't know, I'm not even sure. And they're like, I think the person's response was like, we're all screwed. I was like, wait, what? What does that mean? What do you mean by that? Why are we all screwed? But their burn rate is insane. Like, I don't know exactly what it's all on, but I know that they're, I guess like one of my colleagues was saying that between '26, the year of 2026 to the year of 2029, Their expected burn is to be over $100 billion. So like, that's an insane— like in 3 years they're going to spend $100 billion on whatever infrastructure, people, marketing. Like, I'm sure the tech itself costs pretty decent amounts of money. The compute power of AI is like getting better, but it's still—

Yeah. Well, I mean, so it's interesting. I have a friend who works in HR at a company that builds out data centers. And he said, I can't remember the number of people he said, but they have to hire, they're going to have to hire an extraordinary number of people over the next few years to help. And it's like, what's interesting is it's, It's jobs like electricians, plumbers, construction workers, right? It's not high tech, but we would think, right? Because that's what they have to do. They have to build the infrastructure and get it set up and running and all that. Yeah. Which is like, now it makes sense. But like, it makes me think like there's this capital that's had nowhere else to go.

Well, that was the— yeah, that was the other thing that, like, not, not that, like, I'm, you know, I don't know, but, like, I'm not proposing that there's just, like, this secret money that sits somewhere or whatever, but it's just, it's, it's a little alarming. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't, I don't mean to insinuate anything like that, but it is just, like, eye-opening. When you look at it from like sort of this macro point of view, like, holy cow, there's somehow that many billions of dollars just like able to be pulled together and invested just like somewhere out into the world that is accessible, you know? Like, $122 billion.

I wonder how they're gonna utilize that money, like where they're gonna Where they're going to put infrastructure, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it'll be probably data centers and server farms and all that kind of stuff. And then I'm sure some asinine amount of marketing spend and that kind of stuff too, but—

They have to pay for a lot of electricity.

Yeah. Well, infrastructure is the bottleneck, right? And that's just something that they, that takes a lot of money.

So yeah.

But it's crazy though. That's just, yeah. But it's crazy. Like there's $122 billion out there that they were able to find from all these wherever companies, investment funds, whatever. I was like, you know, I'll just take like 0.0001% of that, please.

Yeah.

I'm still, I'm pretty sure that's still a decent amount of money.

Yeah.

I didn't do the math on it. Some math whiz is like, no, that's not, no, you need like 0.001. Got it. Yeah, thanks.

But I also feel like having that amount of investment and that amount of money, it doesn't— like, on one hand, it like validates that yes, AI is here to stay, right? It's not just this, you know, novelty product that people are really into right now that's just gonna disappear. It's like mass habit, right? But I do think that it also intensifies or like makes scrutiny much more apparent, right? Because the bigger this company gets, the more scrutiny it's gonna face around things like competition, security, you know, data breaches.

Absolutely.

Yeah, the thing that happened with Anthropic, right? Like, you know, dependence on server farms, compute stock, compute providers, things like that, right? So like, I don't know, I just, I think it's like a double-edged sword, right?

Well, and I think especially— It validates it, but also— Between the 3 of us, right, when we were chatting in Slack about this, my reaction was like, and this is a company that started as open source, like the intent was to make it available to everybody, and here they are. So it's like, you know, I don't know what that says. I do think that's going to Force more scrutiny on them too. Yeah. I think it's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's definitely, yeah, definitely some eyeballs that need to be paying attention to them. I think if I'm the other products in the market that, you know, I find this like fascinating as we, as we sort of like transition some of this conversation into the poll that you mentioned.

Yeah.

At the top of the episode. Here's OpenAI raising all this money. If you were— if you go, there's a company called Augment that does some— you guys are like, where are you going right now? So there's this company called Augment that does training or whatever. They help you learn from experts in the field.

Okay.

And one of the instructors is, I believe it's actually one of the original founders or executives of OpenAI. And there's a brief backstory that he gives of how the ChatGPT product came to market. And so if I could truncate it a little bit, and someone could fact-check me on this if they go find it, but I'm pretty sure I remember this accurately. And from what I recall from the lesson that he taught, in the backstory about ChatGPT is that it actually was never intended to be the initial app. What they were doing is they were struggling to get these companies to adopt AI. So they were saying, hey, we have these capabilities for you. We want you to ingest them into your products. We want you to start using our AI to enable your companies to do more, whatever it is, whether you're a software company or whatever. And they weren't getting the adoption and they went and turned on this thing that was more like, hey, here's this self-service way to sort of interact interact with the AI, right? With our, with our LLM.

Yeah.

And that is what was the, it was like, it was this like almost accidental catalyst that was never intended to be a, like, for the general public. Like they, they had intended to build sort of behind the scenes and like go like work with these companies and be this infrastructure layer. Right. And now juxtaposition, like, you know, fast forward a handful of years later, like the broader market starts adopting it. It forces the conversation across the board, including at businesses. And they're trying to establish these technology partnerships. I'm sure they have many of them. I've heard of these things happening. I don't know where. And you look at like what our community, just from what I've observed in the conversations that I've had both with like you two and with others in the community, there's this like really big shift from Yeah, ChatGPT was like great, but Claude has like just run away with so much of our audience's like attention. And I've personally like shifted all of my workflow to be Claude-based at this point. And yet here's OpenAI saying, yeah, we just raised, you know, an asinine amount of money. And most of our market, our practitioners are like, signaling, no, no, no, Claude is the place where I'm spending my time right now. And so if I'm Claude looking at that capital raise, I'm like, either I'm worried or I'm like, oh yeah, we're about to announce something very similar.

It feels like they keep leapfrogging each other.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

And then you get it, but I do think it's, yeah, but I think it also sort of begs the question, like, You know, who are your end consumers, right? If OpenAI's sort of like initial foray into the market was meant to be more on the B2B transaction side and not the B2C sort of piece, then perhaps like that's really where a lot of this investment is going to end up going is like back into that direction. And I don't know who Claude's sort of core customers are, but we're seeing a big shift from them to be like, hey, like get your enterprise on here and, or start orchestrating across your team. Not just the end user, but it'll just be like fascinating to see what happens, which is part of the reason why I asked the question that I did on LinkedIn, which was all about getting ROI out of your AI. Like, is anybody getting it? And would you like to see, you know, what others are doing? Like, I don't know, Naomi, like, I think I, I was actually prompted by Naomi's question to me. She was like, do you, I feel like I, I remember you and I were talking about this. You were like, hey, I feel like there's a bunch of hype that I see, but I like, does anybody actually get ROI out of this stuff? I was like, I don't know, let's see what people say. Like, and the result was there were 2 people that wanted to show off what they were getting out of this.

I mean, sort of, there's like soft, soft, like measurement too, right? Like time saved, you know, how do you put a dollar value on your time, right? And it's just kind of like an extension of your day-to-day now, you know, but like in terms of like actual ROI dollars, I'm curious what people are doing.

Yeah.

Right? Like, great if, you know, you're saving 30 minutes per email that you're building in Marketo or like you're, shaving down some time pulling together reports for senior leadership, but like—

You're accelerating lead scoring and routing.

Exactly. But like actual ROI around revenue. I'm curious about that. I wanna see that.

Yeah. And I think, is part of your curiosity, other, is it self-driven? Is it your own sort of teams or your peers are asking you similar questions? Like, where, where is that curiosity coming from?

I think that's the, I think it's a bit of all of it, right? I think a lot of us who work in this industry, we will often get, you know, a lot of the tools that, you know, you have in your tech stack have now at this point AI components to them, right? There are tools that are all AI and you can't, you just can't escape it, right? Even, and even if you wanted to. So, part of that is, okay, so, if I'm adopting something into the organization or I'm adopting it into my personal workflow, how does that help me either by saving time or can I prove out that it's actually giving back some kind of ROI in terms of real, actual hard dollars to the business? And yeah, like, part of, to answer your question, part of that is, personal curiosity, because that's how I like to learn is from other people, right? That's why things like MOPSA are great and things like other conferences are great, because you get to see what other people are doing, so you can potentially have takeaways to take back into your own, you know, use case. But also just, you know, wanting to be on top of what other people are doing, because if we get that question, then you kind of wanna be known. I think people who work in this, work in our industry, like we tend to, generally be regarded as the subject matter experts in all things tech and digital. So we kind of want to be able to speak eloquently about these things and these topics when it changes constantly all the time.

So yeah. Man, it feels like to me, because I like, whenever I've done like tech selection, you know, I am pretty, anal about how I evaluate. And I think about the time horizon being at least like 3 years, maybe 5 years, where it feels like the time horizon for this stuff is so condensed, right? Like, do you expect to get— and it's different because it feels like, it felt like what, 6, it feels like it was only 6 months ago where Clay, like everybody was talking about Clay, right? Maybe it was 9 months ago. But it wasn't that long ago and I just don't hear about it anymore. So, you know, but I, like, I played around with it and I've played around with some other, like, I never used N8N. That was a big one. I've played around with Relay. And what I figured out was like, oh, there's these hidden costs that are a part of it too, right?

Mm-hmm.

All those calls to the LLMs or, you know, AI platforms have these costs and it's The pricing was pretty opaque, right? I never knew what it was going to cost for any particular call. And I think that's part of what's making it hard is there's just like so many, like the fragmentation in martech has been pretty big for a long time. And now you throw all these things in there, it's like people are creating stuff all over the place that pricing's all over and it's really hard to quantify like how much are you actually spending on it? And then it makes it really hard to go like, okay, well then how do you go like, okay, we spent X amount last quarter, last month, whatever. How do I know? Do I need to get the benefit of that in the short same time horizon? Right. Even if our sales cycle, if I'm a big company, is 12 months, 18 months.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, how do you, like, I don't know how you come up with the model for that. And I mean, like working with a big company right now, like they're really behind using AI for, I think they would call it time dividend.

Hmm.

I don't know how you measure that though, right? Because the level of use by any one person across it, like there're gonna be some people who are like off the charts, right? They're using it every day, all the time, they come up with creative stuff and other people who are Kind of in and out. And then some people are just like, well, that's all, you know, it's all hype, right? It's not going to really affect what I'm doing. And so like, it's really, I think it's a challenge, right? So I think it's probably why in your poll, like what was it? Well over half of the people were like, yes, I want to know.

Yeah. If people are getting ROI, because like, I, Yeah, they're all like, yeah, I definitely want to see what people are doing. And the second option on the poll, for those of you that are sort of listening and watching, was basically like, yes, I want to see, but I'm also willing to demo. And there were just 2 people that said that they were willing to sort of show it off. And while the question wasn't directly like, are you willing to show it off?

Right.

I think those who are excited and confident about it, would've like sort of like selected that. And there was, there's 2 individuals, 2 of whom, both of whom are in our community, and I've heard and watched them talk about, you know, the things that they're doing. So it wasn't surprising to me that they were like willing to show it off. But I think it's very telling of the situation that we're in right now, which is just echoing everything that you just suggested, Hartman, and you as well, Naomi, is just that like How do you measure this stuff? It's really hard. The hidden costs of all these things, the little mini products that you're building, like all of them have these intricacies that are just fundamentally different in an already fragmented landscape of technology. And I think for me, the latest observation That I've sort of like been trying to pay attention to at least, and is really just, it boils down to like this efficiency gain thing, right? I think for years we've been tasked as marketing operations professionals in general with the idea of like, how do you measure the investment of a Marketo or a HubSpot or whatever? How is that impacting our ability to generate revenue? And there's been threads about this in Slack before. There's been conversations probably on this very podcast, if I recall, about like literally doing the math around how much time does it take to build an email, send an email, and what is the cost per email? And then does that email generate a lead or whatever, right? Like there's formulas that people have like built out for themselves to try to say, hey, like by using this tool, we've been able to drive some level of dollars. And like, that's kind of our natural instinct as like people who manage this tech, but also the folks that we report into, they're sort of always trying to measure it that way.

Yeah.

And I think while it's a worthwhile venture to pursue that level of measurement of any piece of technology you invest in, I do think that it It goes without saying that there are many that you just can't do that with, right? Like, what is the ROI of my phone bill if every time I pick up the phone and I call someone that is a potential prospect, like, is it that by paying for Verizon versus AT&T that like I made the right choice? Like, there's just things that like, there are the costs of doing business and some aspects of your investments just sort of fall into that category. And I think AI is, for me lately, has just been like, yeah, this is just a really good enablement solution to like let people do things way more effectively than they used to. And in some cases, you're going to go build out a very hyper-specific product use case that unlocks your ability to do something new or in a novel way, the same thing in a novel way. That is, that is just better than it was before. And if that costs you an extra $100 a month, like, great. But it's like the same motion, just better. And, but a lot of it is like what Justin Norris posted on LinkedIn the other day. It was like, hey, I am forcing my team to prove that they interacted with our agent that we built for them.

Yeah.

To stop asking us, like, or to stop putting tickets in our queue that they could find the answers to. And they have to literally drop the link. This is like, this is a great, if all you did was stop listening after this part of the episode, this is probably the best takeaway. Justin does this post. He says, I built a system. It's an AI agent. It knows all these things about our business. If someone wants to open a ticket with us, they have to prove to me that they asked the AI first by sharing the link of the conversation, because if they didn't, Then I'd just reject the ticket. And the result of that was a 33% reduction in effectively what he calls like paper cuts, like wasted time tickets that could be solved with a system where knowledge already exists. You just need to spend time to go look it up. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. My first thought was Justin's working himself out of a job. I was like, uh-oh, dude, don't get rid of all the tickets.

I don't think that's true though.

No, it's not. My second thought quickly following that was like, that's not true. In fact, it's actually unlocking him and his team's time to go spend more energy on things that really move the needle for the business, right? Which is why I really appreciated his comment about the tickets being paper cuts. Like they're painful little moments that you just shouldn't have to deal with.

So what really caught my eye in that is like, there's this This may be part of what I think people struggle with AI. I'd love to hear your take, Mamie, because I don't know. I mean, I guess you've implemented some AI tools where you are, especially with your broader scope now, is that like, I think people have thought, well, there's not really, we don't really need to do much for change management, right? And I remember doing some research on change management like 12 months ago, and the best paper I found about it was written like a Harvard Business Review article that was written originally like I think the '70s, maybe early '80s, because it still applies because it was all about human nature, right? Resisting change and you need to communicate and then you need to reinforce it, right? So to me, what Justin did is like, people always, I get people all the time like, how do we get people to do this new behavior? I'm like, if they try to do the old behavior, you tell them, go do the new behavior, right? It's not really that hard, except for then you feel bad if you're the kind of person who likes to solve problems and help people. And like, the problem's really with you, not with the people, right? They're gonna do what is most effective for them. And if you enable it, then who's that with? But yeah, have you gone through that, Naomi, with like AI tools internally? Have you had struggles with that?

Yeah, I think, And I actually was having a conversation with this, uh, about this with a friend the other day when we were catching up about similar things around AI in our companies. And, you know, and just in general, right, people that we talk to, um, I think that you can group it into like 3 core gaps, right? Belief gap, skill gap, expectation gap, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, belief gap, uh, you know, people think AI is impressive, it's great, it's this like amazing new thing. But they don't actually believe that it will materially help them in their actual job, their workflow, or the company that they work for, right? Second, skill gap, right? You know, I know what I don't know, and there's a lot about AI that I don't know. There's a lot that I do know, there's a lot that I don't know, and there's the gap in between is huge, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I think even when people want to use AI, it's still like, really surprisingly hard to eke out value, right? You need to be an amazing prompter. You need better process design. You need like really good data. You need to, you know, be very specific in how you're doing, in how you're aligning something. Like just the other day I was asking AI to create this like image for me, 'cause I'm trying to like redo something in my house. And I was asking, create this visual image, 'cause I just want, to see what it looks like, right? And it was putting this one thing in the wrong place. And I said, no, put it on the other side. And it kept not doing that, putting it everywhere except that. I said no. And I literally would like draw out a picture and then circle it and I would say, put it right here. And it still refused to do it. And in my— and I'm like, oh my God. And I'm like furiously typing and I'm like, what is wrong with me? Like, why am I arguing with my computer about this? Like, put it on the left side. And then eventually I just gave up when I'm—

I was like off the temperature.

No more pro— no more polite. No more.

And I'm just like, why are you not doing what I'm asking you to do? Right? And it said something like, I have really poor spatial awareness, so I can't understand your prompt. And I was like, what? Okay. You know, so anyways.

Answer something very much like that.

Yeah. So I'm like, okay, is it me? Is it, what's the skill gap here? Is it me or is it, I don't know. Anyways. And then the third expectation, right? So it's like, And this is an example of it, right? So I have this expectation that AI's gonna not read my mind, but pretty close. You know, I have this expectation that it's just gonna do what I tell it to do, transform it, and then the payoff's gonna be great. I'm like, okay, yeah, that looks great. I can totally visualize what I wanna do. And you know, it just saved me so much time. But the reality of it is like you end up, it just ends up being like slower, messier, and just more frustrating experience.

Yeah.

Right?

And so, I think you can take those 3 gaps and apply them to many scenarios. So, like, yeah, the belief, the skill, and the expectation part. That's just kind of like how I see things right now in organizations, in day-to-day life, in how people use AI. I don't know what you guys think about that.

So, I think I would add a 4th dimension, which is fear. Like, I think people are scared about what it means to Their job, right? Or their whatever, right? Their agency. Um, I think there's a lot of benefits of it, but it's, it's interesting 'cause you brought up that point where it doesn't, it feels like it's not, it's sort of ignoring what you're asking it to do. Mm-hmm.

I asked it to remove a chair and it added 2 more instead. I'm like, what am I, what is like, what am I missing here?

So, so this is why—

There should be no chairs in the picture.

Zero chairs. So, um, it's interesting. So this is the other part, like a risk part that I think, and we were talking before we started recording about how I think anecdotally, I think there are a lot of companies who thought, oh, we can get rid of marketing, we'll get rid of these roles and we can replace it with AI and agent, agentic AI and stuff. And that they're now quietly rehiring. I, I think there's more of that happening than I then makes big news. And maybe it's just wishful thinking, but one of the things I've found that even though I spent a lot of time, and I still need to go try this, try stuff with Claude, I haven't switched over to spending time with that because like it would, I put a lot of invested, a lot of time in training ChatGPT for me and a lot of things I do. But even with that, like I find myself repeating, going like, hey, I told you, don't do this, or I told you go do this, right? And it keeps sort of, it still veers off. And what I think the risk part that I worry about, in addition to all the other ones, right, about privacy, yada, yada, yada, lack of control, is like just personal experience. If you're relying on something like that to just work and you're not monitoring it, or it's really running in the background, like, oh, it's just going to run 24/7, do all this. Like, I, my take right now is like, I would be really worried about that not working the way it intended. Like, we did all this, we got it right. And then it's, it's like when you shoot a gun or an arrow or something like that, right? If you're off by a little bit at the beginning, it's going to be way off when you get to the target. And it feels like that happens with AI stuff that I've personally experienced.

Yeah.

A lot.

Well, that's, that kind of, I can't remember where it was on LinkedIn. Someone had published something, but I can't remember who. And they had, they had kind of like compared it to the gold rush, right? Like people who sold shovels during the gold rush, like you pay for the shovel and then that was it. It was like, good luck. And then if you struck gold or not, or went broke or whatever, it was like not their problem. You know, like they, there's an entire economy built on selling shovels in a gold rush where not everybody finds gold. So I just thought like that, right?

Levi.

I've often, I've often reflected on that same sort of notion. Like when I, you know, I'll be on a walk and I'm like, I actually want to be the person that makes the special bolt to put that light up. Because there's lots of those lights here and those bolts are really imperative to that light being installed. I don't care about the light. I care about the bolts.

Yeah.

You know, I think—

Well, it's funny, it's— that reminds me. So like, I remember back before internet was available on planes and I would travel a lot, sat next to a guy, we actually had to talk.

And—

We actually had to talk? And the whole— we started chatting and I was like, what do you do? What do you do? And he's like, I sell food-grade adhesive. And I was like, what? What do you mean? And basically it's like if you get cereal or a candy bar or whatever, right?

There's adhesive that Is used to seal the package. Yeah.

And I just like, I don't know why, right? Very naive. I was like, that just is part of whatever, whoever, whatever company produces the food item. Right. And it's not. And I was like, oh my God, there's all these things that are part of the economy.

Yeah. The supply chain, like, yeah.

Like there's all, like, have you heard about the, the, the SAI pencil? No, it's called eye pencil. Yeah. So, uh, I'd have to, I'd have to go find it, but I've heard about it multiple— basically it's like somebody talks about like, if you're using a pencil, right? A standard— I don't have one here. I have a mechanical pencil, but you know, a wooden pencil, right? It's like you don't realize like all the things that went into producing that. If you don't, like when you start thinking about it, like somebody had to go, you go like, go all the way back, right? Somebody had to go mine the metal for the little metal piece. Somebody had to get the rubber or somebody had to get the wood, had to get the graphite, right? All that stuff. Like all these things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And totally different materials combined in a very unique way, right? To like create this thing. So fascinating.

And then it comes together and you pay hardly anything for it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

That's so crazy.

Yeah. I don't know.

I think, I think that there's To, to kind of go back to what you're talking about, like people getting quietly hired back to these organizations, I think that there's probably going to continue to be more of that. Uh, it doesn't dismiss the fact that AI does allow you to operate more efficiently with just one person. So perhaps what, you know, it can—

Yeah, I would assume it. Yeah.

Right. It, it, it, it allows you to do that in some regard. It doesn't do it. Perfectly. Will I do it perfectly one day? Maybe. I don't know. But I think to that end, it probably opens up this, I can run a little longer with just like 2 people instead of 5 or whatever. But eventually there's like this sort of plateau, right? There's only so much time in the day and so many things you can possibly be doing. And I think it takes people to be able to make these things work really well. If I like, I don't, did I give the example on an episode previously of like the little coworker agent that I built? Did I share that with y'all?

No. Sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't, I don't remember it. So.

It might've just been you and me talking on the phone too. So that, Yeah. The punchline, or I'll try to be as concise as I can on this example, but I think the context matters for our listeners. And so, you know, today cloud's got lots of capabilities. People in marketing ops are often looking at the cloud code side of things, which is fascinating. I'm just not, I don't have the bandwidth to be able to go look there. But what I did look at as this MCP connection, this server connection to my HubSpot account. And I said, hey, you know what? We've got a lot of folks in our community that I believe are interested in becoming members and there's lots of value we can bring to them. And I just don't know how else to reach them. I don't have the time. In fact, we've never really tried before. And so let me like maybe go hire somebody, a person to like say, hey, let's try to Let people know about what membership is. That was my plan. So I share this with my, with my, a peer of mine who runs another organization similar to ours. And, uh, and his response to me was like, why wouldn't you just make that an agent?

Right?

Like, why wouldn't an agent just do that for you? And I was like, oh, okay, fine. He's like, you know, center your business around agents. So I was like, okay, fine. So, all right, Claude, instead of writing the job description and all the steps in the workbook, the playbook for the person, I need you to pivot this to an agent. Does a nice job for that, creates a folder on my desktop. I point Claude Cowork at the folder and I say, execute the job. So it hits up HubSpot, finds the 10 most likely candidates that look like they're interested in membership. It finds its own data point, didn't have to tell it which one it was. It was the right one. I was pleased by that. And it drafts 10 emails for me in my inbox, right? Personalized, very customized emails, like very customized emails. Like no way anybody could do this. In the short amount of time it did it, let alone probably at all.

Right?

Right. And here's the thing, everybody, like, this is the part where, Naomi, you and I were talking like recently, this is the part where everybody goes to LinkedIn and is like, look at that, look at that, I did it. I have mastered the world. I am God.

Right?

Like, this is like, this is ROI.

Remember, this is the part.

Yeah, everybody goes and shares it, right, with the world. The reality is that was great. Thank you, Claude Colbert, for doing that. It was about 80% correct. I probably still need to coach it. I could probably get it to 90, 95% correct to where I feel really good. And I could actually probably run this on a cron job or a daily schedule to have it do 10 emails for me every single morning. But the truth of the matter Is that it is not going to continue to self-optimize. So just take it a couple steps further, right? For all of you watching or listening to this, and for you, Naomi and Hartman, right? Like I built this little product that is focused on membership sales that I don't have an endpoint, and I could point it at things like, hey, at the end of this, go back and look to see if anybody actually signed up. Like I could give it some more data to try to do some of these things. But to then go beyond that and be like, hey, you know what? Should we try 2 touches, 3 touches, 4 touches instead of just 1? Should we do something like all of the rest of the things that continue to optimize the product that I built is a person's job and they need to guide it on the nuances of the things that are happening in the market, the things that are happening in our little business, the conversations that are happening inside of our community. And help point it in the right direction because it can't pick up on all of those cues. It can't possibly do that.

Right.

And this is where I was like, yeah, this is great. I'm a subject matter expert in my business. I built a little AI product and now I need to hand this off to a human. So where I started is where I ended up, which is like, I actually need a person to do this thing. And I think that's what's going to happen is that you're going to find these Businesses that are realizing, oh, I can build these little tools to do things really well, but I still need someone to optimize them and make them more effective and efficient and better. You know, whether it makes them as an individual better or solves for a KPI that we're pursuing, I think that's where we're going. And that's why people are going to get hired back is ultimately understanding the business and the technology's capability. And that was the short version of the story.

Yeah. No, it's interesting because I was at an event at an engineering school last night, and it was a networking thing for graduate students in engineering school to meet people in industry and stuff. And it was interesting, the questions that came, there was a panel of speakers, and The questions that came from the audience, a lot of them were like, you know, how are you changing how you hire engineers, especially for computer science, right? One person was at AWS, one was at a startup and is CTO. And it was really fascinating because like, on the one hand, they're like, it's not really changing it. I still, like the CTO guy was like, you know, I still look for Attitude and aptitude combination, right? And somebody who fit their AWS one was a different gigantic company. And it's like, because I think that what this goes back to the fear, like I think these people are in graduate school, it's invested a lot of money or somebody did, right? To get them in there. They're like, what am I going to do when I get out? And I'm, I guess I'm hopeful that There will be stuff, especially as a parent of, you know, college students right now.

Yeah, I think there will be. I think, I think there will be, but I think it's going to look a little different than it has in the past. It's not going to be this like sort of, I don't know, in some regards I can't say it with definitive like gumption or anything like that, but like, I do think it'll, it won't feel as like myopic. In terms of like, you know how to do like this particular thing, you sort of like are almost forced to try to understand more in order to use the thing, the AI capabilities to their advantage, right? Like you're having to learn business and the nature of the market and the products and the things that they're saying because all of that context allows you to—

Yeah.

Do more with the tool that we have access to nowadays.

Now, how to run an early, early stage sales call.

Right.

Right.

Sorry. Inside, inside, inside baseball there.

We'll spare y'all the story, but if you're running an early stage sales team, let's just make sure that you, you flip for this audience, flip the deck upside down because that is Naomi's claim to fame.

You're muted.

You're muted.

You're unmuted. Naomi, perfect timing for that.

Sorry. Yeah, it's presented backwards to me. Um, I want to see the price first and what it integrates with and then everything else after.

Yeah.

Yeah. What is the price? What does it integrate with? And let's go back. Now show me some of the capabilities. Okay. Now show me who your customers are.

100%.

Just start there.

I don't care.

I don't care about the rest.

That's so funny. Yeah.

Anyway, I wish, I wish people would send like, actually, this is the thing I challenge anyone who's listening. Send a prospecting nurture email with your price to me. If you send me an email that's like, hey, our product costs this, are you, can you, will you join a call to learn more? I'd be like, yes, tell me how much it costs. I will join a call.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's funny because like whenever I, like I've run web teams and as well, and it drives me crazy that people are like, oh, we don't want to publish pricing. Our competitors will get it. I was like, They already know.

But it's not, it's not published. This is like, you know, send it, send it as a direct email, like a one-to-one, you know?

But I'm like, but competitors are going to go, like, competitors are going to get it. They already do, right? Like every, like, I would never go buy tech right now without contacting people through the community or whatever and going like, who's got experience with this? What are you paying? 'Cause I've been burned before, like pre-community. Like I found out after the fact, like we were getting screwed by a vendor. And, and it's like, and it pisses me off. And they were doing it like, I don't like, pisses me off that I let that happen. Right. But I didn't have any other way to get that inside information. Right. And now that's pretty much the default, it feels like.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go ahead. Send the email with your pricing.

There you go. Don't just standard pricing.

Do the list pricing, right?

List pricing.

Yeah. Just tell us like, hey, we generally sell for this range depending on a number of factors.

Yeah. Here are the factors.

We can get on a call to discuss what those are.

Yeah. Okay.

Sounds good.

Yeah. I would totally do that. And I still say, I want vendor, I wish vendors would do Instead of a free, whatever, premium trial for a week or a month, right? Give me 3 months for a cheap amount that I can pay so I can actually spend time exercising it. And because I'm putting some skin in the game, I'm going to be more incented to spend the time to figure it out.

Yeah.

Yeah. Do you have, do you need to have more infrastructure for that? Maybe like, and maybe you lose some deals because of that. Probably, but like, you're at least getting a little bit to recover from that. Like, I think—

Yeah, I think as, as someone who's come from, you know, all of us have interacted with SaaS companies most of our careers, but like someone who came out of SaaS, like, I think, I think there's also a tremendous value add to that offer, right? Which is like creating a stickier customer that is like more invested and feels like they're going to stick around for the LTV that you want them to be around for.

Right.

And so like, if you can like do a proof of concept motion, have them pay some amount of money to be on the platform for 3 months and give 'em an opt out. And it shows that you're invested in seeing them like have success.

Yep.

And they're like, wow, like this is, you know, this is great. I know that organizations aren't always built to support that, but You know, I think it's money well spent compared to ad dollars, for example.

Yeah. Well, as always, fun chatting. Here we are.

We're at the end.

We're at the end. Top of the hour. Top of the hour. I, you know, I've got, I've got to, got to disappear. Um, well, thanks again. Like, I wish we did. I do. We need to do this more often. I think we say that every time and then life happens.

And then life happens.

Yeah. That's time. Yeah. So we'll do it again, I'm sure. Anyway, thanks to y'all. Thanks to all those out there who've listened and supported us over the years. We always are looking for guests and topics. So if you have either one of those or you want to be a guest, you can reach out to any, any one of us and we'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye everybody.

Bye everyone.

Bye.