Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com. I've learned one thing about the toughest part about AI transformation. And I've actually been curious to hear from your side too. So when I say AI transformation, I mean, within your organization, the people that you're working with, what are you doing to help people adopt, right? I think we should share some lessons on what we've learned. What I've learned is we just did our second hackathon last Friday, okay? And there are some teams that are shooting past the other teams. Like the things, the SU team built something called Tiger Claw. So it's basically open claw, but it's for SEO. And they're like, that's how they're going to work now, right? And then we have the creative team. Like they're probably all creatives like really quickly. And so what I've learned is that this will be very painful and it's necessary pain, right? And we kind of use the joke internally now where, you know, going to work now is like drinking this cocktail of excitement and fear at the same time. And you have to be this very exciting, motivating person at the same time. But you also have to be this person that kind of shows people what's happening in the market. So my point of saying all this is that some people are going to self-select themselves out, which is to be expected. And you're also going to attract some really impressive people in, right? But my thing, my key point here is for us at least, molting is a very delicate process. So, you know, when the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it's a very painful process and it's very delicate. But when it becomes a butterfly, it's very beautiful, right? It just, it takes time. So what have you guys been doing with it? Have you been paying attention to it or not so much on your side? We have. We actually haven't found the transformation to be painful at all. We figured out the solution that works for us. It doesn't mean that it'll work for other organizations. And the solution has been very pleasant for most of the people in our organization. Go on. So instead of, we used to have the approach of trying to, originally of just trying to train people when it comes to AI and get them fluent. And we found that solution did not work too well. Then we started setting up teams whose job was to help get others in the organization ready and prepared. And we also found that it worked better, but that also struggled. And then we ended up moving the solutions team to doing something a little bit different. They would work with different people within the organization, different departments. So I'm not talking just SEO. I'm talking about someone who just focuses on on page, someone who focuses on digital PR, someone who focuses on, you know, content creation. And imagine this for all aspects of SEO. Imagine the same thing for conversion rate optimization. Imagine the same thing for paid management. Imagine the same thing for email. You get the point here. And what they started doing was listening to the people who are day to day doing the job and then creating solutions, leveraging AI that helps them do their job better. And in a more automated way, not so we can charge a client more money or make more profits. We actually haven't seen our margins increase because there's all these costs for using AI. What we found was it allows our team to spend more time on the high level strategy stuff that is harder for AI to do. So then we're able to do more for customers, which in theory, it's too early to tell, should help reduce our churn and create better satisfaction. Because we haven't found most organizations in marketing yet when they're paying an agency to say, I want you to do more for less. We really haven't seen that conversation much at all. Yes, for many years, companies want agencies to do a lot for very little money, but AI hasn't changed that. What we found is the companies who are making profit and are growing are like, how do we do more and do it more efficiently with AI? They don't care about the spending less money. For example, if you have a company that's doing 9, 10, 11 billion a year in profit, cost cutting isn't really an issue. What they care more about is growing their top line. What we found is, and this is not the majority of the companies that hit us up, the ones who want to save money are the ones who their growth has declined and they're going backwards. So they can't figure out how to grow. So they're just like, help us cut costs because that's their way of surviving. Why would you go to an agency to cut costs? Correct. We don't get that that much. But we do deal with them because I see them at conferences all the time. So when the companies are like, yeah, we're going to use all these solutions to replace SEMrush and Ahrefs and all these things that we spend money on and sales for ourselves. Usually the companies that tell us this are growing like 1% a year or negative. So they do need to save costs because they can't figure out how to grow their business. But for our agency perspective, going back to your question, the reason at this point our team has adapted really well with AI, imagine you, I know you once worked for many companies or a few companies. You were in charge of SEO or marketing or paid. Imagine someone being like, here's a suite of tools that makes your life easier. And let me show you how to use them. And they follow up with you every week to make sure you've implemented them, you're on board it and you're using them. And then they check in with you every week to get feedback and how they can continually make it better to improve your experience as someone working for us. And we found that to be the best way to integrate AI in our organization. Because here's the kicker, the moment you tell someone, hey, you need to use AI, go and use it. Well, if we just take content as an example, someone who's never written content using AI to write content is going to do different than someone who's been writing content manually for three years. Versus someone who's also been writing content for 10 years and is an industry expert on that subject. All three of those people will use AI to write content differently. Who's going to produce the best output? It really ranges because of their experience, not only with AI, but because of their experience within that field. So what we're doing is creating the AI that adapts to the person and just say, here's how you use it, here's the technology. And here's how you deal with the agents that'll help do your tasks. And then that way it's standardized and the quality of the output that we get is at a level where we're happy for our customers. Because the moment we didn't just give it to them, like the tech, and we just let them go on their own, the output quality ranged drastically. And we realized that a lot of people were doing the work, but it was shit work. And we couldn't ever show it to our customer. And what just happened internally, we just wasted a lot of time and money for them to create slop that we can't use. So then you're spending double the amount of time and money. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neal's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neal has SEO tools such as Uber Suggest and Azure to BobLake. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more. And we'll see you on the other side. So let me tell people specifically what we do here. So what we do at single grain is we make sure that we have these standups with the leaders. So we have the standups with the leaders. So we have people that are really good with AI and we also have the leaders that are supposed to also pass things around. So we basically have a mix of people, right? And we're asking them every day. It's like a daily stand. It's like, okay, what are your blockers? What have you done yesterday? And also, what are you working on today from an AI standpoint? So that's where the leaders will disseminate that information. And then every Friday, what we do now is there's a, I think it's like three, four hours or so where people get together. And we have this thing called Gattertown. No, do you remember Gattertown where we, it's like these little video games where you're walking around in a conference. Yes, we do that. You do that? It's like the cartoon version. You can go up to person. There's a text bubbling. You start talking, right? Yeah. So we have that. Oh, we did that for the event. Remember the six years ago. Okay. So Gattertown is the software that we use. And so everyone goes into Gattertown and everyone's like sitting at a desk where you can go to like an auditorium. But the whole point is you can interact more and we don't, we want people to talk more, right? So same thing as Neil, we realize that you can't just say, okay, here's a tool, go use it. That doesn't work, right? So what we do now is when we do the hackathons, it used to be per team. But we realized like, if I'm part of a team and you're running the SEO team, Neil, I can just hide, right? So now what we're doing with the hackathons is we're doing, every person has to present something. They might go to the team first, work on the planning, and then they'll do the hackathon, right? So the hackathon's still there. We're just constantly adjusting it. But we also have an AI fluency prep standup that's happening. So it's constantly top of mind. And then I have an agent every Friday that will go to you, Neil, and say, Neil, what did you get done with AI this week? What have you automated this week? It's basically like, it's the Elon question. Yes. So, but it's public. It's in our AI public channel that everyone's responding to it. And then I was looking at it, it's like, by the way, if you don't respond by like 12 p.m. noon, it'll be like, Neil, how come you didn't respond? Right? So then all of it is recorded into a document. And this is not necessarily the police. It's more so to say, hey, we can see over time where we're getting better and who needs help. And the agent itself can uncover who needs more help. And then we can go and help that person, right? That being said, not everyone's going to come along for the ride still. Okay. You can set all, you can build the bridge. We can build a bridge. Not everyone's going to cross the bridge, right? And that's where it's like, I think you and I both want everyone to grow, but that's unrealistic because I asked my dad this question on Sundays. So he used to work as an engineer, a cobalt programmer. Okay. I said, hey, dad, when the internet first came out, how quickly did it take for people to adopt to getting like an email address, for example? Because you know, I started using the internet when I was like eight years old. I'm assuming you were pretty early too, but we were on it, right? He's like, oh, it's very slow, very slow. I was like, dad, what's very slow? Like, oh, very, very slow, very slow. And I'm like, what does that mean? He's like probably like four or five years, at least to adopt to getting email addresses. Right? So inertia is a very real thing. And that gets like, when I talk to people on the team now, the people that have kids, I'm like, man, you should be so excited right now because all your kids need to do is just to be above average a little bit, right? Because human inertia is very real. So anyway, that's the struggle because my struggle is like, I really want to see everyone do it, but it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can get there. So yeah. And this is why I believe the pyramid in marketing is going to be flipped instead of a CMO at the top. And then you have a team underneath him and then you have some C players and then a big group of D and F players. That's the old way, right? That's the old way. I think the new way is going to be you're going to have rock stars at the top, not just a CMO, but you're going to have a bigger A base, bigger B base, and the rest will almost be non-existent. And a company could end up looking and be like, oh, we're going to end up saving money. We cut all these headcounts. You're going to have to spend money on tokens, which is going to be a cost. And then you're going to have to pay more for the A and B players in my opinion. I don't have data for this, but I'm pretty sure you're going to have to pay more. I agree. Because if they can do more, if I automate my job away and imagine I've worked for you, you would pay me more because I can automate myself many times over. Yes. Yeah. And then I would have you go do it for other stuff. Yes. And you'd go teach other people or just run around the organization. So I'm not just like a five or 10X. I'm probably like, if I'm really good, like 100X. Correct. I believe organizations aren't going to save that much on cost in marketing at least. I think you're going to have to pay more money for the good people and the crappy people. You're not going to pay as much. And I've seen a similar trend that you've seen. When we give rockstar markers technology to be better, they work harder and they go do even more. And they'll spend even some of their weekend hours doing whatever they need to learn and adapt. And like, this is cool and exciting. When we give C players and below technology, not always, but the majority of the time, they're like, oh, wow, cool. I can, I can be lazy. I can get a lot of this done and I can spend more time going to the Galapagos or wherever. Dude, you know someone today on an interview for an executive interview literally use AI completely. I was like, it's cool to use AI here. Now show me your workflows. And he like peep pooties plant pets, right? Like it didn't work. So that's a good example of someone being a slop can. You used it purely. I'm like, okay, I'm going to ask you explain your thinking. Did you just accept everything without thinking? And that's clearly what happened. So I ended the interview early. Dude, I'm having the same problem with interviews a little bit different. I'll ask people if they use AI and most people lie to me and say, nope, didn't use any AI for this did all manually. And I can tell it is 110% of my AI because like they'll give me examples like, oh, you know, we should do a webinar and this is a topic. And I'm like, and they're like with this influencer. And I lost him like, who's this influencer? And I can tell they're Googling right now. And I was like, so you know, and they're like, no, I'm like, wherever you heard from them before, you're like, oh, Forbes. And I'm like, so you're telling me they're not anywhere else on the web. It was just one article on Forbes that they wrote related to marketing and you're telling me they're influencer. I'm like, AI pulled this from you and recommended this person. And I'm like, they're in a different country like Japan and English isn't their first language. I'm like, how the heck did you come in? Like this is pure AI. We talked to someone and I want to get back to your story that you're sharing. But we talked to another executive. Okay, this is for like, let's say like a people role. Okay. And this person was like, yeah, you know, I do the vibe coding on the chat GPT. And I was like, dude, you can't vibe code on chat GPT. He's like, well, you know, I do the ADK on the MCP. And I'm like, dude, you're just like saying it to say it, man. Like, and I had to end that interview early too. And he got so pissed. So I'm just, what does that mean? He's spent ADK on the MCP. ADK is like agent development kit from Google. And when my CTO was like, so what did you do with that? So I was like, oh, well, I didn't do it. I had someone else build it. I'm like, okay, well, with the MCP thing, tell us more about it. Well, you know, exact. I didn't do that. I was collaborating with other people. It's like, you just ask one level deeper and everything crumbles. And I'm just, the point of saying this guys is like, if you're interviewing for a job, please just come a little more prepared. And I think you're going to do fine. My favorite is a buddy of mine owns a franchise and they sell pizza. Oh, so another of it. The what? Do I know of it? No, it's not here in LA. And they're mainly, they're in the West Coast, but they haven't really done much in California. When I was talking to them about pizzas and they're like, yeah, we know another friend of yours. We're going to use them to do some marketing. I was like, how's it going? Like the person just gives us AI stuff. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, well, we tell them to get us more customers coming to our pizza store. They just give us reports on what we need to fix. And it's purely written by AI. And I'm like, you sure? They're like, yes. They're like, we've used AI and actually recommends almost the same exact thing that they're recommending and is written very similar, you know, different words, but they're like, they're using chat GPT and Claude for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. I was like, okay. And they're like, the person doesn't get it. We've tried a lot of this stuff. It's not working getting more people into our pizza stores. We're looking to pay someone to solve the problem. We're not looking to pay someone to just ask AI what to fix and then give it to us and tell us and pay them to go and use AI when we could have just done it on ourselves. Like we're looking to pay a specialist who has experience in this space that can help us fix a problem and have a fix this problem for other restaurants that are franchises. And they're just like, we're giving them a test, but they're like, it ain't going well. And this is like, yeah. It goes back to the high horsepower thing. If you have high horsepower and high agency, meaning that you're curious and then you're willing to push, you're going to be fine, right? Versus like the slot cannons. Sorry, did you want to finish something before we go to the next topic? OK, so this is this is related here. So recently we've heard Travis Kalanak, former or founder of Uber, right? He said that there's going to be an influx of more jobs, right? And then recently Robin Hood CEO said that there's going to be way more software engineers and we can go back to Travis Kalanak first. You know his startup, right? Adams. Yeah, Adams. Like he moved from Cloud Kitchens to Adams. Go ahead. Yeah, but similar concept. Cloud Kitchens is part of Adams, from my understanding. Is Adams is robotics company? Robotic company. So helping with kitchens, helping with mining, like actually physical mining when you're mining for like copper, gold or iron or whatever it may be, right? And he is creating a robotic company and he believes more jobs. And we're seeing the same thing. We're just seeing jobs transform. It's just like people like, oh, yeah, this is going to display so many jobs. You're not going to need someone to cook french fries anymore at McDonald's. Well, back in the day, everyone was doing things like farming and manufacturing. And now a lot of it's automated. 92% of people. Yes. And then we've switched into new jobs. And, you know, the example I was giving on a podcast interview literally before I came here. And they were talking about how people are going to lose jobs. I was like, well, if you use a french fry example, you need a company who's going to hire people to build the humanoid robots to flip the french fry or to cook the french fries and flip the burgers. And that requires humans for a job. It's just jobs are moving to different sectors. So here's what I think is going to happen. I think when you look at the industrial age, when you look at or moving from agriculture, right? So farming where it's like 92, 95% of people, you know, you know how long it took for the world to adapt to the industrial age? 15 years. I think it was closer to 30 years. Wow. Yeah. Whether it's 15 or 30, I think it's closer to 30. But it took a very long time, right? Just like, you know, people getting email, you know, after using the Internet, like five years of corporate. So what Travis says here is that when you think about, OK, if robots can build way more buildings, we're going to need a what? We're going to need a lot more engineers. We're going to need a lot more people to manage stuff. Right. Or if people unite are now officially coders, we're officially programmers, whether we like it or not. OK. Now, we're not as good as the best engineers in the world, but it's going to be much easier to start a company and run it autonomously. Right. And so that means that there's going to be more businesses, which means that the legal profession, as an example, a legal profession actually scales with business activities. You're going to need a lot more lawyers. And so this thing is called Jevons Paradox, right? Like once the Internet came out, a lot more people started using it. Once electricity came out, a lot more people started using it. Right. So but I do think and I think you agree with this, I think there's going to be some short term job displacement, just like there was when people transition from the agriculture to the industrial age. So that's what I think is going to happen because it's been time and time again. Dude, I we work with quite a few law firms. One of the law firms we work with is global. I think they have more than 2000 lawyers globally. Then you have paralegals underneath the lawyers and all that. So their staff is quite large and they pay for, I believe it's called Harvey globally. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, so how is AI and this this guy is a partner and he sits on the global steering steering board and he helps everyone throughout every country, you know, just grow. And he's also a lawyer himself and he's a friend and he's just like, dude, he's like, it sucks. He's like, it's so inaccurate most of the time we pay for it. So that way our clients know we're up today. But he's like, if the amount of times it's off, he's like, it causes us to spend more time doing the job and paralegals than us just doing it by scratch without using Harvey. I'm not saying Harvey won't get better, but sometimes a lot of these solutions, people like, oh, they're going to replace law firms. You won't end up needing him. And this lets you bless you. Are you going to really, if you're going through a big case that can cost you millions of dollars, you're really going to just trust AI to just go wild on its own. And if it makes one mistake, it costs you millions of dollars. Dude, the way to use this stuff is supervised, at least for right now. And I think, look, I hope Harvey does kind of what Intercom did, where they pull a lot of the data that they have and they make their own LLM. But even then you still need it's too high stakes to just let a machine do it, at least for right now. So the problem with law is it's not and with a lot of things, including marketing, it's not black and white. Oh, my God. And there's so much interpretation for the state that you're in, the country that you're out. There's too much gray areas. Yeah. And, you know, it's like as a company, you know, we're global. We've had our, it's actually not a lot, but we've worked with customers, some of them being friends, like one of our friends who lives in New York, you know, him, where their company goes bankrupt and he raised venture capital, right? I don't know how much he raised me, like three, four hundred million bucks or something like that. A good guy. He wasn't a co-founder, but honorary co-founder because he was early and they think they made him the CMO. Yeah. We had a contract with him. You know who I'm talking about. His company ended up going bankrupt. Again, nice guy. So the lawyers ended up taking it over. The lawyers ended up suing you saying clawback. Now, even if you're not in that clawback window, they can go back even further and say fraud, fraud, not being used to money, fraud being we paid you money. We don't feel we got enough value for the money we gave you. And what I'm getting at here is there's many ways for lawyers to try to get money back when the law states that, oh, if it wasn't within 90 days or something like that, you can't clawback money. Well, you can clawback money for other reasons. So legally, you'd be like, well, we have a good case. We did all this kind of stuff. Our end, we just look at it because we also have in-house counsel as well as we use outside counsel. Well, if we want to keep fighting them, our legal bills are more money than just giving back a portion of the money that they're just requesting. Just give back the portion of the money and move on. Again, this is not black and white. Human judgment. Human judgment. And it's just you're just looking at things as a formula and a math equation. It's just like, I want to fight and be right because we did a lot of work. So you want to spend 200 grand in legal fees instead of just giving them back 50 grand and making them happy. Give them back the damn 50 grand. Anyway, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, read, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
