ve BINAR AI Business Transformation in Sales and Marketing

Foreign Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are in the world. Welcome everyone. I'm Andrew Miller, one of the partners at the Vendux Group where we focus on helping clients to grow their sales leadership capital. I'm thrilled to be here today with our friend and our strategic partner, Freddie Laker. Despite his youthful good looks and energy, he's he's got an extensive career in media marketing, digital consulting, agency work and and truly driving transformation for his client companies. We know that firsthand and fun fact. He's the son of Freddie Laker of the British airline Laker Airways. So Freddie, I'm going to let you introduce yourself in a second. A couple of quick housekeeping notes. We're going to keep everyone muted for the duration of the webinar. Then there's a Q and A at the end. You can either use the chat function in zoom to submit your questions or feel free to directly ask your questions and interact with Freddie directly. The webinar is being streamed live on LinkedIn and it's being recorded. The recording will be on our site and on YouTube later and many of our interactions and views are in the recorded sessions. In fact, let's jump in. Freddy, it's awesome to have you with us today. Thanks very much for your time. Please just introduce yourself a little bit, let us know your background, how you got to where you are today and then we're going to dive into the topic of AI transformation with a particular focus on sales and marketing.

Sounds great. Well, good to meet all of you today and appreciate you tuning in and hopefully I make this a good use of your time. I'm a lifelong serial entrepreneur. I've been starting Internet related company since the mid-90s. One of those companies in around 2013 was AI Company. Back then we were just large language models or machine learning learning and we were actually transforming text based online news into videos on the fly. I've managed to build a couple businesses or something I'm quite proud of. There's only one that failed but I learned a hell of a lot about this kind of technology back then. So I've been doing this for quite some time. I'm either a CMO or Chief Revenue officer by trade. I've done quite a few of these leadership roles on the consumer side but have also led some pretty significant sales teams these days. I am a founding partner of a group called Camohan Collective. We primarily work with private equity firms helping them work with their portfolio companies doing a lot of kind of go to market focused transformation work. And a significant part of that lately has been really implementing AI technologies. It's something that's becoming part of a lot of private equity firms playbook. And so the things I'm going to talk about today are not because I've read a great blog post about this or because I watch a lot of YouTube videos about AI. You know, these are really, really practical things that we're going to be talking about. And, and I'd say that one of the dangers I've seen when people do talk about AI these days, there's, there's a lot of pontificating going on, a lot of hand waving. We've all seen it. And I think it's really easy to let these things get away from you. And so the things that I want to get into are very practical things that can be applied without kind of letting it get run away from you and really implement in a business in short order.

Terrific. Great. So to that point, I've read numerous comments of yours recently where you're essentially saying business growth and business is entering into a new era where AI is, isn't just an efficiency tool anymore, it's the foundation of a broader go to market strategy and that in the next five years it's going to disrupt sales and marketing more than in the last 20 years. And leaders who hesitate moving, moving in this direction, risk falling behind faster than ever. You also say CEOs and business leaders have to shift from simply funding initiatives to really enabling innovation across prospecting, content, personalization and workflows. So with that context, why do you believe that in the next five years we're going to see more disruption to growth than in the last 20 years?

I've been giving this chat recently, this workshop, executive workshop I call the new growth imperative to lead with this subject and I like to debate it with the CEOs in the room. And I always challenge them. I say, do you think that the next five years are going to be more disruptive than the last 20? And why? And some people say yes and some people say no. And when I explain why I think yes, I tend to give this answer. Look, I've been around long enough. I've lived through the last disruption. I was an early Internet adopter, which served me very well. And I've been through the mobile innovation cycle, the E Commerce innovation cycle and cloud and some of the other big disruptions have happened over the last 20 plus years. What's so interesting about where we're at right now is first off, there's a concept that I'D like to believe the vast majority of you know about kind of Moore's Law and computing power kind of doubling right now, GPU power. Nvidia CEO recently came out and said, we're exceeding Moore's Law. So the tech is quite literally, the power is quite literally moving past this doubling. And so the speed of this underlying technology and its power is moving faster, quite literally than it ever has before. What people don't take into account though, is how accessible it's been. You know, it's not just AI, it's at the exact same time as AI. There are things like no code platforms out. These are for those who aren't familiar. These are systems that let you effectively build apps without knowing how to code. There's workflow automation tools that allow you to almost like a, you know, a WYSIWYG editor, like just kind of create little nodes and connect them together and connect to thousands of applications and interconnect those applications. And these tools are very expensive. I mean, some of them might even be $20 to get in the door at this point. And obviously I'm being very sarcastic, but the point is there is basically no moat. You know, things that used to a client would approach me for, you know, 10 years ago or I would have to develop a budget for that would be hundreds of thousands of dollars, literally are things that you can get from a SaaS tool. Now for $20 a month, $100 a month, someone can put these things together over a weekend. The barriers protect themselves. Before which a lot of time was just frankly scale and money is, is getting eradicated by these types of things. So the ability to be disrupted by small players who take, or frankly just competitors who adopt these technologies is, is profound. And I think it's scary when I, you know, when I walk people through some of these things in this workshop. I mean, I, I don't mean to, but I think I scare the hell out of people sometimes because I tell people, think about what will happen if your competitor implements this and you do not. There's just no way to compete. The sheer, the sheer scale at which some of these things can, can, can do human tasks.

Well, you already put the fear of God into me in the last.

Sorry, buddy.

Oh, yeah, good.

So I don't mean to, by the way, I don't want to scare people, but it is a little scary even for me.

You know, we do, we got to face reality. Like everything looking ahead seems completely different than when we look in the rear view mirror. So yeah, we got to Face this reality. So just some practical stuff. So prospecting, prospecting at scale. How will autonomous prospecting, if we can use that term, change the way that companies think about sales team and headcount efficiency? On the one hand, so that's, you know, prospecting going out. And then conversely, when we are the, the recipients of prospecting, autonomous prospecting, we increasingly know or we sense or we feel like, oh, this is not, this is not a human that's reaching out to me.

This is, it's, it's, it's, there's gonna just like everything I think where there's new systems put in place, there'll be some resiliency that we start to recognize. Pattern recognition is the key to that.

Right.

So you start to detect patterns and you become resistant to the effectiveness there. Before I answer that though, I do want to put one quick note out and I think this is really important. There are two different camps, I think when it comes to implementing some of these AI and automation technologies, I think there are companies that believe that you will be able to reduce your headcount and there will be a massive kind of reductions in headcount and workforce reduction. And I think some companies will implement this and they will generate significantly more profits in the short term and they will think that they have succeeded. There will be another group of people who implement these AI technologies and do not reduce their workforce or if they do, they at least reallocate them or reposition them. And what they will is a massive boost in productivity. I think people that use it for just cost cutting will profit in the short term and lose a ton of market share in the long term. When the people that effectively turn their company into a bunch of superhumans have 3x the productivity of the people that just use it for cost cutting to maintain the status quo. And I think in the long run they're going to get crushed by those folks. So I believe in basically using AI technologies to make people superhuman. So in prospecting, what does that look like? So you know, if I could see everyone in the room, I'd say, hey, if you're, you know, if you're running a sales teams or you're get a commercially focused role, you know, if you, if you're going out there and doing account, you know, building and re. Account research and you're, you know, you part of the sales process, kind of raise your hand. And so, you know, when you think about what that looks like, if you really want to prep someone to be great in a sales call, they've got to Spend some time in it, right? You can throw someone right into a client meeting, tell them nothing and say just run the pitch, don't know anything about the customer, just throw the pitch out. They're going to win some, they're going to lose some. But if you really, really wanted to be great at this, you would try and make those salespeople as smart as you possibly could and you give them relevance, right? What does that really look like? Well, first you probably go look at the company. If you were doing account based marketing or just you had a BDR SDR types or going out there and researching potential prospects, you'd go out there, you look at the, you would research that company, you'd understand what their customer is, what their motivations is. Are they your icp, should you even be talking to them? You know what I mean? Like, is it even a waste of time? Could you just get rid of them if they're not your ideal customer profile? You know, do you, what you probably go look at the decision tree of the people that are there, who are the decision makers, who are the key people you should talk to. And then if you really had some more time, you'd go out and talk and research use of those people's LinkedIns and try and maybe look them up on the website, try and understand them. So when you get on the call, you are really, really switched on. I think on average. Oh, and you probably want to understand market trends and things like that as well. I think on average that process, if you're really, really good and you have people that are specialized at it probably takes about 30 minutes a company somewhere in that range. And so an AI prospecting tool and you could self build these or use these on the market, can easily do that in 30 seconds. We've built a system now for multiple clients. We internally call it profit. We're easily doing about 10,000 of those a day, a day for pennies on the dollar compared to what the level of investment would be. And frankly I think it does a better job than any human I've ever seen. And so what chance does a sales team have have against a group that's using that to power their sales team? The answer is none. You can't, you can't compete with someone using these kind of technologies. So you know, it just if you could hand every salesperson you know as prospectus right before Cole and feed it to them, or you were able to use that kind of insight to personalize decks at scale, sales materials scale, emails at scale, so that you had that personal, personalized point of view and that relevance. It's going to impact conversion rate, it's going to reduce CAC cost of acquisition. These are just winning themes. And AI is just brilliant at this type of work. So this is the first place and I think implementing these kind of technologies, it sounds wild, but it said we're putting these kind of systems together for people for 10 grand. I mean, that same system, if you'd come to me five years ago and said, I want you to build some specialized tech to do this under grand minimum, probably multiple hundreds of grand, you know, and now you can, you can build this using AI and workflow automation tools like nadm. You know, we're not even using full development teams to do this. We're using no code applications to run this. It's just a completely different world.

That is. That's a good segue to a question I've got for you about waiting or not waiting. So this, you know, it's a race on the one hand, but there's no finish line on the other. I think you'd agree, like this, this is just going to continue for the rest of our careers. It doesn't end. So to that point, you know, within our world, we've got business leaders, business owners, entrepreneurs, CEOs in our ecosystem and sales leaders, commercial leaders, and all of them, most of them have big business decisions to make with resource allocation and funding and, you know, where they allocate and when they allocate. So the question is, what's the cost of waiting a bit? We look around and we see our competitors putting in X amount of resources and dollars. Does it hurt to wait a little bit to see how they do, you know, and then follow or where. What's your perspective on being in this race either at the head of the pack without really knowing what's ahead, or just slightly behind and getting a sense of where the race is going.

You know, if AI is meant to solve human, like tasks, maybe the best way of thinking about it's the, what's the cost of waiting on a key hire you've made? And so in that workshop that I do with CEOs, I always ask them, what's the, you know, what's the cost? What's it cost you to wait to make some key hires? Like think of a key hire you didn't make? And what was the implication of that? And I've heard everything from, you know, half a million dollars to one guy told me he, he missed a higher one. It cost him $100 million. And so, you know, you can, you can have these kind of profound impacts from not having the right people in place, whether that means a loss in market share or a loss in key opportunities, depending on, on your size of business. So I think you can, you can think about, you know, most people can quantify this by taking something like this, you know, prospecting tool, for example, and say, well, if I could increase my sales by 5% or 10% or whatever in the next year, you can put a monetary amount to that and you can literally go back and equate it. So I think that the problem that I'm seeing with most folks, and I kind of alluded to this when I introduced myself, was that there's this analysis paralysis that's happening. There's so much stuff coming out, I mean, honest to God, from the beginning of this call, then this call, I could probably get on my newsfeed and seen a new platform, platform announced. I'm not even kidding, certainly today because there's something coming out every day and it's, and it's paralyzing, it's crippling for folks. And so what I've been really stressing to people is this concept of pilots. Just move away. You know, if someone comes into you and they want to talk to you about your three year AI roadmap or you know, even at one year, just, just don't. If you're more mature in the spectrum and some of you are, great, yes. If you're past the pilot stage, great. But too many folks I know are, they're at what I'm going to call, I say it's a big smart, the fiddling stage. It means that everyone's got kind of a Gemini or a chatgpt account.

Yeah.

They're mucking around, they talk to it, they ask you questions. They're still at the prompt based stage but they're not doing these full workflow automations. And so I recommend that people find a single thing. This prospecting tool is a great one. Building this, you know, doing this kind of BDR research is a great. But a single pain point that you want to solve that's small, can be completed in six weeks, maybe eight weeks. Top small project under $15,000, 10 to 15 grand kind of projects. And just do one thing because if you've got anyone in your organization that's not a believer when they see these one things work and you don't and it's not, how do I say? It's not just like, oh, that's cool. Like, you know, like you click around with it. Like oh, it made an image, it made a video neat at one. High fives. You can't run a business on high fives. You know, you need to go in there and say, hey, you know that thing that we used to do that used to consume, you know, 40 hours a week. It's already 40 hours a month for us. That takes nine minutes now. And you know, and, and, and, and by the way, Bob, you know the guy that used to work on that, Bob's the mansion guy I'm always picking on. You know, Bob doesn't work on that thing anymore. And you know what Bob does now? Bob's doing 15 more client calls a day. Oh yeah, you know, that, that, that, that not everyone is going to get behind that. So you know, if you're a believer in this, you do this pilot to show it to everyone else. And, and you can 10, 15, 000 pilots, most people can kind of find that money in, in the budget and just kind of get a special approval, you know. And if you're, and if you're not a believer, do that anyway and you will be a believer by the end of it. I would say as a final thought, there's a, a wonderful ch I've been quoting lately and I think is, is great. It says the, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is to, you know, right now, you know, and I think so it just like you just got to kind of crack on with it sometimes if you feel like you're behind, you know, that's okay. You're only gonna be more behind if you don't make a step on it tomorrow. But just find a great test, a real test that solves a real problem and isn't just kind of like that's cool. And I think you're gonna, you'll find some friends.

With the businesses and the, the CEOs that you work with in this transformation work. Can you summarize the, the drivers are they, you know, top line growth, margins, efficiency increased or improved, multiples, what you know, you're, you're sitting in the CEO. What, what's driving these decisions?

It's different depending on who you're dealing with in the company. Right. So the CFO loves seeing you know, productivity and you know, cost, you know, decreases. CEOs always love to see an increase in productivity. You know, if it's a sales challenge, a go to market challenge, you know, have we increased the number of leads or we increasing the Conversion rate because we are doing less time talking to people that aren't ricp. Salespeople can be kind of, I don't want to call them lazy. I think they can get, let's call, they get busy sometimes and they don't a lot of times don't get down in the weeds. They're really, you know, really great salespeople are great on calls and talking and maybe not great at the paperwork. You know this, this kind of AI work can really, can, can be really helpful to them and then it drives those metrics they're measured by, you know, for other people. You know the, there's, I use this expression a lot I call a poverty of time. And I think it's something that like I have suspicion if I looked across this group that everyone here just wishes they had done a couple minutes in the day. And so for a lot of people just saying hey, I freed up a couple extra hours or you know, some of the tools we built for ourselves in the sales process like within my own company at Camille and Collective, 75% of our sow time off. That's a lot of time. We've got another thing that helps us dynamically generate sales decks. A sales deck, if I did a custom one could take easily an hour to two hours. It takes about six minutes for us now totally custom personalized to a client. You know that four, four decks a day, that's a go. That was like a whole day gone in the old world. Now that's, you know I can fit that into a 30 minute slot in my calendar. So you know what, what's that worth? A lot to me. You know.

Great. Crazy numbers.

Crazy numbers.

I, I got a bunch more questions I do want to open up to, to the floor. Let me ask one more question and then we'll open up. So if you know you're advising a CEO to start tomorrow, what, what's the simplest, most impactful kind of pilot that they would run? How do you, how do you determine what advice to give and to what kind of company?

If I had to pick a couple, the, the really easy ones that I think are common pain points in, in like a typical commercial organization, the, the prospecting one top of fun always gets people excited because you're driving revenue and if you can bump that number up, you always make a friend. Another one is especially with B2B companies, I find that their marketing teams tend to be a little understaffed. And so if you can start building workflow automations that can kind of help a small Marketing team and maybe a couple people operate like a team of three or four people by producing more content, whether that's LinkedIn posts or blog posts. And to be clear, not spitting out generic AI slop, which, you know, a lot of people don't do this very well. So doing it really well, you. So you can produce incredible content even for very complex subjects. But that's a topic for another day I think can be hugely helpful. Personalization is another great one. AI is great at this kind of personalization system. As an example I like to give 10 years ago, I guess a little bit longer when I was at this big digital agency called Sapient and people would talk about website personalization landing pages. You get to a landing page based on these great underlying technologies it unknows, like who you are, maybe by figuring out where your IP address is coming from and can personalize the landing page to talk directly to your company. That kind of stuff literally was like starting conversation. Quarter of a million dollars, Adobe experience platform, stuff like that, that same tool, $99 a month right now. It's insane. You know, so, so I think you know those kind of things. And then the last one, honestly I'm a huge fan of these workflow automation tools like make.com or N8N. Microsoft's got one called Power Automate. And these are these things that take really monotonous, repeatable processes that somebody in your company is doing and just automate these workflows. And they're really easy to spit out. They're actually sometimes not even go to market related. I find that we're able to kind of get together, have a quick, you know, two or three hour, like, you know, even a couple hour like little, you know, work mini workshop with an executive team. And it was funny when you start talking to people and you say what's a job that either you or someone on your team does every week that they should not be doing? Or is it better use of your time? Sometimes we start. I remember we first started doing this workshop, I thought, wait, Surely I'll write five or six things up there. I've had to stay 45 minutes extra at the end of a workshop because they won't stop listing off all the things that you just. It really opened my eyes. There is a stunning amount of monotonous wasted work done. Whether that's like generating reports that go to your upper management, generating reports to go to leadership, ingesting billing PDFs from the billing team that just. It's like someone downloads a PDF they look at it, they pull some data and they stick it in a spreadsheet. Yeah, I don't, you don't need to pay, you know, top, top folks for that kind of stuff. And they don't want to do it either, by the way. And you know what? They'd much rather, they're gonna, there's much more valuable stuff they'd rather do. But a lot of the time that busy work while it's is, is, is low value, it's also mandatory. It's like no one likes doing it, but like the business doesn't run if you do it. So AI is great for that kind of stuff. And so I find that that kind of stuff, it's like high five. It sounds like we'll pick like the most inane automation ever, but people are literally high fiving in the whole way so they don't have to do it anymore. You know, it's like, was it that movie Office Space? You know, it's like the TPS reports joke, you know, it's like it's that, you know, get rid of that kind of stuff.

The make work projects. Excellent. Let's open up the floor, please. Chime in either. Henning, are there any questions in the, in the chat? Otherwise feel free to open up your mics and join us in the conversation.

Yeah, there are no questions in the chat and there are no questions on LinkedIn Live either.

All right, Freddie, if there's no, if.

There'S no question, I could jump in with a question. Yeah, thank you guys for putting this on. Freddie, great, great session. Really appreciate it. One of the things I'm seeing with some of my clients is that you mentioned this repurposing of roles with, with AI. I think that's happening a lot. I think a lot of, from my perspective, I, I'm working with clients that are not trying to reduce headcount, they're trying to make their head count more effective. And I think that's the right way to look at things. One of the repurposings I'm seeing is that they are standing up tools to do better research, client research, market research, all the above. And what I'm seeing, and I want to see if you're seeing this too, is a lot of my clients are moving the SDR function out of sales and into marketing to one, maintain the tools, make sure it's not whatever AI or machine learning they're using is not hallucinating or going crazy. So they're helping to maintain those tools and make sure that they're working properly, but they're, they're almost shifting their focus to more awareness of the company versus a selling function. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that too.

Yeah, I think you're seeing a healthy amount of that. And, and part of the reason is to do that kind of marketing work at scale requires personalization and so, and, and so that you can speak to a lot of people at the same time in ways that are really unique to them versus kind of very broad marketing work. And that becomes possible with AI because it just gives you the mental bandwidth to kind of do this kind of stuff. If you think about, you know, a marketer might come out with a core initiative that's like, okay, we're going to build something that it speaks about our product and how it solves a pain point to a very specific industry. And a marketing team before would have said, hey, this is a great idea for a landing page. We're going to work on that. And they would just work on that one industry thing for a couple of weeks maybe. Now they can basically say here's the formula, here's how we build it for this one industry. And then say Elon, could you basically make industry based derivatives of this? And you know, we work for about 60 different industries. Could you do one for each of them? And then I'll go back and review it and fine tune it and make sure that it, it actually follows, you know, our understanding of it. We just kind of get the core part done. Instead of me writing it from the ground up, just I'm going to edit it and, and that, and that's, and then we could do that same level of effort in the couple weeks now as well. It's game changing stuff. Yeah, it's, and I don't mind disclosing, you know, my, my main business and without revealing client stuff like there's something like 850 SEO optimized landing pages now like that, that was a pipe dream before. You couldn't do that before, you know that that was, we've got a two person marketing team. That's not something that happens at a company our size. And this is what I was trying to say about the moat. The mode is gone. Like, you know, this kind of stuff, if you have the right skills and the right knowledge can make you compete with people exponentially larger than you. And, and that's powerful, you know, that's powerful if you're a smaller business. They're trying to rise up the ranks and, and a little scary, you know, for those the larger firms, they're going to need to figure out, well, how do I. What's the next twist for me so that I can, you know, if scale is not my competitive advantage anymore, throwing bodies at it is not my competitive advantage anymore, what is? And that's. And I think that's yet to be determined.

Thank you.

Good question.

Thank you. Great question.

There's, there's a few guys here with, and gals, I think with, with some gray hair, no hair. There's, there's some notches in our respective belts, which means we remember the dot com era, the late 90s, early 2000s. From your perspective, Freddie, and in the spirit of history rhyming, what parallels do you see and do you not see?

Yeah, I mean, let's be real. That the, when there was the dot com bust, there was an overhype in a lot of these, these companies. And there's definitely some overhype in AI. But you can't say that after the dot com bust that the Internet still wasn't the single most important transformation, you know, the last 20 years. And I think this AI is the next one. So whether there's hype out there or not doesn't matter. You know, Internet became absolutely pervasive in everything that we did. Everything. It's in my, my freaking, you know, refrigerator is Internet enabled now. Like it's in everything. And that's where, that's where AI is going. And so, so regardless of whether there's hype, you know, too much hype, there are a bunch of companies out there milking this where, you know, I, as a communications person, I've definitely been in meetings with CEOs or the like, were talking about how to describe the product. They're like, you got to stick AI in there. Just stick the word in there somehow, because it's important that they're doing it because they think it's important to their valuations and fundraising and stuff. So there's a lot of shenanigans going on out there. And I think there's a lot of people that said, oh, well, we're going to turn on, we're going to give all our team members access to AI and boom, we did it. You know, you know, that, that's, that's not it either. And I think there's a lot of people who got caught up in, again, I've always loved this version. Like, you can't run a business on high fives. There's a lot of people like putting this wild AI ideas in that are really neat. You know, they're very innovative. They may have, but, but actually I think the real opportunity is in the least sexy stuff. It's in the things that are super practical, not that hyped, not that much to hype about. But people look at it and go, man, you solved a real pain point for me. And that's, that's the stuff that's going to stick. So again, people are trying it in lots of ways that maybe will work, maybe won't work. They're creating entirely new ideas. Sometimes those things break through and they become these massive unicorn companies. But my recommendation to all the people that you're on this call or listening to it or watching in the future is, you know, keep it simple, stupid. You know, if you're trying to implement it in your business, use it where it's going to just drive real valuable, real, real value, freeing up people to do better stuff on things that AI is just better at. You know, it's, it just, it doesn't get bored, it doesn't mentally check out, you know, because it's been working on, doesn't find a job monotonous and get worse at it over time. I mean, there are certain things with creative people, you know, you have to almost cycle them in different, in different areas just to like make their work still good because they mentally check out that, and that, that more monotonous stuff can be, could be greater for a better place for AI. In my opinion, humans should be doing human stuff, you know, and, and that's where we're going to excel.

Yeah, but don't those lines start to get potentially very blurred? I mean, I cannot see in any previous technology cycle where we could have asked this question effectively and realistically, what is human work and what is the value of human work? If AI generated work and results and output can far exceed the, the collective, almost the collective intelligence of all humanity and all history.

It's built on the collective intelligence of all humanity and all history. So it's a problem. And, and you know, if, if we're going to jump to the, you know, philosophical societal side of this. Yeah, I, I can't speak to what's going to happen more than five years out business guy hat on and say if we, I don't think it's possible to compete without these technologies in the short term and in the long term. If the, if, if the theory around the power continues to increase and it, and it exceeds humans in all, in all areas, including being able to do things like talk to people or, you know, even getting to a place where an AI might look exactly like me in this video. Call right now and be able to speak like me. Yeah, there's going to be some real, there's going to be some real problems and people are going to have to get ahead of that. But in the short term, yeah. If you don't want to have your business get crushed, I think, I don't think people have a choice at this point. It's a nuclear arms race. Yeah. And hopefully we don't blow ourselves up in the process.

Yeah.

Get dark about it. Yeah.

More questions out there. Comments?

I'll have a question, Freddie, for you. How about human oversight over AI? I mean there is generally the advice that we shouldn't just adopt the results that we get back from our prompts or our workflows, but look at them. How much oversight do you recommend for your own team? How much oversight do you recommend to your clients after you put an AI process in place? Yeah, let's break that into a couple different categories. So let's use the example of the kind of profile building BDR example earlier. In that case you're not going to have people go re review things. You know, the sales folks are going to, you know, review it in the moment. You have to be very, very specific in creating prompts that basically don't hallucinate. So you have to say, hey, if you don't find information on this, the response is information is not available. So you can have incomplete stuff. But you don't want AI to say, no, no, my mission was to fill this sheet in hell or high water. And that's when it kind of goes, well, I can't leave this blank. So yeah, that was Queen Cleopatra, the president of the company and Winston Churchill's the cfo. You know, you got to watch out for that, that kind of stuff. And so I think in those kind of scenarios you are kind of leading folks unaided. But I think that is an input that a human is then reviewing and using potentially in a behind the scenes sales call. So it's not client facing. I think when you start talking about people using this for whether that is creating sales content, marketing content, any form of client, customer facing content, it should only be an aid to you. Everything needs to be fully reviewed. You know, I can tell you how I personally use it. And you know, when I have a question from a client, I don't put the question in AI and say what does the AI think? And paste that into, you know, my emails. Right. What I do is I go, I use Voice to text a lot. So for those who don't use voice to text, that's actually probably the single largest changer in my behavior I've used over the last couple years. There's some great tools like Aqua Voice I'm a big advocate of. I can press a single button, it captures my voice and if I sit there and go whatever, ignores all that, takes all of, and cleans it all up and it makes it so that when I, when I release the button, whatever it sends into the chat bot is, is clean. So it's cleaned up all the grammar. So better inputs, better outputs, right. So a lot of times like I will get off the phone with a client or have a point of view and I'll go into ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, I feel like using that data cloud and I'll say, okay, I just got off the phone with a client, I need to put a respons response back to them. We're talking about a fractional CMO that they may need. And, and I'll ramble off like, I'll be like, hey, I think we've got this, you know, Tom and Sue that are gonna be great for this and we need to make sure we address, you know, this problem. This problem. And basically I'm just rambling. It's almost like having an assistant who, you know, old school days, you sit in the room with me and typing out the, the note to the letter, you know, the letter to the client. Right. And so I, it's my answer. But what I'm having it do for me is then formulating that into a nice clean professional email. Because I think where I get caught up, and I suspect a lot of you guys do, is my brain can work faster than my fingers can. So then I slow down, I forget what my thought is and I spend all my time trying to wordsmith, you know, a sentence so it comes out the right way. This is a great growth hack, you know, so I've spent my whole day, my wife, a lot of times now, she used to, if she heard me talking, used to think I was on a call. Now she comes in to double check that I'm not talking to the computer and so I'll ramble. So it's 100% my thinking, but the AI is basically acting as my secretary and crafting well written notes. That is my thinking just formulated the right way. And that's another one. You talk about taking a sales deck from two hours to six minutes. It's the same thing. I could easily spend 10 minutes on a more well thought out email, but that same thing. Now I can ramble at my computer for two to three minutes, look at it, scan it, boom, it's out the door and probably written better than I would have done it, honestly. But it's my thinking, it's not the AI's thinking. I think that's a really cool way to partner up. That's a great growth hack I recommend to people. I mean it's like a game changing performance hack to be able to knock things out at that speed. Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure.

Freddie. I just gonna, maybe, maybe a last question. Unless there are others. So as a sales leader, one of my descriptions of nirvana is having whatever the number is, 500, a thousand ICPs, thousand CEOs I want to target. I feel they are exactly the right kind of client for me. Can I program a thousand different agents to essentially stalk these people? What are they saying, what are they writing, what keynote speeches are they giving, what funding rounds? Have they just achieved? Everything and then have the agents come back to me on a daily, weekly basis and report out based on what I'm looking to sell or the conversations that I'm to have, is a thousand different agents working with me to essentially inform me how and when and what I should be doing to interact most effectively with those thousand prospects. That's a, that's my description.

I'm going to tell you to think about it in a slightly different way. So when you look at these kind of workflow automation tools that are out there and people start constructing these systems, the big mistake that I see people do is they think about AI as this all encompassing kind of, you know, godlike master system that, you know, kind of does everything in one go. And this is when they get these very messy results back because they're trying to get it to do too much. It may have this vast amount of knowledge, knowledge, but it's not perfect by any standards. What I found is if you think about these AI agents as more like a team of agents, they do much better. Now what I mean by that is think about it like you had, they're humans for starters. Think about it like humans. And you've employed a bunch of people to work on your team and you give each of them a very, very specific job and you make them very, very good at that one job. So for example, you may be one of them. All it does is goes out and it's an ingestion AI. It goes out there and maybe looks at their website or looks at their Social profile, whatever it is. And its whole job is just pulling in information. That's all it does. And it does it well and it makes sure that it doesn't hallucinate and it inserts all that in a structured format for you. And then another thing maybe goes out there and all it does is it's a profiler. It looks at that and says, is this my icp? You know, because you define that. Is this my ICP is not my icp. And by the way, good system. By doing that first, it gates all the other work after it so you don't waste a bunch of money or time talking to people you shouldn't be talking to. So you got one, one bot and one agent that's just like, is this my client or is this not my client? Right? And then another one maybe goes out there and looks at that data, massages into some insights that are useful to you to help you reach out to that customer based on your business, not some generic stuff that's out there to your business, because that's how you create relevance. And maybe another one of those. All it does is look at publicly available content feeds and looks for, for. Because those other things, you would do them effectively one time or maybe once a year. The other thing, if you're just trying to stay on top of them, you build it basically, you know, like a news alert agent. And its sole purpose is read their LinkedIn and look for mentions of them in the news. Frankly, even that, I'd probably make two different agents, you know, one, one reads news sites and one reads social posts and looks for relevant ideas. And the more narrow you make these, the better they're going to be at it again. It's like having a whole bunch of hyper specialists in your office. You're like, buddy, I don't need you to do any of this other stuff. You're just going to be the absolute best at this one thing. And when you're done with that job, you're going to hand it to, to the other guy and then he's going to do something with it. And he's really good at taking that thing you've got and doing something special with it too. So think about it like you've got this like just SWAT, you know, SEAL Team 6 of all these specialist agents. And they all serve a very specific role.

I love that idea.

Yeah, this is how you get a lot of people get a lot of, like, they test out AI tools, they're not that impressed. You put generic crap in, you get generic crap out you say, I couldn't send this to my client. You build a specialist who knows either their job really well or knows your business really well. You train that specialist on your insights. You know, why are you so good in these calls with clients? Why are you so good at understanding the customer needs? Well, teach your agent that, you know what I mean? Like brain dump all those little nuances that you have in your head and tell it to the agent and then make it part of its plan. And it will be as good, it will be as good as you teach it. But if you assume it's going to be on generic and by the way, generic knowledge, you're going to get the same. And again, I always use this comparison of humans. Like if I went back and I just brought some guy into the office one day and said, hey mate, you're in charge of this now. Good luck, you know, and kind of, kind of wandered off. Probably not going to be that happy with his results. But if I took the time to onboard him or her and trained them and made sure they understood my business and made sure how they said how I like to do things and made sure that they understood the way we do things or business and I taught them what works and hadn't worked for us historically, you're going to get pretty good results. And I think that people just don't take the time to do that. Firms like mine do that for people because they don't necessarily understand how to do that. So along with types of the consulting work that we do these days is like, well, I'll come in, I'll talk to you and I'll extract all this kind of knowledge from you and then we'll help you train them. And then what I find is that once people have done it once or twice, like I get it now, we don't need you anymore and that's fine. Good. But let me, let me show you how to do it the right way the first time so you have a success story.

There's no liberal arts AI agents.

Maybe you treat them.

Okay, excellent. We are bumping up against time. Freddie. It just any, any parting words of wisdom? How do people get in touch with you if they want to follow up with you separately to have a conversation? Well, it's the floor is yours.

Appreciate everyone's time today, so thanks for tuning in. If you want to get a hold of me, my email is Freddy F R E D D I E Chameleon C H A M E l e o n.co not.com so you can reach me there or hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm a very prolific poster. Not AI for the record. And so you can find me at LinkedIn.com forward/in Freddy Laker. And that's F R E D D I E L A K E R.

Freddy, Total pleasure as always. Great to see you. Really, really appreciate your time and insights. Lots of good food for thought. Thanks very much. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of the week, everybody. Thank you for being here and for your participation. Thank you, gentlemen.

Bye.