AI Announcer (00:05)
This is Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders who are done with the AI hype and are ready to embrace the real deal. Greg is your go-to guy for scaling sales teams, the one you can trust to elevate your game. And Clint, he's the startup veteran, the mastermind who transforms big ideas into thriving ventures. And today, they're not just looking back, they're revisiting the last 10 episodes.
to extract the lessons and insights that truly matter. Now, let's seize this moment and dive into this special episode.
Charles Hicks (00:49)
AI kind of allows us to automate the mundane and humanize the exceptional.
Christian Wettre (00:55)
Not leading with AI, no. ⁓ Yeah. We're finding that when we did lead with AI, the conversation goes into security very, very fast.
Margaret Freitag (01:06)
you
Jason Green (01:06)
That's
a great question. think the only point of difference in a room has been, do you think this is like electricity 1882 first homes are wired type of change up or do you think it's 1994 the internet?
Greg (01:24)
Well, Clint, guess what? The podcast is real. It continues. We made it. We questioned if we're going to get past two episodes. We are on a roll. These things are coming out weekly and we're doing great.
Clint (01:38)
10 episodes in and we've talked to what business leaders, tech CEOs and a few accidental futurists along the way.
Greg (01:49)
Yeah, don't forget sales people. We've learned things for people that are designing products. We've learned people that were customer focused. It was amazing. mean, we set out a cut through the AI hype and I don't think you and I had a real understanding of what we were going to get into and what we were going to learn. mean, I know for a fact, my AI knowledge is tenfold what it was from day one when we started.
Clint (02:18)
Let's take a quick listen to some of the things we've learned.
Charles Hicks (02:26)
We just take those transcripts, we put them into a Google Doc, we pump them through ChatGPT, and we ask it whatever questions we want to get answered. on the balance, it's better at analyzing those and answering those questions than a human is.
Margaret Freitag (02:43)
when you listen with AI, it's a little bit more unbiased, isn't it?
Clint (02:51)
All our guests really started by experimenting with AI first, and then they started putting strategy and theory on top of it later. For instance, Charles talked about how you can just get started by taking your Zoom call transcripts, putting them through ChatGPT, and you'll find the best summaries coming out of them right away. Then one of our other guests, Margaret.
She uses AI to mine medical research, not to replace analysts, but to just think faster, collaborate faster. In the end, every leader started by solving one annoyance, and the big wins showed up later.
Christian Wettre (03:37)
So I do combine it with humans in the right degree to create something that's better. That's machine and human working together. That's better.
Ganesh Iyer (03:47)
What Gardner learning style talks about is humans learn in distinct way. Some people are very vocal. Some people are very visual. They love to see infographics. Some people love to, they are musical in nature. So they love to listen to podcasts. How you appeal to what resonates in terms of your learning styles.
Clint (04:08)
With a generative AI tool, you now have a combination that takes that C player or B player into an A player.
Greg (04:16)
One thing that was very evident that AI as a side helper to your own job was where most people were seeing the biggest success. Christian was talking about blending automation with craftsmanship. Ganesh, train people's learning styles. You let AI coach to their strengths. With John.
He was talking about how AI could help every salesperson become an A player. And the theme across all of that, it's AI plus the human equals a super performance.
Charles Hicks (05:01)
We used to schedule one-on-ones with our bots weekly, just like you would an employee. And the one-on-ones, the bot a lot of times will bring up issues it's struggling to respond to or things like that.
Margaret Freitag (05:13)
actually have three cloud employees to me and I do a weekly coaching session with them every week.
Mark Bautista (05:15)
report.
Clint (05:20)
One of the big themes through our first 10 episodes was how humans would be working with bots in the future. For instance, one of our guests, Charles Hicks, predicted that managers would be spending a lot of their time in the future coaching bots as well as humans to get the job done. Later, Gabe Larson proved it. He literally runs weekly one-on-ones with his cloud employees. Bringing it all together,
One thing that we absolutely saw is that everyone's job is getting rewritten, but not everyone's losing their job by any stretch of the imagination. As one of our guests, Mark Bautista said,
Mark Bautista (06:01)
AI will not take your job. The sales rep that figures out how to use AI to do their job, they will take your job and you will be out of the job.
Christian Wettre (06:15)
The challenging questions that come up have to do with security very quickly. So if you're in any kind of size company and you're talking about AI and LLMs and what it can do, security becomes a strong blocker, you know, so fast.
Mark Bautista (06:31)
So yeah, that's the hardest part is like how fast can I get this tool deployed? I mean, we had one tool, it took about seven months cycle just to get everything done from a security, a legal standpoint, where then another tool, is very, I guess you could say it's lightweight in what it touches. I had that thing done in under a month.
Margaret Freitag (06:50)
I ask it as one of the deliverables to give me a hot link to the source.
Greg (06:55)
One of the themes that I picked up on was in a corporation, everyone still has their own opinion of AI, whether that be good, bad, or not sure yet. Across all the guests, the theme that was coming out, fear slows progress more than tech limits. Christian, Mark, and Margaret each hit on a point that said trust and compliance.
is the choke point. Margaret had a great tactic. She talked about transparency wins skeptics over faster than hype. What she liked to do was cite the source in her AI documents so skeptics could go double check it.
Mark Bautista (07:49)
Micros is called the frontier. ⁓
Margaret Freitag (07:50)
I've
heard Benioff mention the agentic enterprise. I've referred to it as the autonomous organization, but it's more about outcomes than people. It's more about teammates than tools.
Ganesh Iyer (08:04)
the ability
to bring in your ex-employee into the repository. And we recognize that being an ex-employee and you can chat to that person as if you're talking to that person in the company, but right now it's in a chat view.
Margaret Freitag (08:15)
sort of spinning around in their chair, going into one platform after another to execute a series of tasks and actions and follow ups and all these different things. How do I surround them with a circle of those agents? Is both proactive and reactive to those type of asks and give the seller an interface where they sit in the middle of that and orchestrate those different functions.
Christian Wettre (08:32)
that is
Margaret Freitag (08:45)
to achieve those ends.
Clint (08:47)
Boy, if there was one big theme through the entire first 10 episodes was our guests pushing through the hype of agentic AI. Ganesh Iyer talked about how he's incorporated the concept of digital twins into his application by turning them into coaching agents for employees.
Gabe Larson talked about autonomous cloud teammates, really describing a future where you're working side by side with AI and looking to them as one of your coworkers. And then Ben Taft described his vision of orchestrating AI and pulling them, all these different agents into an agent marketplace so that a salesperson can pull together what they need to get the job done.
You know, as I think about this, we started with prompts in the first 10 episodes and we're ending with digital colleagues. How about that for an idea?
Greg (09:57)
All right, it's great to hear those clips and hear the guests talk about it. But you know what? There's certain times in this whole podcast that someone would say something that just wowed me or it made me angry that someone could now do something so easy. That was so hard when I was in the sales seat. Here's an example. When we're talking to Mark and he goes, the QBR? Yeah, I was done in 24 hours.
Everyone has a single source of truth. Now we use a specific ChatGPT and I asked it a bunch of questions and I think how he said it was boop. It's ready. Oh, that angers.
Clint (10:43)
I think the one that probably caught me first by surprise at the front end of the season was Christian who sells AI powered CRM tools. Talked about how he doesn't lead with AI. Doesn't talk about AI in his sales pitch that much anymore because frankly people are just expecting it. That one really kind of blew me away. You know another one that surprised me caught my attention was when Ganesh was talking about that
digital twin capability that he's got in his AI sales assistant solution about how you could take an ex-employee and create an avatar of that ex-employee who then speak to the accounts that they used to manage when they were part of the company. That whole concept just seemed like science fiction to me, but I could also see how it would be so darn helpful.
Greg (11:35)
Yeah, I remember this came up a few times where people talk about training, you know, role playing and training your sales rep and how much time that took and took away from my team. And you take a look, everybody's in that business. Jason Green, Ganesh, Ben, they all talked about how ChatGPT is, is, you know, or whatever solution they've decided to design it on. They've made one where the sales rep now just speaks directly to it and practices.
They don't even have to learn on live customers. know, they're, they're good by the time they get in front of a customer. Where was that when, when I was asking for it.
Clint (12:15)
You know, another one that I found very cool was when Mark Bautista described how they're using ChatGPT across all their customer facing functions, sales and support, and how they're actually really able to use ChatGPT every day for everything from answering an RFP to building a quote to just coaching the reps in the team. They're actually doing it with ChatGPT right now.
Greg (12:42)
What about when Gabe was talking about how do we get more capacity on the team and, and, ⁓ you know, as targets go up, we can't just add heads. And that was always the handcuffs. And then when he explained that you could supercharge his cloud employees and they could do, I think it was hundreds of dials at a time, carry on hundreds of conversations simultaneously, that one person or that one cloud employee, excuse me. ⁓
was a supercharged human that could then allow you to go after, you know, sales targets that were so much bigger without adding hundreds of people.
Clint (13:24)
You know, Gabe really nailed it from my perspective on what that future user experience with technology looks like, where you're just talking to the application, just interacting with it as if it was a teammate, not as if it was an application. That really stood out to me. That was really insightful. And to me, where science fiction meets reality.
Greg (13:48)
Yeah. And a lot of times we talk about in sales, you know, what's the entry point into a customer, know, what, just, what's the easiest place to go. And when Jason Green started talking about low hanging fruit for AI, finding manual forms everywhere within a company. And when he articulated, they were everywhere. They were in finance, they were in HR, they were an employee onboarding, ⁓ you know, customers asking or prospects asking for information.
Manual forms became the low hanging fruit to bring AI in and make an impact in a company right away. That's what salespeople are looking for.
Clint (14:28)
Tell you another one that I really liked was of course we heard ChatGPT over and over and over. But when we started drilling past kind of the obvious AI tools that everybody's heard about, how one name came out over and over and over again. What do you think that was, Greg? That's right, Hey Jen, we heard that name over and over again as the premier AI video creation tool for marketers, but not just for marketers.
You could use it in sales for coaching. You can use it in customer support for delivering answers to questions, but just creating this very realistic avatar experience with Hey Gen. We tried that out in our own ⁓ AI takes over episode and it turned out to be just matched the hype. It wasn't hype, it was reality.
Greg (15:18)
Really was, it really was. That was one area that just blew me away when we did that project and saw what HM was doing and we got to get our hands on it and do it. That was a big moment for me in using AI. Okay, those were some good points, but you know what, Clint, I want to hear what's the single biggest takeaway you got out of the first 10 episodes.
Clint (15:43)
Huh, that's a good question. Say every one of these leaders we interviewed, they all started messy. They just got going, right? They found a pain point and they started fixing it. And I think that's really the key message in there overall, progress over polish. What about you?
Greg (16:05)
Well, I think as I learned across these 10 episodes, AI is here to help and in a big way. It's just not an option at this point. You need to start digging in with AI and you need to start now.
AI Announcer (16:26)
Thank you for joining Clint and Greg today. You can find every single one of the Prompt This episodes, along with more in-depth articles, at www.promptthis.ai. And don't forget, click that follow button below. We can't wait to have you back. This is just the beginning, and together, we're gonna build something incredible.
