AI Announcer (00:09.922)
This is Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders who are just a bit tired of all the AI hype and want something real. Greg is your go-to guy, experienced in scaling sales teams and navigating the Silicon Valley playbook. Clint, a successful startup veteran, has a knack for transforming big ideas into thriving ventures. They sift through the noise to provide you with analysis and playbooks on how to use AI to launch new ideas, scale your business, and not get left behind.
So here are your hosts.
Thanks.
Well, Clint, 2025 is almost done. Basically done.
Pretty much a good year overall, definitely better than some of the previous years, but I'm ready for 2025 to be done and ready for next year.
Greg (01:01.416)
I agree. Wasn't a panademic year, otherwise it was actually pretty exciting though. If we take it to the podcast, it's a very exciting year.
Yeah, I mean a year ago now, you and I were just kicking around the idea, hey, what if we do a podcast and.
We gotta go through those cycles. Yeah, yeah, maybe we should. Nah, we shouldn't. We should, we should.
Yeah, it wasn't until the summertime that we got serious about the idea. Actually, I do remember last spring we did a little trial recording of the two of us riffing on AI and that was that was funny.
yeah, yeah. If we could go back and, and, listen to that, I bet that might be what we have to do for our new year's Eve party. Yeah, we were like two guys pontificating about AI that had, never really put our fingers on, on it, used it, done anything with it. And we're just like, like, you know, full of opinions.
Clint (02:07.648)
I think we were really latched into the hype machine that was happening in the news. He's like, AI is going to do everything. It's going to take away jobs. It's going to be our new personal assistants. It's going to do this. It's going to be intelligent. mean, we were just, and then we kind of stopped and listened to ourselves. got these two guys don't really know what they're talking about.
Like nothing.
Greg (02:25.198)
Yeah, we fell into the management trap of managing AI in our kind of space around us without ever touching it. Just our opinions. Yeah. Like, yeah, that can't work here.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. But I thought it was good inspiration for us in ultimately taking the direction that we did with the podcast, which is, we're two guys that don't know really that much about AI and we need to learn about it. So let's go talk to people who do know about it and who are deploying it and record it along the way and turn that into a podcast. I thought that was a clever move on our part.
Part. Yeah, I know. think one of the one another good move we made was just not being ashamed of of using AI in this project and actually, you know, leading with it, talking about it and, you know, every step of the way it really accelerated how fast we, you know, brought this to market and also accelerated just, you know, every piece of it. I mean, we used it. The script creation, we used it for ideas. We used it for, you know,
LinkedIn, social postings. We use it for, you know, everything.
Taking tech checks with our guests and coming up with some key ideas to make sure that we talk about in the podcast just by passing it through ChatGPT. mean, we use AI in every aspect of how we plan and produce the podcast. I couldn't imagine doing this podcast, even if it was about AI or not. I couldn't imagine doing it without AI.
Greg (04:04.536)
Right. The other thing from like a startup type of feel is it's only the two of us. Right. And we were able to really, you know, from tech support, we have so many tools we're using and the, know, we had to learn how these tools work. We ran into situations where, you know, we're not, you know, we're not deep web administrators or, know, if you, you know, if you, if you ever want to, get client wired up, ask him about how he fixed the email problem that we had.
you
I'm not a DNS configuration guy and
You are right
with AIIM, that's right. I figured out how to solve the problem because of asking Jim and I how to solve it.
Greg (04:49.058)
Yeah, it was kind of funny. We came from different, you know, size companies and we're two, you know, management, you know, know, upper management guys and there's no employees around here. So we had to get through that. That was kind of fun. You know, I'm looking for where the documents, where's, you know, where's the structure here? And, you know, you had, you had.
You are both delegating to each other because there's no employees around here to anything.
All right, you need to do this and you need that. How about I just do it and get it done? That's definitely the startup energy is very different from managing teams of people.
But you know, it's interesting. were able to, what we did in 90 days, we went from an idea to fully baked out podcasts that pumps out weekly and promotes itself. it's a full, it's basically a full on company and you and I made it in 90 days.
I think the 90-day mark was also really applicable to how we got going with our own AI knowledge. I feel like the 90-day mark was kind of that turning point for both of us where we felt like, we know how to use these tools, and we know how to pull insights out of AI, and we know how to create documents out of AI. All this just kind of, yeah, the script flipped at the 90-day
Greg (06:21.646)
No, no, I can't hear that one more time.
Hold on, I'm inserting an dash as I say this.
Man, you gotta stay on top of this AI stuff, because it just keeps trying to shove these buzzwords in and you gotta just stay on top of it.
We definitely learned the style of both chat GPT and co-pilot
Yeah. But you know, went from two guys that really didn't use it that much and or ever. And we're pretty good at popping out, you know, good documents quickly. And the other thing we're good at is I'll hand you something I created and worked on. then with your instance of chat GPT, you can flip it into something that different in.
Greg (07:12.746)
Yeah, probably under 90 seconds and vice versa. You've put together some pretty pretty big documents and all, you know, pull copilot out and suddenly boom, we have a framework structure to take this big 10 page document into a podcast.
We did end up creating some good content up on the blog about how to work with AI, lessons learned on our part. Probably the ninja trick that I learned was to ask chat GPT how to improve my questions, how to improve my prompts. So use AI to improve the way you ask AI. And we learned a whole bunch of things like that along the way.
of how to get the most out of working with the system. think it worked well for us.
I think the takeaway is you can do this. If you can survive in business and get to these management positions that we're all in or executing as salespeople or product marketing, wherever you are in a company, if you can get to that, you can turn the corner with AI. you just gotta try it out and not even for that long.
So let's talk a little bit about what's happened in AI this year. This is a crazy big year, 2025. think this, you know, we're gonna look back and say this was the year that AI got real, right? Kind of shifted gears from being a science experiment to being something that we all rely upon.
Greg (08:48.846)
Yeah, the agentic AI came in and changed everything, didn't it, Clint?
Yeah, it was, I don't know, agentic AI. I'm a little on the fence about that topic. Yeah, listen, you're winding me up already.
There is a, you know, this is one that winds Clint up like crazy. Go ahead. Clint tells you.
Talk about agentic AI like it's gonna suddenly be your your your next employee on any part of the business It's gonna take over jobs. It's gonna do all this. It's it's I think a gentic
course, fired 4,000 people and replace it with a Gentic AI.
Clint (09:24.694)
as you know. that's a good
They have not missed a follow-up on a lead since that day, they claim.
and beforehand what was happening with the business. I don't know. There's a lot of hype out there around agentic AI. Or how about AGI, right? When AI achieves consciousness. That was supposed to happen, what, sometime around May or June, something like that? And well, that didn't happen.
It's to be running all enterprise level companies should just be one person in the machine now.
That was what everybody was talking about and fully conscious AI was supposed to emerge out from these large language models and take over the world and everybody, all of the CEOs of the big AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, they were all predicting that AGI was imminent in the next.
Clint (10:28.078)
months or years, couple years ahead of us. And there's all this speculation about how it was going to change the way we work, change the way we live. And then that just kind of dried up. Stop talking about it. Right.
Now I read 95 % of generative AI business efforts failed. That's proof that the hype cycle outpaced reality.
I think also in there what we learned from our guests was that a lot of AI projects fail because you don't have a specific goal in mind. You don't have a specific thing you're trying to solve. You're just throwing AI into the mix without any direction, any focus. And I think that's one of the things that we certainly learned this year is how AI projects can fail without a very directed focus solving a specific pain point.
Definitely. And also said chat GPT-5 was going to, they were hyping that up as, know, it was PhD level in everything on the day it launched, right? You know?
It was kind of a bad launch, if you remember that back in August when ChatGPT 5 came out, lot of mistakes were happening.
Greg (11:32.908)
Right. And then like any other good software, they fixed it. A couple of revs were in there. It's pretty good now.
It's a lot better now, absolutely. I think we kind of, to me, the big aha moment is, this is just software. We're going through software's life cycles. We're going through the hype cycle at the front end where everybody says how it's going to change everything. And then it doesn't end up delivering on that huge promise. But it ends up delivering real value. And people get focused on what that real value is. And then you're just kind of.
living the ups and downs of new releases with software. To me, was kind of, I was expecting this big shift in all things computing and in reality, just ended up being another aspect of software.
Yeah, I think if you're running a group or running products or whatever, AI is here, it's in there, but it didn't revolutionize things in the 12 months like it was supposed to. It's now in there and those that can configure it out can start to outpace their competitors and that's about it right now.
But as a software tool, it is an amazing software tool. If you're in marketing and sales, if you're in an executive role and you need a thought partner, you need something that's going to help you generate documents quickly, it's going something that can do everything from take a PowerPoint and turn it into a Word document, Ghost.
Clint (13:10.222)
speculate on a series of ideas, go research some topics. It's a fantastic tool. It's a total game changer from that perspective. It's not C3PO, or Jarvis, but it's pretty darn amazing in and of itself.
For those of us in sales that aren't Star Wars guys, think what Clint is trying to say is...
Star Wars guys, you guys all know exactly what I'm talking about.
It's a cooler laptop to travel with than your desktop.
You grew up with C-3PO, man. I've always wanted to...
Greg (13:44.726)
I my own personal issues. looked like a vacuum cleaner. I'm like, like this guy already, you know?
Well, I think the inspiration for my vision of the future with AI, certainly Jarvis from the Iron Man movies and having an assistant to, know, is really working with you day in, day out, but we're not there yet. I mean, we're definitely steps forward. No doubt about that, right? Definitely steps forward, but we're not at this point where it's taking over the world, taking over jobs right and left, right?
Now let's talk about that because this was a, this was the topic when we spun up the podcast, right? It kind of almost right when we launched the biggest hype was all about you're going to lose your job to AI and, know, all over the news, right? When it started.
And all the stats about layoffs happening.
Yes, and jobs are how jobs are being cut.
Clint (14:44.174)
These were saying that they were jobs are being cut because of AI because they were deploying AI tool
And they all, know, people were posting lists of, know, these are good people. This is the secret hire list of all the people that got cut. And that was happening. So as we brought on probably our first seven guests or so we directly or indirectly asked them is AI taking over jobs in your craft? You know, basically we got sales, marketing, asked product management, we asked management in general.
SDRs, know, anywhere, any, anyone that came on, asked, and, we were surprised a few times, you know, in, certain spots, but, you know, in the news, you know, there was like 10,000 job cuts in seven months, you know, at least, you know,
Please, think was 50, 60, that may have been just one company. Didn't Salesforce announce like 4,000? I don't know.
Yeah, you think about it, yeah, in Salesforce, Microsoft, know, just that's only one industry. It was just happening over and over.
Clint (15:53.87)
Yeah, a couple of thoughts on that one, right? So during the pandemic, all that governance stimulus money was put to work out in business. And the companies that certainly benefited the most were the technology companies that were enabling work from home, right? So all of the software companies that had some way of making people more effective working from home.
All of their revenue went through the roof and all the companies around the nation were spending their PPP money on software to equip people working from home. And it really kind of drove a bubble inside of technology, in my opinion. And it was also not just a revenue bubble, but a hiring bubble. We were hiring people right and left. It was frothy in there for a while. I remember talking to our head of HR.
about how people are jumping ship company to company every couple months and getting 10, 15, 20 % pay raises. Hiring people was super hard back in 2022, 2023. Unemployment was at record lows. And then, know, government stimulus money went away and we have a correction. And all these companies that had frankly over hired had to start letting people go. But what a...
coincidental perfect story at the exact same time is, I can just point, instead of saying I over-hired or instead of saying my revenue has slowed down and I can't afford all the people I have right now, how about if I just blame AI and say that I'm actually being smart as a business leader and I'm deploying AI and I need to let go of 5%, 2 % of my workforce? I think that's what really played out in my mind.
Damn. I remember you were all over that. I remember you used to call me and you're like, I figured it out. I figured it out as each article came in. It's so convenient. know, Clint was so, Clint figured it out. But I think there's a lot of truth in there and you know, nobody likes to just post 10 % workforce reduction to your next quarter.
Clint (17:51.618)
That super con-
Clint (18:07.744)
Exactly. Didn't hit our revenue targets. Gotta let people go. Whoops. No one wants to say that.
Exactly. Here's another one that was kind of interesting in the news was all the synthetic media going mainstream and then that was right in there for us, right? know, that's kind of part of what's
Right. What degree are we creating content versus AI creating content and how much content that's out there? Is it just AI? And yeah, that was a big deal.
Yeah, exactly. you know, that's a two, you know, Barbara is a part of our team and she has a lot of, you know, you know, she's in the brand architecture and the creative side, but the one piece that Clint and I are not, it's super creative people were business minds, right? You know, so we needed AI to generate songs, voices.
Graphics images. That's not me ever. Yeah I I went from being a master of Google searching for images to to a master of creating
Greg (19:03.961)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Greg (19:11.374)
Right. If you're a listener, I'll let you in on a secret. you really look at our stuff, you can tell what was made by the brand architect and what wasn't. It's pretty clear.
I remember she kind of looked at all the images I created for the blogs and stuff and she's like, that's good enough.
But so what we ran into was, you we had, you you had stars, actors, voice, people beginning to, actually bring legal action against, against media and shut down. Yeah, exactly. Right. The time we're generating all the same stuff. And so we're just wondering, is someone going to listen to this voice and think it's too close to someone else's?
Hollywood.
Clint (19:57.87)
It happened kind of a personal front. On a personal front, my sister is in the video production industry and I kept trying to talk to her about, are you using AI tools for video production? No, I've got people that do that really well. We're experts. don't play around with Tinker Toys. okay. And then I started realizing as I got further into it, she's right. AI is great for doing the basics, but if you really...
want to bring an expert level of attention to what you're creating, you need the experts to do it. You're not going be able to do it necessarily with AI.
Yeah, yeah, we're doing fun clips, having a good time with it and pointing out that it's AI. But yeah, I think if you're trying to put up professional quality work, you need AI specialist in there as maybe part of your department, but that's not your creative department yet.
Yeah, that's definitely the case, but it was certainly some lively discussions on the family front on that topic.
Totally. Yeah. Another piece of it was in social media. I chose, I chose the social media part of our podcast. You know, we, post daily and put comments up. So I'm on that thing all the time and looking at it. And what I saw was when, what was it? Sora and Sora two, what was it that came out or, know, there was that revolution. Suddenly every video that came out, you had to question it.
Greg (21:32.366)
And then after about four days of watching that technology take over every single video clip on maybe X or maybe, you know, LinkedIn, you could see a lot of it. And suddenly nothing was real. It started to become unwatchable for a while and then it, yeah. it, you know, stopped believing these things. You stopped even caring what the video was because you just knew it was ridiculous or not true.
And eventually that soured out and it got back to exactly where it was with a fun with a couple funny clips.
I remember the discussions we had with our guest Deepak on this topic and he's building marketing tools, AI marketing tools, and he's definitely an expert in this area. And we're talking about how marketing is, it's both gotten easier and harder at the same time. In the world of marketing, it's easier because you can create more content as an individual and you can get a lot of good...
material out there, but it's harder because everybody is creating good content and flooding the airwaves with noise and standing out in the crowd has gotten actually harder than ever because everybody is suddenly, you know, a decent to good marketer with these tools behind them. so I think that that analogy kind of fits across a bunch of different industries. Have you seen that in sales? What do you think about that from a sales perspective?
Yeah, I think sales is interesting. You know, what I got out of that one was, the same type of thing. It's getting flooded and all these tools are, are, are, you know, putting reach out there. So, you know, six people on a team can hit 50,000 contacts with, with a message. so,
Clint (23:28.332)
That one contact is getting flooded.
You know, there's a lot of six people teams out there. Yeah. So, so, so it's, it's actually, you know, it's, it's harder to stand out. It really is. And it's harder, you know, it's harder, for the buyer side. think the one prediction I'm going to make is that, probably in 2026, a lot of the. You know, purchasing and, and, and just evaluating of tools and things like that. There's going be a lot of automation on.
in taking all of that information and assisting in sifting till you get to something that's real. And that's from a sales standpoint, that's what I see happening in coming up here, because they're getting flooded.
Let's talk about 2026. What are our predictions for 2026? Any looking into the crystal ball, what do you see coming ahead of us in the year?
I'd say we're going to see rounding down of just all these solutions coming out that aren't even asked for. It's just AI can do this, AI can do that. There's so many companies putting up little point solutions and being bought by larger companies to
Greg (24:52.468)
I think there's going be a rounding down of just making something that it can have that it can be done. And it's going to start to be pointed now. Like we need solutions that do this and it'll start to be more market directed.
nation
Clint (25:08.302)
I think AI adoption is just gonna continue to accelerate and we're gonna go from it's a cool new tool that one or two people in the company are figuring out how to leverage first to being an integrated tool into how we all work throughout the year. And I think it'll take a few years, right? I don't think it'll all happen like the light switch in 2026, but I definitely think we're gonna start moving.
squarely into the mainstream in 2026 with AI tools across the business.
Yeah, I agree. And it's gonna happen in multiple size companies within marketplaces. You're gonna see enterprise start to really turn the corner and you're gonna see small companies adopting like crazy because solutions will be helpful and will work.
Well, here's a topic that we talked a lot about, you and me, over the course of this past year, both within the podcast and outside, is that sales development rep rule, right? That entry-level job in sales where you're doing a lot of either outbound cold calling or inbound lead qualification, commonly referred to as an SDR. What do you think happens to the SDR rule in 2026?
I think that's a tough one. I will answer that, but I do want to insert one comment that was something that I found interesting and disturbing at the same time in 2025. educated young people coming out of the school system, trying to find their first job had completely changed. And a lot of these jobs
Greg (27:02.478)
AI had brought solutions to companies and young people with college educations had a hard time finding first jobs. And that one I found a little disturbing actually. So I want to see what's going to happen in 2026 with it. But from a SDR, that type of thing, this is one that...
I think the reach of an individual is just going to become exponential, but I don't think in 2026, I'm going to predict we're still not going to see 100 100 % automation of the BDR or SDR. It's not, it's not going to get there. It might get, it might increase the productivity of it or, or, you know, the, the completion rate of, of AI on it, but it's not going to get to a hundred percent.
Agreed. I'll agree on that part. I'm going to disagree on the on the college grad topic. OK, I get it. I get a different perspective on that one. I've got I've got a point of view based upon my my son graduated last May, went through the whole.
What, did you have a college grad or something?
Clint (28:23.278)
Job search process, really stressed out because the whole talk track in the news was about how college grad jobs are getting wiped out by AI. The friends of his were having a hard time getting jobs. He went through a whole kind of realization, does he want to go into marketing? Does he want to go into sales? And he landed a job and landed a great first job out of college in sales in an area where it's not
likely to ever be automated by AI. So certainly the type of sales job that he took on, I think is pretty safe from the AI incursion, if you will. But I ended up coming up with a set of opinions on that topic. And again, it kind of comes back to, think there's a... anything. It's a surprise, surprise, I had a set of opinions. And what it really came down to...
She knew put opinions. Yeah.
Greg (29:16.684)
Yeah.
And what it came down to is I think that was just a lot of hype because, know, unemployment was at record lows. The job market saturated. You you got like four and a half percent unemployment. Companies are coming out, they're going through a correction because of, least tech companies are going through a correction because of that government stimulus money not being out in circulation any longer. And I think...
College grads got the short end of all those pieces coming together. And I think the cool, fun story for the media to tell was, AI is stealing all those jobs. And I think back across my lifetime and the ups and downs of different job market cycles and technology cycles, and I think, you know, this is just, it's always hard to get that first job out of college. It's always hard. You don't have any experience.
You got to break in. And I think in the end, I just look at as as this past year is just another tough time for recent college grads, more because of the dynamics I talked about in terms of the job market and stimulus money and not because I was taking jobs away. And I think people that that bought into that media story were just spreading the hype. That's my take.
All right, well, let's wrap this up with this thought. I'm gonna wrap what my 2025 kind of final thought is and what I'm thinking about 2026. I surprised myself by how much I learned and can execute with AI. I didn't think I was gonna get to this level and this fast. So my 2026 prediction is...
Greg (31:17.516)
Watch out for Greg Rosenthal. I'm going to take over, pretty much take over the entire economy and world by maybe March.
No.
But at least I'll have some pretty awesome 90 days. No, but I'm going to have some awesome skills and I'm just getting started. And this is probably one of the least painful learning curves of anything I've learned in my any skill I've tried to take on in my entire adult career and life. So I'm really looking forward to what I'm going to execute in 2026.
You can do anything in 90 days, man.
Clint (31:54.542)
All right, I'm gonna look back on 2025 and first off, I'm gonna call out a little bit of disappointment, but not surprised that AGI didn't turn into reality, right? To be honest, I kind of wanted the robots to emerge and see what all that turns out to be like. But I'll also look back on 2025 and think of it, what a great year for making it happen.
Right? So not only were all the big AI companies turning AI into reality for us, but you and me, we turned this podcast into reality. And 2025 was a year of making it happen. 2026, as I look ahead of us, I think the key to success in 2026 is people need to go get AI skilled. I think jobs of the future are going to demand that you are AI skilled. And I think those people that invest
The time and the energy now to get AI skilled are gonna be the ones who really benefit the most in 2026.
Clint (33:03.468)
All right. What do you think about that? Did we did we call it the right way? We'll see. We'll have to come back in a year from now and listen to what we said.
Greg (33:13.774)
if it's anything like the way we called a 2020 five, I think we're going to way off base. But anyways, it's been great doing this and you know, listeners can't, you know, can't thank you enough for being along on this. We're going to have another stack of really smart people coming on. We're already starting to stack them up and, and we got some really good interviews coming up.
Absolutely. We're going to keep digging into this topic, learning more and more every day. Best part about it is AI keeps changing, so there's always something new to share with our audience. And I want to echo what Greg said. A big thank you to every single person who's started listening to this podcast over the last couple of months, joining us on this ride as we learn more about AI. We thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. And it's just great to be with you all. And that's another episode of Prompt This.
