AI Announcer (00:10.254)
This is Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders who've had it with AI hype and want the real deal. Greg's your seasoned go-to guy for scaling sales teams and cracking the Silicon Valley playbook. Clint is a successful startup veteran who turns big ideas into thriving ventures. They cut through the noise to bring you analysis and playbooks on using AI to launch new ideas, scale your business, and stop getting left behind. Now, here are your hosts.
Greg (00:42.722)
Welcome to the Prompt This podcast. This is Greg. Now this is our first episode of the new year and we had an awesome guest with lots of tips and insights on how to successfully deploy AI in your business.
and this is Clint. You know, it seems like we've heard a ton in the news about how slow AI adoption really is in the workplace. Well, our guests, they blew that perspective up completely by claiming that his recent employee surveys show that almost all employees are using AI in the workplace now.
And later in the episode, our guest reveals a strategy while planning an AI project with regards to company constraints.
You know, it was really good talking with another podcaster and hearing about how he's using AI for his podcast. We got some great tips that our audience could be using themselves.
and be sure to listen at the end of the episode for this week's AI Challenge.
Greg (01:38.38)
All right, well, today we're joined by Ken Rodin, who's the corporate vice president of GoToMarket and Delivery at Diversified, a leading international events and digital media company where he operates at the intersection of revenue strategy, execution and emerging technology. He's also the co-host of Futurecraft GoToMarket podcast, where he explores how AI is reshaping, how modern GoToMarket teams actually work.
He's also a doctoral candidate focused on AI and leadership. And Ken brings a rare blend of academic research and real world operating experience, cutting through hype to focus on what truly scales. So Ken, thanks for joining the Prompt This podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to have the seats flipped for once.
Yeah, no, yeah, let's see how this goes.
Yeah, you're the one usually doing the interviewing here. I gotta tell you, Ken, you sound like a very busy person. How do you juggle all that?
Ken Roden (02:43.872)
I probably do too much, but there's so much happening with AI right now and how it's changing the way we work. I'm just trying to balance it and focus on the real stuff moving the needle.
Yeah, absolutely. doing your PhD, a doctoral candidate focused on AI and leadership, that's got to be a real cool experience in and of itself. What a topic to be studying right now.
Yeah, it's really fun talking to these executives who are sharing real time what they're doing and hearing what they're learning and then talking to their employees and hearing their experience as well. Maybe I'll dive into a little bit of it in this chat.
Let's jump into that. I know that as part of what you're doing in the doctoral thesis is you've done some research, right, on the adoption of AI by companies and their employees. Can you tell us a bit about AI adoption, what you've learned?
Yeah, sure. I mean, we all know most companies have AI, right? That's not really the interesting point at this stage. What was interesting in some research that I did back in the summer of this past year, 2025, is that the issues that employees had around adopting AI wasn't their fear of losing their job, nor was it really their confidence in using the tool. What they actually had issues with was the...
Ken Roden (04:03.074)
trust in the leader's vision of how they were going to use AI. And when I actually went and talked to employees, they shared things like they were exhausted, they were skeptical and unsure of what AI meant for them at their company and for their jobs. And what I'm hearing more and more is something that McKinsey's actually backed up that most companies report using AI, but only a third have scaled it.
And you got to wonder why, right? We've got the resources to invest in a tool that can drive business impact when the real problem might be that we're not addressing the confidence and the trust issue that we have in organizations.
Yeah, now when you say exhausted, one, that was interesting to me. That kind of, can you give me a little example how employees are exhausted using AI?
Sure, you know, it's not just exhausted using AI, it's actually exhausted period. Think about how many new tools and technologies an employee might be thrown in, especially if they're in sales or marketing. They might be getting a new sales enablement tool, new CRM, a new plugin, a new AI tool, and they have a little bit of change fatigue, it's called. The other thing that happens is when they start using AI, there is a little bit of fatigue that happens. Imagine...
I'm sure we all can relate to this. You enter a prompt in, you think it's pretty good, and ChatGBT gives you something a little wonky, and so you say, that's not actually what I meant, I meant this, and it gives you something even worse. And then you're almost having an argument with artificial intelligence about it being wrong, and you've spent 25 minutes arguing with it, and you still don't have the thing done. You're exhausted. That took energy. And so what we're finding is this thing called AI fatigue, where people are actually becoming tired from using AI.
Ken Roden (05:48.238)
because it's really hard to step away. It's almost like the combination of being on your phone and swiping through, but actually having to do mental labor on something.
That makes sense. Yeah. Good to know. wasn't just me yelling at the LLM.
I feel exhausted at times just because so many good ideas come out of a session. mean, once you get things tuned in, you end up with more to do, it seems like, than you've got time to do it because the AI is just kind of putting all these different ideas in a frame. Like, yeah, I can be doing this and I can be doing that.
Yeah, I can, I can see from what you're discussing about the leadership, uh, uh, change management is probably one of the most difficult pieces to have to have to deal with. And, uh, with AI it's, it's accelerated it. It's happening a lot faster and things keep changing. Maybe you could describe a little bit more that it sounds like employees are, are almost, uh, disappointed with how management is, is, is attacking their change management.
Sure, so I think what's interesting right now is you talk to employees and you hear different things, but in the conversations with employees that I've had is there's a lot of change being forced upon them. There's a different dynamic growing between employee and employers. There's a little bit of discussion from the employer side of saying, hey, none of you stick around. You don't stay very long. You'll move to the next thing. And the employee on their side is saying, well, how do I know you're not just going to lay me off, especially with this AI thing? On top of that, there's just a lot
Ken Roden (07:20.942)
going on. It's a busy time. People are expected to move faster, deliver faster, deliver results faster and more than they have before. So it's a little bit of fatigue across the board, but employees are particularly feeling that because a lot of what's being talked about around AI is stuff that can impact and benefit the employee. But you can't get the employee to change if you don't have trust with them and they don't have confidence that this tool is going to work for them. Or if they don't have confidence in the leader who's trying to present it to them.
You know, a piece that you said there, I wanted to dig into a little bit more at the front end. Everybody's using AI at work now. And I've just been hearing so many different conflicting stories on that topic. There's, you know, for instance, the U.S. Department of Census is releasing this data that's saying that only like 14, 15 % of companies are using AI in how they build their products or services. But on the other hand, I can't imagine people not using AI at this point.
Where is the reality in your research in terms of how much AI is actually being adopted?
Yeah, you know, I think what I've uncovered around that specifically is the way the questions asked. What I've uncovered, and I want to say that this is through direct conversations versus actually looking at the numbers because it matters, is some employees say, well, I've used AI, but they've used AI once. But some people and some organizations use AI every day for every meeting, for every activity that they're doing. So it is spanning across activities. But if we're talking about desk workers,
The majority of them are using AI. believe that McKinsey says about 88 % of companies report using AI, but only a third of those have scaled it, meaning that they're doing something meaningful like you mentioned, Clint, product innovation or product inquiry. So that's probably where some of the nuance is going. I do wonder though.
Clint (09:16.814)
Everybody's played with it, but only a fraction are actually using it in a productive way on a day-to-day basis.
Exactly, it's not as big as probably a lot of companies have wanted to see in there. You're hearing a lot about companies scaling back their AI initiatives even.
That makes sense. You know, I've been reading a lot about AI pilots in the last year, how they've been failing quite a bit. The headlines seem to blame, you know, a lot of these failed pilots on tools, technology, rollouts, some of it's on employees. What are you finding when you're when you're digging into the research?
I would say AI pilots aren't failing just because of the tools. They're failing because of the implementation. And I'm sure you guys have seen this before, bringing a new tool and somebody does two weeks of training and gives you the tool and says, here, good luck with it. We've trained you on it. And if you're expecting AI to have meaningful impact at your organization, it's not the way to do it.
And I'm saying that based off talking to leaders who have successfully done it, who have done workshops where they actually examine and understand how their employees do work and set a specific goal. Hey, we want to be able to go to market two weeks faster than we have before. Or hey, we want to cut our competitive analysis process by two steps. That's a real goal you can give around AI. And that's something that AI can do.
Ken Roden (10:52.174)
AI probably can't sell for you. It probably can't market for you. It's probably maybe decent customer support or service, but I'm not sure for high escalations how it would do. And so I think having it in the right position, but also having the right vision for it is where you're going to see those pilots turn into something scalable for organization. So the pilots aren't failing because of the tools solely. They're failing because the leaders or the team never saw or answered why we're doing this in a way that the team aligned to.
Makes sense. Yeah, yeah, it's very different, different than bringing in some time, you know, like a CRM application, you where you got users that are just users and you got the super users and you got the admins and you know, all of this, this is very different. You need good execution at every desk from every user. And I can see what without a without a real plan, a lot can go wrong.
Yeah. Greg, you're reminding me of a story that came from a conversation with a team. The director was gung-ho around AI and actually got a ton of investment approved to give everyone in his org access to quite a few AI tools and encourage them to use it. And the team did quite well. I went and talked to some of the employees and the employees said, yep, they gave us access to the tools.
but they never actually learned how to use AI. So we feel like we've pretty much jumped ahead of them. And what that actually created was a bit of friction and lack of trust between the directors and their employees. And I think it's an interesting signal when we talk about technology when we expect maybe the employee to learn it, but the employees are expecting leaders to have a position and understanding about how AI is going to be used.
So I've seen different companies roll out structured two week training programs. And then I've seen companies kind of do a train the trainer where somebody, you know, gets up to speed quickly and then goes out into the teams and, starts doing a lot of hands on sit and sitting side by side by with people. Have you run across any best practices on how that training should be done? Is there any, any insights in there?
Ken Roden (13:05.41)
Yeah, I think the train the trainer option works for a lot of organizations. What I've seen work really well is if you can align the team on a goal at the beginning and then have them help you figure out how AI can solve the problem. And I'm going to say the easiest way to do that is ask AI pop on the projector on the screen on the screen share and say, Hey, we're trying to solve this problem. are the best ways that we could do a human AI?
workflow to improve time to market value, increase value to customers, whatever the metric might be. And that's the way that you're going to get people to start seeing what's possible. And then the idea is, is then they're able to experiment. think the other thing is depending on your company culture, having a way that people can experiment and fail fast and share that failure, whether you call it failure or learnings, so people can know what other people have done so they don't waste their time.
And that helps build a little bit of confidence in the team doing it together. First, just saying, hey, we gave you this tool or, hey, this person's really good at AI, so you should just do what they do. People don't all work the same. You've to give people the space to kind of make it work for them, especially at this stage.
All right, now it's interesting. That's the first time I've heard that and it's different now. you usually, you know, we bake something and then we go for buy-in after that. Get the team to buy in. Now here we have AI, the team and management all creating it together and the buy-ins happening as we're putting it together because we're all designing it. And then the other one, which I never liked, but
It was controversial. was always find the person that's executing the best. I'm from the sales side, by the way. Find the person that's executing the best and let's just take their processes across everyone. You know, well, no two people are the same. Yeah, never, never, never produces what either management, the consultant, the team wants out of that. And this this sounds different. So I kind of really like where you're going with this.
Ken Roden (15:19.852)
Yeah, you you said it really well. We used to talk about it. The seller that whale hunts, not everyone can go find whales. This is different because you're trying to get micro wins so that you're trying to retrain people to think about things differently. So it's not just the output, but it's actually how they're, we've been raised in the Western world on how to learn. The other thing is the pace of business is different than it used to be. So having
the time and ability to tee stuff up to be perfect so you can roll it out to someone just doesn't work anymore. In just what the year of this podcast, AI has changed dramatically. mean, agentic AI has become rolled out from ChatGPT, didn't exist a year ago. So we've got too much changing too quickly that an enterprise can, you know, wait, master the tool and then roll it out to their teams. It just doesn't work like that right now.
It's not like rolling out a CRM or ERP project where there's 15 years, 20 years of experience that you can pull on. Yeah, that's a great point. You have to think of it in a nimble way.
Like, are there already designed models that, you know,
There's not. The one thing that I have come up with personally that I've seen really work well is this concept of an AI sandwich model. I love sandwiches. I'm sure you guys like sandwiches too. Who doesn't want a sandwich? I particularly love a club sandwich because it's bread, some lettuce, some meat, more bread, lettuce, bacon, you know, like, and then another piece of bread.
Clint (16:56.344)
Greg is a fan of the French dip. Don't get in the way between him and a French dip.
I'll eat a Reuben.
There's a lot to it. When you think about it, right? The human is the bread and the AI is the meat. And that's the kind of workflow you want to get. So what you want to do is have that approach because it keeps the human accountable at the beginnings and the end, but has AI be part of the work being done. And one of the things that I really find is that it helps the employee build trust in the process of the workflow being built because it's not just a black box.
But two, it builds accountability into the employee because AI is not a teammate. AI is a tool.
So in there, are you finding in your research any big bang results or is it more just incremental, take what you're doing, go faster, be more crisp, more focused out of the gates with AI or is there a story in there of something that's been completely changed from beginning to end because of AI?
Ken Roden (18:01.004)
Yeah. So I'm going to give your listeners the biggest tip that's going to set them apart for 2026 right now. The boring stuff is the most effective stuff. Buyer research, messaging for email sequencing, cleaning up your data and your CRM, scenario prep. That's the stuff that AI is doing incredibly well right now. Building a marketing campaign, selling to your target buyer.
Creating blog posts and then pushing them straight out, not the use case. The sexy stuff is not where AI is most effective. AI supports existing workflows, so try to invest in that versus trying to replace what's already being done. You want to have projects that remove friction, so the research, synthesis, the prep work, the cleanup, help people do their job better versus thinking of AI, again, being an employee and be able to do its own work.
Mm-hmm.
I like that. If you look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn't echo that. There's a lot of promises out there. There's a lot of problems. No, it doesn't. There's a, but there's a lot of a hype and a lot of promises, but this, this makes sense. If you're executing either in the chair or, or executing across the team, that's what you want. You know, crisp and, and, and keep your, you know, your humans that are good at.
Critical thinking and changing changing pace mid conversation things like that. That's what you want. You want them doing
Ken Roden (19:36.748)
Yeah. I, you know, I am not a technical guy. I'm not an engineer. but I play around with agent workflows often. And I see those, I built this 31 step node or 31 node agent that can do marketing campaigns and increase you to a hundred K ARR, you know, and take you to the moon, all that stuff. I've tried them. I can't get them to work. like, I, I'm not saying they're not possible, but I don't think business.
operators can do this type of work. They're not technical enough. And we're looking at AI to roll out to our employee base. We're not going to hire a whole bunch of engineers to do it. So realistically, teaching employees workflows that work for them is how you're going to build confidence in them using AI. And Greg, to your point, let's keep them on the phone. Let's keep them thinking about the strategic initiatives. Let's keep them focused on the campaign, the differentiation in the market. That's where we're seeing business growth anyway.
So you kicked off a podcast, was it last year, year before, recently? Two years ago. Yeah, two years ago. Okay, so Greg and I, we got started with AI right out of the gates and starting our podcast. What did you do with AI in your podcast?
years.
Ken Roden (20:49.516)
Yeah, I actually think podcasting is a great use case for AI. Using a tool, for example, that can take care of a lot of the editing for you is just one thing that just makes life easier, right? A little bit less friction for you. But when I think of an actual human AI workflow, I look at taking that transcript from the podcast and then having it create several different pieces of
digital assets that I can use. So really a content amplifier. So it's doing things like creating an SEO and AEO optimized blog post. It's doing things like creating a article for my sub stack. It's doing things like creating LinkedIn posts, not only for my voice and tone, but for the voice and tone of our podcast, as well as we write a podcast posts for our, for our guests.
So they actually have something in their voice and tone that is all done for them, started all with AI. So already out the gate, things like that would have taken me, I don't know, five or six hours at least to get that done. I'm only taking an hour now to kind of edit those pieces and be able to send them out. So that's a huge time saver for me. And it really has allowed us to amplify. Then you look at something like one of my favorite tools out there is called Opus Pro.
And it will make clips of your videos and help you understand how they rank. And we've had over, I think, 50,000 views of YouTube shorts with no marketing. And it's all been organic growth. And for a podcast that's a side hustle, that's not bad.
That is pretty darn good. You just gave me a couple ideas in there as well. We have not been drafting a blog post in the voice of our guest and providing it to them. I think that's something we need to fold in here. That's a great idea.
Ken Roden (22:47.566)
Yeah, I'm happy to show you guys.
So since we're talking about AI tools and things that you use, maybe not even in business, what are some cool AI tools that you've found or you're playing with that you really like?
Yeah, so I gave you a teaser. Opus Pro, I think, is probably my favorite tool for podcasting. It's great to get clips optimized for your audience, giving you an idea of how you can edit them, add b-roll, clean them up. It's a great tool. I'm a big fan of Claude. I find that it's phenomenal for writing. I really like the artifacts and projects functionality. So I also love ChatGPT, but I'm a big Claude guy.
And then for workflows, I'm a big relevance AI person. I find as an operator, you know, doing day-to-day business, using workflows and building them and relevance is really helpful.
Relevance. I haven't heard that one. I've heard N8N, of course, but Relevance. I'll go check that one out.
Ken Roden (23:42.412)
Yeah, N8N to me is for the technical folk out there and I will...
I'm by it. Like, that's a lot going on in here. I'm not sure how to put it. Exactly.
and you're a software developer.
Relevance they have little characters they give each of your agents It's a little bit more user friendly for us guys who maybe get overwhelmed with with you know zeros and ones
Yeah, what's an example of that you've used it for?
Ken Roden (24:10.574)
I have my content amplification workflow in there. And you can select the LLM you want to use, the version. So whether you want Claude, if you want Sonnet 3.5 or 4.5, you can make the calls there. And the other one, it's kind of interesting. I'd say people should explore this because I haven't seen, done a full investigation of it as Genspark, G-E-N-S-P-A-A-K. And I just find that it's...
so fast and create really powerful pieces of content like visuals as well as PowerPoints. I actually have it create PowerPoint templates for me so I don't upload the content, but I'll tell it what I'm looking for and then I'll just enter it in and I kind of have it able to set and go whenever I'm ready.
Yeah, I heard about Genspark recently and started playing around with that. I heard two different tools to help you get going with your slide decks. Gamma, gamma.app and Genspark. And I've been playing around with both over the last couple of weeks. I've been very impressed. First time I've been impressed with the creation of a slide deck. ChatGBT never really impressed me with the decks that it creates.
Yeah, Gamma is an interesting tool. They seem to be innovating very quickly. Great for us. I'm sure you guys have to make lot of decks and stuff.
Yeah, exactly. Well, let's go ahead and wrap up with one last question for you, Ken. Really appreciate all the insights and advice that you've been giving us. Let's say we have a business leader who wants to get started with AI but doesn't know where to begin. How do you get them pointed on the right path?
Ken Roden (25:51.084)
Yeah, I would want to understand two things. What do you want to be able to accomplish for your team in 2026? And what role do you play in that? And if you can answer those two questions, we can start out. You have in conversation with Chachabi T or Claude, you pick what you prefer, and you can just have a dialogue. And I would say that would be where I would start. And the reason is two things. One, you're going to get comfortable with the tool, get an idea of what the outputs are like, where it kind of go astray.
But two, it can actually give you some really good suggestions on what's actually possible given the constraints you have, whether it's budget or maybe it's team readiness. And the other thing I would do is bring your team into it. Talk to your team about it. I bet your employees are using AI and you just don't fully know it. might not, and they might be telling you they're kind of using AI, but they might be using AI a little bit more than you think. Bring them into the conversation. And those would be the two things.
Brush up on your own skills and bring your team into the chat. I think you're going to be really successful if you do that.
That's great. Yeah. That's, that's something new. I didn't, I don't think I've ever heard that. You know, we, we, know, we know, you know, using AI to help you use AI and everything, articulate your constraints. That's another piece to put in there and have it work around the puzzle. Yeah. That is, I liked it. That's, I'm going to try that one. That, that is the first time I've heard that.
Yeah.
Ken Roden (27:20.008)
one other little tip that I've, I picked up from someone was ask a question or come up with whatever you're looking for. And at the end say, give me the counterintuitive perspective. Really gets you thinking about things I never would have thought of. And, it's really been helpful in getting me to think about the AI output, not just using it.
a good one.
Clint (27:41.976)
Yeah, have it inspect what it just told you and come back with the counter view. That's a great idea.
Yeah. I also think another great one, you're just getting my brain rolling a little bit is if your team is saying they want more time with you, but they don't have time, you can create a custom GPT or a Claude project that is your digital twin. And you're able to upload your personality assessment, maybe it's some of your writing. There's actually, you'd be surprised how much content you actually have as a leader because you've got
presentation decks and all the stuff that we have and it can create a voice for you and I've had executives actually use that while they're gone to kind of it and then some people know what would Yeah, and use it for prep for one-on-ones or presentations like right like how would they react to this so some fun little nuggets
idea.
can say GPT, right?
Greg (28:41.102)
Will Greg approve this discount on this deal? You go work with it first before you bring it to me.
That's actually a great idea. tell you, that's, you save a lot of time on reps bringing discounts requests to.
to a boss director VP level. spend time prepping prepping people to go to the sea level guys. All right. We are going to go. This is how you talk. This is what you do. That might be a tool that, you know, give them a, give them a leg up. That's great. Well, Ken, this has been a, just a great conversation and, you know, we could tell, you're, you know, your doctorate efforts are, have you really
Digital twin.
Greg (29:26.67)
you know, digging in and you've said things that a lot of our other guests haven't said just not that they're not that they're not studying it, but they're just learning while doing on the job. So you have a different perspective and we appreciate you coming on the podcast today.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And I think the other great thing is there are a lot of perspectives coming in and we can all kind of come together and talk about it and figure out what works. Nobody's figured this out yet. So the more people talking about it and leaning in, I think we're going to be better off.
Greg (30:05.166)
And now it's time for this week's AI Challenge. This is where we have the audience work with AI to get more comfortable with it in their day-to-day business life.
This week's AI Challenge is inspired by our guest where you're gonna be creating your own digital twin. You're gonna be setting up a custom GPT inside of chat GPT that will answer questions as if you're answering them directly yourself.
You've got a good story about AI and business and would like to be on a future episode of this podcast. Go to our website at www.promptthis.ai. Get to the contact us page and fill in the information. We'll get back to you and we'll discuss a possibility of having you on the show.
Clint (30:53.166)
Well, Ken, tell us where our guests can track you down and find out more about you and learn about the things you're working on.
I would say please connect with me on LinkedIn. It's Ken Rodin. if you message me, I do reply. So I definitely want more connection and more conversation on the topics. And then please take a listen to Futurecraft GTM. I think it complements what y'all do pretty well. I'm talking about some of the inner weavings of this stuff happening and a little bit of the work you do talking to some leaders. So take a listen, please.
I will be following that podcast right away. I'm looking forward to it. All right, Ken, you have a great day. We appreciate your time and sharing your wisdom with us. And best of luck with that doctoral thesis.
Yeah, thank you both.
Ken Roden (31:38.978)
Thank you. I need it.
And that's another episode of prompt this.
AI Announcer (31:49.71)
Thanks for joining Clint and Greg today. You can find all of the prompt this episodes and more in depth articles at www.promptthis.ai and be sure to click the follow button below. We look forward to having you back.
