Rethinking AI Adoption using the Sandwich Model with Ken Roden

00:03 Hello and welcome to another episode of Marketing for Marketers, the series where we sit down with the people behind today's most effective B2B strategies to understand what's really driving pipeline performance and growth. My guest today, Ken Rodin, is an executive advisor, GTM strategist and doctoral researcher focused on the intersection between AI and leadership. Ken has helped accountants teams adopt AI in ways that are both practical and impactful.

00:28 drawing from real world experience and academic research to create frameworks that actually work. Now, one of those frameworks is the sandwich model, which I'm very interested to talk about two reasons. One, that paired with doctoral research, I'm sure is going to be a very, very interesting topic. And two, I absolutely love talking about sandwiches. two things. Ken, before we get into it, how are you? Welcome. I'm doing great. Really excited to be here and talk to you a little bit about all the exciting stuff that's happening around AI and marketing.

00:55 I've probably done a hundred plus interviews now on the various different series and different companies. there's the first doctoral researcher on an expert topic. So I'm very interested to have a conversation with someone who's actually, you could argue probably on his, on his way to being the most qualified possible. I'm hearing you say is you just haven't interviewed anyone who's crazy. That's what I'm hearing you say. Yeah. Well, there is that I was just trying to find a polite way of putting on it.

01:25 Um, well, I'm really excited to be here and you know, I think one of the coolest things that's happening right now is marketing is having its moment. We're having an opportunity to rethink how marketing is done, rethink metrics, rethink how we go to market. And it's all because of AI and marketers actually have the opportunity to be on the forefront of all of this. take on that is it's almost a renaissance, a marketing renaissance. Yes. Hopefully with beautiful art. It's interesting. It's both.

01:53 an incredible opportunity and incredibly frustrating at the same time, because the way in which we've done marketing for the last, in my case, 10 to 15 years is completely changing. And I'm very optimistic about that change and, you know, diving in head first, but it's challenging to say the least. think challenge is a great word. And I think you also said the other one change. You know, if you have been in marketing, similar to me, like, you know, 10 to 20 years, you've seen

02:23 a lot change already because we went from the late to early 2000s being about brand. And now we entered a world where we're going back to brand, but we were stuck in this data driven performance marketing approach for the last 10 or so years. And it's not to the data doesn't matter anymore. It definitely does. But I think brand brings on that Renaissance that you mentioned, like it's a huge opportunity, but people have to be willing to change and change is hard.

02:50 It's, yeah, change is hard. And it's what I think is because of the pace of AI. the pace that's come with AI, like don't get me wrong, marketing was an ever changing function anyway, but with AI and the speed of things now it's, it's like X the speed at which you have to operate. So you've not only got this, uh, this challenge and focus, but it's 10 times faster than it used to be. So it's like, you're almost treading water trying to keep up. Yeah, it can be really tough. And I've talked to.

03:18 many leaders and many team members at organizations who are working in marketing and they feel the fatigue, right? So many new tools. We're trying this tool this week. We're trying this tool that week and people don't have the appetite for it. So it's really important that marketing leaders, marketing executives think about methodically how they're going to roll out AI to their teams to prevent what you're talking about right now, which is a real challenge.

03:42 We've got a series of questions that we're going to go through today. So I guess the first one, let's start with like the obvious one. We talk about struggles, challenges, and frustrations. Why do, are teams struggling to adopt AI in a way that makes sense to their pre-existing ways of working or their pre-existing beliefs? It's a really great question to start with. And the answer is probably going to surprise you. I've had the opportunity to interview and talk to

04:12 many marketing leaders, as well as just professionals in the workforce as part of my research. In a recent study I ran, talking to white collar professionals, I found out that it's about trust, specifically trust and leadership around AI. Less than half of employees believe their leaders are taking the right approach or have the right vision for implementing AI. So even if they had the tools and even if the employees were confident in using AI, they were still hesitant.

04:40 because they were unsure of what their leaders were going to do and if that was actually going to be successful or not. So they don't know it's safe to engage. When you say they're unsure of what their leaders are going to do, do you mean they were unsure if they're still going to have a job or unsure of what the long-term strategy is of adopting AI? It's a great follow-up because it's definitely a little bit of the unsure of what's happening with my job.

05:06 But job confidence actually isn't as big of a pain. It's lack of understanding what the leader's vision is. What's the strategy for implementing AI? I talked to a marketing leader who actually, when ChatGPT and a few other kind of forefront tools came out, gave their team full access to everything and just said, go for it, try everything. And what happened was the teams adopted AI, but the leader never did. And so he didn't have a vision for what was going to happen with the tools.

05:33 And so they actually didn't see the leader as credible anymore. And he had a huge confidence gap in his engagement scores, which is preventing him from being able to execute on his goals, which really hurt him and that part of the business. It's interesting actually that you bring up that story. We have a AI push program, I think that.

05:50 name for it is internally, it's had a couple of different names, but AI post-programming, each area of the business is tasked with adopting AI in a way that suits them. one thing we're doing in my team is essentially mapping out all of our biggest frustrations in the team. was speaking to a guy on a previous episode of this series called Spencer, and he said, get a stack of post-it notes. One is a green post-it note and one is a red post-it note. On the red ones, you just, over the course of the week, you write down your biggest frustrations.

06:17 They're the first things that you should try and use AI to solve. And then on the green or yellow post, it's the things that you would like to do with AI, but aren't based on frustrations. They're based on like your wants. So it's your need versus want. And that's what we're doing in the team. So we're mapping out our biggest frustrations, our biggest time sapping things, our biggest impact on resource like resource drains. And that's where we're focusing our efforts on building AI. And I think that's quite a good way of doing it because we're

06:45 be able to position it, if we're trying to make your job easier and better with AI, we're not trying to replace you, which has worked quite well. Yeah. It's very smart for organizations to think more about communicating their vision for how they want things to happen in terms of AI implementation versus giving their employees tools and kind of setting it and forgetting it. So what would you say is the most common misconception that you've come across so far that senior leaders have about

07:10 AI and team performance. You gave an example there of a team leader who thought it's as simple as just giving them access and they'll go wild and solve all the problems that they need to. What's the biggest misconception from senior leaders? Yeah, there's a version of talking to senior leaders as well as talking to board members, including private equity and VC board members. And their mindset is we gave them the tools, we gave them the resources to implement AI. Where are the revenue and pipeline gains? And that's just not what's happening right now for most organizations.

07:40 What's really happening is there's an expectation debt. Many marketing leaders are being sold the story that AI is a silver bullet, that it can fix your pipeline issues and it can help you grow revenue and make you the hero. And that's just not how transformations work. And if that was true, HubSpot, Google, all of these big enterprises would be doing it and they'd be miles ahead of us, right? That's just not actually what's happening. But the other challenge is the lack of intentionality. The leaders that I see succeeding.

08:09 are taking a different approach where they're rolling out AI with a more methodical approach. They've done the pilots, like you've mentioned, they're trying something initially, and then they're working on to embed them into the systems that are already happening versus blowing up how a marketing team works. And that's where the AI sandwich model kind of falls in. Where every touch point with AI is bookended or engaged with human context or judgment. And that's how we build trust in the process. And that trust drives.

08:36 the development and adoption of AI on teams. Okay. So you've just, um, you've just dropped the sandwich model phrase there name. So we're to have to jump into that now. So what on earth is a sandwich model? Okay. Before I start, what is your favorite sandwich? Cause you mentioned that you will say. Oh God, that is a, it's a very, very good question. I'm actually, I'm a big fan of American sandwiches. must admit. Okay. Something.

09:05 two or three different like pastrami. I'd have probably sauerkraut, American mustard. You can get my vibe where I'm going. Or like, I don't know if that's New York style, Italian New York sort of vibes. You definitely need to be in New York to get a good pastrami on rye or rupin. That's definitely, that's a great call. Yeah. I do love a rupin. do love a rupin. Rupins are great. Mine actually is a

09:33 British club sandwich, not an American club sandwich. There is a difference. There's egg on it and there's also like usually like real chicken versus like deli meat. So I have to go to the UK to get that. Wait, so which is the American version and which is the English version? Cause I only know the, I'm thinking right. So Tesco meal deal is a very, very famous thing in the UK, which is basically you can get a sandwich, a side and a drink for five quid, which is dollars wise. You're looking at, um, don't know, $7 and similar that the club sandwich you get there.

10:03 doesn't have egg. Okay. And it's yeah, it's definitely chunks of chicken, like it's proper chicken, chicken meat, but there's no egg in it. So I'm, that the American thing? No. So I guess where I've gone in the UK and had club sandwiches, they put egg on it. I don't know why. Yeah. I mean, it sounds incredible. It's good. But in the US they use deli meat and like the bacon's not as good. Like you guys do like.

10:27 I don't know. It's it's a different. I was reading an article. We're going slightly off topic here, but I was reading an article the other day about the number of preservatives you guys are allowed to use in the U S versus the number we're allowed to use and the number of pesticides you're, you're allowed to use versus the number of pesticides we're allowed to use. And it's something like in the UK, there's a list of a hundred preservatives or in Europe, sorry, a list of a hundred preservatives that you can use. And in the U S it's more like 300, um, that are approved. You know, you can actually use them. And I think that's the

10:57 biggest thing I've noticed about the difference in food. Yeah. Our Oreos might be delicious, but they might kill you. So you can make the call. Right. I'm getting hungry just talking about this. So enough about real world sandwiches. Let's talk about the AI sandwich. think either one of our examples of our favorite sandwiches fits into this method. The reason why is one, everybody loves sandwiches and can relate to it.

11:21 But it provides a structured, repeatable process that you can embed into your day-to-day work by sandwiching in AI to different parts of work. And why that matters is what we've seen at the initial, you know, out the gate of AI. Some organizations tried to go fully agentic in some of their marketing motions, some of their sales motions, and it didn't stick. And there's a few reasons why, but taking the AI sandwich model, you're going to do two things.

11:47 You're bringing in your employees along the journey so that they feel part of how AI is embedded into work. And two, you're eliminating the black box syndrome, which running complete agented workflows can do for organizations. They get the output and they're like, well, why is it this? Or where did that stat come from? Or why is it said like that? Or why didn't you include this? It creates too many friction points where you actually have to go back and do all the work. So think about the AI sandwich model as humans set in the context. What's the goal?

12:16 What's the desired output and why it matters. Then the AI contribution is more like generating, researching, analyzing. That's where you can get things like drafts, or you can get a competitive research program kicked off. And then the human comes in to refine that or take action if it's at the end. But typically what I'm seeing in a lot of workflows are human, AI, human, AI, human. And that's a good start for organizations right now. Each layer has a role.

12:44 Each handoff is intentional and it's not about replacing humans. It's about clarifying when and how to bring in AI so you can leverage it, but not lose the trust. Yeah, it's interesting. So we're, we're doing a lot with AI tools or AI workflows agents that we've built focused on SEO. Cause that was one of our challenges just in terms of a change in resource.

13:06 So we're, we're focused in that area at the minute and a lot of the tools and workflows that we're testing, they are, they are good. Like don't get me wrong. They will give you a pretty good draft, but we, we are having issues with AI just quite literally ignoring or just not able to understand even simple things. So we've always kept that editorial review to a human at the end. we've got it to a place where we're happy with the output that goes to the editor.

13:34 So that there's actually not much work that's needed, but I do question the brands and the companies that are implementing fully automated AI. Like that's go on SEO to just cause that's what we're talking about, but like a fully automated blog that's just written by AI. do worry about that because I think the long-term impact of having surface level skimmable content that's pretty short doesn't have that human touch is I'm not sure how much depth it's actually got long-term.

14:04 Yeah. And just to be clear, I'm very pro AI. use AI every day for my work. But what I do think we're seeing is some people just assuming that you can just start using AI, you can implement a workflow and set it and forget it and then publish. Right. And you shared a great example at the end, you guys review the content before you push play, but we're seeing the other, you know, the set it and forget it approach happen on LinkedIn. That's why on LinkedIn right now you're seeing posts from two and three weeks ago because people are

14:33 putting so much AI content out there that LinkedIn algorithm is going back and looking for non heavily AI generated content to present to you. And so that's why this matters is going AI first without a plan and not having checks and balances and having humans part of it. Part of it is it's hurting you as a brand.

14:54 You've touched on elements of workflow. You mentioned the sandwich model and the human involvement, AI involvement. what, terms of like workflow before tech, is it a case of making sure that your workflow is optimized before you look at tech and AI to support said workflow? Yeah, what I'm seeing is two options. You can implement the workflow that you currently have, or you can use AI to kind of be a catalyst to re-energize your workflow.

15:19 So maybe the workflow for your competitive Intel just wasn't working very well, or maybe your messaging refresh, it was bogging you down. So you can revisit the process, but what I've seen is getting teams together and having them share their biggest pains. think the no card sticky concept of green and red is a great approach. I've seen people do whiteboarding. I've seen like.

15:41 People do surveys, anonymous surveys, analyze Slack channels. Like there's a lot of different approaches, but what's really important is something called the human action model, where we are actually thinking about how to get people to do change. People know roughly how to work. Like your team knows how to do their job, right? Like they've been doing it for years before AI, but we need to figure out how to get AI into the flow so you can be more productive or more efficient. When we think about the human action model, what you need to say is your team members need to recognize that there's actually a challenge.

16:11 They also need to be able to see a better future. get to the end point. But the most important part is they have to believe that there is a path to get there, path. But if they don't believe that the AI is part of the path, they're not going to take action and they're not going to fully adopt it. So when you're asking about like, you do you start with workflows? It's more about starting with, Hey, what are your pains? Can we get them better with the solution? How can the solution get us in a better spot? And you, um, you touched on adoption there. what, what would.

16:41 If you were going to paint a picture of what successful AI adoption actually looks like, what would tell us like, well, what, what does that picture look like? Yeah. For most companies in 2025, it is not fully autonomous. It is more of an AI human sandwich model. Now we might see some innovation happen in the next six months where there could be some really big leaps forward that might change that. But what I'm seeing is actually.

17:08 The more people are embedding AI and less human control, they're actually running into more hiccups. So I would say integrating AI into your workflows, meaning humans are in control, but AI is embedded and consistent. It's not one-off. It's not a pilot, but it's actually how you work. And I would pick a streamlined program, content development. I think SEO is a great one. Competitive intelligence is a gold mine because it is a pain that a marketer has for their whole life, no matter how senior they are.

17:37 The sales team is always going be asking for competitive intelligence and you can never give them enough. So I actually see AI being a huge pain reliever and actually able to help you move faster in that one. So that's actually one I would definitely consider. interesting. I was building an AI agent over the past couple of weeks. I think I've got a post going on LinkedIn tomorrow about it, but it was, saw like 45 versions for me to get it right, but I'm happy with it now. It's switched on, it's working. So it's off the back of these podcast episodes of these marketing for marketing series.

18:04 Typically each episode is a very niche topic. So we're using the RSS feed from our stream platform to trigger the flow, which then pulls the keyword topic from the title, does research on the keyword topic, the SERP analysis, all of that sort of stuff, creates a blog brief, then writes a blog based on its own brief that is created. Turns that into a blog and then that's what goes to our editor for review. And we've actually got it into a really, really good place now where every week on a Monday we get a new blog delivered to our editor ready for her to review. So we've.

18:34 What we've done is level up something we're already doing, which is recording this high, you know, rich and spoken word stuff, and then putting that into an AI workflow that's basically just giving another piece of content like a repurposing. So I think completely agree in terms of the focus of 2025 being an amalgamation of human and AI rather than fully automated stuff. I mean, I've seen some terrible reviews and terrible stories about the fully automated AI things.

19:02 Yeah. But on LinkedIn, you see people who are like, I built this 36 step agent and you too can implement this and it will get you a hundred thousand dollars in recurring revenue. And it's like, wait, but like if HubSpot isn't doing that, how, are you doing that? Like there's a catch. There's some things not fully there. Um, and we might be headed there. I do think we'll get pretty close to what satisfaction can look like for a multi-step workflow like that, but we're not there yet. Most companies aren't going to able to achieve that.

19:32 Now, we spoke about what successful AI adoption looks like in your view. So where have you seen this model drive pipeline or go to market impact? Have you got a story that you've come across during your research? Yeah. So one of my favorite stories as an example of working with a B2B sales team who owned both new biz as well as customer revenue. And they were trying to move to an expansion approach because like

20:01 a lot of teams right now, it's tough to get net new business. So they had to do a pivoting strategy. So they shifted their focus to go to market to focus on growing existing accounts. Then they hit a wall. I bet a lot of people listening can relate to this. Their CRM data was full of gaps and the data was dirty and they weren't able to actually properly blueprint an account for any type of campaign and really any type of one-off outreach unless

20:26 the sales manager or the sales rep actually did the work. And they actually found that Slack had a ton of intelligence, but it was kind of buried in different channels. Reps didn't have the time. And frankly, you don't want reps spending time to do that. What we figured out was it would take about two hours per account just to piece together everything they're looking for. So instead we implemented the AI sandwich model and reps set the context. They knew the accounts, what expansion could look like. And then in some of the

20:54 prompts and some of the agents, actually baked in things like, what am I missing or what am I not thinking about that could be valuable for this type of offering when engaging with this type of account in X industry or X size of business. AI did a lot of the heavy lifting. We had a ability to integrate with Slack and pull out some really insightful information about accounts in there, able to clean up some stuff in Salesforce. We were also able to get some research out there, organize it, and we were able to create these custom

21:23 intelligence dashboards, we were calling them for each account. And then we were actually able to make an overall dashboard that had all of this data coming in one place, giving a holistic view of what blueprints would look like for their top 50 accounts. Humans stepped in, validated it throughout the process, made the decisions, and then they were actually able to take action to it. So it wasn't just that it came out faster, but it was actually delivering something they wouldn't have been able to achieve before. And the head of customer success told me, said,

21:53 This work would have never gotten done without AI. We would have missed the window. We wouldn't have been able to pull it off. It changed what our team thought was possible. It saved over 80 hours. And more importantly, the seller spent the time engaging with the accounts, which is so important in this digital AI world. And that's the kind of shift AI can create when it's embedded into workflow versus setting it and forgetting it.

22:17 So we're thinking about how we can enable or engage the sales and CS teams in marketing. One of the biggest shifts we're seeing is LinkedIn company page performance plummeted into the ground, which means you have to leverage individuals, local companies to build the company brand through personal profiles, personal brands. So we saw a pretty good success story from a company called Storylane who built an AI agent that was listening to call transcripts. And it was then turning the problems, the stories, the trends that

22:46 the AI was picking up in these call transcripts and turning it into social posts that the reps could post, that the sort of style posts would be. I was talking to a prospect earlier this week and they told me about their three biggest problems, bam, bam, bam. And they would therefore come across as an expert on industry or at least someone who was up to date on the latest trends and macroeconomics. So that's definitely something we're trying to enable the CS team with AI to get their buy-in to marketing. I've seen some very interesting things with AI and I think to your point.

23:16 Anything that can enable them to do something. That's the sweet spot. Yeah. One of the things that I have found to be really helpful in getting people outside of marketing to really be an advocate and represent the brand of a company is find 15 questions that are relevant to your target audience and have the seller, in many cases, the executive, someone who could be a thought leader who has some expertise and say like, Hey, I just want to interview you for 30 minutes.

23:45 And you've got a minute to answer each of these questions. And then from that, you've got video content. You've got a transcript that you can use to create LinkedIn posts. And it's taking that same concept that you have, which I love, but it actually gets the person like excited about it because they were part of the work that was done. And what I think we're both saying is bring people along for the journey. And one thing I wanted to mention earlier is that it's not that teams are all unwilling to use AI, but they're exhausted from change and half-baked rollouts.

24:15 Just last year, it was reported that 89 % of workers experienced a major org change. 73 % of leaders believe their employees are facing change fatigue. And then the willingness to support change by employees went from 74 % in 2016 to just 38 % today, according to Gartner. So your employees don't want to do this. That's the problem. So you have to figure out as a leader, how do you motivate them to be part of that chain?

24:45 versus just throwing it at them and hoping it sticks. You spoke about your, I guess, your role as a leader. In terms of that broader question, what role should a marketing leader play in AI adoption? You've told us a couple of stories about, you know, that here's the access to everything, go and have a play. You've told us about sharing vision, getting people involved in the strategy of things. What role should someone like myself be playing in AI adoption?

25:15 Well, I think you're already doing this based off our conversation so far, but marketing leaders are pivotal in AI adoption, not just for marketing, but in the organizational transformation. Why? One, marketing is being disrupted more than any other function right now, especially in the B2B space. So they're being faced with a challenge. So they have to lean in, right? But two, marketers are naturally experimental and curious. They test, they listen.

25:41 They talk to people internally, they talk to customers, they're getting a pulse from the market. So marketing leaders can actually be the architects for how AI is deployed within the organization and represent the brand, both internally and externally. Being the ones adopting AI, but they're designing the system and the behaviors that help AI get implemented, but to keep the work human, that needs to stay human and keep the company moving in the right direction during this massive time of change.

26:08 Okay, we touched on the fact that you're doing a doctoral. I guess what would it be you're doing your doctor? What would be the correct phrase to use here? I'm exploring how leadership is changing in an AI enabled work. And in terms of skills that you've come across during that research, what new skills do leaders actually need today that they didn't have five years ago? Yeah.

26:34 Think of it this way, the skill of collaboration or executive presence, those aren't the skills anymore. The new skills are actually skill sets. It's a mix of being able to collaborate, but also build trust quickly. It's the ability to have executive presence, but also be authentic and engage global audiences. So it's more of a dynamic skill set that we're looking at. From my conversations, what I'm seeing right now, the four things that I would focus on if I were a leader are one being

27:02 AI aware, meaning you don't have to be the expert, but you need to be curious. You can't sit this out and just hand it off to someone on your team because you need to understand what's possible with AI, what the limitations are. So you can understand how to deploy people as well as deploy agents in the future. The other one that's familiar to a lot of people is principle decision-making. So the idea of asking, should we, not just can we trust matters with your employees.

27:31 your customers, how you're using their data for your own AI initiatives, as well as the general market. Trust is going to matter when we're running into things like deep fakes and CEOs are allegedly saying things that they never said. We're going to have to have trust with brands that right now isn't incredibly strong. The two ones that are newer concepts that are, think are really important are boundless team activation, which means getting things done, not just across internal organization, but

28:00 Also outside, building a team of freelancers, agencies, other departments who will come together for an initiative, a specific moment in time, a campaign, a product launch, and then disperse again. So the leader is going to need to able to build teams quickly, establish trust quickly, and also align the team on a vision so that they can execute for both humans and agents. And the last one is a word you don't hear often in B2B enterprise space.

28:29 which is the concept of adaptive imagination. We talk about vision a lot, and vision means that you have a path of what it looks like to get there, but imagination means you're dreaming of what's possible, but you might not know how to get there. And that's where we are right now in this world of AI, because we actually don't know what's available. We just talked about, hey, right now it's not okay, or not really the best idea to implement a fully agentic strategy, but in six months it might be. So we need leaders to be able to actually

28:58 Imagine what's possible and be flexible and agile in there and how they do that. The playbook's being rewritten and the best leaders are building the plane while they're flying it and making their teams confident doing it. Interesting. So there's, there was one word that jumped out for me there, which is curiosity. Cause I'm a huge, I've spoken about it so I'm quite a few episodes before, but curiosity, I believe it to be a superpower.

29:20 And I think when you pair curiosity with an open minded approach to AI, I think that's very, very strong in terms of a skillset, because I think to your point there, you don't need to know how to do it. Like it's brand new. It's something that we've never been faced with before or something that we've never tried before. So the expectation shouldn't be that everyone should just be able to use AI out of the box because you know, it's the next thing. But to have the curiosity to say, I've got an idea. I think we can do it with AI. I'm going to either speak to someone who can help or go and do the research myself. I think.

29:50 curiosity is just going to become even more valuable. agree with you. And if I could encourage your listeners who maybe aren't necessarily in leadership, but are in any role and plan to be working in the next 15 to 20 years, being curious is probably the number one skill that I would say if you don't already have, you develop because the world is changing so quickly, not just with AI, but having an open mind and being curious to understand why can just help you in your own life, whether it's professional or personal.

30:21 Okay, so if we were building AI power go to market, what do you think is the human skill that's most at risk of being undervalued or forgotten? The human skill that is most at risk of being undervalued is the concept of balance. I've seen teams go full speed into AI implementation and be so gung-ho about it with the best intentions and it sounds great, but it's overwhelming and teams burn out and there's a cost to all this change.

30:51 AI isn't just this tech rollout. It's a challenge. It's change. It's something new and it is a mental tax. And I think one of the things that doesn't get talked about a ton is how much that can be draining when you go home from work and you've got to relax. So how do you balance learning something new, but also not overwhelming yourself? You shared earlier that, you you, think you said it took 40 something times to get that agent to where you wanted to go. That's taxing. And that can burn a lot of people out.

31:18 if they don't also have a time and a place to decompress. So think about the people aspect and go for a walk, go pause, go work out, go read a book, whatever your calming thing is, but take a more balanced approach to it. Not you personally, just in general. think I have a tendency, it's both a advantage and a disadvantage of that obsessive tunnel vision where when I've got an idea I could spend

31:45 six hours working on that idea without even looking up for my screen. But that's also extremely, it's good and bad. can cause just as many issues as it can solve because you get so focused on the singular thing that's in front you rather than the bigger picture. made that mistake too, where I reflected a couple of weeks ago on something where I spent in total six hours working on a multi-step agent.

32:10 And like, it didn't even get me the output that I really wanted. And I realized that I was spinning myself into a tizzy and there's that many impact on the other stuff I had to do. So I've had to figure out ways to self-regulate and say like, okay, take a break on the, you know, maybe the little obsessive entrepreneurial excitement and put it on, put it on the burner for a little bit. But I'm assuming in that six hours, even if you didn't get the result you were hoping for, you learn how not to do it, which is just as powerful as succeeding. Yeah.

32:40 So that's a good point. So two things I actually learned from this one, I actually built a custom GPT that will tell me if I'm overdoing something. like if I've gone too far, it's just a little bit of a gut check on like, Hey, like, this over engineered at this point? Is it good enough? But the second thing I've actually done, which I've actually done to be really valuable. And I think it's a tip that a lot of people could benefit from. So secret tip, if you will. I take that whole thread, copy it, put it in a Word doc. And then I have a.

33:09 a GPT actually extract what I learned, not like what was done, but actually what I learned through the process. And it turns it into content for me. And so I'm actually able to kind of summarize it for my own development. And then I actually use it to talk to my clients about. Okay. So if someone listening is just getting started, feeling a little bit overwhelmed, perhaps what, what, what one thing should they do this quarter to build momentum with AI? Not necessarily tick a box of I am now

33:39 using AI, but just to build momentum, just to get that ball rolling. Maybe some folks are using it for drafts or meeting recaps, but for next quarter, think about taking things from peppered AI uses across your team to more of a repeatable system. So think about the AI sandwich method that we talked about. We talked about picking one real marketing workflow. I think competitive intelligence, messaging updates, campaign planning, content creation are all good options. Start with the human context.

34:08 Who's the audience? What outcome actually matters? What's the goal we can set? Is it time to market? Productivity? Don't look for revenue impact at this stage. Map the sandwich. What parts require human? What part can AI do? And then run it. Not once, three times, five times. So you get an idea of how to improve the flow. And then you have a process. You're building a muscle.

34:32 It's not going to be a perfect product launch the first two times you do it. It just doesn't work like that. Just like if you started working out the first two times, you're not ready for an Ironman. It's not about prompts. It's not about a prompt library. It's about getting your team to adopt it, to understand the process and you fine tuning it for your organization. That's when it becomes a system. think that's a very, really, really nice place to finish. Cause I think there's, like I said, people might be feeling overwhelmed generally. think.

34:59 rewind the clock a few weeks and in my team, we went a little bit too quick and we jumped in at the deep end and then we felt like we weren't focused enough. So we hit the pause. We took a step back. We identified the problems, the focuses, actual strategy behind things. So I think it's a really, really nice way to finish off. And I think the last 40 ish minutes has been a, if anything, it should have potentially relaxed people's thinking or approach to AI in the

35:29 it's taken a little bit of pressure off of that overnight needing to adopt AI and be an AI first business. So I think there's been a very, very good chat specifically for that on top of the actionable sort of step-by-step things that you've shared in there as well. Yeah. Thank you for having me. And just for your listeners, you are okay. You are not behind on AI yet. Just keep working on it. You'll figure it out and so will your team.

35:56 Well, I appreciate you jumping on for those listening or watching. We will catch you in the next episode.