JOHN CLENDENNING
0:02
Hey guys, you’re just entering into a conversation we were having in a chuckle. So welcome back to another exciting episode of the AI Marketing Experts podcast we like to call Amy. I’m your host this week, John Cletting. We’ve got the distinguished panel, as Brad would always say, of our fine friends getting together here. And we decided with everything that’s going on in our world right now and everything you’ve heard from us, that a great topic to jam out on for this week would be why AI and why now? Our goal is not to make it doom and gloom there in, you know, when there’s blood in the streets, there’s opportunity like crazy.
JOHN CLENDENNING
1:52
But I don’t think there’s a point in hiding our head in the sand anymore. I think every single outlet, news outlet, you’re starting to see the chinks in the armor. There is AI job replacements, AI taking over robotics, taking over with, with, with friends and family, potentially Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, if you follow anything online with those guys faces and they show up in your feeds, is talking about how it’s the first time in human history where college graduates are less employable and less employed than high school kids. Right? And that’s, that’s Part of the revolution that didn’t exist about a year ago. So why AI? Why now? Why do you need to lean into it for your own business? For you know, how, what you’re doing, whether you’re an agency owner, whether you’re a small business owner, can you use it to find better customers, find those pockets, differentiate yourself, use, do something different in your company. Better, cheaper, faster, stronger, and use that moment to your advantage, because there’s always advantages. Or are you going to get kind of overwhelmed by the tidal wave and be one of the people that are washed away? So that’s our little intro again. Try and keep it positive, not doom and gloom.
JOHN CLENDENNING
3:17
But who wants to go first? We’re all chatting ahead of time, but who wants to kind of chime in on why AI should be a thought? If you’re a business owner, why now?
BRAD KILGORE
3:27
I could jump in. I think that it’s hugely important for anybody out there watching to find a way, find a way, find a way to put AI into your world and into your life. Because as we’ve said many times, it is not going away. And I know that can be extremely daunting and challenging for people who are not technical. I literally had family members and friends this week. That technology, even not even including AI, is like brain surgery to them, and they’re freaked out about it. Right? So this is something that, you know, we’ve, we’ve mentioned before. What did we do when the Internet came out? What did we do when cell phones came out? What, you know, all these new things, and now they’re so ingrained in our lives.
BRAD KILGORE
4:18
You know, literally this week I got access to something where in my car. Now I have Gemini built into my Android auto with Google Maps. I mean, this is just a simple example, but I can now talk to my car at a higher level. The maps are all in 3D. And now I’m talking to my Gemini assistant while I’m driving and say, oh, you know what, we’re hungry. We would like to get some breakfast burritos. Can you tell me some nearby? And she says, yes, talk to me in a normal language. I understand what you’re saying.
BRAD KILGORE
4:53
And by the way, here’s four breakfast burrito places. And she tells them and shows you on your screen and then says, would you like to pick one and I’ll direct you there. Literally, you’re having a conversation with your car, with your AI assistant in your car. Right? So when it comes to business, this is where it’s all heading, guys. You’re going to continue to See, feel, do all these different things of, okay, I’m just talking to my phone now, and it’s writing my blog post, it’s doing my daily work with my team that I would normally have to do. It’s doing all these things for me. Whether that’s Inbox zero, whether it’s estimates, whether it’s anything you could possibly imagine that you are doing digitally now is going to be controlled by AI. And like I said, it’s like, oh, my gosh, how in the world am I going to do this? I’m not a.
BRAD KILGORE
5:48
You know, some people are like, I’m not a technical person. Well, find somebody to help you. You know, find somebody like one of us on the call. Find a high school kid. Find it. Find your grandkid or your kid. I mean, this is not going to go away. And like John said to his point, the wave, the wave of this is just going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
BRAD KILGORE
6:15
And we’ve been tuned into a lot of this stuff for a couple of years now as AI experts and agency owners. But if you don’t find a way, you’re going to get left behind. And I know John and I have done webinars on this where you have to pivot, you have to find a way to adapt. And if that means you are not a technical person at all and you are not going to do much more than tell it what to do, because that’s how it’s going to be, you’re going to just be directing it, then, like I say, just find a way.
JOHN CLENDENNING
6:48
Yeah, there’s definitely a first mover advantage, but in history, first mover advantages usually gave you 3, 4, 5 years, 10 years, sometimes on a long run of being the market leader. We’re now in a point where first mover advantage in, in some of this stuff, you’re. You are behind already. If you’re not in and using it and thinking it through in your company, if you don’t know how to understand what to implement in your company and how you can make things more efficient, better, stronger, faster, then again, get with one of us. Amy’s coming out with a bunch of tools that you can do an audit and figure out the first moving advantage and stuff like that, because you want to figure that out. Because behind is six months from now, three months from now, it’s not three years from now. So you’ve got to be in the game and using this stuff as fast as your competitors are and hopefully maybe even a little bit faster. So you’re in the right place at the right time right here, but be a little bit scared, a little bit worried, a little bit concerned enough to be take some action.
JOHN CLENDENNING
7:53
So what’s your thought, Laura, on the whole thing?
LAURA SUTHERLY
7:56
I hear what everybody’s saying, but I found it very interesting this week when I looked at the number of downloads. I know that Brad, you’re saying it’s very technical and obviously one thing that we’ve mentioned in the past is that you’re able to download and have the apps on your phone and therefore have conversations. So it’s not as though we are having to learn, you know, HTML codes are really some raw stuff. So it’s not as technical. And I think that’s what people realize when they actually get into it. So even though we perceive that the AI playing field is really starting to level out, what surprised me when we looked at downloads, There was only 6.5 million downloads of ChatGPT, which was shocking. And I obviously know that it’s changing daily and hourly. But then there were some of them, that was not even a half a million yet.
LAURA SUTHERLY
8:47
When we think of people, the number in the world that are holding their phones in their hand, but they’re not talking to AI yet that way those numbers seemed really low to me. So I was really surprised to that. So there is obviously an opportunity that you can still get in, you still can get traction. You as a business owner have the opportunity in front of you. When I was doing a webinar here lately, I mentioned a commercial I saw because in agriculture, it’s a very technical field. Everybody’s already dealing with a lot of autonomous equipment. But the conversation about AI doesn’t seem to. They don’t think it’s quite here yet.
LAURA SUTHERLY
9:33
Regarding what we’re talking about with Claude, ChatGPT, Proxity, any of those, but what the commercial was actually having a farmer talk to her AI about water usage and about some crop reports. And that told me if the companies are investing to put commercials on tv, they are talking directly to your customers. So you as a business owner definitely want to be in there. You want to be looking, learning about it, seeing how it will work with you. And again, I highly encourage talking to it. So download those apps from the App Store or Google Play, have it on your phone so that you can be out in the environment, out in the fields, out, and then that’s where you can have that conversation and 100% stay authentic to you stay authentic to what has made your business successful. Look at getting those videos, those photos, those conversations with, with AI, then that pulls your business forward and presents it as you always, always have, but you’re doing it more efficiently. So you’re getting to use AI, but it feels more natural to you because you’re talking to it on the phone, you’re not sitting.
LAURA SUTHERLY
10:53
You know, no one wants to be chained to their computers. I know we enjoy sitting for hours on our computers and learning more and more, more. But knowing that you can do it while you’re getting along with your day makes the world difference.
BRAD KILGORE
11:06
That’s exactly right.
JENNIFER CREGO
11:07
I actually love using my like Claude on my phone rather than desktop. I mean I have it going on my desktop also, but like I, it’s the most wonderful voice that I’ve chosen for Claude. And so a lot of time which, and it’s not available in, in desktop to just play back the response and so, so I enjoy that. I do really want to quick or really quickly want to mention Laura, I think part of the reason why ChatGPT downloads is lower than expected is because there’s this mass exodus to Claude.
LAURA SUTHERLY
11:50
But they were still the highest. That’s what was surprising. They were still the highest. But you’re right, it is a massive mass movement.
JENNIFER CREGO
11:57
Yeah, yeah. So I think so, yes, Claude is there when I think also. So the, as far as why AI and why now and everything and are, are you behind? And, and I think if we look at overall like AI as in phase one was that chat where we’re, we’re typing, we’re, you know, asking questions, we’re getting a response. That can be voice too, but it’s that chat basically, whether it’s spoken or, or in text. And then phase two, which we’re, you know, we’re in for the most part, is that now it’s goal oriented. So when we’re working with AI, we’re, we’re, we’re working with goals and outcomes and we’re using AI for that. It’s not question and answer. And, and so for our listeners, if you haven’t, you know, immersed yourself in, in A.I.
JENNIFER CREGO
12:55
yet, that’s okay. Like you don’t have to start in phase two in this, you know, goal outcome, just start with chat, like just, you know, work with it in, you know, in that way. But like Brad was saying, like you all were saying, just you gotta do it, you, you gotta do it.
JOHN CLENDENNING
13:15
And we’ve talked a little bit about the agent army, so we’ll turn this on, Chris, in a second. So, and the rise of the agent army started with sort of this thing called openclaw, which then Claude came back and they’ve now banned people allowing to use your Claude tokens in OpenClaws and things like that. But because they came back and said, oh, let’s just chat to an agent army. Then tools like Manus, which is just another AI that allows you to talk to it and it will go build stuff. So when, when Jen talks about Cowork, that’s an agent army built into these tools now and you can actually have it come onto your phone and you can dispatch, as they call it. It’s a way to sort of, you know, you could not put it in Telegram. Then Manus came out and said, oh, we can put it in telegram for you. Just click here, fire up an agent.
JOHN CLENDENNING
14:00
And I’ve got, I’ve got mine where I just was driving the other day and, and I was just looking at it right now and said, you know, hey, the following website, I really kind of like the way they’ve done their service pages to look a lot like standalone homepages, but with all the great content. Can you take one of our client sites here as sort of an iteration? Create. Create me a mock up HTML website version. Here’s the client site, here’s the example site I just happened to come across. I’m literally driving down the road talking to my telegram, having that and it came back to me because here’s how well I’ve got mine trained. It said, yo Jason, jc, cool project dude. I’m on it with a fire emoji. So you can tell that I’ve given a little bit of personality, right? And off it went and then it came back at the end and I’ve got thumbs up and fire emojis all over the place.
JOHN CLENDENNING
14:45
Yo, jc, all done your project, man. The, the mock up looks really cool. Here’s the link, right? So again, mine’s fun and, but that was just me driving and I sent that to the team and I said, dudes, can we try this? Can we try this as a, as a, an a split test in marketing again, now you got the human in the loop. Doesn’t mean it’s better because you like it. It just means will it be something that is going to produce meaningful time on page results? All the cool SEO stuff, right? So all that kind of stuff. But long story short, I did nothing but chat to this thing. It came back to me still telling me I’m a cool dude. And off we got a landing page that I sent to the team and said, can we mock this up and give It a try and do a split test.
LAURA SUTHERLY
15:32
And I know you’re going to be tossed this over to Chris, but I want to say, I think that’s what excites business owners, is it’s the idea that we get to be business owners. And so our listeners, our viewers can agree that now instead of just doing those basic chats, it’s directing. So it puts us in that seat that we can have those big ideas and talk it through AI and direct what we want the outcome to be. Because our history, our, you know, educations and the, our experiences all will allow us to know and keep the human in the loop to make sure it’s moving the path that we want so we’re still able to guide our ship, as they say, you know, move the rudder and the sail to know we want to get to point A or from point A to point B.
JOHN CLENDENNING
16:18
But the human in the loop, be the smart, because AI is the great equalizer. And it’s so fast that everybody’s going to look the same, feel the same, be the same, unless you, you are directing better with your knowledge and skill base.
BRAD KILGORE
16:29
Right.
LAURA SUTHERLY
16:30
Exactly.
JOHN CLENDENNING
16:30
Where does that take you? Chris, what’s your thoughts?
CHRIS HUNTER
16:32
So I, I’ve been using AI for the past three, four years. Whatever it’s been, right? It’s about execution speed. To me, that’s really, really what it comes down to is that the people who have AI in their back pockets that are using it to its fullest extent, or at least to what they, they have in their, let’s say, agencies or, or businesses, you know, we’re doing it so that we can execute faster. Okay. And, and the reason for that is that client expectations, at least in the agency world, right, when it comes to marketing, is that they, they, they have an idea, they want something done. If it’s not done within that day, they’re like, why isn’t this done?
BRAD KILGORE
17:17
Right?
CHRIS HUNTER
17:17
That’s the current expectations that are being set. So to me, it is all about speed of execution. And as you all know, I’m busy creating agents and geeking out on cloud code and having it build all sorts of really cool stuff for me and my clients and my employees. So this past week I spent probably 60 hours coding, right, with Claude code, built a ton of stuff rolled out. Hope. My executive assistant to my staff, okay, my son is on that staff. He’s, he’s one of my customer service reps. And so I put it in his hands, I put it in my operations manager’s hands.
CHRIS HUNTER
18:09
And, and the feedback that I got Was, Holy crap, this is awesome. Hey, can you do this? This and this and this and this? You know, also, right. And so I, I built the list and I got, I knocked every single one of those things off of the list. And like next hour to two hours, those, every single thing, one of those things were done, you know, for, for them. So again, it is about ex. Execution. I’m a fast start. So that’s, my personality is, you know, let’s, let’s get things done fast now.
CHRIS HUNTER
18:43
But that’s what AI is all about and what it’s going to be moving forward. We’re right now in, in the bell curve, right? Is, is the, We’ve got this bell curve. I wish my pen would actually draw this. But we’ve got this bell curve here, right. And, and we’re, and we currently are the early adopters, right? You’ve got early adopters on, on one end and on. On the other end. You’ve got the people who will never ever, you know, adopt or they’ll give me extremely late, 20 years down the road they’re going to adopt. And then in the middle, of course, on the bell curve, you’ve got the people, the mainstream.
CHRIS HUNTER
19:15
I believe that if, if this and this were the, were the, in my head here, if we’re looking at my head as the, as the bell curve, that, that we’re closer to about right here. We’re closer to about right here.
LAURA SUTHERLY
19:28
Yeah.
CHRIS HUNTER
19:28
Okay. On this whole technology shift.
JOHN CLENDENNING
19:33
Yeah.
CHRIS HUNTER
19:33
You know, and, and it’s very similar to how the Internet was rolled out, except just a heck of a lot faster. Right. On adoption, if you’re not using AI yet and you’re listening to this, I, I can’t stress it enough that you should have it part of your daily life. I’m telling my kids this, I’m preaching this to my kids that you need to use it. The school district here at least is, is, is saying, no, don’t use it. Right. They’re penalizing them. And I’m saying that’s the stupidest decision that America could make right now.
CHRIS HUNTER
20:04
I think that, that they should be teaching these kids exactly how to use Claude, exactly how to use Chat GPT, how to use Gemini to its maximum extent, because the jobs that they were our institutions have been training people for are not going to exist by the time that they get into the workforce. Not to the extent that it is right now.
BRAD KILGORE
20:25
Yeah.
CHRIS HUNTER
20:26
It just isn’t going to happen. And so they need to be trained on how to use technology like this to make them useful. To the businesses that are on the lower end of this bell curve.
JOHN CLENDENNING
20:37
Yeah, yeah, everybody’s going to be in an adoption moment. That’s, that is the, the next wave. So companies like that we each run and Amy as a collective is talking about like again, anybody listening to this want to reach out to us. We are helping people adopt. We were helping to put things like hope into place and stuff like that. That’s all on our, our roadmap for that reason because how you add it in and as Laura said, without the, without the technical overwhelm, jump in and learn it. We’ve heard the stories that it’s usually the business owner that is the most, the most AI savvy to whatever level. That is 1%, 10%, 50% AI savvy in the company.
JOHN CLENDENNING
21:19
And the trickle down effect is minimal. And that’s, that’s a problem because it’s, you’ve got to find a way to put it in everybody’s hands easily champion it, have it make everything about your business easier and faster, better. So you’re using it as a tool, but you’re using it as one of the most advanced tools. One of the things I want to put into that world is, well, so why again everybody thinks that technology rolls slowly and they don’t quite understand the exponential Moore’s Law curve that is going on with AI right now. There was a pivotal moment 2-1-5 of 2026 where Opus 4.6 came out and 5.3 in chat GPT came out and they were the first code bases that were out twice as fast as any other previous release. Twice as powerful even though the number only went up from 4.5 to 4.6 and 5.2 to 5.3. Twice as powerful as the model before. And none of them were coded by a human at all.
JOHN CLENDENNING
22:25
Right, so that was February 5th. We are now in April. And so two months later, less than two months later, Claude Anthropic has pre released or previewed a new AI model called Mythos. And they chose that name for a very funny reason. They’re not going to release it. They’re not going to release it because where Opus 4.6 could find vulnerabilities and hack about 14, 14.4% of all trials it could get into Javascripts that were open and problems with major companies like browsers and all that kind of stuff. Mythos has proven to be 72.4% able to hack almost any system it’s self taught that much stronger that they’ve actually that what, what they’re actually doing is they’re rolling out. Claude Anthropic has said, you know what, we can’t release this to the world.
JOHN CLENDENNING
23:20
What we’re going to do is release it to enterprise agents, companies to say, you know, use this to lock your stuff up, better find your own vulnerabilities. They’re actually being pretty alteration. They’re probably going to charge them for it, but they’re saying hey, we could actually. It’s gotten so much faster in two months. So much better in two months. This isn’t two years away. So I mean if that’s the big boys worrying about it on our level, what does it mean about how we run our day to day business, do better for our customers, do better for our staff, grow our companies and how can we use that to be ahead of our competitors and find the new emerging markets as they’re showing up in a week, in a month, not five years, ten years from now.
BRAD KILGORE
24:03
Great point.
JENNIFER CREGO
24:05
I know we’re going to be wrapping up here in just a few minutes. Does anyone have anything like want to bring it full circle to something positive that we can end the episode with?
LAURA SUTHERLY
24:18
Anyone?
BRAD KILGORE
24:19
I think it ties into what John just said is it’s going so fast and a lot of business owners are looking at simple AI tools at this point. But be aware, the big boys and the big things are coming. Google has Gemma and so many other things that I couldn’t even explain it to you. It’s so crazy, right? But that’s where YouTube is your friend, right? And look at some of these things of what’s happening because it’s, it’s mind boggling. I was literally talking to a friend of mine in small town Montana, a good friend of mine, where I have some businesses and he was saying, you know, and there’s, there’s controversy over this, but the AI data centers that are coming in for the, in this case, if it gets approved, there’s a lot of pushback. But if it gets approved, the AI data center will bring in 42, I don’t remember how many, 4200 jobs or however many it was. But to that small community, like John was saying or, or Chris was saying actually about what’s happening with education, you know, whether it’s high school, college, elementary school, whatever it is, they’re in a spin right now going oh my gosh, what do we do, what do we teach? How do we handle this? You know, because it’s shifting so fast that the stuff that they’ve been teaching for eons is is irrelevant because anybody could just access it in seconds now and know it and train it or whatever it is. So when it comes to tying this all into businesses, all I’m saying is yes, we will have things that we’ll be offering you to help you.
BRAD KILGORE
25:59
There’s other people out there that can help you, but we’ll be offering things that can help you. But the thing is, is find a way, you know, plug into, don’t just tune out because it’s a big deal.
JOHN CLENDENNING
26:09
It is. I think with that, that’s a really good, a really good positive ending. Thank you for prompting that, Jen. Thank you for Brad for that. So, yeah, check the show notes as we always say, like follow, subscribe, tell your friends about us, jump into the community. There’s, there’s a free community for any anybody on these podcast episodes. We are coming out with some training courses and, and, and more of a coaching groups and stuff like that to help anybody who is a business owner, agency owner, anything like that understand how to be the director of the, the AI. Not necessarily the, the builder of the AI.
JOHN CLENDENNING
26:48
You don’t have to go down the, the road that you know, you know, Chris is geeking out on and gives me FOMO every single day and I, I’m, I’m aiming at and stuff like that because you can be the user and the director of, of, of this advancement. So anyways, follow us, follow everything else and yeah, we will see you guys on another episode and take care. Of the.
