AI Agents, False Productivity, and the Sales Team Reset with Gabe Larsen

hey everyone welcome back to make it happen mondays where we talk about sales business entrepreneurship personal growth mental health and everything in between with guests who i truly respect and i think make a positive impact on the world around us now this week i have gabe larson on the show gabe and i go way back to the days of inside sales.com probably about 10 or 12 years ago uh but the reason he's on the show right now is because i've been watching his content on instagram and he's been putting out some really sharp and honest takes on what is actually happening with ai and sales right now and a lot of this resonated with me and i've actually found myself translating his stuff to my own audience so if you've been following me on instagram some of the stuff that i've been posting it's coming from gabe so i reached out to him and said we needed to have this conversation out loud now gabe started as a financial analyst in new york he was there for the 2008 crash moved overseas to do some consulting in saudi arabia and dubai then he came back to help build inside sales.com from about 5 million to 150 in arr during the heyday of the sales acceleration era from there he went on to customer and helped build that into a 1.2 billion dollar acquisition by meta spent two years inside meta and then when they cut from uh 90 000 to about 60 000 people he got kicked back out now he's building autonom with dave elkington the original founder of inside sales.com and they're building what they call cloud employees which are ai agents that you hire as a salary not as a software license now during this conversation we get into something gabe calls pretend productivity which is the idea that everyone is claiming ai is making them more productive but the actual numbers are not new he breaks down the only four areas where ai is showing real roi right now which is coding customer service sdr and recruiting and we go deep on the fundamentals that got lost during the sas golden age why most companies need to map their processes before they buy a single ai tool and what all of this means for the future of a sales career i hope you enjoy this conversation as much as i did let's make it happen gabe lyson what's going on my friend welcome to the make it happen monday podcast yeah i've been waiting for this one man let's do it let's dive dive in yeah this is this is gonna be a fun one man we were we should have hit record right before we got on this just to talk about it dude that was rated x we need to keep a pg-13 or something here like a therapy session for about five minutes for both of us trying to build businesses in this fucking crazy world right now so anyways yeah that's exactly how i feel um but before like you know i wanted to actually the reason i wanted to get you on here is because uh you know i saw what you're doing on instagram right and and the content you're putting out there and you know it's interesting i'm trying to do the same thing and it you know i'm appealing to different audiences and i don't i think i know what i'm doing but i don't know what the fuck i'm doing i know and but what you were putting out there was really interesting about kind of keeping tabs on the ai market and what's really happening out there and so i got a lot of value out of some of the stuff you're pushing and i was like you know what i i gotta get him back on the show because i think your your career arc is an interesting one um i mean we met i think it was inside sales.com yeah yeah it's probably been 10 15 years but yeah man back to the beginning of john barrows yeah and then and then you were but you were over at like gallup like you you were in the consulting world before that right yeah man do you look i've had an interesting journey i did i started as a financial analyst i did some banking stuff in new york early on like think 2008 crash and was sitting in new york when the mark you know man that all tanked and then i thought what the hell man i need to get out of the us so i moved overseas for five years did some consulting in saudi arabia saudi arabia dubai doing you know who knows what um dubai favorite city in the world ma'am but i remember i was sitting in dubai i thought i was gonna stay there forever but government called us we had published something they thought we were basically spy you know did some secret stuff so they they revoked our business license i had 30 days to vacate the country talk about life moments man i had nowhere to go but back home to salt lake city utah so i come back to salt lake i meet up with the friend and that was kind of the inside sales journey you know i was like man maybe i need to get out of consulting jump into tech so we had a fun run at inside sales that's where we met it was the high volume power dialer you know it's funny you hear about nooks and oram now but you know we were doing kind of that high volume dialing 2005 2010 kind of era trying to accelerate the the sales acceleration world pre you know outreach you know the multi-channel cadence the abm stuff so we had an awesome run man topped off at about 150 in arr man five to 150 it felt like we were going through the we were going crazy man we hit a little bit of a stump but you know at those high numbers outreach and sales loft came in and beat us on the multi-channel cadence so we went pe and i wanted to find something else i moved out to new york and sorry man i'm just giving you the quick oh this is great yeah yeah i moved out to new york i wanted to do another startup because man the five to 100 i thought was just funner than hell and so joined a company called customer and we did man we went we were going gangbusters pre-covid doing kind of a zendesk knockoff you know customer service type thing meta picked us up you gotta have a little bit of luck in your life man this is you you know i can't i always boo who but you know it's always first world problems we were met as fourth largest transaction i mean i can't believe they they bought us for like 1.2 billion you have oculus instagram whatsapp and customer man so uh you know i thought i'd walk away with a few money i mean look i'm grateful i mean i made a ton of money um definitely kind of gave me a different perspective on the the world but after two years at meta they came to us and said look if you don't have ads ai or vr in your title you're basically you're on the chopping block so year of efficiency they go from 90 000 to 60 000 people and and um they kick us back out and i'm like you know what this ai stuff was just starting to warm up gpt was just coming out and i you know i was like man either you can basically be you can eat or be eaten it's us like i'm gonna go start an ai company and see if i could you know maybe be maybe get ahead of this one man rather than i take my job maybe i'll have ai take you know other people's jobs yeah well my analogy for ai these days is it's like getting chased by a bear right i don't got to be the fastest i just get faster than you like that's because the bear is coming for all of us whether we like it or not yeah i mean there's a little bit of a joke there but i mean it was hot enough and so i met up with um dave elkington the original founder of inside sales.com brilliant guy man super smart especially on the tech side of the house masters in machine learning and and we were like man let's create a taunt them so we got a little ai startup and been fighting the fight for the last year or two and it's a fight man so i i want to get to that because i want to get to your perspective i think you got a unique one let me let me ask you though back in the heyday of sass right and and us you know 2000 i positioned 2010 to 2022 was kind of golden age of sales and especially in tech and sass right and i don't think we realized how good we had it i know man i know and i'm i should have enjoyed it more i still had freaking anxiety attacks back then damn it that well and that's what i'm trying to like like for me personally i had plenty of anxiety attacks back then but it was but it was almost everything was still up and to the right no matter i know why was i worried i mean look like good back then man there were great runs i had did you hear that i had two runs of like you know incredible like zero to a hundred plus in ten two times in in that in that window um was amazing i mean you hearing about what's happening with sass companies now they're not their growth rates are they're loving eight percent i was doing a hundred percent you know 50 i mean talk about a great era man well and i guess i you know because there's a lot of consultants and trainers that i know who especially when it crash crash back in 2023 and 2024 like there was like this almost this this this therapy sessions that we had because it was like was i really that good or was it really just the market and i guess how much of what you think that success was was the market versus how good your product was how good you were as a consultant like i'm because because i think they're i think it's obviously both right the product the timing and everything but i'm looking back at that and being like man there was a lot of false positives there with people who were way better you know looked way better companies who looked way better than they were people who looked way better than they actually were and i think we've skipped so much of the fundamentals of business and this is why i want to get back to your consulting days right of kind of the fundamental aspects of of what makes a good business and were they there back then and let's talk about now what those fundamentals look like wow man that's a that's a fascinating topic i mean look i think that i don't know if we give luck enough i mean luck market conditions up to the right timing enough credit because man you hear these guys or how many people have you hired who had this up into the right motion and all of a sudden they got no playbook they got nothing like nothing's working and so to me luck was a huge factor i almost kind of say like luck product and then go to market you know or the three top categories don't get me wrong there were still companies who weren't doing anything but if you you know up into the right seems like we were all moving in the right direction if you had a product that did solve a problem man in those market conditions i remember visiting companies john where it was like you know i remember doing consulting and being like despite your guys's best efforts still you're actually growing like you're so bad at go to market i mean you're not responding to lead for like five years you know people are like i want to buy from you and they're like oh man i didn't know we were getting the leads and you know the handoffs um but despite their best you know the product still like was this problem solver you know like it was it was doing something that salesforce is a perfect example right linkedin perfect example yeah geez those guys man so look i do think man especially in some of that pre-covid world you know i know a lot of companies who man they were really growing fast and the market was just saying hey we got to have remote like think about um some of the the tools i'm trying to think of some of those companies that were doing like virtual events or something like that right some of those companies went zero to a hundred million and just no time because again covet pushed or something like that so luck i think was a factor good product still was there in gtm man i don't know i don't know how much of a factor that was in some of those days that's that's kind of why i look back at that and i used to be super proud of being the guy who trained salesforce how to sell you know and i worked with their team and all as part of that rocket ship and i look back and i was like i almost had fucking nothing to do with that like i i i i i mean there's some dude there's some there's always a little bit but you know i i don't know and i think now is is a lot of people are having a crisis you know con they're just really trying to figure out like what do i do in this market because i don't know if i have the fundamentals i don't know if those if that time did more harm than good for individuals i know it did more harm than good for sales reps yeah because we taught sales reps on process and tech and we did not teach them on fundamentals and and if you hear me talk a lot about you know i always talk to sales as a science and an art right but i i think it should be a little bit more of a science than an art because the science lays the foundation for the art blah blah blah the structure of the process right yeah um but but i think we have way over swung the pendulum to to we like tried to over science our uh sales at this point and we forgot the fundamentals yeah and now you have a whole we taught these reps how to be robots basically and now they're getting replaced by robots and and and you're in in quite you know we're going to jump into what you're doing today because that's effectively what you're doing you got you got agents right who who sdr agent you teach it just like an employee and you don't charge a license fee you actually charge a salary fee effectively because you now you're paying for outcomes as opposed to the software license that's right that's right so where was that for you and i know um i know there's some people who are trying to toe the line of like oh you know humans in the loop and all this other stuff um what was the decision for you everything that you saw with inside sales all that stuff that you saw with like sales reps and empowering them with tools and all this shit um and then what you were doing the customer now you look at this problem are you where's your head at with where sales are because i'll give you my perspective i i think sales reps are fucked like i i really do i because when it and it has nothing to do by the way with all these tools that are automating sales it has everything to do with when the client wakes up and realizes they don't fucking need us yeah and that's what i'm worried about the most because i had an aha moment the other day and uh it was about month and a half ago when i went from chachi bt to claude and then claude co-work right and when i did claude co-work and i figured out what it could do i literally i wrote the blog you can see it says i know kung fu right the the matrix thing and i looked at it and i'm like there's nothing i can't do at this point and and it registered to me after a while like this is fascinating but then i'm like wait a minute i don't think i'll ever talk to another like a i'll probably never hire another employee now granted you know i went through some shit that jades me a little bit but um but not only will i never hire i don't think i'll ever talk to a sales rep again and the reason is is because claude knows everything about me my business my strategy all that stuff and i can just go into it and ask hey what does this tool do do i need this tool and if i talk to a sales rep that sales rep better be so fucking valuable or i'll talk to a customer service or an engineer and so i look at this and i say okay well john you're a one-man show you know two people so yeah fine right you can break things security doesn't matter protocols aren't that big of a deal whatever it is i can break shit so once you get to the enterprise that's all but i also pattern recognition man remember when amazon came out and or you know and we started putting credit cards online and at first people are like are you out of your fucking mind like no way am i putting my credit card online right and then it was like well for 10 bucks ah for 50 bucks i bought it then i ended up buying a tesla online right so it's okay shipping my car shipping my car right then step two uh sass early days of sass oh it's adorable you know if you look if you don't have the money for on-prem yeah okay you go to the sass thing it's it's cute right but then all of a sudden salesforce signs uh um state farm for 150 million and holy shit sass is here for the enterprise how long is it going to take for what i just said there about me and how i'll never talk to a sales rep ever again to creep into smb which is probably already there even though you know laggards mid-market and enterprise like where is your head at when it comes to this evolution of sales reps and i want to get into what do we need to teach sales reps on how to evolve yeah yeah man look i think um boy you teed it up here i mean we joke about the movies the terminator and stuff like that um and i don't know why we won't go there like you know i know it's like oh no the end of the world or something but when you have played i mean i'm so neck deep in this stuff right and i got scars all over the place of where ai failed so don't get me wrong like i've been at it two years i thought ai could replace every single person or something and yeah so scars here scars there etc etc but with that said yeah we went pretty hard on this concept of a digital employee because of some of the stuff you're kind of saying like very early um you know we have this customer service example where i have this client basically call in and be like they talk to this ai you know cloud employee week is what we call them and they get all their questions answered it's about a 17 minute call and and man they hit everything what are the products you guys are upset you know like i haven't heard about your newest products i didn't have one kind of tier one support question after 17 minutes and asking any question this customer has ever wanted and the ai knew everything every single question perfectly answered you know at the end of the the call and again this is just an example but it was fascinating early on it's just like man you are so much better than talking to an hourly worker you knew everything about this company i'm so glad i was able to talk to you i've been wanting to know all these different things i just remember being like wow you know like if you could do that on scale and this is i think one of the biggest challenges we're running into right now you wouldn't believe how many people have come to me three months ago and said gabe i don't want to work with you i'm going to build my own cloud code because i can i can i can replace my 400 sdr team with cloud code they won't come back to me three months later and say gave my best cloud coder is my worst sales rep i put cloud code in my own company and we can't scale it and there's no ro that's a different conversation but but can you scale ai yes on an individual it's amazing and one person seeing some cool stuff but but man when i saw that power john i was just like oh my goodness if we can bottle that up as a digital employee how far can we go and is terminator crazy like you know people you know someone cleaning my house can a sales rep of course a sales rep how far down the path can it go um can it be smb already a hundred percent can it be mid-market why not enterprise man i don't know you know the the seems like the the limits are pretty far out there and i think every week we're seeing people push the boundary and so i just don't know if there are limits right now and so if you're a sales rep it's going to get interesting fast for sure for sure and i think that so again i look at the the the hope that i have is is you know actually the the the limitations of hardware in the sense that it's going to get real expensive real fast right these data centers and all that that has man i don't know you just saw like the um the uber coo just came out and you know two two quarters in you know they burned all their tokens for the year and the roi isn't there right so there's there's there's still problems for sure and we're seeing we're seeing hiring i mean open open ai for crying out loud is hiring strs so so there are you know but i i think we're in this two-year um transition right so i think that's a really good call because that's where i was going just a minute ago it's like dude how many people think they're using claude to replace everybody and and again you've got guys like this uber coo coming back and being like it's not we're not seeing the roi like we're so we're in a weird moment we're definitely in a weird moment well you talk about this is actually something i want to bring so pretend productivity because because i think we're in this where i you know there's two stages of almost anything well the way i'm looking at with ai right now i think we're still in the efficiency stage of ai not the the pro not the the results stage of ai yet yeah so we're seeing all these efficiencies and and we're saying okay look but it's like okay great you can write an email faster you can create a personalized cadence but is it producing a better result i haven't seen it yet i have yet to see it and then and therein man that it's such an interesting now i think we're going to come out of it people like myself who are neck deep and i i think you can get past this kind of productivity to results oriented but honestly man i'm talking to boards all the time and so much a ceo there's so much frustration of we've dumped all this money in claude as i just said you know boy everybody's saving time everybody's a little bit more productive but the numbers aren't moving and if the numbers aren't moving how can i justify the token cod the token costs that are just sky rising and so right now man people are scratching their heads like crazy because dude if you're in a vc or pe game and you put a dollar in and you don't get anything out like you can't justify that for very long so what is pretend pro what are people like kidding themselves like based on what you're seeing out there what this pretend productivity thing like well what is what is the feel good stuff that people are like kind of telling themselves like no this is working and this is why we should and and based on that like what should they be looking at obviously results ultimately the end of the day yeah but is there a shift of from a kpi standpoint that we need to be you know sas versus now is is there a difference or does it go back to the fundamentals like productivity you know but fundamentals might be an interesting word i mean look i think what what you see is every ceo is mandated they need everyone everyone uses clots so you have all these competitions you know the most prompts wins or ai adoption contests so that's everywhere i can name an example i talked to you yesterday my ceo said we have to use cotton so everyone's using it we got a contest coming up cool um what we're finding with that or what people are seeing is just that word productivity like they built something cool they built like the it's like my kids playing you know some of the games they play they build this cool world right so um they bet better emails um they found something that can go research and give them an update every morning um it goes in and says what they have on their calendar man they know what they have on their calendar john you know they're researching what their competitors said oh yeah and people are and it's a scraper bot man and so and and look i'm not saying it's they're they're cool little functional type things you know and everyone's like oh man you were able to like find four accounts that are in your icp yeah dude you know and so every and they're just like you found that and you gave you got a score on your icp and so you know your email is better so i could name the things and it's it's prayed it around the company and this guy created this thing that whatever reviews email so we've all seen it right and then at the end of the day you know then that we got to see our quarterly numbers and then the quarterly numbers aren't there and so they're down so dude it's super fundamental in the concept of like guys roi is return on investment and so if the numbers don't go up or your costs don't go down you don't have a business case and if you don't have a business case you're not employed you're not you don't have a job you don't have a tool so so that's back to the fundamental and the problem right now is if you really want to find roi and ai there's only four areas where companies are actually seeing actual roi not productivity bullshit which i'm not saying it's bad it's fun but real roi those four areas of the following one coding so cursor you know those one you know programmer can do the work of two or three people they're seeing real roi there there there is i think great case studies there that's number one number two is customer service sam altman himself said you know gpt you know we probably topped off in the number of customer service reps this world have seen you can eliminate this is going to be a cost reduction customer service reps with ai i've seen it sierra decagon these companies there there's real cost reduction here i know that's a sad word but that's number two number three is in the sales development world it you got to know the where we are though well i'll get to that just a second but number three is sales development there are studies outbound not really if you got a team of 400 outbound sales development reps um going after million dollar deals ai's doing jack shit for you right now basically um but if you have 200 or 300 inbound reps who are working smb accounts yeah i can give you stories where you don't probably need all of them you just don't that's number three and number four is a surprising one for people but it's typically in recruiting um you've got a lot of staffing companies i i know a company who has had 30 recruiters they're down to seven um because ai is now doing 200 300 hours of recruiting for them each month so they were able to reduce numbers those are real numbers john 30 to seven that's not a small number when it comes to roi it's not productivity horse yet it's real numbers so those are four areas whether you like it or not and the reason is it's really typically cost reduction or revenue kind of revenue increase that's where ai is working right now now the thing you got to understand is just to pinpoint it where we are on that journey cursor i think crossed three billion in revenue there's something really going on there take a company like sierra decagon and intercom in that world those guys are now hitting the 30 50 100 200 million 500 million in revenue so there's actual like gains going on there sdr name the aisdr companies in their revenue john i'll tell you they're in the two to three millions they're nowhere to be found they're tiny that just means we're early on there so the winds are going to be either they're tiny or they're nowhere to be found a hundred million versus two million in revenue that's so much different in where we are in that journey that it's just not happening very much and then the recruiting is almost further behind there's one or two infants starting to move there but it's small small gain so again programming is way big revenues customer service sdr recruiting so you just got to know where we are in the journey but those are reductions that people are like wow that's something i can take i there's a case study i've seen 14 million in cost savings in customer service john 14 million they were a limp they eliminated almost 400 offshore bpo reps that with using ai that is something you take to your board and it's not this i found four accounts with clod and and i loved it because of my research bot showed me my competitors strategy what are you talking about this is 14 million versus a bullshit research bot it's just it's just not even in the same avenue man it's not in the same avenue and this is what um this is what i so i went to rev fest last week right so go nimbly and and you know it's all rev ops and rev ops is now the new darling child right it's you know enablement was kind of cute for a little while now it's rev ops but what what was interesting to me is like i forget who it was but they stood up and they talked they asked like hey how many enablement people are in the room right and like two or three hands went up because it wasn't a ton but there was a couple of boos that came out from the crowd like oh and i was like what the and and and i and i listened to these rev ops and and the guy who was who asked said um yeah you know enablement yeah you know you kind of he didn't say you're obsolete you're you're unnecessary but in the world that's basically what he was inferring right and then they preached about all this wonderful stuff like you just said about all these great insights that they're giving to sales reps and all this oh look at this this prep doc and this and all we're getting we're finding deals for you and i was like you're missing the point in my opinion with this because you we don't have the the number the percentage of sales reps that are equipped to be able to use that information the right way yeah right be able to digest all the information then have a conversation like this the percentage of sales reps that have the ability to do that are so low in my experience that you could pre to produce the perfect fucking prep doc but it's going to land like a fucking turd because that rep is either going to read it verbatim and then the client's going to be like what aren't shouldn't we be having a conversation or they're going to ignore it and pretend like they prepared and just have their basic conversation like they've had in the past and that's where the connective tissue is i'm losing it because it's like it's just like engineering founders who think the the product is the best and they don't need sales reps you know like every plg company i've ever heard back in the sas day dropbox your box uh tableau uh you know all of them oh we don't sit slack we don't need sales reps we don't need sales reps and then inevitably i've trained slack tableau you know i've trained them all so are like revops is i feel like the same thing as revops is like the cool kid now and they're saying look at all this cool shit we can do internally and and they're still like yeah yeah i said we're just going to give it to a sales rep and they're going to be able to use it it's like no you're not like sales reps are not equipped to use this fucking information that's it and and don't get me wrong i i love when i'm not the big prophesying that we need to eliminate all sales reps but i am finding that um and we all see it like dude you and i write social posts every day like are we that much better using claude and gpt like i don't know dude my social posts were pretty good last year two years ago without it my powerpoints like were they that much worse when they were used did they take that much longer like yeah i use claude now to do a lot of my powerpoint but the other day i was like i think i spending like four hours cleaning up all this stuff yeah it took me four hours to do this stuff so to your point like the fancy prep docs the the competitive intelligence the the overviews like i i it well i can tell you it's not moving the needle and all the ceos are seeing it and so you know and i'm not saying it's the end of the world look there's always kind of a crawl walk run to innovation and so to your point earlier maybe we're in a different phase but that's where i've typically tried to say hey we need to get cloud employees who take stuff off your plate who don't just um give you more to do because this is one of the biggest knocks right now with gpt and claude it's like go do this hey i brought it back for you and it's like oh man i got more work to do go go do research now it's back and it's like oh damn it i gotta do i gotta i gotta talk to you again you know like an annoying puppy throw the thing and it comes back throw the bone and it comes like oh i don't even like i want you to go do something and just get the freaking job done you know like what if i could have an agent follow up with these annoying event leads that no one wants to interact with and actually just put four appointments on my calendar that would be nicer than me being like who should i reach out to for my event what what is the icp can you give me four accounts now can you help me craft email man it's getting exhausting john working with this this clod it's like an annoying dog who won't go away that's my analogy yeah no i i hear you and it's also i don't know for for you but it's also for me it's like just because you can doesn't mean you should some of this stuff right like i said with the powerpoints and stuff someone threw together a powerpoint the other day and i was just like with claude i mean you can sniff it out like a you know a mile away now and i'm just like guys honestly and and and this is also a point for you like you use claude to create stuff and we're losing a little bit of that like at least you and i i've done so i've done so many hours of cold calls that i whether i'm using the upfront contract or whatever you know framing like i got the concept these guys are trying to skip it you know and not learn how to put when i did consulting for 10 years you know how many powerpoint decks i put together you know how i learned structured thinking by putting together 10 000 decks man these kids throwing together you know this powerpoint stuff i'm like you're not claude's getting there but you're missing like the point and i don't know how to explain it but i'm like dude you're missing the point i'll tell you this is and as i talk about this a lot you know the the challenge we've gone that i think we're in right now a lot of them but but you know we've gone from this search engine to an answer engine and that's a dangerous thing right so for guys like you and i who have contacts who have business experience and more importantly who are curious this is a superpower because it's like oh tell me more how'd you get that source check that please give me a different perspective right ask me the questions i don't know i should be asked yeah yeah right that that stuff is gold because it's like this expedited learning thing right but unfortunately i think that type that population is 10 i'm i'm going to be generous here and use pareto's principle at 80 20 because for 20 of us i think it's fantastic but for the rest of the people who are just lazy as they're going to take that answer copy and paste it and send and we're skipping the learning process and this is what scares me so much is all the grind that you and i did early in our careers right like the call calls the emails the grant like writing down like meeting people face to face going to events and all that stuff that all allowed you and i to be in this conversation we don't need a script we can ebb and flow we know when to call on ai we know how to use it the right way right but what happens like where's your head at i mean you got you say five kids i got a daughter 15 years old you got a son that's five right like where if if and by the way give me claude give me claude co-work and give me any profession any one of them and i guarantee you i can do the entry-level role that that is stated today better than any rep coming out any kid coming out of college today and like i don't care if it's law i don't care if it's any anything right so if all the entry-level shit now and eventually all this stuff if all the entry-level stuff is being taken care of by ai or has done better with ai i got two questions one is where do the fundamentals come from but more importantly what are the fundamentals anymore like what is it just curiosity and and and business acumen and and eq oriented things and where are the kids going to get that knowledge so that they understand the output that this ai is generating for them right like this two-page document that summary doc like you could put a name of company in and it gives you this perfect thing but most reps are gonna be like cool i'm prepped yeah yeah i see my you and i shared i got a 15 year old as well and i've caught him now already a dozen times on his homework or whatever just you know basically giving away his you know just think for him right um and so man i don't know if i've got you know i do think that entry-level stuff to your point is it's scary because that's the place where it really when you start saying you know customer service or entry-level sales or entry-level this right or that or you know analysis or even consulting right i was a consultant i think they're seeing it a lot these people who are just doing you know punching numbers or crunching you know quick quick pieces of information so um you know one is i i'm a believer you can't run away from stuff so i am like trying to get my kid in it and number two not everyone has this luxury but you know people are part of the reason like why do you start a business like autonom i'm like i got a bunch of kids i got to get them a job i mean entrepreneurship is one of the things that i don't know if you can like outsource right now um to to you you know some clod bot and so you know i'm hoping that i can i can create an environment where i can put my kids in and and teach i control it i can i can teach them some of the skills i can put them in a place i run quote unquote the company um and again i know not everyone has that luxury and i don't know if i will actually without you know things up and down in this world but what my thought no joke was part of that like look if you don't know what to do you can't i got to control it and so my kids are already trying to outsource their thinking i'm not going to run away from it i try to sit down and talk to them about it or work through it with them and then yeah whether it's college or work how do i create an environment where i can start to curate some of their interactions so that they find a way to succeed in this world that feels like it we don't know what's going to be in the future so and i i mean that's kind of what i'm doing is i i told my i i quite frankly i don't know if college is even going to be a thing in a couple years like traditional college like the business model doesn't make any sense to me it never really did i always looked at college as a social education not an actual education um but what i've been doing or what i'm going to do as soon as she's got a week left in school here a week and a half and um after she whether she likes it or not she's going to do this with me um when she when she gets done with school i'm going to sit down and and show her how to vibe code showed her how to create an app or whatever it is because what i told her was look because i don't want to freak her out about the future right i think you and i are on the same page as terminator and holy what's going to happen here and i don't want to put that in her saying you're right but um but i i told her i want her to go to college because i want her to have the college experience i want her the social education of college i think is is invaluable for a kid but i don't want her to be dependent upon that degree for a job yeah same thing i want her to i wanted to have a job i i want her to sit in a cubicle and know how shitty it is to sit in stupid meetings that nobody fucking cares about and have a dipshit boss telling you what to do when you know i want her to have that experience because i always say you have to know the rules before you break the rules type of thing right so i don't want her to be dependent upon that job and that paycheck so what i'm going to do is vibe code create an app whatever it might be and find a way to instagram paid do a youtube thing that generates some revenue so that maybe she can generate two three four thousand dollars a month in cash so that that paycheck doesn't really matter she can go get her art degree if she wants to right because i think that you you nailed it i actually think that the future is entrepreneurship i really do yeah i don't think any of us are going to have a full-time job with a salary and you know and all that fun stuff i mean we can talk universal income and terminator later but um i i think we're all moving towards this hey we're all going to have our own little ecosystem and we're going to plug in a specialty to certain things and maybe manage some agents based on whatever our skill set is but i think the the future is entrepreneurship and and the the sooner we teach our kids how to create how to how to think right that's what is scaring me about the critical thinking is being ripped away from like from you know we're all taught to the test that's why my daughter you know she was in montessori school which i love because it's experiential learning look that's you know so i did one of those calls with a college kid the other day and he's like man what what degree should i choose and i was like humanities yeah go go go think go learn to think if you're just going for a if you're really going to college for a trade man go back to a true trade do do the funding do the electrician thing don't go to university and do accounting no you know don't go to account do some business school finance you know like go go humanities he's like are you sure i'm like yeah man i think you got a lot of sorry you got to go learn to think again learn to think well and that's why i think that the opportunity is that's why i'm trying not to overly hype this the scare factor here and and you know my nephew as an example he's 22 years old and he's he's graduating he's around you know and and you know he did all right in school but he didn't really take advantage of it and i get on the phone with him the other day and he's you know he's got probably another semester left and uh i was like all right you know what's going on and he's like yeah man i you know i know you've been talking about ai for a while and i know i've been avoiding it but you know i'm really once the summer hits i'm really going to dive into it and he's like i think the way i'm going to do it is by you know taking some of the time i play video games and and start to allocate it towards that and i was like what what i go how how much time are you playing video games and he was like oh you know two to three hours a night i'm like well what the fuck and i literally was like i i couldn't even stop like usually i'm kind of like i don't want to scare i'm like what the fuck are you i'm like three hours a night on video games i'm like are you shitting me right now i'm like do you have any idea what is going on right now i'm like like what's the job market look like how's it looking for you your friends getting jobs right now because they're probably not so so with him i'm guiding him through like let's use it to learn let's use it let me show you how to use this the right way and you've seen some light bulbs go off on him with like oh i'm like don't jump to the i'm like so i force props of like learning props if you're going to do something prep for this then here's how to do it and here's how to learn with it because it is it is a superpower if you use the right even for 20 something year old kids because they can leapfrog the if you know the business acumen the how to do things if they use it the right way oh it and i can't stress that enough like from on the individual front like back to the productivity you the way you learn the way you understand the world that back and forth interaction like people have this friend and this buddy and so man these kids in particular if they can start to use it that way i think it's amazing i think again that challenge then says how do i take that concept from the individual and scale it across 500 customer service reps and people's their minds go i i can't do it claude's not doing it it's not scaling across 500 customer service rep so back there are different challenges in the world but man as you talk about the individual and some of these kids in school can they become proficient in having you know jarvis think iron man type thing like you know the guys down there building stuff he's oh there you go i mean he's building cool stuff and he's asking jarvis and jarvis is pushing him further and back to what you're saying with the sales rep like here's my email what did you think this is better here's a different idea i thought about prospecting is this how would you do it differently no tell me tell me i suck give me five reasons why this idea that's like on the individual level i think people can really expand their thinking the enterprise usage of it we've not crossed that chasm there's this huge chasm right but the individuals are starting to really feel like they're thinking better and differently and they're more advanced so i think man if you're a kid in school there's an opportunity here to really be proficient get ahead get into entrepreneurship start be a builder not just to do not just an operator these are big words man for sure so let's finish up on this you're on one end of the spectrum as far as automating strs and and all this fun stuff there's obviously we're in this transition phase and i'm sure now i want you to put your consulting hat back on here um you're sitting there talking to a you know gdm leader gtm leader whatever cro whoever of one of these sas companies that is right stuck in the middle right and there is an obvious argument right now to be had for rip and replace like just rip out your sales team replace it with either you know fundamentally you know native ai and native ai reps and go from there yeah but we're we're trying to transition here right so do you assess your existing like what where do you start like if you're sitting in this mess going fuck my results are going this way i have a bloated probably a ton of reps here i have this ai stuff we're doing efficiencies but i'm i don't know what i'm doing here do you assess the tech stack first do you assess the skill set first do you uh try to optimize what you have right now like what's the transition phase to get to you and what you're doing yeah man so um i'd say number one you gotta just be very weary of the the spectrum here right so we talked about it earlier all these little tips and tools that are like i can now use ai to take a zoom call and fill in fields and crm wow that's amazing that is such bull crap don't go there no one cares it saves three seconds don't buy that tool okay don't be fooled with this little research bot like be very conscientious on the other side of the spectrum don't think you're replacing everybody or your whole team your whole sdr team like that it's crazy okay now bring you back to the center for just a second okay go we're there the next step is this is old school consulting but boy do you got to pull out the the process map you you gotta map your process um i know it's annoying but it's my consulting days at accenture i built a thousand of them every client i implement right now the very first thing i do let me map your process inbound leads outbound i want to understand it cradle the grave inbound lead comes in what happens form you know let me understand it and you might not be able to do this but it's not that difficult you got to look at that and i i usually like to start with the systems the process first and then the people on top of it you want to see what those inefficiencies are and this is classic cons this is classic even sass like don't buy the tool first look at the process and start to see what are those inefficiencies or where are the gaps and problems and sounds simple whether it's a tool or ai you want to find those areas where you could start to carve out the automations like i said maybe we shouldn't be having our sdrs take all these event leads or maybe we shouldn't maybe we should i'm getting all these signals i i'm seeing in my process i got this signal aggregation and i finally have clay kind of working and and i'm getting all these signals but i'm getting too many in the sales team can't follow up on okay interesting maybe i should only have my best signals go to my my top bdrs and the rest of them go to an an ai agent that follows up on them you know but with that process map you can start to see your inefficiencies cool you plug that then number three that's where i typically then get into the people side of it now that i've got the plumbing working and it's going and i'm getting my top signals to my outbound sdr how do i coach those guys to actually work with those signals like what are they saying are they calling they're only emailing oh my goodness we should have them call what are they saying on the phone so those are my three-step process right now watch where you are on the spectrum don't be on the two extremes because it's crazy i can't believe how many companies are falling for these stupid agents that do jack or they think they can replace them get back to the middle be a centralist um politically as well don't be a centralist on the spectrum two you got a map of process i want to see the whole flow end-to-end how the plumbing's working let's talk about some inefficiencies the number three let's get the skill set and the people working and see if we can optimize and honestly if you would have talked to me when i was at accenture 20 years ago the partner would have said the exact same thing he would have just said let's understand the process let's automate out the efficiencies and let's focus on the people people process technology you know it's kind of like the old school thoughts it kind of sells i mean look it goes back to fundamentals man it goes back to fundamentals it really is man it ain't magic ai is cool but man it ain't a magic pill and it is to really get it i'll tell you what having now implemented a hundred or hundreds of clients it's work man it really is work to get it across a whole team to have that roi if you're just flipping on something and you thought you could just give everybody your cloud license and it was going to be the magic bean to kind of grow the company it's just not working and people are starting to laugh at executives who are doing that now they're laughing at them yeah well let's end on that so we can uh maybe go uh i gotta get my coffee man morning coffee i gotta get back to get back to the grind same here so let's uh so tell people where they can find out more information about you what you're working on all the fun stuff look i love linkedin but it's so the algorithm i don't understand it i'm loving instagram i'm loving tick tock so um i do i try to keep up to date on some of the happenings what i'm finding what i'm learning on ai so i'd prefer you probably find me on a channel outside of linkedin find me on instagram find me on tick tock interact with me there i think there's some fun channels outside of sass typical linkedin that would be fun to engage with so and then check out a ton of man we're building some cool you know digital employees that you can insert or hire into your business so check it out it's a fun a fun fun idea well that awesome that was great catching up let's uh let's make it uh so let's catch up soon because i think you and i both need some therapy i can't wait for go to rica i can't wait for go to rica bro good luck on that take care all right but here hold on to everybody else hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as i didn't like i always say at the end of all these podcasts go out there make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went if you make somebody smile you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and i will see you on the other side hey thanks again for listening to the 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