Does AI Beat Teamwork? (P&G Study on 776 Employees), How To Agentify Your Marketing, Is Acquiring A Good Growth Strategy For Service Companies?

0:28I'm going to ask you a question. Yes, because I met a lot of the people there and they don't work that hard. So a lot of the departments, I'm not talking about everyone. I know some amazing people work at Procter & Gamble, but they have so much headcount. Typically, this is not a Procter & Gamble issue. This is, and I don't mean to pick on them. This is a large corporation example. When you have like a hundred thousand employees, you have a ton of people who don't work hard. Your organizations are just bloated and you don't need half the people, but they won't just lay off half the people kind of like X did.

0:56So in those scenarios, I would bet on, what was that? or doge or doge in that example i don't even know what the task is i bet you ai with one person outperforms by a lot two people that's why i just said procter and gamble you even need to know the task but they do so they do have they do have r &d and they do have regular tasks so this study was done on 776 uh procter and gamble employees so procter and gamble just so everyone knows large conglomerate they have a lot of products that you use what are some of the products that procter and gamble has um everything toothpaste toilet paper yeah yeah they have everything it's in your house okay so procter and gamble so this is done by ethan molek over here and um they wanted to see so to neil's point an individual with no ai performed at the lowest quality um but an individual plus ai outperformed a team with no i so a team in this case is just two people with no ai right now an individual plus ai so using chat gpt this is like before 4-0 even came out um actually is pretty close to a team with ai like two people with ai so it's relatively so red would be uh Oh, God.

2:00Red would be... Oh, come on. What happened to this? What's this Paris thing? Oh, it's a logo. It's a logo here. Okay, so what I'm showing on the screen over here, now Neil can see this. So I'm showing this to Neil. But you can see the red is team plus AI, so two people with AI. And then yellow is individual with AI. So it's not really that different. No, you don't need two people with AI. You just need one person with AI. And what you need is more units of one person with the AI than two people working together. Now, here's the thing. if it comes down to a top 10 % task, two people with AI, well, let me finish this.

2:30Two people with AI on a top 10 % task significantly outperforms the other ones. So if it's a high level thing, high leverage thing, then two people with AI is better. Okay, wait, go back to the chart. Which one is two people, no AI? Okay, so that's not one person. So the blue is two people, no AI. Yellow is... Individual plus AI. Outperforms by a lot. Looks like almost 50%. Yeah. Uh, these are the standard standardized qualities. Yeah. So it's, it's like, it's like a 0.25 here. And then it's like almost a 0.4 here. So like 40 ish percent. Yeah. Uh, improvement. Yep. That's huge. Yep. And then this is, this is individual with no AI.

3:10And then the right side is two people with the AI. Correct. They should cut half their staff and give them AI. Yeah. I probably should cut 70 % of their staff. Well, and here's one more interesting thing, right? So you can tell, So the level of, okay, we're marketers, right? Marketers like to spin things. So what this graph over here says is the technicality for solution for a condition alone without AI. So this is people that do not have AI. They're all working on R &D tasks. So a technical task. Does that make sense so far? Yeah. Okay. The blue, the green that you're seeing over here versus the yellow.

3:40So R &D technical people working on it, they are way more technical with the solution. So this part's technical. So you can see they're way more technical. Does that make sense so far? so the the i'm seeing i'm different colors than you but the you're saying the creamish color uh-huh orange or whatever creamish yeah that one is with ai that's no this is not we're not talking about ai this is so the right side will be ai okay but i'm talking about it let's say i'm technical and you're not okay does that make sense so and we're working on a technical task over here okay wait so you're technical i'm not yeah you're not you're blue and i'm cream you're blue okay so i'm I'm the non-technical.

4:14Yeah. So you start to make up random things. So you come up with a really, you know, stories, feelings and all that, but you don't have, you come up with a lot of commercial stories. You don't talk about R and D because you don't understand you're not technical. So marketers, we start to spin things a certain way, right? Now, whereas if I'm an R and D person, I'm in the yellow over here. I just straight moved to the technical piece. Now, when we add an AI, you and I both skew towards the technical side of things because we have the power of AI to guide us. And it's more balanced. If you actually look at it, it's much more balanced than the other way.

4:49Yep. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. So my point to everyone, and both really Neil and I have been saying this to the group that we've had, is that at the end of the day, this AI stuff, this is your assistant. And this proves the point over here with Procter & Gamble. Again, they ran this on 776 employees. I think it took them like a year to do it. And they collaborated with Harvard. so i think this is interesting and i don't have the graph here again that shows that top 10 percent tasks team plus ai performs way better but top 10 percent task we're going to give it to your best people so of course it's going to be better yeah yeah also with this too when people talk about a team of two or one versus the ai i believe and neither you or i have companies that the sides of procter and gamble so we can't talk crap on procter and gamble from the aspect of revenue generation but i believe our employees in a startup would do better two people versus one with the ai because you and i have much smaller teams in procter and gamble so it's easier to choose a players while when you're at procter and gamble scale it doesn't matter if you're procter and gamble microsoft or google or apple there's no way you can have a hundred thousand people and have a ton of A players.

6:03It's just not possible. Law of large numbers, you're going to have tons of B, C, and even D players at that scale. Yep. Okay. Just to continue on the AI piece and I'll give it back to you. I have this one over here on how to identify your marketing. So do you want to know how to identify your marketing? Go for it. Okay. So I just asked this to Grok and obviously you have a little topic on Grok we can talk about in a second too. But basically there are a few ideas here. And my point here is to saying, we don't believe that agents are fully there yet, but I think it's time to start to think about this stuff.

6:31And that's, we're trying to give you guys some ideas and maybe you have some too. So one is on sales qualifying. This one seems pretty easy. So you have an AI agent that analyzes your leads from emails, forums, your CRM data, and pulls them out, right? Who should we be following up from? Maybe you pitched someone two years ago, maybe you should be following up with them. Or maybe that contact moves somewhere else and the AI finds them and just says, here's the message I should send. Should I send it? That is a revenue generating activity. And so then the agent can monitor ongoing conversations, Flag when a lead stalls, suggest next steps, right?

7:00So that's one. And then I'm going to give another one over here. You have, oh, I just signed up for this one. You'll like this one. So I signed up for this agent. This is, yeah, I can say it does tasks on my behalf. So it's called Howie.ai, H-O-W-I-E.ai. Okay. And you send a lot of emails. I send a lot of emails, right? So I just started playing with it the other day. and basically I can say, Howie, find 15 minutes for Neil Patel and I tomorrow, right? And then it'll actually like email you and say, here are the times that are available. I'll give you, it'll figure out what time zone you're into.

7:34So provide Pacific. And then if you're East Coast, it will also provide East Coast too. Or I'll say, hey, Howie, what are my meetings for next week? And I'll say, okay, you have X amount of standup meetings. You have X internal meetings. You have X sales meetings for care or whatever. And then I can say, Howie, clear all my meetings for Sunday and then move them into another day next week. And you can do that now without having to go back and forth with your, Typically, you might just send it to your EA and they figure it out, right? But this does it really quickly. And basically, the way the AI works is it actually will prioritize things based on its algorithm.

8:02And if it can't figure it out, it actually has a human in a loop that would then try to figure it out. So each task takes about 15 minutes or so. I'll give you like one or two more on how to agentify your marketing. So you have an agent that can review content drafts, ensure that each piece has two to three alternate versions, and then try to go omni-channel with the publishing, right? You can do that. I like this research and data gathering one. So Neil publishes a lot of interesting data. If you look at his Instagram, you look at his X, he's got interesting data around the most interesting questions that you wouldn't think to ask.

8:39And so research and data gathering. So you have an agent that scours the web X or internal docs for info on topic you specify. So find me the latest on AI regulation and delivers a concise summary with sources. It can monitor ongoing trends and alert you to shifts. And then maybe you can just produce the stuff that you're doing. I'm pretty sure we're really close to that point already, especially with ChatGPT agents or images. But anyway, I just wanted to give you a couple ideas. Do you have some before we move on? No, I don't have as many ideas as Eric when it comes to identifying your marketing tasks.

9:12And here's something interesting that maybe you guys can all learn from. Eric is more technical than I am on AI. and what he does is every single weekend, I think he uses Saturday or Sunday, he spends time going through all the new AI apps and then I end up learning from him because we talk about a marketing score. He'll tell me about it over text and he goes and just spends a whole day testing things out and figuring out what's new. On my end, I don't do that. I spend time with family or kids and Eric does spend time with his family. He doesn't have kids. but what ends up happening is is I have a team internally that does this 24 7 for marketing in general as well as where our companies spend time on tasks and then go from there but there's a different time in your entrepreneur journey to spend on different tasks Eric's built an amazing business I've built a decent business but we're in different places where I need to spend most of my time on things like M &A and figuring out how we can grow faster while Eric is in building mode where he's trying to figure out what do I need to do to build a better product to just streamline things for each and every single one of my customers.

10:32There's no right or wrong, but as a marketer, what you got to do is you got to figure out what's going to provide the biggest efficiencies based on your leverage point. A great example of this is if you're at Procter & Gamble in marketing, what you're going to do is going to be very different than what Eric and I do because your company is at a very different level. Like for me, I focus either on M &A or things that drive more RFPs because that's what really moves the needle for us from a revenue standpoint. Yeah, and I'll give you guys another perspective too. So one, it's also one, it's focusing on what you're good at.

11:06Two, it's focusing on the highest leverage point for your business. Now, if you're the box CEO, for example, of publicly traded company, multi-billion dollars, right? He is focused on AI right now. Aaron Levy is focused on AI because it is such a high leverage point for his business because all the files that you have, his business has become much more valuable right now. And the interesting thing, I listened to another podcast. Remember Drift, the chat? David Cancel Company. David Cancel Company. So they sold for 1.2 billion or something like that. But it doesn't sound like, I listened to the co-founder.

11:32He did a episode on 20VC. He said, that was the worst decision of my life or whatever. And then Harry Stebbings was like, why is that the worst decision? he's like we sold for 1.2 billion whatever but have we just kept going for a little longer like intercom kept going they just the ai unlocked all the other potential with their business that they didn't know that they actually had but because they end up selling to vista is intercom bigger now i thought intercom was struggling intercom is doing well with i i supposedly they're doing well with um the the the problem solving the ticket solving with the agents uh because intercom was doing really well call it five ten no maybe ten years in the very beginning.

12:07Then they struggled. Then they struggled. So now they're back because of AI. Yeah. But because they held out long enough. But my point of all this is saying, you have to think about the leverage points for your business. I think that's what you're trying to say too. So the leverage points for me are around AI. For Box, it's around AI. But a big leverage point for you is potentially buying other companies. And maybe this goes out into you acquihiring because you can buy these things and then AI-ify them. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale.

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14:22Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? launch your site for free at framer.com and use code ms to get your first month of pro on the house that's framer.com promo code ms framer.com promo code ms rules and restrictions may apply so going really back to box before i get into that box five years ago because i'm just looking at their stock chart was at 13.42 and now they're pretty much at 30 so a little bit more than double um if you look at their 2021 revenues versus 2025 annually they're at 770 for 2025 uh for 2021 okay and now they're at almost 1.1 billion so they haven't grown as much in revenue but the stock price has doubled going back to what you're saying it has to be based on the story if you look at their last uh 12 months growth it's only five percent so the growth has slowed down right Before, like from 21 to 22, they're growing at 13%, then 13 % again, then 4.7, now 5%.

15:27So the growth has slowed down, but people are buying into the story of AI and what it's going to do for the business in the future. Let me ask you a question before we move on here. And then I want to go into this, the aqua hiring piece. But would you say you're more of an innovator, an optimizer, or something else? What stage of a company or just general? In general, just how your demeanor is. I'm more of an optimizer. than anything else. You know what's interesting? So I went to Grok for this. I was like, hey, what would you say the demeanor is for Neil Patel and Eric too? And it was like, Neil Patel is a very strong optimizer and Eric is a very strong innovator.

16:05And it's just interesting how it finds this stuff. But I thought it was just a fun exercise. Anyway. That is pretty accurate. And I agree that when I was working with Heathen, his strengths was innovating. And the things he tweets now, I'm like, oh, Heathen's back because I observe his tweets. he's always talking about ai and how the how everything's changing and so i'm i'm probably more akin to heaton but this is a this is what makes this a good podcast because we're we're different personalities but we're also same in certain areas but do you want to go into aqua hiring thing yeah an interesting strategy to grow and i was talking to eric about this over text but i was also talking in person to one of my team members as an agency the way you get the big contracts like a WPP, Omnicom, which is now the largest agency in the world after Interpublic, after the merger yet.

16:53Publicist is really massive as well. The reason they get these massive contracts is because Microsoft will come to them and say, we need your help with marketing in 150 countries. They may not spend a lot in every single one of those countries, but if you can't do it and you don't have boots on the ground in every one of those countries, you don't get the contract. And I was talking to some of my team because we're winning larger and larger regional contracts and people will throw a random country. And I'm just using this as an example here. I'm not saying it exists or not, but let's say if someone came to me and be like, Neil, we need help in 20 countries.

17:32And one of them being Pakistan. All right. There's not that much revenue for us to generate from large corporations to go build an agency right now in Pakistan. The way a lot of large agencies have grown in those regions is because the demand from their customers. So they eventually hire people in those regions. And you fast forward 10 years, you're like, huh, now we have three, four, 500 people in these regions. And we only did it because of global contracts, but they're not actually making that much revenue from corporations that are headquartered out of Pakistan that expect you to do marketing in Pakistan and globally.

18:11It is the other way around where it's just global entities expecting you to do work in regions like Pakistan. So I was telling my team, I'm like, it doesn't make sense for us to build an agency in some of these countries because there's not enough in-country revenue, but there are agencies in these countries that have five, 10 people that don't make much money and you can acquihire them and give them 100 grand and it solves the problem for us. And it's low risk because it's too risky for us to buy an agency with 50 people, 100 people, when A, we don't know what's going to happen to the founders, and B, the customers don't care if we have 5 or 10 people in these regions versus if we have 200 people in these regions because it's not an important region.

18:58They just want to boot what's on the ground. So to be clear, everyone kneels open to buying you if you're listening to this from outside of major countries like United States or big markets like Japan. If you're in other industries, you're open to buying them, right? Yeah, but the reason I mentioned this to Eric, and this is applicable to any business, he has an agency, but he also has a product business. And if you look at his ABM solution, there's probably a lot of ABM companies out there that have customers that aren't doing that well, and they're barely scraping by you take you're talking like abm uh agencies that have the logos yes all right but it could be agencies or software companies there's abm software companies out there guaranteed that barely have any revenue and they're losing money they're trying to figure out what to do in this economy would you agree with that statement i the reason i'm shaking my head is because um some of these um enterprises we work with so they force us to work with their age their agencies right and these agencies have a lot of abm like b2b logos but they suck right they ask the stupidest questions.

20:01And then my CDO and I are just like, dude, like what is going on here? But, but that's my point. There are a lot of opportunities out there where I'm like, yeah, they have like five to 15 people. Yeah. And some of them barely make any money or they're break even. And what you can do is gobble them up. You already have a better tech. You can just use your tech instead of theirs, plug it in and get rid of some of their people and keep the ones that you need. I like this angle. When we talked about this initially, I had it just on the agency lens, but when you have it with the software lens, I'm like, okay, this, this sounds a lot better, but you can do it for anything.

20:30Yeah. And you can structure it. Cause we kind of briefly talked, talked about the structures here and we don't want to give too much away, but you can structure these deals where like, if you're breaking, even as a founder, you've been struggling, the economy has been bad with the, with agencies the last, I don't know, call it, you know, three, four years or so you just want out, or maybe you get to partner with someone like a Neil or myself and you get some cash immediately. And then, you know, maybe you get some upside if certain numbers are hit, but that's not a bad deal because everyone gets taken care of and you don't have to worry about running a business anymore no and i think this is a really creative way to expand faster because i look at your company in the abm space the one thing that we know is venture capital dollars have pretty much dried up for most industries other than ai quantum computing i don't know what the other industries are because i'm not that much into venture capital but you agree it's not like money's flowing like it was money sitting on the sidelines it's waiting yeah i think we're waiting yes two trillion uh something like that but people get the notion of dry powder really wrong they're like oh there's all these monies and all this money and funds they got to deploy it that's not the case what ends up happening is is these funds raise money from pension funds limited partners uh family offices rich individuals and when they commit to fund like i'm in a lot of funds and let's say i commit you know i don't want to actually throw it out but let's say i commit a hundred dollars a hundred dollars all right and in the last few years they haven't deployed much it may have been where they gave him ten dollars out of the hundred yep so they may say capital calls yeah these are capital calls so like oh yeah we got another 90 to go there's all this money sitting on the sideline the money's not sitting on the sidelines it's in my own bank account yeah and if you don't want to give it sometimes you might just give it yeah depending on how the contract's set up, but the money doesn't get deployed until they got a deal.

22:25So yes, the money is sitting in the sidelines, but it's not really in the sense it's in the individual who's giving the fund money in their bank account and they're using it and investing it as time goes on. And then when deals start picking up, they will start giving them back the money, but there's no pressure on these funds to write a check because here's what people get wrong about money being on the sidelines. They believe that if it just sits there, it looks bad for them. Well, they're not making tons of fees because they're not deploying the capital. And these people who manage tons of money don't want to deploy the capital in bad deals during uncertain times because they make so much on the 2 % fees, the management fees each year, that they're just like, if I screw this up, it screws up the potential to have future funds five, 10 years from now.

23:16So what I'm going to do is just take my time and invest the money when it's the right time so I don't lose money. So that way I guarantee the success over the next 10 plus years and we can keep having multiple funds. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, resubscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.