I Built an AI to Watch How I Work

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. All right, everyone. We are live. Meals in a new home, finally. And we're just joking that the last time he had a nice, really nice background, it lasted for like a month.

0:34Eric Siu:And this time he has a nice background again. So Neil has this issue with business. He's very focused. But when it comes to his homes, he's very unfocused. And when it comes to his car, he's very, very unfocused, too.

0:46Neil Patel:You know I bought a new car, right? You got the Model Y, right? Yeah. Best thing ever from a self-driving perspective. Shittiest seats. I've sat in a long time for a car.

0:59Eric Siu:that's all you complain about is the seats but you miss out on like all the good things too the fact that you don't have to drive is great but i have back pain that's why

1:06Neil Patel:so like i notice it within like 15 20 minutes of sitting um it's so much so that i've been using the self-driving and i started researching every single car company that has self-driving technology out there i couldn't you know find good results so then i plugged into llm and it's breaking down how Mercedes is going to do a good job. And you know, I like Mercedes. Their cars are really comfortable. And what I started doing was I asked the LLMs to find me or Google to find me every YouTube video of someone test driving the Mercedes self-driving. And then it ended up giving me results. And I started watching the video and it was making so many mistakes.

1:52Neil Patel:I was like, oh, I can't use the Mercedes self-driving technology.

1:56Eric Siu:You know, I think that the lesson to learn from this one from a business standpoint is that even just a philosophical standpoint. So this comes from Thomas Sowell, who's like an economist, right? And he, I think he's still alive today, but one of the quotes that really sticks out to me is there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And so you might say, okay, the Mercedes seats are a lot nicer and it looks, it's just more luxury in general. Okay, you get that. But then you miss out on the trade-off that you miss out on is the cream of the crop when it comes to self-driving, right? And then the trade-off is when you drive to Tesla, you get crappy seats, right?

2:30Eric Siu:And so if you look at everything across business, almost everything that you see, there's a trade-off at the end of the day. There's no perfect solution. There's always a trade-off.

2:39Neil Patel:But you have to figure out if the trade-off is worth it. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up. So like for me, I have back pain. I can't do the trade-off of a Mercedes and use their self-driving for no back pain because the trade-off in this situation is self-driving technology that may get me in a crash and may kill me because based on the videos I saw it's not that great and the same problem goes in business when people pick trade-offs it's you may prefer one over the other but you got to really analyze the consequences and figure out can you even is this consequence something that

3:18Eric Siu:you can even afford to have yeah so by the way Neil I have a I just came out from a AI mastermind last week in Costa Rica I thought I could maybe start off by sharing experiences and you can talk about cool stuff that you that's happened in the last seven days let's do it I was in Costa by the way I've never been to Costa Rica before have you no I've never been to Costa Rica so Costa Rica is is really nice so one of the the guys in the group his name is Alan he he recommended Costa Rica and he did a great job of planning the event and so I'll reveal what I can I can't go into too many details obviously but um I'll just talk about maybe the setup for this thing and how I think everyone should um think about at least forming an AI text group or even like an AI founders chat or like a whatever role that you're in I think it's it's really helpful to have peers and maybe that can be like a follow-up to to this piece but um I have always talked about why it's helpful to have a forum like these are like-minded people okay so Neil might have a group of people that he texts all the time.

4:14Eric Siu:Neil and I, we text all the time as well. You want to have people that you can bounce ideas off of, right? And that's always been very helpful. And so that's why I've always been a fan of groups like EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, or groups like YPO, Young Presidents Organization, or even Hampton, for example, because they help facilitate that. Now, what I would say is I was lacking a forum that would just primarily talk about AI. All we wanted to nerd out about was business and AI. We don't want to talk about partying. We don't want to talk about anything else. We don't want to talk about our relationships.

4:44Eric Siu:All we want to talk about is AI and business, right? And so we went to Costa Rica basically last Thursday to Sunday or so, and it was beautiful. So the whole idea here is that, you know, you do it in a nice spot. You know, we had like a big house and it was like overlooking the water with a nice pool and everything. And just every day we'd wake up, we'd have someone cook breakfast for us. They were amazing. and then you know from 8 a.m to 12 we just be talking about business and like ai shares and things like that um and then you know afternoon we play pickleball and then we probably let's go

5:16Neil Patel:back ai shares so you guys were talking about like stocks and all that kind of stuff and which shares you guys own oh no no no ai shares as in like we're sharing things around ai and business

5:26Eric Siu:not the stocks but we did talk about we did talk about stocks yeah it's like the stuff that i showed you already you saw the stocks that jumped like 8 000 right in a year it's like that yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah. We did talk about investments. We did talk about stocks. I think it's just really anything around business. Right. And, you know, I would just say that going into some of the AI learnings, at least from my end. One thing is I am I after I came back, I started off this apprenticeship at my company. And this was a result of one of my explorations that I did where I was talking about some of the challenges I was having.

5:58Eric Siu:Right. and so I noticed something with some of the people that I trained up at the company I would spend like you know I would do these 30 minute meetings and I would do these meetings like 10 to 15 times or so okay and but these after I did these meetings with these people these people were flying and like I didn't have to tell them much they were just very high agency people and they're just figuring everything out and they're doing the jobs of like you know like four or five different jobs at once I'm like dude why don't I just figure out how I can duplicate that across like more people. Why don't I like Jedi train some more people in the organization so then they can Jedi train more people in the organization and spend time like I was doing too, right?

6:35Eric Siu:In terms of scaling it out. So we created this pod of one apprenticeship and I already started rolling it out this week. So that's one thing that I immediately did. I'll pause for a second here.

6:44Neil Patel:So some of them have already been doing this, right? Where they rolled out this pod and doing this apprenticeship. Like what are people getting from it? Like what's, what are the results that people have been experiencing that have been doing it for longer? I'm making assumptions here, but I'm assuming some of these guys have been doing it for longer because you guys are all sharing new ideas with each other.

7:03Eric Siu:Yeah, it's, we're always sharing ideas and things like that. But, but I think when you, when you train, when you, when I'm actively spending one-on-one time with some of these people that are very talented at AI forward, and I'm kind of guiding them along the way in terms of kind of my speed, my expectations and, and, and teaching them along the way. that's why I say it's like Jedi training. They tend to move a lot faster because I asked one of the people that I trained, I was like, hey, like how impactful was it? Because I don't think anything of the time I spend with someone, right? And this guy was like, oh, it was honestly like a nine out of 10.

7:34Eric Siu:It was massive for me that you spent the time doing that. And I was like, okay, I'm going to pick six other people in my organization to do this with. And then they're going to train the rest of the people, right, in terms of just spending a lot of time with them. And so I've been doing that this week and it's already been a high leverage thing already where I'm like, whoa, this is really good. And I haven't thought of doing like an apprenticeship before, but this is what I'm thinking about. So when we talk about this AI apprenticeship, if you want to join my company, we're hiring more. I'll actually spend time with you if you're that damn good.

8:03Eric Siu:If you're not that damn good, I will spend no time with you.

8:06Neil Patel:If you're not that good, forget the time. Are you going to even actually hire them?

8:11Eric Siu:Well, we make hiring mistakes sometimes, you know? How often do you get hired? Right, that's the question.

8:15Neil Patel:Yeah, I looked at my track record last week. We were actually going through every single company I've been through and looking at how many times I hire a good manager that works out. I'm talking about a manager who typically leads a division or a project, whatnot. And this is literally 20 plus years of doing business. I think I'm, what, 25, 26 years of doing business at this point. I'm a little bit better than 50%. I was just like, oh, maybe I've gone better. Maybe I'm at 70, 80, 90%. And I'm talking about we have really sticked hiring processes. I've done much better later on, but I'm still not batting like 70, 80, 90%.

9:02Neil Patel:It gets really hard when you're hiring a CEO. I'm not talking about lower level or middle management. I'm talking about senior management, looking to lead a country or a division or do something new. roughly 50%, sadly.

9:17Eric Siu:Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the thing. I think I'm probably around 50%. I need to run the numbers on this. I might be, you know, around 50 % or maybe even slightly below 50%. But I think we all like to think that we're really good at hiring when it's, when we're not because we're all different people and people are very complex and we all have different personalities. Like Neil's a very different person than what I am. I'll share one more thing, Neil, because I don't want to take up too much airtime here. One other thing that, you know, we rolled out ASAP is, so I built this using Codex. And so you know how meta right now, they're basically, they're kind of seeing how people are, their employees are doing things and they're making processes with it.

9:55Eric Siu:Or like if I, some factory companies are making you wear a suit so they can see how you run certain processes when you're building things. Are you familiar with this? Yes. Okay. I made something. So we're talking about this, but I basically made something using Codex that it's been watching me for this last week. So it'll take screenshots every now and then. I don't even know what screenshots it's taking, but it's watching my screen and it's telling me, hey, this is how you work right now. These are the skills that I think you should be making, meaning that these are like processes that I can these skills I can hand off to other people and make them very portable.

10:25Eric Siu:But it's also telling me in which ways I work very inefficiently and how I can work better. Right. And so I've been running it on myself and it didn't take me that long to build. I was actually very shocked how long it took me to build it. But I'm like, oh, man, like if we run this with the kind of the understanding that, hey, this is going to help make everyone better. and we're going to basically, it's going to make you work more efficiently and it's going to make a lot of processes like skills that you can then hand off to a robot to take care of so you don't have to do it. I'm like, that is super high leverage.

10:51Eric Siu:I have a lot of these other things I can share, but that was another one that I got working. Like I built it on the plane, I think. And like now it's just working. I'm just staring at it right now.

11:00Neil Patel:Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads

11:03Eric Siu:and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Carrot. It's www.care.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side.

11:15Neil Patel:I was in Colombia yesterday. Funny enough, it is Friday while we're recording. Yeah, Bogota. I left Wednesday afternoon-ish or early afternoon-ish. Got there Thursday early in the morning, like 2 a.m., right? So I was at the hotel by 3 a.m. Driver took a little bit to pick me up. I was waiting out there. I'm like, come on, man. there's no traffic here. I was speaking at a marketing event, IAB, Interactive Advertising Bureau. And then I left Thursday right after my speech, right? And then I got back home, call it around midnight. That's not an easy flight. That's a seven hour flight, isn't it? More because there's no direct flights.

11:56Neil Patel:So connecting and I'm like sitting and crammed my head, my neck and back just hurt because, you know, I was up sleeping in a airplane seat for a while but nonetheless when I was there I was talking to some of my team members and we were having this debate on do you fire marketing employees because of AI and what I mean by this specifically is there's two camps right now when it comes to AI and employees some are saying hey we're letting go of people because we're making things much more efficient okay I'm not talking about the companies that are saying we're letting people go because of AI and they're not growing.

12:35Neil Patel:A lot of those are actually just letting people go because they overhired and they're just cutting. But there are actually businesses that have made efficiencies that are cutting due to AI. But there's another camp and my team and I were talking about this and some of them are like, eventually you can just get rid of a lot of people and you'll have way less. Our old VP of marketing, Salo, used to make the pitch to me. He was like, dude if you want your you know company to succeed and he's a friend so when he left yeah I had an exit interview so I let people say whatever they want and you get feedback because it doesn't matter what you believe it's good to hear what other people have to say and I remember solo telling me you should get rid of half to three-fourths of your company and just automate everything through AI now there's differences of opinions but I believe in marketing what we're seeing on the ground working with companies because of ai people aren't really putting too much pressure to pay us less they're putting more pressure to get more and what we're finding is if you go the route of just cutting a ton of headcount and you're using ai to automate a lot of stuff the quality isn't there yet where clients will be happy or the marketing outputs will produce the results that we're looking for.

13:54Neil Patel:So what we're finding in today's world, at least in marketing, and we're finding the winning combination is not necessarily firing because of AI, but more so maintaining because of AI. I'm not saying hire a ton more. I'm saying maintaining. And then you're using technology to make every single person better, more efficient. So that way you can create more outputs for your customers or for your own company that you're working for. And I don't think there's really another way because if you end up cutting staff, it is still hard to get a lot of high quality output done in marketing. And people right now, we're not hearing the pressure of, we need to pay less.

14:34Neil Patel:We're hearing the pressure of, marketing needs to do more. You need, we need better results. We need a, you know, and this is just globally. I'm not talking about just our customers. I'm just, when I go to conferences, I'm hearing everyone say, we need more done faster and better, right? I don't really hear we need a cut cost.

14:52Eric Siu:Yeah. So here's what I think about AI as it relates to staffing in general. And as you know, we've talked about this on the podcast where I believe that my stance is that AI is going to create, it's going to lead to more job creation in the long term. And sure, there might be some short-term job displacement. But what I haven't changed my stance on is that someone with AI is going to replace people that don't use AI. So as an example, if Neil and I are fighting right now, let's say it's a physical fight, okay? if I'm holding a knife and Neil is holding a gun in over a thousand times, who's most likely going to win?

15:25Eric Siu:It's going to be Neil with a gun, right? Assuming I can aim right though. Yeah. Assuming if we fight a thousand times, you're probably going to win most of them, right? Yes. Do you agree? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you. Neil, you keep the gun, okay? You keep the handgun. Now I have upgraded to a rifle. Out of a thousand times, who's more likely to win now?

15:41Neil Patel:You because a rifle, if I'm not mistaken, I've never shot one or I've actually never even shot a gun. But a rifle, I believe, spreads out.

15:48Eric Siu:right so like it's easier to hit the target so you you might be able to you run out of bullets in like 12 shots i can shoot rapidly in 30 shots or so and and it's much more rapid fire right and then okay neil i have the rifle now now you get the machine gun now you are now more likely to win so the way i see it now is just like it's no different than neil riding a horse and i'm driving a car and then he's driving a formula one car that's how i see this stuff and the crazy thing to me neil i was on an event yesterday um and you know i i kind of cited the set i was like Like, look, you have 46 % of Americans are pro AI, whereas 87 % of Chinese are pro AI.

16:24Eric Siu:How do you reconcile that, right? And like some people, I'm just like, it just makes you faster. And so the way I see it is like, look, we want to hire people that are very pro AI and are using the tools. Because what I'm seeing, same thing as you, Neil, is that on our end, what we're seeing is people want more work. They want more help. I don't think it's ever going to change that people want help with this stuff. and when we're showing them stuff on the single brain side when they're looking at how these workflows are working they're like can you do this can you do this can you do this how about this how about this how about this it's much more of a more more more and i'm all here for it because we're