AI Is a Survival Skill for Consultants

0:00John Jantsch:Hey, it's John Jantsch here. I've got a quick question for you. Are you a consultant, agency owner, or fractional CMO who feels like you're reinventing the wheel with every new client, or worse, giving away strategy for free? Well, you're not alone, and that's why we created the Fractional CMO Plus Certification. It's a three-day live experience where you'll license the duct tape marketing proven strategy first approach. You'll learn how to turn strategy and strategy engagements into a product. Our next certification is right around the corner. Head on over to dtm.world slash certify. That's dtm.world slash certify.

0:38John Jantsch:And book a call with a live advisor, or heck, you can just chat with our AI advisor too, to see if this is a fit for you.

0:55John Jantsch:hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast this is john jance and my guest today is steve cunningham he's a former agency owner startup founder and now ai native business strategist he built a successful book summary platform called read it not for me backed by billionaire investor and read a book a day for 10 years. I feel like I do that sometimes. But when AI disrupted his industry, it nearly wiped him out. So now he coaches solo consultants, agency owners, and service professionals to make more money faster and easier by becoming AI native through his company, Simple, and his brand new book, The AI Native Full Stack Consultant.

1:37John Jantsch:So Steve, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, John. I say welcome back. I think this is your first time actually on the show. But you and I tried to record and I was like in a hurricane and it didn't work out. So I'm glad you were able to come back. Good to be back for the first time. So I mentioned the AI destroyed your business. You want to talk a little bit about it or tell that story as I'm sure you have a number of times. yeah so read it for me was a business that i hoped would last the rest of my life i loved that business as i like to joke if i could get in the time machine travel back to 2022 and destroy all the ai i would do it that's how much i love that business i got to read books from my favorite business authors like yourself i live here in san antonio texas by the river walk i would literally go outside, I would take my phone, I would read on the phone.

2:31So I read Kindle on the phone. And that was my job. So I loved it. And so when ChatGPT came out, you know, this is a content business, right? So it would take me about eight hours to read a book and summarize it, take notes and do all the stuff from beginning to end. And when I realized that you could get a passable book summary, which is by asking for it and maybe, and then with some good prompting, get a finished product in much less way less time than it would take for me to read and summarize the book i knew that we were in trouble and so it you know didn't happen overnight i still we still have people reaching out wondering can they bring read it for me into their business and i two and a half three years later it baffles me that people still have not figured out that they don't need us anymore for that.

3:22But yeah, so the revenue went down, not overnight, slowly but surely. And so we realized that we had to do something about that and saw the writing on the wall, transformed our operations with AI. Then lots of folks wanted to know how we were doing it and started showing them. And here we are two and a half years later and we're fully AI native and doing lots of fun and exciting things.

3:49John Jantsch:So I suspect, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm naive, but that most marketers today or consultants have figured out, you know, yeah, I need to use this AI thing. You use the term AI native full stack consultant. How does that differ from someone who, say, just uses it in their workflows? Well, one of the things that has happened in the last few months, the easiest way to put it is the AI has gotten really good. So there was this, we're on a short timeline for the podcast, but I don't have time to dive into it deep. But there were studies done through open AI. So take that with a grain of salt. But it's called the GDP Val.

4:25And what they did was they took a bunch of subject matter experts. They got a bucket of tasks across most knowledge work. And they said, give us your best blank. And there would be a task. And so they would do it. And then they would have the AI do the exact same task. And they would give it to another subject matter expert. And they would say, which one of these is better? And so 2024, Windsor Ties by the AI was like at 10%. Now, it's a caveat that the AI has all of the context it needs in order to do the job. And most people don't get anywhere close to giving the AI all the best, all the context it needs.

5:03So 10%, like people would say, yeah, it's not a 10%. Well, it's probably not a 10 % because you didn't give it all the context. So anyways, move forward into 2025, middle of 2025. We're approaching 50%. Winds or ties by the AI. So we're getting close. We call that the AI tipping point. As of a couple of months ago, the winds and ties by AI were 70%. And since then, you can feel if you're using AI, this is getting better and better. So what we mean by full stack consultant is if you understand what good looks like across any subject matter expert domain, you can get pretty close to doing an incredible job for your clients in all functional areas of the business.

5:53So a marketing agency can do sales enablement, but they can also do some CFO work. They can do some strategy work. And that is what we mean by the full stack consultant. And the idea is that if you get very good at some new skills, which are not obvious to most people, like how to produce a really good, robust context library for your client, you and the company can do amazing work it can be done incredibly quickly and we're learning more and more every day about what that looks like so today this morning i did about and this sounds ridiculous when you hear from the outside and i understand that it sounds ridiculous but i did about in about two hours with 30 minutes of my work and an hour and a half of just waiting around for the AI to finish its work, about 260 hours of design, interface work, copywriting, and development.

6:54I don't do any of those things in the past life. I have no skills in those things, but I know what to ask for. I know what I want and I know what good looks like and now I can get it. So it's an amazing time that we live in.

7:07John Jantsch:I want to go back to a point you made there because, you know, I have jokingly, but seriously said, you know, marketing is everything. And what I really meant by that was in a lot of small businesses, I would go into where a lot of things I had to fix that weren't under the, you know, the heading of marketing a lot of times, because if marketing was going to work or we were going to grow the business, I had to get involved in this area over here. Sales was a typical one of customer service is another one that, you know, that you don't always hire a marketing agency for, but I would get into it out of necessity.

7:38John Jantsch:And I think what you're really pointing to is a great point, this idea of if you go into a business, it's not just a matter of offering a suite of like, what do you need? It's more like I can be more effective at doing my job that you hired me for if I can actually easily fix an area over here that I may not have true expertise in or I couldn't spend the time because I wasn't being paid to fix their P &L, for example. So I think that's a great point. Let me back up again, because I circled, I wanted the word context. Let's spend a little time talking about that, because I think AI has gotten better, but I also think prompters are getting better.

8:17John Jantsch:And we're realizing, you know, we get better output with context. How do you give a, how in your view, this is probably a really long answer, how in your view do you give AI the proper context? so when most people talk about context and there's a term called context engineering they're mostly talking about it in the terms of like a single task that's going on what we mean by context engineering is how does the ai know everything about your business so that whenever you pull up a task to do that you actually the ai can it's really hard to explain without getting into the weeds, but here's my best shot.

8:59So imagine that you have like the world's best employee on every single task that could be done in your business, but they have amnesia. Every single time you give them a new task, they know nothing. So you have to train them. And that sounds like a really painful thing to have to do. But if you build a context library, it only has to be done once to start, you can train that, you can give that AI like 10 years of training in about 10 seconds. So it forgets all the time, but it learns like years in seconds. So all you got to do, like this is how I boot up my instance of how running AI in my world as the CEO of our company.

9:45I onboard the AI. I say, go look at the, I literally create an onboarding file. I say go look at the onboarding file and get yourself onboarded and 10 seconds later it knows exactly like from a meta perspective how we're going to do our work today then I'll say go look at that folder and let's do this task like redesign our interface for this page in our system and knows exactly how I like to work and knows exactly how I want design options and you as a marketer you'll appreciate this so you can go in and you're doing let's say you're doing ad variations you go and ask for you don't even have to be that specific if it knows everything about your business you just say give me five ad variations on this one topic or this one offer we're making sends it back you look at it you're like i like that one the most and i've had the ai give me like the rationale for like this is scored it and ranked it then you give me five more variations on that one.

10:44And then five more on that one. And one of the things that's not obvious to people is that the cost of variations is almost zero. So you can ask for an infinite number of variations. I do that with subject lines for emails.

10:56John Jantsch:I mean, same thing. It's like, I kind of like the idea of this one. Iterate on that 10 more times. Yeah. Yeah. But you can do it for really big things. Yeah. So it's not just like a single subject. You can do it for an entire interface, like an entire... Mm-hmm. set a code. So like, because it works so fast and the cost of its work is so low, it transforms the way you approach the work. And so customizing campaigns, it's down to the individual level, not a problem anymore. Like I can find your LinkedIn profile. I can scrape it and I can send you like an entire landing page. That's speaking directly to you.

11:38And it costs me a penny to do. And so there are things that we can do that were quite literally impossible before that now makes sense.

11:48John Jantsch:If you're a consultant, agency owner, or a fractional CMO who feels kind of exhausted from starting from scratch with every new client, well, this is for you. The fractional CMO plus certification is a three-day live experience built to help you stop being the bottleneck and start leading with clarity. You're not only going to learn, you're going to license all of our systems, documented processes, and practical tools all grounded in the duct tape marketing strategy first approach. We're going to help you turn strategy engagements into a product you can sell over and over again. You'll also get one-on-one support and join a community of marketers who actually get what you're building.

12:29John Jantsch:Our next certification is coming up soon. You can learn more at dtm.world slash certified. dtm.world slash certified. This might be a good time to talk platforms and technologies a little bit. Are you agnostic or have you really gone all in? And maybe it's so complex that you can't really say it in one sentence, but are you a Gemini person? Are you a Chad CPT person? Or are you really building your own stuff? We're definitely not building our own stuff. We have a very particular point of view, which is we're serving companies and companies will eventually choose their LLM of choice. And that's what they're going to do all of their work on.

13:12So we're not hitching our wagon to any one LLM. We also have the point of view that for the most part, most AI wrappers go away. So an organization is going to build their own software. That's our long-term bet. And so we're just using whatever one is most productive. I personally have the max subscription on Cloud, OpenAI, and Gemini. I'm mostly using Cloud right now because Cloud Cowork and Cloud Code just came out. And so if you listen to this like a month later, maybe I'm on something else by then. But Cloud Cowork has been, that tool alone has transformed our operations in two weeks. We literally operate day-to-day differently now because of that tool.

14:02But whatever one's working the best the next time we talk is the one we'll be on then.

14:07John Jantsch:Yeah, you know, I contended for a long time that just what you said, it's going to be plumbing. It's not going to be, oh, I use this tool or that tool. It's going to be, no, this already works with what I use. And I really feel like doesn't that give Microsoft and Google, because of their installed user base, I mean, you know, I fire up Gmail and all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's a new tool, you know, I can opt into. You know, I mean, doesn't that give them an advantage? And also, I think the other thing, the first version of AI tools is everybody kind of used them by themselves. Well, now all of a sudden we got collaboration built in, which I think was a big missing part.

14:41John Jantsch:And so it's like working the way people work already. Yeah, I think like all other things being equal, Microsoft and Google have the biggest moat around it. However, for the longest time, ChatGPT was the best tool. And now Cloud is by far the best tool. And so I would have thought that if it was true, that Microsoft and Google would be like for sure would win. It would have happened right now. Because not only do they have the user base, they have all the documents. And that's what the AI needs for context. But as it turns out, the AI does not read and work with the file formats that we all produced over the last 20 years, which is PowerPoints and Word documents and all of those kinds of things.

15:30So there's going to be a shift around that as well, which I think will loosen the moat that they have because we're not going to be stuck on PowerPoint anymore. Like in the last couple of weeks, I've been on this kick of, and I think this is just true, I will never use Keynote or PowerPoint ever again. and I'm not using like another AI tool. I just build HTML documents and it does exactly what I want. And that's my presentation style. We do SOPs in our business. Everybody in our company builds HTML SOPs because you can just speak into a computer. HTML files open everywhere. And it's also a good language for the LLMs to understand because it's way easier to read than a PowerPoint.

16:14If you pay attention to how software engineers are using AI, you'll have a glimpse of the future. They're mostly using file formats that they're comfortable with and that work well for development, like markdown files and things like that. So that's what you'll see them suggest. You have to use markdown files for these things. And our point of view around this, and I think this will just prove to be true, is that we need to be building artifacts or deliverables, whatever you want to call it, for humans and AI. Not just humans. Humans only is like PowerPoint. Like LLMs hate PowerPoint. I hate Word.com.

16:56John Jantsch:Can't read them at all. There's so much code around them, right? So then you have the markdown files and things that most humans look at it. Like a picture is worth a thousand words. It's a real thing. Like we need to see visuals and workflows and all those things. And so HTML happens to do both of those incredibly well. So whether or not we're right on that, I don't know. But for now, it's like transforming the way that we do work because we can now build things that both our humans understand, the LLMs understand. And also there's this magical thing that happens when a non-technical person speaks a website into existence and presses a button and it's live.

17:40So it's also a really good AI adoption tool because it's cool, right? Like it's cool to like you build something beautiful. So as a marketer, if you have a design system that most companies would never spend$30 ,000,$40 ,000,$50 ,000 on, you can speak one of those into existence. Like you can do it right now. then everything that gets designed looks great in your company and now everybody's sharing beautifully designed SOP documents like that's a weird thing to think about but it's like I like doing it it looks nice it explains what I explains my thoughts and my process and so yeah I think this year is going to be transformative in how we all do work and I don't think it's going to look the same by the end of the year so and I know you have an answer

18:27John Jantsch:for this, but this, I'm guessing listeners are out there going, okay, if I can just speak this stuff into existence, am I going to just start creating stuff without any kind of guardrails and without any human intervention? And, you know, where's the, you know, the pushback you're getting from people that hate AI, you know? So imagine the people that love AI, but don't want to be embarrassed. What do you mean by guardrails specifically? Oh, just meaning like, if I can design all these things, who's going to actually go and make sure that they're being done right, that they look good, that they say what they're supposed to say?

19:01Because, you know, some of,

19:03John Jantsch:particularly some of the image, you know, generates today. I mean, there's, it's like appalling some of the things that show up in, in some of those. The way we look at it, the way we look at how work is done is by deliverables. So it's, you can look at it as a process, you can look at it as tasks, you can look at it as deliverables but if you look at it as a deliverable because that's when the thing ends and that's when the human has to look at it it's when the deliverable is done first of all you should have the AI do a QC process on it itself you can do that and it actually does a really good job of QCing its own work so that's the thing that most people don't understand but then once it comes off the press whatever metaphor you want to use like a human looks at it and says are we sending this out And if you treat it, and this is a language that most knowledge workers don't like, it's a factory now.

19:55And so you don't QC every energy drink can that comes off the line. But you look at some of them, right? And you know that if this one's off, well, we got to look at the ones that just went off the door because maybe they have a defect as well. So it becomes more of a factory mindset, knowing that if you have a good manufacturing process, and again, marketing agencies will hate this.

20:20John Jantsch:Even the word factory, they're going to cringe at. If you do not turn your marketing agency into a factory in 2026, you will be out of business. Let's go have a, we'll do it next year and we'll see whether or not that's true. You'll have to learn good workflows. You need to learn good work instructions. You need to learn good QC process. And so, and once you do, you can start mass producing things that are top notch and knowledge work will be turned into a factory. And then what gets layered on top of that is a new skill set, which is not 100 % clear what that is yet, but we will invent new things to do that will just add value on top of that.

21:10John Jantsch:Fascinating, Steve. Appreciate you. Stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. where do you want to invite people to find out more about, I think it's simpleconsultants.ai and obviously about your book? Yeah, well, if you're up for it, I would love to give everybody in your audience free access to our BlackBell training. And we'll create a page specifically for your network. It'll be roiassociation.ai slash duct tape. Awesome. Well, as I said, we'll put that in the show notes as well. So Steve, again, appreciate you stopping by. This is awesome. And hopefully we'll run into you maybe one of these days out there on the road.

21:50John Jantsch:Absolutely. Thanks, Sean.