How AI Is Changing Online Courses, Coaching, and Client Results

0:00Blue Melnick:So what if the next big shift in events has nothing to do with virtual versus in-person and maybe everything to do with who or what is actually running the room when it's live?

0:20Blue Melnick:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Date Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Blue Melnick. He runs Sage Event Management with his wife and business partner, Barry Baumgartner. They produce live events for the likes of Tony Robbins and ClickFunnels. And these days, Blue's focused on what's next. An AI co-producer called Obi that runs inside a live event built to help small businesses run bigger launches with less overhead. So Blue, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. I'm really excited to be here and talk a little bit about AI, a little bit about events, if it makes sense.

0:55You bet. Yeah, just a fun conversation.

0:59Blue Melnick:So we all lived, well, if you were around four or five years ago, we all lived through kind of a giant shift in how events work. A lot of people really were already doing it. A lot of people had to figure it out. What's telling you that AI is actually maybe even a bigger shift and not just another way that we can be more efficient? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. you mentioned COVID, essentially, and the shift we all had to make from in-person events to virtual events. And some of us had to make that shift really quickly. I think the biggest difference between what happened then and what's happening with AI is nobody told us at that point that the shift was coming, right?

1:44Nobody was like, hey, in six months, you're not going to be able to do in-person events anymore, so start preparing.

1:51Blue Melnick:Get a Zoom account right now. Exactly, exactly. And I think that's the good news because this shift with AI, I mean, I started hearing about this inside of masterminds that we're a part of inside of conversations with our clients a couple of years ago, right? It almost was, it was with the advent of essentially ChatGPT 3.5 was really where things started to get interesting and people started to notice. Coaches started to notice. And people started to talk about prompt cookbooks and how you could generate a year's worth of content in 17 seconds and things like that. People soon realized that AI slop is a little bit too much of a real thing.

2:33But over the course of the last couple of years, it's gotten progressively better. And I think for those of us who are running coaching programs, who are running live events, who are helping people with the information that we have in our heads, right? The knowledge that we have so that our clients can take that knowledge and implement it in their business. AI is becoming a real tool that we can use to help get our clients faster results more effectively. Yeah. Most people talk about when they talk about AI still today, you hear most people talk about how I can be more productive as a result of AI, right?

3:19I can get more done. I can do this with it. I can do this. I can do that. And I really think, funny enough, I really think that the key to AI making a huge difference for a lot of people is turning that and not seeing what AI can do for me, but seeing what I can do with AI for my clients. And that's where we're seeing a huge shift. And the cool thing is, like the original question, which was, how is this one different and possibly bigger? COVID went away, right? Virtual events are still a thing, but you can also now go back and do in-person events if you want. I think AI, with AI, the genie's out of the bottle.

4:04That's sticking around. It's not like in a couple of years, we're not going to have AI with us anymore. I think that is just going to become more and more prevalent. And not to be a doomsday person, but I think clients and coaches and consultants who don't start to integrate tools that help their clients get results faster with AI are going to start to see a decline in business. And it's going to be slow and gradual. For some, it may be like paper cuts. But for some, it may be much bigger than that.

4:36Blue Melnick:Well, and I think what's going to happen and what we're telling people and coaching people on is that clients are starting to figure out businesses. We work primarily small and mid-sized businesses, starting to figure out they can use some of these tools and they are sort of haphazardly using some of these tools. But I think the real winner in the coaching consulting space this is going to be the people that show them how to do it right, how to actually, you know, put leadership first instead of the technology first. And that's really, I think a great, I think that's one of the greatest, I've been doing this 30 years.

5:07Blue Melnick:I think it's one of the greatest opportunities for consulting that, that's, you know, that's come before me at least. Totally. And, you know, I think I saw something interesting on Instagram or I don't remember if was Instagram or Facebook recently, but an old client of ours posted something online and they were like, this is so amazing. I just vibe coded a whole new CRM. And I got rid of my platform that I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on. It wasn't a big number, right? It was like two, 300 bucks a month on whatever they were using. And I have to tell you, I thought to myself in that moment.

5:46I'm a bit of a nerd. I love technology. I mean, I've been vibe coding new tools like crazy. But when I saw that, I thought to myself, that's insane. There are a lot of things that I want nothing to do with having to manage the infrastructure of. And one of them is the backbone of my business, which is our CRM, right? I don't want to deal with the... I mean, I know what I would have to deal with. I don't want to have to deal with the SMTP servers and all of the stuff behind the scenes. And sure, you can do it. But as a small business owner, isn't our time better spent on better things, like getting more results for our clients?

6:32Come on.

6:33Blue Melnick:Yeah. And I think one of the things that people are missing that there was this time when like, oh, QuickBooks is going away. Salesforce is going away. All these things are going away. I think they're only going to get stronger because we're going to get more dependent because they're building all the AI into it natively. And so all of a sudden, it's like, why would you build any? In fact, not only why would you, but I can't ever leave because my entire business now depends on this tool. So I think some of the bigger SaaS platforms are actually going to win. I agree with you. And I also think that there's an opportunity for those of us in the coaching and consulting space to create, you know, to leverage AI and help our clients get the results that we provide, right?

7:20The knowledge that we have much, much faster. My wife calls it the moment of need, right? When a small business owner, an entrepreneur wakes up at two o 'clock in the morning and they can't get back to sleep and their brain starts racing. I'm sure this has never happened to you.

7:35Blue Melnick:I had one of those last week, 2.30 in the morning. Yes. I just got up. I was like, why find it? Exactly, right. So your brain starts racing and who's the last person that you can call at that moment? It's our coach, right? You know, I'm not getting on the phone with my coach at that time of the day. So instead you log into chat or you log into Claude. And I think that's an opportunity that should be taken advantage of by those of us in the coaching and consulting space. because Claude and Chat and Grok and Gemini, all of them, they're fantastic and they're great tools, but they really don't have the experience, the expertise that you have, John, that I have, that your listeners have, right?

8:19All of us as individuals, we've got this incredible expertise that is very specific. A long time ago, I'm sure you've read it. Some of us have read it a thousand times, but Think and Grow Rich came out, right? Sure, sure, sure. There's this segment inside that book on specialized knowledge versus generalized knowledge. And specialized knowledge is what everybody tends to pay money for, right? That's why they come to us and hire us for whatever it is that you or your audience charges. It's specialized knowledge, not general knowledge. And I think it's interesting that the big thing that AI companies are aiming towards, right, the big ones, the frontier labs, as they call themselves, they're aiming for this thing called AGI, right?

9:07Have you heard the... Sure, of course, of course. Right? So AGI is, is it artificial? But the thing that's important is the GI, general intelligence. So everybody's like, oh, this is going to be amazing. We'll have this, you know, AGI. It's going to be a moment. It's like the, you know, the moment when Skynet opens up and takes over the world. I'm like, or maybe there's an opportunity for us to use AI with our specialized knowledge and grow our business and help our clients get results. And I think that's really where we're headed, you know? And I agree with you. It's a huge opportunity.

9:43Blue Melnick:Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about OB. First off, I mentioned it in the intro. What the heck is it? So a couple of years ago, Barry and I, we have a coaching program where of course we help people launch a high ticket offer through the power of a virtual live event. And we've been doing what coaches in group programs do forever, which is we take our knowledge, we teach you, and then you have to take that information, translate it to your own business and then apply it. And as a coach, as a consultant, I've said the same thing most coaches and consultants have said for years, which is I'm responsible for my part, which is I'm going to deliver all of the information to you.

10:27You're responsible for your part, which is the implementation. The problem is that gap between knowledge and implementation, we think of as something that's like, it's just like, we're just this far apart, right? It's so close. But for our clients, it's like the Grand Canyon. It is a massive gap that is where people fall down. It's why courses, generally speaking, have a sub-20 % completion rate. And we were seeing a lot of the same things inside of our coaching program. And we were like, okay, well, what if we were to use AI not to create an open-ended custom GPT, like this just open chat thing, but rather a way to use AI and our knowledge to guide our clients through a specific process or what we call a journey and ask them questions so that we have the context that is most important, like, hey, John, who do you serve?

11:32How do you help them? Where do they live in the world? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they better after they've worked with you than they were before? Things like this. And then use that context to continue to grow and build on itself with the specific thing that I want you to do next in order to get the outcome that I've promised if you work with me. So inside of our coaching program, we started to implement these AI steps that were like, okay, first, we're going to teach you how to determine who your right fit client is, create a profile for them, figure out what it is that they're struggling with at two o 'clock in the morning, and figure out what it is that they're trying to achieve.

12:14And all using a combination of AI with our know-how, right? 20 years of having done this. Then we're going to go from that to, okay, how is it, what's the framework that you have? What processes do you have to help your clients achieve the result? Then we're going to go from that to now, how do we package your offer? Right? And all of this goes in order. And as we go from one thing to the other, we taught people how to do this previously over the course of like a six month period.

12:44Blue Melnick:Right. Now what we do is we guide them through this process where they're answering a series of questions. And rather than having to apply it to figure out what their process is or apply it to figure out what their coaching program or their offer or their high ticket offer is, we just provide it to them. So we teach them the know-how so they understand how to do it. But then we, rather than them have to translate, rather than them having to, you know, cross that gap, that chasm that is the Grand Canyon, we literally just grab them and drag them across, right? Maybe I should use the analogy of a zip line.

13:22But that's what OB is. So we're using AI to ask our clients specific questions to help them get the result that they came to us to get in the first place and to get that result faster, quicker, and easier so that in a one-year coaching program, in our case, your coaching program doesn't have to be a year, your program doesn't have to be a year, but whatever it is that you're doing with them, you're able to do it faster and more effectively so that they get the outcome. Because here's the thing, You know, we've all gotten refund requests from maybe a course. Like if you sell a digital course, you're used to refund requests.

14:01When people get a result, they don't ask for a refund. Right, right.

14:05Blue Melnick:And even as somebody who has sold courses for 25 years, you know, nothing frustrated me more than the fact that I know that only percentage of people were doing anything with it. Whether they asked for a refund or not, you know, they, you know, in some cases they just felt guilty. You know, it's like, oh, it's my decision to buy it. I just didn't use it. I mean, we've all probably done that ourselves. Talk to me a little bit about the state of the course and the coaching industry in general. I know that's a big topic to open up, but one thing that, of course, people make lots of proclamations, but one thing people said with AI is like, oh, nobody's going to do a course now because nobody wants to watch a 40-minute video.

14:47Blue Melnick:They'll just tell AI to tell it what's in the 40-minute video. Tell me, just from your opinion, where that's wrong, where that's right, what that means. Well, I think there's a few things. First off, I think courses as they used to exist, let's just say yesterday, I do think are going to die a slow death over the course of the coming years. And for some people, they've died a really quick death because people just stopped buying. I think there's a number of reasons for that. One of the reasons is, for those of us who have recorded courses in the past, you know, it's kind of like birthing a book, right?

15:23It's a slow process. It takes time. And once you've recorded it, you're like, I never want to do that again. I mean, I don't ever want to stand in front of a camera with no audience and record my content again. So that's one problem. And the flip side to that is people don't, to your point, don't want to sit through a 40-minute long video and then have to translate. So I think courses as they existed yesterday are gone. But here's the thing. Over the course of the last, let's say, 120 years or so, and I know that's a big number for some of us, but over the course of the last 120 years in the education space, we've seen monumental changes, right?

16:05Television, radio, books on tape, VHS, CD-ROMs, not in this order, obviously. The internet. I don't know if you remember when Stanford released their entire course curriculum in 2012 on the internet for free. Everybody was like, oh my God, courses are dead. Stanford's not even charging for their stuff. Right. Right? So this has happened over time, multiple times. The prediction of our knowledge being necessary, it's the end of that. And every single time, what happens when you go back and look at history is the desire for knowledge, the desire for people to take you through a specific journey never changes.

16:48What changes is the delivery mechanism. So how our clients get information or desire information or transformation is changing. TikTok is a part of that, or Instagram Reels or Facebook Reels. These shorts are a part of that. AI is a part of that. They want the information and the transformation faster. So in order to keep up, in order to keep moving forward, we as course creators have to deliver that information in a bespoke way. Right. So how do you deliver customized knowledge to let's say you sell your course to 100 people? You don't want to sit down with 100 people and do this one to one. This is why we sell courses.

17:31Right. But how do you take that information, provide them bite sized chunks, the equivalent of an Instagram reel so they feel as though, oh, that's interesting. And now they answer a few questions and they get an output that is customized to them based on what they just learned. That's a different way of learning, which is where your audience is right now. They're looking for that dopamine hit. They're looking for that instant gratification that scrolling, doing this with our phone provides. But they're looking for it from you because they still need it, right? It's not like all of a sudden ChatGPT and Claude have gotten so much better and now everybody's getting results.

18:13That hasn't happened, right? Just because you have a genius in your pocket doesn't mean you know what to ask it.

18:19Blue Melnick:Yeah. In fact, I think people are working harder and getting less, quite frankly. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with you. I saw a study recently, or I read a study recently, that talked about how companies that have done huge implementations of AI in their business are actually seeing their workforce be less productive than they were before, which is, I think, surprising to many people. So I've said all along, you know, everybody talks about, oh, all the changes in marketing. And the one they often forget is the fact that what's changed the most is the way people buy now or get to buy or expect to buy.

18:54Blue Melnick:And I think that what you just pointed to, consumption behavior, you know, of course, is probably what should be driving, you know, how we're thinking, you know, about them as much as content. Yeah. And, you know, I was doing some more research. And of course, some of this research is a little self-serving, right? Because I have a solution to what I think is a problem. And I think we found, I mean, this isn't a whiteboard solution where we're like, we think this is going to work like this. I mean, we've been using this solution inside of our coaching program for two years. And we're seeing massive results.

19:29And the thing that I'm loving about it, truthfully, and this is selfish, right? But I, inside of our coaching program, we used to year over year, because it's a group coaching program, there's like 150 people in the program. We used to see about a 30 % renewal year over year. And since we've started implementing OB inside of our coaching program, renewals have increased to 45 % or more every time we go through a renewal cycle. And we've been through three of them now since we released this platform. and it's the only thing we're doing different. Like it's not like all of a sudden, it's not cheaper.

20:05We're not one of those coaching programs where when you join the second year, it's like 50 % off or anything like that. It's the same price year two as it was year one with the same promise incidentally. So I think that says, obviously says a lot. But yeah, I think consumption is really important. We have to see what it is that our clients are wanting, what the audience is looking for. and shifting to delivering it in that way so that they get the support they need in their moment of need. So this leads to just another thing that I was working on recently, just really quickly. I think this is an interesting one.

20:44I was looking at the amount of money spent on education, essentially on online education over the course of the last 30 years or so. And it does this, like that. And it's just like it's hockey stick, right? It's just like, you know. So I overlaid something else over top of that, which was, I was like, okay, now let's compare the amount of information that was accessible on the internet for free at the beginning of that compared to now, right? Where now is, let's just say 100%, and back at the beginning is a percentage of it. And when you overlay the amount of information that was free over top of the amount of information that people are spending on information, they both go hand in hand.

21:33Yeah. Right? And when you overlay that with a third piece of information, which is the amount of folks who have digital devices that can access that information, all three of them go up in the same level, which is counterintuitive because you would think, oh, everything's free on the internet. Why would they need me? And I actually think the opposite is true. right? Everything's free on the internet, which is why they need you to provide the specific transformation that they're wanting rather than this general piece of information that's out there called ChatGPT or Claude. So yeah, I think that's where we're at.

22:13That's a little bit of a soapbox, but I'll stop.

22:15Blue Melnick:No, I agree with you 100%. Unfortunately, we got to wrap up today. So I know that you are launching a program coming up soon. So you want to tell us about that where people can connect with you, find out more about Obi. Yeah. So listen, if you want to learn more about how I think course creators are about to make a comeback, my lovely wife, Barry Baumgartner, is hosting a free training. You can get access to that at changecourse.ai. If you want to learn more about Obi, Obi is going to be released in the month of September. I'm not sure when you're listening to this, but it's going to be released in September, 2026.