Why AI Isn’t Replacing You—It’s Freeing You

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tapeaket marketing podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Keith Lover. He is a serial entrepreneur and marketing expert who has founded six companies, raised over$34 million for product launches, and now leads Atomic Elevator. His team specializes in product launch support and created Ella, a pioneering tool for high-definition marketing. He started his entrepreneurial journey at 14. He secured clients like Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and inspires others as a speaker and mentor. We were just talking about it. He lives in Red Lodge, Montana, active in community service through Young Life.

0:46So, Keith, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, John. Good to be here. So, what did you do at 14? Oh, my gosh. So, I had the opportunity to build a software platform for an airport in Billings. I was painting pipes in the summer, and they found out I knew something about computers. And during the regular smoke break time, I started creating a database to keep track of the paper towels and other inventory. Got invited upstairs. That turned into an invitation to build the software. And apparently KPMG had offered him a bid for about$20 ,000. I said, I'll do it for two. And they took it. So that was the very first commercial client I had.

1:28I think I started my first business. I was 16. It was not nearly as glamorous. I was going door to door convincing people to let me seal their driveway. But I paid my way through high school and college doing similar things. I think the idea of asphalt going down and paint going up, we do what we have to do. I just got a lucky break that day, right? So we're going to talk about AI a lot today, I think. It's a hot topic. It's probably the hottest topic going right now. So in fact, I've started a group I call Practical AI for Marketing because I think there's just a lot of, as with any technology, there's all this futuristic talk of what it can do or what it is going to do someday.

2:14And I really like to always bring it down to, okay, that's great, but what should it do? So in terms of your conversations with smaller businesses, how do you help them see the practical uses of AI and not sort of the robots running the world future? You know, one of the things that I like to do is separate the application side of things from the construction side of things. And I think there's a lot of people that are confused about that, John. And I think I'm reminded of a workshop that was being done for business owners in Montana a couple of weeks ago. And they brought in a prompt engineer and machine learning expert for the day to teach them how to do stuff that most of them really didn't care about.

3:00And frankly, didn't understand that that was what was going to be the topic. So I don't think people even know what this beast called AI is. So there's people who are building tools and then there's people who are actually using tools. And those two probably need to be separated before I can even answer the next part of your question. Well, first off, then let's back up a little bit. What percentage of businesses, business owners, people working for businesses, do you think are actually using even a simple interface like ChatGPT? I think every business owner I've talked to has at least experimented with and tried ChatGPT.

3:38when we take forms on our website we ask them how frequently are they using it and i would say that probably a quarter of them aren't using it more than once a week and that's surprising to me they still haven't found that thing and if i might offer a hypothesis about why i think we are used to something like google where you know you type in a search and a computer gives an answer and AI's potential is so much different than that. But most people are sitting down and thinking about this as a search tool and maybe a little bit smarter search tool. And they're just not sure what's beyond that, even at the application layer.

4:17So one of the things that I don't know, you know, you talked about bringing in this large language model expert to talk about things. And like that just goes nowhere with business owners. So I'm going to bring up agents, which maybe we have to kind of break down a little bit. But that's one of the areas where people are like, the future is coming. You're going to have agents replacing all of your people. We don't actually have agents yet. Not really. Because there's a lot of things that I think are going to happen over... I mean, I think we're going to have some simple task bots. But the one that people throw out, tell your agent to book me the best ticket on this flight, blah, blah, blah.

4:59Well, they've got to have access to all the data, all the airline things, and those people aren't going to share that information. Or if they do, some big tech company will be the one that does the interface and will just be a product of theirs like Facebook and not a user. So talk, I just went and rambled all over the place there, but talk a little bit about, you know, that the where we are now with what agents are, I guess, where we are now and really what is going to be a hurdle to this large scale adoption. Yeah. So as I understand and use agents, they basically are bots, if you will, programs that can perform a discrete task and do so in repetition and kind of string those tasks, perhaps one to another to another.

5:46And instead of like right now, if you sit down and chat TPT and say, hey, you know, can you give me input about a story or can you review this website and tell me the pros and the cons of it or whatever the query might be? An agent can actually do something that's much more complex and a series of steps. So it might be, can you build an entire website? Yeah. Right. And step one is this and step two is this and step three. I think where agents are today is still very much in the experimental world. I love the fact that as a company that's created a platform, we now can begin to move our entire architecture into what they're calling agentic.

6:29So we're able to take what we were finding other ways of doing and we can now do it better and easier because most of the things that we need to have done are complex and require more than one step. And agents will help us do that. Yeah, and there'll be a lot of stringing these things together too, right? You complete this task and then go give your output to this agent who then has been trained to do X, right? I mean, is that kind of another way to look at it? I love that vision, John, that really interoperability of agents. It's like, why not have the thing that's really good at X talk to the other thing that's really good at Y and talk to the other thing that's really good at Z.

7:07In the field of marketing, kind of the analog metaphor, if you will, would be the branding person who just is the wizard in the marketing world, right? They're able to just say, this is the emotional state that we're going to evoke for people and pontificate on that. And then you've got the designer who tries to interpret that. And then you've got the copywriter who actually puts words to it. And then you've got the HTML person who has to construct it. And then maybe you've got somebody that needs to be the messaging architect that's thinking about it. And then the performance person, all these different things.

7:41Wouldn't it be great if those could all be strung together? So, yeah, and I think that's a maybe that's a little bit of the dilemma of how people when they're thinking about embracing AI in general is that, you know, one one vision I've seen is is the org chart that has maybe those those analog managers, if you will. Is that what we're going to call people now? Analog managers. But then each of those people will have three agents that help them do their function. And they've all been maybe specifically trained on a thing. But then I've also seen people say, no, we're going to have the data analysis agent that's going to go cross department.

8:18You know, how do you see the org chart of the future? You know, I think the org chart of the future is probably going to be as diverse as organizations of the future. I think the models, what's beautiful about what's happening in this world is the models can be completely novel. We can create things that have never before been seen. An example is, we have been building our go-to-market plans using our software itself. We haven't needed really a marketing department. We even haven't had to do advertising in a traditional way. Most of our team is fully fractional and we can all cooperate and actually perform at a much higher level for a lot less money.

9:02And I don't even know what an org chart is. We had a potential investor asked us to build one and I'm like, We don't even have one for our company. It's just not the way we operate. We kind of collect around tasks and bring expertise to those tasks and then perform those tasks. So it's just a very different organizational model that we've chosen. And I think there's a lot of freedom in how people are able to build. But see, I hear an org chart in there. It's just way different than anything we've been taught, right? So I think it's still... Because an org chart to me is not people doing jobs. an org chart is what functions need to be done.

9:41And so I think that's kind of what you're describing, but we're all just used to, this is our head of that and this is our VP of that. And I think that that whole, that's what's interesting about, I think what's going on is it's not just like, how do we augment what we're already doing? It's how do we rethink everything, right? I love the freedom. I think the moment when we accidentally discovered this idea that turned into this platform for marketing called Ella. This was not an intentional discovery. It was pure accident. And in that moment, every single neuron in my brain fired. Every pattern from that 14-year-old kid who wrote the software for that airport in Billings to the I who'd been a student of marketing for the last decade fired and said, wait a minute, I can do this differently now.

10:31And I can ask this question in this way and get a completely different perspective than the old model was go to the expert. If we invert and put all the experts into a model, it shifts and everything changes. And I'm addicted to that innovation. So I think it's wonderful. Do you ever feel like TV ads are just for the big guys? Well, not anymore. Ad Critter makes it easy and affordable for small business owners to run targeted, connected TV ads that drive real results. Their full funnel approach combines high impact connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting. So you can easily reach your audience across platforms and keep your business top of mind.

11:15And the best part, Ad Critter takes care of the tricky stuff. Just upload your customer data and they handle the rest. And try it out for yourself. Right now, duct tape marketing listeners get a dollar for dollar match on any TV campaign up to$5 ,000. That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. So one of the certainly themes that is prevalent is that this technology is going to replace a lot of people. I mean, every technology does, right? Or at least changes what those people do. Where do you fall on kind of the, it's going to revolutionize industries, replace a lot of people, augment a lot of the value we can bring?

12:11I mean, where do you fall on that continuum? So yes, yes, and yes. Yeah, okay. I do think that AI is going to transform, to augment, to replace. But I don't think that changes our sense of self. I don't think that changes our value effect. If anything, for me, what it's done is created more freedom around that. I talked to so many people, and I know on our team, we're avid, minute-by-minute users of AI. We're more confident in what we can do and in the gifts that we've been created to bring to the world because we augment the things that maybe we're not as good at. I'm a visionary. I'm not an integrator.

12:56So I see big ideas. And when you ask me to actually turn that into a step, you know, set of sequential steps, I just, my brain hurts. I don't like that work and I don't have to do that work anymore. So I think it's not replacing people, but it's replacing some of the things that we as people have done. And what that does is gives us the freedom to go back to what is our zone of genius? What is our superpower? What is it that we love to do. And I don't think AI will ever replace humanity. I think it's just bringing us up to be the very best versions of ourselves. Well, it's interesting because I certainly, I've always, you know, from a marketing standpoint, our mantra has always been strategy before tech.

13:39And I think that in a lot of ways that makes the strategic thinker who can also master AI, who also understands marketing operations, that's the job of the future, isn't it? As opposed to the agency that comes in and does the stuff. I think that's right. I would say our focus has actually been trying to go in and provide even greater effectiveness and efficiency for the strategists. And so because of that, I see a world where AI can actually do a lot of the strategy when well guided and augmented by humans through that. I would say for me, as I've contemplated kind of my own work shift in the last, say, year, most of my time is now relational.

14:25And that can't ever be replaced by AI. Most of my time is getting to understand people and their problems and then finding a way to bring that in. But I'm not spending time on strategy so much as I am building relationships that allow my tools to build that strategy. So I think that's a higher level. Even though it's more one-to-one, there is such a brand aspect to that. There is such a trust aspect to that. And I think that those are the things that are really going to allow them. If there's going to be winners and losers, I think people that get that, I think are going to side on the winner.

15:00You know what I love about what you said there too, is it just kind of reminds me of the benefit to AI in getting us out of ourselves, that if we're going to be able to establish trust. One of the ways that I do this today that I did in 12 months ago is I talk about the fact that I run everything I do through a blind spot and a bias detector. I run everything I do through the lens of our software that can look at a hundred different marketing people's perspectives. And that actually increases my trustworthiness, my credibility with somebody because I'm actually admitting my own limitations. Yeah.

15:42That's one of my favorite prompts is like, what should I be asking you or what am I not asking you? You know, that kind of thing, you know, or, or, or I sometimes have to say, stop agreeing with me. I like to think that my AI is sometimes a little bit too puppy-like, you know, it just wants a wagon's tail and say, yes, Keith, I love you. Will you rub my belly? That's a brilliant idea. Yeah. She's like, no, no, no. Even when I ask, I need to be to go do something. And the end result, if I say, is this biased? And she says, yes. I'm like, well, why did you do them that way in the first place? So I have one more question, but I really do want, we haven't, I want to spend some time on what you're doing specifically with Ella because it relates to everything we're talking about.

16:29But one of the things that, you know, anybody who says the five things that are coming this year, you know, personalization in marketing is certainly a buzzword that's going to be on that list all the time. And it seems AI can help that, but I also don't see a lot of people doing it yet. And is the real missing ingredient is it can't personalize without access to data? I think it's a great insight. I think I would challenge how much data we can give it access too. I would say in general, I'll give you an example. I love what there's a tool called Crystal Nose has done, which is they've used AI to go, you know, essentially determine somebody's personality.

17:11And that gives you a degree of personalization to present information in a particular style. So for example, anytime I do a sales follow-up, I run it first through Crystal and I have Ella rewrite it to that person's disk profile. And that gives me a level of personalization. That's not just this was the conversation we had, but this is who you are and how you probably prefer to receive information. So I think we're getting ulcer to it. And it might just be bullet points in short sentences as opposed to, you know, necessarily hi, John. Right. These are the three things we talked about sign here.

17:48Exactly. Right. Right. So talk a little bit about Ella. If somebody came to you and said, What's Ella? Yeah, so we describe Ella as a high-definition marketing machine. And the reason that we've chosen to describe her that way is we have found, as professional marketers, that most marketing has historically been very fuzzy. The fuzziness has been caused by specializations and fragmentation, right? The fuzziness has been caused by shifts in tactics and expectations. And the fuzziness is the fact that at the end of the day, most marketing is really a hypothesis that needs to be tested out there anyway.

18:26So it's social science, it's behavioral science. And so what we've said is let's try to provide more pixels to the picture. Let's take frameworks and connect them. Let's take pictures and define them in greater resolution. Let's interconnect them so that when somebody says, I want to talk to John about duct tape marketing, they're able to do so with just a high degree of precision. So Ella is a tool that enables better messaging, more discrete personas and essentially better results because of this high definition process. Yeah. And boy, I will say, you know, you used one of my favorite words, frameworks.

19:08You know, one of the best things you can do if you're trying to get some sort of output out of an AI tool is to say, use this framework that's well-defined. I think at least it gives it some guardrails to say, okay, you know, I'm not just going to write something that hopefully sounds good. You're going to write something that maybe is using a proven framework. And so it's going to be more effective right off the bat, whether or not the output's, you know, word for word, what you're going to use, at least the structure will be there. Yeah, I think frameworks, you know, I got drawn into the idea of frameworks because I was a computer guy who fell into the field of marketing, right?

19:46I'm used to, here is a subroutine. If you're going to tell a story, here's seven blanks to fill in. Oh, Donald Miller, thank you for giving me the seven blanks to fill in. Like, I need that kind of thing. And what has been true about all the frameworks, at least that I've experienced, is while fantastic, they've always been discrete and probably more unitaskers. So they're fantastic for one thing, but they are often missing another thing. And what, at least in my mind, has been the missing link to all of this is a unifying, almost marketing operating system that pulls all those frameworks together.

20:25And that's the big aspiration for what we're trying to build. Are you staying very focused on the niche market of, and I thought I read this, of SaaS go-to-market? Or are you really putting yourself out there as any type of business or industry? Yeah, we started in the field of SaaS. Obviously, we are, too, a SaaS product and understand those frameworks very well. But as Ella has so quickly grown, people are contributing their own frameworks. We've got authors who are saying, use mine. Or we've got practitioners who say, have you heard about this amazing system called duct tape? And I'm like, yes, yes, I have.

21:03And so, you know, we're trying to integrate those. And so the idea of Ella is she can help with B2B, B2C, really across industries. And she's getting smarter every single time somebody uses her and at least volunteers their feedback to Ella. So one question that comes up a lot of times and will probably be continue to be debated forever. But are there privacy concerns? You know, I'm sharing all of my personal company data. Is that something or, you know, as an agency, I'm sharing my clients data. Is that an issue with a model like or a tool like Ella? It is an issue for all AI, and Ella has decided to respond to that with a very clear privacy policy, a very clear non-disclosure agreement that we enter into, and also very clear technical parameters where we have opted out.

22:01underlying our tool is open AI, but we have basically disallowed open AI from using any prompt for training purposes, any prompt for storage purposes. And so we can say with confidence that we are protecting the confidentiality of that information. And I think it is important that we do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to be, you know, a raging debate for some time. And I think we'll end up having, won't we end up having the same thing that happened to the search engines that all the privacy and all the stuff that they've been doing and not telling anybody will come back in lawsuits probably.

22:40I am excited to see how intellectual property will continue to evolve around all of this. But in the meantime, we're going to let people do great work and keep what they're doing private. Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you'd send folks to learn more about Atomic Elevator and your work? You bet. Atomicelevator.com. And we've got free trials available. We'd love to sign up anybody. Let them take Elevator Spend for a couple of weeks and see what kind of impacts you can make for their clients. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and maybe I'll run into you one of these days the next time I'm up in Montana.

23:19I hope that would be the case.