The Playbook for Building a Career That Wins in the Age of AI

0:00Podcast nation, before I get you into today's podcast big announcement. as you probably heard at this point because I had John from Stan on the show. I'm an investor advisor to an incredible startup called Stan, Stan.Store. I'm sending you right now to garyvee.com, garyvee.com slash Stan. Go check this out. We've done a Gary V. Stan Store Challenge which actually has a weekly call with me. This is built for everyone who's been affected, honestly, by my overall content. The tech stack, all these features and the minimal costs per month that Stand Store has built is really the tool that was needed for this world that I envisioned when I wrote Crush It, when I wrote Crushing It, and this overall thing I'm thinking a lot about lately, which is the individual empire, right?

0:48This creator entrepreneur slash entrepreneur creator economy that I think is gonna eat up the oxygen, very honestly, the thing that so many of you want in your life and the reason so many of you are not there yet is you've got the strategy for me. you've got the ambition within yourself but you don't have the tools for you to fully maximize it and I believe you can find that at Stan store Stan dot store but specifically I want you to sign up for it through my challenge because I want to get access with you and plus there's a bunch of cool things so if you want to go see those cool things go to GaryVee.com slash Stan S-T-A-N now to the podcast this is the Gary Vee audio experience good afternoon everybody Thank you for having me.

1:33It's funny, I was just sitting, seeing that video for the millionth time, and I was thinking, this is gonna be a speech that I'm excited to look back on in five to seven years. I think that brings me to my first kind of statement, which is, I guess, congratulations. I think it's really interesting when I look back at that video. I launched the e-commerce website in 1997. It was one of the first three to four e-commerce wine retail sites in America. And where I was in my life matched up with technology making a big change in our society. I was in a place where I was about to go full-time into my family liquor store business.

2:18And I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in New York and New Jersey. Really dreamed since I was about 14 to have a big impact on my dad's liquor store. was very grateful and continue to be very grateful for having great parents. And basically at 18, 19, 20, I was obsessed with helping them. And what I thought at 18, 19, and 20 was that meant that I was gonna build the Toys R Us of wine, as I called it, which was I planned on for seven, eight years, I studied Walmart and Target and 7-Eleven. I really thought my destiny was going to be to open up 100 or 200 physical wine super stores around the country, and that's how I was gonna do it.

3:03And then, you know, I walked into a dorm room in college and heard, koo-cooch, koo-cooch, and for the kids in the room that don't know what that is, that was dialed up internet, and really that afternoon, like, I knew my life had changed, truly. I didn't know how, but I literally, and this is really gonna be funny for the kids, The internet was so crazy in 94, 95 that I literally stood behind somebody on a desk on the internet and watched people take one hour turns to be on the internet and we would watch them be on the internet and I literally stood there that first night starting at like 9 p.m.

3:43and at like one in the morning it was my turn and I got on the internet and in about five minutes I found a bulletin board selling baseball cards and I just, you know, my commerce and entrepreneurial DNA took over and I just kind of never was quote unquote the same. And there's been different smaller versions of that throughout my career when I realized that email was free and I could send sales material through it or when Google AdWords came out, that was an unbelievably big moment in my career and then when I saw YouTube and MySpace and Facebook and blah, blah, blah. I was at a Raiders-Rams football game in LA on a business meeting and the game ended and I'm walking back to the car a couple years ago and my brother calls me and I had never heard that tone in his voice and he had just played with ChatGPT and obviously being an early stage investor whether it's been blockchain or crypto or AI or even currently as I sit here today with you thinking about what's about to happen with AR and VR as I truly believe the glasses will become the primary device over the phone a decade from today.

4:56And what will that mean? And all of a sudden, what does that all mean to the apps? And what does it mean to the space I see here and to society? I like spending a lot of time thinking about tomorrow, but I don't like wasting my time on tomorrow, which is what I think a lot of people make a mistake about. And I definitely don't like being excited about yesterday. we all sit here today in this room right now in a pretty unbelievable moment. I was fortunate that I was in retail when the internet thing happened. That was one of the sectors you could really do something with early, right? It would be a long time before the internet would impact dating or Uber this or other sectors, but not lost on anyone here is Amazon and eBay They were two of the biggest winners of the late 90s in Internet 1.0.

5:50I wish you had cameras that were strong enough. Maybe the front row can confirm this. I'm literally getting goosebumps right now because I genuinely believe, this is why I said yes to this talk. I genuinely believe that anyone who is in customer service and customer experience in this exact second is uncomfortably fortunate, has found themselves in a sector an industry that is first, potentially first, very clearly one of the industries that is going to move first, hardest, fastest in integrating AI. Out of all the things in the world that one could be doing for a living right now, this is one of the most meaningful sectors that will most taste the impact of this extraordinary technology.

6:46I have no clue if you're thrilled you're in this business or you really wish you were a fucking doctor right now. I have no idea how you got into this room tonight, but I can promise you, I feel confident when I say this, you will look back at this moment with either phenomenal joy of the serendipity or with regret that you did not squeeze the opportunity harder. I say that because knowing the makeup of this room, there's a lot of people here who are already in it. You know, like for a lot of you, you're in it. You wouldn't be at this conference if you're not in it, or like on the cusp of being in it.

7:26But the reality is, I think you all know this, the term is out there, the technology is out there, people are flirting, people are demonizing, people are scared, rightfully so, I understand. you should read the articles that were written when the tractor was invented and 85 % of society worked on farms. But this is, you know, when I thought about this talk and by the way, I'm gonna do some Q &A so I'll talk a bunch but it was very gracious they're gonna do some Q &A so keep in mind if anything pops up, you can ask me a left field question happy to tell you what wine goes with fish whatever you're interested in.

8:03But you find yourself in an industry that has already been affected, clearly has been affected. It makes me think about a couple things. I was really a merchant and a salesman who really dedicated his life to really becoming educated about wine. And that was great, and I really helped my dad build a big business. But I was a wine connoisseur and a merchant, but that technology came along and I committed myself to that technology and that allowed me to really ride that wave to create unparalleled opportunities in my life that had the internet not come along would have been different. I kind of feel as I was driving here that there's a lot of people sitting in this audience that are in the same place I was at that moment which is I'm curious if people understand in this room how big of an advantage you have within your organizations and within society at large if you actually take knowing how to use these tools more seriously.

9:22The fact that this is fully integrated already into your actual day-to-day is a pretty big deal. just you know for context currently I'm the CEO of almost 3 ,000 person global holding company agency firm that works with pretty much fortune 500s but we've got some in the fortune 5000 I do a lot of investing and so I work with a lot of late stage 50 to 250 million dollar revenue businesses I try to pay attention to culture quite a bit so I feel comfortable in this sentence most people that work at companies are still debating the concept of this. You know, figuring it out, flirting with it, fearing it.

10:05It's still in the muckery. It's still in the haziness. It's still in the gray. Probably right this second, a lot of people are having their big 2026, how are we gonna integrate AI into our business meetings right this second, and you're all already running. And I remind all of you that in business, like sports, speed is a big advantage. And so the biggest thing on my mind coming in here today is this isn't like my normal talks or podcasts that I have to do right now where I have to convince people like, you better stop fucking around, this is here. Right, you know that. This is a very weird one that I was excited about which is are you squeezing this opportunity hard enough?

10:51Do you realize the serendipity of your career put you in a place where you can understand this stuff more? And more importantly, do people in this organization know that the customer service CX leaders in this room actually could become one of the loudest voices within the organization alongside a CTO or a CIO around the effectiveness or the realities of these tools because you're coming from a place of practitionership and practicality, not academia and thesis. Understand? Let's clap it up for each other on that. Like,

11:35there's a reason I asked for that clap. I need to like reset everyone here in a very, I'm gonna break it down nice and slow one more time for the kids in the back. There are very few individuals within organizations that are actually already at the forefront of this being implemented and they can place and taste it. This is a substantial advantage for all of you and not knowing one's ambition in this room, you look back to the history of time. Let me give you a historical comp. In the 80s when home computers and you had developers, if I sat here and this was 1985 and you were all coders, I could say things like I believe in 40 years some of you could end up being the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world.

12:25That wasn't obvious then. A internet developer didn't, you know, or a computer developer didn't go to the CEO suite. But over time, it became so important that that became real. I personally believe, oh, there it is. The second book I ever wrote, this is actually a good visual, if you bear with me. The first book I wrote in my life, Crush It, I wrote in 2008. I basically said that you could make money on the internet, on YouTube and Facebook. I basically talked about being a creator or influencer. The first 50 reviews on Amazon, I got one star and told, and everyone said I was a snake oil salesman because nobody would ever make$100 ,000 a year on YouTube.

13:10That book changed my life because it was really the book that went most viral in the culture around the concept of internet personal brand, where it all was. It came out in 2009. A lot of you know this. It wasn't on everyone's radar. Now it seems like it is the conversation. But the second book out of all the things I could have ever written about in my life, the second book I ever wrote on the back of a massive New York Times bestselling book with a lot of pressure on me and a lot of opportunity on me, the second book I ever wrote was The Thank You Economy. Basically, The Thank You Economy is a book, if you've ever skimmed it, or if you want to AI the summary of it.

13:53I have a funny feeling that the AI and the LLM would come back and say, basically, it talks about humanity and business. It talks about scaling the unscalable. It was a story basically based on the fact that I believed, there was a quote in there that I used a lot on stage back then, which said, the more we become like the Jetsons, my belief is those who act like the Flintstones will win. And to break that down for the kids that have no idea what the fuck those two cartoons are, in the 70s and 80s, 60s, there was two cartoons that were quite popular. One was in outer space and one was prehistoric.

14:32And my belief was in 2011 that technology would do what it's done. It would commoditize much. it would commoditize much but it was the humans that knew how to be the most human that would actually win by weaponizing or understanding those tools. Now I have heard of AI concepts back then but that's not really what I was alluding to. It was more that I was alluding to. If you treated Twitter and Facebook and Instagram not to just post stuff with the hope that you get something but you get into the comments and the DMs and you actually care about people and you listen to what they say and you actually engage with them, you could win.

15:13I can tell you that the only reason I have personal brand and I am known is because from 2007 to 2011, I literally spent seven to 11 hours a day replying to every person on Twitter that ever engaged with me and or even referenced anything about wine. As you can imagine, thinking back that that took me five years of my life where I now can have an AI agent do that for me is interesting to think about. But I think the point is taken. I'm sure it's not lost on all of you. Everything that you know right now is going to become standard. The point I was making with the engineer in 1985 is the point I'm making with all of you.

15:56I genuinely believe a CX customer service mindset human within an organization that does five to$500 million in revenue that is being very thoughtful of how to get very smart about everything to do with AI because they are in the serendipitous position to be interacting with it in real life, not in decks and theory, have the biggest upside professionally in a lot of organizations over the next 25 years. And so I come here today out of joy and really my belief, and I could be wrong, you might all, you know, maybe I'm naive. My belief is I do not believe that this audience understands the upside in front of them and I was interested in coming and telling you that it is.

16:45That's what I have to say. All right? Now, what do we do about that? What does that mean? Couple things. I think it starts with execution. I think the biggest thing I'm actually asking and the biggest thing that I would implore all of you to do, not knowing how senior some of you are or where you are in the organization, you must become a practitioner of these tools. This is very important. This cannot be where you're the architect and everybody knows it in detail. For example, back to a comp, in my social media world, I still write the copy for every post I post on Instagram. Everybody 100th of the size of my audience has outsourced that to their intern, to their this, to their that.

17:30I implore you, the luxury of having the ability to have your hands on the steering wheel of these tools right now is one of the great opportunities of your career. This is really pretty historically true over the last 30, 40 years of technology. It is the ones that are practitioners and understand the tools and the craft that win every growth opportunity in front. This one's so intimidating and you know this. many of you started off jeez many of you the second you heard about this for your thing got scared it was going to fuck you up you know that people are hesitant to this thing people are concerned CFOs like it but a lot of other people are quite concerned about it and I think you take that as an advantage what I mean by that is of course you should inspire especially if you have teams they have to do their thing but I think in practicality this is the time to really get deep on these tools.

18:28If you're using this tool or other tools, this is not something you should know on paper. This is something you should know deeply. Because that knowledge shows up to the next thing I want you to do. My hope is that over the next six to 18 months, you get deep enough that you actually understand it. You understand the logic of how it works. You understand how to maximize it. I'm sure not lost on any of you, including the incumbent tools that you grew up with or the old ones. tools are only as good as the mechanic using them. Right? The ROI of a basketball for LeBron James is billions of dollars.

19:03The ROI of basketball for me is two torn meniscuses and probably a negative$50 ,000. This tool doesn't do the work for you. You do the work. In fact, even at hyperscale in a decade with AI, this is going to be the game. Now, it's going to get consolidated. There's going to be a lot of things and you're going to have to be better and all these things. But ironically, I actually think the spirit of this industry is the winning spirit of the day. As we become more AI'd out and more teched out and more VR'd out and all that, it is the people that are most human that will win. And I think we need to think about that.

19:41And so I implore you, one, to not be in your ivory tower if you have that senior of a position, to not be a manager of, This is 100 % the time to get your hands dirty. Humility is often the gateway to success and happiness. This would be a really good time to be professionally humble and get your hands very dirty on every AI tool you possibly can. Here's why. The next thing happens. My belief is the way this is going to play out is there's going to be the tech energy in companies around this, but then there's gonna be the consumer, the B2B, the humanity part of it all and I believe the people that have the most experience with it have the potential to have the biggest voices in the room in it.

20:32Obviously, I'm not aware of how all your organizations work and I do not know how open your organization is to having you contribute to a conversation that might not be in your department or in your lane. However, thank God, when there's times of change, oftentimes of fear and innovation, things open up a little bit more than they used to. And again, I believe it is your advantage of knowing how to use these tools or have been in it that allows you to start voicing that and bringing that to the table. Both on very selfish career growth within what you do, but also very honestly, I'm sure it's not lost on anybody.

21:12By the way, this room is beautiful. I'm sure it's not lost on any of you. this is about life now too. Like everyone's life is gonna be completely engulfed by this technology. This technology sits in the Mount Rushmore of human innovations. This is electricity. This is like when the plane was invented. Like this is going to change the calculus in a very substantial way. So I think that is a very, very big deal. And then I would tell you what probably comes natural to a lot of you if you love what you're doing in this room. It's almost like do not play in the middle. We just spent a lot of time on like go all in, get dirty and then all the way over here start strategizing, start playing in your minds that these tools and this reality is fully real so what do you do with your time then?

22:10One thing I'm just spending a lot more time on is going back to the thank you economy and thinking a lot about what do you do to make depth happen in a world where width is going to a scale we've never seen before. In fact, when I put my investors hat on, the companies I'm investing in are like restaurants and concert companies and like, I literally am about to help someone start a business that charges people to take walks with other people.

22:46Like literally paying someone 50 bucks to take a walk with you around the block. And I have a funny feeling when I say that, as you can imagine, like when bottled water came out, can you imagine how that landed? Someone's like, I'm gonna sell bottled water. They were like, it's free. And then it became. I think if I was here 10 years ago and said, I'm gonna start a company that charges people to take a walk with another human, it wouldn't have landed. But I think we all know the world is getting far more digital. loneliness on the rise, it's not like so crazy that that could be. Whether it is or not, I do not know.

23:21It's a hypothesis, a curiosity. But I think that little side thing that's going on over there really matters here. I think about what do we do? Because I think in this, I think in CX and customer service pretty much every moment of my life, hence why I wrote that book, what do we do? What do our departments do? we can have such meaningful impact with our human part while the AI part continues to grow and I think that's where I get really excited that's what I was hoping to kind of accomplish here man if I could get some of the people in the room to realize you gotta go really hard on both opposites become psycho expert on AI and then become remarkably good at understanding what becomes double offense on human capabilities that are not replicatable in the next five years in an AI world, now you're talking about a department that I think can make significant impact.

24:16So, look, I mean, this is stuff that I'm so excited about. I'm excited for all of you to be at it. I think you should really, really go hard at it in both places that I'm going. And I think most of all, I'm very grateful because I'm super well-parented and got very fortunate in a lot of ways that I've been able to take advantage of big technology shifts over the last 25 years pretty well as an entrepreneur. but I will be incredibly transparent here. And by the way, I'm probably going to go to Q &A soon so I don't know how you're planning on doing the runners on each side so we should get that going but thank you.

24:50But I stand here today and if I'm being incredibly honest with myself, I've done a really nice job squeezing Web 1.0, Web 2.0, crypto. I bought Bitcoin in 2014 but I bought$4 ,000 worth and I could have bought$400 ,000 worth. Even for someone like me where it comes natural to live around corners, to be fully high risk, to do all that stuff, I myself have not squeezed every moment of when I saw it first or best hard enough. And every time five years later, I'm like, damn, why didn't I make more TikToks in 2018? You know? Damn, why didn't I continue continue my podcast in 2014, 15, 16, because it would, like, there's unbelievable amounts of me stopping short because I was too early or not squeezing hard enough because I didn't let it play fully out.

25:51I will tell you that all of you in this theater find yourself in the perfect spot. You really do. You're already using it. You're already in it. And I could not recommend more you not live with regret and let this moment pass. They're in the right spot, squeeze it, take advantage of it and I hope that makes someone go harder. I wanted to go macro because what I just shared with you, I genuinely believe is the punchline, right? The two edges, go all in on both. This is the opportunity. Understand how that gives you leverage. Start to be a communicator of what you know in your personal, professional life, your side hustle within the organization.

26:30That is the big punchline here. But I wanted to do Q and A because I'm incredibly comfortable going in the weeds on anything that anybody here has within this genre or ecosystem. So that's why I wanted to do it. So yeah, I think raise your hands or stand up and we'll get rocking and rolling. If you are starting a company today and you don't have any customers yet so customer experience is like not relevant, where do you think is the most important area to focus like taking advantage of AI today? So just in general, do you have the business? Are you building the business? Are you debating the business?

27:09The business is being built. It's direct to consumer. It's a direct to consumer brand? It's an app. It's an app. So, you know, I think, look, for me, for example, the number one thing I use AI for by a country mile is to think with me. So, if I'm you, you're trying to figure out what's about to happen. And that could literally be hiring your number two. It could be literally how to get awareness in the app store. It could be how to fundamentally get a arbitrage with influencer cosigns, how to get, you know, personal brand investors to get involved. There could be so many things. So, for example, when I prompt, I prompt only in voice.

27:52Let me rephrase. I prompt 90, 80 % of the time, if it's important to me, in voice, because I am a much better communicator in voice than I can write. I did a 39 minute prompt yesterday. I'm serious. I did a 30, I looked, I was like, because I've got, it's so crazy. In just six months, I've gone from like using it. I'm sure all of you felt this in the last three, four years, two years, whatever it's been for you. At first you're like, oh, I'm gonna treat this like Google search, right? We had to go through that. You had to go like learn that this is not search. Then I went into like more basic and now I'm just like, chat GBT is my friend.

28:29like you know like perplexity Gemini are like my homies like they're my thinking partners I do strategy so for me it's like literally talking like you talk like a three and a half minute as if you're you know you know who I am and as if we were having coffee you like for a minute and 47 seconds ask that question it's sad for me that their answer is going to be pretty fucking good you know like like this is real life so I think you have to think through you have to get unbelievably curious and unbelievably detailed and unbelievably human to get the answers. That's how I would use it. I think it's the thinking.

29:06All the other shit you know, like you can make your deck in it in one second. You can build your fucking app in it in vibe coding. And we're in such a crazy time, but I think it's the thinking. The winners are going to be the most creative and the smartest, not the people that know how to press the fucking buttons. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. hi hey there I'm Erica thanks for being here so as AI evolves and we're all excited and doing all the things what are some tips that you have for ensuring job security because I work with I work with Finn, I program Finn but eventually there will be nothing else that I can do for it so what are some things that I can do to ensure that I still have a job in the next three to five years so it's the most fun question so a couple things I think you I think I think the most practical answer was what I ended with I think you need to be great at thin and everything else because that knowledge of how to be a good mechanic will matter next on the other side you need to decide there used to not be CX it was just customer service Then it became customer experience.

30:25I see some shaking heads, they lived it, they know the history. My friends, humanity and human shit is about to become uncomfortably valuable. So I need everyone to go into their spirit way more than into their tactics. So if, like for example, let's talk about my company. In my 3 ,000 person company, our head of HR is called our chief heart officer. I made that up because I came from small business family land and entrepreneur land and when I got into corporate land I thought HR was the homies. I swear to God. I am who I am. I was a bad student. I was in my own bubble. I didn't know a lot about the world.