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Kickoff Sessions
Weekly podcast episodes with the sharpest minds in the world to help you live a richer & more fulfilling life.
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Kickoff Sessions
#335 8-Figure Roundtable - The Only Offer That Survives AI in 2026
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- Darren Lee
- Adam Power
- Usman Kayani
- Oezkan Akkilic
0:00 Intro & Preview
0:57 Vetting Leads Before the Calendar
3:50 Replacing Ad Agencies With AI Agents
6:31 Why Done-For-You Offers Win in 2026
9:21 Mindset, Adaptation & Human Taste
12:33 AI Setters vs. Real Emotion
18:13 Multi-Agent Systems That Run the Business
22:45 GDPR, Security & AI Dialer Risks
26:03 Will the CRM Disappear?
29:24 How to Thrive With AI (Not Just Survive)
37:25 Resourcefulness & Final Thoughts
AI Does The Backstage Work
Darren LeeIt's not interesting how AI is doing everything in your business but the thing that gets the result for the prospect. So it's like everything behind the scenes. It's nailing. I actually said this at a post but it's recently, which is done few offers are the ones that are going to win in 2026.
SPEAKER_01The biggest growth that I've had in the last quarter is AI agents coming into the business to validate the leads before they hit the calendar. And with that like small tweak, what I'm able to happen is feed that loop back to any formal growth, ads, marketing, whatever, and have a much better feedback loop to get higher quality leads. You guys are in a software business, all three of you.
SPEAKER_03I know all the best softwares have the simplest looking user interface, and the worst ones have the most features and have like such a complex one. There's just so much about simplicity and doing less and taste. That's something AI can't tell you. AI can't tell you to do less because it's optimized to give you more.
Darren LeeWhat's one thing someone can do to thrive with AI, not survive?
Vetting Leads Before The Calendar
Darren LeeSo when it comes to online education, online programs, what have you observed, Adam, in terms of the biggest changes when it comes to on the sales side?
SPEAKER_01Well, on a sales side, I think number one, the funnel can be dialed in so much better with better quality. The biggest growth that I've had is in the last quarter is AI agents coming into the business to validate the leads before they hit the calendar. And with that like small tweak, what I'm able to happen is feed that loop back to any form of growth, ads, marketing, whatever, and have a much better feedback loop to get higher quality leads. And knocking effect of that has been amazing for me. So it's also the AI infrastructure that's managing the feedback loop, but also allowing us to vet every single lead through application before it even hits the calendar.
Darren LeeBut I don't think you guys know this, you obviously don't. What you've done in the past 90 days on ads, like using AI to use your ads, is insane. And I've seen it, like it's it's monumental what you've been able to do, like to remove ad agencies for people so they can run their own ads. You might explain that for people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so obviously in Q1 this year, what we've put a huge amount of emphasis on was really building AI agents, and everyone says AI agents, but I mean like real AI employees that work 24-7 around the clock. So when we're able to do that, my business always had a ceiling. I was always very difficult to break ceilings in my business over the last eight, nine years. And in Q1, I just said, you know what, I'm just gonna break this. I'm gonna break this ceiling. And that's what we did in Q1 by building those AI agents that work for us and fulfill every single part of the gap along the way, allowed us to basically build this infrastructure that we can test quicker, scale quicker, flood the market with creative, have just like that feedback loop from traffic to ICP. It's like this flywheel approach of creative to ICP and then application in the middle. That has allowed us to fucking uh insane like over the last 90 days, it's been insane.
Darren LeeSo and what it means in logical sense is you don't need an ads agency anymore. You can have your own AI platform or AI system to be able to improve a lot of your your ad creative. I'd love to come to yourself, right? So, like CEO of Abufy, massive company. What have you observed in your users? Because you're literally working with thousands, tens of thousands of business owners. Where are you finding them? Where are you finding their biggest challenges right now?
AI Ads Flywheel Without Agencies
SPEAKER_00I think the biggest challenge is in their mindset, mostly. I will come to this, and uh also how to adapt into the changes. That's also a huge change in there what they are doing. Um, so everything what you have delivered as a service, as a a product, uh needs to be re-evaluated and you need to adapt. And the successful ones are adapting it into also a much more service-oriented and also helping on the execution side. So if you have coaches, if you have consultants, it's not it's not just about the know-how to give it to them, it's much more about how can I help them to achieve these goals, what they are looking for, the buyers, and how can I support them while they are on the journey. So more of like a done-for-you service. Much more a done-for-you service, and also really helping in the in the execution process. So, what where we see this is mostly that the offers on our platform are going much more into the high price. So it means you are charging now much more, and when you charge more, it means your human touch point is also increasing. So, because you need to also somehow get the value what you're bringing in, also maybe from the money side. Um, and that's that that's the tendency what we see. So, mostly they are starting with free products, uh, doing these things to warm up, to get to the leads, as you said, right? Making them hot. Um, and then when you are there, then you are coming with your offer, and the offer is no more just a PDF file or just consume it, it's much more on helping them to really execute, also to get to the results.
Darren LeeIsn't that interesting how AI is doing everything in your business but the thing that gets the result for the prospect? So it's like everything behind the scenes, it's nailing, but the done-for you offers. I actually said this at a post with this recently, which is the done-for you offers are the ones that are going to win in 2026, which is kind of what you do, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, a lot of it's done for you, like oh, of course, we are mainly consulting, but we're now able to do more done for you. Because all the high-level business owners, they want more done for you. They don't want to do it themselves. In the beginning, everyone who's like under a million dollars a year, they should do it themselves because they need education. And then as your business grows, you have limited resources with people, and those limited people have only so much bandwidth, and as a CEO, you only want to invest in things that things are done for you. So, even without consulting, will you do the recruiting for us? Yes. Will you actually build the tracking for us? Yes. So you have to do more for them than before, but because we have AI, we can now change done with you or do it yourself to done for you because we are gonna do it for you because we found a better way.
Done-For-You Offers Win In 2026
Darren LeeI want to touch on the mindset part. So, your entire session today was all around mindset and the biggest beliefs, biggest limiting beliefs you will overcome. Why did you focus on that?
SPEAKER_03Because I, you know, yesterday I actually had the entire talk all around sales teams, and I spoke to people at the dinner. I'm really glad I went to the dinner yesterday. And every single person told me, Yeah, I know what to do, I'm just not doing it. And I could tell they just had a limiting belief. So I thought, am I here for myself just to get great content and get a good YouTube video? Or the best thing I could do is actually serve other people, and to serve other people, do I need to give them more knowledge or help them break a belief? And I just thought about someone in that room, they already know what to do, they need to hear, they need to hear more reminders than to learn new things, and that they need to learn more reminder, they need to have more reminders than to learn new things. So let's say you know that you should be doing something with your sales team. You know you should be doing it. You don't need to learn new things, you just need a reminder. And I just wanted to give reminders to people, and I might be the person who says something to you that you already know, you've heard it 400 times before, but I might be number 401 times you've heard that same thing, but you might take action on it. So you know that friend, when I was young, I used to tell friends to do like help them with their business. And you know that friend who never listens to you, you help him. And then what I used to do is internally think, well, I'm not gonna help him again, he didn't do it. But then I learned to change my uh thought around it. I'm not he might not act on the time that I told him, but that might be one of 150 reminders that he needs to be able to do it. When I watched saw Gary V say post more content 10 years ago, I didn't do it until seven years later. But he had told me for seven years until I did it.
Darren LeeWhen you said mindset uh issue, what what context do you have for the mindset issue that people have struggled with?
SPEAKER_00I agree, agree. 100% of it was that's exactly also where people are limiting themselves. Uh they think, okay, I I have done it in this way for a long time, so changing it and going into something new uh is mostly blocked by the people itself. Mostly. Um so I mean these are also things which everyone knows. Be curious, be adaptable, change, you know, everyone knows this. But who is really executing on that? And and then and then when you look into this a bit more deeper, as you said, only 10% is is able to do that, right? And that's the difference of the successful people who are able also to run an online business because they know exactly what's happening on the market, what changes, and you should not blame these changes, you should accept, you could you should welcome these changes and say, okay, how can I now adapt and how can I take the opportunities out of this change? Because each change brings new opportunities, and that's the the biggest thing where people are limiting themselves to not really drive and go to the next levels.
Mindset Adaptation And Human Taste
Darren LeeBut you think AI can solve that? AI can solve for those.
SPEAKER_03AI is not solving mindset. AI is not solving, you know what they call taste these days. You've seen this reference around taste. Yeah, okay, okay, explain. So um for you to prompt something or have the taste of what looks good and what doesn't look good, that's still you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I heard um, you know Jay Hoovy? He uses the word taste. I took it from him, and I thought this is such an excellent way about thinking about AI. You still have to have the taste. And um, I recently started reading uh Rick Rubin's Creative Act, and he says less is more, and now I'm doing way less in my time to do less things and do more detail. My business, like with the software, you guys are in a software business, all three of you. I'm not in software, but I know all the best softwares have the simplest-looking user interface, and the worst ones have the most features and have like such a complex one. So I think there's just so much about simplicity and doing less in taste, and that's something AI can't tell you. AI can't tell you to do less because it's optimized to give you more.
Darren LeeYou've had a lot of changes in the past like six months as well. I've observed personally, like you have your software, you have your education, there's a lot going on. What do you think was the biggest driver for that? Was it like being able to do this with technology and adapting, or was it more of like a force thing?
SPEAKER_01It was more of a clarity thing. It was more of a clarity thing. So I wanted to, I just want to I want to build something that I the infinite game. I think I got that from you many years ago. I wanna I wanted to play that. And with what I had previously, again, it was very, very service-heavy, and I needed to make ecosystem around what I had. So I had to sit back for a period of time and basically think what am I where am I actually going here? And then one of my mentors who is CEO of um Instantly, which is a huge company, remember him said to me, He he said, You need to audit the vehicle that you're in. And I started auditing the vehicle, and then I said what and then I audited the vehicle I was in, and then I audited the skill sets that I have naturally, and then I realized where I lack and who I need to hire. And I read a book called Rocket Fuel. Can you ever read that book? Gino Wickman. It basically talks about a visionary and an architect.
SPEAKER_03And um part two of attraction, you wrote the other.
SPEAKER_01Part two of traction, yeah. Yeah. And then I realized I needed to have a very different team that is a lot more incentivized, and just had to move the chessboard around a little bit to gain that clarity of a more compound effect. And then with AI, we're able to break the previous ceilings that I've had. Maybe those ceilings were limiting beliefs in the past, but it was because it was so service-heavy, it was very difficult to continuously break through.
AI Setters Versus Real Emotion
Darren LeeI'd love to ask you about like HMWera and the AI settings side. How have you seen that develop in terms of the quality and in terms of AI setters versus human setters?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it really depends on the offer and the person because if your offer is like super emotionally sold, it's very difficult. Like if you're a trauma coach or a healing person, AI can't help you. AI can tee up a little conversation, but it has to be handed off to someone to connect emotionally. If you're a fitness person that helps people lose weight, which is a very more common thing, there's lesser emotion attached to that, essentially. So I think with the AI setting and AI as a sales infrastructure, AI can't do the emotional selling for some businesses, but for other businesses, like a clinic, like our software, does very well for clinics because it's very simple. What procedure do you want? When do you want it? And then it can book in because there's a lot lesser emotional connection. AI can't do the emotional connection for you.
Darren LeeWhat about so just to go deeper on that? So you work with wealth management companies, private banking, all that kind of stuff. That makes sense, but what about when you get to the complexities of the offer?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's when the sales team have to come in. So I feel that AI can just like alley oop the sales guy, the sales team. So, like we obviously use our own software. You just met my setter there a minute ago as well. So we still have a setter, you know. Some businesses can completely have no setters. Like I have one client right now, he has no setter at all. But he's a very simple offer. Depends on the offer, depends on the brain. Depends completely on the offer. But I have another client then that helps like men, for example, save marriages, optimise hormones, bring that, bring them back to peak, really fix identities, hold themselves accountable. AI cannot resonate enough yet with that level of emotional connection.
SPEAKER_03How are you training the knowledge base for your AI?
SPEAKER_01So we have a sandbox, and basically the clients update all of their SOPs, their sales call recordings, their assets, and then we basically feed back the sandbox on what we want and we don't want to go into the conversational AI. And you can test it, you can test it a thousand times before you put it live. And again, the best founders know it's not going to be perfect the first time around. Like, you know, it's it's not Manny Chat because it has like we're bit we're building an internal brain based on your own SOPs, your own sales calls recordings, your own infrastructure.
Darren LeeAnd just to add to that as well, so for we do AI coaching, right? AI coaching set of orum. At first, I was so hesitant, but a couple of reasons. The first reason was I thought the big guys would hate it, but it is the opposite. The bigger guys love it because the sales managers can scan, just quickly scan. And then secondly, I thought we'd need so much engineering, like to, you know, like you gotta upload a knowledge base and stuff, but AI is getting so good now with like MCP that it's just getting exponentially better per call. So there's less we don't do engineering to it. The calls that you record are the engineering, which I which is incredible, right? Because the transcripts are like one hour long, they're like 10,000 words or whatever that may be.
SPEAKER_01And that's that that's that's the feedback loop. That's the feedback loop. That's the same what I said in the beginning there about like my ads that have gone nuts. Like it's feedback. Use AI for feedback loops.
SPEAKER_03That's completely from AI, your ads, all AI, like AI video as well.
Darren LeeAI, everything. They're insane. Like I have to say how good they are.
SPEAKER_03And the script is completely optimized from sales call.
SPEAKER_01So we we have we literally have a market research agent that we install into clients on day one. So within 90 minutes of onboarding with us, you'll have uh sometimes up to a 30-page doc adjust on your ICP. So when I say it to when I say it to a big my a my not my software, my agency, we we work with like wealth management, finance, insurance. So I can say to a company with 80 sales reps, what's the ICP? And they're like high net worth individuals. But that's not the ICP at all. Your ICP What is high 95th?
SPEAKER_03How do you even define high network?
SPEAKER_01Exactly, exactly. So we make our AI agent comes in, asks them like 27 questions, and then connects all their last sales call recordings, and then makes an ICP doc. Then we do competitor analysis doc, and then we do a cold traffic ads-based offer doc. So now we have three overall docs combined in a memory bank within 90 minutes of working with a client, and that is the first step of the feedback loop for going to market. So that now that that that feedback loop is all done with AI. What happens then? The market research AI team passes it over to the creative agent. The creative agent will make 18 creatives on day one and 18 creatives every Friday going forward. It will then pass those 18 creatives into a media buyer, um agent, a media buyer agent. That agent will upload 18 into the ad account, and every seven days it it cuts the bottom nine. You have to teach this, bro. Yeah, you have to run this as an offer. And there's a there's also a human in there, for management.
SPEAKER_03So you just give it the parameters of what you want to do.
Darren LeeBut meta are going towards AI agents integrated. That is actually like approved by Meta. So our first conversation about six months ago, you were saying this shit to me on the call, and I was like, what's this guy saying? So your idea, if you I'd love to get your perspective on like full end-to-end business in a box with AI, if you don't mind. Yeah.
Multi-Agent Systems Run The Business
SPEAKER_00Can you explain that? Yeah, of course. I mean, um the capabilities what we see on the AI topics are currently mostly on the operational part, mostly on the consume side. Um but when I was talking to one of the Google managers uh two years ago, he was already telling me what will happen in the future because they are building these kind of things. Um and we were talking about this multi-agent ecosystem, um, which we started already two years ago to start to uh to change our structure because the the platform needs to be completely uh changed. Sorry. Um so what it means is at the end, when we are talking about features, because you don't like the features, I also don't like features. I I I hate the name features as of today, is because it's no more the value. So what you have to do is you need to go in and build the different expertise in this agent, and this is something which we can do already today. So that's that's available, and people are already building these kinds of agents to do some work, done for you things. But the next evolution is uh that these agents are able to talk to each other, and the thing what you already started is to say, okay, I am giving them the autonomous decision to decide what will be the next thing. So means then you have another agent who is then managing the other agents. So if you look into this one, what is on top, and that's the vision where we are working on, is build a strategy agent on top. You get the strategy, you get the input, you you get the understanding what needs to be done, you know the context of everything, and then this agent starts to manage the other agents to unlock them. For example, you say, Okay, I need a payment page. Okay, what should be on the payment page? So it's a design. So then you have an agent who will do the design, right? So all of these things are currently available. So all of these in on verticals, standalone are available. But the problem is currently that you are not able to really build the context and understanding between the agents, and that's the next evolution which we are already in and which which we are already seeing that is happening. So in the next few months, we will see it much more. For example, what we have done in the product development, um we are no more just using uh something like Copilot and all of them to create the code. Now, what we are going to do is we are telling start. The agent understands what needs to be done, and then it starts to write the um documentation and all of these things, and then the other agents are building it, then you are going back in the loop, uh, the agent is checking it, making uh all the corrections and all of these things, and it goes back. So you just follow it, and you as a human, with your competencies, you're just controlling and and and and and checking that there is nothing happening in the background. So, and then when you look from this perspective, you are now coming into complete different challenges. So, what is inside the code? Uh did the agents talk to each other and and and and put something in, you know, with bad intention, with good intention. You need to be able to see that, right? And uh the trends, what we also see on on the current market is that a lot of agencies, consultants are building their own software, they are building their agents because they say, Hey, it's so easy. I just add some code, uh some some some some prompts, and I get my code, I get the product, and I can use it. Okay, so that's the stage where we are. But we see also the Trend that now people are going away from that because they see that they don't have the competency to check what is inside. You know, you just see what's happening as a result, but what is behind. So if you don't have the competency to check it from the security side, the guardrails, uh, the data privacy, all of these kind of things, right? Uh, so if you are not able to understand this, uh, you are going to go into trouble, probably, which you want to avoid, of course. Um, so means some of them are now going backwards and saying, okay, I tried it and it's working, but it's mostly uh just the product visible on the front end. It's nice, I can see it, but to really make a business out of it, that's not proven
GDPR Security And AI Dialler Risks
SPEAKER_00so far.
Darren LeeSo especially when it's front end, like if it's if it's back end, because I know you have your own dashboard that you've built out internally. That's great, it's amazing. Same with yourself with the ads, but when I hear this like kind of vibe coding to sell, it gives me heebie g bees. My background's in engineering, like it wasn't product for many, many years. The reason being is you're German, so you know GDPR. Yes, like the laws, the laws that are like actual laws that aren't in this info space, they're serious.
SPEAKER_03Well, they are in the info space, people just don't follow it, they don't follow it, right?
Darren LeeBut the biggest thing around data and security, like we'll take the we'll take the scheduler, for instance. The laws around the scheduler are crazy, man. Like we have Californian laws, we have GDPR laws, we have UAE laws. You don't know this. There's lots of laws in UAE are in security, and we've all these Ts and C's as a result. If you don't know this and you try to sell it to users, you will get slapped pretty hard on the wrist.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like go high level. Also, they they're like totally like breaking GDPR.
SPEAKER_03They they um sorry what is it is it the dialing um for you can't call UAE leads a lot of the times. There's a lot of dialers.
Darren LeeYeah, I imagine they block it. Same in America, and there's loads of laws in America around dialing. So dial so AI dialers, for instance. There is loads of laws around AI dialers.
SPEAKER_01I don't really know what they are, but no AI dialers right now are just hacking API keys. They're just like breaking in.
Darren LeeYeah, and there's many big entrepreneurs that I know that have built these softwares that are successful entrepreneurs, but it's like this is uh it's like a smoking gun, you know?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, absolutely. I mean for an MVP or an MLP, it's amazing, right? So you get very fast results, you see it, you can get the resonation, you can test it out, you can go out to the market, you know. But if you want to make a scalable business out of it, then you need some additional uh capabilities and also expertise, which is not always given. But I think also in the next one to two years, there will be also a lot of improvements, but you need to see these kind of things, what are coming, and then already adapt today to be able to not be left back, right?
Darren LeeSo yeah, I think the biggest thing as well is with program design. So I know obviously you have the platform for users, you're helping people build their programs, so am I, so are you. That's the biggest thing for me, is like if information is readily available, implementation's where it's at. So if it's done for you, that's great, or if it's done for you, which what you have, what I have, where it's very hands-on, there's again a swing back to having more CSMs, more hands-on people, because it's all about implementation. And I think this is where we've seen a lot of guys that run online programs get wiped out this year, you know. Like we did a massive change, like we rebuilt our program again. This is our fourth year doing it. We do it every single year, and uh, it's necessary. We have to do it. And you recorded like 60 hours or whatever. I I heard you yeah. So I'd love to just come to you on the on the sales side. So we spoke in Bali and you said that a lot of the sales process will be taken care of by the AI long term. Myself, you and David. What's your view on that now? Like, how do you think about that?
SPEAKER_03Like, which part of the sales process do you we spoke previously?
Darren LeeWe said that about a lot of you said CRMs are going to be removed.
SPEAKER_03Yes, but with CRM interface, I think that'll change a lot. Like HubSpot. I listened to, you know, Damesh um from HubSpot. I listened to a lot of what they say, and the user interface, will it even be there? Will you just have a CRM that you just talk to? And obviously you guys are in Sasmo, so you will know more than I about how CRMs will change. Will it just be an interface you just talk to, like Jarvis from Iron Man? Do I just say what prospects are going to chase? Will it just chase your prospects for you? Will it just work the pipeline? How much will it do? How much will be human connection? And I think um who decides how much human connection is involved in the sales process? It's the customer. So the customer decides. If um if you have markets where you call them and they say, I'll rather speak to a human, those companies will need to have a human. And some sales processes will just be all AI.
Darren LeeYeah, it was actually funny. We have this feature on the roadmap for Aura. One of the first features for Aura, which we just hidden for now, was having an AI coach. And I want to crack a different interface, which is the reason why I'm kind of sitting on it. But because we have so much data about your own team that you can interact with it as if it's like Iron Man. So it's like, where's my so it's like show me Johnny's close rate, and then show me where Johnny's not closing, and just it just constantly being popped up to, it's ripped up to straight away, and it can build graphs and everything just straight up. So that would be that that is so straightforward now because we have all the data in place. Um, just needs to be built, right? But I mean, how is that visualized? That's that's kind of a good question. I don't want it to look like Chat GPT, right? Although even at that, it would still look good because that's what that's what like Notion do, it's what ClickUp do, they have that like ChatGPT interface, which is helpful, right? That's the reason why it works so well. Think about it, humans were looking for a way to interact with something versus having to troll through data.
SPEAKER_00The interaction is going much more to be very natural. I mean, uh, I don't want to go too much back, but when we when we saw Windows, Windows 98, uh with this interface, with this clicks, you know, you had no more the need to write something to code something, it was already nice to go, you know. So this click and then so these behaviors we we we are getting used to. And now with with with AI and with ChatGPT Cloud and all of them, we have we are now seeing a completely different user interface. But all of them are going now much more into the direction that the interaction will be very natural. So as humans are talking to each other, so there is no more need to say, okay, I have now an entry field and I need to write there or I need to click a button, this will disappear. So the future, what what people are saying uh is that all of them will be gone. There is no more interface. The interface is just like we are talking to each other. That's the interface which will come probably in the next years. Uh but to be able to do that, there is some evolution things, but this looks like that it will be end up in like in human interaction. I mean, with the robots and all of them, we we see already how it could feel like, and and this is this is going into the star vectors. No more interface, there is no more screen, it will disappear.
Darren LeeOkay.
Thrive With AI Through Clear Purpose
Darren LeeLast question before I wrap up. What's one thing someone can do to thrive with AI, not survive?
SPEAKER_03I actually had AI guilt for a long time. So AI guilt is my idea of you know you should be using more of it. And then I started using more of it. Then I got obsessed with cloud code and I started building stuff that I never needed. So my advice of driving with AI is to look at every architect, arch um, what's it called? Uh arch is it archetype? Um artifact. Every artifact that your cloud coders build you, and then think, did I actually need this? Because when I did it to myself, 95% of the stuff I built in Cloud Code was not needed. So then I realized I should be spending way less time trying to build things in Cloud Code, and I just got out of there. I spent two weeks intensely building things, getting a big dopamine hit, and my advice is actually to spend less time building artifacts and more time on your business, more time just on the what's broken in your business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I did the same thing. Months. What did you build? Fuck knows what it is, man. Just like because when I acquired a software back in December, and I was like just thinking of features that are sound great and look great, but don't do don't do anything. Um, like I spent like six, seven weeks on a new dashboard, and then just went back to the old dashboard that we had previously. Maybe I don't know what what I was doing, but yeah.
Darren LeeWell, the the lesson there though is it has to be scoped, right? Because funnily enough, like we're redoing our onboarding flow for Aura, and we did it because we put through like a thousand sales tubes, and then we found out with AI, actually you'll find us interesting, we were able to analyze all of the calls where they were dropping off, how long it took them to go from click to card, the first call booked, and then we could look to map that process and improve it. And then the engineers only built the new flow based on all of the other issues. It was about 34 minutes to set up, set up your calendar and make a scheduler was 34 minutes, and now it's about how to get it down sub 10. Yeah, so so that makes sense, right?
SPEAKER_01You know, there's the epiphany that I had. Probably when we first started kicking off things off recently, it was like the epiphany I had maybe in February or March, sometime this year, was exactly what you said in the beginning. AI is being used for operations, and what you said earlier is a system with all operations, and then all your agents are here, and then there's one AI manager here that manages all of the agents. So, like our CMO in my agency is AI, it's not even it's not a human. So I looked at using AI to just assist everything operationally, but it hasn't the growth that any growth that I've had this year has come from the same thing that I've done over the same years. It's all just been assisted with AI. So when I actually zoom out, I only realize AI is only assisted operations. Everything operationally, that's where the thinking has come. What can we put in here to make it more efficient, better, and operationally behind growth, operationally behind operations, operationally behind fulfillment, reporting, whatever it is, and that's really helped me. So AI has really become more of an opera a very high-level operational tool across my two sides of the business.
Darren LeeAssisted intelligence, first artificial intelligence. And for you?
SPEAKER_00I mean, everyone is doing the assumptions that with AI you will save time, you will be much more efficient, and you need to do less work. And uh you will see also uh more people who will not find a job. These are the assumptions what we what we are hearing a lot, right? But the reality is completely different. As you said, you're working much more, much more. Uh you're also maybe playing around, right? To be also uh a bit inspired and all these so you're investing much more time. Much more people are currently hired. Just look at open AI, uh, anthropic, job uh what they are hiring, just on their page. They have currently 700 720 uh open jobs, and the interesting part is more than 20% are salespeople. So everyone is trying to uh eliminate all the people, but the guys who are developing it, they are hiring their people. So, as you said, right? So, what is the purpose of the uh sales agent, whatever, right? So, and there are still uh human touch point needs, so it doesn't work always. So the most successful companies, currently, what I have seen on the on the bigger scale, they are running in hybrid model. So they have, of course, the AI agents, of course, because they are creating huge value, but they have also the human-to-human touch points, which are very important also for enterprise sales. You need to go build the relationship. So, from this perspective, uh, we are not reducing time and we are not killing uh jobs, we are creating much more currently. So, and to thrive it, you need to understand how AI works, and it's not like oh uh I will just go and code. You need to understand, but then also use it wisely and say, Okay, for what kind of purpose I am using it? Is it just for inspiration? Is it for ideation? Is it for some information? Is it something I want to replace other softwares for that? You know, you need to be very clear in your purpose, and then if you are very clear in your purpose and you know exactly what you have to do, then it's amazing. If and if you don't use it, it's like you are comparing yourself in a race with a B-cycle next to a Formula One car, you know. So if you don't use it, so you have to know how it works and you need to be able to do it but wisely and really know with what kind of purpose.
Darren LeeAnd before you fab up, from my perspective, what I always say is you don't have a business. What I always say is you don't have a business problem, you have a business owner problem. So the business owners are often looking to figure out to find the problem to go like mentally masturbate on it with clawed code versus like if they actually have a personal problem that's manifesting their business, always. So they're over-indexing, they're working harder and so on. Now they're using claw to do everything. So it's just like, okay, do you have a problem? What's that painful problem? How are you gonna solve it through the theory constraints? Can you solve it with AI? Great, and if you can't, you got a business owner problem and go solve it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's when I lacked clarity last year. That's exactly what was happening. I literally had to like get out of that, yeah. And that's I love what you said there, but you use AI to fulfill your purpose, don't use AI to change your purpose. That can happen so easily because the algorithms that people are like like funny story. I was like talking to a girl on like there was like an event on the beach last week, and she was like, I think there's sharks in the water. And she's I'll ask Chat GBT, is there sharks in the water in Casa del Sol? Chat GBT, yes, for sure there's sharks in the water in Casa del Sol. I said, Now ask ChatGBT, is there not sharks in the water? She said, and Chat GBT said the same thing, no sharks. You're 100% correct, there's no sharks, same thread, same chat. So if you're just being told, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, your core purpose is here. You can just you can be one degree off here, and in 90 days' time, you are like, What the fuck am I doing?
Darren LeeYeah, so again, people are using AI to validate their opinions, and if they're using something like ChatGPT, they're using it to validate their entire idea, so they don't need to think, they're less social. I actually last thing
Resourcefulness And Farewell
Darren LeeI'll say on this, right? Is I had a clip about this the other day, which is have you noticed that your clients are starting to prompt you like AI? Where's this? Where's that? How's that? How does this work? Because AI has removed the critical thinking component of just being an actual human. And if you didn't have the resources around you, like when you started your business, right? You had no money, you're sitting there in a room being like, How the fuck can I make this thing work? Back against the wall, that's when you're most resourceful. There's a story of um a study in America where they gave they gave investment to people without money who could grow up without money and grew up with money. Okay, the people that grew up without money were way more resourceful and they were able to spend the money way smarter. The people with money were like, oh yeah, I guess more flippant with it. So if you have less resources, this is why I always say sales reps need less leads, that's when they're in a better position. 100%. That's why you know you often hear about the startup that was out of money, they ran out of money, and it was their last and they made it work. The Airbnb story. The Airbnb story, all the emails they were sending. Why? Because they had no other fucking options. The brain gets the brain goes away from fear into it's not it's not flight, fight or flight. It's creativity, yeah. It's not fight or flight, it's creativity. If you're the right person, yeah, and you've done nice sequence events. Yeah, guys, you're legends. Thank you so much. I really appreciate working with everyone. You're all awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, thank you.