This week on The Digital Download, we are asking the question everyone is afraid to answer: Is AI helping your business, or is it slowly destroying your unique value?

We often see organizations using AI in a "lazy" way—asking for a blog post without giving the AI any context, tone, or unique selling points. The result? Generic noise that sounds like everyone else.

But there is a better way.

I am joined by Tim Hughes, Adam Gray, Richard Jones, and Tracy Borreson to discuss how to turn AI from a liability into a superpower.

We will discuss:

• The "Lazy" Trap: Why using AI without a specific "steer" creates content that creates no value.

• Feeding the Beast: Why AI will never generate new ideas unless you consistently feed it high-quality content and context.

• The ICP Hack: How to turn a single executive meeting transcript into distinct Ideal Customer Profiles using AI.

• Mining Your Own Brain: Using AI not to replace you, but to extract perspectives from your own knowledge that you didn't realize were there.

• Safeguarding Your Brand: How to use AI today in a way that "doesn't spoil tomorrow".

If you don't set your AI up properly, it might do more harm than good. Join us to find out how to get it right.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions. Bring your insights. Audience participation is keenly encouraged

This week's Host was -

• Bertrand Godillot, Founder and Managing Partner of Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Panelists included -

• Tim Hughes, Co-founder and CEO of DLA Ignite

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of DLA Ignite

• Tracy Borreson, Founder and CEO of TLB Coaching & Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite

• Richard Jones, Richard Jones, Director of Qure 8 Ltd

Transcript of The Digital Download 2026-01-16

Bertrand Godillot [00:00:09]:

Good afternoon, good morning and good day, wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to another edition of the Digital Download, the longest running weekly business Talk show on LinkedIn Live, now globally syndicated on TuneIn radio through IBGR, the world's number one business talk news and strategy radio network. Today on the Digital Download, we're asking the question everyone is afraid to answer. Is AI helping your business or is it slowly destroying your unique value? We often see organizations using AI as, in a lazy way, sorry, asking for a blog post without giving the AI any context, tone or unique selling points. The results, generic noise that sounds like everyone else. But there is another way. Today we're discussing as a team how to turn AI from a liability into a superpower. But before we kick off the discussion.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:15]:

Let's go around the set and introduce everyone. While we're doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend, ping them and have them join us. We strive to make the Digital Download an interactive experience and audience participation is highly appreciated and encouraged. So, Tracy, why don't you kick us off?

Tracy Borreson [00:01:35]:

Good morning, everyone. I am Tracey Borison, founder of TLB Coaching and Events, which I forgot again, doesn't fit in my title here. Anyway, that's events, A proud partner of DLA Ignite. And, and I am super excited by this conversation because I think the answer to the original question is yes, it can do both of those things, but what is it doing for you?

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:01]:

Okay, looking forward to see what came out of your. What ideas came out of your early shower this morning. Okay. Adam.

Adam Gray [00:02:11]:

Hi everybody. I'm Adam Gray. I'm co founder of DLA Ignite. I'm Tim's business partner. Partner. And in stark contrast to Tracy, I'm really depressed about the conversation that we're going to have today. Not because I think it's a bad conversation, but because we see, when we look out across the content that's being produced and, and how AI is being used, we see a whole load of what we might call schoolboy errors, you know, obvious things that people are doing wrong. The irony is that they know they're doing them wrong, but they often don't fix them because either they haven't got a route out or they, in quotes, haven't got time.

Adam Gray [00:02:51]:

So I'm really looking forward to getting into the meat of this discussion.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:56]:

Okay. Interesting. Tim.

Tim Hughes [00:02:59]:

Thank you. Welcome everybody. My name is Tim Hughes. I'm the CEO and co founder of DLA Ignite and famous for writing the book Social Selling Techniques to Influence Buyers and Change Makers. And I'm pleased to say that I'm really excited because Richard has a schoolboy haircut today.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:22]:

What a great leading comment, Richard. Good afternoon.

Richard Jones [00:03:25]:

Richard Jones here, partner of DLA Ignite. I guess with a schoolboy haircut. I'm prone to making the schoolboy errors that Adam has referred to, but I certainly live by the adage that you get out what you put in where AI is concerned. And I think from my own personal perspective, my family have long considered me to be artificially intelligent. So hopefully I can lay that one to rest this afternoon.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:56]:

Okay, great. And myself, Bertrand Godillot. I am the founder and managing partner of Odysseus & Co, a very proud DLA Ignite partner as well. So thank you all. And let's start with a foundational question.

Adam Gray [00:04:10]:

Just before we do the foundational question, I noticed that Tim and I are co founders. Tracy is a proud DLA Ignite partner, you're a proud DLA Ignite partner, and Richard is a DLA Ignite partner. I just, I just thought I'd put that out there.

Tracy Borreson [00:04:24]:

Hey, schoolboy error.

Richard Jones [00:04:29]:

I think you've got to be with you guys for more than a year to be proud.

Tim Hughes [00:04:36]:

I. I like Andrew Sless's comment that Adam and I have school teacher haircuts.

Adam Gray [00:04:43]:

Yeah. Weren't teachers old when we were at school? Now, now they're young.

Bertrand Godillot [00:04:50]:

I have a thing that. This is.

Adam Gray [00:04:52]:

Hi, from Melbourne, 1am thank you for staying up late.

Richard Jones [00:04:55]:

Wow, that's on a Saturday morning too. Yeah, that's even so.

Adam Gray [00:05:01]:

So we just got in, obviously. Been out in a club. Yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:05:09]:

All right. It's going to be a difficult one to manage, I can tell you today. So going back to the question, the foundational question, why using AI without a specific steer creates content that creates no value. Who wants to pick up this one?

Adam Gray [00:05:27]:

I would like to, with a compliment for you, Bertrand. So. So everyone in the audience will not know that we have a number of Team Zoom meetings during the course of the week. So last week we had one of these meetings on Monday and Bertrand said, I've been playing with NotebookLM and it's produced some really great content. Now, I think great is all relative. The content was extremely good. Not as good as the content that Bertrand could have produced himself had he written it, of course, but it was really great content. And you explained what you had done.

Adam Gray [00:06:09]:

You had poured in 50 plus blogs and, and various research articles and, and stuff from Sixth Sense. And Gartner and Forrester and all of these different organizations to give AI your instance of Notebook LM a worldview and an understanding of how you speak and of what you think things are in the world. And then you pressed a button and out came a six minute long video and some show cards and a presentation. And it was, it was breathtakingly good. And I did the same thing that evening. I poured in loads and loads of my content and some stuff to give it context. And I said to my wife, you need to come and have a look at this. And I played at the video and she said, obviously it's an American accent.

Adam Gray [00:07:00]:

She said, but it sounds like you speaking. And I think that this is, this is the challenge, isn't it? That's what everybody wants. Everybody wants to push a button and get high quality content out. But the reason that yours worked so well and mine worked so well is because we had preloaded it with so much content that gives it context, tone of voice, perspectives, world views of our view of the world. And then it did a reasonable job of emulating the content that we would produce. But we're only able to get that because we had that back catalog of content that we could drop into it. And if you haven't got that, if you don't give AI the context, it goes out and finds the context, which means that it finds the same stuff for your blog post as it does for everybody else's. And it means that you can't.

Adam Gray [00:07:57]:

In, in the modern world of sales, the only point of differentiation is you. And if you don't have that, there is no differentiation.

Tracy Borreson [00:08:08]:

Okay, I think an interesting piece here too, because I think what people miss in the like, content creation experience is that when you want to create content, when you have a desire to create content because you have something to say, there's something that comes out of that. And so then when you take that output and now you use it as another input to something else, it can create a reasonable extension of that original input. But also, and equally, if, I mean, let's look at a lot of corporate content, right? A lot of corporate content, white papers, case studies, I'm at this booth at this trade show. Like, this stuff doesn't have that original input. It doesn't have that feeling and desire to like start a conversation, create a connection that goes into it. So you can't get that at the end because it wasn't in the original input. And so I think it's also important for us to look at even above and beyond The. We need this, like, library of our stuff that we can load into it in order for it to be a reasonable extension of ourselves.

Tracy Borreson [00:09:34]:

What was. What's our input in creating that input? Because if we remove that, then we're also just getting into a conversation of create more to create more. So I can feed my AI, but it's not. It's fed with French fries instead.

Tim Hughes [00:09:50]:

And I think that's the. I think that that is the thing, isn't it, that Tracy is. Which is that. Are we. Are we putting out. I know people that have said to me, why. I say to them, why'd you put out content? Well, I need to put something out.

Bertrand Godillot [00:10:08]:

Yeah.

Tim Hughes [00:10:09]:

And there's this thing, isn't it? Are we putting something out because we need to be putting content out, or are we creating content that will actually create a conversation or try and create some digital resonance and trust with our audience? And I think that's one of the big differences, isn't it? And what AI allows us to do is create loads of noise and not necessarily create the stuff that we want to do, which actually is create a conversation, which ultimately leads to someone saying, yeah, can we buy some of your stuff?

Tracy Borreson [00:10:46]:

And I think that if we keep rolling this back, then we come into this conversation of, do we know how to create conversations? Number one, which I think is also something that is lacking in the business environment now. And also, like, what do I want to say if I have been participating in an environment and we've talked about brands as a prison on this show to death lately, but, like, if I work in an environment where I don't. I can't say, I'm not allowed to say what I think, then I don't have a practice of saying what I think. And therefore, I can't create content based on what I think because either I'm too afraid to do that, or I am so disconnected from it that I don't actually know what I think. And so, again, like, I think the AI. The AI conversation is so interesting to me because AI can do, like, really phenomenal things, as demonstrated by Bertrand and Adam, but only if you work it back all the way to the, like, caveman days of what we need to do in sales and marketing in order to make a connection available.

Richard Jones [00:11:59]:

I see it as sort of mining your own mind. You know, there's a lot of stuff stored up in our heads, which is kind of sort of not always relevant, but if you actually record it and effectively put it in somewhere where it can be sort of, you know, brought to the surface, you know, as. And where relevant, you know, it starts to.

Adam Gray [00:12:22]:

You know it.

Richard Jones [00:12:23]:

You're. You're.

Bertrand Godillot [00:12:24]:

Yeah.

Richard Jones [00:12:24]:

You're using all the knowledge you've created, but you're putting it in a place where it's easy to extract it and deliver it.

Bertrand Godillot [00:12:33]:

Yeah, well, I think, you know, as you said, Tracy, nothing can happen if you don't do your homework. I think that's. That's. That's what you. You basically explained very well. So for sure, you need to make your own work. But then there's also. At least that's the experience is if you've done your own work correctly.

Bertrand Godillot [00:12:58]:

And there's the whole idea of recycling. And I think that ultimately, at least what notebooks, and I'm sure other ones demonstrate is that if you've got. If you've done your own work, then potentially you could generate content which is actually recycled content, which can be engaging to some degree this way.

Tracy Borreson [00:13:34]:

Well, I think there is an important piece here because, like, personally, even as a marketer, I'm terrible at content repurposing, but that's because I have so many ideas all the time. Right. But what you're speaking to here, Bertrand, is like, in that scenario, if you do have a place where all this information is being collected and housed in, like, your voice, then it gives you an opportunity to be like, oh, I heard someone talking about that. Like, what would I say about that? Right? And, like, sometimes, I mean, I don't know about you guys. I feel like a lot of us have written a lot of stuff at this point, right? So, like, I don't remember every sentence that I ever wrote. And there might be something that's, like, way back in there, buried somewhere that could be really insightful for a new conversation, which, like, every time I hear Bertrand talk about this, I'm like, oh, man, I would love to. Like, I have, like, more than 100 articles. It's like, it's.

Tracy Borreson [00:14:27]:

It's a lot of stuff. And I write, like, in a very opinionated way. So, like, this is my opinion, and this is what I think, but, like, there's. There's so much value in not letting, like, a single piece of content die because I don't know, there's value in it for people later, too. So I do think that it can greatly enable us from. I would call it repurposing instead of recycling, because I think people say that's. I think people put recycling into the category of regurgitation. And I'm not.

Tracy Borreson [00:14:58]:

I think we've all also heard that, right. Like, there was a guy I was following on LinkedIn who like every three months would just like post the exact same thing. And I'm like, not trying very hard.

Adam Gray [00:15:12]:

No. If we can just bounce to a couple of questions. Really interesting comment here from Greg. The idea of differentiation in sales may be a fallacy or narrative created by professional sales trainers. Additionally, if you give the LLM context that nurtures differentiation, doesn't it? No, no. Is along the show. And, and the reason that, that certainly the first part of that is not a fallacy is because Tim, Tim worked in Oracle for many years. He had a, a large team of people that he, that he, he, he managed.

Adam Gray [00:15:48]:

And let's assume all of them worked hard. Some were really successful and some weren't. And that's because some differentiated from others. You know, they all had the same brand, they all had the same products, they all had the same training. The difference was the people. So absolutely, this is about differentiating yourself and making yourself look approachable, friendly, helpful, all of those things that help build trust. And part of this is potentially giving the LLM or, or the AI tool because probably a bit more than an LLM these days, giving that tool the, the raw materials to be able to help you marshal your thoughts. And LinkedIn user said about collaborative with the AI, which absolutely.

Adam Gray [00:16:41]:

You know, as a sparring partner, somebody that you can bounce ideas of, somebody that can, as you said, Tracy, you know, you've got, you've written hundreds of pieces of content. You can't remember every single sentence. The AI can. And I found with the exercise with Notebook lm, I found that it pulled out some really great phrases that I may have used once before, but I don't use all the time. And thought, actually, even though that's my words, that's a really good way of probably stolen from someone else, in fairness, but that's a really good way of describing this.

Bertrand Godillot [00:17:13]:

But that's an interesting point. And going back to differentiation, Your AI teammate doesn't have any ideas.

Adam Gray [00:17:27]:

No.

Bertrand Godillot [00:17:29]:

It can certainly pick up your best punchlines, Adam, just like Greg, within your material and maybe make connections that you'd even. You didn't even make, you know, in these different pieces of content. Because this is, this is what it's been. This is by design what it does. But it will never come back to you with a really, really bright new angle to the discussion or, you know, something that would really be you. Because the difference, going back to this, you will make the difference. Your AI doesn't.

Tracy Borreson [00:18:16]:

I Think there's also something interesting. Like I'm thinking about places like this show, right? Where it's not, if, if I'm. I, I use, I use my AI for, as a thought partner too, right? But I don't feel like we come up with ideas. I feel like I come up with ideas and I input stuff and then it gives me stuff. Sometimes it gives me stuff I don't think I would have got to on my own, which is great, right? Like, and I love to use it for like my favorite use case for it so far was when I was creating awards for the girls baseball team last year and I wanted a unique award for each girl based on their profile. And I fed the profiles into AI and I'm like, I want these to be alliterative and like it was very good at that. It was way better at that than me. But then when you come, when you get into a conversation with another person or you get into a room like this where then you have like multiple brains interpreting one sentence in different ways.

Tracy Borreson [00:19:15]:

There's. My friend Peter calls it the third mind. There's like not just me and not just you, but us. And we are like creating stuff. And there might be people who are experiencing that with their AI right now. I'm just not. But I will tell you that that kind of thing and like using that as part of the ideation process and then being able to feed the output of that into AI, right? Like you actually get, oh, we're talking about this. And this is Tracy's opinion, this is Tim's opinion and this is Richard's opinion.

Tracy Borreson [00:19:49]:

And we all like kind of agree, but we don't have the same experience. And it makes, it adds this level of like robustness and depth that I think as humans we forget is another one of those like trust building layers like that. I see someone explore their thoughts, I go through the process with them and I'm like, oh, there's like a reality of this that I trust.

Adam Gray [00:20:13]:

I think that part of the challenge here is that we're very lucky in that there's five of us on this call and we're able to effectively brainstorm ideas and see where the conversation goes. Which if I'm a metaphor for everybody here on the call, I find this a really valuable exercise because you say something which triggers something that Richard says which says something that Tim says which. And then I go, oh, I hadn't put the pieces together in quite that way. Now we're lucky because we have people that are comfortable, content creators all Sitting in a virtual room, batting around some ideas, and we've got the time and the space to be able to do that. That may not be the case for you. So AI may be that sparring partner that you have that may challenge you to, to do things. And, and I think that that part of the challenge here again is that for you, Tracy, you're, you're a, a very skilled, comfortable content creator. So AI is, is not doing your work for you, it's helping you to be more efficient.

Adam Gray [00:21:18]:

And I think that for a lot of people out there, certainly when we train organizations, the biggest challenge that we have is that people. I can't write. I'm, I'm not good at doing content. And, and getting people over that initial hurdle is probably the first step to them being self sufficient, isn't it?

Bertrand Godillot [00:21:35]:

But, but to get there, there is, there is an onboarding process.

Adam Gray [00:21:39]:

Absolutely.

Bertrand Godillot [00:21:39]:

Just like you would on board and you. Yeah. Someone, someone new in your, in your organization.

Tracy Borreson [00:21:46]:

And I think. Sorry, go ahead.

Bertrand Godillot [00:21:48]:

Oh, no, that's okay.

Tracy Borreson [00:21:50]:

I was just thinking like this brings me back to the differentiation though too. Right. Because I, Well, I do think that the word differentiation is something that sales trainers and marketers have like agitated. A pain point. People have agitated in order to like sell stuff. But at the same time, like what it makes it easy for me to create content isn't necessarily what makes it easy for Richard to create content. And I think that's the important piece of the differentiation is, is what how do we build that, our, our own unique content creator profile. Right.

Tracy Borreson [00:22:26]:

Some people like video, some people like writing, some people like live content. There's lots of different categories of content that we can create. And once you find your comfortable way to create with what you have, I think that's the key differentiation because then you found your way to make it easy for you.

Adam Gray [00:22:48]:

So, so we've got to the point where we, we can all agree, and I'm sure everyone in the audience can agree, that switching on your AI tool, you know, Gemini, Claude, whatever it may be, switching it on and saying to it, write me a blog about X is not the way forward. Because you're effectively saying to it, tell me everything you know about me. And it says, I don't know anything about you.

Bertrand Godillot [00:23:12]:

I am prisoner of my brilliance.

Adam Gray [00:23:14]:

Yeah. So, exactly. So you have to, yeah, you have to upskill it. So given that that's, that's a prerequisite of getting truly valuable content out of these tools, how do people do that? What's their first step?

Bertrand Godillot [00:23:34]:

Well, anyway, I've looked at that in, in an. Because let's put it this way, I'm lazy as well. So I did try the, you know, do it for me. But, and this is, this is where I realized that I was making the difference and therefore I was, I was approaching the topic the completely wrong way. But I, but I think we, to get to a reasonable level of response, you can say it's all about providing context and to provide context, the broadest contest context as possible. And so it means, you know, you need to think about who is your target with your target target audience, who's your target customer? Of course, what are your value propositions? I think one of the stuff that is sometimes overlooked is your convictions. And we have a very good example around the set here because we do have convictions on how you should be approaching the whole social setting space. Social first could be the theme here.

Bertrand Godillot [00:24:58]:

And if you don't provide these convictions as part of your context, then your AI teammate is going to get carried away and pick up what the average assumption is around what you should be doing if you want to be successful in social science.

Tim Hughes [00:25:21]:

But if you think about somebody tuning in who doesn't have 50 blocks, then, then, you know, for example, we always talk a lot about how do we get people to 100? Well, we move people from 0 to 1 rather than 0 to 10. So surely the, the answer is what you would do is you'd write a blog and then you ask the, the, the AI to check it for you, and then the next day you do it again and the next day, and in 50 days you've got 50 blogs. So the number one thing that Sam Altman says that is the issue at the moment is memory. Because what the LLM will do is basically memorize everything that you ask it and then use that as context. So you just start from day one and just write one and another one, another one, another one, and within two months you've got 50 blogs. I'm just using that as simple for people that haven't got like 50 to upload.

Tracy Borreson [00:26:23]:

Well, and I think the other important thing there is that you, if there are ways to use AI to help you write a blog, right? If you are at blog zero and you've never written a blog before, there's like Marie France is adding some things in in here too. But like lots of people with AI talk about prompt engineering, right? Prompt engineering is about asking the right questions. And so if you know what you might ask yourself, right, like I want to write a blog about this Topic I'm interested in this specific slant on it. And even if you gave it that and it, like, gave you draft points back, right? Like, this is a beginning place. But I think the most important pressure test is when you read it. Test. Would you say that?

Adam Gray [00:27:20]:

Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:27:20]:

And even it's like, would you say that out loud? Right? Because we get also how we read and then how we, like, copy and paste is one thing, but if you took that and you read it out loud, would that sound like you? And if the answer is no, it's not done. So it is always helpful. I talk about this from a marketing point of view all the time, Right. It's very hard to start from zero. It's always easier to start from something, right? So if you have a theme and you have one thing, you think about that and you can put that into AI. AI can give you something to start from, but it is not the output. And if you read it and the words taste bad in your mouth, don't post it. It's not your words.

Adam Gray [00:28:07]:

And then that's so true. Because when, when we first got access to Gemini, I thought, I'll experiment with this and I'll write. I won't write a blog. I'll put in some context and then I'll just get it to publish a blog and then I'll upload it and see what happens. And within 10 minutes, I got a message from Tim saying, is everything all right? What do you mean? He said, that blog was. Was awful. Didn't sound at all like you. Is everything all right? Yeah, it was.

Adam Gray [00:28:36]:

It was a test. And I was going to say, you know, then in the comments, I said, this blog was written entirely by AI.

Tim Hughes [00:28:42]:

But for some, I'd fallen asleep by then.

Adam Gray [00:28:45]:

Yeah, but, but for someone that knows me, it was like all of the things that make. Make me want to read the stuff you publish were absent from. From this. And I think that that's. That's the point, isn't it? You know, people and like Bertrand, you said, you know, you tried it the lazy way. And Tracy, you know, you said if the words taste bad in your. Yeah. The problem is that a lot of people don't genuinely have a belief that they have something to say that the world wants to hear.

Adam Gray [00:29:13]:

So they read the thing that, that the AI has created and they go, that will do. But if they came at this, from the point of saying, I'm publishing this onto LinkedIn, let's say, which has got one and a half billion members and it's going to Be out on the Internet representing me until the end of time. Is this something that I want representing me? And if you start from that point, then possibly not, possibly you might want to rework it, but that doesn't prevent.

Bertrand Godillot [00:29:48]:

You from trying to improve this. And I think this is, this is where the onboarding part of the onboarding process is. If you're not happy with, with, with what came out, you can rewrite it and you should let your AI teammate know what you actually published.

Adam Gray [00:30:04]:

Yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:30:05]:

So that the next time, the next time around when you ask the question, then it improves. And I've seen, I've seen this, you know, I can testify this. It does make improvements to the point where probably my teammate could rewrite one of my posts and I could be probably 95% okay, so I'll, I'll fine tune it again. But, but that can work at least to get you from zero to one of what Tim was saying earlier to help you build your first 50 post that you know, you will reuse afterwards.

Richard Jones [00:30:43]:

I mean, one of the things I find is that, you know, you can start and not necessarily know where you want to go. I think it's a great way of, you know, sort of you've got basis of an idea and, or a seed of an idea and you start writing about it and you see where you go with it and see what comes out of it. You know, you don't. I think that the difference is, whereas historically you might have sat down and had to plan what it is you were going to write, you can now go in with a much more open mind and see where, see where you go and you know, see whether you like what comes out. You know, as we've just said, you know, if it sounds right, then, then then good. If it doesn't, well, nothing bed and should nothing gain.

Adam Gray [00:31:25]:

So, but, but I think it's also worth remembering that, that our AI teammate is not just there to proofread our content. So Mary France said, one, be clear about the message. Absolutely. What are you trying to say? Two, define your why. Three, define your audience. Now this is quite an interesting one because I have, I, I once took somebody that I had worked with previously that had worked in a marketing automation business, had a side hustle of like skin care products that they were involved in the importing of. And I said, who, who are you? Who are you targeting for this? And this person said, well, women, but men can buy it as well. I'm not even sure that was a prerequisite actually, mate.

Adam Gray [00:32:30]:

So the point is You've done some fantastic work around ICP identification, patron. So how have you used AI to help identify and articulate what an icp?

Bertrand Godillot [00:32:45]:

Well, that's an interesting example because I think one of the. We all have content as part of that. Because it is generative AI, it should be used to generate content. I've got a pretty rich definition of an ICP as an Excel spin spreadsheet, basically with a number of angles to it. And what I have realized, you know, consulting with different companies and independent experts, is that they can't really feed that spreadsheet or they've done part of it, right? So this, I came up with this, with this crazy idea. We ran a two hours session like this one, just to call and then obviously I recorded this and I got the transcript and I fit the transcript together with my spreadsheet to my favorite teammates and I asked him to. And I asked it to fit the spreadsheet for me. Interestingly enough, you know, that has generated 15 ICPs on my.

Bertrand Godillot [00:34:09]:

With, with the level of precision that's. Well, the level of details.

Adam Gray [00:34:12]:

Sorry.

Bertrand Godillot [00:34:13]:

That I was looking for. And when I shared that back with this customer, they were blown away. So they are. I think there are use cases that are probably yet to be. Yet to be discovered that might be much more useful than just going for generating content.

Adam Gray [00:34:47]:

Sorry, go on, Tracy.

Tracy Borreson [00:34:48]:

I was just going to say I think that speaks to like using it to help you do the thing you're trying to do do. Right? Like here's a thing you want to do, you know why you want to do it. And let's play with how an AI teammate can help me do that instead of saying like, I'm creating content. I know that there was some comments in the chat earlier about like people just creating content because they think they have to, they actually don't want to. And that comes across in the content. And then if you create that content, you feed that content to AI, going to be more content that feels like no one wanted to create this in the first place. And so there's so many opportunities with the AI nowadays to do, to use it to help us do the things we want to do. But we got to have a level of clarity on what we want to do and why we want to do it in order to turn it on with its full power.

Bertrand Godillot [00:35:40]:

And the good news is that there are synergies, right? Because if now I know my 15 ICPs, then I can, it can be. This output can be used as an input to my, to my ghostwriter for Instance.

Tracy Borreson [00:35:55]:

Well, specifically other things. Like, I always think it's funny when we talk about ICPs because, like, I'm the marketer and I think most of them are out to lunch, so I don't use them. Like, my ICP is the curious, right? Like, that, the extent of it. Like, that's not the right thing for all people. There are people who want to have this, like, precision in their icp, and there's people who want to have the freedom, the flexibility in their icp. And there's different ways to use AI to support both of those ways of being. And again, that comes back to the individualization, maybe I'll call it that, instead of differentiation to say, like, how I use AI is meant to empower me in my experience, in my creation, and my connection in my conversations. And that might look different than it does for someone else, but when you find your system for that, then sky's the limit.

Richard Jones [00:36:55]:

I think there's a. There's clearly using AI to help you do your job, and then there's using AI to create content. You know, they're sort of, sort of fundamentally different angles from my perspective. And giving AI too much control over your content will probably, you know, take you to a bad place. But harnessing its skills to help you do the core components of your job, I very much think it can be valuable to assist with that.

Tracy Borreson [00:37:30]:

It's almost like, as you say that, Richard, something that's coming up for me is this, like, concept of outsourcing versus insourcing, right? So, like, I want a teammate to help me do the things that I know I want to do. And so, like, whether you're using an AI teammate or you're hiring a person to help you do that, or you're putting together a panel of people to help you brainstorm a topic on a certain thing, like, you're doing that for you because you care about it. And there's this whole, especially in marketing and content, right? For the past 20 years, there's been a whole subset of quote unquote solutions that are about you outsourcing that you out don't. You don't have to care. You don't have to care about content. We're all, we all need to do content, but you hate content. So you don't have to care about it and you just outsource it to. I mean, we've outsourced forever, right? Like, we had a whole five years ago it was social media managers, right? Like, now it's AI teammates, but there's still this like concept that I think is the dividing factor, especially in content.

Tracy Borreson [00:38:38]:

When we say how are people using AI to create meaningful content and how are people using AI to create AI Slop is in this. Am I using it just to outsource a thing I don't want to do? And if I think the value in that is, then like, why do I not want to do that? Is it because I don't think I can? Is it because there's infinite reasons? But if we know our reason why we don't want to create content, then maybe we can address our reason why we don't want to create.

Richard Jones [00:39:08]:

I think that's an interesting point. Because outsourcing because you don't want to do it versus outsourcing because you don't have the expertise to do it. A sort of, you know, I see there's a, there's a, some middle ground here to be had where, you know, with a bit of assistance and guidance, bit of coaching, you can do things better than giving it to somebody else to do because you simply think you can't do it. So it's a, you know, there's a, there's a sort of. It should empower you. I think it should empower you to do stuff that you perhaps don't traditionally have the confidence to be able to do on your own.

Adam Gray [00:39:43]:

But given that AI is such a great note taker, I mean, one of the things that you can do if you're starting on the journey of creating content and you want to empower your AI to sound like you when you speak is you can have a debate like this, maybe with another person and you can record it so that you end up with, you end up with a whole load of ideas. And the ideas that you end up with, you can say to AI, I want you to formulate these into a content plan for me that has 50 or 100 distinct posts. And then you have a go at writing each of those distinct posts. And maybe you can, maybe you can do that really easily. Maybe you need to bounce that off somebody else or with your AI, but you create all of those hundred posts, then you've got a huge catalog of raw material that you can then ask your AI to slice and dice into different ways. Because one of the things that I noticed from, from Pouring, I think I pulled 90 of my blogs and articles into Notebook, plus half a dozen or so other resources. And what it did was it was able to make connections that were not immediately obvious to me. So it was able to say, you spoke about this, this and this, actually, if you pull these together, then this is an interesting perspective on this.

Adam Gray [00:41:19]:

Obviously, it didn't articulate it quite like that, but it basically said, here's. Here's an article on this. Here. Here's this different element. And I think that what's really interesting is that it takes your knowledge. If you. You program it and prime it properly, it takes your knowledge and then it presents that back to you in a way that perhaps you hadn't thought of. And I think that's the key thing because, you know, Tim and I joke about the fact that it's not entirely true, but, you know, we've been doing this for 10 years.

Adam Gray [00:41:48]:

We've written, like thousands of blogs. We've written the same blog a thousand times is what we joke because we've got a particular perspective on stuff. We want to keep telling that story because we feel that that's a story that's really important. Now, obviously, it's a little bit more variation than that, but the reality is that AI is really good at that. It's really good at. Okay, these are the. These are the five points that I want to keep making because I think they're absolutely crucial. And it can keep coming up with fresh ways of combining those.

Adam Gray [00:42:16]:

And you have to obviously proof it. You have to make sure that you're delivering something. Bertrand don't sound like he's convinced here.

Bertrand Godillot [00:42:25]:

Yeah, well, no, I think. I think you're right. But the point is that I would add. I would add to date. So it knows everything. So it knows your. It. It captures your knowledge to date.

Adam Gray [00:42:42]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:42:43]:

So that there will be. There will never be a new angle or a new point of view if you don't fit it. And I think that's the point, you know, so that's something that we could add to the discussion is. It is not very. Unfortunately, it's. The lazy button doesn't work there either. So it means that you need to consistently onboard, or at least you need to. You need to manage.

Bertrand Godillot [00:43:22]:

So you need to onboard and then you need to manage if you want your. Your AI teammate to remain as useful as. As it is the first time. Because what the exercise we did, for instance, or you did, Adam, loading your, I don't know, your fifty or hundred pieces of content into notebook, and then you got something really outstanding. Well, reasonably good.

Adam Gray [00:43:49]:

Yeah.

Bertrand Godillot [00:43:50]:

Out of that, if you do the same tomorrow and if you do the same in a month from now, and you don't update anything, you don't add new content, you'll get the same.

Adam Gray [00:44:01]:

Yeah, well, yes, you, well, you may.

Bertrand Godillot [00:44:04]:

Not get the same.

Adam Gray [00:44:06]:

You get different words. The thing moved on. And, and I think that that's, that's one of the very real dangers, isn't it, that as a, as a human, when you are going to, going to write a fresh piece of content, you troll your memory and you think about how you can combine your knowledge into an interesting way based on what you read today. So, so all of us write blogs that say along the lines of, I read a really interesting article this morning in the newspaper and it made me think about this and the problem that that created. Now, AI doesn't do that. It can do that, but it won't do that because you won't fill it with all of that day by day, fresh content, fresh learnings, and different perspectives on things. So we're potentially staring into a bit of an abyss, aren't we, where human intelligence just gradually fizzles out as we stop growing our knowledge and our experience and keep relying more and more on these tools.

Bertrand Godillot [00:45:07]:

And there is a, there's a great anecdote that I want to share on this. You know, I've written a blog on, on Jimmy Cliff. It was rest in peace, Jimmy Cliff. And I have a process when I write, when I, when I write a blog, I, I just copy it and taste it into my, my teammate so that it can give me some, some feedback. And the feedback which came out was, well, that's an interesting block, but Jimmy Cliff is not dead. So I had to come back and say, yes, he is. And he passed away on that date. And then it basically came back to me and said, all right, well, if you say so, then let's move forward.

Bertrand Godillot [00:46:01]:

So at least I've learned something to my IT mate. But that's what happens. So we should all be very cautious with.

Tim Hughes [00:46:13]:

So Greg's made an interesting comment there, Bertrand, which is it captures your knowledge to date, is partially correct. It recognizes your patterns and then predicts based on those patterns, and those patterns can evolve based on the content just created.

Bertrand Godillot [00:46:31]:

Yeah, well, I would say that if you don't feed with new. I agree with that. But if you don't feed with new content, there will be a point in time where it will become dry in terms of ideas because it's predictable.

Tracy Borreson [00:46:46]:

Well, and I think that to me there's like the spark that is the human component. Right. And so like you were saying, like I read an article or I have a conversation and there's something in that that I'm like, ooh that's a thing that I want to talk about. And, and that's the spark, right? So if we are the spark, then we can use the AI for lots of things. Things. But like equally, if, if, first of all, I, I choose to believe that our patterns are not set. So while historically my patterns might have been this, I could change my mind tomorrow and go in a completely different direction. When I was working in corporate, I wrote mostly with insurance customers as the target audience.

Tracy Borreson [00:47:34]:

And so I wrote in a way that speaks more to those people. And as I have evolved my content, it is more like, I'm gonna push you off the fence with this. Are you ready? And that's like me developing as a person, but that is also because I pay attention to the spark that I get. Right? And so even if, if, if we load a bunch of our content into an LLM and you're sitting there thinking like, oh, I wonder what underlying patterns exist here that I haven't actually explored in a standalone blog. Tell me, tell me LLM. It can tell, it can tell me those things. But that spark, that question still came from me. I wondered that.

Tracy Borreson [00:48:16]:

Right? So I think this is the important piece for us to like harness ourselves into, from the human perspective is like, how do we create the spark? Right? And then like use tools. This is what we are great at in terms of human, human evolution. Right? Like we create tools. It's how we do things. We create tools to help us. But if we are, if we are creating a bunch of content from a state of not sparked. Right, like AI, Tell me what to write about today.

Adam Gray [00:48:52]:

Well, that, that's a really interesting point in reference to Mary France's comment here. AI is not for lazy people. It's for intentional people who know they have to, to do the work and establish trust with their, in their words and voice. AI can help organize your ideas, but not give them substance and make them come to life. That, that's true, but you're talking from a position of not being a lazy person who's trying to use the AI as a tool to uplift your capabilities. I think that, that what we, what we see time and again is that people look for the easy option. Write me a blog about like plug in this tool and instantly it'll send a thousand connection requests and, and it'll be a stream of constant ICP inquiries. Yeah, that's what everybody wants.

Adam Gray [00:49:43]:

Everybody wants a one, one button that they push and everything takes care of itself. So for us, and I suspect that's everybody on the call and everybody in the audience, we're looking to see how AI can help us be better at what we do. I think most people are just looking for quicker, and I think the two are very different solutions.

Tracy Borreson [00:50:05]:

And I think also this is also the challenge that comes up in automation, because what we're looking for is quicker, then we trade away the other stuff, and so we produce a lot of stuff faster. But we also. I don't know if I've. I've shared this experience on this show before, but my dad was visiting once, and I was hand chopping pecans because I like to hand chop pecans. My husband taught me knife skills. There's a whole backstory to that. But I get, like, an experience of accomplishing something by doing the chopping. And my dad comes in and he was like, you need a slap chop.

Tracy Borreson [00:50:48]:

There's like, one of those, like, slap machines, which is supposed to make this faster. And I was like, oh, I get where you're coming from, from that. It's also specifically if you don't love to chop nuts. Right? Except I love to chop nuts. So now if I got a tool that takes away something I like to do for the ease of convenience and switches that, for now, I have to wash this slap chop, which is a terrible thing to wash. And it's like really pain in the butt now. I've switched the amount of time from doing something that I love to do to doing something that I don't want to do for to make it faster.

Adam Gray [00:51:28]:

That's. That's basically the E. Myth revisited, isn't it?

Richard Jones [00:51:31]:

Where.

Adam Gray [00:51:32]:

Where this. This woman is working in a bakery, baking pies, working for somebody else, and all she wants to do with her life is bake pies. So she decides, what I'm going to do is I'm. I'm going to start my own business so I can bake pies. And then she realized very quickly that Instead of spending 80% of her time baking pies, she's now spending 20% of her time baking pies, 20% of her time paying invoices, and 20% of her time cleaning and 20% of her time marketing and 20% of her time. And all of a sudden, she may be making more money and she may be doing stuff and building an empire, but fundamentally, the joy has gone out it. But. But I think, again, you know, it's different if.

Adam Gray [00:52:09]:

If you're somebody who loves writing blogs, then actually this. This is a different perspective, different challenge, isn't it? But I think Greg's comment here is really interesting. Yeah, it is funny this, isn't it? Because when the LLM has been trained on billions of people, particularly with something like Deep Deep Seek, which has used the whole of the Internet to. To source its language model. But I would still come back to the fact that when I used NotebookLM and put my blogs in it, it sounded like it was me speaking. So it isn't necessarily just copying everybody. It is largely copying me, or seems.

Bertrand Godillot [00:52:51]:

To be.

Tracy Borreson [00:52:53]:

Also Slapchop. Yeah, we should put that. Oh, we should have a bingo card. That would be so fun. But I want to just talk about the spark component because I think a lot of times we think a spark has to mean something new, right? And I, I agree with you, Gray. I don't think there's a lot of new stuff, right? But I had this, I had this moment once too. I was. I hosted virtual networking events and there was a lady who had come for the first time.

Tracy Borreson [00:53:19]:

I was chatting with her after and she was saying, do you have transcript? And I don't record. I don't. We don't record those meetings, so we don't have a transcript. And she was like, oh, there were so many great things that were said in that meeting. I'm like, well, the point isn't actually for you to remember all of it. The point is for you to notice what resonates with you. That's the spark. It's not something new.

Tracy Borreson [00:53:39]:

It's not the creation of something brand new. It's something that you notice. It's something that you wonder. This is the, like, human connection. And AI is very good at following a path, right? It's good at following a path. It's good identifying patterns. Humans brains are amazing at picking up random stuff. And so like when you go into a room and you look around and you're like, okay, I got this whole room of people that I could connect with.

Tracy Borreson [00:54:08]:

Who am I going to go to first? You make that call. There's a something you like that person over those people. I heard them talking about this and I know about that. Or like my go to is like that person's standing by themselves and I'm by myself, so I'm gonna go talk to them. But that's not, that's not the right thing to do. That's the way I think. And so I think when we remind ourselves that the spark is just us, and it doesn't have to be more than that, it doesn't have to be profound, it doesn't have to be something different. Like there's I'm sure there's somewhere else on the Internet where they have done a show or, or some piece of content about AI and how it can help you, how it's hurting you or how it's helping you.

Tracy Borreson [00:54:49]:

Right, Absolutely. That exists somewhere. But there was something that came up in a conversation that made us think we should do an episode about this. And then this is what came out of that, which is different than what came out of the other ones. And that's the human spark. And when we allow the human spark to live, we use AI to be our teammate in bringing that spark to more people. Then I think we win.

Bertrand Godillot [00:55:13]:

Perfect.

Adam Gray [00:55:15]:

And on that note, and on that bombshell, I, I think we're at time. So obviously, thank you everybody on, on the show today. Thank you everybody in the audience. We've had a fantastic amount of engagement. Again, clearly AI is a hot topic for everybody. So these seem to be going down quite well and certainly an exciting thing for us to explore and an exciting thing to get the comments from the audience on. So thank you to all of you who have commented. For anybody that would like to join us on the show as a guest, if you have a point of view on something that you would like to share with the audience, then please scan the QR code and yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:56:01]:

I know I got easy positioning today.

Bertrand Godillot [00:56:02]:

Yes.

Tracy Borreson [00:56:04]:

Usually I'm like what it does.

Adam Gray [00:56:07]:

So scan the QR code, fill out the form, and we would love to have you on as a guest. And until next week, thank you all very much indeed and have a great weekend, everybody. Bye bye.

Bertrand Godillot [00:56:19]:

Thank you, everybody.

Tim Hughes [00:56:20]:

Thanks, everybody.

Bertrand Godillot [00:56:21]:

Thank you.

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