How to Make “Human Touch” Your AI Advantage with Jay Baer
When AI Becomes Table Stakes, Human Touch Becomes Your Competitive Edge
Here’s something to mull over: every business you’re competing with will have access to essentially the same AI tools within two years.
That Tesla-level advantage you think you’ll get from adopting ChatGPT or Claude? Gone faster than your motivation to mow the lawn when you see the rain clouds moving in.
Jay Baer—who’s helped everyone from Nike to the United Nations (yes, apparently even they need to “keep customers”)—shared this during our recent conversation, and it should be a wakeup call for any owner or marketer that thinks they’ll always have this competitive advantage.
The Great AI Equalizer Is Coming
We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we? Remember when having a website made you cutting-edge? When being on social media gave you a real advantage? When email marketing automation felt like cheating?
Each time, the early adopters got a sweet but temporary edge. Then everyone else caught up, the technology became commoditized, and suddenly you needed something new to stand out.
“AI is going to be eventually, and I think pretty quickly, like electricity,” Jay explained. “Nobody’s like, ‘Yeah, I was an early adopter of electricity.'”
The difference with AI? It’s more transformative than any technology shift we’ve experienced. It’s already baking itself into every tool you use—Canva, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace. Soon you’ll be using AI without even knowing it.
Which means the businesses still obsessing over AI adoption six months from now will be like companies in 2010 bragging about having a website. Congratulations, you’ve achieved the minimum standard.
Double Down on Human
When AI becomes omnipresent, human touch becomes rare. And rare things become valuable.
Jay calls this approach “humankind”—deliberately adding more humanity back into your customer interactions, not less.
Take TD Bank in Canada. They used to celebrate mortgage completions by sending an email that said, “Congrats on paying off your house! We’re charging you $250 as agreed.” (Talk about a celebration buzzkill.)
Now? The branch manager calls personally, invites you in for a one-on-one meeting, brings you a cupcake with a candle, and instead of charging $250, they give you a $250 prepaid Visa gift card.
Cost to the bank: $500 per customer. Value in word-of-mouth marketing: immeasurable. How many people do you think tell that story?
The High Repetition, Low Emotion Framework
Before you start panicking about the cost of cupcakes for every customer interaction, Jay has a simple framework for deciding what to automate and what to keep human:
Use AI for high repetition, low emotion tasks.
Returning a pair of jeans? Perfect for AI. Someone’s first home purchase falling through? That’s a “humans only” moment.
The realtor Jay met in Colorado gets this. After showing houses, he didn’t just send a standard follow-up email. He bought Jay and his wife a trial subscription to the local digital newspaper for $5.
Nobody does that. Which is exactly why Jay remembered it—and why he’s telling the story on podcasts weeks later.
The 25% Capacity Question Nobody’s Asking
Here’s the business question that’ll keep you up at night (in a good way): What are you going to do with the extra 25% capacity that AI gives you?
Because if you’re like most businesses, AI will free up roughly a quarter of your time and resources. The question is whether you’re going to:
- Just pocket the savings and call it a day
- Reduce staff and maximize profit
- Reinvest some of those gains into creating remarkable human experiences
Jay’s betting on option three. Take some of that newfound efficiency and roll it back into bespoke, personal touches that create word-of-mouth marketing.
“Word of mouth is more important today than it was when I wrote the book,” Jay notes. “It’s more important tomorrow than it is today. Because word of mouth, actual human to human recommendations out of your food hole, is literally the only thing that AI can’t fake.”
The Slow Lane Strategy
One of my favorite examples Jay shared: a grocery store chain called Sobeys has created a “slow lane” specifically for people who want to chat with the cashier while checking out.
It’s brilliant on multiple levels. Some customers (like Jay’s mom, who apparently makes friends with everyone on airplanes) love having that human connection. Others appreciate getting the chatty people out of the express lane so they can zip through faster.
Everybody wins when you design for human preferences instead of just efficiency.
Measuring the Unmeasurable
“But Rich,” you’re thinking, “how do I prove ROI on cupcakes and newspaper subscriptions?”
Jay suggests tracking customers who experience your human touch initiatives and analyzing their renewal rates, average order size, and lifetime value compared to those who don’t.
The measurement isn’t always immediate, but the impact compounds. That realtor’s $5 newspaper investment? It’s generating podcast mentions and referral potential that’ll pay dividends for years.
The Scary Organizational Truth
Here’s something most AI experts aren’t talking about that should terrify every business owner: 78% of hiring managers say AI is already costing entry-level jobs.
Makes sense, right? Why hire someone fresh out of college when AI can handle those basic tasks?
But Jay raises a chilling question: “If we somehow stop bringing young people into organizations because AI can do it, we are hollowing out our organizations downstream without even realizing it.”
Who becomes your manager in five years? Your director in ten? Your VP in fifteen? If you’re not developing talent now, you won’t have leadership later.
The solution isn’t avoiding AI—it’s redesigning roles so young people do different work alongside their digital colleagues, not instead of them.
Your Next Steps: The Human Touch Audit
Ready to start? Jay recommends a simple audit: Count how many of your customers actually interact with a human being from your organization, and how often.
Do the math honestly. You might be shocked at how much of your customer relationship is already automated, digitized, or removed from human contact.
Then ask: Where could we add back meaningful human moments? Not because it feels good (though it does), but because it creates competitive advantage.
Maybe it’s a phone call instead of your fourth email in a thread. Maybe it’s a handwritten note with orders. Maybe it’s remembering personal details and following up on them.
The specific tactics matter less than the strategic insight: when everyone has the same AI capabilities, human connection becomes your differentiator.
The Bottom Line
AI isn’t the enemy of human connection—it’s the funding mechanism for it. Use those efficiency gains to create the kind of remarkable, personal experiences that people can’t stop talking about.
Because in a world where every business has access to the same artificial intelligence, the most successful companies will be the ones that invest most thoughtfully in authentic human intelligence.
Rich: My next guest is a business growth and customer experience expert, advisor, researcher, author, and analyst. He has spent 30 years helping more than 700 of the world’s most iconic brands, including Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Bentley, and the United Nations, gain and keep more customers. I am curious to know how the United Nations keep more customers, but maybe that’s an episode we’ll do down the road.
A seventh-generation entrepreneur, he has written seven bestselling books on marketing and customer experience and founded five multimillion-dollar companies. He’s an inductee into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame and travels globally teaching business growth principles to in-person audiences. For three consecutive years, he has been voted a global guru for internet marketing and customer experience. He has also hosted more than 800 podcast episodes and created seven shows including Social Pros, twice named the number one marketing podcast.
A lover of plaid suits, and a hater of red tape, he’s also world’s number two tequila influencer, publishing 25 videos per month on Instagram, TikTok, and beyond. Today we are going to be talking about AI and how you can keep a human touch in it. And how AI is just table stakes. And how you cannot rely on AI or get ahead of it, just keep pace with it with, I believe, five-time guest Jay Baer. Jay, welcome back to the podcast.
Jay: Great to be back. I was expecting a velvet smoking jacket like they do on SNL for the five timers club, but maybe the FedEx didn’t come here yet.
Rich: Yeah. It’s funny, I really should have something like that for you. Like a gold jacket or something, Agents of Change logos on the back. I think you’re my first five-time guest, so I wasn’t prepared.
Jay: There really should be then. I can help design the garment.
Rich: I was going to say, if anybody could create a good-looking plaid jacket, it would be you, sir.
Jay: Thank you. I’m totally in on that plan. And then the next time there’s a fifth time guest, I’ll come on the show and welcome them to the club, as they do on SNL. You just let me know.
Rich: Absolutely. Sure thing. Other than that, the other option would be is we just get a couch here and you are always on the end of the couch, asking even better questions than the host.
Jay: Like a sidekick. Because I don’t currently have a podcast. I would love to be your sidekick.
Rich: The job is yours, my friend.
Jay: Thank you.
Rich: Alright, before we get into the marketing, you are a tequila influencer and I’m just curious, I also love tequila. What has been the most surprising thing that you’ve discovered since embarking on becoming a tequila influencer?
Jay: That’s probably a whole show, but I would say one of the most surprising things is that there are more than 2,000 tequila brands, but only 10 brands or so comprise 85% of the market. So it is the definition of long tail from a competitive branding perspective. And I knew that instinctually, but to really be inside the business now, it is remarkable how big the big guys are and how not big everybody else is.
Rich: I don’t want you to name names, because I know that you’ve got relationships with these guys, so I don’t want you to tell me tell us who your favorite brand is or anything like that. But in general, do you find that the tequilas you like the best are from the more popular brands that we might see at the local bar, or are they more of these niche, really customized brands that have much smaller distribution?
Jay: Much more niche, much more craft. It’s very similar to the beer business where you have big beer that’s creating very large batches and doing it efficiently to protect profit margin. And then you have craft beer, which is making small batches typically with higher quality ingredients, et cetera.
It works the exact same way in the tequila industry. Most of the really big brands that you might find in a grocery store are producing at industrial scale, and the rest of the brands are not. And so we tend to not only enjoy, but also help promote the smaller brands that are doing things in a more artisanal fashion.
Rich: Love it. Love it. Alright, so let’s shift now a little bit towards marketing and AI. I went through your presentation deck, and you talk a lot about the human touch and the importance of human touch when in the world of AI. What drew you to this topic and how it impacts marketing?
Jay: I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Because both of us have seen this movie before, or at least similar movies, where we have this incredible new thing rooted in technology and everybody runs toward it, and early adopters have a defensible edge. But then inevitably, whatever the new thing is, becomes widely adopted, therefore commoditized, and that edge fades away, right?
So the person with the first flush toilet had a pretty good competitive edge for a bit. Obviously this happened with websites, it happened with mobile apps, it happened with SEO, it happened with email and marketing automation, certainly social media. Now don’t get me wrong, AI is more transformative than all of those, because it will impact more parts of our life than social media, for example.
But this idea that you can adopt and embrace social media now, and that somehow that will be the sustainable advantage that your business has versus competition is not true. Like it’s it because everybody is going to have it, right? And my role is not to be a futurist. I’m a near futurist. So my job is to figure out not what’s going to happen in 10 years or 20 years. My job is to figure out what’s going to happen in two years.
And what’s going to happen in two years is that everybody you’re competing with is going to have fundamentally the same access to AI. So you’ve got to come up with, in that situation, what do we do different that actually makes us stand out.
Rich: I one hundred percent agree with everything you just said. And I also believe that even those people who maybe aren’t as excited about using AI for everything, it doesn’t matter because it’s soon going to be baked into every tool you’re used to using, Canva, Photoshop, anything from Microsoft or Google.
Jay: You’re using it without even knowing you’re using it.
Rich: Right. Exactly.
Jay: It’d be like, to me, AI is going to be eventually, and I think pretty quickly, like electricity. Nobody’s like, “Yeah, I was an early adopter of electricity”. Or, “I really think a lot about my electricity strategy in my corporation.” Right? It’s just all in and around, always. It’s omnipresent. And AI will become that pretty quickly. And I used to say, nobody has a department of radio either, right? It’s just advertising.
Ao you got to come up with something new. And by my way of thinking, that’s new is what’s old. That the human touch, the more personalized approach will take on greater importance and be more effective as a differentiator because we will see so much less of it.
Rich: Alright, so if I’m understanding you then, in this near future world where everybody has pretty much, all of our competition is the same access to AI that we do, it’s going to be the human touch that is the competitive advantage in marketing and business communication.
Jay: I think it can be. Now I want to make sure that we’re clear. It’s not one or the other. I’m not suggesting don’t worry about AI, instead pursue the human touch. I think this is like an improv class. It is, yes. And to take this advice to heart. The first thing you got to do is get really serious about AI. I am presupposing that you are going to do that or that you have done that.
The next thing after that is how do you then go through your entire customer journey and say, where can we add back more humanity? Because those things will stand out. They’ll take on greater resonance because they will be fewer in number. I’ll give you an example.
So there’s a bank in Canada called TD Bank. They’re in the US too, but this particular version of it is Canadian. And they used to do this thing where when you completed your mortgage, like a 30-year home mortgage, 20-year home mortgage, at the conclusion of paying off your mortgage, which is a big deal, right? You paid off your house. That’s a pretty big deal. They would send you an email that said, “Mr. Brooks, your mortgage has paid off. We have gone ahead and deducted $250 from your account as a mortgage dispensation fee per our agreement.” That feels like a kick in the nuts. So now they realize that that’s not a great way to settle this.
So now the branch manager calls you on the phone and says, “Rich, we want you to come in and finish up the paperwork on the mortgage”. So you get there, you’re in a one-on-one meeting in her or his office. They congratulate you. They bring you up a cupcake with a candle on it. And instead of charging you $250, they give you a $250 prepaid Visa gift card as a congratulations. Now, does that cost them $500 per customer? Yes. But how many people are those customers going to tell about that experience? Then it becomes a word of mouth marketing investment. And that’s why this personal touch, which I call “humankind”, I think is going to be a terrific marketing strategy when everybody is instead leaning on robots.
Rich: So what are some other ways? Like obviously that’s nice if you get $500 to throw at every customer, and TD Bank has a certain size benefit, an economy of scale, where people from all over the US and Canada could choose TD Bank. But for small to medium sized businesses or niche businesses, what are some of the other things that you’ve either seen work or that you feel would be a really great approach that might be very cost friendly as well?
Jay: I was in Colorado two weeks ago. We’re thinking about buying a house there. And so I met a realtor for the first time and found him online, as one does, and then he was driving my wife and I around and showing us some different houses, et cetera. And the next day he sent us an email and said, “Alright, here’s the houses that I think you like the best. Here’s some other listings that I found in the market that are similar to those. And by the way, because it feels like maybe you’re a little bit serious about this, I’ve gone ahead and gotten you a trial subscription to the local newspaper digital edition”, which cost him $5.
Nobody does that, right? Nobody thinks about, oh, what would be really useful in that situation? And I remembered it, and here I am talking about it on a podcast two weeks later. So you think about how does that resonate with his customer? It doesn’t have to be something that you give somebody, it doesn’t have to be a gift. Those are just an example I came up with.
Rich: And what’s nice about that is the same thing that’s nice about any kind of “gift of the month club” is then you’re reminded every time you get the daily or weekly email from who came from The Coloradoan or whatever the thing is. And so it keeps on reminding you.
Jay: Yep.
Rich: So those sound like some of the type of experiences that customers might then, as you’ve talked about, it’s a talkable point, right? They’re going to go in, they’re going to share those sorts of stories, which I know is a whole other thing that you’ve talked about in the past. But what does ‘keeping it real’ look like in day-to-day customer interaction?
So if I can see doing some magnanimous type of things for my clients, but maybe how do I get my team on board so that all of their touches are human touches with our clients?
Jay: Yeah. Some of it is, I read so much every day, and I was just at a big conference about this recently, about the adoption of AI chatbots for frontline customer service. And look, I totally understand that it’s going to happen. It has to happen. The efficiency gains are too dramatic to not adopt it, even for small businesses, in my estimation. But there’s a way to do it, and there’s a way to do it, right?
There’s a way to do it that says, okay, we’re going to use AI to scrape easy questions off the top. And then there’s a way to do it where it’s, we’re going to use AI all the time. And you know what my advice would be? Be really smart about how you segment your queries and use AI only for the super basic repeatable things. And then free up people’s time to do the more complex things and actually keep it real lean into the personal side of it.
Even Starbucks, right? They used to write your name on the cup and then they stopped, and now they’re writing their name on the cup again. And is that more efficient? No. But it’s definitely more personal and human.
Rich: Yeah. I agree. And I feel like there’s things that are commodity marketing that are easy to out outsource to AI, and then there’s stuff that’s not. And it’s that thought leadership content or whatever it may be, that human touch.
I know a lot of people love having AI write their emails for them. I honestly can’t think of a worse use case than that, for me personally. I’m not judging somebody else, but I’m just like, email and any communication for me is like the most important thing. I’ll take half an hour refining an email to get it to say what I need to. If it’s a difficult situation and I don’t trust AI to do that, I might ask it for a tone check, but that’s about it. So I do see where the value comes.
Do you have a rubric or a framework that you can use to apply to what we should be automating and what maybe we should keep as that manual labor?
Jay: I wouldn’t say it’s a rubric. Chris Penn has a really good rubric that he uses to kind of go through that. But the one I like the best is this notion of use AI to handle things that are high repetition, but low emotion. And that requires you to think about the emotional resonance of each of your customer touchpoints.
If you finished a mortgage that’s a high emotional context, right? That’s going to happen once in your life, twice if you’re lucky. And so that’s a big deal. You don’t and shouldn’t use AI for that. But somebody trying to buy or return, probably a better example, return a pair of jeans. You can probably slip that one past the keeper on using AI to figure out how to get a return label.
Rich: Right. And I would also say as somebody who has spent too many hours on the phone waiting for a customer service rep, that there are times where I just would prefer to talk to an AI bot because I know it’s going to be instantaneous. And if you can have your AI bot solve 90% of customer returns or customer issues, and then elevate it for that 10%, you’re making everybody’s life a lot easier.
There’s definitely places where AI could not just replace but improve some of these interactions that we have with customers and clients.
Jay: Yeeees… And right now, a lot of the AI bots are not successful in that regard. They’re just not quite there yet in terms of their capabilities. They’re smooth handoffs. The technology improves by the minute, but it’s not quite there yet. And you’re starting to see a lot of consumer frustration because they’re being funneled into using AI, and then the AI itself is not fully satisfactory.
One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen, Rich, just recently I saw this stat that something like, this is from CCW research, something like 62% of business leaders believe that AI customer service is valuable for customers. Like 10% of customers agree, so there’s this massive disconnect between what businesses think AI can do and what customers think AI is doing.
Now, that’s a little disheartening, but it doesn’t really surprise me. Because again, I remember when websites came out and everybody’s like, what? This kind of sucks actually. And I remember when mobile apps first came out, this is clunky and hard to use. And even old school pre-programmed chatbots that didn’t have the AI layer. Same thing. So customers who get exposed to technology before it’s fully baked are like, you know what, this actually isn’t as good as I thought it was going to be.
And that sort of a hype cycle, right? That kind of puts a wet blanket on the whole deal. And then it gets better, and they use it a second and third time. Ah, okay, now I get it. So I think we’re in a weird trough of disillusionment right now in terms of consumer use of AI, but I think we’re going to blow past it eventually.
Rich: The AI tools themselves will probably get better. And when we can add agents to them, there have been times, just recently I had an issue with an Amazon order where what I ordered wasn’t what I got. And they said, just keep it and we’ll send you a new version of this. Which they did, but then they kept on sending me invoices saying, “if you don’t return the other one…” I couldn’t talk to a robot to get this done. I ultimately had to talk to a person who could manually do this. There may come a point where the AI agent will be that smart and be able to say, “I see what happened. We fixed it. You won’t get any more bills going forward.” But that’s a nuance that we’re not there yet.
And also I think customers, like you were alluding to, we have to be trained up too, in terms of what we can expect and how we work with an AI bot versus a human being.
Jay: Think about how much better people got about search querying, right? You look at what people would type into Google back in the day, they’d type in “fishing”, right? And now they realize, okay, what I really want to type in is “seven-foot fly rod, blah, blah, blah, blah”. The average, you’ve probably seen these stats, right? The average length of a search query has steadily grown in terms of number of characters every year forever because people get smarter and more nuanced. And they understand that the more specific they are the better the outcome.
The same thing is going to happen with AI prompting, of course. And some of this is just that it’s immature technology, but it’s probably even more so immature consumers in terms of their use of the technology. So I think that’s all going to get solved for eventually. A lot of the humankind secret isn’t necessarily about AI, it’s just about saying, hey, people can create an experience that AI can never create.
There’s a grocery store in Canada called Sobeys, and they actually have in the store, this is actually pioneered in the Netherlands, but it’s in Canada now as well. And it’s got a slow lane. Like literally it says, ‘slow lane’, like this lane in the store is for people who want to check out and buy groceries but also shoot the shit with the cash register person. And my mom would love a slow lane. Like every time my mom is on a plane, she quote unquote, “meets new friends”. You can have headphones on, reading a book, doesn’t matter. She will break through. 85% of her phone contacts are people she’s met on a plane. If she could buy groceries and chat it up with the grocery person, like on purpose, jackpot. She is totally in on that. Not everybody is going to want that, but some people are going to love that. And that’s the power of this countercyclical human touch.
Rich: Then you get the chatty people out of the 14 items or less things, right? So I can go through even faster.
Jay: Exactly. Everybody wins.
Rich: As we’re thinking about AI and implementing it into our business and where we’re implementing it to, I’m wondering about consumer expectations. And there’s definitely been some research, I’m sure you’ve seen it recently, that people are actually against or have a lower opinion of a product when it says “now with AI” or something like that on it.
And the big pushback against especially Coca-Cola by name and their AI generated ads this past Christmas, and how people were downright offended by them. I’m just wondering how much of what you’re talking about now is less about the company doing it and maybe more about where we are as human beings and what our expectations are about the use of AI, versus being able to work with a real human on the other side of this interaction.
Jay: Everybody would prefer to work with a human in most scenarios. Like the research is pretty clear on that. That’s why even today, the most popular contact mechanism is telephone.
Rich: I find that hard to believe with so many people I know.
Jay: Every time I retest it, it’s the same. And it blows me away. And the part that’ll even completely freak you out, Rich, it’s also true for Gen Z. If Gen Z has to get ahold of a business, their choice of contact mechanism is telephone, despite the fact that under no other circumstances do they ever use the telephone.
Rich: I’m almost speechless at this point.
Jay: It’s fascinating.
Rich: Because I have some Gen Z people on my team, and every weekly status meeting is, “Oh, the client hasn’t gotten back to us yet.” “Have you called them?” “Whoa. No, I’m not going to call them. I’m not going to be that person.”
Jay: That’s like an emergency. Yeah.
Rich: I’m like, trust me, they’re Gen X. You are going to get them to take action if their phone actually rings, trust me on this. But yet I find that surprising. But you’ve done the research.
Jay: And I think it’s because if you really need something now, you understand the power of synchronous communication as opposed to asynchronous communication. So that’s I think the difference in that situation.
So everybody would prefer people, but I think everybody knows that ain’t going to happen, right? Like the math is stacked against us pretty clearly, right? The AI efficiencies, the AI opportunity is no joke. And so that’s why when we started this conversation, I was like, look, this is not about whether or not you do AI. The answer is yes, you’re going to do AI. And while you do that, find ways to build back more humanity. Things that allow people to connect with people, ideally in three dimensions, that’s the best possible scenario.
That’s why I think events are not going to go anywhere. I think events actually set aside sort of economic conditions and what have you and tariff impact and all that. But as a thing, I think events are going to grow in importance, not wane. Because again, the opportunities for that sort of proximate human contact are going to get fewer not more.
Rich: A lot of us are always going to look at the bottom line on this. And obviously, AI has some certain advantages, but are there any ways that you can think of where we could measure implementing a human touch in things?
Are there KPIs or are there tools that you know of that would help us understand the benefit of really inserting human beings into some of these interactions?
Jay: Let me take that a couple ways. One I’ve been talking about this a lot lately that one of the biggest questions that anybody in business has to start asking and answering themselves is, what am I going to do to monetize this capacity?
If you adopt AI in your organization, large or small, you’re going to have approximately, your mileage may vary, but approximately 25% more time, you’re going to have everything. If you’re working 60 hours a week, now you know you’re going to work 45 or whatever the numbers are.
And what do you do with that 25%? Do you just have fewer people on your team? Do you just keep the money? Do you go on longer vacations? Do you get involved in M&A or R&D? What do you do with the 25%? To me, that’s the core question. My advice is you take some of that 25%, you put it back into adding more humanity, more human touch, more keeping it real. So you’re still going to come out ahead financially. It’s that you don’t just sweep the board of your 25% and say, okay, I’m taking that to the bank. You say, okay, how can we add back more high touch things? Not because it feels good, although it does, because it will actually make you a more successful business.
Look, word of mouth, which I wrote about a few years ago as you remember, is more important today than it was when I wrote the book. It’s more important tomorrow than it is today. It will be steadily more important every day that you draw breath on this planet. Because word of mouth, actual human to human recommendations out of your food hole, is literally, and I mean this sincerely. The only thing that AI can’t fake and what creates word of mouth is not a nifty chat bot. What creates word of mouth is the slow lane and things like that.
So take some of your newfound efficiencies, roll it back into bespoke personal touches, reap the word-of-mouth benefits, and that becomes your competitive success factor. Now, how would you measure that? You’ve got to track who gets exposed to your human touch thing, and then you run an analysis on renewal rate, average order size, lifetime value, et cetera.
Rich: Now there’s a lot of people right now who are claiming to be AI experts, and there’s a million YouTube channels dedicated to it and all this sort of stuff. It’s still pretty new, so to say that everybody’s in agreement with one thing or the other might be a stretch.
But as you look at the general hub up from the experts that are talking about AI and how it’s going to change business, is there something that they’re not saying that you truly believe in? Or is there something that they’re saying that you’re like, that’s just not how it’s going to end up? I’d be curious to have your take on that.
Jay: A lot of people are not talking about this 25% monetization of capacity question. I think that’s a really important thing to consider that doesn’t get a lot of play.
I would say the other piece of AI that I think is really important to ponder is what it does to organizational structure. You see some people talking about this in the sort of AI/HR world, but not so much broadly yet. The new research shows that 78% of hiring managers indicate that AI is already costing entry level jobs. Which of course stands to reason, right? AI can be deployed to do the tasks and assignments that most typically would be the responsibility of an early-stage person in whatever field you’re talking about.
So as a business manager, owner, leader, even in a small business, you’re like, cool. I don’t need this person right outta school. I’ll just use AI for that. Except what happens in five years. Who’s your manager? What happens in 10 years? Who’s your director? What happens in 15 years? Who’s your vice president? What happens in 25 years? Who’s your COO?
If we somehow stop bringing young people into organizations because AI can do it, we are hollowing out our organizations downstream without even realizing it. And I’m really concerned about that, about what that could mean for people who are maybe 10 years old now, 12 years old now. It’s actually really scary to me. So I think we’ve got to say, hey, it’s not about having fewer early-stage people in our businesses. It’s about redesigning our work styles and our org charts to say, okay, this role is now done by a digital colleague instead of a human colleague. But not we just don’t need those people. Because we just have to give them different work to do.
Rich: Alright, so as we wrap up today’s conversation, if somebody’s listening and they’re like, “I love what Jay has to say. I appreciate the fact that we need to really make sure that we don’t lose the human touch, that we make it part of our interactions with our prospects, customers, vendors”. What would be one step that you would point them towards as way of starting that journey?
Jay: I’d audit it first. I would say, take a look at your customers. And you might have 10 customers, you might have 10 million customers. How many of those customers does a human being in your organization, which may just be yourself, how many of those customers does anybody in your organization actually interact with? And on what frequency? Because if you start really doing the math on that, you realize that so much of our customer to company interaction is already at remove. It’s already digital. It’s already automated in some way.
And yes, I’m a huge email proponent as well because we’re of the same cohort. This idea of hey, could we, instead of doing an email, could we do a Zoom call? Could we do a phone call? Could we do a FaceTime? Even though it’s less efficient, is it more impactful?
One of my first bosses taught me something. I think maybe we talked about this on an episode once. He said, by the time you have the third email, you should have just called him.
It’s no longer more efficient. And there’s a lot of truth to that. I still train people on that all the time. If you’ve sent nine emails, like we really should have just picked up the phone on this.
Rich: Absolutely. Although sometimes the benefit of a paper trail is what you’re really looking for.
Jay: Also true.
Rich: It’s a CYA move.
Jay: AI will be recording the call.
Rich: Exactly. Jay, this has been great. If people want to learn more about you, your tequila, your marketing, your speaking gigs, where can we send them?
Jay: Find me at jaybaer.com. You can find me on all the social platforms on my name, Jay Baer. If you want tequila, look for Tequila Jay Baer and you’ll find all that stuff.
Rich: We’ll have those links in the show notes. I subscribe to all of Jay’s newsletters. I strongly recommend you do, too. Jay, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you so much for coming by today.
Jay: Thanks my friend. I’ll be waiting for my jacket.
Rich: We’re on it. We’re on it.
Show Notes:
Jay Baer has spent three decades helping iconic brands win and keep more customers by blending insights, stories, and a human touch. Check out one of the many bestselling books he’s written, and sign up for his informative newsletter.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.