What I’m thinking about: The dangerous gap between AI drivers and AI passengers…and why most business owners are accidentally becoming passengers in the biggest business transformation of our lifetimes.
I brought my first pod guest onto Get Serious: Callan Faulkner, my friend, AI coach and founder of The Uncommon Business.
Such a fun convo, listen to Part 1 here (where we deep dive into the future of humanity in an AI-driven world), and Part 2 drops today (practical AI tactics to reshape your business).
Key insights from our conversation:
Jobs have never been less safe. Callan shared how Codie Sanchez (who scaled a $48M media company) just replaced three full-time data analysts ($150K in overhead) with a $200/month Perplexity subscription.
Not because those analysts weren’t smart humans with intuition and critical thinking…but because they lacked AI fluency, and were unable to clone their genius into AI.
(The change starts from the top too. Codie invests 20min daily to obsess over AI and learn something new. We are all vulnerable.)
Opendoor recently announced 85% of it’s hires should and will be replaced by AI.
Look at the weak jobs data. Look at the stock market. Read between the lines.
And before you say, “I don’t have a job, I’m an entrepreneur,” business moats and windows to succeed are shrinking by the week, which brings us to…
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The 10% Rule. You don’t need to be an AI expert (and even the experts are falling behind the breathtaking tech advances happening almost daily).
You just need to be 10% further along than everyone else in your industry. That gap is enough to dominate your market while competitors struggle with manual processes.
That’s the benchmark Callan uses for her business…and she’s running one of the fastest growing AI coaching businesses in the world.
(To reassure you even further, Callan considers herself about 3 months behind the bleeding edge, and she’s still within the top 1% of all AI-oriented businesses).
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Documentation as currency. Your proven frameworks and IP (e.g. scripts to close deals with land sellers, or the image analysis prompts behind Land Pricer) become more valuable than ever. You can give AI starting point and an end goal, but the middle part is left up to its discretion…and that is where the magic is.
The operators with documented, repeatable systems with proven results will be able to sell that data to train the models others have put together…or offer the solution to other operators as a plug-and-play product.
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Build a data moat. To accomplish the above, you need to be able to capture and structure your data so you can call upon it to inform internal or external AI models.
Hire someone to do this if it’s not up your alley.
For example, Callan’s team is building out their customer success plan for their upcoming coaching program launch, and they exported their entire email inbox from last launch with all the questions that were asked, and how those questions were responded to, and then trained AI on all of that data, and subsequently organized the outputs.
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Prioritize automation. Harder than it sounds, and something I struggle with routinely.
A member of Callan’s Uncommon Leaders community utilizes a framework where every quarter her team looks at every single task that happened within the business.
They organize the tasks on:
- How much time they took
- Which happened the most frequently
- Which take the most energy
Now they have data to help prioritize what is the #1 task to automate, #2, and so on.
You need to be able to say in one sentence that automating this task, “will save us blank hours or make us blank dollars.” Doesn’t need to be exact but should have a rough idea.
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Be an AI driver, not a passenger. I constantly return to this framework, and it’s the primary way I grade myself and my team on our capabilities with AI.
AI outputs are increasingly becoming commoditized, with lower rates of hallucinations, and more people making blanket assumptions that outputs from AI are “good enough.”
Businesses composed of AI drivers are the only ones that are going to succeed in this evolving economy.
You need to walk the tightrope between maximizing the immense knowledge base that AI can pull from with your own discernment and ability to think critically, alongside providing highly detailed context for LLM models to produce A+ outputs.
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Want to stop being an AI passenger? Callan’s running her Effortless Business Bootcamp in early October – a 3-session multi-hour “adult magic show” where you’ll see tasks that used to take an hour completed in 5 minutes.
At $47, only through this Friday 9/19, it’s as much of a no-brainer purchase as you’ll see this year.
Look, I’ve referenced my learnings from Callan often over the past several months, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m recommending her program, having personally been through it, and I’m a paying member of Callan’s Uncommon Leaders program.
Getting AI coaching from her team and the other community members is one of my largest overhead items, and most of you know how relentlessly focused I am on keeping overhead as lean as possible…which speaks to the level of value I attribute to what Callan offers.
I recently embraced the idea that if I solely focus on implementing lessons from Hormozi and The Uncommon Business, then my own continued success in the industry will be…inevitable.
Is that worth a $47 option for you?
