Welcome back to another episode of Tech Unhinched, where tech gets human. Today I’m joined by Alexander Carlson, or Alex most know him by the founder of digital pop. He is steep in the world of AI, marketing, automation, and obsessed with how solo entrepreneurs can now do the work of entire teams thanks to the right stack of tools. We are going to talk about how that’s changing the game of marketers, small businesses, and honestly how we even define scale anymore. Welcome to the show, Alex. Thanks, Ria. So happy to be here. Alex, we’ll talk a bit about the story, the origin and your AI obsession. So, you know, you’ve said that you’re obsessed with AI marketing automation. Uh, would you like to tell our listeners and viewers what sparked that obsession? Sure, absolutely. I can give a quick little rundown of my journey to AI marketing. It started way back in college. I was actually a computer computer science student and quickly learned that software engineering was a little over my head, but fell in love with website development and HTML and front end, the kind of stuff I could see come together uh right in front of me as I was building. And I knew that I was uh making mistakes and and and I could correct them along the way. And so that led me to WordPress and WordPress development. And I started my own little agency uh about 10 years ago building WordPress sites with a a 9 to-ive marketing job on the side as well. And I did that for about 10 years and just recently took the dive into the agency world solo. And at the same time that about a year ago that AI really started to to boom and to when it got really good uh as as I like to say and that’s where I quickly became obsessed with AI. And I’m obsessed with AI and what it could do for humanity and for the world and on these big large scale talking points as well. But I I’m trying to stay focused what I do best and that’s marketing and digital marketing and combine those two worlds. And that’s uh that’s how I created my own podcast, the AI marketing navigator. That brought me to that about a year ago as well. And I’ve through that had the opportunity to study and research all of these AI tools and the opportunities that they offer for uh small businesses. And I’ve kind of started to put together a very distinct stack of tools that I think um really level the playing field for solo entrepreneurs, small business owners who have never had the ability to really market their services and share them with the people that need them the most, which is their customers. So that’s the long-winded story of how I got to be obsessed with AI. I’m I’m a techie. I’m a nerd. And I really think AI is the next electricity and the next internet combined. You know, it’s hard to really articulate how it might be able to might affect the world in in in the years to come. But like I said, just trying to get my little piece of the pie with AI marketing and and uh Yeah. So again, long-winded long story short of how how I got here. Yeah. Yeah. I know this particular analogy has been used by a lot of our guests, you know, lately how, you know, this is the new electricity or the internet. But Alex, would you like to walk us through your first standout moment with AI tool? What exactly was it, you know, that it automated and you realized that this has the potential to fundamentally change how we work today? Absolutely. It’s hard to pick the aha moments. I talk about them so much because it’s really what makes believers out of skeptics when it comes to AI and it did the same for me. The first one that happened though happens to be with a tool called Clay, clay.com. Definitely check it out if you haven’t. It’s a prospect researching and prospect enrichment tool, but it’s really so much more than that. It’s intelligent spreadsheets and intelligent research essentially on the scale of hundreds to thousands of cells in a table. And I was doing some prospect research and what you can do is you can select a cell and you can add a specific AI agent to that cell. So for each value, for each name in that spreadsheet, you can do extensive AI research. All you have to do is add a very detailed prompt about the type of prospect research that you want the AI to do. And once that prompt is built, you click and drag and copy it into all of the cells just like you would in a spreadsheet. And what would have taken me, I mean, let’s see, it was probably for a few hundred prospects. And what would have taken me a week or more probably to do the detailed research took 30 minutes for the the cells to process. So that was the first real time save with Clay and Prospect Research, that was just like mind-bending to me. And the first time I was like, “Okay, there’s something here with AI.” And since then, there’s been several of those moments, but research was the one that did it for me. prospect research really was the first aha moment that blew my mind when it comes to AI. No, you know that sounds amazing and maybe you know some shout out goes to the Clay team as well, you know, major major shout out to the Clay team. Like I said, if you haven’t checked out what Clay is doing, it’s definitely worth your time. Uh clay.com for sure. Yeah. So, you know, Alex, before AI took over your over uh workflow, what did digital pop look like in terms of the operations when you were just starting? Sure. Um, I think it probably reflects a lot of people who have a side gig or do some freelancing on the side, which is any extra time that I had basically went into maintaining the current business, the current websites, the current clients that I did have. Very little time for marketing or content marketing, content creation, a podcast was the furthest thing from my mind at the point and just really struggling to get clients because of that time crunch and because of those constraints. Until AI and until I had the chance to really dive into content creation, it wasn’t wasn’t feasible. uh and so my starting a solo entrepreneurship uh very much aligns with the AI boom about a year ago and so it completely enabled me to break away from that kind of freelance uh cycle being caught in that freelance cycle. So you know Alex what does your current AI stack look like? Any tools that you can’t sort of live without today? Absolutely. So there’s the personal tools that I use every day that part of my workflow. Then there’s the stack of marketing tools that I would probably recommend to small business owners. The ones that I can’t live without are all the LLMs. I use all the LLM. So Claude, ChatGpt, Gemini, cycle through them based on what I need. Claude’s still a great writer, still a great coder. Chat GPT, I find that their 03 model is just extremely knowledgeable and takes its time, does some really well thoughtout responses in my opinion. And then Gemini, you just have the power of Google. So it can connect to your Google Drive. It can connect to your Google Workspace. It gets access to all of that. It’s very much very much aligned to your work if you have Google Workspace. But then on top of that, there’s two tools probably that I would discuss right now. One is Whisper Flow, W I SP R L O W. And you can just Google Whisper Flow and look that up. It’s actually an app. It’s totally free. And it’s a dictation app. And it’s been almost life-changing. Their mission, they say, is to kill the uh kill the keyboard. And it’s uh anywhere that you can type on your system, basically, you’re able to dictate using your uh your Whisper Flow application. And so I dictate emails now. how I dictate back and forth with my coding assistants that I use um while I’m building and it’s just it is really really handy. I probably use it more than any either any tool as well. Uh so Whisper Flow for dictation and let’s see what else. I guess there’s a couple more yet. So Gen Spark AI, that’s the one I would use for almost anything agentic. It kind of you may have heard of Manis AI if you’re listening uh and you’re an AI obsessed individual like I am. It’s very much like Manis, but I find it even more impressive. It can do presentation creation. That’s it primary use case. and kind of when it came out, but now it’s turned into a full-fledged agent. It can do prospect research. It can build you video prototypes using its presentation features. Basically, anything you need done on the web, I would recommend asking GenSpark cuz it really can go out there and do some pretty impressive agentic workflows for you. And then lovable.dev, that’s the last one I could talk about these tools all day, Rivia, so careful what you wish for as far as tool stacks go, but lovable.dev is this amazing AI coder. AI coding tool lets you prompt to prototype basically. So, if you’re trying to build a website, if you’re trying to build a web app, if you’re doing what I highly recommend to all my listeners, which is building a free tool to use as a lead magnet, a marketing tool, if you can solve a problem that your prospects have and give them a little tool for free to to do it, it’s a great way to get emails, a great way to get leads. So, lovable.dev. So, all the LLMs, whisperflow, genspark agent, and lovable.dev are my is the personal stack that I definitely couldn’t live without uh right now for sure. Yeah, I know. I I think these are some great insights on the tools that you’ve just shared with our audience and they’re definitely useful because I’ve been using Genspart myself and I yeah definitely see that how helpful it is you know even when it comes to repurposing certain content that is out there in whatever format you know that you have it. So Alex if someone shadowed you for a day where would they see AI working behind the scenes within your agency? Absolutely. So, it’s a personal assistant for me. Any problem that I’m trying to solve, any business strategy that I’m going through, I’m going to talk it through with an LLM and go back and forth, ask it to do some research on the market. So, lots of research and then it’s a huge, huge assistant when it comes to just creating the content, the podcast, which then gets repurposed into several social media posts. So, the podcast is doing the research for the episode. I am then creating a script based off of my summary of that uh research that the the agent has done. And I use Descript to edit and create the videos, which is a web-based video editing tool for anybody who doesn’t know. And it’s extremely AI enabled. And I’ve used the underlord quote unquote agent in script, which is their AI little assistant. So they’d see it in the video editing process as well. And then again, taking that transcript, dividing it up into a LinkedIn post, an expost, a Instagram post, uh all the all the social media platforms that I want to get it out on, that’s being done by AI. So constantly they would see AI working constantly in the background. It’s it’s my always on tool that in one way or the other is helping me push the business forward. For sure. No, no, that’s great. Uh, but then you know, how do you evaluate when to drop or switch tools? You know, have you ever sort of cut off a popular tool because it didn’t actually deliver the way it was promised? For sure. Uh, and I think that’s one of the key things to try and keep in mind is to focus on the tools that are actually helping you. I very much suffer from AI tool FOMO where if something is new and flashy, I I need to go test it out. I need to try it. I needed to add it to my list of subscriptions. So, there are tools that’s occasionally I have let go and occasionally I will hop back on. Perplexity is one of those. I’m I’m a huge Perplexity fan. Did use it to do most of my research early on in the show and then started just using Claw Deep Research and Chat GBT Deep Research and kind of replaced it, but now Perplexity has they just have so many amazing features. I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but they they really do a nice job with the research, but now they can pipe in virtually any model. You can use any model that you want within Perplexity. And you have this new Comet agentic web browser that they are releasing as well, which is incredibly fascinating. I’m still on the wait list for that unfortunately, but I’m hearing amazing things about the the Aentic web browser. But to your original question, focus is key and really just focusing on the tools that you use every day that quickly become indispensable. If you can keep it down to a handful of tools, you’re probably going to be better off than trying to constantly find the next flashy tool to try and use. I actually use perplexity myself whenever it comes down to stats or figures. It’s my web to you know look up for that and even though I I have tried claude and chat GBT deep research but I would still sort of rely on perplexity to give me certain stats and you know it the kind of information that it will give you through even from inside the reports and stuff. It makes your work really easier, you know, where you once had to do it yourself. Look in look through the articles, read them up, find the stats, you know, or relevant facts. It would just, you know, place it right there in front of you. So, no, I I I would say that definitely, you know, it’s an amazing tool itself. So, uh, Alex, would you um would you talk about, you know, that one surprising process in this entire time of yours that you fully handed to AI and you never thought you would do it? Yes. In fact, just the other day I started testing the agent from O from Chat GBT, OpenAI. Uh, they just made their agent available, which is a combination of like their their operator and their their deep research essentially. So disclaimer, they they say this themselves in their announcement is be careful what you allow the agent to access because it’s early days. Probably don’t want to give it access to your bank account or your your online banking or maybe even your email and stuff like that because there could be bad actors in the future who are trying to replicate these agents. So that disclaimer being said, I started using it for just some beta testing on one of my free tools, one of the the landing pages for my free tools, just user experience testing. So asking the agent to visit the website, go through, click on all the links, make sure that the links are in order. something that usually I would have to send the URL out to a group of people and have them beta test for me. I had the agent do entirely and just did it in the background and it could virtually do any iteration of a way that a user could um would navigate the page and it would just give me um all the issues, all the links that were broken. It would recommendations on where to move content. So, it’s funny you asked that question because just yesterday I was doing that and I said this is something that I would have handled entirely on my own and I’m still, let’s be honest, I still recommend you go through it at least once on your own. I’m always going to recommend that and there should always be a little bit of human oversight still involved in the process but it’s getting less and less uh every day for sure. Yeah, I mean you know these certain tactical manual tasks. Um I think that yes um AI is definitely doing great in that area but when it comes to certain copies I still have my doubts when it comes to you know the written content and how you know it’s so easier for people within the marketing industry or content industry to figure out okay if this was written by GPT or if this is you know written by a human and not a bot right so I think still it’s very important to um keep up with that because Um people buy from people at the end of the day. Even if you were selling a bot to them, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I I I believe that there are some aspects out there which the humans are going to learn one way or another. So I agree. I think uh yeah, just to extend on what you’re talking about, I think as far as differentiation for brands and for companies and your personal brand being human is going to be the new differentiator. it like it’s already the AI wave hasn’t even fully hit yet as far as user adoption throughout like the population. Uh and there’s already push back against AI generated content. When you people are pulled and surveyed they say that they would prefer human content. That’s not to say that they won’t ingest AI content. We all ingest the things that we don’t necessarily like. But the human content is going to be what stands out in the future for sure. So the the more you can afford to involve human aspect into your brand. So again, it’s going to be a matter of can you afford like a small business owner is going to have to use AI in most instances, but the I think the big players are the new edge is going to be human true human content. So yeah, I fully fully resonate with what what you’re saying for sure. Oh, that’s great. So um Alex, do you sort of plan to um launch your own AI marketing tool eventually at Digital Pop or you know um is it is it only going to be what you are currently doing with with you know um providing certain services to other companies? Yeah, you know I think there’s definitely a space for AI so many AI tools but I I view them as almost temporary and with very little moat. So so many of what these AI tools are doing are just going to be eaten up by Chat GBT or Gemini or Claude in the long run. You won’t really need to switch from Claude to one of these AI tools to do what you need to do. Claude is just going to do it. So I don’t So for one, I don’t see a whole lot of moat when it comes to AI apps unless you can really have some propri proprietary data that makes it incredibly valuable compared to a chatbt or a Gemini or like Meta for instance. Meta will always be interesting to me because they have an incredible amount of personal data that they can use to power their apps. Anyway, long story short, my plan is to focus still on finding the tools that help my my own business and small businesses amplify their marketing way past what they would be able to. No plans on creating any internal tools except for the free ones that I’m that I’m building as lead magnets. I have one fun one that I’m building with lovable that maybe we can throw the beta link in the show notes. the it’s called the Gmail reader and it’s going to it reads your Gmail for you if you like me have a bunch of newsletters that you never have time to to read and I I imagine being able to listen to them while I was working out or doing the dishes or something like that. So I hooked up my inbox to 11 Labs and now with fancy voices like Bert Reynolds from 11 Labs I can read my email to myself and so little stuff like that is about as deep into the AI tool that I’m going to that I’m going to dive into for sure. But um yeah yeah no this is impressive information. Let’s talk a bit about you know um the term scale within our topic you know without you know more overhead towards it’s you’ve mentioned that AI lets you operate at a level of a full team right so what are some areas where this impact is the most obvious right now sure I’m going to go back to just research being able to do the amount of detailed research that these AI agents these deep research agents can do the reports that they can produce they’re really on the level of like McKenzie and you know the all these giant reporting firms um that you would usually pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for to get this type of information you can now have at your fingertips for $20 a month. And that’s really I’d say the most empowering thing that AI is doing for me and for my business is just the ability to educate myself and research and learn about the marketplace, about my prospects, about each individual client. Because if you are running an agency, you know that every week you have to put on a new hat for a new company and it’s an entirely new market and you have to learn everything about it and and now that time to to educate yourself has been reduced by hundreds of percentages in my opinion. Uh it’s it’s quite it’s quite amazing what you can teach yourself and how you can educate yourself. Yeah. So you know do you think that AI is actually redefining what scale even mean for you know businesses or a small scale business today? Definitely. I think it immediately scales your output the minute you start using it. Uh, personally and as far as content creation goes. And when we really get to the agentic AI era, we’re still so early in the the world of these agents of of the the web browsers that are going to be agentic like comets. The true autonomous AI hasn’t even hit yet. And we’re already seeing the ability to scale personal output, individual contributor output, and just content output as well. And so when you grow in these agents, the the scaling of the actual knowledge work is going to be unprecedented I think and and we will we will likely see the first one person billion dollar company at some point in the next few years. I truly believe that as well. Yeah. So is there a point where adding humans sort of become necessary again or you know you believe the future of solarpreneurship is fully autonomous? No, I think there is absolutely going to be the place for adding humans again. And again, I think it’s going to be the the game changer, the differentiator between an enterprise brand, a Fortune 100 company is still going to be able to afford to have humans involved in the more minuscule tasks. Now, I think it’s going to be the the customer interfacing tasks like customer support, sales, uh things like that. If you can afford to have humans monitoring those lines and not AI agents, I think that’s going to differentiate your company. As far as the data entry and the data manipulation and data management, I don’t think there’s I really don’t see a need for businesses or enterprises to reinccorporate humans into that type of work in the future. But for small businesses, for startups, really for any business, those customer-f facing roles, having a human there is going to be make a difference. And there’s going to be people that don’t really mind, don’t really care. So, I think it also kind of depends on the type of business on on the business’s goals. For a very self-service like SAS platform, so for like a SAS startup or a SAS business, I I I see much less need to involve humans in the future than I would for, you know, insurance, life insurance planning or something like that, something that someone very much would like to talk to an actual human about. Yeah. No, that makes absolute sense. So if we you know talk a bit about the limits and the pitfalls of AI, what do you think, Alex, that you know AI can do cannot do right now that you wish it could? Yeah. Um it still struggles to come up with novel marketing strategy and novel ideas. It’s AI is still a an answer tool and it’s going to it’s going to compile everything that it has in its training data as far as basically the the um sum of all the information on the internet to a certain degree and that’s that’s what it’s going to give you an answer on. So, you really need to still have the ability to pull out the value from its strategic recommendations. For instance, if it if you’re going to have it write cold emails, something like writing cold emails, which AI is is very good at doing, but you still really need that human touch because right now it’s just going to go out there, grab all the examples of cold emails that have been used by hundreds of thousands of millions of marketers in the past and and do that. So, the ability to generate novel original ideas is still something that I think it falls short on. Now, GBT5 is coming up in August from from Open AI. That is supposed to be, you know, and it’s hard to determine what’s hype and what’s what’s real when it comes to these announcements, but that’s supposed to be a real big step towards AGI, artificial general intelligence. So, I’m still waiting for I’m still waiting for the AI that can generate a truly original idea. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is really going to be, you know, um a monumental point for human beings because that is where the humans come in the picture right now, right? because only they can come up with the novel ideas or the ways that how they’re going to put or launch these new amazing tools and what not right so what if you know GPD um or AI starts uh promoting its own self what will happen then yeah exactly when we cross that we cross that line to AGI we it’s hard to imagine exactly what what direction it goes and in marketing like I said it’s it’s sometimes hard to stay focused just on marketing because I think that’s just a microcosm and there will probably be the one of the last areas that AI has some truly groundbreaking ideas. So for the for the time being, it’s the I still think it’s going to be the human personal content for marketers that that is the new differentiation. And so it’s a hard balance to strike. You know, I am at the same time promoting complete automation wherever you can throughout your marketing department, but also having a human touch and being able to use that to make a difference. So make yourself available, especially as a solo small business owner because there that human touch is still AI is still not able to do that either. Another area that it falls short and um something I would I struggle to implement myself sometimes is to to maintain as much humanity in my content and in my my marketing strategy as I can. Yeah, you know that that is exactly what I was coming to next that as human beings or people who are way too aware about you know the tools out there and have been using them. We are actually becoming overreiant on AI at this point. So how do you think you know um one can balance automation with strategic thinking? Yeah, it has to be very a very determined effort. I find myself forcing myself to rewrite the content that the AI first generates for me using it just as an outline. So, I would strongly suggest doing that with anything, whether it’s a a podcast transcript being turned into a blog post to exercise your critical thinking. Write rewrite the post with a little bit of your own personal touch and flare. And that’s really the only way that you’re going to be able to continue to practice that strategic that that critical thinking muscle with the the automation that AI offers. Now, I think that’s the type of thinking that is good for us, the the higher level, the higher order strategic thinking. We’re we’re actually in the weeds thinking about the business, how to grow it. We’re not worrying. We’re not doing spreadsheets. We’re not doing data manipulation or data entry anymore. So, there’s there’s the areas of the business that I think are due for automation, and there’s the areas of the business that I think are more benefited from strategic targeted thinking. And so if you can if you can determine those two areas, then your balance should be pretty well struck between where where to feel free to just use AI as much as possible and where to, you know, consider the the cost of offloading AI on certain tasks, certain processes in your business. So Alex, we did talk about your wow moment with AI. So, was there, you know, an AI fail moment that you had where a tool messed up something um major and it made you sort of rethink about it since you’ve been using or exploring around lots of tools out there? Sure. You know, I’ve had some there’s the kind of the obvious one that most people say like when AI will just hallucinate. I’ll still do research for an episode for a podcast guest and AI will hallucinate some numbers or figures and that’s actually why I went back to going to doing perplexity. find that it does that less which uh you mentioned as well and so that’s kind of like the the most common thing is still the hallucinations are are something to very much be aware of and it always kind of it always kind of blunts the uh excitement that I have for some of these LLM so it’s a good reminder but I’ve also had some instances in the AI coding space so trying to build out these free tools with Replet or Cursor or Lovable and I’m still consistently impressed with Lovable in particular and what you’re able to accomplish but at first you know it was very difficult just to code up a Gmail signin So to sign in and authorize with Google, a Google account, took me multiple projects, multiple days of back and forth with lovable just to get it to just to get it to work. So that was probably one instance where as far as the AI coding goes, I think the agents are I don’t know, I want to say they’re 50 to 60% of the way there is like getting you a prototype and getting something that works, but there’s still they still have a little ways to go as far as the coding goes. And I know that’s that’s definitely one of the areas that it’s absolutely replacing jobs the fastest, which is nobody expected, which is coding. You hear about these companies like Meta and and others that are like 30% 40% of their code base is now coded by AI. But I still think, you know, I still think it’s got a little ways to go. So, it’s surprising to me that you can’t code quite as much as is hyped up to be on on the social media. If you look on X or on social media, you you’d think everybody was building the next big $80 million tool or something like that. Um, but it’s just not quite not quite like that in reality. So, that’s I think that’s probably one of the areas that is still surprising to me is coding. How do you see AI changing the broader job landscape especially in marketing? For sure. So marketing I think is going to be one of the earliest jobs impacted by AI. It’s already hugely content creation and coding despite its limitations are the two areas that I think AI is is absolutely perfect for right now. And so obviously content creation is a huge part of marketing and I think it’s going to be a microcosm of the greater job landscape as a whole. We are definitely in for a displacement a massive displacement of jobs. So as far as marketing goes, those lower level junior marketers, the interns who are doing the research, doing the social media management, doing the content schedules, and and just doing the menial knowledge work that that they are assigned, that’s really no longer going to be a tier of the workforce. I I just had a conversation with someone on on my show the other day where the workforce isn’t going to be a pyramid shape anymore. It’s going to be a diamond shape with a bunch of individual contributors in the middle and just a few people on the top and then a few few entry-level people on the bottom who are really going to struggle. And so I think the future of marketing is super small, super agile teams with hundreds of if not thousands of AI agents underneath them that they’re that they’re they’re supervising. And I think that goes for for all knowledge work. And in fact, the you know that leads into some pretty philosophical discussions around universal basic income and uh what what we actually need to do to prepare for that. And um but as far as marketing goes, really small, really agile teams and really kind of the disappearance of the marketing intern and the the the the junior marketers and and more of a a growth of account executives and account managers managing AI teams. Yeah. No, you know, so what would you sort of tell a college student entering digital marketing today, you know, or someone who has just graduated, you know, in marketing, should they sort of lean into AI or avoid it? 100% I would tell them to lean into AI. I would advise them to do it and make sure they don’t do it at the expense of their ability to tell a story. So, another thing that I talk about a lot and that we’ve I’ve talked about with guests on my show is that there’s this ability now to do the the technical work incredibly well and incredibly fast. So, the work that I got into marketing doing like building a website, scheduling social media, publishing paid ads and doing and paid media buying and things like that and making sure all the ads were running correctly. All of that’s going to be done by AI now. And what is really needed is the thought work, the storytelling of a brand. If you’re a marketer getting out of school and whether you’re going looking to do an agency thing or if you’re looking to get a 9to-5 and be an internal marketing team member, it’s going to be your ability to tell that brand story in a creative differentiated way. This is why I’m still studying writing and I highly recommend that to stay up to par on your writing ability. Read copywriting books. I think the ability to differentiate what is of value from the AI is going to be what’s valuable to marketers. though you still need that base, that foundational storytelling knowledge, and that’s going to be more important than ever. Lean into AI for the automation. Lean into AI for all of the meaning meaningless to at risk of being too intense with my word choice, but meaningless work for the work that actually matters for the work that you enjoy doing and use that free time to sharpen your ability to craft a story around your company, around your product, around your brand, and really practice that muscle. Yeah. No, that’s that’s a great advice. So, Alex, compared to traditional tools like HubSpot or Mailchimp, how do AI native platforms change the user experience and ROI for marketers? Sure. So, they can they can really offer what the giants like HubSpot and Mailchimp, both of which now have some pretty heavy AI incorporated into them at a fraction of the cost. I think that’s the main difference that these platforms are able to to offer and with the power of AI behind them. And pretty soon you’re going to just be able to build whatever tool you need for yourself using a lovable or a chatbt even or a Claude that can now code artifacts and and code up little tools that can be shared right within Claude. And so it’s this personalization of software that’s happening. And so the level of personalization that these AI platforms are able to are going to be able to offer to their users over a HubSpot or a Mailchimp is also going to be light years ahead because you can just you can code that right into the the platform. you can tell it to personalize its interface for its user once it learns about its user. So SAS is is really interesting to me and and I think the AI first platforms are going to absolutely blow and again this is why you see HubSpot leaning so heavily into AI. I would not be surprised that’s just a chat agent at some point as well. Um essentially an agent that you just ask to do work for you and you ask questions and it’s the personalization of these platforms that AI is really making a difference with. Yeah know that makes absolute sense. So um Alex uh do you think that the rise of AI stack solopreneurs threatens traditional agencies or just sort of evolves them? You’re only threatened if you bury your head head in the sand here when it comes to AI. So I think it absolutely involves the agencies that are willing to use it, test it, put someone in charge of AI implementation, AI testing in your organization. make someone responsible for finding the areas that are right for automation, enabling your employees, empowering your employees with AI. So, I don’t think I don’t see it as being a detriment to agencies unless you completely close your doors to it and you’re not willing to experiment and you’re not willing to use it cuz they’re the agencies that do use it will and if they use it that use it correctly to to boost actual valuable human content and really personalize their experiences are going to blow the other agencies out of the water. So, ignore it. ignoring it would be the only detriment I think it could have to a traditional agency. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think is the worst buzz word in AI marketing right now? The worst buzz word in AI marketing right now. It’s almost becoming agents and like agentic which which pains me to say because it’s everything that I building and using right now. But now every every AI chatbot every everything is an agent and I think it’s way too uh overused compared to the actual definition of what an agent is able to do. I think GenSpark is an agent. I don’t think Chat GT’s agent even holds a torch to it quite yet. And you know, HubSpot’s agent is just a chatbot in HubSpot. So agent, I guess, would have to be the word. It pains me to say is is way too buzzworthy right now. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes that makes sense because I I’ve also been hearing this word a lot. Be it you see it in writing or companies hopping onto the bandwagon of it. Just everyone wants to be AI first now or agentic. Exactly. Exactly. the most relevant thing these days. So, Alex, if we dive a bit deeper into it, what’s a mistake you see too many solopreneurs making when trying to AI everything? I always turn this one around too and say the biggest mistake is the users who aren’t willing to even try and AI everything. Losing the human touch is still the biggest mistake. I mean, it’s very hard not to fall into the trap of every time an AI bot writes you a new blog post or writes you a podcast script or an email sequence, not to actually go through and read it and just make sure it sounds like you would sound it. It’s not saying something that you feel uncomfortable with. It’s not saying something that’s blatantly untrue. So, the biggest mistake is relying on it too heavily. So it’s it’s again finding striking that balance between the work that can be done well and safely by AI versus the work that should be should still have a human in a loop. So failing to kind of determine where to keep the human in the loop I think is probably the biggest mistake that many users are making early uh in the days of AI. Also you know if we if we delve you know a bit deeper into that um since you’ve been using exploring a lot of tools and you’re usually sort of at at top of you know what’s coming what’s going. So is there anything that you’ve witnessed out there in the space of AI that you believe should have left to just the humans or you know this is not AI’s cup of tea probably? Interesting question. Um the only one that comes to mind everything that I do in my day-to-day work even the creative stuff image generation and video generation a lot of people I think that’s their first instinct to say the the creative the arts keep AI out of the arts and I tend to hear that and I understand that. I don’t. But what I feel it the most for is music. There’s these AI music tools out there. Sunno is one of the thing that comes to mind. Udio I think is the other one. And I see its value for again for marketing purposes and for business purposes, but I think there will always be the marketplace for human creations. So that that goes for businesses too. We talked about how having a human in the loop and having humans involved is going to be something that there’s always going to be a market for and there will be people that are willing to pay a premium for that. I think there would be the same people willing to pay a premium for human created art. And so for that reason, I don’t really I have no I have no objection to AI created art. I just think that as long as we can establish some form of um identification where whether it’s the blockchain or biometric or whatever it might be that something is created by a human. I just don’t think art the AI art will ever beat it as far as demand. I think there will always be a demand and so that goes less for knowledge work. I haven’t found any knowledge work that I think AI should stay out of. I think the academic space, the medical space, the the research space, I think it’s going to absolutely re revolutionize all those and we should use it in every way that we can. But for for some reason, again, I’m I’m a non-creative who finds themselves able to now create images and videos and music if I wanted to. So, I am fully on board for the generative AI wave. I just don’t believe that it’s going to outpace human created art. So, I think that’s the one one I would advise AI. If I could give it advice, I would just say stay out of that area. But, I could be very wrong on that. We could in 10 years we could be living in a world that is Spotify is all AI generated music. It’s already been happening. People I don’t know if you heard the story about a band that fooled a bunch of Spotify listeners that because some of their music was generated by AI. But it’s it’s going to be interesting to witness for sure. Yeah. I know I know about the new um YouTube policies that they’ve made for you know giving no room to the um AI generated content because um lots of the people who were toying it that way they were having more followers or reach in comparison to the people who were actually putting the effort in the content. So, you know, YouTube just had to come in and stop that. And yeah, you know, what you mentioned about the art in particular, um there was, you know, when there was this Gibli trend going on and then there was um lots of debate um people were having around it, right? Um giving the rights to the artist or the people behind it. So I I did have like a few artists in my um circle as well where they were absolutely against it because ultimately does sort of make the job difficult there everything is ultimately animation of something which was done in the past or whatsoever but the scale at which the AI is doing it right now um you know it’s really hard for some people to catch up with that sort of pace and when it comes to the creators the artists let’s talk about you know the musicians or um you know the real artists you know people who are drawing, sketching or you name it. Yeah, it’s going to be I think there will be a period of unfortunate pain for for those types of creatives and I can only hope that there is a balance in the future. You know, like like I said, there’s going to be a market for both. Like there there will be people who just want the AI generated poster to put on their wall cuz they like the way it looks and they’re willing to pay five bucks for it. But there will if you can somehow through some sort of code or some sort of mechanism guarantee that that poster was handdrawn by someone. Once that is in place and once there’s that type of infrastructure, I I I hope that the the marketplace for human creation is is still as viable. But the journey to get there is is is what’s going to be difficult. Yeah. You know, and also this one thing that I feel um is uh which is being forgotten by a lot of people is that you know tools have been here for some time now there are different tools and these are AI powered tools. But then you know there there are humans at the end of the day who are dealing with those tools or using those tools or generating something out of those tools. It’s you know as I talked earlier it’s not you know an AI bot giving its own cousin some prompts and you know getting something out of it. So I think the area which needs to be focused more on is to educate people onto you know using AI be it in your curriculara academia um at your uni school whatever level because even the kids today have access to child GBD and the assignments which we used to do creatively back in our time they literally just go to GPD they would not use their own thoughts to do it and ta there it is right so I I think um at that age um certain creative capabilities that you had are now hindered by the AI. So the education around it I believe is very important. Any thoughts that you have on that? Yes, so many. I echo so many of your thoughts and we were just having this conversation my my own family yesterday. I have a a young 2-year-old, almost 2-year-old now daughter, and we were talking about what the future of education looks like for her. And there’s the part of me that’s so AI optimistic and so pro AAI that, you know, I I fully need to think it should be incorporated in our educ education as a tool, just like the internet was, you know, just like calculators were. I think it has its parallels to those type of analogies when people say like, oh, people said that the calculator was going to make us unable to do math, but really it just empowered bigger, better math. And you know, you could say the same thing about the internet and communication. It definitely came with its detriments and we’re still figuring out how to best use and regulate the internet and I don’t know if we’ll ever get there. AI is going to be the same thing. It’s going to come with some incredible benefits, but it’s changing cognition. It’s changing the way people think and there needs to be, you know, so there’s the side of me that’s like, put it into schools, teach kids how to use it. But there’s the other side of me that’s like for every hour in school that they’re using Open AI, let’s make sure that they’re actually outside and using their brains, too. I think that really needs to be balanced. And this could be just my preconceived notions of that I’ve grown up in. Maybe maybe I’m wrong. And this is where I really get into like the philosophical about AI and maybe reducing that the level of cognition that we’re talking about is actually good for the human brain and they can start thinking about higher order ideas and problems and the way that evolves is like just a different type of cognition, a different way of thinking. That that again that gets into my sci-fi bent and stuff like that. It’s a tough balance for me to strike. I think that it very much needs to be incorporated, like I said, for them to learn how to use, but you can’t deny that it we don’t know anything about it. We already we’re barely aware of what the internet has done to our younger generations. So, we’re already dipping our toe into this new technology and it needs to be done very deliberately. And call it stubbornness, call it my being set in my ways, I still think there’s there’s a need for if not typical research like handwriting for instance was what we me and my family were talking about. Like handwriting and cursive is going away now. They’re phasing that out of schools and education and kids being able to write cursive. I’m torn on whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Is it going to free up more time for better, faster, more efficient communication or is it going to damage brain cells and creative thinking and things like that? It’s the same argument with AI. I I struggle to answer it sometimes. Uh but I I think at the very least just getting outside and getting away from technology is the very least that we need to have for our kids and even for high schoolers and stuff like that for just for basic cognition. I’m far from an expert on neurology and psychology and all of that stuff, but that’s just my humble opinion. Somewhere in the middle and a little more AI optimistic and pro AAI than probably your average person, but but just get the kids outside, people. That’s all I’m saying. Just get the kids outside. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s that’s the need of the hour because um we can feel at this point that what’s it going to take away from them, you know, as you were talking about the writing part. So, and damaging the damage of the brain cells. I I would definitely side with that part because it is definitely going to damage them because if they’re not going to be used, they’re going to be damaged because AI is not going to be using those cells. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So, also you know um Alex earlier we um talked about you know Meta and how you know um there was this recent news as well that Meta’s AI agents are going to take over the ad agencies. So what does sort of future look like for uh entrepreneurs like yourself? you know people who are starting their marketing agencies. Uh we do talk about solopreneurs, right? So um and you might be one as well. But then um you know where how do we see this particular side scaling in the next 5 years or would it ultimately just diminish because now AI is empowering people themselves where they can literally just you know do everything on their own. Do you think that they they’re still going to prevail exist? You know, I think that the agencies are going the way they look is going to change immensely. I think paid advertising, paid media buying, that could very well be something that goes away. I think the need is going to be creativity. So, looking for an agency that can bring you novel, creative human ways to grab attention and to to build demand. So the agencies that can write, that’s why I emphasized writing so much earlier, and the agencies that understand human psychology and human buying patterns and human buying decisions and how to connect those are the ones that are going to survive. Agency that just is buying paid media and doing meta ads for somebody right now, I don’t see them surviving very long into the future. I think that Meta’s goal right now is to have anybody be able to go in there and just in natural language ask for the ad campaign that they want and just build it from the ground up automatically for them with all the settings and everything like that. And there’s really no place for an agency for a full agency dedicated to that in my opinion. Um anyway, um so the shift to you know saying just writing and copywriting is too simple, but the shift to narrative building and being able to create a narrative around a brand and a product is what agencies are going to be needed for in the future. Um and AI is going to help. Some people won’t need it. AI will be very helpful in that narrative building to truly set yourself apart. And I think if an agency is going to survive, that’s what it needs is the ability to tell a story. Absolutely. So, you know, heading towards the end of our conversation, Alex, and I love asking this question from my guests that, you know, what’s that one hard learned lesson that you’ve had in life? And in your perspective, you can say, you know, anything that you’ve learned from running an AI powered marketing setup, you know, that more people could hear or learn from. Yeah, I think especially with AI, the lesson that I’ve learned is we’re not at a point where you, and again, maybe this is my preconceived notions around work and our purpose in life to be work. You still have to do the work. uh you can’t outsource a field like marketing for instance. You can’t step into chatbt and become and have it be a great marketer for you. You still need to learn this the theory and the art of marketing. So you still need to do the work is the lesson that I’ve learned. Educate yourself. Bury yourself into a topic and a theory and something that you’re passionate about and it won’t be as difficult, but you absolutely still need to you still need to do the work. Well, Alex, thank you so much, you know, for keeping all of this conversation real and sharing what scaling actually looks like. Thank you so much for your presence here today with us. Absolutely, Rubia. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Had a great time.