Milan: [00:00:00] Good and hopefully for the last time as well. Alright, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. And we’ll come to our next and very special episode of Card Cast.. We figured that really we cannot be talking about leadership, execution strategy, anything in business without mentioning AI at least once.
And in the card deck there are three cards that are talking to about ai. One is the mindset card. One is sort of the value of ai. The third one is about how to actually get started. And we are lucky enough to have the perfect guest to discuss all of. All three of them at once. So you’re getting three cards in one episode and you’re getting Carter Jensen from the Uncommon Business joining us today.
Thank you very much for coming and welcome. And
Carter Jensen: You so
Milan: Please introduce yourself to our Please introduce selves to our listeners.
Carter Jensen: Amazing. Well, [00:01:00] thank you so much for the kind intro. Yeah. My name’s Carter Jensen. I am the VP of product here at the Uncommon Business. And we are a young but fast moving company that really focuses on empowering business leaders of all types and companies of all sizes. To bring AI into their organization, into their life in new and differentiated ways. So we’re relatively new on the journey. We have been in business for about 18 months. But like anything in ai, as both of you know, it’s been a fast moving business. We just hired our 18th employee actually after 18 months.
So we are very excited to see the growth and we help new businesses every day. So it’s great to be here. Thank you again.
Milan: And before, before we jump into the conversation, I would like to add, and you know, for disclosure, one of the reasons why we know each other is because I am a happy customer of yours.
Carter Jensen: A
Milan:.
Carter Jensen: I would say Milan.
Milan: No, I can, I can think of couple names in the community that are way [00:02:00] beyond where I ever aspire to be, but that’s how we met. I am, I have a firsthand experience with your products and with your teachings, and as I said very, very happy with the outcome. And hopefully we can share some of that wisdom today with with our listeners here.
Carter Jensen: That sounds great. I love it.
Ged: So Carter ai, AI came from nowhere. Well, well it didn’t, but it felt like it came from nowhere and took over the world. And. There’s probably a lot of CEOs out there that are sort of asking themselves the question, well, you know, how can I, how can I leverage ai? How can I sort use it in a way that just doesn’t burn time and attention and resource to actually. Improve my business because, and if you, if you spend any time on LinkedIn these days, you know, you, you will just see a torrent of AI slop that is coming at you. So I, I, I’m, I’m a bit of a cynic about ai and I’ll tell [00:03:00] you my experience a little bit later on. But, but what would you say to A-A-C-E-O that is, is looking at all of this stuff, thinking, how can I use this?
What would you say to, to them?
Carter Jensen: I, you know, one of my previous roles, and I think this is gonna come up a lot in our conversation, I, I led. Ai basically acceleration at a Fortune 100 company. And to say that I made a, a big jump to come into a startup is, is an understatement, right? But, but there’s a reality there. And there’s a, there’s a kind of some magic there as well. But I, you know, today and even in my previous role working with our C-Suite, we heard that a. Right of, a lot of hype. I don’t see any return on investment. Like we’ve done all these programs, we’ve, you know, we’ve done all these things and I think, you know, nine times outta 10 when I hear that, usually they’re taking the wrong approach.
We can dive further into that, Jed, in terms of how they’re implementing it, how they’re empowering their teams, et cetera.. But I would say, you know, I don’t wanna be too cliche about it, but when we look at massive adoption of other [00:04:00] pieces of technology, this is on that same path, right? So you know, whether it’s email, whether it’s the internet, whether it’s the new kind of SaaS platforms that everyone runs on these days, those all had adoption curves as well, and eventually they became mainstream. The AI adoption curve is absolutely massive and we see a huge difference between. CEOs like you speak of Jed, who are full in and see the value and those who who don’t. Right. And they’re, they’re two very different camps. And, and we work with them every day. And so I would say one of the biggest things that we always tell CEOs is. How are you empowering everyone on the front lines? We talk about everyone with a laptop to use AI in their day-to-day task, and that’s very different than, you know, hiring some fancy CTO or buying some really high value platform. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes. So it is here, it is coming quickly. And you, you fall into two sides of the camp regardless of where you are.
Ged: Yeah, I, I, I think you’re right. And I [00:05:00] know that there’s that old saying, you know, a rising tide. Know floats or ships. So, so if everyone, if everyone adopts ai, then nothing’s really changed. No. And all that’s happened is everyone has just moved up together. So, you know, there, there is a very, very short window of opportunity where, you know, you can be that ship that rises first. But it’s. Whether you go back to, you know, well re-engineering, you know digital transformation what was the one after that? Oh, blockchain. Yeah. Yeah. You have all these, all all these, all these hypes that came along that never really
Carter Jensen: Jed.
Ged: Well, well indeed, well, well, that, that didn’t last long at all.
Really did it? Yeah. But, you know, with all these hype cycles, that’s, you know, ultimately don’t really make that much difference. And I think AI is different. AI is different.
Carter Jensen: Correct.
Ged: All we are gonna see is a general raising of ability and
Milan: That’s interesting. That’s interesting, j because you are saying that it’s [00:06:00] different from the position of self-proclaimed skeptics, so please go.
Ged: Oh, look. My, my skepticism really comes back to about three, three and a half years ago. I went deep, deep, deep into ai. And, you know, I was right at the, at the forefront, and I know AI’s been around forever, but you know, this, this latest wave, the, the new, you know, open AI when they released their, their models and their APIs, and. It was incredibly useful. It was incredibly useful, but I almost saw a degradation over time of what’s the results it gave and I guess. Adding to that, the, the mass adoption, whereas where everyone thought that they were gonna save their businesses by just using chat GPT, you know, and they’re not, they’re not gonna save their businesses just using chat GPT unless they’ve got a whole other lot of things in place as well. So I just saw this torrent of stuff that was [00:07:00] clearly AI generated. Just flooding the world. And I thought, okay, hang on a second. I need to take a different approach here. So I backed right, right away and I started position my positioning myself as the coach that doesn’t use ai. And you know, I. I do use ai, but I don’t use AI for anything forward facing, anything front facing.
So I have all my bots and everything else, and my agents working in the background. But nothing that I produce from a content perspective is AI generated. I, I might use an AI agent to edit my videos and I might use AI agents to straighten up my eyeballs, so it looks like I’m staring straight at the camera.. Don’t use it to generate LinkedIn posts. I don’t use it to write articles. I don’t use it to write books. So I’ve gone from being in an early adopter to skeptic and now just using it in the background for things that I know it is really good at. And I’m gonna stop now because I’m probably rambling[00:08:00]
Carter Jensen: Well, Jed, that’s a, it’s a, it’s a great approach and the story arc is not uncommon. Right.
Ged: Now.
Carter Jensen: I think that. One of the big things and, and you highlighted it really well, right when, especially three years ago, the chat GPT moment. You see a lot of people really, we call them offloads, right? We call them AI offloads.
People who type in write me a great LinkedIn post, it puts some garbage out. They copy paste, they post it, and that’s the LinkedIn world feeling with garbage. There’s also another effect of that kind of approach as well, where we see a lot of people, especially executives, I have this story of an old boss of mine when I was first showing him chat, GPT, you know, he typed in, you know, tell me a joke and, and told him a joke, and then he said, tell me a. Joke in a pirate voice and then he laughed and shut his laptop and walked away. And that was the extent of it, right? Of, you know, not actually truly understanding the power of what that is. So I think what you saw is you saw, yes, that external facing garbage flow in because people were just. Posting whatever came out of it.
’cause they thought it was done, [00:09:00] it was good. And then I think you also saw, to your first question, Jed CEOs who did two or three types of things and shrugged it off and said, yeah, that’s kind of cool. Like, I don’t really get the return on that investment. Like, you know, it’s a, it’s a fancy calculator that could write some emails.
I don’t understand further than that. But I’d be curious too, now that you’re seeing the delineation between the two, is it true morals that are, you know, is this idea that you’ve put a, you know, put a line in the sand that says I’m not gonna do external facing. Do you still think it is lacking the ability to create external facing content that you’re publishing?
Ged: I, it can absolutely create external content.. I wouldn’t publish it because you can almost immediately tell when something is written by ai,
Carter Jensen: Sure.
Ged: And you know, are, there are structures that you recognize immediately. It’s not a blah blah, blah, it’s a real blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know? And
Carter Jensen: The
Ged: Is that familiar? Is that familiar? Yeah. M dashes, yeah. [00:10:00] The, the, the emojis. And so. For me it’s a question of trust and authenticity. You know, if I see someone is publishing something that is clearly AI generated, my opinion of them has just gone down a whole lot and I don’t want it to happen with what I push out there, you know, so it it, it is so obvious when AI is being used in that way I dunno, it just devalues a lot of what people are doing.
It just devalues it.
Carter Jensen: Yeah. No, I, I a hundred percent hear you on that. I, I think I would also challenge, we’re going deep into the debate early on here, Jed. I, I would also challenge, you know, you’re in a very specific industry too,
Ged: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Carter Jensen: Your content is, your IP is your work, and, and I totally, totally see that, right?. I think if you’d look at the majority of other industries who, you know, let’s say you are a mid-size CPG company, right?
Who right now is putting out 10 [00:11:00] ads a day and paying a million dollars for the workforce in order to put out the 10 ads a day. The idea that you could create a hundred ads a day with one 10th of the workforce and actually see better results, higher margins, et cetera. Now all of a sudden the debate is, well, is that bad?
Right? Is that, is that a bad thing? Can it, you know, where efficiency in the craft that you talk about isn’t necessarily as important. I could debate you on the craft thing too. We’ll, we’ll go into that, another chapter here.
Ged: Yep.
Carter Jensen: But I think when we, if we were to agree on that line in the sand of, Hey, this is my craft, I wanna do it.
I think, you know, you’re talking about a small percentage with, with the majority of business who are looking to pub, you know, get content out there, summarize what they need to do, analyze investor decks, create, invest, like these are types of things that. We now see businesses being able to do it 10 times the speed at one 10th of the cost that have never been possible before.
Right. And we can go into a million examples about it, but I do think it, it, it is a very valid, know, line in the sand. [00:12:00] I think especially for your industry,
Ged: For, for me, it is a tool and a lot of people don’t know how to use that tool properly. Now, I’m, I would know, I would not class myself as an AI expert at all. I, I, I had a conversation with the CEO of a marketing company recently, and her business has been decimated in the last six months. And you know. What she sees is that companies now think that AI can do what she used to do. And her team used to do but it can’t do it anywhere near to the same level. So, you know, we’re actually seeing this degradation, you know, so she’s lost all her client, well, she hasn’t lost all her clients. She’s lost some clients and they now think that they can just do it themselves, and that’s not gonna be good for them in the long run because.
Carter Jensen: They’re
Ged: They’re not, they’re doing mediocre work. Mediocre work.
Carter Jensen: And, and eventually, if they are truly doing [00:13:00] mediocre work with ai, that’s gonna come back in the results, right? You
Ged: Yeah, absolutely.
Carter Jensen: See, you know, that they made a poor decision and that will automatically be reflected, obviously, in their results. I would say, you know, and I would pick, you know, and I come from 10 years of advertising, you know, that was my first career.
I worked in advertising agencies of all sizes, all shapes. And I do worry about that business model, right? Because, and we could go in deeper into this but a lot of traditional marketing agencies, you know, payroll and the work that they do is tasked, that I believe can be completely replaced very
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Carter Jensen: Right. What I. There is still an art, there is still a craft, especially to creativity and marketing and, and those types of things that those are probably the small amount of jobs that probably are safe for the time being the ones who can come up with those unique ideas. But if you look at a traditional marketing agency model right now and you look at kind of how they’re billing, I mean, it is a [00:14:00] hard business to begin.
Milan: I have two.. As, as you, as you guys were talking, I sort of got two, two pieces. First of all, character, how much do you think that what Jet is talking about, which is, it’s so easy to spot? AI generated content is caused by the fact that it’s easy to spot generate. AI generated content, or it’s easy to spa to spot bad AI generated content by people who don’t know how to use it properly.
And having gone through the course, you know, I do have some do have some opinions on it, but I wonder what, what will be yours?
Carter Jensen: Yeah,
Milan: Let’s start with that.
Carter Jensen: Yeah, I, here’s the thing is, is that when you’re spotting AI content, is AI content that has been properly architected, is my opinion. Right. These are individuals who, you know, throw a couple articles in the, in the blender, shake it up a little bit, copy and paste it away and call it good. Right.
And that’s the content that you’re seeing now? We teach and we talk a lot about. And, and this has showed up in statistics. There’s a very small [00:15:00] percentage under 1% of people who use AI are actually using the paid models and actually doing it strategically,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Carter Jensen: People aren’t doing that. It’s my belief that, you know, when you actually can program and learn to use this as a co-pilot. It can publish things that you probably aren’t seeing as AI generated content. It can learn your tones, it can learn your
Ged: Yep.
Carter Jensen: It’ll learn your style. Right. But I think right now, and to your point, there’s, there’s a small percentage of companies, a small percentage of people who are actually using it to get ahead today. Are the people who actually know how to use it. They aren’t just handing a chat GPT account to some random, you know, marketing leader or executive or intern and saying, go post. 73 articles in the next 10 minutes, right? They’re, they’re, they’re, they’re thinking more about it. They’re building the systems underground in order to ensure that that output is of, of quality.
Ged: Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I may have given everyone the impression that I’m a sort of, you know, a black hat thinker on ai. So I’ll, I’ll take my black hat off and I’ll put my yellow, sunny hat on. And [00:16:00] ’cause you know, AI is, AI is useful, you know, let’s, I’ll sort of slightly contradictory from what I was saying, needs to be supervised.
It needs to be managed, and you need to put the right. Processes and guardrails in place if you’re gonna use that. And, you know, and a lot of it is as simple as, you know, you can get Ai, AI to generate something and you know, it will sound like ai if you just, if the next, in the next prompt, if you say, this sounds like ai, make it sound like it is coming from my voice, it comes back perfectly phrased as I would’ve written it or as I would’ve said it.
So it’s absolutely capable. You just gotta use it correctly.
Carter Jensen: Yeah, and I would even push that analogy and further, sorry, Milana cut you off. But you know, of the things if we, we stick to this example is, you know, you just talked about kind of a two prompt response, right?
Ged: Mm.
Carter Jensen: Hit me, do it again. Now what we’re seeing is people who actually know how to use these things are saying, okay, that’s fine, but that’s only 10% of what I’m actually gonna do. Instead of looking at six different resources in order to form my opinion, I’m gonna look at [00:17:00] 60. Instead of looking at, you know, only three months of consumer data, I’m gonna look at three years. Right? And this idea of Abso actually using AI appropriately should be not only. Matching what you would put out from a human perspective, but should actually be super charging it.
’cause now as a content creator and author, whoever you might be has tools and things that would never have been possible with the time that’s usually allotted for it. Right. And so I would say that yes, you know, the pendulum can swing back to standard, right, of just as good as I would. But what we’re seeing and what we see within our students is that. When you continue to swing that pendulum, you actually now are gonna be able to create much better content, much better output because of the tools and the tactics that you’re using with the new AI technology.
Ged: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Milan: In the, you know, in the, in the value card we’re talking about this and this, what you’re talking about is basically the supercharged access to knowledge,
Carter Jensen: Correct.
Milan: It’s like, you know, it’s not like I spent less time writing, but I can spend [00:18:00] significantly less time researching or to get the, get the foundation for the writing for that creative part.
And that goes back to your to your marketing agency concept. And that is that, you know, the one thing that. Remains of value is the taste, right, is the, is the human touch on what is good and what isn’t, even if it’s just using in the quality assurance capacity. But it’s, that’s the one thing that AI is not doing that well yet.
Right. And I think that, that, that is, that is a big question of how much it’s creeping into that area. I think that there was an, there was an article on. Basically the, the taste and then the artistic creativity is the safe from ai area of human activity, right? But what is not is the intelligence parts because suddenly knowledge and [00:19:00] intelligence can be outsourced, right?
Because it has access to everything that, you know, I don’t have to read 3000 books. I can just you know, get it, get it piece, and get to that. Rational background if you will, or foundation of whatever it is I’m trying to do, but it’s still up on me to figure out a way of, to deliver it best. How to, you know, how to make it resonate with people, how to invoke the right emotions and whatever it is, which is, you know, more on the art side of things. Does it resonate like, yeah.
Carter Jensen: Definitely. And, and I think too, you know, I, I’m thinking of a very specific persona. You know, there are some creatives that I’ve had the, you know, privilege of working with in the past, and, and they’re just at a different level. I think we’ve all worked with individuals like this in the past that just think differently, right?
And they have this creative fire power now. I think that is, is is safe. However, at the same time, those individuals who can understand the situation [00:20:00] use AI in order to inform those ideas is what’s gonna differentiate them. Right? So an AI powered creative, not to come up with the big idea for the big campaign or whatever. But those individuals should have access to all the intelligence they need. They’re not going to need a strategy team in order to showcase all of the consumer data that they spent six months acquiring. Like, you know, these things are at the tip of, you know, at the tip of their fingers to be able to use and actually create ideas off of. And I do think Moola brings up this, this, we’re touching on a lot of marketing here and just, you know, that’s my background. I could talk a little bit more about it, but. You know, the reality is, is that, you know, I would say a good majority of marketing is pretty bad. Right? You know, it is just over the plate. Know, here’s what it is, here’s what it gives you, here’s the price. Go buy it. Right? There’s a
Ged: You dunno which bid is bad. Yeah, we dunno which, which half, which half is bad.
Carter Jensen: Yeah. Right. You know, you know, you know, half of it doesn’t work, but you can’t tell what half. You know, and I think that that’s where [00:21:00] we’re seeing AI just completely destroy.
And Jed, you brought that up, it’s just like I could automate those ads all day. Right. I can actually probably make those even better because I can target them more closely. It’s really kind of the cream on top, right? That is the, the. The big 32nd Super Bowl ads or whatever it might be. That is kind of what that is.
But at the vast majority of marketing, what I’m seeing across the board, especially when you kind of have that, yeah, we just need some ads for this new widget, right, like that, that still is, that’s incredibly it. It’s very easy to automate. I would say.
Ged: So,
Milan: Can we step away from marketing? Can you yeah, let, let’s talk briefly about sort of. Other areas of business that our CEOs might not be thinking about, where ai, because this is the, the content creation is what people see and what people blame AI for the most. But I think it’s not even tip of the iceberg.
It’s the you know, [00:22:00] it’s the dust on the top of the snow, on top, the iceberg, right? It’s very, very little. The true value, as you’re saying is about how are we empowering people in our front lines? Tell us about other parts of business when you see the biggest impact.
Carter Jensen: For sure. So we actually structure our curriculum around this. You know, and Milan, you know this, this well. But what we have done is, you know, over the course of the time we’ve, we’ve been in business, we’ve taught over 1500 different businesses how to do this. And what we see is we split it up into, obviously, you know, you have marketing, but then you have leadership, finance, operations, and hr.
Right?. We kind of go across the entire business. And what we’ve done is we’ve identified some of the biggest problems that those departments have. Right? And we, and these are generally universal, right? You know, regardless of where you are, you touch some of these types of things. And what we teach is how do you use AI on the front lines in order to.
Compact or eliminate those problems [00:23:00] altogether, right? Oh, sales is the most important one. I forgot about that. Right. So you, you think about across all of those and what we’ve identified as the biggest problems and the, and the easiest solutions to implement to get the biggest return on investment as quickly as possible from that type of of implementation. And so, moan, we could pick on sales for a second, right? You know, sales is a, is a huge one. And, and that’s actually our second most popular module next to marketing. But when we think about sales. You know. Most people come in and say either two things, right? I’m not in sales, which is completely wrong.
Everyone’s in sales, right? Everyone’s selling their company, especially at the C-suite and executive level, as the audience knows, right? And the second thing is, is sales is about relationships. AI will never replace that. Right. And those are, those are two of the biggest detractor comments that we see when we’re coming into those, those classes. And I already debunked one of them. Everyone’s in sales. Everyone can learn from being a salesperson. The second one is, yes, sales is [00:24:00] about relationships, but if you were to look at the amount of time your sales teams actually spending on relationships, you realize that the amount of admin work they are doing in order to maintain those relationships is.
Far outweighing the actual time that they’re in front of a client or a prospect. And that’s where we really dive in to say, imagine if team wasn’t sitting in their office for six hours a day, following up with leads, entering the CRM, learning about the person they’re about to go play golf with.
Right? Like imagine if we were to compact that so that six hours a day, they’re not in the office, they’re actually out. Doing the relational ship things that move the needle that they’re very good at. Right? And that’s really when we look at those departments, we’re not trying to eliminate the relationships. What we’re trying to do is to say, what is the zone of genius for that person? Right? A good salesperson, their genius is. Face to face and closing the deal. Depending on the business, that might be a little different, right? There’s no geniuses not filling out Salesforce, right? There’s no geniuses, not you know, researching a prospect company to [00:25:00] see if it’s worth the time for a meeting, and that’s what we attack and that’s what we can compress really in, in an incredible way using the tools in, in AI in general,
Ged: AI is often a really good choice of a who. If you, if you know, if you’ve read who not, how, you know, AI is, is one of those who’s that you can start delegating work to, delegating task to. And Milan, you, you’ve got a, an exact card on this topic itself, haven’t you? You know, so,
Milan: I just wanted to say that, that where we are today, that should be the first question you ask before you ask. Who is should the should it be who or AI or what if, what if the, who is AI for this particular, for this part? Particular question, task, or whatever it is. Yeah.
Carter Jensen: Yeah.
Ged: And there’s a real opportunity there as well, isn’t there? Because I know a lot of people, once they realize that, you know, they will find it easier to delegate to AI than they will to delegate to a human. Because delegating to a human involves. Personal interactions and not everyone is good at delegating, [00:26:00] but if you can decide what you wanna delegate and then put, you know, the processes in place and the the guide rails in place, then that’s then useful.
That’s then useful as long as what you’re getting back is the good product.
Carter Jensen: A hundred percent. Yeah, and I think this brings up a great topic, right? When you think about the who, right? You start to understand the delegation side, but this actually goes down to, from an executive point of view, why it is so important as executives to understand the. Capabilities of what’s possible today in such depth, right? ’cause when you’re sitting at top of your company and trying to figure out, hey, we need to, either, we need to find a home for this task. Is that hiring three new people? Or is there a way that we can delegate those tasks to something that you know is different to AI specifically, right? And if you don’t know those capabilities, if your leaders don’t know the capabilities of what’s possible, which changes what seems to be every three days right now. You’re gonna be stuck in a traditional way of offloading those tasks. You’re gonna be stuck in a traditional way of hiring those six new [00:27:00] people. And you know what? I’m not here to say don’t hire anyone, but when you think about the who versus the how, could start to understand. Understand it. You need to understand this new quote unquote workforce that you brought to life here to say. You know, actually, let’s find a system. Let’s find a tool. Let’s find a process that AI can actually run for us that’s going to take care of that for us. But you have no idea how to make that decision unless you actually know what the capabilities are, are used for, or what they’re poss what, what’s possible with them.
Ged: Yeah. And, and that’s a really good point. You know, things are moving so fast that it’s difficult to keep up, you know, so I’ve, I’ve spoken to a few people and they, you know, their, their perspective is, well, you know, even if I dived in right now, anything I learned will be outta date in three months time, so I’m just not gonna. It. And now that to me is a shortsighted view because like, you know, that just means, you know, you’re, you’re now a Luddite and you’re gonna, you’re gonna fall way behind, you know, way, way, way behind anyone else. But what would you say to A CEO that has that perspective? You know, it’s a, it, it moves so fast, I can’t keep [00:28:00] up, you know?
What would you say to them and where could they go to actually keep up to date easily and quickly?
Carter Jensen: A hundred percent. Yeah. So. I think if you were to look at your LinkedIn feed, Jed, you’ve brought this up, or you know, scroll, tech crunch or whatever, you’re gonna see every new bell and whistle that comes out, and I’m sure you’re being served across every media channel, how some business, you know, 100 x their output and fired everyone.
You know, you’re gonna see all of these things, right, that are, are actually distracting from what the core is. Right? And when we start to understand what the core is. Milan, you know this firsthand from coming through the class. W there’s a new thing that’s introduced every day, right? There’s a new capability.
Some of those capabilities are, are truly transformational, like some things just came out in these last couple weeks that truly do change kind of how we think about the delegation, how the types of tasks we can delegate to that. Who, most of it is actually noise. Now, what I always tell executives is. Just start having conversations with [00:29:00] AI day to day. Every time you come up across a new task, ask the AI system, how could you help me accomplish this? Right? How can AI help me with this task? Now you’re gonna come to the same things where it’s just a dead end, right? Like. You know what I can’t help you with with that, but more and more and more, even just using the systems to reflect on each problem you have throughout the day is going to increase the opportunity.
You don’t need to know about the newest model, right? You don’t need to know about whatever feud philanthropic is having with who like. Don’t worry about the bells, the whistles, the fluff. Think about AI is so accessible. You don’t need to sign up for some massive program. Pay the $20 a month, jump into the system and just start working with it.
Take every task you have to it. So I think that that is the biggest piece of advice we say is you just have to start. Right. Don’t worry about the hype. Right? And I think that’s, that’s really, really important.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Yeah. And the, the, the fact is that yes, if you start today, you have a little bit of an advantage over people who tried three years ago when AI wasn’t quite there [00:30:00] yet. Sorry, jet. Right. But you know what, what we are suggesting in the, in the how card is to. You know, hitch your wagon to somebody who’s already doing the trailblazing for you and try to keep up that way.
Right. Which is what you know, companies like yours are doing helped me tremendously. My journey is different. Look, I came, come from technical background. I was a data consultant in previous life and, you know, founder and I have been always surrounded by some really, really smart people. My co-founders in KEA are just you know, fantastic.
Trailblazers in their own right. I could never keep up with them. Right. But I didn’t. Right. They, they are building their own things and the company’s doing amazing stuff in the AI space. I went a different route and I, I’m. A little bit of a late adopter and I felt last year that okay, we are finally there at a point where [00:31:00] this actually makes a massive, and it’s interesting that it was just about six months after you started your company.
Or calendar like to, to give credit credit where it is. And then that, that accelerated my progress very, very quickly. I don’t think I would be much further today if I did all that work myself for the three years, as you know, many people in the Trailblazers did themselves. Unless I would dedicate, you know, 60 hours a week to it like you do.
Which again, I actually have another job, so.
Carter Jensen: Exactly. Well, I was gonna say, you know, to what Milan brings up and, and, you know, I’d love for the audience to come check us out, you know, we’re, it’s the uncommon business at c. We have programs for, for absolutely everyone. But you know, one of the reasons I I bring that up is, Milan, you brought, brought it up perfectly. You also have a day job. Executives are incredibly busy. Everyone is running their own company and I have the luxury of spending my 60 hours a week, whatever it might be. Researching, playing with the things that look like hype, but could be impactful, and being able to [00:32:00] transfer that to the leaders who are in our program, and I think that’s the most important thing.
Milan, you could have spent a hundred hours a week on YouTube University trying to track down the hype, et cetera. You know, part of our program is, is that as our clients, our job is to distill what we believe is important and what is directly transferable into your business. That’s going to give you an unfair advantage.
Right? And that is our job, right? And that’s why, you know, people come to our class. That’s why people come here because. You’re busy, right? You, you don’t have time to try to keep up with everything. Let us give you the three things this week that you have to go do that’s actually gonna go move the needle.
And I would encourage, you know, whether it’s with us or, or whatever program you want to go with, I think it’s really important, especially for your executive audience. You aren’t gonna have time in the day to just try to watch YouTube videos and hope for the best, right? You have to tie yourself to whether it’s a really great employee through a program like ours in order to figure out what are those opportunities and how are you actually gonna move the needle because that’s gonna be your quickest way to return.
And lemme tell you, the return is absolutely immense. We [00:33:00] look to always drive a 10 x return for every dollar anyone spends with us in their business and in their life. And that’s just kind of the the level we hold ourselves to. And I believe. That we do that day in and day out. And I just think that’s what’s possible in this new world.
Milan: You know, I think that that one has to adopt a new understanding of return on investment when it comes to these things. Right? People have tendency to looking at, it’s almost like the opportunity cost of not doing that is so huge because the one thing from my own experience, like. Things that I wouldn’t even think of doing six months ago.
Right? Because I would be okay, you know, I have to hire somebody, I have to explain it to them. I have to do all this prep work or something like that. Become a let’s play on Sunday morning with coffee. Right? It’s, it’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And, you know, switching the brain [00:34:00] into the thinking.
Instead of, instead of figuring out whether something is possible or not, just freaking try and see where it takes you. Right.
Carter Jensen: Yeah. Yeah. And we live in an incredible world where those trials often end in great, successful, and as you know, right. You know, it’s this idea of taking a complex problem and bringing it to the system often results in some really great, you know, really great things. And I think that, you know you know, one more point, not to open a can of worms, but when you think about companies, if you think about companies in your industry, what we see is we see a widening gap.
Between people and teams who are adopting these types of things and people in teams who are not. Now, it used to be this party trick. It used to be, oh, the intern’s doing it over here, et cetera. But when you’re able to get 10 x the output from a team that was the same size as it was six months ago, the competitors are gonna start to notice.
The differentiation is gonna start to widen, and I think you. Companies who adopt this today, regardless of your size, regardless of whatever, you’re gonna see a lot more competition at the table coming up a lot [00:35:00] quicker because these tools allow you to accelerate at speed we’ve never seen before.
Ged: And Carter, you mentioned, you know, the, the hype over the last few weeks and you know, I, I think I know what you’re, you’re alluding to, but if, if A CEO felt the need to go out and buy you know, an M four, an M five Mac mini and install open claw, they do that?
Carter Jensen: You know, if you were to ask me a week and a half ago, I would say, yeah, go for it. The reality is, again, this world is changing so fast. I have two Mac Minis sitting right here that were running open claw two weeks ago, right? And that’s, that’s the system. And, and for those listening, open Claw is kind of a dedicated AI agent that’s always there, always running. One of the beauties of this world is that all, there’s so much capital flowing into these markets that whenever something comes up, usually something better comes and leapfrogs it. About 10 days from, from that, and. Anthropic actually came out with a system that is. [00:36:00] Absolutely incredible. Same functionality as open claw in terms of what a CEO would normally use it for, right?
Actual tasks I would recommend to the students and the leaders that we work with. And it’s included in the $25 a month program and it’s a lot safer. So it’s called C Clo Cowork. And if you were to choose one platform today, I would say go Claude all, all the way in, download cowork, and you’ll be off to the races.
Milan: Let’s ask you again in two weeks, I was really trying to, you know, keep this content as evergreen as it’s humanly possible in this, in this space. So you, you just, you just timestamped the whole bloody thing. So thank you for
Ged: It is a
Milan: That
Ged: In
Milan: Question.
Ged: In time.
Carter Jensen: In time.
Milan: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s enter the danger. You have two CEO coaches in front of you here.
Right. And I saw in your courses building [00:37:00] coach brains, right? Be hard on us, jet, let’s brace ourselves for what’s coming. What do you see the impact on us, on our industry? You know, you were talking about inside of the company, right? Operations, everything like that. You have a section on leadership, right?
And you do have, you do have a concept of a leadership coach.. What are your thoughts on that? Are we a dying breed?
Carter Jensen: Well, I, I would actually go back to how Jed opened this whole thing right? About, you know, his line in the sand regarding, you know, even content. I, I do really think, you know that when you think about what coaches do, right, what you guys do, working with your clients, working with them, that. Guys are gonna continually to be more important right now.
I think there is an opportunity for you to become more impactful, smarter at the business. You know that you walk into, you’re gonna be able to understand the situation in much [00:38:00] better ways than you ever were before. And there’s probably a responsibility for your industry to pick that up because if you’re not, other coaches are, it kinda goes back to my earlier example.
If you could walk in to a business that had a hundred employees and know. Every single trend of every single employee survey matched with their p and l and tailor your coaching and your advice and your mentorship and whatever you’re doing with them in such a. More tailored way, that’s what’s going to be expected.
Now, I still believe, like do I think that a system is going to completely replace coaching? I, I don’t, I do think it’s gonna potentially replace aspects of your role. You know, we teach a a lot about how to replicate your brain, like replicate your coach’s brain like Milan said. And you know what?
They’re pretty darn good. Ged: Yeah.
Carter Jensen: So I do think that the normal Tuesday morning phone call from a CEO in your industry. Might not always happen like that, right? They might actually go to a system that knows your frameworks, that knows your advice and can tailor its [00:39:00] feedback based on the specific situation. But I do think kind of back to that creative there, there is a still of that very small layer on top that coaches, I think embody when done correctly. I do think that, you know, the average coaches who aren’t you two, you guys are, the cream of the crop are probably gonna fall off because if you’re giving vanilla. Advice. If you’re bringing vanilla products to the table, those can be easily replaced, just like a vanilla ad could. Right. But when you’re thinking about your experience, yes, parts of it can be duplicated in different systems. But I do think that when you think about that top 10%, top 1%, YouTube both fit in there.
Right? But those are the coaches that are gonna be sought after, especially if they’re AI power.
Ged: Yep. I, I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, I’ve spent two years building out my AI coach brain to the point where I can now interrogate my own AI engine, my own AI bot, and it can produce content very much like I would write in my voice, in my [00:40:00] tone.
Carter Jensen: Hundred
Ged: Even get it to, to generate the audio file and the video file directly from the script. Now the iron is, I don’t do that because I actually quite like the videoing. Like being in front of a camera. So that just keeps that authenticity still there because again, you know, if you are an AI bot on video, you can normally tell, you can normally tell. I mean, if it’s a generic character. You, they, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
But if you’re, if they’re trying to replicate someone, it’s still not quite there. Still not quite there.
Carter Jensen: A hundred percent. It is not
Ged: Mm,
Carter Jensen: Especially with video, but we’re only a matter of time away from it. Right. But
Ged: Absolutely. Mm.
Carter Jensen: Know but I think that embodies it perfectly. Jet is, you know, you, you can be AI powered and you can probably reach a lot more people. But if you think about the coaching industry in general, I don’t see a time where a CEO, like they might ask you to do less things, right?
They might focus on, oh, an engagement a quarter versus an engagement a week, right? But that engagement, a, a [00:41:00] quarter is gonna be that much more quality, right? It’s gonna be,
Milan: Yeah.
Carter Jensen: More insight fueling, fueling it.
Ged: Yeah,
Milan: You know, I’m, I’m glad you didn’t. I, I’m glad you didn’t kill my career prospects here, so I really appreciate Karen. You know, my thinking on that is, and I, I’m making this joke with my, with my personal trainer, you might not see it, but I do actually go to a gym every now and then, thanks to this guy, because the conversation always is 20% of what I’m paying you is to tell me what to do because I could find that information myself if I really wanted to.
80% of what I’m paying you for is so I show up. And I think that that’s what AI is not going to do. It’s not going to make you show up unless you’re willing to. And I think that the accountability, the commitment part of it is really, really important. As, as you know, AI powered coach, which is what I would like to see myself as I see going into [00:42:00] places with clients that I wouldn’t be able to year ago.
Right, as in, because some of the, some of the parts of the job became partially automated or again, you know, let’s do a survey. Let’s get through this, let’s get this through quickly. I can now do it for a client and then have that call of the interpretation without having to have the call of the. Having to spend day before, you know, sifting through data and doing something like that, I could do it in 15 minutes before the call and be as ready and as valuable to the client, but with significantly less effort on my part.
Time-wise, which allows me to provide higher quality, go into better questions, do, do more for, for any given client, which is the way I am, I’m seeing it. And again, we’ll see, you know, if AI is good enough for you as a, as a leader. You probably didn’t need a coach anyway. You probably could have done the same thing just reading books before, because getting to knowledge and figuring out [00:43:00] what to do is probably not your problem.
Carter Jensen: Yep.
Milan: Else is going, going on. It’ll be a while before AI will listen to the tone of your voice and see your body language and pick up on the little pieces of information, because right now it only knows what you tell it.
Carter Jensen: Correct.
Ged: Yeah, can, can you foresee a day where there is an AI coach? A leadership team session, and the AI coach has the nuance, the subtlety to say, what’s going on? Yeah. There’s something that someone is not raising. You know, what, what’s, what’s happened? What’s happened? You know, and letting the, having the emotional intelligence to let the silence hang to the point where someone then says. I’ve got a beef with him. Yeah. AI is a long, long way off from being able to pick up that and, and that is a lot of what we do. I mean, you know, you know, it’s picking up [00:44:00] those subtleties, those nuances that are very, very difficult to detect. To detect. And sometimes you can’t even pick it up. If you are running a virtual session, you have to be in the room.
Carter Jensen: Be in the room.
Ged: Yeah. So from that perspective. Are safe for a while. I actually do believe that coaches will disappear, but it’s probably not for another 50 years or so. But then we’ll be in some sort of, you know, technology dystopian world where everything is just done by computers and, and maybe we’re all sitting on the beach drinking pina coladas.
But if, if so, who’s actually making the money? I don’t know.
Carter Jensen: Right.
Milan: Exactly. Carter Jensen: That’s a whole
Milan: What,
Carter Jensen: Show,
Milan: What money, what, what is money? Sorry, sorry. What is money
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: At that point?
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Yeah,
Ged: Maybe that’s another episode. Mm-hmm.
Milan: No, absolutely. You know, I, I’m, you know, going back to our episode with Dr. Karen, so. You know, the, the psychology element of what we do is, is really, really strong. And [00:45:00] I am short term pessimistic, long term optimistic.
I think that, you know, AI is going to get there, but I think that, that it’s not that coaches. As we feel and as we know it today are going to be replaced by ai, I think that the society is going to change so dramatically that that paradigm will shift so much that within that, you know, just read couple of you know, Ian Banks novels and tell me if you see a person of coaching there anywhere.
Right? If you’re in poor scarcity society, then what the hell happens, right? What, what are we going to actually do? We probably still have Pilates coaches, but who knows?
Ged: Yeah, I think they’re safe. I think they’re safe.
Milan: Okay. Okay. Fantastic. Well, Carter, thank you so very much for being here with us. [00:46:00] Again, for the listeners, if you want to hit your AI wagon to somebody who’s really trailblazing for you, check out the Uncommon Business. I can highly recommend it as a, you know, consider this your Google Review. Sorry, I’m really bad at those.
Carter Jensen: Yes. You’re a
Milan: Okay.
Carter Jensen: Student. I, I love it.
Ged: Hmm.
Milan: An endorsement. Yeah, and hopefully, you know, we’ll check in with you in a couple of hours to see what’s new in the world of AI in.
Carter Jensen: It’s I’m not sleeping much these days and I don’t think it’s slowing down at all. So this is
Milan: I can, I can, I can only imagine. And you know, just to go back a little to what you said, you know, two weeks ago we had a conversation about open claw and the implications, right? And today it’s like, yeah, it’s kinda a dead tree. You know, that branch on the devotion tree already, like yeah, it’s great for other, for some things and but again, you know.
It’s just the concept and somebody is going to do a better version of [00:47:00] it pretty damn quickly. So yeah, get on the wagon and get moving. Otherwise, you will be left behind. As an organization and as a leader, it’s unfortunate, fortunate, or unfortunate takeaway. It’s the, it is the reality we live in, in 2026 and beyond.
So thank you again so much.
Carter Jensen: Thank you for having me both. It was a, it was a great conversation to respect you both. Incr a ton, right? And it’s just been an honor to talk with you for the last 30 minutes.
Milan: I think that’s a wrap.
Ged: A.
Milan: I had so much fun. Thank you, Carter. That was great.
Carter Jensen: I hope I delivered something of value to your audience,
Ged: Yeah, you absolutely did. Yeah. I’m just gonna stop the recording now. Now don’t leave. Carter the, there might be a bit of a time where your upload needs to finish. I’m gonna stop it now and we’re all good.
