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The Agency Hour
Man vs Machine: Embracing AI and the Robot Uprising
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That's where I thought the value was. Is you know pushing the pixels, making the doing the edit. It took years to learn how to edit. It took years of you know, I went to uni, I did all the things to get fast at it, and then the machines just took over.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. I know that sounds like a blah blah blah tagline, but it's actually the truth, and I would be happy to personally introduce you to dozens of agencies all over the world. We we have done exactly that. So uh if you want to do that, just email me Troy at agencymaverics.com and I'll make an introduction. Now that's out of the way. This week we are joined by Max Jeff Cott, award-winning filmmaker, founder of Little Gorilla Video Productions, and of course our very talented creative director here at Agency Mavericks. He's also brilliant and incredibly handsome, and I'm sure by now you can tell that he wrote this intro. In this episode, we're going to talk about AI, uh, who needs to be concerned about the robot uprising and why Max is working so hard to have AI take his job. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Max Jeff Cott. Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you very much, Troy. It's good to be here. Although I'm always here, technically.
SPEAKER_01Are you really here?
SPEAKER_00I just want I I I am. And this is the real me. Not Max Bot 2.0.
SPEAKER_01Not Max Not Max Jeff Bot, not yet. Now, why um you for those people that don't know, Max produces our podcast and is our videographer and creative director and is across all the audio and video content that leaves the building. So if anything's broken or not working, it's his fault. Email him, Max at agencymaveric.com. Um Now, who are you and what are you doing here? I think I just answered that question, but um Well, pretty much, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, as you mentioned, I'm the creative director of uh Agency Mavericks, and my mission is to create engaging content that attracts our ideal clients, nurtures them until they're ready to become a Maverick, and ultimately a case study. That's my scorecard. So it basically encompasses everything from helping freelancers to agency owners to help, you know, grow their agency and uh create quality training and everything else that that encompasses all the way through to turning around and saying how much they love us.
SPEAKER_01So not just our marketing content but all of our course curriculum content. Max is the man behind all of that, producing all of that and making it look and sound great. Um we had a new Maverick join Mavericks Club recently, and on the onboarding call, he said, I've been listening to your podcast since February, and I finally uh listened to an episode and was prompted to go to the website, click the request a call button. We then got on a call with him and he joined Mavericks Club uh just from listening to our podcast for a few months. So I love that. It's working. Um so we're gonna talk about AI because uh well, you know, uh for a number of reasons. By the time this podcast comes out, when's this come out? Friday?
SPEAKER_00Friday, not tomorrow, but a week.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. So Bob So by the time this podcast comes out, I will be fifty. I will have turned fifty, I turned fifty in a few days. And I posted on Facebook this morning um that as you do, that uh I'm about as excited as I was when I discovered the internet, right, on the old 7.7k dial-up modem waiting for the first web page I ever visited, by the way, was the Melrose Place episode guide. Because living in Australia, I wanted to find out where Melrose Place the the the uh drama show. They used to play that on a Tuesday night in uh Australia. There used to be Beverly Hills 90210 and then Melrose Place. And I wanted to find out where it was up to in the States so I could uh do the spoiler alert with my friends on a Tuesday night watching Melrose Place, going, Oh, I'll bet you what happens next week is blah, blah, blah, because I'd been researching on the interwebs and it was a very exciting time when you heard the modem crackle, like a fax machine, you'd go and make a cup of tea and wait for the page to refresh, right?
SPEAKER_00The page would load.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00It would load one line at a time. One line at a time.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. It was hilarious. Um I'm about as excited as those days. I the AI, for I I the other day we were in the studio and I had to just wheel the chair back and take a breath and go, I'm overwhelmed with the opportunity of what and the possibilities of what is in front of us right now. I can't even get my head around this quick enough, right? It is extremely exciting. You on the other hand, you're terrified and cynical about this stuff, right?
SPEAKER_00I'm trying not to be. I'm trying to embrace it. I know that there is a lot of opportunity. I think if you asked me five years ago, if I was excited, I'd be like, nope, the robots are gonna replace us all, and and I'm out of the job. But slowly, I mean, little things like even record editing this podcast used to take me a couple hours to do it well. And there's a new plug-in now that our editor Rob in the Philippines has just trialed, and in real time, it cuts the entire thing in about in under three minutes, and that would have scared the hell out of me five years ago. I would have gone, well, that's that what well because at the time, you know, it's taken me a while to accept, but that's where I thought the value was, is you know, pushing the pixels, making the doing the edit. It took years to learn how to edit. It took years of, you know, I went to uni, I did all the things to get fast at it, and then the machines just took over. And so, you know, five years ago I would have thought that's what I do, that's where my value is, and now I've been replaced. I'm useless, I'm terrified. But there's so much more I've learnt so much over the last five years just working among you know, working with you and in agency Mavericks, that I've learnt to add value in other places and strategize and think bigger, and not necessarily put myself in a box and and be like, well, I did two hours work, so that's worth X amount of money, and I can do it in half an hour now, so that makes me worth more. It's like time is not money.
SPEAKER_01So I we are gonna unpack AI tools and we're gonna talk about a bit of a workflow and we're gonna list a whole bunch of AI tools that we're using. But before we do that, what so so what if if if if the robots come in and say, Okay, Max, you know, 80% of what you were doing, editing videos, editing podcast, uh cutting up videos into shorts, putting the subtitles and the emojis and all the sound effects and all that kind of stuff that was taking most of the week, right? If that now is 80% of that's done, let's say you've got four days now where you don't have you're down to a day a week of like actually clicking buttons on the computer. What are you gonna do with the other four days?
SPEAKER_00The fun parts. I'm gonna the creative part is still in thinking about what's gonna happen and what to do and coming up with the story around it. I know that there's chat GPT and you can get writing done technically really fast, but there's still a lot more to it, and that's the fun part. The fun part is not adding subtitles manually or you know, you know, creating a border that matches every other video or whatever it is. In fact, that became tedious and boring and monotonous anyway.
SPEAKER_01Oh fucking. It drove me nuts.
SPEAKER_00It was there was why we could hired Rob at the start.
SPEAKER_01It's fun the first time, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It was like, let's hire another editor to do this so that I've got more time. We'd already kind of started down this road so that we could free up my time so that I had more time to think about the larger, the bigger picture. And now we're trying to do that for Rob. Now we're going, hey Rob, hit check out this AI tool, check out this AI tool. I want to save you time so you're not wasting your time creating subtitles and pushing pixels around, so that then he can work on better projects, more so that there can be more thought behind it. Because even though I mean who knows, maybe the days are numbered, but think is the short answer.
SPEAKER_01Totally. Um, so uh I was uh I I got a couple of handful of private coaching clients, right? And so for that business, I go in and I just manually reconcile a few transactions in zero, you know, every month or whatever and keep the account happy. Takes me a few minutes, right? And I was doing that this morning. I was like, yes, yes, that's a bank fee, yes, that's a bank fee, yes, they're bank fees. And I'm like, what it's like if zero don't figure this out, they're done, right? But and bookkeepers, you're gonna have to level up and change, you're gonna have to start to become financial strategists, otherwise you're done. I'll tell you why. What zero should do is instead of instead of me going in and saying, yes, that's a bank fee, it's Stripe. They charge me for the privilege of accepting money from my customers, assign it to the bank fee's expense account, and having, and it's it it kind of does that already. It's been doing that for years, right? It's like this is a rule, we think this is a bank fee. Is that a bank fee? Click on OK and I go, yes. And I have to click on okay, I have to sit there and manually look at each transaction and go, yes, yes, yes, and approve them, right? What Zero should do when I log in is say, hey Troy, we've reconciled the last 30 days of transactions for you. Take a look at these and tell us if we got anything wrong. And I just look through them and go, oh, that's not right, that's not right. Because 90% of the time, based on historical data, it's gonna get it right. Right? So if you're a bookkeeper and you're getting paid to reconcile bank accounts in zero and that's all you're getting paid for, you're cooked. Sorry, you've got to level up, otherwise the robots are gonna replace you. It's only a matter of time before that happens. I'm sure there's other software that already does it, right? But zero haven't got it dialed in yet. So I'm just warning you, zero, you should really kind of figure that out.
SPEAKER_00If Bardeen.ai didn't pop up automatically, could you not use Bardeen to straight away say, I'm doing these repeat tasks, create a little zap.
SPEAKER_01You could, however, Bardeen, I don't think has an integration with Zero. And I probably and I can tell you probably because it's financial, right? So Bardeen, I don't think integrates with Xero. Bardeen.ai is what we're talking about. Bardeen's a Chrome extension that basically allows you to automate stuff between websites and also has ChatGPT in the back end, right? But if you uh if you so it's kind of like ChatGPT and Zapia on steroids, right? However, I don't think it would integrate with um with uh Xero because it's financial data, right? So it probably doesn't integrate out of the box. I could be wrong, but you know, just looking through its standard integrations that they mentioned on the website, can't see Stripe, can't see Xero. So it probably doesn't integrate with anything financial for compliance reasons, right? So, but it's only a matter of time before, you know, in fact, if you're a developer right now and you want to head start, build this for zero and then sell it to them because they probably are you know a bit moving a bit too slow because they're a big, dumb corporate company and they're probably gonna take them a couple years to figure it out. So if you can do that, then do that. Um so that my point is that anytime you find yourself clicking the same button on a keyboard or a mouse more than once or twice, it the robot should do this, right? Robots vacuum the house now. Robots wash the dishes, they've been washing the dishes for 50 years, it's called a dishwasher, they've been washing our clothes, it's called a washing machine, right? They vacuum the house automatically. Robots are doing everything and should be doing more because and my personal belief is that I'm trying to find a robot to do everything in my life so that I can spend more time being human, and what that means is doing the stuff that robots can't yet do, which is for me, is feel what's going on with your customers and your team and your colleagues, feel what's going on in the marketplace, kind of get your get your sixth sense kind of trained up in terms of like what your competitors are doing and where the market's going and where trends are heading, do better marketing based on that. Talk to your customers, build better products based on that research and that intel. Robots aren't there yet, right? I know people are advocating that you can create and sell an online course with AI, that's fine. It's all very generic and you know, it's like vanilla ice cream, which if you want to do that, if you want to gorge on vanilla ice cream, that's fantastic. But I think the opportunity for most of us is to have that extra time where we can sit with each other, talk, and be more human, which is what you were alluding to is to you know, think about be creative. You know, it's a great book called Creativity Inc. And one of the things that creatives ask for all the time is time. We need time to allow the creative process to happen. And most of us who work in agency land or in coaching or consulting are up against deadlines, we don't have time to think about creative solutions, and I think the robots are actually going to give us that time. Now, I'll just while I'm here, just park this for a second, too, because I think the problem or the challenge that most people are gonna have is they don't want more time because uh sometimes if you have time and you're not busy uh and you don't know what to do with yourself, your subconscious throws up, you know, one of the unresolved wounds from your junkyard of shit that's going on, and then you have to deal with that. And that's a bit scary. So it's way easier to just stay busy. Right. Way easier to just keep tapping on the keyboard. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and uh I think that'd be a beautiful problem to have.
SPEAKER_01What's that?
SPEAKER_00Too much time.
SPEAKER_01Too much time.
SPEAKER_00I mean, not I'm unemployed, I've got too much time, but too much time to think, it would be fantastic. Yeah. It's something you say a lot is um, you know, you have your best ideas in the shower. I feel like whenever I'm on holiday, I go away somewhere, I come I always come back with a whole new, fresh perspective on so many things. I'm just like, oh my god, I want to implement this, and we're wasting time doing this. And and it's only because I've had I've physically been away and I've mentally stepped away. And then suddenly it's like, oh, everything's so much clearer because I've had the time to actually filter out the day-to-day nonsense and the noise that I sort of busy myself about my various concerns being like, Oh, I've got to tick off every Asana task before they go red. So it's like just so I think delete them.
SPEAKER_01Um Right. I mean, and and so, you know, uh um Airtable, Monday.com, click up Asana's dragon its feet, I've got to say, but I but we could battle this out. I well Asana's great AI, AI will already, you know, you basically will tell uh ChatGPT what you're doing, and it'll be integrated, it already is integrating with ClickUp and Airtable and whatever, Monday.com. It will just lay out a project plan for you, right? Uh and Asana are building this, they're just dragging their feet like they drag their feet on everything. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Uh like basic, you know, taxonomies, subtasks belonging to the same project the parent task belongs to. Hello. Anyway, um AI will just go, oh, well, so if you're planning a wedding, here's your project plan. It's and it's all assigned who's on your team. Uh, you tell ChatGPT who's on your team and what they do, and it will assign everything to the relevant team members and put in the deadlines and everything. That'll be done. That'll be done. So if you're spending your life in ClickUp right now or Asana, writing out a list of things that already need to happen that need to happen, and then assigning that to people and putting dates in, right? You you won't have a job. If that's your job, you won't have a job in three months' time or six months' time because AI will just do it, it will automatically lay out a project plan for you with all the tasks and assign it to all the relevant team members, and we'll write an introduction to the project and share it with the relevant team members, and they will integrate with Zoom to book a call on everyone's calendar, and you'll just turn up and go, Oh, who booked this project kickoff call? Yes, it was Bot that did it. And Bot's recording it and is transcribing it and will send us all a summary afterwards, and also we'll nudge you every morning on a text message at 9.07 a.m. and say, Max, your number one task today is to do this uh for this project, and you'll be like, Great. And then you just talk to your phone and it'll happen, and the robots will go and do the thing. Now, for every one of I'm looking forward to it being voice activated too.
SPEAKER_00Chat GPT, you can now there's a plug-in or a Chrome extension, you hit spacebar and just talk to it so you don't have to type prompts. I'm looking forward to that being a thing. I want Jarvis. I want to be, I want it to be uh it'll have Jarvis's voice from my end man, and I will be like, Jarvis, what am I doing today? I was like, good morning, sir. Today you have one task to take care of.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00I'm like, okay, great. Do it for me, Jarvis.
SPEAKER_01Have you seen her?
SPEAKER_00I know the film, I know the one you're referencing. I haven't actually seen it, but it's like he falls in love with the Joaquin Phoenix and he falls in love with his like Siri.
SPEAKER_01With his OS, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his OS, which is played by Scarlett Johansson. Yeah, I'll take Scarlett Johansson, you can have Jarvis. I'll take OS. Um, so so here's the thing. Everyone of my everyone of our team listening to this, here's what I the most valuable day that we will ever have in this company is when everyone gets on Zoom and looks at each other and says, We have nothing to do. Let's just hang out and talk and think. Because we're not doing anything because everything's done. Right? Sounds lovely. That's the challenge. There's I've just laid down the gauntlet, right? There's the challenge for the whole team. Is everyone get on a Zoom call and go, I don't need to do any work, it's all done. The robots have done it all. Everyone, everything's up to date. Now I just want to hang out with everyone and think and talk about how we can make the product better and how we can do better marketing. Right? There's the challenge. Um we should probably do a deep we should probably do a dive into the tools that we're using, right?
SPEAKER_00Sure, we don't want to do that. What are we currently?
SPEAKER_01What are we currently playing with and and and using?
SPEAKER_00Um this week, I feel like I thought about this yesterday because I thought, oh, I better put a little list together. And then I realized, I mean, my feed, my social media feed is just check out this tool, five tools you didn't know existed. How to start a business, a faceless YouTube channel, everything. Just like, yep, cool. It's just I'm flooded with it. And it's always something new. So this week, this is what we're using, but we'll use something different, and we're already uh I feel like we're all it's probably already outdated as as of this recording. But right now we're looking at uh is it swell AI for writing the podcast? Uh well for the all the producer tasks around the podcast, rather, so like the description and the and the emails and the show notes and chapter chapters and titles and things like that. We've got hello.podium, which is another one we're testing. They're both writing tools, both for the podcast. We're kind of playing those off each other at the moment to see which one is better. Autopod.fm is the plugin that I mentioned earlier. That's a Premier Pro plugin that just takes your video, audio, or video, it does just both, and it just edits it in front of you in seconds. You might have seen clips on it of it online, but it it works, it's insane. An hour-long podcast takes about two minutes and fifty seconds. It takes out all of the dead air and then it cuts back and forth between the two speakers based on the waveforms, based on whoever's speaking. So it's just that's insane. So if you use Premiere Pro, check that out. If you don't use editing software, check out dscript.com. That's just an online version of pretty much the same exact thing. It also spits out highlight videos and all these other things. Uh-huh. Uh then there's we're looking at SEM Rush, which is for like SEO keywords and analysis, but also managing all of the social media and content marketing. So that's probably going to be doing a hell of a lot for the next few weeks until something takes all of these and puts it into one. Uh then there's Bardeen.ai, which you mentioned before. We're using that. At the at this point, I'm only using that for just creating good YouTube chapters. But it'll take a video, it'll pop up, you can hit I think it's just command or option B, and Bardeen pops up, goes, Oh, you're watching a YouTube video. What do you want to do? And you go, give me chapters. You just click it once and it writes, it breaks it up into too many chapters to be honest. It gives you a chapter for every few seconds. You just you go I I haven't figured out why it does that. You can probably tweak that, but I just, you know, use the best ones, job done. Takes about one minute. And then recast studio for automatically turning your podcast episodes into short clips and writing show notes and blog posts and social media. So some of these overlap, and we're uh basically just working on a uh the best workflow for Rob to take care of. Rob is our editor in the Philippines to say, hey dude, here's our latest podcast. Go ahead and use Autopod to edit it, and then use one of these uh many AI tools to do all the other things. Because I don't want him wasting his time creating subtitles anymore, or you know, changing the title at the top of a thing, or changing the format to make it oh, this one looks good on a as a story or a real, and this one will look better on 16 by 9 on LinkedIn, and this one is for it's like that's just a waste of time now. It's no longer it's not where the value is anymore. And so yeah, those are the ones we're using that I've just got kind of ready. There's probably ten more that you can think of that you've discovered this morning that I'm sure.
SPEAKER_01Well, there's a there's there's a couple, there's um uh there's and it escapes me. I'm gonna see if I can uh Wright Sonic. So writesonic.com, W-R-I-T-E, as in write with your hand, write sonic.com is an AI article writer powered by GPT-4. Um what I really like about Wrightsonic is Brian Dean at Backlinko kind of talked about this skyscraper technique, right? Where you find content that's already performing really well and you just build on top of it. And so one of the things uh um that I've been which is great, uh however it takes time to then put your own opinion into that piece of content, right? So, hey, here's what everyone's saying, here are the top so for example, you put in a keyword, find the top five blog posts and the top five YouTube videos, kind of collate that data and then kind of work out what everyone's saying. I mean, these are the top five pieces of content. Content that rank for that keyword. So they must be popular and they must be helpful. Take a summary of that, build on top of it, add your own opinion to it. So one of the workflows that we're doing now is we're taking that idea. I'll make a video about it because I can generally off the top of my head, I can add my own spin to this stuff just because I've been doing this a long time and I have that experience. That video, then, usually uh we use Chat GPT to help us write it into a video script, which might take you know 15-20 minutes to kind of come up with a script that we put on the teleprompter for making our YouTube videos. Uh and that's probably the most time-consuming part of writing it, right? So now we have a Google Doc, which is a transcript uh of a video that we shoot based on my opinion around a particular topic. So let's say, for example, proposals, writing proposals for website projects. I have a particular opinion about this. I would take the top five blog posts, top five videos, summarize them with chat GPT, which Bardeen could do really easily, uh, and then kind of give it my own um sort of slant, right? Make a video, then in Wrightsonic.com, you put in the keyword that you want to rank for, you list the top five URLs that come up in Google, right? You then upload your own Google Doc as a PDF, which is your opinion as a reference doc, and WriteSonic will go and write you a customized blog post or whatever you want, email, whatever, based on the summarizing the top five blog posts and adding your reference document as your opinion, right? It's amazing. And the opportunity, I think, now is that if you want to own a keyword or a topic cluster, the there is no limit to the amount of content that you can produce. There is no excuse to not be producing multiple pieces of content. You know, Gary V was talking about this in 2019, 2020, his whole, you know, the content strategy where you take one present one keynote and cut it up into 30 pieces of content, right? Hormosey's been talking about this for a while and everyone's been trying to copy him. And up until now, trying to execute that strategy would send a small business broke because you like Gary V's got 15 people on his social media team, right? Well, I reckon you can do it with two or three people now because all the production of the content, the video editing, the audio editing, the writing, uh, you know, it's it's we're not that far away from infographics being, you know, as soon as they can train AI to actually design text, you know, mid-journey's uh kind of getting close, it's trying to figure out how to write letters. Um, as soon as we can get, and it may already exist, I don't know. If it does, someone please let us know. Email me, Troy at agencymatrix.com. I'm up for it. Uh soon as we can get AI to produce infographics and models, right? You know, the models that everyone uses, the three circle Venn diagram, the triangle, all that kind of stuff. Just describe what you want and have AI design all that stuff. Then you've got graphics for social media, you've got quote cards, you've got short form videos, you've got short form audiograms of audio, you've got blog posts, you've got emails, you've got social posts. There is no excuse to not be surrounding your audience and your niche and your prospects with your content, right? Now, the caveat is this, and this is why I think embracing AI is so important. If you are just churning out what everyone else is saying, you're just adding to the white noise and you're not gonna cut through. And that's why I think it's really important more now than ever, is to have an opinion about what it is your topic is and have conviction in what it is your opinion is based on your experience. And if you don't have enough experience, go and get it.
SPEAKER_00That's what I was gonna say. Is you've mentioned that you've got you've been doing this a long time, so you can put your own spin on it. That's the one thing it's like, okay, if we're all just recycling the same content and adding to the noise, how do you go about putting your own spin on it?
SPEAKER_01Well, if you so you you know, if I if so let's say um I was at a conference once, I got off a plane once, uh flying into a conference in Sydney, and I was walking through the airport with this guy, and he he just happened to realise we're at the same conference, right? He's like 24. This guy, you know, being I mean I know I mean this respectfully, right? But he's like, oh yeah, he basically was like, I'm here because I want to learn how to do marketing because I'm gonna be a business coach. I'm like, cool. Uh and so he'd been through high school, been through university, studied engineering or something at university, came out of university, didn't really know what he wanted to do, and then he was gonna he's I'm gonna be a business coach. I'm like, mate, he never had a job. He'd never had a job, right? Anyway, if you need to skill up on something, if you haven't if you have an idea, if you're so if you want to be a consultant okay, for example, if you want to he this is very meta. I think there's a huge opportunity right now, and I'm just gonna give this to everyone, because again, I'm close to doing this myself. I probably won't because I won't have time, but you know, because I'm doing other things and playing guitar and whatever. Um I think there's a great opportunity if you want to help companies understand how to use AI. I think the AI agency is, I mean, it's already a thing. People are already starting AI agencies, and I think that's the play for the next three to five years is helping medium-sized organizations understand how to use AI, right? Because they don't have time to figure it out. It's not that they don't have the resources or the money, they don't have time to figure it out, which is ironic because if they just spend some time figuring it out, it would free up so much of their time, right? But also a lot of these companies are kind of based on productivity and they just measure output from their from their staff. So they actually don't want AI to speed up workflows because they're just gonna make their staff busier and everyone's gonna burn out. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation. So if you have a theory and you're like, well, I think I can help companies use, you know, uh Munch or Opus Clip or one of these video short AI producer things that take a long video clip and cut it up into a bunch of viral clips. I think I can help them do that, and I think there's a business case in it, and you don't have the proof, then you need to go and find a client to test it on. And you either do that for free or you do it at cost to get that experience, which is how I started out. I started coaching web design freelancers for free over Skype until I got enough confidence to the point and I actually had enough positive feedback and success stories from the people that I was working with that I was like, I'm gonna turn this into a membership, a business, and I did in 2013. So that's what I mean. Like if you don't have the proof, go and get it and then form an opinion based on data. Don't just read something on a website or listen to a podcast and all of a sudden have an opinion because you you come unstuck. Yeah, right. So we had um Manish on the podcast last week, I think it was, uh, who's the founder and CEO of E2M Solutions, who are our exclusive podcast sponsor. We love them. Thank you very much for helping us make this podcast possible. Manish has got 180 staff and uh he I don't know whether he mentioned it on the podcast or in the green room uh pre-recording, but he mentioned that they are you know very quickly having to skill up with Divi AI. This is not a plug for elegant themes, by the way, or Divi. Um, but they Divi have launched uh an AI integration into their platform so you can auto-generate content with one click, you can generate images automatically, they're basically helping, you know, using AI to help you build websites faster and more efficiently using the Divi page builder, right? Now, full transparency, I'm not a Divi user, I've never used Divi, come from an Elementor background, I know Elementor also rolling out some AI stuff, but this is touching every part of our workflow. And I haven't actually had this conversation with Manish, but I will at some point we'll get him back on the podcast. Is how does he take 180 team members and make them more efficient with AI and manage their anxiety around, well, you know, what should we do now, boss, that we've got AI to make us more effective? I mean, a couple of things. It just makes them more profitable because they can deliver things faster, or it allows them to create better solutions for their clients and be more strategic with the services that they're providing because the robots are doing the manual clicking of the buttons, right? Um, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Um, they're building a lot of websites for our clients, they are our preferred white label partner, so they do WordPress development, they do uh SEO, uh, they do some design. I think they do copywriting as well. I'm sure their copywriters are already using AI to speed up their workflow. By the way, if you need extra capacity on the team, you've got work on and you can't get to it, and you need someone to help you get in contact with E2M, we'll leave a link in the show notes. There is a discount for the first month, I think, for anyone who joins from the agency Mavericks community. So check out e2msolutions.com. But the next time I have Manish on, I'm definitely gonna ask him how he's managing his workforce of 180 to bring AI into their workflow and what he expects of his workforce now that AI are going to be able to do a lot of the you know repetitive kind of um you know clicking of the buttons and and and that kind of manual work. A couple of other tools that I've been using. Copy.ai uh is really good for writing all sorts of different content. Uh the podium link I think you mentioned, it's podium.page. I think their lander is hello.podium.page. It's a weird domain, but that's you basically chuck in an audio file and it spits it out into a copy pack for you. Um it's a copywriter. Um and uh Recast Studio, I think you mentioned I was on a call with uh the founder of Recast Studio the other day. Uh he's they're doing some amazing work, and I'm really excited to see where they go. Uh and I will say that it's very easy to get stuck in the AI rabbit hole. So, for example, cutting up long-form videos into short form, there are dozens of those platforms that will do it for you. I think the idea is to find one and then just stick to it and make it part of your workflow, yeah, rather than uh chasing shiny widgets all over the place, which I also think is going to be a big challenge with AIs, it's gonna be very distracting for most of us.
SPEAKER_00So that's the other side of that is I'm excited to see what humans do more of in time. I was doom scrolling the other night and I saw some clip, I saw some video that was like talking about how when before cameras were invented, the best painters and artists 17th century or something, um I don't know, like wildly inaccurate possibly, but the the best painters were it was all about photorealism. The best painters would try to do photoaccurate, hyper-realistic pictures. But it's not like the camera, the invention of the camera put painters out of business. They changed what they started doing. All of a sudden they were doing abstract art and all these other new artists came from it because they had to go in a different direction. They the machine had come, the robots had arrived, and they had to pivot and do something else that was more interesting. And we got all these new forms of art that that AI or wasn't AI, but what cameras couldn't do, technology couldn't do it yet. So I'm keen to see, I'm keen to see where what we do next. Because I you can't it's not obvious, you can't foresee it. And I'm I'm still talking about the day-to-day tasks, and soon they'll be all done. And all the all every step of production will be done, but there'll be something new. There'll be something new that will be way more valuable, and by knowing how everything else is done and having that under your belt and having the experience, you'll have more room to go, well, what if we use this to do this? Um I think that's a really interesting future ahead of us in terms of Or they'll just, you know, enslave humanity and and kill everybody. That's that's that's the other possibility that everyone just thinks straight away they go, Oh my god, you can write my emails, we're all gonna die of Skynet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. If you're if you're an EA, right, and you're spending your time organizing someone's calendar and and and you know checking their emails for them, you're done. Like if that's like motion.usemotion.com, right, automatically builds your schedule. Um, there's there's a whole there's what in fact what you should be doing is you should be replacing yourself with AI and then going to your boss and offering either say to your boss, hey, listen, I've just freed up three days a week because I'm using these AI tools. How can I be more useful to you, right? Or one of my, you know, when Eva started with us as my EA, she was organizing my calendar and my email, and within a couple of weeks I realized that she was, you know, it was way below her pay scale. And she was sitting in on meetings and then she was coming to me with ideas and advice on strategy based on what she was hearing in the meetings, right? So if you're just organizing someone's calendar and email, AI has already replaced you, uh, your boss just hasn't found it yet, you should find it, replace yourself, go to your boss and go, hey, listen, I've just freed up three days a week. I'm using AI to do with this stuff now. How can I be more helpful to you? What else can I do to help you, right? Uh, you can help prepare my slides. Great. There's AI that will do that as well, right? So, you know, you've you you've got to understand, don't be afraid of AI. Understand how it can help you be more efficient and free up your time so that you can spend more time thinking about how you can be more valuable to whoever you are adding value to. Yeah. Yep. I appreciate you coming on, dude, and uh and and talking bots and talking AI, and look forward to spending more time hanging on the stage here, sitting on the couch, talking with you when neither of us need to click buttons on the keyboard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sounds good. Looking forward to it. Thanks for having me, man.
SPEAKER_01I always do. Thanks for being a part of it. Thanks for listening to the Agency Our Podcast and a massive thanks to Max. I'm so glad we got to catch up. We're gonna do it again for sure. I'm looking forward to jumping back into the studio with you to create more epic content, and of course, heading over to the States for Mavcon in October, which is gonna be awesome. We're gonna spend a few days in Manhattan, uh, which we're very excited about. Uh if you don't, if you don't already have tickets, there are a handful of tickets left for MavCon. It is in Fairfax, Virginia, in the middle of October. It's three days. Come and hang out with other agency owners. Uh tickets are stupid cheap. And then the following week, we're going to the high-level summit in Texas, which I'm speaking at, and I'm going to play a song at. So there you go. Okay, folks, did I mention Max was handsome? Don't forget to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. Click the thumb that points up and uh let us know what you want to hear next on the podcast. All right, I'm Troy Dean. We're all gonna die, so let's enjoy the read.