So Eric, how do we wrap our minds around the idea that AI can create more in a day than humans do in a year?

One, It's a great time to be alive because just that statement is profound.

You think about the impact to worker productivity that that's going to unlock, the prosperity in the economy that that's going to unlock just the new ways of working that that's going to be able to unlock for companies, for brands, strategies, all that stuff.

So it's amazing.

It's also very scary.

Like everybody is convinced that we're going to become batteries in the matrix or something, the robots are going to come and take our jobs.

And what we have to do is we have to balance those two things.

We have to actually harness AI to help us deal with the overwhelm and complexity that the just sheer volume of output that AI can produce.

I could give you a great example of that.

I replaced my mom with an AI.

Did you tell her this?

I haven't told her that.

I say that tongue in cheek.

But what do you mean?

It's a great trivial example, right?

So you think about the age old insults.

Hey, did your mama dress you in the morning?

I actually built an AI agent that dresses me in the morning.

You think about Steve Jobs, his iconic black T shirt and jeans every single day.

He did that to reduce the cognitive load of the number of decisions that he had to make in a day.

And you think about what AI is doing to us, it's increasing the cognitive load that we have.

So it's like, how do you offset those things?

Well, AI is actually providing you a better life than Steve Jobs had, which is to say I have an AI.

It gets fed every receipt and picture of everything in my closet.

It knows what my travel schedule is, it knows what the weather is in the places that I'm going, it knows the kind of luggage that I have.

And it will just optimize.

And I'll say like, hey, this is what you're going to pack for your trip this week week.

And you've got two formal meetings.

So you're going to need a sport coach, you're going to need a sweater because you're going to end up in some 50 degree, 40 degree weather.

And it's a great example of how you can actually leverage AI to reduce the impact that the downside of AI has on your life.

And again, that's a trivial example.

All right, you extend that into your job.

So could you walk us through that?

So you have like cameras in your closet and it integrates with your calendar.

Well, so the first thing I did was I just took pictures of, of, of everything that I owned.

But then, you know, most of the, the clothes that I buy, I buy online.

And so I just forwarded the receipts and then it goes out to the website where I bought it and it gets the descriptions of everything.

So it knows the kinds of, of fabric and the weight of it.

And then it, and now that it goes so far as it actually tells me what I ought to go buy next.

So now that I don't even have to really worry about like my sense of style, which is terrible, it, it just figures it out based on the latest trends and it, you know, it knows, it knows my lifestyle and you know, and again, this is like a trivial example in your personal life that hopefully everybody can kind of relate to.

But you extend that into your professional life or any other aspects of the world where AI is going to radically increase the volume or complexity of what's happening.

And all you need to do is figure out the compensating carbon credit esque offset to the complexity of your life and how you're going to interact with it.

I have not heard it put that way.

Think about where your cognitive load is on your brain, what you're thinking about and then, and just think about your thoughts throughout the day.

And then where can we offload the things that aren't as important or we're not the best at and find ways to do that.

And that is a really tricked out way to do that.

Because getting dressed is a thing, but we have all the variables we need.

Almost all of us have to do it.

Ben don't have to do it every day.

And some people say, well, I like that cognitive load and stuff.

Okay, you don't have to do it.

But for most people, like, you know that, like you know all the variables, you know, the weather, you know where you're gonna be, you know, the forecast, you know what clothes.

Just a matter of finding the right combinations.

And maybe you can suggest what else you need to add, like more bow ties or something like that.

More bow ties.

More cowbell.

Yeah.

And more cowbell.

More, More cowbell.

Yeah.

Shout out to Saturday Night Live.

All right.

And Wolf Earl.

So let's.

So one of the.

So kind of amping this up into business sector where Prima specializes.

How do you respond to keeping your brand trusted at AI speed?

Because speed content, your brand can get way out of control quickly by your own employees, by reviews, by your own brand leaders.

It could be a mess.

So where Does.

How are you thinking about brand trust in the AI age?

You know, so, you know, you think about the promise of AI for a brand.

I'm.

I'm going to be able to generate an unlimited amount of content, an unlimited number of personalized experiences for like every single member of my audience, segment of my audience, you know, markets, like all of these, these things that we were never able to do before.

Yes.

But to your point, that's also super scary.

Like, you know, every.

Lose control.

I mean, you're going to hit a.

Number of AIs that have turned into Hitler is a pretty high count.

The Hitler count.

AI is high.

And it gets dark.

Honestly, that's what everybody is because it's going to say, hey, the clicks, you know, clicks on your, the clicks on your advertisement are sure are going great when you go dark and scary.

So let's.

And then it'll keep learning on that and driving with the press of a button and you're like, wait a minute, I thought lead the team was a positive force in the world.

And your podcast is getting nutty.

What are you.

So how are you.

It's the same thing that we talked about in terms of, you know, teaching your AI to dress yourself, you know, so one of the things that we do with our AI products at Aprimo is we actually use AI to ensure the brand safety and governance of the AI.

So we actually have AI agents that we train on all of your brand guidelines, all of your brand safety, all of your legal guidelines for your brand, and we actually put it into the content creation workflow.

So there's now an AI agent that's watching the AIs that are creating the content and making sure what they create is on brand.

Likewise, we have agents or like, if you're in life sciences or financial services or some other, or even just a general brand where you have things like truth in advertising or other just regulations that are, they're out there.

We, we create agents that understand those as well and they watch what the AI is doing, you know, likewise, we have agents that just look to see if content is AI influenced.

So it actually goes and it figures out like, hey, this is all the content that seems to have been generated by AI.

It needs to go through an extra layer of scrutiny.

Then, you know, the, the things that the, that the humans are creating powerful.

It's like the old adage of sometimes you got to fight fire with fire.

You got to fight AI with AI.

Like, you, like you can't use human to govern AI effectively because it's Just, we're too outmatched.

We've got to create the AI to be the good guys, to be the watchdogs.

And that's where you guys come in.

That's where your companies, like, that's how your company's thinking about it.

Like, we are the watchdogs.

We are the governance model.

That's right.

In Terminator, like, the AI were the bad guys, but the good guys also had AI to fight the bad guys.

Yeah.

Makes a lot of sense.

And it's so funny.

It's like, well, people are like, hey, we're setting up this government committee who's going to watchdog all of AI.

Knock it out and set up all this.

I'm like, man, you guys way behind.

Like, you can't like doing that.

The human side has value, but not to be the watchdog because it's just too much.

It's like a fire hose.

Right?

That's right.

What, what does it mean to.

Okay, scaling with control.

What does it mean to scale control or scale with control in the AI era?

So people now are going nuts with AI.

Companies are.

But you guys talk about scaling with control, right?

Is this, Is this.

Yeah.

So, you know that again, everybody, you know, when people say AI, they're mostly talking about generative AI.

So with, you know, OpenAI and Claude anthropic and, you know, Gemini Google, and the actual creation of the content is great, but just like, you know, we're talking about, you know, the, you know, the approval and governance process, which is how you scale with control.

You know, it's.

It's actually every step in the content creation process.

That's not just what the creative did in Photoshop 10 years ago, you know, so, you know, it's everything from the budgeting process and like, how you're going to figure out, like, you know, what you're actually going to put in market.

The planning process, you know, you think about, okay, we can now create, we can, we can now have a global brand campaign, let's say, and we're going to personalize it for all 150 markets that we're in and all 27 market segments that we sell to, and all 15 channels, web and email and Instagram ads and everything.

And every one of those are going to be personalized.

How do you even get the AI to go do that for you?

There's a whole planning process to localize the thing that, the big idea that you have that you want to get in market with all the power of AI scaling that I'll give You a really interesting example of this, both to the positive, negative.

I won't name the company, but it's a massive brand.

You would instantly recognize all the things that you buy from them.

And they're global.

They're literally in every country.

And so if they want to put a campaign out, they come up with a good idea, but then they have to push it down into 150 different countries for them to go figure out how to make it relevant to.

The local market.

Argentina or Italy or.

Different language, different cultural.

Yep, all of it.

You know, and then like, okay, you know, even like you think about the creative.

It's like, it's great that you've got the, you know, the product placement in front of the, the Eiffel Tower, but that only helps you one place, like if we need it in front of Big Bend and, you know, the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge and everything else.

And so that, that localization planning becomes a problem.

And one AI can help scale that.

But in the same way that we talked about, AI can also allow you to do things that probably you never would have done before.

There's this great example where they built this campaign.

They had a great spokesperson.

I won't say who it is, but it's going to be a global campaign with this personality, kind of Internet personality that Everybody loves.

It's JLo, isn't it?

Because of resilience.

Wait, what?

I don't know what he's.

I don't know what he said, but man, those Brazilians hate his guts.

And so like, you know, they, they.

I thought I was big in Brazil.

I wasn't gonna out you, Ben.

But yeah, that was it.

And so literally, you know, our, our product, this was in the, like, literally in the prototyping phase of building this product that, that helps to localize the campaigns.

Like, it's in Brazil.

It like freaked out and it wouldn't build the campaign for Brazil.

And it basically said like, you, you can't put this in Brazil.

Like, it's, it's not going to work.

Your AI agent notified you Brazil and this person, this is no Buenos.

And did you say is probably an error?

And then you looked at like.

We didn't.

We just assumed it was something like, you know, like I said, it was, it was a, it was an alpha version of a product that's now in market.

And we just assumed like we were having an issue getting it to act properly.

And then we were like, then we Googled that and we were like, oh.

We'Re not yeah, like a Brazilian celebrity that had a feud with this person or who knows what.

I don't remember what it was.

He said something that was culturally insensitive, that he didn't even mean it really.

But it was just a tone deaf thing to say.

So powerful for all companies to be thinking about.

I mean this is, this is a red hot topic for individuals using AI for companies.

Even if you're not using companies like a primo, you've got to be thinking about this for your own 100.

Every company in the world now has the hood open on their company.

Content creation, content operations.

Yeah, it's flowing.

So 80 is 80% faster content.

Is, is 80% faster content real?

I mean some people, it's more than that.

In fact that's not even your rate limiter like the, you know, creating.

I mean it's getting the content in market that's hard.

And it's hard because of all these things that we're talking about.

You still have to do all the planning, you still have to get it, do all the approvals, you still have to push it into, localize it for all of the channels.

Like it needs to be a banner ad for websites.

Oh it needs to be a hero image for our homepage.

Oh, it needs to be a glossy print ad.

Oh, it's got to be our TikTok short video formats.

There's just so many things that you have to do that's not just hit type in a prompt and have it spit out an image or a video short or some text.

Wow.

So the heroes of the AI age may not be the, the companies making the AI, it might be the watchdog companies that can actually help your, your company not screw up too badly when they're.

And this is true in like how AI is used in every facet of human society today is like there are upstream and downstream ripples that, that have to be smoothed before you get the benefit of this massive increase in productivity.

What are the bold moves CEOs must make in the AI revolution?

I mean it's like if you read online, it's particularly the tech CEOs, but it's pretty much every CEO now.

It's AI and operations.

And so people are trying so hard to integrate AI into their, their product offerings and their customer touch points and all of the flashy stuff.

But it's really about how do you get real productivity improvements in the day to day work that every single person in a company, no matter what the company is, is doing.

And that's the hard part.

And that's the thing, that's why it doesn't sound bold.

It's hard because people do think that the AI is coming for their jobs.

But you absolutely aren't going to survive as a company if you don't figure out how to get the productivity gains that AI promises.

Because if you don't, your competitors are guaranteed.

The bold moves are being bold enough to look at your day to day actions and moves as a company and bringing your people along.

I think that and being brave about it.

I mean you got to be intellectually honest with your employees.

You got to say like, you know, hey everyone, we are going to get more efficient using AI and that means we're going to hire less in some companies that means we are actually probably going to shrink some roles.

Some roles may go away completely, but this is an imperative not just for the health of the company, but for your careers.

Because the most successful employees over the next five years are going to be the ones that are able to leverage AI the best in their day to day jobs.

And it's a hard message to tell people.

You know, it's interesting, I haven't heard it put quite that way.

Yes, everyone has to be talking about AI, but leaders, it's not about necessarily the moves, it's about communicating to your employees so you can make those moves at scale.

It's easy to sit in the office and hire this company to do that or we're going to do this, we're going to put this technology in the company.

But it's that conversation that's the true role as a leader.

It's easy for me to sit in my ELT staff meeting and say okay, so everybody else is getting 60 to 80% call deflections in customer support by using AI.

So let's roll out some AI customer support.

And it's much different to talk to those supporters reps and say hey, you know, 60 to 80% of support requests are going to get handled by AI over the next two years like this is a foregone conclusion.

So I need two things from you.

One is I need you all to become Ninjas at leveraging AI.

To one, deal with the 20% that aren't so you're even more efficient.

And two, to be the safety net for the 80% to be sure that we don't something bad doesn't happen to our customers from an experience standpoint while the, the, the bumps get smoothed out in the road of hallucinations or you know, whatever else you're, you know, bad answers Whatever else you're worried about, the.

That's a, that's a tough conversation to have.

I use that a primo.

You.

You are.

You've got the vision for, for beyond AI, which is the AI.

Work with the AI.

I, I don't want to run out of time before I get to get off AI for a couple minutes and just talk to you about 6 dang exits.

What have you.

What are we, what can we all learn from you?

Having gone gone through 6x6 exits successfully.

And I noticed that you're on Techstars too.

Right.

So you're probably mentoring, mentoring people in this way, but knowing that we're all not going to get to be your mentee.

What can we learn from you on that?

Sort of in a nutshell, you know.

So a couple of things.

One is, you know, start with the end in mind.

Like the measure particularly in tech is liquidity for shareholders.

Like the employees want their stock options to be worth something.

The venture capitalists want their fund returning exits.

The PE firms want their 3x for their LPs.

That is the measure of success.

And so you have to start with that in mind.

You have to build a strategy for what the company looks like that's going to get the exit that matters to your constituencies, your employees, your shareholders and even your customers factor into that as well.

So all of yours follow that pattern or because I like the normal pattern is hey, we built something cool, we're doing stuff with it.

Oh, now we want to, now we want to figure out how to exit.

But you do you on all your six, did you begin with the end in mind or did you learn this.

On the way you're that out?

I figured that out over time because.

That'S like reverse engineering.

Yeah.

You know, and this is, you know, a bigger philosophical thing that I think most people grasp, which is like time is a scarce resource.

And so you know, the amount of time that it takes you to go from idea or cool thing that you're doing to that exit, like if it's three years or 10 years for the same exit, you know, that's, you know, monumental.

If you like calculate some kind of irr, you know, on that over time.

So time value of money is big.

You want to get your money in three years versus 10 because it's not the same money, it's not going to be worth as much and 10 years.

And it took so much more of.

Your time and your time and your life.

And so if you start with the end in mind and you envision what the company has to be in, I think about kind of three engines.

That power company, there's kind of a go to market engine and that's how you create that enterprise value because you're going from some total addressable market to, you know, money in the bank.

And then kind of a product engine, that's how you create value for your customers.

It's sort of like the problems that you solve and the business benefits they get from that, all that good stuff.

And then a people engine, because it's the people that power those two value creation engines.

And so that strategy then is, what are those three?

What do you have to do to tune those three engines to get to that end state from your strategy?

And then that's what you relentlessly focus your organization on, is the organizational changes that are required to make the current engines that you have, like the one that is in your strategy that represents your exit.

Oh, so good, y' all.

That's like a whole book right there.

In about two minutes we could talk forever just on that.

Very good.

Because it applies to, it applies to every business, right?

It does, you know, in some capacity and it's, and I love that like, like you grounded it in one of Stephen Covey seven habits, right?

Begin with the end in mind.

And that's a timeless principle that applies today in this wild and woolly world of AI and startups.

And Eric's done it six times, so I guess that one's been proven out pretty good, that principle.

You know what, a couple, a couple of more questions here.

When's the time you had a twist or failure in your career and it had to lead to your success or growth on down the road?

Oh my gosh, there is an infinite number of those.

You know, the one that was probably the most painful for me because it, it represented both success and failure.

I was, I had a CEO of a venture backed startup.

It was growing triple digits every single year.

High flyer.

And our growth was actually going to cause our downfall because our sales organization was having to grow so fast and we had built a culture of promoting from within.

And so, you know, we were happy to take our best sales reps and turn them into sales managers and then replace them with two or three green sales reps at the bottom.

And so you're growing so fast that you're taking the best talent off and sticking the worst talent, you know, from an experience standpoint in the bottom.

And you know, it was just like it was killing the company and the board was ready to burn it all to the ground.

And it was one of those situations where your head exploded because you're literally being told by your board that hey, we're going to do something drastic to you because you're so successful.

And I literally almost walked away.

And it was like one of those moments where know you, you really understand.

Like the one thing that I never really appreciated was, particularly in the startup world was, you know, the number one attribute that, that a lot of VCs look for in founders, early stage founders, was something they called grit, which I didn't really appreciate because I was a little more cerebral and I was like, I like founders with IQ points.

That's what I like.

It was in that moment that I really understood what they were really talking about because I could just pick up my toys and go home or I could sit here and grind it out with this array of big VC personalities and help educate them on, you know, how the unit economics, which is a technical term for the way that a technology business scales.

We were actually in a good place and not a bad place and how we were going to get to the other side.

Wow.

So you discovered you really need IQ and you needed some grit in there to ultimately be successful.

And as a leader, that makes a lot of sense.

Shout out to Angela Duckworth, who wrote a cool book about grip.

That's one of my favorite books about it.

You know, hear that story and I'm like, man, what a, what an interesting curse of hypergrowth is like, hey, we've got to promote people way before they're ready.

And then we don't have people ready made to slot into this spots that are that high performing and you just kind of become victims of your own success so quickly.

And people are like, what's going on over there?

Fascinating.

It's fascinating.

The faster you grow, the more fragile your company is.

And people think, I mean, people don't understand that because they think like, oh, if you're a high flyer, you're a high flyer.

But everything is moving so fast and, and everything is changing so fast that it's super easy for it to break.

And you can think of about it like rpms on like gears, the more rpms it's spinning at, if it starts to wobble or the teeth don't mesh just right, like it's going to be cataclysmic versus if it's moving at a very slow pace and something starts to go wrong.

So yeah, it's counterintuitive, but it's something I think a lot of, you know, like all of the hyperscaler VCs will talk about the fragility of growth.

It's great.

Yeah, it's really great to think about that.

The faster you grow, the more fragile your organization can become.

And conversely, that also tells you the secret to growth.

Where, which is the, the organ, the, the foundational rate limiter to growth is the organizational capacity for change.

The faster that you can change the organization and the more change that an organization can cope with before their heads explode, the faster you're able to grow a company.

Well, so many good insights today, Eric.

What, what's your parting thought for our listeners?

Maybe something you would hope to communicate or something that we didn't have time to get to.

I mean, oh my gosh, we covered so much.

You know, the, the things I would tell people definitely is like, you know, if, if you don't think about AI at least 10 times a day, I would worry about your success in your, your career.

So if, if that's something that, that' you're, you're, you know, if you're a career oriented person, you know, you need to be both feet jumping in like it's not a hype train.

It's, you know, it's not the latest shiny object.

Like this is the most foundational change to our society in a generation, at least.

Wow.

So great life advice and great career advice and something good to talk about the dinner table tonight or at happy hour.

Thanks for coming.

I'll lead the team.

Thank you so much.