John Jantsch (00:00.664)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Eva Gutierrez. She is the founder of ThinkWithAI.com, a leading educator and consultant on practical AI adoption for business leaders with a background in behavioral science and communication. Ava’s methods empower companies to get more value out of AI, integrating it into decision-making, brainstorming, recruiting, and day-to-day workflows.

guess we’re going to talk about AI today. Ava, welcome to the show.

Eva Gutierrez (00:33.321)

I’m sure you haven’t been talking about AI a lot. It’s hardly getting brought up these days.

John Jantsch (00:38.958)

I kind of have a running joke with my guests to say, okay, we’re six minutes in and we haven’t mentioned AI yet, you so we better get to that, but you’re right off the bat. We, we’re going to go into it today. So let’s set the table. My, one of the things I think there was this period where it was all like whiz bang, like, my God, look at all this incredible stuff it can do and the future and you know, who’s going to lose their job. I mean, that seemed to be like all the conversation. And I feel like people are kind of settling in now and saying, well,

Eva Gutierrez (00:44.723)

Ha!

Eva Gutierrez (01:02.783)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (01:07.669)

Mm.

John Jantsch (01:08.334)

here’s what it can do, here’s what it can’t do. What do you find is kind of the biggest mindset shift that you think people need to make to look at this in the right way?

Eva Gutierrez (01:21.845)

Number one is how you’re thinking about AI supporting your work. So we tend to read the headlines exactly what you just mentioned of like, you might have a job today and tomorrow it’s gone. And all of this like really big macro thinking of AI is just going to take over tomorrow and that’s the end. And the reality is that I teach the founders and business operators that I work with is so much more tangible. What we look at is saying, hey,

John Jantsch (01:26.531)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (01:48.881)

AI is going to start taking over some of your work, but it’s going to do it task by task. And it’s your job as the human part of this AI relationship that you’re building with your new AI team members to be the one recognizing, okay, this is a task that I should offload to AI. And I say this because what AI allows for all of us is this hyper-personalization, especially as business owners or operators or people that really enjoy their jobs.

It’s the ability to say, I don’t want to do this thing, so I want AI to do it. And even though AI can do this thing, I still am going to do it. So it’s really focused on that task by task and within those tasks, not telling yourself that you have to give it to AI because AI can. It’s saying, what do I now have more time for that I wish I had time for that I can just give to AI and looking at it from a month by month basis.

John Jantsch (02:29.005)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (02:47.314)

What am I having or where am I recruiting AI to help me out this month? Task by task, like bring it way, way smaller. That’s when it becomes tangible and something you can actually create a plan around.

John Jantsch (03:01.198)

You know, it’s funny, I’ve owned my own business for 30 years, so I’ve seen a lot of these things come. And, you know, I remember, I feel like there’s a little parallel to when it all of a sudden became kind of trendy to get a virtual assistant. You know, right? And it was like, oh, I can get somebody from the Philippines to do this work for, you know, whatever, you know, rate. But they still had to figure out what that work was. You know, it wasn’t a magic pill. Right. And I think there’s, I know that

Eva Gutierrez (03:15.38)

Mmm

John Jantsch (03:31.138)

This is not a person doing the work, but I think there’s some parallels, aren’t there?

Eva Gutierrez (03:34.709)

absolutely. And this is the perfect way to set this up as well. What I teach people as well is saying when you go to offload that task to AI, I need you to picture AI as if it was a person and you just hired them. And bonus points is to give them a salary in your mind saying, I just hired this person. I’m paying them $2,000 a month. I just hired this business advisor. I’m paying them $8,000 a month to just talk to me and help me. Right. Put a number on there. This is for your mind.

John Jantsch (03:53.24)

Yes.

John Jantsch (04:01.122)

Mmm.

Eva Gutierrez (04:04.98)

Because what you want to do is now look at that situation and say, how much context would I give this new VA I hired in order to expect them to do this job well? And then in order to expect them to do this job extraordinarily well, right? At the end of the day, it’s the amount of context that you’re giving that person, right? How many SOPs? What about the context of the business and the products and all the things you’ve tried before and what’s working and what’s not working, right? Looking at AI the exact same way,

as you did when you went to hire that VA. I think we’ve all hired a VA, didn’t give them enough context, and then we’re like, man, they didn’t give me what I was looking back.

John Jantsch (04:43.106)

Well, they actually became a, they actually became a pain because you had to like think up stuff for him to do every day, right? Cause you hadn’t really planned it.

Eva Gutierrez (04:48.52)

Yep. Exactly. And so with AI, that’s exactly it as well. What we’re looking to do is say AI should take over your work, just task by task. Don’t make it any bigger than what it really is. It’s task by task. It’s the tasks that you want to offload. This is AI. Like you get to choose what you keep working on and you get to choose what you say. I would love AI to take that on. And then when you hire AI for that task, imagining it’s a person that you hired with a salary.

John Jantsch (04:59.522)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (05:18.192)

and saying how much context would I give to this person? What type of onboarding would I put them through? What would I make sure they have access to before I even let them start working on this project? That immediately helps you get way more success out of that experience with your new AI VA, for example.

John Jantsch (05:36.738)

So you’ve used the term several times and I was going to ask you about this. You intentionally used the term hiring AI. So maybe kind of unpack what you mean by that or how that’s different than people are typically engaging AI. Let’s put it

Eva Gutierrez (05:43.027)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (05:51.313)

Mm-hmm. So I use hiring AI for the human mind because a lot of AI takes just it’s all about reframing the way that we’re thinking about it, right? And we’ve all had conversations in chat to BT where you’re like, wow, this is the most brilliant, incredible thing that just happened. And we’ve also all had conversations in there where you’re like, I am so close to throwing my computer out the window because are you right? Exactly. Like, no, that wasn’t a good idea.

John Jantsch (06:13.774)

Stop agreeing with me.

Eva Gutierrez (06:20.754)

Right? And AI is like, you’re like the, you’re the most brilliant person that ever existed. And so that’s what we try to do here is instead of just like winging it and hoping that it gets the job done, it’s you reframing it in your mind to say, I am approaching this. Like I am hiring a person to do the job. And the only difference here is that AI has the ability to look through way more context than that person would.

And so instead of saying, I’m just going to try to figure out this AI use case, I’m going to just try to put it together. It’s you as the human in your mind saying, as I sit down to situate this, I am hiring AI for this role. I’m not just trying to see if it can work and taking it seriously because it’s however serious you take it is the output that you get.

John Jantsch (07:11.598)

So does this change how we think about the traditional org chart? I mean, when we used to hire a person, it was to fill a role, and that role did all these things. And in a lot of ways, are we saying, no, we want to hire specific AI tools to do specific tasks, and we might have 100 of them.

Eva Gutierrez (07:31.22)

Yes, it definitely changes the org chart. What I teach is this idea of you have the org chart if you’re a business owner, for example, of you up top. And then normally you would have had like employees under you, right? Now you have you up top. You have a bunch of your own AI. Let’s just call them agents for now as a placeholder word here. A bunch of little AI agents that can do a bunch of tasks for you. But you still have your team underneath that. And then your team under each of one of them, they have a bunch of agents that are underneath.

John Jantsch (07:49.452)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59.832)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (08:01.032)

them. Because if we just look at an org chart and then start to say what is the task that each person has to do every day, that’s where we start to go back to the beginning here and we say, okay, let’s start bringing AI support in as much as possible for each of those tasks and looking at that support, not just in terms of can it do the task, right? It shouldn’t just be an assistant, but while it’s hypothetically over there.

Why doesn’t it also be a strategist and help you strategize something that you hadn’t thought of previously with this new context? And then why doesn’t it also act as an advisor while it’s doing that thing too? And looking at the bigger picture of the goals of the company and making sure that this is aligned to them. So looking at hiring those AI agents for everybody with the goal of not saying we should replace our whole team, but the whole team can be monumentally enhanced if they have this AI assistant strategist and advisor.

helping them see what they previously couldn’t see.

John Jantsch (08:58.742)

So does it then, as I listen to you describe that, in my experience, even working with our own team, is it really kind of changes what their role is as well. mean, you talk about these agents, they’re much more of a manager in a lot of ways, managing the agents or managing the output, directing, overseeing, strategizing. so does, while I think that people are getting that,

Eva Gutierrez (09:08.584)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:26.478)

Does that cause some disruption inside of organization where you’ve got a bunch of doers?

Eva Gutierrez (09:32.055)

Yes and no. So I think what happens here is if we were to think about two, three years ago, we look at AI and we couldn’t even fathom where we would be, right? 2023, ChatDBT just comes out. There’s a lot of question of how good is it going to be at things? How smart can it get? Right? And it was hard to predict, okay, here’s where we are now going to be. Here’s what the future looks like. And I feel that same sense today.

John Jantsch (09:39.491)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:43.843)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:51.34)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (09:59.518)

that it’s extremely difficult to predict and say, here is where we will be. Because we hadn’t even predicted that AI would be such a big part of the workforce like four or five years ago. And so to me, it’s so much more about just getting there and then saying, okay, now what is the plan based on where AI is and what its capabilities are and what people are interested in doing and how people and AI come together in this hybrid intelligence? Like where’s our role now? It’s gonna be different than it was two years ago.

John Jantsch (10:08.76)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (10:28.979)

today in a few years.

John Jantsch (10:31.758)

Explain what you mean by hybrid intelligence because I know that that was something I was going to ask you about because I know you’ve talked about that before so explain where that fits.

Eva Gutierrez (10:42.643)

So I love this term hybrid intelligence. I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for two years now since 2023 when I read this incredible book called the intuitive executive. It’s a textbook and it inside it talked about this idea of hybrid intelligence, which means humans will always be central to decision making with AI in a complimentary supporting role.

And so when we look to saying, all right, let’s have AI come in and help us as people, whether you’re a business owner, whether you’re an employee, whether you’re a consultant, whether you’re an advisor, what we’re really doing is creating a hybrid intelligent relationship. I have a relationship with AI where it supports me a certain way. You have a relationship with AI where it supports you a slightly different way. We’re both business owners, so it’s pretty aligned, but there are still different things there that it’s supporting us with. And that’s what’s going to happen across that org chart as well.

That’s when I start to say, well, you know what? It’s pretty difficult to predict where we’re going because the AI support that I need as a business owner is much different than the AI support that maybe my virtual assistant needs. And so as we start to predict these things, it becomes more of a question of, well, at certain roles, what does that change look like? Instead of deciding that there’s going to be this one big macro change.

John Jantsch (11:59.64)

So do you see a window, not necessarily a trend, but a window here where companies will say, I get what you’re talking about. I want to hire that recruiting agency that does this work. Just like, you know, recruiting or people that place, you know, VA’s. Do you see that that’s an opportunity, a business opportunity for people to actually come in and do this for companies?

Eva Gutierrez (12:22.875)

You mean like bringing in AI support, helping them set up on.

John Jantsch (12:25.79)

Yeah, actually be the one that defines the role and then trains and then, you know, installs it, so to speak. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (12:29.587)

absolutely. There are a lot of AI agencies these days that are ready to audit and install whatever it is that you’re looking for. What I tend to push back on here, and there is a time and a place for this, don’t get me wrong, if it’s an incredibly complex setup, you should hire somebody to situate it. But I think one of the most important things that all of us should know right now is the skill set of AI.

Because to me, this is kind of like saying, let’s say it’s like 1999, 2000, right? And you’re saying, I’m just going to hire someone that knows how to use a computer. And then I’m just going to tell them what I want to do on the computer for my business. To me, I’m like, that doesn’t sound that smart, right? And that’s where we are now, I believe, where you don’t want to just say, well, they know how to use AI.

John Jantsch (13:10.04)

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (13:24.027)

You want to be able to say, they can build out something super complicated that would take me hours and hours and it’s not worth figuring out. There is totally that use case, but the skillset of AI, I don’t believe is something that is just like something you outsource. It’s something to say, I’m going to take some time to learn this. And the thing about AI is that it is just a skillset. And so what is the difference between someone that has a skillset and doesn’t? And that is literally just the amount of hours that they have put in.

to learning that thing, right? And so all of us have the capability of learning the skillset of AI and just learning the foundational skillset that you need. Once you know that, then you can start to understand, this new platform came out. It’s actually not useful to me because of X, Y, and Z. this new Chat GPT feature is out. This is awesome for us because of A, B, and C. That’s when you can really start to figure out, okay, this is what I should learn how to do. This is what I should set up.

John Jantsch (14:11.384)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (14:23.088)

and then here’s the complicated stuff to bring to somebody else.

John Jantsch (14:26.798)

Yeah, it’s funny. parallel for me, you know, is in SEO. A lot of people are like, I don’t know how to do SEO. I’m just going to hire somebody to do it. And I always tell people, look, you have to you have to actually be smart enough or know enough about SEO in order to buy it. And I think that that’s kind of the parallel, because otherwise you’re going to get ripped off by people that are selling you stuff that’s not really going to be your thing. But you’re just like, I don’t get that stuff. You do it. So I totally agree. So.

Eva Gutierrez (14:35.26)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (14:42.45)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:58.168)

How does somebody go about, and you’ve kind of hinted at it, think, to the first step is get stuff you don’t like to do off your plate, right? But how do you go about as a business, let’s say you’ve got 10, 12 employees that probably could all benefit in their job functions in some way. How do you go about kind of structuring what our plan’s gonna be? Because I think if you just, I see a lot of companies just, couple of their people are dabbling in it because they like that stuff. And so they’re using it this way and this way and the.

Eva Gutierrez (15:18.812)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (15:23.794)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:27.594)

owner of the business hates it. So they’re like, I don’t care what they do with that kind of, mean, how do you like have a comprehensive plan that’s really going to serve the business well?

Eva Gutierrez (15:36.306)

So I’ll answer this in two parts. The first part here is that I’ve talked to business leaders and I’ve talked to their teams, separate conversations. And if you are a business leader, I can promise you your team wants you to give them guidance on how to use AI because they don’t want to spend their time, their nights and weekends going through some course that they had to buy themselves in order to be able to do this. Right. This is learning and development. They are waiting for you to say,

John Jantsch (15:44.28)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:00.376)

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Eva Gutierrez (16:06.395)

here’s how we’re going to start learning about AI and how we’re going to bring it into the workspace. So it’s a really important thing for leaders to know right now. Your team isn’t going to raise their hand and say, I don’t really know how to use it well, because what benefit does that give them? So it’s creating this awkward tension where the business leaders are like, we want you to use AI more. Please go use it more. We’re more than happy. We’ll pay $200 a month for a chat GPT enterprise account for you. And then the team is using it as glorified Google search.

John Jantsch (16:18.552)

Yeah. Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (16:34.7)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (16:35.1)

So as a business leader, like however you want to go about it, just make sure that you’re giving your team guidance and courses and teaching them, hey, here’s the skillset of AI, instead of just saying, go use it and you figure out how to do it. So that’s step one. Step two here, we get a bit meta. This is something that I teach in my AI First Business system, is that what you can do is just tell AI what you do all day and then have AI give you an opportunity map that says,

John Jantsch (16:47.01)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:03.132)

Hey, here’s where you can use me. Here’s where you can use me at the assistant strategist and advisor level. So what I teach in that AI first business system is essentially recruiting AI to tell you where to hire AI. And then again, now you have task by task. You can say, okay, you know what? I hate doing this one task every day. Let me prioritize situating that and having AI support with that. Or being able to say AI is helping at the assistant and strategist level of this one task.

John Jantsch (17:03.502)

I like that.

John Jantsch (17:15.746)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:31.516)

But if we just made this one little tweak, it could actually now be an advisor as well within that whole task. And now we’re getting so much more information. We’re making better decisions. We’re more prepared, for example. That’s the way that I see it. So leaders making sure that you’re giving your team actual guidance and a plan as to how to use it because they are asking for it. They’re begging you for it, but they don’t want to raise their hand and say it. And then two, create that opportunity map.

John Jantsch (17:54.254)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (17:59.344)

Go through and tell AI what you do every day and have AI tell you where it can help.

John Jantsch (18:05.184)

So you use the term using AI for recruiting. I may have messed that up. You may have done it the other way around. explain kind of what, I know what you mean by that, but I think you kind of went by it. So I want you to kind of specifically highlight that idea.

Eva Gutierrez (18:20.464)

Yeah, so, and this kind of puts me out of a job hilariously when I give this advice, right? Because I help people figure out where to add AI to their work, but at the end of the day, the best thing I can do is actually teach you the skillset of AI, which is this hybrid intelligent relationship where you’re going to rely on AI to help you move forward with AI. So you can go into ChatGPT and say, hey, here’s everything that I do every day.

John Jantsch (18:26.062)

You

John Jantsch (18:45.133)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (18:45.836)

Here’s where I use AI support. Here’s where I don’t use AI support. Here are the tools that I’m using. Here are the tools that I kind of want to use, but I’m not using. And what it can do is create this opportunity map for you. I have a full workflow of this whole thing, but you can duct tape it together, of course, and be able to have AI just say, here’s all the tasks that you do every day. Here’s how AI could help at the assistant level. Here’s how it can help at the strategist level. Here’s how it can help at the advisor level.

John Jantsch (18:59.074)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (19:12.122)

And so what you’ve really done is just upgrade AI into your recruiter, right? Because you haven’t hired AI to do any of those things yet. You’ve just essentially told AI, can you come audit my business and then tell me who I should hire and where it would be the most helpful? But instead of being like, well, you need a full-time salary role here, you need this over here, we get to do it a little bit differently in this case and just go task by task.

John Jantsch (19:38.006)

And I think what you just shared right there is really the biggest mindset shift, you know, because I do think a lot of people look at a chat GPT window and say, I need to tell it what to do. You know, I need to tell it to give me this output. And I think a lot of times they really struggle because they don’t know what they don’t know. And so I think just this idea of asking it first is such a mindset shift.

Eva Gutierrez (19:43.078)

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez (20:03.986)

Exactly. And that’s really all AI is if you start to think about it, right? It’s a mindset shift to say, okay, I just need to start to bring this on task by task. It’s a mind shift to say, you know what I’m going to do here? I’m going to give it as much context and maybe more context than I normally give someone that I hire for the role. It’s all of these reframes that are the reason that it’s like a hybrid intelligent thing.

John Jantsch (20:09.102)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (20:31.829)

This is a relationship we’re building where we’re learning who AI needs us to be in order for AI to be exactly what we want it to be. And the thing about AI, and I talk about this all the time, say AI is like a golden retriever. It’s ready to go whenever you’re ready to go. It’s like, where are we going? To the kitchen? Awesome, I couldn’t be more excited. Are we going on a walk? I cannot wait. You just tell me where you want to go, because let’s go over there. I don’t even care. And it’s our job to put the constraints on it.

and to say, is awesome, I love having intelligence on demand, but my role as the human part of this hybrid intelligence is to constantly put the guardrails on intelligence on demand and force it to funnel this intelligence through the specific guardrails that I need for this specific task or this thing I wanna think through or a workflow that I’m building out. So it’s our job in order to do that. And that is like the macro reframe that we all need.

John Jantsch (21:28.046)

Yeah, and it’s my hope, we never know, but it’s my hope that that’s the 5 % we need to guard, right? And own as humans because that’ll become our job. Well, Ava, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and learn about your work?

Eva Gutierrez (21:33.947)

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez (21:45.605)

Yeah, you can go to thinkwithai.com and that’s where I have that AI first business system as well as I’m building out some really cool stuff with Notion agents right now that I am so stoked about. So you can check everything out over there.

John Jantsch (21:55.726)

Awesome again. Well, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Eva Gutierrez (22:04.242)

Likewise, John. Nice to meet you.