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A “Moore-ish” law for marketing

A “Moore-ish” law for marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing is quietly crossing a threshold.

Not because we can “make more content” with AI.

Because every time the cost of thinking drops, the amount of experimentation and personalization you can afford explodes. And that changes the shape of marketing from campaigns you launch to systems you operate.

I’ve spent decades teaching small businesses to stop chasing shiny tactics and install a marketing system that creates clarity and consistent growth. That “system-first” mindset is exactly what this moment demands, except now the system can learn faster than your team can type.

The “Moore-ish” Law of Marketing: When the Cost of Thinking Drops, Experimentation Explodes

Table of contents

  1. A “Moore-ish” law for marketing
  2. Three forces changing marketing right now
  3. What this means in the near term
    1. Content shifts from assets to streams
    2. Personalization shifts from segments to situations
    3. Agents start eating coordination work
  4. The role shift: from makers to operators of systems
  5. What to do right now: a near-term playbook
  6. How this fits the Duct Tape Marketing system
  7. FAQs

A “Moore-ish” law for marketing

Here’s the framing:

When the cost per marketing experiment keeps falling, the number of experiments you can afford rises dramatically.

If it gets 2x cheaper, or 2x faster, to generate, quality-check, and deploy a new variation, you do more of them. Over time, that pushes marketing from campaign-centric (big launches, big bets) to system-centric (continuous learning, continuous improvement).

The unlock is not “AI content.” It’s collapsed time-to-learning.

When time-to-learning collapses, the limiting factor shifts:

  • Not “can we produce it?”
  • But “can we measure what’s true and decide well?”

That is the big idea in one sentence:

Execution moves from human throughput to machine throughput, while humans move up the stack to judgment, strategy, constraints, narrative, offers, positioning, and ethics.

Three forces changing marketing right now

1) Cost per experiment is falling

The ability to create variations is no longer scarce. What is scarce is the ability to run clean tests, protect the brand, and decide.

2) Time-to-learning is collapsing

Shorter loops mean you can improve messaging, creative, and offers continuously instead of waiting for a quarterly campaign post-mortem.

3) Coordination work is becoming automatable

Most marketing teams spend more time coordinating work than creating leverage. As tools integrate into work apps, AI can draft, route, repurpose, tag, schedule, and execute multi-step workflows under human supervision.

What this means in the near term

1) Content shifts from assets to streams

The near-term change is simple to say and hard to implement:

Your team stops “shipping one landing page” or “one email sequence” or “one ad set.”

You ship:

  1. A message system
    Positioning, proof, objections, tone rules, prohibited claims, and brand constraints.
  2. A modular content library
    Claims, examples, stories, CTAs, offers, proof points, and objection-handling modules.
  3. A generation and QA pipeline
    A workflow that continuously produces variants, checks them, deploys them, measures performance, and feeds learnings back.

Role impact

  • Copywriter becomes editor-in-chief plus conversion strategist
    Owns voice, truth, persuasion, compliance, and performance feedback.
  • Designer becomes system designer
    Builds templates, components, motion rules, and brand constraints.
  • Content lead becomes content operations lead
    Owns workflow, governance, QA, and measurement loops.

2) Personalization shifts from segments to situations

Segmentation is still useful, but the economics are changing.

When personalization gets cheaper, you stop asking only:

  • “Which segment is this?”

And start asking:

  • “What situation are they in right now?”
  • “What job are they hiring us for?”
  • “What objection is active?”
  • “What constraint is binding: budget, time, risk, internal approval?”
  • “What is the next best step that fits their reality?”

Role impact

  • Campaign manager becomes journey architect
    Owns triggers, decisioning, orchestration, and next-best-action paths.
  • Marketing ops becomes decision ops
    Owns data quality, identity, measurement, guardrails, and evaluation standards.

If you want one practical takeaway: the “unit of personalization” is shifting from a persona to a moment.

3) Agents start eating coordination work

Most marketing teams spend more time coordinating work than creating leverage:

  • Creating briefs
  • Routing approvals
  • Repurposing content
  • Tagging and organizing assets
  • Scheduling and posting
  • Producing “version 14” of a variation
  • Summarizing results and sharing updates

As AI integrates with workplace tools, these coordination tasks can be automated or semi-automated with human checkpoints.

Role impact

A new role emerges, especially in teams that want scale without chaos:

Marketing agent wrangler
The person who builds repeatable agent workflows, monitors outputs, tunes prompts, sets permissions, and makes sure “automated” never means “unaccountable.”

The role shift: from makers to operators of systems

If change keeps accelerating, the safest career position is not “the fastest maker.”

It is:

The person who can design the system that produces outcomes repeatedly.

Here’s a simple mapping.

Roles that shrink (execution throughput)

  • “Write 20 posts”
  • “Make 30 ad variations”
  • “Draft 10 nurture emails”
  • “Create first-pass briefs”

These become machine-default, especially for first drafts and variant generation.

Roles that grow (judgment, leverage, trust)

  • Positioning and offer design
    What to say, to whom, and why it’s true.
  • Creative direction
    Taste, narrative, cohesion across channels.
  • Performance strategy
    What to test, what to stop, what to double down on.
  • Marketing operations and governance
    Permissions, QA, brand safety, compliance, evaluation.
  • Customer research synthesis
    Turning messy reality into usable direction.

What to do right now: a near-term playbook

If you want a practical playbook that fits this Moore-ish acceleration, focus on four builds.

1) Build a truth layer

Your team needs a single source of truth that answers:

  • What claims can we make?
  • What proof supports each claim?
  • What is disallowed legally, ethically, or brand-wise?
  • What language do we never use?
  • What industries, customer types, or outcomes require extra care?

This is how you prevent fast nonsense.

AI without a truth layer produces confident randomness. AI with a truth layer produces scalable clarity.

2) Standardize a production pipeline

A healthy pipeline looks like:

Brief → generate → fact-check → brand-check → legal-check (if needed) → deploy → measure → feed learnings back

Notice what’s missing: polish endlessly.

If the system is meant to stream variants, your job is not perfection. Your job is controlled learning.

3) Create an evaluation habit

The question is not “did AI write it?”

The question is:

Did it move the KPI while protecting the brand?

This is where many teams will break. If you cannot evaluate, you cannot scale.

At minimum, define:

  • Your primary KPI by channel
  • Your guardrail metrics (complaints, unsubscribes, refund rate, brand sentiment indicators)
  • Your decision cadence (daily for ads, weekly for emails, monthly for site and SEO)
  • Your stopping rules (when to kill a test quickly)
  • Your doubling rules (when to scale a winner)

4) Reskill around leverage

Train marketers to do the work that scales:

  • Design experiments
  • Write constraints
  • Critique outputs
  • Interpret results
  • Orchestrate tools and workflows
  • Document learnings so the system improves over time

Many teams will run more tests, but fail to compound the learning. The habit of documenting what worked and why becomes a strategic advantage.

How this fits the Duct Tape Marketing system

This moment does not replace strategy. It punishes teams who try to skip it.

Duct Tape Marketing has always been rooted in the idea that marketing is a system, not a pile of tactics, and that clarity beats chaos.

AI acceleration rewards that approach because:

  • A system gives you the message constraints that prevent garbage at scale.
  • A system gives you the customer journey structure that makes personalization meaningful.
  • A system gives you a measurement discipline so “more output” becomes “more learning,” not “more noise.”

Or said another way:

AI makes tactics cheaper. It also makes strategy more valuable.

If you want to future-proof, build the machine, but lead it with principles:

  • Strategy before tactics
  • Truth over hype
  • Consistency over novelty
  • Learning over launching

FAQs

1) Is this just about creating more content faster?

No. The advantage is not volume. The advantage is iteration, testing loops, and faster time-to-learning. Volume without evaluation just creates more waste.

2) What is the biggest risk as experimentation gets cheaper?

Scaling bad assumptions. If your truth layer is weak, you will publish confident errors, drift off-brand, and damage trust faster than ever.

3) What should small businesses do if they do not have a data science team?

Start simpler. Use AI to increase iteration on high-leverage assets where measurement is clear, like ads, landing pages, and email subject lines. Keep the loops tight and focus on one KPI per test.

4) How do we prevent brand inconsistency when AI is generating variants?

Operationalize brand constraints, not just guidelines. Build templates, component rules, disallowed language lists, and a review checklist that enforces your standards.

5) Do we need “agents” right now?

Not to start. Begin with a standardized pipeline and a truth layer. Agents become valuable when you have repeatable workflows worth automating, and clear checkpoints for approvals and measurement.

6) Which roles should we hire or promote for this shift?

Look for people who can design systems, run experiments, and make decisions with incomplete information. “Taste plus rigor” becomes a premium combination.

7) How does personalization change first for most teams?

You move from broad segments to situational messaging on the same core journey. Think objection-based variants, industry-context variants, and stage-of-awareness variants, all measured and refined continuously.

8) How do we know we are using AI in a way that drives growth, not just efficiency?

If your AI program only measures time saved, you are still in productivity mode. The shift is tying AI-enabled workflows to business outcomes, with clear accountability for impact.

Next step: If you share your context (agency serving SMBs, in-house B2B, local service business, SaaS, ecommerce), I’ll translate this into the three highest-leverage workflows to automate first, the roles to redesign, and the metrics that keep the machine honest.

The Marketing Operating System: Why Strategy Alone Isn’t Enough Anymore

The Marketing Operating System: Why Strategy Alone Isn’t Enough Anymore written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

How to Move From Random Acts of Marketing to a Scalable, Predictable Growth System

Table of Contents

Introduction: Strategy Isn’t the Problem

For years, we’ve said it: Marketing is a system.

Most business owners nod in agreement. But very few actually treat it like one.

Instead, what we often find is this: campaigns are built in isolation, tools get added reactively, teams stay busy — but results stay unpredictable.

The problem isn’t strategy. It’s the lack of a system to run that strategy.

When Marketing Lacks a System, Everything Feels Harder

If your marketing feels disorganized, reactive, or overly dependent on a few high-performers to hold it together, you’re not alone. That’s not a marketing problem. It’s a systems problem.

Here’s what it looks like in the wild:

  • Priorities change week to week
  • Campaigns launch at the last minute
  • Results are hard to explain or scale
  • Tools and platforms aren’t integrated
  • Leadership doesn’t know what to invest in next

Even successful businesses experience this behind the scenes. Growth may be happening, but it’s fragile. It depends on effort and intuition, not structure.

Why Strategy Alone Falls Short

Most businesses have some kind of strategy — or at least a slide deck with one.

But strategy doesn’t:

  • Set monthly and quarterly priorities
  • Assign ownership across people and teams
  • Decide what gets launched — and what doesn’t
  • Convert insight into repeatable execution

Without a system, strategy becomes a one-time conversation instead of an ongoing guide.

What Is a Marketing Operating System?

A Marketing Operating System (MOS) is not software. It’s not a campaign calendar. And it’s not a tech stack.

It’s a structured approach for running marketing — all year long.

A solid MOS answers five essential questions:

  1. What matters most right now?
  2. Who owns what?
  3. How does work flow?
  4. How do we measure progress?
  5. How do we decide what to change next?

When these questions are consistently answered, marketing stops being reactive and starts compounding.

Want to find out if the MOS is right for your business? Book a strategy call

The 5 Core Components of a Marketing Operating System

Let’s break down what a functional, scalable MOS actually includes.

1. Strategy First

Every strong system starts with a clear direction. That means defining:

  • Your ideal client
  • Your positioning and point of differentiation
  • A short list of strategic priorities
  • The complete customer journey

This becomes your filter. Without it, your team defaults to what’s urgent — not what’s important.

2. Campaign Planning & Prioritization

Campaigns shouldn’t be surprises.

An MOS creates a predictable campaign rhythm that:

  • Ties directly to strategy
  • Sequences campaigns intentionally
  • Aligns outcomes with business goals
  • Gets planned quarterly, not in a rush

This creates calm, not chaos.

3. Roles, Workflows & Operating Rhythm

Without clearly defined responsibilities and workflows, marketing turns into guesswork — or worse, heroic efforts.

A true operating system outlines:

  • Who owns which parts of the engine
  • How tasks move from idea to execution
  • Where decisions are made
  • How internal teams and external partners collaborate

With this in place, marketing becomes scalable and sustainable.

4. Measurement That Informs Decisions

A healthy MOS doesn’t track everything — it tracks the right things.

Focus on:

  • A handful of critical KPIs
  • Signals that guide smart decisions
  • Regular (but not obsessive) review cycles

The goal isn’t to prove activity — it’s to enable better investment of time, money, and energy.

5. A Consistent Leadership Cadence

Systems don’t run themselves. Someone has to steer.

A Marketing Operating System needs a clear owner who:

  • Sets priorities
  • Makes tradeoffs
  • Interprets metrics
  • Guides iteration and improvement

Without this leadership layer, systems degrade and decision fatigue creeps in.

Why AI Makes This More Urgent — Not Less

AI has revolutionized how fast we can create and execute marketing tactics.

But AI can’t tell you what should be done.

And without a system, it can actually make the chaos worse — more content, more ideas, more busy work.

Within a Marketing Operating System, AI becomes leverage.

Outside of one, it’s just noise.

What Changes When You Install a Marketing Operating System

When you commit to running marketing as a system, things get noticeably better:

  • Strategy gets activated — not just documented
  • Campaigns align to real business goals
  • Teams know what to do and why it matters
  • Tools and data connect into workflows
  • Leadership finally sees the full picture

You stop reacting and start building momentum.

The shift isn’t about doing more — it’s about doing the right things with less friction.

This Is a Leadership Conversation

If marketing still feels like a recurring problem to solve, this is your moment to reframe the question.

Don’t ask:
“What should we do next?”

Ask:
“How should marketing operate inside our business?”

That shift leads to structure.
Structure leads to momentum.
Momentum leads to sustainable growth.

Conclusion: Less Friction, More Momentum

Marketing doesn’t fail because people aren’t trying.

It fails because it wasn’t designed to function well in the first place.

Installing a Marketing Operating System won’t eliminate the work.

But it will eliminate unnecessary confusion, misalignment, and wasted energy.

And that’s what makes marketing a driver of growth — not a source of stress.

Want to find out if the MOS is right for your business? Book a strategy call

FAQs: Marketing Operating System for Small Business

Q: What exactly is a Marketing Operating System?
A: It’s a structured approach to running marketing across your business. It connects your strategy to daily execution, planning, measurement, and leadership rhythm.

Q: Do I need special software to build this?
A: No. This is about process, not platforms. Tools support the system, but they don’t create it.

Q: How long does it take to install a Marketing Operating System?
A: Most businesses can establish the foundation in 30–60 days with the right guidance and ownership.

Q: Is this just for big companies with large teams?
A: Absolutely not. In fact, smaller businesses benefit most — because it reduces the chaos and helps small teams do more with less.

Q: How does this work with AI tools like ChatGPT or Jasper?
A: AI can amplify your system — but only if you have one. A MOS gives you the strategic and operational clarity to use AI effectively, instead of just generating more content.

Are Algorithms Making Us Stupid?

Are Algorithms Making Us Stupid? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Spotify Wrapped is a brilliant marketing play. Every year, millions of people gleefully share their top songs, favorite artists, and most-listened-to genres, essentially turning their personal data into free advertising for the streaming giant. But while it’s fun and feels personalized, it also sheds light on something deeper—and a little unsettling—about the world we live in today.

This year, my #1 song was “Boulder to Birmingham” by Emmylou Harris. It’s a beautiful, haunting tribute to Gram Parsons, her mentor, who died of a drug overdose. My wife and I sing along every time it plays. The thing is, I never asked Spotify to play that song. Not once. And yet, it kept showing up in my mix, again and again. Along with it were several John Prine tracks I didn’t seek out either. In fact, I didn’t actively choose any of the top songs Spotify says I loved this year.

This might sound like a minor quirk in an otherwise delightful digital experience, but it’s actually symbolic of a much larger issue. Increasingly, the world around us is being curated not by us, but for us, by algorithms that interpret our past behavior and then decide what we should see, hear, and engage with next.

Sure, this applies to music. But it also affects our news feeds, our product recommendations, our search results, our social media content, the ads we’re exposed to, and even the lies we’re told. The more we click, the more the algorithm “learns” about us. And the more it learns, the narrower our world becomes.

This is the filter bubble in action. Over time, our exposure to new ideas, unfamiliar perspectives, or even just different kinds of content diminishes. We’re not discovering anymore; we’re being fed what the machine thinks we already like, or worse, what will keep us clicking.

On the surface, this kind of personalization feels convenient. But in practice, it can be dangerously limiting. It traps us in echo chambers, reinforces existing biases, and makes it harder to challenge our assumptions or grow intellectually and emotionally. When the only ideas we hear are the ones we already agree with, how do we grow?

This isn’t just a tech problem. It’s a human one. And it has consequences that reach far beyond our Spotify playlists. It’s affecting how we think, how we relate to others, and how we understand the world. It’s part of what’s driving polarization, misinformation, and a culture of outrage. We’re not just being shaped by what we consume; we’re being shaped by what we’re allowed to consume.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The good news is that we still have agency. We can choose to seek out opposing views. We can read books from outside our usual genres. (I’m not an architect, but Christopher Alexander is one of my favorite authors). We can listen to podcasts that challenge our thinking. We can actively resist the passivity that algorithms encourage. But we must do it intentionally.

Because left to their own devices, the algorithms will not feed us what we need—they will feed us what keeps us comfortable, entertained, and clicking.

I didn’t always see it this way. For a long time, I appreciated the convenience of curated content. But now I’m convinced: algorithms, as they are currently used, are making us intellectually lazy. They’re dulling our curiosity. They’re making us stupid—not in terms of raw intelligence, but in terms of awareness, perspective, and growth.

So here’s my challenge to myself—and maybe to you too: go out and discover something. Don’t wait for it to be served up by a machine. Curate your own experience. Choose what you want to see, hear, and learn next.

Because if you don’t, someone, or something else, will do it for you. And you might just find yourself singing along to a song you never chose in the first place.

The Human Side of AI Branding

The Human Side of AI Branding written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Mark KingsleyOverview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Mark Kingsley, renowned brand strategist, consultant, and author of “Brands in the Age of AI.” Mark shares how AI is reshaping the landscape of branding—putting pressure on brands to act ethically, think humanely, and redefine the meaning of differentiation, trust, and emotional connection. Mark and John discuss why algorithm-chasing alone leads to commoditization, how true brand value now lies in human insight, and the new risks and opportunities for companies of every size in an AI-driven world.

About the Guest

Mark Kingsley is a brand strategist, consultant, and author with deep expertise guiding global organizations through digital transformation. His latest book, “Brands in the Age of AI,” is a practical guide for leaders, marketers, and entrepreneurs navigating the new rules of branding, trust, and differentiation in an AI-powered landscape.

Actionable Insights

  • AI is a force multiplier: It amplifies both good and bad brand behaviors, putting greater pressure on brands to act ethically and humanely.
  • Don’t chase the algorithm—brands that focus only on efficiency and optimization become replaceable and lose emotional connection.
  • Humanizing brands means moving beyond calculative thinking to contemplative, meditative thinking; focus on flourishing, not just transactions.
  • Trust is at risk in the AI era: Brands must be transparent, consistent, and prioritize removing friction for the customer—not just for the company.
  • The best AI-driven storytelling isn’t just a sequence of events—it creates moments of transformation, transcendence, and genuine recognition (“I see you”).
  • Integration and database silos are a real challenge for delivering seamless, frictionless experiences; the future belongs to brands that can connect data and remove barriers.
  • Small businesses can leverage AI to “level up” and deliver greater value, but must avoid eroding value through simple efficiency or automation.
  • The real opportunity is delivering more human, more insightful, and more emotionally resonant experiences—AI should be a tool for that, not a replacement for it.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 00:47 – Is AI Changing the Rules or Raising the Stakes?
    Why AI is a force multiplier for both good and bad brand behavior.
  • 01:50 – Can AI Actually Humanize Brands?
    Why contemplative thinking and ethical choices matter more than ever.
  • 04:54 – Trust, Technology, and the Pendulum of Progress
    How brands can rebuild trust in an AI-driven world.
  • 06:56 – Don’t Chase the Algorithm
    Why marketers focused only on optimization are the first to be replaced.
  • 09:12 – Storytelling, Recognition, and Transformation
    Real-world examples of brands using AI to create “aha” moments.
  • 13:42 – The Brand AI Integration Model
    How database integration (or the lack thereof) shapes brand experience.
  • 18:23 – The Human Skills That Matter Most Now
    Why leadership, education, and redefined goals are critical in the age of AI.
  • 19:35 – Risks and Opportunities for Small Businesses
    How small firms can use AI to punch above their weight (and where they must be careful).
  • 21:29 – Delivering More Value, Not Just Efficiency
    How to thrive by focusing on insight, innovation, and customer outcome.

Insights

“If all you do is chase the algorithm, you’re replaceable by AI. Real brand value is in the human insight, not just the optimization.”

“AI is a force multiplier—it can help you deliver more human and more meaningful experiences, but only if you choose to use it that way.”

“Trust is built by removing friction for the customer, not just for the company.”

“Storytelling is about transformation and recognition, not just a series of events.”

“Small businesses can use AI to compete with the big players—but value comes from insight, not just automation.”



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John Jantsch (00:01.08)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Kingsley. He’s a renowned brand strategist, consultant and author with deep experience in guiding global organizations through digital transformation. His latest book we’re going to talk about today, Brands in the Age of AI. It’s an essential guide for leaders, marketers and entrepreneurs seeking to thrive in a landscape where AI is rapidly changing consumer expectations, brand trust and the

very nature frankly of that key brand element of differentiation. So Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Kingsley (00:37.992)

Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

John Jantsch (00:40.076)

Let’s just let’s just hit it right off the bat. How is AI changing the fundamental rules of branding, if you will?

Mark Kingsley (00:47.55)

Does it change the rules or does it put a more pressure on people’s behavior? It puts more pressure on what I would, know, ethically I would call like better behavior. Because AI does multiply. It’s a force multiplier for the ability to extract more attention and to extract more profit from brands and transactions to extract more attention and etc.

But I see it also as an opportunity to, in the book I speak about like connecting with the I thou connection, me I and you thou and seeing each other with open eyes, seeing the other person as a person, not as a target, as a member of an audience or a potential transaction. And AI does.

offer these opportunities. It just comes down to like what is the choice that people are going to

John Jantsch (01:50.602)

We’ll say a little more about that because I mean, you’re talking about it as a force to actually humanize some marketing and there certainly are people that are saying just suggesting just the opposite. It’s turning marketing into a more robotic exercise.

Mark Kingsley (01:56.211)

Yes.

Mark Kingsley (02:00.766)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Kingsley (02:05.756)

Yeah, well, it’s very easy. In the beginning of the book, I talk about the way in which I’m approaching it. And I do it differently than most other people that speak about AI. Like if you go to LinkedIn, there were volumes and volumes of gibberish every day about the best prompts and how this company is going to market cap, blah, blah, you know, all that stuff. That’s what I call calculative thinking. And that’s basically figuring out how am I going to get from here to there. It’s logistics, right?

John Jantsch (02:22.498)

Right, right.

Mark Kingsley (02:35.742)

And I’m proposing that we also enter it’s also an opportunity for us to enter into what I call a more contemplative or meditative thinking which is I am I am going to consider the way that AI is going to impact my relationship and our relationship to each other to time to history to Society to knowledge all of that and so that this is it’s more of like an inflection point It’s very easy. We are rewarded

for good calculative thinking. We are rewarded with year-end bonuses. Name any domain, any kind of industry, you’re rewarded for returns. But that only goes so far. mean, aren’t we on this planet? Don’t we offer products and services in such a way to encourage the flourishing of human beings? One would hope.

John Jantsch (03:31.918)

Sorry to chuckle there, but I had forgotten all about that.

Mark Kingsley (03:36.486)

That’s the thing. It’s easy to forget, right? Because we get caught up in our professionalism. We get caught up in our engagement. We get caught up in results. And those are things that we can track. How does one track an emotional… mean, brands in theory, everyone that works in branding talks about brands making an emotional connection to people. So that’s hard to track. That’s hard to rationalize on a spreadsheet at the end of the day. And that’s hard. So it’s…

I know that I am shouting in the wind. I know that, right? But, you know, at least someone is doing that. It’s I’m like the, you know, the classic myth of the little boy in the dyke and trying to keep his finger in the dyke trying to keep the sea at bay.

John Jantsch (04:25.304)

Well, it’s interesting because, you know, I’ve been doing this for 30 some years. And I mean, I’ve seen a lot of new technologies come along and you see this huge, you see this huge swing towards what, what the promise of this technology is. And then inevitably you see the swing back to like, here’s how it failed us. So one of the most important words, I think you talked about emotional connection, but certainly trust is a huge part of that. So what role does AI play in

Mark Kingsley (04:51.133)

You

John Jantsch (04:54.19)

enhancing trust as opposed to eroding it. You know, you hear people saying all the time now, one of the negatives about AI is I don’t know what to trust because am I seeing something that’s real or not? So I think there’s going to be this swing both ways to like not trusting and then how do we get back to humanizing the emotional connection?

Mark Kingsley (05:15.729)

This is humanity’s relationship to technology in general, regardless of whether it’s AI or it be computers. could be the… I was just gonna say that, exactly, right? So we all rush to new technological innovations and advancements, and we see the benefits that it’s going to bring us, but technology is never positive or negative. It’s kind of like a neutral thing. What technology does, and this is a…

John Jantsch (05:20.386)

Yeah. Or automobiles. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (05:44.766)

this is an idea that comes out of Heidegger, is that it reframes our relationship to things. For example, the technology of taking sawdust, mixing it with glue and coming up with medium density fiberboard, right? That gives us Billy bookcases. And it’s amazing that we can kind of use this material that was once considered to be, know, detritus, we can now use it for an actual building material and make money with this, right? What that does is that

There are forests in Romania that have been decimated just to build Billy bookcases, just to make sawdust for the Billy bookcases. So that’s what I mean about the constant reframing that technology does in our society.

John Jantsch (06:23.502)

Yeah.

So one of the things that I hear a lot of people talking about is sometimes marketers are just responding to what the algorithms give them, right? You have to do X, Y, and Z if you’re going to show up in AI overviews. And so you see a lot of people just chasing the algorithms that really truthfully are making decisions, in some cases, for our customers. So how do you kind of fight that no, let’s be human to no, let’s chase algorithms?

Mark Kingsley (06:56.889)

If that’s all you’re going to do as a marketing person is chase algorithms, you are replaceable. You are replaceable by AI. And so it’s it’s it’s short sightedness to even to even think that way. I mean, in the book I describe and it’s a it’s a constant example that people use if you look at lawyers. Right. And the education and training of a lawyer is you become you go through law school and then you become a junior partner and you sit there all night long going through paper and going through cases, reading cases.

and looking for ways in to a case or some sort of insight. That is you learning how to be a lawyer, right? But we can now offshore that work to AI and have AI go through and do this analysis. But what we’re doing is we are basically robbing the future. We are robbing new generations of lawyers. So how do we now educate a lawyer? it’s even in marketing, there’s

There has to be some sort of constant readjustment, resetting about how does one learn how to be a marketer, how does one act as a marketer, how does one kind of identify good marketing techniques.

John Jantsch (07:57.998)

Thank

John Jantsch (08:07.598)

Yeah. A phrase just popped into my head. know, know, the first kill all the lawyers, which was part of a much larger phrase, but, but I think it’s now first kill all the paralegals. that.

Mark Kingsley (08:16.477)

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (08:23.325)

No, I would you know, I I you know, I’m much more cynical than you are I say first let’s kill all the mid-level marketing managers

John Jantsch (08:30.606)

Right. So if chasing algorithm, and I’ve totally agree with that. mean, the people that are just looking to like find efficiencies and things like that with AI are essentially almost playing right into the hands of being replaced themselves. Right. So in branding, I think we’ve said this way before AI way before, frankly, anything digital came along storytelling is the one of the key, you know, the key assets. So

Mark Kingsley (08:47.057)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (09:00.472)

Do you have some examples? know you do in the book, plenty of examples, but give us an example of a brand that you think gets storytelling that’s AI driven.

Mark Kingsley (09:12.657)

Well, first off, have to identify what storytelling is. And so I would, first, I think I potentially may take cause with how you’re identifying storytelling. Because a lot of storytelling is basically, at least within the brand world, like the whole idea of the customer journey. A lot of that isn’t necessarily storytelling, but it’s events. It’s a repetition, and it’s a chronicling of events that happen this, then that, then that, then that, then that.

John Jantsch (09:24.494)

Okay.

Mark Kingsley (09:41.487)

I look at storytelling as some sort of, requires some sort of like, aha moment. So I’m like, a moment of transportation, transcendence, transformation. And then, I see the potential here. And so my favorite example, and this all comes down to like, how do I?

create a sense of being seen, of that I-thou relationship, right? So an example that I give when I give talks is I talk about one of my favorite bars in Chelsea called Chiquito. And I used to walk in and the person behind the bar, she would look at me and she’d go, you know, she opened her hands about, you know, like a bottle length and I’d nod. And then as soon as I sat down, there was a bottle of the Barone Reserva ready to go, right? She knew my wine and that’s how I ordered it, right? She knew me.

I knew her, we had a little secret link. We didn’t sit down, I didn’t meet her after work and go, hey, when I walk in, you need to know. It just happens naturally because we saw each other. And so to take that kind of notion of like, you’re seeing, another example that I use in the book is talking about going to JFK in a long-term parking lot. So you can make reservations at JFK, you kind of have to, to do long-term parking.

John Jantsch (10:39.63)

You

Mark Kingsley (10:58.318)

And there are a couple of parking lots there where you type in your license plate. That’s how you do your reservation like any other place. And the first time I showed up at this one parking lot, there was no one there. There was no booth. And I was like, I was ready to get really angry very quickly. I’m a New Yorker, right? I’m ready to get angry. But I pull up just a little bit closer and the gate opens. It’s because there was a tiny little camera that saw me and my license plate and put it together and said, here’s Mark.

And that was that moment of transformation where I’m like, I instantly went from feeling ready to fight to welcome, to like, come on in. You’re here. We get it. In you go. And these kind of innovations are slowly happening in airports. We’re going to get to a point where I don’t need to do bag drop off because AI has been watching my gate.

bio kind of information, biometric information is already out there in the world. I mean, I go to other countries and it scans my face and it recognizes me. My face is already there in that country, even though I haven’t been there since the introduction of AI. So it’s already out. So I’m going to walk into an airport that will recognize me by my gate, by my face, and it’ll recognize my bag. And I’ll do all that stuff. I just put the bag on the thing, off I go, and then it’ll track it for me. I already get.

When I I check my bags, already get text messages from various airlines going, oh, the bags on the plane, the bags off the plane, the bags coming to you. So this is this is all part of that that push to like a sense of subjectivity, I guess, or a sense of like, I don’t need. And part of that is removing all the friction, removing all the bumps along the way where I don’t have to worry about, oh, geez, I’m going to have to stand in this line. Oh, here’s the check in line. Oh, my God, it’s 15 people long. I’m just going to walk from taxi to gate.

John Jantsch (12:28.056)

Yep.

John Jantsch (12:40.416)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Kingsley (12:51.472)

Relatively soon, right? And so that for me is That’s a transformation. That is some sort of transformation in the story

John Jantsch (13:00.878)

Well, I think you used a really key word there because I think where people get tripped up with any kind of automations is when they’re used to make things life easier for the company as opposed to removing the friction for the customer.

Mark Kingsley (13:14.16)

Yeah, exactly. this is part of the frustration, right? Because a lot of the innovations that are spoken of to people to each other in boardrooms is usually on the calculative sense. How are we going to get more churn? We’re going to get more transactions, more exactly. How do I do it with more efficiency, right? Yeah, that kind of thing. So that’s why I say that. that’s why I say that. I feel like I’m shouting in the wind at times.

John Jantsch (13:31.544)

I’ve less people.

John Jantsch (13:42.766)

One of the key elements is a framework or a model you call the brand AI integration model. So do you want to unpack that one for us?

Mark Kingsley (13:53.501)

So it’s there’s there’s an idea and this comes from a friend of mine Ali madad who It has has like a strategy firm that he’s beginning these experiments with like ideas of like what he calls like a like a brand operating system and There is potentially a way to kind of automate the donkey work. It’s the donkey work of strategy, right? Can I can I set up my criteria and my parameters?

John Jantsch (14:10.242)

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (14:21.636)

and set off a system to do the automatic customer segmentation, to do the automatic logistics, the automatic ordering supply chain, all that stuff can potentially come together if we get to that point where we properly integrate databases. the integration of databases is a problem right now. For example, Starbucks. Starbucks is in the middle of closing locations all around the world right now. They’ve closed like 900, no, they’ve laid off 900 employees

and close like a couple hundred locations in the United States in the last couple of weeks. What’s happening is that I’m seeing more more licensed Starbucks opening up in the Barnes and Noble bookstore or in a hotel, that kind of stuff. So that’s not really Starbucks. They call themselves Starbucks, but they don’t act like Starbucks. So what that means is that I have my app, and I can go order a

John Jantsch (15:07.342)

In the supermarkets.

John Jantsch (15:13.966)

Peace.

Mark Kingsley (15:20.774)

coffee 10 minutes out and show up and then the coffee is waiting for me. I can’t do that anymore because the databases aren’t connected. Right. And so Starbucks has gone for the efficiency and the profit, but not necessarily the customer experience.

John Jantsch (15:36.332)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you see that I hate to pick on airports, but particularly in the airport ones. mean, those are concessionaires and those that employee may have been working at Chick-fil-A, you know, two days ago and now they’re at Starbucks. I mean, so you don’t get the same. You also don’t get the same vibe as well as the database issue.

Mark Kingsley (15:53.116)

Exactly. Yeah. and so like and the idea of like a like a brand, sorry, a brand OS, an operating system with AI. So those licensed Starbucks, if they need like stirrers or like coffee lids or something like that, they can’t call up another Starbucks a couple of miles down the road and go, hey, can you loan us some until like the shipment comes in? They have to go through the home company that owns the licensee that owns a license.

John Jantsch (16:14.252)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:21.218)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (16:22.201)

And then it’ll take like a month for the material to get there. And it also comes down to training. So I can’t go to another Starbucks and train there. I have to train within my own little group. So it’s this kind of like segmentation and silo database issue, which I would, know, fingers crossed in the future, if I was king, know, like AI would help kind of integrate all that stuff. And that’s basically friction, removing friction.

John Jantsch (16:47.17)

Yeah. And I think that’s going to be one of the, you know, the, the promise of this agentic AI. think that’s going to be a real stumbling block for that as well, because a lot of stuff has to talk to other stuff. and we’re a ways away from, from that. And frankly, some of the big players are actually going to resist that because they want to keep their proprietary approach or protocols to themselves.

Mark Kingsley (17:11.429)

Well, there’s also, and then on top of it, there’s like a purely a linguistic and epistemological issue there, right? Because if I am going to use agentic AI, anything that I type in is symbolized. It’s called tokenization, right? So like words and sentences and like syllables will be put into a token, like given a numeric value, and then that numeric value is put into the AI. The AI then predicts.

John Jantsch (17:27.554)

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (17:39.152)

What’s going to happen next if I get this kind of input and will give me some sort of predictive output? So it’s like a game of, it’s like a very fancy game of computer telephone. When I think of tree, I may be thinking of an elm. And when you hear me say the word tree, you’re thinking of a pine tree. And so this is, in semiotics, it’s called an open semiosis. It’s like, it never really quite matches the original idea.

John Jantsch (17:49.4)

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (18:06.692)

And this is going to be part of that problem of agentic AI is how are we actually going to know with any degree of confidence that, right? And so this is part of the complexities that are before us.

John Jantsch (18:23.64)

So one of the, I mean, there’s certainly plenty of people you talked about being out there, you know, trying to hold back the dam. I run into a lot of people that are like, no, this is the opportunity to be more human. I’ve certainly heard that. But how do you think leaders, you know, are we talking about different human skills, different human beings that need to be employed in that kind of capacity for us to make that change?

Mark Kingsley (18:45.711)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Different human beings, different ways of educating leadership, different ways of defining leadership, different ways of defining employment, different ways of defining goals, defining profit, all that stuff. This is part of the exciting thing, is like there’s great potential for a transformative change which can enhance human life. That’s my hope and dream.

John Jantsch (19:16.878)

So many of my listeners are small business owners. Right now they’re overwhelmed, I think, is the greatest emotion they’re feeling with everything of AI that’s coming at them. What are some of the biggest risks and opportunities you think that AI presents for particularly small businesses?

Mark Kingsley (19:35.899)

One of the risks, small business, let me make it a little bit bigger first and let’s think through this thing together, shall we? So if I was a branding agency, like one of the larger branding agencies, and I sent an invoice for kind of strategic work, for work that had been done that had been delivered and approved by the client,

John Jantsch (19:48.686)

Okay.

Mark Kingsley (20:05.114)

The client has every right to go, wait a second, why are you charging me this much? Because I knew you used AI and you didn’t have as many people, right? So there’s going to be a certain kind of arbitrage that happens within organizations. Now, if I was a smaller, more mobile agency or client or whatever, that’s where the opportunity is, right? I think it may help you kind of level up to the behavioral capacity of a larger firm, right?

John Jantsch (20:11.169)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:31.758)

No questions. Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (20:34.939)

I mean, and quite honestly, the truth of the matter is like, you know, so my experience is in agencies and brand firms and design firms, et cetera. So the truth of the matter is that most branding teams, regardless of the size of the company, are five people at the most, right? You have like a client person, you have strategy, a couple designers, a creative director, and like kind of an executive director of the thing. That’s five people at the most. And that’s basically what I had when I was at Lander working on Citi. And we were the global brand team.

Working with the global brand team at Citi, we were the global brand team at Landor. We were just five people, and we’d bring in people extra here and there. And so AI now gives smaller agencies and smaller players the capacity to level up to that. So that same amount of practice, as long as you also have an equal amount of insight and an equal amount of innovation.

John Jantsch (21:29.122)

Yeah, and what I find in our agency, we are doing is instead of just saying here’s the same deliverable, we did it faster because we could, but we’re still going to charge you the same amount. We find that we’re able to take the same amount of people and the same amount of input and give them a lot more output, a lot more value than we could have for that same fee, quite frankly.

And so I think that’s how people, or at least that’s how I believe people need to be looking at it is, is you can deliver more.

Mark Kingsley (21:55.28)

Yeah.

Mark Kingsley (21:59.715)

Yeah, I see, see, yeah, but John, I see the problem in that though, right? Because what you’re doing is you’re eroding value. You’re eroding what you can potentially charge. And so there, there does need to be a certain kind of larger societal reckoning about value, right? Because the employee productivity has grown over the last 50 years, you know, because of information technology, communications technology, you name it, right? Our productivity is through the roof.

but waitress have remained the same, right? And so there is going to be a problem.

John Jantsch (22:36.238)

Well, I think we’ve solved all the all of the problems we have the time to solve today, Mark. So I appreciate you.

Mark Kingsley (22:43.643)

Oh, well, John, you and me over a drink over like a weekend. We’ll just get to like maybe one percent of the problems being solved.

John Jantsch (22:50.582)

That’s right. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Where would you have people invite people to learn more about your work, about the book, obviously connect with you.

Mark Kingsley (22:59.515)

So basic is my website is malcontent.com, M-A-L-C-O-N-T-E-N-T. Yes, I do have that URL. It’s one of the proudest possessions that I have. And basically, I do business under the name malcontent because it really describes my approach and my feelings about established processes and established procedures, knowing that there’s always a better way out there. So therefore.

John Jantsch (23:09.87)

You

John Jantsch (23:24.13)

Yeah, that’s right. There are no best practices, right? There’s only better practices.

Mark Kingsley (23:29.371)

And there’s it’s everything situational everything is totally situational

John Jantsch (23:33.559)

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

Mark Kingsley (23:39.014)

Great, thank you.


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How to Build Your AI Team, Task by Task

How to Build Your AI Team, Task by Task written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

 

Eva GutierrezOverview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Ava Gutierrez, founder of ThinkWithAI.com and a leading educator and consultant on practical AI adoption for business leaders. With a background in behavioral science and communication, Ava demystifies how AI can be integrated into business workflows, not as a magic replacement for jobs, but as a task-by-task partner that enhances decision-making, brainstorming, recruiting, and day-to-day operations. If you want to move beyond AI hype and build a real-world plan for smarter, more human business, Ava shares a practical, mindset-shifting framework for getting started.

About the Guest

Ava Gutierrez is the founder of ThinkWithAI.com, an educator, consultant, and trusted voice on AI adoption for business. With expertise in behavioral science and communication, she helps leaders and teams get more value from AI by integrating it into real-world processes, decision-making, and strategy.

  • Website: thinkwithai.com
  • AI First Business System & Notion Agents: Learn more on her website

Actionable Insights

  • AI isn’t about replacing entire jobs overnight—it’s about offloading specific tasks and freeing up time for more impactful work, one step at a time.
  • The biggest shift is seeing AI as a “hire”—give it as much context, onboarding, and clear instructions as you would a new employee or VA.
  • Build an org chart for your AI “agents”—each person on your team can recruit AI to assist, strategize, and advise on their specific workflows and tasks.
  • Don’t treat AI as a generic assistant—define clear roles for each tool/agent, and be intentional about which tasks you offload and which you keep.
  • Hybrid intelligence is the future: the best outcomes come from humans and AI collaborating, with humans making the final decisions and setting guardrails.
  • To create a plan, have every team member list their daily/weekly tasks, then use AI itself to suggest where it can help as an assistant, strategist, or advisor.
  • Leaders must proactively guide and train teams on how to use AI—don’t just say “go use it” and hope for the best.
  • The skillset of AI is foundational—learn enough to know what to delegate, what to automate, and when to bring in expert help.
  • AI can also be your “recruiter”—use it to audit your workflows and identify where hiring an AI agent will have the highest impact.
  • The real mindset shift: AI isn’t just a tool to tell what to do—it can help you discover what’s possible (and what you don’t know you don’t know).

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:08 – The Mindset Shift: Task-by-Task, Not Job-by-Job
    Why AI adoption is about gradual, practical changes, not sweeping replacements.
  • 03:34 – Treating AI Like a New Hire
    How giving AI more context leads to better results and less frustration.
  • 07:31 – The New Org Chart
    Envisioning each person with their own suite of AI agents supporting their role.
  • 10:42 – Hybrid Intelligence Defined
    Why humans plus AI are stronger together, with humans setting the constraints.
  • 12:22 – Should You Hire an AI Agency or Build the Skill In-House?
    Why every leader (and team member) needs foundational AI skills—even when outsourcing.
  • 15:36 – How Leaders Can Build a Company-Wide AI Plan
    Why your team is waiting for guidance, and how to map out opportunities for AI support.
  • 17:31 – Using AI as Your Own “Recruiter”
    How to have AI audit your workflows and suggest high-impact automation.

Insights

“The true power of AI is in letting it take over the tasks you don’t want to do—so you can focus on what matters most.”

“Treat AI like a new hire: the more context and clarity you give, the better the output.”

“Hybrid intelligence is about humans and AI collaborating—humans make the decisions, AI gives you superpowers.”

“Don’t outsource your understanding of AI; learn enough to know what’s possible, so you can lead your team (and not get left behind).”

“_



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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.


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From The Vault: How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era

From The Vault: How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Summary

Back from the vault! In this rerun of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I revisit a solo episode where I—John Jantsch—explore a topic that continues to reshape the foundation of online marketing: search visibility in an era dominated by AI search, zero-click results, and evolving Google behaviors.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been about rankings, but today that’s no longer enough. In this episode, I explain why the focus has shifted to search visibility—your brand’s presence across the entire digital ecosystem. From featured snippets and branded SERPs to Google Business profiles and authoritative content that aligns with E-E-A-T principles, visibility is about showing up where people actually find answers.

As AI overviews increasingly deliver information without clicks, your strategy must evolve beyond chasing keywords.

Key Takeaways

  • SEO is now about search visibility, not just rankings. Brands need to show up in multiple answer-delivery formats.

  • AI search and zero-click results mean most users get what they need without leaving Google, so multi-platform visibility is essential.

  • Google is now an answer engine. Structure your content to provide direct, trusted answers.

  • E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals matter more than ever.

  • Use structured content like FAQs, TL;DR summaries, and hub pages to boost your chances of surfacing in AI answers and snippets.

  • Local SEO still drives results. Treat your Google Business Profile as a publishing platform.

  • Refreshing older content improves freshness signals and knowledge graph visibility.

  • Prioritize quality, experience-driven stories, and unique insights over generic AI-generated content.

  • Don’t chase head terms. Focus instead on long-tail queries and intent-driven content formats.

Chapters:

  • 00:09 Opening
  • 00:58 Evolution of Search Engine Optimization
  • 03:01 The Current State of Search
  • 03:41 Focus on Search Visibility Instead of Rank
  • 06:13 How to Demonstrate EEAT
  • 09:04 Audit Your Content Gaps
  • 10:07 Help Pages
  • 11:46 FAQ Pages and Trust Elements
  • 13:03 Refreshing Your Content
  • 13:41 Utilize Your Google Business Page
  • 14:35 Find Out How AI Is Sourcing Information
  • 15:42 Common Mistakes

Sponsored By:

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Manage projects, chat, and files in one place—simple to use and scalable as you grow.

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John Jantsch (00:01.506)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show. I’m going to talk about search engine optimization or as I’ve started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? Those of you that are on the video version, I’m wearing a Stetson open road. this is the straw version in the cognac.

color is my favorite summer hat. just decided it’s Friday when I’m recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. My grandfather and father had this style hat and a number of US presidents over the years chose this as their primary hat as well. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. All right. As I said, I’m going to talk about search engine optimization, what we’ve always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. There’s been lots of changes over the years, different algorithms, different things, different search engines come along. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what what it actually is even going to mean to business and website owners going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And really, again, was my first website and it was, do we rank?

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won’t go into all what all those things were, but most of them are not relevant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted till about 2010. And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch (02:21.142)

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You’ve got the local search packs. You’ve got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And now all of sudden voice search is a factor featured snippets become a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, all the while the ad units and how they display all over the page, you know, are changing as well. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess fast forward to today, 2024 or so it happened, you know, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we’re now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

six to seven times out of 10 today. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I’m talking about now is this idea of a complete mindset shift away from search and optimization, away from trying to rank for keywords and more about this idea of search visibility. It’s kind of your brand’s share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch (04:19.086)

really clicks for everywhere that, um, that, that a prospect looks, I think that’s what we have to do today. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean, it’s really going to have very, very little value. Um, unless it’s just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I think instead of, of thinking now in terms of like position ranking or impressions, it’s really going to be this, this whole collection. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. I use a case, a local dentist publishes like does whitening hurt. they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that’s how I think we have to start thinking about these is, know, there’s no more. There’s no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it’s how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And in fact, you know, a lot of people are actually calling,

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They’re really answer engines. And the consumer behavior, you know, has changed so dramatically. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. You know, we were all very conditioned to type in six, eight words for what we were looking for and then hoping or maybe refining that search if we didn’t find what we were hoping for. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it’s

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in now and you’re going to get that very specific, in most cases, you’re gonna get that very specific result returned to you that you were able to kind of custom tailor to what you wanted rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch (06:49.39)

One of the things that, and I have to set this up a little bit, that we have to start thinking about when it comes to our content, you know, writing the 101, the how to blog content. And many people are finding that they’re losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you’re wasting your time. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic. And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it’s, it’s practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It’s practically worthless. So Google has this new

No, fairly new couple of years, acronym called EAT. And there’s two E’s in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I’ll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. But the idea behind it is that they want to see not just expertise. That’s one of the E’s, but they want to see experience. Have you actually done what you’re talking about?

They want to see authoritativeness. That’s the, the other a, or I mean, that’s the a. So they measure that by, know, are you getting links mentioned, you know, are you in local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they’re measuring like, are you an authority on this thing that you’re talking about? So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact info. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. So what we have to do, I think, is it’s no longer enough to write this article about how to do something. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch (09:02.603)

So that it’s very clear that that you’re not just talking about this. This is something that you do. This is something you’re an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch (09:16.844)

So in March, 2024, I’m reading a stat here. Knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to really surface credible people and brands again, according to search engine land. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. So how do you compete in an eat world, in an AI world?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. mean consumers still need the information So now it’s a matter of you know, how do we how do we stay visible so that we can get them the opportunity even to get them that information? first thing is There’s five step plan here, right? Okay. Number one audit your content gaps. So

Export all of your site URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we’re trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? So take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You’ve written good, useful content. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How could you add FAQs?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you add a table of contents to your long form content? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn’t read TLDR, you’ve probably seen that. How can you add that at the top of your content so that these…

They’re not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it’s about. It gets very user friendly. It’s very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch (11:24.718)

I have for years been talking about this thing called hub pages. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you’re a kitchen remodeler and you’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. Um, what if you turn that instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether, what if you turn that into a kitchen, uh, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content that you’ve written over the years.

And you placed it on that page. don’t mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. And then those all, uh, you know, kind of becomes a playlist for anybody who’s thinking about, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we’ve been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is it was a very effective SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it’s also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. It’s like, here’s the whole guide, you know, on what I’m trying to do rather than I just found one, you know, I went out and randomly searched and found one, one blog post on something. So the, the, you know, the,

Again, doubly good news is that those pages really are highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. It’s really, in some ways, it’s the same content. You’ve just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It’s also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So every single one of your service pages, every single one of your product pages, even your About Us page now, I think should actually, whether it’s structured as a Q &A, or just has an FAQ section,

John Jantsch (13:42.826)

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the questions you’re being asked. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you’re not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that’s different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you’re in professional organizations and things that you’ve achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the more we can double down on, on just proving that we do what we say, really quite frankly, the better. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch (14:43.128)

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I’m telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we’ve got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. it needs to be freshened up. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I’ve got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How could I freshen them up, add more links, add more experience, add more proof.

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And I would last thing I would say is. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who’s really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform. Now you don’t own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. I would be taking again, in some cases daily if you’ve got a lot of content, but certainly weekly, create a Google or post in your Google Business page that can come from

can be just a shortened version of something that you’ve written, and published, you know, years ago, but you’re giving it a new place, a new home. And again, it’s just going to add all up to the soup of, know, how you get noted or, or quoted as a valuable source. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you’d love to show up in, you’d love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. So.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. So best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would be a link that or something that they’d want to really show up for. Right. And take note of who shows up. That’s important. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories in some cases, you know,

John Jantsch (17:03.63)

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So if you’re not participating in any of those sources or you don’t even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound, there’s your checklist of some things that you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or a Reddit or a house, dependent upon,

you know, the industry that you’re in. So, all right, a couple of common mistakes. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t write for algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think in terms of the human question behind any query that somebody is asking. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and…

If you’re, if you’re at a loss for what questions people are asking in your industry, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can surface what questions people are asking in, certain industries. You can’t set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there’s your last blog post was 2022. We probably got some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, quarterly plan that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don’t obsess over all the tools. mean, don’t go down the rabbit hole. mean, Structured schema is important. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the, underlying code, tells Google or tells the.

Whoever’s visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don’t over obsess about, you know, over engineering tools on this. So here’s what I would say. If you’ve got some ideas today, pick one. If you don’t have any FAQs, that’s where I would start. If you don’t have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch (19:23.666)

if you haven’t visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, pick one of the things that, that, I mentioned here today and just start working away at it. mean, don’t, don’t listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic’s down because

there’s a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn’t that meaningful. Anyway, it was somebody looking for that how to article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. So search visibility being seen where people go to get their information, being seen as an answer engine, as opposed to an information engine is how we have to change the mindset. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. All right. That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.


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Adapting Agencies for the AI Era

Adapting Agencies for the AI Era written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Brent Weaver (1)Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Brent Weaver, CEO of E2M Solutions—the leading provider of white label WordPress, SEO, content, and AI solutions for agencies. Brent shares his view from the front lines of agency evolution as AI, automation, and changing client expectations reshape the digital marketing landscape. They dive into the real impact of AI on agencies, the future of marketing leadership, the enduring value of strategy over tactics, and why human expertise still matters more than ever.

About the Guest

Brent Weaver is the CEO of E2M Solutions, a top white label provider of WordPress, SEO, content, and AI solutions for digital marketing agencies. With deep experience both running and supporting agencies, Brent is a recognized voice on AI, agency growth, and the new skills required to thrive in a fast-changing industry.

Actionable Insights

  • AI is rapidly raising the bar—not just for agencies, but for clients who now expect faster, better results and more transparency.
  • The white label model is evolving fast, with providers like E2M embracing “AI first” internal training, education, and even offering fractional AI services to agencies.
  • The hype of AI often exceeds reality—experiments abound, but many projects never deliver, so agencies and business owners must remain adaptable and strategic.
  • There’s still no “all-in-one” AI marketing operating system, but the industry is heading toward more integrated, seamless solutions.
  • SEO is far from dead; but marketers must get creative, focus on proprietary expertise, and optimize for both LLMs and Google—especially for local businesses.
  • Human leadership and strategy are more vital than ever. AI makes agencies more competitive, but also increases client expectations and the need for specialization and niche expertise.
  • The human element remains central: The future belongs to those who can combine AI tools with strategic thinking, EQ, and deep client understanding.
  • Agencies—and marketers—need to retool, learn continuously, and be ready to lead and manage, not just “do.”

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:10 – The Elephant in the Room: AI’s Impact on Agencies
    Brent shares how AI is changing agency operations, results, and client expectations.
  • 02:25 – White Labeling in the Age of AI
    How E2M is retooling with “AI First Saturdays,” fractional AI services, and ongoing education.
  • 04:46 – Will We Ever Get a True AI Marketing OS?
    The reality (and limits) of current AI tools and what’s coming next.
  • 06:18 – The Hype vs. Reality of AI Projects
    Why many AI initiatives fail—and why experimentation is still worth it.
  • 08:10 – Is SEO Dead?
    Brent’s take on what’s changed, what still works, and how local and LLM optimization are evolving.
  • 11:55 – Why Agencies Are Working Harder, Not Less
    AI may automate, but competition, complexity, and client demands are rising.
  • 13:31 – The Human Element and Future-Ready Skills
    Why strategy, specialization, and leadership will define the next era of agency growth.
  • 15:17 – AI Agents, Frictionless UX, and What’s Next
    How AI will reshape customer journeys, jobs, and digital marketing roles.
  • 18:17 – From Doing to Managing: Evolving Careers and Teams
    The growing need for strategic thinkers, EQ, and continuous learning.

Insights

“AI has raised the bar for agencies and clients alike—faster, better results are expected, but human expertise is still at the center.”

“There’s no magic all-in-one AI solution yet, but those who combine tools with strategy and leadership will win.”

“SEO is evolving, not dying—marketers must focus on unique value, local search, and optimizing for new AI-driven experiences.”

“Agencies need to retool for an AI-first world, but the need for deep specialization, leadership, and EQ is greater than ever.”

“The future of digital marketing belongs to those who can marry the best of AI with strategy, creativity, and relentless learning.”



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John Jantsch (00:01.405)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brent Weaver. He is the CEO of E2M Solutions, the leading provider of white label WordPress SEO content and AI solutions for digital marketing agencies. So guess what we’re going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about agencies and we’re going to talk about digital marketing. So Brent, welcome to the show.

Brent At E2M (00:28.728)

Great to be here. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:30.427)

I did get the title right. Didn’t I? You’re the CEO currently. Yeah. Okay. I was.

Brent At E2M (00:34.446)

Yeah, yeah. Joined E2M in June of 2025. So I’m wrapping up my ninth week on duty. So it’s been a new adventure for me.

John Jantsch (00:40.198)

Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (00:47.197)

Well, E2M is not new necessarily, so it worked with hundreds of agencies. Just in your time and what you’ve learned or from the folks there, what do you see as some of the biggest changes in the agency landscape right now? And I know it’s evolving rapidly, but I’m curious what you’re hearing because you pretty much talk to agencies all day long.

Brent At E2M (01:10.722)

Yeah. I mean, the obvious elephant in the room is artificial intelligence and what that’s doing both in terms of how agencies are run and also how they’re deploying services and also how clients are expecting, you know, what the clients are doing with AI as well. So it’s not just like the agency using it, but the clients are using it. So I think some expectations are changing and also speed to results is changing because a client might say, well, Hey, if I can just have AI do this in

three minutes, right? Like, why is it gonna take you three or four days and just kind of working on how to up level your level, know, what you’re doing for your clients in terms of results. mean, that bar has certainly been raising very, very quickly in terms of what expectations are. And so I think a lot of agencies are feeling a little bit of squeeze, but at the same time, they’re feeling a lot of excitement. So there’s that whole topic, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:00.833)

Well, so to tag, I was going to say to tag onto that though, of course, your primary function is to, in most cases, act as a white label support for that agency. So I’m curious, has the white label mode evolved? mean, how are you, because it’s affecting agencies. So how’s it then in turn affecting what a white label provider like yourself is doing?

Brent At E2M (02:25.614)

And we’ve really like planted a flag that we want to be an AI first agency. And so we are doing lots of internal, kind of retooling education. have a thing called AI for Saturday where our whole company comes in every first Saturday of the month. some of that time has been dedicated to education, working on projects kind of, you know, within the teams doing demo days, hackathons. and so we’re definitely taking AI very seriously. Our team’s taking AI very seriously.

we’re also doing fractional AI services for agencies. So actually going in and helping the agency implement AI solutions. And so I think it’s, you know, people want better results. They want them faster, right? It’s kind of like, you know, dealing with Amazon, right? Like people used to think, I ordered something on the internet. It’s okay that it takes seven to 10 days to show up, right? But in the post Amazon world, you’re like, well, like my kids, for example, they’re like, why I ordered this

30 minutes ago, why is it not already at the front door? I think some of that impatience is seeping its way into the business to business service model. And I also think some of that kind of what people expect in terms of a customer centric centered business, like Amazon will give you refunds on just about anything. think customers are expecting some of that for some of their agency customers, but you know, it’s certainly having a huge impact on the overall industry.

John Jantsch (03:40.967)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:49.917)

So, since you opened the AI can of worms, I’ll go there directly. You know, what I’m seeing a lot of people do is, you know, it’s like we’re in this wild west days still where there’s 473 tools. People are hacking this $20 a month thing together with this $20 a month thing. They’re talking about agents and what they can do. What I’m seeing on the business side, the small business side, it’s like, okay, I get it. I get it. We need to do AI.

but this is exhausting. And, you know, is, there ever going to be a day you think where some, a business owner can actually buy the full like marketing operating system that is AI run and installed in their business and not, you know, have to lean on their agency to do this and an SEO person to do that with AI to me. And again, I’m, just asking your opinion because it doesn’t exist today, but, but I feel like that’s where we’re going to go.

Brent At E2M (04:42.083)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:46.237)

There’s going to be the $5.99 a month solution that’s sort of an all in one as opposed to custom this and custom that and custom, you know, whatever.

Brent At E2M (04:56.494)

And perhaps, you know, I think John that the more I’ve gotten into AI personally and the more Like projects and use cases that I’ve seen it. It’s it’s like the more, you know The more you realize you don’t know and I certainly think that that’s true with AI and and we’re seeing a lot of people do some what I would almost consider to be magical things with AI but then there’s also this like

maybe they do something where they don’t really have the foundational skillset. They’re using a tool like lovable and they’re doing vibe coding and they build an application that gets to a certain point. And then the client says, well, hey, we actually need this for a business requirement thing to do this other thing. And then all of a sudden that other thing maybe isn’t possible within the vibe coding interface. And all of a sudden you have this thing that an agency has spent weeks on in terms of a vibe coding application build.

John Jantsch (05:27.292)

Yeah, yeah.

Brent At E2M (05:49.6)

And then the thing that they needed to do from a business case is not possible within the AI. And so then we’re hitting this wall and we have to go, my gosh, we’re going to have to completely, we have to build this new ground up without vibe coding in order to make the business case work. I there was a study that said that something like 40 to 60 % of enterprise AI projects, and I should probably have a source on this of them quoted, but 40 to 60 % of AI projects at the enterprise level are being abandoned or never seen the light of day.

John Jantsch (06:18.609)

Yes.

Brent At E2M (06:18.85)

and if we all know, from reading wall street, like how much money is being invested in AI, that means like over half of the investment that major corporations are making are, basically being thrown in the trash. And I I’m seeing that same level of kind of experimentation, happened at the agency level and also at the small business owner level. And so I think there’s still, gosh, there’s just so much learning that has to be done. And the upside though, is you find an AI, automation or

agentic workflow that, that works, it gets to a hundred percent. it can have game changing impact on the business, right? Like the ROI on it can be, you know, infinity. And so it’s certainly worth making these investments, but it doesn’t mean that every investment is going to pay off.

John Jantsch (06:51.869)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (06:57.223)

Peace.

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Yeah, I think one of the challenges in the the window that we’re in right now is, is in some cases, the hype of AI is actually outrunning the reality of it. And I think that a lot of people are like, we can fire everybody and do it all with AI. I mean, you see these people, you know, on Facebook ads, like, I have a $16 billion company and I only have two employees, you know, you’re like, you know,

Brent At E2M (07:13.848)

Sure.

Brent At E2M (07:26.982)

They like show this big like screenshot of all their automation crazy I’ve replaced 64 employees right like maybe I don’t know I mean usually I find when you kind of double click on those things and you go in there’s there’s usually some smoke and mirrors around those things but I don’t want to like bash anybody that’s

John Jantsch (07:31.482)

You

John Jantsch (07:35.909)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:41.341)

Well, they’re 100 % there is. And I think that, you know, it’s like all things. It’s kind of like taking advantage of the craze is actually making the reality a lot worse and a lot harder for that business owner that just needs a couple things, you know, figured out to, you know, to make, to not even to replace people, you know, but to actually empower their people in ways to do better and more work. All right. So I’ll get off my soapbox on that one and move to, let’s talk about SEO.

Brent At E2M (08:06.993)

Hahaha.

John Jantsch (08:10.727)

you know, which is a tactic, of course, a channel, if you will, that, that you guys play in quite a bit. There’s that’s another one of those where there’s, you know, like, it would take me about two minutes to find somebody who, who today put on LinkedIn SEO is dead. And so, you know, how are you, how are you, by the way, it’s not, but how are you advising clients? How are you changing even your routine and working around the reality that a lot of top of funnel

Brent At E2M (08:10.819)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:40.679)

types of content that used to generate traffic has certainly gone away. We can debate whether or not it was that valuable anyway. But how are you evolving your model when you think about SEO practices?

Brent At E2M (08:54.414)

I mean, if there’s a piece of content that you could easily just ask, you know, chat, and you would get a great answer for that content, if that’s what you’re gonna be putting on your client’s website to help them grow their rank or grow their traffic from the LLMs and things like that, I mean, that’s certainly probably not gonna be a great strategy. And I think most people got that memo when they saw how much traffic decreased for…

John Jantsch (08:58.781)

Right.

Brent At E2M (09:19.566)

Those kind of common things right like how do I make great guacamole? Right is just going to be the user experience to ask that question on On chat is going to be far better than on a Google browser unless somebody has some type of proprietary ingredient or approach or they can actually build some intellectual property around it and kind of protect that unique recipe right in that case or they have a really great personality around

John Jantsch (09:36.199)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (09:42.727)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (09:47.054)

teaching people how to make guacamole or whatever, and they’re a great YouTuber, and there’s some type of thing that’s unique that AI cannot replicate that they can bring to the marketplace. So I do think marketers have to be a little bit more creative. There’s kind of a reinvention that’s going on. That being said, there’s also a ton of people that are now using LLMs to search for business recommendations, to search for services. And certainly there’s…

John Jantsch (10:09.307)

Yeah, 100%.

Brent At E2M (10:13.248)

a whole cottage industry. our, amount of SEO business that we’ve had has, has categorically gone up year over year, right? And that’s kind of in the post AI world. And a big thing on the, on the E2M team is how are we optimizing our clients’ websites and search strategy for the LLMs, right? Kind of the AEO strategies while we’re also using, you know, continuing to invest in Google. And I think Google, for instance, I I don’t know if search traffic, you know, the

John Jantsch (10:15.035)

the

John Jantsch (10:21.661)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (10:40.738)

The Google usage has necessarily gone down. mean, I think they’re still driving a lot of traffic to businesses. Google Local, massively important for businesses to be active, right? Especially if they’re a service business or they’re working locally or regionally, right? That’s something that I think the LLMs aren’t doing nearly as well as Google. And so there’s certainly still lots of blue oceans, I think, on the SEO side.

John Jantsch (10:47.132)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:02.119)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.853)

Yeah, and I think you’re 100 % right. mean, I’m speaking in a conference next month of all remodeling contractors. And they’re all talking about like, what do need to be doing to change? And it’s like, hey, you know, show up in that map pack, do a better job of your reviews, you know, that, you know, answer, you know, have a lot of FAQs, you know, that answer questions that people would have about remodeling, because that the trust, I think, with the map pack, whether it’s deserved or not, you know, that the consumer has is going to, I think, give that

a life for a long time. And I don’t think you’re going to see the AI overviews for somebody that’s, I mean, you can go there and say, you know, in AI mode, you can say, what’s the best for modeling contractor in this town. And it will give you an opinion. But I think people still value the map pack and the proximity and all the things that come with it.

Brent At E2M (11:55.086)

You know, one thing I think there was this like undertone of like, is AI going to make agencies like obsolete or something? And, and it’s weird because like I’ve asked this to a lot of agency groups have been like, okay, in the post AI world, like who here is working less, right? And I asked people like raise their hands and like, nobody raised their hand. I’m like, okay, the, the right, they’re working more. They’re working way more. Right. It is weird. It’s a weird paradigm, right? Because you would think, Hey, artificial intelligence, the computer is going to do all the work for me.

John Jantsch (12:00.955)

Yeah, yeah, you bet.

John Jantsch (12:11.133)

It’s more. They’re all working more, in fact.

Brent At E2M (12:24.718)

You know, it’s like the logical outcome of that would be that we wouldn’t have to work as hard. And, you know, even though these tools do magical things, I don’t think they make finding leads and customers any easier. If anything, they’re just making it even more competitive. They’re giving advanced marketing tools to a lot larger group of people. And so it’s getting more competitive out there. And that means that businesses…

John Jantsch (12:42.993)

Yeah.

Brent At E2M (12:52.51)

still need agencies and specialists now more than ever. In fact, they need specialists that are specialized in specializations instead of specializations. And that was the other thing I was going to kind of bring as a theme is, is looked like knowing who your customer is, having niche expertise, you know, really knowing your market backwards and forwards, knowing your market better than your clients know their industry, I think is now more important than ever. You know, the idea of just being a general

John Jantsch (13:15.783)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (13:21.432)

Hey, I’m Brent, I’m the web guy, right? Like I don’t think that’s gonna fly in 2026 and beyond if it is even flying right now.

John Jantsch (13:24.401)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (13:31.293)

So let’s talk about the human element. think a lot of people are wringing their hands around. mean, every time you see these headlines that, you know, Microsoft says are 40 % of all jobs will go away by, you know, the next three years. I think you have a lot of people kind of wringing their hands around about like, is this going to destroy the world? know, if people, 40 % of people are out of jobs. How are…

I tell you what we see is I see a lot of people that are working more, as you said, and a lot of it’s because the consumer or the business owner behavior has changed a little bit in that they expect more. So that’s part of it. our mantra has always been strategy before tactics. We actually feel that if you develop a great marketing strategy, marketing becomes less complicated, but far more effective.

and, and so, you know, what I see is a whole lot of agencies that were, have always been delivering tactics are now just using AI to deliver a new set of tactics. and not still not thinking strategically. I think what Mark, what businesses are going to need in the future is marketing leadership and not marketing doers.

Brent At E2M (14:48.78)

Yeah. Yeah. mean, I think we’re running this event. It’s all about AI for agency owners. And I promise this is not just a direct plug for our event, but obviously it’s my duty to promote our event right now. But one of our attendees, and he’s kind of an AI first person, he registered for our event, right? Went in and purchased a ticket.

John Jantsch (14:50.845)

I should have posed that as a question, but it was really more of a statement.

Brent At E2M (15:17.166)

All using his chat GPT agent. So he literally just you know driving in the car Said hey Go buy a ticket to Vistara and his agent, know went and it takes screenshots and says hey This is what I’m doing along the way, but you know, he just kind of had to say yep Yep in the agent already has all of his information and it has all of the information that it needs in order to make that fill out the web forums and actually purchase a product and

It’s, it’s almost like every business from that perspective, every business’s website just became kind of the Amazon one click shopping experience. You know, if, we fast forward two, three years, if we all have these agents that have, you know, secure access to our banking details and to our PII and they know kind of our preferences. mean, what could you do if you can line up an experience that you know is going to meet the needs of a specific target audience? you know, you have.

very few barriers standing between you and them making a transaction, becoming a customer. And I think in that way, AI is going to be disrupting some of these workflows, some of these user interfaces, just as web professionals and digital agencies, how we view creating those experiences. And so I think that while AI is certainly going to destroy some number of jobs, whether it’s 40%, 20%, I don’t know what the number is.

John Jantsch (16:40.976)

This is…

Brent At E2M (16:42.646)

I trust Microsoft, they’re now worth $4 trillion. They must be doing something right. But I think for every job that it destroys, there’s going to be new jobs created. You know, if I was, if I lived in a Waymo city, I was just out in California. I rode in my first driverless taxi. Would I still have a car? I don’t know because I’m like, well, what if I just used Waymo to get everywhere I needed to go? And when I’m in the car, I’m going to work on

John Jantsch (16:45.309)

You

John Jantsch (16:52.625)

Yeah, I’m seeing that already, right.

Brent At E2M (17:10.094)

I’m going to be productive. I’m going to do work. I’m going to be calling, I’ll call 10 more agencies to see if they can come to my event. Right. So I do think that there’s like some things that are not super exciting in terms of jobs in the marketplace right now that likely are going to go away, right? Like data entry, data harvesting from the internet, you know, content editors, right? Like I can get a lot of my content. can dictate it to chat and

John Jantsch (17:28.943)

Mm-hmm. Just basic research. Yeah.

Brent At E2M (17:38.52)

gives me pretty good content. It even gives me some suggestions on how to evolve it and gives me different, know, hey, here’s a version for LinkedIn. Here’s a version for Facebook. Here’s a version for Instagram, right? Here’s a script that you can go and put, take a video and record, right? So things that I would have relied on three, four or five people before I can get done myself. And a lot of times I don’t think I was necessarily hiring those people. I just wasn’t doing it, right? I’d post maybe on one platform instead of four and I wouldn’t hire a social media person to do that.

John Jantsch (17:45.917)

All right. Yep.

Brent At E2M (18:07.022)

And so I think that some of these things are certainly going to destroy jobs, but you know, like what will my kids’ jobs be in 15, 20 years? I have no idea, but they’ll have something to do, I’m sure.

John Jantsch (18:07.867)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:17.841)

Yeah. Yeah. I’m even seeing that in our organization. you know, people that, that really were good doers, good implementers, you know, we’re really pushing them to, know, they have to be more, they, whether they have employees under them or not, they have to really think more like leaders and think more like managers, who are going to optimize, you know, some of these tools, as opposed to, you know, writing the, every bit of social media content, they’re going to be, you know,

looked more as managers. And I think that that from a skill set standpoint, that’s, that’s probably not everybody’s sweet spot. I mean, there definitely are people that are just very good at give me an SOP and I’ll follow it. But I do think that from a career standpoint, you know, if you’re one of those people, you probably need to really start looking at how do I, know, how do I, my strategic thinking, my EQ skills, you know, over and above, you know, being able to, to manage a spreadsheet.

Brent At E2M (19:15.79)

And sometimes, you know, not to like be like capitalist or whatever, but like, think at some point, right, if people aren’t willing to move towards that opportunity voluntarily, they will, you know, maybe have to earn some, learn some hard lessons. And in those, some of those might be expensive lessons. think certainly as an entrepreneur, I’ve had to learn some expensive lessons when I didn’t pivot hard enough or, you know, change my business or change my mindset fast enough. And then you…

John Jantsch (19:32.327)

Yeah, Yeah.

Brent At E2M (19:43.51)

And then you’re like, was a hard lesson. I’m never going to do that again. So I think, you know, people don’t evolve right now and they don’t invest time. Like again, we’re doing these AI first Saturdays as a team. And at first people were like, I to come in on Saturday. we’re like, Hey, look, this is the reality. Like we’re all working an extra, an extra day right now to make sure that we can properly retool and learn enough about this tech because during the week, we’re all very focused on client work. We’re focusing on.

John Jantsch (19:46.097)

Right, Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:55.121)

Yeah, right.

Brent At E2M (20:11.758)

know, doing the day-to-day business. so, you know, we’ve, we’ve made that as a priority all the way up to our leadership team. Right. I mean, I’m waking up at four o’clock every Saturday, joining, joining the team and you know, working on AI stuff.

John Jantsch (20:25.713)

Well, Brent, we’ve frittered away a perfectly good 20 minutes here trying to help people talk people off the cliff a little bit. Is there some place you’d invite people to learn more about e2m’s solutions?

Brent At E2M (20:39.34)

Yeah, you can definitely check us out at e2msolutions.com. You can always email me brent at e2msolutions.com. We’re running an event called Vistara at the end of September, depending on when this episode airs, join vistara.com. So we’re doing two full days on artificial intelligence and agency growth. So, I mean, we’re, think this is such an important topic. We’re running a full two day event on this in Denver, Colorado. So if you’re interested, certainly reach out.

John Jantsch (21:01.319)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:06.791)

Well, I’m just down the road. should probably come down and speak at the event. Well, let’s make, let’s, let’s make it happen then. All right. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road.

Brent At E2M (21:10.606)

I think so. I think so. should. Let’s make it happen.

Brent At E2M (21:20.942)

Thanks, John.


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Empowering Small Business with AI & Strategy

Empowering Small Business with AI & Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Sara Nay, CEO of Duct Tape Marketing and author of “Unchained.” Drawing on over 15 years of experience in every agency role—from intern to CEO—Sara explains why the traditional marketing agency model is broken for both clients and agencies. She introduces the “anti-agency” approach: a practical, strategy-first, AI-enabled model designed to help small businesses own their marketing instead of renting it. The discussion covers timeless principles, the new role of the fractional CMO, how to leverage AI for impact (not just efficiency), and the steps any business can take to reclaim control and clarity.

About the Guest

Sara Nay is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing and author of “Unchained.” With two decades of hands-on experience, Sara is a leading voice in strategy-first marketing systems for small businesses. She has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs and agencies design sustainable, scalable growth through a blend of foundational principles and forward-thinking technology. Sara is a sought-after speaker and advocate for empowering business owners to take back ownership of their marketing.

Actionable Insights

  • The traditional agency model struggles with client demands, scope creep, profitability, and talent retention—especially as AI transforms execution.
  • The “anti-agency” model empowers small businesses to stop renting their marketing and start owning it, with strategy and leadership at the center.
  • Timeless marketing principles (ideal client, deep messaging, strategy before tactics) are more important than ever in the AI era.
  • Rushing into AI tools without strategy amplifies chaos and inconsistency—start with business and marketing goals, then select and train the right tools.
  • Fractional CMOs offer small businesses affordable, high-level leadership, managing strategy, budget, and metrics while leveraging lean teams and AI systems.
  • Owning your marketing brings control, clarity, and the ability to scale—CEOs should focus on their “zone of genius” and let marketing leaders orchestrate execution.
  • Agencies must shift from execution services to strategic leadership and AI-empowered team enablement to remain relevant.
  • Every business can start reclaiming ownership by auditing team structure, clarifying partnerships, and aligning technology to strategy.
  • AI should be used to elevate human talent, not replace it—future-proof your team and business by identifying high-impact skills and integrating AI support.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:06 – Why the Traditional Agency Model is Broken
    Sara shares her experience across agency roles and the pain points that inspired “Unchained.”
  • 03:02 – Defining the Anti-Agency Model
    How AI and strategy are turning the old agency/client relationship upside down.
  • 04:59 – Timeless Marketing Principles in the Age of AI
    Why ideal client profiles and deep messaging still matter most.
  • 07:07 – The Dangers of Jumping Into AI Without Strategy
    Sara explains how “amplified chaos” is the real risk for small businesses.
  • 08:55 – The New Org Chart: Fractional CMOs and AI-Powered Teams
    How small businesses can afford leadership and execution at scale.
  • 11:05 – From Renting to Owning Your Marketing
    The mindset and structural shifts required for true business growth and clarity.
  • 14:26 – How Agencies Must Evolve to Stay Relevant
    Why leadership, strategy, and AI team enablement are the future of agency services.
  • 16:06 – Practical Steps for Taking Ownership This Week
    Sara’s advice for businesses ready to move from chaos to control.
  • 18:08 – Elevating Your Team With AI
    How to future-proof your people and business by blending skills and technology.

Pulled Quotes

“Stop renting your marketing and start owning it. With the right strategy, small businesses can take back control and scale with confidence.”
— Sara Nay

“AI should be used to elevate your team—not replace them. Future-proof your business by blending technology with high-impact human skills.”
— Sara Nay



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John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sara Nay. Sara is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she spent over 15 years helping small businesses build strategy-first marketing systems that actually work. Now being my daughter, Sarah has lived the small business reality from every angle as a teenager, as a team member, as a fractional CMO, and now as the CEO. In her new book,

Unchained, she makes the case that traditional agency model is broken, both for the clients and agencies and lays out a practical AI enabled strategy first approach she calls the anti-agency model. We’re going to touch on that. Permission helps small business owners stop renting their marketing and start owning it. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sara Nay (00:53.858)

Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (00:55.778)

So you and I have been talking about marketing models for a long time. Was there a time when you kind of said, you know what, the agency model is broken and I got to create something different?

Sara Nay (01:06.455)

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been part of the agency space for about 15 years. And in that journey, I’ve moved from intern to community manager, account manager, fractional CMO for our clients among other roles. And so I’ve really been in all the different areas of the agency space. And throughout that journey, there’s definitely been times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite feel right in the agency space. And even further than that,

there have been several moments over the last 15 years where I’ve been burnt out and on the brink of saying, does this make sense to pursue even more, even further? And so I’ve lived a lot of challenges along the way and there’s no secret in the challenges I’ve seen. think a lot of people experience this in the agency space. And so starting on that side, on the agency side of things, there’s challenges with meeting client demands and managing scope creep and scaling and maintaining profitability and

retaining great talent and those are a lot of the things that I’ve heard from other agency owners struggling with, but I’ve also experienced it myself. Also in my roles, I’ve been on in the sales side of our business for a while now. So I’ve spoken with hundreds of small business owners who have worked with different agencies or outsourced solutions over those years. And I have heard all of their stories of

things along the lines of marketing doesn’t work or I’m paying this agency for X and I have no idea if I’m getting results or if anything’s happening with my marketing efforts. And so there’s been a lot of this going on for years in the agency space. But I think it’s becoming more more heightened now with the evolution of AI.

John Jantsch (02:49.518)

So you actually use the term anti-agency model. Now know you’re not an agency hater. so, so what makes this anti or, and not just a better agency.

Sara Nay (03:02.379)

Yeah. So the whole play with the anti-agency model, as you identified, like obviously we’re not anti-agency. We’re an agency ourselves. We have been for 31 years. We love agencies. And so I do keep, I keep explaining that because I don’t want people to think this book is against agencies, but what it’s with the anti-agency, what it’s saying is the model is broken essentially for some of the points that I had highlighted just a second ago. So it’s anti-agency model specifically.

And so the way we have been doing and functioning for years as agencies were being forced in some ways to evolve because of the evolution of AI. so previously to AI, it made sense for agencies to hold onto things like marketing, execution, content, social, SEO, paid ads, all of the execution elements. But with the evolution of AI, I believe small businesses are able to take some of that stuff in-house.

They still need strategic leadership and direction, but they now have an opportunity to stay a little bit more lean with their in-house marketing team by layering in AI systems below them to help with the heavy lifting of execution. And so that’s the whole idea of stop renting your marketing and taking back ownership of your marketing. You still need strategy. You still need direction. You still need leadership.

But now you can build a marketing department or team that is a bit leaner because they’re overseeing orchestration of marketing, which is done by AI systems.

John Jantsch (04:39.086)

So one of the things you and I talk about a lot, cause I say it all the time is I, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years and while a lot of new shiny things have come along, the fundamentals of marketing have not really changed or what we’re here to do as marketers has not really changed that much. What timeless principles do you think from, our system? As you know, it’s still worked today.

Sara Nay (04:59.085)

Yeah. And so that’s the second really section of the book we get into the timeless after the intro and all of that, we get into the timeless principles. And so some of the things that I touch on there are things like target market, identifying your clients on a very deep level. I think that’s becoming even more and more important with the evolution of AI, because what I see is a lot of small businesses bringing in something like a chat, GBT or a clod or whatever their tool of choices. And they’ll start just like,

creating content and so it’s all over the place. It’s not consistent. It’s not on on brand. And so in your original book duct tape marketing, you talked a lot about identifying your ideal client on a deep level, understanding them emotionally, what keeps them up at night, what drives them. And so with the evolution of AI, you still need to understand your clients on a very deep level. But then if you’re going to bring in an AI tool, you then need to train the chat, you’d be to your tool of your choice that you bring in.

on that information. So when you’re creating content moving forward, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal client on a deep level and isn’t just generic. Another timeless foundational principle is core messaging. We talk a lot about that over the years. So identifying your core message or we’ve talked a lot about talking logo as well. And so that’s really identifying what makes you unique, but also what messaging resonates with that ideal client.

That is still incredibly important today, but it’s also important to take that messaging and train your AI tools of choice on that messaging as well. So again, you’re not creating generic content, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal clients with the messaging you’ve identified is really important. And so those foundations are still the same, but the way we’re using them is evolving a bit because of the technology that’s now available.

John Jantsch (06:48.733)

So, you know, we’ve, we’re all seeing people run into AI and just like, look what it can do, makes life faster, better, cheaper. Um, where do you think the danger of this, that like eyes wide open, you know, jump in and start using the tools? What do you think the danger of that is for many small businesses?

Sara Nay (07:07.987)

It complicates things that causes confusion. causes inconsistency. It causes noise. It amplifies the chaos that’s already there. It causes so many issues for the internal team or the team using the program, but also for the clients and prospects that you’re putting out content to as well. And so it’s causing confusion in both of those areas. And so a lot of what I encourage small businesses to do is take a step back.

John Jantsch (07:12.916)

amplifies the chaos that’s already there, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:33.767)

And if you’ve been following duct tape marketing for any period of time, you’ve heard us say strategy before tactics. But it’s now strategy before tactics and technology is the conversation we’re having with clients. And so if you’re thinking about, okay, we need to be using AI tools instead of just diving into tools first, take a step back and answer some very important questions as to what’s the business actually trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy look like based on that?

What’s the team strategy or what’s our current team structure look like? And then you can say, okay, what tools can help us accomplish our goals? And then once you identify what the tools are, you then need to train the tools on your strategy that you would have created to then get to the point where you’re ready to execute on them efficiently. So don’t dive into tools, take a step back, create the strategy, and then answer the question of what tools are gonna help us get from where we are today to where we’re trying to go.

John Jantsch (08:30.936)

So, you know, the fractional CMO plus concept is a big part of our model. what do you tell that small business owner that’s got kind of a smaller budget and it’s thinking, I really just need somebody to do stuff rather than like, you know, I can’t really afford or I, or maybe I’m not big enough to even think about the idea of having fractional leadership. What do you say to that business as to why they need to maybe change their mindset?

Sara Nay (08:55.403)

Yeah, I mean, think, again, I keep going back to AI, but it’s causing small business owners or small businesses an opportunity that we haven’t had before. so, you previously, let’s think of traditional marketing org chart. You would have a CMO in a company and then you would have a lot of different executors under them, essentially. So you’d have like a paid specialist, an email marketing specialist, a social, you know, all of the different channels and categories. That’s never really been feasible to small businesses because

they wouldn’t even have a budget for a CMO, let alone all the other people that are involved in that story. And so I think the best opportunity that small businesses have is right now in terms of the org chart, because you can bring in a fractional CMO. So you’re not paying a full-time salary. You’re paying a set fee every single month. That fractional CMO is then tasked with creating the overall strategy, managing the budget, owning the metrics.

overseeing all of the marketing department essentially. And then under that fractional CMO, believe instead of, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but the direction I believe we’re going is instead of having a specialist in all the different channels, small businesses can have marketing executors that are familiar enough in writing great copy and understanding social media, but they’re really systems oriented and technology first people.

where you can bring in AI systems below them to help them execute at a higher level than they’ve ever been before. And so now you’re getting a marketing org chart with all of these different roles that you previously probably couldn’t even think about affording as a small business.

John Jantsch (10:35.832)

So going back to the theme of renting, mean, the opposite of renting is owning. and so to a large degree, you know, what you’re describing there is kind of that path towards owning your, your marketing, you know, as a business, as opposed to maybe it wasn’t even renting. was abdicating like going here, you do it. I don’t care what you’re doing over there, but how does that change the business owners mindset in terms of.

Sara Nay (10:54.124)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.262)

people in terms of structure, in terms of process, if they’re actually, you know, now they’re going to have those people in their organization or they’re going to have those functions in their organization. Who manages that? How do they hire for that? Are they, are they bringing in more overhead that makes sense for their business if they’re going to start thinking that way, or is this the ultimate path to, truly scaling a business?

Sara Nay (11:16.557)

It obviously depends on the business situation, revenue size, long-term growth goals. And so there’s a lot of factors that I would need to consider to answer that specifically. But for me, if you’re a small business and you’re looking to scale up,

when you’re doing a certain level of revenue, you’ve been in business for a few years, let’s say you’ve passed the 1 million revenue mark, I think it’s time to start considering you need marketing leadership of some extent. And so when small businesses scale up to a certain point, if they haven’t looked for marketing leadership, the CEO becomes the CMO and they either have marketing experience or they learn marketing. And now it’s this necessary evil that

they’re having to spend a lot of their time on where they never wanted to become a CMO in the first place. And so if you’re scaling up and you have high growth goals, looking for someone like a fractional CMO, I think makes a lot of sense because the whole idea is as the CEO or founder, you stay in your zone of genius. You stay focused on the why behind you building the business in the first place. then you… In selling, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:34.798)

or in selling, you know, stuff that actually is going to make money for the business rather than you having to figure out how to manage the technology.

Sara Nay (12:46.121)

Exactly. And then you bring in a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some extent that then is tasked with what you identified earlier in terms of managing team, bringing in partners or hiring full-time team, running the technology, building the systems and processes, running the budget and the metrics. so the fractional CMO is really tasked with leading the marketing department and working alongside you to help you reach the specific business goals that you would have laid out.

John Jantsch (13:15.566)

You know, if somebody, whoever you’re working with is going to bring you strategy first, you know, as the first step, it doesn’t really matter what you call that person, right? What their role is, right? I mean, it’s really more the idea of thinking strategy first, isn’t

Sara Nay (13:21.901)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:31.137)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll throw out all different terms. I mean, we talk a lot about fractional CMO, but if that feels like too elevated of a term, know, marketing leader, marketing strategist, marketing advisor, you know, the point is what they’re doing. They’re, leading the marketing initiatives and not just being an order taker.

John Jantsch (13:51.672)

So let’s flip to agencies that are listening, because I know we have agencies listening as well. How do they have to shift their mindset to really stay relevant? mean, I think in some agency, you look at some of these agencies that are providing SEO and content and social media, that’s their package, right, of done for you services. There might be a time in the very near future where that’s just not that relevant.

Sara Nay (14:19.372)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.423)

or people aren’t going to be willing to pay what you need to run a profitable business. So how do agencies need to shift their mindset?

Sara Nay (14:26.705)

Yeah, and there’s been a lot of stuff coming out there that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and different articles about how many agencies are going to shut down in the next few years. I think a lot of that stuff’s hard to predict, but I do think if you just keep offering execution, it’s a race to the bottom in a lot of cases because small businesses, even if they’re not doing it that effectively yet, they are bringing in AI solutions to cut costs in certain areas. And I think that marketing execution is one of those.

areas. And so, you know, I think if agencies keep offering execution as their core services, it’s going to be very challenging in the next few years moving forward, because AI is becoming more sophisticated. So you’re basically competing against AI in that scenario versus if agencies shift their offering and they step more into this leadership role, where they’re, you know, focusing on strategy.

they’re elevating team, it can be their own team or it can be internal team, but they’re elevating humans essentially with AI systems below them. Then they’re working alongside AI versus competing against it.

John Jantsch (15:35.64)

So if I’m a small business owner listening and.

Obviously picking up and reading the book is going to be step one. But what are a couple steps towards taking this ownership mentality that somebody could start this week? If you’re stuck in the old kind of way of thinking, here are a couple things you can do this week to start changing your mindset or maybe even changing your marketing.

Sara Nay (16:06.165)

Yeah, of course. There’s two things that come to mind right off the bat. One of the first things, and I talk about this in the book as well, is the marketing strategy pyramid. We talk a lot about it at Duck Tape Marketing, but it’s really taking a step back and answering some business strategic questions first. So really analyzing what are your business goals? What are your objectives? What’s your revenue? Where are you growing towards? What are your mission, vision, values? And so really analyzing some of those things.

And then thinking through what is your marketing strategy to help you move in the right direction. And then thinking through what is your team strategy. So you have to have those two bottom layers of the pyramid first to then think about team. But, know, to the question of how can businesses take back ownership when you’re analyzing your team structure, think through like, these internal roles? Are we relying on outsourced vendors? If we’re relying on outside outsourced vendors or solutions.

Do we have clarity and confidence and control or ownership as to what they are doing or are we kind of left in the dark? I if you’re left in the dark through some of your partnerships, that’s when it’s time to analyze, does it make sense to continue on with this partnership or is there a way where we can get more ownership and control? So that’s where I would start is kind of going back to the basics there and analyzing your current structure, your current relationships, your current team.

and making sure that you have clarity in what everyone is doing.

John Jantsch (17:35.672)

So I’m going to go a little in the weeds here on AI, mainly because it’s on everybody’s mind right now. There are a lot of some of these agencies that we’re talking about are shifting their whole model to being calling themselves AI agencies, where they want to come in and show you how to put in agents and how to automated this and automated that. How do you think small businesses should be looking at?

Sara Nay (17:51.703)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:02.806)

I mean, I don’t think we have to convince them that it’s not going away, but how do you think they should be looking at getting the most out of AI as really the end to end solution or the end to end assistant at this point that it can be rather than just looking at it as, here’s how I can automate stuff and or worse yet, here’s how I can fire people and do more with less.

Sara Nay (18:08.909)

Yeah, a big part of that I think is doing an analysis of who’s currently on your team and you’re not asking the question.

How can we get more work out of them or how can we get them to move faster or be more productive? What you’re answering is how can we elevate them to make more of an impact? And so one of the exercises that we’ve done with our team fairly recently, and this is also in the book as well, is we had everyone on our team analyze what skills are they doing on a regular basis. And then we basically had them identify what are human-led skills that they should continue to focus on, things that light them up, that they love.

And then we also had them identify what skills can be AI assisted and what skills and tasks could be executed by AI. And so we went through that exercise so people could essentially analyze their roles and think about how they could future proof their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s a really great exercise for anyone listening as a business leader or for your whole entire team is you should all be thinking about how can we future proof the business as a whole.

And that’s a lot of what you and I talk about when we talk about shifting our model in a new direction. But you also need to be considering everyone on your team. How can you help them elevate with AI instead of be replaced by it? And then how can you help them continue to grow and focus on the skills that are becoming more important because of the evolution of AI?

John Jantsch (19:54.414)

talking with Sarah Ney, the author of Unchained. Sarah, I appreciate you spending a few moments to talk about Unchained. Is there a place that you’d invite people to go to find out more about the work you do, of course, but then also the new book?

Sara Nay (20:08.269)

Absolutely, so unchainedmodel.com is the book’s website, so love for you to check that out and also connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sarah Ney.

John Jantsch (20:18.23)

Awesome, well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the

Sara Nay (20:24.589)

Thank you.


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Do This Instead: How to Adapt Your Marketing to the AI-Shaped Buyer Journey

Do This Instead: How to Adapt Your Marketing to the AI-Shaped Buyer Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

TL;DR

AI has fundamentally altered how buyers discover, evaluate, and choose solutions. The marketing funnel is no longer a straight line — it’s an ongoing conversation between the buyer and AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot.

The Duct Tape Marketing System still works — it just needs to evolve. The Strategy Before Tactics principle still applies. The Marketing Hourglass still maps the journey. And Total Online Presence is more important than ever. What changes is how we execute inside those frameworks.

Here are 8 shifts — rooted in DTM thinking — to keep your marketing relevant and visible in an AI-driven world.

The AI-Shaped Buyer Journey Explained

Buyers used to move through predictable stages — Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, Refer — interacting directly with your content, ads, and sales team.

Today, AI has inserted itself into every stage of the Hourglass:

  • Know: Buyers start with AI search, not Google, and may never see your site.
  • Like: AI presents reviews, testimonials, and “best of” lists.
  • Trust: AI agents recommend experts based on authority signals.
  • Try/Buy: AI surfaces options and even negotiates packages.
  • Repeat/Refer: AI still influences ongoing loyalty by suggesting alternatives.

DTM takeaway: The frameworks still apply — but now we must market to humans and algorithms equally.

Shift #1 – Make Your Website AI-Ready

DTM Principle: Total Online Presence begins with your hub site.

How to do it:

  • Answer-First Pages: Identify top 10 buyer questions, open each page with a 2–3 sentence direct answer.
  • Schema Markup: Add FAQ, HowTo, and Article schema using RankMath or Merkle’s Schema Generator. Test with Google’s Rich Results Test.
  • Answer Hubs: Group related FAQs into one page with H2 headings and concise answers (<50 words).
  • Trust Signals: Include author bios, credentials, last updated dates, and citations.

Shift #2 – SEO for “Answer Authority”

DTM Principle: Strategy Before Tactics — your expertise must be positioned clearly before you optimize.

How to do it:

  • Map buyer intent to the Hourglass stages (Awareness, Consideration, Decision).
  • Create hub-and-spoke content: hub page + supporting subtopic pages linking back.
  • Include your unique methodology/core difference in all content.
  • Cite reputable sources to boost authority signals.

Shift #3 – Content for Humans and AI

DTM Principle: Content as the Voice of Strategy.

How to do it:

  • Write in dual layers: human storytelling and AI-friendly facts/definitions.
  • Include a Q&A section with concise answers (<50 words).
  • Build an industry glossary with plain language definitions.
  • Use structured formats like lists, tables, and comparison charts.

Shift #4 – AI-Native Lead Generation

DTM Principle: Lead Generation Trio — content, referrals, advertising — now adapted for AI ecosystems.

How to do it:

  • Create mini-AI tools (custom GPTs, calculators, quizzes).
  • Ungate flagship resources so AI can access them, adding CTAs for conversion.
  • Build interactive workflows (quiz → personalized plan).

Shift #5 – Multi-Platform, Keyword-Rich Reviews

DTM Principle: Referrals are marketing fuel — now amplified through AI search.

How to do it:

  • Be present on at least 3 review platforms (Google, LinkedIn, niche sites).
  • Coach clients to use service-specific keywords in reviews.
  • Automate review collection with tools like GatherUp or NiceJob.

Shift #6 – Nurturing Through AI Prompts

DTM Principle: Marketing Hourglass — Trust and Try happen through repeated exposure.

How to do it:

  • Create “Best For” positioning pages.
  • Publish “vs competitor” comparison content.
  • Refresh site content quarterly to prevent outdated AI references.

Shift #7 – Competitive Positioning in AI Training Data

DTM Principle: Total Online Presence — be everywhere your ideal client looks.

How to do it:

  • Get quoted in authoritative media (HARO, Qwoted).
  • Guest on podcasts/webinars — AI scrapes transcripts.
  • Contribute to public research or industry reports.

Shift #8 – Measuring Your AI Share of Voice

DTM Principle: Scorecard — measure what matters and optimize relentlessly.

How to do it:

  • Test prompts in AI tools monthly to check brand presence.
  • Track AI mentions using Brand24 or Perplexity analytics.
  • Maintain a monthly AI Visibility Scorecard.

Conclusion & Next Steps

AI isn’t replacing the Duct Tape Marketing System — it’s amplifying the need for it. Your strategy is still the driver. Your Hourglass still guides the buyer journey. But now, your execution must ensure both buyers and algorithms know, like, and trust you.

Next 90 Days Action Plan:

  • Build one AI-ready Answer Hub.
  • Diversify reviews to 3+ platforms.
  • Publish one “Best For” positioning page.
  • Secure at least one earned media placement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AI Share of Voice?

AI Share of Voice measures how often your brand is mentioned or recommended in AI-generated search results compared to competitors.

How does AI change SEO?

SEO now needs to focus on being the most credible, citable source for AI summaries, not just ranking on Google’s page one.

Do I still need a blog if AI summarizes my content?

Yes — your blog is still the core way to establish authority, provide fresh information, and feed AI assistants structured, trustworthy answers.

Can small businesses compete in AI search?

Absolutely. AI rewards specificity and expertise, which means focused niche businesses can outrank bigger brands in AI recommendations.

Is Traditional Marketing Dead? Why Strategy Wins in the Age of AI

Is Traditional Marketing Dead? Why Strategy Wins in the Age of AI written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Over the past 15 years, I’ve watched marketing evolve in ways we never could’ve imagined. When I started as an intern at Duct Tape Marketing, the name of the game was execution. Do the work. Deliver the thing. Check the box.

Back then, success meant staying busy. Creating deliverables, managing campaigns, launching tactics. And honestly, that model served us well for a while.

But today, things are different. That model is breaking.

AI Has Changed the Game

The rise of AI hasn’t just changed how we work. It’s completely shifted the value we bring as marketers.

Small businesses now have access to tools that can write content, analyze performance, and even build marketing assets in seconds. What used to take a whole team and several days can now be done with a few well-written prompts. The result? Execution has become a commodity.

Doing the work isn’t enough anymore. Simply checking boxes doesn’t move the needle the way it used to.

It’s Time to Evolve

This is our wake-up call. As marketers, consultants, and agency leaders, we have to stop viewing ourselves as taskmasters. Instead, we need to step into the role of guide and strategist.

Our clients don’t just need help with content calendars and SEO reports. They need someone who can help them make smarter decisions, implement the right tools, and build systems that actually scale.

Start With Strategy

Every successful marketing system I’ve helped build starts in the same place: strategy.

We use a simple but powerful three-tiered approach I call the Strategy Pyramid:

  • Business Strategy: What are your goals? Where are you headed?
  • Marketing Strategy: Who are you trying to reach? What are you offering, and how are you positioning it?
  • Team Strategy: Who is responsible for what? What tools and systems will support this plan?

Too many businesses skip this part. They dive straight into tactics like running ads, setting up email automations, and posting on social. But without clear strategic direction, those tactics rarely lead to the results they want.

AI doesn’t fix that problem. In fact, it makes it worse. When you automate without clarity, you’re just moving faster in the wrong direction.

Why Simple Wins

One of the biggest changes I’ve embraced in recent years is simplifying the marketing process.

Forget those bloated 12-month marketing plans. Instead, we work in 30 to 45-day sprints. It’s long enough to make progress, short enough to pivot if needed. It keeps teams focused, aligned, and moving with intention.

And when it comes to AI, simplicity matters even more. You don’t need to jump into every new tool that hits the market. Start with one. Get a quick win. Let your team see the impact. Then grow from there.

That’s how you build momentum. Not through complexity, but through clarity and consistency.

AI is Only as Good as Your Strategy

Yes, AI is powerful. Tools like ChatGPT have changed the way we think about creativity, speed, and productivity. But tools are just that — tools. They only work well if you have a solid foundation underneath them.

That’s why I’m so excited about platforms like Ella from Atomic Elevator. Ella is a marketing operating system that helps businesses build strategic marketing systems while staying true to their brand voice. It removes the need for fancy prompt engineering and brings structure to how content and strategy come together.

This kind of innovation gives small businesses the ability to compete with larger brands and gives agencies a smarter way to scale without burning out.

Your Team Isn’t Being Replaced. They’re Being Reimagined.

Here’s the truth: AI is not here to replace your team. It’s here to elevate them.

But in order to do that, we have to change how we think about marketing roles. It’s not just about executing tasks anymore. It’s about bringing empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking to the table. Those are the skills that will set marketers apart.

When I talk to business owners, the most common question I hear is, “Where do I even start with AI?”

My answer is always the same: Start small. Start smart. You don’t need a full AI tech stack overnight. Choose one tool. Build one system around it. Measure the outcome. Then expand from there.

That’s how you go from overwhelmed to empowered.

Are You Ready to Lead?

The truth is, traditional marketing isn’t dead. But it is evolving. And if you want to keep up, it’s time to shift.

If you’re ready to stop chasing tactics and start leading with strategy…
If you want to embrace AI without losing your voice or your vision…
If you’re looking to build systems that grow with you, not ones that burn you out…

Then let’s talk.

And check out my episode with Ellie McIntyre on the Conversion Zoo Podcast for more insights on where marketing is headed next.