The Undeniable Leader with Rob Cressy

Everyone Is Talking About AI But Nobody Has Receipts

• Rob Cressy

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Everyone is talking about AI. Almost nobody has the receipts to back it up. In this episode of The Undeniable Leader, Rob Cressy breaks down the growing gap between AI potential and AI results, shares a real conversation with a marketing agency owner about why expertise is the new competitive advantage, and makes the case for why agentic AI is the biggest opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to get in the game right now.

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What's good? It's Rob. If you vibe with this show and you're a high performer who has a standard of personal excellence, the biggest thing that you can do to help us out is to share this with a friend who needs to hear this. Whether you text them or you just share this on social media, that's how this show grows and it helps others at the same time. We really appreciate this. Enjoy the show. Every day you open up LinkedIn and Twitter and you see another post or video about look at what AI just did. But when you ask people to actually show you what they've built and how they're using AI, you hear a lot of silence because there's a massive gap right now between AI potential and AI receipts. And that gap right there is exactly where the opportunity lives. And I've been using AI every day for three years in a row, building my business, coaching entrepreneurs, and having real conversations with the business owners about how we can integrate this in a human-first way. And right now, as I speak on February 20th, 2026, we are in a defining moment and this game is ship, or this game is changing fast. What I want to do is share three things that I'm seeing right now that every leader needs to hear about AI and the market. And let's start with this. Number one, potential verse receipts. And a lot of people are talking about look at what AI can do. Just before this, I was eating breakfast, and one of the things that I do is I've got a list that I have on Twitter that is just AI, the best CEOs, companies, thought leaders, influencers there, so that I can stay on top of the market and see the innovation in real time. It's such a simple habit. If you want access to this Twitter list, just shoot me a DM at Rob Cressy, I'll send it to you. It'll absolutely change your business. And one of the things that I noticed this morning is how many videos or tweets that were out there of look at what AI can do, look at what AI can do, look at what AI can do. But what I don't see is look at what I did with AI. Look at how I am growing my business right now. And there's a real big difference between potential and receipts. And earlier this week, I did a quick little post on Facebook that said the biggest reason right now that people aren't growing with AI is that they're just not doing the work. But on the flip side, those of us who are all in with AI, we are operating at a frenetic pace in the way that we're working. We are working super fast. We're all in, and we're also creating the output of 10 people, right? So look at the difference between that. And I saw this week there's a really good analogy of what's happening, and it's coming from the world of finance, and it's the letter K. And if you look at the letter K, we've got the one angle going up in one direction. Those of us who are using AI andor agentic AI, we are just literally growing up and big to the side. And on the flip side, those people who are just talking about it or doing nothing, they're the bottom part of the K, that K that's going down there. And as you can see, this is where the exponential gap gets created. Because using AI and doing so at a high level, this all-in-pace, not that dabbling energy, it's not a 2x, it's not a 5x multiplier. This is a 100x plus multiplier. So when you hear someone like me share this enthusiasm about AI, I don't particularly give a crap about AI, right? I'm a business owner. I want to turn a dollar into a dollar fifty. And at the same time, I'm completely aware that this is changing the next decade of business, and I want in on this exponential game, right? So I've got a very unromantic relationship about all of this. But it's so simple for me, and that's what I want to share with everybody in terms of the framing for how to grow in the AI era. And it's just potential versus receipts. And if you do not have any receipts, then just use your growth mindset and say, Why do I not have any? I have not done the work. Why have I not done the work? Because I don't know what to do. What do you do when you don't know how to do something? You learn something. Well, where do I learn it? You listen to a podcast, you watch a video, you read a book, you self-educate yourself, or you work with a coach, or you join a program, you do something. This is not hard. This is growth mindset 101. But I can tell you from doing workshops, keynotes, speaking in front of rooms of hundreds of people when I ask questions on who is currently doing dot dot dot in the world of AI. Raise your hand. You know how many hands are going up? Like none, right? And this is like the basic level stuff because anybody can just pick up the phone and start using the free version of Chat GBT and create an opinion of what they think AI is. So that's their version of a receipt versus this all in nature. And this doesn't mean that we're wearing AI t-shirts, being like, oh my god, I love AI so much. No, this is all around the way that we leverage this as a tool. All right, let's move to number two. Uh, this morning I had a conversation with a friend where this came out of the blue. He called me on the phone as I am uh dropping my son off at preschool this morning, and he runs a marketing agency, among other things. And he saw a post that I did this week that said um AI is a better marketer than humans, and you can replace your marketing agency. So uh he was like, Hey Rob, I commented on that, and I wanted to make sure that you didn't take it the wrong way because I love your content. I totally agree with everything that you usually say, but I did not agree with this. And I really respected him giving me a call out of the blue. And this is not somebody that we talk on the phone ever, right? But when I saw his name, it lit me up. I was like, I don't know what's on the other side of this, but sign me up for this. And we then had a 15-minute conversation. I wanted to share some of this, and I'm also gonna send this to him. Shout out to my boy Dan, um, because he inspired this because there's a really good conversation here, and it's gonna be a yes and to the potential versus the receipt side of things. So when you look at the way that AI is um has potential when it comes to marketing or marketing agencies, it can build websites, build automation sequences, landing pages, PDFs, it can do SEO, which is now now called AEO. It can pretty much do anything that you can imagine. But the difference is you've got to be able to ship the work, and you also need the subject matter expertise to be able to know what to put in there. So while it would be easy to say you can replace your marketing agency, what I said to Dan was while I hear that, here's what I want you to say to anyone who's like, I'm just gonna have AI do this instead of working with you guys. Because number one, as I said in point one, most people aren't gonna do the work, right? Go ahead, be my guest, go ahead and do this yourself. But I've got three years of receipts of people not doing it. So even though we see the world saying AI, AI, AI, I'm telling you from the top of the food chain, 99% of people in businesses are not doing it. They just are not. So let that create a little peace for you. So if they want to go and not do AI and live in the potential, by all means, they're not the client for you because they're not what I call a diamond, right? A diamond is someone who's like, boom, love what you're doing. I want to work with you. Here's the payment, it's easy to work. Boom, shaka lock. This is how we get down. That's not a diamond. Because the next thing becomes as a marketing agency, now that you understand you can create uh marketing and content and automation, in emails, in everything that you want. Better, easier, faster. What is the big value add for you? Is you know what to put in there to make it even better, right? Because there's levels to this game and there's a difference between generic prompts, create me a website, write me a marketing email automation sequence, and noticing the nuances of the language, right? Lead with a hook, make sure to end with a CTA. Let's put in your brand voice, right? Let's sequence this out by days, right? Because that's the big, one of the big gaps that's out there. AI is completely unromantic about who you are, how much money you make, what you do for your business, what your background was, right? So if you're having a terrible day, you can use AI. If you're having the best day of your life, you can use AI. If things are just middle of the road, you can use AI. It is completely unromantic there. And I even had this conversation over the weekend. Someone was like, Well, couldn't you just give AI to somebody who's flipping burgers at McDonald's? Yes, you could. And the opportunity for them to change their life is exponential. But the challenge is that person likely doesn't have the growth mindset or the knowledge of what to put in there to be able to create themselves out of that situation. Of course, the only thing they would actually need to do is read and learn a little bit. But as someone who did not have a growth mindset or self-awareness for the first 30 years of my life, nobody ever taught this to me. I understand this because I was that person for 30 years. I never thought about reading books or investing in my personal growth and development. So I couldn't expect somebody at McDonald's to do that unless they were exposed to someone like me in this content here. So for marketing agencies, the optimism that I would give in side note, I ran a sports marketing agency for a decade. I've got a marketing background and I'm a world-class marketer who understands everything with marketing. So I'm equipped to have this conversation. The value add is if you want to work with the best, we are the best. And we also use AI to do it better, faster, easier. And we can create something that you cannot do on your own, right? Because you know what to put in there. And then as a marketing agency, the key becomes what's that term again? Show me your receipts, right? Because it was, I think it was a year ago, and I even did a podcast on this for anyone to anyone who wants to go back and uh listen to this, where I randomly cold called a marketing agency in Sarasota, and I was like, I'm just curious if they're using Chat GBT at all. And I called them in the front desk lady, I was like, hey, um, I see you guys are a marketing agency and you're doing SEO and digital marketing stuff. I'm curious, are you guys using Chat GBT or AI at all? And she's like, No, we're not using it at all. And I was like, Well, cool. That's something that I would love to at least uh share some stuff and help you guys with because I truly feel an obligation and a responsibility to help. And the lady's like, Well, the woman who's in charge of this is she's going on vacation and this isn't something that we really do, and she's gonna be gone for a few weeks. So if you can just sort of call back in a month, and I sat there and I was like, This is unbelievable. Here's a marketing agency in Sarasota who not only doesn't use AI, but the person who has the key to the next level of their business for the next decade showed up at their front door willing to help and they pushed me away. And that's where I created the podcast. Um, falling behind with AI is going to be invisible. And those who don't know aren't even gonna see it coming. So I shared that all of this actually as optimism because part of being an undeniable leader is doing the work and being the example, and in the AI era, it is not, oh my god, I don't know what to do. That becomes a new world to play in. Which brings me to number three, agentic AI. And this is gonna be some top of the food chain stuff just to plant some seeds in for you. And in 2025, the word on the street was it was going to be the year of the AI agent. So when I was doing my coaching and my programs and the content I'm consuming, I'm preparing for agentic AI. And agentic AI, the simple way to think of this is digital labor. It's like having um an assistant or an intern or a virtual assistant that's always working for you. And it's doing stuff autonomously, where it can not only just uh give you a response, it can actually go and do it. And as you can imagine, this is where the thousand X multiple comes in, to where you can start building a business where you have automation and processes and systems that are running that AI is doing them for you, right? So it sounds very attractive, but once again, over the last since I started in AI three plus years ago, agencai has been a lot of potential, not receipts. And how do I know? Because I'm somebody who's learning every single day in this world, and as I continue to audit everything, I'm just not seeing many receipts. Because if there were, I'd be doing it or I would be learning it. But welcome to 2026. Because now for the first time, we are starting to see receipts. So in the last month, right? So literally just end of January to where we are, the mid to end of February right here, there's been two platforms that have come into my world that are so important that I'm doing a podcast right now to share them with you. And number one is Manus, M-A-N-U-S, and number two is Claude Code, which is built into Claude. So, with this, one of the things that makes me world class is I learn from world-class people. So, one of my mentors is Dan Martell, who wrote the book Buy Back Your Time. Highly recommend you go and read Buy Back Your Time if you've never done so before, andor follow Dan on Instagram. Because if you did nothing but follow Dan on Instagram, you will gain so much knowledge in the world of business and AI. And of course, if you're not already, follow me on Instagram at Rob Cressy because every day I'm sharing AI and Chat GBT insights and prompting insights to help you be better at all that you're doing. And Dan did a call about a month ago where he talked about manus, and essentially he said, for all of us on this call, and there's 450 of us, it is a non-negotiable that you start learning and using manus, right? So now I'm gonna take what my mentor Ed Milette taught us, implement at the speed of instruction. Because so many times in my life, I had to hear something 10, 20, 50 times before I implemented it. Um, meditation was one, um, stretching was one, one of those things where you're like, oh, I know this is good, I know it's good, but you just keep not doing it, right? So, how about we shrink our dispersion here and we actually implement this? So, Dan, who runs an AI venture studio, among other things, is like, this is a non-negotiable that everybody on this call uses manus. So much so that the next day, one of his team members emailed everybody in the program again saying, it's a non-negotiable that you are using manus for this. And on a call this past Monday, once again, Dan said, This is a non-negotiable that you start using this, right? Three different times, it's a non-negotiable. Well, why in the world are we paying attention? Because Meta, aka Facebook, recently purchased um Mis for like a bad trillion dollars, right? So now one of the big players is integrating agentic AI into what they're doing, and this includes integrating them into their ad platform, and that's just a side note, there, right? Because now this is more about um who they are partnering with, and manis is something that can help you get your feet wet in the world of agentic AI. So, one of the things that I'm always willing to do is be vulnerable and share the true thing of what's going on. So, one month ago, I'm like, cool, I'm sitting here at zero with Manaus. What in the world do I do? And this is the same thing that it's gonna be for you when you listen to this if you've never used it before. Step one, go to uh Manis' website and sign up for their$20 a month program. Why? Because we never use the free version, we always use the paid version. That's part of being a pro, right? And then once you've done that, you're gonna go, all right, well, Rob, what do I do now? Well, one of the keys of growth in the AI era is what do I do now is a trigger for let me open up Chat GBT and ask it what I do to use Manus. So I literally opened up Chat GBT. So I've got Manus on one side, ChatGBT on the other. Hey, ChatGBT, act as Dan Martell, my world-class coach with depth and commentary. I just signed up for Manus, and my mentor said there's a lot of gold here for Agentic AI. It's brand new to me. Help me understand what this is, how it applies to me and my clients. Make this simple and easy for me to understand, and give me five use cases that I can use for my business and include the first one to make this an easy on-ramp so that I can get started today. Boomshock locka. Put that thing in there, Chat GBT starts doing it. So the first thing that I actually built was I looked at my own business and coming off the heels of the Jesse Itzler Built to Speak retreat, which, if you have not listened to the podcast, it is the one immediately before this. It is straight fire. Um, I'm like, all right, let's go and create a speaking opportunities database. Why? Because one of the things that I'm doing is actively getting booked on more stages. So let me see if Manist can go and search the entire internet and find every AI or entrepreneurship or leadership or marketing conference in the world so that I've got a list of them, so then I can go and apply to be one of the keynote speakers there. And legitimately, four minutes later, Manist goes, boom. Not only did it deliver this to me, it delivered it to me in a database that looked like a website where I was like, whoa, I did not even ask it to customize anything, I didn't even tell it to put it into a website. It did. And I was blown away. And once I saw that, I was like, okay, I got it. Because one of the things that I'm always saying to my clients is the more you see, the more you can see. So when people are living in the land of potential, they aren't actually seeing and experiencing for themselves what is possible with AI, which is why they don't have the receipts. So part of this is, and I'm gonna make this super simple for you: step one, get in the game. Step two, go from zero to your first two hours. And then once you've done your first two hours, understand it's probably going to take 20 hours for you to start getting better at whatever that new tool or platform is that you want to learn. But as you do it, it will start to feel easier, there'll be more potential, and the more you see, the more you can see. And guess what? By doing this, certainly with agentic platforms, this is where we start to live in the land of 100x and 1000 X plus. So manus was number one, and number two is Claude Code. So back to that Twitter list of mine, right? So I've got the AI Twitter list, and there's the for you feed. And my Twitter is only two things AI and sports, right? I'm very simple in how I operate. I'm a business owner, I love personal growth and development, I love growing and helping people, and I love sports. Everything else completely out of my purview. News, politics, um, stranger danger. I don't care about any of that stuff. Really? AI and sports. So I'm seeing in both my for you feed as well as my AI feed, Claude code, Claude code, Claude Code. And Claude Code is built into Claude. So if you're listening right now and you're only using one platform, maybe it's Chad GP. Maybe it's Grok, maybe it's Gemini. Cool, it's good that you're in the game. But one of the things I'm gonna recommend is that you add on another tool. And the way that I love to say this is one is none and two is one. And I learned this from Ed Myletton, Andy Frisella, and the RT Syndicate. And this is really about your team. So imagine you have someone on your team doing social media marketing and then they leave. Well, now you had one, and if they leave, you have zero. But if you had a social media person on your team and you have somebody else there, so they're both working on it, if one person leaves, two turns into one and you're still good. The same is true with the AI era in the chat level, because you will see a noticeable difference between Chat GBT and Claude and Gemini. Each one does a little thing differently. And I highly recommend if you're not doing it right now, go and sign up for Claude, do the$20 a month version so that you can have better access to Claude code. And you're gonna go, Rob, I don't know anything about coding. I don't have a tech background, I don't care about any of this stuff. Great, me either. So what I want you to do is welcome to the next game. Because one of the things the AI era is doing is breaking down the barrier to what it takes for you to build something. So your ability to build software and apps and web pages and PDFs and content is as simple as you speaking into your phone or your computer, legitimately. But you just need to be willing to do the hardest part. And once again, what is that hardest part? Go from zero to in the game. All right, I've now signed up for Claude in the paid version. I don't know anything about Claude code, but Rob says it's a thing. Cool. How do I learn Claude code? Let me go on YouTube or ask Rob some recommended things. Cool. I'm gonna watch a video for two hours, and that's exactly what I did. It was a tutorial video on a beginner's guide to Claude Code. Legitimately, this is how I learn, right? The way you turn yourself into an expert is by being somebody who does something, who does the experience, aka who has the receipts. So I went through, and this is last weekend, so this is only six, seven days ago. So I watched the two-hour tutorial, and all along the way, I'm doing what it's sharing. And the first thing that it asked us to do was to do competitive research. And the original example was all around something generic for email marketing. I was like, that's fine for this tutorial, but I want to apply this to me. So I just popped open Chat GBT and said, hey, I'm watching a tutorial on Claud Code. And right now, the example they're giving is about MailChimp and Active Campaign. I want to make this example about myself and my business so that I can actually ship something that's relevant to me. What would this be around? Cool. It does it all around AI enablement for entrepreneurs and teams and businesses. Great. So it goes and does competitive analysis on all of that to understand what the market is saying, what is the pain points, what is the challenges, what is the opportunities. And I was like, wow, this is nice. It put this into a text file document. You open this up and it sourced things from all over the place. Then the next thing we did was now that you've got this competitive analysis, let's turn this into a website. I was like, okay, let's see what's good. And legitimately, three minutes later, this thing created a website that is one of the best websites I've ever seen. Like, and I'm somebody who, for the last 15 years, one of my hallmarks has been investing in your personal brand with your website. I am so, that is just so important for me, right? Is everything you do is a reflection of your brand, and everything you do is an opportunity to create a positive brand interaction. So when I saw this website that talked about the pain points and reframed it this way, I was like, whoa, WordPress is officially on notice. I saw something this week that WordPress might not be around in the next 18 months. Take note of that. Because when I saw this website created in three minutes, I am legitimately going to turn this into my website. So you will see in the next few weeks, I am actually going to do this and show you how I did this because it was that impressive. Then the last the next thing it did was well, now that we've created the website, let's go ahead and create a seven email automation sequence for somebody who comes onto your website, signs up for a lead magnet who wants to um know more about how to better use AI and Chat GBT in a human-first way. To dink, to dink, to dink, to dink, to dink. It leads with a hook, has a CTA, but doesn't do the pitch until email seven. And that was done in one minute. And I was like, whoa. And of course, I already gave it my brand voice and my soul data and who I am for my business. So all of this was on brand. And then the final thing that we did was we created a competitor dashboard. So I then put in there uh six different competitors in the world of AI. Not that I see it as competition, but just understanding what the marketplace is doing. And Claude Code went and built a competitor dashboard that told me who they are, their um unique value proposition, the pricing for what they're doing, their lead magnets, their pain points, uh, what they do well, what they don't do well, where I have an opportunity to be better than them. Is this a low, medium, or high threat competitor? All of this on the first time I've ever done this in the first two hours of using Claude Code. Instantly, I saw a vision of the future. So, what I'm doing right now is sharing with you what I'm actually seeing in the market. Because here's what I know to be true. A year from now, there's gonna be two groups of people those who talk about AI and those who are building with it. And a year from now, the AI landscape is gonna be so much noisier because of agentic AI. There's gonna be more content, more talking, and even more uncertainty. But all of that is irrelevant for those of us who are undeniable leaders because we are those who get in the game, stack ones over zeros every single day, and create from a human first perspective. AI may make things easier in some places, but you've still gotta do the work. And what I want to do is be a champion for you on this journey. That's why I'm sharing this message right now. I believe in you. There is so much potential. You don't need a tech background for this. So here's my rallying cry for you. Take this, whether you want the transcript or the notes that you took, put this into Claude or ChatGBT, learn Claude code, sign up for Manus, and go create yourself some receipts. If this vibes with you, I would love to hear from you. Hit me up on Instagram or LinkedIn at Rob Crassi. Sending tons of love and good vibes away. Here's to having an amazing rest of the day!