Why CEOs Must Use AI Themselves in 2026 | Ryan Kohler on AI Agents & Business

What happens when AI stops being just a chatbot and starts becoming a true digital workforce?

In this episode of the AI Profit Leaders Podcast, Ryan Kohler joins Chris Wiser for a deep conversation on AI leadership, vibe coding, AI agents, business transformation, and the future of work.

Ryan shares his journey from early SEO in 2001 to building and selling a bootstrapped software company with 10,000 clients and 280 employees, just before the launch of ChatGPT. From there, the conversation dives into what most businesses are getting wrong about AI adoption and why leaders must personally get “in the trenches” with AI tools.

Inside this episode:

•  Why CEOs can no longer delegate AI strategy 
•  How employees are secretly becoming 2x–10x more productive with AI 
•  The rise of “vibe coding” and no-code AI creation 
•  Why AI is creating a massive workplace power shift 
•  The difference between using AI tools and building AI capability 
•  How AI agents will transform sales, operations, and customer intelligence 
•  Why businesses are sitting on untapped goldmines of customer data 
•  The future of AI-powered teams, workflows, and decision-making 
•  Why this AI wave feels far bigger than the internet boom 

Ryan also explains how his company, Customer Mind, helps organizations use AI to understand customer conversations, sales calls, and business context at scale.

If you’re an entrepreneur, founder, marketer, sales leader, or creator trying to understand where AI is headed next, this episode is packed with practical insights and future-focused thinking.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

All right, good to see you guys. Welcome to the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. I am Chris Weiser, your host, here with an awesome new guest. It's pleased to meet you, Sir Ryan Kohler, founder CEO of Customer Mind. Good to see you, man. First time meeting you. Yeah. Utah resident, you told me, right? Utah resident, yeah. Southern Utah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we're gonna get right. It's gonna be awesome AI stuff today. So I'm pumped about this.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Yeah, super interesting story. Like a recovering accountant, studied accounting in college. You poor thing. Got an MBA, like got this lucky hit of like getting an accounting job at an early learning management company. And we're like early, like shipping VHS, just barely getting into like we had to send you DVDs to just like stream the video. And saw that and went, I should get into SEO. Left, gone to SEO. Somebody asked.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

When was this?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

This would have been 2001. Okay. So this was easy days of Google. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

So I started I started my own company in 2000. So at the right same day, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

There's it's it's a great correlation to AI because like that same time period, like the the world was new. You were getting laughed at. Yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. Nobody knew what we were doing, like a massive market of business owners who had no clue how the internet worked, no clue how marketing worked. And so, you know, very similar to AI, where huge demand, they knew it was important, but very uneducated buyer base.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

And so, yeah, jumped into it. Somebody asked us to build some irene software, and I bootstrapped from gosh, I put 40 grand in, bootstrapped to 10,000 clients, 280 employees, 80% mom. So the majority of the company was all all the sales reps came out of customer support, trained them. And so just happened to sell and step down a month before Chat GPT came out and had two-year non-compute, non-solicit, nothing to do with my hands. Sat around and went to play.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Just like, what would I do? So when was that?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

When was that?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

That would have been uh gosh, the month before it came out, October, what, 2022?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Sounds about right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Yeah, yeah, 2023, I think. Yeah. And so right before it came out, I'd seen like Jarvis or Jasper, whatever they were calling it, and just didn't get it.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

I think it was, I think it was Jasper. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Yeah, they they started with Jarvis and got threatened. Got yelled at it. Switched it to Jasper. I'd seen it and I was like, I don't, I don't quite get this. Yeah. And then yeah, picked up my son from middle school one day and he's like, Hey dad, have you seen Chat GPT? We were talking about in school. Wow. And like literally 8,000 hours later, of if I was filling the blank, you know, an HR person, a teacher, a professor, a salesperson, how would I use this tool? And more importantly, like, how would I get it to work better? Because that was the the big, the big unlock was like, hey, why are you waiting for this tool to get better? I bet I could make it better. I bet I could change the way I'm, you know, better prompting and better context and all that kind of stuff. That I think is where most of corporate America is getting lost right now, thinking it will get better instead of I could get better.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Yeah, and we were kind of talking green room time, just how so many companies are really missing the mark with strategy and planning. And, you know, you you mentioned a thing to me about, you know, imagine letting your sales reps run that show, etc.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Can you can we talk through that? Yeah, well, I mean, it's it's honestly kind of like the wild west. Think about like this is the first time we've had a technology come out that literally like flatten the organization from an understanding standpoint. The receptionist might actually know more about ChatGPT than the CEO. The the blind is kind of blind leading the blind.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

That's really well said, too, because you're you're right. And you know, it's interesting because there's and uh we we didn't know much about each other coming into today, but I told you earlier that I come from the IT services world, and we're watching MSP clients that we have deal with their their clients that are law like big law firms, like saying, Nope, we're getting rid of it, we're removing it, and because they're threatened, right? And so, you know, we were talking a little bit about that ahead of time too, and it's very interesting because they're threatened, but the staff is all trying to use it maybe partially because they're worried about being replaced, but I think it's more they're like excited and anticipating like what might I want to do better, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, it is the most this has gotta be the most confusing time on earth to be an employee. I mean, to be anybody, but especially as an employee, if you think about it, if one of your employees woke up tomorrow and unlocked the an Iron Man suit, like they figured out a real Iron Man suit, like literally, they have almost no incentive to tell you. Just think about that one right there. Hey, if I show up and I say, hey boss, like so. I reworked the process you probably built, you might freak out on them. Be like, what? Why don't you just do what you're supposed to do? And secondly, you'll just give them more work, not more pay. So there's this really weird thing of like they went and they used their own ChatGPT accounts because you didn't provide them to them, probably leaking all kinds of stuff. Yep, they figured out they needed to upgrade, so they're paying it out of their pocket. So at this point, if an employee has figured out how to become twice as effective, they kind of feel like that was their learning, yeah, their asset. Yep. But if they say it out loud, they might get in trouble for putting the wrong stuff in, they might get pushback for it, they might just be given more work. You might take their stuff, share it with the rest of the team, lay people lay half the people off. Yeah, like there's just no.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yeah, their mindset's all, man, it's a really good point because there once people start to get into it. I mean, you're still gonna have your run-of-the-mill normal worker bees, I guess, right? But then you get some people that start to get that excitement and they start to understand, I've watched this happen. And and then they're dealing with, oh, I just created this, but I did it underneath your watch, so now I don't own this anymore, and it's your intellectual property, and now I'm kind of screwed. So, like you said, there's zero incentive for them to go talk to you about it, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Or or the flip side, if they quit, if they quit because you let them use their ChatGPT account, like you don't have any access to their work product. But yeah, and the day, and there's these really cool things. If they uncrack, so we're doing a lot of training right now on vibe coding, but not like to build a SaaS company, like to do a data analysis platform or to build a little dashboard or a calculator. Somebody uncracks that one, it is the most like awe-inspiring thing to them is like, holy shit, I can build stuff.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Yeah, that's funny because I've I'm that guy. Yeah, like I've never been a coder. And I had a very similar conversation. I have a dev team, I have a whole dev team, and I got a guy that runs my dev team, and I sat down with him, and I've been up his backside for nine months now, saying you need to like, and he's not super coder guy, like he's more the project manager and the leader of the whole team, and I've been really on him to say, like, let's really AI first, because I'm an AI first guy. Our whole company's that way. We have a policy, we have a company issued Gemini Pro, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I went to him and I said, Hey, here's where we sit nine months ago. And I've now cracked the vibe coding code myself. So I've figured out stuff, I'm making things, and I'm making things in minutes, and I'm teaching my team how to do that and all this other stuff. And it's kind of you don't want to be the CEO doing that, but still, somebody like you want to be the leader.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah, but here's the thing if the CEO isn't doing that, let's let's say that the CEO has no clue what vibe coding is, they have no clue how to use, say, like not just ChatGPT, but especially as we get into agentic stuff. Yeah, I'm a claude guy at this point. How do they set the vision for their team? I mean, this is this is like saying that, like uh, you know, somebody leading you into war has never actually been there. So there is like as CEOs, as CEOs, we feel like, hey, we gotta hire a really smart team and get out of the way and they'll figure it all out, and that's our job, and we don't want to micromanage them. But not when Iron Man suits enter the marketplace. That's a good point. Not when this really valid point, wildly disruptive technology that's going to not just make your team look, if you want, if you want your team to be 20 or 30% better, sure, let them figure that stuff out. But if you want your team to have 10x capabilities, exponentially, that is rethinking your business model and your process. And there's very little chance that a team is going to lead and go headstrong into that.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yeah, they're gonna do that.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Their risk profile is so different than yours as a leader.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

And so if you're not out there going, hey, I'm gonna jump over here and show you. Thank you, Ryan. Every organization that I know that is killing it with agentic AI has leaders who are willing to show their screen and show what they do with it first. Be so that their team goes, Oh, okay, this is what experimentation looks like.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

That's hilarious because that's literally what I've been doing. You see Maria out here. Yeah, we literally she was confused about a bunch of stuff, and I literally shared my screen and showed her what I built this week, and she was like, You can do that.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

So yeah, just think about this one thing. How many people have not seen somebody else use AI? Meaning they're trapped in their chat.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Their version of it is Chat GPT, right? That's what they think.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

It's a prompt. Yeah, and and their chat GPT is responding completely different than mine and yours is, let alone having never seen somebody use lovable replic, manus, something like that. Yeah, yeah. So if you want the one unlock as a leader, like walk into your next meeting and say, hey everybody, we're gonna stop right here real quick. We're gonna go around the room. What's the coolest or craziest shit you did with AI this week? We're gonna pick one, show your screen and go first. Be like, look, I did this, here's how it works, here's where it drifted, here's how I fixed it or how I iterated. And you will see that one switch that brings it out in the open. Yeah. Where everybody's sharing what they're doing with it. Instantly you'll have a 5x on context of what's possible. Because that's what, for most people, that's the very first unlock is I don't know what I don't know. I don't know what it could do. They've never seen what it could do. So you're like, it's a search engine. Yeah, awesome. Yours is a search engine because that's how you use it. Mine creates entire web platforms because that's how I use it. Same tech. Yep. Just a difference in context and then iteration on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Yeah. Really, really good point on that whole thing. So I, you know, I think the lesson from that little mini discussion there is as a leader, it's really good to get in the trenches on some of that stuff because you want to be, you know, I really I really like your reference of the Iron Man suit. Yeah. Because I think we can all relate to that. That's our second Iron Man reference in today, in today's talk.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Well, it's just it's the easiest thing to think about when you go, but wait a second, like we've been given access to this, you could call it a magic wand, for like 20 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Yeah, it's crazy how reasonable it is.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Everybody has the same access. So what will divide those who are killing it from everybody else will be their capability with it, not the tech. So all this like Claude versus OpenAI versus grok, whatever. Everybody I know that's crushing it, just leaving everybody behind, they focused on their side. How good are they with it? How do they think about it? What is their approach?

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Kind of the platform is the platform, whatever that whatever you choose, you go with it.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yeah, all of us had access to Google and websites, but some of us are rich. Yeah. Right? Some of us took SEO to a different level, and it had nothing to do with the tool. It had we all had HubSpot. We were all using the free tools.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Had to do with the way that we iterated and expanded our capabilities. And AI is that on another level.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, and you can not only have it on another, you can do it from anywhere, you can be anyone. Yeah, that's that's that's crazy cool. So man, that's just that's got my brain going because I actually, you know, as a leader, I kind of felt bad. I don't say felt felt bad is maybe not the right word, but I was in this almost conflict internally. Like, I I and you kind of heard me say it, like, I don't know if a CEO should be doing that, but you're really right because I am definitely like that's what is that's the core of what we how did we get here? Like, and you bootstrapped a bigger company than me, but it's the same basic concepts and the same basic stuff. I boots I and and props for bootstrapping everything because I've done all that stuff too. And you know, I've never taken outside money ever.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

AI was is no different today than it was when I was building that. I had the same thing you were saying all the time where I would get like, hey, why are your hands so dirty? Why are your hands so dirty in product? Why are you so dirty in marketing? Why are you doing these things? And you're like, look, the difference between Goliath and a big company where they are far removed from the customer and a bootstrap disruptor who's coming in to disrupt is almost always that their leadership team is hands dirty with the customer because that's how they sense what's happening. They're not just throwing cash at it because they don't have the cash. Yeah, so they're they're hands deep in it, and it is a constant battle of like, should I be this dirty? Should should I be this engaged with what's going on? And all the great business books are making you feel guilty about it. But if you're if the world was was changing at five percent per year, you could deal with that. But when the world is entering a massive black swan chaotic, five percent a day more than that, more than that at even seems like you just can't expect that your team is gonna follow a leader who uh they know when they get up on stage and start talking about AI, they're like, this guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. Yeah, like nobody follows somebody they don't respect. So what you know we look at as far as you'll hear a lot of leaders go, look, our team's got to learn AI because you know, AI is not gonna replace you. Somebody who's better with AI is gonna replace you. Number one, AI is a hundred percent going to be aimed at replacing workers. But number two, like what is actually going to happen with your best employees is they're gonna figure something out, they're gonna quit their job and go get a new job, making three times more money.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Or they just start their own shit. Yeah, like that's that's probably good.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

Huge like talent leak is gonna happen out of organizations if the leader isn't inspiring, if they're not leading the charge, if they're not there in the trenches with them. So it may be contrary to what everybody else is saying, but every company I know crushing it with AI right now, yeah, has very involved leadership. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

And like I said, I kind of like now I don't I don't feel bad because I I wasn't apologizing to my team on it, but it's just like internally of this conflict. I read the same books you read. Yeah, I've heard the same stuff. Like, how do I get myself in? Unlike you, I didn't go to college, so I have no MBA. So I'm falling back on all the stuff I have to learn. And a lot of it is growth by accident and learning by accident and execution by accident, and it's just that movement, right? You do some stuff, so yeah, I all the things you're talking about are very similar to what we do day to day. And and here in in my brands, we are a completely remote company. I'm like you're sitting in my Austin office, I'm the only one here in Austin. They come in periodically, but it's really interesting how that all works together. So, okay, I want to I want to pivot a little bit here. Jeff, how are we doing on time? We're good, we're good. So I want to pivot a little bit. I want to talk a little, you know, we can talk about AI all we want all day, and we get pretty much unlimited time here. But tell me about customer mind. I want to talk a little bit about where that goes and you know what is your vision for that. And you know, bootstrapped up, did really, really well previously.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Where do we sit now? Yeah, you know, so there's this big challenge. We're we're super hyper-focused on tools, and then we're hyper-focused on prompting, and all that is like table stakes at this point. And the challenge you have is what context are you giving these tools access to? Meaning, like, yeah, yeah, you go in and put in a great prompt, and you go, hey, look, we want to write an email to a BDB founder to talk about AI or whatever the case may be, but that's a very generic focus. And so for us, we look at and go, if we want to really enhance the capability capabilities of our tools. And most importantly, if we want to be able to speak right to a customer, right, like right in their head, like right in their heart, if we want our content to sound like we can read their mind, right? Then we're gonna have to give our AI much more context than that.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

It's got to understand, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, and that means like getting outside of the tools and building a data model that has access to our information, not just data, not just like, oh, in the CRM, you have data, you have all the numbers.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

But I'm talking about it's gotta use somebody else's context, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:50

I'm talking about the context of what your customers are saying on the phone every day. If you think about the greatest, the most highly distributed tool right now, in especially sales, but in the world, is we're recording every single call, right? Almost every organization has 20 transcription tools in there. And if you ask this one question to the average person, you go, hey, cool. So what do you do with those transcripts?

SPEAKER_01 16:13

They're like they don't do anything with them.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

They don't do anything.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

They sit in a repository.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Yeah, they sit in a repository somewhere. Now the organizations, the next step up, are taking those and and grading the sales rep, which is great, giving them feedback. Cool, super great. Think about there's a prospect and a sales rep on the phone and two transcribers, and neither of them get any value from that. We're not we're not using it to write marketing. Marketing doesn't even have access to it. The product team, you know, they try to interview customers to figure out what's in their mind. And yet, here's this stack of transcripts. The the leadership team doesn't have to be.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

And you kind of don't think about it that way. Oh, ridiculous amount of information. I think a lot of people are just assuming, oh, I got my my cloud recorder or my my AI bot in there, my read.ai or whatever you're using is sitting in there. But nobody does anything with the data.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

Nobody does anything with the information, nobody goes and analyzes, especially the customer side of that conversation. You have in there the exact words and phrases that your customers use to describe their challenges, their problems, etc. So, problem number one is we're not looking at it. Problem number two is if we look at this one call, we have no context compare it to. So it's like, it's like you have this super smart assistant taking notes, but you never told them about your organization, your products, whatever. You just say, hey, read this 30-minute blob and guess what the what we're talking about. Yeah. And so that expanding from there and going, wait a second, if we give AI this transcript, but if we also give it context, who we are, what we do, the personas of our clients, like how they think, our NPS scores, our just the more information we can give it to point it to, the more that when it jumps on that call or gets done with it, it's like, ooh, Joe was in this call. I know Joe. He is this type of persona. I know what you guys were talking about because I consumed everything about your product and stuff. And so this, like, the companies that are saying, okay, now we've all got AI, just like we all have powerful employees. But it's like we we bring in these employees, these AI agents, and we go, hey, just listen for a while and maybe you'll figure out what we're talking about. Instead of going, imagine if you did that with an employee. Imagine if every employee you brought in, you're like, Yeah, we don't have a training program, we don't have an orientation program. Like, just listen, and maybe in six months your your brain will figure this out.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Okay, that's you really I mean, that's mostly what sales teams do now, right? So, so what pro like so tell me how I'm just and honestly, this is two two ball dudes sitting here shooting shit. It's kind of fun. How do I apply that to my sales team? And you know, raw company that you know, we record all our calls. Obviously, we're we're doing most of our stuff on either Zoom or Teams, mostly Teams now. Not a huge fan of Teams, but it is and then we do have read.ai, you heard me mention that earlier. And so how do I go into like where does customer mind solve my problem? And I'm you know 20 some million a year. What does that look like for me?

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah, so we start with like, hey, let's build the foundation of what it is that is context, right? Like, let's get the backstory of your company, let's get like the the personas that we target, and not like not weak marketing personas like 30 to six-year-old, whatever, like psychographic personas. Like if you know, if Maslow and Alan Watts got together and we're building the persona of what's inside of you when you're making decisions. Let's build these personas, let's connect them to the products. Like now we can take and consume all of anything we can get access to. Let's take and let's consume all these sales calls and let's tag them into personas and let's let AI massage them and build a giant repository of information that we can now have context to.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

In the same does it is it learning on the fly to kind of do it.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

So you start with like, can you build the foundation of all this knowledge? Cool. Now you have something that when a call comes in, the sales rep, like the very first easiest thing. Sales rep has a call scheduled on their calendar tomorrow. It goes and looks at it, grabs the information about the call, compares it against the knowledge base, and goes, Let me prep you for this call. Here's a dossier of everything going on. Here's a unique needs audit flow based off your playbook, but about this one call. Awesome. You show up on the call and you're actually prepared, which most sales reps are not.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Are not at all, yeah. They're just winging it on every call. Yeah, I we kind of it's really cool. I want to talk a little more about customer mind. I'm kind of do something similar now, but it's so cobbled together because there's all these different pieces that I have to pull together. Yeah. And you and it it's definitely not cohesive. So I see that I 100% appreciate the problem you're solving, especially for so who's your ideal client in that? Is it the SS? I'm you know, sales team of three.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Yeah, yeah. It starts anywhere from a solopreneur that's doing all the sales and going, man, I need an assistant or I need some way to show up. But especially, you know, the bigger the team, the more leverage you get. I would say right. So when you jump into that team of like three to ten sales reps, and you're going, okay, we're not, we're not huge, we're not, excuse me, we're not running crazy stuff. We want to figure out how we compete with these people with superior tools. Yeah. Yeah. And right now you're probably going, hey, we have GBTs, our sales reps use, and there we've injected a bunch of files and stuff, but those might get out of date, and there's no learning model and it's not connected. And you go, let's build this in a way that it's automated, that the mind is there. That system is all the agents done.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

You didn't have to think about it. Because I will tell you, as that AI first guy we talked about earlier, looking at my sales team saying, I really want to use AI for all this stuff. I want to put it all together. I've literally cobbled together six, seven systems.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Now, and it's not bad, but it's I gotta chase a lot.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

You gotta chase a lot, and then like your system has its memory and information in it, but then you give it to one of your guys.

unknown 22:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

And their systems back to zero.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Or heaven forbid you decide, hey, we're gonna we're gonna switch from cowork to manus, or we're gonna roll out open claw over here, and we're gonna roll this system over here. Well, now our knowledge is spread all over hell, right? It's like we we turned into like Google Google Doc factories. We're just building all these Google Docs everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

I I will say that's become that's noticeably been a problem, like that data sprawl thing, right? That's definitely increased more with all this. Cause like I've often said to me, like, I've been uh similar to you, you know, founders, owners, I've been this like awesome idea guy for years, right? And then execution and final is like way over here, and this is really helping us shrink that gap, but then there's all this shit that happens, kind of like all over here, and it's like you're like, Oh, I built all this stuff, and it's like, what happened to that? Oh, it's way over there. Like, so there's like no organization on it, and it's hard because as fast as our brains go now, and uh let me ask you this do you do you feel that you're does the AI stuff kind of make you feel like you're constantly not working? Like, I feel like I'm behind all the time.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

That one, so that's what's super interesting, especially. If you're deep into it, is that we we were told AI is going to make us so much faster. I guess that will free up some time, right? We'll have more time on our hands. We should be working like 10 hours a week right now, right? What's missing though is A, like instead of going, what if we become more efficient? You're like, wait a second, what if we just got massive leverage and we can do 10 times as much?

SPEAKER_01 23:38

As much. That's the deal, right? Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

So that's number one. Number two, there is this nagging feeling that the world's changing so fast we're gonna fall behind.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

That's exactly what it is for me.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Like yeah, like you wake up in the middle of the night and then you add your third part, the the dopamine hit of being able to go from idea to tool. In minutes. Yeah. In minutes. But 3 a.m., you're like, well, somebody would tell me to get up and write this down. Instead, I'm gonna hit manus, load it up.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

We might actually be related. It's kind of dealer, both ball guys.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

But this is the feeling you get inside of it, is and so part of it is also like, hey, we need to make sure we're finding some balance of like, hey, go outside, go for a walk, like like reset your nervous system because you can't run this time.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

I have to go golfing. Yeah, and it's funny because when I I really prided myself like two years ago on being like the guy that was working 10 hours a week kind of thing, and I had great teams and great systems, and as it's come like the last six months, I I just yeah, I feel like I'm constantly behind. I also kind of feel I want to ask you this question. I I'm I don't say worried is the wrong word, but I'm I got this feeling intern, I think it's probably more internal, that we only got a certain amount of window to really crush.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Yeah, no, I don't think it's it is an internal feeling, but it's the same feeling so you have that too? Yeah, okay, yeah, because we have this like this moment in time and you have all this noise coming of these jobs will be displaced and be replaced, and you we're clearly heading into we're so the US economy, especially, but you know, the world economy is built on labor arbitrage, right? Hey, we we have all these people and they work for us for 10 bucks an hour, and then we turn around and combine up whatever they do, and we sell it for 50 bucks an hour, and we make the money and the difference, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Very much a labor arbitrage, and then we brought systems and tools into this, but this is the first time where we're suddenly going, wait a second, these are human augmentation tools or potentially even replacement tools. And you know, my team is in Discord right now, and we have a virtual product manager who's an open claw bot, and a prompt engineer that's an open claw bot, and they're interacting back and forth as a team together, but that clearly is not the same. And anybody who's comparing AI to the internet, it's not. No, it's it's yeah, it's and so you feel like this like in three years of movement is similar, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Like the all the stuff in the no, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

I so you feel like, hey, in three years, I don't know, like in one to two years, it's not gonna change as fast as everyone wants to change because humans are slow, yeah, and organizations are slow. But in 10 years, we might not even recognize the world of work, and anybody who's been around it can sense it. And so you're like, wow, this is weird. And so you might get a we need to sprint.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

It's like we knew something's coming, but we kind of don't know what it is. Whereas 100%, right? Like the the internet, I don't know. I'm 49, and you I think we're similar, same, literally the same. That's crazy. Okay, so we are very similar on all that stuff, and I remember it all starting, and I was a computer company owner back then, and it's just I remember that feeling. I didn't feel like I had a whole lot of control over stuff, like it was just gonna kind of happen to me. I feel like this I can definitely control, I feel like there's movement in it, but I feel like if I'm not like massively, I'm also a kind of of a Twitter bro, so a little bit, so it's I think that world is a different world than reality too. So it's just man, I I've live in this world of constantly feeling like I'm behind, that I can't catch up, and that there's this window that I is a closing window that I'm worried about.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

And I I think that's probably the difference. If we go back and look at 01, 06 kind of area with the internet, like you knew the world was changing, you knew you needed to embrace it, but you didn't feel like the world was going to change completely different. Yeah, you knew it was going to expand out like this, yeah. And right now, that's not how you feel, and that's not the feedback you're getting. You're getting this like, oh shit, like three to five years from now, like the world may look utterly different.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

And and so, yeah, it is. And clearly, you know, I don't believe that it's going to be utopia, because that's a hard change. And I don't believe that it's gonna complete meltdown.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

I 100% agree with that. I don't think humans will ever really be in a world of utopia because I don't I think they thrive on the neg is it negativity, I don't know if that's sort of the right word, but they thrive on like discord.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Yeah, I don't know if it's discord. Thrive as much as we've been trained on scarcity. Yeah. Right? Capitalism by definition is scarcity. Although you could say, oh, it's brought more good than blah, blah, blah. But by definition, competition equals there's a finite amount of value, and I'm trying to get my cut. Yeah. And so that training that we put everybody through, the other problem is we put everybody through a, you know, shut up and do what you're told training in the education system. So the entrepreneur time right now, this is our, this is our, if you were the the little bit disruptor in school, like this is your time. You're like, oh yeah, it's paying off to to not be able to do that. We're both that guy, weren't we?

SPEAKER_01 28:45

I could tell that. Yeah. I put a thing up on my public Facebook wall a couple weeks ago, and it was like, uh, let's let's do a funny prank, let's put everybody through 15 years of education and massive debt and then replace them all with AI bots. And man, I got blown up for that one.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Or let's put them through 15 years of psychological training of telling you to put your hand down and that there's you know, the big one, that there'll be an adult in the room that will have your best interest in mind and will tell you what you should do. And all of a sudden, all these adults in the room either they don't know what they don't know. Yeah, nobody won't allow you to free think either, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

I mean, imagine if you're imagine if you're 24 right now, sitting in college, and you're going, career services has no clue what comes next, and my professors have no clue what comes next. And everybody I'm talking to isn't getting an entry-level job and AI is replacing them. But at the same time, I'm being told that AI is cheating in school, and I'm not being taught how to actually use it in the workforce because nobody knows. Yeah, all the adults in my life suddenly have no credibility with me. Like it is a very interesting time for that.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Well, and you and you watch the kids that just sold Cal. Did you see that? So if you don't know what we're talking about, there's I think it was a couple of 16, 17-year-old kids built an app to track calories with AI, and they sold it to MyFitnessPal, MyFitnessPal, for 100 million. Ridiculous amount of money. Props, kids. Like, that's awesome. Like, I so from you and me, we're like 100% celebrating that. I wonder, like, we think about the money side of it, but it's far more to me. And think about the institutional world that they were in. So so everybody's watching this, like, take the money side out of that. The 100 million gets you a little distracted, I think. It's a big bubble. So let's just take that out of that. Let's just say they let's just say they sold a million-dollar startup or even a hundred thousand dollar startup. The fact that you're 15 years old and you kind of have the forward-thinking brain to say, I am going to defy that institutionalism educate the institutional education piece that I that's been con that I've been forced to conform to. And I just think about our world that we grew up in, that's impressive. And it's and and that's I think what we need a hell of a lot more of.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Yeah, and and I think if you if you deconstruct what they did, you start off with vibe coding. You start off with this idea that and and even the words like you know, we came out with prompt engineering, and and the very small fraction of the world wants to be an engineer and sort of put off a lot of people. Using the word engineering and coding like implies that that we need, you know, for especially since the internet came out, we've consolidated the act of creation in the hands of a very few people. Man, good. Like, yeah, so we've we've consolidated this act of creation. We've all become users, users of Facebook, users, consumers of content, users of software, right? Think about how many pieces of software you are we would define yourself as a user of. Yeah. Now think about how many people in this office right here would say I'm a creator of tools. Very few, right? Now with AI, we start expanding. Right, me and you.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

So now we start expanding that and going, oh shit, I can wake up today and create a website, a tool, a dashboard, uh whatever. And that act of creation, when it becomes unlocked, and you go, Wait, just by talking, I can I can speak a tool and tool terms.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

I I agree with that because it's it's hilarious. Yesterday morning, I have a personal trainer that comes to my house here in Austin and she's talking about I kind of we kind of like do business coaching on the fly with her a lot of times. She's trying to grow her practice, and and I'm like, okay, yeah, we can she's trying to build lead magnets and all this stuff. So I'm kind of like going live with her. I'm like, you realize you can just do that now, right? Like you can give what you want to your marketing person if that's what you want. She's like, Well, I don't know how to do that. I'm like, just vibe code it. And she said, I'm not, and she goes, What? And she actually thought I was talking about like a vibrator. I'm like, no, not not not that. Like that. I literally went and got my MacBook. I pulled out Claude and I said, Tell me what you want to do. And we typed it out, and she's like, I can do that. I'm like, Yes. Like, do you have Claude? She said, Yeah, but I use it like just like you said earlier. She's like, I use it like this. I'm like, tell it you want to see this. And she literally pulled out her phone and did it on her phone, right? And she's like, Oh my god, I can build that. So that's that, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:06

That and that, so you don't put that back in the bottle. Yeah. Right? Like that doesn't go away. And so, you know, if you take Claude, but you know, if you make even an easier entry level, go grab lovable. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

The easiest vibe coding platform on the place are Filipino VAs actively using Lovable right now to make landing page like to make full campaigns for our IT clients. Right. And they're and in fact, our one our main team on this, it's a 64-year-old Filipino mom. And her daughter work together with us. That's what they do. Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:42

And she's she's blown away by it and she loves it. Now the the next unlock is so you get this app and it's sitting there, and you hit the voice icon or use, you know, use like your voice memo.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

Close your eyes so you're not thinking it's an app and imagine it's me or you sitting there that you're talking to. Yeah, because you have no idea how many people come and say, Hey, I wish I could build blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And I literally copy and paste that into Lovable. I'm like, why didn't you just talk to it? Yeah, but that act of like tell it what you're trying to do and it will do it. We've not had technology like that, yeah, right? We did not, you know, think about like I remember my first website I built with Dreamweaver. It was so much work page, man. Yeah, like you had to know what the hell you were doing. But this idea of like, but it's so interesting. It's a you know, we used to have this site I would use with people all the time that was like, let me Google this for you. So they'd send me a question, I'd throw it in there just to be a jerk and send them back the link and it would show me typing it to Google for them.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Let me let me let me vibe code that for you. We should we should we should build that.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Yeah, because it's surprising how many people I take their exact phrase and I drop it in. I'm like, you know, just answer the questions. And and as soon as they get that and it clicks, they're like, wait a second. It's like luckily it's is very opening because they're like, wait, it it feels like I've been being lied to for decades that I couldn't create, that I couldn't make my own tools. And you don't put that shit back in the bottle.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

And so, and and you might go, Well, I don't need a landing page. I don't need, hey, if you have seven spreadsheets, if you have seven spreadsheets and you're like, man, I wish we could put this data from our CRM and this data from QuickBooks and this data from our marketing thing, I wish we could throw this together and be able to make sense out of it. Awesome. Throw that into Manis and be like, hey, I have this and this and this. Will you build me a way to make sense out of this? More importantly, if you do the kind of pull, we move from push prompting, I'm telling it what to do, to pull prompting and say, I'm trying to do this. What do you need to know? What do you need to know about what I'm trying to do to make this work? So if you just ask it, what do you need to know to make? Here's my here's what I have. I have these five spreadsheets from these five systems, and here's where I want to go. I sure wish I had a dashboard with calculators that I could play with this data. Now, what do you need to know about me, my company, or whatever to make this happen? And what can I do?

SPEAKER_01 36:00

I can do prompt that way, actually. I didn't really think about it, but I'm just I I'm often asking questions to whatever platform I'm using. And we I'm mostly on cloud for that stuff, but I also use a combo of Gemini Pro and ChatGPT and you know, I I've inmat, like we're in all kinds. I'm always trying different stuff, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

But yeah, that's a net we take it for granted, but but we have mentally switched to recognize that these platforms can't just do shit, they are smart enough to tell us what it needs to do that stuff. We can ask it. And like you don't get into Excel and be like, hey, Excel, what would you need to know about me to build this spreadsheet? So it's it's a different mindset shift. But as soon as you switch to ask it what it needs, it suddenly is like a consultant with you going, Well, I would need this and this and this.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Cool. Well, this is really like now to me an actual agent or a coworker, kind of like et cetera, et cetera. I'll be curious to see what uh I saw Microsoft literally a couple this week release their their own co-work, their co-pilot, co-work with Claude. And I come from IT managed service provider land, so they've been very deep with the Microsoft ecosystem for years. Right. We had Microsoft Action Pack and all that stuff back in the day, right? I don't know if you remember that or if you were a part of that, but they gave you free software to get you to be part of their stuff. And realistically, a Microsoft Copilot just didn't do anything, which I think is the problem. They run, I mean, it's not a whole lot different than Siri at this point, doesn't do anything, but I think it's funny because both both the big guys, Microsoft and Apple, have kind of been sitting around letting these guys get dirty in the trenches, and then we're gonna see some stuff really start to happen in the next quarter.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

Yeah, and these two companies are gonna be interesting because clearly Microsoft has access to everybody's stuff, yeah, right? And they they've kind of trapped in the ecosystem. And Apple is currently sitting on the greatest computer ever to run OpenClaw.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Right? And so it's gonna be interesting to see where they go with it.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Well, most of them are in our hands, if you think about it.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

And they have what 200 billion not just in our hands, especially on the Apple side, listening to everything we're saying.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Yeah, they got they got million, yeah, yeah, crazy amounts of information, all that stuff, yeah. So I think we're gonna have to do this again in a few months here. So we'll we'll keep in touch. You said you're coming to Austin once a month, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:14

I'm here all the time. Again, like if you want to golf activity, right? Yeah, you golf, I'll flip my code, it'll be great. I'll try to be my right along.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

I'll be like, yeah, Ryan, how'd it go? Like, still going. You know what?

SPEAKER_00 38:26

Last week is still compiling. Just to end on last week was my first my first time snowboarding with manus. So last year I'd be snowboarding with Chat GPT, and so I'd be like writing the lift, doing stuff, and then I'd snowboard down, and Chat GPT's context window was small, and its capabilities to finish stuff was light. Whereas with Manis, I can vibe code five platforms while snowboarding just while I'm sitting on the lift.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

I I was literally, well, I lift while five vibe code while lifting.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Yeah, like four four four versions, task running and mana's while you're out there snowboarding, and just like, yeah, it's a whole new world.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Yeah, I went to I have a house in Mexico and I go down there and just like go lay out and hammer away on the on the laptop. And it's it's kind of a it's like that side of it's really cool. So kind of wrap things up a little bit here, what do you see coming? Like what what's what do you see the next quarter gonna look like?

SPEAKER_00 39:15

You know, the the here's what the challenge is the more powerful our tools get, meaning like there's a a huge power difference between Chat GPT and Claude and Grok in the chat interface versus say cowork or manus versus a lovable and replic. And you know, if you figure out as you start bringing agents into the mix, uh open claw agents, or everybody's going to be releasing that every platform will have some variation of cowork, or I mean of open claw, right? Yep. The challenge is we're moving from micromanaging it and prompting to giving it bigger projects and say, like manage. Yeah, it's managing and filling in the gaps, but that means very much like an employee, we have to give it more context. When you get up at the upper level of an agent, this is like an employee. You just hired a crazy smart, extremely arrogant employee that has no context. And so that next level not a whole lot of guilt or like they don't care.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

It doesn't care. Yeah, it doesn't care about tokens. It just ghosts, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

It's like ghosts, it's like a wildly smart new college grad that believes they've got the black card and they can just burn anything they want. And so our ability, like all those are gonna drop into the world, and everybody's gonna go, oh my gosh, we got agents everywhere. And we're gonna be back to where we were at with Chat GPT of going, but it's not working. The ROI isn't there. And they're gonna blame the tech instead of going, wait a second, maybe we need to figure out how to train this stuff. The more capabilities a tool has, the more strategy that you have, you know, think about how do you teach it how to make a good decision? Because that's where we're at with OpenClaw. That's right. Can you give it decision-making frameworks and capabilities, just like you would with an employee that you're about ready to unleash? And how do you build checks and balances and how do you get it to check its work? And how do you give it, you know, the it goes back, it's so funny, but like I spend more time in psychology and old business books thinking about how did we teach employees this because we got it's just an agent, it's just an employee.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Yep. Yeah, and and they all have souls and you know, workflows and all the different stuff that we got to give them. We just gotta make sure we do it. And I think everyone's really right now where we sit, there's like the haves. I kind of get it, they get this, and then there's everyone else, and the everyone else is just looking for that easy button to get in, and it just it's not quite there yet. But I I I think you're you and I are very similar on everything.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

And that's that's the second thing is in the next in the next year, we're gonna see what happens when people aren't just five times better, but when they're five times better and iterating at five times the cycle time.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

Because that that's where we're at, is not just like, oh, I'm better at ChatGPT than you are. Okay, cool. Maybe I'm you know getting 20 or 50 percent better of output. But what happens when I'm getting five X better output and growing at five X faster? My it's the slope on the line.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Yeah, it's gonna really enable the the get the getters to just leave behind. Just go, just go, yeah. Cool. All right, man. I really really enjoyed this conversation. We are uh you're in town for South by Southwest this week. We've got internet marketing party tomorrow night. So I'll be around. We got some stuff here at the office tomorrow, but I'll be around IMP. Uh well, uh we got uh he's gonna be at AI Profit Machine House with us on Thursday. Super pumped. First time we're doing this, and I'm excited about that. Now, I don't mean just us, but the first time we're doing AI Profit Machine House. I've never had my own South by event, and we've already signed the paperwork to do a three-day event next year, so that's pretty cool. So uh and we go the same time. So we got Chingy in the house on Thursday, which is pretty cool. Like his name's Howard, he's a really good dude. So we're gonna have a blast on Thursday. I'm excited. Great conversation, Ryan. Really appreciate you. Good luck with our customer mind, and uh, we're gonna be doing a lot more. All right, thanks for joining us on the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. We'll see you guys soon.