How AIS Created Workflows Driving 30 Articles a Month [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 109]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:19:05

Keven Ellison

When they told me that I was going to be bigger than the internet, I started marketing my first technology business and I didn't have a cell phone and I didn't have the internet. And when they told me that it was going to be bigger than the internet, I was all in. You need to get on this now.

 

00:00:19:07 - 00:00:38:02

Speaker 2

You're listening to the Endless Customers podcast, brought to you by the team at impact and customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. You can start to learn the principles of endless customers and how you can implement them in your business. Pick up a copy of Endless Customers, a national bestseller wherever books are sold.

 

00:00:38:05 - 00:00:56:20

Speaker 2

Ready to start implementing endless customers in your business? Talk to impacts about how our coaching program can help you implement endless customers to success. And if you want to experience endless customers in person. Do not miss our upcoming conference, Impact Live! August 18th through 20th in Hartford, Connecticut. There are limited spots available, so make sure you register today.

 

00:00:56:21 - 00:01:00:16

Speaker 2

And now onto the show. Here's your host, Alex Winter.

 

00:01:00:17 - 00:01:27:11

Alex Winter

Today we're talking about something that every marketing and sales leader is thinking about. But not everyone is doing well. I our guest is Keven Ellison, VP of marketing at AIS. And he's not just using AI tools. He's leading his team to adopt a mindset that allows them to innovate without losing their voice. In this episode, Keven shares how they're integrating air into real workflows, the mindset that's driving adoption, and how they're staying personal even as the tech gets smarter and smarter.

 

00:01:27:13 - 00:01:29:23

Alex Winter

Keven, welcome back to the show, my friend.

 

00:01:30:01 - 00:01:31:21

Keven Ellison

Thank you. It's great to be here.

 

00:01:31:22 - 00:01:40:16

Alex Winter

It's great to have you. It really is. And, I'm jealous. I'm seeing the palm trees in the background, and I'm wishing I was out. You're in. You're in fabulous Las Vegas. Is that right?

 

00:01:40:18 - 00:01:41:14

Keven Ellison

Absolutely.

 

00:01:41:14 - 00:02:00:07

Alex Winter

Yes. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and taking the time. We have a lot to unpack. We're talking AI, and I know that's like a very blanketed statement, but you are on the leading edge of of this revolution, and you've always been on the leading edge. I met you a few years back when I came out to film, case study with you.

 

00:02:00:07 - 00:02:16:08

Alex Winter

And I feel like you've always had, an eye for tech and just staying on the leading edge of whatever's trending. And you're just a really smart guy. So I want to stop talking and let you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about AIS to set the stage before we get into all the the details.

 

00:02:16:10 - 00:02:41:12

Keven Ellison

Sure. Thank you. And thanks for the great, compliments. But, so I've been here. I so I've always been marketing technology companies. I, I'm 63 years old. I'm an old guy. I'm an old marketer. Okay. And, I came to AIS, just had my work anniversary eight years now, and, the company is a technology provider.

 

00:02:41:14 - 00:03:15:06

Keven Ellison

It's had to pivot from, traditional, which started to 22 years ago in copiers and printers, and it's now pivoted into more technology business, which is I.T services, telecom and also security cameras. And now I am pushing which was marketing as a service more towards providing AI. Not only consulting. But we're going to be moving toward subscription based, scalable AI agents that we're going to be able to provide our 2600 customers, as well as our prospects, prospects.

 

00:03:15:06 - 00:03:39:12

Keven Ellison

So we've been doing this now. I mean, we've been doing this a long IT out being in the business for 22 years. We have all these customers, but they're having the same challenges that all other businesses are having right now on this AI landscape that's just coming at us. It's a big giant tidal wave of information, and it's really hard or difficult to sort of navigate your way through it.

 

00:03:39:14 - 00:03:50:07

Keven Ellison

And I think I've found a really easy way to do this, because I'm having to do the same thing that every business leaders are having to do now in their business.

 

00:03:50:09 - 00:04:21:10

Alex Winter

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. It's it feels like a revolution, almost feels like that.com bubble, but almost even bigger. And it can be very overwhelming at times. But I think it doesn't matter what industry you're in or what age you are or all that stuff is irrelevant. It's more about the mindset. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how you got your team and the company to adopt AI, and how you started to like, get everybody to like, ride the proverbial wave and get into the the right mindset for for being open to this.

 

00:04:21:12 - 00:04:48:16

Keven Ellison

Sure. It's it's not much different than trying to get the mindset of, say, when we first received they ask you answer or enlist customers what we are trying to do to, indoctrinate or actually teach or educate our staff on something that's new. Now, I picked it up really quickly and I did because I started business back, 30 years ago where I didn't have a cell phone and I didn't have the internet.

 

00:04:48:18 - 00:05:17:00

Keven Ellison

And when somebody told me that I was going to be bigger than the internet, I jumped all in. And this was about two years ago, and I think I was at an impact live when I heard, Rocher, speak for. All right, who's, head of the marketing AI Institute. And I got to meet him, and when he, had his, presentation, I looked at that and I went, wow, I really got to get going.

 

00:05:17:02 - 00:05:48:03

Keven Ellison

And so if you really look at how AI has invol, has evolved inside, for business, you look at it, marketing has been able to achieve great things with AI already. And they did. They we are the ones that are early adopters of it because it's allowing us to do content. It's allowing us to do, social media, take any of the tasks and really automate those workflows in order to, permeate the rest of our organization.

 

00:05:48:06 - 00:06:10:00

Keven Ellison

Okay. So really, my role has changed over time. So when I first started doing this with my team, my staff immediately rebelled. Okay, I had my content manager say to me, Keven, I can write better now, I trust it. You know, I'm stuck on it. You're stuck within driving between the AP style guidelines. And you know what?

 

00:06:10:00 - 00:06:30:17

Keven Ellison

I can't write as good as me. So I learned early on that we have to show by example. Right. So, a year ago, I took my content manager and I said, okay, show me or tell me, show me your greatest article that you've written. Okay? And I want to see that. Sure. So she did. I said, okay, give me a couple other ones.

 

00:06:30:17 - 00:06:57:01

Keven Ellison

So she gave me those examples. What I did was Then I said, tell me the next topic you're going to be writing about. And she did. She gave me the next topic and I said, okay. Overnight, I took the articles that she wrote. I built a style guide within ChatGPT of the way she writes, and then I took that and I wrote the next article, using the principles of they ask, you answer and writing the way she does and using her articles as examples.

 

00:06:57:02 - 00:07:17:12

Keven Ellison

When I did that, it's sort of a reverse engineer of her. I said it back to the next morning and she goes, wow, Keven, you wrote, that's probably the best article I've ever seen you write. And I said, that's not me, right? That's it. I and when I showed her that she was all in. So now yesterday we had a call yesterday and she goes, Keven, you know what?

 

00:07:17:12 - 00:07:37:22

Keven Ellison

She goes, I could go and I could be making probably a lot more money with other companies or going out there. But you have teach. I've been teaching me on what I need to know and have a longer life and within my role, not at any organization, whether I'm at a I else or not, because you're pushing me to learn AI.

 

00:07:38:00 - 00:07:57:21

Keven Ellison

And she says, I see the writing on the wall. If I don't learn this stuff now and in the way you're pushing me, then I'm I'm going to be out of a job. And I said, absolutely. I said, you're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. So that's that's sort of what we need to do. And I'm finding it I'm finding the same sort of sort of pushback throughout the rest of the organization.

 

00:07:57:23 - 00:08:25:04

Keven Ellison

My role is changed from vice president of marketing to now I ambassador, and I'll probably be the, AI architect within our organization, in the future. And I'll probably have somebody else that takes my role in marketing because I see what's happening. A month ago, let's say, ChatGPT, really quietly launched a way of, recording meeting minutes, for two hours.

 

00:08:25:06 - 00:08:50:19

Keven Ellison

And they can record any meeting with, with and in 120 minutes. And it can also then be billed a meeting summary and it can be billed the, the, summary and the minutes of that meeting. Or take the minutes of the meeting summary and then pull out all of your action items. Right. Wow, that just took out read I honor edge took out everybody, and they don't even know it yet, but it's actually took them out.

 

00:08:50:21 - 00:09:26:01

Keven Ellison

Think of the future as and we'll get to it. I'm going to show you some things that we're building, but think of the future as are you really going to need a CRM? Okay. Because I was going to listen to all of our phone calls, I or our video calls, which you which you guys have been telling us over and over again, we should be recording everything, but it's more important now that we are, because not only for training our sales staff, but I is going to be doing a better job than what we could do, not only in identifying our ideal, our ICP ideal customer profile, it's going to be able to be able

 

00:09:26:01 - 00:09:43:08

Keven Ellison

to respond quickly. Based on their pain points. It's going to be able to do all of those things for us and very quickly where we could could have done it. Okay. Or we have to think on our toes or think think in the in it on a call where we don't have to do that now. Right. All right.

 

00:09:43:13 - 00:10:06:12

Keven Ellison

So just threw up all over you with that answer okay. But what's happened is I'm teaching my team today. Going back to what your question was, I'm teaching my team today those practical things that they need to learn, but they need to learn how to do it right. Okay. And one of the biggest problems I've seen is that people don't know how to prompt correctly.

 

00:10:06:14 - 00:10:22:08

Keven Ellison

So that's the first thing I taught my team okay okay okay. There's four things that you need to know how to prompt correctly. The first thing is you need to give it a role. And I don't mean you need to give it a role. Like if you're going to, say, I want you to be a copywriter or I want you to be a content manager.

 

00:10:22:14 - 00:10:51:01

Keven Ellison

I mean, you need to give it a specific role. I want you to be a content manager for a fortune 500 or a SAS company. Enterprise company that has, successfully, with their last article, had 280% increase in, in, engagement and, and in, driving traffic to our website. Now, you've got a write a really good title role that you provide.

 

00:10:51:03 - 00:11:18:22

Keven Ellison

The second thing is you need to provide enough context. We need to teach the AI, tools what platform you're using, whether you're using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Mistral, deep secret, whether you're using any of these elements, you need to give it a plenty of context to know who you are and what you do. Third, you need to tell it how you want, what success looks like, and how you want it to provide that, that result back to you.

 

00:11:19:00 - 00:11:41:21

Keven Ellison

Okay. And the fourth thing that's probably the most important is that you need to tell it this. You need to say at the end of your prompt, you need to say, ask me any clarifying questions to ensure that you complete this task with 95% accuracy. If you do that and you provide that last item right there, anything that you didn't provide up in the top are part of it.

 

00:11:41:22 - 00:12:03:00

Keven Ellison

Those first three items I gave you, it will ask you those questions before it provides you a result back. Okay, okay. But most people don't know how to prompt. And the reason for that is because every time we prompt in element, we get a result back. Okay. And so you don't know how good that result is.

 

00:12:03:02 - 00:12:10:14

Alex Winter

Yeah a lot of people take it at face value. They get a response and are like, okay, great, perfect and move on. They don't really question don't.

 

00:12:10:16 - 00:12:33:17

Keven Ellison

And that's that's because we don't know what we don't know. Right. That's true. So I have I have custom instruction sets for and I've written out prompts that are maybe 2 or 3 pages long to get really great results out of them. But what I've taught ChatGPT or I've taught Gemini and I've taught Claude is that when they're, responding to me, I want hard truths.

 

00:12:33:17 - 00:12:54:11

Keven Ellison

Hard facts. I don't want any BS. I don't want them to sugarcoat anything. I want them to play devil's advocate. I always want them to ask me the tough questions. But you need to tell it that because you know what? The L wants to please you by providing you a result and a good result. Right.

 

00:12:54:13 - 00:12:59:02

Alex Winter

That makes total sense. You you, you clearly passionate about this?

 

00:12:59:04 - 00:12:59:21

Keven Ellison

Oh, you think.

 

00:12:59:23 - 00:13:19:22

Alex Winter

I love it? It like it's just oozing out of you, man. I love how passionate you are about it. And and very knowledgeable, too. And there's just in what you just said. There's a lot to unpack there. But I think one of the key takeaways for me, I really love how you're leading your team by example. And the idea here is it's similar to they ask you answer or unless customers where if you don't have buy in from the top down, it's not really going to work.

 

00:13:19:22 - 00:13:38:12

Alex Winter

So for you to use these tools and set the tone, set the example, help guide and teach the rest of your team, you're getting that buy in. And it sounds like the buy in is really paying off. And I'd love to hear a little bit more. Like, what other tools are you using in your day to day? We heard a little bit about your content manager and how how much time do we got?

 

00:13:38:12 - 00:13:39:23

Alex Winter

How long does this episode give me?

 

00:13:40:01 - 00:14:00:23

Keven Ellison

So really, I mean, so we've got the content manager. So then we also, what I do is they can be really overwhelmed. I know my team could be overwhelmed because there's so many tools out there. Right? Right. So I have a list or a group of followers that I follow, right? That I follow on line. And I'll be glad you can put that in the meeting notes or whatever you want to.

 

00:14:01:01 - 00:14:28:12

Keven Ellison

But I follow Jonathan Mass B Jones. Sabrina Romanoff I follow these people and I follow them on social media, on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram. Excuse me. And each of these people and I have more than that. I have a number of them that I follow. But I'm a senior. Okay? I wake up really early in the morning, I wake up, it's not really rare for me to wake up at 330 or 4:00 in the morning.

 

00:14:28:14 - 00:14:50:05

Keven Ellison

Okay, so before I go to the gym or before I go to the pool to swim, I'm actually scanning what what they've said in the last 12, 24 hours of what they're showing us, even, you know, what's coming out with the, the different lens. But what I do is I scan those and I only take the best, and I put that into our, our messaging system.

 

00:14:50:05 - 00:15:07:06

Keven Ellison

We use Microsoft Teams here, but if you have slack or anything else, I take that role as I want to give them what the cream of the crop is for them to check out and see what those tools are. Now, there are so many tools when people are putting layers on top of all the different types of lens, right?

 

00:15:07:06 - 00:15:34:15

Keven Ellison

And they're coming out with these tools that can do this or that when it comes to marketing project. Yeah, I'm really a traditionalist about I want to learn how to do things ourselves by doing them, by prompting, by us creating, the workflows and the automations, using either make or not end to build agents. Because I think it's really we need to control that, you know, people are out there, either they're collecting or they're trading props right now.

 

00:15:34:15 - 00:15:58:03

Keven Ellison

Right? Yeah. And that's a big thing. Right. So you see all these people all use this prop, use that from you know what I'd say 95% or 98% of those prompts that they're giving away. And they're saying that this prompt does a great job, this or that. I've tested many of them and they don't do a sufficient or a, a they do an average job of being able to provide a good result out of it.

 

00:15:58:07 - 00:16:20:09

Keven Ellison

Yeah. I typically now I've taught ChatGPT to take a prompt that I think is something that I like to look at, and I have it now. I tell it to create a super prompt. And what that means, ChatGPT knows, is to take that and use all the knowledge that I've given it on how to write a great prompt, and it'll come out and give me a prompt that's full 2 or 3 pages long on how to do it.

 

00:16:20:09 - 00:16:20:17

Keven Ellison

Correct?

 

00:16:20:22 - 00:16:24:11

Alex Winter

Right? Right. Experimentation. Experimentation is huge, Keven. And and we do.

 

00:16:24:11 - 00:16:26:10

Keven Ellison

The same thing. Yeah, absolutely.

 

00:16:26:16 - 00:16:45:07

Alex Winter

Our CEO, Bob Ruffolo is pushing us to do the same thing. And I think there was a fear in the beginning of like, oh, we're going to try experimenting with tools and it might not work or it might not be good, but that's that's part of the journey is like you have to experiment with these tools and if it's not good, then you know, okay, cool this prompt or this tool isn't working for me or for my specific task here.

 

00:16:45:07 - 00:16:50:17

Alex Winter

And you can move on to the next one because there's like a new one coming out. It feels like every single day at this point.

 

00:16:50:19 - 00:17:10:02

Keven Ellison

Right? What's the greatest way to learn? And that's to to make mistakes or fall flat on your face. I mean, because that's how we learn, right? It's not like doing things correctly. You can't learn if you just keep doing things correctly every time. It's always by making mistakes. And that's how I probably learn more than anything else is how do I make mistakes?

 

00:17:10:02 - 00:17:16:00

Keven Ellison

And then I take that learning from it and and I apply it the next time. On how to fix something.

 

00:17:16:02 - 00:17:24:14

Alex Winter

That's great. You make it better. No really, really great advice for for a multitude, not just for AI, but in general when it comes to learning and growing and scaling your businesses here.

 

00:17:24:14 - 00:17:44:21

Keven Ellison

So, you know, there's one other thing that we should probably be thinking about to see in the future, right? Okay. So what I'm originally people were I was saying, is I going to take my job, right? That was a big thing. And then know somebody that knows AI is going to take your job, right. It's really about I to my staff that they're not going to be managing people in the future.

 

00:17:44:21 - 00:18:12:00

Keven Ellison

And I'll show you that in a few minutes, right of what I see as the future. But they're not going to be managing staff, they're going to be managing the machine. And something Gary said a while ago and other people are picking up on it. He actually said on one of his, podcasts and said that we're going to need to teach our people not to be Masons anymore, but to be architects and so what I'm teaching my staff is you're not going to be managing people, you're going to be managing the machine.

 

00:18:12:02 - 00:18:37:19

Keven Ellison

And so what we're building right now is let's take our mike. My, content manager. I'm taking her entire workflow from the beginning, from a creative brief we would take with our own company, learn everything about the company you possibly care for. I created a GPG that creates a 40 question GPT. It's a creative brief. You take that and you drop that into what we're going building out as a content management agent.

 

00:18:37:21 - 00:19:01:07

Keven Ellison

And it has all of the workings. They ask, you answer the big five. And it, it, it what it does is it does every step that she does in building the keyword strategy, building the keyword calendar, then and using SEMrush to do that. It goes out and reaches out and touches those tools. Then it goes and builds a content calendar, builds out Google Docs.

 

00:19:01:09 - 00:19:29:21

Keven Ellison

Then what it does is then it starts writing the articles. It takes the article from ChatGPT, then it takes it, humanizes it and Claude, then it takes that and removes the watermarks, the AI watermarks from it. And then it's ready to post. It puts it into an folder inside Google Docs, and then it creates the images using, either it can use grok or it can use Adobe Image Studio, or it can use Leonardo, whatever we want it to, or it can even use ChatGPT to do that.

 

00:19:30:02 - 00:19:49:19

Keven Ellison

But basically it can create the image for that blog article, drops it into a folder, and now we're ready to post if we wanted to. We can even take that a step further. And now we can take that and, make it so that it could actually do the posting itself on the website. Now think about that. You just took a workflow that we've taken.

 

00:19:49:19 - 00:20:08:23

Keven Ellison

That's the content manager. Now she's going to be watching that workflow making sure that it does. Now. She started we're in this process of becoming when you trained her seven years ago on how to be a great content manager. She was doing about two articles a month. We are two articles a week. And then we moved it up to three articles a week.

 

00:20:09:02 - 00:20:29:13

Keven Ellison

Now we've got five products or services, and I didn't think that would be scalable. Now it is scalable because what? Last month she wrote 30 articles using AI and using this process. Okay, now she could do a thousand articles or we could be doing this for other customers, teaching them how to do that by using this agent that we're building that does the entire workflow.

 

00:20:29:13 - 00:20:48:06

Keven Ellison

And by the way, it also has reporting at the end of it. So it drops that into the folder so they can see how they did and how their article performed last month. On top of that, we're going to be teaching it how to do Aiteo or what's called geo articles as well, so that it not only does SEO articles, but your articles as well.

 

00:20:48:08 - 00:20:55:05

Keven Ellison

So now we're building this agent that's now something scalable that we can actually offer our customers as well.

 

00:20:55:07 - 00:21:16:01

Alex Winter

That's fascinating. Automation. Automation is a beautiful thing, but there's still a human element to it. And I think that's something I hear. Marcus. Absolutely. Yeah. And I hear Marcus say that a lot, that you can automate these workflows and really crank up your production schedule, the quantity, but you still need to have your content manager there to oversee it and be the architect and make sure that it's still in the right voice, in the right breath.

 

00:21:16:01 - 00:21:16:13

Alex Winter

Amazing.

 

00:21:16:13 - 00:21:33:14

Keven Ellison

You're right. If you think about it, the LMS are right. They were sort of in an infancy stage. They're probably at a young teen or an adolescent stage. Even with grok coming out, you know, a musk product where he says it's a, PhD level student. But if you think about it, you still need it.

 

00:21:33:20 - 00:21:57:02

Keven Ellison

There's a number of things that I can't do, and that's the human element. Right? So you definitely need somebody in there to oversee it. But we also need that architect or that content manager in there to making sure that they know how to make new changes when they become available. It was a while ago when we looked at content and said, oh, this content is good because it came back from ChatGPT in a row.

 

00:21:57:07 - 00:22:27:03

Keven Ellison

As good as our content manager can write. But did it really write like a human? No, it didn't, because it's got dashes in it. It doesn't break up to the writing, that it can. But you know what? We just needed to teach it on how to do that. And so that's where we need to have whenever there's new, new, updates or new ways of teaching that or prompting it in that, automation, we need somebody, a human to in order to do that.

 

00:22:27:07 - 00:22:29:12

Keven Ellison

You're absolutely right.

 

00:22:29:14 - 00:22:39:13

Alex Winter

That's a great point. And I, I let you get my wheel spinning. I like there's so much to unpack in this conversation. Right. So I love talking with you, I really do when this happened.

 

00:22:39:13 - 00:22:41:06

Keven Ellison

I love talking about it too. Right.

 

00:22:41:06 - 00:22:46:23

Alex Winter

This happens in Unpack Live too. I feel like every impact live, you and I end up in a corner of, of a hotel.

 

00:22:47:03 - 00:22:48:06

Keven Ellison

Or two weeks out.

 

00:22:48:06 - 00:22:49:02

Alex Winter

I know we're almost there.

 

00:22:49:03 - 00:22:49:10

Keven Ellison

Yeah.

 

00:22:49:14 - 00:22:58:00

Alex Winter

That's right. I have to show you there. Yeah, I got a shameless plug. Oh, you'll be there. Awesome. Well, for anyone that's listening and watching Impact Live August 18th through the 20th up in Hartford.

 

00:22:58:01 - 00:22:58:15

Keven Ellison

You can.

 

00:22:58:15 - 00:23:02:05

Alex Winter

Meet Keven. You can meet us in person. Don't miss out. Yeah. I think there's still.

 

00:23:02:07 - 00:23:05:01

Keven Ellison

Some love I would love to talk about. I. Yeah.

 

00:23:05:02 - 00:23:24:22

Alex Winter

Absolutely. So, my, I guess my, my next question or where I want to go with this. You certainly have done a ton of of legwork in testing. How does this affect day to day. So like, your content manager is you talk to that whole workflow. What about like your videographer? What about other pieces of your content trained social media.

 

00:23:24:22 - 00:23:27:23

Alex Winter

Like how does that affect the rest of the the ecosystem?

 

00:23:28:01 - 00:23:50:19

Keven Ellison

Right. Hey, that's a really good question. And so I told them that the first agent that we're building this content management, system and taking her workflow and building that out was going to be the first thing. But again, it was the slowest thing because we had to learn how to do that. In fact, I'm I'm now taking a, mentorship class over the next two months on learning how to build my own end to end workflows.

 

00:23:50:21 - 00:24:09:12

Keven Ellison

So I got actually, I'm working with a guy from Upwork, here in the US that's helping me build this out right now. But I'm learning the ins and outs and doing this right. But I want to learn how to build my own workflows and build my own agents, okay? Because there's agents, there's MSPs, there's even rags that are going to want to go.

 

00:24:09:12 - 00:24:40:02

Keven Ellison

And don't get me started, because that's a whole nother rabbit hole not to go there, but so I've also at the same time where we have dailies, scrums. And so at the same time, while we're going through this process of building this, I am now having our videographer and our social media, strategist. I'm having them all, all of us converse on seeing how we're going through this process, because the next step will be either.

 

00:24:40:02 - 00:25:05:15

Keven Ellison

So probably social media, and there will probably be video shorts, because my goal is to take something like the creative brief, and then we have content that goes out and builds different types of content. Then we have social media that we developed. Then we would have video and video would be not only for the content portion of it on the website, but it's also going to be shorts for social media, and then you're going to have social media, but it's all going to be the same.

 

00:25:05:15 - 00:25:13:01

Keven Ellison

Be it's not going to be the same, but it's going to be a different compartment of that whole system we build for marketing.

 

00:25:13:05 - 00:25:30:14

Alex Winter

Right? It's it's very much what the coaches here at impact teach when they're when companies are implementing endless customers, it's just using using AI versus doing it yourself and repurposing content as if you're writing a really great article. That article could easily be a selling seven video on your website could easily turn into shorts on your social media channel.

 

00:25:30:14 - 00:25:35:11

Alex Winter

So it's the same principles, just just with more automation and using AI.

 

00:25:35:13 - 00:25:56:05

Keven Ellison

And you know what? It really goes back to know having the foundation of knowing how to develop something really well. Let me give you an example. I spoke to one of the experts in it, a and I said, Hey Jonathan, I said, how come somebody like my age, 63 years old, is getting more out of AI than anyone else that I see?

 

00:25:56:05 - 00:26:19:10

Keven Ellison

And I see a lot of kids diving into it, but they just don't get it. And they they really don't care where, where it is and where it's going. And he said, you know, and he's 50 something himself. He said, you know what the 50 plus people have have so much business experience. They're getting more out of AI because they can put that experience into the Lem in order to get a great result out of it.

 

00:26:19:10 - 00:26:49:00

Keven Ellison

Okay. Now let's take something like in as customers. Okay. If you don't have the framework on how to build great content that Marcus teaches and your, your staff teaches us and what we've learned from all of your, your team, if we didn't know how to do that, we would just be putting out content, okay? And I see it all the time because I talk to a lot of business leaders and they said, oh yeah, we just want to create a blog, but they don't know the value of creating really great content.

 

00:26:49:02 - 00:27:11:17

Keven Ellison

Now, if you know that, you can now apply that into a, AI agent or an AI workflow, and now you've got something, okay, you've got something of real value to your audience and to your organization in order to build trust with your, prospects and your customers. That's the key here, is that you need that foundational approach in order to do it.

 

00:27:11:17 - 00:27:28:19

Keven Ellison

You can't just say, hey, I know how to build agents and go, because I see that every day of these kids building agents, but they really don't have that human or that foundational methodology on how to build them the right way or afford to, provide a really great result.

 

00:27:28:19 - 00:28:00:03

Alex Winter

Yeah, yeah, those are excellent points. And it's funny, it almost seems like common sense when you say it that way. But until you just said it that way, it like they just have that like, yeah, that's that makes total sense to me. I had the moment I think to people that were, were around and doing business before the internet are starting are really starting to see or we're the first ones to see the writing on the wall with AI, it's very similar in the sense that like, this is going to help you do your job better, and you can apply that experience to your point and, and really leverage it to your advantage.

 

00:28:00:03 - 00:28:07:03

Alex Winter

And I think that's a really interesting angle there. So with that in mind, you said that there was you had like some show and tell stuff for us, right. Is that sure?

 

00:28:07:03 - 00:28:10:23

Keven Ellison

Sure. Yeah. Let me tell you, one of my pet projects that I'm doing on my weekend.

 

00:28:11:02 - 00:28:11:15

Alex Winter

Okay, cool.

 

00:28:11:15 - 00:28:32:02

Keven Ellison

Yeah. Here's one I share with Marcus. Okay. But I'm going in. I'm building it right now because my brother was an executive, a fortune 1000 company. Right? He was a CEO of them. Okay. And, and so he's retired now. He just recently retired. He goes, but I want to live my life for you. And I called and I said, how so?

 

00:28:32:02 - 00:28:58:02

Keven Ellison

And he said, well, I just got a PDF file in from MIT Sloan that said, this guy from, India, he created his own personal board of directors. Okay. And so, I read the white paper, I got it, I learned it, and I said, okay, how would I build this an AI? Because he said, I want a board of personal board of directors.

 

00:28:58:02 - 00:29:18:17

Keven Ellison

And I said, do you know who those are? And he goes, I'm thinking through. And I said, I need you to start figuring out who you want, because this guy had used Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett. Yeah. But he built all these people for business.

 

00:29:18:18 - 00:29:51:05

Keven Ellison

And so then after having that sort of interview and discussion with my brother, he said, you know what? I like a board for business. And then I'd also like for business and talk to them about business, but then I'd also like one for a philosophy, and I'd also like one for travel. And I said, okay. And he said, but I said, the way I want to do it is I want this personal board of advisors or directors, and I want is I want to be able to throw a topic into them, and I want them to be able to all of them have a discussion in order to do this, so I can watch the

 

00:29:51:05 - 00:30:27:06

Keven Ellison

discussion from before they come up with result in an analysis back to me. And he goes, that would be awesome. Can you do that? And I said, I think I can build an agent do that. So what I've been doing is on my off time and weekday weekends when I'm just having fun, as I've been having discussions with ChatGPT and also rock, and also Claude, and I've been having a lot of voice discussions with them on how I go about building this board of directors, and they're teaching me on how I would use deep research to take videos and interviews and all of this where I can compile this information on it.

 

00:30:27:07 - 00:31:02:05

Keven Ellison

Maybe my brother wanted, but, what's his name? The, French leader Bonaparte. He wanted him to be on his business board of directors because he was so great at establishing the framework of the, government. And so he wanted that person in there because he wants different people to look at different ways. So I need to find out how I could extract that information by getting their written works on doing this in order to do deep research, in order to build a dossier on how they would react to others in the group.

 

00:31:02:05 - 00:31:33:13

Keven Ellison

So, to show you what, I'm doing for AI. So several months ago, I saw the writing on the wall of where we're going with, agents and and where things are going. The first thing. What I would first pet projects was, the. It's about solving business problems. Okay. And when I say solving business problems, I wanted to take something small, like, let's say our, our staff, our sales staff doesn't know how to post on LinkedIn.

 

00:31:33:15 - 00:32:02:13

Keven Ellison

They don't do enough of it or they don't do it at all. And they just don't have the time. They may be lazy, they may just not know how to do it. They don't know the best practices for engagement. They don't know all these things. So the one of the first things I went out and I built, and I'll be glad to share it with you, is, a workflow automation in make and, and what I did was I saw others that were building sort of these workflow automations.

 

00:32:02:18 - 00:32:21:14

Keven Ellison

But this is a very simple workflow automation. But what I wanted to do is our content manager creates these blogs every week, and then we send these links to our staff and say we want them to post them, but they weren't doing anything with them because they didn't know how to post them. Right. So what we did was we created a workflow automation, but I wanted it in their own style and their own voice.

 

00:32:21:16 - 00:32:45:09

Keven Ellison

So what we did was we built a style guide. I built a GPT that can take anything that they've written or somebody that they, maybe that they like to read on LinkedIn, that they want to, personify. And in fact, I'll tell you right now, one of our senior execs says, hey, one of our senior salespeople said, I don't write really well on LinkedIn.

 

00:32:45:13 - 00:33:02:08

Keven Ellison

Well, and I don't do enough of it. But what I'd like to do is I really like reading market share it. So I said, okay, let's let's build a style guide on market. Share it. So what I did was I screen scraped and I listen, I screen scraped 15 of articles of the last 15 articles of market share in it.

 

00:33:02:10 - 00:33:21:11

Keven Ellison

I threw in my GPT three. It built a style guide. So now I have a style guide. It's just a spreadsheet inside of Google Docs. It's a style guide for, one of our salespeople. Okay. And if like for myself, I have 15 posts, I've got many posts. Right. So it was able to take it, build my own style guide off of that.

 

00:33:21:16 - 00:33:46:06

Keven Ellison

Then it injects best practices in that style guide. And now what happens when we get an article link that comes out? We have another spreadsheet in Google Docs and our staff and our, content manager. She just puts the link in there and she goes, moves it from false to true. And what then she runs this, and now our 15 salespeople get an email with three different ways that they can post in their own voice.

 

00:33:46:08 - 00:34:08:19

Keven Ellison

It has the article link in it. It also has the hashtags in it. And then it also gives them three disruptive hooks. They could use that they could replace at the top of it. And what it does is this, make automation much so simple. It reads the article, puts it in their own voice of how they would post for it, and then sends them an email right back to them that they get so they can post.

 

00:34:08:21 - 00:34:25:10

Keven Ellison

It's taken something that I saw our VP of sales about an hour to do, where he had to go out and find the article that he wanted to write about. He had to read the article. Then he had to figure out what he wanted to say, and then he posted it, and it took him probably 45 minutes to an hour to do that.

 

00:34:25:12 - 00:34:37:20

Keven Ellison

Now it can be done in two minutes in your own voice. Wow. And I've got my whole team, which I only had probably 1 or 2 people every once in a while a week posting. I've got him posting every day now.

 

00:34:37:22 - 00:34:40:07

Alex Winter

Unbelievable. That's so cool. Yeah.

 

00:34:40:09 - 00:35:13:01

Keven Ellison

Well, as soon as I saw this, I said, what? I don't want to post this about our products and services. I want to post about AI. That's what I want to post about. Okay. Yeah. So what we did was we created another automation and I created another scenario here that allowed us to create in make. And what it does is I can now find an article and I can take something from Forbes or TechCrunch or OpenAI or I can take anything along that.

 

00:35:13:07 - 00:35:40:16

Keven Ellison

And what it does is here it takes something where I just email it from my, outlook. I emailed the link to this, to an email address, okay, that we created in Gmail. It reads the article from that link. Then it goes to the style guide. It puts it in its own voice, and it immediately spits an email back with me the same way with three different ways to post it, with the, little icons and everything in it.

 

00:35:40:20 - 00:35:49:13

Keven Ellison

And it's using best practices in order for it to. And now I can post on a regular basis really easily on anything that I see that I want to go out and post about.

 

00:35:49:18 - 00:35:51:05

Alex Winter

There you go. Wow.

 

00:35:51:07 - 00:36:15:01

Keven Ellison

Okay, now let's take this a step further. When I was talking about building agents and the reason I want to go through a mentorship program. Yes. Let me show you. What I did about seven months ago was I took I looked at our organization and I said, okay, this looks like a normal org chart, but it's not okay at first looked at all the different types of tools that we use.

 

00:36:15:01 - 00:36:38:20

Keven Ellison

Okay. And what I did, I looked at oh, let's take a look at we've got employees, we've got different types of automation tools. We use Microsoft Office, Office, HubSpot. We use Salesforce as our CRM. We've got Hey Jen for video, we use power BI in Microsoft, we use Canva, we use SEMrush, we use all these different tools.

 

00:36:38:20 - 00:37:00:09

Keven Ellison

Okay. Now what do I want to do in order to build an energetic AI organization? Because this is the future. Well, I'm going to need for our CEO or president to have a chief agent. And I'm going to need a multi context protocol, a chief multi context protocol. What that does is it talks to all the other MSPs here and the MSPs they talk to the agents.

 

00:37:00:12 - 00:37:20:05

Keven Ellison

Okay. Then I wanted to do is take all of our different departments. So I started with sales and I built out from the head of sales, I built out individual agents that we would need. Now I did a 6 or 7 months ago, and some of these are going to be changing pretty soon because I'm learning more about each department.

 

00:37:20:09 - 00:37:44:00

Keven Ellison

But what I did was I built a Gpt3 that I could interview each of our department heads and say, okay, let's talk about the workflows for each of your staff. And now let's start talking about what agents we could build. Now, I did this all the way from sales. So we've got, outside sales, subject matter experts, inside sales team, our proposal team and our admin admin function.

 

00:37:44:02 - 00:38:02:21

Keven Ellison

And now I built agents for all of those using a variety of tools. And then I went, because I know marketing so well, I did the same thing for the head of content and that video and written content, I did the same thing for demand Gen. I did the same thing for social media. I did the same thing for marketing operations.

 

00:38:02:23 - 00:38:24:13

Keven Ellison

Okay? And I'm building all the agents for identifying all the agents. So they can be built. Now, I haven't done it for our apps department, I.T services dotcom because I don't know enough about them, but they'll be placed into this. And then I also built it for finance. I also built it for our customer service team. And then I've also built it for H.R.

 

00:38:24:15 - 00:38:50:00

Keven Ellison

And now we've got when you look at it, we building a giant, a genetic AI organization that can all be talked to by each of the heads, these KPIs and the head of sales, all you has to do is use a voice. ChatGPT where it can be using an MCP multi context protocol that he can actually talk to him and say, hey, can you give me that last report or drop into my inbox?

 

00:38:50:05 - 00:39:09:22

Keven Ellison

What, what the, what our staff did in sales last month and tell me how we can improve on these things. And all it's going to do is go out and talk to the agents or do this. This is the future. Wow. This is what every company should be building right now. We're looking forward to the future because this is really where it's all going.

 

00:39:10:00 - 00:39:18:05

Keven Ellison

And I didn't get this idea. Just out of the top of my head. I've looked at experts. I mean, I went to a company called conductor. I, I.

 

00:39:18:05 - 00:39:20:01

Alex Winter

Remember the conductor.

 

00:39:20:03 - 00:39:44:17

Keven Ellison

Yeah. Conductor. And they were the first ones that came out with this. And you know what? The way I actually, the way I actually figured out how to do this was I took something that they had they've already built something similar to this, and they but they weren't giving it out. And so what I did was I used ChatGPT to say and I did screen captures of their video as they panned through this.

 

00:39:44:22 - 00:40:04:19

Keven Ellison

And I said, put it all back together with me, and now tell me what it is. Amazing. Okay. And now it explained to me what they were building here. And then I had discussions over two weeks about, walks with ChatGPT and she and I, I say she because I have a female voice that I to. But then that's her.

 

00:40:04:21 - 00:40:14:07

Keven Ellison

That's what she personifies. But I we had these discussions on what I was wanting to build and what we needed to build for the future.

 

00:40:14:09 - 00:40:19:10

Alex Winter

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for for letting us peek behind the curtain there a little bit. That's really.

 

00:40:19:10 - 00:40:21:00

Keven Ellison

Cool. Absolutely, absolutely.

 

00:40:21:00 - 00:40:21:05

Alex Winter

Yeah.

 

00:40:21:05 - 00:40:23:11

Keven Ellison

And for everybody, it's something we all need to be thinking about.

 

00:40:23:14 - 00:40:40:03

Alex Winter

It is something we all need to be thinking about. And it's got me thinking, so you you put in a ton of R&D, a ton of research, and you spent a lot of time clearly learning the tools, implementing the tools, building out this whole workflow. What kind of results are you getting? And like, how is it, how is it like on the other side?

 

00:40:40:03 - 00:40:45:21

Alex Winter

So we've seen a lot of the front end in the build out and the architecture stuff. What's the what are the results that you're getting?

 

00:40:45:23 - 00:41:14:11

Keven Ellison

Well, okay. So okay, so early on this is I'll give you one result that I did over a year ago. So I took something that's probably every marketing person or any marketing agency is in the past where you've gone through the process of building an identity or an organization. Right? I had two pharmaceutical companies. I had one pharmaceutical company company, and they wanted to build an identity for this new, pharmaceutical sort of.

 

00:41:14:13 - 00:41:40:09

Keven Ellison

And this was a year ago, and I used I didn't I didn't want to tax my team because I was something new. I mean, and they were still scared of it and feared it at that time. Right. So what I did was I took it on all my shoulders to do it myself. And something that would take probably, oh, probably 3 or 4 months to do, where you'd have to start with, identifying the name of the organization to building out the logo and the brand.

 

00:41:40:11 - 00:41:58:13

Keven Ellison

Then, building out all the colorways, what you did in black and white needed something. You'd have meetings with them, with feedback, and then you turn around and you give them more and you do this back and forth. In about three months, you'd have a complete identity and brand style guidelines, and you'd have their creative brief and everything that you built along with that.

 

00:41:58:14 - 00:42:14:00

Keven Ellison

Right? Okay. This was a six figure process or price tag for this, for this, new pharmaceutical startup. And it wasn't just a small six figure. It was pretty good price. Our pretty good,

 

00:42:14:02 - 00:42:14:16

Alex Winter

Investment.

 

00:42:14:16 - 00:42:37:09

Keven Ellison

In this proposal. Yeah. Proposal for them. Right. And that they had the budget for. I'll tell you right now, it took me eight hours to build this, okay? I could not go back to the customer and say next day and say, hey, I did this on my weekend. Here you go. All right. I had to take them along through the process that a normal business would, but I shortened it.

 

00:42:37:09 - 00:43:01:06

Keven Ellison

And within two weeks I had given them and I sort of had to, I sort of had to take them through the process. And even though it was a shortened process, I sort of had to take them step by step through it. But I was able to show them everything from what the logos that they would be seeing, and that they could provide feedback on all the way through to the packaging of their pharmaceuticals.

 

00:43:01:11 - 00:43:04:04

Keven Ellison

And I could do it all in one meeting.

 

00:43:04:06 - 00:43:08:01

Alex Winter

Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of ground to cover in one meeting. Yeah, typically.

 

00:43:08:03 - 00:43:32:01

Keven Ellison

But yeah, think of the feedback that I got and I was able to take all that feedback that I, you know, had from them. And record that into I and come back and say, okay, this is what you want. And in fact, that's how we got there really quickly with them. All right. So, so that's, that's something that, you know, and this was a year ago using the tools today the tools are even much better to do this right.

 

00:43:32:03 - 00:43:50:03

Keven Ellison

I mean you can take right now and I can do a, workflow within ChatGPT and GPT to do this, where I could take something and go all the way to an ad campaign and do this really quickly. But I didn't have that. I just had the tools to be working on. So that's one way that it could be.

 

00:43:50:08 - 00:44:10:02

Keven Ellison

The other is you need to start and just start with a simple project and a simple business challenge and fix that one at a time for each of the departments. You need to do that not only for your business, but you need to do it for, each of the departments to show your value, because they're still they're going through this process.

 

00:44:10:05 - 00:44:33:04

Keven Ellison

They don't understand how powerful this is. So really it you really need to take baby steps in order to get them to have that buy it. Okay. And the way I look at any other any AI project that we have coming up, one can create more revenue for us to get, create, more gross profit margin for us.

 

00:44:33:04 - 00:44:45:00

Keven Ellison

Okay. For three. Is that a nice to have? Or it can provide us more insight into the business if it can do one of those three things. That's how I identify what the priorities are. Got it, got it.

 

00:44:45:00 - 00:44:51:23

Alex Winter

Well, and it sounds like results wise it's just way faster. So you're you're.

 

00:44:52:01 - 00:45:03:16

Keven Ellison

And way better, not just faster. It's much more efficient and better than a human can actually do it. You trainer. Right. Yeah. But you have to take the time in order to build it, right?

 

00:45:03:18 - 00:45:04:11

Alex Winter

Yeah. I mean, that.

 

00:45:04:11 - 00:45:29:13

Keven Ellison

Goes back to you guys teaching us what we've learned within those customers. And I constantly go out and find out what the best practices for anything that I'm going to build an AI in order to put that in, inject it into either the prompting or into the project, or the GPT or the Gem, or that whole workflow automation.

 

00:45:29:15 - 00:45:50:10

Alex Winter

Yeah. No, that's this has been an incredible conversation. I feel like I have so much to unpack and I need to go experiment a lot more. I feel like I've been experimenting a lot, but you're making me look bad. Keven. I'm like, you're you're, just 100%, 110% into this, and I, I really, feel inspired and I think, and I hope a lot of people out here watching and listening are inspired as well.

 

00:45:50:11 - 00:46:07:16

Keven Ellison

Well, I gotta tell you, it feels like Christmas every day because I get a new tool or a new way of looking at how to use things, or, I mean, I can't wait for ChatGPT 5.0 to come out because I've seen what grok can do. With grok 4.0 and all the new advancements of what Claude's been doing.

 

00:46:07:19 - 00:46:24:06

Keven Ellison

So it's like every day I get a new Christmas present that I get to go play with, and I get to toy with, so, that's why I'm so passionate about this. Yeah. Sad. And I know what it can do for our organization as well as our customers.

 

00:46:24:08 - 00:46:46:02

Alex Winter

Absolutely. So with the few minutes we have left here, this is my favorite part of the show. What's the one thing we cover? A ton of ground. You showed some really cool tools and some really cool workflows. What should business leaders and CEOs and people that are listening to this show take away from this conversation? That maybe you're not as entrenched in AI as you were, maybe haven't even really started to mess with AI and need to really get on the train.

 

00:46:46:02 - 00:46:47:05

Alex Winter

What would you say to them?

 

00:46:47:07 - 00:47:16:08

Keven Ellison

Yeah, so I'd say this is how I did it. And again, I'd say I make mistakes all along the way, but, you're not too late to get into AI, okay? Nobody's too late to do it. Okay. I would say immerse yourself. Okay? Just like any marketer has ever done in anything, what we've had to do is we immerse ourselves in it, we learn how to use it, and then, we take that and everything in the business experience we have, and then we apply that.

 

00:47:16:08 - 00:47:47:14

Keven Ellison

Right. And we've had to do that because our customers have changed. We also we always have to redefine ourselves. So that's the one thing. The other thing is you're only limited by your creativity when it comes to AI. Okay. So if you immerse yourself, you learn how to use the tools, properly. Okay. Any efficiently. And then, and then you, you adapt for, what it is that you're going to use within your organization.

 

00:47:47:16 - 00:47:50:03

Keven Ellison

That's what you need to do.

 

00:47:50:05 - 00:47:58:04

Alex Winter

Couldn't I said it better myself? That's so true. And don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to fall in your face to make mistakes. That's where the know. That's where the beautiful things happen. That's. That's the magic.

 

00:47:58:04 - 00:48:17:03

Keven Ellison

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I, I would rather make mistakes than be right all the time or make things over and over again. And for them to be right because when it gets it got to that point, even using AI, when it kept telling me over and over, no, this is the right way that you're building this, that you're doing this right over and over again.

 

00:48:17:03 - 00:48:33:23

Keven Ellison

I said, wait a second, let's play devil's advocate. I want you to take a turn now, and I want you to be a hard critic of me. And when I did that, now, it now it started to show me the behind the curtain, really, of what I needed to do in order to fix it, to make it right.

 

00:48:34:01 - 00:48:40:23

Alex Winter

Excellent. Very, very cool. Keven, thank you so much for your time and for being on the show today. It's been an excellent conversation.

 

00:48:41:01 - 00:48:53:05

Keven Ellison

Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And listen, if anyone wants to talk more about it, again at Impact Live, I'd be happy to because as you can see, I'm passionate about it. And I love talking about this.

 

00:48:53:05 - 00:49:08:02

Alex Winter

Yes, yes, we'll definitely be talking a lot more at Impact Live. I hope to see everybody at Impact Live that's watching and listening as well. Yeah. Thanks again Kev. And we'll definitely drop we'll drop all your info in the the show show notes. So that people can reach out if they have questions, if they want to check out what you're doing.

 

00:49:08:04 - 00:49:10:23

Keven Ellison

But absolutely. Or reach out and email on LinkedIn as well.

 

00:49:11:01 - 00:49:30:07

Alex Winter

Okay. Cool. We'll do that for sure. Thanks again. And for everybody out there watching and listening is endless. Customers. I'm your host, Alex. Catch you later.