How Do You Build AI Content Workflows Your Team Will Actually Use? [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 161]

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

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;10;20

Bob Ruffolo

We have a new coach here at IMPACT who’s been building with AI to take your content strategy to the next level. Stick around to the end of the episode to find out how you could put this to work for your own team.

00;00;10;22 - 00;00;29;11

Stephanie Baiocchi

You're listening to the endless customers brought to you by the team at impact. Endless customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. If you want 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;29;11 - 00;00;50;29

Stephanie Baiocchi

Ready to start implementing endless customers in your business? Talk to impact about how our coaching program can help you implement endless customers to success. And if you want to experience endless customers in person, don't miss our upcoming event! Endless Customers live in Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the seventh, 2026. Registration is now open. And now on to the show.

00;00;51;00 - 00;00;53;24

Stephanie Baiocchi

Here's your host, Bob.

00;00;53;27 - 00;01;10;16

Bob Ruffolo

And welcome back to Endless Customers podcast. Today we have a great guest with us new to the Impact team. Newer endless customers coach. But trust me, this guy comes with some incredible experience. Regan Cotton, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on here for your very first episode.

00;01;10;22 - 00;01;14;00

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, no super excited. First podcast overall. So we'll see where it goes.

00;01;14;02 - 00;01;33;10

Bob Ruffolo

Oh yeah. Well, you know, I gotta tell you and you know this and the whole team tells you this all the time. We are so excited to have you on the team here at impact. We do something called the Expert change some Monday meeting that we have. We get the entire team together for 90 minutes. We do a lot of show and tell and then we do some trainings.

00;01;33;12 - 00;02;06;00

Bob Ruffolo

And Regan in the last 3 or 4 weeks said multiple things to share, multiple things to train people on. I think we've been incredibly impressed with your aptitude for AI, and you come from a marketing background and you've done marketing, coaching and training before, but you are really sharp when it comes to everything AI right now, and you're really helping advance us in terms of what we can be doing with endless customers in AI first world, with cloud skills and and software you've been building and tools.

00;02;06;00 - 00;02;23;21

Bob Ruffolo

So that's where I really want to start. This conversation is just I guess we'll just start here. Like you came to impact, you saw what we were doing, and then you just jumped in and start getting your hands dirty. What did you see and what were the opportunities that you see that we should be doing more of?

00;02;23;23 - 00;02;46;21

Reagan Cotton

Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Yeah. No, I spent the past several years doing marketing and a decent amount of media as well, and kind of more like a solo operator had some subcontractors and joined impact because I love the team. I love the vision, I love I mean, I love the endless customers model. And like when I read the book, even before I had the job, I said, you know, even if I don't have work in there, like, this is something I want to apply to, like what I do because it made sense to like, clicked.

00;02;46;21 - 00;03;05;18

Reagan Cotton

And then, you know, very fortunate to be able to work here with everyone. But I think when I was doing my own thing and it was it was twofold. One was like the fear. I was like, is everyone using this? And I'm going to fall behind. So as like kind of someone that has your own business, you have all these clients and you know, what are what is the competitors doing.

00;03;05;18 - 00;03;27;09

Reagan Cotton

So I felt like it was a part of me that was like falling behind on the other end. I was like, there's this huge opportunity, you know, Chad, GPT comes out, what can I do with this? So I can speed some things up? And then Claude Cowork comes out and that felt like a game changer. And I was like, this is a huge opportunity because I'm certain maybe 90% of the people aren't utilizing this, you know, for what they're doing and to automate things and to build workflows.

00;03;27;09 - 00;03;45;23

Reagan Cotton

And. Yeah, and so it was twofold. And then when I came to impact, it was, you know, there's that onboarding period. So you don't throw people right into it like we're slowly building. And I was like, well, well I'm still building into it. Let me kind of use some of that background in AI to kind of help advance, you know, impact in any way it can through AI.

00;03;45;24 - 00;04;06;03

Reagan Cotton

So it was just like, hey, if I have an extra five hours, let me mess around and do this. This week, AI was in my head is built for problem solvers. If you're someone that has a problem and likes to solve those problems, AI is a really, really, really phenomenal solution. And I think every company has, you know, a few of those really good problem solvers that you could put them in any space and say, hey, we have this issue.

00;04;06;04 - 00;04;12;00

Reagan Cotton

Can you help us? And like AI is like that ultimate tool they can use. So that's that's kind of how I've seen it.

00;04;12;01 - 00;04;32;20

Bob Ruffolo

I like that analogy. It makes a lot of sense. And yeah, you've already jumped in and have been one of those problem solvers for us because of your AI skills. So so let's look at what you've observed here. So you've jumped right into the squad. And for those of you that know our team, he's working with Ali and Mandi.

00;04;32;20 - 00;04;56;12

Bob Ruffolo

So he's he's working with some veterans here. And he started looking at all the projects of what we're doing with clients and the endless customers. Playbook. What were some of the first things you said? We can be doing this better for clients could be adopting this better inside their organizations, or we can be using these better things with our clients because you were you just came in like a firestorm with ideas.

00;04;56;14 - 00;05;04;17

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, I have a tendency to do that. I tell people I go really, really fast and sometimes I'll leave a little bit of a wake. So it's nice to have people to kind of keep me, keep me lined up.

00;05;04;17 - 00;05;14;06

Bob Ruffolo

But from the CEO of the company, please don't slow down. Continue to push, push, push because we will keep up with you. We will. We promise we'll do our best, but keep pushing us.

00;05;14;08 - 00;05;16;20

Reagan Cotton

Sure.

00;05;16;23 - 00;05;45;03

Reagan Cotton

There was. I think for me it was. Every company now has to kind of take a step back and look at their their employees in every single role and say, hey, could I free up ten hours of that employee to do something more important? Could I free up 15 or 5 hours or some some task that they do so that the value they provide you that know the company internally but externally is more valuable for impact like our what we do is coach, right?

00;05;45;04 - 00;06;03;27

Reagan Cotton

We are teaching and coaching and that's how we provide the most value. So everything we can do that's not that. Whether it's, you know, manual entry of different things or a multitude of different spreadsheets or, you know, kind of going back for through the last weeks and kind of seeing where we're at and just back flowing that through AI, that saves an hour or two.

00;06;03;27 - 00;06;24;10

Reagan Cotton

And then the coach can just focus on this meeting, what needs to happen here and maybe even they see some more, you know, input from past meetings. So I think there's a lot of things internally on impact. And we're still defining that, you know, as we've seen like we've seen some I mean across a team like all these SMEs we've been having, they're like, I've built this, I built this.

00;06;24;10 - 00;06;40;03

Reagan Cotton

And you start to kind of see that energy within it. Like we're getting the value that we're we're spending in the air because it can be expensive, you know, for an organization. Sure. Like it feels. But if you had to pay for Google the search, you'd be wondering, hey, what are you guys spending all your Google search on?

00;06;40;06 - 00;06;54;25

Reagan Cotton

Like, are you guys looking up the right thing? So now it's with AI where people are probably going to step back and be, hey, I'm spending, you know, X amount, what value are we getting out of that? And I feel like an impact. We're starting to see that a little bit with the dashboards and just different content. And that's been super neat.

00;06;54;25 - 00;07;09;14

Reagan Cotton

And so I think the same thing goes now for for the clients we work with and all the awesome companies that we get to see on a day to day basis or week to week basis, it's like, okay, how do we provide that same knowledge and what we've built and what we've been building saying, hey, we're on the path with you.

00;07;09;15 - 00;07;19;14

Reagan Cotton

We're still learning, growing right now. We're we're not perfect, but we have a lot of really good solutions that we can kind of nudge you in the right direction to get on the same path with us. Yeah.

00;07;19;16 - 00;07;45;16

Bob Ruffolo

You know, one of the things I've been observing in just the business world, you go back five years ago, there were SaaS products for everything. You'd pay anywhere from a few bucks a month to whatever, $1,000 a month. And you had a lot of these small tools that maybe did one thing really, really well. And maybe it was a few bucks to 20 bucks a month.

00;07;45;19 - 00;08;07;01

Bob Ruffolo

And today it's so easy to build one of those tools. With AI, you can build your own thing, you can customize the for the way you want it. And we've actually seen some people build things in Claude, built their own products, and then they pitched them to us and I'm looking at like, oh, it's awesome. It's only XML per month.

00;08;07;02 - 00;08;23;23

Bob Ruffolo

Like, we should totally buy that. And then, you know, you were like, no, we should just build our own. That made so much sense. So I think we're gonna see a massive shift in like, these low level, do one thing SaaS products going completely away because people are going to build their owns and the way they want them.

00;08;23;26 - 00;08;44;12

Bob Ruffolo

And we had somebody pitch us a product. There was a content management tool. And I mean, it felt like over a weekend you just built something that was really at the level of what someone was showing us, maybe slightly better because it was better for us, because it was made for us in our environment, the way we would do things.

00;08;44;14 - 00;09;01;22

Bob Ruffolo

Can you share your experience of like the whole thing from why? What you saw? Like why? Yeah. And then and then, but also get like specifics. So to audience that has no idea how to build something. Tell them how you did it.

00;09;01;24 - 00;09;18;09

Reagan Cotton

Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. It was a conversation I had with with Mandy here. And, you know, they had pitched us something about content creation, and I just had overheard it. And it was the same thing. I think it was a Friday. And I had finished up kind of a lot of the stuff I had to do was 11:00 and I was like, I feel like this can be done with AI.

00;09;18;10 - 00;09;35;03

Reagan Cotton

I was like, I feel like we could build something with cloud in my head. I was like, even if it's 50 or 60% as good and maybe takes a couple hours of us, you know, whatever, you know, it might be worth it to just build it internally versus, you know, by externally. And that's a conversation. Now companies are going to have to have if they have the capabilities.

00;09;35;03 - 00;09;55;14

Reagan Cotton

Yeah. And so the first thing I like to do is kind of map out what it is. So you start with like what the problem is, you know, and then what the solution is. And then you kind of just tell that to cloud, like, hey Claude, in this case we need to write articles for blog posts, you know, for people to answer their questions.

00;09;55;14 - 00;10;10;20

Reagan Cotton

And I put the manuscript in there, but also for SEO and EO and G and all that stuff. So that's the goal. And then you kind of backtrack and say, okay, if I was doing this manually, how would I do that? Well, the first thing I would do is figure out, you know, what the topics are. Why do I do that?

00;10;10;21 - 00;10;25;18

Reagan Cotton

Well, you know, they ask, you answer, right? That's the whole goal. So what are the questions people are asking you right now and you SEMrush or whatever to to find some keywords. And so I said, okay, Claude, the first thing you're going to do is scrape the website so you can kind of figure out the brand voice, like, what is their tone?

00;10;25;19 - 00;10;45;15

Reagan Cotton

Do they have other blogs we can read for, kind of like their syntax, and then use SEMrush or any other keyword tool to pick the best 12 blog articles. And so that was the first step. And like I said, I was built for problem solvers. So I had a whole bunch of hiccups along the way where I wasn't connecting.

00;10;45;15 - 00;11;01;08

Reagan Cotton

And then for a while, you know, AI is not perfect. It was lying to me and I was like, wait, this doesn't make sense. And so you kind of work back and forth with it. But once I kind of got that done and, you know, I had the good keywords and I was like, okay, here is I think I had like ten articles that were really, really good in my opinion, that I pulled.

00;11;01;08 - 00;11;20;08

Reagan Cotton

And I kind of inputted them from the impact blog and said, here's kind of the writing style, like, this is what we want the formatting to be. Here's some of the bounds we want, you know, FAQ at the bottom. We want an intro. We want this to address the problem at the beginning. We want, you know, this many h2 and h2 s or so just.

00;11;20;09 - 00;11;36;03

Reagan Cotton

But that's where the expertise comes in right. If you know if you don't know what you're doing. You're not going to get any results. Like right now if I was, if someone was to ask me to go do something, you know, for, you know. Astrophysics after physics or like a dentist, I'm like, well, tell me how to do it.

00;11;36;05 - 00;11;36;23

Reagan Cotton

Like.

00;11;36;27 - 00;11;38;26

Bob Ruffolo

Sounds right.

00;11;38;29 - 00;11;56;06

Reagan Cotton

You don't know. And so I've written blog articles, you know, I review blog articles, I know how to write them. I know what needs to be done. So then as it's writing them, I can go through in the same iterative process and say, hey, this isn't right. We need to add this. Oh, the first, I think addition or whatever had like 5000 word articles.

00;11;56;06 - 00;12;15;07

Reagan Cotton

I said, okay, we need to get this within 1000 to 1800 for bigger ones. So you start to kind of squeeze, claw down and like what the skill is and what it needs to be, and then the output and then the final thing is what do you want the output to be. So once you have the content it's like, what do you want the output to be?

00;12;15;08 - 00;12;32;29

Reagan Cotton

Well, for me I was like, well, we could have a PDF or we could have it as a text file. But this goes to where my belief in the next two years will be, and I think we're starting to get there. I've seen a lot of really good software that does. This is 90% of people within a company.

00;12;33;01 - 00;13;00;23

Reagan Cotton

When I was doing research for the webinar, I did only use AI for simple prompts, right? And so they're not really utilizing it. And so for those people, you either have to a train them and teach them to use it, which is possible, or share the tools with them for them to use simply. Right. Right. Because not everyone's going to spend a Friday all day and maybe a little bit of my night, if I'm being honest, messing around with it because I got excited because, like, this is really cool.

00;13;00;25 - 00;13;18;18

Reagan Cotton

So I wanted to make this shareable. And so I went through some extra steps, which you don't have to do of, you know, putting it on to like a website. I had a little bit of experience in the background and just kind of building a really nice UI from it, and that's when you present it, instead of it just being a bunch of different cloud skills where it's very siloed.

00;13;18;18 - 00;13;36;12

Reagan Cotton

I could send that link to Mandy or Austin or Ryan or Bob and be like, hey Bob, if you need to write 12 articles, this will do the job. But here are a few things to be aware of. And I think I even mentioned like it's not perfect. If there's errors, let me know. And so would we sell this to someone at his current state?

00;13;36;13 - 00;13;52;05

Reagan Cotton

No, because it's got a lot of bugs. It's also, by the way, rather expensive to run just because it's manually done. I think it's like 4 or 5 bucks to do it, but in my head, it's like that does save a lot of time. And so when you get to the content manager instead of, right, 12 articles, the 80% is done.

00;13;52;05 - 00;14;07;29

Reagan Cotton

Now you bring in this expert content manager and say, hey, you need to go through each of them. You're the expert. Edit these oddities. Is this good? Is this right? And you know it's not going to be able to pull the good data. So you still need to have the SMEs that you can talk to because it's going to say, oh, the cost of this is x, Y and Z.

00;14;07;29 - 00;14;09;23

Reagan Cotton

And you're like, whoa, that's that's way wrong.

00;14;09;25 - 00;14;28;10

Bob Ruffolo

So so Reagan. So you built the skill, but you showed us the interface. So you didn't just have a skill that people have to go to the claw, just have the skill installed and go ahead and do the thing. You built an entire interface around this. So talk to us about your thoughts on that and how that came to be.

00;14;28;13 - 00;14;48;16

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, that was a little bit of experience with software. I think like 2022, I was doing a software startup with a good friend of mine, and ChatGPT actually kind of ruined us. Ironically, when it came out, we were like, well, we don't need this anymore. But so I did a little bit of experience with just kind of building websites and I don't want to say coding, but just understand the function of it where I could have AI do it for me.

00;14;48;16 - 00;15;12;09

Reagan Cotton

And I know like the steps. And so maybe some people know this, but, you know, using different tools like Vercel and GitHub. And there's one more that I always forget the name of. Let me just click it real quick, super base to like store all the information. Yeah. To build a UI that looks a lot easier and maybe more what we're accustomed to than just a cloud scale.

00;15;12;09 - 00;15;28;21

Reagan Cotton

And like an agent and a chat bot where I could send it to someone as like, hey, this looks like a HubSpot page, almost where it's like, hey, I got to enter the website here. Here's some of the articles I need. It shows you it running through and the outputs on the right side, and it shows you all of the all of the articles written.

00;15;28;21 - 00;15;48;03

Reagan Cotton

And it had some tabs. So it was really just the UI. I think that was like that. Next, the final cherry on top or that last 10% from hey Bob, here's an awesome Claude skill with 18 different steps. It runs through and it has all these great steps. But and that was honestly a lot of the work was getting it to the website and getting it to function.

00;15;48;03 - 00;16;07;02

Reagan Cotton

But in my head I was like, it goes back to that 9010 for the 90% of people who don't really feel super comfortable with AI or still learning, or in that process of understanding how to use it, I could send it to them and be like, hey, here you go. Internally. And you know, we talked to a couple of people in here who like, this is awesome.

00;16;07;03 - 00;16;25;29

Reagan Cotton

Like, what do we have to do? And so I think that's the future of AI a little bit. The next 1 to 2 years is like, how do we build those shareable, shareable tools and skills and identifying the people who are really passionate and problem solving focused within companies and saying, hey, whatever that looks like, you're going to be our go to person for building some.

00;16;26;00 - 00;16;40;03

Reagan Cotton

Now, even Maddie's doing it internally, like she built a spreadsheet with cloud skills, and now she's sharing them. And it's like there's gonna be a couple people that are really passionate about that, like, latch on to that within your organization and be like, hey, can you build this for this team? Can you build this for this team? Are you able to do this?

00;16;40;03 - 00;16;47;19

Reagan Cotton

I've seen this. Is there any way to make that happen and just see where it goes? You know, because you don't know but it really can't hurt to try.

00;16;47;21 - 00;17;25;18

Bob Ruffolo

So now Ragan you might not know this. But if you go back a few episodes actually we haven't even released this episode yet. But it's going to be coming out soon. We had Scott Merritt from Honest Fix on and he's a huge AI geek. And he's releasing I think, 11 pieces of content a day, and he's doing that because he's trying to build a moat around his business, because if he has just dominating the AI visibility and he just keeps building, building and building and building on it, it's going to be almost impossible for anybody to to break into his market from at least an AI visibility standpoint.

00;17;25;25 - 00;17;51;22

Bob Ruffolo

So as you're building out these tools, it does have me thinking a lot about that. And I see how important it is for people to probably be upping the amount of content they're putting out. I think 11 might be excessive, but it depends on your business and how you know you're competing and what you're trying to accomplish. We used to say three, you know, a piece of content written a week with around the big five.

00;17;51;23 - 00;18;15;22

Bob Ruffolo

I think that's changing. And, you know, as we think about what AI could do, you know, a good another good friend of mine. His name is Ruan, and he has a company called Splash Test, but he also has an agency. What he's been doing is using call rail with his clients. What outputs is the transcripts from these calls?

00;18;15;23 - 00;18;42;13

Bob Ruffolo

It strips out of all the personal information. And then he loads it all into AI. And he deals with smaller businesses than we typically work with. And they don't have content managers, but it's decent enough that these guys feel confident that it's got the brand voice down and the contents being written, and it's stuff that they're actually saying because it's coming out of their transcripts and their calls, and it's just pumping out like three pieces of content a day and being, you know, on their website.

00;18;42;13 - 00;19;02;10

Bob Ruffolo

So it comes off a call. Rail goes in, AI automatically is processed into articles, and it's publishing and scheduling three articles a day being regularly published. What are your thoughts on all that? What I was just sharing. And where do you think the future's going with content, if that's going to become so almost democratized?

00;19;02;12 - 00;19;21;27

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, it's sort of where humans are really good at inventing solutions to be more efficient, but then we just end up doing more work, and then the efficiency that we created is just the standard, you know? So I think I think that's where a lot of things will probably have where it's like blog articles will be done 90, 99% faster within the impact.

00;19;21;28 - 00;19;28;00

Reagan Cotton

Okay. Now content manager is more of a reviewer, but where does that open up the content manager to provide even more value for the company?

00;19;28;00 - 00;19;30;10

Bob Ruffolo

Now that's great. I'm seeing.

00;19;30;11 - 00;19;54;28

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, yeah yeah. And but that's that's the world. You know, everything's always evolving. You know, every every single job, every single role is always moving and it's just continuing to grow. So I would say probably that whether it's within blogs, whatever it may be, there's always going to be new tools that speed things up. And either you're going to start now and maybe we have like who knows how long the runway is before it's the standard.

00;19;55;00 - 00;20;01;16

Reagan Cotton

You start now and get ahead of that before it's a standard, or you kind of lag behind and give your competition a little bit more ground.

00;20;01;16 - 00;20;03;05

Bob Ruffolo

So yeah, it's.

00;20;03;05 - 00;20;04;11

Reagan Cotton

Kind of west.

00;20;04;13 - 00;20;24;10

Bob Ruffolo

I agree I agree completely. So okay, so you have a small business, no content manager. Maybe you're working with the agency who could set up that. I think that's better than nothing. Right. That's a really good. And it does feed AI. So you know his clients, my friend ruins clients are dramatically increasing their AI visibility just by doing that one simple thing.

00;20;24;17 - 00;20;46;26

Bob Ruffolo

Right. But once you get a little bit bigger and you can have a content manager, to your point, having a content manager that can build skills and can build systems and can, you know, just operationalize this whole content management function so you don't have to pay an agency, but that person then also reviews all the content. So the content is going to be better because you have a human in the loop going through the content.

00;20;46;29 - 00;21;11;01

Bob Ruffolo

Where I think many people underestimate is also the value of not just having written content, but can you add visuals to that content that go along with it? And that is a little bit harder for AI. It can be done, but it's harder for AI to do. But when you have a real video of real people doing real work, now the trust signals go way up in the authority and they feel like they know you.

00;21;11;01 - 00;21;37;24

Bob Ruffolo

And that's a lot of businesses still won't do it. Also, questions do we need 15, 20, 50 piece of content a week? Or maybe we need some at that level. Then we also need higher quality. I mean this is all going to be dramatically changing. So yeah, it's fascinating to think about, you know, how fast like content marketing has changed in just a few years.

00;21;37;26 - 00;21;56;02

Reagan Cotton

No, 100% going back to where I was, you know, a couple of years ago when it really started to ramp up, it was that place of like kind of fear and concern where it's like, am I falling behind, you know? And a lot of people are like that. And when that happens, you become afraid of AI. I think that's the worst thing you can do is become afraid of it, because I don't think that's going back, the genius going back in the bottle there.

00;21;56;02 - 00;22;26;09

Reagan Cotton

But I think, you know, if you're proactive and you're like, okay, what can we do? You know, and you start to ask those questions, you'll start to kind of, you know, snowball effect yourself towards like a really good solution. But I still agree. I think what AI is going to do is more things in house, you know, with a SaaS revolution agencies, I think we have this huge like external like growth where everyone had a whole bunch of different tools and softwares and sales teams and agencies and marketing.

00;22;26;10 - 00;22;45;08

Reagan Cotton

But I think AI is going to probably help us like to start to bring things back, which I think is awesome. You know, I'm a believer and that's why, you know, did enjoy the impact model was because, you know, we're not here to hold your hand. We are for a little bit, but after a while it's like, come on, you got to go ride the bike by yourself, you know?

00;22;45;11 - 00;23;06;02

Reagan Cotton

And I think AI is going to empower a lot of people to do that into learn and to kind of grow their skills. And then with the efficiency, grow themselves into more important things. Now, a content manager, not only is writing blog articles, maybe that frees up 20 hours for them to get really good at, you know, keywords and C-O and grow that skill and then become that part of the team, you know?

00;23;06;04 - 00;23;24;07

Reagan Cotton

And so it's like roles evolve. Where can you back flow that a little bit more time because boss is sending content manager home. Oh you got it done in ten hours this week because yeah you can go home now. It's a smart boss is saying, hey, we have 30 hours to train this person in another way, to grow them and their career within the company.

00;23;24;07 - 00;23;24;20

Reagan Cotton

So.

00;23;24;21 - 00;23;52;19

Bob Ruffolo

Well, you know, what you're saying though, to is like, we live in a competitive economy. And as soon as something if I. Okay, let's go back to 2004, for example, some companies didn't have websites, some did. Those ahead websites tend to get a little bit more visibility because they had a website. And then a few years later, then copy started blogging and those blogs were ranking for keywords.

00;23;52;19 - 00;24;15;21

Bob Ruffolo

They had more visibility than the people that weren't blogging. And then obviously YouTube and social media came along and you can see the same pattern happen. Now. We are empowering all these companies with all these AI tools. So so the bottom is all going to start like being democratized, starting to do more of it. But we're also seeing on the other end of it that the companies that are ten out of ten now, there's so much more they have to do.

00;24;15;23 - 00;24;41;08

Bob Ruffolo

They have to focus on getting reviews on every platform, respond to every review on every platform. They've got to get all their their local citation sites consistent and accurate nap. They've got to really build out their profiles online, different websites and their website and really build up their in their authority. They've got to be doing more with video.

00;24;41;09 - 00;25;00;25

Bob Ruffolo

They've got to be building self-service tools and better optimizing the website with schema. And the list goes on and on and on and on. If you were to actually go into like chat or anything right now and say, like, what is the best company and does this and why did you select them? It'll give you 500 things to do and your list of like just got to 500 things.

00;25;01;02 - 00;25;21;07

Bob Ruffolo

But I think the moral of the story is, how do we get AI to do the basic things that a human had to do a few years ago, and then we never got to these other things, but now we have to have AI do so much of that for us, uncover it and automate so much of it because there's so much more to do if we're going to be the leader in our market.

00;25;21;10 - 00;25;27;24

Reagan Cotton

Yeah, the business world always spins, but it's just spinning a little different now. So we just have to make sure that, you know, we're we're spending with it.

00;25;27;24 - 00;25;31;02

Bob Ruffolo

It's been faster and it spends more. Yeah there's a lot more.

00;25;31;04 - 00;25;32;25

Reagan Cotton

That's never slower.

00;25;32;27 - 00;25;50;22

Bob Ruffolo

You know because it's so funny. I even think about when I started impact, it was like there's like 5 or 6 things we would do with a client. And it's like if we were blogging and we were posting on Facebook or Twitter at the time, we'd send out emails, we build out some landing pages, ebooks, and we'd do their website.

00;25;50;27 - 00;26;00;21

Bob Ruffolo

And that was great. For most companies today, it's just, yeah, unlimited amount of things that company has to do. It's just so different.

00;26;00;24 - 00;26;15;06

Reagan Cotton

Yeah. No. And especially, you know, some of the calls I've been on just starting to equip a lot of the different content managers with some AI tools, you know, even for, I mean, for past blogs to be able to go through an old past blogs and just rewrite them, you know, and update them, it's they're like, man, like my I had 60 hours of work I do this week.

00;26;15;06 - 00;26;42;08

Reagan Cotton

This makes it 30 or 35 like you feel like the weight off the shoulders, like, man, this is like doable. It's possible. It's attainable. Which is which is phenomenal. And so I hope, you know, I love it as much as I love AI. There's downfalls to everything. I really hope it just it helps, you know, the human like work experience to be like better and like, you know, more more time to do the things you you're passionate about and to grow within that because people are like, oh man, all those menial tasks it takes away.

00;26;42;08 - 00;26;55;07

Reagan Cotton

I'm like, I don't enjoy menial tasks personally, you know? So I'm okay with AI taking those. But within the same reference, you know, we want to we want to make sure we're we're supporting people to use it. And not trying to replace people has always been where I'm at now.

00;26;55;07 - 00;27;09;20

Bob Ruffolo

Reagan. So you've been here a couple of months almost. And you've got your hands dirty with clients as well. So from an AI standpoint, content standpoint, what's some of the coolest stuff you've seen clients do or that we've helped them do?

00;27;09;22 - 00;27;23;03

Reagan Cotton

Yeah. From the have them do I think. You know, it's funny at first I could I could tell when someone was using AI to write blog articles because obviously it has kind of that talent. If you do it enough, you understand it.

00;27;23;04 - 00;27;26;25

Bob Ruffolo

Lots of contrast frames and lots of em dashes. Yeah.

00;27;26;28 - 00;27;44;14

Reagan Cotton

Just make sure you're always prompting no dashes and all caps with like a bunch of exclamation marks. But that was that was the first tell. And then I remember about a month later, I was reading some content from the same, same client, and I was like, did you right there with AI? And they're like, yeah. And so I think the coolest thing is they're starting to understand how to, like, hone it in to what they need.

00;27;44;20 - 00;28;00;18

Reagan Cotton

And I'm like, I thought it was maybe, but it was hard to tell. And I think that's in today's world really, really, really good. And so I think just the ability to kind of take it beyond a simple chat has been the coolest thing for me is take it from like, hey, I want an article. It's like, this is what I want, and you just sound like this.

00;28;00;18 - 00;28;28;25

Reagan Cotton

This is the tone here, the sections. Here's what he needs to cover. They've done a great job with that. And I think as far and I think impact has an absolute massive both opportunity and responsibility, if we're being honest, to help guide the clients with a lot of the information and knowledge that we have in the AI world, I think, you know, just as all their roles and responsibilities have shifted with it, so has my role as a coach.

00;28;28;27 - 00;28;46;12

Reagan Cotton

Like I need to be teaching and explaining and showing people how to use AI. That's just part of it, you know? That's why we're here as the coach and teach and equip. So, with that, I think the same thing just I think as simple as sometimes they're afraid to use cloth, they're afraid to use ChatGPT. They don't understand it.

00;28;46;13 - 00;28;58;25

Reagan Cotton

A couple days ago we had a call and it was just walking through how to use Cloud Coworker. And here's a skill and here's how to use it. And here's the article. And you know, and I don't want to say it's mind blowing, but you can kind of see they're like, oh my goodness. Like this. This is awesome.

00;28;59;01 - 00;29;20;09

Reagan Cotton

You know. Yeah. And so I think for us, every person is going to be at a different like aptitude for, for AI recognizing that and then being able to teach it. And just like we have our roadmap for a company for content and video and website and whatever it is like, I don't know where, again, I've only been here two months, but I see I see an AI roadmap in the future.

00;29;20;10 - 00;29;37;13

Reagan Cotton

You know, I see I see an AI roadmap where every company is like, hey, we want you guys here in the next year because, you know, you got three years to be there before. That's where the market is, you know? But I think there's time. I don't think we need to panic. Panic. I think a lot of this stuff is still fun to talk about, but not quite where it needs to be.

00;29;37;13 - 00;29;39;17

Reagan Cotton

But it's the time to dive in.

00;29;39;19 - 00;29;56;20

Bob Ruffolo

Well, you know, for our audience, I've seen Regan still new. He's been building up his book of business since he's been here. He does have a lot of availability. So if you liked anything that you heard from him today, he's available to chat. I'm sure. Regan, if someone wants to get in touch with you, the best way to do is just to send you an email.

00;29;56;20 - 00;29;57;21

Bob Ruffolo

You would think.

00;29;57;24 - 00;30;18;27

Reagan Cotton

Shoot me an email. As of now, I still have a little bit of time. You know, who knows how fast I'll get busy here? But no, I mean, this is something I really, really enjoy doing and I love coaching. It didn't even expect this to be something I was coaching when I came in, but it just kind of how everything came to fruition as I was messing around and and you find a need, you know, that's our goal is to find a need and fill that.

00;30;18;27 - 00;30;33;17

Reagan Cotton

So maybe that's for me is a lot of AI stuff in the near future and long term. But yeah, if your company or whatever it is is like, hey, we don't really feel like we're getting value out of AI or we don't really know what we're doing or we don't quite fully understand it. Would love would love to connect and help you in any way I can?

00;30;33;18 - 00;30;56;07

Bob Ruffolo

Sounds good. So send me an email. Actually, easiest thing to do is just go to Impact Plus and tell the talk to us. Say you want to talk to Regan and he'll he'll make some time for you. This has been a great episode. We'd love to have you back on the show in a few months. So keep building really cool things here, and let's let's continue to show and tell in the podcast that the audience will geek out over all this stuff, and you're doing some really great things.

00;30;56;07 - 00;30;59;17

Reagan Cotton

So yeah, for sure, always forward, always moving forward.

00;30;59;18 - 00;31;07;06

Bob Ruffolo

Awesome, Regan, thanks for joining. That's another episode of the Endless Customers podcast. Until next time. We'll see you at the next episode.

00;31;07;08 - 00;31;08;22

Stephanie Baiocchi

If you liked this episode, please.

00;31;08;22 - 00;31;13;15

Stephanie Baiocchi

Take a minute to leave us a review. Thanks for checking out the Endless Customers podcast.