SHOW TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is automatically generated by Descript.  Any errors or omissions are unintentional.

[00:00:05] Jeff Sieh: [00:00:00] Hello, folks. Welcome to Creator News Live. I’m Jeff Sieh and you’re not.

[00:00:08] Zac Brown: And I’m Zac Brown, Welcome to the show.

[00:00:10] Jeff Sieh: And this week we’re sitting down with Mike Allton, host of The AI Hat Podcast, co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing, director of partner-led growth at Agorapulse, and one of the most respected voices in the move from social media marketing into practical hands-on AI. Mike is gonna walk us through the friction audit he uses to find repeatable work in your week and show us how to turn those processes into permanent AI workers using custom GPTs, gremlin j- uh, gremlin, Gemini Gems, Claude skills, and co-pilot agents.

[00:00:40] Jeff Sieh: So sit back, clear your schedule, clear your mind, and get ready for this week’s episode of Creator News Live [00:01:00]

[00:01:08] Jeff Sieh: There we go, Mike. Your very own intro via Suno.

[00:01:12] Jeff Sieh: but Mike, let’s just dive right into it because there’s so much I wanna talk to you about. But first I wanna ask the audience. So I want you guys to kinda do a quick kinda gut check in the chat. When you open ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever AI tool you’re using, are you there mostly to ask or are you mostly there to build?

[00:01:30] Jeff Sieh: So drop ask or build in the comments wherever you’re watching from, ’cause I’d love to know, because it really is kind of a mental shift that you need to make with all these new tools coming out, and it’s, it’s even… it has been hard for me to do it, and I feel like I’m pretty tech-savvy. But we’re gonna talk about that with Mike today.

[00:01:47] Jeff Sieh: But Mike, you’ve been at this for, gosh, more than a decade. So for folks who only know you from, The AI Hat, take us back so- to Mike Allton of like 2013, 2014 actually day-to-day. When- [00:02:00] what was, like, The Social Media Hat and kind of your pivot story?

[00:02:03] Mike Allton: Well, after 15 years, I’m still not Jeff Sieh,

[00:02:06] Jeff Sieh: That’s right,

[00:02:07] Mike Allton: I don’t understand what I’ve been doing for all this time. Yeah, I used to build websites and I’ve had so many other careers, but I started blogging about social media for fun, frankly, and met incredible folks like you and Peg Fitzpatrick and decided, “Okay, this is, this is a direction I can take, with my career,” ’cause I’ve, I’ve figured out how I could help people, could help businesses get online and actually have a presence on social media.

[00:02:34] Mike Allton: I obviously talked about a lot more. It was more of a digital marketing umbrella, not just social media. I talked about email marketing, content marketing a lot, blogging. I even spun off the blogging content. You know, you nicknamed me, uh, the Blogging Brute

[00:02:47] Jeff Sieh: Right, you wrote so much.

[00:02:47] Mike Allton: One of those original shows.

[00:02:49] Jeff Sieh: Yeah

[00:02:49] Mike Allton: We were interviewing Gary Goldstein, who was the producer of “Pretty Woman,” and I was blogging about the episode while you and some of the other, hosts were asking him questions.

[00:02:58] Mike Allton: So I published that post, [00:03:00] like, moments after we got off the call. fun times. Fun times. Yeah. But, uh, I got hired by Agorapulse eight years ago, so I’ve been working full-time for Agorapulse, leading their influencer marketing and their brand partnership initiatives ever since then, and “The Social Media Hat” was a side project, a side hustle for me for many years until I decided to really weigh in on AI

[00:03:22] Jeff Sieh: Hmm. Well, I’m glad you did because you’ve got a lot of great stuff, and I, I mean, we were kind of teasing at the beginning, you’ve been traveling everywhere doing these trainings for, you know, corporations and groups and, you know, we’re gonna be at, Digital Day Wichita next month, a conference talking to those folks there.

[00:03:38] Jeff Sieh: So you- you’ve really kind of nailed it and really kind of found your lane with this AI stuff, because it’s changing all the time. It’s really exciting. So thanks for, for doing that.

[00:03:46] Mike Allton: Yeah, this is, you know, I tell people all the time, this is the fourth industrial revolution. This is not just a new app that you can sleep on. This is not a new social network. I, I was literally telling people in a room yesterday that when I was doing the social media [00:04:00] stuff, I would tell business owners, “Do not jump on the latest and greatest social networks.

[00:04:06] Mike Allton: Wait until they’re truly mainstream. Wait until we know that they’re not gonna go away,” like Blab and Periscope and s- so many others have over the years. And I, I would still give them that advice today. I would tell a business, “Don’t waste your time on Blue Sky. Don’t waste your time on Lemon8. Sit back and wait,” because as a business you don’t need to be a trendsetter.

[00:04:26] Mike Allton: AI is not that. AI is an industrial revolution like electricity. It’s, it’s not an option. So yeah, I’m, every week I’m in a different business or in a different event, trying to help people understand and wrap their brains around what do they do with this stuff? How do I actually take this blinking cursor in a chat and do something with it that can actually help my business?

[00:04:46] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool. Zac, you got a question?

[00:04:49] Zac Brown: Yeah, Mike, when did that moment click for you? What was that feeling when you went, AI was not just another tool to write about, that it was going to actually reshape the work that you were doing [00:05:00] completely?

[00:05:00] Mike Allton: Yeah, I love this question because when I first started using AI and started looking at it, that was many, many years ago, and it wasn’t impressive. It wasn’t, effective at actual business purposes. It was just a toy. There were people creating images for fun. I don’t really enjoy playing with tools for fun.

[00:05:20] Mike Allton: That’s never been my personality. I wanna know why do I need to do this? How is this gonna help me before I really invest any kind of time in it? So it wasn’t until I was listening to Paul Roetzer’s podcast, “The Artificial Intelligence Show” with Mike Kaput in late 2024, and they were talking about ChatGPT, of course, but more specifically, they were talking about something Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, had said.

[00:05:44] Mike Allton: And at that time, he’d said in a few years, like five years, which we’re getting really close to that time now, he said 95% of marketing is gonna be handled by AI. And that really stopped me cold. I said, “Wait, what? What do you mean?” Because up until that point, I’d used [00:06:00] tools like conversion.ai, where you could have it, you know, you’d tell it to write me an ad copy in the style of Gary Vaynerchuk, and, and it was just rubbish.

[00:06:09] Mike Allton: they’re much better now, but, you know, back then it, it was not impressive to me. So I said, “Wait, what?” And then I started to pay a little more close attention to what people were actually doing with ChatGPT in late 2024 and realized, oh, this, this is going to truly change everything. That’s when I decided to launch the podcast, which you and I both know is really just an excuse to be able you know, get free consulting.

[00:06:31] Jeff Sieh: Right, exactly. Exactly

[00:06:33] Mike Allton: will, w- people will volunteer to be interviewed, but they won’t volunteer to just let you pick their brain for an hour. So I could record me asking questions of folks from NVIDIA, LinkedIn, HubSpot, for free and, and get their advice and then share it with other people.

[00:06:47] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, don’t tell anybody that ’cause that’s, that’s kind of my little secret. Like that’s how I, how I’ve grown my business. Don’t let anybody know. Uh, we’ve got some great people in, the chat. Dustin Stout waving hi, and he’s like, “Mike.” Yeah, Dustin and Mike and I go, back a long ways.

[00:06:59] Jeff Sieh: [00:07:00] And then Rich says he loves that it’s electricity. I read something the other day I thought was really cool that they compared it… Because, you know, there’s all this talk and, and we do need to kinda… The energy consumption and the data centers and all this stuff, that’s a real issue. But they compared it to almost the, you know, the Industrial Revolution, but even when trains were, when they had to make this big push for…

[00:07:20] Jeff Sieh: That was new technology, and laying the track, and it disrupted farmers’ fields, and all this. It was very disruptive to society, and there were people who were, thought it was gonna kill everything and it was gonna bring everything down. And so I feel like it’s, there’s a big comparison to, uh, when the trains kinda, the continental railroad and all that kinda stuff happened.

[00:07:39] Jeff Sieh: There’s a lot of comparison to that. But Mike, in your bio, there’s a line that I really love, and it’s, “The era of playing with AI is over,” which I thought was great. So when, you mentioned you heard this on a- the podcast, but like when did you specifically stop playing? Like, we kinda teased at the beginning, you know, we need to stop asking questions and start [00:08:00] building things.

[00:08:00] Jeff Sieh: So when was that specific moment for you? Like was there a project, a call? When did, when did you realize you kinda crossed over to building?

[00:08:08] Mike Allton: Yeah, I would have to say for me it was about a year later. I’d, I’d started the podcast, in mid 2024, called it “AI and Marketing Unpacked,” and I was interviewing people, and there weren’t a lot, there still aren’t a lot of AI podcasts out there, particularly ones that were focused on marketing. And by the end of that year, I was feeling frustrated that the podcast and, and any kind of work that I wanted to do around AI just, I didn’t like I was getting the traction that I should’ve.

[00:08:35] Mike Allton: And it was December 23rd, I remember it very clearly, ’cause we were leaving St. Louis, Missouri, to drive two straight days to Southern California, to spend Christmas with my in-laws in Southern California. I know you’ve made drives like that and fantastic drives across the country, but it’s also 30 hours of road.

[00:08:52] Mike Allton: and I was obsessing internally about we, you know, ’cause the rest of the family’s listening to podcasts and their own shows and things, so I’m [00:09:00] obsessing internally about why I didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of traction that I, that I should’ve. And right around probably Kansas City, I started to realize, number one, I wasn’t on vacation.

[00:09:11] Mike Allton: I was pulling all that friction with me. And number two, I just wasn’t doing the kinds of things that I expected I should be doing in my business. In other words, I was still doing a lot of administrative robot work even though I was using AI every single day. So I had called up Gemini. I’m a, a big Google user, so I, I started a chat, a live voice conversation with Gemini, and I basically just asked Gemini to help me unpack why I wasn’t getting the traction that I thought I should.

[00:09:42] Mike Allton: I gave it all my data, all my friction, and we had a strategic conversation over the course of the next, you know, countless hours driving across that country. And when we got to Southern California, at that point now we’re at the in-laws, so no huge plans. I had a lot of time on my hands to just relax, [00:10:00] and I put myself to work.

[00:10:01] Mike Allton: Me and my new AI chief of staff, we determined how I needed to reshape my business, how I need to rebrand, how I needed to completely spin off the AI content. I’d been blogging about AI and publishing podcast episodes and so on, on the Social Media Hat, on thesocialmediahat.com, which doesn’t sound at, at a high level like it has anything to do with artificial intelligence.

[00:10:23] Mike Allton: Created the AI Hat, rebranded the podcast, built a whole new website, all that within two weeks over the Christmas break with just me and the AI. And what came out of that was not only that new brand and new focus, was an actual AI chief of staff that knows everything there is to know about me, my business, my goals, my objectives.

[00:10:42] Mike Allton: It understands my bandwidth. So like right now, you mentioned I’m traveling a lot, and I am. I’m speaking either at, like, an event or in an individual business every single week. I still have the podcast, but I’ve had to reduce publishing to about once a month ’cause I’m traveling so much and I’m so busy and I’m still working for Agorapulse.[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] Mike Allton: And so I give people an example all the time. If I had the idea And shoot me if I said this out loud, but if I had the idea to start a second podcast, I think we’d all agree that, that that’s a pretty dumb idea. But if I take that idea to ChatGPT, ChatGPT would say, “Mike, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.

[00:11:17] Mike Allton: That’s absolute gold. You should absolutely start a new podcast. Here’s the opening script for you,” right? And it would just dive into that project because most AI is a yes man. But if I go to my AI chief of staff, it says to me, “Mike, are you crazy? You can’t possibly start a second podcast right now.

[00:11:34] Mike Allton: You’re barely hanging onto the one you have. Let’s talk about why you wanna do that. Maybe there’s something we need to talk about with the first podcast, or if you’re really set on it, maybe it’s later this year,” right? It’s the kinda check that every CEO needs to have, who is coming up with all kinds of idea for their staff mid-quarter.

[00:11:51] Mike Allton: That’s what my AI chief of staff does. That’s, that’s when I realized I don’t have to just use AI as a glorified search engine. Now it’s a strategic partner

[00:11:59] Jeff Sieh: So I want [00:12:00] to, before you ask your question, Zac, I want to kind of pull this string a little bit. So I want to ask you, now this didn’t happen overnight, right? Like you didn’t just say, “Hey, I have a chief of staff,” da, da, da. It had to learn about you, it interviewed you. The, the tool got better, right? And so now it…

[00:12:15] Jeff Sieh: Like, that’s what I’m loving about the Claude and Claude CoWork and Claude Code, you know, those things that have memories and I can… It’s a living document. Like it constantly is being updated. It’s constantly being better. So I just want to make sure that we’re, we’re clear that you didn’t just drive and magically everything’s fixed.

[00:12:32] Jeff Sieh: It’s, it’s taken some time for you to train things, correct?

[00:12:35] Mike Allton: Right. However, less time than what most people think because the way I’ve seen a lot of people use ChatGPT, for instance, is they have that one chat that they keep going back to because that chat they’ve had this long conversation and they feel like ChatGPT knows me in that one chat. And that’s a problem because there’s a chat context window.

[00:12:56] Mike Allton: There’s a limit to how much all these AI systems will [00:13:00] remember within a given chat. Now they’re doing better. That chat context window keeps getting better and longer, and they’re getting better at remembering things across conversations, and yet that’s still a problem. So if you’re going back to that one chat and all of a sudden it goes off the rails and it’s answering questions you didn’t ask, or it’s answering the same question over and over again and you feel like it’s just confused, that’s why.

[00:13:23] Mike Allton: You’ve hit your chat context window. So that’s not where my AI chief of staff lives. My AI chief of staff lives in custom instructions. It lives in a Gemini Gem and a Claude skill, in a custom GPT in ChatGPT, and an agent in Copilot because as a trainer I have to use all the tools. So it’s actually a living, breathing Google Doc where I’ve spent time enhancing- I was just showing people yesterday, I’m on version 4.1 with this Google Doc, and it, like it- like you were asking, it, it lists all these things that we’ve established over time.

[00:13:56] Mike Allton: These are all the things that I want it to know. But it’s not just in a [00:14:00] chat. It’s in an actual custom instruction and custom version of the AI. And when I wanna make a change, I change the Google Doc, and then I copy and paste the contents into Gemini and all the other places.

[00:14:09] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Very, very smart

[00:14:11] Zac Brown: I love that. And Mike, you’ve done this thing that I think is the wonderfully crazy thing that we as creators do. You picked up The AI Hat without putting down The Social Media Hat. How do you think about those two brands and audiences now? Like, is there one Mike or are there two?

[00:14:27] Jeff Sieh: That’s great

[00:14:28] Mike Allton: Well, there’s, there’s thankfully only one Mike, although Ian Anderson Gray has said for years that I must have a clone of myself, but I do not. It’s just me. and, and to be transparent, the, the, The Social Media Hat really is on maintenance mode at the moment. I’m not regularly publishing there. I have no social media marketing clients or any kind of projects or income related to that site.

[00:14:51] Mike Allton: In fact, for a while I had published that, like I said, that Blogging Brute site dedicated specifically to blogging and content marketing. [00:15:00] I’m probably gonna shut that down this year and just move all the content back to The Social Media Hat. and I honestly don’t know if The Social Media Hat will continue much longer ’cause The AI Hat is doing great.

[00:15:10] Mike Allton: I’ve, I’ve got, you know, invitations to speak and, and, and client, work that I’m doing and contract work that I’m doing. More than enough to handle with somebody who’s still got a full-time job, that he wants to keep. So yeah, not much going on over there, to be frank.

[00:15:25] Jeff Sieh: So speaking of that full-time job, I wanna, I wanna dig into that because I think, one, I think we learn from people, like how they do their time management, and we can apply a lot of that stuff to somebody who’s got a side hustle or has a corporate gig. I know a lot of people have a corporate gig.

[00:15:39] Jeff Sieh: Uh, our friend Sean, Roberson from, But Mostly Disney, he’s like a realtor and he’s doing this But Mostly Disney thing on the side. So, a- you’re director of partner-led growth at Agorapulse, and you’re carrying like real stuff you gotta get done. Like, this is a day job. This is what, you know, keeps food on the table for now.

[00:15:54] Jeff Sieh: So how does the day job feed the consulting work, and maybe the consulting work [00:16:00] feed the day job? I’m sure you’re learning skills that you’re, when you’re training that you can apply to things in, Agorapulse and in that organization.

[00:16:08] Mike Allton: There’s a couple things to it. The, I think probably the most interesting one is not about AI as a, as a technology, but it’s about the importance of relationships and interactions, ’cause that’s what my job at Agorapulse is all about. It’s about finding relationships and developing them and, and leveraging them both with influencers and with other brands that we might wanna partner with as an organization.

[00:16:30] Mike Allton: That’s a big part of what I’m doing right now at Agorapulse. We’re launching a whole new project called Archie. We can talk about that a little bit, and it’s going to be influencer-led when it launches this summer. I’m doing calls with influencers, and I’m walking them through it. I’m going to events, you know, like AI Business World, Social Media Marketing World, to have face time with influencers, which AI can’t do any of that at all, right?

[00:16:53] Mike Allton: So there’s, there’s that aspect of it, but it’s also interesting that I’m able to continue to [00:17:00] foster and leverage those relationships that I’ve been making for, you know, over a decade now, and leverage those for both aspects of the business. You’ve been on my AI Hat podcast. Many of the people that I’ve known from social media, and the digital marketing space have been on that podcast, and the reverse is true.

[00:17:17] Mike Allton: We’re talking about me starting a second podcast, a new podcast, but this is for Agorapulse. And w- when and if I start that podcast, there’ll be that reverse feed there as well. I’ll be able to pull folks that I’d had on the AI show and bring them onto this new podcast that’s all, it’s gonna be all about AI and social media specifically.

[00:17:35] Mike Allton: So there’s gonna be a lot of overlap there in topics and in the talent, the people that I wanna talk to

[00:17:40] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. It’s, it’s awesome. I, I mean, it’s just, it’s so fun to see how far and different our jobs are since when we first met each other a long time ago . I mean, it’s just, it’s like this stuff didn’t exist. I remember when Ja- what was it? Jarvis or Jasper came out. they had to quit calling it Jarvis ’cause of Marvel.

[00:17:56] Jeff Sieh: But, that was the thing, and then that was basically what we’re [00:18:00] talking about moving away from, is not just asking questions, but building real, real tools for your business. And, uh, Disney Hotel Lady, I see your question. We’re gonna get to that. But I was so excited that Mike was on, I forgot to mention at the very start of the show our sponsors, Ecamm.

[00:18:13] Jeff Sieh: they are amazing. You can find out more about them at Ecamm.com/jeff. But by the way, they actually… Well, uh, here’s a word from our sponsor That’s right, folks. The amazing folks at Ecamm

[00:18:42] Mike Allton: I love that three-piece tweed you got going on

[00:18:44] Jeff Sieh: I know. It’s like, I look kind of like Colonel Sanders a little bit, so we’re gonna have to ma- redo that one. but, let’s, why don’t we kind of go to this next section, and this kind of, goes into some of the questions that Disney Hotel Lady, Cause she goes, “Wait, what? how do I do that? I don’t understand how to move away from one long [00:19:00] chat.” So let’s talk about that, because there’s a lot of, this, these .md files that a lot, like, Claude and even ChatGPT, it’s kind of where you’re, they’re kind of almost standardizing where memory lives in these chats.

[00:19:14] Jeff Sieh: so talk about that, her question about like, w- “How do I, how do I even move away from what I’ve been doing?” Like, what do you tell somebody who comes up to you at a conference, Mike, and has that exact same question? Like, “I didn’t know I could do that.”

[00:19:23] Mike Allton: Well, the first really cool and different thing about AI as a technology that makes it different from every other tool, every other technology you’ve ever worked with, is that anytime you’ve got a question, you can ask it. So I don’t know which LLM you’re using, and it doesn’t matter because they’re all the same.

[00:19:40] Mike Allton: You can go into Copilot or Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude and say, “Hey, I wanna make a permanent assistant,” or whatever you wanna call it. “How do I do that with you?” you could get specific if you want to. With Claude, it’s a skill. With Gemini, it’s a gem. With ChatGPT, it’s a custom GPT. And with Copilot, it’s an agent.

[00:19:59] Mike Allton: [00:20:00] Those are kind of the four areas, the four big models that I typically work with, that most of you should be using one of those. I know we’re gonna talk about that in a minute too. But you can ask it and it will tell you and it will walk you through how to do it. You can give it a very specific task, something that you’re doing on a regular basis, like I was preparing for my podcast, so I built a podcast showrunner, an AI showrunner, and it’s only for that task.

[00:20:21] Mike Allton: I don’t use it for anything else. It’s very, very specific and specialized. Or you could go vague and general like my AI chief of staff. That’s just kind of an all-purpose assistant. But then the next key step is Ask the AI to interview you. Just say, “Hey, ask me questions, whatever you need to know to help me build this assistant.”

[00:20:38] Mike Allton: Because there’s no magic wand, there’s no special programming or coding that you have to do. You just need to be able to give the AI all the context that it needs to do a good job, knowing in the back of your mind that it’s not permanent. You know, it might not ask you a question that eventually you think that probably should know that information.

[00:20:55] Mike Allton: If so, you can always go back in and edit that. But in the end, it’s gonna give [00:21:00] you a whole bunch of information. You’re gonna say, “Hey, output for me now all the instructions that I need to build this agent.” It’s gonna be a whole big block of text that all you’re going to do is copy and paste that into the configure screen.

[00:21:11] Mike Allton: And I don’t know, Jeff, if you want me to screen share, I can even show you guys what these screens look like, ’cause they’re all the same across all the LLMs. Dustin’s in the audience. He created a fantastic tool called Magai. Magai is a wonderful tool, and it has a option called or a feature called Personas.

[00:21:26] Mike Allton: That’s basically the same thing. The beauty there is you create a persona, and then you could use it with every other LLM. So you can be having a conversation using your chief of staff persona in Gemini, and then you get to the point where now I want to actually write some of the content that we’ve strategized with Gemini, but I know Claude’s a better writer.

[00:21:42] Mike Allton: Just switch the model to Claude in that same chat within Magai, and your persona’s still there. It’s that ever-present assistant. So at the end of the end, you ask the AI for help, you ask it to interview you, and then at the end of that interview, once it’s asked all the questions that it has to ask, you [00:22:00] tell it to output the instructions for this assistant.

[00:22:03] Mike Allton: And then you go into whichever LLM you’re using. You say new agent or new custom GPT or new gem or new skill, and there’s a name for it. Don’t name it Bob. You won’t know what that’s for. Name it something meaningful to you, right? and they all have this. They all have a name field, they all have a description field, which is just like a one-sentence general description.

[00:22:22] Mike Allton: What is this for? And then there’s an instructions field. Copy and paste from your other chat. That’s all you have to do. You can save it then, but if you want, you can scroll down. There’s also fields in every one of these models where you can attach knowledge files, PDFs, transcripts, whatever resources you think that assistant would need to have available to it to do a great job.

[00:22:44] Mike Allton: My AI chief of staff, I have a specific Google Doc that is the instructions and a second Google Doc that is the AI chief of staff knowledge file. That knowledge file doesn’t change too often, and that’s why it’s a separate file. It’s my target ICP and details about that, some [00:23:00] other details about my channels and those kinds of things.

[00:23:02] Mike Allton: So that’s there as a living document that I can attach, and then I also have a voice file. I’ve got a 16-page document that describes how I communicate and how my communication style changes by different channels just a little bit, little bit of tweaking and a little bit of adjustment there. So those are the two files that are attached to my AI chief of staff.

[00:23:20] Mike Allton: my podcast assistant has a couple of different files. Again, that’s the same no matter what large language model you’re using. If you have a knowledge file of some kind that you think this AI assistant should need to have, you can attach it. One of the cool things with Copilot, a year ago, people, if they came to me and said they were using Copilot, I would grimace.

[00:23:39] Mike Allton: I’m like, “I’m sorry.” It’s actually really good now, particularly if you’re already using Microsoft 365, because if you create a Copilot agent, you can now point it to a SharePoint folder, and it will automatically update. If you upload new files to that folder, those are now accessible to your agent, and of course, it has deep integration with Word and Excel and [00:24:00] Outlook.

[00:24:00] Mike Allton: but at the end of the end, put in those instructions, save your new assistant, and then test it, and if it doesn’t give you the exact output or the same exact experience that you would expect, all you have to do is tweak the instructions

[00:24:11] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. So it’s funny ’cause you’re talking, and before I get to your question, Zac,Dustin goes, “Honestly, I wish I could steal Mike away from his everyday job because he’s teaching everything just like I do. He’s basically my twin.” He- Well, You’ve got a lot more hair. You’ve

[00:24:23] Mike Allton: Yeah, he stole my hair is

[00:24:24] Mike Allton: what

[00:24:24] Jeff Sieh: know, it’s just crazy. can you talk real quick, because you’re, you’re talking about these documents and the memories and stuff, I think it’s important to people to know that they need to figure out a way that they can sync it with the cloud, because if you just leave it on your desktop, let’s say you’re going into Claude, CoWork, and it’s, you know, you, you’re building it.

[00:24:41] Jeff Sieh: It’s gonna just live on your local computer, and then you go to your laptop and you’re traveling, and you’re like, “Oh, it doesn’t know who I am anymore,” because it’s not, it’s… Those files are somewhere it can’t access. Can you talk a little bit about that, Mike?

[00:24:52] Mike Allton: Yeah, it’s this new phenomenon that has occurred with these AI models. And I say n- new, and when I say new, I’m really talking about [00:25:00] mainstream new. Some of this stuff has been around for, for a couple years now, particularly on the Google side. And Claude was the first, I think the first to kind of make it mainstream, or maybe OpenAI.

[00:25:08] Mike Allton: But there’s an idea, an aspect of these AI tools where it kind of lives on your computer, and it’s cool because it can engage with your computer. It’s not just a, an assistant popping up like Clippy used to. It can actually manipulate files and upload files, and if you’ve got the Chrome extension, it can see the Chrome tabs that you have open and do things with them.

[00:25:28] Mike Allton: I mean, you can literally ask these AI tools to draft a publish or draft a blog post for you and then push it to your WordPress installation. It will do that for you. But they only live on your computer. Like you said, I have a desktop. If I open up my laptop downstairs, I can’t see what I did using Claude CoWork on my system.

[00:25:47] Mike Allton: Microsoft Copilot has licensed Claude CoWork and hasn’t released it yet, or at least they have, it’s not, it’s not everyone. But eventually you’ll have the same ability inside of Copilot. I’m pretty sure you could do this with ChatGPT. [00:26:00] I haven’t personally done it, but I think that was their Atlas tool.

[00:26:03] Mike Allton: Someone can correct me in the chat if I, if I’m wrong. and Gemini has had this ability in a different area of Google’s massive cloud of, of apps, but now they’re baking this into Gemini as well. So eventually all the tools, if they don’t already, will soon have that ability, which means you, everyone in the audience, will soon have the ability to have a conversation with your AI on your system and have it do stuff for you, which is pretty cool.

[00:26:25] Mike Allton: You can give it a task, ” Hey, I want you to write this blog post and then prep it on my WordPress site,” and then you walk away and it figures out all the stuff to do.

[00:26:34] Mike Allton: This is separate from the kinds of assistance I was talking about a moment ago. You’re not building a skill inside of CoWork. That’s a separate area of Claude.

[00:26:45] Mike Allton: You’re not building a skill or a gem or anything like that, the same way. they’re really separate features.

[00:26:51] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Very, very cool. So I just wanted to… ‘Cause I know that’s, that’s something that people don’t understand when they move. Like, “Oh, my stuff’s gone.” Well, it’s still there, it’s just you’re not at the right computer kind of a thing. So thanks [00:27:00] for that.

[00:27:00] Zac Brown: Mike, you’ve given us the benefits of using this AI for multiple things, but we need you to be honest with our audience for a second. If creators solopreneurs are using AI mainly for just search and research right now, what’s the actual cost of staying there? Like, what are they leaving on the table?

[00:27:17] Mike Allton: That’s a great question ’cause there’s, there’s some nuance there and a couple different points. First, they’re simply not leveraging the tool to its greatest capability. if you’re going into Canva and you’re using it just to create the right size canvas for a social post without actually putting any content in, and then exporting it and then opening Paint or something stupid to actually put the content in, y- you’re wasting your time and you’re not leveraging Canva to the extent that you potentially could.

[00:27:45] Mike Allton: It’s the same way with these AI tools. If I’m just going in and asking it questions like, “How tall is Tom Cruise?” I’m gonna get a fast answer and I’m gonna get the answer rather than, you know, 10 blue links where I could go and click through to find out how tall he is. [00:28:00] So I’ve saved myself a little bit of time, but how did that really move the needle for my business?

[00:28:05] Mike Allton: It did not. Did that allow me to scale my business? it did not, particularly as a solopreneur and creator. This is one of the things that made me most excited about my AI chief of staff because as, as Jeff said from the outset, I’ve had the social media hat as a side gig for over a decade.

[00:28:21] Mike Allton: There’s nobody here in the room telling me what I should or should not do with that business. I’ve got the dogs here. They don’t do anything for me. They don’t help me. They don’t answer any questions. They barely move. So The Social Media Hat was always a true solopreneur business. There was nobody that I could turn to, which was a stark contrast from my previous corporate America life.

[00:28:42] Mike Allton: I worked for a company with 80,000 people. I was in their global IT department and the guy next to me, Todd, was hired the same day I was. So whenever either of us had a question about anything, it was lean over to the next cubicle and ask our question and then go back to work without having to give him all the context ’cause he already knew it.[00:29:00]

[00:29:00] Mike Allton: That’s what the AI chief of staff became for me, was my first major hire as a solopreneur. Now, this true assistant, this partner in my business, knows everything. I don’t need to give it all the context when I ask it a question, and I can ask it truly strategic questions and have those strategic conversations back and forth.

[00:29:20] Mike Allton: And then I could hire additional specialized assistants like a podcast showrunner and a blog post writer and an email marketing campaign assistant and so on, that could be as broad or as narrow as I needed them to be. So solopreneurs who are just asking questions back and forth, they’re missing opportunities.

[00:29:38] Mike Allton: That’s the first problem with where they’re at today. The second more further deeper thinking problem is if you’re sitting still today and you’re just using these tools at a, at a really, really shallow level How are the other creators and the other entrepreneurs in your space who are technically competition moving faster than you? If [00:30:00] I’m able to save myself a minimum of two hours a week by using AI tools, how am I using that time today? What else am I doing today that I wasn’t doing before? And I’m not just making up those numbers. I’ve got that podcast showrunner. I used to spend two hours every single week looking at my guests’ LinkedIn, their website, coming up with a totally custom bio, thinking about what angle I could talk to them about, uh, writing the description of the show, and then of course, coming up with all the questions giving them that as a document before the show.

[00:30:34] Mike Allton: Two hours, easy, every single guest. And I used to have multiple podcasts. I have my own podcast. I’ve always had my own podcast, and then I have a bunch with Agorapulse.

[00:30:42] Jeff Sieh: Right

[00:30:42] Mike Allton: With the AI, that’s now a 20-minute task. 20 minutes and I’m done, and it’s fantastic. I mean, it literally is better than I wrote it before.

[00:30:52] Mike Allton: When Jeff, when I bring you on the show, I’m going to recite an introduction that Claude wrote about you based on your [00:31:00] background information, and 9 times out of 10, the guest tells me, “Wow, Mike, that was the best introduction I’ve ever heard. I need to bring you with me everywhere.” And I tell them number one, Claude wrote that, and number two, you did all the work.

[00:31:12] Mike Allton: I don’t take any credit for these introductions. I’m very transparent about it, but they’re that good. That’s what people are missing out by not using these AI tools in their way. They’re missing out on the opportunity to save themselves time and then refocus that time on stuff that’s even more strategic that they wouldn’t have even dreamt of doing before

[00:31:29] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, for me, so it’s, it’s saving me time to be more creative in things that only I can do, right? Like, I think that’s the, the thing that I’m finding ’cause and there’s a lot of articles out there about like, okay, AI’s not really saving us any time because we’re putting more work on top of stuff you know, we’re getting done.

[00:31:44] Jeff Sieh: And so I like to try to, okay, what can I be creative on that I didn’t have time with before? just a, a little, those, these little silly little songs I do at the beginning, I would never, ever be able to do those without AI, right? Like, I could never, like hiring a band and doing, I mean, all the [00:32:00] s- the studio work, I would not be able to

[00:32:02] Jeff Sieh: It was, it was out of the re- realm of possibility. I’ve always wanted to do that since I was a kid, have my own little, you know, theme song for a guest coming on, and now I can do it. It takes me 10 minutes. the thing that you were saying about the podcast, like show prep, like nobody likes writing podcast show notes.

[00:32:16] Jeff Sieh: Nobody does. Well now, I basically give the, okay, here’s my guest, here’s their bio, this is what I wanna talk about, boom. The stuff that I was having to copy and paste chat things back and forth, now with CoWork, it does it all at once. I have it, my entire flow done. It gives me lyrics for multiple different types of lyrics for the show at the beginning.

[00:32:38] Jeff Sieh: It he- gives me thumbnail ideas. Now, it even can go into Canva and give me a mock-up where I just drop in whatever. It gives me the prompts that I’m gonna use for Midjourney So I mean, all that stuff happens at once, where before I was having to go research, copy and paste, write the prompt, do all the stuff.

[00:32:56] Jeff Sieh: It’s all at once, and it, it easily saves me over two [00:33:00] hours a week. And then you don’t even count all the, the post-process stuff. So I want you to talk about, Mike, now, you’ve kinda touched about it a little bit, the difference between talking to AI and staffing AI. ‘Cause, I don’t know, you probably follow Allie K.

[00:33:12] Jeff Sieh: Miller, who’s AI with Allie. She does, she’s one of the, the biggest AI people out there, and she likes to talk about, like, going and actually finding things that you do over and over and over every, in your week, and see if you can automate it with AI. And then if it doesn’t do it, you argue with it. Like, “Well, why can’t you, Claude?

[00:33:28] Jeff Sieh: Figure it out.” And then it starts to do that, and you find these processes and systems that you can implement. So talk about that. break it down for somebody who’s never built, like, a, you know, a Skill or a custom GBT. What does it really mean to put AI to work for you? And kind of maybe talk about how they can make that mind shift, and where’s the best place to start?

[00:33:47] Mike Allton: Yeah, it, it, it goes to that friction audit that you talked about in the introduction, and this is simply a way to, to think through everything that you’re doing in your role, in your business. And we’re not talking about personal and private stuff, right? We’re talking about, you know, [00:34:00] in your business, professional activities, what are you doing every day?

[00:34:03] Mike Allton: How much time are you spending on those things? And what do you or do you not look forward to being able to do? ‘Cause I don’t want you to try to replace the things that you love doing with AI. I wanna give you more time to do even more of the stuff that you love to do. But we all have what I call administrative drag: crap that has to be done, but we don’t enjoy doing it, and it takes far too much time.

[00:34:25] Mike Allton: The sales teams that I’m working with, many of them are spending 70% of their time on non-revenue-generating activity. Copy and pasting from,an email into a CRM or, you know, creating a new pitch from scratch again for the 100th time this week. The kind of stuff that just you’d think you’d be able to automate a lot of this stuff, and you can with the help of AI.

[00:34:47] Mike Allton: So do yourself a favor and do a friction audit. You can just write down a piece of paper, or you can go to the aihat.com/friction if you want a template. But the point is to look at every single thing that you’re doing on a day-to-day, [00:35:00] week-to-week, month-to-month, even year-to-year basis if you wanna think that far out, and write that down.

[00:35:04] Mike Allton: What is that task? Checking email, checking social media, drafting our weekly report, creating a pitch, processing a transcript. These are just, you know, off the top of my head, some things that some of you guys watching right now, you guys have to do this stuff on a regular basis. Write down a little description of it, and write down how much time you’re spending on average.

[00:35:22] Mike Allton: This doesn’t have to be exact. All right? This doesn’t have to be down to the minute. But roughly, how much time are you actually spending looking at your email inbox every single day? How much time are you spending coming up with new ideas of posts for social media or whatever it is? Now, I recommend doing this in a spreadsheet or a PDF or something digital, because the next step, once you’ve got it all…

[00:35:45] Mike Allton: And by the way, don’t judge yourself. Don’t try to correct yourself as you go through this. “Oh my God, I’m really spending this much time on Twitter? I should stop.” Don’t worry about that today. Just write down the stuff that you’re doing and how much time you’re spending. But I recommend doing [00:36:00] it digitally or take a picture if you want, if you wanna write it down physically, because then the next step is share it with AI.

[00:36:05] Mike Allton: And this is again, where AI as a technology is so much different from Photoshop. You could not ask Photoshop to help you figure this out. But you can take the output, the, the download, the picture, whatever you’ve got of everything that you’re doing on a regular basis, share it with your LLM of choice and say, “Hey, this is what my life looks like today, every day, every week, every month.

[00:36:27] Mike Allton: Give me 10 ideas-” Just, just 10 ideas of how you could help me streamline some of these tasks. You’re not necessarily looking for the AI to do the whole thing for you, but what we want, at least at the outset, is just a little bit of help. How can you help me with one of these tasks? How can you take a one-hour-a-week task and turn it into five minutes a week? Or maybe 10 minutes a week. You know, you still wanna be in that loop, you still wanna review it, and most of us are, if we’re just getting started, we’re not to the level where we can build truly autonomous agents. [00:37:00] We just want an AI assistant that we can turn to when we want to, when we need that person, and say, “Hey, can you help me with this today?

[00:37:05] Mike Allton: Can you help me take this Google Analytics export that it makes my eyes bleed just looking at it, and help me actually understand what I’m looking at. What do you

[00:37:16] Mike Allton: see here? Help me understand the insights from all this data.” Just as an easy example. And the cool thing is you don’t even have to export data anymore.

[00:37:24] Mike Allton: You can just open it up in a tab in Chrome. Here’s my Agorapulse social media report in one tab. Here’s my Google Analytics website report in a second tab. Help me understand what’s happening with my social media activity compared to my website activity. And if that’s something you need to do on a regular basis, you put that into your friction audit, and then you share that with your LLM of choice, and you say, again, “Help me identify the, the top 10 things that you can do to help me with this task.”

[00:37:51] Mike Allton: And then you pick one. You just pick one. You say, “Okay, you know what? Number three looks fantastic. Interview me about number three. Learn everything you need to know [00:38:00] about number three so that we can figure out how you can actually help me with this.” Maybe it’s building a skill or an agent or a gem or something like that.

[00:38:08] Mike Allton: Maybe it’s doing one of the other kinds of features that you have available to you in these AI tools. One of the issues that a lot of people run into with AI is that when you ask it a question, it can make stuff up.

[00:38:21] Mike Allton: It can hallucinate, right? It’s not gonna hallucinate a fact like how tall is Tom Cruise.

[00:38:26] Mike Allton: But if you ask it, like, “Who should I be targeting with my business?” Or, “What did Jeff Sieh say on my podcast when I interviewed him last year?” It’s probably not gonna give me a quote from Jeff. It’s going to make up a quote. Maybe it’s something that Jeff said, but it probably won’t be on my podcast. It, you know…

[00:38:42] Mike Allton: So it hallucinates, it makes up stuff, it’s inconsistent. So there’s actually a feature inside all these tools. Its technical name is RAG. You don’t need to remember that. The point is, there’s a way that you can create a digital binder in every single one of these tools. In Claude, it’s called a project. In Copilot, it’s called a notebook, and you’re [00:39:00] able to put in specific sources of data information inside these notebooks, inside these binders.

[00:39:06] Mike Allton: And when you ask a question of the AI from within this digital binder, it will only answer you based on the sources that you gave it, and if it doesn’t know, it will tell you. It won’t confidently make something up, like I’m, I’m bullshitting my children. It will tell you either, A, “There’s the answer, and here’s where I got that information,” or B, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.

[00:39:28] Mike Allton: It’s not in your sources.” Right? So I’ve got a notebook- All of my past transcripts are in there. If I want a quote from Jeff, I go to that notebook. So when you’re doing your friction audit, some of the stuff that you’re doing and wasting time doing every single day, week, or month is actually solved not by an agent or an assistant, but, but just having that digital binder.

[00:39:49] Mike Allton: If you’re wasting time trying to look stuff up inside your organization, that’s the solution, and you can ask the AI, again, ” Should I create an assistant for this or should I [00:40:00] create a RAG or a digital binder or…” You can get specific and you can say, “Hey, do I need to create a skill or a project or an agent or a notebook or a gem or a custom GPT or a project?”

[00:40:10] Mike Allton: The capability exists with every single one of these tools, and you can just ask it to help you

[00:40:16] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Great, great advice. That’s gonna be like its own YouTube video right there, Mike. I just, that was just really good.

[00:40:24] Zac Brown: So Mike, custom GPTs, Gemini Gems, Claude Skills, Copilot agents, our audience is hearing a ton of names today. For a one-person business, do they need to pick a lane or do you feel that they can mix and match?

[00:40:36] Mike Allton: They absolutely cannot mix and match. You can’t. You have to pick a model, and I’m sorry, but you have to pay for it. You have to spend the 20 bucks a month, ouch, to pay for one of these models, and you have to do it today. You’re not allowed to use free ChatGPT anymore. I’m serious. You guys, do not come to me tomorrow and say, “I’m still using free ChatGPT.”

[00:40:55] Mike Allton: My– I will yell at you, I will bite your head off, because it’s, number one, you don’t [00:41:00] have access to all these fun things that I’m talking about. You just don’t. You know, you go to these free tools, you’re gonna have limited functionality, limited usage. Number two, if you’re bouncing around different tools, you’re not investing the time that you need to learn how to use these tools in the best possible way.

[00:41:16] Mike Allton: I don’t like having to say four different feature names every time I’m talking about what’s, at a, a high level, the same kind of feature. But I just know we’re of a mixed audience. It’s so much more efficient as a business, whether you’re a solopreneur or a team of 10 or 100, if you’re using one tool and you’re learning that tool and you’re sharing with other people who use that same tool, what have you learned?

[00:41:37] Mike Allton: Oh, wow, you learned that? That’s fantastic. How to do that myself. So if you’re a solopreneur, get into a group with other folks, either colleagues, friends. You Jeff and I have had masterminds for years, right? Find a mastermind. We’re all using the same tool. No matter what, do that. But then the third most important, and the thing that people don’t even realize most of the time, is that when you’re using the free models, the free versions of these tools, everything [00:42:00] that you do, everything that you say, everything that you learn and interact with those tools is being used to train the next version, the next model of that tool.

[00:42:08] Mike Allton: And honestly, transparently, some of the stuff you’re doing, who cares? I mean, I, honestly, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing, I wouldn’t care until I’m doing something that’s proprietary to my business, until I get to that moment where now I’m having a conversation with my free ChatGPT about this thing that I’m doing in my business and how do I really monetize it and take it to the next level, because what I do is really different from everybody else.

[00:42:31] Mike Allton: Well, I just told ChatGPT everything that I do that’s, quote-unquote, “different from everybody else.” And it’s not as though Zac could lean over into his laptop and ask GPT, “Hey, what’s Mike doing that’s different from everybody It doesn’t know that. But six months from now, somebody wants to do that thing that I’ve been doing, and they go to ChatGPT and they ask ChatGPT how to do it, ChatGPT knows because I taught it.

[00:42:54] Mike Allton: This is what happened to Samsung a couple years ago. Their programmers were struggling because they were hitting a [00:43:00] bug. And most of you probably realize you all have these smart TVs now, and they have all these apps, so they’ve got computer programmers who’ve gotta develop these apps. And these guys at Samsung were having this problem, and they thought, “Oh, wow, you know what?

[00:43:10] Mike Allton: This new thing, ChatGPT, could probably help us with that.” And it could. AI is so much better at reading a billion lines of code and finding the one missing semicolon. it was a great idea in theory. But what they did was they uploaded their entire code base to ChatGPT, which meant they didn’t just teach ChatGPT the bug, they taught ChatGPT everything that they’d ever invented and created in Samsung.

[00:43:33] Mike Allton: So six months later, the team at Vizio, maybe they like the idea of having a artwork displayed on the TV when it’s not actually running anything, and they just go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, how do we program artwork as an option?” And ChatGPT says, “Here you go. Here’s how to do it. Let me give you that code.”

[00:43:49] Mike Allton: That’s what you guys cannot afford to do. And again, I don’t care if you’re a solopreneur, a 10-person, 100-person, 1,000-person business, you have got to invest $20 a [00:44:00] month. That’s it. You could use a tool like Magai or do one of the other LLMs. I don’t have a personal preference. They’re all fantastic. The only difference there, the only thing that I usually sometimes steer people in a specific model is if they’re already paying for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

[00:44:17] Mike Allton: If you’re paying for Microsoft 365, that means you and every other person in your organization already has access to Copilot 365. Use it. Pay the extra 20 bucks a month for the extra Copilot add-on because that gives you access to agents and notebooks and deeper integration in the Microsoft ecosystem.

[00:44:34] Mike Allton: But if you don’t, still use Copilot because it’s part of that Microsoft tenant, that agreement that you have with Microsoft that everything that you say and do on their platform is secure. You and I would have no qualms about opening up a new Word document and having a conversation in the Word document about proprietary business information because we assume, rightly so, that it’s safe.

[00:44:58] Mike Allton: Your conversations with Copilot [00:45:00] in that instance would be the same way

[00:45:01] Jeff Sieh: Yeah. Dustin says, when you’re talking about the free, it equals liability, I’ve always heard it like, if it’s free, you’re the product, right? Like it’s getting, you’re giving that the data. So, I wanna talk real quick, the kind of real, the kind of my unlock that made me think about, okay, this can be, do more than just answer questions.

[00:45:18] Jeff Sieh: And it was a very simple thing when I started using Claude CoWork with their desktop thing, is I created… And this was getting ready for my talk at Social Media Marketing World, was that it would send me a daily digest, and it was specifically, ’cause I talk about vis- I’m m- you know, Mike’s kind of about agents.

[00:45:34] Jeff Sieh: I’m more about like visual, using AI in the visual realm. And I had it every morning send me an email. It looked like something out of the Morning Brew. I mean, it was broken down, but it was, okay, what’s all the new stuff that’s coming out for visual marketing? What was announced in the last 24 hours? What new videos were published to YouTube?

[00:45:50] Jeff Sieh: Teach me how to do that stuff. And then geared it towards my talk, which is about visual improv, is kinda the way I was going with. And I got that every morning for months leading up to my talk, which helped me [00:46:00] craft something. But that little unlock, like it was helping me with a problem and helped me be creative in that problem, was really, really something, incredible for me.

[00:46:08] Jeff Sieh: So I wanna know, other than like your podcasting workflow, Mike, what’s a specific example from your own week? Like what, what AI worker that you build is saving you time right now, and what does it actually do, kind of other than your podcast prep?

[00:46:21] Mike Allton: Yeah. So every day, Gemini looks at my calendar and looks at every single person that I’m meeting with, and, and we’re all using digital calendars, I hope today, which means if we’re meeting with somebody else, we have an attendee in that calendar, and their email address is in there, right? So Gemini looks at the email address of anybody that I’m meeting with today, and if the email address is different from mine, if it’s not an Agorapulse or the AI Hat or the SocialMediaHat.com email address, if it’s something else like hisdesignonline.com, Gemma says, “Oh, Mike’s meeting with somebody outside his organization today.

[00:46:53] Mike Allton: Let me check this person out.” And so it goes and looks at, and it finds their LinkedIn, and it finds their website based purely on [00:47:00] the email address, and reviews those and sends me an email at 6:00 a.m. every day, “Hey, Mike, you’re meeting with Jeff today. Here’s Jeff’s background.” And it’s not just copy and paste from LinkedIn, ’cause maybe that’s a sentence, maybe it’s four paragraphs.

[00:47:13] Mike Allton: It’s a summary based on everything it learned about Jeff. That’s part one of the email. Part two is it looks at what Jeff has posted to LinkedIn within the last week or two, finds something for me to draw attention to and talk about as a bit of an icebreaker at the outset of our meeting if I want to.

[00:47:30] Mike Allton: Maybe, you know, if Jeff and I have known each other, I wouldn’t need to do that. But often I’m meeting with people that I don’t know very well, sales calls, right? Vendor meetings. You guys are all doing prospect and sales meetings, I’m imagining, in the audience today. This is gonna be hugely valuable to you.

[00:47:43] Mike Allton: You don’t want to take five minutes before a meeting and glance at somebody’s LinkedIn and join the call and say, “Hey, I saw you went to Ohio State.” Who cares? You wanna be able to talk to them about something that’s actually meaningful and important to them, particularly if it’s been 30 years since they went to college.

[00:47:58] Mike Allton: They don’t care about that [00:48:00] anymore. Let’s talk about how they posted to LinkedIn about having to reduce headcount last week and how hard that is. Or the award that they got or the book that they published. Whatever it is that they talked about within the last couple weeks, that’s what you wanna bring to the fore because it shows that you were paying attention.

[00:48:16] Mike Allton: So the email gives me that, that information, that icebreaker, and then the third most critical part is, “Hey, Mike, here’s how you can pivot out of that conversation into what you really wanna talk to this individual about.” Maybe I’m meeting with an event organizer and I’m pitching them on, on a paid keynote.

[00:48:36] Mike Allton: That’s really what I wanna talk about, but I don’t wanna start the conversation that way. I wanna build rapport. This is a real problem solver because either one of two things is happening. Number one, most people today, either they do this on their own for about five minutes before the call because they’re scrambling and they had three other sales calls that day, and so it’s not great, right?

[00:48:58] Mike Allton: Or they don’t do it at all because this [00:49:00] is something that would normally take somebody a lot of time and, and only the best salespeople do this. So it’s a great meeting prep, and it’s something that I can automatically do with Gemini running every single day if I’m meeting with somebody externally. If I’m not meeting with somebody, I don’t get an email.

[00:49:14] Mike Allton: And all the other LLMs are slowly creating this kind of a scheduled agent or assistant that can run in the background for this or whatever you want it to do for you

[00:49:24] Jeff Sieh: That’s awesome. Mike, once again, I have so many more questions. We’re gonna have to do a part two about this ’cause we are running out of time. We only have, like, five minutes left, and I wanted to let people know where you can see you speak, if they want to have you as a speaker, where they can find your podcast, all the stuff that is Mike Allton.

[00:49:41] Jeff Sieh: The floor is yours, my friend

[00:49:42] Mike Allton: Well, thank you. So first of all, it’s always a pleasure. we, we’ve been doing these kinds of shows, uh, on each other’s, platforms for, for years, and it’s so much fun. I, I enjoyed meeting you, Zac and definitely enjoyed talking to all of you in the audience. I’m doing kind of a combination of private events and public events.

[00:49:59] Mike Allton: Like Jeff mentioned, [00:50:00] I’ll be at Digital Wichita in mid-June, so if you’re in that general Midwest area, definitely check out this event. Incredible lineup of folks. I’ll be speaking at, MarketingProfs B2B Forum in November, maybe some other marketing and, digital marketing events between now and then, but mostly private stuff.

[00:50:16] Mike Allton: So if you’re interested in having me come into your organization or your event, obviously I do a lot of large 50, 100, 500-person, you know, internal events, or you just want to ask me some questions and find out what else I’m doing or learn more about the podcast, you can go to this theaihat.com/connect and all my information is right there

[00:50:32] Jeff Sieh: Awesome. And where can people find the amazing Zac Brown?

[00:50:35] Zac Brown: Uh, you can follow me at Zac Brown Creative on the socials. You can listen to my podcast, “The Zac Brown Show,” wherever you get your podcasts, and it’s also on YouTube now, so that’s pretty exciting

[00:50:45] Jeff Sieh: Yeah, and make sure you go and listen to Mike’s, The AI Hat podcast, I’ve been on it a, a, a time or two, and, a lot of people listen to it. We were teasing before it, a lot of the speakers at Social Media Marketing World were on Mike’s podcast, and that, you know, that’s a… It’s, if you’re wanting to [00:51:00] learn this stuff and dive deep, and even if s- you don’t understand something on the podcast, ask your AI about it.

[00:51:06] Jeff Sieh: Like, if you’re, like, you’ve never heard of RAG before or whatever, write those things down and then ask it. you can even just take screenshots of your notes that you take and send it to AI. I mean, there’s all sorts of things now to get information into your AI that gives you really good, solid information.

[00:51:21] Jeff Sieh: Disney Hotel Lady says, “I’m gonna have to rewatch this several times, to get, get myself set up. And Jeff, expect emails with questions.” Bring it on. I’m more than happy to do that. thank you so much. Thank you guys for being here, because we always, I always have this,

[00:51:47] Jeff Sieh: Thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you, Mike, for being here. Make sure you guys go check him out everywhere. Thank you for our sponsors, Ecamm. they are amazing. You can find out more about them by going to ecamm.com/jeff. Use code JEFF15 to save 15% [00:52:00] on your first purchase. And with that, we’ll see you guys next time.

[00:52:03] Jeff Sieh: Bye everybody. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Zac. See you guys later.