Ep 79: Why AI Won’t Replace Taste, Strategy, or Human Judgment
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Episode Summary
In this episode of Enterprising Minds, Alex and Dave take a grounded look at where AI actually fits in modern marketing, business workflows, and daily productivity. The conversation starts with the shift from prompt engineering to AI agents, asking whether highly customized agents still create enough value when newer models are already strong out of the box. From there, they dig into the growing fatigue around managing multiple tools, subscriptions, models, context windows, and token limits.
The discussion also explores the widening gap between AI hype and operational reality. Google I/O-style announcements, AI IPO narratives, data center demands, and CFO concerns over AI budgets all point to a more complicated picture than the “AI will solve everything” storyline. Alex and Dave compare AI infrastructure to telecom: powerful, necessary, and widely accessible, but not always the place where long-term differentiation is created.
A major theme of the episode is that AI is useful, but not a moat by itself. Everyone has access to similar tools, often at a low monthly cost, which means the competitive advantage comes from how people use them. The hosts argue that strategy, taste, empathy, experience, and human judgment still matter most — especially in marketing, paid search, content creation, and customer experience.
The episode closes with a practical reminder: use AI to reduce friction, organize your work, and free up time, but do not mistake automation for intelligence. Whether it is turning voice memos into project management updates, cleaning up bad AI-generated campaigns, or carving out time for real human conversations, the best use of AI may be helping people do more meaningful work — not replacing the people doing it.
Ep 79: Why AI Won’t Replace Taste, Strategy, or Human Judgment Podcast and Video Transcript
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to latest episode of Enterprising Minds. Got Alex and Dave present today. Thank you everybody for liking and subscribing to this date sharing the podcast and signing up for the, Pathways newsletter. We greatly appreciate all that interaction and, it's totally self-serving, but it's fun to see the numbers go up and to the right. So thank you everybody. We definitely appreciate it. And if you want an open dialogue, find us on LinkedIn or any of the places that I already talked about. So I, today's show even though it's a digital marketing podcast, I'm gonna talk about. The physical reality and operating inside of it. And Alex, you have your own interesting topic, which I think we'll kick off with.
Alex Pokorny: We can get into it. Yeah, it is.
From Prompts to Agents
Alex Pokorny: There has been a number of advancements with AI and LLMs and then basically how we use them. So if you go back to like the very, very beginnings, prompt engineering was became the phrase right, and then trying to make sure that you have the perfectly crafted prompt and there's tons of people trying to sell or giveaway a hundred different prompts for you to use anyways, all that kind of stuff.
Basically it works to some degree and it was far more useful then than it is now. Still useful today. Definitely. But the.
Dave Dougherty: You're talking the prompts or the ai.
Alex Pokorny: The, the prompts. The prompts those were very, very prescriptive. And some of them are completely pointless because the models are smart enough that you don't have to start with this whole, you know, very specialized, prescriptive prompt.
And then now we're kind of moving into this world of agents, so more pre-trained. Mini models, I would almost say, um, it's the same model, but it's just kind of personalized and fit to this, you know, particular use case. And as I've been building them and as I keep exploring them, I'm starting to hit this point where the next model release that comes out, even like the last ones, like 4.8 from Claude and even 4.7.
Opus 4.8 and 4.7. They're great. Honestly, like I started comparing in unguided, just kind of general. No instructions. Pretty clean build right of opus and versus one that's gotten like a whole bunch of like best practice documentation in like, you know, markdown files. All the kind of like the standard kind of check boxes are there, right?
The instructions are solid. It's been tested heavily. It works, but all still with the untrained model, it's pretty darn close.
Do Agents Still Pay Off
Alex Pokorny: So I'm starting to get to this point of. What's the continued purpose of these agents or is just, you know, what the agent is about, needs to become far more difficult or specialized or, you know, in these niche like use cases.
But then it also brings into the point of like, how, how much time are you spending building these things versus just how much is it saving you time? Because the more specialized they get, the time savings drops.
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: You get something that you do every single day, five times a day, well that's fantastic. I mean, you're gonna have tons of time savings in a month.
That's easy. But if it ends up being like, oh, well I need this one specific agent to do this one really random task that I do twice a year, just do it. There's no point. They start to like hit that line. So, I don't know, I, I don't dunno if it's just me kind of coming to terms with stuff or just kind of spitballing of where do these things go right now?
As agents, do we still see them as being as valuable as they were or is there kind of a, a next level that they need to get to? What's your thoughts?
Dave Dougherty: Honestly, I've been think, i, there are a couple of different ways that I'm gonna go with this.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: I've been thinking in my own experience that like. I'm less and less excited about a new model release because the old ones are already really good. already doing the vast majority of what I want them to do. Time is still a problem for me. And I think we talked about this in the last episode, just the burnout. That you get from having all these different agents, doing all of these things because you gotta keep track of all the things that they're doing. and then, while they're working, you're trying to do something else.
So you're split or you're jumping back and forth. And so I'm finding myself being really much more intentional on what do I need to go deep in? What do I wanna go deep in? And then how can I have these help me with things that I would otherwise deprioritize? Now I don't know about you, but. My coworkers are still very much at the beginning, I introduced a coworker of mine to the fact that, hey, we have copilot finally. And you can have it summarize your unread emails. And they're like, oh my God, what? It was like, okay, cool. You're being introduced. You're on the, you're on the wagon, now you're on the path. but that to me has been table stakes for what, two years, right? Something like that. So it's okay, not everybody's there. And then I've been some things in the news, but then also from, people around town I've been having get togethers with or conversations with where the backlash from students on ai.
You saw Eric Schmidt being booed at a commencement speech that he did. plus, there's just that natural aversion to people changing the way that they do things. So part of me feels and maybe this is just my mood of the day, which I'm, I'm open to that feedback, but it feels like the die hards are going to continue to be die hard. The average user is going to continue to upskill a little bit because, oh, hey, I could do this a little bit faster. And I hate typing emails, but great. This can summarize a quick email to my boss and my boss thinks I'm working on stuff. Wonderful. 'cause those e I'm guilty of not sending those emails.
Typically,
Hype Versus Reality
Dave Dougherty: Where I struggle is coming off of the Google IO conference and watching that, and you get all of this hype and all of this, we're gonna be, we're gonna be in a post-cancer universe. It's that would be wonderful. Are we there yet? No. Do we have a roadmap to get there? No. Do we like, but it's that's a great story for shareholders,
Alex Pokorny: That was such a hype.
Dave Dougherty: the normal people.
Alex Pokorny: Oh my gosh. Even some of the product releases that were released don't work, which is.
Dave Dougherty: Or they're not connected to one another.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, which is like the second or third year in a row that they've re-released things that are like, it's now available and it's like, well, in like three months time it'll be available to maybe the US market and then like, I don't know, we'll do a pilot in Australia and then eventually maybe Europe, and then it's like, oh my gosh, you're roadmap is years.
And they're like, oh, it's, it's available globally today. No, no, it is not.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. No. 'cause we want that. Yeah. Two tenths of a percent boost on the stock price.
Alex Pokorny: I know based upon verbiage instead of reality.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So I think for me, I think there's, there is that big split between the narrative with Wall Street and then the reality on the ground. And it feels like that gap is continuing to widen for me. Yeah, I don't know. I, that, that's where, that's where I'm at.
AI IPO Talk
Dave Dougherty: And I think the other big thing that is in the news recently are the IPOs. The initial IPOs. now granted, I will just say because. I'm friends with a lot of lawyers. This is not investing advice. This is purely entertainment. to your own financial advisor. but personally, SpaceX looks like a disaster to me. Clot is more interesting to me in the long term. The initial bump, man, I don't know that feels wait three days for the initial dip and then buy the dip. You know what I mean?
Alex Pokorny: I have.
Dave Dougherty: what are your thoughts on the IPOs? 'cause I know.
Alex Pokorny: I actually have concerns about Claude open ai, any of them with their IPOs. Listen to a bit of a contrarian economist, but I, I have to say I agree with overall thought of. Basically comparing this to the telco market where you have an incredible technology that is gets released. Amazing things are built in value off of it,
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: the technology itself isn't worth a whole lot.
I mean that, that's the thing is like the amount of people who are connected via cell phones and the amount of connections and the connection, speed and quality, it's all skyrocketing and it has been for 15, 20 years. Like it's an amazing path. However, I don't think of Sprint, T-Mobile, at and t, you name it, Vonage.
I mean, it doesn't matter where on earth you are. Don't care. I mean it's, and if you look at the stocks also, nobody really seems to care as well, but the technology that they're creating is phenomenal. But it is, it's a base layer, it's utility, and even apple on top of it goes up and down quite a bit. And gotta say innovation wise, those things have kind of slowed down a a bit.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Um, stocks are decent, but still, like you got a limitation there and then the thing that's actually building value off of it really becomes TikTok Facebook. I mean, what became meta with Instagram? I mean like the valuation that basically happened due to the ability of what cell phones generated was really where the money was at.
It wasn't so much on like, Hey, we're putting up more cell phone towers and everybody's tracking where the next cell phone tower's gonna go up. Like we, we don't care about that, but we do care about data centers for AI companies. Like if you think about like what a utility kind of like topic, like who this, that always kind of cut me as pretty funny.
It was like, man, of all the sci-fi novels I ever read. There was AI all over the place, but nobody talked about the complaints of ai. Data centers like that never came up.
so once you talk about these utility factors of just like, you know, this is just a part of it, then you start to look more and more like just a cog in a machine versus the, you know, the amazing, you know, experience that is this all knowing, all seeing all powerful tool.
Dave Dougherty: Q, pink Floyd,
Alex Pokorny: I know. I
Dave Dougherty: to the
Alex Pokorny: mean it,
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: yeah, I mean, on the other hand, it's fantastic also that these tools, the very best of the best are available globally for 20 bucks a month. And that's amazing. I mean, it's not stuck in some giant corporations locker and only the giants. It's, you know, largest of corporations ever get access to it.
I mean, we're kind of looking at IBM Watson right now, but you know that, that sort of experience, right. Instead, it's. 20 bucks a month. That's it.
Dave Dougherty: And there was, I don't know if you listened to the.
Budgets and Real Costs
Dave Dougherty: Paul Reyer AI Market Institute, AI Marketing Institute, that, that podcast this week they were talking about some of the headlines that were in various publications around CFOs looking at how much they're spending on tokens and how they're blowing through the AI budgets. And then
Alex Pokorny: Yep.
Dave Dougherty: actually, you know what? People might be cheaper.
Alex Pokorny: Correct.
Dave Dougherty: and you know what? We get more loyalty and a longer, turnaround and, it is it's interesting that kind of all these things are coming coming into focus
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: there definitely was, my God, this new technology, we have
Alex Pokorny: Right,
Dave Dougherty: it out. We have to
Alex Pokorny: right.
Dave Dougherty: out.
Like whatever. But also, just how many people do you know that, for $20 a month you could do. A whole bunch of stuff that would basically be a personal assistant, right?
Alex Pokorny: Note.
Dave Dougherty: it would free up a bunch of your time and your thoughts and it's wonderful. But then how many people do you know are that are just not, they're just not.
And then you start talking to 'em and you're like, oh, you know what? You could actually have a three month meal plan in about 30 minutes instead of spending your Saturday doing it. Unless you wanna, unless you like being really specific like that.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, if you do, great.
Dave Dougherty: yeah.
Frozen Dinner Analogy
Dave Dougherty: And so I think, one of the, one of the analogies that I used way back when we first started talking about this was like, to me, AI seems like like frozen dinners in the grocery store. I was like, okay, for some people that is good enough. Your doctor's not gonna be happy with it. It's not life affirming, right? You're not gonna be happy with yourself when you're eating them. but they serve a purpose that's great. If you want an enjoyable experience or you prioritize quality of food or what the food does to your body, whatever then you're gonna pay for more premium ingredients, premium experience with world renowned chefs. Or maybe you go to the avant-garde side of things and then you're, then it's jazz and it's that was an experience, but you know what? I just want a good burger. I don't need nitrogen in my ice cream. Just gimme the fucking ice cream. And it was, yeah. I think that still applies for me. With certain things. If I care about it enough, I'm going to have that. I'm going to allow a certain amount of friction in my life so that I can be good at something or that I can say that it's outta quality that I like. Whereas if I look at a huge, research paper that I really only need one fact from AI is great. I don't know. I'm feeling ramly today, so please jump in whenever
Token Limits and Context
Alex Pokorny: was gonna say one other kind of offshoot of that, the conversation as well is speaking of token usage, that's one thing I'm definitely been diving hard into is trying to keep the token level down, like.
Dave Dougherty: paying for extra or no?
Alex Pokorny: I have been avoiding it so hard, and it has been difficult, especially with like the side projects of like the book writing and all the other kind of stuff that's going on as well.
Like I've been doing a ton of, I gotta say, AI only administrative work, so cleaning up projects, creating markdown files, like reducing context windows and trying to save as much as possible and stuff like that. It's stuff that I think will be probably hilarious in five years. People will be like, what context?
Window of a million characters. Are you kidding me? It's a billion now. You know? And it's like, why would you even waste your time? You wasted hours doing this. Yeah, right. I mean, it's like, you know, when flash drives were cool because they were a gig or less, you know, even right.
Dave Dougherty: Actually ran across one of those in the back of my drunk drawer the other day and I was like, oh man,
Alex Pokorny: I can put
Dave Dougherty: even put a PDF on this now,
Alex Pokorny: right, I'll put the first image of a PowerPoint deck on this. I just need 26 more.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, only the first couple of SpaceX Rocket photos on their
Alex Pokorny: The planet photos from their handout. You see
Dave Dougherty: exactly.
Alex Pokorny: investor guide. It was just photos of planets. I was like, Ooh. Swinging through the fences, man.
Dave Dougherty: book.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, selling the dream, selling the dream. Yeah, no, it's, um, as token usage kind of goes up and then trying to optimize all those files and stuff like that, it does always kind of, it gets me back down to that same point that you were just making of like, you know, where, where's that level of friction and then when, when does it suddenly became not of value.
And I've been hitting that, especially with the, the book project because now with the number of chapters I've written. It blows its context window by reviewing files,
Dave Dougherty: stuff. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: And then trying to check like, if I do a continuity check, man, that's like the end of the session for the night. Like, that's it, my, it's just gonna kill it.
So it, it's, I've even been going back to chat GPTs, trying to, you know, dual load, basically the same project hasn't really been working, if not surprising, but trying to basically kind of keep both of 'em in, in pace with each other, through instructions and files and stuff like that, of trying to basically kind of dual between the two of them before start paying for extra, but.
Juggling Subscriptions
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I pay for all three and I keep thinking how I need to just not pay for all three. But then I keep finding these situations where it's oh, I was on a groove with Claude and now I'm out.
Alex Pokorny: Yep.
Dave Dougherty: Okay, switch over to chat, GPT, blah, blah, blah. And like I have some stuff with Gemini, but I'm finding Gemini is more of my sort of everyday personal assistant
Alex Pokorny: Okay.
Dave Dougherty: of thing because it's on the phone, it's got my emails.
Alex Pokorny: Okay.
Dave Dougherty: Is much more of the personal and I'm like falling into that kind of groove with that where Claude and Chat bt are very much more work or, creative idea kind of things.
Alex Pokorny: Interesting.
Dave Dougherty: there's something about Google where it's like they've coded it so that the answers are like always short.
Alex Pokorny: Oh, nice. Yeah, I've got that in instruction.
Dave Dougherty: I, that's great.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: When I'm playing with an idea or I want you to help me write something or, I don't want brevity then, right?
Alex Pokorny: Oh, sure,
Dave Dougherty: long answer and
Alex Pokorny: sure.
Dave Dougherty: to edit it down
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: But that's my own personal preference and workflow. Gimme the whole thing and then we'll take out the unnecessary stuff.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Model Switching and Book Boom
Alex Pokorny: Have you been shifting models within those different subscriptions as well? 'cause that's the other thing that I get too.
Dave Dougherty: I've been playing around with that 'cause it's interesting. So ai, at least for my friends everybody's got a book project now, which is awesome and hilarious.
Alex Pokorny: Great competition.
Dave Dougherty: yeah, it's
Alex Pokorny: ah.
Dave Dougherty: I, and so it's cool 'cause one of us actually published something, so go check it out. Phyllis Welch. Wrote a book and she's an awesome human being. Go support her.
Alex Pokorny: Did. That's awesome.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Choosing the Right Model
Dave Dougherty: so Opus 4 7 4 8 is wonderful for the creative huge book kind of writing project stuff that is great. I'm using sonnet for more of the conversations and like brainstorming. 'cause I don't need a huge amount of logic there. I just need you to punch some holes into my thinking or
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: what it is I'm saying, or, whatever else, right? what actually I have been finding recently, and, the limitations are the best thing for creativity, right?
In my day job. We don't have these nice So that's forcing me to use the internal, the internal one. And that's fine. At least there's something right.
Voice Memos to Project Manager
Dave Dougherty: Flip side of that though is I need to get a lot of my ideas out in a short amount of time. Into, into a formatted thing.
So one of the ways that I've been working recently to get most of my ideas down is in, I'm, I run on back almost exclusively. There's the voice memos app, and I have it on my phone. I have it on my computer, I have it on my iPad. I have it on my, personal computer. So I'm using the voice memos and I just talk. And then it automatically transcribes it and it's just in that app. And I grab that transcript and I put it in and I just say, format this for an email. Keep this as for your memory, these are the projects that I'm working on. 'cause I have too many projects for my short term memory to be effective. So I'm just like, I need you to be a project manager. Here's everything. Format it, track it. Here are the daily updates and I keep that tab open. So then as I'm going through the day, I can say this is the update to that, this is the update to that. Gimme three things I could do right now based on everything. I got 15 minutes, gimme something I could do in 15 minutes. And then that way it's just boom. I'm staying active, I'm keeping everything moving. and it's a way to work. More quickly with a limited use, which is interesting for me because then, going to Google IO or seeing these model releases and being like, here's all these crazy new things you can do.
And it's yeah, I don't know that I need that though.
Alex Pokorny: Dave, you're not curing cancer in your 15 minutes.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. You know what I mean? 'cause time is still a problem. And like biology, like my brain can only handle so much in the day. And if I hit that at noon, my butt's still gotta be in that seat.
Alex Pokorny: Man.
Dave Dougherty: just, I can't just go away.
AI Teammates and Surveillance
Alex Pokorny: I definitely foresee a future where people's teammates are just, and managers are just ai. Like if that's what it takes to kinda keep people going, moving, you could totally see, you know, you got cheerleader teammates and everybody else getting you and keeping you going on whatever it is that's trying to get done.
Dave Dougherty: You're amazing. Along those lines, if you have an AI boss, do you get in trouble for swearing at 'em then,
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, probably.
Dave Dougherty: or do you think they look past that since it's a robot
Alex Pokorny: Bet it collects.
Dave Dougherty: friend?
Alex Pokorny: I guess it, I bet it collects everything and then pulls a sentiment analysis, be like, Hmm, yes, we're seeing a lack of productivity after 1:00 PM. Also, general negative stance after meetings with these people. Hmm,
Dave Dougherty: You appear to be a jerk.
Alex Pokorny: exactly.
We've detected a potential future workplace violation. Yay.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Minority report
Alex Pokorny: Exactly
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: would be a sentiment analysis.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Based on your YouTube search history, these comedians.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Right.
Dave Dougherty: No thank you.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah,
Dave Dougherty: you.
Alex Pokorny: that's gonna be an interesting world deal.
Knowledge vs Intelligence
Dave Dougherty: and it's interesting 'cause like I hear things from like from friends that are on the agency side or consulting side where they're like, man, don't know what we're gonna do. But then I talk to some friends that are on the small business side. Either they only own their own things or they are in charge of running all the marketing or whatever for their own, the small thing. And they're like, I don't know what to do. So there's this such, this weird mismatch of, the knowledge is there. Nobody knows what to do with it, nobody's confident enough to explore it. And I keep going back to, I was listening to Kendrick Lamar the other day. As you do, and there was a quick line in one of the songs of knowledge is Not Intelligence. or no, it's the other way around. Intelligence is not all knowledge. And I was like, oh, that totally explains AI for me. Just because you have all the stats doesn't mean anything, right? there's no, you don't know what to do with it. You
Alex Pokorny: Sure. Sure.
Dave Dougherty: And if
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: it incorrectly, guess what? You're still gonna have bad results because. There was no taste, there was no experience to help guide it. There's no whatever. That's the human element to me that really comes into this where okay, cool, we have the complete knowledge of, 2.0 right now.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: and yet. It feels 90% of people are just creating cat videos instead of actually doing something useful.
Google Rewards Gone Wrong
Alex Pokorny: Can I bring a, a really weird and strange example that fits this.
Dave Dougherty: That's the point of this.
Alex Pokorny: Google Rewards if you've been invited to their program. It is a bizarre little program, and what it is, is it is a mix between. Some of the Google Express and some of their kind of small business accelerator programs, if you're familiar with the Google My Business side of things or
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: the very quick and fast, you know, form of advertising that they've been pushing, like craziest small businesses, which is like, we'll handle everything.
Just type in your web website and hit enter and give us money. Which I'm sure the exce success rate is just fantastic with things that are completely unguided from people have no idea what they're doing.
Dave Dougherty: what you're doing,
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Clear. Yeah, I know. So the Google Rewards program, if you get into that they have all their automated recommendations, which if anybody's had a history with paid search, you know how bad their automated recommendations are.
But if you click them and apply them and they're nice little formatted website, which just shows you each of the recommendations, and you just click it, you get points. And those points then can be get redeemed for pens and mugs and backpacks, and Herman Miller chairs and a PS five if you get enough points.
So you click all these things, you gain all these points, you burn your actual business in an ad account, and you get a PS five.
Dave Dougherty: say it is cheaper to just buy the Herman Miller chair.
Alex Pokorny: I got no leads, but man, I got this sweet PS five.
I was like, man, I should go back to the agency side. What am I doing? I'm gonna collect all these gift cards,
clicking these things, and then undoing them because dear God, that's a dumb idea. You do have to keep 'em active for like 30 days to get the point, so that won't work.
Dave Dougherty: That is all.
Alex Pokorny: It's like.
Dave Dougherty: feel like there's going to be a lot of the consulting for those who can hold on.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Will be cleaning up the AI stuff,
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, it will be.
Dave Dougherty: we don't have enough experience with cl the AI only campaigns yet to fully understand how much work there is going to be of that. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: If you've been running p max campaigns or especially anything lead gen, you'll know that pain because yes, they can find, I don't know if it's even individuals. I'm pretty sure it's bots that will fill out leads. They will do it and they'll optimize to that, but then it's just garbage.
Dave Dougherty: The business equivalent of taking health advice from TikTok Influencers. just need turmeric little black pepper.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, you gotta, you can't forget the light cover
Dave Dougherty: Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: sometimes salt, I mean, for seizing.
Yeah, pretty much.
Generic AI and Bad Campaigns
Alex Pokorny: I mean, it's just like this generic crap advice, which I mean, getting back to your point of like just using straight AI for. A very uneducated, unintentional kind of purpose. You're going to get something really generic and really basic. It does take quite a bit to provide all that context, like your voice memos, you know, talking about the act of projects and the updates to them, not just like general context, right?
'cause they'll write a professional email, but it might not be your tone and voice at all. If you include enough of your tone voice, then yeah, then it's there. Finally it gets the context, right? And or you have these. Mass produced, pushed like crazy over-hyped machine learning systems that are just not that good.
And then people come back with like, oh, it doesn't work. You know, they just write off the entire category, which, I mean, you and I have spoken at that at length of all the times we run into clients who are like, oh yeah, paid search doesn't work for us. It's like, come again.
Dave Dougherty: It.
Alex Pokorny: Oh, you did it poorly and it didn't work
Yeah.
Yeah. There's a recent.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And I love the marketers who are just like it should work this way. It's yeah, I should be skinny, but here we are.
Alex Pokorny: I'm glad we live in a world of shoulds. How about like actual reality? Let's switch.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Okay. It's on me. I know I need to do better. I'm working on it, but, man. Yeah, I think so. as an example, right? 'Cause people like case studies, so you know how whenever you go on a vacation you're like, all right, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna relax. But then you forget about the two days before you go on vacation where you gotta wrap everything up or prep everybody for how you're gonna be gone because they want to seem like they're gonna cover for you, but really they're just not going, they're not gonna be helpful, but you appreciate the effort. So I would call if I found myself in that situation recently. And like I said, I have too many projects to keep my memory straight, right? So I'm just like, all right. I find a meeting room. I book it out. I sit down, I turn on the voice memo, and I just start talking, and I go, running through all of this because I need to update my team on everything that's going on, the status of every project, what they need to watch out for over the next week while I'm gone, yada yada.
40, 48 minutes later. I get the transcript and then I put it in and I'm just like better, not truncate anything because I literally don't have time to do that again. And I just put it in and I'm like, and it's okay, great. And I categorize it because, my brain is like all over the place.
So a lot of times you just start talking and then you free associate, you're like, oh yeah, and that, and then that. But it ended up re being really nice. 'cause like for the last month or so, I've been telling my boss like, Hey man, this is too much. I can't I need help. So I sent him the email after I have ai in, put it into a format that I can email my boss and he goes, Hey, this is too much.
I'm like, yeah, I've been telling you.
Alex Pokorny: Welcome to my world, all.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah but here it is. It's documented. Now you've experienced it. But then that became the foundation for the project management piece because it was like, I literally went through everything and that became the context everything moving forward. And that's been, that has been really super helpful. Because how many times are you sitting there with 400 unread emails, and then you have all the teams chats or the Slack chats or whatever else, and you're just like, man, I can't keep a sense of all this. That project management piece that addresses that really specific personal need. That I think most people who haven't tried yet really need to just exposed to something like that, right? Because I have a couple coworkers where they've taken the initiative to actually sit down and ask me like, Hey, how could I do X, Y, Z?
And so, Hey, let's, let's talk. Let me show you how I'm using it. This is how you can go. And then about 15 minutes in, I realized they're not paying attention anymore because their brain melted. And it's just okay, let's go get a coffee. We'll come back to this. I think if I just say it like four times, I think it will maybe stick in your head, right?
They need to be able to try it,
Interns and the Hype Cycle
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I think it's gonna be really interesting with all of the things that we've talked about, the backlash the new grads piece is front of mind just because the new summer intern group started recently. So it's great fresh energy, but, they're being forced into talking about ai, and you can tell none of 'em are really excited talk about ai,
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: But you're one of the lucky ones. You have an internship, anyway, like I said, I was feeling rambly, so save me please.
Alex Pokorny: Well, that's actually a good wrap up point too, because that is, you know, current state, you know, we've talked about hype cycles with the Google io. We talked about the IPOs and the fanciful versions of, you know, the future that, you know, those always proclaim to be, you know, we will be doing this amazing thing, so please invest in us.
Right. It has to be pitched that way. That's just the way that they work.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. That's the game.
Alex Pokorny: exactly. But it, it ends up being this, you know, I kept calling it like the, the rubber ball. The rubber ball bouncing. Of the, the AI hype cycle, because you get this bounce, it goes way up in the air, like the Google IO thing,
Dave Dougherty: Right.
Alex Pokorny: and then about, you know, two weeks later, once all the podcasts and you know, every, all the commenters hit.
That ball hits the ground. 'cause they're like, yeah, reality is, it doesn't work. And maybe if you read the fine print, it'll be released eventually. So, you know, but that, that's the piece that I think is keeps bouncing out there for the grads as well. And as companies, especially as the CFOs start to realize.
Is this actually providing a whole lot of value?
No Moat Without Taste
Alex Pokorny: And then to my points, last episode of episode before was talking about AI is not a competitive edge because everyone has it 20 bucks a month and 40 minutes later, I can get the exact same image that you created. That is not a moat. That did nothing for you.
Like you wanna write on a massive, highly segmented, many hundreds of ads campaign. I can do it too, and 20 bucks and 40 minutes, like there's no moat there either. So it's not a competitive edge. So it's not really replacing people, it's not really doing the job of other people. It's supplemental at best.
It's efficiency here and there, and it's again to the point you keep making about the coworkers only available to those who actually use it. So it's a tool. It's a great tool, but it's just a tool and that hype circle.
Dave Dougherty: trying to find circumstances where I'm like, what would I be willing to fully automate?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Honestly, throughout the entire customer journey, there's not much.
Alex Pokorny: Yep.
Dave Dougherty: The creation of ideas, like getting something to react to. Yeah, sure. But then I want to, I wanna polish 'em because I know who we're targeting or I know,
Alex Pokorny: No.
Dave Dougherty: I'm empathetic towards the target audience and what they need and yeah. So it's like there's not much that I would want to totally And it's interesting 'cause I don't know if you saw this, 'cause algorithms are all different. Some of the SEO guys that we like to follow have started posting case studies of people who have implemented the AI advice on AdWords or
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: their website, and
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: it work either for a short period of time and then it crashes or, it just, it's a slow trend down because it is no longer unique. It doesn't have a point of view. It doesn't have additional information. It doesn't, yeah. Having taste, having a point of view is still the differentiator,
Alex Pokorny: Heavy reality.
Dave Dougherty: to do that. So anyway, I was gonna talk about meeting in person, but we're short on time I'll just put a plug out there. The stuff that I have felt really, really, really good about recently has been all in a coffee shop or a restaurant, talking to new people, finding out about their career journeys connecting on some nerdy thing like guitar pedals. So just. Keep doing that. Use AI to carve out 30 minutes so that you can have 30 minutes with a human. I'll just pitch that as a to-do between now and the next episode of Enterprising Minds. Thank you for for sticking around. Thoughts, comments, and questions, guys. We're looking for that. We love the feedback. Please comment share it, find us on LinkedIn, or on enterprising minds.com. And until next time, care and keep having fun.
Alex Pokorny: Chairs.
