What to do with your existential fear of AI
In 2016 the growth rate of my company dropped by 50% because of a seismic shift in the market. It happened gain in 2018 and in 2021. The first time it was a change to search. The second time it was fear of privacy laws. The third time it was post COVID. Every time we recovered and returned to stronger growth rates.
AI is a new seismic shift. And we are running the same playbook to get our growth back. I will now give you exactly what that playbook is, and my best recommendation for how to spend your time in this time of deep angst about AI taking over everything.
What do do with your AI angst:
Build Your Network
Build solutions for your customers problems
Automate everything you can to keep your costs low
Build Your Network
Spend time every single day building real relationships. This could be responding to DMs from followers. It could be taking the time to answer emails from customers. It could be hosting a podcast and interviewing key people in your industry. I’ve personally shifted my time so that I now spend 50% of my day on this, every single day. Why? Because in the previous shifts we experienced, we lost all of our organic traffic. For some reason, that seems to be what happens when the world changes. People stop finding things on their own. They get jittery and scared. They only want to buy from places that their friends have recommended. It’s herd behavior, it’s primal. Going back to the days when one person would drink the water first to make sure it was safe for everyone else. This always happens in times of deep uncertainty. And AI is most definitely a time of deep uncertainty.
Everything good in marketing flows out of connections. Your content will improve. Your messaging will improve. Your customer service will improve. It all gets better, and more resilient, when you build relationships. It’s so easy to get sucked in when there seems to be easy traffic, easy growth, a new way of optimizing things. But you have to remember we are still humans. We still came from cave people who depended on each other for survival. For most of the time humans have existed we have needed each other to even exist. You could argue we still do if you look at the science around connection. So at the end of the day when people are scared and uncertain, they turn to each other for advice. If you cannot build trust with the people who are being asked for the advice, you will get erased from being in business.
Build Solutions for Customer Problems
If you build solutions with intuition gained from networking, AI cannot replicate that. Sure, it could build a generic version of what you build. But how much do generic products make in profits versus brand name products? If you truly get to know your customers, and build solutions for them, they will be loyal. Even if there’s an AI that could roughly do the same thing. Everyone’s most scarce asset is still time, so if you can make things that give them what they want, in the most efficient and spot-on way possible, they will choose to buy from you and they will pay a premium.
Automate Everything that is Not Networking or Building Solutions
Focus is key in a time of change. And you want to focus as much as possible on building your network and building solutions. Automate everything that is not one of those two things.
