Agency owners need to get their hands dirty with AI

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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I have no creative introduction whatsoever.

Gini Dietrich: That’s fine- So maybe- … because I’m gonna phew.

Chip Griffin: So maybe, maybe we should just take a, a deep dive for w- you know- … couple of minutes here and try to figure out what it is that we’re gonna talk about today.

Gini Dietrich: We’re gonna talk about the bro culture who told agency owners to use AI for three months and then not again.

Chip Griffin: Yes. apparently, agency owners need to, to really get up to speed on AI, but then just to hand it all off to the team and move on with their lives.

Gini Dietrich: This is the most ridiculous, ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard, and I understand that I don’t have context ’cause I didn’t watch the bro video, but that’s ludicrous.

Chip Griffin: And in fairness, I watched it a while back, so my context is a little bit off too. But it- look, this is, this is not, this is not one-off advice. I mean, frequently I hear people advise, you know, agency owners to, to have some general knowledge of something but then to let go. And, I think in some cases that may be worthwhile.

But I think AI is moving so fast- … and has such an impact on our businesses that, that we need to … as leaders, we need to remain curious, we need to be hands-on. We cannot simply rely on our teams to do this because it is transformational to our businesses and to our industry, and that’s not something that you leave in the hands of somebody else.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, and I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly and truly do not know how I did my job five years ago.

Chip Griffin: Yep.

Gini Dietrich: Because, it’s such a huge thinking partner for me to help me figure out what I’m missing, what holes I need to fill, what’s overly complicated, what’s too jargony. Like, I don’t know how I did my job without it.

So the idea that you would do a deep dive for three months and then be like, “Okay, everybody else take over,” like that doesn’t, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Chip Griffin: No, it does not. Now, in fairness, I think, I think what they were saying was sort of hand over the day-to-day of it, and you can certainly still use it to help you with your own writing and the basic stuff.

But I, think you still need to be beyond that. I think you need to be pushing- Yes … the envelope yourself- Yes … experimenting, innovating-

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes …

Chip Griffin: inspiring your team.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, if you’re not doing that, you’re not getting the most out of it that you can.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Like, yes, because this is one of those things that if you’re not using it, you don’t know what has changed, and it’s changing so fast, right?

I mean, a couple of weeks ago, Claude came out and said that they’re watermarking everything, and you can’t just retype it into a new document because the watermark is in the tokens and how it thinks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And everybody freaked out. Like, everybody’s using AI. So, okay, so it’s watermarked.

Like, we all know we’re using it. Everybody’s using it. I use it, you use it. Everybody uses it. Like, okay, so it’s being watermarked, but like, if you’re not using it and understanding it and evolving with it, then you might freak out about that. But it’s not that big of a deal.

Chip Griffin: It is absolutely not that big of a deal.

It’s stupid, in fact, but, you know, if it, if it amuses somebody to, do that, fine. I’m sure that somebody will figure out how to, to reveal those watermarks and post gotchas, kinda like in the old days when people were like, “Gotcha, that CEO didn’t write their own blog post.” No, duh.

Gini Dietrich: Really? Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And, and, and, their shareholders don’t want them to do that either.

Gini Dietrich: Correct. Right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Not, at their hourly rates. And- No … and that, and that was 20 years ago before their hourly rates got to where many CEOs- Right … have their hourly rates today. But in any case, so

you

Chip Griffin: need to be learning and experimenting and understanding how it’s evolving, because, I mean, even some of the advice that, you know, someone might have given you or I might have given six months ago is not the same advice I would give today.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, in fact, you know, some of the things about, you know, the importance of providing instructions and guardrails and all that kind of stuff, that may be shifting. You know, we’re now seeing Anthropic saying, “Well, that’s, that’s not really the best way to get things out of the, the more recent versions of Opus and Fable and that kind of stuff.

You actually wanna give it more freedom than you did before, otherwise you may not like the results.” And- Yeah … and those things are changing. You know, a, a couple years ago, everybody was like, “You need to tell it what kind of mindset to have. Act as a social media strategist.” Nobody will tell you that today, because that’s not the best way to get stuff out of it. But if you’re not continuing to experiment and roll up your sleeves and be in there day to day and figure out not only how it can help your business, but how it can help you personally, and that’s beyond just the thought part of it. That’s figuring out how do I make it my own personal operating system, my second brain, which I am extremely passionate about, and I think that, most agency owners should really be thinking about this whole, you know, whether, you wanna call it that operating system or second brain concept, having something that really knows you and as much about you as possible so that it’s really there, not even just as a thinking partner or a sparring partner.

I mean, it’s, there as a mini you-

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: That can help you to think things through and not forget stuff, which- Yep … as I get older, is more and more important.

Gini Dietrich: Well, and one of the things that I’ve done is I do– I’ve done exactly like that. I’ve done exactly that, and I think I’ve talked about this before, that I have a co-CEO agent that I’ve built, and it will s- it kinda, it kinda makes me mad sometimes.

But one of the goals that we have inside my organization is to have everything less dependent on me, because right now the, the business is very founder-led. It’s, you know, I’m the thought leader, I’m the brand, all of those things, and it’s a big, big goal over the next three to five years to extract me from some of that and start to build other leaders inside the organization that, you know, can help us scale and do all of those things.

So my AI knows that, and I will do something, and it will say Is this the best use of your time? I thought you were trying to extract yourself, and I’m like,

“Ugh. Fine!”

Chip Griffin: See, yours is more polite than mine because mine will just straight up tell me that it’s not a good use of my time. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it will do that, yeah. and, that I shouldn’t do it. Yeah. Or, my other favorite is it will say, “Well, this does not, you know, match what you said in, you know- 2022.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: You know, “Why are you saying this now?” Or something like that.

Gini Dietrich: What has changed, or yeah. Yeah, yeah …

Chip Griffin: yeah, what has changed, or just it’s, it’s not consistent. Yeah … and, so having it call me out, the, I mean, it … Sometimes it’s caught me on things where I’m just not thinking it through, right?

In, the moment I give a quick answer and say, “Yeah, let’s go in this direction,” it’s like, “Wait a minute, hold on.”

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: That c- that conflicts- Yep … with advice you’ve given in the past. Yep. You know, square this up.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. And I will say that, you know, you made the point about using it in your personal life, too.

I have an agent that is helping me parent a teenage girl, and sometimes I get very frustrated and I’m like, “Meh,” and I type something out, and it literally said to me the other day, “So let me get this straight, Gini. You are raising a strong, independent young woman who can think for herself and do things the way that she thinks are best, and you’re mad that she’s doing this?”

And I’m like- Well, when you put it that way, like…

Chip Griffin: to, to which I would be tempted to respond, “You know I can delete you at any time, right?”

Gini Dietrich: But it holds up a mirror sometimes and you’re like-

Chip Griffin: It, does …

Gini Dietrich: “Oh, okay.” Yeah. “You’re right. All right, you’re right. You’re right.”

Chip Griffin: But it, you know, part of it is just is, is playing the what if game too.

And I think that’s something that’s really hard to delegate to your team, or maybe not comfortable for them because- Right … some of those what ifs may result in them not having the jobs that they currently have. Exactly. Not necessarily that they are out of a job, but- Right … but their job would necessarily change.

And, you know, one of the things that, that I will often do is I will say to my AI engine of choice, “So, you know, here’s my challenge. How might I go about that differently?” Or, you know, “How could you help me with this?” Or, when it gives me an answer, well, why do I still… ‘Cause sometimes it’ll say, “You need to do this next.”

And I’ll say, “Well, why?”

Gini Dietrich: Why? You’re right. Why?

Chip Griffin: What is it about it that you can’t do-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah …

Chip Griffin: so I can, you know, make a legitimate decision about really whether it is something I need to take on. And I’d say probably 50% of the time it’s like, no, actually you’re right. I could create a process that would allow me to, you know, maybe not get it all the way there, but close enough.

And I think that, you know, having those kinds of conversations and engagement help you to figure out things that are important not just to you, but to the business itself. And if you simply get a general knowledge and then leave off in delegation, you’re not getting anywhere near the value that you ought to be.

Gini Dietrich: 100%. I totally agree with that. And I think this, this idea that you should just deep dive for three months or one to three months or whatever it happens to be, and then leave it off to your… Like, that’s just, it’s ludicrous. It’s ludicrous. Like it’s, bah. Bah.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And, and I mean, and the, the other thing that I think is helpful is, you know, there’s all sorts of things being said and written about AI, including this podcast, this episode, and previous episodes.

And one of the things that I love to do is I love just taking a link to, you know, one of these podcast episodes or videos and, throwing it to Claude and saying, “Hey, anything I should take away from this?” And what it then does is it reads the transcript and takes a look at, all of the behaviors that I currently have with it and say, “Okay, well, you, you’re already doing 90% of this, but here are the two new ideas that you might consider.”

Hmm. And it, And, so I find it really helpful, so I will… Sometimes I don’t even watch the video. I’ll just, you know, I’ll see the headline on a, a, video on YouTube, you know, “Get 10X the results of Claude Design by doing this.” And so I’ll just grab the link, and I’ll shoot it over to Claude and say, “Anything?

Should I watch this? Is there anything to take away from it?”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: And, it will come back, and it, because I, do all of the work that I do and because I have systems set up so that it records all of the activity that I do with it and all of the rules and context and all that, it’s able to say, you know, “You’re better than it in these places, you’re worse than it in these places, and this stuff is just, you know, rock stupid- Yeah

and you shouldn’t do it no matter whether you can or can’t.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly right, and, using it in those kinds of ways are the big things I think most people are missing. And you know, you- before we started recording, you and I were talking about how 99% of humans just in general are not using it in those kinds of ways.

We’re not building skills, we’re not building agents, we’re not curious about what it can do. We’re not using it in ways that can help us. I mean, I use it, to your point, for everything. I use it for parenting, I use it for home design, I use it for all work-related things. I, I honestly and truly, I don’t know how I lived five years ago without it.

I don’t.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, it, can help you find just little things that are just, you know, mind-numbingly annoying and I sometimes will kick myself for not using it as my first port of call. So-

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep …

Chip Griffin: for example, a couple of weeks ago, I was having, a, a really technical networking issue in my house, as far as how my laptop was talking to my, my NAS. And it wasn’t doing it exactly correctly, and so it was l- leading to very, very slow transfer speed.

So it wasn’t just invisible, it was just really slow- Mm-hmm … in a way that it, shouldn’t have been. And I’m pretty smart about home networking and LANs and all that kind of stuff, and so I, I couldn’t figure it out, and so I did some quick Googling and I couldn’t find it there. And I’m like, “You know what?

Let me just give the, exact situation to Claude and see what happens.” Not 10 seconds later, it has come back with a really bizarre solution. I tested it, immediately worked, solved the problem.

Gini Dietrich: And it worked. Isn’t that crazy?

Chip Griffin: Right. That’s crazy. So I, mean, it, could, it… And, normally you would expect that, the same thing would pop up in Google results, and it didn’t.

Gini Dietrich: It didn’t, right.

Chip Griffin: Because it was, it was such an edge case that I had. But it was able to, parse through all of the detail and figure out what the real problem was and how to resolve it. And so-

Gini Dietrich: And then it worked. That’s crazy …

Chip Griffin: and, then it worked. And, otherwise, I would’ve just given up and just had to live with the fact that my laptop was talking incredibly slowly to the NAS.

Which it, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world- Right. But, yeah … but there were certain tasks that it just made difficult, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to work the way it, it should. And so it, helped. So, but if I wasn’t spending the time with, with the tool myself and I, went to a team member, could they possibly solve it?

Sure. But, that, A, that’s wasteful-

Gini Dietrich: Right …

Chip Griffin: and, B, I’m not learning from it.

And, I think the, the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that when we lack knowledge about something, it’s harder to manage our people on those tasks. And so, you know, if you are a PR agency owner, the fact that you’ve done PR before helps you to manage your team because you can figure out what actually makes sense. Does it really take this long to do that? And, and, not only do you understand what they’re doing and, how it impacts, but also they respect you more, right? If you are– I’ve seen PR people managed by non-PR people- And it tends not to go all that well because they’re not talking the same language.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And if we want our whole teams to be energetically using AI, and we’re not using it, we can’t speak that same language. Again, I, used to have occasions where I would see a non-technical person managing a dev team.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, no.  That’s a terrible idea.

Chip Griffin: And that’s the worst. Right? Yeah. Because th- because developers know they can pull one over on you if you don’t- Then, yeah … if you don’t know what they’re actually talking about, right? And, I always had a much better time managing devs ’cause I, I can code myself and those… So when they kind of give me a, a baloney answer, I’m like, “Really? Really?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah.

No, okay. All right. I guess we can’t do that.” So, you need to understand the AI in order to be able to prod your team, manage your team, encourage your team, inspire your team. So- this is, this is really not one of those things where you can say, “Look, I just, I need to be an executive level person on this, and that’s it.”

You need to be in the trenches on AI, at least for the foreseeable future. At some point, it may begin to stabilize, and you can treat it more like a lot of the other activities. But as long as it is developing and evolving as quickly as it is now, you need to be in there, and you need to understand it every single day.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And one of the things I will tell you with my team that I have learned over the last few months is that- They don’t have the same level of, shall we say, excitement that I have around it. And because of that, I’m able to train them and coach them on how to use it. And so I will say, “Well, have you prompted it with this,” or, “Have you tried that?”

And they’ll go, “Oh, no.” And then they’ll do that and go, “Oh, well that worked.” And so if I wasn’t using it, you know, constantly like I am, I wouldn’t know to be able to train or coach those things. So I think you’re exactly right. It’s kind of like I say to my market- our VP of marketing all the time, I’m like, “You have the hardest job in this building because this is my core expertise.”

And I’m sorry, but like I’m gonna have ideas, and we’re gonna have debates over things that you’re doing because it’s my core expertise. And this is the same thing, like you should know enough to be able to say to your team, “Have you tried this?” or, “Have you thought about that?” or, “Maybe try prompting it with this,” or, “Have it play devil’s advocate,” or, “Have it poke holes in it for you.”

So like you can’t do that, to your point, if you’re not using it every single day.

Chip Griffin: Well, and I, think you’ve touched on the key thing here, which is that it’s not doing the work for them. It’s coaching. Yeah. It’s mentoring. Yep. It’s advising. Yep. It’s inspiring. And those are all the, the things that you need to do.

I’m not sitting here saying that you need to build all the processes out and hand over preset skills- Right, right … or bodies of context or whatever to the team, but, you need to know enough that you can have that, those conversations and say, “Have you tried this? Have you seen this?” You know, you, you– I, experimented with this the other day.

You know, I think this is the kinda thing that would really help you doing X, Y, or Z. And you just can’t do that as effectively- Yeah … if you’re just like, “You know, I heard someone say, I heard Chip and Gini talking about this, and I think maybe you ought to do this.” But I mean,

you,

Chip Griffin: just don’t come across as confident if you haven’t tried it yourself.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, 100%. And look, I know I’ve said this before too, but it’s fun. Like, it’s fun. So even if you don’t wanna use it from a business perspective or you haven’t figured out the best use of it, like try it personally, test it out personally. I found this app called Cookshelf where you scan all of the cookbooks that you have, and then it indexes all of your recipes, which is great, and it helps you meal plan and it builds grocery lists and all that.

However, you still have to come up with the meal plans ideas. So I have to say, “Okay, I wanna make tacos,” and then I put tacos into the app, and it gives me like 75 recipes from the cookbooks that I own. Overwhelming. Great, but overwhelming. So now I use my AI to say, “Okay, last week we had this, this, this and this.

Here’s my app. Here’s all the cookbooks. Give me an idea. I wanna have one night pork, one night steak, one night chicken, one night vegetarian,” and then it does that work for me, and then I go into the app and find the recipe, right? So– And it tells me which cookbook it’s in and which page. So then I just go to my shelf, I pull it off and I cook.

Makes things significantly easier. The app made it easier, AI made it even easier. So there are lots of things. I have my books in my library downstairs color-coded, which drives my father-in-law crazy because he thinks I should be using the Dewey Decimal System, but they’re color-coded. They’re like red, orange, yellow, right?

So I took a picture of all of my books on all the shelves, there’s more than a thousand of them, and I put them into Claude and I said, “Create me an index of all of the books by author, by title, and then tell me what, which shelf they’re on and which– and how far in.” Now I have my own Dewey Decimal System.

So there are lots of ways that you can use AI in interesting ways personally to get excited about it and then transfer that over to the business Yes, they’re color-coded. I know you haven’t gotten past that yet.

Chip Griffin: I, I, I just, you’ve left me speechless.

Gini Dietrich: It looks so nice. It’s so pretty.

Chip Griffin: It, I, I, I, I feel like maybe you should be experimenting to see how AI can act as a therapist for some of the issues you clearly must have-

Gini Dietrich: I do have, yes …

Chip Griffin: if, if you, if you’re-

Gini Dietrich: But it looks really nice. It looks very nice.

Chip Griffin: It looks re- it d- that is fantastic.

I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten rid of all of my cookbooks and most of my regular books because I-

Gini Dietrich: Oh, wow …

Chip Griffin: stopped cracking them open, and I decided that the fact that they looked good on my shelf didn’t really matter to me anymore.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, see, it matters to me, so.

Chip Griffin: And, when it comes to cooking, I prefer the, the, the Top Chef challenge style.

You just go and you grab a couple of ingredients, and you say- … “What can I make with this?”

Gini Dietrich: That’s weekend cooking, which I agree with. Oh, no. Weeknight cooking, I can’t do that.

Chip Griffin: Oh, that’s week, that, that week, that’s-

Gini Dietrich: I just have to, like, have a plan.

Chip Griffin: No, I do that lunchtime, whatever. I mean, just- Yeah, I don’t have- It, just, it’s the shortens the time, right?

So if you’re doing it for lunch- Sure, yep … you know, you got maybe 10 or 15 minutes, so what can I, what can I do with- Yeah … what’s available here? What’s going bad in the… Usually start with what’s going bad in the fridge.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, grab one or two of those and say- Hmm … “Okay, how can I put this to work?”

And it, to me, that’s a lot more fun than using some recipe well, first of all, I’ve always hated recipes, but secondly- Yeah … it’s, not as mentally challenging, and I like my cooking to be mentally challenging.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t have the time during the week. Weekends- Hmm … I totally agree with you, but during the week I don’t have the time.

Chip Griffin: Hmm. Well, anyway, on that note, since I feel like we’re starting to veer off topic and off track a bit.

Gini Dietrich: I will send photos of my color-coded shelves that we can include with this.

Chip Griffin: I, I, that is, that is fantastic or disturbing or perhaps both. So- … on that note, we are gonna wrap up this episode. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.