AI has completely changed the way businesses launch offers—but not always for the better.

In this episode of Growing a Deeply Rooted Business, Jess and Rachel dive into what they're seeing behind the scenes with launches in today's AI-driven marketing landscape. From fake "live" webinars and chatbot overload to the surprising return of live events, sales calls, and authentic human connection, they're breaking down what's actually working in 2026.

If you're preparing for a launch this season, this conversation will help you decide where AI belongs in your business and where your audience still expects the real you.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why AI has made information free and why human connection is now more valuable than ever.
• The biggest mistakes businesses are making with AI in their launches (and how they're losing buyer trust).
• How to use AI as a tool to support your strategy instead of replacing your expertise.
• Why live launches, communities, and sales conversations are making a powerful comeback.
• Practical ways to build trust with ethical, human-first marketing while still leveraging automation.

Meet Your Hosts

Jessica Walther is the founder and CEO of The Launch Collaborative and Sustainable Success Systems. As a launch strategist and systems consultant, Jess is dedicated to helping solo business owners and small-but-mighty teams build businesses that deliver both peace and profit. She specializes in creating sustainable growth strategies that align with her clients' values and lifestyles.

Rachel Lopez is the founder and CEO of Gal Marketing Agency, a boutique email marketing and strategy firm. With over a decade of experience, Rachel helps heart-driven entrepreneurs craft intentional marketing strategies that attract, nurture, and convert leads sustainably. Her human-first approach ensures that marketing efforts feel authentic and effective .

Together, Jess and Rachel blend systems, storytelling, and soulful strategy to help you grow a business that's deeply aligned with your life—not just your revenue goals.

Connect With Us:

• Jess Website
• Rachel's Website

Hang Out & Say Hi!

• Deeply Rooted Business Instagram
• Jess Instagram
• Rachel's Instagram

I want you to picture the last launch that you sat through as a buyer.

Maybe there's a webinar and you have the hosts going live at a specific time.

They're counting down, the music's blasting.

You see people in the chat being like, oh, my God, so good, so good signed up, and you have that icky little countdown timer in the corner, and somewhere in the back of your mind you're thinking, is any of this real?

Are these people actually on here right now?

And I think what's crazy is that in our current landscape a year ago, people are probably wouldn't even have thought anything different, or you would have never even considered that, or you probably would have assumed that a live person meant somebody was actually on there and that maybe a chat means that these were actual humans.

But now you're not so sure.

And it's completely okay to think that way.

The reality is, is that AI has changed launching.

And some of it is super exciting.

We are all on the AI train here, but some of it is making buyers trust you way less and even before you've even said a single word.

So today, we're going to walk you through all of the good, the bad, the robotic, of how AI has changed the launching landscape.

And I want you to then decide what side you've landed on, if it's for the good or for the best or for the worst.

Let's get into it before we do that.

Welcome back to another episode of Growing a Deeply Rooted Business.

I am Jess, your sustainable growth systems expert, and I'm here with Rachel, our lovely marketing mastermind.

This is one that I am super excited to talk about.

One, because we're going into launch season, so how timely this is.

Second of all, that exact scenario that Rachel just described in her opening intro came from a real story about a webinar that I attended that was very robotic and very bad.

And we're going to kind of get into kind of where we think they went wrong.

And then what parts of your launch are really good to use AI in?

And then what part parts you really need to kind of pull back a little bit.

But before we get into it, let me tap into my yoga teacher roots.

Ground down on your chair.

If you're sitting, if you're standing, feet firmly planted down on the ground, and you're gonna take a deep inhale and exhale release all the launch stress, all the hesitations, all the things that you hate about AI.

All right, so let's get into the good about AI, what we've seen happening.

And one of the big shifts that I've been talking to my clients with during this upcoming launch is really how AI has changed your offer or what you should be offering and what parts are becoming really important to people and what parts are not.

One of the things that we have noticed is that AI obviously has made information free.

We were already inundated with information just from web search and books and all of that things, but now literally anybody, anywhere can go in ChatGPT and get the answer to anything they want.

Or I've heard of people downloading lab results from their labs instead of going to dietitians using AI for that.

We've definitely seen some clients use AI in a really bad way as far as copywriting and marketing, things like that.

And the thing about this is information is everywhere, but you need to focus on the things that can't be automated, which are your proprietary frameworks, how you look at things differently and then also just you to connection and community.

Yeah, I think people are truly craving humans right now.

They want that human interaction.

We swung so far into the digital course world and then added AI into it, where everybody could just say, actually, I don't think I need this course.

I'm just going to Google it.

I'll chat chip, I'll have Claude figure it out for me.

All of those different things has really made people just want a trusted source at the end of it.

I value my time in my business coaches community where I'm like, oh my God, I have a nuanced question where I don't want to have to put all of these layers and layers of context into a chat just because she's going to get it when I say I'm stuck here and how do I do it?

So things like that are really coming back to the forefront, which is great because one, we're all humans here, right?

We're not talking to robots.

Like that's a downside for the robots, not for the humans.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the things I'll always hear is AI has killed the course creation or the digital product business when I don't think that's the case.

It's just killed the ones that are evergreen, delivering knowledge, not really having human interaction around it.

We're really seeing the whole landscape, be able to shift from an evergreen funnel to a more live, interactive experience.

Because like you said, people are craving humans.

Human connection talking can't really be automated.

And so when you're evaluating the offer you're about to launch, make sure that you have those pieces of Community and connection in because the courses that are doing that are still winning.

Rachel and I are both in the Yap challenge.

We saw her have a $6 million launch on a $250 project.

So it does sell.

You can still scale.

But she is showing up live.

She is delivering the content.

She is in the community.

There is space for human connection and that's why her people are one, getting really great results which are helping her launch bigger and better the next time.

But two, people are buying her stuff because it has those items in it.

Or for example, one of my clients runs a coaching certification business and at the beginning of the year we were team Evergreen.

We're going to go evergreen.

Instead of delivering content live, we're going to do recordings, all of that.

And we really kind of had a gut check about what our values were as a company.

Did we think that our students would be able to get the same results in a recorded experience versus something live?

And in the end of the day, even though it is more expensive and more time consuming to do live, we decided to keep the entire program live and are just automating things behind the scenes that can help us out and using AI behind the scenes to help speed up that process.

But the main forefront of our product is still human delivery.

And it works because this coaching certification program that I work for has an 86% completion rate which the industry standard for coaching certifications is 15%.

So live works.

Live also sells at this very moment.

Yeah.

And everybody is trying to low key sell something, right?

You open TikTok and every freaking video is an ad or every video is just a subtle product mention.

I think what's great about moving back into the live launching space is the consent aspect of it.

Right.

It is obvious that you are selling and people have the opportunity to be like, actually I'm not in the mood to be sold to right now or I'm going to tune in hardcore.

Because I know and I'm giving you my permission to use my attention kind of thing.

And I think that that's really valuable.

And one of the things that I don't think is really proprietary to the app challenge, but one of the things that really got me excited is that she was like, let's be transparent.

What are we doing this for?

It's to literally sell and take care of our families and do replace this income and do all of this.

And it's just that vulnerability and being like, we all got to make a buck, but we're going to do it in a way that's with consent and more human like so anyways, I just think that's something that is also setting apart this AI evergreen, launching energy to just coming back and showing up as a human.

Yeah, yeah.

So back to our experience that we mentioned at the beginning of the episode.

Let's talk about the bad and where we've seen kind of AI go wrong.

And it's where you're not being transparent in that it is AI delivering this.

AI chatbots are great.

They are a great way for your customers to be able to get answers on demand or maybe when your team is not available.

But when they are presented where they are, an actual live human and there are no options to actually talk to a live human, that's when the customer experience begins to suffer.

Like that webinar that I went to, it was framed as a time webinar.

It wasn't on demand.

It was like, be here at 11am, put it in your calendar, we're going to show up.

And if I'm going to block off my calendar as a busy entrepreneur for your webinar, then I expect you to show up live.

And this was not live.

It was somebody playing a recording of a preview previous recorded webinar.

And it was just, it just went horrible.

So hopefully they'll never do it again because not only did everyone in the chat figure out that it was recording because the screen was really blurry and it wasn't playing right.

The moderators in the chat were also bots because when people were pointing out that this was happening, that the screen was blurry, we couldn't read, we were getting responses that didn't even make sense in context or anything.

This is a company that I think has a really, really great product.

But I could see in the chat if this is their free experience, what's it gonna be on the poor, you know, that is setting yourself up for failure is delivering these poor customer experiences.

Yeah.

And I wanna make a really important distinction here.

We're pro automation, we are pro tech, and Evergreen is not the villain.

I truly believe a lead magnet is an Evergreen funnel.

It is how in the transparency and the presentation of it that really walks the line of icky or not icky.

So really understand understanding what the difference is and I think always coming back to aligning it with your values.

Right.

If you showed up to something like this, would you feel the ick or would you be completely okay with this experience that is delivering it?

So I think that's really important.

Also really over trusting the robots and the AI is kind of bad taste, bad strategy right now because it's just removing the unique value prop, which is what makes businesses successful.

What makes marketing successful is why somebody should buy from you.

Because everybody can go and sign up for chat or Claude and essentially get any course they want.

I say that with air quotes.

If you're not watching us on YouTube because the you of it all is the valuable part.

I think I was even watching Anthropic, one of their founders, talk about how it will default to agreeing with you.

So you need to kind of disagree.

And I think a really good rule of thumb that I follow is that you are not ready to use AI unless you know what good looks in your business or in your strategy because you need to be able to evaluate it and use it as an accelerator and not a complete replacement.

So if I don't know what a good email marketing sequence does or is supposed to look like or do, and I just go into Claude and say, write me this and it spits out this and I don't go back and forth with or refine it or do anything like that, then it's probably not going to work for me.

It's not going to work for my audience.

Because the strategy and knowing the strategy and that's why we have our lab with our employees and they're not just generic like write me a quote, we have infused our frameworks into them to help accelerate our output.

That we do.

And now we're sharing it with other people.

But it's not like we're just going in there and it's taking a while to build.

And I think people are trying to use AI as a way to cut corners or speed things up.

When really, if you don't take the time to put the system and strategy in place underneath using it, then you're just gonna get a bunch of garbage outputs really, really fast versus stuff that's actually gonna help move your business forward.

Yeah.

And at the end of the day, from a marketing customer experience level or customer journey level, the 24 plus touch points from awareness to conversion, if you're in a launch, they need to build on trust.

And the more and more you just put out there because people think it's a numbers game, the more you put out there that are constantly just reiterating that, I don't know, that's the opposite of what you want to be doing in a launch.

Launches should be compounding trust with every single touch point.

So if you're here saying, I'm going to be live, you better show up live if you're going to say, this is a replay.

Transparency is what's going to build that trust and really allow you to be like, hey, I am a business owner.

Hey, I am using AI, but I'm not going to allow it to eat at the parts that I think are the most important to the launch, which is the human side of it.

It's the really being able to build that relationship with X amount of people that you're trying to convert.

I think that's the most important part here because we're getting to this point where everybody's just throwing slop out there and it's just a lot to sort through.

At the end of the day, it's valuing people over your profit or just in line with your profit and valuing that personal customer experience, experience over.

Just trying to make a quick buck.

That AI, that webinar that I went to that was recorded was a quick kind of lazy solution.

If they didn't have the capacity to show up weekly on that webinar, there are so many different ways they could have delivered that they could have said, been transparent.

This is an on demand webinar or turn it into a podcast that you could listen to while you're walking.

There's other ways that you can kind of rework the thing to where it still benefits you and it works for you, but it also is delivering a really good experience for your customer as well.

And I think that's when we get into our next point.

Rachel said before, we believe in automation and we believe in AI, but it's selective automation.

Human first AI, human last touch AI.

That's where we draw the lines and trying to figure out where we're going to use AI and where we're going to use automation in our businesses.

Yeah, humans are having a comeback, right?

We all had that moment.

We were so tired, so burnt out that Evergreen was, yes, we need to go Evergreen.

It's so smart.

All of these crazy tech marketing businesses like Click Funnels, they sold the dream of being able to convert while you're on the beach making margaritas and all of that.

But the current landscape is that whatever we can give our time is so valuable.

Whatever we are not able to truly automate is the premium option now because so many people are checked out in the sense that it's like, Oh, I spend five hours running my business every week and I serve 200 clients and I'm obviously making up this case study.

But that's a marketing spiel that you see out there.

And you're like, oh, my God, I want to work five hours and make $50,000 this week.

But at the end of the day, that's so not reality.

For where people are at with the trust perspective, with just overall buyer behavior.

Live webinars are returning.

I'm seeing it with my clients.

I'm seeing it all over the board.

And then B roll.

Instagram is dead because people want to see your face.

Why are we in the YAP challenge?

Because getting in front of the camera and talking to it is the best way to grow your business right now.

Because a robot.

Unless you're cloning yourself, which please don't clone yourself, that's just creepy.

Every time I get on TikTok, it asks me if I want to make an AI clone of myself.

I'm like, no, thank you.

That sounds crazy.

But, yeah, the human connection is important.

So getting in front of the camera, as much as you may not like doing it, it's super important right now.

Doing things like podcasts, YouTube, we're seeing the big Amy Porterfields, and even them go back to live webinars every single week.

And then we're also seeing the rise of sales calls versus selling in DMs sort of thing.

And then let's make social social again.

Manychat has killed the Instagram experience.

I hate it, I hate it, hate it, hate it so much when it's over.

You know, I'm a caption reader.

I like to see the discourse happening in the captions, and it's like, comment this, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like, ugh, this ruins my fun.

Because I love hearing what people are having conversations about whatever they're resonated with and all of that.

And I think that's interesting that you're saying sales calls are returning.

People are more likely.

Which is hilarious.

Not hilarious, but I've had so many clients that we have built funnels to essentially mitigate them having to be on calls.

But in reality, what it was doing, it was just eliminating.

Disqualified people from showing up to calls.

Cause they were still forever gonna take sales calls.

They were just gonna only make sure that they're taking the most qualified ones.

But for the people that are like, yeah, I run my business with absolutely no discovery calls.

Now, people who are really interested in making buying decisions, they have to talk to a person first.

Right?

Because the ick and the disillusion of, is this a real person?

You have to have that conversation.

It can't just necessarily be an application.

It's gotta be a Little combo deal application than call.

And we discussed, it's the effort.

Effort is sexy.

Now people want to see effort before they give you thousands and thousands of dollars.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the, the sales call funnel because I think that shows where there is a good way to automate things, making sure people are qualified.

One of my clients, they have an application, it asks them if they've read their service guide, yes or no, are they ready to invest.

If not, they get routed somewhere else to review that stuff first and commit.

And then the people that are getting on our calls, we're nurturing beforehand.

So by the time that they get on the call, they're ready and her conversions are staying up.

And that's the good way to automate.

The bad way to automate would to be, oh, I'm not going to have a human interaction with you.

I'm just going to expect you to shell out $3,000.

Because I wrote a really good email, which I hope nobody does that because we work with our clients so closely.

I was never going to sell any of my services where I'm working with you one on one on a weekly basis.

And we have to interact without us talking and me making sure you fit the vibe because I my experience with you, your experience with me.

And I want to make sure that we're also aligned on the way that we're looking at things from a strategic perspective so that we don't get into this.

I don't want to call anybody out a bro marketing campaign.

And I'm over here with our ethical marketing.

So all right, let's bring it home because these three shifts are really what is making up the current landscape.

So the good.

So AI has made information free, right?

It's everything is at everybody's fingertips.

And the unautomatable system stuff, the human stuff, the community, the accountability connection is what's becoming the premium.

It's what's becoming the decision makers for people.

The bad is that a lot of the same tools are really creating these kind of cheapy icky feelings for things.

Fake webinars, bot chats, manufactured urgency.

All of it really is so obvious and it is leaving such a bad taste in people's mouths.

And so really understanding that trust is the currency right now.

And really leaning into the way that you can build that trust still using AI and different components, but highlighting and putting your primary effort in the human elements.

And then lastly the robotics.

So the more automated stuff gets and the more people are leaning into this.

How do I make this as fast as possible and get a quick buck, the more that the humans are in the spotlight.

Right.

It's how we can prioritize the premium tickets without that confused seller journey.

I love that live launches are returning.

They're so much fun.

Not for me, but they're fun for my clients.

And I love helping my clients themselves.

Sales calls are returning, which is phenomenal because if you know how to do it right, you can have so many developmental conversations.

And I know I didn't add this, and this is probably not needed in the recap, but when it comes to the tortoise and the hare, even if you have a qualified tortoise show up to a sales call, that point of connection, that human point of connection, builds so much trust that when they are ready in six months, it's a lot easier to then sell because they had that initial touch point with you where it was an icky selling of you being like, no, you're ready now.

It was like, hey, maybe you're not ready, but you know what, I'm still gonna be here when you are kind of thing.

Maybe these things aren't super scalable, like the sales calls and the live launching, but they are working right now because of the human factor I would have.

To push back on.

The live launching is not super scalable because we just saw Ms. Yapper do a $6 million launch pretty much by herself.

And I've never her mention anything AI.

Everything I've been to with her so far has been live.

Obviously she's recorded content in the course, but it doesn't seem like she leaned into that a lot.

So I think that's the proof that it can still be done.

It can still be scalable if you're focusing on the right things, which is getting your person results.

If you do that, then everything else just becomes easier.

So if this episode hit home, make sure you share it with business bestie, the one that's experiencing AI FOMO panic that a lot of us are have or has a big launch coming up.

Make sure that they're hitting all of these points and really staying true to their values in their launch.

And we want to hear from you.

We want to hear about your experiences with AI.

What's some good with some bad with some robotic things, what's some questionable things that made you go, we love to talk about that stuff.

And if you're planning a live launch in launch season and you have questions that we want to follow along with your launch, so drop us a comment or something and let us know and we'll observe with our eyes and we'll cheer you on.

Launch season is upon us.

You should be ramping up right now.

Yeah, yeah.

So next week.

This is the first part of probably a six part launch series.

We always do it around this time because we know everybody's gearing up for that last big sales push of the season.

So make sure that you follow, subscribe, whatever.

So you get a notification and until next week, we're rooting for you.