Shownotes
When a team member fed me pure ChatGPT fluff instead of their actual expertise, it was time to draw a line. As an early adopter and power user of AI, this episode reveals the exact guidelines now required for using AI in the business—from protecting proprietary knowledge on closed systems to owning every output you submit, even if AI generated it. Learn when AI is brilliant (research, refining messages, automating tasks) versus when it's a road to mediocrity (outsourcing your thinking). The uncomfortable truth: AI has all the information but doesn't really know anything, and lazy AI habits are causing thought atrophy in otherwise smart people. These framework guidelines will help you leverage AI's strengths while protecting what actually makes you valuable.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcripts
What's the proper use of AI for your team and your business? I don't know if you, if you've given this much thought.
I've, I've been thinking about it now for a couple of days and I'm, I'm going to share some thoughts on it.
The, the context here is the other day I asked my team for some input on, on a prospecting strategy, like a, a new sequence workflow that we're putting together for some outbound stuff that our clients and customers are doing. And I said what they're using today can be upgraded. And what I want is, I want our way, like air quote, like our way of doing it.
Like if we had to build a campaign from scratch or workflow or sequence from scratch and the goal was maximize sales for MSPs or even for our own business, what would it be like? What's the perfect breakdown? And I put out like a suggested, here's one example.
And I had done a ton of research actually using AI and, and, and other stuff. And then of course my, my own experience and so I gave all that to my team and I said, hey, what would you do? Like, what's your perfect campaign?
What's your perfect sequence? And I gave them again, like I gave them all my research, gave them all the context and said I want you to think. And, and that's how we hire people.
Like I'm not just hiring people for, for their hands and to carry out tasks and do what I tell them to do. Like I want smart people. It's why we hire you. Like, it's in our process. So ask the opinion. One of the answers I got was just like reaped of GPT.
Like I could, it was, it wasn't a good answer. It was full of a whole bunch of fluff and stuff that you'd find in sales blogs and like that, but nothing really actionable. Right?
It's like a, it's like a person who's read every book but never actually done the job. Like, and I can smell these answers from a mile away because I, I, I use AI all the time. So when I see it I'm like, yeah, dude, that's gave me GPT.
And I thought we gotta address this.
Like I can't ask a question and ask for input in an opinion and get something that I could simply copy and paste into GPT because we're outsourcing our thinking at that point. And all AI is, is just like one big large predictive text model. And I'm, I'M a fan of it.
Like, I'm, hell, I wear a device, like an AI recording device. So I'm like, I'm an early adopter. I'm a power user, but I know its limitations. I gave this thought.
I created these guidelines that I'll share with you in case of. They're helpful and they're not exhaustive. It's not a, this isn't a declaration that says this is the policy forever.
It's a, based on where we're at and what I've been thinking these past couple days. These are the guidelines that we're putting in place.
But this is going to be a flexible, you know, malleable, you know, framework that we're going to continue to iterate on. But what I really need you to do as a team is I need you to understand Commander's intent of this.
Like, I need you to understand what the purpose of this is. Less so the specifics of each bullet point more so what I'm getting at and, and the intent behind it. Here's what I came up with. High level.
First of all, all of our playbooks, all of our templates, all of our frameworks, all of our, like, all of that stuff has to be done on, on a closed system. I am not paying open AI and training open AI at the same time. You know, I'm not training my competitors.
I'm not training, you know, like everyone else, like on, on my knowledge and on my experience and on the thing that I, I sell, frankly, like, yeah, we'd all love to democratize every answer and like that, but that's what we get paid for is our expertise is our, our answers. All of our stuff. Anything that's even marginally proprietary or has the potential to be proprietary needs to be on a closed system.
So we have, we have business accounts and you know, we verify in advance. Like, none of this information is being used to train, train the model and to train other people.
So if you're using our stuff outside of that, then like, that's a, that is a clear violation of, of the guidelines of the, the intent here. And because of that, like, part of the, the recommendation is like, I really recommend like, you, you get a separate personal account, right?
Like, I don't have access to, to all the chats, even though I, I own the account. I don't have access to all the chats of everybody even after they leave. Like, I, I don't. And unless I steal a login or something.
That's not my, my intent. My intent is I want to close the system so I'm not training things.
You know, we get kind of personal with, with some of this AI stuff when we ask questions and get content. Like, I would just recommend do that somewhere else, like on, on a different platform.
Second thing is, if I ask for your opinion, if I ask for your input, if I ask for your experience, do not feed me AI bullshit. I'm asking you because I want your opinion. I hired you because I want your opinion.
And I'll talk in a second about the good uses of it and how to leverage it. But do not take my question, feed it into GPT and give me GPT's answer. Because frankly, if that's the case, I don't need you.
Like, I could have obviously put it into GPT myself and gotten GPT's answer. And I would argue I'm better than most when it comes to, when it comes to using these models to get really high quality outputs. I'm very good at it.
We spend a lot of time in them and I don't want somebody else's quick copy paste into that. So don't feed me the AI bullshit.
And as kind of a third guideline here, if you're giving us information or input or experience or something that is more than, let's call it 25% of the message has been originated from AI thinking that you're required to disclose it. You know, it's like, it's, it's okay, don't feed me an AI answer and take credit for it.
It's probably more important if you, if you do, like, if you say, you know what, I don't actually know the answer to this, let me go to AI and start asking questions and then I get something out of it that I think, hey, that's really valuable. Okay, fine, disclose it though. Like, we, that's, that's a requirement going forward. If it's, you know, if you're using it in other ways, fine.
But if it's originating the thinking, if it's doing the thinking for you, I want to know it, right? Like, I want that to be disclosed. Because by the way, that's also information everybody else has.
Kind of the fourth one here is regardless, like, if you put that in there, you own the answer, right?
Like, so if you give me that answer, even if you disclose it, if you haven't taken the time to read it, to refine it, to reprompt it, and you've been lazy with the, with the AI and you, and you give a shitty answer, it's your shitty answer, Even if I know it's AI. Like if you give me a shitty answer that was generated in AI, that is your shitty answer. Is your name at the bottom of that assignment. It is your.
Is your responsibility and you take ownership of that.
So if the machine starts to hallucinate and you're not paying close enough attention and you're being lazy in the thinking of it or in your thinking, you publish that. To me, you're the author. And I think that's really important. Like, I can't, can't give me an answer by. Oh, shit.
You know, I thought that wasn't a good answer. I don't know why it said that. No, you said that. Now what's the flip side? So what, what do we use AI for?
Well, you know, I just put like a handful of these things. Use AI for research, right? Like if you're not sure if you want to, to learn more about something. Like we, you know, dig into.
We use deep research for compensation research. We use on, on GPT. We use like all, all the tools and the research models are phenomenal.
We have some really great prompts for salespeople, like, before you go on sales calls, like, prompts, the deep research functions on these AI models. And you will get some killer information. So absolutely, it's got all the information in the world. Use it that way.
That's one way you can use AI to refine your message, right? Like, hey, I put this together. Here's a voice note answer. Can you take this and make it a proper text so that I can copy and paste?
Now again, read it because you're going to own the copy paste. But you know, I do that. I walk a lot.
I'm right now, I'm out walking and I can record an audio note, copy the transcript, drop it in GPT, turn it into, you know, actual text and paste it. That's a, that's a really good use of it. Kind of similarly, using it to edit your messages.
Like, I'm sending this memo to, to somebody important or to an investor or to a customer or to something. Well, then drop that shit in an AI if you need to. Or plug in AI into your writing app, whatever it is. Using AI to automate any of your tasks.
Use AI to automate your entire job. Like, I mean, in terms of the tasks and the execution of things.
Like if you're filling out reports or you're doing admin work and you're doing shit with forms and all of these things and you know how to automate it then by all means, I don't just like, we don't allow it. Like I, I support that. And if you can automate the, the administrative and execution and task side of, of your role significantly, well, cool.
Like I, I hire smart people.
I can, I can give you more roles and if you can figure out how to automate those even better huge productivity gains again, you still own the outcome of that thing, right?
Like if you train AI in a way to do something for you and you think, oh, I had it filling out these forms or submitting this thing automatically and it was doing it all wrong. AI doesn't, doesn't own that, right? Like you, you set it up, you're the, you're the driver of it.
But automated tasks, things like that, I'm not, I'm not worried about now. I'd for free disclose it. If you've managed to, to free up four hours in your day using AI, then awesome.
Let's, let's find a better, better way to, to leverage that time for, for higher gains and higher productivity. And then you're using AI to challenge your thinking, right?
Like if you, if you have some thoughts, if I have some opinions, you know, in this example with the prospecting sequence, if I looked at that and said, okay, here's where I'm suggesting, let me drop this into to AI and say, hey, what are the holes in this? Or what are the gaps in this? Is there, you know, is this, how would you improve this? And it says, well, I would do this and this and this and this.
And you might go, okay, like, you know, six out of 10 of those suggestions suck. But like one's really good and a few. Or maybe let me, let me refine it so, you know, challenging your thinking by not originating your thinking.
Because you know, like the thing that I kind of put at the end of this was AI is just a synthesis of all the things everyone else has said. It is a road to mediocrity in, in the vast majority of cases, especially where like deep expertise and context is really required.
That's why regular business owner goes to, to AI and says, write me a good outbound script or write me a good email. It still sucks, right? Like, it's still not, not, not very good. If it says, you know, hey, here's my, here's my, you know, my sales results.
Like, what should I do to fix sales? It's not going to give you very contextual, you know, highly accurate answers. Like it's not a good expert in the field yet.
Like it probably will be at some point, but it's just a synthesis of everything everyone else has said. So you, you're asking for average to come out of that. Then it has all the information, but it doesn't really know anything.
And it's funny because I put this together. I was talking to my wife about it last night. Hey, we're having to clarify the use of this and da, da, da.
And she was like, it's so interesting, you of all people, like, as an early adopter and such a heavy AI user and such an advocate in so many ways for you to kind of raise your hand, say, in my business, I'm limiting the use of AI.
And I wouldn't say I'm limiting it like I'm, I'm using it more effectively, I'm using it for what it's intended to be used and I'm using it to its actual capabilities today. Like, it's not a very good. It doesn't have original thought, it doesn't have the level of expertise of the people that I have on my team.
In my view, I'm not limiting it, I'm using it properly, like the right tool for the right job. Because I think there are so many people today that are relying on AI to think for them.
You know, it's like any, anytime anything comes up, the first thing I do is like, hey, I gotta, I gotta go to, you know, I gotta. Let me check GPT, let me check GPT, let me check GPT. Let me. I'm like, do you even think anymore? Right?
And it leads to this lazy thinking habit that I swear I, I see like, atrophy of thought occurring with people. Like, people that are just like, beginning to not even be able to think for themselves.
They are immediately resorting to an AI driven answer and it's laziness. They think it's the shortcut to actual thought.
And in my field, like in sales and sales consulting and all of that, it's great because the more that people do that, the more we stand out, the more quality stands out, the more real expertise stands out.
And I think we still have such an advantage for those of us that are actual experts in our field and know what we're doing for us to use AI, like, oh, if you've never built a sales team, if you've never led a turnaround, if you've never had a hard conversation, I don't give a shit. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, you can, you can ask GPT for those answers, but if you don't know what's good and what's not.
You're not going to help people get great results. So that's what we've got. Those are some of the guidelines I put in place for my team.
I hope it's helpful and, you know, passing along to your team, maybe there's a bullet or two in here, or if you have, you know, some. Some feedback or some suggestions, feel free to, to send them over. We can keep refining this thing as we go. Adios.
