Beyond the Demo: The Human Error in Your AI Rollout

nate you just dropped five figures on a shiny new ai platform we're stoked you've scheduled

the demos you sent out the logins and then you hear nothing from your team and they quietly go

back to using their spreadsheets is that not the most frustrating thing ever 100 unfortunately

this is what we're hearing everywhere and the problem isn't the tech like the tech is awesome

it's just another case of change fatigue and i think the other hard part is it's not that your

team is lazy either right the problem is just a failure to connect the tool to the humans who

are actually using it yep yep yep the teams don't resist change they're resisting the ambiguity of

it so today we're going to not talk about the features the apis all those bells and whistles

we're going to talk about feelings we're going to give you the type a unhinged

playbook for rolling out new tech without enticing a full-scale mutiny exactly we're

the people who build both the high performance marketing machine and make sure people actually

know how to drive it right so with that die let's dive right into the organized chaos of ai adoption

all right so to kick us off we're breaking today's episode into three parts the first

being the psychology of nope why great tools fail part two will be the three rule of play

book of adoption and finally my favorite part three lightning round ai x and wins so let's dive

right into the psychology of nope die you kick this whole thing off with the linkedin post and

from my pov you just nailed it you said stop demoing features start demoing outcomes so let's

start there why do you think so many incredibly smart leaders get this fundamental first step

so wrong you know i think it's easy to just look at the numbers and tell your

teams like this is why you should do it see we're gonna get all this roi or you're gonna save all

this time and you know in part it's the vendor's fault because they're selling this tour of the ui

because it's easy they're gonna get you engaged that way right and so that's how you're selling

it to your team and then it's also our fault is leadership because we're focused on that macro

that roi and not how it's going to affect the day-to-day of each person in their micro workflows

right so

that last piece of the puzzle is then it feels more like a mandate to those people

instead of a mission right it's one more chore one more thing on their checklist their to-do's

that they need to add to their ever-growing pile of things to do right everybody's needing to do

more with less now and really the ai is going to help them remove some of those chores or to-do's

instead of adding it to their plate so you need to show them how it's going to affect them not

just tell them

that it's going to affect them and there's there's a lot of different ways you can do that right like

you and i have gotten into the tools ourselves and experimented and then try building something

and then instead of just being like hey guys look i can do all these things and it's saving me time

we're going to them and going hey look what i did here's how i did it this is the time i saved

and now i can spend this time doing this instead right so you're getting to show them how you can

level them up into a more strategic

place of thinking and using the ai to take away all of those little like to-do's of running through

spreadsheets and trying to nail down trends that kind of thing i couldn't have said it better

myself and to kind of go one step farther one thing i've noticed in our work areas for those

of you that don't know die and i actually work really closely together in our day-to-day job as

well um but on top of going to them and saying here's what i made here's how i made it here's

how much time i saved etc i feel like we've gotten really good at saying too and this is why i'm

coming to you because i thought of maybe this almost seemingly unrelated point on how it could

benefit you and what you're passionate for in your day-to-day job so i wanted to show you this in case

you wanted to run with it and again instead of mandating that they then go try it out more so

just driving excitement around like hey i did this really cool thing i think you're going to think

it's cool and i think actually you could learn from it and it will help you in this way um anyway

i think at the end of the day this really comes down to being a classic performance marketing

mistake right so to to kind of tie a bow on this like you can have the

best ad creative in the world but if you send all those people to a landing page that's just

not great and doesn't immediately say what's in it for me to the to the shopper right or the

the lead they will bounce and that's something that we deal with every day trying to make sure

that all those pieces work very well together and i think in this case the ai tool is the ad

your team's overflowing inbox or workload um you know plate of responsibilities is the landing page

so you have to be hyper relevant instantly yep

100 all right i think that's a perfect segue into part two the three rule playbook for adoption

so uh let's get into the actionable framework in the blog post that i recently that we recently

posted on our website i broke this down into three core rules really rule number one is all

about the setup frame the mission not the mandate one way in which this can go very wrong is when

it's a top-down order use this to

tool starting tomorrow it was expensive it will help again not the complete context we're not

um allowing the team to build excitement and get in there and test it out for themselves

we're basically just mandating that they get to use the order or mandate that they use this new

tool i think the problem is that like you hit on earlier die they immediately it immediately

becomes a mandate and not something that's exciting their plate's already full their

inbox is already full analysis one more to do being added to an ever-growing to-do list

and i think especially at companies where you run a little bit lean and your to-do list already isn't

maybe shrinking in size that just adds to the stress and basically makes the team shut down

and stop learning at that point would you agree with that percent and as you're saying that i'm

looking at all of my like to-do post-its because i got too overwhelmed with my digital to-do list

today it was like i need to focus on just the most important ones yeah they feel it just like

totally relate to that

i think one way to overcome that though is a pretty simple step right instead of having a

top-down order of you know you start using this tool it was expensive or it's shiny or whatever

the case may be instead make make a mission statement so as an example like for the performance

marketing clients that are listening you know we don't we're not just using an ai we're using

a tool to kill five hours of like a week that we would spend on manual campaign reporting

so that we can reinvest that time in a way that we can use it for the next step

into creative strategy that actually moves the needle again a simple change of lingo or how you're

presenting the mission can make a big difference in how it's perceived with the team i love that

we're using insert tool here to kill five hours doing x y and z so that you can reinvest your

time in higher level strategy like you can just reframe that anybody can right now right write

that down you can reframe that however it works for your team or your team or your team or your

team what tool it is how you want them to use it or how you know it'll save them time that kind of

thing that's and with very minor tweaks outside of that you maybe could even hit on the people

that are gonna adopt this sort of tool slower right for example we could reframe that slightly

by instead of tying it to the amount of or like being able to reinvest in the creative strategy

that moves the needle you might know a team member that responds better to something they're

personally interested in so you can do that and then you can do that and then you can do that and

frame it that way kill five hours so that you can spend those five hours doing this part of your

job which i know you love more yes i love that it gives the tool like a purpose beyond because

management said so right it brings us exactly to rule number two which is my absolute favorite

and that is demo outcomes not clicks so put another way it's why they should do it not how

they should do it uh it's where you're

like show and tell like grade school right keep it simple and make it tangible bring it to an l10

we run by eos system and in in the business that nate and i work in together too uh so i think of

l10 or like your huddle your all-in team meeting right where you're going to show how you did

something and not just tell them right and make it tangible here's the end result here's the time

savings for me or for them uh and talk about you know

showing someone that finished report that took 12 minutes instead of walking them through the 12

minute process click by click of how they got there so showing them hey this took me an hour

normally and now with what i used insert tool here from ai it takes me 12 minutes and getting

to that outcome and showing that kind of like before and after like it's the same or maybe

it's even more improved uh giving them that outcome is kind of that magic trick so like

speaking of another example as a creative director i would demo how to generate a brief or a storyboard

so i'd show them a fully fleshed out storyboard maybe it has end frames it has your establishing

shot it has all the different angles that you're going to be using and it has that both in words as

well as in pictures and it took maybe 20 minutes for me to make and refine versus hand drawing or

sketching in frames

instead that takes hours and hours of time right so you're only on your maybe

first cup of coffee instead of third cup of coffee before you finish it

i couldn't agree more and honestly i think that leads me perfectly into our final

most unhinged rule which is kind of where you have to let it get a little messy rule number

three from our perspective is foster curiosity and don't force compliance it's pretty basic but

let's dive in at the root harsh compliance metrics

are the enemy of creativity and adoption it creates straight up fear i think we've hit on

that so far today but again like these ai tools are coming into a workspace where people have a

lot on their plates their inboxes are full like we are trying to drive efficiency and do so through

ai versus expanding teams right so when this does end up being like something you roll out and

immediately have compliance metrics or are on their butts about how many times today have you

used this or whatever um in a negative

way it creates straight up fear and they shut down and there's already so much fear right

with ai like they're gonna lose their jobs job displacement is like one of the number one fears

right and it's really just about evolving with the use of the tool versus doing the same thing

the same way you've always done it and we have gone through so many of these changes throughout

history right like the 1940s 60 of the jobs that existed today don't exist in the 1940s

like it just continues to evolve so

people need to learn like i have a new tool just like it went from scribes to printing press or

hand sketching everything for creative to using photoshop this is another one of those albeit very

big jumps for everybody to uh get to cope with and everybody copes with it in a different way

so adding that harsh compliance that you're talking about nate just like exacerbates the fear

exactly and really what we want our teams to do is level up by

being able to learn more about these tools and use more because at the end of the day that's what's

going to win right you might not lose your job because of this but you might to someone who knows

more about it or can do the job twice as efficiently because of it and that's what we're

trying to avoid i think one that's another great segue one really great concept that i like to

deploy and i think die you've done a recent really great job at doing so is this the sandbox concept

when you're launching a new tool like this consider creating like a

channel or a team's chat um really engaged around ai explorers like what cool feature what buttons

did you click today that you thought were awesome or how much time did you save on that and really

just celebrate those wins along the way i think also doing things like hosting a prompt party

can really go a long way and again drive more excitement than fear and die like i mentioned

earlier i think you did a really great job at fostering this sandbox concept recently do you

want to would you mind walking us through what you did

yeah thank you nate that's very kind of you also love prompt party how have we not thought of that

alliteration before and we need to bring that back to everywhere that we work right now i love that

so yeah i recently did a team's channel you can do it in slack whatever right um between different

departments so product designers which are on totally different team um unrelated to any of

my teams not unrelated but they don't report up through me along with our editing and photo team

um within our the company the name of the team and i think that's a really great way to do that

and i work for on on on our daily jobs right and bringing them together i had heard one product

designer for example had been playing around with ai and trying to see if she could get to a result

she was looking for with an edit that she wanted done on a photo that was coming back to them for

approvals and so she was playing around with it and then sent that back as like here's more what

we're looking for i think she wanted the model to be a little more sexy in her pose and her body

language something like that and the model that we had picked just wanted to be a little more

sexy in her pose and her body language something like that and the model that we had picked just

wasn't really bringing it right so she had shared that and i sent it to my teams and it was like

light bulb like why don't i get everybody together because my teams are also working on stuff

and when i did that and i created literally it was like ai for product design and editing i didn't

call it anything really fun like prom party i definitely might change it but i'm getting them

all together and just being like hey guys let's just share what everybody's doing and trying and

what's working and also what's not working so we aren't all trying to do the same thing and

the same things in a sense and then everybody has different fails right you can avoid some of

those fails and help everybody level up a little faster in their prompts and utilizing ai and so

everyone started dropping in i've tried this i've tried that maybe somebody's a little quiet and i

kind of prod them like hey you had that really great project you worked on a few months ago you

should share that and they did and then somebody on the other team was like oh my gosh i've been

beating my head against a wall trying to get that to work and they had a very nicely laid out like

here's how i prompted here's the model and then i sent it to my team and they were like oh my gosh

i used in order to get to here um so now they're able to do that all together it's amazing and i

love that i even added in and what i love go ahead i was gonna say what i love about like the team's

chat or the slack channel concept of this too is believe it or not people like get up get positive

reactions from the reactions in the chat so like when things like that happen and suddenly you have

12 hearts on your chat about something you tried and got a good result from like that's positive

reinforcement coming from elsewhere and you're like oh my gosh i've been beating my head against

for sure all of you are just amazing i love that and i had a really fun time writing and

it was so much fun reading about that i was like that's like the most fulfilling experience for me

and i think that's why i'm so grateful for having you in the group and for letting me sit down here

and really just be able to give everyone the time of their life i think that's so much fun and a lot

of people have been very supportive of the fact that you made this conversation and you've shown

that about like how when things are tough like you said it's you're the best part and you've

got the most fun feeling about it and like that's really inspiring i think and i think that's so

34% of your organization actually utilizing the tools, right?

And we're not quite there yet in our day-to-day jobs.

And I think most companies aren't quite there yet, right?

And AI is like slowly getting a little bit better with each iteration.

So it can't do everything that we want it to do.

But by having him join, and he's one of those early adopters,

he also became kind of a translator, I want to call it,

where he was able to go and say, this is everything that I've tried.

And here's how I think it can maybe relate to your department

or your role within the company.

And having that translator that he's been there for years and years and years, right?

So he's able to see all of the different roles and how they've changed over time

and be able to translate the AI into how it can be used for other teams.

Yeah, be that perfect liaison.

Exactly.

That's awesome.

While you were going through that, I did have one kind of other suggestion,

I guess, to give the audience here.

Not necessarily coming straight from the sandbox concept,

but we've talked a lot about how you don't want orders to be coming from the top down.

One way I think we've been able to embrace still having like a top down message,

but without having it be a mandate is in our marketing team,

all of our marketing managers have a weekly one-on-one,

whether that be 30 minutes or slightly longer,

depending on the needs of each individual and what projects they're currently working on.

They have a weekly one-on-one, right?

And what we've added,

to that template of stuff that they run through or check in on is what,

Hey, what cool things have you done with AI in the last week or two?

And it's not again,

trying to say like,

Oh, you haven't used it.

Shame on you.

More so trying to understand at a deeper level where everyone's at with their intimacy with AI and,

and figure out scope and how we can grow that.

But also more importantly to celebrate the really cool things they've done.

Right?

So what happens is all of them,

marketing managers collect these from their teams.

They then filter through,

and pick like kind of the shining stars and they bring them to our manager meeting that we have every week.

And then we hand out,

you know,

through our EHR system,

there are recognition badges that you can hand out that the whole company can see.

It's kind of fun.

And the team loves it.

We make sure some of the badges we hand out or the recognition pieces are about AI.

And then also we're facilitating,

um,

the connection between teams,

right?

Like the other day I had a pay-per-click team member do something pretty freaking cool with AI.

And,

it,

even though at face value,

you would not think that their prompt or what they were doing with AI would be related to someone on my Amazon marketing team.

But knowing like the prompt and their outcomes were somewhat related in the backend.

Like we,

we linked up those two through the manager,

like,

Hey Logan,

something you did there was really cool.

And I think this other team member on this other team would benefit from that.

Like you two should connect this week and maybe,

you know,

riff off each other and come up with something even better.

And so I think again,

like you can still have that top down message.

Like,

we're all asking what,

how have you used AI over the last week or so consistently,

and we're celebrating those wins,

but it doesn't come across as a mandate.

A hundred.

Yep.

Love it.

Before we move on to part three,

I think we should quick recap our three rules on the playbook for adoption.

So rule one,

frame the mission,

not the mandate rule to demo outcomes,

not clicks and rule three,

foster curiosity.

Don't force it.

Okay.

Don't force compliance.

So that brings me to our lightning round.

Nate,

you're going to go first.

We're going to talk AI ics and wins.

What's the biggest AI ick you've seen in marketing right now?

Oh,

okay.

Challenge accepted.

I think,

okay.

There's maybe a bigger ick example I could come up with,

but the one that hits home the most for me right now,

is I guess I would categorize it as full-fledged autonomous AI that's maybe not quite ready and where I'm seeing this or being used in maybe a malicious way.

Right?

So we sell at our day-to-day job,

we sell Halloween costumes and do quite a significant volume on Amazon.

And what we're noticing is something starts selling well,

and it's very clearly AI driven.

All of a sudden,

like 10 more listings pop up of basically a direct knockoff of that product.

There's typos in the title and then the bullet points,

but they're able to just get these listings up basically within hours of something starting to sell and then take business away,

right?

With a cheap knockoff.

So I would say,

but you can tell if you look deep,

the images aren't great.

They've clearly just scraped them from your listing.

They're lower quality.

There's typos in the bullet points.

You can tell it's,

it's potentially maybe a direct from factory type listing.

So it's coming directly from China versus a,

a us business either way,

like using AI,

clearly autonomously to knock off other people's product would be my answer.

That is a big ick for anybody in e-commerce,

especially working on Amazon.

Huge,

huge ick.

Yes.

What about you?

Oh,

yours is really good,

Nate.

I think mine would be when people are clearly just using AI to answer your emails or to automate sales emails to you.

I mean,

emails are such a simple thing.

And when you know somebody and they use AI to write the email.

Now I understand,

and I have used AI to help me refine an email.

Maybe I'm like going a million miles a minute and I'm typing like half sentences in,

right?

And then I click that AI button and have it give me full sentences and look like I took the time.

And then I reread it,

make sure it's in my voice real quick,

right before I hit that send button.

But the people that don't reread it,

and it's got all the M dashes and it doesn't sound like them at all.

And I'm like,

that was not,

I'll say Pete,

I don't work with the Pete's.

I don't want to throw anybody on the bus,

but that's not Pete.

Pete's so much more fun.

This is very like automated,

right?

Or something like that.

Or maybe it's the opposite.

I'm pretty sure I did that to you once because I was feeling lazy and you called me out.

But you were playing with it and we knew we were because we had it as a new tool,

so it was fine.

Yes.

But yeah,

that or yeah,

the marketing emails or sales emails that I get where it's like,

oh,

I'm going to do this,

I'm going to do this,

I'm going to do this,

I'm going to do this,

I'm going to do this,

and then the sales emails that I get where it's like clearly they have not taken any time.

Like,

nobody is going to click through on that or respond to you and say,

yes,

I'd love to set up a meeting and learn more about your tool because whatever tools you're using clearly aren't working because you got my name wrong.

You have no idea that I'm in the middle of my busiest season.

So maybe this isn't the right time,

right?

Like a lot of those nuances.

You got to remember that AI has no context,

right?

So if you're going to use it to write your emails,

make sure that you're teaching it.

your voice first right what to say and not say how you talk um because if you don't i mean

everybody's gonna be like well they clearly didn't even care to take the time to write an email to me

right it makes a big difference all right i agree that's a little thing

i uh have a few more questions i think we could run through quick if your game yeah all right

what's the most unhinged but brilliant thing you've seen someone use ain for work

okay i don't want to my own team's horn but we have started using ai for gender swapping

in unisex apparel so think of like a sweater maybe it's an ugly christmas sweater okay

and you're landing on the page nate and you see it on a woman you're gonna be like oh well that's

not gonna fit me right right because you're tall you have long arms right

your frame is built totally different than a female frame so if you see that you're a lot

less likely to click through it and think like this is for me but if we gender data to prove

that even on our own platforms yes right yes we have proved that and we proved it by taking photos

of that same product on the other gender and then making sure that it displays based on what

filters they're using so if they're searching in mail they're going to see it on a male if they're

searching female c on female of course but it takes so much extra time and now you're doubling your

code for booking models paying models shooting it editing it putting it on the site tagging it

appropriately right so instead we are able to swap the gender utilizing ai and you can do the same

thing with regular size standard size to plus size you can do it with a mannequin and a dog more

recently so crazy so yeah no way a little plug here too you can do that yourself with swapthelens.com

if you're interested in learning more about how to use swapthelens.com you can also check out

our website at the bottom of the screen or you could just go to our website and we could call

that once you have a little more options you can just click on that and it'll pop up all the products

and then it will show you the ones that you want to use and then it'll say what are your favorites

and then it'll give you a non-conventional one to choose from and that's the way you're going to

do it hopefully this video is helpful to you so while waiting on our ads we would like to

get straight to the point so before we begin can i just say thank you to the people that are using

swapthelens.com for joining us today thank you to the people who have been using swapthelens.com we

really appreciate it and thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you to the people who are using our websites

So the team started taking screenshots of the pause video, giving it to Google Gemini

saying, I work for this company, here's their website, and put a screenshot of the item

and said, can you please find it?

And it started actually turning into now whenever we have video where we don't know the item

number, that's the method we take because it came back nearly 100% accurate.

I never would have thought of taking a screenshot of a pause video and saying, go find this

on my website, and then it coming back within seconds with the answer.

But I was like, genius.

Yep.

So many things that are still yet to be discovered.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Okay.

Should we do one more question?

I think so.

Okay.

If type A unhinged was an AI, what would its one line mission statement be?

Going back to part one, what's the mission statement?

Now, if you know anything about AI, know anything about us, you probably would guess that we

would have been prepared and typed that into.

.

.

I have always said, do AI.

Because I don't know if AI was timetable or not, or just

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

of my missions is to help my teams do things bigger, better, and faster. Not grow my teams,

but help my teams do things bigger, better, faster. And I do that through creating processes

and acting as an agent of change. And I think that could be worded better in a one-line mission

statement, but that's the essence, I think, of what we are trying to do with Type A Unhinged,

right? We're creating processes. We're helping people scale. We're helping be that facilitator

of change management with AI. Yes. Through change management and use of AI, we help

teams scale bigger, better, and faster. How about, okay, I love your take. I have a slightly

different one. See it?

So Type A Unhinged AI systemizing the 90% so we can help you pour 100% in the remaining 10.

Worded better. Wow. Not worded better. That is worded better. That's, I feel like, a better way

of wording what I said, like 100%. Okay. Well, so to land this plane, the secret to AI adoption

isn't about the tech at all. I hope we've gone over that, or I hope you've learned that, if not

anything else.

It's all about remembering that there are humans on the other side of the screen,

and that we, it's our job as leaders to connect to them.

Yep. It's that simple. Frame the mission, demo the outcome, foster the curiosity.

That's it. That's the entire playbook.

And if your marketing tech stack is still gathering dust, and you need someone to come

in and create some organized chaos, you know who to call. At Type A Unhinged,

we connect powerful marketing strategies with the people and processes that make them work.

Head over to typeanhinged.com.

And don't forget, subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening so that you don't

miss an episode. And we'll see you next time. Until then, stay Type A.

And a little unhinged.