How to Build Your AI Team, Task by Task

John Jantsch ( 00: 00. 664 )

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. John Jantsch is who I am. My guest today is Eva Gutierrez. She is the founder of ThinkWithAI.com, a leading educator and consultant on practical AI adoption for business leaders with a background in behavioral science and communication. Eva’s techniques help businesses extract more value from AI by incorporating it into decision-making, brainstorming, recruiting, and daily workflows.

guess we’re going to talk about AI today. Ava, welcome to the upcoming episode.

Eva Gutierrez ( 00: 33.321 )

I’m sure you haven’t been talking about AI a lot. It’s not particularly raised these days.

John Jantsch ( 00: 38.958 )

We’re six minutes in and we haven’t mentioned AI yet, you, we better get to that, but you’re right off the bat, I kind of joke with my guests. We, we’re going to go into it today. So let’s set the table. One of the things I believe there was was a time when everything was like,” My God, look at all this incredible stuff it can do and the future and you know who’s going to lose their job.” I mean, that seemed to be like all the conversation. And I think people are starting to say,” Well, well, I guess I’ll get it.”

Eva Gutierrez ( 00: 44.723 )

Ha!

Eva Gutierrez ( 01: 02.783 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 01: 07.669 )

Mm.

John Jantsch ( 01: 08.334 )

What it can do and what it can’t do are listed below. What do you find is kind of the biggest mindset shift that you think people need to make to look at this in the right way?

Eva Gutierrez ( 01: 21.845 )

Number one is how you’re considering whether AI can support your work. So we tend to read the headlines exactly what you just mentioned of like, you might have a job today and tomorrow it’s gone. And tomorrow will be the day when all of this seems to be really big macro thinking about AI will start to fade. And the reality is that I teach the founders and business operators that I work with is so much more tangible. What we look at is saying, hey,

John Jantsch ( 01: 26.531 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 01: 48.881 )

AI will start resuming some of your work as it goes along, working on it gradually. And it’s your job as the human part of this AI relationship that you’re building with your new AI team members to be the one recognizing, okay, this is a task that I should offload to AI. And I say this because what AI allows for all of us is this hyper-personalization, especially as business owners or operators or people that really enjoy their jobs.

It has the ability to say,” I don’t want to do this thing, so I want AI to do it.” And even though AI can do this thing, I still am going to do it. So it really concentrates on those tasks, not telling yourself to give it to AI because AI can, to do so. It’s saying, what do I now have more time for that I wish I had time for that I can just give to AI and looking at it from a month by month basis.

John Jantsch ( 02: 29.005 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 02: 47.314 )

What am I having or where am I recruiting AI to help me out this month? Task by task, such as reducing the size of it. That’s when it becomes tangible and something you can actually create a plan around.

John Jantsch ( 03: 01.198 )

I’ve owned my own business for 30 years, so I’ve seen a lot of these things come, I know, it’s funny. And, you know, I remember, I feel like there’s a little parallel to when it all of a sudden became kind of trendy to get a virtual assistant. You’re aware, right? And it was like, oh, I can get somebody from the Philippines to do this work for, you know, whatever, you know, rate. But they still had to figure out what that work was. You’re aware that it wasn’t a magic pill. Right. And I believe there is, I am aware of that.

Eva Gutierrez ( 03: 15.38 )

Mmm

John Jantsch ( 03: 31.138 )

Although this is not a person doing the work, I believe there are some similarities, don’t they?

Eva Gutierrez ( 03: 34.709 )

absolutely. And this is the perfect way to set this up as well. What I teach people as well is saying when you go to offload that task to AI, I need you to picture AI as if it was a person and you just hired them. And one of the best things to do is to give them a salary, saying, I just hired this person. I’m paying them$ 2, 000 a month. This business advisor just came in. I’m paying them$ 8, 000 a month to just talk to me and help me. Right. Include a number there. This is for your mind.

John Jantsch ( 03: 53. 24. 24. )

Yes.

John Jantsch ( 04: 01.122 )

Mmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 04: 04.98 )

Because you want to look at the situation right away and say,” How much context would I give this new VA I hired to expect them to do this job well?” And then in order to expect them to do this job extraordinarily well, right? At the end of the day, you should give that person the most context, right? How many SOPs? What about the context of the business and the products and all the things you’ve tried before and what’s working and what’s not working, right? Looking at AI in the exact same way,

as you did when you went to hire that VA. I believe we all hired a VA because we didn’t give them enough context, and then we’re like, man, they didn’t give me what I was looking for.

John Jantsch ( 04: 43.106 )

Well, they actually became a, they actually became a pain because you had to like think up stuff for him to do every day, right? Because you hadn’t really planned it.

Eva Gutierrez ( 04: 48.52 )

Yep. Absolutely. And so with AI, that’s exactly it as well. We’re trying to say that AI should take over your work, just task by task. Don’t make it any bigger than what it really is. It’s going by going. It’s the tasks that you want to offload. This is AI. like you get to decide what you keep working on and what you say. I would love AI to take that on. And then you realize that the AI you hired had a salary for that task.

John Jantsch ( 04: 59.522 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 05: 18.192 )

and stating how much context would I give this person? What type of onboarding would I put them through? What information should I give them before I even start letting them work on this project? That immediately helps you get way more success out of that experience with your new AI VA, for example.

John Jantsch ( 05: 36.738 )

You’ve used the term a number of times, and I wanted to know more. You intentionally used the term hiring AI. So maybe sort of explain what you mean by that or how that’s different from how people typically interact with AI. Let’s put it

Eva Gutierrez ( 05: 43.027 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 51 ) ( 51 ) ( 51 ).

Mm-hmm. So I use hiring AI for the human mind because a lot of AI just wants to reframe what we’re thinking about, right? And we’ve all had conversations in chat to BT where you’re like, wow, this is the most brilliant, incredible thing that just happened. And we’ve also all had conversations in there where you’re like, I am so close to throwing my computer out the window because are you right? Absolutely. Like, no, that wasn’t a good idea.

John Jantsch ( 06: 13. 774 )

Stop agreeing with me.

Eva Gutierrez ( 06: 20.754 )

Right? And AI is like, you’re like the, you’re the most brilliant person that ever existed. So that’s how we try to do this, and instead of just winging it and hoping it gets the job done, I’m trying to say I’m approaching this. Like I am hiring a person to do the job. And the only difference here is that AI has the ability to look through way more context than that person would.

So instead of saying,” I’m just going to try to figure out this AI use case,” I’ll just try to put it all together. It’s you as the human in your mind saying, as I sit down to situate this, I am hiring AI for this role. I’m not just trying to see if it can work, but I’m also taking it seriously because the result of your efforts, regardless of how serious you are, is the output you receive.

John Jantsch ( 07: 11.598 )

So does this change how we think about the traditional org chart? I mean, the purpose of hiring someone was to fill a position, and that role did all of these things. And in a lot of ways, are we saying, no, we want to hire specific AI tools to do specific tasks, and we might have 100 of them.

Eva Gutierrez ( 07: 31. 22 )

Yes, it definitely changes the org chart. What I teach is this idea of you have the org chart if you’re a business owner, for example, of you up top. And then, normal, you would have employed similar people, right? Now you have you up top. You possess several of your own AI. Let’s just call them agents for now as a placeholder word here. A bunch of little AI agents that can do a bunch of tasks for you. However, you still have that team under you. And then your team under each of one of them, they have a bunch of agents that are underneath.

John Jantsch ( 07: 49.452 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 07: 59.832 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 08: 01.032 )

them. Because if we just look at an org chart and then start to say what is the task that each person has to do every day, that’s where we start to go back to the beginning here and we say, okay, let’s start bringing AI support in as much as possible for each of those tasks and looking at that support, not just in terms of can it do the task, right? It shouldn’t just be a helper, but it should also be used as a backup plan when it’s over there.

Why doesn’t it also be a strategist and help you strategize something that you hadn’t thought of previously with this new context? And then why doesn’t it also act as an advisor while it’s doing that thing too? and making sure that the company’s goals are in line with theirs in the long run. So looking at hiring those AI agents for everybody with the goal of not saying we should replace our whole team, but the whole team can be monumentally enhanced if they have this AI assistant strategist and advisor.

enabling them to see what they couldn’t see previously.

John Jantsch ( 08: 58.742 )

So does it then, as I listen to you describe that, in my experience, even working with our own team, is it really kind of changes what their role is as well. mean, when you talk about these agents, they’re much more of a manager, either managing the output, directing, overseeing, or strategizing. so does, while I think that people are getting that,

Eva Gutierrez ( 09: 08.584 )

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch ( 09: 26.478 )

Does that cause some disruption inside of organization where you’ve got a bunch of doers?

Eva Gutierrez ( 09: 32.055 )

Yes and no. So, I believe what occurs if we examine AI two, three years ago and are unsure of our current situation, right? 2023, ChatDBT just comes out. There’s a lot of question of how good is it going to be at things? How intelligent is it, exactly? Right? And it was difficult to foresee,” OK, here’s where we’re going to be.” Here’s what the future looks like. And I feel that same sense today.

John Jantsch ( 09: 39.491 )

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch ( 09: 43.843 )

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch ( 09: 51. 34. 34. 34. )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 09: 59.518 )

that it’s extremely difficult to predict and say, here is where we will be. Because we hadn’t even anticipated that AI would make up the workforce as much as it did four or five years ago. And so to me, it’s so much more about just getting there and then saying, okay, now what is the plan based on where AI is and what its capabilities are and what people are interested in doing and how people and AI come together in this hybrid intelligence? What’s our current role, then? It’s gonna be different than it was two years ago.

John Jantsch ( 10: 08.76 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 10: 28. 97 )

today in a few years.

John Jantsch ( 10: 31. 758 )

Explain what you mean by hybrid intelligence because I know that that was something I was going to ask you about because I know you’ve talked about that before so explain where that fits.

Eva Gutierrez ( 10: 42.643 )

So I adore the term “hybrid intelligence.” I’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for two years now since 2023 when I read this incredible book called the intuitive executive. The concept of hybrid intelligence was covered in a textbook, which stipulates that humans will always play a supporting role in decision-making while AI will always play a supporting role.

And so when we look to saying, all right, let’s have AI come in and help us as people, whether you’re a business owner, whether you’re an employee, whether you’re a consultant, whether you’re an advisor, what we’re really doing is creating a hybrid intelligent relationship. I have a relationship with AI where it supports me a certain way. You have a relationship with AI that supports you in a slightly different way. We’re both business owners, so it’s pretty aligned, but there are still different things there that it’s supporting us with. And that’s what will also happen across that organizational chart.

That’s when I start to say, well, you know what? It’s pretty difficult to predict where we’re going because the AI support that I need as a business owner is much different than the AI support that maybe my virtual assistant needs. And as we start to predict these things, it becomes more and more a question of, well, at some roles, how will that change manifest? Instead of deciding that there’s going to be this one big macro change.

John Jantsch ( 11: 59.64 )

So do you see a window, not necessarily a trend, but a window here where companies will say, I get what you’re talking about. I want to hire that recruiting agency that does this work. Just like recruiting or people who place, you know, VA’s, you know. Do you see that that’s an opportunity, a business opportunity for people to actually come in and do this for companies?

Eva Gutierrez ( 12: 22. 875 )

You mean like bringing in AI support, helping them set up on.

John Jantsch ( 12: 25.79 )

Yes, actually be the one who defines the role, trains, and then, you know, installs it, so to speak. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 12: 29.587 )

absolutely. There are a lot of AI agencies these days that are ready to audit and install whatever it is that you’re looking for. Don’t get me wrong, if it’s an incredibly complex setup and you need to hire someone to do it, because I’ve always been against it. There is a time and place for this. But I think one of the most important things that all of us should know right now is the skill set of AI.

Because, in my opinion, this is sort of like saying,” Let’s say it’s like 1999 or 2000,” right? And you’re saying, I’m just going to hire someone that knows how to use a computer. And then I’m just going to tell them what I want to do on the computer for my business. That doesn’t seem to me to be that smart, right? And that’s where we are now, I believe, where you don’t want to just say, well, they know how to use AI.

John Jantsch ( 13: 10.04 )

Okay.

Yes. Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 13: 24. 027 )

You want to be able to say, they can build out something super complicated that would take me hours and hours and it’s not worth figuring out. There is definitely that use case, but I don’t think the skill set of AI is anything that you can outsource. It’s something to say, I’m going to take some time to learn this. And the thing about AI is that it is just a skillset. What distinguishes a person with a skill set from someone without one? And that is literally just the amount of hours that they have put in.

to learning that, no? And so all of us have the capability of learning the skillset of AI and just learning the foundational skillset that you need. Once you know that, then you can start to understand, this new platform came out. Because of X, Y, and Z, this new Chat GPT feature is no longer available to me. This is awesome for us because of A, B, and C. That’s when you can really start to figure out, okay, this is what I should learn how to do. This is what I ought to put together.

John Jantsch ( 14: 11.384 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 14: 23.088 )

and then comes the complicated material to give to a different person.

John Jantsch ( 14: 26.798 )

Yes, it’s funny. parallel for me, you know, is in SEO. A lot of people are like, I don’t know how to do SEO. I’ll only be hiring someone to do it. And I always tell people, look, you have to you have to actually be smart enough or know enough about SEO in order to buy it. And I believe that’s kind of the analogy because otherwise you’re going to be taken advantage of by those who are selling you goods that won’t actually be your thing. But you’re just like, I don’t get that stuff. You do it. So I completely concur. So.

Eva Gutierrez ( 14: 35.26 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 14: 42.45 )

Mm.

John Jantsch ( 14: 58.168 )

How does someone proceed when you’ve kind of suggested otherwise, and the first thing you want to do is take things you don’t like to do off their plate, right? But how do you go about as a business, let’s say you’ve got 10, 12 employees that probably could all benefit in their job functions in some way. What kind of structuring is your approach to our plan? Because I think if you just, I see a lot of companies just, couple of their people are dabbling in it because they like that stuff. And so they’re using it this way and this way and the.

Eva Gutierrez ( 15: 18 / 812 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 15: 23.794 )

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch ( 15: 27.594 )

owner of the business hates it. So they’re like, I don’t care what they do with that kind of, mean, how do you like have a comprehensive plan that’s really going to serve the business well?

Eva Gutierrez ( 15: 36. 306 )

So I’ll answer this in two parts. I’ve had separate conversations with business leaders and I’ve spoken with their teams, in the first instance. And if you are a business leader, I can promise you your team wants you to give them guidance on how to use AI because they don’t want to spend their time, their nights and weekends going through some course that they had to buy themselves in order to be able to do this. Right. Learning and development are at play here. They are waiting for you to say,

John Jantsch ( 15: 44.28 )

Yes. Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 16: 00.376 )

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Eva Gutierrez ( 16: 06.395 )

here’s how we’re going to start learning about AI and how we’re going to bring it into the workspace. Therefore, it’s a really crucial fact for leaders to be aware of at this time. Your team isn’t going to raise their hand and say, I don’t really know how to use it well, because what benefit does that give them? So it’s creating this awkward tension where the business leaders are like, we want you to use AI more. Please make use of it more. We’re more than happy. We’ll pay$ 200 per month for an enterprise chat GPT account for you. And then the team is using it as glorified Google search.

John Jantsch ( 16: 18.552 )

Yes. Right, right, right, right.

John Jantsch ( 16: 34. )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 16: 35.1 )

So as a business leader, like however you want to go about it, just make sure that you’re giving your team guidance and courses and teaching them, hey, here’s the skillset of AI, instead of just saying, go use it and you figure out how to do it. So, step one is now. Step two here, we get a bit meta. What I teach in my AI First Business system is that you can simply tell AI what you do all day and have AI provide you with an opportunity map that reads,”…

John Jantsch ( 16: 47.01 )

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 17: 03. 132 )

Hey, here’s where you can use me. Here’s where I can work as an assistant strategist and advisor. So what I teach in that AI first business system is essentially recruiting AI to tell you where to hire AI. And then again, now you have task by task. You may say,” OK, you know what?” I hate doing this one task every day. Let me place that first, and then have AI support for that. Or being able to say AI is helping at the assistant and strategist level of this one task.

John Jantsch ( 17: 03.502 )

That’s what I like.

John Jantsch ( 17: 15.746 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 17: 31.516 )

But if we just made this one little tweak, it could actually now be an advisor as well within that whole task. And now we’re getting so much more information. We are choosing wiser choices. We’re more prepared, for example. That’s how I see it, exactly. So leaders making sure that you’re giving your team actual guidance and a plan as to how to use it because they are asking for it. They’re begging you for it, but they don’t want to raise their hand and say it. Create that opportunity map then, two.

John Jantsch ( 17: 54.254 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 17: 59.344 )

Go through and tell AI what you do every day and have AI tell you where it can help.

John Jantsch ( 18: 05.184 )

You then use the phrase “using AI for recruiting.” I may have messed that up. You might have turned things around. explain kind of what, I know what you mean by that, but I think you kind of went by it. So I want you to kind of specifically highlight that idea.

Eva Gutierrez ( 18: 20. 464 )

Yeah, so, and this kind of puts me out of a job hilariously when I give this advice, right? Because I assist people in figuring out how to incorporate AI into their work, I believe that the most effective way to impart this skill set is the hybrid intelligent relationship where you can rely on AI to help you advance. So you can go into ChatGPT and say, hey, here’s everything that I do every day.

John Jantsch ( 18: 26.062 )

You

John Jantsch ( 18: 45. 133 ).

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 18: 45.836 )

Where do I get AI support here? Here’s where I don’t use AI support. Here are the tools that I’m using. Here are the resources I kind of want to use but I’m not currently using. And what it can do is create this opportunity map for you. I have a complete workflow for this, but you can duct tape it all together and have AI simply say,” Here’s all the tasks you do every day,” of course. Here’s how AI could help at the assistant level. Here’s how it can help at the strategist level. How can it be of assistance to advisors?

John Jantsch ( 18: 59.074 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 19: 12.122 )

And so what you’ve really done is just upgrade AI into your recruiter, right? Because you haven’t hired AI to do any of those things yet. You’ve essentially told AI,” Can you come audit my business and then tell me who I should hire and where it would be the most helpful?” But instead of being like, well, you need a full-time salary role here, you need this over here, we get to do it a little bit differently in this case and just go task by task.

John Jantsch ( 188 ) ( 8 )

And I think what you just shared right there is really the biggest mindset shift, you know, because I do think a lot of people look at a chat GPT window and say, I need to tell it what to do. You know, I need to tell it to give me this output. And I believe that they frequently struggle because they are unsure of their answers. And so I think just this idea of asking it first is such a mindset shift.

Eva Gutierrez ( 1943.078 )

Yeah.

Eva Gutierrez ( 20: 03.986 )

Exactly. And that’s really all AI, if you start to consider it, isn’t it? It’s a mindset shift to say, okay, I just need to start to bring this on task by task. You know what I’m going to do here, is a mind-shift to say? I’m going to give it as much context and maybe more context than I normally give someone that I hire for the role. It’s all of these reframes that are the reason that it’s like a hybrid intelligent thing.

John Jantsch ( 20: 09. 102 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 20: 31.829 )

We’re developing a relationship with each other to understand who AI needs us to be so that it can be exactly what we want it to be. And the thing about AI, and I talk about this all the time, say AI is like a golden retriever. It’s ready to go whenever you’re ready to go. It’s like,” Where are we going?” To the kitchen? Amazing, I was at a loss for words. Are we going on a walk? I cannot wait. You simply let me know where you want to go because let’s head there. I don’t even care. And we have to impose limitations on it.

and to say, is awesome, I love having intelligence on demand, but my role as the human part of this hybrid intelligence is to constantly put the guardrails on intelligence on demand and force it to funnel this intelligence through the specific guardrails that I need for this specific task or this thing I wanna think through or a workflow that I’m building out. So it’s our job in order to do that. And that is similar to what we need as a whole.

John Jantsch ( 21: 28.046 )

Yes, and we never know, but it’s my hope that that’s the 5 % we need to keep safe. And own as humans because that’ll become our job. Well, Ava, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Eva Gutierrez ( 21: 33.947 )

Mm-hmm.

Eva Gutierrez ( 21: 45. 605 )

Yeah, you can go to thinkwithai.com and that’s where I have that AI first business system as well as I’m building out some really cool stuff with Notion agents right now that I am so stoked about. So you can check everything out over there.

John Jantsch ( 21: 55. 762 )

Awesome again. I appreciate you stopping by, I suppose. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Eva Gutierrez ( 22: 04.242 )

John, too. Nice to meet you.