And so I feel like in your comment around there are things that we're good at and things that AI is better at and things that AI is worse at, tell me, like describe for me the difference between when like a human needing to be good at pattern recognition to be good, to have this domain expertise, this new oil, and this chat and the LLM, the AIs being really good at pattern recognition.

Yeah, I think I'll give you a personal example.

I did a movie a number of years ago, and I remember the hubris that I had felt when I had started the process.

And I was just like, look, the way I'm going to make this movie is I'm going to, I'll know it when I see it.

I'm going to keep iterating on everything, the script and the shooting and everything and the editing.

I'm going to keep iterating until I see that it is good.

And that's a hell of a theory, except like when you get stuck.

How do I shake loose personally? And how do I help my team or organization shake loose from being like, get unstuck from that old paradigm? What would you, what would you advise?

Like, what's the answer?

I think if, if in the early stages things are pretty simple, um, I, I've, I have kind of two beliefs.

One is that, like, every company's a snowflake, right? Like, you know, some, some companies AOV's 10 bucks, some company AOV is 300 bucks.

These are fundamentally different companies.

Some companies are selling subscription.

These are totally different companies.

And so once you sort of acknowledge that, I think that there's probably one or two sort of true north metrics, sort of true north dashboards that a company should really, like, stick to.

What do I do to get a sale? There's founders out there that listen to stuff like this, and I think they get a little overwhelmed with it all.

Who are you running against, Joseph? And make your pitch for one minute.

Thanks for having me, Howie.

I'm running against Jamie Eldridge.

Oh, boy.

I'm running for state senator in the middle section of Worcester District, and I'm running as a compassionate conservative with common-sense policies, enforcing the audit, lowering energy costs, obviously lowering taxes, no question nine, repealing Chapter 135.

Obviously, we can't keep spending billions of dollars on the legals, and I'm definitely against his recent S.2134 Muslim initiative, which I think is... completely out of whack.

So if you want to learn more about my candidacy, it's www.votetimshea.com.

yeah maybe they have clouds today to do that but it's all it's all manual right

it's it's all manual and it's very error prone and i think it lacks a sort of like larger vision for like what you could be doing with that time and energy and then there's the question of like well now that we've got all these numbers on screen we have all these numbers all polished all nice in a dashboard and there's this question of like who cares And I'm in these meetings today in 2026.

And in these meetings are people, 20 people, expensive people in a room looking at a, you know, a spreadsheet projected on the wall.

And everyone's saying the cost for acquisition was $10 yesterday.

And now it's nine 50.

And two days ago it was 10 50.

And we're just like, it's like reading like the weather report.

And

Wow.

And so it's pretty common that if, if you sell on subscription goods online, 80% of your customers never come back.

That means 20% of your customers need to make up for all the money you spent to acquire the other 80%.

And so co- if you say, "Hey, you know, Tim, lifetime value sounds cute, but I've got this, you know, SaaS platform," it's got it on screen.

It says, "Our customer LTV is $100." And I'm like, "Listen, I don't need to know anything about your company, but I'll tell you, your LTV is not $100, and that's because you don't have one type of customer.

You have many types of customers, right?" You've got a customer that is gonna buy one thing from you, you're never gonna hear from them again.

You've got one customer that you gave them a 30% off discount on Black Friday, and they're not coming back until next year.

... everything else in place, does, isn't it? It's like the foundation for all decisions.

And can you just talk a little bit about what you see in that? And also, how can you tie these data investments into revenue outcomes?

Yeah, 100%.

So look, I'm out there selling just like every other, you know, founder is.

People ask me all the time, like, hey, what am I going to get? Tim, I pay your fee, like, what am I going to get out of this? And we're like, listen, you should get like, double what you pay me, you should get maybe 10x what you pay me.

When you are interviewing a new ad agency, You're asking them, it's a performance marketing agency, what am I going to get out of my marketing? I'm going to pay you, you're going to have a million of my dollars to spend every year.

There's an expectation I'm going to get $1.1 million out of that investment.

And it's confusing why those questions are not asked of technologists.

So where is AI actually delivering value in retail? Like, where are you seeing it actually delivering value for retailers or brands?