AI is way Underhyped. He Runs His Entire Marketing Team with 40 AI Agents | Relay.app, Jacob Bank

My take on AI is it's like an intern.

It's just an intern.

It does exactly what you tell it to do.

It's the intern.

This is something I've changed my mind on, actually.

A year ago, I said, "Hey, think of an AI as your intern," and then I realized that that was the wrong mental model.

There is certainly a class of tasks that AI can do.

Those are the time-saving kind of tasks that you would give otherwise to an intern.

But AI can also do these strategy analyses and competitive analyses and content creation tasks that an intern definitely could not do.

So for example, I am not good at sales calls.

I do not have a background in sales.

It does not come naturally.

But it turns out there are some techniques that are pretty valuable in sales calls.

So I have an AI coach that reviews all the transcripts of my meetings and says, "Oh, you could have talked about this better," or, "You could have articulated this value," or, "You were too easy-- eager to jump into a demo there.

You should have asked some more discovery questions." If you go out and hire a sales coach, a good sales coach is like ten thousand dollars a month for one meeting a week.

You can build a pretty good AI sales coach by yourself and a little bit of, you know, transcript training, and it'll cost you like five bucks a week to run.

[chuckles] When there's a new role or function I'm taking on that I don't have experience in, or I don't feel like I'm an expert at, how can I figure out the right coaching relationship where I can give my coach the raw data of what I'm doing and then have it give feedback to me on the right cadence, whether it's after every call, or once a day with a summary, or once a week with a summary? That's why I'm now realizing that thinking about AI as an intern was so wrong.

My take on AI is it's like an intern.

It's just an intern.

It does exactly what you tell it to do.

It's the intern.

This is something I've changed my mind on, actually.

A year ago, I said, "Hey, think of an AI as your intern," and then I realized that that was the wrong mental model.

There is certainly a class of tasks that AI can do.

Those are the time-saving kind of tasks that you would give otherwise to an intern.

But AI can also do these strategy analyses and competitive analyses and content creation tasks that an intern definitely could not do.

So for example, I am not good at sales calls.

I do not have a background in sales.

It does not come naturally.

But it turns out there are some techniques that are pretty valuable in sales calls.

So I have an AI coach that reviews all the transcripts of my meetings and says, "Oh, you could have talked about this better," or, "You could have articulated this value," or, "You were too easy-- eager to jump into a demo there.

You should have asked some more discovery questions." If you go out and hire a sales coach, a good sales coach is like ten thousand dollars a month for one meeting a week.

You can build a pretty good AI sales coach by yourself and a little bit of, you know, transcript training, and it'll cost you like five bucks a week to run.

[chuckles] When there's a new role or function I'm taking on that I don't have experience in, or I don't feel like I'm an expert at, how can I figure out the right coaching relationship where I can give my coach the raw data of what I'm doing and then have it give feedback to me on the right cadence, whether it's after every call, or once a day with a summary, or once a week with a summary? That's why I'm now realizing that thinking about AI as an intern was so wrong.