Greg Boone: Putting Yourself Out There, AI Education, and Becoming AI Curious.

Season 2

May 29

We are leveling up and bringing this episode of The Sound of Inbound to you from the incredible WalkWest studio, with AI: Voice or Victim? host Greg Boone. Greg brings decades of technology and executive experience to the AI conversation and is one of the leading North Carolina minds on AI.

You won't find anyone else more bought in to AI becoming part of our world, and as Greg would tell you, you need to join now or fall behind. Enjoy listening to Aaron and Greg's conversation about the cutting edge of this technology, and all the places it will take us.

Check out this episode on YouTube and Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Aaron: Hello everyone. Today we have a very special guest in a very special place on a very special episode of The Sound of Inbound. We are here in Walk West at their offices in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they're going to be joining me here on the Sound of Inbound with their CEO, Greg Boone. We got to meet Greg at a very special event this past fall at something called Founders Focused. It was a HubSpot hosted event that we put on here in Raleigh and it was a fascinating conversation about all things around the market and where AI is going and all that kind of stuff. So Mark, how excited are we today about having Greg join our podcast?
Mark: Excited? I'm saying curious might be the better word. I'm —
Aaron: AI curious.
Mark: AI curious about this crazy studio.
Aaron: Would you call yourself like AI by curious?
Mark: Yeah. You know what? Yeah, let's say it.
Aaron: That's straight talk.
Mark: That's straight talk. Yeah, there you go. That's straight talk. AI by curious today with Greg Boone. We're going to change it all up.
Aaron: I think we should call the podcast today AI by curious with Greg. Actually I think he calls himself AI serious. So we have talked with a lot of people this season around where AI is going and what it might do and I would definitely call him one of those folks that really thinks about the frontier of where AI is going to go next. So excited to have that conversation with you.
Mark: It's going to be a great one. Let's do it.
Aaron: Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so everybody here is our next guest on the Sound of Inbound, Greg Boone with Walk West.
Aaron: Hello everybody. Welcome to another amazing and special episode here in the studio with Walk West. I am here with Greg Boone. I got to meet him last year in the fall and I got to say this guy is AI serious he likes to call himself and if I did my research correct he actually has that trademark pending. I think that is actually accurate that he has a trademark coming up on AI serious. This guy is like the Lewis and the Clark. He is the Madam and the Curie. He is the Louis and the Armstrong. He is this kind of person that sits at the frontier of where AI is going next. Actually I want to call him the Michael and the Jordan because I hear he's a sneaker head and right now he's probably wearing some dead stock Jordans. How did I know? So, I'm very excited today to welcome here on The Sound of Inbound my next guest, Greg Boone. Greg, thank you so much for joining us here on the Sound of Inbound.
Greg: Uh, thank you for pegging me 100%. That was awesome. Am I — am I that like predictable?
Aaron: No, not at all. We just like to do our AI research on our AI guests.
Greg: Well, that's — hey, man. That's — hey, can you do all of my intros?
Aaron: I can.
Greg: Like every time I go see — I can be your hype, man. I get up there and I could get up on the stage and be the hype man. You need a hype man.
Aaron: You're like the Spliff Star to Busta Rhymes or however you want to. Okay.
Greg: Yes. My age right now.
Aaron: And if you give me a little bit of a chance, I could use some other AI tools and actually write your own intro music, too.
Greg: Are we going to use? Oh, I love that. Yes, we absolutely got to do that.
Aaron: All right, we're going to talk about that one.
Aaron: So, this show is not only brought to you by Inveniv, it's also brought to you by Walk West. And the music that you're hearing today is also going to be a collaboration of Greg and I on how we feel about the AI future. We'll write a whole track about that.
Greg: That sounds awesome.
Aaron: This is a really special episode. So, thank you so much for hosting us here at Walk West. I really appreciate it, Greg. And your team's been great and your equipment is beautiful and your offices are beautiful. You're down here in Raleigh. It's a great vibrant area, especially for folks like us that we're hoping to be at the next edge of where things are going to go. But I would love people to know about you and where you've come from. I think you went to North Carolina State University like I have as well. So that's amazing. I wanted to hear your origin story. So can you share with us kind of where you started and how you got here?
Greg: Yeah, so actually I started — so I'm born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, right not far from here. I graduated from Northern Durham High School. Go Knights and Ladies. Where I left and I graduated in 1995 and I went to play basketball and baseball at Howard University the next year. I was there for about two years, almost two years. I transferred to North Carolina A&T State University where I accidentally fell into computer science. I say accidentally because I was in business school at Howard and then I asked the folks at A&T I said is there an information systems course in the B school here. They were like, "Well, no, the closest thing we have is computer science." And I found out very quickly there was nothing like information systems, but I fell in love with technology and I was always good at math. So, I really enjoyed it. And so that got me into this journey in the tech space and I've used my business sense, my marketing sense, and my tech background ever since then. And that's how I ended up here.
Aaron: I think I looked at this up on your resume. Did you work for IBM for a minute?
Greg: Yep. I started my career in 1998 as a software engineer at IBM in Durham.
Aaron: So I feel like everyone is at least a degree or two degrees away. And I just realized that you and I both worked at IBM. So I worked at IBM for a hot minute. We — our company was purchased by IBM in 2015. And so when that happened, I became part of IBM Watson Health which was one of their first foray into AI. So kind of an interesting like weird intersection between our two careers. But I was only there for a hot minute and then I started working for another.
Greg: I was only there for 3 years.
Aaron: Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. And I was literally there for like 3 minutes though.
Aaron: But that's still — I mean that's a — it's a really interesting thing about our backgrounds that we have really tried a lot of things. And then here we are together intersected again.
Aaron: So as far as like when you think about your origin story to where you are now, could you have even imagined where you would be sitting today when you first started out or did you think this was really your whole goal the whole time?
Greg: No, I couldn't imagine it. Right. I actually thought I was just going to be in the business world once I — you know I gravitated a lot to computer science because I was one of those folks that was looking at salaries coming out of school.
Aaron: Yeah, I did that too.
Greg: Well, I ain't going to be a doctor and I'm not going to spend time become a lawyer. And I was like, well, I like this software engineering space, but I was always thinking about how do I save enough dollars to go do something, you know, more in kind of a business environment. And I actually didn't really care what the business necessarily was, but I wanted something where I could put my own stamp on it, my own name to it. And I had several failed ventures early in my 20s.
Aaron: I did too. I did too.
Greg: I learned a lot.
Greg: Yeah. But no, there's no way I would have imagined being here. But I do think by combining my business at least aspirations with my technical background and always understanding emerging technology — I just never been a fanboy of any particular technology. I'm just always trying to keep pushing forward and figure out now how do I turn that into a business, right? And so that's how my mind works all the time.
Aaron: I think my goal for this podcast today, everybody who's watching, is to like try to break the algorithm. So, what I want to do is I want to start placing some random facts in the middle of this podcast so that AI just gets totally messed up. You were at one point a club owner, too, I believe, right?
Greg: Yes, I was.
Aaron: Yeah, I did my research.
Greg: Yeah. So at one point in time I was really heavily involved in film and music and I'd never told anybody about this but when I was writing music for film especially in school I met a club owner and he found out that I wrote music and he said to me one day — he's like, you know, I didn't even think about the opportunity this guy was giving me but he said to me and a bunch of other students — he said, if you guys want to write some tracks for the club and then bring it over we'll play them on the weekends. And so nobody else took him up on the offer except for me. So I showed up one weekend. By the way, clubs do not look good when the lights are on.
Aaron: That is a fact.
Greg: That is a fact.
Aaron: You do not want to see what it's like — a haunted house. Don't turn the lights on. You just don't want to know how the sausage is made. But I was going to say that I — I did bring my music in and I didn't really know what he wanted me to do. So kind of being completely oblivious to the opportunity, I brought in the film music I was writing and he had all these amazing speakers. So he was playing my music scores like these big like action scores and love scores, all these things I had written. I didn't think he wanted me to write dance music. I didn't even know about that. And if you imagine if I was like in Miami or something like that, I'd probably be like as big as Daft Punk right now if I had done that. But that was like my understanding and appreciation. And actually I was part of a band too and we went to a lot of clubs and spoke and performed as well. And that is a hard hard industry to be a part of. You must have learned a ton of things when you were a bar owner.
Greg: Yeah. I learned a lot, right? I was trying to explain to someone about you know having to have tough conversations and folks like as managers are like, you know, having these tough conversations. I said imagine having to fire somebody that is three times the size of you that could just ball you up at any moment. Yeah. I don't think these conversations are as tough as the ones, you know, that I was dealing with. But I think you do learn a lot, right? You learn a lot about the economics. You learn a lot about marketing. You learn a lot about how to continue to reinvent yourself, right? A lot of these things I've taken, you know, even to today trying to understand because especially when you're in that type of business, you may be hot for a minute, but you have to figure out how do I keep getting people to come back.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, that's marketing. Exactly.
Greg: That is definitely marketing.
Aaron: Yeah. I was really interested in talking to you today about — well, of course, where AI is going, but I feel like the human element is still the thing that we all have to keep front of mind. Because I think that's the only thing that's going to keep us different. That's what's going to keep things kind of feeling fresh. Otherwise, we're all living in a sea of sameness, you know? So, I feel like those lessons learned that you must have had in the early days all kind of I guess culminate to what's happening today and kind of all that you bring to the table. But being in the club is like, you know, I figured you've got all the aspects of the transactional audience, the brand, the experiential stuff. You get to work with the different kinds of mediums from the music to the whole experience. Did you bring in smoke? Did you bring in the smoke, too?
Greg: Oh, yeah.
Aaron: Did you — you did all from bubbles to smoke machines to the mechanical bull to —
Greg: Oh my god. What was it like Madden video game tournaments to — where do you buy a mechanical bull? You know, you rent them.
Aaron: You rent them. Okay. Okay.
Greg: A business lesson also. I don't want to store and own a mechanical bull.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, I'd be here at Walk West.
Greg: Right. Exactly. And so you start to diversify the types of audiences as well. Yeah. Right. But one of the most frustrating things about being in that type of business is you sit back and you realize that you have to cram so much of your revenue in such a short window of time. Right. It's like 5 days a week during, you know, 15 hours a day that there's nothing going on in there. And so you're just looking at this empty space like, "Oh my god, I'm paying rent. I'm paying this much. What am I doing?"
Aaron: Didn't even think of that. That's incredible.
Greg: So people ask me that all the time. They're like, "Oh, would you ever go back in that business?" I was like, "Hell no. I wouldn't go do that."
Aaron: I — this is a very maybe a very big stretch of parallel, but I do feel like owning an office as we do — we rent an office, but I mean having an office and then having an empty 2 to three days a week if not more it's a huge anxiety on me constantly. But I still feel like going back to like the human element, having people do come together at least a couple times a week and having work by proxy and inspiration by proxy is extremely important. I mean, what do you guys think about here at Walk West about having your office? And do you have people come in every day or do you have them come in whenever they want to or need to?
Greg: You know, people can come in whenever they want, but we're typically here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Like that's the quote mandatory. I wouldn't describe as mandatory because everybody just seems to want to anyway. Yeah. I've been here actually every day this week and I've been surprised because I see certain people in here and I was like — I thought —
Aaron: I came in here yesterday — I had a podcast I was recording with a guest from Singapore. So it was like at night for him and in the morning. So I got here like 6:15.
Greg: There's nobody here at 6:15 a.m. Right. But 8, nine you started see other folks roll in and I'm like — you know, I was dressed from like the top half in like a very professional way but then I was like sweatpants and whatnot. I was like oh I didn't think I was going to see other you know people in here. But you start to get that feel because they're like yeah I just like working in here. People feel a certain way. And then we're using the space in a very different way than historically. Like we have our studio here. Yeah. Right. We have different amenities for folks that want to kind of get away. You know, also I was here Monday and one of our colleagues, Kate — all of our kids were out of school on Monday, so her daughter was here with her, right? And so, you know, we just want to make it an environment that's very easy for people to come and work together and feel a part of something.
Aaron: There's something that's lost when we work digitally. As much as the tools try to keep us connected — even the video calls that we have with our clients. I mean it's one thing when we're doing these like discovery calls for example when we have them all virtually and it's a completely different thing when we're in person. And I won't drop any names but a very very large pharma company found it to be important enough to fly all the way out here to meet me and I had no idea really why but when they came in the room the phones were put away and they were just so in the moment and there was a lot of back and forth going that I feel like you can't do when it's digital because you feel like you're cutting people off. So, it feels like it's a one at a time and if you're not that personality of really ready to insert yourself, you're not going to even get have a voice. But in a room when everybody's sitting there, I could see everybody's looks and I could feel the way they feel and then I could go to them. So, I mean, having an office for me, I feel is wildly critical, especially for creative teams.
Greg: I talk about this on stage a lot. I have a book coming out called AI at the Speed of Trust. I was on stage a couple weeks ago — and that'll be on screen.com — and I talk about this trust deficit that we're in, right? A lot of times — and I tell people in a world where, you know, any amount of content could be generated at the push of a button, right? People are going to want to see a real person interact with a real human, right? Because one, they're going to have so much noise and optionality. And so it comes down to then who do you trust? And I don't trust a lot of things just through the screen anymore. That's just where we are. Yeah. As a society. And so you want to have these types of connections. So I'm not surprised that they did that, right? Because it was probably the final decision is to like, hey, and see the sameness, right? We talk about this — if every proposal looks very similar and this and that, right? What it comes down to is do I want to be around this human? Do I want to work with this person or group of people? And that's the reality. That's the separation and differentiation that we have to do.
Aaron: Yeah. I absolutely agree on that. There's a lot of things that our team tries to do to make sure that we're not in that sea of sameness. I do feel like our job is to be that pivot point. That's what we're introducing to the story. And these days it feels like it's getting harder and harder and harder. Like we're losing that authentic element of it unless we can do things in person. It's like the last frontier of what AI cannot necessarily impact. But I wanted to get into something else. You're a fanboy of Michael Jordan. I grew up — I mean I grew up playing basketball.
Greg: Yeah. Like I grew up in a time where — he changed the game, right? Even my son — my son is seven and he has a calendar that's a Jordan poster. Yep. Right. Whenever he kind sees, you know, some of my shoes and things and I try to get him — like it's just a — I'm a big fan of Michael Jordan for a lot of reasons. So obviously the basketball one was one, but also how he transferred that persona into business. Right. Like people don't — he is a wildly successful business person. People knock him a lot of times like, "Oh, the Hornets aren't winning this and that." Like yeah. But he made that — he changed that whole environment for us. And also growing up here.
Aaron: Yeah. So I was going to mention this because — well, number one, how can I not be a fan as well? I lived in Minnesota for four years when I was in high school and in college it was in Wisconsin and we would go to Illinois for all sorts of different kind of events in Chicago. And when the buses were coming in, I grew up in an era where I would see Scotty Pippen and Michael Jordan and — oh my god, crazy guy. Rodman.
Aaron: Rodman, thank you. Dennis Rodman. They were probably like 45 stories high. They were on the sides of the building. They were larger than life. And the thing that Michael Jordan kind of represented for me was a brand. I mean, he was on point wherever he was. He always knew how to kind of manipulate the media in certain ways, but he was such a great brand, not just for basketball, for just being professional. He just brought so much more to it. And I think a lot of folks didn't even realize how much more you could do with a brand like that, a personal brand like that. And of course, Nike figured it out, hence the shoes today.
Greg: It was some push, too. And as someone that — not only did I play basketball, also play baseball — also admired the fact that he was able to transition. You can — people can say whatever they want about how good he was or wasn't, but the fact that he could do that. Right. That he was athletic enough, right, to be able to do that.
Aaron: What was the other athlete? Bo Jackson. Yeah. And he played baseball, football and basketball, was it?
Greg: Yeah. He was crazy. Triple threat. But Michael Jordan wasn't bad at baseball. He was actually he was in there. Deion Sanders played football and baseball. Yeah. Great. And just the versatility is one of the things I talk about a lot too when people ask me about being in this moment and being on stage and like — well people ask like — oh, well, are you — do you get nervous when you're like in front of that number of people? I said I was a pitcher in baseball and I was a point guard and shooting guard in basketball. Like when you got, you know, 10,000 plus people yelling at you and everyone looking at everything you may do wrong — like this is nothing talking to a hundred executives, right? Yeah.
Aaron: The thing that I learned from all these lessons over the years and I feel like it's all about putting yourself out there and just trying things. And I feel like that's a struggle we have with a lot of clients right now that are quite conservative and they're afraid to try things. So maybe my connection about bringing up Michael Jordan and all the things that he tried is he just was willing to put himself out there. In the last two three years — actually maybe about three years ago — we were doing nothing. No podcasts, no videos, we weren't even promoting ourselves. It was all a referral business. And then as I felt like I was telling our clients to get in the community and get involved and they weren't doing it, I felt like, okay, let's put ourselves out there instead and then show them what it looks like. And we had a couple of lightning in a bottle moments, but it is all about just trying things. I think that's what brands need to think about these days. Just put it out there and try. That level of professionalism still needs to be there, but people are going to give you that space to just maybe be a little bit messy and not have to be perfect with every single execution point. So, you know, as I even talked about this right now, I hope they're not cutting out all my ums — I mean, it has to be like more of an authentic conversation and authentic ventures that we're all going to try. So, I love that you hit the stage. I love that you're also the CEO. I love that you also have your own podcast and that you're writing a book. I was going to say earlier — when you're willing to put your ideas down that has a time stamp on it and it has persistence, it's also a very risky move. HubSpot gave me a — I thought this was so funny and ironic. HubSpot gave me a gift this Christmas and it was a book on AI and the book was a year and a half, two years old and I'm like, how is HubSpot giving me a book on AI that's two years old? And the first chapter was all an apology saying — the first thing was, it's like you're reading this and everything you're about to read is completely out of date. But I learned some lessons and you're probably going to learn from those lessons too. And so I think for you — I think just curious is, like, how do you approach those risks? Do you just say it head-on let's go for it or do you kind of measure some things first? Do you do it in a more measured way or what do you do?
Greg: I mean I have weekly PR meetings about this topic and I say — okay team — one of the things I'm highly concerned about is how stale some of these things may be. So the book is more about leadership and how do you actually move your organization through this change right. And you could abstract out AI and talk about a lot of different types of transformations, you know, over the years and I think going forward. So it's not so much an AI specific book as it is — how do you start to move into an environment that is so challenging, so unknown, a future that no one can predict, right? And so what I try to do is make sure that I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm simply laying out, hey, these are the things that you're going to have to do to keep reinventing yourself, keep evolving, keep learning. Right. The reason why I keep getting certifications is because things change so fast. But to your point, when similar to yourself, two years ago, I wasn't on stage talking about all these things. I wasn't talking about, you know, a book. I was doing what a lot of people were doing in a digital marketing world trying to either gamify or automate or what's the attribution of this thing or that thing more experiential. But what I realized — and the team around me helped me realize — is that the only two things that we can really control is what I would consider personality growth, right? What we're doing right now — and community-led growth, right? Why I was wanting to partner with a person like yourself, right? While we are partner, why we're — I always say the ocean that was Google that we all fished in is dried up. I said, what ponds are you going to curate if you're not? And that was the thing that I learned a lot from HubSpot — like, you know, and it goes back then. And I kind of stumbled into — we acquired a podcast community platform last year, Earfluence, which is effectively what evolved and became our content studio, right? So we actually don't just have my podcast or — podcast or Jason's podcast — we actually have 50 plus podcasts that we produce for other folks helping them understand right and that's like kind of owning your own little kind of media.
Aaron: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But HubSpot actually I guess when they acquired The Hustle in 2019 or something. Yeah. They basically did the same thing. They basically realized that in a sea of sameness, if everybody's doing this thing, now they were teaching everybody to do the same thing.
Greg: Right. But I listened to Kip Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan talk about, you know, when they zig, we zag. Sorry to be long-winded here, but one of the things that you kind of touched on earlier that we're leaning into is what we call the anti-trends. Like you may have saw when you got off the elevator, we have a little newsstand. We put out our first edition of our newspaper a couple weeks ago, the Walk West Gazette, right? We're looking at billboards. I'm literally thinking about getting either an RV or a box truck and putting Walk West on the side of it and driving that [stuff] around.
Aaron: Going back to ad men days. Actually, a really talented creative director was at a big design meeting with me and we were talking about the future of digital marketing. This is years ago. And we were saying, "Is print dead?" And the one thing he said to me, he's like, "Well, when I put a magazine in the middle of the table, it doesn't go away. I can't swipe away from it. I can't click close." So, I feel like print — I'm with you. Like print has like maybe a resurgence to a certain degree, and it's feeling very interesting again. There's data behind the fact that you're more likely and significantly more likely to read a PDF that is printed out that's on your desk than you are in that damn graveyard of folders that you have, you know, on your desktop. Yeah. Yeah. I'm significantly more likely to actually read the thing that's in front of you. Do you write your notes when you're in meetings? Do you write them or do you type them or do you take notes?
Greg: Uh, I take very few notes. I use Granola and technology. That's one of those things where I'm kind of a little bit of the opposite because what I want to be is present and in the moment in the conversation. Yeah. Right. So I — the number of times I see folks that are heads down just writing notes. They're only picking up a third of what we're actually talking about and they can't really even interact because they're too busy writing down exactly what I said. I'm like — like why you writing down what I said? That [stuff] was dumb.
Aaron: So I have — recently — okay, I'll go back a couple years. So I used to be a Moleskine writer. I used to like write all my notes in Moleskines. And when I'm listening to folks to try to keep up with the conversation and not forget what I wanted to say or what they're saying, I write everything and I can see it visually in my head better than when I type stuff. So I can almost see the notes and the shape of them. And I also do little sketches and stuff where they're talking as well. And for some reason that was a better place in my head. And then at one point during a trip, I lost a Moleskine and it had some really important information in it and I freaked out. So I went to Remarkable and that was all digital on the e-ink, you know.
Greg: Oh, I had that too. I went through this whole journey.
Aaron: I'm going to keep going. Keep going. And so I went through that and I started getting lazy and I started not bringing up those notes. So, I started writing on Post-its again and my desk, as my friends will tell me and my colleagues will tell me, will just become a hot mess of Post-its. So, good for you. Not a sponsor. Post-its. I still love you. But then I'm moving on to something really recently. I got targeted by a company called Pocket. And it's hey.com — also not a sponsor. And one of the things that I was so interested in was a physical hardware piece — a device that you could snap to the back of your phone or just carry with you. And when it's activated is taking notes all with AI and afterwards it'll send you a transcript of the entire conversation. It has onboard memory and it'll also give you all the summary, the action items, everything like that. And you can use this with your phone. You can use it also in person. So, I used it during the discovery calls — discovery sessions when this client was in town last week and it was absolutely insane all the nuances that it picked up. I'm so impressed. So, as you said, it's like I'm evolving about where I can go with my being present in these conversations and how much more value I would have if I'm not focusing on the notes. But even as I talk to you right now, I'm kind of thinking in the back of my head comically, what kind of sound bites are we going to get out of this? Right? And so, some of that's helpful to write it down. Sometimes it's not, you know, but I feel like there is, right?
Greg: You know, so I have my notebook here. I was doing a podcast yesterday and I have it to your point — to write things that I want to make sure that, one, I'm always learning from every conversation, right? So in real time, I wanted to react and make sure I didn't miss, you know, something that I wanted to respond to. So I will take a note on that, but it's a quick note that I'm back to it. Yep. But I used to get have all these Moleskines and I'd have them just sitting around and then I would lose them and then I would figure out, you know. And then my wonderful admin Becky Olsen — one day she bought me one of those digital ones where you write in there but then I stopped, you know, taking a picture of it or doing all the stuff and then it just became a graveyard of things. And then what I realized I'm like — you know, at the end of the day it's the Pareto principle, right? 80% of what I'm having a conversation is the same. 20% is the nuance and I need to be focusing — and you know training myself to then figure out what is the 20% is different. And then using that to take notes and to understand how to be more engaging in the conversation. But I see especially — and I try to train, you know, younger folks in their careers the same thing. I'm like hey man don't write every single thing down here. Like that is not helpful. Like this is not a test. We are not in class anymore.
Aaron: Yeah. And actually, that's something — my daughter currently attends NC State and I'm curious as to how they are present in the classroom and what they do about leveraging AI and how they kind of think about how they're going to apply these skills and if they're taking notes anymore like we used to do. When you were in school, did they have the slide projector thing? Because they had it when I was there. And I would be scribbling down trying to repeat like everything that they were putting on the slide I was trying to do. And then of course fast forward to my older daughter, they would take pictures of the things that the teachers were showing so they wouldn't have to go back and take all the notes. And nowadays I'm wondering if they're just turning on AI notetakers to just listen in on the whole thing and try to be present, I would assume.
Greg: Yeah. I mean, I'm going to be speaking on stage at East Carolina on Monday, right, to undergrad business students there. And part of it is, you know, I've kind of created this brand where I say the quiet part out loud. Right. Like I'm not gonna — I just I'm past the point of filtering the impact that AI is going to have. Yeah. For people that either don't want to acknowledge it or don't care to understand it or — and I get people are fearful of it but especially within the education system. And I tell people all the time it's like look I said this at the beginning of 2025 to our team here at Walk West. I said by the end of 2025 every hiring manager in America will be asking what AI tools are you using to be more productive? And so then when I talk to certain folks in the education, especially in higher ed, and it's like, "Oh, well, I don't want them to use this or some people are leaning in." I said, "You're going to make these people unemployable." So, you understand that, right? Yeah. I don't know a single hiring manager that is going to be looking for the person that is anti-AI. I do not know that person, right? And so — as much as I believe in human connection and the human spirit and this and that, I do hope — I genuinely hope that people — I always tell folks when they were like, "Well, they're going to cheat." I was like, "Well, I'm sure people cheated with the calculator. I remember people cheating with the graphing calculator taping the answers and the notes inside of — I'm like, "Hey, how about you just change the [test]?" How about that? How about we just decide that the technology has advanced so much, it's probably time to change the test." Right. And I think that this time around though — sorry to be on a rant here because I'm very passionate about this. I have three young children, right? I'm concerned, you know, when they get to that age, they're young. They're five, seven, and soon to be nine. I'm just like — they're learning AI already, right? They're using Canva. They're using some of the AI pieces in there. They're learning machine learning and classification. Is this a cat? Is this a dog? Right? They're starting to learn this. And I'm just wondering how much pain as a society do we have to feel before we start to realize like hey man I didn't make AI. I'm simply trying to tell you how the game is played. Right. And if you don't understand the rules of game then how are you actually going to compete? And so it is a Game of Thrones. Are we the Unsullied or the Dothraki?
Aaron: You know, there's a lot of — actually, that's that's going on right now where I think — you had it in something you had mentioned maybe recently too about the — maybe you just said it — about where the Google juice is dried up. That's what you were saying. And I recently did get a chance — I'm working with Google right now which I'm very feeling very fortunate about and we also had a chance to have some folks to join us on some conversations for our podcast and they're giving us a sense of where they're going to go with all these tools and it is a new frontier for sure. I was going to say and I wanted to mention it to the Google folks. I wish I did, but I want to ask you now — with all these tools now between us, are we further becoming less and less connected to the original social community environment that, you know, gets people to want to actually get to know each other. So, for example, the social behaviors of teenagers and people even in college these days, they're more apt to text and DM than ever call. They would never do that. Or if a person hits like on something, that's a very very big thing. Like, oh, you liked it. Oh, he must want to go out with me. Like, what? He just clicked like. How could that have any kind of signal towards what they really really feel? And so, you're losing all that context. And I feel like with the AI tools, people are, as we've all talked about, they're less likely to now engage at a company, like to make a phone call, to send an email, even go to their website anymore. They're more likely to just do all their work in AI. And so I wish I kind of talked to Google about this. I feel like the technology is pulling us further apart than bringing us together. What are your thoughts on that?
Greg: I don't know that I actually agree with all that. I guess — I mean what is there five different generations in the workforce right now? Right. I would say, you know, the folks that are in school in college right now — a lot of what I'm hearing going back to kind of the bar and club business — a lot of them don't even go out that like —
Aaron: Exactly. Exactly. But they're doing stuff in like house, you know. Yeah.
Greg: Right. They're doing — a lot of people are drinking less. Right. And so people don't — people want to think about the negatives relative to our past, right? We all have a glorified view of our past. Yeah. It's like we — for whatever reason, I guess it's like it's how our brains are wired.
Aaron: I didn't really like the house parties. Did you like those house parties in college?
Greg: I did not like them. I loved them when they weren't my house.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Greg: But when it was in my place, y'all need to get out of here. You know, but the reality of kind of what — like I'm seeing people like watch a lot of stuff on YouTube, like watch 90s stuff. I'm seeing like different styles from the 90s and things that are coming back. People are being more anti — and like turning their phones on do not disturb. I'm seeing from younger generations. Right. I think our perception of what we're seeing versus the reality are not the same. Right. And we also like to put things into the context of how we view the world. Right. So for some of them maybe the connection, you know, the connection is different. Right. I know when you call somebody they're like — what is — like this is weird. Why are you calling me? Like, is somebody in trouble right now? Right. But I think for me, I, you know, I'm more like — I'm more —
Aaron: I have the same thing, by the way. If my phone rings, I think something's wrong.
Greg: Correct. Like my dad calls me in the middle of the day. I'm like, "Is everything okay?"
Aaron: That's exactly what I do.
Greg: He was like, "Can you look up some airline tickets?" I'm like, "Man, are you kidding me?" Right.
Aaron: Exactly. He call me like, "Oh, what are you doing?" I'm working. The same thing I'm doing every time you call me in the middle of the day.
Aaron: Okay. I have a standing rule with my parents if they ever watch my podcast. Hi, Mom. And if they call me during the day, I have a standing rule that I have to answer. So I don't want them to cry wolf with me. But it's happened so often now that I'm like, do I have to like get rid of this rule where I have to answer every single call that they send me.
Greg: So my dad is a retired truck driver. He just started learning how to use the internet on his phone. He's never written an email, never sent an email. So he is never going to watch this. Right. So I'm not worried about that. But I, you know, but I have the other side of it, which is every small technical issue becomes my problem. Right. And it becomes very urgent.
Aaron: Oh, they're very — my dad's very smart about this. I don't know if he did it on purpose, but everything that I buy, he buys. And I keep wondering why. And then he realizes because I'm the tech. He's like, well, you have it, so I'm going to get the same car. I'm like, you're going to buy the exact same car. I'm like, buying the same car. And then I get an Alexa. He gets the same damn Alexa. I get the same laptop. He has the same laptop. He gets the same phone. And I'm just like, "Oh my god, please stop." When I got the Google at home, you know, Wi-Fi, he's like, "He got the Google Wi-Fi." And he's like, "You're going to help me put it all together." I'm like, "Oh, I just — it's so smart." But again, do you feel like that the technology in a way is giving us an excuse not to have as many interactions? I do agree with you and I'm very excited to actually see video, ironically, of kids going to a party — like I saw one recently of like a bar mitzvah and when the kids walked in, they had to all hand in their phones. There's like no phones allowed. You're gonna get this little snap, you know, Kodak camera that you're going to get to be there. So, you are more present. But do you feel like in general the technology is pulling us apart to a certain degree?
Greg: No, I mean, I actually feel like — and this is one of the things — and I'll bring it back to kind of the business community. You start thinking about like the whole SaaS apocalypse that people have been talking about of late. I think for the last, you know, 2025 — we go back to the Marc Andreessen "software eats the world" or "software will eat the world," whatever the book title was, right? We've created so many different pieces of technology already, right? And so part of the SaaS apocalypse is people I think get it twisted and they think, well, oh, people are going to vibe code their own Monday.com. Like, no, that's not the point. The point is I don't need 15 different solutions anymore. I need three. So, what AI is going to do is going to consolidate processes and tools, right? And so, when people want to blame AI, I'm like, what AI? And I have a lot of these conversations. We call it app rationalization. A lot of companies are saying why do I have 15 tools? Right. So AI can't be to blame for everything that we've all been creating for the last 20 years. Yeah. Right. And that's why we've ended up — when we have — we bring it back to kind of marketing and my team has heard me say this a lot. You know it's like — oh well, I'm a — because we have social tools now I have a social media marketer. Because we have this tool I have this type of marketer. I said — I said now I said [stuff] I need two of y'all for every one pencil. One of you can write and one can erase. I was like — like what is that? Like we need full stack folks. We need full stack folks for sure. Or the reality is — and that's why you're seeing a lot of consolidations with teams. I've talked to companies locally and I've talked to companies globally and they're saying the same thing. We have so much redundancy that's based on how we've built tools and processes. Yeah. Not how customers actually want to engage with us. Like I don't want to talk to your sales and your customer success and your account executive and your salesperson. Like why are you throwing that at me? Because that's how you're organized. Right. That whole friction — that's pre-AI problems. AI does not give a [damn] about your process or your org chart. It only cares about the outcome. And that is the thing that is driving these valuations in SaaS. That is the thing — when I find it very disingenuous when people say, "Oh, no, AI is not going to replace or take any jobs." I'm like, if AI reduces the process, reduces the number of tools, how are you not making the connection that these teams are either going to be smaller or more productive or you're going to be doing — or you're going to upskill people to do different things?
Aaron: I would say upskill. I was going to say — so this may be — I hope that I get this right. You know, a lot more about the world of AI and some of the terminology and stuff like that. Our team has been historically in the last year and a half, two years, really used AI for reference material and refining language on things, maybe putting together some research reports, they're really not using the agent concept. But if I get this right, if you go back and watch any Marvel movie with Tony Stark in it and he starts talking to Jarvis and having Jarvis do something for him, that to me is the agent model. Is that — am I getting that correct?
Greg: That's correct. That is the agentic thing. It is the "hey Jarvis go do the thing and then come back to me when the thing is done." Yes.
Greg: But that is the — and that's when I — you know, we were talking to clients early last year and my team here would say oh this bank said that they're not going to use AI. I said oh that's cute. I said what happens when their technology vendors put AI in there because the market sophistication gets to a point where every consumer and every user expects us to be in there. You don't have a choice anymore. And they're like well they're not going to use it. I'm like, unless they go off the grid, right? And so by Q3 of last year, you know, the phone started ringing and people were like, "Hey, we need to talk about this. Our vendors aren't, you know, allowing us." Now, 2025 in the media was the year of the agent, right? That was more of the hype side of where agents were. It was more of the year of automation, AI assistance, AI co-pilots, right? How do I talk to the information inside of whatever tool called?
Aaron: Exactly. Like LLM.
Greg: In 2026 though it is the agentic portion right as Jensen said at Nvidia every single company needs to have an open clause strategy right and so if you look at Salesforce — Salesforce Agentforce is not a co-pilot assistant. It is "I'm going to go do something for you." Yeah. HubSpot — you know, they're creating their agentic components. Every tool will have an agentic — uh, way of using it. And my concern is then what happens when they flip the switch and say that you're using the old way that you pointed and clicked around to get 10% productivity. We're turning that off.
Aaron: Yeah. I will say something about all this though. I think our industry, at least we work in life sciences, they're very slow to take action on certain types of things. Even though they're considered a very innovation centric business, their whole world is to discover new things. That's what they're there for. I would say they're very conservative in all this. And so when I think about AI and what it can do for us, it's like giving a person that has no context a blank piece of paper and telling them to do something with that blank piece of paper and they have no idea where to start. Some — you know, you and I, we might fold origami, we might write a poem, we might write a script for the next podcast or we might write a speech or we might do a strategy plan. We're thinking about all sorts of things we can do with that piece of paper. Or take a little spider off the floor and move it outside. You know, that paper has a function for us but for a lot of folks out there they don't have that understanding of the possibility because they just don't know what they don't know. And so part of what I think AI has introduced for you and I is like — it's like the gold rush gold mine for us. It's like we're going to find ways to be the frontier and take advantage of it and then eventually folks will follow us because they really don't know what to do with it.
Greg: Yeah, they call that the blank canvas problem, right? They call the blank t-shirts that.
Aaron: It is called the blank canvas problem.
Greg: Yeah, so it's the blank canvas problem. And I always say when I'm talking about this, whether it's training or on stage, I say the greatest thing that OpenAI ever did for AI adoption was make it feel like Google search. And then I follow up with — and the worst thing that OpenAI ever did was make it feel like Google search. Because that's what people treat it like, right? And I always tell people I don't AI search anything. I instruct. I have it go build things for me. Like you should see my screens. I am spinning up so many different things in parallel, right? Because I've trained myself to work differently, right? This is an upskilling and an adoption and a change management problem. It's also a leadership problem, right? Because if you have a leadership team that doesn't fully understand the capabilities of the tool, they have no frame of reference of what this thing can or cannot do, right? And so it — what strikes me so odd is the very basics — like you can't have an AI strategy if you are not AI literate. Mhm. Like how all these people talking about our AI strategy — like you don't even understand what this thing can and cannot do. Like — and I think people get grounded so much in just the foundational large language models but they're not even thinking about the end products. This is going to be in every technology that you use. Yeah. So if you don't understand how to talk to machine, you don't understand what this thing can do. I mean there's going to be two CEOs, two types of CEOs over the next — I call it 24 months. You're going to have the ones that recognize that they're not built for this moment and they step aside. Yeah. And it's already happening. There's several, you know, very public folks, you know, not all of them are stepping aside because they can't — they're not there for the moment. But they do recognize that somebody else needs to come in. And then you're going to have the — brutally — I'm going to take advantage of this moment and I'm going to cut as much weight as possible to clear up some budget to figure out what my agentic strategy is. I'm not even calling the AI strategy anymore. What is your agentic strategy?
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, this is where I kind of — we were introducing you before this podcast started and we said we're both AI by curious. But that's for me the perspective of what's it going to do for me and what's it doing for the rest of the world because there's some certain aspects of AI that we could maybe control and design and tell it what to do. And then there's other points of this where I can't control what its perspective or perception of our brands and our clients brands are at all. Like we can only do so much. So there's a lot of things that are just kind of out of our control and that's okay. So, it's like you said, we have to embrace that. I'm struggling right now personally to figure out how to tell it what to do and come back to me with the result. I'm getting a little bit better about it. But it is getting to be this to a point where I'm feeling like I need some inspiration to figure out what is it that I should be asking for it to do. I would love that Tony Stark day. I would love it. I want to be able to say to a Jarvis at one point, okay, here's the client profile. Here's their market. Here's their ideal client profile that they're targeting. I have this platform that can do all their marketing for them. Here's the strategy docs that I've been writing up or thinking about. And I want to execute a campaign that can do A, B, and C with this result, and I need you to try it for 2 days and tell me if anything's working. If it doesn't work, stop. If it's working, keep going and amplify it. And I would love to do that kind of discussion with it and let it run. I feel like for transactional businesses this is possible. It's like there's only so many variables involved with the transactional work. Like people are buying soap, okay, do they buy it or not? But in the work that we do, the sales process is so long that the markets change from the point in which you talk to them initially to the time in which you sign the contract. So you have to adjust all the way to that point where you actually get them to close in on business. And so you're building this nurturing schema that might be adjusting through that course of engagement. And that's where I'm hoping AI would help us be that kind of like — let's wiggle with it. You know, I'm trying to put a lot of different little sound bites in this — wiggle.
Greg: Yeah. Like, so, you know, I'm — I'm getting longer in the tooth when I play basketball. I played this morning and one of my buddies — he's like, "Greg, put the wiggle on them." It's like — he's like it's just like, you know, it's almost like a dream shake — a course and turn around Kobe style, but it's like we got to do that with AI, right?
Aaron: Exactly.
Greg: But the thing is — again this goes back — the reason why I have 35 GAI certifications is this stuff has been moving over the last couple years and I'm always trying to understand — like I have one for data visualization I have one for vibe coding I have one for cybersecurity for talent for HR for, you know, employee experience. I'm trying to understand how it impacts and how someone would think about this and how they could do their job differently right. And I was talking to someone recently and they were like what do you think folks need to learn? I said actually I think people need to unlearn. I said the problem right now is we try to apply historical rationale, reason and processes to an agentic world and that's where it keeps blowing up in your face, right? Because the problem that you want AI to solve probably isn't the actual thing it should be trying to solve and that should be the human side should be solving the other thing. Yeah. And so when people's like, "Oh, well, you know, I'm scared that AI is going to replace this or — can it's going to do this part of my job" — versus for me, I'm like, man, I want to see all the things AI can do that I hate doing, right? And so for me, it's trying to reimagine how I actually work and where are the friction points. But I also understand that there's so many different variations and variables that are going into it. Like someone that's using a free version is a year behind from capabilities for one. Yeah. Right. I have one slide that I show now and I would just say your AI basic is showing, right? Because you're basically just showing — "I did a LinkedIn headshot and I did a carousel and I did" — like all right cool man, right? Like — I'm building applications, websites, I'm building new business models, right? And I'm like — that's I'm not trying to judge anyone, right? But you think about the spectrum inside of organizations. One of you — you know some groups are using it as Google search and then there's people way over here doing open Claude that are running two-person companies generating six figures in revenue right? And it's the same underlying technology right? But the problem is one — the leaders have not — as my guy Alec Coughlin will say — is you got to have your hands in the dirt right? So as a CEO I'm like I'm going to put my hands in the dirt I'm going to show the team the art of what is actually possible.
Aaron: I love that. I love that. Yeah.
Greg: And I'm going to experiment. Right. Somebody has — and it's got to be — and you got to build in public, right? And you have — I was meeting with a CEO here a couple days ago and she was just asking me about AI and she's in the marketing space too and she said something and I told her I was like this warms my heart and what she said was I don't know what I don't know. There's so few people that are leaders that would admit what they don't know.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.
Greg: I have all these certifications, right? And there's still a ton of things I don't know. And I am okay with that, right? But other folks are like they feel like they have to have the answers.
Aaron: So, okay. So, two more questions that I have for today and I want to make sure we cover them both. So, the first will be the kid in the candy store for you. I want to talk through what your vision is for AI in the next not year, but let's say 5 years. Like really look out because it's going to be at astral lines that maybe none of us can imagine. So, you'll be the futurist. And the other thing I want to talk about is you've mentioned this a couple times today, but you have like unlearning. You used the word un and there were other things you talked about that were kind of we had like reset our minds on things. And we are about both part of a conference called Now Unbound. Which as I talked to some of the HubSpot folks, hi HubSpot folks, they told me that this should be considered an unconference and that there's this trend now of people trying to do things in the opposite — the zigzag. I got called — the anti-trends. The anti-trends, un-trends. So I thought we should also discuss the rebrand of Inbound to Unbound.
Greg: [Expletive] I was there last year in San Francisco and I said when I was there —
Aaron: When you say "there" you're talking about the Inbound conference.
Greg: Yep. Yep. And I —
Aaron: Was that your first conference?
Greg: That was my first time.
Aaron: Okay. Right. All right. What was your thought about the conference in California last year for HubSpot?
Greg: Again, I've been all in on AI for the last going on three and a half years at this point. Yeah. Right. It made all the sense in the world. It's like it's not in Boston. It's in San Francisco. Like they tried to like, you know, tip their hand as much as humanly possible. We're going to do this in San Francisco. We're going to do this in, you know, in the area where all AI companies are.
Aaron: It's the incubator.
Greg: Yeah. And I was — we've hired all these people from the AI community. We've renamed and given people new titles that are AI specific.
Aaron: It was like the AI incubator was in a toaster and it popped and then out came Inbound.
Greg: But the thing that was — the thing that was so interesting to me, and I didn't realize this until I was just kind of like listening to the whispers and other partner — the whole reason why I got into the HubSpot partnership was because I was following them, going all in on AI. Yeah. Right. And so I was there and the thing that shocked me was so many partners were woefully unaware that they were moving and going all in on AI. Like I was like, this — this is not a secret. Right. And I thought that maybe — yeah. You have a few whispers, but it was like the overwhelming majority. And the thing that was really shocking to me, some of the folks even on the sales and the customer success side of HubSpot seemed surprised. Some of them literally said to me, "Oh, don't worry about that. We're not really pushing." I was like, "Oh, no, no, no. That can't be the messaging."
Aaron: Yeah. Well, it's represented every year. It represents this point where we can stop all the things that we're working on and hear from other folks about how it's going for them and understand what trends are happening. And a lot of folks have they look down all year. They don't have a chance to look out. The majority has to look down every day. And they work so much in the weeds that Inbound has represented this over the years. This fusion of let's think about what works for other organizations, but let's also introduce some new theories. Let's introduce some new technologies and let's try them together and don't be afraid about it. Then they also bring all sorts of inspirational talks in as well that really show you that the world's much bigger than your tiny little, you know, fiefdom and so you build a very different perspective of what marketing and now of course sales, customer success, customer experience might actually represent. So the big question is a conference that's been around for 15 years has now rebranded itself from Inbound to Unbound. What are your thoughts on that?
Greg: It made all the sense in the world. Right. All right. For me, you can't go on stage and say inbound is broken and everything has to run into a loop. You can't go to that same conference and say AI is mediating everything that we've taught you to do. Like you can't do these things and then stay authentic and genuine and then show up again this year and call it inbound again.
Aaron: And say the same thing. Yes.
Greg: Yeah. You can't do it. Yeah. Right. And so I thought it was — I thought what they did was important last year. Hey look, we're going to move this to San Francisco. We're going to show you some new faces. We're going to show you how the world has changed and we're hoping that you're going to change with us. And then by the time it came around this year, now we're going to call the thing Unbound. We already admitted, right, that the world has changed. The thing that was concerning, and I'll go back to like the partner side though, is I thought our job as agencies and consultancies was to be at the forefront for our clients and to see where the puck is going. Yeah. That was the thing that was concerning to me. It's one thing if you're a customer of HubSpot and you show up to one of these conferences and you're like, "Oh man, all this new stuff." But how can you be a partner being paid to be on the front end of this and have no clue how much the world has changed and what —
Aaron: It's all good — great point. And I don't need to go through it right now. I'm very very involved with them. Very very very involved. I feel like I'm collecting Skittles stickers or something from these guys.
Greg: Oh, but I'm not — I'm talking about as a partner.
Aaron: I gotcha. So what I wanted to share was that organizations like that if you're going to put a lot of effort into it will give you a sightline into where things are going. They can't do it for everyone because like anything it's like opening up everything in the kitchen sink to let everybody start rushing in and saying I have a lot of things I want to share with you guys. I think for those partners that have a lot of passion, strategy, focus on thinking about how to leverage tools and strategies together with HubSpot, they will have a voice in where things will go. Because I'm part of that now and I can say I'm an N equals one. I sure I'm sure of it. But at this moment, I'm experiencing a partnership with HubSpot at a very different level where I'm helping advise things, look at stuff on UX/UI, look at stuff where features on the AI side are going. And we're doing a similar thing with Google. They're very respective. I'm actually so almost shocked about how much they're putting into our feedback, how much like ownership and respect they're putting into our feedback to drive where things might go next because they want to know what works. And what I've told them before and I'll say it here again, it's like yes, I'm in one specific niche because it's such a vibrant community in just life sciences and healthcare, but the things that we do here could be applicable for any industry. So, I feel like organizations like HubSpot that understand how to run community, that understand how to take the voice of the partners into consideration and then actually put it into practice, I very much respect these businesses.
Greg: Oh, I'm bullish on that. I was bullish on HubSpot. I continue to be bullish on it because they are willing to say the quiet part out loud. They are willing to say that we have to change. My big —
Aaron: I wish they would do more though because I think a lot of them say a lot of stuff. I want them to show how to do it. So, if there's one thing I would criticize about Inbound over the years, it's like they talk the big talk, but you really have to dig into certain sessions to figure out how to put it in place.
Greg: Well, at least the credit I would give them is that they created a playbook, right? What I told my team — so we came up with our four piece strategy beginning of last year. Podcast, Partnerships, PR and Publishing, which I love. The whole point of that was personality-led growth and community-led growth. We think about podcast was the perfect medium. We have video, audio here. We can control our own narrative, right? The other part is the community. How do I figure out — find more incentives, more errands, right? How do we work together? Right? And so they put out a playbook. I have not seen a single other marketing provider put any type of playbook out there to help their partner network or their customers.
Aaron: Now, you guys did the thing that I feel like was missing from HubSpot. You added this layer that showed about how to put it in place. Correct. So the playbook for me, as much as I liked it, it's a good playbook, it's understandable, it was missing that last step. And when you buy a platform like Salesforce or like HubSpot or even other platforms like project management systems like ClickUp or Monday, you have this crazy huge white canvas again and you don't know where to begin. And so it goes back to they don't know what they don't know. Now you and I have a job because a lot of companies will hire us to help them figure that out. But I think what's brilliant about platforms like this is they're giving us this stage platform — ironic, coincidental that you and I get to work in — to craft it the way we need it to and tailor it for each client. And that's an important aspect of it. But if there's one thing about HubSpot's conference with Unbound now, I'm hoping that I don't want to hear the same thing year over year as you said. I want to know exactly how to put it in practice tomorrow. That's the part that most —
Greg: Do you listen to much of their marketing — it's the Green podcast or watch?
Aaron: Yeah, sometimes I do. Yes, I do. Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. So I religiously like have been listening to it for the last, you know, almost two years now because when you listen to Kip and Kieran talk they will give very specific ways to apply this. The problem is they have such a variety of types of organizations. You have yours that has a niche in this area that — but a lot of these things are applicable to all of these different organizations. My frustration is that — what I always say this — I use this one graphic slide and it's a hang glider and a space shuttle and I tell people all the time it's like — you know — this is not another tech upgrade. AI is the difference between you know in past digital transformation — the difference between a hang glider and a space shuttle. Sure they have the same underneath physics but that's where the parallels stop right. And I said — you know — and I always use the same Upton Sinclair quote all the time from 1934 and I said it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Yeah. Right. And I always tell folks I said that's not about ignorance, it's about future shock or loss aversion. And the reality is we keep tying ourselves to our historical ways of working, our historical processes. So people will come and they'll say, "Well, how do you do attribution to this? Well, how do I get the clickthrough rates?" I'm like, you're not understanding. The whole damn world has changed. Yeah. And you want to keep trying to tie it back to an analog past because you don't know your role in the future. And so that's why I keep saying unlearning and breaking the process. What I had to do — just a little secret as to how I came to this four piece strategy — was in December of 2024, I had an early paid version of Google's Deep Research, their Gemini 1.5 experimental. And I kept asking the machine, I said, "If Google were to go away tomorrow, what are marketers going to do in 2025?" I was pushing my brain because I had already registered a domain. I had already registered a domain — what is AEO or answer engine optimization — in November of 2024. Nobody wanted to have the conversation. I was like all right whatever man. And so I moved on. I was like I need to figure out what I'm going to do for my company because I'm trying to help y'all. Y'all don't want to have this conversation first. First — and it kept saying the same thing. Short form video, podcast, video. It kept saying affiliate marketing in communities, right? So personality-led growth, community-led growth, right? YouTube, right? Another thing we push these on to YouTube because it's not a walled garden.
Aaron: You said PR. Oh, actually, let me really really quickly stop you here for a second. LinkedIn or YouTube? Which would you go with?
Greg: We do both.
Aaron: I know, but which would you take priority?
Greg: Well, I don't view the world that way. I love all my children.
Aaron: Pick one. You had to pick one.
Greg: If I had to pick one, I would go with LinkedIn right now.
Aaron: But isn't it interesting that if you post thing on YouTube, you do get the Google juice. If you post on LinkedIn, it's in a walled garden, and only when people log in will they ever get to see it. And there's no SEO benefits.
Greg: But see now you — this is where we diverge because I don't care about the SEO benefit directly. What I care about is curating my own pond, right? SEO is a thing if we all assume that the only pond or ocean was Google. Now I push myself to imagine Google going away. Yeah. Right. So that's why I watch on LinkedIn like I'm eating popcorn and watching people debate well AEO is just SEO and this and that. I'm like how many people clicking through to your site? Nobody cuz y'all can argue about that [stuff] all day. I agree. AEO is SEO.
Aaron: So here's my point about LinkedIn. Does the AI tools on the outside of LinkedIn can reference any information you post inside of LinkedIn?
Greg: That's what I mean by like all that great work is irrelevant.
Aaron: Okay.
Greg: The problem that people get — keep getting caught in — you understand in marketing I always tell people I said in marketing there's six to nine month lag between your actions and results. Yeah. Right. The problem with that is the capabilities of AI double every six months. And so people then create a system or process based on what they view the world today not versus what the thing will be capable of in six to 12 months. Right? So when I came up with the 4P process, the reason why I did that — because even my own chairman asked, he's like, "Oh, we gotta — he's like you're talking about this AEO stuff and this and that." And I was like, "Yeah, but once I realized I said if I were an LLM, right?" Because I like to be weird like that and assume that I can be a machine.
Aaron: You are an LLM.
Greg: Okay. Like if I was a machine, how would I rank authority of something? I said I was sure [stuff] not just believe what you put on your own blog. Yeah. I was like maybe that's a reference point. And so what I tell folks, I said we're going to do three things really well at Walk West. We're going to make sure you're seen, heard, and cited — cited by humans and machines alike for maximum results. Because what I was trying to get across was if I was an LLM, I would cross reference your website. I would cross reference LinkedIn, YouTube, other authorities in milliseconds and then bring all that together to then come back with my recommendation. Yeah. That is not how we've built marketing for the last 20 years. Yeah. We've told people you need to optimize because people like, well, how are you optimizing your site? I'm like, man, if you don't stop talking about your own site, you better show up. Somebody else needs to give you the credibility. So if you had — if you had no budget and you want to be heard, seen and cited, where do you do that?
Aaron: I would go on LinkedIn. YouTube.
Greg: Yep. Yep. Right. When you say relatively no budget and the same things that we're doing, I would lean in some of the communities. I would show up at more events. Yep. Again, there's a trust deficit that's happening right now, right? And people like, "Oh, it's the same sea of sameness online." I was like, "Yeah, because I'm not focused and worried about that." Where I'm different is I'm going to — I tell people all the time I said in the world in this content we created at a push of a button. I said the difference between you and I is I can be on camera, on stage, on point all the time. That is the difference. Yeah. Like if you would have met me two years ago I wasn't out front like that. The reason why I'm out front like now is because our environment in the world requires that. There are literally jobs right now that are called CEO Storytellers. Yep. Because they've figured out that you'll get more visibility through your executive team — as HubSpot — they literally have all of their folks coordinating and posting things on LinkedIn. They're creating a network effect of their executives.
Aaron: You shared something that I want to maybe finish with, but I still want to get your quick take on where we are in 5 years. But one thing that you said, Greg, which I think we should all try to take home is if you have no budget, you got to still show up. And I think for at least our clients, going to a conference and showing up is definitely step one. Sharing that experience about what you've learned from that conference is your thought leadership. It's your people vicariously living through your experiences. It's building a voice for yourself. And I think that's the part that gives you set up — gets you set up for the site that you were talked — being cited and earning that media. Because I never thought of it in this way recently. I mean we've had some people that — I didn't even win these clients over the years. We had one client that was so a client — prospective client that was so active in all the different conferences that he really like he gained the entire algorithm. He would just show up at a show and talk about what he saw. Took a lot of pictures and just kept putting it up LinkedIn. Putting it up on LinkedIn and this is so many years ago. This is like eight nine years ago. He was so ahead of everybody else even thinking about this stuff because he started showing up everywhere. People just expected him to be at all the shows at that point. And that kind of shared experience that he was putting out on LinkedIn I feel has been trying to — people have been trying to capitalize it a lot more these days but they do it in such an inauthentic way or unauthentic way that it doesn't have the same kind of power that he had initially because it was very innocent. It was like I am in this role I'm not the CEO of a company but I'm so interested in science I'm just going to be excited about what I'm seeing at these shows and he built a voice for himself and for the company and I think that's built them a really great base over the years that had a lot of staying power. It built a brand that I think they were able to really capitalize on that.
Greg: He combined personality-led growth and community-led growth together. Curated his pond. My concern — and when I kept trying to explain this at the end of 2024 — I said they — people again they keep asking me like why am I doing this so much? Why am I pushing the team to this? What I'm highly concerned about — and I'll get back to your in five years at some point whenever we want to talk about that — but a year from now, two years from now, the people that have not curated ponds that are still trying to gamify Google — like I am highly concerned for those because I ask people all the time, it's like where are you going to fish? It's like you have not invested any time in curating your own community in your own pond. You've not seated with anything, right? You're still talking about gamifying something in which Google themselves say they want to own — they want to own the entire experience from end to end. They don't want you fishing. You are on rented land to begin with.
Aaron: Exactly. Exactly. Yes.
Greg: And I would bet dollars to donuts that when they — when Google IO next month, they're going to say, "Yeah, we are flipping the switch to AI mode almost exclusively." Yeah. And at that point, it's game over if you've not curated your own pond.
Aaron: I agree. I agree. I have had a little bit of insight into where Google might be going with some of the tools as we're beta testing them now. And I want it to be easier. I think they're still trying to give it a more iterative process of roll out. What the functions might be. I kind of wanted to just be like get rid of all the clutter. Just tell me what's important and if people really want to get a hold of me and they don't know how to call me, you know, it's like there was even a point in time where I was just like I'm not going to read my email. If they want to call me and they really want to talk to me, just call me. This was a number of years ago. I wasn't getting like 150 emails a day or more. And so for now, I think what the AI hope to do would be, like you said earlier, it's like, can it allow us to just be focused on what we're good at instead of all the minutia? I really do hope that. Okay, so let's talk about the five-year outlook. You have five words to — I'm just joking. In five words, predict the future of AI in five years.
Greg: Oh, man. Wow. Yeah. I mean, well, first thing — so Dr. Westerman at MIT. He said in the course I took last year — he said if someone asks you for your five-year plan tell them that you're already 10 years off the moment they ask you the question. He said because the advancements of AI — like he's like we are in the space and no one can predict. But what I do think will end up happening is I think you're going to have a lot of — much smaller people-wise — smaller companies are going to be out there.
Aaron: Okay.
Greg: Right. I think that there —
Aaron: More companies but —
Greg: There are gonna be more companies, a lot more companies, but a lot smaller companies and people.
Aaron: Interesting.
Greg: Right. I think that because these tools — if you understand — my chairman and I, we've created three new companies in the last nine months. Yeah. Right. And two of them already have over six figures in revenue. Yeah. Right. Once you start to understand how to leverage these tools to do all the mundane tasks we always say, you know, let the machines handle the routine, let the humans handle remarkable. Once you can bifurcate his things —
Aaron: By the way, they're awesome quotable quotes.
Greg: But once you can bifurcate the things that you don't actually need to do. Yeah. I mean, as knowledge workers, we spend 50 to 60% of our work week searching for things to do our job, copying and pasting, reformatting data. Yeah. Go-to-market or salespeople spend 70% of their time doing administrative tasks. 70%. So that means there's only 30% that they can actually be present and actually closing deals and meeting new folks.
Aaron: Exactly.
Greg: So my hope is one — we get that time back. But two, I got to imagine as companies start to get smaller. That's going to create a lot of opportunity. It's going to create a significant amount of incumbent disruption because if you are a laggard — and I get it, it's going to be hard for big companies to move or to change — that just means there going to be a bunch of nimble folks that are now had an idea. They had a level of expertise. And I talk about this across all industries. There is not a single one — someone that tried to have a debate with me talking about, well, what about plumbers and this and that. I said, let me explain this to you. If I want to start a plumbing company today, right? I would do it. All the back office would be AI. My SDR would be AI. Everything would be agentic. I would pay my plumbers 30% more money. So, I'm going to have the best damn plumbers. Yeah. I'm going to be 30% faster.
Aaron: I might need one of those plumbers soon.
Greg: Right. I'm going to be 30% more profitable. Yeah. I'm going to be 30% cheaper. I said, I'm going to undercut your whole market. And I literally had the same — I was having this conversation in the coffee shop with that same CEO from the marketing company and I was explaining that to her, right? And I said, "BlackRock has invested significantly in acquiring these HVAC and trade holding companies." Yeah. And so I got up, we were leaving the coffee shop and this is a true story because I connected with the guy on LinkedIn after — two guys sitting next to us that have been listening to my whole kind of, you know, impromptu TED talk, right? And they say, "Hey man, if you start that trade business, you know, that AI plumber, we'd love to talk." We both work at BlackRock. They were both — we were right next door. Yeah. And so we connected on LinkedIn and after that — but the whole point of it is it's everywhere. It's going to disrupt everything. So what I imagine is there's going to be agentic — every industry that you could ever imagine in five years. And the people that lean in today, the people that learn today, right, I think are going to have a competitive advantage that I don't — it's going to be — I just it's going to be so far ahead, right? You and I talked off camera, right? Did you look at when I was talking about Scott Brinker's Martec's Law from 2013?
Aaron: No, I didn't see that. No. No.
Greg: Okay. So, when I was in Bogotá, Colombia speaking, I think I was texting you about something.
Aaron: Oh, that's right. Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. And I was like — I said I'm going to show this one slide. And 13 years ago, Scott Brinker put this Martec's Law and he basically said that the marketing technology capabilities grow exponentially but the adoption is logarithmic and it's very kind of — you know — basically he was basically saying the gap is widening 13 years ago. And then so I posted something the other day and Scott liked it and it was like — hey if you add AI into the equation now you start going from co-pilot to agentic AI — now you're talking about that gap is going to be 5 to 10x.
Aaron: Yeah, exactly.
Greg: I said I am very fearful of like — at what point is it going to be so far the technology from the people that are doing it that these people are going to be able to be upskilled.
Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.
Greg: Because people are still waiting on the sidelines saying yeah I might try that in 2027. I might look into — I might get me a chat too.
Aaron: Too late. It's going to be too late. I do agree about the smaller nimbler teams. I actually didn't think of it in that way. It's like a Seal Team Six of sorts. You know you bring —
Greg: I might own 20 companies 5 years from now. I told my chairman, I said, "Hey, man, if this [stuff] don't work out at Walk West, I'm just going to start 20 companies that each make $50,000 a year. Spin up — like you could spin up a company every week." That's what I told him. He didn't understand at first. Then he said — he now he doesn't — he's never written code in his life, but now he's using Claude — he's using Lovable creating. He said, "Hey, man." He called me one day. "I finally understand what you've been saying."
Aaron: I do hope that — here's my last thing I'll say. I do hope that AI for us will at some point put some of the work that we do in our agency, lightning in a bottle, and we could create our own like Inveniv bot that if people can't afford hiring the entire agency, they can bring in some of our insights. Still using some of the theories and tools that we might be leveraging with some human interactions here and there. But the whole point was let's make it easy for them. And we've learned so much from all the work over the years that this could be something that at least starts a low barrier of entry to start thinking about working with an agency. So, that would be one interesting thing. I hope also AI lets us be kinder to each other in the future, kinder to the environment as well. And makes it just a lot easier for us, a lot lighter for us, and we're not so like weighed down by all the other anxieties that we're dealing with all the time that AI sees some patterns about — what if we tried this and you could be a little bit better about how we treat your environment or how we treat each other. I hope it could do that for us.
Greg: I think you know just to that point man — like I always tell folks I'm like the goal even here at Walk West every single employee has at least one GAI certification because I always try to explain to folks it's like my goal is to make sure that I increase your quality of work which will then increase your quality of life right. And so as bullish as I am on AI I'm also very bullish on humanity. And what I try to get across to folks all the time, you know — again, it's like you're stressed and you're frustrated because you're doing this thing that you don't want to do. Like just — we have to admit that, right? Like I used to spend so much time with my direct reports creating board decks. I'm talking about days sometimes. I ain't spending more than 30 minutes now on a deck. I know how to use all these tools now. My team knows how to use all these tools, right? So now we can go have strategic conversation. We can go, you know, have a walk and talk over coffee and not feel any guilt at all because we know we can get to that work.
Aaron: Mhm. I also recently with my co-founder — I've created a lab, RDU Labs, Mark Bavasoto and I — because and it's for giving greater access and being more AI equitable if you will, right? For like trade organizations small business to your point because I think we're about to enter a world in the next 5 years that be have and have nots.
Greg: Yeah. The big companies are going to be able to do these things. And I want to make sure that I'm doing everything I know that to be able and everything in my power to give people access that may not have the dollars, may not have the knowledge. I'm like, who are we to be these gatekeepers of these things? But I am seeing some people that are like, "No, I'm not telling people, you know, my secret sauce." I'm like, "L — man, that ain't going to be secret for like — for about like six months." Like to your point — like when we met the reason why I was so thankful to the fact that — and I knew I was like we're going to hit this off because he views the world the way I do. There can never be too much, you know, competition or like — I can't serve every single client. Yeah. The whole reason I started AI Voice of Victim podcast — and my chairman asked me beginning of last year, he said why do you call it that? I said by the end of 2025 people are going to feel like they're victims and nobody told them. I said I can't have that on my conscience. Yeah. I was like, because once you see this, once you see how you can do these things and my team has seen — they can't — they not going to do math by hand again. They're never going to do it. Yeah. You can't go back.
Aaron: Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree. I think it's beautiful that you're putting some thought into how to become a mentor for the industry with this RDU Labs thing you're talking about. I think that my role as well, I'm trying to move more into that mentorship thing. I'll be speaking at some schools and trying to speak at more conferences as well. Just try to share — I want to be sharing more of what we've learned and how to help people kind of make it work for them too. One of the things that I think is missing — and I meant to bring this up earlier when we were talking about the personality growth and like being on stage and I realized this over the last especially over the last three years as AI's kind of advanced — is there's a lot of senior executives and CEOs in particular that will never do what you and I are doing and being on camera and being vulnerable. Like I don't know if you've recognized that but I mentor and I advise folks they have built their whole careers staying behind the screen.
Greg: That's going to be a challenge.
Aaron: So one of the people I got to meet that came into town of big pharma company — if she says the wrong thing in front of the wrong people the stock goes down and billions of dollars are lost and people lose jobs and markets change. And so I — yeah I would — would I love to be Tim Cook for a day? Sure. Would I probably destroy the company in one day? Probably because I'll say something really stupid.
Greg: But I ain't even talking about that big. I'm talking about there's going to be a lot of companies of our size that will not be in business in 2027 because they just won't put it out there.
Aaron: They will not put it out there.
Greg: I have talked to these companies and I'm saying, man, go do this. Like, I can never do that. And I'm like, what's the alternative?
Aaron: That's the authenticity that I'm looking for. And I think that when people come and work with us, I try to tell them it's in one of our slides as well. Like we — this is how we — who we are and how we operate and the brands that we help are basically going to become this too. You're going to be transparent. You're going to be fun to work with. You're just going to be friendly. You're going to be accessible. You're going to try things. You're going to be out there. And if they don't agree with that, you don't need to work with us. Like that's — so we tell them that. We actually even have a unicorn on one of our slides that's like, "We want to be fun to work with. You want to be fun to work with. We don't want to make this into like a weird thing." And so when we're doing our pitch, they actually giggle at us and we're like, we want to be friendly and fun and we want to enjoy this — is we're spending most of our time with you guys. So if we can't enjoy it, then what's the point?
Greg: Well, that's why in 5 years you're going to be wildly successful. Your team is going to be wildly successful, right? But I'm telling you point blank because I advise a lot of people. I'm like, you have got to figure out — and I tell people all the time, I say, you have to find someone that's going to be a spokesperson. Yeah. Someone has to be out in front. And again, I'm not talking about the big end customers that we work with. I am fearful for other agencies, other consultancies, other types of businesses. And I'm like, you've gamified everything down to a digital footprint and now the world requires you to be a human and out front and that is going to be your downfall.
Aaron: I can't agree more. I don't like to talk double negatives, but I will say I'm going to keep going back to something you said earlier — this small nimble team idea is probably going to happen. Because the enablement tools that weren't there 20 years ago, 25 years ago exist now. So when I thought about building a company when I was leaving school, I was thinking about all the formalities. You need a CEO and a COO and a CFO and blah blah blah blah blah all these C's. And at this point, why do you need any of it? If you can just be — I mean these are the solopreneur concept in the gig economy that actually came and went obviously to a certain degree and we kind of like do this universal thing of expansion and contraction but when it comes to being like seen as a company, respected as a company and you have certain kind of talent that you could say we all can bring certain interesting things to the table but we're full stack — I think that's a really — actually when I was talking to the video crew here, hi video crew, we were coming in here getting set up this morning there were four folks in the room and I said are you guys all full stack? Do you all have to know everything? Are you all lighting, sound, set, and design and all this? And yeah, okay. They're all doing — we're all doing all the things. So I think that the concept of full stack is maybe more the norm. And what we have to do next is what are we bringing to the table on top of that talent. That's why I kind of go back to maybe a bad term to say it, but Seal Team Six. It's like these folks have to be able to drop in and change and be a catalyst for change and do it immediately. Hopefully they don't do it violently.
Greg: Yeah, they do it — we victim renaissance — they are a voice and I hope there are more voices like yourself, Aaron. I think that the world requires more generalists right. And even in the marketing world I tell folks I'm like — oh, it's like I'm a field marketer, I'm a content marketer, I'm a social market. I said do you aspire to be a CMO? Absolutely. I said well you can only do one thing so you have to break that right. But no man — I really appreciate the opportunity to partner with you, to talk to you, to learn from you, right? You know so much about HubSpot, so much about marketing, so much about the industry. And again, you're just a genuinely good human. And so, I'm at this point in my career. I've exited multiple times. I've done well for myself and for those around me, but now I'm in this stage. I'm like, I just want to work with people I want to work with, man. So, I like working with you. So, I appreciate it.
Aaron: I love that, too. And I aspire to do more what you do, too. I wish at some point I could get out there more to share more of our stories and have a team that I feel like — like you have built here where they can really handle all the ins and outs of the business and you could be out there sharing the story more with more people. I aspire to do that. I would love to write a book one day too. I'm not sure how hard that is, but — I don't want to say it's easy.
Greg: No, but there's some folks here at Walk West that can help you. So —
Aaron: Okay. All right. All right. We'll keep that going. All right. So, Greg, thank you so much for joining us here today on The Sound of Inbound. If you want to find out more about Walk West, you just head over to walkwest.com. All you got to do is type in Greg Boone and then just start typing in the letter A and you will find everything he is doing online. He is literally everywhere, everything all at once when it comes to AI. I would — if you guys have any questions, I'm sure about AI. He would be loving to connect with you. I'm sure on LinkedIn, right?
Greg: Absolutely.
Aaron: Because we're all there doing a lot of stuff on the LinkedIn community and we would like to get involved. I hope you're going to join me at Unbound this year.
Greg: I'm absolutely going to be at Unbound.
Aaron: Okay. So, for those that are going to be joining us at Unbound, you want to check out unbound.com. And as I've said many times before, take advantage of this. If you want to go to the show and you want a discount, DM me and I have discount codes for those that would like to attend this year. Greg, this has been so fantastic. Thank you for joining us. Anybody want to check out our podcast at soundofinbound.com. You'll also have it on all the big networks from Apple to Instagram, Spotify, and everywhere else that you might find it, YouTube. So again, thank you so much for joining us today, Greg. It's been great.
Greg: Thank you.

Mark Killmeyer

Greg Boone: Putting Yourself Out There, AI Education, and Becoming AI Curious.

Kat Tooley: The Start of Unbound, Experiential Marketing, and Event Management