AI Is a Function, Not a Relationship

Joe Rockey runs a consultancy that takes on the problems businesses have written off as unsolvable, and this is his fourth time on the show. The conversation stays on one line the whole way through: AI as a function versus AI as a relationship replacement, and what happens to the businesses that get it wrong.

From there it goes wide: why half the writing world hates AI and why that fear is misplaced, what a demographic-obsessed marketer is telling you about themselves, why your refrigerator wants to show you ads, and the story-based book Joe is writing about culture as the real product.

Solving Impossible Problems

Richard Lowe: Good morning. This is Leaders and Their Stories. I’m Richard Lowe, and I’m here with Joe Rockey. He’s an expert in sales and an all-around good guy, and we’re going to have a great discussion today. Joe, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Joe Rockey: Well, thank you for having me back on Leaders and Their Stories. I like being on this one. We solve problems that are pretty much considered impossible problems, the ones everyone just accepts as, oh, this is just the way it is, we’ll deal with it. That’s what my consultancy firm goes and crushes, those types of events. So wherever you want to take it from there, that’s where we start.

AI as a Function, Not a Relationship

Richard Lowe: Very cool. We were having a little discussion about AI before the show. Why don’t we just jump right in there? You use AI a lot. What do you use it for?

Joe Rockey: I use AI as a functionality, not as a relationship replacement. I think that distinction is really what’s going to be the difference between those who have success in AI and those who end up losing in AI, for lack of a better way of saying it. I don’t think the real losers are going to be those that don’t use it. I think it’s going to be those who use it incorrectly. And the fundamental limitation, where I see that line in the sand, is: are you using this to replace a relationship?

Joe Rockey: Because at the end of the day, and this always goes back to what business success is, every business comes down to two questions. What’s your relationship with the employees, and what is the business’s relationship with the clients? As long as your AI is doing functions that help enhance that, it’s going to be a good tool for you. But if you’re using the functions to try to replace the relationship, you’re going to lose. That’s the fundamental difference, and why you see some people winning the AI game and some people having AI cost them money until they don’t want to touch it anymore. Kind of like a bad accountant.

The Writers Who Hate AI

Richard Lowe: Yeah. The way I look at AI is, if you’re not taking advantage of AI properly, then you’re not going to come out of this looking good. And there are lots of reasons for that. I’m a writer, and the writing backlash against using AI is severe. The writers I’m referring to, probably at least half, hate AI with a purple passion. They don’t want to see it. If you use it, they’re going to jump all over you. I even wrote an article called Dogpile, because they literally dogpiled a poor writer who asked a question about it, and I thought it was quite grotesque. They’re going to lose in the long term. They’re afraid, and that fear translates to anger. They need to change so that they’re not afraid anymore, and use it where appropriate. An appropriate place to use it would be, say, helping you create an outline. I do probably 10 to 40 interviews for a book. That’s a lot of stuff to paw through manually, when I can just have AI do it in a few minutes.

Joe Rockey: And the other part of it is, where I have seen the problem you’re describing, it isn’t just in the writing community. It’s basically the solopreneur mindset, because this is what keeps people from going from a solopreneur to a true entrepreneur. The difference is employees and delegation. If you’re using AI to delegate functions, like what you’re describing right now, go through pages upon pages of content and take my personal bias from having done these interviews out of the equation. What did the person actually say? And guess what? You’ve got a better product, because your bias is going to taint it, because let’s face it, every human has biases. If I’m getting interviewed by someone, I’m going to start talking a certain way to them. But the AI, looking at the transcript independently, is going to look at things differently. So if you as a writer are getting offended by that, either A, you’re a control freak, B, you’re trying to put your bias into the narrative, or C, you’re following a cult mentality that’s the equivalent of saying the world is flat. Probably multiple, but you’re at least one of those three. That’s the problem.

An Electronic Contractor

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I understand the fear: that they’re going to lose their creativity, and people who aren’t creative are going to create stories and make money, and it’s a limited market for books and stories. But that’s really the wrong place for the fear. They should be using it to further their career, using it as a contractor. Think of it as an electronic contractor. If I need a drawing, I go out and get a drawing tool. If I need an image, I get Leonardo. If I want something to scan through all my 40 hours of interviews, I use Claude and build an outline from that. That’s called smart use of your time. I don’t need to spend an entire day, or two, or five, going through 40 hours of interviews. I can do it in 10 minutes.

Joe Rockey: Likewise, you also don’t need to spend an entire week training someone to do this, because either the number of times you need that particular process doesn’t justify a 40-hour-a-week position, or you can just train the AI to do it quickly. And it’s always on for you. There’s no waiting until after the weekend with AI. Push the button. You can do it right now, on your phone, wherever you’re at. So there are certainly capabilities to it. Like I said, it comes down to using it correctly. Are you replacing a relationship? In the case of putting an image on the front of your book, the answer is no. It’s a requirement to get the book out. You have to have a meaningful cover, but you already know what the relationship is going to be with the person looking at it on the shelf. You’re just doing the same thing you’d do hiring an artist: I want it to look like this, this is my vision. It’s not the AI coming up with the creativity and the idea.

Joe Rockey: I think that’s the difference. If you’re a real writer, or you’re in any field, you’re capable of doing things better than the AI and having it as a tool. But if you’re insecure, then anything that could threaten you, whether it’s another person or another tool, is going to threaten you, because you’re insecure by definition. And as much as we don’t want to admit it, there are a lot of those going around. That’s just part of life.

Why AI Writes Mediocre

Richard Lowe: Right now, one thing about AI is that it’s a mediocre writer.

Joe Rockey: It’s that over everything, actually.

Richard Lowe: It goes for the common denominator. It’s very conservative. If you try to write a book that has any kind of gratuitous sex or violence, it’s not going to do it. It will simply refuse, or it will soften it down to nowhere near where you want it. I’ve experimented with this a lot. That’s the problem with AI if you try to use it to write: it’s going to create something that’s mediocre. Now, you can force it to not be mediocre with proper prompting, but it’s still going to have AI-isms. Most people don’t realize this. They think it’s just the words, all these AI-type words. It’s far deeper than that. The spine of what it writes will be the same. If you write a novel, every chapter will be the same length. Every chapter will have the same structure: beginning, middle, end. Every chapter will end cleanly. The journey will be cleanly ended. It looks like the perfect book. And that’s not something that’s very entertaining. Humans write messy. That’s one of the big differences between AI and human writing. AI does not write messy unless you really prompt it to. It writes pap, predigested food.

Richard Lowe: Some people are also afraid of copyright infringement. The newer AIs tend to chop things up into such pieces that there’s very little, if any, copyright infringement. The old ones did it quite badly. You’d have pieces of old copyrighted stuff in there. I haven’t seen that lately.

Joe Rockey: It could have gone away in the last 18 months or so. And think about it: the backbone all those companies were built upon was don’t get sued, don’t get sued, don’t get sued. That’s why you have all this watering down. In my opinion, there are two reasons why it’s always going to be so-called mediocre. First, it doesn’t really know what good content is. Look at Google. It doesn’t know which recipe is the best chocolate chip cookie recipe. What does it go off of? Words and people’s reviews. That’s why if you go on Google and type in a recipe, every single one of those pages looks exactly the same. They’re all a pain in the *** for the user, but they have all the same content over and over again. The point is, it’s a computer. It doesn’t know what things taste like. It can do the math, but it doesn’t really know how people interact with each other, what’s going to captivate their attention. They’re using proxy metrics. How long did you stay looking at this ad in your feed? How many responses did this get? It doesn’t really know what your goal is, and it doesn’t know what the person posting’s goal was, which may or may not have been getting attention. That’s the ambiguity of why everything gets watered down to the middle. In that regard, you have to be very clear with it. You also have to be clear you’re not repeating an echo chamber with yourself and going down a delusional road.

The Echo Chamber Problem

Richard Lowe: Yeah, AI does that a lot. It wants to make you happy. That’s one of its design goals: you come out thinking, yeah, I got the answer I wanted and I feel good. What that means is it’s going to tell you what it thinks you want to hear, unless you prompt it not to, and that can be difficult. So you’re going to get the story you want to hear. That’s called an echo chamber, as you just said. You’re going to get back what you put in. Now, that can be good or that can be terrible. Say you’re looking for a movie. Do you want it to echo back what it thinks you want to hear about that movie, or do you want a real review before you spend your money? And movies aren’t cheap anymore. Bringing a family to the movies is well over a hundred bucks now, easy. And that’s without all the fancy stuff.

Richard Lowe: That brings us back around to how you started this: the relationship. What AI doesn’t do very well is relationships. It can, as we learned with Boardy, introduce you. And that’s awesome. But then you have to take over from there and actually build the relationship. Boardy is an automated lead generator. AI can connect you. It can do some management of those relationships. But at the end of the day, you have to do the relationship. That’s where the handoff occurs. You can try to make AI do the relationship, but you’re going to fail.

The 1960s Car Lot and the AI Sales Bot

Joe Rockey: Yeah. This is something you’ve seen throughout the history of sales. Go back to where the trope began, the 1960s car salesman: you’re not getting off this lot unless you’re going in the car I want you to buy. Everyone hates that feeling. Everyone hates being sold to and being used. That’s human nature. Then the internet comes along with great promise, eBay and Amazon, and people say, okay, cool, this is the new way people are going to buy and sell. The reality was, it was just better than the negative of the used car salesman trope. And what these AI companies are doing, or people using AI as their sales bots, is just pushing down that road.

Joe Rockey: But there is a proven fact: any time someone is buying something that’s important to them, not necessarily expensive, but important to them, they want a salesperson. They want an actual relationship and to know who they’re talking to. That’s ultimately why, if you’re selling something that solves an important problem for your clients, an AI sales bot will never be able to cut it. You’ll be able to sell things your clients don’t regard as important. Okay, that’s fine, except for the fact that you are automatically only selling to those who don’t care about you. Think about where that puts your company strategically. And this is coming from a guy who has solved massive problems and knows this is one. Don’t step into it.

Dumb Feeds and Shared Databases

Richard Lowe: Yeah, AI is not good at that. What AI is good at is consolidating things into feeds and putting together like stuff. If you’re interested in widgets, it’s going to feed you a bunch of widgets. I like watching YouTube videos, and once in a while I’ll watch something different. And then suddenly my feed is full of that different stuff instead of what I want. That’s just dumb AI. It shouldn’t change the whole feed structure based on me doing the odd thing on one or two videos. It should know the majority of the videos I watch are of type A, and not start feeding me types B and C and D because I happened to look at them once. That’s a dumb design, and that’s the way YouTube works, and a lot of the other stuff too. And one of the mysteries people have is, I was just on Amazon, and then I went over to YouTube and it started showing me the same thing. Don’t be surprised. It all shares the same database behind it. You look at diapers, don’t be surprised when you start seeing ads for diapers.

Joe Rockey: Well, if you think about it, this is what every marketer has wanted from every textbook written back when I was in college, and that was after 9-11, by the way. Every marketer has always wanted more knowledge about their client, more knowledge about the prospect. And the shame of it is, it’s all driven through the wrong pathway.

Your Ideal Client Is Not a Demographic

Joe Rockey: When people talk about their ideal client profile or ideal prospect profile, and this is advice for anyone looking at hiring a marketing company: if they start asking you questions about demographics for your ideal profile, they don’t know what they’re doing at all. Because your ideal client has nothing to do with what they look like, how much money they have, where they went to school, where they live, anything like that. What they have in common is: what is the problem they have that you can solve? That’s it. The rest of it doesn’t matter. The rest is at most a logistical problem, if it matters at all. How do I get my HVAC company to your location? How do we figure out a payment system? Those are logistical problems, not can-they-be-my-client problems. And that’s a massive thing you need to know up front when you’re building your business.

Joe Rockey: But going back to your database point: they can collect all that information real quick. We think he’s this old, we think they make this much income based on their viewing habits. So now they have a really deep demographic database on you. And it’s just horrible that they think that’s how you buy. I don’t choose Wendy’s over McDonald’s because I have a four-year degree. I choose it because their burgers are better. End of story. But that’s not how they look at it. They look at it through the prism of demographic data, and it’s just not smart.

The Customer Service Labyrinth

Richard Lowe: Yeah. And what’s been happening with customer service lately is sickening. Try to get hold of customer service at just about any company. You’ll go through the AI crap in the front and get into this labyrinth. Try to get hold of the IRS. Just try to get hold of a person. It took me hours, and I finally figured out how, and that took a lot of research on the internet to find the exact choice of words that makes it drop all of the AI and go straight to a person. It took me hours and hours to figure that out. And it changes all the time. But if you’ve got a problem you need the IRS to help you with, you do want to talk to them.

Joe Rockey: This is an example of why you should outsource this. That’s why you hire accountants. You’ve got more important things to do, like watch this podcast.

Richard Lowe: But various things, hosting companies for example, used to have beautiful customer service. You’d be on the phone less than a minute and you’d be talking to somebody. Now you go through their FAQs, then their knowledge base, and the AI wants to make sure you get your answer from there, and if you can’t, it sends you back there. Finally, after 30 minutes of monkeying around, you might get a form that sends it off to some support person, God knows where. And then maybe, if you’re lucky, a week later you get a response that doesn’t solve the problem. I’ve been finding this true over and over and over again.

Joe Rockey: And what you’re describing is opportunity for all the competition. That’s fundamentally what it is. It’s an over-reliance on AI to replace that relationship. AI replacing a relationship creates an opportunity for the competition. That’s what happens.

Ads on Refrigerators

Richard Lowe: Right. And I still don’t understand why companies think we want advertisements on refrigerators and dishwashers. Why do they think that? Well, obviously they make money. But I won’t buy a dishwasher or any kind of appliance that gives me ads, period.

Joe Rockey: What you’re describing there is a very short-sighted way of squeezing revenue, which is not the same as solving the problem. The problem the appliance was here to solve, you could argue the refrigerator solved in the 50s, and in some ways they did it better then. Food lasted longer and stayed colder. Now it’s just trying to squeeze out extra revenue. There’s a difference. Take the video game industry, which is notorious for this. They bring out new and additional content, maybe seasonal, maybe an addition to the game, and you can choose to buy it, but you don’t lose functionality of the main game because you didn’t buy the DLC. That’s a product you keep building on. If you make a refrigerator correctly, you don’t have a chance to make money off that client again for a decade. That’s the position these companies are in.

Joe Rockey: The bigger underlying problem is that the subscription economy is getting way out of control, and there’s a natural backlash to it. People just want to own things. But all of these companies want recurring revenue, recurring revenue. And if your business model can’t survive in a way that your clients want to pay you, your business model can’t survive. That’s the end of the story.

Streaming vs. Owning

Richard Lowe: Let’s take streaming versus physical media, DVDs and Blu-rays, for example. Streaming is a lot more convenient. I like not having to get off my **** to go put in a DVD. But I don’t own those things. Theoretically you don’t own DVDs either, that’s a license, but there’s no electronic thing that comes out and takes it back. I can make backup copies. I can do any number of things with a Blu-ray or DVD that I can’t with streaming. You could buy a movie for 29.95, and tomorrow they lose the license on it, and boom, it’s gone. You don’t have access anymore, and you have no appeal, because your contract says you’re renting it as long as you have a subscription. You’ve seen that over and over with movies and streaming. It’s a model I despise. If I spend 29.95 on a movie, I may not own that movie, but I have rights to it. It should never be deleted or boofed or censored or modified. It’s mine. That’s one reason I’ve got a Blu-ray collection that’s hundreds and hundreds of Blu-rays. I don’t actually subscribe to any streaming services, because I completely disagree with them. I still use the free ones once in a while, like Tubi.

Joe Rockey: No, it makes sense. At the end of the day, it’s an asset you own versus an asset you rent. We see this in the marketing space as well. Do I want to be heavily invested in social media, where I have to hope they give me the impressions and views? They have no incentive to do that for me. In fact, they have an incentive not to, so that eventually I’ll pay them to do it. This is the problem with the subscription service model: it creates partnership dependency without ever actually being a partner. That’s the downfall risk of being on a subscriber-based system. There are actually very few industries and companies that should have a subscription basis. The vast majority would be better off selling their product, having it go as is, and then selling it again the next time it’s needed. Or selling it to someone else who needs it. How about that as an idea? Instead of trying to re-rinse the same clients you already have, go get new ones. What a novel idea that used to be.

TANSTAAFL: You Are the Commodity

Richard Lowe: I wrote an article called TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It comes from Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Nothing’s free. So you’re on Facebook, posting away, having a merry old time, under the illusion that you’re the customer. You’re not the customer. You’re the commodity. They’re selling you, your statistics, what you do, to advertisers. Do they care about you? No, because you’re not the client. You’re not the vendor. You’re just something they sell. You’re a sack of potatoes to them.

Joe Rockey: In a very real way, it’s the internet equivalent of going to a stadium. They’re selling all this stuff to you, giving you the entertainment on the field, and they’re monitoring you. To a certain degree they make sure you’re sitting in the right section, with the right angle on what they want you to see. Most people don’t look at it like that. Just like in a stadium section, you have people around you that you can talk to: hey, did you see that? But all you’re doing is putting yourself into a controlled environment that you’re not the master of. And most people never look at it that way.

Why TVs Are Too Cheap

Richard Lowe: Well, look at TVs. TVs are way too cheap. You can go into a store and buy a big TV for low hundreds. How the heck do they do that? When you think about what a TV really is, unless you know the system behind it, you don’t understand how they’re doing it. How can they sell a big TV for 200 bucks?

Joe Rockey: Yeah, they used to be thousands.

Richard Lowe: They should be thousands, and they’re not. How do they do that? Advertising. Look at your TV. I’m looking at my Vizio right now. It’s filled with ads from Amazon and everybody else. Everything on that TV is rented. You’re paying a lower price because it’s subsidized by all of these advertisers that are permanent. You can’t take them out.

Joe Rockey: Nope.

Richard Lowe: Theoretically you can. You could jailbreak the thing. I found a product that lets me put in a YouTube replacement, so I don’t have to watch YouTube advertisements on my TV. It’s jailbroken, a complete replacement, and YouTube doesn’t like it, so they have to do an update every few weeks because YouTube blocks it somehow and they have to get around it. I think it’s cool, because that’s one less advertisement for me. And I’m about to get rid of my Alexas, because they’re putting in more and more ads, and now they’re starting to put in voice ads. About to throw them in the trash.

Where the Ad Money Went

Joe Rockey: That’s how they get you. The world of advertising has gotten harder than ever. If you look at the way America has gone, especially since the streaming services started allowing you to pay to not see commercials, the vast majority of people have some form of ad blocker on any browser they’re on. So you can’t get ads through conventional websites anymore. People aren’t watching ads during network television, because they’re not watching it on TV anymore. They’re streaming it the next day, and they’ve already paid not to see ads. So that’s a major ad distribution source gone. The only thing left is what people will actually watch live, which is basically live sports.

Joe Rockey: The pathways where all this ad money went to reach the consumer are radically disappearing. That’s why you see every single sport breaking all kinds of contracts, spending more and more money. It’s literal supply and demand. The only place commercials get watched is during the NFL, during basketball. That’s how you get a quarterback making 50 million dollars: because the only time you will watch a commercial is waiting for Patrick Mahomes to come out of a TV timeout, and Budweiser will cut that check, period. Inevitably there’s an end to that road, but we haven’t gotten there yet. And that’s what all these extra ad surfaces are trying to do: find a place where a middle-of-the-road company can afford to put an ad. Not to mention, the platform gets to cut the action. Now the refrigerator company gets the cut because your ad is on the fridge. Alexa gets the cut because it’s through their product. People are losing, with the exception of their own platforms, Meta especially. They don’t have a way to give you ads anymore, so they’re trying to suck you into their electronic world so they can be the master of the ads. It’s all coming down to that. It’s all influence. It always has been.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it’s true. We’re becoming an ad-based economy and a service economy.

Joe Rockey: I would argue we always have been. I’d go all the way back to the Civil War, the way newspapers were written. Even telegrams had ads on them.

Richard Lowe: It’s true. But it’s even more so now. There are ads all over the place, in front of your face, ads the size of buildings now.

Joe Rockey: I just think they’re more connected. If they’d had the ability back in the day, they would have done it. They just couldn’t. It’s technological change.

The Book: Culture as Strategy

Richard Lowe: So, changing the subject slightly. You have a book coming out in the near future that you’re working on. What’s that going to be about?

Joe Rockey: Let’s just admit this: I don’t like textbooks. I was not the valedictorian, didn’t want to be, and probably never will be. I don’t like textbooks, but I do like helping people and teaching stuff that matters. One of the best books America has ever produced is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It’s about finance, and it’s a story. Not a textbook. An actual story that you get to live. My book is going to be that type of story-based narrative, specifically about the business’s relationship with its employees: how important it is to maintain and excel in that department of your life as a business, and how you benefit immensely from it. We’re not going to get into all the numbers in the book, but the reality is ROI, culture, all these other things you become better at. When people actually want to work for your business, all these other relationship problems start going away. They do the customer service better. They follow through, they deliver. Everything you want your business to be doing comes through. And, by the way, you become the place everyone wants to work.

Joe Rockey: Back it up right now. If you had to send your 16-year-old daughter to work, and it had to be in fast food, where do you want her to work? The vast majority of people sit back and legitimately think about it, and they’re not going to say McDonald’s. They’re not going to say Burger King, or Taco Bell, or KFC. Over 70 percent of people will say, I want them to be at Chick-fil-A, because of the culture that’s established there. It’s a place where they work together. Not to mention it’s efficient and profitable. That comes directly from the culture. That’s what we build for our clients, and that’s the value of investing in your people. They have a different recipe than everyone else, but so does McDonald’s, so does Burger King, so does KFC, and you don’t want your daughter working there. It’s not the recipe. It’s not the product. It is the culture. That’s the important thing that needs to be distinguished.

How to Reach Joe

Richard Lowe: Awesome. So tell me how people can get hold of you.

Joe Rockey: Well, there’s a little QR code right here over my shoulder. That goes right to my calendar. You can also get hold of me at Elite Business Cruises. That’s elitebusinesscruises.com.

Richard Lowe: Very cool. Well, thank you for coming on the episode. I appreciate the discussion. A lot of eclectic subjects. And thank you for listening to Leaders and Their Stories. This is a regular podcast. I try to do at least two or three a week, with lots of interesting people coming on, so come back.

Joe Rockey: You think about it: this was one of the rare AI conversations that will be truly evergreen. This thing will still stand out ten years from now.

Richard Lowe: It’s true. It’s true.

Quotable moments