[00:00:00] Toni: Is AI about to take job? Well, we just talked to someone who thinks so.
[00:00:05] Jacco: percent of all sellers, after they learn the pain, they start pitching their product. This is not what good sellers do. Good sellers learn what the pain is, listen carefully, and then they try to identify, okay, I know that's your pain, but what do you want the output of the thing to be? What do you want the impact to be? Today's AI systems already go straight to impact now.
[00:00:29] When we saw this happening, that's when I said, we could replace 70 percent of the, of the relatively transactional sales people that sell 20, 000 platforms.
[00:00:39] Toni: That's Jacco van der Kooij.
[00:00:40] He's the founder of Winning by Design.
[00:00:43] And despite some being on the line, he believes companies have a massive opportunity right now.
[00:00:50] Jacco: It's called the zero day exploit. Those people who knew about the real estate market crashing, they didn't take a big hit. They all walked out of hundreds of millions of profit, right? When Moneyball came out, right, and it was applied by the Oakland A Oakland Ace for the first part, but it was the Red Sox who became a champion on it.
[00:01:09] Any cycling team applied marginal gain. They were the first ones. And it is nowadays optimized by jumbo, right? But the concept is whoever gets their first. Get to exploit it first. So the problem is not will we get all there? No, no, the problem is who will get there first will allow to get an advantage.
[00:01:27] We do know this in AI. If you get an advantage, the advantage will only get bigger over time, not smaller.
[00:01:34] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:01:44] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, and more.
[00:01:51] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps experts.
[00:02:02] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:02:04] Mikkel: So here's the backstory for you, Jacco. I don't know if you know this, but we've obviously decided to continue the show. Toni and I, we bought the rights. We bought the equipment. We had a wonderful teammate called Bart who helped with the entire setup.
[00:02:19] And you know, Some cameras, they can get fairly complicated. This one in particular. So I think, I want to say the last four recordings, we were like, okay, now it's in focus, everything is perfect. Record, get the final product. Yeah, it was not in focus. It just turned out really poorly.
[00:02:36] Toni: We just needed an iPhone version.
[00:02:38] Like, you know, these guys way overbought the capability for the video camera there, but It's fine. Now we have it. It's fantastic. We're
[00:02:45] professionals.
[00:02:46] Jacco: And this is my point. I see the same thing. It's like, look, I had it with my son is, you know, like they all want to go to some other universe, the Android universe, the this universe, the camera universe. Once you're in the Apple universe and you just have given in, you just say like, okay, I am with Apple.
[00:03:02] I'm fine. Then the world, because you stop worrying about that
[00:03:06] stuff. Apple figures all this out for you. like, these are not things that we should be having conversations around. Like whether my iPhone should be working as a remote and whether I should use an app in order to do that. I control everything in my house via my iPhone and everything is Mac and it all works and I'm always protected and secured.
[00:03:23] So I go like, but yeah, good luck on your. Technology provider with things that is it? The Nick Canon D60 212. 5
[00:03:31] Toni: a, it's a Lumix S5 or something like this. And the things with those is like the shorter the description, the more expensive. So kind of, I think we went on the top of top shelves with this thing. But we didn't want to talk about video cameras today, Jacco. We wanted to talk about some other stuff and usually we're talking about kind of broader, you know, revenue architecture bowtie topics which this also definitely fits into.
[00:03:56] But we're talking about specific today, artificial intelligence, In the go to market across the bow tie. Right. And you recently and the team did some research on this. You published a piece of content on this also, maybe to kind of just kick us off on the whole topic. What is your, you know, what is your vision around this?
[00:04:16] what is it that you're seeing? What's going to happen to the go to market? You know, once we get to a point of implementing more and more and more AI solutions
[00:04:24] Jacco: Okay, so, we gotta see AI in context of how we got here, because otherwise we're either gonna see it as a threat, we're not gonna understand the missed opportunities. You gotta
[00:04:33] see the whole picture. So the whole picture, and I'm only going about a decade back or so, starts in about 2000, you know, like 12 ish, right? At that time, we are growing companies. Now, for the listeners to this, we need to understand that we live in a context We are working in hyper growth world company. we're not thinking about AI as if I'm deploying it at Wells Fargo or at ABN Emerald or Deutsche Bank or anything. We're thinking about like, hey, our companies generally have to grow somewhere from like 10 million to a billion, right? In that turn, realize this, the goal of the startup is to turn a million dollar asset into a billion dollar asset. There is no other industry like that. Gold doesn't have that. Energy doesn't have that. bonds, stock market, none
[00:05:20] of that has that. We're turning million dollar assets into billion dollar assets. That goes to an exponential part of the growth curve called the S curve, right? Revenue architecture model, the S curve, it goes through that. That is an exponential function for which historically we used human beings to fuel that growth. Now, in Silicon Valley, what do we use for that? You know, three specific functions, SDRs, AEs, and CSMs.
[00:05:49] Like, that was the call in, in SaaS. And in that market, it essentially centered itself on that. Like, if you have three go to market motion, I simplify it to three. No touch, low touch, and high touch. No touch, historically, has become PLG. Low touch was the SDR AE and high touch is what we refer to as enterprise sales or something like that, right? Now that no touch middle category, that is what we pumped the volume up because we couldn't afford the high touch enterprise salespeople that SAP and Microsoft and all those companies were using. So Salesforce early on, you know, by the, you know, like by Aaron Ross mindset, right, created that middle category and said like, Hey, that's the new thing. And so suddenly We started adding and hiring companies, small companies started hiring two dozen SDRs and a dozen AEs or something like that, right? Or reverse, right? Two dozen AEs and a dozen SDRs, right? Like, like that overnight, right? You would work at a company that's barely started, has 36 people in the sales floor, right?
[00:06:52] Excitement, energy, coffee machines, that whole thing. That thing just blew up, right? That's what, that thing, no touch becomes PLG. Low touch becomes AI led growth and high touch becomes and stays human led growth. PLG, AI led growth, human growth. That's what we're in the middle of right now.
[00:07:15] Toni: Yeah.
[00:07:15] Jacco: That growth, in order to create that, we funded human beings by the bucket load. We exponentially grew the company size. Because the resources we needed to grow the revenue exponentially were not there yet to the way the systems are today. Today, we no longer need to grow the people exponentially. Like PLG, we can grow the systems, and systems do grow exponentially. That's the whole thing that you're seeing in front of you right now.
[00:07:47] Toni: when I kind of follow your train of thought, right, kind of you're talking about the process ization of selling and go to market and on the, on the no touch side is PLG, makes total sense. And the, the disruption that you're seeing, the change that you're seeing is that in the low touch space.
[00:08:03] Instead of hiring a bunch of SDRs and AEs to, you know, close 10, 15, 20K deals, you're basically seeing that that will be more and more and more taken over by AI led growth, And, you know, I think this also makes this a little bit clearer for everyone listening, because first of all, ah, okay, phew.
[00:08:23] There's still a place for us in the enterprise, right? There's like, you know, that, that kind of thinking is out there. But if we're now thinking about AI led growth for the low touch space, how's that gonna work? I mean, How do people need to think about this?
[00:08:37] How do they need to envision this? I know kind of, I, I, you know, watched a little bit of a demo that you kind of showed there, but, but, you know, take people through how that future potentially could look
[00:08:48] like.
[00:08:48] Jacco: Okay, let's start again a little at the beginning, you know, like look, what we have is we are living right now in the world. I hope that the buyers don't like the process that they're buying with right now. Like it will be hard, you will be hard fetched to find any human being in the B2B world that says like, look, I love to buy because the buying process is fantastic.
[00:09:11] Right? Like, it's not. It is, it is, it is. Pretty bad. Gosh forbid you surrender your email to somebody that you don't know in, in an effort to buy something. You will be overwhelmed with calls, whatever, right? They will find you, they will haunt you down, right? Like, so, so, that experience today. Now that, for example, that experience, where, how does that manifest itself?
[00:09:30] It manifests itself as spam, email, bad discovery calls. You have to get multiple calls. On average per call, five to seven questions remain unanswered on the discovery call from the buyer's perspective, right? Yeah. Very centered longterm uh, uh, um, pursuit. And when you're on the call with a vendor, they don't know, most likely they don't know much about you.
[00:09:52] They don't know much about your company. They probably don't know very much about the market and it is not uncommon. That you actually, the buyer knows more about their product than the seller does, right? Like, it's very common these days. And that, you know, like you may have heard me explain that this is all because of the knowledge reversal. Shouldn't be necessarily blamed to the seller. It's just the world has shifted. The buying process is not. And so we're sitting in a process that is awry, right? The seller's process that is awry. If the buyer not liking that, that is that middle sector, right? that AI led growth. What I encourage you to think of is folks, an Uber is not a different new taxi experience. It's not a taxi that was painted black and you know, like removed all stuff on it, right? No, it's a different experience.
[00:10:39] Airbnb is a different experience. Netflix is a different experience. All these things in the modern world are different experiences first and foremost. So what we're going to see is a different buying experience that cannot be compared. The same way that an Uber and a taxi do the same thing, but are hard to compare the same way that, you know, like you're sleeping in a bed that you rent in an Airbnb and in a hotel, but those are two very different experiences, right? And so like, uh, so that's the same thing. We're going to go and experience a different buying experience. Some of that is known and still needs to be determined by the buyer. If I go back 15 years, Uber doesn't exist yet, right? Can you predict Uber Eats? Because if you can, I'd love to talk to you and I'd love you to help me what the future buying experience looks like.
[00:11:28] Because Uber Eats is a room beyond Uber. It's a dimension beyond Uber. You need to have Uber first before you get Uber Eats, right? And so we're trying to think about what will Uber Eats look like in the sales world, while we haven't, we're not completely centered on what the Uber experience looked like.
[00:11:46] What we do know, Uber wasn't invented by taxi companies. We do know Airbnb didn't come out of the hoteling industry. And personally, I was deeply involved with Netflix. Netflix did not come out of the media and entertainment industry. So if Salesforce says that they know and have the answer to this, I gotta tell you, the history has shown that the established providers in this market have no clue and are the worst part to look at because they're the ones who are generally railing that down.
[00:12:12] Anyway, so I don't see that that sales force per se or any of the established vendors has an answer to where we're going in the future.
[00:12:19] Toni: from looking at this space, they're starting to emerge a couple of glimpses though, how this thing could look like. Right. I think you have, you know, most prominently recently 11x actually kind of out of the UK now moved to the U S did a big Andreessen Horowitz round to, you know, selling practically the AI version of an SDR.
[00:12:41] Makes total sense, sends those emails, you know, sends a LinkedIn message, comes up with that stuff, takes inbound calls. Now people might love it or hate it. You know, that's actually great for 11x people have opinions about them, but you know, whatever they may be. I think we have seen a bunch of automations happening in the marketing space, right?
[00:13:00] So kind of the whole copy AI or writer, kind of those teams have built a lot of stuff around where you could see like, yeah, I can. I can see how this is going to impact marketers life. And lastly, I think we have seen similar developmentsin the support space, but I don't want to say CS, but in the support space, right.
[00:13:19] Kind of an agent answering those questions in a, in a really fast way. I think where, where people still fundamentally kind of disconnect and where, where at least kind of switched for me , you know, reading some of the research that you guys did. Okay.
[00:13:33] Here's actually a play for an account executive. Here's an, here's an account executive examplethat can be done through AI, now kind of some of the stuff that you've shown there is still, you know, you can clearly see it's early days. But it's addressing exactly this knowledge gap, right? that, you know, I think buyers have, you know, researching a lot, understanding what's going on and then meeting either a junior rep or an ill prepared rep that is unable to answer those questions and, you know, has difficulties going, Oh, let's go technical.
[00:14:04] Let's go legal. Let's go into some of the areas that are really important maybe for the buyer, but the AE really can't be expected to have any clue about any of that stuff. And suddenly with AI, snip your fingers, done, it's there, right? I mean, was this a little bit of a turning point for you as well?
[00:14:20] Kind of, you know, seeing that and kind of seeing the application of that in the go to market.
[00:14:25] Jacco: I am so excited to share all my passion with you folks. Like, I think about it day and night. Some people go, Oh, that must be a blessing. Freaking, it's a curse, right? Like this stuff. Okay. So the problem is as follows. We are currently applying AI on the same processes. Those processes were broken in the first place.
[00:14:47] Toni: Yeah.
[00:14:48] Jacco: And so, if we're moving it now, like, the reason why companies that involve themselves like 11x are working, is because they're optimizing a highly inefficient approach, and they make that more efficient.
[00:15:01] And so, think about AI has three, it does three things, and we're primarily working only on two.
[00:15:07] Number one, it does something in more volume. It just can process things at a higher volume, right? Like Bingo, love that. Number two, it does it at a lower cost. At a fraction of the cost, actually, right? Like, by my calculations, within a year, two year, at 1 50th of the cost, right? And number three, it can do things at higher quality. Now, out of those three things, people are only interested in two of them.
[00:15:38] Which would those two be?
[00:15:40] Toni: Well, volume and
[00:15:41] cost,
[00:15:42] Jacco: Volume and cost.
[00:15:43] Toni: about quality? Who cares about
[00:15:45] it? Hey, it can't beat our quality, right? So we know that. We are the high quality producers. Or the quality of our guests, that's for sure. Yeah,
[00:15:56] Jacco: the third is what buyers are asking for. That third one is what the buyer wants. The buyer wants more quality. The seller wants lower cost and higher volume. And so what most of these AI companies, including those you mentioned on, Simply based on, hey, we can either process the same amount of leads and get an improved outcome or conversion is better.
[00:16:17] Or, if you have an increase in volume, we may do it at a lower quality. That is the case. Many AI systems operate at a lower quality. But because they can process so much volume such a short time frame, the output is improved. That is in the eyes of the observer. Did we actually make an improvement?
[00:16:36] Well, the outcome is better. And to some companies, that is perfectly fine. They go like, dude, I got a million visitors on a website a day, whatever, right? Convert as much as you can and you'll be fine. most B2B would do this if they have a hundred qualified leads every day, right?
[00:16:53] Like a hundred qualified leads a day, everybody in the B2B would go like, damn, I have that. In all intents and purposes, that is a quality based business. Not a volume based business, not a low cost based business. Where AI today is very focused on lower cost, higher volume. That will change, and that is changing. And so you see companies like OneMind. com, right? Like, number one, and then Mind. com. They're more focused on can we create a quality based experience rather than a quantity based experience. Knowing That the price of this is already so low that you don't really have to think of cost. The cost is already coming down, right?
[00:17:32] like across the board, so at such a volume. Think about it that way, right? Now, in that process that we're applying, in what we're working on, we're still executing the process as is. Is it the discovery call? Is it the follow through? and we are not understanding yet What it is, and I'll give you a few examples of that.
[00:17:54] If you're open to it, I can give you a few examples of what does a new experience look like.
[00:17:58] Toni: please.
[00:17:59] Jacco: Okay. New experience looks like when the three of us are on the call and I, I simply want to know something about, let's say winning by design, right? Like I would say, Oh can somebody dial in the winning by design?
[00:18:09] And we would ping and let's say we're on a zoom session or something like that. And we see Winnie by design's agent that will soon launch will be called Winnie and Winnie will join the call. And we go like, Winnie we need to know the following. What is the price of this? Oh, Winnie gives us the price.
[00:18:24] Oh, price per, whatever, revenue architecture. See, it's just two and a half thousand dollars. Winnie, when is the Next class. Winnie, can you sign me up for that? Yes. Winnie, I need my team to do it. What does, what does 10 wool cost like? Winnie says, blah, blah, blah. Can you send me a quote right now?
[00:18:37] Winnie then asked, Jacco do you approve that or does Sherry approve that? Right? And, or do you have a colleague who approves it? I said, my colleague Sherry would approve that. Winnie would say, I know that your email is, you know, Jacco at syntax. com. Does Sherry's email follow the same syntax?
[00:18:52] Okay. Syntax. Yes. Okay. Do you mind me sending her an invite for next week? Yes. All that will, will be done with Winnie in five minutes.
[00:19:01] Okay. I have been testing now with these agents, like humanoid agents that we speak to. I don't need to be on the phone longer than 10, 15 minutes. It's stretching it when you're on the phone with an AI, because you get all the info you need because you ask straight questions, you get straight answers. I encourage you to go to OneMind. com, engage their agent in, I think it's a Chrome browser, not in a Safari browser, but do it in a Chrome browser and practice talking to an AI. The same way that when we looked at ChatGPT's cursor blinking for the first time, we didn't know what to ask.
[00:19:34] And we entered Google queries, right?
[00:19:36] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:19:37] Jacco: And a year later, we know how to work with it. And now, you know, like reflect, chat GPT, reflect on the article you just wrote and compare what it was, right? What do you think? it's a fantastic query, right? But we learn, we learn these things and how to communicate with AI. And we haven't learned how to do that with agents yet. And so we're replacing humans with agents and expecting that we're going to have a 60 minute call with an agent. No, it's going to be 10 minutes and you're going to get every info, you're going to have all the view graphs, you're going to have the details, it's all going to be emailed to you, summarized and everything in 10 minutes.
[00:20:09] Toni: this still things, it seems to me like a Q& A, a Q& A thing. Yeah. Right. But it goes much further than that. Right. I mean, these agents at least kind of what we have seen, sure they can answer specialized questions like, Hey, do you have a SOC two type two certification? Well, yes.
[00:20:27] Blah, blah. Here's the documentation,
[00:20:29] Jacco: Talking leaflet,
[00:20:30] Yeah, yes. But alsothis agent would actually then, you know, turn the table a little bit and be like, but let me ask you some questions, right.
[00:20:38] right. Now, here's where the things are happening right now.
[00:20:43] So we are right now enabling some of these agents with the winning by design SPICE methodology, right? And that is what that is, is asking questions correctly. And what we notice here, most of the agents get to what we refer to as a situation and pain question.
[00:20:57] Let me ask you what your situation is. Oh, you have this amount of people and so on. Do I get it right? Did you have this pain? Yes. And then they can pitch. What we saw with the agents that surprised us from the get go is that once we powered them with the SPICED algorithm, that they do not pitch after they learn about your pain. And that they ask, and if you say it's like, oh, how did your problem solve that? They say, oh, may I ask, you said earlier, you said this thing, and that's the impact that you wanted out. May I get it right? Is that the impact? Is that the output that you want out of this? The AI systems. started to advance the conversation further than 70 percent of our sellers do. And we know that because we categorize that, right? We go, okay, they're in the situational domain right now, they're learning about the situation, then the seller moves, identifies pain. We know what the questions are, right? 70 percent of all sellers, after they learn the pain, they start pitching their product. This is not what good sellers do. Good sellers learn what the pain is, listen carefully, and then they try to identify, okay, I know that's your pain, but what do you want the output of the thing to be? What do you want the impact to be? Then they go around that. Today's AI systems already go straight to impact now.
[00:22:15] When we saw this happening, that's when I said, it's like, we can now replace 70, based on that, we could replace 70 percent of the, of the relatively transactional sales people that sell 20, 000 platforms.
[00:22:29] Of course, if you sell a quarter million dollar software or above, you have different skill sets, multiple negotiations and decision process navigation and stuff like that.
[00:22:37] but that alone was already exceeding. this was the start where we were like two months ago. If you see where we are today, it's Yeah,
[00:22:51] Toni: I think what's actually in my head is like, well, theoretically, cool. It can obviously kind of go further, but. from your perspective and maybe you already have examples or proof of this, but the rest of the selling process.
[00:23:03] It's, it's less so, I mean, I've, I've seen some of the spin sorry, the, sorry, the spice selling. Wow. Oh, we're going to do this in postI've seen some of the spice frameworks also for the discovery call it's not scripted or something, but it's extremely well structured. I can totally see that an AI reading this.
[00:23:20] applies this perfect and, and humans will struggle with that period. As I struggled with every new thing that anyone learns. But do you think that, from this clear and structured methodology for the discovery call that the AI can also transport this over into the rest of the sales conversation?
[00:23:36] do you think we're there already or what's the situation on
[00:23:38] that?
[00:23:38] Jacco: Yes, so imagine the following. And I saw that in the demo the other day, our friends at One Mind were accidentally demoing this because they saw, you know, like, AI developers sometimes don't know how good their product is, right? They go. But what they did was the following two things. you know, like there was a second discovery call with a customer. The AI remembered everything automatically from the first discovery call. In the first discovery call. the AI in this case, her name is Mindy. Mindy extracted through the conversation, the seller said, Oh, I need to bring my CMO in this. Okay. In the second conversation, Mindy knew, Hey, last time you said you're going to bring your CMO. May I ask, is your CMO with you? Okay. Folks, that's decision process navigation.
[00:24:21] Toni: Yeah,
[00:24:22] Jacco: That is the navigating of decision process, right? Like, and then, you know, like whatever follows next. Now imagine how close we are to, if I say, let me bring my CMO in this. Right? And, or in this case, my COO, which is Sherry, and Mindy says, Okay, I looked up on your LinkedIn profile or your website. It looks like Sherry is your COO. Did I get that right? Because there's no limitation on access to information on LinkedIn, right? Like, that is merely an API call to be made, right? Look at that how many of the sellers don't know the CRM record of the customer, really?
[00:25:00] Like, there is data in the CRM, they're just not using it. They're just not looking at it and preparing with it. And I will do this all automatically. Don't get me wrong. Like I've sold multi million dollar, largest deal I've personally closed myself is 50 million plus, right? You don't do that by looking at somebody's LinkedIn profile. That's not what I'm, you know, like, that's not what I'm tackling here. What I'm tackling here is you have five discovery calls to close a 20, 000 deal, right?
[00:25:26] Can you optimize that? Oh, heck yeah. Like you can optimize the heck out of that, right?
[00:25:31] That's that middle sector. That, that, you know, like AI led growth sector that we're tackling, right? Where will it apply? High volume in our world, high volume, 20 deals a month, 50 deals a month, a hundred deals a month. You're right. Like not, not humannot like human led growth that takes six months on average.
[00:25:49] No deals that need to close.
[00:25:51] Toni: I think one other, you know, so when you think about the benefits of AI, so one is like, oh, you know, wow, the sales rep is prepared. Like that's, that's new. And the sales rep is actually answering my questions. You know? Yes.
[00:26:02] Jacco:
[00:26:02] Okay.
[00:26:03] Mikkel: so
[00:26:03] Jacco: Think of the following.
[00:26:04] I want you to step with to me in the age agentic world. Now realize where most people gets lost in the age agentic world is when they think that all the agents that I'm gonna speak about in a second. That those are real things they interact with.
[00:26:17] There's not. You interact with one agent and that agent has sub agents, for a second. And those sub agents are, they're not visible to the seller and they're not visible to, to, to, to the buyer. They're only visible to us, infrastructure providers at the back end, okay? Follow my thinking. So, I'm gonna divvy up. Three roles for ease of understanding. I'm going to have an agent to develop and generate the lead. I'm going to have an agent to close that lead. I'm going to have an agent to make that lead happy with whatever they bought. Right? Simplified, right? I'm going to go to the agent that sells, the sales agent. Underneath that agent, there will be an agent, sub agent, that specializes in discovery calls. In that agent that specializes in discovery calls, there will be an agent who is specializing in diagnosing and using question based sales techniques, which are well defined, spin selling, QBSD, all that stuff, right?
[00:27:18] Now in that agent, that agent that specializes on just asking, asking diagnostic questions will be an agent that learns, okay, Hey, today I did it a thousand times this way. I figured out like, like, like how to do that. And that agent will be running, running, running. Yes. Now there's a thousand calls a day like that.
[00:27:40] So there's a thousand calls that happen every day that execute a QBST, a Question based sales technique. It executes a particular sequence and it learns that there's an improvement already. There will be an agent checking on all, you know, question based sales techniques that comes to the conclusion, if we tweak this a little bit and we change that question and we use this word, we may have an improvement.
[00:28:06] So the next day, the QBSD based sales agent which is part of the discovery, which is part of the sales process, right, which all happens in microseconds, will get improved.
[00:28:19] And the next day it figures out that it has 12 percent improved outcome by changing the sequence.
[00:28:26] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Jacco: And so moving forward, it creates that delta and it tries to improve itself.
[00:28:30] And sometimes it moves backward, right? Now think about that happening not over a period of weeks or months. But think of that being executed at 0. 2 seconds. All that, and it happens instantly. It analyzes, it improves, it figures out, and it instantly starts to iterate itself.
[00:28:52] The point that you see down here, what is happening, is that agents have an ability to improve itself in a very short timeframe, and they will never walk out of that knowledge. Where a salespeople have a heart, has a longer closed loop cycle to train and to improve. And when they get at the crescendo, they ask for a salary increase, more stock options, and if not, they walk out of the door. Which is extremely disruptive for a company going through the S curve.
[00:29:24] Because either they have to pay, which means their sustainability goes down, or they let the, the scalability is lost. Therefore, AI agents is in a perfect application and will be applied to all those companies going through that hyper growth mode. The problem is for a lot of companies, it's too late. And I can tell you for how many, it's for about a thousand of the 1200 unicorns, it's going to be too late.
[00:29:51] Mikkel: Just wondering here, like with everyone being able to implement these systems. We're all going to have the same agents that are great at discovery calls. the whole competitive advantage around we have a stellar sales team.
[00:30:04] Will that just evaporate during 2025?
[00:30:07] Jacco: Abso frequently. Okay, realize the following. Moneyball told us this, right?
[00:30:13] The movie Moneyball. Maybe not the movie you had in mind today, but like, it is there. By the way, I can use the big short, I can use anything. Anybody who's a first mover has a disruptive advantage, right? Anyone.
[00:30:24] It's called the zero day exploit. Those people who knew about the real estate market crashing, they didn't take a big hit. They all put, you know, like walked out of hundreds of millions of profit, right? When Moneyball came out, right, and it was applied by the Oakland A Oakland Ace for the first part, but it was the Red Sox who became a champion on it.
[00:30:45] Any cycling team applied marginal gain. They were the first ones. And it is nowadays optimized by what is it? Vima jumbo, right? But the concept is whoever gets their first. Get to exploit it first. So the problem is not will we get all there? No, no, the problem is who will get there first will allow to get an advantage.
[00:31:03] We do know this in AI. If you get an advantage, the advantage will only get bigger over time, not smaller. So if you are getting in AI first and you deploy first and you're testing first, then you get the advances first and so on and so forth. That's the trick that companies don't got. And so what you and I, and what we're dealing with, and I'm doing these days, a lot of dinners with executives is like, I'm going like, look, I don't care what tool you get, I don't care where you deploy it. My advice to every listener down here is tell everybody on your executive team that in their area of function that they're responsible for. They need to do in the next 30 days a test with what AI can do and they need to experience it. Because, I hate to say it, but in our world, I would say 7 out of 10 lazy is not doing anything, right?
[00:31:55] They're just sitting on their hands because the pain of doing nothing is very minuscule versus the pain of doing something and disrupting is very, you know, it's And I'm going like, folks, they asked me, why is the market not taking the change? And I'm saying, it's simply, and I hate to say it in the wrong way, but there's not enough bodies of dead executives laying on the side of the
[00:32:13] road right now.
[00:32:14] Right. That's what's happening, right? Like that won't be the same a year from now because 2025 gentlemen will no longer be as like, Oh my God, the market, the financial market hurt us in 2021. And now we suck and we don't have money. That won't be the case any longer. 2025. Right. From everything we're seeing, and you know, folks know we have good exposure to VC and PE firms.
[00:32:37] It is like, folks, put up a shot of growth, right? like if you can't grow, you're not going to get money. We're going to take ownership of your company. We're going to have you do a down run. We're going to replace your CEO. But these things must come to bear right now. And AI is a solution. So it's kind of like pressure on, which I kind of love.
[00:32:55] Guys, are you
[00:32:55] not, are you with me? This is exciting, right?
[00:32:59] Toni: yeah, I mean, like, like, of course you know, that's exciting for people on the sidelines, as a services business, as a support, as a consultant, right. It's kind of, you're not under the same gun that the CEO is under the same gun and so forth. Right. So it's like, they have a need, they have a pain, they need to kind of, I don't want to say they're in a squeeze, but there's some expectation that they need to deliver and they're going to be looking around like, oh, you know, Jeez, who can help me?
[00:33:22] And you know what? Jacco can help you. So that's why I'm saying, right? I think it's going to be interesting. I think it's going to be fun. I think finally seeing growth again and stopping the big whine, I think I'm really looking forward to that. But obviously it depends a little bit on the perspective.
[00:33:35]
[00:33:35] Jacco: Okay, let me let me tell you why your perspective is right, but it's much bigger than that What AI is doing because it operates at a fraction of the cost it democratizes GTM You no longer need a 50 million round from a top tier Silicon Valley VC or Notion in the UK or somebody like that, right? And Notion we'll define, they're the top AI VC firm in Europe.
[00:33:57] But, you know, like, we no longer need these, gazillion dollars of rounds in order to grow, which made rapid growth primarily valuable for US companies. Every company in the world, within short, can deploy AI based GTM motions. Now, granted, if you're selling a 500, 000 software, very specific software for the, war industry or something like that, yeah, you're gonna have special sellers. But for 90 percent of all the products which aim somewhere to be sold between 1, 000 and 50, 000, right? They no longer need to hire a floor full of people in the salesforce towers, right? like, you don't need that.
[00:34:35] Toni: So
[00:34:36] Jacco: And that democratizes GTM.
[00:34:41] Toni: and kind of allows all of this you know, hyper growth and all of these wonderful things.
[00:34:45] Jacco: in a different form.
[00:34:47] Toni: yes, my point is actually kind of when you kind of flip this, you know, over to the other side, because a lot of people listening, we were like, Oh, geez, am I, am I, am I the 70 percent or am I the 30%, right?
[00:35:01] What, what is it? What do you think is going to happen? You know, I don't want to say the job market and stuff, but what do you think is going to, what's going to happen there?
[00:35:09] Jacco: Okay, this is a common misconception, and I'm going to be really harsh on this, okay? And we all need to be honest about what the market is that we're living in, okay? I'm going to draw an analogy, and I'm going to draw what we live in the world that we live in, okay? Analogy number one. I need to dig a hole, but an excavator doesn't exist yet.
[00:35:26] How am I going to dig a hole? I'm going to get a whole bunch of human beings with a shovel digging a hole, okay? The excavator comes around. Do you think that the human beings who are all breaking their backs on digging the hole go like, excuse me, I'm going to strike because I don't want that excavator, I want to continue to dig a hole myself.
[00:35:42] No. The excavator was invented for digging the hole, and the human beings were used as surplus, as a way to fix the point in time that hole needed to be dug, but we needed the excavator. Right? Now, those human beings who dug the hole were relatively unskilled labor. They need to be healthy, they need to be sound thinking, don't get me wrong, but they were unskilled labor, right? Now let me draw that analogy to that has happened in our world. Back in 2012, before, if we go back to the 2005 time frame, right, and I grew up in the 1990s as a sales professional. Sales professionals generally required about 10 to 20 years of expertise. You were not a seller in your mid 20s. You were not even a seller early thirties.
[00:36:28] You were in your forties, you became a seller because you needed to learn the trade, the product, the market, and so on. And you built extensive networks on, right? Now, starting the 2010 timeframe, we needed more sellers because of this new approach to selling this inside sales technology, the way of selling. And we couldn't hire, we had two problems. We needed them in volume, and we couldn't afford to pay them like 250, 000, 350, 000 which is what, you know, in
[00:36:58] those days I would make 250, 000, 350, 000 and would pay that to my sales teams in those days, right? And that was not even questions asked, that was thank you for showing up. and we, there's terms for that, it's called grey foxes, ball tops and stuff like that. That means that people of age, right, people who have kids in private schools and has car payments and house payments to make, they were in sales because, and they were motivated, hence the whole quota plan came out and all that. But now we're entering this whole, we need growth, we can't pay for it. So we're hiring young people, early on in their career. Who came out of 12 years of education on sales, who studied sales extensively, who had internships in sales. Okay, wait, what? Okay, no, that didn't happen. There was no 12 years in sales.
[00:37:41] There was no internships. What happened is, a whole bunch of people entered sales because they didn't like what they studied and they needed to find a home for themselves and they got, you know, no qualifications needed. I'm going to apply for that job. They need a lot of people. I can make a lot of money. The coffee machine looks fantastic, right? Ping pong during lunch. And so they came by the hordes, they came into our market. And you know, they were welcomed. We needed the capacity the same way that we needed the capacity to dig a hole, right? Well, the excavator just came around people. We have 70 percent of people that do not care, that do not listen to this.
[00:38:17] If you're listening to this podcast, I guarantee you, you're not guarantee you, but I pretty much can tell you. You are whatever, 30 minutes into this, if you're still listening to this, you're passionate about this topic, you're gonna be fine. you're part of the 30%. The 70 percent right now is not listening to this podcast, it's on their mountain bike and they will show up tomorrow at 9.
[00:38:37] 05 and leave at what, 4. 45, right? Like, you're not passionate about your job.
[00:38:44] 30 percent is the passionate people who know what they're doing, who our market will always be ready to play for, right? We just don't need any longer the people who are not interested. And believe me, you both ran sales teams. If I tell you to go back to the company, you will at least be able to pick out five people on your team of 10 that you go like, yeah, that's fine. We don't need them any
[00:39:03] longer.
[00:39:03] Toni: No, I mean, always. Yeah, of course. I think my problem is like, well, you know, Will there overnight just be more holds to dig? Right. I think the amount of demand is probably going to be kind of the same.
[00:39:14] Right. and I think that will lead to a net reduction in workforce that you need, which is also kind of the idea, right? Kind of to a degree, also kind of saying that that is actually, you know, we're coming out of this phase of growth at all costs. We're kind of still doing the same thing, but on a smaller budget, right.
[00:39:30] this is actually now a way out. This is actually now like, actually we can kind of fix it with this thing now. So it's a good thing, right. But it still means Hey, we actually don't need so many folks and that's great for some, and it's not so great for
[00:39:42] others.
[00:39:42] Jacco: I want you to think that this is a step. What we are going with AI is a step in between. A new step will occur. It is already happening. We're already seeing it and your eyes are already opened on this.
[00:39:53] So first step that we had is that the financial markets collapsed and that I call that first storm, storm number one, right?
[00:39:59] It started late 2021. And in our world, DocuSign was the first stock that dropped and it's early December, 2021 that that happened and it cascaded through. It was not a domino. It was the market as a whole who felt that you were just the first one to fall. Right. And so, so that happened, right? And we're in the remnants of that right now.
[00:40:16] In 2025, we got through that, you know, markets have re established and we're establishing growth. We're now being hit with the second. The second one is the AI market, replacing the first market. And as a result, we're trying to still execute today. Growth at all costs, but we do it growth at lower cost.
[00:40:34] Toni: Yeah, exactly.
[00:40:35] Jacco: And that's what we're using AI for.
[00:40:36] And that ain't going to work. It's going to work for a while, but that following your term, what you're saying is we're digging more holes to it. That will, will run itself into the ground.
[00:40:45] That's not where the success companies are coming from. The success companies are coming from not doing volume and lower cost.
[00:40:51] They're going to create a better quality experience, right? That new process will actually involve the remaining 30 percent of your sales team needs to do something different. Right? And teams that understand that 70 percent is going to go to AI and that 30 percent is going to human. Now, you shouldn't think of it as 70 percent of my people get replaced and 30 percent of my people stay. You should think of it as 70 percent of the activities of the, what needs to be done gets replaced. That will come out at the same result, but that means that the sales process will be optimized for humans to interact with each other with humans and for AI systems to interact with humans where they're, it will be two specialisms.
[00:41:40] So for example in person meetings, small events, small conferences with 50 executives or 50 leaders or 50, you know, like, experts meeting will be an ideal scenario Where a vendor will set up that environment, make room for that environment, invite people, let them interact with each other while they pay for the bills and facilitate the conversation, get a good speaker and so on. That will be fantastic and not for a one day event. Good sellers, a good sales professional, will go to a city like Berlinbook a meeting. They not only book a meeting with that customer that they met, but will start meeting with three other people inside the same company in
[00:42:18] multi threading. Then they will throw an pavilion event that evening where they invite people in the region.
[00:42:25] The next day they will have a workshop. That afternoon they will, you know, having dinner. Like, it will be a whole thing of events. Today, it's not. Folks, the mid market doesn't work like that, right? The mid market works like start your Zoom, close a deal, move on to the next Zoom. So that human element will come back. That's the 30%. And once a month, a week will be dedicated to pure human led growth interaction. Go ahead.
[00:42:49] Toni: you know, what we've seen with PLG and
[00:42:52] then, sorry,
[00:42:54] Jacco: When I deliver something that passionately, you got to at least affirm what I say. You got to go like, damn, that I don't, you can disagree with it or you go like, but
[00:43:03] I just laid my soul on the
[00:43:04] line.
[00:43:05] Toni: you and, and I want to take it one step further. While I think there's going to be the balancing, I think also there's going to be a merging of things. That was actually kind of where I was going. Right. So what we've seen with PLG, which is a complete, you know, it's, it's a process that's basically being run.
[00:43:20] and then over time, it was like, Hey, wait a minute. We can do some, you know, I don't know. I think they call it sales led growth and kind of have a combination of human and PLG at the same time. Right now you and I, and we are kind of talking about AI led growth based on, you know, this avatar and everything is being done and kind of no human interaction.
[00:43:37] Well, there will probably be you know, a, a motion where maybe those two things are blending a little bit, you know, it could be that you know, you have a human on the call and then you have your assistant on the call as well, that does some stuff right up. We're seeing some of that already now with those enablement tools that do like life coaching on the call and so forth.
[00:43:55] And, you know, our imagination is still a little bit too. short sighted, I feel, kind of to, to see, okay, here's a new approach and what are all the, you know, the mixing and matching, where's all of that going to end up being, right? And I think, I think there's so many additional versions on combinations that we're not currently thinking of actually when we are thinking about AI led
[00:44:15] growth.
[00:44:15] Jacco: A fantastic, you have a fantastic point. Like, I appreciate that perspective. let me add the third storm entering the room, which addresses that.
[00:44:23] So the first storm was, You know, like the financial market crashed, you know, like we need to become sustainable. And oh my gosh, we're spending 4 to acquire 1.
[00:44:31] That's probably not a good way, right? GTM efficiency, the whole talk about GTM efficiency. We come through that, we lower the cost, we fire people. Now AI comes in, right? And goes like, okay for the younger companies, I need to grow. I'm not even going to hire people. I'm going to straight go to
[00:44:45] AI, become highly competitive.
[00:44:47] 1, 000 or 1, 200 unicorns today have like hundreds of people. I saw the other day, you know, several companies and beloved people that, you know, we know like at outreach and so on, like multiple rounds of layoffs, right? And they will fight their crown back. But we'll see. Unicorns like that are going to go through a challenging time, right? And they need to just like, they grew too fast. AI will disrupt that, right? Then, the third one comes, and the third one is going to be really hard for most people to digest and understand.
[00:45:16] The problem with the third one that the market is realizing, and we start to see, you already start to see the first words coming around, is like, how can it be that I've spent ten times, I have ten times more software tools than I had five years ago, but productivity of human beings has stayed relatively flat. This understanding that we have, we're throwing too many tools into the toolshed, but nobody's using those tools and as a result productivity is not going up, is leading to an entire new understanding. Is SaaS actually the right solution? Now, in my opinion, SaaS as a software product has always been overvalued. At 20 x is definitely overvalued at 10 x is overvalued at five to seven x. We could argue whether it's value, but there's overvaluation for the product and undervaluation for the services. So give an example. Winning by Design will sit in a major Fortune 500 company. We will spend there two, three days. The tool vendor will come in for one day, right, like for one hour. That company that comes in for one hour is valued at like, like 10, 20x. The service provider who helps the people realize and builds all the human understanding is valued at one to three x.
[00:46:19] I think that that is going to balance itself. This has leading to the term software as a service or service as a software. what we see companies like Salesforce starting to do, they start to offer services. And they start to compete with services companies right now. And as a result, we're going to see massive firms starting to bonk each other heads. All this leads to the following. What is software? Because I can tell you about like a decade ago I forgot who said it. You know, you may put this in the notes or something like that. But it was a famous guy who said every, every sheet in an Excel spreadsheet is, is an application.
[00:47:00] Toni: Yeah.
[00:47:01] Jacco: Nowadays, like yesterday, we need to add some number.
[00:47:05] I took a picture with ChatGPT, right, and said add the numbers up to me. Folks, all those companies that thought that every sheet was a different application, that's now a query inside ChatGPT, right? So those companies are no longer really companies. So what are we buying? This is where we're going to see that much of the market is moving in winning by design terminology on the revenue meter.
[00:47:28] We're moving, we first were pay up front in hardware, then we will go pay up front hardware with software support contracts. Then we went to annual support contracts, SaaS. Then, you know, and now we're entering what I refer to as the PPX. We're going from SaaS. to PPX. SaaS is subscription, PPX is pay per outcome, which X stands for action, outcome, click, whatever you want to do, but it's something. Now, when we move to the PPX world, where companies are paying for outcomes, folks, we're not having annual subscriptions any longer. Now, the reason why annual subscriptions are so valuable for providers is they essentially make A lot more money on those people who are barely using the products than they are really making.
[00:48:15] You,
[00:48:16] your
[00:48:16] top
[00:48:17] Toni: like a gym membership.
[00:48:19] Jacco: right? Gym membership thing, thank you, right? And so that is going to be ripped out of the market. Now do that to, look at 1, 200 unicorns. Do that to 1, 200 unicorns and figure out who's left standing. Now, and the last point, and I know I'm talking a lot, but I'm so like, I'm sitting here and I'm seeing it right in front of me, right? Folks, of those 1200 companies, I argue that 600 of them are nothing more than mom and pop software shops. And they have a very healthy business to call on to do 30, 40 million dollars of revenue. But they have no reason to become a unicorn. They have no reason to go public. And those companies will essentially become vertical SaaS companies. And we will have gazillions of vertical SaaS companies. And when I say mom and pop, they will operate in Brazil, in the pharmaceutical center in Brazil, in the south of Brazil. and they have a fantastic business, and they use it, they won't be a global pharmaceutical software firm that does that any longer. All these markets will start to become vertical and vertical using standard products and become more, and I call them mom and pop, not to insult, but more, hey, mom and pop, high quality deliverables and so on and so forth. That's the third storm. And that third storm is brewing, right? It's right on the horizon.
[00:49:35] We can all see it.
[00:49:37] Mikkel: So actually, it's, it's kind of crazy to think about this stuff. I've just been listening to this whole conversation now. You're welcome. And the thing I keep going back to now is that the barrier to entry is incredibly low as well, because of this new technology we have. So to your point, anyone can come in and disrupt.
[00:49:53] And I heard Of all people, Ben Affleck talk about what does AI mean to the movie industry? And he was excited because now anyone who has an idea to create a movie, they can so much more easily go and create. Right. And I just wonder where is this going to take us? what's going to happen next?
[00:50:10] And what is the human involvement in whole this endeavor going to be? Like you pointed out at some point, the human hops onto the call, right?
[00:50:17] Jacco: Okay, listen to this, because you, Mikkel, you point a perfect example. Netflix, essentially, I don't know about you, but I used to go to the cinema. I'm sorry, I'm a cinema freak, right, and I hate that it's no longer there, but I used to go to the cinema at least once a week and during the hot seasons two times a week, right? I can't find a movie in the cinema any longer, because everything is on Netflix nowadays, right? And so I kind of like am disappointed about that, of course. And so we can say Netflix is killing the Hollywood industry. And believe me, although they may be in geographical, from the rest of the perspective of the world, they may be close, it's two worlds apart, right?
[00:50:54] LA and San Francisco, they don't like each other. And well, Media Land doesn't like technology, right? but look at what happened. What Netflix did, is it launched I am now watching Korean, you know, like pop,
[00:51:10] you know, series, I'm
[00:51:11] watching Norwegian, right? I'm watching Norwegian crime. I'm watching Spanish robbery series, right?
[00:51:16] I'm watching Dutch crack movies, right? Like whatever, you know, Freddy is, right? Like, but like, and so suddenly, Netflix enables a movie and entertainment industry with an outlet that says, Hey, I got an outlet to the world. You create. And suddenly we have all kinds of regions demonstrating with all kinds of local, regional artists and actors finding a job. Yes. What did this cost? We are no longer funneling all our money to Hollywood. We are now
[00:51:45] funneling it to Amsterdam and to London and to Berlin and to Munich and Paris where the local people. That, what we say, do not fear innovation, it doesn't threaten a job, it has historically proven that innovation creates jobs, but not at the same place where it disrupts it, right?
[00:52:04] It creates it elsewhere. And so like I said, about 70 people are losing their job because, folks, wherever AI creates a new job, that's where they will pop up, right? And they will be fine. We don't have to worry about that,
[00:52:17] right? Like, we can't design a business around taking letting us, let innovation stop us because we're worried about the 70%. But Netflix is a perfect example. And it's Mikkel, thank you for bringing it up.
[00:52:29] Mikkel: I also wonder, and this is super difficult also for us to even start guessing, because humans are really terrible at estimating time. And we can sit and be really optimistic and say 2025. But how long will this kind of next wave take to really materialize? Do you
[00:52:45] think?
[00:52:46] Jacco: that we have an answer for today. So many of you know Moore's Law, which by the way is not a law, but like as a technologist, it's, you know, like whatever it is, right? It's a bridge to think about it. It's not governed by, scientific principles. But Moore's law is, you know, like every 18 months we are able to do 2x the amount of, you know, the price of the system goes about half or we can double about the number of transistors in the old days on a square space, right?
[00:53:11] So we now have an AI law. And again, it's not a law, but it is about AI quadruples in performance every year about four times. So every year it goes, the
[00:53:24] performance from AI goes up about 4x. If you do that for 10 years, right, which, you know, and look, I'm not talking about the AGI detailed cancer research AI performance. In our world of two human beings communicating with each other, for the next decade, we're going to improve 4x year over year, right? And for our intensive purposes, we are already in the world of AGI. And what I mean with that is we're already world in the chat GPT and the like, the engines that we're currently running on with agents will give us AGI like performance for what we need, right?
[00:54:01] We don't have to
[00:54:02] wait for it, it's already
[00:54:03] Toni: happened in our world. But it goes up 4x every time. Now, if you do 4x to the power of 10, right? Any idea on what you think that will come out? I don't know. It's like 400 or something like that.
[00:54:17] Yeah.
[00:54:19] Jacco: in a decade from now our AI systems will be a million times better than today. A million times better. Okay,
[00:54:30] Toni: Yeah. let's visualize that, you know?
[00:54:32] Jacco:
[00:54:32] you can't visualize
[00:54:33] that, right? But like, take a pizza, Cut it in, you know, like try to imagine what a million pieces will look like and then go
[00:54:39] like that millions of pieces what you have right now and that pizza is like, we can't comprehend it. Human beings cannot comprehend, you know, like large volume of that, right, and exponential behavior. We are just not
[00:54:53] good at
[00:54:53] that.
[00:54:55] Toni: So, and maybe to you know, close it out a little bit. Last time you were here, we were talking about the, I want to call it now the SaaS collapse. We didn't, you didn't say it like this, but we talked basically about that, right. and one of the very memorable lines there was like, Hey folks, You're one of the 1%, you know, knowing about this, you can do something about this.
[00:55:14] Now here, listen, this is what you need to do about, right. And see there, some of the SaaS collapse was like, you know, some of that was ongoing, but it really accelerated and kind of, we all were like, Hey, you know, obviously Jacco was right. Now we're seeing this AI change happening. What is it that the top 1 percent that's listening to this, what is it that they should be taking away from like, Hey, I need to do those, the cliff notes, you know, AI summary.
[00:55:36] what are the three things of, you know, what should people be doing right now that they've acquired this knowledge?
[00:55:42] Jacco: Work with AI, find a solution for AI for your product, or talk to your team and let, if you're a CEO, and let your team, tell your team that everybody needs to, for the next 30 days, experiment with the AI that is dedicated to their particular segment, right? Everybody has a form of an AI. I would ask them to ask of yourself the following question. When you look back a year, two years from now, right? Two years from now, AI, ChatGPT came out right about
[00:56:10] now, two
[00:56:10] years from now, right? Compared to how much you did Google search then, if you compare that to today, how much Google searching you do, in your case, what do you say? How much percentage are you still on Google versus where you were two years ago?
[00:56:26] Toni: I don't know, 30, 40% maybe, something like that
[00:56:28]
[00:56:28] Toni: on my mobile. I'm like, more on Google. I realized for some reason, I
[00:56:31] dunno.
[00:56:32] Jacco: Okay. That's primarily because you touch your hand and you, you think it on your phone, right? The moment in time you install your ChatGPT app on the
[00:56:39] phone, then, you know, like that even is game over, right? Like, so, but it's because you haven't installed the app, which is, you know, like, because we think of it as a web app more than, but you'll get there. Okay. But once you, we're going to find, and I'll take a careful number, we're, taking into account that we are doing 30 percent less on Google searches than we used to do two years ago. Is
[00:57:01] that a fair assessment?
[00:57:02] Toni: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:57:03] Mikkel: Absolutely. Yeah, I saw from a big search guy called Ran Fishkin, that it now accounts for roughly 6 percent of all searches, where YouTube is like seven. So it's pretty big now in the whole pie chart.
[00:57:17] Jacco: And what we're seeing is that took two years. If I told you that Google would be threatened, like Google had,
[00:57:25] we know now that Google held its AI developments back to milk the SEO system for as long as they could, right? They just went into cash cow mode and go like, we're holding it back and they're going to have to pay for that price because JetGPT rushed in and took it away from them, right?
[00:57:38] Like had Google done this? The way they should have, then we would not have an issue. But they got caught, they got caught, right? And so now we're, we're, that, the world's largest internet company per today, right? Just got caught out in the cold. And that cost them 20 to 30 percent of my searches two years. I want you to extrapolate that for another two years and see which companies is going to do that again, and again, and again. And the thing is, I'll give you an idea. when we put humankind on the moon it cost Western civilization as a whole about 37 billion. You can look, you can chat GPT that if you want, right? You chat GPT that what the economic value is today, it would be 150 billion, which equates to the investment we currently have done in AI over the past years. Cancer, over the past 25 years, 200 billion dollars is approximately invested in cancer research, according to Chet GPT, right? The only two industries that have historically gone faster and bigger up to this point, nuclear energy, and, although it's unrecorded, the US weapons industry probably want to say, hold my beer, I got something to say about this, right?
[00:58:50] those are the two. And we could argue that AI is a new weapons developer, and then we can all, okay, so this thing, is applying what the engine that we're applying to sales that is affecting this, this web talk ultimately is powered by 150 billion investment, which is going to double over the next three years. It's started. It's unstoppable folks. It is Accelerating, right? Like, and it's not like, Oh, outreach came out with a new algorithm and it's competing with sales loft against the new algorithm and these two people are duking it out and we're all benefiting from their duking it out.
[00:59:30] Right? No, you got like two of the largest bohemians in the world throwing government like money at it, right? Powered by governments.
[00:59:40] I go like people, can we please surf that wave? Can we please say, thank you very much. Let's surf that wave in, right? Like. Again, most executives sit on their hands, because, I'm sorry to say, they're too old in their mind.
[00:59:54] Whether their physical age has nothing to do with it, but they're in their mind too old. They can no longer adjust to all these changes. They're too old for it. They go like, I can't deal with all these changes. And as a
[01:00:05] result
[01:00:06] Toni: had this Mikkel and I had this feeling like six or twelve months ago, where and you know, maybe we're still there. I'm not quite sure. But we had this feeling like, geez, all of these guys are talking about AI and, you know, we tried ChatGPT, but we're not really
[01:00:20] Mikkel: using it.
[01:00:20] Can't trust it.
[01:00:21] Toni: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just the next, you know, web three kind of thing. That has certainly changed, right? So, I mean, I used to be an AI skeptic actually, you know, up until like, I think three months ago. I feel like, and now I've flipped. I've completely flipped you know, in this regard and really excited.
[01:00:37] Like I can't imagine you excited on this level. I don't think anyone can, by the way. But you know, without me being able to express it, I'm really excited about what this thing is going to bring. But also as a dad, I'm also like, Shit, you know, what are my kids actually going to do? And you know what, it's fine that I don't know.
[01:00:55] My mom also didn't know this about me. So it's, it's fine. that kind of exists, but you gotta ask sometimes your questions, you know, like, Hey, what's going to happen in 10, 20 years from now? And, your example of, Hey, you know, if something, you know, four to the power of 10 is like a million or whatever.
[01:01:10] It's like, yeah, forget about it. We're not going to figure this out right now. We kind of need to live through it to see it. but those things do kind of captivate your mind
[01:01:18] sometimes.
[01:01:18] Jacco: Okay, there is a fantastic role down here and there's a fantastic future. I'll align this with my wife the other day in the Tahoe mountains stepping on a wasp nest and being stung multiple times to which she had an allergic reaction.
[01:01:31] her breathing started to hurt her. She didn't rush to the emergency room.
[01:01:35] So the doctors told her like, whenever that happens, anything that you get stung and that starts contriving your breathing, emergency room, period, so for those listeners. Now she got stung, but she didn't go to the emergency room. Her body recovered and so on. In the days following up, she schedules an appointment with a doctor to go over it. And she starts researching the topic. Of wasps, you know, like what the venom is and so on and so forth. She shows up at the doctor. I went with her, the general practitioner. And the general practitioner, long story short, fantastic practitioner, not a problem on the practitioner side, but doesn't know that much about venom and how to treat it.
[01:02:09] Knows the general stuff like, hey, here's an EpiPen, next time go to the emergency room. But other than that, thank you very much for coming and don't be so stupid again that you, when you get stung, that you just wait it out, right? We go back and it was not a, we're not happy with the outcome, right? And think there to yourself what is happening. The general practitioner, let's say, has half a day of people visiting her. In this case her. And so, Every person that visits has done CHED GPT like analysis a year from now, done research, knows what their disease is, and this poor woman has, doctor, has to deal with 25 different cases coming at her of well researched people, right? She ain't, like, she can never, as a general doctor, she can petition, she can never answer to that. That's the world of the sales profession right now. Right? Now, refer to surround. Will my wife Maureen, if there is a specialist out there in the world, who specializes in venom, and knows the difference, and so, Maureen will never be able to do that, right?
[01:03:18] Like, what is that, that curve again, that you know too much, but you never know anything, right? There's a curve, a forgetting curve, or something like that. But imagine Maureen does that, right? And she goes to a specialist, a specialist, she won't be able to be the specialist, right? My point is this. If you're passionate about what you are passionate about, then you're an expert at that. And folks, the two of you are among the best podcasters. The way you ask questions, let me talk, and stuff like that. I thank you very much for that, right? But you are fantastic, did your research, all that. If you're an expert at that, then you don't have nothing to fear. Right? Like, like, that's the point that I'm trying to tell you. Like, like, be an expert and do what you do passionately. And those people who listen to this call an hour, an hour into it, if you're still listening, you're passionate about this topic.
[01:04:05] And you'd
[01:04:06] have nothing to fear. You will go with the wave. You will learn about your new topic. You will learn about JGPT. What's the next thing? The One Minds and so on and so forth. You will employ it. You will have nothing to fear. But what we don't need in the future world is generalists who pay a price, who ask a salary of a, of a specialist, but are unable to deliver against it.
[01:04:23] We don't no longer need that.
[01:04:27] Toni: Jacco, thank you so much for spending the time with us. It was a pleasure
[01:04:32] Mikkel: always. And there's a bunch to read up on here. There is a research paper on this. We'll link it in the show notes. I'm sure there's also a Winning by Design video on YouTube. If you haven't seen those yet, check them out. I don't know, Jacco, is there still music being played during those videos?
[01:04:48] Jacco: I can no longer do that because I get constantly struck. like the YouTube stops.
[01:04:54] Toni: Oh yeah. Copywriting, right?
[01:04:55]
[01:04:55] Jacco: well, copywriting
[01:04:56] is fine. It just means that they place advertisements in your content and they, you know, they send it to the rightful owner of the song. And so I don't have an issue with that. The reason why you can no longer do video is because they stop distributing it because they go like, Hey, we can't promote that video, right?
[01:05:08] You got to float on your own abilities. And then yeah, we
[01:05:12] have
[01:05:13] 20, 000, 22, 000 followers, but I do like an occasional somebody I don't know watch my videos, right?
[01:05:19] Toni: Yeah. the good old times of Jacco videos. no longer available, no. And
[01:05:23] Mikkel: realize in 20 25, 5, but still in 2025, he'll just write a transcript or a prompt, and then he has like an AI version of himself just being recorded. He can sit on the chair, on the lawn and just
[01:05:34] relax.
[01:05:35] Jacco: You were close. The 2025 version, I have an AI system generate my own music track. So I do not have licensing rights to contend with. It's just like that, you know, like then I can go back to music, but you know, like I had to be very cautious. The other thing that I also found is that we all need, you folks, we're all educating people, right?
[01:05:56] and the education that we need is not coming in the normal way. Schools are not educating people the right way. So in the end Mikkel and Toni, you folks are the education of this market, right? That's the function that you nowadays provide. So I highly encourage you to continue to do what you're doing with the podcast and focus more on AI and where it were placed.
[01:06:15] Toni: we are thinking about exactly that.
[01:06:16] Mikkel: Thanks so much for joining Jacco. a pleasure to have you.
