ClickUp’s $1M Bet on the 100× Marketer

When I first saw ClickUp’s job posting for a “100x marketer,” I assumed it was a prank or a clever PR stunt.

The role promised one person who could own brand, positioning, campaigns, creative direction, social, content, email, lifecycle marketing, production systems, and quality control. The person wouldn’t manage a team of 50. They’d build the systems, direct the AI agents, and review everything with enough taste to separate great work from garbage.

The compensation came with a million-dollar growth path—not necessarily a million-dollar salary on day one.

It’s a bold bet. It’s also a useful thought experiment because it asks where marketing is going, what AI can realistically handle, and what still requires a human being in the driver’s seat.

My conclusion is simple: a 100x marketer probably won’t replace a marketing team of 50 anytime soon. But a marketer who uses AI to remove organizational bottlenecks can create far more leverage than one who merely produces more content.

That distinction matters.

The 100x marketer sounds impressive—but the job description hides a problem

ClickUp’s definition of an “artisan” is compelling. This person has refined taste, understands the audience and market, knows what to build, and can evaluate dozens of AI-generated options quickly. The agents are the hands. The marketer is the taste and judgment.

That’s a much better description of advanced AI-assisted marketing than “just write better prompts.” The real work involves orchestrating systems, evaluating output, correcting course, and making high-stakes decisions without endless committees.

But the description also quietly bundles together several highly specialized jobs.

• Brand strategy and positioning
• Campaign strategy
• Copywriting and creative direction
• Video and visual production
• Social media and community engagement
• Email and lifecycle marketing
• Marketing operations and automation
• Quality assurance across every channel

It’s possible to find people who are strong in several of these areas. It’s extremely rare to find someone who is elite at all of them, understands AI systems deeply, and can operate inside a large company without becoming overwhelmed by meetings, approvals, politics, and competing priorities.

Even if that person exists, why would they take the job?

Someone capable of building and running a 100x marketing operation may already have a profitable consultancy, agency, product, or small company. They may value control and flexibility more than a large compensation package tied to someone else’s strategy. A million-dollar opportunity will attract applicants, but it won’t necessarily attract the one person who can actually do everything the role demands.

AI agents require tradeoffs, not just more capability

One reason this role feels premature is that people often discuss AI agents as if more capability automatically solves the problem.

It doesn’t. Every system has tradeoffs. An agent may be fast, tireless, and capable of producing dozens of variations. But it may also lack context, taste, accountability, or the ability to recognize when a technically correct output feels completely wrong for the brand.

That last part is especially important in marketing.

I can get away with AI-generated thumbnails for an AI marketing show because the audience expects that aesthetic. But other brands I work with can’t use the same approach without seeming inauthentic. Their appeal depends on a more human point of view. The technology may be identical, but the brand context changes the acceptable tradeoff.

ClickUp does some funny short-form content and social posts. That kind of humor often depends on timing, cultural awareness, and a sense of what the audience will find familiar or surprising. Maybe an AI system will eventually handle that well. Today, I’d be cautious about assuming it can.

There’s also the problem of review volume. The job description suggests that the artisan can look at 50 AI-generated options and instantly choose the two worth publishing. That sounds efficient until you ask what those 50 options are.

Are they 50 headlines? Maybe.

Are they 50 emails, 50 social posts, 50 ad concepts, 50 landing pages, or 50 videos of different lengths? That’s a different problem. Reviewing output still takes time. If one person is responsible for every marketing surface, the human reviewer becomes the bottleneck.

AI can generate faster than a person can evaluate. That doesn’t create infinite capacity. It creates a growing queue of decisions.

More output doesn’t necessarily mean better marketing

Marketing leaders often assume that if AI makes production cheaper and faster, the logical next step is to produce more.

I’m not convinced.

More content can create more opportunities, but it can also create more noise, more mediocre experiments, more brand inconsistency, and more work for the people who have to review, approve, distribute, measure, and improve it.

I’ve experienced a small version of this myself. I once over-automated a marketing system in Infusionsoft while working in higher education. The system technically worked, but the experience started to feel robotic. We had optimized the workflow and lost some of the human voice.

That’s the danger of treating AI as a production multiplier without deciding what should remain human. You can easily create a machine that publishes constantly while making the brand less trustworthy.

This is one reason I’ve written about the human loss many marketers are feeling around AI. The concern isn’t irrational. When every decision gets pushed into a system, people can feel their craft being reduced to prompts, templates, and approvals.

The answer isn’t to reject AI. It’s to be more deliberate about where human taste, empathy, responsibility, and original thinking matter most.

The real path to 100x leverage is fixing bottlenecks

The most useful idea I took from this conversation is that becoming a 100x marketer isn’t primarily about orchestrating more agents.

It’s about removing constraints.

Every organization has a bottleneck that limits what the rest of the team can accomplish. It might be slow approvals. A broken CRM. Unclear positioning. Poor lead follow-up. A lack of usable customer research. A campaign process that requires six handoffs. Or a senior leader who has become the only person capable of making certain decisions.

If you make a non-bottleneck activity 10 times faster, the organization may barely notice. If you remove the constraint holding back revenue or customer experience, the impact can be dramatic.

That’s why I keep returning to this sequence:

1. Find the constraint. Where does work pile up? What repeatedly delays growth?
2. Define the problem precisely. Don’t say “marketing is slow.” Identify which decision, handoff, system, or capability is causing the delay.
3. Use AI to investigate and design solutions. Let AI help collect information, compare options, document processes, write code, and expose patterns.
4. Keep ownership of the decision. AI can recommend a path, but a person needs to decide what the company is willing to trade off.
5. Measure whether the constraint moved. Productivity metrics are useful, but the real question is whether the business can now move faster or perform better.

This is more practical than asking whether AI can replace 50 people. It asks what the company actually needs to improve.

For a deeper starting point, I’d use the framework in What Marketing Workflows Should You Automate With AI First? Start with repetitive work, but don’t stop there. The highest-value use of AI is often helping you work through the complicated problem everyone has avoided.

AI should help marketers move through bottlenecks—not become the bottleneck

AI has made it much easier for me to get unstuck.

When I hit a technical problem in WordPress, a CRM, a website build, or some other system, I can usually investigate and find a path forward much faster than I could before. AI can scan documentation, explain code, suggest fixes, and help me test alternatives.

That’s real leverage. But I’m still responsible for steering the project.

Ken pointed out something that’s easy to miss: as marketers build increasingly complex AI workflows, they can become passengers in their own systems. That happened to me recently while I was working through ideas for a project. AI started taking the conversation in a direction that sounded plausible but wasn’t aligned with the actual goal.

I had to stop and say, in effect, “This isn’t the goal. This is the goal.”

That kind of correction sounds obvious, but decision fatigue makes it easy to hand over the wheel. When a system gives you a polished answer, you may accept it even if it’s solving the wrong problem.

This is where the human edge in marketing becomes practical rather than philosophical. The human advantage isn’t simply being creative. It’s knowing what matters, recognizing what doesn’t, understanding the consequences, and choosing which tradeoffs are acceptable.

Soft skills will matter more as AI expectations rise

There’s another responsibility marketers need to prepare for: managing expectations upward.

Executives are seeing bold claims about 100x organizations, autonomous agents, and teams replaced by systems. Some will assume the technology is further along than it is. If marketers don’t explain the gap, the pressure will eventually land on the team.

That makes communication with leadership a core AI skill.

Don’t simply say, “AI can’t do that.” Explain what it can do, where it needs supervision, what quality will be sacrificed, and what experiment would produce useful evidence.

For example, instead of promising to replace an entire team, propose a contained test:

• Choose one marketing surface, such as lifecycle email or paid social creative.
• Document the current process and baseline results.
• Use AI to reduce handoffs and accelerate variations.
• Keep human review and brand accountability in place.
• Compare speed, quality, conversion, and team capacity after a defined period.

This approach gives leadership something better than hype: a measurable learning loop.

It also protects the team from being judged against an exaggerated promise. A marketer may be able to 10x one part of the workflow while creating unacceptable sacrifices elsewhere. That’s still valuable information.

What marketers should do now

I don’t think marketers need to become full-time AI engineers. I do think we need to keep developing practical AI fluency.

Start with the work closest to your expertise. If you’re strong in lifecycle marketing, use AI to improve segmentation, analysis, testing, and documentation. If you’re a content strategist, use it to organize research, identify gaps, and explore angles—but keep the point of view human. If you’re technical, build small tools that remove recurring friction before you attempt an elaborate agent architecture.

You don’t have to chase every new term. I can’t keep up with every new framework, orchestration pattern, agent swarm, or tool. I’ve narrowed my own focus at different points to a smaller set of tools and practical projects. That’s enough to keep learning without spending every day rebuilding the stack.

Use AI to make your existing strengths more powerful before trying to become a completely different kind of professional.

And don’t confuse complexity with leverage. If you’ve created a sophisticated system that requires constant maintenance but doesn’t move an important business constraint, you may have built yourself a new job.

That’s the opposite of 100x.

The marketer stays in the driver’s seat

ClickUp’s job posting is valuable even if the exact role is impractical today. It forces us to imagine what happens when one person can direct a large collection of AI systems.

Some parts of that future are already here. Marketers can research faster, produce more variations, write code, automate repetitive tasks, and solve technical problems with less help.

Other parts still require a great deal of human judgment. Taste doesn’t scale automatically. Brand trust can’t be reduced to output volume. And no system eliminates the need to decide what the organization should do next.

The best use of AI isn’t creating 50 more things for one person to review. It’s helping that person identify and remove the constraint that matters most.

So keep learning the tools. Build useful systems. But stay responsible for the goal, the standards, and the consequences. AI can be the hands. It shouldn’t be the driver.

The conversation delves into the job description of a 100X marketer at ClickUp, exploring reactions, feasibility, challenges, and practicality of the role. The discussion highlights concerns about the role's impact on the marketing team and the company's operational structure. The conversation delves into the challenges of ClickUp, the operational side of business, the radical job boasting experiment, the human element in AI marketing, the capabilities and sacrifices of AI agents, the role of AI in marketing, the future of AI in marketing, managing expectations and soft skills, fixing bottlenecks with AI, and the impact of AI on work and productivity.

Takeaways

* The concept of a 100X marketer raises questions about the feasibility and impact of such a role in a marketing organization. * The job description of a 100X marketer at ClickUp sparks discussions about the practicality and implementation of such a role in a large organization. AI agents require a balance of capabilities and sacrifices * Managing expectations and soft skills are crucial in the AI marketing landscape.

Chapters

* 00:00 The 100X Marketer Job Description * 03:02 Reactions to the Job Description * 06:11 Feasibility and Impact of the Role * 08:54 Challenges and Concerns * 12:06 Practicality and Implementation * 16:40 The Challenge of ClickUp * 17:10 The Operational Side of Business * 18:15 The Radical Job Boasting Experiment * 19:19 The Human Element in AI Marketing * 20:12 The Capabilities and Sacrifices of AI Agents * 21:29 The Role of AI in Marketing * 22:40 The Future of AI in Marketing * 26:06 Managing Expectations and Soft Skills * 32:18 Fixing Bottlenecks with AI * 37:22 The Impact of AI on Work and Productivity

Welcome back to the AIdriven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez and I'm joined by my friend Ken Ferret. Yo, what's up, bro? And today we're talking about being a 100x marketer. If you didn't see from LinkedIn posts and uh just general news going around is that ClickUp, yes, that big software company that is like a big I I don't even know what to explain ClickUp. They kind of do a little bit of everything these days, but it's kind of like an interactive, I don't know, Excel sheet in the sky kind of a thing. That's what they started as and now it does a lot of stuff. Project management system. Is that fair, Ken? I mean, they table competitor. I'm biased. ClickUp project management system. Note to make on I tried it once and it was clunky as all get out, but it's a big company. Lots of people love ClickUp. Um, it's fine. you know, it's up there with Air Table and Monday.com. It's kind of in that realm. Um, but they've gone all in on this AI deal and they recently posted a job description which is kind of causing a little bit of a stir. My good friend Ashley Foss sent this to me and she's like, "Dude, what do you think about this?" And I saw it and I was like, "What?" And I was like, "Well, maybe." But with that in mind, I just need to read it to you. So, I'm going to read it here on the podcast and then we're going to talk about it because this this is kind of a big marker of what we could be looking at for the future. Um, but we have to ask the question, is this an indicator of what's to come? Is this where we should be thinking about aiming our careers as marketers? That's what we're going to talk about. But first, let me actually just read the job description. Okay, so it starts off from ClickUp. And the title of this job title is 100x marketer, chief marketing officer. Okay, so that's the title. And then we see from Zeb Evans, the CEO. We're executing on the 100xorg. I'm looking for one person to own the entire brand marketing function at ClickUp. Not manage a team of 50, not sit in meetings all day, not write briefs for other people to execute. One person who builds the systems that produce worldclass marketing at scale and reviews everything with taste. Uh sharp enough to know the difference between great and garbage. Good copyrightiting right there. Good alliteration. We call this person an artisan. What is an artisan? An artisan is not just a quote unquote good marketer. An artisan is someone with whose taste and judgment are so refined they can orchestrate AI systems at hyper speed while maintaining quality that lesser teams can't achieve at any speed. Taste. They know what good looks like before it exists. They can evaluate 50 AI generated options and immediately identify the two worth publishing. They're internalizing the craft so deeply that quality assessment is instantaneous judgment. They know what to build, not just how. They understand the audience, the market, the trade-offs is uh well enough to make high stakes calls without committees. Speed of orchestration. They don't just prompt AI. They op they operate AI systems like instruments. Fast iteration loops, rapid evaluation, continuous course correction which takes a team 15 uh team of 15 six weeks takes artisans days. Ownership breath. An artisan owns a surface end to end. Not the social part, not the email part, the whole thing. Strategy, systems, execution, quality. Fewer people means fewer handoffs. Fewer handoffs means faster, better output. This is the marketing equ equivalent of what an a 10x engineer does. Own an entire product surface idea execution live. Uh the only two things that matter uh yeah it says only two things that matter is systems and I'm going to spare the description of systems. Can you or essentially can you build a mark uh marketing system that compounds and two review can you judge quality at absurdly high bars what you own brand messaging and positioning for everything ClickUp puts into the world campaign strategy creative direction and systems that execute execute them social media presence content and engagement email marketing drip campaigns and life cycle flows content production pipelines across all formats quality gates nothing ships unless it meets your bar you build systems that do it. You are the taste. The agents are the hands. So, this is the job description. It is up to a CMO title. So, not guaranteed CMO title. And you get about a million comp growth growth path. So, it doesn't even guarantee a million-doll salary at first. A million comp growth path as in you'd grow into a million dollars. So, you probably wouldn't start that at the beginning. Uh, and there's a few other things on this. I skipped over a couple paragraphs explaining systems and review, but that's generally the resume, the 100x marketer. Ken, initial reaction to this crazy job post. I thought it was a prank. [laughter] I thought they were just messing. I was like, well, ClickUp does a bunch of random stuff. And then I was like, it's got to be It's got to be like them just messing with us. It could be a PR stunt, that's for sure. I wouldn't be surprised. I would be like, "Okay, cool." Like, it's a fun PR stunt, but man, I I'm honestly my my the my real hot take was that like this person is going to be set up to fail because that that I don't think the tech is there yet to do everything that this person wants to do. And you got to find someone who's such an expert at so many different areas of marketing to be able to pull this off. Well, um that that's my initial I mean I could go into my own rant, but I'll let you give your your input. I went and pulled the audience over on LinkedIn and we've had 74 votes. Not a great showing on the poll, but not bad. I don't know. I haven't been regular on LinkedIn lately, so my posts haven't been getting as much reach and that's okay. 74 is good enough though. And I asked I asked the crew uh could a supermarketer with insane tech chops replace a marketing team of 50 people. Okay. And then I also gave some context. This is like what ClickUp's hiring for. And maybe it's just a PR stunt. What do you think? And but the options I gave them were four different options. Absolutely. Yes. But with sacrifices maybe in two year or two and then absolutely not. And the results are as following. Absolutely got 12%. Yes, but with sacrifices got 18. Maybe in a year or two got 14 and absolutely not got 54. So well over half are like no way. Not even close. Just no. Hard no. Hard pass, you know. And a little chunk 15%. It's not a big chunk. Said maybe in a year or two. They're like ah someday maybe because they're seeing where it's going. I said yes, but with sacrifices and uh you know a very the smallest portion of people 12% said absolutely not or absolutely. So it's kind of like I'm kind of in the absolutely yes but with sacrifices and like asterisk major massive sacrifices. Sure. Could it be done? Yes. Is it the best? Is it worth it? Uh no. [laughter] And and I always say like if you had a marketing team of three, it might be better. But likely, right? Like 50 I'm thinking of the whole architecture. You have someone who's so specialized in certain areas that like you have a great copy uh a copywriter, a great media buyer. You have certain people that could do such extreme specialized skills. It's almost like saying to the CEO, "Hey, you don't need a CMO. You could do it. Just do a have AI do it. Why don't you just have someone set up a system and then you run it? It's it's it's that logical fallacy. Like I just got to say this before I'm done. If I were ClickUp's competitor, wouldn't it be funny if you were like Air Table and you're like job posting the thousandx CEO [laughter] just as like a reverse PR stunt. If it is a PR stunt, you know, that would be really funny. Well, you know, like there's two things that I that come to mind on the the job description. They said fewer handsoff means faster, better output. And I'm like, yeah, but that you're assuming that the CMO has the ability to interpret all that output. Like if they don't, it's going to come out like garbage and sooner or later it is. The second thing that I thought when I was reading this, what are all of the marketing people at ClickUp right now thinking? all their employees if they see this. Oh, bro, I didn't even think about the indicator of like, we don't value you if you're not one of these 100x marketers. Yeah. It It's just like, should they start looking for jobs right now? Should they be on the hunt? Are they in on it? Like, there's just stuff. A lot of tech companies have already been sending the signals of like, we're going to be 100x orgs, we're going to be AI first, blah blah blah. This has been happening for over a year now. So, like, if you work in tech, like, come on. The writing's been on the wall that this is the expectation now. So everybody better be token maxing even if productivity isn't increasing just for the appearance of token maxing productivity. [laughter] Sorry if you're working in tech I you've been hammered lately because of this stuff. So but everybody else has to think about it because this is sending a signal and other people CEOs specifically start to borrow from other CEOs. this is going to have an impact even if it doesn't like have the like everybody starts hiring it. It's going to start making CEOs think how they evaluate marketing teams because of stuff like this. Um I do think it's actually possible. I even for a company the size of um of of ClickUp which they need a lot of stuff. They have a lot of social accounts. They they have a lot going on. I just don't think it'll be very good. Even if that marketer is like world class like so this this person also even if it's possible this person is going to be incredibly rare. Like I've interviewed probably hundreds of marketers lots of fantastic marketers. There's only a few that are this good marketing wise and then very there's even less that are this good and have serious AI chops that can orchestrate agent. Shoot I struggle to orchestrate more than one at a time. Let let alone create these crazy loops that now loop loop loops are old now. Do you hear what the new thing is? Grids. I don't even know what that is yet. [laughter] Grids. But people are like loops are out, grids are in. I'm like freaking what does that even mean? [laughter] You know, have you heard I have not heard of grids, but you know the thing I'm thinking about with this scenario is again, if there's a CMO who could do this, why would they come work at ClickUp? They're already doing their own thing. That was my thought, too. I'm like, okay, even if you got a million dollar compensation package out of the gate, like a million dollars a year, I don't know what I How much is that a month? Uh, what? It's probably about 100. Gosh, 100K a month. Almost 100K a month. Yeah, it's a little less freak. It's so much money. [laughter] So much money. But even if you did, that person, if you're that good that you can actually crush it, is probably a multi-millionaire already. Let's be honest, if you're that good at marketing and that good at tech, you already freaking figured it out how to do it solo and scale a little small organization that creates a lifestyle that you want. Why the heck would you work for ClickUp? [laughter] Yeah. and all of a sudden have to bend to the whims of the CEO even if you report directly to the CEO which you do in this position, right? So, it's like like how are they going to tempt this person? Now, I know because I posted about it and I asked this question, you know, there are a few people that were like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Well, some of them I'm like, "Well, like are you I don't know if you're this person." And some of them I don't know because I didn't know them at all. I'm like, "Well," he's like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Did you apply?" He's like, "Yep." I'm like, "Well, I don't know you, so I can't eval evaluate whether you got the marketing and the tech chops." Um, but, you know, million-dollar comp packages will attract people, but will it attract the person that can actually do do it? I don't know. I I think they probably will try to hire this person and see what they can do, and it'll be very interesting. I'd rather do it as an experiment rather than I I don't know. Are they going to let go of their whole marketing team? I don't know. Yeah, I mean I would assume that they would have this 100x marketer like doing their own thing. They'll have the other they'll pretty much if they were smart, they fire the whole marketing team and be like, "Oh, shoot. Maybe we can't outsource the whole marketing team to one person yet." They would split test it like split uh and check like who does better at what. But I I I have a feeling that this is a little bit more of a extreme, you know, like let's just do a little PR stunt. this person may end up being a marketer. They they may get rid of say they have 50 employees, they might get rid of 10 because this marketer cannot do this. But to have just one person um is and with a $4 billion company, you got to know there's so much moving parts that it's like from an organizational and operational structure, it just sounds like this person would be working like 24/7, 365 and have a miserable life. Yeah. Just to get everything set up. And they also have a similar one because a company this big doesn't have a lot of room for failure. So if you post something and it's not great, people are going to point it out. You know, at at ClickUp size, they would. But if you were doing this solo, like it's a lot easier because if you miss with your systems, then you know, you just recalibrate and try again. But like a company at ClickUp size, it's a lot of focus on every social post. It's a lot of there's there's there's going to be it that's going to be tough to iterate on the systems. 100% agree. They also have another role like this called the 100x chief of staff. Yeah, I didn't look at that one, but apparently you were looking at it and just before we got on, you're like, "Dude, they have a lot of 100x roles." I'm like, freaking I know they have the 100x or going on. So now I'm like, okay, [laughter] they're really pushing here. I I would have a feeling that they internally are talking to everybody and saying, "Listen, guys, we're just testing something. They're not your jobs are not on the line." I hope I hope that's the conversation internally. Oh, and oh I hope but you know leaders bad leaders do bad things sometimes and just sort of like this is where we're going. We're hiring these people and everybody everybody else is like what I need to get my resume out and leave. [laughter] Have a good extern burn. I think let's we'll talk about the good things in a second. There's some things that you really should be thinking about for this, but one more slam on this before we head into the good parts of it is um you and I talked about this right just as we started, but neither of us are fans of ClickUp the software. So like, okay, 100, they hire 100x marketer who's probably got their own systems and agents and things that they do. Are they going to force them to use ClickUp? Because that would be part of the sale, right? Like, oh, you have to use ClickUp. So, even if you do find the person and tempt them with a compensation package and they come in, like, are you going to force them to use ClickUp? Cuz I doubt they do. [laughter] I don't know any 100x marketers/ tech people uh that are like rocking ClickUp as their main AI home base. It's all like Claude and MD files and or OpenClaw. You know what I'm saying? Like it's a collection of tools that and they have to have a harness and it's not ClickUp. is not designed for it. No. And I Yeah, I would agree with you. There's going to be so many use it as a database. And you know, I will say I don't know the the ClickUp ClickUps API. I will say that I predominantly used it as the project management tool. And someone here might be like, well, that's why you don't like it cuz everything else is great. But I'm like, that's what ClickUp was known for was like the spreadsheets, then they moved to project management. Everything else has been like ancillary or they're like trying to get more money, but ClickUp is I get why people like it, but it is clunky. And it is very clunky. People who want to use AI do not like clunky. They like speed and efficiency. Now, the way they're positioning just to jump on ClickUp's website now is the software to replace all software. So, this really is the goal that it's the database. I'm sure I'm sure it's like Yeah, they're definitely trying to come after everything. So, no, you're definitely you're definitely going to have to use ClickUp. I'm like, dude, 100X marketer that's got all these agents orchestrated and tuned in, they're going to have to learn how to use your system. That's going to be tough because I I've heard a single person in the AI space and I'm not like paying attention to everything, but I listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of YouTubers, newsletters. I'm trying to keep a pulse on the AI space and not I I like I can't remember ClickUp being mentioned till this job posting. Yeah, I mean it looks like for ClickUp if go high level is the uh the marketing SAS product that can do all things. This is trying to be the the operational side for a business. That's what ClickUp is trying. And I'm like uh you you're now going against um Microsoft. you're going against, you know, just a whole bunch of different groups of people that I'm like, it's a big company, so a lot of people do it and they might, but again, I haven't found anything that I've been like, "This is awesome from ClickUp." Um, there's other products that work way smoother. So, [sighs] what I like about this job posting is one, it's it's fun to see somebody push the envelope and try radical things. Um, it sounds like they're betting the whole or on it. It's like, hey, sometimes bold bets win, sometimes bold bets sink ships. But it is fun to see someone. It is an interesting I thought experiment to think like, oh, like what how would you orchestrate this? Like how could you do this right now? Like it it'd be fascinating if you're listen like I'm almost tempted to just like interview three marketers to see how they would do it. Marketers that I think would actually be able to pull it off. like okay like there's going to be sacrifices because you can't automate every no matter how good you are with the tech and how good you are a marketer there's going to be things that you're just going to be able to miss whether your agents get it wrong or there just I don't know like remember one time I overautomated infusion soft when we were working in higher ed and the loop and it got a little crazy and the the audience kind of felt like you're feeling a little robotic that's how it's going to feel 100% there's no way around it like you can't give enough voice and brand and crap context into it to not make it feel like that. It's going to feel like that has to at that scale. But you know that maybe that's part of the job. Like I can get away with AI thumbnails on my podcast because it's an AI marketing podcast. So it's like it's ex it's expected. So maybe they can get away with that because they're positioning themselves as like the master database of all the AI stuff and they can come across as feeling a little bit more robotic like my thumbnails are fine being AI and no I don't pretend to be otherwise. um some other brands that I manage like I can't get away with that because their brands are more like I don't know I I can't say I'm inauthentic but like their brand because their brands aren't AI it would be perceived as inauthentic. Yeah. They're more human human element to it. So like but I love that they're pushing into it and challenging it and coming up with the stuff. It is an interesting idea. I think eventually agents will be able to be more more capable. Also, in time, you're like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe as agents get better and they have access to more context and have bigger context windows and more tools, they can orchestrate things and spin off little agent swarms and accomplish things relatively well in a way that's pleasing to you because they know your taste and preferences. Maybe today that's a sacrifice. A year from now, maybe. But there's still going to be sacrifices in the process. But what would those sacrifices be? Yeah. I I What would they be leaving behind? Oh, I I feel like there's right now because of the way I've seen the level of AI, it feels like they're sacrificing just about everything. Like I think their copy I if if you know when I look at ClickUp social media, they they do some funny reels or like some funny things that they do that I'm like there's a human element to that that um whoever's doing the CMO role like I don't think AI could ever pull that off. like that needs a human touch for comedy and jokes and just the way they frame things. I'm like, you're going to lose that. And I think that that's I'm probably wrong, but I'm assuming that's actually worked in their favor. Uh that they because they keep doing it. So clearly these they got to have some metrics that this is working for them eventually if especially if you're doing a lot of media and video. And I don't know how much media and video ClickUp does, but I assume it's a lot, you know, with reals and all the video short posts and video ads and YouTube and uh they they do I mean I think they do even big commercials like on TV and all that kind of stuff too because they're big enough. Um like how do you how do you have enough time to even watch all the variations of those videos to find the ones that actually run? And then you need a certain amount of variations to run a split test. I'm like, there's not enough time in the freaking day to watch all the videos, even at 2x. [laughter] You think about it, because AI is going to spit out 20 and you need to find, like he even said, like you need to be able to look at all the different variations and then judge the two of of the 20. Yeah, he even said 50 pieces of output and immediately know which two are worth publishing. But what if those 50 pieces of content are all video and some of them are 30 seconds and some of them are 5 minutes? Oh. Oh, you're going to be screwed. How do you have time for that? It takes too long to review everything. And that's you. You become this massive bottleneck of review. Like that's and that's the problem that I'm like, there's just not enough hours in the day for one person to do this. Now, if you had only one person in charge of just video, maybe, but that person's got to be in charge of more than video. We're talking about billboard size stuff. We're talking about design and social and image ads and emails and all kinds of crap. So like in order to accomplish it, you have to scale everything way back into a meaningful amount of work and have to prioritize, which means you're doing less. Even though the AI agents can move faster, they can only move as fast as you can review everything. Yeah. I I my my my guess there's there's two guesses that I have on this. Number one is if they find someone, it's going to be a young person who cuz they said like experience doesn't matter. It's just your output. degree matters. No experience, no resume. Uh, no you Yeah. No required, no resume, no degree. Just we want to see systems plus review. That's it. So I I could see that there might be one guy who makes their care, this launches their career, guy or gal who it launches their career. Um, so I could see that. The second thing I can see is they're trying to find someone super high level, but at the end of the day, they'll end up maybe taking over one depart division of marketing. Like they're going to crushing it in copywriting, for example. And they might get there, but like and that whole team maybe goes away, but they're not going to like replace everything um tomorrow if they found someone. I just haven't seen AI be able to pull it all off. Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely can't pull off the video. The video part's really hard, but it takes someone working with it really closely and evaluating a lot of stuff to be able to put together one good video. Yeah. And and I don't know a lot of um marketers who are great at video who are also great at like ads copy, you know, like those are just two different skill sets that like and then like Yeah, there's there's probably out there I I can I can think of there's one person who commented on my post. Let me see if I can find him. Give him a shout out cuz um what did he say? It was uh where are you? Finn Mc Mckenty. Oh man, I love I love this guy. He's got great LinkedIn posts. Go follow Finn Mc Mckenty. He's probably one of my favorite followers on LinkedIn right now. He says this is one of the people that I actually think could do it. [laughter] He says, "No way. I am for sure in the top 01% of AI users in the context of marketing and it's just not possible." I actually believe him. The technology isn't the issue. You could build whatever you want. It's just that no human can juggle that much context in their brain effectively. Also, if I'm replacing 50 people, I would certainly need more than 1 million a year. [laughter] He's one of the guys that like he's financially well off enough. He's like, I freaking would never do this even if he could do it. Um, but again, and he's I don't think he has previous CMO experience, but like he's worked for uh is it Amber Crombie? Amber Crombian and Fit Creative Live. Uh he had a huge YouTube following uh in the hundreds of thousands for the punk rock NBA. It's fun channel. Um so like he's he's got serious chops. I've seen his post. The guy knows what he's talking about. He's really good. Um he could probably do it, but he's saying no way. He's one of the people I would have nominated for it to see if it was even in the realm of possibility. Yeah. [laughter] I'm with Finn. Finn is Finn is smart. Like listen to Finn. Yeah. Uh the question is will it be available to do a year from now then? Yeah. I I you know I think putting a definite timeline might be hard but I think that will be the future. I I think at some point it'll be able to not be just like a intern level. It'll be able to be manager director level when you have the appropriate skills um to function well. I think the discernment piece, you're still going to need someone with high level of discernment and a human individual to execute certain things about the business. Um, I I just don't see that going away. And then even just like artistic tastes, all that stuff is is needed. Like all of us know the basics of AI that you get what you put into it. Um, so you just need those people who can put really good stuff into it to have great output. Yep. There's So it sounds like the consensus is it definitely can't be done now. We did have a company solopreneur that made a billion that was worth a billion dollars generating revenue in the hundred hundred maybe over hund00 million for sure and it was worth over a billion. So, we have our first billionaire uh soloreneur and I think he has his brother as like an executive assistant kind of a thing. So, I'm still going to count that as a soloreneur. The problem with this company was on the marketing front. He generated a lot of fake AI testimonials and endorsement which is very unethical and was selling like kind of questionable GLP1 type products which is a hot market. and he hammered it and did it and it's like okay but the first soloreneur billionaire while it's now technically accomplished did it unethically in a lot of different ways. So again that's like it was possible but major sacrifices [laughter] on ethics and uh integrity and quality and all that kind of stuff to the point where it's obvious because like you had like Professor Dumbrador giving endorsements with a fake looking Dr. AI photo, you know. So that's how they knew. They found a bunch of like funny names in there and tried to validate that they were real Facebook profiles and social profiles of all these doctors and they're like, "This is totally AI slob." So, and that would that's what would happen to ClickUp if they really try to push it. Now, I think based on what they're saying here, you're probably right. They're probably just going to give them a small section and then build it out and then build it out and try to be like, "That's the path to million. If you can get up to this point, then you can earn a million dollars. But we're going to start you here at this comp package and we're going to give you this little section of the company to try to run with this and we really want to see you scale this out. I think that's going to be the pitch and that's how they're going to keep themselves a little safer. Otherwise, it would be way too risky. Yeah. There there's no way a $4 billion company would just get rid of their marketing team tomorrow and hire one guy. Like maybe maybe if the person I'm going to be pretty blunt here, maybe the person's on crack, they would do that. But I think ClickUp has enough marketing chops that they wouldn't do that. That's just my my guess. Like everything that they've done, while I may not be a big fan of their software, clearly they're smarter than I am cuz they have a $4 billion company. I do not, right? And they have better marketing acumen. So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt in that aspect. I'm like, okay, there's a play here. And obviously, we're talking about it. People are talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but I think it's this sounds like one of those things where they had an off-site brainstorming meeting and they were trying to come up with ways to become a 100x org. They're like, "Well, let's find the best 100x talent out there and see what we could do." And this was this was this is coming out of one of those brainstorming meetings for sure. Um, [sighs] the question is like what do we do about this? So, let's get practical because I think people are going to continue to think this way. CEOs are seeing this kind of stuff in their news feed, which is going to come back to us as marketers. And I think again, it's important to be honing AI skills and sharpening them and staying up to date. It's really difficult like even for someone like me and I'm pretty technical. I like keeping up to date with it, but I can't keep up with everything. So like I've just kind of honed into like chat GPT and codeex now the chat GPT app with code mode, I guess. Um, and I'm using it more and more and I'm rebuilding my whole website in it. It's getting really exciting. I'm using Brael. It's like it's it's great. I I love it. Um, and I'll be publishing a podcast on that soon on that process. So, you need to be staying up to date and pushing the envelope with it and kind of just incl every every week, every other week or so, and keep pushing it. That's good. Don't feel the FOMO when you're like, "Oh, I'm not spinning up agent swarms and designing my own SAS apps and all that kind of stuff." Like, ah, like maybe build some little mini tools. Like, keep going and just don't stop. Um, and then eventually like it what's hard now becomes easy a year from now. It used to be hard to prompt. Now it's not. You You can give crappy prompts and they still figure it out. You used to had to be super particular about how you talk to them. I spent hours refining prompts and instructions and now I don't. I just word vomit voice command into it and call it good because that's easy now. But now I'm learning how to orchestrate systems and code and think through like what do I want to have happen here and how do I help the agent orchestrate it all, you know, kind of a thing. [gasps] Um yeah, the other thing I was going to mention um I don't know if I interrupted your train of thought there. Go, but but the other thing that I would say is what practical things you could do. You obviously said number one, grow your skill set. And when I think about grow your skill set, grow your expertise before you start going a different vertical, right? Like continue your expertise, whatever it is, use AI to make that faster, smarter, like more agile. Then move to another one, another, you know, adjacent um skill set. But the other other side of the coin that I was going to mention is don't forget about the soft skill of that if you're talking with leaders, manage their expectations. Because if they're reading this stuff, you got to be ahead of the game a little bit and be like, well, hey, actually, this is what AI is capable of. This is what they're probably doing. Like, bring them back to reality a little bit. It's a very much managing up situation. It's a managing up situation cuz if you don't do that, what ends up happening is all these people are all of a sudden going to be like feel the pressure that now they have to perform in 100x when the tech is not even there yet. So like you might be able to 10x but 100x like okay let's let's everybody calm down. This is a little like hyperbole that's going on in the world right now and you're falling into it hook line and sinker. Yep. The big thing I'm communicating now is bottlenecks and constraints. And it's funny because the CFOs love this conver love this conversation but essentially I'm like we can't use AI just to be productive. We want to use AI to tackle the most com the most uh the biggest bottleneck holding us back, the biggest constraint that if moved makes the biggest difference because these are the things that we there's all these activities we have to do every week, every month. We got to continue doing those. We can use AI to speed those up. But it doesn't matter how efficient those normal activities become if we don't address the bottleneck. which is why I'm like beating this drum on this now on LinkedIn here on the podcast because if you don't fix those things then no no amount of productivity is going to help like there's a constraint and you can only go as fast as that constraint. It's like you can only run a race so fast if you're doing it three-legged, you know, and you have a band tied around. The reason why I say it's because I've run a 6K with a three-legged before. Random fact about Danz today because I'm weird. Uh but that was a major constraint. You can only run so fast tied to another person, you know. Then if I wanted to go faster, I'd have to cut that. Getting shot by paintballs. Who was shooting those paintballs? I won't say if it was me or not. [laughter] That was a different race. Ken was different different paintball race. Yeah. No, I didn't get shot while I was three-legged. That would have been too much. Um yeah, sometimes now now it's like we need story time with Dan and Ken. [laughter] Everybody's gonna be like, "What just happened?" Um, but you have to find the constraints of the company and then use AI help you find the problem. Define the problem. Find it, define it, and then actually tackle the problem. And they're never easy. It always takes a long time to actually usually fix the constraints. There's a reason why they're constraints and they haven't been fixed yet because they're not easy and they take time. But the more of those you fix, the better things get. Sometimes you need just a hundred little constraints fixed in order to get a big movement. Sometimes it's one big one that just takes for freaking forever to finish. Um, but AI can help you with all those things, but probably not in complete automated mode. [laughter] They just help you with bits and pieces of it, and you still have to drive the whole project manually with help and assistance from AI, which is nice. I find I rarely get stuck anymore because AI is able to get me unstuck so much faster. Uh, when I run into techno problems or WordPress problems or CRM problems or why doesn't this work right now problems, and you can have it scan and bring you information and help you find the fix so much faster. It's amazing. So, it's getting me through the bottlenecks faster, but that's what people need to focus on. Um, and it's sad because I feel like this 100x marketer, the the way you become a 100x marketer is not by orchestrating agents and systems. It's by fixing bottlenecks because if you fix enough of the bottlenecks, you could 100x them. You could 100x the output, you know? And that's where you really should be focusing, not spinning up systems and doing all the freaking content and stuff. I'm like, dude, that's if anything, I want to slow content down and focus like what can I do that no one else can do and then use AI to fix the bottlenecks to get more lead flow going on, you know? Yeah. And and one thing that I would encourage, you know, something that you said that I don't want people to miss is that as you're fixing the bottlenecks and using AI, it is becoming so much easier for you to lose being on the driver's seat and being coming on the passenger seat. that like people forget that you're supposed to be driving the whole situation. Dan, this happened to to me like this past week. We we were texting each other back and forth about some podcast ideas and I was like throwing out these ideas and you're like this is not you. This is this is AI. Stop letting AI drive it. And I'm like I'm like are you leading this conversation or is chat because it sounds like chat's leading the conversation. You need to take the reigns. [laughter] Yeah. And I'm like oh gosh you're right. And then I was like, right, I got to manhandle chat GPT, you know, like and and had to change the thing. But even myself who's in it all day, every day, I think sooner or later, we get decision decision fatigue that we want someone to just give us advice and we pivot and it's so subtle that we let AI do the work for us that we have to be mindful of that as you're coming into it. So, I think that's why when Finn said all those decisions that people need to make, I was like, he's spot on cuz that's that's where people are going to get tired. It's not that you might not have the expertise, but the 5,000 decisions that you have to make every single day for every little piece is going to be exhausting. Dude, one thing that I've heard recently that's just given me so much freaking hope for the future because sometimes I do get nervous. I literally will have like not panic attacks, but I'll have like moments of like we're all going to lose our jobs. No one's going to have work. Economy's going to spiral out of control. I'm like, dude, I need to stop getting I need to get out of the newsfeed sometimes and go for a run. That's what I have to do to pump myself back up. Um, but something that gives me so much hope that kind of like runs against that narrative in my head is uh the fact that almost everybody I know who's like really into agents and harnesses and is orchestrating that is freaking working way more hours, right? And I'm like, it seems like AI is multiplying work. It ain't doing the opposite. [laughter] So I'm like, I don't I don't like work ain't going away. We ain't going to undo the curse of work. work will always have pain and all humans are going to have to be involved, which is pretty much what historically has happened every time we've added new technology and automated graph. We've always just created more jobs and more work to do and more specialties and weird things. So, I know this one's different because it's intelligence and who knows and it's scaling across so many different ways in so many different sectors. So, like I get it. I I get why it's concerning and I still understand that. But it just seems like right now the trajectory is that the smartest people using it are working way more. They've they call them AI vampires. I think or something like that. Well, and and and part of it is, you know, we we talked about this with ClickUp, but I everybody's creating harnesses and different text stacks that now people are even creating their own tools cuz they don't want to use this tool, but like you're doing busy work and you're just adding stuff. And I'm like, well, just simplify life, man. Like, what's the thing that you need to change? What lever do you need to pull to like grow your business or grow your efforts or or do the project, whatever you're doing? Focus on the accomplishment part, not all the things that you're doing. This happened when I was trying to I'm rebuilding one of my websites. I literally um you know, Claude started taking me on this bunny trail and I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, what are we doing? This is not the goal. This is the goal." They're like, "Sorry, I just it just started hallucinating and taking me down down the wrong path." If I would not have caught that early on, I would have probably lost three hours in my day. And I I think this is happening to a lot of people. So, I think that's good. Now, I just need to go for a run and avoid getting shot by Ken in the woods. [laughter] [music]