Free Info Is Dead (Here’s What Replaces It)

Your trials and tribulations, your experiences, your successes and failures, all of those cannot be replicated by AI. So, the new currency is not information, it's interpretation, access and you.

Welcome to the next evolution of the podcast Entrepreneur School in the AI era. We are here to figure out how to integrate AI into the business you've worked so hard to build in a way that still feels like you. I'm your host, Kelly Sinclair, award-winning marketer turned AI platform co-founder. AI has fundamentally changed how I thought about work systems and what's actually possible. This show is about navigating that new reality together. It's going to be a wild ride, my friend, but I truly believe there's a way to leverage AI in a way that's intentional, human-centered, and aligned, it's an ongoing evolution, so let's explore, because AI may just be the unlock you need to achieve the life first business you truly desire.

Hello, my friends. I had total inspiration for this podcast episode today. I was working with my AI this week, and I think what we were doing was going through some old training material from a course that I previously took, just to kind of like pull out some of the core concepts that I wanted to apply, and it left me with this comment, this summary statement, and I thought, oh gee, I have to do an entire podcast episode just on this sentence, and so I am here. We are so here's what it said to me. It said, "Free information has less currency now. The value is in interpretation, filtering proprietary frameworks, and access, not knowledge itself. Like, it hit me, I was like, "Yes, that is exactly what I've been trying to talk about, when I'm talking about expert-backed AI, when I'm talking to our beta users of Wave, who really care about protecting their IP, but also know that the next phase of this industry is to add AI to help you teach what you do, information scarcity is gone. Lead magnets now compete with instant AI answers. So, the bar has shifted from "Does this teach them something" to "Does this give them something that AI can't.

So, let's break this down a little bit, because the old model is broken and AI broke it. Thanks, AI. While we love it, we love lots of things about it. There are a lot of things to consider, and I think if you zoom out to being someone in the knowledge industry, so the knowledge economy, right, is anybody who sells their knowledge and experience for money. Previously, that was packaged up as digital courses, or consulting, or coaching, or some combination of all of those things, and you know, if we've been in this industry for a while, and if you're listening to this podcast, this is probably you. The model was built on a simple funnel, give away a taste of your expertise for free, aka this is a lead magnet of some kind, whether that be a PDF or a quiz or a tool or even a workshop or a training or something like that, and then you would nurture people toward trusting you, and then you would invite them to pay to learn with you, right? The problem with that now is that assumes that information is what was scarce, and that is not true anymore, because generative AI is helping people stretch beyond their usual roles and easing the learning curve for attempting new tasks, which means your audience can now get a good enough answer from Chat GPT or quad in like 30 seconds, so the free PDF, the checklist, the five steps to doing x, that is table stakes now, not a differentiator, the bar has been moved, so this is why we keep talking about on this podcast. Asked the concept of expert-backed AI, because I feel like as experts we have a role to play in helping our students, potential students, to understand the difference as well. So, generic AI gives people answers, but what you do as the expert is you help give the right answer for them, it's all about the customization that nuance the lens of how it actually applies to the individual that you're talking to, and now these models have gotten so smart, like I still have my mind blown multiple times a

day, and I am working very deeply in the world of AI with different models trying out different things. The baseline has moved substantially in the last six months, even in the last two months, new models are dropping all of the time, and so the standard for excellence is just really high right out of the gate, so that therefore it stands to reason that people are like, I can just go to AI and I can get the answer to what I am looking for, but there's this piece there that is missing, which is validation, validation of the output, and that means that the user has to understand or trust that what AI is delivering is actually good, is actually not just accurate, but good, right? And there's a difference in that too. It can be factually accurate, but it doesn't make it good, like helping somebody create their own marketing strategy. Here are five things you could do. Cool, but is it good if you have a marketing strategist who's built an AI tool based on their own expertise? The output of that is much more likely to be good. In fact, great rather than just generic good enough will help you get moving. Ultimately, we need to be looking to people who really want to take things to the next level in order to move forward.

So, this is the gap that we're living in. AI insights are good, but they're remaining broad, generic, detached from a brand's unique positioning, and the same is true for your clients' specific situations, their histories, their blind spots, and goals. The value is not in what you know, it's in how you apply what you know to this person right now, and I want to say that even though AI can be really great, we can add all the clawed skills that we want, make sure that all the context is always there and present and being filtered. There's still something about human involvement and the ability that you have based on the battle wounds that you have, the lived experience that you have that has helped you to get to where you are to understand how you would look at things differently, your trials and tribulations, your experiences, your successes and failures, all of those cannot be replicated by AI. So the new currency is not information, it's interpretation, access, and you. So now we need to start thinking about how to position ourselves as experts differently, inside of the world with AI. I am definitely not on the team that's like just stand over in the corner and say, well, I'll do a better job, right? Like, we need to embrace it. We need to embrace it, because people's baseline expectation is I can do things much faster now, and if you aren't checking that box with the solution that you're providing, they're going to look somewhere else, right.

So, there's definitely an evolving role of human experts in this AI era, and that emphasizes your unique value and human judgment, creativity, ethical leadership, all the things that you bring to the process, because what you're really selling has always been this, but people just didn't know how to articulate it before AI made that contrast so obvious, right? Your proprietary frameworks, your pattern recognition, your ability to see what someone can't see about themselves, that is what AI cannot replicate. Critical expertise lives in people's heads that troubleshooting logic built over 15 years of doing the thing that you do. The pattern recognition as a top performer acts without fully explaining it. The instincts that you have built over your career are invaluable. You all. Are the proprietary system so now the question is, are you positioning yourself that way? How do you connect what you've done into allowing people to use AI to help implement what you know and how it applies to them, and what additional access support availability are you bringing to the table that creates a really wholesome supportive AI forward version of what you do? I think this is the opportunity and the place that we are at right now is it's time to think about how to shift, how to shift from the membership that you offer, the coaching services, and the structure that you provided before the digital course that was really effective has gotten your clients amazing results, but now it's time to level up, and that if you're in that position, you're exactly who we're here to support with Wave, because this is - we believe that there is such an important role for humans to play as AI rolls out. This is not about replacing yourself with AI; this is about extending your capacity and allowing AI to support you and your students through whatever it is that you support them with, so building what we call bot squads that are trained on your expertise and being able to deliver those

in a way that actually keeps your proprietary frameworks and IP gated, protected behind the curtain, not handing it over in a quad skill file, is something that we feel is very important, and we know that this conversation is starting to just get more and more center stage, definitely something that I've been looking at for a long time. Obviously, Andrew and I have been building Wave for almost a year at this point, and we are starting to have our first beta clients using it, and they are onboarding their clients who are using their bot squad. It's very exciting to watch, and it's also very interesting to watch the conversation about making sure that your IP is protected. How do you monetize AI, and in this time, when this is the type of industry that you're in, considering how commoditized information itself has just become? Right, I think this is something very important to sit with. It's really the precipice of why we created Wave in the first place.

Also, there was just not a solution before. When I was talking to people from market research, even as recently as a few months ago, it was almost like, well, I think it's just the price that I have to pay, right? I can create a custom GPT, I can send that link to somebody, and I just hope that they're a good person and they don't share it with other people, and that I am actually getting paid for the expertise and my years of experience and what I bring to the table. Well, we believe that you absolutely should be, and there should be a way for you to gate access to that, and create basically what Wave does is creates your custom GPTs, turns those into bot squads where they can actually talk to each other and produce a full system of outputs and maintain context, but it appears like almost like a learning management system, where you can actually see all of the users and subscribers that you have, you can turn on and off their access, you can sell a recurring membership to your brain of AI bot squads, those kinds of things are all possible now, and they weren't before.

So, when we don't know that a solution exists, we accept the parameters of what we're faced with when it doesn't have to be that way tomorrow. So, if you are hearing this, and you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, yes, it's time for me to think about how to convert my expertise into AI, how to blend my expertise with AI, how to reframe kind of what I'm offering, and to become an AI forward educator, then I would love to connect with you. We are moving into our phase two of our beta, and we're building out a brand new offer that will go live in June, so make sure that you get on our wait list in the link in the show now. Thanks, and feel free to send me an email or a DM directly, and just type botsquad, and I will get you some more information about where we're heading next, what that looks like, who we're looking for. Glad to have you part of this journey. Thank you for being here on the podcast. I know that I have so many loyal listeners who listen to every episode. Hi, Shar, and have been here from day one, and I so appreciate you, and I want you to know that you're the first to hear about things. I share all the details with my podcast listeners first, and then my email list, and then maybe social media if I get around to it, so ah I am excited to be sharing this with you, and I will be back next week with another episode, and I'll talk to you then.

Thank you for listening. If this episode got you thinking about how AI is impacting your business and what it might look like to integrate it in a way that actually fits. I'd love to help you think that through. You can book an AI strategy chat using the link in the show notes. It's a space to talk about where you are, what's shifting, and how to move forward with intention. And if this episode was helpful, please share it with another business owner who's navigating this evolution too, and make sure you're subscribed, so you don't miss what's coming next.