The newsletterOnce or twice a week. 1 hot take, 2 tool suggestions, 3 best practices.
No. 004
95% of the time, your AI project is a RevOps project.
On the podcast Scott Ward asked me why my site has two paths: RevOps and AI, and the truth is that I’ve never been able to keep them separate once things get started.
Somebody calls me about AI on the go-to-market side, and 95% of the time I start digging and find processes nobody ever wrote down, no data hygiene workflows, tools that don’t talk to each other, and a CRM mess. So we don’t really start on the AI stuff, we start on that.
You can add AI to those situations, but it’s just going to amplify a really messy and inefficient situation, and potentially even cause more problems than it solves.
I’m not trying to talk anybody out of implementing AI here, I want it to work and it usually can, but you have to learn how things actually work without it today and have clear documentation and data for AI to really work well.
Everything that I mentioned is all things that people can actually do.
Two tools I used this week. One thing I'd stop using.
Wispr Flow Notetaker
I’ve been paying for Wispr Flow for dictation for a while and have been awaiting the Windows release of the note taker feature.
It’s solidly in the category of my preferred note takers because it captures from your machine instead of joining the call.
That’s what I liked about Krisp, and I canceled Krisp because Notion’s built-in one was fine and I didn’t want a third subscription doing the same job. This one I’m already paying for and it does it better than the one I canceled.
WhiteWhale
Intent data usually comes from somebody else’s model deciding an account is “in-market” and never telling you why. With WhiteWhale you write the questions yourself, ten or fifteen of them in plain language describing what a buying moment looks like at your company. Did they hire a CRO, are they posting SDR roles, did they announce a new market.
It checks your accounts against those questions every day across news, job posts and the rest of the open web, and it shows you the source for every hit. Results push into HubSpot, Slack, Clay and Claude.
Full disclosure, it’s a referral link. But I only refer products I use myself.
Canva
I’ve mentioned in a few places that I don’t use Canva anymore. Figured I can go into more detail.
Canva was a great tool for a non-designer like me that wasn’t using the real professional level tools (Adobe stuff). Anytime I wanted a quick graphic, for years, it was my go-to due to ease-of-use.
Then came AI and I went to Gamma first, and now I don’t open Gamma either because I’m in Claude Design. The image/graphics generation was already good enough a year ago. What I couldn’t do was edit easily. But now I easily adjust things in Claude Design instead of describing a tiny change to an AI and waiting to see what comes back.
Replacing it with
Three things I'd do this week
Hand AI the stuff traditional automation can’t check.
I have a task that runs once a week and goes through every contact that got added to HubSpot that week, then tells me which ones to delete and which ones to mark non-marketing so they stop counting against my contact tier.
HubSpot could do most of that with a workflow. I don’t do it that way because a workflow can only read what’s on the record, and the thing I actually want to know is whether the context outside of HubSpot gives me a hint to how I should handle it, which means going and digging through old email and notes first. So that’s the piece I hand off. It’s small and boring and it saves me money every month.
I find it more useful to have AI scan the contact and do some digging into whether I have previous context on them.
Go look at what you’re paying AI to do all day.
Go pull the usage report on whatever AI your team is on. I looked at one last week and a third of everything was running on the most expensive model, and most of that was people rewriting emails. Scheduled tasks are the same story. Somebody asks me if they should have AI run something once a day and usually the answer is no, because a Zapier zap or a HubSpot workflow does the same thing for a fraction of the cost. You just have to know how to build it and with what tool.
A lot of times they’ll be like, oh, should I use Cowork to do this once a day? And I’m like, actually, you can just use Zapier or a short custom coded action to do that every time it happens and it’s cheaper.
Give the company AI something to read.
Your team is already using AI on their personal accounts and you’re not going to police that. What you can do is make the sanctioned one better than theirs, and the only way that happens is context, some second brain it can read that their personal account can’t. Mine is Notion, but there are a ton of solutions for this.
Those chats people are having one-to-one with AI create all this great context, and it’s only in their chat. It’s not helping anybody else.
Thanks for reading. If the hot take hit close to home, almost every company I open up looks like that, so don’t be discouraged. Start small and write down exactly how a single process works right now before approaching the AI solution.
Kevin
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