Transcription
We should all be having dozens or hundreds of agents working for us. So over time, I built up this team of 40 AI marketing agents to work with me. I'm the only marketing person at Related App. I have an AI coach that once a week tells me, "Here are the themes that seem to be really working well or the styles that are working really well for you. Do more of this, do less of that."
That's why I've had a few very successful posts on LinkedIn. So for example, the post was here are the 40 marketing agents that I actually use. And that post so far has 1.5 million impressions and the most comments ever on a LinkedIn post. You know, I've been posting consistently on LinkedIn for a year with no results. And then all of a sudden, I was like, wo.
If your job is as a junior content marketer to take a YouTube video and write a blog post based on that YouTube video, that job won't exist anymore. A high quality marketing contractor, let's say I had four people at $12,500 per month each. That would be $50,000 a month. And my AI bill is $500 a month.
Building AI agents is the fundamental skill that will define every professional's career for the next 30 years. It's a requirement. In the same way that knowing how to use spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel was a requirement for the last 40 years, knowing how to build AI agents is a requirement for the next 40 years. We are all using it for probably 1% of what we should be using it for. Here's what I'll say. AI is way underhyped.
My name is Jacob Bank. I'm the founder and CEO of Relay.app. Relay.app is a platform to build AI agents and workflows that get work done on your behalf. So, right now, we're a nine-person team. We have five engineers, two designers, a product person, and myself. If we did not have AI, we would probably need to be a 15-person team to achieve the same level of accomplishment that we have now.
Once upon a time, I was an AI researcher, then a startup founder, and then a longtime product lead at Google. And I've been working on relay.app since 2021. So, I've seen the whole AI boom over the last 3 years from a very close vantage point.
My take on AI is it's like an intern. It's just an intern. It does exactly what you tell it to do. It's the intern. This is something I've changed my mind on. Actually, a year ago, I said, "Hey, think of an AI as your intern." And then I realized that that was the wrong mental model. There are certainly a class of tasks that AI can do. Those are the time-saving kind of tasks that you would give otherwise to an intern. But AI can also do these strategy analyses and competitive analyses and content creation tasks that an intern definitely could not do.
So for example, I am not good at sales calls. I do not have a background in sales. It does not come naturally. But it turns out there are some techniques that are pretty valuable in sales calls. So, I have an AI coach that reviews all the transcripts of my meetings and says, "Oh, you could have talked about this better. You could have articulated this value or you were too easy to eager to jump into a demo there. You should have asked some more discovery questions."
If you go out and hire a sales coach, a good sales coach is like $10,000 a month for one meeting a week. You can build a pretty good AI sales coach by yourself and a little bit of, you know, transcript training and it'll cost you like five bucks a week to run.
When there's a new role or function I'm taking on that I don't have experience in or I don't feel like I'm an expert at, how can I figure out the right coaching relationship where I can give my coach the raw data of what I'm doing and then have it give feedback to me on the right cadence whether it's after every call or once a day with a summary or once a week with a summary. That's why I'm now realizing that thinking about AI as an intern was so wrong.
So back when I was at Google, there was a role called tech lead manager and that was a hybrid role where you were both supposed to be the technical expert who knew the entire codebase and could review technical designs and solve the hardest problems. But you were also a manager. You were also responsible for coordinating the other people on the team. And it's a very hard role. It's hard to do both technical work and management work at the same time. But I think that's what the future holds for all of us. We all need to become super ICs. Let me explain why.
If your job is as a junior content marketer to take a YouTube video and write a blog post based on that YouTube video, that job won't exist anymore. You cannot build a job just doing single individual content repurposing tasks like that. If your job is to work at a large corporation and manage a team of a thousand people, I don't want to say that job is going to go away, but I think that job is going to become less and less important because companies are going to be smaller. We're going to have many more leaner, smaller companies. So that skill set of managing a thousand people, that's going to be less and less important.
Everyone is going to look like me where about two-thirds of your day is individual contributor work. I'm doing stuff. I'm making YouTube videos. I'm editing blog posts. I'm publishing content. I'm talking to customers. And then one-third of my day is coordinating my team of AI agents that helps me with those things.
The thing that's so exciting about this super IC future is that that's the work most of us love. Most people that I talk to who are in very junior roles are like, "Uh, I wish instead of just writing this blog post I was told to write, I had a bit more strategic influence on what we were doing and why." And everyone I know, including myself when I was at Google, who was in a complete organizational management role was, "Ah, I wish I could be closer to the work. I wish I could get back into product. I wish I could be closer to the customer and the user." And so now, I think every role in the future will combine the best of both worlds. We will all need to be strategic enough and senior enough to decide what needs to be done and to be able to see what good looks like so we can give the right coaching, but and we need to be still hands-on enough that we can actually edit the blog post and edit the tweet and make the video ourselves. That's the future of the workplace.
Yes, it's a bit overwhelming to see 40 of them all at once, but if you click into any individual agent, they're very simple and they all have very specific jobs. One, every time we create a new YouTube video, it creates a LinkedIn post automatically. Every time we create a new YouTube video, it creates a tweet automatically. Every time the CEO of one of our competitors posts on Twitter or LinkedIn, it lets me know what they're talking about. Every week, it goes and looks at our competitor pricing and it lets me know if anything important has changed.
So, one by one, I built up this team of AI agents to help me. I have not had good luck with trying to build a single agent to try to do 25 things at once. That is one difference maybe with human employees where when you hire a social media marketer, you want them to own all of social media marketing, especially if you're a beginner. Start simple. Create one agent that can do one thing, create a second agent that can do a second thing, create a third agent that can do a third thing, and then maybe have one agent that sits above them and helps invoke them when necessary. And then build up over time. Do not start with a 40 agent or chart. Start with one.
One very important thing to keep in mind is that AI agents are not a set it and forget it kind of thing. You can't just build an AI agent and say, "Oh, this thing is just going to work for me forever." I'm constantly modifying my AI agents. For example, I do assessment calls with new customers where I'll spend 30 minutes with them and we'll identify opportunities for AI in their business. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if they got a personalized Google Doc from me after the call with what we had talked about with five specific use cases and links to templates? And I thought this was so cool. So I built an AI agent to help me with it. I said, "AI agent, your job is to take this transcript of the meeting and turn it into a really nicely formatted Google doc to send to the customer." And after doing that 10 times, I was like, "This is not the right format. The customers aren't reading the Google doc. I should have just included in the email." So I fired that agent and I said, "Uh, we don't actually need that job to be done anymore." I actually repurposed that agent and said, "Can you just take that summary and put it directly into the follow-up?"
Sometimes you just don't need that function to be done anymore. Like we were very focused on SEO a year ago. And then we realized that it's just not the important channel for us right now. It's such a small percentage of our new users and it's relatively high effort. So we're not going to focus on SEO anymore. So I told my AI SEO agents, you guys can stop for now. Like I'll come back to you in the future, but for now you can stop doing what you're doing. In the same way that you would tell an SEO agency, we don't need SEO at the moment right now. We'll come work with you again in the future. And the really cool thing is there's no emotional baggage. There's no disagreements. There's no coordination costs. I just have an idea. Hey AI agent, can you help me with this idea? And they say, "Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it."
Um, and so I don't want us to think about it as replacing people. I want to think about it as giving me superpowers. I wish I had the time to do all these marketing activities cuz I love doing them. They're very valuable to the company. And now I can do that. We all want to do more at our jobs. We're all ambitious people. We're all motivated people. We all wish we could do more and now we have the tools to do so.
It's fascinating to think about how perspectives on what a risky career is versus what a safe career is have changed over the years. In my parents' generation, a safe career was working at one large Fortune 500 company for 40 years. You know, getting your watch when you retire or after 50 years. And a risky career was starting your own company or moving between companies every couple of years. I think that has completely flipped. The riskiest career is if your skills are too tied to the environment of one particular company that could change over time. And the most robust careers are people who are starting their own companies and who are having lots of different life experience.
I'll give you an example. Much of our team I've recruited from Google because we all work together at Google and now we're working on this startup. And if you ask 10 people what's riskier, staying at Google or joining a startup, most of them will say it's safer to stay at Google and it's riskier to join a startup. And in terms of your cash compensation for the next year, yeah, that's true. Like Google is going to pay you more in cash for the next year than most startups will. But if you think through the long-term lens of your career where it's about how broad of a network have you built, how many new skills have you built? How have you pushed yourself to develop new experiences? It is way riskier to stay at a company like Google than it is to join a startup or start a startup.
There's two ways you can react to the current AI agent craze. You can say, "I'm skeptical. I don't believe it. I'm going to put my head in the sand. I'm going to keep working the way I've always worked." That's one way to react. The second way to act is like, whoa, this is a cool tool that's going to completely change the way that work is done. And I want to be on the cutting edge of how I'm using it. Please be person number two. That's going to serve you much better.
I never want to communicate you should take more risk. That's not the way I frame the discussion. It's not you should take more risk. The way I frame the discussion is you should optimize your career for personal growth and learning new skills. And often the way to create personal growth and learn new skills is to go into newer and more uncertain environments where you'll have more responsibility and you're less sure of what's going to happen. And I don't think that's risky. I think the riskiest thing you can do is to stagnate. And so for me, it's all about reframing the conversation about what risk is. Risk is stagnation. Progress means learning and growing and pushing yourself. And so I always want people to optimize for progress and growth and pushing yourself.
I have no marketing background. I am terrible at marketing. I was not even on any social media platforms until a year ago. I hate sharing stuff about myself in public. It was deeply uncomfortable for me to be the person responsible for marketing. I realized that organic social media and marketing on LinkedIn was the best channel for us to succeed as a company. But I worked really hard at it for a year to learn to get good at it. And now I love it. And so it could have felt, oh, it's so risky to put so much effort in this marketing strategy that we haven't tried. No, it's an opportunity to take advantage of an uncertainty to learn and grow in a new direction.
And I think often about how different the world my kids are going to live in. There are certain areas of technology where I'm just like, "Wow, that's so cool. That's obviously better." I'll give you one small example. Where we live on Parnassus Hill in San Francisco is very close to the main testing area for Waymo and Zoox. Zoox is I think it's Amazon's self-driving car division. And so I take my kids to school. My two older daughters are sitting behind me on a cargo bike and they're saying Waymo, Zoox, Waymo, Zoox. And for them it is so normal to see a car with nobody driving it. They think it's cool because they have all like the cameras and lasers on top, but it is so natural to them the idea that a car can be driven by a human. And so in the particular area of self-driving cars, I am so happy that I think neither of them will ever need to drive a car by themselves because it'll be so much safer and so much more convenient and so much better for the environment when all these cars are electric.
There are other areas where I have more mixed feelings like I don't want them to be just scrolling YouTube Shorts all the time even though there's a very, very good algorithm. The general way I think about it is maybe twofold. One is I try to give them as many real-world challenges and experiences as possible. Yeah, you still got to learn how to ride a bike. You're going to skin your knees when you're riding your bike. This is what I always say to my daughter, "Skin knees are good for kids, right? Because if you're skinning your knees, it means you're trying something and taking risk in the real world and dealing with the consequences." This is another big breakthrough when I was teaching my kids to swim. It's okay if they swallow some water. That's going to happen when you're learning how to swim. Like, it's okay if you swallow water from time to time because that's what it takes to learn how to swim. So, I'm trying to have them take, you know, some risk in the real world.
The thing that I haven't thought about yet, because my kids are too young, I don't know how tools like ChatGPT or AI agents like we're talking about now, I haven't yet thought about how those are going to influence their educational journey. But because I'm working on AI agents, I do think a lot about what my kids' careers are going to look like. And here's my current perspective on that.
Number one, the ability to clearly articulate what is important, what needs to be done, and give guidance on how to do it. That will always be important. That will only be more important in the future because our jobs will be more of how do we efficiently instruct AI on what it needs to do rather than how do we do it all ourselves. So, I'm spending a lot of time like I really want my kids to learn logic and philosophy because I really want them to be able to very clearly articulate what they want.
And then number two, I want them to think about areas where their unique personality and abilities can shine through in a way that AI wouldn't. And so that's why I record our own YouTube videos because it's an expression of my personality and people build a social connection. Those are going to be the two fundamental skills for the future of the workplace. How good are you at articulating what you want and telling that to AI? And then how good are you at building social connection with others? And those I think are going to be durable skills for the future of any career.
There's no doubt that the US is ahead of China on artificial intelligence, but the claim to technological leadership for the United States appears to me to be pretty narrow. What are Americans going to be using AI for? Well, to make a lot more PowerPoints perhaps and to file a lot more lawsuits against each other. Whereas the Chinese are much more manufacturing-focused. So, China is going to use AI to make more iPhones, make more electric vehicle batteries, make more drones, and make more munitions. Last year, the US built around five ships. China built about 1,500 ships.
I've spent about equal parts of my life between the US, China, and Canada. Right now, it looks like the US and China are both very intent on losing, not on winning. Both of these countries making very big mistakes.