Building Organizations That Get Smarter With AI

Courtney Baker: [00:00:00] We often talk about smart people, smart strategies, and even smart technology, but what about smart organizations? Companies that actually get more intelligent the longer they use ai. What does it take to build a business that doesn’t just apply AI to a few workflows but actually learns, adapts, and improves as a whole system?

Courtney Baker: Hi, I’m Courtney Baker, and this is AI Knowhow from Knownwell, helping you reimagine your business in the AI era. As always, I’m joined by Noel CEO, David DeWolf, chief Product and Technology Officer Mohan Rao and nor light CEO, Pete Viewer.

Courtney Baker: We also have a fascinating interview with Jason Malicki, who shares his perspective on building authority in the AI era.

Courtney Baker: but first, Pete viewer joins us to break down some of the latest in AI news.

Courtney Baker: Pete Buer joins us once again to make sense of the latest AI [00:01:00] headlines. Hey, Pete, how are you?

Pete Buer: Good. Courtney, how are you?

Courtney Baker: Good. I’m excited about this one. I’m ready to hear your take. A former Google executive recently argued that traditional college degrees are losing relevance. Fast and an AI driven economy.

Courtney Baker: What’s your perspective here?

Pete Buer: So we’ve, this is a, a new story, right? A, I think AI is accelerating observations that people have made about the education system for some time now about how technology enablements, powers a candidate. In ways, um, that at least augment, if not

Pete Buer: Im improve. when sometimes, uh, depending on role supersede, uh, the impact that a college education might otherwise have.

Pete Buer: in the Yahoo piece, uh, ex Google Exec Mo got at. Suggested that AI is making traditional higher education, less critical. That skills like adaptability, problem [00:02:00] solving and creativity will matter more than any particular brand or study of education, and that companies will increasingly hire, therefore, for what people can do with ai, not what degrees they happen to be carrying around with them.

Pete Buer: Takeaways for business leaders? Number one, I think this spells a moment for new thinking on managing talent across the lifecycle. So historically, degrees served as a proxy for competence, but AI’s leveling access to knowledge, to expertise, um, and what matters now is how effectively someone can apply AI to problems or how someone can tackle problems.

Pete Buer: Often powered by ai. So how do you promote this in role descriptions? How do you let people in the labor market know that this is what you’re looking for? How do you test for it? In candidates, our traditional interviewing techniques go out the window, at least in part. [00:03:00] And how do you develop it in employees once you’ve brought them into the organization?

Pete Buer: That leads to the second takeaway, which is about, um, a moment for new thinking and leadership. If degrees matter, less than training and upskilling and engagement and cultural developments matter a whole lot more. Leaders have to ensure that they’re turning their organizations into continuous learning engines, places where employees can grow faster than () the independent tech capabilities of the technologies that are around them.

Pete Buer: A final thought for executives. I think the question isn’t whether to stop hiring people with degrees. It’s how to start thinking differently about hiring, training, and leadership so as to reflect the skills and requirements in candidates and employees and leaders that actually differentiate you and your business in a world of ai.

Courtney Baker: Pete, there’s so much about this that really resonates with me. [00:04:00] I’ve, I’ve talked for years about the fact that many marketing interns, very prestigious university here in my town, uh, that the marketing. Crew come outta college not even knowing what A CRM is. And I, you know, that’s where the capability, it’s like, I, I can’t deploy you, uh, to do this thing because you don’t even know what A CRM is yet.

Courtney Baker: Yet it is, uh, the central hub for most marketing today. Uh, and so I’ve been quite. critical in that area, but I had a moment, Pete this weekend. So if I just zoom back a little bit from maybe less about the business implications, but more of the societal implications of this. Um, I was watching the Baylor football game.

Courtney Baker: I have young children and I was saying to my husband, I would love for our girls to go to Baylor. And he immediately said, Courtney, they’re not, colleges aren’t gonna exist by the time they get to college. I had a moment of. That’s [00:05:00] interesting because there is more than getting a degree that happens when you go to college.

Courtney Baker: You know, you are exposed to a very, you know. Group, group of your peers, you’re kind of put in your own lab and shaken up and seeing, you know, like what, let’s put you out into the world. And so I think it’ll be interesting. Obviously there’s the business impacts that I think you’ve covered so well that we have to think about if do, if co the way that we think of college today changes dramatically.

Courtney Baker: But also the societal impacts of, 18 year olds not having this ability, not just to work out their, their skills, their, their professional training, but also their relational

Courtney Baker: training before entering the workforce.

Pete Buer: I, I think there’s, I think there’s also like, to extend on your thought, Courtney, I think there’s also something to how we, how we teach our kids to think about learning.

Pete Buer: I think it was Thomas Edison who back in the day made the observation that you, you shouldn’t expend a whole [00:06:00] lot of energy memorizing or learning things that you can just look up in a book

Pete Buer: like save your brain power and capacity.

Pete Buer: For the synthesis and the cataloging and the application of that stuff and look it

Pete Buer: up when you need it. I feel like there’s a modern allegory in in the tool of, of ai, like do you need to know what A CRM is or do you need to be a good problem solver? Solver and data shifter and analyst who can then.

Pete Buer: Up what a CRM is and get a demo and learn from chat GPT on the 10 things that matter the most about CRMs when you’re in your first year of employment. I, I dunno,

Courtney Baker: And that what I’ve heard is law school is the greatest, uh, place to learn how to think. So we all need to become lawyers

Pete Buer: lawyers, well, that would, that would in inevitably lead to the downfall of mankind.

Courtney Baker: Alright. Well, Pete, thank you as always.

Pete Buer: Thank you, [00:07:00] Courtney.

 

Speaker: A lot of companies are experimenting with AI in frankly isolated ways.

Speaker: but what does it take to design an organization that gets smarter?

Speaker: The more it uses ai. I sat down with David and Mohan recently to dig into that question.

Courtney Baker: David Mohan. We’ve talked a lot about pilots and experiments over the last couple of years, as has everyone, but the real power of AI isn’t just in.

Courtney Baker: One-off productivity boost, you know, or, or making an AI tool work for you. It’s creating systems, uh, with those people that just keep getting smarter and smarter. So today I wanted to talk about what it means to build organizations that get smarter with ai. And by the way. The idea for this episode comes from [00:08:00] something Mohan said recently about the speed at which an organization learns being one of the biggest things a company can do to establish competitive advantage in this era. Be careful what you say around here, Mohan and David, it can and will be used in future episodes. So, David, let me start with you.

Courtney Baker: How do you see companies using AI to learn faster than they ever have before?

David DeWolf: Yeah, I think you bring up a, a couple of interesting topics here. Um, the, the first one, just this speed of intelligence. What I’m seeing is the compounding effect of intelligence, right? So when we have these systems that are human in the loop, but working now with AI that can give us more information, more intelligence, more knowledge than we’ve ever had at our fingertips, um, in a very, um, tailored way for what we’re looking for at the moment, we’re able to iterate very, very.

David DeWolf: [00:09:00] Very quickly, and if you look at this at the micro level, right? Just look at how the high performers use chat, GPT, right? Um, or your favorite LLM Cloud, whatever, right? It’s not just that they craft a single prompt and get a single answer. It’s the iterative nature of, oh, it gave me three more ideas. Let me ask you this.

David DeWolf: It didn’t dig into that. You know, asking the follow up question in the iteration and after six, seven, ping pong balls back and forth with your favorite LLM. The breakthrough is stunning. And, and that’s what I call compounding intelligence, right? It is this. Iterative nature which we are as humans feeding the technology and the technology is feeding us back and that it helps it to grow.

David DeWolf: Right? think what’s really interesting when you talk about organizations, Courtney, is the question is how do we become more learning

David DeWolf: organizations? And whenever I think about organizational. Design, and operational [00:10:00] efficiency and effectiveness and development, right? You always start with strategy.

Mohan Rao: And then

David DeWolf: you derive your structure from your strategy and then you plug people into the structure that exists. And that’s how over time we have learned, you optimize a system. Well, if learning and this compounding intelligence is ultimately what we’re after, that’s the how we’re gonna compete. That is the definition of strategy, right?

David DeWolf: So now. How do we create learning organizations? What is the structure of a learning organization? And it may not be the traditional organizational structure, it may not be the silos of marketing and finance and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It may be a different construct that we need to fit into the organization, and I think this is why we see here very recently, a lot of these.

David DeWolf: Layoffs are thinning out management and redesigning organizations. You see a flattening of the [00:11:00] organization and the organization of people into a structure that’s oriented around learning towards a specific objective versus around a discipline itself.

Courtney Baker: Oh, that’s so interesting. I have perceived those differently of just like, oh, we’re gonna do more with less. you know, like we have this new technology, so we’re gonna shrink down our workforce so that we, you know, don’t have this, you know, burden of these people. ’cause we’re gonna be more profitable.

David DeWolf: I’m sure there’s no doubt there are some that are doing that, but I think what’s really telling is if you look at the amount of middle management that has come out, right, that’s where a lot of it in corporate America is coming out. Um, that’s not necessarily doing quote more with less of, Hey, we’ve got, you know.

David DeWolf: 18 content writers, we’re gonna now do it with three. Now that’s taking out the layers, right? And so I, I do think that what I’m seeing is the smart organizations are actually thinking about the restructuring. So there’s probably a little bit of both there.

Courtney Baker: [00:12:00] Interesting. Mohan, what do you think?

Mohan Rao: You know, back in the nineties there was a book called The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senger, I think. Um, uh, and this subject is so exciting because the vision of that book is finally realizable, uh, right through ai. Um, the, it was called the Fifth Discipline because, um, there were five things that learning organizations do.

Mohan Rao: Um, personal mastery, mental model, shared vision. Those things are impacted by, uh, positively impacted by ai. You can learn faster, you can become, uh, develop mastery in your craft. But the fourth and the fifth model in that book was about team learning and systems thinking. Right? And that was something that was not as well realizable till now.

Mohan Rao: Um, and now it’s really possible. To make learning organizations that learn into an operational value [00:13:00] stream, uh, right, so how companies operate, how do they get better from week to week? Um, how do they, um, instrument, um, getting the data, how do they get better outcomes for each step in the process? What David said about compounding intelligence clearly kind of is possible.

Mohan Rao: When you have the right infrastructure and you build the right AI layers and then enable your people to work on that so they become more efficient. The vision of that book is finally realizable now.

David DeWolf: Yeah. Moan you. You know what? You just spurred an idea in my head, by the way. That’s compounding learning right there, right.

Mohan Rao: Yeah.

David DeWolf: from you, you, you put in my head in that book. He outlines disabilities for learning and the seventh one is the myth of the management team, interestingly enough. So just to go full circle there.

David DeWolf: All right. Isn’t that interesting? Yes.

Courtney Baker: Yeah, I think this is really such an interesting thought [00:14:00] provoking idea, especially for leadership as you step into 2026 to kind of take a step back. We’ve had, you know, a couple of years here of like. Really high emphasis on experimentation and how do we start making that transition from experimentation to ensuring we’re learning and then starting to execute against those learning.

Courtney Baker: So as you’re thinking about 2026, if you, I don’t know, David Mohan, do y’all do like a word for the year? Do either of

David DeWolf: I do.

David DeWolf: Yeah.

Courtney Baker: Okay.

Mohan Rao: I do. too.

Courtney Baker: could I propose for you to learning as your word for next? And, uh, maybe for anyone listening as well, what better word,

David DeWolf: Do we all really do words for the air? That’s crazy.

Courtney Baker: Yeah. I think we’ve all been listening to Mel Robbins too much or something. I dunno. Um,

Mohan Rao: I have too many small PostIt, so that’s all I can fit in.

Courtney Baker: get that word in. Get that word in. [00:15:00] David Mohan, thank you as always.

David DeWolf: Take care.

Mohan Rao: Thank you.

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Speaker: Jason Malicky is a consultant, strategist, and speaker who helps firms embrace the transformative potential of ai.

Speaker: He sat down with Pete Viewer recently to talk about building authority in the AI era.

Pete Buer: Jason, welcome. It’s so good to have you on the show.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, Pete, it’s great to see you and obviously great to be here. So, um, longtime [00:16:00] listener and, uh, big fan. So.

Pete Buer: Likewise. let’s start with a little bit of context for the listening audience, if we could, your company and your role and how AI fits into it all.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, so, uh, my name’s Jason Malicki. I own a marketing agency called Rattleback, and we are an advisor to professional services firms, and we do a lot of work around thought leadership development. So AI fits in on multiple fronts. Obviously, it’s become a. Part of the thought leadership development process, uh, number one, but number two, it’s also changing the nature of how clients buy.

Jason Mlicki: And that’s affecting the way we approach thought leadership in general and the types of things we would do with clients.

Pete Buer: I would love also to plug your podcast

Jason Mlicki: Oh.

Pete Buer: Um, you’re, you’re a busy man and, uh, I think the audience would benefit from knowing where to tune in.

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, no. I also do a podcast, it’s called Rattle and Pedal. I do it in partnership with a great friend of mine by the name of Jeff McKay, who’s a [00:17:00] fractional CMO for professional services firms. We are, uh, five or six years into this journey, and we just sort of talk about everything as it relates to growth.

Jason Mlicki: In the professional services landscape, whether it’s strategy, culture, thought leadership, we have guests on Pete’s. You’ve been a guest. David’s been a guest. Um, Courtney’s been a guest and, uh, it’s a great show. We have a lot of fun doing it and, uh, keeps us, uh, sort of on the edge of what’s happening, right?

Jason Mlicki: You know, by bringing in smart people to learn about things that we don’t always know everything about. So,

Jason Mlicki: um.

Pete Buer: and to your, to your reference, we share an audience, uh, in professional services. So let’s, let’s dig in and talk about that world a little bit. you’ve taken a position in your writing and in your speaking that authority is a real differentiator for professional services firms. Does the presence and role of AI change that in any way?

Jason Mlicki: So it does, it doesn’t change it, but it, it changes how the, how of it changes it, right? So like [00:18:00] authority is still, is going to be more critical than ever, especially in a world where people are struggling to discern fact from fiction, right? And they’re struggling to figure out what’s true and what’s not, and, uh, make sense of it all.

Jason Mlicki: What’s changing is that it’s, how you demonstrate authority, demonstrate expertise, and the channels by which you go about it now have, are changing sort of rapid fire. One of the things I like to talk about is, and you’ll laugh about this, is that professional services *has always been a people business.*

Jason Mlicki: *And it’s, and going forward, it’s going to be, the people are going to be more important than ever. The funny thing about this is when I first got into this, and you and I have been in this space longer than neither one of us cares to admit. The the thing that I noticed was everyone would* tell me, Jason, it’s a people business, but the people were practically invisible on the, uh, you know, there was no presence of the people outwardly from a marketing, uh, role whatsoever.

Jason Mlicki: And it’s because firms were sort of historically [00:19:00] like. Reds had to put their people out in front of the brand. They were comfortable with them. You know, obviously interacting with clients. I mean, that’s the presence of the business, but, but the idea of putting them out in front of the brand was scary to them.

Jason Mlicki: And I just think we’re now in a moment where, and you’re a perfect example of this, where it’s the people that are shaping the story, that clients are connecting with. They’re connecting with Pete, they’re connecting with Courtney, they’re connecting with David over top of, and the two things need to work symbiotically more than ever.

Jason Mlicki: So I think that’s a critical piece of this as we go forward. Does that make sense?

Pete Buer: Yeah, it makes total sense. I, I find myself wondering If I can do a great, uh, intelligent search on AI or assemble a army of agents around me, my personal board of directors who are prompted, programmed to sort of be expert or, you know, or authorities of their own as a buyer, do I walk around feeling like maybe a authority doesn’t matter as much, or [00:20:00] that I’ve got my my own channels in.

Jason Mlicki: You know, it’s funny, I I, it’s so funny you asked that because I, I have been wrestling with this, you know, I mean, our whole business is built around this idea of helping clients bring out their best selves. Make their expertise visible and all of a sudden I was like, is expertise irrelevant? I

Jason Mlicki: mean, if, if AI can, can categorize the world’s knowledge and so, and, and, you know, throw up an answer to a question, um, instantly.

Jason Mlicki: How does the expert compete with that? And I, I wrestled through this in a podcast episode. I was a guest on a show and they asked me to kind of pontificate about that a little bit. And, and I actually got some pushback from a client recently. And, and that’s what actually kind of got me to the conclusion, which was that. the thing about ai, you and you understand AI better than I ever could, so I don’t wanna imply that I understand it as well as you do, but I always talk about it as, as, as, as generative AI as a, um, a massive prediction machine, [00:21:00] right? And so it’s trained on the world’s knowledge and it predicts what comes next based on the world’s knowledge.

Jason Mlicki: But it’s sort of the expert. It’s up to the expert to figure out when the perva, their prevailing wisdom is wrong.

Pete Buer: Yep.

Jason Mlicki: To say, wait a minute, this is what everybody thinks, but it’s totally wrong and it’s, and it’s very difficult for AI to make that type of, of leap, at least in my experience. You might tell me, Jason, you’re wrong.

Jason Mlicki: I have proof, but that’s what we see.

Jason Mlicki: So,

Pete Buer: Oh, that’s, that’s when expertise is at its best, right? When, the outlier explains the truth rather than the trend

Jason Mlicki: yeah.

Pete Buer: Uh, when conventional wisdom has reached a point where it needs to be debunked or the next new thought, you know, needs to be developed. so is this now, like, are we, are we pushing ourselves into a new, um, to an edge in expertise or in in authority that causes us to think differently about it?

Pete Buer: That raises the bar on the [00:22:00] expectation around, the kind of authority and expertise that professional services firms can

Jason Mlicki: I, I, yeah, a hundred percent. I think it does. When AI first kind of burst on the scene for me and I, and I’ll be first to admit that like I was a little slow to the game, and obviously generative AI wasn’t new when chat GPT showed up, you know, 30 months ago or whatever. But to me, it was until a lot of people liked me, it was, I hadn’t spent any time with, with that type of, you know, AI technology before.

Jason Mlicki: Um, but anyway, one of the things that I pointed out early was I was like, look. A lot of consultants built their reputation and their expertise through pattern recognition. I’ve seen this problem 20, 30 times before, and here’s how you solve it. AI has a better patter pattern. Recogni machine pattern recognition machine.

Jason Mlicki: Than any expert could ever possibly be. So your, your, your, your fundamental value proposition has to change as a consultant, and it’s gonna take some people a while to grapple with that. But that’s the reality of it, is that AI is now the pattern recognition tool, and [00:23:00] you as the expert, are the one that has to figure out when to depart from the pattern.

Pete Buer: Nice. Nice.

Jason Mlicki: Um, it’s a bit of a change, right? For a lot of people.

Jason Mlicki: So.

Pete Buer: I wonder if buyers go through a cycle, uh, not, not unlike sort of the technology, uh, hype cycle where for a, for a time you feel like you don’t need help because you can get it from the technology and then, you make a mistake. Or then you discover something that you should have figured out, you know,

Jason Mlicki: a,

Pete Buer: year ago or whatever, and all of a sudden the, the consultants become incredibly valuable again.

Jason Mlicki: I think that’s a very prescient way of putting it. Right? Like, like, and I think we’ve all experienced it at some point where we’re like, wow. But I should have seen that coming, but I, but I didn’t. Right. And you’re kind of blindsided by your own ignorance, I guess. So anyway.

Pete Buer: If I grew up as a marketer, or if my company’s, you know, been making its bones on an approach that’s all about SEO and content marketing, what do I do now?

Jason Mlicki: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a difficult [00:24:00] question and there’s no, there’s, there’s like, there’s not a

Jason Mlicki: specific one for one answer. So a lot of people, when this first kind of hap started seeing this happening, they wanted to say, well, okay, I, I learned how to win at SEO. How do I win at GEO? And we’ll talk more about that in a

Jason Mlicki: minute, but it’s not quite as simple as like straightforward as, stop doing this, start doing that. the first place I always tell clients to start is like, there’s really sort of two ways you can look at this. So, we’re in this no click world, right, where people are sort of retreating into walled gardens as you, as you, you would like to talk in the tech universe, right? Um, and inside the walled garden, they have no, no reason to ever leave.

Jason Mlicki: You know, I can, you know, kind of have a massive experience with chat g ChatGPT, your perplexity, that solves all my problems, and I have no reason to ever leave there. So there’s really two ways that you can play this, you know, you know, play number one is. You need to show up where clients are going to spend their time going forward.

Jason Mlicki: Um, so inside of those search ai, gen gen, AI enabled search experiences, or you gotta give ’em a reason to leave the walled garden, you have to give ’em a reason to go outside the walled garden and actually come to you and [00:25:00] wanna find you, not just your expertise. So does that make sense?

Pete Buer: Makes sense. I’d love to understand how, though, how do I, right, how do I, how do I show up in the walled garden now that, that in in search results, I’m integrated into a paragraph that might not even reference me?

Jason Mlicki: Yeah,

Pete Buer: then how do I get ’em to hop outta the garden and come visit me?

Jason Mlicki: yeah, no, let’s start with the first one. Um, how to show up in the walled garden. So there’s a ton of research being done about this, and of course I would say right now the jury’s still out, you know, and for those of us who’ve been around the game for a while. You know when Google first kind of became a thing around 2004, 2005, all my clients were asking me, Jason, how do we show up in Google?

Jason Mlicki: How do we show up in Google and how do we show up in Google? And nobody remembers. There really wasn’t a playbook at the time. It was like we were kind of, there was a lot of trial and error going on. I think the same thing’s happening now. There’s a lot of trial and error going on. I will say the one thing I saw interesting this morning was that I don’t think there’s any like, just like Google, there’s no real.

Jason Mlicki: You do [00:26:00] these things, you’re always going to show up. You’re going to show up sometimes, and other times you’re not going to show up because generative AI is generative.

Jason Mlicki: So every time you do a query, you’re having an interaction. It’s different every time. But you know, through all of our reading on this and all of our research on this, we’ve really kind of brought it down to, I think there’s five things in declining order of priority, and I’ll just sort of rapid fire what they are.

Jason Mlicki: the first is original primary research. So. Generative ai,

Jason Mlicki: despite all the hallucinations that everyone talks about, is designed to try to discern fact, and it loves data. So anytime you can give it original data as source material for it to learn from and say that this, this research says this, it values that, so it’s gonna put high priority on that.

Jason Mlicki: The second thing is high authority placements. I always like to talk about. Generative ai, unlike traditional search, is actually a little bit more like a human in traditional search. Google used proxies for what was valuable. Proxies were things like backlinks, page speed. Domain authority, all these like [00:27:00] weird technical terms that they invented, right?

Jason Mlicki: But generative AI kind of operates like a human, like it starts to learn through human language that oh, HBR is a really authoritative publication, and that’s a really useful place to find information. Um, someone who’s referenced there, they must be really smart and really authoritative, right? It understands that.

Jason Mlicki: So, high authority placements. Um, we talk a lot about clear, comprehensive content and stop me if I’m going too fast.

Pete Buer: You’re going. You’re doing awesome. Please keep

Jason Mlicki: Um, clear comprehensive content really is, you know, I’ve talked a lot about like point of view, right? You’ve got to have a point of view about issues in the marketplace and a lot of that point of view you carry through those high authority placements, but the self-published content you’re producing that needs to be super comprehensive, super clear, and parable.

Jason Mlicki: We talk a lot about this idea of like, what are very straightforward questions and answers that you can bake into anything that you’re publishing or producing. We’re even going as far as, as you’re seeing this everywhere now, but like, [00:28:00] um, putting frequently asked questions sections on landing pages so that we know that the generative AI search tool understands holistically what this is about, and it could answer some of the types of queries that might lead someone to this source material.

Pete Buer: Nice.

Jason Mlicki: Fourth and fifth, and again, we’re talking declining order of authority here, but, um, traditional or declining order of priority, not authority. Priority got me thinking about authority. Um, traditional pr you know, for, for years I’ve been kind of like, I don’t know, I’m kind of critical of pr. I’m like, you know, I, I’ve, for the last 20 years I’ve been telling clients your PR dollar, a hundred percent of it should be going towards.

Jason Mlicki: Article placements, you know, getting your experts placed in places that matter. Well, that’s changing a little bit and we’ll explain why in a second. But, it’s important to get the media talking about you and your firm. So not just about not just putting your expertise into the marketplace, but [00:29:00] talking about you and what you’re doing.

Jason Mlicki: You know, whether it’s you you’re raising funds or you had this impact for a client or the culture or whatever. Um, it’s important to make your firm notable. That’s because of reason five, tactic five is wikis and forums. So there’s a lot of research out there saying, and this is getting more and more pressed lately, um, that a lot of the generative AI search tools tend to rely heavily on Wikipedia content and social forum content.

Jason Mlicki: Reddit, Quora, I have a hypothesis as to why. mainly because it’s mostly open source content and there’s no, there’s no copyright infringement risks, right? It’s like, it’s all just kind of there for the taking. Wikipedia is in theory a, Encyclopedia, right? So, you know, the, the editor community is there to try to create and identify fact and truth, right?

Jason Mlicki: So there’s a belief that the information is credible. so anyway, the four and five go together

Jason Mlicki: because [00:30:00] in order to actually get visible and in Wikipedia you need to have notability. There’s a, that’s a key piece of it. so it’s, it again, it’s, it, it’s sort of like these are the five things you gotta do to show up on the walled garden.

Jason Mlicki: There’s sort of an order of priority and. It’s not like any one thing where it’s like, well just increase your page speed. That was kinda like SEO, right? It’s like, oh, get back links. Like, it was always like some simple loophole. There’s no simple loophole

Jason Mlicki: here, right? It’s like it’s, you gotta work this over time.

Pete Buer: that makes total sense. And, and what a wonderful, you know, for the market

Pete Buer: or if, if I got you right though, that’s,

Jason Mlicki: Yeah.

Pete Buer: you show up in the walled garden.

Jason Mlicki: Yes.

Pete Buer: do we get people to, uh, get outta the garden and come

Jason Mlicki: How do we get him outta the garden? Yeah. So that, that’s, you know, it’s funny when this first, when this first became a thing over the last, last, you know, couple years, that was my first inclination. I was like, oh my gosh, you’re gonna lose all your search traffic. You’ve got to. Give clients a reason to seek you out purposefully.[00:31:00]

Jason Mlicki: Um, and I didn’t think a whole lot about how you showed up in the walled garden until maybe the last 12 months. I suddenly realized like, oh, we gotta figure out a show up there too. Um, so getting ’em out of the garden. So the, the the magic is in the phrase I just said. So a lot of the inbound movement and the content movement that’s played out over the last 20 years, I’ve chosen to call it the content era, was predicated on this kind of loose idea that brand marketing wasn’t that important anymore.

Jason Mlicki: It was sort of like. You know, clients could just find you for your expertise through your thought leadership, through a Google query, and they didn’t necessarily need to know you even existed. Well, that’s the rewrite of this. It’s

Jason Mlicki: like now it’s like we have to give them a specific reason, not just to seek out our expertise and stumble upon it, but to literally find us.

Jason Mlicki: And want to find us for something that we’re doing. The example I give is because there’s a couple ways to do this and you’re doing one of them, by the way, you know? So, um, this show in its very existence is one of the best ways to do this, is to create a, a brand [00:32:00] around key people and an idea, you know, Hey, I know

Jason Mlicki: how. So you’re a perfect example of what this looks like. You know, in, in a, what I call an elevate an expert model, where you’re putting people forward and saying, we’re gonna build a brand around these people and people are gonna seek us out for our point of view on a key issue or a key set of issues because of the way we’re putting.

Jason Mlicki: Our key people forward.

Pete Buer: Nice.

Jason Mlicki: second way to do this is, is to do it at more of a like brand level or like a firm level, and that’s to own it through investing in like a systematic research program. So you see our good friends at TER doing this with the

Jason Mlicki: TER 30 where it’s saying, we’re gonna own this issue of.

Jason Mlicki: How do you pick the best partner software ecosystems? Right. And we’re gonna build a systemic research program that, that looks at that every single year and how, you know, the, the partnership ecosystem is changing and we’re gonna become known not just for being Terra and [00:33:00] investing in IT services firms, but for the Terra 30 and

Jason Mlicki: having a point of view on.

Jason Mlicki: The best place is to build a business. Um, and so it’s sort of like, again, people will actively search for the TER authority. I’ll give another quick example is one we work on as well. It’s, it’s, um, it’s called the Middle Market Indicator, which is done by the National Center for the Middle Market. We’ve been partnering with them for over a decade on this.

Jason Mlicki: And what’s interesting is when you look at the data on it, um, it is made the National Center for the Middle Market, the leading authority on the US middle market. I mean it, they are the number one authority around anything as it relates to the US middle market. And it all starts with that indicator

Jason Mlicki: and that indicator is.

Jason Mlicki: The main reason that people find the center, ’cause they go looking for it. They like, oh, they hear about this thing called the middle market indicator. What is that? And they go to try to track it down. so it’s sort of, there’s like two playbooks here that I see. One is sort of building around key people and one is building around research and a key issue.

Jason Mlicki: and they both kind of meet at [00:34:00] a point of we’re building a brand at the end of the day. Right.

Pete Buer: That is so awesome. Thank you.

Jason Mlicki: Got it.

Pete Buer: almost wasn’t keeping up with the conversation ’cause I was taking copious notes as we went. Uh uh, along

Jason Mlicki: Jason, thank, thank you. And, and for folks listening, um, I think you get a sense for the kind of, um. Clear guidance and partnership, um, that would result from taking Jason up on an offer to spend some time together.

Pete Buer: So I encourage it.

Jason Mlicki: Well,

Pete Buer: Jason?

Jason Mlicki: um, Pete, thanks for having me. Always

Jason Mlicki: good to see you and, uh, you know, love your show. Love what you guys are doing and, and thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Speaker: Thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to leave us a rating and to share this episode with someone who’s navigating AI transformation.

Speaker: At the end of every episode, we like to ask one of our AI friends to weigh in. So hey, deep seek. Today we’re talking about organizations that get smarter with ai. What do you think makes the [00:35:00] difference between companies that just use AI and those that actually grow more intelligent over time?

Elizabeth: The key difference is treating AI like a partner for learning, not just a tool for tasks. Companies that get smarter build systems where every AI interaction improves the whole organization, not just completes a single job.

Elizabeth: And now you are in the know.

Elizabeth: Thanks as always for listening. We’ll see you next week.