What we talked about
Jimi Gibson is VP of Brand Communications at Thrive Agency and a longtime marketing strategist with more than 25 years helping brands cut through noise with clear messaging. In this episode of the Pre Vetted Podcast, Jimi explains why the biggest shift in marketing right now is not just new tools, but a new discovery path: buyers are moving from keyword searches to conversational AI questions, and many businesses are becoming invisible as a result.
Show notes
Jimi Gibson started his career as a professional magician, floating people in the air, sawing them in half, before spending 16 years doing promotional shows for a Fortune 100 company and eventually running marketing agencies. That background shapes how he reads the current AI disruption: not as a technology problem, but as a performance problem, where capturing attention, holding it, and converting it still follows the same brain chemistry it always did. What has changed is where buyers go when they want an answer, and most businesses have no idea they have already disappeared from that conversation.
What we covered
- AI large language models are not keyword-based search engines. They build a knowledge base by looking for consistency, recency, and coherence across everything a business or person has published, and companies that optimized only for traditional SEO are seeing traffic drop 25, 50, or even 75 percent as buyers shift to asking AI instead of scrolling results pages.
- The E-E-A-T framework, experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, originated at Google in 2016 and has been adopted by the major LLMs as the core signal for deciding which businesses to surface. Being invisible as a person inside your company is now a competitive liability: the models want to know who the experts are, not just what the website says.
- A Search Engine Journal study found that executives who publish on LinkedIn just 10 times per year, less than once a month, saw referral rates increase by 30 percent and deal sizes grow. The bar to get into the AI knowledge base is lower than most founders assume, but only if the content reflects genuine experience rather than generic AI-generated copy.
- Jimi’s practical 30-day checklist: add a named author with a bio to every company blog post, post on LinkedIn, appear on an industry podcast (YouTube transcripts are actively indexed by LLMs), start a Reddit presence by commenting on relevant threads, keep the Google Business Profile current, and build a FAQ page with 60-to-80-word answers to the exact questions your customers ask.
- He introduced his “Five Finger Method” as a framework for generating authentic content that AI cannot replicate. Each finger represents a category, the pinky for promises and guarantees, the ring finger for passion and relationship, the middle finger for the villain your brand fights, the index finger for the specific customer you are addressing, and the thumb for the unique thumbprint you leave on the world. Cycling through those five prompts can generate 50 or more distinct content ideas that hit every E-E-A-T signal.
- On the nature of LLMs: Jimi explained that a model predicts the highest-probability next word, one token at a time, which is why its default output is generic. Hallucinations happen when the model takes a low-probability guess because it lacks data. The practical implication is that content built on real stories, scars, client wins, and named frameworks gives the model something genuinely distinctive to latch onto, and makes the business impersonatable in a useful way.
About Jimi
Jimi Gibson is VP of Brand Communications at Thrive Agency, a 20-year-old digital marketing firm with roughly 1,000 active clients ranging from small businesses to enterprise franchises. He is also a TEDx speaker and a working magician who performs to this day.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimi-gibson
- Website: https://thriveagency.com/about
Episode 125 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-vetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today, I’m joined by Jimmy Gibson. He’s VP of brand communications at Thrive Agency. He’s a TEDx speaker and a longtime voice in modern marketing. Jimmy has spent 25 years, more than 25 years, helping brands cut through noise.
with clear messaging. And lately, he’s been focused on what happens when buyers stop scrolling and start asking AI for the one answer. Jimmy, welcome to the show.
Jimi Gibson (00:41) Happy to be here, Federico. Looking forward to our conversation. Should be a fun one.
Federico Ramallo (00:45) Yes, yes, going to be a fun conversation. Thank you for being here today. So for people meeting you for the first time, how do you describe what do you do?
Jimi Gibson (00:57) Hmm. Well, that’s changed a little bit over the last few years. I came to Thrive about five and a half years ago to head up their strategy department. You know, I’m a firm believer and so is the agency. If you don’t have a good strategy, you’re going to end up somewhere pretty expensive and somewhere you probably don’t want to be. So, setting the strategy before we start doing any work, I think is the right way to do it. And then I moved into an executive position.
and was actually guiding the teams on all the work that we did. We have about thousand active clients and we work with small business owners all the way up to enterprise, multi-location, franchise businesses. And so it’s never a dull moment as far as that goes. And then I guess about a year and a half ago, the owner came to me and realized that things were shifting with the way companies were discovered and there was a lot of confusion.
out there about AI and is SEO dead or we all gonna have to pack our bags and listen to the robots or you know what’s gonna happen. And so he actually wanted me to be the face of the company and to help educate business owners and founders and CEOs and folks within organizations about what they should really be focused on. And there’s certain things that
Maybe you’re a little bit behind the times on and there’s other things that you’re just at the right moment that you need to take advantage of a few things. you know, there’s a lot of misinformation out there and because we’ve been around for 20 years and we’ve seen just about every shift in the algorithms, he felt strongly that we had a voice that we needed to be able to help people through this transition. So that’s what I’ve been doing for about the last 18 months is
speaking at conferences, talking to interesting people like you and writing articles and yeah, just trying to make sure that everybody gets the right information at the right time.
Federico Ramallo (02:54) But right, very interesting. And what put you into marketing in the first place?
Jimi Gibson (03:02) well that’s an even more interesting story, Frederico. I actually started out as a professional magician. Not a musician, a magician, yes. Floating people in the air and sawing them in half. I actually got a magic kit when I was very young and I was hooked. I didn’t know why it was hooked. Maybe it was channeling my class clown behavior or…
I knew something that somebody else didn’t know, or there was this idea of things happening behind the scenes. And then you come out on stage and you perform this trick that defies physics. And yeah, it was just fascinating. And so in high school, I met a gentleman who was an account manager for a fortune 100 company. And they were looking for somebody to do promotional shows and
So I did that for another 16 years. And I got to hang out at the advertising agency and see all the cool campaigns they were working on. And I thought, you know what? If there’s any career that’s similar to being a magician, I would say it’s a marketer. And so I still perform magic, but I did transition into working at agencies. I was a creative director.
at an agency, I ran an agency, most of my career has been on the agency side of things, trying to solve problems for people who want to grow their business. And I guess there’s a parallel between capturing attention, keeping that attention, and then moving them to some sort of conversion. And I guess it’s the lens that I see marketing through, and I don’t know, maybe we’ll chat about that a little bit today, but it’s been an interesting dual career.
from the performance side and then the marketing side for sure.
Federico Ramallo (04:45) You
Right, right. I find that fascinating. mean, I think that there is this…
know, dynamic between you and the audience when you’re on a stage, right? Similar to theater, right? Like you have this dynamic. And then when we get into marketing, we have additional layers of, you know, if you have a camera, you don’t see the audience directly. But I think that that dynamic still exists. It’s just a little bit more complex. It takes a little more time to…
Jimi Gibson (05:00) Sure.
Federico Ramallo (05:17) know, receive the feedback from the audience, ⁓ But I think that there’s a lot of parallels between your magic shows and promoting a company,
Jimi Gibson (05:20) Right.
There is, there’s certain steps that I think are important to understand about a communication, whether it’s a marketing campaign, whether it’s a leader trying to guide a team, whether it’s a social media post. And you know, our brains are pretty much all the same. They all want the same sort of things to happen to make us feel comfortable to elicit that curiosity and then have
magic trick work and it be like this, amazing, wow, or for the business to succeed in helping a customer figure out that they’re the right choice for that business. I think we’ve maybe sort of lost some of that wow and some of that theater that we should be including in our messaging. And would love to explain some of the brain chemistry that’s related to a magic trick and then how we can use that in business. And I think
people could apply that right after they finish listening to this episode if they’d like
Federico Ramallo (06:25) Right, right. Yeah, I agree. I totally completely agree and the level of You know noise that has been on them on the on everything right we’re over over flown with so many you know messages and posts and notifications that our attention span has been greatly reduced right so Punching through that noise has been more and more challenging, right?
Jimi Gibson (06:49) Absolutely, and I think it comes down to how specific are you communicating or how much are you relying on the easy button of chat GPT to write all of that for you or communicate all of that for you. And so I would say we’re overwhelmed with content that’s pretty basic and vanilla and not very spicy. And you you can have good spice and bad spice. But I think
There’s going to be a sorting out period where the folks who are being authentic and they’re telling real stories and they’re including their scars and bruises and champagne toasts that have happened through the course of their business are going to win out over the people who were satisfied with generic content.
Federico Ramallo (07:37) Right, right, yes, I completely agree. So you’ve said that AI changed how marketing works today. What is the biggest change you’ve seen so far?
Jimi Gibson (07:49) Yeah, I would say, and for those of you watching on video, I’ve been around a little while in the business and I remember when desktop publishing first started and everybody was afraid that, my gosh, nobody’s going to need somebody to do their layouts and all of that. I think AI has been more disruptive than that because it’s hitting on everything.
Do we need artists to draw pictures? Do we need photographers to take photos? Do we need writers to write us engaging copy? Now we’re getting into the agentic era of having them do tasks. Do we need all of the people on our team that we thought we needed? And I think one of the things that we’re seeing from an agency perspective and working with a variety of clients is the human element.
still has to be there. AI is not to the point where it can replace all of that. And the way that these AI models find businesses is a little bit different than traditional SEO. And if you’re not aware of how they work, it’s probably good to study, do some research, ask whatever your favorite large language model, whether it’s Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok.
any of those, just ask it. How do you find a business? How do you work? That’s the interesting thing about them. If you converse with them, they’ll tell you. Now sometimes it’s not always true. We’ve heard about the hallucinations. But I guess the biggest difference from a visibility standpoint that we’ve seen is in traditional SEO, the person looking for a business would type something in more related to a keyword.
thinking, right? That was the way that we existed for many, many years. And then you would receive back a page on Google that had 10 blue links, and then it was up to you to decide, do I click the first link? Do I click the second link? Or wait a minute, there’s an ad. Yeah, I don’t want to click on that ad, but I kind of recognize this name. And so it was really on the person who was doing the search to decide what that choice was.
And companies optimize their website for that keyword structure, right? And so there were keywords on your website, there were backlinks to the website, which are still important. But the way these large language models look at a business has changed. It’s not keyword based. Backlinks are still important, but the quality of those sites linking to you is much more important.
One of these large language models is actually trying to do is they have a knowledge base, right? And so there’s periods of time where they update their knowledge base. And then they layer that on if they can search the web with additional information that adds to that knowledge base. And they’re looking for certain things. And if a business has not taken the time to pay attention to what these
AI bots want to know or what it takes to get in the knowledge base, then they’ve become invisible. And we’ve seen some of our clients and some of the prospects coming to us, traffic to their website has dropped off 25, 50, 75%. And they’re quite upset. And so I think the biggest shift that we’ve seen is the conversations are now happening.
in so many different places. Again, as I said in the beginning, there’s a lot of confusion about what do I do? How do I do it? I don’t want my traffic to disappear. How do I get visible on these various LLMs? All of these tools are upgrading at a very fast speed. And I would say there’s a lot of confusion. And so I know that was a long answer to probably a short question, but
Federico Ramallo (11:48) You
Jimi Gibson (11:50) I would say the biggest thing that we’re seeing is confusion and people not being visible in the places that they used to be visible and that’s very disturbing to businesses.
Federico Ramallo (12:00) Right, right. I mean, I remember Paul Graham saying to an executive of Google that their business model is dead, right? Because now Google Ads are dead, basically. But I mean,
And I was taking that with a grain of salt, right? Because I don’t think that a big company like that is going to be immediately dead. But there is definitely a revolution on how to promote companies, right? I think that’s the takeaway I take from that comment.
Jimi Gibson (12:19) Sure, sure.
Federico Ramallo (12:32) And the SEO was something that was working for many years. Before that, I don’t know if you remember, the companies would have names like AAA, Acme Company, whatever name that is, right? Because that way you would show up to the front of the book, right? Of the white page, right? Or yellow page. So, you know, then we had SEO that basically was a…
Jimi Gibson (12:45) for the phone book, yeah.
Right, right.
Yeah, those were the days.
Federico Ramallo (12:59) revolution on how we promote companies and what you’re describing is a revolution, maybe a revolution, maybe an evolution, but a new way for companies that they should promote because if they follow the traditional SEO route, they’re not going to get the results that they were getting before, right?
Jimi Gibson (13:20) Yeah. And I would say one thing, and I’ll use an acronym that actually Google originated back in 2016, and then they updated it in early 2020s. It’s E-E-A-T, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. And so Google basically qualified content related to that acronym, and these large language models have picked up on that. And I would say
while you can be a little bit pessimistic and think I’ll never be able to catch up, you actually have an opportunity right now to stand head and shoulders above the people who are not hitting one or more of those letters in that acronym. And so what these large language models are doing is they want to know, can I trust this company?
to have them be in the consideration set of what I reply back when somebody asks a question to me. And they’re looking for businesses that qualify, but more often than not, they’re actually looking for people. Because it’s hard for a business, so in the past, you could have backlinks to the website, you could optimize for keywords, and a website could rank with the owner.
or executive team or people within the organization basically being invisible or faceless. What AI loves to see is the people. And so if you have sort of hidden behind the scenes in the past, this is a great opportunity for you to step out, be visible, be in the conversation with a perspective so that…
The connection between the company and the people within the company now gives you a significant competitive advantage for those who want to stay invisible from a person perspective. And I would say you don’t have to be a content creator. You don’t have to produce content at the rate of what you might imagine. The bar is very low.
Search Engine Journal actually released a research report in November of last year that said if an executive published 10 times a year on LinkedIn, now that’s not a month, that’s not a week, that’s a year, 10 times, less than once a month, their referral rate would increase by 30 % and their deal size would be larger. And so that should tell you.
that these models are hungry for experts because it follows the experience expertise authority. And then if you’ve never really put a lot of effort into reviews from clients, now’s the time because in that trustworthiness factor, what they’re also looking for are brand mentions and the sentiment of the brand. Is the sentiment positive? Is the sentiment negative?
And so they’re looking in a variety of places for these customer reviews. And so those are just a couple of the clues that folks should be aware of. And I’m happy to give a couple of tips for, know, if somebody wants to, you know, do their first tackle in the next 30 days, what should you do? But yeah, I would say that’s the major difference is it’s no longer okay to be invisible.
Federico Ramallo (16:42) Right, right. And as you said, now we have greenfield opportunities, right? Because the first one in the game are going to have much more impact, right, and authority. And that’s going to stick for a long run, right? Even if the policy changes further on the road, that being the first is going to have a larger weight into it, right?
Jimi Gibson (16:48) Right.
Yeah, because you want to be included when that knowledge base is updated. And, you know, these AI platforms love it when people are consistent in what they talk about. And so they’re looking for consistency. They’re looking for recency of information. And if you start getting recommended, it’s going to go back and go,
Federico Ramallo (17:12) Right.
Jimi Gibson (17:33) Has Federico got anything new to say about this? And so the sooner you get started, the better off you’re gonna be, just like you said, for sure.
Federico Ramallo (17:40) Right. So you were talking a bit about what advice would you give to a founder? What they should do in the next month or so.
Jimi Gibson (17:50) Yeah.
If you’ve never been identified on your company blog as the author, put the owner, the founder, the CEO, some executive or subject matter expert as the author of a blog on your website. That’s probably the easiest thing. You have control over that. It should have your name, your title, and a brief bio. And so if you just committed to doing a blog a month,
or have your team write the blog and don’t let them or you don’t have chat GPT write that blog for you. You have to have some expertise. You have to talk about your experience. You have to talk about your struggles, things that AI cannot write for you. After I give these tips, I’m going to give the audience
an easy way for them to be able to communicate what they’re about in a way that chat GPT cannot mimic. And so I think that’ll be helpful for listeners. And so that would be the first thing to do. The second thing to do, which these AI models also are able to capture what’s going on in social media. And so, you know, from a B2B perspective, LinkedIn is a very popular place. From a B2C, I would say Facebook.
Instagram are very popular. Even if you have a B2C focus, it will still be able to understand what you’re talking about on LinkedIn. I would say if you’ve never been on a podcast and you know somebody or if there’s an industry podcast of some place that perhaps you belong to an association and they have a podcast, perhaps there’s somebody in your community that would be a partner brand to you and they have a podcast.
Get on a podcast. The page for the show will give you the authority of you being the expert that’s being interviewed. If that podcast is on YouTube, these AI models are looking at the transcripts of YouTube. That’s a very popular place for them to cite. If there is potential for you to get a Wikipedia page, that’s also another place for you.
to engage in some content off of your website. And then I would say it’s declined a little bit, but many of these models look at Reddit threads for how they are finding out about businesses. And so there is value in starting a thread, but there’s actually more value in you commenting on a thread. And so if you’re not familiar with Reddit,
do a little research, look for conversations that are appropriate in your industry. And then if you’re a local business, make sure your Google business profile is up to date. Make sure there are location signals within the Google business profile, your website. And then I would say an easy one for businesses also to control is to start a frequently asked questions page on your website.
because these models are really structured to answer questions and go to your customer service team, say, what are the common questions that we get? Talk to your sales team. What are prospects asking about? Use that to formulate your frequently asked questions page and then simply put those questions and then provide the answer in about 60 to 80 words. That’s what
is about enough information that satisfies the requirement, but doesn’t require you to write tons and tons of copy on that. And so, yeah, those are probably six or seven quick tips that will help. There are tools out there that you can see what your level of visibility is, but I’ll tell you an easy and a free one, is just go to every one of the models, and they all are different, right?
Go to ChatGPT and type in who is and put your first and last name. Don’t put your business, just type in who is and put your first and last name. Then a separate search, say who is the expert in and then talk about your industry. And if you don’t show up, you’ve got your answer. And then about every 90 days after doing these activities, do that same search again. And try to determine
where they’re referencing that information, what signals it’s picking up on. And so it’s going to look a little bit different between Clawed, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity. If you’re not sure which of these platforms your customers are using, ask them. That might be a great survey that you could send out so that you understand.
that most of your client base is using this particular platform and then you can work to optimize for that platform. So I don’t know, was that helpful, Frederico? That was a lot of information there and I think if you just committed to doing two or three of these, you certainly would be better off than where you might be now.
Federico Ramallo (22:49) I think it’s very, very useful. While you were explaining this, think your explanation was very captivating. I think it is very much valued and appreciated. I find it interesting that you can actually ask the agents, how did you find that information? How did you come up with that list of experts? So the way you can…
Yes, I agree with you that there is some level of hallucination, but most of the information they provide is accurate. You cannot take it as face value. You have to double check it yourself, basically. Because that’s how these agents work. I think that the keywords was a best imperfect solution that we had before because…
computers had the limitation of, they were unable to determine.
analyze words as level as LLMs can do that now, right? So yeah, I find that very interesting. And the idea of having a frequently asked questions, I think that’s another interesting idea because that way now you have a much better, you know, structured information in a much more compact way that can provide the responses that the agent will look for, right?
Jimi Gibson (23:57) Right. Yeah. And I would say there’s two other nuances to this approach. First, you have to decide what do you want to be known for? And so sometimes the answer is, well, I want to be known for everything that I do. But perhaps there are key services or products that are your best services or products. And if you had to choose three to five things to be known for, focus on
all of your content that you’re putting out there to examine those three to five things from a variety of angles. Because what AI is looking for is they’re looking for consistency of what you talk about and what your experience and expertise is in. And they’re also looking for coherence across all of these places. Are you saying the same thing over and over? And so when the business owner at Thrive came to me and said, you know, Jimmy, I want you to be the face of the brand.
I needed to decide what did I want to be known for. And so if you look at all of the content that I produced over the last year, it’s very clear when I type in who is Jimmy Gibson, what it picks up and the consistency of the message that I have communicated. And so that actually frees you up not to talk about 20 different things, right? Pick three to five things and make sure you’re examining all of those topics from every angle.
And then the other thing that I would say is be passionate about what you talk about, give examples, give case studies, talk about the struggles. And so I’m gonna hold up my left hand for those of you who are watching, for those of you who are listening, just know that I’m holding up my left hand. And I’m gonna start with my pinky. And I think we all remember the pinky promise when we were kids that we made a promise on the playground.
You didn’t break that promise or you are not gonna be very popular at school. And so what promise are you giving, you know, on behalf of your company? What promise are you giving to your customers? Do you have a guarantee? Do you have some sort of risk reversal? What are you willing to stand behind? What promise are you giving to your team? What promise are you giving to your vendors? I mean, right there, if you just did that finger, you’ve probably got.
five or six or seven different things that you could talk about that chat GPT cannot replicate. The next one is your ring finger. And so, you know, I would say in most parts of the Western world, that’s where you wear your wedding band. That relationship started with a spark of passion for that other person. What passion do you have for the business that you’re in? What passion do you have for your customer? What, you know, if it’s not about the money, what is it about?
People are very interested in that. But it’s also about the relationship. You didn’t ask that person to marry you on the first date. You didn’t expect that person to answer you on the first date. Are you in it for the long-term relationship? My wife and I just celebrated 20 years of marriage. That’s a different mindset than saying, I just want one sale and I’m moving on, right? And so right there, you’ve got another five, six, seven things you can talk about. The next is the middle finger.
And no, I’m not giving Frederico the finger. I have all my fingers up. And we often consider that a vulgar gesture, but it’s actually a gesture of defiance, right? And so who is the villain? Who’s the enemy of your brand? People love to rally around a cause. You know, what are your employees fighting for? Are they fighting for your customer? Is your product or service the best that it can be? Go ahead and name your villain.
your customers want to rally around something they believe in. So do your vendors. It could be a person, a company, an ideology. And you know there’s ways to do it respectfully. You don’t have to trash the competitor. But if you truly believe your product or service is going to save somebody or give somebody what they’re looking for, then it’s your responsibility to name the alternative that is not going to get them what they’re looking for.
And so right there, I probably gave you 10 or 15 different ways to express the middle finger. The pointy finger is the next one. And the pointy finger points at somebody. And so if you don’t know who you’re talking to, you can’t even tell those previous three stories, right? So you have to know exactly who you’re talking to, what their pain is, what are they staying up late night worried about? What are they passionate about solving? And
you know, right there, you’ve got a ton of things to talk about that chat GPT can’t write for you. The next one is the thumb and that’s the universal symbol for, hey, things are going great or thumbs down, things are not going so great. If you just had a KPI dashboard that was thumbs up or thumbs down and no wishy washy in the middle, it’d be pretty clear to know if you were succeeding or not. But the cool thing is the thumb print is also
sort of a metaphor for what thumbprint are you leaving on the world with your business? What thumbprint are you leaving on your customers? The people that work with you, your vendors. What is unique to you? I have three sets of twins as nieces and nephews. They actually can open each other’s phones with their face ID, but they can’t open it with their thumb. That’s unique to every one of us. And so right there, just you carry this hand around with you all day.
I’ve probably given you 50 or 60 different things that you can talk about that are unique to you that hit on all of those experience expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And when you get stuck, just rotate through those fingers and you will have a world of content that’ll probably last you a year.
Federico Ramallo (29:38) wow that’s amazing that’s a masterclass on on how to create high quality content
I am.
I’m amazed by your answer. ⁓
Jimi Gibson (29:51) Yeah.
It took me a long time to make it that simple. But being a magician, you know, we do magic with our hands. And I thought, you know what, everybody’s got all these frameworks and they’ve got all these difficult things that nobody’s ever going to remember. I would say the majority of people have one hand, hopefully two hands, and they can carry these around and they can remember what those fingers represent. And it should stir something emotionally in you to be able to write from the heart.
Federico Ramallo (29:55) the
Right, right. the…
And if you cannot explain it, a or I would say it in a positive way when you can explain your topic. So a five year old could understand it that you can, you know, take just the essence that that is when you truly understand the topic.
Jimi Gibson (30:42) And I’ll kind of peel back the curtain a little bit. I started naming that the five finger method. And if you type in to Claude or chat, GPT or Gemini, what is Jimmy Gibson’s five finger method? AI knows what it is because I was consistent. I created a framework that isn’t just here’s your content plan. There is a specific process to go through to create content.
and it’s unique. And so those are the things that you also want to be looking for. And I think this is the first time I’ve ever tipped that. But yeah, listeners can do that right now and it will show up and you can see where that is being referenced. And so I’m consistent in the way that I communicate the technique to create content. And you can do the same thing for your business. You’ve been doing it for years. You know exactly how to do it. Just package it in a way
that now you can become the expert at doing this. And so when somebody asks, how should I create content, I’ll bet I come up on this process.
Federico Ramallo (31:51) Right, right. Yeah, I find that so fascinating. We did an experiment that where we asked the, we did it with Chechi Petiba, it probably happened with others, to impersonate a person, right, a friend of mine. And please describe this topic as this person, right? And we were amazed on
how close it was representing that person. We thought it was funny and that’s kind of where the whole thing ended. ⁓ We thought, well, the agents are getting smarter and smarter. But now when you’re describing how they build their knowledge base, then it makes sense. I mean, if we can work towards
Jimi Gibson (32:23) You
Federico Ramallo (32:38) getting the agents to impersonate us, right? If we can provide all the information, if we can build a framework that it’s unique to us, we can provide this unique perspective, then we can get the agents to put us as trustworthy experts into their list of subject matter experts, right?
Jimi Gibson (32:59) Yeah, that’s a perfect analogy. And you’re exactly right. It is kind of fun. And then what you did was you reverse engineered and you went, okay. Well, then I want to be impersonated and I want it to know what my personality is, what my point of view is. And if you sound like everybody else, there’s nothing that it can latch onto that makes you discernible from the next business person out there saying the exact same thing. So
If you’re looking for permission to be yourself, you’ve just been granted permission to be yourself and to have a point of view on something.
Federico Ramallo (33:34) Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s amazing. mean, I come from software engineering, right? So for me, ⁓ the revolutions of…
Jimi Gibson (33:41) Mmm.
Federico Ramallo (33:44) know, changes of mindset or learning new tools, right? Every time you learn a new language, coding language, you basically have to throw away all the knowledge you have and start afresh, right? There’s still some things that you can kind of pick up after you learn, know, it’s like learning a new language, right? It’s hard, right? Because you basically have to change your mind completely, right? And then,
Jimi Gibson (33:50) Right.
Federico Ramallo (34:09) roles that are more related to people, they don’t change as much, right? Because people are kind of the same. We want to think we are evolved, but we are at the end of the day, we are animals, we’re mammals that, you So what I’m trying to say is that, you know, I’m used to those changes. But now with AI, that is getting into the revolution on
Jimi Gibson (34:32) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (34:32) how
we think, how we talk, how we operate. And there’s a lot of hype around it. And it’s a different revolution that I was not prepared for, if that makes sense. And I find it interesting.
Jimi Gibson (34:50) Yeah, well, you’re probably like me, you know, as a developer and then as a magician, I have to know how it works and what goes on behind the scenes so that I can understand how to use it to my advantage. And so I think a lot of organizations are frantically trying to figure out how do I use AI? How do I create workflows that are efficient? But fewer folks in business are going
wait a minute, how can I be discovered and how can I be found when people are asking questions because, you know, I would say the typical phrase if somebody’s searching in the old way of SEO for a keyword is about four to five word phrases. The typical number of words that people use when they’re communicating with one of these large language models is 32 words. And so it’s very conversational.
People are asking questions. They’re trying to get things done. You know, my wife uses it to plan a vacation or, you know, to do some decorating in the home. Well, invariably there are products and services associated with those types of things and you want to be in the consideration set when AI has got this knowledge base of who’s out there doing what and then they also have the ability
to look at the sentiment of positive or negative for a brand, who are the people that they should be looking at, who are the experts in that area, and the more breadcrumbs that you have around the internet that show who you are and what you do, the more likely you are to be in that conversation. The challenge is people are oblivious to the fact that they’re not even in the consideration set. And so…
I would say there’s a window of time where you can do some of the things that we talked about today to get your visibility in a better place.
Federico Ramallo (36:48) Right, right. And instead of trying to fight it, embrace it.
Jimi Gibson (36:53) It’s not going anywhere, is it?
Federico Ramallo (36:55) Yes, it took me a while to come at peace with that, Yeah, and then the other thing I’ve been learning about or I’ve been talking about is this idea of synthetic content, right? There’s so much AI-generated content that it’s hard to find the, break the noise, you know? And it makes these conversations,
much more interesting because there is no AI involved in this conversation. It’s just two humans talking. And the quality of the conversations we can have and the content generated by it, it’s a much higher quality than any AI-generated content so far. Maybe in the future it will change. ⁓
Jimi Gibson (37:45) Sure.
Federico Ramallo (37:48) And you kind of lean into that mention that we shouldn’t use chatch GPT to generate the content. We should talk about our struggle, our experiences, rather than just ask GPT to generate some content. Because eventually,
we as humans, we see the patterns and we can detect when it’s a hollow article, right? And so the agents are getting better and better to detect that, right?
Jimi Gibson (38:16) Yeah, and if I can use the magic analogy again, it’s a really smart mind reader, but all it’s doing is it, when you ask it a question, it is converting your words into tokens, which are numbers. And then before it gives you that answer back, it is looking at the highest probability of what it should reply back for each word. So,
The first word, it analyzes what the second word should be. Then it analyzes those two words, what should the third word be? And so if you think about that its goal is to give you the highest probability answer, it has no emotion, it has no feelings, it has no empathy. It’s just wanting to give you the right answer. Well, it’s been trained on all this stuff that’s out there that now becomes pretty generic.
because it wants to succeed in giving you the right answer. And so we talked about hallucinations. Hallucinations sometimes are throwing in this random answer because it wants to train itself on, well, maybe it would be right. Let me take a chance here. It doesn’t know, so it’s gonna guess. And once you know that, then you can go, okay, well, I can use it to create some drafts. I can use it to…
think about things and ideate, can have it give me a separate opinion on something, but in the end, it’s your content, you should own it. And you have to layer in the things that are outside of its probability set, because that makes it unique.
Federico Ramallo (39:53) Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I am kind of adding a little bit more on the magic. It’s magic until you see how it happens, right? that magic element, the awe kind of disappears because now you know how it happens, right? So I think that with the ancient…
Jimi Gibson (40:04) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (40:15) We’re looking at them as, they’re magical. We have so much hype around it because we don’t really understand how it works. So in the magic show, we want to be taken away by the magic. So it’s kind of OK. But in this case, for agents, we really want to understand how it works and just being able to leverage rather than just, you know.
get amazed by the shiny new object.
Jimi Gibson (40:40) Couldn’t have said it better. That was an awesome way to put it. Magicians are truthful liars. We tell you we’re going to fool you and we do, but you don’t want that same thing to happen with these AI platforms.
Federico Ramallo (40:43) I am.
I think of magicians as the first white hat hackers.
Jimi Gibson (40:56) Yep.
Federico Ramallo (40:58) Yeah,
ethical hackers, right? That they overt hack for the good of humanity, if you like, right?
Jimi Gibson (41:07) That’s right. Bring
the joy and wonder back.
Federico Ramallo (41:10) Yes, yes. I think that this is amazing, Jimmy. I am truly awed by everything you discussed. I remind I was thinking of there was an old antique, actually, a desk that was built. I don’t know when it was built, but 1700, something like that, that was.
a magician artifact that was moving a…
Avatar, a wooden Avatar, they couldn’t figure out how it was working. I don’t remember the name. I was trying to get up. anyway, it turns out that there was a person inside the desk, right? That was moving the character, the Avatar. And it…
trick the people for many, years, until eventually they found the desks and were stored and they were able to uncover the mystery. But it remained a mystery for many, years. don’t know if you, you know what I’m talking about.
Jimi Gibson (42:22) Yeah, it was actually called the Mechanical Turk and he had a turban and he would challenge people to play chess and people were amazed. Yeah. And so back then they were creating autom, what’s the word, automatons. Yeah. Mechanical robotic things. And so this was the next step.
Federico Ramallo (42:31) Yes.
Mechatronic, right?
Jimi Gibson (42:45) that was more human-like. And so, yeah, he sat at a table and had a chessboard and, yep, fooled people for a long time.
Federico Ramallo (42:55) Yes, yes, and I think that a lot of the hype we’re seeing on AI is a little bit like that. I’m not saying all of it. And I’ve been exploring through the episodes kind of what’s hype, what’s real, on what AI can do, right? Because I find it fascinating, right? And I’m trying to uncover that.
Jimi Gibson (43:02) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (43:14) of mystery around it. So that way we can decide, this part is real, this part is hype, and then how can I leverage it better?
Jimi Gibson (43:23) Yeah, and I think, you know, that’s what we’re trying to do for our clients, because they’re confused, and they read a lot of articles, and they try to understand, you know, should I spend my money on this, or what’s going to happen with that? And yeah, so I’m glad you have this show, and we can speak openly about these topics. And hopefully it can help people sort fact from fiction or magic from mechanics.
Federico Ramallo (43:48) Yes, yes, this is amazing. So how can people reach out to you and Thrive Agency?
Jimi Gibson (43:54) Yeah, so thriveagency.com is the website. We have a lot of information on there. I write a blog with my name and bio every month, just like I have asked everyone to do here. I also follow that up with about a 15 minute video. It’s educational. It’s not sales pitchy, so you can go to our YouTube channel. And then I write just about every day on LinkedIn, trying to share some of this information. So would love to connect with people on LinkedIn.
You can DM me and ask me a question and I’ll be happy to answer it or figure out where I can point you to to help you solve your problem. So, would love to connect with some of the listeners for sure.
Federico Ramallo (44:37) Amazing, Jimmy, I truly appreciate you being here today. We’re going to leave the links on the description of this episode so people can also reach out. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Jimi Gibson (44:50) No, I would just say if you haven’t been proactive about being out there and talking about your industry or your product or service, get out there and do it and it actually will become fun for you and you’ll see the benefits tenfold in the effort that you put out there. So yeah, that would just be my encouragement to listeners.
Federico Ramallo (45:14) Right. Amazing. Jimmy, thank you very much for joining us today.
Jimi Gibson (45:18) Thank you. It’s been a fun conversation.