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AI Is Making Your Team Dumber (If You Let It)
When a team member fed me pure ChatGPT fluff instead of their actual expertise, it was time to draw a line. As an early adopter and power user of AI, this episode reveals the exact guidelines now required for using AI in the business—from protecting proprietary knowledge on closed systems to owning every output you submit, even if AI generated it. Learn when AI is brilliant (research, refining messages, automating tasks) versus when it's a road to mediocrity (outsourcing your thinking). The uncomfortable truth: AI has all the information but doesn't really know anything, and lazy AI habits are causing thought atrophy in otherwise smart people. These framework guidelines will help you leverage AI's strengths while protecting what actually makes you valuable.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
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What's the proper use of AI for your team and your business? I don't know if you if you've given this much thought. I've. I've been thinking about it now for a couple of days, and I'm I'm going to share some thoughts on it. The, the context here is the other day I asked my team for,
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some input on a, on a prospecting strategy, like a new sequence workflow that we're putting together for some outbound stuff that our clients and customers are doing.
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And I said,
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what they're using today can be upgraded. And what I want is I want our way like, er, quite like our way of doing it. Like if we had to build a campaign from scratch or a workflow or sequence,
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from scratch. And the goal was maximize sales for MSPs or even for our own business, what would it be like?
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What's the
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perfect breakdown. And I put out like a suggested
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here's one example. And I had done a
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ton of research actually using AI and, and other stuff. And then of course, my, my own experience. And so I gave the all that to our team and I said, hey,
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what would you do?
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Like, what's your perfect campaign? What's your perfect sequence? And I gave them again, like, I give them all my research, give them all the contacts and said, I want you to take
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and and that's how we hire people. Like, I'm not just hiring people for, for their hands and to carry out tasks and do what I tell them to do.
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Like I want smart people. It's why we hire you like it's in our process. So ask the opinion. One of the answers I got was just like reeked of GPT, like I could it was it wasn't a good answer. It was full of a whole bunch of fluff and stuff that you'd find in sales blogs and bullshit like that, but nothing really actionable, right?
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It's like a it's like a person who's read every book but never actually done the job. Like, and I can smell these answers from a mile away because I use AI all the time. So when I see it, I'm like, yeah, dude, that's
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gave me GPT and I thought,
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we gotta address this.
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Like I can't ask a question and ask for input and an opinion and get something that I could simply copy and paste into GPT because,
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where we're outsourcing our thinking at that point. And all AI is, is just like one big, large predictive text model. And I'm, I'm a fan of it. Like, I'm how I wear a device, like an AI recording device.
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So I'm like, I'm an early adopter. I'm a power user.
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I know its limitations.
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I gave this thought,
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I created these guidelines that I'll, I'll share with you in case of they're helpful and they're not exhaustive. Like, it's not a this is a declaration that says this is the policy forever.
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It's a based on where we're at and what I've been thinking these past couple days. These are the guidelines that we're putting in place. But this is going to be a flexible, you know, malleable, you know, framework that we're going to continue to iterate on. But what I really need you to do as a team is that easier to understand commander's intent of this.
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Like I need you to understand what the purpose of this is, less so the specifics of each bullet point or so, what I'm getting at in and the intent behind it.
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here's what I came up with. I level
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first of all, all of our,
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playbooks, all of our templates, all of our frameworks, all of our, like, all of that stuff
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has to be done on on a closed system.
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I am not
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paying open AI and training open AI at the same time.
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You know, I'm not training my competitors. I'm not training, you know, like everyone else. Like on on my knowledge and on my experience on the thing that I, I sell frankly, like, yeah, we'd all love to democratize a reinsert.
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Sure. Like that. But that's what we get paid for is our expertise is our answers
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all of our stuff. Anything that's even marginally proprietary or has the potential to be proprietary needs to be on a closed system. So we have, we have business accounts and, you know, we verify in advance, like, none of this information is being used to train, train the model and to train other people.
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So if you're using our stuff outside of that, then like that's a that is a clear violation of, of the guidelines of the, the intent here.
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and because of that, like part of the recommendation is like I really recommend is like you, you get a separate personal account, right? Like I don't have access to to all the chats, even though I own the account, I don't have access to all the chats of everybody, even after they leave, like I don't.
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And unless I steal a log in or something.
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that's not my my intent. My intent is I want to close the system. So I'm not training things.
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here we get kind of personal with, with some of this AI stuff where we ask questions and get content like I would recommend do that somewhere else, like on on a different platform.
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Second thing is, if I ask for your opinion, if I ask for your input, if I asked for your experience, do not feed me I bullshit,
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I'm asking you because I want your opinion. I hired you because I want your opinion. And I'll talk to you about
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the good uses of it and how to leverage it.
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But do not take my question. Feed it into GPT and give me GPT answer, because frankly, if that's the case, I don't need you. Like, I could have obviously put it into GPT myself and gotten GPT the answer. And I would argue
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I'm better than most when it comes to when it comes to to using these models to get really high quality outputs.
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And I'm very good at it. I we, we spend a lot of time in them and
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I don't want somebody else's like quick copy paste in into that. So
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don't feed me the AI bullshit. And as a, as kind of a third guideline here,
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if you're
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giving us information or input or experience or something that is more than, you know, let's call it 25% of the message has been originated from AI thinking that you're required to disclose it.
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You know, it's like it's it's okay. Don't feed me. And I answer and take credit for it's probably more important.
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if you if you do like if you say, you know, I don't actually know the answer to this, let me go to AI and start asking questions, and then I get something out of it that I think, hey, that's really valuable.
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Okay, fine. Disclose it though. Like we that's that's a requirement, going forward, if it's, you know, if you're using it in other ways,
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fine. But if it's,
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originating the thinking, if it's doing the thinking for you, I want to know it.
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Right. Like I want that to be disclosed because by the way, that's also information everybody else has.
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and the fourth one here is regardless, like if you put that in there, you own the answer. Right. Like, so if you
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give me that answer, even if you disclose it, if you haven't taken the time to read it, to refine it, to re prompt it and, and you've been lazy with the, with the AI and you and you give a shitty answer.
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It's your shitty answer.
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Even if I know it's. I like if you give me a shitty answer that was generated in AI, that is your shitty answer is your name at the bottom of that assignment? It is your is your responsibility and you take ownership of that. So
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if the machine starts to hallucinate
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and you're not paying close enough attention and you're being lazy in the thinking of it or in your thinking,
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you
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publish that to me,
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you're the author.
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and I think that's really important. Like, I can't, I can't give me an answer about, oh, shit. You know, I thought
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That wasn't a good answer. I don't know why it said that. No, you said that.
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Now.
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what's the flip to what? What do we use AI for? Well,
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you know, I just put, like, a handful of these things,
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use AI for research, right?
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Like, if you're not sure if you want to, to learn more about something like we, you know, dig into we use deep research for,
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compensation research. We use, on on GPT, we use,
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like all all the tools and the the research models are phenomenal.
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we have some,
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really great prompts for salespeople, like before you go on sales calls like prompts, the deep research functions on these AI models and you will get some killer information.
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So,
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absolutely. It's got all the information in the world,
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use it that way. That's one way,
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you can use AI to, to refine your message, right? Like, hey, I put this together. Puts AI. Here's a voice. No answer. Can you take this and make it a proper text so that I can copy and paste?
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I again read it because you're going to own the copy paste. But, you know, I do that. I walk a lot. I'm right now I'm out walking and I can record an audio note, copy the transcript, drop it to a GPT, turn it into, you know, actual text and paste it. That's a that's a really good use of it.
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Kind of similarly using it to, to edit your messages like,
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am sending this memo to, to somebody important or to an investor or to a customer or to something.
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Well, then drop that shit
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in an AI if you need to, or plug in AI into your your writing app, whatever it is.
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using AI to to automate any of your tasks, use AI to automate your entire job.
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Like, I mean, in terms of the tasks and you know, the the execution of things, like if you're if you're filling out reports or you're doing admin work and you're, you know, doing shit with forms and all of these things, you and you know, how to automate it, then by all means, I don't just like we don't allow it like I, I support that.
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And if you can automate the the administrative and execution and task side of of your role, significantly more cool. Like I, I hire smart people, I can I can give you more roles and if you can figure out how to automate those even better.
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huge productivity gains.
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again, you still own the outcome of that thing, right?
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Like if, if you
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train AI in a way to do something for you and you think, oh, I had it filling out these forms or submitting this thing, automatically, and it was doing it all wrong.
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AI doesn't doesn't own that. Right. Like you, you set it up. You're the you're the driver of it.
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but automated tasks, things like that. I'm not I'm not worried about now,
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I have a free disclose it.
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if you've managed to to free up four hours in your day
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using AI,
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then. Awesome. Let's let's find a better way to, to leverage that time for, for higher gains, a higher productivity.
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And then you're using AI to challenge your thinking, right? Like if you if you have some thoughts, if I have some opinions, you know, in this example with the prospecting sequence, if I looked at and said,
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okay, here's what I'm suggesting, let me drop this into the AI and say, hey, what are the holes in this? Or what are the gaps in this?
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Is there, you know, is this how would you improve this? This is what I would do, this and this, this and this. And you might go, okay, like, you know, six out of ten of those suggestions suck, but like, one's really good. And if you or maybe them, then we refine it. So, you know, challenging your thinking, but,
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not originating.
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You're thinking because,
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know, like, the thing that I kind of put at the end of this was
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like,
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AI is just a synthesis of all the things everyone else has said. It.
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it is a road to mediocrity. In, in the vast majority of cases,
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especially where like deep expertise and context is really required.
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that's why,
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regular business owner goes to, to AI and says, write me a good outbound script or write me a good email, it still sucks, right? Like it's still not, not, not very good if it says, you know, hey, here's my here's my, you know, my sales results, like, what should I do to fix sales?
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It's not going to give you very contextual, you know, highly accurate answers like it's not a good expert in the field yet. Like it probably will be at some point.
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But it's just a synthesis
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everything everyone else has said. So
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you're asking for for average to to come out of that.
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That it has all the information, but it doesn't really know anything.
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And it's funny because I put this together. I was talking to my wife about it last night.
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you know, hey, we're we're having, like, clarify the use of this and editor. And she was like, it's so interesting, like you of all people, like, as an early adopter and such a heavy AI user and such an advocate in so many ways for you to to kind of raise your hand, say, in my business, like I'm, I'm limiting the use of I and I wouldn't say I'm limiting it like I'm, I'm using it more effectively.
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I'm using it for what it's intended to be used, and I'm using it to its actual capabilities today. Like, it's not a very good it doesn't have original thought, it doesn't have the level of expertise of the people that I have on my team.
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in my view, I'm not limiting it. I'm using it properly, like the right tool for the right job.
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because I think
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there are so many people today that are relying on, I think for them, you know, it's like any anytime anything comes up, the first thing I do is like, hey, I gotta I gotta go to, you I gotta let me check GPT, let me check GPT, let me check GPT, let me, let me do even think anymore.
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Right. And it leads to this lazy thinking habit that I swear I see like atrophy of thought occurring with people, like people that are just, like, beginning to not even be able to think for themselves.
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They are like immediately resorting to an AI driven answer. And it's it's laziness. They think it's the shortcut to actual thought. And, you know, in my field, like in, you know, sales and sales consulting and all of that, it's it's great because like, the more that people do that, the more we stand out, you know, like, the more quality stands out, the more real expertise stands out.
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And, and I think we still have such an advantage for those of us that are actual experts in our field and know what we're doing for us to use AI like, oh shit.
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if you've never built a sales team, if you've never led a turnaround, if you've never had a hard conversation, I don't give a shit like it doesn't matter.
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Like you can you can ask GPT for those answers. But if you don't know what's good and what's not,
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you're not going to to help people get great results. So,
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that's what we've got. Those are some of the guidelines I put in place for, for my team. I hope it's helpful,
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and, you know, passing along to your team, maybe there's a book or two in here, or if you have, you know, some some feedback or some suggestions, feel free to, to send them over.
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We can keep refining this thing as we go. Adios.
