Episode 717: Is A.I. Making Your Team DUMBER?

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Ralph and Lauren take a bold look at a rising issue in modern marketing teams: is AI making your team dumber? Drawing from real-world agency experience, Lauren shares a transparent case study from her own business where AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper created an illusion of productivity but resulted in lackluster, surface-level insights. The discussion tackles how over-reliance on AI can quietly erode critical thinking, replacing strategic interpretation with generic output that “feels” complete but misses true business impact. You’ll learn why being “human in the loop” matters, how to train your team to use AI as a collaborator—not a crutch—and why tools should ask better questions instead of just giving faster answers. This episode is a must-listen for any marketing leader, CMO, or founder using AI to scale without sacrificing intelligence, creativity, and judgment.

Chapters:

  • 00:00:00 – Kickoff & A Powerful Shoutout to Steve Sims
  • 00:02:21 – AI in Marketing: Game-Changer or Risk?
  • 00:04:26 – When AI Fails: A Shocking Case Study
  • 00:08:06 – Critical Thinking vs AI: Who Wins?
  • 00:13:24 – Smart Fixes & What’s Next for Teams
  • 00:25:52 – Final Takeaways & Must-Have Resources

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

PT Ep. 717 Ralph & Lauren (Is A.I Making Your Team DUMBER?)

Ralph: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Professional Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11,

Lauren: to like the beloved, Steve Sims, RIP to an amazing human

being. When we recorded our podcast together, he told me never record down here again.

So because of him, I always recorded upstairs and I just wanted to remember him.

Ralph: I remember him. , Great guy, , unfortunately, , will leave his obituary and the. Show notes. It’s not something that we enjoy doing, but obviously a great guy. I was in the same mastermind with him for years and years. He was a tremendous speaker. I never really figured out how he made money,

Lauren: Oh, he was the concierge to the

stars.

Ralph: I know He knew

Elton John. I don’t know. He partied with Royals, like he did some crazy stuff. So, [00:01:00] anyway, we miss you Steve. , We will leave a link in , the show notes. The episode he was on here with Perpetual Traffic kind of kicked me in, , me and M’s. Ass about like our public speaking.

I remember that. It was like, he’s sort of shaming us for not like promoting ourselves well enough. . Which he was. right. he was absolutely right. So anyway, we’ll leave a link in the

Lauren: If you don’t know him, we also leave his go for stupid book. a great book and the title Go for Stupid is you’re gonna miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take, and more than likely you’re actually not taking the full shot. You’re just like tapping it in versus really going for gold.

, And that was. A profoundly interesting book for me because it, challenged exactly that. So anyone that’s listening and your brand, your personal vision of who you are and who you wanna be, or for your company, like he did that really well.

Ralph: Yeah, I loved about him and I think it’s just a good. Rule in general, and this is something that I’ve struggled with and I think a lot of people struggle with, is just being yourself he never held [00:02:00] back. It’s like he he was always somebody who just like spoke off the top of his mind.

Now, sometimes that does get you into trouble, but the point is, is like I always respected that about him. He is like. he always knew where you stood with him, and he was just one of those very, very cool characters in our industry that, , unfortunately passed far too early. So, , we’ll miss you, Steve.

today’s show is not about that. Today’s show is a bit of a rant. Because we feel like you probably more strongly on this because I have to, there’s a couple of things that we’re doing on, especially on our creative side, which is pretty tremendous with this tool. It’s a tool that everyone else is using now or everyone should be using, and it’s called ai.

Have you ever heard of it?

Lauren: Yeah, I think it was a movie with Will

Smith.

Ralph: Yeah, it was a great, yeah, it was way back when it was like the robots, all that. The question really is, is AI making your team dumber and [00:03:00] overlying upon it? Like, yes, we’re using a shocking Steve Sims type of title on today’s show.

Lauren: He’d be like, you know what? Y’all team is getting stupid on stupid. That was a

terrible Steve Sims

Ralph: Absolutely. God awful. Yeah, he’s turning over his grave. , The point is, is. This is something that I think you have to safeguard against, and I don’t know as if we have, well, we’ve got a few tips for you here on how to prevent it, but I think it’s something that you as a director of marketing or a CEO or even someone who’s in the trenches doing this stuff every single day, or maybe I have a small team, something to watch out.

For it, something that you’ve noticed recently. And so give us some context for what this revelation really is. And it’s sort of the anti of all the other things that are being out there right now in ai. ’cause I really haven’t seen a whole lot of this. Everyone talks about, oh, AI is threatening and it’s scary.

If you talk to like somebody my mother’s [00:04:00] age, she’s like, I don’t even know what it’s, it’s gonna take over the world. Like Terminator two surprised that she actually knew that movie by the way. She’s 89. , The point is. Is AI making your team dumber? And I’m not saying that the Mongos media team is dumb by any stretch, but you’ve been noticing some things.

So what are sort of the things to watch out for at this point?

Lauren: I would say, okay, so good clarifying, like, I don’t think anyone on my team is dumb. I just have found recently that there are opportunities where critical thinking, , has eroded itself a little bit because. ’cause of our team’s over reliance on ai and as I’ve told you, Ralph and fer, anyone, the snake, like we’ve been using AI since before Chacha Petit, right?

So when Jasper was Jarvis, we really jumped on early. , And like I remember it was like 2020, like it was pre pandemic, maybe even 20. And like we were on the news in Australia because of how efficient AI had helped us in the workplace. And [00:05:00] I don’t know if that helps or hinders where we’re at with it, but we’ve been using AI so much and e every month it gets introduced more and more.

So our personal journey with AI was using it. I described it like a calculator. , It makes you better and faster at math. And then for our copy team, which is how we started with ai, it just allowed the copywriters to never cramp their hand. Like when I grew up in school, we had to hand write. Our essays, and I remember like shaking my hand because I was like exhausted.

Like I was like I couldn’t write fast enough and there was such a time limit for me to be able to express all that I wanted to say in the essay and in ai. Like we never had to take a creative break. Our copywriting team never had writer’s block, and then we progressed from it being like a tool of inspiration, a source.

To keep the flow going into having like it in workflows, right? So we have it connected to systems where we always have human in the loop, we have the human QAing, we have the human contributing. , And we’ve seen, especially recently now with how much we use [00:06:00] ai, the way that a lot of the content that comes to us from AI is so confident and it feels so good because of how quickly it was delivered because of all the stuff it takes into consideration.

That has provided some use cases where we have a false sense of certainty on the output of the delivery. So in that use case, it was like, and sometimes I’m like on the on calls with PAC members, like our team members and just I’ve seen some of our PAC members feel floored. Like they’re so shook when it’s like, hold on. We’re missing these five critical elements, like it’s completely missing from this presentation or from this, , report that you’ve submitted. And it, has become almost like a, deer in headlights moment where that critical thinking aspect has been eroded because there’s so reliant.

And again, that like false sense of certainty is that what AI delivered is like amazing and better. What. They could have thought of on their own, which is where I’m [00:07:00] saying that’s not true. ’cause I have seen better work and I know that they understand. And when we, point out the things, it’s like, oh duh, I can’t believe I missed it.

But it’s, those kind of moments where we’re missing some of those foundational stuff. And I know a lot of business owners, we do this with like shiny object syndrome. Like we, we stopped doing the thing that made us money and we’re, we’re chasing something new. We’re chasing something new. And now I’m starting to see that. At least with my team. So I’m being like vulnerable and transparent,

, Of something that is found. And then like in the like proactive piece Absolutely. Of like I know that, , we have things that we’re working on to help combat it and it’s not saying like, oh, I’ve already solved this and everything.

Like, this is just me being transparent and vulnerable of how we’re growing and progressing as a team and like just trying Ralph to like, signal to you and to other. Listeners that this could happen as well to you, and it’s how do you overcome that? Because having to tell a team member that like, whoa, okay, I get why this sounds good, but we are way off target.

Like this is [00:08:00] not what we’re trying to do. Like that’s hard

because you lose their

confidence.

Ralph: I agree. I think it would help for people to maybe put this into context a bit, as an example, maybe something that you, you know, the name is have changed to protect the innocent or the guilty. But maybe an example.

Lauren: I’m guilty. I’m the owner. I’m the

leader. It will always be me. Let’s just be super clear. So we’re gonna

say it’s Lauren.

Ralph: it’s Jocko Willink, you know, it’s, this is extreme ownership here. Like you’re ultimately responsible for your team and your team’s health, wealth benefit. You know, everything that they learn, their professional and personal development, all of those sorts of things. So gimme sort of an example when somebody loses strategic thinking and like, what is that?

And maybe that’s like a good thing to define here because strategic thinking sorta comes in ai, but not really. So

it depends, but the point is like, gimme an [00:09:00] example of like where you saw this, you’re like, huh, this might be a more pervasive problem within, you know, the people that I work with.

Lauren: Yeah. and again, like no one did anything wrong. this is something that like is attributed to little Lauren. Scenario, right? Like little Lauren didn’t do anything wrong in this case, or like other Jocko Willings and stuff. This is just a trend I’m starting to

see.

, Our team is, is starting to use AI as a crutch, where it’s been a, great tool. But it’s becoming a crutch. So there’s an overreliance of ai. So if you’re listening to this, I invite you to look at is it a crutch for your team or is it become like the replacement?

So you talked about earlier, like people are scared, like this is gonna replace you. AI is an amazing collaborating solution. But when you have a crutch on ai, you’re over reliant on it, and then you start to replace. Some of this critical strategic thinking with ai. That’s where it’s like we start to see a delta and like if you haven’t heard or have read the book, , co intelligence, it’s like living and working with AI that got recommended to me by meta [00:10:00] execs from those that are in charge of ai.

So this was a book that. Gave me language to understand a phenomenon that was happening. And so let’s give it like the actual use case. Right? So Little Lauren, we have, , three main types of reports that we do within the Mongos media ecosystem, right? We have our weeklys, we have our postmortems, and we have our impact reports.

So our weeklies are like numbers, dashboard based updating. Our postmortem are looking at like campaigns and looking at like fixed periods to see how something has worked really well. And then an impact report might be six months. It might be an annual report, it might be a full quarter. It’s just there are different styles of reports that we have, and in creating these reports we have f.

Inside of them, right? So frameworks might be like, Hey, what goes into the postmortem? What goes into the impact report? What goes into our weekly, that’s been predefined. And then, , part of it, like in our impact reports we have, Delivered impact and opportunity. So then [00:11:00] within those we have specific frameworks that we need to hear by, , on our postmortem report.

It’s like what we did. What we learned and what we’re doing next. So it’s that same category of what we did, what we learned, what we’re doing next, delivered impact, opportunity. And so where Little Lauren came and presented like, here’s how I wanna frame this information. Here’s the data, here’s the insight that I’ve seen to contribute to the postmortem. It was like, yes, it answered what we did.

Ralph: And when you say postmortem, this is on like a campaign that was launched or email sequence, like whatever it is, and then you analyze it afterwards. Could we have done better? Where do we do great? Where do we not do great? Where can we improve?

Lauren: Exactly. So it’s, it’s done in the sense of like, we will talk about Labor Day, for example. Labor Day is the pre-Black Friday. It’s the end of summer. We know that summer is a summer slump. That’s why Prime Day is in July. It’s the slowest time of the year. So Labor Day, just like cake start H three [00:12:00] so that you can have a strong HH Q3 is for a strong Q4.

And so we’ll do a postmortem so that we can look at last year’s Labor

Day sales. Postmortem

and extract the learnings.

Ralph: that would be H two is what you’re talking about.

Lauren: Oh my gosh. Yeah. H

two

second half of the year. H one, first

half of the year.

, Thank you. I appreciate that.

Ralph: it’s a

postmortem, they obviously use AI to create sort of the bones of it, is what I’m understanding. And then where you are seeing the gap is in the analysis and or critical thinking that is layered deeper than just what you get from AI and a summary.

we see it all the time now on, like, I I do enjoy like the AI generated summaries of long emails. I love that. ’cause I love the TLDR like on Gmail. Now, this like. I think maybe I just have it activated. I don’t know if everyone does, but it’s super helpful. I’m dealing with this lawyer issue right now.

It’s like, oh my God, these lawyers write like novels. [00:13:00] And of course, you know, they charge by the word or by the hour. I’m not sure what, but whatever it is, it’s like I want like just tell me like what are the bullet points? What are the engineers say? What did this guy say? What was our counter offer? So. AI does that extraordinarily well.

However, does it do any sort of critical thinking or interpretation of that data? What should Ralph do next? It doesn’t tell me that,

Lauren: it potentially can. Which goes into like, the biggest solution is that like we’re trying to do and internally is like look at how do we ensure that AI is a collaborator, that we don’t have an over-reliance on it. How do we maintain human in the loop and that it’s a resource, not a replacement.

And I think like the biggest solution, if like you skip to just this part is that, , how might we make sure that AI is asking us more questions and delivering answers. Because we have the answers inside of us. I just need AI to help get me there, right? Extract the data out of me and collaborate, co-create with me.

That’s where we find AI to be the most successful. And so that’s like our current solution of what we’re [00:14:00] working towards, to make sure that the individual doesn’t lose agency and the authority and the critical thinking and strategic value that they have inside of themselves. Right? Little Lauren. A hundred percent knows how to do this and has done this before, but what we saw is Little Lauren became a deer in headlights and like forgot. So what I’ll share on the screen for those that are following perpetual traffic.com/youtube, I’m actually just gonna give you verbatim one that my team did for Lauren Petillo. So, right, like we have a LinkedIn account that we’ve been growing. So it’s like, rather than finding the template, I’m just gonna show verbatim what this report looks like.

, And like in that small things, right, like opportunity for us to have stronger clarification. This is a postmortem page. Our postmortem reports are one page, so you can see the template right here. But the reality is like, look how long this single report is. It’s not one page, it’s 18

pages. So they were doing a postmortem as an impact report, which is an H one to look at six months where [00:15:00] postmortem is looking.

Usually at like a campaign. It could be a three day sale, it could be six weeks, no more ever than three months. ’cause then you’re looking at more of an impact. But yeah, so that’s like small things. It’s like, okay, hold on guys. Like I get it. We have our process. But I take that ownership on me as it wasn’t well communicated.

Like, Hey, remember. Postmortem is locked to a single page versus in like all this extra information that’s good that you can see. But it wasn’t what I wanted. So our postmortem is supposed to be one page. I’m gonna zoom in a little bit. So on that you can see like we have the dates, we do what we did, what impact did we have, what do we wanna do next?

Those are the three column titles on the majority of the page. Then underneath, we have observations and opportunities where we’re saying observations are essentially things that we identified that prevented us from having the great success that we wanted. And then opportunity is a further update in what else we could do to make it better. Does that template so far

make sense?

Ralph: It does. My question is, is on these, like we’re only [00:16:00] looking at the first two pages of 16 pages.

Lauren: No, this is one it’s only supposed to be one page. A postmortem is like one page. Let me tell you, in a rollup, like what does the executive need to know? What happened for the

results of the campaign? That’s all

Ralph: Right. How much was this generated by ai?

Lauren: I’m assuming the large majority of was. Like this is our design. Right? Obviously like that’s a template that we have. The content that’s in here, I will say that it was written entirely by ai, but we had Little Lauren and Little Wallach Jr. Like they were writing the information, putting it into AI to get the answer for what to put in what we did

here.

Ralph: As opposed to them thinking and burning, calories to try and determine the what we did. It just spit this out from what, like weekly reports, that kind of thing? Like

Lauren: well, like we have weekly reports. It’s the people that are closest to it, so they’re feeding all the information into ai. I love your example of burning calories, like they already did the [00:17:00] reps.

So they’re uploading the data into ai and then rather than looking at it like you can see underneath what we did, we posted 140 times.

We posted five times a week consistently to keep Lauren active and visible on LinkedIn. We used different post styles. We focused on AI and marketing. We tested different times. So those are true to what we did, but we’re the glaring piece for me. Was when we look at what impact did we have, I see our posts reached over 90,000 views in the last six months, and we reached more than 19,000 people through comments and outreach. If you agree that that’s like impact amazing for me. I’m like, that’s not impact. That’s what we

did.

Ralph: That’s the result of what we did, not the

impact that we had.

Lauren: Exactly. The impact I am looking for is like, what did that

translate to?

Ralph: Did that bring in any qualified leads? Did that have, like, all of a sudden they filled out applications for Lauren to speak on stage? I get what you’re saying

Lauren: That’s what I’m looking for an impact.

Ralph: It’s like, I don’t care about [00:18:00] 90,000 views. 90,000 views is nice, which led to X, which would’ve been

the statement that I care about the most.

Lauren: I don’t care about posting 140 times. I don’t care about the different posting styles.

This was an opportunity for me to be like, okay, let’s, let’s rego back to this report.

Like we’ve been doing postmortems for a while. So that’s where I was like, this is so interesting. ’cause I look at previous reports that you’ve created, and then I’m looking at the report that I’ve been given now and I’m like, Hey, little Lauren. Look at this, what happened? And so again, it’s a deterioration, it’s an erosion of the critical thinking because when I was like, Hey, remember that you did this?

You’re like, oh yeah, I already did this. It’s just that ai, that sense of security with AI that overreliance like that led me to believe. This was

better. And so that’s the hard

part. It’s like is AI making you your team dumber? No, it’s AI is making your team think that they weren’t smart to begin with. When they were, and they are. [00:19:00] And so in this specific report, again, like for me, what we did is the results we achieved, not the tasks and the actions that we did, it’s what were the results, and then the impact is how did that impact the business’s bottom line? How did that help us progress towards our overall arching goals?

Ralph: this is really good because I think this is a, like, we’re not necessarily giving a solution here, but this is a gotcha, because if you get this report once and then you’re like, yeah, it’s not really that helpful. Then this next time you’re like, then you just might just let it go. And it’s up to you as the leader or the director of the department to say, hang on here.

I know you’re using AI as a productivity tool. That’s great. However, I need some critical thinking at a deeper level here. Those 90,000 views resulted in X amount of new contacts for you, five of which reached out to you for strategic opportunities that are.

Blah, blah, [00:20:00] blah, what is the contribution?

This is like attribution. What’s the contribution to the business? This is what we did. You know what I mean? Not what it meant. And I

think if there is a way maybe I’m not using Jet GPT or Gem, I tend to use Gemini a fair amount. I don’t know whether or not. they’re capable of being able to do that, but it does take that level, all right, what does that mean to me and what am I gonna do about it?

What’s the action and or the result that the stakeholder, which is you sort of speaking, and Ryan, , our COO would be so happy. You’re talking about Agile Scrum here, but you’re really the stakeholder. You’re like, okay, what is it? You guys are now doing for me, what’s the impact on me? The actions that you did, and so therefore, that will then determine or color what we do next.

Is it 140 times or is it doing 40 posts that are just better and longer?

You know, that’s

the insight I want to know.

Lauren: a hundred percent. and again, it’s [00:21:00] me, my opportunity to make sure that I empower little Lauren to understand that we wanna look at the forest, and I know that me as the owner, like that’s my skill, that’s my superpower.

And so no

one’s fault because I. Just get to teach them and instruct them more about what actually matters, right? We talk about NPIs all the

time. This is just an internal thing that if you’re listening and your team is using ai, amazing. I’m just being very vulnerable and very transparent of where I am, seeing that collaboration disappear and disintegrate almost like their own.

Trust and confidence in their ability to use. And this is just one example and like it’s been a trend. So again, I go back to the co intelligence book, which, provided me the vernacular and the real world case studies of where this was studied in isolation, like looking at college students, submitting essays, looking at different cases where someone was equipped with ai and when someone was not equipped with ai and how it, deteriorated that critical [00:22:00] thinking.

is AI making your team dumber? It couldn’t make it look that way because when I look at this type of report and I look at previous reports that little Lauren has submitted, I’m like, this feels like two different people. And because you felt so confident, because AI gave you something that you wouldn’t have thought of, you now thought that what you wouldn’t have thought of was

better. When the reality is like always, it depends, and for us, I’m like, no, what you had done before was better. Like it was, and so that’s where I’m like, oh shoot.

Ralph: This is also, a management leadership opportunity to reinstill into your people. It’s like, I need more of you and what is up here, not what you’re typing into ai. That’s why I

hired you. I didn’t hire chat G GPT or Gemini.

You know, I hired you because you’re the person who can interpret this data and give me actionable results, or you. To change course and what it is that you’re being assigned to, to make things better and more impactful for the business. [00:23:00] So it’s like you can turn the tables on that. You can say, oh, I can’t believe you didn’t do critical thinking on this, or No, let’s turn it the other way.

I know you used AI here, but what I’m paying for is you.

And like that inspires people. I had a conversation with one of our, top people last week, like she was holding back. I’m like, you need to be more of yourself. I want you to be an ass kicker here. Like, do that thing because that’s why I hired you.

And she was like, this is great. You know, so we’re all about empowerment and bringing out the best in people and all these other sorts of things. So thank you for making us aware of this because I think as a business owner and a department head, you need to be aware of these things and like figure out a way of doing it.

I don’t know, as if like everything we said here is like the exact solution. ’cause it’s going to depend of course, but it’s something to watch out for because over reliance on these tools. Is actually not helpful for business and for life in general. They are a, force multiplier productivity tool, [00:24:00] but they’re not why you hire the people that you hire, you hire them for

their brain. They’re not a

replacement.

Lauren: Yeah. And so like when we talked earlier, like, is AI gonna replace me? It’s like, no. It’s like, , an in co intelligence book. I’m gonna keep going back to it. Like I have no affiliates code or anything like that I got from the library. , But when Meta executives told me to read this book, as I’m talking to them about the, , power of AI in advertising, I listen.

Right? So pass on that to you, , in that. It sets you up for success. There is no like, I mean, I’m not saying it’s not impossible that there’s no Terminator outcome, but they talk about use cases of when the calculator was introduced to the classroom and how the parents and the teachers adopted the calculator and what that meant for students and again, that enriching their education aspect is where I think AI is coming in in today’s era.

AI is still relatively new. I can’t say I’m an expert on, I’ve just been using it for five years. My team has been using it and this is what we’ve seen our evolution happen. And I’ll be transparent, I’ll, explain how what we’re doing and [00:25:00] working on with Little Lauren. ’cause this isn’t an isolated, this is

happening

this is transcending generations, locations, gender. This is just an evolution that we’re seeing. , And I think it’s supported by like how AI is there to give you positive results, like the meta algorithm, that if you don’t provide it the right amount of stuff, it’s gonna give you what they think makes you happy.

And people are using it for therapy. People are, feeling good and so it’s this. Confidence that AI is providing someone without giving proper context if that confidence is well deserved or not. So it’s this false sense of certainty that we’re trying to combat with, like, you are the human in the loop.

Use AI to ask you the questions to extract out of it ’cause you have the power inside of you. , And if there’s stuff that you have questions on, then research. Do what you know, how to do before

AI

Ralph: Very cool. Well, we’ll do follow up

episodes on this ’cause this is gonna be an ongoing issue. Actually, it’s funny, you can mention this subject and I know you have to run here, but, I’m next up on my Audible ’cause I only read [00:26:00] like self-improvement books. On my Audible is a book called the AI Driven Leader.

I was highly recommended by a group that I belong to, so I can’t wait to read it because it talks, I think a lot about this kind of stuff. So it’s super interesting. It was not recommended by meta, however, by a group of other leaders that are, you know, in businesses that are larger than ours, smaller than ours, everything else.

So anyway. We’ll leave links in the show notes to that no affiliate link, and also leave links to, , Steve Sims book and the episode that he was on way back when. Of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a rating and a review or a comment. We’ll read it on air here. And of course, everything that we mentioned here is over@perpetualchoppy.com.

And of course, the visual part is on perpetual traffic. Do com slash YouTube, I believe. but everybody already knew that and subscribed to it, so

So on behalf of my amazing co-host until next show, ya. [00:27:00]

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