YouTube is launching a timeline editor for Shorts that shows clips, overlays, and audio in one view, with drag-and-drop trimming, reordering, and zoom.
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[podcast_headshot url=”https://www.consultingsuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/1760243917.png”] Reaching a million-dollar net worth is a significant achievement, but finance expert Nick Maggiulli argues it can be a “dangerously misleading” milestone, creating a false sense of security. He joins Michael to reveal why your next financial moves are far more crucial than your last. Drawing on extensive data, Nick uncovers the surprising …
The Wealth Ladder Framework with Nick Maggiulli: Podcast #364 is a post from: Consulting Success®
The lights are on but nobody’s home. The engine’s running but no one’s driving. The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead. Pick your preferred idiom for unattended automations run amok. (“The Wi-Fi’s on, but there’s no Internet.”)
Over the past weeks, I encountered AI agents and automation at two separate martech companies — as a customer of one and a pseudo-prospect for the other — that leaned toward the “annoyingly efficient” upper-left quadrant of the 2×2 below. Efficient for the company. But for the customer? Not so much.
I’ll share what happened, as examples of how these things can slip off the rails, and then offer a few ideas for avoiding such outcomes. I won’t name names, because I generally admire both companies and think these kind of issues are not uncommon.
That said, yeah, it’s ironic that these are martech companies.
A product I subscribe to has been emailing me helpful onboarding tips for weeks. It’s been a good cadence, not too frequent, and the content has been genuinely useful. They come from an email address that we’ll call friends@acme.com (not the actual company or email address).
However, last week I had a billing question. I searched for how to contact someone about it, and everything pointed me to emailing friends@acme.com. Simple and easy, right? So I emailed them my question.
No reply. Not even an automated acknowledgement of receipt.
Not a big deal. I wait a day, and then email again to check back.
Again, no reply.
A couple of days later though, friends@acme.com sends me another cheerful onboarding message. Really?
I reply once more asking about my billing issue. I volunteer that maybe I need to contact a different email address about this? Again, no reply.
I go back to hunting around their app to see if somehow this was my fault, that I missed a “for billing questions, contact billing@acme.com” instruction. I search FAQs, account screens, help docs. Everything just points to friends@acme.com.
I abandon the effort for the time being, as I had other things to do.
While it’s impossible to debug this from where I sit, it seems like an automated routing problem. Multiple teams sharing the same inbox with some automation rules to direct incoming messages to the right place. But it’s broken. Maybe it’s a bug in the routing logic. Maybe the destination I got routed to is unmanned. Maybe an LLM is trying to interpret my message but it’s erroring out. Perhaps a RAG look up of my account is failing?
Automations can be fragile, especially complex ones. As a martech person, I appreciate that. I empathize with this certainly unintentional fail. But better safeguards could and should have been implemented.
Funny enough, as I’m writing this, I just received yet another onboarding email from friends@acme.com, clearly still oblivious to my prior attempts to engage with them. I laugh out loud, causing the person next to me on the plane to give me a sideways glance.
Meanwhile, in another part of the martech galaxy, I downloaded a new report that a vendor was offering on a subject of great interest to me.
Now, in fairness to the vendor, I am probably an outlier responding to this classic demand-gen tactic. I don’t think of myself as a prospect for their product, at least not right now. I’m just interested in the subject matter.
Within a couple of minutes of filling out the form, I get a personalized email from a rep.
You want to talk hyperpersonalization? This message nailed it. The opening paragraph was crafted about the nature of my work on chiefmartec. It raised a concern about AI that was very relevant to me. It asked a genuine-sounding question about what sparked my interest in the report. It was a very human sounding message. No simple Hello, $FIRST-NAME template. This was production-quality generative AI personalization.
The only AI tell? The near immediate arrival. No human could have researched me and crafted that message that quickly. But, hey, that’s not a bad thing. A fast reply. A well-personalized message. I admire the fact that it was AI-powered.
So I reply, complimenting them on their response time — my wink-wink that I know how they did that — and letting them know what my interest was and why I’m probably not a real prospect for them. I assume that will make it to the real rep.
They didn’t reply back.
That’s fine. I had intentionally disqualified myself. But it felt a little odd. Their original email was very conversational, and I had engaged with a remark that I would have expected to elicit a response back. In exchanges I’ve had with reps at other martech companies under similar circumstances, they almost always replied. Those threads sometimes led to other beneficial connections and outcomes over time. (The funnel is perennially oversimplified.)
But no worries. They’d moved on, and I moved on.
Until a couple hours later when I got another email from the same rep — but formatted very differently. It opened with old-school Hello, $FIRST-NAME personalization, referenced something unrelated to what I downloaded, and offered calendar options for scheduling a demo. Huh? It was a total non sequitur to the exchange we just had.
Now, being a martech nerd, I can call this: I got thrown into an automated sales sequence.
I shake my head. A week later I get another message from the rep, seemingly sent by their automation engine, as it’s formatted the same as that last one. This one makes a generous offer, but for something pretty irrelevant to me. It’s also Hello, $FIRST-NAME personalized — but now also with a $COMPANY-NAME personalization plugged into the first paragraph. Except the company name inserted is most definitely not my company.
Yikes.
Cross-contaminated data? Misconfigured automation sequences? An LLM hallucination inside an AI agent? I suspect there may have been compounding errors along this journey.
My guess as to what happened? An AI SDR agent crafted the first message. The rep never saw it. Nor my reply, which the AI SDR intercepted and didn’t know what to do. So it just enrolled me in a sequence. It added some fields to my record through a data enrichment service that were just flat-out wrong. The sequence had no “memory” of my exchange with the AI SDR. These were probably two different products with a weak integration at best.
Humbling moments like these are good to keep things real.
For the record, I am in favor of leveraging AI and automation in martech. That’s arguably been the raison d’être of this blog for the past 17 years. But for nearly as long, I’ve seen Martec’s Law at play: technology changes quickly, but organizations change slowly. As a corollary: we almost always underestimate the people and process changes required to successfully leverage fast-changing technologies.
With all the vague-but-urgent, top-down edicts to adopt AI, teams sometimes feel the need to rush new capabilties into production. The move-fast-and-break-things ethos. For real AI transformation though, I recommend a go-slow-to-go-fast ethos instead.
That doesn’t mean the teams driving this transformation are lollygagging about. It’s a high-gear intensity for everyone in this period of disruption. But you can’t skip over major stages of the journey. You need to take it a step at a time to learn what the technology can and can’t do. But more importantly, you need to understand its dependencies and ripple effects. You need to figure out which legacy processes need to be updated — and which ones need to be entirely reinvented or gracefully put to pasture.
Move fast with pilot projects and experiments! But contain them as narrowly as possible at first. And absolutely keep a human-in-the-loop — even if it’s just post-hoc review of what happened — watching closely. Don’t scale prematurely. You want to make sure that your foundation is solid because that’s what makes it possible to reliably move faster in the next stage. Chasing ghosts and wrangling tech debt in production really gums up the works.
Here are a few concrete suggestions:
Always have a way to reach a real human. AI and automation can be efficient for customers as much as it is for the company — when it addresses the customer’s needs. But it’s never going to be 100%. The edge cases are infinite. And while not all of them will be valuble opportunities lost, some of them will be. If a customer wants to reach a human, you probably want them to as well. The lower-right corner in the 2×2 at the top of this article sums it up: go the extra mile for loyalty & love.
Run secret shopper exercises. Have people who take the journey as prospects or new customers, carefully recording their experience. Doing this with your own employees is a decent place to start. But ideally you want someone external with fresh eyes and no bias for internal politics to run the gauntlet. This is a little more difficult in B2B, given the data enrichment industrial complex that hones in on one’s identity, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy.
Regularly inspect every active AI agent or automation. Just as elevators and escalators require regular inespection, anything that moves your prospects and customers along in their journey should be periodically reviewed. Are the rules and data definitions being used still valid? Is the content and branding still relevant? What are the contexts in which it works — i.e., what could have happened before it, what might happen next? Timestamp and sign these inspections. Repeatable test harnesses and heuristics are good. But you also want the benefit of human judgment in that check-up.
If you use a rep’s name in communications, loop them in. I know, the whole point of AI agents and automations in such scenarios is to reduce the manual work for reps. But they can use inbox rules to reduce the noise until there’s a response from the recipient. Then it’s probably worth at least peeking at it, even if they let the automation carry on. It also makes it easy for them to occasionally review what is being sent in their name. After all, it’s their reptuation as well.
Distinguish between the “laboratory” and the “factory.” My frequent collaborator Frans Riemersma has made the insightful observation that there are two different missions with martech stacks. One is serving as the steady and reliable factory in production use cases to protect current revenue. The other is serving as a laboratory to run experiments with new or adapted use cases. Keep these two things distinct in how you manage them! Be wary of lab leaks.
I also think there’s a tremendous opportunity for existing martech platforms and new martech entrepreneurs to provide more governance and monitoring capabilities to address these issues. This is a big part of what good “orchestration” needs in our new AI age of marketing.
Building an automation or deploying an AI agent is getting easier by the day. Keeping them all aligned and working properly? Without good operational discipline though, that’s going to be like herding cats.
[podcast_headshot url=”https://www.consultingsuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/1760243917.png”] Reaching a million-dollar net worth is a significant achievement, but finance expert Nick Maggiulli argues it can be a “dangerously misleading” milestone, creating a false sense of security. He joins Michael to reveal why your next financial moves are far more crucial than your last. Drawing on extensive data, Nick uncovers the surprising …
The Wealth Ladder Framework with Nick Maggiulli: Podcast #364 is a post from: Consulting Success®
Learn how to use Reddit for SEO to improve your organic search and AI visibility.
Looking to turn an AI tool into a competitive SEO advantage? These expert-level prompts show where leaders can save time and sharpen strategy.
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Some GA4 users report seeing “Analytics Advisor,” a conversational AI interface in Google Analytics.
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For most of us to improve, grow, and contribute more we need to shift from a scarcity/poverty mentality to an abundance mentality. That’s easier to agree to than it is to implement.
While the trope is about people who “were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple,” there are also many people who have hit a potential triple but stop at first base because they’re afraid of being critiqued for the aggressive base running, even though the outfielders still havn’t caught up to the ball.
I’ve coached people who are constantly looking for bargains or cost reductions in embarrassing manners. They choose cheap hotels for their workshops, or refuse to fly business class, or remove the taxes from the dinner bill before calculating a 15 percent tip (they don’t leave more than that). They wait for the last possible minute before paying for something on a deadline.
Powerful people enjoy dealing with powerful people, and they expect people to look and behave in a mature and sophisticated manner. Yet I often hear, “I’d love to have you work with us, but we haven’t budgeted for external help.” (Budgets and money, which can be moved among budgets, are two different things. You may not have “budgeted” for me, but you certainly can move money from existing budgets to hire me.) You need to overcome their poverty mentality. They focus on cost and not benefit.
An abundance mentality is how you view life through your belief system. Your beliefs create attitudes which are manifest in your behaviors. If you think buyers are a step above you, your attitude will be not to confront them and your behavior will be docile and timid. If you believe, however, you’re dealing with a peer, your attitude will be one of engaging an “equal” and your behaviors will be expressed in a conversation (not a presentation).
When people tell me that they are “doing great” but don’t act philanthropically or generously, I know they’re either not doing great of they’ve never shaken off the poverty mentality.
If you’re rounding first base and they’re still chasing the ball in the outfield, run like hell to make it all the way home. Sometimes you have to ignore the third-base coach and keep going. That’s the difference between your having more of an abundance mentality than those who don’t—because they think they’re helping you by projecting their caution onto you.
Keep running.
Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into. —Wayne Dyer
Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. —Epicurus
Basically, I chose not to identify with being broke any longer. I realized I deserved a beautiful life, and abundance was something that I needed to welcome into my life. —Jen Sincero
When I meet St. Peter and he asks why I’m so dirty, I’ll point out that I slid home never hesitating, with a huge collision at the plate. And while I didn’t score that run, I’d had a great game. —Alan Weiss
The Fishbowl: In January I’ll be starting a year-long, monthly, “live” coaching session whereby one member of the group will be coached by me for 45 minutes on a current issue of theirs, we’ll deconstruct what happened, and then have 45 minutes of Q&A. This is a variation of the very popular “fishbowl” technique I ran a few years ago.
You may volunteer to be the person coached or simply watch. You needn’t attend every session and I will provide video to everyone afterwards along with written commentary. This should build your coaching prowess considerably.
This will be $500 for the year and I’m offering it to you, here, first, because I’ll obviously have limited participation. My offer to you is $400. (An hour of my “situational coaching” on my site is $2,500, so this is a hell of a deal if you choose to be coached or even just observe.)
You can register here: https://alanweiss.com/store/quick-pay/
I’ll cut off registration in December, but if you wait and we’re filled, I can only put you on a waiting list. If for any reason I don’t run it, you’ll receive a full refund prior to the end of this year.
The Proof Behind Social Proof: TOMORROW— YOU CAN STILL REGISTER
Has anyone ever asked you, “Give me an example of your point?” and you suddenly forgot how to speak? Or have you said, “Let me give you an example…,” and then have immediately gone into brain freeze without any ice cream? “Social Proof” comprises pragmatic examples that others can readily relate to which reinforce your point instantly.
When you “open the hood” on social proof, beneath is actually a psychological dynamic which creates normative pressure assuring that the actions of others are appropriate and should be imitated. A desire to “fit in” is created.
Join me for 90 minutes and fill your conversations, narrative, and collateral with social proof that will build your brand and fill your bank account. People ask what research I invest in for my success. I don’t. Then they ask what my investigative habits are. I don’t have any. “So what DO you do?” they ask.
I look around.
Learn how to look around to dominate conversations and close business: October 14, 2025. 10:30 to noon, US eastern time. Video and Zoom notes included. Fee: $350 until and including Sept. 30, $500 thereafter. https://alanweiss.com/growth-experiences/the-proof-behind-social-proof/
BOOK SPRINT begins Nov. 3, 60-minute weekly call to create a completed, professional book proposal in the following 60 days. I have an 80%+ record placing these books with publishers for the last five years. I will introduce the proposal to agents and publishers (and so can you) and provide an additional 30 days of support for the book. The fee is only $4,500. Stop procrastinating and produce your first (or next) book, which is how I’ve attracted well over 90% of my business over the years. Register here and I’ll send the simple prep work: https://alanweiss.com/store/quick-pay/
AI: Alan Intelligence
My unique AI resource which will direct you to the relevant aspects of my entire body of work to answer your “real time” questions about proposals, value based fees, conceptual agreement, avoiding “ghosting,” and thousands of other issues with text, audio, and video resources, all of which you can download. Please go here to gain lifelong, constantly growing access to my work, including referral to specific pages in my books which you can access online: https://alanweiss.com/ai-alan-intelligence/ If you decide at any time to engage in one of my two elite, personal coaching relationships, I’ll deduct the full fee you’ve paid for this resource.
Zoom Workshops 2025: Join me on September 9 for our next installment. If you can’t attend “live” you’ll still receive the video and the AI Companion transcript. https://alanweiss.com/growth-experiences/zoom-workshops-2025/ October 7: Self-Awareness and Self-Honesty. This is the psychological issue of our times.
Million Dollar Consulting® for the World: I’ve provided 14 modules with videos from me, from your colleagues globally, slides, and text. They include everything from launch to self-esteem, proposals to fees, closing business to creating a brand. No upsells! It’s only $115. What do you think about a 10,000:1 ROI? We have over 500 people from 47 countries. https://milliondollarconsultingcourse.com
Million Dollar Consulting® for the World ADVANCED: The new program contains over 60 videos and has 15 modules focusing on what to do in the buyer’s office, overcoming crises, financial planning, and much, much more. https://alanweiss.com/growth-experiences/advanced-global-learning-program/
Million Dollar Consulting® for the World GRADUATE: Another 12 modules with videos by me and your peers on contemporary issues such as Raising Fees Aggressively, How to Be Consistently Interviewed, Maximizing Happiness, and Managing Multiple projects. Join the people from 57 countries who are availing themselves of this inexpensive way to dramatically grow their businesses in any economic times. How does 100:1 ROI sound? https://milliondollarconsultingcourse.com/graduate-learning-program/
Looking to turn an AI tool into a competitive SEO advantage? These expert-level prompts show where leaders can save time and sharpen strategy.
The post 28 Expert-Level Prompt Examples & Templates For SEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
