Value-First AI Daily - Jan 9, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome back to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative AI intelligence report. And missing Nico today, but also excited to announce that George B. Thomas is going to be joining us on the daily again. I I feel started today. Yeah.

[00:32] **George's Return and Focus on AI Empowerment** George B. Thomas: It does, it starts today. It'll roll through uh moving forward. There has just been a change in who I am. Um, what I think, what I'm playing around with on the daily and and things that I'm learning. And and Chris, if anybody has paid attention to me historically, when I start learning cool shit, I like to share it with the world. And so I had to find this outlet of like, listen, uh, I'm I'm doing a lot with AI assisted human empowered things. And uh, so I I knocked back on your door and I'm like, um, um, hey, hey brother, what what does it look like if I come back uh and and so you graciously was like, yeah, yeah. And so I'm I'm excited to see the journey and what we can teach and what we can create in 2026 around empowering humans uh with their AI assistance and AI tools and AI mindsets and all sorts of fun stuff. So, so I'm excited, brother.

[02:06] **Chris's Perspective on George's Return** Chris Carolan: Yeah, well, we're obviously happy to have you back. And I I not really a door. I've just like you've been in the window like playing out in the yard. I've been an elf on the shelf. when it's time to right. Uh but yeah, man, because what what we're what we're also experiencing and I'm experiencing it every day right now is this kind of inner loop. First of all, there's no better way to to keep up with what you want to keep up with than doing content every day with other smart people who are doing and care about the same things. But it's also creating this inner loop, like the speed at which we're able to go. We're seeing the gap between what we think is possible and what other people think is possible. And I I want to touch on that specifically today because I think and we talked about AI native last week, but I really think that's going to be a powerful filter that people can use to figure out, uh, you know, whether they're ready, whether the use case that like we're seeing, oh, you should be getting value out of with AI. We're seeing that everywhere, every use case. But um, I I think an example that came up yesterday, and you happen to touch on it before we started, like if somebody says to you, if if a leader shows up and says, uh, I need a HubSpot person. I want to hire a HubSpot person.

[04:20] **HubSpot Personnel Needs in an AI-First World** Chris Carolan: Like do you give them a HubSpot person? And here's the difference. and we dig deeper if you want, but like if you're an AI native business or you have an AI native mindset and you might not even be there there yet, but your strategy for 26 is to change, is to transform into an AI native business, the way that you you need HubSpot. Stage mindset and effectively. Right? That HubSpot, if you bring somebody in to do that HubSpot, that's the HubSpot that helps you write some better emails and, you know, send send some more emails, make some more calls, like do some more of the old stuff better. And uh yeah, so I think like so if somebody were to come up to me and ask that now, I know for sure that because I also want to challenge, want to be able to challenge leaders. Like, no, you don't just need a hubspot person. And if you ask AI, and if you ask anybody out there right now, what a hub's person, hubspot person is supposed to do for you, it's marketing and sales and CRM. And like helping sales teams save a little bit of time here and there. and it's just a world away from where you need to be.

[06:19] **AI Lags Behind Business Needs for HubSpot Expertise** George B. Thomas: Yeah. It's it's interesting, Chris, when I hear you talk about this, one, you're kind of trying to make me talk about something that I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about online. I'll I'll tease that and leave that lay there right now. But what's I'm about to say something that blows my mind that I'm about to say. And that is AI is so behind what a business owner needs from a HubSpot human at this point. It's crazy. Like if you if you go and ask uh AI, can you give me a job description for somebody that will help me with my HubSpot? It will not talk about knowledge vaults. It will not talk about breeze assistant agents. It will not talk about uh the ability to leverage into an MCP. It will not talk about the ability to get a private API key. It will not talk about being able to use the terminal to set up a project on your computer where you can either design a new email programmable module that hooks into hubDB or actually create a process where you can just say, create me a deal and you get a deal, a quote, line items, everything put into place. the AI will not give you that as the tool set that your hubspot person needs. But those are the tool sets in 2026 and beyond that your hubspot person needs. Like, listen, I tease this out before the show with you. I said, I don't know if I'm ready to talk about it, but I don't know if I'm a hubspot person anymore. Like we've talked about T-shaped marketers in the past where it's like, I'm really deep in hubspot and I can do video editing, and I can do podcasting, and I used to be a designer and I'm a developer and it's like T-shaped format. Ladies and gentlemen, we may be in the area where AI needs to be the long leg of the T and I just happen to also know how to do hubspot really well. Like this, this is the world that we're living.

[08:27] **AI's Role as the Foundation, Not Just a Tool** Chris Carolan: But that's absolutely right. And that's the reason like if I know because here's what happened this week, right? We we um, I'm working with Ryan Ginsberg on a a fun new project where I finally get to implement like everything like we're transforming the business. They've got some homegrown systems that they use and they've agreed to let us use the whole hubspot data model. Build a little bit of cool stuff on top of that like, you know, app wise, right? But you got a little accounting system over here, but hubspot owns the business model of the business and the data model. And like and what we showed them this week, he they literally said to me after they had been introduced to hubspot in March, right? They bought hubspot. They were self-starting on hubspot, self-implementing. And that meant marketing, you know, lead, like let's get some leads in here. God, feels so clunky, like so hard to get data in there. Where am I supposed to go? It just and what they said was it's a completely different hubspot. I'm seeing right now. And if I know the leaders see hubspot in that light, I'm happy. I'm yep, I'm happy to be a hubspot guy. Because it's business infrastructure and now AI infrastructure is what the business actually needs. So what was a conversation I had last night is if if you're training somebody, like if we know because there's a ton of people that are asking for hubspot people right now, right? that's a huge need. Right. But this is the part where like we need to help leaders move beyond that simple ask and say, what do you actually need? You need somebody who can help you be AI native, which is building AI native infrastructure. And if you ask for that, now you're going to bring somebody in that will have the remit and have the support they need to actually build hubspot into your business and not just treat it like the quick win emailing tool. Right? Which is what Yeah. you will get if you keep it at. And it's like this vicious cycle of if that's what you get, that's what the business sees it as, that and then hubspot's never the system of record and all these issues that we've been dealing with for years don't get solved because we just have a mis we're misinformed about what hubspot can and should do for the business.

[12:10] **Real-World Example of the Need for Up-to-Date HubSpot Skills** George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it it it's funny. I was so I I have clients, obviously at sidekick strategies. and one of my clients wants to bring on somebody to help. and I play nice with humans. I'm like, that's fine. Let's bring on somebody to help. And in bringing on this somebody, this somebody said, hey, I've used hubspot. I kind of know hubspot. And I said, well, um when did you use hubspot? And they said two years ago. to which I tried not to laugh. And I said, well, I don't care if you used it two months ago. What we need to do is just let's meet for an hour and I can give you the the kind of here's where we're at now state of hubspot. But before that, please just go in and start to look around. It wasn't like 45 minutes after the meeting where we were talking to this human about like coming in and helping and they I know hubspot. Uh I got this email of like, wow! Hubspot's changed. Um, you think? You think. Like the amount of think by the way, this is just hubspot we're talking about right now. The amount of things that have just changed in the life that should make you go, wow! Life has changed. Like it's it's time to and I don't mean this is any type of joke. is time to wake up and activate yourself. And it is time to realize we are in the world where execution is key, which means education is key. Last night I spent three hours watching YouTube videos. I didn't spend it gaming on my, you know, PS5. I didn't spend it taking a nap. I didn't spend it watching the good doctor. I spent three hours watching YouTube videos to be able to activate and execute on things that would get the business and me into better places in the future. Are you doing that right now for yourself?

[15:01] **Execution, Mindset, and the Role of AI** Chris Carolan: Yeah. And you mentioned that in the slack. Execution is king.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Chris Carolan: What does that make mindset?

George B. Thomas: Oh. Because that's the thing, right? God God with a little G. God with a little G maybe. I don't know. I don't even know what like what's higher than the king. Is there anything higher than king? Right. Because that's why I'm trying to bring it like if you can understand what AI native means and use this filter, AI helps you do whatever you ask it to do right now and that can be a lot of slop and lots more content that nobody like that nobody resonates with. Uh it can help your team send out 100 more emails, make like get 100 more connections, but then are they ready to have a conversation that's actually going to drive value, right?

[16:10] **AI Mirroring Human Laziness; Stop Being Lazy** George B. Thomas: So can I can I can I talk about that? Can I talk about the the the fact that I am so sick and tired. Like I feel like I'm going to go out in public and I'm going to hear somebody say this word in an event and I'm going to walk up and I'm just going to punch them in their face. If I hear AI slop one more time, because here's what it here's here's here let's just let's go to just principles of life. Um, stop being lazy. Stop being lazy. because there's no reason for there to be AI slop. Between skills and sub agents and process and systems, there is zero reason to be putting crap in the world. But you have to understand the power of skills. You have to understand how to activate sub agents. You actually have to have a damn plan, a goal, a thing that you're trying to help humans with instead of thinking that you're gaming the system and being lazy with a tool that lets you golf more. I'm sorry. I'll shut up. I'll shut up.

[17:52] **AI Reflects Human Thought and Operations** Chris Carolan: Well, that's the thing. We're still in the mode where AI is very much a mirror of humans and how they think and how they operate. And before there's AI slop, there's a lot of human slop. Right? Like slide decks that that nobody reads or understands, like spreadsheets, all this time we spend man, just spinning the wheels, thinking we have to check boxes. like basically anything where it would have been easy to call somebody out for checking a box, like the output was slop. Yeah, I feel like that's a thing like if you're asking AI to help you do more of that. That might be the that might be the postable moment, right by the way of this episode like the social tweet uh or the social X. I hate that. Um the the moment in this is that AI is your mirror. And and I I would challenge people uh to look in the mirror. That's all I'm going to say. I'll leave it right there. That's a different podcast.

[19:37] **The Importance of Mindset and Right Direction** Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um that's going to be like a recurring theme. Yeah. I think is is how important mindset is because it's easier than ever to activate and execute um and but it'll help you go in whichever way you want.

George B. Thomas: But that's the key right there. That's the key. You can activate and execute in all the wrong directions. So, so what becomes more important than ever is this saying and I believe the first time I may have heard it or at least it stuck was with Remington Big and he there like you got to slow down to speed up. More than ever, I would say, you have to slow down to speed up so that you can activate and take take execution into the right direction instead of seven of the wrong directions. Now, be careful with that though because not every direction is a wrong direction. meaning, did I spend time creating a website that is like revenueloopsystem.com or something like that where I painted out to the world like this is what I wish hubspot would have launched instead of loop marketing. Yeah, was it a waste of time? No, it was a learning lesson. Um did I throw out a super human framework.com website that needs to be like radically updated and changed based on things that I know now. Yes, was it the wrong direction? No, something needed to be out there, but it was a learning lesson. So there is this idea of giving yourself the ability to play but then really slowing down to speed up on the big thing. The million dollar idea, the way that you want to change the world, the major problem that you're super passionate about. You know that's your purpose, right? And so now all of a sudden you can use the four cornerstones to activate in the right direction and just just demolish anything that you ever thought you were able to do and impact more humans than you ever thought were possible. But it's because you gave yourself time to play, you learned the lessons and then you really sat down and was like, this is where we're going to apply that. This is how we're going to make that impact. This is the thing that will be our ripples when we get to the end of this.

[21:44] **Activated, Potential Filled Canvas, Harder to Choose** Chris Carolan: Yeah. And uh good to have you with us today, Chad. This is the new struggle. Now that we're activated and filled with so much possibility and potential, the canvas becomes so large, it gets harder to decide what to paint. Well, here's the thing though too about that. I was watching this video, Chad, I love that you just said that. I was watching this video where um maybe you do want to paint 20, 30, 50, 100 paintings because then five of them become the ones that are worth something. Like uh in this video that I was watching and it even everybody uses Thomas Edison. I get so tired of hearing about Thomas Edison and the damn light bulb, it just drives me insane. But like all his ideas and the light bulb and the phograph, right? And so sometimes you just want to paint to paint because you're a painter, but sometimes you need to paint because you need to build a masterpiece. So I love that Chad brought that in there. So like there there's this dichotomy of like giving yourself the freedom, but forcing yourself to have the focus. Ooh, that's post.

[23:00] **North Star and Freedom with Focus** Chris Carolan: There you go. Oh man. I mean, that's man, what are we focusing on? That that's the thing. like that's where it's like I'm all about I'm less of a planning guy and more of like the North star.

George B. Thomas: You said something the other day, Chris. You said something the other day that blew my mind. You I think it was in slack. You said, uh, you wake up and there's the work to do and then there's the work that you actually do to get the things done that need to be done. And like it's this big goal like you're talking about the North star, but it's not like how it was historically where it's like, I have these seven things and if I get these seven things done, my day is great. You might get to thing three and all of a sudden you just realize that you could build this thing that you could never build before and so that becomes the rest of your day, right? Freedom, but focus. A destination but things that.

[24:01] **ADHD, Strong Rope Analogy, Summit Talked Speed, Project** Chris Carolan: And I've actually got I'm trying to to share this message because it it relates strongly to uh like my natural ADHD tendencies, right? And this concept uh uh I'm calling it woven rope right now. Um but like because I want to work I naturally work on just jumping from stuff to stuff. That's like how it's my natural operating system. And now, thanks to AI, like we have a rope is stronger than any single thread. Progress happens when you're weaving any thread, not just one specific thread. Jumping between threads isn't distraction, it's construction. And um like I tie that to when we went to the AI summit last year, Yeah. like all these all these leaders who are building successful companies, who have built traditionally successful companies and now they're building AI companies, not one damn person on the stage talked about focus. Yeah. They talked about speed and experimentation and creativity and bring people in who have deep domain expertise and can ship stuff. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And here's a personal example from a couple weeks ago that if in this moment, like because I'm continuing to understand what that actually means and now I think we can create flags like if you get a feeling like tech debt is being created in that moment. Yeah. Like stop yourself and think of like all right, like and and what happened was um we're figuring out how to build VIP portals. Like we put this value first operations repo together, you bring everything in there and now you can just like ready make VIP portals for clients. And the way that I initially built it out was like, hey, I did this thing over here. I want it to look like that, but here, so bring that in. And then there's other clients we want to do that for too, right? So, of course, as we did that, the original context was for one client. So everything that got built out to be for all the clients still had a little taste of that initial plan in there, right? And what happened was, I clicked on or I my email wasn't correct uh in this in this thing and uh I asked uh I asked Claude to update it. Uh for for each portal. And um he uh he said he had to update it in 18 different places. Whoopsie. And I and at that point, I had been talking to Ryan. I was like, yeah, at some point, we probably want to refactor this like, you know Yeah. In that moment, I was like, nope, that's not going to fly. Like. Yeah. So and what was different is since he was building and we were building, this I could just say, now that you know what the whole plan is, what we're trying to do here, let's rebuild it right now with this simple context that he's definitely in line with where it's ridiculous to have to update this thing in 18 different places. Yeah. 30 minutes rebuilt.

[28:52] **Tech Bloat, Old School, Clone Philosophy, Not Code** George B. Thomas: Can I can I tell you where my brain goes when I hear you talking about this. First of all, my brain goes to this thing that is just tech bloat. Um we buy Avoma and we need 20% of it. We buy, you know, Canva, we need 5% of it. We buy we're in a world where tech bloat shouldn't be a thing because we can create the thing with the exact functions that we need. So when I hear the story that you're telling, I'm like, oh man, tech bloat and old school creation. Here's one thing that I think I'm going to probably preach over and over and over again. It's clone the philosophy, don't copy the code. Because if you copy the code, you're going to bring things in that people don't need. But if you clone the philosophy, you can then make it exactly what they need based on the thing that you're trying to provide. So imagine VIP portal philosophy skill, but now it needs to be for this data model and these names and this thing and these actions because not every portal needs the same VIP portal. You see what I'm saying? And and so there's this thing of like understanding what you want to bring into it. So for instance, I'll give you an example. Watching a video last night, and I hear these guys talk about these like super dope designers. And I'm sitting there and I had to pause the TV because I watched YouTube on TV. judge me if you want. I have an iPad, I have a phone, but I watch it on TV. Uh, I'm one of the smaller numbers. Maybe or maybe our numbers are growing. Anyway, not why we're here. I'm watching that and I stopped. I'm like, hang on a second. Claude, I need to do something. I need you to research who are the top 10 digital designers in the last five years that are award winning for apps, SAS software and websites. Um, go do this deep research. Okay, Claude, the the reason I want you to do this deep research is because I want you to find the matching philosophies and best practices across these 10 top designers over the last three years. All right, Claude, you've got those philosophies. Now what I want you to do is I want you to create a design auditor skill that now I can deploy and say, as this auditor and these philosophies and best practices, please go look at this website and return back to me the things that we should change to take it from 80% to 100%. Claude said, damn, this is a good idea. Let me go ahead and start working on that right now. I hope people understand what just happened and what I did. You have the access to all the brains on the planet to clone the philosophies so that you can create your own code to live the life that you want to live and do the things that you need to do.

[31:48] **Closing** Chris Carolan: Well there. Uh, and we're going to be here every day, uh helping you unlock that. Um uh but like you, we'd love to hear um which things are resonating, which are not. like there's so much opportunity uh and the more that we can talk about it is really what solves this because even what I'm starting to understand is like it's got to be a show and tell like when we're talking about use cases uh for it to resonate. But also that's where this underlying need for AI native and unified context. Like what's going to what work for somebody else, like if they have their data shit together and you don't, it's not going to work for you, right? And it has nothing to do with AI not working for you. And trying to help this this balance of understanding and not being overwhelmed and getting to the point, well, I can't use that. I can't do that then. And here's a great example from earlier in the week and then we'll wrap. a trusted client, somebody I've known for a long time. Somebody I know loves AI. Knows what it's supposed to be doing for him and his business. And we're talking about like how this gets done in the organization, like who owns the AI initiative and the infrastructure and uh while understanding that it is imperative that the business understands and leverages AI like immediately. And like he said, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's there yet. Uh and I said, and while also saying like, yeah, I use it every day, personally, but I can't even imagine seeing it in production day-to-day in the business, right? And when he approaches that from AI is not there yet, that's incorrect. It's just incorrect. What's not there, which he also knows, which is the project that we're working on, AI cannot do the work because your systems and your data and your people are not unified. Yeah, listen, the and then I'll shut up. The amount of things in the last 14 days that I've looked at my hubspot portal and realized I need to change or clean up um based on the way that I now want to use AI inside of my portal is numerous. and I know that it's a hill that I've got to climb because it's that important because AI is that ready.

[34:59] **Outro** Chris Carolan: Yeah. Uh so we'll be back at it next week. Uh George and I got probably a mountain of hubspot updates to go through. Uh so everybody have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Thanks George. Thanks to everybody. Thanks Chris.