I Taught a Bot to Be Me in Half a Day. Now It Runs My Marketing While I Sleep.

 

Want to watch a sales director turn a funny color? Ask how many AI subscriptions the company pays for. Then ask how many are bringing in business.

The silence that follows is usually long enough to make a pot of tea. And possibly drink it.

Most businesses collect AI the way we collected football stickers as kids. ChatGPT? Got. Claude? Got. Gemini, Perplexity, Gamma, HeyGen? Got, got, got and got. Six months later they’ve paid for the full album and they’re still doing most of the work by hand. It’s like buying a Ferrari and using it to store the garden furniture.

The question I’m asked most is, “Frank, which AI should we be using?” I’ve stopped answering it, because it’s the wrong question. The right one is far more profitable:

What should your AI be doing while you’re asleep?

From Clever Chatbot to Proper Employee

Phase one was the chatbot. You typed a question, it typed an answer, you copied, pasted and told your boss you were “using AI”. Lovely. But it was never a strategy. It was a very expensive thesaurus.

Phase two was the tool explosion. Everyone became a collector. Very few became better sellers.

Phase three is where we are now: agents, bots and workflows. AI that doesn’t just answer, it does. It works from your material, follows your rules and handles the weekly jobs that used to need a junior hire and an industrial quantity of coffee.

You’ve stopped hiring an adviser and started hiring an employee. One who never calls in sick, never asks for a pay rise and never pinches your sandwich from the office fridge.

How I Taught a Bot to Be Me

I never ask an audience to do something I haven’t tried myself. So, I gathered over 2,000 pieces of my own work: 25 years of articles, keynote transcripts, videos, LinkedIn posts and training notes. Either a valuable body of intellectual property or a remarkable amount of hot air, depending on whom you ask.

I fed the lot into Google Drive then connected it to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude so they could learn how I write, the stories I tell and, more importantly, the things I’d never say.

The first drafts were rubbish. It was written like a corporate consultant who’d never met me but had somehow read my diary.

So, I did what I’ve done with every young salesperson I’ve trained. I coached it, corrected it and showed it what good looks like. It took half a day, which is less time than most companies spend arguing about the Christmas party venue.

Then I loaded everything into a bot. I call him Tab. As a former jazz drummer, I can tell you he keeps far better time than I ever did. Drummers keep the beat for everyone else, then turn up late to their own gigs.

Frank’s Quick Tip: Your AI is only as good as what you feed it. Feed it generic rubbish and you’ll get generic rubbish back. Feed it your stories, case studies and wins, and it starts sounding like you on a good day.

What Tab Does Every Week

Area	Tab’s weekly workload
LinkedIn	5 posts in my voice, 40 targeted invites to Vistage and TEC chairs, event organisers and speaker bureaus, plus daily connection tidy-ups
Video	7 Reels, 7 TikToks and 3 YouTube Shorts cut from my keynotes, edited and captioned
Content	8 articles republished across Medium, Substack and Quora, with a hook and a question on every post
Admin	A Friday summary and tracking which invites actually get accepted

 

That’s 22 posts a week across four platforms, all run from one WhatsApp chat. I send a voice note from a hotel lobby, and it’s done before I’ve worked out which way up the room key goes.

A few years ago, that would have needed a marketing department of three or four people. Or one speaker working evenings until his wife forgot what he looked like (I know, that was me).

But here’s the detail that matters most: I approve every name before an invite goes out. Tab finds, drafts, edits and publishes. Tab has never once decided who I should be talking to. AI without a human in charge isn’t a strategy. It’s a runaway shopping trolley heading for the car park.

So What Does This Mean for You?

Salespeople: Imagine waking up to briefing notes on your ten priority prospects. Finishing a meeting to find it summarized, the CRM updated and a follow-up waiting for your approval. The AI handles the preparation. You handle the persuasion. That’s where the money is.

CEOs: Stop buying tools and start building workflows. Tools don’t create revenue. Workflows do. On Monday, ask your team which tasks get repeated every week and which should never need a human again. That list is your first agent. Just don’t hand it the keys to your CRM, inbox and LinkedIn account and hope for the best. A clever workflow that gets your account restricted isn’t terribly clever.

Small businesses: This is the great equalizer. You’ll never outspend the big players, but you can absolutely out-workflow them. And you’re already sitting on your own 2,000 pieces: proposals, emails, quotes, reviews and recorded sales calls, all gathering digital dust.

Frank’s Quick Tip: Don’t start with technology. Start with last week’s to-do list. Anything you did more than three times is a job for a bot.

The Bit No Bot Can Do

After 25 years of selling in more than 70 countries, one thing hasn’t changed. People still buy from people they know, like and trust.

Tab can write in my voice. He can’t stand on a stage, spot the CEO glancing at his phone and win him back with a story. AI can suggest five brilliant questions. It will never notice that question three just made the customer squirm.

So my rule is simple:

Automate the admin. Accelerate the thinking. Protect the relationship.

The salespeople who lose out won’t lose to AI. They’ll lose to the humans who learned to run it.

Want Your Own Tab?

I’m building agents, bots and workflows into my sales training, leadership workshops and keynotes, using real examples from my own business. I also run a practical, no-jargon paid webinar showing exactly what I loaded, how I taught it and what I got wrong first.

Drop me a line at frank@frankfurness.com  or call UK +447711 672888 or USA +1 407 558 9714.

While you’re asking AI to write yet another email, what do you suppose your competitors’ agents are doing tonight?

Frank Furness
International Keynote Speaker | Sales, AI & LinkedIn Training

 

THE BUYER HAS CHANGED. HAS THE SALESPERSON?

 The customer is now in control, and while you're checking them out, they're checking you out too.

I sometimes wonder how many salespeople are still selling the way they were taught twenty years ago. They have their prospecting scripts, their presentations, their objection-handling techniques and their closing strategies. Some even believe that if they can just get in front of enough people and talk long enough, eventually somebody will buy something. Unfortunately, the customer has moved on, and in many cases the salesperson hasn't even noticed.

Years ago, the salesperson had a tremendous advantage. We controlled the information. If somebody wanted to know about our products, prices, features or competitors, they generally had to speak to us. We could arrange the appointment, turn up with our beautiful brochure, deliver our carefully rehearsed presentation and guide the customer through the sales process. We were the experts because we had the information. The customer had the questions, and hopefully we had the answers.

The Customer Has Taken Over

Then along came the internet, Google, social media, online reviews and now artificial intelligence. Suddenly, the customer didn't need us to explain everything. They could research our company, compare competitors, check prices, watch demonstrations and read what other customers thought about us. And they could do all of this at eleven o'clock at night, sitting on the sofa in their pajamas with a glass of wine. Not exactly the ideal environment for a salesperson to deliver their carefully rehearsed PowerPoint presentation.

Today, the buying journey often starts long before the salesperson knows there is a potential customer. Buyers can use ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini to research solutions, compare suppliers and prepare questions. They can ask AI to identify weaknesses in a proposal, evaluate alternatives and even suggest what they should negotiate. By the time they contact us, they may already have a shortlist of suppliers and a pretty good idea of what they want.

We used to think the salesperson was taking the customer on a journey. Now the customer is taking the journey, and we're hoping to be invited along for part of it. Sometimes we're invited in at the beginning, sometimes near the end, and occasionally we discover that the journey is over and somebody else has got the business.

And Here's Something I've Noticed in My Own Business

I spend a great deal of my time speaking at conferences, working with companies and training sales teams around the world. LinkedIn has become one of my most important business tools, and over the years I've noticed something rather interesting.

Before I've even spoken to a potential client, I can often see that they've been looking at my LinkedIn profile. Sometimes several people from the same organisation have been checking me out. I haven't delivered a presentation, sent a proposal or even had a conversation with them, but they're already doing their homework.

And it doesn't stop at LinkedIn. I regularly discover that people have been reading my articles and passing them around to colleagues and their teams. In some cases, my ideas are already circulating inside a company before I've had the opportunity to meet the people who might eventually book me.

Think about that for a moment. I'm being evaluated before I've even entered the room.

Fortunately, I enjoy writing articles and sharing ideas, and my LinkedIn profile gives people a pretty good idea of what I do, how I think and the subjects I'm passionate about. Hopefully, they also discover that I have a sense of humor and don't spend my entire life talking about artificial intelligence.

But it made me realise something important. While I was using LinkedIn to research potential clients, those same clients were using LinkedIn to research me. The salesperson was no longer the only one doing the investigating.

Would You Buy from You?

That's a question I increasingly ask people in my LinkedIn and sales training programs. Forget what you think your profile says about you. Look at it through the eyes of a potential customer who doesn't know you.

Imagine you've sent a beautifully written prospecting email. The customer is interested enough to look you up. Your LinkedIn photograph looks as though it was taken when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, your headline says 'Sales Executive at ABC Company', and the last thing you posted was a photograph of the Christmas party three years ago.

Your company website is full of photographs of people shaking hands, but there's very little evidence that you understand the customer's business or the problems they're trying to solve.

The customer hasn't met you, hasn't seen your presentation and hasn't discussed your prices. But they've already formed an opinion. And unfortunately for you, it might not be a particularly good one.

Now compare that with a salesperson whose profile clearly explains who they help, what problems they solve and the value they bring. They share useful ideas, customer stories, short videos and insights relevant to their industry. Which one would you be more inclined to meet?

And here's the irony. The first salesperson probably complains that nobody responds to prospecting emails anymore. They blame the economy, the competition, LinkedIn or perhaps the price of petrol. It never occurs to them that the customer may have rejected them before the sales conversation even started.

The New Salesperson Needs a Different Set of Skills

Does this mean salespeople are becoming irrelevant? Not at all. I think the opposite is true. But we have to stop believing our main job is simply to deliver information. AI can already do a remarkable amount of that.

Our real value comes from understanding customers, asking better questions, challenging assumptions, sharing experience, solving problems and building trust. The salesperson who turns up and repeats everything the customer has already read on the website is going to have a difficult time. The salesperson who brings fresh thinking and helps the customer make a better decision will always have an advantage.

We also need to recognise that our sales and marketing activities can no longer operate in separate little boxes. Our LinkedIn profiles, websites, videos, articles, customer testimonials and personal reputations are all contributing to the buying decision. Every one of them is either helping to build confidence or giving the customer another reason to look elsewhere.

The old sales process was largely about the salesperson controlling the conversation. The new one is about earning the right to be part of it.

So here's my question. We spend an enormous amount of time teaching salespeople how to find, research and approach customers. But how much time do we spend making sure that when customers research us, they like what they find?

The buyer has changed. Has your sales team changed with them?

---

Frank Furness
International Keynote Speaker | Sales, AI & LinkedIn Training

www.frankfurness.com
frank@frankfurness.com

 

The Biggest AI Mistake I See Salespeople Making

 

Are we becoming better at using AI — or simply better at collecting AI tools?

I spend a lot of my time speaking and training around AI, sales and LinkedIn, and I've noticed something interesting.

People love discovering new tools.

ChatGPT. Gemini. Claude. Grok. DeepSeek. Perplexity. Clay. Apollo. HeyGen. Gamma. Beautiful.ai. ElevenLabs.

Another one launches and suddenly we're signing up for another free trial and trying to remember which email address we used.

At some point, you have to ask:

Is any of this actually helping us sell?

That's why I've changed the way I think about AI.

I'm becoming much less interested in individual tools and much more interested in the journey.

Start with the sales problem

Suppose I want to win a new client.

I could use LinkedIn and Apollo to identify the right people.

Then Perplexity, Grok or Gemini could help me understand the company, market and what is happening around them.

I could take that information into ChatGPT, Claude or DeepSeek and ask the AI to challenge my thinking, identify potential problems and prepare intelligent questions.

If I need more information about the prospect, Clay can enrich it.

Now I have something worth saying.

That's when the creative tools become useful.

I could turn the idea into a presentation with Gamma or Beautiful.ai, create supporting graphics in Canva, produce a personalised video with HeyGen, or potentially use ElevenLabs where voice makes sense.

Suddenly we're not talking about AI tools anymore.

We're talking about a sales system.

And that's a much more interesting conversation.

But there's a catch

The more AI can do, the more important I think the human becomes.

AI can research somebody before I meet them.

It can't build the relationship for me.

AI can suggest five brilliant questions.

It can't look across the table and realise that question number three has just made the customer uncomfortable.

AI can draft a follow-up email in seconds.

It doesn't know whether I should pick up the phone instead.

AI can create a beautiful sales presentation.

It doesn't know when I should close the laptop and simply listen.

Those are human skills.

And they're becoming more valuable, not less.

Don't ask which AI is best

I'm also increasingly convinced that we're asking the wrong question.

People ask me whether ChatGPT is better than Gemini.

Or Claude.

Or Grok.

Or DeepSeek.

My answer?

For what?

Try giving the same genuine business problem to several of them.

Don't ask five AIs five different questions.

Give them exactly the same problem.

Then compare their thinking.

You may be surprised.

Take the strongest ideas, challenge the weak ones and add something none of those systems possesses:

Your experience.

That's where I think sales is heading

The winners won't necessarily be the companies with the most AI.

And they certainly won't be the salespeople with the most subscriptions.

The winners will be the people who understand where AI can remove friction, where it can improve decisions and where it should get out of the way.

My rule is becoming very simple:

Automate the admin.
Accelerate the thinking.
Protect the relationship.

Because the objective isn't to use more AI.

The objective is to spend less time doing things machines can do so we have more time doing the things humans do brilliantly.

Where in your sales process could AI save you the most time without damaging the human relationship?

#ArtificialIntelligence #AISales #Sales #LinkedIn #SalesLeadership #Marketing #ChatGPT #FutureOfSales

I deliver keynotes, training and consulting on AI, sales and LinkedIn.

Let’s talk — frankfurness.com email frank@frankfurness.com

call UK 07711672888

USA 407558 9714

The AI Presentation Wars: Has Gamma Lost Its Crown?

 

The AI Presentation Wars Just Got Interesting

I was having dinner with a client in New Orleans last month, the kind of place with a jazz trio in the corner doing far more with three instruments than most speakers manage with sixty slides. Somewhere between the gumbo and the second round of drinks, she asked me which AI presentation tool she should be using.

I used to have a one-word answer for that. Gamma.

Not anymore.

When Gamma Was the Belle of the Ball

I've built well over a thousand presentations in my career, for rooms as small as twenty people and stages as big as four thousand. The lesson never changes. Your slides aren't there to say more. They're there to get out of the way and let you say it.

When Gamma turned up, I was properly excited. Here, finally, was a tool that could knock out a half-decent deck in minutes, rather than the usual half-day wrestling match with PowerPoint's alignment guides. I recommend it to clients. I demonstrated it on stage. I built it into my AI masterclasses like it was doing me a personal favour.

Lately, though, something's shifted. It wasn't one big falling-out. It was death by a thousand small ones.

More Features, Less Magic

The decks started looking a bit… samey. Same pastel gradients. Same stock-photo people gesturing enthusiastically at whiteboards. Same “AI made this” fingerprint that anyone who's seen more than three of them can spot from the back row.

Meanwhile, Gamma has been busy bolting on more of everything.

More AI. More image generation. More integrations. More collaboration tools that nobody in the room asked for.

It's turned into a Swiss Army knife problem. Twenty-three tools folded into one handle, and somewhere in all that engineering the actual knife stopped being sharp.

Then I Went Shopping

Curiosity got the better of me, as it usually does, so I spent a fortnight testing the competition properly rather than just reading the marketing emails.

Beautiful.ai was the one that made me sit up. The slides had something Gamma's had quietly lost: restraint.

Proper spacing, clean typography, charts that looked like an actual designer had been in the room rather than a very confident algorithm. Instead of dazzling me with a hundred clever tricks, it just helped me build something I'd be happy walking out on stage with. Which, last I checked, is the entire job.

Canva, meanwhile, has grown up when nobody was watching. I spent years filing it under “where people make Instagram posts,” and I was wrong to. Magic Design has come on enormously, the Brand Kits keep everything consistent without you having to think about it, and if you're already living in Canva for your marketing, there's now a genuine case for building your decks there too.

Presentations.ai is the one nobody's talking about, and I'm not sure why. Sharp AI, attractive layouts, and it understands business storytelling rather than just filling boxes with words. Quietly excellent. Put it on your shortlist.

Plus AI takes the opposite approach entirely; it doesn't ask you to leave PowerPoint at all, it just gets smarter inside it. This means you keep your animations, your master slides, your presenter notes, your corporate template, all of it. No mystery exports. No formatting meltdown five minutes before you're due on stage, frantically dragging a text box back into position while the AV guy pretends not to notice.

My Workflow Now

These days I don't marry one tool. I run the lot in relay.

Claude does the research. ChatGPT helps me shape and sharpen the ideas. Presentations.ai or Beautiful.ai builds the first draft. PowerPoint is where I finish it, because that's where I get full control over the last ten percent that actually matters.

And, crucially, at the end of it, it still looks like my presentation. Not the software's.

Frank's Quick Tip Before you rebuild your deck with yet another AI tool, ask whether the problem is the software or the story. Nine times out of ten, a beautifully generated slide still can't rescue a message nobody has thought through properly.

 

The Real Lesson Isn't About Gamma

This isn't really a Gamma pile-on, much as it might read like one. It's a pattern I've watched play out across thirty years of new technology landing on my desk.

Companies keep adding features because they can. Customers, on the other hand, generally want one thing done brilliantly, not eleven things done adequately. The businesses that last aren't the ones with the longest feature list. They're the ones that never forgot what they were good at.

My Current Favourites

●      Beautiful.ai — for polished executive presentations

●      Presentations.ai — for fast, sharp first drafts

●      Canva — for marketing and visual content

●      PowerPoint with AI tools — when you need total creative control

This market moves fast enough that today's leader could be next year's cautionary tale, and frankly that's the fun part. Our job as presenters was never to fall in love with the software. It's to find whatever helps us tell a better story and leave the room saying “that was brilliant.”

Because in thirty years on stage, I've never once had an audience member walk out and say, “the speaker was forgettable, but did you see those gradients on slide fourteen?”

Want help building presentations that actually land? Email frank@frankfurness.com or call +447711 672888