Imagine if your top expert—maybe even you—could be available 24/7, across multiple languages, without burning out. Sounds like science fiction? For many SMB leaders, the knowledge held by key individuals becomes a bottleneck, limiting growth and overwhelming crucial team members. But what if AI offered a way not to replace, but to amplify that irreplaceable human expertise?
Today, I'm talking with George B. Thomas, widely known as "The HubSpot Helper," but we're diving deep into something even more cutting-edge. George has actually built an AI Digital Clone of himself – an AI trained on over 16 million words of his unique content, insights, and perhaps most importantly, his core values and beliefs. Discover how this isn't just about creating a chatbot, but about authentically scaling human expertise to augment his team and serve his audience in ways previously impossible.
George firmly believes AI's true power lies in augmentation, not replacement. He shares how his AI clone functions as an internal assistant, a content creation partner, and an external resource, allowing his human team to focus on higher-value tasks. Forget the hype; this is a real-world look at creating a human-centric AI that embodies your unique essence.
The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked George B. Thomas about:
✨ Beyond Content: Cloning Your Essence - Discover why simply feeding content into an AI isn't enough. George reveals the crucial step of documenting and integrating core values, mindsets, and beliefs to create an AI that truly reflects and augments you or your expert.
✨ Augmentation in Action: Real Use Cases - Learn how George's AI clone assists his team internally via Slack, helps generate content aligned with his voice, and provides 24/7 external support – proving AI can be a powerful collaborator, not just a tool.
✨ Purpose Over Profit: The Why Behind the Clone - George shares the vital importance of building such an intimate AI from a place of purpose, passion, and persistence, rather than chasing monetization alone, ensuring authenticity and long-term value.
Learn more about George B. Thomas
- Connect with George B. Thomas on LinkedIn
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
- Sidekick Strategies
- GeorgeBThomas.com
- Beyond Your Default Podcast
- Hub Heroes Podcast
- HubSpot
- Marcus Sheridan
- Ann Handley
- Michael Stelzner
- Social Media Marketing World
- Ian Anderson Gray
- GeorgeBThomas.com/Helper
- GeorgeBThomas.com/Growth
- The AI Librarian: How RAG Can Revolutionize Your Business
- AI as Your Co-Host: Unleashing NotebookLM’s Potential in Content Marketing
- Slite
- 1Up
- Delphi.ai
- AI Work Buddy
- Jorge Fuentes
- AI Primer: A Comprehensive Guide
- AI Training for Businesses
- Explore past episodes of the The AI Hat Podcast podcast
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
AI Digital Clone: How to Augment Your Team's Expertise with George B. Thomas
[00:00:00] George B. Thomas: If all of a sudden we had a hundred, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000, does it become a, a big revenue driver for the organization eventually? Yes. But if you're watching this or listening to this, and that is the driver for why you clone yourself, stop it. Don't do it. Because this type of intimate creation has come from a place of love. It has to come from a place of purpose. It has to come from a place of passion and you have to realize that you're gonna need to be persistent over the long haul to create something that is amazing and that you're willing to put your personal name or your business name on top of.
[00:00:47] Mike Allton: Mike's got the Hat, the AI kind. Unlocking power in business, you'll find. Cut through the hype, explore the tech. Every week, new ideas to check.
[00:01:12] Allton leads us on a digital quest. AI secrets, he'll always invest. Tune in tight, don't miss a beat. Knowledge, groove, keep you on your feet. Listen up! To the AI flow. Business growth, here we go. Cuttin' edge insights, that's the plan. With The AI Hat you'll understand.
[00:01:55] Greetings program. Welcome back to The AI Hat Podcast where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at harnessing the power of AI across all areas of business. From streamlining operations and boosting productivity to gaining a competitive edge and driving explosive growth. Oh, and you get to learn too.
[00:02:12] Subscribe, be shown to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.
[00:02:18] Today I am thrilled to welcome George B. Thomas known throughout the business world as the HubSpot Helper, George has helped countless companies transform their operational chaos into smooth running systems that actually drive growth. He's become legendary for his ability to make complex HubSpot implementations look easy.
[00:02:36] And now he's combining that expertise with cutting edge AI tell businesses achieve even more remarkable results. Hey George, welcome to the show.
[00:02:45] George B. Thomas: Mike, thanks. I, I just think I need you to follow me around and introduce legendary. I don't know, but I, I do love helping some humans with HubSpot. I will say that I, I do love me some AI and, and I am super excited to be here with you, brother, and spend the next 35, 45 minutes just like being able to add value to the, to the humans who are gonna be watching or listening to this. So super excited.
[00:03:12] Mike Allton: Well, I gotta tip my hat to you, sir, because. One of the reasons I do the intros the way I did and do for every podcast that I do is because of you. Oh, watching you intro Marcus Sheridan and Anne Handley just blew my mind and it's obviously been something that I've kept with me ever since.
[00:03:29] And we're talking what, six? Probably seven years ago. Yeah. I don't know. It's been a long time. The way you captured the room and built up and hyped up that guest and passed so much energy to them. Dude, that was amazing, and I will always remember that.
[00:03:43] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I appreciate that. And of course, we're talking about Michael Stelzner's event at Social Media Marketing World, where I hopped on stage and did a little MCing.
[00:03:52] I love MCing. I love being the hype man. And, and here's the thing, what I love about you taking that and running with it and, and there's a lesson to be learned here, is that you immediately set the energy. Right, exactly. You immediately make the person feel comfortable, feel valued, and therefore because they're comfortable and feel valued, they wanna give more value to the world.
[00:04:14] And it just so happens that we're in a digital presence versus a real world like social media marketing world. Yeah. Love it.
[00:04:22] Mike Allton: Love it. So thanks for that. Now, before we dive into the technical stuff. I'd love you to share what led you to focus on like business process optimization and why you think it matters so much for companies today.
[00:04:34] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Can I just say lack of time I. I, I, honestly, like, listen, one of the things when, when you are a human who focuses on value first, human-centric content that educates because you're trying to get humans into conversations around how you can help them with a tech stack, how you can help them in life, how you, however, you're watching this, you're listening to this, however you help humans.
[00:05:06] When, when you do value first human centric, you're going to get busy. Be because you're focused on a relationship instead of a transaction. And so when you get busy and you're doing the thing that you love to do, you're gonna reach your point where you're like, I don't have time to do the thing that I love to do.
[00:05:26] And this is where you have to figure out how to optimize and you have to figure out the, the tools, technologies, or, or future paths. To allow you to do things that you once weren't able to do, so that you can buy back, no pun intended on, on the book out there, but, but, so you can buy back some of your time so you can continue to do the thing that you love.
[00:05:51] And, and of course, that thing is also your zone of genius, right? So for me, it's, I love educating humans on HubSpot. I love educating humans on how they can grow their business. I, I love educating humans just how to be better humans. And if I'm stuck in the trenches of Clickup or answering a a thousand, employee questions or ans trying to answer somebody's question who maybe speaks a different language well.
[00:06:22] That just gets difficult and, and so lack of time and, and the, just wanting to serve better, serve faster is why I've headed in this direction.
[00:06:36] Mike Allton: Love that approach. It makes so much sense to me. One of the. Interesting quirk, maybe about me personally is that I only need six hours of sleep every night.
[00:06:48] I go to bed at 11, I wake up at five and I feel great. Which is a bit of a superpower. 'cause people who need eight, nine hours of sleep every single night, I get two to three hours of additional time every single day. Yeah. On those folks. And I use that time, I use it to, I got side hustle. So I'm spending hours every single day on this business, and this has been true about me for years.
[00:07:10] That's how I was so prolific as a blogger. I had extra time, an extra hour or two every single day, but most people wouldn't know that just by looking at me. Most people see the exterior. They see the output. I'm like, wow, Mike, you must have some clone who's able to do all this extra stuff, and we're talking 10 or 15 years ago.
[00:07:29] Yeah, I was. People were telling me that Ian Anderson Gray was famous for saying Mike and his clone are blogging. Yeah, but that's not you. You've actually built a clone of yourself. Yeah. To help address this issue. We're talking about a lack of time. Talk to me about it. How has that changed your approach to business and how did you do it?
[00:07:49] George B. Thomas: So, so first of all, let's just be very clear. This is a digital clone. It's, it's not, my wife is thankful that it's not another, me walking around in real world, but, but the digital clone, here's the funny thing about this is I have been creating content since 2013 around HubSpot. So HubSpot tutorials. Webinars blog articles, and, and so I've answered the questions somewhere at some time.
[00:08:23] The unfortunate thing is that most mere mortal humans, can't actually go find the answer to the thing that I've answered at some point in time. Let me be honest with you. There's times that I know I've taught something and I can't find where and when I taught the thing, and, and so I was sitting around with a couple buddies and they were like, dude, you need to clone yourself.
[00:08:48] And we started talking about this technology, which I'll mention a little bit later, and, and we started down this road of like, okay. Let's go ahead and take all of the content that we've created historically, and let's start to feed this system. Let's build this clone. And at first it was literally positioned in a way that people could interact with it, ask it questions, and it would just be able to find the information and give it to them fast in a conversational way.
[00:09:18] So Mike, we added both websites, George b thomas.com and sidekick strategies.com, and we had it start to feed into this closed LLM model. Right? That's one thing that I want everybody to understand is one of the big worries that we have in the AI world is like, this thing's gonna hallucinate, like it's gonna make junk.
[00:09:39] If you're helping you humans with HubSpot, you can't hallucinate brother. Yeah. It, it needs to know the know. So it's a closed model, but we started feeding it George B. Thomas and Sidekick Strategies. Then we started feeding it the podcast, so the Beyond Your Default podcast, the Hub Heroes Podcast. Then we started feeding it the YouTube channels, the George B. Thomas YouTube channel, the Sidekick Strategies YouTube channel. So you can, you can see where I'm going of like all the mm-hmm. Blogs, podcasts website pages. It's all going into this place to feed. Machine. And then once we had that in there, we could start to construct like what are the custom instructions that we wanna give it?
[00:10:23] What's the role that we want it to play? And again, the first bit of this was we're gonna give a place where people can go and interact with the clone of George B. Thomas and ask questions and learn and anywhere, anytime, any language. 'cause this thing has like 57 languages in it. I can sleep, by the way, I'm very much like you.
[00:10:44] I sleep, I usually 10 15 and I'm in bed five 30 I'm up, so I, I have some extra time here and there as well. But, but I still do sleep. And so this clone could be interacting in different languages, in different time zones and helping humans even when I couldn't. And, and so the point was how do I scale?
[00:11:03] HubSpot helper? Well, it's, it's by cloning. It's by getting that content in there. Now, since that initial build and that initial id idea, we've gone a lot of different ways with this. And, and so one of the things I'll mention is now, and, and, and I'll get back to some questions with you, is now we sit here and we have george b thomas.com/helper, which is the HubSpot helper.
[00:11:29] We've also got George b thomas.com/growth, which is the growth helper, which that's more of the personal and professional side of like growing yourself or growing your business. 'cause it leans into like things like the superhuman framework that I've built out and things like that. But also the, the exciting part is we've got an internal helper and the internal helper lives on our Slack channel where anybody in the organization can go over.
[00:11:55] Mention the clone, ask it a question, whether it be about HubSpot, whether it be about what days we're off, whether it be anything internally, they can ask it. And we've even got a version that we've now made that our website chat so people can ask things about product or services. And so you have to think one clone, different instances, different places it can live, but all the conversations that, and, and by the way, I'll, I'll tease this out.
[00:12:24] And different ways that you can have a conversation.
[00:12:30] Mike Allton: Oh man. Okay, so first of all, we were joking before the show that we, we might not follow the planned run of show, and, and we have officially gone off the rails because I have so many new questions about what you're doing right now. Forget the rest of the script.
[00:12:43] Yeah. Just to give some context to those listening, this, this is the basic kind of a approach that we've talked about a couple times on this show. A RAG, a Retrieval Augmentation Generation system where to what George just said, it's a closed LLM, meaning when you have a conversation with this LLM, with this chat bot, it's only pulling data and answers and information and sources from the material that you fed it.
[00:13:07] It's not going out onto the web. I did a whole show about Google's Notebook LM. Which is a great example. Yes, yes. Of a Rag that anybody can basically start up, I feed it every transcript from every podcast episode. So when I want a quote from Chris Penn that he literally said to me, I go there. cause if I go to ChatGPT or Gemini, even if I give it a link to my website and I say, gimme a quote from Chris Penn, it's still gonna go into the web and find something that Chris Penn probably did say.
[00:13:35] But not to me. Yeah, right. So we've done the same thing at Agorapulse, where we've fed it our blog, we've fed it, our documentation, we use a, a tool called Slite. And actually Slite has this built in, which is amazing. We were using a different tool called 1Up. I did an article about that. I'll link to the show notes for people who wanna read more.
[00:13:52] But then we just transitioned everything in Slite. So it's got all of our internal documentation, our blog, our case studies, our release notes, and we're using it primarily internally, and we are testing it, using it. Externally. So my first question for you as a follow up is what are, what are you using technology wise?
[00:14:11] What, what tool? 'cause it's, this isn't something people do just outta the box with GPT.
[00:14:15] George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Thi this is the number one question I get, which is funny because they wanna go to the tool versus like the technique. So I'm gonna give you the tool, but I also wanna share one other very valuable piece of information.
[00:14:26] 'cause I mentioned content. Okay. But I also wanna mention context here for a second. Mm-hmm. And then I'll mention the tool. Mike, I want you to realize that one of the things that we've done very purposely is we've looked at all the stuff that we've done, so like the Beyond Your Default podcast, okay?
[00:14:45] We went through every episode and we said, Hey, break down the main topics, the mindsets, the beliefs that George B. Thomas must have based on this episode. Which got us to a place where we created three very important documents for whenever you're thinking about cloning yourself expertise or cloning a business.
[00:15:04] And they might smell or look or rhyme differently based on a human versus a business. But we have a doc that is the 10 core values of George B. Thomas, and it is robust and built out to what those core values mean. We have the top 25 mindsets of George B. Thomas, and it is, again, very robust document. And we have the top 25 beliefs of George B. Thomas, how he interacts in the world. And so now when we create custom instructions, we make sure that we put into, when you're answering the question, make sure you pay attention to the core values, mindsets, and beliefs of George B. Thomas as you're delivering this engagement. Right. So that is like, it's, listen, you can clone your content, but that's not cloning your essence.
[00:15:54] And I don't mean to get weird here, but, but what makes you, you, what? What are the core values of your business? What's the mission statement of your business? What's the like, value proposition of your business? What's all the products and services? 'cause all of that makes up the essence of the business.
[00:16:13] Or the essence of the human, right? Mm-hmm. Now, with that being said, in that little extra caveat, here's the thing. You can go to delphi.ai and you can do this today, but you have to have the content and the context, and then also the strategy moving forward of how you're actually going to leverage it to be a useful.
[00:16:37] Valuable human-centered experience, not just a clone and, and you have to be thinking externally, internally, and also yourself. Because one of the things that I didn't mention, Mike, is you, you said Ian Anderson Gray. Yeah, Mike and his clone. Listen, I've got an instance of my clone that nobody can get to other than me and my team.
[00:17:03] That is the content creator version. And so when I tell it to write something like George B. Thomas, right now we're sitting at 16 plus million words in this closed model. It knows who the flip George B. Thomas is and how he would write something. And so like when we go in, by the way, on a daily basis, we go in and we grab the latest HubSpot updates.
[00:17:27] We then go over to our content creator and say, teach this update like George B. Thomas would teach it to the world. We put that in a document and upload it to the clone. So the clone is actively being taught HubSpot updates in the way that I would teach it based on the years of content creation and the value mindsets and beliefs of how to show up as a happy, helpful, humble human helping people with HubSpot.
[00:17:56] Mike Allton: So many brilliant points in there. 'cause you're right, most of the tools that I've seen. They will allow you to pull facts and information out of the, ocean of sources that you've given it, but I haven't seen too often where you have the ability to also then mold what that looks like. When it's outputted through the use of the documentation that you provided, which is absolutely brilliant.
[00:18:20] So folks, make note of that. Make sure that you're doing that because that is how we keep these human centered. One of the ways I wanna come back to how we're, how else we're keeping them human centered in a moment. Yeah. But that is really, really interesting to me how you did that. And what you're talking about is similar to the concept that I've mentioned on the show before, my AI Work Buddy, but it is a little bit different, the AI Work Buddy.
[00:18:42] I designed that to be a resource that people can turn to, not as necessarily a clue to themselves, but like we used to be able to lean over to the next cubicle and say, Hey. Bill, what do you think about this? Yeah, but so many of us are working from home or we're isolated on, on individual teams. I, I work from home.
[00:19:03] There's nobody here that I can talk to for my side hustle. And even at Agorapulse, I am a sole contributor. I'm not really part of a team other than the general marketing team. So when I struggle with, how to approach a particular scenario, if I want help with a project, there isn't somebody I can turn to, but I've got that Work Buddy just happens to be AI trained on my role and responsibilities.
[00:19:24] And for folks who want something like that, I'll lead to that in the show notes as well. But this is different. This is
[00:19:30] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Gimme one second. 'cause they rhyme and, and I'll tell you one of the things that surprised the heck outta me. Is I've actually had people email me or communicate with me of like, look, I was having a hard time.
[00:19:42] I was, I, I wanted to write this email response, but I just wasn't sure how to do it. I, I, I've always seen you as the kind of like, empathetic, authentic, vulnerable, like human. The, the guy that's like, like, 'cause people know, like, I talk about value first. I talk about human centric. I talk about being the best version of yourself, living a life beyond your default.
[00:20:02] So they literally are like. I just put the email in your clone and I said, how would George B. Thomas answer this email? And then they took that email and tweaked it a little bit to their verbiage, but it gave him a jumping off point. So it literally, they were digitally Mike leaning across the, the desk going, Hey George, how would you write this?
[00:20:21] Right? And I want you to start to think about that because I'm positioning this as the HubSpot helper, but it is literally 24 7 access to the air quotes brain of me as a human. And so you could ask it questions not about HubSpot. Yeah. And it's gonna tell you what I would think based on my values, my core mindsets, my beliefs, all the Beyond your default podcast episodes that it has to pull from, which was a personal growth podcast we did like
[00:20:54] anyway.
[00:20:55] Mike Allton: Yeah. Yeah. Just a technical question with, with Delphi, were you feeding it the transcripts from podcasting videos, or does it actually consume the audio and the video?
[00:21:05] George B. Thomas: I give it the YouTube channel and it brings it all in. And all the also, here's the thing, you can say please keep this synced.
[00:21:14] So when I upload a new YouTube video to either channel, it automatically goes in. I have my websites. Whenever I post a blog article, it automatically goes in, by the way, I have a Google Drive folder that any document that I pull into the Google Drive folder can then be uploaded and it syncs that document.
[00:21:32] So if I add to the document later, it'll bring that new information in from the document. The podcast, you just give it the RSS feed. It actually has a really cool functionality where you search for the podcast and then hit it, and it just, it just brings it in. It keeps up to sync. So, so think about this.
[00:21:47] We live in a world where, as a content creator, as somebody who's trying to be a helpful human, I'm creating content all the time. And now I know that it's gonna be uploaded to the clone. So what's happening? I'm getting smarter. I'm helping other people get smarter, and my clones getting smarter. To help people get.
[00:22:05] Mike Allton: Yeah. Love that. That is fantastic. So I, I promise I'd get back to that human-centered question. Yeah. Because the businesses listening are gonna be all over the place. Some people might be sold, content creators like yourself and, and be seeing this as a model for them literally to duplicate themselves and expand their businesses.
[00:22:25] Yep. And, and. I definitely wanna talk about monetization, but I also want to touch on the fact that other businesses might be thinking about how employees within the business might look at this as a threat to their existence as an employee. Right. If the business can duplicate my knowledge, what do they need me for?
[00:22:47] How do, how do you respond to that kind of a concern?
[00:22:48] George B. Thomas: Yeah. I, I, I just need you to be human. I, I need you to be human and interact with humans. Like, listen, one of the things that brings me great joy, I have a, a, an employee. He's like my right hand man. His name's Jorge Fuentes. And he'll come to me multiple times a week and be like, bro, I used your clone.
[00:23:06] To like get here or I used your clone to like, answer this question or I had this training and I just wanted to double check if what I was thinking is what you would be thinking before I taught them this thing. And so it's, it's not a thing of replacement. And, and by the way, I will I'm gonna draw a line right here.
[00:23:25] The entire internet. I want you to know I don't live in a world. Where I believe AI will steal the jobs or steal our jobs. I don't think I'm ever gonna replace Ai, or replace employees with Ai. I am firmly in the camp of the, I'm going to use it to figure out ways to augment me, augment my team.
[00:23:50] Augment the processes, right? Because for so long there's been these conversations about like automation and like, we need to start to have this augmentation conversation. Like, how can you take who we are as amazing human beings and make us even, it's like the $6 Million Man, which I'm aging myself, but how can we make ourselves faster, right?
[00:24:46] How can we make ourselves stronger? How can we, and, and so that's the mindset is like. I'm very much in the camp of if you embrace where we're at, if you lean in and wake up with AI every morning in some little bit of way, just like I talk about everything else 1% better each and every day. If you get 1% better each and every day on this idea of augmenting yourself and quit having this fear-based replacement conversation, you'll it, you'll be in a far better place in the next six months.
[00:25:20] Year, five years. 'cause this ain't going nowhere. Like, here's the thing we're talking about, how this is so amazing, which by the way, we, we haven't even talked about like three different ways that you can communicate with it and like the different languages and things, like we'll get there. But, but like this is the beginning.
[00:25:39] Yeah. That this is, we're, we're at the birth of something that is gonna be crazy when we look back at it.
[00:25:52] Mike Allton: Long time listeners of the show, or folks, if you've seen me talk, we're talking about one of my values right now, one of my philosophical beliefs about AI that George just so eloquently put that it is here not to replace us, but to augment us.
[00:26:05] Now, that said, I am a realist. I understand, there are some jobs and some roles that are gonna be phased out. They won't be needed. Some people, a lot of people are gonna have to upskill and transition. But that said. We need to look at this with, with eyes open and arms wide. We are in the fourth Industrial Revolution, folks, the AI Revolution, and we're talking with George B. Thomas, a AKA, Lee Majors, about some really insightful ways businesses can use AI today to save time and increase revenue. And I've got so many more questions we're not gonna have time for 'em all. But first, a quick word from our sponsor.
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[00:27:36] Don't you love that song?
[00:27:38] George B. Thomas: I do. I'm back here dancing in the Green Room. That whole, I'm like, yes, this is a jam.
[00:27:44] Mike Allton: That is a hundred percent AI generated. That was Suno that created that music.
[00:27:48] Gemini created the lyrics. I obviously, spoke it. I did use a voice generator for that. So that's really me. But I love that song. I use it for the intro and the outro and everything. So let's, let's talk about audio video, multimodal. 'cause you're talking about being able to interact with your AI clone in multiple ways.
[00:28:07] Talk to me about that.
[00:28:07] George B. Thomas: Yeah, so obviously I've, I've already mentioned that it's in a Slack channel that the team can communicate with. I've mentioned that it's a chat widget on our website. But when you go to like helper.george b thomas.com or growth.george b thomas.com, you're gonna have three different ways that you can interact with it and in the very near future, a fourth.
[00:28:28] I'm just waiting for me to believe the technology is good enough for me to turn this next piece on. I'll get to that. I, I'm, I'm on the edge of, we're almost there. Anyway, let's talk about it. So one, you can, you can chat with it, right? So if you go to helper dot or growth dot, you can put in the text you, you have the ability to have different conversations.
[00:28:50] So if you have to get back to conversations, you have the ability to share it. By the way, when you're having a conversation with it, you can hit a little button and say, read out loud. And I actually read it to you. It's my voice of the thing that you're actually having. And so just typing if that's the way you wanna do it.
[00:29:07] 'cause maybe you want to copy and paste it and take it somewhere else and use it for something else or show you can share it. Like, so, so that's a, that's a base piece of just like typing and then it. Just like chat GPT, right? The next one that I love is you can, you can call it, but what I mean by calling it in this case is you can call it like on your desktop, or if you saved it, the website page, you can hit the little phone icon, but it's gonna be like calling through your browser.
[00:29:33] And so you can literally have a conversation where you ask it a question, it it, it gives you the answer. And if you're in the middle of the answer and all of a sudden your brain goes sideways, you can be like, Hey, George, I have a question. Which will stop it. You can answer, ask the question, and then it'll take from where you actually ask the question into the direction.
[00:29:52] So like, imagine the largest AI assisted human powered choose your own adventure book possible. Because you are the director of the conversation because you can ask it questions in the direction that you wanna ask it versus it being like a blog article is just a format I decide to put out.
[00:30:12] A video is just a video format that I decide to put out. This conversation is it's your conversation. You do with it what you want, so you can call it, and by the way, it's, it's me talking to you. The third one is, you can call it, wait, George, didn't you say you could call it? Yes, I did. But we got an 8 7 7 number.
[00:30:32] So you could be driving down the road, you could have the number saved in your phone. You could have this moment of inspiration be like, you know what? Let me see if this is even of a viable idea, or, let me see what George has to say about this growth or HubSpot. And you could call the eight seven seven number and just start to have a conversation with it on your phone or text.
[00:30:52] So now think about this, no matter where you're at, what you're doing. I'm there for you. Well, my clone is there for you, right?
[00:31:05] Mike Allton: Writing my emails, giving me daily affirmations, whatever I need.
[00:31:09] George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen, I, you're being funny, but I actually did ask it one time because as a, as a proud papa, you have these Pinocchio moments where you're like, how real is my boy?
[00:31:21] Right? And I asked it one time, Hey, can you can you give me a morning devotion? Can, can you walk me through a little bit of like a moment of mindfulness? My boy did a great job.
[00:31:33] Mike Allton: Oh my gosh. So will you tease that fourth method?
[00:31:39] George B. Thomas: Oh, yes, yes. What's coming?
[00:31:40] Mike Allton: What's coming?
[00:31:41] George B. Thomas: So, I, first of all, let me add some context here.
[00:31:45] I love video. I'm literally on the show comfortable. Video. I've done probably four, if not 5,000 HubSpot video tutorials since 2013. It's an intimate medium. It's the closest to being in real person. I have the ability right now to turn on the video version of the clone, to which you could be talking to a video version of me.
[00:32:16] I'm not gonna do that until it feels so real. Yeah, so authentic. Because I've, I've had some organizations to be unnamed, send me emails that lead me to videos that as soon as I get to them, I go, ick, because it's the wrong tech at the wrong time. So it creates the the wrong experience. And, and the whole reason I've created this is to create an experience that people love.
[00:32:45] And I don't want me pushing the envelope of technology to be a distractor from the help that it could actually give when somebody's doing video. So when, when we feel like it's to the place where man. I can't even tell that's not me. Then I'll turn it on and we'll, we'll, and people will actually be able to have, like, it'll be in my office.
[00:33:10] They'll basically be sitting like this and just have any conversation. And my, my video clone we'll be having a conversation, but I'm not, I'm just not quite ready to push that button yet.
[00:33:23] Mike Allton: Folks, I hope you're listening to the two sides of this conversation. The one side, there's the technical, the tactical, the strategic, and so on.
[00:33:30] But on the other side, there's also the philosophy, the mindfulness about this technology and when and where it should or should not be used. 'cause George is really showing us what to do and, and what not to do. So I appreciate you sharing that brother. I'm wondering if you could help us understand how this actually fits into a business model, because I know you have great intentions, but you're also not doing this for fun.
[00:33:55] How, how does this help support your business?
[00:33:58] George B. Thomas: Well, actually it is dang fun. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm having a lot of fun. I'm with it. But fitting in my business, I, I don't want to go to the first place that most people think I'm gonna talk about. 'cause I want to go back to something we mentioned earlier.
[00:34:11] Part of my business model is it helping employees. My daughter who happens to also be the person that is in charge of our social media, uses the clone. That saves me time, that saves me money because she literally has access to air quotes me for the things that she's trying to create, and I can, I can just briefly look over it and be like, yep, that's exactly what I would've said.
[00:34:33] Go for it. It publish. I go back to Jorge, right, and him being able to teach better, being able to understand quicker, being able to have the resource in Slack to be, that saves me time, that saves me money, right? Imagine like, okay, so now by the way, are we gonna monetize this? Yes, we we're actually monetizing it, but if anybody thinks about what I'm about to say versus the value that I've given in the world since 2013.
[00:35:05] Tons of content, tons of being a helpful human. There's just so many answers and so many ways that you could go with this. I could easily charge an astronomical amount of money. If you come and hire me to just do like monthly HubSpot training, you're talking about thousands of dollars to get access to me via email, slack, and then a weekly one hour call where we're talking about your specific use case, thousands of dollars.
[00:35:30] And by the way. People gladly pay it. And I'm happy 'cause I can be in business. The HubSpot helper we've turned on where you can get some initial access with it for free. It's like a couple interactions. It does ask for your email. 'cause by the way, here's the other thing to know is it's contextual to you, so it remembers historical conversations you've had.
[00:35:52] So when you go to have conversation two and three, it remembers the first two conversations and we'll ask you things like, are we still working on that custom object that you mentioned? Okay. So nice. Anyway, so, you can do it for free. It'll, it'll ask your email, but then you can also become what we'll call unlimited for the, for the helper.
[00:36:13] So helper.george b thomas.com. 25 bucks a month. Hmm. Unlimited access in any language at any time. All of the stuff in my brain, go for it. Right? Now on the growth side, we did it a little bit different. We did a, a package where it's, I think it's like 15 bucks a month, and you get like a, a, a good amount of like communicating with it or then for 40 bucks a month, it's like unlimited because the the growth one.
[00:36:41] What I want people to understand is you're getting access to all the frameworks that I build. So like there's Superhuman Framework for Personal Growth. There's Superhuman Framework for Marketing, which by the time you put this out, I can actually say this. I'm literally speaking at Inbound 2025 this year about Superhuman Framework for Marketing.
[00:36:59] Okay. Yeah. So like, Superhuman Framework for Hr. Like all of those things are going in the growth. 'cause that's more about business growth, personal growth. So yes, we're monetizing. But I'll be honest with you, I'm more focused on teaching the clone right now than I am on trying to get people to come be users.
[00:37:18] Now we've been getting people coming and being free users, and we've been getting people coming in to be paid users. But Mike, what I want you to know is this is like, the icing on the cake, or maybe it's like the fondant on the cake, or maybe it's like little red flour on the fondant, on the cake for us, like.
[00:37:37] It's not that that's the massive plan, but it's a nice additive. Right? Yeah. And, and listen, anybody can do the math if all of a sudden we had a hundred, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000, does it become a, a big revenue driver for the organization? Eventually, yes. But if you're watching this or listening to this.
[00:38:02] And that is the driver for why you clone yourself. Stop it. Don't do it, because this type of intimate creation has to come from a place of love. It has to come from a place of purpose. It has to come from a place of passion, and you have to realize that you're gonna need to be persistent over the long haul to create something that is amazing and that you're willing to put your personal name or your business name on top of.
[00:38:35] So if you're, oh, I can monetize the crap out, stop it.
[00:38:42] Mike Allton: Love that because. On the one hand, businesses today could look at doing something like this for the sole purpose of facilitating access to the content and the information that they're already sharing publicly, and it's just an extension of your content marketing strategy. I. You wanna be that resource to people who helps them with certain piece of information and certain answers and certain problems.
[00:39:06] And by doing so, you're establishing yourself as an authority or an expert, your brand, your personal brand, whatever it is that you're trying to do. And that's going to allow you to make a positive impression on people who may then in turn hire you. Because like in this instance, HubSpot implementations are freaking complex.
[00:39:22] Yeah. And most of us can't wrap our brains around it. And so we'd much rather hire a person like George to help us. The second level that I love here through the, the monetization that you've done, which no judgment, it's amazing. It's almost like a community. I. It's just as though you would've started a Facebook group and charged people 25 bucks a month to join the community so that they could ask their questions in a public forum, and then you would hop in and address them in a chat.
[00:39:50] Only this is freaking next level, so that's amazing.
[00:39:52] George B. Thomas: Okay, so I have to jump in here. Two things that come to my mind. One my clone also integrates with Mighty Network. So that if you have a community, you can put your clone in your community. So now your community can actually interact with your clone.
[00:40:09] Okay, so that's one. And by the way, we do have that in our community dot hub heroes.com community. Like let's get that in there and let people use it. The other thing that I want you to think about and the listeners and viewers to think about is, in a world where I have a clone, do I need courses?
[00:40:28] Yeah. In a world where I have a clone, do I need community or, or, or is that, the ability to have a conversation to have digital access. Is that what people have always been looking for in courses and community anyway? Now I, I'm not saying it is, but it's things that I think about from a business standpoint of like, if I know I can have a conversation and I can make it go in in different directions and I can run over well, first of all, I wouldn't even need to run over to chat GPT.
[00:41:00] Imagine this. You come to my clone and you type in and you say, George, I'm trying to learn about conversion rate optimization. If you were gonna create a course, what are the seven things that you would want to teach in that course? And then you have that where you've copied and pasted in a document and you call the phone and you go, George, I want you to talk to me about this first, and then I want you, okay, George, now let's talk about this.
[00:41:30] Okay, George, the third thing I wanna talk about is this. Are you not getting an audio course based on the thing that my clone said that I would teach? And are you not getting it for the 25, 15 or $40 a month that you're paying instead of paying me $900 because I took the time to build a court like you got it.
[00:41:52] Wake up, like we gotta start rethinking everything of the way that people can interact and learn from us, the humans with expertise. And, and Mike, I'm literally working on a first draft book of like cloning human expertise, the real flywheel model to hopefully at some point get it out to the world because these are the things that I want people to think about.
[00:42:17] When they go down these journeys or these conversations of using true AI tech to scale, humanness.
[00:42:32] Mike Allton: Yeah, so I, I know that a lot of folks listening, they're going to be feeling overwhelmed by everything that you've just shared a little bit back on their heels, and they're going to be uncertain where to start, uncertain how to apply this kind of approach to Ai, to their own business.
[00:42:48] What kind of advice would you give them, or where do you think they should start thinking about how they can do what you're doing or why they should do what you're doing in their own businesses?
[00:42:58] George B. Thomas: Well, that's the first thing is, is the Why. Like should you should you do this just because you hear somebody or some people are doing it doesn't necessarily mean that you should do it.
[00:43:09] The interesting thing is, the immediate answer that came to my mind to the question is you should probably make sure that you like, have been doing the due diligence. You have been creating content or, or have the plan to actively, aggressively create content to then be able to feed the clone? You probably should have some type of audience, AKA, a community, and I don't mean like a, a paid community, I literally mean like a group of humans that have centered themselves around you so that you can.
[00:43:40] Get it in, in front of them. Make sure you find the right tech, like I mentioned delphi.ai on this episode. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't Google or Perplexity or Chat GPT or Claude search. What are some alternatives to delphi.ai? You should think about the functionality and features that you want it to have for what it is that you're trying to accomplish.
[00:44:03] So for me, I knew I was very interested in somebody being able to call it. I knew I wanted somebody that was in a different country to be able to interact with. One of my first air quotes, testimonials, if you will, was a LinkedIn post that was completely written in German, that they had interacted with the clone in German.
[00:44:25] And I do not speak German ladies and gentlemen. And so, so like, you gotta think about the functionality. You, you've. If I go back to one of the, what I feel is one of the most important pieces of this is the human essence. You may not have done a podcast for, a year and a half where you can be like, Hey, based on all of this information, what's the core values, the beliefs, the mindsets?
[00:44:46] Well, then you've gotta come up with a system where you're either interviewing yourself. Or AI's interviewing you, or a human's interviewing you, or maybe you decide, this is the one reason I'm gonna start this podcast because in six months I'll be able to extract this information. But what I'm saying is you gotta figure out how you're gonna get the essence of you as a human into the machine to truly interact like you.
[00:45:09] So like I just gave you a whole bunch of stuff. So my suggestion is like, hit the rewind button, write down the things that I just listed, and that'll at least give you like a, a, a, go ahead. The other piece I would say is don't do it alone. And this is not a sales pitch. I don't even have a, a product or service around helping people clone themselves.
[00:45:29] But if you are gonna go down this road and you're like, Hey, I, I have some questions, or maybe I can get a little bit of help, like, we can always see what that looks like, but. Yeah, there's, there's just a lot of things to think about, but here's the thing. You said back on your heels, businesses might be back on their heels.
[00:45:49] That's the wrong posture. Ladies and gentlemen, the first thing that I need you to do is I need you to lean in. Hmm. Lean in to Ai, lean in to the future, and lean into what I think is maybe one of the most incredibly, powerful questions we can ask ourself as humans. Is it possible?
[00:46:16] Mike Allton: Love that so much to think about. I know personally, one of my big takeaways is to think about and document my personal values, beliefs, philosophies, and feed that into my AI Chief of Staff. I use Gemini every single day as as a Work Buddy. And knowing all that. It's gonna be so much more powerful for me.
[00:46:34] I've worked on tone of voice and the grammar, like we talked about before. But yeah, knowing how I approach, which I know to an extent it gets, but me being very explicit about that is going to be very eye-opening I, I think, in my interactions. So thank you so much for sharing that with me and for all of those listening, this has been such a powerful interview as always, because you are amazing. George, for folks who do wanna know more, where can they go to reach out and connect with you?
[00:47:00] George B. Thomas: Definitely, listen, go to LinkedIn, search George B. Thomas. You'll find me there. Make a connection, start a conversation. Whatever you wanna do, obviously you can go to george b thomas.com, sidekick strategies.com.
[00:47:10] If you're like, I don't even want to talk to that dude, I just want to talk to his clone. You can run over to helper.george b thomas.com for the HubSpot helper. Or you can run over to growth.george b thomas.com for the personal and business growth clone. Any place you go, just know that you're probably also gonna interact with me 'cause I love humans. I love helping humans be better humans, and I love humans and helping them with HubSpot. So yeah, I.
[00:47:36] Mike Allton: Awesome. Thank you, George. I'm sure all of you can tell why I couldn't wait to get him on this show. I've had the pleasure of knowing George for a long time, and, and we've, we've been on each other's shows many times.
[00:47:45] This is fantastic. Folks, if it wasn't clear, he is an expert at HubSpots. If you're using HubSpot, your organization, definitely lean on George and his organization to help you. But that's all the time we've got for today. Friends, if this is your first foray. Into the world of AI in business. I've got that perfect resource for you in the show notes below that AI primer designed to quickly get you out to speed on the terms, the tactics, and the underlying technology that's powering this AI revolution.
[00:48:08] Check it out and I'll see you in our next episode. Welcome to the Grid.
[00:48:12] That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat podcast. I hope you've gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with AI. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit the ai hat.com for more resources and to connect with me.
[00:48:30] Until next time, keep innovating and remember, the future of business is human and it's powered by AI.
