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#18 · My 15 Minute Call Strategy

youtube ↗AI & Automation

I'm starting a small agency in the chatbot and voice agent space, but I think chatbots might be the wrong focus. What are your thoughts?

I used to be negative about chatbots because the technology was unreliable and too flexible for real business use. However, over the last six months things have improved; chatbots can now set meetings at 90‑95% of a human’s quality, making them valuable for high‑volume lead nurturing and booking. I see chatbots as sitting on the flexibility‑reliability spectrum: traditional automation (API calls) is highly reliable but inflexible, while AI trades some reliability for much greater flexibility. Chatbots are even more flexible but less reliable, which can be frustrating because clients often expect you to change their output and think you have full control. In my experience, selling chatbots has been tricky due to that need for constant tweaking. That said, their reliability is improving daily. If you start now, don’t expect quick money, but as the chatbot wave grows, focus on building more reliable and robust chatbots to take full advantage.

chatbotvoice agentflexibility vs reliability

Related answers

youtube ↗AI & Automation

Is selling chat bots and CRM still viable in the next couple years, what systems will be in demand now and in the future, and how can I overcome running out of ideas for retainers and delivering less value to a $3,500/month AI automation client?

Yes, selling chat bots will remain viable and actually increase in value as they become more intelligent and easier to implement. CRM and structured data will also stay in demand. For services, focus on systems tied to revenue because they’re easier to justify and have higher perceived impact than backend optimizations. To overcome running out of retainer ideas and delivering less value, list what the client currently does to generate revenue, list what others use to generate revenue, find the overlap, and build systems that help them do the effective activities. Avoid low‑return activities like excessive LinkedIn posting; instead, double‑down on high‑return channels such as trade shows. This approach lets you quickly justify your retainer value.

chat botscrmretainerai automation
youtube ↗AI & Automation

What should I learn first when building chat bots, and how should I position myself when selling them (e.g., as a chatbot expert or AI lead ops)?

When selling chatbots, emphasize the outcome they deliver rather than the fact that they chat in a human‑like way. Position yourself as selling speed‑to‑lead systems that, on average, double a client’s top of funnel or generate about $15,000 for businesses earning $50,000‑$100,000 in the digital‑agency space. This avoids the commodity race to the bottom where chatbots sell for $10/month. For learning chatbots today, it’s all about prompting. You don’t need RAG or retrieval‑augmented generation. Simply take a model like GPT‑4.1 Mini (million‑token context), load the client’s entire knowledge base—articles, PDFs, OCR‑converted text—into the prompt, compress if necessary by telling the AI to remove whitespace and superfluous words, and you can fit roughly thirty books of content in a single prompt.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Do you see chatbots getting so good that the prompt will be as easy as just telling it who they are and giving them a knowledge base — basically "Bob's your uncle" simple?

Yeah, absolutely — it's just a matter of time. We're already getting to the point where you can have really good, seemingly customized conversations with them, just using GPT-4.5 (the new model that just dropped about a week before this recording, and it's very good). I have no doubt that the next generation of models will let you simply say "hey, this is the business, here's some stuff they do, do it" — it'll automatically pick up the tone of voice, automatically pick up what you want it to do, and even ask you a clarifying question when you initialize it, like "do you want me to book appointments? What do you want me to do?" A lot of this is going to get done for you. When that happens, your point of leverage changes — it stops being about actually installing and implementing a chatbot with a bunch of agent features doing function calling or tool calling, and becomes about knowing where the tools are and the simplest, easiest way to deploy them for the customer. So yeah, we'll get there pretty soon — probably not for at least another year, maybe six months to a year — so there's still a lot of value in knowing how to do it manually right now.

chatbotspromptinggpt-4.5future of ai