Why Do Most AI Implementations Fail
Discover why most AI implementations fail before they launch — and the critical mistakes your team must avoid to succeed. Don’t repeat costly errors.
Special Guest: Jon Cheney, Founder and CEO of GenAIPI
Jon Cheney is a tech entrepreneur, author, and musician best known as the Founder and CEO of the General AI Proficiency Institute (GenAIPI). He previously founded Seek, an augmented reality software company that raised millions in venture funding before he exited the business. Cheney used AI tools to launch GenAIPI from scratch, building the platform in about 30 hours for just $400. Today, the company is an AI consulting and enablement firm that helps businesses and individuals implement AI strategies and training.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joncheney/
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The Show’s Main Transcript
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[00:00:22.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1019. In this episode, we’ve got a really great guest folks. We’ve got John Chaney with us. Founder and CEO of GenAIPI. John’s got a ton of experience in tech startups. He started this company, it specializes in helping small to medium-sized business with AI and getting and using AI effectively. He’s got a ton of experience in this area. I’ve seen him being interviewed on other podcasts, which I’ve been really impressed. I invited him, he was gracious to take the invite. It should be a great show. So, John, would you like to give the tribe a quick intro before we go into the main part of the show? John?
[00:01:11.560] -Jon Cheney
Well, you already did a great job. I’m just a curious tech entrepreneur. I just love— I love cool things. I’ve got this random little ball sitting here that is like a glass ball. You can, like, project images on it, kind of like the Eye of Sauron. That’s actually kind of why I saw it. Anyway, I just love cool tech, right? I love movies too. But, uh, but anyway, I’ve been curious, uh, just always been tech curious, and I’m always the first person to sign up and buy the Tesla or the iPhone or the Apple Vision Pro or whatever it is. I always, you know, I’ll be the first to sign up for Neuralink when they, when they open it up. But, uh, but anyway, I’ve been able to take that passion and, uh, turn it into helping companies adopt new technology. That’s really been my career. I Founded a company back in 2016, raised $13 million for that. I was in the augmented reality space, ended up being a great B2B SaaS company, exited that a few years ago, and then dove into this, right? Dove into figuring out how to— well, I just realized that my AI usage was so far ahead of most people around me.
[00:02:13.900] -Jon Cheney
And I said, man, I think there’s opportunities to help people maybe catch up. And so that’s why I founded GenAIPI, and we’ve grown grown really fast and it’s been a lot of fun, but excited to be here today.
[00:02:25.080] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:31.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we do a lot of great work with the team over at WP-Tonic as well.
[00:02:40.900] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of the interview, I’ve got some messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:02:49.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress native toolkit. Use what you need. Backup, scan, boost, social, VideoPress, stats, and more. All with modernized dashboards built into WP admin for your site or your client’s sites. See what Jetpack can do. Jetpack.com. WP-Tonic is sponsored by Ninja Forms, and let’s talk about one of their powerful tools: conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the whole form lives in one panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during build and less support load after the handoff. Ninja Forms, powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.
[00:04:09.650] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Got some, like I say, hopefully you listen to our new sponsors. We’ve got some new sponsors of the show, much appreciated. They’ve got some special offers. Plus we’ve got a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and other services aimed at the power user, the freelancer, the small agency owner. You can find all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals, wp-tonic.com/deals. Wp-tonic.com/deals. You find all the free goodies there, folks, and the discounts. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. They normally laugh at that, John. So there we go. So let’s go straight into it, John. So I think obviously there’s a lot of people in business talking about AI, really curious about it, but they’re really stuck about how to implement it in their organization, being for-profit, nonprofit, whatever it is. You know, they really struggle about how should they utilize AI for and get a, uh, get a return on investment, basically. Got any insights about that, John?
[00:05:31.110] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, you know, this, this is not a new problem. Every time there’s a new technology shift, people have to figure out how it fits, Right. One of the interesting things about, you know, what I was thinking about as you were, you know, stating this problem is, you know, a lot of people use ChatGPT or Claude or one of these LLMs, and they ask it all kinds of questions, and they maybe they’ll strategize with it. Maybe they’ll, you know, have it, have it build a website for them or something like that. Whatever it is, most people are still using it kind of like Google or, you know, helping them, you know, proofread their email or write their email for them or even write their social posts for them. But man, why not ask the exact question that you just posed? Right. You know, a lot of people are there. They’re looking at it and saying, man, it seems like AI is just an extra cost. Right. And they’re, you know, they don’t feel like they’re getting that ROI or they’re not replacing systems. They’re not doing whatever. Right. But why not go into ChatGPT or whoever it is you want to, whichever LLM you want to, you want to snag and say, hey, here’s my business, here’s what I’m about.
[00:06:32.710] -Jon Cheney
I want to save, I want to use AI to save $100,000 a year, right? So $8,000 a month. Let’s help me figure out how to do that, right? And then just work the problem, right? I think that AI is just so capable of looking at large complex data sets and systems. And if you can figure out how to connect it all and do all that nicely, then man, you can actually get in and make that happen. But one of the things that we’ve done that we help, the way that we help companies manage this is we come in and do it for them, right? And oftentimes, you know, the CEO is excited about AI, the VP of Sales is excited about it, and other people are excited about it. And everyone says, okay, hey, here’s your accounts, and they buy the technology, but then they have no plan on how to train, follow up, make sure the processes are being, you know, coordinated across departments, across the company. And it just kind of gets lost. And the CEO doesn’t have extra time. Right. I’m the CEO. I’m drowning. I wish I had more time constantly.
[00:07:32.340] -Jon Cheney
But, but we come in and we act. You know, that’s why we came up with our fractional chief AI officer service, because that solves a big problem. It’s just having somebody dedicated to AI. And you can come and hire us if you want to, if you’re listening, or you can just go and find somebody to do it. But you need someone in your company that can actually stay on top of it and say, this is my job. My job is to make sure that AI is working across the company. And if you do that, You know, depending on the size of your company, how many people you have and what you’re doing, man, you could really start pulling in those, those real savings and start measuring that real ROI and becoming what, you know, people are calling these days an AI-native company.
[00:08:11.670] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, over to you, Kurt.
[00:08:14.310] – Kurt von Ahnen
John, I’m listening to you answer and kind of introduce this whole topic, and I still go right back to like the origin question. And that is like when I’m talking to my clients and they’re all saying, well, how do I optimize that with AI? Like for every single tool, I’m like, well, what do you think you’re gonna do? Like what do you think’s gonna, like how do you envision this, right? And I’m amazed that they never really seem to have a grasp or an idea of what they’re actually envisioning. And so as you’re giving the answer and we’re saying AI first or an AI-centered company or things like that, Do you think that on the whole companies even understand, like, what is AI? Like, what’s the difference between using AI or having a function in a spreadsheet? I feel like I could show them a really cool Excel spreadsheet and they’d be like, man, that’s an amazing use of AI. And I’m like, that’s not even AI, it’s a spreadsheet with a function in it. You know, you kind of understand the question. Like, like, I don’t even understand what is AI and what isn’t.
[00:09:18.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like we’re missing a fundamental link in the chain.
[00:09:22.340] -Jon Cheney
Well, and you also see every software today, AI-powered, right? Everything is AI-powered, right? Even if AI has nothing to do with it, or, you know, they used AI to vibe code something, I don’t know. The reality is it’s just so easy. I mean, you have to put it in your buzzword. Check everyone’s LinkedIn profile. AI something, right? That everybody wants to be there. And that’s cool. I think I respect that. I have AI in my LinkedIn profile.
[00:09:48.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Right.
[00:09:49.160] -Jon Cheney
But that’s my business. That’s what I do full time. And so I think the best way to judge whether something’s an AI or whether it’s just kind of a nice predictive thing or just a formula in a spreadsheet, like you’re saying, is to— let me actually answer this in a slightly different way. Agentic AI is where we’re at. Right. A lot of people, when they think of AI, they’re thinking back 2 or 3 years, you know, ChatGPT. You ask it something, it answers. You ask it something, it answers. You ask it something, it answers. And it’s just this kind of conversation. And that’s fine. It is AI. That is AI. That’s what people are calling AI. But today I’m looking for, can this app, this function, this whatever it is, actually do things for me? Can it actually work for me? Can it give me value while I’m sleeping? Right. In the same way that, you know, you can hire somebody from another time zone, you know, to be an external, you know, whatever, assistant from the Philippines or whatever it is. There’s so many different things. And yeah, I’ve got people working for me all while I sleep.
[00:11:01.880] -Jon Cheney
That’s great. AI can do that now at scale. And if you do it right, you could have 100 agents working for you. Right. And so I think I think maybe the best way for me to answer that, at least today in 2026, and 2027 is coming fast, man. I swear this year is going by so quick. But it’s the AI. Yeah, something like that. But you got to be where it is today, not where it was a few years ago. And the companies that are winning today are the ones that have figured this out and that are trying. They have resources in place. They have a goal, a vision of, okay, I want to use the latest and greatest technologies available. So that’s me. Like, I always have, you know, the latest iPhone, right? And the second this new one comes out in September, I will have it. And I don’t do that just because I want to spend money and have the latest gadgets, but it’s because I know it is going to make me more efficient and effective at whatever I do, because I’m going to have to wait 3 seconds less on every click across thousands of clicks a day on my phone or my device or whatever it is.
[00:12:08.340] -Jon Cheney
I want the fastest, latest, and greatest, and I’m using it. But a lot of people are stuck with, you know, it works. It’s okay. I was in a room yesterday speaking at a conference, probably about 30 business owners in there, all doing $20 to $30 million plus, some of them doing more than that. And I’m not kidding you, there were probably 3 power users in that room. So 10% of the room was 3 power users of AI. And then it just dropped off dramatically. It was almost the other 90% are still using, they’re still working. Most of the things they’re doing, they’re doing the same way they’ve been doing since 2015, and they’re just leaving money on the table. It’s just crazy to me. There’s so much potential.
[00:12:50.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, from personal experience, I was super reticent to use AI to do something as simple as filter my email, right? Because I was so afraid I was going to miss an important message or miss miss a lead or miss— but then I started adding up the time and I’m like, I don’t have 2 hours a day to delete spam, and I don’t want to pay a virtual assistant from another country to do it either, you know. So I finally set up an agent, like you said, that, that, you know, every day at 8:15 just goes through and takes things that I, that I know to be spam ahead of time. It just clears all that out so I don’t have to mess with staring at that stuff anymore. What do you use?
[00:13:25.270] -Jon Cheney
What’s your, what’s your email AI tool of choice?
[00:13:28.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
So it’s using a combination of Claude and Slack. And so it sends me a Slack direct message with a review of the emails that came in, what has been archived and what is worthy of my attention.
[00:13:42.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Cool.
[00:13:43.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
And it does, you know, and I set that up. So every day it runs at 8:15 and I just look at that and that saves me about 2 hours a day. And if we take that and we blow that out over like the agency rate and time, right? So you say, well, if an agency hour is worth $200 an hour and that’s 10 hours, that, that’s $2,000 a week. That’s, you know, that’s $100,000.
[00:14:03.570] -Jon Cheney
That’s like, you just grant right there.
[00:14:04.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
You just start doing the math, right? But the trick is to be productive with the time that you’ve just given yourself.
[00:14:10.390] -Jon Cheney
Yeah.
[00:14:10.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
So without me monopolizing the whole conversation this morning, what, what do you say are like the top 3 things that people have to get clear on before they even touch AI tools? Like, like, what are the 3 things they got to be clear on before they they really start trying to jump in?
[00:14:26.680] -Jon Cheney
Yeah. And I almost want to, again, answer this a little bit differently than the way you asked it. I think you just got to jump in. You don’t have to get clear on things. Just go, right? Let me give a perfect example of this. My son is 9 years old. Okay. I have several kids, but my youngest is 9, and he spends a couple hundred bucks a month on AI credits, right? Because I let him use it. But he’s 9. He’s using— he’s not a developer. I’m not a developer. I don’t know how to write code. Neither does he, right? He just knows that you can just talk to it and it does stuff, right? He can build a video game. He is building video games, right? He’s just doing it for fun. He’s just like, hey, yeah, build something that does this. Hey, make it so this works. And hey, I don’t like this. Hey, change that out, right? The beautiful thing about AI that’s so cool as compared to a lot of other technologies is The interface is just speaking, right? Whether that’s silent typing or voice or using something like Whisperflow, right, that makes it the best of all worlds.
[00:15:29.980] -Jon Cheney
But I think that if you’re listening and you’re saying, man, I just don’t know what to do here, I’ll give you a couple of things to try. Okay? Number one, I’m super biased on this, and I don’t get paid by them to say it, but this, this platform called Replit changed my life, changed my business. It’s just a vibe coding platform. There’s several of them out there— Lovable, Base44, Bolt, and you know, there’s a bunch of them. But Replit, R-E-P-L-I-T, go in there, just open up the website, and it will say, what do you want to make? All right, it’s right on the screen. You’ll say, what do you want to make? And maybe it’s a website, maybe you want to make a video, maybe you want to make some slides, maybe whatever. I want to urge you to make like a website and make a, make a personal website for yourself, or Maybe have some tool that you want for your business, you know, the, the, a dashboard that helps you to figure things out. Just tell it, give it, I’m not kidding you, give it 3 or 4 sentences, right? And then say go and just see what happens.
[00:16:24.160] -Jon Cheney
It is just amazing. And you’ll just be like, holy cow, I thought only developers could do this. I thought I had to go spend $50,000 to build a website like this or whatever, right? Just get in there and try it. But Replit is just an amazing one. If you need, I’m going to give you one more tool right now and then we can, we can go back to you guys. But another tool that, again, I don’t get paid for, I just use it all the time. It’s called Manus. Manus is an amazing AI kind of assistant. I call, I call Replit my developer and I call Manus my personal assistant. Right. Manus will just do anything you ask it, right? Whether it’s to go research something or to build a deck or to build a website or, or to go, you know, find me 20 new potential clients in the area. And to, you know, and you can, you can email back and forth with Manus like almost like a real person, right? You can even connect it into Slack as well. But, but those are two tools. And by the way, the cost of those tools, Replit, I think is $20 a month.
[00:17:18.560] -Jon Cheney
And Manus, I think they have a package for— I think, I think the lowest one is $15 or $10 a month or maybe $20. I don’t know. But they’re almost nothing, right? They’re almost nothing compared to what you’re doing. The amount of productivity I get out of just those two tools is easily equivalent to what used to be 10 people.
[00:17:37.690] – Jonathan Denwood
Nice.
[00:17:38.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan.
[00:17:40.600] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. That was fantastic. Let’s move on. So I think there’s a lot of debate about the effectiveness of AI. I think when it comes to coding, a lot of our listeners are, are coders. But they’re also a large group of business owners that listen to this podcast as well. It’s a diverse group. A lot of them in the WordPress space. But there’s a, there’s a lot of back and forth on YouTube, online in general, on X about the effectiveness of AI when it comes to actual coding. I think the debate has moved on a little bit, but even in coding, you know, people say that a lot of developers in quite a few organizations are being forced to use AI. You know, there’s been a lot of controversial back and forth about how it was implemented in Amazon. And then outside the coding area, the back and forth gets even more intense. You know, you’ve had Starbucks trying to implement AI implementation, which publicly I think it’s, it’s seen that it failed. Why do you think the debate about can you use AI effectively in organization is still being discussed? And there still seems to be a lot of different views about this, John.
[00:19:41.060] -Jon Cheney
Because it’s new. Again, this is not a new pattern, right? Anytime a new technology comes, everyone wants to be there. They want to use it. It looks cool. And the promises that come from these founders like Elon or Sam Altman or, you know, any of those guys, like they’re going to, they’re going to be projecting their vision and oftentimes their vision is maybe a little bit ahead of actual capabilities. And so a lot of these moves were made, these big, hey, we’re going to cut 20% of our workforce, those types of moves were made too soon. Right. And a lot of these leaders have come back and said, hey, we cut too much. We did this wrong. We did the rollout wrong. And I don’t think that’s wrong. Right. I know that’s weird to say, but I think they’re doing their best. They’re trying to make decisions that they believe will help their company and serve their shareholders, which is their job. That’s how they’re paid. Judge that they can literally get sued if they don’t do that right. If they sit by and let this thing, you know, float by, they’re going to, you know, they’re liable for it.
[00:20:49.750] -Jon Cheney
And so they’re doing their best. They’re doing their best to try and figure it out. At the same time, I think, like I said earlier, I think a lot of companies bought the tools and said, go do it, and gave no real direction or resources for training or, or even tried to figure out, you know, hey, what are we going to do with AI? You know, before they actually made the cuts. Right? Like, what is the plan? And, and so, you know, if you actually can get in a lot of trouble even with vibe coding, if you go in and you just say, hey, build a thing and then you just kind of work your way through it, yeah, you could build something cool. But if you actually take 3 hours before that and talk to ChatGPT or Claude or something and make a real plan and then bring a 7-page document into Replit or Claude Code or whatever you’re doing and get busy, you’re going to, you’re going to be way more effective. You’re going to be way more successful in figuring out how to do that. And so, you know, I founded the General AI Proficiency Institute to help companies figure this out because I saw this happening.
[00:21:47.400] -Jon Cheney
I saw, I saw people trying to implement AI and failing, right? You see those stats that, you know, 90 to 95% of AI implementations fail, right? And it’s because they buy the tool and they forget about it and they don’t put leadership in place that’s really responsible for it. They don’t plan, they don’t have measurement, They don’t let departments talk to each other to say, hey, are they— I mean, they of course can talk to each other, but they don’t have structure to allow them to talk to each other and say, hey, let’s build a system that connects us all together. In fact, we just, we just launched a new system that does that. We could talk about that in a minute if we want. But, but the reality is, you know, this is just kind of the pathway for a lot of new technology. And you have to know that a lot of it’s going to be experimental, and then they’re going to say, okay, that didn’t work, and then they’re going to try the next thing, and they’re going to, you know. So, um, so I don’t— again, I don’t put blame on these guys, on, on the people that, that made these cuts.
[00:22:42.390] -Jon Cheney
I think they’re trying to do the very best they can, uh, but at the same time, there’s a lot of people that suffer from those mistakes, and, and they then have to go figure it out. I will say this, and this is maybe a little bit different topic too, but I think today the best application for AI is in small to medium-sized businesses and/or, and maybe even more so, startups. Startups, just the startup game is completely different. I had to raise millions of dollars for my startup I founded in 2016 because I’m not a developer and I had a tech product I wanted to build. So I had to go hire people that cost lots of money. And I ended up having 50 developers at one point. Right. I mean, that’s expensive. That’s why I had raised $13 million. Over 8 years and go through all kinds of ups and downs and, you know, run a business. It’s really tough. Now you can start a business in a few days for a couple hundred bucks. You can go drive an Uber for a few days and you’ve got your seed money. That’s pretty game-changing.
[00:23:44.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it is. What’s your— you know, obviously with agents and framing, You know, obviously what, um, that has changed the landscape considerably. But then you’ve got, um, how do you think like OpenAI and Claude and Perplexity, and how do you think, do you think they are going to be able to build an effective moat around themselves that it, like, open source, um, AI, large learning, large language models won’t in the end dominate. And basically, the, these, the ones I’ve named basically can’t really protect themselves and it becomes a commodity, basically. What’s your own views about that before we go to our break, John?
[00:24:53.550] -Jon Cheney
So let’s talk about a couple of things here. I think that number one, the capabilities of models themselves will likely stay pretty, you know, even. I think that, I think that the open source model and the open source models today are 6 months behind. The frontier models because they can dig in and reverse engineer the frontier models and see what they’re doing and do all kinds of stuff. And there’s so many people working on so many things. I think that the intelligence level is— we’re also going to hit a plateau, right? You’re going to hit diminishing returns because you can only be so smart, right? Even if the AI is continually 10x smarter every year. Okay, let’s just say you can do that. You can only use intelligence up to a certain level in your business. That’s going to do. And so I think you start there. The intelligence level is going to be about the same. So then what’s the moat? I think there’s a significant moat that will keep OpenAI, Anthropic, these guys in business is, number one, their distribution is fantastic. Right? They’re the leaders there. But number two, they provide the harness, the infrastructure, the security, they provide the enterprise-grade system and infrastructure that allows someone like, I don’t know, Toyota to use their AI, right?
[00:26:15.820] -Jon Cheney
You can’t just put a random AI, the superintelligence, right? If we get to that ASI level or whatever, you can’t just put one that’s unregulated and has no infrastructure and just like, oh yeah, it’s super smart, let it in the business, right? There has to be structure around it and guardrails and all kinds of things that Toyota, quite frankly, is not going to build, right? They’re going to say, hey, I need Anthropic to make sure this works well for me. Or maybe the US government, right? I need whoever to make sure this works well for me and isn’t going to leak data and isn’t going to do this and doesn’t break the law or whatever it is. If you have an open source model that’s just super intelligent with no guardrails, I don’t think these big enterprises and governments and things like that will be able to use it. So I do think there’s a place for the big companies long term. But from an intelligence level, from just an everyday user, if you, if you know how to deal with it and you’re okay with trying to figure out that security and infrastructure and you can host your own model, yeah, I think, I think that you’re going to have somewhat of a commodity on your, on your hand.
[00:27:16.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. But are you not concerned by the amount of money that they have? They’ve gone on the markets and they’ve basically gathered basically the return the returns, if— because I think you’ve said in this interview so far that you think that the statements that the job losses that are going to occur in the near future were overstated. You know, you might, you might get those type of losses in the medium to kind of semi-long term, but in the short term they were well overstated. Wasn’t there— I know people saying because of the— because of Agents, that token usage has gone up considerably. But have you not got some concerns about the vast amounts of money that these companies And do you really think they can get the kind of returns that are necessary for the amount of money that they’ve, they’ve received, basically?
[00:28:30.390] -Jon Cheney
Absolutely.
[00:28:31.600] – Jonathan Denwood
All right.
[00:28:32.080] -Jon Cheney
And I think a lot of people think that we’re there with AI, and maybe not, I don’t know. But, but the, but the reality is I think we’re in the second inning for AI. I think we’re still so early. Right? We’ve seen some of what it can do. Uh, we’ve, we’ve seen some of those visions and promises of the future. There’s plenty of things to figure out, you know, from an organizational structure, um, at companies, from a leadership perspective. How does this really fit in? I think we’re still just learning it. We’re right at the very beginning. And so companies that are, you know, like partnering with us and stuff like that, they’re at the very, very forefront, and we’re learning, right? And are we making an impact? Yeah, totally. But, but man, I just think we’re so far from what AI really truly can deliver. And so, you know, if Anthropic was available for me to purchase tomorrow on the stock market, I would buy it.
[00:29:20.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, fair enough. Time for us to go for our break. John’s really been a fantastic guest. He’s answered the questions really with great focus. We’re going for another break and we will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:29:34.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:30:10.410] -Jon Cheney
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[00:30:49.840] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Want to point out, if you’re looking for a great technical partner, you’re building a large learning, um, If you’re building an e-learning website, a community website, and you’re looking for a technical partner, look at WP-Tonic. We’re well known in the WordPress sector and we can provide a white label solution. So if that’s interesting, go over to wp-tonic.com/partnerswp. Wp-tonic.com/partners. Let’s build something special together. Over to you, Curt.
[00:31:31.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thanks, Jonathan. John, I kind of— I went through the website because honestly I had to do some research before the show and I’m looking at our questions and the next one that’s coming up for me is, you know, AI literacy and non-technical teams. And this has always fascinated me in the AI space. And it seems like something that you guys are like, specialized in— I hate to say like specialized because I’m sure you do a ton of other things— but the idea that a company is going to adopt AI and then they’re going to introduce the AI to staff, it’s kind of like I’m a WordPress, you know, I run a WordPress agency, we create a website, it’s got an LMS in it, maybe a CRM, and then we have to come up with some kind of training or onboarding for their staff to be able to run that website and use it. Um, What, what in the world does, does that look like? I mean, in practical terms, you go into a company, maybe the CEO is like on board but not practical experience, and then you’ve got, like you said, you’ve got a 2 or 3% people that are engaged and curious and know about things.
[00:32:35.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
But now you’re giving a team access to these AI tools. How does the company get a return on investment for that access without just a bunch of stupid credit usage over stupid tasks that the staff initiates that have no bearing on business?
[00:32:52.000] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, it’s a good question, and it’s definitely something that everybody’s grappling with right now. Um, training. So we— so in our, in our model, in our model, our fractional chief AI officer model, we have a— we have 3 pillars that we focus on: strategy, transformation, and education. And I always say that the most important one of all of those is education, right? It has to be. And the reason for that is, yeah, we’ll come in and we’ll have a few people on our team working with your company and helping you do that. And that’s great. We’re, you know, I’m, I’m a pianist. You see a piano behind me here. I got fast fingers, and so do my other people. I hire good people. But if you have 150 employees and we can improve their productivity across the board by 20%, that’s like hiring 30 new people, right? That’s millions of dollars of impact and speed increase and all these different things, right? And so we really care about, you know, again, and 20% isn’t That’s not that hard of a needle to move, right? I’ve done the math on myself. I am easily 10x, literally 10x.
[00:33:51.030] -Jon Cheney
I’m 1,000% more effective with AI because of the way that I use it. All the agents and things I have, right? I have my agent right here is on this computer is building a video game. I have agents right here that are, you know, tracking everything that I do and paying attention and automatically sending things when I needed to. I have some that are working on sending sales emails right now. I have all these different things happening right now as I sit on this podcast, and I just have stuff happening, right? And so getting as many people in the organization as possible in there. And so we’ll just do remote training just like this, sitting here on a computer on a Zoom meeting, and we’ll get 50 people in the room and we’ll say, okay, great, we’re going to focus today on, let’s say, Replit as an example. And here’s what we’re going to do. I want everyone to pick a problem, something that they do commonly, whatever. And I show them how to do it and they use it and they try it and there’s I was like, man, this is crazy. And what a lot of people— what I think is really useful for a lot of people is to figure out how they should operate today in 2026 when agents are possible, are available to us.
[00:34:56.970] -Jon Cheney
And whipping up a website. I did this presentation yesterday, like I mentioned, to this group of about 30 big business owners.. And I got up and I said, you know, I really hate making slides for presentations like this. I just want to kind of show you how I work and whatever I said. But you know what, I guess, I guess maybe you guys would like some slides. And so I just whipped up a tool and I just said, hey, I need some slides for this type of group and this, you know, let’s, let’s try to figure out how to get them excited about Agentic AI. And then in, in about 60 seconds, maybe 45 seconds, they just watched as my screen just went and just, you know, built up all these slides really quickly and it’s just done right in front of them. Right. And again, the 3 people in the room that were excited about that, you know, that know AI, that, you know, they weren’t surprised, but the other 90% were just like, what on earth? Holy cow. Right. They’re still building slides in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Like, come on, guys, you’re wasting hours and hours and hours of time to put together something as simple as a slide deck.
[00:35:59.490] -Jon Cheney
Right? Or, you know, I sat here the other day, I was in this room right here, I had my team over and we were thinking about a new model, a new financial model for just something we’re working on. And I opened up an Excel spreadsheet to kind of build out the model because I’m good at that. I’ve done it before. And then I— but I caught myself after about 20 seconds, like, what am I doing? And I actually instead opened up Replit and just said, hey, Replit, here’s what we’re thinking. Here’s all the parameters. Here’s what we’re working on. Build me a quick dashboard or tool with sliders and things so we can test different assumptions on this. And, you know, 2 minutes later, I’ve got this beautiful financial model. I can change it. And we were able to very quickly share it up on my screen here, and we’re able to sit here and, and, uh, and figure out, you know, what, what we wanted to do. But that’s, that’s, that requires, and even required me catching myself as an AI, you know, guru or whatever the heck I am. I’m not a guru.
[00:36:49.860] -Jon Cheney
I’m just, I just love the tech. But the point The point is, uh, you have to, you have to teach these people how to think differently because they’re all— everybody has their tasks that they do. They have to make presentations, they have to come up with a strategy, they have to implement that strategy, they have to do all that thing. And AI can assist with every single step along the way. And so a lot of it really is training to show people what is possible. You show them the tools, you walk them through, you guide them through a couple ideas, and then you say, hey, you guys are smart. You know your business way better than we do, right? Just go think about it now. You know, it’s possible. Identify, you know, a few opportunities where you could use this and go do it and start saying, okay, I’m not going to spend 2 hours building that slide deck anymore. I’m going to spend 5 minutes doing it. And then, you know, I’ll tweak it after that, right? Just let, let AI do the heavy lifting and build it and all this stuff. If you, if you know the tools and if they, if they know what’s possible, these people can do just amazing things.
[00:37:46.250] -Jon Cheney
People are brilliant. I really believe in people, and I actually am a huge— at the General AI Proficiency Institute, we care more about people than we care about AI. We are absolutely pro-AI, but we believe that AI can be used to increase the capabilities of humans. And ultimately, we can’t let AI replace humans. And the reality is it can’t. It can’t ever replace us. It can’t think like we can., you know, connect with people like we can. We’re just going to move. Is it going to replace jobs? Yeah. And I’m going to say not replace but displace, right? It’s going to move me, might move me out of a bunch of tasks that I historically was doing, but now I’m going to have free time to do the higher order, the higher level job that AI can’t do. And we’ll always be able to keep making that move.
[00:38:34.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of people that’ll say there’s only so many higher level places to go, but then there’s other people that say This ain’t a piece of the pie thing. It’s just bake more pie thing. So it’s, it’s, you know, I think as I was listening to your answer, John, you know, like, why am I wasting time making a PowerPoint? The truth of the matter is, is that we have people in corporate America that are professionals in that space, technical writers, or, you know, people that are experts in Illustrator or a, you know, a format expert for working in, you know, Adobe in some way. And when we leverage AI tools and we say that it’s easy or it’s simple, it’s a real hit to their pride. But I think, you know, that, that pride issue you kind of addressed later in the answer when you said, you know, let it do the heavy lifting and then you come in and edit it and tweak it, right? And that, that makes a whole lot more sense. And that’s the way I’ve been able to adopt some of the usage in what I do, because I suffer from that.
[00:39:34.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
I consider myself an expert in certain spaces, And so it’s real hard for me to say, oh, I’m going to have AI write that for me and then I’m just going to review it. Like, no, I actually want to write it. Like, I want to go through the exercise of actually writing something.
[00:39:46.950] -Jon Cheney
But can I say something about writing? Because yeah, I think writing is a really fascinating thing. I’m a writer. I’m writing a book right now. I’m writing 3 books right now, actually, but I’m publishing one in January and it’s going to be awesome. It’s about AI, whatever.
[00:39:59.050] – Jonathan Denwood
3 books, John?
[00:40:01.390] -Jon Cheney
Well, AI.
[00:40:02.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Wasn’t one book sufficient, John?
[00:40:04.970] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, no, you know what? And they’re different topics and they’re just— anyway, one of them is about time and one of them is about— it’s kind of more of a spiritual kind of one about time and all eternity, which is pretty cool. And then one of them is called AI Works and another one’s called How to Build a Business in a Weekend with AI. Right. But guess how much AI I’m using to write these books? Almost zero. Right. And there’s a reason for that. I’m doing that very consciously. Could I whip out a book in the next 5 days with AI? No problem. But quite frankly, I’m not really interested in what AI has to say. I’m interested in what Kurt has to say or what Jonathan has to say. And I hope people—
[00:40:44.270] – Jonathan Denwood
you’re one of the few guests— you’re one of the few guests that have said that, John, that they’re interested in what I’ve got to say.
[00:40:52.610] -Jon Cheney
But I, I hope people are interested in what I have to say and not in just what I orchestrated my agents to say. Right? There’s also a ridiculous amount of learning and thought alignment and things that happen as you go through the exercise of actually writing it out yourself. Now, does that mean I don’t use AI to write? No, I certainly do, especially for something that’s relatively, you know, it’s like, hey, I need a quick report on something, you know, I’m going to send that out, right? But if I’m trying to think through thoughts or convey messages that really matter and I have a really deep opinion on it, I will let AI help me edit. It’s almost like I do the opposite, right? I’ll write the first draft, then I’ll say, hey, where am I missing opportunities to make this better? Right? Do I have any grammatical errors? Is there anything I can do here? And it’ll say, oh yeah, if you add maybe a personal story here, maybe elaborate on that a little bit more. That wasn’t super clear. Awesome. Right now, now I have kind of this guide that helps me do that.
[00:41:47.330] -Jon Cheney
But the act of writing, the act of creation, I think is critical and unique. To humans. Oh, there you go.
[00:42:00.820] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go. Right. Let’s move on. You know, another area that’s been in the news lately has been guardrails. You know, obviously the government, there were security fears about certain frontier versions and that, you know, and they were barred, um, from export to be used by foreign countries, blah blah blah. And, and then you got the concern about spaghetti coding, haven’t you? And, um, I think that’s justified to some degree, but also, how, how have you and your team dealt? Let’s start with the spaghetti code problem, you know, what have you implemented so if something doesn’t work the way it should, that it can be dealt with in an effective way? You know, what’s your own experience about that? And then maybe you can go on about your thoughts around security and how that should be viewed.
[00:43:17.850] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, you know, the spaghetti code issue is one that is mostly created by developers who think they’re smarter than AI, and they just aren’t anymore. And that’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay if you’re not smarter than AI. Neither am I. And that’s not going to change. AI is going to get smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter. There’s no human on on planet Earth that can pass any of the benchmark tests at the level that AI can, especially combined with the speed at which it can do it, right? And so it— now, does that mean I don’t employ developers on my team? No, I absolutely do. I have great developers on my team. My CTO is a rock star, right? And I pay him what he’s worth, but he uses AI to code everything. The top Anthropic engineers use AI to write everything. The reality just is that today, as of today, 2 years ago, maybe not, but today AI can write code better than anybody. The big problem comes in when you have really large code bases, especially legacy code bases where you need to deal across 20 million lines of code and it needs to understand all of the context of everything and it doesn’t know that this system exists over here, so it builds a secondary system over here.
[00:44:35.890] -Jon Cheney
Things like that happen. And that’s why having good developers lead AI is most certainly the, the most optimal way. And it depends on what you’re building. If you’re building a dashboard internally for yourself to, to be able to manage some of your things, who cares? You can— AI can handle that. That’s going to be 50,000 lines of code tops, and AI can handle that no problem today. But when you’re, you know, looking at a big, large enterprise piece of software, something that maybe is as complex as Salesforce, right? And I’m talking like all of Salesforce. Most people don’t need all of Salesforce. They just need a CRM that keeps track of a few things. And that’s why a lot of people are building CRMs on their own. But, but the reality is when you have just huge code bases, that’s just a context limit and it’s a temporary problem at best or at worst, I guess is what I should say. It’s, you know, maybe, maybe the limit today is 1 million, 2 million tokens. There’s a couple models that say they can handle 10 million tokens. That’s fine. Eventually those limits will just go up just with scaling, right?
[00:45:31.630] -Jon Cheney
We’ll get to 100 million and then we’ll get to a billion. And now you’re beyond what anything, you know, any system will— any system that has a billion lines of code is a bad system, probably. So anyway, that problem will just kind of self-heal as these models get stronger and more capable. Now, The security one is really interesting, and it’s one that I don’t really know how it’s going to play out because I think we’ve hit a wall, right? Where Fable 5, GPT-5.6, the government comes out and says, nope, you can’t do that. This is now smarter than any of our developers even know how to deal with, and it’s able to break into our most sensitive systems. Okay, so then, well, what’s GPT-5.7 or GPT-6.9 or GPT-8.5? They’re all going to be smarter than this wall that we’ve hit, right? And Fable-6 and whatever the next things are, right? The government is right to be worried about it. It’s also impossible to stop, partially because of the problem that Dario was talking about the other day when he was testifying to Congress. Saying we need to stop open source models, we need to regulate open source models, because those open source models, as we were talking about earlier in the show, are only a few months behind, right?
[00:46:58.830] -Jon Cheney
And so because they’re only a few months behind, then anyone in the world is going to have access to intelligence to be able to get at our most, you know, sensitive data, right? I mean, I’m waiting for the day when someone says, oh yeah, so-and-so deleted all of the records that You know, Bank of America, they hacked it, just deleted it. Now everybody’s mortgage has no— you know, nobody knows what their balance is, right? I’m sure there’s a lot of people that would be happy about that.
[00:47:25.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
It was a great movie plot 15 years ago.
[00:47:27.600] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, no, for sure. And now it— now it is— it is a thing. It’s— it’s reality. And so what is the solution? I don’t really know. I don’t know if it’s possible. Well, first of all, we’ve already talked about this, right? There aren’t really guardrails in a lot of these open source models. And because of that, if you’re a bad person, you can use it for bad things. If you’re a good person and want to be productive and helpful to society, great, go cure cancer. Amazing, right? Again, AI is just a tool. It’s going to enhance all of these different things that we’re trying to do in life. And how do you solve that? I don’t know. Can you just push? And here’s the other, here’s the other, the flip side of that coin. If you just say, okay, guys, we have to just kind of stop. Guess who’s not going to stop? The open source models, the other countries with their models that are competing. Right. You’ve got this arms race of AI that if we just slow down on our side, other people aren’t going to pass up America. And that’s, that’s what, you know, that’s, that’s important to, to these business owners, to the government, to people to make sure that, hey, look, Maybe it is risky, but we got to push forward.
[00:48:37.240] -Jon Cheney
We got to figure out how to do it and do our very best to put guardrails in place. But because you need, you need those advanced models to figure out the cybersecurity side of all of this. Right. Okay, great. Well, if somebody can use a model to infiltrate, right, well, can we use models to stop and block them? Right. And so again, very much an arms race. It’s a very, very interesting discussion. And I don’t have a solution. I wouldn’t claim to be smart enough to have that solution.
[00:49:04.130] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I think it’s in flux. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:49:07.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think that kind of brings us, you know, full circle, John. I mean, thank you so much for sharing all your thoughts here, but, uh, the next thing that we’re going to ask is, you know, what if, what if you weren’t here now? What if you went back in time to the beginning of your career, right? You had a time machine or something, right? What advice would you give yourself to make anything different, if you would?
[00:49:33.450] -Jon Cheney
You know, I saw that question in the prep for this, and I’ve thought about it. The first thing I’ll just say, the first thing that pops into my mind, I wouldn’t raise any money from other people. Yeah, that’s a tough one for some people because you know, how do you— and today it’s much easier to do that because you got AI and you can, you know, for so many, you know, like I said, go drive Uber for a few days, you got your seed money and you can go do something. You know, back in 2016, I had cool ideas. I wanted to try them. I wanted to do it. And the reality was I just, I didn’t see a way to do it without going and raising capital and hiring people. Maybe I could have found, you know, more co-founders and figured that out and we could have, I don’t know, you know, there’s just different ways that happens. But when you raise capital from other people, you lose a little bit of freedom, right? You’re really going into debt and you kind of have to stick with it, right? You have to stick with whatever you’re doing because you got to get to a return for them or at least be able to show that you did your very best or they’re going to sue you, you know, for taking their money and not, you know, not doing that.
[00:50:41.270] -Jon Cheney
So, I think that’s one piece. And again, I don’t know if I would actually follow my own advice if I was back 10 years from now. Even if someone said, don’t raise money, here’s all the problems, here’s all the pitfalls, here’s whatever, I might have still done it. I might still do it just because that was the way that it happened. And, and I learned a heck of a lot too. So it was really, really good, you know, raising $13 million. We raised from about 52 people, I think, 52 separate entities, individuals, you know, family offices, things like that, whatever, across all that stuff. So a lot of that started as smaller checks, you know, as angel and then turned into bigger institutional. But man, you know, having to deal with 52 egos is, uh, is, you know, a good way to put yourself in therapy. But, uh, yeah, you know, which, which I, I did actually end up in therapy a little bit. Nothing crazy, but man, it was tough. I had to just figure out how to deal with so many voices and, you know, how to learn how to, how to be a better leader and how to deal with all of that.
[00:51:35.390] -Jon Cheney
Um, but But in the end, if I really had to just say one thing, and I’m going to give myself advice that I followed, but I’m going to tell you what I did that I just loved. Don’t wait to start a family. Right? And I didn’t. I got married and I’ve been married almost 15 years now. I’m married. I have 4 kids. And man, I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful I did that. And that provided a foundation, a stability, a reason to get up every day, right? To keep going. I got to take care of my family. I got to make sure they eat. I got to make sure we pay our mortgage. I got to make sure my kids can do gymnastics, whatever it is that I want them to do. I want to buy them that new mountain bike, Kurt, which is awesome. We should go biking sometime if we’re ever in the same place. But yeah, anyway. That’s the advice I would give is make sure you remember what matters most. You can always get a new job. If your startup fails, it fails, whatever. The family piece is what gives it meaning.
[00:52:50.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s pretty dang insightful. We have a friend of the show called— his name is Rob Walling, and he does things with TinySeed and has a podcast. And he’s come on the show and talked about, you know, bootstrapping versus taking investment. And it’s, it’s pretty insightful information.
[00:53:08.880] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, that’s cool. I’d love to listen to it.
[00:53:11.100] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to wrap up. Have you got another, like, spare another 5, 10 minutes before you got to go? Yeah. Yeah. Right. We’re going to wrap up the podcast and Kurt’s going to have to go off and we’re going to continue the discussion, which you’ll be able to watch on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. I’m just going to ask a couple of questions about John’s business background and a couple of lessons that he’s learned. He’s got a tremendous amount of experience in business. So I think that’d be a good use of the additional 10 minutes. But we’re going to end the podcast part of the show. So John, what is the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:53:51.690] -Jon Cheney
Yeah, come and connect with me on LinkedIn. Just look me up, John Chaney. I, um, You know, I post every day, a couple times a day, sometimes more than that. Pretty active on there. And then, you know, my website, genai.org. If you, if you need help with your business with AI, anything, come and come and check it out. We just launched some new software called Jenna. It’s pretty amazing. Basically a competitor to OpenClaw and Hermes and things like that, but really built for business with permissions. And so, so that’s pretty fun. But, but also follow me on my, on my personal socials, right? I’m @Chinipiano, right? I, and I post about AI and entrepreneurship and faith and family and my farm and kayaking and mountain biking and adventures and all kinds of stuff. And so I’m on Facebook and Instagram and X and TikTok and YouTube even. Yeah, but I’m @Chinipiano. That’s kind of my, that’s my identity everywhere.
[00:54:46.630] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out about you?
[00:54:50.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, so that’s the best place to reach me. Or you can just visit our website, manananomas.com.
[00:54:58.010] – Jonathan Denwood
And hit me up on X at Jonathan Denwood. That’s a good way. Or look me up on LinkedIn. I’m the only Jonathan Denwood. We will be back next week with another fantastic interview. We’ll see you soon, folks.
[00:55:12.390] -Jon Cheney
Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group, and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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