This is an archive episode, first broadcast in 2024 under the show's previous name. It carries a short synthetic announcer introduction; the conversation underneath it is untouched human audio.
Content marketing's promise was that if you answered your customers' questions honestly, you would win. So what happens when anyone can generate those answers in seconds?
Marcus Sheridan is the natural person to ask. His swimming pool company came through 2009 by publishing the answers its competitors would not touch, most notably what things cost, and They Ask, You Answer turned that into a method a lot of businesses now run on.
This is his second appearance. It was recorded in May 2024, when the show carried a different name.
What this episode covers
- The excuse that died. "We don't have the resources" was the standard reason companies gave for not producing content, and for fifteen years it was at least arguable. Sheridan's position is that the excuse has gone, and with it the cover it provided for not doing the work. What remains when the resource constraint disappears is a willingness problem, which is harder to admit to.
- Price, still. Most companies still will not discuss price publicly, more than a decade after he started arguing they should, and the reasons they give have not changed either. He walks through where AI pricing tools alter that calculation, including his own priceguide.ai, and why a buyer who cannot get a number from you will now simply ask a machine instead.
- Two objections, both dismissed. "AI content isn't good" and "AI isn't creative". Sheridan's answer to the first is to look in the mirror at what you were producing, and to the second that people are lying to themselves.
- You cannot fit the future into containers of the past. His framing for why incremental thinking fails here, illustrated with the companies that had no website in 2000 and no email in 1997.
- White collar trouble, blue collar boom. His read on where the disruption actually lands, which is not where most commentary in 2024 was pointing. He also talks about the emotional dishonesty he sees in how leaders discuss job losses, and about paying your team to experiment rather than expecting them to find the time.
- Life after search. What a business does when buyers ask an AI for a recommendation instead of typing into Google, and why he thought video and social would matter more, not less.
- The eighteen-month prediction. An avatar of you, answering questions on your own website. He was specific about the timeline, which makes it one of the few claims in the archive you can now check. He also argues the uncanny valley is temporary, which is either reassuring or not depending on your disposition.
- Appointing AI champions. How he suggests structuring experimentation inside a team so that it survives the first quarter, including paying people for the time rather than hoping they find it.
- The fiduciary duty to learn. His strongest claim: that leadership has an obligation to understand this, and that treating AI as "a tool" is a category error that will not survive contact with the next few years.
About the guest
Marcus Sheridan is the author of They Ask, You Answer and a speaker on sales and marketing. He is best known for River Pools, the swimming pool company that survived the 2009 crash by publishing the answers its competitors would not give, and which became the case study underneath the book. This was his second appearance on the show; the first, on his other podcast, was about content rather than AI.
Find him at MarcusSheridan.com, his pricing tool at priceguide.ai, and on LinkedIn, where he says he is most active.
Resources mentioned
- They Ask, You Answer - Sheridan's book
- priceguide.ai - his AI pricing guide tool
- Kodak and Blockbuster - his examples of the pride cycle
- TikTok - the platform he admits he was wrong to rage against
Quotes
"Anyone who thinks it's a fad is about to be swept off the pier."
Marcus Sheridan
"It ain't going to judge you for being dumb, for being ignorant, for being uninformed. It hadn't judged me yet."
Marcus Sheridan, on where to start
Books - the Human-First AI Series
- Hello! I'm New Here
- An Absolute Beginner's Guide to AI
- Use AI, Stay Human
- The AI Pilot Handbook
- When AI Becomes Your Responsibility
Connect with Alastair on LinkedIn.