Home/High Ticket AI Systems Podcast/Stacey Force
Episode

Hard Skills Expire. Human Judgment Does Not.

With Stacey Force/August 10, 2026/37:02 listen/Hosted by Jordan Lally

Stacey Force works as a fractional chief marketing officer with The Marketing Blender and is part of the founding team at Symeta, a team-based entrepreneurial assessment organization. She spent about 25 years working inside Fortune 200 companies across marketing before moving to fractional work. The two roles give her a view of growth from two angles: the marketing systems that drive client revenue, and the team behaviors that determine whether those systems actually get used.

The conversation centers on how organizations move through three levels of AI maturity, from using AI inside existing tools, to handing off operations to agentic systems, to eventually creating net new value. Force argues that most companies are stuck between the first two levels, and that the bottleneck is almost never the technology. It is the people, specifically whether teams have enough role clarity, trust, and shared context to orchestrate AI work rather than just produce outputs themselves.

She draws a sharp line between producers and orchestrators, and explains why the shift from one to the other is harder than it looks. Discernment is the skill she returns to most: if you cannot judge whether the output is right, a confident and complete AI response is not a safeguard, it is a liability. The same idea runs through her advice on differentiation, where she says price and personalization are already largely solved by AI, and the only durable edge left is the human kind.


What You Will Take Away


About the Guest

CMO, The Marketing Blender; Co-founder, Symeta
Stacey Force

Stacey Force spent about 25 years in marketing roles inside Fortune 200 companies before moving to fractional work. She now serves as a fractional chief marketing officer with The Marketing Blender, working with organizations ranging from startups to companies in the hundreds of millions in revenue. She is also part of the Symeta team, which focuses on team-based entrepreneurial assessment, studying how individuals behave within teams and how organizational culture shapes team performance.


Full Transcript

Full transcript of the conversation, published verbatim. Speaker labels come from the recording itself, not from an automated guess.

Robby Bryant:0:02
Stacey Force, what would you say to someone who thinks that their hard earned skills are still their safest bet in today's job market?

Stacey:0:11
think that's a really good question, Robbie. So, you know, your skills are important. It's important important to build skills. I would say that in today's job market, hard skills are expiring faster than ever before. And really what you need to think about and lean into and what I would be telling prospective employers about is your soft skills. How good are you at? How are you able to demonstrate the way that you engage in critical thinking and communication? and creativity or resourcefulness and how are you bringing those kinds of skills to bear because as the workforce shifts from being uncertain, which it was in COVID, to unpredictable, a lot of the the th ways that we made decisions and the things that we did in the past aren't going to work the same in the future. And so the the through line for that is being a really good, you know, being able to talk about your soft skills and behaviors.

And the ways that you're practicing those in the workforce.

Robby Bryant:1:17
Amazing. And to everyone listening, this is the High Ticket AI Systems Podcast, where we interview real coaches, consultants, and agency owners about what is really working to help them scale their business. Today I'm here with Mrs. Stacy Force, CMO at a few different companies, seemingly, from my knowledge, has worked under a bunch of agencies and companies. Stacy, would you mind giving yourself a quick introduction and what you're currently doing right now?

Stacey:1:44
Yeah, absolutely. Hello, everybody. Thanks for having me today, Robbie. Essentially, I spent about 25 years of my career working for Fortune 200 companies across all different disciplines of marketing. And as I saw the workforce starting to get disrupted, I started to read organizations like the World Economic Forum saying that by 2030, 65% of work would be outcomes-based and fractional.

I decided to go and give that a shot. So I have been working as a fractional chief marketing officer with the Marketing Blender now for about two years. and then I also my passion project is working with Semeta, which is a team-based entrepreneurial assessment organization where we're looking at team behaviors, how individuals function within teams, how teams function with together, and then how culture creates the right environment for those teams to thrive. and so I have lots of different projects, but yes, I I think Semeta and the Marketing Blender are the two organizations that I'm working with closely with closely with now.

Robby Bryant:2:56
Awesome. And with Semeta and the marketing blender, how different or similar are your roles and you know what you're trying to achieve with your outcomes?

Stacey:3:07
Yeah, that's a really good question. the work that I do with the the marketing blender, I'm working with everything from startup organizations all the way to companies that are between two and five hundred million dollars. And so that is a vastly different set of circumstances. I think the process that we practice at the marketing blender, so helping organizations really think through who they serve. the personas, the market spaces, who their ideal customer profiles are, and then helping create value proposition, messaging, really strong playbooks and putting tactics in place for them that really translates regardless of how big or small the organization is. So we're bringing really good rigor process methodologies, scorecarding, metrics monitoring to organizations of all sizes.

And at Semeta, that's what I'm doing too. it's just that with Semeta, I'm also doing more of the thought leadership. and that thought leadership is coming from my myself as opposed to the the clients, myself and our co-founders as opposed to being led by our clients.

Robby Bryant:4:22
So would it be fair to say at the marketing blender, you will spend a lot more time thinking about how companies grow, whereas at Semeta you're spending a lot more time thinking about how people actually work inside of a company?

Stacey:4:37
Ooh, that's a good way to frame it. Yeah, yeah. Certainly my role at SMETA is to help create growth. But you're absolutely right. You know, when we're working with the marketing blender, we're putting a marketing system for growth in place and we're leveraging a lot of the people and technology tools. the people tools that we're building at SMETA, the tech tools that are available more and more every day. So I think that's a really good way to look at it. Yes.

Robby Bryant:5:03
I guess my next question would be of your two roles, are there any areas where they almost disagree with each other? Because one you're focusing so heavily on growth and one you're focusing on I guess more interpersonal connections.

Stacey:5:14
Hmm.

Stacey:5:22
That's so the place that they maybe they don't disagree, but the biggest place of intersection that I see is how organizations are starting to think about integrating AI and create value with AI. So what we see over and over is that the use of AI is not a tech issue, it's a people issue. and the example that I would give, MIT and Namda did a really good study where they looked at AI adoption across organizations and they said you know, tier one is where people are using AI for productivity. So they may be using it in some of the existing tools they have like Canva Canva or you know HubSpot, or they may be using LLMs or other you know, tools to create content more quickly. level two is where you start to introduce the use of agentic AI into your processes and systems. And that's the first point that I think you see that intersection and some of the friction. You know, when you start to turf off some of your operations to AI, you have a whole new set of challenges that people have to untangle and and think through. some of the most interesting things that we see there is this idea of, you know, the things that make for strong teams also make for strong use of AI in this sort of tier two framework. So an example that I would give is role clarity. really strong teams require role clarity. Everybody needs to know what they're doing and how they contribute and how that contribution fits into the broader team. When you start to use AI, giving it really specific instructions about what it is that you're trying to do, and both places setting really solid context and being really clear about the thing that you're trying to deliver, those are good practices, whether that's a team practice or an agentic practice. and then that third level of maturity is kind of where everybody wants to be, but we haven't really figured out how to get there yet. And that's using AI to help create net new value, recombinant solutions, looking at the way an organization processes and functions and and sort of dreaming up new ways that they can bring value to the marketplace. And we really see that organizations are stuck, really stuck in that kind of tier two position.

Stacey:7:46
Where some of them are still in one, of course, and are just starting to experiment. But in order to get to tier two, you really have to start thinking about shifting your workforce, right? And and it requires a different level of context setting for multiple people to be leveraging AI and creating value with it. and so as we see that sort of move away from a very hierarchical model of work and top down where one person is giving multiple people instructions to go and and you know complete a task, we see the need to have, you know, much better context setting up front and almost that swarm model of creation. and that's where someone like Semeta is going in and looking at how much do teams trust each other, how well do they function, how cohesive they are, and do they have some of the tools that they need.

To shift the way that they work and really leverage the tools effectively. Does that make sense or did I just tangle things up for you?

Robby Bryant:8:50
No, that makes total sense. And I like the way that you put it. This is a conversation I have with business owners almost every day about implementing AI and and how it should, in what ways it should. And what I see repeatedly is that the successful businesses that are using AI are putting it second. They're using it as a helper. They're po they're focusing on the people and the connections first and how can AI morph around that and make that more efficient.

And then in the complete opposite end of the spectrum, you have all these new agencies emerging where they are AI-based agencies. They there that's their whole thing is AI. And I think, tell me if I'm wrong here, but I think a lot of agencies now are skipping your step one and your step two, and they're going right to three. They're saying, Okay, how can I just use AI in every single facet to make this as easy as possible and to make me have to do the least amount of work as possible. And they're completely neg neglecting the personal aspect of it that AI s should really just be aiding. Is that something that you found too?

Stacey:10:02
Yeah. Yeah. Oof. Something we think and talk a lot about at Sumeta is the shift that people have to go through in order to be effectively using AI. And we would say that, you know, people that in sort of tiers one and two are producers. They're still producing work and we're still bonused and we're still judged by the amount and the quality of work that we produce.

And as you start to shift from tier two to tier three, what we see is that people have got to start being orchestrators. They have to be orchestrators of the work. And there's a lot around that that we sort of haven't thought through universally across all the different, you know, places that we're trying to do that. And you know, there's all kinds of things that come along with that shift, right? The the kind of output when you move from being a producer to an orchestrator. dramatically changes. your identity to a certain extent is is really different as someone who produces a thing versus someone who, you know, sets the context and orchestrates the thing. and I think, you know, we see people who are trying to kind of be all digital all the time, maybe losing the plot a little bit on how do you shift the role intentionally. of the person who still has to orchestrate the work. And I think you also see this issue of discernment come in. I could ask AI to create a fabulous marketing strategy. But if I didn't know what a fabulous marketing strategy looked like, AI is going to give me something very confident and very complete. But it might be completely wacky and wrong. And unless I have the discernment to look at that and go, mmm, a little more of this, a little less of this, you know, or let's point to some of the reference material.

I could be operating on a completely flawed idea or plan. Yeah.

Robby Bryant:11:55
Yeah.

Yeah, it's like I'm not sure if you've seen any videos of there's been politicians in the US and in Canada, there there's been a few of them over the past couple of years, and they're reading their speech and it sounds like a very well put together speech. And then as they're reading, you hear and if you want a more politically charged way to put that, you could say this and then they keep reading down. And it's like they they didn't even proofread what you 'cause they you know, if you don't know what a good speech is supposed to look like the same time if you don't know what a good business or what an efficient use of a certain tool or why a connection is supposed to be made. you know, you're you're kind of yeah, you're having a a robot throw a bunch of paint at the wall and and hoping it sticks.

Stacey:12:42
Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting because one thing I see is that some of my clients are starting to move from probable probabilistic AI, right? So the traditional Chat GPT or other types of agents to more deterministic AI. So an AI that is much more operating within boundaries that you set for it and using almost like very complicated if-then statements.

And it does a couple things, right? If you're using a deterministic model, often you're not using something that is on the in the cloud and training itself off its own models. You're able to bring it into your environment, have a local resource that's only training on your company's data and the data that you're giving it. But the deterministic means that it's not it's not experiencing the same kind of drift that d that general models have. And I I think that we'll see more and more organizations start to look for ways to really sort of f fence almost the AI that they're using so that it is more specific to them, learning from them and has like a lot less crazy ideas when it comes to the things that it is making up. Yeah.

Robby Bryant:14:03
Yeah, and are those different like MLMs that like someone like I'm not using, or is it like just like a a GPT that was custom made inside ChatGPT? Like what is what you're specifically describing?

Stacey:14:16
What I'm specifically describing is a little bit different. It's something that is using SDIC or SDCI as its base. And so it is a newer kind of model. I mean, there's all right, we're seeing neuro symbolic and all these different types of models. And so it it is purposely more of like a repeatable if-then agent.

That's able to act autonomously and seek information. So, how you use it is for things like you know, reporting in a system, things that have high repeatability, where something like an an agent may still be the right choice for complex problems like coding or to some extent writing. But that deterministic base gives you a little bit more stable. information source to draw from. Like it's not making the same level of dynamic decisions as a a traditional L L

Robby Bryant:15:22
Okay. Gotcha. So nothing I'm using at the moment. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I I wanna ask you because we do like to talk about obviously with business growth and client attraction on the show, what between marketing blender and Cemeta, what do you feel like you have more I guess power or input in as far as the direct growth of the business?

Stacey:15:26
Probably not. But you'll see more and more of these emerge.

Stacey:15:48
Mm.

Stacey:15:52
Yeah, that's a really good question. I I would I would a little bit say yes and I mean I think what we're seeing are right, a good foundation for growth is good wherever you apply it. we're certainly seeing things that are good business practices that scale into some of the new tools and tech. You know, the for me the big difference is Semeta is pre revenue right now. And so we have to be a lot more resourceful. with how we're managing tools and leveraging resources, where when a client hires me through marketing blender, their appetite for spending money on things like pay-per-click, things that are purposefully able to juice the engine a little bit better, I've got more ability to play with some of those paid mechanisms. whereas we're mostly doing things organically at Semeta.

Robby Bryant:16:47
I I understand. So getting clients for Blender is is a totally different game than getting people to try something new like Cymeta.

Stacey:16:56
Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the you know, more established clients that I work with through Blender already are very sure of who their ideal customer profile is. They have had reps when it comes to sales. They they sort of know who their customer is. And so it's a matter of fine tuning and really directing content to the kinds of people that are gonna purchase. Whereas with SMEDA, we're still a little bit learning who are ideal customer bases. And so we've got much more of a kind of broad attraction mechanism in place.

Robby Bryant:17:33
Okay. Well let's take marketing blender. I want to hear from your perspective. When you think of like your dream clients or your favorite clients that you've worked with, where did those clients come from originally? Did they find you? Did you find them?

Stacey:17:48
A combination. So our CEO does a lot of the lead generation at Marketing Blender. And she has written a book, Corporate Caffeine. and she also speaks quite a lot across the United States. So we have very much of an attraction based model, and a lot of the clients that I've worked with come from some of those different speaking engagements and personal connection. yeah, and I I I Even in this world of broad automation and great targeting and reach, personal connection and word of mouth is still one of the most powerful ways to meet new clients.

Robby Bryant:18:25
Yeah, and I think it shows a lot about the strength of the business. You know, you don't have to go out and be knocking on people's doors or, you know, cold pitching over the phone if you have such a great product, such a great service, such a great team that it's kind of just traveling on its own.

Stacey:18:42
Yeah, yeah. And podcasts, we attract a lot of clients through the Marketing Blender podcast show. so another way that if you understand your audience and you're generating content for them, that acts as a really good lead generator as well.

Robby Bryant:18:56
Amazing. How do you use your podcast for lead generation?

Stacey:19:01
we are constantly on targets or on topics that we know are important to our clients. so for example, I recently had an opportunity to be on our podcast at the Marketing Blender and talked about teams and how teams need to shift and some of the culture work that teams need to do to be prepared to adopt AI. And we were able to generate conversations using the podcast from its initial broadcast going out to our audience, but then also in conversations with clients as a proof point.

Robby Bryant:19:37
Awesome. So are you having podcasts with clients or is it podcast with like other p yeah figureheads in your industry?

Stacey:19:46
Mostly it is our internal team and when we can talk clients into coming onto the show, we're bringing clients in.

Robby Bryant:19:53
Amazing. Awesome. I wanna jump tracks again. You know, when you say you know skills are becoming obsolete faster than ever before really, if that's true, what's the scariest job title to hold right now?

Stacey:20:09
Ooh, that's a really good question. I have two teenage children who are going into college right now. So that's the kind of question that I'm talking to them about.

Robby Bryant:20:18
What do those conversations look like?

Stacey:20:20
Yeah, yeah. you know, I kinda think getting too specific right now is troublesome. Like if you focus all of your skills in one area, and that area gets you know, moved into so first of all, maybe I should back up and say it is never a mistake to build expertise in a subject matter area, right? And and I think now more than ever you want to have deep subject matter expertise in whatever area you have passion for.

So that when you shift to be an orchestrator, you're doing something that you really love and enjoy. I think the kind of skills that are probably the most likely to be disintermediated are those technical repeatable skills. So I watched my husband, who's a software developer, who went from developing code, you know, in a dark room in shorts and bare feet for years and years, to, you know, leveraging AI to do just amazing things and to use it as a thought partner and a brainstormer and then you know a checker that's not the right word for it. but is and so that's a skill where we always thought that the we always thought that some of these white collar jobs would be the safest and I actually think that they're not because there's a lot of production that happens underneath them. I have so my one kid is studying psychology and sociology.

And the conversation there is go learn about people because it's always going to be important to know what motivates people, what drives people, and you know how to discover people's passions. and then my other son is going to school for chemical and biomolecular engineering. And so that is right, deep subject matter expertise that's looking at how we produce food and how we produce medicine, and where I think we will turf off parts of a role like that to AI. there still will need to be a human orchestrator looking at things as important as food and medicine. but I would equally encourage people to, you know, f follow their passion. As long as there is a human in the mix, that's a job that's gonna stick around for a while. And so that means again, like really leaning on being a good communicator, you know, critical thinking, the things that we have to do to be better humans working with AI.

Robby Bryant:22:45
Sure. And I find it interesting that you said We think the white collar jobs are gonna go first. I guess I've never really thought about it like that because anything that requires thinking, I feel like would be easier to get an AI to do before something, you know, any any type of labor, mechanical plumbing or welding, where you need to get down on your hands and knees and and look at something really closely and it's not tightening right, and that seems like it would be almost a a safer bet. from me. D do you agree or

Stacey:23:22
Yeah, yeah. So two things. A hundred percent. I think we're gonna see plumbers and electricians making as much as accountants very quickly, right? Because the number of people going into trades is slower than it should be. And we've got so much pent up demand for things like welders and engineer and and plumbers and electricians and some of the skilled and even unskilled trades. so yes, I think any of those roles are probably still pretty safe. but it definitely takes a a certain kind of person with the aptitude and the desire to go and work that way. I think what we're actually seeing, so originally was, ooh, we're gonna lose all of our entry-level jobs. And I think what we're really seeing is a lot of those middle tier, middle manager jobs are what is sort of not getting rehired. That's the spot that's sort of disappearing. We haven't worked out how to use AI to d really truly drive strategy and vision yet because of that discernment.

Robby Bryant:24:20
Mm-hmm.

Stacey:24:20
Right. And and because it still takes human ingenuity to come up with the idea that you're leveraging AI against, we're seeing this drain of middle management. And what that is doing is it's putting a lot more pressure on high performing teams, right? On the people who are there to be much more autonomous. We spent the last 35 years training autonomy out of the workforce and asking people to follow directions and trust in their leaders.

Now I think what we're gonna see is really high performing autonomous teams. And I would liken it to an octopus. So if you think about an octopus, each one of their tentacles, their arms, has like a a brain and it's pushing information back up to the central brain, but it's working autonomously and solving problems autonomously. And I really think that the workforce is gonna resemble that much more than what we have known traditionally.

Robby Bryant:25:15
Sure. And I find it really interesting. You said plumbers and mechanic or or you know any type of mechanical trade, their salaries are going to shoot through the roof very soon. and to your point, yeah, you can tell when someone is trying to do something that involves vision or any type of expansion, you can tell when they use AI. You can tell you know, there's so many gurus and coaches today.

You go on Instagram, you can tell every single you can tell immediately. I you won't know what it is, but you can tell immediately when their caption was generated by AI. It's just in this this format format that now we're all so used to scrolling on every at least for me, I I use I don't use Google anymore. I search things on MLMs. So when I see that that phrasing, just immediately, this came out of a robot. Do you do you think it'll ever get to a point where AI is so powerful that we can't tell and AI is actually making good human decisions that we can't think of ourselves.

Stacey:26:21
That's that is sort of that's a really good question, right? My my crystal ball's a little bit broken, Robbie, but I think the nature of LLMs is that it always moves people to the middle, right? It's always trying to predict and so almost the universe will shrink if we only are using LLMs of of content and ideas.

And we need people to keep pushing the edges of that universe out. and I I do think with some of the newer types of AI, like the SDCI where you're embedding cognitive reasoning into it, we may see that it mimics human thought and human behavior more closely than the tools that we're using today. But in my heart, I'm an optimist and I think that AI is a tool that people will use and we as humans will continue to always grow and develop and push the envelope of what's possible. And so I optimistically think that AI will never totally catch up because we will always free make ourselves to be the orchestrators.

Robby Bryant:27:36
I think I agree. And I think from the other side of it, not thinking so introspectively, whoever you're creating for, they, you know, especially in 2026, we really crave human connection and we're getting less and less of it at ever every you know, everywhere we go. We're we have we go to the checkout, we don't have to talk to a human anymore. anything, you know, we sign up for a a course or something, you know. all the things that we see in our space and you never even meet with the coach. It's just modules and automated emails. so on the contrary to what I asked you earlier, do you think that there's a skill set right now that you'd actually tell someone like, no, don't worry, like AI is never gonna come for that.

Stacey:28:26
I think we are at a really interesting moment where we will have to determine the human skills that we augment with AI and right now it's kind of pretty cheap and easy to do, but the as resources start to be more constrained, we'll have to do more selection around how and where we're using AI. I mean, I am such a big believer that We have to build our human skills. and those things are the most important things that we can be doing today. And I don't think that for things like you know, if you if you l so I'll step back and say, Okay, the three things that it takes to sell a product, right? price, personalization, and differentiation. price AI will win on, it will drive the price to be cheaper and cheaper. Personalization, it's already winning on.

Right, a good integration with Hubspot, you can get great personalization. Differentiation is the outlier. And that differentiation can come through brand, it can come through purpose, it can come through connection. You know, that differentiation comes from the things that are really the the the ways that we operate as humans in the world. And I think that human differentiation and brand differentiation, you know, that those are the things so I'm wandering a little from the skill set question, but I think the skills the skills that allow us to create that differentiation are the ones that will continue to be evergreen.

Robby Bryant:29:55
No worries.

Robby Bryant:30:04
Okay. And I want to end kind of you know, looking forward. could you first tell me what advice would you give to an entrepreneur who's coming into one of these spaces, whether it be consulting or you know, an agency that helps other companies, what advice would you give to them based on how they should look at AI and use AI going forward?

Stacey:30:29
So the the first piece of advice that I would give them is build great teams. Because if you have a team that you trust that complements you well, that allows you to operate at your highest best use, that's gonna help you accomplish anything. The advice that I would give entrepreneurs when it comes to using AI is be curious. Try everything. one thing I tell my clients all the time is that everything you do in marketing is an experiment. And as long as you have measured it and you understand the result, it's a good experiment. And I think as tools are changing and as the workforce is changing, we've got to just enter with curiosity and see what we can do with the things that we have.

Robby Bryant:31:18
Yeah. And just made me curious, w you speak about teams so much. What does your team environments look like between Marketing Blender and Sumeta? Are are they large? How many people are at each company, how many people do you work with on a daily basis?

Stacey:31:35
We so the Sumeta team, we're a team of three full-time, and then we have helpers and we have partners. and so we're a universe of about twelve people. and we really practice our vision is not just something that we have on the statement on the wall as a statement. We really look to practice our vision. So scientific artistry is a great example. One of our values is scientific artistry.

And that is the act of taking science as far as it goes and then taking a creative leap to see where you can get to. And it's something we really push ourselves to practice every day. When it comes to the marketing blender, you know, that is a really interesting and unique environment where we've got, you know, anywhere between 12 and 20 CMOs that function like I do, and then kind of a core headquarters team of about 12. and then we've got great partners and you know helpers that sort of span out from the center. And I think when you have a distributed team like that with such totally different skill sets, you know, managing such different types of clients, the key thing there is really clear communication, really good, you know, context setting and making sure that you've got a good way to sort of manage everybody's activities together. So it's a little bit different.

Mm, depending on the kind of teams you're talking about.

Robby Bryant:33:04
Yeah, no, that's that's interesting. You said you have twelve to twenty CMOs in the marketing blender. How does that work? How do you guys divide up roles and is it ever feel like too many cooks in the kitchen?

Stacey:33:17
the our model at Marketing Blender is that each CMO is a primary contact for one of our clients. and then we'll pull the resources we need from our head headquarters team to help us with thing with social and digital and design and develop web development. and then as CMOs, we do a lot of knowledge sharing with each other. And if I have too much on my plate or if I have a problem I can't solve.

I have a really great network of really smart people that I can call in and ask for help anytime I need it.

Robby Bryant:33:52
Amazing.

Stacey:33:53
and I would say that our CEO, Daisia Coffey, who's an amazing person, she is really committed to psychological assessment and making sure that the CMOs she's matching with the companies are a good match. so we talk a lot about our strengths and the kind of clients that we can best serve because that's gonna be the best way for her to create good matches between the CMOs and the clients.

Robby Bryant:34:18
Awesome. That does sound like a a very cohesive team structure. Stacy, over the next twelve months, what in terms of goals, numbers, visions, what are you excited about? What are you looking forward to? What are you trying to accomplish in both Cemeta and the marketing blender?

Stacey:34:37
Big, you're asking for my long-term plan, Robbie. SMED is easy. No, no, SMED is easy. We we are publishing a book on what entrepreneurial best practices are. So our 12 gears of entrepreneurial performance this November. So we will be working really hard to help seed some of that conversation and awareness out in the world. and that will be definitely our focus for the next

Robby Bryant:34:40
Twelve months.

Stacey:35:05
at least six to eight months. with Marketing Blender, it's just doing a good job for the clients I have. I recently started working with a client who is using some really interesting deterministic tools. And so I have the privilege and honor of going in and being one of the first CMOs to really bring deep marketing knowledge to bear as we're thinking about how we can use these tools to reach out to not just our buyer, but really you know, folks that we have to attract, folks that we have to inform, and then folks that just need to know the story to close the deal and leverage that capability of being able to generate more content and insight effectively across, you know, a much buyer broader buying committee, than narrowly focusing on our buyers. So I'm super excited to roll up my sleeves and learn about that.

Robby Bryant:35:59
Awesome. Stacey, this has been an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you going into the weeds on you know the topics of the AI. I I speak with business owners every day about automation taking over, what what's working, what's not. nobody's gone quite into the weeds on the technical side of the AI as much as you have. So I I really appreciate that. Where can people find you if they want to learn any more? Where can they find Sumeta? Where can they find Marketing Blender?

Stacey:36:26
Yeah, so I'm Stacy Force and I'm on LinkedIn at Stacy Force. or if you want to find me through Cemeta, that's www.semeta.science. and the marketing blender, I would say go to YouTube, type in the marketing blender and watch our podcast. That's a great way to get to know us.

Robby Bryant:36:47
Amazing. Thank you so much for going into the weeds of this and taking the time to speak with me. you shared a lot of the stuff that a lot of people typically don't hear in this space. So I I I thank you very much. And to everyone listening, that's the episode. We will see you on the next one.

Stacey:37:04
Mm-hmm.


Questions This Episode Answers

Why is AI adoption a people problem rather than a technology problem?
Force points out that the same qualities that make teams work well together, role clarity, trust, and shared context, are exactly what determine whether AI gets used effectively. When those foundations are missing, introducing agentic tools adds friction rather than speed. The technology is rarely the limiting factor.
What is the difference between a producer and an orchestrator in an AI-enabled workplace?
A producer creates the work directly and is judged on the amount and quality of what they make. An orchestrator sets the context, directs the AI, and is responsible for the result without doing every step. Force argues that most organizations are still rewarding producer behavior even as they ask people to orchestrate, and that tension creates a lot of the confusion around AI adoption.
Which jobs are most at risk from AI according to this conversation?
Force says the surprising answer is not entry-level roles but middle management. Those coordination and oversight jobs are quietly not being rehired as AI takes on more of the production layer. She also notes that technical white-collar work with high repeatability is more exposed than skilled trades, where physical presence and judgment in context are still hard to replace.
What is deterministic AI and how does it differ from tools like ChatGPT?
Force describes deterministic AI as a model that operates within strict boundaries you define, using something closer to complex if-then logic rather than probabilistic prediction. It is less likely to drift or generate unexpected outputs, and can be run locally on a company's own data rather than on a shared cloud model. She sees it as better suited to high-repeatability tasks like reporting, while general large language models still have advantages for complex problems like writing or coding.
How does The Marketing Blender use a podcast to attract clients?
The team publishes episodes focused on topics their clients care about, and then uses those episodes both as broadcast content and as proof points in direct client conversations. Force describes a recent episode on team readiness for AI adoption that generated follow-on conversations with clients after it went out to the existing audience.


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