→ Get a marketing plan based on your insights, stand-out message, and embodied mission. Embodied Marketing Live is coming up: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/live

AI is making speed-to-results insane. But that’s not necessarily creating better outcomes.

What happens when everyone starts losing depth because of AI?

In this episode, I talk about why speed has been one of the biggest contributors to my success as an entrepreneur, why I think we’re losing the ability for depth, and what I’m seeing in marketing right now as AI becomes part of everyone’s workflow.

We explore the difference between depth and overthinking, why surface-level execution is becoming more common, and how to know when it’s time to hit the gas vs. pause and question what you’re building.

Key Takeaways

• Why delegating everything to AI will backfire
• The most important CEO skill in the age of AI
• Why people tune out when they see AI content, and what to do about it
• The speed vs depth balance that built my business

 ____________________________________

More ways Embodied Marketing can support you:

Turn your expertise into consistent revenue. Funnels, strategy, launches—everything done for YOU. Apply here: https://get.embodiedmarketing.com/app

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE PODCAST!

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Embodied Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to Apple Podcast, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review.

Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

I think that with AI, we are going to see a lot of companies and people lose the ability for depth. The problem is when you use AI, and you don’t question it and pause and put the depth in yourself with the AI. Even if the information in there was valid and good now I lost trust in that brand because I’m like, “Is this how you’re gonna execute your work?” To me, it feels lazy. It feels like we’re trying to take the shortest path possible, and we are sacrificing depth to get there. Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, you guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an amazing week. I’m happy to be back in my office, in my studio. I was in a, an amazing trip to Colorado last week. A mix of with some of my friends to the Red Rocks concert and with Trevor Hall, and then I stayed a couple of extra days in Boulder.

I have a friend in Boulder, and I love Boulder. Colorado, I have fallen in love with it. Give me two years and we’re gonna have a house there because I love it. I love Colorado and the mountains in general. Sometimes I really do ask myself “Why did I move to Texas?” I really don’t know. I do love Austin, but in the summer I question my life choices a lot.

And just nature to me, I call it my church, because I feel the most connected to myself, and therefore God, the universe, when I am on a solo hike in the mountains with no service and just present. And so last week I got to do a part solo trip and, it was beautiful. It was always… It’s I cannot recommend solo travel enough, especially if you are a mom.

Yes, I struggle with the guilt, and I have to negotiate with myself how I’m justifying that I’m going on a solo trip, because when I get back I’m gonna take my kids on a two-week trip. So I have all those conversations in my head, 100%. But I just my creativity and my connection and, I don’t know, for me maybe it’s partly ’cause I was a young mom I didn’t get a lot of time just to be on my own and have my own autonomy over my days.

And so when I travel and I just have nobody I’m responsible for, and I can work if I wanna work, I can hike if I wanna hike, I can sit and read if I want, I can walk the streets and shop, I can go to a coffee shop. Like- it’s great. And I’m always so refreshed and excited when I come home. So happy to be back in the studio.

That was my week last week. So many creative ideas for the podcast and content, and I have the new business that we’re launching. So we launched a series on social media called Get Dirty, Get Paid, and we’re doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes there. So two episodes have come out so far. They’re amazing.

They’re fun. Definitely follow along for that, and I will be doing stuff on the podcast as well as it relates to that new company, so very exciting. Today, I wanted to talk about something that I was contemplating last night, and I was thinking about it and was like, “That should be a podcast episode,” ’cause I think it’s a reminder and also opportunity for you to look at how you are executing in your business and your marketing today.

And I think part of this is especially relevant in the era that we are in with AI, and that is this concept of the dance between speed and depth. And I think that business success, marketing success comes from knowing which one of those levers to push and pull at certain times. And I think that with AI, we are going to see a lot of companies and people lose the ability for depth.

I see speed and depth as this Not opposites, but one pulls away from the other, right? Like, when you pause and you take time to go deep on something, and so you stop and you question and you really take it in, you’re slowing down, right? But then you can have the experience where you’re going too deep or you’re overthinking and you’re ruminating and you’re waiting for something to be perfect, and you’re losing speed.

I think naturally people gravitate towards one or the other of these. You’re naturally very fast and you have to intentionally slow yourself down a little bit to have more depth.

Or you’re somebody who has a lot of depth and puts a lot of energy into something before you launch it, before you ship it, and you have to sometimes get yourself to speed up. And I really think that as a CEO, knowing when the situation, the business, the season you’re in, the project you’re working on, the problem you’re trying to solve, how much pressure to put on each, is a very important skill from the CEO.

With that said, I am also seeing this trend and direction we’re going in where we are losing depth. When I look at copy that people are putting out on social media that is so obviously AI, and just messaging and marketing materials and It’s so obvious.

And so we are losing depth. For example, I had someone send me a quote, and they sent me a quote on something. They did this audit for me, and they sent me a slide presentation. And, I work in Claude all the time, so I can spot AI very easily, and it’s definitely not bad to use AI.

The problem is when you use AI, and you don’t question it and pause and put the depth in yourself with the AI. And this quote that somebody sent me, it was, like, this slide deck, and it was just so obvious that they uploaded my stuff, it spit out the quote, and they sent it to me. They barely edited it.

Even if the information in there was valid and good, I, first of all, could have done that myself. Second of all, now I lost trust in that brand because I’m like, “Is this how you’re gonna execute your work?” To me, it feels lazy. It feels like we’re trying to take the shortest path possible, and we are sacrificing depth to get there.

So I think we’re gonna go into this era where people who lack the depth and the ability to pause and critically look at the outputs, let’s say, that AI’s given, but not just AI, like the outputs in general, are going to struggle because you’re gonna blend right in. And what that also does is it loses trust.

Like, when you see somebody where all of their social media content or all of their ads or all of their copy, their emails is so obviously AI, you lose trust. You’re like, “Oh, you’re not really putting your heart into this.” Is it just me? ‘Cause that’s how I feel when I see it. When I see a so obviously written by AI, created by AI social media post, I ignore it, and that brand loses trust from me, even if it’s subconscious.

I’m like, “Oh, they, they’re not putting their heart into their content.” It doesn’t have that authenticity. So I think we’re in this s- place where you have to know as a CEO how much to push the gas on each one of these levers, because both are very important. And you can easily get off balance and put more energy into one or the other and hurt yourself.

So let’s talk about that a little bit. Speed, on one hand, I think is one of the greatest assets and strengths that an entrepreneur in a business can have. I think it is one of the single biggest things that has contributed to my success as a business owner. I move insanely fast. The moment I am clear, it’s like I don’t like having open loops, so the moment I’m clear on a direction we need to go, on a project we need to work on, whatever it is, on something we’re launching, changing, I want it yesterday as soon as I’m clear on it.

Which means I take a lot of messy action. And sure, there’s downsides to this. The downsides include sometimes I overwhelm a team. Teams do not like it when you build the plane while you fly. Sometimes I launch something and we have to go back and improve process and systems. But the upside of that is that I don’t overthink.

I don’t wait until everything’s perfect and everything’s put together. We learn through experience. We launch something, we get feedback, we improve it. We’re like, “Oh, we forgot about this. Let’s add this in.” We build the plane as we fly, and we do it really well. And it’s not chaotic. It is intentional.

And it is like the only way to learn is through experience. And so that’s a huge strength for an entrepreneur to have, and I think the ability to be really nimble like that and to be able to be like, “Ooh, this isn’t working. Let’s throw this out there. I had this idea last n- last night. Let’s ship it.

Let’s move it fast.” Even in my content, I will m- meet with my content manager, and we’ll have an idea, and we’re not waiting four weeks to put that content out. Like there… We have a way to move stuff around to get it out, to ship it, to make it real time, which creates authenticity. So you could look at your business right now and do an audit.

How fast are you going from idea, from clarity to shipping something, to getting it moving, to moving into action? How long does it take you to go not only from idea, but piece of clarity of “Oh, that’s what we’re missing,” or, “That’s a problem we need to solve,” to action? And I think this is where also team is so valuable because you can move so much faster.

You can go from, “Okay, I have an idea. I have a piece of clarity. I’m gonna do my part, and I’m gonna pass it off.” And the most successful entrepreneurs I know do this relentlessly, where they understand that their job is to be that clarity, to question things, to direct the ship in which direction you’re going and which direction we need to change, how we’re steering, but then they pass it over to the people actually running the show.

So first thing you can do is really ask yourself that. Am I making it so that questioning, and needing something to be perfect or every detail f- you know, finely defined, am I allowing that to slow me down? Or is there flexibility and the ability to move quickly baked into how I run my business and how I execute my marketing?

And this doesn’t mean chaos. I think a lot of times we do move really fast, and it’s amazing how much something gets done in my company in a day, in a week, when you set that standard But it doesn’t mean it’s chaos. Actually, we’re extremely organized, and we have really good systems because I’ve had my business for 10 years, and I know how to build a system around a team.

And we have top-notch systems. What’s fast is changing something in the system. Oh, we had this problem that came up. Ooh, we should do it this way instead ’cause that solves that problem. Okay, email changed, automation changed, done. That fast. What’s fast is, oh, I had this thought about how we should shift the messaging around this launch.

Let’s get copy today. Let’s ship it today. And same thing with clients. When you’re in the middle of that, it’s like how fast can you execute? And I think speed is one of our greatest assets and one of our greatest strengths as a company because it is a huge value of mine. Now, ironically, I’ll tell you, I was in- on my trip last week, I did two energy healing sessions.

They were amazing. I did… It was called Tai Yi. I’d never done it before, but it’s basically based off of your chi and your meridians. I don’t know. Super woo, okay? But it was cool. And the energy healer did the work on me, and her- one of her takeaways for me was she could see how fast I move and how strong.

She said the moment I walked in the door, she’s “I could feel your creator energy, like, how much of a force you are with creating and doing in this world,” right? And she’s “But you could balance that a little bit more with slowing down, talking slower, listening to the people around you more, and it’s not gonna actually slow down your progress, but it will make your life easier,” basically.

So ironically, maybe I need to slow down a little bit. Except for my… I will stand behind speed and how fast I move is one of my greatest strengths. So that’s that piece. Then we have depth, okay? Like I said at the beginning, when you pause to create more depth, so you pause to say, “Could I improve this messaging?”

Or, “Is this really the strategy we should execute?” Or, “What’s missing here in how we’re explaining this?” Or maybe it’s internal processes in your business, and it’s like, “Okay, how could I break this down further? How can we put some more intention behind this?” There are times when that is necessary And there are many times in my business that I will pause the team and I will say, “Hold on.

I think we need to question this a little bit more. I think we need to think about this a little bit more.” And usually it’s because I can feel there, there’s a lack of clarity, that we’ve scratched the surface on something and we need to pause and we need to ask the right questions to get below the surface to get to the solution to finish, mapping out the project or whatever.

So I know in the moments that depth is the pedal that needs to be pushed, and usually that comes from there’s a lack of clarity, there’s surface level messaging, Or there’s surface level execution. It just hasn’t been fully thought through. Not to the point of overthinking, but thought through enough that there is clarity and it’s clear. and there’s depth. That’s the best way.

Depth and intention. And so I will balance that with speed. Now, it very rarely means that I massively delay something we’re executing. Very rarely have I said, “Okay, let’s add depth here,” and completely delay, execution or launching something. I’m a big fan of putting deadlines on something that are hard to achieve and pushing for it, and then being fine if you don’t hit it.

Not at all for clients, but internally that is something that I will do a lot, is if we’re changing a team process or we’re adjusting something, I’m like, “All right, can we do it by tomorrow?” If we don’t do it by tomorrow, I’m fine. It’s not like it’s urgent. But it’s one of my famous words “All right, can you get this to me tomorrow?”

Because why not? What are we waiting for, right? And then you push for that, and then it’s okay if you don’t hit it. Now, with clients, what we do is we have a deadline that’s a very fast deadline. Let’s say it’s two weeks from a strategy call to complete an entire funnel. We try to do it in 10 days.

So our internal deadline is actually faster than what we tell the clients because overdeliver, underpromise is something that I like to do. So still, I like that little bit of pressure. Maybe it’s not good, I don’t know, but it works. And Elon Musk talks about this a lot too, where he puts almost impossible deadlines on his team.

And sometimes, though, people say, “That’s not possible. We can’t hit it,” and then they hit it. And I… And that is a strategy. So my point being, depth, pausing to have depth does not mean you have to way slow down your process. I think it comes down to intention. So my point with this is when we look at marketing today, I think we’re gonna go into a time where a lot of depth is going to be missing from people’s marketing and their messaging and their copy, because it’s gonna be easy.

It’s going to be easy to just go to Claude or Chat and say, “Hey, write me this email,” and take the exact email and do it. The more I use AI, the more I realize it sucks at copy, and the more I think human-written content and created content is going to be important. That’s where I’m at right now with it, is I think that actually it’s one of those things that you shouldn’t use AI, definitely not to get it to 100%.

but it just, it’s not good. It’s very obvious when it’s AI. Even when you feed it good things, it’s still just- You can feel it. So anyways, I think that people will crave that authenticity and that depth. And because humans are overstimulated right now, like that’s the era we live in, overwhelmed, overstimulated, too much noise, it is gonna be easier to take shortcuts and to ship something that doesn’t have a lot of intention behind it, to send the email, to post the thing, to create the content, to build the slide presentation like the quote that somebody sent me, and not h- pause to have that intention behind it because it’s so easy to push a button, get it done for you, and not critically look at it.

And the magic is gonna be in the people who just pause and question it. And I think as I’m talking, I think that is the thing that I naturally do. I’ve always been like that since I was a kid, is I question everything. So I very rarely take something at face value and go, “Oh yeah, it’s good.” I almost always look at something and go, “How can we make it better?”

And so when I’m reading copy or I’m looking at a slide presentation or I’m looking at a process document my team made, I’m always like critically looking at it. I don’t just take it at face value, and that’s what you have to do with AI. That’s what you have to do with what you put out. And on, on the flip side of speed, it’s looking at am I going so fast or am I staying on the surface because I’m so overwhelmed and busy that what I’m putting out in my company, whether it’s marketing or maybe it’s delivery and operations, what I’m putting out in my company is lacking depth?

And ultimately, that’s gonna waste more time. So just the intention behind slowing down and questioning the depth of something is gonna save you time and actually make it so you can go faster. So when it comes to your marketing, I think it’s very important that you move fast in terms of making changes, executing a live launch, launching a new funnel, changing your ads, maybe building a new product, all those things.

Once you’re clear, move fast. Leverage that speed. Do it messy. Fast is not the same as chaotic, but move fast, but do not sacrifice depth. Build the process and the systems and the time and the energy in- into your day-to-day, into your systems, into your process, that you don’t sacrifice depth for speed.

Because if you are operating in a place where you stay surface level in your marketing, in your messaging, in your strategy, in your delivery, if you catch yourself wanting to cut corners You’ll pay for it. It’s costing you. I guarantee you it’s costing you. And I think this is also where for me, like focus work comes really into play.

So I was on my trip last week, and I worked a lot. Like when I do a solo trip, I actually love working, and I love working in like these deep work focus blocks where I just ignore everything and I work on a project that I haven’t been able to get to. And so one of the things I did was I had a huge list, and I know like the first day I was like, “Where do I even start?”

And I was like, “All right, I’m gonna categorize this so that today all I focus on is like this one part of the business, this one project, so that I can go deep, and I can spend the three hours that I needed to on something.” And it’s rare that I have three hours of uninterrupted time to actually dive deep into something.

And I think that those deep work sessions where all you’re focusing on is one thing is so important. I heard this clip from Alex Hormozi who said one of the… I’m totally butchering it, but essentially my takeaway from what he said was he constantly knows how to leverage his time to do the highest value thing.

And so every day he has very deep focus work blocks. But before he goes into that, he does what is going to be the highest leverage thing for the business, so the thing that only he can do but also the thing that is gonna be the biggest leverage. And that’s a constant game. But then if you are playing that game and you are like, okay, asking yourself that question every day, “What’s the biggest leverage?”

‘Cause there’s never a shortage of things to do. There’s never a shortage of ideas. There’s never a shortage of things you could do in your marketing, in your business. It’s always a matter of what is the most important. What is gonna impact the business, the team, the growth, the retention, whatever, the most?

And that’s the thing about being a CEO. It’s like you’re never doing the same thing. I love that part of being a CEO. My days are never the same. Yes, I record podcasts every week and I record content, and that is, the most consistent thing I do. But in terms of where I put my energy and my time and like the projects I work on, it’s never the same.

Because it should always be questioned what is going to be the highest leverage thing. That allows you to have depth. So build that into your routine, your systems, your expectations for yourself And don’t move so fast that you become reckless and chaotic with it, ’cause it will be felt on the other side, whether that’s team, customers, marketing.

And I think it’s gonna take discipline, it’s gonna take intention to operate in a place of depth. AI is making it so we can move insanely fast, and that’s amazing. I’ve actually used AI a lot for building this new company, and it’s like I have been able to do what would’ve normally taken months in a week, but I haven’t sacrificed depth because that will actually cost more than the cost that it took me to slow down, to have enough depth.

So that is what I have for you guys today, something to ponder, to think about. Like I said, I think it’s gonna take discipline and intention to maintain depth in the world of speed that we live in. And speed is, again, an asset. There’s nothing negative or bad about speed unless you are allowing it to sacrifice depth.

And depth is not the same as overthinking, right? Depth is intention. It’s getting to the root. It’s that connection. It is what separates you from all the other companies. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast, and I will talk to you next time