Want your evenings back? AI can give you that.. if it works behind you, not in front of you.

"It's fun to be lazy. On the other hand, you lose control of your own message."

That's Karl W. Palachuk on The Sales Show this week. Karl taught college for 10 years and has written 25 books, 10 of them on standard operating procedures for IT. He uses AI every day. He just doesn't let it speak for him. 🐬

I invited him because of one idea: the AI barbell. More AI in the back. More of you in front.

The lazy version is going stale

The easy win with AI is to take yourself out of the equation. Let it answer your email. Let it summarise the meeting you were just in.

Then it assigns you a task you never agreed to, and you can't tell, because your brain switched off.

Karl thinks people are getting tired of that. And it costs something real: control of your own message. You don't need a big personal brand. But what goes out under your name should be you, so people can decide to do business with you.

His analogy: the calculator. People said kids would stop learning math. Instead, teachers took math higher with it. AI is a tool. Taking the labor out of the equation doesn't do you any good.

Let Claude and Gemini fight

Karl doesn't let AI write for him. He's written 25 books.. it learned from writers like him. Where he loves it is research.

His loop is simple. 🐯

1. Ask Claude a research question: which companies are in this industry, who are the key people.
2. Rewrite the answer a little in his own words.
3. Feed it to Gemini: "Tell me if there's anything I'm missing."
4. Let the two of them fight.

You get better information because you're not relying on one source. He calls it LinkedIn on steroids. You can dig deeper and deeper, even when someone's profile is thin.

For staying current, he gives an agent around 100 sources, lets a second agent find the common threads, and ends up with a handful of topics. He doesn't read 1,000 magazines. He reads the few that matter.

The back office is where AI pays

Here's the barbell in practice. Karl's examples come from service businesses, where the ground is always moving.

Take your book of standard operating procedures. Many companies have one that nobody has read. If it exists as a file, give it to Claude and ask two things. First: where are the inconsistencies? Then: if this is our real process, how do I build a schedule that runs it best?

Or the time cards. Write an agent that checks them every day and rejects any that aren't filled in from yesterday. That's the hour you'd spend opening every time card and chasing people.. gone. 🌴

Don't know how to build that? Ask Claude. It will walk you through the steps and offer to write the code. Karl's view: the top 10% will always be the top 10%. Today that means the ones who take the time to learn AI.

In front, it's you

The other end of the barbell is you. People decide whether they like and trust the owner. So the time AI saves in the back goes to the front: the calls, the conversations, the relationships.

Karl's warning is about an email most of us have received. You ask a simple question and get 14 paragraphs back that start with "that's a really good point." It's clearly AI, and it leaves a bad taste. The sender put their name at the bottom.

His rule from his teaching years: if you're not willing to stand behind it, your name doesn't go on it.

Lead generation that lasts 20 years

The best promotion Karl has ever done is his newsletter. He grows it month after month. People on it chose to stay, because opting out is easy.

How it grows: he never gives a talk, online or in person, without a useful handout. You get it with your email, and you join the newsletter. His 68-point checklist has done this for 20 years and five editions. Search the name and pages of results show his checklist.

The rule: it has to be truly useful. A handout that's all self-promotion gets deleted.

Your move this week: hand one back-office job to AI (research, SOPs or time cards), then spend the hour you save with a client.

That's the AI barbell. Machines in the back, so you can be fully present in front. That's a big part of Sprintlife: a business that runs in the background while you spend your time with the people who matter.

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjrvQnH7TlI

Want the AI skills and the community to build your own barbell? Join Sprint Club, 7 days free: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.

Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆