235: How AI is Transforming Business Strategy
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Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek. Today, Courtney Baker, CMO of Knownwell and host of AI Knowhow, talks about how AI is shaping business strategy and the future of work. From scaling client relationships to protecting creativity in an AI-driven world, Courtney shares how leaders can adopt AI in a way that elevates people, not replaces them.
In this episode, we chat about…
Courtney’s career path from nonprofits to marketing leadership and AI innovation.
Why AI in business strategy should focus on elevating humanity instead of replacing jobs.
How Knownwell uses AI for professional services to scale client relationship insights.
The shift from AI execution tools to AI as a strategic decision-making partner.
Why human creativity in business and marketing still outperforms AI-generated content.
The risks of over-reliance on AI in relationships and society.
What leaders need to know about AI adoption, data security, and global regulations.
Key Takeaways:
AI helps businesses scale client relationships by turning subjective data into objective insights.
Professional service firms can use AI to improve client health tracking and decision-making.
Leaders who engage with AI tools now will be better prepared for future strategy-level applications.
Human creativity and problem-solving remain essential, even as AI handles repetitive work.
The future of AI in business will move beyond task automation toward strategic guidance.
Companies and society must set boundaries to ensure AI adoption supports people rather than replacing human connection.
Resources from Courtney
LinkedIn | knownwell.com | AI Knowhow Podcast
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today, we have Courtney Baker. She's the CMO of Knownwell. It's an AI-native Commercial Intelligence platform and host of the AI Knowhow Podcast. Formerly CMO, CRO and probably some other acronyms and initials at Full Focus. She led its transformation from a personality-driven to a product-led brand. She has over 200 episodes as host of her own podcast and 70 on AI Knowhow. How are you doing Courtney? Courtney: Doing great. Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike: Sure. So, I'd like to start out every episode of getting to know you. Who is Courtney?
Courtney: Yeah. Well, you know, who is Courtney, continues to evolve, you know? I don't know about how your career has gone, but for me it's been a lot of getting, yeah, it's about pursuing the things that I'm passionate about and deploying my craft towards those. And you know, that looks different and different seasons. And it's been everything from traveling in Africa to help with the HIV and AIDS crisis, to working for adoption in China and in sports and now in AI. And so thankfully, I chose a craft in marketing that lets you deploy it in lots of different ways. And right now, I'm really focused on how we help business leaders deploy AI in a way that elevates humanity. We're really excited about what we're building at Knownwell.
Mike: So, that's a curious question because I think there's two different factions of AI. Half the people say, "No, AI is going to wipe out humans." The other side goes, "No, it's going to enhance humans." So you say that you're going to use AI to enhance, so tell us a little bit about what you mean by enhancing without, you know, sometimes going to take over.
Courtney: Yeah. Well I think we definitely as a society have a choice.
Mike: Yeah.
Courtney: And I think we've got to intentionally decide how we are going to use this technology? What are the things that we're going to preserve as humans? You know, for example, do we really want AI making our movies for us? Well, probably not actually. We as humans really enjoy the creativity of expression and making movies or music or those things that were like, "No, no, that's humanity." But there are lots of things that, I'm sure there are some people in the world that like doing, but there are lots of things that we do that we would love to offload for somebody else to do, to let us have more time to do the creative things, the things we as humans engage in relationship with one another. We'd be glad to offload that onto AI to help us have more time to do those things we're passionate about. And so that's what we're focused on and trying to continue that conversation, in society to figure out how do we do that well, and I think we've learned a lot in the 2000s and the 2010s on, you know, some things we probably could have done better in the creation of social media, for example, that we wish we probably could have gone back in time and done a little differently. And so how do we think critically about this and deploy it well in our businesses?
Mike: Yeah, because, you know, I just saw an article two or three days ago, I think Bill Gates came up with it. He says, "Yeah, in 10 years, there won't be any doctors, surgeons and things like that. You know, you're gonna need it, but it will be able to go in and you'll just be able to type in like WebMD now. But it'll actually say, " Yeah, I don't know how it's gonna work." If you put something on your finger and say, "Yeah, you know, you have this, go, take this." It's just amazing. How far it's come in. The people that work for me use it in blogging, the email support. I am a very, very low level, you know, Copilot type guy.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: But it's nice when I do like even a pitch deck for a new hotel, it creates these words and graphs and I'm like going, "Wow!" You know, that would've taken me a month to do and it took a couple days of just editing. So, let's talk about Knownwell a little bit. What is your focus? I know it's AI, but are you a consultancy or what is Knownwell? Yeah. Well, basically
Courtney: what we're doing, you know, if you think about e-commerce or SaaS companies. They've really kind of had an unfair advantage in some ways because they have had all of this rich transactional details about what is happening with their customers. When it comes to professional service firms, like especially the marketing firms, the technology service firms, the financial service firms, they don't have all of that rich transactional detail. What they have is rich relationships. And so if you think about a small, let's just take a marketing firm. When you're starting out, you've got 10, 15 clients, there's usually somebody on the team that just intuitively knows what's happening with their clients. They're just good at it. They've got their thumb on the pulse of their clients. And they can sit in a meeting and then afterwards be like, "Hey, you know, something was off with Bob and I noticed that they were late on their invoice. They're never late on their invoice. And this other person posted this thing on LinkedIn. We should probably have somebody on our team reach out to the executive on their team and just make sure we're on track here." They're good at that. But you know, first of all, professional service firms are hard to scale anyways, but that is also hard to scale. It becomes impossible really quickly as you get more and more clients. And so essentially what we've been able to build with AI is what that person was doing on that small team. But we can do it with AI at scale. We can sit in the midst of all of these conversations, the structured data, external data, and say, "Here is the objective, score of this client, the health of this client. These are the opportunities, the strengths, the weaknesses." "Hey, here's what the relationship map looks like. So for executives in these professional service firms, we've talked to hundreds of professional service firms." Even the most successful, they will tell you the way that they know what's happening with their clients right now is their team, their account managers manually mark each client, red, yellow, green. And so what happens is the executives are basically having to make decisions on the future of their company based on the subjective information. It doesn't mean that information is wrong, it's just it can be incomplete, especially in these professional services that have a mini to mini relationship map. It's hard for one person to really know what's going on. What we've done with AI, it's basically sit in the middle of all of that and help account managers go do the thing that they're great at, which is be in relationship with other people. It's helping executives see, "Okay, I have an objective source of what's actually happening, and my clients and I certainly can use subjective information alongside that but my confidence in making data-driven decisions has just increased dramatically." That's what we're doing. We're pretty excited about it.
Mike: So how are you, you know, talking to someone like me who has no idea what AI is. I'm very, very low level, so you have these marketing people, these high level C-suites and all these different people. What are you exactly? Are you cloning them? You know, I pulled that out of some other podcasts. I think, you know, people are cloning themselves so that they can free themselves up and some AI is doing all the work or answering the questions. How are you actually helping them in AI? Are you doing all the leg work?
Courtney: Yeah, that's a great question. So we at this point are not doing the legwork, but what we are doing is sitting between, you know, all their email, all their Slack channels, all of their structured data, their CRMs, the industry news on that client and the client itself, and scoring that company and then giving, "Hey, these are the strengths and weaknesses." These are the recommendations, and those recommendations could be, this was said to the delivery manager who may just not be inclined to be thinking of the next sale opportunity, you know? They're thinking about just getting the job done, like, "Hey, this lets somebody know in sales," and then you can assign that task and make sure that action happens against it. I do think at one point those recommendations and those like tasks, those action points can be automated even further with AI so that it can actually go do that thing for you. I see that in the next year or so that we'll be encroaching in that area. Mike: Yeah, because I talked to her, I think she was a marketing, advertising person. She got a lot of the emails.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: You know, wanting her and asking her these things and, you know, she started a podcast and a blog and all of a sudden she's like, "Oh my God, I need five VAs just to put 'em in different folders, for me." And then she ended up somehow cloneing yourself and renamed it this and had its own picture and it learned and she didn't have to ask, answer any of the DMs anymore. You know, just like this, AI did all the DMs and helped her.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: Then it would summarize everything, put things in graphs, and I'm just like, "Oh no, my God."
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: I can barely turn the microwave on, you know?
Courtney: And I think that's what's so encouraging, especially for innovators or people that kinda lean into this stuff is the AI gets smarter. Even with our platform, the sooner you start, the sooner it starts to increase in its knowledge of your clients and learning trends. What I think is so incredible is being able to look at the portfolio, look at all of your clients and AI being able to connect dots. That's honestly, a human just would not be able to sit through all the data and try to find, I mean, it's incredible at doing that. I mean, kind of what you talked about on the medical side of being able to connect those dots. It's just really challenging for us, we don't have the time as humans to sit and try to do that, but what we're able to provide for executives on that level is something they've really never had before and certainly gets me excited. And I think it's similar to, I don't know that we'll ever move to having businesses without CEOs, but there's certainly some of that data that helps you really know, okay, this is the next move. And I think that's gonna continue to grow.
Mike: Yeah. It seems like it'd be. Hey, you know, I'd love to ask a super computer if I'm making the right decision, you know? What's your opinion on something? Maybe not take over my job, but say, "Hey, AI, this is what I'm thinking about." And then they go, you know, and all the probabilities and or how do I ask this person?
Courtney: I think that's exactly, what you talked about like, you're using that just like to do things a little bit faster, you know? I think that's really eye-opening for a lot of people. Right now we're just at the tip of the iceberg with AI. We're at that execution level. We've had manual labor, like the robotic side of AI for a long time. Now we're in the execution of using AI in our businesses. I think platforms like what we're building at Knownwell, and I think there are certainly many more that really help with that operations level actually help us work cross-functionally and with each other, and we'll just continue to move up. I think we will start to see AI on the strategy level of, "Hey, am I making exactly what you said?" "Help me with the strategic decision. The strategic direction that my business is moving into." I hope that we'll hold on to ideology as a human. Again, going back to that, where do we draw the line of, no, we're gonna hold onto this. This is society. We're gonna hold this for the humans, I hope, ideology in our businesses. I know we make a hard line there on our values and missions, but certainly, there I think it will encroach on that.
Mike: Yeah. You know, I'm buying some hotels in Spain and I don't know that much. I know it's beautiful. I like going there and I like the red wine. That's about all I know.
Courtney: I'm going next month, so
Mike: There you go. You know, we're buying an hour and a half away from Barcelona in that area.
Courtney: Nice.
Mike: But I was asking, I was like, do people wanna go to the wine region or do they want the mountain side and I asked AI all these different questions, you know?
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: If I were to buy, which one are tourists going to in this area? And it spits it out, and then you just refine it. In 2025, is tourism going to be higher or lower in this? You know, and it's just, I don't have to think. I mean, my God, how many years it would take me to research things.
Courtney: Right.
Mike: It's just amazing. And ladies and gentlemen, Courtney Baker, knownwell.com. When people go to Knownwell, what are some of the first things they need to do? They just want to know, it's like, how can it help me? And they need to get a hold of someone they go to knownwell.com, what happens?
Courtney: Yeah, first of all, you can see a demo of what we're building, if that's helpful, just to give you a little more information. You also can schedule time with our team. We'd love to show you your data on the platform so you can just kind of get a real picture of what it would do for you and your business and actually see it firsthand. You know, these AI-native platforms, they're very different from a SaaS platform or things that we're used to previously. And so just being able to get your hands on it and really experience it, I think is really powerful. So you can certainly do that, on our website as well.
Mike: It's kind of a scary question. You know, we talked a little bit about maybe the medical, some of these things.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: And I'm not talking about maybe taking over jobs, but what level of execution? What do you think, in five years from now if I were to ask that AI a question? What's some of the stuff that would just be mind blowing do you think is gonna happen in the next five years?
Courtney: I will say just personally, I do hope that there's incredible medical advancement. I think we all have family members, friends that are impacted, that there's some really encouraging things on the medical side that I hope progress really quickly. Sometimes it takes a long time for peer-reviewed science even to get executed in the medical community. But I hope in five years that we've come really light years on that front. I would say in the business side of things, that creativity will be gold. It's really not going to be how fast I think we'll get over that hump of like, "Oh, okay, I can just do all these things faster than like my counterpart."
Mike: Yeah.
Courtney: But actually being able to bring creativity, I think that will be the gold standard. So even when you think about marketing firms, you know? I can check these boxes, but more I bring this thing that is truly human, that AI just can't replicate. I think that's where the gold standard would be. Actually, I just read a report recently on AI-generated ads. Like the images are just tanking, you know? It's just not, you think, "Hey, we'll just, we'll create all these AI images and ads, and we'll just run the algorithms to see which ones perform the best and then we'll run that one." When you run that test, get the winners and then just run it against human creativity. Human creative beats it every time. And I think that's where I do worry about young professionals being able to get the reps of the creativity of strategy. I think about the word creativity, sometimes we think about visual creativity, and I just give as an example of visual, but I mean, business is a creative pursuit. Like even in all of our roles, there are parts of what we do that are extremely human, extremely creative. And I think we're gonna have to think creatively about people coming onto the workforce, you know? They haven't had the reps and the experience to be able to deploy their own creative thinking, their creative problem solving yet. And so you've got AI that is probably better at that than them. And so we're gonna have to think about that creatively, but I think that's where we'll be in the next five years, and maybe this is hopeful. It might be a little optimistic, but that's where I hope, that's the direction we've gone.
Mike: Yeah. And that is a worry of mine. And I'll ask you this question a little bit. It is at the young kids when they get out of college, you know? I talked to some kids. Now it's like, I don't need to know math. I just use my phone.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: I don't need to tell time. I don't need to do this. I don't need to know a language. It's all on my phone, you know? They always tell me, it's like, why do I need to know that? I just looked it up. I'm not gonna say dumbing down, but it's just a different thing 'cause here I asked them something tech and they, you know, and they just do it. But it's the common sense stuff that I think we're losing and I think it five years from now, you know, I hope that the kids still learn, young adults still learn something. They're even losing their communication skills now.
Courtney: Actually, I think that's a great point. I hope we like double down actually on the humanities. We have become very knowledge-based on the sciences and math. I actually hope we like to lean towards history and communicating well with each other, the arts. I hope we are able to really elevate those in this transition. I can see that happening, but I think it will have to be a very intentional choice for us. That may be what we emphasize, just change a little bit.
Mike: Yeah. Because, you know, kids don't even know what 1776 is anymore, you know?
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: Who did we gain our independence from, you know? Like, I don't know, China. It's not important to them anymore, but here's the thing. It might be, but they're just not taught, so. Yeah and that's the whole thing, you know? The governments are gonna have to have some regulation. How are they embracing AI in your field with businesses? You know, Washington and these different people just go like, "Eh, you know, I don't know about AI."
Courtney: Yeah. You know, obviously I think the regulation. I would say our administration right now is very anti-regulation. I think the community at large, if you watched the more global AI meeting that happened earlier this year, there was a lot of emphasis on not regulating. What usually happens, and I expect will happen here, is that Europe will set the first round of regulation and then US companies like Knownwell will have to follow suit to be able to be global, we are all, so many of us are global companies now. I mean, we're a startup, we're already a global company. And so we have to figure out how to not just align with the US market and US regulations, but global regulations. And so in some ways I think that might be, that posture may play out well because even if our current administration doesn't deploy certain regulations, the next administration might. And so you're kind of ready and prepared even if that does happen, I think it's a little worrisome if you go thinking you're not gonna have regulations and then, you know, four years later have some robust regulations. Mike: Yeah. Who knows what the Trump administration, you know? Maybe he'll just put it on each individual company. If you wanna be global and you have, you wanna meet Europe's regulations, just do it, you know? Maybe it'll be up to the individual company.
Courtney: Yeah. I will say for companies like ours that are working for businesses, obviously there's a great, a lot of scrutiny on security. Like our company has to compliance, lots of making sure that data is secure. And so I do think there is a commercial pressure to have those really topnotch. In some ways I do think that is working but I do think there are other companies that don't have that mechanism that makes them have excellent security and make sure that they kinda have their own regulation 'cause they know that's what's best for them commercially.
Mike: Yeah. 'cause I'd hate to give you my entire life to build up my AI and have it go somewhere.
Courtney: I think that companies that we're working with are even more stringent. I think because this is new technology that there are more than even some other technologies that they probably should be more. But I think just the nature of AI, they really, they're asking great questions, they're very informed, and they're bringing in their technologist early on to ask the right questions. Honestly, I've been impressed on that front and feel good about how it's getting deployed with the clients that we're working with.
Mike: I asked you where you think the good stuff with AI. What are some of the bad stuff that people may not be thinking about or they need to be cautious about?
Courtney: I continue to hear things about people leveraging AI for relationships and obviously that's outside of business, but I think it's one of the most concerning things, that I've seen in lots of different realms and lots of concerning, you know? As a mother, I think we have to already be thinking, I listened to my 8-year-old talk to ChatGPT, and I'm like, this is a little, I mean, the way that they engage, they basically give you exactly what you wanna hear in the way that you wanna hear it. And lots of uses for that, lots of concerns about how we start to replace meaningful relationships. And I think we've already seen some, this transition with social media where people have pulled inward. They've stopped relating with the larger society and in my mind, that is a slippery slope that I can see AI just, you know, that being a real downfall to our society is leaning on AI to be exactly what we want in a relationship.
Mike: Yeah.
Courtney: Say, do exactly what we want. So I'd say that is right now the area that very presently even and concerned about. Mike: Yeah. There's whole worlds being created under those goggles.
Courtney: Yeah.
Mike: And people can be who they want and that is their persona that they want to be and they're just too shy or too withdraw to do anything else 'cause they don't love themselves.
Courtney: And I can only imagine, it certainly wasn't easy for me to be a young person. I would never wanna go back, you know? That during that time, it's just a really nice solve for a challenging period and a lot of people's lives have a lot of change. And so if you don't have the maturity to get yourself outta that, it's just, again, a slippery slope.
Mike: Yeah. I think there's some Hollywood movies back in the day where people were in these little capsules with the goggles on. But it is scary. Courtney, is there anything before I let you go, that you'd like to inform our listeners? Something that I didn't hit on?
Courtney: No, I would just encourage everybody listening, if you're not taking the time to engage with these tools. I actually say this all the time. I think a lot, because everything right now is execution-based. Like, how do I do my job faster? How can I write this email? How can I do this thing faster? It kind of lends itself to individual contributors, because they're just like, boots on the ground, let me execute faster. That a lot of leadership positions, executives just aren't using the tools as much. And so I think as we start to progress again into those operations level, strategy level, that the executives are gonna be the ones that are kind of behind 'cause they're just not as experienced using these platforms and maybe aren't gonna be able to, to leverage them as quickly as they would if they had been, you know, hands on the technology. Thinking about it, how they would deploy it in their day-to-day work.
Mike: Yeah. That was funny. I sometimes catch my wife, she argues with whatever AI, you know, she's like going, why did you gimme that? That's not what I asked. Give me these three. And I'm like, are you actually arguing with me?
Courtney: Listen, I had a, we were doing a segment for AI Knowhow, and I was asking AI, or I was asking ChatGPT about the Scarlet Johansson issue that came up. Yeah. I don't know if you remember that. She basically accused OpenAI of using her voice.
Mike: Her voice. Yeah.
Courtney: I could not get ChatGPT to basically say that had happened. It was the most bizarre. We have it on camera. Our producer was like, what? Like, I kept being like, "No, no, no. I don't think that's what happened." I essentially was debating with ChatGPT.
Mike: It's funny.
Courtney: It was wild. And again, another area that you can be like, that was actually concerning.
Mike: Now it's protecting itself. Wow.
Courtney: I know. What is happening?
Mike: Courtney, how can people get ahold of you?
Courtney: Yeah, well you can find me on the AI Knowhow Podcast, as well as on knownwell.com and we are also on LinkedIn.
Mike: Perfect. Courtney, thank you so much for coming on The RIcher Geek Podcast.
Have a great night.
Courtney: Thank you.
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ABOUT COURTNEY BAKER
Courtney Baker is the CMO of Knownwell, an AI-native Commercial Intelligence platform, and host of the AI Knowhow podcast. Formerly CMO and CRO at Full Focus, she led its transformation from a personality-driven to a product-led brand. With over 200 episodes as host of the popular Focus on This podcast and 70 on AI Knowhow, Courtney continues to pursue elevating humanity while leveraging transformational technology.