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The Next 3 Years of AI: What’s Actually Coming
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Get your BOPA Guide to grow through other people’s audiences: https://danchez.com/bopa.
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez steps back from the day‑to‑day drops to map three predictions marketers can actually bank on: the tech will keep getting better, adoption will keep climbing, and the combo will spark unpredictable (good and bad) consequences. Along the way he looks at benchmark trends, real usage data, and how to navigate doom narratives while leading with practical optimism. We also cover a fresh LinkedIn poll on why most haven’t launched a show yet, a 21‑day challenge to fix that, and a viral AI‑video example you can ethically borrow for creative ads.
My Favorite AI Tools
• Tella (AI screen recording app I record all my solo episodes with) - https://danchez.com/tella
• High Level (My all in one marketing platform) - https://danchez.com/highlevel
• Zencastr (Best AI podcast tool) - https://danchez.com/podtools
• n8n (my favorite AI automation tool) - https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
• Ethan Mollick (AI analysis) - https://x.com/emollick/status/1961169796491329653
• Epoch AI benchmark trends - https://x.com/emollick/status/1961561723501953131
• Nicole Leffer (LinkedIn post on adoption) - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7369517902724530179/
• SparkToro + Datos usage data - https://x.com/randfish/status/1962934818515399064
• “Diary of a CEO” interview with Roman Yampolskiy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UclrVWafRAI
• SoloPodcastChallenge.com — 21‑Day Solo Podcast Challenge
• X (formerly Twitter) thread of hyper‑real AI dog video - https://x.com/aitrendz_xyz/status/1963541647683182753
Timestamps
• 00:00:00 — Why now: predictions that are safe & useful for marketers
• 00:01:23 — Prediction #1: AI keeps improving (benchmarks, cost curves, real capability jumps)
• 00:04:40 — Prediction #2: Adoption is accelerating (Nicole Leffer’s observations, everyday use cases)
• 00:06:56 — Usage data deep‑dive: SparkToro/Datos show rising AI‑tool visits (10+ times/month cohort growing)
• 00:09:22 — Prediction #3: Unintended consequences—productivity gains and new risks to watch (e.g., sycophancy)
• 00:11:48 — Doom takes vs pragmatic optimism (Yampolskiy clip; lead human‑first, AI‑driven)
• 00:13:48 — Poll results: why most haven’t started a show yet (time, uniqueness, “too many shows”)
• 00:15:37 — 21‑Day Solo Podcast Challenge (0→7 episodes) + 00:16:46 — Viral post breakdown: hyper‑real AI dog video & creative ad ideas
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and AI Predictions
00:00:00
Speaker
For the last couple of years, people have been making all kinds of predictions about AI, about the best utopia ever coming, and the worst doomsday scenario ever, and everything in between.
00:00:10
Speaker
I find that hypothesizing the future can be fun and be really interesting, But that it's not really a useful exercise. So we don't do a lot of it on this podcast. We make minor predictions and call some fun shots.
00:00:23
Speaker
But we haven't done a lot of it here. But today, i actually want to dive into it a little bit more because it's been almost three years since ChatGPT came out. Some history has evolved. And you know that the best predictor of what's coming in the future sometimes is what's happened in the past.
00:00:38
Speaker
So now that we've had a little bit of legroom and some some time to see how this AI thing plays out, I actually think there are a few things that we can count on reliably and are therefore safe to
Dan Sanchez Introduction and Podcast Focus
00:00:48
Speaker
discuss. So welcome back to the AI-Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends call me Danchez.
00:00:54
Speaker
And in this particular type of episode, I like to break down what's going on in the news, what's going on in the world, but there hasn't been a lot of major AI news and updates other than the ChatGPT project update to OpenAI, which I covered in yesterday's episode.
00:01:08
Speaker
So today I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of things to help you, the marketers, understand what's going on to better align your careers and make plans for the future.
00:01:19
Speaker
So let's talk
Will AI Continue to Improve?
00:01:19
Speaker
about the first one. I think there are three things that we can count on when it comes to what's coming with AI, right? Three things that I would bet money on are going to be true.
00:01:31
Speaker
Okay. The first one is that AI is going to continue to improve. Now, that might kind seem obvious to some people, but I don't think you understand. I've been paying attention to the AI space now aggressively for about a year and a half.
00:01:43
Speaker
And it seems like every couple of months, there are a lot of naysayers saying we're going to hit a wall. Things are going to start progressing. LLMs can only go so far there's always a ruckus around that and people wonder like well i don't know maybe maybe it will stop progressing and honestly even a year ago i was saying like look even if it does stop progressing and this is still true but even if it does stop progressing like we will have five more years of innovation because all the practical people like my like me and you it takes us time to even figure out how to put the tools to use they put out these great tools and developers are like okay what can we build with them
00:02:20
Speaker
It takes years for it to be integrated into our workflows, into our processes, into our existing tools. But it hasn't stopped progressing, has it? No, it's taking major leaps and bounds.
00:02:32
Speaker
So if you look at this, I like looking at Ethan Mollick as a great like first play person I pay attention to for news because I know he does a good job of vetting what he's seeing. And he's talking about like how the improvements are happening over time, especially with bringing the cost down to render these computes, because right now it gets really expensive. But every single year it gets cheaper and cheaper and a little farther up.
00:02:54
Speaker
He even went and had this graph from Epoch AI that is showing the rate of improvements across all these all these colored lines we're looking at on this graph. are showing accuracy across these big benchmarks, these big tests. And you can see on the left side, we have ChatGPT3, on the right side, we have ChatGPT5.
00:03:12
Speaker
And there were some big jumps between three and four, but remember, it was only like a few months between those things of when they released it to us, the benchmark like this. And of course, there's a huge jump from four to five, but there's a lot of small improvements along the way, making it feel like not that big of a difference from four to five, even though between when four first came out and when five came out, there's a massive leap in difference.
00:03:34
Speaker
to show that these things are improving. They're not hitting a wall.
Leveraging Audiences for Lead Generation
00:03:38
Speaker
They continue to get better. Hey, just quick interruption. This is Dan here and I just want to apologize because I've never shared this resource with you. It's from a good friend Brian and he created a fantastic resource that has brought him a high ticket a customer every week for the last 52 weeks.
00:03:56
Speaker
The first time I saw it, I couldn't believe how simple it actually was to implement and I'm using it even in my own business now. and It's a tool around how to leverage not your own audience but other people's audiences in order to generate leads and get clients.
00:04:12
Speaker
So I want to share this research with you. He breaks it down in exact detail so that you can actually learn how to leverage the audiences of other people like I am today. Go to danchez.com slash Bopa, B-O-P-A, in order to get access to Brian's resource and guide on how to leverage partnerships and other people's audiences in order to generate high-paying ticket clients now. Again, that's danchez.com slash B-O-P-A.
00:04:39
Speaker
So I think that's something we can
Growing Adoption and Intuitive Tools
00:04:40
Speaker
count on. We can actually look at this and be like, okay, this is stake we can put in the ground be like, this is going to continue to be a thing. If it continues to get better, then it's going to continue to get more useful. It's going to continue to get more and more integrated into the way that we do things.
00:04:56
Speaker
It means change is coming. Now, there was one thing I used to think about a lot, and that is, well, just because it's improving fast doesn't mean it gets adopted fast, which kind of brings me to into my next post um from from one of my favorite AI creators here on LinkedIn is Nicole Leffer.
00:05:12
Speaker
And she was talking about recently, she's just noticed a shift. amongst some different demographics, some different generations that are usually slow to adopt tech and noticing that there's not just an adoption, but adoption of that. It's more nuanced that has going into different tools now and is getting an excitement and a level of enthusiasm around this new tech than before.
00:05:34
Speaker
And I'm seeing it myself. More and more people are bringing AI to me, not knowing that I specialize in AI. And they're like, have you seen what this? Have you tried that? Have you notice this advancement here and i'm like huh i've noticed the same thing as nicole what nicole's noticing and i've noticed that there's an uptick in the adoption the hype cycle is actually finally getting people to put their hands on the tools download gpt at least if not more maybe perplexity maybe maybe testing the tool in gemini because they already have google workspaces or something and it's starting to make a difference people are starting to pick up the tools and not only that but the tools are becoming more useful like
00:06:09
Speaker
More and more people are tapping into and oh, this is way better than Google. Yeah. So even my wife, who's not the most friendly towards adopting AI, she's a little bit skeptical of it, is now starting to use it because, well, it's becoming more intuitive. It's becoming easier to get what you want as AI does a better job of navigating and discerning what you actually want when you type in a query versus Google. It got a lot better, but you're still having to search for it.
00:06:35
Speaker
AI just gives you the answer. Now that's just one use case of 100 use cases of what you can use AI for. I mean, that's what Wednesday's episode is about, right? I talked about 10 different ways that I'm using AI in my daily life. Go back to that episode to to learn more about all those things.
00:06:50
Speaker
But as AI becomes more useful, and gets more powerful and is more is improving steadily, well, adoption going to grow, more people are going to tap into how powerful this thing is.
00:07:02
Speaker
And it's my this is I think it's a safe bet to say that the adoption cycle will start to grow at a much faster rate. because all the tech companies are focused on it. All the big tech companies are focused on making it as convenient to use as possible.
00:07:20
Speaker
They know there's gold in them hills when it comes to AI and they're going to continue integrating it and making it more user friendly, making it more approachable, making it more useful to the average user to the point where it's hard to even find a dumb phone. So we all use smartphones now. have you ever tried to find a dumb phone? It's pretty difficult. I have.
00:07:38
Speaker
But AI is going to be incorporated and essentially you could say shoved down our throats, but I don't think most people are going to resist. They're going to take it because it's going to make their life easier, more useful.
00:07:48
Speaker
I also saw this post from Rand Fishkin. This was just kind of a tease of a webinar that they did. And haven't even seen the webinar, but even the graphs that he posted about AI adoption have been very telling.
00:07:59
Speaker
This one in particular was really helpful for me when it talks about the adoption curve. of AI tools you can see slowly what is it let me break it down for you if you can't see the screen it kind of has this bar chart that shows like a hundred percent of web users right so it's like the world's wide where everyone using the web or at least what data could be collected from dados and spark toro We have people using AI tools, zero visits a month, one to three visits a month, four to nine visits a month, and 10 plus visits a month to any of the major tools like ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, all those things.
00:08:37
Speaker
And you can see this bar chart and you can see that the 10 plus, of course, all of them are growing other than the the zero visits a month is shrinking in favor for the ones where more and more people are essentially going to these AI tools, 10 plus visits a month. So the most recent June 2025 has 80 or sorry, 20% of people use going to these sites 10 plus times a month.
00:08:58
Speaker
And this is across the large scale. ah data sample collected from a ton of different devices so it's a pretty good little representation of what's going on online when it comes to people's website visit behavior that's kind of indicating a lot more people are using the tools it's still only 20 percent going to it 10 plus times a month but the curve is growing and I think that will continue to grow so that's my second prediction right AI adoption is not slowing down it's it's certainly not growing as fast as the
00:09:29
Speaker
The improvements in the tool, the improvements are on an almost exponential scale. It's a log-morithmic curve of going up and to the right versus the adoption rate is more slow and steady, but it is steadily improving more and more people.
00:09:43
Speaker
And we went from March 2023, we had maybe 7%, 5% adopt going these tools 10 plus times month up 20%. So, yeah. adopt going to these tools ten ten plus times a month up to twenty percent so That's a lot of adoption and that'll continue to grow. Of course, Google is like 90 percent, right? 90 percent of us go there 10 plus times a month. Right. And that was another graph they had. I'll link to this below if you want to check out their webinar to see more of this kind of data.
00:10:09
Speaker
But I thought this one graph was telling in and of its. So what are my three predictions?
Unforeseen Consequences of AI Integration
00:10:12
Speaker
Again, the tech is going to continue to get better. There isn't a wall. It's going to continue to improve. Two, users are actually adopting it for a number of different reasons, but they are adopting it slow and steady. More and more people are using these tools, and that will continue to grow, and I think we'll accelerate at some point. It won't just be slow and steady. It will have an ah ah acceleration curve of some kind as it gets incorporated into our devices. we won't we There won't be any way but to use AI in order to get things done.
00:10:41
Speaker
And my third prediction is that there is going to be some unpredictable consequences of the first two predictions. There are going to be things that we didn't even know we had to deal with until it was too late.
00:10:53
Speaker
Some of it will be fantastic, the like whole new things of ways of doing things that nobody could have predicted. There will be some horrible things that nobody could have predicted. But for sure that something this big and this widely integrated into our lives is going to have good and bad consequences.
00:11:13
Speaker
So it's hard to know what those are going to be. Like the sycophancy thing. Like that's a word that we only learned just back in the the spring and I think is going to continue to be a big deal. But that's the thing that we didn't even really think to think about until chat started getting so good that people started having delusions about of how how what they were capable of or what what their how good their ideas actually were until this last spring. And now it's now it's kind of a known thing that I continue to talk about on the show to be aware of.
AI as a Life Co-Pilot
00:11:38
Speaker
That's one of the negative things.
00:11:40
Speaker
On the other side, it's starting to become such a great co-pilot for your life because of how well it can pick up information and search things that it's becoming useful for so many other areas of life other than just marketing.
00:11:51
Speaker
So that was unexpected. I didn't realize how useful it would become so quickly. And that's going to have consequences in productivity in a really good way. So there's going to be a lot of things that we can't really predict. Sure, we could watch sci-fi. We can make some bold predictions, but we really still don't know.
00:12:07
Speaker
The job loss or job market is still kind of an unknown at this point, though we can certainly see a few different industries or sectors that are being hurt right now, like copywriting and customer service and even entry-level web development is being hurt as far as new new jobs being created in that field because of AI.
00:12:24
Speaker
Are we creating a lot of jobs with AI right now? I haven't seen a lot of it yet, but it's certainly getting incorporated into more and more jobs, especially marketing jobs.
00:12:34
Speaker
Though there is one new story that I want to cover lastly in the new segment of this show, and that is on the diary of a CEO, Dr. Roman Jan Paladsky, sorry if I butchered the name, is saying there will only be these five jobs will be remaining and there will be a total global apocalypse by 2027 because AI is getting too dangerous.
00:12:56
Speaker
And while it's fun and juicy to watch episodes like this, I don't think they're particularly helpful. Of course, you could join the ranks and join waving the banners, but it's not going back. We're not going back. we're not It's not going to slow down.
00:13:08
Speaker
There probably does need to be some safety things that are addressed. But in general, I find that videos like this only fill us with fear and insecurity. But I tend to recommend and jumping into this with a optimistic beat, but a realistic beat like there's going to be bad things that happen and giving way into fear like this, I think is just not going to be helpful.
00:13:29
Speaker
There's a lot of uncertainty. We need to step into it with confidence. with clarity about what it's capable now and what we can do with it now and with hope for the future so that we can be the leaders that step into our companies, into our social circles, and into our lives to lead with confidence to tell people this is what it should be like. We should be human first.
00:13:50
Speaker
yet AI driven. We should make the most of this. We should use this to become more productive and get more done, yet without sacrificing the human edge that we all bring to the table.
00:14:01
Speaker
And I think you need to lead with optimism because there's no such thing as a pessimistic leader. something a wise leader once told me. So I'm trying to step into this with optimism, thinking it's better to lead with optimism and hope and to shape the future that we want to see with AI rather to give in to the world's going to fall. The sky is falling. It's all going to come apart and there's nothing we can do about it.
Podcasting for Business Growth
00:14:23
Speaker
So while it's an interesting watch, and I recommend watching it just to see what other people are talking about, just know that this is a belief that you don't have to subscribe to.
00:14:34
Speaker
Moving on, I did a poll on LinkedIn recently, and I didn't ask an AI question this time. I asked a different question. I asked, why haven't you started a podcast yet? Because I've noticed there are very few podcasts out in the world. And yes, it's funny that most, despite the fact that there's less podcasts than blogs and YouTube channels and social accounts, a lot of people, 42% said they haven't started a podcast because there's too many of them.
00:14:56
Speaker
And I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? You know, there's less podcasts than every other channel. Did you know that only like 90% of those channels that are out there, like make it past episode seven, it is a blue ocean, but still other people have reasons. Like there's not enough time, nothing unique to say.
00:15:12
Speaker
Uh, 1% said it costs too much. So it's clearly not a cost thing. I thought this was interesting and that's why I decided to help people launch more podcasts.
00:15:23
Speaker
In fact, my business partner and I decided to put on a podcast challenge in order to help more solopreneurs, experts, and consultants launch more podcasts because I felt like the medium needed more voices out in the field. Just like this one I'm doing with the AI-driven marketer, I felt like more people needed a chance to be able to get their voice heard, to get their expertise out there so that they could educate their clients, they could educate their prospects, and to build demand for themselves to build demand for their services and if not just help a lot of people for free i find podcasting to be the best ai tool out there because i can sit here and record an episode and use that transcript to repurpose into an avalanche of content down the road it's also a lot easier to produce than youtube videos though i tend to be spending a little bit more time on the production side these days if you haven't noticed a podcast is a lot easier to produce than any youtube video but you you still get a full video with every single podcast, whether you're recording on Zoom or Riverside or like me with Zencaster.
00:16:22
Speaker
So the podcast challenge is a 21-day challenge where we're helping people go from zero to seven episodes in 21 days. That helps them get into the top 10%. Again, 90% die before they even make it to episode seven.
00:16:35
Speaker
So I'm like, dang, if we could help people just get to their first seven episodes to build up the reps to continue going, that would be a win. And of course, there is a price to it with a fun reward, because if you actually make it all the way to the end and you complete the daily task, about a 30 minute task every single day, you get a full refund. Yeah, it costs $9.97, but you get it all back if you complete the challenge.
00:16:59
Speaker
And even if you don't complete every task on time, But you do get your seven episodes done, then you get to the 997 towards a credit towards Solo Scaled, which is a community of people and a coaching program to help you scale your company with AI, specifically for solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, those kinds of people.
00:17:16
Speaker
So if that's interesting to you, go over to solopodcastchallenge.com. And we want to help you launch a show like the AI Driven Marketer, because honestly, this is the best marketing channel I could have ever launched. It's been a fantastic ride. And I want to help more people do
Realistic AI-Generated Videos for Marketers
00:17:29
Speaker
the same.
00:17:30
Speaker
And to wrap up this podcast, I have a viral post that has just been going viral. It's been doing well on LinkedIn. It's kind of a thread of posts, but man, look how real this AI video looks.
00:17:42
Speaker
It's a dog that who brought a hose from the outside in and the hose is turned on and it's like flooding a person's living room and then they walk in and they're like shocked by all the water.
00:17:53
Speaker
It looks so real. The autonomy, the way the dog's moving, even the camera footage looks real. All the furniture looks real. Oh, the couch changed in that frame. But everything looks so real that it's like hard to discern what is real anymore.
00:18:07
Speaker
Now, discerning eyes can look to like, oh, the couch changed between the two frames, but everything looks pretty good. And it's fooling a lot of people. It's gotten 70 million views in seven days across TikTok and other social platforms. And here, even on this thread, it's gotten something like a few million views here. 2.6 million views just on X. So it goes to show the AI video has come a long way. It's fooling a lot of people, and it's something to be wary of. Now that you're scrolling through the net, to be...
00:18:35
Speaker
extra skeptical as if we didn't need to be skeptical on the internet enough now we need to be more skeptical because video footage can be faked so easily these days and while that's certainly a warning it's also an opportunity for marketing not to fool people but to bring your product to life in a way that it's never been before What would it be like if you had your product, if you have sell a physical product to bring it to life, have somebody holding it, doing something extreme, ah ah embellishing a little bit like the features of a product, right?
00:19:04
Speaker
We all know that these super ball-ish commercials were out of reach for us because we didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the creative. But now... It's all about the idea. If you have a good idea for a way to show a feature off in the product, all of a sudden, if you spend some time just on Google Gemini, you can get a whole awesome, even just little mini video done with AI.
00:19:29
Speaker
And of course, I would try to make it larger than life because, well, ah ah that's what AI is good at. You could try to make it look like a normal video of a chiropractor cracking your back, but I'm like, you better, should probably use stock footage for that because AI is probably going to make it look silly.
00:19:42
Speaker
But if it's a chiropractor flying through the skies, he cracks your back or something. I don't know. That's kind of silly. But you know what i'm saying? Like you could come up with ideas that are impossible and that's what AI is really good for. So I'm looking forward to seeing more and more marketers tap into the creative potential of what AI video can do.
00:19:58
Speaker
Because it's certainly looking more and more real. And I'm not saying we need to use it to fake people. I'm just saying we should use it to come up with fantastic creative.