How to Stand Out From Competitors: What AI Can't Replace [MM282]

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Klarna recently split the difference by replacing 700 agents worth of work with AI, but then rehired people back because they found the hard emotional calls were better handled by people.
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How do you stand out from your competitors when every one of them has the same AI that you do?
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I was at an event with about 10,000 people sitting in a hall waiting for my friend Pat Flynn to take the stage.
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And right at that moment, a kid and his dad sat down right behind me and the kid turned to a total stranger and asked, do you have any extra cards?
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What happened next is the part of your business that AI can't copy.
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And let me tell you why.
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You know, last week we talked all about AI and which tool you should be using, what your choices are, and how to pick.
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This week we're going to talk about what is still yours once everybody has all of the same AI tools.
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Because really, if everybody is using AI, won't all businesses end up the same?
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Everything will just become a bunch of AI-generated junk, right?
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It's a fair worry because your competitors are getting the same AI tools that you are, and they're learning how to use them.
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Well, recently, I got my answer to this question in a place I didn't expect, a Pokémon card event in Texas.
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Pat Flynn and I have been online business friends since I started online in 2007.
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He's pretty famous for building Smart Passive Income, which is one of the best-known online business brands out there.
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And we've been in the same weekly mastermind every Wednesday for more than a decade.
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Now, these days, Pat's world is Pokémon.
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His Deep Pocket Monster channel and his companion channel, Short Pocket Monster, are worldwide, well-known, and have millions of followers.
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And as part of that brand, he has created this Pokémon card event called Card Party.
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It's a trade show floor full of vendors, stage shows, a huge community of collectors, and importantly, also their families.
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It's a spectacle.
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The first Card Party only had about 1,500 people.
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But Pat's continued to grow the event over the last several years.
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And this year, in Dallas, he had 10,000 people, and he does this multiple times a year all across the United States.
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Now, I'm not a Pokémon guy.
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My kids went through a Pokémon phase.
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I think it's really cool.
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I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, so I sort of get it.
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But I'm really an outsider at an event like this.
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So, in a way that only Pat Flynn can do, he struck a deal with the Gaylord Texan, which is a super fancy resort here in the Dallas area.
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In fact, it's where my wife kidnapped me and took me for my 40th birthday, as a surprise.
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That was some time ago.
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And he drew so many people to the event, there wasn't even any parking at the hotel.
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I drove up to the hotel, and I was greeted with signs that showed event parking off-site.
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Then I took a fantastic shuttle bus, and there were a sea of people waiting to register for Pat's event.
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Then I went to the vendor floor, and I walked through these double doors, and I actually thought I was in the wrong place.
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Thousands of people, hundreds of tables.
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It was a sea of humanity.
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It was so amazing.
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I took a 360-degree video on my phone and texted my mastermind, and I said, Hey, guys, Pat may be underselling this thing.
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Because he had created a sea of superfans, and if you haven't read Pat's book about superfans, that's a must-read as well.
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So after milling around with my mouth agape on the floor of the trade show for a while, I went upstairs to a behind-the-scenes event that Pat was doing with his top fans, where there were hundreds of people that were in there to understand how Pat actually makes his videos to meet Pat's staff.
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And they were all speaking from the stage, and Pat was bringing his superfans up on stage.
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The fans were finishing Pat's sentences.
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They knew all of the inside jokes.
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To my surprise, they knew the video editor and some of the producers by name.
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It was the kind of intimacy you really normally associate with things like podcasting.
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Pat's video channel fans were all there, and they were really part of a bigger family.
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And there was this binder guy there, a very famous man from one of Pat's videos, who actually sold his binder to Pat to make some money.
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Pat finished the binder and was so moved by the guy's story that he gave it back to him, and now he's on stage at Pat's event.
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All kinds of crazy things going on with kids in cosplay, parents chasing their kids around.
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And the word for it that I could come up with was, it was just wholesome family entertainment.
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So I'm sitting there in this room, and I'm waiting on this event to start with Pat on the center stage.
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And behind me, a kid and his dad walk into the room and sit down behind me, and I can hear this conversation between this kid and the dad.
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The kid is super excited that his dad brought him to this amazing event.
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And I'll admit it, I was totally eavesdropping because I was reminiscing about when I used to drag my kids around to stuff.
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They were hunting, in this case, for these special event cards that were being handed out at the event.
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Honestly, I didn't even know what these gold cards were that they were looking for.
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And the kid just turns to a total stranger, some guy sitting nearby, and asks him, Do you have any extra cards that I can have?
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Something only a kid could get away with.
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Something that a kid would do.
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And then they got into this long conversation, this kid and this other adult.
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And it turned out that the man did have extra cards, and he gave them to the kid.
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And the kid lit up, and the two of them just talked about what they were collecting.
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And, you know, that's the kind of thing that my wife Paula has a name for.
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She calls it a scrapbook moment.
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This dad had his kid at this event with all of these like-minded people that were in community with each other.
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And this was going to be etched on this kid's mind like the page of a mental scrapbook.
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Well, that kid got one of those cards from that total stranger.
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And that is the kind of thing that AI simply can't provide.
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So back to the question.
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If everybody has the same AI, how do you stay different?
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This is the moat.
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Look for the human pieces of your business.
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Human interaction, human taste, person-to-person moments, community, face-to-face service.
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You know, there's an old saying that I really like.
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People don't usually remember what you did for them, but they always remember how you made them feel.
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AI can make someone feel heard in a chat window, but it can't be the stranger in the next row who hands a kid a card who does something special because they can.
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Fun side note about the quote.
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That quote about people remembering how you make them feel is usually credited to Maya Angelou.
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But the earliest version on record is really this guy named Carl Buehner in 1971.
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Thought you should know.
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Now look, I feel really strongly about you looking for the human parts of your business as a way to differentiate.
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But this is also under attack by AI.
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There are already things that can clone your voice.
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ElevenLabs voice cloning is amazing.
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And things that can clone videos like HeyGen.
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And that is also getting better and better.
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And now there are even services like Delphi that build an AI clone of an expert by ingesting all their videos, books, and podcasts.
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And these things can answer fans' questions around the clock in the expert's clone voice.
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And they can even do it in 40 different languages.
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So yeah, AI probably can answer a question the way you would from everything you've already said.
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But AI can't go to a card show in Texas.
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It can't sit in a hall and hear a kid ask a stranger for a card.
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And in a lot of ways, AI can copy what I've said and tell you what I said before.
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But it can't live what I'll say next.
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You know, the other thing that's under attack is the feeling of relationships.
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Therapy and companionship is now, according to a Harvard Business Review article, the number one way that people use AI.
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About 1 in 10 adults use chatbots for emotional support, according to the American Psychological Association in 2026.
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So the phrase, my customers are talking to me, isn't a moat by itself anymore.
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A chatbot increasingly can be a good listener too.
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But what it can't do is put real people together like that kid and that stranger.
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And here's another thing to keep in mind.
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About 85% of consumers, at least right now, would rather talk to a real person than AI when they contact a business, according to AnswerConnect in May of 2026.
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Klarna recently split the difference by replacing 700 agents worth of work with AI, but then rehired people back because they found the hard emotional calls were better handled by people.
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So what does this mean?
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Here's the takeaway.
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Use AI for everything that doesn't need you.
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So there's more of you that you can use in the moments that do need you.
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Let's take my business, for example, this very channel.
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I'm building it on my point of view because that's the part that AI can't replace.
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I don't even know what my point of view is going to be in three months.
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Everything is evolving so fast.
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AI can tell you what I've said, and it might be able to make a guess that's a mixture of everything that's going on on the Internet about what I might say, about things that haven't happened yet, but it doesn't know.
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Only I get to decide that, and I get to share that with you.
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There'll be plenty of AI talking heads with AI opinions, and that's absolutely fine.
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But Mark Mason's point of view can only come from Mark Mason.
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Shoot, maybe in the end it's only handfuls of people, but those are my people.
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They're who I'm talking to, and they're who I'm taking care of.
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And everything else, the distribution, the transcripts, the busy work, that's exactly where I use AI in my business.
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It's like I explained in the last video.
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Claude drafts blog posts for my wife for her personal brand based on other content that she's already created, which then she edits to make them hers.
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Her photo sessions are scrapbook moments for the families she shoots, where Paula's adding value is by composing shots, getting families at ease with their photo shoots, being present to take pictures, and of course, editing those photos one at a time in a way that delights clients.
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So what does this mean if you're a plumber or an accountant or a shop owner trying to use AI in your business?
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It means that you should use AI first in the non-human pieces of your business, like maybe accounting or bookkeeping or reading invoices or doing inventory or other kinds of drudgery tasks that you absolutely have to do but don't want to do, so that that frees you up to spend some time to think about the human pieces of your business, like talking to customers.
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Or one of my favorites, Paula rents lenses from a company that oftentimes writes her a handwritten note and includes a piece of candy in the box with the lens.
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AI can't do that, but you can.
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And you can learn your customers and care about them because they will remember how you make them feel.
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What's the action for this week?
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Use AI to find the part of your business that AI can't copy.
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What you need is a prompt where you describe your business to AI or skip that if your AI already knows about your business.
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Have it ask you up to five questions first, one at a time, about your business and what you do on a day-to-day basis.
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Have it split your work into AI work and human work.
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Then you'll ask AI for a short strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats analysis.
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We call this a SWOT analysis.
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On the human connection versus AI for your business and for these tasks that you've described above.
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Then ask AI for three human moments in your business to either add or take advantage of and pick one that you can double down on this week.
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Now, I'll provide this prompt that I've already created for you in the description of this audio or video.
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You can download it or go to markmason.com to find it.
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But the point is you want to use whatever AI that you're using to identify a place in your business where you can start building a moat.
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Here's a pro tip from this approach that you should be using anytime you use AI.
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Notice that we ask AI to ask you about your specific business before it answers.
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That's the one move that makes answers come back specific to you instead of getting back generic AI slop.
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And that's a whole method that we're going to talk about in a future video.
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I'll be excited to deliver that to you in the coming weeks.
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So here's the takeaway.
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Use AI in your business for everything that really doesn't need you so that there's more of you for the moments that do.
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Next week, we'll get back to something a little more practical like how to set up Claude to do some tasks in your small business without doing any coding.
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Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the Mark Mason Show.
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For more content like this, hit subscribe or head on over to markmason.com.
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Hook up with us on social media or leave feedback.
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Until next time, ciao.