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Overview

Most small businesses think they’re using AI the moment they open ChatGPT. That’s a tool habit. Building your marketing processes around AI is a business model, and the gap between the two shows up in your results long before anyone can explain why.

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch talks with Jérémy Jarry, CMO of Bookipi, about what happened when he rebuilt his marketing team around AI over the past year. Jarry explains what AI native means in practice, why his team started with one person and one dreaded task, and how they learned to measure AI by hours saved and revenue earned.

This conversation is for small business owners, marketers, and agency leaders who are using AI tools but haven’t seen the payoff yet. You’ll hear how to pick your first process, what human in the loop looks like day to day, when to scale AI back, and how to keep up with constant change without chasing every new model.

Guest Bio

Jérémy Jarry is the Chief Marketing Officer of Bookipi, an international SaaS platform that millions of small businesses use for invoicing, proposals, contracts, websites, and getting paid. Over the past year, he rebuilt Bookipi’s marketing team around AI from the ground up and wrote about the experience for Entrepreneur. His work centers on growth, go-to-market execution, and applying AI across marketing so lean teams can compete with much larger companies.

Key Takeaways

• Jarry defines AI native as redesigning a process from scratch with AI’s capabilities in mind. He describes it as a mindset change for the whole team.
• Start with your calendar. Look for the work that eats the most time and the work your team dreads, then see where AI fits.
• Prove it with one person first. Bookipi started by automating one marketer’s reporting, which freed that person to explain the numbers instead of gathering them.
• The same thinking applies outside marketing. A plumber with an AI receptionist can keep fixing the leak while the next job gets booked.
• In a Bookipi survey of more than 2,000 customers, the top reason for skipping AI was a knowledge gap. The team expected cost to top the list.
• AI still needs your direction. A prompt like “write an email for John” goes nowhere until you define the topic and the outcome you want.
• Give people time to adopt. Bookipi let slower adopters keep their old processes, and they came around after seeing teammates spend more time on creative work.
• Human in the loop means real review steps. Bookipi feeds AI a central knowledge base for brand voice, and nothing launches until a person checks every asset.
• Measure hours saved and revenue. Counting how many agents the team built each week told Bookipi very little.
• Review time has to be shorter than build time. If checking AI’s work takes longer than doing it yourself, pull the process back and rethink it.

Great Moments (Timestamps)

• [00:02] – John on the difference between a tool habit and a business model
• [01:11] – The moment Bookipi decided to rethink its marketing processes
• [02:04] – What AI native means, and why Jarry calls it a buzzword worth defining
• [04:12] – Where small teams should start: your calendar
• [05:08] – Automated reporting and the plumber with an AI receptionist
• [07:23] – The 2,000-customer survey and the real barrier to AI adoption
• [10:44] – Where adoption stalled and how the team handled it
• [12:43] – What human in the loop looks like at Bookipi
• [14:46] – Measuring agents built versus hours saved
• [16:35] – Keeping up with the pace of AI without chasing every tool
• [17:55] – How Bookipi started with a tradie’s invoicing app

Memorable Quotes

“Most small businesses think they’re using AI the moment they open ChatGPT at their desk. And that’s a tool habit, not a business model.” – John Jantsch

“Look at your calendar. Look at what is actually taking a lot of time. Look at what you don’t like doing and see if you can integrate AI within it.” – Jarry

“I don’t know many marketers that like to create reports.” – Jarry

“We need to make sure that the time that the human is actually going to spend to review the campaign is actually less than the time it would take them to actually create a campaign from scratch themselves.” – Jarry

Resources

The BJP owed it electoral success in part to attracting young and first-time voters with promises of employment, economic growth and what is known in Hindi as “achhe din aane waale hain,” or “good days are coming.” Since the BJP took office in 2014, the country has charted strong GDP growth, but the macroeconomic success has been belied by ongoing and rampant inequality that falls especially hard on the poor and young.

The BJP claims to have fulfilled some of its more targeted campaign promises, such as engaging in merit-based public sector hiring. Yet 40% of Indian college graduates under 25 are unemployed. Paradoxically, the unemployment rate for youth who cannot read and write hovers around just 3.4%. For college graduates, who are the CJP’s main constituency, it is nearly nine times higher at roughly 29%.

Seizing on this building discontent, the CJP uses the slogan “Achhe Din” ironically, on posters and memes. Its manifesto opens: “If you are going to call us cockroaches, the least you can do is pay our rent.” It calls for making “lazy” – a code word for the unemployed – a protected political identity.

Underlying the joke is a serious point: that stigmatization of the jobless offends millions of impoverished people, something critics note is protected in the dignity and equality guarantees of articles 21 and 14 of the Constitution.

Who speaks for women?

The BJP has gained women’s electoral support through a combination of targeted welfare schemes, support for increased women’s representation in legislatures and endless talk of women’s empowerment, or “nari shakti.”

However, masses of women protesters have challenged state-defined women’s empowerment. They stop police vans carrying detainees, scale barricades and criticize the prime minister.

One of the most prominent among them is Neha Bora, a Ph.D. student and president of the left-wing All India Students’ Association, whose blunt messages to Modi has seen her profile skyrocket. Modi has said he has been subject to vulgar abuses by the protesters and was shocked by how “our daughters” could use such foul language, but he viewed them as “misdirected children” and was ready to forgive them.

The throngs of women who are protesting express deep discontent with the government’s paternalism. They challenge its Hindu-inflected understanding of empowerment and insist on speaking for themselves rather than being spoken for. They express outrage at the government’s brutal response to their peaceful protests. They describe how the police have beaten and sexually harassed them, while anonymous self-styled guardians of religious morality engage in doxing, threats of rape and acid attacks, and circulate demeaning AI-generated images of them. For protesters, that record sits uneasily besides the prime minister’s denunciation of violence against women.

‘Cockroaches never die’

The CJP motto, “Cockroaches never die,” has wide resonance. Protesters have survived, but not escaped, violence, incarceration, internet blackouts and police blockades. The sunglass-wearing cockroach mascot makes a mockery of leader-centered nationalist branding.

Recent youth-led uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal have shown how quickly online mobilization can outrun official control. What distinguishes the CJP is that it pairs humor with legal and technical infrastructure. Its online portal Saakshi vault, which means “witness,” collects photos and videos of police violence that protesters upload; volunteer lawyers use these to issue complaints against officers.

The CJP’s recent and remarkable successes do not mean that the movement is likely to disrupt the BJP’s hold on power in the next parliamentary elections in 2029. For now at least, the CJP is fairly concentrated in urban strongholds and would need to build organizational infrastructure and develop long-term demands.

However, a generation that a government minister wrote off as lazy and expendable has exposed the cracks in the system that the chief justice defended. Whatever form it takes, the movement provides a vision and reminder of what democracy looks like.

Amrita Basu, Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.