Happy Tuesday!
This week I sat down with Josh Thomas, founder of VAiQ. Josh places virtual assistants for executives, and he spent all of 2025 figuring out how AI fit into human teams, without replacing them.
(That second part is the conversation we are constantly having internally, and the question every client asks before hiring our team, so this one hit close to home.)
We covered the 40% productivity unlock, a Gemini hack hiding inside your Google Workspace, and Josh's framework for AI-assisted content. Here are 5 takeaways:
Watch the full episode here:
1/ "Replace Humans With AI" Already Failed
Forbes ran a study showing that workforces properly trained on AI produce up to 40% more than untrained ones. That is the productivity story.
The cautionary half is the one Josh kept coming back to:
Klarna laid off 700 customer service agents.
AI tanked service quality. Whoops. So, Klarna brought the 700 back, then publicly committed to a human workforce.
Josh's framing: AI is a force multiplier on humans, not a substitute for them.
The companies betting on full automation keep walking it back. We are past the point where saying that is even controversial.
2/ The Free AI Hiding In Your Google Workspace
This was the takeaway I shared with the team immediately after recording:
If you run your business email through Google Workspace (and roughly 90% of small businesses do), every person on your domain already has Pro-tier access to Gemini, Notebook LM, and Nano Banana. By default. No additional license.
Josh found out the same way I just did. By accident.
Just go to gemini.google.com, log in with your workspace account, and it is there. We were paying for Nano Banana through our Workspace bill before we ever discussed adding it.
The bigger point: the reason most teams don't use AI heavily is friction. Workspace eliminates most of it, because Gemini is already wired into Drive, Calendar, and Gmail.
The connection layer that other AI tools charge $99/mo for is already paid for.
3/ The Bookend
Josh's framework for AI-assisted content is simple. Human at the start, AI in the middle, human at the end.
- Human up front sets direction: The big idea, the source material, the angle.
- AI in the middle handles the heavy lifting: Outline, drafting, research pulls, structure.
- Human at the end does the finishing: Tone, nuance, fact-checking, the things that make it not read like a robot wrote it.
That last part is also where you catch the hallucinations, which is the non-negotiable layer. This is exactly how our content services work:
AI compresses the middle, which reduces cost to clients.
The start and end stay human. That ensures the quality clients come to us for in the first place.
4/ Brain Dumps Beat Custom GPTs
I asked Josh whether he had built a "Josh GPT" so his team could sound like him without him being in the room.
His answer surprised me. He hadn't.
Instead, he takes a walk while a team member hands him a list of topics. He talks his way through them out loud. The transcript becomes source material for everything downstream.
Tone, cadence, metaphors. All of it baked in because he literally said the words.
You don't need to engineer a sophisticated voice clone. You need 20 minutes of yourself talking unstructured into a Wispr Flow, and a teammate who knows what to do with the transcript.
(This lined up with what Doug Downs said in newsletter #69 about long-form content starting with a recorded conversation, not a blank Google Doc.)
5/ Stay In Your Lane
Josh's closing line was the one rattling around my head all week.
Right now, there is something on your to-do list that you have absolutely no business doing yourself.
Inbox triage, calendar scheduling, vendor follow-ups…
Stuff that should cost less than what your time is worth, but somehow ended up on your desk because the alternative felt like "more work."
Get it off your plate:
- AI for the parts a system can handle.
- A VA for the parts that need a human.
- You for the parts only you can do.
That is the online business game right now.
Until next week,
Greg
P.S. If you want to talk through how we would run AI-assisted content for your brand, grab a slot here.