Last December, I sat down with a real estate company. Father-son team. Smart people. They knew AI existed but hadn’t done much with it.
I didn’t prepare a presentation. Didn’t make slides. I just opened my laptop and ran a live demo of an AI agent doing something useful for their business.
About ten minutes in, the father stopped me. “Wait… it can do that?”
He immediately started rattling off ideas. Thirty, maybe forty different ways he could use this across his business. Listing automation, client communication, and market analysis. I barely said anything for the next twenty minutes. He was selling himself.
That’s when I realized something I should have figured out way earlier.
Nobody Needs More Information About AI
There are thousands of articles explaining what AI can do. Podcasts. YouTube videos. LinkedIn posts (including mine). People aren’t short on information.
What they’re short on is seeing it work. On something real. Right in front of them.
It’s the difference between reading about how good a restaurant is and actually tasting the food. One is interesting. The other changes your behavior.
The Otis Elevator Lesson
A friend of mine brought up Elisha Otis recently. He’s the guy who made elevators safe in the 1800s. The problem wasn’t the technology. The problem was trust. Nobody wanted to get into a box held up by a rope.
So Otis went to a convention, got on a loaded elevator platform in front of a crowd, and had someone cut the rope. The safety brake caught it. The crowd gasped. And elevators went mainstream.
He didn’t explain why elevators were safe. He showed them.
I think about that a lot. Because the AI adoption challenge right now isn’t technical. The tools work. The barrier is belief. People don’t believe it can do useful things for them specifically… until they see it happen.
What Happens When You Show Instead of Tell
At one of my workshops here in Austin, a chef showed up. Zero technical background. Probably the least tech-savvy person in the room. By the end of the day, she was building custom GPTs that automated parts of her restaurant work.
She didn’t need a pitch. She needed to sit down and try it with someone who could answer her questions in real time.
I’ve seen this pattern over and over. The salon owners who didn’t know AI could answer their phone calls. The investor who realized he could automate his deal sourcing. The content creator who watched an agent draft a week’s worth of posts in fifteen minutes.
Every single one of them had the same reaction. “I didn’t know it could do that.”
How to Actually Get People On Board
If you’re trying to get your team, your clients, or your partners excited about AI… here’s what I’d do:
- Pick one problem they already complain about
- Build or find an AI solution that fixes it (doesn’t have to be perfect)
- Show them live. Don’t explain. Demonstrate.
That’s it. Skip the slide deck. Skip the company-wide memo about “our AI strategy.” Just show one person one thing that saves them time on something annoying.
I call this approach start small and iterate. Don’t try to sell the whole vision at once. Show one win. Then another. Let curiosity do the rest.
Because once someone sees what’s possible, you don’t have to convince them. They start convincing themselves.
Try This Today
Think about one person on your team who’s skeptical about AI. Find one thing they do every week that’s repetitive and annoying. Build a quick demo or find a tool that handles it. Then just… show them.
No pitch. No slides. Just “hey, look at this.”
That’s the Otis move. And it works every time.
