Why AI UGC Is a Trap (And What Actually Works) | Cody Plofker

Written By Andrew Foxwell | Co-Founder of Foxwell Digital

This episode features Cody Plofker, of Jones Road Beauty, and one of the most talked-about voices in the DTC/e-commerce space. The conversation covers how Cody has turned Claude into a full-stack CRO and conversion engine, going 5-for-5 (as he puts it) on winning A/B tests with almost 10% CVR lifts each.  

Cody also gets into his end-to-end workflow and how it all starts with his "customer intelligence" markdown file fed by live MCPs ( a combination of Junip reviews, RichPanel CX tickets, OuterSignal, ListenLabs, GA4, Heatmap API). He also covers how he built Jones Road's entire design system inside a GitHub markdown file so he can now one-shot landing pages at an 80% quality rate in a single session.

Andrew and Will dig in with the harder questions from why human taste still matters, why QC agents alone won't save you and how to decide whether to build a landing page first or an ad first, The episode closes on KPIs and how Cody is raising output expectations across the board and tying AI utilization directly into performance evaluations.

Key Takeaways: 

  • How a CRO intelligence process that's pulled from customer reviews, support tickets, surveys, heatmaps, and GA4 can change the quality of your test hypotheses.

  • What you're actually leaving on the table when relying on QC agents to catch everything in your AI output.

  • Why you should be building your ads & landing pages from a single brief. 

  • How your team can go from idea to live within 24 hours to get more testing cycles and improve your overall funnel launch standard.

  • How to use this analysis to surface winning persona/angle/format combinations you quietly turned off a year ago.

  • Understanding how much of your competitive moat actually lives in the quality of data and documentation you've fed into your AI system.

  • When you tell your team AI adoption is mandatory and the approach that creates real behavior change.

  • What "best in class" output actually looks like now that AI has raised the ceiling on what a single operator can produce.

Tangible Links

To learn more about Cody Plofker and his team at Jones Road Beauty go here: https://x.com/codyplofhttps://www.jonesroadbeauty.com/

To connect With Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com

To connect with Will Sartorious DM Him Here https://x.com/will_sartorius

To Connect With Thomas Moen DM him Here https://x.com/thomasmoen

To learn More about The Foxwell Founders Community and the conversations, like this one being had go here: www.foxwellfounders.com

Full Transcript

Andrew: Welcome to another episode of AI D2C WTF. So good to be with you again, Will, and today's guest — Cody Ploffer. Legend. Obviously everybody loves this guy. He's doing a ton with AI. The episode was absolutely mental, in my opinion, in terms of the things he talked about. What's your take on this?

Will: Yeah, I think "mental" is an understatement. It seems like he has become his own CRO agency in and of itself, and it's very clearly driving results. But also — how to properly use Claude Code and how to incentivize your employees to use Claude Code. I think he just did a really nice job touching on all these things that we're all sort of stressing out about. But if you're interested in landing pages, this is the one to listen to.

Andrew: Yeah — AI landing pages, the creative process, the way the systems work in his organization, and organizational AI usage. A lot of good topics touched on today. Let's get into the episode.

Tracking CRO Tests at Scale

Andrew: As I was just saying to you, everybody loves hearing from you and loves hearing what you're up to. The first question I want to talk about is what you mentioned to me at the Meta Performance Marketing Summit — showing me how many landing pages you've built. You admitted it was not a great use of your time as a CEO, but you said it had been huge in terms of results. One question I had is: you're building all these pages and going through them. How are you keeping track of the tests in a way that makes sense? Because you're doing so many iterations, and everybody does this a little bit differently.

Cody: Yeah, I built a roadmap tool. That was actually one of the first things I did — and I don't follow it, I don't organize it. I just hired somebody new, which we'll talk about, to run this whole process for me. I'm going to give her everything I built and did. But I'm just terrible at taking the time to do it. Theoretically it would all be in there. Otherwise it's just kind of like intelligent chaos. But yeah, built a lot of pages — a little combo of new landers and then doing a ton of website CRO with Claude as well.

Andrew: So I'll just ask one more follow-up on this. You've gone through all of these and — how have you decided which elements to use? Because a lot of the pages I saw you had built, they have obviously the PDP and then a whole bunch of features under it — different skin tone variations, all these different features that I'm sure you've seen convert before. How do you decide which to put where? Is it based on what you know about the best-performing combinations?

The 5-for-5 CRO Streak — and Why

Cody: Yeah, that's a good question. Those were actually sections I built for our PDP for a new launch we had. For me, the most foundational thing — and I've said this in a lot of tweets — I'm five for five on intelligence tests that I've run end to end in Claude. And by end to end, I mean starting with the insights and the research and the strategy.

What I think is cool is not just that I can design and build stuff, but because you can do that so fast, I actually think the strategy is more important. You only have a certain limited number of testing slots you can take up. So being able to do those to a much higher degree of quality — I think I'm really onto something, because prior to this, we have never had five winning tests in a row. Usually it's like one or two out of ten. And these were some pretty big wins — like five to ten percent lifts.

Andrew: Ten percent lift on CVR?

Cody: Yeah, CVR.

Andrew: That's insane. I mean, relatively speaking — that's crazy.

Cody: Yeah. And the fact that it's multiple in a row. The reason why is this customer intelligence system I trained. I just — I didn't know where it was going to go — but one Sunday I was just like, hey, I feel like Claude could do a pretty good job with CRO. So I started feeding Claude everything I had access to. I gave it our intelligence, MCP, I gave it a Slack channel, I gave it spreadsheets, I gave it transcripts of Looms from a past CRO agency, I gave it notes I always take in Granola when I'm recording my podcast. I've had Dylan Ander on twice — he's the CEO of Heatmap — and I gave it those notes. He later sent me his book as a PDF. So I kind of built these knowledge bases and trained it.

And then what I'll do is just go to Claude and say, "Hey, this is what I want to do. Here's what I have. What else do you need?" And I'm like, "What do you need for UX best practices?" And Claude tells me — Baymard. So I go scan the web and find that. So Claude kind of has all the CRO frameworks. It's trained on the ICE framework. It's trained to look at highest traffic pages above the fold as the highest-leverage areas. There's just a certain testing framework we've picked up over the years from working at different agencies. It's trained on that. So it has the CRO basics. Then it has our data — at the time IntelliGems MCP, now GA4. We have the Heatmap API. So it's pulling in data from multiple sources and analyzing that data in dashboards.

And then where I think is the coolest part is the qualitative stuff. I have this one really big customer intelligence markdown file that analyzes a lot of subjective insights. It has our Junip MCP reviews, it has RichPanel CX tickets API, it has OuterSignal MCP, it has ListenLabs — which is like a customer survey and focus group tool we use for prospects — we can build panels and send surveys, do customer interviews. And then we use Typeform as well for internal customer advisory stuff. So Claude analyzes all of that.

I have skills set up — any of the skills, like my CRO skill or landing page building skill, anytime they run, they actually refresh those APIs and pull new fresh info into that customer intelligence markdown file. So the reason that's important — and it's a long way of saying this — to your question of where do you even start and how do you know what to test: I just ask Claude. It'll analyze all of this. And I think that's been the biggest factor.

Then I can go and design four variations of each test, stack variables, and be able to design and develop features. Claude knows from analyzing that markdown file that shade matching friction is the number one issue. I then have a skill that does competitive intelligence — looks at eight different websites, sees how they handle that friction, what they do on their PDP sections, builds a mockup of it. Once we get it in a good place, it gets that over into Shopify. So that's a little bit of the workflow that's been really cool.

Human in the Loop — Where Cody Gets Involved

Andrew: Yeah, that's awesome. I have a couple of follow-ups on that. The first question is: when you start running this process, at what point are you as the user getting involved? Is it not until the page is fully developed, and then you start providing feedback? Or do you have checkpoints throughout where Claude says, "Hey Cody, here's what I'm thinking — what are your thoughts?"

Cody: Yeah, that's a good question. Every phase I get involved. Usually there's a plan. I'll do a brief first — like, let's say we're trying to come up with a test or I'm trying to build these sections. There's some component of a brief where I say, "Hey, build me an HTML file, pulling from these sources." And obviously I'll build a skill for building the brief itself. Part of it I like to see, because everything has to be human in the loop. You can't just do an AI swap for everything.

I like to see the brief — it has the insights, the data, the qual and quant, the test plan. I just try to think of it like: what would a world-class CRO or digital product function look like without AI? And like, what would I want? I would want briefs based on user research, based on data, based on competitors. So I just had Claude doing that. I'll review that, give feedback and notes, kick it off. Then we go to the next phase — wireframes, mockups — and it'll do some mockups. I'll give feedback on those. And then once we get those in a good spot, there are probably multiple rounds of revisions. We'll then take that into Shopify. There's a ton of back and forth there.

I want to be super clear: this is a really poor use of my time. I do it at night because it's fun. I do it on weekends for fun. There are multiple, multiple rounds of revisions. This is not a one-shot thing. I can one-shot a page to 80% quality. That final 20% — that takes a long, long time.

Andrew: I certainly hear that. And getting the page into Shopify and ensuring the API is firing correctly can be such a pain in the ass.

Building Ads and Landing Pages Together

Andrew: The other question I have is: it sounds like you're using a lot of social listening tools to help build these pages. It's almost like a chicken-or-the-egg situation — are you thinking, "I'm going to build this page first and then build ads around it?" Or, "I have ads that are performing well, so I'm going to build the page for those ads and then build additional ads on that angle or persona?"

Cody: Almost like thinking of them together. So some of them — for the landing pages I probably have five or six templates. Those are like different pages in Shopify — their templates. Call it a listicle, a performance LP, which is more just your standard LP with a buy box, an enhanced PDP that looks like a PDP but is conversion-optimized, a "10 reasons why" advertorial that I adapted from Zach Stuck — so there are like four or five of those.

Those are the building blocks, and Shopify can duplicate them, you can put copy on them. My goal — and I want to chat with you about this because I'm not there yet on the outside — is to just have an idea and be able to build a funnel. And to me, a funnel is a toolkit of ads — call it 12-plus ads, diversified creative, statics — like a minimum viable test — and have that go to an adjacent landing page.

Andrew: Cool. I like that a lot. Honestly, using social listening insights to do CRO, and then to do ads — I've been doing the opposite, just using insights from ads to generate landing pages. But by that point, the angle may have fatigued out. So for discovering net new angles, that approach makes a ton of sense.

Why QC Agents Aren't Enough

Andrew: The other question I have — people love sharing their CRO agents. And I have a CRO QC agent that I think is pretty good. People ask me all the time: "Can I just have a bunch of QC agents go through this? Why do I have to be involved at all?" Can you talk to why just having QC agents isn't going to solve your problem — and why human judgment and taste matters here?

Cody: Yeah, I mean — so how are people using QC agents? Like, what components of it?

Andrew: For example, like your page should have social proof, a block with all the press articles that mentioned you. If you don't have these 20 things, your page won't perform — that kind of thing.

Cody: Yeah, I don't know. I think about it the same way you'd manage people. I was actually doing something earlier — I was whisper-flowing and giving feedback, and if somebody walked into the room, they would think I was on a call with a person. I was just like, "No, this is the framework we need for this" — we were redoing our KPIs.

I just think about it as managing people. And it's the same way — you can also choose to take junior or mid-level employees and not give them a lot of clarity and direction and not be in the workflow, and see what you get. Or you can give them clear direction upfront, proper context, and help them tweak along the way. I'm not trying to completely remove myself — that's where you get slow output.

At the very least, you have to spend a ton of time building. I put an ungodly amount of time into building our design system — a painstakingly large GitHub markdown file of our design system. That took so long. Now I can one-shot a page and have it be 80% there. But it's still not perfect. AI is not deterministic, and it still messes up some stuff. So you have to be in the loop.

I think building skills and context layers are the highest-leverage things you can do to allow you to be more hands-off later. But it's not just like, "Let me set up this thing." That's all just AI engagement bait on Twitter — "Oh, I built this thing that's launching 1,000 ads." That's where I've made mistakes on ads. On landing page stuff I've been much more detailed. When I've tried to do ads and said, "I'd love to launch 1,000 ads" — I'll get a few good reference ads and try to scale it, and it just becomes slop.

Will: Yeah, I completely agree. I hired someone to sit in Claude Code and generate ads because I tried to do it initially — just "generate me 100 ads, here's social listening, here's ad performance" — and the outputs are just not good.

What Systems You Need Now for Higher-Converting Creative

Andrew: So let's go back to creative overall. I think a lot of folks are trying to solve this with AI — we're going to take over creative and figure it out. Will's putting out a ton of proposals on this from Selfmade. Two questions, and maybe you both can answer: first, what systems need to be in place now to make higher-converting creative? And second, where is the creative workflow going to be by the end of 2026? Because right now it feels piecemeal. Nobody has mastered the workflow from brief to ad — all those pieces, bringing the teams together. And Cody, you've been really spot-on with predictions, so I'm curious what you think.

Cody: I haven't mastered it either. I'm a laser-focus person and all my effort has gone into the CRO stuff. Will is way ahead of me on image gen and that side of things — I want to get a lot better there.

I think it's interesting. I wouldn't want to be a software icon-builder or design tool right now — I think a lot of that is getting commoditized by people who can just build stuff. I consider Claude like the white-collar operating system — like, you never have to leave Claude and you can just do everything from there. Think about it: we have Motion MCP pulling in, we have Polar MCP, we have Meta MCP, we have Shopify — you just have all of your sources. Getting all of that stuff in one place is incredibly valuable.

One of the things we're working on internally is — even if you don't know where it's going to be valuable — getting people to change their workflows and behaviors. If they're used to using Docs or Sheets, and now you're asking them to do it in Claude, it's very different. But I just know that having everything connected in a context layer and talking to each other is going to be massive. I don't even know yet what all the value is going to be. But I think context is the most important thing — the models are great, they're all good, but actually having your context is the key. So the more you can document and orchestrate that stuff, the better.

But also — Meta is probably going to do a lot of it. That's what I think is going to happen.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that's true. We now have like 70 members connected to the Foxwell MCP — our knowledge base — and that's every call transcript we've ever had, everything in Slack, every SOP. What you said about landing pages being incredibly valuable in terms of bringing an answer forward for what's really going to work — I think that's a good point. But yes, Meta is going to do a certain percentage of this. The challenge is really sitting down and looking at where the inefficiencies are in your own workflow and how you're trying to solve them. I don't know, Will — what do you think people can do better now, and what does it look like in the future?

Will: For sure. I think there are sort of three pieces of the equation, at least as it pertains to ads and by association landing pages.

The first one is a gap analysis — you compare and juxtapose yourself to others in your vertical. What formats, personas, angles, and emotions are they testing that you're not? Index all of your ads — Claude's on 4.6, just have it go through all of your ads, look at your personas, angles, emotions — and say, "This is how I compare to my competitors." That's piece one.

Piece two is a time series analysis — you use the Meta API, pull in all the ads you've ever run for the past 365 days or five years or whatever, tag them all with the same taxonomy — persona, angle, emotion, format — and then you can say, "You know what, I turned this ad off a year ago, but I haven't run that persona/angle/format since." So you're able to resurface old winners rather than lose all those compounded learnings. A lot of brands have had so many successful equations in the past that have just been lost to time. It's such a pain to go back through your Meta ad library.

The third piece is social listening — perpetually scraping your reviews, subreddit comments, Facebook comments. If you add those all together and give them proper weights, you have a really good sense of what you need to be creating. Here are my gaps from the gap analysis, here's what's worked in the past, and here's what consumers are saying about me right now.

The cherry on top is using Reddit, TikTok, and Google Trends to see if there's anything trending right now that you can quickly spin up ads for. If you can spin up ads within 24 to 48 hours — I know it's hard, but it's actually not that hard — and sort of add that as the gravy, then you're going to be in a really, really good spot. That's my equation and how I think about things.

Andrew: Quality is important, but strategy is important — getting the right data, the right angles. And just speed to launch. I'm making that a core KPI of my growth team — a 24-hour funnel launch time. We review data on Monday, we have a deck, we're trying to automate that deck, but basically: here's an idea, this angle has taken off, here's an iteration on it. Pre-AI, teams were better or worse at this, but it just took too long. You'd get an idea and it's like, "We'll brief that, put it in Asana, go to design revisions, build a landing page" — it's a month later and you've missed the opportunity. No — let's get that live tomorrow. And even if that's just a V1, you can go brief UGC creators on that and scale it up.

Cody: Can I tell you where some of this comes from? I had a landing page somebody sent me — a new template I hadn't seen before. I sent it to a few people, including Zach Stuck, and Zach said, "I'll tell you how it's doing in 24 hours." And it haunted me. I was so upset. I was like, that's what it takes to be successful. And if I asked my team to launch this, it would have taken an embarrassingly long time.

Will: Yeah, I mean — so much of it is going through and assessing the systems you have and completely adjusting all of this. It's a totally different ball game as it relates to digital marketing now. So much of the AI stuff is focused on ads, but it's not — we all know that launching ads that match to landers in a persona-driven funnel is ultimately what helps scale big brands. And there were way too many tools in the middle. It doesn't need to be that way anymore. Too many people in the middle too.

Cody: Yeah — you have to brief a copywriter, brief a designer, you have no idea what their priorities are or their workload, and then you have too many approvals. Versus now it's like, I have an idea for an ad, I'm going to make some ads. I have an idea for a landing page, I'm going to make a landing page. That's so much of the actual value — you don't have to rely on other people to produce stuff.

Incentivizing Employees and Creator Programs

Andrew: I agree. I also think there's not enough employee alignment on this. There's not enough incentive for them to be faster. This is something I've been working on with a couple of agencies. How do we design systems where, when the employee saves 40% of their time, there's a financial incentive tied to that? Cody, you said before — if you were starting an agency today, one of the three things you would do is offer AI automation as a service to brands, audit and automate, and take a percentage of the savings.

Cody: That was an old tweet — I forgot about that one.

Andrew: We went deep cuts on our research. But my point is, I think a lot of it is employee incentive. Okay, look — if you're going to do this, we're going to save X amount of time. Let's put that into dollars, and that's going to be a bonus for you. That's a big part of it.

Andrew: So when you're utilizing Claude and building all this — don't you ever run out of storage and tokens? How do you functionally do this? Because from my end I'm hitting the wall, and I feel like a lot of people are.

Cody: I have my whole team on Claude Enterprise. Most people are on the Pro plan. Power users either request extra usage and we approve it, or they're upgraded to the Max plan — which I think is around $100 a month — if they're proving it's worthwhile. I'm on a personal $200-a-month Max plan. And as a power user — outside of that one week period where they had all those usage limits that were clearly bugs — I never hit it. I push it really hard. I use Claude 4.7, extra high. I mean, I don't use it that much nine to five because I'm busy in meetings. But mornings, nights, weekends — I almost never hit the limit.

I've thought about it, though. What would I pay somebody to run these CRO tests? I'd pay thousands a month. I'm paying $200. If I had to pay $1,000 a month, it's legitimately building that much value for us. And I've also canceled three tools that'll save us a few thousand a month — not only saving money, but those tools were actually inhibiting our workflow.

Andrew: One thing — you talked about your creator in residence program and shipping daily content. How is AI playing into that?

Cody: We're not there yet. It's been hard to build and just find the right people to lead it. We're doing stuff, but it's been a slow start.

I think as big of an AI bull as I am, I'm actually pretty bearish on AI content. I think static ads are one thing and it's great, but when I see people talk about AI UGC, I'm just like — you're so far off. I've read some good stuff on this lately. The ClickUp founder did a really good tweet after their layoffs — he had some really good points. He was talking about essentially automating as much of the administrative stuff so you can spend more time talking to customers. How can you automate as much of the operations, the backend, the analysis so you can spend more time being creative?

That's what I'd want my creative strategist to do — just think. Where creative strategy used to involve poking into Motion, building reports, spending a lot of time in an ad account — hopefully that can just be handed to somebody on a silver platter: "Here's exactly what the data is from the last seven days, and here's the ad you should make." And then maybe that changes the role. Everyone's talking about the role of the media buyer changing — maybe it changes the role of the creative strategist too. If the analysis can be done by anybody, I actually just want to hand that to a creator who really gets social content.

So that's my goal — we have some dashboards that show our top ad account data but also organic social trends. Hopefully people — this is my vision — we have the studio built out. If you're listening, I just need the person to run it. The idea is to have these dashboards on a big TV in the studio, like AirPlayed: "Hey, here are four videos and the top trending thing — acne-prone skin is trending on TikTok right now, here are the top four viral videos. Make a version of that." So long answer to say: not automating the creative, but automating all the prior stuff — the project management, the insights — and the post-production as well.

Getting Teams to Actually Adopt AI

Andrew: I want to sort of go back to something we were talking about earlier. Similar to you, I'm kind of addicted to Claude Code. I think there are certain people that just find it impossible to pull themselves away from. How do you incentivize your team to have that same level of commitment? I've done certain things internally, but I'm curious — Cody, it probably takes you like two or three hours to do a landing page now. If you were to hand it off to someone on your team, it'd probably take them five days. How do you reconcile that, and what are you doing to teach them or hand things off?

Cody: Yeah, it's a good question. First of all, it kills me because it's so hard — it's unbearably hard and we're working through it right now.

So I have a Director of Data and AI who's leading all our initiatives internally. He's a data analyst by trade who was super passionate about AI, so he's leading everybody. One thing we did is get everybody on a Claude plan, and for a while he did weekly trainings. He'd teach them Claude co-work skills. He did a mandatory one on what a GitHub repository is. He did one this morning with a small group — just like, "I'm going to build something live; who has something they want to build?" Trying to get people excited and show them how it can help.

I would say it definitely helped. Everybody is using Claude daily, some more than others. I would say the highest level is obviously him. One of his goals — and one of my goals for him — was to get our data warehouse into Claude. We're working with Polar to do that so anyone can get insights from it. And we're building a lot.

So our demand planning team built a demand planning software in there. That's replacing an $80,000-a-year software, and doing it better actually. So on one level that's happening. Then I would say like a bell curve — most of the org is like, "I'll use some skills, I'll try this stuff," and then there are laggers. It's really hard. He's even noticing — meeting with people, doing some internal change management work — people are really resistant to changing their workflows. Probably multiple reasons. First of all, they just don't know what it's capable of. Sometimes they're too busy. And they worry that they're automating themselves out of a job. That's definitely a concern.

So it's really, really hard. What we're noticing is — and the ClickUp guy talked about this — you have to create disruption. I have one person who's doing a really good job using it, and she hasn't built stuff herself but she's using it for workflows we've built for her. Part of the reason is she's got additional scope while losing people on her team — one's on maternity leave, one just left. She's had no choice but to use it. The people who are comfortable don't feel the urgency.

I've built five landing pages — and by "built" I mean I populated the templates with content without ever going into Shopify. I used Shopify CLI to do stuff you'd normally do manually, because I'm not going to sit there and upload images one at a time. But I find most people aren't doing that. They're just comfortable in their old workflow. So I don't know what the full answer is. I just know we have to disrupt it. I tried to be like, "Hey guys, this is exciting!" And now it's like — no, you f***ing have to do this. If you want to work here, you have to follow this process. You have to put this information here. It's just a new way of doing things. I've been unimpressed with how people think they're using Claude and they're actually using it to like 10% of its ability.

Will: Yeah, I think a lot of it is — whenever you have employee stuff and you're trying to get them motivated, the number one thing to look at is: what are they scared of? They're scared of automating themselves out of a job. So discussing it and saying, "Look, this is not something I intend to replace you for. I need you to know I'm doing this because I'm trying to make your life easier and your work more efficient." Doubling down on that.

Also, giving them a roadmap of what you hope it looks like — even if it's not what it'll ultimately be — and refining that every month, going through and saying, "This is what we're trying to do, these are the things in my head, so you have more transparency." So much of it as an employee is just guessing what the leader is trying to do. The more transparently you can talk about that, the better.

The third one we talked about is incentives — absolutely incentivize people. If and when you're adopting this, if you can prove you're saving money, there are financial incentives aligned with that. This is just like when Toyota came up with the Kaizen process in 1980 — they gave people a proportional amount of money based on the percentage of time saved. That's how everybody became obsessed with incremental efficiency improvement. That screwdriver is positioned too high — let's move it down here. It was incremental, not huge. And I think that resonates with people, because a lot of people sit down to do this and it's like sitting down to write a book — you don't know where to start. The answer is: start small. It's brick by brick. Audit your time, understand where AI can help, start there.

And ultimately — show people the possibility. You're going to keep working here, you're a great employee. If you want more time with your family, this is one way to do it. This is a way to make your work more efficient. Incentivizing them that way too, not just financially.

Cody: First of all, you're just so much better at that than me. I just try to brute force it. You're so much more thoughtful and empathetic — like, "Oh, here's what people are actually thinking." I'm like, I just want people to use it.

But how do you feel about just making it mandatory? Do you think that's a good idea or a bad idea?

Will: Yeah. As a business owner and as the leader of any organization, you have the right to make anything mandatory. This is your organization. The issue with mandatory statements is — if you come in and just say, "This is mandatory, period," that's a problem. What typically happens in corporate settings is they'll send a paragraph from the leader, and people are like, "What is this?" There's no runthrough of the why.

If instead you go through and say, "Look, here's the situation. We're making AI mandatory in 40% of what you're doing. I want to make sure you're all there. Here's why it's important — it's going to allow us to scale, it's going to allow you to spend more time with your family, more time to think strategically." That is a massive leverage — being an emotional leader and saying, "The fear I have is X, Y, and Z. The hope I have is X, Y, and Z." Speaking about it honestly. Checking back in on the mandate every month. And also saying, "I may not make it mandatory in the future if I feel like it's a bad idea — but right now, it's absolutely something that has to happen."

And allowing people to disagree. "If you vastly disagree with me on this, you can come to me — you're not going to be fired for telling me if you think this is stupid or could be better. I want you to know you're empowered to come to me and say this is a problem." So much of getting people motivated is showing them the why and what you're hoping the future looks like — not just a dogmatic statement.

Cody: Makes sense. Very thoughtful. Much more thoughtful than me.

Will: Well, this is like so much of what I do now — helping organizations and agencies that are in the founders community, coaching on employee stuff. AI is obviously a big topic because everyone's trying to figure it out.

KPIs in the Age of AI

Andrew: Good episode. I have one more question — do you have time, Cody?

Cody: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: The question is about KPIs. You mentioned you're redoing your KPIs now. There's a lot of not focusing on in-platform metrics, as you've said, and focusing more on incrementality. How are you reshaping KPIs in the age of AI to make better decisions in the short and long term?

Cody: Expectations are just higher. Expect that people can do more, get more done, move faster. For us, KPIs are tied to bonuses — to their overall rating, but also bonuses. If I'm going to be paying out based on it, it's gotta be pretty high expectations — what I think people are capable of and what best in class looks like. I don't think we're there yet, but I'm definitely going to set expectations there.

So when it comes to the volume of output — number of ads launched, funnels launched — definitely trying to pair those hand in hand with it. You can just get more done. You can just get more done.

Andrew: It's interesting. I'm curious about your philosophy. It's not KPIs per se, but one of the components of our performance evaluation is AI usage and utilization. Last year we did a bounty — whoever did the most with it won a prize. This year it's like, all right, cool, that was fun. Now we're making it mandatory. It's just our general expectation — the same way you're using a computer and Slack and email, this is a tool. We will train you on it and invest in it, and here's why we're doing it. So it is part of people's evaluations, reviewed monthly.

Cody: Is that just like token usage?

Andrew: No, because I don't want to incentivize that. They kind of have to prove how they're using it — how they're improving their role and their function with it.

Cody: Yeah, that makes sense.

Andrew: That's interesting. Cody, thank you for being on. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.

Cody: Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

Andrew Foxwell | Co-Founder of Foxwell Digital

Co-Founder of Foxwell Digital, a social media advisory firm focused on honesty and transparency across paid social. Through its membership offerings, online courses, account management, and consulting services, Foxwell Digital helps brands and agencies make better decisions and scale sustainably.

https://foxwellfounders.com/
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