The Two Things We're Doing For The Rest Of 2026

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil asks Eric to name the two things he is actually doing for the rest of 2026, and the answer is less about tools than you would expect. Along the way they share their own survey of 100 companies on AI agent adoption, and the numbers are far below the hype. Neil also gives away the specific tactic he is using to get cited by ChatGPT and Gemini. Key takeaways◾Of 100 companies surveyed, only 17 use AI agents in marketing at all, and just 3.5% of their marketing staff.◾The fastest route into AI answers is getting into the same articles that already cite your competitors.◾Shipping constantly beats one big launch. Staying top of mind is the strategy. Chapters00:00 Marketing and Hiring Priorities02:55 What Counts as an Agent06:20 2026 Focus Areas10:43 Europe and Service Expansion

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  If you had to pick two things you're gonna do for the remainder of 2026, what are they gonna be? And then the second question I have for you is, are you ever going to fix how your company is just founded by you and bring in someone else?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  So, is your question tied to marketing or business? Both, okay? Let's talk about marketing first, what I'm gonna do for the two things for the rest of 2026.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And then do the business side, and then the third one, which was about the founding partner or co-founder, that is more business side, but I'm curious on all three.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  I think, so I'll start with marketing first. So we're, and I'm sure you guys are doing this too, but it's not even just about marketable moments, it's really about how can you ship stuff and stay top of mind, right? And you look at when Nikita Beer, the former product lead at X, he left pretty quickly. But he launched a lot very quickly, I knew he was gonna fall asleep. He was about to yawn. So, so anyway, Nikita Beer was like, look, it's not about just like one big launch video or whatever. It's like constantly shipping all the time so you're top of mind, right? And there's so much stuff we're shipping around, like the single brain gateway we have, the ambient agent. There's all these things that we have where the engineers now, they're all learning how to do marketable moments. And so we wanna get, we wanna push that very hard. But to answer your question directly, it's also the agent-led growth piece, right? How do you set up the MD files?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  How do you make it easy for agents to purchase? And setting up APIs and MCPs. I think, you know, it's that agent-led growth piece, we wanna solidify that foundation, and marketable moments ties in with that. So that's maybe two things. And the third thing is, I'm paying a lot more attention now to how we're doing organic social. So we just had a new contractor start on organic social. First post he puts out, like 500 comments on LinkedIn, and then it's like he's just responding to people and stuff. I'm like, this is pretty good, right? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit on that more, but how this relates to also the business as well is I have now all these workflows sourcing for all the people. And I stole your two promotions at two different companies, an average 10 year, three years. It's just sourcing everything every single day. And it's also sending them, sending them very specific questions to, which we can talk about later.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  So that's the three things on the marketing side. And related to that, on the business side is the recruiting piece, right? We have these workflows reaching out to people. Hey Neil, I saw that you're working on this and that. You know, we're building these revenue company brains at single grain. Would you be interested? We're looking for AI, very AI-forward people, right? So recruiting's a big one. Second thing is, related to that, there's some executives that we're bringing in. To answer your question directly, would I be, would I be open to a strategic investor? Like, yeah, I would be. And we do have a new executive that's coming in, that's gonna free up a lot of my time. We'll see. Where I can focus more on product, marketing, and recruiting.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Before I ask you a question about the single brain side.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  Well, then you have to answer the question too.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  No, before I ask you a question.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Okay, but then you have to answer the question after, go ahead.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Dude, this is how many people actually use agents in the marketing world?

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm curious how it looks in a year.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  So Neil, you should read to the.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Sure, so how popular are agents in the marketing world? OpenAI says users are using agents when it comes to their platform 1.1% of the time only, which is really tiny. We interviewed companies, 100 companies. The total employee count in marketing was 1,416. Numbers are rounded for clarity here. Not the one for companies using agents, because that's a straight number out of 100. But only 17 of those companies were using agents in marketing. And when you dive in a little bit deeper, majority of the companies aren't actually using agents. And when you actually look at how many employees, it's only 3.5%, roughly 3.5% of employees are using agents in marketing.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I don't know about the other departments, it's hard for us to survey that, due to the fact that we don't have access to a lot of engineers or product people. Is that a dog?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  It's a dog, it's a dog.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  As a dog barking. But yeah, I was like, it's very tiny. Everyone talks about agents and how they're using them, but I don't think actually most people use them.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Let's test this real quick. So Noah, how would you define what an agent is, and I'll repeat it in here?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  A program that's gonna run things for you and manage all of your AI.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Okay, what do you define an agent as?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I look at an agent as something that is

• 4:55Speaker 01

  software that's going out there and doing things for you, and actually executing and getting it done and reporting back what it did.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Noah and Neil said the same thing, and I actually agree with you guys. To me, an agent is just code. Like, you define something that you want, the agent thinks in the middle, and then you get an output, right? And so, I just don't think that, I don't think most people, like, agent is such a weird, like, I even hate using the word agent, right? Like, it sounds so like, oh, look at me, I'm using H7, look at me, I have a six-pack, right? Like, you don't even need to say that, it's just like, I'm just having this do it for me, right? So I just don't think most people know, but I would suspect that that number goes up a lot once we were just like, okay, that's what I use. But in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just using AI, right? So, yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Spot on. I think what will happen is, in the future, the number will go up. People will be using Gemini or ChatGPT, and it'll do stuff for them, but they'll look at it as like, oh, just Gemini did it. They won't call it an agent, they'll just be like, AI, help me get it done.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  It's not like I've logged on to the internet and used TCP IP protocol today, you know what I mean? And so like, all the flows that I have working, like, are those agents? Yeah, they are, but like, it feels so icky for me to say agent, I don't know why.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  But I think a lot of the flows and everything will change drastically in the future.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Probably, but you know what? I was reading, I don't know if you saw this, I'm reading this other Nvidia book, right? And one of the senior engineers, who's still there today, I think he's been there for 20-plus years. He's like, dude, if you think about it, like, people are like, oh, AI is gonna destroy the world. Like, no, AI is not gonna destroy the world, you know why? Because AI is not gonna think in human terms, like zero sum, where we're trying to kill each other all the time, right? AI is gonna be thinking about, oh, we need data centers? Oh, okay, let's put them underground, because there's a lot of space underground, so we don't have to disrupt the humans. But humans are territorial, right? Like, if I'm competing with you, you're competing with me, I'm competing with you. Like, we're a little territory, like, we wanna compete with each other, right? AI is like, no, like, AI, he's like, dude, AI moves at the speed of light. AI doesn't have to be on this planet, it can be in the space, it can be in space, it could just be moving around. And so it's gonna think way beyond this. And so the way we're even talking about it right now, you look back on this in maybe two or three years, it's like,

• 6:48Speaker 00

  look at these dumb humans talking about like us, right? Like, they're gonna think way beyond how we think right now.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  So. And yeah, so what's your answer to the three and three?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Three and three, so three things that I'm focusing on from marketing till the end of the year, and then three things that are business for the end of the year. Marketing, one, I am trying to get a list of conferences that I should speak at that have our ideal customer profile. We're trying to move more and more upstream to larger companies, even on the SMB side, because you could be a SMB, but you could be part of a franchise, and there could be 300 of your locations. So we would consider that SMB, but it really is starting to become enterprise, because it could be multi-billion dollar accounts. And I believe you're gonna get a lot of those relationships from conferences. The second thing that I'm working on heavily towards now in the end of the year is GEO and getting rankings specifically through one simple, obvious tactic.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  So I am typing in all the queries that we ideally want to rank for, or be mentioned globally on these LLMs. And I'm looking at the sources they're cited, citing, and I'm trying to convince the people that are citing my competitors to also mention me within their articles. Because I found that that's the quickest way to get AI to cite you. You know how everyone's like, you need to create listicles?

• 8:10Speaker 00

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• 8:52Speaker 00

  then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www dot singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  If you just look at the articles that they're only pulling your competitors from, because it lists out, and you get included in those same exact articles, it's the fastest way to get mentioned on Gemini, ChatGPT, any LLM by far. So I'm manually myself emailing the people and building relationships and trying to get included in every single one. And my team's helping me out because I don't speak all the languages and my team also doesn't.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  This is where you would set up a Grok bot for this. This is for just for fun.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so th- those are the two things of marketing. If I had to pick a third thing for marketing right now.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  By the way, that's digital PR.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the third thing is ramping up content even more. So 2pm today, I'm starting to film 30 minute to hour long form videos.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  You know, that'll publish, but I want to see, this will be my first one that I've done in a long time. I want to see if I can do two of those per week. So I'm already producing a lot of content, right? I do two shorts a day, a chart a day. Sometimes we miss a chart, but let's call it three pieces of content. I also produce a long form video, one a week, that's usually around 10, 15 minutes. I'm now trying to produce two longer form articles per, or longer form video content pieces per week. That would be 30 plus minutes. And this does not include text based. And then of course, we do the podcast and stuff like that.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  My guess, if you stop doing the long form, it's because you get bored. Because there's so, the long 45 minutes to 60 minutes, unless I'm doing a webinar where you can kind of just be yourself, it's really hard to do those.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  It is. It's more screen sharing than it is

• 10:42Speaker 01

  than of me talking and going line for line.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  But you know what, what I've learned, and this is, and I want to come back to your answers, but like, when I do a webinar for 60 minutes and I'm just sharing a screen and I'm kind of just like talking, it's actually very enjoyable, right? It's not enjoyable when you have a script, for me at least, in front of you. And you're like very stiff and you're like, yeah, you know, we're going to do the 10 things on this and that. And then it's like, you just have to like, it's a slog. Like, remember that one time we went to record that course for you, for that one company? And that took the entire day. And then like, that was painful. Yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Dude, the way I do my recording these days is I record in my house for hour. And then the crew that's helping record, I will go and either eat lunch with them in my house, so like Uber eat something or whatever's in the fridge. Or depending on the time of the recording, I will just go into the theater room and we'll watch a TV show for 30 minutes to hour. So you just get a mental break.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And then go back to recording.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Neil and I, we're a little older now. We're in our 40s now. So we need, we need mental breaks. We need to take, we need to take naps sometimes too, you know? So, yeah, but continue. Did you, you covered the three marketing and the three business already?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  No, I covered the three marketing.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Business is find more companies to buy in Europe this year. I already found the one in Latin America that I want to buy. So I'm not really focusing on Latin America.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  You got the German one too.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Anymore. It's not done yet. I look at this once they sign a LOI and then once we really know. German one's too early. But, um, yeah, so I want to focus on Europe and that'll set us up for a much better next year. I want to start N filling services. When I say services, like what do we lack? Because one way to grow is you just buy in regions. The other way to grow is you add in the services that you're not offering. So we offer, for example, marketplaces and TikTok shop marketing. We've been doing that for a while. We're not known for that. There's other companies out there that are

• 12:50Speaker 01

  better than we are at it, just being very blunt. Because that's all they specialize in. So either go and recruit those people from those organizations and bring them over. Or if I can't do that, just go buy a competitor who just does that. So I think what that's two. And then the the third thing that I'm trying to do on the business end is, this sounds really cheesy. I, I need to push my team, especially my executive team, to create a much better work-life balance.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  When you try to recruit amazing people, they die for the company and they'll do whatever and continually work. But just like how I'm getting older, my team's getting older. And you know, it's just like, someone the other day is joining our call when they're, one of their immediate family members passed. I'm like, what are you doing? You know, like, this is not acceptable. Like,

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I, I can't say that. I have to be there, but I'm like, hey dude, we're going to reschedule this call. I can't say directly on the call, like, what are you doing? But it's just like, no, I don't want you on the phone. Go be with your family.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  So anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you later.