Ghost Team co-founder Elliot Garreffa breaks down why most companies struggle to see ROI from AI—and what to do about it. This conversation cuts through the hype to reveal the unglamorous truth: successful AI implementation isn’t about buying licenses or running proofs of concept. It’s about understanding your actual workflows, identifying where AI creates 10x (not 2x) improvements, and building systems that your teams will actually use. Elliot shares real examples of SEO systems that compress months of agency work into minutes, and explains why human-in-the-loop isn’t a compromise—it’s best practice.
“If you just go and prompt an LLM and try to create some content, it might make incremental improvements, but it’s actually not that good. Where we come in is building systems that create 10x, 100x improvements.”
“You have to really understand the problem before you tackle it. Any good technology implementation does that step upfront, and we’ve found it incredibly true for the AI space.”
“Don’t think about using AI to do this part of this process. You can just do an entirely different process. That gets far better results than just slapping things on top.”
“The kind of thing that would’ve taken months to get back from an agency—we’re doing it directly within the chat window. That obviously changes a lot in terms of a typical process.”
“When you add that human touch, it is significantly better. Regardless of how much training data you have, you can still really tell whether something has been AI-generated or not.”
“One of the best things you can do when first getting started: look at things you’re spending a huge amount of time on. Focus on automating those first. They save you time, which means you can focus on more valuable tasks.”
“People see these workflow automations on LinkedIn and they want them. But whether these systems work is all about the detail under the hood—the prompting, the training data, the customization to your brand.”
This conversation goes deep on MCPs, context engineering, and the technical stack that actually delivers results. Listen to the full episode to hear Elliot walk through a live demo of automated SEO research and strategy that would take traditional agencies weeks to produce and learn why starting with Lindy or n8n beats jumping straight to building custom SDR systems.
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