Using AI to Understand Your Customers | Darby Rollins' Keynote at The World AI Summit (June 2024)

Full video transcript

Darby Rollins is introduced as the founder of Gen AI University, noting he was one of Jasper’s very first users — pre-ChatGPT — and later wrote the first book produced using Jasper. The host frames the session around a core question: is it important to know who your customer is? “If you don’t have a target, you’re sure to hit it” — meaning a message built for everyone targets no one. The audience is told they’ll leave with a 10-to-20-page blueprint of their ideal customer avatar by the end of the session.

Rollins opens with the story of a friend, a keynote speaker and author who has visited all 197 countries, who had big ideas but struggled to articulate them in a way that landed with his audience. Rollins says most businesses think they know their one or two core audience segments, but there could be dozens of segments they’re not speaking to simply because the language isn’t right.

He introduces the “buyer brief” process, which starts with a blueprint — a way to get inside the mind of your market using AI. The audience is shown a QR code they can scan to have an automation generate a 10-to-15-page personalized blueprint covering their audience’s feelings, goals, dreams, fears, desires, and motivations, along with false solutions the audience has already tried and gaps in the market AI can help surface.

To build the blueprint, you answer a few key questions: how you describe yourself (entrepreneur, creator, business owner, knowledge worker), a description of your product or service including the problem it solves and your unique selling proposition, and any additional context you want to include. Rollins explains that focused, minimal context is enough to get a usable first result, and that you can run the prompt multiple times, testing and tweaking as you go.

He traces the method back to work with direct-response marketer John Benson roughly two years earlier — before ChatGPT — when the same “marketing blueprint” concept took professional copywriters days to complete manually. Rollins notes that without AI, a non-professional business owner might spend weeks reading Amazon reviews, browsing Reddit, and surveying customers to gather the same information that AI can now return in about five minutes.

Rollins demonstrates the process live using a custom GPT called “The Mentalist,” trained on his team’s buyer brief book so it has the book’s frameworks built into its knowledge base. He brings an audience volunteer on stage, whose business is a “conscious AI agency” focused on collaborative AI design sprints for businesses that want to adopt AI ethically but lack in-house expertise. Working through the same core questions — business description, target customer, and unique differentiator — Rollins feeds the answers into the GPT.

The output segments the market into groups such as small-to-medium enterprises, tech startups, and corporate innovation teams, each with distinct needs, wants, behaviors, and pain points. Small-to-medium enterprises need affordable AI integration and hands-on guidance but face limited budgets and a lack of in-house AI expertise. Tech startups may be better funded but face uncertainty about ROI and difficulty finding the right talent. Rollins references a lesson from John Benson: secondary complaints, not just the primary pain point, are often what really drives someone to buy — for tech startups, that might be frustration from past experiences with unreliable partners rather than the stated ROI concern itself.

Rollins frames the output as a starting point, not a finished product: “the ball’s back in my court” to discern whether the AI-generated analysis is actually accurate, and he says he leans on subject-matter experts to validate it. He contrasts this “accelerate and amplify first, automate last” approach with businesses that jump straight to automation without first understanding their audience or refining their process, calling automation “really the last thing you should be doing.”

The talk closes with a broader point: businesses that hesitate to adopt AI risk falling further behind as the gap between AI-fluent and AI-hesitant competitors widens. Rollins emphasizes that the tools will keep changing, and that adaptability — what he calls “productive play” — matters more than mastering any single tool. He reiterates that the blueprint exercise is available to attendees via a QR code or the custom GPT, delivering a Google Doc report plus a full digital copy of the buyer brief book, and closes by taking audience questions, including a clarification about a partner company’s name spelling and a book-writing tool giveaway.