Serious AI with Chris Duff
September 18, 2026
Serious AI Partners is now the full time business, and Serious Land Capital runs on a few hours a week. This is the first episode under the new name, recorded seven days after that decision. It covers what it actually took to move a company from one brand to another, what Claude Code handled without a contractor, and the one part it got badly wrong.
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(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Serious AI. Excited to get back into the recording seat here. Whole bunch of changes. We have shifted the name of this. First off, that’s pretty minor, but you know, it used to be the Get Serious podcast, now it is Serious AI with Chris Duff. Obviously, I’m Chris Duff. For those of you who have been tuning in regularly over the past couple of years, and if you’re new. Awesome to have you. So if you follow the newsletter, Serious AI News, I had recently announced that you know switch the full time role and business focus to enterprise AI implementation, which is branded under Serious AI Partners. Serious AI for short, compared to furthering long Serious Land Capital, which has now shifted to a few hours a week. Since the opportunity and feedback that I’ve gotten for enterprise AI implementation has just been so significant that I view this as
Kind of the point where my where everything that I’ve done in my career thus far has led here. And I’ve never been more excited or optimistic in terms of the opportunity to take on and you know already the interest in the services that we’ve begun marketing here. Which is why I’m so excited to be sharing the journey with you all as we move forward here. So you know that’s kind of the prelude here. And as far as a content strategy and cadence is gonna go, still once Once a week here it is at a minimum is the game plan. I know at least on the podcast I was off for a couple weeks as I was going through this transition of businesses here. But now that I’ve got kind of the guts and the piping all set up here, it’ll be much smoother going forward. And you know, we had staff transitions and everything as were shifting out of the
Serious Land Capital business full time as well too. So there’s just been a whole lot going on behind the scenes to address to get all this set up for you. Overall, I would kind of expect you know some more of the same of what you’ve seen before with some extra flavor here that I really want to experiment with. And again, all everything content-wise is a constant experiment, seeing what’s working, what Particularly interest interests me because I think if the host or the person creating the content isn’t you know fully into what they’re doing, like that we’ll come across loud and clear to the audience and probably will show up in the back end numbers here. So I’m I’m always looking at okay what’s kind of lighting me up, what do I want to share, what’s going be valuable to folks. And so we can have kind of a Mutually beneficial yeah state of state of progress here. And so core to that, what were always doing when it was land, you know, slash AI oriented podcast. Now it’s gonna be, you know, AI effectively exclusively, was okay, sharing certain deals that were getting involved in, how we
Navigated certain scenarios within business, you know, certain AI tools and procedures and strategies and tactics that were utilizing that was beneficial, you know, kind of state of the market type setups here. So and I think critical to that was just like the underlying vulnerability and focus on data and hard truths. That to me is what’s Critical to you know being a true thought leader with within any particular space here. So I need to do whatever it takes to preserve that as you know key a kind of key agreement that I have with my audience as it continues to grow here. So you can expect more of the same when it comes to, hey, what’s going on with the business? You’re gonna be along this journey, the Serious AI Partners, maybe it blows up in my face. I don’t know. You know, that was kind of the precedent were setting up when initially started the content journey here with Serious Land Capital. Obviously, shifted out of that here. So you guys have been along the journey the whole way, seeing the decisions that we’ve made here. So it’s it’s
Open book as far as okay what’s what’s going on a week by week basis and what are we seeing that is going to be utilized in our own business, what might what might be working, what might not be, and so forth here. So that’s kind of the more of the same piece. The other pieces of content that I’d really Love to Pursue in a in a larger direction here is you know some of you when you know might have been familiar when we did these Land Daily Diligence sessions. So these were live Facebook sessions where I was taking certain land deals that we people would send us and then live reviewing them on these calls. So you know that was an interesting format and we’d have
Lot of positive feedback from that as well when we did that. But it’s like, okay, how can I take that into what we’re doing with AI as well too? Because I’ve set up, you know, I’ve presented a number of demos, oftentimes to private audiences of various sizes, some like five to ten folks, some, you know, several hundred, some even several thousand, at varying levels of complexity here. And you know, I have received just a lot of feedback. Hey, Chris, like you’re you’re you’re you’re very technical, but you explain things very well for people to kind of grasp what they might want to do with AI. And obviously I’m betting my entire career on that factor here. So I would love to really show more of the builds that I’ve done. Internally here and also just to demonstrate like I again we are pushing the frontier, we are pushing the boundaries with what AI is capable with. Every single day, every single day I’m discovering something that I didn’t quite conceive of e even the day before and determining, this is actually possible now. That again that this stuff is evolving so quickly here.
So I’d really love to get the gears starting to turn for a lot of the folks tuning in here. And in instead of just having, you know, talking head as the core visual for these you know podcast slash YouTube presentations, I’ll be able to actually do, you know, live demos and you know, I have Software set up that will just be more visually engaging to follow for a screen share here. So I would love to do some more of that. That’s in the pipeline as well. And again like all of this has some type of commercial interest for me because like I’m trying to get clients for enterprise AI, like it helps if I’m you know demonstrating cutting edge frontier capability in regard to creatively And efficiently using AI tools here. So again, I’ll as I’ve always said, like pay attention to the incentives of the folks who are you’re following or even paying attention to. So you know this isn’t just a labor of love for me. Like there’s obviously a commercial incentive, but I’d rather be up front with this type of stuff because I think it just you know builds more trust in regard to who you’re paying attention to. So that’s another angle there.
The third angle is related to that second one. But especially as I’ve you know, now diving into more of the enterprise AI space, and really looking at, you know, still just pretty much every corporation out there, I’d say every business. I haven’t met one business yet, including my own, that’s a hundred percent fully AI optimized. Like they are completely aligned. At the cutting edge, everything is done perfectly here. Like that it’s just it’s basically impossible to be done because of how fast things are moving. And there’s always certain gaps where you can be accelerated a bit further here inside of another area. And then as soon as you catch up and you’re fully optimized in a certain area, the technology improves again. And so you fall behind straight away. So I’d I’d love to you know either take Like feedback requests from the audience, like, hey, I have this, you know, issue within my own particular business. And I can kind of dive in and just present a case study. Here, here’s what I would do to start solving this. Or potentially even dive into some companies where we can just utilize publicly available information and determine, okay, where are some of the inefficiencies here? How would I start tackling this?
Or even like looking at you know negative customer views or like clear problems that could be augmented and solved through efficient use of ai here and then walk through okay here’s how an enterprise ai implementation would look like for particular companies that we choose here and again go through more of like the visually stimulating Screen share mechanism. So though those are kind of the three that I really love to dive into. Obviously that this is one of just like, hey, here’s in update, here’s the strategies, here’s the tactics, of what we’re gonna be pursuing here behind the scenes. And the other piece that I’ll dive into today is just to again kind of Open up your eyes and share the marvel that I’ve had at you know just getting this new business set up to where again everything’s been moving so quickly here. Like it’s the by the time I’m recording this, it’s like effectively been seven days roughly since I made the decision to go full time into the Serious AI Partners business here. So
You know, many of you entrepreneurs or business owners or you know, part of startups that anything like lit listening to this, a lot of you are familiar. Like that there’s there’s a lot of moving parts to get all that set up. You gotta get a new a new website. I actually had the LLC in place here. So that was like the one thing. I had a base home page set up that was basically just a static HTML file that was attached to the Serious Land Capital website. So Barely optimized. So a little bit of upfront work done, but it almost nothing. And you know, to have to move everything over from another business and plus like you know, Serious Land Capital, we still have as an active entity and now shifting to a few hours a week of still reviewing deals. So you know, every Monday afternoon, okay, how do I orient? To have that business like almost completely on autopilot, have automatic messages go out and still like preserve the brand equity? How can I make sure that we’re still having or our organic traffic come in? I still have SEO articles, and so forth being monitored and maintained. How do I adjust the overhead? You know, shift everything over to Serious AI Partners, you know, have certain like kind of close up conversations, what technology is just like not even
Useful anymore, like all this SaaS switching, plus again, spinning up a new company here where again you do you just have to deal with the guts of the organization. And like I already had a lot of you know baggage so to speak in terms of you know content strategy and existing automated routines that I wanted to adjust but carry over to the Serious AI Partners which like includes this podcast. But how is it going to be branded differently? How do I have to shift the existing channels? All the different descriptions, all the copy adjustments, you know, connected to different emails and so forth. Like these are all the decisions that and actions that need to be taken to fully, fully move things over. And you know, having run or started a lot of businesses in the past, like usually this is just a You know, multi-week effort, or you might get some of the initial pieces set up. But you know, you’re trying to run the business itself. You’re not actually like working on it. And then okay, now I have to like, yeah, still have to update the website here and there. And I just wanted to knock all of that out like right away. I didn’t want to be distracted from client level work because I’ve already had some like really interesting conversations that you know, again, I really think this that this business has
A route to be the you know best thing that I’ve ever worked on so far and like a lot of pent up demand that I’m only beginning to scratch the surface on. So I’m like, you know, I don’t want to have to have in the back of my mind all this you know piping and infrastructure related tasks that just need to be addressed. Like you know DNS settings on An email just making sure that I can even get email delivered, warming up domains and so forth. Like all these kind of boring tasks here, which again, you I used to like have to hire that out or even get like a Fiverr contractor in. Hey, I like set up the DNS for me. I don’t want to deal with this. Now you can just run that all through Claude Code. Like Claude Code has just been an absolute godsend when it comes to setting all this up and making sure like I’m basically fully optimized. From the start, like SEO, GEO, using like a hundred percent fully optimized settings across entire website, branding, et cetera, here, so that I can as seamlessly as possible carry over the optimization that I already had from Serious Land Capital into this new brand where
Again, pretty much all past businesses I’ve run, including Serious Land Capital. I mean, we you spent thousands of dollars on website designs and SEO and like routine work there, very technical stuff. But properly using Claude Code now is able to run all of that without having to hire out to anybody. And being able to get it done much faster and super token efficient as well, too. Like I was running all of this on Opus 5 Claude Code here, and like I’ve barely scratched, you know, 10-ish percent of weekly usage on a Claude Max plan of like constant usage of just really you know setting up all again all the guts of this particular business here. But like I was also realizing, hey, this is like the core focus. Let me just like really sit down and just knock all of this out sequentially here. So that I just don’t need to worry about this. It’s not gonna have the mental space later. And this is just it has another aside, like this is again kind of a continued lesson here of you know, so many entrepreneurs, and I’ve definitely fallen victim to that myself too, and you have to relearn it often, is that yeah, you if you have distracting priorities here, like that’s almost always going to be.
Your largest potential downfall from realizing your potential. And like if you’re opening up new business here, new business here, and you’re distracted in all these different ways, I mean, first off, again, like the guts of the business itself, just getting through this infrastructure, this used to be a multi-week process. And e even constraining it down as much as possible and having all this automation, Claude Code and that. Like it’s taken the greater part of a week of me just really, really knocking this down step by step by step, to do. And so, you know, I think anybody listening to this has, you know, moved from a different house or apartment or what have you. And even though like again, it’s it’s almost a one to one analogy, like so it can be really exciting. Yeah, moving to A new spot, almost always there’s gonna be some underlying optimism there. But the underlying process, like it’s a it’s a huge both physical and mental bandwidth either. On the back end, I see, yeah, I gotta move everything over. Even if you hire movers and so forth, okay, like my base home base is gonna be a bit messed up as everything’s being moved over. And once I move over to the new house, like
You don’t have those autopilot routines, like even navigating your own kitchen. It’s like, wait, where are the spoons? Where are the knives? I have to change up my steps here, I have to like have a few extra cycles just to think about how I’m adjusting to this new state of being that I’m in or even like your driving routines, okay, where you know, where’s the grocery store? Where’s the where’s the gym? If your kids are in school, where do I gotta go to drop them off there too? Where’s the airport? Like I gotta sort all that out and you gotta get the new timing down for all that. Plus again, all the infrastructure. Hey, I’ve got to schedule somebody to install internet. I gotta make sure, you know, now the power bill is being paid here and I need like irrigation installed and all that type of stuff. So you kind of get the picture, like that there’s just there’s a lot of tasks that need to be Taken care of. And all of those tasks are not like business driving activities or like personal growth oriented activities compared to I if you were in the same spot and just continuing to focus on what you’re doing. So like that’s what we always have to realize is the cost of starting anything new. And I had to realize that at the time too I was like I have a hundred percent conviction this is the right business to be focused on full time here.
So let me go through the pain, but let me knock it out as quickly as possible. Yeah, and have to deal with hey, the new Serious AI Partners domain. Yeah, what when I’m sending stuff out, even though my DNS is fully optimized, stuff is still going to spam because I just have to you have to just wait, wait it out, test things out, wait until your email gets better here. These are just the growing pains of starting something, starting something new. All like the SEO and GEO, that has to start from basically zero. That there I really can’t you know, it’s a different type of brand compared to what we’ve built up on Serious Land Capital, all of that has to be adjusted, you know, all again, all like the podcast routine. The automated publishing has to go to a different website. How do we set up the guts for that? New w website beyond just doing a core home page here. You know, what do we what do we actually believe is the mission behind our brand? How do we build in about page? How do we build out in FAQ? What are even the appropriate questions for an enterprise AI company? What are people even asking? I don’t know. And so all of this it really had to sit down and make sure, okay, that this is this is ac actually what I’m thinking about for the business here.
And again, I can’tell you how many messages I’ve gone back and forth with Claude Code on this. It was extremely helpful, but still limited, even at these high-powered models, high-powered settings here, which is and you know, I think kind of regardless on how good these models might get, if you’really trying to do Something new and you have your own sense of personality and branding and what you stand for. The base model, even if you train it on all of your data, which I obviously do, and I have just tons of reference materials for it, just asking it to pump out a website you know at the snap of a finger is I can tell you from experience is just not going to go well. You really have to maybe if you don’t care that much, or if you don’t even know what you’re doing, and what should be considered good or not, then you might notice, which is again the problem with a lot of folks with utilizing AI is all these answers sound so smart that you don’t realize when it’s you know completely wrong. That’s probably the biggest danger of using the technology right now. And so
You know, I have been fascinated to follow this particular company. Polsia. I might have talked about it before, but it’s it’s this solo operator. He’s had a lot of success in the past, more of an engineering type, but he’s built like this whole multi agent business building company that now you know he’s been open for like six years, six months or so with a ten million dollar. Run rate already, you know, that’s annualized revenue that’s already been coming in, low churn at least by month two for his customers and raised thirty million dollars and is now like have you know again self-reported apparently a private market cap of two hundred fifty million dollars and he’s like solo operator here. But and this is like As I was going back and forth, it’s a really interesting model here. Is when you when you dig into the numbers, and this is something I was going back in Claude Code, like, hey, get give me some claim checks on that. And you check his Trustpilot numbers, and they’re terrible rating. It’s like a one point in. It’s been like going down even more recently. Tons of one-star reviews here because the agents are just not, you know.
That they’re not working as effectively as customers might have expected, or they’re taking certain actions that they didn’t fully approve. And I can totally see that because it’such a you know dream type scenario, right? Of like, hey, just tell these agents to go build an entire business, to go to go take care of, you know, it’s gonna post everything, it’s gonna take care of my marketing. It’s gonna take care of the website, all that type of stuff. It’s gonna bring customers in and I’m just gonna make money. Like who wouldn’t have that dream? But the problem is, is like folks you might attract to set something up, like might not have any type of track worker. They might even know how to build their own business, so they don’t even know what they’re looking for. And how to kind of grade the agentic output. And you know, that’something that I really noticed. Building out the Serious AI Partners piece too is that yeah, like the initial FAQ questions, even it when I directed it, okay, go look at a handful of these websites and use them as inspiration here. And then we can come back, run it through my voice and everything we’ve kind of defined about the brand so far. And I almost had to go question by question. I’d say out of like close to 20 questions that are on the FAQ, maybe two or three of them,
I didn’t need to have change. And it was like, okay, that’solid there and generally pretty simple. All the other ones, it’s like, nah, this is just this isn’t quite right. And it wasn’t like being overly perfectionist, but you really if it part of this like building a new company too is again, you have to decide what you’re gonna stand for and what kind of customer you want to serve. Like the this is all ultimately like there’s no rules in business, right? So f figure out What you actually want to do, you have a fresh start here. And it is the output, when you’re trying to automate like a lot of the creation of this back end stuff, is it actually appropriate or not? And if you haven’t put the thought in for how all of these answers should be addressed, again, what your brand actually stands for, how you wanna especially like enterprise clients here. These Should generally be considered the most sophisticated and complex type of customers in the entire world to go after. Like you have to be very careful on your positioning to ensure you don’t just rule yourself out completely, especially as a newer name within the industry here. So it takes a lot of care to really think about, hey, is this the appropriate direction?
And so I just, you know, mentioned that again as like a warning of like, yeah, these models are tremendous. They can just spit out entire websites within 10 minutes. But is the content and the branding and the direction actually representing you in a way that is distinctive enough and accurate enough to actually achieve the goals that you might, you know. You might not even have clarity on internally until you really sit down with them and spend s cycles thinking about. So you know, some folks I get it like the strategy is like, hey, just go out and like trying to get customers right away. We’re worry about the branding, worry about the guts of the business later on. There’s certainly something to be said to that. To me in this case, well first of all like it’s not like immediate cash pressure. So You know, I wasn’t gonna like run out of money within a week if I didn’t land a client here. So I could afford to be a bit more thoughtful with the particular process. And in this instance, and this is something that we did with Serious Land Capital as well too, is like we took the time to really build out the brand first and think about hey, what
What do we want? How are we going to market ourselves? What kind of terms are we going to look for working with certain customers and so forth? And we took the time to build out a solid, a solid website without first understanding what whether there was gonna be true demand and so forth there too. But it really helps, you know, going through that exercise. Now I can actually answer questions like this. Now, now I have an understanding what my brand even means. And not get stuck in a loop of you know ignorance about what you’re building in the first place here so I actually prefer that approach now of get let me get kind of the picture set up and then I’ll be able to present myself in a much more accurate and defined way going forward too and again like Then you can just go hog wild with the marketing and the demand here. And like I’ve improved so many of the automations that we had, like just chop down all these automated SEO and GEO and even like the podcast routines and stuff. And w where you can just be so much more sophisticated where I can run, you know, as soon as I’m done recording this podcast, I just have a Claude Code routine that will
Auto chop it up it’ll present me core headlines according to what we know has worked and what we’ve defined previously full descriptions that are gonna go across Spotify and YouTube will be able to publish on those platforms by itself it’ll be able to create thumbnails in ChatGPT so ChatGPT has better image generation and And it can handle all of that you know from Claude going back to ChatGPT and then back into Claude without me having touch it at all. So that these are like the more frontier routines that you know how do I remove the human from these steps? And then I get final approval at the end here. And once it’s like solid enough, it’s like, yeah, you don’t even need me to post anymore here. Though those are Again, kind of figuring out a way to push the limits of what’s possible with these models here and just making sure that hey, I can get all of the piping set up for this particular business. I think all I have left is the auto newsletter publishing side, which is limited. The website’s probably ninety plus percent done. Social profiles, YouTube, LinkedIn, et cetera, all of this has already been optimized. SEO, GEO, et cetera.
To a greater degree than Serious Land Capital ever was too just even more alignment. I could go in a lot more directions here. But you know suffice to say the ability to have this, you know, almost all powerful Claude Code setup here that can at least help with the technical elements, and be able to ha handle WordPress adjustments and work way faster than I ever could. But also knowing where my judgment is going to override what Claude wants to want wants to put out. And you can be the judge for yourself. Take a look, seriousai.partners. Take a look at you know, I’m very proud of how the website has turned out here. It should like show my voice from what you see there and how I’m approaching this business. And I think it you’ll you’ll see that came across very well. And it doesn’t read like, this is just AI slop. That’s presenting you know another AI consultant here. So take note of that. You know, again, check out my LinkedIn profile and you can you can copy off all of this and figure out, hey, what whatever Chris did, you can probably reverse engineer and know that it’s it’s fully optimized for what he’s doing on his end here. So you know to take that for what you will my gift to you all. Hope to work with some of you if it makes sense, you know, really targeting five million dollar plus revenue
Companies that want to you know take their business to the next level through intelligent and efficient use of AI that is data driven and has appropriate human judgment behind it, which is exactly how I built it out for Serious Land Capital. You can see all that on our Serious AI Partners website. For more info on what we’ve done here. And those of you listening probably have the sense that we know what we’re talking about over here, but and always trying to get better. So with that in mind, hope you subscribe and share. Looking forward to building out this next part of the journey. And talk to you all next time. Bye.
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