Agentic AI's Least Obvious Takeover Yet | James McCann | Everhaze [EP. 322]

[00:00:00] James McCann: You land on what I call the, the 80/20 rule, that 80% of client servicing is really kind of, below the sea level.

[00:00:07] James McCann: If you think of that iceberg analogy, that a lot of it is research, media monitoring. It's making sure you understand the trends. It's making sure you understand the right people to pitch to and, the stories that they like to write about and so on. That is the critical element of, of making these campaigns successful.

[00:00:20] James McCann: The 20% then is ultimately what clients are paying for. They want the, heavy hitters in terms of advice. The high-level kind of strategic play. But because of the broken economics now it- it's harder to get that 80% right to contribute to the success of what people are paying for in that 20% block.

[00:00:37] James McCann: We launched Lu, which is our agentic layer that now sits across the platform to help agencies solve that 80% problem and deliver greater value now going forward.

[00:00:47] Pete Townsend: This is MoneyNeverSleeps: sharp riffs, big ideas and real insights from smart people. I'm Pete Townsend, GP at Norio Ventures. Let's go.

[00:00:59] Pete Townsend: As more and more of financial activity integrates with AI agents, it's easy to forget how many other parts of finance are becoming agentic right alongside it. My guest today is James McCann, CEO and founder of Everhaze, the intelligent operating layer for the future of PR and comms. James knows this industry inside out. It's his second go-around as a founder, as he founded and ran ClearStory, an international PR agency out of Dublin, until it was acquired last year, and then he started Everhaze .

[00:01:29] Pete Townsend: James, welcome to MoneyNeverSleeps.

[00:01:32] James McCann: Thank you very much for the kind introduction, Pete.

[00:01:34] Pete Townsend: So listen, James, you really landed on something with Everhaze here. What is the earned secret or, like, the inside edge that you have because you've been doing this for years that other people building in this space may not have?

[00:01:48] James McCann: I look specifically at the economics of the industry, right? Certainly since COVID, how it's, it just effectively been increasingly broken, right? That a lot of those in in-house and agency roles are working an awful lot of overtime. In Ireland, four out of five, I believe are working, more than 10 hours a week unpaid.

[00:02:07] James McCann: And yeah, look, we look at that and we said if the model is broken now you cannot p- possibly fulfill that.

[00:02:13] James McCann: My experience as a, as an agency owner we built it from €500, entirely bootstrapped. Cash flow was a big thing, getting the right people in Having an editorial model, having a service model, all of those kind of real headaches. You land on what I call the, the 80/20 rule, that 80% of client servicing is really kind of, below the, below the sea level.

[00:02:35] James McCann: If you think of that iceberg analogy, that a lot of it is research. It's, it's, media monitoring. It's making sure you understand the trends. It's making sure you understand the right people to pitch to and, the stories that they like to write about and so on. That, that is the, the, the critical element of, of making these campaigns successful.

[00:02:49] James McCann: The 20% then is ultimately what clients are paying for. They want the, heavy hitters in terms of advice. They want the right media training. The right strategies. The right messaging, and that's the high-level kind of strategic play. But because of the broken economics now it- it's harder to get that 80% right to contribute to the success of what people are paying for in that 20% block.

[00:03:10] James McCann: Everhaze launched last July as a way of, of doing, mass media analysis on trends, right? Messaging and narrative analysis. And this month, early July, we launched Lu, which is our agentic layer that now sits across the platform to help agencies solve that 80% problem and deliver greater value now going forward.

[00:03:32] James McCann: And we, we, we genuinely think we have a, a potential here to help solve that broken economics problem, help the industry transition from that retainer plus hours to capability or outcome-based pricing. And yeah, I'd say that's our, that's our hidden secret.

[00:03:46] Pete Townsend: Yeah. It's mad when you think about it because I set yesterday a Google alert for something that I need to be tracking as a regulatory theme develops in the industry, right? And that was a bit of a pain. I, I hadn't done it before, but it, you got through it. And, and then I thought about maybe I need to set 150 of those.

[00:04:05] Pete Townsend: Forget about it, right? And then being able to take all of that data that you are tracking and all those news items, the trends, what's happening, the emerging stories, and turn that into something for your client to then talk about to a journalist, talk about at a conference, feels like a messy, messy piece of work

[00:04:27] James McCann: To put it in a digestible format. So if you take artificial intelligence as a, as a topic or, money laundering or, fintech regulation, whatever it might be, these are really, really broad topics, right? At a national level, let's say in the UK, there's at least a couple of hundred mentions across all the different channels on a daily basis.

[00:04:44] James McCann: You expand that to Europe, a couple of thousand, and so on.

[00:04:47] James McCann: To just break that down and understand the trends.

[00:04:49] James McCann: But then it's making it, digestible, deliverable, and actionable, I think, which is what, agentic AI now enables that to do. So, for example, if you are tracking, like finance regulation across the European Union, right? Everyone has a central bank then you've got the European Central Bank, and you've got kind of different amplifiers of different stories and so on.

[00:05:09] James McCann: Being able to get that digested in, like, a 10-minute podcast format and delivered into your client's hand, that's what we're talking about here.

[00:05:18] James McCann: Our clients can talk to Lú and say, "Okay, look, I have a new client here, an emerging, fintech startup .

[00:05:23] James McCann: They're very interested in money laundering regulation and, and the central banks across, across EU 27.

[00:05:30] James McCann: Can you build me out sufficient alerts to capture that, create a 10-minute podcast daily send it to me so I can send it to the client as a digest?"

[00:05:38] James McCann: And it'll go off, obviously do those things. And like, when you think of what that means then for that economics problem of the industry that is massive because not only are you taking the labor out of having to work with the tool, like setting up a Google Alert or whatever, but you're also getting rid of the admin, the, the setting up, the, the calibration, all of that, and you are getting a byproduct straight to your WhatsApp, to your Telegram, to whatever channel you wish, to then provide that to the client.

[00:06:08] James McCann: So now you have a capability that you can sell, and you can, you can market. And for very busy in-house teams, you become an economic advantage and a manpower advantage to them And therefore to their executive team. And again, I, I think that is what the agentic era, when deployed correctly, is actually about.

[00:06:30] James McCann: You really need to look at the human problems , like where is the pain there?

[00:06:35] James McCann: Let's solve that, right? This is actually about ensuring, we can get back to thinking and being creative your only limit is your imagination. Whatever you feel you might be able to create here as a solution to do whatever you need to do to provide value, it's, it's there.

[00:06:52] James McCann: That's where I think generally we're going.

[00:06:55] Pete Townsend: We're going to start seeing, job placements and looking at job descriptions and saying prompting AI as a skill, right?

[00:07:04] Pete Townsend: The in-house people themselves using Copilot perhaps to try to track all of this activity, the emerging trends going on themselves versus, say, using Everhaze.

[00:07:16] Pete Townsend: The real difference to me seems to be that it's the PR agent themselves who knows this and knows the industry inside out, and that value that they add to the process, to the actual day-to-day execution

[00:07:31] James McCann: Yeah. Well, I

[00:07:31] Pete Townsend: matters and makes a big difference here.

[00:07:33] James McCann: Yeah, like how many years' expertise, might, say, an account manager, account director have, or, senior account executives.

[00:07:40] James McCann: What scenarios have they worked with across their professional life, the crises they've managed, the CEOs they've helped, in terms of media training.

[00:07:48] James McCann: All of that is human experience. It's all human-centric. It's that 20%. There's some things that I already feel are redundant, like prompt engineering and so on. AIs can write their own prompts, right? So now what really y-y-you need to do is, like, it's, it's conversational.

[00:08:03] James McCann: Like, Lú is an entirely conversational tool. Like, we feel we've helped lower the barrier to entry for AI just by that alone, that being able to talk to it as if y-you were just musing, you were, you were giving your expertise and your thoughts and your experience, to do a thing and it goes and does it for you.

[00:08:23] James McCann: I think we're looking at a totally different dynamic

[00:08:25] Pete Townsend: Yeah, we are. And just to double-click on what you said there about it, it's about having that, that PR brain and having that experience and having that network and the contacts that I had lunch a couple weeks ago with a founder who was introduced to me by their PR agency and someone specifically within that PR agency that I've known for a while.

[00:08:46] Pete Townsend: And during lunch, I said, "That intro from that individual," the PR agent, I said, "That was, that was new for me," because usually intros to founders for me come from other founders or operators or VCs. And he said, "Well, that's just what she does." And it feels like having that, having the human touch be able to be maximized here will allow a heck of a lot more of these type of intros and network opportunities to be to be done by the PR agent.

[00:09:21] James McCann: People buy from people, right? Like PR is a very people-centric game. It's built on trust. It's built on the ability to not just sell your clients, but like, th-th-there's a real critical skill there in terms of helping people succeed. And I, I always find kind of people within the industry, if you ask them for a favor, they'll do their level best to deliver it.

[00:09:43] James McCann: But then, of course, there's a mountain of other things that they need to get through, Like that's a really high-value task. That's something that people pay for. That's that 20%, you can do more of that now. Like, you can literally have one person's job, and that's all they do.

[00:09:56] James McCann: Maybe they kinda record the meeting and whatever intros need to be done are done kind of straight away via their agent. "Hey, just make these intros." Done. Like the level in which you can now kind of make those connections, do those favors, build value am-am-amongst your, your network.

[00:10:13] James McCann: PR and, and media relations has kind of, I, I feel like drifted further and further apart, the last kind of 20 years in the industry, right? Because it's harder for journalists to get away from the, the, the news desks, and the only channel into them is maybe their inbox or WhatsApp, and it's being bombarded, and they get ratty.

[00:10:30] James McCann: You get frustrated. Do you know you, you need to deliver for the client, and it becomes this like flywheel effect of, of doom, for the, for the industry. There is a really tangible way of now unwinding that, that if both sides of the, the equation have a way of fo- just focusing on what they need to get done, you, you end up with a far better matchmaking, that y-y-you know, there's a, there's a reduction to the noise and the ability then for people just to say, " I have a new fintech client. They, they, they're in this space. Here's their investors. I know such and such over here does the news desk for the 'Fintech Times,'" whatever it might be.

[00:11:01] James McCann: "He does these kind of stories. I'm gonna make an introduction."

[00:11:05] Pete Townsend: Something about being able to get out from behind the laptop, see the whites of somebody's eyes in real life does make a difference, a huge difference in terms of building connections, and it feels like as well that the best stories tend to come out when both sides care.

[00:11:19] Pete Townsend: That where you've got a journalist that actually wants to get a good story out and wants to get the truth out, and you've got a, a, an agent, a, a, a PR professional who wants to do a great job getting that message across for their client,

[00:11:32] James McCann: Yeah, people buy from people, you

[00:11:33] Pete Townsend: do. They do. The, the hard question, Jimmy, is that,

[00:11:37] Pete Townsend: what I've been seeing right now out there in this space is that VCs are pushing back hard on anything that looks like SaaS, software as a service, wrapped around AI.

[00:11:46] James McCann: Yeah

[00:11:46] Pete Townsend: you've closed your round anyway. How did you answer that question that goes, what's stopping PR agents from just going straight to Claude or Copilot, like you said, instead of Everhaze?

[00:11:58] James McCann: 100%. So infrastructure is the first, making sure the, the, the infrastructure is reliable, right? That it, it, like you talked about Google Alerts there, it doesn't necessarily have radio, it doesn't necessarily have print, for example, podcasts or, or whatever it might be.

[00:12:12] James McCann: So getting the infrastructure layer is critically important because the last thing you want is a client picking up the phone to you and say, "Hey, listen, I heard I was on such and such a show," and not being able to provide that, right? So, like, and, and also just, real-time data across journalists and so on, right?

[00:12:24] James McCann: So, so infrastructure is the, the first key component. The next thing is tools, right? And the ability, like, there's two, two assumptions I'm making with the market. Tools are going to be a way of, advancing agentic AI. So if I want a radio clip, I can send my agent a, a, send Lú a message and say, "Hey, client was on radio there at 12 o'clock RTE1 or whatever it might be.

[00:12:48] James McCann: Can you send me the full segment?" And it'll just send it to you, and you can then kind of forward it on, right? Like, that saves a lot of time as it is. That, like, that by itself is a tool. We're gonna have clients come to us with their wish list of tools.

[00:12:59] James McCann: We're gonna build them as quick as we can, put them into their hands as quick as we can so they can sell the value. The other assumption that I'm making about the market is that, generally, society and the economy can only absorb so much change it's not something everyone thinks like, "Next year, we're not gonna need accountants," and all this kind of stuff, right?

[00:13:18] James McCann: That's all the bulls, right? We'll start to see the start of this in three to five years' time, in, in, in our workplaces generally. In about 10 years' time, it'll be fully normalized people will have to roll along with it. But it's gonna be 20, 30, 40 years before we get used to the pace of this, the pace of what is possible. I, I kind of give an example of like, let's say we, you know, AI gave us the, the plans for the Starship Enterprise and the entire blueprint, how we go about it. You couldn't build it tomorrow , you know? Like, it's gonna take a couple of lifetimes maybe to put it all together, but like you have the blueprints, you can work towards it.

[00:13:53] Pete Townsend: Definitely. And it sounds like relationships and judgment are the real product here

[00:13:57] James McCann: Big time. Big time

[00:13:59] Pete Townsend: Well, listen, James, what's the best way for people to get in touch and learn more about Everhaze?

[00:14:03] James McCann: Yeah, look we'd love to hear from, from anyone w-with thoughts info@everhaze.com or find us over on LinkedIn at Everhaze.

[00:14:11] Pete Townsend: Wonderful. Listen, awesome to dig into this with you. Really looking forward to seeing how you guys scale in the market and uh, looking forward to our next chat

[00:14:22] James McCann: Appreciate it, Pete. Thank you very much

[00:14:23] Pete Townsend: And to all you out there, thanks for watching and listening, and don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It helps others to find the show, and it means a heck of a lot to me. Till next time, see ya