Digital Velocity

Hosted by Erik Martinez

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Episodes

117

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast...a podcast covering the intersection between strategy, digital marketing, and emerging trends impacting each of us. Host Erik Martinez, Founder and Lead Strategist of Digital Velocity Agency, brings you a wealth of marketing experience along with his unique perspectives. Join him each week as he interviews industry veterans to dive into the best hard-hitting analysis of industry news and critical topics facing brand executives.

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August 11, 2026Episode 11739 min

Episode 117: The One Thing About AI You Can't Look Up: Sheryl Barbosa on Fear, Facts, and Your Own Team

Somebody on your team is uneasy about AI. You asked why, got an answer that sounded a little thin, and let it go. Sheryl Barbosa does not have that option. She is an environmental scientist and a sitting city council member, which means when a data center goes up outside of town, the neighbors bring her their fears. Her job is sorting the concerns that hold up from the ones that quietly stopped being true, and then talking to people about it without telling them they are wrong. In this conversation with Erik Martinez she covers what has actually changed about data centers, water, and power inside the last year, and why some of what all of us have been repeating is out of date. Then the episode turns. Erik could look up answers to the water question or the power question. But, there is no way to look up information about his own team, and he had been reading their AI hesitation as a verdict on the people rather than as the information it was. There is one question to ask your team, and how you frame it determines whether the answer that comes back is useful or worthless.

July 21, 2026Episode 11641 min

Episode 116: Your Team Isn't Resisting AI, they're Waiting for It to Be Relevant with Mark Maynard ACC

You've been using AI for months. You can see what it does. And when you look around the room, you can count on one hand the people on your team who are actually using it. The rest aren't pushing back. They just haven't started. "I had to hear from some other people how they're using it in their daily lives, and I didn't wanna just trust people who are tech-savvy." That's Mark Maynard, a coach, author, and speaker who helps leaders in hotels, restaurants, museums, and a construction company connect purpose to daily operations. Six months ago, he was the person on your team who still hasn't tried it. Using ChatGPT for recipes and road trip stops, nothing more. Mark joins host Erik Martinez on Episode 116 of the Digital Velocity Podcast to talk through what actually changed, and what it means for leaders trying to bring their teams along. Mark shares the specific moment a client problem broke through months of skepticism, explains why trusted people telling real stories mattered more than any demo, and describes how he used AI to help a construction company turn 1,000 pages of operational playbooks into something their employees would actually remember. "Efficiency was not the desired outcome, depth was." If the people on your team haven't bought in yet, this conversation reframes why, and what to do about it.

July 15, 2026Episode 11536 min

Episode 115: She Ignored the Most Common AI Advice. Where Jess Loseke Started Instead Changes the Math.

Tension-first. Functions as a trailer. The listener must hear the episode to get the answers. Jess Loseke spent 16 hours last weekend on her employee handbook. With AI. Your first question is probably the same as ours: why would that take 16 hours with AI? That is the wrong question. The right one is harder to sit with. "What is a pain to me are the things that are not getting done in my business because I cannot afford to hire for them. Those are the things that are killing the growth of my business right now." Jess Loseke, Co-founder, Midwest Barrel Company Jess co-founded Midwest Barrel Company, the first company to put a barrel (think Bourbon or Whiskey) on the internet. She runs lean, she's tech-forward, and she's ignoring the most common piece of AI advice right now. She's not starting with her most repetitive tasks. She's starting somewhere that, on the surface, sounds like the wrong place. Her business partner has a PhD. He's the best salesperson she's ever met. He sat down in a meeting and said, "I'm failing to see how I'm going to use this in sales." If a co-founder at an AI-forward company is saying that, what does it mean for the rest of us? Jess has an answer. It starts with a number: 75%. And it changes the math on what "good enough" means when the alternative is zero. This conversation with host Erik Martinez goes somewhere most AI conversations don't.

July 7, 2026Episode 11434 min

Episode 114: Storytelling in the Age of AI: Why Good Content Still Starts With Humans with David Ebner

You are publishing more content than ever. So is everyone else. And somewhere in the rush to keep up, a lot of it started to sound the same. David Ebner, President of The Content Workshop, has a blunt explanation for why. "A tool doesn't know what good is." In this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast, host Erik Martinez and David Ebner get into storytelling in the age of AI: why so much of it reads like word salad, what actually separates good from generic, and why the speed everyone is chasing might be the very thing making the work worse. David has spent 13 years telling brand stories, and he does not think AI is the problem. He thinks the problem is that most people never learned what good looks like before they handed the work to a machine. There is a specific thing David does before he ever hits the magic button that most people skip. Miss it and you get slop at volume. Get it right and the tool starts turning you into something closer to a superhuman writer. Listen to Episode 114 to hear where human creativity has to stay in the process, and why good was always good no matter how it gets made.

July 1, 2026Episode 11334 min

Episode 113: Your Best AI Person Hasn't Told Anyone Yet

Erik Martinez and Pat Barry made their AI predictions six months ago. Agents, AI shopping, rising costs, governance. They were right about almost all of it, and almost none of it showed up the way they expected. Pat keeps running into the same pattern across every organization he works with. Someone has quietly built something remarkable with AI. When Pat tells them to share it, the answer is always some version of "yeah, they're not really into it." The capability exists. It's invisible. And nobody is asking why it stays that way. Meanwhile, Erik went from spending his days in Excel, PowerPoint, and Canva to doing ninety percent of his work inside tools that didn't exist in their current form six months ago. Pat's building entire training decks with agents that get him 85% of the way there in a quarter of the time. AI platforms are turning into the new office suite, and most people haven't realized the shift already happened. Token costs are climbing and Erik describes trying to track them as "absolutely maddening." One of Pat's healthcare clients made a governance decision that positioned them as what Pat calls "the team of the future." A university with 50,000 employees and access to the same tools can't keep up. The predictions were about what AI would do. What actually changed was how the humans work. That gap is the conversation in Episode 113.

June 22, 2026Episode 11229 min

Episode 112: Your Agency's AI Progress Is One Resignation Away from Zero with Ishant Kulshreshtha

Most agencies have someone who's figured out AI better than anyone else on the team. They built the custom GPTs. They know the prompts. They're the one everyone asks when something breaks. Now ask yourself: what happens if that person leaves tomorrow? "If your agency relies completely on one AI champion, the agency's progress is limited to one resignation." Ishant Kulshreshtha , AI Strategic Analyst at White Label IQ, joins host Erik Martinez on Episode 112 of the Digital Velocity Podcast to talk about what it actually takes to move AI knowledge out of one person's head and into the organization. Ishant shares a practical 30-day process any agency owner can start today, explains why the data your agency has been collecting for years is more valuable than any tool you could buy, and makes the case for why building AI capability is a team sport, not a solo act. If you've been relying on one person to drive your AI progress, this is the episode where you find out what you're actually risking.

June 8, 2026Episode 11132 min

Episode 111: Why 83% of Agency Leaders Know the Strategy and Still Can't Execute It | Agency Core 2026 with Brian Gerstner

579 agency leaders were asked what they need to do to succeed. The answers were clear. Then they were asked if they're doing it. 83% aren't. Brian Gerstner, president of White Label IQ and co-founder of Agency Core, sits down with host Erik Martinez to unpack what the Agency Core 2026 research found when it studied the gap between knowing and doing across small and mid-sized agencies. As Brian puts it: "there was very clear understanding of what needs to be done. And when we ask people, what are you doing? massive gap" The research identified three mindsets shaping the industry right now. One group is pulling ahead. The other two are either moving fast without a clear destination or stuck and overwhelmed. The difference between them is not what they know. Brian has a specific prescription for every agency still stuck in that gap, and it starts with something most agency leaders have been putting off.

May 26, 2026Episode 11032 min

Episode 110: Strip the Buzzwords: What Actually Drives Search Visibility in the AI Era with Cameron LiButti

The headlines say AI is changing everything about how businesses get found online. Cameron LiButti says those headlines are missing the point. Cameron is the founder of Bidview Marketing, a fourteen-person agency working with medical practices, law firms, and service businesses across the country. He spent four years as a mechanical engineer before finding his way into digital marketing, and that engineering background shapes how he approaches SEO: start with the data, build the structure, and be willing to tell clients what they don't want to hear. In this episode, Erik Martinez and Cameron work through what's actually happening inside search — and what isn't. AI Overviews aren't a new algorithm; they're a new interface sitting on top of machine learning that's been running since 2015. LLMs like ChatGPT aren't pulling from an independent database; they're scraping the web and Google's results. And the businesses that tried to game that system in 2024 are seeing the consequences now. The conversation covers: • Why Cameron's answer to the most important SEO question hasn't changed in eight years • How search intent determines whether AI is sending your prospects to you or past you • What a tax attorney and a medical practice reveal about where AI leads actually come from • The site structure fundamentals that apply equally to traditional crawlers and AI crawlers • Red flags to watch for when evaluating an SEO agency or consultant

May 11, 2026Episode 10926 min

Episode 109: AI Agents - You're Already Using Them. Pat Barry and Erik Martinez on Picking the One Worth Building Next.

There's no agreed definition of an AI agent yet. The people building them, the people selling them, and the people writing about them all mean different things by the term. There's also a real disagreement about how to start. The conventional wisdom is to pick a small task and let an agent take it off your plate. That's not wrong. But the small thing you pick should be doing real work for you, or building a real skill you'll need later. Otherwise you're using AI to look busy. Pat Barry and Erik Martinez sit down to work through both questions. Pat, a data scientist and AI consultant, opens with the version of the agent definition he's heard most often: a client who literally meant a robot. From there they get into what actually counts, what doesn't, and where most of us should start if we're being honest with ourselves. If you've ever asked yourself whether what you're already doing counts, or whether the next thing you build is worth building, this is the one to listen to. In this episode: · Why nobody in the AI world has settled on what an "agent" actually is · What counts as one (and why what you're already doing might already qualify) · The simple test for whether the agent you're about to build is worth building

April 27, 2026Episode 10838 min

Episode 108: "One Person With AI Could Do More Work Than a Whole Team" — Wes Lemos on the Three Levels of AI Most People Never Reach

Most of us are using AI to solve a problem once. We polish an email. We summarize a document. We move on. And we tell ourselves we are getting good at this. Wes Lemos has been at this longer than most. He runs Roll Digital, founded TIV AI and Vibe Scribe, and has built hundreds of projects across multiple servers. In Episode 108, he sits down with Erik Martinez to talk about why solving a problem once is the entry point, not the destination. "One person with AI could do more work than a whole team can." There is a shift Wes describes that most people have not made yet. It's about what you do after AI gives you the answer the first time. Wes has a framework for what that looks like, and most listeners have yet to move beyond the first level of it. In this conversation, Wes and host Erik Martinez get into what is actually possible right now, why the gap between awareness and capability is widening, and the one shift that takes you from getting value out of AI to building real assets with it.