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Building AI First Growth Strategies with Brett Jansen of brettjansen.ai 2-17-26
00:24:50
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- [00:00]
Scott Becker
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- [00:15]
Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader who focuses a ton in artificial intelligence and also in healthcare. We're joined today by Brett Jansen and Brett, founder of Brett Jansen AI and also the leader and I believe, founder of Health Tech House. Brett before we get started and we'll talk a lot about what you're seeing at the intersection of AI and operations and a lot more and about what you do with cohorts and more. Can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us about how you got started in what you do and a little bit about Brett Janssen AI and Health Tech House?
- [00:57]
Brett Jansen
Yes. Thanks, Scott. I'm excited to be here. I've been in healthcare technology for the years, but now I am focused on growth strategy for startups, for organizations that are in an inflection point and are looking to raise money. So I've come in at a very interesting time because I have always been in technology. I was there during the dot com, I was there during the SAS boom, and now I'm seeing obviously a shift with AI. So a couple years ago when ChatGPT first came out, I started playing around with it as a beta tester and got sort of just obsessed with learning and getting better at the models. And I'm always one of the first to jump on a new tool when it comes out and I'll spend hours kind of pressure testing it. And in 2025 is when my consulting business, both for Health Tech House and Brett Jansen AI exploded because I was being able to provide services and deliverables to my, my clients using AI and they all thought I had a team behind me and it, it was really just me. So I started seeing real time, the power of AI and now I want to do whatever I can to get the word out there to help organizations grow faster, smarter, leaner as we go into this next point of technology advancement.
- [02:14]
Scott Becker
Amazing. And take a second, Brett. You're working sort of this inter intersection of AI and real business operators. What's sort of the biggest misconception that some leaders have about using AI in their operations? What, where are people sort of not quite there yet. And then I guess in contrast where are leaders really accelerating in the use of it and what's working?
- [02:36]
Brett Jansen
Well I think the biggest misconception is that AI is just an additional tool that you bolt on to your existing tech stack. You know a lot of leaders that I'm meeting with, you know, for discovery meetings, they're treating it, you know, like we did CRMs 15 years ago. They purchase it, they think if we train people on it and then they move on. But AI doesn't work that way. You should really rethink your perspective that it's, it's infrastructure, it's going to reshape how decisions are, are made, how information flows, how your teams execute. So instead of thinking as a bolt on to what you're already doing, I would start how can it transform my Monday and then kind of build it up from there. This whole, you know, one size fits all, you know, organization like we're our, our flag is in the ground for co pilot. We're set, we're doing an enterprise wide that's going to fail because the models are changing almost daily at this point and every single model has a different use case. So what sales is going to get out of Claude is going to be very different from what product is going to get out of, you know, chat, GPT. So my, when I come into organizations I say don't think of AI as meaningless headcount. I think that will be a reality here shortly. But right now think of it as how can I use AI to amplify my existing talent? How can I take AI and rethink how we do business to increase our margins without necessarily slashing people yet. And how do we start to think about AI being the infrastructure layer that we now build our business on top of or reset the business on top.
- [04:11]
Scott Becker
Of and talk a little bit about. We see people sort of individually, lots of individual use cases for AI. You know every individual, not every individual, but certainly a ton of them are starting to use one of the different tools or another in sort of daily business or daily life. How do you accelerate or do that throughout a company to make it more thorough and more system driven so that you're doing it not just as individual one offs but as a company strategy or part of bigger, bigger efforts, more enterprise type efforts.
- [04:48]
Brett Jansen
So this is very timely. I met with an organization yesterday, they have over 10,000 employees and they're starting to think differently about this and what they told me their problem is they have, have you know, obviously multiple different departments all of them kind of have their own siloed technology stacks. And so their CTO had recommended. We're going to go with Enterprise ChatGPT. We're already a Microsoft shop, so we're going to deploy Copilot as well. My perspective when I come into organizations, big or small is do an assessment with the department leaders. Let's talk one to one. Do like a brainstorming session. Where are the bottlenecks in your specific department? I will take all of those convers and I'll synthesize them and use AI to generate a plan and say look, in this department here's your, here's your bottleneck. In this department it's this. And then we'll start to strategically assign. This is going to be a great opportunity to layer this specific AI tool. And I know that that's not what a lot of executives want to hear right now, especially ctos. They want a one size fits all. But the reality is they're not built like that. Even with the recent release of Opus 4.6 out of Claude, I am wildly surprised by how much the model evolved. Just a month ago, last night I built out a private equity investor deck for a client. 34 slides on Claude PowerPoint, you know, everything and it was world class, like a McKenzie type deck. I was surprised myself that it gave me that output. So I started to think when I'm engaging with an organization where organizations spending the most time that's not producing revenue or value to the organization, can we apply AI there so we can move again faster, smarter and leaner and help accelerate decision process. So we're not having a circular, you know, argument amongst teams, amongst leaders and moving, you know, moving the ball forward as quickly as possible. And to me that's where AI is really going to start to set businesses apart from one another if they think about it strategically like that, in parts and pieces versus enterprise, big bang all at once.
- [07:00]
Scott Becker
Thank you. And talk about that for a second. Then I want to talk about your most recent upcoming AI cohort. But for leaders that are overwhelmed by AI and so many of us are, quite frankly, what are the first. And you mentioned this some. What are the first one to two use cases or more that you think could deliver value quickly without sort of trying to do something so broad that it, you know, that it overwhelms in trying to adopt it. You mentioned something just very, very important that takes up, used to take tens of hours if not hundreds of hours putting together a PE pitch deck. Now you could do it in a very quick Period of time, particularly with the right inputs. Talk about leaders that are overwhelmed. Where are starting use cases?
- [07:46]
Brett Jansen
The first one and I think I'm biased because I came from sales. You know, I was a senior VP of Optum obviously under United and I'm a chief growth officer. So for me I'm my first use case is sales intelligence. So I'll sit down with organizations and I'll do actual interviews with their best sales reps, record the conversation with their knowledge. I'll have them role pay play with me, you know, a, a, a discovery call or how they pitch the product. I'll take those recordings and using a tool like granola, I'll feed the transcripts into Claude, you know, as a dedicated project and I'll produce a playbook that's driven by insights and it's something that 95% of sales leader are never going to be able articulate clearly all at once. And we'll use that playbook to create better sales enablement materials to generate insights for how marketing can better support us on top of the funnel. That type of work I'm starting to see a lot more asks for me to come in and do that type of workshopping with organizations. Use case two would be board and executive meeting preparation. You know, the one thing and I think all C suite level leaders can attest to is preparing for a board or preparing for an a raise. It takes, you know, dozens of people, you know, 20 different iterations of different decks. And so how I'm working with organizations now specifically on the raise side is all come in to help frame the performance, build the strategic, you know, through line and generate the talking points. So instead of us spending, you know, 20 to 40 hours on deck iteration, we're getting one good synthesized curated deck that's a combination of the all the brainchild of the C suite level teams. We're doing one round of reviews with the bankers and the investors and then we're giving a final product. So we're condensing, you know, 80 hours worth of work into about 48 hours or about two days. So that's, that's to me like a wow for my clients.
- [09:51]
Scott Becker
And not even just the consolidation. You know, some of these board decks are so, I wouldn't say bad, but so many of them were like catalogs or like 200 pages, 100 pages. People spent a tremendous amount of time in them. I serve on a few boards. No board member wants to look through 100 page deck. They really want, they really want what you're talking about to Curated. Here's the top 10 things we ought to discuss. Here's the top five things that we had to discuss.
- [10:15]
Brett Jansen
Right.
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Scott Becker
That just sounds to me so right on where you're going with that. I love that. Brett. Talk about what you're doing. I want to touch more on using it for sales intelligence in a moment. Talk about the upcoming AI cohort that you're leading and who should join that. Where is that the most valuable for people? What does that look like?
- [10:38]
Brett Jansen
Yeah. So the cohort is really twofold. It's AI powered. We're going to be talking specifically about go to market and I get a lot of questions on like, well, what is go to market? To me, go to market is every bit of connective tissue for any organization, large or small on how they grow and scale the business. So product sales, marketing, operations, finance, et cetera. So the cohort is intent intended to be six weeks long. It's really a opportunity for organizations to either reset their growth strategy or build it if they're a startup using AI. And so we start with an audit of their current strategy, what's working, what's not, where does your sales process break down? Then we go into messaging, where is it failing to land, where are you losing clients and and that you should be retaining. And then we start to build the AI infrastructure around those specific fracture points. So it's not just he. They watch me do a demo of chat GPT on setting up a custom GPT for you. They'll they're building alongside of me. So at the end of the six weeks they're investor ready. They are ready to blow their numbers out of the water. And they all have it built with concrete deliverables from a better understanding of their Persona matrix. Not just one ICP or ideal client Persona, but all of them that's generated by AI powered research. We've got custom sales playbooks, I've got some incredible speakers lined up. So I'm really excited about this opportunity. I know that joining a group like this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I want to emphasize that I built this under the guise of I want revenue leaders, operators or even founders and C suite members that want to use AI. They have a need for it in their organization. They obviously need to scale and grow their business. I'm helping and do it in six weeks and I'm really excited about it.
- [12:28]
Scott Becker
And talk for a moment, is that sort of for large businesses, small businesses, mid sized businesses? Who would this be best for the AI cohort? Because it sounds fascinating and something that you know, would love to enroll one of my employees in, quite frankly. Is that doable or how does that look? What does that look like?
- [12:47]
Brett Jansen
So when I initially researched to do this, I was planning on targeting startups because that's been my sweet spot for the last four years. However, what I've found, and it's resonating is this is really intended for organizations both large and small. I don't care if you're a pre seed all the way up to a publicly traded company that need to be using AI and want like a speed round boot camp to do it. The way that I built the curriculum out is it's, it's deep enough that it's going to create immediate impact. But I, but I intentionally am creating the content as if this person is fairly new to AI or maybe they're dabbling in it and aren't just using it correctly. So again like I'm going to give them, I'm going to show them a deeper level of prompting that they've never seen before. We're going to get really creative in terms of setting up some automations using cloud cowork that's going to change their lives and I mean that literally. And they're going to see the power of being able to build a pitch deck in less than an hour or synthesize a year's worth of sales calls into your new playbook for 2026. All of this is going to be helpful regardless of the size of the organization it's really intended to be. Anyone that knows they need to use AI to do better and get better and run faster, smarter, leaner and have better output. That's who I'm targeting for this now.
- [14:11]
Scott Becker
It's fantastic. And so when does that the next cohort start?
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Brett Jansen
March 23rd.
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Scott Becker
Fantastic. I'll have to ask you more details on that unless you want to talk about them here like cost and commitment and so forth. Yeah, to join the cohort.
- [14:30]
Brett Jansen
So I priced it pretty low. It's $2,500 a seat. I did that because I wanted to make sure my seed and pre seed organizations were not feeling left out. Oftentimes for any sort of consulting engagements, they're priced out because they just don't have the capital. And I also price it as that because I'm having some organizations approach me that say, hey, you know, we want our VP of sales and our VP of marketing to attend. But we didn't necessarily budget for this. So I priced it low enough that it would feel comfortable, you know, moving Forward with it. It's six weeks long. I do 90 minutes of live, you know, workshopping, and throughout the week they have access to me and my team during office hours. Obviously, we're going to have some really exciting guest speakers and I would expect around four to five hours of implementation time per week just to make sure that you're grasping the concepts you're implementing in real time. So the end of the six weeks, you're not looking back and thinking, okay, what did I miss? You're thinking, how do we move ahead now because we have the infrastructure in place now.
- [15:34]
Scott Becker
That is remarkable. Thank you. And you send me a link to that. We'll make sure that we also are able to distribute that to people so people could see that as well. I love that. Talk for a second about how should executives think about experimenting with AI versus really trying to embed it in how they operate? And then maybe also the question of AI tools versus AI talent and how you look at those two. Those two issues.
- [16:04]
Brett Jansen
Yeah, I think in terms of, you know, in terms of experimenting with AI and how they operate, three things come to mind is first, you know, executive commitment versus just curiosity is really important. I, I'm working with an organization right now, I'm obviously not going to call them out, but their entire sales team, they have about 26 reps, are all actively using AI. They're so hungry to close more deals, obviously make better commissions. The chief Revenue officer, though, is very, you know, uncomfortably cautious about it. You know, old school sales leader, he doesn't understand, you know, why should we be using this the way that I've done it works fine. And I think that that type of mentality is going to leave you unemployed by the end of this year. And I know that that sounds really provocative, but it's true. Because the younger generation, I'm a millennial myself, we are embracing it so fast and it's changing so fast that if you don't start digging your heels in and saying, you know what, I better figure this out, you're going to be left without a role. Probably in, in the, you know, historical sense, I would say second is process documentation. I actually, you know, my ops person on my team, she's having me essentially scribe my workflows. It's recording my workflows where I'm touching my mouse. And then she's creating SOPs, and this is all being done with AI so she can help me to delegate some of my day to day work stuff out to, you know, other people and, or agents. So that's an incredible opportunity that I think anyone, regardless of your role, can do. And I would say third, and this is probably the most uncomfortable one, is you're willing to confront that. You know, what is actually failing right now is the gap between institutional knowledge and honestly what's being shared on social media. I know that that sounds crazy, but I learn more about new models, new workflows just by following along intently on YouTube and TikTok and some of the influencers on LinkedIn. And then I'll test it and then I'll deploy it with my clients if I feel like it's relevant to them. I know that you mentioned you asking about AI talent versus tools. I would much rather have, in my opinion right now, a VP who is is dangerous with Claude then pay thousands and thousands of dollars to hire a team of SDRs that are AI enabled that don't know how our sales process works. I think if you find some very core people in your organization that are dangerous with AI there, those people A, deserve a raise, but B, they're going to start to poke holes and where bottlenecks can be fixed with AI, I would lean on those existing employees now. Now don't get me wrong, I think there will be a time specifically in healthcare, you know, there's a lot of roles that are high turnover, they're hard to hire for, and they're not necessarily a value add to the patient experience. And that's where I'm seeing a lot of AI technology in healthcare start to replace potential roles. I think that's gonna accelerate by the end of 2026. I'm thinking medical assistance and I don't say that to be fear mongering. I'm just, this is where the technology is going so quickly and I want people to be prepared to think how can I make myself sticky in today's world? And you do it by being an AI super user at your organization.
- [19:26]
Scott Becker
That is literally fantastic and just amazing how quickly some of these tools are coming along. And your point on the millennial versus the older generation, that the older generation better pick this up quickly too or they could be really left behind. I think is actually so right on. So thank you for that talk for a second. If someone joins your cohort or if we have one of our employees join your cohort, what's the one outcome or capability you want them to clearly leave with? You know, in, in, in, in, in 90 days or whenever the cohort is done.
- [20:01]
Brett Jansen
Number one is mindset shift. I want people to think AI first. But the more important One is I want people to walk away with a very strong value add AI enabled workflow that's going to rethink how they do business. Obviously we're gonna build this out, you know, across sales, marketing, product ops and finance in the cohort. But if I could give anyone, you know, anything to walk away from, I want them to say, wow, this really works and get them thinking, how can I apply this to other departments? How can I apply this to other products that we wanna launch and get everyone in that AI first mentality. Because I want to see, you know, specifically my startup founder, I want to see more startups, you know, succeed. That, that, that metric of 90 of startups fail, I want that number to drop significantly because they're able to have better market intelligence, better competitor buyer intelligence and know how to kind of change their messaging and their content because it's being fueled by AI insights. That's what I want people to walk away from is say, hey, we've got a better process now. We're powered by AI truthfully, not just because it's cool to say it. And now we know how AI can actually and conceptually work, let's go apply it to the rest of our business. Now that Brett's showed us the foundation.
- [21:23]
Scott Becker
I think literally just, just fantastic. Brett, what you're doing is incredible. You've had this great career. Just so people understand your career a little bit more, you were at Optum for some period of time. You've got this tremendous leadership background. Great go to market background, Take just a moment and talk about your background so people get a better sense of some of the background you have that you bring to what you're doing.
- [21:48]
Brett Jansen
Yeah, I say this, it's going to sound like I'm bragging, but I think it's important in this world to establish some credibility. There's a lot of coaches and consultants out there that say that they can help, but they've never actually lived it. I'm a bit unique because I've been both in marketing and sales and I've had the opportunity to be blessed with some incredible mentors. Mentors. But throughout my career I've closed a little over 125 million in closed contract value, both as an individual contributor, a sales leader and a chief revenue officer. I've now advised over 60 startups and just in the last two years alone I've helped startups raised over 250 million primarily in the private equity space. So I, I'm a firm believer in AI. I guess one last caveat, I would throw out. Here is is when I set out to do consulting in 2021, you know, it was hard to consistently generate clients and have that top of the funnel going. 2024 is when I became an AI super user and by the end of 2024 I was hitting a hundred thousand dollars in monthly revenue by myself just because I was able to work with so many clients and support them with AI. And so 2025 I had the opportunity to start hiring and scaling myself and I don't think that would have been possible without the use of AI and me becoming the super user that I am today. So I I say that because I want people to understand that AI can become your superpower, your team superpower, your organization superpower. But you just have to go into it with the right mindset and it takes time and effort to train the LLMs to do what you want it to do, but the output is absolutely incredible and I'm both excited and and a little fearful of the future, but I feel like those that commit to AI first mentality are going to be the winners in the end.
- [23:42]
Scott Becker
Brad it's simply eye opening and inspiring to visit with you today on the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. I found a post where you talked about the AI cohort coming up. We'll also repost that so hopefully more people see it. I highly recommend it. Brett Jansen Remarkable what you are doing. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast. Just fantastic.
- [24:06]
Brett Jansen
Thanks Scott.
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