Full Throttle Leaders: JD Miller

Michael Falato opened our conversation on Full Throttle Leaders by asking about the book I'd just finished, and I told him the same thing that surprised me most while researching it: I expected to find maybe a dozen AI tools worth mentioning in sales, and instead I catalogued 158 of them across 48 different sales processes. Yet a survey I cite in the book found that 61% of sellers still haven't touched AI in their day-to-day work at all. We're all still in the experimentation phase, comparing notes with each other because nobody has quite figured out the playbook yet.

Michael made a good point about people using AI to research him before ever reaching out on LinkedIn, and I pushed back a little: AI is very good at pattern matching, which means it can generate a dossier on someone in five minutes that used to take hours. But that same pattern matching is what makes a lot of outreach feel hollow. It's learned that when someone says they're having a bad day, the right response is sympathy — but that isn't empathy, it's a trained response. The sellers who win are the ones who let AI clear away the research grunt work so they have more time to be genuinely curious about the person in front of them.

We also got into digital twins, which I've only just started experimenting with myself — Michael had actually chatted with mine before we recorded. I'm still a little wary of letting a bot speak in my voice, mostly because I think being unmistakably myself is my actual differentiator. But we agreed there's real promise here for smaller companies: tools like this are letting one- and two-person shops compete with much bigger incumbents by scaling a founder's expertise in ways that simply weren't possible before.