Embracing the Future: Human Connection in the Age of AI with Alessio Pieroni | 011

Hello Today on Leading with Purpose, I'm thrilled to welcome a true visionary and global change maker, Alessio Pieroni from his roots in Italy to transforming industries worldwide. Alessio has worn many hats, former CMO at Mindvalley, founder of scale to impact, and now a pioneer at the intersection of human connection, one of my big things and AI innovation, I am thrilled to have this conversation and with a passion for revolutionizing education and a mission to harness technology for deeper authentic relationships, Alessio is redefining what it means to lead with heart and vision in the digital age. Join us as we dive into his journey, his groundbreaking ideas and his insights. Hello, Alexiou, welcome.

Hi Mark. I'm super excited to be here. Great to reconnect.

Absolutely. I'm really, really thrilled. It's been a year and a half, yes, a little bit more than that, since we first connected at the soulful leadership retreat in 2024 and it's been absolutely fascinating to see some of the people that you've been working with and just this whole progression of AI. But curious, if you want to just get people caught up who may not be familiar, if you could share some of your journey from being the CMO at Mindvalley, one of the biggest personal development brands, where you scaled it to $75 million to now founding the scale to impact what what in space transition.

So I would say that sometimes Life finds the way for you. And that was kind of what happened to me. I started my career. I was burned out. I tried to go corporate, I tried to go non profit. I really couldn't find my way. And then I remember that during my uni, I was at a conference, and there was a speaker, and the speaker was very cool, and I was like, one day, I'm gonna work for him. And that speaker was mission. And so I took a one way ticket to Malaysia, and I moved there, I'm not gonna work for him. And that's kind of how I fell in love with online education, marketing, personal growth. All these three words were kind of very foreign to me. I wasn't really into that before joining mem Valley, and that has been life changing. I met my wife there, some of my best friend fell in love with marketing, fell in love with personal growth, change completely. So that has been such a fantastic journey. And the reality there is that, I don't know if you ever read the surrender experiment from Michael singer. It was kind of a situation like that that is like, Oh, I'm gonna try this thing. Oh, I'm good in this, and we're gonna try that. Oh, seems that there is something telling me I should improve this. Let me improve that. And really going like that. I got promotion after promotion and became, in just a few years, Chief Marketing Officer, managing a team of out of 50 people from their nationalities when I was 29 big budgets and scaling Mindvalley like we, I think in two years, we went from 25 to 75 million within an incredible work. And but at the end of that work, I was kind of feeling, you know, I feel I need to do something more. I was always very entrepreneurial. I always the feeling of, I want to take things to the next level. And that's where I say, you know, just go out in the world and let's see what happens. And so I resigned in January 2020, and my last day in office was like the first week of COVID. So I resigned when the world was normal and my first day unemployed was very different than what I expected, but at the same time again, Life finds the way. So a lot of people needed to go online because of COVID. So as soon as they were that they just left my Bali, a lot of people started calling me. I wanted to build a startup, but the calls kept coming. So I start consulting people and consulting the other and everyone asked me, Oh, do you know copywriter? Do you know a marketer? Do you know project manager? Do you know an advertiser? And after a while of doing this, is like, why don't I just take all these people together, I train them as I want, create my own agents, and that's where scale for impact was born. And fast forward five years. We work with some of the biggest people in the industry. We work with Tony Robbins, Marty Sabir, Shefali Sabari. We work with literary legends in this industry. And at the same time, we work with a lot of six figure coaches that want to take their business to the next level. So that's a lot. Of what we've been doing. We have a team of about 18 people right now going very strong and allowing everyone to grow. So that's that's what has been and again, Life finds you the way, right?

I love that you mentioned the surrender experiment and the idea of Michael singer saying, I'm going to follow my inner guidance, whether it makes logical sense or not, if my heart and soul are telling me to go, I'm going to follow that. And like you say, you learned all the skills that you needed. You acquired them all, but also the connections that you have made along the way. You've worked with some of the biggest leaders in personal development. I'm curious with your understanding of both technology and personal development, what does leading with purpose mean to you? Personally?

It means to step back if you like basketball like sometimes, step back in basketballs is the thing that you need to do to make to step forward, right? So that's stepping back give you more points than selfie forward in basketball, right? And leading with purpose, to me, means, like a lot of people, lead with KPIs, lead with results, lead with force, strengths, right. Leading with purpose is kind of stopping for a second and then be like, hey, wait a second. Let me take a step back and really think is like, whoa. Does this align with my values? Does this align with what I actually want to do? Right? And sometimes we are always so much in the tactics of our business, so much in the little thing, but taking that step back and realigning yourself with the purpose. Michael singer example, is a perfect one, and then using that to go to a whole new level is what it means. Means what are living with purpose. It takes things to a complete new level. And I believe that the people that are reaching the biggest results in the world are the ones that are fully aligned between their purpose, their action, their tactics, everything that they do.

Yeah, and then that's one of the reasons why I resonate with you so much, that deep alignment and everything that we're doing, the people that you want to work with you, just alignment is such a key piece of that. That's why I'm very grateful to have you as part of meta mind and also a contributing author in our most recent soulful leadership book, and in your chapter embracing the future human this, you're talking about human connection and AI. And I love this intersection of technology and humanity, and I've even seen like to me, it feels like AI is evolving and reflecting human consciousness almost at this point. And I'm curious again, you use AI in a lot of different ways. It's a brand new toy for many people, but I don't know many that know it as well as you. And how does because there's a lot of people that fear AI, and especially it taking away from authenticity and it taking away from human connection.

Yeah, that's that's a very great point, I set some context. When chatgpt came up, we started deep, diving a lot our work in with my team of what, how can we use this fantastic instrument? And in the beginning, when we started playing around with chatgpt, we were simply like, Okay, this does something cute, but nothing we could use for business. And then I took this sprint for one weekend, and I'm like, I want to replicate what my team does with AI, and see at one level AI could generate something like that. And at the end of the weekend, playing around with some APIs and some spreadsheet and some non technical thing, I was able to replicate about 60, 70% of what we normally do with weeks of work. And I was like, wow, okay, this is a lot better than I expected. And we started saying, Okay, what if I create a platform that allow me to take these things to the new level, and that's where online courses.ai was born, which is basically a platform where we took all our knowledge expertise that we've been creating over the years of working with the best of the best, and made it available for everyone so that they can take their marketing, their business, to the next level, a small fraction of the price. And that has been the beginning of my journey with AI. We've been learning a lot, and I believe that this year, we are entering into a new phase, which is the agentic AI phase. We are seeing the rise right now of AI agents. We are seeing. Seeing basically chatgpt, Google, everyone launching their own operator that AI is going to go on the web and do things for us. We've seen a few days ago, Google launching bell tree and creating videos with audio included. That it's frankly scary,

Because you really cannot understand, really anymore, what was real and who is not.

But it's very interesting. And you mentioned about AI and connection, and I will say a few things about that. First of all, yes, a lot of people fear AI, but I think that's I do have some fears about the AI as well, but the solution is not running away for sure, for sure. There's another solution. I think that AI is like fire. It can help us to create a new, different society, better, more warm, where we can cook our own food, or it can burn us, right? But once we learn how to control it, it can take things to the next level and and I think that being afraid of fire is normal, but we learn how to work with that, and that's the same thing we need to do with AI now, I believe that right now the disconnection problem is a lot more because of social media than because of AI, right? And yet, I'm offering a very different point, which actually a lot of people that are forward thinking in AI are discussing about AI is going to connect the world in a way that is a lot bigger than what we are connecting right now. And how is that going to happen? Because AI is going to kill our phones and possibly even our laptops. So this is a very fascinating theory, but let's go back to the examples of the operators that we have seen before, right? So if I know we want to book a trip, what we do is that we open a website, open another tab, open another tab, compare five different destination, and then we choose the destination, and we compare the hotel, and then we compare the price, and then we book the thing, then we take out our credit card, and then we do this run around in mutual AI is already doing that right. And of the AI is doing that automatically, without us doing any of these clicks, browsing, this kind of stuff, and what's going to happen is that a lot of our interaction with the internet is going to transform into that now, traveling is a simple example, but maybe in the future is going to be about building a website. Maybe in the future is going to be about a lot more complex things that AI is not able to do yet. And actually one of the biggest rumors that you might have seen is OpenAI just bought the company from Johnny Ive, which was the guy that was the designer of apple and most of all, the Mac and iPhone that we use. And the idea is that they're going to launch in 2026 or 27 the first AI hardware. And what a lot of people are saying is that that's what's going to completely replace the iPhone. And at the moment, we live in a world where social media is, I don't know, 80% of our hype that we spend on our phone, right? And imagine a world where we don't use the internet ourselves by clicking and doing stuff, or we don't use social media ourself by watching videos, scrolling infinity, little stuff. But if you really want to have fun, we simply ask AI, Hey, show me 10 fan videos, and then they make you see 10, five videos through your glasses. You see that, and you're fun. So instead of being there and actually scrolling and everything, they will bring it directly to you. Or you need to do something for work, you ask AI to do it. You discuss a bit with the eye, and it changes it. But imagine a world where you have glasses or people saying that you have a little necklace that basically will hear what you do, will feel what you say, or this kind of stuff, and we will interact with the internet, but also with society around us in a different way. Now that's interesting, because it might kill the iPhone, it may kill social media, it may kill the world as we know it in 10 years, and maybe it will connect us more, because clearly, right now, we are as disconnected as we have ever been. What would happen if AI. Will actually break that disconnection that we have right now, and I believe that that could be a very interesting thing. Maybe in 10 years from now, we will laugh at ourself and the time we were spending on Easter right?

Absolutely, that is amazing, and it's funny because you're right. So many people spend all the time scrolling and using it as a I have caught myself using that time as an excuse to say, I'm catching up with friends. I'm looking to see what they're up to. But most of the role, 80% of it, is the stuff you don't want to see. Where, if you could say, hey, AI, you know, my top 10 friends, what are they up to? And they can just give you an update on those people, exactly. Or, hey, I want to hear the news. Give me the good news, not all the

exactly, and they'll tell you. Hey, Alicia is traveling in Spain while Michael is having a cruise across the Caribbean. Oh, that's cool. Show me some picture of Michael. Okay, cool. Love it. And I caught up with my friends, which is what social media was supposed to be, not watching some stupid 10 second video about some people doing prime to each other, right? We've learned

that the algorithms were designed to psychologically keep us addicted and to literally raise our hormones and all of the different things that is manipulating us. Where you're saying that AI can give us control again,

obviously, is a big part of what they are trained to do. And let's be frankly, right, going back to leading right? Obviously, people that own Facebook or that own Apple or Google, their entire thing is about, how can I keep people as much as possible inside my device, right? So for Facebook is, how can I serve them content I keep them saying for Google is that, how can I keep them searching for things or spend as much as possible time with Google and for OpenAI, you will be how much can I spend as much time possible with AI and but the interesting thing is that spending time with AI is contrasting spending as much time as possible with social media. And that's where this thing could become interesting, because considering how everyone is going a lot more with AI, this might actually break the social media Kingdom, where we eat right right? It's

funny. You mentioned travel before. You know, we just got back with our family from Las Vegas, and when we're looking for the different places, Renee has always been the travel agent. She loves being able to compare all that stuff, but to be able to just literally put into chat GPT. We have 250 year old twins. These are the kinds of things we like to do. We don't like to do these things. We want to have a nice place, but we want to what's the most affordable and in the way that it can give you the background of all of that stuff. So we do the same thing with food. You know, these are the types of foods that we love to eat. These the kids that won't eat onions, they don't like this stuff, they will make a whole list of foods, of menus that we can eat. And then here's all the ingredients you need. And then do you want us to order it for you? It for You and have it delivered? It's

it takes things on different level. Like I also was planning my travel for the summer. I don't know if there is anyone planning their travel without consulting chatgpt, right? Should it go in this island or this other should I be in this part of this. Other part, I want to this was bad, like, like, even just for a consultation, is, like, it's just incredible, and we're at the beginning of this revolution, right? The noise, it's true that we replace all our jobs and stuff. I don't know that. I think that is so difficult to understand where we are at the moment, right? Personally, think we will still have jobs. They will change, right? I'm something with some people that were saying, Look, when the internet came on in the 90s, everyone was like, we will never buy anything offline anymore. We'll just buy things online. And we know today that That's stupid, right? That is like, well, obviously you still buy things off, right? So I believe it will be the same with AI. It's not that everything will be aI completely. I believe that AI will be a big part of what we do, but there will be a lot of other things as well. Yeah.

Well, you bring up the exact next point that was kind of on my mind around that, that fear of it replacing it. And as you had said earlier, you know, it's not to stick our head in the sands or to hide it. It's not we're not going to stop progress, but we're figuring out, how do we do it in a way that does create greater connection? And you've used it, as you mentioned, with your teams. And I'm curious, how do you see AI changing the way leaders connect with their teams and their communities, and what opportunities and challenges do you think AI can bring into leadership itself?

Well, I think that's a huge part of our way I could be used, is for AI to coach us through some situation. Right? It, and I'm gonna give a different example, rather than the leadership, and then I will go back with leadership like one of the biggest thing I've done in the last few months has been to use the AI for sales. What do I mean? I mean that every single time I do a sales call with a client, I take the transcripts of the cone, upload it to chatgpt and discuss with them, what were their objection, what was their problem? What did I did wrong? What should I do better next time? Which will be the proposal I should send them, and I really discuss with them a lot of the things, and my close rates, in my sales has been going so much higher than before, right? Because I'm seeing things that I have no idea that I was supposed to do, right? And I learned so much more. I grew so much more for that. And obviously you can do the same on leadership. What if you have this conversation with a person in your team, you have this problem and you don't know exactly how to solve the situation. Take the transcript of the situation, pass it with your GPD and ask you, how can you coach me through that every use, it's a thinking pattern that is like something that is so important. And sometimes you can even say, look, think that you are Simon Sinek, how would you approach this situation? Think that you are whoever leader that you like. How would you approach this situation? Think you are Lebron James. How would you approach this situation? And that's such a big part, right, of how we should use AI and how this can app now at the same time. And this was a beautiful sentence, that someone signs said last week in a podcast. It was like, imagine that right now you have this problem with your wife, and imagine that you just vote and you have a whatsapp conversation about the fight that you're having. You take this, upload it to any AI tool and ask them, How should I answer? And then AI give you the perfect answer to solve the debate or problem you're having with your wife. Now, the problem with that is that your wife might come back to you and be like, did chatgpt wrote that for you, and that might create the biggest fight temper, right?

I've been in that fight, that fight, yeah,

and that's very interesting, because it kind of say that, look, AI cannot really replace you, cannot really replace your connection, cannot really replace things, right? But what would happen if you have that kind of conversation with chatgpt about America fighting my wife, I want to be a great husband. I don't know how to solve this. Am I doing something wrong? And then chatgpt help you think through. And then you come back and in your own words, using yourself, you come back and say something to your afternoon, your wife ask and say, did you chatgpt? You're like, yeah, I was confused on this. Chatgpt had me think it through. And I think that no, that's what I should do. So you still keep your authenticity, but use AI to coach you through that, to take the things to next level. I think that that will improve humanity like crazy as it improved my sales. Could we make better as a father, a better coach, a better leader? Absolutely. And that's I believe, where I'm saying, like, we cannot fear this. Like, sometimes it's so good to look at other point of view. Sometimes it's so good to have a thinking barter that takes things to the next level. And that's to me, what AI is. And

when you were sharing that story, I was understanding part of it is that even no matter what friend you talk to, whether they're all for you and supporting you, there's always an underlying agenda that they're not even aware of. There's a subconscious, and because AI doesn't have that subconscious program running, of like, how do I manipulate them? Or how do I give them the answer that they want to hear? They literally, you know, like you said, you can program to give us a certain type I work with a men's coach, and it, it has a program, self, GP chat, GPT, to sound like him, you know, and to be able to do that that kind of feedback, I love the being able to mirror. In fact, I think you may have probably heard that Harvard did a big experiment about the top 100 ways that people are using chatgpt and therapy was number one.

Yes, well, let's see these. That there are some thing I might be afraid to say to my therapist, but there are things I may not be afraid to say to AI because I have no charge points. Now I don't know if AI will help me exactly solve that problem. Better than a therapist. I maybe I still go to my therapist for certain things, but there are a certain level of thing that I'm not comfortable yet to say out loud that I'm comfortable writing to an AI and maybe AI as a therapist could be very good for those issues to bring them up a lot more, make you more comfortable and allow you to start talking to somewhere else a human maybe, right? So I definitely think that is a very huge potential, absolutely,

yeah. And again, your work with a lot of different leaders in different ways. Are you are you seeing them incorporate it themselves, or are most of the people that you're working with say, okay, great, you do the AI stuff for us, the marketing stuff, or are you actually helping coach some of the leaders that you're working with to integrate these different ideas themselves, rather than just outsourcing the AI work,

I think there is a variety of things that I think, I believe that most of all the business are AI powered, right, that they use AI for brainstorming, for basic stuff. Hardly I see businesses that say we don't use AI for anything, right? There are other businesses that more on the fourth front. And as you were mentioning, they create GPT on themselves, or they even use some more complex technology to go and recreate themselves as a AI coach, right? There are some people trying to do this for free, people that are actually charging for that. So there is definitely a lot of things that are happening that I believe that can make sense, right? I believe that there is a lot of unknown on that. Like one of my major question is, will people pay hundreds of dollars for our AI coach, whether I have chatgpt for free, AI replica of myself, whether I have chatgpt for free. I haven't seen yet any very big, successful case study of someone uploading their content, having an AI, replicating what they do, and then selling and making money and making that scale. It's a very green idea, but I believe that the fact that share GPD is free or $20 a month for the BEST OFFERS, it's like you will always be compared to that, right? And I feel that that is a very low anchoring of a price that is difficult for someone to create, to transform themselves into an AI make right, at least for now. So that's, that's, that's our unfortunate thing, that's maybe a different application right

the same time, so that I don't see AI replacing all of these things altogether. And yet, if we're not ai ifying our businesses, I feel like we are losing opportunity. You mentioned before, using it to train your sales, yourself in sales. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I want you to speak to Jennifer deep Stratton with our sales team, because she was just mentioning how she wants to AI Ify, everything you know, bringing that in. And so that's another thing, is that we have to learn how to bring AI into our businesses in new and unique ways as well.

That's a great point. Let me say also something else that I think that is not talk about enough, the people spending five to 10 hours a week deep, diving into AI, playing around with the different tool, playing around different things, and that's a lot of time. And I believe that when AI came out, I was that person, and now I'm focusing this 10 hours a week on sales, and my business is growing a lot more. Now here is the challenge that I want to say, right? You don't have to be the first of the first to apply AI. I think that is very important to take a look, spending couple of hours a week to look at what's new out there, continuously playing around with chatgpt, and try to do new focuses and stuff, but it's incredibly overwhelming to try out every new things that happen every week with AI, and it's incredibly a big time waste sometimes. Yeah, I'm sure you've been in this situation that you try to do something with AI, work so hard to make it happen. It doesn't happen anyway. Still, two hours, right? There are those kind of situations, and it's important that we also understand well, look, maybe AI is not there yet. Like, one case for myself, I don't know how many hours I spent to. Try to have any AI come up with a very great UX design for a sales page, even based on a template that I give them. And then taking this UX design, transform it into an actual web page and make it look exactly what do with the copy that they want, with the things that they want. It's not there yet, like I tried so many different tools. I tried so many different things, and I've not been able to that. If any of your listeners have been able to that, please let me know. But it's like, it's so difficult, and sometimes it takes you 100 hours, maybe 500 hours, to figure out this fake Now, if your business is about creating a tool like this, it makes sense. If your business is about having a marketing agency for course, creators, that probably doesn't make sense. And so it's very important that we understand, look, I may not be the person to discover how to create the design I want with this. I will look out for the space, for anyone that is able to do that, and once someone discovered, I will use I will pay for that solution, and I will do it right and and it's okay, it's okay sometimes to arrive second, right? You don't need to be the first one in every single thing. And it's a lot better to invest three hours to find that solution and use it, then invest in 500 hours to be the first to create a solution. And that's also my approach. I'm really trying to go 8020 because I don't have an AI business. My business is a marketing agency, and I need to do work, right?

Well, you bring up another point about efficiency, because you're talking about how you can get a lot more done, and that gives you more free time. I work with attorneys, and they're saying the same thing, you know, chatgpt is helping to get their research and all of their work done in a fraction of the time. They're saying, you know, that I would normally charge $1,000 for that work. And now it's like, it was, like, two minutes. How do I how do I charge for that? And they're like, well, we just, we get more done. We're not going to charge them the old prices. We're going to just be more efficient and get more done.

Totally, totally. That's, that's exactly a game and understanding for this use case. I can do incredible stuff for this other use case, not that yet, right? It's super important.

Yeah. Well, again, I love the positivity and the opportunities that you see. I'm curious if there's any last word that for those who might be concerned or worried or those who are very, very excited, what would your last words about AI and the possibilities that lie ahead?

I think that the AI is a big wave that is coming, and there will always be people afraid of the way, and there will always be people surfing it. And I think that's I like surfing, you see, then that's my best wish for everyone listening. I was like, surf the wave. Don't kill yourself on the way. Don't do anything crazy on that. There's a way that is coming, and we cannot run away from it. And what we're able to learn how to live with that way surf it, the more we're really able to take the best, enhance our life, make it better, and live in a new, better future. That's

beautiful. Alessio, well, I am grateful for this time that we got to share together. I look forward to more of it. We'll have your contact information below, but you want to share again, the name of your company and where people might be able to find you.

So our website is scaleforimpact.co, and you can find me a bit everywhere, but I will guess LinkedIn is definitely where I'm a bit more active. So you can look for Alessio Pieroni on LinkedIn, and that's where you can find me, Alessio.

Thank you so much. Appreciate you coming in from the other side of the Atlantic, and look forward to connecting with you again very soon. Thank you all for listening.