AI as a service multiplier: Cutting busywork while strengthening customer relationships

For convenience services operators, the promise of AI is not abstract or futuristic. It is practical, operational and immediately measurable. In his conversation, Ethan King repeatedly returned to a central idea: AI works best when it automates repetitive work so people can spend more time on what customers value.

King framed AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement for human connection. In industries like vending, micro markets, office coffee service and pantry, teams are often stretched thin. They juggle routes, service issues, inventory concerns, customer communication and marketing, often reacting only after something goes wrong. AI, King argued, allows operators to get ahead of those problems.

What are some clear ways that AI can directly increase revenue or optimize performance for businesses?

When are you surprised by AI? Does it ever surprise you when you discover a capability?

Ethan King: Yes, actually. Google just released a massive update in December with Gemini 3 Pro. A couple of things really blew me away.

• Nano Banana, an image-creation tool that is part of Google Gemini. I uploaded a keynote address and asked the tool to generate an explainer in the form of a whiteboard illustration. In about 30 seconds, it did it — flawlessly.
• VEO3 Pro is a video capability within Gemini. I asked it to create an HTML 3D interactive visualization of the solar system that I could copy and paste into my website. It took a few minutes, but it generated it. This didn’t require any programming on my part. This is code that I have — that I can use. It looked like something that a studio would have spent $100,000 on. But I did it all myself with just one prompt.

So, where we are headed with that? You may think, “What does that have to do with my business?” Well, I just want you to see the possibilities. If I can generate an animation of the solar system, then I can certainly do something that’s applicable to business in developing code, creating an app. All of this is at our fingertips right now, and it is getting easier and easier to implement.

As you look at the different possibilities of AI, is there one particular AI platform that you recommend over another? Is Google a free platform?

Ethan King: Google Gemini has a free version. And then of course, with Pro, you unlock more uses. So, they’ll let you taste it, basically. But if you want to keep using it, then you need to go to the paid version. And that’s pretty much how all of them work.

Now, I get this question a lot: Which one is the best? And it’s always changing. So, if I had to pick a daily driver right now — and I want to date-stamp this — we’re recording this in December of 2025. But I would still pick ChatGPT as my daily LLM driver because it seems to be very innovative. It’s like the Swiss army knife — it’s good at so many different things:

• Writing.
• Image generation.
• Organizing your thoughts.
• Saved memory and the ability to give it context to customize it, and it references all of my other chats.

But, every week it changes. There are certain tools that just really shine at certain tasks.

• Claude is very good at writing, and you can set up different writing styles. Also, it sounds more natural and human than ChatGPT.
• Claude is also good at creating visualization graphs and coding.
• Gemini 3, with the new version that just came out, I explained where it shines.

So, they each have different qualities that shine, and I see them as a team. You don’t have to just pick one. You can use all of them.

Now, we do have to be careful because all of these little $20 subscriptions start to add up. But I would say use the free versions of some of them, pay for a couple, and make sure you’re getting ROI from that. And it’s very easy to get a return on investment from that $20 a month.

Do you think we’re ready to start dealing with avatars more frequently out there?

Ethan King: I do. The adoption process has been slow. It will continue to improve as we, as humans, get more used to it.

My prediction is that within the next five years, we will prefer to speak with AI for things like customer service issues. I see a time when, if I call a company and have an issue that needs resolving, and a human answers the phone, I might just be like, “Hey, can you transfer me to your AI, please?” Because with well-trained AI, you do not need to deal with any type of incompetence, or bad mood or attitude, or looking all over the place. It just gets done.

Can you share an example of how you used AI-driven digital avatars to scale a business or enhance leadership presence?

Ethan King: For a client in the franchising industry, we created an AI clone that could conduct daily, repetitive 30-minute onboarding interviews, freeing her time to focus on one-on-one touchpoints, competitive research, and financial reviews. The AI clone saves her 30 minutes per interview, and she (or her clone) conducts multiple interviews a day, saving her hours and scaling her operations.

Yet, there is a lot of resistance to AI currently. Someone will try AI and get bad results, and then they think, “Oh, this doesn’t work. Oh, it just sounds like slop.” And they dismiss it altogether.

AI has to be trained just as a person does. You wouldn’t just fire a person. The same thing with AI. You don’t just fire AI and dismiss it. You train it. It learns.

• Make sure you craft it to speak in our brand voice — and that it understands your business.
• Be a little patient with it upfront as you train it.
• To correct it, add more details to the AI knowledge base.
• It remembers what you tell it, and it will not make that mistake again. 

It’s an ongoing process that keeps getting better. So, it’s worth putting in that work upfront, but that’s the biggest hurdle I see for people to get over in their minds.

When you combine AI and storytelling, it becomes a powerful tool. Why is that critical to brand amplification, and how can you take it to the next level with AI?

Ethan King: Storytelling is everything. In fact, I tell people: Replace the word marketing with storytelling because storytelling is what triggers human emotion, and emotion triggers action.

Nothing brings that out more than stories. It’s the oldest form of human entertainment and education, and stories have a framework that evokes certain psychological triggers.

Blake Snyder, a Hollywood screenwriter, wrote Save the Cat, which posits that we watch the same 10 stories — with different characters, settings and environments — over and over again. He broke down the models that trigger human emotion.

We can apply the same storytelling frameworks to our marketing messages to really amplify what we’re doing, and we already have our stories: they come from your everyday interactions with clients. 

1. Develop this library by keeping a daily list, even in the Notes app on your phone.
2. Share those stories on social media, in your emails, in your newsletters, in your blogs, in your articles. They show what makes your business significant.
3. Those stories are what connect people to us. They build relationships. People start to feel like they know you.

When you:

• Show up every day on social media, in e-mail, all these different platforms
• Provide valuable, entertaining content 
• Educate and inspire  your audience

That’s when you have a recipe for shareable and savable content. People feel endeared to you and want to do business with you.

To do it:

• Put the storytelling frameworks into AI.
• Train AI on the different stories that resonate with your business, and it begins to learn about your business. 
• Use AI to generate content, putting your stories into frameworks proven to work.

How do you balance automation and maintaining authentic human connection, and customer interactions and marketing?

Ethan King: The human touch is everything. What we’re doing is having AI take on those repetitive tasks.

Every company has administrative work — the things no one really wants to do, but that have to get done. Ask yourself: Where can you have AI automate those low level things so that you can magnify the human connection?

Automation shouldn’t feel like it’s automated. If someone’s doing business with you, and they feel like it’s cold, and that you just automated their processes, that’s the wrong way to do it. As the consumer doing business with you, I shouldn’t even notice that the automation is there. That’s when automation is done right — when it’s amplifying the human connection.

And there is an art to it. It’s about deciding which touchpoints we can authentically automate, using our brand voice and customizing them.

That’s the real art of automation: It amplifies the human experience. Then, when you come in on a high level, and someone is dealing with you face-to-face, it’s that much more impactful because they’ve had all these other touch points from the automations that you’ve designed.

What emerging AI trends or tools do you think will have the biggest impact on business in the next one to three years? How should business leaders prepare for that?

Ethan King: Well, voice agents, things like that — agentic AI is going to start to take off. This is where AI really starts to do things for you proactively.

For example, I was at Best Buy the other day, looking at refrigerators. I haven’t bought one in a while, and I wanted to see what was new. Now, these appliances include AI, so your refrigerator can have a built-in camera. It can see when you’re running out of something and automatically order from Instacart to replace it. This can all happen in the background. AI starts taking action proactively for us.