AI experts and industry leaders share how AI tools can bring people together and amplify mission.
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If you haven’t started, you’re already behind.
That was the undercurrent in the room at the DSN AI Deep Dive events in Plano, Texas and Lehi, Utah, where hundreds of direct selling executives gathered recently to learn from AI experts and executives who are strategically embracing artificial intelligence (AI).
No longer a novelty, AI has become the non-negotiable “cheat code” for working smarter, faster and leaner as technology rapidly iterates. While the original generative AI could identify patterns and create content, the evolution of agentic AI can now execute multi-step processes autonomously, learn from its own mistakes and act as a bridge to other applications.
Predictive AI, which can wield historical data to forecast a customer’s next purchase, has progressed to encompass prescriptive AI, an advanced form that can trigger customized discounts to prevent cart abandonment or craft retention offers to win customers back. And the evolutions and enhancements will only continue.
The brief era of looking down on AI as “cheating” has ended, according to Heather Chastain, Founder and CEO of Bridgehead Collective. Instead of asking, “Did you use AI?” she says leaders should ask, “Why didn’t you use AI?” This simple mindset shift can set the tone for employees who are AI-resistant and help teams become cross-functional, accelerate productivity and free employees from tedious, time consuming work.
“AI is not to be feared,” Chastain said. “Your lack of engagement with AI is what you should be afraid of.”
Designate an AI Champion
Sanctioned or not, most employees today are actively using AI. To quantify this, Young Living conducted a survey of its employees and found that almost three quarters of its teams were already using AI—most of them using open-source models.
“They were putting our intellectual property into ChatGPT and asking questions and that was being shared with everyone on the planet,” shared Jeremy Maughan, Young Living Vice President of Data and Information Technology.
As a solution, Young Living formed an AI Committee to select an enterprise-level AI tool that could protect company data, determine best practices and provide prompt and context engineering training. As a result, top performers are now even more productive, with their top AI-reliant employee tripling his productivity levels and delivering the output equivalent to hiring two additional full-time employees—all for the cost of a ChatGPT license.
“If you want to keep good talent, teach them how to use AI,” Maughan said.
Train AI as a Partner
AI can now behave like a colleague in many ways. With closed-loop AI systems and custom GPTs, leaders can fine-tune training for specific data sets, like handling routine customer service questions or analyzing large datasets. Dan Debnam, Inovara Founder and CEO, cited a case study where his company created personal AI assistants for field leaders. The assistants’ scenario-based training guided distributors through a self-paced educational program to help them gain core skills in two- to five-minute sessions. The process delivered quick results for the instant-gratification expectations of younger generations and prevented rookie team members from getting stuck before they could even get started.
eXp Realty, who announced a vision to integrate AI into 95 percent of its workflows by 2030, recently rolled out Doc AI, an internal solution that instantly reviews contracts. For brokers, who oversee hundreds or thousands of agents, what was once a tedious and time consuming task is now an automated review process that flags complex issues.
There are countless other applications for AI, and as it becomes easier and more effective to implement, Debnam encourages executives to evaluate tools relative to their impact. Tasks that are repetitive and data-heavy should be turned over to AI, while those that directly rely on trust and empathy should be human-led and AI-assisted.
“Let AI do the lifting, and absolutely let people do the connecting,” Debnam explained. “Anything to do with connection, anything to do with trust, anything to do with building community—that’s the stuff we want to safeguard.”
Originality Is the New Differentiator
Marketing workflows—once splintered across multiple team members—can now be managed almost entirely with AI. Kathleen Ross, Speaker & Fractional Chief Marketing Officer, shared a comprehensive workflow for how to implement AI at every step of the creative process.
Beginning with Perplexity for research; custom GPTs and Fathom to brainstorm and take notes; Claude for messaging; and Midjourney for storyboarding, before finally bringing the overall vision to life with Veo 3. Upon completion, HeyGen—in combination with ElevenLabs—can translate the video into multiple languages, and Opus Clip can cut the video into smaller segments for different mediums.
“We all have a movie studio in our pocket, so we have both an opportunity and a challenge,” Ross said. “If everyone has the same access to the same tools, the only differentiator is originality.”
With AI, amplifying human creativity has never been easier, but the event’s analysts and experts agreed that no AI tool will be a “set-it-and-forget-it” system. Humans need to input correct data, refine outputs and spot check for fabricated answers known as “hallucinations.”
There will certainly need to be continued discussions around protections for both customers and brands as AI’s evolution progresses. But as leaders wait for more information or the “right” time to transition its technology strategies, Debnam warns that while AI adoption can work for everyone, it won’t wait for anyone.
Don’t Lose the Personal Touch
Personalization has long been a selling point within the direct selling model. Thanks to distributors who maintain personal relationships with their customers, companies can effortlessly intuit the right products, campaigns and sales roll-outs.
“In an industry based on relationships between people, the main and most important thing is to create personalization for each customer and for each distributor,” said Yoav Shpringer, Apptor.AI Founder and CEO.
With predictive AI, brands can scale that personal touch by using customer and distributor data to anticipate needs before they arise. Models can identify when to engage; what support is needed; what to offer; and which products will be most relevant. And prescriptive AI can turn those insights into automated actions. This drives retention, improves onboarding and ensures customers and distributors truly feel “seen.”
Concentrating on Compliance
In an increasingly regulated industry, sending thousands of distributors out into the world to teach and coach is a recipe for compliance disasters. But today, AI can not only provide internet-wide monitoring to make sure noncompliant messaging is addressed, it can also prevent it from happening altogether.
With tools like Jasper.ai and Nowsite, brands now have the capacity to offer distributors templates and market-specific tone control that can be tailored to match their unique posting style while staying 100 percent compliant. The key is to not only offer these tools to distributors, but to train them on it as well.
“In just one click, they can have a post that’s compliant, authentic and in their voice,” said Shellie Sullivan, Nowsite Chief Growth Officer. “It helps you duplicate, helps your sellers and builders to follow your sales strategy and turns their leads into customers. When it’s done right, it doesn’t feel like tech; it feels like relief.”
The Best AI Tools to Level-Up Your Workflow
These six tools received high praise at the recent deep dives. Here’s how to make them work for you.
- Fyxer / Email Productivity
Triage your inbox to organize, flag and draft pre-written replies that match your unique email writing style. Fyxer can also link to your calendar and meetings to prevent double-booking, take notes and prioritize next steps. - ChatGPT / Brainstorming and Auditing
Automate repetitive tasks like data entry and identify trends. At the enterprise level, it can be used to analyze proprietary information, forecast inventory trends and test new ideas. - ElevenLabs / Voiceovers
Create hyper-realistic voices that use tones, pauses and lifelike emotions. Use it to build multilingual AI customer support agents, narrate social media clips or lead a company podcast. - Midjourney / Image Generation
Generate images from text prompts. Brands can wield it to visualize product design or packaging, make a social media ad or website and turn ideas into visuals in seconds. - Runway / Video Generation
Generate and edit videos and animations from text prompts or from existing media that feel high-end without a full production pipeline. - Snowflake / Data Storage but Smarter
Think of a meticulously organized filing cabinet that can also read, understand and make decisions based on the files you feed it. Snowflake lets you store your cloud-based data in one place and run AI models across all of it without leaping systems.
AI Terminology Cheat Sheet
Generative AI
Creates customized content from prompts and uses learning models to identify patterns.
Example: Crafting photorealistic images or illustrations from text descriptions.
Agentic AI
Goes above the traditional model to perform tasks with a higher degree of autonomy and reasoning utilizing external tools, executing multi-step processes, identifying its own failures and updating accordingly.
Example: Producing its own content; placing it as an ad; tracking it on social media; and optimizing for best performance.
Predictive AI
Focuses on personalization by utilizing data to identify patterns that can forecast outcomes, behaviors and future possibilities.
Example: Predicting which product will be in demand when.
Prescriptive AI
Uses predictions from predictive AI and combines them with additional models, rules or resources to create actionable steps.
Example: Flagging specific customers at risk of cart abandonment and prescribing discounts.
From the September/October 2025 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
