r/Entrepreneur • u/pknerd • 14d ago
Tools and Technology Could an AI podcast help explain a B2B service and bring in customers?
Recently, I experimented with a different way of explaining my web tracking service.
Let me be honest: I am a developer, and reaching out to customers is not something I am good at or feel comfortable with. On top of that, business owners were not able to connect with the service I offer, and they were asking questions that were not easy to answer in a few messages.
What I did was write a blog post in which I documented the journey of implementation, but it was quite long and more suited to educating someone already interested in the topic.
So I turned it into an AI-generated video podcast: an AI version of me as the guest, with a fictional host asking questions business owners asked me during the calls, plus others they might ask.
The answers came from my own content and implementation experience.
At an agency I previously worked with, clients would request podcast scripts and arrange studio recordings, which involved considerable time and expense. That experience made me curious about whether this format could be useful for smaller businesses, especially when AI tools are getting insanely good at doing such things.
I haven’t measured whether it generates inquiries yet. Producing something convincing and getting someone to trust it enough to contact you are different things.
Curious whether anyone has tested this and seen actual inquiries or sales.
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u/apocalypsebuddy 14d ago
I see this as a popular ad format right now: fake podcast clips selling some service. I always hit skip as soon as I’m able to
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u/SibriMacdonado 12d ago
Dude, I feel like there are more fake podcast than actual podcasts. The other day I actually found out that people will buy an entire set up just to make reels.
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u/edkang99 Serial Entrepreneur 14d ago
You answered your own question. It’s about trust and nobody trusts AI content right now. At best it can be entertaining. Like those podcast
Videos with animals or Bigfoot. But even then when products are tied in there’s backlash.
You’d be better served by creating building in public videos or even simple talking head ones or loom videos of you demonstrating your product. And of course don’t ignore founder led sales.
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u/BagAdministrative330 13d ago
I am on the service business side of things and I would say the trust point is the real one. My customers hire us to come into their homes, so the face and the name are the whole pitch. An AI version of me would not book a single job. If you redid this with your real self answering those call questions, I think it would land a lot better.
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u/gapingweasel 12d ago
The AI version will never connect with the audience.
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u/BagAdministrative330 12d ago
That is exactly how it plays out with my customers. They book the person they expect to see walk through the door, so a copy of me would lose the one thing that actually does the selling.
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u/pknerd 11d ago
I left the comment here.
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u/BagAdministrative330 11d ago
Got it. My take stays the same though. The questions you collected from real calls are genuinely good material. I would just have your real face and voice deliver them. That is the part that builds trust with business owners.
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u/coffeeintocode 14d ago
Does anyone actually listen to ai podcasts?
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u/execution4uN 12d ago
People do. But would they trust the services? I doubt. Does your buyer persona fancy that?
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u/Neil_CME_Marketing 9d ago
I tried to when they first came out.
I thought it was pretty tough.
AI podcasts remind me of the fake news that plays in the backgrounds of video games and comedies. The concept sounds good but they definitely come across as filler.
Here's how you know they are junk. Look at real podcasts. They get real sponsors because their target audience listens to them. The sponsor pays to get their brand plugged in.
NOBODY (that isn't already part of the scheme) pays for AI podcast sponsorship.
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u/Strict_Ask_51 14d ago
Your instinct is half right, and the wrong half is the expensive one. The good half: turning the real questions prospects asked you on calls into content is exactly right. That Q&A is the actual objection-handling that moves a deal.
The bad half is the AI version of you. For B2B the thing you're selling is "trust me to implement this in your stack," and that sale runs entirely on them believing you're a competent real human. An AI clone of yourself quietly torches the one asset that converts. People can smell it now, and the moment they do you've lost trust you never had to spend.
So keep the format, drop the clone. Same questions, but it's just you, a plain talking head or a Loom over a screen share of the thing actually working, even audio. You being slightly awkward on camera beats a polished AI you, because awkward reads as real, and real is what they're buying. You don't need to be good at outreach, you need to be visibly the person who knows this cold.
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u/francksiduo 14d ago
what worked here isn't the AI part, it's that you turned your own sales calls into the content instead of writing what you think they need to know. the questions business owners ask you live are the real FAQ, a blog post written from the implementation side skips half of them because you forget what confused people the first time.
I'd track which questions from the podcast still show up again on calls. if the same three keep coming up despite the content existing, the format isn't the problem, people don't consume pre-work before a sales call no matter how it's packaged, and that's fine, it still saves you from re-explaining the basics once they're already talking to you.
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u/MichaelleB53 14d ago
I think there's something really useful in what you did here, but I might look at it a little differently than some of the other comments.
I wouldn't start by asking whether an AI podcast can bring in customers. I'd back up one step.
You said business owners weren't really connecting with the service you offer and were asking questions that were difficult to answer in a few messages. That's the part I'd pay the most attention to.
Because if people aren't quickly understanding why they need what you do, turning a long explanation into a podcast may make the explanation easier to consume, but it doesn't necessarily solve the reason they weren't connecting with it in the first place.
I actually really like that you used the questions prospects asked you on real calls. I've worked in sales and with business owners for a long time, and those conversations are gold. They tell you what people don't understand, what they're worried about, what they value and sometimes what you're explaining in a way that makes perfect sense to you but not to the buyer. 😂
Before making a bunch more podcast episodes, I'd go back through those questions and sort them.
Are people asking what the service actually does? That's probably a clarity or positioning issue.
Are they asking why they need it? That's more of a value/problem-awareness issue.
Are they asking why they should trust you to do it? That's a proof/trust issue.
Are they interested but still not buying? Then I'd look at what happens later in the sales process rather than assuming you need more content.
That's also why I wouldn't judge the experiment by views or listens. I'd watch whether people who consume it understand the service faster, ask better questions, move into conversations with you, and ultimately buy.
On the AI version of you specifically, I don't think the answer is automatically “AI = bad.” But I do think you have to be careful about what job you're asking AI to do.
If your biggest challenge is that people need to trust you enough to let you implement something inside their business, I'd want as much of the real you in the trust-building part as possible. You don't have to become a polished content creator. Honestly, a developer explaining something clearly on a Loom while showing me exactly how it works can be a lot more convincing than a beautifully produced podcast.
You could even keep the podcast idea and test both. Let the AI version explain one topic and have you explain another similar one yourself. Then measure what actually creates conversations instead of debating which format should work.
And I wouldn't worry too much about not being “good at outreach.” You may not need to become great at outreach. You need to get very good at explaining who has this problem, why it matters, what changes when you solve it, and why you're the person who can solve it.
Once that's clear, the podcast, Looms, articles, LinkedIn posts or whatever else you use are just different ways of carrying that message.
So I wouldn't throw your experiment away at all. I'd just make sure you're testing the right thing. Right now I think the bigger question isn't “Will people listen to an AI podcast?”
It's “After they hear me explain this, do they understand why they should care?”
If the answer to that starts becoming yes, then you've got something worth scaling.
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u/Total-Reasonable 13d ago
For web tracking, the real buying blocker is usually verification, not explanation: will it capture the right events, survive consent choices, and fit their existing stack? Test the podcast against a short technical proof page that answers those questions and tags each CTA by source. Otherwise you'll only learn whether people watched, not whether it removed the objection that prevents a purchase.
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u/feartrich 13d ago
Minimally altered AI copy, AI audio, AI video, people pick that up on that. Fairly or not, people identify that kind of stuff with laziness and mistrust. That doesn’t mean your strategy can’t work, but you’d basically be going down a content farm/numbers game path.
Everyone thinks they can prompt their way out of slop, and you can to some extent, but you’d be putting in a similar number of hours as learning more effective sales strategies. And you won’t have to pay for all the extra token usage. So why not do that?
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u/pmarks98 12d ago
don't use avatars - tbh a podcast is a great move if you hate cold outreach, since prospects can just listen and the spotify/apple podcast algos are way undersaturated.
I currently run 10 AI podcasts on autopilot with Jellypod and get ~20,000 monthly listeners. its high quality stuff and I insert an ad mention in them here and there but it really does work
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u/pknerd 12d ago
You know what, it does not leave a good impression that the founder of
Jellypodis promoting as a user of the app.1
u/pmarks98 12d ago
Fair - I should've said that upfront but yes, I'm the founder of Jellypod and also an avid user
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u/Psychological-Toe831 11d ago
Edison Research just put out a report showing that 66% of listeners would be “betrayed” if they learned that a podcast had AI hosts.
B2B podcasting is very successful. Biased as I run a podcast production company, but it’s a proven model that works for our clients.
B2B podcasting relies on trust and will not work with AI generated content.
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u/pknerd 12d ago
Thanks, everyone, for the responses. Considering the nature of the members here, who seem mostly conservative or old-school in their thinking, I am not surprised and was expecting the kind of responses I received. A few points I would like to address:
Someone asked whether people pay attention to such podcasts. It depends on the person or group of people. For instance, I skip many ads on YouTube and use an ad blocker on Chrome, but that doesn't change the fact that people buy stuff after watching, reading, or listening to those ads. It also depends on how you make the ad.
Someone called it slop. I disagree because not everything produced by AI is slop, just as not everything produced by humans is slop.
Last but not least, there's always some resistance to something new. From typewriters to AI, we have seen resistance, but we have also witnessed these inventions become the norm. The reason behind this, I guess, is economics. Usually, new inventions help scale things or make them easier and cheaper, so they get adopted. There was a time when people opposed the Internet and online businesses, but here we are, discussing things on an online forum. Many here might run online businesses as well. Given the economic issues we are seeing, businesses will be forced to adapt to AI ads of all kinds, and they will become the norm, like other inventions.
As AI videos and audio become increasingly realistic, the line between reality and AI is getting thinner by the day. Unless you label the content as “AI,” it does not look AI-generated at all. I am not here to promote what I did, so I won't share the link, but when I used that AI tool for the first time for this promo, I was surprised by how realistically it created my digital version. In a few months, there will be no difference between a real video and a fake video. I am not an AI video or editing expert, but I still think I was able to produce something quite good.
Look, the sole purpose of sharing this video was to answer all those questions people usually ask. I am thankful to everyone for sharing their advice and tips. A few were able to figure out the reason behind this, and they also shared some valuable tips.
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u/BionicMetro 11d ago
Here’s what I’d suggest. If you wanna use an AI voice, clone your own voice and really work on it. There are a number of places you can do that now and so I’m not gonna go through a list because I’m not here to promote anyone.
But if it’s a podcast, use a cloned voice and work with that voice so it doesn’t sound like AI. And here I’m talking about an audio podcast. If you’re doing visuals, that’s gonna be different. But you don’t need video to do a podcast in the traditional sense.
The other thing I will tell you is, if you let AI write the script that’s what it’s gonna sound like. In other words, you will need to be writing the script. And that means writing like a human talks, imperfections and all.
And see this is where things get challenging and the hope of saving time gets eaten up by having to do the actual work. I know two podcasters who are fairly well known and have a decent size audience and use their voice clone for their podcast. Their audiences don’t know. And the way that happened is because they have spent a massive amount of time writing their scripts like the way they talk and training their voice model. Hope this helps
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u/JimmyKur128 12d ago
I'd measure it before you make more. Put the podcast on its own page with a unique contact form or booking link, and send it only to prospects who already asked one of those hard questions. That way you can see if people who watched it reply faster or ask better questions than people who just got a text answer. Also be upfront that the voice is AI-generated, because people who figure it out on their own tend to stop trusting the rest. Honestly, a short 3 minute screen recording of you explaining one real client setup might do the same job and feel more trustworthy.
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u/pknerd 12d ago
Thanks for your response. Some others said the same thing: that I should have discussed the original setup first. I did exactly the same in the blog. It was difficult to in the video because I had to hide so many things, and it was going to be too technical for mere business owners. If you're curious what I did, I could share with you privately
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