Day 2 – Breakout Session 4 – 9:45-10:15 AM
Room: Affectiv
Stop Treating AI Like a Google Search
Erik Madsen, Creceda Innovations · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello
An MIT Sloan Management Review study published just weeks before RizeCon found that 95% of organizations are seeing zero measurable ROI from AI. Erik Madsen opened with that number and a $40 million business owner who told him two days prior: “We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on AI and have yet to realize any profit.” The problem, in almost every case, is the same one: generic input, generic output. Tell AI to write you a marketing plan with no context and you’ll get a generic marketing plan. It’s not a tool problem. It’s a use problem.
Erik spent 30 years working with thousands of businesses domestically and internationally at Creceda Innovations, and the pattern he sees is consistent: great product, great service, no clarity on how to scale it. His session was the ground-level companion to the morning’s AI panel — less about which model to use and more about how to give any model what it actually needs to produce something useful.
What he covered
Generic input produces generic output. Erik’s opening diagnosis: most businesses treat AI the way they treat Google — type a vague query and hope something useful comes back. The gap between AI’s theoretical capabilities and what organizations are actually producing with it is enormous. That gap is almost entirely explained by the quality of what goes in. AI doesn’t know your business, your voice, your customers, or your goals unless you tell it. When you do tell it, the output changes dramatically.
The 30-40-30 approach. This is the operational framework Erik and Creceda Innovations use with clients:
The first 30% is quality input — providing AI with the DNA of your business before asking it to produce anything. The middle 40% is letting AI do the heavy lifting: drafting, analyzing, building, structuring. The final 30% is human review — editing, adjusting, and humanizing the output so it sounds like you, reflects your actual positioning, and is accurate. Erik’s line on this: the calculator didn’t replace the accountant, and the spreadsheet didn’t replace the financial analyst. AI doesn’t replace the business leader. It amplifies one.
The five context files. Drawing on the same principle the morning’s AI panel covered, Erik named five areas of context that AI needs before it can do useful work for your business: who you serve (your ideal customer, their pain points), what makes you different from the competition, how you talk (your authentic voice, your language, your style), what your products and services actually are, and where you’re going (your growth priorities and goals). Without these five inputs, you’re asking a brilliant stranger who knows nothing about you to represent your business.
Five questions to answer on Monday morning. Erik gave the room a concrete starting point:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What makes you different from your competition?
- How do you talk about what you do?
- What is your competitive positioning?
- What are your specific growth goals?
Answer those five questions and feed them to AI. That’s the context file. That’s what changes the output from generic to useful.
The live website persuasion analysis. Mid-session, Erik ran a live demonstration — a volunteer’s website (atmosoft.com) analyzed in real time by AI on a 15-point persuasion framework. The site scored 62 out of 100. Strengths identified: exceptional brand voice and positioning, transparent pricing, compelling three-stage framework, strong FAQ section. Critical weaknesses: zero quantified social proof, no urgency, repetitive and generic calls to action, missing emotional resonance, and lack of buyer avatar precision. The full analysis — with specific rewrites for the hero section, problem section, engagement section, and all 15 scored dimensions — took about two and a half minutes. A consultant doing that work five years ago would have needed a week. The prompt used wasn’t even a trained one. With the five context files loaded first, Erik noted, the output would have been significantly more specific.
Speed and relationships are the new currency. Erik’s summary of where business is heading: two things matter most. Speed — AI compresses timelines that used to take months into 90-minute work sessions. And relationships — the human element that AI can support but not replace. He cited a vendor who sells to Walmart and put it plainly: “The person I’m talking to on the other line still puts their pants on one leg at a time.” The tools accelerate the work. The relationship is still the transaction.
Client results with the 30-40-30 approach. Three examples from the last 45 days: a local Idaho Falls franchisee built a sales promotion in 90 minutes that increased product revenue by 19% in its first week. A top-10 home care franchisee from Long Island built a full-year growth strategy in under 90 minutes — step by step, week by week — projecting 20-25% growth. A landscape franchisee in Wyoming used AI to take generic corporate messaging from his franchisor and make it sound authentically like him in his local market. He’s projecting 4X growth this year as a result.
What attendees got
Creceda Innovations had a booth in the hall offering free website persuasion analyses — the same 15-point AI-generated analysis Erik demonstrated live. Attendees who stop by, give their URL, and leave their contact information will receive a full analysis either same-day or the following week. Erik’s son Jonathan was running the booth and offering prizes — AirPods, water bottles, speakers — to attendees who visited.
One moment that landed
A volunteer gave his website URL. Two and a half minutes later, AI had produced a full 15-point persuasion analysis, identified four key strengths and five critical weaknesses, and generated specific rewrite suggestions for the hero section and multiple other pages. Erik asked the room: if you’d hired a consultant to do that five years ago, how long would it have taken? The answer from the room: over a week. That compression — from a week to two and a half minutes, on a generic prompt, with no trained context yet — is what the 30-40-30 approach is designed to make routine.
“A GPS is the most powerful navigation tool ever built — if you tell it where you want to go. The same is true with AI.” — Erik Madsen
“AI should be a tool, not the master. We have to keep it as the servant, and we’re the master.” — Erik Madsen
About the speaker
Erik Madsen is the founder of Creceda Innovations, where he works with small business owners on AI implementation, marketing strategy, and growth planning. He has spent 30 years working with thousands of businesses domestically and internationally, with a particular focus on helping companies that have a strong product or service but haven’t yet figured out how to scale it. Creceda Innovations developed the 30-40-30 approach as a practical framework for small businesses to get real, measurable ROI from AI.