""Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." — Simone Weil
Why in-person experiences become your most valuable, highest-margin asset as AI scales.
On Saturday, I ran the Peachtree Road Race with 60,000 other people (for the 19th year in a row). On Sunday, I sat in a stadium with 83,000 fans losing their minds over the Brazil v Norway World Cup match.
143,000 humans in 48 hours. Every one of them chose to be there, in the heat, packed shoulder to shoulder, when they could have watched from home.
That's when it hit me... We're in the middle of the biggest digital explosion in history. AI writes, designs, calls, and sells. Every business is racing to automate every interaction and shave every cost. Good. Do that. I teach that.
But here's what most people miss about where this goes: When something becomes cheap and everywhere, its value drops. Make it rare, and the value climbs.
AI is about to make digital interactions infinite and nearly free. Chatbots, auto-emails, AI voices, generated content, all of it, everywhere, instantly.
So what gets rare? Real human presence. A room that's actually full. A person who actually shows up.
And rare is where the money goes.
The businesses that win the next decade will run two plays at once. They'll automate the digital busywork down to the floor. Then they'll take the time and margin that buys them and pour it into real, in-person experiences a competitor can't clone with a prompt.
Picture it in your world. Your live event becomes your highest-margin offer, because a generated webinar is free and a room full of your best customers is not. That onboarding call your competitor swapped for a bot? It becomes the reason people choose you. A handwritten note, or a workshop people can actually walk into, starts to feel like a premium, because everyone else vanished behind a screen.
Scarcity is strategy. As the digital world floods, the real world becomes the luxury.
Don't wait for a stage or a big launch. Start with one room.
Almost every real break in my career traces back to a room, not a funnel. A live EO meeting. A dinner that turned into a deal. The internet builds your reach. Relationships build your business.
So this month, put one in-person touchpoint on the calendar. Invite your 20 best clients to something small and real. A dinner. A half-day working session. Keep it tiny and make it happen.
One room beats a hundred automated emails.
Here's where AI earns its keep: Use it to kill the friction that keeps you from ever hosting anything.
The reason most people skip hosting a live event is the work around it. The list, the invites, the logistics, the follow-up. So hand all of that to your AI.
Open your main AI assistant and give it something like this:
"Pull my top 20 clients by revenue from my CRM. Draft a warm, personal invitation to a small in-person dinner in [your city] next month. Build the guest list, a simple run-of-show, and a follow-up note for afterward. I'll handle showing up."
Let the machine do the mechanics. You handle the handshakes.
This week on King Moves, I recorded a solo episode about connecting the dots.
Some old photos surfaced on my feed, and they revealed something about my family I'd never consciously noticed. Then I spotted the same pattern in my work, a through line running from a newspaper job twenty years ago straight to the AI work I do today.
Steve Jobs said you can only connect the dots looking backwards. In this one, I walk through how to find yours, and why it might point to a superpower you didn't know you had.
Take a listen, then go flip through your own old photos.
Stop playing life on hard mode. Automate your success.
Until next time,
Ethan King
A.I. Automation for Business Growth
Keynote Speaker | Author | CEO | Strategist
ethan@ethanking.com
P.S. Practicing what I preach: we just built an in-person podcast studio at our office, we will be booking guests for face-to-face recordings soon.
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P.P.S. My next live OpenClaw + Hermes class, where we build your AI agents together in real time, is this Saturday, July 11, 10 AM to 2 PM ET; grab your seat at YourOpenClawStrategy.com.
"I'm not a computer guy. After one session, I now have six different AI employees connected to my systems and doing real work for my businesses. I love it."
— Nick Najjar, CEO, Elephant Capital Partners
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