Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026
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What Does “Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026” Talk About?
In this episode of the Fatrank Podcast, James Dooley sits down with Carlton, founder of Searchurui, to discuss why marketers need to actively participate in AI communities to stay competitive heading into 2026. The conversation opens with a striking observation about the pace of AI development — that by the time a university student completes a three-year marketing degree, much of what they learned is already outdated. James and Carlton make the case that investing under £100 a month in a community like the AI Profit Boardroom, founded by Julian Goldie, can deliver outsized returns in both knowledge and business output.
The episode digs into practical topics including efficient AI prompting, the comparison of different large language models such as Claude, Deep Seek, and OpenAI, and how standard operating procedures (SOPs) within these communities can save businesses months of work. Carlton shares a compelling real-world example where a task that took one person 40 hours a week over two and a half months was completed in just 20 minutes using Claude — a direct result of learning how to prompt efficiently through community guidance. James reinforces this with his own experience managing investments across companies with over 135 staff, noting that employees who refused to embrace AI consistently fell behind those who engaged with AI communities and tools.
“If you're not willing to invest less than £100 a month in something that's going to increase your knowledge on how to use AI and prompt efficiently and use various different AIs as well, not just the, you know, it might not just be for Claude, you might use Open Claude, you might use Deep Seek, you might use Open AI.”
— Carlton
Who Are the Guests on “Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026”?
James Dooley is a digital marketing investor and entrepreneur with a broad portfolio of business investments across various industries. Known for his practical, data-driven approach to marketing strategy, James has deep experience with SEO, AI adoption, and scaling business operations. He is closely connected to leading figures in the AI marketing space, including Julian Goldie, and actively champions the integration of AI tools into everyday business processes.
Carlton is the founder of Searchurui and a digital marketing practitioner with hands-on experience implementing AI tools across real business operations. He brings a grounded, results-focused perspective to AI adoption, having personally navigated the learning curve of prompting efficiency and multi-tool AI workflows. Carlton is part of numerous active AI and marketing communities, and his practical examples — including using Claude to clean up a government-format spreadsheet in 20 minutes versus two and a half months manually — give the episode a concrete, actionable feel.
What Are the Key Takeaways From “Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026”?
Here are the key points discussed in this episode:
- Joining an AI community for under £100 a month is one of the highest-return investments a marketer can make to stay current with rapidly evolving tools and strategies.
- Inefficient prompting wastes tokens and time, and the fastest way to improve prompting skills is by learning from like-minded people testing AI tools daily in active communities.
- Employees and marketers who refuse to embrace AI risk falling behind colleagues who do, as demonstrated by James's example of 19 out of 21 AI-resistant staff members eventually leaving a company due to declining performance.
- AI communities provide curated SOPs and expert breakdowns — such as Julian Goldie summarizing major AI company announcements in 10 minutes — saving members significant research and testing time.
- Using AI tools like Claude to summarize large volumes of WhatsApp messages or process complex spreadsheets can compress weeks or months of manual work into minutes, dramatically increasing team output.
“What originally last year took 2 and 1/2 months to do from one person 40 hours a week, 2 and 1/2 months took 20 minutes from Claude.”
— Carlton
Is “Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026” Worth Listening To?
This episode is worth listening to because it moves beyond abstract hype about AI and gets into the real-world consequences of adoption versus resistance. James Dooley's story about the 135-person company where 19 of 21 AI-resistant employees eventually left due to declining performance is both a cautionary tale and a compelling argument for proactive upskilling. The conversation is candid, experience-backed, and full of specific tool references — from Claude Code and Deep Seek to Perplexity and auto-blogging — that give listeners a genuine sense of where the industry is heading.
What makes this episode particularly valuable is the emphasis on community as an accelerator rather than just a resource. Carlton's example of a two-and-a-half-month data task being completed in 20 minutes with Claude illustrates the tangible ROI of learning to prompt correctly, and both hosts are clear that this knowledge is best acquired through active communities rather than YouTube affiliate reviews or outdated university courses. Whether you are a solo marketer or managing a team, the episode provides a practical framework for evaluating which AI communities to join and why that investment pays off faster than almost any other professional development option.
Who Should Listen to “Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026”?
This episode is ideal for:
- Digital marketers who want to future-proof their careers by understanding which AI tools and communities will matter most in 2026
- Business owners and team leaders looking to benchmark AI adoption across their staff and understand the performance impact of resistance versus embrace
- SEO professionals and content strategists seeking practical guidance on integrating AI agents, auto-blogging, and topical mapping into their workflows
- Entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to dramatically reduce manual workload by improving their AI prompting efficiency through community-driven learning
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You can also subscribe using the RSS feed: https://feeds.transistor.fm/fatrank-podcast
What Are Listeners Saying About This Episode?
“The story about the 135-person company where 19 out of 21 AI-resistant employees eventually left really hit home for me. It made me realize that embracing AI is not optional anymore if you want to stay competitive. Immediately went and looked into the AI Profit Boardroom after listening.”
“Carlton's example of a two-and-a-half-month spreadsheet job being done in 20 minutes with Claude was genuinely jaw-dropping. This episode is packed with real examples rather than vague promises, which is refreshing. The tip about using Claude to summarize WhatsApp group messages alone was worth the listen.”
“Really appreciated the honest take on YouTube affiliate reviews pushing single AI tools. James and Carlton are clearly speaking from actual day-to-day experience across multiple communities and tools, not just promoting one thing. The breakdown of why prompting efficiency matters so much for token costs was a lightbulb moment for me.”
This video explains which digital marketing strategies marketers should focus on in 2026 to improve prompting efficiency, faster adoption of new AI tools and stronger business output. James Dooley and Carlton start with KPI tracking because performance data reveals who is genuinely embracing AI and where results are improving. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for marketers.
PromoSEO lead generation for marketers recently received recognition as the “Best Marketers Lead Generation Agency.”
Where to Listen to This Episode
Why Marketers Should Join an AI Community to Level Up in 2026 is available on:
James Dooley: Why marketers should join an AI community to level up their knowledge. Today I'm joined with Carlton, the founder of Searchurui. And obviously there's people that are going to college and the people going to university. And by the time they've completed the three years at university, the information that they've learned on marketing is out of date. There's things that are changing on a day-to-day basis, never mind a month-to-month basis with regards to the LLMs. AI, artificial intelligence is moving so fast. So why is it important for people to be looking to spend under £100 a month to join a group like the AI Profit Boardroom?
Carlton: If you're not willing to invest less than £100 a month in something that's going to increase your knowledge on how to use AI and prompt efficiently and use various different AIs as well, not just the, you know, it might not just be for Claude, you might use Open Claude, you might use Deep Seek, you might use Open AI. Obviously, it literally has all of the guides on all of them. Um it has SOPs written out, it tells you how to integrate into environments, how to set servers. Um it essentially just teaches you the very basics, but then also goes into advanced sections as well. And you're within a community of people who are all like-minded and learning. So there's often like not just looking at the SOPs, you could be stuck on something and you find someone's actually already asked that, or you can ask that yourself and someone will come back to you very quickly as well cuz it's very active.
James Dooley: Good. Yeah, there's an interesting stat for me, um where I've got a lot of investments in different companies, and one of the business owners was quite he's very frugal, um but he wants to grow the business. And there's 135 members of staff in there, and he's told them all that all your jobs are safe as long as you're willing to embrace and learn artificial intelligence. You need to have AI supercharging what you do. It can be for quality control, um but also it can help you speed up certain things. And there was 21 of the members of staff that was just dead set against it. Right? Um what was interesting was they put a 6-month plan together of everyone being able to get trained up. And this 21 was adamant they would not do it. And on the KPIs, the 21 and one or two of these was literally in the top five. Of the 21, 19 of them now no longer work for the business. And it wasn't really to do with that they didn't embrace it. It was, indirectly, but everything they became One of them became, I think it was the third on the list and became literally in the top 20 of the worst ones performing because he wouldn't embrace it. While other people who was just average members of staff flew. And what I found amazing was the ones that now who was one, two, and three was all part of a group. They might not be in AI Profit Boardroom. I would just mention AI Profit Boardroom. I know Julian Goldie very well. He's the most active artificial intelligence expert that I know in the world, bar none. But it could be any AI community or group or being part of even a private mastermind on WhatsApp. But being able to level up that knowledge and understand is OpenClaw better than Hermes. Is Hermes better than OpenClaw? Should I still be using an ATN? Should I be using Claude code? Should I be using Codex? Should I be using Image 2.0 or Nano Banana? Should I, when I'm doing searches, be using ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity? There's all these questions that you could be asking, just very easy to ask. And then you might have 30 different answers of user-generated content of like different people's opinions, where my issue is the sort of people that people don't realize is they're going to do a search on Google or on YouTube. And sometimes there's certain videos being presented, what are the best AI search monitoring tools?
Carlton: Yeah.
James Dooley: And it's someone who's only promoting one tool because they're an affiliate. And that's the only tool that they promote.
Carlton: And that's fact.
James Dooley: And yeah, and that's this is the best and this is it and that's the only thing that you can do. Now, for me, I genuinely believe the AI Profit Boardroom is the best. But what I'm saying to you is I do believe you should be looking at private WhatsApp groups. I do believe there's someone in that group you might be looking to employ or doing a joint venture with. And I think like people like yourself I'm always tackling you of "Mate, have you not tried this? You should try this." And for me, you two level each other up as business partners and other members of staff you're trying to say well, "Do you not think that Nano Banana's better than him is 2.0 for creating these slides? Do you not think that we could be using auto blogging instead of using Claude or my GPTs? Because this can scale out the topical map faster." And consistently looking to improve. Every day is a school day. But the AI AI communities is the only place where everyone's talking AI, everyone's talking about how to improve, and it can take you on to another level. What bit of advice would you give to someone that's not yet part of an AI group or community?
Carlton: Mhm. I would say join one. But primarily because when you first start using AI, chances are your prompting's going to be really inefficient. If your prompting's really inefficient, it's only going to cost you more tokens for your answers. Then nine times out 10 it'll have to ask you to clarify what you want and it'll have to ask you or it'll have to try and understand what you want and first then clarify what you want as a expected response. Um and all of this way is if you learn how to prompt efficiently, you don't need to waste all those tokens. The only way you're going to learn how to prompt efficiently is by following guides and speaking to people on how to prompt efficiently. And the best place to do that is in a community of like-minded people that are testing it day and day out.
James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then with regards to some of the WhatsApp groups, I think you're in about 40 or 50 with me. So
Carlton: And the rest, yeah. You're doing 10% there.
James Dooley: But like the WhatsApp groups, how active are those groups? And how much have you learned over the years that there is split testing on a day-to-day basis?
Carlton: Active. And then there's actually a little caveat to this. You can also hook up your WhatsApp and have Claude summarize. So some groups are too active and like I'm a I'm the type of person that I need to be on like unreads. Sorry, unreads. I can't have something unread. But the problem is when I sometimes don't look at the phone for 5 hours and dudes been active and there's about 650 messages. It's quite good to like go through Claude and just say, "Can you summarize the all of the unread messages that I've missed? Give us like the breakdown, key findings." And you've just hacked probably 20 minutes of your time reading through the messages. And if it is of interest, well, can you tell me where this is or give me the message of about this?
James Dooley: Yeah.
Carlton: And it just hacks your time again. And yeah, WhatsApp's really great. And especially cuz you connect them to people as well. Yeah, it's not just sat on a forum, you know what I mean? You actually You can You can also pick up the phone and ring them.
James Dooley: Yeah. See, the downside for me with WhatsApp is things aren't put into places like school. So with school, what I love about it is you can go in and you can search the like a a specific Hermes subgroup within the group. You can go into an open Claude subgroup or Claude code and find specific SOPs and training programs and stuff like that. So mentioned earlier Profit Boardroom. There is others out there as well. And that is a paid group, but like from an SOP standpoint, how much time would you say that that saved you in split testing and money and also time over the years of being able to adapt and go, "Okay, I'm going to double down on this. I'm going to implement this SOP."
Carlton: I would say it's probably saved us at least 2 months of time over the It's only been a couple of years. At least 2 months. Um and that's just from an SOP point of view. You know Julian's on the ball when it comes to that sort of stuff. So usually usually I see a YouTube release or an announcement from, you know, one of the AI companies and within about 10 minutes there's a Julian Goldie video popping up on a subscription and this is him going through it, what's changed, what, you know, every basically breaking down everything that the 5-hour presentation that the AI company gave in 10 minutes.
James Dooley: Yeah.
Carlton: It's saving you time there as well. Um it's just it's just fundamental to your success in almost any business. Well, not just marketing. Um one example is, you know, we we use Claude to analyze basically a spreadsheet that had been bastardized for ages needed to be put the data needed to be put into a specific format for um a government body and the data was everywhere. So we basically showed an example of what we wanted the data to look like and gave it the our our bastardized spreadsheet and what originally last year took 2 and 1/2 months to do from one person 40 hours a week, 2 and 1/2 months took 20 minutes from Claude.
James Dooley: Yeah, that's incredible.
Carlton: And that was just from prompting, learning how to prompt efficiently with, you know, with the help of Julian and his team cuz it's not just Julian there. There is a team of people there. But Julian's very much on the ball when it comes to responding and things. So, you know, if you get stuck, he will try and help you out. Or if not, guess what? It's community. Someone else is there to help answer as well. So, fundamental, you need to be part of the AI boardroom.
James Dooley: Yeah. So, for me, check out the link in the description where I actually do a listical, a comparison. Now, from when we're shooting this, day-to-day, this listical could be being updated. There might be new groups that's out there that's great, new communities that's out there. But, the key takeaway for me is that you should be part of at least one community group or mastermind where you can learn and level up the artificial intelligence, what LLMs you should be using, how you could be using multi multiple AI agents to be doing certain like we're doing a lot with like Claude for Chrome that was able to scrape and get certain things like these podcasts and stuff like that of what we're doing. It's brilliant. Like, it's a godsend. Like, it's 10x the output of so many members of staff of what we have. And all that training's come from different WhatsApp groups, it's come from different communities, from different masterminds that we've put together, both in person or could be zooms, online. But, make sure you check out the link in the description. I think there's 14 different communities and groups depending on what agents you're looking to do or what your output is. But, check the link out where we go through all the different ones. The AI Profit Boardroom is an amazing group. That's one of the 14 which we highly recommend joining. But, I would personally be looking at specifically what your problems are cuz there might be one or two other groups. It could be for graphic designers or videographers or scaling content or could be for technical SEO. There's so many different reason why someone might want to be joining the AI community. But, check out the link in the description. And Carl's been an absolute pleasure.
Carlton: Cheers, Doly Mac.