Skip the Hype, Book the Appointment: Alec Newcomb on AI That Pays Off

By Pam Torrey, Senior Director of Marketing at Leaping AI 

Scroll LinkedIn for ten minutes and you’ll find someone who replaced their entire marketing department with agents. I wanted to talk with someone who sees what is happening inside real companies, so I invited Alec Newcomb onto Built for Growth.

Alec is the fractional CMO at Thompson Creek Window Company and the founder of MarketingAlec, a newsletter for marketers who want AI results without the noise. He also teaches at two New England universities. In a typical year, he sees about 250 companies through his consulting, speaking, and board work. Here is what stood out from our conversation.

Nobody is getting replaced

The loudest AI story is about headcount. Alec says it doesn’t match what he sees. Across nonprofits, construction companies, and home improvement brands, he told me he isn’t seeing anyone get replaced.

He lives in Maine, the oldest state in the country, and his clients there are fighting to keep every capable person they have. One of the most common conversations he hears: a team member with 40 years of experience who wants to work two days a week. AI helps bridge that gap. He sees the same pattern in the Midwest, where there is no deep bench of great home improvement marketers waiting to be hired.

Start with the end goal

When a company asks Alec for help, his first question is what the end goal is. If the answer is growing faster and more efficiently while training their people, they’re a good candidate. If the answer is cutting 75 people down to 25 and letting agents run everything, he says that isn’t possible today.

He has a name for AI that exists to look impressive: performative AI. Inside Thompson Creek meetings, he calls it kabuki theater. The test he uses is simple. Know why you’re doing it.

A mandate for the bottom line

Thompson Creek’s CEO, Chris Sever, gave Alec a clear charge: drop more money to the bottom line. The industry has dealt with thin margins, bankruptcies, and private equity coming in. Alec’s mandate was to get radically efficient and add double digits to the company’s bottom line.

His view is that you won’t get there with a process tweak or a staffing swap alone. Every process has to be on the table. That is harder when you manufacture your own windows and run on legacy systems, as Thompson Creek does.

He also credited the forward deployed engineers on our team for getting into the trenches with Thompson Creek when there was no roadmap. Thompson Creek was one of our earliest customers, and I’ll gladly take the compliment. His broader point is the useful one. Thompson Creek had the technical ability to build its own voice stack, and Alec says that would have been a bad idea. He calls it a bad idea for 99% of businesses. His advice is to find your superpower, double down on it, and let a partner handle the rest.

Customers over 72 would rather talk to the AI

This was the part that surprised both of us. About 26% of Thompson Creek’s customers are over the age of 72. They are often doing their last big project, and they want to do it once and do it right.

Alec said these customers would rather talk to the AI than to people in the call center, including staff with 20 years of experience. His read is that they don’t feel rushed. The younger customers are the ones most resistant. He cautioned against painting with a broad brush, since preferences vary by region and by product.

Thompson Creek started with a 50-person call center and a question about efficiency. Once the first results came in, the questions got bigger. Voice AI works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so a homeowner who reaches out at 11 p.m. gets an answer. And if a customer wants a real person, they get one. Alec says Thompson Creek is agnostic about how customers want to engage. In his words, we are in “day zero” of this technology.

Use a balanced scorecard

Thompson Creek tracks the shift in three ways. The team runs call recordings through AI for sentiment analysis, which shows whether customers are happy and what upsets them. They pair that with traditional sales metrics and with customer satisfaction metrics.

Alec warns against focusing on hard savings alone. You can over-optimize and sacrifice the customer. He gave an example: 80% of Thompson Creek’s customers have bought only one product. That is a huge opportunity, and how you treat those customers matters.

Bring your team in early

Alec teaches that most employees are worried about AI, so he starts with transparency. Tell people what the journey looks like and ask whether they’re on the bus. Some people will opt out, and he understands why. For everyone else, he says training is essential. The rough goal he described is that people do their work 18% better and get 40% more of it done. The time they get back goes to the work they want to do rather than the work that drains them.

Marketing and HR move first

When I asked what surprised him, Alec said the fastest AI adoption he sees is in marketing first and HR second. Both teams are understaffed in tight labor markets. Thompson Creek’s marketing team is four people, and Alec says they may add one as the company grows.

He also said AI is growing faster than the internet did, which is saying something from a person who ran a search engine in his twenties.

His advice for any leader is to get your team talking to AI. He told a story about a heavy equipment supervisor whose reading skills were limited. Once he started talking to ChatGPT, Alec said he could perform two or three levels higher. AI will do great things for your most AI-fluent employees. Don’t leave the other end of the curve behind.

Listen to the full episode

Alec shared a lot more in the full conversation. Listen to Episode 4 of Built for Growth here.