A first-hand account of AI and the sales psychology around it.

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

Elbert Hubbard wrote that in 1911. He died four years later aboard the RMS Lusitania. The quote is 115 years old. I heard it used yesterday in a basement hotel conference room in Victoria to sell an AI platform and a high ticket dream.

AI is big business. The global coaching industry is now valued at $5.34 billion, according to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, up 60% since 2019, so of course every man and his dog are jumping on the bandwagon. Some have earned it, some have learned the language, and some are downright sales masters posing as experts while categorically applying every sales tactic, psychological trigger and seed plant in their repertoire to sell you a dream. Or in this case sell you the idea of a brand, with a price tag of course, and as we say in Yorkshire: a fool and his brass are soon parted. Right now, that brass is a golden ticket which is moving very fast indeed.

The point is, I went to a free AI summit yesterday. I upgraded to the VIP ticket for £50 to really see the mechanics. I have to understand how things work and dissect it, that is just me.

I took six pages of notes, because of course no recording, pictures of slides, the people or the place were allowed, several people got told off throughout the day.

I behaved for a change. What I observed did not need to be recorded, my instinct and notes were enough.

So let me relay what I observed - not because I want to throw stones, but because what happened in that room is directly relevant to something I care about very deeply, which is people being drawn into the AI unicorns and rainbows hype, while simultaneously drowning in AI the way I did before I built a system to contain it. I researched the 6 pages of notes after and here is where we are with it.

The venue was a basement room at a hotel in London. No natural light, no phone signal. Nine hours, 9am to 6pm, half an hour for lunch and one seven-minute break at 4pm.

The day did not open with the main man. It opened with his (alleged) head of M&A, who told the room multiple times in her opening pitch that men sell to women and women sell to men. She claimed to have made millions before the age of 24, sold her companies, and secured a multi-million deal from an ancient, single podcast appearance with the man whose event it was.

I have spent time in the Middle East, I have been in rooms with genuine wealth, I know what it looks like, and I would be very, very surprised if she was a multimillionaire as she claimed.

This did not fill me with glee, I hate being taken for a fool. The photo op which happened later, yes the £50 picture, had to be retaken because it was blurred. She did it begrudgingly. The energy throughout the day was unambiguous: get out of the way if you are not paying, with no photos, no recording signs up everywhere and a terms and conditions that was intense, and probably unenforceable. I could do an entire article on those alone, but I digress.

The presenter bounced in wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, then played a video with a view from inside the glasses, identifying objects on a table, pop-up boxes over a fork and a bottle, all very futuristic, almost certainly promotional footage rather than any proprietary technology. The opening statement was this: stay till the end, you are on camera and you will be banned from all future events if you leave early. Pointy finger, sweeping the room, theatre, not technology. Your reward for staying is access to 1000 AI tools, and a certificate of AI mastery and speaking, then we were off.

The authority script started immediately and did not abate for nine hours. Photos of lots of stages, countless billionaires with him in tropical settings. Richard and him on Necker. Abu Dhabi, Dubai, the pyramids in Egypt. A free Lamborghini, gifted by Mr Lamborghini himself, presented as evidence of the calibre of his network. He told us, many times throughout the day, that he was losing money on the event. He told us about his 100+ companies, that he came from nothing and all the usual baloney that a blind man on a galloping horse could see was thin. He told us how he had donated vast sums of money to famous peoples charities, and that he used it as leverage to get favours returned which in turn led to more introductions to high net worth individuals. That chain eventually led to a famous opera singer, which in turn led to a planned speaking gig at Ferrari. He told us we could speak at Ferrari too. For a fee. To speak at the upcoming pyramids event in Egypt was over seven grand…..

After the event I looked - The number of Companies he has shifts on every page of his website and sits alongside a reported annual organisation revenue of approximately $3 million with 32 employees. Not multiple nine figures, but what do I know?

Then he told us about the Nigerian.

He arranged for someone from his inner circle, his “family” to share a stage with Stedman Graham, Oprah’s long-term partner. That person subsequently defrauded a large number of people and is now in prison, because of this he can no longer, in good conscience, endorse anyone.

The techniques operating simultaneously:

1. Inoculation. Pre-emptively removes any expectation that he will endorse you or vouch for you. Before anyone in the room asks, the reason he cannot give it already exists. Objection handled before it was raised.

2. Authority by association doubled. The story requires him to have been close enough to Oprah’s partner to arrange a shared stage. That proximity is the credential being established, not the fraud. The fraud is the vehicle, the Stedman Graham name is the payload.

3. The family contradiction. He sells the inner circle as family. Loyalty, belonging, community. The story simultaneously demonstrates that family membership is conditional. The observation is not that he cut someone loose when they became a liability, anyone would do that, it’s simple self-preservation. The observation is that the audience absorbed both messages at the same time, subconsciously. We heard the loyalty story, we also received the conditional loyalty story.

4. Moral authority manufacture. By publicly distancing himself from someone now in prison, he positions himself as a man of principle who draws a line. The audience reads integrity. What is actually happening is liability management dressed as ethics.

5. Fear anchoring. The story plants a quiet threat. If someone from his own inner circle, his family, betrayed him and was publicly disowned, what happens to others? The room does not consciously think this, they feel it, and it manages their expectations.

This is one of the most sophisticated plays in the entire day. Five techniques in one story, none of them named, all of them operational within a short story. Protection, proximity, belonging, integrity, fear, and most of the room didn’t see it.

Here, without editorialising, is some more of what happened in that room:

  • Claims to have made millions before 24, sold her companies, multi-million deal from an old podcast appearance (which can’t be found)

  • No recording, no photos of slides, no photos of the venue. Several people told off throughout the day

  • Three volunteers called up and coached. Publicly, brutally. Dressed as cruel to be kind.

  • A Ukrainian woman told that posting political content and carrying a Ukrainian flag on her social profiles was a mistake. Do not be political. Speak to everyone.

  • His own slides featured diverse audiences. Arabs, Asians, Africans, as evidence of global reach. Speak to everyone, apparently, unless offending them costs you nothing.

  • Branding, billionaire, network, visibility and more branding was said so many times it felt like a mantra but was actually conversational hypnosis and NLP.

  • The Amazon bestselling author shortcut, which I knew, had forgotten about and probably should do!

  • That the AI platform was HIS brain, all his expertise wrapped up that you could ask anything and get a nine figure strategic answer. That old brain system again….. It really gets my goat that one.

  • A monthly subscription, presented at the end of a very long day, was displayed in a way that made it look like a one-off flat fee. It was not.

  • Agreement anchoring, “who here would like to…” repeated throughout, every hand raised is a micro-commitment

  • He said he had taken the covid jab but had researched since and probably would not have been if he had known more, framing it as: we should not judge. One person stood up and left, polarity in full swing, I can change with more info explicitly implied.

  • Misspelled “insuracne policy” flagged by him as a charm, almost certainly an FCA compliance sidestep, he flagged that one, I spotted others but didn’t note them.

  • QR codes went direct to purchase page, no intermediate step

  • AI Mastery and Speaking certificates at the end - we did not speak, and we certainly did not master AI in that room, far from it.

The techniques used throughout are well documented. A 2019 analysis by an independent attendee who attended a similar event, mapped the psychology in detail and estimated $250,000 was generated from a single room of 100 people. Not bad for a days work!

The structure is not improvised, no natural light removes your sense of time, in exactly the same way Las Vegas casinos do. No phone signal means you cannot verify a claim, check your balance, or call anyone outside the room. Nine hours of one voice and one worldview depletes your analytical capacity methodically. A funny moment placed immediately before the close releases the tension built across the entire day and drops every defence at the exact moment of the ask. None of this is accidental room booking, it is well orchestrated, intentional architecture, designed to support a highly skilled, yet tenuous sales pitch.

Being the cynical old Yorkshire bird I am, I spotted it in the first five minutes, so did the South African man sitting next to me, we were whispering about it straight away.

Now, the AI product itself.

Chat interface, no visible projects, no visible connectors, no architecture. When I asked whether my existing work could be migrated across, the answer was better to start with a clean slate. Six months of prompts, context, session notes, and documented decisions not valid in there. Your way is clearly not working for you so start from scratch, my way works. Look at me. The 1,000 free AI tools offered to anyone who stayed to the end turned out to be a curated directory of publicly available tools. Character AI, YouTube Summarized, Imagetocartoon that anyone can find for free. The certificates, laughable.

But the quote, I love the quote from 1911.

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

Used in that room to sell a machine. A machine that, by its own terms, required you to abandon everything you had built and start again inside someone else’s ecosystem, with no projects, no connectors, and no way to direct any of it toward an outcome you had defined.

Elbert Hubbard wrote that as a statement about the irreplaceability of the extraordinary human. It was used yesterday as a pitch for removing the human from the equation. I have thought about that quite a lot since, because in my view the HUMAN is at the centre of everything. The machine doesn’t work unless you direct it and I have hundreds of documented failures to prove it, so I disagree. A lot.

I am not writing this to be unkind about someone who is, by any measure, exceptional at selling. I am writing it because the gap between what was promised and what was being sold is exactly the gap I built a methodology to close.

The problem is not that you do not have enough tools. The problem is that without a system to direct them, you cannot tell the difference between a thousand tools that do something and a thousand tools that do something useful. AI can be genuinely transformative. It can also be the most infuriatingly frustrating time munching platform you have ever used, and a million tools won’t change that.

So again:

One machine absolutely can do the work of fifty ordinary men, if set up correctly, but no machine can do the work of one extraordinary man - that is YOUR job.

Sadly, the people who understand AI the least are currently the most exposed to those who sell it convincingly, and a fool and his brass are soon parted.

If you have ever sat in a room like this one, I would genuinely like to know what you walked out with.

P.S. If you want to know why I care so much about this, Article 1 is a good place to start.

configure YOUR system. contAIn™ the chaos. control YOUR outcome.

References

[1] International Coaching Federation / PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study: https://coachingfederation.org/blog/coaching-industry-continues-global-growth-with-5-34-billion-usd-revenue-new-research-reveals/

[2] Elbert Hubbard: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elbert-Hubbard

© 2026 Samantha Maeer. All rights reserved.

This article was originally published on Substack.