A B2B lead generation case study with the real numbers from my own business. Three months after launching The AI Edit, running the method I sell on myself: 49 leads, 37 qualified, 29 pitched, 21 closed. Six of those high ticket, two under £50.The close rate on pitched leads was 72%, which sounds implausible until you know why. It's high because the definition is strict, not because the selling is good. A lead only counts if the person has a genuine need I can meet and their business fits the profile of a client I want. Everything else is a conversation. Most businesses inflate this without meaning to, a downloaded guide becomes a lead, a polite reply becomes a lead, and then the pipeline looks healthy while the revenue doesn't follow.Almost every one of the 49 came from three places: existing network, referrals from that network, and LinkedIn. That's the honest picture at three months. The channels that work fastest are the ones where relationships already exist.Search has delivered nothing. Traffic is growing, domain authority is up, some AI chatbot visibility. Leads from either: none. That's expected, because search and AI visibility take time and a site that launched in April isn't in the models yet. I'm publishing this at three months with nothing to show from search, and I expect a very different number at nine.Also in here: why ranking 11th for a keyword with ten searches a month is a good thing, and why we're only five and a half stages into an eight stage method.Read more: https://www.theaiedit.ai/blog/b2b-lea...

AI privacy risks are not what most people think they are. Nobody ever promised you a private conversation with a chatbot, and five different readers can retrieve what you typed without asking you first. This video walks through all five, using nothing but published policy and public court records.Switching off model training does not make your chats private. It makes them untrained on. Your conversations are still retained, still exportable, and still producible in court. On a work account, incognito mode hides the conversation from you and not from the person who pays for your seat.Covered in this video: what the training toggle actually governs, why flagged conversations and feedback buttons override the setting you carefully switched off, how shared chats ended up in Google search results, the preservation order that captured twenty million conversations people had already deleted, and what your employer can pull from an organisation data export.Then the practical part. What to change, what to stop doing, and where to put the things that should never touch a company account.

Sources referenced in this video:

* Anthropic data retention policy

* Claude incognito chats

* Gemini activity and retention

* WIRED on Claude chats in search results

* Forbes on Anthropic transcripts in Google

* OpenAI preservation order

* Wiz research on the DeepSeek database

* Chat & Ask AI leak

* Browser extension collecting AI chats

AI Fluency for Leaders:

* Three hours, CPD certified

Read more on Substack:

* Are AI chats private? Here's who can read them

LinkedIn profile optimization is the first thing to fix if you want clients from LinkedIn, not a new job. Most advice out there is written for people chasing recruiters. This isn’t. Your profile is not a CV. It’s a landing page, and its job is to turn a curious visitor into a lead.

Here’s what most people get wrong. They polish their profile like a record of where they’ve been, then wonder why it brings in nothing. But every comment you leave and every connection request you send pushes people back to your profile. It’s either working for you or quietly costing you business.

This podcast walks through the five parts that matter: your headline, your photo, your banner, your About section, and the featured section most people don’t even know is there. Plus the keywords that help the right buyers find you in LinkedIn search.

Get them right and your profile stops gathering dust. It starts bringing the right people closer, every hour of every day.

Links mentioned in this podcast:Photofeeler - (not sponsored) LinkedIn generation servicesThe B2B Lead AcceleratorJoin the communityLinkedIn for more leads: Mini Course

Read more:How to improve your LinkedIn profile to attract new business

Prefer to watch it as a video?

Best AI tools for productivity: search that and you get a list of fifty. Then you get overwhelmed and get nothing done. After training more than 1,500 leaders to use AI, I can tell you the number of tools is not what makes you productive.The research agrees. Productivity climbs when you use one to three AI tools. At four or more, it drops. More tools means more switching, and switching is where your focus goes.So this isn't a list of fifty. There are five tools that have changed how I work, and one of them is something you're already paying for.But the tools are the easy part. The real shift is knowing what to hand over, what to keep, and the principles that decide the difference. That's what the mini course is for.Links mentioned in this podcast:Productivity for Lead Generators mini course - https://www.theaiedit.ai/offers/itnug...Claude Cowork: 12 things I learned the hard way - https://www.thehumansintheloop.ai/p/c...This podcast is also a video; watch here:

What to post on LinkedIn depends entirely on what you want back. If you want likes, post one thing. If you want leads, post something completely different. My most viral posts got tens of thousands of views and zero leads, so this video is about the second kind.I know how to go viral on LinkedIn. The trick is to post about politics. It works every time, and it has never once brought me a lead, because the people arguing in my comments were never going to buy from me.So this podcast is about what to post when the goal is leads, not likes. Post for the room, not the crowd. Post the things only you could have written: your opinions, your data, your stories. Pick one subject and stay there until you're known for it. Welcome the people who disagree with you, because the argument is the point. And comment as much as you post.It ends with one simple test you can run before anything goes up.Links mentioned in this podcast:LinkedIn lead generation mini course - https://www.theaiedit.ai/offers/xz3zsRXe/checkoutLinkedIn lead generation service - https://www.theaiedit.ai/lead-generation-consultant/linkedinLinkedIn is the best and worst place on the internet right now - https://www.thehumansintheloop.ai/p/linkedin-is-the-best-and-worst-place

Every week I pick the three AI stories that matter most for anyone running or building a business. What happened, what it actually means, and why you should care.

This week is a special edition, because one company managed to produce three terrible stories - guess who?

So this week it’s all Meta. Watching its customers, watching its staff, and handing the job of deciding what billions of us see to AI it marked itself.

A B2B lead generation strategy isn't a list of channels you're running. It's a series of deliberate choices about what you won't do. Two million leads across two decades, and the pattern repeats: most businesses confuse activity with strategy.A strategy is the thinking you do before you act. The deliberate choice of who you're targeting, what you're saying, where you're reaching them, and how the pieces connect. It's also a commitment to what you're not doing.Imagine getting from London to Paris. Paris is your objective. Strategy is how you get there: road, air, train, or sea. Pick one and you've said no to the rest. Tactics are the decisions inside that choice. Most businesses skip that step, pick tactics at random, and end up stuck in Kent.Eight questions to build a real B2B lead generation strategy:1. Who are we trying to reach?2. What are we selling them?3. What stories are we telling?4. Where are we going to reach them?5. With what resources?6. How do they all connect?7. How will we know if it's working?8. What's our rhythm?The answers only mean something if you're equally clear about what you said no to in each one.Strategy is subtraction. The businesses that grow fastest say no to the most.Related reading:The B2B lead generation system on The AI Edit - https://www.theaiedit.ai/blog/lead-generation-system

This week: EY has just withdrawn a marketing report that turned out to be full of AI hallucinations, fake citations, and a reference to a McKinsey study that doesn't exist. Google has announced the biggest overhaul of search in 25 years, putting AI in front of everyone. And thousands of people on X just dismissed a real Monet painting as AI slop, with implications for any business worried about how its work will be received.

This Week in AI is live every Friday at 9:15am. My monthly Insider’s Briefing goes deeper - the top stories from the month in 30 minutes, once a month. May’s is on the 2nd of June and it’s free to register here.

This week in AI: three stories that matter for anyone running or building a business. A 72-year-old Chelsea Pensioner lost his life savings to a deepfake of Martin Lewis. A newly elected Norfolk councillor has had to publicly insist he is not AI. And Anthropic has launched a product aimed squarely at small businesses, which may be a turning point.

This Week in AI is live every Friday at 9:15am. My monthly Insider’s Briefing goes deeper - the top stories from the month in 30 minutes, once a month. May’s is on the 2nd of June and it’s free to register here.

This week in AI: three stories that matter for anyone running or building a business.Sam Altman is having a bad week in court. A Harvard study has shown AI now outperforms emergency room doctors at diagnosis (but there are caveats). And one of the most-cited papers proving ChatGPT helps students learn has been retracted by Nature. This Week in AI is live every Friday at 9:15am. My monthly Insider's Briefing goes deeper - the top stories from the month in 30 minutes, once a month. May's is on the 2nd of June and it's free to register here.