Ep 46: The Future of Work: AI’s Impact on Jobs, Marketing, and Business Strategy
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Episode 46: The Future of Work: AI’s Impact on Jobs, Marketing, and Business Strategy Podcast and Video Transcript
[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]
Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to episode 46 of Enterprising Minds. Happy New Year. This is the first show of the new year. Did you guys enjoy your month off? Month and a half off of recording podcasts? It's a good time. Yeah. So we we were just discussing our fair suite, you know, forgot to hit record.
Discussing AI and the Job Market
Dave Dougherty: So now we're going to jump back into what we were talking about on sort of AI and job market, and I'm doing a horrible job of, of, of pitching it.
So Ruthie, you originally brought it up. Why don't you why don't you summarize? I'm going to be
Ruthi Corcoran: super terrible and I'm going to kick it off to Alex. And the reason is because he came up with this sort of nice, I'll frame it up for you first, but he, he, he's got this nice idea about the impact of AI on digital marketing.
That's triggered a number of thoughts.
Impact of AI on Digital Marketing
Ruthi Corcoran: Okay, so recently I've had an encounter in which I've gotten a, a new perspective on the future of digital marketing as a result of AI and you sort of combine AI along with something that I think many folks in the corporate world will have will have seen, which is their company having service centers outside the United States or outside of Western Europe in often the United States.
Sometimes in India is one of the big locales. I know China can be there's a few in South America. Costa Rica comes to mind for, for me anyways in which you have these sort of service centers where you've got really talented folks, just not in, in the Western, Western countries who are doing a lot oftentimes more of the, Tech it sort of activities.
And one thing that I recently encountered was a pitch of, Hey we've got a, I powered digital marketing activities, basically completely not only outsourcing, but also AI powering all of the various digital marketing activities. You might think of social media to website building to. The gamut of paid media, et cetera, inclusive of content creation, but also that historically more it development side of things.
And this struck me as sort of a maybe an unintended or surprising consequence of of AI was that it would enable a broader suite of people to be doing. Digital marketing activities, which at least it seems from my perspective, we're often more kept in the, in the United States market simply because your familiarity with the folks you're talking to and and your, your closeness with the market.
So that was sort of a. Eye opener for me. And then Alex shared some of his thoughts on what this interaction might mean or how he sees it as well. So I'll hand it over to you.
Alex Pokorny: Sure.
The Evolution of Digital Marketing Roles
Alex Pokorny: Kind of the main thought was basically, is this harkens back to an idea of back when we had print turning into digital and marketing and when that happened, basically, we had small organizations.
They would always have what I used to call the quote unquote web guy. Okay. Who basically was the one individual who could write HTML who had some concept of basically of creating a basic website, and they took care of basically that new medium, so that kind of plays here. It kind of doesn't the way it kind of.
I mean, it doesn't play is that this isn't necessarily a new medium. We're still taking the same mediums, just doing it in a different way, and the skill sets and individuals who are practicing it are different. It's more of the all encompassing role and this idea of you have a generalist who does. most of what you need versus having a number of different specialists.
And where that really plays through is where that went. So instead of having this one individual, you soon had either you supplemented them with an entire outsourced external agency who helped do database management, email management, maybe they did, you know, e commerce, because the web guy didn't know those things and that was enough expertise there.
So it was a skill set gap. Or perhaps there was a resourcing gap where you had this individual being pulled into too many conversations, you want to have advice all the time, and they didn't have enough time for you. So you started to build out an in house team. So then we have this rise of basically much larger marketing teams as digital marketing teams is that kind of split off from regular marketing kind of became its own thing, but also the creation of larger and larger it organizations.
So you have this kind of, it's what I really consider as. You know, you're removing the bottlenecks by, you know, put everything out and then now you're going to pull everything back in and you have this rubber band effect going back and forth because there is pros and cons to both of those things of how often do we need the skill set?
Do we really need it enough to have a full time person do it? Are we really needing such a large team still do this thing after we've built the site or after we've done the big initiative? Do we still really need this whole giant team that we've hired in or do we need these additional resources?
But also during that time, you had a number of traditional print agencies claiming that they could do. Websites, social media, everything else, and they really couldn't. They tried to, but they didn't have the expertise, the innate knowledge to actually execute on that well. Some of them hired in eventually kind of built up that talent, got some people with some, you know, experience.
But during those early sales, there isn't enough work for full time staff who are experts. So we also are going to see kind of the realization piece there. And that's what I was kind of getting to with some of the pre show conversation was.
AI's Role in Content Creation and Strategy
Alex Pokorny: Where are these cracks and how all encompassing is AI?
Basically, that's the kind of the two questions. What is the web guy can't do? What is AI cannot do well enough that you're going to have to bring in expertise? And AI is constantly changing and evolving, so that's a that's a difficult question. And then trying to understand, you know, where does this go in terms of roles for specializations?
Do we see a journalist who is now able to do social media posting, writing, scheduling because they're using an AI tool? Can they write now emails even though they're not really good at writing? And at what point They not have the ability to do these things, you know, is it a experience gap? It might even be context environment where you just don't know the company well enough.
You know, that happens often with clients using agencies where agency just doesn't really get their business and it frustrates them to the point where they start building out an in house team. You know, it could be liabilities if they're in a particular litigious kind of environment, there's a lot of pieces there too.
So what are your guys thoughts?
Challenges and Opportunities with AI
Alex Pokorny: What do you think the cracks are going to be where AI is going to basically not, not work, not be good enough that you're going to still need in house talent?
Ruthi Corcoran: One of the things I was thinking about and the reason that I wanted you to frame that up is because I was so intrigued by this idea.
The first thought that came to mind, or a series of thoughts was, Hey, One of the things that you need to enable the AI to be a eyes, right? Whatever various models you're using to be effective is you do need some set of expertise to know what it needs to do. And to know what's stopping it from being able to do it.
To let's use a couple of examples. First, this, this email marketing example, your generalist digital marketer, could they spin up a few emails and set it? Of course, perhaps they could also have work with AI to say, hey, what kind of strategy could we create? To make this more sophisticated, how do we make a more sophisticated drip campaign?
But there we start butting up against, you need to know enough to have that sort of conversation, so to speak, with the AI, but what kind of strategy? To get towards and so where we see models developing in such a way that they can be more robust in their ability to provide that strategy without it being inherent in the sort of prompts or the questions.
I think that's important. And then the other piece I was thinking of is for some of the activities that your generalist digital marketer needs to do, right? Planning out a campaign, figuring out audience sizes predicting the impact of a particular. Paid media campaign. You need the inputs already connected.
You need the data sources connected in order to draw from them. Especially if you're using some of your historical data or your, your internal platforms to inform what the campaign will be. And so in that case, that's something that maybe an AI can't solve before you, it needs inputs in order to be able to get that end result.
Dave Dougherty: So. If you're using internal data, yeah. However, I've been playing around with Google's deep research, the Gemini deep research stuff. Oh, man.
You, the amount you can do now, if you, again, this is, if you've taken the time to learn how to use these tools, like ChatGT, or, or Gemini, or Anthropic, or whatever else. It is unbelievable what one person is capable of doing. Now you have to actually sit there and go, is this generally correct? You know am I going to check it for mistakes?
But for example, I had, I had chat GPT. Who it was a custom GPT I created to help with sort of, you know, strategy, like marketing strategy stuff. And it was specifically prompted around, you know, best practices around this, that, and the other. And like, I took my time developing it. I had it create a research brief around a brand strategy question where it was, all right, I'm going to use my website this way.
I'm planning on using these. Social channels in this way, what's the best way to do it? How do I leverage? You know, how do I set myself up for the best own media experience while also leveraging the potential growth of how the algorithms prefer to have your channel set up? So as a writer research brief around these questions, it did.
I brought that over to Gemini's deep research. It went and within 15 minutes. put together a document that analyzed like 150 different websites around those things, presented the summary, and then I could ping that research on specific questions on how to do this. So what would have been like a week long research project on am I thinking about my strategy correctly became two hours of asking questions of the research it did on my behalf.
AI Tools and the Future of Marketing
Ruthi Corcoran: Small First, I love how this highlights how much our generalist digital marketer that we've been talking about needs to pay attention to what the heck is going on with the advancement of various models. Case in point, right? I have not been keeping up to date over the last few months. I've been prioritizing other things and here we go.
This is Dax, by the way, he's come to join us. If you're on YouTube, my dog just walked in the room. The second, the second thing that comes to mind as I listen to your response, though, Dave is you are to some degree, a specialist, you know, the right questions to ask. I, I could foresee a world in which the various models and applications, et cetera, develop in such a way that.
They're able to take much more broad questions and come up with such a detailed response. But I think at least for the time being, you do need to have enough knowledge to be able to ask the right questions to get the type of information you you seem to have gotten back.
Dave Dougherty: Yes and no. I think if okay, I'm gonna give you a challenge.
I'm gonna give the audience a challenge if you haven't played around with it. Yeah, or used AI in this way. If you're not sure how to ask the correct prompt, just ask it for help in creating a prompt to do whatever it is you want to do, and it will write the prompt for you. And then you can go to your free version of Gemini or Anthropic or ChachiBT, use all of them, put in that prompt and see what output you get.
Across all of them. It is, it is fascinating because ultimately I can have an inkling of an idea and I even did this recently with and I swear to God, Alex, I'm going to get back to your original statement. This is a full circle thing. But I was I was rewriting my, my personal biography for my sort of resume site, and I hate writing biographies, even though I have a writing degree, I can easily write somebody else's writing your own biography sucks because it's like, you braggy, but that's the whole point of a biography.
So how do you do it in a way that. You feel okay with so I hit the microphone and I just started talking. Here's my background. Here are the things I'm proud of achieving. This is the way I want to do it. Don't be overly optimistic like the people who programmed you in California. I'm a Midwestern male.
Keep it to the point, right? And And it did. It was unbelievable. So I had a conversation with it in order to create the draft. So then I could easily just say, I like what you did here. I don't like this. Let's change this that try it this way. And within an hour, I had two different biographies written mostly through copy editing for me, but it was at least it gave me a lot of different ideas on how to put the biography together.
Right. Alex, you've been making faces while
Alex Pokorny: I'm talking. Yeah, I've been going back and forth on this. There's, there's all these little pieces that keep kind of popping up. One is you had a clear vision and a lot of people don't. You might have had a clear enough vision to send it off to an Intern, you know, have somebody else like take a crack at it.
So it gives you a rough draft. Ruth is sending out here. Thank you, Ruthie. Okay. It's the other piece that I'm kind of hitting with is there's a difference in level of competition as well. So the competition level will rise. With AI being so available, you know, it's being built into tools. You see it built into LinkedIn.
You see it built into Microsoft tools as well Where it prompts you and helps you so it's now elevating that ground level up a stage So that competition level now will rise to Whatever the basics are, you know, you might be missing on your filled out website pieces here and there because you didn't know that you should be creating them.
But the stuff that is there probably will be okay and decent. I mean, the how websites have changed over the decades. A lot of it is there's no more spelling mistakes. We don't see that those really anymore because we're processing tools that correct that already. They're also getting more complex, more design heavy because like Squarespace, WordPress, all those others that have prebuilt templates.
It's not a static one pager anymore. It's a multi, you know, page menu, dropdowns, everything built out. There's a footer. Most people don't think about building out their footer privacy policy. They don't think about it, but Squarespace or LinkedIn will, or sorry, Squarespace or WordPress will help you write it.
So you can get that, that policy that you're legally required to do. So I think some of that is still having that vision and I, I keep thinking about small businesses in this aspect of, I've always got this phrase of like, there's the practice and then there's the business. So the practice would be you're a plumber and the business is you had to get your LLC registered.
You got a printer on top of a filing cabinet somewhere in a back office that has the paperwork for your taxes, for the accounting. Or all the other kind of stuff, maybe you need business cards or a sign on the door. That's the business side of it. Everybody has to have some version of that. And then your practice maybe is the restaurant, the plumbing, you know, the manufacturer, whatever it is that you happen to do.
And a lot of people focus so hard on the practice. Yet don't have the skills on the business. They think they can learn them. They try to and they typically struggle. It can be a lot of businesses aren't profitable because they literally aren't just looking at their bottom line because they don't know how to actually create a bottom line.
Like
Alex Pokorny: charting and graphing aspect. So, I see this as like there'd be pieces there.
Dave Dougherty: If they know that. I think that the answer changes considerably when you're talking about, you know, okay, I'm in a big corporation and this is my view from, you know, on top of the hills. Right. Whereas if you're in the small business or you're a freelancer, side hustler, you know, even a medium sized business, you're going to have to do more of the general, the general things you're going to outsource to AI, the stuff you don't enjoy doing.
Which is what you traditionally did with agencies anyway. Like I like going to conferences and talking with people and doing the happy hours. And that's what I want to do with my job. Don't care about writing a blog, right? Well, now, you know, don't necessarily have to, however, as more and more people get used to AI across the web.
I think there are certain situations that are bubbling up where there are expectations that it is your voice. So I think like a static web page on a company's website, I don't, I don't necessarily care if it's written by AI, because honestly, the copy on most companies sales pages is so bad anyway, that the AI probably did him a favor.
However, if you're doing a blog, or you're doing a LinkedIn post, With your face on the post, you know, like that should be your voice, especially, I mean, these schmucks that are using AI to just spam comment people on LinkedIn, like of all the places where you should be commenting as you it's there.
Because everybody can see what you're doing. You immediately come off disingenuous and you have to ask yourself, you know, do I want my brand to have that hit? I mean, maybe a lot of people don't care. And I, I understand that personally. Nah, nah.
Alex Pokorny: You got kind of a long, longer term view of that too. I mean, I guess you'd have that expectation of others as well on LinkedIn, that there have a longer term view of their reputation versus some random brand that they may have thought of in an afternoon.
And Burned it and by the next day,
Dave Dougherty: yeah, I think that's one of the problems with the the hustle culture that so many people came up with now, right? Like you're in your 30s and 40s and you came up with Silicon Valley, you know, build things, break things, burn things, you're going to try a whole lot of stuff.
You want to be an early adopter because that's what you were told your entire career. And now we're seeing that that doesn't necessarily work, right? Yeah, sure. You have the short term gains, but long term. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's worth it. Because, you know, I mean, the other part of it too, is if you're creating so much content via AI, there's no way that you can keep track of all the stuff that you published so that when one of the posts like blows up and you get some negative PR on it, you're going to be really confused because you have no idea that you actually published that.
So, you know, how are you going to handle that? And I, I don't know that enough companies are actually thinking about that. Solo creators, definitely not thinking about that, right. Cause you're so focused on just creating things, you know, try to scrape by a living that yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah I think we're getting back to the question basically with that because that is one of those cracks where the expertise is missing like you have been able to hire someone on Fiverr to write to 10 social media posts for a dollar for 10 years now, I guess that's been going on a long time, but there are still people hiring social media strategists and writers and entry level folks as well.
You name it all the way up and down the chain because. Yeah. The quality you get, it's not going to be great. You want someone who understands your organization really, really well. Someone who actually has a smart strategy in mind as well, which as a CEO who maybe came up from the finance side, they don't really have a background in what's going on in the social media space of, you know, what's going to resonate well with that particular audience these days.
And they'll. Trust the advice given and maybe it's AI and it is not great advice and they'll burn, you know, something and realize that, man, I, I don't have time for this or I shouldn't be doing this. Probably both.
Dave Dougherty: So I don't know if you've read Dan Pink's a whole new mind, but that was a book that in my MBA classes one of my MBA classes we, we read and it really hit me where he.
This idea of the Hollywoodification of everything. And I think, you know, with the crater economy and the influencer strategies that you're seeing a lot of companies employ now is absolutely happening. And especially we've talked about career growth as marketers on previous episodes as well. And there's.
You know, a lot of higher ups that are actually taking the same kind of strategy that, you know, Hollywood actors are having, where you have a publicist, you have somebody who's handling your social media, handling your interview requests, handling all of these things, like setting you up to be successful as the brand of you for this particular field.
And that's how you get enough attention. You get enough reputation in order to get the larger roles. And I think that's even, especially if we're living in an attention economy and that only gets worse, you. You're going to have to do things and be places to make the content you generate with AI or something in order for it to pay off as well.
So,
Alex Pokorny: yeah, this is, this is interesting. I don't know. I'm thinking about the, the spread of tactics as well. Is it going to get wider or is it going to get shallower?
Dave Dougherty: Well, I think the, the, if we go off of historical performance and I'm in it, you know, again, I'm speaking in generalities, but like, what's the advice you see for small businesses and creators all the time, it's. Pick a channel, be really good at that channel, and when you have that up and running and going well, then you diversify your channels, right?
Yeah. When you go to a big company and you're consulting or you're inside the company and you ask like, all right, where are our audiences? They're like, well, we're going to develop this campaign and we're going to have a podcast and a video and we're going to be in these four social media channels. Okay.
But these are all like, these are all bespoke. Content pieces, like, are you not repurposing anything? Like, how are you, you know, so it's like, we're, we're hitting the same audience and 13 channels. So you're not going to talk to anybody anywhere then, because you're not going to be remarkable anywhere, you know, and you'll just rely on paid to boost your message because it's not going to be good enough to stand out on its own.
Right. So I think if AI will enable the corporations to. Make more content for all of their channels, and it will just continue to be the boring, bland, legally approved stuff.
Alex Pokorny: Can I switch to a different topic? I got a, I got a question that has been burning in my brain and I'm not finding an answer to it.
I just had this conversation yesterday with someone and this and I still don't have a good answer for it. What I want to bring up is AI tools. And their use of the internet and searching the internet kind of continuing off your point of basically of organizations. If content is easy to create, they're going to create a lot more web pages and there'll be just a lot more websites and pages out there.
If you can literally create. An entire website with a prompt, which you can now that's just one more page like that creates an explosion of content.
The Hardware Problem of AI
Alex Pokorny: And then here's the question that I don't have an answer to is, how do you handle the hardware side of this? Basically, like. Google has geothermal basically fed servers because it's so expensive to have all these servers, which, I mean, when you search on Google, you don't search the Internet, you search their copy of the Internet, which means they visit all these web pages very slowly, just like you and your browser ping that server, got a file back.
pinged the server, got a file back and they eventually created a copy of that one web page and they did it as far as they want to. Which is the difference between searchable web and the dark web is those two lines. But really what it is, is basically is it's massive numbers of hard drives filled with copies of pages.
And when you're searching on Google, you're searching those hard drives, which is horribly expensive. Yeah. Who couldn't handle it? That's one of the reasons that they failed that. A bunch of business concerns as well, but one of the major ones is they, they couldn't handle the data. Microsoft and Bing have struggled with it.
They finally seem to have kind of gotten it, but they literally put their servers inside of shipping containers and sink them in the ocean because it's so expensive to cool them. I mean, it's like, there's these weird cases happening because of just the massive amount of data. I mean, YouTube, they talk about like, it used to be 127 hours are uploaded every minute.
Like that's just a losing game literally at every minute you got hours and how many hundreds of hours can your laptop handle? Like it's it's it's a it's a hard drive problem But like DeepSeek with 150 million dollars versus 250 billion dollars. It doesn't matter. They don't have that hardware So are they searching the web?
I mean, I know chat GPT has a relationship with Microsoft, but are others just searching via Google? I mean, I know there's some AI bots out there that are trying to start scraping, but there's a hard. Chat
Dave Dougherty: GPT came out and was like, we think they they scraped our. Documents to shorten the. The DeepSeek stuff to make it as good as ChatGPT.
You know, it's like, that's the thing. So many people are not talking about like, Hey, okay, yeah, it is a Chinese run thing. So whatever they tell us in the approved PR statement is only a portion of what reality is. I mean, you can't Fair, but
Alex Pokorny: the hardware problem. Yeah. How do, how does ChatGPT, Cloud, everybody else handle the web?
Dave Dougherty: So There's some interesting conversations at least that I've had after chat GPT released their operator. So yeah, it's like an it can actually take your browser and start doing stuff on your behalf. Yeah agent work. Yeah. Yeah you know some of it is like Okay, that would be really cool. Other pieces of it are I'm not comfortable with you having my credit card information.
So no, you won't be booking my travel for me later, you know and
Alex Pokorny: it's a trusting I can change your time to
Dave Dougherty: it. Yeah, I mean, and that's where I think where we are now is similar to when Google first came out with search. They had to teach people how to search. Right. And a lot of the things that we're discussing right now, I mean, that's first adopters, right?
I mean, you know, think about your parents or your friends that are a mechanic or something like they don't, they don't know they're, you know, they're playing around with it, but okay. The, the interesting thing with operators is that hit me at least was. If you look at like marketing automation and that whole marketing, digital marketing funnel, there's an assumption that a user is a human user and therefore could be a lead. But if you have a robot researching on behalf of a person,
and all of a sudden your pages get, you know, massive amount of traffic. And your lead quality goes down, your salespeople are less productive because these people didn't not, didn't want to be called, but you didn't adapt your, your sales funnel to it, right? Like there are all these knock on effects of that where we have some really baked in assumptions here.
For how this whole ecosystem is supposed to work and so like it might end up just being more of a in the moment thing like you either capture the conversion in the moment or these longer tail sales things you provide the research and they contact you. You know, in terms of like inside sales, man, that's going to be really hard.
If you've got, if you've got chatbots looking at all of your documentation and providing feedback to the robots that are searching and asking questions on what's the pricing, where's the documentation, how do I put together this research report for, you know, the person who queried this, this research.
That's a totally different thing than, than how we've assumed. Online sales will go. And in terms of the hardware, you're going to have to do a ton of infrastructure. You're going to have to just the energy costs alone for electricity. Like we talked about that previously, the three mile Island and the geothermal and Microsoft, you know, throwing down 80 billion, like, yeah, yeah.
There's some, there's some limitations here as it, as it scales up.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I that's a really interesting point about like bots on sites Increased and intelligence. What does that do to, you know, the companies that are receiving that traffic and those queries and those forms. That's a messy situation.
I mean, we've already seen reports that majority of clicks now on the Internet are actually from bots, which is not surprising. I mean, software can click a million times a minute versus human beings are. Pretty slow. So you're going to see small amounts of software doing big impact, but when it starts being more credible traffic, because right now it's like, oh, it's bot traffic.
We, we exclude that from our analytics. We, you know, we block it or honeypot it or whatever with, you know, our server systems. And we try to like slow it down and kill it off basically. If it's not, Google bot are the ones we want. But yeah, now you'll be at a point where you have massive Usage, which, yeah, will have power costs, which will have processing costs.
What if Google is going to become a paid service, you know, subscription service for all these different AI tools? You know, if they're going to start having to basically funnel money through Google just to deal with the fact that they're going to be crazy on their systems and their servers, like.
Dave Dougherty: Maybe I might see a deal come up.
I don't, the the issue with that is if you have the open source ones like llama and now the yeah. Deep seek or deep whatever it is. Yeah. Deeps. Yeah.
It ha your paid model has to be really good. Like really, really good. And that's where like Google and the Gemini stuff for me is really good for research and discovering discovering sort of the directional things for what I do. Like if I want a a YouTube description based off of a transcript, I'm going to chat GPT on that because the output is just better.
Sure. Right. So, I mean, that's where, you know, you have to play around. You have to figure out what, what works and, and what's good for that. But yeah, yeah, I don't know, man, you know, the other thing that I'm thinking about too, with all this is, you know, with is okay.
The Future of AI in Business
Dave Dougherty: If you are on the corporate side, cool.
You already have a job. You have some adaptability. I think about where I was 15 years ago as the, you know, the guitarist turned marketer, whereas it's like, just somebody give me a chance and I'll show you what I'm capable of. Like all the recent grads. How do you get the experience? You know, with all the hiring problems now and all the, you know, everything needs five years of experience for an entry level job that, you
Alex Pokorny: know, that's what I'm thinking about right here, the exact same situation that I literally was thinking the same thing because these, applicant tracking systems, ATS systems that you are applying through like Workday or LinkedIn or any of these other ones. They're doing keyword matching and people today are, I even know some people who have now done this successfully. They take the entire job description, put it in white font and white text and smallest font possible and throw it at the end of the resume and now they've gotten on interview panels.
Because they have a 90 percent match rate to the javascription, it's white on white is the old SEO trick from like the late 90s early 2000s and people are using it and it's working right now, but that whole the reason why we have these systems and why they're suddenly like in place and being used so heavily, even though they're not the capability clearly isn't right is because of remote work.
And I created resumes, mostly remote work, so you got thousands of resumes hitting a company. I mean, how do they handle a thousand resumes? They're not going to read them. So these systems to try to sort through them. But the problem is based on keyword matching, you might be a team lead at a construction company and you're applying to supervisor level one at a manufacturing place.
And since you had team lead, Not supervisor, you have a low match rate. So even though you're by skills qualified by keywords, you aren't. So we are, it's the same thing that Google went through, which was keyword matching and eventually went to topic and like purpose kind of intention driven searching, which said, no, when you're searching for a new shoes, that's a commerce search.
You're not looking for. The latest releases by, you know, press release, instead, you're looking for a pair of shoes that you're going to buy, you know, there's like these like intention isn't there yet. And the system currently is very, very broken. I mean, hence why white on white works. It's because it is very broken.
But that's the same thing that's going to happen here. There's basically you have intelligent agents who are going to be filling out forms on behalf of individuals and they'll fill out a hundred forms to try to get the pricing information to respond back to you and say we have looked through all the options for buying whatever widget and this company provides the best pricing which now these companies are going to get slammed.
With questionable quality leads that are from real customers, but it is being sent via a piece of software. So it becomes, looks not legitimate, man. Yeah. I mean, that's what I was saying. Mind blown. Like you're, you're right there of just, that is a different world. That is not one that we are currently prepared for like Akamai.
I mean, any of the big server companies, their response would be bot traffic, block it. However. You don't actually want to have that happen, but you also don't have a way to handle it. Well, and God forbid you signed a usage contract. Yeah, I know. Yeah, right. Servers are going to blow up. The amount of visits and everything is going to just go nuts on you.
And yeah, there's the thing I was talking to this person yesterday about is there is no cloud, really. And I think that's a big fallacy that a lot of people have about the internet is you have Wi Fi, yes, but your Wi Fi is going to your router, which literally has a wire connected to it. And that wire, if you trace it all the way around, will eventually get to the server that you are requesting files from.
And it comes all the way back to you. I used to have a sticker
Dave Dougherty: on a monitor that I had. I had a cloud with a lightsaber. And it was just that. It was, there is no cloud. It's just somebody else's computer. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Now. Circling back to one of the points that, that Ruthie brought up, you know, kick this whole thing off.
She was talking a lot about the internal data, right? And, you know, it's like, I think one of the places where, where the AI content can be helpful is if you, if you don't know what's going to work, right? Very traditional marketing problem, right? I have a great product. I need to inform people about it.
How do I do that? I have all these various channels I can choose from. I'm going to do a campaign in one, a campaign in another. I'm going to see what works. And if I feel like there's a little traction in one of them, I'm going to shut down the other ones and devote more time to that one. Right. Right.
Right. So if you can do more of those experiments more quickly with some kind of generic AI stuff, okay, well then maybe as like a experiment piece and then that's where you come in later with the, all right, let's get that email marketing specialist who can deliverability rates and look at the neighborhoods that we're sending from and, you know, all of those things, because you know that that tactic works.
For your, you know, for your marketing mix, but if you don't know if tick tocks, a good strategy, well then, you know, you'll need, you'll need to experiment with that. I mean, you can do less with AI in tick tock right now. But you know, just wait, just wait. So yeah, I think that's going to be one of those more interesting things where I think the, the, the creatives and the small business side of things will start matching up.
With the larger enterprises where, okay, we have to run these experiments. We don't know where the audience really is or if they'll interact with us in this way on this channel, those would be good, good things to use that for. But again, you have to make sure that it's aligned with the brand. It has a good tone of voice.
You're not just copying and uploading in bulk, right? Like, because I mean, that is definitely the, I need to plan three months of social media content. Nobody wants that job. Right. But you have to have someone apply some thought to it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, because otherwise it's just going to be, yeah, it's going to be three months of junk.
That's just not going to work and not going to convert and whatever. It's really just
Alex Pokorny: back to like old school marketing. I'm just like, we ran a print ad, we ran this, we went to a trade show and we did this and we feel like. There's, there's a, oh my gosh, there was a car dealership I worked with once from an agency there's a chain of car dealerships, like they had a lot going on, right?
Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: And we came in there for a monthly presentation, showed the results, and the owner was like, I don't believe it. I don't believe any of your numbers. And it's like, what do you say to that? Like, you know what I do believe is when some guy comes in here on a Saturday and he's got a newspaper underneath his arm and he's got a highlighter around our ad.
So I know it works. And it was, it's like, yes, you're right. That worked for that individual. Everybody else, I don't know, and you don't either. What we have is the numbers we have, and this is what we can show, and this is what we can prove as far as we can, and then it's a question of, which is the same with ROI, ROI is actually an emotional statement, of do you feel this was a good return on your investment?
And you can look at it from a financial perspective, or you can look at it really, which most people do, from a tactics perspective, so it's a little too early. Because there's no dollar value quite yet. So instead it's lead quality, which is, again, not a good, you know, qualitative metric.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and how many huge companies do you know have the data cleaned up enough to implement any of these things?
Alex Pokorny: Nobody.
Dave Dougherty: I don't know anybody.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, so. Yeah, I just heard of a massive corporation that's like one of the Fortune 100 ones who just got web analytics.
Dave Dougherty: Just asking everybody to move off of, yeah, all those platforms. Yeah,
Alex Pokorny: I was just like, oh, that's good. I'm glad they got their early 2000s. There's 25 years behind
Dave Dougherty: man.
Yeah. Wow. Okay.
Dave Dougherty: Remind me to, to tell you something off camera. All right. If thank you everybody for making it this far in the episode, appreciate it. Hit us up. We've got YouTube, we've got the email in the, the, the description of the podcast and YouTube we're on Instagram. So hit us up, let us know what you think. What have you run come across? Is there any other topic you'd want us to discuss in this vein?
I'd be really interested to know what's going on, but transcript show notes in the links as well. So with that, we will see you have a great two weeks and we will see you with another episode of enterprise.
Alex Pokorny: Thanks.
