#95: The Role of AI in B2B Sales & Marketing and How To Futureproof Your Job (with Reid Robinson, Lead Product Manager for AI at Zapier)

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All right, I'm excited to do this episode. Reed Robinson is the lead AI product manager at Zapier and we wanted to do an episode focused on AI because why not? That's, that's the hottest trend other than ABM that we get. AI is the one that continues to come up over and over. So Reid, thanks for, thanks for being here. Want to just give people your quick overview background and so they can hear your voice before we hop in?

Yeah. Excited to be here, Dave. My background, I mean, I started my real career in like proper cold calling sales. I remember my first job, we actually had no computer. It was just like, you know, classic smile and dial days. My initial onboarding actually included watching Glengarry Glen Ross and Boiler Room.

Oh my God, it's amazing.

I had a strong start in a lucrative career, but I then got into the world of, you know, sales development rep at a company called hootsuite, who I imagine some of the people here are quite familiar with on the social media side of the world. Worked there for five and a half years doing everything from sales. Led a number of our initiatives with, you know, the emerging trend of social selling. Then started to work with product partnerships. I worked really closely with, you know, Facebook and Google and LinkedIn, you know, managing the relationships between them and Hootsuite. Then joined Zapier to lead up strategic alliances, working again closely with Google and Facebook. So we've done a lot of work with the World of advertising, I would say for a long time, so quite familiar on that side. And then actually briefly left zapier to start up my own business in the NFT side, sold it late last year and rejoined with the focus of leading a number of our AI products. And it's been very exciting time. One of the reasons I was so excited to rejoin is I'm a huge fan of no code building and being able to automate a number of workflows, and the thought of combining that with AI just got me super excited. And we've been doing some fun stuff. So, yeah, excited to chat about what all of that actually means in detail.

So hootsuite brings me back. Hootsuite was like a key part of my early career. I worked in PR in social media in like 2010, 2011. And Hootsuite, we were a big Hootsuite customer at the time. I was at a company called Constant Contact. And hootsuite had this legendary owl bus at south by Southwest. You know about that, of course.

Yep.

All right, so if you're listening, at some point, you have to go to Google and type in a hootsuite owl bus, south by Southwest. That's so for. That'll forever be embedded in my mind as what hootsuite was. And this was when Clout Score was like the thing. And so you got like hootsuite open and I got like, you know, Reed. Reed Robinson, 42, clout score. I. I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't remember what the scale was, but. Yeah, that's hootsuite's great.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember that old toggle you can filter. You can filter a Twitter search by Cloud Score. Yeah, that's great. I was. That was all the rage. Yeah, there's.

There's an interesting. There's a. There's almost like. It would be interesting to have some level of that thing come back. People are on LinkedIn. They talk a lot of trash about, you know, they don't like LinkedIn influencers or whoever. There. There should be some like, you know, you hover over someone's thing. You're like, well, no, actually, this person is legit. Here's. Here's what they've done. There's. They're interesting variation of Cloud Score I think would be useful today.

Yeah, they're like trustfulness type thing. Yeah, yeah.

Wait, so you were. You were working at zapier, left to go start your own thing. Did you know you're going to come back after selling. How did you, why did you come back to Zapier?

No, I didn't know I was going to come back. It's not typically, you know, what you do when you leave to start your own business. So we were in the midst of selling the business and you know, I had gotten interested in kind of the AI technology space, given a lot of what was happening in the NFT world because I had just started collecting a lot of AI generative art. So just seeing like what artists were playing around with, with tools like Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall E, they were creating just like these absolutely beautiful pieces of art and I got really interested in collecting that, supporting a number of those artists and then just playing around with those tools myself. And I had stayed in touch. Zapier's co founders were really helpful to me and my other co founders as we, as one of the other ones came from Zapier as well. They were very great, just like helpful voices and advisors to us as we hit like kind of pivotal moments. And so we had stayed in touch and they had shared that they were getting increasingly excited about AI and wanted, you know, were interested in me potentially joining back to work on some of the, like, the non engineering side of things. And that's, yeah, what I've been doing. So helping us launch our, you know, Things like the ChatGPT plugin, the natural language actions API that we released as well as our, we built and launched our, the first versions of our Open API, OpenAI and ChatGPT actions apps on Zapier which, you know, became incredibly popular.

So we'll get into some of those specifics, but what I want to ask you right now is give me the read like what's a hobby? What's a hobby of yours? What's something you do personally outside of this work life? Do you run, ride your bike? Are you an artist? What's a hobby of yours?

Oh, this one's going to be fun. Two things. One, not a hobby, but I'm a dad to a almost two year old now, so that really feels like, you know, when someone's like, what do you do outside of work?

That's not a hobby, that's a full job.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, that's what I'm saying. So the amount of time for hobbies.

Is a lot lower. Right now it's minor six and four. So I'm with you.

Okay.

All right. So number one, is your dad okay?

Yes. Number two, and this is actually kind of what it's A weird way, but what led me back to Zapier is I'm. I'm interested in collecting stamps. Something I've inherited from, you know, my grandfather and then my father. And you know, when I first started playing around with AI and the art side of things, I created like an AI stamp album.

Interesting.

So like all completely generated and hallucinated, essentially stamps from these models and, you know, just started mapping them to, you know, real world ones and, and just doing it for fun. But it was a great way just to learn about what's going on. Same stamps. Really interested in stamps. It's a funny thing.

There's a thread. I'm not going to take us on another side tangent, but there's actually like a deep thread I think between nf, like you're. You being a stamp collector and you being into NFTs, there's something connected there. All right, so. All right, so you me were dads. Saturday morning, we're not in our work mode. We're having a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, standing at the park watching our kids play. I ask you about AI. Don't give me the, don't give me the, like, I work in this industry. I work at Zapier Answer, like, read as like my friend, as a person, you obviously got to be passionate about AI to like be in this space to have this job. Give me the high level, like for the people that are listening to this who are B2B marketers or B2B, you know, work in B2B sales, in B2B SaaS. Ish. Why do we care about AI? Isn't it just another like, hype cycle that we're going to go through. What's the big story here?

I guess the most exciting thing for me is like I cut my teeth doing the jobs in a SaaS business that people don't want to do. Right. You know, the whole like world of smile, dial call reports, all like the absolutely manual data entry that you do as like a real like the lowest low on a sales team is what I cut my teeth with. And you know, I had a lot of colleagues who were similar levels on the marketing side and got to see, you know, hey, we did a conference and they were entering the leads into the CRM and trying to map things there. What gets me excited without a doubt is just its ability to help you do these tasks that you would normally not be able to do. It is able to remove a lot of, you know, it just like up levels people. It augments what you're capable of. Doing, I don't think or believe it's going to replace anybody. It's going to certainly make a lot of people more efficient for that. But I think that just frees people up to do work that is a lot more enjoyable. Nobody wants to do the manual data entry piece. Nobody wants to be sitting around doing these, you know, very repetitive style of tasks. But even if you were to try to, let's say, okay, you learned a little bit of coding and you could do this, like, that's still outside. The thing with a lot of these AI tools that they can do is you can just describe the job you need done. Almost everybody can describe what they need done and then magically watch it happen. Like there's an exciting and magical element when it actually does succeed and you have figured out how to do that and now you're like, wow, I don't need to do this anymore. I've just, you know what? Normally took me three hours to do this draft report of something. I have this draft in my hands in 30 seconds. Sure. It's not great. I'm not going to deliver this to a client. I'm not going to email this to a customer. But it did its job pretty well and now freed me up to do that higher sophistication work that I find more enjoyable, that's more valuable. And that just freeing up of kind of resources and freeing up a mental workload is very exciting to me. It's one of the things I loved about the automation space overall. Like, you know, one of the quotes I remember hearing from a customer once was just about how, by learning how to use Zapier, they were, you know, the way they described it was it gave them time so that they didn't need to spend a Saturday morning manually uploading, like, whatever they were doing. And they were able to, like, go to their daughter's like, dance practice every Saturday instead, because that was the time they were normally doing a manual process. And just hearing those types of things gets me really excited. And I think when I think about opportunities for AI in its, like, current strength and current capabilities, it's just a further evolution of, like, taking away more and more of jobs people really don't want to be doing and giving people the power to spend time with what's valuable.

Yeah, that's a really good frame, I think, especially since we're talking about, and on this podcast we're talking about marketing and sales. So I'm not here to talk to you today with, with Reid about the existential threats of a Guy, we're gonna. We're gonna mostly focus to, like, you know, sales and marketing and B2B SaaS, revenue generation. Maybe that's the Dave Gehart podcast. We could talk about that. But this is not Lex Friedman. This is B2B marketing. So I think what you mentioned is really interesting because if you rewind back to your life as a salesperson doing cold outreach, doing outbound, or I think of my job as a marketer or people that I've worked with, you can start to really quickly when you take that frame that you laid out, put tons and tons of tasks in there and start to reframe everything and be like, wow, this is like, why am I doing this? Why am I not leveraging AI so I can spend my time doing some of the more deep creative work. And I agree with you that it's not going to replace the creativity in the sales and marketing side of things. And so maybe as a salesperson you can get a lot of that automated so you can spend your time. One of the topics we talk about a lot is doing better research, like, really trying to figure out who Reid is before I'm going to sell him something and do the outreach. And then maybe there's all these other things AI can do. Even. Just the other day I got a. I wanted to read this, this report and I was like, I'm not reading this 20 page boring report. So I put it pop, fed it into Chad GBT and I was like, give me a summary of this. And I got, you know, five bullet points back and got the gist of the article. So there's a lot in there from a productivity standpoint.

Yeah, absolutely. I love. Yeah, that summarization piece is probably one of the most popular use cases that we're definitely seeing from people. It's also most relatable, particularly if Anybody has a ChatGPT Pro Plus. I forget. I think it's Plus now account or they just launched ChatGPT Enterprise, the code interpreter version, which allows you to, like, upload a document. Pretty fun to play around with if anybody hasn't. If anybody's listening and hasn't tried it yet, try uploading things, asking questions about what you've uploaded. Pretty impressive with what it's capable of doing, particularly with data as well.

All right, I want to talk through. You sent me a bunch of examples of, like, things that you all have built and done at Zapier. I want to talk about those. And then we're going to shift and talk about specifically for B2B marketing because coming into this conversation my mind always kind of goes to like the sales and marketing external facing activities like generating revenue conversion, how do we generate more pipeline, blah, blah, blah. But as I'm thinking about this, there's actually a lot in like the day to day life of a marketer that between automation and AI, you can make life easier with things like, you know, plugins and chat and being able to just like type words and have things happen. So let's talk through some of these examples. So first One is this ChatGPT plugin that you guys built.

So when we had the opportunity to build a plugin for ChatGPT, it was extremely exciting, you know, one of the fastest growing products to 100 million users. How do you not want to build an integration for it? And, but we played around with a lot of like what would a user want to do in ChatGPT? And at the time we had actually run through the team that I worked with, you know, we were doing like kind of AI R&D is the best way to think about it. We had done a lot of like really quick spinning up of like product ideas and a lot of them we sunset really quickly because we, you know, we took learnings from it sunset then moved on. But one of the durable things we noticed was that there's a really fun and exciting and interesting moment when you can give some of these models access to integrations on zapier. And so we had started to build out an API with that. And then when ChatGPT plugin came around, we realized there was a really exciting moment where you could potentially permission ChatGPT to access certain actions that are available on Zapier and give it the ability to do that in your conversation. So you could do things like, you know, if you normally use ChatGPT to not help you reply to customers or something like that, you could give it access to search your Gmail or search Zendesk or search Salesforce even. And you know, in the conversation be like, hey, can you pull up details from this account? Or can you pull up my last email from Dave and then help in that ask it be like, okay, now I want to reply using this type of messaging. And then you can also give it access to the ability to draft or send with your review emails out as well. So you can actually do quite a bit of work in there. One of the cool things we also gave it the ability to do that has been valuable for users is you can actually also ask it to create zaps for you and even recommend zaps that might be interesting for you. So if you describe your job, what you're looking to do, ask it to recommend what are sorts of use cases that might be relevant for you and your job. You can even tell it like, no, that's a horrible one. Give me more like this, right? And eventually you just ask it to like draft that zap for you and it'll try to do its best job and give you a link that has like the trigger and the actions built out for you.

That's cool. So you can literally be like, hey, what are. What are the. Here's what I do. What are the things I could think about automating in some way?

Yeah, exactly.

That's awesome. All right, what's this one? Something with retina AI.

Yes. So this is the customer example for the kind of use case I was just talking about where, you know, they wanted to actually use the Zapier plugin to pull data from Gmail, for instance, to learn kind of their writing style was their objectives. You know, like pull in some of my most recent emails and just give me a snippet of my writing style. We actually see a lot of users do this with ChatGPT just overall as a way to, you know, then in the future when you want to ask it to write something about you, you can just say like, hey, use the following writing style in this so that it's a little bit closer to what you would actually want it to be.

There can be a lot in there with like scaling of a brand voice. I've heard this a lot from sales organizations or marketing leaders that we've worked with. It's like, hey, how do we control this in some way? Right? We have hundreds of salespeople or even just cloning what's working, Right. Like, I think there's something really interesting about A, being on brand, but also B, understanding which type of tone and copy and works really well for emails and being able to like replicate that as opposed to 50 different reps having 50 different style of outreach, right?

Yep. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the, like, internally there's a really fun use case we do with a HubSpot for personalized emails, for lead generation that uses that sort of flow. So essentially what we do is as new leads come in, I mean, this is probably like a bread and butter use case for a tool like Zapier, right? We have an absurd amount of integrations with forms, right? Because there's so many marketers out there with a million forms, there's an endless supply of forms. And there's also a ton of advertising that is lead gen focused. You know, like there's lead forms with Google Ads, lead forms, Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn's lead gen forms. Now imagine normally what we see a lot of marketers do is those come in, they get added to a CRM and an email gets sent to that individual. What you can start to do, and this varies depending on how much trust you're going to put into these systems, is you can feed that step somewhere in the middle to a model such as ChatGPT and give it information about how you normally would talk, how you would normally. Your writing style which would normally send. You can even integrate with tools like Jasper where you might already have templates for your writing style, really crafted for that flow, and then have it send a more personalized email. You know, for us, you know, we've more, a little bit more advanced systems where you could even have it determine what would be the right type of response first and then the next step would then kind of do a little path. So depending on what stage that user might be in, what scale they might be what, you know, is this going to be a high quality lead or is this going to be a more scaled approach that we want to take? It'll then personalize and customize that based on those characteristics for that. So, you know, I've been in, I don't know, intersection of sales and marketing for quite a lot of time and the topic of personalization comes up time and time again. And so incorporating, you know, a model into a workflow to help with that personalization is really interesting. I'll always say a call out, like if you don't want to fully automate these things, like definitely do a human review process there. We support things like doing things just as draft emails. Right. So if you did want to come into your morning, just review what the kind of outputs have been, you can go ahead and do that as well.

All right, what do you think if we had to bucket this for people who want to think about how they might bring AI into their company? Let's be real with people and talk about it right now. You know, like heading into the fall 2023, what are the some of the things that you would say that AI is not good at yet versus the type of things that AI might be good at and then maybe from there we can kind of whittle down into be more specific for people. Yeah, and I want to start with not good at because I do think a lot of people have False expectations. And there's been a lot of hype and marketing around it. And so they're like, yeah, I, I, I asked this AI to like, you know, make a video and write this script and edit all these animations. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That advanced for what's possible today. So I want to level set with that first.

Yeah, first off, what it's not good at is probably giving you the quality of output you want in its base format, right? Like in, in its out of box shape. If you ask it a simple query like, hey, give me a email response to this email, right? Or like write a response to the lead for this email that I got from the lead. It's not going to do a great job there. You know, it'll give you something that looks credible but it's not. Like for you when you read it, you're like, that has nothing to do with my business. They missed a lot of key points. And so first off, just like it's not going to know you and your business out of box. That's really something. You have to do a good job of giving it that information. Second, it's not good at math. Do not give it a job with math. It might look like it does a good job with math. You know, it might do a good job with a number of things that you tell it to do with math. But if you keep in mind, like these are, it's a large language model, there are things you can do to get it to be better with arithmetic. Like there's a Wolfram plugin with chatgpt that is amazing in terms of expanding its capabilities for arithmetic. But really do not try to do math things with it right now lastly, I'd probably say like, just on the trust side, I think a lot of people have this assumption that, you know, they can trust absolutely everything that comes out of it. Like you really do want to check. I'll give a good marketing example. I was helping, my wife's a social media marketer and you know, she was asking me the other day like, hey, can you help me think of some, you know, examples of brand moments where they may have been doing more like showing than telling? And it went, it went poorly for them as like a campaign and she was sharing some, her examples and I just like, I just asked ChatGPT, I was like, hey, can you name some key case studies of where brands, you know, showed instead of telling and how that went poorly for them? It did its thing where it told me great stories, but you can't just trust it. Like those could have been completely what the industry would call hallucinated. Right? Right. Like completely made up.

Or it could be. Also a lot of that data is from not everybody's going to be doing it on like the current data. So it could be old data and you're probably often going to get the same other examples as it's serving up to other people. Right?

Exactly. So yeah, just always check.

But like a productive example would be you find those things Today's episode is.

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Go check them out on your own, then feed it to Chad GPT and then ask the question. Yeah, because you can say like, hey, what are the similarities between these things? And do that analysis for you.

Yep. So I'll say one other thing because I just see this come up so often, they really can't access the web. I see a lot of people give, you know, models like URLs and they're like, hey, summarize this article and they feed it a URL and there's things you can do, but typically out of box. They're not accessing the web. At best, they're like, they're looking at the actual text in the URL itself and just like hallucinating an article from there. So be very careful with that.

Okay, so those are some good guardrails. What are the things that absolutely, like, if you're, if you were talking, well, you are. Not to put this much pressure on you, but you're standing on a stage right now and there's 3,000 B2B marketers in the audience watching you with every, with, with every breath. And if you could give them recommendations on where to audit. And I'm talking to the skeptical people out there, the early adopters, this is not for you. They're obviously flying and running. But I would say the 80% of you who are skeptical, I don't know why, like, here's the opportunity to say, like, here's where I would come in as a consultant and like tell you to audit and think about your sales and marketing or, you know, organization. What are the, what are the buckets of things you would tell people to go look at and think about when it comes to using AI?

Yeah. The first thing, maybe before we dive into use cases, I'll even say the first thing I tell people is just a lot of people in the room would have tried, like chatgpt themselves. I talked to people who, even they're familiar with ChatGPT, they're familiar with Zapier. But one of the things they, people often don't Connect the dots on is the fact that you can, you know, the whole. One of the biggest value props we're seeing with people is this kind of like running in your sleep type model. As we talk about it, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, I use ChatGPT all the time. And they, they go to the website, they use the app, they type in it, there's. But then we talk to them about how you can incorporate that into a way that just runs automatically for you. And as that relates to the use cases, talk about things like data extraction. It's probably one of the most valuable things and it does a fantastic job. And what's amazing about its ability to take unstructured text and turn it into structured output is that it doesn't need to be the same format each time. Like I'm sure every marketer here has played around with some sort of data extraction tool where it like always needed to be in the same spot or the text always needed to be like the third word and before this word. What these models are really amazing at is you can do something like hey, every, you know, maybe you get a lot of emails about inquiries from people, but you need to extract, you know, not only the simple details like what's the lead's name, their email address. Like those are more simple things to get. But maybe you offer six different types of services and you want to properly figure out from the text which service that user is interested in, which geographic area they mention, if they do mention one so that you can route the lead to the right team or you're just again personalizing that follow up based on that. They do a fantastic job of that and we see that as a huge use case across getting things into tools like Asana, Jira, Salesforce, Trello even. I often talk about if you ever wished that data was coming to you in more of a form and not free form text, use the ChatGPT extraction type action. Phenomenal job at that. Secondly, you know, we talked a lot about summarizing content. It does a really typically it does a very good job at that. There's always like the little asterisk of like, you know, make sure it's actually not hallucinating things and there's things you can do to control that a bit. But typically a great job at summarizing whether that's your call notes, whether that's your just free form notes that are coming in. Maybe it's taking all the data you have on that lead and putting it into the hands of the sales rep that's about to go on a call with them because maybe it's too long or maybe you're giving the model, hey, here's all the information we have from them. Here's information about our business. Give three bullet points. I'm sure everybody in this audience is, you know, familiar with how much a sales rep is actually going to read before actually calling that lead.

This is, I've spent my whole life doing this. Hey, product marketing team, can we make a headline and three bullet slide for a competitive deck about how we're different than the competition? It's never three, it's always 1600 words and 15 bullets. So maybe like the final process is like run it through chat GBT and say no, actually three bullets and then I'll give it to the team.

Yeah, exactly. Really good at jobs like that. And lastly, just getting you to the draft state kind of the flip side, right? You have a short amount of text and you want to make it more text. And this might be the whole doing draft replies to your leads, doing, you know, if you just had a call and you wanted to take your notes and turn it into a more freeform or more structured response and maybe the marketing team is helping you in that process by giving the model information about like case studies that might be relevant and how to talk about those case studies. Right. You know how many marketers here have probably ad nauseam talked to sales team about all the case studies they have available to them and how they should be referencing these. Right. But you know, you could potentially build an AI system that maybe even looks at the email a sales rep is about to send and says like, hey, you know what, Based on the conversation you just had, it looks like this case study might be relevant. I have written in your style how you should incorporate this into this email. Here's your one, your three sentences or your four sentences, right? All those sorts of things start to become possible and really interesting in ways that as marketers thinking about how do you make all the amazing things that you're doing accessible to these teams? That's also a really interesting avenue to look at.

Do you think that will be pushed by, is it going to be software vendors that give these ideas and you and go like, here's something that you can do or is there going to be a world where like I can almost think of any recipe and then find a way to go and create it? Because I think there's a lot of people that are listening that are just, oh, that's a good idea. I'm going to take that and run with it. But not everybody, like, thinks, like you, for example, and can think about how to connect those things. Do you think, how do you think this is going to be? Like, what does the future look like to actually go and execute on some of these?

Yeah, I mean, first off, that's also probably use case number four, I would say for everybody in this room is like, use these tools to help you do that. I'll give you a great example. I'm about to do a blog post for this, for people in this audience, which is, you know, oftentimes with, you could talk to ChatGPT about how to actually build tools like this. It is very familiar with zapier. It's probably very familiar with every martech tool you use. And if you just say, hey, I heard this dude Reid talk about this use case, about case studies, how would I actually build something like this? And it'll probably give you pretty good instructions on how to do that. If you use the Zapier plugin, it might even try to get you 90% of the way there. Hopefully 100% is our hope. But even if it didn't get you all the way there, ask it questions, hey, this step isn't working. What can I do? Its ability to be a. Probably a lot of people in this audience have heard a lot about how it's assisting in code generation and engineers are using it to generate code. If you haven't, yes, that's happening. But what's exciting for me, for marketers and sales reps even, is just it can teach you how to essentially become a developer without having really any clue what you're doing with development is really exciting. I'll give you a blog article I'm working on is essentially teaching people how to use ChatGPT to write code that can run in a zap. And the reason this is exciting is like, there might be certain processes you run where you're like, hey, data formatting is probably one of the most popular ones, right? Like this data comes in all the time, but we need to format it. And there's actually some rules in place for how you format it, right? Like if the lead was from New York, we need to format it a certain way, but if the lead was from California, it formats a different way. And creating a zap to do that is kind of a pain in the butt, but code makes that incredibly easy. And as a marketer, you could actually just go to ChatGPT, describe the job you need. Essentially you can tell it to just Write the code for Zapier and then you just copy and paste it into Zapier. And that's going to happen every single time.

That's the really exciting part. And I want to just pause on that because I want people to understand this. For anybody that's been skeptical, like, that's the one. Like, if you're a marketer like me, I'm working on this right now, which is like, I want to redo my website. And typically the way that I would do that is, is I would draw it up, find a mockup tool, write the copy, mock it up, and then I get to the frustrating part, which is I gotta wait for a designer and they're gonna tell me it's gonna be two weeks or like the marketing team has 15 other things going on. And so, like, we can do this, Dave, but like, let's prioritize it for, you know, Q4. Right. But what you're telling me now is I can basically write up all the instructions of how that page should look and what should be on it and I can actually get that code myself and I can go and do that. That's the really powerful thing to a marketing person. And that's not to say that creative's not going to need to be involved. There's going to be editing and tweaking and style stuff that needs to be, that needs to be changed, but that have to do. You can do so much less sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen. You can do more stuff yourself without having to bring other people into the process.

Yep. And even, you know, I've been doing some of these things and I've realized, oh, I actually do need to bring in a designer at this point. Right. I need to bring this into an actual engineer. What's kind of cool is you could just ask it, hey, I actually want to bring in a designer. Can you take the discussion we've had so far and write a design brief? And now that designer on the other side is like, oh, wow, this is so much easier to work with because I've gotten this well articulated breakdown of what the client or what you know. Even if it's internal resourcing that you have. Right. Of what you're looking for, you could even give it. I'm sure your design team, for those with internal design teams has a form. Right. Just copy and paste that form into ChatGPT and say, hey, give me the answers for this form based on the conversation and hopefully you'll be 90% of the way there to getting there.

What do you think marketers could be doing to future proof themselves right now?

Honestly, that last point we touched on, learn how to do that, I think the biggest thing I talk about to particularly my friends, like talking about, like friend, you know, being on the. I actually did have this use case of being on a playground, talking to another dad who was in marketing who asked me about AI stuff. And the biggest thing I'd say is going back to an early point, I said, if there's hundreds of millions of people are using ChatGPT in the website, they're using it in whatever, all manual ways, let's call it. If you can be the person internally that learns how to use these tools in ways that are a little bit more unique and a little bit more valuable and a little bit more like always running, you could turn that into a system, you're turning that into a process. And that is going to be very valuable for organizations and for leaders because every leader out there, every organization right there is figuring out what's our A.I. strategy, how are we using A.I. for our operations, how are we using AI for our business, what are we doing there? And if they know that, hey, there's this marketer that's actually built out these cool systems, these cool tools that are running. Let's figure out how they did that. The bar, you know, our co Wade had a quote about, you know, the bar for knowledge of AI being lower than it's ever going to be. And I think that's a point, you know, as marketers take to heart. But yeah, the bar for what does it mean to be an X expert of using AI in marketing is very low right now. And learning about this and trying it is going to make you one of those people who's going to be able to do this. You know, like we had a woman, Carly, on our comms team built out through one of the tools on Zapier called Interfaces. She built out a number of bots that were essentially like doing things. Like a lot of times people would contact our comms wanting draft press releases, draft copy for social media. And she actually created a number of bots that would essentially just allow anyone in the company to come to them, ask questions about what, like give the content that they wanted. And it created draft comms stuff for them to use so that then they could workshop it and come back to the comms team with something that was in the roughly the right style, a lot more structured the way it should be structured and kind of got people a lot closer. And internally that was Good. Does an amazing AI achievement. Right. And I think for marketers like you can learn about this stuff, you can implement this stuff right now and be viewed as one of those people who is innovating with AI in your role and yeah, just encourage that.

I feel like there's going to be like somebody inside of the each company in like the revenue ops or ops role who previously was responsible for like the tech stack and now that that job is still going to be tech stack but it's going to be like automation and AI expert inside of the company where like before it was ops would be you. Ideally you have a centralized ops team and they help CS and sales and marketing and product. But there's almost a new role popping up that if somebody can own that and then like they're the expert internally, then it's like I'm never going to spend as much time learning about AI as you are. But if I have somebody inside the company who's an expert that would be, that feels like that would be a, a well thought out higher inside of a high growth company.

Yeah. And I'd say it doesn't take much right now for the people listening to become that person. So all those people thinking like, okay, what am I doing with my career? What is my next, like what is my, the value that's unique to me that I'm bringing here. I'd say it probably doesn't take much to be that person right now. That is kind of expanding your organization's knowledge on how to actually incorporate AI into your systems and into your workflows.

What about design and what's your opinion on like design Creative video? It seems like there's interesting use cases there, at least on the design standpoint. I haven't been super impressed and I know other marketers feel the same way. Like you can kind of get the graph, you can kind of get graphics and design stuff. Right. But then like, you know, with things like people and objects, you know, you'll have a, a person with you know, 15 fingers that all blend into each other. But there seems to be something here. I was just messing around in Canva yesterday and I'm like, man, there's a whole world of like Photoshop to Canva to AI that's going to change. You can make videos. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about what's interesting about that space. Yeah.

All right, so first, yeah, I got a lot of questions on this, particularly people wanting to use like Mid Journey and automations or models like Mid Journey. I Should say give and their lack of API. But anyway, the first thing that I'll say is again going back to early comment I made on like the briefs, right, if you can use these tools to give you graphics that at least represent the style of what you want your campaign to look like and you're delivering that to someone, that's probably going to be very helpful relative to what you could have done in like just describing it one side. Secondly, there are a, there is an incredible amount of tools being released that use AI right now. Probably some of the ones I'm most excited for actually some of the fig I use Figma a lot. So the tools that are working in Figma to go from like a Figma frame to the actual code to launch that as a website is really intriguing, right, because that again just continues to lower the bar to go from like idea to production and you know, you as a marketer feel like, hey, I want to do like this, why I want to do this one page website that talks about like a very particular feature. If you could just design that in a tool like Figma and have some ability for that to then get launched as a one page website on your domain, that is really cool. And similarly if you could describe the type of page you're looking for and then have like again get to that like X percent mark, like maybe it's 75% mark of like it displayed in Figma. Really cool. I think the visual stuff with AI though is a bit further off I would say for those types of use cases I think those are a little bit of harder ones to get right and to really work well. I think they'll work well for probably smaller startups and smaller businesses, right that might not have as much stringent controls on like the exact look and feel of everything on their website. Right. Like you're talking about any larger brand is going to be like no, it didn't use our footer and we had a style guide for this and give me a lot of difficulty with that. But for, you know, if there's marketers working with smaller businesses that have less things on that probably be able to find some tools that do a pretty good job for you. But I definitely caution that tools like that are going to be very new at the moment and yeah, but I, I see a lot like I was playing around with one called Loco Phi AI L O C O F Y that does do a kind of like front end development from figma. But yeah, it's still quite a bit to learn about and try to do.

What about on like the audio video side? A lot of companies in this space are producing videos, podcasts like this one or TikTok YouTube shorts, name it. Or even just like product launch videos. Anything interesting that you're seeing in the video audio space for creators?

You know what, I'll give one that was really interesting the other day, but I don't know if anybody listen this familiar with a tool called Captions. You know, I think their core product was about, you know, doing video shorts and doing like those overlay captions type of stuff to it. Just captions AI. They recently launched a zapier integration as well. But really what they're starting to do with a number of their AI stuff is really interesting to see. Be able to use that media and get it into a. All those different kind of do a lot of different things with video content, for instance, is really fascinating. Probably one of the bigger tools and more interesting ones I've seen from a marketer case on video was them. There's some other ones. I mean there's some really cool companies doing some interesting things with like I was listening to one from another one that was doing like an actual like they did AI graphic stuff for like Hollywood style films and that was really cool just to hear about. But I think for marketers that might be a little bit out of reach at the moment. Yeah, the audio stuff. The other thing with audio we hear a lot about is summarizing audio actually. So if someone were to, let's say not want to listen to this whole podcast, I want a summary of it or something, you know, being able to build out workflows for yourself that you could just get the file download, it'll transcribe that audio, it'll then split out the summary for yourself, maybe give you action items or talking points, something like that, as well as something we definitely see quite a bit.

Yeah, imagine I could give some. I could take the hundred video interviews from Exit 5 podcasts and like it's one thing to get the content back from a transcript perspective, but what could we do with the video? Right? Like let's make a, let's make a five minute clip of every time we've talked about AI in the last hundred episodes.

Yeah, the last thing I'll say, just as relates to video, I actually talked to a customer that had an interesting example and it was about preparing content and preparing those briefs again. But if you kind of give it more and more information about how you want to structure your content for things like video content, right? Like you have a big piece of content that your team just produced and you know that you want to split that piece of content into 10 different other pieces of content and you roughly know how those 10 pieces of content should be styled and structured and scripted. You can kind of give it instructions for each of those 10 and have it spit out the design brief or the campaign brief. Right. For each of those 10 pieces of content so that it can then go off to the video. The content teams that are responsible for each of those pieces with again, roughly, hopefully something that is close enough to a breakdown of how that piece of content can potentially be used in a different format.

Cool. All right, Reid, any parting thoughts or something you want to plug or shout out before we wrap up? Otherwise, this has been a really helpful conversation for me selfishly, just to get a little bit deeper in the AI space and I hope it's been helpful for those that will be listening to this.

Yeah, I'd say just to anybody listening, like feel free to tag me on Twitter, read out loud, underscore at the end or on LinkedIn, just read. Robinson I love hearing from users on what they're trying to do. If you run into cool use cases or difficult things you're trying to do, hit me up. We're happy to see what your doing there. There really are. I mean the last thing I'll say is I mentioned just like try this if you're really trying to get ahead, just try to do something in a day, like put a day together, try to make something cool happen that you'd be like, you know, if I can make this actually happen, it'd be really cool. Just try to do it and use for now, use ChatGPT as your assistant to try to make that happen. It's probably better than you thought it giving you detailed instructions and just like every time you run into a, a wall of something that didn't work, tell it the wall you ran into and tell it to overcome that and just try to keep going and learning is what I would say right now.

I love that. I love the idea of just like taking a make it a half day thing, make it a day thing. Give it, give it an exercise to the team. Like hey, we need to take this a little bit more seriously. Let's everyone take a half day tomorrow and just go and poke around in tools and come back and we're going to have a discussion with no real agenda of like what we're going to do, but let's have a discussion about what we might be able to do with AI for our sales process or something. And I think that could be really beneficial.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, Reed Robinson, thank you for doing this. People. Go to LinkedIn, go find Reed, send them a message, send them a connection request, ask them a question about AI. Tell them that you learned something from this episode. That's the best form of feedback and call to action that we get from the show. Reid, thank you for doing this. We'll let you get back to your your day outside of the marketing realm. I appreciate you coming on.

Thanks for having me, Dave.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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