Ep. 3007: 8,000 People vs 1 Chatbot - Who Does It Better?

I want to move over now and talk more around kind of how things are changing in marketing in general, because there's a couple things we can touch upon here. So marketers are using Cursor now, what people actually want from marketing services, and then also the fact that IBM just cut 8,000 people against one thing.

AI.

Yeah. So maybe we can start on that one first. So 8,000 people versus one chatbot. So who does it better? Obviously the chatbot did it better because they cut 8,000 people. Yeah. So So I'm just looking at this one over here, and IBM laid off 8,000 HR employees, not for budget, not for performance, they got replaced by a chatbot.

Wow.

That bot is called Ask HR, and it runs on IBM's own AI engine, Watson x Orchestrate, okay? 94% of HR work automated, pay, vacation paperwork, even terminations, $3.5 billion in productivity gains, 40% drop in HR costs. IBM built a system that made these types of layoffs possible, now they're selling it to everyone else. Packaged, no-code, enterprise ready. But you're going to start to take a look at this afterwards.

I don't have that many people in HR, but yeah.

IBM calls it innovation. Let's call it what it is, y'all. One of the first at-scale white-collar replacement experiments, and it worked.

Yeah.

I think I was just texting with a mutual friend this morning and I'm like, so how many of these AI automation people do you have now? A couple of weeks ago it was 2, now it's 6. It's growing pretty quickly. I'm like, so what's the job? Automate everything they can and then replace where we can and build these flows where we can. And then they're like, we're on a mission right now to replace our internal Gong. I'm like, that doesn't seem really difficult to build. It's gonna take a little time, but he's like, yo, it's going really well right now.

Wait, why do they want to replace Gong? Expensive. Yeah, but Freshworks, is it Freshworks is the company? They have a Gong alternative that's really cheap.

How much is it?

It's like a fraction of the money. It's not like half the cost.

Yeah, I think they want to see if they can build workflows to just replace it. Sometimes it makes sense to just pay for the cheaper one.

Yeah.

So instead of trying to build it, but like, you know, they have their own philosophies and there's no right or wrong answer for that. But I think we're going to see a lot more of this. And look, we saw it happen with customer service. Now this is HR. We've kind of seen it happen in sales a little bit. I think what's up next, maybe creative, maybe marketing.

Yes. But looking at Gong, I just checked this out. This is a March 5th, 2025 article. Gong has passed $300 million in annual revenue. I did not know that. They're a good size.

They're still growing.

They're still growing.

Yep. All right. So this one, this one is interesting. What do you think the only moat that's left in business is now?

I think the only moat in business, and there's only one in my opinion, and I could be wrong, or let me rephrase, for most businesses, because there could be some moats. Like for example, you saw the Pentagon invested in a rare minerals earth company for $400 million or $400 billion or no, $400 million or something like that. There's some moats like there's only so many natural resources and I own them. Like you can't—

That's called a cornered resource.

Yeah. But if I look at like moats for most businesses, the real moat that I see is a brand. I think there's not really much of a moat other than that because if you and I go try to create shoes that are better than Nike or Air Jordans, let's actually use Jordan as a brand. Jordan has a strong following. It's not about you and I creating a more comfortable shoe or a better looking shoe. We don't have that Jordan cachet. At least when it comes to athleisure wear, footwear, because we're not Michael Jordan. That to me is a true moat that is just too hard to get around, even with AI or technology and even time.

So I think we're saying similar things here. I believe that the only moat in business now is actually your distribution. So if you look at Google 10 years ago, and you know this a little bit, 10 years ago, 2 pages scraped 1 visitor. 6 months ago, 6 pages scraped 1 visitor. Today it's 18 pages scraped 1 visitor. And then Anthropic 6 months ago was 6,000 pages scraped per 1 visitor. Today it's 60,000 pages scraped per visitor, right? So the Cloudflare CEO said that if the business model of web has been search fundamentally for the last 35 years, you get value by subscriptions, ad, or fame. All 3 of these things are going away and they're going away fast. And so this guy, Only CFO, not OnlyFans, but like Only CFO. So he's like, look, as a finance leader at a software company and a small-scale influencer in the finance accounting space, I have been seeing the problem firsthand. Everyone is fighting for eyeballs. Competition is greater than ever.

AI is commoditizing software.

Traditional content strategies are breaking. I think we can agree with that. AI is radically changing the methods of getting attention. Yes, which we can talk about in a second, like what we're seeing people actually want. Customer acquisition costs are rising. So there are a lot of companies wasting absurd amounts of money, making money, marketing money in 2025, running old playbooks. The joke used to be half of the marketing budget is wasted, but I don't know which half. Today, for many companies, it's like 80% of the marketing budget is being wasted. And so yesterday when I was at this AI potluck, one person manages a bunch of influencers and like, here, I'm like, so how does it work? How do you decide how much to pay? He's like, oh yeah, we just throw 50 grand here. Meta will give us money. We'll throw 100 here. I'm like, so how do you measure? Oh, we don't, right? But he's like, she's like, that's how the game is played now. And no wonder it's like, you know, Adobe or Snap will come to us and try to throw money at us. And then they like, they don't know how to measure it, right? But I do think to your point, brand is the moat, distribution is the moat in this world that we're in now. And then I just think like, you look at what people are looking for now, they want LOMO. They want YouTube, they want Reddit, they want stuff that isn't the stuff that people were looking for like at a much more aggressive pace a couple years ago. It's shifting quickly.

It's shifting really fast. I also think there's going to be a day of reckoning in the AI marketing space where companies are going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're spending all this money on this technology that's going to make us more efficient, but we didn't see our revenue go up or profitability go up. What the heck are you burning all this money on? It doesn't mean that the technology's bad. I think there's a big issue with how marketers are using the technology and many of them are just spinning their wheels and doing a lot more work with AI. But this work is irrelevant, has nothing to do with their bottom line. They think it looks cool, but at the end of the day, your CFO, your CEO, none of them care unless you can move the needle.

Yep, 100%. And now you're seeing the same thing, right? People are looking for LLMo, YouTube, Reddit.

Yes.

Like what else are you seeing an increase in?

We're seeing it in everything LLM related.

Yeah.

And we're just seeing crazy inefficiencies and people burning money and not having good KPIs in mind before they burn the money.

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Here's a question. Are you charging more for LLMo?

No.

Around the same. But you're not, you're not charging for rankings. Or you never charge for rankings.

We never charge for rankings. But when you're looking at LLM optimization, we look at it as a lot of the fundamentals are similar to SEO, but there's some other different stuff as well. So We charge for what the work is and it really varies company to company because some companies have like, they're in 20 different countries and all these different languages and they have like 50 different divisions.

Yeah.

So it depends how many you're helping, how hard it is, and it's the same thing just like SEO.

Dude, I got a good one for you here. So you know Jason Cohen from WP Engine?

Yeah.

So okay, WP Engine, they used to do foreign media.

SmarterBear or whatever it's called, right?

So he tweeted this. So his basically premise is that no successful SaaS company has a strong social account and I think it's actually more, no successful B2B SaaS company has a strong social account. Do we have any counterpoints to that? Because if you think about it, who actually is—

Wait, repeat the line again.

No successful B2B SaaS company has a strong social account. Like Salesforce, HubSpot? Oh, HubSpot actually does. HubSpot with their YouTube.

Is it strong? Ahrefs has a good YouTube.

HubSpot is pretty good. Ahrefs is pretty good.

Yeah, but even then it's not strong like the consumer ones.

Yeah.

You agree with that, right? I agree with that.

Yeah.

Like if I look at like HubSpot's Instagram, that's a great example of it. They have 621,000 followers.

What's like the average view?

I'm looking at the reels. Nah, dude. Like 10,000 reel views, 16,000, 11,000, 20,000, 17, 14, 26. It's not bad, but, and this is not, I'm not trying to hate on HubSpot. We have the same problem for our B2B company or even ourselves.

They just don't have a lot of viewers in our space.

No.

Yeah. So I think here's the thing. You can't, it's hard to say strong social account because strong compared to what?

Yes.

If you are trying to hit your TAM, I think they're hitting a good amount because they're just like, if you say strong social account compared to consumer, it's not fair because there's way more eyeballs for consumer. Let me give you an example here. So you know that company Clue.ly, right? We're talking about them a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. The one place that the company that helps you shoot everything. Yeah.

So like they do controversial marketing, right? But they also do— have you seen this one? So there's this gal over here, right? She's talking and then basically this view, like 1 million views over here, 2.1 million views over here, right? Let me show you the video itself. So this video, let me go back to it, is basically here, check this out.

Prime Neymar or Prime Hazard on your team? What's Prime Neymar or Prime Hazard? Is this soccer players?

Yeah. He's so good physically and he has special— She has no idea who these players are. Yeah, yeah. So, but then everyone in the comments on like YouTube or TikTok is like, what is she using?

Clue.ly, Clue.ly, Clue.ly.

But 4 million views on that video. And so all these content creators that they're hiring, like it's working really well for them because they know how to drive pumps.

Clue.ly is blowing up from this because Everyone's just looking at it like, oh, it helps you cheat on everything else.

Yeah. Controversial marketing, I think it works to an extent. You just can't, I don't think you can do it forever, but this viral 4 million view formula, that's what they do to get massive signups. And I think they're growing like a weed right now because you can cheat on everything in so many different things.

Yes, but what I think is going to end up happening is they're going to be like Jasper. Remember when Jasper came out? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were just like, create content easily, click some buttons. What happened with Jasper in the long run? Massive churn.

Well, they didn't really have like a moat. And I do think that the moat that Cluely has is actually they're pretty good with distribution, which is why they're hiring these people. I don't think they have a product moat. I don't think they're stronger right now, right now from a product standpoint versus like other companies, but they can always hire for that, right? I think the distribution piece they have pretty good right now because it is a consumer SaaS product.

Yes, but with, with Cluely, You're going to end up getting a lot of users and they're going to end up joining, but you start cheating on certain things. Okay. Why do you actually need to cheat on a lot of this stuff? Like Neymar versus Hazard, like just reality-wise, why do you need to cheat?

Well, I'll give you an example. So I do, I would like to cheat on if I'm talking to, let's say I'm interviewing you for a job, right? And then I have a heads-up display over here that tells me all these things about you. Oh, you went to Michigan. Oh, you went over here. Here's an interesting fact. Or like maybe some other things I found about your work, like that heads-up display would be very Interesting to me. Yeah, it'd be useful to me.

It would be useful, but I don't think it's useful enough to spend money on every single month. Like, I don't think it's that useful. I do.

I think the one thing that's worth copying from Cluey though is if you watch his interviews, like this controversial marketing. So this guy Sully tweeted this, he's Cluey's cheat on everything. Soham, that guy Soham, the Indian dude that had like a bunch of different jobs at YC, lie and deceive, right? And now we have founders fabricating lies and chasing attention by any means necessary. Is this what startups have become? Just whoever can become the most controversial. Now, this is not necessarily new. You look at the news cycle, even if you look at ESPN or CNN or whatever, everyone looks for controversy. And I think it can work. But again, I think you can flame out your audience over the long term.

So yeah. Time will end up telling. And you know, Clue.ly has— there's a product, what's the product name that competes with Clue.ly and they just released it for free?

Oh, they posted it. So they're like, oh, we just took their code and we open sourced it or something like that.

It was something like that. They just made it all free. Yeah.

You know, okay, let me give you a cool thing. This was at this AI founders dinner that I hosted the other night. So have you heard of synthetic customer development?

No.

So to build like billion-dollar software companies, you have to be doing a lot of customer development. You have to be talking to customers like the CEO of Intuit again, you know, the CEO of AOL. They're like, talk, it's about the customer, stupid. And synthetic customer development, instead of having me I have to book a call with you, Neil, or book a call with Noah. What you can do is you can take all of your call recordings, like your Gong transcripts, for example. So I had a friend, he basically took 70,000 of his transcripts and he made a custom GPT from it, right? And from then, all his people are just talking to that custom GPT, especially like the last 90 days or 2, you're just looking at sales calls. What are people looking for? What are customers struggling with? And so now you have synthetic data that's being created and you can train off of that. Instead of always having to wait to have these customer development calls, because those calls are important. But this is a good example of people using synthetic data to drive business outcomes. And I think it's really smart.

I think it's smart too. I think we're going to see a lot of people doing things to help them grow faster, generate more revenue, become more efficient. What I'm really waiting for is there was a rumor that Meta may end up buying— what's that eyeglass company? Ray-Ban? Ray-Ban?

Meta? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Ray-Ban, right? They have the partnership with them.

Yeah, because they have all those glasses.

And if you look at most eyeglass solutions, like, did you ever try the Vision Pro?

No, you did.

I did. But did you ever even go to the Apple Store and try putting it on or anything?

No, never.

It's really cool and amazing. It gives you a headache and it's just too heavy. It's not practical. Meta's version, I'm not saying it's as good, I doubt it is as good because it's too small. So how much can you fit in it? The concept is really good. And if everyone starts wearing a version of that or contact lens, how much new inventory do we now have for advertising?

A lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And everything—

multiple ones too. Yeah. Yeah. Not that that matters. You can only have like one human using it at a time. Yeah.

Even in like the iPhone, we have a phone. Apple doesn't really showcase much ads within our phone.

No, but Meta will.

Yeah. And I, if Apple, this is just my take on it, I bet you more people would have iPhones if Apple made it for free and then they made the money by showing ads.

But they don't— that's, you know, it's just business models and philosophies. Meta is an advertising company, so they'll drive more.

Yeah.

You know, Apple's about this privacy and simplicity thing and design.

Yeah, that's true.

So we're gonna end the episode here. See you guys later. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.