Wait, there's a thing called AI? 🤔😆

Good morning. Happy Friday, April 4, 2025. What's going on? LinkedIn Nation. Welcome to another episode of let's Build AI Skills Weekly right now with Nico and George. Nico can't be with us today, so it's just. Just me and you, George.

Awesome. I don't know why you mentioned that weekly for now thing, but how the heck are you doing this morning, Chris?

I'm grateful, I must say. Just getting to represent. Let's see this logo and this logo every day. Right now I could be in a worse position, I'll tell you that. So feeling good. Listened to a couple of. I was listening to more of Scary Smart from mogadot.

Yeah.

This morning. And then I saw Nico share the five AI transformation things that are happening that everybody should care about. So it's got me thinking big. But we're gonna use our Sunday, you know, Singularity Soothsayers episode to dig into that with. With Aaron Wiggers, maybe make that into a call in show of some sort. There you go. But I have a path to get us back down to the. To the basics and the skills that we try to focus on in this show. Had an interesting conversation with the. With the brand identity team from HubSpot yesterday. Yeah. And you know, you did some great AI settings episodes in Hub Heroes, like in November, December, last year. Right? Yeah. And of course, that's how I like. I don't. I try to understand what's going on. I don't always use the tools that I talk about and suggest because I can see people using them. I. It. I can consume all these discussions about the things, and I'm able to kind of translate, you know, the value of that for people. So, of course. And I should, you know, give credit where. Where credit is due. Nick. Nick Bellistry. Okay. I got to chat with, with him and he set it up. So naturally, I don't remember the other person's name that was. Was on with us, but she was awesome. And the whole idea is like, hey, you've been using the, the. The brand identity, like beta for a while and we want to do feedback. And in my mind, I'm like, all right, this is going to be the thing that actually gets me to start using it. I'm going to fill it in and here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to go to Claude and go into my, you know, profoundly experienced project where foreshadowing all of this stuff is already built out. Right. Right. Yeah. I'm just going to screenshot what HubSpot's asking for. And I'm going to ask Claude to help me, you know, fill in. Yeah.

As a true AI Baller does. I mean, isn't that how we roll? I'm just saying.

Right. So naturally time passes and I don't get to that. So. But really open, because I believe the feedback of why that happened will be helpful for this team. And so I share that at the beginning of the, of the conversation and I said, so I would love to just go through it with you right now, like, what I was planning to do so that you can see the cloud project and everything that's coming from and we can see how it gets filled in. And looks like we got Nico joining us, so, so we'll bring him in.

Good morning.

Good morning, sir.

Sorry.

You're fine.

So, so we, so you're going through that process. Yeah. So I'm like, this is the mindset because I wanted to share this part because I, I, I mean, it wouldn't be hard to call me a homer for HubSpot.

Right.

Especially for Content Hub. Yeah. And especially for all the tools that are in Content Hub that could just make everybody's lives so much easier when you get serious about content. Content repurposing. Right.

Without a doubt. And by the way, if you're watching this and you're not serious about content and content creation, I only got one thing to say. Shame on you.

Yeah. And get on board. Like, please, it's your last chance forward. So what I was sharing. So how come, how come a guy who is such a, you know, believer and evangelist of this tool and this tool set and this whole part of the HubSpot platform not be using it yet. Wow. Right.

Yeah.

And I said it's, there's a switching cost. All of this stuff is already built out in cloud projects.

Yeah.

And, and they asked, like, what could we do, like, to make it easy for you to switch? And I'm like, you know, we don't, it's all like internal. Right. Either internal for me or internal for our team. Like, until we get, you know, like 100% or not 100%, but, you know, until HubSpot becomes a part of each process. Yeah. Right. And I know that if I do the stuff I'm doing in Claude in HubSpot instead, it will go that extra mile, like if I do it there. Right. Instead of getting the extra mile, like right now, it costs me an extra mile to go and decide to do it in HubSpot. Yeah. Because that's not the process. And I'm not. We don't have a lot of the distribution, you know, set up so that at the end, like I could go do content remixes all day long, but if I don't have landing pages, emails, social ads, all those things set up, it becomes very much a copy and paste activity. Yeah. That is similar to what I'm doing, you know, in Claw and these other tools.

So I wanted down where my brain is with what you've said so far, please.

Yeah. Because.

Because here's the thing. This idea of switching what people need to understand when I see people, it's HubSpot getting us and others to adopt these AI tools, especially around content creation. You have to realize that there's real world fundamentals at play here for Chris, Nico, I'll say both of them. Well, Nico's probably actually both. Nico has two best friends. Chris has a best friend. His best friend is called Claude and he spends a lot of time with Claude and he trusts Claude and Claude knows him intimately because they've been friends for the last year, year and a half, two years, they've hung out at the park, they've had intimate conversations, they've sat down and they've drank coffee together in the early mornings as they're creating things together. And there's just a relationship that has been built for me. That's my, my clone. At this point, my clone is so dope. Helping me write emails, helping me create articles, helping me do a new version of HubSpot updates that we're thinking about putting out to the world. Like all of these things that I can ask my clone to do. Which by the way, my switch was from GPT to clone. Right. Like I, I've chosen a new best friend and I still have my second best friend that I go back to quite often. Right. But HubSpot, they're basically asking, Chris, can we be your new best friend? Ladies and gentlemen, that takes time, that takes trust that, that takes you delivering. For years and years and years, HubSpot has talked about delation. Now's the moment to cash it in. If you don't delight the out of us, especially around AI content creation, you're not going to be our new best friend. All right, Chris, go ahead. Keep, keep moving forward.

I mean, that's it. And I think the challenge of HubSpot is you just killed George. Yeah. And, oh man, I was so ready to say something with great conviction. Be careful, be careful. Ah, your reaction.

At the same time, we love HubSpot, but like, that's where my brain goes when I hear you telling this story.

Right. So what? Yeah. And the challenge of HubSpot is that to, to get like, it's a full platform, there's lots of other people using the system. And if those people aren't as convicted as trusting as much, they don't have as much of a relationship, that impacts my relationship. Yeah, right. Because now. Right. And I think that's a hard. Like when we talk about everybody needing to focus on like, change management and mindset transformation and like, it doesn't matter how awesome the tools are. Like, if not everybody's aligned and getting on board. And as they were, as we were going through it, I did think of like, okay, if you had done this thing, like, maybe I would have switched already. And that was the upload of document. Like, it's so easy to just create another project and claude and pick which documents I want in there. And now all of a sudden I've got all of the things. And. And if you haven't, I'll pull it up here if you haven't seen the settings before.

So before you pull anything up, can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Because. Because I'm hoping Nick and team watch this. Like, at this point right now, my question would be, can I create a folder inside of my HubSpot file manager and can I hook my HubSpot AI to the folder so that it just naturally looks at the things that I upload into my folder in HubSpot as a database context for the thing that I'm trying to do with my content creation? I don't know if that even exists, but if, if we're not thinking in that direction to add massive amounts of context in an easy uploadable way to impact the output of the thing. Okay, Chris, go ahead and show whatever. Just show whatever you want to show.

Well, this is where. And Nika, I promise I'll let you go after this because this is where he gets a.

His mind's starting to break.

School us.

I'm purposely like throwing bones out on the ground. Like, yeah, come on, get him going.

You get to school us on what about to be possible. Because Dharmesh just alluded to it in his most recent post as well. And we've been talking about it as like this open source, like, everything world that we're diving into. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, like AI settings in, in HubSpot, right. You go to data sources and, you know, started building out HubSpot, you know, growth specialist Right. And this was just. I copied. I screenshotted this, put it into Claude and into the profoundly experienced, you know, cloud project. Said, fill this out for me. Like, that's it. Right. And all of this information is from there. Right. Instead of me taking the documents that Claude is drawing from.

Yep.

And just importing them. So that was kind of an unlock for me that I could give them some piece of feedback. But then when they're asking about which system, like, do you work in? Like, how do we get you working in Hubs? That's the wrong question. Like, we're. I don't want to care about which system I have to pick to work in. Right. And if. And like with chat GPT, like, I don't. I haven't. And maybe Nico can speak to this. Like, the integration with HubSpot that just came out, like, is there an integration with Claude coming out where I could just plug in the projects? Like, don't build out this stuff if it's already built. And that's what the post I'm referring to from Dharmesh is talking about. Mcps. Right. And he can. And that's where we're talking about when everybody can build their own tooling that's related to whichever platform they want to use. It's like the platform I'm logging into today is my platform.

Can we.

The one I built for a second.

Though, because you said something real important right there. Just because you can doesn't mean they have. And what I'm trying to say here is, Chris, not everybody's like Nico, like me, like you. Not everybody is like people who have actually been working with this and building structure and system and context and cohesiveness and strategy. Like, some people are still sitting here and like, if they turn on HubSpot, it's like, oh, my God, this is possible. We have to remember where we're at compared to where they are at, whoever they is. Right. We got to be careful of how, like, I get you. I see you. Heck, I am you. Right. But my brain is like, hold up. How many don't even have Personas in their portal? How many don't even know what life cycle stage means? How many aren't even creating content? How many have been running a afraid from AI for the last six to eight months? So, like, there is a.

Really deep.

Canyon and wide and them deep and wide.

Deep.

And anyway, if you know, you know, I'll shut up.

All right, Nico, so what are. When you ask the question when or when they ask the question when anybody when any software providers asking the question right now, like, how do you get, how do we get you to use our like, product? Like, what are they missing when they frame it like that?

I think it's, I think it's just that sentence. It's, it's moving away from how do we get you, how do we get you to do this? Right? Like, it just, it sounds too much like. Because it sounds like you're trying to force me. It sounds like it's a gimmick. It sounds like, oh my God. All right, it's another thing I got to try out. Sounds like effort. Now I don't want to do it.

Right.

Because if you had to discover a way to get me to do it in the first place, how, how good is that thing that I'm about to try?

Right?

So there should be such a thing as natural aggregation. What does that mean? What does it look like? It looks like, I don't know, advocating for yourself, right? Like, how do you try to get people or like how do you get people to want to try something, try it for yourself, post about it for yourself, right? Pass it around to people that, you know, ask them to test it and then ask them, you know, what their opinion is of it and ask them to post it. Trials, alpha testing, beta testing. If you're building a good product, it sells itself, right? Advertising was a means of a crutch for companies that couldn't necessarily have the best product. I think way back in the day. I'm not talking about today, though. Companies do use that mechanic today. But yeah, I, I think that to, and yeah, to answer that question, if you, if what you're offering and what you're doing is good enough. Look, there are plenty of businesses out there, not that many partners. I think it's only like a handful of partners, maybe ours included, that pretty much run off referral. They don't even have marketing departments. They don't have sales team. They just run off referral. If you want to figure out how to sell a product, you should go talk to one of those companies.

Yeah.

You know how many companies, like, I don't know, like databricks has to advertise? Right? But Data Fountain doesn't. Okay, Microsoft, when was the last time that you saw Windows advertisement? I can't even remember now. It's, it's the top platform and it's our, it's pre installed everywhere.

Right?

So that's a little bit different. But when was the last time you saw a Coke ad? When was the last time you Saw a Linux ad, one of the top operating platforms out there for development, especially for open source development. Linux. I've never seen a Linux ad ever in my entire life.

Right.

You know what ad I've never seen? An Nvidia video card ad.

Yep. Way, way back in the day out of them.

I never seen them on tv, they never paid for a Super bowl bowl ad. And I don't see them in my feed, in my browser either. I'm just saying. But I know who they are.

Yep. Yeah. And, and when we're having these conversations, it's hard to gauge like whether they know, like there's obviously an initiative, like to get to this. Right. Where. So this is in private beta. This is HubSpot homepage, if you haven't seen it yet, is what I, you know, on the record, I said this was coming in September of last year inbound, go smash the data button chat interface for every user. And that's their experience in like, if you, like, if you haven't experienced this yet in GPT or any of the other tools that are available to you yet, like, this should not be, like, if you have experienced those, this should not be a shocker. Like that experience that we get by just chatting through our problems, our questions, our, you know, whatever in the moment and, and having that, those answers, those conversations just delivered back, right? With how excited do we get when that suggestion right after that is just like either like nails the exact question you were going to ask next or drops like some brilliance that you hadn't thought of yet and you're like, oh yeah, let's, let's ask that question. Right. And so when we're having these conversations about how do we get you to. It's the challenge. And I have empathy for the team, like all of the 200 whatever product teams that HubSpot has, it's like, are they thinking in the old world, like when they ask that or are they actually building stuff that gets us to this page, like faster. Right. And I know some of them are and some of them aren't. And that's where, like, you know, when you understand the data model behind the scenes, there's still a disconnect between the content side of the platform and the CRM side of the platform. And like those are the things where it's like there's still structural things that get in the way of, you know, how they can achieve, you know, some of these things. And that's where it's like, you know, for the people already doing the things in the the LLMs and knowing that everybody is just developing up. It's like the web, the web, you know, the web searchability that just came out in Claude. I knew it was coming someday. Like, yeah, I wasn't gonna just stop using cloud. Right. I'm gonna go try Perplexity and, and, and GPT to understand how powerful that is. But never for one second did I think that Claude's never gonna have like web search. Right, right. And now that it does, man, it's so good.

It is. It's actually like, I mean I wouldn't, I won't use it over Perplexity because it's like a resource difference thing.

But.

Right.

If you are trying to do anything that requires real time, then yeah, I don't, I don't know why you wouldn't be using it.

Yeah. And that's where it's different. Like I, I'm totally with you. Like if it's a natural Google search like process, I'm going to Perplexity.

Yeah.

But my, the ability now to ask Claude in conversation, hey, go look this thing up. And now it's in context with the conversation. It's so good. It's so good.

Which even with Google, right, that's shifting over to AI mode soon. So if you didn't get that announcement in your inbox yet, Google is launching an AI mode. You can mess around with it now if you go to Google Labs and it's pretty slick, but you know, it's basically Perplexity. It's pretty much, pretty much the exact same thing, much more minimalistic interface. So of course that might have some attraction to it. But end story is like it's an evolution. You just gotta go with the flow.

Right.

Fighting this, this current is not going to do you any good, especially if you're in our space. If you're in the information processing space, this is not going to do you any good. I just sat in a AI leadership webinar yesterday for four hours and it was very interesting. The, I'll tell you this much. The number of people who were AI leaders in that, in that meeting out or in that webinar outside of myself were. It was a, I think it was nearly 5, 000 people in attendance. 6% of us, 6% of that group were actually like in some type of position in terms of like leading AI within the company.

Wow.

Out of 5, 000 people.

Wow.

That's what the percentages look like.

See this is, I go back to Chris that, that they and the US and I'm not sure. I'm not a dividing type person. Yeah, but we've been saying this like I'm actually, I'm the guy who tries to bring us all together but I'm just saying we're entering a world where with AI and usage there's a they and there's an us and, and hopefully we can be there to help people get caught up to speed or, or at least enable them in some way. But listen, this is why the show used to be called something else. And this is why immediately when we started we're like, it's time to wake up, it's time to get moving. You've got like this is changing everything. There is not one there thing that is gonna be alive in the next two to five years that it will have not have touched everything. The movies you watch, the medicines you take, the experiences you have. Like this is going to be hidden or in plain sight. It will have been part of it.

It'll probably be plain sight. Be honest, like I think it's going to be extremely difficult.

I'm just saying there will be the jokers who try to hide that they're using AI to get the thing done that they're doing.

Oh yeah.

So either, well, I saw this, I.

Saw this thing this morning on LinkedIn that you know, I know a lot of people have been talking about the fact that like yeah, we're going to end up with garbage content and stuff and it's totally true. I'm not going to get away from it or, or try to defend and say like no, it's not going to happen. But yeah, it's, it's, we're already at the point where there's like fully, fully believable video rendered like tick tock style ads, right where it looks like somebody selling a product but it isn't. Right. And that's just gonna flood. It's gonna flood YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, like all the, the places you use currently to watch videos and stuff. You won't know the difference between an ad or an AI app already and if not already, I guarantee you by June you will not be able to tell the difference. It's over this year. It's over. Audio, video, text, image, it's over this.

Year or it's just beginning.

Well, I just mean in terms of being able to tell the difference.

Yeah, I know. No, I'm excited, I'm excited for Sunday conversation and anybody who wants to hear us, I don't know why but we appreciate it if you. We're gonna dig in deeper because there's a. A podcast that just came out was shared in the comments of five things that you should care about. And I've got. I've got some takes on that podcast. Nico. So much of it is like, how do humans take advantage of this? And it's like, look, folks, if. If that's, if that's where your head's at, you figure out, okay, how do humans still get the margin? Like, you're gonna get passed up and you're gonna invest some time and energy in things that are not going to work out for you.

So I need those people to Google something today. If you're that human, Google what a steamroller is. That's what's going to happen.

Everybody way everybody have an amazing weekend. 9:30am Central Singularity soothsayers with me, Nico and Aaron Wiggers, and anybody else who wants to join us and go deeper on this stuff, we'll be live on LinkedIn and YouTube. And until next time, everybody have an awesome Friday.