EP 77: How To Use AI For Competitive Insights

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Can you use AI and chat GPT to learn more about your competitors and your customers than you could on your own? Well, you actually can. And we have a very special guest today that's going to tell us how and why you probably should too. All right, so my name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI. That's what you're listening to. Thank you for joining us. So we are a daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people make sense of what's going on in the AI world. Because there's a ton, but not just like, hey, here's a new tool or here's a bunch of news, but how we can all actually use it to help grow our companies, to help grow our careers, to increase our output. Right. So that's something that we're going to be talking about today, how we can use AI and ChatGPT to learn more about our customers, our competitors, and just insights that would be kind of hard to get otherwise. So before we get into that, let's quickly talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. So first, TikTok is, is now going to start labeling AI content. So TikTok is going to ask creators to label their AI content so we kind of know what's real and what's not. So this kind of follows Instagram that announced this also a couple of weeks ago. Also interesting that TikTok is asking creators to identify it and not necessarily developing any sort of detection system to do it. So we'll see how many TikTokers are actually fessing up next. But not least, Microsoft has a new large language model. That's right. So they recently announced Gorilla and It has beat GPT4 at writing API calls. So we're going to have more about this in the newsletter because it is pretty breaking news. But their new large language model called Gorilla, was in its own testing, was better at generating accurate API calls. So more on that in the newsletter. Last but not least for today, $5 billion in sales. So that's China's Internet giants just recently announced that they ordered $5 billion. That's billion with a B in Nvidia chips to power their AI ambitions in the coming years. So we do talk about Nvidia pretty often on the show because, hey, hot take. I think that they're one of the most important companies here for the US Economy because they are powering this whole generative AI movement, not just for the US But China as well. All right, so I hope you're excited because we're going to be talking about using AI in a way that we don't talk about a lot on this show. And I think we should be talking about it more. So as a reminder, if you have any questions, please make sure to jot them down because I'm excited to bring on our guest for today. We have Yogesh Chavda, the founder of Y2S Consulting. Yogesh, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited.

All right.

And we were just talking pre show. Hey, we're both from Chicago, so we got to have a great show here and hold it down for the Midwest. Right?

There you go.

Yeah. So, Yogesh, just before we get into using AI for competitive insights and analysis, kind of just quickly tell everyone what your background is, because you have a very, very extensive background, you know, even outside of, you know, founding your own consulting company.

Yes. So I've been working in marketing and market insights my entire career. And I actually started working with Procter and Gamble initially. So I was, I, I spent almost 17 years with them working across six different countries under very different circumstances and built up a, you know, like a, you know, a pretty wide set of, you know, capabilities around. How do you do marketing under, you know, develop in developing markets versus developed markets, different kinds of brand, you know, new brand launches, you name it, basically. I've also worked for some other companies like Spotify and Pinterest. I was the global head of always on marketing at Spotify. I was the global head of commercial insights at Pinterest for a while. And then my last big role was with a hearing aids company out of Denmark where I was managing the market insights work for hearing aids in the US and then in between, of course, I've been doing some consulting work as well. So I just started my consulting company again this year.

Yeah. Wow.

That's the short version of my background.

So let me cut it down for anyone listening, whether you're listening on the podcast or listening with us live here. Yogesh knows what he's talking about. Right. So he just dropped some companies that all of us probably know and use. So, png, Spotify, Pinterest. Right. So Yogesh, with your background in insights and marketing, what was your kind of take when you first kind of saw this, this generative AI wave, specifically with ChatGPT, what was your thoughts on, you know, hey, did you think it was going to be something, a useful tool or at first were you just kind of like, all right, this is, you know, something that could just be a fun little tool and we'll see what happens.

So the funny thing is I found out about this tool through my 16 year old when he told me about this back in November, saying, dad, I'm using this to write my essays. And I was like, what is this, you know, all about? You know, so that's how I kind of it. Right. Thankfully, he's not using it, you know, to, you know, from a school perspective. He's very smart about what he does, so I don't want to get him into trouble, of course. So with that said, as I started playing with ChatGPT in particular, that's where I started. And then I also played with Bard and then, you know, later with Claude as well, I would say that I started recognizing that this is not just a basic tool that can do basic stuff. This is a very sophisticated tool that can actually drive productivity for different kinds of roles very, very quickly. It can help you do research very quickly and you can mine information very, very quickly, which would have taken me weeks or months to do in some cases because it's able to find it. Right. And analyze it. Now the challenge, of course, that everybody had, and I had in particular was like, is this real? So I was always going back and checking to make sure that whatever ChatGPT was telling me is actually correct or not. Right. And there were instances where I was finding like, no, that's not working. So, you know, there was a learning curve that I was going through. But the more I learned how to use the tool, the more I became a convert to say, this is not just a fly by night thing, this is actually a game changer. It's going to change the way work will happen moving forward. And organizations will have to be thinking differently about how they structure their work streams internally to be able to incorporate generative AI into their organizations. It's not a bolt on to your work stream. This is actually a redesign of your work stream completely based on generative AI, in my opinion.

Yeah, that's a great point. A lot of people think like, oh, maybe I can find a way to work ChatGPT or to work generative AI into my workflow, where I think if you flip that coin on its head, you can start to have ChatGPT or AI kind of be the base. Right? Right. Yogesh, like, is that something that have you started to maybe restructure a little bit, even how you're doing your consulting work, just to cut down on that repetitive and sometimes mundane task of research and analysis.

Completely. Completely. So I can give you three different use cases already in terms of how I'm using it in my consulting work. Right? So the first one is, if I'm pitching to a client and I know a little bit about the client and they're new to me, I'm using ChatGPT to understand their industry. So that, okay, this is the industry they're operating in, this is what's going on. These are some of their pain points. These are some of the things that are happening inside the industry. And that's helping me say, okay, if that's what the industry pain points are, then what are the brand's pain points in this case? So chatgpt or may not be able to help you specifically because of, obviously, the cutoff up till October, but you can bring in Bard at that point to help you supplement kind of thing, Right? So between those two, you're able to kind of like, you know, build out the understanding and say, okay, this is where the landscape is today. How do I write my pitch? Right. So I've actually used ChatGPT to help me think about how I should craft my pitch. And then the third thing that I've also done, and I'm doing a lot of presentations at conferences right now, but I'm actually using generative AI to help me think about my presentation. My very first presentation I did was back in March of this year at a conference here in Chicago where I was actually talking about how brands have to overcome stigma. And in fact, that's the positioning for my consulting company. I help brands think about how to address stigma in their industry. For example, when I was thinking about the presentation, I had my own outline in my head. But ChatGPT actually helped me make it much, much more sharper. So between the quick assessment of the landscape, the pitch development, and then the presentation development, in all those three cases, it's helped me significantly. I'll add a fourth one, my blog post. I post every week on my LinkedIn page, and almost every post I've done, I've started first on CHAT CPT to help me think about the question I'm trying to answer. And then it's helped me then basically think through how to actually write and craft my blog post. So, you know, I'm seeing this as a massive productivity enabler for like a, you know, a small, you know, consulting firm that I have you know, I'm doing the work of about two or three people here. If I had to have to do this without ChatGPT, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I do real quick just want to shout out some, some people joining us live today. So. So thank you for that. And again, if you're listening to this later on the podcast, make sure to check out the show notes if to come and, and ask Yogesh some questions. We'll have the link to join this thread. But Audrey, just saying, really excited for this one. So thanks for joining us. Mark saying that's a great move, kind of talking about what we're talking about here. Brian joining us, saying good morning from the Gulf Coast. Thank you. Harvey saying Dallas, Texas, glad to be here. So if you do have any questions, just as a reminder for Yogesh, please drop them now. Uh, so. So, Yogesh, I do have one other question because you talked about, you said, hey, you know, you're able to use, in your consulting role now, chatgpt in, in a way where previously you might have had to use two or three employees to do some of these things, right? So I guess what are maybe Specifically what are one or two ways that you're using ChatGPT on an ongoing basis now? And you look back and you say, you know, if you look back at your PNG days or your Spotify days or your Pinterest days, and you're like, wow, if I had this technology now, how could it have changed what you were doing back then? So I guess could you speak a little bit to that and just how today's technology, given your background, how powerful it is, and maybe even how much easier would it made those things for you.

So I'll give you a specific example from Pinterest, and if you have time, I'll talk about one that's happening right now as well. So I was at Pinterest when Covid was starting up back in March, and the global head of sales at the time asked me if I could help the entire organization in terms of the commercial organization, in terms of keeping up engagement with their customers, their ad sales customers, by launching a newsletter that would kind of like showcase how different and unique Pinterest was relative to all the other social media platforms, Right? And it wasn't as if I had like, you know, a month to start this. I had like literally five days to start this. And I was freaking out because I'd only been in the company for a couple of, not even a month yet, right? And I was able to basically, you know, you know, build a team out relatively quickly who spent time. It took them like a day or two to, you know, like mine the data to say this is what the behaviors were of Pinterest users on the platform. And, you know, for the last two weeks, let's say, right, I started that on March 20, if I'm not mistaken, of 2020. So right after Trump's overlord office address, two days later, I was launching the newsletter in the US two weeks later, I had launched the same newsletter across seven additional countries. And by the time I was done, I had about 25 people working on just the newsletter, between analysts who were mining the data, designers and copywriters and sales leaders who are all kind of involved along with the legal team to make sure everything was right, to make sure that everything that was being launched every week was meeting the requirements and everything else like that. Had I had a tool like this, it would have been a massive game changer for my analysts, for example, because you could have mined data much, much faster and it would have probably identified things that we would, we were probably missing because remember, these are people looking at data and saying, okay, I'm seeing these trends over here. I think we should talk about that. Had I had a tool like this, right, it would have supplemented that process, number one. And number two, it could have also probably supplemented the writing of the creative and given us more options to address because we were always in a time crunch. We went with the best idea that was there and we were like, okay, we gotta run. So we were running all the time. But this would have been a big, big enabler for us in that, in that space, basically.

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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, speaking of, we'll, we'll drop this in the show notes but we actually had a, in episode a couple of weeks ago with Patrick MVA. I think it's episode 54 where we talked about that, right? Like talked about using, you know, just kind of mining customer data and customer reviews. I think that's a super powerful way Yogesh, that, that we can use it. So, so wanted to shout out here Fabian saying greetings from Chile. George. George Strom saying hey, looking forward to hearing these insights. Jackie, good morning. Athena saying great to see you again. Saying hi to Yogesh. Brian saying this is so Brian talking about how this is how he's been using Chat GPT and, and Harold here saying he's been able to create more in quarter one alone than he was of all of 2022. You know, Yogesh, how has, you know, ChatGPT and generative AI been able to change kind of even your output in, in Y2Y2S consulting? How has it changed the game for you?

So like I mentioned earlier, you know, my consulting is focused on helping brands overcome stigma. So one of the things I'm doing right now is actually building out a database of brands that have had to address stigma within their industry or brands that are facing stigma. So think about the Bud Light example from the last few months. It's become a stigmatized brand today, if you know, for lack of a better word, basically. So if I had to do this the old way, it would have taken me literally months, months to pull together a database of information about the brand, positioning the brand selling point, the different types of stigma that it could be affected with looking through their website and trying to pull all that information together, it takes time, it takes time and effort to pull that together. I've been able to structure the database and pull together at least my first 10, 20 use cases in the space of a couple of days using ChatGPT, using one of the plugins on the subscription version where you can scrape through their websites. It's able to summarize everything on the website. It's telling me exactly what the unique selling points are there, what's missing. It can do comparisons if you wanted to, versus other, you know, competitive, you know, websites if you wanted to play it that way. You can do all those kinds of things, right? So when you've done all that and you're. I'm able to build up my database for me, that's one of my unique selling points for my consulting company to say that I have a database for, you know, brands that have been, that have been stigmatized so I can come and talk with information and data and be able to talk about this in a far more intelligent way and very quickly than had I not had this. It would have taken me probably 12 months to pull this together. I'm doing this right now in weeks basically.

Yeah, that's such a good example. Having to go through hundreds or thousands or sometimes millions of data points used to be an incredibly time consuming process and now it's not necessarily. All right, so we have a question here from a LinkedIn user. Sorry, sometimes we get the name, sometimes we don't. Asking Yogesh, in your Pinterest example, how would you feed it the data over the last two weeks of Pinterest Trends? So how would you take that one on Yogesh?

Yeah, so first of all, this is all obviously first party data, right? So let me start with that first. So if they were to have, if they were wanting to use some sort of generative AI tool, my suspicion would be that we would have had to go through a process to make sure that, you know, the data that gets ingested stays within the firewalls of the Pinterest world. You know, that's what I would have, you know, in short, first and foremost. But once that's the case, you can literally pull the data and download it into, let's say a Google sheet, document millions of data points if you wanted to, then you can just upload the link into say ChatGPT through a plugin and you can then basically start the process of questioning chatgpt on what is it seeing and then what you wanted to go look for basically in the simplest way that's how I would have done it basically.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think Yogesh, you bring up an important point. There is, you know, a lot of the things that we're talking about and the ways that even you're using chat GPT would require the plus version, so the 20amonth version. So you know, if you're listening out there and maybe you're a little newer to ChatGPT and you're like, oh, that doesn't sound like something you can do. Right. We had a whole episode Friday on ChatGPT plugins and kind of the new features and functionalities that, that provide. So yeah, even the example that Yogesh. Yogesh is talking about of uploading different data points or reviews or scraping websites, yes, that does require kind of that chat GPT plus, you know, Yogesh, what's, what's one maybe unexpected way that you've been leveraging generative AI that maybe you weren't necessarily thinking like, oh, this could really help in this endeavor or maybe what's one way that you think other people should be using ChatGPT or AI that maybe they're not thinking about?

So I'm still playing with this. So I'm not yet gone live with this, right? So as I mentioned with my blog post, I'm talking a lot about all of these kinds of use cases. So if anybody who's following me or if you want to follow my, my, my personal LinkedIn page, you can subscribe to my, my, my blog post there about all those use cases. But the thing that I'm playing around with is you could literally create a short blog post or some sort of narrative that you want to create. And using one of the plugins on ChatGPT, again on the side, the subscription side, you can actually go create your own video. One of the plugins I think is called Vista, I think, where you can actually use stock imagery to create literally like a 30 second video of your post. I was blown away when I saw that because when I at least played around with it, I was like, the selection of the imagery, the tonality of the voice, the script it wrote out based on what I had written out was pretty amazing. Was it 100%? Of course not. You still have to go back and edit and do certain things that always is going to be required. But the fact that it took me from say zero to like say 85% of the way there, right, is a massive, massive game changer. So for me, who's, you know, I come from the insights world. I've worked with advertising my entire life, right? But I was not the person responsible for creative. At the end of the day, there were others who are much better at creative than I am. But here I'm now doing creative work in a way which I never thought I could do before. Now I can with the help of, you know, these kinds of tools, right? So for a small business who's trying to, you know, figure out how to create, you know, communication, not just in terms of 2D posts for Instagram or whatever, you could create TikTok posts, you could create long form video if you want. All those things are doable today. Sitting behind a laptop and maybe just having the right person helping you figure that kind of stuff out. That's the stuff that we can also help with now, which I never thought I could do.

Yeah, so many unexpected use cases. I think even what Yogesh is talking about, I think we've actually done a video or two. So check back later in the comments or if you're listening on the podcast. And I think we actually have a video on that one. Last one Here, Yogesh, from Dr. Rasifa asking what are two major AI apps that you use with ChatGPT or just maybe what are some either plugins or apps or even other AI tools that you're using and finding value with? Yogesh.

Yeah, so on the. I can never remember the names correctly, so just search on the plugin part of it. But the one I've used, I mentioned Visla already, which is the one that can create video for you. The other one I think is called Open Scraper, if I'm not mistaken, which allows you to kind of like scrape websites. Right. And analyze websites for you. So I found that to be incredibly useful. So those are two that I would suggest very rapidly. There are, there are some other ones which I'm still playing around with, I'm not really been happy with with this one is you can actually go have a plugin that can actually analyze YouTube videos also up to a certain like length. You know, I'm. I'm trying to figure out which is the best one to use for that just yet, because there's some of them have, you know, like, you know, paid firewalls and things like that. I'm not ready to pay for things just yet. So I'm kind of like doing all the free stuff right now, you know. But I think that would be another one that I think would be super helpful as well if you're able to analyze advertising. In fact, one thing that I tried to do this week and I'm not completed yet, is to analyze the video. I have actual data on the video from some market research surveys. Can ChatGPT actually analyze those two things together? For me, the moment I can figure that part of it out, that's going to be another, at least for me, a momentous step forward in how you can actually connect different components of ChatGPT to solve the problem that you're solving for?

Basically, yeah, that's a great example. Yogesh is how you can string together different tasks that would normally take hours. We've covered so much in such a short period. Of time talking about customer insights, analysis, even some favorite plugins use cases. So thank you Yogesh so much for joining the Everyday AI show. Your insights were super valuable and I hope everyone out there enjoyed this as well. So thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, and just as a reminder everyone, we covered a lot, so make sure you go to your everydayai.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be recapping a lot of the things that we talked about today. So if you weren't able to type as fast as you could and take down all the notes and all the nuggets of information that Yogesh was giving us, don't worry. We've got you. Go check out the newsletter. So thank you so much for joining us. Join us tomorrow. We're going to talk one more time about Mid Journey. We have our part two series coming up, so we hope to see you back then and every day with Everyday AI. Thanks.

Thank you.

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