Most Marketers Have No Idea What's Coming

Happy 2026. Hey, how's this for a New Year's resolution? How about you Master AI Marketing? The AI Business Society gives you live training with experts who are getting real results. No hype, no fluff, just proven workflows that work. And you've got access to an incredible library of training from many of the incredible guests that you've heard on this show. So secure your AI transformation by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com AI hey there, Michael Stelzner with a special episode for you today. The day was December 19th. It was literally just days before the Christmas break, and I wrote a post on the social platforms with the following words. Quote, Most marketers have no idea what just happened over the last two weeks, and it's so big that it's hard for me to wrap my head around, unquote. That post resulted in hundreds of comments across Facebook, LinkedIn and X. And I went on to explain that many of the world's biggest companies had just done a show and tell. And this is what's a little strange about it. They decided to do it right in the middle of the holiday season. And as I'm sure you can relate, this is the time of year where it's chaos time, because you're running around as a marketer trying to get all your stuff done, trying to promote, but you're also getting ready for potentially some time off, right? And it's kind of like the worst time to make a big announcement because you're competing with every company in the world that's trying to get the attention of consumers. Yet despite all of this, this is when all this big news happened. And I explained inside my post that these businesses revealed something that was nothing short of this changes everything. And I was very confident that a lot of the world missed it. Now, before I share the rest of that story, I need to roll back the clock a little bit and share some backstory. For most of 2024, I had noticed that marketers were really struggling, especially those who had agencies or were consultants or were solo operators. And I was attending events and I just started noticing so many people were really struggling, trying to figure out where they should focus next. They were hitting a lot of brick walls. And frankly, I was also feeling some of the very same pain with my business. So I did something that initially I told myself I wasn't going to do. I considered exploring something new here at Social Media Examiner. So in the summer of 2024, I decided to run an experiment and we have an experimental mindset here at Social Media Examiner. And it's an important mindset because it allows us to try new things. And you know that when you run an experiment, if you think back to the way it used to be when you were in school, you have a hypothesis, you do a series of actions, and then you measure the outcome. And it's okay when you're running an experiment, because if it doesn't work, then you can rerun the experiment, try something different, or just move along. And that mindset is what I employ here at Social Media examiner, so that when we try something new, it's not forever, and it just gives us a chance to kind of run lots of little experiments. So my hypothesis was that the small business marketing community, which is really our main audience here, was going to need help, and they were going to need help understanding how to apply AI to their everyday work. But I needed to be sure that my intuition was accurate, and that meant it was time to run an experiment. I went into this knowing that it might not work, and that was completely okay. So I started the AI Explored podcast back in May of 2024. And what I decided to do was not have a show focused on news in the AI space and not have a show focused on the tech side of it, because there's a really big audience out there for that. But instead, I wanted to focus on the practical applications of how to put AI to work. And what I was going to do is I was going to find and curate some of the best people that I could find and interview them in a way that made a lot of sense to a lot of people. And the concept was to launch with the most minimum viable show that we could do. So we decided to take the art from our bigger show, this social media marketing podcast, duplicate it, change up the font a little bit. Well, actually, just the same font, but change up the words and have it be a slightly different shade of blue. Now, if the experiment would be a success, in order for the experiment to be a success, that another way, we needed to get a thousand people listening to each of the first 12 episodes. Now, by the time we hit episode 12, a thousand people is not a small number. The idea that I could get a thousand people to carve out 40, 45 minutes of their life every single week was kind of a big deal, because those people would either have to stop listening to another podcast or they would have to magically somehow discover this. And if we couldn't achieve this goal, the plan was to not proceed with the show. So we started in May, and once we Hit the five week mark, the fifth episode, which is actually about a month later, we took a look at the data and the data was really strong. I was really surprised that we had far surpassed the goal of having a thousand people just on the first five episodes. And I kind of did the math in my head and I said, there's no reason for us to continue this experiment. It's a raving success. We're going to go ahead and make the AI Explored Podcast a new permanent show in our lineup today. Eight months later, after we launched that show, the AI Explored podcast is now in the top 15 of marketing podcasts in the Apple Podcast Directory, with thousands of people listening to an episode within the first 24 hours when it drops. So I'm really excited to see what's happened with that show. Now taking you back to the story. So it's June at this point, my conviction is really strong. I feel like we're onto something. I, I felt that marketers, creators and entrepreneurs were eventually going to come around to this belief. AI changes everything. That's the belief that I was hopeful that a lot more of this audience would come around to AI changes everything. But I wanted more data. So I decided to conduct a research study. And if you've been following Social Media examiner for a while, you know that we've been doing research studies for over 15 years. And what I did was I put together a comprehensive study and I surveyed 1250 marketers from all around the world. And I really wanted to get at where they are with AI and marketing. How often are they using these tools? What are they doing with them? What are their plans to do with them? The results of the study were pretty powerful. 90% of the audience we studied said that they either agree or strongly agree that they need to do more with AI and their marketing. So we, we later released this as an actual report for free that you can Download called the 2024 Generative AI Marketing Industry Report. You can just Google marketing Generative AI Marketing Industry Report, and you'll be able to find it. So the good news is like, all.

Right, now I had a second proof point. I had people listening to the podcast.

I had a lot of marketers kind of tell me what they were doing.

And it was all kind of lining up.

Then in September, we decided to do.

Something different at Social Media Marketing World.

If you've been to Social Media Marketing.

World in the past, for example, in 2024, we had two keynotes and maybe three breakouts dedicated to AI. So a total of like five sessions the year before, we had like three. What I decided to do was to actually open up an entirely new track at Social Media Marketing World called the.

AI and Marketing Track.

And as of this recording, we've got almost a dozen, actually 11. That's just a nice marketer speak.

We have 11 people speaking on how.

To put AI to work for marketers. And this means that if you decide to attend, you could literally sit in sessions all day long every day and rapidly increase your learning. So then we decided to do something else. In October of 2024, we launched the AI Business Society, which is our dedicated paid membership where marketers can get ongoing training live, where we have meetups twice a month. We have a really vibrant community in there. And, you know, all this is to say that I have been tracking for a long time what's been happening in the AI space, specifically as it relates to marketers, creators and entrepreneurs. And this now brings us back to where I was in the story in December. So I'm, I'm now in December and I'm writing this post on 19 December. All this news had dropped and I knew that there was very little chance that most of the people in our community even realized what happened because of all the things we just talked about. You're all working really hard. It's just before the holidays. So what ended up happening was Google OpenAI, which is the company behind ChatGPT, Meta, also known as Facebook, Amazon and a bunch of other brands, decided to all show off their AI innovations two weeks before Christmas, right? Why in the world would they do that? That's like the worst time in the world to ever announce anything, right?

Well, I think it's because the leader in the industry, OpenAI, decided to do something called the 12 days of ship miss and this is where they revealed something new every day over a period of about 12 days. And they announced that they were going to be doing this right. So all these other bigger companies, the Googles of the world, they decided that they were also going to have formal announcements. So to help you understand just what OpenAI did, how about we actually let ChatGPT tell us herself? Okay, I'm going to run a little experiment here. I have Chat GPT opened up and I'm going to use the advanced voice mode and it's going to start talking to me in just a second. How's it going today?

Hey, it's going well, thanks for asking. How about you?

Doing really well. Hey, I want to ask you to tell me what you see right now. I have My camera open and I'm showing you something. What do you see?

It looks like you have a Rodecaster Pro audio mixer in front of you. It's a sleek device with faders, knobs, and some colorful buttons. Are you working on some audio production?

Actually, yes, I am. Hey, I want to ask you another question. I am doing a podcast and I would love to summarize what some of the big news releases were by OpenAI during their 12 days of shipments. Can you kind of tell me and my audience everything they need to know about the top level summary of kind of what you guys released.

Over the past 12 days? OpenAI introduced several new features. They launched the O1 model, enhancing reasoning abilities. They also unveiled Sora, a text to video generation tool. Additionally, they expanded Canvas for collaborative writing and coding. They integrated ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to handle complex tasks. They introduced advanced voice mode with video capabilities. They added projects to organize chats and files. They made ChatGPT search available to all users. They released the full O1 model to developers. They launched 1,800chatgpt for phone access. They expanded app integrations, including coding tools. Finally, they previewed the O3 and O3 mini models set to release in January 2025.

Thank you so much, Siri. I really appreciate your help on this one.

You're welcome.

I'm sorry I called you Siri.

No worries at all. It's easy to mix us up. Let me know if there's anything else I can help with.

Okay, so there you have it. I didn't do any editing of that at all, and it's pretty darn impressive. Now I want you to really process what just happened. I opened up my phone, I opened up chat GPT, I used the 20amonth paid app, and I started talking to it and I turned on my camera. Chat GPT knew what I was doing because I showed it my Rodecaster. It didn't just say, I see a Rodecaster. It inferred that I'm about to record something, which is kind of cool. Then when I went on to ask it about the news, you heard it go click, click, click, click. And it was searching the Internet to find the news, to rapidly summarize the news and to repeat it back to me. And while it was talking, I interrupted it, it paused, it listened to what I said. I said, I'm sorry I called you Siri, Siri. And it said, that's okay. It happens a lot. So imagine how mind blowing this is to be able to do all of this in a Matter of like two minutes with the push of a button. We're literally Talking Star Wars 3PO level stuff here, right? Without a physical robot. But the ability to see, the ability to think, the ability to speak, the ability to gather information and bring it back to me, the ability to do it in a jovial kind of way, I mean, that's kind of crazy, right? The ability to go beyond this and solve really crazy challenges. That's where we are right now. And in addition to everything that OpenAI released, there were some other big news from Google and they released a whole bunch of stuff. The things that I'm excited about is they released something called VO2VEO and then the number two, this is their text to video generator. Many of you know how to create images out of text. Well, this creates video and this makes the stuff that Sora does look like child's play. It's ridiculously realistic. In addition, Google released something called Deep Research. Deep Research allows you, using Gemini, which is their AI tool, and it's only available with their paid program, to have Google essentially go out on the web, research like 50, 70 different sources, amalgamate all the data, pull it all together.

For you, and kind of put together a report for you in a matter of minutes.

It's really pretty phenomenal. And they also released something called.

Well, actually, let me pause before I tell you about the third thing.

Those of you that have been listening to the show for a while might.

Remember a while back I had a special episode of this podcast where it was a male and female voices that were talking about the report that I had released. But those weren't actually real people, those were AI. So that is a feature that's part of Google's Notebook lm. Notebook LM has audio overviews. That's not the new news. The new news is that Google now allows people to interact with these AI voices and to ask clarifying questions. It's not really completely ready for prime time, to be honest with you, but it's getting there. Now when you combine all these things together along with all the other things I haven't even explained, I'm here to tell you that I've never seen in a two week period of time this level of innovation and the possibilities of it ever, ever, ever, ever. I'm in my 50s, I've been around before the Internet. I was there when it started. I saw all those possibilities. I was there at the beginning of social, I was there at the beginning of AI. But this, this, my friends, is next level. The pace of Innovation that is happening that so many of us are not prepared for is really crazy.

And here's the, here's the deal. This is going to provide a massive advantage to marketers and who embrace this innovation now. And just to share a little bit about what we've been doing internally at Social Media examiner, in December, we decided to train everyone, all of our employees, on how to use AI. I put together a really sophisticated training with one of my staff members, and we showed all the use cases, provided them access to all the tools. And then I went on to say something else. I went on to say that this is now a expectation for everyone who works at my company, that they have to use AI to improve their work, to not do their work, to improve their work. And I also went on to ask my leadership team to every week in their weekly reports, explain to me how they're using AI and what they're learning from it. And this forces them to be held accountable by me that they're actually utilizing AI and that they're learning from it. In addition, I asked them to do the very same thing of all of the people that work for them. And this is just way. The way that we're trying to get everyone in this company acclimated to using AI on a daily basis. Now, let me be very clear. Any marketer who understands how to put the latest AI innovations to work will have an unfair competitive advantage over other marketers. This should excite you and it should scare you. It's exciting because you now have the opportunity to become a supercharged marketer who's able to be more productive and accomplish.

A lot more than you ever could imagine.

And what this really translates into is.

It means that you'll become more valuable.

To your employer, it's job security.

To your clients, you'll become more valuable.

It's going to help with retention. You're just going to.

And for those of you that work for yourself, it's going to allow you.

To just get so much more done.

So that you have time to think.

To do deeper things.

And it's scary on the other side of things because other marketers who begin utilizing AI innovation and who adopt it, they could have an unfair advantage over.

You if you don't also adopt it. And, and, and that's a little scary, right, because that could mean you might become less valued at your work because your productivity isn't keeping up with those who are using it. And I understand there's a lot of challenges related to this. So here's a couple suggestions on your path forward, I believe it's time for us to get our notebooks, our physical notebooks out and go back to metaphorical school, because we have a lot of learning and relearning that we need to do. For those of you that are listening, that are lifelong learners, which I know is a huge chunk of this audience, this is extremely exciting because you get a chance to try something new, to improve yourself, to find ways to basically get through the things you hate doing so much faster without being reliant on other people. For the other chunk of the audience who absolutely loves routine, your current patterns and kind of where you are right now, you're gonna have to break that pattern. This is just simply not going to be optional for you. You're going to have to embrace change. And I get it. Because so many people right now feel like they do not have time, right? Because I'm sure you're thinking right now, like, I've got so many things to do. How could I possibly make time for this? But if you don't make time for this, you will find yourself in a pinch in the future, in the very near future, where there's going to be other marketers who are getting more accomplished, getting rewarded more, and you're not achieving that. You're not feeling that. Here's the thing that I want to say to you and anyone you can talk to, anyone who's. Who's embraced AI and loves it, and they'll affirm what I'm about to say. I know what it's like to not have any time, but I also know that AI actually gives you more time. I know it sounds a little crazy, but investing a little bit of time into learning these things allows you to have a lot more time down the road. Because if there's one thing that AI is really good at, is it's increasing your productivity. When you're at that time of the day where you're just fried and your.

Brain is kind of dead, this is.

When you can use AI to reinvigorate.

Yourself, to talk to it, to interact with it, to.

To get that idea flow going back in your brain again.

I. I am so excited now because.

Even though I am the CEO of this company and I do all these things, I can honestly say I've never had this much margin.

I really haven't.

It's absolutely phenomenal.

And this is not rocket science, okay? You do not have to be a.

Genius to understand how to do these things.

It just demands time to learn it. And you have to decide that I want to allocate time to this. Now here's two obvious things you can do right now.

Since I know that you like to learn by listening because you listen to this show, I suggest you make a habit of listening to the AI Explored podcast each and every week and go all the way back to episode one and just start listening and make it a regular pattern in your life. I can say this with confidence you will learn something that you can apply immediately during each and every episode. I work really hard to make it very easy for anyone who listens to the show to understand exactly what these people are talking about. And if you've been listening to my shows for a while, you know that's what one of my gifts. I feel very strongly that you will enjoy that show. And if you're listening to this on that show, thank you for listening. Number two, in addition to listening to the AI Explored podcast, consider investing in yourself. By making an investment in yourself, you're committing to yourself that you want to become an AI enhanced marketer so that you can have all the benefits I've been talking about. The best way to do that is to come join me and thousands of other marketers at Social Media Marketing World 2025, taking place March 30th, 31st and April 1st in San Diego at the San Diego Convention center in California. Now, here's the good news on this we have a dedicated ticket just for AI for the AI track. So if you're on a budget and you don't have a lot of money to spend, you can come and literally just go to AI sessions all day long. In addition, if you're in a position where you cannot travel because you're just way too far away from San Diego, we also have a virtual ticket. The virtual ticket gets you streaming access to all the content and the recordings of everything so that you can go back and study it over and over again to check out all of the different ticketing options. And we have four go to social media marketing world.info I implore you not to just listen to today's special podcast without prioritizing learning how to use AI in your work. And if you're starting to use AI or you've been using AI, but you know you need to go further, you have some opportunities and and I've just expressed those to you. I believe AI is going to be a massive game changer and I can't wait to see what all this innovation that has happened over the last month and what is happening right now is going to make possible for you. Now I want to hear from you. What do you think about all of the changes that are happening in the AI world? What are your thoughts about AI in general? Are you concerned? Are you excited? What's got you excited about what's coming next? I'd love to hear from you and I'm going to tell you how to do it. The three platforms that are the best ones to reach me on are Facebook, LinkedIn and X. You you can simply search for my name, Michael Stelzner, on any of those platforms. You can private message me, or you can simply comment on any of my posts that are there on the platform. Do me a favor and tag me, especially if it's an older post so I I see it and I will commit to responding to you. If you tag me or you DM me, I guarantee you that I'm going to get back to you. Thank you so much for listening today. I can't wait to see what AI unlocks for you. Catch you next time. AI Business World early bird pricing ends on January 16th. You can save 300 on your tickets. Register at AIbusiness World live today.