Day of the I ️ AI Challenge : Sales

Hey everybody, great to see you today. Good morning. I am super excited to be here with you today. It is day 2 of the I Heart AI Challenge. I was actually going to put a jacket on. I totally forgot. Oh well. This is how we roll. So excited to have you here. Thank you for joining. I usually spend the first couple minutes just giving a chance for the different networks that I am posting on to catch up. I'm actually going to go and just make sure that we are live on LinkedIn. It looks like we are. Let's see. I'm gonna go over here. Oh, here we go. Oh my gosh, almost there. It says it's starting soon. Let's see if I'm live. Anyone there? Oh my gosh, Talisha's in the house! What's up? I'm looking at mine and it says starting soon. I hope you all can see me. Um, Talisha, maybe you could tell me— you could obviously— you could see me okay, so we must be live at least on one of 8 platforms. Um, I'm gonna sign in as we wait for others to join us. So great to see you today. It's gonna be a super fun day.. It's one of my biggest, most exciting topics. I think marketing is such an interesting, um, world we're in right now. So many things are changing. It's actually where I saw the biggest amount of movement in AI over the last year. Um, not to say that AI hasn't been around, but marketing was one of the first areas where people were really starting to see tangible results. So we're going to talk all about that. Allison, what's up? Great to see you here. Thanks for representing. Um, I'm gonna open up a new canvas for today, but just to recap from yesterday, we talked about sales yesterday and had Dr. Lisa, who is amazing, come and join us. And we talked all about like how to reframe your mind in this new world where AI can help you be a better seller. And we talked about, um, the importance of now moving into a world where before maybe it was hard to build a prototype, maybe it was hard to create something that you could demonstrate real value to your prospects before you even sold anything. But those days are gone. And if, if you're not already moving in the direction of how do you show versus tell what you can do for the world, um, now's your chance. Like, now's the time. Good morning everyone, good evening, good afternoon, all the, uh, all the events. Great to see you. Hi Sheila from from the West Coast, so it's early, early there. Thank you for joining, Gabrielle. Uh, from my wonderful community, uh, Francois, good to see you all. All right, let's go. Uh, we got a great family. I can't believe I just danced on camera. Anyway, I won't— I promise I won't do that again. Um, but this is super fun. All my family— Flavia is here, super excited to see you as well. This is going to be an incredible opportunity for you all to get a sense of marketing from a couple different perspectives. We're going to be talking about not just marketing from the perspective of how do you really improve the marketing organization inside your company, but also how do you improve marketing if you are an agency or a startup. But my favorite, how do you actually improve marketing yourself? I am a huge believer that every single one of you has a unique perspective in this world. We need to hear that perspective now more than ever. It'll help us build better software, better solutions, and really a better planet. The world needs to know who you are, what you think. And I know some of you, there's a voice in your head that says, oh, no one needs to know my thoughts about this, or no one. But the reality is, is that your future job, business partner, uh, startup opportunity, or corporate role is going to be based at least fractionally on how well the world knows you. And so marketing is a huge part of that. And so hopefully you'll get a little bit of everything. Wonderful to see you all. Um, I see— oh, Daisy's in the house coming from Modesto. I'm super excited to see you. Thank you for joining us. All right, I think we've got a contingency. 345 challengers joined us yesterday, over 1,000 people. Have joined the challenge, which is crazy. Um, who knows about the replays? I didn't get a chance to pull that, but that's a lot of people, way more than, you know, little old Noelle Russell Russell was expecting. We also got VIP challengers from all over the world. More kits went out today. We got like 16 more VIP people yesterday, so it's gonna be fun. We're gonna have some special sessions over the next couple weeks for those who signed up for VIP. Because as you'll see, these sessions are geared towards helping you understand kind of some general areas that you should focus on. It's meant to give you a cheat sheet of what to go after, what to look at, what to try out, what tools to use. But I will encourage you to think a little bit bigger because this is just the beginning. And many of you, um, our VIPs get access to our AI Leadership Institute, which is really where I do all of my training, fingers on keyboard and building stuff. So I get to spend 30 days with the VIPs. So super excited, wonderful to see you. Whoa, good job, Michael! Michael Novak's in the house, he made it. Frank, my buddy, uh, Frank Digs Data, he's got his own podcast and it's incredible. We actually have to do another one of those, so thanks for showing up. Um, but good morning, Leonard, nice to see you. Uh, it's so good to see you all. All right, are you ready? Let's do this. So the just to give you a lay of the land. I'll start with a beginning, kind of what we're going to do today. We're gonna talk a little bit about marketing. I already gave you a little bit of an understanding of the different types of marketing topics we're gonna cover. Then I'm gonna talk to you about my, I mean, it was hard. I actually had to really figure out what I wanted to cover because there's so many areas in the world of marketing that I think are interesting. But that's why we're gonna talk for about 40 minutes. And then we're going to invite my very special guest to the stage. Jennifer Ives is with us. She has done some incredible things from helping grow startups to being critical member of go-to-market and marketing teams inside of large corporations. I don't want to steal any of that thunder, so I'm going to let her introduce herself and tell us all the exciting things that she's doing right now and has done over the course of her career. The everyone I'm bringing to this stage, maybe some of you know them, but many times I find there's just so many valuable perspectives and they're in niche areas of the industry. So that's why this challenge is all about— I Heart AI is kind of like, how do we bring as many of these perspectives together? Things that you wouldn't normally take if you took a class on marketing, because it's going to narrowly focus on marketing. Here we're going to talk about sales, marketing, daily life, professional life, and we're going to bring it all home on Friday. So, so excited you're here. Let's get this party started. All right, so I'm gonna pull up my whiteboard. I'm actually, if you notice, I'm doing it in— what's the word— landscape. Um, I'm doing it in a different perspective. Yesterday I tried the mobile perspective. I got some mixed feedback, so we're gonna try it this way. Um, hopefully now as you see this, it should be easier to see. Let's see if I have a pen somewhere. Oh yeah, we're good. All right. Oh, that is a beautiful highlighter. Let's see how it goes. Oh yeah, you could see that a little bit. I might have to brighten it up. We'll see what happens. Um, so marketing, and I'm going to write along. Here's a fun fact tip for yourself as you're acquiring new knowledge. The best thing you can do is take some notes. No one has to know you're doing it. You know what, you never even have to look at those notes again. But just writing things down like I do, writing things down, creating additional sensory input when you're absorbing information makes it exponentially more impactful to your ability to retain that information. If you look at people like Tony Robbins, he often will say you get a— I mean, I've heard percentages all over the place. I've looked at real data. You're definitely in the triple digits, right? 200%, 300% more likely to retain information in your brain if you actually engage more than one sense. So now you're looking at me, you're seeing me, and if you write down some notes, oh my gosh, I mean, I, I can't give you any, you know, thing to eat, but if I was feeding you, it'd be even better. Which leads me to a wonderful announcement we have for those of you in South Florida and And we actually have a couple community members in the I Heart AI community that are also PyAI ambassadors. But we have partnered with Deep Learning AI and we are serving pie and education this Saturday actually in Miami at the Miami Dade College. So exciting. We have over 40 people registered, which is right at the limit. We have about 10 more, maybe 20 more people we can fit in that room, maybe, right? Some of you have been in that room. It's not super big, but we're gonna have some pie. We're going to talk about AI and it's going to be super fun. So the community offers you the ability, and if you are an ambassador or if you are a meetup organizer, it's just a great place to get the information you have about your community out into the world. All right. So we're going to talk about marketing and I'm going to focus on— let's let yesterday— I think I tried to focus on 4 areas. We'll see how we do. I'm going to go for 4 areas today too. The first one, and you probably know, I could probably ask you, is, uh, content generation. So content generation, of course, marketing is all about getting your picture, your idea, your business in front of as many eyes as possible. It's not the sales side, which we talked about yesterday, which is closing that business, getting those people to trust you enough to do business with you. This is all about How do you get them to know you? And here is a quote that I heard from actually someone I've partnered with in the past. His name's Grant Cardone. No matter if you know him, great. If you don't, that's okay too. But he's, he's really big in the world of business and specifically real estate, which is how I've partnered with him. And he always says, known beats best every day. And it's kind of sad.. And I watch it all the time. As a matter of fact, many of the speakers you see here have been building AI businesses or AI organizations for the better part of a decade. And most of us are now watching known people beat best people because we're not doing a great job marketing ourselves. So that's why it is— yeah, Uncle G, what? That's why it's so important that we make sure we have an opportunity to share who we are with the world, and more importantly, do it in a way that engages them. So we'll talk about that. And of course, AI can help amplify your ability to get your voice, your message, your business out into the world. And yes, I mentioned this yesterday, but Frank, yeah, this is the Vibe. So I'm using a Vibe digital smartboard. It is like a Surface Hub for non-people who could pay that much for a Surface Hub. So, but it's awesome. I love it. And actually integrates with lots of different technology, Microsoft and Google, and, you know, all the different mural-type tools, Mural and Miro, and anyway, a lot of those types of things. So I love it. I use it for my clients. We do brainstorming on here. We're able to capture. So I will share with you the notes that I capture when we do our recaps. I send you out a picture if it's useful. I'll send you out a picture of what we've covered. So we're going to start with content generation. Then I'm going to talk about, of course, the future of chatbots. Dare I even say it, right? Like chatbots got such a bad rap because they were not awesome. But they— a new age is dawning on the world of conversational applications. And I want to encourage you rethink your strategy around chatbots. And then one of my favorite areas, which is little known, is digital advertising. So we'll talk about how this can help you build digital advertising that will basically exponentially grow your ability to be seen by more people. This challenge was seen by 21,000 people in 3 days, meaning that I got it in front of them, and I did that with the help of AI to make sure that I was using— well, I don't want to steal my own thunder from this section. So wait, we'll get there towards the end of this session. And then of course, all of this means that you're going to be asking AI to help you persuade customers to work with you. And I— oh my gosh, I think Frank, you were the one who introduced me to Jordan Belfort, another guy where I'm like, I don't know how much I like him, but he's got some very interesting points. And one of the things he has said is you have the power with your voice, with your words, with your marketing, and certainly with AI to get in front of and convince people to work with you. So it is incredibly important that you do that. And we don't have to go to jail like he did to learn this lesson. We know that responsible use of this technology to build content that's engaging, authentic, in integrity with the people we know we can help and serve— like, responsible use is key to actually leveraging this. So very, very exciting little 45 minutes we got going on here. So hopefully you'll enjoy it. This will be available in the free community. So there's a QR code. It's not covering my whiteboard this time. So there's a QR code. You're welcome to scan it, join the challenge. I think that might be the community link. I can't remember. Someone can type it in. But you don't have to join the challenge if you're here and you just happen to see me live and was like, Hey, I want to join Noelle Russell. You could just join the community and this content will be much better. It'll be edited. Sitting for 2 hours is a miracle. So thank you all for being willing to do that. But some of you won't be able to stay the whole time. So if you can't stay, don't worry, it will be recorded and made available in the thing in the, in the community. Okay, so let's do this. Let's start with content generation. Now here is audience participation. I have a bunch, about 20 or so members of the community. We just hit 100 members last night, which was Amazing. I just got this idea, which is so silly. It's all about like marketing and sales. But I got this idea to do I Heart AI like 2 weeks before, like right in the middle of January. I was like, you know, February is coming up. I heart AI. I heart love Valentine's. I love it. And as a matter of fact, tomorrow, right after this session, I will be hopping on another person who we think the same. We're kindred spirits. But Ti is gonna be, and she runs the You and AI podcast. She's running a session. So I'll be joining her right after this. I'll be running over virtually and joining her podcast and live session on why we love AI and how it's helping people. I do think there's a lot to be worried about in this space, especially in marketing and persuasion. But I think there's so much more that allows people who could not before get in front of the customers they wanted to help and serve. It's easier now than it ever has been before. Now it doesn't mean it's easy, it just means there's a lot less friction to get your message in front of the right people at the right time. So, ah, T's in the house! What's up? Um, yay, I'm so glad you're here for your shout out, but I'm so excited for tomorrow. It's gonna be amazing. Okay, so the first one, content generation. Did I write again? No. So content generation. The reason I was talking about the community and those of you in the community that are here, this is a chance— like, this is not Noelle teaches you all the things. This happened yesterday organically, and I absolutely loved it. Um, if you have a tool or a technology— now please do not spam us with the thing you sell, or, you know, like, be cool— but if you're using something, type it in. And I'm gonna— I've talked to a bunch of people, so I'm gonna use some of the ones that they use already, but if you're using something, type it into the chat and let's try to, you know, let's try to keep it nice and helpful. And we're helping each other grow in this space. We're not trying to sell anything, not yet anyway. So content generation, I think about it in a couple of different ways, but first things first, the tools. So the first tool I actually started using that I felt was like production, I actually showed it to clients that I had. Was Microsoft Designer. And I say this almost— and you could just Google— oops, I mean Bing— Microsoft Designer in your browser, in your Edge browser. But Microsoft Designer was the first introduction into how do you use this without knowing anything about tech. I don't know if you all remember, and you probably do, but last year a lot of those early advancements in technology, in generative AI, were like, hey, go build a sandbox in this area. Hey, download these Python packages. Like, it wasn't super accessible. And Microsoft Designer came out super fast, like March, and started saying, hey, just type in what you need and you could even upload a picture that you want. And again, in the, in the community, in the AI Leadership Institute, we actually have classes where we walk through, we call them live learning sessions where we actually build this stuff. Together, which is super fun. But you can go and take a look at this, right? I got 40 minutes. So you're going to go and take a look at this tool. It's pretty cool. But it has evolved since then. Now the tool itself has evolved, but there are other tools that are now available. One, which is an extension of the work started with Designer, which is Bing Image Creator. Now don't worry, although I am a Microsoft MVP, I'm not going to be all about the Microsoft stuff. I'm a little bit, a lot about it, but not all. And I'm going to encourage those of you who've used other stuff. Bing Image Creator. Anyway, that's Creator. Bing Image Creator is a tool that you can use now and actually comes right inside Copilot. It's super easy to use. And what it allows you to do is get ideas about imagery that you can use. Now, many of you know that when you ask it to build you an image— I, for example, if you go and take a look, I have two podcasts, The Lamplighter Effect and Good Morning AI, and both of them are on different sides. Like, one's all about leadership, mindful leadership, uh, the Lamplighter leadership principles— love, ambition, mindfulness, right, purpose. You get the idea. It's an acronym. And Good Morning AI, and I use AI for both, and AI was And I did it at different times. So Good Morning AI, I did, I don't know, 6 months ago, and it was not beautiful. I couldn't get it to write the text the way I wanted to. It was just a struggle. There was friction. And then I went back 6 months later and said, build me a Lamplighter Effect podcast. And like this, the letters were all right. I didn't have to ask. So it gets better all the time. But here's the fun part about this is that you get better too. Probably I asked it a better question. I gave it better description, more clarity. Now there is, um, obviously with both of these, it's— and, and of course, let's put on— I mean, I'm not silly, I know, like, we could put on Midjourney, right? It's getting better. It also used to be, if you want to build all this stuff out inside a Discord, like, it was unnecessary, there was a lot of friction. Now it's getting easier to do that work, um, but there's lots of tools, right, that do content generation. Now, content generation, in this case, these are all images. I want to share with you an interesting thing that happened yesterday, and I might have shared it yesterday. Um, oh, not yesterday, over the weekend, where I was talking to my son, who's a graphic artist. He's 17 years old. I was talking to him, and I was like, oh my gosh, like, have you used these tools to help you create art? And he immediately was like, oh no, I don't use AI. And I was like, What do you mean you don't use AI? Like, AI is our world. And he immediately started thinking about, like, this part. He immediately started telling me how he didn't really want to use technology that would use other people's information, art, ideas, creativity without compensating them for that work. And that's the way he was thinking. Like, it was his mindset. Like, I don't want to know, I don't want to use it unless I know they're going to get compensated. And so I think that's fascinating to me because it represents— maybe it's generational, but I also think it's just a mindset that's going to force us in the world of content generation, specifically in images, to figure that out. Yesterday we talked a little bit about copywriting. Oh yeah, I did share the story a little bit yesterday, but, but I— it's refreshing to me. I want to know that users like my son, an entire generation of users, are are going to say, I'm not going to use your tool unless you tell me how you got that, how you got the data, how you train the model, how are you compensating the artists that originally created, you know, some of these. I mentioned yesterday the Funko art that I've done and the Lego. I just did one, and I'm going to write a whole article on it because getting my hair to show up in AI is a whole thing. Like, I have very intrinsic detailed prompts that I have to use for it to get hair that looks like mine, and it's not easy. But it just goes to show that prompt engineering, meaning your ability to talk to a model and coerce it into building the thing that you actually want that's good, is not instantaneous. And even in these tools that have gotten better, it still requires you to ask a good question, which I think is awesome because that means as a marketer, as a salesperson, as a professional, as an academic, we have to get good as humanity at asking good questions, and that is not an AI thing. However, I will share with you some examples of me asking a good question to generate more good questions, and that's kind of a maybe a life hack a little bit. Okay, so these are content generators from an image perspective. I also was at CES this year actually with T, and we talked about— oh my gosh, yes, and Daisy's a curly-haired girl too, so she totally gets it. Um, but even brown again, like, oh my gosh, the iterations that I went through in building images to represent diverse people. Like, it's— and I think it's just funny— not funny, it's terrible— but it's, it's, it drives me crazy when I see lots of AI-generated art and it doesn't represent women or people of color or like me. And the reason it doesn't, because it's harder. Like, it's way easier if I'm a marketer to just build stuff that looks looks like the majority of the United States or whatever. It's not even the majority, but it looks like white male people because that's how the models are trained, right? That, that's the images that they've been trained on. And so those biases, the reality is, is the only way to get beyond those biases is to be the person who actually continuously trains this model to say, no, brown curly hair actually looks like this. It's a little bit different. So this requires a responsible approach. It also requires some level of clarity on how you're going to ask the model to do what you ask it to do. It also requires, just like parenting, a huge amount of patience, which I had to exhibit when I was trying to build my own little Lego minifigure. I'll definitely include my Lego minifigure picture in my day 2 recap so you can see it. Um, okay, so Next though, so this is images. What about writing? And I say that because actually what I really mean is copy editing. There are lots of tools. Anyone want to throw out tools that they've been using? Oh, I see a few. Oh my gosh, yes, I also have to use Canva to edit stuff that comes out of GPT-4. Um, all right, awesome, this looks great. So I— oh, I need to go to chat so I could see all of your wonderful chats. There we go. Claude, oh yeah, for sure. So this goes back to a tool we mentioned yesterday, which I'm just gonna put— it's not related to Midjourney, I'm just putting it on the same thing— but Poe.com, right? Because in Poe, I can go and test out what— and oh my gosh, Leonard's here! You should totally give us like a link to your showdown. So he does these image showdowns where he does an image with a prompt and he does that prompt on multiple platforms And it's fascinating to see how these platforms interpret his prompt. It's the same prompt, but it shows up very differently. Sometimes the same, but sometimes surprisingly differently. So awesome, Leonard. If you get a chance, I would love for people to— maybe you could post the last one you did. Um, but so fun. I look forward to that because it gives you insight into how these models are different and how one size doesn't fit all. One prompt doesn't mean the same thing. And these are the types of lessons that we really need to think about when we're building content to serve a community. Um, okay, this is amazing. Um, okay, so writing, just gonna draw a line. I at CES, um, as I was mentioning, had an opportunity to actually, uh, be on stage and I interviewed, uh, May from Abib, from Writer. She's the CEO of Rytr.com. So of course I want to mention that. And what I like about it— I think it's Rytr.com. Um, what I like about this tool is that when they first started, they went after a use case every company has, which is marketers who are struggling to generate unique headlines, A/B test copy, like all these things that people are doing every single day. But it had to come out of our own head. And I am a marketer, so I I totally get this where I'm trying to think of what's, you know, a new way to say 7 ways to learn this thing or 5 reasons to buy this protein shake or like all the different way. It's very hard, like cognitively to continuously come up with new and creative ways. So Rytr created a platform that allowed us to expedite that, but that wasn't the beginning. That was our initial— thank you very much. That was their, uh, initial approach. Now they, they used it, and this is a great marketing technique, by the way, and I did it with Amazon Alexa as well. Start with one thing, one thing you know your customers need right now, and market the heck out of that one thing and solve that one problem, no matter how simple it is. So at Alexa, one of the first things we did for the financial industry is we did an analysis, and I've talked about this before, but this analysis allowed us to go back and see what on your website, what are the things that people need every single day but takes them more than 5 clicks to get to. This is a good thing to do for anybody's website, right? If it takes them more than 5 clicks to get there, how do you make it easier? Well, on Alexa, we decided to partner with certain banks And actually, we have a couple people who are on some of these projects, so maybe you'll chime in. But we would go to these banks and say, hey, the routing number— I don't know if you remember, 10 years ago, it was hard to find the routing number to your bank. Like, you'd have to like go in and search for it, not find it, and then click into stuff and go to wire, but it would be for international, not domestic. Like, it was a mess. Wire, a mess. So What we did at Alexa is we said, why don't we just build a skill and the only thing it does is let you just ask what's the routing number and get your answer? And when we did that, guess what happened, right? People were like, this is amazing, what else do you have? And that's exactly what happened with Ryder. They solved a problem that had tangible ROI immediate— well, not immediate, but you know what I mean, within 3 months They were able to show that, hey, if you do this work, it will exponentially grow your value in market. And now they're saying, okay, we're doing more than that now. Yes, of course we're going to help you write copy, but we're actually going to help you build a strategy for building the messaging of your organization in a way that represents your core values as an organization. They also have a very— and I'm just going to abbreviate it— they have a huge responsible AI play now. Because what they realize is that they can— people will use their tools to create persuasive messaging, but they need to make sure that how they train that model and how their customers use that model, that it is layered in. It's a thread of responsibility that is weaved through. So Rytr.com is one. Of course, um, I want to go use its old name, but Jasper is another one. Do you remember when it used to be called Jarvis? I would imagine Jarvis, you know, Iron Man. I'd imagine they ended up getting a cease and desist on that name, um, but it was cool when it started. But here's another lesson that we can like learn from that. They just started. They started with the name they had no right to use, but they got started. When they transitioned to Jasper, they already had customers who would change with them. Now there's customers— I mean, they have hundreds, uh, thousands, hundreds of thousands of customers that don't know them when they were Jarvis. They just got started. So no matter where you are, whether you're inside a company, whether you're starting your own business, whether you have already a successful $1 to $10 million revenue business, whatever your idea is, like, just get started, build it. And the most important thing of both of these is they solved a problem people had, and they could the people who wanted that solution could get that resolution very, very quickly. There was tons of other things you can do with these tools now. But to get that first person to say yes, we had to— it's called a— oh my gosh, some of you know this. Like, we used to call this, and maybe some people still do, minimum— what is it— MVP, right? Minimum viable product. But I changed that. Like, 10 years ago, I'd get on stage, I'd be like, with Alexa, you're not doing minimum viable product. You're doing minimum remarkable products or minimum lovable products, right? You're gonna find the one thing that your customers will love you for building, and you're going to go to market with that immediately. And then you're going to add stuff to it over time. But the thing that most people do is they get stuck in this cycle of it has to be perfect and it has to be my vision and it has to have all these features. And the days of being able to roll out 25 features every 3 years into software, those are long gone. Like, customers are more excited about the one thing you can give them than the 100 things that might come 3 years from now. So, learn that, right? Absorb that and use that to change your decision to go to market much faster than maybe you even feel comfortable doing. But it's such an important thing because guess what happens the second you go to market? Your clients start telling you, wow, this is awesome, or you missed the mark, and you use that information to, like, iterate. I won't say the word agile, but you iterate very, very quickly. Continuous development, continuous improvement, continuous customer satisfaction. All right, awesome. So Jasper, of course, I— we, um, Michael Novak, thank you. Yesterday you had mentioned Einstein, um, I don't— I think E-I-N. I don't know, don't judge me. I'm, you know, um, but Einstein is from Salesforce. I think it's called Einstein GPT. Again, um, I love what they said recently about the Apple Vision goggles. Like, they're not perfect. I love them. I have Metaverse Pros. I was one of those who bought into that, and I love it. I use it. I love having the ability to see all of my computers. I have a Mac a, and two Surface, uh, laptops, and I could see them all inside this metaverse environment. I love it. It's a great workspace. Um, but someone said about the Apple Vision Pros, they said this is the worst it's gonna be, and it's not terrible. Apple will continuously iterate, continuous improvement, continuous development, and it will continue to get better. And the same is true for all these tools. Including Einstein GPT. What I like about Einstein is that it's built by Salesforce, and Salesforce, they're geared specifically— I mean, we mentioned CRMs, and that's why Michael brought it up. Einstein GPT is the ability to amplify— if you're already a Salesforce customer, amplify the work you're doing inside of Salesforce to now, you know, leverage these tools to make your work better. Okay, so that's just This is not an exhaustive list. This is just— and these are copy, these are images. It's not an exhaustive list. It's just meant to give you a sense of some of the things you should go play around with. Now, what I wanna move into next is actually the idea, and I alluded to it a little bit, is the idea that, and I'm gonna call 'em chatbots, right? Everyone will tell you chatbots are dead. I will tell you, It is a new age. We have actually seen, I mean, even myself, I have built conversational apps that people, they think they're talking to my team. And I always like to tell you all are my friends. Like I am a team of one. I have nobody else working for me. There's no one running camera and lighting and there's no one. So, but I could do a bunch of stuff. Like I can answer questions people are currently sending to my website. I can book a sales gig, or a speaking opportunity all simultaneously because of the systems I have in place. And many of those systems are powered by chatbots. Right? And maybe you don't want to use that term. I used to last year, I tried not to use it. I used words like intelligent agent. Right? Or conversational app. You do what you want. I really realize that it doesn't actually matter. Um, it is a little tiny robot that's going to have a conversation on your behalf. Generative AI changes the game here. If you have a chatbot, it should be better now. And if it's not, if you have not integrated it, it's something to think about. One of my favorite chatbots that I use today actually comes through a platform, and I love the name, so I'm going to share it with you. And none of these— I am not an affiliate for any of this stuff. Like, none of you could just go and check it out. Um, they're all things that I personally have either used or invested in. But one of these is rainmakerai.com, not .ai, which is what I typically do, but rainmakerai.com. And it has inside of it the ability for you to train a model And I think this is critical. Train the model on your brand, your voice, probably most importantly, your core values. And the way that you train this model in Rainmaker AI, when you go and use Rainmaker AI, it will ask you, what's your website? Here's a fun fact. Most websites are not awesome. Um, so I have, you know, I use SEO and I, you know, I've basically been intentional about building my website. Many of our websites are just a slightly more glorified version of brochureware, right? Like a brochure we used to get handed to at a conference. So these also should be things that are crystal clear on your website, right? Like on your home page, on your landing pages, you should be able to say Oh, it's Noelle. I know what she thinks. I know how she thinks. I know what she does. I know what she sells. It should be crystal clear. Then when you get a chatbot, you can just say, yeah, go to that website. Everything there, I want you to build a conversation around. And you can— I think there's a 14-day trial for Rainmaker, but you can go in and train your bot and then you can have a conversation with it and just be like, hey, what do you guys do here? And it will use GPT-4 or something similar. To build a conversation with you. What I love about it is that it actually continuously asks you engaging questions like, oh my gosh, have you used this before? Have you used AI in sales? Have you, you know, questions that doesn't sound like, well, let's face it, 2 years ago, robots would be like, I am your chat service agent. What question do you have? And then you'd ask it a question like, I don't know the answer to that question. Now we have a much more engaging term. So, so, Intel, depending on how you choose to frame this, it's a critical part of your marketing strategy. You know why? Because like me, if no matter what, you can't do all the things. And one of the things you can at least do is capture information, respond to people who are asking questions, right? Like, and every time I get a new question, I go and train the bot to say, hey, I have this. Now, I worked on a really cool Microsoft project, which is now, of course, part of another solution, but it was called Q— does anyone remember this one? Q&A Maker. What it would allow you to do, I don't even know if the website's still up, it probably is, but Q&A Maker was one of my favorites. Personality chat, actually, the woman who helped build this now runs AI in India. It's awesome for Microsoft. Q&A Maker, the reason I loved it was because I could— it's just like automation. I could, every time something happened to me, the first time it happened, I'd be like, oh man, I wonder if anyone's going to ever ask me this again. The second time I'm like, wow, I'm wasting my time. I should not be answering this question for the second time. But third and fourth time I get the same request, I definitely feel like I'm wasting my time. Q&A Maker let me go and train a model back then was before LLMs, but I could train a model to actually say the things that I knew. Like I know now, for example, I, I, my career started at WebSphere. I knew every question anyone could ask about WebSphere. I mean, to the tune of thousands of questions like you could, I could not, I couldn't be stumped. That's not necessarily true anymore because that was again the days when we had fixed features and I could memorize all the things. But Q&A Maker would have been brilliant because I could just give all of the answers I already know to questions into this bot. And if someone happened to ask one that I already knew the answer to, my bot could give that information. And I don't have to let the bot act like me, though I do have a Nearly Noelle bot. I'll give you this as a fun fact. CareRicter.ai. So Character.ai is a conversational app generator. As a matter of fact, Alexa integrates with it today. When I went and asked my kids last year in like February if they used AI, um, they're like— and not my 17-year-old because they have evolved their thinking— um, but when I asked them if they used AI and they're like, I think the only AI I use is Character.ai, and I was like, what pray tell is this? And so I went and looked, and it's your ability to create your own chatbot.

You—

not a GPT bot, but your own personal— I mean, technically, I guess it's like a GPT store. And I actually wonder how much of the success of Character.ai— OpenAI was like, hey, that's a good idea, we should do that. But you can go there, you can find Nearly Noelle. I built a responsible AI bot. I mean, there's tons of bots. What I loved about the Character.ai platform is that it was characters that people were building— anime characters, manga characters, like all of these cool characters that I don't know if this has ever happened to you where you watch a movie and at the end you're like, I totally wish I could know how it ended, or I wish I could talk to that character and make sure they're okay, or whatever, um, or know how their life turned out. Okay, maybe I get all in in some of the movies that I watch, but it's cool because now in Character.ai I could go and I could talk to that character. I can go, hey SpongeBob, it was a pretty rough episode I saw there, like Are you, you okay? And it would be able to remember the episode. It would remember the character relationships. I mean, it's pretty fascinating. So worth taking a look. But again, another tool in your toolbox, another way to think about how do you engage. I thought it was awesome. Some of my son's friends ended up sending me pictures of saying that they went to my Nearly Noelle bot. They found it. They didn't even know that it was there. They found it and they then took a picture of it because they said, hey, Nearly Noelle, happy or Merry Christmas. And I, nearly me, ended up responding Merry Christmas. And I was like, oh, well, good, good on me. I was very nice, as I should be. So, so it's just a cool tool to have in your toolbox.

All right.

So these are just some of the tools. I really do think, though, having a conversation with your clients, especially when you can't, This is the most important. We know I've been in the contact center space for a long time, and there are things that your customers don't necessarily need from you. Like yesterday, oh my gosh, so it would have been awesome if I had a chatbot that said, oh, Noelle's just gone live on LinkedIn, and it would know when someone asks me that question in the community to just be like, oh yeah, she's live on LinkedIn, here's the link. That is 100% a chatbot thing. Why wouldn't I do that? Maybe I will. And These types of things help amplify who you are. It allows you to take you and amplify the work that you can do, who you can talk to, how many people you can talk to, and how many people— most importantly, how many people you can help. All right, so that is our chatbot conversation. Um, now we're going to go into advertising, and this is fun. Most of us don't play in the world of ads. I don't know why. I think more of us should. Um, There's some controversy, controversy maybe around it, but oh goodness. Oh, sorry, I got too small. Uh, let's see here. All right, so that's a D, digital ads. And really it's digital advertising. And what this means, and I'm going to just give you some hacks on how I do my digital advertising. This can be used inside companies. Uh, it can be used individually. I promote a lot of my content, um, I'm— and I'm not selling anything. I'm just like, hey, you should know me, come be my friend, hang out with me on this challenge, for example. So digital advertising means advertising. If you look it up, right, there's a definition. It means getting what you do in front of people you can do it for. Okay, I paraphrased, but you get the idea. So with digital advertising we have the ability to get what we do out in front of people in a digital way. That means I'm not necessarily talking about paid, but there are two types. You can pay for it, paid advertising, or instead of paid advertising, you could what we call organic. I'm, I'm an organic person. Like, literally, I eat organic. I like my marketing and digital advertising to be organic. But paid is nice because— and here's what I do— I start with organic. I build content that I love, that I created, that is all me. I might use generative AI to help me phrase something for a different market or a different audience, but it's my content. Like, I'm posting it. And then when I detect— and I can use AI to do this detection, or I could just look at my ridiculously large spreadsheet and say, oh my gosh, that organic ad is doing pretty good. That post I did on Instagram, that's pretty good. I hit 800 accounts, all right, 8, 8,900 accounts, or I hit— I think yesterday was like 21,000. Um, and so what— wherever my organic traffic goes, if I see traction, I uplevel it. This is on Instagram or on Facebook is often called boosting. But here's the kicker, or the trick, is you don't pay for things you don't already know your clients are gonna love, that your audience is gonna love. So post— I post all the time. I learned this from a friend of mine. I don't know if he's on right now. Um, I use now, and this is like a week, maybe 2 weeks now I've been using it, Metricool. And the reason I did this, because I was using a different tool that had a little bit more friction. Um, and what I do is I go on Sunday, my husband and I sit down and we, and we do this all the time, but on Sunday specifically, we build all of our content for the week. And it's usually based on last week's stuff. So people will be like, oh my gosh, Noelle, you're everywhere. I see you like everywhere. You're posting all the time. I'm like, well, technically I posted for 4 hours on Sunday. Now you're seeing it. Trickle out over the week. Some is organic, some of it I'm like on in the moment and I'm just publishing, but 90% of my content is pre-scheduled. And that is a flex. Like, you want to do that, right? You want the world to know the value that you have, but you don't want to— I always, uh, call it like you don't want to be on the hamster wheel of like social media, constantly taking pictures of yourself and doing all these things. This is why, um, and there's several of us in here that own communities That's why it's really important to be one of those people that go to a meetup and you speak, get up on stage and say what you care about, say what you think, say what you learned, and record it. And then you could take that— I use another tool called Descript. And another tool called Repurpose. These two tools help me take one piece of content. So I was just at FSI, Financial Services Institute, and I did a keynote and I got off stage. Now granted, he's biased, but my husband was like, that was amazing, like better than I've ever seen. I think he says that after every talk I do, but still, I kind of believed him. And so I was like, oh my gosh, let's get the recording. So we got the recording and then we put it into Repurpose And it now can create a podcast. It can slice it up into 15 different mini things. It creates a month of content for me that I can now sprinkle into my content plan. Like, but here's the best part. Like you want to get up in front of people and say what you care about. Now you don't have to get up like me in front of 1,000 people or 10,000 or 70,000. At the end of the month, I'm going to the— you'll laugh maybe— the National Association of Home Builders. To talk to them about AI. How cool is that? But I'm gonna record that because there are a bunch of industries like home builders who need to know how to use this technology to amplify their ability to do more in the world. And I'm a big believer in that. But these tools are critical to— I don't have time to watch a video and splice out clips. And like I said, I'm a party of one, two technically with my husband, but someone's gotta cook for the kids. So, um, but we have like, you know, we're building something and that something is kind of like my brand, my, my interest in helping the world with AI. And so I use these tools to help amplify my ability. If you have a team, massive amplification with these same tools, right? So these are— and, and I don't know exactly what the extensions of these are, I think it's .io maybe. Anyway, just Google repurpose content, and you'll— it'll pop right up. They're advertising as well. So these are just some of the tools. Like I said, my biggest encouragement to you is to write content so much that you start to see some stuff stick, right? Kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall, though I tell my children never to do that, even though they want to do it. Like, some stuff is going to stick, some stuff is going to not go viral, right? You don't need it to go viral. You you just need your audience to raise their hand and say, that was cool, I liked that. And now you know to do more of that. One of the biggest misconceptions I run into with the clients that I work with around like, how do they grow their sales and marketing and get more leads, right? So if we're looking at sales and marketing together, marketing is your ability to get people to raise their hand to work with you, and sales is your ability to actually convince them that that's a good idea. And the best businesses do that really well at scale. So marketing is all about how do you get in front of people, and you actually want to repel people who don't think like you, right? I don't know how many of you have had this, but I've had clients that I don't actually like. None of you all, of course, but I've had clients where I'm like, why am I working with you? It bothers me so much. You're not a nice person. How do I know? Why am I doing this? Like, when you're not very careful about how you're showing up in the world, how you're marketing yourself, you want to create marketing that says, I stand for this, I believe in this. Remember the concept of building in our brand, our voice, and our core values? Oh, you can't see that very well, but right, the brand, voice, and core values, like, that is the, like, the most important thing so that people who have your same ideas, share your core values, they're going to raise their hand and be like, oh my gosh, you're like me. And then people who don't, some of them will troll. I don't know if you guys saw that post the other day. I got someone in my comments was like, what did he say? Oh, he said, he goes, a shiny red jacket doesn't mean you know anything about this space. And I was like Oh, I didn't do— I mean, I don't feed the trolls, so I just kind of let him die a slow death in oblivion. But, um, wow. Like, so I don't want to work with someone like that. Even if he wanted to pay me, I don't want to work with him. So I don't— I, I think it's really important that you amplify who you are so people who do not resonate with you don't even want to follow your stuff. Be aggressive. I almost went cheerleader on y'all, but Yeah, it— I know, it's crazy, crazy. And that's not the first one. One of my— one of the, um, really fun trolling activities I got a couple, like, uh, maybe last year, last summer, with somebody in my TikTok stream. And I've got a couple viral TikToks, they have 450,000 views or a million and a half views. And, um, someone will go in there and be like— literally, I took a picture of it and did a whole thing on it, but it said Go back to the kitchen and watch YouTube. And I was like, okay. But it's one nice thing about having a community like me and like all these people is that when people say that about you as you're building your thing or as you're growing in your career or as you're starting a business, we will be there. You don't have to say anything because my community showed up and they were like, Google her. And it was awesome. I didn't have to say anything. Like your community, your audience, your customers will come to your defense. And that is because you're real, authentic, and you take care of people. Um, so these things are critical: brand, voice, core values. And then when you build content that does that, some of your content is going to resonate more than others. The sad part about advertising is it is a numbers game. So don't pay to advertise stuff that doesn't land with your customer. Post a bunch of stuff. As soon as you start to get engagement, boost it. If you get a lot of engagement, turn it into an ad and run it on evergreen. Like, those are the things that I've seen be massively, um, successful. Priscilla's in the house! What's up? Um, oh my gosh, so we didn't talk about affiliate marketing today, but we should do a separate session on that. But part of your strategy— as a matter of fact, I've told you I'm not getting paid by any of these companies. It's not because— well, it is a little bit because I don't really want to do that. But one thing that communities offer you the ability to do is not actually have to build your own products and services for those of you in this space. And Priscilla is one of the best at helping you build a community. Like, you would own that community about whatever it is— soccer, dog racing— no, dog racing is bad— um, like rabbit training, um,, you know, kid caring, whatever it is that you care about, build a community around that and then find products you love and build a relationship with that product and sell it on behalf of that person or company. And that's— it's a beautiful business model. I, I've always worked for companies that have affiliate programs, and so I've cared for them from a slightly different perspective, but I absolutely love it. So thanks for being here, Priscilla. Awesome. Okay. So I think we're almost over. Alright, I think we're at the last one, which is— oh my gosh, of course, and it's actually a great segue to our speaker who is in the house. What? So excited to have you. Thank you for coming. So we're going to end with just a tiny 2-minute drill on responsible use because when you're building digital marketing ads, and I'm going to give you a practice that I use that I actually like. But it can be used dangerously. So I want to caution you that when you're building things, responsible AI— oh gosh, responsible AI means that you are adhering to certain tenets of building things, right? So one of them is to build technology that is transparent. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday. We also want— so we build technology that people, you know, it's not a black box. It might be an easy button, but you could see the man behind the— or women or people behind the curtain. Like, it's transparent. It's not— and again, understandability is not the goal. It's just, can you see what's happening in there? If you had an expert, could they ask the right questions? The next part moves you past transparency to explainability. Can you explain how what you do works? And none of this infringes on your IP. None of this asks for code or bit, you know, bits and bytes. It's just, can you tell me how this works and your philosophy on building it? And any company, either if you are building something, you want to adhere to these tenets. If you are using something, you should be asking questions about these tenets. The next one is around— I'll just go to fairness because it's my favorite. Will your model serve everyone in the same way? And this is a hard question because many models— the, the interest— I always say that this is an exposure of bias. And bias, bias Beggets empathy. And I say that because what that means is that you actually need people who understand the bias to be the ones asking the question. You can't have a bunch of people, a homogeneous group of people that are building something, be the same people that like look at it and go, yeah, I think it's good, it seems to serve everyone, when they are not a reflection of everyone.. So you need to find people that understand the bias, that are victims often of that bias, so that they can ask better questions. And then your team— again, you don't necessarily need to employ them, though I encourage you to do that— but you will get more empathy for your user when you understand how that your systems that you built to help them could actually hurt them. So this is a huge whole section. There's companies that focus on this. I certainly talk about it quite a bit. The next one is trust. And what that means really, you can go and say maybe privacy, right? You want to create trust with your users. Tell them, I always say on my stages, save the Bessies, which is related to the quote by, that became famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but actually was written by Bessie Anderson Stanley, but her, her attribution got lost over decades. And I always worry that when we're building systems, we will lose the attribution of where we got the information that made it possible. Now, some of you, many of you, uh, know this. It's kind of like when people call you. Um, I had someone call me and interview me for a book that they were writing, and they, you, like, they used what I said in the book, and they did not even say they talked to me in the— even in the index, they never said they even talked to me. I was like, that's— now I don't trust you, and now I can't say nice things about you, and that makes me sad. So building trust, measuring how well you take care of the things, the coveted things that your users, your customers have given to you, their data, Be very vocal about your practices here because this is where most companies will fail. And finally, robustness. And I say this because I've worked with some of the largest clients in the world, customers in the world, and they will build incredible, amazing AI systems, but they will not really think about the enterprise architecture that they need. That's why it's cool. Wes Groover is probably in the house, um, like thinking about cloud and data architecture How does that work? Because elasticity— I always tell people, you need to build— when you build AI, you need an elastically scalable system. You need to be able to handle 100 users. Like Microsoft, Microsoft's AI, uh, projects, when they started, we're getting about 100 requests a month, maybe 200. And then over time, 5 years later, they're now getting 5 billion requests. Most companies, when they build AI systems, When under pressure, those systems start to crumble at the very time when those systems should do well, and it's because they don't build them to be robust. So these are some of the things I want you to be thinking about when using this technology. And the last thing I'll mention before we bring up our guest is that you can amplify a lot of the work that you do, and these are some of the things that we're teaching in the AI Leadership Institute. But in marketing specifically, I have used— and I'm just gonna say ChatGPT, but you could use any of these large language models or do a showdown like Leonard. But ChatGPT, I would ask it some very important questions. And we're going to dive into this in our conversation over the next half hour. What, what are And I'm not going to write out the whole question, but fears, um, limiting beliefs, and, uh, let's call it dream outcomes. I will go to ChatGPT and I will ask it for my demographic, for executives and business professionals who want to learn more about AI, What are their biggest fears? What are their limiting beliefs? And what do they actually want to get out of this? When it— and I tell it to put in a table for me. I'll even ask it very specifically to give me 25 or 10, but usually 25. Now I have a table of 25 of these. Now I can take this content and I will say, thank you for that answer, draft me 25 tips for overcoming those. And now it's going to write you content for overcoming all of their very specific targeted beliefs, uh, fears, limiting beliefs, and dream outcomes. Beautiful content. And then you use this magic tool inside— some of you might know it— inside Canva called Bulk Create, and it allows you to take all 25 and bulk create 25 images or Instagram Reels or stories. They will all kind of look the same, but when you're giving tips, that's okay. Like, build your brands, have it represent who you are, your voice, your message. Bulk Create, poof, within about 15 minutes you can build 25 pieces of content that you can sprinkle across your content calendar for the next month. So that's kind of cool. I hope you'll try it. We actually do have videos, um, throughout, uh, all of our learning. We have videos where we walk through this. We have people in the community who do it, and so they're creating videos. So feel free to, uh, to ask me more questions about that later, but I wanted to leave you with a practical thing you could do to grow and amplify your marketing strategy. So now without further ado, uh, super excited to bring up our very special guest. Jennifer and I go back a lot. Welcome, Jennifer. Uh, we go back, uh, quite some time. She is one of my favorite people and has always been in the space of growth, right? How do you grow a business? And so has done sales and marketing, go-to-market strategies, and I really was super excited. I did not know when I would put the speakers, but it naturally happened that I got the right people on the right day. So I'm so excited that you're here today. Would love for you to maybe start by introducing yourself. And many people know you already, but for those who don't, who are you and what are you doing right now?

Oh my gosh. First off, as everyone knows on who's joining, you are such a favorite. You have been a good friend for a long time and to join you is just insane. I feel, I feel so honored and so blessed. I'm Jennifer Ives, and as Noelle Russell mentioned, I've been in the AI space from a sales and marketing perspective, from a go-to-market perspective for many years. I'm a geospatial engineer by early in my career, and so I've been playing and living in data-rich environments for a long, long time. And about a year ago, co-founded a company called Watering Hole AI to help marketing and sales leaders really better understand AI, mainly custom AI algorithms, predictive AI algorithms to generate kind of market more effectively and generate revenue faster, mainly focused on the mid-market and the enterprise customers. So, you know, I'm a mom, I am a wife. I love to hike, ski, hang out with Noelle Russell Russell when she's in town and when we're together. And it's just really lovely to be here with you. You today. Did I, did I cover everything you know about me?

Amazing, amazing. I'm so glad you're here. Um, one of the things that you didn't mention, um, but I— and it, of course, it's kind of a secret little group, so I won't over-amplify, but Jennifer's one of the best connectors, um, and she has brought together these, um, this amazing group of women. We actually— I was introduced during COVID um, but they have, you know, it's this little light that shines in my inbox on LinkedIn of like celebration and support. And, you know, you can try and bring a bunch of people together and they might not do that. They might not engage in that way. But I've watched people help each other get jobs or help each other find the right people to staff in a company. I mean, it's just a beautiful skill that you have in creating that team. And it's also— it's beautiful because you're not doing it for a company. Like, you just brought us all together. So I try to get to D.C. anytime I can to hang out with all of those amazing women. So super amazing to have you. Thank you for that. So I want to get started and I figured I'd start a little bit around maybe your experience over the last year, right? Like over the last year, the world kind of changed. As you mentioned, you even like looked at opportunity. I would like to get your opinion on like what happened last year for you specifically and how did it change what you had been doing up until that point?

Yeah, so it was really interesting. So up until— so companies, boards, CEOs tend to call me when companies, technology, data-rich technology companies, whether it be a product company or a services company, they tend to call me when they're at inflection points. And I love— my passion is around hypergrowth companies. So they can call me at an inflection point at $5 million, at $35 million, and they want to grow to $75 million or $50 million and they want to grow to $150 million. So I've been doing that for many years, working with global companies. Companies, global data-rich, deep technology companies, leading-edge companies. And about a year and a half ago, we— I was with a company. We did very well. We worked really hard. We supported our clients. We had 2 private equity events. And after the second private equity event in 5 years, that's a, that's a pretty intense run. So I took some time. I took a little bit of a break. I traveled with my family. I hung out with my dog. I went hiking. I took long walks.. And I kind of got my creativity back and I got my mojo back and all those things that each one of us needs to do, whether it's that, you know, you're taking 5 minutes or 10 minutes or an hour. And in my case, I took a couple of months to do that. And it was during that time that a dear friend and technologist called with an idea that she'd been beta testing for a couple of years around applying AI models to marketing and sales to really rev up the engines of, of companies. It can really be applied to all size companies. However, it's generally the mid to larger size companies who can technically afford the custom piece that we— that, that she was talking about. So as Noelle mentioned, I, I said, let's go ahead. I've worked with startups and high-growth companies for a long time. I advise in particular passion around female technology founders. I've done that my whole career. I don't talk about it on LinkedIn. As Noelle said, I do a lot of things privately because it's not for me about getting kind of the notoriety or anything like that. People know. People know. They share. They know they can say, hey, call Jennifer Ives. She'll help you with that. She'll give you an hour or maybe she'll even advise you and sit on your advisory board. So, that's what happened. I started a company with my co-founder to really address what I knew could be solved. This go-to-market side of of companies, whether it's a technology company or not, you know, you choose the industry, but the go-to-market side has all this data, right? And you've been talking about it today with Noelle, and if you follow Noelle, she talks about it quite a bit. And I follow Noelle to learn every day as well. And so we were looking at the customized AI models and how you can really apply those to marketing and sales activities to amplify, right? Noelle Russell was talking about it today, amplify your message and really make sure that the message is in front of the right people at the right time in a way that they want to take that information in. So that if that, if that message and if that information sits well with them, then they might want to buy your product, right? And then you can get to the sales piece and hopefully get through the sales funnel much faster. And again, this could apply to small enterprise and I'm sorry, small, mid, and enterprise companies. So that's what I did about a year ago. And it was really that typical story of someone who has a problem or who knows the problem and a technology, in this case, AI, artificial intelligence applied to go-to-market. So the marketing and sales side of business and trying to solve for it. So a lot of founders, they have a problem and they either look for a solution and co-found a company. In my case, that's what happened. So thank you for asking. Yeah, it's been exciting.

I loved it. I love watching everything.

Yeah, I played everything that you were talking about today.

Yes, exactly. I mean, a lot of it I learned as you went. I've lived vicariously through your experiences. What was like last year, thinking through some of the client engagement that you had, what was some of maybe a use case that stood out for you? Where you're like, oh, that's, you know, this is interesting or new or even like every company should be doing this. What were some of the use cases that you were exposed to?

Yeah. Yes. So, and okay, so I'm going to name some use cases. We'll talk through a couple of use cases. Before we do that, my surprise over the last year was the lack of knowledge that really smart executives knew about AI, what it is, what it isn't. I mean, I would walk into meetings and or stand on stage like you, right? Stand on stage and just start with, this is what AI is, this is what it isn't, this is what generative means, this is what predictive means. Like, just go through some very basic— by the way, this isn't to say that people aren't smart. These things are moving so quickly. AI is moving so quickly that it's really important that when talking one-on-one or 10-on-one or 70,000-on-one, that I make sure, and Noelle Russell does this all the time, I learned from her, to make sure that your audience has a baseline. So that's, that was one of my biggest aha moments was that I live and breathe it. I see what's going on. I assumed every other executive at the C-suite or VP, SVP, C-suite level knew and was keeping up with it on a daily basis. And that wasn't the case. So I had to remind myself to back up a little bit and bring the education, like help the journey, help those executives through the journey and along through the journey. Because the news cycle is going to keep everyone focused on ChatGPT for a number of reasons we won't get into today. AI is an entire spectrum. I know it's not just ChatGPT and large language models. And again, if you follow Noelle, and I know you do, she shares the entire spectrum and her institute and the institute, just the leadership, AI Leadership Institute does such a good job with that. So This group already knows all of those things. I was surprised by that. So before getting to some of the use cases, we really had to educate and re-educate and over-educate and re-educate and re-re-re, right? You get the idea. With that said, some of the most exciting use cases were things like an edtech company, a startup edtech company was messaging in Facebook Facebook community groups and on Instagram. And very quickly, and this wasn't even the AI piece, this is just your analytics piece, right? Very quickly through beta testing, we were able to find out that only one of those channels was working, right? It was, it just happened in this case to be Facebook community for this particular product for the, in the edtech space. Instagram was falling flat, but you know where they were? TikTok. And that was a channel that the company had never thought of. So we identified that very quickly. And then you start, you know, before you can do the predictive piece, then you start saying, and I'm just gonna make up something silly, right? Then you start saying, okay, well, on one channel, it doesn't matter the channel, one channel they like to see, and this has nothing to do with the edtech company, they like to see, you know, and hear a message with kitty cats in baseball hats. And that same message, the same product I should say, on another channel, let's say TikTok, they wanna see it or hear it or take it it in a different way. It could be puppy dogs, um, uh, holding a baseball mitt. I don't know, you, you get the idea, right? So it's really important to look at all the data, pull the data in, understand what's happening within your world and with those that you're talking to. So this edtech company, we were able to show there's a lot of money, time, energy being spent on two channels. One is working, one is not. Here's a channel you haven't tried yet. Let's make that your ideal customer profile, right? You know your ICP and where they are hanging out, how they like to be talked to, how they like to take in information. Another company that was really interesting was a global company who is a supply chain company, and they had kind of a 30-day free— this is a SaaS company— they had a 30-day free access. And then some people went through to immediately become and automatically become— they just chose Yes, I'm going to, you know, after my 30-day free trial, I'm going to sign on. They were wondering about kind of that marketing, that 80% of your marketing funnel that you really don't know what's happening. In today's day and age, you can have a little bit better idea of what's happening up there, but there's kind of 80% of the marketing funnel and all the marketers here know 80% is a little dark and you're trying to figure out, you know, what's happening, who's doing what, what actions are they taking before they get into the sales funnel. They really wanted to know about that marketing piece. However, we started to data as they were coming through into the sales funnel that they were churning out. And we were looking at the data of the churn to then start predicting, kind of identify why they were churning out, when they were churning out, how they were churning out. And then you can put AI predictive models in place to identify all of that information, start predicting and getting ahead of it so that they don't churn out. So those are two use cases, again, at that mid and enterprise level. Use cases at all levels, right, around opening up of emails, what subject headers work, what email messaging works within emails. And if you're a large enough company, any size company, if you can move the— and I'm just going to use a silly number, right? If you have an open rate of 1% or a click open, click through, and I'm going to sign on and revenue is happening for your company at 1%, you know exactly if you can move that to 2%, 3%, 10% increase, you'll know how much revenue that's bringing into your company. And if the return on investment— because AI is not necessarily the tool that you should use every single time in marketing and sales and go-to-market. However, if you calculate that that return on investment is greater than the amount that you are investing in the AI tool or tools, uh, plural, or the custom work that you're having done, If that ROI is higher, clearly AI is the right decision to make.

Oh my gosh.

Let me pause there for a moment. Ask me some questions.

Yeah, I love it. This is great. And hi, Akash. Thank you for chiming in. I think one of the things I wanted to mention is that there was a new report that came out that demonstrated exactly what you were saying about when to use AI and how often and what for. But it's some good news. IDC did a joint research with Microsoft and they ended up finding, and I think this is exciting, like I was like, we're doing the right, we're still in the right space. But they ended up finding that, you know, of all the companies that they surveyed, they found that 92% of companies were able to achieve their dream outcome, right? They were able to achieve return on investment of their AI spend to spend in less than 12 months, which is really not normal. Like, for most, like, if we're selling software products, like, normally we're on a longer tail than that. But what was very exciting about that was that they also said that for every $1 spent implementing AI, companies in this study were receiving $3.5, right? $3.5 for every dollar spent. And that was like tangible Like, to your point on ROI, like, if you can tell that for every dollar you put in, you know, it's like going to a vending machine. If I put in a dollar and get $3 back, I'd put in a dollar every single time. I'd try to find as many dollars to put in as I could. So it's, it's an exciting time because last year we didn't really have the data to back up the claim and the hype, but now we're starting to see companies are doing, um, are building projects, they're getting a 3.5 return on that investment and they're seeing those results in shorter periods of time, which is super exciting. So I did see a question come in, um, and I think it's because we both probably do this, but do you always differentiate between generative AI and AI when you're talking about this type of technology?

I do. I'd love to hear your thought on that, and then we can talk a little bit about that because it's a great question and I get it often. What are, what are your thoughts? And I want to riff with with you on this just a little bit.

Yeah, okay. So I, um, just like you said, like, I'm a big believer. I mean, I was talking about AI before we had generative AI, and— but I will admit that it was like vegetables to kids. Like, I'm like, you're gonna need this, this is necessary, you're gonna— you want this. And they're like, I don't want it. They're like complaining at the dinner table. So as— and, and similarly to your journey, like, I would start talking to executives And there was friction there. So I started to talk about more interesting use cases, which is why I always led with Alexa. Like Alexa is a great use case for selling AI because people don't think of it as AI. They're just like, oh, I could just talk to something and it'll do stuff for me. And LLMs kind of amplified that, right? Like they basically accelerated people's understanding of, oh, I could just type what I want and it gives me something back. And so now I'm like, yeah, of course. That's a thing, but I often call it lamp lighting. Like it's a use case, but it's not the use case, right? There's probably dozens of other types of technology and it might not even be AI at all. But I do definitely distinguish between computer vision and, you know, like these different forms, algorithmic development. I definitely make sure people understand that there's decision logic, decision algorithms that are very different than algorithms you'll see in a large language model. So I appreciate that distinction as well. I think we're the same, but what do you think?

We are. I'm nodding the whole time because it's so true. There's this huge— everything now seems to fall under AI, and yet everything is AI and everyone talks about ChatGPT. And you're like, I'm so glad ChatGPT hit the market. One, it's an amazing tool and It helps with efficiencies and all the things that you and I talk about on a regular basis and that you were just sharing just even today alone. And yet there's this misunderstanding as to the breadth and scope of AI. There's also what rubs me as someone involved in AI is when someone's talking about analytics, which is amazing when you are analyzing data. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing something with the data besides having it in front of you to analyze it. So it doesn't necessarily mean that it is artificial intelligence. And when those two words or ideas or thoughts get conflated, which happens often all over LinkedIn, all over the news, all over any many, many conversations I have, that makes me a little crazy. It really, you know, like I said, it's like a little bit of a friction point for me when we're talking about analytics, which is amazing. Amazing. However, if I hear one more time on the news that someone's released a new product or a new quarter has started and a new product has been released, go figure. And it's real, and an AI product. We have an AI tool, AI tool, and it's an analytics tool. It just— and I know we've digressed just a little bit from generative and AI. There's just this huge conversation and discussion on, oh, it's all AI. Well, it's not. And some of it is. And then some of it's on spectrum of AI. And so where are we? And as executives, right, everyone who's joined today, just to know the basics of kind of what differentiates those things so that when you at the very least go into a meeting, right, with your team or with your client, or, or, or you can help them understand the difference, just the little differences between it makes them smarter, makes them more engaged, makes them, helps them ask better questions. I love what you just mentioned about how quickly true AI, when you are investing in in artificial intelligence for your business, the return on investment that we now know, right, that the numbers speak for themselves and also how quickly, like you said, it's a year we often see. So at a year, absolutely, it takes like you can't— there's no denying. And it takes about a year, especially for predictive AI, for those predictive models to really understand. And they're always human guided. So I do also want to say that you can't just set AI and let it go. I think we, we all are on the same page with that. I always like to say that anytime I speak, it's human-assisted, human-guided AI. The 12 months is excellent because it really does allow for those predictions to get really tight and really helpful. You can start to see a difference depending upon the use case, and as soon as a day, 3 days, 6 days, you'll start to get a different perspective on your data. And absolutely, the 12 months around those predictive models is, is, is key. Yeah, I agree.

And I think, you know, so many times, um, just like you said, I think it's important to have clarity of thought, right? And the more clear you can be in your messaging, the better someone can understand what you're actually selling them. Now, I do think we're in this beautiful hype cycle, right? So we're at this top of the hype cycle, but the trough—

and it's noisy—

yeah, it's coming, right? And that trough is going to be in the areas where people start asking, wait, you know, and we're starting to see it already, right? Wait, It can lie to you. Wait, it isn't— how much data do I need? And do I need all my data ducks in a row? And wait, is it analytics or is it predictive analytics? Which again, still no algorithms could be in place to do predictive analytics. So there's like certain levels of what understanding is. And that's why I always say like literacy is so critically important. And that's why you spent most of last year doing very similar work to me, like going around and just trying to educate people. On the right questions to even ask about this. There are some use cases like market, like amplifying a content generation team, or better yet, thinking differently about how you're going to invest those dollars, right? Like maybe you need to outsource that to an agency, or maybe you can be amplified by an agency. In other words, you can take some of the content generation back. You can make sure it's much more closely aligned with your message. And then let an agency do the distribution. Like the relationships, I think, have to be reinvented just like our roles do quite a bit. So yeah, really cool. Okay. Let's see. Lots of fun comments in here. So I'm going to go back to our questions. Oh yes. So I always like to just kind of think about a little bit, the lessons that maybe you've learned, like what surprised you or what do you wish you knew a year ago before this amazing journey kind of kicked off when ChatGPT launched. What are some of the lessons, or maybe one big lesson that you learned over the last year?

Yeah, one big lesson over the last year is literacy. I know it's not the most exciting. I know everyone's like, oh, there's not going to be any big moment of intelligence drop here or nugget drop. Literacy. Everyone here is upskilling. Everyone who's participating participating today is increasing their AI literacy, even if they're already AI experts, right? So I, I'm sure that we have a lot of AI experts joining today and you're continuing to upskill. It is moving at such a rapid pace, the literacy. Like, if I could go back a year, I think I would have tried to understand faster the length of time required for literacy and for the noise in the market to— it hasn't died down yet. It's still a very noisy market. The literacy at an executive level is still not to the level where most AI experts would want when they are having a conversation with those executives. And by the way, those executives run the gamut. It's a CEO, it's a CFO, it's a chief technology officer. Just because someone lives and breathes technology every day doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily mean they are literate in all aspects of AI, that piece of technology that is artificial intelligence. So it's really interesting. Again, I wish I had something else beyond—

Oh my gosh, that's like— I 100% agree with you.

That's it.

100% agree with you.

I talk to you all the time, right? I'm like, wow, I'm on stage or I'm writing posts or I'm doing something around literacy. And there are all of these models that could be in place to help companies right now. However, you can't, you know, it's almost like feeding someone dessert before they've even started their dinner. You shouldn't do it. Yeah, yeah. So maybe that's not the right analogy, but you shouldn't start with your dessert first. You really have to understand and be curious and understand what it is that you're one, trying to solve. Be literate in, at the very least, the highest level and levels of artificial intelligence so that you can ask the right questions when you are in these meetings and you can turn to the right partners. You need to be literate in AI. This is the— please do not leave here today without knowing this. There are so many people today that are talking about AI in the last 12 months that do not have a background in AI. So to be literate in AI, even at a high level, to be able to ask the questions of a potential partner so that you yourself can differentiate the type of partner you may or may not be working with, that is critical. So please, oh my goodness, for that reason alone, the number of people who have hung up shingles, I'm an AI expert. And by the way, we're all learning together. So there are the Noelles of the world who have been in AI for decades. And there are really folks who 6 months ago you know, took one class and now, which by the way, do. It's upskilling. So there's no harm in that. However, they may be positioning themselves as the AI expert to help you with your strategy or you fill in the blank around the AI piece.

So yeah, and I think it's kind of like what we, we started off talking about this, you know, kind of unfortunate situation where if you are, you know, if you're known like known beats best every day. So even if you're great at what you do, even if you have a decade of experience, like if someone else is better at going to market than you are, they will win with a 4-month-old company and no direct skills in the technology. Which is why it's so important for us to really harness the skills of good marketing. And even I, you know, I often will go and look at other marketers. I'll go through their sales funnel. And I'll learn. I'll be like, okay, you have— you don't— you definitely don't know what I know. And, and it's not bad to think that. Like, we all should be constantly evolving, and we should ethically hack how are other people selling this. If you're not getting the sales and marketing that you— like, the leads and customers that you want right now, like, go hack people who are, no matter whether they're good, you know, whether they have decades of experience or not. Like, If they're selling something, look at how they're selling and then model what's working in the market. What I do love about the world we're in now with generative AI is that it's easier than ever to model that, but it also gives us an opportunity to think, you know, once I see something that works, we can say, hey, I love this idea, how do I create that for my unique selling proposition or value proposition? That is the key though, remember core values, brand voice, your uniqueness in the market is first. And once you establish that, then— I mean, like I said, there's lots of people selling AI. Like, I mean, on like TikTok, like, I get, you know, it's probably my algorithm, but I get these people. I'm like, but last year you were selling some Kindle authoring tool, you know, like, what are you doing? But it's working. So, um, I think it's really important to kind of keep your eyes open and. And in this spirit of literacy, like just absorb as much as you can without getting overwhelmed. So I do often say, pick a lane. Like maybe you wanna find out what image generation is all about. Like we have a person in our community, Rick McCauley. He was on yesterday. He teaches at Broward College. He's awesome. He has a lane. He was a photographer. And so now he loves the idea of amplifying his photographic skills with a tool like Midjourney. We also have, you know, people who have different types of skills, but like, or life coaches. Like, you could do anything with this technology, but whatever you do is the unique part. And so don't let, you know, the world say everybody talks about AI. You know, it's like saying everyone's special, and when everyone is special, no one is really special. So, so own your uniqueness and use that to drive the decisions you make. And again, creating clarity in what you're thinking about. Now is your chance though. We have quite a few questions that have come in. I'm gonna flip through them. But if you have a question for myself or Jennifer around marketing or even sales from yesterday, please feel free to drop them in the channel, in the chat, regardless of your platform. We have like 8 platforms simultaneously being in, fed into this chatbot thing. So, of course, I wouldn't expect anything different from you. I mean, I could do one, but why when there's 8? Why? It's awesome though. I looked at the stats yesterday. And I was, I was like blown away. I was like, oh my gosh, like I had no idea. But it's so cool when you guys are, when everyone here chimes in and asks questions. Verole asked questions yesterday and you're here today. Thank you for coming. Do you recommend the concept of choosing a lane or two and staying with them because of how rapid the changes are taking place? And maybe I'll clarify what I meant by that. And then I would love to hear your opinion on like specialization. But that's really what I think, you know, that's what I'm thinking. When you say choose a lane, I'm thinking specialization, but I'm not thinking of specialization in terms of technology. I don't think you should become a specialist in a tech because, well, Jennifer and I both have seen the waves of technology and the consolidation that always follows the hype. And so we're right now in this time where thousands of products are entering the market, and within the next 2 to 3 years, those will get gobbled up, go away, die slow deaths, die fast deaths. Like, those— that consolidation will happen, and you don't want to have all your eggs tied to one of those types of baskets. Where you want to pick a lane is in your own specialization. Are you a contact center person? Are you in healthcare? Are you retail? Are you sales? Are you marketing? Are you executive-facing? Are you helping small businesses? Like, what is— again, it goes back to those 3 things that we, you know, what is your voice? Like, who are you trying to help? Who are your customers? And then narrowly focusing. They always say the riches are in the niches. Like, find your niche and then go wide with the technology that you can use to help that niche. But your specialty, the lane, is actually you, your lane. I know I follow and have worked with this guy, his name's Alex Hormozi, and he has this phrase that I love, and it's, he's like, you are zero of one. And what he means is that, like, you're not one of 100, you're not one in 40,000, like, you're a zero of one. Like, there is no one like you, and that's the most important part of your marketing strategy, is to clarify who you are so that you can use that to attract the customers that you want in your business. What are your thoughts on the lane conversation, and how do we keep up with all this stuff?

Oh my gosh, you couldn't have said it better. I even wrote it down because I'm going to use it in the future. Exactly how you said it, like, find your niche and then go wide with the technology. You couldn't have said it more perfectly. Sometimes I'll be working with companies, especially companies I'm advising, and I'll still, and I'll say, I'm not trying to be hard on you. I'm gonna ask you really gently. However, we've gotta get to it. Who are you? What do you do? Who do you, like, how do you do it? And then how do you differentiate yourself? The who are you and how you do it and what do you do, like, who are you doing it for? Like, what is it that you do? What is your niche, right? What is it that you do? And then how do you do it that's different from everyone else? Who is in that market? And then absolutely you identify that, and then you go really wide on the technology that fits this particular, like you said, is it that you are working with, I'm just gonna, you know, you're working with chief human resources officer at midsize hospitals in the US. Like that is, and the riches are in the, I'm gonna use that too. Like really understand, hyperfocus on who it is that you're solving challenges for, and then go wide on how it is the technologies, because those technologies will change. Go, go wide on the technologies. Again, I, I use kind of, you know, CHRO at a mid-size hospital. It could be, um, marketing and sales for B2B global brands of a certain size of a certain industry. Like, boom, like, go. And then even from there, I would recommend to the company that they like Cut another layer, cut another layer, like get a little more specific, get a little more specific and go wide on the technologies or go, you know, the technologies and the ways that you can help them. Yeah, absolutely.

And I will encourage you all, some of you are inside businesses and don't own your pricing strategy, but this concept of narrowly focusing also gives you the ability to identify and claim much higher prices for the product that you sell. So the highest priced products in market are those that are solving a very specific problem for a user. It's kind of like you go to the store and you see, you know, Sales and Marketing for Dummies, right? Like it's super cheap book because it applies to everyone and that means it doesn't really apply to you. But if you see a course online that says Sales and Marketing for Small Business Owners, you're going to be like, oh my gosh, that's me. I'm willing to pay a little bit more. Sometimes up to $1,000 for a class that's specific to my role. But now I see sales and marketing masterclass for people in, you know, artificial intelligence. Now I might join this mastermind that meets in person, and I might pay $10,000 to be part of that, right? Because it's with CEOs that are my people. And so you create this elevation, this exclusiveness, the more narrow you go. And some people call it like a dot. Right, where they'll say, you know, this is the world and your job is to find like the dot. Like, what is— you don't want the world, you don't want to market to everyone. You want to market to people who have a very specific set of dream outcomes that you can help them with. And that they— and, and a very— like you were saying, I mean, you want to know their demographics and their psychographics. Like, I particularly, you know, maybe I want to just work with women. Maybe I just want to work with women executives. Maybe I just want to work with women executives who are between $1 million and $10 million. And maybe I want to work with women executives between $1 and $10 million that are in AI and are people, you know, and are women of color. Like, that is a very small dot, but guess what? It represents 15,000 businesses in the United States, and I only need 10 to build a, you know, 7-figure business. So, right, like, you know, I always call it million-dollar math. Like, do the math to figure out what is your niche. The more specialized you get, you have the ability to create an offer that's so compelling that they will— it will garner premium pricing. Um, this is not a race to the bottom. This is not who can sell the cheapest iPhone cover on Amazon, right? You are special. You're going to become a specialist. And I— so I love that question. We actually have a bunch of other questions that came in while we were talking. So let's go through. I'm going to come back to your question on how we actually learn by doing a little bit later, because that's a great segue to the next session that we'll do tomorrow. Akash asks, how can we best identify the tools that work for our area? For example, he's in cybersecurity. What, what advice do we have for kind of figuring out how to navigate this sea of technology? And maybe just from our perspective, what do we try to do?

Okay, so I, I'm a little old school when it— when, like, if it's not my area of specialty, I would start— I'm going to start that, that large circle behind you. We'll use that analogy for this question too. I would start at the large. I would start Googling or start searching, whichever, right? Start searching.

Yes.

Top da da da, and I'd fill in the blank. And then I'd take those and I would do another search and I dig and dig and dig in. That wouldn't be the only way I would do it. I would also go to my community, right? So as, as leaders at whatever our industry is, we should in fact be part of a community. And if you're not part of a community, start to create a community of those who are doing similar work in a similar industry. It could be an industry, it could be the type of technology, like however you slice and dice it. And then I would start asking and then I would start following different people on LinkedIn or TikTok or wherever you get your information. You're going to kind of have to do— there's no one answer to like hit a button and all of a sudden you're going to get the 3 answers that you want. You want to start kind of slicing and dicing and going through a bit of a matrix to find those answers. And you will get to it. You will get to this, right? You'll get to that dot as to what are the very best 1, 2, or 3 tools who are the very best 1, 2, or 3 partners who might not be a name that you know, but darn it, every single time you ask the people, ask the people that you trust, you Google and then you're asking the people you trust, that name keeps coming up or that product keeps coming up and you're like, wow, I don't see it anywhere in the news. I don't see it anywhere. Right. I would absolutely got to start big and really then depend on your community and pull it in. Is that Noelle, is that what you found as well?

Yeah, 100%. And actually, one of the things that I personally do is I set up Google Alerts and these, right? Like, how do we create, to your point on tools and ways to just get it, like setting up alerts on the topics that you care about and on yourself for that matter, so that you know when people say nice things or not nice things about you, you can track it down. But I use it, like for me, I'm very interested, of course, in Microsoft AI. Anytime it comes up on the internet, I want to know what the story is, and I want to know before everyone else. So it's literally why I created a podcast called Good Morning AI. So every morning I would go and I'd like look through and be like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, and then this. And the drama in like the OpenAI world is just— anyway, um, it keeps us going, keeps us talking, that's for sure. But one of the other things I'd recommend is actually be a voice Um, Akash, for the community, like start a podcast, invite people. You'd be surprised who will say yes. I mean, I got someone like Jennifer and I got someone like Dr. Lee's, like you ask and people will say yes because you're not— all you're trying to do is the same question you're asking, your customers are asking. So you can, on behalf of yourself, but more importantly, on behalf of those you want to serve, you can create a community around that.

And.

It could be a podcast. It could be a blog. People still read, you know, I do. Um, you could build a book series on Kindle. Like, it doesn't matter the vehicle. I always tell people, as a matter of fact, on, uh, I was doing a class for LinkedIn and the content creator that was producing my class, he came to me and he said something that changed how I write content forever. He said, um, he goes, okay, we're gonna build your first module. I want you to build the first 500 words of this module. I want you to build it in 3 ways. I want you to write it. I want you to say it without a camera on. Just talk like you're talking on podcast. Then I want you to video it. And then I did that and it took me, I don't know, an hour. And the next time I met with him, I showed him that and he did not look at it and go, oh, you're way better at one versus the other. He was like, which one did you feel the most, like the least amount of stress building? Which one was the most comfortable? And I thought that was awesome because of course I love video. Here I am. And he was like, okay, great. Then we're not going to prescript. We're not going to write a bunch of stuff. We're just going to generate videos like right off the bat. And we were, and that's exactly, if you look at the two classes I had, my first class had 3.2 million learners. And it was because I didn't have a script. I didn't read notes. Like I just talked right from my heart about a topic at that time, deepfakes that I love. And it, it was because not just was the content interesting,, but I personally enjoyed building it. So I think your learning curve will also be accelerated by connecting with people where you can kind of feed off their energy. And like I said, do a podcast and it doesn't have to be live. You could just do it recorded, record conversations. You could even set up an interview and just interview people. You can interview— I just did an interview via email, like ask questions via email and say, hey, if you wouldn't mind, would you answer these? Ask them exactly the kind of questions you're asking. But Google Alerts, and then just starting to connect with leaders that you see in the community. You'd be surprised. And then of course, at the end of every conversation, ask, do you know anyone else I should talk to? I mean, Jennifer does that, like, who else should, who else should I be friends with? And people will point you in the right direction. And referrals are everything. So hopefully that's helpful. Thank you for that question. Awesome, Akash. Thank you for that. Okay, let's see. Uh, Was that one? I saw another one.

Okay.

I'm going to show this question and then I will read it for everyone. Do you see the increased use of AI merging with traditional disciplines of marketing and sales, especially in smaller firms? Good question.

I— oh gosh, I wish I had a crystal ball for so many of these questions, or so many questions like this. Because tomorrow, the next day, everything's moving at light years. My initial response is yes, I do. Now, 6 months from now, you may come back to me and say you were completely wrong, Jennifer. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know. But what I will say, and the reason why I'm leaning into, especially you said smaller firms, so I'm going to, you know, like a small business, SMB, midsize, and enterprise, right? So SMB. I believe that there are going to be products and tools out there that are in fact is going to make marketing and sales more efficient. And they, it will probably pull some of that together. I don't think that, that's not me saying that marketing and sales goes away as individual kind of, that the marketing arm, Noelle already, you know, defined marketing and sales. And they do have two different roles as part of your go-to-market or your revenue generating flywheel. And it can be a revenue generating flywheel a company of one, a solopreneur. It could be 40,000 people around the world, right? But it's a revenue gen. No longer is it a funnel. It is a circle like this. And you've got marketing, sales, partnerships, all of these things. And again, Noelle already mentioned some of them. So my short answer is yes, I do believe that AI is going to be able to make these two things more efficient and work with each other. And I do believe that you're going to see some tools come on the market. And and pull, swim through and come out on the other side of the noise.

Yeah, I would, I definitely agree. I actually, I think it helps us focus more on some of these traditional, I mean, think of like Ogilvy, kind of old school advertising. I mean, I just reread that book over Christmas because the core principles of like traditional sales and marketing end up being the very human side of sales and marketing, relationship development, authenticity of brand, voice, brand voice development. And those things as AI tools join the market, like those are the types of things that those companies who do not have a strong voice, they are going to get diluted. So it's so very critical to actually harness these old traditional disciplines of, that do not, they're not talking about like, how do I write more emails or how do I create? I talked about yesterday, the soap opera sequence. Or a Seinfeld sequence. It's, it's more about like, it's actually evergreen in the sense that it doesn't talk about tech at all, right? It's talking more about how do you establish yourself as a brand. And those truths, like the way you establish yourself now, is very similar as the way someone would have had to establish themselves later, right? Like, uh, or in the past, like in the '40s, right? If, if I remember, um, reading about an author and speaker, his name was Emmett Fox. And I loved here watching and listening to, uh, his content back then. This is in the '40s, because people, uh, would write like in, um, the New York— I think it was like the Post or something, whatever was out back then. And they would write, they were like, Emmett Fox comes to New York City and you can't tell who— like, you could not tell by the people going into the event who was actually speaking. And what they meant was, is that he attracted a little bit of everyone in the way that he spoke, and he personalized a session so that everyone in the audience, whether they were kind of like what we did today, right, whether they were startups, whether they were professionals, whether they were big business owners, whether they were— had no job at all, they would all come because they could find something of value in what he was saying. And that was— and that was his marketing strategy. He then went on to be a You know, bestseller of many, many books, dozens of books. But I loved the idea because it's the same thing we're trying to do now. How do we get in front of as many people as we can and get them to look at us and go, I hear my problem being solved in what you're saying? They then raise their hand. Marketing check. And then we learn how to solve their problem in their unique way. And that's how I can help us do it better. Back then, maybe we could only get 40 customers a year. Now we can get 400,000 customers in a year when we merge these tools together and actually use them to build more scalable and global solutions. So it's exciting. I think we get to leverage a lot of these. And so if you haven't read, if you're in advertising and haven't read the Ogilvy book on ads, it's definitely worthwhile reading because through the lens of an AI-driven society, I just, I like it. I think it's really cool. So, and I'm one of those people who always read old books. All the time. You should see— well, I mean, I have a whole bookcase behind me, but I have tons of these old, old books, um, because I feel like a lot of it starts to ring even more true now when humanity needs more humanness. And that's why I do these things, like, where you can see, like, it's me, and I don't always know all the tech stuff, and I can't figure it all out all the time, but you definitely know, like, this is Noelle. It's not my Nearly Noelle bot trying to talk to you over the internet. So awesome. Well, it's been amazing. We have a couple more questions I want to ask you just because it's always great to hear, you know, kind of what you're excited about in the coming year. And also, is there anything, you know, you want to share with the audience or encourage them to do? Or how do they, you know, if they're interested in working with you, like, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Oh gosh, the best way to connect with me, I think, is LinkedIn. Search Jennifer Ives, Jennifer Ives Watering Hole AI, or Jennifer Ives. Yeah, search, search for me. I love— listen, Noelle Russell and I are friends for a reason. We approach the world in a very similar way. Community is everything to me. It's everything to her. And however I can be of help to you on your journey, let me know. Watering Hole aside, just let me know if I can be of help. So LinkedIn is the very best way. Wow, I started with the last question and then forgot the other two questions.

No, okay, so that's great.

Here's how you can contact me, community build with me. Yes.

Is there anything that's coming up for you or anything that we can help, you know, come and support you at that you want to talk about?

Oh my gosh.

Speaking anywhere soon? Like, maybe the best thing we could do is just keep following you on LinkedIn and you'll let us know.

Follow me on LinkedIn. Thank you so much. Amplify things that resonate with you, right? If it's something that should be spread further out and within your community, please, please do so. I mean, we're all here to help each other and support each other, especially when we've shared something that, that might be helpful to others in the world. So please amplify. I've got a couple of speaking engagements coming up. I'm going to post about them because they're not confirmed yet. So let me, let me post about them. And I'd love everyone's help in, in supporting that. And then again, it takes a village. We're all in this together. I say this to Noelle Russell Russell and others all the time. There's enough room in this world for everyone to shine. So however I can help you, let me know. And thank you in advance for, you know, if there's something that resonates with you that I post, thanks for helping, you know, share it with the world. I appreciate it.

Yes. And of course, I always do. I think it's so exciting. And we live in such an interesting world. I always like to let everyone, you know, you all should know that I did intentionally pick the people to be here. And of course, I picked people that I thought were like-minded, like-hearted, but also are in areas of the business that I don't know very well. So, or that I don't specifically work in. I tend to be a generalist when it comes to artificial intelligence because I want to kind of like Emmett Fox, right? I want people— if someone— if I did a public event, I would have people who are startup founders, who are business owners, who are, you know, in, in maybe it didn't have a job at all. Like, I want everyone to know that the opportunity to use this technology to improve your life is available no matter what stage you are in. But I will say that one of the things that's made me successful has been my willingness to have an opinion about things. And so I think as we, you know, and especially in marketing, one of the things that is desperately needed right now are humans who are willing to have an opinion, and an opinion grounded in core values that you truly believe in, and then your willingness to share it with the world. Now, many of you, like I said, don't want to get up in front of a bunch of people. That's okay. You can just start by posting on LinkedIn, um, tagging people like myself and Jennifer, like letting, you know, the world know that you have an idea. And here's the fun thing that I found out: most people, when they write something or do a video, hitting that publish button, like giving it to the world, is very stressful. Lots of people find anxiety in doing that. And if you don't, then you should do more of it. Like, that's If you find it easy, awesome. But the good news is, like, do what that LinkedIn guy told me to do, right? Like, write a little bit, do a little video, do audio only. Did you know on LinkedIn they have audio only events? You don't have to show your face. You could just do an audio only event. You can invite people on, it's like a live podcast. Um, find the vehicle for sharing what you care about with the world and then lean into it and do a bunch of that. Don't let, like, If we listen to the world, they're going to say you have to be on Instagram and then you have to be on TikTok and you have like— do what feels good and then monitor your results. And if it's going well, do more of that. If it's not going well, change it up. It's not a hard— it's not an algorithm. It's a pretty simple equation. But that equation starts with you getting clarity on who you are, what you care about, and how you think you'll help the world. We talked about it yesterday. The Ikigai, right? Like the Venn diagram of, of life. And it talks about— and, and I find the most successful people that I work with, like, they have this Venn diagram in their life that they represent. Like, hey, I love doing this type of work, and I'm really good at doing this type of work. They're, you know, and, and so they connect. And now I do a little bit of examination and find out, is what I'm good at and what I love, how can I make that valuable to the world? I love connecting, teaching, sharing, and it turns out the world needs technologists who can teach and share. So I have my beautiful Venn diagram. I'm good at tech. I love to teach and share, and the world really needs literacy right now. So poof, but it didn't come by accident. Like, this is like a year of just being true to what I love, what I'm good at and what— and being— putting my ear to the, you know, railroad tracks, as they say, um, listening to my Google Alerts and being like, wow, the world needs this. And be willing to change your this. I don't know, necessarily think I wanted to be in tech my whole life. I don't know that I was like, oh, I can't wait to be an underrepresented female on a technical team of people who don't really value my contributions. I don't think that was my goal. Goal. But what was my goal is I realized, oh, I'm actually good at this, and the world needs people who think differently that are good at this. And so, so I merged it. But be— if it was— if it happened to be, I don't know, political science, don't think I haven't thought of it. But if you, you know, political science needed— if they needed me in the world of political science, maybe that's what I would do. But right now the world needs me in tech, and so that's That's why I'm here. I'm so glad you are here with me, Jennifer. Thank you for spending time with us. So excited. You'll see the day 2 recap. If you haven't joined the challenge yet, it is your time. I'm gonna go back and answer 2 of the questions that we got. What's up, Wes? Thank you for that. We got 2 questions about how do you get your hands on this stuff? How do you practically build with this? And so we have what are called live learning sessions that are gonna happen after the challenge. This challenge has been— of course, we're going to talk through a bunch of things, but once you figure out where you want to play— do you want to be in sales and marketing? Do you want to change your daily life? Do you want to improve your professional work? Once you figure that out, then you're going to need to actually practice this stuff, and that's where the AI Leadership Institute comes in. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow, um, but these live learning lessons for the next 30 days are available to all our VIPs, which Some of you are part of that. So super excited. If you're not, it's not too late to join the VIP. Just check your email. Oh, and if you haven't gotten an email from me and you join the challenge, please check your junk mail spam. For whatever reasons, if we're not friends and you've never gotten an email from me, your mailbox won't know. AI will be like, who is this fine person trying to talk to you? So go make us friends. Add me to your contacts so that I can talk to you about this. Um, so excited. What a great day. Thank you for your time, Jennifer. Thanks everyone for coming, and I will see you tomorrow bright and early, 10 o'clock AM Eastern. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye. See you next time.