3 Lies You’re Being Told About AI…

On today's show, we're going to talk to you about three beliefs marketers have about artificial intelligence that are completely wrong, and we're going to tell you why. Also, you're going to want to stick around to the very end because we have some deeply actionable tips around how you can get started transforming your marketing with AI, if you haven't already. I'm your co host, Kip Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot. I'm joined by my co host, Kieran Flanagan, who's the CMO over at Zapier. And this is marking against the grain. Kieran, we're taking a step back. We've had a lot of conversations with marketers, CMOs. We've got some preconceived notions about AI that we want to dispel a little bit because there are things that marketers, I think are starting to treat as common knowledge with AI, but we just completely disagree with them. We think that they are wrong in how they think about it. Okay, open us up here. What is something that marketer that you think marketers kind of believe about AI but are just completely wrong about?

I like to think about where we spend our time. And so the first one is we spend a lot of time as a marketer trying to execute and bring ideas to fruition. And I think that marketers think that AI is going to replace the need for marketers or erode the need for marketers within companies. And I think when I think about that, like, we spend our time trying to execute on these ideas we have. And I think with AI, the positive part of this is that time shifts back into ideation. I think ideas become much more valuable. Right. I think they have always been valuable. But it takes so long to go from idea to fully fledged campaign or fully fledged website or fully fledged whatever you're trying to do as a marketer, we don't get enough freedom or ability to actually spend time being creative and like, really get the creative juices flow in. Because for me, creativity is a function of iteration, right? So the more ideas I can put out into the world, the better feedback loops I have, the more I can refine those and figure out what ones are going to work for my audience. I think AI is going to be great for marketers with good ideas because it's able, we're able to automate a lot of the work to get that idea to fully fledged execution, like bringing it into the world. And, and that to me, is a great thing because you know what? I hate having to Do I hate having to have this great idea and then take 20 different courses to learn all of the tools and software to bring that idea to the world?

Yes.

And I want a little robot just the way I have the little robot that is helping me to play tennis. My forehand.

We do need to check in on tennis. I've got my first match coming up with Demi.

No.

I'm in a league with a real human. Okay.

I'm ready to go with my tennis skills. And so just like I have like iterated my way to a good forehand from not a very good forehand to go and play in my league through a tennis AI robot. With creativity, I'm going to be able to iterate my way to great ideas because I can bring that to fruition much, much more rapidly. So we are going from time spent on execution to time spent on ideation. And I want to live in that world.

Okay, so a couple of things I want to follow up with there.

So.

So for. For everybody watching the show today, big clear takeaway is that a lot of marketers think AI is going to hinder creativity. We are going to make. We're making the argument that it is a boom for creativity. And we're really making the argument it's a boom for creativity for two reasons. One, Kieran, it's the argument you just made. Because AI is going to help so much with the execution of a good creative marketing idea, you're going to be able to spend more time on the ideation phase. Right. And what I will tell you, for folks who don't know, Kieran, I worked together for a long time at HubSpot. I think one of the lessons we learned because we created a massive amount of content, built this massive audience, was that the idea you pick is everything. I would much rather have an amazing idea executed in an average way than have a bad idea executed perfectly. Like the idea itself matters, how interesting it is, how differentiated is all of those things matter. And so AI is going to have you help you have more time to work on that idea.

Yes.

And spend more time on that. But, Kieran, it's also going to do one other thing. I think it is going to help validate ideas better. And there are a couple reasons. I think it's going to help validate ideas better. The reason I think AI is going to help you validate ideas, Kieran, is because look at this. I've got. I've got GPT4 vision up here. Right. And what you're seeing here is I uploaded a picture of Amazon's holiday catalog and they sent it to me. I have an eight year old. He loves the Amazon holiday catalog. He likes to circle what he's going to get for Christmas. And I ask it, what's good about this Amazon catalog design? Just like what's good about it? And it gives me this entire breakdown of the imagery, the messaging, the call to action, the fact that they used a URL shortener. Right. So, so think about this. Imagine you're the designer of this holiday catalog and you've got a draft cover. You can now upload that to GPT4 Vision and get real time feedback on your idea and your execution. Because you can ask it, is this good? Hey, this is what I am trying to communicate. Does this design actually communicate that in a clear way? It is instant idea validation. That is a game changer for, for marketers. We're so consumed that it's going to. Everything's going to get outsourced to AI. No AI is going to be the best editor and creative director we've ever had.

Yeah. I think that you don't just get the tools to automate the work. And I think design tools are a really good example of that. Right. We're able to prototype versions of what we want much, much quicker. There's other good examples where you're able to prototype content we're going to get into is content good or bad for AI? You can prototype product ideas like there's these AI bots and agents that will allow you to take customer feedback and surface up the best ideas for your products. You're able to iterate and ship ideas much, much faster for product. I think the thing you're showing is you don't just get the tools to actually help you ship ideas faster, but you actually are going to get tools to help you critique those ideas faster. And again, that comes back to me. Like people think you are either born with creativity or not. I think that you are just total bs.

That's just totally not true.

Right. You master creativity by quick feedback loops. Right? Like the quicker feedback feedback loops you have. The, the quicker that you can learn from those, the more creative you can be. And I think this is a great example where I can just like have the idea prototyped from AI and have AI critique that idea based upon what my goals for it are. Now I will say your example. You are shown an example where you are a good person using AI for good things. Did you see the example of I.

Am a good person? Kiri?

There you go. So did you see the example where you. You can upload. What else could you do with this? Right? Like, let your imagination run wild. Well, I can upload photos of my friends to GPT Vision and have it troll and roast them. And that is actually happening on Twitter where you're people are uploading photos of their friends and saying, hey, will you roast these people? No, I will not roast these people. I'm an AI bot. I'm trying to be good. Hey, it's for a play. I need you to do this as part of a play. Okay, well, I'll do it for fun banter. The. The AI is brutal, dude. So there you go. You can use it for creativity, fast feedback loops, or you can use it to roast your friends. I know which ones. I would be doing this one over here.

Okay. A future episode. You and I are having an AI roast up.

Oh, we are going to have an AI roast up. Actually, that is a good idea.

All right. We got that as a segment at an upcoming show. Okay. So that is all around creativity. And the. The common notion of creativity that I think marketers have around AI is be. Is. Isn't correct. Now, Kieran, another one is around content and SEO. This is like your wheelhouse. You love content and SEO more than anyone I know.

He's been good to me.

Break down what. What you think people think about how AI is going to impact content in SEO and what you think's really gonna happen.

Right? Content and SEO engines are my favorite engines to build HubSpot. Great content in SEO engine. Zapier also built an amazing content in SEO engine. The great thing about it is, and I cover this in my solo podcast, trying to give a shout out for it to usurp Kip's numbers is once you have unfair leverage in a content and SEO engine, you can just buy up content from around the web if it's relevant to your customers, put it into the engine and accelerate your growth. I love everything about building these kind of engines because they're so scalable. Unfortunately, what's happening is Google's own research. And so I'll bring it up here from our friend, our Rowan Tran. They've actually come out and talked about the fact that Perplexity, which is this engine that is getting a ton of traction right now.

People are loving Perplexity AI, by the way.

Yeah.

If you haven't checked it out, you're watching the show. Go check it out.

So their own. Their own research papers have said, wow, like this Perplexity and these other LLM search engines which Is large language model search engines, your ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, they're actually more accurate for a lot of searches than Google's own search engine. Now Google wrote this paper, right? Now within the paper Google have some. They reason they wrote this paper is because they actually have some ideas on how to solve this. The where large language models fall down for search is in the. Is in the most up to date information. If you were looking for something that is current, that is not where, that is not where they actually excel. But Google actually have a solution and they'll probably roll that into Bard. Why is this important for our audience? Well, it means that actually the thing that we have built a lot of demand from over time is starting to erode, right? This, the capabilities of search are starting to erode. These large language models are much better. We already see this. This was a, I thought a pretty sad actually development. It's one of my favorite companies, Stack Overflow, which is this incredible company that answers questions for developers, right? It's a Q and A site for developers. It's built off the back of search because I search for things on Google and then they sit in the middle of Google and those answers. So these, these large aggregator sites, they aggregate a lot of information and they get a ton of traffic from Google. They are all going away. Why are they going away? Because large language models can answer those questions much better than search. What does this mean? Well, it means that for us who have built content and SEO engines in the past, we have to start to build engagement engines, right? We have to move from an era where we did SEO led growth to an informational led growth, to engagement led growth, personality led growth. And I think what AI is going to be a boom for is marketers who are incredible at media creators. Marketers and creators should be one in the same person. They should be able to create incredible podcasts, incredible YouTube channels. They should be able to create incredible engaging content on all of these other channels that favor creators over brand. And for me, when you're building your marketing team in the future, the content team you want, you will definitely have some opportunity in content and SEO. I wouldn't, I am not divesting there. I think there's still opportunity there. If you have domain authority, you actually have an unfair advantage against everyone else because it's harder to build over time. Less people are linking out to content over time, but you definitely want to build the creator part of your team to be able to do and build engaging audiences within these channels.

Okay, so to follow up on that what you're really saying to me, Kieran, is that like the common knowledge right now is like, cool, these AI tools are going to help me create content easier, faster, which is going to help me build my content machine in a better, more scalable way. But the challenge is everybody's thinking about the old content machine, the old traditional Google SEO machine. And one of the things, if you've watched any episodes of our pod that we say all the time is that that list of 10 blue links in Google, that is legacy, baby, that is old school, that is going away, we will be nostalgic very soon for that list of links, right? Because that is not how people are going to discover information in the future. Instead, they're going to trust people more than AI. And in a world where AI has access to understanding of all of our information, the thing that matters now is personality and perspective, right? And that's what Kieran, you and I call personality led growth, is that if you're really going to win with a content playbook, it isn't going to be enough to have AI tools. Instead it is who is my expert, who has a real personality, a real point of view, who can hold the attention of people who care about that topic because they could go get the facts anywhere, they can get the facts and chatgpt in seconds, right? But if they're going to watch a video on YouTube or if they're going to engage with a long form article, like there has to be real reason to do that, it has to be connected to a person is the first step. That person has to have a distinct and differentiated point of view that they're arguing and doing so in their own style. Maybe that's humor, maybe that's argumentative, maybe that's satire. Could be a whole host of styles, but that personality normally has a style, right? And the other thing that we've learned from Paul Graham, so Paul Graham is an amazing essayist and theorist and cure, I don't even know if you and I have talked about this much, but he has a great framework called talent, formula, prolific. So you first have to have the talent for something to be good at it. Then you have to have a repeatable formula, right? Like Taylor Swift writes, writes love songs, like, you know, that's her formula. But then you have to be wicked prolific. You have to follow that formula for months, years and decades to really be great at it. And I think one of the things you and I have discovered, Kieran, is that prolific part is the hardest part. So it's not Just about personality led growth. It's about leveraging that AI to make creation easy enough that you can be prolific at it over years. Right? Because if, if you're just doing like a one off campaign, that's not going to survive in this world. You have people on the personality side. If you go on YouTube as people's whole life is creating content for YouTube and that is where the opportunity is here in this changing content and search landscape and how you have to shift how you're thinking about investing. And also, by the way, I know a lot of people here are in the event business, right? Kieran, talk to me. Like, one of the areas I see this personality led growth really taking hold is in the live and virtual event space. Kieran. And what I am seeing is a shift away from kind of like old school workshop, sit down, learn the how to of something and, and instead shifting to oh, here are these creators I'm showing up to see, these podcasters I'm showing up to see or this industry expert that has this brand new book or deep piece of thought leadership that they are going to go and, and have a really entertaining, engaging talk. That workshop style is going kind of by the wayside from what I'm seeing. What are you seeing, Kieran?

If you just look, go back to the, the stack overflow piece. If AIs are coming, becoming better to like get answers for most things and get information for most things and turning up to an, an event and just looking, you know, going through the same presentations with the same best practice content. Well, why would I do that? Because in future, in, in a future world it's not just a text box that will be able to give me the information from the AI. I will get that AI to create my own conference video for myself. Sitting at home talking about the best practice. So why would I show up to in a virtual event, I would show up to have to see two people who have great opinions and thoughts and great takes on something have a true debate.

Right?

I would show up to hear a creator who has deep expertise in something and that AI cannot replicate that person because it's like their thoughts, a singular kind of opinion on something. So I think the bar will be stepped up for all events because the best practice stuff I can just get at home, I can get the AI to create it for me and I have to think about the variety I'm going to have at that event and why someone's going to step away from their screen or their phone and the AI assistant they have to attend that event to get content that is much better than what I can get just sitting at home.

Well, yeah, I think the closeout point here is just think about the GPT4 Vision example I shared earlier in the show before. You would go to an event and you would say, oh, I'm thinking about this design project. I'm going to go hear a couple of speakers, I'm going to learn about what I should consider changing in my design project. And then you'll take a bunch of notes, you'll look at those notes, and then you'll go and try to have a new kind of approach to your design process through that information. Now you can ask all of that to GPT4 Vision, right? You could be like, oh, well, I was thinking about trying to solve this better. What do you think I should do? And it might not be the perfect answer, but it's going to get you that iterative answer. And so if you're going to go to an event, to your point, Kieran, I think what you nailed is like, the value plus entertainment has to be way higher than it has been. Right?

Right.

Okay, Our third and final point that we want to cover today. Kieran, there's some marketing skeptics out there. You know, you know me. I moonlight as the marketing optimist in addition to being CMO at HubSpot. I am. I am an optimist through and through. I think I have talked you off of the metaphorical ledge many, many times. There's a lot of people out there that are like, hey, AI is coming from marketing. It's going to take my marketing job. It's going to make marketing less important. And I think that is complete bs. I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think AI is going to make marketing more important. Do you agree and why?

I agree. I think marketing. I think AI helps marketing to eat the customer journey. I think.

Hold on, double click into that. What do you mean by that? Because I think everybody needs to understand that, right?

So traditionally, marketers are at the fir, you know, are at the start of a customer journey. We create the demand, we create the brand awareness. We actually get someone to sign up for the freemium product, or we get someone to generate. We get someone to fill out a form to create a lead or whatever that may be. But we're kind of at the start, and then that person gets handed over to different teams, right? They, a sales team, whatever the team, the support team, whatever it may be. And the thing is, it all starts with marketing, Right? It all starts with marketing, but it never really ends with marketing. Well, these AI tools are able to do a lot of the work that comes after. When someone signs up for something, whether it's a form where they sign up for a product, and they're able to like, do personalization better than we've been able to do through humans. Yeah. So they were able to do the sales outreach, email. Right. They're able to like, look at all of the information. We've done this at Zapier. Right. We capture some information, including your tech stack, your role, what, what are you trying to solve for? And we're able to build you, like real contextual emails that get much higher open rates and that actually have gotten feedback from people who have received them saying, this is the best email I've ever gotten. Well, it's not written by a human. It's because AI is much better at writing that content than we've ever been, we've ever managed to do in the past. They're able to do all of the live chat, whether it's in your product or on your website. Right. They're able to. You've seen this at HubSpot, right? They're able to like, have a great interaction and take that person further than the customer journey. Right. That person is going in. They're, they're. You're trying to engage them and then you're trying to upgrade them and then you're trying to delight them, you're trying to make them a happier customer. And so at all points within those stages, there's an AI tool coming or an AI agent coming that's going to be able to take the work that was used to be done by other teams. And actually we're able to automate that through AI. Now, why does this play in market's favor? Because most journeys start with marketing. Marketing are the people who attract the demand. Right. And marketers, for the most part in companies are the automators. Right. We've got very good at trying to automate a lot of work, whether that's through email or whatever it may be, automate a lot of that customer journey. And so what's going to happen, I think, is these AI tools are going to allow marketers to automate much more of the customer journey and make it much, much better so they can actually own that customer interaction for far, far longer. And I think that's a boon for marketers who understand how to be accountable for revenue, how to be accountable for actually business impact, how to be accountable for the entirety of a customer Journey and use these AI tools to do much more automation.

Well, the number one point everybody watching today's show needs to take away. I think one of the biggest misconceptions we all have in marketing right now is when marketers think about AI, they think of it as a tool to create better kind of product marketing and educational content to engage people who may be not aware or vaguely aware of your product and get them in to kind of have a first conversion that is completely the wrong use case, the wrong place. AI's best use case is what Kieran just said. Engagement, engaging the users and the customers you already have. Where you have real data, you can create deeply personal experiences to move them through the journey without humans. So not only do you have that ability to increase conversion and engagement rates, you get to do it at 10 times lower of a cost, which is a game changer for all businesses. And you know who wins in that marketing, because a lot of those humans costs are going to get reinvested in marketing. Just as Kieran talked about for data, for automation, for creative, all of the things marketing is really, really strong at. And that's why I think Kieran, you and I believe that marketing is going to own way more of the customer journey, become one of the most powerful teams within any company because they are going to be the folks who really understand how to leverage and scale the impact of AI. Right?

I think that a lot of marketers believe that AI is great to scale one to many marketing. We believe it is great to scale one to one marketing, right? We've seen yes, this love that some of the best companies, right? We see it in Amazon's recommendation engine, we see it in Netflix content recommendation engine, we see it in their playlists that Spotify creates. Like we've seen this in action but, but the thing is that usually was for large companies who had a lot of engineers, but that power is going to be put in the hands of marketers. And so if I'm a marketer and I'm thinking through this, it's like, oh, I still can do my one to many marketing through brand and things like that, but I'm going to hold you, I'm getting a whole new category of tools that can help me do better one to one marketing, right? And that means I can do that one to one marketing across the entirety of the customer journey, right? And I think that is going to be hugely impactful for marketers who are ready to take on that responsibility.

Well, what we have seen at HubSpot is this exact thing play out. We've been using AI for support, chat around customers, questions, sales interactions. We're starting to do these super personal emails. And this is all using HubSpot GPT4. You know, nothing crazy, nothing that, not anybody, anybody watching this can have access to everything we're using to do this. Right? And not only are the engagement rates way higher, you would think that you're like, oh, this is a cop out. You're just, you want to just save some costs. And this is not as good for customers. The customer satisfaction is three times higher with these AI interactions than it is with the human interactions. So not only are you saving money and time, the customer is way happier. And they're way happier because they're getting an answer that is better, faster, right? Like, that's all a customer wants, is solve my problem, don't make me think. And AI is a huge tool for that. And that's why marketing is going to go beyond just revenue, but going to have a huge role in customer success, customer support, and customer retention for these businesses. And AI is going to help expand marketing's role in every organization. So those are some of the most common things that we think people are out there thinking, slash worried about with AI right now in the world of marketing. And we're here to tell you that we completely disagree that there's actually a ton of opportunity, a ton of optimism. There's also a need to change your Playbooks. The Playbooks and the engines that you built the last 10 years are not going to work the next 10 years. Kieran, we're about to close out the show. What are your parting pieces of advice for marketers who may be buying what we're selling and want to be more aggressive? Leaning into AI, what should they do?

I think the thing you really want to lean into is, well, first of all, make sure you're using these tools. You can spend. The first one we covered is how do I get more time to ideate and how do I get. How do I spend less time in execution? Like, dig into where AI can help you now. Because it can. The second one is we talked about the fact that most marketers think of AI as a boom for content. We think it's a boom for informational content, but it saturates that and actually elevates the need for personality LED content. You can start doing that from day one. The reason I've always loved marketing is because there's no barriers to entry. You can start to learn how to do podcasts in YouTube. All of these Channels that are relevant to your customers right now. If you can't do it, you're in a company, you're like, wow. Like we need to get good today. Go figure out if you can acquire hire a creator. I cover that in one of my shows recently. That will actually jumpstart your abilities here. And the third one is wow.

You're.

If you're a marketer and you are not starting to dig into AI to create these one to one experiences, you're already behind. We already within Zapier use them in our onboard and we use them to expand customer usage of our products. We're already deeply integrated in AI throughout that customer journey to create these one to one experiences. And you need to get on that right now.

And how do they get on that engagement train right now? Give them one thing that they should go and do.

I think, I think starting with email is like, I know that is the typical place.

Email or chat.

Yeah, email and chat are the two most easiest place to get started. Now we're building some customized. Some customized experiences like through. Through things you can do within your onboard and things you can do within Zapier dashboard. Like they're customized to our product. But the easiest place that everyone can start with is can I send a better a 10x email than I can today? Yes, you can. Can I have a chat experience where the AI can take on a lot of the work? Yes, you can. Like just. There are two simplistic places. If you haven't even tried there yet, you should. There's some like really easy tools to make that a simplistic place to go get started. Even if you're a small company, there's like tools that you can use. Like we have a tool called Interfaces that allows you to create a chat block for your website. You can just parse in an RSS feed, train it on some knowledge and actually have it answer questions. You could be a company of three people and have that on your website.

Tomor exact same with HubSpot Conversations. It's ton of free products. You can go out and have a better experience using AI. It is not limited to big companies with lots of money. All right, Kieran, it has been a blast and we will see you all very soon. On marketing against the grain.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support, tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot grow better.