Marketing Against The Grain Live: The Future Of AI | INBOUND 2023

What is up? Hitbound? How we doing?

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All right, we host a podcast. We thought we'd do a live for you today. How's that sound?

We thought we would do the first ever live recording with just a small gathering of people.

So let's just friends and family today on Marketing against the Grain. Okay, on today's show, we got a great show for you. We are going to talk about the AI transformation that's happening. Every transformation has winners and they have losers. And we're going to tell you how to be a winner. Today we have three Ps to the success of AI, and the last one has nothing to do with AI actually at all. Has nothing to do with being a tech nerd. It is a skill that we can all build and win in this generation. So, Kieran, you've got this set up for us. Tell us where we're at in this hype cycle.

Right now, we are in all things AI, right? You're at a conference. There's a lot of things being talked about in terms of AI. The exciting thing about every technological shift is it actually creates winners and losers. And so there's a lot going on. But there's three things I think we should pay attention to and what we're going to cover in this segment of the show. First of all, we have created a new category like AI has come along, and now we have this category of AI chat. And I think we cannot understate how important that is. Let me just give you some of the stats, because we are a group of marketers. We love stats. ChatGPT. We all know, right? Over 100 million users, 1.6 billion visits each and every month. But there are many other instances where people are now going to consume content through AI chat. You have Google Bard, right, came out and launched their platform or their search equivalent to chatbots. 155 million visitors each and every month. And they're growing, so they're about 10th of OpenAI. You have this, like, incredible website called Character AI. Not many people have heard of this, but it's a unicorn. You can go chat to famous people throughout history. That has over 655 million.

Theory, I think, blows my mind. You're just talking to fictional people as AI bots.

Fictional people.

And they have, what is it like.

650 million users, 665 million users, and you can talk to, like, anyone you want from history. Who would you want to talk to from history?

Oh, gosh, Da Vinci. Da Vinci was way ahead of his time. I want to ask Leonardo da Vinci.

Even though he's still alive. It's still Will Ferrell for me, actually, like my favorite first, my favorite person in the world. And then you have Snap, right? Snap has its own AI chat. It has over a fifth of its entire user base using AI chat. It has over 155 million users each and every month. And that's more than OpenAI has and ChatGPT. So we have. We have that going on. We have more companies than ever adopting AI. If you look at studies released by IBM, every year it has gone up over 42% of companies surveyed. And I've integrated AI into their work. But the thing that we want to talk about is the Goldman Sachs that which over two thirds of every job will be automatable. Is that a word?

Automata? I can feel like I have pronunciation issues, so I'll let it pass. But I can get. I don't know if it's actually a word.

They are automatable, which means two thirds of every job will be able to. You will be able to automate this. And that sounds scary, but we are here to tell you that marketeers who can integrate AI in the way that we are going to tell you it are going to sit proudly on the winner's podium. And that is why I think the topic that we are covering today is incredibly important.

Okay, that's. That's one hell of a setup. I was blinded. I don't know. By the lights, by the ultra white shoes. You're also wearing a pinky ring.

Today I went pink. So I went wearing pinky ring.

I don't understand. I was like. You were talking. I was like, yeah, yeah, he's wearing a pinky ring. What did you do?

At some point in my life, I just thought I would just go all.

Be.

Be wherever I want to be. Go all out, Wear rings, wear jewelry, wear the blind and white runner. I'm here in person. I usually record this podcast. So my mom, I have to take a photo. My two brothers sitting in the audience. So I need to get a photo of my mom. She's like, oh, you keep talk to each other every week. Do anyone acts? No one actually listens to this. The only audience I have are my two dogs who castle me for food. So, you know, I had to, like, make an effort if I'm going to be on the main stage of invent.

You should. So the pinky rings for mom.

The pinky ring is for.

No, the pinky ring is just. Because it's cool. Cool, sure. Kieran sure. But no, in all seriousness, we normally are used to doing this in, like, little rooms in our house with nobody listening, so thank you all for. For being here. The first thing we want to talk to you about in the AI world today is the attitude we think that everybody should have to succeed in AI and it is the attitude that I find the most successful people have. I call it the paranoid optimist. And it's this thing sound, like, paradoxical, but what I would tell you is you have to obsess about being a paranoid optimist, which means fundamentally, like, I think good things are going to happen. I think AI is good for the world. I think it's going to help my business. But I need to be paranoid enough to know that it's all not butterflies and rainbows, that there are things that could go wrong. AI hallucinates. It might change drastically how we do things in our business, and I need to be okay with a massive amount of changes. Those are all things that you kind of, I think, internalize when. When you're in a paranoid optimist.

Right, Right.

I think you're just a pessimist. So you don't know.

I can't believe, you know, life and speed for.

I think it's going to.

I'm going to ask which one of us is the paranoid? Which one of us is the optimist? It's. I'm definitely not the optimist. I'm definitely the optimist. Okay, so of this pairing, you and.

You'Re definitely the paranoid. Yeah, look, I. I will over rose color.

It's the Irish. Should we. We just see Irish. Like, it comes out pessimistic. So you and I do advisory. We do venture. One of the things that we obsess over is on founders who can actually figure out how they can ride a trend and go big, but understand how to mitigate against the risks. And I think that is an incredible lesson for us all to take away from this kind of technological platform shift that's going on right now. You can look at it and you can say, wow, this is going to be really disruptive to my job. You can look at it and say, wow, this is going to be really disruptive to my job. And it gives me an opportunity to gain leverage against everyone else. And I think that is the attitude you want to take going into kind of this AI revolution. And I think that's what I tried to remind myself. And Kip does a really good job reminding me when I tell him all of the things that may go wrong.

And this is how a conversation with Kieran goes. I say, hey, Kieran, I got this awesome idea. And I proceed to tell him my idea. And he's like, well, let me tell you about all the things that are terrible about that idea and all the things that won't work about that idea. And that's basically a paranoid, optimistic. We'll say all that. But go ahead and do the idea.

I'll do it anyway.

Right. And you would still, at the end of it, you'll be like, yeah, we should still do it though, right?

It may go horribly wrong. I remember telling you one of the things we wanted to do, and I was like, this could go horribly wrong and I could lose my job because it could go that wrong, but we should do it anyway.

And it worked.

And it worked.

And so when you think about that mindset of being a paranoid optimist, I think of it largely as playing offense, not defense. Anytime you have a massive transformation happening in the world, new opportunities are unlocked. And the people who don't get to take advantage of those opportunities are the people who are playing defense. Anytime I'm feeling stressed, anytime I'm feeling out of sorts, I stop myself and I say, am I playing offense for my playing defense? And most of the time, it's because I'm playing defense that I feel that way. Right? And the second you shift yourself back into offensive mode, great things happen. Exactly.

Okay, that's one P. We did what every great marketers did. We get in that. We got a great acronym. What is the second P?

All right, second P. Profits. Make profits. And this is about seeing the future. At any time you're in a transformation, if you just see just a little bit, just a tiny bit months or a year into the future, you have an inordinate advantage over everybody else. And the reason you have that inordinate advantage is because when a new transformation like AI happens, most people are at the same starting line because it's new. And so it's not like there's been somebody who is an expert for the last 30 years, and I. There are a handful, but there. The mass majority of business people aren't. And so you're like, great, I'm at this level playing field, so if I can just learn faster than everybody else, I could be successful. And I think one of the things you and I do a lot of, and I'd love to hear from you about, is like, we think about recognizing patterns to see the future, right? And I would love to hear from you like like, how do you kind of see the future, try to turn from somebody who's active learning to somebody who's actually predicting what might happen?

Right. I think the thing that, what I would like to do is go step back and go through marketing and like, go through how we actually do that. So marketing used to be very much a creative discipline, like pre Internet era, highly creative. If you think about some of the best copywriters that we still cite today, they were like from the 60s, from the 50s, because creativity was do or die within marketing. What happened? When the Internet became popular, marketing really shifted to be at the intersection of creativity and science. Right. And that was one of the reasons, I think I benefited from that platform shift. Because I was a failed software engineer. I spent many years trying to be a software engineer. I read all of the coding books and it turns out I was awful. Like, I was not good, terrible developer. I was not a good developer.

I was not a good developer.

I feel like if I had AI and I went back in time, I could be a developer, like, because it would just do the job for me.

You're still a shitty developer, man. Sorry, I was just a bad developer.

But so we went from like creative and art. We went from art and science. I think the thing that is going to happen is there is a new breed of marketer and that marketer will live at the intersection of click it, Kip, click it.

We're not used to slides, so it.

Will live at the intersection of art, science and wait for it, AI tools. Right. I think AI tools is going to be incredibly important for companies and teams to adopt. And we have some tips for companies and how you can actually make this real, how you can have your marketing team sit at this new intersection, be really great at the creativity, be really great at the science, and really excel at the AI tools. And maybe we should get into, like, what would be the first thing we would tell our audience or if someone asked us how to do this, what's the first thing we would tell them to do to really start to like implement this in their company?

Yeah. So if you want to get started. So you're like, great, guys, thanks. Thanks for, thanks for the pep talk. I want to go do some shit now. Okay, so like, what would we actually tell you to go do? The first thing that we did at HubSpot, I'll give you, I'll give you the behind the scenes is we collected all the use cases. We basically did had a couple people who went and looked at all the large language models looked at the APIs and said, hey, what's possible? What could we actually go and do out in the world? And then once we determined what was possible, we said, all right, what are the use cases we would want to do with AI? We came back with 126. It's like, that's, that's kind of a lot. We. It's like, clearly we're not going to do 126 things, but can we maybe prioritize them and pick the top three and maybe go do the top three? And that's fundamentally what we did, is we took those use cases, we boiled it down, we found the top three. The first one was chat. And we were like, oh, obviously we large language models, there's ability to make our chat way smarter and way better. And we did that. And what really broke through is we saw that AI was able. We basically used HubSpot conversations, Google Dialog Flow and OpenAI. With that integration, we were able to fine tune the OpenAI model enough to basically answer 78% of support questions via AI. Like, that's pretty meaningful. Like it has a massive difference. And you're like, oh, cool, that's nice that the AI was able to answer those questions. But do people like it? Customer satisfaction went up almost 300%. Like, wow, okay, we're answering more questions with the AI and it's a better experience for the customers. Like, that was the obvious win. I know at Zapier, you guys did something very different where you covered, you basically did a hackathon, you took a kind of a different approach. I'd love to hear about it, right?

I think so. I think that's a great example of bottoms up. I think AI needs to be some way top down and bottoms up. And I think bottoms up means you have to build it into the culture of your team. And at Zapier, what we did is we had hackathons again where the teams could figure out how to like integrate AI into the work they did. Like Very similar to Kip, we had a hackathon across all teams and marketing developed some really cool stuff. So we've seen in Zapier since that hackathon, over 45% of people within the company are actually automating parts of their job through Zapier and OpenAI and different AI tools and the things that we brought to life. Where I truly believe every go to market is going to have an AI concierge, right? That's going to be with you 24 7. It's going to help you to Sign up to the product on board to the product. It's going to turn every product experience into a touchless experience. This is really an explosion for product led growth where everything becomes centric around the product.

Hold on. I want you to go deeper to this because for folks who don't know, Kieran and I worked together at HubSpot for years. And here works at Zapier, not in CML. I'm seeing mode HubSpot. We have this like endless WhatsApp thread where we just kind of go back and forth on ideas and it's like, oh, cool, have you seen this? Using this? And like once a week one of us will do something, the other person's like, that is fricking amazing. And like, you told me about your concierge idea and I was like, damn it, he is smarter than me. And he figured that out. And I was really, I was like, I was mad for a couple of days. It's like, I don't know why I didn't see that. So, like break down for people like what you're actually doing. Because yes, everybody's going to have a go to market concierge, but like you're building this right now, like, what's actually happening.

So the hardest thing to do really is to get used. Like, I saw a stat before where 50% or 40% of all users sign in to a product and never reuse it again. Why did they do that? Because to get a user to consistently use your product, you have to get them to the value of that product in a short amount of time. And AI concierge can shortcut that route to that value. Right. And so what it actually does is it trains and all your data. It looks to see who are the successful customers and what they did. And that actually can guide you to do those things. And after you sign up, after you activate and become an active user, after you upgrade, after you become a customer, we want to use you, we want to help you use a product more. It can start to actually be your assistant to guide you through that process. The other cool thing is who here enjoys getting outbound email?

Anyone who likes outbound email, man, there's.

Not gonna be one person just for fun. Really?

No.

Okay, we should take a picture of that. Take a picture of this.

All right, so.

So we've been practicing using AI concierge to ingest data and provide our current user base with these kind of really personalized email. We get emails back saying, this is the best email I've ever gotten.

You showed me Some of those icons.

And the AI created those. Right. Incredible. If you know where to integrate AI, there's incredible experiences that you can actually.

Build to tell people, spill some tea. Like, what's the tech back end? Like how. What's the. How's the sausage getting made?

We're using Zapier, we're using OpenAI, and Zapier basically integrates with all of the kind of AI platforms. So we can use Claude, we can use OpenAI, and so we can actually ingest a bunch of data. We have our own product that actually ingests all of our data. Any RSS feed you can give it. So we can build very highly personalized experience through the product combination of the product integrations inclusive of HubSpot. We're a proud and happy HubSpot customer. So that is the next P, but the third P is the one controversial one.

The next thing we're going to talk to everybody about is, I think, fairly.

Controversial, because you do not need to be an AI geek, you do not need to, like, code in AI for us to believe that this trend is going to be incredibly impactful for everyone in this audience and every business in B2B.

All right, so here's the final P is all about personality led growth. One of the things Kieran and I spend a lot of time talking about when you're thinking about kind of predicting the future, you say, what are the principles? What are the underlying things that have changed? And because of those changes, what do we think is going to happen? And so what we said is like, oh, AI is going to create a lot of content. AI is going to make it easier to create content. Because of that, humans are going to create a lot more content with AI. Right. Like that is, that is, like, I don't think, very controversial. And so, all right, humans are going to create more content, but all of that content is going to be derived from these large language models. That's, that's going to keep training on what's out there and it's going to kind of be a seed of sameness. And the way to really create truly differentiated content and build a differentiated brand is through personality. And personality, who creates the content is going to matter even more than what the content is, because you can't have a relationship despite Dharmesh's best hopes and dreams with an AI bot. Right, right. Like you need to.

And that's what I'm going to do.

Okay, hold on. Before I keep going. Garrett has a tennis robot friend. It's named Timmy.

Everyone should get A tennis robot friend. I go to my tennis, he plays.

Tennis with a robot every day.

And everyone is on all the courts and they have their friends and they're having a good time and I'm like pulling my tennis robot down the tennis court.

Sad.

It's really sad. It's so amazing at the same time because it's like consistently it wants to be with me, will play with me. So everyone's getting stuff.

So while you might not be able to have it with a chat bot and player, you could have it with a tennis spot. But the, the point we're trying to make is that who and the personality around those people creating and telling that story are going to matter. And the reason for this is that there, if you look at all the data, 50 million people worldwide consider themselves influencers. Like, I don't know about you, but like, that kind of blew my mind. We were going down this personality led growth angle and I was like, there are that many influencers in the world. I'm just like used to being on Twitter or whatever and seeing a handful. But it's hard to believe across everything there are that many people who like, self identify as influencers and creators. And to me, Kieran, that just points out that we are on the precipice of an entire new generation where the person in the personality are going to matter in this AI monetized world.

Right? Consumer has had its creator moment. There's been, we've seen consumers or creators within the consumer space start companies, start venture firms. We've seen an explosion in the creator economy or products that facilitate those consumers. I think B2B is going to have its creator moment and I think we're going to invest and buy products from a personality led growth brand, where brand is the aggregate of the creators who work within your company. So why do we believe that? First of all, we truly believe it because we are busy and very busy. And you know, sometimes I come on to do the podcast and I'm crying because I don't want to do the podcast.

I literally, I literally WhatsApp Kieran Last, last week and I was like, kieran, what's the deal with the show today? He's like, I need to curl up in a ball and cry.

I did actually say that on a WhatsApp.

I like, I need to cry.

I need to cry.

You're like, this week is horrible. I need to cry. And so I think the point we're making is that there's a lot of people that tell you to do stuff, right? There's very few people that tell you to do stuff and do it themselves. And the point that we're making is like, we have options in life. There are some. We could, we could do some things. We are putting. We spend 15 to 20 hours a week doing this show because we believe one, we believe in the show. But do we believe building these skills are going to be paramount to being successful in the next generation?

Right. And let's just do the quick why we believe this. There's some trends you should care about and then we're going to tell you how to do it. First of all, the cost to acquire a customer has gone up 108% for all of us in this room. Right. It is just harder and more costlier to acquire.

That's in 10 years. In 10 years, the cost to acquire customers more than double.

And so why is that? Well, since 2016, more marketeers, actually 100% more marketeers, less channels. We've actually had left channels to market to. The blur links are going to be a historical artifacts, right?

We're going to, we're going to reminisce of the time of like, remember when we used to scroll, right?

SEO had name links on it and.

We like would click one and we hit back and then we go click.

Back and forth, back and forth.

That error is going away.

We've all used these AI chat. We talked about a chat earlier on. We've all used these products. They're just a much better experience. They more concise, more better formatted. So we believe the blue links is going to be harder for us all to acquire an audience from. I made my career being really good at getting people to click on my link. I think that is going to be harder in the future because a lot of search gets cannibalized. Social platforms want you to be creators. They do not want you to be brands. Everything that they geared towards and set up for is for you to be a creator. They have creator programs. They spend billions on them. They actually want more creators to create content on those platforms. They're also closed walled gardens. Like over time, Google has become a little bit like this where it's hard to get anyone from these places, whole gardens onto their own website. So we believe traditional brand channels are going to be disrupted. Which means there's three types of B2B creators in the future in my mind.

All right, I got the slide on this, so I got you, man.

Got the slide.

All right, let's do it.

Play the slide.

You got it?

I did this Myself in Canva and then the team made it look awesome.

So the team took the slide better. Come on.

I'm also a terrible designer. All right, three types of creators. Before AI, you had the lazy creator, the lazy marketer, the marketer who basically just copies paste things, but not that well. Right. I'm sure we all know those marketers have seen those companies. The copy and paste marketer is how most of us have made our career. Right? We see something that works and we're able to replicate it for our company. The original thinker is the person that everyone else is copying, copying from. Well, in AI and in the AI era, the lazy marketer gets smoked.

The lazy marketer is cooked because AI just does a better job, right? Like just does a drive by.

The copy and paste marketer becomes bigger. But the original thinker, the creator, the B2B creator, is more important than ever. And I think what we should do is talk about how do you do that? How do you be in the B2, how do you be the original thinker in that B2B creator category?

Yeah. Well, first of all, like, why is original thought so important? And the reason it's so important is because with more content, it's easy to have less connection and less emotion. And what I see loud and clear are people who want to connect to other people. Like we're all here at Inbound right now and the best creators know that and are able to build that connection at one to many through these platforms. And what's cool about what you and I have been able to do is we've seen, we've studied the best creators. I spend more time on YouTube than anyone, saying a lot of time. And you should this guy like, I will literally, I will like WhatsApp here and be like, I just watch this video, watch this 30 seconds. This person did an amazing framing of this idea. But it's, it's the studying of not just the idea of being original, but how you package it in a clear and concise and differentiated way.

Right. First, I think first of all, even before that is writing is the most important skill to learn in the post.

AI era, which is very counterintuitive because right now people are like, oh, AI is going to do all the writing for.

Because AI does the copy and paste part really well. It does not do the original thought part very well at all. And what's going to happen is we're going to get an explosion of copy and paste type content. I was actually in many places today and I've heard People actually talking about that. Did you see that content? It was all AI. Was all AI. Was all AI. Original thought is going to be a gold mine. I think if you cannot write and you are in a marketing team of the future, it's going to really stand out.

Right.

So I think writing is number one, a core skill to have. The other thing that I think is a core skill to have if you want to be in that B2B creator category, is you need to have an entrepreneurial mindset to content. Because what happens when you're trying to get really good at content? Boy, do you feel a lot?

Well, no, I feel like I was, I was talking to somebody who's an AA plus content creator. 800 million monthly is on YouTube. AA plus content creator. And one of the things he told me is like, look, what you need to understand is I am ruthless. I look at the data, I have ideas. I have no preciousness about my ideas. Those ideas I ship and I have a three strikes and they're out rule. If I have three, three bad metrics, you know, if the U duration isn't good enough, if the CTR on thumbnail isn't good enough, that idea is done, I kill it and I move on.

Right. It's the art science. And I think the thing that actually helps do this is the AI tools. But the iteration on content really matters. I meet so many people. I actually knew an incredible blogger who is incredibly successful, made a lot of money from writing some blogging and they showed me their Google Analytics chart and like for five years it was like nothing. And that was like. And we had Matt Wolf on the show. Yeah. And that Matt Wolf is a really great AI YouTuber. He has tried to crack YouTube since 2015. 2015. And he finally cracked it 2022. And so he actually had a lot of experience in actually failing a lot within content. The other thing that you talked about is tested iteration. Right. And you have to like bring in the data. Turns out when we were trying to make YouTube work on HubSpot, like thumbnails, like all of these details really matter. We both extract that data and then it's the originality of thought on top of that that truly, truly matters.

Yeah. So one of the ways I would encourage everybody to think about it and why we're so big on personal personality led growth, why we're spending so much of an AI show talking about it, is because it is how you're going to to differentiate long term. And the reason that that's going to happen is because there's just not that many great channels like Kieran and I love two by twos. And one of my favorite two by twos to think of is think about a channel that has high distribution or low distribution which means it's easy to get your message out or it's really hard to get your message out. And then think of it as it's really hard to monetize that attention or it's really easy to monetize that. For example, Google search you if you're good at Google search, you can get. But you can get both audience and monetize that audience. There are very few of them. Right. YouTube and Google are really the game. Short form video, for example. It's really valuable for building a connection. But it's super hard to monetize.

Hard to monetize. It's hard to get subscribers. I think there's limited channels for creator creators. I will call that like LinkedIn is a really great channel. LinkedIn is really good creators. I think it's actually going to only grow in importance, especially if you want to be in that B2B creator mindset. But the other thing is like we have to get out of the middle of. In terms of our point of view. I think we've got to the point in tech where we don't want to say anything that why are we so.

Why. Why are we all so afraid? Why do you think people are so.

Afraid of saying people are mean online? And I think the Dennis people and that's it.

And I'm out of here.

My bone bone.

But no you think that's why I.

I think people just don't want to deal with like incredible. Incredible points of views are incredible because they speak to a certain segment of an audience and they. And then you have another segment of the audience that are huge detractors from that. And I think having a point of view is not as easy as it sounds. It takes deep thought. It takes being able to learn something. It takes being able to like truly understand something. But I do think that we as marketeers and brands need to get back to having points of view. And I think you want to have.

Look, I agree. People want you to tell them the truth. The truth that they may even buy an entire album is in the Billboard Hot 100 now. See wrote songs that are about telling the truth. There's a reason Taylor Swift made a billion dollars on her. I love. I mean like who loves Taylor Swift?

We have a whole podcast coming out tomorrow.

Taylor Swift subscribe marketing, Instagram, YouTube or Wherever your podcast.

Taylor Swift. And I don't know what. I didn't even know. I didn't know one of her songs.

But here was like I don't know what you're talking about. The Taylor Swift thing. I was like, I just went with it because I'm a pro. No, but. But the core issue is people want to be told the truth. And that's part of the essence of a personality. Because we've spent the last 10 years writing a lot of blog content and text, informational content that is informational and. And devoid of who actually wrote it. There is no significance in the person that created that short form video, that blog post. What I am telling you, what you were telling everyone is the who is creating it is going to matter more than ever over the next couple years.

And I want to end yeah on one. I want to know why it's an incredible time to be a marketer. Why this is the best time ever to be a marketer. If you come back to what I said, the the lines between where a marketer hands something over to sales customer success are going to get totally blurred because all of that is going to get much more touchless. Right? AI is going to actually be able to help you buy a product, help you onboard to a product, help you to do customer support. Everything starts with marketing. I think marketing own way more of the customer journey in the future. I think marketing get to own much more of the revenue and the customer in the in the future. I think the AI era is going to be the best time to be a marketeer than ever before. Much better than the art and science. It's going to be an incredible time. I think if you can actually be in the first mover and the first people to really understand this and integrate it, you're going to have an incredible career.

We did a whole episode on how marketing is going to eat the world. Marketing is no better time to be a marketer because you have the automation skills, you can build the AI skills. It's going to be incredible.

I have to get a photo from my mom. Oh, sorry. Can I give Karen one quick round.

Of applause so that Kir, she thinks.

Me and Kev just talk on WhatsApp.

Here, take. Take your picture my friend. Take.