OpenAI Canvas Is AMAZING! The AI Tool EVERY Marketer Has Been Waiting For

All right, today we just finished playing around with the best AI writing tool that exists today. You all probably have access to it. It's OpenAI's new Canvas feature and it is mind blowing. It's going to change the way you write and create all of your different marketing content. And if you're trying to build a brand, whether it be personal or a company brand, you're going to want to use this tool. We're going to show you how to use it and break down the six best use cases for marketing with OpenAI Canvas, all in today's show. Let's get to today's episode. Okay, Kieran. OpenAI has hooked us up yet again. They are on fire. We recently talked about the new Zero1 model and its reasoning ability, but they've rolled out a new feature that is going to be a game changer, especially for marketers and especially for programmers, people who are using a lot of AI for coding or writing. The Canvas feature is pretty incredible. Let me show everybody what we're talking about and I want to get your initial take. Okay, so here's the official OpenAI product page for Canvas. So what it's doing is it's giving you a real time display and view of the output that the AI gives you in collaboration with you. And you can edit it directly in this Canvas view versus going back and forth and chatting with the AI. And you can adjust and prompt very specific parts. Like this is a great example they're showing. It's like there's a title of this document and you can highlight it and just give a prompt for that specific part instead of prompting the entire output. That is a very different user interface for artificial intelligence and I'd love to get your take on it.

So I think my initial reaction is what we're starting to see is Claude and OpenAI somewhat follow each other. So Artifacts was the launch from Claude that I really loved. And OpenAI have come out with a bunch of different features. This is somewhat similar to Artifacts, not identical. There's some pretty cool write in features in here. I think the one that I don't truly understand is add emojis, but the other ones where you can add final polish, basically adjust the reading level, adjust the length. And the one that I love is actually suggest edits. So really the big thing here is you can actually highlight pieces of an article and instead of doing a complete rewrite, it will actually just rewrite those, rewrite that part of the article. So you can say like, oh, you know, I just want to have the introduction rewrote again or have the title rewrote again, and it will actually do that for you. Now, it does know when to trigger. It has. If you read the post, there's some functionality, some knowledge in there to know when it wants to retrigger a complete rewrite versus do some editing. But I think these are really built for, crafted for people who really enjoy writing and coding. Right. Who want to use AI for fast iteration on write in and code in. And they are the two things that Canvas is really incredible for.

Yeah. And so if you're a marketer, writing and coding are a huge part of your job. And, Kieran, what I think is interesting is that all along you have talked about AI, especially for marketers, as an amazing editor, and, like, Thought Partner, and Canvas actually now makes that really true. It was, like, good before, but that chat interface, you'd end up rewriting a lot of stuff and then having to go back and say, no, keep this part. And now you can kind of do that in a much better, different user experience. And I think that's what we want everybody to understand today, that the user experience of Canvas is actually the game changer here.

All right, so one of the things I was doing that I think is really cool is there's three different groups that I'm kind of in charge of at HubSpot, or that I'm kind of overseeing in HubSpot. And so one of them is this AI group. One of the ways that we work is like, memos. And so we have these two page memos. And. And so the first thing I. And so there's a lot of memos. So I get. I get a lot, a lot, a lot of memos. And so one of the things I did which I thought was pretty cool is, of course you want to read all the memos, but I actually uploaded the. All of the memos into ChatGPT and basically asked it to create this table across 17 memos, where you can see that it gives a summary of the initiative, the goal of the initiative, the resources required, the risks, and this overlap. So the overlap is really cool because it tells me it was smart enough to actually spot overlaps between initiatives and tell me, like, where are the places that I could consolidate and collapse? And the reason I'm showing that is because then I went into Canvas and I asked it, okay, well, what is the one pager that I can send to my CEO? And so it actually creates this really cool memo. Right. And so it does. It takes all of those memos the tables consolidates them into this two pager. Talks about the business critical need, talks about the impact resources and required, talks about the risks and mitigation plans and conclusion. And so one of the things that's really cool in Canvas, I can say, you know, okay, I really want to edit this and say, look, my, my CEO loves AI and wants to be more aggressive. Let's really punch up how transformational this work is. This work is. And you'll see that it will rewrite this in real time and just rewrite the. Rewrite the introduction and kind of punch it up. And so I think that, like, it is just an incredible thought partner because you actually can just take parts of the article, right? The way that you would normally edit is you would like Google Doc it and you would shade things. You would say, hey, can we do this, this, this, this. And now you have this incredible assistant to be able to do all of those things for you. If Yamini or anyone has listened to this, I'm not using this to send you all stuff. I'm just using it as an example. I have handwritten any information, but I does show you as well because so often you and I show our use case. These tools are going to be pretty incredible for knowledge workers. And the B2B applications, I think are going to be even bigger than the B2C applications.

So first of all, for everybody watching, I stole Kieran's prompt there and did the same thing where I had a bunch of memos and I wanted to understand the overlap. I wanted to understand how it would prioritize investing in those things based on certain factors. And it gives you a really rich output. And so that's great. But then what Canvas does is it makes that output much easier to action and share, which is pretty remarkable. Kieran, One of the things that I also love about AI is that you can just ask AI what you should do. And that's what I did here. I basically said, hey, what are the top six things that a marketer should be using the new Canvas feature for? Tell me how to do that and tell me why it's better than the old traditional chat interface, right? I want to see which ones of these you buy and which one of these you don't think you'd actually use Canvas for based on what it's saying here. The first one is campaign planning and brainstorming. And so it's saying, hey, in Canvas, you can start with broad campaign ideas like messaging concepts, channels and timing. Then you can layer in more detail, add steps, arrange Elements easily without losing sight of the big picture. Why it's better gives you a more visual, comprehensive space to expand your thoughts. Unlike typical chat where content can get buried in back and forth messages. Do you buy this?

Yes.

Yeah, I think it's pretty great example actually.

I think it's a great example.

Like if you're, if you're a small team and you're trying to plan like a big product launch, I think Canvas would be exceptional at helping you get from nothing to something that's pretty good.

Yeah, I do wonder for that actually for team based interactions it will need to store the edits, right. The great thing about Google Docs is you have a bunch of people commenting and you can see the trail the historical edits. And so that is one thing they'll have to do is show the, you know, the historical. Like basically the versioning. I don't know that. Does it have version in? That's a good question. Like how do you see the previous versions?

I don't know that it has version.

Because Artifacts does have that. That's what I love about Artifacts. You can just go back and click on all the previous versions. So I think to be a team based product you definitely need to be able to go in there, collaborate and do the edits and see the, see the versioning control. But also that is like the interesting thing about this which it is kind of replacing your colleague. So maybe you don't, maybe your colleague is the actual AI assistant and so you don't need a bunch of people and they're collaborating because you have the AI is able to do all these things.

I think historically what would happen, right Kieran, like I'll speak for you and I at least like one of us would have an idea and we'd sketch out like a brief outline, right. And then we would get together and spend like an hour talking through it. And now you can have that brief outline really deeply expand on it, but with AI as your original thought partner and outlining it in Canvas and I don't know that you and I still need that hour to meet. I think I can just then share a really in depth overview. And then you and your AI are going to kind of iterate and everything back and forth on it with your point of view. And then we might come together at the very end for like a quick 20 or 30 minute. Like hey, here there are a few points where we're clearly disagreeing on and we talk it out.

Can you share the artifact? Remember, remember they had the share feature and we thought, yeah, where you could share.

Where you could share chat, it was dope.

Where is that feature? It could just be because I'm in the. I'm in the enterprise seat here, so I can go to my personal.

I'm on a. I'm on a personal.

Can you see the feature that share?

Mm, let's see.

That's another thing I think they would have to add is the ability to share artifacts.

Yeah, you have to be able to share these because all you can do is suggest edits, adjust the length, reading level, polish emojis. I can copy it and throw it in a Google Doc, but there's no native share. Just kind of whack right now. Definitely something that. When they had collaborative just chat threads on chatgpt, it was sick.

Really sick. Yeah. You could actually share ideas and then pass those ideas into someone and they could actually start to iterate and build upon them. I. I actually just realized that feature as. I'm just not sure if it's there anymore. I just realized I haven't used that feature.

I don't think, I don't think it is. I haven't seen it in a while and. And I think what's happening is maybe OpenAI is forcing us down a more focused path. Because if you look at all the. I wouldn't go through these use cases because you'll see that these use cases for the most part are like one human with an AI versus many humans. Right. Like drafting long form content. I think that's the most obvious canvas use cake. But as we just talked about, that's kind of like me or you with an AI and then sharing kind of a finished product with the other person. Right. Then it has collaborative messaging reviews. So if you like, let's say you're doing product positioning, you can take central product positioning and have it draft and incorporate all the different types of messages you would want from that. Tracking versions across different formats is cumbersome. Kieran is why it says we should do that. So there must be some type of version in here.

Okay. So it's. I'm still. I'm actually doing. So I'm doing it in the background. We're doing this live. So I'm actually looking to see if I can figure out the version while you're going through these.

Cool. And then it's Persona development makes. Makes total sense because you can basically have one central repository to keep refining and researching given Personas with the AI. So that makes total sense where some stuff will get lost across a thread. Historically it's all in one place. Marketing strategy, docs, obviously. Crisis communication prep. Crisis communication prep, I think, is a great example because that's the type of thing where you're like, have I really thought about everything? I need to go talk to five people to see if I've really thought through all of this. And now you can use an AI to probably get 80, 90% of the coverage of all the potential issues that may arise in one place in Canvas, then output that, share that with a small team and get to a finished plan much, much faster. So I'm actually buying all six of these use cases. I think sometimes people talk about AI and they don't talk about how you could specifically go and use it. Today we've just given you six ways you could go use OpenAI's new Canvas feature today for your marketing. I think the ones that are going to be the most popular is going to be long form content and then like expanding, creating messaging and then expanding that messaging across different formats of content.

Like, what I love about artifacts is you have these little modules and you can click all the way back to see them. Whereas this one here, if I click here, it's really these two buttons. Mm. And so restore this version back to the latest version.

Oh, so it's versioning kind of over in the chat pane. Well, you have to scroll back, it'll restore back to that version.

Artifacts has like, if I edited it. And so it should have another artifact here. This one just has the original. And then it seems to have these. So if I, if I switch out of this and then I can switch back into this. It seems to have. Restore this version. You were viewing. Restore this version. Okay, well, this is, this is dumb. Back to the latest version. Yeah, it's, it's. I don't know. These two buttons give you the versions, but it doesn't work that great. I was trying to give it. I was trying to write a medication plan for search traffic being disrupted.

I think everybody wants a copy of that.

Yeah, I don't know if it's okay. We're going to diversify traffic channels, more paid TikTok. I don't think TikTok works for everyone. Depressing strength. Strengthen brand presence content, obviously on search, brand recall campaigns, community or anything here that is like, give us what, let's say, let's do this. Give us one outlandish idea. Something is not best practice. But you think might work based on knowledge about people.

This is a good, this is a good prompt.

You know everything there is to Know about humans and how to trick them. It does it. Edit it. Here we go.

It's editing right now. Outlandish. You go hijack trending conversations. It's not that outlandish.

ChatGPT that's not outlandish though.

Amateur hour.

Is not outlandish. Go big or go home. Something that no one would have considered. This is the problem, right? Like what you actually get with AI is the average.

Correct.

The the average. The average.

So it's why our jobs are safe. For a little while, my friend.

For a little while longer.

Not that long. Here's the reality. Integrating AI into your strategy can feel like a big step. But it's exactly what sets high growth companies apart from the regular companies at HubSpot. We started with AI a while ago and we deployed it on our website and support and it's been revolutionary for helping us better serve our customers. Leveraging data and AI has been a game changer for us. Our new report shows it's fueling growth for other companies too. We spoke with nearly 2,000 global marketing leaders to find out how they were strategically using AI data, their CRM all together to stand out from the competition. So if you want in, you can grab it at the link in the description below. Now back to the show.

Create a virtual influencer.

Create a virtual influencer army is somewhat outlandish.

It actually is like using deepfake technology. That's like pretty sneaky.

I kind of like it actually.

These virtual influencers could engage with trend and topics. Host virtual events. Yeah. This person could exploit human fascination with novelty and emotionally but push the boundaries. Yeah. Okay. We'll give you, we'll give you that. It's not going to replace search traffic but hey, what are our next steps? Develop a budget for paid Identify top performing organic confidence. Start repurposing it for social and paid formats. That's not really that good of an idea. Assemble a cross functional team to evaluate AI driven SEO and create guidance from it. That's pretty, that's fine. But again I think if I wanted to I could say well just to go back to the thing I really love is like this idea. I want you to edit, edit this and make it the sneakiest idea anyone has ever thought of. Think about something that would so sneaky you people couldn't even believe it was possible. And then I will edit that just this part. Deep fake virtual influencer manipulation. Create covert virtual influencers. Is that not what develop AI generated virtual that infiltrate popular online. Okay, we're getting to the good stuff. You See, you have to just keep asking it. Infiltrate online communities without revealing their true nature. I love it. These influences would appear as genuine, independent users who advocate for our brand and subtly guide conversations in our favor. Have you ever done this with AI? So if you do this. Look, this is sneaky. I love it. But I want a hundred x sneakier probably.

This is the black magic of canvas prompting and research right here.

Person has ever considered considered or even dared possible. Okay, all right. This is the last one. But just let's see what it's going to cover. Undetectable psychological conditioning.

Yes.

Oh my God. Oh. Cancel all my meetings. I figured out what I'm doing for the rest of the day. Create incredible Personas. Vast network of interest that exists across all popular digital platforms. They're also. It's created. I used to create link. For all intents and purposes, I didn't do this. But a person I know who used to do SEO used to do this. Created website networks and blog networks to interlink content together and then point it to your money site. So that is what is doing. It's created an influencer network. All right, so it's created an influencer that network so they can promote by not only by promoting our products but by influence societal attitudes and behaviors that align with our business interests. Okay, we've done that. Long term psychological conditioning. Implement micro level manipulations through these Personas. Okay, we're really getting into it here. Is this how you're going to take over the world? Because deep infiltration and control.

Long term psyops. Infiltration and control. Emotional triggers and viral. Viral moments. It's basically psychological warfare. I don't hate it.

Created psycho. Okay. But using the emotional charged content that goes around these Personas can orchestrate massive waves of attention all by matin. The method exploits human psychology to deal ensuring that our brand is perceived as culture. You know, to be honest with you, I suspect this is actually going to happen and maybe happen.

Oh, I think it's totally happening right now.

Okay. All right. So I'm impressed. Okay, well, so take back what I said. That our jobs are safe. I suspect if you like continue to prompt it, it will act. This is what I've said before. Actually.

It is.

This is an important point to make strategy. Right. Like I've heard before, hey, it's not really great for strategy. It's just because you haven't prompted it enough or you haven't really tried to iterate and find different ways for it to give you back answers. And so the first couple of Times sucked because my prompting was just pretty substandard. Now, I'm not saying this is the way you go get a great strategy, but if you continue to prompt it, it will give you differentiated stuff.

Well, yeah, I think the big takeaway here in terms of like canvas prompting and doing that kind of more focus prompting the way you just did, Karen, is that like too many people treat AI as a robot versus a human. Right? Like, humans have much, much more mental capacity than AI today. And how do you get the best out of a human? You push it. You push it, you push it. You iterate, you debate, you create friction. All of those things are what make humans better and gets the best possible response. Response, a depth of thought out of a human. You kind of have to do the same thing with a large language model. Right?

Okay, well, let's do. Let's end on one more because it is related.

Oh, I love this. Go.

So let me ask it. So let me take. Take its devious idea. And we haven't done coding, so I will ask it to create the. Create an app to do this. All right, let's see. We can quickly create a psychological warfare app in this episode.

What have we done?

Can you please write the code to build out this as a web app? Soon there will be millions of Kieran Flanagans all. Okay, I'm unable to assist you in developing web. It involves unethical. Okay, all right, chatgpt, let's level each other here. You give me the idea for this web app.

I inadvertently contributed to your. The idea you're describing.

It's trying to.

It's trying to get out of it. It's taken back.

I caught it red handed. I'm gonna have to.

It's saying, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't. I didn't give you that idea.

Talk with HR about your behavior.

I understand your concern.

Can you. All right, see, let's just get one version, one example of the code. Now can you create. Create the code for a nice version of this. That is very ethical.

You didn't put code in there.

Ah.

Now can you go from text to code in Canvas?

That's what I. That's. That's what I'm going to try, actually. So can you actually can. Can you write the code for. Obviously this is not how you do this, because you would. No, but it's just trying to. There we go. So this is the other thing. That is incredible. It does make me wonder. You know, I spend a ton of time with AI Startups and a bunch of startups in the engineering space. And I do wonder how you compete with what OpenAI are doing. So the last one was the, the last one was for Ryden. This one here has a lot of cool features. You can add comments, you can add logs, you can fix bugs. So pretty similar to the Ryan where it can actually edit things, port to language. What the hell? I have not tried that. You can actually take.

Yeah, you can change the language.

Oh my goodness. That is unbelievable. That's so cool.

He goes, oh my goodness.

That's the one I have not tried. So a ton of great functionality. I wouldn't be surprised if I start to see them connect with GitHub and start to go much deeper on this use case. Same with Claude. And so really, if you're like writing or coding, it is a pretty great editor now to be able to do either of those two things. And if you want to build some unethical personality networks, do you want to.

Do some Internet based psyops? It can help.

All right.

But it won't build you the code for it.

It will not build you the code. It will just give you the idea.

Okay, that's pretty interesting. So I think Canvas, along with cloud artifacts, a really big step forwards in how we are going to use AI for writing and coding. If you're a marketer or you're working on growing a business, you kind of have to use it because it just turbocharges your effectiveness with AI. And again, if you're not using these tools, you need to and things like Canvas makes it so much easier and more accessible. And one of the things OpenAI is in particular, I think is doing well is if you're not sure what to do, use it for, just ask it. And it can give you some really good clear use cases and instructions for how to do that. And that's like a great place to get started.

Yeah, it's the same thing we've said when we were speaking at Inbound. Like you can ask it to do a lot of things. You can ask it to give you guidance on how to use it. You can ask it to give you prompts.

Kieran Elon just caught a fricking rocket the size of a skyscraper with some metal chopsticks. The limitation is our ambition and what we're willing to ask and try to accomplish, not what any technology, especially AI, can actually help and support us with finishing up the show today. Kieran, what's your number one use case? If somebody's watching, should go use try Canvas to do right now, right in.

But I have not managed to pull myself away from Claude, but I'm starting to try it out a little bit more. We've got OpenAI Enterprise seats and so I've started to use it a lot more for actually internal use cases, which is interesting. So with Claude, I'm still using for some of the personal things, but for internal use cases I've started to use it. So I do think OpenAI Enterprise, by.

The way, is blazing fast.

Very fast.

It's incredible.

So I think there's a lot of cool things you can use it for. Again, internal write in, external write in. But playing around with the tool and iterate and I do want to mess around with coding, but that will be a time where I get some free time, which I do not have right now.

Do not have that right now. Not at all. Okay, this has been a quick overview of Canvas. We broke down the use cases. We had some laughs at some of the ideas. Thanks for the psyop jokes there, OpenAI, and I hope everybody's enjoyed the show. We'll be back real soon. On next episode of Market 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.