Welcome to Artificially Intelligent Marketing, a weekly podcast where we stay on top of the
latest trends, tips and tools in the world of marketing AI, helping you get the best
results from your marketing efforts.
Now let's join our hosts, Paul Avery and Martin Broadhurst.
Welcome to episode 25 of Artificially Intelligent Marketing.
Paul Avery here and this time I'm not joined by my colleague Martin Broadhurst because
he is on tour at Inbound 2023 HubSpots marketing conference.
And we'll hear from Martin at the end of the show as he tells us what he feels were his
top takeaways, lots of generative AI in there.
And we've also got a few interviews that Martin was able to record while on site at the show.
So with us picking up from Martin later on, it's my job today to take you briefly through
the AI news that we saw this week.
And we're going to start with Slack.
So Slack is introducing a new AI tool designed to help users navigate the workspace of Slack
more efficiently.
The tool is going to be called Slack AI and it's going to be tested this winter and it's
going to offer features like summarizing threads and recapping channel highlights.
It also brings a more advanced search function that effectively allows users to ask questions
in natural language questions and then the tool is going to provide a summary against
those questions and then links to any relevant conversations from Slack.
In addition to launching Slack AI, Slack is also going to launch Slack Lists, which is
a feature to help users track projects and tasks within their team.
A little bit like what you'll see if you're using project management apps like Asana or
if you're used to using database apps like Airtable.
Slack is also enhancing its integration capabilities with a new workflow builder where the aim
is to simplify the addition of third party apps into your Slack ecosystem.
So this news comes as a follow up to previous efforts by Slack to leverage AI with the introduction
of their chat QPT bot for assisting in things like message replies.
And so ultimately this is the ongoing evolution of Slack as a tool baking AI to try and make
things easier for its users.
If you're a marketer in a marketing team that uses Slack, then hopefully these new features
are going to make it easier for your team to collaborate.
Certainly the ability to access summarized conversations is going to aid in more efficient
communication and those Slack Lists may help you better with project management.
So I think this is one of those things that if you're a Slack user, jump on in, have a
little play once we start to see this emerge at the back end of this year and see if it
improves your experience.
Is it worth adopting Slack because of this new tool?
My suggestion would probably be not.
But of course Slack has a number of other benefits and if you were considering the tool,
then this might be the one that nudged you over and made you think, oh yeah, we'll give
that one a go.
So moving on from Slack, now we're going to talk a bit about Anthropic.
So we've talked a fair bit about Anthropic on the podcast in the past.
They are the developers of the Afflord Chatbot, which is a competitor to ChatGPT.
And in essence, what Anthropic have done is roll out a pay plan for Claw 2, which is going
to be available in the US and the UK to start with.
Now though, people who've listened to the podcast know that there's a few things that
we love about Claw 2 compared to ChatGPT.
So for example, Claw 2 has a much larger context window of up to around 75,000 words.
So there's lots of cool stuff that you can do with it that's much easier than with ChatGPT,
like having it summarize large documents.
It also produces its outputs nice and quickly and Claw 2, since it was released, has shown
that it's much better at more complex reasoning.
A couple of episodes ago, Martin went so far as to say that it's actually now part of his
go-to workflow.
So as a power user, he's probably going to need this new Clawed Pro plan because it's
going to offer five times more usage than just the free part at a monthly fee of $20.
So in essence, if you pay for Clawed Pro, you're going to be able to use it a lot more
without maxing out your capacity within the tool.
You're also going to get priority during peak times and Anthropic promises early access
to upcoming features.
So it's quite interesting to see this from Anthropic with them positioning this premium
offering of Claw 2 is basically them competing pretty much directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT+,
which is the paid version.
So this is quite interesting to see.
I think as marketers, the introduction of Claw Pro is part of this wider battle of the
bots, right?
So the key question remains, will Claw 2 carve out its niche in a market where ChatGPT+,
already has a major stronghold?
We've also talked in the past about the release of Google Duet.
So having generative AI tools baked into Gmail, Google Slides, Google Sheets, et cetera.
And there are a number of companies currently testing Windows Copilot and Office 365 Copilot.
And that should be released fairly soon to the rest of us as well.
And of course, that brings generative AI into the tools that people use every day like PowerPoint,
Word, Gmail, Sheets, and all of that good stuff.
So this is just another story in the rapidly evolving space of generative AI tools for
brainstorming, reasoning, content creation, et cetera.
And I think as a marketer, it's just about staying on top of all these different news
items so that you can get a feel for what the landscape looks like, what tools might
be best for different applications and use cases, and just the types of pricing as well.
Because I think seeing the price of Claw 2 be similar to ChatGPT is not a surprise.
And in many ways, maybe ChatGPT+, has set the bar there for what people are happy to
play or pay in order to access these tools.
And we may see others follow suit there.
The next story is about Microsoft.
And according to the AI newsletter, the neuromaniac of our favorite newsletters, Microsoft has
stated that they'll shoulder any legal expenses if your business encounters legal challenges
from using their AI offerings.
If this sounds a bit familiar to you, then that's probably not a surprise because Adobe
has made a comparable commitment in the past for its AI tool Firefly.
So the backdrop here is that a number of AI companies, including Mid Journey, GitHub Copilot,
OpenAI, have all faced legal actions for allegedly utilizing creative content to train their
models without proper permissions.
And as you might expect, the scenarios made some businesses hesitant to use the tools
because of any potential issues that they then may find themselves in if they're using
them.
But when you see Microsoft make a move like this, it's another interesting attempt to
really give customers confidence that they can trust the tools that they're using, not
just in terms of how the tools were trained, but also in terms of what data that you give
them and how much you can trust the information that you're being put in won't be used to
further train the models or for other purposes that you haven't signed up to.
And ultimately, these types of moves are mostly, I think, targeted at large enterprise customers
who might not have had confidence to step in and use tools like ChatGPT and other tools.
I think with the release of ChatGPT Enterprise and now Microsoft promising to cover legal
costs if you get into hot water, the generative AI battle is on to attract high value enterprise
customers.
If you work at one of those sort of larger companies or maybe more risk averse companies
and you've been itching to get your hands on these types of generative AI tools at work,
then your wait might soon be over.
Next we're talking Zoom and the popular digital video meeting and webinar software.
And Zoom has rolled out its AI companion.
So the new assistant previously known as Zoom IQ offers a range of functionalities that
include things like if you're late to a meeting, it will provide you a quick written recap.
It's very good at summarizing meetings, pinpointing key discussions and outlining actionable next
steps.
And it can even assist users in crafting chat responses in the Zoom chat tool.
And there's more that Zoom promises will be coming to the tool because it promises that
at some point it will aid in drafting emails, offer chat message summaries, recognize meeting
intents in chat conversations and even support brainstorming on a digital whiteboard.
Coolest part about all of this is that Zoom is going to opt for this to paid subscribers
with no additional charge.
This is fairly awesome.
I'm a user of Loom.
I love Loom for screen recordings and they've been beta testing AI driven title creation,
chapters for videos, video summaries.
And I found it pretty useful.
It's a bit hit and miss.
I think it gets things wrong.
And I thought this was a really nice addition to the tool that I really, it's kind of cool.
I think it's a bit buggy so that I'm not entirely sure I'd trust it commercially.
But then Loom said this week or last week that you now need to pay if you want to access
Loom AI.
And I understand, right?
It costs money to access AI driven tools and these companies have to make that money back
somewhere but I think it's very, very interesting that Loom are looking to charge users.
I certainly won't be paying for the AI tool.
Honestly, I don't think it's worth the extra money.
But Zoom is saying you will have it for free.
We talked a little bit earlier about ChatGPT and Claude Pro sort of setting a market expectation
of paying $20 a month for that type of generative AI experience.
If Zoom are going to offer AI driven tools as part of their existing subscriptions without
increasing their subscription fee, which of course there's no guarantees that won't come
later down the line.
But if that was the case, it would be a very interesting pricing bar to set that if you're
a meeting tool like Teams, Google Me, then for the meeting driven benefits on their own,
you probably can't afford to charge much extra because people can get that cool AI wizardry
within Zoom as part of their existing subscriptions.
If you're a marketer and you use Zoom either for webinars or for your internal meetings,
then of course all of the features and benefits that we've discussed in this particular news
story so far will be a benefit to you.
And if you're already using additional paid tools like Otter or Tacti to record meeting
transcriptions and generate AI driven summaries, it might be possible that you can just go
all in on Zoom and drop some of those other tools you've been using.
So again, another very interesting space to watch.
The next story is about Sprigg.
Now Sprigg is known for its in-app surveys and Sprigg has launched a new feature named
AI Analysis for Surveys.
So this tool uses generative AI to delve into survey data and offer immediate insights.
What sets it apart is its ability to turn survey data into a conversational AI interface.
So in effect what you can do is you can directly ask your survey results questions in a natural
language chatbot style way and the AI will sift through the data including qualitative
responses so long form text responses potentially to provide relevant insights.
Ryan Glasgow, which is Sprigg's CEO, highlighted that users can pose custom questions to their
survey data and the AI will analyze the entirety of the responses to provide answers and in
a move to make their tools more accessible, Sprigg has broadened its free plan now encompassing
in-product surveys, session replays and open text AI analysis.
So if you do lots of surveys, either for bus to repair market research, messaging creation,
customer analysis, I think it's probably worth going and have a little look at what Sprigg
are doing because you might find that this new AI driven analysis tool is beneficial
for you.
Especially given that traditional survey analysis can be quite labor intensive, especially if
you are using surveys that have those open-ended text answers, it would be interesting to see
if when you're playing with Sprigg's AI analysis for surveys, if you can really pull out insights
and trends for that information that you then double check manually and just see how good
the AI is because if it's good, could really change how market research is done, how customer
sentiment analysis is done.
And of course, if we're seeing this type of thing being released by Sprigg, then expect
to see it perhaps in other tools like Typeform or SurveyMonkey or other other tools that
you can use for market research.
I know I've not used Sprigg before, but I think I'm going to go and explore that and
see how powerful it is.
So the next story is not strictly a marketing story, but it was just too cool to not include
and it's from Amazon.
So this week, Amazon introduced a new technology called Amazon One, allowing customers to
use their palm for activities like payments, loyalty card presentation, and page verification.
Create the system, Amazon utilized generative AI to produce millions of synthetic palm images,
a method known as synthetic data.
And this approach enabled Amazon to train their model effectively, achieving near 100%
accuracy.
So in essence, you can imagine going into a shop and you don't need your card, you don't
need your phone, you don't need your watch, you just hold your palm above a scanner and
that's how you pay.
So you go out pretty much with nothing and you can still pay just using your palm.
Amazon has interestingly emphasized the system's privacy features.
So Amazon One operates beyond the usual light spectrum, so it can't recognize things like
gender or skin tone.
And the primary purpose, Amazon says, is to match a unique identity with a payment method,
not to be able to identify individuals in any way outside of that, you know, asterisk,
asterisk.
So I can see that there might be possible privacy issues here, whether this technology
actually takes off or not is going to be an interesting one.
There's lots of companies working on the power of things like retinal scans to provide this
same sort of capability.
But obviously having your retina scanned is potentially a bit more technically challenging
and also not a great user experience compared to just waving your palm over something.
So yeah, not technically a marketing story, but wanted to include this week because it
sounded really cool.
Next story is that you can now access a new Canva plugin if you are a ChatGPT Plus user,
which makes it simpler to create visuals such as logos and social media banners.
Now before this integration, to combine the powers of Canva and ChatGPT was a bit of a
task and with the plugin, it's a bit more straightforward.
How it works is you go into ChatGPT, you go to the plugin store, you install the Canva
plugin and then you select it when you are adding your prompt.
You describe the visual you want in the chat box, prompt box, and then ChatGPT will present
some design options to you, which in my experience playing with the tool has been based on Canva's
existing templates.
You choose one and then you'll be redirected to Canva to go make the edits that you need
to make and then you can download your Fav Canva.
As this is a plugin, you can obviously only access it if you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber
at $20 a month because you don't get plugin access with the free version of ChatGPT.
What does this mean for marketers?
Well, it could potentially streamline your ChatGPT Canva design process.
So you could probably end up with slightly faster production workflows, although I have
to say in my quick tests, it mostly acted like a smart search for finding good templates
among all the options available.
And let's be honest, Canva does have huge amounts of templates and it's sometimes a
bit for paying searching or scrolling through them looking for a good one.
But in essence, you use ChatGPT, you say, look, I needed templates going to be perfect
for this use case.
And then it surfaces three for you to choose from.
And if you don't like them, then you can ask it to show you some more and you can give
some direction on, oh no, these were a bit too much like A and what I was really looking
for was B.
So I think it may be, at least in my early tests, looks like a fairly powerful quick
search for Canva templates.
But certainly I couldn't get it to do anything really interesting, like starting to influence
the design from within ChatGPT.
I had to go edit the template directly in Canva.
So kind of cool, maybe not quite as exciting as it sounds on the surface.
Right.
The last story this week is about Gizmodo.
So Gizmodo is a tech publication that's owned by Geo Media.
And this week, Geo Media has decided to lay off the editors in its Spanish language site,
Gizmodo en Espanol.
In place of the human editors, they're now leaning on AI to handle translations.
So before this change, Gizmodo en Espanol had a dedicated team producing original content
and also adapting English articles for their Spanish readers.
But now articles on the site carry a disclaimer indicating that they've been translated by
AI, which might need to dislike content variations.
So in essence, no custom content is being created for the Spanish readers now.
It's all being translated directly from any English content that's being created by those
teams within Gizmodo.
As you can imagine, in the early days of why we figure out these tools, it hasn't gone
flawlessly.
There's been some hiccups.
So some readers have noticed that articles can start in Spanish and then unexpectedly
switch to English.
And it's also worth noting that Geo Media's initial foray into AI written articles in
July encountered issues with factual inaccuracies.
So a lot of the issues that we know with generative AI very much front and center here.
The GMG Union, which represents the writers, as you would imagine, avoids their concerns
over this move.
They highter that Geo Media has previously suggested that AI would complement human writers,
not replace them.
The Union also pointed out the uncertain future faced by the site's employees.
So what does this mean for us as marketers?
Well, of course, there's multiple levels here.
Gizmodo is not the first publication to explore or use generative AI to produce content.
Most of the examples we get to hear about in the news are usually when it goes wrong
for obvious reasons, but certainly we do know that other publications have been doing some
of this and I suspect many more are.
But I think what's really interesting for us as marketers is that this is another sign
of that changing media landscape.
So if you're a PR professional, for example, we're really going to have to think about
how we adapt to a world where your press releases and pitches might be read and translated by
AI before they even reach the human journalist, if indeed they ever do.
And then the precision of the language that they're using in our press releases, etc.,
becomes paramount, right?
Because any ambiguity or cultural nuance might be lost or misinterpreted by an AI tool, which
could lead to miscommunication or missed opportunities.
So I think that's just a risk for the publications, but it's also a risk for us.
Secondly, building relationships is at the heart of PR.
If we're seeing fewer human editors that are themselves being replaced, sadly, in some
cases by AI, then the traditional approach of cultivating relationships with journalists
and editors is both much more important because you really need to identify those high-profile
journalists and editors in your industry that have such a powerful voice that it would be
folly for their publications to try and replace them with AI and build strong relationships
with those people.
But we also need to understand how the media are using technology probably more than ever
before.
And I think one thing's for sure, the more publications lean into AI-generated content,
we might see that their appetite for things like contributed editorial from companies
or even our press releases that we send them, it could reduce over time, right?
Because they might not need to rely on those interactions with companies as much as they
can just leverage generative AI to produce content.
Of course, we can have a very long conversation about how good that AI-generated content is
going to be.
But if that ability for us to add value to the publishers through contributed editorial
is lessened, we may see that earned media opportunities dry up even more and are replaced
by pay-for-play or pay-for-appearance opportunities instead.
So I think there's a layer underneath all of this, whereas a marketer or a communicator
is a PR pro especially, we have to look at what's going on in the media and really think
how is this going to really impact on our approach to PR and media relations.
So that's all the stories for this week.
Martin's going to be back in the UK.
In fact, I think he's landing about now and he'll be with me again on the podcast next
week.
So with that being said, we're going to segue into learning a little bit more about what
Martin found out in Bound 23 in Boston this week.
Hello, everyone.
This is Martin coming to you from Boston, where I've just attended the HubSpot conference
in Bound 23.
This was a conference packed full of AI right from the get-go, to be honest.
Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot, opened with a keynote that really set the tone for
what we could expect.
Yamini honed in on the major tech changes, particularly generative AI, entering the picture
in a big way over the past year.
And she claims that we're stepping into an age of intelligence where AI isn't just data
crunching anymore.
Instead, AI is about generating new content, new insights, and importantly for an organization
like HubSpot and its customers, new experiences.
For businesses that get this right, the rewards are massive.
She spoke about some research they'd done at HubSpot, which identified the fastest growing
companies and what made them different.
And it was companies that were generating the best customer connections.
She said they're growing five times faster than their competitors.
Her advice was to start small, but act fast.
Some practical tips that she gave were to get chatbots added onto the website.
If you can get AI-powered chatbots resolving customer queries, it can make a big impact,
so much so that HubSpot's own AI-powered chatbot is now successfully resolving 78% questions
it receives automatically.
She also recommended that you pivot your content strategy.
So she's talking about creating more content and more experiences with AI helping the distribution,
but not necessarily just the generation.
You need human expertise, podcasts, video content, audio content, with AI assisting
the production, but not the sole driver of it.
Let's just switch gears slightly and have a look at what Dharmesh Shah, who was one
of the co-founders of HubSpot, I think he's the chief technical officer still.
This is a guy that fell in love with generative AI very early on.
In fact, he said that he even had some intriguing conversations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
when GPT-3 launched and he managed to get early access to the model.
Another interesting tidbit he said was that he's an early investor in OpenAI.
I'm sure that's going to pay dividends for him personally.
He highlighted the McKinsey report that said that generative AI is poised to add between
2.6 trillion to 4 trillion annually across all sectors and that report highlighted sales,
marketing, and customer service as being the business functions where generative AI will
make the biggest impact.
As HubSpot has sales, marketing, and customer service hubs in its core offering, you can
see why they might be excited about this.
So Darmesh urged everyone to get their hands on next-gen CRMs that are full of rich data
but driven by AI.
Getting these insights pulled out of the data so that you're able to deliver better customer
experiences.
They think of it as AI and data on steroids working on tandem with human skills, whether
it's sales reps, marketers, or customer support reps delivering highly personalized experiences
for the customers.
Now let's get into some of the nitty gritty on the actual product updates that HubSpot
is rolling out.
If you are a HubSpot customer, there are some really exciting developments here.
The first thing I want to say is that HubSpot AI is being baked into everything.
It's not just a sprinkling of AI here and there.
This is a full-on integration of AI across the HubSpot product line.
I think we saw that from the roadmap that they had published on the website.
Everything from understanding customer content, company data, it's promising to bring forward
new levels of automation to the system.
So back to what Yaroni said earlier, she was talking about bringing chat bots onto your
website.
These are the tools that they're bringing forward.
They're also doing prediction models and we should see in the future, virtual agents working
seamlessly to make your life as a marketer or a sales rep or whatever your role may be
a little bit easier.
So getting into the specifics of it, they've announced a content assistant image creation
tool.
So the content assistant already existed.
You could sign up and get it in beta.
But now they've added image creation to this.
I think it's running on Dali, but I'm not entirely sure that they didn't or at least
I didn't hear the specifics as to which model they were actually using.
So I mentioned content assistant.
They've also launched campaign assistant so you can input your goals, your audience and
your brand voice and then let AI whip up the whole marketing campaign, which is kind of
accurate but not wholly.
Right now it doesn't automatically generate all of the assets, but in discussions that
I had with the product team, it seems like the longer term vision is to have AI agents
actually doing this autonomously for you.
That is a very exciting project.
Imagine AI building whole campaigns for you based on data and insights it has all autonomously
gathered from your CRM and customer data.
Being able to segment an audience and say, we think this is going to perform well and
look I've created the landing page, I've created the AdWords copy, I've created the follow-up
emails and the form and it's done it all for you.
That is a real game changer.
But I want to be clear, we're not there yet and who knows whether we'll ever actually
get there.
One of the tools I was most excited to see was the AI website builder.
Many of us have spent hours, if not days fumbling around with different website designs and
layouts and this tool aims to take that pain away.
You describe your business, your preferences on style and voila, it will come up with a
tailored site including layout, styles and pre-written content all through GPT 3.5.
A few observations on this.
It follows very much a wizard UI interface so you can put in some detail and there's
a text box actually where you can describe your business and it's limited to 500 characters
in your description.
The more detail you put in there, the better the copy will be across your site.
It seems like actually when you choose the style, what it's doing is it's picking a template
and choosing some fonts and some colors based on that style but you're limited to say 12
options and it might be like minimalist or fresh or these are the kind of terms that
it uses and you just choose minimalist and then it will create a minimalist looking website.
It pulls images from stock image libraries and adds them into the website and basically
you get a done for you responsive website in seconds.
What was really interesting was the response that this got on partner day.
So lots of marketing agencies, design agencies in the room and when they launched this product,
product yeah the response was somewhat muted shall we say.
It's an interesting development.
It's nothing like the Wix AI tool that has been previewed recently.
That looks to be a whole different level but we haven't actually seen that in the wild
yet so maybe that's just a style over substance until we get our hands on it.
Next up was the AI chatbots.
Now these aren't your run of the mill chatbots.
We're talking natural language processing that can delve into your knowledge base, into
the customer ticket histories and look at the different web product pages, your pricing
pages all of that kind of stuff and use natural language to deliver personalized and quite
nuanced customer support.
You don't have to be techie to deploy this either.
It's quite simple to get started.
You make sure you've got the tracking code on the website and then you choose the assets
that you want to add in to the chatbots knowledge effectively.
So you would select all of the web URLs that you want to have included in its knowledge
and then it will just start talking to people with that knowledge.
There were a few other bits as well worth noting.
They launched SMS marketing which is finally now baked into the HubSpot product.
That's not necessarily AI powered but it's something that if you're a HubSpot user you
probably found yourself wondering about.
On the sales side the sales hub tools have had a complete redesign which is focused more
on prospecting, deal management and forecasting.
And AI is right at the core of that where AI is surfacing insights and trying to automate
some of the grudgery associated with reporting.
Actually that was one of the really neat demos that I saw.
If you've ever tried to create a report in HubSpot it can be quite frustrating.
What they've done is using prompts you can now find the right report and it will generate
it for you so you can say show me the sources, marketing sources of our leads from the past
month and it will create that report for you and you can add it to a dashboard.
That's something that's been missing for a while.
It's been a bit tricky to kind of get into.
There are a bunch of other features as well.
Things like customer support, so service hub, has an AI assistant that will summarize tickets
and actually suggest responses.
So if you've got a long customer query or maybe you've gone back and forth with a customer
and had lots of conversation, if a new rep is jumping into that ticket to offer support
they can see a snapshot of what the issue was there so they don't have to read reams
of text.
Overall, I think it's a really promising first step from HubSpot.
Having seen the way that they've dealt the AI into the marketing hub in particular, it
seems like they've taken two design philosophies.
One is the wizard-based user interface.
It will take you through a sequence of steps.
It will ask you to describe something and then it will ask you which option do you want
and then maybe give you another option with some variables at the end and then you'll
hit submit and it will generate all of that.
It will just take all of that information, put it into a prompt and spit something out
for you.
Then there's a more in-context editor.
This is where if you're looking at the UI, so maybe you're creating a webpage and you're
writing some copy or the text box where you edit the copy will have a button to start
generating some content and it's a bit like Grammarly Go.
If anyone has got the Grammarly Go Chrome plugin where you can use AI content creation
anywhere in your browser, it's sort of like that.
I'd say that HubSpot is laying some solid groundwork and the thing that's really exciting
is when you speak to the product team and you can see that just on a personal level,
they're excited about the possibility of AI agents being core to the backbone of the
HubSpot platforms.
Having played with these tools a bit, they're not reinventing the wheel or revolutionizing
the thing.
It's an evolution rather than revolution.
The potential is what's grabbing everybody's attention and HubSpot's made some good inroads,
but the future with AI agents potentially delivering entire campaigns and dealing with
customer support tickets, that is where things look particularly promising.
I've also had an opportunity to sit down with a few attendees at the conference as well.
Here's a couple of snippets taking you through what a few of the delegates thought of the
announcements and really trying to get an insight into how they're using generative
AI in their marketing activities.
I'm here with Tash Cartwright, Omnichannel Marketing Manager and Luke McNaney, Content
Lead at Student Roost, the UK's leading purpose-built student accommodation provider.
Is that right?
We're one of the UK's leading, yeah, this is top three of us, but we are definitely
in the top three.
Don't want to overplay your role in the market there.
You've just come out of Inbound 23 where the focus was all things AI.
What are your thoughts on the conference?
It's my second time at Inbound, so I came back in 2016, completely different experience
with a few more years of marketing under my belt, attending slightly different talks.
I learned a load about leadership styles, quite a bit about belonging, and then obviously
the buzzword of the conference, which is AI, HubSpot's AI system specifically, but also
how I could start to integrate AI into my day-to-day job.
Yeah, AI was all pervasive right from the opening keynote.
Luke, as Content Lead, this must be something that's been on your mind for a while, particularly
since ChatGPT launched, is AI going to replace you?
What are your thoughts now that you've been a bit more immersed in it?
I think for me personally, it's been quite eye-opening and reassuring in a way, just
because there is that skepticism there for my part and what that means for my job and
my career in the future.
I know it's something I've discussed with other people in the content world as well.
So to actually go to some talks and learn about how these tools can be assistance and
actually help you to refine your ideas and your content is something I'm really excited
about going back to the UK and exploring in a lot more detail.
Yeah, so we were talking off air and you were saying that you've not really thrown yourself
into using any of these tools at this point, is that right?
Yeah, not at all.
So it is brand new to me.
Obviously I'm aware of it and it's something that's been at the periphery, but I haven't
actually had any sort of active use.
I went to a couple of talks that were specifically revolving around AI.
Obviously it was a bit of an overarching concept and something that was touched upon in a lot
of the different talks, whatever the topic was, but some specific ones around AI and
just how it can benefit and just enable anyone really writing content or delivering content
in creating ideas and refining those ideas and just delivering in the same time as well.
So it becoming a big resource.
Yeah, I think that's the way to say it is as a tool rather than a replacement.
In the Omnichannel game, was there any interesting developments in the HubSpot suite or any tools,
any vendors that you spoke to at the conference doing anything interesting?
Well it's a term that's been thrown around, again, more so in the most recent years.
I think Neil Patel's talk is first talk about the future when everybody's using AI, how
to stand out.
He spoke about the Where's Waldo effect, which obviously we'd call the Where's Wally effect
and that using AI tools could end up meaning that we all just look like we're wearing red
and white outfits.
However, he then lent into the fact that with Omnichannel, we're all trying to be absolutely
everywhere at once and especially in the student space, it's that rule of seven, isn't it?
You want people to have seen your brand seven times before they'll then come on and make
a meaningful action, whether that's converting or whether that's just spending a little bit
more time on their clicking about so we can collect some data on them.
But he did say that it's a lot better for us to be concentrating on exactly where they
are instead of trying to do loads and loads of different channels, maybe try a multi different
content but on the same channels.
So lessen your channels, invest more money into those channels, but then start layering
your content on those channels so that people are seeing different pieces seven times, but
not necessarily in seven different places.
Yeah, that's a really interesting observation.
I went to one talk with Neil Patel where he was talking about email marketing and he was
talking about AB tests and hyper-personalized content.
Actually, it wasn't AB test, it was multivariate and he was saying that they'd taken all of
their customer data and created hyper-personalized emails.
Every single recipient on their list got hyper-personalized and he said this was an email list of about
1.5 million customers or subscribers, split it down the middle.
Same people got the generic and 50%, so 750,000 people in each pool, 750,000 people got hyper-personalized
and he said they run this experiment four times to see which one got the highest uplift
and the highest conversions.
He said hyper-personalization at that level, completely unnecessary, doesn't deliver the
return on investment.
She had personalization, standard personalization that we're already doing is fine.
You don't need to put the time, effort and energy into trying to make it hyper-personalized.
So forward looking then, going back into the office next week, what's the big takeaway?
What are you taking back to student Roos with you?
I will probably hold my hands up and say that I'm quite different to who I was seven years
ago when I came to Inbound and that I feel like I may have become the kind of marketer
that I didn't want to be, which is where I'm trying new channels and I'm trying new things
in a safe space.
I'm leaning into Twitch, I'm trying all these new cool channels that the students are using
every single day.
However, the idea of AI, I was leaning away from it and actually everything that I loved
about my younger self and being more in my infancy in my career was that I just jumped
into absolutely everything because I wanted to absorb it all.
Stephen Bartlett from the diary of the CEO, he spoke about leaning in, especially when
it comes to things like AI, which it's going to transform and it is transforming our jobs
every single day.
The next five years are going to look really different for marketers.
If I continue to lean away from that, I'm going to get left behind and that's not where
anybody needs to be.
What we need to do is lean into it and use it in a way that's going to enhance what we
want to do each day instead of actually going, okay, that looks scary and it looks going
to take my job, so I'm going to pit myself against it.
So I went to MIT on Monday before the conference started and I was walking around that AI exhibition
going, nope, not a chance.
Whereas now I've ended the week and I've actually used chat GBT to summarize a super long article
about the new Google algorithm and send that over to my manager and I'm excited to go back
and see how I can use that.
That's a fantastic use case and lovely to see you diving into it.
Luke, how about you?
What are you taking back to the office?
I think I also too will be taking the plunge.
So I think just building on what Tash said, it's just a bit embracing the opportunity
there.
So as someone who's going back to the office next week to start and putting together the
content strategy for the next student academic cycle, that I know full well that using AI
tools is going to help me deliver on a lot of those outputs in a way that two weeks ago
I would have really shied away from.
So I think just that in and of itself is a big gain.
Fantastic.
So leaning in, not leaning out is the message there.
Well thank you very much for your time today and I hope you join us on the show at a future
date with updates about how you're using AI in your marketing.
So I'm sat here with Joey from Tenshor.
We're on day two of the event.
Day one was all about AI, big product developments.
What was your take on it, Joey?
Yeah, honestly the first thing that I took away was HubSpot didn't take AI lightly.
I mean they took an approach that was, hey we're going to use generative AI across our
platform, sales hub, marketing hub, CS hub, all of the hubs.
We're going to figure out how to help people be efficient and effective with our tooling.
Really I think what it's doing is it's calling all the ISVs or the ecosystem that surround
HubSpot to a higher standard.
How are you guys going to leverage AI for your technology to keep up to the standard
we're setting for making lives easier, giving people the freedom to focus on what they need
to focus on rather than all the menial tasks that they have to do in between.
Yeah, it's interesting you talk about the kind of community around it.
As we were walking through the exhibition hall there we both observed that everyone's
talking about gen AI, but in terms of actually having some deep integrations or interesting
use cases, not a lot of it in the conference room floor there.
Yeah, no that's a good point.
I think it's because it's such a big topic everyone's talking about it.
Everyone has an opinion as far as practical applications, people building smart solutions
within their software innovating and creating customer centric customer first products.
No one's doing that right now and I think it's for a couple of reasons.
So the hype cycle, Forbes hype cycle puts generative AI at the peak of inflated expectations
and that makes it bound for the trough of disillusionment.
And so I think it's accelerated.
I think it's going much faster than Forbes had anticipated.
So we're quickly approaching trough of disillusionment, but what that means is people are expecting
generative AI to do a lot and they're testing with it and trying to figure it out, but they're
finding that there's a lot of roadblocks, a lot of things that generative AI is not
capable of doing and at the core of it generative AI is just a small piece of the puzzle.
It is not the peak of AI and it's not as broad as people expect it to be and so tied properly
with business systems with other versions of like document AI, of vision AI, really
utilizing a full like vertex AI platform, for example, like on the GCP, on GCP.
It is, it's like a really small portion.
We're running free generative AI workshops, little half day workshops tailored to companies
to help people identify just that.
Like how do you actually use generative AI in your business?
What are some real practical use cases that you can build, implement and get rolling with
today for software vendors trying to figure out how to use generative AI in their software
offerings and for like manufacturers, retailers, people who are like in their lane trying to
figure out how to adopt a new technology and make it work for them and where it makes sense
and it's cheap.
I mean generative AI is cheap to run.
Like we're talking, if it's completely integrated in your business, every arm of your business
is using it and using it really well.
You're looking at a thousand, two thousand dollars of spend when it comes to like building
your own generative AI solution using a Google or Amazon or Azure LLM.
Yeah, so like do it, try it, keep working on it, iterate on it, like figure out a way
to make generative AI work for you or talk to me and I can.
Yeah, so that's very much what Tencho does, is that right?
Yeah, so we're an IT consulting firm.
We do cloud infrastructure like everyone, right?
We can get you into the cloud, we can get you into a hybrid or multi-cloud.
We think multi-cloud is amazing.
It keeps people, it keeps cloud costs down, big cloud cost optimization play there.
So moded me plays though.
We do data.
Data is our specialty place.
So we do a lot with data from data lineage, data governance and security frameworks all
the way to building a prod ready AI environment.
And then we do applications, full stack software development, integration, modernization.
We work with some really big names in the marketing industry.
Specifically, we work with them to a MailChimp.
But there's a lot of different applications that we're working on building, iterating
on currently and all the talk is around AI, right?
How do we introduce it into our culture and how do we introduce it into our platform?
So yeah, that's what we do.
Great.
Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you and having you on Artificially Intelligent
Marketing.
Enjoy the rest of your conference.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Artificially Intelligent Marketing.
To stay on top of the latest trends, tips and tools in the world of marketing AI, be
sure to subscribe.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.