In the latest episode of the AI Edge Podcast, "AI Is Not a Strategy," hosts Yadin Porter de León, Jessica Hreha, and Michelle Moore are joined by guest Robert Rose, founder and chief strategy officer of the Content Advisory. The episode delves into the role of AI in enterprise marketing, emphasizing that AI should not be viewed as a standalone strategy but rather as a tool to enhance existing strategies. Robert Rose argues that AI is an innovation seeking a strategy rather than a strategy itself. He compares it to electricity or telephones, which require a strategy to be effectively utilized within a business context. The discussion highlights the importance of integrating AI into business strategies rather than using it as a replacement for human creativity. The episode addresses the current challenges enterprises face in adopting AI, particularly in content creation. Many marketing teams are experimenting with AI but struggle to integrate it fully into their processes. The conversation suggests that AI is often misunderstood as a tool for generating new ideas, whereas its strength lies in expressing and augmenting existing ideas. The hosts discuss the misconceptions surrounding AI, such as the belief that it can replace human creativity. They stress the need for businesses to set realistic expectations and focus on how AI can support creative processes rather than replace them. The podcast emphasizes the need for a structured approach to integrating AI into marketing strategies. Robert Rose suggests a "getting ready to get ready" strategy, which involves preparing marketing teams to leverage AI effectively in content creation and other marketing processes. This episode is particularly relevant for B2B enterprise marketers looking to understand how to incorporate AI into their marketing strategies effectively. The insights shared by the hosts and guest provide valuable guidance on navigating the complexities of AI adoption in large organizations.
Find out more about Robert Rose at Robertrose.net
AI Edge Podcast - Transcript
EP 008 – AI Is Not a Strategy
00:00:03:06 - 00:00:40:16
Robert
The biggest challenge that most organizations have is that they look at create as a workflow state, but create is a process in and of itself, and most businesses don't understand the creation process, the iteration, the challenge, all of the things that go into the create process.
Yadin
Welcome to the AI Edge podcast for Enterprise Marketers, a show dedicated to sharing insights, strategies and experiences from a group of experts who have successfully implemented these solutions in a large enterprise B2B software company, specifically with the context of global marketing and how that effort can connect to sales, its product and the rest of the business.
00:00:40:18 - 00:01:04:00
Yadin
I'm Yadin Porter de Leon, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Michelle Jessica. Start with you, Jessica. Jessica, how are you doing? It's been a while since I've been on the show with you. You've been all over the planet, I think. What have you been up to?
Jessica
It has been a while. I've been on quite the road show at one point all in a row in London, Austin, York, Denmark, Norway, France.
00:01:04:00 - 00:01:23:12
Jessica
And then it ended with, like, our family vacation. I finally caught up with them end of last week.
Yadin
Oh, my God. Yes. It was like I remember you people. I lived with you. Right?
Jessica
Yeah. Well, it was two and a half weeks at a time without seeing my kids, which they reminded me of the other night. But I'm about to drop off my son for two weeks of camp, so I kind of threw it back at him, like, What are you talking about?
00:01:23:12 - 00:01:39:00
Jessica
You're about to go for two weeks, so. Yeah. Yeah, it's been great. I love connecting with the community, with customers. Being out at Cannes Lions Festival. It was new for me and really engaging to meet with other Eskimos. So happy to be back home for the rest of the summer.
00:01:39:00 - 00:01:59:23
Yadin
Super fun back home. Got you back on the show. It's great to be recording with you today, Michelle. How have you been? What you've been up to?
Michelle
I'm doing really well. I'm I got back home again after a week up in Oregon for my sister's wedding where it was in the high nineties and low one hundreds. So I'm back home in Santa Cruz, California, now, where we have the marine layer to keep us cool.
00:01:59:23 - 00:02:20:04
Michelle
And I have not perspired in a meaningful way for the past 48 hours. So I feel great. I feel fresh and rejuvenated and perspiration free.
Yadin
That's fabulous. Yes, You're in the hot zone. It's great to go back to Santa Cruz, which is where I grew up, as a matter of fact. And it's very cold pretty much all year long.
00:02:20:04 - 00:02:37:13
Yadin
Every once in a while you get like something in the eighties, But it's a surf town, a beach town. But at the same time, it's very cool. You like you said, you get that marine layer going on.
Jessica
Wow. I've no idea what that's like in the Carolinas. Perspiration free, just not that often around here. (Laugh)
Yadin
Now you just got hot hot, more hot.
00:02:37:15 - 00:02:58:22
Yadin
Oh, yeah. Me middle of the summer, it'd be like, Oh, it's like 56. Sure, why not? All right. Well, we have a very special guest today, Someone who I personally been following for years. That is Robert Rose, who is the founder and chief strategy officer of the Content Advisory, the Consulting Advisory Group of the content Marketing Institute, a wonderful institute.
00:02:58:22 - 00:03:19:22
Yadin
I must say, as a coach and strategist, Robert has worked with marketers at more than 500 companies, including global brands such as Adidas, Roche, Salesforce, Nasser and Hilton. And Robert is the author of four books. Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert
Well, thank you very much. I'm a big fan of your show, so I'm super happy to be here.
00:03:20:00 - 00:03:37:21
Yadin
Thank you so much. That's kind of love. High praise coming from you and all the work that you've done. You're in L.A. So we're warm out here or up here in Northern California. Michelle's got the marine layer, Jessica. Of course, it's just hot. Hot. What's the weather like in L.A.?
Robert
It's not hell, but you can probably see the outskirts of it from here.
00:03:37:21 - 00:04:01:06
Robert
It's it's it's really, really, really hot. It is 107 degrees as I talk to that.
Yadin
Yeah. Oh, wow. I think we're. We're getting it.
Robert
Yeah. Something. Something. Something. Climate change. Yeah.
Yadin
That's fabulous. So you've been doing a lot of work as well lately, too. You might have been globetrotting as well. Robert, where have you been circling the Earth recently, or you've been kind of close to home?
00:04:01:08 - 00:04:18:06
Robert
I have not been circling the Earth. I have been doing quite a bit of travel, but it's certainly more than in the last couple of years. But it's mostly been domestic. I have not had the privilege of getting back to Europe or Australia or Asia as I've much very frequent in the past, but that's been pretty rare these days.
00:04:18:08 - 00:04:40:17
Yadin
Yeah, focusing on the U.S. market.
Robert
Well, that's that's one way of putting it. Yes.
Yadin
It's kind of a big market. I think it deserves some good focus. Well, as our listeners, you are a regular since the show. Now that we have a few different parts of the show and we usually start each show up with the two topic objectives, then we go to strategy and tactics, teams and tools and business impact at the end.
00:04:40:17 - 00:04:50:13
Yadin
And then at the absolutely end of the show, we actually do a little bit of a lightning round. So we're going to go ahead and just kick it off into sort of the objective today.
So what are you seeing since you talked to a lot of companies, a lot of different teams in different verticals? What are you seeing, Robert, in the market right now with how air is being adopted within these organizations and specific to, I think, that content creation effort,
Jessica
Speaking of hot, right?
Yadin
I read a blog post about it, I think.
00:04:50:13 - 00:05:57:02
Robert
Yeah, well, it's probably an understatement to say I'm not sure if you guys have heard, but air is kind of a thing right now. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely sucking all the oxygen out of the marketing room at the moment. Look, I think the headline for me is that it's kind of the sexiest thing that not a lot of people are doing right now, which is there is a lot of experimentation, There is a lot of let's see where all the use cases are and not a lot of enterprise team level integration except for in the largest of large companies, most marketing teams don't know what to make of it right now.
00:05:57:02 - 00:06:17:08
Yadin
I mean, I saw the I think he was the founder of one of the founders of Anthropic who came on. It was on an event. And basically he said, you know, a bank came to us with 500 use cases and this is amazing. And my reaction to that is if you go to any technology vendor with 500 use cases, that's tell me you don't know anything about strategy without knowing anything about strategy.
00:06:17:10 - 00:06:38:05
Yadin
And so it's literally this sort of everything looks like a nail right now. So it's a little hard for enterprises to get their arms and minds around what I can actually do.
Yadin
And I think you've got the opposite problem, too, in certain circumstances where somebody has used it once or twice and didn't really understand what it was, how it works or what it's useful for, had a bad experience.
00:06:38:05 - 00:07:02:03
Yadin
Analysis is just terrible and I don't know why anyone want to use it.
Robert
Yeah, I think that's true as well. And that's again sort of applying the wrong use case to the wrong thing. Right. I think if we had to do it all over again, I would love to not call it generative AI, I would rather call it expression A.I., because what it's built to do is express an idea or help us express ideas.
00:07:02:05 - 00:07:30:02
Robert
It's not there to really help us generate new ideas. It needs good ideas in order to help us express those great ideas in meaningful ways. And so in many ways we've set it up for failure. I was also watching Meera Marathi, who's the CTO of Open API, who every time she gets on a stage it seems she puts more feet in her mouth, but she's talking about the idea that it solves creative problems that probably shouldn't have been there in the first place.
00:07:30:02 - 00:07:55:07
Robert
It's like, No, no, no, you misunderstand. Creativity is not a problem to be solved. It's there are so many other wonderful and amazing use cases for how I can help the business, but replacing someone's human creativity is not one of them. And so there's a lot of false expectations being set right now in many businesses. And it's tough because it's moving so fast.
00:07:55:09 - 00:08:20:03
Jessica
Yeah, and I think it goes back to augmenting creativity, right? Or helping with the admin tasks so that you have more time to be creative. Gartner talks about it as a technology team mate. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Robert.
Robert
Yeah, so AI is, as I've said many times in many talks, AI is not a strategy, it is an innovation looking for a strategy.
00:08:20:03 - 00:08:45:14
Robert
And so it's like you don't walk into a business and say, What's your electricity strategy or What's your telephone strategy? You say, What is the strategy that a telephone or electricity helps you facilitate? And AI is a very similar thing. It's this amazing, innovative thing, but it needs structure. You have to build the strategy. And so Gartner going to Gartner, they've got a way to put a phrase around everything.
00:08:45:14 - 00:09:10:03
Robert
I don't disagree with that. That technology copilot or technology body or technology friend or my own personal thing is, you know, it reminds me a little of like AI is Clippy.
Jessica
That's Yadin’s favorite.
Yadin
I love Clippy. I love it so much.
Robert
So there you go. That idea, I think it lessens the impact that it can have to look at it only as sort of a technology copilot.
00:09:10:05 - 00:09:34:20
Robert
But I also think it needs we need to leverage it. We can use the technology or the technology can use us. And I think if we take that former sort of approach where how can we actually use it to enhance or refine or supplement what we're doing now, we have a more interesting question to answer as a marketing team or as a business or as an integrated approach to something.
00:09:34:21 - 00:09:51:23
Jessica
Yeah, I just got off a call right before this call with the company. I joined in the second half to be brought in to talk about adoption and answer questions for them, and they caught me up to speed by saying that I was a goal for them as a marketing organization. And I thought, I don't have time to unpack that right now.
00:09:51:23 - 00:10:16:08
Jessica
But yeah, right to talk about that. Right, Right. Because that's not the goal. Like what else? Goals. And that's I feel like that's just a common trap we're hearing. And I feel like we're also all screaming from the rooftops that it's not a standalone strategy. And so somehow we've got to bring that together, whether it's within the marketing leaders, our CMO's, or if it's mid-level leadership to say that it helps you in your strategies.
00:10:16:08 - 00:10:37:01
Jessica
But you all have KPIs for a reason and we need to focus on those and see if I can help along with that.
Robert
Well, that's exactly right. And I think in large part it's going to fall upon the companies that you work for because we're not being helped right now by the anthropic and the open eyes and the Microsoft.
00:10:37:01 - 00:11:07:03
Robert
Apple is probably the first one to actually really get this right from a positioning standpoint. But those other companies at current moment are making AI the hero. They're not making the user or the marketer or the business person. They're not making them the hero. They're making the technology to here, which is the problem that opening AI continually does, is to say basically, in so many words, asking the question, Are you worthy of this amazing technology?
00:11:07:05 - 00:11:29:06
Robert
Boy, is that is not going to be helped. And so what I'm heartened by are companies like yours and others that are out there sort of dispelling the good gospel, as it were, of truly solving business problems with a tool and a tool set, rather than sort of bringing some magical box to bear to determine whether you're worthy of its amazingness.
00:11:29:08 - 00:11:55:09
Michelle
Yeah. The question is really, is this a tool worthy of our amazingness and our strategy?
Robert
Exactly. So that's exactly right.
Michelle
So, Robert, when clients approach you and are wanting kind of an entry point to your point, AI is only as good as the strategy and the use case and the approach that's put to it. So what do you find to be kind of the common low hanging fruit where you would help guide?
00:11:55:11 - 00:12:13:11
Michelle
Like how does the conversation go? How do you guide that conversation and what do you ask your clients?
Robert
And fortunately for me right now, the answer to that is it's a little like trying to give when you give your kid the medicine and you're like, Here comes the bus, here comes the bus. You know, look, you're going to try and spoon feed them this medicine that they don't want to take.
00:12:13:13 - 00:12:36:04
Robert
Because honestly, the conversation to have and ideal mostly in marketing, which means most of what I'm doing is going to be they're looking at generative AI as a means of making their marketing process better, which ostensibly means making their content creation process better. How can they make it more efficient, more effective leverage at scale, at whatever it is that they want to do?
00:12:36:04 - 00:12:58:07
Robert
That's the question I'm getting asked. I'm not getting asked about data using to figure out finance, predictive analytics. I'm not getting asked those questions. So from a generative AI marketing content perspective, one of the things that we talk about is we say, look, we believe in a getting ready to get ready strategy. So in other words, let's go in and look at the one biggest.
00:12:58:07 - 00:13:24:05
Robert
And this goes to a content strategy question more than anything else. The biggest challenge that most organizations have is that they look at create as a workflow state. They think create is a workflow state, and then there goes create, manage, measure, optimize, whatever it is. But create is a process in and of itself. And most businesses don't understand the creation process, the iteration, the challenge, all of the things that go into the create process.
00:13:24:07 - 00:13:46:10
Robert
So what we do is we go in and we sort of map that out. We say, Hey, listen, let's map out your content management and especially your content creation processes. We look for what we used to call in the old days sort of tribal knowledge, but now is more appropriately called a current knowledge or a current process. Like what really happens, what's really going on in the business right now?
00:13:46:12 - 00:14:05:23
Yadin
Yeah, I like that one thing. You describe it like what happens next in your process? Why give it a SUSY? Well, Steven de Souza is not a process.
Robert
Exactly. That's right.
Yadin
So I think we've drifted into the teams and tools section of the show and I think we just wrapped up strategy and tactics and we're kind of drifting teams and tools. So yeah, I'll let you finish your thought.
00:14:05:23 - 00:14:22:15
Robert
Sure. And then basically what we do is we look at it and we say, let's map those out and let's identify if there's basically anything we want to fix because there may not be. Right. We may be doing well or there may be things that we know are broken. But, you know, they're kind of broken for us and we do them fine and they're not worth fixing at this point.
00:14:22:17 - 00:14:45:08
Robert
Fantastic. Now what we can do is we can map that out and then start to build at each stage of that process where generative, I might add value like where we hypothesize that in these use cases. And then what we do is we prioritize those use cases by saying, look, is it and this is the biggest aha moment that our clients will have, is is it an enhancement?
00:14:45:08 - 00:15:06:16
Robert
In other words, is it this net new thing that basically makes us more efficient? It's a new way of doing things that makes us more efficient, or is it a refinement? In other words, it's stuff we're doing every day,
Robert
but it'll be done better and faster with AI? Or is it a supplement or basically something that will technically make us less efficient?
00:15:06:16 - 00:15:25:09
Robert
But it's this cool thing that we do now, but we just kind of deprecate it because we don't have time to do it or persona development is a great example of that. We don't do it as often as we should, but it's something that we could do. And then there's complement, which is basically a net new thing that we've never done before that could be made possible with this.
00:15:25:11 - 00:15:56:02
Robert
So the key there is mapping out the priorities, because what typically happens is senior leadership is looking for that refinement. In other words, stuff you're doing today that I could do with less headcount and less people, basically less money. And then if we look at it and we say, exactly, but if we actually start mapping out all of those use cases that we just spent all this time building, what we find and we've got the data to show this, that basically half of the use cases that typically get built are what are called supplements.
00:15:56:02 - 00:16:15:01
Robert
In other words, there's stuff that we should be doing. But honestly, it's going to take some net new skills and net new resources to be able to do so. Aligning that tension between what senior leadership is looking for and what we can actually deliver against is step number one, because now we know these are the use cases that will add value.
00:16:15:04 - 00:16:42:06
Robert
Now we can get the technology and we can test that theory and we can say, great, yes, it's making John and Bill and Mary more effective or no, this actually is something that we should do with the human hand. And we don't need AI in order to do that. And it's not making us more effective or efficient. We find that most of the use cases are net new people, net new skills, net new understanding, and that is a classic tool that's helping us be better.
00:16:42:11 - 00:17:05:00
Robert
And that when you only look at it through that lens of doing existing things more cheaply or more efficiently, it's usually a big fat fail.
Yadin
Yeah. So the big question then is I think I love the framework. The big question is how many companies are actually taking that medicine. As you say, new and sell them. This is how you have to do this and this is what we need to do first.
00:17:05:06 - 00:17:24:02
Yadin
Where are you delivering this? And everyone says, yes, that makes sense. And then they go out doing exactly what they were doing before.
Robert
Well, I would love to tell you that it's been a raging success for us. It's been amazing. And it's been we're fighting clients off the front door every day, but it's not true, I think, in many regards.
00:17:24:04 - 00:17:46:12
Robert
And this gets to something that I'm sure you all are feeling as well in many regards. I think right now most companies are looking to the big giants for answers. In other words, I just saw an article the other day that said McKinsey and BCG and Accenture, they're crushing it with AI right now. They're crushing it with AI consulting right now.
00:17:46:12 - 00:18:05:12
Robert
It's like, Yeah, they are, but they're selling the big, huge enterprise project that basically are millions of dollars and nobody knows if they really want or not. And it's the Open Eyes and the Microsofts and the Amazons and the Googles that are getting all the attention with this rather than those that are actually trying to solve business problems.
00:18:05:12 - 00:18:28:22
Robert
And so that's my small shot at the big five consulting firms. But to me, it's this leaping on to the trend. Those kinds of projects that I just described are rare. They're not happening. Where I find they are happening is in where you all have a lot of experience, which is actually building this in an internal organization like smart people that are going, yes, this is the way we need to solve this.
00:18:28:22 - 00:19:03:17
Robert
We need to get an AI council together. We need to get a leadership team together and figure this out with use cases and build in the proper parameters of what we're going to be doing and really do the work.
Jessica
Yeah, and I think that's where I kind of get at a soapbox a bit too, is that you don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Robert
No. Exactly.
Jessica
With a consulting firm like Accenture or others to just get a group of people together, the hands to keyboard on the ground, people who understand the use cases, the workflows, the processes to start to identify those use cases, to create the usage guidelines, to call yourselves an AI council.
Jessica
And then ladder up to your executive sponsor. Now you're getting more integrated within the larger business goals, but at the same time, you're already seeing those efficiency gains because you're not waiting for the strategy to come to bear to start to benefit from productivity, efficiency and cost savings. Now,
Robert
100% agree with that. That is such a great way to put it.
00:19:27:02 - 00:19:47:06
Robert
One of the things that I've been telling a lot of clients is I know you feel like you're behind like a million miles behind right now and that everybody's way ahead of you. But you're not just know that you're not there are a lot of people throwing money at weird experiments that some of them are working in. They're interesting and they're fascinating, but most of them are just that.
00:19:47:06 - 00:20:11:21
Robert
They're just experiments where they can afford to throw money at it.
Yadin
Yeah, and I'm finding teams where they're good, meaning they excited about it. There's also energy bugs. Their lacking the change management, which is the biggest part and I know preaching to the choir with Jessica here where it's the hardest part is getting people to learn new things and to change the way they have done things in the past.
00:20:11:23 - 00:20:31:22
Yadin
And it's not that this technology is so new and amazing and advance, but it forces you to learn something new and to change the way you work. And I think because there's so much and you can comment, both of you, on this, it's because there's so much excitement about that that people feel like they're behind. People feel like this is more important than that.
00:20:31:22 - 00:20:50:10
Yadin
Other implementation of that content management system that went horrible last time, which followed the previous content management system, which went horrible last time, and they could just ignore it and not really have to change the way they work, which is what most people do. This is different and hey, how are you using this? Because we're doing per seat and the seats cost a lot and it's new and it's interesting.
00:20:50:10 - 00:21:13:09
Yadin
So we need you to come back with something new and interesting to tell us about whether it's the efficiency gain or whether it's the creativity improvement or whether it's doing the thing that they'd never done before. What sort of your thoughts on it is that driving this different conversation? Because this is just another tool that does something that should, like you said, fit into a strategy and it's not as something in and of itself.
00:21:13:10 - 00:21:44:04
Robert
I think one of the confusions there is, is what's happening now is that and it's not dissimilar from what happened to your point about content management, which is at a certain point content management. This is going back 20 years now into the early days of 2000, is basically content management as a tool became embedded in everything. It was embedded in the shared way that we get Google Docs and it was embedded in the way that we managed our blog post and it was embedded in the way that we managed emails.
00:21:44:09 - 00:22:04:19
Unknown
There was some interface, some tool that you use to manage content, and then the output of it could be made ou one too many, or you could publish to many different channels at the same time. That was the magic that happened. I is suffering at this point from a similar thing, which is is it better for our team to use something embedded into Microsoft three, six, five?
00:22:04:19 - 00:22:33:00
Unknown
Or is it better to use a standalone enterprise product? Is it better to use something like an enterprise version of Anthropic and Clod? Or is it better to use something like a Jasper? That confusion right now is because everybody's trying everything and to muddy the waters even further. You've got all these ankle biters that are basically just interfaces over the top of chat GPT, which give you those crappy results that you were talking about before.
00:22:33:02 - 00:23:03:02
Robert
And people go, This is useless. Yeah, but you pay $10 a month for that uselessness.
Yadin
Yeah. Got to show the ROI the uselessness.
Robert
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Jessica
Yeah. I think there's still a big disconnect with marketing leaders too, who still suffer from not enough experience in the systems and in the tools. I think Karen Flanagan from HubSpot is a great example of leading by example and how far he's dug into it and all of the resources that he providing.
00:23:03:02 - 00:23:26:11
Jessica
So I feel like as a CMO, he's really speaking from experience with the team and I think we still have CMO's sharing on panels in France and Cairns and things like that, saying that it's great for meeting notes and teams and it's like we've got to get beyond that. The meeting note summaries or the meeting summaries and next steps, it just shows that they're not in the weeds enough, but then do they need to be?
00:23:26:13 - 00:23:48:23
Jessica
So then that's why we encourage this ground up approach to really stand up and share your use cases and share what's working and be the catalyst within your teams to spread the gospel that it's working for you. And here's how it can work for other teams, and then be bold enough to share that with your leadership team so that's something they can latch on to and then look at your goals.
00:23:48:23 - 00:24:09:06
Jessica
So we got to figure out how to get leadership. There's a lot going on in a CMO's mind and a lot of things that they're responsible for. And to date, you can't go to that and talk about content creation because they're either not, that's not what they worry about a day to day basis, or they'll just stop you and say it is not there yet.
00:24:09:06 - 00:24:32:20
Jessica
We don't do that. We can't possibly push out content because our health care audience will never believe it. It's like, Well, that's not what it does, but hopefully that's not the message you're sharing with your team on how to lean in. So, Gideon Roberts, you how are you guys are seeing that education are sort of how do we pull together that disconnect between leadership and then the marketers who are more hands on?
00:24:32:22 - 00:24:52:02
Robert
What you're getting to is sort of the two sides of the coin, which is, one, are they connected enough to know, even know what the realistic value can and should be? But to you get into this pressure that I'm definitely hearing from my CMO clients, from their boards and from their management teams, where are we on the air?
00:24:52:04 - 00:25:19:00
Robert
I had one client who basically threw in a customer help chat bot on their website just so that they could tell their board that they were doing AI. And so there's a lot of pressure there. And the very similar thing happened in the very early days of all of y'all are so young. There was an application called Test and Target and test and Target came from a company called Omnicare, which was competing with Google Analytics back in the day and ultimately was bought by Adobe and became Adobe Analytics.
00:25:19:00 - 00:25:42:20
Robert
And they're testing product testing became this huge thing. Testing and targeting content became this huge thing, but it became the kind of solution that a CMO would go, We're going to test everything single block of content on our website, all 50,000 blocks of content on our website. We're going to test it and optimize it using this tool. And nobody went, Is that a good idea?
00:25:42:22 - 00:26:04:03
Robert
Yeah, you know, I mean?
Yadin
Yeah, there's usually a question to questions you ask who's it for and what's it for? And those questions don't get asked a lot. You just say this is great. Like I people need to ask who's it for and what's it for and how do we know it's working? Asking those three questions will allow you to integrate it into.
00:26:04:03 - 00:26:25:09
Yadin
And I guess the big question I have for you, Robert, is when you have companies are putting AI at the center of their strategy is their strategy or what's our A.I. strategy, which is so weird. It's like asking like, what's our percolate strategy or what's our asana strategy? What's our Microsoft Word strategy? It's just crazy. But what's the impact in the organization?
00:26:25:09 - 00:26:52:22
Yadin
When people put AI first, we mentioned a couple different things, and I think Jessica has some really good perspective as well with some of the people she's talking to are these second order effects that happened. So we're in the impact section of the show now with our second order effects that happen when you put A.I. at the center of your strategy or make A.I. your strategy, the what are you seeing that sort of the strange meanderings of the organization that were when AI's put as their strategy?
00:26:53:00 - 00:27:14:20
Robert
I think that's it, right? It's thrash the two things I think that are impacting the most and I spoke to one of them a little earlier is one thrash, but two, the one I spoke to earlier is this disconnect between what senior leadership expects and what the team is building. In other words, so often and we're just seeing this over and over again, Look, you throw enough spaghetti against the wall and something will stick.
00:27:14:20 - 00:27:36:12
Robert
So we are seeing teams that are basically throwing enough spaghetti against the wall to recognize benefits from it and that they're seeing stuff. I heard one use case where they totally took a blog from a company
Robert
that they acquired, went through all 2000 blog posts and had I rewrite all the blog posts in the companies guidelines, editorial guidelines, etc..
00:27:36:17 - 00:28:00:00
Robert
Interesting use case. I would argue a little bit like, okay, big deal. Right? But ultimately, yeah. Okay. That's an interesting use case. So the key question is what was the value created there other than a really cool case study for the company? What was the real value created? Did it drive more sales? Did it just look prettier? Did it just read better?
00:28:00:04 - 00:28:31:01
Robert
And so many of that tension between that senior leadership expects, which is, again, if you believe the major headlines, senior leadership is all about less people to do more work and or what's really happening, which is the same or more people doing more interesting work. That tension right now is what happens when you put that aside because you don't get it resolved.
Jessica
Or I think you have use cases and experiences throughout the marginalization that don't turn into anything because you didn't document it correctly.
00:28:31:06 - 00:28:51:01
Jessica
You didn't have the hypothesis in terms of what success was supposed to look like, and everyone's just using it along the way. And is it helping? Sure, But we don't know in what concrete ways, and we can't share that with the board on a slide.
Robert
That's right. As I've been coining it, superior mediocrity, which is this the one who translated their entire blog?
00:28:51:01 - 00:29:11:16
Robert
It's like, okay, was that a good use case? Let's assume that you had a human and a human was going to take six months to do what you did and maybe 24 hours. I'm making those numbers up. Is that gap valuable? Like was that a valuable project to do anyway? If you would have assigned a human six months to do that, but you would have gone.
00:29:11:18 - 00:29:33:02
Robert
No, that's just not a priority for us. Okay, well then what's the real answer there? Is it really not a priority for you? It's just not a priority at x price? Or is it because we can do it for so much less money that we'll actually assign a project manager to that and actually do it and we'll recognize that value and that work is just not getting done for the most part.
00:29:33:04 - 00:29:58:12
Robert
Honestly, the conversation isn't about A.I. at all. It ends up being a lot about marketing, strategy, content strategy, and how they're managing the operations of the marketing teams. So it becomes very much a marketing operations question to say, Do you really understand how stuff is getting done now? What activity? One of the things that I talk about a lot in my book is that differentiation, competitive advantage.
00:29:58:12 - 00:30:26:10
Robert
If we go all the way back to our Michael Porter, if I can be so geeky for a moment, the competitive advantages defined by the activities that we do in the business and so those that have competitive advantage do different or different kinds of activities to actually create that competitive advantage. And so when we start looking at the activities that the marketing team is doing every day and wants to do for a competitive differentiation in the future, that's strategy.
00:30:26:12 - 00:31:02:05
Robert
That's when we talking about content strategy, marketing strategy, marketing operations strategy, once we understand that now we can ask better questions of what I can do to help. So that's part of the problem, right? Is that that's not a fun, sexy, wonderful, cool, con award winning conversation to get to have that's like, all right, let's fix the plumbing and figure out where the technology can help us fix our plumbing, not where we can create some cool chat bot that answers questions about what color cape we should be wearing as superheroes.
00:31:02:07 - 00:31:16:00
Yadin
The loss of that same chat bot will show you how to construct a bomb if you ask it the right way. And that's the problem with just pushing chat bots out there. And I've red team a couple of ones that people are like, Hey, we're going to do this thing for an event, here's a chat bot for the event.
00:31:16:02 - 00:31:33:03
Robert
Yeah, you said, Well there's that, there's all that.
Yadin
And I got it to just tell just all sorts of crazy information because it was training a large corpus of information, not just the stuff for the event. So you throw a big large learning model in there and it'll spend on a bunch of stuff that you don't want it to spit out.
00:31:33:04 - 00:31:47:19
Yadin
It's reminds me so much of the cloud days. I'm sure you've heard this analogy a million times, or like, what's our cloud strategy? We do the cloud, what are we going to put in the cloud? And all these people on the
Yadin
team are just scratching their heads going like, Well, are we talking customer experience? Are we talking about accelerating this platform?
00:31:47:19 - 00:32:12:04
Yadin
Are we do we want to make sure that the sales and what's the goal? But everyone was just like their boards are asking what's our cloud strategy? And it feels like we're just caught up in the same mayhem and no one's yet.
Robert
It's same. Yeah, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. What I was going to say, and just to that point is I worked with a client recently that said, okay, we're going to replace RFQ with a chat bot that looks at our customer help documentation.
4
And so they did exactly that. They used their thousands and thousands of documentation from the corpus of their help library to feed into the model. What nobody bothered to do was go in and say, how much of this is actually outdated, irrelevant or actually inaccurate anymore. And so the chat bot dutifully returned stuff about products that just didn't exist anymore, just because nobody bothered to do a content audit of the corpus to see if it was actually still relevant.
00:32:38:09 - 00:33:03:12
Jessica
And I think Real-Life example of what you guys are getting that even at VMware, the pilot that was started out in my team too, and why it took us so long to see results with our pilot is because first we had to document the process of our content operations today because we didn't have that documented before. So we had to go through the painstaking process to say, okay, what exactly are the steps that we did to create our bomb build materials, bomb, not the bomb we were talking about earlier.
00:33:03:14 - 00:33:25:05
Jessica
And then we even optimized that. We brought our agencies into our project management tools in our office emails. So we're responding to things faster. We were able to optimize the process with that alone and then we applied our hypothesis that we could get it done faster, spent more time in editing and get our packages out to our stakeholders, then faster to that.
00:33:25:05 - 00:33:45:20
Jessica
And we did, but we couldn't do that without knowing how long the process took today. So just to bring it full circle of going back to having your hypothesis of what success looks like, but then actually documenting what the process looks like. And I think Robert, where you guys come in is the process doesn't work today, so you have to go back and optimize that process first and then look at how can I help you with that?
00:33:45:21 - 00:34:06:16
Yadin
You mean Jessica? You mean you can't just throw air into my process and just magically it makes it all better?
Jessica
Maybe, but it won't work in the long term. Yeah.
Robert
Yeah. I mean, just those words documenting your content strategy and bomb your bill of materials, of deliverables through a content process that's particle physics for many companies right now.
00:34:06:18 - 00:34:26:18
Robert
Just solving that problem is challenging enough. Nevertheless, putting any AI over the top of it.
Yadin
Yeah. So I think right now we're at a great point in our show where we're going to transition into the lightning round where we do our final thoughts. Just a quick go round of sort of a distillation of the course. You know what our conversation is today.
00:34:26:20 - 00:34:48:04
Yadin
Robert, we'll end with your sage advice and we'll go and start with the panel. Co-host here. Jessica, you have a lightning round topic.
Jessica
Yeah. So I brought back some thoughts from the Cannes Lions Festival, some quotes that I thought was really interesting because I think so often and we even started the show talking about how the technology companies and others are talking about how A.I. replaces creativity.
00:34:48:06 - 00:35:11:17
Jessica
And I have some great quotes from, for example, Raja, the CMO of MasterCard, very forward innovative team who says when technology levels the playing field, creativity is a company's superpower, and then noted that his competitor groups have 2 to 3 X to the budget than them and he's kicking their behinds. So a great example of technology, I think leveling the playing field.
00:35:11:17 - 00:35:36:00
Jessica
And so you have to rely on your creativity and should and that's where it can really come into play. And then Will.i.am, if you guys don't know, is very invested and involved in AI. It's kind of fascinating. He did rap part of his walk up music, which was enjoyable. I wrote down. He said AI is more of a threat for admin than creative creatives will create tomorrow's industries.
00:35:36:05 - 00:35:57:19
Jessica
He talked about how there's always light new electricity and that every renaissance needs creators. So just some ending notes for me, there should be value of creativity and human creativity isn't going away.
Yadin
Yeah, that is fabulous. I love. That's the sentiment. My quick lightning round topic. I want to make sure leave you enough time is just that. Going back, it's point a lot of threads you talked about before.
00:35:57:21 - 00:36:21:17
Yadin
I'm doing some CMO roundtables, I'm talking to several individuals and I'm trying to make sure that I really instill in them that this is not a solution for your content marketing problems. It's not a solution for your content creation problem and a solution for your strategy problems. It is indeed, like you all talked about, is a tool that was designed to do something very, very specific.
00:36:21:19 - 00:36:44:04
Yadin
My favorite example is it was something designed to dream it dreams. This large learning model predicts the next word, using this interesting way of predicting the next word. I won't go into the technical details, but really I think what people need to do is just understand what the technology is first. It's something that people just don't take the time to spend because there's so much noise, there's so much noise out there and this is what it is.
00:36:44:04 - 00:36:59:13
Yadin
This is what it is. Really take the time to understand what it is. And I think we're going to go into another show a little bit deeper on it and then understand how it gets used as a tool within the strategy that you have for the business. So go and like you talk to Jessica and Robert, map out your process.
00:36:59:15 - 00:37:25:09
Yadin
Go ahead and create your strategy. Create your goals and objectives, and then say, Where do I place I in this chain to do something, whether it's augmenting, whether it's complementary, whether it's improving, accelerating. And so I'm jumping up on my soapbox over and over again, talking to people like you, like, hey, you're the air guy. Like, yes, I'm the air guy because I think it's this exciting technology, but I'm also a marketer and I'm a creator and I'm a creative.
00:37:25:15 - 00:37:45:10
Yadin
And those will always come first and the tool will come second so that I will hand it over to you, Robert, for your final thoughts.
Robert
Well, okay, so those are all amazing thoughts. There's a couple of things I guess I would focus on, which is I hundred percent agree with the idea. And thank you, by the way, for the shout out for the podcast.
00:37:45:10 - 00:38:20:08
Robert
I mean, it's one of our loves that we do. And it reminds me very much of…
Yadin
I know more about the Browns now than I ever knew before.
Robert
Yeah. Sorry for that. Yeah, you probably know more about a lot of things than you wanted to know about. There is a wonderful I wrote actually on this and summing up basically what all of you sort of had in each of your lightning round responses is this idea that there are two different kinds of content that we create typically, which is one, this idea, by the way, comes from a guy by the name of G.K. Chesterton who actually wrote about Dickens.
00:38:20:08 - 00:38:48:14
Robert
He was a critique of Dickens writing. He said, There are two different kinds of content that we create. There is what we call constructed content and created content, and the idea of constructed content is content that is created but can only be loved after it is created. And so think about everything there from a user's manual to a street sign to an instruction manual, all kinds of content that we all have to create.
00:38:48:16 - 00:39:13:17
Robert
But really it can only be loved and it can be loved very deeply, but it can only be loved after it is created. And then there is created content, which is that which is loved before one word hits the page. It is content that exists in our dreams that is loved before it's ever expressed, and that created content is always better suited to come out of a human than it is to come out of a machine.
00:39:13:19 - 00:39:34:15
Robert
Because right now and everything we talk about with AI has to be like right now. And yet and those kinds of things. Right now, AI is not going to give you the best content is going to give you the most probable content. And so it will always give you good stuff, but it will always give you the most probable stuff.
00:39:34:17 - 00:39:51:19
Robert
In other words, one of my favorite sort of experiments is to say, Now have I write me something about X and it'll write that paragraph dutifully for me and then I'll say, Is that the best you can do? And I will say, Of course not. Of course I can do better. And here you go. Here's another rewrite of that whole thing and I'll get.
00:39:51:19 - 00:40:07:18
Robert
Is that as good as you can do? No, of course not. I can do better. I can give you more and you can continue that for ever. It will never come back to you and go, Shut up. Number two is the best one. You should live with that one. And that's what you should get. That's what you should use. It's done.
00:40:07:18 - 00:40:35:04
Yadin
It's done. Stop bothering me.
Robert
Exactly. And we just need to realize that that is it's not a competition. We are not competing with AI. We use AI as a tool to help us be more clear, to help us iterate words that we've never sagacious it use the word sagacious. For me, the other day when I was trying to figure out some sort of inspiration, I was like, That's a cool word.
00:40:35:04 - 00:40:56:13
Robert
I'm going to figure out that word to use somewhere.
Jessica
What are the statistics that would fall next in the probability model?
Robert
Exactly. Well, I was actually asking some of those things that was actually asking for sort of alternative ways to say the same thing. But that's the kind of thing where it can be truly helpful. And if we just start from that sort of premise, we're going to be just fine.
00:40:56:13 - 00:41:18:16
Robert
We're going to be just fine marketers as businesspeople, as content creators, as artists. All of this sort of spectrum is that it's just a tool. It's just a tool for us to leverage and augment our talents.
Yadin
I love that. That's a great sentiment to end on. And with that, we're at the end of the show. Robert, It has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you about this.
00:41:18:16 - 00:41:40:01
Yadin
I think we dug deep on the topic and we think we got some really interesting ideas that surfaced out of this quickly. Let everyone know where they can find out more about you. Of course, this old marketing podcast, everyone's got to listen to that as well. Where should people reach out to you?
Robert
So I'm spending a lot of my days doing fractional marketing services and content services for companies, doing exactly the kinds of projects that we just talked about.
00:41:40:05 - 00:41:57:18
Robert
And you can learn more about that at Robert Rose Dot Net, which is my site. And then of course, the company consulting where we're doing very specific things around content, strategy, process, governance, all those things where we use words like bill of materials and governance and structure and metadata and all that stuff that's at content advisory dot net.
00:41:57:18 - 00:42:13:13
Robert
So yeah, and of course glad to connect with everybody on LinkedIn to
Yadin
Fabulous. Well, Robert, Michelle, Jessica, great show. Thanks for having everybody on.
Jessica
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Robert.
The End