In this episode of The AI Edge podcast, host Yadin Porter de León and co-hosts Jessica Hreha and Michelle Moore welcome AI marketing innovator Natalie Lambert to discuss the strategic implementation of AI in enterprise marketing. Key Highlights: 1. Focused AI Adoption: Natalie emphasizes the importance of prioritizing specific use cases and providing targeted education when introducing AI tools to marketing teams. This approach helps overcome initial hesitation and demonstrates tangible benefits. 2. Hands-On Learning: The discussion highlights the effectiveness of interactive workshops where marketers, including C-level executives, can experience AI tools firsthand. These sessions often lead to "aha" moments that drive adoption. 3. Balancing AI and Human Input: The conversation stresses the continued importance of human oversight in AI-generated content, particularly for brand consistency and legal compliance. 4. Productivity and Job Satisfaction: Real-world examples illustrate how AI can enhance job satisfaction by automating tedious tasks and allowing marketers to focus on more strategic work. 5. Emerging AI Capabilities: The hosts and guest explore exciting developments in AI, such as the ability to create interactive content components like quizzes, potentially revolutionizing engagement strategies on marketing websites. 6. Change Management: The episode touches on the challenges of implementing AI in large organizations and the importance of leadership buy-in to drive adoption.
Natalie Lambert’s Consultant Company: https://genedge.co/services
Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) Event: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/events/marketing-artificial-intelligence-conference
EP 009 – Staying Focused With AI
Jessica Hreha, Michelle Moore, Natalie Lambert, Yadin Porter de León
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:03
Yadin
Welcome everyone once again to the Edge podcast for Enterprise Marketers, a show dedicated to sharing insights, strategies and experiences from a group of experts who have successfully implemented A.I. Solutions in a large enterprise B2B software company.
00:00:36:07 - 00:00:57:05
Yadin
Specifically in the context of global marketing and how that effort can affect a connect sales I.T product and the rest of the business. I'm an importer de Leone and I'm joined by my fellow hosts Jessica Rhea and Michelle Moore. Jessica, let's start with you. How have you been doing? What you up to?
Jessica
Hey Yadin, I'm great. I am enjoying the end of summer.
00:00:57:05 - 00:01:08:20
Jessica
My kids actually started school last week, August 1st, which is super early for some people, but it is still very summer on the weekends, I tell everybody. So lots lot to do, but definitely getting in a swing of all in sports season. Good to see you all today.
00:01:08:20 - 00:01:33:19
Yadin
Yes, it is early for everyone. Everyone's kids are starting school early and we're not totally sure why, but it's happening by the time this posted are probably post summer, so everyone's kid will be back and everyone's going to be all in the groove that by the time you're hearing this. But right now we're experiencing still summer even though kids are going back. Michelle, how are you doing?
Michelle
Yeah, I'm in the same boat, although mine start this Thursday, which I already thought was just obnoxiously early.
00:01:34:08 - 00:01:42:12
Michelle
It doesn't align with the calendar year.
Yadin
It really doesn't. Let's go back to the days when we were all farmers and we needed people with the help of the harvest.
00:01:42:14 - 00:02:01:14
Yadin
That's what we need.
Michelle
Yeah. Anyway, it is what it is. Nobody asked me about the schedule, so.
Yadin
No, we were there for that day in Congress.
Michelle
Nope.
Yadin
We set that and then the school district, etc.. All right. So we have a very special guest on our show today. Always excited for our guest today. Very excited to welcome Natalie Lambert to the show.
00:02:01:16 - 00:02:31:03
Yadin
Natalie is a marketing innovator. We don't say that lightly. Focus on generative A.I.. She founded Jet Edge to help organizations leverage A.I. for competitive Advantage. Previously at Google Cloud, she led integration in marketing. Very cool story by the way. Actually, the title she had was very cool and she developed A.I. strategies and tools. Her experience includes CMO roles at in START and CFO and leadership positions at Citrix in product marketing and digital workplace technologies.
00:02:31:03 - 00:02:51:23
Yadin
And she has been quoted in major publications and has written for Wired, Forbes and Socios.com. Very impressive. Natalie, welcome to the show.
Natalie
Thank you. You make me sound so much more impressive. I was here in the space, but now I'm really excited to be here.
Yadin
There you go. You just put that recording of my intro on your website and then just click it.
00:02:52:01 - 00:03:10:17
Yadin
It will be a useless tldr. Just press that. So as we always have the structure of the show each week we like to go over topic and objectives, strategy, tactics, teams and tools in business impact and we do a wonderful lightning round at the end. So first let's go ahead and kickoff the show with the topic objective. I'll just set the stage.
00:03:10:19 - 00:03:31:05
Yadin
This is the Who's it for and what's it for? We're going to be talking about and I'll just start with something interesting that Paul Reiser, who's the founder of the Marketing Institute, posted not too long ago because the conversation is starting to get more around getting focused. There are a lot of these broad sort of visions of how it's going to transform everything, how we're going to do everything with it.
00:03:31:06 - 00:03:50:05
Yadin
And a lot of people struggled with that perspective. And so he talked about being focused when it came to adopting AI with in the organization. He has a few different frameworks, but this one he sort of just posted on the fly on LinkedIn, and it was actually probably with a small group. Prioritize, use cases, Don't try and do everything under the sun.
00:03:50:10 - 00:04:09:04
Yadin
Provide education to training, which is always something he talks about, But do the education training specific to the tool that you're thinking about bringing in. So that's, I think, a really, really important one. I think it's something that team at VMware really did well and we focused very much on that tool that they were using and of course monitor utilization and the report meant performances versus benchmarks.
00:04:09:04 - 00:04:31:22
Yadin
So you talk to a lot of organizations. So you're in there in sort of in the trenches with so many people at global marketing teams. What do you think about organizations shifting to this more focused approach based on your experience?
Natalie
It certainly is where I see the most success, and this comes down to my belief, and I think we're all seeing it.
00:04:32:00 - 00:05:00:10
Natalie
A.I. is a daunting technology. It needs so many different things to different people. I've been in trainings where I've talked about technologies and use cases and people have come up to me and said, I thought I was just chatting about like one spectrum and then you've got the other who are doing incredible things. But the reality is, is that you're going to have users who are just more timid when it comes to this stuff.
00:05:00:10 - 00:05:26:19
Natalie
The power users are going to do their thing all day long. And to get that group, which is probably the 80% group of folks starting to play around with these technologies, giving them the specific instructions, the tasks, the use cases, the prompts, take the guesswork out of what they're trying to do, and this is where they get more comfortable.
00:05:26:19 - 00:06:01:12
Natalie
So to that end, where you said kind of working with different companies and most successful organizations of getting people to actually use the tech are those where you give each marketer a very specific JPT, a very specific use case, teach them how to use it, have them get comfortable with it, and then expand that use. So I couldn't agree more with what Paul said because the folks who have the most people using it not to say using it almost, but the most people starting to dip their toe is when you give them that specific thing.
00:06:01:14 - 00:06:29:03
Natalie
So that's what I've seen in the success with the companies that I work with.
Michelle
When you start working with a new company, do you typically start with a marketing organization and from there, where would you next extend your efforts to?
Natalie
My experience, primarily just because of my expertise in marketing, that is where I start with those teams. It always exciting when these teams bring in specific people.
00:06:29:03 - 00:06:52:17
Natalie
So I was working with a gaming company recently and they actually brought legal into the session. It was such a great group to bring in because of all the legal implications of using this. Another organization brought in it and they joined the meeting to start to figure out the technology. So for me, with a marketing focus, I think those two teams are the most relevant.
00:06:52:19 - 00:07:30:21
Natalie
But I just got I mean, you did this at VMware. I know you had such a large group of people who were part of it. Where did you extend it beyond those?
Jessica
Yeah, I mean, similarly we brought in I.T. and legal to the first kind of rounds as well, of course, with Michelle and Gideon, too. But definitely we saw that marketing was leading internally within the organization as well, just in a way of naturally finding the use cases, starting in the content team and then the brand team and then we were kind of going out to ads, campaigns, kind of digital execution side of things, customer advocacy, and then even MarTech department things from there.
00:07:30:23 - 00:07:53:04
Jessica
I want to go back, though, to you because I feel like getting the list that you went through. Number three was provide education and training for generative as specific to the tool you're bringing in. And I don't think Paul means it this way, but I want to make sure emphasizing, though, that foundational, broad base level of education, though that is really important to understand in generative before you bring in a tool.
00:07:53:06 - 00:08:14:10
Jessica
And so this is something I talk about a lot, for example, and this was even in our values as a marketing I counsel at VMware. I was that foundational. Generally I training for that education was foundational to responsible use of AI. So kind of coming in with where you people at in terms of their foundational AI knowledge, do they even know what generative is?
00:08:14:12 - 00:08:33:10
Jessica
Do they know how it's different from machine learning? Do they know that it's different from. To your point? Nathalie And like how we got here and how it works. And you don't have to be a data scientists to understand how it works, but understanding that it's predicting the next series of tokens helps you understand where it comes up with this stuff and that It's not always net new information.
00:08:33:12 - 00:09:00:13
Jessica
And then it's very important, of course, to educate on the specific tool that you're using. You can't just give people licenses and expect them to figure it out, which is what a lot of companies are doing right now. And I think why we're seeing, as we've been talking about so much interest in consultants in Big four firms and everything like that coming in to really help people not only figure out the change management side of things, but also figure out how to use the tools and hopefully bringing education along with that as well.
00:09:00:15 - 00:09:21:11
Natalie
One thing I want to add to that is the two things you said are absolutely kind of part one and part three of my training. When I talk to companies that middle ground in between, the one being what is it, how does it work, how does it get the responses that it does? Everything is so important to setting that foundation to the tools is understanding what it can do.
00:09:21:11 - 00:09:50:23
Natalie
And I actually want to separate those two things between the foundation and how the technology works. The tools that do a specific task. And then the middle ground of here are all that use cases. Because what I have found, especially for those people who are timid, if you can go through a list of successful stories just kind of painting a very big canvas, a big picture of what's possible, you get people starting to think and apply it to their world.
00:09:51:01 - 00:10:21:11
Natalie
And that's where I have seen walking into training sessions with teams, the people who are very reserved about this, worrying about their jobs and things like that, and just kind of how does this apply to me? You start to see them open up around things that they now see possible. So it's a middle ground to get people comfortable simply through understanding the technology and what's possible and then jumping into the tools. And I do think that that middle ground is important.
00:10:21:11 - 00:10:40:03
Jessica
Absolutely. And I think last year it was very like everyone just needs to go in and experiment and they'll understand. And now I've said this for a long time. I like every use case shared inspires another use case. So actually showing people how it can be used and how it can apply to them is what you're saying. And I agree completely.
00:10:40:03 - 00:11:08:05
Yadin
Yeah. I think you put the individual, the marketer, as the hero within the story, and we kind of have this theme of talking about that rather than people who are just like you said, the reserved and they're worried about what's this mean to my job, But when they understand what it does, they understand that they're actually the fuel and they're the energy that gets put into the tool that then creates the powerful output and understanding that this is augmenting what they're doing and enhancing what they're doing, accelerating what they're doing totally changes that perspective.
00:11:08:05 - 00:11:31:00
Yadin
But I think there's another nuance that's in there, which is sort of how you talked about, you know, flipping the order of those where they're like, let's make sure that we do A.I., Let us see who. Then we bring in a tool, because I think there's some we've chatted about this before. There's some struggle. Then when you try and do that introduction of education, of that broad, what is that and what is it token and what does word prediction even mean?
00:11:31:02 - 00:11:53:22
Yadin
Some people will say, okay, this is interesting, but nobody's ever been in that mode of hey, look at here is percolate a content management solution and this is how it works. I mean, nobody cares about how percolate works or how Grammarly works in the back, but this is the first technology where people are actually having to understand how it functions the backend, because it's a black box, because you put something in and then something comes out that you didn't put in.
00:11:54:00 - 00:12:17:07
Yadin
And how did it do that? And nothing's ever happened before. Other tools are just correct. My spelling where they make sure that I can send tweets automatically. And that's very, very clear. How are you seeing or how are you bridging that gap when you're talking to these companies to say, this is how you get your team, the mode to actually be able to have that conversation, to be able to be educated in that kind of way and to care, to want to understand, because I think that's the problem, is a lot of people just don't want to know.
00:12:17:09 - 00:12:31:08
Yadin
They're like, just give me the killer app, show me how it does my job. I want to click on something and have it come out. And I don't want to be high literate in the way that you're talking about. You see there is a sense.
Natalie
It's interesting. So with my larger trainings, it's not an option. We're all we don't need to do that upfront.
00:12:31:08 - 00:12:59:02
Natalie
Stop. I said, You do. And challenges is that I think you brought up a great example like Percolate, like when we use a package app, a standard marketing package app, you do something and you get something and that's something is correct. The problem that I and our labs and really all the different models have introduced is what you put in does not necessary early mean what comes out is right and not something that people don't understand.
00:12:59:02 - 00:13:22:04
Natalie
And so the reason why and even as I go through that entry training, the reason why I make sure we do it is I say, listen, I'm not going to waste a lot of your time on this. You didn't come for a tech lesson. But if you don't understand how it works in white to make mistakes, you as a marketer are going to be, you could be liable for mistakes, things.
00:13:22:04 - 00:13:46:03
Natalie
There could be biases introduced. And it's a technology that doesn't work like others. And it's one of those those things that you just have to know.
Michelle
Yeah, it's really important to understand that other software always performs per task on a very predictable basis. And this is not this is so different, you're not going to get the same output two times in a row, even with the same prompt.
00:13:46:05 - 00:14:17:14
Michelle
I do love your ideal pairing of marketing with legal from the get go because I feel like Legal's role is to help people understand what they can't do, and marketers role is to help people understand what is possible, what they can do. And so they have the assurance and the guardrail and the safety net vehicles, guidance and support, and then they have marketing to help kind of spark the aha moments in terms of showing them what's possible
Yadin
Because you can like you mentioned, Natalie, you can get yourself into trouble if you don't understand how it works.
00:14:17:14 - 00:14:33:17
Yadin
I was actually engage with one company and I wondered, I walk them through the process of, okay, we want to rewrite all of our support documents on this one page. We want to leverage it and we want to be able to scale that effort out. Do we need a disclaimer at the bottom? How do we need to disclose that we're doing this?
00:14:33:17 - 00:14:50:20
Yadin
And I said, look, this is one of the things that you're going to have to do with legal and you're going to have to decide what your company's comfortable with, what your liability is, what's the involvement of human versus the technology and how to walk them through the whole process. Sometimes it's not just like, here's the spec doc and this is exactly what you need to do because it's not that clear cut.
00:14:50:22 - 00:15:12:15
Yadin
But like you said, you have to understand what it is and how it works so that you can have a conversation around what you're going to do about it.
Jessica
which is why I guidelines are so important as part of that. Right. But Natalie, I'm curious to that ended and you bring up transparency. How are you guiding organizations through figuring out what their transparency statements or kind of POV are because we get that question a lot too, for clients.
00:15:12:16 - 00:15:31:07
Natalie
I think you said it perfectly upfront is just working with the team upfront to have those guidelines in place and all of that, and I think that's incredibly important. Beyond that, as a consultant coming in, I don't want to be making these rules, but really just letting you know the the lay of the land with how this all works.
00:15:31:07 - 00:16:01:02
Natalie
So first of all, just letting them know that just like today and really you write something, you publish something that's incorrect, that plagiarizing somebody is content, you're responsible. A.I. doesn't alleviate that or put a middleman in there. You are responsible. There's also more important for a lot of companies aspect of do you even own the content that you create and how can you ensure that you will hold up to something that is copyrightable by your organization?
00:16:01:02 - 00:16:24:17
Natalie
And so the guidelines I typically give as a lot of this is still being done. So there are no black and white answers. If a person creates a piece of content and has it spellcheck their copy edited by a guy that is 100% that is copyrightable, then you have the flip side where it generates the entire document or a piece of content that is not copyrightable by U.S. law.
00:16:24:19 - 00:16:55:22
Natalie
So then you have the middle route and this is being worked out. There is no answer. But my typical advice is the same advice that we would give for any A.I. a human needs to be involved. Review. Edit Shake it, add your special flair, your glitter, your all the things that make the content on brand and yours and unique, Don is what that human element brings and starts to add more of that component that pushes it the side of copyrightable by an organization, by a human.
00:16:56:03 - 00:17:15:19
Natalie
But until these get through the courts, these are the type of conversations that we have to have, and you're going to have to work out that risk with your legal department.
Jessica
Yeah. Have you guys seeing the transparency statements increase at all on content you're reading? I've been trying to find them throughout, and it's even asking the market economy today and I've only found a handful of them.
00:17:15:19 - 00:17:35:23
Jessica
So it seems like the norm is still not to disclose any AI usage, yeah.
Natalie
I have like my personal statement that I have a framework. It's zero six, three, four and five. I will comment on that and say how much A.I. is involved. But in general I have not seen it in the content that I read.
00:17:5:23 - 00:17:51:23
Yadin
That's crazy. So I knew this was going to happen. Natalie There was so much that we were going to be able to talk about. I knew that we were going to get on all these wonderful, amazing topics that I really need a lot of attention. I feel like I'm on the show I think are going to dig deeper. And I have this feeling strong, feeling that you're going to be on the show again to talk about something else.
00:17:52:01 - 00:18:27:12
Yadin
But right now, I think I'll move us in to the Strategy and Tactics section, where we look at a lot of the great things that we've talked about already should inform the approach of how companies train, how they provide support, how they bring tools in and how they look at creating value within their company using those tools. So with this staying focused framework, how does that shift that people need to make to being focused yet still providing that education for air literacy and then getting focused on specific training for the tools?
00:18:27:14 - 00:18:48:09
Yadin
How does that focus? Was starting small? How do you advise people to shift their strategy, their adoption strategy based on that framework? And what do you think that responses are? What's that response been when you're engaging with them on that?
Natalie
So I do think again, your AI counsel that you did at VM was such a great way to start to create those use cases.
00:18:48:11 - 00:19:33:09
Natalie
Outside of that, having teams come together, pick a single use case that is causing them pain, whether it be monotonous and you just hate the task in general. It's taking a lot of time, is costing a lot. It's not performing well. You want to bring some level of creativity that you've not been able to do. Pick something that is making the collective team unhappy and have someone come in and kind of raise their hand, say, I want to run this particular process to find another way of doing it and see if a new process, a new tool, a new way of completing that task benefits the team.
00:19:33:11 - 00:19:56:19
Natalie
And I'll be honest, while I've seen the lack of the best results in terms of biases and things, I haven't seen a use case that people are like, you know what? This didn't help me at all. They're not there. So you might decide that you're creating a piece of content that your team only feels comfortable with the brainstorming part and not the final delivery part.
00:19:56:21 - 00:20:24:13
Natalie
You might decide where that line is in which is used, but really focusing on those areas that cause the most consternation in some form as a team, figuring out how to solve for it and bringing in something and changing the process. They have found to be successful with companies I work with.
Yadin
Excellent. So I'm seeing work coming out soon, possibly unhappiness framework, where you rank for strength.
00:20:24:13 - 00:20:45:22
Yadin
You know everything by on how happy it makes you. And then use that for prioritizing use cases, which is actually not. I know I laugh at that, but actually it's not a bad way to start approaching things because unhappiness really is just correlative to inefficiency. It's called to preventing for opportunity costs where now you can do something better because you're having to slog through this stuff that nobody really wants to do.
00:20:46:00 - 00:21:09:14
Yadin
So maybe we need to lean on a happiness framework for the AI.
Michelle
Yeah. And then happiness project to counter the help.
Natalie
I want to I does that quickly because I've seen actual tangible things. So for example, I was working with one company who had a team of kind of a mix of folks, but they were using an agency to write all of their case studies, the customer case studies.
00:21:09:16 - 00:21:37:20
Natalie
They had a great person who was great at talking to customers and pulling the story out but wasn't a writer. We worked to create a way to actually bring in the brands, voice and all that, but amazing transcripts of the customer calls that she's so good at pulling together. She was able to take that and now write the first draft of every case study that they had.
00:21:37:22 - 00:22:17:08
Natalie
Now, for her, this was opening up her skillset, being able to do more for the team than she had been able to in the past. And she specifically talked about this as a increasing her happiness, her joy, her ability to contribute to the team. That's not small when we're talking about wanting to keep and retain talent, being able to give them the power to do more and support the org like that, I don't think that should be dismissed and it should be a true way of thinking about ROI of using and marketing.
00:22:17:10 - 00:22:36:07
Michelle
I agree. It should be a Metric?
Jessica
Yeah, I mean, we had this similar story to we've told it already from Kenny McChesney who is on the show a while ago, and we talked about in Laura Housman when our CMO was on to still talks about employee happiness. So maybe it's not project unhappiness, it's Project finding joy, right? That air unlocks.
00:22:36:07 - 00:22:59:00
Jessica
I love that.
Natalie
I'll tell you, I worked with another large company who had to do things like snippets and pull that together every week for leadership and being able to have. I go through it and summarize 30 different time snippets and elevate it. That was one of the worst tasks and that wasn't unhappy to be able to have.
00:22:59:06 - 00:23:22:03
Natalie
I be able to do that and write the initial draft for leadership. It goes both ways and I do think that's an incredibly important point to think about.
Jessica
That's a really good use case. On the weekly highlights, the roll up summaries that get rolled up and rolled up and rolled up, and sometimes it's really hard to create those small abstractions and also figure out what's important to leadership. So I love that use case.
00:23:22:03 - 00:23:24:06
Yadin
00:23:22:06 - 00:23:43:07
Yadin
That is fabulous. And I think we've already wandered in the Teams and Tools section because you've already got some really great examples of how people have really gotten in there. Leverage it. One thing I was really interested in though, is how you've worked with companies who maybe were struggling, who were trying use cases, were not seeing really, really great results.
00:23:43:07 - 00:23:57:16
Yadin
And I think this is something that we run into a lot where people have already tried it out and already formed opinions that it doesn't really work well or else we're not getting the results. So we want to not can the ROI that we will. Actually, there's a really great see that was just released by Microsoft about productivity.
00:23:57:18 - 00:24:18:13
Yadin
I was, of course, listening to Paul and Mike on their podcast and they were talking about this report as well, and there was talking about how certain companies just aren't seeing the ROI. And when they dug into it, they realized, well, there some of the metrics are using it as well, how much time there's even an email or how much time they're saving, responding to emails, or how many fewer documents they were reviewing or less time or spending.
00:24:18:13 - 00:24:35:02
Yadin
So it was like Microsoft Word, it was outlook. If those are the metrics are using, they're not really that great. And so I imagine you run into
Michelle
Only on productivity.
Yadin
Exactly. And so there's also that you know elements that are harder to measure like happiness. What's what's the joy framework? How are you walking companies through who already have had a bad experience?
00:24:35:02 - 00:24:52:05
Yadin
Because I think that number is starting to grow of had a bad experience to have used tools who have deployed licenses, but just nobody was using them. How are you taking them and changing the way that they're doing education enablement and how they're shifting their approach to adoption? So they start seeing what are I really is and they start getting it.
00:24:52:23 - 00:25:16:02
Natalie
In my experience, it's two very opposite ends of the spectrum. Okay. And so let's take kind of going in ground. I think true ground up is bringing everyone together. And in a lot of the trainings that I do, we build it through hands on workshop so everybody brings their computer and whether they have a paid account of X, Y and Z, it doesn't matter.
00:25:16:04 - 00:25:41:23
Natalie
And we start to build what I call conversations, threats that are reusable by them over and over again. So think a persona. Why don't we will start that that workshop by everyone. Think about one of the biggest personas that you market to. Let's really build that out through our conversation. Start asking their hopes, their dreams, their feels, fears, what keeps them up at night?
00:25:41:23 - 00:26:09:18
Natalie
What are their aspirations that are role really? Get the AI to start having that conversation, start really pushing on topics that matter until you feel comfortable. That conversation that the I truly understand your persona. And then let's go back to it multiple times throughout this workshop and ask questions of that. You know, maybe let's ask what are the top questions that this persona has to help with your cocktail plan?
00:26:09:19 - 00:26:33:03
Natalie
Maybe you have a blog or a white paper you've written and you want to show the persona, have the persona, read it and give feedback on it. In each of those examples, people's eyes open wide when they start to see it in use at a strategic yet tactical level in what they can do on a day to day basis.
00:26:33:05 - 00:26:59:13
Natalie
And so I'll do that across four or five use cases in which those conversations now exist on the left hand of their screen, regardless of the tweets, to be able to go back to every single day to ask follow up questions. So you might have a writing assistant. These are things that a lot of people, at least if you have a paid account, would think of as GPT and being a gems and bots from Poe and things like that.
00:26:59:19 - 00:27:24:14
Natalie
But now you've got all of these built out that you can go back to over and over again. And I think people leaving a training session with hand dribble pieces of API or those conversations that they can use for the next six months year becomes incredibly compelling. And I've seen a lot of use cases where I'll do a training and then I'll get called about.
00:27:24:17 - 00:27:57:11
Natalie
I want to build another, will you help? Because they do go back to those conversations. So I think it's the tactical hands on. Let's build that on one side. On the flip side, it's getting there. Most senior leaders using this stuff, their hands on. One of the most interesting experiences I had was I went to work for one of the largest companies in the world, and they brought all of their CMO together from different companies.
00:27:57:13 - 00:28:16:15
Natalie
And we did a hands on workshop, quite frankly, Exactly what I'm just telling you about what I do in the day to day workshops. And I could see I'm probably exaggerating, but I felt the eye rolling through the case because so they were helping to really get hands on with things that they probably haven't done for weeks, especially those of large companies.
00:28:16:17 - 00:28:41:20
Natalie
And we broke them all into groups and had them go through this exercise to been hour and a half, have them build out these exact same conversations, and their minds were blown. They were all laughing about messaging that the I came up with. One was a retail company and they were shocked at how well they got women and jewelry buying in that particular.
00:28:41:22 - 00:29:03:09
Natalie
But they just it got the essence out that they were shocked because they had built this persona. And when we did the debrief, I had some of these CMO was making comments like I got back in 45 minutes, but it's taken my team three weeks to put together. I've gotten back comments like, I don't know how we're not doing this for everything.
00:29:03:09 - 00:29:23:14
Natalie
This saves time. I have another CMO, which is flat out said I was actually kind of dreading this. This was the most fun that I had had. Playing with marketing tools and marketing is now something that's fun and I want my team to experience marketing this way. And so you get a group of folks like that who have had this hand on experience.
00:29:23:16 - 00:29:51:14
Natalie
They are going to start encouraging the teams to push it down. They are going to be showing their approve simply by doing. And I think that that goes a long way because I do think especially marketers in their lower to mid career, they still see this as shitty in some form. And when you have that leader pushing it down, it becomes okay and it becomes something that I have permission to push forward.
00:29:51:16 - 00:30:14:19
Michelle
Yeah, I love that emphasis on the fun factor. I mean, maybe that's an overlooked selling point too. I mean, we talk about it bringing joy at increasing productivity, but it also I mean, I agree. I find it quite fun. I'm curious, are companies approaching you yet about how to leverage tools and capabilities that they're finding being turned on in their existing software stack?
00:30:14:19 - 00:30:39:12
Michelle
I mean, now that companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, they're deploying these new AI capabilities, but not necessarily with any formal training or enablement. So I'm just wondering, are you finding a shift interest from third party tools to, well, what can I do now with these new capabilities that we already have or that are at our disposal, maybe for additional costs?
00:30:39:14 - 00:31:10:06
Natalie
The initial tools that I'm getting the most questions about are the Google workspace. Like all the Gemini capabilities built into Google Workspace and all the copilot capabilities built into Microsoft Tools, those are, I think, the top priority right now simply because there is that ability to roll them out, think that what's the most right to get used are those built into the marketplace, the hub spots of the world that can start to bring these capability native into Google?
00:31:10:08 - 00:31:31:14
Natalie
But I haven't been getting many questions about that today. I think that a lot of companies still are looking at the big ones, the chatty betas, the clods, the Gemini eyes of the world to just get teams focused on it. What I will say, it's going to start getting built into every tool. So having folks really feel comfortable using it I think is the best.
00:31:31:19 - 00:32:03:02
Natalie
You're going to use the tools that it comes with. It's going to be the easiest, but I actually think that's more advanced or further down the adoption funnel than I've seen being used today.
Michelle
Interesting. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that changes. But again, it goes back to reinforcing that idea of the foundational understanding, because once people have that foundational understanding, then they're going to be a lot more likely to experiment with and embrace new capabilities as they're popping up.
00:32:03:04 - 00:32:29:21
Yadin
I think you brought up something really interesting, Michel, which is about that fundamental understanding, something that's gone through the thread of our conversation. And so moving to our impact section, the impact of because you talked about eyes popping, people being blown away, their minds blown, teams like feeling like things have been transformed. Once you actually take them through that fundamental understanding of what it is, what it can do, let's workshop through it so that your perspective is shifted.
00:32:29:23 - 00:32:53:04
Yadin
What are you seeing as being the impact ongoing? And if you heard of stories, you've seen results of companies that have had their minds blown and now things are changing within the organization. What's that impact? You can also to put it right next to companies that really just didn't pick it out and didn't take off. And what the difference is between those two paths on that company's take.
00:32:53:06 - 00:33:14:02
Natalie
I have a couple of great stories, actually, but I'd start by saying in terms of of all of this, start playing. Don't be afraid to screw up. Just grow up in private. And by that I mean don't necessarily have an I create a blog and that don't even read it and paste and post it on your site that's due to ramp up play use.
00:33:14:02 - 00:33:45:19
Natalie
The technologies haven't screw up and when you plan you think you have something right. Share it with people, See if there's biases or things that are incorrect that you never saw yourself in creating this. And so I think what marketing teams are gonna get wrong are just not even playing on the flip side. One of my favorite stories that I heard in one of the sessions I gave is someone told us that there are Central Global Team was really focused on playing these technologies and they created this entire email campaign for an upcoming event.
00:33:45:21 - 00:34:13:16
Natalie
They had it. They had created all the content, they signed off on it, and they sent it to the regional teams and the regional teams took them. You say I and did all the localization and the translations. Those folks didn't have the training that the global teams got when creating all the emails, and so they got the localization and hit go in the automation system.
00:34:13:18 - 00:34:39:09
Natalie
Some of the translated items did not come out as written by the globe. Some of those were choices were less than ideal, let's put it that way. And they actually had customers come back and have to say like, what is going on with this email?
Jessica
So they weren't trained on the process of reviewing, is that what you're saying?
00:34:39:09 - 00:35:12:22
Natalie
Essentially of reviewing, yes. And just going through you have to review a human has to be involved just because the content that you got is final. There has to be that next step. And it took a review of the localization. I don't know what went wrong in this particular case, but basically something had happened where A they talked about it would be a lively set of speakers on stage and it basically got translated to a burlesque show. And you can tell like, like what happened.
00:35:13:00 - 00:35:46:19
Michelle
And I’m sure they were very disappointed when they showed it.
Natalie
But like you can see how some of these localization things in translation things go wrong. When you talk about a speaker, I've seen localization was translate that to Boombox instead of a person speaking on a and so it just does require those second and third level reviews because somebody reading it still might see all the words they make sense and aren't actually thinking about it in the context of somebody reading it because they didn't have to just review in the past.
00:35:46:21 - 00:36:20:10
Natalie
And so I think where things go wrong is just not taking the time to do the added reviews. To think is good enough to not take opportunity to share it with multiple people, to see if there are things missed because it does open up the ability for things wrong. But that's easy way because that can generally be fixed, but nuances that you might not want to publish publicly to come out and it can impact your brand negatively.
00:36:20:12 - 00:36:41:03
Natalie
You know, worst case, you're dealing with lawsuits, but like generally it's going to be on that brand impact.
Jessica
It doesn't change the brand review process or any editorial review process. And I think that's something to keep in mind. Right. Like you still want to follow the same process. Hopefully it just accelerates maybe different pieces of it. But it doesn't replace the accountability of review.
00:36:41:05 - 00:37:01:00
Jessica
So we talked about making time for play and I think there's two kind of blockers that are getting brought up now. Is that one someone like the Enthusiast I champion might say, well, how do I get my CMO to play with it in a way that's meaningful for and not something that's just a personal kind of plan, right?
00:37:01:00 - 00:37:26:15
Jessica
How do I get them to play and understand from a marketing perspective? And then how do we get people carve out or feel like they have the time to play? I've heard CMO's say you are already overwhelmed with upcoming deadlines. How do you give them the time or make the time for them? So kind of both sides, it's still finding the time to do this and with everyone being overloaded anyway, what are you seeing or how are you walking people through that?
00:37:26:17 - 00:37:59:15
Natalie
In my particular role, I've been fortunate in that who I am being brought in by is the top is the CMO, is the CEO depending on the situation, who see opportunity and want their teams to start to get the benefits of the technology. So I think going to come down to most companies have some type of mbio, some type of goals, raising your hand, saying I want one of mine to be 20%, 10%.
00:37:59:15 - 00:38:25:20
Natalie
I don't know the right number to play with these technologies to see if we can move the needle. Because while I recognize everyone's overloaded, I, to my core believe that these will save time and improve productivity long term, the ability is there. It's just a matter of doing that initial work upfront. And I think the time to play around with the technology and the use case, it's going to get smaller and smaller as you grow.
00:38:25:22 - 00:38:55:22
Natalie
It takes a long to play with the first one and then you learned how great NASIR was and it gets easier and easier for every use case you add. So I don't think the time commitment is a lot for the value you'll get out.
Jessica
And that kind of goes back to your age. Enthusiasts want to spend the extra time because they are inspired, motivated to see the career potential and then they're figuring out what works and giving that specific focus step by step process guidelines to the rest of the team so that now they know exactly what to do to go in there.
00:38:55:22 - 00:39:18:11
Natalie
They see the wow factor of that and then their hook. It's the seen as believing technology to be open to applying it and trying it out for other things. And that's kind of how I see the chain reaction. If you all kind of go from there.
Natalie
Super. Well said.
Yadin
Nice. All right. So I think we're at a great part go to the final part of the show, which is the Lightning Round.
00:39:18:13 - 00:39:41:17
Yadin
And this is just a quick thought, something maybe that's a good take away or something that's been on your mind that you want to have people walk away with all start with one thought that I think is sort of pertinent to this, which is being focused and having the high literacy on sort of the foundation of what these large language models do and then pick super specific use cases, whether it's through workshopping or whether it's starting threads or having like persona conversations.
00:39:41:17 - 00:40:04:07
Yadin
Like we talked about Natalie, because I think one really good perspective is that these are just the fundamental building blocks of what are going to be far more complex and far more sophisticated weighted and widely distributed and omnipresence applications and integrations that will be just everywhere. It'll be in your iPhone, will be your Android will be in a computer.
00:40:04:09 - 00:40:25:11
Yadin
But understanding now how they work, how they function, what they do will then inform you to have the literacy and the fundamental skills in order to be able to better interact with those tools as they evolve. These are just vision, recognition, speech recognition, audio interfaces. All these are just lots of little Lego pieces that will be put together to create something far more comprehensive.
00:40:25:11 - 00:40:40:18
Yadin
And I think having an understanding now ensure that you're not necessarily the way and the curve. You want to be an expert, but you have to be someone who just understands how these tools work so that you can use them in a way that you can create value, and that's as an individual, a strategic advantage. So I'll go maybe with you next.
00:40:40:18 - 00:41:03:14
Yadin
Michelle, if you want to give your thoughts for this episode.
Michelle
Sure. Yeah. I've been really excited because I think that I may have found a hallucination hack. Not 100% sure, but it's working for me. And that is because I use chat bots quite a bit for research. I write a lot of help articles, fake news, that type of stuff.
00:41:03:14 - 00:41:38:16
Unknown
So I'm always doing online research and of course you always have to check your sources. And the bots have gotten better at citing sources and not just making up URLs, but I do find that I will click through to validate the URLs, but I won't necessarily find the data points that it provided in those sources cited. So what I've been doing and I started doing this with perplexity and it still remains the best at it, is that I'll take a chunk of output from clot or chat and CBT or whatnot, and I'll paste it into perplexity and say, Please fact check the following.
00:41:38:18 - 00:41:55:22
Unknown
And it does an amazing job at it. And then I even found that chatty beauty, which is, in my experience, still the worst at making stuff up. It'll fact check other bots and it will be more accurate about fact checking other bots than it will be about providing its own unique data. So I just think that's really funny.
00:41:55:22 - 00:42:18:15
Unknown
It's something I'm going to keep playing with and documenting, but I urge people to just kind of try that on their own and see if they get similar results. Excellent. I'll go next to mine is getting into August now this now evergreen now getting cut. So like is makan evergreen? When is this going to come out or. Yeah, this is this will come out in August or sometime this month.
00:42:18:17 - 00:42:41:03
Unknown
We are in conference season, so very excited to see all the different conferences coming up that people are doing. And no surprise, maybe it is. AUDIENCE My favorite conference is the marketing conference where everything is kind of focused on not only our industry but on air. And it's not just one track of the whole thing. So I'm really excited because we have a new session.
00:42:41:05 - 00:43:04:22
Unknown
I'm bringing in. Melanie Marsden, so a former colleague from VMware who's now at on this, she's going to talk about eight best practices for operationalizing. I learned the hard way. So it's kind of the evolution of the Air Council, the education, the training, the change management, but then how do you keep it going? How do you continue expanding it with different teams and different use cases?
00:43:04:22 - 00:43:23:18
Unknown
So I think she's got a really great POV coming from sort of a half content, half MarTech. She's actually more in a MarTech sort of role now, so really excited for that session there and all of the other content that's going to be at that show. So I recommend to our audience to look into that may concur. That's fabulous.
00:43:23:18 - 00:43:49:19
Unknown
All right, Natalie, what's your lightning round? But I'm going to go the opposite direction you did, which is go to the advanced things that you can do. I don't know if you've been playing around with cloud artifacts or hold up previews, but for marketers, this is technology that enables you to ask the shop what to create an interactive output and actually see it in real time.
00:43:49:21 - 00:44:28:20
Unknown
So think whether you have a microsite and you want to add an advanced web component. Maybe you want to build an interactive content calendar for your entire team to be using or interactive dashboards, quizzes, whatever it is. We as marketers who are kind of more traditionally trained versus as coders or as some of these graphic agencies doing a lot of this more advanced work, it's now at our fingertips to be able to build this content on our own and I just can't get over how much advanced work is being democratized with AI and it's something people should be playing with.
00:44:28:20 - 00:45:01:16
Unknown
When I was at startups and even mid-sized companies, we did have sites and we could add components directly to the websites. I recognized large, large companies. As a marketer, you can't do that. But being able to on a quiz at the bottom of every blog based on the content, this is now easy to do. And I just like, I'm just like I'm blown away, Natalie because like $60,000 quote Project one's on like an interactive quiz that I eventually got a consultant to do it for cheaper, but we would all love to create this stuff ourselves.
00:45:01:22 - 00:45:24:05
Unknown
So I think we're going to need a tutorial next on this or I'm about to announce. I love it. Yes. Not just as a quick aside, but even on my website, I want to add this interactive component. I don't have skills I want to hire. I bought a third party tool. I was able to get this exactly how I want it in my colors in every single thing aspect, running the way I wanted to.
00:45:24:11 - 00:45:49:15
Unknown
In a 30 minute conversation, I was able to get rid of the third party tool, bring it in, running it natively, no delays. It just it blew my mind. And so I go back to boy, my mind going back to the fun aspect that keeps coming up. And I think there is something here and this but I think there will be talk about but being able to do this and improve engagement across all the content we do and be able to do it ourselves, it's huge.
00:45:49:17 - 00:46:12:12
Unknown
Everyone's going to want to know now what the name of that third party tool is. They used to make the quiz. So it's Connor Fox just going in and ask it to create a quiz based on this blog or this page or whatever it is. It will literally build it out the whole code, ultimately giving you something that you can invent right at your Web site, who I'm going to use that today, literally.
00:46:12:14 - 00:46:37:14
Unknown
But you didn't get about that. I just actually just created a wire talking and then I just created an interactive quiz for a website blog and it just spit out the HTML code for a radio button quiz about how your organization can adopt AI. You can't. And what felt like really is that is yeah, I used to be a web developer actually many years ago and a lifetime ago, and this is actually pretty good.
00:46:37:16 - 00:46:58:21
Unknown
Aren't there some quotes now that are like a limitation now is creativity and the art of the what possible or impossible? Right? Whoever comes up with the best use cases and examples, I do believe it is my creativity holding me back and how I think about this. And I'm sure I am not the only one. Everyone go out there and make a quiz today.
00:46:58:23 - 00:47:15:05
Unknown
Hallmark. Love it. All right. Well, this has been wonderful and a fabulous conversation. As for funny, I'm looking I'm actually running the code right now, so I'm like looking at it in my web browser. I'm like, Wow, it just did it. I'm looking at the quiz, Love it. It's in my tab in Chrome. I'm clicking on the radio buttons.
00:47:15:05 - 00:47:35:23
Unknown
It's absolutely beautiful. I just just created it. So, Natalie, this has been a phenomenal conversation and I maybe I'll just host this quiz and actually with only going to show not Yeah, just put on your website and think about it as a Christian you like with everything that's happening with SEO right now. Yeah. To be able to increase engagement on your site matters.
00:47:36:02 - 00:47:56:09
Unknown
These things matter. It's fabulous. So tell us, Nelly, where can people find out about what you're doing? How can they connect with you? I'm going to learn more about your consultancy. I'm working to find you. Yeah. So genético not com ro seo. Yeah. Yes. Well, what SEO is my website, but please do follow me on LinkedIn or connect with me.
00:47:56:14 - 00:48:17:13
Unknown
I post prompts and all sorts of things. I'm also have a YouTube channel where a lot of the things we talked about today, including building a web component. Exactly how I did that videos are how to do it, how to create a personalized writing agent. And so all of those and how to do all the stuff that we talked about are stuff that I really try to bring into video and make it truly approachable.
00:48:17:15 - 00:48:30:08
Unknown
Thank you so much, Natalie, Jessica, Michelle, thank you all for joining another episode of The Edge podcast.