AI and Marketing: Chris Singel on AI-Enabled Market Research & Growth

Chris Singel Transcript

  Hey, I'm Guy Powell, and welcome to the next episode of the Backstory on Marketing and AI. If you haven't already done so, please visit ProRelevant. com and sign up for all of these episodes and podcasts. I am the author of the newly released book, the post COVID marketing machine, prepare your team to win.

And in the process of writing based on these interviews a book called the marketing AI machine. And you can find out more about this at marketing machine dot pro relevant. com. Today I'm interviewing Chris Singel of Delta Digital. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He is a digital marketing agency owner and AI optimist.

I love that term. And he is passionate about transforming the marketing landscape. And certainly AI is going to do that. With hands on experience integrating AI tools, Chris helps businesses streamline workflows, boost creativity, and deliver AI. Impactful results, all while maintaining the human touch and evolving in an evolving industry and no question about it.

When you're working with AI, you still absolutely have to have that AI, that human touch. Chris, appreciate it. Welcome and let's get started. Thank you for

having me. No, this is exciting. I I find that the actually interacting with humans is the more interesting part of all this. As I use AI in my day to day job and look at the data, it is still getting to talk about it and talk to people, that sparks my joy.

Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny you say that, because, when you're working on your laptop, you go, let me just do this in AI and blah, blah, blah. And you lose that human touch. Absolutely. It's so good to have you. Anyway, let's talk about you a second. Tell us your back story on how you got involved in AI and marketing.

Oh gosh. AI specifically would've been March 20, 20, 20 19 when Google Bard launched. The next day, two days later, I was in the shower thinking, can I use AI to write a book about ai? And I did. And 12 minutes of work later it was published. I used some of my digital marketing expertise to help promote it online.

Two days after that, it was a number one new release in its category on Amazon. Not, a ton of book sales. That wasn't life changing. What happened next was I took that story out to local news agencies, did a little PR around it, and all of a sudden that story is being told on ABC, NBC, Fox. And from there I had a connection to a TEDx talk.

And so I took that story of promoting the AI book about AI. Took it to the TEDx people. And so since then, I've worked with companies, spoken at universities, hosted events, all of this stuff about AI. And I've fallen into being an expert because of 12 minutes of my work. So I'm trying not to take it too seriously.

But it does speak to your point about you really can brainstorm and create things that are meaningful and valuable with minimal effort. So let's focus on that. And then I the human get to spend my time talking to humans and explaining that.

Yeah really. Congratulations on putting that book together.

Thank you so much. And so I'm a couple years behind you. Hopefully, there'll be some additional, nuanced learnings that I can I was going to ask, are you writing the

book yourself or is AI writing it for you?

Of course I'm going to be using AI. How else can you write a book on AI without using AI?

Although I will admit I'm going to use the AI. To help write the book, but it's gonna be my intelligence that I add to that AI for sure. To make it hopefully interesting. Yeah, I love

that. My dirty little secret about the TED Talk is I wrote every word. I loved it. I was happy with it, and then I reformatted it and ran it through AI a bunch of times.

So the end result was some sort of mix of the two, but at the beginning it was all my thoughts in words. So it is nice to see how it can shape and form things. And I got feedback from a professional writer that said, oh, I like this line specifically. AI wrote that line, . So it's this balance. Hey, if it can do it better, arguably than I can and quicker, let's try it.

Yeah absolutely. That's the whole purpose. And that, that does bring up one thing and we're getting a little bit off topic though, and that is that there's going to be so much content generated through AI. You wonder how a company can stay ahead of the curve so that they can still be found with all that content that's out there.

That's the same question we've been talking about in the search engine optimization game for 20 years, though, right? The people who can hire copywriters and ghostwriters and make a piece of content for everything on their website have been winning that game. Now does that change when Google will automatically give you an auto generated result based on its best answers for your location and what you're looking for and all these factors?

Maybe, but it still does speak to the humans need to be out there leaving genuine reviews and doing the genuine business so that the robots can scrape it and put together all that information. It doesn't really detract from the real human element of things, but it does mean maybe there's. Slightly fewer jobs for those copywriters who probably hated their jobs.

Anyways, churning out another article about best plumber in Houston, best plumber in Fort Worth, like how much value is that providing to anyone? Really? So now letting the robots do that work, in my opinion, just remove some of that drudgery from everyone's life.

Yeah, hopefully that's right. And there's definitely, to get that a little bit of optimization in there does take a little bit of drudgery, unfortunately, and hopefully now, the us knowledge workers will be able to benefit from getting out of that drudgery and stuff like that.

Before we go any further, tell us about Delta Digital.

Oh, gosh, I was. Updating my local movie theater's website in middle school using dial up internet. So I've been doing this internet thing for a long time. And then the, my wife is texting me. So after that, I followed my digital passions and followed my comedy passions.

Wound up in Los Angeles, long story short, at comedy. com. And then at Will Ferrell's Funny or Die running social media. Men and I scroll from Grand Rapids, wound up back here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was running digital for a local TV station through Tegna, the multi billion dollar company. And then a couple of small marketing agencies here I was running digital for.

And when COVID started, got laid off and said, I could just run this thing myself. And it's been great. The flexibility is amazing. I love my clients and just figuring out. What can I streamline so that I can provide the services of an agency, 10 times my size, if that makes sense. And it's been great. And everyone's happy.

The funniest thing to me, and I'm sure you get this as well. People complain to me, you're sending me too many clients and it's that's what you're paying me to do. I can slow down, but I don't want to hear you complaining that you have to answer the phone too much.

Yeah, really. That's a complaint I'd like to hear.

I'd like to have that as myself, but yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. Good job and great to hear that. We touched on it a little bit already, but this thing about the human and machine collaboration and how the two of them can work together better. So what are the ways that you found to strike that balance between, leveraging the AI tools that are out there and then still preserving that human element in in the work that you're doing?

Yeah, it's fascinating. The usage data is changing constantly. And when I used to give these talks a few months ago, even it said less than one out of five people are using AI. And now I just saw a statistic this week. 93 percent of Gen Z workers use AI on a daily basis. So people are starting to use this.

So how do we use it? I was in a meeting with not Gen Z people, some higher level CEO type people. And they were jokingly asking, Oh, Chris, after this call, are you going to use chat GPT to rewrite this ad copy? No, while we were on the call, I copy and pasted it. I saved the four of us from having to have a follow up meeting.

The copy was good enough that we were all happy. And it was website landing page copy. If we don't like it, we can always change it later. But it was optimized. It was on brand. It included the keywords we like. In less than five seconds. So I do think there are these opportunities there where the low hanging fruit still isn't widely distributed.

But beyond that, there's still all of these generative tools. I was running a Facebook ads campaign and we had four written. We hired a copywriter. They were really great and on brand and smart. And then one we use generative AI to produce and That one had better results. So sometimes you have to actually look at the data of, hey, what are we trying to accomplish here?

And can we achieve that using a way that's more effective and quicker and cheaper? Let's just do it that way. And I've since hired that copywriter to do other things. So she hasn't lost any work. But it is interesting to see don't assume that just because you spent more money and time and human hours on it, that will be your best performing asset.

Try it. Try and test and experiment. And even when I talk to individuals, just talk to chat GPT, like it's a human, like it's a entry level employee and help train it to the level where you want it to be, because there's really no use in no harm in trying, don't give it proprietary secrets. Don't rely on it for your lawsuit going in front of a judge.

But I do think there's a lot of opportunity to just try new things with it and what it is capable of doing changes every day. I was just reading about, open AI's new canvas platform can now do coding with you in line or text document editing. And instead of just a chatbot, you work collaboratively on the document together.

It's so cool.

Yeah, that is really cool. One thing, though, that I found is you talk about training AI, so to speak, on whatever you're trying to do, right? A Facebook ad or put together a website or whatever. But it's also. Training yourself on how to write better prompts to get better results out of that AI so that your end result is actually better.

And so it's a combination of two. It's not only training AI, but it's training yourself. I think that. That can, that really, can add a lot of value.

Yeah. And I think sometimes people might overthink that prompting. I was in a business meeting, a collaborative of companies.

And one guy said I was a professional journalist for 20 years. Can I tell it to scrape my journalism articles and write in my voice? And I said but do you write your sales copy in the way you used to write your journalism articles? What are you accomplishing there? Or should you just prompt the AI to say, Hey, you're a.

Professional sales maker who's an expert in this industry. Write the copy how an expert would. Not how I would. Do better than I would. Don't limit yourself to the data I already have and be dependent on. I was worried this guy was going to spend hours of his life feeding it these articles to train it the wrong direction.

Just train it. Towards the expert and see what it can do. I think people are limiting themselves to a think that it will max out at my level of intelligence. And that's simply not true. Even the AI book I wrote. It's not very good. Don't buy it. It's only 99 cents. Arguably not worth it. But there were a couple points in there where.

Look, it was done in 12 minutes, way faster than I could have done it. But a couple of points, I don't know if I would have thought of that specific example. So the fact that it can help you generate these ideas beyond your own intelligence is amazing. Again, not perfect, not better than had I hired a human to write it, but that's not the story, right?

It's how is AI using AI? Yeah.

But I like you, I like your point though here this in your, in that, particular example, the guy is saying let me use what I used to do and and that's not really what I'm really trying to do today, number one, but number two, I'm actually trying to do to significantly better.

And, let AI go out and find out all the experts and bring that knowledge in and then write something. And of course, if you want to have your spin or your taste or flavor on there as the writer, then absolutely you have to do that. But it can bring in. so much that that you can't get to and that I think is, one of the the major advantages of it.

You just don't have access. There's no way you can have access to the whole internet. And even

if you have access, your brain can't hold all of this. Like the way LLMs, large language models work is billions of tokens and references, and no human will ever be able to think that way. And sometimes they're irrelevant.

Sometimes AI hallucinates, but sometimes my intern writes crappy copy. You have to treat it as this. This is a first draft, and let's do it better the next time, but yeah, you're right. You can reach more potential possibility, but you do still need that human to say, here's exactly how I want the final draft to be.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, there are people that are skeptical of AI and and whether it's going to take their job or replace their job or what have you what have you seen? And how do you think, how do you think employees and businesses can, not necessarily replace the job, but actually do better or not replace the job and get, significantly more out of it.

Yeah. After my TED talk, I had a guy come up and say what about wealth inequality? What's AI going to do to this worker relationship with their bosses? And I said I'm not in charge of that. Don't, I don't know exactly how this will all shake out. But the open AI guys, people much smarter than me seem to be saying.

Hey, let's level the playing field. We want to make sure that this is accessible to everyone around the world. So if there's a good prompt engineer or someone who barely has access to the internet, who wants to build an online business can do that anywhere in the world now and can access all that expert knowledge through the paradigm of just chatting with someone, I think really does lower the.

Barriers to entry, which if you want to go down this topic helps all the people who have been previously disenfranchised and not helped out historically. So it does help level that playing field, but more specifically, I do think there have been opportunities for people to create content where there just hasn't been before.

I have friends in Los Angeles. I was in L. A. for 8, 9 years who are actively against artificial intelligence because they're worried the studios are going to replace them with rough drafts and that they just hire a writer to finish it. And then I was visiting Los Angeles and all of my writer friends said, actually, I used AI to help me write 10 rough drafts because now I can do it quicker and at scale.

And it's still my ideas. And it's not the finished version that I want to produce, but everyone who seems to be against it is finding ways that they can use it. And my big thing is, yes, we should not give our relationships with our loved ones over to AI. We should not give all of our confidential client information to AI.

But the things that are repetitive or boring or we don't care about, let the robot do the work so that the humans can be humans.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's to me, it's maybe it's a more fancy hammer. You have, you need a hammer to build it to build a house, but it's a tool.

It's a tool. And when it went from, I had to have a hand hammer and now you got the power hammers and whatever. It's like the same thing. I used to have a pen and paper and. And I could do some search with Google or whatever. And now I've got the way to do the same kind of a search with something that actually, is much better.

It's like that machine powered hammer.

Exactly. I was just talking to someone who proudly was like no, I'm writing the book all by myself. I'm not going to use AI at all. I'm hiring a ghostwriter. And it's if you're willing to let someone else do the work, you can get instant, effectively free feedback.

From an AI and it's not going to be perfect, but do you think the ghostwriter's job is going to be perfect? So it is this balance of, let's use the tools that are available to us without dehumanizing the work we put out. I will also mention there are aspects where these AI fact checkers, if someone is Really intelligent, but they don't present that way.

Or sometimes they might be on the autism spectrum. Then their writing gets flagged as being written by AI. That's not fair. That's a real human doing that work just beyond the capabilities you expected them of let the humans put out the content that they're actually capable of doing using the tools available to them.

Yeah, absolutely. And and the tools as a human, so to speak, if I can use a tool to make my product better. And get it done faster, and get it done at lower cost. Then what's wrong with that? That's what business is all about. And I, I hate to say it, but that's what capitalism is all about.

And it doesn't necessarily

The Writer Friends Los Angeles say, AI is not going to take the writer's jobs, writers using AI is going to beat out the writers who don't.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's right. And and I've heard that comment, and I use that comment now, and I think that's very valid.

I don't know, I haven't really seen that many people that are not using AI in marketing. Everybody I talk to, unless there's a regulatory issue I've talked to a couple of banks and financial institutions and even some healthcare. Where they'd love to be able to use AI to do this, but there are some limitations and or regulatory requirements.

And so they're a little bit hesitant or, or limited by their legal teams to say no, you can't use AI over there. You can use it over here, but you can't use it over there. Yeah, absolutely.

Once you let that genie out of that box, where exactly do you have that dividing line? That's for your compliance lawyers people to figure out.

I don't want to get into that mess. But it is interesting because there's obviously those regulations, but I think sometimes people also forget about the basics of marketing and brand voice. I was speaking to a company and I said, Look, if your KPI is opens on your email, we could have an AI generate an email that says I've kidnapped your Children.

Please open this email. That's not on brand. That's not going to sell anything, but now you are optimizing an AI to do a thing that will hit the data point. You told it to optimize towards. Is that actually what you want? So having these humans in there to think through, okay, but then what happens? What's the next step?

What do we actually want to do? I get very nervous because I've heard the opposite of companies saying, Oh, we've automated everything. And now the AI automatically fills it in and automatically launches the campaign. Hang on. Are you sure that is what you want to accomplish with that? I've seen Facebook campaigns with intentional typos because that gets more engagement, which shows the ad more, which then gets more sales on their product.

But do you want to be known as the company with intentional typos? I don't know.

Yeah. I wonder, I don't know if you saw that Coca Cola ad it was a Christmas ad that was generated in a hundred percent in AI. And mixed reviews.

Some people loved it.

Yeah. For me. There's always people that are trying to, point out the negative because they get more clicks that way.

Okay, leave them aside. Because those aren't really, valid criticisms. For me, it was obviously a I don't know if you'd call it a machine generated or a cartoon kind of generated ad. It wasn't supposed to be, it wasn't supposed to be, where you have a deer or a truck or whatever.

It was supposed to look like that. And and I think it saw, it got its purpose and it certainly got, more news than it would have otherwise have gotten. So it, in that respect, it actually did better.

Exactly. Yeah. If you're doing it to generate the buzz, that's amazing.

And of course they had to still hire a marketing agency to create the ad. Like it's not like all of these jobs were completely automated. I'll be sad if there's no Santa Claus drinking a Coca Cola at Christmas. I love that ad.

Either that one or the polar bears. I love the polar bears, man. I don't know whoever came up.

With it, it's so funny. Coca Cola, they're creative that comes up with those ads. First of all, I don't think AI could come up with that creative. Now I do believe that AI could maybe improve some of the idea, but nevertheless, whoever came up with that. And whoever came up with the Aflac duck, I'm almost certain that an AI.

I could not come up with an Aflac duck and so it's fascinating, but nevertheless, I think, the copy could be improved a little bit or tweaked a little bit and AI can, add some value to it nevertheless. And that I think is, going back to our point about the human and the machine together.

That's where I think the you still need the human to come up with that incredible creative of those polar bears or the Santa Claus or the Aflac duck. So yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent.

And I tried early on, before even the book, to ask the AI what does it feel like to be an AI?

Because there is this almost somatic thing to advertising, right? Of I want the feeling of Christmas, and I don't know that AI will ever be able to really capture that human element of the nostalgia of being a child, and Polar bears and Santa Claus, but you're right. I think it can tweak sales copy pretty easily already.

I will say I do a good bit of comedy and I've been trying to have AI write jokes for years and they were previously terrible, but recently they're getting better. I think all of these things are getting a little closer to human. But again, it's that when you're really trying to capture a feeling, only a human can do that.

Yeah, no, that's true. But, what I, and I did something similar to that. I had I had AI generate a poem for a Christmas party, generate a poem for Twas the Night Before Christmas and it did really well. And then I made a couple of tweaks to it and whatever. But nevertheless, it gave such an easy starting point to provide that foundation of what you needed.

It was perfect. It absolutely was perfect.

Yeah, just this week I played with, it's definitely helpful if it has a base to work from, and obviously it knows that poem, but just this week I gave it, write a sci fi story in the style of this author with the ethos of this philosopher, and it turned out amazing, like it generated so quick locations, characters, action, like the feeling of it was pretty close to exactly what I wanted, on the flip side, I had also been writing my own sci fi story, and I said, oh, expand this point, and it was terrible, because it didn't know exactly what I was already going for, it does need that sort of Body of work to go from and that knowledge.

So it's not quite at that human innovation level of being able to start from scratch and create ideas. But if you give it enough to work from, yeah, it's really impressive how close it can get.

Yeah, absolutely. So what are some of the common pitfalls that you've seen marketers make mistakes with and how can they potentially avoid some of them?

Yeah, I think people do optimize towards the wrong thing. Sometimes I have people still concerned about time on site or whatever vanity metric of the day might be, where it might be, Hey, someone landed on your page and it was so good. They bought right away. I don't care if that took them two minutes or one minute where, the, I mentioned the open email thing earlier, Hey, that was a really engaging headline, but did we actually drive any sales from that?

Do we have any brand recognition or did that actually hurt our brand? Was that on topic where it is easy to. Optimized towards these things people want, what gets measured gets mannered. What gets measured gets managed, right? Peter Drucker's famous quote. But when you remove the human from the equation and you just say optimize more and more, suddenly you forget.

I think of the Soviet Union story where they had a a metric that they wanted to hit a number of metric tons of nails. So they just produced one giant nail, which was totally unusable. And it's guys, you need a human in there to say, is this actually And then they flipped it on them. And I'm sure this is a joke and not a real story.

And they said, okay, not volume by weight. We need volume by numbers. They produce tiny nails that were totally unusable for what they need. And it's you need to have someone actually thinking, is this driving towards the business goals we want? Does this make a meaningful difference or are we just optimizing for the sake of optimizing?

Yeah, absolutely. In the Soviet case, they were optimizing for their own benefit. No question about it. It just wasn't exactly a benefit. It was, I

see it. In massive corporations, sometimes I just want to prove to my boss who has to prove to his boss who has to prove to his boss that I hit the KPI. And only until you get up to this level does someone say, Hey, we are doing that KPI for Y reason, not just for X KPI.

Sometimes, you gotta play the game.

Yeah, absolutely. I remember I was we were pitching some business with Kodak, a long time ago before there. There, I don't even know if they're still around. And he said the resurgence

Polaroid type stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. They were going on, everybody made their bonus except the CEO because everybody had these kind of weird KPIs and and they, they, they couldn't they couldn't somehow align them to what the CEO needed, which was success for the, for the board and for the stockholder.

Yeah.

But everyone along the way could point to the work they were doing and saying, Hey, I did good enough. That's your problem.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Change my KPIs. I'll do it differently next time. So I

don't think an AI will ever stop and think, is that actually what you want me to do? There's an AI researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who explains one of the hardest things about training general artificial intelligence beyond what we're even talking about today is He calls it coherent, extrapolated volition.

What coherently do you think humans will actually want in the future? And the problem isn't physically programming that into a computer. It's humans don't know what they want in the future. Thinking through the next steps that you will be able to logically Actually want is just a very difficult thing to do.

So hoping that a computer will understand, don't make an infinite number of tiny nails or one giant nail that's unusable. Here's how humans will want to use them in day to day life requires actually knowing a lot about how humans work together.

Yeah, absolutely. And that gets political, so we're going to stay away from that. Or it could get political. But, yeah, absolutely. So where do you see how marketers can stay ahead of the curve as AI gets better and then we get better at using it? How do you see that? What do marketers need to do to to stay ahead of the curve?

Yeah, I think just a willingness to try the new tools. I think people are Get set in their old ways, especially as your agency gets bigger and bigger. It's this is the process we've always had. I got to get approval from Steve who gets approval from Mark who gets approval from legal or whatever. And there's often good reasons for that.

But being able to say that's all fine and good guys, but I can generate 10 ideas. Can we approve 9 of them so that 8 actually get approved so that these 3 I can test and then we'll see which ones are actually performing being able to be flexible with your processes. And implement new tools as they come out is only going to get more and more important.

Obviously, you will still need the humans in the mix to have those approvals for various reasons, but you need to be willing to try these new things. I was speaking to a group of companies and after my talk, they all sheepishly said, actually, I'm already using it for emails while I use it for scheduling.

I use it. None of them wanted to admit they were using AI until all of them felt comfortable that it's okay to admit you're using the tools available to you. But once one person explains how they're using it for their specific niche, then other people can jump on and say, Oh, we could all be optimizing to the best of our ability.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is funny. I did a breakfast where I invited, some mid and senior level marketers and and there was a they were all saying we're using it for this, we're using it for that. But they were also very interested to hear that. They were not, they were worried about FOMO.

Are they missing out? Are they behind? And there were only one or two out of the ten that were there. There were really only one or two that were significantly further along. Had done some really interesting things with a very specific application to support the business. Otherwise, they were all doing, what we're talking about.

Mostly content and creation and, and ideation and brainstorming. But never. Not really. Other than these two, were they doing it for a very specific business application?

And I've seen, I was just watching this week someone saying, find an AI tool for your niche, and then it can tie into your payroll and your marketing and your legal.

And that's super interesting and useful. I've often coached the opposite because if. You make that core to your business and that tool goes away in six months, you're going to have to redo the entire way you use business being more comfortable with these tools like open AI. That's probably not going anywhere.

Like Google's Gemini, like Microsoft's copilot. These tools will exist. So finding ways to plug and play different parts isn't quite as streamlined as this AI tool for your niche. But if you become dependent on that tool and it changes or goes away, or they up their prices by 10 times, do you want to be tied into that technology?

And again, that's an issue that from people have been talking about that technology problem for years and years. So it's this balance of using the technology available to you without becoming. Overly dependent on it, so it's dangerous, but it's exciting. I think.

Yeah, absolutely. Where are we in 3 years?

With what we'll be on a beach somewhere drinking

my ties, right?

That's a good point. Yeah.

Three years is that middle period where I think humans are pretty good at estimating where we are next month and pretty bad at estimating where we are in 10 years. So I would say in about three years, this is all much more robust.

We're all much more trusting of it. But I would say they're Probably been some pretty major headlines of, hey, they ran a marketing campaign without the context of this could be offensive to some people or one or two things where the AI does significant brand damage and they recover, of course, but humans are doing that now.

I think it's like people often complain that Tesla's aren't perfectly safe. But are they safer than the average human driver? What sort of standard are we holding these things to and how flexible can we be with that standard? So I think we're further down the road of accepting it, but there's still not luddite, but a still hold out technology sort of folks who point to those errors and say, look, it's not perfect.

But I think we're closer to accepting, hey, AI is making my life easier. I'm treating it like an entry level employee that's now trained up to a mid level employee, and all my other employees are working with it. We're building internal knowledge bases. I think we'll see more of that sort of thing, where whether it's hosted on site or segregated or there's governance to it, where you have a tool that is my company's smartest employee because I own that AI.

I think we'll see more of that in the next three years and be More dependent on it, but also will have more ownership of that tool, and that feels less frightening than saying, Hey, Google, here's my last 10 years of client financials. Show me what we should do next. That makes me nervous. I don't want to give all that data up to Google or Apple or even open AI at this point.

But I do think we'll see more of internal data warehousing that allows us to make better informed decision on specific data beyond what we've been trusting it to do today.

Yeah, I think so. And I think I think the other thing, and let me ask you, maybe ask it as a question. What about specific right now we're using AI to generally support our copy or, do some more creative things.

And but what about AI to. Really solve a very specific business question like, I don't know, come up with a, our elevator pitch or come up with a messaging platform or come up with a, do very specific kind of applications. Do you see things like that taking place? Or do you think it's going to be going to remain more general?

You're almost pushing in towards this general artificial intelligence thing or some sort of agentic AI where it is going out of its way to say, here's what your business needs. I do think in only three years, we'll still need someone to say, Hey, what does my business need? Or what should I rebrand as or based on this?

What else could we be doing? I don't think we'll trust it enough to let it make those decisions for us. But I do think it. As the workforce gets younger, as the people most likely to use it, is that Gen Z demographic, maybe we'll see some sort of UI, UX, user interface, user experience shift, where no longer is it, let's physically type into a chat box or even talk to it.

It says, I know you're a copywriter. Here's two copies. Which one do you like more? Here's two copies. Which one do you like more? And it just simplifies the whole process. But you then have a human giving final say. You still have more AI generating it. And it's way less stress and workflow. I think, I don't know if you were a Westworld person, but they wind up building whole worlds and stories with this sort of visual 3D, have this person be this sort of character and this person be this sort of character, and then it builds a world.

I think we will get to a point where it needs very little feedback because it knows. Pretty close to exactly what we want. It just needs that nudge to get going that direction, which is exciting. Maybe not three years. I think we'll maybe be approaching that Tinder style. Which of these two do you like more?

Yes. No. In three years, but it'll be a while before we get to the, should I launch this business? Yes. No.

Yeah,

but we'll get there.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're right. Do you have a like a good case study or an example where you've really seen AI provide some real value?

I think I mentioned earlier the case study of.

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better. And when it's me and a CEO and a CTO and a consultant, and we can save four hours of meeting time at our ridiculous hourly rates because you can get it to chat GPT, generate a line of copy for a website. Awesome. That might not show on the bottom line, but the amount of time and energy we saved is so worth it.

I also mentioned the Facebook story of, Hey, we had some copywritten ones versus an AI one and the AI one did better actually look at the data and make sure it's making a meaningful difference more generally, we had a direct to consumer mattress brand that we scaled from nothing to a million dollars in one year.

And a lot of that was built on automations and. Generating some content. And I think you have these opportunities now where people are going to make a one person billion dollar business because the service is so valuable. It doesn't matter how many employees it has. I remember my mind was blown when Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, and now they do a billion dollars in revenue every month.

So that only had about 20 employees when it sold. I think that's trend is going to continue to accelerate, but will AI say. Please start this business. No, you still need someone heading the thing saying, I want to do this and feel like this and provide this service to people, but it's going to be really valuable for the people who can harness it.

And to your earlier question of, is that fair? Anyone can do that. I don't think it takes a Stanford MBA to make a product people care about.

Yeah, i'd like your example of instagram because and I think that can happen too, especially with Outsourcing and things like that where you have a company of core individuals that You know, maybe they're 10, maybe they're 20 or 50, and yet you are worth a billion dollars just because you have that that you took the risk and and then you executed, really well.

One last question for you. So if you were a if you were going to give advice to a, an up and coming new market or just coming out of college, what would that advice be? I

think I'd just say great job, I was just on a podcast where I told someone, and I'm not trying to get political, but I would say I wish everyone had the confidence of a straight white man, just go out there and try it, it's gonna be okay, I meet a lot of young people who feel like they don't know what they're doing, and they don't, they're 22, 25.

But being able to try these tools, like when I use the book to write a book about AI using AI, that AI was two days old. I had just as much experience as everyone else using that tool. I just had the confidence to be like, I wonder if it can do this thing. So have the confidence that you can do it and look.

If they're a marketer, they're not a heart surgeon. They're not saving lives. If you mess up, your boss can help train you. Just if the AI messes up, we need to train it and fix it to be better. It's okay to make mistakes. It's far more important to be willing to learn and grow because that's what humans can do.

We can adapt and learn. And the AI isn't quite so good at that just yet, though. Be willing to be human, be willing to try things and implement technologies. I'll also say when I worked at massive companies, there's a lot of this, inertia where it feels like, oh, they know the right way to do it because that's the way they've always done it technology changes.

Be willing to say, hey, I actually think this way might be better. And your boss will thank you for it. Please be willing to speak up and say, I think I might know a better way. Or I think I have an idea. 1 of my biggest failures as a manager was someone came to me with an idea and it didn't work out. I almost scolded him.

I said, why aren't you doing this already? I don't think he ever did it because I was so excited about it that I came off as scolding when what I wanted to say was, this is so good. Yes, please do it. So I want you to know your managers want you to succeed. We all want you to succeed and we want you to use the tools available to you for the most part.

We talked about the regulatory issues and that there's reasons not to depend on the AI, but I think they're willing to try new things in general and just be confident about it and listen to feedback. If your boss says, Hey, don't do it that way. There probably is a reason, but you can talk about it. A good boss will always let you talk about the why behind the reasoning.

Yeah, absolutely. And so now what we need to do is you have AI treat bosses teach bosses how to be good bosses. Maybe

there's some of that already. I have a good friend who is an industrial organizational psychologist and she says sometimes I ask AI what is a specific exercise I can do for this CEO to better learn how to be empathetic with their employees or whatever they need.

So AI can do those things. Okay obviously she's the one with the PhD so she can apply it and use it. Okay. And know which exercises won't work for that specific person, but there is, that old adage of the guy's trying to fix the expensive machine and it takes him one minute to fix it.

It's not the one minute of his time that's valuable, it's the years of experience knowing what'll actually work.

Yep, I use that as well. It's a great line. Great minds! And it's true, it is absolutely true, we've been doing this for And whatever it is, 20, 30 years, and it's all of that culminated in where to hit that, the hammer on the submarine to make it work.

Chris, thank you so much. This has been

great. Thank you so much.

Yeah, no, thank you for participating and being a part of this. Where can folks reach you and reach your company and learn more about you?

DeltaDigitalAgency. com. If you're looking to have me on a podcast or speak or come talk to you guys, DeltaDigitalAgency.

com slash press. Other than that, I'm all over the internet, willing to chat with folks. And my, my final thought would be let the robots do the work so the people can be people.

Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Delta digital agency dot com. And so fantastic. And for the audience, then please stay tuned for many other videos in this series of the back story on marketing and A.

I. And if you want to, please visit marketing machine dot pro relevant dot com to download some excerpts of some of my previous books and also find out more about my upcoming book. Chris, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Thank you again. Have a good one. This was great.

Absolutely. Thank you.