The AI Shift Every Marketer Needs to Understand with Lubna El Bannan

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Speaker B: Hi Lubna.

Speaker C: Hi, Ibrahim.

Speaker B: Welcome to Below the Fold podcast.

Speaker C: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: I'm, um, uh, super excited to uh, have you on the show, uh, for the listeners and viewers. This is Lubnal Banan, MD, of P Digital. Um, we've been trying to uh, arrange this recording for quite some time now.

Speaker C: Indeed.

Speaker B: And uh, yeah, I'm thrilled uh, to uh, have a conversation with you about first of all, your background, your company and how the um, uh, agency tech partner proposition is sort of, uh, shifting and transforming and how we service clients, uh, in this industry, advertisers or marketing teams. And so I'm keen to get your pov. Uh, how about we start with a simple intro about yourself and maybe from there we segue into PS Digital.

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. I mean, never too late. We've had back and forth to organize this, but I'm so happy I'm here today, uh, because in the past period of time I was working so much on things that will bring value today in the conversation. So I'm really excited and thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah, and the work never stops.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Uh, so my name is Lubna. I'm the managing director for PS Digital. Let me give you a bit of a background. I have been in the industry of marketing and digital for the past 18 years. So I bring experiences from marketing side digital, social media. I've also worked on pr, events, communication strategies and so on. Um, eight years back I have decided to step in as ah, a shareholder, a managing, ah, director for PS Digital to expand the business from being in Egypt. So PS Digital was basically operating uh, in Egypt, um, for the past 19 years. So they already had their setup, their team. But the purpose of me stepping in was basically to set up an entity here in the uae. And from here we can expand and serve more countries, more clients, more industries and so on. Um, me being here in the UAE for the past 16 years, the dynamics of the market, the experience, the connections and so on helped a lot. Starting up, uh, or expanding the business basically in the UAE and the Gulf and globally. Um, PS Digital is more specialized in digital transformation execution. So we are uh, aiming to be the one stop shop where brands could come in, build their entire digital ecosystem. Was it an informative website, e commerce mobile app and integrate um, with other systems that they operate with like CRMs, POS payment gateways, uh, logistic partners and so on. And then also we have um, the performance marketing which is basically running the ads. So once you build the digital ecosystem you also drive traffic to this so you can convert and uh, bring growth and sales and social media communication. So I would say um, it's not a list of services, it's more of a metrics of how you bring different solutions together to um, uh, make sure that you meet the objectives of the client and the business. Um, today we're more than 100 employees. Uh, we serve more than 26 countries all over the world, different industries, um, global brands, local brands, SMEs as well. So ah, it's a very diversified portfolio and has been an amazing experience so far.

Speaker B: Fantastic. I remember we've had a conversation in the past about the importance of the ecosystem, uh, together with advertising and how advertising alone obviously isn't enough. Uh, when partners are trying to steer the attention of advertisers, the ecosystem is as important, if not more important. My question to you is how much headroom M do you think there's still to invest in or um, put efforts in when it comes to ecosystem in the region versus advertising? Because I feel like it's very underrated still here. Or maybe it's not because you have firsthand experience in the market. Do you think there's much more to do when it comes to ecosystem versus advertising?

Speaker C: So much to do honestly. So I've noticed the biggest mistakes of the brand. Some brands would actually struggle to build the right digital ecosystem. And today nowadays, I mean people live online, they purchase online, they spend so much time online. So it's not like before where you have physical interaction with brands. I mean not much of events and on ground activations. Brands are now spending two words online. All right, so when you look at um, how brands are present online, most of the brands and the mistake that I see the brands would do is that they build separate assets individually so they have a website and then they have social media communication and usually I've also seen that they work with multiple partners and building your digital asset that connects to all social media and advertising and everything integrated together. Centralized brings so much value to the brand because you would see an integrated data and ecosystem that you would be able to do smarter decisions moving forward. So let's speak more about the digital ecosystem.

Speaker B: Yes, I just wanted to ask you actually if we can break it down in practical terms. Is it the website alone, is it the app alone or, or is there somewhere something in between or uh, some form of marketing tool? In between?

Speaker C: Yeah. So it depends on the brand of course and um, it depends on what they're selling. But I'll give you the massive example that I can give. So let's say it's a brand that sells online. Okay. So a brand that sells online would usually want to build an ecosystem of an E commerce. So whether they would build their website, online ordering and, and then the mobile app as well. And some brands even like if we speak about QSR brands. All right. It's not only the digital assets that they have would be the mobile app and the website, they might even have online ordering kiosks for example. Sorry, self ordering kiosks. So so many interfaces that the customer would see. Right. And today you want to bring the user interface and user experience into consistency with the brand identity and customers that step into the mobile app or the websites would feel the same journey, would feel the same flow, would feel the same brand and so on. So it's so important today to not only make sure that your website or mobile app looks beautiful, but you need to also make sure that it is functional properly. It takes the journey into, it takes the customer into a simple journey and a flow to convert at the end. Right. And then once you build the main interfaces, okay. The background of what's happening is also important and today we're trying as much as possible with our clients and we always recommend for brands that they would automate the backends so basically integrate with other systems they have. So if they have CRMs that they're working with, if they have POS systems that they get orders from, if they have payment gateways, if they deliver and they have logistics partners and so on, all could be automated into the backend itself. And once you do this, you start seeing the system starts getting very smart because you see all the inputs from different data sources coming together into one ecosystem. And not only you're going to be able to see data and understand and make more data driven decisions and, but you'll also be able to get insights of what's working, what's not, what needs to be improved and so on. So um, this is the digital ecosystem basically and then building on the digital ecosystem, once you have the main Presence and the fundamentals and the core of the brands. You want to bring in traffic. Right. And this is where the performance marketing or the ads come in. What? Well, this needs a different episode, but let me just give you.

Speaker B: We can touch on it, obviously.

Speaker C: Yeah. A quick glance of how things have been so evolving. Eventually, um, in the past, I, um, would say couple of months. Um, because when you used to do campaigns, you usually build the campaign architecture. You put a strategy for that, you segment, you put the target audience, you definitely would love to, would want to more focus on the content and put in the hooks in the first five seconds and so on. So building up the campaign itself is something. And looking at different platforms, but also making sure that you run these campaigns and you integrate all the campaigns into your digital assets. And this is today very important because you want to make sure that you see the traffic coming. It's not only about ads, which is what you said at the beginning. Brands, uh, would run ads and they think this is a standalone, would bring in business growth and value. But when you integrate it, you see actually the entire journey and you see the drop offs. So once someone would see an ad on meta.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Okay, does he get interested right away and clicks or does he. Maybe you need to retarget them more and then they convert into the digital assets. But once they get into the digital assets, the mobile app or the website, this is a very different journey and you need a lot of analytics and insights there and tools that will make you understand the journey that they go through. Did they add to cart? Did they check out or they still just left something into the cart and you need to maybe push notification on and start using. It's not only about the campaign because the campaign would bring you exposure on social media and different platforms, but connecting the campaign itself to the digital ecosystem and understanding these customers, when they come into the digital ecosystems, where do they really drop off or get more excited and interested and purchase?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's an entire journey. And I believe successful brands today do it the right way when they ensure the full integration and automation of the ads and the digital assets together.

Speaker B: I mean, you touch on a lot of things. Many things.

Speaker C: I chose many things and I.

Speaker B: We needed episode 100%. Now I know, uh, you touched on many things that I'd like us to double click on. Um, the first one is back to the ecosystem before we go to the uh, performance marketing and how that actually has changed in the past couple of months here on the ecosystem front, um, to really integrate all these different touch points together in a way that you are able to read the data and you're collecting data, you're growing your sort of audience profiles. Um, and a really great example, qsr, because it's so fragmented today, uh, especially with the aggregators and so many different touch points. How do you bring everything together? Um, a lot of people say that investing or the investment required in uh, data aggregation and CRM is very expensive and it doesn't always yield the expected, uh, return. And so what do you think is a very practical, simple use case of using uh, sort of a CRM technology or data management platform or one of these tools that can help you link all these touch points together? That's, that may not be costly, but that could generate return. Do you have something off top of your mind that is it may be success story without maybe naming, you know,

Speaker C: uh, the brand, the brands. Okay. So again, it depends on how the brand, the maturity of the brand. Okay, I get, I understand for startups, they don't really want to invest in CRMs that could cost sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right? But I must also say that today, with the evolution of AI and with the evolution of uh, the digital, um, landscape Today, there are CRMs that are affordable, that you can use and you can actually only purchase specific subscription that would make you grow and scale slowly without being very costly. So there are solutions for this. But before we talk about costs, let's also look at value. Right? Because the most important thing today for any brand is data. And if you have data, your valuation goes up. As a company, you can bring so much value to different customers in terms of segmentations and understanding their behavior and so on. So it's important to know how to use the data. All right, so when you have a CRM M, again, sometimes you have digital ecosystems that are not even integrated with the CRMs. There's the back end. Let's say a, um, brand has a mobile app. Okay. And there's a back end for this mobile app where you store all the customer data, the purchases, you have all the insights and analytics and convergence there. You're able to use this data and you're able to even call it a CRM. While it's not really CRM M, you might want to monetize more on this. Some manual work would happen there. That's absolutely fine too. But it's always good to go baby steps instead of just, you know, putting money and investing and then feeling like, okay, I can't see the return on investment so quickly because it Takes time. So building up on your back end and, uh, understanding the data you have and working with it by segmenting data, by looking at the customer's behavior, by maybe push notifications or emailers or SMSs or bringing in offers, and it depends on the brand and the communications, but putting in a full strategy for what you have, and then when you see it work, scale it up. And then when you scale it up, don't go crazy and have a CRM that would cost you a fortune. Scale it up with a CRM that would basically have different tiers that you can pay for and then you can

Speaker B: upscale and meet your immediate needs.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: Slowly grow.

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. I believe that's the best way to do it. And we've done this with multiple, um, clients all over the world, by the way, not only in the UAE or the Gulf region, even in the America side and the Asia side. And it's usually great because once you see the value and you see the sales coming in, no business owner would tell you, I don't want to invest. They would all say, okay, take my money. I mean, I'm happy to pay. I'm seeing results. Right.

Speaker B: So, okay, that, uh, sounds, um, I mean, makes sense to be honest. Uh, because, yes, unfortunately, so many brands tend to go all out and then they end up with a super expensive license, surrounded by expensive consultants on how to run the tool. And unfortunately, they're not able to make use of the data that they're collecting or they're not collecting it. Or maybe their performance marketing is not very effective, so it's not really driving quality traffic. Um, on the performance marketing note, can I add something? Yes.

Speaker C: And I think that's the beauty of digital, um, in general as an industry, that you don't need to go spending all out. Right. I mean, testing is so important. I mean, with your digital ecosystem or with your ads or with your creatives or the testing is such an important phase for every brand, and that means you're always in control of money and the investments you're putting. So if you're speaking about CRMs, you can always test small tiers or packages, um, on SaaS platforms, let me call it this way. So I don't name any platforms, but you can go with small subscriptions and then you scale it up. And it's also the same with digital and performance marketing and ads, right? You can put a, uh, thousand dollars and see how it works and then start optimizing and take what works, what didn't, and then go and put another 2,000 so I scale it up this. And I think this is the key, because before you put any more. If you have a budget of $10,000, don't go put the budget of $10,000 immediately on ads, scale it up. So I think scalability is a key for every single thing the brand does in terms of marketing and digital and being online.

Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. And I think testing is a really good point. I think some are, um, trapped in this realm of just following the data. And unfortunately, if you only rely on data and you don't test, you might not know what's on the other side. And sometimes you just have to, you know, rely on your natural or your human instinct instead of data. Just data.

Speaker C: Yeah. Because what's important as well with data is you need to read the data in the right way. So if you see a flow of data that tells you, okay, you've been successful or you've been unsuccessful, uh, you need to understand why. And usually systems wouldn't tell you this, Right. It's external factors that you need to analyze. So if the campaign hasn't been successful for a specific target audience, you need to sit down and think, like, why did it not work for this audience? And it might not be the creative or the integrations or how the ads were set up. No, it might be external factors. It might be, uh, a specific period of the month where people have already spent their salaries. And maybe you need to run this specific campaign beginning of the month when people get the salaries in so, so many aspects where you need to evaluate politics, economy and so on to understand why is it working and scale it up or why is it not working? And let's sit down and fix it and see the reasons behind it.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So many parameters to play with, to test. Uh, and sometimes you have so much that's happening. And I guess this is something that in my agency days, we would advise clients when they would come to us and ask for benchmarks, ask for industry benchmarks. And our reply is always, uh, your best benchmark is your own historical data, and you have to build from there. Like, look at what you've done in the past, because your brand recognition, uh, your audience is your product is unique to you. So your best bet is to build on that and improve over time. And yes, try to take into account some external factors, uh, competitive, uh, competition factors, et cetera, but build on what you have and test and learn. Uh, the other point I wanted to double click on before we move into AI is performance, marketing and advertising sort of set up to the ecosystem and how that's. You're right, it has shifted over the past couple months here. It continues to shift. Um, it's moving from, it's shifting from a highly fragmented campaign architecture, campaign structure where you want to have as much segmentation as possible in order to understand what's performing, what's underperforming, what's working, what's not working so that you can make adjustments, uh, and generate better results. Right? You shift budgets around, you shift creative around in order to generate better results. But the way the platforms are changing is they're moving towards automation and the reliance on AI. The algorithm is just using more and more data points. So it wants you to go as broad as possible and it will use the creative, it will use your, uh, assets, your ecosystem in order to generate the highest possible, uh, value, um, for you. And I see a lot of advertisers still stuck in the sort of traditional, conventional way of setting up performance marketing campaign and not really trusting the system. And I feel like I could understand why, because for you to really benefit from the system, you also have to have a very strong integration with your ecosystem so that you feed it the right signals and the right data in terms of who's adding to cart, who is converting. Because if you don't have that connection, then what is the algorithm optimizing against? Um, how quickly do you think is this mindset changing? Or does it need more work? Or do you feel like more and more advertisers are jumping on this trend?

Speaker C: So thank you for bringing this up because actually, um, it has been so dynamic and changing, I wouldn't even say every week, literally, sometimes every day. I mean, you see with meta ads today, uh, previously you used to depend m much more on the experience of the media buyer and the performance team putting in the campaigns and setting it in the right way. Was it awareness, was it convergence and looking into the full sales funnel and building up ads for each funnel? But today it has changed because now the AI is doing that for you. So, and today instead of brands focusing on setting up the campaigns, and I specifically would speak about meta, they should now start shifting into looking at their creatives because as good your creative is as well as the AI will detect it and push it to the right segment and the right audience. So it's been shifting a lot. And honestly, I don't have the right equation. I don't think someone would have the right equation of what to do where, but I think it's multiple efforts put in together, not only from setting up the campaign, but also giving it a pause and thinking, where is this campaign going and to whom? And are they all the same behavior? The audience is all the same behavior. Or I might want to even split down the audience and target each one with a different communication. So as much as it's getting simpler with AI, it's getting more complex for the creative because the communication message for each audience has to be really different. And the hook in the first, let's say five, six seconds needs to also be very targeted to who you're speaking to. Um, and I believe people have to adapt so quickly. Brands and their teams and their agencies need to always be on top of trends because as I told you, it's really rapidly changing. And um, we've seen so much growth in terms of running ads on multiple platforms. Call it Meta, uh, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, programmatic even. We've seen so much growth when you start looking at not only setting up the campaigns with the right creatives, but also integrating into your digital system ecosystem. Exactly like you said, because you close up the loop completely and you get to understand which ad is working not with the clicks, but with the purchases.

Speaker B: With the purchase, yes.

Speaker C: And then going back to the campaigns, we in PS Digital, we've shifted um, our strategy and not only looking at how campaigns work in terms of roas. Today we work with clients on profitability. So when you evaluate a campaign, it's basically you evaluate how much did you spend versus how much did yield in terms of sales. So this is what we call ROA on return on ad spend. And with clients where we've sometimes done achievements of ROA times 30. So with every dollar the client has spent with us, we've yield $30, um, in return. And we as a team, we were so happy. ROA of 30, I mean, let's brag about it, right? But when you go back and look at the costs and look at the um, cost of food, cost of ads, cost of any integrations and then the sales, sometimes the brands are not profitable. So we've done this exercise and I think this is where many brands feel that, okay, I can my ads are doing sales, but I'm not profitable. M and that's the next level today. Like brands should start thinking and start estimating and forecasting and putting KPIs of when are you profitable and what ROA would break you even. And whoever is running the ads, performance team, media buyers agencies need to start looking at, okay, what's my ROA break even. And then optimizing segmentations, communications as you go to achieve not only roas, but profitability too.

Speaker B: And on the point that um, the algorithm is becoming very, very powerful, uh, in showing the right ad to the right audience. It means that now you can build 20 different creators for 20 different audience Personas. But hang on a second, it's going to cost you money if you want to build so many creators, right? And I guess this is where you could start thinking about AI and this is where we can start talking about this topic. Um, how is AI going to help advertisers on the creative front? Whether it's copywriting, whether it's um, uh, creative image generation, um, production, etc, what does it mean to the advertiser? But I'm interested to know also from your pov, what does it mean for the agency? Does it mean that you can do more with the same amount of talent or does it mean that you can do, uh, the same with less talent? So where is the sort of, if you think, if you, if you don't mind sharing agency headed, um, are you going to be, going to try to be more efficient by maybe reducing the amount of people that you rely on so that you can use AI more and so that you can grow your sort of, uh, margins? I'd love to know a bit more about your input on this topic from an agency perspective also, not just from advertisers.

Speaker C: So recently we've spent so much time in the past year, uh, looking at AI, but not as tools, as layers that we plug in with every part and aspect of our digital ecosystem. So today every department we have has KPIs to integrate AI tools. All right? So we work with AI in every single aspect we do in our lives. Call it coding, call it ui, ux, performance, marketing, insights, analytics, building dashboards, creatives, videos, uh, whatever you name it, you name it. Anything you name is something we definitely use AI somehow within the process. And the purpose of this is that again, the world is changing so rapidly and if you don't catch up and if you don't adapt, you'll become obsolete very soon. So AI has helped us so much to be efficient. Not sure if it has helped us to be as effective as I personally would have expect. So I believe the time. So let me tell, let me give you an example, for example. So if we speak about copywriting, okay, it takes our team, let's say seven days to build copies without AI normal, Hm, human work, like seven days to build, um, copywriting for an informative website today with AI tools, they are able to finish an entire copy with SEO driven, AEO driven, GEO driven, call it whatever you want to call it, copies that are matching the aspects of the industry benchmark in terms of being detected on a website by the search engine or the uh, LLMs in one day. So that means my productivity has actually been more efficient, 70% in copywriting. However, the human element comes in here because I believe as much as AI has helped us move so quickly, there has to be a human element that stops there and read through, verify, understand, maybe do changes with AI and maybe do changes manually. So um, I would say it's a hybrid process nowadays in our agency where we try as much as possible to utilize the um, technology and the AI tools that we work with across different departments, but also ensuring that our team is always there. And instead of them spending time on doing the work themselves, today they spend time on strategic thinking, more so verifying and seeing does this really work or not? Um, so that's an example for copywriting if I may mention. But let's also speak about coding right? Today AI coding is just crazy. Like we used to have, I mean not we as an agency, but I believe brands, um, and agencies and companies used to, to hire big team of software. You would usually look at agencies back in the days and see the biggest teams they might have would be software engineers to code. Right. Today it's not the same anymore because coding has become native language. Like do you code?

Speaker B: Um, I vibe code.

Speaker C: Okay, but I mean even if you coded you don't need to code anymore because native, I mean it's English. If you type now on an AI tool, it's going to code the entire uh, mobile app or website and so on.

Speaker B: Isn't that uh, insane though that the coding and computer engineering, computer science were like the hardest areas skill set, uh, just maybe two years ago it was like the top thing to uh, be knowledgeable of. And now today you can just

Speaker C: not even have, I mean you should have

Speaker B: them, you don't even know how. Need to know the language of coding. You just have to, you can just type it down, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: I mean it's crazy, right? But again it gives you efficiency. But let's look at ah, cases that we've seen. I mean in the market, like Amazon for example, the AWS had an outage of their service for 13 hours because they, their AI coding agent has coded something and went into production autonomously. So it took its life autonomously and it decided by itself as an AI agent that delete everything is the solution and recover again. So it went on outage of 13 hours. So today, I mean, everyone's talking about this story, right? But it makes you pause, it makes you say, okay, I can use AI, but I need to be really careful on how I use AI. I mean, with coding, we have achieved an efficiency of 60%, which is amazing. Right. And you see other brands, by the way, going to exponential efficiency of sometimes times 10 efficiency. But I believe people will be holding back a bit because you need human verification. You need to give the right permissions to AI agents. You need to make sure that you have sandbox or test environments where the agents would push the work they've done on test environments. And then you go through it, you verify it, and when it's done the correct way, human would push it out live, right? So I think things are evolving with AI, but the one thing I know for a fact is that it's an evolution that we all have to go through it. I mean, whether we like it or we don't, it is something that every person has to use on a personal level, on a daily perspective. And also every brand who would want to be successful has to integrate it somehow.

Speaker B: Are you able to become more competitive when it comes to cost to pricing to your clients with AI is the sort of. Do you feel like the, uh, the market is catching up in a way where you're not just able to be more competitive, but you feel like maybe advertisers and clients are also being a bit more demanding? Yeah, you know, like they're, they're. You, you can't, you can't say now you need seven days for a copy, you know, because they, they kind of maybe expect, uh, you to deliver that in much, much faster because they know that you have AI and BI is becoming so good. How, how are you, are you experiencing this type of, uh, situation? How are you dealing with it?

Speaker C: See, that is just an amazing question. Yeah, I think, Yeah. I mean, who's not right? But today you look at cost versus value, right? So yes, AI has dropped. Your, um, has increased your productivity has brought you efficiency. Maybe you had a team of 10. Now you don't need the 10 anymore. You maybe need four or five, right. So your costs are dropping down in terms of cost is maybe human. Right. But on the other side, you want to make sure you have the right AI tools. So you're investing in this as well. You want to make sure you're giving the right learning and development for your team to use AI. And by the way, this has been one of the biggest challenges we've been through. Because you cannot just throw an AI team, an AI tool in the team's face and say, okay, go ahead, work with it. You need to give them trainings, you need to let them understand how does that work. You need to make them utilize it in the best way of their own style as well. Right. And um, as much as you write sops and how do you go through it and so on, things are evolving so fast. So the adaptability of the team themselves and the management of the agency plays a major role when it comes to using AI. But that's a value that we put and instead of us looking at uh, okay, maybe we dropped, um, we have more productivity or we're now being more efficient in terms of um, uh, efficiency, uh, timelines, let me say it this way, but also look at how the work is being so much upgraded. So I think now we are going to be looking into more value and clients expectations will be really higher than what we've seen previously in the past years because you have no excuse. So it's not only about producing the work with AI, but it's also about spending time putting your strategic thinking and the thought process that makes sure that whatever you got in terms of material from the AI tool, you're really elevating it. And it's not just a copy paste or an AI content that is just being pushed online.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, I mean this is enlightening, uh, to know what are some of the elements that you are leveraging to sort of say to the advertiser, hey look, uh, yes, AI is making things more efficient, more productive, but there's still an investment required, there's still education, there's still training, there are some guardrails that need to be put in place so that the AI doesn't hallucinate. It's not as simple and there's still some man hours that need to be put in place. Uh, and I like how you stressed on value because I feel like ultimately if you tie the client's investment instead of tying it to uh, the man work and the effort from the agency or from the partner, you should tie it to value because that's ultimately what he's investing in. And if that's elevating, then that has a price. Right? And the client should be willing to invest whatever investment is required in order to get that result. And maybe the um, perhaps you, you enlighten me if you want, but perhaps the right way to price a project nowadays, as with this transformation is to price it based on the outcome and the value that you can generate as opposed to the input and demand hours. Right. And we should move away from maybe, uh, I don't know, uh, fees, commissions to sort of maybe revenue share.

Speaker C: I mean. Yeah, possible. I believe some agencies and clients would work together with such partnerships, maybe commission bases. Uh, but I think it all depends on the scope of work as well. So when we at PS Digital would be scoping a project today, you're not only, um, I mean you're paying the fees for also an accelerated project plan. Right. Previously without AI, you might take three months to deliver, I don't know, a website in E commerce, whatever. Today you're able to deliver it in two, three weeks maybe. So this acceleration is also money. And it's not only, I mean you can't work in a partnership that a, uh, client would come and sit and tell you what's your costs and I pay only this cost because otherwise it might even be better for him to go use AI tools alone. Right. When you bring expertise, expertise. And when you bring agencies, you need to trust and build a partnership with them that they will be doing the right thing using the right tools. And um, if brands would think of getting into doing agencies work, some would and some would succeed, by the way. I'm not saying no, but it's a big hassle because it's not as simple as you see. Let's put a prompt and I get something out and let's publish it. It's not as simple as that. It does require a lot of strategic thinking that I don't believe. We had to put much effort in this before when we used to do the entire process as human. Today, because you're getting, you're putting input as a prompt and you're getting an output as a material from the AI, you will be spending time to really validate. Does this make sense to the market, to the brand, to the industry, to the audience and so on. So it's, it's again, it goes back to value, goes back to trust, it goes back to credibility. It goes back to proven records of success. I mean when a client comes into you and see that you've done this before to other brands and has successfully brought in the right accomplishments the brand would want, I did not see any resistance from clients. Yeah. Talking about cost, not really, no.

Speaker B: Do you think that agencies, uh. I don't know why I said we. Maybe because I'm ex agency. Uh, should agencies start adding prompt engineers in the structures that they're Proposing to clients as an additional layer.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I mean, with every AI tool we use, we have SOPs, and the SOPs would be part of it would be how do you prompt and what do you say, what input do you need to add? Uh, and what data do you need to upload and what brand identity needs to be uploaded. You might want to add some links, you might want to add some competitors link and ask the AI to, okay, go check this, check what are they doing and give me what's the benchmark in this market. Um, and you might want to even add some data of yours, but of course, be careful of privacy because again, it's a big topic. But I mean, as much as you put in terms of data in your prompts, as much as the output would somehow be more accurate in terms of an output. So, um, prompting is very, very, very important. That's why I told you we spend time with the team, training them, giving learning and developments. We sometimes even give a list, of course, that they have a list of courses, they have to go through it. So they, and they get tested by the way, along the way to make sure that they are not jumping into the AI tool and thinking it's going to be magic, because no, that's not the reality. So, um, I believe prompting would be a very important thing. I mean, on agency side as well as with brands, if they use AI themselves.

Speaker B: Nice. Top AI tool used on databases personally today.

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, Claude.

Speaker B: Claude for personal.

Speaker C: Claude for personal. And for work.

Speaker B: And for work. Okay.

Speaker C: I mean, if you ask me this question, I believe other people as well, if you ask this question two months back, I tell you ChatGPT, who wasn't using ChatGPT, right. But Claude just hammered everyone. Honestly today. Claude is not just about chatting. Right. It's more about building and giving it a skill and building a skill, uh, with AI. And then it knows. So every time you want to do the same task, it just knows. Claude Cowork of course, is amazing. I mean, I'd say be careful of what access you're giving it because if it access your folders, your emails, your life, it might be dangerous. But, um, also agents, you can now build agents and you can build agents, you can integrate them together and they could talk together, do the entire progress and entire process, an entire project and come back to it's powerful, it's insane. And of course, the AI coding side of Claude has been really emerging in the industry as well. And we've seen great projects coming out from Claude. Again, if you give it the right prompt, as you said.

Speaker B: Agreed. Lubna, thank you so much for coming to the show. I didn't even notice the time passed by, to be honest. Uh, yeah, I look forward for another conversation.

Speaker C: Same here. Thank you so much for having me, Ibrahim. That was really, really fun, I must say.

Speaker B: Yeah, agreed.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you.