AI-Era Marketing: Inside GitHub’s High-Speed, Human-First Approach

Speaker A: Welcome to Content Disrupted. Bold takes on brand marketing. I'm, um, your host, Dan Baptiste, and together we'll explore what it takes to excel in brand marketing at one of the most exciting and disruptive times in industry history. Welcome to Content Disrupted. Joining us today is Adam Walden, vice president of brand and corporate marketing at GitHub, one of the most important companies shaping our world today. Adam has the challenge of marketing to an audience of developers. Typically distrustful of your marketing messages or marketing messages in general. Adam. And operating in an industry that is barreling headfirst into the great unknown. So today we'll dig into his approach, how influencing people and building trust is changing in our modern ecosystem, and get his vision on where this crazy world is headed. Adam, welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Great. Hey Dan, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah. I'd love to start with the mission of GitHub and your lane within that. So if you could kind of describe

Speaker B: that, that'd be great. Yeah. Well, from a highest level, our mission is to accelerate human progress through developer collaboration. So we really put developers at the center of everything we do, the center of our thought process of how we work and how we operate. A lot of times if we're evaluating two decisions, we'll come back to like, well, what's the right thing to do for the developer? And oftentimes even if that's not the easiest thing for us or the most straightforward thing to do, that's typically how we're leading this conversation, our thought process. So that's kind of where we start and end in a lot of ways.

Speaker A: Awesome. And when you're looking at sort of building relationships with that community, obviously GitHub has been foundational in the developer community forever. But how have you gone about that decision making process in the strategy of investing in that community? Like, how have you fostered relationships? Is it purely what you said, which is always do right by them, or is it more to that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting question. And again, when you talk about GitHub, there's a, in sort of the market in the world we're in today. Like, we're both like, we're like the hair club for men, where we're both like, we're a customer and we're the user, uh, ourselves. So we're obviously a company mostly of developers. And GitHub had its start squarely within the developer community. So when GitHub was founded, we really had this amazing market fit of helping developers do better work. It started specifically with Git, and trying to put a, um, better ecosystem around Git, then everything after that has been, how are developers collaborating, how are we helping them do better work, how are we helping them think about security, how are we helping them think about what's going to be the best way to connect with each other and the larger ecosystem? So that's really where we like. It's part of the DNA of where we came from. And so because of that, years later, our biggest challenge was moving into enterprise customers and taking the success that we had within developer community and now bringing that up. And a lot of companies you've seen, I think a lot of companies in our space historically have had similar challenges, which becomes, okay, great, you've got this incredible audience now. How do you monetize that? How do we be more taken seriously? And that was a challenge for GitHub, um, six years ago, I would say maybe eight to five years ago. And the sense, not surprisingly, kind of came to a point right around the acquisition with Microsoft, where Microsoft came in to Microsoft credit. They didn't come in and say, okay, guys, let's start making some money, let's get that machine going. They really understood and continue to understand the value of GitHub being agnostic and serving a developer community first and foremost. And so that continues to be our charter and what we do. And so therefore the challenge for us is never around the developer community. It was really around how do we take this message we have and convince enterprise customers that they should be spending their dollars and investing with us, that we've got this transformative, secure platform that's going to help them really accelerate their work and do better business?

Speaker A: Yeah, and it looks like that world has completely changed as you think about how to do that. Like the problem and the mission is the same, I would assume, but how you get from A to B is different. So as you're looking at, uh, kind of moving through that pace of change and that level of education, how have you done that or how have you managed that in a world that seemingly like, like every two weeks, whatever you were talking about is mildly out of date? So how are you navigating that?

Speaker B: The analogy I use a lot of times is sailing. So I grew up sailing on the Long Island Sound. And when you're in a sailboat, you're holding onto these small sailboats, not like a big fancy sailboat, but you've got a tiller and you pretty much have to hold the tiller fairly loosely and you aim for a specific direction, but you Aim generally for the direction, knowing that the wind and the current and the waves are going to shift you around and throw you around. And if you try to hold on too tightly to that tiller, you might break your arm, you might capsize the boat. And you have to understand that the winds are going to take you where they're going to take you, and then you're going to need to tack and you need to think about where to go next. So obviously my analogy here for kind of the world we're in today is very much that we aspirationally, as we look at things like AI and agents and all the new models that we're bringing into GitHub, we want to be absolutely relevant on the cutting edge. With Microsoft, we're defining a lot of those new technologies and what agentic development means and generative development means within the new communities or kind of writing the definitions as we're writing the scripts at the same time. It's really a crazy and interesting place to be, which is right on this razor's edge of it. But as we do it, as you're pointing out every couple of weeks, there's new competitors, there's new companies that are coming out with new ideas, there's new ways of thinking, there's new technologies coming out of China that are lower cost. There's new concerns both from the developer community in terms of what it means to them and the safety of their jobs, as well as what it means to enterprise customers and how they're going to be investing in the right platforms and products and continue to excel. So all that to say, it's a very iterative process. We've become over the past six months, much more thinking like a startup than ever than we have in a while. We used to be very startupy. We kind of got a bit more into, uh, a planning model and now we're much more in this startup model. We're innovating, we're moving quickly, we go for a two week sprint and then we kind of pause and be like, okay, are we heading in the right direction? What's the landscape look like now? How do we need to pivot to stay competitive and so on and so forth. So our landscape has definitely come in over the past six months and in

Speaker A: going through that process or that transformation, almost like back to your roots of like this fast moving startup. What changes have you made and has anything been particularly effective as you're trying to operate in that mode?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that the biggest change we've made is that we've really started working with our enterprise and product teams on two week sprints. Back in, we've always had two week sprints, but the two week sprints are now much more focused on iterative product development and being smart, intelligent and reactive to the world around us. So that's become much more of a tightened motion again. And that means as the marketing team, we need to operate in two weeks brunch. We don't have a six month roadmap. Now that we're looking at and understanding what we're going to be doing in the next six months and how it's going to be coming out, we're much more responsive and that's coming in much closer just because again there's new models that are coming out. The agent of technologies are coming out in different ways and are being responsive in different ways. There's more traction in different products and things that we didn't expect to be, or in different models or different competition. So from a marketing team we're moving much quicker now. We're being much more responsive and therefore we're thinking about what are those things that we can do that help us be successful. So it's not like planning out a big out of home campaign typically, although we still think about those from like a brand and what get a means and value and safety and trust element of it. But from like the new technologies and a product launch, it's coming out much faster. So we're thinking obviously we lean much heavily into digital like everybody else. We think about influencers and talking about that story. And we're really blessed and lucky that we have the trust of 150 million developers on the platform. So we've got a nice built in engine for ourselves. Obviously not every company has that, but that's another way that we've got. We can start our flywheel a lot of times by just bringing out the product and bringing in front of the right customers and getting that conversation started ourselves.

Speaker A: You mentioned a couple of things I just want to hop back to. One is your commitment and your investment to the developer community. And at the same time we see this technology creating almost like a displacement of the maybe parts of that community in general. So inherently there's friction there, right? But it doesn't seem that friction doesn't present itself in the community as much as you would think because you know, a lot of people are embracing this and finding new ways to invent themselves. But as a company that's having to make some of those decisions around how we help a community that we're in some ways in conflict with like, how do you juggle that? Like, what's your approach there?

Speaker B: Well, first of all, we never think about ourselves being in conflict with the developers. We're always looking at, like, what are they looking for? And from the highest levels. Kind of the way I think about it is it's not that we're trying to, obviously no ways trying to eliminate a community of developers. We don't think that developers are going to go away by any means. We think we actually have an ambition to have a billion developers on the platform in the next few years. There's going to be a billion people that are going to now are going to be able to code because of AI, because of low code, because of the ways that the technology continues to evolve and developers going to be more and more important. But we also think that there's a changing of the role. And a lot of times I think about it going from artisan to architect. And now you get to come in and instead of having to think about all the little pieces and building it together and what are you going to do? You get to be able to manage m that more with AI. Uh, you have a partner, which is AI. They get to take care of the laundry and the house cleaning and you get to think about the more creative aspects to it. And so that's really where we believe that the technology is going. That's the investments we're trying to make. How do we have a. It used to be a pure program and now it's a partner programmer that's coming in and sitting with you and helping you to make better code than ever before.

Speaker A: It's pretty amazing. I think I've heard the term VOD coding where you're getting it in very low, low skill, but you have an idea in now people who don't know how to write a stitch of code can. There's access to building software and applications, certainly not at the fidelity of a developer by any means. But starting to close that gap is really interesting, especially as we think about the convergence of the sort of business leader or problem or consumer and developer, like coming together with software to bridge that gap is fascinating. And as you think about that change, how far in advance does your messaging go? Like, are you starting to see that to go from 150 million to multiple billion? It's almost like democratizing coding, right? Like, uh, are you actively pursuing that or is that going to happen naturally and you're focusing on your core?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. I think Philosophically, we are doing that. We think about that and some of the decisions we make tactically, we're very much thinking about our core developer and what are the tools they need to be successful. I do think as we think about and you as we move to a billion developers and more people can like, what is the definition of a developer? Right. It used to be something someone who could code and went to computer science degrees and knows math really well, et cetera, et cetera. But even if you think about it, the last numbers I saw was that there was 35 million or 40 million developers in the world and yet we have 150 developers on the platform. So already the definition of what it means to developer and how you use code and has started to evolve and start to loosen up. One of the things we play with is Nike very famously has the kind of redefined what it meant to be an athlete. Used to be athlete was a competitive and you got paid and you were elite and you were going out and doing it all the time. But they evolved it to anyone with a body is an athlete. And then they came up and that's where the shoes they did and that's where their whole, that's their whole platform came from. And for us, we think about that anyone with an idea is a developer. So in the sense of like, if you've got an idea, if you want to solve a problem, you can use code to solve it. And oh, by the way, we've been in the era now for quite some time where likely, really probably actually no big ideas, no huge innovation is going to happen without software at the center of it. Now, it used to be we made cool things like wheels and levers. Those are nice printing presses, like all that stuff that human innovation created, no code in sight. Going forward, software is going to be at the center of any big leap in transformation. And so therefore all of us, we've often said for a while that every company is a software company. And we're getting to the point that everyone knowing some code and understanding about how developers think and being able to be successful at that is going to be important, I think to most of our lives.

Speaker A: It's fascinating when you continue to play that out and you think of the accessibility of software development past, you might outsource in the future. Who knows how easy it is to start to stitch those things together, which is interesting. And then as part of that, there's an education that has to happen. And you mentioned investing in the community and having developers either sit with you or have Videos. What do you view specifically from like a thought leadership standpoint? What do you view as your role? How actively as you think about the world opening up from a, uh, developer and access to developing tools, do you feel like you can provide the software in the community will educate, or do you feel a responsibility or a goal of also bringing the community along with you and do you take that as part of your approach?

Speaker B: Yeah, the thought leadership aspect is huge. As I said, we're the hair club, right, for men. We're both the customer and the audience. So we're creating these things of thinking about them and defining them as we go. So we have a sense of openness as part of our DNA. Obviously, GitHub is a huge part of the open source community early on and continues to be a big piece of our DNA. So we think about that. Our CEO Thomas and our cpo Mario are uh, often writing on blogs and thinking about what they're doing and talking about that state of innovation or working really closely with Microsoft and thinking about it. So thought leadership, I think is important because all this is happening surprisingly in the open like never before. Obviously there's a lot of proprietary technology, but in terms of like, the ethics of AI, uh, and how we're creating code and tools and what we're doing, I think it's super important for it to be open and for us to play a role there. One of the hot topics right now, personally that I'm having the team really take a dive into is the sense of understanding the importance of models. We're all, everyone. Every time there's a new model out, we're racing, like, here we go. We're supporting it too. And I think it's important to take a step back and be like, cool. Why? Anyone listening to this podcast that's a, uh, CEO or a CTO or running with teams, why do you care about which models your teams are using? Why different models for different applications when you want to choose which one is right? And it's funny, I often raise my hand and ask embarrassing questions in meetings because I feel like it'd be that guy. I'm old enough now and been around enough to like, take some kicks. And it's one of those things that I've asked a number of times now, and there's always that I'm like, well, yeah, uh, more better. It's like, okay, like, why?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So like, yeah, I feel like my role personally is to ask a lot of the ignorant whys and then knowing that those can be translated and put out in terms of whether it's thought leadership or helping other people think through it as well.

Speaker A: I think that's a great point. One, it's a fundamental question as the we're moving, moving, moving. We accept things and move on. And I think in the content space, just as a function, we got into these production modes because I got to fill all these channels and I got to perform in search and like I've spent the last four or five years asking people why? What are we trying to do, what are we trying to communicate? And you start to realize you as human nature and things pile up, you start operating and you lose sense of the why, especially at the speed things are going now. So it's a really healthy exercise and often you get to a level of insight that feels really basic but really important that people aren't talking about. So I think that's really important. And we get to this concept of positioning. So as you start looking at questioning the why and where this is going and how does it influence the developer community and enterprises and the future, uh, of accessibility to software, there's a lot of like big meaty questions into your point. Those are all out in the open now because from everything you hear, like this is transforming society. How we work, how we think, how we interact with one another is going to continue to change at a rapid pace. So we're all kind of involved in this experiment, right? But from a positioning standpoint, how do you think about like the, the sort of macro story of what you're trying to tell versus some of these micro positioning pieces in the lanes and what is the relationship of the two, especially when you're in these like two week sprints. And from a marketing standpoint, I will

Speaker B: say the danger of two week sprints and moving so quickly is the sense of being too reactive or too panic or like, oh, there's a thing and then everyone flocks to that thing. And I'm sure we'll talk about content more as we go, but there's always also like content marketing is really interesting because, and I know you know this because you live it, but like the attention span of people now is like we're like cats. Like it's good, it's gone. So it's, there's all this panic and fear based on a moment and then the moment's gone around to the next one. So it's a very interesting paradox to like kind of continue to exist in but from us. So the thing that I'm doing and my team really we focus on is Thinking about, we live in this world of technology, we live in this world of AI, we live in this world of software, and yet at the end of the day, we're marketing to human beings and human beings have fears and they have emotions and we have thoughts and that's our customers and so, and they have full lives. So when I think about GitHub and from the highest level of branded positioning, I really, the thing we were landing on is the idea of possibility is that GitHub, uh, everyone has an aspiration. And whether that's for your company or for your community or for your side project or for the world at large, you're something you're trying to do or many people are trying to do. And GitHub is a place that gives you that possibility. And that as we think about our product, which is being able to infuse it with, with AI, and as we think about it in the sense of like connecting all the dots throughout the software development lifecycle so that we're helping you create and collaborate and ship and secure everything within software. And obviously we think we do it great and we think we have an amazing solution around it. But at the end of the day, what does that mean to you as a human being? And the thing we're trying to come up with this idea is that it's possibility and that there's in the world we're in, which is fairly divisive, there's all sorts of wars and other things happening everywhere. Can Gita be a place for you to come in and think about not what is right now, but what is possible? And to your point before that, like, yeah, AI has got this threat of, within, uh, the developer community. Again, if we think of it from, from something that's adversarial but to possibility, that kind of helps unravel that and loosen that a little bit, is here's some support and help for you to imagine now and create and realize what's possible. So from that, from a highest level, what we think about it, from a

Speaker A: brand, I love the aspirational nature of that. And for us, even as you think about the aspirational of possibility, then you say, okay, what's in the way? And those start to become the pillars or the things you need to overcome and those become really interesting ways to dig in with people. Because all of these things are almost like apparatus to demonstrate, uh, empathy, which clearly, Adam, you guys have done from day one as a company always saying, well, what does this mean for the developer community? Which isn't always the Case with business, a lot of folks will think about like, how do I push this product or reach this person or get this sale? You're automatically operating at an advantage because you're saying, well what does this mean for my customer? And when you uh, like lift the notion of possibility as a direction and then say, okay, well what's in the way? And in some cases for you, which starts to sort of link everything together is software skills and access to technology. Now you're opening that up. Okay, as a developer, what is the possibility for you in this new world? If we think about agentic AI, what is the possibility for you? So inherently there's the aspiration and then there's this nature of overcoming things which together demonstrate that you understand where people want to go and you can help them get there. Which is, which is really cool. And as we look at this sort of ecosystem shift and how people start to experience this message, I don't know about you, but as we start looking at concepts around information discovery and how, you know, different the world is right. Like we're seeing things like LinkedIn deprioritize posts that take you out of LinkedIn or Google trying to retain you within the sort of Google ecosystem or uh, Perplexity or any of the others. So there's this idea of almost like closed ecosystems that you have to participate in all of them. So are you seeing the same thing and how do you think about that from a marketing standpoint?

Speaker B: Yeah, we definitely see that. We've seen that for a while. I don't know how new that is, but one is we really think about each of our marketing channels, especially the non owned channels, about what's the purpose of it, who's our audience for space. So LinkedIn is very different from Instagram versus X versus Snapchat or whatever, everything else. So we were really thinking about like who's this specific audience and what do they want to hear and what's relevant to them. We very rarely or never reuse. I mean I think anyone does really these days. You shouldn't spoiler alert and think about like from each channel because each channel has a specific audience, each channel is a specific language and way, each channel set of rules and whether it's formal or informal. And so yeah, we're definitely, if we're going to LinkedIn, we're posting natively on LinkedIn because that's going to perform better. We're always thinking about that. We're, we're putting in, we do LinkedIn newsletters as well. So if we do LinkedIn newsletters and then we do our own posts on LinkedIn there we create a little mini ecosystem. So we're thinking about how do we maximize each of those ecosystems for what they are and not go too crazy or not even really think about it. We're really thinking about them, I would have to say, you know, almost as silos in terms of obviously we create an overall marketing messaging program and then we think about each of our channels and how are they going to perform for us, I think is the easiest way we think about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the shift that we've started to observe is this concept of in the old model, you had this like bottoms up approach, very like topic post. How do I like perform on these 100 disparate keywords? And I have a social team that is owning each of those channels. And the challenge has been because there's been so much demand, it started to distribute like the content creation centers. And a lot of times those teams don't have the time or the bandwidth to collaborate with one another. And what you get is this like soup of different messages or interactions depending on whomever owns whatever channel. And uh, there's a ton of inconsistency. What we see is almost like the antidote for that is starting to think and root ourselves back in the kind of your concept of possibility or as brands like what is this top line position and how do we sort of materialize that within the rules of LinkedIn or what would people want to see in LinkedIn in service of this message? And you start to make these sort of messaging trees and have momentum show up everywhere. Because that concept of like moving people from one platform to another, to your website to a conversion, like when those gates start getting locked, then that process breaks. Right? So starting to think about how to influence folks and are you taking a, uh, similar approach with your team of cascading common messages, but adapted for how people would want to see them in different environments or different audiences.

Speaker B: So fundamentally we actually, the thing we've started doing is looking at three different Personas, like very high level Personas and putting most everything we do through the Persona. So we call them builders, drivers and learners. So builders are really, you think of them as a core developer. What do they need? What are the tools they're trying to, what do they have to understand, how do they want to connect with other developers, how are they going to foster and build their career, Those kind of things, drivers, you could think of them as business decision makers or customers or advocates within an organization that are going to help spread your message further. And so for them we're thinking about how do we help scale, what's that mean for developer productivity? What are the tools that they're going to want to know that they can help show success within their role that they have and show that has impact. And then the last one we do is learners. Said someone that's just again we go to a billion developers, you think about the next generation of developers or we think about new people that are coming into code and they might be turning to cursor now because that's a great simple ID they can jump on. There's the GitHub. It used to be for free. You had to. We asked you a lot of information. Like we kind of took you a while to get there because of cursor. Thanks so much. We just got rid of that, made it real simple. You just get started on it. So competition always makes us better. We love competition. But we're also thinking a lot about those new developers and how do we get them into the ecosystem, how do we make that get up the sticky and that they've got a great experience from the get go and they're learning and connecting with the whole development community. So the high level tier lens is yes, we think about some of those bigger messages, we think about how they're going to cascade but we typically think about them through these three different audiences. And then we think about like there may be some messages and things we're doing that are just about the driver community as we're thinking about like new security tools or we just launched scalability within a specific region geocentricity so that you can guarantee that all of your code is within a specific country. And uh, builders and learners don't care about that. But big enterprise customers and governments care a lot about that. So again we change that message depending on who we're talking to.

Speaker A: And is all of that in service of this concept of possibility or is that still being developed? Like is there a top line position where it's like yes, how people receive that message and what they do with it. Like creating possibility and the. All the things you need to worry about depending on what camp you fall in is a Persona is going to be very different. But are you still kind of rooting it in that possibility lens or is that not how you go to market?

Speaker B: So yes and I guess or no but whatever the right one is there

Speaker A: whichever one half full or half empty. Yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker B: So this is a new. We're just starting to Roll this out. We're just thinking about how it kind of comes to life in different ways. It's always been part of the DNA. It's. We sort of put a name to it more and we're thinking about that as we get a, uh, run up to our big user conference in October, which is universe. We think about like, how are we going to be underscoring it there? What's that brand message? As we think about when we do some bigger events and programs with our friends at Microsoft, how do we show up and what's that mean and how do we have this consistent message to the developer community? So it's always been there. If you think about it as we think about even enterprise customers and how we're helping them do better work, it's all about possibility. What's the possibility of transformation and what's the possibility of outperforming your rivals and all that doing innovation? So it's always there. We're just putting a name to it now and really thinking about that more from the highest level of brand. And then what's that mean for how we fire on each.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love putting a name to the, these efforts. I, uh, think it just creates a universal understanding because now you're like, okay, guys, remember this is, uh, what's the role of possibility in this? And it almost like that vocabulary starts getting infused and it takes what could be sort of disparate teams feeling disconnected into a common approach or lens, which is great. I know you focused a lot on storytelling in your career. Any things that you, any tools or uh, philosophies you use in communicating well with these communities, like any advice you have for folks who are trying to tell meaningful stories in the current environment, I mean.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, I kind of go back to the basics. One is, as I said before, remember we're talking to humans you're not talking to. Even though I just mentioned those three Personas we have, they're not Personas, they're people. And they all have hopes, fears, desires. And so I think all of us just remember you're talking to humans when we're storytelling. And then the second thing for me, and I guess my advice for others is get out of your industry. Like, how are other people telling stories? What's going on in, in the arts? What's going on? And uh, how does the opera telling stories or ballet or be inspired by street performance that you happen to see or by a book you read or by how some niche shop around the corner is promoting what they're doing? Like, I think there's inspiration around every corner, if you're open to it, and to think about how that can affect and impact what we want to do. I come from a big events background as well, and I, uh, have a real passion for live event and human connection and getting people together. And often when I'll walk into an event, I just do this thing which is I kind of just clear my mind and I just sort of like, what. And then like, whether I physically or actually close my eyes, that open them again. When you open your eyes, like, what do you instantly see? Like, what's the. What's the feeling you have? What's the sense of, like, how you, your place, your role in this environment? What are you reacting to, what's standing out, what feels good, what feels weird? And I think we think about that for marketing as well as we're doing a campaign or a program or anything we're doing. You talked about this before. We're moving so quickly. Pause, Stop for a second. If you're going to see this message flash across your phone or your screen or on a billboard revver, what's that really going to mean to you? What's that saying? What's that feeling you're trying to evoke? What are we trying to have people do? Does it align with who they are as human beings and how we want them to live a more full life? If you're just trying to ram, again, marketing 101, but you're trying to ram any message or thing down someone's throat, it's not going to do it unless they're at a space where they're looking to solve a problem. They want to hear it, and it's sort of resonating with them in a way for them as a human, which again, why I think you take these inspirations from the world around us.

Speaker A: What's the most surprising place you found inspiration? Like, do you have any funny fun stories where you showed up at an event, you saw something interesting and it launched a different style behavior that you weren't expecting?

Speaker B: I think, like, I love. I think music is a universal inspiration for us or it hits us in a very visceral way. It's all of us, and I think in a really interesting visceral way, it's very primitive within our bodies. So I'm always inspired by music and thinking about how we could bring music in to different unexpected ways. I also think, like, specifically live music. So two years ago, we opened up universe actually with this incredible. It was a cello performance but the being GitHub, we wanted to make sure we kind of connected the acoustic to the digital. So we had the software. There's a guy, a young man, that wrote this incredible piece of software that listened, interpreted music and then created visuals based on the music. And we projected those on the screen. And then we had another guy that both created music with code. So he's creating music with code. That music would go out on speakers and then it would be put back in the system and visualized. And then we had two cellists, one electric cello, an acoustic cellist, creating music and singing. That would then inform the whole process once again. So we created this incredible loop and then it was up on the screen. So we had it in from like the half hour before people walked into the stage. And it was one of the first times at a tech conference where I saw people come in and not just get on their phones or not swipe up their laptops, but they actually sat there and looked at it and watched this performance because it was so. It was so human. And it was people creating things with their art, but also integrating with technology. So things like that really inspire me.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so awesome. I think you experience things like that and it just sits with you forever, right? And sometimes we don't know why, with music being so primitive, but even adding music to something, it immediately changes the mood or how that content is consumed. It's really interesting. But we're talking a lot about humanizing and connecting with people on these, like, really core levels. We're in a moment now where there's pressure to move faster and scale, obviously AI is, is an avenue to that. So how do you see AI aiding in humanizing content, but also like, what is the danger of maybe, what are some things that people are maybe thinking about it incorrectly? And that's causing almost a dehumanizing effect, which we've all seen, where it's like, that's AI slop, like, get this away from me. So how do we understand the world through your lens?

Speaker B: So I think viscerally, it's much easier currently to pick out kind of like poor AI in graphic and visual representations versus in words. It's there in words, but it takes a little longer to get to it. You may read it and like, have this taste in your mouth, like, what is that thing I'm, um, tasting where in images right now? A lot of times, I mean, there's some examples of great, great visual AI and it's going to get only better. But at the moment, a Lot of the stuff just you look at it and it's like there's just something wrong with that. It's something that doesn't feel like it's resonating and connecting. So for us, like, we definitely are looking at different ways to tap in. And again, if you think about what are those simple or more arduous repeatable tasks that AI can help in. So we've started looking at AI for Docs. Docs sits on my team right now. We're not using it because Docs and the documentation of GitHub still continues. We don't think of it as just like a manual, but we think about it as like, again, how's it helping the developer experience? Where you want to learn GitHub, you're a human being. You may be someone that likes to read a changelog, you may be someone who wants to just figure it out yourself, or you may be someone that wants to read through the doc and get a sense of what it is. So we think about that. How are you learning and what's that way you're going to learn in the best way for you. So we think about applying it for AI, uh, for docs, we've thought about and we're looking at it a number of different tools. For some of the blog writing and some of the other long form writing we do, we think about looking for some of the content we create and how it can be distributed out onto different platforms. But all those are experiments currently and none of them I think we were questioning about, like, what's the danger? And all of them, we still feel the loss of humanity and perspective and our customers as many people's customers, but they know it too, right? It's not like we're using AI to connect with florists. I'm sure florists are amazing, but like, I wouldn't try to create a digital flower and give it to a florist and be like, what the hell, that's a digital flower. So for us, if we're using technology to try to market to technologists, like they're going to know they're ahead in the learning curve, so they're going to be much more aware and sensitive to it. So for those reasons, we continue to try to be really authentic and think about like, what are the ways and where does AI and technology make sense to augment their experience. So for instance, you're coming in trying to learn about GitHub? Uh, absolutely. AI should be part of our ecosystem. You should be able to type a question. It should be able to show you ways to solve, navigate through it. That's great. But we think about like how are we creating content that we want to share off to you? Typically these days still it's done by, that's done by humans.

Speaker A: What's interesting as we think about that, the minute you talked about that taste or the visceral reaction that we have when something is synthetic or created by AI and a lot of times you almost feel like, I feel like I'm being tricked. Like you didn't create this which has as marketers, like that is the farthest away from the consumer. You want to be right. Like you want to add to their life and bring something new to the conversation. And then if we get back to the conversation around how a lot of these platforms are operating too, like you think of the role of content marketing is seeding your ideas out into the world in a way that you're connecting with customers around like a shared interest or a problem set or you're investing in people. And I think to get back to some of the dangers is like this AI originated content is continues to be an issue and it doesn't do any of the things that we're describing which is like how do I add to the conversation, how do I get something new in market?

Speaker B: Not yet at least.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's to your point. Human creators, just like developers, like still really important. But when you can add AI into the mix to say wow, could I research faster? Could I correlate a bunch of data points together? Could I understand the agendas of 10 events that are covering this and what are the commonalities and differences and starting to like now say like oh, I could put together thoughts that I could never put together before and now I can have a much better approach to this story, this market.

Speaker B: 100% yeah. I think for research and understanding audiences and markets it's great and like agents are going to be able to go run off and like do really intelligent research for us and come back and like do some analysis in ways that we've never seen before. So I think from those kind of ways it's incredible. The other thing I think about though is I said for now sort of tongue in cheeky. But the other interesting element to this is like what are the tolerances of new generations? I have a 9 year old son and he's already asking me, he's like well why don't they just do all, why don't they get rid of actors and just have AI do All the actors and you're like, oh, gosh, I'm

Speaker A: gonna put you up for adoption, but I still love you.

Speaker B: I still love you. But you know what? But like, that's the question. Like, that's the expectation of him and his generation and the generation after that. Those of us who remember, like, when CRAFT was created by humans, like, God bless us, and I hope CRAFT continues in different ways and we find that ways to, for that to evolve. And the tolerance for many of us are like, oh, that's AI generated. Will likely evolve to be like, oh, cool, that was AI generated. That shift is going to happen. It happens with every single generation as we look back over the years about what the expectations are. So I think there's some interesting. You go off this plot line and see, kind of see where it's heading. I don't know. I think, uh, we are in a massive tectonic. In the midst of a massive tectonic change in ways that our little lizard brains can barely comprehend. And it'll be really interesting to see kind of how we continue to try to use our little hamster wheels and keep up as much as we can. And I am hopeful and confident that the core aspects of humanity stay there and become, stay important. And we continue to create the necessary building blocks and fundamentals of what it is to be human and what is to be creative and what it is to connect with each other. And I think that might be the final frontier. Because if you ever talk to, well, that'll be creative, like, maybe not. We'll see. Like right now it's obviously derivative, but that sense of like, human connection and how we can be with people and each other and those kinds of things, like, that may be the kind of thing that like, is the final frontier in this.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you mentioned tolerance. I have similar, uh, age. I have two girls are 10 and 13. And I remember when they were young and we started, they would watch shows or something on an iPad and when a commercial would come on, they would literally start crying. I'm like, oh my God, girl, you don't know what my life was like. Like, we didn't have this like, fast forward on demand. We watched whatever popped up. But even like the tolerance for media and how that changed consumption into apps and now we're same thing. It's like these, these movements of you and I like where we used to be cool, but we're not anymore. And now the new generation is going to write those rules based on their patterns and with what they're okay with.

Speaker B: And I think I'm liable with patience too by the way. Like people like we embarked um, on a project here at GitHub a few years ago but called Is it Fast? I'm like literally shaving off like hundreds of seconds of the common behaviors that you want to do. Because a developer, when you type in a request and hit enter, you're now expecting it to pop up instantly. You're not expecting to be lag. Apple's ruined us in Google with having their phones with faster chips and everything is supposed to be faster and faster. And in parallel causality. Our kids today, like they want to watch Bluey episode 12 or whatever it is, pick your thing or right now, right, they will listen to the Wicked song number four from the Broadway play in French now. And like. And they get it.

Speaker A: Here you go.

Speaker B: Of course. And like again, we didn't use that. We used to that sense of like patience and understanding that there was things weren't immediate and having to have not get what you want.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We had to not get one. And this generation we're developing gets what they want exactly when they want it. And that's an interesting. As we think about AI and the tools we're creating and how things continue to be fast, what are those expectations and what does that mean for all of us?

Speaker A: I think it sounds like we're going to create a whole generation of pain in the ass brats.

Speaker B: If my kids any education then yeah, we're right on the way.

Speaker A: You mentioned the agentic a couple of times. Can you explain where things are and where they're headed for folks who may be less in the weeds on that?

Speaker B: Well, it's funny because I was just at a Microsoft event last week and we were talking a lot about agents and there I think they start out saying like everyone's kind of got a different definition of agents, which is funny. But the way we define and uh, we think about agents are basically AI tools that can go off and do some work without you. So you could send them off into the field. So research we're talking about before is a great idea, a great use case of an agent. You could say hey, and um, by uh, where is it? Like it's pretty much here. Tools are around us and coming out every day that get even closer to this or more. But you could say hey, I would love to understand Russian literature in the 13th century and how it impacts modern day society and what are those key themes and so on an agent or more, more likely now even string of agents. So one agent will do the research on it, find out some information and intelligently decide, oh, it really needs to get an in different agent set off to look at like the art in a certain culture. And that'll come back. And so these little agents, these uh, little modules are all going off independent from you and doing work from you. You think about like ChatGPT. ChatGPT. You're asking questions, it's giving response. It's this whole thing where it has to be called, uh, call and response. It's going off and doing work based on models. Agents become this thing that actually goes off and does work without you being involved in it. And it could even take, by the way, minutes, hours eventually, I guess.

Speaker A: Yeah. And seemingly the idea is these become almost virtual employees. There's been predictions that you can start having like virtual co workers in this sense. I don't know about how the branding is, uh, but like in the very, very near, future. Is that real and what does near future mean? Is that today or is that like end of year?

Speaker B: I think end of year. Again, we've sort of talked about it when for with GitHub having a partner programmer. So it used to be a peer program as someone that you kind of can go off and help you do some, like look up some stuff for you and help you along the way. Like specifically a partner program is someone that can actually do pieces of the work for you. And we look at it in that aspect of it. I think by the end of the year you'll be seeing developers specifically that have a partner program or have agents that are supporting them can go off and help with pieces of code, come back with a big module, maybe create the first core for you that you can then iterate on and get to a better place. And then when you come up to a big problem, you could send them off again and help solve a new problem. They come up with ideas. Hey, have you thought about this? So really? Yeah. A virtual companion that sitting alongside you and working with you to help you create better code and come up with the better ideas and let you as the developer again sit in that more of an architect seat. Think about what is that craft you're trying to create but you get that support you need.

Speaker A: What about beyond developers? Specifically in marketing, where do you see them playing a role and what would that role be?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think in marketing there's some really awesome places it can be. Like, what's the right marketing mix that I should do? What is my competition doing across or what we're trying to do international market. Help me understand the penetration of my competitors in this specific market. What have they done in the past six months that we've seen resonate? What are people talking about on social? And how does that correlate between what's happening in digital or an out of, um, home? Like, I think in terms of, again, that sense of research and understanding what a market is like. Amazing. Obviously, media buying has been programmatic for years already. What's this start to look like when everyone now is AI, so it's not even about. It's a next level of sophistication for programmatic ad buying and planning. Right now the ad, uh, planners is a job that may be an early casualty. And we think about a different job needed now because you can have an agent, you can have AI that comes in and like, hey, let's take a look at your marketing mix. What do you want to spend? What audiences do you want to hit? Hey, historically, this is how things are working out and can come up with a really great plan for us. So I think that's something I look at.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as this technology starts to get deployed in these ways, how do businesses create a competitive advantage if it starts to flatten? Right. Like, so if you're like, okay, maybe it's how you direct or to your point, orchestrate the agents and point them in a direction. And maybe it's no different than everybody has access to people and employees and this is just a virtual version of that. But is there a sense that like the businesses could homogenize when everybody has this universe of similar tools, or is it, is that where the expertise and the direction and the vision really shine?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I mean, historically there's always been. Before everyone had a personal computer or access to computers. Like there was advantages in some technology and some companies would jump up. But in a world where it's fairly agnostic or level playing field and everyone has generally access to the same technology, obviously money will play a role for a while because you're going to get early access and use it in better ways, hire people that understand it better. So that's going to be an advantage. But I think in the longer horizon, humans are really creative. So there's always ways to get your message out in a way we haven't even thought about before. In ways that AI may or may not ever be able to think about in a human way that connects with people in a way that becomes surprising. We've seen all sorts of, whether it's viral videos or real life stunts or programs or things that people do to be able to connect and get through the noise. For every generation, for every new evolution of product, there's always kind of this fear of like, oh, well now there's that tip for human creativity. And yet humans continue to be creative and find ways to really move above the noise and connect with it. And I also think influencers become increasingly important in that age too as we think about who are those people that we still love and want to connect to and resonate with and have a message for us and for each of our communities that we live within. And how are those influencers helping more and more accelerate the importance of our industries?

Speaker A: We've seen influencers play the role of media from a, uh, influence standpoint for a while, but to your point, having an opinion on what's happening and why it matters and all those things, to your point, when there's a lot of unknowns, become incredibly important. As we think about senior marketers and we're looking at this next wave that you're describing here, how do they prepare or how should we think about investing in our skills, time, energy, mindset so that like we talked about with developers like this community in a lot of ways can be displaced. But then there's people who can partner with technology and AI to like really amplify their skill sets and their results. Like how do we do the latter, not the former. And any advice you have to navigate that?

Speaker B: Yeah, first of all, going curious and eyes wide open, like this is, we are definitely in a new age and trying to hide back on what worked yesterday and run away from it is just not going to serve anyone very well. I think that there's a lot of great resources available in terms of like understanding what new technologies are out there and ways to start dipping one toes into it. I think honestly in talking to younger generations and people that are like really comfortable and driving this change within your organization and people that are like, hey, we should check a look at uh, Jarvis or whatever we're looking at, like check it out, get involved, get a hands on demo, take a look what things are doing and be open to it. Because I think this isn't a us or them, this or that kind of world that we're in. I think this is again an additive place as technology always is, to help us see things in a different way, open up new creative outlets and possibilities and get us to kind of like uh, dream bigger than we had before, having more possibility.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great way to Wrap here. I think as business leaders, like, our superpower is our experience. We've seen a lot of things, and we know where we're steering the ship to go. So understanding the different tools at our disposal. To your point, in the early social days, it was like this reverse mentorship. Like, hell, yeah, come. Come here and, like, teach me this thing. And then once you understood it, then you could take your vision and see how this could work. So I think to your point, having curiosity, being open to change, but leaning into what makes you special, which is your vision and where you can go and how you can get your teams. Plus, your teams may look different when you add technology into the mix, and hopefully that goes bigger, faster, and you can achieve your possibilities as we wrap this up. Adam. But thank you. Any final thoughts as we close out?

Speaker B: No, Dan, thanks. I really appreciate this. I think. I really like the way you just sum this up, but I think, again, it's.

Speaker A: We're all.

Speaker B: There's humanity in all of us and, like, finding, remembering, like, what it is that makes your brand, your team, really special and how we can use technology to support that and create new. Open. Open up new avenues and possibilities. So this is a real pleasure.

Speaker A: Awesome. Um, thanks so much. We appreciate it. Thank you for listening to content disrupted brought to you by Skyward. To stay up to date on the latest ideas and insights in brand building and content marketing, visit our website@skyward.com that's s k y w o r d.com join us for our next episode, where we'll continue to challenge marketing norms and inspire you with fresh strategies for growing business through brand storytelling.