NB65 - AI & the Future of MarTech with chiefmartec Scott Brinker

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Speaker E: Artificial intelligence is reinventing business as we speak. You can either get up to speed or get left behind. The choice is yours. And really, it's a no brainer. Join Cognitive Path founders Jeff Livingston and Greg Verdino as they chat with AI experts about the latest ideas, trends and technologies that are creating the future of business today. This is no Brainer.

Speaker C: Hey everyone. Welcome to another edition of the no Brainer podcast. I think we're in our 60 something episode. I'm going to just timestamp it because the AI world, uh, changes so quickly. So this is being recorded in August. August 1st and should air in September. And with that, I'd like to bring in my most esteemed bald brother of another mother colleague, Mr. Greg Verdino. Greg, how are you?

Speaker B: I would say bald is right. Esteemed is questionable. And I'm not feeling particularly esteemed on this August Friday.

Speaker C: But you might be steamy.

Speaker D: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: Although it has cooled down a lot.

Speaker D: I feel like we talk about the

Speaker B: weather a lot on the, on the show as we kick it off.

Speaker C: It has cooled off today, but it was ferocious July. Ferocious July.

Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. Anyway, good to be here with you as always.

Speaker C: Definitely. We have a rock star guest today, so I don't want to talk too much. Let's get him on in here. But before we do that, let me do our commercials, which is punch the like button. We need you to help us get into the algorithm and get this wonderful podcast sourced. Subscribe, comment, share with your friends. And if you want to have some suggestions or have some sort of a concept that we should be picking up, please do go to the no brainerpodcast.com page and send us an email. And with that, Mr. Greg, please introduce our esteemed guest.

Speaker B: I am almost embarrassed to say we haven't had this gentleman on our show in now nearly three years, I believe, of podcasting. It seems like a massive oversight. Somebody that we have known for years and years and years and years. Uh, we've certainly traveled in the same circle since the early days of social media marketing and content marketing and all sorts of other things. And now, of course, into the world of artificial intelligence. Ed H. Has called this man the Godfather of Martek. So Legend, in particular, will particularly want to. I said particular twice now. I've said it three times.

Speaker C: Pay attention twice.

Speaker B: So, for this episode, and many, uh, of you may know him as the Chief Martek, we are Welcoming, of course, Mr. Scott Brinker. Scott, welcome to the show. How are you?

Speaker D: Wow, what an incredible introduction. I feel particularly esteemed, uh, within the group, but, uh, wonderful to be here with you. Uh, I've been a big fan of yours, Greg, for ages. So, so excited we're doing this.

Speaker C: Awesome.

Speaker B: It's great to have you, and I'm sure we'll have more than enough to talk about on this show. Why don't we dive in? Because obviously a lot of your work sits at the intersection, by definition, of marketing and technology. And, you know, when Jeff and I started our consultancy, Cognitive Path, and probably this podcast as well, we kind of assumed that marketers would be leading the charge. And we found back then, certainly that they were kind of stuck in the world of personal productivity. They were looking at AI kind of like they were looking to easily bolt it on to existing workflows and systems. And that just never sat right with us, never felt quite right. And it seems that marketers should be thinking, first and foremost from a technology perspective, that it's gotta be baked into the stack. Now, you've been living and working in this world for a while, so what are you seeing in terms of how marketers are thinking about where AI fits into that Martech stack?

Speaker D: Well, it's certainly, uh, all over the map right now. I mean one of the things that's fascinating about AI is like you've got from the board level on down, you know, just this like deafening mandate, uh, of we've got to be doing something with AI doesn't necessarily know what they want to be done with AI. We gotta do something with AI. Um, um. And in some ways this is, this is a wonderful thing, you know, for marketers because it really is in many ways giving them the permission to like break out of the mental models that they've had before and start to be able to run some experiments and do it under the COVID of saying, hey, yes, just to go figure out some AI. This is what we're doing, this is what we're learning. But I think you're right. It's just change is always hard. But changing mental models, changing the way we even think about, like, how do we run this? What, what do we mean by marketing technology? What is its role? What are the customers expecting out of that? It's just hard. And I know you've probably heard a number of times that uh, story about the shift from, in industrial factories when they went from being on the water wheel on the shift to electrification. And when electrification came, the first thing everyone did was just keep everything in the same shaft based structure that it was. And it took decades until people realized, wait a second, actually we don't have to have all these things in a line. We can put the electricity anywhere. Do, you know, completely rethink the way we run a factory. It's definitely one of those moments. I mean the first thing people think of is like, okay, how do I use this to accelerate the same things I've always been doing? Classic example of that right now is with the content marketing pipeline of like, hey, I can produce a lot more content a lot faster, a lot cheaper, but it's sort of in the same vein of what had been produced before. You know, now it's the sort of. Yeah, I mean the real challenge is to say, well, wait a second, is that even what we should be doing anymore? Is that actually going to have the impact we want? What could we be doing that wasn't even possible before? So, uh, that's a fun time.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's really interesting too to see, as you had noted, the widespread adoption. And I think one of the weird things that we see is these large enterprises are obviously more capable and have more resources to kind of throw at the problem and maybe kind of break things along the way as they get into it and find answers. And we're seeing a lot of the middle market and smaller market kind of lag and struggle and really maybe even be perplexed by what's happening. And in addition to your view as an analyst with Chief Martech, I mean, obviously, uh, I think by the time this podcast comes out, you will have left HubSpot. But you've, you've been one of the players there for a long, long time. And so you get to work with a lot of different types of organizations. What do you think some of the challenges are based on? Size and resource. I mean there's all sorts of factors in play, right?

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. And just, yeah, a little context on the HubSpot side. So, um, we're recording this at the beginning of August. Uh, my last day at HubSpot will be September 5th. I'm closing out at their big inbound conference.

Speaker C: Incredible. You've been there forever, brother.

Speaker D: Well, I joined eight years ago because, uh, the founders, uh, Brian and Dharmesh did. They really wanted HubSpot to go from being a great product company to being a great platform company where it would like, integrate and uh, really lean into an ecosystem which if there's one theme we've had as like a nagging issue in Martech forever, it's been, can I get this stuff to integrate better together? And so, uh, for me it was actually a real passion project to be like, all right, at least with one of these Martech companies, see if we could make this just a little bit easier. Um, so that was a great adventure. Really happy with where we got it. Um, and uh, yeah, they're now taking that ecosystem, integrating it with their channel and going amazing places. That was great fun. Um, I would say the thing that's interesting about your comment here of, uh, the large companies have such tremendous resources, they can apply against this and perhaps in some ways feel the most threatened by these changes. Um, they have a lot to lose, so there's definitely that board level motivation. I think the thing that's interesting for me though, and particularly having worked with so many small and mid sized businesses in the HubSpot ecosystem, is in many ways this should be their time to thrive, you know, because the toughest thing for the, you know, larger companies here is just the inertia. It's just really hard to change. Even though they realize they're facing tremendous risks of disruption, they are at the same time incredibly risk averse, you know, and uh, it's like, I don't envy that. It is a real hard struggle Even if you have gobs of money that you can apply to this, you know, the smaller companies, in many ways, so much of the cost associated with technology does continue to drop. You know, and actually if there's one thing that good that came out of that crazy martech landscape of 15,000, you know, some odd vendors is talk about

Speaker C: a, we do need to talk about the graphic. Like what do you do with that graphic?

Speaker D: Uh, well, depending on who you talk to, you'll get some very colorful answers about what to do with that graphic. Some of them involve flammable liquids and things like that. Um, but one thing good that has come out of that being the environment in which we operate is it is a buyer's market. All this competition has gone to the place that the technologies that small, mid size, well, any business, but small and mid sized businesses have access to the sort of technology that frankly in many ways puts them on par, you know, at least with the raw capabilities there as, you know, enterprises as they just wouldn't even have had that, you know, opportunity 10 years ago. So I don't know, I actually think it should be the golden age, uh, for the SMBs and the mid market.

Speaker B: Do you think that most leaders in the mid market understand that? Because I would agree with you. Right. They've got more agility, they've got less sort of cultural debt or however you want to think about it, they don't have the dollars to throw at it. But we saw through all of digital transformation. Throwing the dollars at technology was never, never, never the answer. It was always culture, it was always the inertia in an organization. Always, you know, the, I guess the unwillingness to challenge the status quo. And small business and mid market have that advantage, as you're saying. But I'm wondering of small businesses are getting the sense that because they don't have the budget, they don't have a right to win.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, you know, origin stories are a uh, crazy thing. They are probably the greatest asset any company has and often it's, you know, greatest anchor, you know as well too. And so like, you know, the framing, you know, particularly for smaller businesses, if they're still founder led, you know, they have a certain mental model of like, okay, this is, this is where we sit in the universe and where our strengths are and where our weaknesses are. Those mental models, they're hard to change. And so you could totally see it if you know, you're a small business, a mid sized company and like your entire worldview had been shaped by. No, we're just not going to have the sort of resources of those big folks. And so I don't even want to think about things that you know, would be uh, you know, out of my league. Yeah, it probably is uh, like you probably do need like some sort of jolt of the system to be like well wait a second. Actually this environment has changed quite a bit and uh, the things that are our strengths probably are still our strengths but some of these things that were weaknesses of ours maybe not so much anymore. And certainly when it comes to like the cost of technology, I mean I would be hard pressed to think of something in the Martech space right now where the cost of the technology is the primary constraint. Talent.

Speaker C: Very interesting.

Speaker D: You know, willingness to engage it, you know, I mean lots of other constraints for sure. But yeah, raw technology costs. I'm not sure how big of a constraint that is anymore.

Speaker B: Yeah, it reminds me of something uh, that I once heard Rashad Tabakawala say. I don't know if you know Rashad even just by name. He was sort of a big innovation guy, a publicist. He's since sort of semi retired. He's kind of almost a business philosopher in these days. But um, you know, so he came out of the big agency world. He works with a lot of big brands, you know, talks to a lot of CMOs and CEO CEOs. It's a bit of a C suite whisperer in a way. And I once heard him talking about, for those of you who are watching, you already know where I. But if you are, if you are one of our many listeners, Jeff just somehow sparked a sort uh, of a um, a little bouquet of balloons that

Speaker C: uh, it's the no brainer clown car. Here we are again.

Speaker B: Rashad was listening to him speak at an event and he was talking about how as an individual today he has access to more AI than many of his clients have access to because they're locked down. Maybe they have one system, it only does certain things. Maybe it's co pilots what's tied into their Microsoft. And he's like I've got Claude, I've got Copilot, I've got gemini, I've got OpenAI, I've got. You know. Then he ran through, you know, I've got Midjourney, I've got Dolly, I've got. He ran through all these things and he's like I'm paying $200 a month and I have practically an enterprise grade AI stack at my hands, at my fingertips to do all sorts of things that I might want to do. Whether it's just experimentation or efficiency or innovation or whatever else. And you know, I think that kind of, in a way maybe it's a bit an overstatement, but it reinforces your point that there is a very low entry point to get into the market and start experimenting with a lot of these new technologies that can be game changing for a smaller business or even an individual.

Speaker D: Yeah, totally. I mean it's actually one of the things the power to individuals is. It is really mind blowing. And one of the things I've been so excited about is yes, you see so many examples of like these individual creators, you know, leveraging this to the hill and can't stop raving about, you know, how much value they're getting out of it. You know, technically speaking there is no reason why individuals inside larger organizations can't now be empowered with that same sort of. It's almost like a corporate creator type opportunity. But again this kind of goes back to the thing like oh my God, for like large enterprises, the potential for them to unlock an army of corporate creators. I mean it's almost inconceivable the scale of innovation that had the potential there, but it is absolutely late in potential. It's almost certainly not going to be tapped anywhere near it because wait, like empowering all these individuals across the uh, like people's heads explode.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker D: But this is something that again I think like a smaller business, even on like a mid sized company, like if they are willing to lean into this, this ability to sort of change, you know, as much of the culture, you know, as it is the actual operating of how they empower more and more of the individuals on the edge of the organization. I think they're going to have incredible accelerance to that and I think it's going to be really hard for the enterprises to adapt uh, to that.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I mean one of the things you mentioned in the report, um, which I thought was interesting, it kind of speaks to this is the uh, whole transformation efforts, for lack of better words, um, it falls down at the weakest link.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Whatever the weakest part of the enterprise is. So let's say that's the IT department which won't let you use anything besides Copilot, which by the way is getting a lot better but was pretty, pretty bad for a couple years there. Uh, so for example, that might be it or it might be the legal team which will let anybody say anything publicly or put anything into any kind of an LLM, um, ever, lest they be fired on the Spot, you know, that kind of thing. So maybe that's a little bit of what you're speaking to with that smaller and medium enterprise. It's a lot easier to get that stuff overturned. It's a lot easier to be nimble, move, react, have the CEO say, yeah, let's just go do this, or whoever might be the, uh, line person that has authority to authorize whatever initiative it is, as opposed to a large enterprise where there's so much process and so many archaic ways of doing things that may not even make sense anymore.

Speaker D: You know, it's funny, uh, uh, one of the things I've always been a big advocate for is, uh, the adaptation of, uh, agile management methodologies sort of grow out of agile software development, but like adapting a lot of those concepts, if not practices into the marketing space. And some of the times where I've seen teams be incredibly successful with that is, you know, agile tends to organize folks around these like small, little cross functional teams.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: They like embed someone from legal and they embed someone from IT on the team and they're given that permission because again, that's the thing. It's like, you know, the safest thing you can do from a IT security and legal perspective is to shut off the entire company and go home. That's the safest way to make sure

Speaker C: I'm not going to lose my job today. Right.

Speaker D: But it has some other negative consequences. Uh, and you know, like balancing that is just, it's hard. But I think you really do need to co op those teams and those departments into that sort of innovation cycle. Um, because having them as like an external barrier on it. Yeah, it's just, it's painful.

Speaker C: Don't know what you're talking about. Are you guys getting an echo? Hold on. Jeff's AI clown car again, I think

Speaker B: we need to have some kind of a safe word or something that we use in our transcript to know when we have a weird echo and we're like, what's going on? Yeah, we can edit these things out.

Speaker D: I'm hearing voices in my head all the time, but sadly they're not echoes.

Speaker C: Well, now we're keeping this clip in here. Don't edit that one out.

Speaker B: I figured I would edit this out, but this may be one of our social shorts. Speaking of social though, and obviously we're not here to talk about social media, but a lot of the conversation we're having is um, eerily reminiscent of conversations I think we've probably all had before. Right. Which is on the one hand Just look at social media. That was going to level the playing field, and in a lot of ways it did. Right? And allow smaller organizations, individual creators, et cetera, et cetera, to kind of level up and play on the same field as the big boys. And at the same time there we also saw those overly prohibitive social media policies. Nobody wanted to relinquish control in the large organization. Nobody wanted those pesky individual contributors actually exerting some level of authority and creativity and sort of ability, uh, kind of, kind of grow into their own ability to get stuff done and be creative and all of that. Um, and we're still seeing the same thing again, right? So in a lot of ways, the more things change things, there are many things that really don't change nearly as quickly as we can, and that in a lot of areas, they should. I don't know why now my mouth is not working. So maybe it's the voice is whispering into my head. And this reminds me kind of, of that sort of, you know, uh, not to. Not to, you know, go blow your head up. But. Right. Martech's Law. Right. The idea that, you know, the external environment, but particularly technology, is changing exponentially. Your organization is improving or changing incrementally or logarithmically or whatever the right word is there, and you end up with this big gap between the pace at which the world is changing and the rate at which an organization change. What are some of the things a leader can do to sort of unlock that block and close that gap from your perspective?

Speaker D: Yeah, no, I, uh, I do think that is the quintessential challenge. And the way I always picture it in my head is, you know, like, uh, you know, you've got sort of one foot on the ferry and one foot on the dock and the ferry's headed out. You know, it's a fairly uncomfortable experience. Uh, I think at one point in time we referred to it as a yoga class with Genghis Khan. First of all, you got to just. We just have to accept there isn't a magic bullet there. This, um, is just hard. And it's hard for everyone. If you want to take some consolation in that. I don't know of anyone, uh, who feels like, you know, we got this whole piece of change thing, piece of cake. Um, the two things we've just always found is, you know, first of all, so much is changing. You have to make strategic decisions about which changes are you going to pay attention to and which ones you're going to put on the back burner. Um, you know, a classic mistake is people just try doing too many things at the same time and uh, do none of them. Well. Um, that never seems to work. Um, the second thing though is, you know, we were talking a little earlier about Agile, um, you know, again, without even like necessarily having to go into a specific agile methodology. Just the recognition that developing agility as a skill within the organization is an enormous competitive advantage in an environment where just change is so unrelenting. Um, you know, because, you know, you don't, you don't have to change exponentially. All you have to do is be able to change faster than your competition. And that's a real, that's a real asset.

Speaker B: To that point.

Speaker C: One of the things that also came out of the report was you were talking about the long horizon, as other people have, uh, started to call it, which is that log horizon of adoption where everybody feels this pressure or maybe an anxiety even where they have to adopt now or they're going to get left behind. And in reality, per our conversation, enterprises just aren't going to be able to move that quickly. And even the small medium ones have their own challenges, which we've discussed. It's kind of like a balancing act where you have to adapt, but at the same time maybe tabling that anxiety or that sense of, boy, if I don't do this, I'm going to be out of work and on the soup line in October. Uh, is probably not realistic. It's not a real fear. If you would.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I'm a bit of an optimist by nature, so I always do try and look for the silver lining in that thunderstorm cloud. But, um, to me you're right. I mean, most companies are not going to change anywhere near at the pace of what everyone is expecting here. Uh, to me, the whole point of that is though, that's an advantage for those few who are willing to, um, because it's essentially arbitrage. It's almost like change arbitrage. Like, you know, if I'm willing to embrace this now before so many of these others are, I can take advantage of this. And like, we've been around this to see like, these were the people who were the ones who got the number one position in Google because they, they moved on that early on. They're the ones who ended up with these like, massive social media followings because, you know, they were only engaged in that authentic. You know, the same thing is happening here now. I mean, again, different technologies, you know, different ways in which it's going to be harnessed. But the concept of saying this is a mom of just tremendous, um, tectonic shift, you know, most people's reaction is to basically freeze. And those folks who are willing to act in that have a huge advantage. Now, if you're in that sort of freeze camp, I mean, you can take consolation that you're probably with the majority still. So, yeah, I think to your point, it's, it's probably not going to kill you right away, but sooner or later change. So, like, you know, why not a little early, get a little bit of benefit out of it this time?

Speaker C: 100%, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm wondering if we could kind of focus in on some of the other challenges that organizations have these days in making these kinds of shifts and embracing the changes and building AI into their organizations. Um, we've been talking a lot about sort of the human stuff, and I fundamentally believe the human stuff is and probably always will be 90% of the challenge. It's the individuals, it's the organization, it's the teams, it's the leadership, the vision, it's the communications. You know, it's all that stuff. But at the same time, we know from the work we do, and I know from conversations we've had before. Scott, you've seen it from the work you've been doing at HubSpot and beyond HubSpot, that data will often get in the way. We've been talking about data for decades as a key strategic asset of the organization. It's clearly vital for digital marketing, all marketing, from targeting to decision making. But organizations still struggle around data strategy. Why do you think that remains such a big obstacle for so many organizations? And what could they do about it?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, forgive me for this tired metaphor, that it, uh, is definitely a bit like eating your spinach. It's one of these things where, like working on data infrastructure and sort of data quality management is something that is at least one, if not two steps removed. The actual sexy things that everyone really wants to do. And even if intellectually people have in their head of like, oh, well, wait, actually the sexy things I want to do, you know, they require me to have even the spinach. People are not as excited to actually do the work. And it is hard work. Um, and it's some of us log. Um, and so I think that's been, uh, Yeah, I mean, one of the primary. It is, um, as you say, it's more than 90% human side. Like, am I actually going to get promoted by the work I do on the data infrastructure and the data quality, um, how do you measure that? Am I going to be celebrated by, uh, a President's club award? And so, I don't know. I mean, again, you could say like, okay, well, that's the problem. If you see that is the problem. One of the solutions is for leadership to say, look, we get the connection. We want to be a leader in this next AI wave. There is no AI strategy without data strategy. Data strategy is completely useless if we don't have the right actual data infrastructure, you know, and process. So we are going to make heroes out of the people who are championing and driving our data evolution. That could help get it happen.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's amazing how many times we've been in enterprises and they're like, we want to build out all this genic stuff and do this. And then we're like, okay, uh, can we do some conversations with your IT department, some of your other folks? And we get in there, God damn. It's like you got into their data stack, you look at their environment. Hey, why is everything on people's personal drives? Why do you have three different customer records? Why do you have Box, Dropbox, SharePoint? It's like a nightmare. It is a nightmare. And I actually think, and, uh, please forgive me if you're a marketer for saying this, I think marketers are the worst man. I think we are the. And I'm a recovering marketer, former cmo, but I think we are the worst man. We're like that kid that shows up like, after school, comes home, fourth grade, throws his jacket on the floor, starts getting peanut butter, slops it all over the counter. It's on the.

Speaker B: That's not just Mike's door. That's not just Mike. No.

Speaker C: Uh, apparently it's me too. But, uh, but, you know, I mean, like, marketers are terrible with data. I mean, we are definitely, as a creative, uh, type, tend to just want

Speaker B: to make the sausages.

Speaker C: Don't care about how messy the kitchen gets.

Speaker D: Well, yeah, I won't disagree with that. I guess my, you know, again, always being the optimist. My defense for the marketers would be is their mindset is ideally suited to their primary miss, which is, how's the world changing? What's new, what's exciting? How do we make sure we stay up with it? You know, uh, they're really, really very good at that. But yes, there's a. There's another side of that, which is, yeah. You know, often, you know, some of the more Foundational, you know. You know. Yeah. It sometimes doesn't get the attention it deserves, so.

Speaker C: Yeah, but also AI is making it better. Right. Where, for example, and I know you've talked about this too, rag databases, for example, being able to access unstructured data, maybe even categorize it a little bit better. I mean, don't you think that to some extent the technology may help us overcome ourselves? In some ways, yeah.

Speaker D: Okay, now this is actually the really scary thing. This is the thing I've been sort of wrestling with in my head for this past, uh, week. Um, I follow, uh, Ethan Malik, uh, you know, just as close. I saw the post of Great stuff.

Speaker C: I know what you're about to talk about.

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, um, so he recently had shared a paper that actually missed from a couple of years ago called the Bitter Pill. You know, and it's basically this thing of like, you know, for years people had tried to, like, really craft solutions to solve particular problems, like winning chess or Go or stuff like that. Um, and then in the end, the way they actually, you know, like, the winning solution ended up to be just give this AI enough compute power and let it go, figure it out on its own. And it beat all our elaborate, like, human approaches to this. And it's called the Bitter Pill because it's like, why do we even waste so much time trying to figure out all this stuff's doing just better than we are at it? You know, And I can't help but think, like, yeah, you know, a lot of these things around the mess that is data, the mess that is the, um, automation landscape, you know, around marketing and all this. I mean, my default reaction is like, yeah, this takes real expertise to think about how these things are going to be structured and manage this and orchestrate this. I'm wondering, like, I don't know, is this in, you know, not here today, but how far away are we where, like, no, I actually just turn that whole mess over to AI and it's going to figure it out way better than, like, we ever was. Very well may.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the, uh, hypotheses, and I'm just sharing this for the larger listenership, is that came out of that post was rather than fix all these processes and do the process mining, six months of work to basically create a genic AI. Just unleash the AI and figure it out and iterate your way through it. And, uh, I had some hesitancies as well. I thought it was idealistic and perhaps, dare I say, a dash naive when it comes to the wayward thinking that I see in some LLMs, you know, but still, I mean, that may be a, uh, 2025 response, right. It might be a much different picture

Speaker D: in six months, you know. He did, yeah. Thank you for adding that context because he really did sort of present it as like, okay, well this will be a great example. Like, like, let's see how it plays out, which one, which one will win. Because playing chess, well, you know, that was a complicated challenge at the time as a very structured, well, domain controlled game, you know, running marketing inside an organization. Reason to believe this is a little bit of a different game.

Speaker B: Right? And it's not. And it's not just. Right, it's not just running marketing inside an organization because every marketing campaign ultimately lives or dies based on what happens when it meets the market.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: You've got that added layer of complexity too, in that it has to actually be relevant, compelling and appealing and not offensive once it gets out into the marketplace. Because we know you can obviously set an entire brand on fire when, and you know, a human. And humans do it all the time too, of course, Whether a human or an AI creates something that just flat out does not work in the market and is potentially damaging.

Speaker C: Right. And then there's the polarization issue too, where these things can literally just whack off half of your market and then attract the other half. I mean, we see that now as well too, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Every time, I feel like every time a new campaign comes out, good, bad or otherwise, that's what happens.

Speaker C: Oh, my Lord.

Speaker B: I think, you know, and again, maybe this is a, as Jeff said, a sort of, a sort of type of thinking or a, uh, whatever, a mindset that is uniquely mid-2025 and six months from now, it'll be a totally different game. Who knows? I wouldn't be surprised. But I feel like at this point in time, and a lot of these kind of come down to this in my mind, is that AI shines a light on the worst of your existing organization. Right. Whether it's the way in which your company or culture has become calcified, whether it's the bad data practices that have lingered on for decades, whether it's your inability to actually understand and document your own workflows. Right. All of this stuff that kind of gets buried under the table, especially if your organization has been successful all of a sudden becomes critically important and really ultimately damaging when you try to introduce artificial intelligence, uh, into the organization and integrate it. And I think that's really a problem. Or a challenge that a lot of organizations are struggling with right now is they think they're ready. They've heard the hype. They know it's easy in the sense that you can buy the technology and just start running with it, whether you're pixie dust, right? And then they go, oh, wait a second, our people aren't ready for it. Our leadership isn't bought into it. We haven't really figured out our fundamentals that we should retain and maintain as we go through this transformation. So we're just flying blind. Our data is a mess, our processes haven't been documented. But hey, give me some of those cool agents because that's going to change the business. And then they discover that that's just flat out not the way it works.

Speaker D: I have no response to that. Yeah, well said,

Speaker C: Scott. Maybe, uh, to that point though, one of the things too we can think about, and we were talking about this on the pre call, the three of us. One of the great points in the Martech report that made me, uh, and this is rare because I'm such a, like a pill and a skeptic, but you know, like, it really made me dream a little bit. It was really awesome. And what it was, was instead of thinking about efficiency, instead of thinking about cost savings, what are we going to do with those optimizations?

Speaker B: Really?

Speaker C: For a lot of brands it's an opportunity to use these tools now. You have these resources that are now suddenly freed up and you have this super powerful tool set. What are you going to do to innovate? What are you going to do to differentiate your marketing? To differentiate, maybe your product marketing, Differentiate your whole value proposition? How are you going to change your business now with these tools and become dramatically something different that your competitors can't catch up to?

Speaker D: Yeah, no, no, I'm glad that resonated with you. I mean in uh, many ways this was sort of just my response to the fear that, uh, I think a lot of marketers have of, ah, like, well, wait a second, this stuff taking big parts of my job and you know, taking things that used to be like, you know, three days and now it's like three minutes. This can't be good. So many of those like sort of default things of like, oh yeah, this process that used to take this much time and resource and money compressed, um, a huge boon to efficiency. Uh, well, maybe we can just then like make more cuts. And I think the reason why I genuinely believe that is the wrong approach is because this efficiency that we're talking about, it's basically going to be inherited by everyone. Every company is going to get it. And so there is no differentiation value to you whatsoever, uh, in that, I mean maybe they'll be for a little company here for like six months there. But it's not a permanent, uh, wedge. The only wedge is frankly the only one there's ever been, which is how do we innovate, how do we differentiate? And so if you're able to take those resources and now unleash them on those sorts of new missions, the way you said, I love it, but so poetic of like, you know, let them dream a little bit, you know, about what's possible. I mean that's amazing. But this does require two things. First of all requires individuals who are actually willing to do that. Um, and so yeah, if you want to be in marketing, you know, you have to really be willing to embrace that. Some marketers already do. Others, yeah, they have to do a little bit of like soul searching and be like, okay, yeah, am I m ready to step out into like a larger view of what I can do? But then the second thing is you also need the company to enable that and support it. As we were saying earlier, like, ID is just going to shut it down and legal is just going to shut it down. Then like, okay, you're screwed, those things. So you know, but again, companies who like, you know, we're going to embrace this and we're going to like, you know, really invest in people uh, who want to co create and innovate on this, uh, with us. Yeah, I think it's going to be a bit of a golden age.

Speaker C: I really love that.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it's really, I mean fundamentally this is probably a little bit cheesy sounding, right? But you know, it's, I think, you know, a lot of folks are focused on doing things better and they should be focused on doing better things. And that's really the mind shift change that has to happen. And so much of the narrative around AI today, even uh, the narrative coming out of Silicon Valley, broadly speaking, the labs, um, is around efficiency, around productivity, even things that at face value would appear to be truly innovative and game changing. Like some of the video models and the way they give people the ability to essentially make the movies in their mind, then become a whole narrative around. And this is going to allow us to make more movies quicker and faster. And it doesn't become a narrative around. This changes fundamentally the way we might communicate ideas or we might, might introduce entirely new business models. And I think in A lot of ways. Clearly that, uh, narrative sells the opportunity short and drives leaders and individual contributors even into this box where they're just thinking in terms of how can I just do more faster? And it uh, for some reason is leaving this whole idea of doing better things and doing different things on the table for I think many, many people who are in this sort of, of flux and ambiguity trying to figure out how to make sense of this.

Speaker D: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'll give uh, credit to uh, those companies, uh, that uh, they know what sells at the moment. Right. Um, because actually selling this like, oh my God, business models, everything's going to change. Turns out actually there's a lot of people very scared about buying that. Um, you know, the efficiency thing is actually very easy for like, you know, boards. Yeah, well, sign me up for that. That makes sense. Mathematic. Um, and so I think even some of these companies that are truly visionary in what they're enabling. Yeah, I guess I can see like, well, all right, they're selling what the market's willing to buy at the moment. But it does raise the question of like, okay, well, where's the inflection point? Because the efficiency thing will play up to the point that everybody has it. Um, you know, and then the question is, what's next? But I don't know. I mean, you know, far be it for me to, you know, judge the PR Personas, uh, you know, of some of these, uh, you know, leaders out there. But they strike me as the types that really do want to go down in history as, you know, the visionaries on this. So I'm m hopeful the narrative, uh, they will give, will uh, expand as the market is ready to absorb it.

Speaker B: Yeah, for better or for worse, I would say that's true. Right. And you know, with AI, uh, you know, kind of, you know, with the current narrative in a lot of ways, with the exception of the massive job loss conversation and stuff like that, it's almost like in a lot of ways it's getting reduced down to the same kind of shift that, you know, it's the fax machine, it's the Excel spreadsheet. You know, it's just a productivity thing. But to your point, when everybody has becomes table stakes, it doesn't become a way to raise the bar.

Speaker C: Congratulations, you have a comment box on your blog. I want to ask you a crazy question. Uh, we had this guy, fantastic gentleman, his name's Brent Orell, he's actually a senior researcher at the American Enterprise Institute and just put out A major report on, uh, on this very topic, which is the whole productivity, 20, 30% of your job stuff and how it's going to affect the American workforce. Fast forward to where we are today. One of the things that Brent talked about quite a bit was how this was actually not going to be the doomsday scenario, although it will create disruption. But what he thought was that it's going to increase growth across the American economy because people are going to become so much more productive and, and better able to do new things, that basically this is the productivity boom that the economy's needed since maybe the 90s when we first started getting email on the web and 1.0. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that's also kind of a crazy way to look at it, or you think that's on point?

Speaker D: You know, as I disclaimed before, um, I tend to be an optimist on these things. So that is the narrative that more naturally resonates with me, but, but also acknowledging that, well, I know a thing or two about Martech. As we start getting to some of these larger societal, uh, issues. Um, I'm, um, definitely over my skis in being able to have a truly informed opinion.

Speaker C: But you are too humble. You're a pretty successful business guy, my friend.

Speaker D: I do think there's more risk, uh, and it primarily comes down to how there are definitely huge swaths of professions. I mean, like, some of the ones, you know, people have been talking about, like, I mean, like accountants, um, you know, like legal aids. You know, there's a bunch of these things that actually you had people entirely dedicated to very fixed functions that technology is going to like, yeah, basically automate away. And the thing that's scary about it is it's happening at a speed that we've never seen in history. I mean, we've had technological changes, but never anything remotely at this speed and never at this scale. And so when you start thinking about, well, whoa, wait a second here. If you talk about, you know, employment displacement, you know, for suddenly millions of people in a matter of a few years, you know, society hasn't really developed mechanisms for how it deals with that. And as much as I would like to imagine that at this exact moment that this is happening, governments around the world are operating at peak efficiency and strategic, you know, lens on this, there might be a little doubt, you know, in some of these cases. And so, um, yeah, I mean, joking aside, like, you know, I think it's going to be a real challenge in the political realm for. Okay, what are we going to do about this? There is, I do believe there's another side to this. Uh, like we will get over that, but I think it has the potential to be, yeah, uh, a pretty m. Bumpy, um, ride for, you know, that transition period. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I mean that's a macro lens. If you kind of bring it down to the micro lens of the individual organization or even an entire industry and you look at the marketing industry, it really is going to take leadership, both the people and the practice leadership to rethink the role of junior or even entry level employees. The answer is not AI can do that work now because in that scenario there's obviously the near term risk of job loss, but there's a mid term risk that there's no seasoned strategic talent to lead these organizations in the future because they had no way to cut their teeth. And there is value in the struggle that AI strips out of so much of the work we do. You know, I've always thought this. I've been a content marketer at various points in my career. My wife had an, and I had an agency for a decade plus. She's still a content marketer and a HubSpot customer. Uh, but, um, you know, it's like the blank page is not necessarily a bad thing every time, right. You know, and now, you know, one of the big promises, of course, of AI is well, you don't have to start with a blank page anymore, just start chatting and you get a whole blog post drafted for you. It's like. But a lot of the thinking happens in the drafting, right? Uh, and that's true of a lot of the, kind of like learning how to go through a dense legal document and find the gotchas, or learning how to look at somebody's giant pile of receipts and crap from the last 12 months and figure out how to apply tax code or whatever. Right. These are things that, when you have a level of, sort of a foundational level of understanding of these things, it allows you to be a better user, in my opinion, of an AI system that you maybe don't quite trust just yet. Right. And you need to be able to spot where it goes off the rails, whether you call that a hallucination or whatever. Um, if you can't spot the problem that come out in whatever an AI generates, then you're kind of in a bit of a sticky situation. Uh, but more importantly and more broadly, it's this. Five years from now, ten years from now, if there are no entry level marketers today who become the Sups. Who become the directors, who become the agency owners, who ultimately becomes the cmo. Right.

Speaker C: Finally, Gen X gets its thing.

Speaker D: Wow, there's so much here. Um, and I do apologize. Uh, I know we're coming up, uh, on the top of the hour, and, uh, I made the terrible strategic error of, you know, having something booked immediately following this, which was. Yeah, uh, uh, had I known.

Speaker C: Had you known, you'd be on the Clown Car Express.

Speaker D: No, seriously, this, uh, yeah, this conversation has been awesome. And, uh, yeah, I feel like we barely scratched the surface.

Speaker C: Well, let me get us out of here. We'll post links to all your stuff, and we can't wait to hear what's next. Scott, can you tell us before we leave or.

Speaker D: No, you know, what's next is I'm still wrapping up the things on the HubSpot side. It turns out there's quite a bit going on there. So after we get to the other side of that, then we'll be talking about what's next.

Speaker C: We'll put that LinkedIn in there so people can follow and find out. Greg, do you have any final words before I give the commercials?

Speaker B: I do not. I mean, it's been wonderful. I mean, I say no, and then I start talking. Um, but, uh, no wise words. But I do want to thank you, Scott, for your wise words. Um, definitely appreciate having you on. It's been, I think, a great conversation, even if I feel like I maybe spoke too much because all of the good stuff came from the other two guys, as usual. But, uh, thank you. Thank you for joining us. And as Jeff said, we'll make sure all of your how to find Scott stuff will be available on the Show Notes page@nobrainerpodcast.com with JAT. With that, Jeffrey.

Speaker C: Okay, 100%. Thank you, Scott. And so with that, ladies and gentlemen, if you enjoyed Scott Bricker today on the no Brainer podcast, punch that like button, share it with your friends. Comment, and tell Scott how awesome he is, because he is and you were. Thank you. Um, and also, do subscribe. We need you. We appreciate you. Please leave us a comment. Comment and do email us if you have suggestions. And with that, we are out of here.

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