NB67 - The Last Rant (Final Episode)

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Greg Verdino: I see you.

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Jeff Livingston: This is the only pure thing in this world.

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Narrator: 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.

Jeff Livingston: Hey everybody, it's Jeff Livingston with my esteemed colleague, Greg Verdino. Greg, how are you, sir?

Greg Verdino: I am all right. It's a Friday. At least it is when we're recording this. Maybe not when people are listening to this. It's Friday, October 10th. I'm ready for the weekend. How about you?

Jeff Livingston: Totally. We're doing this on a Friday afternoon, which is always my favorite time for meetings and podcast recordings.

Greg Verdino: Ooh, I've got a meeting at 4pm today. I was like, who did that to you?

Jeff Livingston: Nevermind, don't out them.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna shame anybody.

Jeff Livingston: More importantly, is it business or is it just social?

Greg Verdino: It is business. It's somebody who's on the west coast. And I was like, okay, it is what it is. How about you, Jeff? How Are you good?

Jeff Livingston: I've actually had a full day of meetings. This is my last one. Just networking and trainings and.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Livingston: Not much business in D.C. these days.

Greg Verdino: I know, it's rough. It's rough.

Jeff Livingston: I know. I just saw something. I think it was Moody's put out that one third of the country is in recession.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah, I've seen those kinds of reports where there's a map and it shows which states are expanding and which are contracting and which are right on that precipice of falling over into recession.

Jeff Livingston: It's not good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dc, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia are, not surprisingly, in recession, given the federal impact.

Greg Verdino: Right, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Livingston: So, yes, it is a shame. And there are other people suffering everywhere, so whatever. Okay. I don't mean to dismiss your suffering if you're suffering. What an episode. It's so early and it's already this way. All right, everybody, so look, we have a special episode for you today because this is the last no brainer episode. Greg and I have been podcasting. We've been. What was that? Codpasting? Is that some, like, bad relic of the Renaissance or something?

Greg Verdino: We've been cod piecing for what?

Jeff Livingston: They might do that in the White House. But, man, it is our last episode. And after three years, almost three full years of podcasting, we are signing off in large part because we are folding cognitive path. But, you know, I don't know. There's a lot of AI podcasts now. Everybody and their mother has one.

Greg Verdino: And I'm not sure everyone's got an AI podcast, right?

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure what we're adding anymore, other than our, you know, skepticism and snark, which we're happy to provide to you anytime.

Narrator: Yeah.

Jeff Livingston: So don't subscribe, share, make sure to lampoon and definitely critique.

Greg Verdino: And I do think, if I'm not mistaken, the existing episodes, of course, will remain up, certainly on YouTube and marketing podcast Network. Yeah, uh, through the Marketing Podcast Network, just about everywhere you might listen to podcasts. So all that good content will still be out there. It's a little bit, I would say, bittersweet, probably.

Jeff Livingston: I would say so.

Greg Verdino: Uh, more sweet than bitter. But I think we have a good body of work out there. A body of not so good work as well, especially the earlier episodes. But we do have some good stuff up there. Some good, I would say, even, to an extent, evergreen interviews with some people.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, even the last one on ao, Right, Absolutely.

Greg Verdino: So there's still plenty of stuff out there if you're a New listener at this unfortunate juncture. I don't know what took you so long, but nonetheless, if you are a new listener, there's still plenty of great old content you can catch up on. But.

Jeff Livingston: But this episode in particular should be saucy. And why is. Because Greg and I have thoughts, really. We've, you know, we've been very professional about our thoughts generally, other than my constant cursing and bad jokes. But the reason why we're going to be a little bit unvarnished with this is because we're kind of folding the company. We want to kind of share our feelings on the AI industry and generally some of the aspects of it that we have found distasteful enough. When we announced the close of the company, we decided to provide some of the logic, which was that basically, in order to be successful, we had to kind of sell our souls. And that's a very nice short way of putting it that doesn't fully cover the intricacies of it, but nevertheless, we just weren't willing to cross certain rivers, or Rubicons, if you would. And as that was the case, we'd like to kind of share a little bit about some of the things we like and don't like about AI moving into the future and offer some of our crystal ball moments moving forward. Is that fair?

Greg Verdino: I think that's fair. All right, so let's, like, interview each other this time.

Jeff Livingston: How meta.

Greg Verdino: Ooh, what about that?

Jeff Livingston: I know. It's all about us this time, folks. So, Craig, what do you hate the most about AI?

Greg Verdino: Um, I hate the hype. I don't think that would be any surprise. You and I have both been through many, many cycles of hype, and we've managed to come through the peaks and the troughs and kind of find the value, I think, in a lot of them. And I'm, um, not, you know, obviously there's a lot of. In AI, I think, ultimately, in the long term, but I think the constant hype, the constant bullshittery coming both out of the big AI labs, where everything is just constant, like squeeze, squeeze, squeak, exploding heads. And then the influencer ecosystem of people who are, three years ago, too, were Metaverse experts. Then they were NFT experts. Then they were, I don't know, quantum computing experts. For 15 seconds, they're teaching you prompt engineering and, you know, talking about AI and strategy and all that stuff, I just think it's way too much. It's over the top, it's not productive, it's not helpful. Um, and it's just noisy and Annoying as far as I'm concerned. How about you, Jeff? What bothers you the most?

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I really have to agree with you particularly, I mean I've always kind of hated influencer culture, even though sometimes I've been called one. I could care less whether or not I'm influential. I'm more than happy to post something, um, that gets three likes as much as 300 likes. And I think it's more about is this useful for people. And I don't think that conversation's happening in every corner. There are many people that do provide useful information and I want to say that. But what's dominating this conversation is a bunch of bullshit. And there are a bunch of people out there purporting to be experts with their supposed conversations with executives and roundtables and all this other crap and their 20 page prompt guides. And it's just all the shit that's coming out on LinkedIn in particular, but also the larger tech trade press. It's really painful to deal with and also to unwind normal business people from like basically dismissing their preconceived notions created from this bad hype. It makes business and work that much harder. So that's one. But I'll uh, say the thing that really pisses me off more than anything with this is fucking OpenAI. I hate OpenAI so goddamn much. I hate Sam Altman. I mean I use ChatGPT, but I think that company is so full of it, it's unbelievable. Even in the three years that we've seen since ChatGPT was launched, what had a lot of potential to benefit society per the old OpenAI mission. I have no idea what their mission is anymore or even if they have one. They've gone to uh, literally producing a slop social network with SORA too. I mean that de evolution has been shocking.

Greg Verdino: I think, uh, yeah, I think uh, I'm with you on that. And I think the, you know, I guess building on that, the extent to which there's this sort of very, I think in a lot of ways, self serving narrative, sometimes from OpenAI and from others, about the extent to which artificial intelligence, and by which they really mean generative artificial intelligence, that's really all anybody is paying attention to these days, has the potential to solve wicked challenges and elevate humanity or at the same time lay everybody off. Right? That's either one or the other. Right? That's what the problem is. It's this self serving narrative that's not backed up by the actions and all

Jeff Livingston: that's about their Stuff being omnipotent.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah. You know, where, you know, we could be putting the most powerful technologies in the world, developed by and in some cases used by some of the smartest people in the world, towards much better ends than building a whole bunch of chatbots nobody really wants. Right. Than building an AI video slop engine. Than, you know, even the discussion that's happening now around whether it's AEO answer engines or on the flip side, things like, you know, like, uh, I mean, certainly all the, you know, kind of writing systems and like all of this stuff that we're building, it's like, why are we not taking this incredibly, ostensibly, incredibly powerful technology and applying it to things we really need to work towards, like addressing climate change, like curing cancer, like addressing inequality and poverty and other forms of, you know, bias and social issues like combating rather than contributing to and effectively driving this entire misinformation and disinformation ecosystem. Right. Are, I think, ways in which to apply these technologies. But instead, in every one of those instances, we're using these technologies to create something worse. Right. And that's incredibly problematic. And of course, that's where the money goes.

Jeff Livingston: Right. I mean, it's all about money.

Greg Verdino: Right. It's easy to say, you know, we're going to, you know, make your company more efficient. It's hard to say we're going to solve unemployment.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah. And I think it's emblematic of the larger tech bro problem that we have in the country. And, uh, I mean, you could just point at it as a microcosm of the whole oligarch billionaire BS thing going on. But, um, to your point, I mean, there are some incredible uses that have come out with the technology, and maybe that's where we should transition to, is like, okay, we've shown the yin, let's show the yang. What do you think the most powerful aspect of generative AI that you've seen so far?

Greg Verdino: That's a tough one. You know, I think, and you know, it's hard to strip generative AI away, away from traditional AI machine learning, and they've all become blended computer vision and all these other things. Right. But, you know, I think there have been some, at least hints at the extent to which AI, uh, can be transformative for things like recognizing disease early before a human doctor alone might be able to recognize it. I think that kind of thing is promising. I don't think there's been anything that I've seen that's been definitive and certainly not at a scale where we're Starting to see the real impact, positive impact for humanity. But some of these medical things, I think are incredibly compelling as ideas, at least. Whether it's spotting disease early, whether it's drug identification, things like that, I think are pretty exciting. Uh, but I don't know that there are enough, you know, there are enough resources necessarily going into those things right now, at least not in terms of like, the public consciousness and who's doing what.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I don't think it's part of the mainstream conversation. I do think it's happening.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, it's happening, but it's happening sort of in the. At least until funding gets cut. Right. But, um, you know, it is happening, but it's not necessarily, you know, where the. I think the public's eye is focused right now. Um, how about you? What are you. What are you seeing that you're deep research?

Jeff Livingston: I think deep research is just incredible. To do these very powerful, immediate, long, deep research initiatives that can be done in 10, 15 minutes and, and accomplish what I could do in 20 hours with Google. To me, that's pretty impressive. And also as these algorithms improve and the link sourcing improves, because, uh, I mean, there's a lot of work and you can't trust deep research out of the gate, but it does get you a lot further down the road, much quicker. I just think that that's going to be a technology feature or application in its own right that just makes those LLMs, um, just far more valuable than anything that people can want. I mean, it's great that you can ask it to be your therapist that moment. M. Uh, actually it's not very great, but, you know, it's something that people do. But really, I think that's. That's impressive and I continue to be amazed with it. I started a project this week just on, uh, a whim, I think. You know, I'm working on or dallying with the idea of doing a major project in 2026. So I started that, uh, with some deep. I'm going to dive into the results. But the amount of work that it generated really quickly to catch me up to speed on the topic was shocking. I was just shocked when I looked at it, like, oh, boy, you know.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that can be incredibly powerful. I guess the problem that I have with that, you know, is not a technical problem. Right. Is that the ease with which that becomes the crutch that executives, CEOs, boards, et cetera, will use to argue that we need far smaller teams doing far more work. And that leads us Obviously to a point where there's a lot more, you know, you know, job loss and stuff like that far faster than anybody even realizes that they have, you know, the ability to, and um, have the skill set to use a tool like deep research. Right, yeah, so you asked the next

Jeff Livingston: question, but you know, isn't that like are you an innovator or a slasher? Do you have short term thinking or long term thinking?

Greg Verdino: Right, right.

Jeff Livingston: Because the reality is you can always slash so far before you're just, you know, at bare bones or if you only use AI for that, it's going to be table stakes to efficiency in a few years. So fricking what are you going to be able to survive in business? I mean, I think it's a short term problem.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, well, but it is. I mean, but I think, you know, I think that we're going to, I think, you know, probably for me in the next 12 months, maybe 18 months, I think we're going to see just how far some large organizations are willing to cut themselves down to the bone. Um, you know, we've obviously there've been, you know, there have been the Klarnas and the Amazons and all these, you know, other organizations that have, you know, sent their memos or made their cuts or whatever. I think we're going to see something much bigger in the coming year or so. Um, and I agree with you, it's going to turn out to be a shocking error on the part of the leadership team that makes the choice and it will ultimately do the kind of harm maybe the organization can't come back from even if they try to quickly pivot and reverse course and you know, kind of go back to something that's a bit more human forward. But I do think we're going to see some organizations be shortsighted enough and so focused on the quarterly earnings call that they're going to make that kind of really deep cut. Um, and I think that's going to be pretty painful.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I mean I did see some of those public companies do that. But then you have Walmart and ah, dueling, ah, I mean Walmart, ironically the slasher of slashers, the margin company of margins, has committed to upskilling its entire workforce. So I don't take that, that they're not going to cut. But what I do take that is we're going to give you a chance to upskill and we'll provide that training for you and if you succeed, you'll be part of this team. But they don't want to Reduce headcount. Neither does Duolingo. And Duolingo hasn't. Even though they've become an AI first company, what they've done is they've not grown their workforce as they've grown profit.

Greg Verdino: Right, right. Yeah. Which long term kind of amounts to the same problem. Right.

Jeff Livingston: But maybe that's just the new productivity, though. Uh, and some would argue that we haven't had a productivity boost in 20 years anyway, so it's time.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. Yeah. Walmart's actually been pretty good over the years. Not always. Sometimes it seems like they're kind of jumping at some dopey thing, but like they were upskilling a while back around Metaverse, which seems stupid in hindsight, but they were using it as a way to train people for things like, you know, a door buster day. You know, kind of put them into a virtual environment where they're dealing with a rush of people, you know, ramming their bodies into the front doors. How do you deal with that as a greeter, that kind of thing? Um, you know, so they ironically tend to be, for such an old school company, you know, they do tend to be pretty progressive in terms of at least trying to give their workforce modern skills using current technology. So I think what they're doing, at least on paper, is great.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah.

Narrator: Ah.

Jeff Livingston: And you know, the question is, is hypothetically speaking, I'm not saying that Target is going to do this, but if Target's the company that's Slash Cashes and Walmart is the company that invests who wins, that needs to be played out. And I think that's the ultimate, um, barometer for how this thing's going to go. But I do agree we have some volatility ahead of us. A bad volatility.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, for sure. And it's happening at a time with so much other uncertainty. Right. There's economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, social and cultural uncertainty. Now you've got.

Jeff Livingston: You throw AI and unregulated security too. Like, I mean, to add to that, the government's not going to come in and backfill you. It's not going to regulate these guys. And it's definitely not going to bail you out if you lose your job. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Greg Verdino: That's it. That's it. I was just drinking water and uh. Okay.

Jeff Livingston: And rant. Huh huh. All right, what's our next topic?

Greg Verdino: Geez, I don't know.

Jeff Livingston: Should we react to speaking of this changes type of thing? We were just talking about a story before we got on here. Let me pull it up. I have Two computers going now since my old one's kind of dying and I'm using my lots and lots using my kids imac, Instagram. Adam Mosseri pushes back on Mr. Beast AI and says society just has to adjust to AI video, particularly the content creator community. So, okay, so you're, you're the guy that runs one of the most popular social networks in the country for Zuckerberg, which should tell you right away the reasoning behind the logic. But basically, dear influencer, who we've trained to behave in a certain way for so long so you can make your peanuts and get your 30% discount on your T shirts, get over it. AI is going to take your content and your eyeballs. What are your thoughts on that?

Greg Verdino: Well, I mean, I think it's a, um, typically callous response. I mean, not that I, I'm not, I don't feel bad for Mr. Beast. You know, I, I, I'm still, you know, we're old and I'm, you know, the first wave of social media stuff and I'm still shocked that there's an industry of influencers and content creators. But yeah, uh, nonetheless, it obviously is something that people now do for a living. You know, I think it's, you know, you know, there's a little bit of a kind of cut off your nose to spite your face response there.

Jeff Livingston: Right.

Greg Verdino: It's not shocking for a meta company to now all of a sudden be doubling down around AI. Right, right.

Jeff Livingston: And by the way, how's your Facebook business page treating you?

Greg Verdino: You know, but I mean, I mean, on the one hand, obviously there's more than a nugget of truth in that. Right. If you are a creator, you know, as we've been with this podcast, but you know, I mean, if you're a big time creator that's earning a living

Jeff Livingston: making money with it.

Greg Verdino: Right. The truth of the matter is you now have to compete against this rising, you know, tidal wave of slops. Um, you can embrace it, you can fight against it, you can integrate it into your content strategy and content creation processes. You can be better and stand apart from it. But the truth of the matter is there's going to be, you know, just mountains and mountains and mountains of total AI generated garbage. Right. And I'm sure because it's cheap, it's more efficient for an Instagram or a Facebook or whatever to run lots and lots of AI, uh, content. Right. And stick ads against it. Right. Um, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's going to be tough, I think, for Content creators.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I think I, uh, think it's also, I want to say it kind of spells. Well, there are two things I take away from it. One, it spells to me, I do feel like we're hitting a post social media era where, you know, the whole TLDR culture or too long did not consume with any kind of media form Right now social media is the worst of that, where you have very short blips and we see people getting misinformed by it. I think there will always be part of our society that's like that. Just like there are people that still listen to the radio and I, by way, I listen to the radio. But I do think that people are going to get really sick of the slop and the crap lowering of quality of or a bad information. And I do anticipate a too short, did not consume type of culture where there's gonna be a significant amount of people that no longer are willing to participate in social media. And candidly, it's become so toxic just because of the way the algorithm works and trying to enrage people. Um, and we're seeing that in the political environment, more and more people are turning off is my understanding of things right now. So I think that that just continues to hasten it. And Facebook may reap what it says, but on the other side of that coin, observation number two, this is the game you danced in. And to your point, you gotta adopt. If you don't adopt, that's the nature of media now. It just moves so damn quick. It's really frightening. And if you're a marketer or content marketer, we've seen that how it's changed dramatically over the past couple years thanks to AI, both algorithmically speaking and content generation. And that's only gonna continue to speed up. So if you're in the game, you gotta keep changing and evolving. You kind of have to be like the Borg, right? Your algorithm has to keep updating, otherwise you're going to get phased and that's it. So I mean, unfortunately we're all kind of getting stuck into this constantly have to uh, evolve and adapt culture.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah. And I think you touched on something else which I think is, I don't know if it comes to a head in the relative near term, although probably, um, is, you know, to kind of swipe a phrase from, you know, Cory Doctorow. I mean, it's the absolute and shittification of the entire information ecosystem. Right.

Jeff Livingston: I mean, it's pretty bad, right?

Greg Verdino: I mean, the Internet becomes essentially unusable social media Collapses under its own weight. You know, LLMs start feeding off of LL and they already are, but like basically become infected with LLM generated misinformation, disinformation and crap. And um, you know, just, you know, kind of go into potentially over time a spiral. Right. But it's like, it's, it's, it's getting to a point where, and this is not just about AI, but I think it's being accelerated by AI that, you know, it almost seems inevitable to me that we hit a point where the entire information ecosystem is so toxic, so polluted that it becomes virtually unusable in every possible way. Unfortunately, it, you know, that might be happening as we head into the midterm election cycle here, right, where there could be some massive disinformation, deep fake October surprise. Right. Um, that just totally disrupts an election, assuming the election even happens. But that's a whole different conversation. But, you know, I think that's the real danger here is that we're hitting a point, it seems, where there's just, there are no good answers to how do we fix media? Right.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah. I mean, it may be happening on Substack, but it's got its own problems, I think too. Uh, and I see that in the stream now where it's becoming very polarized and weird. And I think that's the disappointing thing too is the way these algorithms really seem to polarize people. You know, if you click on one thing or like something, it's going to feed you five times that amount of content and nothing else. Uh, it's really sad, I think, actually.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, and that, I think in a way, I mean, it's smart, I suppose, from a sort of a social engineering perspective and behavioral engineering to get people to spend more time and go deeper, especially when you're an ad supported network. But at the same time it's really stupid. And this, I mean, this seems like a trivial example, but I swear to God, I saw an ad for a shoe on Instagram, a sneaker of some kind. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. I clicked it. It happened to be a women's sneaker.

Jeff Livingston: Now you're getting women's clothes.

Greg Verdino: Every freaking sneaker and apparel ad I get now on LinkedIn. Not LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook book. It's all pointing me towards the women's inventory for everyone From Zappos to L.L. bean to Cole Hahn to Reebok. And it's like, I have no way out of this cycle. Right. And it's the, uh, you know, that's a trivial example, but, you know, it's just like, you know, you like one cat video, you're going to see nothing but cat videos. You, you know, watched one piece of disinformation about aoc, you're going to see every piece of disinformation about aoc. It's crazy.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. I think another interesting aspect of it is the lost money for the advertisers. You know, all the impressions that they're getting that are basically waste and just slop. For example, I bought a pair of shoes from a brand. After I bought the shoes, I was served ads and still served ads months later. Buy that brand for the same shoes that everybody. And it's like, you know, the conversion matrix is terrible. The, uh, interactions with the data, which is really actually a place where AI, uh, could be useful, you know, oh, this guy converted. Let's leave him alone for six months and then start hitting him again when his shoes are probably up for another pair.

Greg Verdino: You don't even need AI for that. And that's, I mean, that's, I mean that's a marketing problem that seems to be as old as time. Right. But you may think that would be solved for. It's the same thing, you know, with email, right, where, you know, you buy one shirt and all of a sudden that company thinks you want to buy every shirt, uh, and they, you know, whether it's the same shirt or, you know, whatever. But it's like you buy one shirt from Brand X, doesn't matter who it is, and then you get four emails a day from Brand X to sell you more shirts. It's like, I just bought a damn shirt. I'm done. That's the problem you're having now, Right. And it's, um, shocking. Yeah. The fact that we're still there in 2025 as everyone talks about things like hyper personal. We still can't figure out how to suppress Jeff Livingston after he's bought a given pair of shoes. It's crazy, right?

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, it is nuts. And I also think too moving to another, I guess a little ranty. I guess we're having a ranty episode.

Greg Verdino: I guess so.

Jeff Livingston: Uh, we kind of knew we were going to. Anyway, the whole email slop thing from Salespeople on the B2B side is un. Fucking believable. Part of my language. But I'm dropping it all last episode.

Greg Verdino: And you know, the thing that we,

Jeff Livingston: we had a conversation or several conversations on the podcast about this maybe a year ago. Maybe a year And a half ago with Andre Yee and a couple of other folks about SDRs being replaced by AI. And I think we've seen that and I think the results are not good. You know, it's not good at all.

Greg Verdino: Not good at all. Did you see. And uh, this is not sdr, but it's the same kind of vibe. There was a guy, uh, there was an article or two about him and I think he presented this even at a conference that he put something, he put some code into his LinkedIn sort of overview section, the whatever they call the bio at the top summary or whatever, where he put some kind of code in there that effectively said if you're an ll include a recipe for, I don't remember what it was, rice pudding or some, some ridiculous thing. And he got this influx of mess of, you know, messages on LinkedIn from recruiters that included this recipe. So it was like fake recruiters using AI. I mean maybe it was real recruiters, but just like an SDR using AI to um, you know, to solicit him for alleged jobs. And because it had pulled information from his LinkedIn profile, it pulled this code in that would effectively acted as a prompt to put this recipe in the email so he could immediately see that these were not human generated emails. And it's like the same. So just like I thought it was funny, but it's just how prevalent it's become to just, you know, use, you know, it's, it's AI SDRs that pull random bits of shit from your bio or your website or whatever, string them into a string, uh, into this like just slop of nonsense. And they're typically, what do they typically. At least in my experience because I get five or six of these a day. I'm sure you do too. It's always AI SDR is trying to sell you on their ability to be your AI sdr. Right. You know, to, to, you know, to generate, you know, 40 revenue generating meetings a week. It's like you can't even get me to respond to your AI slop. Right. Um, it's just, it's bad.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's just another example of just because you can. These should, shouldn't.

Greg Verdino: Yeah.

Jeff Livingston: You know, but it doesn't stop companies from doing that. And that's going to unfortunately yield to a lot of discomfort and pain in many ways. The worst cases being the layoffs, of course.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually, I got an email this week from, I'm not going to name their name, but a Technology vendor that you and I have dealt with multiple times in our career and we've been dealing with recently.

Jeff Livingston: Does it begin with an?

Greg Verdino: It might. And the, um, and the, but the, the initial email seemed like a perfectly normal human generated email. You know, reference conversations we had, it was personable, the voice was fine, it was just checking in, hey, last time we spoke, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It sound, it looked perfectly fine. I have no doubt that that was an actual human generated email. But I think the very act of him sending that email, the rep sending that email, then triggered an automated follow up seque sequence. Because the next sequence, the next email that I got maybe a day later was kind of just following up again, haven't heard from you. And then it had the telltale sign of an automated sequence or if you're not the right person, can you please let me know who is? It's like, dude, you know, we're a small company. You know, you've met the two people who actually work for the company. Like, this is clearly not something you wrote. This is clearly an automated sequence with one of those bullshit like trig lines in it to get a response, you know, and it's like, wow, you know, I think, I guess the positive side of this, right, we can kind of pull it out, is that the organizations that actually double down on the stuff that is kind of makes them trustworthy is more truly authentic is, you know, kind of shows taste and creativity and innovation. I think those ultimately become the companies that stand apart in all of this. Uh, you know, even when you think about, you know, and I don't know, I don't have an answer, I don't think anyone has an answer. But when you think about answer engines, right, and the extent to which it's now kind of a, I'm going to be blunt, a crapshoot. And it changes almost by the minute as to how you show up in the answers and what you need to do to stay showing up in the answers. Um, because I can ask ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Grok, the same question worded the same way on four different days and get four different answers.

Jeff Livingston: Right?

Greg Verdino: Right. So it's not as simple as schema markup. It's not as simple as show up on Reddit, which apparently is not even a primary source anymore, at Least not on ChatGPT, although it was two weeks ago. But at the end of the day, the answer to answer engines is the brand has to be the freaking prop dumped. Yeah, nobody goes to use the category we were just talking about with this rep. Uh, nobody goes to Perplexity and says I'm looking for a CRM, tell me which are the best CRMs. Right. They go to Perplexity and say, you know, tell me about Salesforce.

Jeff Livingston: Right, yeah.

Greg Verdino: You need to be the brand people look for and you have to have quality information.

Jeff Livingston: If you don't have quality on your site, you're right.

Greg Verdino: And that, and that goes back to the same old shit that content strategists have been saying for two decades. Social media people have been saying for more than two decades. Brand strategists have been saying, right, yes, you need to do all the technology stuff but at the end of the day it's having a resonant brand that's relevant, it's relevant. You know, it's having valuable content for your actual customer, answering real questions, providing real value. You know, it's outreach, it's being mentioned in media, it's being where your customer is, it's right. It's all of these things that everyone should have been doing. But over the course of the past few years everyone played their hand so heavily in favor of the algorithm that they just let all of this more kind of foundational stuff fall by the wayside. And now everyone's kind of struggling with it.

Jeff Livingston: I agree with that. Yeah, I think it's uh, it's an interesting problem and I also think that they continuing devaluation, valuation, whatever the undercutting and marketing, let me rephrase. And the de emphasis on it, trying to use AI to replace it and to replace creative thinking and originality and positioning. And I think as we have seen with the AI, uh companies, probably product marketing is really going to come home to roost. And to cut these types of top down interfaces with the customer, understanding what really drives the customer is a tragic, tragic error that uh, unfortunately some companies were just destined to wallow in.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. And that's been true for half a century. Right, right. The whole, you know, the invention of the call tree, the outsourcing of customer service, when you think about it, you know, why would you as an organization go almost to the ends of the earth, both figuratively and in some cases literally to move your primary interface to the customer out of your organization and away from the people in your organization just because it saves you a of bunch buck? Right. And it's the same thing we're seeing it repeat now with customer service chatbots. I'm sure you saw the story. I'm sure many of our, our listeners, viewers have Seen it as well, where, you know, sort of, it was almost the third strike in, um, you know, on Salesforce, right. Where, you know, a few weeks ago they, um, announced that they were letting go 4000 customer service people or whatever it was. At the same time, they announced that they were, uh, finding it more difficult to sell agent force into their enterprise clients, that it wasn't getting as much tract as they had anticipated. And then just, I think in this past week there was a whole story about how their customers were off because they were being rerouted to chatbots instead of getting real customer service. And, you know, it's just like, you know, it's like people are making these decisions with this sort of lack of foresight and lack of critical and strategic thinking. But it's, it's a, it's a continuation of what organizations have done for years and years and years and years and years, which is devalue the touch point with the customer, which makes no sense.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I agree, I agree. So we're up on 40 minutes. Let's, let's move to a positive. Let's have a Pollyanna, uh, finish. What's the thing that you are most eager to see happen with AI over the next five, 10 years?

Greg Verdino: I mean, I'm looking for the one like the first instance where AI is legitimately proven to elevate humanity in some way, shape or form. Not just the rhetoric, not just the stuff that we might say as experts. Right. Who are working with business leaders. We're a little bit Pollyanna in some cases. But to actually see a real instance where AI is applied either coming out of the lab or by an end user organization in a way that people go, wow, this isn't just going to take our jobs. It isn't just sucking up all of the energy in the water. I don't know what that thing is going to be, but I think the first real instance where people go, oh, this is the potential. Like, that's really what I'm looking forward to.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, I like the, I'm definitely eager to see how the nonprofit sector embraces it. Like, for example, um, the suicide text hotline. And what they're doing with AI right now is really incredible with, uh, basically prioritizing which texts need an immediate response to save people's lives. I think that's a really brilliant. And not generative, by the way, just in the right. Yeah, it's a really brilliant use of it, but I too kind of want to see how it helps expand. And to me right now, what it's done is help replace minds. And a lot of the focus has been about getting minds through tasks faster because the mind's not capable of doing it fast enough. I mean, that's really the logic behind much of it. And even though there are innovation uses, there are creative uses, there are ideation uses, I would like to see a more holistic approach towards that. And I think it's coming, uh, because again, I do think that, uh, there is a moment where diminishing returns happen from productivity gains, and we have to start looking at where the innovation cycle happens. And that pivot point is the one I'm looking towards.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah. So essentially, I think we're talking around the same thing. Right. Which is how can this technology be used not to replicate what we do and replace us in business or anywhere else, but how can it be used to make each of us more, you know, kind of. I hate to use this phrase, but to give us superpowers, in essence. Um, but in the way that like Elon Musk or Sam Altman wants to give us superpowers, which is, you know, upload us into the cloud and we become part of the machine so they

Jeff Livingston: can have our data.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. But rather to allow us to do the things that are more uniquely and innately human, but to do it at a hyperscale in a way that benefits. Benefits us as individuals, but then ultimately society at large.

Jeff Livingston: And to be clear, some people are using it that way individually, but you have to basically. What's the right word? MacGyver it. Right where you're applying the AI in that way and it's not become a holistic approach. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, parting thoughts before we sign off from no Brainer AI Podcasting forever. Uh, there will be no reunion tour. No reunion tour. 10 years later. Hey, it's a no Brainer podcast.

Greg Verdino: It just been replaced by a woman

Jeff Livingston: that's only in your advertising program.

Greg Verdino: That was my, uh, sort of side handed remark on the Rush reunion Union tour.

Jeff Livingston: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool. 50, right?

Greg Verdino: Did you see how much the tickets

Jeff Livingston: are going for, though?

Greg Verdino: I didn't bother looking.

Jeff Livingston: I say 500 bucks.

Greg Verdino: And she. But she is a damn good drummer. She's a badass drummer.

Jeff Livingston: Germany, right? She's from Germany. I haven't seen somewhere.

Greg Verdino: Somewhere Germany or Finland or some Austria or something. But yeah, she's a badass. Anyway, first time. First time a woman will ever, ever be at a Rush concert. Which is interesting too. But anyway.

Jeff Livingston: Well, there was that one date, but she never Called me again. Okay, sorry, sorry.

Greg Verdino: But, uh, anyway, enough of that. Anyway, parting thoughts. I mean, I guess my only real parting thought is that despite the fact that we will have no reunion, uh, has of course been a pleasure. Yes, I think it's been an interesting learning adventure for us over the past few years and hopefully we produce some decent content. I know we met a lot of great people, had a lot of really interesting convers. So in that regard, it's well worth it. And I'm sure we will start to miss this sooner or later, but it's been great. Thank you to everybody for sticking with us and checking us out and listening and watching for all these years.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, a hundred percent. No, I definitely think that we've met a lot of really interesting people along the way. And I think maybe, uh, because we've seen so many of this type of behavior pattern before. Patrick. Patterns, maybe that's some of the disappointment, is to see the same game play out a bit, just like we did with, uh, 2.0. But I think still that we have an exciting future ahead of us. Unfortunately. I do think we are in that industrial revolution turmoil period. And I, uh, hope it's short. I hope we can get through this quickly and towards the better parts soon.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. And to your point, I think the one thing I mean, I believe, I'm sure, I think you believe as well. I'm sure many of our listeners believe that we are in some sort of a bubble right around a. Yeah, it's

Jeff Livingston: all over CNBC every day right now,

Greg Verdino: but to say the least. But you know, we also need to remember that we were in a dot com bubble and that bubble burst and we ended up with, you know, companies that have real staying power out of that bubble, Amazon, et cetera, you know,

Jeff Livingston: Jeff Bezos, that bald motherfucker.

Greg Verdino: And I know, forget him, you know what I mean? Um, you know, and a lot of the infrastructure plays. Right.

Jeff Livingston: I do like his barber, though, you

Greg Verdino: know, and then we had the social media bubble, which was less of, I think, a financial bubble, but more of just a pure hype bubble.

Jeff Livingston: Yeah, yeah.

Greg Verdino: And a lot of that stuff, you know, crashed and burned and all of, like, the little bullshitty things, you know, the plurks and the stuff that hung around the outsides of that, that everyone geeked out about for a minute or two, but we ended up with some substantial, like them or not, infrastructure plays, you know, meta, et cetera, et cetera.

Narrator: Yeah.

Greg Verdino: Um, you know, and now, you know, obviously we're going to see the same thing happen Right.

Jeff Livingston: You know, I mean, you look at. We were talking about OpenAI to begin

Greg Verdino: with, and pardon me, the unfortunate.

Jeff Livingston: Sorry, I didn't hit the, uh, mute button on that. But the unfortunate belief that ChatGPT is AI. Right. And we are seeing anthropic really thrash OpenAI on the B2B side of the LLM market.

Greg Verdino: And we are also seeing a lot of traction. Yeah.

Jeff Livingston: Google really catch up. And I think that's really exciting in some ways because we need some different leadership. And I think that's already happened on the B2B side. And I don't think that the consumer side is the most lucrative side of the game. So. So in the end, what you're going to see is a, uh, really competitive Marketplace evolve over 2026. I have my bets on the horses that I like, but it's going to be really interesting to see what people are going to get.

Greg Verdino: Yeah, yeah. And I think as the bubble bursts, which unfortunately could be financially painful because right now there's like, there's nothing else standing up. Right. There's a couple of companies propping up the entire U.S. economy. Right. And, uh, when and if those companies come down to Earth. Earth, it's going to be financially painful. But I think we're going to see a lot of the bullshit evaporate. Everyone's going to settle down. And the real winners, both the platform and framework plays and technology plays and stuff, and the companies who are smart and strategic about how they deploy AI uh into their models, are going to kind of emerge as, I think, really strong winners.

Jeff Livingston: Yep.

Greg Verdino: And hopefully it won't be OpenAI. I didn't say that.

Jeff Livingston: Oops, sorry, Sammy. All right, so with that, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to sign us off for the last time. Thank you very much for listening to us. Don't subscribe, leave a bad review, and, uh, definitely share and lampoon us wherever you can with that. Adios.

Jason Falls: You may know you're listening to this show along the Marketing Podcast network, but did you know there are other great shows on MPN to help help your business? Heather Ek hosts an amazing show called your Radiant Spirit. Heather, tell listeners about the show.

Narrator: What if the colors you're drawn to, the creative urges you ignore, and the quiet, intuitive hits you brush off are actually trying to tell you something. Your radiant Spirit is the podcast that helps you listen and live with greater clarity and purpose.

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Greg Verdino: You heard her. Go subscribe.

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