Shann Biglione: AI Is Coming For Marketing. Now What?

Speaker A: Hey M everybody. Welcome back to another edition of Over a Pint. Today I've got the co founder of Kumquat. He's also podcaster for the pod, the Overthinkers. He's a prolific writer, father and husband. Chan, welcome to the pod.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Fat. Nice to see you.

Speaker A: It's nice seeing you, man. Um, I do a lot of these. I'm not too intimidated. I'm going to be honest with you. I'm pretty intimidated by you.

Speaker B: Shouldn't be.

Speaker A: You've got a lot going on. You've got a lot going on. Shan, let's start by giving people just a better understanding of you. Give us a little bit of background how you got into marketing, what you're doing now.

Speaker B: Uh, I got into marketing because I loved marketing. My dad when I was a kid would drive around, uh, endlessly. Might I say it was rather painful for me and boring. But one of his favorite things was to come up with advertising campaign ideas. Uh, and so he was not an ad man, but he was advertising his own business. He was doing antique things in the southwest of France, where I'm from. And so it kind of gave me the bug. And I've always liked advertising. We had this thing in France, um, called Culture Pube, which was a TV show. Every Sunday I was showing advertising after the movie at 10pm on the Sundays and I devoured it. Uh, we had uh, the, uh, advertising nights, which was cinemas screening advertisements back in the day when people were enjoying advertising. Not what we have these days, I think anymore. Uh, but it was this thing and I always loved advertising. I studied physics for a little while. I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Then I figured out I was not smart enough for this. Uh, thankfully early enough. I, uh, got an undergrad in physics, but moved on across the road to a business school. And as I arrived in the business school, clearly my appeal and my calling had always been marketing. So I majored in it, worked in it, and I basically spent the first 15 years of my career, uh, as a marketeer. Digital marketing is where I started because I used to run, uh, digital stuff back in 2005 just to give you a sense of how old I am. And, um, before YouTube or Facebook were a thing, and in the 2000s, early 2000s, I was running fan sites and whatnot for Xbox and the, uh, movie studio I worked at. Disney kind of saw me doing all those things and said, hey, why don't you digital marketing for us? And that's kind of how I started My career and fast forward a few different roles and finished my marketing career as a chief strategy officer for Publicis, which I did in China. And then I did a similar role when I moved to the US and after that I founded a company uh, which was doing reputation management. Uh, it was great, very fun. Got acquired, hired by a company called Signal AI, uh, which was uh, a media intelligence company. And uh, we finished that story last year. Just the acquisition was well over and we had stayed on as employees and it was time for us to figure something out. Now the new one is kumquat. So now I'm looking at synthetic audiences for corporate communications, uh, and public affairs, investor relations, those sorts of things. So a little adjacent to marketing but it is not the same type uh, of work as I used to do as a marketer. That was a long story. Thanks for joining my TED Talk.

Speaker A: I love that, I love that. And I want to get more into the kumquat story and find out more about that. But I want to start here. Shan, you've spent a lot of time um, in the business. You've spent a lot of time understanding, thinking about working in AI. Give us the state of the state right now before you do. Here's my thesis. I thought more businesses would be using AI more. So yeah, what I mean by that is this. There are a lot of companies that if you talk to the CEO, you talk to the cmo, you talk to leaders, they would say yep, we're using AI. But you drill down a little bit and it's more of we've got a bunch of licenses and a bunch of people are doing I don't know what with AI. That's my thesis. Give me your thoughts.

Speaker B: I think there is something super appealing about AI and marketing and I think there's a variety of reasons for that. But one of them is I remember before AI became a uh, thing when I was still at publicist, there was this thing called DCO Dynamic Creative Optimization. And that was this whole narrative in the industry that advertising was becoming a one on one type of engagement with the consumer and be able to dynamically optimize the creative to the person who was seeing it. Now the truth of the matter is it was pretty much bullshit because there is nothing about it that was one one and frankly in the end could have turned out to be just a few variations available and the systems, even at Google at the time or Facebook, which is not good enough. The resizing, whatever the, the speed at which you need to operate to create an ad was not what is the speed to serve the ad that's required for it to work. And so there's a lot of little things that we're trying to hack it. And I think AI is very tempting because it is kind of feeding quite well into this ability to scale this, because the second you put a human into the system, it works terribly. Like it has to be fully automated. And AI kind of brings that promise. And so there is a, an appetite that fits this narrative of the industry of going to more customization, personalization. And it is one of the ways we're going to get there. I think the second big reason why people are excited about AI is the costs aspects. There is a, uh, hope that we can get to things faster, cheaper. And it's been kind of the pressure in the industry. You know, agencies have been on a swirl and a downward spiral really, frankly, in terms of how they're able to justify their prices, the headcounts and whatnot. And I kind of seems like a good way to try to address, um, those things. So there is a lot of different conditions, you're right, to make AI exciting and people are excited to your point. They like to talk about it. I think there's a few different reasons why it's not as ubiquitous and as standardized as we would have expected to be. One of them is, in reality, the AI output is not that good, um, for marketing purposes. My company does a lot of things for corporate communications. The reason, one of the reasons, one of the reasons I really love doing, uh, this market is because they work in semantics and words and written things. They write memos, they write press releases, speeches and things that AI is very, very fluent in when it comes to create videos. It is getting better every quarter, but it is still not completely there yet. And so there is that first reality that the AI itself is not always that good. And then you have the second layer, which is, as ever, I was running Business Transformation for Publicist Media at the time and is a real issue. The problem with change is change is not a technological issue. It's a people problem. Right? And so to get people to really buy into it, change the they work is going to take time. Uh, we had on my podcast very recently a behavioral scientist who was talking to us and she spent a lot of time on AI adoption within the companies she works at just to make sure she, we're helping people understand how to change their behaviors and how they work to fit AI systems within them. And so getting the humans to buy into this is a problem. So if you have this Venn diagram of the tech is not completely there yet, not as easy as it should be and the output is not perfect. Plus the fact you have humans who have to be willing to change the way they work is going to make it difficult for this to scale. Like every technological investment, as ever, the change is going to happen slower than we anticipated, but it's going to be deeper than we anticipated.

Speaker A: That brings us to your article and that's how you and I cross paths initially. Shan, you've written I ah, think a very interesting piece, uh, called five reasons marketing is one of AI's most vulnerable professions. Talk a little bit about the article. Why you wrote that.

Speaker B: Well, because I work in AI and I'm quite passionate about it and also because I think we have to be a little bit honest about what's happening and there's a lot of talk about AI is not here to replace people. And we know that ultimately there's many people in finance who are very happy to do this. And let's be clear, they own the keys of the kingdom. So I think there is just a bit of a reality check and also there's a, maybe something, a bit of a personal bias there. But you know, I've left advertising technically about five, six years ago and it was a slightly sad departure for me. The things that attracted me first and foremost to advertising and to marketing at large not just advertising, is that when I was running, not, uh, running when I was walking the corridors in the business schools. You know, I mean my greatest strength was finance. I came from science, I did math and stuff like, you know, the, the financial stuff was, you know, scoring high grades but I had zero interest in it. I loved the marketing aspect because marketing was where there was creativity. There was something else that was just not like accounting was my most dreaded thing, for instance, and no shade on accountants are just not made for this. Um, and so the aspect of marketing was the creativity. And I still to this day will, you know, will die on the hill. That creativity is one of the greatest powerful, the greatest powers in marketeer has um, in a quiver. Um, and it is just sad to me how we're kind of giving a little bit up on it. And I think the story of AI is kind of interwoven with what I've seen as trends in our industry. And I point out some of the things that I point out in the article are we have built a system that, that is ripe for AI. We have systematized things, we have created, you know, programmatic Systems. We've bought into the whole idea of personalization at the expense of what I think is also important. I don't think automation is not important, but, like, you know, how we build a brand that asks that, that basically, uh, acts like a totem. I uh, call it the Tower of Babel that speaks a common language where you and I, even though we might be quite different people individually, you can still relate and understand, you know, this is who Louis Vuitton is, this is what BMW is and whatnot. And I think, you know, that aspect of how we've created systemic destruction with creating the many languages that destroy the Tower of Babel. In a way, I really equate the brand to the Tower of Babel. And I think that was one of the things that I think AI is picking up on. And there's loads of other things. Like, you know, there is things like the fact we have machine to machine interacting to make advertising, buy it, you know, sell it. And so, yeah, sure, AI is ripe for that. Structurally, we've designed a sandbox that is going to be very good for AI to go. And that's one of the reasons probably that drove me to write this article. It is both topical, but also an indication of a broader trend within industry.

Speaker A: So fast forward a bit, Chen, and what do you see the future of a typical agency, a typical marketing department, looking like 3, 5. You pick the number down the road. What's that? What's the look in your crystal ball? And give us that.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, look. So one of my mentors. I was very lucky to have a mentor publicist, or I mean, I say mentor, maybe I'm a bit arrogant, uh, about this. I had the chance to speak to him a few times and get some advice. Uh, was Rishak, uh, Tabakawara, who is one of the best people in this industry, and he has this provocation, uh, which he's had for 10 years, or maybe even more than that, but at least 10 years. I think maybe 15 years. And he likes to say agencies like cockroaches. And he gets people upset because, like, what do you mean you're cockroaches? It's like, yes. And the reason he says that is because we will. We're the one. The one animal of the animal kingdom that will survive the nuclear holocaust. And that is really what he meant. Uh, it was honestly just a. It was not a demeaning, uh, uh, narrative. It was more kind of pointing out the fact that we're survivors. And the reason we're survivors is because there is always going to be accounting reasons or laziness reasons or capability reasons to rely on another actor. And so I think agencies do have still a role to play within this, within this structure. And I think there will be an appetite for this. I do think there's going to be some serious changes though. Uh, I don't know exactly where they're going to go. I can only say it's more of a question of when than a question of if for me, that the nature of agency is going to change dramatically. Um, agencies are going to have to become much more tech centric, that is for sure. And they'll all pretend that they are tech centric. I'll just tell you as someone who's founded a company, it came from agencies. Our first company was born out of the fact that one of the PR agencies, my co founders we were working at, uh, refused to productize something because they'd still rather be selling $500,000 DEX than selling setting a $50,000 a year access to build as many decks as you want. It was not compatible with the business model. But that transformation towards tech is kind of a, it's the reality of where things are going. I think Publicis has been the company that's been the most investments and that's paying off at the moment. We'll see if they'll be able to sustain that. But of the holding companies, the one that's been the most proactive, that tech centricity is going to be critical because that is just uh, the tide that's coming and we cannot be that continued stopping it. Um, I do think though that the number of people approaching them is going to be shrinking dramatically. I do not see anywhere near the same level of staffing that we've had. I do think there's going to be plenty of space for human, uh, in there, but the type of human skills we're going to need is going to be very relationship driven. Very, very relationship driven. Much more than, um, specialty driven. And I think that one of the weakest position probably in the future will be the one I used to hold the strategist, uh, which I adore and I defend. I think there's many, many things, but I think it's one of the things with strategists we're not always very, we're a bit socially awkward often and we're not always the easiest people to kind of put into the room. Unlike, you know, the creative who has this expensive Persona and whatnot, or the commercial lead. We're a bit more nerdy typically in, in nature I'm doing broad strokes here, but that's kind of my experience. And I think, you know, there'll be, we're, we're dealing a lot with logic and logic will be something that AI does pretty well, for instance. And so there'll be a lot of reasons to kind of extract back to the core. And I think we're like every commoditized industry think of photography for instance, or think of uh, songwriting. They tend to create a system that promotes the exceptional talents more and more. And the middle gets completely buried. Like it's almost, it's very hard to have a sustain a lifestyle just being a middle of the road photographer. Now everyone can do photography, right? And so that type of dynamics, when you get to that democratization of the tools, the access, the ease of creations and whatnot and the make it very cost efficient to do it, you will have your flagship Chris Nolan filming in film for IMAX type of thing. That will be rewarded, but that will be going after the exceptions. And you know, photography I think was a good example. I could see advertising agencies going in a similar direction.

Speaker A: Interesting. One of the points you bring up Shan, is marketing, um, needs to rebuild its moat around understanding people. Yep. What do you mean by that?

Speaker B: Well, we often talk about marketing as the growth engine. It's great, that's cool. I think the ratius growth comes party for marketing for many other things. Um, I still believe that one of the superpowers of marketing, or at least its key roles in the boardroom is to represent the voice of the customer. Uh, this should be job number one for us. Understanding what consumers like, don't like is something that a lot of marketers have lost, um, ground with. Uh, it's just like the disconnect has existed. We hide ourselves more and more, and myself included, by the way, I'm not throwing stones on this one. Uh, behind the screens we get others to kind of run things. We look at data, like audience data. When we were in media, just like we were swearing by this and everything was run through that. But the reality is you gotta understand people. At the end of the day that is so critical. And I think that's one of the biggest value we can bring to the boardroom is to make sure we're not fully disconnected and making stupid decisions. Um, and so I think in the world of AI it's going to be extremely true. AI does a very good job getting an understanding of people or summarizing it at the very least. In my case, my company is Doing synthetics. So we are actually even replicating what people are saying or even, uh, uh, simulating, uh, what they may be saying is probably the more accurate term. But generally speaking, you know, not losing touch with real people is going to be super, super important. And then there's also the fact that, as I said, the relationship aspect is going to be important. I really encourage every marketer to build networks, to know folks, to interact with others. Um, even the world of tech. I'll tell you right now, you know, what differentiates for me, a company that's going to be successful or not in the world of AI, for the most part, it will be having people at the top that have credibility as humans. Uh, so my company, Kumquat, my co founder, Dan Gaynor, he's exceptional. He's been a comms guy for his entire career, worked in the Obama administration. He worked at Nike, worked at Webby Shanwick. Um, you could take everything that Dylan, my tech guy, and I are devising. If people did not trust Dan, it would be a very different proposition. If you take evidence. Another great company that does synthetic audiences in marketing realms, for instance, the two founders, they're from LinkedIn B2B institutes. They have built this relationship, and that matters to them. So I think for me, these are two facets of the human aspect. I think both to succeed in the world of AI, you're going to have to have that human connection and people knowing who you are and trusting who you are for them to value whatever you've got to sell as an AI product in the back end. Uh, but also really think that the core role of marketing should still be something that is understanding audiences, spending time with them, doing anthropology and so on, and really gathering that intel. I had a friend and guest on the podcast, guy called Tom Goodwin, who's a decently famous marketeer. He said my biggest advice for marketers to go sit on a bus. And I think this is a good provocation. Sit on a bus, listen to what people are saying, see what the kids are doing, see what is happening. Um, it matters so much. And I'll tell you, even my anecdote, I think anyone who's a marketeer and who's a parent knows that we think we know childhood because we had our own. And then you go and see your child playing, it's like, fuck, I am so not up to speed with the way it works. We all, at some point, get lost with what it means to be a young person in this society, right? We thought that we'd always Be cool and you know it would not happen to us. And here you are, I'm 45 years old and I have no clue what 10 years old are about. I got to go spend time with them, you know, to get that. And that's an extreme case but I think it's a very good example as to why understanding people, spending time with them. And you need to have that. We need to represent that shen within

Speaker A: the last 10 to, I don't know, 15 years, maybe even longer. If I was just to look at marketing painting with a roller. It seems like we have gone from uh, a heavy ah, focus on brand to a uh, focus on performance. Yeah where we have to measure everything that we possibly can. And the best marketing is the one that you can measure. I could easily point to something and go this is the ROI I've received on um, X. But that game's changing so much. If your viewpoint of the world is you have to understand humans more, you have to build and focus and spend time on relationships in some way. Does this mean brand marketing is making a return?

Speaker B: Well, I think it'd be put that I think there's a bit of a comeback happening. Um, well at least there's conversations about it and that's a start. I mean we've seen the lesbian of this world, peer field, Markerson's, even Byron Sharp, one of the most left brain person in our industry who are still kind of arguing in favor of having things that just make us look a bit creative in terms of how we come about. Um, you see research companies like System1 researching a whole push around that aspect. I think people understand that brand matters and that we might have lost sight of it. I think there's world champions for that. I think there's marketeers like me who joined this industry because that's what they were. Um, it was the light that attracts us little, little mosquitoes and bugs kind of to the profession. So I think there is a inherent desire to go there. I think we have lost some point track for sheer economics. I mean we have been overtaken by tech industries. Uh, I mean let's not even try to compare with the largest. All agencies combined are still a fraction of what a single large tech company which owns 80% of advertisement nowadays, um, is going to be in terms of market capitalization. So we were the Davids uh, as an industry but I think we've kind of surrendered a little too soon. I think we kind of threw the baby with the bathwater a little bit too soon. I think there's A desire for people to change, to see the direct roi. Being able to quote numbers became a very important part of being a marketeer or even a cmo. Um, this is what uh, uh, Rory calls the arithmetic of marketeers. Um, and so I think, you know, that that comeback of brand is at least happening in spirit. It's on the stage. I mean, can is doing a great job kind of emphasizing on it. And I do think Mock 2 are waking up to it. Whether it will really change the way we do things, I don't know. I mean, it's uh, I would say I gave up. I did not give up, but I realized it was harder and harder and I've been able to make some impacts, you know, and I know that for me I've been becoming, I've become good at telling people every left brain was the right brain, works how to get there and kind of motivating them to go to that well. But it is not easy. And I just don't know that we're going to be paying for it. That is the biggest problem. Um, my hope is that ultimately brand does matter. One thing that I know for fact, we've seen that, we've seen the data on this in the past and it happens every single time when there is, um, ah, abundance of choice. The brand does make a difference. People always think the algorithm will fix it for you. And I don't buy this. This is not going to go into with Scott Galloway at some point back when he was still talking about marketing, but you know, he was making the point like, you know, Alexa is going to kill how you buy your products because you can just, Alexa buy batteries and it's going to be the end of the conversation. And I always felt like that's not true at all. That's just not what's going to happen. Because at the end of the day, we need that brand to signify something. It is who we are as human. We're a group people. And you know, if you read about the history of sociology and morality and whatnot, you know, it's pretty clear that we're designed to find our uh, tribes and brands are part of that. They're part of that journey, they're part of the, the process. And, and so I think being a brand, getting people together, giving a sense of definition, maybe not meaning to be too strong, but definition for what is acceptable, what is something that signifies something to others within my group is a role that they play. And it goes way beyond the functional aspect of it and what we're Going to see is more and more, I think companies doing well. I mean, I was speaking recently to an ex client of mine who was CMO and um, one of my clients and he left and he went to run a company and he was in the private equity side. Private equity being for those who are not familiar, uh, companies, we invest in private companies from the public and the way they typically invest is take something and try to extract more value so they can repackage it and resell it in a few years. Right. And the way he transformed the business, he was telling me, I'm not going to give any names on this one because I just don't know how public it is. But like he's like, what we did is we took what existed and we just put a good brand on it and we saw a 5x increase in revenue over three years. And I think people will notice. I think it's going to be pretty obvious that it works because it's not just a passion point, it just freaking works. That is the reality of that. And so having that comeback towards proper branding, uh, proper definition of what it is that we do, that Babel Tower, it is powerful. So I think we're right for the comeback. I just wouldn't put my entire life savings on the fact this industry will be able to fight its way through to the top.

Speaker A: I want to go back to your article again, Shannon, um, and point number two, and that really caught my eye, which is synthetic audiences are replacing traditional quant research with measurable accuracy. If I'm looking at marketing right now, right now, today, M 2026, um, I think research is in particularly in a tough spot when it comes to AI and um, disruption there. You're talking about quant research as something that is being disrupted and how accurate, uh, synthetic audiences are. Have you focused at all on qualitative?

Speaker B: Well, it's interesting because that's my entire company that I'm launching. Kumquat is qualitative.

Speaker A: Talk about that.

Speaker B: Um, and so yes, I do believe in it. I think the reason the article I call that out is a. Because in my experience marketing relies quite a bit on the quant aspect. Um, and that's the bulk. While, I mean I have a, my, my specialty was in market research when I was studying and you know, qual was very often described as a way to get to a better quant survey because ultimately you need to quantify things. Right. And so quant is, is often kind of the, the core of how decisions are made. We're actually like there's X percent of people going to be liking this. And also I think it's the first layer where we could get validation. Uh, I saw someone, for instance, posting about my company being like a bit made up because we could not give a percentage. It's not true. It's true. We do not come out arguing about a percentage accuracy for what we're doing because we're doing qualitative stuff and percentage accuracy is slightly less relevant for the way we do things. Um, and so my focus right now is we're already at a stage where for quant, it is clearly working pretty well. And if you speak to this book, the folks at Evidenza, for instance, who are expert at some of those stuff, they do a lot of work and, and whatnot. And from what I gather, spending time in this space at the moment, you're going to see plenty of this spreading left, right and center and, and, and, and that's going to be important. The quality aspect I think though is, is interesting. I will tell you though, I mean, hey, it works really, really well. So what my company does is we're mimicking stakeholders. I'm speaking to comms folks. So investor relations, public affairs, corporate comms, they speak to journalists, they speak to investors, they speak to politicians, regulators, activists, NGOs. And so for me to be able to kind of predict what those guys are saying is not a quant question. We find ways to quantify that a little bit. But most importantly, what is it they don't like about what you're saying? What is it they would like to hear more of? What is it that we need to change to be able to fit within the agenda these people are trying to push? And so that requires much more of a qualitative response. And that works for my use case. Super, super well. Uh, and that's one of the things I'm proud of with kumquat is we see companies right now changing the investor narrative and seeing straight away, uh, changes in stock prices. We've seen people being able to get completely different journalist connections where they're able to kind of play stuff they were not able to place before with journalists they never spoken to because they suddenly can tailor that to the taste of these journalists. We're seeing people who work for companies kind of understanding how to better work with Democrats with this platform at the moment. Like, you know, that's the type of stuff that he helps enable and it does that really, really well. Um, but when I think of marketing, specifically, most marketing is obsessed with consumers, right? That is where we're spending time. They're not obsessed with the one journalist or the one politician or lobbyist and whatnot, which is what my company is focused on. And so, for me, the aspect of synthetic audiences for qual I respect. I think there's good things to do there. And it's interesting. But to my point earlier of meeting, uh, your audience sitting on a bus, it's hard to meet a thousand people for a survey. But for having qual and kind of seeing how they respond to something, I would argue that in many cases, I don't put it in the world of marketing. I don't think I will put as high as a replacement agenda. If anything, I'd probably argue that you want to be doing more ethnography right now than investing in qualitative synthetic audiences. Feedback from mothers, for instance. Uh, and I would say that for me, like, that, that's. That is why I'm creating a bit of distinction in this article specifically. It doesn't mean I don't believe synthetics can be wonderful for qual. This is what I'm literally, you know, sacrificing my entire income for right now as the company that I'm founding. But I think you have to be smart about which use case you want to activate this on. And I am very, very optimistic about the use case we're doing with kumquat, the CRO cons. I am not as bullish on the marketing side. When most marketing is here to target consumers. And it's fairly easy to go meet consumers, you should go meet them.

Speaker A: I want to stick with kumquat a little bit. This is interesting. What challenges are you running into Shen, as you roll out your product? Are people naturally gravitating toward it, or do they have a problem with the synthetic portion of it?

Speaker B: So, look, I mean, we've announced the. We announced the company last week, uh, which has been fascinating for us because, you know, we've been running in stealth for a few months now. And so we have customers in the platform that operates, um, disclosure. We bootstrap. So we have no investors. There's something. We've been able to generate revenue soon enough to be able to kind of pay for the business. And it's in. It's in its first stages. And so we definitely have been seeing responses and questions. The synthetic aspect is not a big question. Um, that was a concern last year, I think, in the synthetic market. And, you know, when I was starting to brainstorm a little bit, you know, speaking to a few folks and, oh, I don't know if people will buy into synthetic. And I met last year somebody who's running creative for a big automotive company and they basically replace the entire thing with synthetics. Like if they can do it and it works and if basically they don't do any market research, quantum market research research for their content. Now everything is tested by synthetic audiences because they were like 90% accuracy, but they could do 15,000 versions of creative tested and having this done in a day, they're like, let's just stop the real surveys and just go straight to the synthetics. And so that was. Something is happening right now. It's hot. I mean, look, it's, it's, um. People want to speak to us. They're curious about it, they're meeting us there. We have customers and I'm talking very big brands. People who would have been a white whale a year ago are just like, you know, really excited. We're in conversations to kind of close contracts with, um. So there is. No, there isn't. There's a. There's a genuine interest and understanding of how far since the audience can take you. And I think it's taken us further than people realized, but they're willing to go there. So I'm, um. Right now, what I'm saying is people are welcoming it because they see the value, they see the merit. I mean, for what I do, especially, I'm trying to solve something that was not possible before. You know, you could not pick up the phone and find out what Andrew Rossorkin was thinking of on something you're writing. It's just. That's just that was not happening. And one of my favorite things with new technologies is not to replace what we're doing, but do something new. And we're trying to do something that was just not possible. So there is a genuine appetite. And in my case, you know, even everything is imperfect. It is way better than what used to be done before, which was like finger in the air. What do you think? What do I think? I think he would say this. And then 15 opinions come around the table. Everything is edited. Legal team says yes to this, no to that. And now people are like, well, we have a way of at least stress testing this. It might not be 100% accurate, but it's going to be indicative of what we're going to get as a reaction. Let's work it out. It is worth working out. And so that sweet spot is very, very good for me, uh, to be in there. The biggest challenge is not to tell people you can be synthetic audiences is change. At the end of the day, people are changing, folks, as I said at the beginning of the call, changing behavior around a new tool, a new way of working. We do save people time and energy, but we're a new workflow. You got to go in and log into a platform and test something that you were not testing before. So it is technically additive to their workload. Of course it should be suppressing other things, but I'm not there to help them change the way they work. Right. And so the change management of how people are not just curious about it, but start using it a lot and kind of making this part of the day to day, this is where I think it's going to take a little bit of time. And why at the end of the day, most technological changes take a bit longer than they should sometimes. Because to have human adoption requires genuine interest and desire for it. And you need to have motivators, carrots, nudges. If you're doing behavioral sciences to help people get there.

Speaker A: I want to close with this, Sean. Um, you are in AI, you're deep in it, you are with your company right now. Um, you're at the leading edge and people who are using your product are definitely seeing an advantage. And we could go through a number of places where organizations who've really got their act together or using AI are seeing dramatic changes, positive changes, maybe bottom line types of things. But when does, in your opinion, when does AI stop becoming a competitive advantage? When are we going to hit that point where now that everybody's using it, it's no longer, it's no longer that, that silver bullet.

Speaker B: You asked, you're asking me not if, but when, which I think is a right way to frame it. I would say a good chunk of it is already not a competitive advantage. Um, we are at the mercy of whatever those AI models are able to do. They're getting better by the quarter, I'm not going to say by the hour, but they are getting better. I mean, we use Fable, for instance from Claude in our platform. Stuff that used to take us two days to develop literally three months ago, can be done in two hours nowadays.

Speaker A: Uh, uh.

Speaker B: And so there is clearly, you know, if I take for my world, the world of startups, it is incredibly hard to have a mope. It is both the best of the times and the worst of times to set up a business. It's the best of times because you can come to really cool shit and make it real very quickly. I mean, I can walk into A meeting. I mean, you know, we used to say like, you know, startups were able to raise money on the PowerPoint. If, uh, you're still just getting a PowerPoint, you're a fucking moron. Like, you know, people could spend an extra two hours and give you an interactive version of what they're trying to get you to invest in. Literally. It's just, it's that quick to get to something that kind of brings it to life. Um, and so it is fascinating because we can figure out new use cases, new ways to build things and even my own company where the way, the speed at which we iterate with just frankly, I mean we're three, but there's only two of us doing the product side of things. And really there's one engineer who's building most of it. I'm just here to kind of give directions. It is, it is thrilling. I mean, I, I, I'm having some of the best m, best, best time of my life just playing with those tools and creating new things. It's, it's just, yeah, uh, you know, we're, we're bringing things into the world. That's just awesome. And to see people able to use it is just fascinating in times that should have taken me a team of 15 people three years ago. But the downside is of course the moat, you know, what is defensible about it? Because if I can do it more easily with the two of us, that means others will be able to do it. There are going to be other ways to create a moat, but generally speaking, the AI itself is eating at it fast.

Speaker A: And

Speaker B: I think the differentiation aspect is going to come from either data sets that you've got or relationships that you own, uh, or uh, inertia that you've got. Apple sucked at AI for the longest time, but they have install base for the devices. Um, it doesn't even matter that Siri is still terrible. There is clearly going to be the second there's an AI that works well on a phone, one platform is going to be scaling, it's very fast going to be Apple. And so there are going to be market dynamics that I think are going to come into play. But AI itself has a competitive advantage. You might be lucky. And some of my bets right now is what I do. Frankly, I don't think it's going to lift a finger to go and solve because it is not big enough, it is not universal enough for what they're trying to do. And so anthropic or OpenAI or those companies, I don't think they're going to be interested in doing this, um, in the way they build it. So there is still time for me to kind of do that. But there's plenty of others who are going to try to build it. But the truth of the matter is it's not even like, you know, how do I win vs company A vs company B is how long until the AI can do it on its own. There is entire aspect of what I used to do as a strategist. Frankly, these days AI does it better than I used to do. And ah, it's humbling, uh, for sure. But I don't think we can go around like whenever I see people pretending like AI will never be as good as humans, you're deluding yourself. You are deluding yourselves. The tech itself is the worst it will ever be and it's getting better. And it's not even great AI that we've got right now. Let me be clear. The LLMs are basically regurgitating things and they have pattern matching. It's not advanced M awareness of what it's really talking about. But one day, if all goes well, um, not well, depending on how you look at it, they will be different, better A.I. systems. Um, I think it's going to be very, very hard to be differentiated in this market to have a true product mode. Um, and what worries me the most, frankly, is concentration of power, uh, of everything we see here. I look at all this right now, it's thrilling. But there's definitely a direction that it's going to be worth keeping an eye on. I think we need to have power balances in the systems because at the end of the day it'll most likely be private. That's going to have those sorts of things. And what happens when those few people slash companies have the models everyone needs? That is not a good place to be in. So I think there's some serious, serious societal questions ahead for us, uh, beyond how quickly we're going to get away with having some difference using AI or not. I think we're going to quickly find out. That is not even the key question.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for being on the podcast. You have the final words or how do people find out more about you, about your organization? Anything you want to promote, Take my

Speaker B: company is kumquat AI. So if you want to find out more about synthetics for corp comms, please do reach out. Uh, in terms of finding me, you usually find me on LinkedIn. Uh, I used to have Twitter, but I gave up after my favorite tech bro took over. Uh, and so, yeah, LinkedIn is a good place to find me, and you can sometimes read me on force, but really, LinkedIn is the place to follow.

Speaker A: John, thanks again. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thanks very much.