#294: Adapting an Analytics Team to an AI World

[Announcer]: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. [Announcer]: Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language. [Michael Helbling]: Hi everybody, welcome. [Michael Helbling]: It's the Analytics Power Hour.

[Michael Helbling]: This is episode 294. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, probably right after the old RTO policies got rolled out, you probably got another executive communication about going AI first or whatever the hell that means. [Michael Helbling]: And let's be honest, I think we're all making pretty heavy use of AI now in some capacity. [Michael Helbling]: But what does that even mean exactly?

[Michael Helbling]: And specifically in our world of data? [Michael Helbling]: I mean, should I just be uploading all my data to Claude and letting it come up with my analysis? [Michael Helbling]: Or is it in planning where you are constantly having to tell chat GPT not to jump the gun and start writing SQL when you're just exploring some concepts or ideas? [Michael Helbling]: And I don't know.

[Michael Helbling]: So welcome to the AI Analytics Power Hour, I guess, this time. [Michael Helbling]: We're going to talk about it, not just using it yourself, but how to think about rolling AI out across your team or your organization. [Michael Helbling]: As always, I'm joined by my co-hosts, Julie Hoyer. [Michael Helbling]: Welcome.

[Julie Hoyer]: I'm back. [Michael Helbling]: Actually, welcome back. [Michael Helbling]: Glad to be here. [Michael Helbling]: Oh my gosh, yeah, of course.

[Michael Helbling]: It's like you've never been here. [Michael Helbling]: It's been a while. [Michael Helbling]: It has been a while. [Michael Helbling]: And Moee Kiss, how you going?

[Michael Helbling]: I'm going pretty good. [Michael Helbling]: Outstanding. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm Michael Hellblink, and I'm excited for our returning guest. [Michael Helbling]: John Lovett is the VP [Michael Helbling]: of Analytics at SEER Interactive.

[Michael Helbling]: He previously held leadership positions at Further and Web Analytics to Mystified as well as many other companies. [Michael Helbling]: He's the author of at least a couple of books, the most recent one being The New Big Book of KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. [Michael Helbling]: And today he is our guest. [Michael Helbling]: Welcome back to the show, John.

[Michael Helbling]: Thank you so much. [Michael Helbling]: It's great to be here. [Michael Helbling]: Awesome. [Michael Helbling]: Well, it's great to have you back.

[Michael Helbling]: Finally, it's been a long time. [Michael Helbling]: So it's a long time coming. [Michael Helbling]: But I think what drove us to this was specifically how it seems like you and all the team at Seer are really diving headfirst into [Michael Helbling]: using AI in significant ways across your organization and across the teams to do your work, to bring new ideas to life. [Michael Helbling]: Just talk a little bit about what it's like inside your four walls and how AI is impacting your work.

[John Lovett]: Yeah, yeah. [John Lovett]: Well, I'll start by saying, so I've been in SEER now for a little over three and a half years. [John Lovett]: And the last 18 to 24 months of that, I've just been immersed in it. [John Lovett]: And I'm not like talking as an AI enthusiast.

[John Lovett]: I leave my analytics division, I hold a P&L, and basically I'm making hard bets. [John Lovett]: And as the kids say, I've got some receipts to show for it. [John Lovett]: So I do want to say, though, that [John Lovett]: At our company, I'm obviously going to talk a lot about my experiences and how I rolled it out to my team. [John Lovett]: But the first thing I really want to say is that getting your hands dirty with AI isn't optional anymore.

[John Lovett]: You said this in your preference, Michael. [John Lovett]: But doing it without accountability is really how you lose credibility. [John Lovett]: Every story I'm going to tell today is about building infrastructure that makes AI trustworthy. [John Lovett]: And not just fast and not just do more, but this is a little trite, but I developed this when I first got to SEER.

[John Lovett]: The tagline for my division is we build trust in data and we empower people to use it, to use their data. [John Lovett]: And that hasn't changed with AI. [John Lovett]: AIs come along, but that's really fundamental is trust in data and really being able to use it. [John Lovett]: So that's kind of the first thing that I'll say about that.

[John Lovett]: And if you indulge me and let me ramble a little more, just talking about SEER as a whole, like I couldn't, well, what I've been able to accomplish, [John Lovett]: starts at the top and shout out to Will Reynolds, the man, the myth, the legend. [John Lovett]: He's the CEO. [John Lovett]: In fact, he doesn't like to call himself CEO of Sear, but he founded Sear and he basically said, guys, listen, we are all in on AI and everybody here needs to get on board or. [John Lovett]: You don't need to, but there's the door.

[John Lovett]: And made it such that we had a big pivot. [John Lovett]: I want to go back to December 2025. [John Lovett]: It was a mandate for every single person in our company. [John Lovett]: I think we're about 175.

[John Lovett]: We're closer to 200 people now. [John Lovett]: Had to take an AI training course and get certified in AI. [John Lovett]: So it was like mandatory requisite. [John Lovett]: Everybody gets trained.

[John Lovett]: And then we rolled around to summer of 2025 and Will said, listen, everyone at this organization, from associate all the way up to executive, senior VP has agency to be able to take license to develop with AI, build [John Lovett]: the prototypes, show them to your clients as prototypes, get feedback, and let's get them into production if people like them. [John Lovett]: So the company as a whole basically said, we're all in on this. [John Lovett]: We're going to give you the tools.

[John Lovett]: We're going to give you some training and let you loose on this and really make it a part of our culture at the company and make it such that it was a part of everybody's job. [John Lovett]: I'll pause there. [John Lovett]: I've got more on that, but I'll pause there for a minute. [Julie Hoyer]: Even with the leadership mandates, that is pretty big to hear such big pivots and saying they wanted it company-wide.

[Julie Hoyer]: That's awesome to hear because it sounds like it gives you and your team a lot of opportunities and the invitation to go try things out with AI, see what works, get ahead of some of these trends or figure out what it could be best used for. [Julie Hoyer]: But I am curious, even smaller, [Julie Hoyer]: before the leadership mandates or right afterwards, what was your first thought around it, John? [Julie Hoyer]: Or what was your first even small step? [Julie Hoyer]: Because you were running a whole team.

[Julie Hoyer]: How did you then as a leader of an entire delivery team of analysts, [Julie Hoyer]: go about that. [John Lovett]: Yeah. [John Lovett]: You know, honestly, it was kind of like staring at a blank piece of paper like, what do I do with this? [John Lovett]: I was just like everybody else.

[John Lovett]: And I think my first experiences, which I do encourage people to try, are just use it for your personal life. [John Lovett]: Like I would literally open my refrigerator door, take a picture with chat GPT and say, what can I make for dinner? [John Lovett]: And it would look at it and say like, oh, you've got pasta sauce there. [John Lovett]: I see some tomatoes and I see a bell pepper.

[John Lovett]: Like here's a recipe for you. [John Lovett]: And then I would just start using it and talking to it. [John Lovett]: My family and I took a trip to Ireland last Thanksgiving, back in 2000. [John Lovett]: 24.

[John Lovett]: And basically, I had to build our itinerary. [John Lovett]: And so we're driving around Ireland. [John Lovett]: And of course, I had to put the chat to PT Irish accent on my on the talker. [John Lovett]: And so my wife called my girlfriend.

[John Lovett]: It was like, that was like, where should we go today? [John Lovett]: What restaurant should we go to in Galway? [John Lovett]: And it was like, it was giving me recommendations. [John Lovett]: And they were great.

[John Lovett]: It told me where to stay. [John Lovett]: The funny things that started happening when I would talk to it and it tell the things [John Lovett]: You know, I said like, hey, I've got three teenage boys. [John Lovett]: Here's the things we like to do. [John Lovett]: This is what we want to try to do on our own.

[John Lovett]: It was like a month later and I'm in the kitchen and I'm asking it something probably what to cook because I rely on that a lot. [John Lovett]: It thinks I thought I liked to cook and I say, I only ask you because I hate to cook. [John Lovett]: I just need the ideas. [John Lovett]: And it said to me, how are the boys doing?

[John Lovett]: What would they like for dinner? [John Lovett]: And that for me was like, [John Lovett]: Like, and of course, like, this was my... Oh, see that? [Julie Hoyer]: I feel like that would scare the shit out of me.

[John Lovett]: It totally scared me because I was like, what? [John Lovett]: And I almost dropped the phone because I was like, how do you even know that? [John Lovett]: And then the voice said back, well, you told me that you, I know that you went to Ireland with your boys and you talk about them a lot. [John Lovett]: And it brought that up in conversation.

[John Lovett]: And that for me was like... [John Lovett]: like blew my mind in terms of what the possibilities were. [John Lovett]: And that was all just like my personal life before I really even started getting into it with work. [Moe Kiss]: Can I ask a little bit?

[Moe Kiss]: I've had a similar experience where there's been a lot of support leadership down in terms of everyone at the company has been given access to every single tool that they could possibly want, enterprise grade. [Moe Kiss]: I do personally think that is an absolute game changer. [Moe Kiss]: I'm not going to tell you which tool to use, you can use any tool. [Moe Kiss]: But talk to me about the team experience, because I do feel there are those that are like, yeah, I'm going to roll my sleeves up.

[Moe Kiss]: I'm going to get my hands dirty, that sort of stuff. [Moe Kiss]: And there are folks that are really scared. [Moe Kiss]: And they have that, it's going to take my job. [Moe Kiss]: How did you navigate that team dynamic of the folks that are super keen versus the ones that are very apprehensive?

[John Lovett]: Yeah. [John Lovett]: Yeah. [John Lovett]: associated with that. [John Lovett]: There were people on my team that were like, let me add it, I'm all in.

[John Lovett]: Others that are like, I don't think so. [John Lovett]: I'm skeptical. [John Lovett]: One of the things that we did as an organization that I think helped open the door a lot, and this was early last year. [John Lovett]: So actually, many of you have even been early 2025.

[John Lovett]: We, as a company, every division looked at every single deliverable that we had. [John Lovett]: What do we regularly produce for clients? [John Lovett]: What are our workflows? [John Lovett]: How do we work?

[John Lovett]: And then built this huge list of, if we do all these things, where can we start AI that would help us to do these things faster, more efficiently, better? [John Lovett]: And we came up with a list at that time of 15 different [John Lovett]: workflows, deliverables, processes that we did on a regular basis. [John Lovett]: Then we said, okay, we're going to prioritize this subset in Horizon 1. [John Lovett]: We call them, we have horizons of work.

[John Lovett]: Horizon 1 is going to be this first build. [John Lovett]: We had a series of them in Horizon 1, then we go to Horizon 2, and Horizon 3 is bigger thinking, stacking them all on top of each other. [John Lovett]: But that really gave us the opportunity to think about [John Lovett]: the day-to-day work that we do, and how AI can be a part of that. [John Lovett]: I reiterate it at every team meeting, at every dead meeting.

[John Lovett]: I'm going to hold that for you guys, I don't know if you'll see it, but I keep a sticky note. [John Lovett]: You probably can't read this, but on my monitor that says, how can AI help me do this? [John Lovett]: And I genuinely think about that. [John Lovett]: It's right here on my monitor.

[John Lovett]: I have to look at it every minute because I encourage my team, like, you're going to do something. [John Lovett]: Think about if AI can help. [John Lovett]: And there's plenty of things that AI cannot do for you, but there's a lot that it can do. [John Lovett]: So that was sort of a door opener for people to say, oh, I do this every day.

[John Lovett]: One quick example I'll give you is like, we're an agency, right? [John Lovett]: And despite me trying to squash this as much as I can, we live and die by the billable hour. [John Lovett]: So we have to track time cards, right? [John Lovett]: And I've got team members that do it religiously and team members that just don't.

[John Lovett]: And they're not part of their workflow, not part of their habit. [John Lovett]: We built an agent that said like, hey, connect. [John Lovett]: In our case, it's a Claude instance to my calendar, to my rake, which is our project management. [John Lovett]: We've got connections to all of our platforms, but I can say, hey, look at my calendar and see everything that's on there and populate my timecard for today or this week.

[John Lovett]: Just that alone, I spent maybe less than an hour on that every day, but now I'm like, boom, I got it and I can do it. [John Lovett]: That same tool that I built to do that, [John Lovett]: Now, every morning I get in and I say, what's my morning briefing? [John Lovett]: What is the most important thing I have to do this day? [John Lovett]: And it goes to my inbox.

[John Lovett]: It goes to my Slack. [John Lovett]: It goes to all these different tools that I use every day. [John Lovett]: And it can say like, oh, you've got a podcast tonight with the [John Lovett]: with the greatest podcasters on the planet, you need a prep for that. [John Lovett]: And so it will tell me kind of the most important things to do.

[John Lovett]: And that for me has been like such an eye-opener to say, like, you know, I would sit at my desk on Moenday, it's like, oh, crap, what do I have to do this week? [John Lovett]: And I would write it out with a pencil on a piece of paper. [John Lovett]: And now I can just ask my AI partners, like, how do I, you know, what's important to me? [John Lovett]: And that's been a big change as well.

[Julie Hoyer]: Did you? [Julie Hoyer]: Okay. [Julie Hoyer]: This is a little nitty gritty, but I'm curious. [Julie Hoyer]: Some people still love like, I still love to write like a to-do list.

[Julie Hoyer]: Obviously that's not AI friendly by any means, unless I put it somewhere digitally. [Julie Hoyer]: Um, you do. [Julie Hoyer]: Okay. [Julie Hoyer]: So I'm, I'm curious, like, do you then to help with that workflow of utilizing AI to surface things to you?

[Julie Hoyer]: Are you actually like snapping a picture of your physical to-do lists? [Julie Hoyer]: Are you retyping them? [Julie Hoyer]: Are you dropping slacks to yourself so that your AI will read it? [Julie Hoyer]: Like, [John Lovett]: A lot of times, and maybe this is me, old guy, old school, I take notes when I'm on a call with a client and they're just riffing and talking about stuff and I'm either trying to capture requirements or figure out what's important to them.

[John Lovett]: I want to be in that moment. [John Lovett]: And for me, even though [John Lovett]: Whenever I can, I have a inscriber that's recording the call so I can have the whole transcript and we can talk about that later. [John Lovett]: But that's critical for me going back to, but I'm still taking those notes because when I go to write a scope of work or proposal or [John Lovett]: just update a report for a client or whatever I'm trying to do. [John Lovett]: That to me is like, okay, my brain interpreted this, I wrote it down, I know I need to get this done.

[John Lovett]: I generally don't take pictures of that and put them into Slack. [John Lovett]: A lot of times I will send myself Slack messages for reminders, but more often than not, those are links and different things that I want to come back to. [John Lovett]: But I do rely on head and paper for my thinking process to help me do things. [John Lovett]: And I still haven't gotten away from the satisfaction of checking something off the list.

[John Lovett]: I give that to myself. [John Lovett]: That's so good. [Tim Wilson]: Michael, quick question. [Tim Wilson]: How many times have you solved this same analytics problem this month?

[Michael Helbling]: Oh, probably enough times that I'm considering invoicing myself. [Michael Helbling]: Step one, fix GA4 source medium. [Michael Helbling]: Step two, lose the will to live. [Tim Wilson]: Cool, so let's stop living like that.

[Tim Wilson]: Prism by Ask Why lets you save your best workflows as skills, portable expertise you can reuse across datasets and tools. [Michael Helbling]: Okay, so like normalize UTMs, dedubleeds, merge Facebook and Google spend, maybe rename 37 versions of newsletter into one civilized channel. [Tim Wilson]: Exactly. [Tim Wilson]: You build it once, then you run it again, instead of recreating it like it's Groundhog Day, but with more spreadsheets and less Bill Murray.

[Tim Wilson]: I mean, I like Bill Murray, but I do like fewer tabs. [Tim Wilson]: Plus, you know, there was Andy McDowell as well, but really plus jam, jam memory. [Tim Wilson]: It remembers context across sessions like your org's definition of active user, which table is the source of truth, and that one cursed date range where tracking alas broke. [Michael Helbling]: So I don't have to start every meeting with before we begin.

[Tim Wilson]: Here's the lore of our metrics Yeah, or or we explain that revenue means net of refunds here not whatever looks best on the slide Okay, well my dashboard has now been personally attacked [Tim Wilson]: Well, that's good. [Tim Wilson]: My mission, my mission is complete. [Tim Wilson]: But skills plus memory means prism gets smarter about your world over time, your processes, your definitions, your shortcuts. [Michael Helbling]: So it's like an assistant that actually remembers my preferences, like I'm not getting from most of my streaming apps.

[Tim Wilson]: Exactly. [Tim Wilson]: So if you want early access, you can go to Ask Why and join the waitlist. [Tim Wilson]: Speaking of waitlist, use code APH when you sign up and you will be bumped right to the top of that list. [Michael Helbling]: OK, good deal.

[Tim Wilson]: I'm already on the website. [Tim Wilson]: Well, we've been doing this ad spot for a while. [Tim Wilson]: I hope you, Michael, have already gone to the website and signed up. [Tim Wilson]: But for anyone else, that's ask-the-letter-y.

ai and use code APH. [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I'm putting myself in the place of the user. [Michael Helbling]: It's called Empathy Tim. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, well, I don't understand that.

[Michael Helbling]: And I'm already over here saving time and my sanity using these skills. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. [Michael Helbling]: It's too good. [Michael Helbling]: I take my notes online, but, but same thing where I've got the transcript plus the notes.

[Michael Helbling]: And sometimes I can push them together into the prompt and use both. [Michael Helbling]: But yeah. [Julie Hoyer]: Okay. [Julie Hoyer]: Small tangent.

[Julie Hoyer]: Well, I'm just curious. [Julie Hoyer]: So John, you have your three boys. [Julie Hoyer]: Um, and I have a few wonderful people in my life that are, you know, their teenage years getting ready to go to college. [Julie Hoyer]: And I fell into a very interesting conversation.

[Julie Hoyer]: And so I'm curious if like what you tell your boys, like going into college, maybe they're already in college, out of college, but like in the AI times, I was talking to someone and they were telling me that like they aren't great at taking notes. [Julie Hoyer]: And I kind of panicked for them thinking, you're about to go to college. [Julie Hoyer]: Like you have to get really good at taking notes. [Julie Hoyer]: And they said, yeah, but there's AI.

[Julie Hoyer]: But as we just talked about, like there still is this analyst [Julie Hoyer]: skill of hearing certain things from a stakeholder or still having your own like mental filter right of like what you think is important or you really want to reiterate on or you want to build a story later so to be able to jot it down and it is a skill I think to actively listen. [Julie Hoyer]: you know, take your notes, whether you're typing or writing. [Julie Hoyer]: And I suddenly got a little worried and I didn't want to like harp on them saying like, well, you really need to like learn how to do it.

[Julie Hoyer]: But it had me thinking. [Julie Hoyer]: What are your thoughts? [Moe Kiss]: I still take notes as well, even though there's like a transcribe function. [Moe Kiss]: For me, I wouldn't say it's necessarily, sometimes it is like, what is the key points that I'm taking away that I really want to follow up, but I actually think it's how I listen.

[Moe Kiss]: Like for me, how I absorb the information, if I'm not taking notes, I will, my brain will probably go off on five different things. [Moe Kiss]: So I wonder if it's like more a style thing than a like AI, not AI thing. [Michael Helbling]: I have noticed in meetings, I will summarize and repeat in the meeting sometimes so that the AI picks up on it better. [Michael Helbling]: And that's a change I've noticed just for the transcript.

[Michael Helbling]: I'll be like, OK, so to summarize, we're probably going to make sure we do this, this, and this. [Michael Helbling]: And then I know that the AI then will come through the meeting transcript and be like, oh, I'll pull that out as it to do. [Michael Helbling]: So even my style of conducting the meeting is shifting a little bit behind it because I know that then I don't have to write that down. [Michael Helbling]: I get the AI will surface that as my to-do.

[Michael Helbling]: But yeah, it's crazy how we're adapting. [John Lovett]: We joke about that. [John Lovett]: I do that too where we're like, hey, transcribe or remember this piece and we kind of joke. [John Lovett]: I did literally just take out a pen and paper because I don't want to forget the questions here.

[John Lovett]: So Julie, starting with the question, I definitely worry about the future for kids. [John Lovett]: My oldest is about to turn 21, which is a frightening thing in and of itself. [John Lovett]: He's off at college in North Carolina. [John Lovett]: was a very, he helped me may listen to this because such a proud dad, he changed his major.

[John Lovett]: He was a finance major. [John Lovett]: He changed his major and I said, which change to? [John Lovett]: And he's like, dad, I entered the business analytics program in the business school. [John Lovett]: And I said, [John Lovett]: What?

[John Lovett]: Shut the front door. [John Lovett]: And I said, you do know that's what I do, right? [John Lovett]: Because I never got a notice. [John Lovett]: I mean, he's like, yeah, dad, I know that's what you do.

[John Lovett]: So, like, such a proud dad moment. [John Lovett]: But he's never been, I actually wrote a blog post about this. [John Lovett]: He's had dyslexia. [John Lovett]: He's had learning challenges.

[John Lovett]: He switched high schools because he wasn't getting the support that he needed. [John Lovett]: To your point, [John Lovett]: His handwriting, even as an adult, was horrific. [John Lovett]: He just didn't read like anybody else. [John Lovett]: He didn't do things like everybody else.

[John Lovett]: When he did math, he did it all in his head. [John Lovett]: He didn't write out the problems. [John Lovett]: And so he just thinks differently. [John Lovett]: And so he has been a very early adopter of AI.

[John Lovett]: And for good or for bad, he's also as a high school student and now a college student figured out how do I use tools like chat tpt and what have you and then not have my teachers think that I wrote it with AI. [John Lovett]: So he's got the anti-AI tools to figure that out, which honestly, like I'm like, buddy, I'm going to pay for that subscription. [John Lovett]: I'm going to pay for your chat tpt subscriptions or whatever he needs because I want [John Lovett]: my kids, when they get out of college, to have this as part of their skill set.

[John Lovett]: My middle son is a junior right now in high school, and we're looking at colleges. [John Lovett]: We went to Syracuse a couple of weekends ago, and those are my questions. [John Lovett]: I want to know from universities, how are you guys going to teach AI? [John Lovett]: Because the university that says to me, oh, it's off limits, they can't use it, I'm going to be like, you know what, you're not going to prepare McTin for the workforce.

[John Lovett]: that might not be the way I want to go. [John Lovett]: And I just think it's a matter of, like, we took notes, we listen and think with our brains and our hands and record things. [John Lovett]: My kids, like, they're on their phones. [John Lovett]: They're, you know, they don't actually know how to talk on a phone.

[John Lovett]: They text and I don't know if you guys have younger kids, but like, when you call a kid on the phone these days, they're like, they don't even say hello. [John Lovett]: They don't even say what. [John Lovett]: It's weird. [John Lovett]: They know how to.

[Moe Kiss]: No, but they know it. [Moe Kiss]: I mean, my three-year-old knows how to like pinch and zoom and swipe and you're like, what the? [John Lovett]: It's wild. [John Lovett]: So I just think about learning style.

[John Lovett]: I'm seeing with my own children shifts and I wanna, and I tell them like, you may not plagiarize, don't just take it and copy and paste it. [John Lovett]: You have to put your brain into this. [John Lovett]: It's gonna give you an output, but the output it gives you is generic stop. [John Lovett]: And until you put your voice into it and teach it and put your brain into it, that's when it becomes a partnership, not just a, [John Lovett]: dictation machine or an answer engine, it's really when you start to leverage the value of it.

[John Lovett]: And there's little tricks that I do, we can talk about later about like, like I teach AI my voice. [John Lovett]: I said like, I uploaded my books, I uploaded my blog posts. [John Lovett]: I said, I uploaded like email examples. [John Lovett]: I said, this is how I write, this is how I talk.

[John Lovett]: And I want you when you're writing on my behalf to mirror this, to use this, to add this to your knowledge so that when you're generating something, [John Lovett]: For me, it sounds like me, and it's legitimate like me. [John Lovett]: And all of my agents and tools, no M-dashes, I sign off cheers, so my email messages, I have all these little quirky things that I wanna say. [John Lovett]: I'm like, no jargon, don't use buzzwords. [John Lovett]: I put things that I am like, no pie charts, stuff like that.

[John Lovett]: I'll put those into my instructions. [John Lovett]: And in fact, if anybody wants, [John Lovett]: this. [John Lovett]: I can give this as a resource, but I built, we were first to choose at our company. [John Lovett]: I haven't made the choice yet, but it's like, do you want to go with chat GPT or Claude?

[John Lovett]: And I was like, well, if I give up one, how do I take all that teaching and learning that I [John Lovett]: taught it and bring it to the other. [John Lovett]: And so I developed a guide to be able to take out of the model and say, what is my personality? [John Lovett]: What do you know about me? [John Lovett]: How do I talk?

[John Lovett]: How do I think? [John Lovett]: How do I act? [John Lovett]: And then give me those instructions that I can upload to my next agent so that it teaches it what I am like. [John Lovett]: And I found that to be like a transferable thing that I could say like, oh, if I [John Lovett]: suddenly lose access to one of these tools, how do I not lose all that history with what I've told it, darling?

[Moe Kiss]: Okay, John, you're brilliant. [Moe Kiss]: And yes, we want all the resources, absolutely, because I'm literally doing that at the moment. [Moe Kiss]: Like no comment on politics at the moment, but yes, migrating from one tool to another. [Moe Kiss]: But okay, what you're talking about is like fundamentally leading from example, putting in the time and effort to do it well.

[Moe Kiss]: Back to your team. [Moe Kiss]: I am sure there are people that are dabbling and just producing utter shit. [Moe Kiss]: And as someone on the receiving end of reading lots of shit, it's like that exploration period. [Moe Kiss]: I guess I just like I want to better understand is like you have gotten to the value point.

[Moe Kiss]: I'm I think probably quicker than most. [Moe Kiss]: How do you how do you help your team get to that value point more quickly? [Moe Kiss]: Because [Moe Kiss]: The feedback is always, I'm busy, I don't have time, and I'm the first to say all of those things. [Moe Kiss]: How did you create the time for both yourself and then your team to get to value faster?

[John Lovett]: Yeah, yeah. [John Lovett]: So time is, you still have to do your day job. [John Lovett]: So for me, I do end up working more. [John Lovett]: I try to tell my team not to do that.

[John Lovett]: But sometimes it happens. [John Lovett]: But putting that aside for a second, [John Lovett]: One of the things I did early on last year, I'm a huge believer in conversational analytics. [John Lovett]: I think it's coming. [John Lovett]: I think it's coming for us all.

[John Lovett]: And so I built a conversational analytics, which is how do you get [John Lovett]: an MCP to communicate with whatever LLM you choose, chat, GPT, quad, whatever you want. [John Lovett]: I started with GA4 because that's what we had most access to, and I expanded it to BigQuery. [John Lovett]: And I said, everybody on the team has to make these connections. [John Lovett]: Use the MCP, follow the instructions, set it up so that you have the ability to talk to your data with these tools.

[John Lovett]: And so, some begrudgingly, as we started, some jumped right into it, some were slower to act. [John Lovett]: I think it was not even a week, it was the first few days of doing this exercise. [John Lovett]: One of the analysts on my team sent out on our company-wide Slack, oh my gosh, our blog post just went viral. [John Lovett]: We had a huge spike in traffic.

[John Lovett]: It's amazing. [John Lovett]: This blog has never seen this much traffic. [John Lovett]: Will, our CEO, he's got all the agents and the MCP connected as well. [John Lovett]: He's a big runner, right?

[John Lovett]: He's a marathoner. [John Lovett]: He talks to it when he's running through his headphones and using [John Lovett]: Claude, as he's running, and he's like, hey, so-and-so just posted this post, so we had this big viral spike, and he started asking questions. [John Lovett]: He's like, I'm just curious, where did this traffic come from? [John Lovett]: And the agent responded, and it's talking to him, oh, it looks like 99% is from China.

[John Lovett]: And then he goes deeper and he goes, oh, really? [John Lovett]: Like, what kind of traffic is this? [John Lovett]: Did they bounce right away? [John Lovett]: What did they engage?

[John Lovett]: And they were like, no, all the visits were sub one second or whatever it was. [John Lovett]: Come to find out it was a bot. [John Lovett]: You know, so a bot was hammering our site. [John Lovett]: My analyst team was like, hey, we made this great discovery.

[John Lovett]: Look at me. [John Lovett]: I got this new conversational analytics thing to work. [John Lovett]: And that was a like screech hit the brakes, like needle off the record moment for me. [John Lovett]: I was like, wait a minute, I got to put some controls on this.

[John Lovett]: So it was that same week, I had seen, actually, I think Tim Wilson reposted, oh, and I'm gonna forget his name, Twyman's Law. [John Lovett]: I'll come back, we'll get this in the show notes, who gave me the reference. [John Lovett]: I wrote a lengthy post about it. [John Lovett]: But Twyman's law, for those who don't know, is essentially, if any number looks too good to be true, it probably is.

[John Lovett]: And Twyman never really published this. [John Lovett]: It was like word of mouth, and it got around. [John Lovett]: It has become this marketing staple. [John Lovett]: And so I was like, hey, [John Lovett]: that would really work for my conversational agents.

[John Lovett]: Why don't I build that in to say, if you're seeing this huge spike in traffic and it's anomalous and it doesn't match any of the other patterns and the data doesn't match, question it and dig in. [John Lovett]: And that was really a groundbreaking moment for me to say these things a lot of you. [John Lovett]: You know, they're gonna tell you, if anybody's used chat GPT, I definitely call that the yes man in my arsenal or my toolkit, if you will, because it's always like, John, you look great today.

[John Lovett]: That shirt looks awesome on you. [John Lovett]: You cooked the best dinner ever. [John Lovett]: Like it just, it always gives me props and like, yes. [John Lovett]: And that's what he was doing.

[John Lovett]: It was like, you found an amazing insight. [John Lovett]: Look at this. [John Lovett]: And then you put something like the guardrails on it, like Twyman's Law, to be able to say, you can't just throw out a number like that. [John Lovett]: You need to verify it.

[John Lovett]: And since then, I've actually adapted it to [John Lovett]: This isn't too technical, but all of these models that we use, or most of them, are all probabilistic. [John Lovett]: You ask GPT question, Claude, Gemini, whomever you want, and it's going to give you probably the answer. [John Lovett]: It's doing word by word, and what's the next logical word, and how does it go? [John Lovett]: If you ask it, what's two plus two, they say, I've seen this enough, that's probably four.

[John Lovett]: But when you're asking it to do analysis and the metrics and dimensions and all these different things, it sometimes with a thousand percent confidence tells you, you had this massive traffic spike, you got a viral sensation on your hands, and it thinks it's true. [John Lovett]: And so [John Lovett]: I figured out a way to be able to take those probabilistic models and built into my instructions, deterministic instructions. [John Lovett]: So I say, never give me a number.

[John Lovett]: Every number that you generate, I want to see the SQL query, I want to see the math behind it, and I want to know the logic. [John Lovett]: I want to know what's missing from the data, and I want to know what you can't show me reliably. [John Lovett]: And that has also helped me to provide those guardrails. [John Lovett]: So I started with Twyman's Law, but I've evolved it to have this deterministic layer to say, like, don't just give me a number.

[John Lovett]: I want you to perform the calculation. [John Lovett]: And I actually have SQL built into my instructions that says, like, how do you do this? [John Lovett]: And how do you get at it? [John Lovett]: And that for me is really up the reliability of the answers that I get, because it will give you garbage and junk and mislead you out of the gate unless you put those filters on it.

[Moe Kiss]: So what's your perspective then on, you've applied that to your own instances and Will is a phenomenal leader who gets the data side, right? [Moe Kiss]: But there are lots of stakeholders who don't, who won't build that. [Moe Kiss]: So is your thinking then that you need to find a way to apply those guardrails for everyone in your company? [Moe Kiss]: Or how do you scale that?

[John Lovett]: Yeah, so great question. [John Lovett]: Remember, I mentioned that we've all had agency to build our own agents and experiment and do things. [John Lovett]: I am the vibe coding master. [John Lovett]: In fact, I was up till 2 AM last night just vibe coding because I was having so much fun.

[John Lovett]: And so I just build these prototypes, and I build them for me, and I build them, and I play with them, and I see what works. [John Lovett]: I iterate on them. [John Lovett]: We just had our first release day. [John Lovett]: So release day was, we had, I believe it was, [John Lovett]: 11 agents that got released to the company.

[John Lovett]: So these are somebody's vibe coded that went to our engineering team, they stress test them, they productionalized them, they made them ready for the whole company to use. [John Lovett]: And that is where I get things like Twyman's Law, the [John Lovett]: data guardrails into production for everybody. [John Lovett]: As a company, the engineering team has built out, we call it the CRMCP. [John Lovett]: The CRMCP has connections to our data sets.

[John Lovett]: It's got connections to all of our sales transcripts. [John Lovett]: It's got connections to every one of Will's presentations. [John Lovett]: It's got connections to every one of our town halls. [John Lovett]: You can get so much information from this one.

[John Lovett]: CR MCP, that that is how we productionalize things. [John Lovett]: We bring them as an organization to once they've been viped and tested and tried, we productionalize them by having it go through a relatively specific process. [John Lovett]: But everybody's encouraged to bring the ideas [John Lovett]: kind of back to the original question is like, for my team, I built an AI innovation lab. [John Lovett]: And we've got weekly meetings, they're optional.

[John Lovett]: I usually have them on Fridays. [John Lovett]: And I've got a core team that prioritizes ideas and puts things on our roadmap for delivery. [John Lovett]: But everybody is allowed to bring ideas. [John Lovett]: Everybody brings challenges.

[John Lovett]: And this is something I'm playing with, or this is how I'm trying to work through this issue. [John Lovett]: And so that just opens up the [John Lovett]: the door to possibilities and everybody trying things and everybody getting excited about what they can possibly do with AI that can help them. [John Lovett]: So that's been a big lift for us as well. [Julie Hoyer]: I'm curious because I've seen it so many times.

[Julie Hoyer]: I'm sure all of us have a new technology. [Julie Hoyer]: It's very exciting to use it. [Julie Hoyer]: John, I'm curious how did you, because it sounds like you guys have gotten to the point where you're very focused on problem solving, but like what you're saying with your Friday meetings, right? [Julie Hoyer]: Of like bringing ideas or problems, things they're trying to work on.

[Julie Hoyer]: Like how do you keep your team or in the beginning, how did you get your team to really think of using AI as a tool to solve specific problems? [Julie Hoyer]: Like is that a fight you're still fighting? [Julie Hoyer]: Do you feel like you guys are pretty mature in that thinking? [Julie Hoyer]: I'm curious how you got there, if you are.

[John Lovett]: Yeah. [John Lovett]: So it is definitely a tough one. [John Lovett]: I'll give you another real-world example. [John Lovett]: So it was three weeks before the Olympics were about to start.

[John Lovett]: I'm a huge Olympics fan. [John Lovett]: And I think it was a Saturday morning, whatever, scrolling on my phone. [John Lovett]: And I said, hey, what if I ran the world's largest [John Lovett]: geotest to test a bunch of prompts and see what kind of data I can get back about the Olympics, that LLM model. [John Lovett]: So this is you typing in a prompt to chat GPT, perplexity, like all the different models and seeing what responses come back.

[John Lovett]: And I developed five hypotheses. [John Lovett]: So like narrative persistence is one, like how long does a narrative stick before it changes? [John Lovett]: Temporal velocity, how soon when an event happens or let's say somebody is awarded a medal, do the AIs pick up on that and see, I looked at social proof, does social presence make a difference with [John Lovett]: which how frequently athletes showed up in LLM responses. [John Lovett]: So I had these five hypotheses.

[John Lovett]: And I basically, I wrote a blog post about it. [John Lovett]: I was so excited at all the state of collecting. [John Lovett]: And I put out a general thing to the team. [John Lovett]: I was like, hey guys, I'm the only person working on this project right now.

[John Lovett]: Everybody's invited. [John Lovett]: Come on, jump in. [John Lovett]: Like, give me some help. [John Lovett]: And it was crickets.

[John Lovett]: Like everybody. [John Lovett]: Oh, I was going to be like, no one responded, right? [John Lovett]: Because like, nobody, everybody's like, I got my day job. [John Lovett]: I got all this stuff to do.

[John Lovett]: Like, and, and again, like this is sort of that, uh, I don't want to call it apathy, but like, uh, I'm afraid of it. [John Lovett]: I don't know how to do this. [John Lovett]: I don't know what you're asking me to do. [John Lovett]: I've never done that before.

[John Lovett]: How do I do this? [John Lovett]: And so the Olympics started, I had three ways, pre-Olympics, during Olympics and post-Olympics. [John Lovett]: And obviously we're in that post-Olympics phase right now. [John Lovett]: During the Olympics phase, [John Lovett]: Nobody responded to me.

[John Lovett]: It had been three weeks, almost a month. [John Lovett]: And I said, you know what? [John Lovett]: I can't have this. [John Lovett]: I went to four of my people on my team and I said, I need you to be a leader here.

[John Lovett]: I need you to, here's the hypothesis, it's framed. [John Lovett]: All you have to do, I built an agent to be able to analyze the data. [John Lovett]: It had all my guardrails in it. [John Lovett]: It had the hypotheses.

[John Lovett]: It had what we were testing and it was showing data and I was doing preliminary results. [John Lovett]: I said, I need you guys to log in here and either prove or disprove these hypotheses with the data. [John Lovett]: And every single one of the four people I asked was like, I will do that. [John Lovett]: And again, I had to think about how I was going to write it.

[John Lovett]: I used my agents to help me, like what's a persuasive message that people with not a lot of time are going to want to do this and adapt to this. [John Lovett]: And, you know, so I was thoughtful about it. [John Lovett]: Do you think part of it was like the just a bystander effect like you kind of ask everyone and everyone's like and soon as you went to people individually prop could very well be in and again that's part of you know I've I've got a big team out see everybody every day and so I'm reaching out to people that I see on zoom maybe once a week or just at big meetings and [John Lovett]: me reaching out and saying like, hey, I need your help on this.

[John Lovett]: This is an important project for us. [John Lovett]: This is going to help us know what to test with regard to GEO. [John Lovett]: It's going to tell us about how the models think and how we can use that to build tests and experiments and really understand what's going on. [John Lovett]: Everybody's on board.

[John Lovett]: We've got to give all hands tomorrow and we're not even done the analysis. [John Lovett]: I'm the fifth person. [John Lovett]: There's five hypotheses and [John Lovett]: We're all going to do five minutes on what are we learning so far? [John Lovett]: What have we found?

[John Lovett]: Like, how is this going? [John Lovett]: And it was that little nudge, that personal touch, that reaching out directly that helped me get my team on board. [John Lovett]: Because everybody, you know, when you do ask that bigger question, there's a lot of like, that's, he's not asking me. [John Lovett]: I can kind of shirk off into the shadows.

[John Lovett]: and see who else will step up first. [John Lovett]: So that was a big one for me. [John Lovett]: And I'm super excited about the results. [John Lovett]: Like I've already found so many fascinating things just through this research already.

[John Lovett]: So that's something that maybe by the time this actually probably will be by the time this is published, you can check out the GEO results. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I like that. [Michael Helbling]: I find that for certain people, they just jump in and start doing their own AI process. [Michael Helbling]: And other people need AI defined into the process for them.

[Michael Helbling]: And I think that's sort of where I've seen, like I was talking to somebody recently, and they were like, I need my team to be doing this. [Michael Helbling]: And I was like, well, why don't we set up a process where you take them through these steps? [Michael Helbling]: And one of the steps is you go do this thing with AI. [Michael Helbling]: And now you're putting an AI enablement step into the process, just making it part of the standard process for them.

[Michael Helbling]: And it was like, oh, yeah, that'll totally work. [Michael Helbling]: And so some people just need you to give them [Michael Helbling]: delay out the how do I do these steps even though like a lot of us because we're the way we are with analytics and in curiosity and asking why we'll go into the AI and be like I want to set up a series this I want to set up a process or so we'll just start with the AI and work through. [Michael Helbling]: and learn as we go.

[Michael Helbling]: And then other people need like, I need you to tell me exactly how to do it, but AI can be part of it as part of that. [Michael Helbling]: So it's very interesting because I'm watching adoption like this too. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm sort of like, yeah, not everybody is just going to jump in with both feet. [Michael Helbling]: So how do I get them active?

[Michael Helbling]: And that was one of the ways that we, we kind of thought through about, about that was just sort of like, okay, well, one of the steps is you go to the AI and you do this, this, this and this with it. [Michael Helbling]: And that's how you get through the process. [John Lovett]: I love that example, Michael. [John Lovett]: One of the things that sort of runs in parallel with that, when I use AI to do something, if I like, let's say it's an analysis, I'm just like, hey, I'm trying to understand why does this brand get a bunch of citations, but not a bunch of mentions?

[John Lovett]: And I do an analysis, I get a good output that I like, I usually go back and forth with the AI, and I'm a, [John Lovett]: Maybe I'm a beneficiary of having lots of tools, but I'll take a Claude output and throw it over to ChatGPT and I'll say, what do you think of this? [John Lovett]: And it says like, oh, that's pretty good, but you forgot these three things. [John Lovett]: And then I'll read it and edit it and I'll put it back in Claude. [John Lovett]: And I was like, hey, how about this?

[John Lovett]: And I was like, wow, that's really smart. [John Lovett]: Those are good ads. [John Lovett]: So I play them off one another. [John Lovett]: But the one thing that I always do, and this is maybe a limitation of tools in 2026s, [John Lovett]: I use Ninja Cat, I use Claude, I use Gemini, I use basically use everything, but I am so worried about losing my work.

[John Lovett]: And so it's like that whole thing like I didn't even save your file and your computer stopped and you lost it. [John Lovett]: I tell it. [John Lovett]: So I hit context windows. [John Lovett]: We have like you hit your limit for the company this month.

[John Lovett]: You can't log in for 24 hours. [John Lovett]: As soon as I think that's going to happen or as soon as I get an output that I like, I tell the agent, write the instructions so that I can replicate this and give those instructions to another agent and teach another agent how to do what we just did. [John Lovett]: That for me, I can then pick up and say, hey guys, I show my team, I built this analysis, here's something that we do every day. [John Lovett]: Here's an agent that will help you do this.

[John Lovett]: you can ask it any question and it's gonna guide you down this path of using the right information, asking you questions to be able to get to the right outputs that are gonna produce something that's relatively consistent. [John Lovett]: And for me, that's been a huge unlock because those people who are like, I don't know what to do with this thing. [John Lovett]: I don't know how to build an agent. [John Lovett]: They can certainly use an agent and they can certainly use something like that to help guide them through an analysis or really any type of workflow.

[Julie Hoyer]: How have your analysts felt? [Julie Hoyer]: Because Moe, you and I have talked about this on previous episodes of the shift in work of looking at a blank page and you're creating your own thing, your own work, you're on thinking your own analysis, right? [Julie Hoyer]: Compared to if you are using AI to give you something to react to, it's a completely different process in your brain. [Julie Hoyer]: So I'm curious, John, along those lines, [Julie Hoyer]: What has been the reaction or the feedback from your team?

[Julie Hoyer]: If they're using AI in these tools for an analysis, how have they liked, disliked, you know, pros and cons of using AI to start an analysis and they're like checking the work. [Julie Hoyer]: They are confirming what AI has found, things like that. [John Lovett]: Yeah, I think it definitely happens. [John Lovett]: I would say that the first reaction of the team is, this is just slowing me down.

[John Lovett]: I have to ask it all the questions, do all the things I would do the analysis for, and I have to go make sure it didn't hallucinate or give me bogus answers. [John Lovett]: it does slow you down at first. [John Lovett]: And it does make you go a little bit slower to say, I'm going to question that. [John Lovett]: I'm going to be curious about it.

[John Lovett]: The whole part of AI, is it going to do the job of the analyst? [John Lovett]: It can help to surface insights and get things. [John Lovett]: But if you don't have the curiosity, if you don't have a spidey sense for that number ain't right, it will just give you junk. [John Lovett]: I would say that initially it does take longer to do things.

[John Lovett]: And this might take us on a tangent, but what we're doing for that today is [John Lovett]: My team still builds dashboards, right? [John Lovett]: We still have reports, and that is our source of truth. [John Lovett]: We get our data, we pump it through our tools, we use tools like Funnel, and we pump it to BigQuery, and we can do queries out of there. [John Lovett]: I find out the specific regex for the queries, and I replicate that in my [John Lovett]: tools in my agents so that when I'm doing an analysis, I can look at my dashboard and say, okay, LLM visibility rate is 42%, share voice is whatever.

[John Lovett]: What does it say in the agent? [John Lovett]: And if they match, then I feel good about that. [John Lovett]: And I'm like, okay, this matches my source of truth. [John Lovett]: If it's way off, I'm like, okay, why was it off?

[John Lovett]: What was going on here? [John Lovett]: What was happening? [John Lovett]: We've tried to build in those things where we can say, let's have a source of truth. [John Lovett]: It used to be for me, I would ask it a question and then I would go to GA4 or Adobe Analytics and like, all right, let me dig up this number.

[John Lovett]: Honestly, like I'm so far out of those tools from the day-to-day perspective, I'd be like clunking around and be like, oh, how do I find, I don't even know what explorer to build to get through this number versus having the conversational agent when I could just ask it things. [John Lovett]: My team was great at that. [John Lovett]: They would do an analysis and then they would verify a GA or whatever platform so we could see those two things. [John Lovett]: But having that source of truth and having that dashboard, I'm still gonna, we will still rely on those.

[John Lovett]: AI isn't going to kill the dashboard just yet, but I think it's an important resource to have for that validity, for the data quality, for the ability to make sure it's not, you know, you're not getting AI slop. [Julie Hoyer]: Have you guys then turned the corner where [Julie Hoyer]: you're seeing efficiency gains from your new process of using AI like in your day to day work. [Julie Hoyer]: And then second part of the question, I'm going to hit you with two before I forget my second part of my question.

[Julie Hoyer]: On our International Women's Day episode, Moe, you guys were talking about how maybe efficiency gains is like not the only outcome or [Julie Hoyer]: great part that could come from AI. [Julie Hoyer]: But right now, that's what people are most focused on. [Julie Hoyer]: So I'm curious, John, have you guys found the efficiency gains? [Julie Hoyer]: And are efficiency gains the only positive that have come out of you guys integrating AI into what you do, or have you found other great things coming from?

[John Lovett]: Definitely, the efficiency gains are a big thing. [John Lovett]: For us, it's been a lot about, hey, we've got this process that we do. [John Lovett]: It's part of the workflow. [John Lovett]: Now when we do it, we can repeat it across client to client to client.

[John Lovett]: That's agency life, right? [John Lovett]: It's like we're repeating these things. [John Lovett]: We've got similar analysis, different data sets. [John Lovett]: That has definitely helped us move faster through these things.

[John Lovett]: The structured prompts, the way that we build methodologies and the way I tend to take, hey, I built this once, give me the instructions to build it over and over again. [John Lovett]: That has gained us a lot of efficiency. [John Lovett]: And then the ability to upscale [John Lovett]: employees, right? [John Lovett]: So it's like, I get a new team member, I get a contractor on my team.

[John Lovett]: And I can say like, Hey, here's an agent that's already built, you can get up to speed much more quickly using this. [John Lovett]: So those have definitely been the case for efficiency. [John Lovett]: I think, I think the other thing, the second question, if I'm right, [John Lovett]: It was like, what else besides just the efficiency is that? [Moe Kiss]: So, John, there's a concept we talked about a couple of episodes and I keep it.

[Moe Kiss]: It's funny, Julie, that you mentioned it because I was going to bring up the exact same point. [Moe Kiss]: So, Jim Lysinki, I think is how you pronounce his name. [Moe Kiss]: He wrote a book, The AI Marketing Canvas, and he has this like quadrant thing and, you know, talks about internal productivity and that's really where everyone's focused. [Moe Kiss]: But the other quadrants are like internal growth.

[Moe Kiss]: So, like, [Moe Kiss]: using tools to accelerate your workforce. [Moe Kiss]: Then there's external productivity, which is a lot more of that customer service, how you can use it to have productivity gains that are for your users. [Moe Kiss]: Then there's the fourth quadrant, which is really external growth, using AI to completely unlock new revenue streams. [Moe Kiss]: My observation is that everyone's really stuck in that internal productivity quadrant.

[Moe Kiss]: From what you've shared, it sounds like you're also using it for internal growth. [Moe Kiss]: Is that a thing that you're seeing play out where the productivity gains just seem to be the thing everyone's so anchored on? [Moe Kiss]: The thing I also then want to understand is if you are having productivity gains, how are you measuring that? [John Lovett]: So with, I mentioned earlier the horizon builds that we're doing, every horizon build has assigned productivity metrics.

[John Lovett]: Like how much time did it save? [John Lovett]: How much money did it generate? [John Lovett]: We have KPIs that we build. [John Lovett]: You guys know I like KPIs.

[John Lovett]: So we got KPIs that we build around each one of those things. [John Lovett]: So we are measuring productivity in a number of different ways. [John Lovett]: I think with the growth, this is an interesting one because it is sort of a creeper. [John Lovett]: It moves more slowly than just the productivity gains.

[John Lovett]: But one example I'll give to you. [John Lovett]: So I mentioned that we record all our calls. [John Lovett]: We ask our clients, can we record these calls when they allow us to? [John Lovett]: We do.

[John Lovett]: So we've got all these transcripts. [John Lovett]: And so my [John Lovett]: My head of BD comes to me and says, hey, I've been talking to this prospect actually since October. [John Lovett]: And we've had a dozen conversations. [John Lovett]: I built a notebook LM that contains all the transcripts, contains what we talked about.

[John Lovett]: And now, here we are in January or February, and they just asked for, we think we need to include analytics in the scope. [John Lovett]: And so everybody's been talking about this project. [John Lovett]: We've got pricing calculators. [John Lovett]: We've got scopes of work.

[John Lovett]: We've got all these things. [John Lovett]: And he basically said, I need you to get up to speed on this. [John Lovett]: And so I was able to use all of the resources, the transcripts, what the client wanted. [John Lovett]: I did get on one call with the client and talked to them and got to ask my very specific questions.

[John Lovett]: But immediately after that call with having no prior knowledge, I was able to write a scope of work and my BD guy came back to me and he's like, holy shit, John, you nailed it. [John Lovett]: Like, I can't believe that you got that figured out in such a short amount of time. [John Lovett]: And we didn't even talk about it. [John Lovett]: Like he just gave me the resources, but I was able to plug in and use my tools to be able to say, what does the client need?

[John Lovett]: How does that match up, match up with my products and services? [John Lovett]: And then what can we offer them that's going to fit what I heard in our conversation? [John Lovett]: And so that for me was a growth moment where I could say like, that really not only did it save me time, like it would have taken me months to get up to speed, but I was able to turn that around in like 24 hours and get something that was so spot on that my BDO was like, that's amazing.

[John Lovett]: And hopefully fingers crossed that, you know, that deal comes through, but it was just a good growth moment. [John Lovett]: That's one example that I can think of there. [John Lovett]: I think the other thing I'll just mention, you know, productivity is, [John Lovett]: Obviously where you wanna go, the part of this as being analysts, there is a whole new discipline and we call it geo, but it's AI search, right? [John Lovett]: So it's like, hey, we got all these models, people have questions, we're moving toward this zero click world where it used to be, you're ranked on a, [John Lovett]: on Google or Bing or wherever, somebody saw your link at the top and they clicked you, and they got a visit to your website.

[John Lovett]: Now, your brand is getting surfaced via these LLM models. [John Lovett]: They see your brand, and they may not get cited. [John Lovett]: And they're like, OK, I'm narrowing my list down. [John Lovett]: I'm seeing these things, but I'm not even clicking through.

[John Lovett]: And I'll just type in direct to get to that brand's website. [John Lovett]: And so for me, part of this being that curious analyst and I'm collecting all this data and writing prompts and developing prompt methodologies, I'm like finding wild stuff. [John Lovett]: One example was, hey, in Claude, we see mentions, which is like your brand is mentioned, and then citations, which is the link to, you know, whether it's a podcast episode or your resources, whatever it is, like all of a sudden in Claude, all the citations dropped off December 1st.

[John Lovett]: And I'm like, what happened? [John Lovett]: And just because I'm looking at all this data across all my clients, I was like, oh, Claude really did stop using citations at that point in time and just cut it off. [John Lovett]: And then the other example, I'm analyzing data. [John Lovett]: I'm trying to build a report for a client.

[John Lovett]: And I see the data went back to December 15th, 2025. [John Lovett]: It was the week that ChatGPT announced they were gonna start having ads in their free accounts, right? [John Lovett]: So you won't have them on enterprise or paid accounts, but the free accounts are gonna start getting served ads. [John Lovett]: And I actually looked at the data and I was like, what is going on here?

[John Lovett]: I started to see the nature of the responses change to purchase intent-driven responses. [John Lovett]: they were actually preceding the way that chatGPT responses to same questions we were asking like months ago, they were changing this dynamic. [John Lovett]: And I saw all these changes in the responses. [John Lovett]: And I was like, something's going on here.

[John Lovett]: And I connected it to the fact that they just introduced ads. [John Lovett]: They are prepping, they have been prepping for like a month and a half, you get ready for this. [John Lovett]: So I mentioned that because [John Lovett]: There is so much to learn about how these models operate. [John Lovett]: And it's kind of like going back to like search days when you're trying to understand the algorithm, like we've got this whole new field of who knows what the hell's going on within these models is up to us to, and if anybody tells you they do, like I'm calling bullshit on that because [John Lovett]: All we can do right now is experiment, test things, try things and see what works.

[John Lovett]: Honestly, in my 20 years in analytics, this is the most fun I've had because I'm learning new stuff, I'm playing with new tools, I'm getting to see all these things. [John Lovett]: For me, that's growth. [John Lovett]: I am growing as a professional because my tool gets expanding, I'm learning all these new things. [John Lovett]: I can tell clients, if I can surprise and delight a client by saying, look at something I found about you.

[John Lovett]: I'll just give you one example. [John Lovett]: My client said, hey, this blog post just popped. [John Lovett]: Over the summer, it started ramping up and ramping up. [John Lovett]: We get all this traffic to it.

[John Lovett]: It's amazing. [John Lovett]: We're so stoked on this. [John Lovett]: And on the call with the client, this was like a regular status call, I looked up their prompts and their geo-reporting, and I found the URL that they had referenced. [John Lovett]: I said, wow, this is amazing.

[John Lovett]: The last two weeks, you guys have gotten 102 citations on this particular blog post. [John Lovett]: But yet all of those responses, nobody mentions you. [John Lovett]: You're never mentioned in this set. [John Lovett]: And the category was like risk management.

[John Lovett]: They had become this authority on risk management that enterprises were citing, brands were citing, you know, forums were citing, all these people were citing, but their name never got associated with that because it just wasn't in there. [John Lovett]: And we developed a simple task for like, hey, just don't do it in a pitchy, salesy way, but just insert your brand name into [John Lovett]: You know, here's a description of what this is, and by the way, our products solve for this.

[John Lovett]: In your FAQs, I had a big FAQ section in the blog post, I said, hey, just enter your brand name as, you know, when you're closing it out, say like, we do this, and here's the product that delivers this. [John Lovett]: Within two days of that test, [John Lovett]: mentioned started showing up in AI Overviews, which is one of the fastest to pick up on changes to websites. [John Lovett]: And I was like, boom, proof point right there. [John Lovett]: I got the first signal where it was like that change that they made to their content pages produced a mention which had never been seen before out of like six months of testing.

[John Lovett]: And so, you know, that was only like a couple of days into the process. [John Lovett]: So when I can show a client like that, and then I did another analysis yesterday morning and I'm like, okay, signal strong. [John Lovett]: And it led me down this whole other rabbit hole of like understanding mentions and citations. [John Lovett]: And I learned about ghost citations, which I won't get into.

[John Lovett]: But like, this is the fun stuff where it's like, we're curious analysts, we're trying to figure stuff out. [John Lovett]: And never before has there been this playground of like so much data, so much information. [John Lovett]: that we can just dive into and show clients things they've never seen before. [John Lovett]: And that for me is, I think that's the growth that, you know, it's gratifying, it's fun, it's exciting, and it's definitely keeping me going.

[Moe Kiss]: Oh my God, John, this is like positively infectious. [Moe Kiss]: I love it. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I know. [Michael Helbling]: I'm trying to remember a time when I've seen you like this fired up, John, honestly, like I've known you for a long time.

[Michael Helbling]: This is great. [Moe Kiss]: But so like you've had, I guess, I'm going to say the privilege of approaching this as a leader who then is trying to like bring your team along. [Moe Kiss]: There are lots of folks, I would say, who probably have the same level of enthusiasm as you, but might not be in a leadership role. [Moe Kiss]: What advice would you give that person, that mid-level analyst who's doing all this playing, they're having lots of fun, but how can they have a ripple effect on their business if they're not in a leadership role?

[John Lovett]: Build something cool, show it to somebody. [John Lovett]: Show it to your manager, show it to your boss's boss. [John Lovett]: If nobody picks up on it and you think it's brilliant, share it on LinkedIn, share it on Measure Slack, share it somewhere, get some feedback on it. [John Lovett]: And if you get that positive feedback where people are like, this is cool, we've actually done this with our blog posts.

[John Lovett]: at SEER, we're almost not allowed to write a blog post anymore until we've seen something on LinkedIn, like see any of your reacts, see if you get any comments, see if you get any mentions on it. [John Lovett]: So test it, like play with it, put it out there, see what you get as a response. [John Lovett]: You know, and this may be harsh, but if you're an organization and you built something that you know is [John Lovett]: productive, adds growth, is clever, is adding to what you do, and your leadership doesn't recognize that.

[John Lovett]: I'd be time to look for new leadership, but it is hard. [John Lovett]: I would just encourage people to experiment with things, build things within your boundaries that you're allowed to do, and then share. [John Lovett]: put them out to the world. [John Lovett]: And if your leadership won't listen, take it to LinkedIn, take it to Measure Slack, take it somewhere that you can find an audience that thinks that's cool, and you'll grow your brand that way, you'll be able to find your people, I guess.

[Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that's great. [Michael Helbling]: All right, we do have to start to wrap up, unfortunately. [Michael Helbling]: This is so good though. [Michael Helbling]: All right, well, one thing we love to do is go around, share a last call.

[Michael Helbling]: AI is never going to change that. [Michael Helbling]: Well, maybe it will, I don't know. [Michael Helbling]: But John, you're our guest. [Michael Helbling]: Do you have a last call you want to share?

[John Lovett]: Well, I have two quick ones, but I guess I need to ask permission. [John Lovett]: Am I allowed to offer another podcast? [John Lovett]: Yeah, of course. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, come on.

[Michael Helbling]: Do you think we follow rules around here? [John Lovett]: I would bring it anyway, but the artificial intelligence show is a podcast. [John Lovett]: It is run by, I want to make sure I get their names right. [John Lovett]: Paul.

[John Lovett]: Paul Ritzer and Mike Kaput. [John Lovett]: And every Tuesday they put out a podcast and they aggregate all the most recent AI news. [John Lovett]: And it's brilliant. [John Lovett]: My wife actually loves listening to it with me in the car.

[John Lovett]: We listen to it a lot. [John Lovett]: And she'll talk, she'll be like, oh, their voices are so soothing. [John Lovett]: But just great intel, great information. [John Lovett]: This is also the company.

[John Lovett]: I think their company is changing brands, SmarterX. [John Lovett]: They were on the MACON conference in Cleveland, I wanna say. [John Lovett]: Cleveland, yeah. [John Lovett]: Yeah.

[John Lovett]: Yeah. [John Lovett]: And Julie, you need to get there because it's all in Cleveland. [John Lovett]: Yeah, it's a great conference. [John Lovett]: But that is also the training that everybody at SEER was required to take was piloting AI.

[John Lovett]: So great resource they've got. [John Lovett]: They do a free one-on-one training on a bunch of different things once a week where you can tune in and ask questions. [John Lovett]: But just a fabulous podcast, a fabulous resource, definitely worth checking out. [John Lovett]: And then my second one, a very quick hit.

[John Lovett]: I encourage everybody on LinkedIn. [John Lovett]: There was a community that started, and I just happened to see it that was called the Geo Community. [John Lovett]: And Geo stands for Generative Engine Optimization. [John Lovett]: Some people call it AI Search.

[John Lovett]: Some people call it all sorts of different stuff. [John Lovett]: I just happened to be, I saw it. [John Lovett]: I was like, that seems cool. [John Lovett]: And the first couple posts, [John Lovett]: were very intriguing to me, and I started commenting on it, and all of a sudden, I want to get a Rohit thing as the founder, and he's like, hey, would you want to be an admin on this and join me in kind of managing this community?

[John Lovett]: So I think we're only a couple of hundred people strong, but if you're curious about Geo and all that stuff, I got super excited about learning. [John Lovett]: Check out the LinkedIn Geo community, the Geo community, good resource to get up to speed. [Michael Helbling]: Nice. [Michael Helbling]: Excellent.

[Michael Helbling]: Okay, Moe, what about you? [Michael Helbling]: What's your last call? [Moe Kiss]: Well, I am quite excited. [Moe Kiss]: Probably not as excited as John, but my good friend Eric Weber is...

[Moe Kiss]: back writing, and I'm super, super pumped about it. [Moe Kiss]: So he has a great blog from Data to Product On Substack, and I get it via email. [Moe Kiss]: The latest one was the Conundrum on Buy versus Build, which is something I always am super interested to read about. [Michael Helbling]: Awesome.

[Michael Helbling]: All right. [Michael Helbling]: Julie, what about you? [Michael Helbling]: What's your last call? [Julie Hoyer]: Okay, my last call is totally not AI industry related at all.

[Julie Hoyer]: My life the past few months, you know, I'm just trying to keep my eyes open in the middle of the night with a little baby. [Julie Hoyer]: So I've been doing a lot of reading. [Julie Hoyer]: So my last call is I went down a path of reading some historical fiction books. [Julie Hoyer]: And I read one that was really good.

[Julie Hoyer]: So if anyone's looking for some new reading material, a little break from AI news, maybe, you know, switch it up. [Julie Hoyer]: It was, and I know this is popular, but it was codename Helene. [Julie Hoyer]: And it's by Ariel Lohan, if I'm saying her last name right, but either way, [Julie Hoyer]: really great book. [Julie Hoyer]: It is about a British spy going to France near the end of World War.

[Julie Hoyer]: So it was a really like interesting take, a different storyline that I had not really read about. [Julie Hoyer]: And it was just an awesome breed. [Moe Kiss]: Julia, I'm going to sidebar you after this and send you the name of an author who's written like six books very similar to this. [Moe Kiss]: I'm going to read this one, but I'll send you mine too.

[Michael Helbling]: We got a whole other podcast going here. [Michael Helbling]: Yes, I have a last call. [Michael Helbling]: So we heard about this and we're kind of think it's really cool. [Michael Helbling]: There's a new visual data visualization contest, but it's for children.

[Michael Helbling]: So if you have a kid between the ages of seven and 12, there's two different age groups. [Michael Helbling]: I know. [Michael Helbling]: So not everybody's kids fit into that category. [Moe Kiss]: I can fake, he's tall, I can fake his age.

[Michael Helbling]: Yeah, whatever you wanna do. [Michael Helbling]: It's like Aussie age, you know, it's different. [Michael Helbling]: It's, yeah, the conversion. [Michael Helbling]: All right, anyways, we think it's a really cool idea.

[Michael Helbling]: There's some really great advisors behind it, but they're doing a data for kids visualization contest. [Michael Helbling]: And it opens, the contest opened literally yesterday before the show comes out. [Michael Helbling]: So there's still time right now. [Michael Helbling]: You can go jump on their site, we'll put it in the show notes and you can check it out.

[Michael Helbling]: But if you have a kid in that age group that's really different age brackets, I think between seven and nine and 10 and 12. [Michael Helbling]: And so you can kind of work with your son or daughter and just come up with a cool data viz together and might be a fun little project. [Michael Helbling]: So anyway, that was my last call. [Michael Helbling]: All right, John, what a pleasure.

[Michael Helbling]: Thank you so much for coming back on the show. [Michael Helbling]: It's so good to talk to you. [Michael Helbling]: It's been fun. [Michael Helbling]: It's been great talking to you all.

[Michael Helbling]: It's, yeah, and I know we're gonna see you at Marketing Analytics Summit, right, in April, so. [Michael Helbling]: Can I do a team look forward? [Michael Helbling]: Am I allowed to do that? [Michael Helbling]: Yes, of course, yes.

[John Lovett]: Absolutely. [John Lovett]: The extra day till Thursday, I am doing a half-day workshop on conversational analytics and how you can connect your GapGPT LLM of choice with BigQuery or Google Analytics, and so you'll see it live there. [John Lovett]: Nice. [John Lovett]: At the Marketing Analytics Summit in Santa Barbara.

[Michael Helbling]: It's funny, John, your blog post inspired me to create my own conversational analytics integration with Google that I built myself. [Michael Helbling]: Because I was like, hey, I should try to build something like this because, you know, I read your blog post and I was like, yeah, this was pretty, pretty cool. [Michael Helbling]: And I made some cool things out of it. [Michael Helbling]: Anyways, so I want to kill you.

[Michael Helbling]: And it didn't kill me. [Michael Helbling]: And I'm okay. [Michael Helbling]: I did stay up until two o'clock in the morning one time working on it, but that's the fun part, I guess, you know. [Michael Helbling]: No, but you don't have to stay up until two o'clock in the morning to come to Marketing Analytics Summit.

[Michael Helbling]: And there's a couple of really important things about that. [Michael Helbling]: One is it'll be April 28th and 29th. [Michael Helbling]: So John will be there, we'll be there. [Michael Helbling]: And we want your questions.

[Michael Helbling]: We actually have a survey live right now. [Michael Helbling]: You can go to analyticshour.com. [Michael Helbling]: IO slash listener.

[Michael Helbling]: Did somebody get that right? [Michael Helbling]: Yes, listener. [Michael Helbling]: And take our survey. [Michael Helbling]: And then you can submit questions that we will answer on the show, hopefully.

[Michael Helbling]: So that's kind of out there right now. [Michael Helbling]: We'd love to hear from you what questions you have to answer live at Marketing Analytics Summit. [Michael Helbling]: So that's coming up. [Michael Helbling]: And so don't miss that.

[Michael Helbling]: We also love to hear from you every other witch away too. [Michael Helbling]: So please reach out to us. [Michael Helbling]: If you're doing cool things with AI, if you're inspired by some of the stuff you're hearing, of course we'd like to hear from you. [Michael Helbling]: Obviously, when talking to John, it sounds like John, you're pretty active on LinkedIn.

[Michael Helbling]: So that's a great place to find you and follow what you're doing and interact with you there. [Michael Helbling]: And then also in the Measure Slack chat group. [Michael Helbling]: And we also love to hear from you via email contact at analyticshour.io.

[Michael Helbling]: So please reach out. [Michael Helbling]: And we have stickers and Tim loves sending them out. [Michael Helbling]: So you can ask for stickers too. [Michael Helbling]: So just send us a little note.

[Michael Helbling]: All right, I know that I speak for both of my co-hosts when I say, no matter how AI is changing your work and no matter how you're getting your processes rolled up, hopefully it's being both efficient, driving efficiency and increasing productivity. [Michael Helbling]: But remember, keep analyzing. [Announcer]: Thanks for listening. [Announcer]: Let's keep the conversation going with your comments, suggestions, and questions on Twitter at @analyticshour on the web at analyticshour.

io, our LinkedIn group, and the Measure Chat Slack group. [Announcer]: Music for the podcast by Josh Crowhurst. [Announcer]: Those smart guys wanted to fit in so they made up a term called analytics. [Announcer]: Analytics don't work.

[Charles Barkley]: Do the analytics say go for it, no matter who's going for it? [Charles Barkley]: So if you and I were on the field, the analytics say go for it. [Charles Barkley]: It's the stupidest, laziest, lamest thing I've ever heard for reasoning in competition. [Tim Wilson]: Tony?

[Tim Wilson]: No. [Tim Wilson]: None of this in the outtakes. [Tim Wilson]: None of this. [Tim Wilson]: None of this.

[Michael Helbling]: None of this. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that's fine. [Michael Helbling]: It's yeah, that's fine. [Moe Kiss]: That's my hopes.

[Moe Kiss]: That's my thinking face. [Moe Kiss]: Like, what do you want me to do with that? [Michael Helbling]: Moee, I'm just it's fine. [Michael Helbling]: And people know who we are now.

[Michael Helbling]: If our listeners are like, I can't believe they didn't look engaged enough in this short video that they put on their website. [Michael Helbling]: I'll be like, you know what? [Michael Helbling]: That's why we can't have lights things. [John Lovett]: I love the images you guys are putting out there.

[John Lovett]: They've been fun to watch. [Michael Helbling]: Oh yeah, thanks AI Studio, Google AI Studio, Nano Banana Pro. [Michael Helbling]: I just, it's, what's hilarious is like, I don't even have good pictures of all of us. [Michael Helbling]: I just grab random headshots and throw them in there and be like, make a picture of this.

[Michael Helbling]: That's pretty good. [Michael Helbling]: I don't know if John, if Tim shared the video I created with Vio of him and I, Crip Walking, but we're not going to put that on social media. [Tim Wilson]: That's in the, that's in the slide channel. [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that's in the slide channel.

[Julie Hoyer]: That's the only reason I joined the, the Mass Life channel. [Julie Hoyer]: Cause I agreed that there was some fun happening. [Michael Helbling]: And I created an analytics power hour brain at 40 else that I'm holding while we're doing it. [Michael Helbling]: So nice.

[John Lovett]: Nice. [John Lovett]: Oh my God. [Michael Helbling]: It's you, it's like imagery wizard. [Michael Helbling]: Oh, oh no, John, you don't understand like, [Michael Helbling]: I'm fully AI enabled at this point.

[Michael Helbling]: Like, it's a problem. [John Lovett]: AI enabled the dangers. [Michael Helbling]: It's not good. [Moe Kiss]: Rock flag and review your workflows first.