Striking the Balance Between Creativity, Relationships, and AI

Can I tell you one thing?

I love more than hosting a podcast.

It is appearing on someone else’s podcast.

Now, hear me out.

Obviously really fun hosting a podcast, but when you’re on somebody else’s podcast, you just get to sit back, relax, and answer whatever question they come up with.

And I have to tell you, I had such an enjoyable time being on the No Brainer podcast, which I mentioned recently in episode 36.

I got to talk to Geoff Livingston and his co-host, Greg Verdino, and we talked about striking the balance between creativity, relationships and AI.

Artificial intelligence is remaking marketing as we speak.

And if you’re a marketer, you can either get up to speed or get left behind.

The choice is yours and really it’s a No Brainer.

Join Geoff Livingston and Greg Verdino as they explore the latest AI news, trends, tools, and ideas that are creating the future of marketing today.

This is No Brainer, an AI podcast for marketers.

Take it away, Geoff and Greg.

Hey, this is Greg Verdino and welcome to No Brainer.

I am here as usual with Geoff Livingston.

What’s happening, my man?

What’s up, sir?

How are you today?

How is sunshiny in New York?

It is cold, shockingly cold.

I feel like we’ve gone back into winter, although it is supposed to be spring and there are some flowers poking their heads up, which is good as well, I suppose.

It is a nice time of year, for sure.

All right, and with us today, we have another guest who is patiently listening to us chit chat and pitter patter.

We’d love to introduce everybody to Courtney Baker.

Courtney is the Chief Marketing Officer of Knownwell.

Knownwell uses AI to help professional services firms like agencies and consultancies, for example.

See how this all ties together?

Spot churn before it happens.

So, Courtney is an interesting guest because she is both the Chief Marketing Officer herself.

So, of course, we’ll have CMO perspective, but because of the work Knownwell does, Courtney is also going to have interesting ideas about what this means for the world of agencies.

So, hey, Courtney, welcome to the show.

We’re thrilled you’re here.

We’re also very thrilled that you’re not bald because our last guest was bald and we kind of have the whole Coneheads episode going on.

It was really bad.

It was bad.

Yes, indeed.

For those not watching, I do have hair.

So it’s an important fact going on.

There you go.

Very cool.

We’re very excited to have you.

Thanks for joining the show.

We do share mutual friends as well.

Andre Yee giving you a shout out.

Hopefully you’re listening.

And then before we get started, we should probably give our podcast commercials really quick, Greg.

So let me go do that.

Folks, if you like this pod, in spite of our bad dad jokes, please give us a like on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, if there’s anybody that actually listens on Spotify and all the other fine platforms out there.

Make sure you give us a review.

And we do take feedbacks.

The web URL is nobrainerpodcast.com.

Make sure to stop by.

And if you really feel like it, you can even drop us a line.

We are known to do mailbag episodes now and then.

So we’d love the feedback.

We’d love to hear what you’re thinking and what’s got your mind turning in the space of AI.

So with that, my man, back to you.

All right.

So, and I would say my woman, Courtney, we’re gonna cut over to you because of course we wanna hear what you have to say and what you’re thinking.

I think we’re gonna start with something simple, a small topic, just a little thing that not, it doesn’t require a whole lot of philosophical thought or a wide lens view.

So we’re in this age, obviously, where anything that can be automated will be automated.

There’s AI cropping up in virtually every application with zillions of different use cases, some good, some bad, some in between, and an opportunity to really bring a lot of intelligence to virtually any business process.

So I think it would be interesting to start with the simple subject of humanity in the age of AI, right?

Where we’re in an age where, again, AI can help us do things that humans have never been able to do before.

For example, spotting churn before it happens, as your firm does through some of your services, but also creates an environment in which humans, we humans that work in marketing in particular, may be called upon to do the things that only we can do, that the technology is not, at least not yet, capable of doing.

So I’d love to get your perspective on that.

What makes a human marketer valuable in an age of AI?

Yeah, I think that’s such a good question.

And I think it’s really what we’ve promised our whole company around.

Even if you look at our name, which is Knownwell, it really came from this idea of, as we’re building an AI platform, how do we use the technology to actually elevate humanity?

And I always think about somebody that we had on our podcast, Christian Madsberg, and he said, like, humans were kind of out, like long shorts or long pants.

You’re like, we’re kind of not very trendy right now.

I think we’re gonna come back around to be in trend.

And I think it’s this idea of once we’ve kind of settled in with the technology, how do we see how it actually helps us be more human, to connect with each other, to do the things that AI can’t do?

Even if you look at some of the things that AI does that you may look at as, oh, that’s creative.

It’s really not really understanding what it’s doing.

True creativity comes from understanding your audience and understanding how it’s going to be perceived to know whether or not something is creative or not.

So really this idea of how do we figure out what those things are, the connection, the relationship, the things that only humans can do, and then how do we establish the guardrails to help the technology do that.

I’m curious when I hear that, I keep thinking about HR, which of all the functions within work, right?

And not related very much to what we’re talking about.

Love HR.

Actually, I do love good HR people.

They’re really actually fantastic people.

They’re really about cultivating EQ and really sustainable, awesome places to work, which can be really cool when you have a great company with a good organization that’s really building a culture.

That being said, I think we all know that one of the things that we see a lot with AI is resumes, right?

And I’ve been reading on LinkedIn for the past, I don’t know, it must be two or three months about people basically bonking on resume fulfillment.

And I’ve never been a big fan of the resume as a way to get a job.

I’ve always felt it’s your network, right?

Network is one, two, three, four, and five when it comes to job hunting.

But it’s really interesting how the AI has been deployed, AI tools, I should say, to really filter out people and folks that are probably qualified.

They may have the je ne sais quoi to fit in correctly, right?

That kind of the rocks in your head match the holes in mine connection that we need to make companies work, but it’s not on paper.

And I think we miss that a lot.

And I wonder like how we do keep that human element, not just in creativity, I totally agree with that, but also just generally when we let AI into our work lives and our systems, if you would.

Karen, riff on that.

Yeah, it’s really interesting.

I was talking to an executive of a basically a virtual assistance company match executives with assistance all over the world, and they still hold on to in this day and age, which I think is kind of mind blowing that they personally interview every virtual assistant to just make sure, hey, I’ve met the person I’m placing, and now I’m meeting you.

And I think what they’re really saying is there is something here that no technology can fill, that there’s still a gap there.

And I think it’s this very idea of what makes us different than a machine.

And there is still a difference.

We can debate on whether or not how long and what that all looks like, but I think there still is a difference.

And what she’s saying is that gap can only be filled by a person.

That’s kind of cool.

Greg, what do you think the difference is?

I mean, I think right now I think there’s a number of things, obviously.

Geoff, you and I have spoken about, and I know you’ve also written about on the sub stack, the importance of soft skills.

I’ve done a lot of work over the past five or so years around soft skills like adaptability.

And I think that is truly a difference at this point in time.

Clearly machines are great at the quote unquote hard stuff, right?

But they don’t possess any capacity for soft skills that can maybe emulate things like empathy, but they don’t truly feel empathy.

They don’t have the ability to truly, to your point Courtney, be creative.

They’re essentially pastiche machines and even something that appears to be creative or novel or new is really just a remix of the data that went into it.

And the data was effectively human data, the time being.

So like that true spark of creativity, I think the level of understanding we as humans have of one another as irrational beings, machines are great at rational, but how many marketing or sales or purchase or life decisions do we make that are wholly irrational?

So I think there’s that.

And I think a model of the world, certainly right now is something that machines lack.

And that’s if you look at, say the work that OpenAI is allegedly doing with Sora, they’re trying to teach a machine how to develop a model of the world to understand the physics of the way a human moves through an environment or whatever.

But we’re not there yet.

Technology isn’t there.

And I think having a model of the world is the difference between generating a predictable response to, let’s say, a prompt versus understanding what the consequences of an action will be.

So I think there’s a lot of stuff that is uniquely human that right now machines just really aren’t good at.

I think the other thing, and I’ve said it a couple of times now, Geoff was at one of these occasions at one of the A&A conferences where the reality is when you look at today’s generative AI, yes, they can improve productivity and performance and efficiency and effectiveness, and it all comes down to how well you learn to use these tools.

But at the end of the day, they don’t take somebody who sucks and turn them into a superstar, right?

They just make them suck.

They raise the bar, right?

Raise the bar.

And I think when you think about and talk about marketing, what that means is the junk rises to a mediocre middle, right?

Where it’s good enough, but not great.

If you are really a superstar, whether it’s creatively or strategically or at relationship management or whatever, I think if you over rely on those tools, you end up sinking to the mediocre middle, right?

Yeah, they’re down.

So I think we have an interesting opportunity, and this is a human thing, to raise our game, to be cool again, to not be the skinny jeans or the bell bottoms or whatever your cultural reference is these days, and find ways to raise the bar on the work we do, the thinking we do, and the creativity in the grandest sense that we apply to the problems we need to solve.

Thoughts, Courtney, before we move on?

Yeah, I think one interesting thing that comes to mind is I think there’s a real risk if that does happen, if the superstars start to come down to the media for middle, we lose the people that are able to judge if something is done well in marketing.

Like, how will this be received?

Is this good?

Especially when we’re talking about really creative parts of marketing, which I certainly love and lean to, there’s something that has, somebody that has to say, this is good and it’s going to resonate.

And I think when we start talking about that bar coming down and people coming to the middle, that’s one of my biggest concerns is who’s going to be there to say, this is good or this is bad, because I don’t think that’s something that machines can do for us as well.

Or this is technically correct, but exploitative, and we’ll leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Right?

Exactly.

Because I think that’s the danger of optimal performance.

It could be optimal and then break everything, because it’s actually false, right?

It’s a false positive.

It’s a really interesting moment in time, because we have a lot of experts in their fields that have become experts by experience and doing the work.

Also people talking shit on LinkedIn.

Is that Greg?

Greg, do we need to see some posts in the chat?

If you’ve seen our like ratios, you know it’s not us.

Yes.

I think we have the benefit of experience, I think, is when we get a newer crop of younger junior employees that have these technology tools at their discretion.

How do you start to get that expert level, that really high bar, highly proficient, to kind of play that role in the next generation?

So it’ll be really, I’ll be really interested to see.

Assuming they’re even in the next generation, right?

And I don’t mean that means the, you know, existentialist stance, but you think about it, when you look at, let’s say an ad agency, it’s not the rock star creative director who came up with just do it, that’s going to get sidelined by AI, right?

It’s going to be the entry level copywriter who can’t get a job because somebody senior in the agency figured we can do that junior rote routine work with AI.

So how do new people get even into professions?

That’s, I think, going to be a real challenge, kind of building on what you just said.

So just to move us on, because we’re already 15 minutes in and we got to get Courtney, we got to get all the wisdom, all the wisdom.

Number two, data is gold, said Matthew McConaughey.

That must be gold right there.

But all jokes aside, data is gold.

If we fuel our intelligence with really good, clean data, I mean, obviously the AI or particularly machine learning is going to work well and provide some dramatic insights.

And obviously this is your reason to Etra, right?

Can you talk a little bit about why marketing firms are different from e-commerce and how data works there?

It’s harder unless you have data from your actual first party clients, that kind of thing.

Can you walk us through that a little bit?

Yeah, if you think about it, for all the professional service, people listening, I’m going to tell you your job in a lot of ways is harder to know your customers.

And I’m going to cap you out at that in a second, but just hang with me.

When you are looking at e-commerce or SaaS, you have so much transactional data on your customers.

And it’s so easy to utilize that and really figure out what is happening with your customers.

In professional service companies, so much of the transaction and the knowledge is held in relationships.

And relationships is a very, we don’t think about emails or Zoom calls or all of these natural communication flows as data.

And yet in professional services, it is probably the richest data that you have in the organization.

But until we had generative AI, we’ve really not had a way to harness that data to really make it actionable for professional services.

And so that’s what we’re doing.

That’s what we’re building is actually, how do we take the structured data, the natural communication flows in an organization, the relational data in an organization and external data and actually provide insights, actionable intelligence to go do what only humans can do, which we already talked about, which is really intervening in the relationship, really taking proactive action and engaging with our clients.

And so I think it’s a really interesting idea of how we think about data and how I think in professional service firms, marketing agencies, we have to start thinking about our relational data different and how we can leverage it in our businesses.

So basically you read signals to tell people when they’re about to get canned?

Exactly.

You know the reason why you haven’t heard from them or they’re sending these really short emails because you’re about to get fired, Jo.

You’re about to get fired.

You’re about to get fired.

I use this analogy all the time.

If you think about a small marketing firm, you’ve just got maybe five to ten people on staff.

You’ve got 25 clients, 50 clients.

That might be too much for my example, actually.

But you usually have somebody on the team that is just really good.

They have great intuition about what’s happening with your clients.

Yes, they pick up on the vibe.

They can connect these disparate points of information and say, hey, I think something’s off with the Walla small water bottle right here, client.

And I think we need to reach out to them or set up a meeting.

They just do that very intuitively.

The problem is we can’t do that at scale.

And so how do we actually harness, again, this very rich data to do what that person does intuitively so that we can, again, do what humans do and go intervene in the relationship?

My client is Hula Coffee.

There you go.

Speaking of, let us do a commercial break before we get into some of these relational components.

All right, Courtney, thanks for your patience while we did that.

Let’s get back to it.

So with this relational data and turning it into meaningful insights and you have these incomplete data sets maybe creating better operations, less churn, and you’re really talking about scale and alerting people when normally if they had more time to be present from that emotional intelligence standpoint that they would pick up on the signals.

Tell us a little more about how that might work for a larger firm.

I can really see this being a play for somebody that’s got that portfolio.

You were talking about at least 25, 50 clients where this can make a huge difference.

Yeah, I think it’s so many times what we hear from professional service executives especially is, you know, if they’ve got some kind of CSAT or whatever form of those surveys you’re using, one, they’re almost always incomplete because it’s hard to get that information back.

And the second is it’s highly subjective.

And so you’re looking at this portfolio view of what’s happening with your clients, which is massively important.

And what I have here is subjective and incomplete.

And so how do we reframe that so that you have intelligence that actually gives you a clearer view?

And I think so many times when you get down even into the account management section, what you find is you actually are spending your energy and time on the wrong clients.

They’re the clients that eat up the majority of your time, but are the least valuable to your company.

And so this is like, how do we give you a view to understand who is the most valuable?

Where does your energy and time need to go?

Really all of those relational index, those intersections so that we know where to move.

It’s actually pretty simple when you start thinking about collecting the right kind of data and thinking about it differently, I think is the first step here.

Interesting.

So let me flip that funnel on you.

Does it tell you when to fire a client?

Yes, it will tell you when to fire a client.

Or at least maybe not in those exact words, but it will tell you when you should be thinking about firing a client.

That’s exactly the kind of intelligence that we’re working to service.

So it’s basically you’re burning lots of cycles.

This is not profitable, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s actually hurting your other business, that kind of thing.

Exactly.

We’ve all wondered that before.

We’ve all been like, is this actually worth it?

Because I’m not sure it is.

Look at the bags under these eyes, Courtney.

I feel that way all the time.

It’s really difficult to make that call.

And so how do we, again, it’s because we’re missing this relational data that other industries have.

If we have it, it’s really not a hard, it’s not hard.

It’s just that we haven’t had it at our discretion before.

Sure.

How hard do you think it is to get professional services leaders to wrap their head around the idea that all of these things that they’ve thought of as routine, maybe even sometimes ephemeral relationship type communications, your emails, your Slack chats, your phone calls, your meetings, whatever, to get them to see that as the valuable data it really is?

And then how does, I guess, the second part of that is, how does an organization then typically go about pulling all of this stuff together and actually getting it ready to use in that fashion?

Because we’re seeing even with content, the other unstructured data source that’s all hot now because of generative AI, you can’t even get companies to figure out how to get their content in one place and prepared.

Once you start thinking about stuff tucked away in an email system or sitting on a Slack server or in transcripts or video recordings from Zoom calls or whatever spread all over the place, how do you get that stuff to actually work?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

So for the first question, what we’re really trying to help people understand is we have a new era of operating our businesses.

We’re going to have intelligence that we never, it was probably always the thing that we felt like we needed.

We just never thought was going to be possible.

And so understanding what that could look like, I think is the first step, especially for executives.

Do you feel like on that note, you’re democratizing analytics?

Because I definitely feel like there’s a level of business, like the top enterprise, maybe 4 to 500, they could do this already, but BI is not really available to most people.

We talk about this all the time on our podcast, like mid-market companies.

This is your moment.

It is.

This is it.

Like go, go, go, go.

Because it’s so true, we can have these things that, one, we can move faster than larger companies right now.

And we’ve all been looking at Amazon’s systems and structures and wondering, wow, that must be really nice to have all that.

We can have so much of that today.

And ironic, though, that they’re at the background with the Gen.

AI movement.

It’s very true.

Actually, I say Amazon, and yet in our Hot Takes episode, our CEO said that he didn’t think Amazon was going to be around in its current form, but we’ll save that for another day.

Hot Take, Hot Take, look out.

So yeah, I think understanding, again, it’s in some ways hard to…

We’re really casting a vision for something that doesn’t exist today in a form that we really understand.

And so for executives, really framing up, there is a way that we did business previously, and we’re moving into a totally different era.

And I think framing it up that way of casting that vision and helping people understand that this is something you want to be moving towards this and figuring out what your business looks like in the future.

Very nice.

In your question about how do we get all of these different data, these different relational data sources in, one thing that we found so far, one, there’s not a really comprehensive view of this in a lot of organizations.

So first of all, it’s just helpful to really get clear at an executive level, what are the different ways that we are leveraging relationships and what do those platforms look like?

We’ve been surprised by companies being surprised.

And so one, I think that’s a really interesting step to just understand, where is the relationship held?

Where are the tools that are assisting in the relationship?

And then we’re building all the different integrations from dial pad to email to Zoom and everything in between.

So just integrating it into the platform.

Very cool.

Let’s shift a little bit back to the marketing world a little bit with creative agencies and even some of those professional services firms that are catering to marketing, which can be any of the intergalactic empires from BCG to Accenture down.

Obviously, there is a need to meet AI, but how?

What’s that business model where these guys incorporated into their offering?

What are your thoughts on that?

I know it’s tangential to what you do, but as a marketing officer, certainly you probably have opinion.

Yeah, I think it’s a really, it’s interesting in that it goes back to our very original premise.

My standpoint is I want to fully leverage AI to help me do the things in marketing that.

And so we’re pulling that lever completely.

What I found and what I think is interesting is which companies are moving that way versus the ones that have changed their name to humanmarketingonly.com.

And I get that urge of how do we show that what we’re doing came from humans and which parts of this came from AI.

And I think ultimately it really comes to how do you show value.

Yeah, I have a really strong opinion on those brands and I see that with editorial stuff as well, but I wanted to let you continue before I start ranting.

I’m so curious though.

Now I’m like, where do you land?

I think it’s really stupid, right?

I think it’s really short sighted to say we don’t use AI at all.

First of all, I think that within 12 months, you’re going to be lying when you say that because the reality is it’s getting baked into everything.

Absolutely, yeah.

Right?

So it’s not true.

It’s not true if you spell check, by the way.

And the reality is that what we have to come to understand is where we use humans to strategize to your point.

I mean, to the EQ side of it.

But to completely ban this stuff is basically to make yourself irrelevant long term.

I know that’s the counter argument that everybody hears, but I just cannot see people remaining competitive long term with that approach.

It becomes almost a cottage in industry where we hand make our own china and our own pottery, which is cool.

And it’s an art form and it’s unique, but it’s very much a very small niche and nobody really buys it.

They still go to Crate Barrel and get their machine made plates.

Yeah.

And this is where I come back to how do we elevate the art?

How is the combination greater than the two parts?

And I think that’s very possible.

And I know the three of us, very biased individuals, when we answer this question, but I would not hire someone that said, I’m not using AI.

I actually would be asking the opposite.

How are you leveraging AI to get us the best results that we can?

I want to know how you’re doing that for our…

We had a guest a couple of weeks ago that said the very same thing, that he would not hire an employee if that employee was not familiar with AI to some extent or another and isn’t personally using it.

You have to agree, right?

It’s like an instant disqualification.

Hi, I’m a Luddite and I’m not going to use technology ever.

Right.

I literally had a conversation two days ago with a university and they were trying to figure out what the role of AI is going to be in the classroom.

And I said, listen, I am asking everybody I’m hiring, tell me about how you use AI.

Tell me about a time you had a problem that you needed to solve and you leveraged AI to help you solve it.

And I think this moment of time of how this is being leveraged is a really interesting one.

We’ve got to really think through how we’re doing this well.

Do you think culturally we’re storming before we know?

Maybe.

I think that’s a real yes.

Yes, I do.

And I think the thing that sometimes maybe gets lost, especially with marketers who have a bent toward shiny objects, as many marketers do, You don’t say.

Hey, how’s that ChatGPT working for you?

Right.

You almost treat AI like peanut butter and apply a little bit of it to everything, even when it is not beneficial.

Not good with Mayo, man.

Not good with Mayo.

I fundamentally agree, for example, when Geoff says that the agencies or the brands that outright say we will not do not, cannot, never will use AI are at a minimum fooling themselves.

However, I do think there’s validity when a brand like CVS says or Dove says we are not going to use AI to generate unrealistic or unreasonable images of, let’s say, female models, right?

Dove is very big on that.

They’re not using AI to modify the way their models look.

And that’s so a brand for that, right?

And it kind of comes down to making smart strategic choices about when, where, how and why AI is right for your brand and when, where, how and why it’s not.

So it again comes down to this idea of a human being making a strategic decision about how technology can benefit the brand or the business, which I think ultimately at the end of the day is a right role for humans, right?

Have the data to make an informed decision, but ultimately have the critical reasoning to make the decision.

What do you think?

I think when you think on the subject of decisions, I think to us and we’ve discussed this on other episodes and offline as well, Geoff and I, that the sort of the steamroller of artificial intelligence as it comes into the world of marketing would seem to be poised, if not already happening, poised to radically remake the agency business model, right?

Where a typical agency is billing on hourlies and they’re essentially incentivized for spending as much time as possible to deliver as little work as possible.

A lot of what they sell is making lots of markup for things that are incredibly expensive.

Well, we have to shoot that commercial for the new laptop model in Bora Bora.

There’s a lot of that stuff that still happens, but there’s a lot of margin in that, a lot of profitability for agencies.

It would seem that now, not that you want to go as far as say Sam Altman and say that, AI can replace 95% of what an agency does for free, but certainly there’s going to be price pressure.

There’s going to be a requirement for agencies to be smarter about how we serve clients profitably, even if we get paid less to do.

What are your thoughts around that?

Can we just kill the hourly rate fillable hour model that I feel like?

It’s broken.

It’s broken.

It’s done.

It’s seen its time.

A new thing has to arise.

And so I just think we all do it.

You’re going to be paid on performance, right?

You pay on the value that is derived from the agency.

And that takes the equation of I don’t care how you used AI.

What I care about is the value that you provided to my organization.

And I will pay you well for that.

I don’t care if it took you two hours or 27.

And I think if it’s like somehow who’s going to get us together?

You two get us all together.

We’re making the move.

This is happening.

Let’s just all do it at the same time.

And it’s done.

I think the newfangled agencies are going to totally kill a lot of these traditional agencies.

And we’ve been very moderated about the way we’ve said this.

But I mean, like Greg is always kind of pulling me back in when I make this statement.

But I do feel that way.

Part of my logic is photography, actually, because when I focus came in to cameras, keep in mind that this is like a serious side hustle of mine.

And I actually was in the midst of launching a business before my better half lost the job and I had to take a real gig.

I was about $8,000 a month in a portrait and trade show business I had to let go of.

But the biggest pressure point from a competitive standpoint wasn’t great photographers because I was never going to be a great photographer from a portrait standpoint.

I have other areas where I’m stronger in.

But I could take a decent headshot that would work for most people.

The pressure point came from kids that would be buying these Sony A6600s and whatever Greg’s got.

Kent pisses me off that he takes good headshots now.

But to that point, though, that you could basically point any kind of $1,000 camera with an eye focus and get a lockdown on somebody’s eye.

If you have any sense of light, you’re going to get a decent headshot, and you have people running out, undercutting the market for $100, $150 for a headshot.

That’s going to work back to the raising the bottom standpoint.

It raises the bottom of the market, but it also craters the cost.

So that mid-market of photographers that are good, maybe even very good, but not great, all of a sudden get killed, right?

And then you have to be the Cade Martins of the world, where you take these just incredibly emotive portraits to just stand out where you’re like, Cade, what’s your price?

It’s $1,200 for one headshot.

Fantastic.

Here it is.

Take my money.

Make me look amazing, Cade.

That person’s still always going to exist.

And that’s true of agencies too.

But I think the average to very good agencies are in deep dog-doo with this.

All right.

Ran over.

But I still, the other side of me just feels like when there are constraints, and what you’re really saying is it’s putting a constraint on this middle group.

There are these superstars that know how to do this.

They know how to figure out the way that they can still be relevant.

The A-Team at Saatchi & Saatchi, right?

Yes.

I still think there is this opportunity for a bigger portion with that constraint to re-envision themselves, to become something new, something different in the market that’s not there.

And I think sometimes that constraint breeds it faster than in other times.

So that’s my maybe optimist glass half full view.

I think you’re right about that.

I do think that with these tools, some people are going to be inspired to evolve.

In fact, this may be the missing piece, right?

If you think about AI and the way it works in supporting human weaknesses, right?

Data accuracy when it comes to analysis, that kind of thing.

Or market research where it’s really good at, particularly with ML.

Hello, Courtney.

And Knownwell.

But if you think about some of the natural weaknesses that human beings have, if people use AI to kind of play to their weaknesses, this could be a really powerful moment for them.

I also just want to come back to the Sam Altman statement about what was…

Is this at 95% of the things agencies do today?

Oh, my gosh.

Whatever he says.

He said 95%.

The only thing he cares about when he says it like that is how many headlines he gets with it.

Yes.

Yeah.

So we can all say, first of all, he’s wrong.

But second of all, it still takes someone doing and implementing.

And even with the photography example of a kid with…

It still takes someone…

Pointing that camera and clicking on it.

Yeah.

And getting it set up and getting…

There are just…

It’s so much…

I think a lot of times we just write off the things that it takes to actually pull it off with AI.

And that lift right now is still substantial.

Yeah.

It’s funny.

I was going to say Altman and not just Altman, but he’s the poster child, right?

He’s famous for selling the sizzle, not the steak, right?

He’s talking about what he believes artificial intelligence should, could and may one day be able to do.

And he’s got a point of view, of course, that it will in fact reach a point of general intelligence, human level intelligence across all sorts of things.

It’ll be agentic, able to complete tasks without human involvement, and that it’s going to radically change everything.

But then those of us who actually sit here and use the tools on a day to day basis, realize my writing is worse when I use AI, right?

I have plenty of ways I can use it to be more effective, more efficient, with brainstorming, outlining, secondary stuff, boilerplate stuff, a little bit of research, versioning, asking it to critique my writing or to edit something or whatever.

But I know for a fact that if I write a paragraph on a topic I know well and ask Chet, GPT or Claude or any of them to write a paragraph on a topic I know really well, I’m going to do better 100% of the time, right?

And it’s knowing when, where and how these tools are valuable and where their limits are.

And I think the problem with Sam Altman, too, is…

There are so many of them, man.

Often, I speak often about OpenAI’s product marketing challenge in that they effectively have no product strategy.

It’s all over the board, right?

And it’s confusing as all hell.

I don’t think he understands what his market even wants.

Because at the end of the day, rather than automating the mundane tasks so that we could be more creative, he’s automating the creative tasks so that we can do the mundane bullshit.

Nobody wants that.

He’s not actually thinking about what the market wants and how the market really uses the tools so that he can actually fit the product to the need.

This 95% is total BS and discounts all of that, plus the reality that even in this day and age, the AI era, so much of business is still fundamentally about human-to-human relationships, right?

The buyer is a human, the seller is a human, the person across the aisle and human resources is a human usually, right?

People work with people they like theoretically, not the case for Geoff and I, but we’re, I guess we’re unique in that respect, right?

But it’s fundamentally about humans, right?

That is so…

We’ve come full circle.

Good.

I love, I did not think about them creating in so many ways with Sora, the part that, no, we actually love as humans doing that piece of it.

You’re doing the wrong thing.

And we talk a lot…

Yeah, about the individual productivity layer, like the execution layer of, there’s so many things in that level that it’s like, yes, take that, make me faster in that.

And we’re really focusing on that operational level of how do we cross-functionally work and leverage AI in that way so that we can maybe be in less meetings or the things that we really don’t like doing on that operational level.

I think that is, I’m gonna have to think about that later when I think about their product lineup.

And going after the wrong thing.

Right, so much of creativity, human creativity is about the process, not the product, right?

Not to overly hype Geoff’s photography sideline.

He and I were down at the Association of National Advertisers, AI for Marketers Conference in Hollywood, Florida a couple of weeks ago.

And we were in early to do some prep and pre-work and stuff like that.

And we also took some time to do a photo walk around Miami Beach.

And right, I’m not putting, to put words in Geoff’s mouth, although he actually said it, but Geoff was getting jazzed on the process of taking photographs, of walking around, of looking around, observing action, finding things that were interesting to his eye.

At the end of the day, whether he came out of it with one or a hundred and one phenomenal photographs was almost irrelevant, right?

But AI is taking all of the stuff up to the perfect picture, out of the equation, right?

And saying, if you’re a writer, you don’t need to look at a blank page.

Writers like the blank page because it represents possibility.

The crazy thing about what he’s talking about, I haven’t even looked at the files, but I know I have good shots in there.

I really enjoyed it.

I’ll enjoy editing them, too, someday when I’m sick and I can’t move.

You know what I mean?

But we all have something like that.

Or writing or knitting, right?

It’s great to see a finished product, but a lot of the enjoyment comes in the process of doing it.

And a lot of these AI tools are stripping away the entire process or condensing it down into a fraction of time, or taking the decision making out of that process between the prompt and the response.

That said, if you’re an agency or a business person or a marketer in general, there are certainly ways that these tools, these technologies can assist us in doing what we do better, faster, more capably, more effectively, more efficiently, to better results, et cetera.

So how does AI, what are some of your best ideas for how AI helps us to level up creativity and our human thinking and our human capacity?

Yeah, it’s a really good question.

And I think we have to be mindful.

I think what you just said, sometimes it’s really good to have a blank sheet of paper.

And I will caveat that on the other side of the spectrum of sometimes it’s good to brainstorm with people in person.

There is just something, even with other technologies that we have today, that we have to be careful to still understand the power that we have when we’re just together with people and to find spaces for those.

I think we may, again, I think humans are gonna be more on trend in the future.

We might even start to prioritize it more, which is again, I am such an optimist on this podcast.

I do think on the flip side of that, I do find that AI is really helpful with just sparking ideas.

I think I’m in a remote global team so not only are a lot of my teammates remote, all of them are remote actually, but they’re also in different time zones and so sometimes I need a thought partner to help me think through ideas and it does work great for that.

I do wholeheartedly agree with you that I’ve never found a piece of copy from an LLM that I could ship.

It is not great and again, we’re coming like full circle here with this conversation.

It goes back to my ability to judge whether or not the writing is good or not.

So one thing that I love to do is just test, keep a list of all the things that I have tested.

In AI, if it’s, it could be as simple as writing social media posts, it could be creating YouTube shorts, whatever the thing is, I keep a list of those tests and then I try them out.

It may not work great right now, but then I retest them later on because again, as y’all know, it changes constantly.

All the time.

But I would say the biggest power for me with AI is that thought partner of, let me bounce ideas off this tool and just see what it gives.

It could be one word, but it’s just that collaborative partner that so many times in remote global work is missing that I have found that it has fulfilled pretty well.

What’s your cheat prompt?

My cheat prompt?

Your cheat prompt for that.

I’ll give you mine.

Mine is I take the text, I throw it in there and say, where are the weaknesses?

Oh, I like that.

I always say, well, this is more with my personal stuff.

I will put in a post I’ve written and I always say, keep it short and make it casual and fun.

There you go.

Because it just, all the time, it makes me sound boring.

Very for fashion.

I always end up, it’s like you said, it’s never ready to ship.

You always have to rewrite it.

Greg, what’s your cheat code?

I forgot one.

No emojis.

No, I know.

That’s so annoying.

And include one typo.

Viewer Geoff was talking about the typos.

I find my posts with typos do better now.

I leave them in sometimes.

You know, if it’s too perfect.

If it’s not perfect, you just know automatically it’s not AI.

Cheat code, Verdino?

I don’t know if I have a single cheat code.

I tend to do a lot of stuff like you’re describing, Geoff, of review this and tell me where the weaknesses are or what could I add to make this better.

I also tend to, I guess, if I have a cheat tends to, I suck at titling things like blog posts and articles and stuff like that.

So I tend to do a lot of read this article and give me a seven ideas for punchy titles.

Then you grab one and work it.

Right.

And they’re always terrible, but they usually have something.

Oh, no.

You’re a professional podcaster.

Do you have your phone on?

I don’t.

Oh, no.

Move that.

Where was your AI, man?

Greg, this is about to be the Geoff and Courtney show.

We’re out of time anyway, I believe.

Courtney, any final thoughts before we terminate Greg’s phone?

Go ahead, Courtney.

I just for the marketing agencies listening, I think there are a lot of ways to think about this moment in time.

And obviously, like with this conversation, I lean much more on the optimist side of it.

But I think this is a really important moment.

And if you’re a middle market, especially professional service firm, I would just really encourage you to lean in.

I think this is something that can be leveraged, although certainly obstacles ahead.

And if you’re interested in finding out about Knownwell and curious to see what we’re building, we’d love to showcase it to you at knownwell.com.

Sounds great.

Thank you so much.

And folks, thanks for joining us today for another edition of the No Brainer podcast.

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We do appreciate the feedback.

We may include you on a future Mailbag episode.

Mr.

Verdino, any last words?

Just thank you to you, Geoff.

Thank you to everyone listening.

And of course, most of all, thank you to you, Courtney.

This has been really great.

Courtney!

We’d love to have you back at some time when we’ve got more.

I’m sure we’ll have plenty more to discuss with you about all sorts of things.

For sure.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you, as always, for listening and watching.

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Be sure to tune in next week where we’ll be back with our regular scheduled programming, a brand new episode of AI Knowhow on using AI to solve your commercial intelligence problem.

You didn’t even know you had one, but you do.

We’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you made it this far in the episode, first of all, thank you.

And second, we know that AI is changing all the time.

And so we’ve got you covered.

Here is another great episode for you to watch to stay in the loop on what’s happening in AI and business.

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You can do that right here.

I’ve always wanted to do that, by the way.

So do that now.

That would be great.