Is Artificial Intelligence An Extinction Event For Marketing Agencies | Paul Roetzer

This episode explores whether artificial intelligence (AI) poses a significant threat to the traditional marketing agency model.

1. AI is transforming marketing agencies, pushing them towards more efficient and technologically integrated operations.
2. Human oversight remains crucial, particularly in areas where AI interacts directly with customers.
3. Legal and operational challenges are emerging, especially concerning the ownership and copyright of AI-generated content.
4. Agencies must evolve or risk becoming obsolete, with a significant divide between AI-native and AI-emergent firms.
5. Education and proactive adaptation are essential for agencies to thrive in an AI-driven market.

1: Introduction

Host Mike Linton introduces the topic and guest Paul Roetzer. Overview of AI’s potential impact on marketing agencies. Paul Roetzer: "AI is the next big thing, but there's more uncertainty than certainty about its impact."

2: The State of AI in Marketing

Discussion on how AI is currently utilized in marketing and its potential future applications. Paul Roetzer: "We're just scratching the surface of what AI can do in marketing."

3: Implications for Agencies

Exploration of how agencies need to adapt to survive the AI shift. Paul Roetzer: "Agencies must evolve or become obsolete in the face of AI advancements."

4: Legal and Operational Challenges

Roetzer discusses the complexities of copyright with AI creations and operational changes needed in agencies. Paul Roetzer: "The copyright issue is a ticking time bomb for many agencies using AI."

5: Future of Marketing Agencies

Speculation on the future role of marketing agencies in an AI-driven industry. Paul Roetzer: "The future will favor agencies that are nimble and AI-savvy."

1. Educate Your Team: Invest in AI education and training to keep your agency competitive.
2. Adopt AI Tools: Start integrating AI tools into your workflows to improve efficiency.
3. Review Legal Implications: Understand the legal aspects of using AI, especially regarding copyright issues.
4. Innovate Constantly: Stay ahead by continuously exploring new ways to apply AI in your agency.
5. Develop an AI Strategy: Create a clear roadmap for incorporating AI into your business model.

A CMO Confidential Interview with Paul Roetzer, Founder of the Marketing AI Institute and author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. Paul discusses the rapid growth of the AI business, early impacts on agencies and marketing organizations, why you should be careful using AI with customer interactions, and how things will evolve to handle a "string of actions" versus specific tasks. Key topics include: why you should create an "AI Council" to stay on top of current and future innovations; why he thinks there will be AI Native agencies and AI Emergent agencies and all others will be obsolete; and how creating a roadmap allows you to think through the tech stack, employee capabilities and your partner ecosystem. Tune in to hear tips for interviewing and selecting AI vendors.

People

Paul Roetzer, Mike Linton

Companies

Marketing AI Institute

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Paul Roetzer

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Mike Linton

The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network looking to launch or scale your podcast? I hear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com dot. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the head of marketing.

Paul Roetzer

Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to chief marketing officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Paul Raitzer. Today's topic is artificial intelligence, an extinction event for agencies.

Mike Linton

Now, Paul started his career in the advertising and marketing industry and became an early student, a very early student of artificial intelligence. In fact, he was so captivated by the potential of AI that he founded the Marketing AI Institute in 2016, where he serves as the CEO. He is the creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence conference and wrote a book called Marketing Artificial Intelligence. I think he's particularly well suited to talk about this topic. This is his second time on the show.

Last year we discussed AI. A view from the front lines. Welcome, Paul. It is great to be back. And maybe an important context to that is I created marketing institute while I was running a marketing agency.

Paul Roetzer

So I think after 16 years of owning and running an agency and then blending that with the AI thing, there's a lot of convergence here. My past life and my current life. Yes, we think a perfect guest for the show. So thank you for that. Let's start, let's start.

Mike Linton

Give us your take on where we are really in the AI cycle. You have Nvidia at $2 billion or 2 trillion. Sorry, the drama at Open AI. Many of our listeners saying, off the record, I'm not even sure what to do with this, but everyone wants me to do something and everyone also acknowledging this is truly the next big thing. What's really going on?

What's your take? Yeah, I think we're early. I think overall we're definitely starting to see Wall street recognizing what's happening. And so you're seeing some of these major stocks take off like Nvidia, and people aren't familiar with Nvidia. They make the chips that are used to do all of the training of these massive models.

Paul Roetzer

So you have OpenAI and Anthropic, and Google and Microsoft and Mistral and Meta. You have these companies that are building these big foundation language models that power the ability for all of us to generate content with AI. So the training runs of these things cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and they will cost billions of dollars in the years ahead. Nvidia powers all of that. They're chips.

And then what happens is there's something called inference, which is when you and I go into chat GBT and we say, write me an article for this, or create a plan for that. That is inference. That prompt goes to the machines and it runs and gives us an output. Nvidia chips power that. Where we're at is AI is becoming practical.

We all have access now to tools like perplexity and chat, GPT and Runway and whatever your favorite genai tools are that help us do our job. They make us more efficient, more productive, and they help us with tasks. And so I think we're at the stage where a lot of people are starting to find value in tasks that AI can assist with. And at the same time, big enterprises where you spent your time, Mike, they're starting to realize, wow, we might be able to scale this up and really change the way we do our marketing, the way our strategies are structured, the way our tech stack looks, the way our team looks, and they're trying to figure out what in the world that means. And then the agency ecosystem is trying to figure out, what does this mean to us.

Like, what if AI is going to do the thing we used to do? Now, what do we do? And so I think we're in this very early phase where we're starting to see value created. But there's more questions than there are answers as to what this means for all of us moving forward. I think that is a great opening context setting.

Mike Linton

Before we go to the agency thing, I want to talk a little more just about the industry and what's going on in AI, so we can write the agencies in the story in a little bit. When you look across the AI world, what industries or functions within companies or wherever are really making the most progress in applying AI? We talked about the infrastructure, the Nvidia chips and everything else, where that's an easy investment. You could see this thing coming. But who's actually applying this?

Well, now, are you seeing real business results at scale yet, or is it all early? Yeah, so I think it's important contextually to understand the different kinds of AI. So AI is like a field of study, goes back to the 1950s. So we're coming up in like 70 years that people have had this theory that these machines could do human like things for a long time in business, like, say, the last two decades, there have been companies in healthcare, logistics, e commerce, media and entertainment insurance who have used machine learning. The main form of AI we've had where the software learns from data and it makes predictions about outcomes, predictions about outcomes and behaviors.

Paul Roetzer

So you have all kinds of businesses in a lot of different industries who have successfully used AI to do pricing optimization, recommendation engines for products and services, predictive engines about forecasting models. All of that's been around for a while. 2022 was the emergence of the generative AI phase. That was where we could use AI to create text, images, video, audio is a hot one now, code, that's the part where we're still waiting to really see leaders emerge who have scaled the use of generative AI in companies. We're seeing signs of it because we know OpenAI's revenue is exploding.

So they're charging like dollar 30 or dollar 25 per user per month for a Chad chipt enterprise license. The same with Microsoft. They're selling copilot licenses. Google's doing it in workspace. So we know companies are starting to infuse this.

It's like, what are they doing with it? And most of them seem to be focused on marketing, sales, and customer service. Customer service. We're starting to hear more and more examples of companies that are actually transforming their customer service with this. So let's talk about that for a minute, because one of our earlier guests, Tom Goodwin, said generative AI was still in its infancy, and he called it, it was the equivalent of having 1 million cocky teenagers, interns working for you.

Mike Linton

Super helpful on the efficiency and cost front, but really not ready for real consumer interfaces at scale or surely anything that requires any kind of choice and thinking. Yeah, talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a helpful context to think of it as like a really smart intern in a lot of cases. Um, you know, the human, the person with the domain expertise and experience, who has points of view and intuition and, um, you know, has been doing this for a while and knows if an output is any good or not, there's still a massive purpose for those people in this process. And the way I think about this is like, if you're an attorney or a marketer or a consultant, business consultant, if you go into chat GPT, and you ask it to help you build a plan for a market segment, say a go to market strategy.

Paul Roetzer

It's going to do it and it's going to look pretty good, but you, as the expert, need to know if it's actually any good. So, like, I think, you know, again, your history is a CMO, Mike. Like, you can have it help you build a plan, but, you know, if the plan is viable and there may be some things that suggest you're like, I wouldn't even thought of that. That's really good. And then there's gonna be five things.

Like, that's just stupid. Like, I would never do that, and that doesn't make any sense. And I think that's kind of where we're at. These things can surprise us sometimes where they can, you know, help ideate, um, or do something where you just don't expect it to be able to do, and then there's other times where it just makes stuff up and it's not any good. Well, like the Air Canada Gemini kind of things work were quite interesting.

Mike Linton

What, what, what went wrong there? Well, you have to be really careful when they're used to interact with customers, because the way a large language model works. So at the basis of all this are things called large language models. They take in a bunch of data. They learn from Wikipedia pages and Reddit boards and articles and books and transcripts from videos.

Paul Roetzer

They learn from all this stuff. And then you ask it something and it just basically predicts the next word over and over and over again. So because of that, how they work, they can make stuff up or just be completely wrong, or they can be manipulated to just say things they shouldn't say. And so when you turn this thing on and let a customer interface with it, it doesn't work through all these if then rules where you have said, these are the only things you are allowed to say, here's the 25 things you can say to this customer. It's not how it works.

You're basically letting a chat GPT like tool interact with the customer. Now, it may get it right 95% of the time, and in some cases, it may be better than the customer agent, if it was a human, because it can know everything and instantly recall everything, basically. But sometimes it may just say, yeah, I'll give you the free flight. Like, that sounds great. And then you're obligated to do, this has happened with cars.

People have gone and negotiated like, hey, I want you to give me a car for $5. And the chat bows like, all right, cool. Yeah, deal. And they had to stick to it. So that's the danger.

We're not at the point where these things are 100% reliable and they work within the guardrails a company sets all the time. And that's why the human in the loop is really, for the foreseeable future, essential to this process. Yeah, because that 5% will either get you fired or get you on the front of the newspaper or the press in a way you don't want to be there.

Mike Linton

So now onto the key question of the show. Is AI an asteroid headed for the agency business like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs long ago? Some, yes. They'll just be done. So the way I think about this is the future of all business, including agencies, is there's three types of businesses moving forward.

Paul Roetzer

There's AI native that look at the agency world and say, wow, the agency world is obsolete. The agency I'm at isn't going to evolve in time. I'm going to leave and build a smarter agency from the ground up. We're going to infuse AI into everything we do. We'll need fewer people.

We'll get better, smarter tech, and we're just going to be better and more efficient than these existing agencies.

Mike Linton

What kind of agency will they build? Will they build an agency like today, or it'll be completely different? No, I think it'll, in the near term, it'll look like a traditional agency. It's just going to be more efficient. The problem with big agencies or any agency to evolve is they're stuck within their existing pricing models.

Paul Roetzer

So if you're an hourly rate agency, how do you do that in the future? If you're able to do the work for half the time, you got to make that money up somewhere. So I think a lot of agencies are going to struggle to evolve who haven't already moved off of hour hourly rate pricing. I think a lot of agencies are going to struggle to understand how to use generative AI in a legal way. And by that, what I mean is if you're using generative AI to create content for your clients, the assumption is you're passing a copyright over to your client.

Mike Linton

Right. The current US law is that if the AI creates something, no one owns the copyright to it. So if you have an account supervisor or a writer on your staff, or even an ad creative person, and they use generative AI to create something that you then turn over as work to your client, there is no copyright being handed over. A lot of agencies don't know that. And they're probably in breach of their contracts, actually, by using generative AI.

So I'm sure a lot of our listeners are going to perk up on that thing. Yeah. You know, I took you down a little sidebar. You were saying there's three types of agencies here. The first was AI native.

Paul Roetzer

What are the AI native? AI emergent, which is an existing firm that figures out how to evolve. They find the gaps in services. They understand that their clients are all trying to figure this stuff out. Maybe they move more into, like, language model consulting, training of AI agents.

Like, there's all these emerging areas that no one knows how to do. And there's a lot of opportunity for agencies to be the ones who already have the trust relationship, who evolve now, they got to get through the talent changes, the tech changes, the impact on their financial model, all of that. But the AI merging is, you already have data, you already have distribution of a customer base that trusts you. You likely have financial stability, the ability to invest in innovation, like you can change, but you want to be Netflix, not blockbuster, basically, in this scenario. And then the third type of company is obsolete.

They're just irrelevant. And it may take a year, may take five years, but they just can't compete with the AI native and AI emerging companies over time. And what percent of agencies, in your mind, I mean, there's, you know, tens of thousands out there, maybe hundreds of thousands, are, are going to be obsolete. A lot? Um, over 50?

I don't know. It'd be hard to say. Like, I think a lot. I've talked with a lot of the big agencies. I've done some consulting work for some of the big agencies to help them evolve.

And there are definitely some big agencies that I think have the resources and the vision to do this the right way. I think it'll be painful. I think there's going to be a lot of transition within those agencies. I think there's going to be turnover of staff. It's going to look different, but I think they'll make it through.

There's probably a lot of small to mid sized agencies that just won't. They're just not going to have the will and vision to do it. Let's talk about that a minute, because, so in your mind, this is an asteroid, that it's going to strike the agency world, but it's not going to wipe out everybody. It's going to create a survivor mentality, or those that can adapt will. Those that won't, won't.

Mike Linton

What are the emergent agencies doing right now that make them candidates to survive the asteroid strike. Education and training is the first and foremost always. So this is where we get brought in is to come in and do the intro to AI, the beginner level course for these big firms, different sized firms, and then they layer in what theyre doing and many of them are building roadmaps like heres how this impacts our products and services, but heres how were also looking at the operations of our own firm, all the ways that were going to drive efficiency in everything we do in marketing, sales, service, operations, HR, finance. We're becoming an AI merchant company. And in the process we will evolve our services, we will evolve our pricing model, we'll evolve our tech stack.

Paul Roetzer

And I think that they're able to be more agile. So they have to be within cultures where people get comfortable with change. So I mean, it's outside of the agency world. But go look at Google. This is a behemoth, dominant company that had sort of lost the ability to be agile in bringing products and services to market to the point where their founders had to come back in in December of last year and like bring the startup mentality back.

I was listening to a podcast on a flight the other day where one of the guys being interviewed was saying like, yeah, I'm literally sitting in a room on weekends with Sergey coding together. So their founder is like back in the room on weekends grinding to like rebuild this startup culture within a company that had lost a startup culture. And I think what's going to completely lost it. Yeah. So I think for agencies, there's a lot of agencies that don't have a startup disruptive innovator mindset.

And I don't know how you thrive through this without that. So somehow you have to get that back into these cultures. So let's stay on that and say, can small agencies survive this? I think the small agencies actually stand a massive opportunity to grow because it's easier for them to have that startup innovator mindset. It's easier to make changes.

My agency was like, when I sold it, I think we had 17 employees or something and we could turn on a dime at 17 employees. I could decide at 08:00 one night that we're changing direction, and tomorrow that next morning I go in and say, this is what we're doing and everybody does it, and you could change whatever you need to change financial anything. So it was just easier with the lack of legacy stuff and all the challenges that come with employee bases as they get bigger and bigger and so I think small agencies have a really great opportunity to evolve and be the ones that can adapt more quickly and offer these kinds of services. So I think there will be a lot of smaller agencies that can grow fast. And I think there's going to be a renaissance or an explosion of those AI native firms.

People that have innovative thinkers who are stuck within the legacy system that they're in. They look on like there's no way this agency is going to evolve the way they have to. I've got a little nest egg, or I could go get an investor. Like, I'm going to go do this myself. And I think you're going to see a ton of that.

Mike Linton

And will they replace the agency as we know it today or will companies hire them in a different way? Well, to play that out, you really almost have to try and project what is three to five years from now look like. What is the world of the agency? What does the world of marketing look like? Exactly.

Let's project that. I'm not going to project it, Preston. So we have GPT six, GPT seven, GPT eight. The question becomes, what can't that system do? Now, no one really knows that answer, but directionally we know where the research labs are headed and they're all working on things that are called AI agents that are able to actually do a string of actions, not just like develop a draft of something or come up with some ideas or create an image or video, but to build and execute a plan.

Paul Roetzer

So the example I always like to give in this scenario is we're a HubSpot partner. I was HubSpot's first partner back in 2007. My agency was, we still use HubSpot today. If I want to send an email in HubSpot, it's a minimum of 21 clicks. So we did an intro to AI class recently.

If I wanted to send an email to the 1300 people who are registered for that class, and then I wanted to drive promotion to our in person conference, I would have to go in and click content, email list template. I would pick all these things and then I would actually start writing the email. And then I have to get to like personalizing the email. And it's like this is a big project just to send a single email. Instead.

Imagine I just go in and text prompt in HubSpot and say, send an email to everyone who was on the webinar, the intraday class. If they haven't registered for Macon yet, make sure to include like a promotional code for that. And if they're not part of our online learning academy include some information about that. It just goes and does it. It goes and finds its list.

It goes and looks at whether or not they went to the other thing. It does all the things I would be clicking around to do. It drafts the email, writes the headline, creates the personalization tokens for it, and then it just says, okay, it's ready for review, human. I go in, and this looks fantastic. This is an example of saving a huge amount of cost and time.

Mike Linton

Macon is the marketing artificial AI conference. Yeah. So now do that for advertising and social media and analytics and SEO. Like, do that for all the things agencies do, and imagine a future in, like, two years where the AI agents can do 50% of the work. That's not an unrealistic scenario at all.

Paul Roetzer

So two years from now, half of everything we're doing, the AI can do for us, or at least like, assist us in doing, and now you're saving all that time. What does an agency look like in that scenario? So people are licking their chops right now, thinking this is a massive savings, but if you happen to be running the cost center, you got to be on the front end of this, as you said in the beginning, about what they're doing in the short term. What should they be doing in the long term to get this? Because I took away in the short term, what you said is, start putting this into your infrastructure agency.

Mike Linton

If you want to be AI emergent, like, right away, and it has to be an awful lot of people's jobs versus a team working on it. It has to be built into the bones of the agency. If I'm getting that wrong, stop me. But then what else should they be working on for the long term? So I'm a believer, like you need, I used to call it an AGI Horizons team, like a artificial general intelligence, or like, when these things achieve, like, human level capability across, like, all cognitive tasks.

Paul Roetzer

That's what all these labs are working on is AGI. That's their mission. I don't know if they'll get there. I don't know if we'll ever agree on what AGI actually is, but I know that the models are going to keep getting smarter and more capable. And so the only way I can guide people to be ready for this is you have to have people in your organization who are staying on top of the latest news and information and trying to connect the dots for what does it mean for us?

And so if we look out and say, oh, my gosh, like a new AI agent demo just dropped and it's mind blowing for advertising buying. Like, we could totally see how this would play a role in it. Someone on your team needs to be now thinking six to twelve months out when that becomes prevalent within the industry. So the only way to, to figure this out is to try and see around the corner. And the best we're probably going to be able to do is like six to 18 months.

Like anybody theorizing beyond 18 months, it's just educated guesswork at best. I personally have done this, I avoid doing this all the time. But in episode 87 of our podcast, I created an AI timeline through like 2030 of what I thought was directionally going to occur, just to try and give people a heads up of like, this is the stuff I think you need to be looking at. So I would have an AI council within an agency or within a brand that is in charge of monitoring this stuff, thinking about what it means, and then I would have like a segment of that that's this kind of like futures team, Frontier team, horizon team, whatever you want to call it, that's thinking about like the real innovation that is potentially coming. And what does that mean to us?

Because that may look very different than what you do for the next twelve months. Super helpful. Let's flip this over to the marketers because now you have to manage not only AI in your own company, but also all these agencies that are working on AI. How do you think about that as a company that is aggregating all these partners into a story? How do you even structure this as a marketing department?

I think first you have to have a roadmap for yourself. So same principles of problem I always teach brands is education and training is number one. Like an internal AI academy. You need an AI council that is like charged with thinking about this stuff. You need an AI roadmap that lays out your priority use cases, the problems you're going to solve.

Like, you know the strategy for how you're going to move forward. And then within that you need to be doing AI impact assessments on your people. Like do our people in their current constitution, the way we train them, the way we hire them, do they fit where we're going? You need to do that with your tech stack. Like, is our tech stack the right tech stack?

Like for example, with us we have a learning management system that's like a foundation of our online academy, right? It is not viable to scale, it is not the right LMS, but LMS is core. So we're actively looking at a smarter version of a learning management system. That's our tech stack. And then the other component is your partner ecosystem.

Do you have the right partners to get you to the next level? And that may be one agency. It may be a collection of ten agents. Whatever it is, you need to have a vision for where you're going, and in some cases, your agencies may help you create that vision. You may need to lean on some of them, but the question becomes, which ones of them are you having at the table?

If there's like, if you're thinking about your AI roadmap and there's some of your agencies or outside partners that you're not even inviting to that meeting, there's a pretty decent chance they're probably not the right people moving forward if you're not even including them in that conversation. Got it. I want to go to the vendor component in a minute.

Mike Linton

But if you're a small b, two b company, like I look at my old companies, I could easily create the consoles you recommend. I could. I could have front end thinkers and everything else. If Im a small b, two b company where theres not that many people in my marketing department, I dont have that much money, what should I be doing? Robert?

Paul Roetzer

Same thing. It can be a two person marketing institute, seven people, and thats assuming everyone was full time, which theyre not. So even in that small environment, you still need, it could be one. I mean maybe Im the AI council. As the CEO, Im just, I'm thinking about this every day, and I'm like, you just have to have something, and you have to have a formal structure to think about it and take action on it.

So in some ways, like at the institute, our weekly podcast became a core part of our informal AI council because it forced me and my chief content officer Mike, to once a week talk about what was happening in the AI space and what did it mean. Now we happen to do it for an audience, but the reality is, if no one listened to our podcast, I would still do it because it's a forcing function to think about this stuff in a regular rhythm. Got it. Hey, I want to flip to the vendor or the partner discussion, because Accenture just said it's AI. Consulting is their most rapidly growing piece of business.

Mike Linton

If you're sitting there looking at all the potential people you could hire in AI, including the agencies, including all the consulting companies, how do you even, you can talk about the accenture earnings, but also how do you know who's good and who's not good? Yeah, that's a, that's a challenging one. I mean, we've thought about, even through the institute building, like a partner ecosystem. So again, like, for context, we were HubSpot's first partner in 2007. We were the origin of what became, like, 45% of HubSpot's revenue.

Paul Roetzer

Their, their partner ecosystem, their reseller program is what drove HubSpot's growth for the years. So I've seen an ecosystem emerge from literally, like, the ground up. Right. I've considered that we may need to be a catalyst to create that, because people come to us, brands of all sizes come to us every day asking for help with this building roadmaps. We don't do it, though.

Like, we don't provide the services. So I've actually questioned, like, okay, if we built. Let's play this out. We build a partner program of agencies. How do we vet them?

How do we know someone's worth putting. Their reputation line as a vendor? Look, because I'm sitting here, no one is out there saying we're not going to do AI. We're going to stay where we are. I mean, everyone's sticking AI and other marketing materials, everything else.

Mike Linton

Every consulting company saying we're on the front end of AI. If I'm in that particularly smaller company where I am the AI console, or I have a small group, that's the AI console, how do we even, how do I even know who is really doing it and who is just doing showmanship on top of it? Yeah, that's interesting. I'm building a new course series called scaling AI right now, and I have a vendor audit in there for tech. And now you have me thinking, I need to create a partner audit.

Paul Roetzer

Good. I need to do that. So useful to everyone. Yeah. Getting something from it.

Yeah. So give me like a month, and then I'll actually have an audit for you. But the way I would do it is probably the way I always thought about when I owned my agency, how I taught our team, and that was to prove your value and the potential value by doing it yourself. So we were our own client in many cases. I would create frameworks like our marketing growth hackathon.

I would create a model for us to accelerate growth. I would run it on ourselves, and then I would go do it and I would share what we were doing. So to me, AI isn't any different than you need, not only to understand people's positioning and their services, but have they actually done it? Are they an overnight AI expert? They didn't ever talk about AI before three months ago, and now they just basically post Twitter threads, that's probably not who you're going to hire.

You want to go hire people that, you know, know how to do this, and so you want to see demonstrated expertise. I want to make sure we're talking about the fact, because I heard you just say, anybody can talk about it conceptually. Somebody has to be actually doing it actually for real, even in their own space or with some client or something. And you have to be able to actually see that case study or that example. Or you should be suspect that it's theory versus execution.

Yeah, no, they're legit. Like, if they have a podcast, go listen to three episodes. It's easy to fake expertise and thought leadership now because chat GPT is the shortcut to do it. So if I want to go say, like, let's say I wanted to go sell services in healthcare, and that's a bad inch. I actually know a lot about healthcare energy.

Like, let's say AI for, like, energy companies. I know nothing about energy now. I know about AI, but I don't know anything about energy. I can go to chat GBT and write a blueprint right now on AI's impact on energy companies. Correct.

And, like, I can put that out and then, like, people call me, but if they went past the surface level, they would realize, like, I actually don't know anything about the energy industry. I just, like, I have this AI knowledge now that may translate over. But if I'm looking for someone with specific knowledge in the energy space, I don't want, like, one LinkedIn post about it. I want someone who's, like, been in this. Like, they have domain expertise in this space.

Now they're layering AI on top of it like that. I would just vet them out. I would make sure they're actually, like, someone who knows what they're doing. So what I just heard you say is, get below the surface on this for sure and make sure you're looking at real case studies versus conceptual knowledge. Have an unscripted conversation with them.

Like, it's like anything. It's like interviewing someone for a job or like, trying to assess your agency. You hired probably a million agencies in your day. Like, not a million, but, you know, like, you hired some agencies, you want to sit across the table from them and make sure they actually know what the hell they're talking about, that they're not just like, you know, it's not just a bunch of case studies that are surface level. And the people who did those probably don't even work at the agency anymore.

And all that knowledge is gone. Like, you want to know that you have a trusted partner across you, not someone who makes nice Twitter threads. I think that is a. A really good way for our listeners to think about who they should be hiring. We did a whole show on vendor management, which I think is probably also super compelling here.

Yeah. So we're almost at time here. So last question. It's a two parter. You can take both or one, but to take at least one funniest AI story, you can share in public and or practical advice we haven't discussed with discussed yet.

Mike Linton

It's two parter, take one or both. Yeah, I mean, the practical advice is probably an easier one for me. Um, if you're an agency, you got to just get started and you have to have someone who owns this. Like, if, if you're the leader of the agency and you've got a 80 hours workweek already, you, you're not going to be able to put the time in that's needed to really develop a depth of knowledge to figure this out. And this is where the I counsel may come in.

Paul Roetzer

Maybe you, you create that and you like, give them some autonomy to go figure this stuff out, but you have to put someone in ownership of making this a priority in your organization, whatever that looks like to you. So that would be like, my biggest piece of practical advice. You can get started tomorrow with, like, pilot use cases, like go get, you know, Runway or chat GPT or what, anthropic whatever it is. You can go start playing around with this tech right now. But to like, operationalize it and build a strategy around it, you have to commit to it being a core part of your growth strategy.

So that would be my practical advice. Funniest thing, AI would struggle with that one. I don't know, man. I've had some funny conversations with chat GPT, just like a lot of fun. But yeah, I don't think I have anything crazy.

Mike Linton

All right. I think if you're good, we'll bring you back in a while to talk about a report from the front lines again. And then maybe a funny story. Maybe I'll have one the vet then for you. There we go.

So thank you, Paul, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO confidential. If you are enjoying the show, please like share and subscribe. Look for all of our shows on the I hear everything network, Spotify, Apple and YouTube, which include marketing, the battle between believers and non believers. Parts one and two is the CMO job the hardest job in business. A report from the media front lines and what your agency really wants to tell you but won't.

Parts one, two and three. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO confidential.