Why AI Will Be Bigger Than the Internet With 'Silicon Valley's Most Wanted' Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer Fin.ai

10:41Paul Adams:That's where people start worrying about jobs. We'll go into that later on in terms of how jobs are going to change within companies. But just for the listeners, to put to one side, that's a beautiful little exercise. Things that make our business tick, things that AI does really well, and straight away, should someone be on that looking at, okay, how do we delegate that to AI very quickly so that we can take our people and focus them on other value creation rather than removing people, obviously, because I wouldn't be suggesting that. I'm thrilled to introduce Brand Growth Hero's newest partner, Jolson.

11:17Paul Adams:Jolson is a leading B Corp certified commercial law firm that specializes in guiding the founders of scaling CPG brands. With long term relationships with clients like Little Moons, Trip, Eat Natural, Bear, Graze and Pulsan. Jolson is also famous for advising the Innocent founders in their landmark sale to Coca-Cola. And believe it or not, they still work with the Innocent founders at Jamjar Investments today. I'm especially impressed by how Jolson sets founders up for long-term success and by their commitment to championing female founders. Recently, I asked Jolson's managing partners, Phil Hale-Smith and Paul Chappie, whether it really can make a difference from a commercial perspective if you work with a corporate lawyer who not only understands your business, but also knows you and what you're trying to achieve.

12:04Paul Adams:The deals that you can negotiate can deliver massively different results because you've got someone that has lived and breathed that for decades alongside you. And you're often behind the scenes, so you're not actually going to be visible. It's like having kryptonite in your pocket. Exactly. That's what Jolson is. Kryptonite in your pocket. That's it. Thank you very much. Okay, we can finish now. Job done.

12:32unknown host:I'm going to get Paul a special t-shirt with kryptonite in on it now.

12:35Paul Adams:Yeah, maybe not in your pocket though, just kryptonite. Huge thanks to Brand Growth Heroes podcast sponsors, Jolson. Now let's get back to the show.

12:48Paul Adams:Talk to us about how do you talk internally about how the world is going to change for us and when?

12:53unknown host:It's already changed. The when is in the past. like more change is going to come but i'll give you a sense of the scale of this i said i had a front door to the mobile wave so i could see that play out and mobile and social kind of went together or like if you're into b2b technology like me you know sass went together so mobile social and sass as a business model all kind of happened at the same time over the course of like 10-15 years like mobile is about 15 years now like you know 2008 was the iphone so we're there we're like you know well over 15 years um the wave before mobile was the internet and that's like your kind of late 90s into early 2000s and before that was like you can go you can go all the way back before that was bill gates microsoft which is like put a computer on every desk but even more recently like even over the course of the last hundred years we've had like you know mainframes which were like these big computers that takes up an entire room then and then you know they were like you know people used to do all this stuff by hand everything that you can do in a computer today people at some point in the past did it by hand at their desk with pen paper um like you know you can imagine offices from like a few decades ago the secretaries like literally dozens of secretaries all lined up like that's how offices used to work in a lot of cases and so those then was bill gates put a computer in every desk then that was just like personal computing then there's the internet and because people had a computer on the desk you could access the internet um and then came mobile and social the biggest wave we've experienced uh so far in our lives is the internet like the internet was much bigger than mobile now mobile itself was enormous you know completely changed how humanity communicates um changed changes how kids learn like you know enormous societal disruption the internet was bigger than mobile i'm certain as certain you can be that AI is definitely way bigger than mobile and social and I think if I had to bet it's bigger than the internet I actually think it's going to be substantially bigger than the internet the reason for that is AI unlike the internet and unlike mobile the internet and mobile kind of changes how you do business but the internet doesn't do work for you and mobile or such doesn't do work for you.

15:07unknown host:AI does work for you. AI is a worker. Because AI does work and does incredible work at times, it's going to totally change how we work. It's going to unrecognisively change how we work. And so I think it's going to be huge. I think it's going to happen really fast. It's already happening so fast. We're like at the frontier. I meant we bet Intercom. We bet Intercom. We bet the company on AI.

15:33Paul Adams:What does that mean? We bet the company on AI.

15:36unknown host:Well, we had a really successful SaaS company, you know, over 200 million in revenue, annual revenue. We saw this kind of one way door. You know, someone is going to build an AI powered customer service solution. And it's going to be better than Intercom. So we can decide to start building that thing ourselves now, or we can wait and probably get destroyed by someone. So we built Fin, which is our AI agent for customer service. Now Fin's going to do all sorts of customer communication. We can talk about that in a sec if you want. And so we built Fin and got it to market as fast as possible because we knew that this is a classic disruption theory.

16:12unknown host:You know, if you don't, if you wait, someone else will disrupt you. So you've got to disrupt yourself. You've got to build a future version of yourself. And so we built Fin, the future version of ourselves. By the way, and it's been a huge success. We like, I'm glad we bet the company on AI.

16:27Paul Adams:Have you launched already? Is Finn out there?

16:30unknown host:Oh, Finn is over two years old, yeah.

16:32Paul Adams:So what does Finn do?

16:34unknown host:Talks to customers and answers all the questions, resolves all the problems.

16:37Paul Adams:Why does it do that better than Intercom with a bit of machine learning?

16:40unknown host:Well, first of all, it's way better than humans. The jobs thing that people talk about isn't going to play out the way they think. And we'll talk about that in a second.

16:46Paul Adams:Let's talk about that in a second.

16:47unknown host:Like we have Finn. Finn is now doing, resolving tens of millions of customer problems a year. and many of our customers, most of our customers have not reduced their headcount and many are increasing their headcount. So like I can explain, there's a thing called induced demand, which basically means if you make something easier, more people do it. So that's going to happen with AI a lot. Like most of the world has a supply problem. Like if you think of things like healthcare, there aren't enough nurses, there aren't enough doctors you know um the most recent example i'm kind of going off topic here but the most recent example is radiology so for the longest time um ai like futurists predicted that radiography would die because ai is better by humans than reading x-rays um like way better and when touch view showed up when people could like apply that to radiography to x-rays Turns out, yep, way better.

17:50unknown host:The AI can analyze and diagnose far better than humans. So people were like, okay, radiology is dead. Radiologists are screwed. Don't go study radiology in college. Turns out that radiography is booming. And there's more radiographers and they're doing great. And the reason is because there was never enough of them in the first place. and now because of AI we can make the technology and the service way more accessible to way more people so way more people are now going getting x-rays and also it turns out the job isn't just taking x-rays like that's a crazy reductionist view of what a radiologist does and there's a lot more to it than just reading x-rays but you know people have these kind of like fear mongering narratives there's huge disruption coming our jobs are not going to exist in the form they do today in 10 years no no no doubt I've no doubt but I don't think it's like all doom and gloom it's not like you know suddenly people have no jobs that's not how it works so

18:51Paul Adams:how do you imagine thinking about you your family you know us how are we going to be living in and I'm thinking about consumer as consumers right and then we'll link that back to the companies that serve those consumers how will we be living in a few years time you know in three five years time what's life going to be like you know weeks travel weekend leisure play work shopping browsing physical supermarkets online you know how are we making choices how are we

19:19unknown host:making decisions talk to us about that i said earlier like you know the past is the best predictor of the future right like no by the way no one can predict the future so i'm trying to say things with like certainty that i think i have it and i'm kind of going to caveat it here and there no one knows really you know the answer to the question is no one knows but here's here's what i think is going to happen and i'm just like trying to look at these like trend lines and play them out you know the chat so like ai is two years old from for intensive purposes two years old in that time nearly a billion people use chat gpt every week nearly a billion so like there are over 800 million people using chat gpt every week and chat gpt is not google these are not the same things they work entirely differently google and crazy successful arguably one of the most if not the most successful technology companies born of the internet era maybe amazon are more successful you could argue but google have totally changed their cash cow like their cash cow is google search results and ads and like more and more ads above the fold and like you know scroll scroll scroll now you can get an organic link it's all ads so it's like a total cash cow for the longest time and they've disrupted the whole thing with these ai summaries at the top and they've done that because they have to compete with chat gpt because those summaries are what people now consume people don't why would you click why would you scroll and click some random link when somewhere else and something else can deliver you this like beautiful summary synthesizing the whole internet um so google have like disrupted their own business their cash cow because they know what's coming like consumer buying decisions are totally changing this is like only in the like first two years of this technology and if you like again use the think about the internet i always tell people like you have to remember think about this as like the start of the internet so imagine it's you know we're the equivalent of maybe late 90s as racist technology so like in the late 90s most people did not have the internet most businesses did not use the internet people bought things by going to physical locations and buying them no such thing as buying online because online wasn't a thing you didn't even know what that meant you know and if someone if someone back then had described things like search engine optimization to you like it sounded like you know a madness and you'd be saying why would you be wasting your time on that for god's sake yeah and like it sounds ridiculous it sounds like the biggest waste of human intellect ever you know like crazy why would you do that yeah and so that's where we are now with ai that's where we're at it's 1999 people still go to blockbuster to get their video people still go to the bookshop to buy their magazine and they read the news in their daily newspaper and they leave it all around the house you know that's where we are and so you have to like the first thing i keep trying to implore is like you have got to appreciate how early we are in this new world we're in a new s curve these things study history we're in it it's irreversible for better and for worse ai will be amazing and terrible and we're in it and um and there's no going back so i'm sorry it's 1999 and i say to people like you need to become an ai company and this is like maybe more kind of important for a technology company than a cpg company but I say to everyone you need to become an AI company and and then they're like you know what does that mean do a bit of dabbling over here I'm like no no no no imagine it's 1989 and someone said to you you need to become an internet company like you need to be an internet company it's this you need to deeply internalize that every way in which your work is going to change

23:05Paul Adams:bake it into every fiber is it unfair to ask you to kind of imagine painting a picture back to our lives right like you know are we going to be going to a different portal than google or will it all be seamlessly if we're going in looking for you know dinner tonight or clothes shopping ideas are we going to be going to an ai portal or will google have that ai portal and will it be machine will it be learning based on our previous history what what what will be different versus what we're

23:30unknown host:doing now let me let me do five years five is like far enough into the future that i think some of the hardware changes can come to pass and they're the hard harder things so hardware is like your phone so i said earlier like right the end of the phone you know the next iphone will look like today's iphone like that we're done we're done that cycle's done and what people are building now is wearables so glasses like you follow any of the stuff in hardware like ears glasses rings necklaces pendants like wrist thing you know things on your hand bands so the next year of hardware computing is wearables and so in five years time we we probably don't carry around a blackboard time bill anymore now maybe we do because it does things the other things can't do but for the most part i think a lot of our life will be through things like sunglasses and ears things and wearables so a lot of the information we get and consume will be through augmented reality so like it's it's going to radically change for sure it's going to radically change and a lot of companies are investing huge money to make this future come to pass so some version of it's going to work and come to pass i think um meta are doing like kind of incredible stuff and wearables at the moment but some of this is going to come to pass like how does that what does their life look like well how we consume information is going to totally change both the way in which we do it through hardware and by the way people listening might be like this sounds like batshit crazy what sunglasses with like augmented reality i don't think it sounds that crazy yeah if you go to 2005 and like wave this thing around you know like your phone yeah yeah people like this is what's going to happen next but the the way the information gets kind of like synthesized and delivered to you that's all going to change too you know so that's your question like you definitely are not going to google and looking up search results or searching in boxes you know i think voice will be a huge interface a big one um ai is good at voice a lot like and i encourage people like if you haven't talked to chat gpt or claude i use claude a lot claude by anthropic what does that mean anthropic are a company so open ai is the opening i build chat gpt and anthropic is a company that builds a product called claude why do you pick claude over chat gpt um they're very similar products you know there aren't massive differences in them um it's just kind of personal habits we we build we build we build a lot of thin on claude and we have a very good relationship with anthropic and i just like it's a it's brand

26:07Paul Adams:like that's actually the reason interesting the short answer is brand why do i pick

26:11unknown host:anthropic over because i like i like claude better the brand the company you know just personal preference yeah by the way i use chat gpt a lot too every single day like i use it for work a lot i use chat tp more um for specific work things and i use claude more for my personal life but there's no real reason for that there's other products too like perplexity is amazing another company and product called perplexity that people should check out but here here's like a thing i started doing recently i run a lot and running is like my you know exercise in my therapy so um i listen i used to always listen to music right so like running is is how i kind of like get away from like a busy life and I run and if I don't run I don't feel as good so I run and I'll think but I listen to music for the most most most part and recently I've started talking to ChatGPT instead I still listen to music but yeah I talk to it so funny I do that too on my walks every day I talk to ChatGPT yeah so like voice is just the most amazing interface it's the most natural interface and so yeah I think a lot of us will just talk to these wearable devices and they'll be delivering us like recommendations for all the things you mentioned where to go what to do where to eat what to see you know what's happening.

27:29Paul Adams:So if I'm a consumer packaged goods company right or founder listening to this you know even if I'm a scaling brand and I'm already doing 10 20 million should I be actually going okay I'm going to have to go out there and start looking at all of the ways and taking bets on the future? Or should I just wait until someone like Meta takes a view and kind of delivers it to me and says, right, here's the platform. This is the view we're taking on the future. And you're going to basically create a profile on this or you're going to be able to migrate or Shopify will sit into it or whatever. You know, I shouldn't have to, I'm imagining I shouldn't have to take all that responsibility on myself as a founder.

28:06Paul Adams:Do I just need to keep my ears and eyes open for the moment?

28:09unknown host:It depends. It depends. It depends. what I would say to people is, well, here's things I think are true. And then people can decide what to do with this. Here's what's true. At the beginning of these S-curves, companies you know and love die every time. They don't adapt. They don't change. They think that, you know, they kind of wait and see and they die. And companies you've never heard of before become household names. and then there's like everything in between you know and so these the beginning of these s-verbs are like incredibly chaotic um but by the way like i don't know if people i don't know how much people follow this but as a quick just as a quick like side note all of the ways in which people market and do marketing don't work anymore oh tell us all the efficacy of every channel is reducing like the more you do more and more and more and you get less and less and less back

29:12Paul Adams:If this episode is inspiring you to think about new ways that you can drive growth for your business, don't forget to click follow or subscribe on your favourite podcast app and even leave a review. Your small gesture has a big impact on me and my business and will be truly appreciated. Do you know what? Can you just tell us, because you always were in this, you know, when you were in Facebook and you're working with Nike, etc. We've all felt this for a long time in CPG, but no one has dared say it. are we right? Have you seen the data to show that all the marketing that we're doing online is actually practically not working?

29:47unknown host:There's loads of data that shows that efficacy has gone down.

29:50Paul Adams:I knew it was going down, but like, is it going down to the extent that we should actually just face up to it? That it's just, is it a waste of money?

29:57unknown host:I don't know, is it a waste of money? I don't think it's a waste of money.

29:59Paul Adams:But it's certainly getting more and more challenging.

30:03unknown host:Are people wasting money? Definitely. Is it a waste of money? No. like we we spend a ton of money okay marketing in traditional channels you know so all traditional

30:16Paul Adams:marketing channels are not working anymore the way they used to yeah yeah how good they are

30:21unknown host:is reducing and are the amount you can get from them is reducing and so that's going to continue and so like um in the beginning like so you know so marketing's totally changing like i'm a product leader i've been a product leader all my career like designer originally i've worked internet marketing teams all my life um but i'm leading a lot of marketing intercom now because um we're reinventing from first principles how we do marketing like rethinking first principles because it the old way doesn't work so what does that mean going back to first principles to reinvent how marketing is going to be for you guys this might be very specific to technology i don't know how directly it applies to consumer but but i think it might apply quite well actually the old way of doing marketing in a technology company any consumer like a consumer technology company any anyone who delivers a product over the internet was um a lot of planning and a lot of orchestration internally and themes and really clear messaging and everyone get on the same page and then refine refine refine create something really polished and then launch it and test it uh and test it yeah test it um test it iterate it um yeah but it was very much uh organized and polished and it was brand first so like the identity is the company channel like content from brands from companies that is polished uh no one cares no one cares maybe they never did really to be honest but like no one really cares and all the content that does really well now is from people so it's from Paul not from Intercom um like why is your podcast so popular because of you it's not because of the name of the podcast or your logo or your identity it's because of you and the guests you bring on right so um marketing is moving from away from companies to people you're a founder and you love seeing your picture out there you're going to do really well and you should do more and more and more of it if you're a founder who doesn't like that you need to find someone to be the face of the company because um content that's doing really well is authentic and real people and then it's raw it's like real people doing real things so it's not

32:46Paul Adams:polished it's basically like you just you're just saying it like it is on whatever you look like on that day doing whatever you're doing in the spur of the moment you don't need to have something that's been orchestrated and made perfect like 1980s ads no you need to just ship like just ship it now like you just need to ship it like why is this happening there's kind of two reasons

33:06unknown host:it's happening or there's a reason it's well it kind of predates ai a little bit you know by the other format's video so like it's all video you know what do people consume video uh what do people consider videos of people like look at tiktok look at youtube look like what's the content that people what's the content with the views people riffing talking chatting it's just them it's real life it's not polished um obviously like people curate what they say and are specific about what things they talk about but like it's it's real and it's authentic and so like those patterns already, there was already, this pattern kind of was pre-AI to some degree but TikTok predates AI but now you have a term called AI slop, I don't know how many people are familiar with this term, have you ever heard this term before?

33:54unknown host:Also people actually talk about the slop the slop apocalypse right, so the AI apocalypse of content so by the way here's a fascinating thing Last week, there's a study coming out last week. I think it was from Berkeley. I can't remember. University of Berkeley. Anyway, last week, the curves crossed. One curve is content created by humans on the internet. And the other curve, or their line, is content created by AI. And last week, they crossed. So last week, more AI content created than human content created. This AI content is terrible. It's slop. It's just awful stuff.

34:42Paul Adams:Yeah.

34:43unknown host:And a lot of people, a lot of businesses are trying to like, you know, they're trying to shortcut this whole AI thing by using AI to create content for them and using the tools to create content for them, which is really easy to do. The content's terrible. It's awful stuff. It's awful.

35:01Paul Adams:But it won't be. It won't be forever.

35:04unknown host:Well, let me get to that. So like, by the way, this content isn't awful in the sense of like, you know, mindlessly scrolling tiktok's not good for your brain like actually most of the content that you're mindlessly scrolling tiktok that's not good for your brain it's like good content in that it was good enough to get in front of your eyes right i'm not talking about that content i'm talking about like just awful stuff anyway so a lot of brands like destroy a lot of companies are destroying their brands by producing all this crap and so here's the thing in a world where the content the world's full of ai rap content the slop real people saying real things will will do really well because people want to see people people want to talk to people people want to

35:43Paul Adams:connect to people and does that mean that for jobs that there's going to be more jobs around having you know the right decision making around what is good and what is authentic and what is real and is that where humans are going to win in jobs is that why we're going to be still needed

36:01unknown host:to sift through all this crap i don't know about the sifting but but here's another thing we kind of talk a lot about in technology and by the way like i think you can i think anyone who's who's got a consumer um consumer goods product or brand um should should look at the technology industry

36:16Paul Adams:as like the kind of frontier of all this world oh absolutely you know like things that are playing

36:22unknown host:out in our world will play out in our world yeah you know so just recap for one second so people need to like think about all this ai slop don't do that um build your brand uh humans real authentic unpolished and um i think we're talking a lot in technology it's a really awkward word but people talking about taste like having good taste like do you have good taste or do i have good taste and i'm trying to hire a lot of market leaders right now i'm talking to like other technology leaders like me working for some of the most amazing ai companies everyone's kind of trying to hire the same type of people and one of the attributes of these people is that they've got great taste so that means that when they make content or they oversee content being made it's like really good it's tasteful and this is a really troublesome term because like you know who has good taste or how do you even measure if someone has good taste how do you have good taste you study culture and you study people and you observe and introspect and so like people can build um taste by introspecting observing culture observing people's society following technology following what's happening with ai following what people are saying about ai and you can kind of like reflect on like what's good what's bad and over time develop a kind of an instinct for what's

37:46Paul Adams:good like an internal language model that you've built inside yourself with emotion as well as

37:51unknown host:cognitive layers yeah and it's the same for like it's the same for anything like um food you know how do foodies become foodies because they eat a lot of food and they talk about it a lot and think about it a lot and read about it a lot or like art how does an art critic or like a fashion mogul like how do how do these people become amazing at critiquing art or amazing at like um being at the forefront of what's happening in fashion it's because they study it you know and i think a lot of there'll be a lot of reward for people who are at the very frontier cutting edge of this new world um where these like giant new companies and brands get built for people who can like study be at the cutting edge and study the kind of zeitgeist and be a part of it and start producing really good content that um follows these trends that people are consuming and that are being rewarded by uh you know these kind of channel distributors whether it's youtube or x or whatever

38:47Paul Adams:so to go back to you guys at um intercom or at finn you're going back to first principles how are you going to adapt the marketing you now do in the future what choices are you making now

38:57unknown host:versus what you did before no one no again no one really knows but here's what we're doing uh we've blown up the past we've blown up how it used to work um like literally just blowing the whole thing up and um the oh and the reason for that by the way is i kind of took over um kind of large parts of marketing to come and the reason i blew up everything was because people are habitual like all of us humans are human the human species are so change-averse hate we hate change even the humans who love change still hate it a lot of time like we're really change averse because change is risky you know um you go back like 100 years 500 years you don't go around just eating random shit off the bushes you know like you don't experiment you eat the things you know don't kill you right so like we we and you stay in the cave with the fire at night time like there's deep deep reasons why we are risk averse change of our species and so that now plays out in the modern workplace like people won't change they're going to stick to the same thing they did always because that's how they're hardwired and then they're going to pretend to change oh yeah you know and it's gonna be a lot of pressure to change too um and they're going to pretend pretend to themselves kid themselves like oh yeah we're doing ai we're like i'm using i use chat gpt you know without actually like deeply deeply introspecting on this is ever going to work and so i blew up everything and i told the team the reason i'm blowing up everything is because the only way you know if you've kind of like crossed the boundary of where you need to be is by crossing the boundary like you know you have to kind of like go over the boundary and realize oh shit everything's broken all right now that we know everything's broken we can add back in the pieces we need and now we're like at the boundary where we need to be um and people are going to like really struggle with this idea they're going to keep doing loads of the things that they do today that don't work maybe never did and they're going to persist with them and dabble in ai over here but like you can't do it you're not that's not the future it's like you're it's 1999 and you're like playing around with the internet but you have your blockbuster store still going and you're thinking most about your Blockbuster store, you know.

41:20Paul Adams:You're based in Dublin and one of the forefront in drone deliveries is in Dublin. What's the name of the... Mana. Mana. Yeah, Mana, yeah. And there's a couple of zones in Dublin where it's regulated to get drone deliveries within minutes from Amazon or from Aldi or from, I don't know who is on board, I can't remember. Have you done it yet?

41:41unknown host:I have, no, it's not in our area.

41:43Paul Adams:Not in your area, okay.

41:44unknown host:No, but Des, our co-founder, does it all the time.

41:48Paul Adams:Okay, so he's probably one of the people who is at that forefront, cutting edge. You know, I'm not saying Des is wearing a wearable, but he's going, using his voice to say, hey, mana, deliver me whatever. Five minutes later, something's delivered to either the top of bus stops I think they're using or because that doesn't hurt anyone's head. And then it comes down, then it comes down a chute or into your garden. But I was talking to people recently, actually I was home in Dublin last week and they were saying that there's drones near them. And all night long, the drones are buzzing in their estate and they're dropping things all night long.

42:23Paul Adams:And the noise is really, really annoying, right? So I'm sure there's a whole lot of regulation piece and behaviour and all sorts of stuff that's going to change that. But we are, if we're a CPG company, right? Thinking about how people shop, thinking about, for example, what kind of packaging is most, and this is like simple stuff, rather than just, oh yeah, do we have a case of six, a case of four? do we also have a drone delivery perfect ready case of two because that's what people want when they order it from a drone they don't want a case of four or a case of six and they don't want one you know we're going to have to be thinking about little things like that um and getting ahead of that really quickly and they're small things or this like the yucca app i don't know if you've got the yucca app yet in ireland have you it's y-u-k-a everyone here even on the isle of man is using it and let alone like in london so it's a french company where you scan any barcode and it will tell you the traffic light system but it gives it yucca points so it'll tell you green orange or red based on their own system their own ai system but things like um additives real research that's been done at links it gives you the source the research and everything and i think very soon there will be yucca scores on packs and you'll be going around with your wearable probably in the future i'm now doing the imagining and you'll be doing your shopping with your wearable maybe when you go into tesco you'll be able to download your tesco app on your wearable and then you just be able to look at something and it's added to your trolley but your trolley is virtual and then you just go pick up your trolley at the trolley collection place you

43:50unknown host:don't actually need to necessarily pick anything up yeah all that's all that technology is coming like um it's here all that stuff's here today but it isn't mass market though here's what I think about this stuff um one is like all the technology that you use today by the way like we are at the very very beginning of this s curve i mentioned earlier ai there's a there's a one there's a parallel when like mobile and social are going to happen together the parallel one here is robotics so like ai and robots okay and ai powered robots are insane again like go on the internet and look up like china ai powered robot and see the things that robots ai powered robots can do like crazy shit like just unbelievable and blow your mind i will google that i'm gonna do that and drones right drones are robots basically and what i like what i have to kind of always impress one people about this technology is the worst it's ever going to be this is the beginning of the internet the internet used to be terrible like dial-up modems and it was awful you know and like people with their pdf their marketing pdf was their website right like it was awful but it evolved very fast and it comes like you know Shopify emerged and like made it easier to do all this kind of stuff it's the same, that's where we're at and so all this technology, it's the worst it's ever will be, the large language model that you use chat GPT or Claude, it's the worst it'll ever be, the drones are the noisiest they'll ever be, they're not going to get more noisy they're going to get quieter like all this technology is going to get way better the drones will get to a place where they're very quiet either because they'll be way higher in the sky or like they'll just, both will happen probably.

45:35unknown host:They'll be able to reduce the amount of noise the drawing makes. All this wearable stuff is coming. And so the combination like AI and robotics is going to totally change how we shop. A lot of this though is really hard to plan for. Like, you know, if you're like a consumer brand, it's really hard to plan for that stuff. Like, how do you know? Well, you should experiment for a start and understand the technology because good decisions come from knowledge and trying things and experimenting with stuff in a real way, not like a pretend way. So it's really hard to say how people will shop in the future.

46:12unknown host:I don't even know if we'll go to Tesco in the same way that we do today. Now, people said that when the internet showed up, hey, no one will buy in a store anymore, everyone will shop online. But a lot of people, even today, a lot of shops especially i think in the u.s with like flagship cosmetics brands things like that um the shop is a showroom it's not a shop you know like it's an experience and i can imagine a world in which that that becomes um more common but certainly the way in which people will decide to buy one product over another is going to totally change i don't know how but yep you're going to have wearables on you're going to have audio and visual glasses or ears or whatever and you're going to be told things um like buy this this is on offer loyalty points over here this thing's healthy this thing's terrible for you like all that stuff is going to come the amount

47:08Paul Adams:of noise i mean the noise we already have what's that noise going to be like and then you've got industries adjacent industries or opposite adjacents which is like you know the quiet uh wilderness escapes and quiet coaches, which you'll probably pay to sit for an hour with you every day and say nothing to them.

47:28unknown host:That's why I go running. I just run away from all the people.

47:31Paul Adams:Yeah, but then you talk to ChatGPT.

47:33unknown host:Yeah, sometimes they do, yeah.

47:35Paul Adams:So let's talk about the big CPG. Do you think Nike is looking at all of this? Do you think that... Oh, 100%. So how are they looking at it? What are they doing?

47:43unknown host:60 % to 70 % of Nike are in total denial. or maybe i'll go a step further like this might be offensive i apologize to mikey half of people like you aren't even included and they have no idea what's going on and then another half like in denial because at the beginning of these s curves everyone's just getting those skeptics and cynics um every time same thing and then i say a tiny minority are like doing things and making things and trying things and and building like all of this is like you have to make things and you ship them whatever that means to you ship them into the real world get real feedback from real people otherwise you can't learn if something does or doesn't work you know um so i'd imagine that like uh a lot of people at nike yeah are experimenting a lot you know all these huge consumer companies the other the other thing is the more practical way you can probably think about it is is how work gets done not the thing you make market sell but how work gets done in your company like how work gets done is already been transformed um there's huge productivity gains huge creative gains to be made from people um trying these new tools how do you avoid the time

48:58Paul Adams:waste though so what i'm finding with the companies that i'm working with is you know there's companies that are helping you to streamline your ops your supply chain your finance all into one user interface. There's companies that are taking all of your data from your supermarkets. And instead of you having a zillion XLs that you're trying to do VLOOKUPS, they are, you know, bringing it all into one UX lens view, right? And then they're linking that to actions. So there's a great company called Elm, actually, who I think I put you in touch with, Kian. It's brilliant. Where, you know, taking all the EPOS data interface, and then it's like, okay, we're not in those five stores up in Manchester, according to our data.

49:36Paul Adams:and then you can syndicate a field sales visit as a result of that through the actual dashboard. I mean, how amazing is that, right? Yeah. How do you personally pull internally? How do you make a decision on which tool to jump on board with and which one not to waste your time with? Because I'm sure I feel like with all of the podcasting AI available and all of the different kind of work efficacy tools available to me, I spend so much time jumping on one and then it doesn't work and jumping on another. and I know all of my colleagues and friends in LinkedIn Network are doing the same. We all seem to be wasting time until we get to the one that's eventually going to win.

50:14Paul Adams:Do we just wait and then jump on the one at the right time that wins? Because it's so nation to the industry and there's going to be so many people who just fall away?

50:23unknown host:Yeah, well, for a start, like there's no winners yet. It's way too early.

50:27Paul Adams:So what do you do? What do you do? Do you just try a whole lot of different things?

50:30unknown host:Yeah, I don't think it's wasting time. Okay. You know, you're not wasting time. if you're properly doing it like if you're properly using the tool looking at the website isn't using the tool using the tool is actually using the tool using the tool for like a pretend use case isn't using the tool like using the tool is i've changed something about what i really need to do like real work or you know real things i'm trying real things now because a lot of ai products look great and look like they work but they don't the majority of ai products don't work there's a lot of real rubbish crap again the same as like early internet any of these early s curves loads of rubbish like think of all the like mobile app store the first app store all the

51:12Paul Adams:apps rubbish but i've got like ai anxiety because i'm afraid that i oh i do like i'm i there's so many out there and i don't have time to try them all but yet i could be missing a trick so yeah

51:23unknown host:it's overwhelming it is yeah it's overwhelming the kind of two pieces of advice i have are one you're not wasting time like that's like saying you know um hey i'll wait till the internet's figured out i'll wait till the winners have emerged on the internet then i'll start to use the internet you know i'll still send letters and i'll still put like you know leaflets in people's letter boxes you know for my marketing campaign and then when the internet works then i'll do it it's like you've lost it's too late too late your competitors are destroying you already so it's i don't think it's wasting time now you can easily waste time for sure you know so like the way i've spent countless hours i regret um and it is overwhelming there's so much noise so much hype i just ask other people oh good old word about you know social proof like ask other people what do they do and what are they using what's good what's not you know like that's kind of uh that's what's worth seeing with finn too like how in terms of how we're marketing fin it's um word of mouth social proof customer evidence like all the like you know the new way of doing marketing for ai i think will actually go back to basics a lot of you know back to fundamental things can be really good back to mad men you know not the whiskey in the morning part but the other parts you know the good parts so like i think it'd be good yeah you have to just do it you have to try it i don't think it's not wasting time talk talk to us about

52:47Paul Adams:jobs if you're a founder in a scaling cpg brand and you're thinking about the future of your team you said at the beginning that people are peddling this myth that you know nobody there'll be no jobs anymore talk to us a little bit about your hypothesis for what work will look like if ai is doing a lot of the work of people what will people be doing in a cpg brand the job like just

53:08unknown host:on the jobs thing uh this happens every time too you know like cars used to be made by human human human beings they're screwing in bolts into cars now it's all robots car humans do not make cars robots do it's not like loads and loads of car making people wandering the streets looking for a job like that's not how the economics of employment work so so like every time it's the same people change the job that like let the type of job kind of goes up a level of abstraction and people manage the people who made the cars now manage the robots who made the cars like same for customer service our space the people who are doing the customer service work which is a shit job by the way like it's repetitive answering the same question over and over high huge turnover staff people hate it can't get people to to work in it for long those people are now doing way cooler jobs they're managing the ai they're designing the ai they're writing content and knowledge for the ai to use like higher intellect work more interesting work so like that's what happens a lot it turns out in companies um companies in the future will be way smaller i i think we've had this like huge bloat over the last 10 20 years huge bloat in companies where hyper specialization um and specialists hire more specialists and subdivide their specialism into even more specialists and you got you had huge bloat and the problem with specialism people optimized for like domain knowledge at the cost of speed like more people means slower you know and it's worse like politics people disagreeing and like looking out for themselves so if you've less people you can make decisions faster and i think the future looks like companies will be way smaller like i don't want our company to grow bigger i'm trying to i am hiring but i'm trying to do way more way fewer people and one of the reasons is because ai ai is a converging technology it's it's it's it's merging things together that used to be separate so like the way we build software has totally changed we used to have like pm designer engineers three distinct roles and now the roles are really merging because a designer with ai coding tools can be an engineer you know and an engineer with an AI design tool can be a designer.

55:29unknown host:So we're seeing these roles merge. And I think the same is what's happening in product and marketing too. I'm currently talking to the team about the idea that product marketing, content marketing, and customer advocacy are basically 80 % the same job. The people who are brilliant at these things understand the market, understand the customers.

55:52Paul Adams:So you're going back to the way it was originally.

55:55unknown host:Yeah, totally, totally. Back to the fundamentals. I love it. Back to where it was pre-internet. So it's an amazing time to be a founder because if you properly go deep into this AI world, like properly and invest in it, you can do so much with solo. There's companies of two and three people that would have been like 50 people. If you have all the AI tooling around you, and it's early, a lot of this stuff doesn't work properly yet. There's definitely loads of crack products in the market. It's overwhelming. But if you kind of work your way through it, which just takes time, and honestly, good old-fashioned hard work.

56:31unknown host:We also like, this is a whole other side note. I think we entered a time with COVID and things like that where people got fond of not working hard. A lot of people. They got fond of like living at home, like working from home and, you know.

56:43Paul Adams:Yeah, not backbreaking stuff.

56:45unknown host:Yeah, and grinding it out. Grind. Yeah, the grind. Embrace the grind.

56:50Paul Adams:Embrace the grind. I love it. quickly before we wrap up because i know that you've got a hard stop who should we follow what should we watch who should we be following on youtube or wherever where do you get your information what newsletters who should be following on linkedin in order that we try i know we can't be at the forefront of this the way you are but who do you get your inspiration from i read ai newsletters okay like there's lots of different ai newsletters like i can send you links to them please do we'll put them yeah i'll put them in the in the notes right yeah exactly

57:19unknown host:so I follow AI newsletters now that's mostly like technology AI technology news like before we got on here we were talking about Sora you know like that's things like hey Sora 3 is out you know or like hey someone has built this thing on the back of Sora or whatever

57:33Paul Adams:Sora's incredible anyone we'll put a link to Sora as well but be careful

57:37unknown host:it's incredible yeah

57:38Paul Adams:you know the way people can upload themselves to Sora right and if you don't know about this we can't explain it now so just go and have a look S-O-R-A right

57:47unknown host:Sora 2 yeah

57:48Paul Adams:You can upload yourself and then you're also giving permission for anyone to use your avatar in anything that they want to create. What about products? So like if I had a product, like let's say Perfect Head, my friends at Perfect Head, my matcha tea, could I upload my matcha tea can? And then anyone can create anything they want with my brand. I mean, can brands almost become trending on an AI platform like Sora in the same way as a human could?

58:14unknown host:That's the exact kind of experimentation I think people should be doing. that's really good practical I think a lot of what I talked about today is a bit abstract for people maybe but like practically yeah you know these tools are incredible VO, Google's equivalents of Sora.

58:26Paul Adams:So where could your brand live in this new world?

58:29unknown host:Well no one knows.

58:31Paul Adams:Yeah that's what I'm saying I'm saying almost think about it practically like brainstorm and then go and go and do it.

58:36unknown host:And go and start making this stuff like this is these are all of these tools all these AI tools are used by prompting them, which basically means giving them instructions in words. And all of us are good at words. Humans are good. This is why ChatGPT exploded, because, hey, it's easy to text. It's easy to talk into a box. I know how to do that. I do it every day on WhatsApp and Google. You know, it's the same thing. So, like, you just talk to it. And prompting is a skill that I think everyone needs to get really good at. Prompting just means, people, by the way, overcomplicate a lot of this stuff.

59:08unknown host:Prompting just means being good at giving the AI instructions.

59:10Paul Adams:Yeah.

59:11unknown host:And like telling what to do and refining the instructions.

59:14Paul Adams:With your objective in mind.

59:15unknown host:Exactly, yeah. And so like just go to Sora and all these tools and just try stuff.

59:23Paul Adams:It's great advice. Paul, thank you so much for coming on today. I really hope everybody out there is inspired to start thinking about how the future is going to impact the way their company works, the way their products are shopped, the way we're all going to live. and even if this does nothing else but makes you sign up for some AI newsletters, follow some new people on LinkedIn, start thinking about this thing, maybe within the next year it'll become apparent to you as to how you're going to use it and how you're going to move forward into it. But the objective of this really was to just give you some fodder to make sure that you don't just stay stuck doing what you're doing now because it's all changing.

1:00:00unknown host:Yeah, and ignore the hype. It's hyped, it's overhyped, there's a lot of crap out there, it's overwhelming, but it's real. It's real. And like, I just can't encourage you enough. Like, it's the next internet. And it's here. Like, it's already happening. It's two years old. Like, the internet is here again, the new one, two years ago. You know, you can put your head in the sand or you can hate all the hype and crap around it. Or like, you can get making stuff. Totally.

1:00:34Paul Adams:Paul Adams of Intercom. thank you so much for coming on Brand Growth Heroes today.

1:00:39unknown host:Yeah, thanks for having me, Fee.

1:00:44Paul Adams:Thank you so much, Paul, for that inspiration. I mean, really, it has just shifted something inside of me. And like I said at the beginning of this episode, you know, when I was introducing Paul, it made me wake up and set up a WhatsApp group, inviting all the UK founders that I know to join that group to kind of share our thinking and our learning on this journey I'm about to set up the LinkedIn page. By the time this episode goes live, there will be a LinkedIn page called Brand Growth Heroes Next Gen CPG. Please do join. Please do like and follow the show. Share this episode with anyone who you think will find it useful.

1:01:20Paul Adams:And yeah, don't be scared. Lean in. Brands in every single category who are going to win are the ones who take this new shift seriously and lead with open eyes, open ears and open hearts.

1:01:37Paul Adams:As always, thanks again to my tech guru and sound engineer, Jip Bagan of Bala Groove, and my podcast producer, Catherine of Social Cues.