Adam Brotman and Andy Sack | Co-Founders, Forum3 | It's a Bird! It's a Plane! Holy Sh!t, It's AI!

32:47So talk about, so I'm somewhere between the, I can use this to write legal briefs and personalized emails versus this is going to obliterate humanity. I should be moving as fast as I can in the execution, but thinking bigger, right? Okay. And one of the things you said in your talk or in our pre-show is the past is not going to be a good predictor for AI. And you also talked about being on the other side or the far side of the trough. Tell us what that means as you look at AI. I think you've done a little bit of that already on the, you can't think about this as technology burdened by any adoption or infrastructure.

33:36You have to think about it of technology as technology unleashed. Add any color to that you want, and then tell me about the trough.

33:48Adam, you want that one? Sure. So on the trough point, my first thought is we interviewed probably the leading example of a company that has completely adopted an AI first mindset and practice, which is Moderna, the vaccine biotech company. And they went out, they've always wanted to be AI first, even before ChatGBT was a thing. Like that was a part of their reason for being was to use technology and AI to help solve some of these biotech questions so they could help cure diseases and prevent diseases. That's their mission. And so in a weird way, they've been AI first in the beginning. They went out and sought out the leading AI digital transformation expert in the world.

34:40And it's not Andy and I. We aspire to be that. But it was this guy named Bryce Cholomel who was working at Google, who had come from BCG. He lived in France. He was a professor. He wrote books. And then he ultimately led the Google Cloud AI transformation group. and him and his team were plucked out of Google to go work at Moderna to lead an AI transformation. And they got a headstart on this. They got educated, they ran hackathons, they developed a generative AI champions team. They did all these practices to get 3 ,000 of their 5 ,000 employees using AI every single day. And to make it not just a random active AI kind of thing, but actually like a fully blown, scaled AI first organization where they were harnessing AI.

35:33And what he said to us was, he said, and he said, all these people are like saying that, is there too much hype about AI? And he said to Andy and I, he goes, we're over on the other side of the trough of disillusionment of the hype cycle saying, hey, everybody, we're over here and it's real. And they claim to be able, they claim on their, they published a thing online, a case study, if you will, or customer story online that says they feel like they can do five times the amount of product marketing and product development that they could have done before they became AI first. And they're probably doing the work of a hundred thousand people or so with a five, 6 ,000 person organization.

36:22And that's when he was saying it's real. If you adopt it, the level of like innovation and productivity gains are real across every function. That's, that's what, you know, when I think about the question of like being on the other side of the trough, I think about what Bryce was telling us about where Moderna is at. And I think it was just a good case study to, to keep in mind that, you know, if you, if you would, if you embrace it and invite it to embrace AI and get curious and get literate and really try and infuse it in what you're doing, it can have this profound effect. And you can be one of the companies that has a competitive advantage as this technology is speeding along and the capabilities are getting better and more fascinating.

37:05You want to be a company that's, it's like surfing, right? You want to be, you want to, you don't, you want to start paddling now. You know, you don't want to be paddling as that wave. in the front unfortunately the wave isn't going to be probably coming from behind you it's going to be probably coming at you there you go something as powerful as this you know so this says you got to start practicing and experimenting right away and you can't outsource this to like one or two people you've got to plug it in and we'll talk more about this in a minute because i want to flip now into marketers so after ai has whatever it's going to do but we'll put it in the Positive Light, Saved Society, Cured Cancer, created a StarTech-like intelligence, intergalactic foundation.

37:46What kind of impact is it going to have on marketing and agencies?

37:56I don't want to do all the talking, but what I'd say is, I think it's going to change the job of marketing. I mean, it's probably going to impact some jobs in marketing. It's going to impact jobs across every function, right? And some functions are going to get impacted more than others. Like there are some functions and I'm not trying to be whatever, you know, Pollyannish or whatever the right word is about this. Like it's actually like, you know, there's going to be disruption. And, you know, frankly, Andy and I, we're probably not going to be necessary as I nervously laugh about it in a few years.

38:29Like there's a real like it's like every knowledge work is going to get disrupted. As a marketer, though, I think there's a real opportunity with AI. Because this isn't something that like today you can just like spin up an AI marketer that's just going to, and trust me, Andy and I, we're working on a thing called Spock at our company. It's an AI marketing expert platform where we're trying to see if we can create like a great platform to help marketers. Yes, SPOK. Oh, rats, I thought it was. That's okay. But yeah, that's the idea. And the idea is it's not easy, right? You don't just go wave a magic wand yet and say, we don't have AGI yet.

39:09It's not just as simple as like, hey, do all this stuff for me. And so there's a real opportunity for marketers to get AI literate, to get in the flow and start experimenting, like we said, because I think what's going to happen is that personally that the job of marketing is going to change. I don't think it's going to eliminate the need. I mean, companies are going to still need to do marketing. In fact, marketing might be more important than ever in the age of AI with content everywhere. And, you know, we think so, too, at least from our show. And we have one show called Will Your Next Best Customer Be an AI Bot?

39:43Because if the bots don't find you, you know, customers aren't there running around doing search anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Consumer. Yeah. So consumer behavior is going to Andy, maybe we can talk about that. Like consumer behavior is going to change radically because of this, which means as a marketer, you're going to your job is more necessary. than ever, but that doesn't mean your job is not going to change. I mean, think about my job as chief digital officer at Starbucks. Like there was no such thing as a chief digital officer when I started. Right. And it wasn't like, like, you know, the, the disruption that came from digital meant that, um, you know, people, it just changed the nature of the job.

40:19You had to sort of understand how to connect dots differently. And I, I think that's true now AI and marketing. I think I did, I do think it's about getting literate, getting proficient, getting your organization to at least embrace it on some level so you can experiment with it and then figure out how to make your job better, easier. I've never met a marketer that has all the resources they need. So my guess is that the productivity enhancements that AI give are gonna really be a blessing for in certain cases. And yes, it will be disruptive. And so I think there's gonna be either marketing leaders, marketing individual contributors and agencies that are gonna realize like, I need to be one of the, I need to be one of the, the, I need to be in that, in that Venn diagram circle that says I'm experimenting with it.

41:08I'm literate and I'm sort of surfing, you know, not, not somebody who's sort of resisting. Can I add, can I add? Yeah. And if you can also write in agencies. Yeah. So I, I actually, I, I will. So to the, to the point of like, uh, I'll call it the paradox or contradiction of, of Sam Altman's quote that 95 % of marketing as we know it will be completed by AGI within five years time, approximately, which would make whenever we say that, which would make everyone that's listening to this podcast nervous in there and fear driven about their job. So that's like a clench. On the counter to that, if you think about what AI enables, what we talked about just moments ago, AI, it certainly enables a tremendous amount of content, like every aspect of the multimodal, the text, the audio, the visual.

42:12Now, an explosion of creativity allows content to go through the roof at very low cost, and to the point where synthetic influencers have been born and they're getting millions of followers. Synthetic bands are forming with synthetic music and they're getting millions of followers. So as you've got that content and explosion of creativity occurring, all of that sort of empowers the marketer and it raises the need for being smarter and more strategic about marketing in the age of AI because you need to stand out, even the need for it to stand out and be differentiated about. And oh, by the way, we're in the internet age where the switching costs like TikTok are almost zero.

43:01They are zero. If you're not making an impact within five seconds, oh, next channel, please. Five seconds, maybe. So the people that are able to deploy the tools and the creativity in ways, and oh, by the way, you know, the example I used of TikTok and make it viral and making it a gen, the people that understand what's capable, it's much more of a composer. And I actually think that the, the, that drives a whole new realm of what it means to be a marketer to Adam's point, the job of marketing will change. And I'll go further to say that like, those that can deploy marketing to actually win the game of marketing for their company, which means increased personalization.

43:49Ultimately, the message that Mike, that would resonate with you would be different than the message that would resonate with me. And working with AI to have the right creativity deployed and the systems deployed in a way that it actually drives sales. And from all that, you actually have a lot of talk in the venture industry about the birth of, they extrapolate and go, oh, at some point, there'll be an individual person that creates a billion dollar company because they just manage AI. I think we're a long way from that. However, I think you are going to see really powerful creative teams. And I think it totally affect like, you know, the definition of what an agency, a marketing agency does, you know, I think AI really puts a test on them and they're going to need to transform what an agency does.

44:48Do I think people still need help in managing all this? Yeah. We talk to business leaders and marketers every day and they're like, you know, they go, oh, this is a neat tool for creating a blog post, but they really, A, don't understand the tsunami of change that's coming. And they also don't understand, even if they do, they start to understand it. A, it instills fear. B, it's like, where do I even begin? And I think there were real, like in our book, we try to answer that. Real steps that you can be taking now as a marketer to start understanding for yourself and start planning and instituting change.

45:28I want to talk about that in a minute, but I want to stay in this and say, look, okay, so if I'm out there and I want to get an AI vendor, or I want to convince my company to do it, how do I even go about evaluating vendors the right way, and then telling non-believers or slower adopters how I'm measuring the impact, especially people that want ROI on everything I do? Give me a, how do I even pick the right vendor and measure the impact if I'm bringing someone in? Well, on the vendor side, we get that question a lot. It's a really good question. And I think it goes to, there's a first step you need to take as a leader, whether you're a marketer or CEO or whatever, like for organizations, you have to have some in your organization, there needs to be a center of AI literacy and proficiency.

46:32It doesn't have to be every single employee on day one. And I think this concept of like some, there's a bit of a crawl, walk, run that might be necessary and different companies have different cultures. However, there needs to be a center of AI literacy and proficiency in your company. Now you can call that an AI council. You can call it an AI champions team. It might be one person. It might be a 20 person AI council. The point is that group or person or persons has to invest at least, you know, a month or two right now, like getting AI literate and proficient. They don't have to become experts, but they need to be like listening to the right podcasts, getting, taking a bootcamp, doing a workshop, like understanding enough about the contours of AI and the trajectory of it, and staying abreast of it.

47:25So then for that reason, if you get to that place, which is not that hard, it takes about a month or two, it doesn't take, you don't have to hire Google's AI transformation expert to do it. It could be a part of somebody's job. It could be a part of the CMO's job. It could be a part of the CIO's job. It could be a group of people that are young and old and mixed and passionate about AI. Once they get to be to a baseline of AI proficiency, it's like riding a bike. All of a sudden you just do it. Meaning you're up to speed, you understand it, you have an intuition about it, you have a feeling for it.

48:01And then when you're talking to a vendor, a potential vendor, because remember you're talking about a potential vendor, Mike, every single piece of software that's used in the enterprise is going to have, if not already today. Every consulting company already is saying we understand this. Every single company, there's not a piece of enterprise software you're going to use in marketing or any function that doesn't have some AI widget or AI co-pilot or AI assistant or AI whatever. And so you're already having to assess that with all of your current vendors, let alone all these startups are going to come at you with these wrapper apps that are going to say, hey, I've got this cool thing.

48:38You just need to be able to go, cool, let me take a look at it. and you assign it off to someone on the council or whatever, you take a look at it. And you can just, you have to look at like, who's the back, you know, do they have, who's behind them, what technology they're using, see a demo, and you'll be able to suss out like, all right, this. But it is practice due diligence versus, you know, I read a book and I can do this. Yeah, and you can't fake that. But what I'm here to tell you is that it's not like a multimillion dollar expenditure as a company to get to that point. But it requires a level of focus and a mindset shift.

49:17So in our book, we talk about what is the common trait of best practice in our case studies of companies that have been able to get to at least that first basic step is that they had executive sponsorship. They got some little bit of a center of AI literacy and proficiency going and they effectively committed to doing that. And then at that point, they were able to sort of take that and run with it. And that includes assessing vendors. That includes figuring out what their AI use policy should be and how they should do experiments and how they should do roadmapping and all that. And what else is in that playbook that you would share with our listeners today?

49:56Because I like those three steps in the console, but like... Yeah, I mean, Adam just talked about the AI console. So, I mean, step one is really is at the C-suite level, get proficient yourself, right? Like, so we have a whole, like, this is not the, AI is not the kind of technology that I think you want to outsource. You can't just hire an agency to go do it for you in the way that you could say social media, et cetera. So, A, start playing with the tools yourself and come up to speed. And the way we, what does that mean? That means get a license to chat to UBT, probably get a license for your team to one of the large language models and get people, get the employees start moving on their own journey of productivity enhancement.

50:53And really what that means is getting through the first 10 hours of use, because we're finding that in general, even still, while it's been the fastest adopted technology in history, the level of use and understanding is low in the business world. And so, A, get proficient, which means understand how to prompt, understand what the tool is capable of, generally get your mind around it. get a council in place. And then the next thing is, is the council as it proliferates, we basically go, okay, like choose one area where one or two, but choose one area where you think you can have a, where it may help your business.

51:40And whether that be customer support or some marketing task. And every time like executives always ask us, oh, like, and people look too early for ROI. And I think in general, if, if when people do the, the first step and do the 10 hours, if they're not seeing like, Oh my gosh, this saved me. They could have a holy shit moment. Yeah. If they don't have their own holy shit moment. Yeah. You have a whole, every person that we've put and said, Hey, do something for your fan, do a job for your family that are your children or, or for work. And they tried to do that and they turn to the large language.

52:21I'm just using chat GPT because it's the predominant one, but there are others. Quad is fantastic. And now Google is quickly on the rise with Gemini. Sue's one, we don't care which one, and start to do a job that you want to do. If you don't, everybody has an aha moment as they go, whoa, look at that response. And they also realize some of the limitations. As you do that, that we say, okay, now choose an area in your business where you can actually have a productivity win and don't look for ROI too early in that process. And the main reason is like, you have to give people the opportunity to experiment and it takes a little bit of time, but the ROI is so clearly there.

53:07I mean, I think that's going back to earlier in our conversation when Bruce from Moderna said, look, I'm on the other side of the trial looking back at the people who are going, When it's this hyped or overhyped, like looking back on like, what are you waiting for? Because they're seeing 5X kind of productivity gains. It's insane what not in all areas and not without mess and not without failure, but it's incredibly in the ROI is so intuitive. It's like you're paying$20 a month per user and you're getting thousands of dollars worth of productivity gains. um it's an IQ test my holy shit moment my holy shit moment is when I had it design a picture like that I wanted to make I want to send a funny picture to a friend and it could do just about anything in seconds and I thought this would have taken my any good creative team it would have taken a day yeah and it was like holy shit and and I don't want to let the ROI point go because you you both said something really interesting it's kind of like trying to calculate the roi of electricity and and i and i want you guys to talk about that a little more because i think you were the the moderna thing is is leading to that but yeah it's basically saying don't be don't be crazy stupid about this thing yeah we got that we actually got that quote from bryce at Moderna when he said...

54:36Okay, that's not our full quote to Bryce. All right, well. But to that point, let's talk about ROI. And Andy's right, like people are too quick to... So it's funny where the word ROI, because first of all, it doesn't cost you very much to get proficient and to use the actual tools. So in the strictest sense of the word ROI, it's funny because you're talking about investing, a portion of some people's time to get up to speed on one of the most important, if not the most important technologies that are coming into the world and spending 25 bucks a month on some enterprise level thing. And if you use it right, you're probably already going to see, and there's studies that have proven this, if you use it right, you're going to see, call it 20 plus percent productivity gains across every function that's using it right so for starters the roi on that as a strict matter of roi is astronomically high but that's not even like that's funny that is like talking about the roi of electricity or computers because to bryce's point because we're not when what we're talking about that's just talking about you just talked about making a picture faster not that you can't make a picture right now it's just that you'd have to the tools and the people and the time, what we're talking about, what Andy and I are talking to our, you know, we're learning the case studies that we have seen, the 20 % to 40 % productivity gains that could lead to 10 % to 15 % EBITDA improvements across an organization, that's actually kind of becoming kind of table stakes to the way we think about ROI.

56:17In the book, we talk about a case study of a company called Susie that actually the CEO got proficient himself, understood, got literate, and right away was like, oh, I can use ChatGPT. In this case, it was ChatGPT to create an unlock in my sales process. So you start to realize it's not just about productivity. It's about either higher quality output or some unlock of something that was just beyond your reach. And so like, that's when things get really wild because in that case study, for example, he, what he did, and we talked about this in the book is he actually realized he had all this data.

56:57He said, I have all this data. And what he was referring to is that I think he used a sales software program called Gong, I think. And it was transcribing and categorizing every single sales and account management call. His team used Slack, right? So he had all these transcripts. And he was like, wait a minute, I could feed those into, I can sort of jerry-rig using Zapier, like feed those into a, to ChatGBT and into a program that basically I can take my own domain knowledge of what's a good sales call, what's a bad sales call, what's a risk for churn, What's a high propensity to close? He had this in his own mind because he's built this sales organization over years.

57:41And he was able to take his own domain knowledge, combine it with the data he had with the transcripts and ChatGPT. And he came up with a sales agent. It's not really, you know, kind of sales bot that would basically take all the calls real time that his sales and account management team was having and create a Slack or Teams or whatever based alert system. that would allow him to have a much better rate of close and a much better rate of preventing churn. And he did so without having to fire a bunch of people or hire a bunch of people. He basically, I think he said he tripled, I think in the book he said, right Andy, he said he tripled his sales.

58:22He tripled his sales without having to add any sales people or any account reps or whatever. So it's an example of, you think about the ROI in terms of productivity lift, But a key part for your audience to think about that we've learned is that you have your every company has their own domain knowledge. And that's something that ChatGBT doesn't have as well as you do. So you've got to combine that. If you get AI literate and you do the steps we're talking about, you find that you can combine your domain knowledge expertise of your company with the AI, with the data. Right. And that's how you and that's how you get these unlocks.

58:58And that's where the real ROI magic comes from. And that's, you know, that's what we're, so there's both this sort of always on productivity lift and, and, you know, profit improvement and throughput improvement. And then there's these breakthroughs that only you'll be able to come out with. And we talked to a, in our book, our last chapter was with Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who's sort of a guru in this space. And he wrote a book called Co-Intelligence. He's incredible follow. He has a blog. He has a book. He's kind of the guy to listen to in a lot of these cases in terms of applied AI for ROI across a number of industries.

59:37And we asked him to read our book. And the chapter was, professor, kind of critique our book. Tell us where we got it right, where we got it wrong. And as Andy likes to say, as a good professor did, he sort of chastised us and said, yeah, your playbook is great for today. But it's not good enough. You should be pushing your clients harder, pushing your readers harder to experiment because only the client, only the marketer at a company really knows their company and can sort of take that. And they should be thinking about all they could get. If they can take their AI proficiency, they're the key to these unlocks, which is where the real ROI is going to happen.

1:00:18So I think that is a great way to finish this and get to our traditional last question, because clearly we could talk to both of you for a long time, but we're at time. Mike, we're just getting warmed up. I know. Well, look, we, we, you know, we'll have you back on the show, even though this, you know, this is a two-parter, but we always finish with this last question. It's a two-part question. Funny story you can tell on the air and or practical advice we haven't discussed yet. You could take one or both of these, but you must take at least one. you know you prepped us and gave us warning you were going to ask those questions we did adam did you did you prepare because i sure as hell didn't you know we're like what are the two questions again might give funniest story funniest story you can tell on the air or practical advice to our listeners we haven't talked about yet funniest story you can tell on the air i'll i mean i don't know i'm sure you're dying to tell the funny story yeah i don't have a lot of practical advice but i'll take the practical advice you tell the funny story all right there we go i i i mean this is not i mean It's not that funny, but, um, you know, yesterday, um, I got dressed up for work.

1:01:51I tend to, as Adam points out, I tend to like button down shirts and I hold from my closet, a silk shirt, um, that I've had a little while. I mean, it's a little dated, but in its datedness, because I'm a little dated, in its datedness, it's got this very nice silk feel. So I've got the good 1970s look going on. And I go to work. John's a little look with nothing on you. Yeah, with nothing. And I go to work, and I spend all day. And then Thursday happens to be poker night for me. So I played poker last night. and as I arrived I had my coat on as I arrived people like oh Andy like looking good like look at that shirt like I got a couple of compliments about my shirt I take my coat off I sit down and like I don't know 15 20 minutes after being seated at the poker table the guy next to me says hey man you're like he tickles my my right shoulder puts his finger in it's like you got a little bit of rip and my entire my entire seam of my shirt was gaping open at the poker table and i had played for 20 minutes and not been totally unaware and i think i had caught the shirt um as i you know some at some point during the day i had caught the shirt and ripped the hell out of it that's my a lot of people a lot of people are probably happy that shirt's going going away.

1:03:26As a matter of fact, I stood up on the poker table. I had change of clothes in the car and I tossed the shirt into the rubbish. Sorry I couldn't deliver a funny story, but that's what I've got. That's right. Adam, last to you, practical advice we haven't talked about yet for our listeners? You know, I, I, I feel like there's the, the, the biggest piece of practical advice that we haven't talked about is it's probably has to do with read our book. Yeah. I was actually going to say like my brain is going to like, there's a notion of getting, being curious about these technologies and not letting the fear um and feeling like you're behind like stop you and i i i'll be honest with you like i was i'll give my story in relating to the practical advice is yesterday i was giving a presentation on behalf of our company to um a bunch of school public school superintendents and principals about what does ai mean i don't know anything about education.

1:04:40So I was, I literally built a presentation that was saying, look, I'm going to tell you what I think I would be doing if I was an AI for school. And I think the practical advice that I want to give is that as I was giving this talk, I wasn't sure as I walked in, I'll be vulnerable here. Like, I'm like, I wonder if this is like useful information anymore. Like Andy and I spent all this time studying this stuff and getting up to speed and being in the jet stream. And I walked in thinking, I wonder, what if everyone like rolls their eyes and goes, yeah, we know already, right? So I, but I put it aside and I wound myself up and I gave my best attempt at a, you know, educational and inspiring and insightful presentation.

1:05:26And when I got done, I didn't have to wait till I got done. You could just see from the reaction in the room that no, the room didn't know any of this stuff on some level. And I think the practical advice is there's a huge gap. We've sort of talked around this, but I just want to say directly, there is a huge gap between where 95 % of marketers and companies are today and where the, not even experts, just people like me and Andy who have, and other, you know, folks at companies who have really tried to really get into this and become AI literate proficient. And my advice is don't, like, it doesn't, you can get there, you can get there in like a month and there's a way to do it.

1:06:10And, and I'm just saying like my, the practical advice is like, listen to Paul Racer's podcast, right? Read our book. You know, be curious and get involved. It's not too, it's not too late. There are people, not just Andy and I, there are people that can synthesize it for you. In fact, the AI can do it for you. You could go to ChatGPT and say, I want you to be my gen AI tutor. And spend 10 minutes a day having ChatGPT in advanced voice mode while you're driving around tutor you on AI. That's my advice is just get started and realize that you probably have a bigger gap than you realize. And it's easier to close that gap than you think.

1:06:51I think that is a great way to end the show. So thank you, Adam and Andy, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. Look for more of our shows on the I Hear Everything Network, Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, which include Your Best Customer is an AI Bot. Welcome to the New Frontier. The Rise and Fall of Peloton is seen through the eyes of CLTV. Using AI for anticipation versus reaction. And is AI an extinction event for agencies? Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Marketers have been working on personalization since the dawn of the internet, and actually even earlier than that.

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