What Happens When AI Becomes Your Marketing Team? | Profound on Lightwork

0:00So big news this week, Profound raised$180 million Series D at a$1.8 billion valuation just seven months after your Series C. And joining me now, we have co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader. James, congratulations on the round. Thank you very much. Before we get into all of this and the round and what it entails, I figured it'd be good to start with just what Profound does, because it really sits at the center of a lot of things that people are starting to catch up to. I think consumers are increasingly asking things like ChatGPT and Gemini what to buy instead of searching Google. And brands are on the flip side seeing the other side of that.

0:41For someone who's less familiar, tell us a little bit more about what you're seeing and what AEO might mean for someone hearing it for the first time. Sure. Well, the kind of way I would get there is through the lens of marketing is a top three line item for every business on the planet. It's one of the biggest industries of white collar work globally. And yeah, really, it's going through what is clearly the biggest transformation in its history. So marketing is changing in so many ways. And yeah, really that begins with agents replacing humans as the new modern day consumer. So how does an agent like ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok interpret your brand products and services?

1:31That becomes the new hair on fire problem for every CMO on the planet. But more interestingly, as the internet is changing and transforming and becoming agent first, what we're seeing is that agents are consuming more content, more marketing on the internet. So for marketers now, there's this new insatiable demand to create more that is being driven by agentic demand. and here at profound we're building the canonical ai marketing platform that you know began with really helping enterprise brands understand how they show up in ai responses but now more interestingly is being used by brands by by marketers globally to build and customize and deploy agents that can create marketing on their behalf.

2:27So yeah, we launched two years ago and we now work with over a third of the Fortune 100, some of the biggest brands on the planet, many of the Fortune 10, including some of the biggest agencies on the planet as well. And we're seeing enterprise marketers completely transform the way that they do their work with our platform. Yeah, I mean, I've seen it on Profound's platform as well. So I sit across early stage investment team and the marketing team, and we as a team have also been playing around with it and have just seen that evolution from just pure analytics to now this sort of super intelligent teammate, if you will.

3:07Can you walk me through a little bit of that evolution of moving from an analytics first platform of where you show up and brand visibility to now this sort of AI marketer? What does Profound unlock today? Now, basically, here's the sequence of events. So every marketer on the planet initially cares about, okay, how does ChatGPT talk about my brand products and service? Then the next thing they say is, well, okay, that's interesting, but what do I do about it? And then they say, well, that's crazy. I need to create 100x more content. Well, how am I going to do that and keep it high quality? So that's kind of the stage of the journey where we are at now.

3:43And the breakthrough that CMOs are having globally is that you can create high quality work with AI, but it's a function of the context that lives within that harness. so the way that profound works is we collect all of the context dynamically about your brand product services your org chart approvals who in legal has to sign off the content then we pipe in all of the data and insights from our platform that you can only get inside of our platform and then you can pipe in third party external data through hundreds of integrations and you synthesize that all together and then all of a sudden you are able to create content marketing that is super effective, super on brand.

4:32You know, it looks and feels like content your brand would create. And humans really, you know, the marketing team that is human are spending their time just approving, editing, you know, they've gone up the food chain, basically. Yeah, I mean, I even see it in a lot of our existing workflows where so much of the work is just funneling context between different platforms. And now that you sort of centralize this, I'm curious, where do you feel like it's very good? Where do you feel like something like a contact manager or AI marketer still needs some work? Is it the taste part? Where's the human really filling in today when it's working with Profound?

5:14I think the thing that is very good is that it's all happening in one place, which I think is unrelatable if you're a startup of 20 people listening to this. That doesn't sound like a hair on fire problem, but if you are a brand like Nestle or Unilever or Apple or JP Morgan Chase, these giant organizations, they will have upwards, they will have tens of thousands of marketers who are all creating work constantly. and what we've cracked is this idea that it's one cohesive context layer that runs across marketing so you don't have dave using claude sally using copilot samantha using chat gpt all disparate context pulling from xyz and one's kind of writing slightly on on brand one slightly off brand and it's this this fragmented ecosystem of marketers what we have is this cohesive context layer where all of the marketers across a giant organization are able to log in and it deeply understands your brand your product your your tone of voice what's happening what the do's and don'ts etc so yeah we've really cracked that um and it's quite remarkable how much of the work can be done with agents once you have everything connected um there's this kind of raw creative ideation that is still important so humans need to steer um and then there's just the final approvals yeah i think you know again if you're talking about a large enterprise brand um they don't want to post work and frankly i don't think they should i think you know these models are still probabilistic we do still you know naturally see some level of hallucination it's the same as you know all of our engineers are using cognition devon to write the majority of our code right now but we still review the pull requests you all have almost been very prescient in pushing this idea of a marketing engineer i'm curious what you see as that role today and how you see that evolving you brought up cognition is it sort of like a developer where you know junior developers are more moving into levels of orchestration what does that look like for someone in marketing today and what is marketing or marketing engineers i mean today we're seeing yeah customers log in and spend their day inside of our platform um because that's where you will go in to understand what's going on so you can measure that's where you can manage the content so you're collaborating with your team to you know help build marketing um you can distribute inside of the platform so we integrate with all of the cms platforms etc um and yeah you can actually you know create the content there as well so we see our customers spending their days inside of the platform but what we will also likely see is those workflows just taking place outside of our software and you know the profound AI Marketer that we abbreviate to AIM can now connect with customers through email or Microsoft Teams or Slack and yeah it can meet you where you are so it can you know work overnight build a report send it through over email if you respond and say yeah that looks great it can go and create a first draft that you can then respond back over email and say you know ship it to legal for approval and it can go and steer to legal but you'll still need to configure that agent inside of our platform.

8:48So it becomes like a teammate. It becomes like one, you know, always on teammate that can do the work and deeply understands your organization and, you know, the things that matter. Yeah. One of the things that really fascinates me about your approach to building, you know, applied AI and taking, you know, all this stuff coming out of labs and turning it into a genuinely useful, super intelligent marketing teammate is it sounds like you are all are doing some sort of benchmarking for marketing work. And in my head, marketing is a lot of judgment. There's no really clear yes or no binary answer.

9:27How do you think about benchmarks around marketing and how do you define what good looks like for a marketing agent? Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out the first true marketing benchmark. it's very exciting it's cool just to be able to build at the frontier and we've got some really exciting talent who are building that out right now in partnership with some some great partners i think the you know the topic of verifiable non-verifiable is extremely interesting i think what we may see over time is that verifiable domains that and you know naturally got attacked first by ai so code generation or like what we're seeing right now in math, for example.

10:14When there's a verifiable, correct response, AI will be able to attack that vertical almost autonomously. And the need for a human kind of goes out the window to an extent. When we enter into these non-verifiable domains, it is much more dependent on human review and human approval. So building the benchmark has required us collaborating with hundreds of our customers and thousands of marketers to build a robust benchmark that you know really it captures the consensus of okay is this good marketing is this bad marketing if that and there are lots of marketing that are verifiable right answers and wrong answers as well so we're trying to really like span the gamut and be able to speak to what is a very subjective category with a robust, broad, deep eval that can go across the different pillars of marketing.

11:14Yeah, we've seen applied AI push towards different verticals over the last couple of years, but no one's really cracked it for marketing. And yeah, I think it's a cool opportunity. Yeah, we'll have to do a deeper dive on the anatomy of a great marketing benchmark. It's just such an interesting philosophical problem to think about, too. Like, how do you break apart so many of these, you know, verifiable parts, but also the very subjective parts of what will resonate and narrative and storytelling? Shifting gears to the very exciting Series D announcement, you know, it's a huge milestone for the team.

11:51I'm curious what sort of drove you all to raise this round and also what you're excited about with this. And if there's anything that team is heads down on building coming off of this milestone. Yeah, I think it's all a function of our ambition. Yeah, we are not running out of ideas of things we want to do. In fact, I'd say the number of ideas we have that we're excited about are increasing. And yeah, you know, really what we're trying to do is build a company that we can take all the way. we want to build the canonical air marketing platform that every marketer on the planet wakes up eats their cornflakes and logs into to do their work or at least interacts with to do their work as per our previous point um and yeah it takes a lot of people to build that um there's uh yeah a lot on our roadmap um beyond what exists today kind of that there's obvious things then slightly not obvious things that we're going to be talking about over the next few months um but really yeah It's just a function of us wanting to build more and be able to, you know, be more aggressive.

12:58Yeah, it's truly so exciting that a platform like Profound exists. I think as I think about just all the touch points that I have day to day with our marketing team, Profound just is such an important part of that stack today. Maybe just final question for you, since you do have this unique window into where this space is going and how it's evolving. What do you think the marketing space will look like in five years? Obviously, I think Profound will play an important role at that. But do you think there's anything that we're doing today that will feel or sound absurd in five to 10 years? I think dashboards are dead.

13:31I think the concept of a human being logging into an analytics dashboard and squinting at line charts and coming up with an idea based on that row of data and writing up their idea and getting an approval. and then writing the first draft of that that it's you know we're entering the sort of the high frequency trading uh version of that now and it's going to be yeah ai driven um and and human supervised um but yeah you will just talk to your agent and you'll say hey you know can you look through all of the data over the last seven days and let me know where our competitor is pulling ahead and where you think the opportunities are and it's so good at that I mean, Profound does that today and it's better than any human being.

14:22Yeah, I'm very excited for our future, especially as someone who does spend a lot of time looking at our analytics and a lot of dashboards. This is just so, so exciting. Thank you for taking time out of the day. I know this is an exciting day for you and the team. So I appreciate you just demystifying the headline and helping people understand what Profound is doing and where this space is heading. Yeah, thanks for having me, Claire. I appreciate that.

14:49Thank you.