Insider Starts to Experiment with AI

0:01All right. So we are going to talk about how Insider is starting to experiment with AI. And this will very quickly become a non-headline for us where this will probably be the last time we're using this headline because we've done a headline in the past where we said CNET is using AI. And now Insider, which is basically owned by Business Insider and they own Morning Brew and a bunch of other publications, they're experimenting with AI as well. And I wanted to give some context here before you react, Neil, on how this is being done because I think this is smart. So the headline here is from Axios.

0:32It says Insider's newsroom will start experimenting with AI. And the way they're doing this is the company is setting up a working group to test how to responsibly incorporate AI into its workflow before rolling out a set of AI rules and best practices to the broader newsroom. So they're basically starting like a little skunk works. And skunk works is usually like you have a team that is designed to disrupt what you're currently doing as a company. And I think that's really smart. How can you create a working group to test how this might work? What's going well? What is it? Best practices before you start rolling it out to the broader team.

1:05And starting Thursday, members of Insiders Newsrooms can apply to be a part of the working group that will test different ways to leverage AI across all of Insiders journalism products. Thoughts? They're trying to use AI to save on costs. If you end up using AI, you can get more done from your people, especially when it comes to a business that's heavily reliant on content creation. If you can get your costs down and your production up, you in theory should get more traffic. It's a win-win. More profit, more traffic. Yep. And a couple of episodes ago, I cited a Jason Calacanis tweet, and I didn't read the last part of his tweet where he talks about how AI is going to nuke a third of the jobs.

1:45So the very last tweet, it says, in a down economy, CEOs are looking for an excuse to fire expensive, old, entitled, slow people, as we've seen at Amazon and Google. They're excited to replace them with half-priced young folks, that includes you, Emma, who want to change the world and who now have access to the previously hidden knowledge. So what's going to happen? The kids, I'm quoting right now, the young people, they're going to learn AI very quickly. They're going to adapt. And what's going to happen? Companies are incentivized to want to cut on costs to drive profitability, especially if they have investors.

2:17So it is what it is. We're going to see a lot more of this. Yeah. And it's not just going to stop with things like insider using it to figure out how to create more content. It's going to be used with marketing agencies or even companies being like, huh, we paid this big team to analyze our analytics on a daily basis. We can use AI to figure out a lot of this stuff. And instead of having a team of 20 to do this, we can have a team of three. or they're going to be like, huh, we have all these graphic designers and creative people cranking out content for social media for us. Now with all these tools like mid journey, we can end up doing five times the amount of work with a fraction of the people.

2:58So now we're going to, you know, we down our creative department to just one or two people, because what you'll see is these tools are going to help companies get more output with their marketing. And they're going to be able to do that in a more cost efficient way, which is going to increase margins. I believe the way we do business is going to change fundamentally. So one, we're no longer, maybe you would see companies with thousands of people, maybe it's down to hundreds, or maybe it's down to the teens. And the amount of money you need to raise as a startup, or even start to build a product is no longer in the tens of millions, or even millions, maybe it's in a couple hundred grand or so.

3:36And so I think we're going to see a lot. Or you may not even need to raise money. You can probably do a lot on your own now and you can get a proof of concept out and get feedback without even raising a dollar because hosting and some of those things don't cost much. And you're going to start seeing more pressure from investors to show you more before you even raise a dollar from them. And that's a good thing because now investors will say, Hey, show me proof of concept and show me you actually have traction because that will become the baseline, The baseline for getting to traction to getting to kind of cash flow break even at least is going to come down quite a bit.

4:07And I believe we're going to see a lot more. Naval Ravikant talked about this, how in the next 20, 30 years or whatever, we're just going to see a lot of people that are working in small bands or small teams or individually. And, you know, they're going to get the job done and they're going to move on. And I think we're going to see a lot more of this in terms of company building as well. And so I think that's, you know, Neil talked about using mid journey or, you know, using runway ML to kind of use text to video and things like that. But it's talking about data analytics to like data analytics salaries, we're talking data science salaries are really expensive.

4:38And so if I were using, if I were trying to pull apart data and get insight on Neil's millions of visits a month or his answer to public tool, I might just plug my data into that, plug it into the OpenAI API. And then I can just ask questions around data without having to wait a couple of days to get into the numbers crunch or a data analysis done because computers probably can do that better. And that's how it is. Here's the best part. So on Ubersuggest, we're on AWS. We've been having calls with Google and their cloud team. and they're just like, hey, if you switch to us, we'll give you a discount.

5:08You'll save quite a bit of money. We'll help with the migration. You don't have to worry about migrating the tech stack or anything. We'll do it all for you. But what was interesting wasn't the money savings, although I do like that. What was interesting is they were saying, hey, you have tons of data. We have a lot of different models on our end, but it'll help slice and dice your data for you. You can ask questions and we can end up spitting out answers by computing your data and giving you insights that you didn't have before. That was interesting. Like, just think about what could be done with AI.

5:38You know, for us to do that before, one of our guys who works with us, Carlos, wanted a budget of around 550 or$580 ,000 a year to have a team of people just slicing and dicing our data and getting insights so we can create more thought leadership type of content. But now imagine doing this all with Google's cloud solution and doing it for free. You know what's crazy too? I forgot to mention this part, Neil. Someone offered on Twitter, they hit me up and the Morning Brew founder responded to something along the lines of what this tool does is it will pull, imagine pulling all the marketing school episodes that we've done and it will just automatically create tweets for us.

6:16And it'll also create the images too. And it'll create carousels as well. And if someone could do that for us, because I know sometimes like maybe 10 or 20 % of the time we'll say something that's really fire. Maybe the other 80 % we're just kind of riffing and having a conversation. But that stuff is good when we say good stuff. No, and what's cool is with AI, it can dissect all really cool stuff from the content that we're producing. And we can just take those tidbits because you can say, hey, what do you think people like to learn about the most from our content? And then take those tidbits and put it on social and see how it does.

6:46And I don't think it's really perfect right now to really help us grow our traffic. But within a year or two, it'll get much better. All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to hit us on YouTube. Subscribe to us as well. Leave a rating review. Those have really been upticking quite a bit. We're going to pick someone to come onto the podcast soon to ask a live question. And maybe Emma can answer the question too. But that is it for today. And we will see you later.