Who Controls Your AI Marketing Stack? (AI Sovereignty)

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Did you see that talk with, you like CNBC.

0:28Neil Patel:see did you see the alex karf from palantir earlier this week i did not see it but it was going viral on twitter and i did not read about it on twitter either other than i saw david sacks

0:38Eric Siu:and a few others mark and he just responded today yeah so okay here let's talk about i'll give you some context here so the real question is who controls your ai marketing stack okay so when you have when you have anthropic that just updated their cloud design yesterday and they told figma they're only going to have a basic version of it and now it's like it's it's pretty damn good and figma is like, what the heck? Or when you have an anthropic saying that they're about to get into drug discovery and all these things, right? What ends up, what David Sachs is saying is that you, if you don't have any AI sovereignty, where you start to give all of your context and all of your data to these companies, then what, like ultimately you as a company, me as a company, we want to have our data protected, right?

1:18Eric Siu:You need to have some tempo, you need to feel secure. You need to have some type of sovereignty from these models out there. Cause if they, if you start to give them everything, then they're just going to start to build whatever they want, right? Same thing like, oh, Harvey, which is that legal company that raised a bunch of money. Oh, Anthropoc is now illegal as well, right? And so the thinking here is that Alex Carpenter is saying, look, you know, these are great models. These frontier models are great models, but they did a partnership with NVIDIA. So Palantir and NVIDIA, and they want to have these really open weight models, right?

1:45Eric Siu:And so there's been talk about how GLM 5.2 is really good. It's like Opus 4.8 level, right? Which is as of right now, these are the really good models aside from Fable 5. But again, like with, I'll give you another example here. Claude released something called Claude Tag, right? So Claude Tag allows you to chat with your Claude inside of Slack, for example. You can have different connectors. The problem with that is once you come off of it, you've already fed all that context to Claude and they get to keep it. You don't get to take it with you, right? And then they have limited connectors. You have to use their expensive models and things like that.

2:16Eric Siu:So you don't have sovereignty versus if you start to put some of your stuff on open weights, then you save a lot more money. Plus you get to control your stack and then you don't need to worry about anybody coming in to start a competitor against you the next day. So that's why I think AI sovereignty is not just important for your marketing, but also important for your business too, because you don't want to feed them all your data.

2:36Neil Patel:Yeah, and the screwed up part about Figma, I was skimming the David Sachs posts. It was either yesterday or the day before. I believe their product person was on the board, Anthropics product person was on the board of Figma. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, he left three days before. I believe it was three days before or they released their version of a Figma competitor. That's so bad. That's bad. And I'm not saying the product person intentionally did it. Anthropics is a big company, so it could have been someone else working on it. But I do understand the issue here. I believe what we're going to end up seeing, a lot of marketing data is on the cloud.

3:12Neil Patel:You're seeing it in either AWS or Google's cloud or Microsoft's cloud. I believe they'll come up with solutions that'll help companies make decisions based off their data and not use the data for anything else. Because your data is already in some of these cloud environments and they're not using your data to learn from or do sketchy stuff, at least from my understanding. And companies already trust Google. They trust Amazon. They trust Microsoft. Really easy places to plug in and be like, oh, cool. You'll allow us to get access to our data, make decisions from it. And we don't have to worry about people stealing it all.

3:49Neil Patel:Yeah.

3:49Eric Siu:And they all have NVIDIA chips. So Microsoft actually launched something yesterday where they're putting 6 ,000 engineers against it. And it's called the Frontier Company or something, but 2.5 billion invested. And it's all to help people deploy. And one of their key tenants there is, hey, your data is your data. We're not going to build on top of it. And that's really important, right? Because if you're spending hundreds of dollars, if not millions of dollars on this stuff, it's important. And when we talk to people on the single brain side for these managed deployments, that's the number one question we get asked a lot.

4:16Eric Siu:hey, do you guys own the data or do we own the data? And we say, no, you own the data. We'll compound with you. You get to own your memory and we'll build with you, right? And they're like, oh, okay, sounds good.

4:25Neil Patel:Yeah, no, people don't want you to own their data. When I saw the David Sachs expose, I literally sent a message to my team. Be careful what we're sharing with OpenAI and Anthropik.

4:38Eric Siu:Yeah, it's big. And don't get me wrong. I use it all day and it's my default, but I trust it less and less. And then you see OpenAI is like, oh, considering giving 5 % stake to the US government. And then you see, you see now the government's controlling, you know, it's like export controls. Like, oh, this model can't, yeah, you can't, you can't launch this one. It has to be slow launch. And then Fable 5 came back, but it's a nerfed version. Like I was using it the other day and it found some security vulnerabilities in one of my things. I was like, hey, do security sweep, right? Once it found it, because it talked about, it used the keyword security, it bumped me back down to Opus 48, right?

5:10Eric Siu:And so these things are, I'm just like, you know, it's becoming a little dicey to the point where you want to have your own sovereignty. So having your own NVIDIA chips or having and then using these open weights, it's going to save you a lot of money. And I think you can sleep better at night. And it's going to help with your marketing, too, because, you know, someone else doesn't have your data and they can't just steal your messaging. Yeah.

5:28Neil Patel:And I believe all of this is just going to cause NVIDIA to grow even more.

5:31Eric Siu:Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a thinking. I was listening to Gary Tan and Naval on a podcast today. And it's like, oh, I think Gary, apparently Y Combinator did some math on this saying, oh, maybe this stuff is, you know, still 90 ,000 times more upside to human usage with these things. 90 ,000 times? 90 ,000, 90 ,000 X. And I'm like, that's a lot. So anyway, I don't know how that pans out, but I do believe that we're still in like the first or second inning right now. Yeah, I think it's really early. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, that's how I'm thinking about it. I mean, like when I sit in these AI chats, like we're all talking about GLM.

6:07Eric Siu:You can use Open Router for this, by the way. So if you want some AI sovereignty, you can sign up for Open Router. You can sign up for GLM 5.2. It's like five to ten times cheaper than using like a clod. I still just for myself, I just buy a bunch of clod max and open AI subscriptions for myself. Then I go to town on it. I just keep switching the keys. But for your company, if you want predictability there, I would say you can do that. And then I am prepared to start paying API costs again for Fable 5. because as of next Tuesday, it's going to switch back to usage only. And then I made a little video game the other day.

6:40Eric Siu:Did you see that? No. Dude, I made this video game where it has like, have you played like Age of Empires or StarCraft or any of those games?

6:50Neil Patel:No, I played back in the day. Do you remember Star Wars? It was like a pod racer. We have Annika and Skywalker on like a little, not a race car. What do they call them? Like the pods? The pod racing. Do you know what I'm talking about, Noah? Dude, you play the most garbage games, man.

7:05Eric Siu:I saw this guy playing like Fruit Ninja before and all this stuff.

7:08Neil Patel:No, you've never seen me play Fruit Ninja. I have seen you play Fruit Ninja. I've never done a Fruit Ninja.

7:12Eric Siu:Play Fruit Ninja. Okay. No. Sudoku, yes. Monopoly, yes. This game, here. I'm going to, here, Neil, just take my phone. I'm going to explain it. So Neil's looking at it. So that's basically like a city, right? That's dummy data and it shows your city and what's on fire and your city and what needs help and what needs attention. And then you can basically create quests for your employees to take on and you can award bonuses for those quests.

7:30Neil Patel:is this real data of your company or this is just like that one's dummy data but i just added real

7:35Eric Siu:data as a this morning and then now like it's it's building right now and i'm just like okay well some stuff i want to keep private from from like some people in my company but i so maybe i want to shade it out but then i want to give them quests and then maybe a quest is repeating and you can award them in stable coins and smart contracts right you can award the money you can escrow the money and just award them but then imagine the world can just grow right and then you can have other maybe i want to trade with your business or maybe someone from your business that needs extra work and then they're working on quests in my business right so my point of saying this is that these models are so strong where you can start to make previously stupid things like this that actually can help your company because if you gamify the company it actually makes it fun and you can see who's doing a good job and who isn't doing a good job so anyway that was a little tangent for me um but yeah it's only gonna get crazier you should make the fire bigger in the game so people can see it like burning you know when i open it on my it's actually on fire oh And you can see people moving around and stuff.

8:30Eric Siu:And then the stuff that's going well, you see gold coins coming out of it.

8:33Neil Patel:Yeah, you should see who's working on putting the fire out. And you can create a little character that's throwing water against it if they're actually working on it.

8:40Eric Siu:Let's say your character becomes really more powerful. You level up in the company, right? You start to look cooler and cooler with your gear. And so I think there's a whole thing because I looked into this. Do you know how much World of Warcraft was making at its height per month?

8:56Neil Patel:Profit or revenue? revenue i don't know like 500 million billion dollars a month wow it's good it's good guess

9:05Eric Siu:so this is a massive company world of warcraft at its peak was making 180 million dollars a month and so i'm like at one one day when i have more time for this if you make a world of business wob instead of wow i'm like how much is that going to make because you're charging at world

9:19Neil Patel:of warcraft you're charging 12 a user per month was that it because didn't microsoft buy activision blizzard for like 80 billion dollars or something crazy but that was when world of warcraft was already like out oh so they have more games than just work way more games yeah they have call of

9:34Eric Siu:duty um they have yeah a lot of franchises i just know activision blizzard as warcraft yeah well no blizzard's also diablo it's also starcraft that's the diablo is the game elon plays yeah yeah so he plays diablo 4 but anyway all that to say is um i want to say something real quick i i noticed something. I've, from a recruiting standpoint, cause we're still talking about AI. I've been talking more and more about this forward deployed marketer. And I don't know if I, I don't know if I explained it well here, but I've been posting and these posts didn't get a lot of reach on LinkedIn, but I've had a handful of people from large companies reach out saying, and these people are like, these are, you know, companies doing billions a year in revenue.

10:10Eric Siu:Right. And some of them were leads for, for, for, um, for single grain. And they're like, Hey, you know, after 20 years of working at so-and-so multi-billion dollar company that everyone knows, um, I like what you're doing right now. I want to come work with someone at the, you know, talking about the front end, right? Like at the frontier. And then I was talking to someone else. He's working 15 years at this company doing billions a year. And his comp is like, let's just call it like a million a year or something like that. And then he's like, yeah, I know I'm probably gonna have to take a cut if I work with you.

10:36Eric Siu:I was like, yeah, you are. And then, and then, but he's like, but I want to, I want to be in the next wave or whatever. And then all that to say is these people are so motivated, but then the challenge is I almost have two companies right now. This is where I'm going with this. I have one side where everyone is super motivated, having fun and just cranking all the time, right? Cause they want to crank. And then the other side, it's a lot of, I don't have the time for this. Uh, I can't do it. Oh, it's I'm too overwhelmed. And, but the other, the, the, the side that's super cracked out, they see the other side.

11:07Neil Patel:Wait, is it two different companies or two different cultures? Two different cultures, two different cultures.

11:11Eric Siu:So you have one culture that's super, super AI native, super AI build. You have the other one that is like, you know, you start, when you start to hear the clients that work with them, right? I just asked my gong, like, what are they saying? Not proactive enough, right? Not coming up with strategies, not fast enough, right? And that's a cultural thing. And that's why I keep harping on this AI native piece thing, because AI native for us means it covers all four of our core values. Be a relentless learner, be biased to action, be unreasonably resilient, make bold long-term bets. If you're not AI native, you violate all four.

11:42Eric Siu:And so the challenge right now, and I'm seeing this in these CEO chats too, that these people have thousands of employees they're seeing the same challenge and then when we have new people coming now they're just like dude eric like i've seen the training stuff i've seen the committee stuff it doesn't work right i'm like so what do you do it's like you know i i'm a fan of not trying to keep trying to fit square pegs into round holes and just make it's better off if we find them a better spot to work at and that's that's what i'm seeing i don't know what you're seeing yeah either

12:09Neil Patel:people culturally want to embrace it or they don't it's too hard to get people to embrace it who don't want to see it's just if you don't have a role from switch them out as cutthroat as that sounds and do you want to know why your forward deployed marketer is gaining traction right now why because so many people are funding money into forward deployed engineers exactly billions and billions of dollars anthropic is doing it open air is doing it microsoft's doing it i think you just mentioned microsoft today is 2.5 billion uh a few of the private equity funds have been jumping on board as well it's just you know everyone's just like oh companies are going to struggle to integrate this let's spend a lot of money these are their new versions of uh accenture or uh mckinsey or bain but they actually do more hands-on stuff yeah and yeah and then on a side note did you see accenture stock it's been taking yeah i i've been watching i was wondering

13:02Eric Siu:if you looked at it yeah but dude so one thing one of our mutual friends syed likes to say that AI is IA, which is intelligence amplifier. But I also think AI is TR, which means truth revealer. Never, never has it been easier for me to have an informational density or the informational advantage where I can see everything in the company, right? And so if I try to hide from you, you smell it from a mile away. And you already probably have a good nose because you've been doing entrepreneurship for a while, right? But now it's probably 10 times faster. You can just get to the point. And so I think this is more for anybody.

13:36Eric Siu:One, if you're super AI piloting, want to be a forward deploy marketer. We're hiring. So is Neil. Neil's hiring too. But I would also say that if you're not down for that and you're working at a company right now and it's uncomfortable for you, I think you should find something else. I think you should find something else that fits you because it's better for you and it's better off for the company as well. Don't make it hard for the company. Don't make it hard for you. And I think if you run a company right now, it's hard to rip off the bandaid, but you're better off putting people in a better place.

14:01Neil Patel:So we're seeing AI, one of the biggest disruptions it's causing to marketing that people don't talk about too much is valuations of agencies. So some agencies that are very AI centric have extremely high valuations, which I don't believe will last. I don't see a service based company. People could disagree with me. There's some AI forward ones that have been trading for over 30 times profit. I think that is very excessive for, you know, AI forward marketing type of company. And the very traditional ones who haven't adapted, their valuations are getting cut. And a lot of people in AI right now, they see the opportunity as, hey, how do I take this technology and implement an organization, which definitely is an opportunity and is a massive one that people should focus on.