Will AI Take Over Marketing? Lessons from 2 Years of ChatGPT

0:00Will AI replace markers? What we learned after two years of ChatGPT being around.

0:11All right. So let's start this off by saying that I'm very optimistic about technology and Neil tends to be pessimistic about everything. Yes, about the whole world. You go first. So, you know, back when OpenAI first came around and then ChatGPG came out, I saw a big problem and I never really felt AI would replace marketing at all. And there's two main reasons. One, I think the creativity to replace what you and I have and other amazing talent has. And I'm not saying we're the best or anything like that, but just if you're a good marketer, it's really hard to replace your creativity with something that's scraping the web and then coming out with outputs based on what they've seen in the past versus coming up with stuff that's new and fresh.

0:59The second thing is, is a lot of what they scrape on the web is inaccurate. So then it's affecting their decisions for the future based off of stuff that is inaccurate. And that is a hard problem to solve. Google has not been able to solve that problem. And they've tried so much since day one. I don't know how much they've invested into it, but my guess is over a billion bucks easily. So my take on it is, will AI replace marketers? Not the best ones, not even the good ones. I think it'll replace the below average ones. And so I had a conversation with Seth Godin about this. If you do a job that AI can do, either you're going to figure it out first and change your job so that AI works for you, or your boss is going to figure it out first and you're going to lose your job.

1:38And we were just talking, so bestselling author wrote, by the way, he wrote a book called Lydgpin, which we make all our employees read when we start, but that's, I digress. And so I think this is no different than when you think about the industrial age, right? Everyone used to be farmers before, right? Then we moved into industrial age and then everyone kind of started doing like, you know, computer work, right? We call that blue collar work. Yeah. Right. So I think there's going to be another shift here. I think most people will learn how to leverage the power of AI and then they'll be enhanced by it.

2:04To your point, I think the best of the best people are the creative people that are constantly just a little bit ahead of the curve. If you're just a really good learner, you're talking to other people like Neil's really good at getting on the phone with people and learning his own way. I'm really good at like reading things and then talking to people about it. If you can do that, you'll be ahead of the curve no matter what. And I think you'll have a significant advantage too, because you'll be able to compound yourself. But I think if you're below average, what happens with the below average people?

2:28They don't want to learn new things, right? They're the type of people where, you know, it's like they do something right now. It's like, oh, Neil, look, I did this. But they did it six months ago. It's something they should have done six months ago, right? They're too slow to adopt to things. And so I don't necessarily look at chat GPT as AI. I just look at AI as a whole. And I don't know if you saw this. There's that big investor conference. Did you see what happened? That was yesterday. It was in Saudi, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Saudi. The cumulative CapEx,$9 trillion. $9 trillion. How do you recoup?

2:58How do you recoup? It's too much investment for many people's view. I say it's still very reasonable CapEx. $9 trillion is not too big. Maybe too small. So Masayoshi-san came on. And he's like,$9 trillion expenditure CapEx on AI, on the chips, right? He's like, that's cheap because over the next 10 years or so, that's only going to be 5 % of what the potential value is going to be, right? So his whole point is that we're going to scale quite a bit. Everyone's talking about these super chip centers. I forgot what the Giga, was it Giga chip by NVIDIA? Do you remember what I'm talking about? No. But yeah, okay, anyway, for example, Elon built this giant cluster, right?

3:48And it took him 19 days to do it, right? And so we're going to see a lot more of these. There's a lot of infrastructure work going into AI chips. And Neil and I are not technologists in this sense. We're not pros at this. But my whole thing is, if there's a lot of investment going into infrastructure right now, this has a lot of room to grow. And so my conclusion is AI will replace mediocre to bad marketers. Now, this is what I'm really curious on, right? Because when we talked about this a few years ago, you're a big believer that AI would replace many, many more marketers. You're more optimistic about it back then than now.

4:22I'm curious what's changed for you. I tend to be like that, though, because usually when you see my patterns over the years, like when a new thing comes out, I'm like, oh, Neil, Clubhouse, this is the new thing, right? And sometimes you're like, this is stupid. And like, you were right in that case, right? But sometimes I'm right, too, right? Sometimes I'll call it and it's like, oh yeah, that sometimes you'll call things. You'll be like, oh, you know, you're going to buy these Facebook likes. I'm like, I don't think that's going to work. And it like didn't work. Right. So there's like certain things we'll try and like, we're going to get a lot of things wrong.

4:49And then I think with chat CPT though, I think you, you, you look at what Sam Altman says and obviously he's talking his own book here, but he's like, it's going to replace 95 % of people. I think that's a bit heavy now because if 95 % of people are replaced, what are they going to do? Then it's going to be like anarchy, right? When we can't have that. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the agency owners association. So this is a agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Su. And these were nine and eight figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that.

5:24If you want to grow your agency to seven figures, eight figures and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're going to learn how to acquire more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketing school, the aisle slash agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven day free trial, right?

5:49So once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by$200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketing school, the aisle slash agency to learn more and we'll see you inside. And I don't think that 95 % is a little bit heavy. I think it's extremely heavy. You know, you want to talk about mowing a lawn. Sure, you can create something that's programmatic and analyzes the landscape and the terrain and be like, okay, here's how you ideally mow the lawn or how much you watered or whatever it may be. But for a lot of stuff that isn't the blue collar jobs, like the white collar jobs, I do believe a lot of them are going to be hard to replace.

6:28I could be wrong. It really depends per industry. And I've been wrong in many places, right? I just think, you know, when this AA first started coming out and people used to ask me this question, people used to always say, Neil, you're biased. You own a marketing agency. And I was like, Sam Altman is biased. He created a AI company. And honestly, I wasn't saying this to try to be biased or not. I really felt it wasn't replacing any or it wasn't replacing most marketers. And the reason being is I'm like, look at what it's outputting. If you look at the progression of chat GPT and what they're releasing, the quality is drastically slowing down on, or in the abilities of what it can do is drastically slowing down as in the innovation part.

7:14And I still think we're in the early innings, right? Like if it's in baseball, I would say first inning or second inning. But what I'm getting at is it's really hard to continually innovate and make it 5 % better, 10 % better, 50 % better. and for it to do extremely well, you need not 50 or 100 % better. You need leaps and bounds better. And I think that's extremely hard to do. Yeah, I think we'll see in due time, right? I think we're still, it's still very, you talk about innings, it's very early right now. So I think I'm really looking at the next five to 10 years or so. So, and we've talked about this on the podcast.

7:47We're bearish in the short, or more bearish in the short term, but very bullish in the longterm. And I would say for me, typically when I call trends, I call them right for the longterm. So for example, Nvidia, I told my mom to buy that stock. Why? Because I bought video game cards when I was like nine years old, right? Now, did I know they're going to come into this AI? I think no, right? But at least I knew they're going to rip for a while, right? And so I think long-term, it's going to do, I think it's going to help people be more productive because I think the mediocre and the bad marketers, it's going to be like, hey, maybe you just shouldn't be doing marketing.

8:19Go do something else that's more productive where AI can enhance you and you'll do a much better job. I do think we'll become a lot more productive as a society. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And I do think AI is going to change marketing, whether it's from the creation process, the systems and processes helping with boring tasks. It's definitely going to have an impact on marketing and it already has had an impact. It's just the aspect of it's going to replace all marketers is going to be tough for even the majority. But what is very realistic is everyone is going to have an AI assistant that's going to power you.

8:50You're going to have your own virtual buddy that is helping you do anything you want, or you're going to have specific agents that go and help you with specific tasks and job roles that you need filled out. All right, so that is it for today, guys. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association where we help agency owners grow. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.