Why Big Tech Is Spending Millions to Partner with Smart AI Startups

26:05That's not what an agency should be doing for you. That's your brand. That's you. And so I do think one of the biggest challenges, Stephanie, as I work with some of the biggest brands our team works with, the technology is the easy piece in some ways. It is improving. It will continue to improve. we companies like typeface and many others will keep pushing the limits but the change management that the companies have to go through is actually going to be the harder piece and it's going to be gut-wrenching because not everyone is interested or capable of completely reinventing their skill set after 10-15 years in a job and suddenly tomorrow morning somebody tells you oh you got to start doing email marketing completely differently or run social campaigns completely differently.

26:46And so I think you're right. Those who do it, by the way, they will become extremely marketable in their skills because that skill is now going to be so sought after as this wave progresses. So, I mean, when it comes to this change management piece, because I mean, you've worked at these very large companies, so I'm sure you know how probably difficult it can be to, you know, get a team, much less a company on board with being curious in these new spaces and trying things out and having the space to experiment and fail and just completely just staying curious in a space that's changing so rapidly like this.

27:21I mean, I don't even ask people to predict two years from now. I'm like, what do you think about next month? Like, where are we heading in this AI space? So how do you get your team on board with this? How do you think about that within your company or these larger companies to upskill in a way that's positive and exciting? Yeah, no, that's, I mean, that's a great question. And in some ways, if you ask me, I mean, sometimes when I do these kind of discussions, people say, hey, who is your competitor? Who do you worry about the most? And is it the incumbent that you are kind of, whether it's agency or whether it's some big software company, or is it the next five startups that kind of are also kind of coming after similar vision or space?

27:59And yes, we compete with kind of those in different ways. I actually think this change management piece is the biggest competitor because the opportunity is so massive. I don't think this is going to be one winner take on, no matter how great Typeface is or any other product is or whatever. I think it's driving that change in complex organizations. First, if you ask me today, the single biggest predictor of customers we work with, whether they are going to be really successful in getting big ROI with AI, with solutions like Typeface, or they are going to fail after the initial pilot. There are many factors, but the single biggest predictor is the C-level in almost all these companies right now is extremely excited.

28:44They are chomping at the bit. They want to do AI. Sometimes they don't even know what that means, but they want to actually go after this shift. But if they don't have the internal operational rigor and they don't have the champions at the operational practitioner level, oftentimes what we are finding is the C-level signs a deal or even brings a solution in, but then the practitioner level is either fighting these solutions because they don't know how to integrate that into their day-to-day life and their day-to-day workflow, or they truly genuinely are scared that, hey, if I adopt this solution in a year or two, is this just going to get so good at what it does that either half of my team will no longer be needed?

29:26And I think both are very valid concerns. I don't think Silicon Valley can just brush it off saying, oh, well, those jobs will go away, new jobs will come in. I think that will happen. But to an average individual who is at the receiving end of that, they're not going to just easily walk into that kind of a change management journey. So I would say that's, Stephanie, my biggest challenge right now is not the rate of improvement of AI models or will the cost come down or all the legal frameworks or policies come in place. All those are problems to be solved, but they will get solved. It's every single industry.

30:01I mean, I'll give you one data point just to illustrate the scale. We are not talking about, I mean, the worldwide software industry is few hundred billion dollars after 30, 40 years of PC, then web, then smartphones, cloud, etc. But the labor industry is 10 trillion plus, even more than that. And so what's actually going to happen for the first time, that software is no longer actually limited to the purview of automation. it literally is going to touch 10 trillion plus dollars of economic output and change job definitions industries workflows at that scale and so i would say that's the biggest thing i mean you said how do we deal with it in our company that's a little bit easy for us because in some ways as a company that was built from the ground up to be kind of ai first and we are our job is to actually deliver these tools.

30:58But even then, it's funny you said that because me and my leadership team constantly worry that as we grow as a company, we don't want to become kind of complex in our own business that the breakthrough solutions that are coming. I mean, one of the things my chief product officer was just telling me last week that he is actually going to put a mandate around the level of AI tools we are using in our own engineering and product development. And I think we use a lot already, as you can imagine, just kind of be in this space. But we are going to have to keep pushing the bar ourselves to the next level if we want to be that AI native organization of the future.

31:37So when you say a mandate like that, do you mean that you're requiring your employees to play with these tools or a mandate as in you can't bring too many new tools into the company because it's too much? No, no, I think it's actually, first of all, everyone is excited. I mean, I think people want to play with these tools. It's not like, I mean, most people are, not everyone maybe, but they want to play with these tools. What I meant by, first of all, mandate as in use more, not use less is in our case. That's what I thought, Vishwanda, confirm. Yeah, yeah. No, use more, but use more in the sense that we have to use these to be way more productive, way more faster, way more nimble in how quickly can we respond.

32:14So it's not just like, hey, try 20 demos of 20 tools, whether it's Cursor, Windsurf, whatever, GitHub Copilot, that people are willingly doing, especially in our space, because they want to be on the cutting edge, but actually tying it to the ROI and impact. And maybe that's the last piece of the change management, is AI will not succeed, no matter how promising it is and how much hype it has and how much excitement it has. If these applications and solutions can't directly tie very quickly to either top-line revenue growth or tangible savings. And ideally both, because I don't think the days of just saying AI co-pilots will make you more productive, but trust us, you are more productive.

32:59We can't measure how. I don't think that's going to work. I think increasingly CEOs, CROs, CMOs, we do see our customers saying, if you show me this is how much you will improve my email click-through rate and improve the conversion of the funnel. Yes, then I can see a direct dollar ROI and I don't mind actually investing, which I actually think is a good shift for AI solutions to go through because there's just too much noise, too much hype. So that change management coupled with real ROI that you can point to, I would say are the two biggest shifts ahead in the next 12, 24 months, if not longer.

33:36Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Some of the conversations I'm in, half the people say, like half of these CMOs, they've been too focused on numbers these past couple of years. I mean, too tied to metrics that are kind of leading the company the wrong way because they forgot about, you know, investing in brand, investing in a longer term vision and like keeping an eye on just, you know, a three to five year goal versus just how do I make sure I get lots of leads and prove my value as a marketer and show, oh, look, here they are, even if many of them don't convert, or even if you have a buying cycle that's 400 days long, a lot of these B2B companies have.

34:14So how do you think about balancing these two in this space we're in of yes to metrics, I can show you ROI quickly, and thinking about how do I invest in brand and a longer term vision too? Yeah, no, that's a great question. And as you know, there's all this kind of, there was all, there has always been this joke that a lot of marketers kind of they have so much data all the analytics and they can kind of have dashboard after dashboard yet if you ask a simple question about tell me exactly what your customer journey looks like where are different customers go through in spite of all that investment and cdps and analytics and a b testing and that's kind of i would say as the industry there is a bit of ownership i would say but more than bit of ownership on the technology side over the last couple of decades in MarTech, where there are thousands and thousands of tools that companies have bought and brought and deployed, yet they don't really have that much better capability to engage their customers meaningful.

35:12I mean, yes, they're keeping up. So to your point, it would be a mistake to just brute force and say, oh, I'm just going to generate 50 more reports of AI. And kind of, by the way, there is this kind of a fun phrase, a lot of, and it's not limited to marketing so I don't want to be overly harsh to the CMO community that I know but there are all these kind of reports that have what I kind of refer to as these watermelon metrics they all look green from the outside but they actually are red on the inside they are like really unhealthy about your real business and lots of teams just run their business by staring at these green circles that look great but it's not translating into improved NPS or improved customer journey or improve customer satisfaction.

35:58And so to your point, with things like brand, with things like content, you're going to have to rethink what measurement even means because it's not just, oh, I'll just measure the standard three metrics and if they are trending positively. Because as I said, brand is a very ephemeral thing, at least has been so far. And I think that's an exciting area, Stephanie, to your audience. There's probably some interesting startups that are being built or will be built, which is if you look at typeface, we are more on the content creation, personalization end. But what is the world of measurement in this new world of AI platforms where attributes of brand are now more codified and attributes of these campaigns where I'm not running a simple A-B test, but I'm going to run 100 ,000 variants.

36:45How do I even measure the efficacy of my marketing? I think it's probably a brand new area for innovation. Yeah, I agree. I mean, and they say even like, especially in the B2B space, the buyer already has their mind made up by the time they're looking for a tool. And it's because of the work that you've probably been doing on brand. Because at this point, I mean, a lot of these technologies are becoming, I should say, democratized. Like I think about cybersecurity. You go to a cybersecurity conference and they all look the same and they all use the same buzzwords and they're probably pretty much the same, like maybe a little bit better here and there.

37:19But if you end up choosing one, it's probably based off, oh, I've seen that brand. I've heard of it. They've been around. They've been talked about by people I respect. And that's when you make that buying decision because you've already heard of them. And so that's why I think, yeah, thinking about how do you measure brand? How do you look at all the content you're putting out there? How do you see the performance? Is it resonating? Is going to be more important than ever? Because a lot of these technology companies are kind of converging with some of the capabilities they have access to. Yeah, no, I completely agree.

37:46I mean, just maybe to give you a little bit of a teaser of where we are going at typeface, but also where industry is going in that same vein of what you were just talking about. One of the things that our customers are pushing us and telling us exactly like you said, where once they figure out that brand can be codified with these brand agents and I can understand attributes, then they realize I can do this scaled campaign creation where I can do way more emails, way more kind of, but not way more emails as just blast the same email, but personalize and run different channels, different campaigns.

38:18Once they realize the conclusion, then they come to is exactly what you said, which is, oh, if I now have my brand codified and if I can run all these campaigns at a far faster speed and personalized micro audiences, now I need a way to measure in very granular way what's working and what's not. And if I'm going to measure 100 ,000 variations of the email, I can't have somebody manually reading Excel or dashboards or Tableau reports or whatever i need the same ai system to become a closed-loop performance agent and so one of the things we are working on is kind of can you do that holy grail of last mile closed loop which is as you are running this significant number of campaigns significant number of on-brand touch points can you build a closed-loop ai performance agent that's going to analyze and measure in real time all these micro interactions, what's working, what's not, because no, again, no amount of human beings at agencies, they can analyze maybe three or four Google campaigns a month.

39:23But if I suddenly start running 10 ,000, like there is no chance they can analyze that in a meaningful way and in time. And so I do think this closing the loop is one of the, Stephanie, every CMO we are working with is saying, if you can get us to a point where these AI agents are creating this closed loop marketing content funnel and our creatives and our marketers are really doing the high value job of curating, inspecting the most high value interactions, but they are not in the flow of minute staring at every cell on Excel and analyzing the click through rate. That should just happen automatically and let them focus on the high value brand interaction.

40:07So I do think that's where you will see us going, which is the last mile, closed loop AI agents that just complete the loop back all the way from creative to measurement. Yep. I think you just coined that term. I mean, it was a term coined when I was back at Google, where we always talked about last mile, but I think you just coined it for marketing now. So it's yours. Yeah, no, it's exciting. Well, you have the platform and community, so I'm sure you can drive more awareness. Yeah, yeah, I definitely am. I would love to hear something that I've had a lot of conversations around, I don't feel like I've gotten a ton of good concrete answers yet, is around the world of search and SEO.

40:45And I mean, especially in the space that you're in around personalized content and personalized marketing, how do you think about search of the future? Like how should brands be showing up to be having their results show up in these LLMs and making sure that they are on top and they have enough content out there to actually be fed into these models and found? What's your view on that? That's a multi-trillion dollar question for a lot of companies finding it out. I should say, full disclosure, I was one of the early angel investors, one of the first ones in Perplexity, which is one of the search innovators in this space.

41:23So just wanted to make sure. And I think very highly of them. They're doing some amazing innovative work. But more broadly, I do think This is a fascinating question, Stephanie. And we do see it a little bit in our business. But as you know, we are not in the consumer search space. We are more on the brand side, how we help brands adapt to this evolving landscape. So maybe I'll give you a two-part answer. Parts that seem obvious and clear to me that are going to happen. And then parts that are complete unknown right now, at least to me. I'm here for it. Yes. I think parts that seem pretty obvious and clear that there are going to be some natural progressions of kind of the standard world of SEO is going to have, it's already breaking.

42:06I mean, it was already breaking even with the cookie less. And then now here comes along these answer engines. And now people talk about answer engine optimization or really embedding in content. So I think there is sort of going to be natural evolutions, both of technology and business models, where the traditional kind of the 10 blue links and just kind of bombarding links and then expect the user to bounce from link to link. I think that world is going to go because people are going to want more synthesized content. And then in some ways, it's not exact analogy, but I think what Amazon did many years ago, where if you look at their recommendations, they figured out how to actually serve you the most relevant recommendation right in the product pages that you are looking at.

42:52And in a way, even though it was an ad, I as a user found it extremely valuable because over time it knew my preferences, it knew my buying habits, and essentially it was serving contextually the right products for me at the right moment. And so I would say there is an evolution that's going to happen whether people right now are calling answer engine optimization or embedding commerce or travel or the big categories will just get included increasingly in these kind of deep research or kind of the answer engine results. So I think that's obvious. And I think either the big players like Google or the upstarts like Perplexity and OpenAI will kind of push the limits, see what models work.

43:36That is obvious. And then somebody will invent or multiple people will invent the commercial ad unit equivalent for that one. And I think we'll go through that intense battle. And I think that's easy to figure out. What's not so easy to predict in my mind, which is as these agent-based systems become more and more automated and increasingly we can rely on these agents to just do all the research on our behalf and serve us the most synthesized kind of form of insight or piece of information. I think in a way you can think about maybe five years from now, maybe even sooner than that. If today you do 10 Google searches, It is highly conceivable that nine out of those 10, you will never, ever even see those searches.

44:26An agent will do it on your behalf, will synthesize the most relevant nuggets. And you will probably only see one small piece of insight where you never even saw those nine searches. And so then I think you're going to have to evolve SEO or even answer engine to kind of almost agent engine optimization. where these brands are going to have to optimize themselves for these agents. Like how do you look appealing to, I know it sounds a little bit Terminator-like, but I don't, it's not, but I do think it's going to be these massive communities of agents collaborating, cooperating, and then brands are going to have to figure out how to actually cut through these swarms of agents to get their brand insight in front of the user through the agents.

45:14And so I think in some ways, people used to complain Google was the gatekeeper or Apple App Store was the gatekeeper in the web and mobile era. I actually think these autonomous agents are going to become the modern day gatekeepers for brands to have to get through. Yes, yes, yes. Oh my gosh. I just had a whole visual of how to woo an AI agent and how to get them into your space and hi, pick me. I mean, I think at least my view on this too, because I totally agree. Like the world will soon be agents to agents. I mean, I was even thinking this when I was using the operator model the other day of ChatGBT.

45:50And I was like watching it do all these searches. And I was like, go just find me Kendrick Lamar tickets within a few hours drive of Austin under this price point within the next six months. And I was watching what it was doing. And that's when I also had this realization of, oh, there's going to be agents on the other side bidding on this and working. Yeah, and feeding it. And I don't even know what website you're going to. I actually don't even care as long as it's a good result. And so when it comes to giving me stuff I care about, I think that's where having amazing content is going to be necessary and lots of good Q &A and thought leadership and different kinds of content, especially in this B2B space.

46:27Like how do you stand out so that you have a bunch of different formats for these agents to choose from where that it's very clear you are the best answer or you have the best answer for what this person's looking for. And I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think you said it much better. I know there will always be people and companies and models. They'll figure out like people figure out how to do SEO hacking and they'll figure out how to hack these agents. And yes, that will happen at global scale when you have such a massive opportunity. But the real secret in my mind, and I know it's a little bit potentially self-serving to what we do.

46:59But if you as a brand have amazing content, an amazing way to engage your customers, you can imagine these agents as they go find the right information if the value of your content is fresh it stands on its own merits it actually is purpose built for the right audiences it is reinforcing the attributes that the customer may be interested in looking for then in fact in a world of ai you no longer are at the mercy of two or three corporate gatekeepers but you have these billions of agents where they are really dispassionately going to just pick the pieces of content that actually they think matches the best insight or the best attribute to whatever you as a user want.

47:41And so I do think ultimately the real holy grail for brands to adapt to this world is start creating a institutional capability to create extremely high quality, high volume at scale content very rapidly. I mean, I think that is the real holy grail because I don't know how these agents are going to evolve and how agent to agent swarms are going to work. And what I do know is if that is a currency you hold, then your brand will find a way to cut through through those stories and through that piece of content. Yeah, I agree. The other thing I've been thinking about too, in this world where everyone's going to be wrapped up and trying to figure this out, I think offline things are going to be more important than ever, events and showing up in the real world and being able to play in spaces that you can compete in differently.

48:32I mean, I think the value of relationships these days is so undervalued and getting face-to-face with people and building a relationship. So no matter what company you're working with or what you're doing, you've got this network of people that kind of got lost for a while. And I think people forgot, hi, we're humans, we need to all hang out and talk to each other and build relationships and do cool things together. And so I think that'll be a big currency of the future too is shifting back to like real world things as the agent thing gets figured out as well, of course. You know, it's funny you said that, Stephanie, just as a minor digression.

49:01In my personal life, I'm a big mechanical watch. I love mechanical watches. Are you wearing one? Yes. Let me see. It's a longa zuna. But I would say the intricacy of somebody creating a mechanical kind of a watch, the handcrafting, the physicality of getting the movement right and the art and craft. Obviously, it's completely kind of idiotic from a commercial sense because in the day and age where everyone carries one iPhone or you have a clock, every device around the room probably has 10 clocks. So you don't need it. But I think the inherent value of going back to these physical experiences, and when you said it, it reminded me, by the way, and in case you are not, I'm sure you don't track that word, the mechanical watches are suddenly on a massive resurgence.

49:56which is exact opposite of what people predicted when Apple Watch and iPhone happened, because people value the physical experiences even more in a world surrounded by billions of similar looking watches. And so to your point, as these agent-based marketing systems and even as you cut through content, the physical events and kind of the reality of creating experiences, I do think we are going to see a pendulum swing back to the analog in many ways. And those who figure out how to leverage AI for what it's good at, to do massive scale, massive personalization, but then layer on top of that, that extremely human touch element through physical events, communities, bring people together.

50:41I think that is going to be the ultimate secret sauce for what future CMOs are going to have to crack. So one thing that I would love to hear your take on is around the future of partnerships, which I don't actually get to talk a lot about on marketing trends. But I know when we talked yesterday, you mentioned how, you know, the future of tech companies that will succeed are the ones who get to also partner with the amazing giants like the sales forces of the world. And I'd love to hear your perspective, especially from maybe like a marketing perspective, because this is in the world of marketing, partnerships oftentimes falls inside of that.

51:17Like, how do you think about this and how to really get a leg up in this space so that you can maybe hold on to the successful ones and be a part of, you know, everyone winning? Yeah, no, I love that. I'm glad you kind of, as you know, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. It's something we have done. We try to kind of, it's a core strategy from day one of typeface. As you know, when we started the company early on, we were fortunate enough to partner deeply with Microsoft and Google and then Salesforce early on. And we are working with these three giants in the enterprise kind of space on the forefront of AI in their own respective ways.

51:53And again, like the agency topical earlier, there's a little bit of a controversy or maybe debate around, oh, should startups even bother trying to partner with the big guys? they are complicated companies it will never work and you should not waste your time trying to kind of make that work we are 100 convinced that the way this ai kind of shift is going to play out first of all it's so massive and big as we have been talking about that no single company and certainly not startups can go take kind of take on the entire stack or the entire challenge so then you have to figure out what is your core competency where are you going to play in the stack to deliver value to the customer.

52:34But then where should you really go partner with others who are bringing their own competency, their own unique IP strength, whether it's product, technology, distribution. And so AI, I think, Stephanie, is different unlike maybe the previous shift where there was a little bit of a fear. I think it was a little bit of a zero-sum game that startups really have to compete by making the incumbents irrelevant or fight the incumbents and that's the only way you're going to win business. I actually think with AI, what we are seeing is exact opposite. At least our experience is these massive platform companies like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, they are investing billions of hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, laying out global platforms.

53:18They need interesting applications to light up these platforms. And yes, they have their own applications. They have Office, they have Google Workspace. So they will do that. But they don't have all the applications. And certainly in the marketing domain, what we realized is they were very keen and eager to say, hey, if you work with us deeply, adopt our technology platform that lets us showcase the power of Microsoft's AI platform or OpenAI's models or in case of Google, Google, Gemini, we are very close early partners with both. They get very excited because it starts showing the power of their platforms in applications to end users.

53:58So first, it is truly a win-win. I don't think it's a zero-sum game. Now, yes, you still have to navigate these complex organizations. They have their own politics, their organizations, their sales structures, and that takes a lot of effort. So I don't want to trivialize it. But if you figure it out, they are actually extremely motivated right now to pull companies like Typeface into their customer base, their channel, their distribution. Same with Salesforce. I mean, they have been an incredible partner. They continue to be an incredible partner. where they have a very broad suite of applications, but they early on made a bet that Typeface represents best-in-class content engine to integrate with their marketing cloud suite.

54:40And so we are now, I think we are the only one, but we are deeply integrated inside their product and their sales teams routinely introduce us to customers. They bring us into their customers and business. and then we jointly demonstrate how typeface plus salesforce can completely reimagine your workflow so i think this is kind of the other side of that agency dialogue where in some ways these big platform companies are also going after that hundreds of billions of dollars of agency spent because they now see that as a category that can move to software from services and so if you find the right partners if you create the right win-win kind of integrations on product and go to market, we are actually seeing that be one of our biggest tailwinds.

55:29Now, we don't disclose exact numbers externally as a private company, but what I would tell you is a very large majority of our marketing leads come from doing joint programs and events with these three partners. They bring us in. Now, we still have to do our part. We have to go execute it. But some of the biggest enterprise wins we have had in the last few years have been with the help of these partners. So it's been extremely valuable. And I'm actually even a big believer now that our only way to win in AI is by going jointly with these partners. Because as a small company, we'll never have the distribution, the reach, the awareness that these giants have in the market.

56:14I love this perspective. And I think it's something that most marketers don't put enough focus on. I mean, like I said, when we talked about this the other day, I'm like, I haven't heard a lot of people talking about this. And I do think it's because of this startup era. I mean, you know, I was in the Bay Area, we were in the Bay Area. Like, you don't want to work with these big guys. They're just going to come and take your IP and then you're going to get acquired by them. And then there goes your company culture. And like, this has been ingrained into a lot of people's minds, at least in the Bay Area.

56:41That's all you've heard for a while. Yeah. And so it's a nice mindset shift to think about how do you partner with companies that make sense. And I mean, I'm part of this, I don't know if you've heard of Dan Sullivan. I'm in his entrepreneurship group. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he has a whole thing around how do you find partners, but also even competitors that you can also work with. And there's so much white space in that market of like, can we get to a collaboration space where it used to feel like competition and like, let's collaborate instead. By the way, to be clear, I don't mean you should be naive.

57:13I mean, these big companies are going to compete. They are going to want, as soon as they think it's a massive enough opportunity, they will come up. I mean, as I said, for a decade, I was at Microsoft. I've been on the other side. And so I have no illusions. But I do think in a shift as big as AI, there's so much, like if you truly believe that it's a 10 trillion plus opportunity, then they are going to go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of the biggest opportunity. And if they think you can help them win big, They will partner. And I think they are partnering at least. So I agree with you.

57:49I think companies will figure out how to do it. It's not easy. But this does feel like a little bit of a different, like, oh, in the valley, it is fashionable. Like any incumbent, it is kind of, you should really be wary. You should kind of trash them every single day. And I think, and maybe it's because at Typeface, we have a lot of people who were kind of on the other side for a while. Maybe we have a slightly different view. But one last thing I'll say, because a lot of your audience is CMO. One other reason why we are doing this, by the way, these partnerships, it's not just because it's good for our business, which it is.

58:22But one other thing I hear from a lot of CMOs and even CIOs and CTOs, that especially in marketing, they really have fatigue of thousands and thousands of point solutions. Because marketing, unlike some other functions, like in finance, there are two or three ERP vendors and people may hate, they have to work with. but it is a consolidated market. Whereas in marketing, it is so many point solutions and thousands and thousands of solutions and every marketer wants to bring their next favorite tool into the company. And then before you know it, the CIO, CTO on one side has a governance nightmare on their hand.

59:00Like I don't even know how many tools my team is using, where the data is leaking, whether it's efficient or not. And the CMO doesn't have any end-to-end visibility as you and I were talking about. And so I think one other reason why we are doing this partnership play is to provide a more integrated platform vision of these capabilities versus going into a brand and a CMO and saying, oh, you know what? You are going to have to spend the next five years buying 50 different AI tools and stitching them before you see any results. I don't think most companies want to do that. Yep. No, I agree. So this, I mean, brings up an interesting point too.

59:39I mean, you were a CTO and now you've got this amazing marketing company. How do you view these worlds coming together? Like, how do you think about talking with your CMO or showing a CMO how to talk to a CTO or CIO so that they can collaborate in a way that marketing can move forward and move quickly without breaking the entire tech stack? Yeah, no, I mean, this is the other fascinating topic. I know you and I have talked a little bit about this, but I think, I do think one of the other interesting shifts that AI is going to cause in a lot of companies, I don't know if it's going to cause it in every company, I think eventually it will, is the functional lines are going to become way more blurred because the knowledge base that these AI systems can kind of truly look across is going to start enabling decision-making and strategy definition.

1:00:29And you were kind of already seeing this where the line between what is a product to how you market that product to how you drive sales whether you call it growth hacking plg or whatever the buzzword is i think you are already starting to see even pre-ai a little bit of what is the definition of your product is your website landing page your product or even the google query that somebody types in and the experience they get and the commerce experience that likes of stripe have completely nailed all that is your product i mean how you experience. And so I think the line between what a CTO or a CPO kind of quote unquote is responsible for versus what a CMO is responsible for versus what a CRO, I actually think one of the fascinating things that's going to happen with AI is it's going to collapse.

1:01:18Now, I don't think accountabilities will go away, but the true customer journey, if it really does become that connected, and if these AI agents can truly automate across customer service to marketing, to sales to product, then a CMO will have to be far more integrated with CTO and vice versa. Or a CRO and CMO. I mean, by the way, even in our own company, we just recently hired two amazing leaders, a CRO and CMO. And if I see right now, they are more often in the same meetings discussing their entire strategy together because you can't really do your digital demand gen and your campaigns and your content separate from your sales programs and sales activation.

1:02:05And so I think one thing I'm excited about, and if I could be kind of hopefully not presumptuous, but to say anything to your CMO community, I think CMOs are going to have to actually view their role in a far more expansive fashion. I don't think, I mean, I know there was a time where CMO is dead or the CMO role is going away. It was kind of the thing 10 years ago. I actually think it's going to be the reverse where brand and standing out in the world of these automated agents, what we were talking about, becomes more paramount. CMO is almost going to have to play a far more active role upstream in product and downstream in sales and customer success, because the brand is going to become more and more of a product that lives everywhere.

1:02:55And it's not just the image you put on your website or a post you do on Instagram. Brand is every single interaction across every single touchpoint. Yep. No, I 100 % agree. I mean, it also, it feels like there's going to be a roll-up, which I think you're kind of saying where, you know, previously you would have your chief brand officer and your head of customer success. And I feel like many of those things are rolling up under the CMO. And CRO, to me, those roles kind of can be mixed sometimes. And I don't know how I think about who does what with that, but it seems like there are many of these are going to go underneath the CMO because they're the ones who are going to be controlling a lot of these pieces of like, how is our brand showing up?

1:03:36How are our customers feeling? Like, are the support tickets taken care of? Like all of that seems like it's going to be under one role. And whether the title will be called CMO or like each company may call it differently. And again, this is another form of change management because at C-level, the politics and ownership, I mean, it's not going to happen easily, but we are actually seeing the good news, Stephanie, back to some of our biggest customers. We see they're already like one of our largest telecom customers. They now have a new C-level role where the CMO, the brand, and the growth all report into this one person now.

1:04:12Yeah. And so that's kind of starting to happen. Yep. I love it. We do a section where it's relevant or not relevant. You just say, you know, what you think about it. All right. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. Resumes. Not relevant. Banner ads. Relevant. A-B testing. Not relevant. Standing desks. Relevant. LinkedIn thought leadership. Relevant. The fake Zoom backgrounds. Not relevant. Corporate swag. Relevant. A personal newsletter. Relevant. Work from home. Mixed. In between. Mostly not relevant. Uh-huh. Okay. You have your people mostly in an office. We are big believers in kind of being in office, but people do need and have flexibility.

1:05:07That's why I was a little bit, but yeah, for me personally, the chemistry and being in the back of your thing, kind of being together is so much energy. As much as I love this dialogue on video, but in-person is amazing always. Next time you're going to be here, right next to me. Yeah, we would love to do that. All right, last one, pickleball. Relevant. Do you play? Because I'm disclosing my age probably biased. I play. I love pickleball. It's a big thing here. I love it. Yeah, I love it. You do? All right. We have to get you to Austin. We can have a match. Yeah, I would love to do that. Can I ask a quick question just from my producer perspective?

1:05:43Yes, yes. We've got Abe. Get him. And actually, it's a question for both of you. I'd love to hear both of your perspectives on it. But as I was listening to you talk about AI agents and agents representing both individual consumer and businesses in both buying and selling, would that lead to a super pragmatic shopping experience where digital content marketing is either going to be obsolete or it doesn't really need to be clever or creative because you're not appealing to human emotion anymore? Like how do you see digital content marketing changing if it's just AI agent to AI agent? That is a fascinating question.

1:06:21And I'm sure actually this is kind of one of those a little bit like Stephanie's earlier question around search. I think there can be very many valid answers right now. And I don't think anyone can prove until it plays out. My personal view, and maybe you can say it's a little bit of a wishful view I have of how agents are going to evolve, is that it would be a very boring and dry world if it just became very emotionless, dry, pragmatic, agent to agent conducting transactions in commerce. and not having a super emotional kind of storytelling component. Sometimes both functionally relevant to stand out, but sometimes even just for the craft of it.

1:07:05Like we as humans do value those. It's like enjoying an amazing movie or a song. You couldn't really distill its value. Like does a song have to be really four minutes to like, but it is. And so I think the brands that will stand out will figure out even in the world of this deeply automated fabric of agent to agent, how to break through and convey deeply, deeply emotional experiences and drive that as your value. So I hope it doesn't go down the path you are describing, but I can see why that's a valid outcome also. So Stephanie, what's your take? You talk to a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I would see a place where, let's just say a personal consumer agent where I'm like, go out there and do things for me.

1:07:56I would be having an agent having my values and my humor and the things that I like. And so it probably would only be choosing other things based off of that. Because I don't think it's just going to be, yes, robotic, go find this. It's like, no, like this is my style. At this point, you probably got a lot of information on me. I'm voicing into ChatGPT or whatever it might be. all the time. So you know, the things that I look for and care about and how I would filter it myself if I were going out there and searching the internet. And so I think I would see them being a little bit humanified, like feels like a human interaction because it's built off of the human behind it.

1:08:32And so that's my optimistic view of, yeah. And why you need to show up as a brand also, like showing - I think maybe Rose, as Stephanie was saying, the other thing I realized, first of all, I love that. I would say maybe Rose, the only thing I would say is, it also depends on what category and what the context is. If it's a highly utilitarian kind of a shopping transactional experience like buying an airline ticket or something, you really don't need that deep emotional connection or it's a very basic price and timing and conflict. I think those will probably go down the path that you are describing.

1:09:08And I actually don't think that's a bad thing. I don't need United sending me a lot of emotional emails about kind of how to engage with them. But then if it's buying an engagement ring for my fiance, it's going to be different things, I would say, in life context. So, but I hope it doesn't go down and become very mundane, monotonous agent to agent and takes out the fun out of it. We won't let that happen, Abe. I hope so. You will certainly do your part. I will do my part. I will tell everyone, don't let that happen. We are humans. We get to have fun human experiences here. Exactly. Well, Abe, that was such a fun interview.

1:09:48Thanks for coming on Marketing Trends. We'll definitely have to have you back for round two in the future. So yeah, thanks for joining. We'd love to.