How to Make AI Work for Your Brand With Two (Enterprise) Insiders

15:13Craig Foldes:And I think this notion of celebrating and incentivizing and rewarding that adoption is really important. I've got a number of others, but I'll stop there. Those are just a couple of really basic ones.

15:23Sean Frank:Yeah, Matt said the word creativity gap, right, or imagination gap. I think that's so true. Like, because we're so used to software doing the same thing forever, but like this software is updating in real time all the time. Right. So even if somebody did a demo six months ago and thought it was cool, like what's capable now is just so much stronger. I bring up Claude getting really good at data and not hallucinating anymore. And it's like that happened in six months. So in six months, it ended up being not a good data tool to the best one on the market. So I think the biggest tip for everybody is you just have to do live demos in front of everybody.

15:56Sean Frank:So like get everyone on a call, make them have cameras on, spend an hour and build a game in real time or build AI videos in real time and like go through all of the actual workflow. And it's slow and it's boring and it's messy. But watching somebody be like, OK, here's an image we have. We're going to make a whole video story about it and doing that in real time in Higgs field blows people's mind. So I think that's like the biggest tip. Matt, any response to that?

16:23Matt Kruer:We're doing the exact same thing. We've got a team channel where everyone's just posting things that they're building, that the organization can interact with each other. I've got questions around how to do X and Cloud Code or something else. So we want to foster a lot of organic engagement. We do a monthly town hall that, like you said, we don't have any of the executives in it. The power users present to other people that are just interested in AI. I want to see what we're building, what we're doing within the business. And like you said, live demos, videos, you know, we're constantly posting, you know, YouTubes from by marketers around, you know, look at this workflow they built.

16:59Matt Kruer:You know, I've been buying, you know, prompt libraries and just flooding them into the, you know, our shared folders just to get people to experiment. So a lot of this actual, you know, experience of using it.

17:10Sean Frank:I haven't even thought about buying prompt libraries. That's hilarious. So it's like, yeah, I'm sure that's like a whole market. And like, I just, like, there's so much undiscovered land here. What's up?

17:19Matt Kruer:Right. It blows my mind. I mean, when you watch one of these YouTube videos and you see like the complexity of these prompts and like what it really takes to get the output or the output that you want. You know, I think that's one thing where a lot of people don't understand what a good prompt looks like. And if you can just take that variability out of it, because, you know, if they do use the tool and they don't write a prompt, they just write it off as though this doesn't work. You know, a lot of the time it's because they're not prompting it right. They're not using the beating it with the right context, the right data.

17:46Matt Kruer:And so trying to take as much of the kind of user error out of it as possible so that they have a better experience is something we're focusing on.

17:53Craig Foldes:I think that is the most important point. I think a lot of people are threatened by the technology and they want to point to it as not working or not ready for prime time. And when you get crummy outputs, people are like, oh, I don't get what the fuss is about. But, you know, that the reality is, is to Matt's point about prompting, like just use a simple prompt optimizer. ChatGPT makes one available. Just say, hey, this is what I'm trying to do. This is what I want to say. And I'll be like, oh, if you're trying to do that, just tell me this. And then that's it, right? But I think a lot of people don't want this to necessarily succeed in a weird way for whatever reason.

18:23Craig Foldes:So, you know, pointing to high quality outputs, I think is critical. I think you've also both talked about sharing things publicly. And I think one thing that's beneficial about that is you're able to see the ways that other people use and interact with the tool. And that can be a light bulb moment for you and your own interaction. But Matt, you talked about tops down and bottoms up. And I just want to share my buddy, Ben, who's a phenomenal leader. I think he's led one of the best rollouts across the country, same with my friend Danny at Fabletics. And they've done something similar where they've trained a small group of individuals, you know, really entrepreneurial, curious, empathetic people who've been at the company for a while and have high trust.

19:03Craig Foldes:And then they've sent them out across the organization to go find problems and pain points that AI could help solve across different departments. But most critically, what they've done is they've then surfaced that back up to leadership to say, look, for you as a marketer, here are 20 things within your department where we feel AI or automation can help make an impact today. But most critically, you need to tell us the three that you want us to work on, right? And so this idea of bottoms up, but then top down mandate and requirement is so important because the labs and others will tell you like, this stuff lives and dies with the executive champion.

19:39Craig Foldes:If they're not all about it and making it happen, then it's not going to necessarily go anywhere or people aren't going to celebrate it. So I do think that that bottoms up, tops down, mixes is critical.

19:48Sean Frank:In our org, 10 % of people, super users, like 10 % of people will do, like they won't do any work that doesn't involve AI. So if I ask them to do something, the first thing they're doing is going to AI and figuring out what they mean and then optimizing the workflow from there. And then 25 % of users on top of that are, you know, they're going to use it in something, but it's really getting the majority of the block, 60 % of people, to break it into their workflow. And a lot of it is just like, look, these people are professionals. They've been working for 10, 20 years. Now they have to do this other thing when they know how to do it the way they've always done it.

20:22Sean Frank:And getting that to break, I think, is really hard. So Matt, you brought up CX as the first thing you guys do. The next tip, practical for the audience, what's the 80-20? Where can people get AI value right now? Max, talk about your CX experience and we can expand out from there because CX is an obvious first one. What's up operators? Welcome to the Rich Panel ad read. Rich Panel has been a sponsor for over 12 months. I've been a paying customer for over 12 months and guess what? I just renewed to pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%.

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21:27Matt Kruer:Coding and CX is where everyone's focused. And we don't have as much of a coding need. And so that's why we picked CX. And, you know, it's, it's been a success for us. We've been really happy with the output. And now it's about scaling it. And, you know, the fact that we have this tool in place, enables us to do frankly, just more and better customer experience than we than we did before, you know, for example, we're going to launch in Poland this year. And, you know, it prior to having this AI solution, we might have had, you know, the only customer service solution for our Poland customers is to call our, you know, an English speaking, you know, agent, right.

22:04Matt Kruer:And we couldn't, you know, we can't translate languages. And so this is enabling us to deliver a much better experience in each of the countries for each of the products that we serve. And so we'll continue to grow that product. You know, the obvious one, and where I'm sure a lot of your listeners are focusing on is just our marketing, you know, content, and just increasing the velocity and variability of our content. That's always a bottleneck, I think, for any consumer product company. And so being able to do more of that is going to be a huge win for us. And then long-term, I think what I'm most excited about is how it's going to change our product development cycles.

22:42Matt Kruer:So both using the models to both collect all the insights that we have internally that we've built over 150 years of being in operation to scraping all the external points in terms of reviews and customer feedback, feeding that into our product development cycle, and then also just doing the actual automation of things like CAD. And I haven't seen that necessarily get to the point where it's ready yet, but I think that's going to be a big unlock is just in physical product development. It's something that Jeff Bazelis is working on with his new startup. And I think that's going to be really transformative in the physical product space.

23:16Sean Frank:Yeah. So three levels there, but first with CX at Ridge, rich is up 50 % year over year. And with that tickets naturally go up, but human answer tickets is probably at like a five year low, right? So like some tickets still have to go to humans, but as the business has grown, the number of tickets actually reach a human operator is shrinking over time. So that means our CX team is 10 agents where it used to be 25 agents, right? So that's like a real practical use case right now. And I think everyone agrees that's going to be solved. It's like, it's like they're, they're doing voice now, but like we, we don't do voice.

23:54Sean Frank:We just do written text. And it's like, yeah, this is what Chachepty was literally designed for. Craig, what were the trends you're seeing around CX before we moved to marketing?

24:03Craig Foldes:Well, I think your point on, on voice and CX, I mean, this stuff is getting so good that it is both inevitable and non, it's not controversial to say that text, audio, video will be indistinguishable from human produced content or voice like relatively quickly. That's probably a 2026 thing. And so, yeah, I mean, without a doubt, like, you know, CX and all these other areas like, you know, content creative, like we just now have a new tool at our disposal to help us with the output of that work. Right. I often say this is just like Excel, like it's just another tool to help people do work. I think there's a lot in the SDR and outbound sales automations and things like that, where, you hear teams just like you had said, hey, instead of 25 folks, we've got 10 folks doing it.

24:52Craig Foldes:I think sales and outbound sales is also that world right now too.

24:56Sean Frank:Anything that isn't talking to someone in person, but like setting up calls, like answering questions, everything. It's like, dude, the ball isn't even moving there. The ball's there. It's just waiting for someone to pick it up, I think.

25:07Matt Kruer:Just assume that the technology will be good enough, even if it's not good enough now. Your default assumption should be it will be, and it will be faster than you think. And so you have to start experimenting now so that when it is there, you've got the kind of the pipes and the foundation in place to take advantage of it. But because of that process, I mean, Craig, you talked about needing executive sponsorship. I think that's been critical for us because there has been like when we've really tried to embed it into material workflows, there has been this J curve to the investment where it is a worse experience for your associates.

25:40Matt Kruer:It's, you know, like you said, Sean, you're they're used to doing things a certain way that probably pretty efficient at it. You're forcing them to use this new tool. It might not be working exactly how they want it. And so there is that learning curve where it actually is probably less productive than their current process. But then quickly will accelerate through to a much better experience. But you really need the executive sponsorship to clear the way and kind of maintain the kind of the conviction that this is going to work.

26:06Craig Foldes:Can I jump in with a great use case within that? Sorry, Sean, I get so excited to build on his point. So I'll stop, you go, and then -

26:11Sean Frank:No, no, no, dude, it's a convo, man. Craig, build on it. What's up?

26:15Craig Foldes:You know, we talk about kind of like slowing down and problematic in that way. I would try to be crazy strategic around some of like the big use cases where a simple solution could solve. One thing that I immediately go to is there's so much process loss when briefs are potentially handed off to another cross-functional team, right? And what gems or GPTs are, they're just effectively like books around what best in class output looks like. And so anytime you've got a brief that is handed off or something like this, like, just run it through a book about what a best in class brief looks like. And then it'll spit back out the GPT will say like, hey, you know, head of category at Ridge, no, this brief is missing x, y and z for your partner on the design team.

26:58Craig Foldes:And when you have a use case like that, where the two teams are able to work together and define what best in class output looks like to then have that middle layer, that GPT, that's then a trigger for them to be like, oh, my God, there are all these other use cases where something like this is relevant. So I'd be strategic there. I had a situation at Crocs where we built that for somebody and she got like legitimately emotional. She was just like, oh, my God, my team spends hundreds of hours each quarter on things that never see the light of day, not because the work isn't good enough, but because the brief was off and all that we deliver didn't meet the goals, right?

27:33Craig Foldes:So when you can be like surgical and identifying these high impact, low effort opportunities, and then people just see how easy this thing is both to use and create. And it starts to snowball.

27:43Matt Kruer:I think that's an underestimated value of AI, especially for larger organizations is, you know, everyone wants to talk about all the alpha that AI can create, but there's a lot of value in just the like reducing the beta across large organizations in terms of just the variability of outputs that you get for the same process, right? So I might have one team that is amazing at writing briefs and always comes out with great content. And the other one is inconsistent. And being able to give them those tools, those best practices packaged up in a clawed skill and just know that I'm always going to be able to get the right hooks that I want, the right demos that I want for the new products with much higher hit rate is incredibly valuable as you think about just empowering your organization and enabling you to then move on to doing other stuff.

28:28Sean Frank:consistency of communication and communicating internally. Good use cases. I actually wanted to talk about creative next because do you guys remember when Instagram started tagging things made with AI? They were like, hey, this is made with AI. And then the CEO of Instagram came out and he's like, actually, it's going to be easy for us to tag stuff that is made with people because everything's made with AI now. So he's totally inverted that. And Craig, you said earlier, it's indistinguishable from created by a human. And that's a great 2026 prediction is that video will be there. Right now, even the best video models, if you look really, really hard and there's somebody speaking, you can still basically figure out that it's AI.

29:10Sean Frank:I think that totally changes by Q4 of this year. I think this is where the puck is definitely going, is that creative will almost entirely be AI. Taylor Holliday came on here and he said 20 % of spend in most of his accounts are fully AI. And he called that a loss because he's like, look, why isn't it 50 %? It's going to be 50%. Longtime sponsor Northbeam is launching Incrementality later this quarter. This means that you can now have the trifecta of marketing measurement all in one platform. That is multi-touch attribution, media mix modeling, and incrementality holdouts all inside of Northbeam.

29:46Sean Frank:You can automate that lift testing end-to-end, unify results with your MTA and your MMM. This is a lot of letters, but if you know, you know, and you can start to cut what doesn't work and you can scale what works and you can do this all with confidence. This is why this is such an incredible ad to Northbeam. Northbeam's incrementality measures what results marketing is actually generating, not just what they're claiming credit for. As a CEO, that's like music to my ears. Sign up now and you can lock in 50 % off unlimited tests for the year. YouTube Shorts is now reporting that 20 to 40 % of all YouTube Shorts are basically just AI.

30:22Sean Frank:So it's like AI video, but consumers are consuming this even if they don't want to or don't mean to. And I think all of us as brand marketers are going to have to create ads using AI. And if you haven't done so so far, it's like the next obvious thing, infinite iterations on video. So Matt, are you guys bringing video and static ads that are made with AI into your ad account?

30:43Matt Kruer:Yeah, we are. I mean, we've been experimenting now with our agency. They're building their own tools to help, you know, we're seeing it more useful and copy and static ads. We're still struggling with video, I think to see, you know, to have it be at the quality that we want it to be at. But again, the assumption is it's going to get there. And so we're going to keep iterating on it, but we are definitely embedding it into our, into our content creation workflows and completely agree that in 2026, you're going to see a significant increase in, you know, our own copy, but in our own content, but, you know, across the board, people using AI to produce look at.

31:18Sean Frank:And Craig, what are you seeing right now? You must be excited about this.

31:23Craig Foldes:Yeah. I mean, look, it's a spectrum, right? When we talk about AI and creative, there's kind of the Coca-Cola, like big commercial, whatever. But then if we go back to this analogy of these tools just as Excel, right? It is a tool as part of the creative process. You can use AI across all different variations, excuse me, all elements of the creative process to speed things up. And when it becomes easier for creatives to create more content, what inevitably happens, I would imagine, is better segmentation, right? You're able to hit and have the right creative asset and messaging hit the right consumer, because it's so much easier to create more and more output.

32:01Craig Foldes:I think that is an inevitability. I mean, the labs have effectively said as much, I love creating AI versions of customers to pressure test messaging against, etc. And so that I think phase one is inevitably that I think phase two is almost like an agentic build where it's just studying performance and then creating net new, you know, assets based upon what's working and what's not. I don't think we're there now. And I don't know that 26 is the year for that, but I think the segmentation element is where this is. But just to wrap a bow, AI for creative is not just Coca-Cola, right? It's not just, oh, that's a hundred percent of the output.

32:36Craig Foldes:It's where and how to plug this technology into the entire creative process.

32:40Sean Frank:Here's a good practical use case for everybody. We have a collegiate program. So we have every school and you can get a Ridge Wallet with the school logo on it, the mascot, the team, whatever. Those campaigns on an individual school level might only spend$50 a day. It's like, look, Alabama has a lot of fans. They don't have that many fans, right? And put that to every school across the whole country. There's a limit on how much we can invest in actually getting that creative, right? Am I going to get a jersey for every team? Am I going to get a fan wearing the Jersey talking about how you can buy the wallet.

33:12Sean Frank:It's like, even if I want to just do that digitally with a designer, it takes a really long time. But what we do is we have B-roll, we have photos of everyone because we have product pages for everyone. And then we can use AI to put in a fan and a Jersey, right? So now I actually have a more compelling Alabama ad or Harvard ad or whatever, right? And I can do that for 250 schools now, and it could be two days of work instead of literally a three-week-long thing trying to get all of these individual UGC pieces shot and sent back to us. So it just starts unlocking alpha at the edges of your ad account where you weren't able to do it in the past.

33:47Sean Frank:So that's where a practical tip where I think it is useful right now, it is blending some amount of AI, so AI UGC, with actual B-roll. So you're not hitting somebody with a 60-second an AI-only ad because I just don't think it's there yet, but you're putting in three to five clips of AI that are all three segments each.

34:08Matt Kruer:It's obviously in that same vein, SEO is obvious as well in terms of just creating a lot more blogs, a lot more, particularly, we've got a thousand SKUs in our catalog. There's a lot of SKUs that just don't get attention from whether it's creating content or blog content or some of those static images. And now you're getting to get to those that long tail of your product assortment that you just wouldn't touch before.

34:31Craig Foldes:Absolutely. I think that's it where you as the leader just step in and say, oh, hey, this buy is only a thousand units or ten thousand units. It's not one hundred thousand. That's not as important as some of these other things. Boom. That goes to the AI production cycle, like with some of these big companies. Right. Like, you know, people don't even have visibility to the size of the buyer. They don't even know if what they're working on is going to be part of a massive campaign or not. And so I think that's where leadership comes in. And just from an efficiency standpoint, you're able to segment it.

34:57Craig Foldes:I mean, Sean, that's a perfect example.

34:58Sean Frank:Do you guys think this will be an advantage to incumbents because they have more capital, they're more durable, they have larger infrastructure, already have distribution? Or do you think there's just another tool for the rebels, the small shop by merchant, to get bigger, faster, better? Who actually wins the most right now?

35:17Matt Kruer:I don't know. I would say right now it feels like the rebels, it's an advantage to because they're just they're nimbler, they're quicker to adopt it and do experiment. I think in a lot of ways, maybe it's lower risk for them to experiment. So right now, I do think it's an advantage. Like I'm looking to, you know, what's happening in DTC, what the vibe marketers are putting together to kind of see what's at the edge from a content creation capability. But, you know, I could see as it becomes more, you know, frankly, better, you know, becoming an advantage for the incumbents, What I think about is what is this going to do to the long-term margin structure of our businesses?

35:56Matt Kruer:Does every business become five points more profitable? Or does that extra five points that it frees up because your content budget is smaller get redeployed back into more ads, higher customer acquisition costs? And if you don't figure this out, then you're at a disadvantage. And I think everyone will. And so I think it's more going to be the latter where this is just going to free up dollars and that are going to get reinvested in more growth. And it's going to just increase the level of competition even that much more.

36:26Craig Foldes:You know, Sean, to your point about capital, we're talking about something that costs$20 per user per month, right? So it doesn't matter that you're sitting on billions in cash when things are that cheap, right? And I go back to this quote, 50 % of the Fortune 500 from the year 2000 are gone. They just don't exist anymore. They either went out of business or whatever. And so I think we are talking, I feel strongly, about a transformation like the scale of the industrial revolution. This is the real deal. And so to me, when you're at a big company right now, there's so much uncertainty and so much of your time is spent trying to justify being able to use the tool rather than actually leaning in and leveraging it.

37:05Craig Foldes:So no, I don't think that this is, I think this is for the rebels, right? And I would go so far as to say, like, as an employee, if you are hindered in any way, from your ability to master and leverage this transformational tech, like, that's not awesome for you in your career. And you should probably go somewhere where it is more celebrated and encouraged. I don't know what the net outcome is for some of these larger companies and disruptives from incumbents. We're obviously talking about retail. If I was a venture backed software company like Monday, or even Figma, which just IPO'd, I'd be very, very scared of some of these up and coming tools that don't have the headcount or institutional stuff that we've got as a retail brand.

37:42Craig Foldes:I'm not sure, but no, this is for the rebels. And by the way, if I mean it sincerely, I think that people are doing themselves a massive disservice if they don't learn how to leverage this technology. And if they are encumbered in any way from doing it, that's problematic from a career development standpoint.

37:58Sean Frank:So I'm of two minds, right? If this is the internet, the internet was very good for the rebels. The mobile phone was very good for the incumbent. Now I've launched two brands this year, right? So Ridge, awesome, multi-hundred million dollar business. Inside of Ridge, we split up a brand and we just launched, we're working on launching another one right now. Making the website in lovable, three clicks, three prompts. I literally just said, I'm making a supplement brand. This is Groon's. Make me a website like this. Here's my design pack. And literally I have a working functional website in three prompts.

38:30Sean Frank:Now I can refine it. I can make it better, but like 50 prompts, it's like, that's not that much work to come up with 50 prompts to make a working website. So that is really, really good for the rebels, right? Same thing in my ad account, bro. I will have 500 ads in an afternoon that are all high quality. I have a design pack. I have my talking points. I could spin up different personas. And it's like, that's one person grinding for an afternoon and I have what would take a thousand people at Walmart to make 500 really good ads, right? Now, that is all for the rebels. Why incumbents might win is because of discoverability.

39:07Sean Frank:If this eats the internet and ChatGPT gets all of its product recommendations from Amazon, well, I don't have an Amazon account for my new brand yet. I don't have an Amazon listing for my new brand yet. And that is like the deciding factor is if it's the gatekeeper of the internet, then people who currently have Amazon listings are going to benefit the most. So it's somewhere in between. I think the rebels are going to win. It's like, look, if I was 20, I would just have a product and grind all day to make the world's greatest AI brand. And there's a company called Minerals. I'm sure you guys have not heard of them, but they'll do$100 million this year, AI only creative.

39:45Sean Frank:And check them out. They have a crazy ad account where they just have a very strong point of view. They only use AI to make the ads. They have never shot a person. So that's a rebel kick in. Okay, what is overhyped? Let's talk, we're trying to give people practical tips. What do they need to avoid, right? Where is like, hey, it's not there. It's not going to help you. It's a waste of time. Is anything off limits? We'll go to Matt and then we'll go to Craig. What's that, Matt?

40:12Matt Kruer:You know, I think right now for me, what's been overhyped is just the ease of adapting these tools within larger organizations. I mean, the bottleneck for us right now is integrating these tools into our systems of record or, you know, our key operating systems and being able to actually embed them in the workflow versus being something that someone's doing off to the side as a kind of on their personal level. So when I think about an Oracle or a Windchill, which is our PLM, every time we bring in an AI partner, they drastically underestimate the amount of work required to get these tools integrated into a corporation's systems.

40:54Matt Kruer:And so to me, just the speed with which you can implement these tools within your organization is overhyped right now. It takes a lot more engineering or deployed engineering work than it's ever sold to us as.

41:10Sean Frank:And this is maybe with the bathwater type stuff where it might actually be better to throw out all of your systems and just build them again from the ground up with AI. And that's the threat to legacy SaaS.

41:20Matt Kruer:Well, that goes back to your advantage as the rebel, right? You guys have more modern tech stacks and way less technical debt that you're dealing with than we do. It slows us down tremendously that we have to figure out how to get 30 years of Oracle data into these tools. And it's not clean. There's so much customization. Everyone's Oracle instance is custom. So every time our partners come in, they have to learn a new instance of Oracle, even if they've said they've done it before. So you guys definitely have an advantage in that regard.

41:54Sean Frank:I always tell people, just move to Shopify. Get off all this stuff. Usually, that's the rice case. I have one friend who has a brand. It was subscription first. He was on a custom build-out of something that wasn't Shopify. He moved to Shopify. Because Shopify is so much easier to cancel the subscriptions, he lost half his revenue in one day. There are some challenges when you actually start moving over legacy systems. But Craig, what else is overhyped in the world of AI?

42:24Craig Foldes:I would agree with Matt wholeheartedly. I think that the ease of adoption, you know, the change management of this, I think HR is going to be such an important point or part, I would argue, even more important than a CIO. In this, like, we are talking about transforming workflows and many elements of the nature of work. And so I think the ease of rolling this out, Matt went deep into some of the technical stuff, but I just mean some of the cultural elements. I think that's overhyped. I think, you know, I mentioned in my role, you know, we work with a lot of venture firms. And I would just argue that respectfully, a lot of these like VC backed AI startups are overhyped.

43:01Craig Foldes:I spoke with one buddy. Oh, my gosh, he he raised at a hundred million dollar valuation. He's still figuring out what his product is, like literally like, you know, didn't give up that much of the company. A hundred million bucks. You think that's legitimate. And we were just brainstorming on like what he needs to go build. So I think that there's a lot of hype in that space, too. and I do, I just want to build on one of the rebel comments too. I don't know if now's the time, but there's something I want to add there. Go ahead. I think when we talk about, and I'm curious for both of you on this, right?

43:30Craig Foldes:Like Matt, with you and your CFO lens, I think speed, speed, speed, speed, right? In big companies, there's all these different reviews and matrix processes, et cetera. You know, Sean, you just outlined how in three clicks you built effectively a prototype of a, you know, of a website. And for you as the executive, you're now able to go dictate to your team, just go build me this, right? I don't need to go through all these different reviews or all these different processes. I've told you what I want. Now go do it because I have this new skill set that I can bring this to life. Like that's just work now.

44:01Craig Foldes:Like how do you justify the return on that? Right? Like Bryce, who I alluded to earlier, you know, he framed AI as like, what is the ROI of electricity in your office? What is the ROI of a laptop? Like this This is just core to how work gets done. And so when we talk about speed and justifying some of these things, how do you approach that? Because it's challenging.

44:21Matt Kruer:Sean, you said you triggered something for me too, but I was super excited when AI started taking off around this notion that legacy SaaS would get replaced by new tools or that you'd just be able to spin up your own solution to replace that. So far, that has been kind of, from my perspective, overhyped. We've got more than$25 million of SaaS spent and I would love to right size that. I haven't been able to get rid of a significant portion of my legacy SaaS yet. It's all been kind of incremental spend for me so far.

44:57Sean Frank:all these things feel so close but it's like when you start talking about sock to reporting which you're going to require or whatever it's like i don't i don't think the lovable like spun up erp is going to have that right um and you know greg on your point talking about like people like creatives were mad when ai came out like and they're still mad if you go on instagram or if you go on any design form people like are mad where people are making stuff with ai but like It is just democratizing creativity, right? It is so good that I can three-click a website and then show it to my designer, who's going to make it better because they're professional.

45:36Sean Frank:They've studied it. But now we can speak the same language. Just like having AI translate my phone calls from Polish to English so my reps can take care of them, just like internally, we can all be speaking the same thing when we're making briefs, and it just lets me speak design language to my designers. I think it's obviously a positive thing, I think. We'll make more ads. Sean here to tell you about Saris Analytics and Saris Pulse. Ridge is profitable every single day. And we've taken that super seriously since we built this business. We track contribution margin by day. We look at the SKUs we sell every single day.

46:12Sean Frank:And we have to do this manually up until Saris Analytics came out. We take all of our SKU level data. We build it into the data warehouse. Everything that goes into making a true P &L, I get on a day-to-day basis. Sarah's Pulse gives you clarity so your CLO and your CFO and your CMO start speaking the same language. Contribution margin shifts teams away from hoping profits survive the season to managing them in real time. Book a walkthrough with the Sarah's Pulse team today. Click the link in the description and thank you, Sarah, for bringing you this show.

46:42Craig Foldes:A couple of things to build on that, right? Of course, people are unclear, threatened or in certain ways, but I think we all need to get comfortable with it. I often say that it's like analogous to online dating where like I'm 37 a decade ago, like when my buddies met their wives or whatever on online early on, I was like, oh, that's weird, right? Like, and now it's normal, right? It's like, of course, you met your friend on Hinge, you wouldn't meet them at the bar, like, that's what's weird now. And I think there's this like Overton window where you wouldn't challenge an analyst on how they came up with their forecast and like, oh, you use Excel, that's not appropriate.

47:12Craig Foldes:It's like, no, of course, it's just core to how work gets done now. And I think that's the evolution that is inevitable, particularly as more AI native folks rise the corporate ranks. But Sean, you mentioned communicating in the same language now, I would go one step further if I could, where like, I can now communicate Sean in your language. One of my favorite use cases, just like, create an AI version of your manager, right? I did this all the time. And I can say, okay, you know, this is what I plan to say to Sean, based on how you know how he likes to process information. Is this appropriate?

47:44Craig Foldes:And like, no, he wants this, this and this at the top. And so now because of this tool, I'm able to communicate in the way you like to communicate with or a similar example. And then I'll be done like, hey, I know our executive team likes their executive summary formatted this way. These things are just algorithms and copycats. So I'm going to just take the last six months worth of executive summaries or whatever. And I'll be like, hey, this is what good looks like. Now I'm going to tell you what I'm trying to say. Just spit it out in the way that is optimized for what our executive summaries look like.

48:14Craig Foldes:I think this idea of communication, but tailored communication in the style that people see fit is like a no-brainer, super easy in-backel use case.

48:25Sean Frank:And we're just trying to get information transmitted more efficiently. It's like the bit rate of data transfer. It's like people can only talk so fast, but if you're speaking the same language, it's just a little bit faster. So I think that's a great use case. We're going to end the podcast talking about the future. Where is this going to go? Craig, I could tell you're incredibly bullish on it. It's the industrial revolution. I think it's more like the internet, right? Where it's going to change how we work and live on most things, but this isn't going to be like people starving and then they stop starving because we invent farming or whatever, right?

48:59Sean Frank:But I'm still incredibly bullish. I think you're 101 % on like 90%. Matt, where do you think this is going?

49:05Matt Kruer:I'm closer to Craig than you. I think, like I said, And my assumption is that it will get good enough to do, you know, kind of any one of the functions we need it to do. And, you know, I think one of the debates you hear a lot about is like, is it going to be, is the solution going to be like a general chat agent? Does ChatGPT just continue adding features and capabilities where it just becomes a one size fits all or, you know, general chat bot? or do these all these like product wrappers that are, you know, wrappers around LLMs, are they a viable long term solution? My experience is that these applications of these wrappers are actually, you know, viable and where I think a lot of the value is going to be created because, you know, I think you need there's so much domain specific expertise required to do any of these functions, whether it's, you know, creative or finance.

50:00Matt Kruer:And, you know, we need, you know, we need someone that has that deep domain expertise, wrapping it around the LLM and providing that context and creating the guardrails that are necessary within that function to make sure that it's, you know, doing the things it's supposed to be doing that is properly being evaluated. That's that is a very significant value add that I don't think someone like an open AI is going to be able to do. So I do think it's going to be product-specific applications for each function that are the best technical people combined with deep domain expertise that can handle things like those integrations and all the very specific content to copywriting or things like that to make it really perform.

50:41Sean Frank:Yeah. So how are you guys changing your personal lives with the belief of where the world's going? And here's an example. Right now, Legacy SaaS isn't dead, but I think all of us are sitting around being like, I don't think Adobe is going to be worth$200 billion in 10 years or whatever, right? That really feels like a radio station in the 30s. It's like, yeah, eventually TV and movies are going to replace this. But I mean, I could obviously be wrong. So I mean, Craig, are you doing anything in your personal life to change this? And then we'll end on that.

51:09Craig Foldes:I am. I want to just, I agree with everything that Matt just said. I think one of the biggest changes that I've made in my personal life that has actually been incredibly rewarding and helpful. About a year and a half ago, when I started leveraging this tool, I was just like, oh, okay, like, I have to make this, this thing needs to know every single thing about me in order to be my everyday AI assistant, my Einstein in my pocket. And I need to figure out a way to feed it and make that happen. So I started journaling like a year and a half ago. Now it's like a 200 page document. And I can now like reflect on myself, how I handle certain situations, why I handle certain situations, I bring in a ton of different books that I'm either reading or downloading.

51:49Craig Foldes:And it's almost like anthropomorphizing them to guide me in my day to day, right? Like, I've now got Jim Collins coaching me on my unique, specific situation grounded in my background. So this idea of journaling, logging, I am recording every conversation that I have, you know, so that I've got this everyday I assistant, particularly in Notebook LM that is just helping me every step of the way. I think that's been one of the biggest transformations. And I'm so much better at handling certain situations as a result. That's been one of the bigger unlocks for me in a personal life.

52:21Sean Frank:This is why it's like, it's so omnipresent because we're talking about how it can help you with your work and your job and making creative and making copy. But also we just described it being a coach and a therapist and like, I mean, what can it do? So Matt, how are you making changes in your personal life?

52:36Matt Kruer:I mean, I'm really just trying to lead by example right now. If I'm going to ask the organization to embrace these tools, I need to demonstrate that I'm doing it. And so, you know, I'm in clawed code, you know, every day. And I literally had not ever opened a terminal, you know, before four months ago. And now I'm in there trying to code and do these things. And then, you know, showing and demonstrating to the organization, this is what I built this weekend. This is what I did. And so trying to do that and then trying to really understand the technical is something that I consider myself non-technical, really trying to get like a decent basic understanding of the technical aspects and the architectures and things like that of these tools so that I can be the translator to the organization.

53:20Matt Kruer:Because I think that's where there's just still a massive gap when you think about like, you know, a Main Street company like us. I see on Twitter, I listen to all the podcasts around the amazing techno things that are being done, but the vast majority of people still have no idea what that is or how to do that. And so I'm trying to be that kind of middleman between, I'll call it the West Coast and kind of Main Street operators like Bissell.

53:44Sean Frank:Last question before we end it. Who do we think is going to win the most? Or how do you position yourself to actually win in this, right? You sell a very practical good. I think even with AI and robots and everything, the world's going to change in the next 25 years, people still have to vacuum, right? And Craig, going back to Crocs, people are going to wear shoes. But who do we think is going to be the biggest winners? Who's going to be the biggest losers? And selfishly, my thesis is, oh, people are going to still buy stuff. This is a great thing to be a consumer brand, right? I think it's a hard time to be in entertainment because I think everything could just be AI.

54:22Sean Frank:Like stranger things, people hated the ending. So it's like, yeah, might as well AI your own version of it. It's a horrible time to be in legacy SaaS because you don't know what's going to happen. Unless you're at like Nvidia building the next generation of hardware, it's really hard to understand where tech is going. But I think people are still going to eat gummy vitamins. So maybe that's a good place to be building. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. Aftersell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit.

54:55Sean Frank:Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. AfterSell has already generated over$1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher CAC. So check out AfterSell and tell them that the operators sent you. Craig, how do you think you can position yourself to win in this new economy, this new world?

55:35Craig Foldes:I don't know who's going to win. I know Google is well positioned, all that stuff. But I know that the people that will win over the next three, four, or five years are those who know how to use these tools to get better in their day-to-day, to produce higher quality outputs more quickly. And when Matt talks about cloud code, I'm just like, dude, take me with you on that journey, right? I'm non-technical, but I know I need to learn this stuff. So I can tell you the people who will lose are those who don't know how to master this. And those who win are the ones who are leveraging it nonstop every day, I feel.

56:09Matt Kruer:I mean, I don't think it changes kind of what makes companies successful today. I still think it's going to come down to, you know, the strategy of a company and whatever makes you successful today. Like if you're in floor care, you still have to bring the best product. You need to bring new innovation to the market. And I think people lose track of that thinking about how to use AI within their businesses. They kind of are like a hammer in search of a nail, but it really should be the opposite way of like, what is your strategy to win in your particular industry? and how is AI a one piece or one tool in your toolkit for making, allowing you to execute that strategy or do it better.

56:45Matt Kruer:But you still need to have that differentiation, that strategy, whether it's, you know, product or, you know, whatever your business is. I don't think that necessarily changes.

56:54Sean Frank:Everyone plug what you want to plug. So Craig, plug away. 20 ,000 people listening. How, how can they best get in touch with you? How can they have some more Craig in their life?

57:02Craig Foldes:I don't know that anybody wants more Craig in their life, but if they want, Just go to chatwalrus.com. We help normal people. We teach them how to work with AI to turn into superheroes. And so go to chatwalrus.com. Yeah, that's that.

57:16Sean Frank:Okay, Matt, your turn. Plug away, my man.

57:19Matt Kruer:Well, I definitely need the exclusive invite to Craig's weekly call here. Please support Bissell. We're a family-owned business, 150 years old. We make a lot of different cleaning products, not just vacuums. And so check us out and appreciate the support.

57:34Sean Frank:And look, I highly recommend Craig's off-the-record conversations. I've spoken twice and he's had people from OpenAI show up. He's had a bunch of great operators. He's had the HexCloud team, Mike Beckham, everybody there speaking. And it's unrecorded and gets as raw as possible. So that's why he does it. Guys, thank you for being here. I think this is going to be a reoccurring segment, just talking random AI stuff. I love that you guys both bring big company experience and are currently trying to help people use these tools every single day. Maybe I'll think of some more examples and I'll share them at the end.

58:07Sean Frank:So thanks everybody for being here. Thank you for listening. Talk to you later. Goodbye.

58:11Matt Kruer:Thanks for having us.