Expedia × Profound | Competing in an AI-Driven Search World // With James Cadwallader and Daniel Shin Un Kang

25:07But we didn't think the motivations of not wanting to look like a failure or continuing just because we can was actually a very good decision for anyone involved in the party. So we made the decision to shut it down, return the capital, and I took some time off. And as that was happening, my book was released, which was really, really tough because on the face of it, I had to show, hey, I'm doing really well. It's successful. The book actually talks about applying venture math to careers. So the crux of the book is there's a trillion dollar industry that's paid to be wrong. So venture capitalists lose money about half the deals they make, and they miss the mark 90 % of the time.

25:45But if in the few times that they win, it's a 5 ,000x return, as we've seen with, you know, Masa's investment in Alibaba or Index's investment in Figma. I think Figma was a 6 ,000x return or something like this. You can still win dramatically, even if you're wrong most of the time. And how do you sort of apply that into your career? And, you know, got to talk about this in the stages of TEDx Stanford. But internally, as you can imagine, was I had just killed my baby of a startup and going through that. And I said, maybe I need to take a break from entrepreneurship for a little bit. but oddly enough, joined Expedia as an entrepreneur in residence and also got into the future of search a little bit more.

26:22Where is search evolving? So AEO was a big topic even when I got there and not formally involved. But I was thinking, all right, where's this thing going? What about the ads? What about the agent of commerce? What about all of these things? And I thought deeply about what I call probable future states. So rather than what will happen, what are the ranges of futures that would happen? and how would we, as Expedia or anybody else, position ourselves to these probable future states so that we're in an advantage. So as I was thinking through that, an opportunity came up where they said, hey, well, we really like your work.

26:54We think this is interesting. Can you go and actually run this P &L? So I think it's been, what, three and a half months now since I've been running this. So everything is very, very new. I'm getting tons of help. I'm learning a ton from, again, practitioners and operators at this frontier like James and like others who are building. Now, let's get into what you are working on together, what your companies are working on together. So, and I would love this as much as you can be transparent about it and open to be a bit of a case study on James, what your company does to help brands and Daniel and what your company does to work with a team like Profound to understand what's going on in our ecosystem, especially around things like AI and AEO or answer engine optimization and leverage it to build your brands and grow your share and make earnings and have a great future for your company.

27:45So I think we should start with what are you doing? What's the scope of your relationship right now? What's the scope of the work you're doing? I'll kick off and set a little bit of the context of what visibility means and where we're going and where we're working together and where we want to, or I'll speak for myself, or I want to continue to work together. When it comes to AEO visibility, it's important for everybody to understand again where you are and what metrics are going after. It's actually a surprisingly hard thing to crack. And I'll talk about at least three major complications. The first is, again, to set context, no ground truth.

28:18You have to synthetically prompts to get a proxy of what consumers are seeing on their screen and then try to get in front of them. So on the visibility front, there's a couple of hard problems you have to solve. The first is getting to the right set of prompts. How do you know that this thing is actually reflective of what consumers are searching? So how do you do that? The second is actually choosing a vendor and understanding their methodology. So Profound is one of them. There's like 15, 20 plus companies that are doing this with different methodologies. An example of this is even in the prompting stage, some companies prompt using a headless browser, others use an API, and some have like some memory enabled.

28:55These small methodologies actually creates a large variance in the actual outcome that we see on the outside. So how do we resolve that? And what is the best methodology that best reflects what happens in the real world? And then the last thing you sort of have to think about is once you get this raw output, and by the way, this is like another technical hard thing you have to do. But once you get that raw output, you then need to derive a visibility metrics. When people say visibility, what does that even mean? Is that like a rate? Is that a share of voice? Like, what does that mean? And when you say visibility, it's your brands, right?

29:25That's correct. And how is this actually correlated with AI traffic, right? Because at the end of the day, yes, brand exposure is important. All of these is important. But for a consumer brand like ours, getting that revenue and getting that transaction and making sure it correlates is important. Otherwise, you're optimizing with the wrong variable. So there are like three really hard problems to solve. And I think, you know, internally, we've done a great job of this with the help of our partners. And where we're working together very, very actively is the synthetic prompting and the vendor methodology.

29:55I think Profound has done a good job of understanding the trade-offs and coming up with the methodologies and also giving guidance on how to think about even the prompting and scraping of the information. I'll give you one very concrete example. When prompting, some vendors choose to prompt via the API. And there's a lot of business benefits to that. It's cheaper. It's scalable. It often breaks less. You probably need less stuff to scrape the data. but I don't think it's as reflective of what consumers actually go through. So despite the fact that it's more expensive, that there's a lot more operational overhead, you know, Profound has chosen to take this methodology for that accuracy, right?

30:35So these are like the snippets of examples of why, you know, working with a partner like Profound is helpful. For a non-technical person, what is the exact business problem that you are trying to solve? And you say it's visibility of your brands, but take that a step further. Okay, so basically you want to maximize in a new platform shift to maybe relate to James's view. Google used to show a bunch of links and route people to different pieces of information. AI search engines ingest information and then share the most relevant. How do you show up as a part of that? And whether it's in brand mentions or links.

31:11So you want to know how much where you are showing up when you're not showing up. and then constantly optimize your stuff to be able to go do that. And I can expand a little bit further of how AEO is a simple but a hard path to success. Essentially, you want to get into one of four inputs. The first input is the training data. And that alone isn't enough, but you do want to be included in somehow. The second is a retrieval process. So when a user types in the queries, it looks at the model, but sometimes it gets snippets of information from the web and then surfaces it. The third is outside your direct control, but you want customers to actively query your brand into their queries and then you show up in your context window.

31:54And the last thing is, as these things compound, whether users mention your brand in their query or the output contains your brand, this gets consolidated into your user memory and will be referred to. And if you can maximize that, you get a compounding effect of your brand increasing. So you want to be included in one of those four inputs. The way you do that is through two things. The first is technical enhancement. So is our content even discoverable is like a big one. And then the second is worthiness. Is your content worthy of showing to our end customer? So when you look at those two things, there's a ton that you could do everything from file types like markdowns to make sure that bots are able to access your stuff.

32:33And it turns out different bots react differently to different file types, right? Or do you even recognize what bots are crawling on your website? All this technical stuff. And then the content is, of course, is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Is it actually useful to the end user? So it's simple in a sense that there's four inputs and you have two levers to get there, but getting there is actually pretty hard. And visibility, of course, helps you understand where you're missing, what is working and what isn't working, right? When you're trying to optimize these two levers.

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33:41James, I want you to talk a bit about how you're helping with those business problems, but I love the quote that as I was looking at video of you, James, before we started, and this relates to what Daniel just said, we're not building content anymore for human beings, right? We're building content for user agents on behalf of consumers or human beings. That's such a profound shift. And Daniel, I think everything you talked about was about that shift. And at the end of the day, you have to have things that are built for the bots, but that people really need and want. And that must be very, very tricky to manage.

34:15So James, could you talk a bit about your company in terms of how you're helping Daniel solve that very enormous opportunity slash problem? Yeah, I think the point you make is a good one in that it's just true that you are creating, I said marketing to machines, really, that's the idea, right? Because if I asked ChatGPT a question about where's a good place to go on vacation for my honeymoon in the Bahamas you know where does chat GPT go to to answer that question does it use the pre-training that Daniel mentioned or does it trigger a web crawl because it hey it said you know I said give me the latest hotels or find me something very specific that the pre-training doesn't feel you know the classifier would say the pre-training probably can't answer this so then okay well does it it's going to run a bunch of web searches and it will surface likely some Expedia results, then how does that content get pulled through?

35:08Because the content, a lot of the content was designed for humans. Now, I won't overshare out of turn, Daniel, just in case I'm making you nervous on the other side of the screen. I won't share any secrets. You guys have a lot of sophistication around what you do. But I mean, I think one thing that is kind of obvious about Expedia is they just have huge volume. Daniel, can you speak to any of the volume that you have in terms of web Because that was one of the most fascinating things that I discovered through our partnership is just the sheer volume of content these guys have is just hard to wrap your head around sometimes.

35:41Exactly. And picking a partner that's able to work at that scale was hard. We're talking hundreds of millions of assets, right? So try optimizing that. You'll talk to this, but you're going to need a machine to be able to do this. Yeah. I mean, so it's enormous quantities of content. And I think for what it's worth, there's two ways to interpret that. You could just interpret it as the, you know, Expedia is N of one and content is their business. So you'd expect them to have hundreds of millions of pieces of content. I also think there's, and it sounds like sycophancy, but I think there's an argument just to say that they're a very sophisticated team and that they are pioneering the future of content marketing.

36:20And actually most businesses will catch up, maybe not to that same order of magnitude. But I think businesses are going to create a lot more content. Put it that way. And you need great technology to understand how that content is performing at scale in these new AI surfaces. So if we ask, you know, 100 ,000 or a million questions about vacations in the Bahamas, how does Expedia get pulled through both as a brand and as it's mentioned, but also does it get cited? Is it going, you know, are the models using Expedia.com or, you know, jimsvacationblog.com to answer these questions. And that varies from platform to platform.

37:01So really giving the team visibility into not just how they show up, but also the why. You know, why do you show up here? Why don't you show up here? And then a place that I think we, I mean, candidly without, you know, I don't think this is super confidential or anything, but I think a place that we're excited to lean in more with the Expedia team is on sentiment as well, which is kind of like a new vector. Sentiment didn't really exist in the world of traditional search because as we've spoken about, Google search was just surfacing links. There's no sentiment attributed to a link. But think about it like this.

37:36If I ask ChatGPT, what are the best marketing podcasts in the world? It will say something about the CMO podcast, but it will give an opinion as well. It will say, Jim always gives hot takes about XYZ, XYZ, but sometimes it misses the mark on this and this. So you're getting an opinion for free. And that opinion varies and evolves over time. When you're running hundreds of thousands of prompts every day, you start to see the drift of that sentiment starts to change over time. And then you can attribute why that sentiment is changing. So it's a new surface area. I think really what this comes down to over time though, which is going to be, when I was watching, I was actually watching a fantastic podcast with Winston, who's the founder of Harvey AI, a completely different category of business to ours.

38:26But he was with Brian Halligan, who's the founder of HubSpot as a new podcast. And Winston was on that pod. And he had this amazing quote where he said, you have to re-earn your right to play in the category every six months. That's like the new world of building software. And so the next six months for us are going to see a huge focus on profound winning content orchestration as well. Because what we see is that, you know, as Daniel mentioned, all right, cool, you want to update 200 ,000 pages. But now because of generative AI, we can and we can do it thoughtfully. We doesn't have to just be I think the headwind here or the the controversy is that, oh, that means AI slop.

39:12I don't think that's true. Slop is a function of context. If you give models tons of context, the output's amazing. Slop is a consequence of if I just said to chat GPT right now, create 10 ,000 blog posts for Expedia.com, it would happily do it, but it would suck. But if I give it tons of context and raw data and interesting inputs and unique insights, it does a very good job, or at least it can get it 90 % of the way. So yeah, I think Profound will become this workbench that different teams at Expedia use to orchestrate and automate production of quality content. It will start off as quite low lift, kind of, you know, the simple content, it's not necessarily going to be aimed at humans, but yeah, that's where we see things going.

40:00Daniel, what's James's team helping you do that you could not do yourselves? I think there's a central point of we oversimplify it by saying, hey, synthetic prompting. I think just get us the data. Here's the queries. And from a buyer's perspective, it seems like a simple ask. If you try to build it yourself, I'm sure it's technically very, very challenging to do, especially QA, making sure all the data pulls through, making everything and making sure everything's accurate. And to James's point, also do then start doing pattern recognition, right? of every search engine actually rewards different things, whether it's AI mode or Gemini or Chachapiti, Claude, they value different things.

40:39The sentiment on it is going to be different. All of these things are something that is, I think, probably very distracting to a company that is doing something else. In our case, meeting travelers where they are. We don't want to spend all of our time doing this. This is something we need to help diagnose the problem and start optimizing our content and our technicalities. And this is where Profound is helping. And to James's point, I think, as we go forward and we integrate further, it would be great to sort of, how do we think about content production and QA? Of course, we have our own engines, but I think there are different areas where we can play together.

41:13I think there's a heuristic to that as well. And it is a heuristic, but I think you could also just take the simple point that we've got close to 50 engineers or folks working in engineering product design data now, working full-time on this. And by full-time, I mean mostly six days a week, long days, long nights, and have been working on this for a year and a half, day in, day out, day in, day out. And the product that we give to Expedia is the output of all that work. Do you think we'll ever get to a point where there will be a way for us to assess how we show up as a brand in the AI search world.

41:52You talk about sentiment, we're starting to understand that. But if I'm one of Expedia's brands, if I'm Coca-Cola, if I'm Toyota, I want to show up right. And I want to have an idea to, am I behind, ahead? Where do you think that's going to go? Yeah. I mean, we essentially, that's what we do today, honestly. We work with the biggest brands in the world to help them understand how they show up on an eval-based approach. But also we have a very sophisticated suite of CDN integrations. So we can actually plug in as well to, you know, if it's Akamai or Cloudflare or AWS or wherever the site is hosted, and then we're able to even see when ChatGPT is visiting that page to cite the content.

42:38So we can actually give you that. That's first-party data, but most marketers aren't using that data because it's, you know, it sits with IT or, you know, web services, but we expose those user agent visits to marketers. And essentially that's the new click. When a user agent visits, you know, the CMO podcast.com, that's the replacement for a human being because it's crawling on my behalf. So yeah, I mean, essentially long, long way to say I genuinely believe we can give you a good, at least a good direction of understanding there today. And I 100 % agree with that. And I think what we're doing is, it sounds a little cringe, but it is world class in terms of the industry standard.

43:22But I'll talk about some of the limitations there. But things like, hey, understanding user agent string, like who even visited you. And then working through, again, the attributions and what the data actually means. So a simple example might be like, hey, out of all of the results, like where did you rank in results? As in when they say, hey, top three destinations, were we, you know, on the second one or the third one? All of these things. And you can start fine tuning to your point, Jim, like where do you show up and what does that mean? But I think what we have is, you know, extremely helpful for setting a direction of how we're doing and where we're going.

43:57Of course, I think there are some industry problems to be solved. I think James and I talk about this from time to time. and Profile Art is a great solution for it, building towards this, but user memory is going to be a problem. So as we think about how the construct works, which is we are prompting search engines as if users were doing them, looking at the output and then using that as a proxy. But as more and more users use AI search engines, their memory and personalization will come into effect and impact what the end outcome will look like. So if you think about the RAG process, retrieval augmentation and generative, you know, more and more the personalization, the context window and memory is going to impact it.

44:38So how, as this scales over time, what is the accuracy of this proxy? And I think that's an industry problem to be solved. And James, I think you're already working on a few solutions, right? Yeah, we have persona-based prompting, so we can build personas. So we could build a persona of people between the ages of 30 to 35 who are based in Dallas with an interest in horseback riding and Mexican food. We can then send prompts through that persona. And I think, you know, I definitely, I'm always the first to kind of like nod my hat to Daniel's point. It's not surefire. It's not perfect. But it starts to, you definitely see once you append that persona to a thousand prompts and you send the prompt through that persona, you see a difference in the results.

45:19So it's definitely true that you can start to see that difference.

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46:29We're living through the biggest change in the internet since we've known it, right? And you talked about that, James, about a half hour ago. And Daniel, you've been talking about this. What's your counsel, both of you? Because you're deeply into this. You're doing super fascinating work. We have a lot of CMOs in our audience who are scratching their head right now saying, uh, am I doing enough? What should I be doing? Am I preparing myself? What are we doing that's needed to win in this new world? So what's your counsel to someone who's watching or listening, who feels an urgency to get going?

47:00What should they do tomorrow? I'll zoom in a couple of things. I'll make two points. The first is we talked a lot about AEO today, and it's certainly really, really important. and for most companies it's going to be the vast majority of your AI traffic. But I think thinking of AEO in silo with the rest of Agentic Search is a mistake. So AI ads is coming. Agentic Commerce is already here. The Google launch, their UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol. OpenAI has their ACP. These are all words, but like the idea of finding product market fit in each of these services and platforms is going to be extraordinarily important for every consumer brand that's out there.

47:31I think if you can't get AEO, like good luck getting everything else. But it's, you have to think of it as a portfolio. And the search engines will also think of them as a portfolio of where to send the users on a query basis as they compete with other search engines to retain user attention. So I think that's point number one. Point number two is a little bit more theoretical and zooming out a little bit more. Every major tech company, I think, is playing AI bingo. And what I mean by that is they're not solving for a single future. They're solving for many futures. And I talked about these probable future states.

48:03For example, Meta acquired Manus late last year. Right now, it manages a general purpose agent that allows web rails to compete tasks on behalf of people. OpenAI launched Atlas to compete with Comet. All of these things are not isolated products, but I think a coverage play. So I'll give you a very quick mental model to think about it. Imagine on one axis, you've got the human interaction point where humans interact with agents. And then another axis, you've got agent rails, how agents communicate with one another. So right now, on the human side, there's a lot of assumption that the primary interface is apps like ChatGPT and Cloud and Perplexity.

48:40But it's possible that it happens at the browser level. It's possible it happens at the OS level, like your phone and your computer and your hardware level. And then on how agents communicate, there's MCPs, which seems to be the primary driver today. But there's UCPs and ACPs, and also a host of payment regulation problems that need to be solved for agentic commerce to scale. So if you think of this and you see what tech companies are doing, they are precisely playing some version of bingo. And I think at any tech company or any CMO, you should, yes, weigh in on what's happening today. But what will happen and will be the dominant form of where consumers interact with AI in the future and make sure that you're positioned at an advantage for whatever future that is.

49:22So that's my two cents. James? Yeah, my counsel to any CMO right now would be to go and find whoever was running your SEO, give them a pay rise and give them a pay rise and realize that what was formerly considered the kind of black sheep of the marketing stack could well now become the most important priority across the entire business. There's an ongoing debate around, you know, SEO versus AEO, GEO. All I'm saying is those folks that have been used to building content for algorithms are very well positioned to thinking about this new problem space of building content that's designed to be consumed by bots.

50:04And I think they are best positioned with this kind of they have all the tool sets of kind of a technical know-how, technical ability combined with it does still involve some creativity. So I think that SEO function could become mega sexy, is basically my view. And if you have a good SEO team in place, both internal and agency, I would lean in. Maybe to match Daniel's double point, the second thing, it's not a kind of one and done, big red button. This is a function of marketing. How you show up on these new surfaces, you don't solve it. It's an ongoing endeavor. and you need to give, if you empower that team, you need to give them the space and the encouragement and the, you know, the necessary resources to be able to build that strategy.

50:54We work with incredible marketing teams, but it's folks like Daniel or like the team at Ramp who are just super empowered and they are able to chip and iterate and learn with lots of agencies. So yeah, that'd be my two cents. Before we jump into the creative brief, let's talk about advertising for a minute. What do you think is going to be the biggest change in how we create place ads in this world of creating content for machines on behalf of people? I mean, that seems to me to be a very significant change. What's your counsel on that? My personal take is that generative ads will be the biggest unlock in marketing history.

51:30You know, if you think about the progression of advertising, beginning with newspapers, going to radio, television, social, it's essentially been a, I mean, search on the curve of intent, being able to measure intent, being able to understand what the user wants. You essentially, back in the days of newspapers, you were confined to just, okay, well, they bought the Financial Times, they probably work in finance. That was the best stab in the dark. Google search gave us a bit more. Social gave us interesting new signals because you could see what videos and comments, etc. Generative chat, multi-turn conversational interface.

52:06You understand such rich context and intent. Advertising is going to be so wonderful. And LLMs are perfectly suited to be able to synthesize a perfectly tweaked, tailored advertising moment exactly to that part of the conversation when Jim was asking about the Bahamas and just mentioned that, oh yeah, your partner loves paddleboarding. What if you booked this spot around the corner while you were there? Personalization in a way that we could not imagine three years ago. I'll share my speculation on sort of the AI ad space a little bit. I'm a little bit torn because there's a lot of problems to be solved precisely because of, I think, what James mentioned.

52:48I think it's the curse of context. The amount of noise in conversations to find out what the true intent is, is going to be extraordinarily challenging. And then the bar for recommendations would be really high because you expect to be so personalized. So that's going to be a really hard problem for these companies to think about solving. How do you take a slob of text over the last three to five minutes of just text with disjointed ideas and get to the intent such that the correct ad is sort of placed? And I think there's going to be a balance in terms of how these search engines also think about placing ads compared to organic, compared to actually having an agent complete a task through Agenda Commerce.

53:28Right. And it's going to be an interesting one because they're all fighting for the users. And right now, it's going to be an interesting one for these new players to actually take dominance. I'll take one other example of this. We know that AI search engines stole queries from Google. A lot of the queries are informational in nature, not commercial in an intent. And it's because they can't service commercial. So it will take time for these AI search engines to catch up. But once they do, it'll be an interesting battle to see how the ads play out. What a lot of startups are doing right now is there are now third-party AI ad services that are being launched.

54:07And there are publishers in AI search and chat beyond the majors like Claude and ChatGPT that are actually sizable in their user base. It'll be interesting to see how this ecosystem develops instead of having a couple of big players competing. Maybe there'll be this fat long tail that are competing alongside them. So it's an interesting one from a marketer's perspective. I think it'll be great to have a diversified sort of set of paid ads platforms, certainly. And then if there's obviously this long tail, even better for being specific on consumers. So very optimistic you both are about the future of advertising.

54:43Yes. They're probably biased. Okay. Okay. Listen, let's flip into a very quick creative brief. You guys are both two amazing young men. And what I think is interesting is, Daniel, you are super educated, right? degrees, McGill, Oxford, others, you're an international pilot. James, you have no formal education. So I'd like you to both speak to that. Why was that the right choice for you? I mean, who's doing better? I think James is crushing it. I remember at SPC, when someone said, this is SPC, that incubator, accelerator, that I spoke through. They start you off in a cohort. So you're in a big group.

55:19And I remember I walked in one day One of them was, oh yeah, you're the uneducated one. I was like, damn, that's a brutal way to put it. But this was a good choice for you, James. Why? I started my first business when I was 18 and just never looked back. So there was always, I mean, not now, but I think when I was 18, the idea was that I would start a business and then I was going to go back and do university. And then that didn't happen. Then I started a second business after that. And it just, it would be disingenuous of me to sort of make it sound like a Machiavellian strategy that was in place.

55:51I think I love learning quite often. I especially, you know, for all the stick that it gets, I think the U.S. education system is actually pretty cool. I think Stanford is, I think it's a very exciting place. Same probably for Harvard or, you know, Oxford, I think, in the U.K., where Daniel was. And, yeah, sometimes I fantasize about, you know, what it would have been like to have had a formal education, but I didn't. And here I am at war with my helmet on and my bayonet, and that's that. Daniel, how about yourself? Quite an interesting academic and successful academic record. Why was this right for you?

56:26I think to, similar to James, I don't think there's this grand plan, but I think it had to do with my survival strategy. So I grew up in a low-income immigrant family in the middle of nowhere in Canada. So opportunities were hard to get by. And if I didn't make it, the downside was pretty catastrophic. So what are some ways to hedge my risk and elevate my base case every time I go somewhere? So when I trained to be a pilot, I couldn't go ahead for a number of reasons, and then I pivoted to college. So college set a baseline of, I could probably get a minimum wage job, hopefully. And then Oxford did the same thing.

56:59And my career throughout, whether it's SoftBank or starting my own company, did that same thing. I think what I'm coming to realize is I've elevated my base to a level that I'm comfortable. And in the same way that maybe James fantasized about the counterfactuals of what it would have been like, I think starting early and doing what pulls you gives you a higher chance of finding and arriving your life's work, right? Like, what do you want to dedicate? James, you said you're going to work on this for the rest of your life. Like that's life's work. And I think that's incredible that you found it.

57:31And it's something that I will be looking forward to and continuing to iterate and seeing I've built this space for myself. What can I go do with it and bet my life on it? You know, this question is coming if you listen to our show. What's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young boy? James, start with you. I was big into soccer or football. We would call it correctly. I agree with that. There were, I mean, there's some controversy right now. I think with his son, Brooklyn, going around on my, my fiance, showing me it last night on social media, but these David Beckham Adidas football boots were just like, had to have them.

58:09Yeah. I mean, the only commentary I'd add is that I can just remember it being so visceral. Like I, it wasn't, it was a needed to own that pair of football. Nothing else mattered in my world at the time. And I think it's interesting when I think we, I shouldn't say who we work with and who we don't, but we may or may not work with the aforementioned brand in some way at this point in time. And, uh, it definitely leaves a lasting impact. Yeah, sure does. I'm older than you guys by a lot, but I remember when Adidas first came into the U S basketball shoes and it was that and they were triple the price of what I was wearing but I had to have them and I really did feel like I could jump higher move faster perform better with them on I'm sure you did I'm sure you know that's 90 % of it right yeah so Daniel how about yourself I think the biggest brand is probably Apple I think growing up like in the middle of the farm middle of nowhere like getting exited stuff hard but then when I when I first came across like an iPhone and I said wow that's that's pretty incredible I wonder what it can do and it took some time before I got my first set of Apple stuff.

59:10Now everything's Apple in my desktop here, but I like that there are technologies and software specific to Apple that enables you. Like I do pop music, right songwriting is my hobby. And there's specific software that is just better on the Mac and sound and plugins that are just better. So it's had a thing for me since I was a kid. And I'm finally able to use some Apple products. I'm very happy. Jim, can I ask you a question? What AI model are you using most right now? I'm using ChatGPT Pro. I'm using Gemini. I want to start using Claude. I think Anthropics is an amazing organization. So I want to lean in, but I haven't done it yet.

59:51But I mean, for my needs, you know, which are more research oriented. I mean, I was being honored at a big thing in New York in April. And I just said, you know, what should I wear? I had the most amazing response. I mean, options, they talked about my personality, the place I'm going, what it's like. And I asked it the other day, what I could learn from a choir to be a better show. Amazing response. You know, so a thought partner and a challenger. And I would say a standard elevator in addition to the normal stuff, you know. But yeah, it's a different, like, I can't search and get that. So no, it's a game change.

1:00:29But I think I have a personal goal to expand and try some other models and just keep exploring. What do you recommend for what I do? Why do you use ChatGPT and Gemini? Gemini, I'm a Google shop, right? We do everything on Google. So it's just obviously easy. And ChatGPT, I guess, was the first that came across and I just signed up right away. Yeah, it's been life changing. I mean, I was ChatGPT peeled to the max. Like I was an early adopter. And I think being an entrepreneur, you kind of root for the underdog like David and Goliath. Yep. I hate to say it, but more and more frequently as of late, I've been using Gemini because the responses are really good.

1:01:09So that's kind of... No, they are good. And it's easy. It's a build into everything I do, right? Yeah. It's a lot for grabs still. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. So, okay, guys, I think we have to end with this question. What should... I think you've kind of answered it, but I want you to put a punctuation mark on it. What should CMOs, senior marketing leaders do after they stop watching and listening to the show? I was at www.tryprofound.com. I think you'll get a few of those. I think they should pay attention to the category. I think you should understand that this is a very big platform shift.

1:01:47This isn't search with a new UI. You are building marketing for machines. This is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing. And you should think about it and, you know, consider it and invest accordingly, is my opinion. Yep. Daniel, anything to add to that? Just from a practical point of view, as a CMO, this is one portfolio of many. You're probably juggling paid loyalty, like everything on the stack. Realistically, keep open a radar, but get someone on your team, Empower someone on your team to go deep on this stuff and coordinate for you and bring the results back. Like you will not be coordinating with all of the page channels and the marketing channels and the corp dev and everybody internally within your company to go and execute, whether you build a product internally or work with a vendor.

1:02:33Like you will not have the bandwidth. Go empower your team to go do that and just let them run. Amen. Love it. Guys, thank you. Did you enjoy this? I loved it. Yeah, it was great. Let me add one thing to Daniel said. I was watching the college football finals this week, you know, Indiana against Miami. Apple, I think, released for the first time an ad about students and why they're right for students of all kinds. It is a gorgeous, beautiful, thought-provoking ad. So if you haven't seen it, it's a long one. It was like 60 or 90 seconds. Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Yeah, we'll take a look. James, thanks for thinking of being with the podcast.

1:03:10Jim, thanks for hosting me. This was great. Yeah, really appreciate you having us on, Jim. It's truly, I'm not saying this to be polite, truly an honor and a privilege to be on with you. Thank you. That was my conversation with James and Daniel. Listen, I normally do three takeaways for a business brand and life on this one, but this discussion was so interesting. I think there is really just one takeaway for you, our viewers and listeners, And that is learn about this profound shift in the internet and the implications on marketing. I think James said it well, go to the people who run search for you and get to know how you're going to show up in this new world of AI and creating content for machines on behalf of people.

1:03:52So go learn about it. Talk about it with your team. Elevate this on your priorities. This is really, really powerful. the implications for your brand and this industry are really deep. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.