Scaling teams, culture and product in the era of AI

0:00Silvia Oviedo López: The Voices of Search podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.

0:47Search marketers are not just adapting to new ways of consumer discovery. They are adapting to an entirely new way of working. In fact, nearly 40 % of workers' core skills are expected to change by 2030, as AI reshapes how organizations hire, build teams, and develop talent. I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining me today is Silvia Oviedo-Lopez, co-founder and CEO of Bluma. Before launching Bluma, Silvia led global content discovery and international growth teams at Pinterest and Canva, giving her a front row seat to how AI is changing both the way people work and the way consumers discover brands. Today we're going to talk about how AI is changing search, marketing organizations, and why companies need to rethink the role of a specialist and generalist, and what it takes to build an AI-ready culture.

1:39Sylvia, welcome to the Voice of the Search podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Jordan. Pumped to be on with you. Sylvia, you and I have known each other for a long time. We've been friends since our eBay days where we both kind of really grew our careers. And we're probably very fortunate to have great leadership around us while we were at eBay. One of the things I want to talk to you about is, you know, you've been part of a variety of different teams, whether it be eBay, Pinterest, Canva. And, you know, over your years of experience, like what really makes a great team? what makes an organization really gel and function and work as a team?

2:20That's such a great question. And I think that's kind of what everyone as a leader is trying to find, right? What is that fleeting balance of everything working and the team really humming and things really moving? And I think it comes down to a few things, right? It's like, the first thing that you need is a clear vision of what success looks like, right? It's like, Where are we going? And then how are we getting there? It's not just about having a lofty vision, but having a plan to get there that's reasonable, attainable, it's bold, and it's exciting. And I think the third part is very strong execution.

3:00I think when you hear any leader or company talk about their secret sauce, everyone keeps coming down to execution. ideas are great plans are fantastic but if you don't have the execution layer that's where things really start decomposing and I think a lot of the uncertainty that we're going through right now in this big period of transition and change is because the execution part is changing rapidly and we are all being asked to adapt very very quickly to that. No question I think that's one of the biggest challenges everyone's facing right is that the way we execute is completely changing. One of the analogies I love using is that the screwdriver came before the drill, but the reality is that carpenters and people worked with screwdrivers for years and years and years.

3:52Then all of a sudden the drill came along and it sped up their work, made them more efficient. It changed the way that craftsmen executed their work using a power drill. We're doing the same thing as knowledge workers in this AI transformation. But before we get into what that AI transformation is all about, tell our listeners a little bit about your past, where you've worked and some of the roles that you've had and how you've seen transformation in the organizations you've been a part of. Yeah. So I feel like I've been always at the forefront of whatever was coming next, right? Most recently, so I am now a founder and I'm building in the people and AI space at Blooma.

4:35Prior to that, I was at Canva where I was involved in leading all the AI transformation, right? From building the AI products that were the first AI products that were used at really massive scale to transitioning an organization that was very creative, very design-oriented to an AI-first world. Prior to that, I was at Pinterest where I got a front row seat to social media, international expansion, global growth, as well as like if I continue going back, I've been in tech for over two decades at this point. I was at eBay where I learned a lot about commerce and social commerce and UGC. And then prior to that, I was at Yahoo, where I go to work and really, really at the beginning of UGC, Yahoo groups, Yahoo Answers.

5:31You're welcome. Internet. I was part of the team of Yahoo Answers, GeoCities, you name it. And I think even prior to that, when I was a teen, I was really into IRC and chat rooms and all that. And it's been truly a privilege to see the internet be born from dial-up internet to what we have today. And I think the cool part is that things are just getting started, right? Like we're in the first 30 years of something that is going to be long lasting. And the reality is that while we feel that every change or every revolution has a huge impact, the reality is that we are incredibly adaptable and resilient as workers, as humans, as technologists, and as strategists.

6:22So I'm an optimist. So that part is the one that excites me. It's like the amount of possibility that lays ahead of us. And you've gone through transformations, right? Whether it's Pinterest, Canva, you've seen how hard it is to take a team or an organization that's even larger and shift the way they think, shift the way they work. Tell us about some of those experiences. Tell us about what worked for you during those transformations and maybe what didn't work. Yeah, I think something that's important to recognize is that as humans, we deeply dislike change. Change goes against, we strive for balance in any situation, be it at the personal level, at the professional level, at the societal level, right?

7:09Any disruption and change is something that the system tries to reject. And so when you are building a team and going back to the points that I made earlier about you have to have a clear vision, you have to have a clear plan. How do you get to that vision? And you have to have very clear execution. Ultimately, when you're introducing change, right? like for example, AI is a new technology that is changing the way that we are doing things or moments like COVID and work from home, it's like it's really changing how we are relating to each other and how we are collaborating with each other. It really shifts very fundamental ways of engagement between us humans.

7:54And I think that's a part that we tend to react to, right? It's like, I mentioned this in the first question about executions, like when the way that we execute changes, we tend to react because that's what we can control. Like what we like ultimately, when you're part of an organization, especially if you're part of a big organization, sometimes you can feel a little bit not in control. And that is not a feeling we love to have.

8:26You And so when that agency and that autonomy is taken away, it's frustrating, it leads to burnout, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think that as leaders, when we think about helping teams through that transformation, and I'm sure this is something that a lot of listeners are going through at the moment or have gone through in the past few months, helping people navigate what this next phase looks like is extremely helpful. And also making space for the discomfort and making space for the hard conversations and making space for someone being able to say, hey, I don't like it, but I'm going to get there.

9:08You know, that human connection component is what really resonates with what you shared there, right? That we still need that human connection, we still need to be able to hold dearly to components that make us what our species is, right? We want to have a sense of control. We don't need to domineer, but we need to have a sense of control in terms of what we're doing, how we're doing things. And this is incredibly complex when you think about knowledge workers or creative workers, right? Because they're not necessarily building a house or pouring cement. or one of my favorite billboards in San Francisco is that AI can't fix your AC.

9:48It's a local company in the Bay Area that can repair heating and cooling systems. And it's a great billboard because it's true. I mean, AI doesn't just walk into your house and replace an air conditioner that's broken, right? And there's a huge sense of control and accomplishment when someone can do that, right? And today for knowledge workers, there's kind of an escape as to what that is and what that means. There's so much talk about replacement of jobs. There's so much talk about the press kind of pushing this narrative that AI is going to basically eradicate certain roles and jobs and companies.

10:32And then to really kind of make it make that, you know, news story real, what we see is that executives, CEOs at publicly traded companies go and tell the street and investors that they've been made huge job cuts because AI has made their organizations more efficient. What are your thoughts on that? What are your beliefs in that? And how should we deal with that as workers in any size of company? That's a lot to unpack. There's a few layers there, right? I think the first one is around job displacement. And I don't think I've seen that deal, but I like it. My first question was, like, who has an AC in San Francisco?

11:19It's out in the East Bay. It's out in the East Bay. But it is true, right? And I think we tend to be a little bit alarmed. And again, I'm an optimist, so take what I'm about to say with that lens. But I think there's this tendency to be incredibly alarmist when it comes to change, right? And we tend to hook on the bad aspects of whatever change is coming. And I think we tend to talk a lot about like, oh, AI is coming for jobs, AI is going to displace, AI is coming to. And I think first, it's important to acknowledge that a job is a construct of tasks, right? It's like what makes a job of marketers that you do market research, you think about positioning, you pull data, you do creative, you do like you decompose into a number of tasks and um processes and relationships and and so so it is true that some of the skills and processes and ways of doing things and the tools are going to be replaced displaced enhanced um you name it right and so yes there's going to be change um but the part that i find a little bit frustrating is what you said like there's a lot of CEOs and companies that are using this as an opportunity to do major workforce restructure and blame it on AI.

12:52And for what it's worth, and I think anyone who has lived through a few of these cycles, this is not new. This is something that has been happening in every major tech cycle at any major company. There's a moment where it's like, oh, we're restructuring because of AI. We're restructuring because of SaaS. We're restructuring because of big data. We're restructuring because of social media. You know, it's like it happens every seven to 10 years. And we live through it. We will go through it again. It's just the way tech companies and the stock market works. And I think it's important to acknowledge that.

13:32So what I would recommend is like when I hear, oh, we're restructuring because of AI, is like, okay, like there's a workforce restructure that we need to acknowledge. There's a new way to think about skills and how like within a company, those skills are priced and hired for and acknowledged or like recognized and supported and expanded. And I think something that is interesting now, especially in smaller companies and startups, and this perhaps comes with a bit of a Silicon Valley lens is companies are now hiring for potential and for the like hiring for the slope right like how quickly can you learn like what is your learning velocity because there's this fundamental acknowledgement that the landscape is going to change every three to six months and the real skill set is adaptability and the ability to work with the technology, the knowledge that you're given in a given point in time.

14:43I think it's important to acknowledge in that regard as well that a lot of the fundamentals still hold. And I think, I mean, this is Voices of Search, right? So I'm going to use an example tied to search. I think SEO has gone through a really massive transformation over the past 15, 20 years, right? Constantly, yeah. Especially in the past three to four years. Yeah, the last couple of years has been painful, yes. Yeah, it's like, hey, things are really shifting. But the reality is that what makes someone stand out and what makes a company or formerly known as SEO manager successful in this world is you're ultimately solving for a user's need and pain point, right?

15:38And I think when you start peeling back the layer, great products answer universal needs. Great processes answer human needs that are universal as well, right? And I think with search, it's like ultimately the problem that you're solving for is you you have one user that's searching for information and you have a broker, which used to be Google. Now it's ChatGPT or Code. The broker may be changing or there might be new players that are coming into the picture. But the fundamental need of I as a human am trying to find the right information or like even I as an agent am trying to find the right information, that still holds, right?

16:24And I think when you bring any process, task, occupation back to that fundamental, that actually changes the lens in which I see transformation. I love this. And optimist, optimist, I want to ask you a more optimistic question than the dooming gloom question of, hey, AI is going to take all of our jobs and replace them. But even in your response to that question, a lot of it had to do with where are things going? Where do we as humans involved in operators of AI need to go? What are the skills, what are the capabilities that we must have in order to be relevant in today's job market? And one of the things that I find really encouraging about AI is that AI is going to cure cancer.

17:14AI is going to prevent deaths. AI is going to monitor and secure environments that we work in, whether they be physical labor environments. And I've seen literally robot companies that are building AI systems for job sites to prevent injuries to, you know, all kinds of capabilities that are going to help humanity and Earth like be a better place. Right. So AI will do that. But behind those capabilities will be humans. And so what are the skills? What are the capabilities? You mentioned a few of them, right? Being able to be more adaptable, being able to have a fast learning curve. Right. But tell us more about that and tell us about where you think we, especially younger and new individuals entering the job market, should be investing in their own capabilities.

18:08Yeah, I think probably comes down to three skills, being what I've already said. But one of them is creativity. The other one is ingenuity. And the third one I would say is thinking boldly. We have a new technology. It's going to be capable of doing a lot of great things and a lot of horrible things. It's like ultimately as any tool put in human hands, we've learned that it can go in very different directions. And so I think if people can tap into the what is possible or even like what are we not even imagining today is like leaning into that possibility, I think is something that excites me because I've seen it happen in the past 30 years with the internet.

19:07I grew up in a very small village in the middle of Spain for 100, 500 people. When I turned 12 or something, I got access to a modem and sadly I could speak to anyone in the world. I found Project Gutenberg and I could download any book that had been published for many, many years in any language, like those, like the level of access to information was something that I had never dreamed of, right? And when I think about what could be possible today, as you say, it's like curing certain sickness or environmental challenges. I recently found out about a company here in San Francisco, and what they're trying to do is use AI to remove toxic waste, right?

19:52It's like removing the need for humans to go and remove that toxic waste. Like that's like incredibly cool. So what else could we be doing? And I think there's this interesting tension happening right now. And I think you and I enter the workforce around the same time, which was right around the 2008 crisis. What was interesting of a world where that first few years of access to jobs got really hard. The young people back then couldn't find a job. What happened is that a lot of people came up with their own jobs and ideas and et cetera, et cetera. And from that time, you have companies like Facebook being born, right?

20:33When nobody's handing you a playbook, you have to build your own. And I'm super excited to see that happening now. you have a mix of a new technology, a generation, Gen Z, who has gone through a lot in their, like, from 10 to 20 years, like, they've lived through so, so much and, like, such fundamental change in how the world operates that I think, ultimately, I'm optimistic about what can be. But I think going back to that, like, creativity, ingenuity, and, like, being bold about what is because I think sometimes we forget the agency that we have to change the world. Absolutely. That is brilliant.

21:16And I think before we get into talking about how those capabilities translate to search, content marketing, I want to talk a little bit about Bluma and what you're building and how this transformation in AI and knowledge workers was a critical point for you to build Bluma and why you think the world needs something like Bluma. So tell our listeners a little bit more about the product, what it does, and then we go into some questions from there. Yep. So Bluma is an AI power coach focused on helping people have amazing careers. We're also seeing it become an extension of an HR team, right? It's there to support an employee, to help people have a private and trusted place, to workshop ideas, thoughts, feedback, situations, and to create accountability and goals to ultimately have impact.

22:16The reason why my co-founder and I started Bluma is both of us come from leadership roles. I have been a leader at Kanban, Pinterest, have run large global organizations. My last org was 1 ,500 people. And I've seen firsthand the challenges that come with scaling a team, scaling a culture, and keeping people focused on having impact. And when I was thinking about what are the tools that truly help drive meaningful change in terms of performance and impact in employees, one of the ones that I kept coming back to is coaching. right then um the interesting thing about coaching is that in the sports world every top performer i'm thinking steph curry for example michael jordan you name it's like they have not just one coach they have one coach for free um free throws one coach for like defense one coach for like you need someone who's helping bridge the gap between where you are today and what is possible.

23:16And I think it's super important to have that level of support and that level of guidance. The problem is that it's extremely cost prohibitive to roll that out to 100 % of the organization. And I've been extremely lucky to be on the receiving end of coaching programs and coaching engagements. And I've also been very lucky to be in organizations that, while not at 100 % coverage, they had very strong coaching programs over to employees. What I wanted to do, and going back to what I think technology can do, I'm a big believer that technology should create access. And so I wanted to bring the power of coaching to everyone in the organization.

24:00And that's where Buma was form. That's amazing. And I really think that there's something that, that probably a lot of our listeners are thinking about as they hear about Bluma, which is, you know, how do you get the context to build a coaching platform and make it relevant to me as a person, right? Because I, as a person have my own unique challenges and beliefs and background. How do you make it relevant to the individual? How do you make it relevant to each company in the ecosystem of that company? Yeah, great question. So we've spent a lot of time thinking about those problems for a couple of reasons.

24:41One, coaching is a lot about expertise. So we didn't want to just put, like, give you generic advice. We've worked with experts and we've developed over 25 frameworks for coaching. And so that we use that as like our coaches general knowledge to be a great coach, right? Because coaching is not necessarily a to-do list. Coaching is not like just generic advice. It's like, it's a little bit more involved, but coaching needs context. And that is something that a great coach will do. They will understand who you are and what is the situation you're in, And so we have spent a lot of time working on personalization and understanding user preferences and at the same time understanding a user context.

25:35we are able to work with an organization's context, so anything from values to career ladders to best practices, like whatever people teams use for that organization and bring it into the coaching experience so that the individual is coached in their organization's context. Now, the interesting part is that individuals don't stay forever in the same job. they move around. And so the idea is that as you move around, you might lose your organization's access to organization's data, but you keep your own coaching, which is something that so far you've been losing as you move jobs until, unless you are very religious about copying and pasting everything into a document, which very few people.

26:24Yeah, exactly. And then the third part that is exciting is like, we also have integrations with different tools. uh we're just announcing actually today i think it's happening while we're talking um we are announcing our integration with granola oh awesome bring your granola notes and connect them to bluma and use them because i'm sure it has happened to you you leave a meeting and you're like what did i say how did i show up was that absolutely stupid um so i yeah it's like you can then connect with bluma and get feedback get advice get uh also get accessibility because I think the one part that I really cared about when building Boom, I was coaching on its own is great.

27:04But what I've seen it fail is when it doesn't translate into business impact or goals or results. And I think that to me is a part that matters a lot. Like it's great to get great advice, but if you don't do anything with it, it's a little bit pointless. Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Previsible. So you're looking for SEO help and you've got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy-less project with low success rate.

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28:48And, you know, I think it's really, first of all, congratulations on connecting this with Granola. Love Granola's product, and I think that that's one of the advancements that we have with AI now, is that, you know, note-taking has now completely transferred from having a pen and paper at your desk to having these automated systems that capture conversation and help to synthesize what are the important inflections in that conversation. And now with a coaching tool that you can advance your own capabilities, make yourself more capable in conveying your message, making sure that it sticks. And those are the human components of the skills that you mentioned earlier, right?

29:25That's where the ingenuity, the innovation, the ability to capture an audience through your own capabilities is the key skill that we all still have to have. One of the things that I've noticed as we transition to this AI world is that there are few industries that have been met with AI from multiple angles. And search marketers is one of those. search marketers are faced with the challenge of both having to relearn how they go about approaching search marketing because there's new discovery channels chat gbt open ai but we're also having to learn how to re-skill ourselves and become better at doing uh the the activities that in tasks that we've often done and so what it's done is it's created a huge amount of pressure on even new people who are entering the search marketing space.

30:28And I'm curious to get your perspective and your experience in helping individuals who are faced with this dual threat where both the industry that you're working in is changing, but at the same time, your skills and capabilities are also having to adapt and change. and that becomes an increasingly frictioned environment. And one of the things that I've noticed, and I'd love your opinion on, is a lot of these individuals are just facing fatigue much sooner. They're just getting tired because the market is changing, the industry is changing, and the way I do work is changing at the same time. And so at the end of the week, it's just complete drain.

31:14And I'm curious, like how you see both coaching, development of people and how we go about addressing that core challenge that many search marketers are faced with today. I mean, I think the first thing is acknowledging it. Right. It's real. And I think the one thing that I would add to what you've mentioned is the volume and competition is wild. Like it's 10 times what it used to be. And the interesting thing with content marketing and search marketing is that it's an ecosystem that rebalances itself every few years in a painful way, generally. Right. It's like when you're thinking about like the algorithm changes and like the big impact that that has on on companies and individuals and processes and how things work.

32:09I think we're in a little bit of like, it's going to happen again. And it's probably going to happen. I don't want to take out the crystal ball, but I think it's going to happen, if not by the end of the year, by March next year. Because right now there's just so much volume, so much of the same. And it's this really fascinating tension of everyone is being asked to create more. but everyone is fatigued by what more looks like. Like I think everyone is using the same tools. The outputs are starting to look very much of the same. You are like starting to see companies like Substack launching these AI detectors and things like that.

32:57But on the flip side, when I look at all the algorithms and I'm chronically online and I have been for so many decades it's at this point that I can tell if something is AI, even if someone has done a very good job, not making it look real. And the interesting thing is that the algorithms are actually rewarding AI, like a polished AI version of content, right? And so I honestly feel for everyone who gets trapped in the middle of that, because on one hand, the platforms and everyone, people who come on podcasts like myself, it's like, just be yourself like do the like be creative and be unique and do the the thing that's quirky and fun and unique and and and follow like the craft but at the same time um you have the ecosystem is rewarding the grind and the volume and and at that point where you see this two forces in opposition, what I have found in every content ecosystem, and I'm thinking about all this as a content ecosystem, is it cracks and it breaks.

34:06And we are getting ready for that to happen in the next six to 12 months, because I don't think it's sustainable, as you say, right? People are just creating more of the same because they have to. There's no other option. But I do think that uniqueness and people who spend time doing things that feel real and authentic actually are the ones who connect the most. And I think that's the tension between the volume, craft, authenticity that we're going to have to navigate in the coming months. Yeah, it's definitely coming. And I mean, one of my favorite exercises is the the the AI email detection.

34:58Right. We all get a lot of emails every day. It's it's, you know, or even the Slack AI messages that we get. Right. And and sometimes I'm just like, can you just send this to me with some broken English and some misspellings and some really poor grammar? because it just would be a lot more fun of a message than this very formulaic, very polished email that just isn't necessary in many cases, right? It's just tell me that this is okay and you love the idea and I'm good, let's go, you know? You know where that happens? I love it. It's like between my doctor and I, like I use AI to email her and she use AI to write me back and where it's just this conversation.

35:40But when I actually wanted to go back to a quote from you many, many years ago that I remember seeing you say at a presentation. And it was, content is not king, content is presidential, because people ultimately vote on it with their attention. And that's something that over the years really stuck with me, because ultimately what's happening in a world where everyone is creating a lot of, like there's so much, it's like, how do you stand out? And I think what we need to not forget is like there's people on the other side and the people that we're trying to appeal. And when you're building brand through content, through search, through like generative, like however you want to, however you want to go about it is if you connect with the human on the other side, you're doing a good job.

36:34Otherwise, it's just more. and look, I use AI, like it's a tool that we use, right? It's like, it's just being mindful about how you use it, right? It's like, what are the parts where you can bring it into your process and what are the parts where it's best to do a hybrid or just keep it old school and human? I love it. I mean, one of my favorite recent experiences of this year was my dad and mom came to visit, and we recently got a small office in the mission. It's very, very small, and it's not an impressive office whatsoever. It can fit like four people max, but we needed some space, right?

37:21One of my co-founders, he recently had a baby. He's like, hey, I just need space so I can get my work done, right? And I'm like, great, so we found this tiny office. This tiny office just happens to be next door to the original OpenAI headquarters. It's just coincidence in the mission. And my dad comes over for lunch in the mission one day and we're walking past OpenAI's headquarters. And I go, hey, dad, that's OpenAI's original headquarters. We see Sam Altman just walking around every now and then just in the back patio. And he goes, what's OpenAI? I, and so I'm like, okay, I got to start from the beginning here.

37:56And so I'm explaining to my dad, all this AI stuff. And he goes, I don't understand anything you're telling me right now, Jordan, but what am I supposed to know? And I said, dad, behind every one of those computers is a human being. That's all you need to know. And so, and that is just like the simple truth of the fact, right? Like if you're going to use these tools, you have to know that there's a human being behind it and what I'd like to know from you Sylvia and what the team over at Bloom is doing is how are you all doing that with a product that is so intimate to an individual right coaching and I've been very very fortunate in my career I've had a lot of different coaches both ones that were my manager and I just was very fortunate enough to be in a place where they were open to coaching me and others where I had to seek out external coaches that are you know have trained and professionals at professional development.

38:47And in either of those experiences, one of the most important components of having that be successful for me was the fact that those individuals got to know me. They got to know what made me tick, what made me angry, what made me sad, what motivated me, why I loved my job or hated my job. And that was so critical to those relationships that I had with these coaches. And as you're building Bluma, how are you and your team making that a centerpiece of the product that you have and ensuring that that becomes something core to the product as it scales and it's used by more and more people? Great question.

39:28So I think there's a few things that have been an interesting part of the journey of building Bloma. And I think what you note about like the intimacy and the getting to know someone and what someone is willing to share. That has been a very interesting, fascinating journey. Humans are sometimes, like oftentimes, they're very complicated, but oftentimes they're more willing to share with machines than with people. Oh, that is definitely true. Yes. Because there is no judgment. right it's like it's and i think for anyone who has gone through a coaching relationship of any kind or like a relationship that requires you to open up in a more intimate way um there's this feeling of like am i revealing too much are you gonna think of xyz of me are you gonna tell this to someone um so i think that that is an area where i was actually expecting a little bit more questioning.

40:30People are very, very willing to share. There might also be a little bit of self-selection bias of the people who actually decide to sign up. But so far, that has been a surprising stat. And that is not only from us, right? If you see data from ChatDBT, from Anthropic, from companies like AI, they do AI therapy. People are very willing to share just because there's no judgment involved. And I think that it's really important part when you're creating this kind of relationship. Something that for me was also important is to go back to first principles of what makes a great coaching relationship.

41:11And part of that is being a proactive coach. So what we've built is a proactive coach. Of course, you can go and be like, I just came out of this meeting and I'm very frustrated and like, help me navigate through this. But if just open the app it will pull from the thread and be like hey sylvia we've been talking about like how you give feedback and how to be more effective about about doing that and landing your message do you want to pick up that thread uh so we have both modes um i think the third component of it is and for me this is around like the product philosophy of how we built it with any AI product, I want to be very careful with going into personification.

41:51I think we've all watched, or like maybe not all, but Hair is a movie that I would highly recommend. I think it's on one hand, it's kind of cool that we've gone into that level of assistant and like artificial intelligence, right? On the other hand, I think there's a slippery slope of when people start merging humans and machines, and that creates a very great area. So our intention has never been to pretend that Bluomai is a human or replaces a human. I actually believe in technology enhancing human capabilities, not replacing humans. And so what we see is some people use the coach on its own.

42:30Some people use it in tandem with a human coach. right so you can work with your manager or a coach and bluma and like use it in between sessions you can do share you can do share goals um because we wanted to have that option of um like multiplayer if you wanted to where all your conversation data is private to yourself but if you want to share your goals your progress your documents you can share it with um with your coach your buddy your significant other a friend your manager etc i love that in fact you know it reminds me like One of the studies we've done at Previsible is around measuring how well LLMs can respond to SEO questions.

43:09We use the same 50 SEO questions. We've been running this for almost a year now. And it's surprising. Most LLMs can do pretty good. They can answer about 70 % to 80 % of the questions accurately. But it's in a sterile, perfect environment. It has no engineer to respond to, no boss to deal with who has no idea what SEO is. it has none of that, right? It's just an LLM being fed a test and respond to A, B, C, D. And I think that that's one of the interesting things that I share with a lot of SEOs and search marketers is that that's our job, right? Our job is to deal with all of that ambiguity that we are faced with in our roles and in our companies and in our day-to-day activities.

43:55And one of the things I'd love to understand from your vantage point, Sylvia, is where is Where is leadership going with this AI transformation? You've been a leader at some of the most well-known tech companies. You've been able to lead transformation at these organizations. And now you're building a product that in essence helps organizations up-level their talent and their people. How are leaders making good decisions? What decisions should leaders be making? and what advice do you have for any kind of leader, whether it's a manager or a CEO of a company, around how this AI transformation can help their teams and organizations adapt?

44:37So I think a leader's job is never easy and straightforward, but it's always fun and exciting. That would be my take, and I guess the bias is that I have been in leadership for many years, so I enjoy that. enjoy that like good amount of chaos and opportunity. But I think ultimately what makes a good leader is someone who can set a vision for where the organization, the company, their team, like whatever your sphere is, right? Like how can you set the North Star there and then create the conditions for their teams to succeed? And I think that's where the AI transformation, any transformation, but the AI transformation specifically right now is where some leaders get it really, really right.

45:28Some leaders don't, right? It's like, I'm sure everyone has been in the situation was like, why don't you roll out AI to all the things that you do, right? And then it's like, someone might be like, okay, I'm going to roll out AI to everything. And then three months later, you're like, half of the people are not using things. The things that we rolled out are not really helpful, or the other flavor of the situation, well, there's two more flavors, but third flavor is we're going to build everything in-house. We're just going to like plot our way through this AI transformation. And then the fourth one is like, what's AI?

46:04I don't want to hear about it, right? It's like kind of like put your head in the sand and ignore the situation. And I think ultimately there's a happy medium for every organization. And what that happy medium looks like is very, very different. So I always go back to what is the problem that you're trying to solve and what are the right tools to solve that problem? Right. It's like it might be in some cases you have to like really go deep into AI outsourcing. So what are the right tools to do that effectively? In some cases, it might be like, hey, you have to build, you have to upgrade your processes, et cetera, et cetera.

46:40I think that happened probably in the first two years of having more access to AI tool. Everyone was trying to build the right tool, the right process. And I think what people discount, especially when you build any kind of internal tool, but now with AI makes it very inexpensive to build the zero to one, but building the one to 10 or one to 100 continues being very expensive in anything you do. Correct. Yep. What I'm finding is a lot of organizations being like, oh, I'll just build like, well, and then you're like, OK, but how do you who's going to maintain it? Who's going to keep it up with like whatever, like latest models, like who's going to train it?

47:26Who's going to make sure that it gets adopted in the organization? Who's going to measure impact? was going like all those questions that are kind of like not the sexy ones but they're the ones that um come with any transformation it's like you have the shiny shiny star that we all follow but then it's like okay what happens afterwards and i think what we're seeing in many organizations now is like there was a lot of excitement for certain things that excitement has fizzled out and a question that I do get from many leaders is like, okay, like, how should I measure success of rolling out any AI product?

48:05And what I tend to go back to, and my bias is that I come from a primarily consumer background, is I would measure success of any tool, be it B2B or B2C, by looking at how many people are coming to use it every day, how are they using it, and what value are they extracting out of it, right? At Pinterest, we used to look at how many people came to Pinterest, what kind of engagement they had on the platform. But then the most important thing was, did they do, did they act on the idea that they came to the platform for, right? It's like, we care more about someone going out and cooking the recipe than someone spending two hours just browsing.

48:47And I think that's when I build Bluma, for example, it's like I actually want to affect change in someone's performance. I like, of course, we track time spent and we track conversation messages and so on. But ultimately, if I can help you be more confident, show up to work, if I can help you like get that promotion, if I can help you run a reorg, if I can help you remove some stress as a leader, then that's what I would consider success. And I think going back to what does success look like at the transformation level for an organization, a company, a team, I would look at what is the behavioral change that a leader is trying to affect and then figure out what are the right tools to get the team there.

49:38Love this. And thank you, Sylvia. I mean, this is a lot of brilliant insights into like where Your personal experiences has taken you why Bluma is a relevant tool for anyone that wants to help up-level their skills and capabilities and hopefully some nuggets for SEOs and search marketers. But I want to transition to my favorite part of the podcast, which is what we call our lightning round. I'm going to ask you five questions about different topics, and hopefully you can give me a quick 30-minute response on each. Are you ready?

50:09Silvia Oviedo López: Let's do it. All right. What is the biggest AI skill that every search marketer should develop over the next year? I'm going to go back to creativity and ingenuity. Try the quirky thing, like people, like there's the rules matter, but they don't. So get playful and get creative. My next question is, how will AI help transform the most entry level roles in an organization? There's no excuse not to know things anymore. Back in my days, it was like, you can Google that, like now you can become somewhat proficient very, very quickly in like 10 minutes. So I think there's going to be an expectation that people are a little bit like all-terrain and you can throw any challenge at anyone.

51:06So my recommendation for anyone who's in that like first zero to three years of their career is become really, really, really good at picking things up on the fly. And again, that can be a Google search away, a chat GPT chat away, like things you can figure it out. Love that. No, it's so true. I mean, we have so much more access to information. You said it in the show, right? Knowledge is now so much more accessible. It used to take a dial-up modem. Now you can just prompt your way to so much knowledge. What's one leadership habit that individual should... Let's take that back from the top. Sorry, team.

51:47What's one leadership habit that leader... Wow. This is not a well-written question at all. I'm sorry, Sylvia. What's one leadership habit that individuals should stop doing in the AI era? That's such a great question. Trying to have all the answers. The reality is that the answer might as well change tomorrow. So I think we should lead with more curiosity than certainty. Yeah, no question. Especially with all the changes that we've seen in the past few years. What is one mistake companies are making when introducing AI to their organization? I think a mistake is rolling out things too fast, rolling out things too slow, or not rolling out things at all.

52:48So I think we're in that Goldilocks problem where we have to find that perfect balance. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. I think in the era of AI, being slow is going to cost you more than being wrong because the cost to switch is reducing. Yeah, that is so true. We've seen that from a lot of organizations. looking into the future what will make a great marketer successful which i mean like honestly that's the kind of easy way out answer if you think about like any great marketer of history it came down to i mean there's a bit of right place right time but also leaning into that creative aspect and i think that will continue being true and that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast.

53:43A huge thank you to Silvia Oviedo Lopez, CEO at Bluma for joining us. If you'd like to contact Silvia, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on thevoicesofsearch.com. You can also visit our company website bluma.com. If you haven't subscribed yet, want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.