Episode 56: Transforming B2B Marketing with Deep Customer Insights and AI Innovation | Akash Pathak

In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers Podcast, Steve sits down with Akash Pathak, a trailblazer in growth and digital transformation with over two decades of experience.

Akash shares riveting narratives from his career, particularly focusing on two transformative case studies. The first one dives into a healthcare firm's innovative approach to understanding B2B customer needs, leading to impactful marketing strategies and digital content development that significantly improved market presence. The second case study unveils how strategic data analysis and customer insights guided a company in optimizing its investment between digital and sales efforts, enhancing the synergy between sales and marketing teams.

Throughout the conversation, Akash emphasizes the importance of customer-centricity, digital innovation, and the dynamic interplay between sales and marketing in driving business growth. His expertise illuminates the episode with insights on leveraging technology and data analytics to forge deeper connections with customers and tailor marketing strategies for maximum effectiveness.

This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone interested in pushing the boundaries of B2B marketing and sales integration to achieve unparalleled success.

Connect with Akash Pathak and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn. 

Transcript

‍Steve Goldhaber: Welcome back. This is. Steve, I'm your host of the interesting B-to-B Marketers podcast, and I'm excited for today's episode. All right, Akash, introduce yourself. Tell us who you are and, and what makes you tick. 

Akash Pathak: Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me out. I appreciate it. Yeah.

My name is Akash Pathak. I'm a growth and digital transformation specialist. I've been working in the industry for 20 years. Plus I've been focused at that intersection of growth and transformation. What that really means is that companies are looking to grow their business, look at how they can grow their business.

They're also trying to transform capabilities to modernize their capabilities. And then [00:01:00] that's where I come in. So I've had the. Pleasure working for Fortune fifties, some smaller companies. I would say the last seven, eight years I've been more and a head of a market, head of marketing roles leading the total business.

And before that I was really more focused on digital Q.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, nice. I'm gonna describe you as a Renaissance man. You are not the old marketing archetype. You, you are the modern Renaissance man. When it comes to marketing and especially growth marketing, that's a great area to be in. I mean, I feel like when we started in marketing years ago, it was just like we do ads.

We're the ad people come talk to us if you need an ad. Alright, so as we always do on the podcast, we are going to jump into case studies. So the first one you're gonna take us through this is. Healthcare, and we're doing a little bit of brain surgery in healthcare because this is all about getting inside the minds of the customer and figuring out some insights about kind of how do you make your marketing campaign a little bit more impactful?

So take it away. 

Akash Pathak: Yeah, thanks. You know, I think there's always a lot of different opportunities where you feel like growth is [00:02:00] stagnant, and this is a great example of that, where in this healthcare business. Targeting a specific B2B customer. They, you know, revenue was increasing, but not at the rate that other businesses were growing inside the firm and outside the firm.

So some of the competitors were gaining better traction. This was a situation where they wanted to go deeper inside the mind of their target, but didn't know how right and didn't know what it took. And so some of the proposals we came up with were actually like sitting down with that customer in their living room and understanding their lives.

And where this brand could play a role. Now, I will say that the success of the program, once we got through it, was great because we were able to uncover a lot of new insights, understand what role that brand could play, and that we actually got, you know, the budget and the team. Momentum around developing the digital content that we needed, but also the sales engagement that we needed to really drive it full.

So the result was the next year when we put this in the market was really, really positive. And it was a combination of segmentation from those insights, but also the [00:03:00] sales team being behind what we were trying to do. Some of the key insights we found is that this target really is inundated like we all are.

We put our, sometimes we just don't see that we're all inundated with content ideas. Business needs patients in this case, and that can be overwhelming. And so some of the insights that we found is how can we more integrate ourselves into our lives with bite-sized content and then also enable the sales team to, to come and bring that to life.

I'll say that. One of the hurdles that we really found is that you have to describe what this investment can do. 'cause if business is good but not amazing, sometimes there can be pushback around, you know, why should we even invest this time and money to do this? So that was one of the big learnings I had.

Not only the project in terms of what it was able to do, just organizationally. 

Steve Goldhaber: How do you kind of think about that and help people understand that there could be a benefit at the end of the road? Yeah, tell me like, where did these, first of all, I love these projects, right, where you're just trying to get, you're trying to get close for the [00:04:00] customer.

Where did this one come from? Was it our marketing efforts are falling flat? Was it a top down thing from leadership saying like, we don't know who we're talking to, where, where did it come from? 

Akash Pathak: This one was interesting because the idea of getting close to the customer came from, you know, a collection of people on the team, myself, a couple other people.

And the challenge that was out there was initially just. We're not growing as fast as our competition. You know, it was a market research meeting where we looked at our competition, we looked at our other portfolios of business, and we're like, this one's just not growing as fast. I wonder why. And there's some interesting insights at a very high level on the target.

And we're like, okay, well that's interesting. So we had a debrief after that we started to talk about and think about it. And some of 'em came up with a pretty innovative idea to glean more insight. And then we're like, well, that's interesting. But then we asked the question, what would we do with that?

You know, do, do we even, you know, like we don't want to go into management and say we're just gonna get these insights, and then they'll sit on a shelf. We wanted to go in and say, okay, if we got those and invested that time, the money wasn't that big. Right? Getting insights wasn't. Huge [00:05:00] proposition money wise, but the time was big.

It was a big time investment. You're flying out, you're, you know, you've got people out of the office for a long time, spending time on this project. So then we, we said, okay, well we, we need to have some, we need to have an idea of how we'll make it actionable at the end. And then, so then as we kind of developed that, once we talked with management, they're like, this seems great.

Like it's a no brainer because the worst case is it doesn't work right. But yeah, if we keep doing what we're doing, you know, we're, we're in the same boat, so they're like, okay, let's, let's try this. Like, thanks for bringing, you know, a new idea to us and kudos to the person internally who was like, let's just reframe this a little bit.

Because if we go out and do market research through survey, we're gonna get what we got If we do this where we sit in a. Their home, their office observe, just get a little bit deeper. We might get some new stuff and we're like, yeah, that's a, that's a good call. Yeah, I like 

Steve Goldhaber: that. I mean, it's very like anthropomorphic research where, I mean, I, I've done so many focus groups behind the mirror glass, and you can learn a lot from them, but there's always this like element of the person being [00:06:00] paid to do the research almost wants to perform.

Where it's like they're just telling you what they think you want to hear, but when you actually go and do the observation, is it participant observation? That's probably like the research term where you actually get in there and and follow these people around. I feel like it's a little, it's not as safe probably for the research folks because many of them are just very comfortable in doing the predictable.

Akash Pathak: But I do think you can get better insights when it comes to this type of research. Also help get some specific channel insights, which we didn't think we would get. So, for example, we had to, the actual part that we had thought about was how will we action on it. We had said we would ask about different, you know, how do they engage with sales people and channels?

And we did get some good insights out of that, that we're able to then go and use very tangibly for a media plan, email content, sales teams. So that was. And we didn't sort of know that we had to get some of that, but you never know what you're gonna get sometimes, you know, from customer insights. But we knew we had it on our list of, of [00:07:00] interviewing of different questions we wanted to ask, and so that was a really nice thing as well.

Steve Goldhaber: How long did this whole process take? Well, I mean, after you got approval to do it. 

Akash Pathak: How long the investment the, the actual research probably took about two months. It took us about, I would say four weeks to six weeks to really get our brains around it and figure out how we would use it. So I would say about three months.

Steve Goldhaber: That's not bad. And were people at the company doing it, or was this a third party who kind of helped you guys? I. Pull it off. We 

Akash Pathak: ended up talking to a couple of third parties. You know, we talked to a couple of third parties 'cause it felt like a little bit different than, you know, what you and I talked about with just a focus group behind the mirror.

And so we found a couple of third parties that were, I guess, just more innovative. You know, they were more about getting a little bit closer to the customer and they helped us pull it off for sure. They were a huge partner. They were a huge partner on gathering the insights and just helping generate some great ideas for us.

Sometimes you need a little bit of outside in. Spark some ideas, and so it's one of the cases where, again, going back to the business problem is fairly stagnant and so just [00:08:00] needed some fresh thinking to yeah, to change it up 

Steve Goldhaber: a bit. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for sharing the first case. We're jumping into the second one.

I like this one because I work with a lot of different clients and I always get to be an observer of the sales and marketing relationship barometer. I, I've seen it all. I've seen, we don't know where the sales people even said, cuz we don't talk to them ever to, no, I do ride-alongs. I actually, every now and then go on a sales call and see what it's like.

Right. So give us some background about the industry at case study number two.

Akash Pathak: Yeah, I love that. I think we could talk about this a lot, so it'll, it'll be fun. But yeah, I mean, it sells a marketing relationships and they run the gamut as you know, and it is important as leaders for us to create some congruency between the teams, collaboration between the teams.

You know, that's part of the job of, of leaders and obviously this, this example is really point the arrow at how we win. And so I would say the business situation here, it's. It was, it's similar to what I talked about before, which is growth was not awful. You [00:09:00] know, we were, it wasn't declining business, it was a growing business.

But there's a question about where do we invest to grow it even further? And so again, in taking a look at the industry, this one felt like it could grow more. Some of the other contexts is there are a lot of changes in leadership for this team. So it's actually, you know, good and bad. Good in the situation of, hey, we can take a fresh look at different things or run a different analysis or gives us an opportunity to rethink things bad in the sense that, you know, as a lot of changes happen in management, sometimes you, you can, you know, you have to make sure that you're getting the mind share on different opportunities as well.

You know, 'cause there's a lot of different things that they wanna tackle and they're assessing the business. As they come in. So for this one, you know, they're, they've been classically focused, not classically, I would say, but pretty classically focused on like just digital and sales, you know, connecting with these customers, setting up appointments through different content, through different products and services that we had that would help them.

And then sales would come in and there was a, there was a decent segmentation model there around. Where's the big [00:10:00] opportunity doing some, you know, historical analysis on where are we getting, you know, some traction? What types of businesses are we getting traction with? I think one of the challenges there really was like when this new leader was asked as they came on to run this business on the, on the operations side and working with me on the marketing side question was, where do we invest?

You know, what do we invest to kind of grow this even more? That posed an interesting question for myself. I worked with one of our consulting agencies on this. And some of the internal teams as well in data and analytics. And we thought, okay, well we don't know whether you invest in this digital component or the sales component because we don't know the combination of the two and we don't know the power and we don't, we don't even know like frequency for, for example, you know?

And so we have some correlation on, hey, it's working, we're seeing some. Stuff happens. Sales come through for these different segments and we're focusing on these segments. We're refreshing those segments and getting more customers on those segments. So we said, why don't we take a step back and say, if we can put them together, look at the historical data, let's find some insights.

So it started there and then they, and [00:11:00] then basically we kept peeling that onion, more insights came through. Now we found out, oh, okay, like we can actually get to, you know, salesperson should talk to this person three times and. That's because we know they've engaged with this type of content with us before, and so we're like, well that's really interesting.

Let, that becomes a whole model, right? Of now we're forecasting. We don't even have to look back in history. So that gets to the new leaders question, which is where do I invest? The other thing it came to was I. Looking outside our company, we knew people are investing in events or conferences and other things.

So we said, okay, well if we carved out 10% of this budget and said We wanna try new things, we know this works, which is this model that we created, but we also would need to try new things 'cause that'll get new people into this model through content, relationships, et cetera. Thought leadership, and then maybe that we can run that through the model as well to see where it goes.

So like. Maybe there's a 10% carve out it from an investment perspective and we see if the return is the return. So it was, I mean, honestly, it's like, you know when, when you're on the consumer side and [00:12:00] you see that frequency analysis, but I, on the B2B side, what's really cool is like, to your point about sales and marketing, you, you're kind of like, all right, I gotta triangulate both of these.

And I, I actually felt like in this case, a new leadership in sales. 'cause sales had a new leader at that point as well, was actually really open to this. So like, this is great. This is, this helps us triangulate where I can focus and maybe I can get more. Some of the ideas they had were like, maybe I can get more precise with my training around talking points against this, right?

Because this area is not as powerful as the top area. So that, that became a really rich conversation and frankly, I, it helped bridge the gap between sales and marketing. But you know, I think at the end of the day. Sales and marketing are always gonna have a, a little bit of healthy tension. And I, I think that's okay.

I think it just keeps us honest. It's like it is what it is. Sometimes, you know, we'll have beers off work and then at work we have to kind of like challenge each other a little bit. 

Steve Goldhaber: So I wanna jump in on a word that I really like that you just used this triangulate and I think that's. Such a powerful word in describing sales and [00:13:00] marketing.

It reminds me of a similar engagement where the sales and the marketing folks didn't really know what the opportunity was. And one thing that was really apparent was the marketing folks actually said, Hey, we know all this engagement data on how people are consuming content when we push it out. And what we figured out was that sales, and this was a renewal business model, so every two, three years.

These accounts would renew. There was a correlation because the sales people had shared all their success rates with us, and you could see people who indexed high on content consumption renewed high and low, lower, right? So what was really interesting is that the marketing programs weren't just seen as like a demand or awareness.

Campaign. It was actually a sales intelligence program where you could tell the salespeople, Hey, we've triaged your accounts into like three levels. You know, essentially like a, a green, yellow, red, stoplight system. And we could say, these clients appear to be trending, not to renew. So something's going on, they're jump in.

Or, Hey, these other [00:14:00] clients are really highly engaged, like, don't offer the promotion or a discount in a, you know, in a procurement led process. It's fascinating when you can triangulate some of those things. 

Akash Pathak: I like that example. I love the, the yellow, like starting to trend, you know, in a direction that we don't love, you know?

I love that one. I, I think it's, you can always focus on growth, right? And sometimes we're like, well, but what about this yellow. You know, and maybe the red spine, you know, you kind of let it go. You don't have resources to do everything. But I love that example. It's a good one. And I, and I think that's the power of a relationship between sales and marketing.

If you can just get to these simple contracts, I feel like that's what gets the wheels going. You know? 'cause they're after the same thing that marketing is after, which is growth. But, you know, you've gotta, you've gotta find some simple ways to sort of get everybody, you know, after those goals. 

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome.

Let's jump into the Get to Know You part of the podcast. My first question is, tell us about your first gig in marketing, and you can go back as far as you can. We've heard childhood jobs, entrepreneur, [00:15:00] so wherever you want to take us. Tell us about your first gig. 

Akash Pathak: That's funny. That's funny. Yeah, so I, I got into marketing almost as, almost as an accident.

I had like a. My college background, I'll start with very shortly. I started off in computer science, went into English, so I did like a big radical change there. I just realized one day I didn't wanna be a, like a software engineer, and so then having an English degree in English literature, it's sort of a what are you gonna do, can teach, obviously.

And so I had looked into pursuing like a PhD or Masters. Then one day a lot of my computer science or my engineering college roommates and friends, they're like, you should come to this like consulting event. I'm like, I don't. Okay, sounds good. So I went to a consulting recruiting event, ended up becoming a consultant, which was, I don't know how that happened.

They were like, okay, you, you might be able to put some proposals together. You understand, you know, at the time, obviously digital is not blowing up yet, but it was like, you know, it was where. A lot of, some smart people were like, that's where the future [00:16:00] is. So I actually started off as a consultant. I did a lot, as I said, like a little bit of new business.

Then I started working on actual implementations and I worked there for a long time, like almost five years. And then one of my clients came to me and said, you know, you wanna take a role full-time? And I said, sure. So all my work really as a consultant got really into e-commerce and marketing really quickly.

Know, 'cause that that was a world of digital at the time. You were essentially trying to figure out the early days of marketing. So whether it was email, websites, some of the first paid ads, creating affiliate deals with, you know, brands that are huge. Now, I'll give you a funny story. Like the Points guy, he is not gonna remember me, but I literally remember like texting him on his phone to like create a CPA deal.

Right. You know, these were the things that we were trying to do back then. 

Steve Goldhaber: This is like the airline reward point guy. 

Akash Pathak: Yeah. Yeah. Now it's like, goodbye. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I was gonna say he's, he is made some good money selling the company. Yeah. 

Akash Pathak: So he is good. He is good. But anyway, yeah, so that [00:17:00] was my start is that, you know, I brought this performance mindset into marketing.

I had an English background, so I was able to do some of the creative side as well, the brand side. And that was my start, you know, and I really enjoyed it. And once I started doing it, about a year or two in, I was like, this is what I wanna do. And, and then I went in pursuit of masters as well, part-time.

'cause I was like, let's just double down. This is the career. So that was how I started. Funny story. 

Steve Goldhaber: That's awesome. I, I remember in the early, you know, digital age, this, I'm gonna probably say, let's just call it like 2000. I remember really getting hooked into like, oh my God, it's gonna be so amazing. But in the early years, I remember constantly going, you battle between this can be done.

This is so exciting. And then when you went to execute, technically things weren't as advanced. So you'd find yourself in a program where you're like, this software's broken. It's not working Right. And it's funny how today, yeah. It's rare that you find yourself in a position where like you can't execute a program where, where before it was like, well, yeah, we could execute this, but like, what do you do to factor [00:18:00] in like AOL email addresses?

That's a separate campaign to the AOL address. Like it just was like you just got to a point where you're like, this isn't gonna work. This is too hard to execute. But yeah, it, everything is pretty easy though from a technical standpoint. 

Akash Pathak: Got a lot better. But you're right, it was. I mean, it was wild, wild west.

And I think that's kind of where AI is. Like there's some things that work really well, and then the more I play around with it, I'm like, this doesn't work that well. You know? Yeah. So now that everybody's added it to everything, you know? Yeah. Like goes on Canva and I'm like, why? What, what is this generating for me?

This doesn't make any sense. So nothing against Canva. Awesome platform, but you know, I still, I think there's still some work to do as everybody rolls out their beta. ai. 

Steve Goldhaber: One of the funny stories about kind of the beta AI is a local car dealership through on like chat GPT is like their service, but there's obviously a role for that.

But the way that they had implemented it, it was just like an out of the box installation. So this guy starts negotiating the price of a car and GPT agrees to sell it to him for a [00:19:00] dollar. And he's like, no, I have a, I have a contract with this company. You guys have to honor it. I. I was like, this is amazing.

Like, or there's another one where the pot is like, Hey, can we help you find a car today? And he is like, actually, can you create some Python code? I'm trying to build this and the back. 

Akash Pathak: Sure, here's your code. It's just, oh, it's just those early, early fun calling works or hallucinations about ai. 

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, let's jump back into.

This is a little bit of a hypothetical here. It's Monday morning, you get to cancel every meeting, and you say, I can do whatever I want this week. From a marketing perspective, what are the things that get you really excited that you would say, I, I could do this all week long? 

Akash Pathak: That's a great question. I mean, I, I really love working.

With other people to find like new opportunities. So, you know, like you always think something's going well, and I always think there's something that you could probably change up and do slightly better, right? If you get like two or three people, smart, smart people in a room, take a look at some different analysis or run analysis and come together.

Just think [00:20:00] about something. Some people hate analysis, like actual numbers, and I respect that. I think that then they bring a lot of other, you know, really tangible benefits to the table. I think that's really rewarding. I think, you know, just taking a look at things and saying, let's rethink this and find some new opportunities.

And it's just, you're striving for success, right? You know, you're trying to get better at the, at the game. So I like that. I think that's really fun. I think that, you know, other aspects are. I always enjoy, you know, when, when teams are really energized around an idea and like following that momentum. So like, you know, sometimes you get in rooms and people are really, really energized and so that's always fun, you know, that's like the really exciting part about marketing is, is there's ideas or business momentum that gets people really energized and so it's fun to be a part of that.

I'd say those are the two. 

Steve Goldhaber: I like that. What's a pet peeve? Ears as it relates to marketing? Like what's something that you're just like, the industry's gotta fix this because it's just been driving me crazy for too long. 

Akash Pathak: Oh gosh. And the industry's kind of crazy, right? I mean, one of the things I [00:21:00] think is lol, let's take CDs.

You know, I don't know if it's a pet peeve, but it's, I've been there maybe two to three times, I think, and I think it's a great conference, but it's also just like chaos. You know what I mean? And I don't know. Sometimes, I don't know. Like what? Like I know when I came home from it, I was like, okay, I'm really excited about all this stuff.

But I don't know, I guess I don't know how I would use it, you know what I mean? So I understand how like, you know, from a consumer electronics perspective, it's awesome. But as a marketer, I think it's good to see where things are going, but I just don't know, you know, how tangible it is. You know, when I get back to work, I kind of, I feel like people are still struggling with like.

Their final and sales and marketing, you know, connections. And I feel like that's the reality of work or, you know, fixing a brand or, I don't know if CES is like, it's not not helpful, but I don't know if it's like that tangible, which is fine, you know, like if it's a great big party in Vegas for everybody and marketing wants to get involved and, you know, but I, I mean, look, I, I don't know if [00:22:00] it's like a massive value.

Steve Goldhaber: No, I think, you know, I think some of it also is, is the conference circuit. And when you get tired of South by Southwest, you're like, we need something new. This looks new. And it's definitely cool. But like to your point, it's, you're not looking at ad platforms there. Like you're, you're looking at products and maybe there's a way to get, you know, some type of partnership in, but they're product folks, they're looking to launch big.

All right. I'm gonna jump over to another topic. You know, we're both in the 20 plus year marketing club and over the course of our careers, you get to look back at the people that you work with or that you hire to understand, hey, that person's a great marketer. So this question's more focused on like, what are some of the, the themes or patterns that you've seen looking back to say, when people are looking for talent, this is what it takes to be a, a really.

Effective marketer. 

Akash Pathak: It's an awesome question. I think it's, at the end of the day, it's someone who really gets the fundamentals of marketing and understands business impact. So there's so much right now. There's so much. I like the AI noise. I think it's [00:23:00] great. There's so much noise around different things happening in the industry, but then you meet people who are like, look, we need to put down, what's the insight?

How are we going after it? How are we gonna measure it? And those are the people that I think win above and beyond. And I think their ability to sort of instill confidence in others around them, around that, that they're gonna march it through that process and come out on the other end, sharing how they did.

Those have been the marketers that I've hired that I love, and they've done really, really well. Because they get the fundamentals and it's second nature to them, and everybody around them is, is just. If they don't know the fundamentals, they're learning from them. They're seeing them, you know, basically just drive right through the process.

They're using technology, they're understanding it, they're being innovative. That's not the core of what they do. I think some of those marketers are, are almost like those big rocks, you know, driving we really good results. Right. Now I wanna caution that with saying like, what if someone is working on the edges, right?

What if someone is working on innovation? What if. Someone is working on something [00:24:00] specific. Marketing has gotten so broad and I think it, I think that's right, where you can have a data scientist, you can have a media ad tech expert, you can have a content expert, creative, etc. All these different functions.

But for, you know, the things I do, which is, you know, you're generally in a seat where you're trying to just drive the whole bus forward. Those are the type of things that. I've been really excited about. I would say the other capabilities or other talents, I've seen a lot of people thrive in those as well.

Different characteristics, right? The people who are like super duper innovative, let's pick on that for a while. I love them because they're almost like what we were talking about before. They're thinking about, okay, I, this thing is bugging me about the business or a process, or, I heard about this technology and I just wanna keep poking at to see if there's something there.

And that's great, right? Like you need that because it's just gonna. Freshen things up a little bit. That goes back to the case study that we talked about, which is this individual that we tapped and we're like, Hey, this feels a little stagnant. What do you think? And through the course of several conversations, [00:25:00] he's like, what?

We tried this. And we're like, that's interesting. And as we dug into it, we ended up loving it. So those things are good. But you know, to your point about, you know, I guess a general marketer, those are the things I look for. Fundamentals through the noise, ability to bring people. In a really clear way.

Those are great. 

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, we're gonna end on a theme that could extend this podcast for 10 hours. So we're, we're not gonna do. The question is, is AI underhyped or overhyped as it relates to the world of marketing? 

Akash Pathak: Oh gosh, yeah. It's definitely a 10 hour question, let's call it properly hyped. I think it's wild, wild west right now for ai.

Like the reports from CES are really funny because I think they like put chat GPT in a bike, you know, an electric bike. You know, like they're just. Everything's got ai, you know, you're just like, whatever. Just put AI in it and there's no form function to it. You know? It's like, what are you gonna do on the electric bike?

You're gonna be like, Hey, you know, I really need, like, I don't know. I don't know what gender is [00:26:00] gonna do to the bike. Right. You know, it's not, it's not like a useful function, I think like. Car manufacturers have put it in as well, you know, and it's like, that's intriguing, but sore in this state of like, it's helping people sell Franklin.

Yeah, I mean, because it shows you're innovative. So even in our business, like if you talk to a, let's say you're thinking about working with a technology in the media space or creative space, whatever it is, they're gonna throw out AI and they're gonna say, we have it embedded now. That creates a lot of tension.

Because as you know, as marketers, we're trying to figure out, well, is that true or is that smoke and mirrors? Is that actually gonna work? And if you do have ai, I need to understand what it's doing to actually propel something forward and create an impact. Whether that's get more relevant with the customer or.

Optimize, you know, without me having to, you know, turn the dials. So I think we're, I think it's properly high. I think it's, frankly, I think it's been, when you look at the research, it's been in development. Generative AI has been in development for, you know, 10 [00:27:00] years. Deep Mind. Other companies have been working on it for a really long time.

I think it's finally had its time of day. I think we have to be careful with a lot of people saying, I've got ai, now I'm awesome. And think very carefully and then I would just, I'm not gonna name vendors, but when you look at the history of ai, some vendors in our space, marketing service providers on the technology end have had AI integrated.

For several years, and some of them have actually been able to separate from others by leveraging that AI in a real way. So I think we have to be careful with the hype of like, oh, all this stuff is here. It's like, well just look back and say, yeah. There are actually a couple of things that have actually already been in development where there were two three x stronger.

Then the standard protocol, right? And so that's great. And now as we get into this new wave, we're like, great. Okay. I mean, great. Put check GPT in your electric bike, have at it. But is there a real use case here that I can actually test out and think about? I. That's, that's gonna drive [00:28:00] some, you know, drive like a wheel.

That's getting back to the foundation, right? Is it going to create more relevancy with my customer by rapidly like credit, you create a version. Is it gonna help me synthesize insights so I don't have to like. Have three data analysts crunching numbers. Instead, they can just look at insights and serve those up at a faster rate, like that's powerful.

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