Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Mind the Model: Episode 009: Martin Bertilsson
28 Plays4 days ago
Season 2, Episode2
Hosts: Nathan Guerra & Emmalee Crellin
Guest: Martin Bertilsson (Founder of AIMSOO)
Is the AI bubble about to burst? Maybe, but it’s not 1999 all over again. In this episode, Nathan and Emmalee sit down with Martin, ex-Google veteran turned AI founder..
From the "devastation" of traditional creative work to the rise of the "AI Butler" who gatekeeps your customers, Martin lays out a future where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) eats SEO for breakfast. If you aren't optimizing your data for the machines, you’re basically invisible.
The Meat & Potatoes:
- RIP, SEO. Hello, GEO: Forget clicks. It’s about verifying your data so AI models (the new gatekeepers) trust you enough to serve your answer.
- The "Butler" Effect: Marketing is no longer about convincing a human; it’s about convincing the AI assistant that summarizes the world for them.
- Ad-pocalypse Now: Think AI is free forever? Think again. Martin predicts 2026-2027 will be the "golden years" for advertising as ads inevitably flood AI interfaces.
Quote of the Week:
"You must treat AI the way you treat death" — Martin
Mentioned Links & Resources:
- AMSO: Martin’s startup solving the discovery problem for small businesses. Check out AIMSOO.ai
- Check out Martin’s LinkedIn Newsletter: Feed the Machine: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/feed-the-machine-7343126532489388032/
- Mind the Model: Got questions? Email the show at mindthemodelpod@gmail.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Greetings
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Mind the Model. I'm Nathan Garrett. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Emily Krellin. Em, how's it going? Hey, it's going good, Nate. How are you? i'm good. I'm good. It's um pretty bloody hot here in Australia, as they say.
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm always a little bit... I always feel strange saying bloody. I i lean into it. I say bloody all the time.
Are We in an AI Bubble?
00:00:29
Speaker
um i i wanted to start off by asking you a question, Nate.
00:00:36
Speaker
And it's a hot topic, so as we've discussed offline, you and I very plugged in. Subscribe to heap of different podcasts, newsletters, business chat. You know, we we have our secret society AI group.
00:00:52
Speaker
um But we're really plugged in. The rest of the industry may not be as much as we are. Do you think, do you think we are in an AI bubble?
Lessons from the Dot-Com Bubble
00:01:05
Speaker
I do. i do think we are in an a AI bubble. having I'm old enough and i'm hopefully wise enough to have lived through the very first dot-com bubble. um A little known fact that I was with a company and we were about six weeks away from going public when the bubble burst.
00:01:22
Speaker
And so on on on paper, I was worth going to be worth a million dollars or so. i had you know stock options and everything. was It was great. And um I ended up with just big, giant, blank pieces of paper that are worth absolutely nothing because that company imploded like many others.
00:01:39
Speaker
um So I'm familiar with the bubble cycle. I have lived through it before.
AI Bubble vs. Dot-Com Bubble
00:01:44
Speaker
Yes, I think we are in an AI bubble, but I do think it's different than the dot-com bubble in many ways.
00:01:51
Speaker
How so? so Part of the thing with the dot-com bubble is there weren't really a lot of legacy companies involved in that business. So there was tons of companies that were small, that were starting, you know, things like Amazon.
00:02:07
Speaker
But also pets.com. And you had all these companies that had spent a lot of money and and but on the promise that one day the internet would be huge. Most of them died in the dot-com burst because they just didn't have the money and they didn't have the faith from investors to keep going.
00:02:24
Speaker
There were some companies that survived that. We all heard of Amazon before. and We all know the Googles of the world. But there are companies that survived and they passed it. However, the difference is is now you have a bunch of startups like OpenAI, but also much more smaller, many small kind of pieces of business.
00:02:42
Speaker
But you also have these big, giant, huge companies as well. So you've got Google, you've got Microsoft, you've got Amazon. And those companies are so incredibly well-funded and I think can survive any bubble that bursts now.
00:02:57
Speaker
Will there be some casualties along the way? i think at some point there inevitably has to be. There's just so much hype and so much money and so much potential that a lot of these companies won't survive. From a younger generation perspective, because i won't classify you as boomer. I was a boomer.
00:03:17
Speaker
um I was not around. Righto. I'm sure your kids love to hear you say that. and I was not around for, well, I was around obviously, but I wasn't working during the time of the dot com work.
00:03:31
Speaker
you know, bubble bursting. But we have seen it time and time again of like the new, the rise of the new fad in tech and then it goes down in the new. And it just, it's that wavelength that, you know, some things go really trendy and maintain momentum and then others peter out. I think back to quite recently, the metaverse, Facebook doubled down so much that it renamed its company Meta, which I still think is an absolute mistake.
Impact of a Bubble Burst on Companies
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, crazy. Yeah.
00:03:59
Speaker
But the reason I bring it up is because there's a lot of hype with AI, but there's also a lot of like prove already proven value. I agree with you that there is a bubble, but I don't necessarily think that it's um in line with what you're saying. I don't think it's going to burst in the way that.com bubble bursted in the past. And the reason I wanted to start off the conversation in this manner is because I think it's really important to share these learnings of us being super plugged in that other people who might not be as keen on tech and business news for AI.
00:04:37
Speaker
They might have heard the term, but they might not have understood exactly what what was meant by it. I think there are commentators, especially out of the US, who are saying that, yes, there is an AI bubble because the valuations are overhyped. There's way too much money being pumped into them. And perhaps you can make that assumption for a lot of companies, but I think for the frontier models, I think of the strongest players, OpenAI, i Google Gemini, Anthropic Cloud, Grok to a lesser extent, but it's still maintaining momentum and relevancy considering it's connected to X, which I will still always call Twitter in my heart. and I think those are valid.
00:05:21
Speaker
perhaps a little over overvalued, but the remaining remaining um AI companies, I do think that they will eventually be gobbled up I guess the the the challenge from bubble perspective and the reason people talk about it a lot is, will it affect the total stock market and everybody's portfolios? um you know Most people in Australia have a super that's attached to the stock market. And so the question really is, is with an AI bubble, are you going to see a 30, 40, 50% drop in the stock market?
00:05:50
Speaker
And I think that you probably could. i think you probably could see a 30% corruption. And I think, like I said, it will destroy a bunch of smaller pieces that then, to your point, get picked up on the big guys.
Introducing Martin: Digital Advertising and AI
00:05:59
Speaker
Nate, over to you to introduce our very, very ah brilliant guest that we have on the podcast today. So our guest goes back with me quite a while. So we both worked at Google together. He has been in the digital advertising space for around 25 years. He's worked in e-commerce and online payments. He probably, i think, goes back to the dot-com era with me, which dates him a little bit as well.
00:06:23
Speaker
He's spent his time professionalism. performance marketing and data management. He was head of Google Analytics for APAC, for Google, and is now spending his time mentoring AI startups, but also running his own startup called Aimsuit.
00:06:41
Speaker
So I want to welcome to our guest today, Martin. Martin, welcome to Mind the Model. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. Good to talk to you guys. Good to see you again, Nathan. Martin, what we're going to do is we're going to start off the way we always do with a couple of quick fire questions to warm you up. ah First one being, what is your favorite AI model and why?
Favorite AI Models: ChatGPT and Grok
00:07:00
Speaker
i actually like Grok. And like, so what I use most is ChatGPT. was first, I got rusted on there. It's got all my memory. It's got all my projects. It's got all that stuff. But when you want to do a quick picture. You want a different take. You want the daily news. Grok is getting better and better. I wouldn't have said this six months ago, but I can see that part growing on me. Right.
00:07:23
Speaker
So that's that's just as a human. Then what we use like for coding and stuff is mostly Claude because they they're a very strong coding model. They were a very strong coding model for a long time.
00:07:35
Speaker
Martin, do you have a ah prompting methodology or approach that you tend to use when you brief AI? I do. i mean, it sort of has grown over the years. i mean I started using what's today called Gemini. It must have been like four or five years at least. And you you learn very quickly that if I say the same thing this way as opposed to that way, I get a different answer. Right. So a lot of it is just like experience. I know when to be authoritative. I know when to phrase things in a certain way.
00:08:09
Speaker
And then when you know you're going to run things again, like copy that query or tell it to remember it, it increasingly is getting good at remembering old things and not just regurgitating an hallucination thing.
00:08:21
Speaker
So you do want to build your own prompt library for your own world. For you, what's the last thing that you used AI for? Yeah, I was making Google ads yesterday. I was literally like scrolling. I was making headlines. up with With the AIMSO thing, and we're we're sort of trying to advertise a category that hasn't existed before. And so the Google automated systems just simply cannot come up with. It gave me home decor headlines and keywords.
00:08:47
Speaker
So I had to use ChatGPT to basically go, no, no, I need keywords like these. I need headlines like these. Let's see what we can do with this. right And it's amazing how well it understands an interface like Google Ads, right? Because it will have ingested so much discussions on what are best practices to do that exists on forums and any other channels we can imagine. right it it is The best part of AI is really this, that I have like a 90% expert in anything You know, you might not want to rely on it for anything like checking insurance contracts or whatever, but but I can get very far without going anywhere, without reaching anything. Martin, we we alluded to it a little bit at your bio, but we want to know more. And if you could share with our listeners and and and viewers, what is AIMSO?
AIMSO: Bridging AI and Small Businesses
00:09:34
Speaker
Why'd you start it up? What does it mean? And why do you feel that now is that right time to start the business?
00:09:40
Speaker
right So how do you connect small business to the world of AI so that they can be part of this as well, be found, do business? So that's a discovery problem. it It really is. It's basic visibility. It is like, how do you how do you get into the phone book that a billion people use, being non-Google AI search, if there is no phone book?
00:10:04
Speaker
Google has a phone book. You can list yourself in their phone book. Now you're in. But what about all these others? And like you flip this, like, so what would the others do? Is perplexity they're going to start their own small business listing product?
00:10:17
Speaker
And is a hundred other AI tools and and models going to do the same? And then the small business who can barely manage to keep up two listings and hate doing it, are they going to have to maintain listing accounts on like 30, 40, 50 different places,
00:10:31
Speaker
So the theory we had was, why don't we just create one? You list yourself one, we make it the basic visibility free, we will integrate with all those AI tools, we will verify the data so they can trust it, and we will just propagate this. right That solves the basic visibility problem. That is really the key of what we're doing.
00:10:53
Speaker
And Martin, what's your um what's the biggest barriers for
Challenges in AI-Driven Marketing
00:10:56
Speaker
you guys? like What's your biggest challenge? For us, the biggest challenge, I think, is that we are a touch early, and not in terms of where industry people understand what we're doing. That part is not that hard to explain.
00:11:08
Speaker
But if you go and talk to your average hairdresser, baker, backhoe driver, plumber, hey, you're not showing up on ChatGPT? What?
00:11:18
Speaker
Like, what are you talking about? Like, yeah like you're literally like explaining that because they don't know that they're not showing up. They haven't thought about it They haven't seen it. They haven't felt this pain yet.
00:11:29
Speaker
And so if I wanted to, can I, can I sign up today or how do I, how do I get my small business recognized? Yeah, it's it's completely free. Just go to aimso.ai. You put it in. Basically, you just fill in the basic information. It's free. you don't need a credit card. We will then verify you. like Same as we Google, Facebook, something like that. You'll have to like prove that it's actually your business, that it's not someone like hijacking your business to talk bad about it or something like that.
00:11:55
Speaker
And that's a safety of our of the of the small businesses that they get to control their information. But the second one is, of course, also that we need a trust level with the models. Right. where There's so much AI slot generators. There's so much black hat stuff going on that over time you want to establish credibility with the models. And the way you do that is you have consistently good information that they don't get a lot of pushback.
AI's Impact on Marketing Strategies
00:12:20
Speaker
How do you see marketing changing with the rise of all of these AI models and how the world is starting to shift a bit where the time to set up a Google Ads account and understand best practices and get the best out of it used to be days and days and you know have to bring in experts whereas now you have an expert like you just said a 90% expert at the palm of your hands. how How do you see that change happening for marketing? There's several layers to this. And the most immediate, what I've seen is is like, and and let's be clear here, it's like the devastation, i would call it, all of creative and basic work. I was talking just not long ago, as a friend of mine, they run a large digital agency group, we could call it perhaps.
00:13:06
Speaker
They have cut 80% of their solution engineers, the people who used to sort of sit and do bespoke jobs, figure out solutions, middleware and stuff like that. They gave the remaining 20% unlimited access to to tools, AI tools, and they've doubled their productivity.
00:13:24
Speaker
If you look in making imagery, video, like not the highest end yet, even though we're even seeing now high end brands also generating. But if you look at the scaffolding of all the creative industries, the people who sit and um and edit things in in Photoshop, the photographers, the studio people, the makeup people, it's all gone.
00:13:46
Speaker
and And wherever it's not gone, and it's going. So like ah the the first stage of this is definitely creative destruction. There's no doubt about that. And this part is not that pretty. But then comes the marketing itself. The biggest change in the next couple of years is the fact that more and more people will have someone. It's like everybody gets a personal shopper and assistant.
00:14:11
Speaker
So the marketer is used to talking to directly to a human. right and and controlling the message to the human, all of a sudden, no. It is like I'm there, i'm the I'm the lord of the manor, and I'm sending my butler out to talk to you first before the butler tells me what the butler thinks about everything is heard. right So marketers can't rely on the old tactics of, like I'm going to try and affect or or you know convince the humans or in some way. You need to also convince these machines.
00:14:43
Speaker
And then there's a third, even more fundamental difference as this leads to is you lose editorial control. Marketers are used to deciding if I pay to put my ad or my message somewhere, it will come there the way I intended it to, unless something's gone technically wrong.
00:15:05
Speaker
This has been true ever since someone drew a wall ad in old Rome, right? Like you you choose this. No longer, right? You have no control over what the final boss layer of AI will actually render on someone's screen.
00:15:20
Speaker
What pixels, what sounds, what messages, you do not get to control that. You can only put out the best sort of base information and then hope. that that that is got And that is completely different. Forget brand safety, come forget all of it.
00:15:33
Speaker
You cannot control this. Businesses that are banks, that are insurance, how do they work in that world? Because they have such regulation, but also, ah you know, cruft in terms of their business, the layers of structure. How do they navigate that?
00:15:52
Speaker
So I don't think there's a regulatory problem. the The problem is in how if you don't really know what I will see and you're trying to communicate with me, How do you then decide what are you trying to communicate? What are you going to try and show me? right How does this work? What will get through the the noise of the AI sort of rebuilding?
00:16:15
Speaker
That is where the problem starts to happen. There's different words to explain, essentially all the same thing. LEO, AEO, GEO, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, language ah engine optimization.
00:16:30
Speaker
Is there difference in What is it in your own words? Which one do you prefer? I prefer generative engine optimization, Geo. It was one of the earliest ones.
00:16:43
Speaker
And I also think it is it is the more all-encompassing. If you go on Syrenge Optimization, that became popular two years ago when the first guy started building tools here.
00:16:54
Speaker
And that's because people just thought about this as search. Right. I'm going to affect what the chatbot says back in text. So that's an answer. Right. Yep. That's an answer. Only answer layer, all these things.
00:17:07
Speaker
But generative AI is going to be inserting marketing messages into generated images, into generated videos. We're going to see, you know, programmatically bought, generated product sponsorships show up here and there. All of this stuff is coming.
00:17:23
Speaker
So as a marketing practice, it's far bigger than just the answer. So I like the geo, as we usually call it. What does good geo look like in practice then for a marketer today? To be honest, it looks like good SEO if you if you really simplify it down. It hasn't changed that much. You you need to have your data.
00:17:47
Speaker
whatever the data is in ah in a format that is optimized for what is going to come but past, like a crawler of some kind, and for what you know, some form of intelligent machine learning system will then do with that information. i Like the SEO industry had a very simple life in the sense that it was kind of just understand Google's crawler, understand how Google works and you're done.
00:18:17
Speaker
ah That's no longer true, but the principle holds. good data in the right format. That hasn't changed. What changes is a bit how you present it, how you put it out there. AI and doesn't love JavaScript and pop-ups and stuff like that. So you almost have to have like shadow sites and MCPs and things. But principle, good is just make sure you have good information.
00:18:41
Speaker
If you want to go a bit more cynical, you'd go good geo or good SEO is the one that sells. And that's when you get into why don't we do a million listicles in the dark? Why don't we generate thousands of fake comments on Reddit and you know all this sort of stuff?
00:19:04
Speaker
I'd say that is good in the sense that sometimes a little bit of it works and you can show, hey, here we made some money. But It is not good in the long run. It's not going to work in the long run. And we've also seen lots of examples where someone has let someone do something like that. And then comes the Google bot and has one look at this and goes, that's some sort of scammer.
00:19:26
Speaker
Cut them off. And so now they've doubled their like AI business and lost the 98% of their business that was Google. So so like people need to be careful here.
00:19:37
Speaker
it It almost seems like it's the beginning of the SEO process. world where you know people had to kind of test and learn to figure out the the best practices for SEO. Is this going to replace SEO? Like are we now going to move or agencies going to rename their SEO departments to geo I mean, I think they're all doing it. so So yes, in that sense. How much of that is driven by the hype that is enormous right now?
00:20:06
Speaker
right So you see the geo tools and the geo businesses, they're they're getting valued at 40, 50 times revenue. So Adobe picked up SEMrush. It's probably not because they wanted the old SEO practice. right They wanted the geo and they wanted the footprint.
00:20:22
Speaker
and So so so so so like you' you're seeing this and it's it's natural. I think also, but it is exactly that problem with like most of your business today is classic search. It is humans who are going to your website. They are buying things, however they're operating.
00:20:38
Speaker
The world is very not that different from 18 months ago in terms of where the dollars are currently going, but we can all see where it's going. We are seeing massive adoption in many, many areas of AI simply because it's just a better experience. It is faster for me as for me that that it does 50 searches instead of me doing one at the same time. like It's such so obviously much better. So it will come. And they everybody has to do this pivot over there.
Transition from SEO to GEO
00:21:08
Speaker
The biggest problem, I think, for the SEO people, and I talk to a lot of these guys, a lot of my good friends, is they spent 30 years selling traffic. Give us money, we will give you clicks. And now all of a sudden a technology shows up where the click is not like the right metric at all anymore. So how do you go back to the same people you told last year, give me this many dollars per this much there iss many clicks, and try and convince them to give them money for something else? It is actually becoming really hard for
00:21:42
Speaker
it's To me, it sounds like the the move from SEO to GEO, it's it's a journey for, you know, agencies and small businesses to find out and to to figure out the best practices.
Key Players in the GEO Space
00:21:55
Speaker
But it also sounds like there's a bit of a shift in consumer behavior.
00:22:00
Speaker
But for you, do you see any other players in the game that are really doing, you know, GEO quite well or who will make that transition better? Out of the established players, if we look at the people providing answers, that I mean, Google is doing a good job so far of the shift over. It's a big lift for them, obviously.
00:22:20
Speaker
ah Facebook is is not. I mean, if if there's a surprise here, it is rather how poorly Meta's AI is doing inside WhatsApp and the other surfaces it has, like how how little I find I ever want to go back when I try it again and again.
00:22:38
Speaker
So if those like the two polls here, and I think that's fair to say. There's not that many other players. very No one has really succeeded in grabbing share except for open AI.
00:22:51
Speaker
So they're probably around 70% now of consumers sort of chatbots use in the West, outside of China. um So we have a tale of a couple of big players right now dominating everything. Perplexity is a rounding error. As much as I love them, I use them all the time.
00:23:11
Speaker
But they just haven't broken through yet. But I think it's wrong to assume that where we are today is where it will be. It ties back to what you said, Nathan, right? ninety ninety four ninety five the big discussion was, would the consumer web be dominated by AOL or MSN?
00:23:31
Speaker
And safe to say it was neither, right? Like, I think it's far too early to to say he was going to own this and where he goes. That being said, I wouldn't want to bet against the big players. Yeah, it's really it's really hard to know. I i think ultimately about modes, right? And if you look at some of the modes that the big guys have today, you have distribution as a fantastic mode. I think almost a year ago, I posted one of the first LinkedIn articles about this. It's like, what are the modes in search, right?
00:24:02
Speaker
You can have great technology, but now everyone's got the same great technology. Then you can have data assets, as in I know stuff that other people don't, so I can give better answers, I can give a better result. And the third one is distribution. Humans are very basic. I will click on what's in front of me as long as it's free and easy to use. and Why would I download another browser if the one I have, I like it, and it the one I have has AI built into it? I remember the reason I started using Google was because it was so much better than Yahoo.
00:24:32
Speaker
But to your point, Em, Google now are in the position where they're going, okay, AI is impacting us. So what we're going to do is we're just going to integrate AI into our experience. And I think that's a very clever way for them to do it.
00:24:44
Speaker
So look, one of the questions I have for you, Martin, is putting your prognostication hat
AI Access and Ad-Driven Future
00:24:48
Speaker
on. I mean, right now people are paying for AI, but do you think the future of AI access is inevitably ad driven?
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, yes. or ah Or rather, this's's there's going to be ads here. ah This is, in a way, the biggest opportunity in the history of the ad tech industry and for advertising and marketers. This is this really is amazing.
00:25:16
Speaker
and and And and and if you if you put this in the simplest possible terms, if there's eyeballs, there will be ads. That has been true since old Rome. There literally are wall ads in Pompeii that you can go look at. right like there there There will always be someone showing up with something to sell and willing to pay to do it. right that That part is a given.
00:25:37
Speaker
The other part is that AI models are horrendously expensive. ah They are not making right returns and it's getting increasingly hard to justify the investments and the capital expenditure based on what's happening in coding and the AI infrastructure game and so forth. And you already saw this at the end of the last year. Kathy Woods of ARK Invest always.
00:26:03
Speaker
I'm always keen to be on the latest narrative. But I mean, she's saying this is where we're going to go. OpenAI has started talking about advertising and marketing and and all these things.
00:26:14
Speaker
And when you start doing the numbers on what it's worth, you you quickly I mean, I did this back of the envelope calculation for a meetup the other last month.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's five times the size of Google, just the e-commerce piece. So like what I always tell people is if you don't think there's going to be ads in ai you have to convince me that Sam Altman doesn't like money. Hey, so Martin, at that at the start, you you spoke to us about all the different countries that you've worked out of and and it recently in Singapore now in your long, illustrious career.
00:26:47
Speaker
Are there specific learnings from other markets? I don't know if it's a global insight. i think it's actually very similar everywhere. people have just the way I would phrase this is that the Americans are six months ahead, especially in California. It really pays to go and see what those guys are doing. ah And if you want to get ahead in your market, but it is no more than six months. It used to be a couple of years before like things filtered out. now Now it's much, much faster.
00:27:19
Speaker
Other than that, the discussions are eerily similar everywhere. right the The copyright conversation is the same in Europe as it is in Australia, as it is in Singapore, as it is in Japan. The legal freedom versions are a little bit different. I'd say the skill level inside ah the industry is similar. As in a year ago, you could almost waterboard someone and they wouldn't know what zero click was.
00:27:46
Speaker
Six months ago, everybody figured out what zero click was, right? Like, you get you get these things. Do you consider yourself to be an ai optimist, realist, or pessimist?
Philosophical View on AI's Inevitability
00:27:56
Speaker
I have realized that ah you have to treat AI the way you treat death.
00:28:03
Speaker
What a statement. maybe maybe Maybe AI will turn out to be this horrible Terminator thing that will do some cancer virus that kills us all.
00:28:15
Speaker
Maybe it will. Can I stop that? No. So I might as well just roll on. you know If it happens, it happens. And death is the same thing. Well, except I know it will happen. But I don't know when it will happen. I have to operate on a going concern.
00:28:29
Speaker
I still have to live my life. I still have to enjoy myself. I still have to raise my children. So yeah yeah it kind of doesn't matter if they are about to do it. right And the debate up as to whether humans will try, that was over in 2015.
00:28:44
Speaker
Humans will try. Because you're in this constant thing, if we don't do it, they will do it. If they are the Chinese or they are someone else, or you know Google goes, well, if we don't do it, then Elon will do it. It doesn't matter.
00:28:57
Speaker
This will happen if it happens. I can't do anything about it. Might as well roll on. And ah a lot of what's coming here is very optimistic. Huge reason to be optimistic. If you're in advertising, I think 26, 27 is going to be golden years like the early days of programmatic.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yeah. Right? We have at least $2 trillion dollars in in revenue coming to our industry that we didn't have before. We're going to re-cook at least $500 billion of the existing annual digital spend.
00:29:32
Speaker
How long that takes? Four, five, 10 years, 15 years? you know who knows? But the narrative, the hype, and the parties are coming in 26 27.
00:29:45
Speaker
So I'm hearing optimist, a dash of realism maybe, is that what I'm... no a lot of realism. I mean, I follow the same, i would imagine, podcasts. I listen to Jeffrey Hinton. I mean, i like it is a bit of a worry when like Nobel Prize winners who invented this stuff have changed their career to say that it's going to destroy us. And Hinton calls himself the like the positive guy because he only thinks it's like 20% chance won't.
00:30:16
Speaker
like so like
00:30:19
Speaker
But um you know you have to. but but what What are we going to do? like Are we going to crawl under a rock and die prematurely? like like like Don't borrow trouble is is a good maxim to live by. like Trouble will come for you eventually. So Martin, last question for you.
GEO's Future in Marketing
00:30:34
Speaker
In three years time, GEO will be blank for marketers.
00:30:39
Speaker
In three years time, i think GEO will have morphed massively and it will be table stakes for marketers. right If we think about GEO as I as a marketer understand how I need to relate to AI models and the AI powered interfaces that all customers use.
00:30:59
Speaker
If you're not doing that, you will be invisible as a business. You will be irrelevant as a business. So for marketers, what we today call GEO is the first step on this journey that you just have to get on. It's like hiring the first social media manager in 2007. That wasn't going to really pay back in that year. But if you missed out on that ride, not a good thing.
00:31:22
Speaker
and there is It is just simply so fundamental to how everything will be done. and And like, look at B2B right now. 90%, more than 90% of all procurement officers are now using already AI search. They're too lazy to write like reports themselves.
00:31:44
Speaker
If you're not, if you're selling B2B and you're not using a GEO already, you're losing out. In three years, it will just not, it'll be a joke. That's a great spot to end. Martin, thank you so much for your time this morning. and We'd love to hear more about your company, AIMSO, and all about GEO and the shifting landscape.
00:31:59
Speaker
Thank you for having me. Thank you for the podcast. and I keep listening with interest.
00:32:06
Speaker
Nate, what did you think of that chat with Martin? Well, look, I have known Martin for quite a while and I thought it was really interesting and informative.
Reflections and Key Insights
00:32:14
Speaker
Both thinking about why he liked Gio as a name, but also just the discussion around the future and present of Search and Gio and how they're merging how they're different. So I found it really fascinating. Yourself?
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, I love that chat. It was very cool for him to share his experience of, you know, being through that the the dot-com boom, as yourself, the elder millennial, and, you know, the rise of programmatic and his background in digital advertising and marketing.
00:32:50
Speaker
Google Analytics and data and all the like. One thing I really got away with, which I should have pressed him on this and perhaps we have a follow-up with him, but the fact that he was talking about, and I don't know if it's already happening or if he was kind of putting on an Oracle hat to look into the future, but having marketing messages you know, via GEO being integrated into generated images or video, that was just like, mind blowing to me because it makes sense for that text.
00:33:23
Speaker
But if, you know, I go to Nano Banana and I say, hey, you know, create a picture for me of Em sitting in at a cafe on her laptop. And then next to me is a Coca-Cola Coke Zero.
00:33:37
Speaker
That's slyly, but like, That is that the future? That's wild. So that has me yeah excited, nervous. There's a whole lot of, I suppose, brand safety considerations in that as well.
00:33:49
Speaker
You can kind of use Gemini and you can kind of use ChatGPT and you can kind of use a thousand free services to make an image. But you could see an era where that suddenly is very expensive and everybody everybody's starting to lock it down.
00:34:05
Speaker
And so to do it, you get an advertising experience and you can unlock partner experiences where you can start to do fun things with Coke in Gemini. And you can do fun things. You can totally see a partner experience where they, for Christmas, they can do you and your family in a thousand different Christmas places that are made by AI, but brought to you by Coca-Cola. And with that, what what he was talking about, like the creative destruction. So AI, the opportunities that lay ahead with advertising being infiltrated in that generation of images and video, but then also the creative destruction that it's happening at the human level for creative teams. Because we talk about job losses and we talk about the potential, but to hear that businesses are changing that dramatically and dropping headcount and remaining as, if not more productive,
00:34:58
Speaker
is just fascinating. And I think that's something that we're going to be, I think, continuing to reckon with in 26. Yeah. And to his point of like, don't borrow trouble, it's very, you know, the way he said it of, you know, thinking of AI like death, i you chuckle because it's such a strong visualization. It's such a Swedish way of approaching it as well. yeah Love that. um Yeah. It's controlling the controllables is what I come back to.
00:35:27
Speaker
One question for you. do you so he seemed to quite um willing to believe that the legal teams, the banking, the industries, those heavy regulated places are going to have no problem integrating AI into their work marketing workflows.
00:35:43
Speaker
What's your point of view on that? they'll they'll be They'll be slow to pick it up, but as soon as a major one has some good wins on the board, everyone else will be chasing. And to his point, you know, for people who didn't hire a social media manager in 2007, do they lose out on all that much? No, but the people who did had it gained a really strong hold for the future.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah, they didn't miss out in 2007, but they lost out by 2010. If they had the learnings and the experience. Yeah. Yeah. So um get involved is what you're saying. Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:36:15
Speaker
But overall, love the chat. I loved GEO perspective. And I think it's only a matter of time that some agencies start to reshape and rename their internal SEO departments to more of a GEO approach.
00:36:31
Speaker
Well, um I think that's a good place for us to stop. Lots look forward to this year in 2026. And be sure to like, share,
Listener Engagement and Contact
00:36:37
Speaker
and subscribe. if you have any questions or want to hear a future guest on the pod, just send them over to mindthemodelpod at gmail.com. And remember, the intelligence might be artificial, but the wins are real.
00:36:49
Speaker
Thanks. See you next time.
00:36:57
Speaker
This episode was brought to you by TestChimp. TestChimp is a web developer's best friend. TestChimp uses deep runtime context to automate your testing workloads, generate scenarios, write scripts, and fix bugs all in one place.
00:37:13
Speaker
Stop wasting time and start shipping quality code faster. Bugs but finding bugs doesn't have to with TestChimp.