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Growing an Audience By Betting on the Future With Ai
108 Plays10 months ago
In this episode of the Attention Podcast, host Dan Sanchez interviews Andrew Bolis, a marketing AI expert. Andrew shares his journey of building a personal brand on LinkedIn after losing his job as a CMO, emphasizing engagement and networking as crucial elements. They discuss the impact of AI on marketing and content creation, highlighting the potential for automation tools like Descript and GPTs. Andrew demonstrates the practical application of Chat GPT for automating business processes, and they explore the future of custom GPTs and AI integration in podcast production. The conversation underscores the importance of AI education and the need for unique perspectives in the field.
Want to learn more about using Ai for marketing? Check out my other show at AiMicroskills.com.
Timestamps:
00:00 CEO guided me to LinkedIn success.
04:34 Engage with others to boost visibility and connections.
08:04 Building relationships through podcasts, connecting, and helping.
10:41 Promoting AI on social media led to success.
15:19 Automated browser extension documents and guides steps.
20:16 Recommendations for AI tools and systems.
22:38 Generate hundreds of names using ChatGPT.
27:52 Shared AI account at tech company causes limitations.
29:49 Increasing adoption of AI tools in business.
33:10 Copy Point AI automates writing processes efficiently.
35:32 Podcast audio automation and AI transcription enhancement.
38:23 Marketing will change with AI tools.
42:46 AI-generated content competes with human content.
45:07 Best place to connect is LinkedIn for AI.
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Transcript
Introduction to Andrew Bolas and LinkedIn Journey
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the attention podcast. I'm Dan Sanchez. And today I'm joined by Andrew Bolas, who is become known for AI for marketing, um, and has built an audience from 1000 to 25,000 followers on LinkedIn just within the last year. So Andrew, I can't wait to dive in the story. Can't wait to learn a little bit more about AI. But before we get started, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on the show, Dan.
Transition from CMO to LinkedIn Consultancy
00:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, man, I'm excited to get into this one because I love stories of growth. I love talking to creators and how they're able to get there because it takes so much effort, right? Especially in the beginning. But before we dive into like how you grew so fast, what were you doing before then? Like what was post growth? What did that look like? And then what caused like the, what became the catalyst for the rise? Sure. So about,
00:00:54
Speaker
A year ago, a little over a year ago, I was actually working in marketing full-time at companies. At that time, I was a CMO. At that point, I've been doing marketing for 15 years. I lost my job due to layoffs. And at that point, two people were getting laid off left and right, especially marketers. I think some of them still are getting laid off. So I knew it was gonna be challenging to find a marketing job.
00:01:23
Speaker
Um, so I basically had two plans. One is I'm going to start doing consulting, which I did start doing and had some traction there. But even within consulting, I realized there's a lot of consulting and agencies out there. So how do you differentiate yourself? So you need to build a personal brand. And that's how I got into LinkedIn. So I basically started posting on LinkedIn about a year ago. So same time last year.
Challenges and Realizations on LinkedIn
00:01:49
Speaker
Wow. Okay. So December last year, you start hitting it hard. Um, did you get some initial attraction there? Did things go well? So when I started, I had a thousand connections, all former coworkers from decade plus of me working in different office shops. Once in a while they would like one of my posts, but not really. Cause they don't really comment. They're not like other creators on the platform. And, uh,
00:02:15
Speaker
I also found that a lot of marketers don't really know LinkedIn like they think they do because they just think it's another channel. So I wasn't really getting much traction. Like my first month I would post, I would comment a lot on others. Someone would comment back, which was nice, but there wasn't much traction. And I realized like I actually had to learn this from other LinkedIn creators who've had some success, not necessarily sort of marketing or assume that I just know how it works just because I know other like marketing channels.
00:02:44
Speaker
It was funny with my own story.
Networking and Engagement Strategies
00:02:46
Speaker
I didn't, I thought I knew LinkedIn too until I got hired at an agency where the CEO was already like, like hot.
00:02:54
Speaker
I don't know, he was already a creator on LinkedIn and Roland and had been doing it for a while. So he got me plugged in and he was like, no, this is how you really do LinkedIn. And that's finally where I figured it out and started growing, growing myself. Otherwise it's like, it's kind of painful at the beginning because you start off with all these connections and then you realize you're like, oh, like, like three fourths of all my connections. Don't spend time on LinkedIn.
00:03:16
Speaker
they're on other platforms or they're working so you have to end up trying to build a following of the people who actually like frequent the website how did you how did you unlock some of those first followers
00:03:31
Speaker
So that's a great point you bring up. A lot of the engagement on LinkedIn, the initial engagement, like when you post in the first hour or two, which determines how much the algorithm shows your post over the next day or two, a lot of it comes from other creators and people posting on there. So it is a lot of networking. So that was a big unlock for me.
00:03:51
Speaker
I started by building a list of other similar size creators who covered marketing at the time because that's what I was talking about. I would keep a note of when they post. I would comment on their posts. A lot of them would then comment on mine. That got things rolling. And then I also started trying to talk to any creator on there who would talk to me who had some success.
00:04:13
Speaker
I'm just asking what's working, how do you plan your posts, what topics do you decide to cover, and what formats are working for. You just start asking a lot of questions. Nice, so you actually find the community, you start participating in it, engaging with the other creators, and then naturally, did you start engaging with people in their comments too?
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah. And if I was to do it all over, even before I ever post it, I would just start by commenting and reposting other
Leveraging AI for LinkedIn Growth
00:04:44
Speaker
posts. Because early on, if you don't have that many followers, it doesn't really matter. Nobody's going to see what you're doing on there. And if you comment, repost, and then send a connection request, 90% of people will accept it, even if they're bigger creators.
00:04:59
Speaker
And if you just do that for like a month and get like a few hundred of those as your connections, then the first time you post, they're going to see your posts. They're going to remember that, oh, this person always comments on my posts and a lot of them will comment on yours and your posts will take off. So I didn't do it that way, but that's how I would do it now. Huh.
00:05:19
Speaker
Dang, I've never thought of that extra step of reposting their post to get their attention before hitting the connect to request button. That's smart. It's funny, I tell people this, and people, I don't know what it is. Very few people get this, but I'm like, the game in LinkedIn is in the comments.
00:05:41
Speaker
like almost imagine a party and everybody's in separate rooms having getting to know each other and you just have to go into each room and work the room you go and talk to people and then some people remember you some people won't but that's okay you'll you'll find those other people in different rooms at different times and the more conversations you have and the more rooms you work the more it's unreasonable that people aren't going to know you
00:06:02
Speaker
They see your post they're gonna engage with it. Why? Because they know you and you've had some good conversations before It's kind of like the same thing with networking and like a new city you land a new city where you go out to lots of meet and greets and Get to know people and all of a sudden People know you it just takes time and a lot of effort Yeah, I really I really like that analogy and the comments are like a low-pressure way to build connections
00:06:27
Speaker
As in you comment, the person replies, well, now if you send them a connection request, there's context there. And with bigger creators too, it helps if you just comment a few different times, they know your face, you become a real person for them. And I say that because they just get a lot of comments.
00:06:47
Speaker
Um, so yeah, I think it's a low pressure way as in it's just like small talk. So it's much easier than, than, you know, just, than just writing like a paragraph long connection request to someone you don't know and just hoping they read it and accept or whatever. So you have things going kind of crank in here on LinkedIn. Did you ever like work with other platforms? You ever start a podcast to get to know people better or other channels or was it mainly, has the growth mainly just been LinkedIn?
00:07:14
Speaker
So no, before LinkedIn, I didn't, other than managing like company pages, which I did at my full-time jobs, I've managed podcasts too, like for companies, but I was more doing it from the backend. Like, and it was never my face. It was never my own personal brand. And even on the podcast, it was me like asking speakers, inviting them. I wasn't the one interviewing them. I wasn't the host.
00:07:39
Speaker
So what I had to figure out was more like how LinkedIn itself works. And once I figured that out, the rest was easy because I had the marketing background. So I knew how to write very strong hooks or intro sentences at the start of the post. I knew how to like research what topics are trending in a specific industry and focus my posts on those topics because they're likely to get traction and things like that. The reason why I asked is that ended up being like a big,
00:08:08
Speaker
one-two punch, but in like a friendly kind of manner. It's like getting to know people on comments, then reaching out to them via connection requests, getting into the DMs, and then usually like if I wanted to get to really get to know a creator, it's like part of why this podcast exists, is to build relationships. Because I don't know what happens, but there's like a serendipity that happens, is the more friends you can make, and the more people you can help, and especially if you're getting them onto your show to shine the light on them and what they're good at and all they're doing,
00:08:38
Speaker
Uh, the better that is for business, whether you're doing it for your company or for your own solo, pernourorship or consultancy. I find that it just goes well. And that's a lot of fun to meet people in the process. Um, that's been my, kind of my game on LinkedIn for forever is LinkedIn and podcasting, podcasting and LinkedIn. Of course I was working for a podcast agency where that was just, that was like their main strategy was that, that game. Um,
00:09:06
Speaker
But now I'm excited because AI has kind of been a new thing for me, but it's something that became pivotal for you in your own growth. Is that what led to the major switch for your growth is when you started shifting to AI? When did you make that choice and how did you begin applying that to the kind of content you're creating?
00:09:27
Speaker
Sure. So through the end of June on LinkedIn, I was just talking about marketing at that point. It's been six, seven months of me on there had slow steady growth. Like I got up to 6,000 followers, which is not bad, but I was getting tired of LinkedIn in a lot of ways. I wasn't seeing as much traction. The effort I was putting in versus the results were just not that good. So I paused and I started thinking, Hey, like I need to make a shift here.
00:09:58
Speaker
I was using AI tools, you know, sort of like started like in spring of this year, but I wasn't really writing about it. And then all of a sudden I started noticing people who
00:10:13
Speaker
I don't know how to put this like nicely, but like they were average marketers, not necessarily great, but not bad either, who are now covering AI. And to be fair, like not even covering AI that well. But they were getting a ton of traction on LinkedIn. I started looking into it and I found out well, LinkedIn is or Microsoft, the parent company of LinkedIn is a major investor in open AI, I think they own half
00:10:39
Speaker
of open AI, if not even slightly more. They actually promote AI topics, but this wasn't also just a LinkedIn phenomenon, like on X or Twitter. A lot of people were covering AI, getting a lot of traction. And I started looking at the AI content specifically. A lot of it was by creators who knew AI, but didn't have a business background. So I figured, okay, well, if I start covering AI and I inject in my marketing knowledge and my business background, I can see this.
00:11:09
Speaker
sort of taking off and plan my first post. Took a while to get that post out, but that post went viral and that's when I realized, okay, I have something here. Yeah. When you say viral, how much is viral for you? At that time, I had 6K followers. The post had between 250,000 to 300 impressions, like 200 reposts.
00:11:38
Speaker
a thousand
Viral Success and AI Marketing Strategies
00:11:39
Speaker
plus comments or something the last I checked. And yeah, so at that time I've never had something that successful.
00:11:49
Speaker
Dang, that's pretty viral for LinkedIn. I mean, going viral on LinkedIn is much harder than it is on something like TikTok, but when it goes viral, it's hot. AI is also just super relevant to a lot of people, a lot of, on a lot of people's minds. I remember I was working for a tech company eight months ago and we created a cheat sheet and the VP of marketing posted it as a one-off. And she used regular on LinkedIn, but wasn't, I wouldn't call her creator on LinkedIn. You know, where somebody's rolling up their sleeves and really trying to grow on LinkedIn, she wasn't that.
00:12:18
Speaker
She posted and I swear it probably had 120k Impressions on or something crazy like that, which it's just a lot for somebody who's not regular on linkedin And i'm like it was in the education marketing space this cheat cheat chat gpt cheat sheet for a higher ed I'm like yeah every higher ed marketer on the platform probably saw that over a week Yeah, it was just nuts. It's the ai content has been absolutely crazy, but you're right i'm not seeing
00:12:47
Speaker
The hype around AI has made me mad. Because, I don't know, we've all been into chat GPT and saw the wonder of it. And then everybody's talking about it. And the best you hear is, go play with chat GPT. I'm like, what the heck? Play with chat GPT is the best advice you have to learn this massive thing. Prompt engineering, you're like, okay.
00:13:14
Speaker
What? It's made me frustrated a few times, right? It's almost like you want to learn graphic design. They're like, go play with Photoshop, which if you're a marketer and you've ever played with Photoshop off, like just off the cuff, downloaded it and gave it a shot, you know, that probably didn't go well. Right. I feel like it is with AI knowledge or AI education right now. It's kind of like, go play with this. You're like, no, you got to be more than that. The problem too is, is a lot of
00:13:44
Speaker
content out there about how to get a small thing done or some kind of tactic. There isn't really content to actually achieve a goal with AI. A goal is in, hey, I'm building a marketing campaign. How can AI help me with each step of the campaign? That's the kind of stuff where then you need someone who's done marketing campaigns and now knows how to use AI tools, combines both, and then gives you practical ways of actually using it. That stuff you don't see a lot of out there.
00:14:16
Speaker
I find that most AI stuff is like really shallow. It's like tools pushing the envelope in a really niche way. But it's not helpful. What do you find is actually helpful right now? Or maybe like what are you posting that's getting the most feedback from people saying, Wow, I did this and it frickin worked. And now this is like, this I'm using it over and over again, because it's so helpful. What is that stuff? Sure. So
00:14:45
Speaker
I think you're right. A lot of AI content is almost like junk food. You've probably even seen that cheat sheets do great on LinkedIn right now. If you're trying to grow, find a good designer who can build cheat sheets and you'll grow.
00:15:00
Speaker
I can't imagine anybody's actually taking the cheat sheet and necessarily using it to accomplish much. What I've tried more recently, there's two things that I try that I work where it's a loom recording of me accomplishing something using an AI tool. And by accomplishing something, it's something like, okay, I'm going to document the step-by-step process fully.
00:15:22
Speaker
Without typing a word myself, you know, here's a tool that does it. It's a browser extension at the end of it. I show here's all the steps that documented and you know, here's how because now people know how to use that tool and I gave them a business use case that they can apply that works well.
00:15:38
Speaker
These are like 2-3 minute loom videos. I'm actually planning to do more of those. And then with my carousels too, instead of just saying 20 prompts to do X or 20 tools to do Y, it's more like a step-by-step guide that by the end of it, they accomplish something.
00:15:54
Speaker
like the guide for how to build your custom GPTs, it's three sections. It's ideation, coming up with a good idea and giving them examples. It's now you're going to build the custom GPT and it's three promoting it, how to actually promote it and get people using it. So that gets a lot more traction and just someone just saying here is steps to just build your custom GPT. Yeah.
00:16:16
Speaker
So what you're putting out there are use cases. I've seen a number of your posts. It seems like a lot of your stuff focuses around highly specific chain prompts. Um, with, and you, you kind of bracket in like, put your information here and then give it this prompt and then put your, when it gives you that reply, then respond with this and then respond with this. Because we all know like, if you can do really good chain prompts, you can get some really good leverage out of chat GPT. So it was a lot of your content focused on like chain. I don't know. I guess they could call them chain prompting templates.
00:16:47
Speaker
That's the best description I can get for them. Yeah, exactly. It's a more of a conversational way of using chat GPT as in you start with one thing, you get a response, then you keep. With my guys too, even though you can't get the prompts, copy and paste them and use them,
00:17:03
Speaker
I'm really trying to get them to learn how to use charge EPT or whatever themselves and using the prompts more as an example. So I always try to explain the logic even behind the step. So like the marketing campaign one where you're building a marketing campaign with charge EPT starts with like market research.
00:17:23
Speaker
And then the second step is ideation. And I explained that. So they're even learning how to do a campaign from start to finish. And they have the prompts in there. So that seems to be resonating with people. Yeah. I remember trying out one once. When I was first, I was playing with chat GPT.
AI Tools for Content Repurposing
00:17:42
Speaker
I was logging in more and more regularly, usually for content repurposing as a marketer. That was pretty common, very common first thing we were all doing. And Maya Grossman, who's
00:17:53
Speaker
a career, I don't know, climbing the ladder, working your way up from start to VP. She puts out this chain prompt that just blew my mind back in the spring that was like, hey, like, ask at first, tell japichi this, and then put in these six prompts back to back. And then each one builds on the other one, it ended up giving this like, master plan for how to grow your career with only maybe like the only thing you'd customize it is your job title. What are you now?
00:18:20
Speaker
and then start building a plan to get to the next level. So if you're from director to VP or from VP to CMO, and that's all you're customizing with, but like the information it gave back like blew my mind as far as like how good of a plan it could build for a career acceleration. I was like, Oh my gosh. Um, but I still didn't even think through like, what could I be building right now based on my own plans and processes, um, for how to do this. It wasn't until I discovered custom GPTs just a few weeks ago that I was like, Oh,
00:18:51
Speaker
ChatGPT is now like a genius intern that lacks common sense. If I can just give it step-by-step directions, it can actually execute it pretty well every time.
00:19:05
Speaker
Where like, I'm sure a lot of businesses just don't know they can take a lot of their step-by-step processes. They're all doing manually right now. I can't, I don't even realize that it can be offloaded to chat GPT to execute. Something that would take two hours can now become 10 minutes or five minutes. How are you helping people understand like what they can automate within their own businesses?
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way you put it is important because, so there's two types of businesses that are interested in AI, businesses that are not really like, they don't have processes in place. They don't even have like a real marketing or sales or go to market strategy that's working. And all of a sudden they want to start with AI. I get DMs from those people often. Yeah.
00:19:54
Speaker
don't even at this point engage much. Cause I know like this is a person just like, they're just maybe an AI enthusiast. So I'm seeing you're smiling. So I'm guessing you've seen some of those as well. Okay. Yeah. We're marketers. We've both worked in multiple companies and we know most companies don't have processes period. Yeah. But even then you're like, ah, so, so with those, with those companies, there isn't like, it's very hard to,
00:20:21
Speaker
Actually, you can recommend random tools to use if they have a very specific problem, but it's very hard to build a system that's going to actually give them a very high ROI. The better companies are generally mid-sized, slightly bigger, and they already have
00:20:38
Speaker
documented processes for like their marketing campaigns, their sales process. When you have that, then it's very easy to take that and take each piece and figure out what the combination of like Chaz EPT, other AI tools like Zapier in the middle and integrations, how does turn each piece into like an AI powered process or whatever you wanna call it and kind of build up upon each other.
00:21:04
Speaker
And then, you know, I've seen it work really well, specifically in marketing and in sales, because also specifically with sales, like salespeople hate doing a lot of the mundane CRM data input, a lot of the outreach, a lot of those things. And that's what AI is really good for if you feed it all the context it needs. Yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
one of the first things i did with the custom gpt was i took a process i developed not i developed actually discovered it from a a book called hello my name is awesome bret andrea watkins fantastic book on naming things as i was working for this podcast agency dem naming podcasts at least once or twice a week i decided to come up with great names and usually multiple names were an agency i gotta serve up multiple names for them to pick from and they all have to be great because i have to live with it if they pick a bad name right
00:21:56
Speaker
So I had to level up the naming process and it was a good process, very logical how you would work through this process. Multistep, take me about two or three hours. It's a serious chunk of time. And I found out that part of it, chat GPT can execute. Like the process is taking the category that you're in. Maybe you want to start a cybersecurity podcast for cybersecurity experts, whatever.
00:22:22
Speaker
you give it that it comes up with 10 words it takes those words finds rhymes five rhymes or rhyming words for those words so now you have a list of 50 words and then it needs to go and find five idioms for each of the rhyming words that are the rhyming words have so you might start with something like cyber cyber and have hyper and then you would find an idiom for hyper like
00:22:48
Speaker
I'm struggling to find an idiom for hyper in my head but you'd find the idiom or the phrase that it's in and then you'd reach then you would switch out hyper with cyber and With the idiom and that would be the name and then it compiled a list of like hundreds of names And then and then that's normally the process I would follow but it takes time to go through it all right to research Every name every rhyme and then every idiom for every rhyme, you know You build an excel sheet of all these things and you manually go through them all and start looking for the interesting ones that came out of the process
00:23:17
Speaker
Chat GPT can do all that. Now, I had to chain prompt it because it don't only give you so much text in one and it's obviously putting out a lot of names, but dang.
Custom GPTs for Automation
00:23:27
Speaker
So I put it into a custom GPT and called it name frame and now I'm just using it to name things. What took two or three hours now only takes five minutes. So I'm like, dang. Like how come more people aren't figuring out this custom GPT thing because all your internal processes, or not all of them, but a lot of them can be turned into these little custom GPTs.
00:23:46
Speaker
Even if you don't sell them or release them to the public, you could just customize it for your thing and then just execute it. But I'm starting to find more and more use cases for these. Have you developed a lot of these custom GPTs and start releasing them for people to use or are you using internally?
00:24:04
Speaker
I'm using some internally, but what I really liked about your example, there's a few things there. One is you've done this process yourself quite a few times and you had a framework for doing it successfully down to the steps and how to sort of get from the start to the finish. When you take something like that and yeah, like wrap it up in prompts or a set of prompts and then now a custom GPT, it works pretty well.
00:24:36
Speaker
I haven't released any, I have been using custom GPTs and I know a lot of also other AI creators or people who have courses are actually starting to take their collections of prompts or mega prompts that they give away during the courses and are part of the learning experience and actually wrap them in custom GPTs. Because the custom GPTs, you can actually have a lot more control and it's easier than
00:25:01
Speaker
the prompts and then also there's opportunities with custom GPTs in the future where you can like charge a fee or whatever to access all of them or things like that.
00:25:10
Speaker
Right. They haven't started allowing people to charge for these, right? As far as I know, they're all like, it's either private, available by link or public. Those are the only options. Yeah. No, they promised an app store and then said that it's going to come out early next year. So the ones that people are charging for now are private and you only find out about them if you obviously pay to get access to them. Yeah.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Right now, I'm like using them as like, I'm probably going to start using it as a lead magnet and just like, Hey, get access to it. If you subscribe to my email list or something like that, it'll be interesting to see if you can come up with one that's worthwhile on a marketplace. Most of the ones I try are neat, but not like.
00:25:57
Speaker
worthy of a monthly fee. Yeah, there's, there's a couple of people who've had like a lot of success with them on LinkedIn, where there was one person, you know, they're pretty well known for AI, and they released
00:26:13
Speaker
custom GPT for LinkedIn post writing, but they actually injected all of their best practices, everything in it. And I remember the post went viral and then I checked with the person and they told me got him like 700 leads or something, because there was something inside of it that said like you have to whatever like sign up or something.
00:26:35
Speaker
I don't remember exactly the mechanism, but within two days. He told chat GPT to throw an ad in there. He probably co-wrote. Yeah, but it can be great for Legion. I mean, it's almost like a free app that you're releasing, right? So a lot of people, I think, are more than willing to sign up or whatever it is, if it's free. The problem I've had is I even want to share it with people just for feedback. And they're like, well, I don't have the paid version of chat GPT. I'm like, dude.
00:27:06
Speaker
How do you not pay for this already? It's so useful. Oh well. That's where I'm finding more and more is a lot of my peers don't even have the paid account. I mean, some do, but many, many don't. Even if they're enthusiasts, like they love the AI stuff and they're reading about it a lot, they're not paying for it yet. So I'm like, come on. I feel like we're so early, so early with AI still.
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah, no, we're still early. It's funny, there was a company that was talking to me about doing a workshop for their team, and then it had to be put off because it was that period where OpenAI closed off sign-ups for paid accounts because the servers were overloaded and stuff. She's like, well, we're waiting for the sign-ups to reopen so we can get our team members accounts. Yeah.
00:27:54
Speaker
I remember even at, I was at a tech company that had a strong AI focus because they were building AI into their tech and we all had just one shared chat pro chat PTE or plus account. Now I'm looking back and I'm like, dang, we didn't all have their own accounts, but I guess we all shared one and it was fine. But, um, now because I'm using mine more and more, I'm actually hitting the limit.
00:28:16
Speaker
With how much I can prompt it in a day, which I'm like, dang, like, you know, you're starting to use it a lot when you're running to, it's like, it's capping you at the plus at the plus account because you've, you've prompted it too many times. It's written too much for you. You got to wait till the next day. I'm usually running into it at the end of the day, but it's happening more and more often. Uh, is that a problem you run into often you, you hitting the prompt limits?
00:28:38
Speaker
Yeah, there are two, I guess if you're only doing prompts, if you do mega prompts, it counts them as one request. And if you write the mega prompt properly, it can do like a bunch of five prompts in one, basically, but then, yeah, but
00:28:57
Speaker
But I run into it more when I'm using Dolly inside of Charge EPT because if you're doing image generation, you might need to see four or five, 10 variations until you get one that you like or whatever, and it's just one click to regenerate. So that's where I'm running into it the most. I know people who just get a couple of different logins or premium accounts. Interesting. Just for that. Get around that. It's funny, they don't let you upgrade or pay for more usage limits.
00:29:26
Speaker
Whatever, they're just trying to keep up with their own success, so. What are you most excited about? Like just around, that's coming out, but it's just around the corner. It's not quite here yet, but as far as being able to impact marketing and see great ROI from AI, what do you think is just around the corner that you're waiting for?
00:29:49
Speaker
So I think there's two parts to it. On the user side, I am seeing a lot more adoption. Now, as in there's a lot more openness to using these tools because people realize AI is not going anywhere. And keep in mind, people like me and you were the exception here, as in we're in these tools every day and using them. Most people maybe have heard of chat GPT, used it once, use it once a week, once a month.
00:30:20
Speaker
but now people are getting serious. Companies are also more open to workshops and trainings for their teams. So I think on the one thing, the users are actually taking it serious, especially companies, which I feel like that's where the biggest value unlock is for businesses. And then on the other side, the tools themselves are starting to think more about like business use cases and things like group access.
00:30:48
Speaker
For example, if you try to use TragiPT at a company and every person has their own login, well, now you have to take the same context like brand guidelines, brand voice style, all that stuff and feed it maybe into your custom instructions or whatever it is for each user. A lot of these tools too right now are more on the B2C side or one person using them. There's also now
00:31:18
Speaker
I know some of the AI writing tools, they do have team accounts that share contacts, share brand guidelines, and you just set them up once. Everybody on the team now, when they ask it to write a blog post, they get something that's on brand with the company's voice.
00:31:39
Speaker
That's huge. I've noticed Jarvis has been pushing hard in that territory, right? And that's where they're ahead of chat GPT. The funny thing is I'm like, I could probably still build what Jarvis is doing just with custom chip GPTs. Cause you can just like upload your own knowledge and instructions and have it do some pretty consistent work. But still Jarvis has a few different advantages built into it right now that probably make it worthwhile if you're doing a lot of AI writing to use something like Jarvis versus just chat GPT.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree. And does Jarvis let you like pick the model or is it just like by default, like open AI chat? You know, I haven't been in Jarvis for a while or since they've adopted multiple models. Um, that's kind of like their, their thing when chat GPT came out. I'm like, Oh, that's going to kill Jarvis or no, it's not Jarvis anymore. It's Jasper. I keep Jarvis name and then they had to change it to Jasper. Right. Um, they.
00:32:37
Speaker
Now, now they're like, well, we use all the models. We just lose all the models because I think a lot of people are like, well, I'm just going to use chat GPT because it's free or way cheaper. Um, they're like, we just use the best of each model. And I don't really know how they're doing that. I don't know if you can pick it. Um, there's advantages to each one, of course. Like if you, if you want to pull something, like if you want to do more SEO heavy stuff, then you being able to use Bard for doing some of that query research is probably going to be better than using Bing.
00:33:05
Speaker
Right? Which is what chat GPT has access to. So it just depends. Yeah. So the other tool that's doing really cool things right now is copy.ai, which has been around forever, like for the copywriting and writing, they now have these automation workflows that can be built with a single prompt. So you say,
00:33:29
Speaker
I'm going to be doing, like help me do outreach on LinkedIn to sales leaders at companies of this size, use my sales outreach script or whatever, or sales outreach process.
00:33:48
Speaker
you know, find their details and write a personalized message to each of them. And it'll actually then create like seven steps in a sequence. You can look at each step. So maybe the first step is grabbing the person's information from their LinkedIn profile. Second step is writing the personalized message like it basically
00:34:10
Speaker
creates these workflows all from a prompt, and you can go into each step and customize it a bit more. And then once you're done with this workflow, you can just feed it a CSV or use their API to have it running in an automated fashion. So I think things like that, too, are pretty cool.
00:34:30
Speaker
People are, it's a new thing and they're still trying to get people to use it, but the fact that you can create an entire workflow like that from like a prompt describing the steps is pretty interesting. Yeah, it's huge. I'm looking forward to this year more.
00:34:47
Speaker
automation and AI happening. Right now I feel like everything's manual. I have to manually go to chat GPT. I have to manually go to mid journey to produce things. But I'm like, come on, like, what if you know the prompt that you want, and you want every time this thing hits zappier, I want it to prompt get this and then put it over here.
00:35:04
Speaker
You could technically do that through Zapier, but it's not easy. Like, none of that's, like, there's certain things that I want to have happen that I'm like, how come this isn't happening automatically? Like, it should be. It's just, it's just time. I'm just waiting for all the devs to catch up to build it into their tools. Like this podcast, I want to be able to publish it. And, like, why do I have to write show notes anymore?
00:35:23
Speaker
It's stupid like the transcript is there. It does an amazing job of summarizing coming up with the timestamps But I still have to even with cast cast magic I could take the audio from this very podcast and I will upload it It will transcribe it a I enhance it give me all the content But I still have to copy and paste it all back into the host In order to get my title and my show notes and i'm like this should just be done I should just be able to record this
00:35:49
Speaker
publish it, maybe trim the edges or whatever, but eventually that'll be automated too with AI. It'll know that I messed up at minute 35, right? And then I just publish and bam, it's out. Zencast is close, which is why I use that tool, where it can automatically create clips and then it transcribes the clip and then uses that transcription to drive the writing for the social post. Because you just can't post the clip alone. You got to have some writing with it.
00:36:13
Speaker
And you got to have the title and of course the captions. But Zencaster does that all with one click. And I don't even think about the writing anymore. I just like, Oh, that's a good clip. Kill that clip, post that clip. And it just posts it out everywhere for
AI in Podcast Production
00:36:24
Speaker
you. I'm like more of that's coming, but I'm just eager to see, see it happen with all the tools. I'm like, why am I still copying and pasting crap? It should just be baked in now. Yeah. And having like using multiple tools because each one is good at different things.
00:36:38
Speaker
I don't know how much if you use Descript, but Descript is starting to add in more AI features. So Descript's thing is they transcribed any audio, video file you add. Now I think they are adding clips to where you ask it to find interesting moments and it generates clips. I think it's a newer feature. Descript has publishing built-in to certain channels. Again, I don't know how I haven't used the publishing part.
00:37:06
Speaker
There are a few companies like that that I do think are in a place to automate what you're describing where it's a specific use case, but it's start to finish. And I do think that would be super exciting once it comes out. Because then you can spend your time doing more interviews versus all of the small things that you have to do after the interview. All the little things that are really just nitty gritty, right?
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. I I wanted to love D script, but I hate D script It's so frustrating you code I don't know what it is You just go to click and drag and just to cut a clip and you know like Crop that little part over and it just may have to do it like three times I'm like now so I use cap cut which is like the tick-tock version of an editor Oh, that's a fantastic little tool. It's like got everything you want in it and nothing nothing else Yeah, I've heard
00:37:56
Speaker
CapCut is easier too for just getting clips. I think it's probably one of the more popular tools for that, just to get a clip. What are you saying to marketing leaders? Because there's people that are very much tactical, that know how to get in there and build these things themselves. But what do you think marketing leaders that are less tactical should be doing to prepare for AI?
00:38:23
Speaker
So there's a couple of things. One is that marketing as we know it is not going to ever be the same again because of all this AI stuff.
AI's Impact on Marketing and Content Creation
00:38:33
Speaker
These are not just, I mean, they are tools, but they're more than tools. I mean, this is like before marketing operations with a thing or maybe sales operations with a thing. You know, if you're not thinking about this stuff as a marketing leader,
00:38:49
Speaker
You're going to have a lot of problems because if your competition is and they're using these tools and can cut their costs and use those costs, for example, to generate more leads or whatever it is, they're going to be you in the marketplace.
00:39:05
Speaker
What's happening to us is from the top down, a lot of investors are looking at startups and saying, hey, why can't you use AI to cut your costs more? Especially in marketing, sales, and customer success, because those are very rich for AI use cases. As a marketing leader, you can't ignore it. You need to start playing around with the tools yourself. You don't need to become an expert, but you just at least need to maybe once in a while open chat GPT and try it.
00:39:34
Speaker
Things like that. Then it helps for you to actually create a plan for how you're going to get your team using AI tools. There's different options, everything from courses out there that team can go through to like doing a workshop or you bring in someone. But it's not just teaching them the tools, it's also having accountability that they're actually using them. The same way you roll out a new tool in a martech stack and you create accountability around its usage and how it's effective.
00:40:05
Speaker
what's our ROI from this tool, it's the same way you have to treat AI. So if you actually have a head of ops or marketing ops, they can sort of be the champion and stuff and work with you on these things because it's not different than rolling out marketing operations tools. Yeah, that is different. It's almost like a different way of thinking and approach to marketing ops. But the more I play with it, the more I feel like I'm like,
00:40:32
Speaker
This is a marketing ops thing mostly. A lot of AI is. I guess you could be using it for ideation on the front end, but it feels very ops heavy because it's coming to sneak into all the different tools and then requires ops to configure it all. It's too bad most companies suck at marketing ops. I don't know. Well, yeah, that is true. It ends up being marketing ops at companies because companies use a bunch of other tools and everything needs to work together. And there's also the team environment.
00:41:00
Speaker
where people need shared access. So that's why it ends up being marketing ops heavy. But if you have a good marketing ops person or manager or leader, they also know how to do everything. They know how to evaluate a tool. They start with the use case. They don't even look at the tool. They start with what's a challenge.
00:41:19
Speaker
Then they look at the tools, look at pricing, look at like an onboarding plan. So they just know how to roll out tools properly. And if you know how to do that for marketing ops tools, you would know how to do it for AI tools. You might need to work with an AI consultant or something, but you need someone internally who's sort of managing this process too. Man.
00:41:42
Speaker
Oh, ops people. They're already incredibly rare. Probably going to get more rares. The AI thing comes on. It's probably going to be marketing ops and focus on AI. And if you are, by the way, in marketing ops, I mean, interested in AI, some of the best AI people that I've seen had a lot of success come from a marketing ops background. Because to them, these are just new tools. They know how to roll out new tools and how to help companies roll them out. So one last question for you.
00:42:13
Speaker
As somebody who's growing an audience, where do you think AI is going to be?
00:42:21
Speaker
the most helpful for people who want to grow an audience in the future and are just now getting started. Do you feel like it becomes more of a hindrance and that it just makes it so much harder to stick out because now it's easier for everybody to make content? Or do you feel like it's going to help accelerate some people forward knowing that they can be more prolific this way? I think it does both, but in different ways.
00:42:51
Speaker
If you're putting out average content, now you have a lot of competition because chat GPT without even that much effort can generate average content. So now you're going to be competing against AI generated content if your content is average. On the other hand, all of this content does drive more attention. It does some ways all sort of support each other. So if you have really good content,
00:43:21
Speaker
even if some of it is sort of AI assisted is maybe a better phrase where some of it is 80% AI and you put in the final 20%. Well, now you can scale that quality content and do it at scale or cheaper or you can do it for your clients cheaper and sort of use that leverage to generate more income or more career success or progression for yourself. So I think
00:43:50
Speaker
It's kind of both sides. I think if you invest into learning the AI tools, invest time and effort, you're going to end up being on the side that it actually helps money and income wise. Whereas if you just sort of ignore the tools, well, now you're going to have a lot more competition and things like that.
00:44:11
Speaker
Fantastic. So if you don't have a unique differentiated point of view or something we're saying, it's going to be harder. But if you have something we're saying or are working towards getting like just have a whole perspective on learning and growing in the light. But I won't dive into that here. But essentially, if you're doing the right things and taking the right steps for being being found and doing cool stuff that not a lot of other people are doing, it's going to help you.
00:44:36
Speaker
If you're just trying to become prolific for the sake of being prolific, it's going to work against you because now everybody can do that. Exactly. It can almost be a hindrance or a multiplier. It's like your choice and how serious you take it. There you go. Andrew, where can people go to learn more from you and connect with you on all the resources you've developed around AI?
00:45:07
Speaker
Sure, so the best place is LinkedIn. If you just type in my name, Andrew Bolas, B-O-L-I-S, you'll find me. I share these carousels and almost mini guides on there pretty frequently that people like. Yes, that's the best place to connect with me. I specifically cover AI for marketers. I think if you're a marketer, you'll find my resources very helpful. Andrew, thank you so much again for joining me. Thank you for having me on, Dan.
00:45:39
Speaker
you