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00:00:01
3-Signal Test to Spot the Next AI Mega Trend (Before Everyone Else)
486 Plays2 days ago
$100 Off Social Media Marketing World: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/AI-Driven
I'll be speaking there!
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez sits down with Michael Stelzner (Social Media Examiner) to unpack how to spot real megatrends vs. hype, why resistance is often the clearest early signal of a lasting shift, and what AI is likely to change (and not change) about marketing on the road to 2030.
My Favorite AI Tools
• Tella - https://danchez.com/tella
• High Level - https://danchez.com/highlevel
• Zencastr - https://danchez.com/podtools
• n8n - https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
• $100 Off Social Media Marketing World- https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/AI-Driven
Timestamps
• 01:46 — How Mike evaluates trends: excitement, resistance, and sustained adoption
• 03:25 — Clubhouse as the cautionary tale: viral moment vs. lasting megatrend • 05:42 — AI “sub-trends” & hype cycles: why “agents” talk doesn’t equal adoption (yet)
• 13:06 — The three AI “shock” moments: ChatGPT, voice interaction, and image breakthroughs
• 17:06 — Echoes of early social media: the Wild Wild West + competitive advantage for “know-how”
• 20:00 — The pattern break: big institutions pushing AI faster than consumers can absorb • 27:39 — 5–7 year outlook: the baseline for “good marketing” jumps; small teams scale massively
• 36:03 — Human advantage: discernment + emotional sensing (and lived experience) as the moat
• 39:36 — What becomes obsolete: search-as-we-know-it → “single best answer” intermediated by AI
• 44:11 — Thriving in 2030: training + experimentation as the unfair advantage
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Transcript
Intro
00:00:05
Dan Sanchez
Welcome back to the AI-driven marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Danchez. And today I'm stoked to have Michael Stelzner as a guest on the show. If you don't know who he is, I'd be amazed, but he is the founder of Social Media Examiner, the Social Media Marketing World Conference, and the AI Business Society. Mike, I'm stoked to have you on the show.
00:00:25
Michael Stelzner
Dan, thank you so much. It's super awesome to be here.
00:00:29
Dan Sanchez
Awesome. I actually asked when I was working for you and then reporting to the marketing director, John actually asked him probably 10 months ago. I was like, Hey, do you ever think Mike would come on my show?
00:00:40
Dan Sanchez
And he's like, Dan, I've seen Mike on maybe one guest interview in like three years. So I don't know if he's probably going do it. I'm like, okay, okay. So I'm so excited to finally have you on because I have questions for you that I think everybody will want to know the answer to.
00:00:52
Michael Stelzner
I hope I can provide answers. Like I'm really looking forward to this, Dan.
00:00:56
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. So having you on is different than having someone who's deep in the weeds. And I know you are deep in the weeds. You play with Claude and make projects and you're doing a lot of stuff with AI. But I think the perspective that you can provide, Mike, is one that I'm truly excited about because you've been in the game for a while. You've seen... Things come, you've seen things go. You've been consistent on the podcast, talking to all kinds of experts, big, small, and everything in between for over a decade now. like Since you started Social Media Examiner back in 2010, I get that timeline right?
00:01:30
Michael Stelzner
2009, pretty close, yeah.
00:01:31
Dan Sanchez
2009, close. So you've seen things come. So I want to now you're digging big into AI. Like I want to kick it off by asking like these big picture questions, the things that you see that nobody else sees, because no one's ever been paying attention into the the small and the big things going on in the marketing landscape.
00:01:47
Dan Sanchez
quite like you have.
00:01:47
Michael Stelzner
Mm-hmm.
00:01:49
Dan Sanchez
So to kick it off, when you're evaluating a new trend, like AI included, what are some early signals that you look for and what do you trust the most?
00:02:01
Michael Stelzner
Well, it's it is a really, really good question. And I have been an entrepreneur since 1996. So I saw the emergence of what we know the as the internet. I saw the emergence of the social media thing.
00:02:18
Michael Stelzner
I saw the emergence of the mobile thing. I saw the the AI and I saw all the all the in-betweens. One of the benefits to being a gray hair is to kind of like start to notice certain patterns and trends that happen. And whenever there's a really, really, really big breakout trend, usually the the things that you want to look for that seem to be consistent are number one, how are everyday people responding to it, consumers?
00:02:46
Michael Stelzner
And if you think back to November 30th of 2022, when ChatGPT dropped, this was kind of like a Holy crap, what is this thing? Moment, right? You had that moment. I had that moment. Everybody I know had that moment within the first couple of weeks. And so what we look for is this incredible excitement in the early days.
00:03:09
Michael Stelzner
And we ask ourselves, are ordinary people evangelizing it? Because Dan, we're both marketers and we know that we're really good at evangelizing things that we get paid to evangelize, but we're looking for your everyday people that are just going out of their way, sharing it because it's good old fashioned word of mouth.
00:03:28
Michael Stelzner
And Dan, I don't know if during COVID you ever got into clubhouse. Did you ever get in the clubhouse?
00:03:33
Dan Sanchez
for like a brief moment that clubhouse was because I was in the marketing game.
00:03:35
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. So, so clubhouse is an incredible example of what ha how this happened. We were on lockdown. The whole world was, and this thing came about called clubhouse and it allowed people to enter into these rooms and have conversation, which they were desperately missing. And it was actually highly viral because everybody was talking about it. It served it it solved a real problem at the time. OK, you had people from every kind of walk of life, every background. It wasn't just marketers. It was all sorts of genres of people that were coming into this space and having conversations in every conceivable topic. So what why did Clubhouse?
00:04:13
Michael Stelzner
Why was it like magnesium? Why did it? come and stop and why do other things like social media or AI stick, right? So the the excitement, first of all, also has to be followed by resistance, okay? So there has to be people that are in opposition to it in order for it to stick, okay? When social media first popped out, there were a lot of people in opposition to it, Dan. There are people saying social media is bad.
00:04:40
Michael Stelzner
Social media is horrible. Why would I go on there and just post pictures as my cat, right? Same thing with AI. There was mass resistance to AI. So when there's mass resistance to it, that's another signal that this is a megatrend. Why? Because people see it as a threat, okay? So when something happens at first, there's excitement and then very quickly resistance. Those are two signals that typically mean there is a megatrend happening here.
00:05:05
Michael Stelzner
When the internet first came out, guess what happened? A lot of people said, oh, that's horrible. I would never put my credit card on the internet, right? Like all these all this resistance was happening. I would never buy a product on the internet, right? So it's the excitement plus the resistance.
00:05:19
Michael Stelzner
And then the next thing that separates like Clubhouse from everything else is the adoption. That's the other side of it. Like there has to be excitement and resistance, but there also has to be growing adoption.
00:05:31
Michael Stelzner
So in the case of Clubhouse, it grew and then it stopped. In the case of social media, it always grew. It never stopped growing. In the case of AI, it's always been growing. It's never stopped growing.
00:05:44
Michael Stelzner
But if we zoom in even deeper into AI, let's take a look at some of the hype cycle inside of AI. So agents is a great example. For the last year, everybody's been talking about agentic AI.
00:05:57
Michael Stelzner
But guess who those everybody's were? They were paid marketers.
00:05:59
Dan Sanchez
The tech companies. Yeah.
00:06:02
Michael Stelzner
There were marketers that were working for companies like Salesforce or HubSpot or other companies that were basically paying people thought leaders to go out there and evangelize the concept of agentic AI.
00:06:03
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:14
Michael Stelzner
And the reality is that you are not seeing adoption. Okay. You're not seeing excitement. You are seeing resistance. Okay. So that's an example of a hype cycle and not something that I would call a trend.
00:06:27
Michael Stelzner
Any reactions to any of that?
00:06:29
Dan Sanchez
It reminds me of when AI first got its first kind of like big hype kick in about 2017, 2018. Remember that? When Einstein was becoming a thing within Salesforce and they were hyping it up.
00:06:40
Dan Sanchez
And i was, i remember looking.
00:06:40
Michael Stelzner
We had IBM Watson too. I know that was something around that time probably too.
00:06:43
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. There was, there was an AI push and but that's back when machine learning really started to become like a term people were starting to use, taking advantage of this big data. And i don't know about you, but at that time I looked at it and I was like, eh,
00:06:58
Dan Sanchez
Seems pretty dumb to me. Like, I don't know how this is useful unless maybe your target.
00:07:00
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:07:03
Dan Sanchez
But is that really AI when it can just kind of predict what maybe three products you'd be most likely? Like, does it a big leap to predict that if you buy a baby bottle, maybe you'd be interested in buying some diapers, you know?
00:07:15
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:07:15
Dan Sanchez
No. But that's what it was. It was hype and then it didn't last. Yeah. Yet here we are and AI's sticking around, but you didn't jump in right away.
00:07:26
Dan Sanchez
it It wasn't like chat. You gave it some time to see if it was going to stick. Is that what was going on?
00:07:30
Michael Stelzner
Well, you and I know more than we're alluding to because we've had lots of private conversations. But yes, I sensed that this could be a trend, but I did not want this to be another Clubhouse trend because I was on the Clubhouse bandwagon and I was evangelizing it organically, right?
00:07:41
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:07:46
Michael Stelzner
And i I went out and created videos and wrote emails and I thought it was really going to be a big deal, but it didn't stick. so i And I did the same thing in crypto, you know, in the Web3 space, right?
00:07:55
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:07:56
Michael Stelzner
So I'm like, I'm not going to get it wrong this time. So it was a slow boil. i I wanted to see that there was actually sustainable growth over a period of time.
00:08:07
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, and you and I both know you got started before I did, because i i've but I'm about a year and a half in since I started AI Explored podcast. And this show has been longer, but you got in a little earlier than I did. But i i I wanted to proceed with caution because I was facing a lot of resistance from marketers.
00:08:28
Michael Stelzner
And from a lot of my friends who are former writers, because I'm a former writer. So I just wanted to make sure that this thing was going to stick.
00:08:32
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:08:35
Michael Stelzner
And I just was tracking all the metrics and I saw that there was a sustained, consistent growth and that there were just so many people random people from every walk of life that were having transformational moments that were happening in their life. And it wasn't so subsiding. It wasn't because of open AIs brilliant marketing.
00:08:57
Michael Stelzner
Open AIs really good with marketing, but they suck working with influencers. So it was all organic. So that's how I knew that we were onto something.
00:09:05
Dan Sanchez
Gosh, I remember it was, i remember immediately using it and seeing the, I i didn't see how going practical, but I knew it was different and I knew it was good. It took me about a year to see enough practical practicalities of it or how it could be useful to actually be like, I'm doubling down on this and this is going to be the thing.
00:09:18
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:09:21
Dan Sanchez
So essentially what I hear you saying is like in order to really separate the hype from things that are truly helpful, you the new parameter you've put in place is essentially you kind of wait for it to stick.
00:09:32
Dan Sanchez
And you're giving it a certain amount of time to see if it goes beyond six months or a year before you're, but you're probably dabbling before that.
00:09:41
Michael Stelzner
Well, I'm looking for extreme resistance from certain audiences. Okay. That's actually something to look for. Not just excitement, but extreme resistance because there's been extreme resistance in every one of these major innovations that we're talking about with the internet, with social media and with AI, because resistance is people don't resist something until they see it as a threat.
00:10:04
Michael Stelzner
Does that make sense?
00:10:04
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:10:05
Michael Stelzner
So when people see it as a threat, that's a signal to you that this is a, this is a trend that they think isn't going away. It's a really crazy signal that most people have no idea to even look for. So it's excitement plus resistance, plus sustained organic people that just keep talking about it and it's not letting go. You know what i mean? And you can just tell that there's, that they believe deep down that this is going to be transformational. Those are the things that I'm looking for in order to know that this is actually a shift and That's a consumer behavior shift because it's really hard to get consumer behavior to shift.
00:10:39
Dan Sanchez
It's really important for everybody listening right now because right now it's like, okay, now it's obvious. You're a person listening to an AI marketing show. You you get it. But there's going to be subtrends because this AI thing is going to be so big that there's going to be multiple subtrends within this AI trend that any of us could ride and bet our career on. Like AI video, especially the Sora thing,
00:11:01
Dan Sanchez
Gosh, that's one right now that I'm like, that that's a thing in and of itself. Just Sora and you in AI videos. That will be a thing. How it plays out? We're still in the early days. It felt like, Sora feels like the early days of chat GPT where we're playing and not quite sure exactly how that's going to be a thing, but it could be nothing.
00:11:20
Dan Sanchez
You don't know.
00:11:22
Michael Stelzner
But this is what you look for. First of all, you look for people that are evangelizing this that are not the obvious targets, right? You're not looking for the influencers who are out there actively normally covering all the news that's related to AI video. You're looking for everyday people talking about it organically without any motivation at all. That's the first signal. The second thing that signal is you're looking for people that are in extreme opposition to it.
00:11:47
Michael Stelzner
which will come eventually, right? Because they'll say, oh, this is bad because it's it's it's it's indiscernible from from real stuff, right? You're looking for that. And then you're also looking for that growth data. Like there needs to be entities that are starting to publish information about the growth data. When all three of those things are in alignment, then you know it's still early and it's a good time to latch onto that trend.
00:12:11
Dan Sanchez
That makes sense. So if going use your own criteria, I'm thinking like, okay, Sora specifically. I've literally had normal people, school teachers come and be like, oh, look what my son sent me. It's him fighting a bear. Ha ha. Isn't that funny?
00:12:23
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:12:23
Dan Sanchez
And they're just like kind of sloppy AI videos. But to him, it means the world because it's his son's face in the video. And he thinks they're funny to me. I was like, oh, okay. I don't even know who this is.
00:12:33
Michael Stelzner
But if that continues to happen for months instead of just for a couple of weeks, that's going to be the key thing you're looking for.
00:12:34
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:37
Michael Stelzner
And also if people start saying, I don't know how I feel about this, you know what i mean?
00:12:38
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:12:41
Michael Stelzner
That's going to be another thing because if it threatens, then it's probably means that they, that that people take it extremely seriously.
00:12:42
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:12:50
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. So I think we're on the early days of that, but I am watching it now. I've gotten some better signals to pay attention. So I'm curious with, when it comes to the development AI, has there been anything that's genuinely surprised you or even contradicted your expectations?
00:13:05
Michael Stelzner
Well, there's been three moments in the AI journey for the last three years or so since ChatGPT moment came out that surpriseded that shocked me. I can't see there's anything that contradicted my expectations because I don't think any of us know what to expect until these things happen and then we get shocked. But the first moment was obviously the ChatGPT moment. Like I was gobstopped when I saw how good it was. Like I'd previously worked with AI models that were not very smart. But the fact that I could talk this thing and it sounded like a human and it was articulate and stuff, it just blew my mind.
00:13:38
Michael Stelzner
The second moment isn't going to surprise you, Dan, but it was when ChatGPT rolled out the ability to talk to it and interact with it, the ability to actually talk to it and sounded like a human, responded like a human.
00:13:45
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:51
Michael Stelzner
It had emotions, it could laugh, it could do different accents, it could do different languages. That blew my mind. It kind of reminded me of the very first time I was able to use like Spotify kind of thing, you know, like listen to any music, but it wasn't Spotify, it was Pandora.
00:14:05
Michael Stelzner
You know what i mean? That blew my mind, too.
00:14:07
Dan Sanchez
Yes, I remember that.
00:14:08
Michael Stelzner
And then the next one was Nano Banana Pro. Nano Banana Pro was the next major moment because it's ridiculous. I mean, I know you agree with me.
00:14:19
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:14:21
Michael Stelzner
So those have been the three moments that came to my mind as I was as i was thinking you know about this question. But none of them have contradicted my expectations. I knew that eventually I'd be able to interact with AI and be able to talk to me. I also knew that the images were going to just keep getting better, you know, but at this point, I don't know what's going to surprise me next because I think we just get used to radical surprise, but but I do instinctively feel like we're almost at the point where not much more is going to surprise.
00:14:53
Michael Stelzner
maybe real time maybe eventually if like they have real time ai agents that actually look exactly like you respond in real time and i can't discern the difference that'll probably surprise me when robots get to be as good as like c3po you know what i mean that's probably gonna there's the r2d2 no c3po that'll probably surprise me but I can't imagine that there's going to be a lot more innovation other than just continuous improvement that will shock me.
00:14:53
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:15:22
Michael Stelzner
Because at this point, I feel like i feel like there's not a lot more ground to cover. I don't know. What's your thoughts?
00:15:29
Dan Sanchez
I think one that hit me was personalization. Two in the spring was personalization when they rolled that out. Like it can kind of take tally of everything you've had talked about and you can ask it like, based on conversations we've had, what would you say about this or that?
00:15:43
Dan Sanchez
That started blowing my mind.
00:15:44
Michael Stelzner
More like memory memory and the ability and ability to consult you and know everything about.
00:15:45
Dan Sanchez
was like, oh, this is going to be a thing. Yeah, the memory feature. Yeah.
00:15:49
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. That didn't surprise me as much because i kind of I kind of could sense that's where it was all going because it's just ingesting so much about us as we interact with it.
00:15:50
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:15:58
Dan Sanchez
And then the usefulness of O3, the reasoning model, once it had the capability of searching the internet. So if it didn't know the answer, it would go and find it and help you.
00:16:05
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:16:08
Dan Sanchez
Like now, now I hear stories.
00:16:09
Michael Stelzner
You're talking like deep research, that kind of stuff?
00:16:11
Dan Sanchez
No, not deep research, just just the thinking model with the tool of the internet. So like you can ask it like, hey, like what does the government need to get my new address?
00:16:16
Michael Stelzner
Oh, yeah.
00:16:20
Dan Sanchez
I just moved to this state. And its ability to go and figure that out and and then go find Reddit thor forums and like find the insider tricks for you.
00:16:26
Michael Stelzner
Isn't it fascinating that right now, nobody everybody thinks that's normal now.
00:16:28
Dan Sanchez
So good.
00:16:29
Michael Stelzner
you know Everybody thinks that's normal now.
00:16:30
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:16:31
Michael Stelzner
Yeah,
00:16:31
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. But that blew my mind. Last, it was just last spring. Hasn't even been a year. That's that capability has been out there now.
00:16:37
Michael Stelzner
and if we didn't have it anymore, we'd all be upset.
00:16:39
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah. We'd, we'd all waste away trying to go back through the the websites, especially the government websites, trying to figure it all out. So I have to ask, like looking back at past marketing revolutions, what echoes do you hear in the AI era where, and where does the pattern break? Like what's similar to the past ones you've seen and where, where is it going differently?
00:17:01
Michael Stelzner
Well, the one that I'm obviously the most familiar with is social media because I started Social Media Examiner in 2009 and I felt like I was late to the game, but I wasn't. Social media, some of the sites started in 03, some in 06, so I wasn't really late. it Just helps everybody understand how early we are on this AI bandwagon. This does remind me a lot of the early days of social media.
00:17:22
Michael Stelzner
I called it the Wild Wild West back then. As a matter of fact, my very first online event, which I had Gary Vaynerchuk, keynote at, I had this guy on a horse like in the Utah desert or whatever, like like racing across the desert.
00:17:36
Michael Stelzner
And I just called it the Wild Wild West. And we're hearing a lot of people use that phrase, right? It's kind of the wild, wild west right now because there's people doing whatever the heck they want.
00:17:42
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:17:46
Michael Stelzner
You know, they're not really asking for permission. you know what I mean? They're just kind of taking taking things into their own hands. And that that includes a lot of the companies that we rely on. You know, they're stealing my books, you know what i mean? And using it to train the models, all that kind of stuff. but But the reason it reminds me of it is for a different reason because in the early days of social media, it was very complicated to understand this new thing.
00:18:11
Michael Stelzner
Like understanding Facebook like wasn't super intuitive back in the day.
00:18:16
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:16
Michael Stelzner
And it was just Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is all there was. And Twitter was ridiculously confusing. Nobody understood. What the heck? You're supposed to only tweet 140 characters? Like, what's that all about, right? And it required a lot of training.
00:18:30
Michael Stelzner
And AI is not intuitive today. It's just a little cursor. You know what I mean? You have to know how to use it. So these two parallels are kind of shockingly similar because it's only as good as you know how to to use it.
00:18:47
Michael Stelzner
Know-how is the key word.
00:18:48
Dan Sanchez
Brett?
00:18:49
Michael Stelzner
Those who know-how have a huge competitive advantage. That was exactly the case back when social media popped. Huge advantages because there were so few people back then doing the kinds of things that everyone does now. And even though, yes, there's millions of people utilizing AI, you and I both know that they're just using it as a glorified search engine.
00:19:12
Michael Stelzner
That's all they're doing. 99.999% of users of of chat GPT are asking it a question and accepting the answer. That's it. Okay. It's exactly the same.
00:19:23
Michael Stelzner
There's nothing different. so yeah, there you go. That's, that's, that's my answer is that this is exactly the same as the social media era. And, but it's growing much faster.
00:19:36
Michael Stelzner
And as a matter of fact, it's growing too fast because consumers cannot keep up.
00:19:36
Dan Sanchez
Does it break any patterns?
00:19:41
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:19:41
Michael Stelzner
were you about to say?
00:19:42
Dan Sanchez
Does it break any patterns? Is it like different than how social media took off?
00:19:45
Michael Stelzner
that's that's That's the pattern break right there is that
00:19:47
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:19:50
Michael Stelzner
every big business in the world has this internal belief system.
00:19:59
Michael Stelzner
We gotta get there first, okay?
00:20:01
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:20:01
Michael Stelzner
We're gonna spend billions to get there first, okay? What does get there first mean? Nobody knows, okay? But all they know is they need more Nvidia chips and they need more access and they need faster processing time and more memory and all the things, right? So there is no major company that we can think of that's in the top 20 companies right of the world that is not investing billions in this. So this is the difference, right?
00:20:27
Michael Stelzner
When social media started, there was no major companies behind any of it. They're all startups. Today, there's two startups, OpenAI and Claude. and clae And then the other big one is Gemini, which is not a startup, okay?
00:20:43
Dan Sanchez
Right.
00:20:43
Michael Stelzner
And then you have a bunch of, you got Facebook trying to do stuff, but the startups are not winning because it it's so hard to pull this off and it requires enormous financial capital and resources. So this is the the quandary that we're in right now.
00:20:59
Michael Stelzner
Because these companies are spending billions and billions and billions on energy, chips, all these things, and consumers aren't adopting it fast enough They got a real problem, right? They're innovating, but they don't have a marketplace for people to buy these products yet. And that is completely different than what happened in social. Social organically grew on its own.
00:21:21
Michael Stelzner
And AI is trying to be grown by institutions. Does that make sense?
00:21:27
Dan Sanchez
Right.
00:21:27
Michael Stelzner
And the institutions are not succeeding, which is why all these companies are filing to go public this year. OpenAI and Anthropic will be public companies this year because they have to or they'll bankrupt.
00:21:40
Michael Stelzner
and Gemini will win, which means Google will win.
00:21:42
Dan Sanchez
an interesting conundrum because I remember social media, like it was a consumer thing.
00:21:44
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:21:47
Dan Sanchez
Like we all did it and businesses were like, why would I post? How is that good for business? And like executives were making fun of social media for a while before they're like, oh, it stole the election, right?
00:21:55
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:21:58
Dan Sanchez
But with AI, it seems like businesses are more the front runners of it and consumers are kind of lagging behind of it.
00:22:05
Michael Stelzner
Consumers are using the one tool, right, which is ChatGPT,
00:22:10
Dan Sanchez
JHPG, yeah.
00:22:11
Michael Stelzner
And maybe they're using Gemini if they're in school because or copilot because the school is on Microsoft or on Google ecosystems. But it's ChatGPT. We know this, right? It's the one that's winning the race. And it's kind of like the early days of social. People were with Facebook and that's all there was. You know what I mean? And then eventually they went to Instagram and then they went to all the others, you know?
00:22:35
Dan Sanchez
There's one massive AI consumer app that most of us marketers don't really think about because it it doesn't it's not applicable to marketing, but it's actually a huge consumer one. It's a character AI. You've ever been there?
00:22:46
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I haven't tried it.
00:22:46
Dan Sanchez
That one's pretty big, bigger than Gemini.
00:22:47
Michael Stelzner
I haven't tried it. I haven't tried it, but I know what it is and I wouldn't be surprised if it's an acquisition target by somebody.
00:22:56
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, it's an interesting app, but it's more consumer focused versus all the other tools we i usually talk about on the shore, you know, have business applications, especially marketing applications. But a character AI is interesting because it's like talking to a fictional character, but it's actually setting plot points for you as if you're reading a novel, but you're one of the characters in it.
00:23:14
Michael Stelzner
So it's like its like entertainment.
00:23:15
Dan Sanchez
And now you're interacting with the character, but you can see you can even feel it like forcing you down a path that you know is coming based on the dialogue you're having with the character. You're like, it's like an interactive novel almost.
00:23:25
Michael Stelzner
That's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, I mean, that's that's entertainment. That's really cool. I've never tried it.
00:23:25
Dan Sanchez
It's an interesting thing.
00:23:32
Dan Sanchez
Worth a try. I feel like marketers will get into that eventually where we're building interactive experiences for as content marketing. I don't think we're there yet, but actually made a prediction that we would do it at some point, but I've been wrong on that prediction.
00:23:43
Dan Sanchez
Now I'm like, sometime we'll figure that out.
00:23:45
Michael Stelzner
My guess is it's mostly for the younger generation that has a lot of time on their hands or the older generation, but probably not for the working class is my guess, right?
00:23:48
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not yet. I think we'll build, I mean, imagine today we'll we'll have websites that are not completely custom tailored to you.
00:23:59
Dan Sanchez
Otherwise we would just go to our own chat GPT account, but we will have websites that might, you know, adjust themselves pretty by a lot to accommodate themselves for you or emails or whatever, whatever it might be.
00:24:11
Michael Stelzner
Well, you know, it's funny. I had Jeremiah Oying on my AI Explore podcast recently. He works for Reid Hoffman's venture capital. Reid Hoffman is the founder of LinkedIn firm up in the Bay Area. And he's talking about And a day where, and again, this is coming through the lens of the Bay Area, but he's talking about a day where agents will interact with your agent-friendly website and humans won't go to your website at all.
00:24:39
Michael Stelzner
So imagine creating an agent-friendly website that's designed so that when AI agents come knocking at the door, they know how to interact with the agents and facilitate the entire transaction without human involvement at all.
00:24:52
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:24:53
Michael Stelzner
that's what That's what he's saying because that's where they're making their bet. you know That's where they're making their investments. But in that era, there is no such thing as a website. You just go to your agent. The agent does talks to all its agents, which talk to all the other agents that that your businesses have created. And then they all negotiate deals behind the scenes and then come back and close the deal for you. that's what he' Let's just hope that doesn't actually come true because I like the idea of us marketers having a little agency.
00:25:21
Michael Stelzner
But that's what that's what they're betting on
00:25:24
Dan Sanchez
Uh, it will probably be it's a things rarely ever really die, but they change. So that will probably be true. And then websites will still be true. I just got a new client that came and I'm like, how'd you find me? And she's like, chat GPT recommended you, which is funny. Cause like I've searched myself on chat GPT, even blank chat GPTs to see if I come up as AI marketing consultant. Not really. If you search AI marketing podcast through a a generic chat GPT, then my show will come up.
00:25:49
Dan Sanchez
but not marketing consultants. so I'm not exactly sure what she did to like find me or how was personalized to her, but it came up. she and Then she browsed my site and made a purchase.
00:25:56
Michael Stelzner
Well, that's cool because that's the AI basically taking all of its understanding of her and all of its understanding of everyone in the ecosystem and customizing her.
00:26:01
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah. and It matched us.
00:26:06
Michael Stelzner
And that's why it's going to be really hard. And I've had a number of people on my various shows talking about this. It's not going to be easy to kind of be the one because there is no, it's not like a Google search.
00:26:17
Michael Stelzner
You know, the days of like having to work through 10 different results and all those days are gone now. The AI is doing it all for us, right? That's what that's what the research does.
00:26:25
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:27
Michael Stelzner
That's the benefit.
00:26:28
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Remember I posted on LinkedIn a while ago. It's like, because of that, certain things in marketing will change, but then some things won't change. There are things that humans and AI care about positioning, for example, like positioning still widely applicable because the agents will care if you specialize in the thing that they're looking for, for your, their client.
00:26:39
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:26:46
Dan Sanchez
Right.
00:26:46
Michael Stelzner
Well, and I also think humans want to verify, too.
00:26:47
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:26:49
Michael Stelzner
I mean, the trust concept, right?
00:26:49
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:26:51
Michael Stelzner
Like, people don't fully trust what the AIs come up with right now. They're going to want to verify, you know, the concept trust but verify.
00:26:57
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:26:58
Michael Stelzner
So humans are going to need to verify with their own eyes that what the AI is recommending to them is actually what they believe to be true as well. And that's a good thing, at least for now, because that means they're still going to take those recommendations, go to your website, check you out, maybe even check out your socials, look for the things that humans look for, and then ultimately affirm or deny the recommendation of the AI agent.
00:27:20
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:27:21
Dan Sanchez
It's gonna be wild. So it's good segue into like, if we just zoom out a little bit more and look at, you know, five to seven years from now, what does your gut tell you the marketing industry will like look like because of AI? Yeah.
00:27:32
Michael Stelzner
Well, first of all, I think all of us are going to be much better marketers because we're already getting better as marketers because we have access to all these tools. And I think that the what we call bad marketing is going to be what we today call good marketing. Does that make sense? Because what we call good marketing today is going to be the bottom standard.
00:27:56
Michael Stelzner
Does that make sense?
00:27:56
Dan Sanchez
Yep, yep, yep.
00:27:58
Michael Stelzner
And good marketing is goingnna be like good marketing is going to be like 10x more than what we think it is today, right?
00:27:58
Dan Sanchez
The baseline is moving.
00:28:04
Michael Stelzner
So everything that we think that is good marketing today is going to be the bare minimum baseline. Right. And the future marketing is only going to be incrementally more powerful. So, for example, today we think about marketing as just like a couple of channels, right? Like we're going to do podcast marketing and we're going to email marketing. Right. We're going to do Facebook and Instagram marketing. Well, five to seven years from now, that's not going to be enough.
00:28:30
Michael Stelzner
You know what i mean? We're going doing we're going to be doing like 25 different channels and it's all going managed by one person and all their ai agents. Right. And anything less is going to be considered not even acceptable. Right. So so so marketing is going to get better.
00:28:45
Michael Stelzner
It's going to be more persuasive. There's going to be more simultaneous things going on because they are going to enable all that. And and it's going to be good because. It now means one person or a small team can accomplish what in the past might have been 50 to 100 people, right?
00:29:03
Michael Stelzner
What it would have taken that many people to do. And that's good news for the small businesses that are out there. Because right now, most small businesses cannot accomplish everything they want because they do not have the money to hire all the people they need to hire to be able to pull off all the things that they want to pull off. That's going to fundamentally change, which means there's going to be a lot more people buying products and services that they didn't even know existed. because AI is going to help them be better marketers. That means there's going to be more exchange of commerce. That means there's going more flow of money. That means there's going to be more prosperity, all the things that are going to come from that. That's the first thing. The second thing is that I think that human plus AI is going to be absolutely essential.
00:29:45
Michael Stelzner
I think that there will probably be a resistance, major resistance against just just pure AI, right?
00:29:56
Michael Stelzner
Even though it'll be really good, I do think that it's kind of like the easiest way to describe this is you can have robots. Like in these movies, you can have robots and then you can have guys that are wearing robot suits.
00:30:08
Michael Stelzner
Sometimes the guys that are wearing the robot suits are actually, they got the human brain plus the robotics. You know what i mean? That it's a horrible analogy, but I think,
00:30:15
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Like Iron Man.
00:30:18
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, exactly.
00:30:20
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:30:20
Michael Stelzner
Rather than just the robot itself, right? Which has limits. So I think human plus AI will be absolutely huge because if we can get to a point where we as people can spend more time in our higher order tasks, the kind of tasks that normally take enormous brainpower. And Dan, you know, those tasks, you know what they are for you. It's probably creating takes a lot of brainpower, right?
00:30:44
Dan Sanchez
That's right.
00:30:46
Michael Stelzner
So if you can actually, if you can create 10X faster because all the difficult things are are sped up for you now, right? Like the ideation stage is is sped up, the actual, the the video phase is sped up because all you have to do now is speak it, direct it, and then modify it and edit it. And then eventually you're just gonna be talking to a machine with your own voice. And you're gonna rotate that 90 degrees, zoom in, zoom out.
00:31:12
Michael Stelzner
change my hat to a different color let's work on the lightning in the background you know what i mean that's where we're going to be all of a sudden you'll be able to create incredibly awesome stuff videos all the things right and creative
00:31:18
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:31:26
Michael Stelzner
Unlock is going to be huge. It's kind of like the equivalent of the matrix where Neo all of a sudden learns Kung Fu, right? I think that all of a sudden now creative marketers are going to be able to learn very rapidly how to do things that they don't know how to do the whole thing, but they know how to do pieces of the thing.
00:31:46
Michael Stelzner
example, let's say you always want to make a movie and you're really good at writing, but you suck at the rest of the movie. Well, what if you can bring on all the quote unquote extra layers like an expert in lighting and an expert in music?
00:31:59
Michael Stelzner
an expert in storyboarding, you know what I mean All of a sudden you can be a movie maker. You know what mean? so So I think the human plus AI thing is gonna be huge because I think it's gonna unlock incredible creative things.
00:32:06
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:32:13
Michael Stelzner
People's mindsets are gonna shift from I can't because I don't know how to I can because I have access to unlimited resources. And if you have access to unlimited creative resources, what's that going unlock?
00:32:28
Michael Stelzner
It's going to unlock new business ideas, new creative ideas, just tons of stuff. And for real creative people, I honestly think that the creatives are going to have a renaissance. the the The most creative will win.
00:32:40
Michael Stelzner
Full stop. And I think creative people, especially people that have any attention challenges, like people that are like me that are dyslexic or people that have ADHD or any of these kind of challenges, all of a sudden now the AI can work as fast as their brain can work.
00:32:57
Michael Stelzner
And now all of a sudden, holy crap. Look what they can create, right? And all of a sudden, they can have forces that come alongside them and that maybe bring the operational or the follow through or all the things that they're not good at. So I really do think this is going to be an incredible creative renaissance. We're going to see things that we never even thought possible.
00:33:16
Michael Stelzner
and And it's going to be good. I don't think it's going to be bad.
00:33:20
Dan Sanchez
I love it. i I mean, i I'm already feeling it already because I used to work at a podcast agency and he used to take a team of like four people, a writer, a producer, at audio guy and a video guy, like two weeks to turn an episode. And I was always like, so long to turn one episode, one interview and not even like really complex editing or anything. Nothing fancy is just getting out and then writers got to listen to it after it's edited and, you know, write the piece and write the social for it. And it took time to to get all the deliverables back to the client. But now as a team of one, and I'm working with some constraints here, and there's some things that I can't do in order to speed up the process. But as a team of one, you know we're talking like 30 minutes of prep, depending on who I'm talking to or if I'm doing a solo, I record. That takes the longest time because you need can't rush the production part. But then the post-production is just like, click, click, click.
00:34:08
Dan Sanchez
Oh, here's a transcript. ChatGPT, do what I've already taught you to do. Bam, bam, bam, bam, done. And then they even tools that even post it for you afterwards. And it seems like What used to take two weeks and team of four, I'm now doing solo in maybe three hours.
00:34:24
Dan Sanchez
And most a lot of that's just rendering time and the time it takes to actually say what you need to say or do the interview. So I'm already feeling it. I wouldn't be able to do this podcast without those tools. And now I'm trying to champion how other people that do it, but it's happening across every every aspect.
00:34:36
Michael Stelzner
By the way, your questions were your questions were amazing. i don't know if AI helped you come up with these questions or did you come up with these on your own?
00:34:42
Dan Sanchez
Oh, chat GPT definitely helped me come up with these questions. But i had it I had to do deep research on all the interviews you've been doing because I know you've been doing other interviews.
00:34:45
Michael Stelzner
I was going to say, these are really good questions.
00:34:50
Dan Sanchez
I'm like, well, I don't want to ask Mike questions that he's already answered before.
00:34:50
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
00:34:54
Dan Sanchez
I want to ask, and I kind of gave it the vision. I'm like, there's certain questions that I want to ask Mike that are big picture questions, industry questions that he's uniquely capable of answering.
00:35:03
Michael Stelzner
I got to tell you, I was so, so pleased with with this line of questions.
00:35:04
Dan Sanchez
And that's, these are the questions that came as a result. Yeah.
00:35:08
Michael Stelzner
I was like, wow, these are really good questions.
00:35:12
Dan Sanchez
So that's that's the power of being AI driven is you can have it go and do the deep research, analyze all the other questions, I guess, like you have already said and spoken to, and then find find the missing missing piece that we can cover uniquely on this show. But every show has got its own angle. So every show could be doing stuff like that in a way that's unique to them. So next question is, you talked about how this human plus AI like releases new possibilities.
00:35:34
Michael Stelzner
Thank you.
00:35:39
Dan Sanchez
But in your opinion, what are the specifically human skills that AI can't do, can't do well, or just compliment gets complemented with AI that marketers should be focused on?
00:35:50
Michael Stelzner
I think discernment is kind of the key word here, knowing good from great. And I think humans know great when they experience it, when they see it and they know good.
00:36:03
Michael Stelzner
And I think humans that exercise discernment when using AI, and you and I both know that we've all been guilty of not properly discerning the output.
00:36:14
Michael Stelzner
You know what i mean? We're just like, oh, it's so much better than I can create, publish.
00:36:15
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:36:18
Michael Stelzner
You know, we don't read it sometimes. but But I do think humans are uniquely skilled to discern good from great. better than AI can.
00:36:28
Michael Stelzner
I think it just is something that we're born with is this ability to kind of know greatness when we see it and when we experience it. The other side of it is understanding human emotions. So I don't think AI fully yet is able to understand human emotions, but it's getting there.
00:36:45
Michael Stelzner
But emotions are something that is a feeling more than it is an expression. Does that make sense? So we sense it.
00:36:51
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:36:53
Michael Stelzner
AI can't sense the way humans can sense. So I think when you couple understanding the emotions with discernment, those become really valuable skills that AI is not going to be able to replicate. and But if you are using AI and you can use your discernment,
00:37:12
Michael Stelzner
and try to think about how this might feel or how it might make other people feel, I feel like that's the one-two punch. you know It's kind of those two things utilized by humans in relation with AI that can result in something very powerful.
00:37:30
Dan Sanchez
The one I think about all the time with this is that scene from Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams is talking to the will, the kid. He's like, you know a lot about a lot, but you don't know what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel, right?
00:37:41
Michael Stelzner
There you go.
00:37:41
Dan Sanchez
I kind of come back to it It's that experience.
00:37:42
Michael Stelzner
That's right.
00:37:43
Dan Sanchez
Like, you you haven't experienced anything. You don't actually know. You've just read all the books.
00:37:48
Michael Stelzner
That's a really good point because AI can only experience things through the lens in which it's trained.
00:37:54
Dan Sanchez
That's right.
00:37:54
Michael Stelzner
And right now, most AI is being trained on the written word. And that means it hasn't seen the movies. It hasn't walked through your house. It hasn't witnessed the world and they are training world models and that's coming. But right now it's not there, which is a major limiting factor to AI.
00:38:12
Dan Sanchez
And it'll never be able to experience it as a human. Like, because because it's never a human, it'll never have the human experience, which is going to freaking count for a lot, right?
00:38:15
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:38:18
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:38:21
Dan Sanchez
As we write copies, we try to discern use our discernment to decide good good from great. It'll never know because it's never actually had to like grow up.
00:38:30
Michael Stelzner
Right.
00:38:30
Dan Sanchez
It's never had parents. It's never had all these things that we've all had as as as humans. So human taste human discernment and taste, is there anything else?
00:38:40
Michael Stelzner
No, I mean, those are the big ones that I can think of.
00:38:42
Dan Sanchez
Those are the big ones. Yeah.
00:38:43
Michael Stelzner
Well, it not even tastes as much as emotions, right?
00:38:43
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:38:46
Michael Stelzner
Just the just the the sense of knowing what is and what is not good or bad. or i mean, it's discernment.
00:38:55
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, those are the ones I came up with. I haven't put deep processing into it, but probably upon further reflection, I might amend some of those answers. I don't know.
00:39:06
Dan Sanchez
What are some of the old marketing or creative behaviors that just become obsolete in in this new era?
00:39:13
Michael Stelzner
Okay, well, I think this one, it's a little early to tell, but I think the tea leaves are out there on this that people are not going to be searching in the way that they used to search for information and answers.
00:39:26
Michael Stelzner
So if we think about the historical way we've done this is we've gone to Google or to Bing or whatever, and then we've been presented with a their their machine learnings, what they think are the best answer, which all but have all been manipulated by marketers. and the, that is kind of going away and we already are seeing all the signs like, heck even, even Gmail now is just rolled out the ability to not even show your emails anymore. And just, just to lift up kind of the things that it thinks are important to you. So the idea that, that's a consumer behavior that's going to change, right? Which is that there's going to be what I call the single best answer and the single best answer.
00:40:06
Michael Stelzner
will be will be always provided unless asked for otherwise. Said another way, you know, where should I eat some Italian food tonight? It's gonna give you one answer.
00:40:17
Michael Stelzner
But if you say list out all the Italian restaurants that are good, that are nimery, that you have to know how to query the system. You know what mean?
00:40:22
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:40:22
Michael Stelzner
But we are moving towards an era where only a answer or only a few answers are going to be the result. And that is going to fundamentally alter the way that we market. Because the job of marketing is to get a message in front of an audience.
00:40:37
Michael Stelzner
And if there's this intermediary in the middle of it, which is this AI system that decides what to reveal to that person and we don't have any control over it, that's going to alter completely the way we market.
00:40:51
Michael Stelzner
Don't you agree?
00:40:52
Dan Sanchez
A hundred percent. Cause I'm, cause I, as a consumer, I'm already doing it this way and already like selfishly wanted to continue in that direction. So I want them say, Hey, go and find me a date spot with my wife. And it's like, huh? Well, they liked that Italian place last time, but Dan's trying to watch his cholesterol. So I'm going to keep that in mind. I'm going to read some menus and try to find something Dan likes. Okay. This one, this one looks good. It's got top rated. It's going to go and find a couple that are nearby and find the one based on things that it already knows about me. And I'm like, selfishly, I want that.
00:41:21
Dan Sanchez
But as a marketer, I'm like, how can i manipulate that?
00:41:27
Dan Sanchez
Executive assistant, yeah.
00:41:30
Michael Stelzner
But yeah, that's go that's going to make it really hard for us marketers, right? Because honestly, there is no way to control the input. There's a lot of people that think they've understood it, but nobody really knows.
00:41:41
Dan Sanchez
But I mean, it's like the, if you just think about like, okay, well, what what are things that people would want to come here for? i think it just comes down to like, you you just have to do more, but it's getting easier to do more.
00:41:51
Dan Sanchez
It used to be hard to set up a website. Now you can vibe code one. It's easier. And that'll continue to be easier. But now it's like, okay, well, let's get the nutrition facts of all of our menu items up. And we can give something, that gives the the agent something to go and look at, right?
00:42:04
Dan Sanchez
Because, but like, otherwise it's just guessing at what the nutrition value of these things are.
00:42:09
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, it's I think we're going to see pretty quickly. Open AI in particular is going to need to monetize so they will have sponsored answers. whether consumers will pay attention to it is really a big question.
00:42:23
Dan Sanchez
Or continue to trust, yeah.
00:42:24
Michael Stelzner
but you know, we're already starting to see a little bit of this.
00:42:27
Michael Stelzner
Like when you search for products and services, you do not see Amazon in the results, but you do see Walmart in the results, which is really interesting. And it kind of signals to me that, you know, Amazon has got a competing investment that they've made inside of Claude, right?
00:42:42
Michael Stelzner
And until Amazon makes a big investment in open AI, which I believe they are negotiating right now, you're not going to see Amazon products listed in the recommendations, right?
00:42:51
Dan Sanchez
Interesting.
00:42:51
Michael Stelzner
Walmart, you are.
00:42:52
Dan Sanchez
yeah
00:42:52
Michael Stelzner
So you're starting to see how this might work, right? Once they turn on the commerce engine, they're going to for sure make people pay to play. Just like Apple made Google pay a fortune to have it be the default search on the phone, on the iPhone.
00:43:04
Dan Sanchez
Yep, yep.
00:43:05
Michael Stelzner
and on the Apple computer. So you're there's going to be those kind of arrangements going on behind the scenes. And that'll be really interesting how that pans out on the e-commerce side of things.
00:43:14
Dan Sanchez
probably be like a big affiliate network where it's just taking affiliate commission for every recommendation.
00:43:18
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if Amazon, for example, has the exclusive recommended products, then you can bet their bottom dollar that everybody's going to be paying Amazon to make sure that they're the ones that are recommended.
00:43:20
Dan Sanchez
Good work.
00:43:28
Michael Stelzner
You know what i mean? So there's going to be like all sorts of weird back end deals going on.
00:43:34
Dan Sanchez
So last question, describe a business that's thriving in 2030. What are the leaders doing today to build that business? Maybe even things that are kind of like, no one's no one's letter not a lot of people are putting emphasis in this thing right today, but it'll be the things that will be celebrated in best practice like five years from now.
00:43:57
Michael Stelzner
Okay. Well, it's hard to believe that it's actually four years until 2030, which is kind of scary.
00:44:02
Dan Sanchez
That's right.
00:44:04
Michael Stelzner
but I'll take a stand. I'll take, I'll take a view at this, that I think those that are going to be thriving in 2030 are going to be taking some definitive actions right now.
00:44:14
Michael Stelzner
And I think one of those actions is going to be training. I think, as we mentioned earlier, using AI is complicated. It's not intuitive, especially as a marketer. And I do believe that, and all of my contemporaries believe this as well, that getting people trained up on how to use this inside of the businesses that they work for is going to be absolutely essential because those that survive are those that adapt, right?
00:44:45
Michael Stelzner
Like when social media came out, People fought against it and those that are not on social media today are struggling. When the Internet first came out, everybody fought against it.
00:44:56
Michael Stelzner
And now the biggest companies in the world are all Internet based companies. OK, so the biggest companies in the future are all going to be the ones that embrace where the trend line is going, which is towards ai adoption. So in order for that to happen, people need to actually train up.
00:45:12
Michael Stelzner
It starts with you. You have to figure out how to use these things. You can do that by listening to Dan's podcast, to my podcast, We founded the AI Business World Conference, which is which dan you're going to be speaking at, which is part of social media marketing world.
00:45:27
Dan Sanchez
Yep. Yep.
00:45:28
Michael Stelzner
That's going to probably be one of the best opportunities for you to come and literally sit at the feet of 20 of the world's leading AI experts coming up in April. The AI Business Society you mentioned earlier. You've got programs programs and stuff like that. But take, you know, carving out time and taking this seriously now because we're so early is going to be absolutely essential because you are going to have an unfair advantage because this stuff is not intuitive and I don't think it's ever going to be intuitive.
00:45:57
Michael Stelzner
It'll eventually get to the point where it's so baked into everything that it will be intuitive, but Those that understand it now and start unlocking keys, it's like unlocking doors. And the more you get, it's like you get more keys, the more you begin to learn this stuff and more doors open.
00:46:10
Michael Stelzner
And when doors open, opportunity is on the other side of those doors. And that opportunity it could be career opportunities. It could be entrepreneurship opportunities for you to go off on your own if you work for an existing business. Or it could be you become one of the more valuable employees inside the company because you help lead the company into this next evolution, revolution, whatever the right word is, renaissance.
00:46:30
Michael Stelzner
So I think that the key thing is going to be training.
00:46:31
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:46:35
Michael Stelzner
I don't know. What do you think?
00:46:37
Dan Sanchez
I made my career off the back of learning all the digital tools first because the marketing directors didn't want to learn them. And I was the kid in the room. They're like, well, he'll figure out. So I figured out email and text message marketing and social media and all that kind of stuff.
00:46:50
Dan Sanchez
Before long, I was the one who was the marketing director. like It just didn't take that long because that became, now we don't even call it digital marketing anymore, right? It's just marketing because it's just digital is standard and doing print is almost like the the niche version of marketing these days, right?
00:46:58
Michael Stelzner
Okay. yeah
00:47:07
Dan Sanchez
Because hardly anybody does it. And I think it's that same thing with AI. Like the people who want leapfrog over are getting trained now, but training is just the beginning. You have to get training and then go and experiment and take some reps at it and then go get more training to figure out how to do it better and different levels of it.
00:47:23
Dan Sanchez
But the ones who get training early and then start acting on it. Yeah, I could see that happening cause i saw it. I mean, it happened with digital, happened with social, but it starts with that first step of training. So
00:47:34
Michael Stelzner
Well, and let me just say one more thing, folks. If you feel like you're overwhelmed a little bit, join the club. None of us have got it all figured out. It's impossible to keep up with, but you don't have to have it all figured out.
00:47:45
Michael Stelzner
You just need to have a little bit of it figured out, enough that's going to give you an edge. That's it. And then once you learn it, then you learn something new. That's how we always do what we do. So I would encourage people to dive in deep. I think this is this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for so many people that are listening.
00:48:03
Dan Sanchez
If you go to socialmediaexaminer.com slash AI dash driven, you will go to a special link where you will get a discount for a limited time. i think it's two weeks.
00:48:13
Michael Stelzner
You just said social media exam. Oh, okay. You're right.
00:48:16
Dan Sanchez
socialmediaexaminer.com slash AI-driven.
00:48:16
Michael Stelzner
So. Oh,
00:48:19
Dan Sanchez
Special link, you get a discount on ai the AI business world, the conference.
00:48:19
Michael Stelzner
okay.
00:48:23
Dan Sanchez
So go to that yeah URL. If you want to join this conference, you want to hear, spend some time with me, I'll be there both days, Wednesday and Thursday at the event. Mike, you'll be there and a ton of awesome people that are really people, you really do a good job of finding people that are in the trenches doing the thing.
00:48:41
Dan Sanchez
So it's probably one of the more practical conferences I've been to.
00:48:41
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. You get a hundred bucks extra hundred bucks. Yeah, it'll be an extra $100 off the already discounted price.
00:48:46
Dan Sanchez
Yep.
00:48:47
Michael Stelzner
So I can't wait. Thank you, Dan, so much for having me on the show.
00:48:51
Dan Sanchez
Thank you for being here.