From Data to AI How Martech is Evolving

This week, I had a fascinating conversation with @Rajeev Nandan, founder and CEO of @Pierian, about the evolution of Marketing technology and the impact of AI on digital marketing strategies.

We covered:

✅ The move from traditional marketing to AI-driven, data-led strategies.
✅ The transition from a consulting business model to a scalable SaaS offering.
✅ The financial metrics that drive e-commerce success and sustainable growth.
✅ How businesses, big and small, can use AI to improve customer acquisition and retention.
✅ The importance of balancing creativity and data in a world increasingly shaped by automation.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:02.752)

Okay, so today I'm here with Rajeev Nandan, an expert in digital and data-driven marketing and the founder and CEO of Pierian, a marketing technology startup here in London. Rajeev, welcome to the Fractional CFO show, how are doing?

Rajeev Nandan (00:19.327)

Thank you, I'm great. How are you, Adam?

Adam Cooper (00:21.344)

Yeah, I'm very well, thank you for asking, very well. And excited to jump into this. So today we're going to be talking about how Martech is evolving and the shift from traditional marketing to AI driven strategies and how it impacts businesses of all sizes. So to start with, would you mind giving us a bit of an overview of how you went from being a, I think I saw you were a chemical engineer at the very beginning to founding a marketing technology company.

Rajeev Nandan (00:51.262)

Okay, so that's a 30 year old history, but in brief, I'm from India. You walk into careers in engineering, medicine, law even, largely driven by parental pressure and ambition. I did that. I realized I wasn't a great engineer. I did work for two years in a refinery in Western India, but I kind of worked myself out of engineering to study marketing and do an MBA.

loved the idea of how brands engage powerfully with their audiences and found myself a role in technology which brought me to London. I worked in London in large companies, tech as well as digital companies like Sapient Publicis for about 15 years and then decided I wanted a long-term corporate guy and didn't want to spend the rest of my life working in large corporates.

dabbled, you know, as you do, you know, into certain new things, anything from hardware design and IoT, you that was the last best thing, if you remember, from the 2010s. Wearable devices, they're still with us, definitely, you know, producing lots of data and experiences, you know, the FedBit device and all that. But eventually, what I did is I understood, having had a sort of management and marketing background,

then having been part of companies that created digital experiences, built websites initially, but then went into sort of the mobile first world and realized that sort of the underpinning foundation was how we utilize data to build better experiences in a channel called digital. And so I started with that idea and built a consultancy business which is called Period and I'll answer more questions about Period.

to the course of this session.

Adam Cooper (02:51.904)

Okay, excellent, excellent. And obviously a very varied background there, which is interesting and always gives you a different perspective, I find. And so I wondered, what was it that during that varied experience made you think that now was the right time to launch, period? What were the gaps in the market that led you to launch the company?

Rajeev Nandan (03:15.757)

So if I reflect back a little bit more over the past 20 years and people who have built careers in the Western world, you had the internet around the late 90s to the present. That was a massive opportunity. So if you're in finance or banking or in construction, you have to consider how the internet actually helps you and how it impacts your role. So that's for anyone in the job market between 95 and 2005.

we have to contend with, do I want to work in this industry? And I studied marketing as post-grad, so I definitely had to consider that. I missed that bus. I said, look, everyone is going after this dot-com thing. I'm not going to be following the herd and I'll do something else. So I went to work in a find way, right? I could have joined a dot-com at the time. Upon reflection, maybe that was a great idea to avoid the dot-com bus. 10 years later, having done software and technology,

and having worked in the West, the next opportunity that came along within this context is the whole mobile experience around after 2005. That was called Web 2.0. And that's when I said, okay, let's figure out what I can do. And I worked mainly with telephone media clients for SAP, as I mentioned earlier. That gave me the idea that companies like Boris one at the time were looking to

The comparison was how much revenue could you have from a website in comparison to a high-speed shop which was 10 feet wide and 30 feet deep in size with three people, right? And the Aha! movement was when Morifone for the first time at its central London store, the website actually did more revenue than that store. Right, okay, yeah, that's a milestone. So that's how I kind of chanced upon this thing.

And then I worked more in experience design and sort of big e-commerce departments because that's what you needed to do. You needed platforms to run them. And this is pre-cloud as well. So lots of software. It wasn't really tailor-made for front-end experiences and things have improved a lot now. And what I did not fully understand in the 2000s and the noughties is how data was actually going to impact. During the time I heard about Amazon Web Services, right?

Rajeev Nandan (05:43.068)

And you had, I remember the time when the first tweet was sent by some American who was stuck in Egypt. And that became a viral thing. Viral wasn't a thing in those times. So I actually thought this is very, very interesting. So with the internet in 2000, I missed that boat a little bit. But we have to understand what data really means. And what can I do? And what can I build on this?

And that's when in the, what we see in the, from around 2012 till today is how data has actually infused itself and has become bigger than technology. What we call AI today is basically data. Elon Musk tweeted a month ago that we are running out of data for AI. We don't have enough data to train our models. Right? So obviously that's what I zeroed in on and we used to talk about small data and big data.

and how it helps different parts of the business. But I really focus on nature of utilizing customer behavior data for e-commerce retailers. So that's kind of the milestone that I'm living with right now. And then we'll see how the rest of this goes.

Adam Cooper (07:00.896)

Okay, great. And obviously, you know, looking at the data and looking at customer behaviour data, there's a lot of financial insights and financial metrics that you can glean from that, which then allows you to make sure your business is viable, to make sure that you're able to use that to generate a business for yourself and for your clients. What was it that you focused on in the early days?

in terms of those key financial metrics that allowed you to ensure that the business became viable.

Rajeev Nandan (07:39.875)

So in the early days, know, sort of the three-step parts of this was that I obviously started with just myself, right? So I said, okay, what skills do I bring to the table that will help large companies? And large companies, because that was my skill set in my day job at the large tech and software and digital design companies I worked at. So I had this confidence to go to Sky and say, I can help you on your analytics.

bold statement, right? Because they have 50 handlers doing exactly that. But once you kind of go beyond past that barrier, the question really was the investment in channels, retail or call center or digital, it creates static fixed assets and people expect that to turn around and give them returns, right? So you build a website with a shopping journey and expect that to perform. It never works like that, right?

In those days, this entire industry has been shaped by very strong creative input. And they never get those teams, never got a chance to actually test those ideas with their own customers. There would be a little bit of user testing. So the metrics really would be, is how can we, we building an experience that we can measure? So you go to an online shop, you add products to your basket.

you expect some of your customers to convert to checkout and fulfillment, right? So are we performing? Do we have the benchmarks and the KPIs for that? Are we losing 99 out of every visitor? Do we know that first one? Do we know that? If we know that, what are we doing about it, right? If Amazon converted 20%, do we do anywhere close to that or even 2%, right? These KPIs are important, right? And ultimately,

building a shop on the high street and building a channel like a web or app or a social commerce channel. It's exactly the same. You want your KPIs to be be met. So these what I worked on is for my business, we had to deliver an uplift in the performance of e-commerce investments and marketing for our clients. And if we could prove that we could firstly measure it and secondly help them deliver it, then we are successful.

Rajeev Nandan (10:03.267)

So that's sort of the client KPI translated into the work, the way we should go.

Adam Cooper (10:08.802)

Yeah, okay, that's really interesting. And you mentioned you obviously started out on your own and you had to take the initiative and go and speak to these large clients and use the key metrics that worked for them. What would you say for the business itself, for you and Perian, what were some of those key financial decisions that you took that really had the biggest long-term impact to get you from startup one-man band to where you are today?

Rajeev Nandan (10:40.323)

So the biggest decision you take as a sole open year, which is one person one person company to begin with in this industry that you are actually in a room full of very mature, very talented large companies. have design companies, have system integrators, you have technology companies, you have legal firms sometimes involved, know, we're talking about

privacy, marketing and those areas. So in some sense, for me, we had to work out whether we can build this from the ground up in terms of people and talent, or I needed essentially an access of high quality consultants who I did not need to hire on a fixed-term basis. So obviously, pre-IR 35, that was quite an active industry.

And the decision I made is that we first have to build a brand and a reputation for great work on digital transformation driven by data in marketing. So I didn't worry much about, I followed the internet model. You first build it. We are not worried about our data and our net margins, as long as we are self-sustaining over a 12-month cycle. We can't be making losses, but I'm not going to hire

anyone who isn't one of the best in that discipline in the London UK area. So I hired senior, I hired trusted network, so what that meant is that instead of hiring three people and going wrong with two of them, I hired one and organically grew out of that team. So I hired very senior people who were solid hands and were willing to work flexibly for short-term, medium-term or long-term contracts.

That's how I went about in terms of people cost and managing that equality. So that was kind of one of the biggest decisions I had to make because one of the things you were able to start at the beginning is it's possible and I'm going to sustain this for long enough to live to fight another day. And that is a risk. But then the time side of that book, either I decided.

Adam Cooper (13:00.3)

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, lots of insight and interesting insight there for the audience. And I know when we were talking earlier, I think you've moved from a purely consulting model more to a SaaS model, scalable SaaS offering. And that obviously comes with its own financial challenges. Consulting businesses generate more immediate cashflow. SaaS can require more...

upfront investment, if you will. So how did you manage that trade off as you shifted from one towards the other?

Rajeev Nandan (13:37.72)

So what we've done is a little bit of detail on the whole sort of strategy that we are looking to build is that, so consulting and providing services such as financial services and accounting and bookkeeping and legal services. This is a time and material space, right? You can sort of shape that into a fixed price project or you can shape that into a retailer, but ultimately we are selling time for sale, right?

What I tend to have is seven year sort of time horizon for one single idea and concept and after that inpatients kicks in and we move on to the next model. So what we have done is we have, and you'll hear consultants use the word framework a lot. So you apply a business problem or opportunity that you want to work for your clients, build these frameworks. These frameworks used to be

intellectual properties for for McKinsey's and these strategy companies or tech companies. The value of these frameworks is diminishing because particularly with what we have with AI being able to help you with sort of knowledge bases. What we now need is actually frameworks that execute and sort of deliver all in the same package. So you'll actually find

very revered consulting firms here and across the board in the US actually moved to acquire software companies and solutions companies that can at least help them explain their ideas to clients. We followed a similar path and throughout my journey and throughout the journey, my team and I, have gone from idea to prototyping really quickly, tested it with clients. They have said no because we are buying the software from IBM or some other software company.

But we always kind of find that that's essential for us to prove that our consultancy work is proven in execution and we can offer it to clients for test and learn. Having done this for seven, eight years, even what we now feel confident about is that we can actually take these product prototypes into market and use cases, particularly when AI is here to give us some sort of a cloud and software infrastructure that needs to take.

Rajeev Nandan (16:02.738)

months and years to build in the past. Right? So it gives more tech companies or somewhat consulting companies this kind of very unique opportunity of a, and this is kind of very contradictory. AI right now is very cheap for startups. It will become expensive. It will become just like the internet. The internet was free. You had Napster giving you free music 20 years ago. Right? This is where we are on AI.

because Big Tech is building the infrastructure for startups to then, obviously not to be a limited business frame, but right now experimentation with AI models is available. And that's what we are doing. We are converting some of our frameworks for analytics, for e-commerce, for solutions, recommendation engines into solid production quality enterprise software.

Where we are at the moment is we have our early customers who are testing this out. The reason we getting these pilots is because they know that the old era of enterprise software from the very large companies is being charged by startups across the land. So that's why we're getting the opportunity. We're not there yet. We have a few of our clients trying this. We are still largely 80 % in consulting and tech business.

but this is the pivot we looking to make.

Adam Cooper (17:34.046)

That's great. Very interesting. And you touched there at the end on customers and the customer acquisition approach when you're transitioning from a consultancy to a SaaS business. And I know many companies are doing that, have done that in the past. But that acquisition piece can be a struggle when you're known for consulting and you're moving across. So what shifts have you done? You mentioned pilots, but

Are there other shifts that you've made and strategies you're pursuing to really attract and retain customers at this early stage?

Rajeev Nandan (18:09.334)

So we are in the stage of attraction at this point in time. And attraction means we are able to secure the first three meetings with the initial intro of the introduction of proposition to the right stakeholders to the third one where we can secure a pilot. Our approach right now is focused on one of the places where we are slightly privileged is because

When we say we worked with three large clients or five large clients, these are companies with a scale of operation in terms of divisions, like consumer or business or markets. So the UK, several markets in the EU we've worked with, such as Germany or Spain. So it gives us a larger playground than we would have if we were focused on, let's say, the SME market.

So these are different departments, functions, different marketing areas. have brand marketing, or performance marketing, or search marketing, or some social media marketing. So we can actually, if we say five customers, we have about 25 prospects from them. That's us, step one. However, in SaaS, you want to be able to do business with the founder of a new model. So we are actually ourselves in the throes of actually figuring out the scale game.

I don't think I know that answer at this point in time. How does a SaaS company actually go from network effect from existing customers to a more skilled model? That's our marketing and growth marketing challenge. We sort of understanding across the internet. We are speaking at forums. We are going to events like the Web Summit and other SaaS platforms. But that would be our journey.

part of the investment we see in the market is to actually sort of find the marketing and the growth marketing budget to be able to do that at scale.

Adam Cooper (20:11.734)

Yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned about going for larger clients and a lot of the audience of this podcast is sort of SMEs and people starting small businesses where they're targeting larger, larger clients. And one of the challenges is always making sure you're meeting with the right decision maker or meeting with a decision maker, making sure you've got access to the right budgets. How are you overcoming that as a challenge in terms of, again, particularly if you're now

trying to break into the SaaS market away from the consulting market, you're needing to potentially speak to different budget holders. How are you navigating that challenge?

Rajeev Nandan (20:52.408)

So biggest difference between large clients or large companies and a small company is the decision making in small companies is concentrated in the sort of less than three people. So it's going to be one person or three people, right? And the approach has to be a test and run approach or a test and run trust approach, right? So we're not looking at

puts in 100 and fortune 500 companies with the ability to write up investments in marketing and technology. So we have to present a near bulletproof working solution that in the summer, presses .exe on their computer and the software works. So the readiness has to be much more. So it's actually harder in my view to be able to work with SMEs. And the SaaS model is more appropriate for this market as well for startups.

Startups do not tend to scale in the number of people that can employ, the number of salespeople that can employ, field offices reaching out. So I think the digital SaaS approach is perfect for our industry when it comes to the SME market. In terms of answering the question on how should SMEs address acquisition of larger clients, for me what worked is the network defect because I had worked with in the telco media industry for a length of time.

So therefore I was able to, I actually worked for technology clients and I went to technology clients to sell marketing. And they said, I will try to find you someone who's willing to speak to me in the first instance and a colleague in another department. And that's how we managed to navigate a brick by brick. The benefit of that is that as a startup, you are focused on understanding the domains. So in my case, it was Telco e-commerce.

you are focused on understanding the challenges of that function. So you can have a customer attention challenge, you can have an NPS and a promoter score challenge. So these are the use cases that you tend to go in. And even if you're selling consulting, what I understood was, and my background was general focus management and marketing, but you have to go in with some sort of a specialization. Because these are big, mature business areas where it's...

Rajeev Nandan (23:16.627)

very strong understanding of that domain. So what we worked on really is, which are these use cases and which are the problem domains? And for us, it was the data angle. How is this getting solved better than what I have brought on the table? And if I can't prove it through an explanation using slides, I have to go in with a prototype of the software or some other demonstration of our skill set. So this is, but the network effect is how we were able to

market ourselves to large companies essentially.

Adam Cooper (23:52.032)

Okay, that's really interesting. And as you say, I think that's a really nice way of looking at it, looking at the domain, understanding the challenges of the sector and then the specialization and going in with a solution that's really targeted. That's a really nice way of looking at it. And specifically around, know, when you're trying to sell software, you you're often having to use different measures of ROI for those clients than you are from a consulting perspective.

What are some of the, sort of in your experience, best ways of identifying the right measure for those sort of conversations that you're having with larger clients? You talk about domain and specialization and sector, but what are identifying some of the key metrics and ROI, what are some of the best ways that you've seen that done?

Rajeev Nandan (24:48.571)

So I'll give you a couple of examples. There is generally a solid foundation of strategy. For example, e-commerce, customer acquisition strategies. There are reams and reams of those documents being prepared internally in these clients. So many of these large companies are not lacking.

that mission, right? And consultancies have a habit of going back in and stating the same thing in a different way. And that doesn't really help because you end up with PowerPoint fatigue with a sense of this is never going to be done. And a lot of these instructions to listen to consulting advice comes from top down. So, you know, from a CFO to a CFO,

or a CEO even. What we did is actually, instead of that actually let's assume all these ideas are great. What does it look like if we actually implemented some of these things, right? And who in our ecosystem, technology, marketing, customer support, right, sales, who are the key stakeholders and who is willing to be a business owner of this particular use case or idea, right? So you literally write this down and say, okay,

I have my sort of KPI sponsor. Then I have underlying sort of things that contribute to the KPI. So, for example, we want to reduce our spend in paid search. Right? How do we do that? We do that by not losing the audience we have in paid search in Google. We do that by improving our organic rankings. Okay? So the sponsor for this is the CMO who has...

few million to spend. It's a large company. The spend is in millions. We've Google done paid search, similar to social. So we then worked with the teams to kind of say, OK, if we have this goal, let's find the initiatives that actually work, and let's have a plan to do this. So we came up with a very simple define these use cases. Effectively, don't write long-winded strategies.

Rajeev Nandan (27:11.055)

Be the anti-consultant here. Be the execution focused team, because that's been done. It still feels like documentation, it defines customer personas, it defines behaviors on teams and media and marketing agencies and technology partners. And then we design a solution which can borrow from existing work, but is somewhat uniquely focused on execution. Remember, we are executing inside a marketing team.

So we don't have the luxury of the three year CapEx program to transform technology platforms. We have to work almost like we have to work like SMEs here. We have to work like startups. So at the time, because I had worked in large agency, the large companies were like, I have to be the anti-consultancy. I have to be the anti. And I'm saying this as a consultant, I have to be different to a, we have to be a team different to a team that brings up lot of documents. Cause that's been done.

We have to find a way to execute. we had large software partners working with us. We had a manic Monday rule where Monday afternoons we locked ourselves. And we had a one week sprint plan. Monday, because Fridays were too slow in these places, I figured that I'll let people rest on Friday and do their admin and catch up on knowledge. But Monday afternoons allowed us to actually have a

very thorough plan for the week. So we ran these weekly sprints somewhat fashionable now in the world of technology. But in the 2010s, that sort of adoption of agile was quite new in marketing. So we did that. And that's really the answer here that we were able to show a series of mini executions under a large program. And that's that's kind of gets you the mandate to continue doing that repeatedly.

Adam Cooper (29:05.57)

Nice, okay, I like that. Being the anti-consultant and being execution-focused, those are good skills, good traits to have, absolutely. And I wonder, you're obviously in this shift at the moment, going from the consultancy to the more SaaS model. In terms of how you're structuring your business now and how that's changing, you mentioned earlier about a consultant-led model versus a full-time employee-led model prior to IR35.

How has that changed and are you struggling or finding challenges on the hiring side, particularly with this kind of talent drain that we're actually seeing within the UK at the moment? How's that impacting your plans?

Rajeev Nandan (29:54.182)

So the change that we are making requires us to have, there is a, in preparation for this podcast, I actually read through some of the articles on essentially the impact of AI and GenAI on skills and in marketing technology and even data analysis. So if you had a sort of a computer science sort of background, you don't really need computer science

computer scientists who work in martech because the tools are highly configurable and so I call this the sort of the semi-technical industry right we we are working with software that's built by really solid companies good startups so our engineers essentially data engineers they kind of do things on the surface which is very similar to what you do inside a chart gpt or a gemini

AI engine, right? You do the right setup and then you can run that. This kind of skill set is going to, is highly vulnerable to AI, right? So it's not deep software engineering skills, not back end skills. So we are kind of facing, noticing that the number of such, number of data analysts and some basic programmers we need is reducing, right?

This is a huge problem for us because we moved away from high. So one of the shifts we did is as we as a consulting business stabilized, we are

Rajeev Nandan (31:39.228)

and for our island's need to understand them as well.

Rajeev Nandan (31:46.473)

Sorry, I had a call coming.

Adam Cooper (31:47.822)

That's okay, just, no problem. Just carry on from where you left off, fine.

Rajeev Nandan (31:53.076)

So we moved on from, we actually did post-1935, did move to a strategy of permanent colleagues. We still do have a flexible 20 % I call them who are remote and in different countries and different parts of the UK. So we did move away from the high cost, high reliable senior resource, senior contractor resource to more permanent. We post-COVID, we set up a

beautiful office here in Siringdon, the tech quarter, which I'm pretty happy about. And so that shift happened, but now we're talking about the skill set. And the skill set of basic programming skills and analysis skills and all of that will get automated and in fact, each and every day. This is a World Economic Forum report. is one of those skill sets that would essentially get replaced with

with automation and agentic workflows, agentic being the term that AI agents work in the background to produce the insights that you need. You can have your legal contracts first seen by a notebook LM application from Google, available for free, I believe, right now. And then you send some questions to your legal counsel, which takes out the junior legal clerk who would have done that first pass for your documents.

facing exactly the same challenge. In creative, once again, I don't know if you noticed, if you're a Mac user, Apple have created a beautiful image generator. I was playing around with that, where it can do what tools like mid-journey have been doing for a couple of years now. Once again, creative is a huge part of marketing and execution of campaigns. So creative...

resources will actually more become creative AI engineers. In fact, they will need to shift focus and lot of the behaviors would need to change. It's not that they will get replaced. They will just need to adapt in a way that needs a little bit of work and thinking through right now. So yes, have, and finally, we just know that to be a tech SaaS business.

Rajeev Nandan (34:15.005)

we will become more of an engineering company rather than, we used to be very similar to a media agency in the past, we will look much more like a tech company in the future.

Adam Cooper (34:28.406)

Interesting. You said there about the, you've mentioned creative a couple of times in your answers and I'm interested, as you say, that shift away, or do you see it as a shift away from creative to data? Do you feel that with the, as you say, the changes around AI, the World Economic Forum report that you mentioned, does that mean that the importance of creative increases or is it something that you feel

It's about merging creative and data and everything's changing. How do you see that that kind of balance between the creative and the data sides?

Rajeev Nandan (35:07.879)

So I think there are very few university courses that are first for married, left-brained, right-brained, which the answer to your question demands creative and data. And unfortunately, even in the tech industry and the digital or the martech industry, the workflow has been such that creatives come up with what your user interface will look like.

They do some level of testing and then it's given to engineers to build and then it's launched. By the time it's launched, the creators have left the room. They're probably from a creative agency from central London or Manchester and they've gone into the next job. So they're no longer the guardians of the experience that they had initially imagined and built. That's headed over to a production and management team supported by a data analytics team, which might sit inside marketing or digital law or inside IT, right?

They see the performance of that interface. They see how customers are interacting. And they're the ones who are bringing the message that this is not working. I think this design is faulty or this journey ends up in a black hole on a 404 page that we need to help customers with all these things. So what will change now is that creatives will have the analysis power with AI and with analysts during design.

You might have heard of synthetic data. You can create synthetic web traffic to test your designs. These tools will start coming in. So a three-month design process where the last one month is creative teams scratching around to test their work and their designs will be inherently test driven. Inherently, customer testing will be incorporated in that.

So AI is able to give you these advantages at the beginning of the... If it's created for marketing communications or it's created for a website, it's going to give you that advantage. So creatives actually will benefit from this. There are elements of this creative workflow that will get supported by other place by AI and output to image production that Apple's recent. For that you need the software earlier in the past, need the graphic designer, the copywriter.

Rajeev Nandan (37:33.23)

Some of that is not going away. A lot of that is not going away. But it has to become more efficient. It has to become in a new world.

Adam Cooper (37:42.688)

I absolutely agree with you on that. One of the things, as you were talking there, I was thinking, you know, one of the challenges that people say about AI is obviously it's as good as the data that it's being trained on. And obviously, you know, a creative team and a creative view on things, you know, is something that naturally leads to original thought rather than, you know, something that copies or is based on data that's already being fed in. So what's your view on how

how as a company that is trying to join together creative and data, you overcome this, overcome this sort of limitation, natural limitation around AI.

Rajeev Nandan (38:25.201)

So we do a lot of workshops where we are required to come in with insights around a business problem, right? So if we are proposing to change an e-commerce acquisition journey to improve customer interaction, engagement, and therefore revenue, we have to understand the underlying behavior with the data they have. Now, what I'm talking about is that the analysts in the past

employer skills of knowing Google Analytics or other analytics tools. To create these reports, a huge amount of their time was actually spent on data collection and management and just organizing the thing because these tools were difficult to use. They are still difficult to use. They do often out of box KPI reports and things like that. That entire process is now upside down. do not need, analysts do not need to spend that time.

Then the focus, and a lot of them would get brownie points for just being able to handle these tools. That's gone. That's no longer a skill set for an analyst. Now the question I have with analysts is what insights are you gaining from this? And the AI is an assistant on that. But right now the challenge we have in our industry for AIs or for analysts or copywriters or creatives is if they have done an AI first thinking on this, they're undermining their own intuitions, their own...

personal creativity. So what we have noticed is when people come up with brains of charity, pity, supported insight for a meeting, first one is too much. Right? You know, I believe in the power of three, steam jobs, distilled everything into those. We need nuggets and we need inspirational ideas. We do not need charity, pity, volume. So we are in danger of being overprepared and less natural.

because it takes three seconds for Gemini to spit out 20 pages of insights on a particular problem. It even finds data which we haven't had time to validate. So we have to somehow teach our analysts, our creatives, our copywriters to not lose their intuition, to not lose their spark. Because if they keep doing it, they will get replaced. Because our clients are very much capable of doing exactly the same thing.

Rajeev Nandan (40:54.212)

They don't need us in that case, right? So we have to find this balance of when is it my assistant versus when is it replacing my work entirely, right? So I have a role of being the AI sniffer sometimes when I see, when I see actually you have gone too far in this, you probably need to shut down your computer and write on a piece of paper, go to the whiteboard and explain things. know, that's, we have to be,

This is the consulting part of the work, right? This is when the cracking a business problem does require human intervention, right? We still have a voice, we still have our brains and we are not there. We are not producing an AutoCAD design for the next car. We are producing ideas and we are cracking business problems and the assistance has to be from AI. This is, I think, a problem across every company, right?

and we are kind of exactly the same.

Adam Cooper (41:56.238)

I think we've got our quote there, Rajeev. You're the AI sniffer. I think that's brilliant. So I love that. And that's so true. It's like focusing the energies of your team on those nuggets and those inspirational ideas is so important and never more so now than when, as you say, there is 20 pages of chat GPT blurb that can be spat out and we need to be better.

Rajeev Nandan (42:01.967)

Thank you.

Adam Cooper (42:21.88)

We need to be better, absolutely. So I'm just shifting gears slightly conscious of time and we're gonna move on to what I call our business book bonus section. And this is where we ask our guests to provide us with a recommendation for the audience of a business book or any business content that's really helped you during your business career and that you want to recommend to the audience. So what would you like to recommend to our audience, Rajeev?

Rajeev Nandan (42:47.375)

So this is a great question, by the way, because one of the things we have lost in the era of TikTok style content consumption is long form content, right? So I would say that despite the influx of AI generated content on platforms like LinkedIn, it's still possible to follow some good authors who I know handcrafted. A couple of those people I'll mention, Scott Brinker, he's a writer on marketing technology. So

He is definitely one I would recommend. He has, I believe, also written a book. I haven't read them, but that would be a good recommendation. The second one is if you're interested in marketing and you want to go pre-gen AI and pre-charging BT, then there's a book which I've only partially read, but it's a great read. called Business Marketing by Seth Gordon, G-O-D-I-N. And that is for everybody.

from small business areas to large companies, people who want to understand the impact of brand and identity and effectiveness in marketing. That's a great read. I have just started listening to Salman Rushdie on storytelling on the Masterclass app. He is, I don't think he wants to be a teacher on writing, but he does a great job.

teaching you how to write stories. So those are my three recommendations for today.

Adam Cooper (44:23.53)

Excellent. That was a very nicely varied three there, Seth Godin, Scott Breaker and Salman Rushdie. We'll put links to those in the show notes. And thank you very much. is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to say before we wrap up or if not, where can people find you?

Rajeev Nandan (44:42.401)

I think can find me on LinkedIn, Rajeev Nandan, working for Peerint. I think we have covered a great deal today, Adam, so thank you. Thank you for this opportunity. I do want to say we have spoken about AI a great deal in this, and there is a lot of uncertainty in the careers market. We have a war in the East, and we have a very unstable geopolitical environment, at least for me.

conversation standpoint when things appear to be shifting every day. But I think it's also a great opportunity for us to apply our minds. And there are different roles everybody's going to play with the advantages that GEN.AI technologies that's bringing to us. And every industry starts to benefit. we have to... So I'm the first internet boom. So that's why I know that actually I should pay more attention at this point in time.

And even if you are leaving school at this point in time or you're at uni or you're mid-career or you're 50, I turned 50 last week, you have a massive maturity and a pivot point at this point in time. So don't be afraid of being uncertain times, as some would call it. You don't find that knots are a new one if you want to play with it for a while. It's a great time to experiment and learn new skills.

Adam Cooper (46:10.272)

That's a great positive note to end on. So thank you very much, Rajeev, for joining me today on the Fractional CFO show and I really appreciate your insight, your perspective and your time. Thank you.

Rajeev Nandan (46:21.772)

Thank you and Godspeed. Take care.