Introduction to Mark de Grasse

SPEAKER_01

Hey AI enthusiasts and forward-thinking business leaders. Today our guest is Mark de Grasse. Through his company, AI Branding Academy, he's equipping marketers with custom AI tools and techniques that are delivering world-class branding strategies. Mark's been involved in creating over 300 brands and producing more than 50,000 pieces of content. And he's got a particular interest in preparing businesses for the future, especially in the context of AI's impact on marketing. As always, this episode is packed with insights on how early adopters, like Mark, are using AI at work and how you can too. Now, let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Dagle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. Okay, I'm excited to get this episode started. This is the first episode in our news studio with such a fantastic guest. We kind of surprised Mark as he showed up, but today's guest is Mark Degrasse. AI Branding Academy is his company. And Mark's about to share with us actually, I have a lot of questions because I'm not a branding guy. So, and I need to be. This is going to be an important lesson for me as well. So with that, uh Mark, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and how you ended up here today?

SPEAKER_00

Sure. I founded the AI Branding Academy pretty recently. I've been doing uh marketing and business development for about uh 20 years, uh, a lot of content development. I've had magazines and content platforms, and I actually built a company 100% organically and then sold it using basically just content. So when AI came around, I got very, very excited because I'm always trying to teach people how to create lots and lots of content. And it's really difficult because you have that creative side that a lot of people don't really understand. Uh, but AI has actually negated the need for you to get really good at it. And instead, you could lean on AI, create a lot of good content using you know what you're good at, and then uh, you know, get traffic without having to pay for it.

SPEAKER_01

100% agree with everything you've just said. I got a question though. How how important is the content for the branding? Uh it's it's uh it's what your brand is.

SPEAKER_00

So the way I look at content is your forward-facing evidence of your competency. So if you're not making content, if you're not not giving anybody a reason or evidence that you really know what you're talking about, then you could just be full of crap and nobody would really be able to tell. You could be, you know, very good at presenting, you could have a good packaging and you could look really good. But at the end of the day, if people have to make a decision on whether to work with you or not based on how you look, uh, I think it's not going to be as good as you basically saying, hey, here's an article or here's a video or here's a tutorial or something that educate people on exactly what you're supposed to be uh a

The Importance of Content in Branding

SPEAKER_00

pro or expert at.

SPEAKER_01

So this is interesting because in my definition or my understanding of branding, it was the strictly the aesthetic. Ah, yeah. But that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00

No, no, that's that's the common misconception is that branding is your logo and your fonts and your colors, and that's it. That's that's your brand. To me, branding is anything that you're recognized for. And so you should be recognized for every element of your business, your product, your services, your customer care, uh, you know, of course, how you look, you know, your logo, your website, uh, how your office looks, uh, all of that is necessary. But what's actually more important is that every single impression that you make on a potential customer or an existing customer is either going to take away from your brand or add to it. And so if unless you're defining every interaction that somebody could have with your business, whether it's internally or externally, then you're missing out. You're essentially telling people that uh you haven't taken the time and effort to define how uh you know your employees talk to your customers or how they should be responding to emails or how the product's supposed to perform. And so my premise is that since we didn't have AI before, it was impossible to take the vision of the founder and really put it into all those different elements of a business. But you have AI now, and so there's really no excuse uh not to form everything around the brand.

SPEAKER_01

Seems like w without AI, I mean, I I we have a brand, but I don't know that we've necessarily clearly defined our brand voice, and I don't know whatever we have defined. I don't know that it has been clearly interpreted to our team and those who represent our what we're doing, so that there's a cohesive message. So how does one go about doing that?

SPEAKER_00

So that's exactly what I found too, is that you know, everything should be branded, every interaction, every employee manual, every uh event that you hold. But the problem is that you would need like a brand manager or brand Nazi to basically harass everybody into compliance and say, hey, you know, that's not a term that we're supposed to use. That font is wrong, that spacing on the sign is wrong. Like it would have to be this person who just everybody hates. Uh so nobody wanted to do that. So what you could do now though is form essentially, I call it the soul of your brand, your brand pillars. And so there's nine different pillars that we defined at the academy. It includes your brand voice, brand slogan, brand summary, uh, core brand values. So all the typical elements that you'd usually find in like a business plan, you define all these at the very beginning using uh a set of GPTs that I set up. And then once you have the brand pillars, now you basically feed that into any AI platform and say, hey, based on these brand pillars, create me an article about X. Now it has your brand voice, it has your values. And so now you can basically flavor everything you do just by saying, refer to these brand pillars. Now there's a few different steps, but that's the first one. Then we have your brand essentials, which is more of your visual elements, and then we have the style guides, which include your community styling, visual styling, written styling, interactive styling, and experiential styling. And so it's a very complete program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it takes a little bit of work, but as soon as you have what we call the blueprint, now you can apply everything to every single process that you have within a company. And instead of relying on your employees to come up with processes, you could basically say, hey, refer to the GPT. It has all of our data, and then that'll kick out whatever they need, and it'll be branded without them having to think.

SPEAKER_01

So in your program, you actually encourage people to build those custom GPTs based on how you've built yours, or they use your technology.

SPEAKER_00

It's actually a framework. Okay. So uh I have partners, and the partners have access to essentially the source code for all of the GPTs and all of the AI that we use, and then they can employ it however they want to execute. So our target market is really professional marketers and agencies who want to go deliver this service. And what I was trying to do was give marketers the ability to implement uh their own systems in a uh AI systematic way that now they could add AI. They could say they do AI because everybody needs to say they do AI now. Yeah, that's like a misnomer. But uh, you know, for it's eventually gonna be known as the internet. Like, hey, yeah, I'm on the my website, it's you know, my business is on the internet. It's like, yeah, your business uses AI, that's the same thing. Uh, but it nobody's really thought about how to systematically apply it. And so, you know, they'd randomly generate something or randomly use it for a process. But my thing is if if nothing you do is branded, then none of it matters anyways, because you're not adding to the brand

AI’s Role in Defining Brand Voice

SPEAKER_00

value every time you do anything.

SPEAKER_01

So this is very interesting because a b a big um push for us for the past six months is so I launched a podcast at the beginning of the year on the encouragement of um my investors. They said you have to, you know, like it helps with the distribution. And I've um have trained with some people that both you and I know who focus very much on looking for leverage in every opportunity they get. And with the podcast, it's great, it's out there. But I was looking for ways to repurpose that content, leveraging, you know, eating the dog food, leveraging AI. One of the challenges initially was um if I'm going to be presenting as an expert in using AI, I don't want my output or my um content to have a synthetic field. For for anybody who's if you don't know what that means, it's essentially this is authentic, we're having a real conversation. Synthetic would be generated by the machine. We generate a lot by the machine with very little interaction at this point because we've calibrated prompts and that sort of thing, with the intention being authentic output, indistinguishable from me writing it versus the machine writing it. However, a cohesive narrative or brand voice or anything is absent from that. So for somebody like me or somebody who's out there is already creating content and they're doing it, maybe they're still doing it the old way and like beating up the keyboard and spending a lot of time. What would you recommend for them to? I mean, obviously the AI branding academy would have the full complement of what you need to do, but what would be some simple steps for people to at least start to consider when they're creating this content?

SPEAKER_00

I I would say definitions because a lot of people, especially in, you know, I'm in marketing, and so there's a lot of terms in marketing. You have funnels and you have campaigns and you have customer journeys. All that crap is the same thing. The problem is that within most industries is nobody sat down to say, okay, what does this word mean for my business? What does this service mean for my business? Uh, we think that there's some kind of like default view of what we do somewhere floating out there that everybody understands. There's not. There's only what you define. And so I'd say if you really want to start having your brand voice enacted, one, if you just define your brand voice, and then uh when you start any of these prompts, you just say use this brand voice. That's the easy way. Uh, but the more uh you know advanced way is to say, hey, what are the terms that we use often and what are our definitions for the terms? Now we didn't do this before because writing definitions for terms is boring and hard, uh, but we have AI. So you could now say, hey, here's what it means for my business. You know, so let's say that I am a car mechanic and I want to get some organic traffic online. If you just started saying, like, hey, just define an oil change, and you might say, Well, everybody knows what an oil change is. It's like, no, everybody doesn't know what an oil change is. On top of the fact that your definition of what that means is completely different than Bob down the street. So you haven't done that. So now you're leaving it up to the public to figure it out. Like, why would you do that? So if you really want to get ahead, like make a list of like your core things that you do and just define it using AI. Say, hey, uh, you know, I'm Bob the mechanic, AI, uh, I need you to create a definition for an auto change. At my shop, we make sure we do these five steps. And so this is our process for doing an auto change. AI will come back and say, okay, well, it looks like this, and they'll give you a nice little summary. And then now you start uh, you know, creating a dictionary essentially and training all your employees on it, and then all of a sudden, without even trying, you've created a system of definitions that now all your employees use and understand, and now your customers can use and understand too. So it sounds like a roundabout process, but when it comes to content, like you have to define it. Yeah. Well, with AI, if you leave AI to define it, it'll define it differently every single time. So, and so we're real employees. You know, an oil change to you know, your new mechanic mic might mean something completely different. So, you know, the whole process that I'm talking about is actually really integrated with your operations too, but you're getting content at the same time, you're getting customer care at the same time, and you're also getting the ability for your salespeople to really brand what they're selling all at once.

SPEAKER_01

And then the conversation the salesperson has doesn't really change when the person starts the prospect goes to client, client becomes you know a fulfillment obligation. Their experience isn't, well, the sales guys said this and customer service said it this way. Never done that.

SPEAKER_00

Well, you know what's funny, because I came from an operational side too. Like I've had businesses and I've I've had four different executive roles, and they were all different. And so I've seen how operations usually work. And really the communication problem is just that that, you know, uh, you know, Billy the salesperson sold them on these features that he didn't communicate to customer care, or maybe customer care doesn't even know what they are. And then all of a sudden you have this uh, you know, really jarring experience for somebody who got sold on something, and then, oh, look, it's completely different. So I've tried to enact everything within marketing to say, hey, you could build content, you could train your employees, you could train your customer, all while creating information that you could also share online. And then now it's all combined into a single system.

Integrating Operations with Branding

SPEAKER_01

So in the frameworks that you teach, it's about defining the brand, but what about the content creation itself? What processes do you recommend that people do so that they're leveraging AI, staying true to the voice, and getting the ultimate impact of engagement or that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_00

Great question. I I call them content machines. Okay. Uh what you need is a platform that you could constantly add to and and create more and more things, and it'll just keep on building. So kind of building like a database on most of the past. It is a data set. Most people don't know what a data set is, though. So data set is just a list of information. Uh, but you have to deliver it. And I like to deliver it in uh time-sensitive ways. And so typically a podcast would actually fit. Uh, but you would say, in my system, you'd say a season of a podcast. And so, okay, uh, we're gonna do a 30-episode season, we're gonna choose a subject matter that is the most related to our potential customer. So for you, it might be uh AI. So the first season is just about novel uses of AI, and now you book all the people, and now you have a set thing that you're gonna get done. And so that's what I would call a content machine. So the season is the content machine. So you can create all this stuff and now it gets delivered in a certain way in a certain time. And now, because you did it all in the same kind of sequence, now it's branded and it feels like you have a case study, essentially. Now you could do this with magazines too, or blogs or newsletters. Um, but you just have to decide on the machine and then how often are you gonna build it and you know how long is it gonna go?

SPEAKER_01

This is great because I'm learning how many things I'm doing wrong. No, there's no, there's no wrong, you know.

SPEAKER_00

The thing is it's just different ways.

SPEAKER_01

Well, how about I'm I'm doing it the hard way? The hard way.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's actually a good way to say it.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Well, I'd like to stop doing that. So for somebody, if they were gonna go into this effort, and obviously, like I wouldn't start from scratch, I'd be looking for frameworks that I could lean on for what you've got there. In your environment, what does that process like how much effort is involved from the business owner or the thought leader who's looking for this?

SPEAKER_00

It has to be minimum because the problem is that any content initiative isn't gonna work if you stop. So tell me about that. Well, most of the time people say, Hey, I'm gonna start a podcast. Like, oh, I got all these people lined up, I'm gonna do all this stuff, and then they they do a few episodes and they're like, Well, I put them up and nobody liked it, and nobody shared it, and now I'm discouraged because I've been doing this for two weeks. I spent all this time and effort, and so I'm just gonna stop. And so what people need to realize is that nobody you don't subscribe to stuff you've seen once, right? You know, even if you see a viral post and it's by an awesome creator and they say amazing things, like I still don't subscribe most of the time until I've seen a few pieces. And so, what you're not doing is giving people the time to actually get to know and like what you're putting out, or you're doing it so randomly that they can't see a pattern and there's no reason to subscribe. It's just like the McDonald's model where it's like, hey, McDonald's sucks. It's trash food, if you can even call it that. But if I'm in a foreign country and I'm unfamiliar with the dialect and I've never eaten anywhere and I see a McDonald's, I know what I'm gonna get. And so, even though I don't like the food, I don't like the corporation, I don't like anything about it, it's still safe. And so I'm gonna go back to that place. So that's how that's how you have to look at subscriptions. People don't subscribe to a single idea or concept, they subscribe to somebody who's consistently putting things out. And so what you have to do is just keep on putting it out to find those people. Now it doesn't have to be super defined or even good at the beginning. And if you look at any YouTube, YouTuber who's been on yeah, you go to the beginning, you're like, oh my gosh, this was trash. And it's like, yeah, because that's how you have to start. And so initially, what people do is they don't do enough content. You know, they say, Hey, I've done 10 pieces and it's not working, and then they just stop versus I say minimum 30. You do 30 pieces of content. Ideally, you do it in a systematic way. And so you say, Okay, here's my podcast episode. I start with this, then I go here, then I ask this question, and then you go here. Okay, and this is it, this is the topic. And then you do all of them like that. So now you have a case study, you have 30 pieces, and now at the end of 30, you could say, okay, let me review. And you'll find that two or three did much better than the rest. Then you set up your next season and say, Okay, those are the two that were hit. I had fun talking to these people. It's easy to do these ones, so I like that aspect. Now you take those lessons, you incorporate it to season two, and start calibrating. You do it again. Yeah, yeah. So it's uh it's just like paid advertising. Everybody knows in paid advertising, A, B testing, you do this and then this, you change one parameter, and then you do it again and you do it again. Uh, but we don't apply that to everything else. So for me, I'm like, no, these are all tried and proven methodologies for advertising. You just didn't take enough time to make it work. And so keep going, you know.

SPEAKER_01

So that should be an expectation for anybody that's creating that that wants to get a uh a content momentum behind their brand, they got to stick with it. And I don't know if there's any numbers that you can share with us, but what is that what does that cycle look like as far as like how much time before I start getting gratified from my It's a while.

SPEAKER_00

Well, there's a cheat code. Okay, and the cheat code's called money. And so if you want to say, hey, I need to rush this experiment, typically I tell people a year. Okay. It's gonna take 12 months of consistent content creation, consistent delivery, and you'll have an answer. And you'll be doing better than 99% of people on that organic topic if you did it right. And there's lots of ways to do it wrong. But uh, most people just are gonna quit after the first month. And so you have to figure you're beating out nine out of 10 people just by continuing, showing up on day one. Yep. And it's it, but it most of the time it's a year, and and there's you know, magic happens sometimes. If you are, oh, it's just my first Instagram. Now it's a zillion dollar. Uh that's not gonna be you. You don't know enough, you're not magic. Maybe you are, but you're talking about somebody who essentially walked on like red-shirted college and just like, oh, I'm just magic. And you're like, okay, well, you don't, we don't, we're not gonna talk about you. Uh your average person, it's gonna be a year, it's gonna be a grind, you're gonna feel bad during the process. Uh, but continue on. And it's because nobody's nobody keeps going, everybody quits. And I'm just like, no, I've seen and people think it's about being good, and it's not about being good because there's tons of people who like bad stuff too. And so even if your stuff is trash, that there's still a market for it. You just need to be consistent enough to deliver it, and then you'll find your people.

SPEAKER_01

You know, that's encouraging to hear that because I I've had the opportunity and the inclination to create content and establish thought leadership in in my industry for 15 years, but it seemed like a lot of work. There wasn't it was kind of like the the payoff was somewhere in the future. And as an entrepreneur, you wear a lot of hats, right? So you're like, not only do you want it now, but you don't have bandwidth to necessarily invest your resources into something that doesn't have like with marketing, if I spend a dollar, I can measure it, right? And with this, it's a little different. However, there is a moat anybody can go buy an ad and they can actually bid more than you, and your ad drops down. But with something like this, with everybody dropping up, because there's that there is an intention behind it beyond just spending money, you have the opportunity to establish something that for somebody else to catch up with, they've got that year learning curve ahead of them. So yeah. And now with AI, and that was that was the reason that I started doing more content, was because the the result cycle for creating that content was compressed significantly. So if somebody is interested in testing this stuff out, now I know that you guys have your own tools, but are there some tools that you've seen in the marketplace that you're like, oh, this is a must-have for somebody who's interested in a content effort?

SPEAKER_00

You know, I always tell people Chat GPT, okay, you know, because it's 60% of the market, you know, it's 60% of the traffic. I'm not sure about you know, users, but um, everybody uses it. It's been the most consistent, it's been around for really long time. It's kind of like Tesla and electric cars. It's like everybody's coming out with an electric car, but it's like, yeah, but they have been doing it for 15 years. Like it's a long time for that thing. So uh, and it doesn't change as much as some of the other ones, which are just all over the place. Now, is it the best? I actually think that Claude, in terms of generative content or creativity, is better, but I'm all about processes. And in terms of like a business owner, like Chat GPT is gonna do more in terms of helping you with operations, helping you with processes, helping the utility tool. The utility. Yeah. And so even if you you know need something a little bit more creative sometimes, like no, chat GPT, like just learn how to use it. It's like the default, and then you could get more advanced somewhere else, but there's gonna be a consolidation in the next like. Six 12 months, who knows what's going to be around. And so why waste your time?

SPEAKER_01

It's a great point, you know, because I on the interviews we have a variety of people and a lot, all the creatives. I use Claude Opus, I use Claude, right? And I haven't had the results that they get from Claude, but like you, I'm not just using it for the creative side or the content. I'm using it for ideation, strategy, coming up with all kinds of stuff. And I didn't get the results from Claude that I do get from ChatGPT. So I'm glad to hear that I'm at least using the right model based on.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, anybody it could change, you know, and they they're all doing dumb stuff still because you have like uh with ChatGPT, they have this memory feature where it remembers your past. But if you're a marketer, you're working with like a hundred different companies, and all of a sudden all your stuff's jacked up because the memory is based on a single brand and not the brand you're talking about. So there's still some stuff going on, and Claude has issues too, and sometimes they all break. Yeah. So, you know, if you just uh I'd say create your your tech stack suite for like your core things. For me, it's Jet GPT, Claude, uh, mid journey, and perplexity. And so those are like my four that I always use. And then I'm much I get better and better at using those, so you get proficient. So I just say just pick one and say, I'm gonna be really good at that, but just make sure it's a big advice and not some random app you downloaded because there's a ton of them are just open AI's API plugged into something dumb, and then oh, sorry, and then uh and then you're stuck with like this whatever, like it's just bad results and you're paying for it. So yeah, Chat GPT.

SPEAKER_01

So what were you doing in the branding space prior to launching the academy?

SPEAKER_00

Well, you know, I had an agency for about six years. Uh my last uh gig was as the presidentdigital marketer.com. Prior to that, I had an agency where I built 300 different brands, essentially myself for small business owners. And what I was trying to do was essentially give the business owner everything they needed to do marketing themselves. And so I built the website, built the brand, built the lead magnet, built the funnel, uh, social media graphics, like the whole suite. And then I created like 30 tutorials to say, hey, here's how to employ all these things I built for you. Five percent of the time, they actually did anything. And so what I learned was I actually wanted to work with marketers. Marketers appreciated the information, could understand and execute it, and actually wanted to do marketing where nobody else does. So I got into branding specifically. So I built all these brands, right? So I have a lot of experience. Uh, but when I was trying to figure out, like, I want to make an AI company, but I want it to be really useful for long term. Um, I couldn't do that without the branding elements because I could tell you how to make an article or write a book or build a magazine or whatever I want. However, unless you have the brand set up, then all that crap is gonna be all over the place. Well, it's just AI's decision that day. Here's what AI thinks today. And it's like, okay, well, that's useless on top of the fact that, you know, eventually we're all gonna have like so much access to AI that we're not even gonna be thinking about it, which means that why should anybody come to your brand and your content when AI can generate everything? Like, what's the point? The point is your brand has a flavor to it. You know, let's say that you're a straight shooter, so you just like this guy's YouTube channel because he just speaks to it straight, no fluff, no stories, he just says facts. Like, that's what I like. So, what you're trying to do is say, hey, I'm like this. Uh yeah, we all have access to the same information, but my information is flavored like this, and you'd be like, Oh, I love that. I don't care that I have it all. I like this type. And so if you don't have that flavor, like if people can't identify your content and your brand with everything that you do, all of a sudden it's like, Mom, what's the point? I don't need to go to you. I have magic machine to give me all the answers. So you literally have to brand it. Otherwise, you're basically sending people to generic AI. And the next step for this is actually that you're gonna have to start licensing your information, protecting your information. That way it doesn't get stolen by AI and just recreated somewhere else. And so that's another component that we haven't we don't have to worry about as much. We probably all should worry about right now. Uh, but you're gonna have to own all your data set. But what this is also gonna do is make brands like infinitely more valuable because in five years, when nobody creates content anymore because AI is doing it for them, and you have a data set from your industry with uh, I don't know, 50,000 pieces of content, that AI company is gonna be very interested in you because they'll say, Hey, we don't have to build the data set. Like, oh, the data set's got done and it's branded and it comes with a following. So essentially, when you get into branding, you're getting into value creation for the company itself. And now you could sell it for you know millions of dollars or whatever they'll pay for it. Who knows? You know.

SPEAKER_01

So that's an interesting way of looking at it. Entrepreneur, marketer, all the that stuff is in my background as well. And branding was always it was always like a stepchild. Yeah. It was like, oh, you know, how do you measure it and all that kind of stuff? And it didn't seem like it was uh it's it seemed like something that the bigger companies could afford to do because they've got money to throw away. If you're enjoying this episode and want to learn more about how to start using AI at work, we've made it easy for you. For just one dollar, you can have full access to the Chief AI Officer community, which will give you additional training, custom software, daily training calls on AI tools, using AI automations, getting more from your Chat GPT sessions, and the business of being an AI consultant. Simply go to chiefaiofficer.com forward slash insiders to accelerate your AI journey. Now, back to the episode. But the way that you're describing it, A, it's accessible to a solopreneur, B, it's important to that individual, not just so that they've got uh consistent messaging, but you're you're saying they're actually creating intellectual property that makes their business, even if it's a solopreneur business, more valuable to the outside who might be interested in buying the company, partnering with the company, whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so, but when you're not doing it, you're essentially uh assigning that task of defining the brand to your employees and that contractor

Operational Efficiency Through Branding

SPEAKER_00

you just saw. And the marketplace, the customer, which is even worse. Yeah. So a lot of times when you see these brands, like, oh, I can't do that until I'm a billion-dollar company, like Nike, and we always quote like Nike and Apple. It's like, no. What branding does is essentially make your operation infinitely more uh efficient. And so instead of, hey, okay, we're doing a booth, guys, let's get ready for the show coming up in a couple months. What should we do? Right. Then you get in the room with the whiteboard and you put the bubble in the middle and you start putting random ideas up, and then you come up with this piece of crap that's committee built and it isn't reflecting maybe the owner. The mission. Yeah, it's just some, it's probably the most obnoxious person in the room is making all of your design decisions for a booth. And it's like, what are you talking about? You have a defined brand. We shouldn't be discussing this at all, especially with people who aren't qualified, which is usually what we do. We take the marketing task, which is very nuanced, and we say, Hey, random jerks, you know, Sally, the intern, has the exact same decision making and design power as the graphic designer because we're all in the same room coming up with crap. That's completely wrong. You wouldn't do that with your legal consulting, you wouldn't do that with your financial consulting. But some reason the face of the company, let's just make it up as we go. So it's when I started looking at it, I'm like, it's crazy that we even operate like this, even a little.

SPEAKER_01

These are huge wake-up calls from a you said something just a moment ago that was had never come into my consideration before that that this effort is part of an operational process. It it makes your operations more efficient. And when you said it, I immediately got it. I'm an ops guy and never considered that as a contribution to a more efficiently running company. Yes. But it makes perfect sense.

SPEAKER_00

Well, and that's true. Well, it's because we've really devalued marketing. We've turned marketing from like this profession, mad men on you know, New York, and it went to like, uh, whatever Fiverr guy who does Google ads for five bucks. It's like we and it's marketed like that too. Because if you look at the GoDaddy, build a website. Look, I'm in a kitchen and I built a million-dollar website. Like, no, so we it's not everybody's fault that it's come to this. It's just uh we need to change it because the perspective of marketing is that it's kind of this whatever task that anybody can do instead of what it actually is, which is like equal parts art and science, and at least as complicated as accounting and legal, but we just don't appreciate it like that.

SPEAKER_01

Interesting. So the people that are being attracted to your message, is there a specific avatar? I know you said marketing, marketers, and agencies, but are are people from outside of that ecosystem uh coming? And what is it that's attracting them?

SPEAKER_00

I I think it's the the branding aspect because the the way I I put the you know, defining your brand was really uh taking the vision of the owner, the vision of the person who has the most to lose, also has the most to gain, but is probably the most passionate about the success of the business and propagating it throughout the entire organization. And so if you if you don't do this stuff though, it it's just you're leaving it up to everybody you hire. And what I saw, because I I did do a lot of hiring, was that this uh effort to always find somebody from the outside. Somebody on the outside's gonna come better. Yeah, they know better. I don't know TikTok. Let me hire the TikTok person and let them make some stuff up. It's like, what are you doing? Makes perfect sense, you know. And then you don't train them right, and then you then you're surprised when they're unhappy and they're not getting the results that you wanted. It's like, of course they aren't. You didn't do anything correctly. You need to be bring them on board and you need to define to them what it is. And really, what I think is gonna end up happening is companies are just gonna start to realize, like, hey, I should just you know promote from within because they know the business. Yeah, instead of random person comes in, and that person could be a miracle worker, like you get some unicorn and they come in and they change the whole company. That rarely happens because that person is having to deal with years of people defining their own crap, and now all of a sudden they're gonna change that. No, they're not gonna change that.

SPEAKER_01

So if you've been doing this for this long, at what point was it that you started considering AI as perhaps a collaborator or provider of these services on your behalf?

SPEAKER_00

Oh man, AI was like a miracle when I came up because I I looked into it probably like four years ago. Uh, there's a company called Synthasia that does the avatars, right? They've actually been around for a long time. And a friend of mine Were they doing avatars before? Oh, yeah. Okay, at least back then. Okay. And it was a friend of mine that was investing or had some connection with them. And I was like, uh, that's useful maybe for like HR videos, but nothing real. Yeah. Uh and then it wasn't until like 2022, I want to say, that I used Chat GPT and uh a company called Lensa that does like the avatars. Remember when everybody was posting the AI avatars? Yep. Uh, but I did that, I was like, this is the first time I've like really acknowledged that this is a useful tool and not just useful for like, hey, I could write some articles. I was like, man, I just compressed 40 hours of research into like 30 minutes. Like the amount of time I would have spent doing just the ideation part, I was like, this is this is instant. So I was like, okay, AI is cool now, but AI itself, I've probably read like a thousand instances of AI because I'm very into hard science fiction, which is like a subgenre of science fiction is more technical. Uh, and I was like, I know exactly how this could go a bunch of different ways. And most of the time, what you find is science fiction authors have predicted the future a million different ways. Yep. And I'm like, well, one of these has to be right. But I really saw it as like, this is what we always wanted computers to do. Nobody looked at computers in the 50s, sci-fi, and was like, I really want to learn how to program. I want to have to learn how to program this app so I could find pictures of my son's birthday party from five years ago. That because that's what you have to do on Facebook. You have to say, okay, uh, I want to find pictures of my son's birthday party from five years ago. Let me go find my wife's profile, let me find her pictures, let me scroll down, let me see if it's there. You know, what we wanted was Facebook show me pictures of my son's birthday from five years ago. It has all the data. It should know that at the very least. But instead, we're taught to be programmers of a clunky, ugly system that changes all the time. That's not how computers are supposed to work. So AI, essentially to me, is what computers were expected to be for like the history or at least the last hundred years, and now it's finally coming up. So I'm like, yeah, this is a feature capability that we should have had a long time ago.

SPEAKER_01

So it's interesting because I'm always curious for somebody who's uh just getting their toes into the water of AI. The easy questions

The Evolution of AI in Branding

SPEAKER_01

are, okay, how much money is it gonna save me? How much is it gonna cost me? Like they're looking at those really uh I got a quote that I like to use arithmetics, not an opinion. Yeah, right. So they're looking for that quantifiable input. And you said that the first time that you had that aha moment, you realized how much time it saved you and in your internal process, it was able to do that really quickly. With what you're doing now with the academy, what would the staff requirements need to look like if you were doing this without AI?

SPEAKER_00

Oh man, it just enormous. You would have to have a writer, a researcher, uh at least one assistant to set up scheduling. Like, I mean, it would be well, I I just couldn't do it. Yeah. Actually, I just I made a magazine over a weekend just to as like a case study to say, like, okay, well, if I had AI, like how fast could I make this happen? Because I always I love magazines. I think it's it's curated, it's you love them as a deliverable or as somebody who consumes them.

SPEAKER_01

Uh both. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, because what we have, you know, when the internet came online and we got Google, we started going out and and finding the information we always wanted. Problem is that you don't always know the information that you want. Yeah. Right. And so if you can't search for something you don't know about, how do you get it? And basically we all just said, oh, we'll just, I guess we'll just look for what we we want. And that sucks because we never discover anything new. And so for me, magazines show you stuff that in a category you're interested in, but shows you a bunch of stuff that you've never even thought of. And so all of a sudden now you have access to a bunch of stuff. Plus, it's curated, which or it's like a set time, and so you have to get the project done. And so a lot of these like operational aspects of making a publication actually are really good for delivering information on all platforms because now you got it done. Versus I have a blog or I'm supposed to post on social. Yeah, and then it just becomes this chore, like brushing your teeth, and I'm like, eh, it's you're not gonna make anything good doing it like that.

SPEAKER_01

So interesting perspective. So you're building in like urgency because people are expecting this to drop on a certain day or whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. You set that expectation, you set it for yourself. You said because with me, you know, if I don't have a deadline, like it's not getting done. Yeah, like if it's no, just do it as you feel like it. Like, no, who operates like stays on the whiteboard for a long time. Urgency, and I need a tough deadline, and then then magic happens. Now, what would have taken you maybe a hundred hours now takes you, you know, because you only have 10, took you 10. Yeah, yeah. So uh it helps a ton. And then and then now you have a format. So the other part, again, is operational, where instead of me having to structure, like, okay, supposed to put up an article a day. What should I write today? It's like, no, the magazine, the X magazine issue is gonna be uh a generative AI for uh fast content generation. Like that's the subject matter of the thing. Oh, okay, well, generative AI for fast content. Okay, well, here's how to make a podcast, and here's how to make an article. And now all these decisions that you're like, oh, what do I do are now just automatically done. And then if you format it a certain way, then now you have a format for articles, you have a format for podcasts, you have a format for videos. No thinking. You gotta not think.

SPEAKER_01

So a magazine seems like a big lift for. I mean, I don't have a big team, and it seems like, wow, that would be cool. It'd make us look like we were a lot bigger than we were, but that seems like a big lift. But you're saying that you tell me what building a magazine in a weekend looked like.

SPEAKER_00

Uh, well, most of people have lots of content, right? We all make content. So for me, I I was gonna give a speech in January and I was like, I want to give something out, but if I do a book, everybody has a book. Nobody reads them most of the time. Yeah, but I was like, everybody loves magazines, and so I just took my top content from the previous year and I just formatted it into a magazine. And so I've done that before. Yeah, yeah. But I was able to do something that would have taken me 100 to 200 hours in about 10 to 20. And that's because I didn't need an editor, uh, I didn't need a photographer, I didn't need a graphic designer. Uh, I basically took the logo that I generated for the magazine, I reversed engineering it, engineered it using something I call logo craft, where basically it looks at your you upload your logo to Chat GPT, you run a single prompt. Interesting. It spits out like here's the brand identity based on the visual that you just provided. And so then I designed the magazine based off of the parameters that it gave me. And so that solved a bunch of other problems too, and then boom, it was done. Now, I have done this a lot of times before, so a lot of people can't. But if you get the one issue done, then now you have the format, you got the layouts. Now it's just a matter of get the content, which content's easy, and then now you just plug it in again and again and again, and there you go. And now you can talk to people and get contributors, yeah, which is why I started doing it.

SPEAKER_01

So this is interesting because I I always think about using AI to generate online content, not physical content, not we we we helped, it helped with a book that we did, but the magazine is fascinating and that's further moat. Like I'm always looking for as a business owner the oil change. Well, everybody on this block does oil changes. Oh, but we do the blank oil change, right? Like if you can do that, you're you're uh there's a quote from Buckminster Fuller that I learned a long time ago, and he said, You don't win by competing in the existing paradigm, you create a new paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. Now, creating an entire paradigm is challenging. However, creating a point of distinction in the marketplace from branding isn't like you're essentially getting that benefit of the new paradigm because you're no longer the same category as every other oil change, oil change, oil change. And a magazine seems like something that would certainly contribute to that perspective in the marketplace. Oh, these guys are different. And I guess you can always, if you do end up using the tools to create that physical deliverable, you can certainly comment on it online.

SPEAKER_00

So you still get the added benefit of the well, you put it up as an online issue. You then publish the articles as online articles and you create graphics off of the pictures that you've made in there. I mean, it's there's a million uses. You could basically do one magazine a year and probably set up your content schedule for the entire year. You know, you just say an article per month, and then we split the article into 10 or 20 splinter pieces, and then they refer back to the article. So now you're creating this ecosystem of, hey, here's a neat tip. And did you know this is only one of five of the ones that you found in the this article? Click here for the article. And so, and that's that's why I started it because I found that um, you know, my business partner at the time when I had a fitness magazine, knew all these trainers and he was constantly talking to these trainers. I'm like, this isn't doing anything for us. Uh, but they have all this information. What if they just send us an article and then I'll put it in a magazine, and then they get the magazine, which they'll then hand out to people. Yes. And so uh I did it really for content collection. Yeah. Because nobody, if you say, Hey, write for my blog, everybody's like, uh, yeah, hey, write for my magazine. And then you show them, oh, and I'll send you a few issues. Oh, instantly, like everybody wants to be in it. And so I got tens of thousands of pieces of information just for distributing the information. And so that that's why I kind of started it. Yeah, and then that became you know, the online platform, which led to a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm very interested in that part. We're gonna be exploring that. Well, but it's a timetable because a lot of times, even if you say, like, hey, I want to you know recruit contributors and you know, yeah, you'll write for us, but you don't really define when or how or all these things, it's like, no, magazine. We got the magazine coming out. Deadline. I just posted with my partners. I said, Hey partners, we're coming out with this in 30 days. You have two are two weeks to get me an article that should be considered. Here's the parameters, here's the layout, go. And a lot, a lot of people won't do it, but a lot of times what I would do is reach out to 20 people for a topic, and there's a certain percentage that we'll definitely get back to you. And then there you go, you got content forever. Like I have more content than I could ever publish. And that's just sitting there.

SPEAKER_01

I like the fact that by by doing that, that if you're asking other people to contribute, right? Moves it up to the top of their priority list. Oh, there's a deadline. Blog, he'll post it whenever, but a magazine is getting that's very interesting. I'm um gonna explore that.

SPEAKER_00

Though I am developing these for other people, so it's it's it's pretty intense, but like I said, just do one. Yeah, you don't have to plan, oh, let me set up a whole company around it. It's like, no, plan one issue, get the one issue done. You don't even have to put a date on it. Yeah, like the one actually I'll give you one. I brought some uh today, and I didn't put a date on it because whenever I do a speaking arrangement, I just switch out the ads to go with whatever I'm selling at the time, and then I just print enough for just the event, and then I pass them out. So it doesn't have to be as intense as people think.

SPEAKER_01

Oh man, a lot of great ideas. So you mentioned synthesia. Um, one of the things that we do a lot with our content is we're leveraging 11 labs and tools like that. We're leveraging uh Hey Gen. Hey Gen, I love Hey Gen. Yeah. So does that have a place in the the branding and content environment in your world?

SPEAKER_00

Well, it's it all just depends on what you want to lead with. Because ideally, you should be doing all media, right? You should have a podcast, you should have a YouTube channel, and you

Leveraging AI for Physical and Digital Content

SPEAKER_00

should have uh, you know, and some other content platform to share things on, usually your blog. Um, so you need those pieces.

SPEAKER_01

You said blog versus a social platform.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, well, okay, this is very important. You only own the information that's on your website. Yes. And so a lot of people think like, oh, I'm building all this YouTube credit's like, yeah, they could ban you tomorrow. So that's a pretty dangerous plan. Instead, if you said, hey, my base operations is my vault, like my website's the vault. I put everything on the website because I own it there. And then I share on the other platforms because they're just other websites. Essentially, when you post something on Facebook, you're doing it on a competitor. Yeah. You're saying, hey, competitor, here's content. Go ahead and get some traffic with it. And it's like, why are we supporting this? Yeah, yeah. I want you guys on my website. I've created this, I own this. You come over here and find it. And so that's really why I think it's gonna start happening with everything online is it's gonna be like your space. And you need to privatize your market because if it's if you don't put it on your thing, then you don't own it. Why are you doing that?

SPEAKER_01

Everybody listening, please pay attention to that. See, I've heard that called deep deplatforming, taking them from the social into your eco, your vault.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I call I call it privatizing your following. Yeah. It's like, hey, you own the following. If Facebook wants to censor your crap, doesn't matter. I own my following, they know where to find my information. And then all of a sudden we've taken all the power away from these big platforms and we've said, no, it's it's mine. Why shouldn't it be? You jerks have been profiting for it from it for 20 years. Like the thing that buggers me most is like the SEO, where it's like search engine optimization. Like, oh, you're building content for another for a competitor instead of your customer. Like that's all you're thinking about as you're a competitor. Yeah. Google's a competitor. Don't think of them as anything. Don't think of them as charity because a lot of people think of Google as like this public service where they have to send us traffic. No, they're the most vile capitalistic, and not that capitalism is bad, but the way they do it's bad. Monopoly on the market, and you're handing them information. Why would you do that? So, and it's for traffic, and there's still some value in SEO. But if you turn it from SEO search engine optimization to customer-centric optimization, now you get into oh, okay, now I'm building content for my people. I want it to be useful, I want it to be helpful, I want it to lead to a sale. And so now it's mine and I'll keep this for me.

SPEAKER_01

These are all some fascinating uh uh perspectives that when you're saying them like duh. Yeah, it seems obvious, but it's but I haven't heard them position that way.

SPEAKER_00

Well, we've been programmed. Yeah, everybody's been programmed since and I I say, you know, if you really look at society in general, like it hasn't developed much in 20 years. Yeah, you could go out wearing something that you wore in 2008, and nobody would be like, hey, old timer. Like, but if you said, okay, that was 20 years ago, let's look at 20 years before 2005, 1985, a different planet. But somehow we're just stuck. And we're stuck because of the monopolies, because there's been uh no incentive for innovation because the big guys make enough money doing the way things are. Why would you develop anything? Profit her profitability. So I think we're now returning to where we should have been 20 years ago, which is making changes, making moves, disrupting the norm, and then now we're gonna start developing again. So it's a great time.

SPEAKER_01

You know, in that perspective, um I was gonna ask you where are you like you're obviously you're in the lab, like you're doing your own research, you're figuring things out by doing things, but where are you finding I don't know, are there people that you follow or certain brands that you think are doing a good job and you are paying attention to how they're doing things? In the AI space in particular, or the tools or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00

No, not really awesome. Like most of the time, I think the AI companies are doing things really wrong, where it's like the the memory function for Chat GPT, where the idea is okay. You're saying, okay, we're branding the content a certain way. However, they're not asking me what brand it's for, you know. Same thing with like Facebook. Facebook has that little AI tool. You click on it, it's like, hey, can AI help? It's like, what do you mean can AI help? I don't know. You tell me, jerk. What do you what are we doing here? Because what they should do, like an ideal Facebook is not, hey, I'll help you write a post because why would you do that? Instead, it would be, hey, Facebook, show me pictures of my son from five years ago. Like, that's how AI integration should be working. And instead, it's just like, oh no, we're just making it generate everything. Like, wow, why? So it's just tech nerds that don't really understand how people intuitively want to use things and instead are assuming

The Future of AI and Branding

SPEAKER_00

that they know. And people don't know how they want to use something, they just want things to be easier. So I think uh, no, there's not a lot of companies I'm looking at where I'm like, they're doing a great job. Uh, but there are, I think the the next companies that are gonna come out and just have phenomenal offerings and very useful things are gonna be out in the next like six to 12 months, and they're not gonna be brand names that we know about. It's gonna come out of nowhere, and you're gonna be like, oh, you broughtly, that's the new brand everybody's talking about. You're like, who are they? Oh, they just started like three months ago. Like, that's gonna happen. Yeah, and it's gonna be a whole new wave of people thinking differently about AI application and not thinking programming, because we're all thinking programming. We're thinking this is how things are used. And one of the things I teach for using AI is get rid of that. Stop thinking in terms of, hey, I need to give it this answer. And if I don't give that answer right, then I can't move on to the next step. That's how programming works. How AI works is hey, I want to do this, I don't really know what I am even saying. What should I do, AI? And then AI adds in that smart component of, oh, well, here's the five things you can do. Which ones do you want to do? And so if we start shifting our mind from like, hey, here's how things work, and how can I plug things, how can I plug AI into how things work? Think of it differently. Think of like, no, let's just skip how things work, let's just go AI problem, and then mush those two together. And then now you got something novel and that's gonna be useful. But it's it's a paradigm shift. Love it.

SPEAKER_01

So uh you mentioned that you have a bunch of custom GPTs in the academy. Is that how somebody gets the result? They just work with the GPTs based on the specific columns that you mentioned and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, we have a framework, uh, you know, it basically goes from like saying your directive, setting your rules, and then setting your information in order to get the result you want. So it's a framework that anybody could use to create anything, but it gives you specific parameters to create. Plus, the people in the community are all speaking the same language, which is the biggest thing. Because what I found when I was a digital marketer was the reason why I was able to collaborate with so many marketers is because everybody knew the digital marketer framework. They knew the customer value journey goes like this, and then this, and then this. Everybody knows the terms, we're all speaking the same language, and now we don't have to go through that process of me teaching you how I do things, me understanding how you do things, and then now we could create something. So essentially, what I'm doing with the academy is centralizing the language. So I could say, hey, you need to program this with your brand. Okay, brand pillars done. I don't need to ask for anything else. So now I can make GPTs that take all of the programming part, the branding out of it, because it's already done. And now you just add in the new stuff, and now you can create whatever you want. And so it simplifies the creation process, and anybody can make the GPTs.

SPEAKER_01

So I'm very interested in this, and I I honestly, as I mentioned, I hadn't really put much, I certainly not this much thought into what does brand mean until, as I mentioned, a mutual friend of ours, Aitan Pollinger, introduced me to what you were doing. I checked out what you were doing. It's like you got to meet Mark when you move to Austin and all that kind of stuff, yeah, randomly. Um so I I'm very interested in going through this process myself because I realize we've put a lot of energy into creating content. This you've traveled here. I'm like, there's effort that goes into this. It's not just, hey, AI, make a podcast episode, right? And but for me, also I want to make sure just out of my own personal uh preferences, I want it to be the best that I can that I can create. I realize after this interview that I'm missing out on, like you mentioned, I don't know what to ask. I didn't know. I thought I was branding by just consistently putting I'm not gonna say it's shit, but putting stuff out there. I like, I mean, I Well, you do better than 90% of businesses just by doing that.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I want to do better than 99.99% of the businesses. So I can you tell me a little bit more about what uh a user experience is like for AI Branding Academy?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's basically you set up the pillars. The brand pillars are step one, and it starts with vision. Like the first thing you do is set your vision. And for me, like even though the terms And these GPTs that you've built, they'll help you.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, they just walk you through.

SPEAKER_00

You literally could know absolutely nothing, and you could have a defined brand in like 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_01

So here's my problem. It's not that I know nothing, but I've never verbalized it. Well, yeah, you know. It's all kind of just a knowing that I have. So that's what we're doing. We're starting to set terms.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we're basically taking it's just a list of questions. Essentially, each one of the GPTs acts as a wizard and it says, Hey, what do you think about this? And then you say, uh, one. And then it's okay, what do you think about this? And then by the end of each phase, you have your pillar. And so the brand vision, like I said, still incorporates my 20 years of doing this stuff. And so it's really has two specific requirements. It has to be ambitious and it has to be quantifiable. And so a lot of times with brand vision, you just end up with this kind of like wishy-washy, like, I want to save the world. We change oil. Yeah. That's like, we're saving this. It's like, no, that's not impressive. What's impressive is you saying, I'm gonna do this by this timetable, and it's gonna be done like this. Like, that's a vision. So if I said, hey, you know, for AI Branding Academy, we're gonna be certifying 20,000 marketers by the end of 2025. Got it. And they're gonna be known as leaders within their industries. You'd say, Okay, I'm paying attention. Sounds like a thing. It sounds like you have a plan. But a lot of times you you don't take that step. You're like, what do you do? And it's like, well, we help people wash their carpets. You're like, oh, okay. That's that's okay. But it's just noise at that point. Yeah, just noise. It's like, oh, well, you know what? We're the uh we're planning on being the largest carpet cleaner in Albuquerque uh by 2027. Uh we currently serve about 10,000 clients and we're gonna have 30,000 by that time. And we're gonna do it by using our proprietary process of uh three-step carpet cleaning called be like, oh, where do I sign up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and it was just that one shift. I didn't do anything. Yeah, all I did was tell you my ideas clearly.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I love it. So for somebody, because here's my my, I guess, my challenge is that I don't consider myself a creative person. And to me, brand would like I I would infer that that meant that I needed to, I think about graphic designers and I think about like the stuff we talk about, fonts and colors and all that. And that is not, I mean, shit, I'm colorblind.

SPEAKER_00

Well, well, and you shouldn't have to be. You don't have to be a creative. You're a business owner, you've done a million other things. Why should you also have to be good at this? Yeah. And so that's where I started saying, like, oh, well, people just don't respect marketers because what you should say is, hey, I don't know brand, branding professional. What should I do? Okay, here's what you should do. The problem most of the time is that when we do outsource, like, let's say you went and found a creative, what typically happens is you say, Hey, I don't know what to do. And you don't give them any parameters. You just say, uh, just go wild because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. And the creative most of the time will be like, Oh, perfect. I love doing what I feel like doing. And then they deliver something that you don't like because you didn't define anything, and then now you have a bad relationship. But what should happen instead is you've defined your brand pillars and you said, Hey, here's my brand pillars, here's my values, here's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, Access this GPT. It contains all my brand's information. Ask it what you need. And then all of a sudden, look, you get branded materials that are perfect, and you didn't have to do anything, be a creative or not, but you were able to outsource properly. And so a lot of what I'm doing too is specifically for the outsourcing to marketers. So the marketer doesn't have to inject the definition and then fail because they did it wrong over and over and over again. Like you could communicate what you need to. Not that you know branding and colors, but you do know your business and who you're trying to sell to, and that's what really matters. So stop trying to brand, stop trying to create new brands all the time, is what I tell people. Because that's what you're doing when you say, Hey, TikTok person, just make TikToks. I don't know. It's like how would that help anything? It doesn't, it's just the creator now.

SPEAKER_01

I'm super excited about this. So I I guess as we're wrapping up, let everybody know how they can find out more. How does somebody start to engage with what you're doing there?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I would just say ai branding.academy. Uh, and you can check out I have free tools on there. You can try some things out, but I I have partners. So my goal is really to start showing people where to go. And so Atom Pollinger, he's one of the first partners. And so I have a list of these qualified, certified individuals that know how to enact these things. You can just talk to one of them and they'll go through the exact same process because that's essentially what they're, you know, white labeling is the entire system of AI branding. But typically it's do your brand pillars, set up your vision, and then then you world's open. Like you just go crazy.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'm looking forward to uh leveling up my brand after this, man. Thank you so much, Mark. It was wonderful to have you here as our first guest in the new studio. And um folks will be putting uh links to, I guess, any resources that you want me to share in the show notes because I want people to, if they were having the same challenges that I was having about this definition of brand, what that meant, that was not interesting. Just too much work. I'm not that guy. But now after hearing this, I see the impact that it should have been having all along on my stuff. I certainly recognize the mistakes that we've been making by not having clear definitions for uh even internal use, much less for external use and this barrier that that I had built in my mind of I'm not creative, takes too long, I don't know this stuff. Like all of that can be managed by some interactions with some customized GPTs. That's pretty spectacular, man. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00

Well, and I'll give you the uh the brand vision GPT. If you want to share that, it's just a direct link. Just make your vision like really what I'm trying to do is fix business because I think we've gone way off track. Yeah. You know, if you do have a successful business, it ends up getting sold and then it turns into crap, just like everything else. So my goal is to really empower entrepreneurs and business owners to say, hey, establish your vision, just live and die by that, and everything else good will happen because you did that and you didn't assign the the task to your employees.

SPEAKER_01

I'm actually going to use that custom GPT today. Do it. Very cool, man. Thank you so much, Mark. No problem. See you guys. Thanks for tuning in to using AI at work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work. And a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI Officer, for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. So thanks to our producer, Evan Desalnier, for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle UsingAI at Work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.