How AI and Automation Free Marketers from HTML with Brendan Farnand of Knak

Brendan Farnand co-founded Knak to take the HTML out of email — so marketers can build campaigns instead of wrestling with code. He's also the first guest to set the benchmark on our new series, Past the Pilot.

I'm Kevin Kerner, host of Tech Marketing Rewired from Mighty & True. This series is about what senior B2B marketing teams are actually doing now that the AI experiments are over. Brendan went first, and he got specific.

We get into the "square-shaped" marketer AI is making possible, why Knak canceled its Lovable subscription once designers and developers landed in the same platform, and the campaign agent his team put into production — fed with brand guidelines, briefs, research, and even recordings of their kickoff calls. He also explains why they killed the fully-headless version, and what OpenAI told them about keeping a human in the loop.

Then the three benchmark questions every guest this series answers:

1. One AI workflow you put into production that moved a real number, and one you killed.
2. What's still stuck in pilot that you expected to be running by now.
3. The one thing your team won't hand to AI, and why.

Brendan's answer to that last one — about writing, and why his voice still has to sound like him — is worth the listen alone. Stick around for AI Roulette, where a snarky bot asks him why he'd still rather work on cars.

Reach Brendan at Brendan@knak.com or on LinkedIn. Learn more at www.knak.com.

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Transcript

Why Marketers Should Not Code

Brendan Farnand 0:00

Those kind of technical things, again, that's not something a marketer should be thinking about every day, right? And and nor were they hired to to be a developer. And and I think that spans across a lot of different technologies today. But yeah, you know, the idea with Knak is to tr try to abstract all of that technology complexity away from the marketer so that they can really focus on what they do best and and the biggest, you know, make the biggest impact that they possibly can, sort of thing. And yeah, I think more than ever now, Kevin, you know, I think marketers and and everybody are are more than willing to adopt new technologies in order to uh to kind of level themselves up, right? So that they can make a bigger strategic

Meet Knak Co-Founder Brendan Farnon

Brendan Farnand 0:50

impact.

Kevin Kerner 0:50

Hey everyone, I'm Kevin Kerner and welcome to Tech Marketing Rewired from Mighty and True. This is a show that asks a dozen or so senior B2B marketers the same three questions about where and how they are rewiring in real time. This particular series, Past the Pilot, is about what teams are actually doing now that the AI experiments are allegedly over. Today is Brendan Farnon, co-founder of Knak, the platform enterprise teams used to build email and landing pages at scale. He spent years helping marketers create on-brand content faster and easier than ever. They're exactly the right person to ask what's worth handing to AI and what still isn't. Stick around and I promise you'll walk away with one thing you can test this week. Let's get into it. This is tech marketing rewired. Brennan, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you on. Thank you, Kevin. Happy to be here. You've done a lot of building since uh the Cognos days. What's the what's the thing that you think has stayed the same? So stay true in marketing since you know being at Cognos back in the old days.

What Cognos Got Right Early

Brendan Farnand 1:56

Well, uh I will tell you uh I was very fortunate to start my career uh Cognos as a marketer. And you know, one of the other things that I'm really fortunate about with that, with that role, was I I didn't know what any other organization was doing at that time. So when I came in to my first job out of university, uh Cognos as a as a as a marketer, uh I saw, you know, what I didn't realize was maybe the most advanced marketing organization in the world. The things that the marketing team at Cognos was doing was extremely advanced. I think a lot of organizations, I mean, I talked to tons of enterprises now. I will say there's a lot of companies still trying to catch up to where Cognos was like almost 20 years ago. It's it's wild. Like the attribution reporting that we had, we had full-blown marketing automation. We were actually early Eloqua customer back then and had things set up just super well. Yeah, as you can imagine, our data foundation was incredible as a BI company. Yeah. Our reporting was unbelievable. We went down to very detailed levels of how campaigns were performing, yeah, how we could, you know, do better next time. We had this great reporting loop that everybody had access to. Um, and and just a real demand gen engine that was set up there. And again, I came in kind of going, I guess this is how every company does it, right? And and then I uh yeah, I I I went to other companies and I saw uh you know what they were doing, and I actually, you know, I feel very blessed to to have seen what you know really good advanced marketing looked like at that time. And and I actually part of my career I spent bringing those learnings to other companies and helping them innovate, you know, their marketing processes and technologies and operations uh and things like that. So that so that really kind of shaped my the rest of my marketing career, certainly.

Kevin Kerner 4:06

Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of telling given the knack. I was looking through Knack this morning about your the tagline right on your website. Let's like let's make life easier for marketers. That's a really good uh because back in the day, Cognos, some of that wasn't very easy, but the Cognos sort of front end gave you that type of visibility that you uh you just couldn't get anywhere else. And so it's pretty amazing. But the making life easier for marketers, tell me a bit about that as it as given your background, why you started Knak and and and how you are have this vision to try to make it easier for people.

The Real Cost Of Campaign Mechanics

Brendan Farnand 4:44

Yeah, I mean, Kevin, as a as a as a as a father of many children, uh, you know, of course, you uh you want you want everything to be easy uh every day as much as possible. I think every marketer wants their their job to be easy. And I think more than that, you know, what what what I always found as a as a marketer is it's not that the job was hard or or you know, I wanted uh you know, to to cruise or or have an have an easy job. It was more that I could never work on the things that I felt were the most impactful things that I could do because I was stuck working on the things that you know I had to do, uh, the mechanics of building campaigns. There was a lot of technical intricacies with every campaign that's run. My my co-founder and I actually we we met at Cognos as as I think so so we we both saw this problem. I was I was doing product and solutions marketing, and he was doing email marketing and demand gen and and uh kind of saw the the struggles from different sides, but we both experienced kind of the same thing where you know we're not technical people, you know. The reason that I went to into marketing to become a marketer was because you know I'm a creative guy. I want to make a big impact on the brand that I work for and the business that I'm I'm working at. And I I did feel very hamstrung for a lot of my career where I actually couldn't do the things that I I wanted to do. I remember at IBM, you know, getting took taking on a couple of new products, and uh, you know, the the IBM way was, hey, look, you know, here's your products, let's start building some awareness around them. Uh, let's, you know, we're gonna we're gonna do these campaigns, and and you know, I had some ideas for for what we could do. And it's like, hey, well, now how do I go and how do we build them? And it's like, well, here's here's the budget pool for working with you know a big agency. And it's like, okay, so so I don't actually build them. I have, you know, I have our campaign plan and I've got to work with an agency and spend the budget and the weeks and weeks to get them created. And it it kind of just those kinds of things kept happening throughout my career, uh, not just uh uh at those companies, but you know, later on. And and so I I that that's kind of one of the reasons why Knak Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 7:16

I always thought that like in big marketing organizations back in the day, the marketing teams that are running marketing in, let's say in IBM, they're more like procurement than anything else. They just kind of have a pool of money and they just go to others and they have the things done and then they review it. Yeah, it's just harder to get and nowadays, of course, you're it's so interesting to me that Knak was started before probably during the AI thing years ago, but now you're now you're fully into it. How much it's not easy to build what you've built, but it's certainly easier to get these tools in the hands of people that are actually like thinking about the work, not just asking someone else to do it.

Brendan Farnand 7:56

Yeah, yeah. And I think uh, Kevin, I I think we can probably thank a lot of different technologies for for that, right? Um marketers, I think actually everybody in every role uh is now super enabled with tech, right? And they're doing things that they could not do before because they were too technical. And I and I think that's that's really the story of of the Knak platform, right? Is like we've taken something that was historically a very technical process, like creating emails, you know, believe it or not, is you know, every branded email has HTML code in the background

Abstracting Email Complexity For Marketers

Brendan Farnand 8:36

that is you know very complex and and intricate uh for all the different marketing, you know, the email clients and and and devices and things like that out there. And you know, the those kind of technical things, again, that's not something a marketer should be thinking about every day, right? And and nor were they hired to be a developer. And and I think that spans across a lot of different technologies today. But yeah, I would you know the idea with Knak is to try try to abstract all of that technology complexity away from the marketer so that they can really focus on what they do best and and the biggest, you know, make the biggest impact that they possibly can, sort of thing. And and yeah, I think more than ever now, Kevin, you know, I think marketers and and everybody are are more than willing to adopt new technologies in order to uh to to kind of level themselves up, right? Yeah. So that they can make a bigger strategic impact. And that's you know, we've been doing that for years, and we're now doing it even more and even kind of a faster rate with AI. So it's a pretty exciting time.

Kevin Kerner 9:48

Yeah, it really is. And tools like yours help people bridge that gap between the technical, the scariness of the technical part to actually getting a lot more done. There are a lot of enablers that do that. I saw a quote that on your LinkedIn profile just recently about I'm super interested in design and development together and talk working together better. And there's a blurring of lines now, even like who does the development? Who does the design? Because now I saw something Figma had put out about um, you know, their Figma to MCP connection. And it was really interesting because they had a designer and a developer talking about it, and at the end they asked, Well, who should own the design? And the developer said, Well, we should. And the designer said, Well, we should. Like they both have that, like, that feeling. This Jack Steele, who's one of your director of engineering, he had a great quote. So designers are almost speaking the same language as developers now. They're working off the same canvas, and it's really breaking down

Design And Dev Start Speaking One Language

Kevin Kerner 10:44

the friction between design and development, which I I totally agree. How do you how do you see that? And how do you see um designers and developers getting in the same flow in instead of just kind of keeping out of each keeping uh out of each other's way?

Brendan Farnand 11:00

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing to see certainly at Knak, you know, our our development team and and product team and design team, you know, a lot of those lines right now across those teams are are are becoming blurry, right? And I think it's because of what what we were chatting about earlier, you know, the the accessibility of these things, like design to developers who are not designers, and and development to designers who are are not developers, you know, that those that's becoming uh actually more of a the same spectrum, right? And uh it's pretty neat. I think what what that's allowing us to do, number one, is come become a lot closer together, right? All of these things historically, even you know, if you look at Mac six months ago, right, we were using lovable to do, you know, our designers were using lovable to do prototyping and things like that. And we thought that was pretty pretty awesome, right? So because that was like workable prototypes, it's not just flat images, you know. They're you know, we would kind of pass that over the wall to the development team, and the developers were pretty thrilled because they had a kind of a semi-working, you know, you know, piece of technology that that was, you know, all built with our design language, of course, and and all of that kind of stuff. So it was it seemed to collapse a lot of a lot of things. Now, fast forward to today, we actually just canceled our our lovable subscription because we now have designers and developers in the same platform. So not only are we speeding up the processes that existed before, you know, before it was the same kind of thing, just faster, right? Faster to design to prototype, faster to you know to pass to the developer and help have them understand uh and build. But now it's collapsing even more. And and them being in the same exact platform, we're actually seeing designers be able to design things and have them be coded in you know a way that developers actually have a head start on developing, and it's even using some of our development practices and things like that. So the really those those lines have completely blurred today. Before it was like, okay, things are just really a lot faster, better handoffs. Now there isn't handoffs, it's just one continuous motion. And what that allows for us is is of course, we can move so much faster, we can prototype fast, we can build fast, and we're delivering just a ton more value to our customers every day, which is pretty, pretty exciting place to do it.

Kevin Kerner 13:50

Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, that interlock

From Handoffs To One Continuous Flow

Kevin Kerner 13:52

between the design and design and dev. I'm seeing more designers in GitHub now than I've ever, you know, more marketers inside of that tool is some sort of development environment. And, you know, you got to get comfortable with that, some of the language there, but it's um it's really a game changer when you're in that same repo or environment as a developer and you start talking their language, and vice versa. There's some there's a lot. I guess developers have always been in Figma and other design tools, but there's a lot more connection between the design side now.

Brendan Farnand 14:23

That's it. I think that's it. And those, you know, those tools, you know, that that are actually kind of building in the background, right? That's something that that we've always done at Knak, right? Is is we've been that tool that where you actually kind of design or or or produce and then have it kind of be coded automatically in the background based on, of course, best practices and things like that, maybe not developers, you know, a certain developer framework, but for you know, whatever channel that

The Rise Of The Full Stack Marketer

Brendan Farnand 14:52

that it's going to. And I think there's a lot of parallels, Kevin, to you know, what what is happening in marketing today, right? Uh as well, from kind of design all the way through to execution of marketing campaigns. Marketers, there's a lot of talk. We we had our customer advisor board last week, and there's a lot of talk about the full stack marketer and what does what does a a marketer look like today and and how is that different from from where you know what it used to be. I heard a while back it, you know, about you know, marketers typically were were quite T-shaped, right? You you know what that you know what that means? Yep. Yeah. Yeah, where they yeah, they they do a lot of things, but but they're yeah, deep on maybe one or two areas, right? And I think the opportunity with AI and what that's provided for marketers is the ability to not just not be T-shaped, but actually maybe like square shaped or something, right? Like you can kind of go you can kind of go deep everywhere without having to have that deep knowledge, right? So, so a full stack, it's both it's both width and depth, right? Which is is pretty pretty incredible. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of what's happening in marketing and marketing operations today, that the the the true modern marketer today, or a real full stack marketer, can do so much all the way from design of their campaigns, you know, in adherence with their brand standards and design systems and language, all the way through to you know, execution of those campaigns and reporting uh sort of thing, all on their own. Um, you know, that to me, you know, if I were to think about you know my days as a marketer, uh that used to be five people, right? And and and and probably six, eight different technologies involved in that whole thing. And and now it's collapsed into one full stack marketer. It's it's pretty pretty incredible.

Kevin Kerner 16:49

Yeah, it's very exciting as a marketer too, because you have all this capability that you didn't you couldn't get act access to before. It was always a there's always a wall up. I can't get to that stuff. Do you think that the um so your platform Knak does is is it is getting a good way there to give the more capability to the and marketer. Where do you think things are going? As a platform provider that does part of this, like where your solution is sort of pushing the envelope on what a marketer can do and create. Where do you think it's gonna what are you guys looking at in terms of where it's

Removing Friction Unlocks Volume And Tests

Kevin Kerner 17:22

headed? How much more capability can you give the marketer?

Brendan Farnand 17:25

Yeah, it's a good question. I I think, you know, I one of the questions that we we are are constantly asking our customers is, you know, if if you were to take all of the friction away from all of your processes in marketing, what are the possibilities? Right. What what could you then do? And there's a lot of talk right now about you know, a couple different areas, but one, volume, right? You could do as much volume as you want to do. We we talk to a lot of organizations that are just not doing the amount of marketing that they want to because they can't, right? They don't have enough resources, their processes are too slow, you know, those kinds of things are are real real things. I live that as a marketer as well. It's like, man, if I just had more time, right, I could do I could do such so much better of a job with you know this campaign, or I could do more follow-ups and get more interest for this, you know, this event that I'm running or something, right? Though those those things are real. And and so I think volume, number one, can can go to a place where you actually want it to be, right? That's number one. I think number two, you know, what that actually unlocks, Kevin, is is not just like, hey, let's just blast our database every day. I mean, you could do that. That that that's not gonna be great for you, but but I think what that actually unlocks is the ability to test and iterate, right? That that I talked to so many marketers who don't test and they they don't uh you know build A B tests and they don't look at their reporting and they they you know they don't iterate based on what works and what doesn't. And I think when you break down all the barriers of you know producing campaigns for marketers, you you unlock that ability to be able to do some testing and and really learn from the results of your own marketing, which I think is just really, really important.

Authenticity Versus AI Slop

Brendan Farnand 19:32

So I think that's the second thing. And then I think the the third piece and kind of maybe the result of some of that is is really high performing campaigns, right? That this is really what it's all about is like how do I now engage my audience in a real authentic way, right? And that's becoming more and more important, Kevin, with with AI, not just because of all the AI slop out there, but also because I think consumers are are using AI on the other end, right? Our customers, our prospects are all using AI to filter out all the crap that they don't that they don't care about, right? And so you know, how do you break through in that kind of world? It's it's I'll tell you, it's not by you know sending more AI slop to your customers and prospects. It's it's by by learning what actually works, what engages your audience, and and how to talk to them. And I and I think you know the the the best way to do that certainly is to keep you know uh keep keep some some taste, some human uh element uh to your marketing. I think that's really important. And and I I think too, you know, the building personalized content and things like that, when again, when you have zero friction for producing, you know, incredible campaigns, you know, you can you can do some amazing things with personalized content and it that is really highly engaging for your audiences. And so I I think the the possibilities are are pretty amazing to think about, but I think it's gonna take some time for for especially enterprises to get there with their marketing and and and to truly enable those full stack marketers with with what they need to do that.

Kevin Kerner 21:19

Yeah, it's interesting too. I think that um even if you had that most advanced technology that had agentic looping and goals and all the things that you set the AI on the course of, it there's a certain amount of there's a certain amount of like cultural change that needs to happen or just thinking that needs to change. There's a lot of training involved. So these these things are happening very fast from a tools perspective, but there's also a big uh

Benchmark Questions For The Series

Kevin Kerner 21:44

sort of muscle memory that you need to break down to get some of these new tools working the way you want them to work. But it's the the capabilities are absolutely there. That leads me, uh I wanted to uh we are started a new part of the show where we're gonna get into some benchmark questions. So This is great fodder for the questions I've got already asked you. But I'm going to ask you three questions. And these three questions are going to be asked to everyone on the show, and then we're going to compare to see how it changes over time. Probably do 10 of these or so and then can then put out some sort of end result summary of this. So I'm going to go through three questions. Um, you can answer them either from what you're seeing from your customers in your case, or you can answer them for your own marketing organization. But let's dig into it. Great. So this first question is what's one AI effort tool or workflow you put into production this year that made a real impact? So an AI effort tool or workflow that you put into production that made a real impact, and one that you killed and why. Wow. Wow.

The Agent That Builds Campaigns Faster

Brendan Farnand 22:40

Very uh very interesting. So, okay. One I would say that that made a real impact. I would say our we we're actually build, we we've built an agent in our campaign creation workflow. We we want to be at Knak, of course. We want to be drinking our own champagne and and you know, trying to be essentially on the forefront of you know what the market is doing and and where our customers want to go. So we're doing a lot of experimenting with with our own you know agentic workflows and processes and things like that. So yeah, we we have built a an agent that actually houses a lot of kind of base level information uh of our brand and our you know brand our brand guidelines, look and feel, you know, those kinds of things, brand voice, all that kind of stuff. And what we do is we feed every campaign that we do, we actually feed a number of inputs into this agent. And so when we kick off a new campaign at Knak, we actually have we have a whole bunch of artifacts, right, that are part of that. One is a campaign brief. You know, we also have a notion page where the campaign brief lives, but also a bunch of other information, like research that we've done, discussions with customers, those kinds of things are all on there. So those all flow into the agent. What one of the interesting things that we we just kind of realized is we're also having all of these kickoff calls and discussions about the campaign where a lot of information is captured. And so we're actually now feeding all of those recordings of the calls about the campaign into this agent as well. So this agent has this incredible context on you know the the campaign itself and even how it's evolving along the way. But it also has all that foundational things that don't change very often, right? Like our brand and and you know, all of those pieces. So what that is enabling us to do is now feed that agent information for the campaign and have that kick off the campaign being actually produced in our platform. And so, and that's where like we're seeing a lot of our customers go is being able to kind of feed the kind of downstream platforms that are actually doing the best of breed, best in class creation uh or production of these uh campaign assets, and then having those pieces kind of you know build the actual campaign, go through a workflow, uh, you know, do translation, localization, like kind of the all the the pieces of that that channel uh in in the platform. And it's it's pretty pretty amazing to see that happen, Kevin. Like uh yeah, it's it's uh we're you know what it's actually unlocked for us number one is is a lot of a lot of speed, right? It takes a lot of the the guesswork out of creating like oh boy, you know, which header should we use for this campaign? Uh, you know, which one, you know, we have to go back and look which one performed the best for on the last campaign, those kinds of things. Like that, all that together with our agent context, and then the the the performance and all the data that we have in our platform, you know, mashing those together is is amazing to see happen. So, so the speed, the quality of of which we're seeing the campaigns come out of there are are pretty amazing. And so, yeah, that's been that's been really cool to see us kind of like agentify that process, and what that's kind of what we're hearing our customers trying to do every day, too.

Kevin Kerner 26:30

So I love voice data. I don't know if I use I'm a major Whisperflow user. I can't even type anymore. I use it so much. It's just insane. But you get into these like uh conversations with the AI, and it's just that added context plus the skill, the stuff that doesn't change with the context of the stuff that's specific for the moment is just it's just absolutely incredible how the structure and the synthesis of what you say, like you feed that. Plus you're you're loading in additional like campaign data. That's even better. What's one thing you killed? What's one uh thing that you killed in this an effort that you're like, oh that didn't work? Yeah, anything?

Brendan Farnand 27:10

Yeah, no, yeah, there's

Why Fully Headless AI Got Killed

Brendan Farnand 27:12

there's stuff. There's definitely stuff. I mean, we we've we've gone through the whole spectrum, Kevin, of of hey, let's try to do this totally headless, right? Let's go, let's have agents just go all the way through the process, you know, call our MCP, push everything through, you know, and and uh, you know, a human doesn't see it till maybe till the very end. I I will say that that some of the stuff coming out the other end was, you know, I don't know if you qualify it as slop, but it certainly was not up to our standards, right? We we at Knak when we do marketing, like we're marketing to marketers, right? So so our bar for quality is very high. And you know, when we had some campaigns that were kind of created fully agentic, we just felt like there was something missing there. And at our customer advisory board last week, OpenAI was there and they were talking about how they require a marketer to actually go in to an AI generated campaign and actually like that's like the first step after it's generated. The marketer has to go in and read it, tweak it. You know, it's that taste, right? They have to add the taste and the human element to their marketing campaigns, or it doesn't go out the door. And and I think, you know, for us, we're you know, we see that we saw that firsthand and and we're we're now doing that, right? We want to make sure our our our marketers are involved somewhat in the process. We want to speed up what we can with agents, but not have them do everything. I think that's to at least right now, uh it didn't seem to yield as good a results as when a human.

Kevin Kerner 28:48

Same, same, I'm seeing the same thing. I'm glad to hear you say that. It's almost impossible. Even when you nail the process and the skills and everything, it's it's totally nailed. You would think you could just press a button and it would come out great, and it just does not happen yet, which I guess is a good, it's a vote for us humans right now, because we need to be there. But uh it's yeah, it's just not there yet. Let me ask you the second question. Is there anything that's still stuck in pilot? Meaning something you expected to be running by now that isn't still

The Data Layer Still Stuck In Pilot

Kevin Kerner 29:18

stuck in pilot?

Brendan Farnand 29:20

Yeah, good, good question. I I I think right now one of the things that we're working really hard on at the company is actually data and and being able to have one place across the business that everyone can go and interact with the company's data, right? Whether it's a finance person, whether it's a marketer, whether it's a sales leader. You know, we want everyone to have access to the data. And I think that that piece, I wouldn't say that it's, you know, like not possible. It's certainly, I think it is possible today, but it's it's yeah, I think it's more difficult than maybe what you read on on X today to to allow for that. And so that's something that we're working really hard on to make sure that uh is gonna be possible. It's definitely taking taking more time than we we'd expected, but you we yeah, we Yeah, but if you get it right. Something we think is important. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Kerner 30:20

So it's something you're not gonna kill because if you get it right, it's really the foundation for everything. And it and the AI tools are making it a little maybe a little easier to do that, but still really hard to get a consolidated data view. I agree. Completely agree. Okay, let me ask question number three. Then you may have answered this already, but I'd be interested to see if there's another thing. But what's the one thing your team won't hand to AI yet and why?

Brendan Farnand 30:43

Yeah. I I do I do still think it's it's the the writing stuff, right? I think again, writing AI is great at get getting

What Writing Still Needs From Humans

Brendan Farnand 30:56

a foundation built and and and ideating and things like that. I think it's really excellent still or today at that. I still think you, you know, what I'm actually doing now internally is like I'll have a you know a great meeting with a customer or something like that, and and you know, it'll be recorded, but and I'll get AI to give me a summary of the meeting, but I'm I don't just send that out internally, right? Because I find what happens is number one, it's very long form. I get a lot of yeah, I get a lot of documents that's like it it takes so like a fraction of the time to that it took to create it to actually read it, right? Like to it's like a a 30-minute read of a 10 page document that like I think the person who created it probably didn't even read it themselves, right? Yeah, and so so I I feel like there's there's there is a bit of a a strange gap there where what I'm doing is I'm getting now my my summaries from AI and I'm using that just to remember the meeting itself. And I am because number one, I want them to feel my voice there, I want them to feel like it is coming from me, but but also there is a lot of there's some inconsistencies in in the AI uh write-ups, but also you're right, it's very verbose. Like there's there's pieces that I am like, you know what, that's not important. I I want to skip that, or I don't need to tell others that part of the story. And so so that's yeah, that's a big thing that I'm I'm seeing.

Kevin Kerner 32:32

Yeah, very good. I think you know what's super interesting to me is like the verboseness, the like the depth of the stuff that it feeds back to you. And we get this a lot on the strategy side, so it'll run it through strategy skill, it'll give you a great strategy, and it's a long strategy, like it's long stuff. And so the one thought I had around this is that you have to, some of the things are only gonna be AI consumable to the next step. And so you might have a big MD file that you would never read the whole thing, but you're gonna feed that into AI, and AI is gonna just eat it up. So it goes to the next chain skill. But then there's the stuff like, well, I need a summary, I got to get a summary of that, and then there's the summary piece. Getting as a marketer or even just as an AI consumer, getting in your head things that are need to be long because you're gonna feed them into AI in the next step versus things that you actually are gonna use are two different things. And they're both useful. Like the the MD file downstream is pretty darn useful, but I don't want to send it to you to read because you'll go, what? This is just that you just created this with AI. Now you need to put it in something to summarize. Yeah. So it's just a different world that we live in in terms of like copy word length stuff.

Brendan Farnand 33:46

Totally, totally. And I will say, like, you know, even in the last six or eight months, Kevin, the amount of long documents I'm being asked to read is has like exploded.

Kevin Kerner 33:58

Yeah, yeah.

Brendan Farnand 33:59

Like, so so great. We've got all this great amazing AI and the ability to kind of take take all the data and and synthesize it. But now, but I've never in in the history of my career been asked to read so many five to ten page documents. It's unbelievable.

Kevin Kerner 34:15

Well, you just put it into AI and have it summarize it, and then that's the only thing you can do on some of these documents.

Brendan Farnand 34:20

It's crazy.

Kevin Kerner 34:21

Yeah, exactly. That's nuts. Well, this has been great. So those are the first, you so you're the first person to answer those three questions. So you're setting the benchmark here. It's been

AI Roulette Cars And Identity

Kevin Kerner 34:30

really, really pretty high. So one more thing I want to do with you is we do an AI roulette question, and we just I just tweaked the AI bot to be a little more snarky. This this I think I did accidentally. So it gave me the question here. I've been testing questions, so I'm gonna I'm gonna do a new one. So this I start I was using gems and then I went to Claude. I just put that in a Claude project. So I basically put in your profile and it's it's looked at everything. I'm gonna hit send here, and it's just gonna give you a question from directly from the AI bot here. So let me do this. Nice. I'm excited. Okay. Okay, Brendan, cars can't think. I can. You'll pick the car every time. So what's the dumb one got that I don't? So that's basically the AI asking you. What's the dumb one got that I don't? Why why cars and not me, Brendan? What's wow? Is that so AI is asking me?

Brendan Farnand 35:26

Yeah, AI is my AI is asking. Why not it? Wow. Well, that's uh that's interesting. I was assuming that cars should probably win. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, if I could choose. But yeah, I I think uh, you know, again, it comes down to uh you know being being a a little bit more more human right now. I feel like, you know, yes, cars are are mechanical things, but really when you when you put your hands on something and and you know wrench on it and you know put some some some you know sweat equity into it, um it's really rewarding. And and then you know, your your car is actually almost like a an extension of your identity, right? And so you make it your own. So I I I to me that's why it's because the the you know cars are are are physical, they're real, they're human, and and we're all connected to those things in a real way. Or certainly I am when I when I work on stuff. So that's that that that's my answer. 100% Kevin, do you feed the answer back into AI? Is that how the I may, yeah.

Kevin Kerner 36:33

I'm I may feed it back into answer. See what it see what it is. We'll know. I don't know. I'll do that after the fact. You know what's really cool though now, and in terms of really any sort of like physical skill, I was doing this with a drip line. I was putting in on some like plants here, is you can take a picture of something now, and then it will give you the thing. Like, what part is this, or how does this fit here, or did I do this right? That part is amazing. It's that combination of uh image and then the AI, and then you do the thing with your hands. Uh that for me has been like a game changer because I'm not very bright when it comes to some things. It's just it just figures out the thing. It's incredible.

Brendan Farnand 37:12

But that's the isn't that the the perfect cross-section, Kevin, of human aid and AI? Like I do the exact same thing. I swear, like, you know, I have a pool and every I don't know anything about bulls. Every single step, I'm taking pictures and it's walking me through the air Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

Kevin Kerner 37:30

Well what's the uh when I was working on my truck a long time ago, there's that there's that one book you always get when you're working on your car, and uh, you know, it's like you get you buy it at yeah, that's well not even owner's manual, but there's like the uh there's the book you get at uh Barnes and Noble or something that's everything you need to change in the car. And it's always greasy and you know you got dirt all over and the pages are all there's something about that too.

Brendan Farnand 37:55

Isn't that a the Haynes manual? Yeah, that's right. The Haynes manual. That's right. Yeah, yeah. That's uh yeah, for sure. It is it is nice to have that all you know in in AI's brain instead of a greasy book, right? Yeah, that you might you might lose the pages of, you know, that

How To Reach Brendan

Brendan Farnand 38:12

kind of thing.

Kevin Kerner 38:12

Brendan, it's been great talking to you. I'm really a fan of what you guys are doing at Knak. It's really some awesome stuff. I would encourage everyone to go look at what uh Brendan's doing. And um, if people can get a hold of you or the company, like how do you want people to stay in touch with you?

Brendan Farnand 38:26

Yeah, Kevin, yeah, definitely LinkedIn. I'm I'm pretty responsive on there. Just link in with me anytime. Or yeah, shoot me an email, Brendan at Knak.com. Uh happy to chat anytime. Awesome. So good to talk to you, Brendan. Take care. Nice to talk to you, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.