The AI Movement with Brooke
The AI Movement with Brooke, explores how entrepreneurs, founders, creatives, and leaders are navigating the rapidly changing world of AI.
Through real conversations with people building, experimenting, pivoting, and growing with AI, Brooke goes beyond the latest tools to uncover how this technology is changing the way we work, make decisions, build businesses, create, and define success.
The AI Movement with Brooke
How to Measure AI Adoption at Work | Bernard Meyer
Paid partnership: This episode includes paid promotional content from Omnisend.
AI adoption can save a team hours without improving business results. After over a decade in marketing, Bernard Meyer now leads AI operations at Omnisend, despite not coming from a technical background. He explains why teams need to measure AI by the outcomes they want, then test whether their AI workflows deliver.
We chat about making AI a daily habit, where human judgment still matters, and what changes when e-commerce teams connect Omnisend to AI assistants. If you're deciding how to bring AI into your own work, this is a practical look at what effective adoption takes.
In this conversation:
- Why Omnisend shifted from tracking hours saved to measuring business outcomes
- How AI helped the sales team move from 25% to 100% of follow-up emails sent within 24 hours, with people reviewing before sending
- Why teams need to test AI workflows before putting them into use
- Where creative work still depends on human judgment
- What Omnisend's MCP connection with AI assistants makes possible
- Why Bernard sees building as one of the best ways to learn AI
- How AI can help or hurt the connection between a business and its customers
Partner
Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing platform used by more than 200,000 brands. By connecting Omnisend’s MCP directly with ChatGPT or Claude, you can review campaign performance, uncover what needs attention, create client-ready reports, and take action without manually moving data between tools.
About Bernard
Bernard Meyer is Omnisend's AI Operations Manager, where he leads AI adoption and builds workflows and automations across the company. Before moving into AI operations, he spent more than 12 years in marketing, communications, and content.
Connect with Bernard on LinkedIn
Timestamps
00:00 Bernard's move from marketing to AI operations
03:18 Making AI a daily habit
07:07 AI-assisted sales follow-up
09:13 Measuring business outcomes, not hours saved
11:00 Testing AI workflows before launch
13:21 Where creative work still needs human judgment
16:08 Connecting Omnisend to AI assistants with MCP
23:09 Building as a way to learn AI
27:13 AI and real customer relationships
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How I AI is now The AI Movement with Brooke.
LinkedIn: Brooke Gramer
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AI, we still believe in it, but the way we're measuring it is wrong. So we switched to a outcome-based. So every single team, they had to focus on not what they're doing with AI, but why they're doing with AI and what outcome they're gonna achieve. So if we're doing outreach emails, they need to move the positive response rate from 1.5% to 3% with AI. We don't care what tools you're using, we don't care about the prompts. We're focused only on the outcome.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the AI Movement Podcast, the space where modern entrepreneurs and founders come to stay current and navigate their next move with AI together. I cover the conferences, sit with the people leading this shift, and I bring it all here. Broken down, without the hype, whether you're building something, pivoting your work, or trying to keep ahead ethically, you are in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome back. Today's guest, Bernard Meyer, did not take a traditional path into AI. He spent over a decade in marketing, then after teaching himself through hands-on experimentation, became OmniCen's first AI operations manager. In this conversation, Bernard takes us inside OmniCen's AI as a Habit Initiative and shares what it actually takes to make AI part of how an entire company works. We talk about where AI is producing real results across engineering, sales, and customer support, where it still falls short, and why every AI workflow needs to be tested before it goes live. His journey proves that you don't need a traditional engineering background to help shape how AI is used in your company. All right, let's dive into my conversation with Bernard. Bernard, it's so wonderful to have you on the AI Movement Podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you very much for uh inviting me. I am always excited to talk about AI. So please let me know when I'm talking too much.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I'm more excited because you also have a marketing background like myself. But for listeners who might not know you yet, could you share a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in the AI space now?
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. So I have been working in marketing before this transition to AI for I would say maybe 14, 15 years. And the last position I had was the senior director of communications and creative. So pretty much, you know, branding, PR, video, social media, content, lots of creative stuff and design as well. But then I got, I mean, I had been getting into AI a lot over the last few years, you know, immediately when Chat GPT 3.5 came out and it took over the world. And then I just kept investing into it. And then I was pushing this the CEO of the company. I'm like, guys, we need to we need to do something because I feel like we're not we're not really pushing AI internally enough. And so finally he just came to me with a proposition. He's like, okay, put your actions where your mouth is. Would you like to be the first AI operations person in this company? And I said, definitely. I didn't even hesitate. So I made that switch last year in September.
SPEAKER_00So are you self-taught with AI, or did you go to school or upskill in any way?
SPEAKER_01Oh, completely self-taught. And the way I approach everything, I guess many of your listeners are probably the same. It's like you can do a lot of theoretical stuff, but really when you get your hands dirty and when you actually build and get into the details, that's when you learn the most. And so I tried my best to learn about ML and all that kind of stuff, but really I just wanted to see what AI can do. Um, and so the first thing I did, ChatGPT came out like in the beginning of November or something along those lines, and then immediately I decided I wanted to publish my first book completely written by ChatGPT, and it was a very painful process, but eventually I published it under a fake name on in Amazon, and you know, this that process of of seeing how much you can do with AI and how you have to at that early time, you know, Chat GPT didn't even have memory, right? So I had to figure out how to do all that and kind of make this whole book just a chat GPT. So I've been doing that kind of stuff, you know, sort of on my own time and and then pushing it internally as well, but completely self-taught, just pushing the boundaries. And I think it's probably the way that I would recommend most people to do it because the the problem with theoretical stuff is that by the time it's published or a video comes out or a lesson comes out, or certification comes out, oh my god, you're like six months behind and it's already moved far ahead. So I guess the best thing to do is just see something interesting, try it and learn.
SPEAKER_00I could not agree more. So flash forward to now or end of the year 2026, and AI has come a long way. I'm sure you've had a lot of really cool opportunities to build and experiment with your work at Omnicent. Where are you using AI most powerfully now? If you can share a little bit about how it's really moving the needle for your work.
SPEAKER_01Well, maybe I can give a little background about how OmniCent in general was uh approaching the topic of AI, like internal adoption, because that's gonna make a everything else make a lot of sense. So we started this initiative and the CEO, you know, the the leadership team, they really had great strong opinion about AI, uh, about how work should change because of AI. And we we call it the AI as a habit, meaning that we wanted to transform every single person or at least the average person within the organization to make AI not even its activity, to use AI and to make that a habit on an every single day basis, right? And generally the idea, and it's still gonna be the idea. I'm not so sure when we get there. The idea is to make every single person within Omniscent AI first, meaning that when you're faced with a problem or some situations, you default to AI first. You think, how can AI solve this problem? So we therefore began this very long program. It was challenging, it was interesting, it was fun, but now we have AI embedded in every single department. And I would say every single team within every single department across the entire organization. So I have examples of impact from non-technical HR to legal team to finance team, all the way, of course, to the engineering team and the ones who are doing some RD stuff. So usually the biggest impact that people see is when they are talking about engineering, right? AI is able to triple, you know, 3x the amount of code that people can write. We are now at a point where AI is completely or partially doing 70% of all the code that is happening here in Omnisand. And this is, and I would make a little asterisk here because generally, when you are starting a new company, as like two to five people in a startup, you can do all sort of YOLO stuff, you can AI everything, you can be the most sophisticated because you don't have much of anything to attack at that point, and you don't have a customer base. Yeah, we have you know 200,000 customers, we have been in the business of 14 years, and so there's a lot of legacy code. And so we took a conservative approach, like a very safe approach, and still we are at 70 because that whole time we have been building confidence, at least in the engineering side. Non-technical teams, definitely our support team has seen a lot. So we have, and I think you would probably see it on many other websites as well. Uh, a lot of the conversation is now routed directly to AI. We use Fin AI. It used to be intercom, and now I think that they just completely change the whole thing to fin because a lot of the questions that you're getting, anyways, are usually the same, same type. And then there's a little like 20, 30 percent has some sort of special use cases that you need a human for. But even when our humans are using it, they are also using AI tools. For example, we have a documentation sort of tool that we use called Slight, more like a knowledge base, and then there's an agent attached to that that has access to all the knowledge and all the intercom past support cases. And then when an agent is talking, they can quickly research okay, what is this customer talking about? What is this question? And then the AI can suggest bullet points how to respond for the most appropriate way. So this is one of the things that it took a while for people also to to kind of embrace, which is that when we're asking people to use AI, they think that we want people to use AI all the way through up until the end, right? So I want the content team to use AI, that means they have to write their content with AI. No, we just unfortunately we're not there yet where AI can create create content. But along the path of using AI to write that content, you're doing quite a lot of stuff. You're researching, you're checking competitors, you're even just fact-checking or proofreading your own text, right? So our content team is using AI. Uh, we used to have someone that was just proofreading and just checking the grammar and just editing and that kind of stuff. And that position is gone because now AI is up to the point where it does that. Researching briefing, that part, that position is cut in half because AI does most of the first run work, and then the second one is handed off to AI. Actually, the biggest impact in terms of team transformation, I would say, is actually our sales and agency team. So yeah, which yeah, it's like a non-technical team, but they by themselves have always been very enthusiastic about AI. So, one example we had was let's imagine our sales team has a bunch of meetings, and their calendar is determined by how many leads they can connect with and how many meetings they can set up. So they can't really schedule their own time so much because they're always waiting to see what kind of meetings they're gonna have. And their goal has always been once they have a meeting with a lead for the first time, and the leads have, you know, these complicated, sometimes it's pretty straightforward meetings, sometimes they have lots of questions about different complexities, technical questions, pricing questions, all that kind of stuff. And their goal has always been we want to send a follow-up email within 24 hours. The reality was that they did, I think it was 20, 25% of follow-up emails were sent within 24 hours. And they had a goal. Okay, now that AI is in, let's see if we can make that from 25% all the way to 100%. And so they are now at a point where 100% of their follow-up emails are created by AI. They still verify it at the end, you know, they they they press that send button. They just want to make sure that everything is great, but now they are able to send follow-up emails within 24 hours.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's the number one goal for sales, right? That they have to reply within 24 hours. That's the way to get the best successful leads. Incredible. I just have a quick follow-up because first off, thank you for giving me so many case studies. It's like the best part about these interviews is really getting behind-the-scenes case studies. And my first question for you was do you have a time where you're auditing the AI if it's really doing what it needs to be doing? Like, how are you setting those regular check-ins in place? Because I think that a lot of people rush to see how we can use AI, but then it's maybe adding more time onto their work. So I'm curious like how you as an AI operations manager are always doing those check-ins and making sure that it's being used correctly.
SPEAKER_01So the way that we this is going back to that AI as a habit, sort of company-wide initiative, right? And so we set for each department and then some teams with each department, quarterly goals. And the goals were not focused. And this is a mistake that we made in the first time. The first mistake that we made in the first iteration of this AI as a habit was to measure returns in terms of how much time it saved. Right. So I used to spend 30 minutes to write an email, and now with AI I can spend five minutes, and then I multiply it by 10 emails per day, and then blah, blah, blah, so many hours per week saved. And then we at the end of the quarter, we saw that's a lot of hours saved. But the reality of the problem was that we didn't see any impact on our business results. Right? So we're saying that we saved equivalent to 60 full-time employees hours. And then I asked everyone, I essentially, but also asked the leadership team, like, okay, guys, if we hired 60 more people to this company, full-time employees, what would you expect the difference would be, the impact would be on our business results? Which our revenue, our customer, you know, outcomes, what would be the difference? There would be some sort of impact, but there wasn't. So we said, okay, let's switch this. Where AI, we still believe in it, but the way we're measuring it is wrong. So we switched to a outcome-based. So every single team, they had to focus on not what they're doing with AI, but why they're doing with AI and what outcome they're gonna achieve. So if we're doing outreach emails for our sales aid, like our agency team or our influencer team, they need to move the positive response rate from 1.5% to 3% with AI. We don't care what tools you're using, we don't care about the prompts, you don't care about anything. We're focused only on the outcome. It's generally an omnist and direction, right? Don't care so much about the metal, we care about the end. The only way to get that, to reach that goal, is to figure out how to use AI correctly. And to you you generally have to figure this out by the middle of the quarter because anything after the middle of the quarter is iteration improvement. And so this is kind of the thing we figured out. You build it for about a month and then you test it. You test it a lot. Vehemently, I mean, it's the most boring part of AI. Building it is fun, it's sexy, it's exciting. But testing it, you're doing the same prompts over and over. You're sending the same email, you're not even sending it to customers, you're sending it, sending it to each other, you're asking each other is this good quality, bad quality? You have a bunch of Google Sheets and you're just going over. It's it's technically evals, manual evals that they're doing, and they're just checking each line to make sure that there is no mistakes. Okay, this is the 70% general stuff, and then 70% is covered. Okay, now I gotta test the 20% in those little edge cases. And then when they reach a quality check of like about 85-90%, then they say, Okay, it's about as good as it's gonna get. We're gonna push it live, and then we're gonna watch it for that last month of the quarter, and we're gonna see what we need to change if anything actually breaks, as we say, in production. So this is kind of the model that we had to learn with every single person. Do not push out anything live unless you have tested it vehemently and you can put your stamp of approval on it.
SPEAKER_00I love that distinction because if you think about it, a quantifiable amount of time saved might be a personal goal when you're using AI. But does that really give you that outcome-based ROI, which is what we're all seeking, right? My next question for you is you share just like this amazing way that you are approaching AI and really hitting those benchmarks internally. When you talk about outcome-based, have you figured out anything that you you can't hand off to AI? This is what's so interesting to me right now. Like, what have you found that, okay, when we do more of this with AI, it actually damages our ROI? Um, it's great to hear that you're already getting great customer satisfaction and increasing that percent, even though you're using AI emails or customer service, because that can be a really delicate dance itself. So, if you could touch on what haven't you been able to hand off to AI?
SPEAKER_01I will say we've handed off quite a lot in the ones that are pretty a little bit more straightforward to measure. So when we are using AI for even calling, like telephone outreach, or we're using AI in this custom support, we realize that people don't care so much that it's AI. They do care that they know it's AI. And so this transparency is the most important thing. You know, people will answer a call and then they will ask, Are you AI? And then our AI agent will say, Yes, I am. And then the guy will just say, Okay, and they will continue the conversation. Um, the ones that we still haven't been able to figure out is the ones that generally in marketing are less directly related to some sort of specific number, and that is the creatives, right? Video, it's still much cheaper, much faster, and you have much more control if you just record it yourself. Video is impossible. Um, our design, it's almost there, and they're using it for a lot of the let's say lower risk or lower level tasks. But when it comes to quality stuff that we're putting out to the customers, we're still relying on human beings to do that kind of stuff. Our product design, the same. So this is kind of that workflow where I figured out that any even content, right? Content, design, video, all that kind of creative parts, we cannot hand it off to AI yet. And there's a part of me that believes we're never going to really hand off that much to AI. We still need someone with figure out, okay, this piece of content is great, or this piece of content sounds robotic. And you know, you've seen it on LinkedIn, you've seen it on Twitter, you've seen it everywhere, where you just read a piece of content and you just like your eyes glaze over because it's just the same clawed speak and the same sentence structure. And you know, honestly, question mark, blah, blah, blah. Yes, it's you you just lose interest immediately, and we can't do that for our customers, you know. So that's the the limitation that we have.
SPEAKER_00So fascinating. I agree with the creative space. I have a lot of friends that are in that space, graphic designers, and they've been still getting a lot of work. You know, you would think that they would maybe be losing some of their clients, but it's almost become a real flex now to be imperfect, to have a typo in your email, to show behind the scenes of it actually being done by a human. I've seen that rise.
SPEAKER_01I feel it's now pretty interesting. Even when I'm writing, I feel that I need to write and to prove that I'm a human. So I'm gonna add in typos. I'm not gonna use like sentence case. I'm gonna use lowercase and just have a bunch of type. Like I used to, I feel like I used to care more, but now I'm like, I want to show my rough adjust this to let people know that a human being wrote this message or this post.
SPEAKER_00Yes. I wanted to talk a little bit more about what you're building, maybe for 2027. I know it's hard to think in the future with AI, right? But maybe there's anything that you want to tease on what's coming through for your marketing pipeline, or any cool features, like things that you're seeing trends-wise, especially within the email and te marketing space. It's crazy how much text marketing has blown up in the past year. It's almost like everyone can't make any transaction without giving your phone number now. So there's a lot of obvious opportunity for marketing for that. And people are becoming more comfortable. I'd love to hear what you're working on, what you're building, how you're integrating marketing and AI.
SPEAKER_01One of the things that we figured out, and I even wrote like this think piece uh earlier this year, was that people have now sort of invested in their own AI assistant, as I call it, if it's ChatGPD or Cloud. And they're putting a lot of context there and they're talking with that entity every day about everything, including their business, right? And so we still have like software services businesses that are asking people come to our place and then do your work. And then the people have to copy paste from here to there. They want to give their agent or their assistant all the context, but the the context is over there. So the first thing we did is we invested in MCP because we want people to use Omnisend however they work. And most of them, a lot of people are working inside their ChatGPT, inside the cloud. And now they're able to do all those actions directly through their assistant. And as these assistants get better, and they're gonna get better, I would say, not exponentially, but they're gonna jump a lot over the next few months. They're gonna be much more powerful and they need to be able to do a lot of actions inside the services that usually normally go to. So we're gonna build up this is the MCP, right? And we're gonna continue making that as strong as possible so that people can do what they need to do without ever logging into Omnisend. We don't care so much about you know tracking what you're doing on our website. We do care that our customers are finding value and finding value faster and making more money more quickly. The second thing is that we're bringing a lot of this also inside Omnisend, right? So now we're doing quite a good amount of work with our own reporting AI. So instead of you having to declare a bunch of charts, you just go in there, you just ask in natural language how did my emails perform last week? How did my SMS perform last week? Compare that to the previous period. And now we're building that out so that you can take as many actions as you want inside Omnisend just with natural language. And because it's Omnisend, we also have context about how your actual store is performing, how your campaigns are performing, what is the best text messages to send, what is the best time to send, all that data that you don't have to click through anymore. So I think it's gonna be pretty exciting over the next few few months. I think people have been calling it the age of the agent for many, many years, but now we have assistants and agents that are next to people, and we want to make it much easier for them to use those agents inside Omniscent or to use Omniscent in their own agents. And this is gonna be the the big thing I would say.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that terminology does get thrown around. Agents, assistants. I like to just say it's like having your own personal intern at your fingertips. Exactly. And being able to use natural language and be able to recall reports and build out necessary projects for your client is just incredible. I'm so excited to hear more.
SPEAKER_01Just to add to that point, you know, we see a lot of our merchants as well. Let's just say they have a they're a small business, they have a bunch of stuff going on. They're wearing all the hats, not many hats, every single hat that you could wear, they're wearing it. And they're coming and they know that email marketing is important. They know SMS marketing is important. They don't know anything about SMS marketing, they don't know where to start. So when they come to OmniStand, this is the goal, we want to make it so simple for you to start. Two or three clicks, you don't even have to think about what you need to do. We will tell you what you probably should do based upon your profile, based upon all the data we have in the industry, based upon all the data that we have, aggregated data from our customers. We've seen everything many times over the last 15 years, and we can give you those recommendations, and then we will tie those recommendations to the ultimate revenue so that you can see it's not just a recommendation, but it's actually going to pay off. So we are investing in that quite a lot. So it's gonna be much, much easier for people just to get the most out of the business without having to put so much mental energy into learning the basics. Let me say that.
SPEAKER_00Who are some of your top clients? Have I received any text messages probably from people that work with OmniSend?
SPEAKER_01Um, oh, we have so many names. I mean, it's been a while since I was marketing, but Lego definitely was there. Oh, Lego, wow.
SPEAKER_00Has anyone shared any initial positive feedback with using the MCP? Because you were released that pretty new. It's it's so fascinating. Every time you log into Claud or Chat GPT, you see a new connection available. So I can see as As a marketing service, the race to really get organic and be in inside an LLM is so important. I'm curious to hear if you've had any great client feedback since you released that earlier this summer.
SPEAKER_01We've had pretty great feedback. Again, you know, a lot of our clients, let's say the someone on the bigger side, you know, they have millions of contacts and they have large businesses. They're making hundreds of millions per year. They don't necessarily want to be the innovators. They want to make sure that the thing that they're using is working. Right. And so when you have a strong client base, then you need to make sure you're not the first in-cloud or or ChatGBT plugin store with your MCP. But when you launch that MCP, you make sure that it works, that it works very well. Okay. So when we release it, and I've seen a few MCP examples that were very fragile, a little bit shaking. So when we release it, we release it with our full confidence. And when we release it to the agencies and brands, they said, Oh my God, thank you so, so much. Because some of them are really pretty advanced. They have clawed code setup and they got like autonomous workflows going. And now they can just connect OmniSend there and they can have their whole workflow done. So people, I would say that our MCP in the past few years, MCP was probably the most popular feature we've released in the past few years. And it's just a very straightforward app feature, but people love it because now they can do so much in the AI assistant that they already use.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, speaking as someone who has absolutely worn all the hats. I started my career pretty early on. I mean, if you think about how much the digital space has changed since 2009 when I graduated college, we really were, you know, the traditional like working your way up from the mail room era in the corporate space. And it's so fascinating to see that people are going to be leading businesses and can have digital storefronts now where they don't have to train an intern or spend that money. And maybe they can develop more than one storefront and spend a really cool time just to see, like, oh, what do I want to maybe launch as a passion project and be a first-time founder? Do you have any side interests or do you have a storefront? One of my favorite questions to ask is now that AI has given you hopefully more freedom and time, have you launched anything on the side? Like, what are you doing with your creative output with AI?
SPEAKER_01I would love the time to play around with video, actually. Because I I I graduated English literature. And ever since I was like whatever age I was that I could read, I was I had a book in my hand. So I love stories if I have the time, or even better, video with nice music. And I love to play with VO Gemini, VO last year. But honestly, I used to feel bad. And now I had a new idea that makes me feel best bad. I had so many ideas and I would build them, but then I would just kind of get lost in the work again because then you find something that could work for work, and then you try to build it out and show it to the teams. All right, so your your time is kind of spent a little bit, maybe halfway between here and work. But I heard a quote that that that I find pretty valuable. This is to kind of balance out the guilt that you feel from not finishing your projects, right? And the idea was that building is the new reading. You're not building something to ship it or to to sell it. You're building something just to learn. And the only way to learn is to build. There is no such thing as watching, you know, going through courses or certification or college classes for AI. Building is your reading. And so now I'm pretty okay. Uh, even this week, I don't know if you saw, but they have this new sort of AI called JEV that came out. It acts very quickly, it decides very quickly. It's not even an LLM, it doesn't produce text or images, but it just decides very quickly. And everyone on Twitter yesterday and a few days ago, they were just trying it out. And so today, before our meeting, I had 30 minutes, and so I just built something with it just to see how fast it actually is. And it's I'm not gonna be able to do anything with the thing that I built, but it was just there. So now I understand, okay, this is how it actually works. And hopefully, when I have a problem that is relevant, I can see, okay, this is this solution could could work.
SPEAKER_00That's so fun. I'm gonna have to check it out, Jev. My brother built something just for fun for our family this week. He did a virtual karaoke so we can all like join in because we're all over the world in different places, and he just vibe-coded it, right? Do you have any hackathons or do you encourage any internal building within your company?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. We so this AI as a habit initiative. One of the ways in which we kind of got adoption to increase was that the company decided we are going to dedicate one full day every month where everyone does nothing else except AI. And it's, I mean, it's a pretty big investment. We are like almost you know 300 people in the company. But we decided that this was the only way we need people to actually get their hands on and we need to dedicate a time and space for it. Uh, and so some of those we did hackathons. We did all kinds of hackathons. And the first one I did actually was this challenge because I wanted people to move from ChatGPT assistant to vibe coding. And many people hadn't had only touched ChatGPT or Clot and they never actually tried to build something. So our first one was a sort of a challenge where you have we divide people up into teams, and then they have to build these three types of things within one hour time frame, and then at the end we judge which one was the best. Some sort of egg-catching game, and then another one with some uh other game. It was like uh just ridiculous things. But the goal was there just to have fun and then to see how quickly how easy it is to build things now. Um, and then the hackathons we had after that was actually two types. One was to hack together something that we can put in our product for our customers, and then the other one was to hack something together for our visitors to our websites, like a tool, an SEO tool, or you know, image alt text kind of tool, anything that we can host on our website. And then the third hackathon we had was people could build an agent with with Google Gemini, or they could make a video, just any sort of 30-second video about any story, and that was a lot of fun. People just people are very creative and they found how easy it is to make a video, how difficult it is to make a consistent video, but those kinds of hackathons where we balance some fun, learning, and and and work uh really paid off.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've worked at a couple companies before where they did those types of creative projects and and hackathons, and it's fun. And you you never really know everybody's pain point until you come together and you can think about things to put forth. Are there any trends as a whole that you're seeing in marketing that are coming through for how AI is changing this space? We touched on how creative advertising and those types of content are probably going to be slower to really move through. Since you do a lot of speaking and writing and research on your own, is there anything that you've discovered recently?
SPEAKER_01You know, I the vast amount of information in my head when it comes to AI is more trends that are short, that I wish they were not short-lived, but they are, and people are constantly trying to push further ahead with more extreme, more sophisticated versions of AI. The thing that I would kind of counter here is there is a way to use AI to make your human relationship stronger, and there's a way to use AI to distance yourself from the people that you're trying to reach. And and sometimes those innovative tactics, they're just moving people further away from other people. When I have an e-commerce store, I want to understand who my customer is, and I want to reach, I want to provide to them a solution that they've been looking for for a long time. And other tactics that I've seen, and I've seen a lot automated Reddit scrapes and all these kinds of stuff, they push you away from understanding your your target audience. And so I would kind of warn like kind of warn against that kind of direction. Our goal inside Omniscent, for example, has always been if this is the scale of stuff that people do, especially if you're in marketing, you're in sales, you have 30% of time with actual people. And then you got 70% of time with administrative stuff. So I hope this is a trend that I would see, but unfortunately, I'm seeing a little bit more on the other side where people are just not connecting more with people, but they're just doing more things through AI and not really understanding their customers.
SPEAKER_00I'm experiencing that firsthand where there is that desire to move more into real life analog events and spaces and brand activations. People are really craving that. The more that we become AI-centric, the more that we're wanting the remedy. We we need the remedy on the opposite end of doing more in person. So I think it's you know up to us as leaders on our teams and in our communities to really push that and guide people in that direction. So thank you for sharing. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01No, I was gonna say, even with our own marketing, without releasing too much internal info, we have seen over the years that in-person events is the magic key to not everything, but it's the one thing. And digital events and and digital communication, it's still fine, but it's not bringing that much growth as just meeting someone in person. You know, if you're if your viewers have that possibility to travel and to talk to people or the customers in in person, highly recommend it.
SPEAKER_00I've done some live podcast tapings, and those are just so special to actually get to meet people in person. Um, maybe I'll do another one of those in 2027 because it was just so great. My final question for you, I love to just leave the floor open. You know, if you really had something that you wanted to share, a key takeaway, what do you want to leave listeners with from our conversation?
SPEAKER_01I I guess I would repeat the same in terms of AI. Building is reading, doing is learning. Uh, there's no other types of learning that can be done. And I would really just recommend if people are interested in AI and they haven't had the chance yet, just jump into it. Don't even prepare yourself too much. You know, just get into that and see how it can help you. I've seen that there are like two kind of worst AI people. The first and the most worst, most worst, if that makes sense, is the AI person who thinks that AI can do everything. Uh and the second worst is uh is one of the things that AI can do nothing. And you know, the the truth is somewhere in the middle. And so to become that person, you have to actually play with AI and figure out where it can help you and where you probably should take over by yourself.
SPEAKER_00Such beautiful last words. The truth is somewhere in the middle. So, Bernard, thank you so much for your time today and for staying a little later at the office to be able to speak to me. It really means a lot. Um, I really enjoy getting to learn more about OmniSend and maybe even start to look into text message marketing for my platform. It'd be a good opportunity to connect with people in that way. So thank you so much again. I appreciate you.
SPEAKER_01You're welcome. Thank you so much. It was fantastic. Loved it.
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