Beyond the AI Hype: Brand, Data, and the Future of Human-Centered Technology

AI is reshaping marketing, customer experience, and enterprise technology faster than most organizations can keep up, but speed alone doesn’t guarantee better outcomes.

In this episode, Shawn Cordner sits down with Jared Ruth, Founder of RipCurrent Agency, to explore where AI creates real value and where it can quietly undermine trust, brand, and human connection if deployed without intention. Drawing on decades of experience across enterprise service providers, marketing leadership, and emerging AI use cases, Jared shares a grounded perspective on how organizations should think about personalization, automation, and the evolving role of humans in an AI-driven world.

The conversation spans practical AI applications in marketing and CX, the risks of AI fatigue and over-automation, why “English is the new programming language,” and how data from marketing, contact centers, and digital channels can (and should) shape smarter AI strategies. Most importantly, Shawn and Jared challenge the idea that AI replaces creativity or relationships, arguing instead that it raises the stakes for authenticity, culture, and owning the moments that matter most to customers.

This episode is a must-listen for technology leaders, marketers, and CX executives navigating AI adoption while protecting brand trust, human experience, and long-term differentiation.

Transcript

Shawn Cordner (00:13.038)

Hey everybody, I'm Shawn Cordner, Chief Marketing Officer of Amplix. This is the Amplitude of Tech podcast. Thanks for joining us. Today, my guest is Jared Ruth. He runs an agency called Ripcurrent Agency. It's a marketing agency that leverages AI for their clients to help them build their brands and go to market. This was a super interesting conversation. He's a really sharp guy. He's got a lot of hands-on practical experience with AI. He also comes from the technology provider space. He gave us a lot of context on how AI is being used today, how it's going to be used in the future.

And we had a great conversation. If you're a technology leader that wants to learn about AI applications and how they can better collaborate with marketing, or if you are a marketer, or if you're just someone who's interested in AI and the implications that it may have on society, I think you're going enjoy this conversation. Thanks for joining us.

Shawn Cordner (01:05.57)

All right, Jared Ruth, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks, Shawn. Appreciate the opportunity.

I appreciate you spending some time with me. It's been a while since we connected. We go back, I guess, maybe four or five years. worked on a couple of projects together when I had my branding agency and you were working with one of the companies that was a client of ours. were doing a pretty, pretty large rebrand and we worked with you on that and you became one of my favorite people in the industry. Just such a nice chill California guy. Very smart, very sharp. And your career has kind of taken a bit of a different turn. So let me just turn it over to you real quick.

let everyone know, you know, where you've come from and where you're at today.

Well, appreciate that, Shawn. The feeling is absolutely mutual and the flattery will get you everywhere. So thank you for that. yeah, so it's been a wild journey. You know, I spent 25 years-ish in corporate America, ranging from, you know, tech and engineering all the way to operations. you know, most recent stint in the large service provider areas were

Jared Ruth (02:13.942)

related to marketing and then doing product launches and things for emerging technologies on the managed services side. yeah, you know, various background in different areas, kind of shifting all over the place. And maybe I attribute it a little bit to getting bored easily, but most recently, you know, it's been a really cool journey because I stepped out of that corporate environment.

out on my own. So definitely a little scary, to be honest, and you've known what that looks like. But it has been just such an incredible eye-opener for me, going from having massive budgets and a team and all that, to really being able to build and craft on my own and relearn, honestly, a lot of things that I had forgotten over time. you get so busy with

PowerPoint presentations and emails and meetings and all that stuff. And then all of a sudden you're just sort of left with, okay, what do I know? How can I contribute value? And then, you know, initially you're feeling like, oh boy, this is going to be tough. All of a sudden realizing that there's a ton of value that you can contribute and bring to the market, which is really cool and exciting.

Yeah, I think that's really relatable. It's worth saying that you were at one of the largest technology telecom service providers out there. Very, very big recognizable name and you had a very important role there. And then you worked overseeing marketing for one of their subsidiaries, which is a very cool and growing company in itself.

Yeah, absolutely.

Shawn Cordner (04:01.294)

But the bigger the company, the more complex your day gets. There's more things that you have to talk about and more people that you have to engage with, more stakeholders that you have to answer to. And it's really, hard to get anything done aside from meetings, right? And meetings and email doesn't really work, but it does feel that way sometimes. our audience is mostly technology leaders in the IT and the CX space, but I'm sure that's very relatable too, because...

You know, the bigger the organization, the more complexity in their technology ecosystem that they have to manage the more stakeholders that they have to answer to, which is some of the things that I want to get into today actually. And I just want to assure the audience before we go any further here that, even though this is two marketing guys, we're going to try to thread the needle between marketing and technology, and not talk too much about, you know, the things that really excite us, the brand stuff and the marketing talk. So.

We'll try to keep you on the technology side, but I'm sure some of it's going to leak in because as I'm fond of saying and our nine episodes and I've probably said it about 15 times, you know, I'm a hammer and everything looks like a nail to me. Right. So I look at everything through a marketer's lens and I'm sure you do too, but start there. Right. So just, just briefly, what is your current agency that you started? It's it's rip current agency.

and you are deploying an interesting use case for AI in the marketing space. So just talk to me a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. So, kind of following up on what you just said there too, you know, what I, what I realized that there is, you know, it's after all this stuff is necessary that we do every day. I'm not saying that having meetings and emails isn't necessary. It's extremely important. but what I found out, when it left is that, you know, why we had access to all these tools and platforms and all these things that, that, you know, we use from an enterprise perspective, from a, for marketing.

Jared Ruth (05:57.294)

That's not the case, obviously, with most main street businesses, smaller businesses, medium-sized businesses even. And it was interesting because, you know, as a service provider, we enabled a lot of our partners in the channel with these types of platforms. And I was interfacing with them every day, but I guess I didn't realize to what extent, maybe they didn't totally...

You know, leverage those or in some ways even know how to use them. And so, you know, when I started a rip current, you know, my, my real mission was to show people, you know, that marketing while, you know, I always say, you know, sometimes the people marketing sucks because it seems to just like pull everything out of everywhere and, money and, you know, top line revenue and everything.

But it's really, it can be very complicated and challenging and frustrating. think especially if you're a business owner, you're hearing these things, you're getting emails every day about, your SEO isn't optimized. You can do more with advertising, you can do more with this. And so my intention in creating RipCurrent was to cut through all that noise and just help people understand, okay, here's the fundamentals of what you need to do as a...

to market your business. And it's actually not that hard and it's not that expensive. So I find myself telling people a lot of times when I'm getting in talking to them, here's a bunch of stuff you don't need to do. Here's the emails you don't have to pay attention to because a lot of these are just going to waste your time, right? So that's been really cool helping these smaller companies cut through the noise, cut through the, you know, all the things they're hearing and get

back to the basics of marketing and using AI agents as a major piece of that to help them streamline their daily operations and get the information they need to market effectively.

Shawn Cordner (08:01.644)

Yeah, I think one of the use cases for AI in the marketing space right now that I'm most excited about is personalization and predictive analytics, right? Because to your point, business owners and the technology leaders that are listening to this, they're inundated with emails. I get them all day. And these companies are just constantly barraging you on the phone and text messages and emails, and you don't know what to respond to, and you really don't end up responding to anything but...

Sometimes there is a product market fit there that you do want to explore. I've definitely, I've responded to some cold calls. just had a, um, a meeting yesterday with a company that's in the cyber security space, a media company, and you know, looking at maybe doing some advertising with them. And I'm pretty sure that the email that the guy sent me that I responded to was an E an AI driven email, right?

The reason that I responded to it was because it was so specific to something that I had going on. And he found that through publicly available information. He's not snooping on me or anything, right? But the AI pulled it in. It recognized a signal. It pulled it in. It crafted a message that was speaking specifically to my intent and my interests. And presented the information in a way that was quickly consumable, concise, and value forward. And so I responded to it and

I think that's a great use case for AI. Thoughts on that and what are some of the other great use cases for AI in marketing?

Yeah, totally agree. what's so cool is, mean, you know, just scratching the surface when we talk about email campaigns and A &B testing and web personalization and all that stuff. But to your point, know, AI is a great way to put those messages out in front of people like yourself.

Jared Ruth (09:59.128)

but it still takes a human behind that, right? There still has to be that connected tissue. So AI might have gotten you to respond and said, hey, this resonates with me, but it still takes a human to follow up and get you interested enough to say, hey, I wanna talk to you. And that's where I think, we run into this relationship with AI where,

We need to be very careful about making sure that the AI is maybe leading that conversation, but not expecting AI to take over everything. Right. And obviously that's different depending on the use case. And so I hope we have time to dig into a few of these because there's certain things that are very transactional. Right. And you can use that and people actually appreciate the fact that you can go in, you don't have to talk to anybody. You can get an order in, you know, see those things, but there's other scenarios and many scenarios.

where people very much expect to still talk to a human. They want that interaction. Now I have small customers where they'll use AI to start the conversation or provide information about the business. And they'll tell me all the time, Jared, hey, this is really cool. Like this is saving me so much time and thank you and you know, all that good stuff. But I'm like,

That's true, but also when they come into your store and they're giving you a five-star review because of the way your employees treated them, that's not my AI. I wish I could say it was. It's not, it's you guys and your employees. So I can get people there. can, you know, have that front end, but if they go into your store or they go into your business, they go into wherever and get treated terribly. AI is not going to fix that necessarily. So.

So yeah, so it's, it's, there's this dichotomy between the two that, that are, that's really critical to understand. And I, I think it's important. So.

Shawn Cordner (11:55.404)

Yeah. From a messaging perspective and from a personalization perspective, it can help your company be the signal through the noise, which is ultimately what marketing is about, right? It's trying to understand what the market needs and what you deliver really well and what maybe your competition is failing to deliver. And if you can zero in on that and communicate that in an effective way, you'll start to stand out. There are obviously more tactical things that need to be considered to do that. Right. But AI can, can definitely.

help you with that, but to your point about keeping the human in the loop and not from the perspective of to check the AI, but from the perspective of putting authenticity forward and putting your people forward, right? Your brand is partly your business strategy, but it's also partly the culture and the people that you have and the culture that those people foster have created. So that's almost as important as the business strategy, right? Where that can become.

the business strategy and you have to be careful letting AI take over too much of those kinds of interactions because you lose that authenticity, you lose that connection and really you start to erode the brand. That culture is so important and AI really cannot put culture forward. And I think we see this in the context center space quite a bit. lot of people start wading into AI in CX because they see it as an opportunity to create cost savings, reduce labor costs or

You know, deflect transactional calls and, and push those calls off on the AI so that the, the reps can focus on more complex calls. And that's, that's very valuable, right? But you also have to think about why is that person calling? What emotional state is that person in? What are they trying to accomplish? What do you need them to accomplish? How can that interaction reinforce the brand and the culture, but also what are the potential risks?

of introducing AI at a moment that is, you know, somebody is emotionally fragile, maybe it's a medical situation, right? Or a legal situation. You just, have to be careful with these kinds of things or someone's already amped up because they're just so angry at your company because of something that happened. You have to be careful about putting the AI too far forward there, right?

Jared Ruth (14:14.06)

Yeah, no, you said a couple words there which are perfect and, you know, after years of working with you, I'm not surprised because you're a brand guy. you know, emotion is a big one, right? And then the second word that you said there was moment. Okay. So when we think about AI, especially as it relates to brand, and that's going back to that employee example I just gave.

AI can simulate these moments and they can simulate emotions. can do all that stuff. But, know, the thing I keep explaining to people is AI will not show up in those moments, right? AI is not going to go to your kid's soccer game. It's not going to show up at a funeral. It's not going to go to a birthday party. It's not going to barbecue with you in your kitchen over a couple of beers, right? And these are the moments that really create connection.

more so than any simulated environment, right? Now, you could say, a call center employee is not going to go to your kid's birthday party and all this stuff. But the point is, I think we just really got to think about it in that context of what is real, what feels real. AI is going to continue to help us with transactional volumes of things and simulated environments and maybe

get you to hook on to something because it's interesting to you, right? Because of that specific ICP. AI is not going to build a relationship that's meaningful with Shawn over time, you know, in a way that is this human connection and interaction. mean, we, our interactions go well beyond, you know, what we did as, you know, in this brand strategy stuff in corporate, you know,

It's because we've connected on a way that was beyond that. I just think, you know, it's not anything I'm saying that's like, my gosh, I never thought of it that way, but it's so important as a marketer and not even as a marketer, just as a marketer, an operations, as a business owner. You know, as AI becomes more front and center, we constantly have to remind ourselves that this does not replace human connection.

Jared Ruth (16:42.664)

In fact, human connection becomes even more important. And so, you know, that's really what I find super interesting about this. So to tie it back to what you were saying about marketing versus operations versus, you know, these different parts of the business. Yes, AI is going to be able to connect the dots through these scenarios, but it's never going to replace the way a customer feels. know, Maya Angelou, we say it all the time in brand, you know, it's about how you make people feel.

It's never going to be able to replace that. I mean, to some extent, simulate it. You you talk to AI, it's like, what should I do about this? Tell you some ideas, but it's never going to be, you know, hey, we're out playing golf. I'm saying, hey dude, I'm struggling with this. This is hard for me, you know, and you're telling me, hey, this is my experience. That's not going to be replaced anytime soon, in my opinion.

You're totally right. It's interesting because as marketers, it's something that I kind of laugh at, we're contributing to this problem of AI fatigue, right? There's few people that you would ask if there's an AI bubble that would say no. It's just the, what's the magnitude of the bubble? How much is actually real and how much is bubble, right? But there's a bubble and marketers contribute to that because

product marketers, especially are just slapping AI on everything. There are products that have been out there using machine learning of some sort for years and years and years. Now all of a sudden it's, it's relabeled rebranded as being AI. And so they think that that's what the audience wants to hear and then what the market wants to hear. But I think there's already fatigue and because everyone is now saying, we're AI too. You're not differentiating. You're just contributing to the noise.

And so I think you're going to start to see an already a pendulum swing towards human authenticity. And the example that I was going to give you is, I heart radio. I listened to several I heart radio podcasts and they have like a little sonic branding element that they do. This, this woman with a very pleasant voice says I heart media. And now after that, I noticed the tagline extends and says,

Shawn Cordner (18:57.954)

guaranteed human or something to that effect. So they're already capitalizing on that swing back of people getting a little bit tired of hearing about AI and maybe a little bit wary of AI and AI generated content as they should be.

Hadn't heard that sound.

Jared Ruth (19:16.686)

Yeah. Well, you mean it's so true. I've been some advisory and investment circles and I was actually talking to a guy, buddy, a good buddy of mine who runs a fund and he said, you know, we've gotten to the point now, whereas if you start your pitch with AI, like we were an AI company that does dot dot dot, we're like shutting the conversation down immediately. It's become, you know,

Tell us this problem you're solving. And if you want to further along in the conversation, talk about how you're incorporating AI into solving that problem. So, but that's always been the case. You know, I think, you know, especially around investment, you know, you always start with the problem. You always start with, this is the problem here. Tell him solving it. AI, you know, by introducing anything on the front end, you know, Hey, we're an AI company.

it's sort of become completely meaningless at this point.

Yeah, your AI is potentially creating problems as well, not just solving problems. so that's the foot to lead with necessarily, but you said a term, a marketing term earlier, ICP. And I think it's worth just explaining to the audience what that is. So that's your ideal customer profile, right? That's what does a great customer look like that?

Right.

Shawn Cordner (20:43.072)

Our messaging, our offering, our value proposition is really going to resonate with those people for whatever reasons. Right. so marketing does, especially brand marketers. We spend a lot of time trying to understand how to position us to an ICP. And, I think that this is a great time to turn towards collaboration between the marketing organization.

within a company and the IT organization within a company or the contact center, CX organization. because it's important when you're deploying, especially like a customer facing or market facing AI, something in the contact center, for example, the, know, that we were talking about. We're done that you understand who are the people that are calling into the contact center and why are they calling in? so.

part of the process, part of the discovery process of scoping out an AI project should really involve obviously a lot of stakeholders within the organization. But marketing needs to be a key one because of the impacts on the brand. There's opportunity with the brand, there's risk to the brand. The classic example being the thing that happened with, I can't remember which airline it was, but Air Canada maybe.

Asked an AI about the bereavement policy and it's like, yeah, we'll pay you back. then they contacted a live person after the fact and they said, no, that's not a real policy. And then they got sued because they refused to pay back the whatever $800 that the ticket costs. And it costs them untold money in, in damage to the brand brand equity and trust. Right. So, maybe talk to me just cause I think you, have a unique perspective in that you, you come from.

the space, the technology provider space. You've dealt with a lot of the end user customers, the buyers, the ICPs, and they're buying personas for those companies. And obviously you know a lot about AI and brands. So maybe just talk about the importance of marketing and IT or contact center organizations collaborating with each other. What role can marketing play in AI projects?

Jared Ruth (23:06.316)

Yeah, well, it's interesting. So ICP, you know, as we define it has shifted so much since AI became sort of mainstream in, I mean, to your point, it's been around forever, especially as it relates to project product positioning. I mean, you look back to Amazon and they've been doing this for forever, right? It's going way back. But until it reached prevalence and, you know,

in the last few years, the ICP has been shifting. So it used to be, as you recall, we would have pretty broad segments, you know, and especially if it relates to these larger service providers. Our segments could be like, you know, employee based or so we were doing mostly business B2B at that point, but it could be all the way from ranging from.

This company has 10 to 99 employees and this company has 100 to 1000 employees in this company. And so we're marketing to these segments, right? And so you're looking at that going, okay, well, mean, shoot, 10 to 99 employees. That could be the difference between a very small company that's, working out of somebody's garage, you know, doing, you know, wooden toys all the way up to, you know, a massive company with a hundred people.

And maybe the hundred people are warehouse distribution employees, they've got, you know, so, so it, you know, I think where, you know, ICP and segmentation have driven with AI is all of a sudden, you know, B2B. In fact, it was, it was interesting. You know, we would, we would interview people and in some ways I would start looking at marketers that weren't B2B.

And they would come to me and say, Hey, you know, I know I'm applying for this job. I'm mostly B2C, but you know, business consumer, but you know, I know this is a B2B job. And I said, well, don't discount yourself yet because candidly, I'm really interested in talking to B2C because our business B2B is becoming more B2C all the time. Right. We're starting to talk to individuals and our ideal customer profile is, is it used to be, Hey, we're looking at

Jared Ruth (25:23.182)

CEO of a tech company or we're looking at, you know, a CFO or this is a story we're trying to tell this person. Now I'm trying to tell a story to Shawn, you know, a chief marketing officer, you know, at Amplix. And here's the thing, Shawn lives here. This is what Shawn likes. is, so our ICPs are, are, are becoming smaller and AI is helping us, you know, tell that story better.

and directionally give us more information that helps us tell those stories better. And so then, you know, to bring it full circle to your question, this is important information for the whole company to understand. So the more you can pass that to your support team, I you were talking about, you know, in telecom, omni-channel experiences using AI and kind of preemptively understanding

what a customer is going to do or need or say before they say it. Well, you've got all these interactions through your app, through your web, through maybe a customer interaction over the phone. All of this becomes super important. And candidly, right now, I mean, and it's probably beyond this now, 80 % of calls coming in, they already know what the call is probably going to be about. I mean, it's

I mean, it may even be higher than that now based on the conversations with your UCAS, CCAS providers. It's incredible preemptively how we can operationally guide these calls into the right hands. So that's just one use case, but it's a really, really great one because it's helping us solve these problems much faster than we used to be able to do and save a ton of time and money along with it.

Yeah, I think it's such an important point that marketing generates a ton of data about your customers, the market, and it, that data can enrich any aspect of any AI project, right? We, we talk a lot about in, in contact centers when we're selling them AI, we talk a lot about how the conversations and the interactions that they're having through their customer support channels.

Shawn Cordner (27:38.634)

are a huge source of untapped data. And so one of the use cases for AI and marketing in that context is mining that data, those calls using AI to pick up sentiment, to flag keywords as a way to help drive marketing strategy and brand strategy, product development and feature development, uncover new product opportunities, gaps in the market, uncover

uh, insights about your competition and all of that can feed marketing, it goes the other way as well. mean, uh, Amplix is maybe a little bit of a different example because we don't have a contact center in the traditional sense that we don't have a, we've got customer or client support specialists, but they're dedicated. It's not like a call center environment, but even still, you know, we might get in the order of a thousand calls, Oh, 2000 calls, few thousand calls, whatever. You know, we get.

tens of thousands of hits a month on our website, unique users, right? So we're, we're driving a lot of traffic and all of those interactions throughout our entire digital footprint are being recorded and tracked. And, know, we, we do it, we have a very solid privacy policy. We're compliant with everything, but you know, we're collecting that data and, that data is very usable for other areas of the organization, not just.

Yep. Well, and it should, I mean, and I'm sure it is for Amclex, it really drives your content strategy on the web and other things because it used to be, put an FAQ up there, you know, we'll answer some questions that we're getting a lot. Now it's about interactive videos. Now it's about content on demand. It's a bunch of other things that are really helping, you know, with those interactions. And, you know, I think

It's really interesting too. One of the things that makes me laugh as I stand up more, just very simple chat agents with customers, right? Stuff that, you know, has become sort of table stakes for technology companies, but still isn't necessarily for non-tech companies. What's wild is that, you know, users still feel like when they're talking to a chat agent,

Jared Ruth (30:00.206)

that it's like that nobody's looking. It's funny, like you'll see these interactions and the things that people are typing. It almost reminds me of, you know, early web days and this still happens where you'll have somebody on Google like, hey, how do I, you know, hide a dead body or something, you know, and it's just like, hold on, dude, like this is a problem, right? So I think that that what's really cool is, you know, to do your point, they're

They're telling you exactly what they need. And unfortunately, you know, too many times businesses are completely ignoring all that information and they're, they're not using it to their benefit. Not only from a marketing perspective, but to your point, that's not getting back to operations. That's not getting back to retention. That's not even getting back to sales for crying out loud, you know, and candidly, you know, I know I have colleagues that may be watching as former colleagues.

We were guilty of some of that, right? We weren't using our data the way that we should have been all the time. And I'm saying that as the marketing leader for that environment, know, hindsight, you you look back and say, wow, we could have been doing better. But yeah, it's really interesting how valuable that information is. And if you're not leveraging it, well, I mean,

most fundamental piece, guess what? Your competition definitely is. So you're already, you know, a couple steps behind.

Yeah, it's a, it's a huge gap, right? mean, I think this is broader than just the marketing discussion too. think organizations are still struggling with all of the data that they have and that data is living in different silos and is that data ready for AI? Right? So the data is a big challenge and a big problem and an untapped resources in a lot of organizations. But, know, the good thing is that there's a lot of motion, tours.

Shawn Cordner (32:03.572)

using that data and leveraging AI with that data. We've got a podcast and a webinar coming up with this guy, Scott Weiner from NuEon. And he's an AI expert. The guy addresses Congress regularly and helps them develop policy, which is a challenge, right? Because they don't want much of an AI policy right now. But a lot of the Congress people that he deals with are trying to learn as much as they can about it.

Um, but you know, one of the, the questions that I'm, I asked him in some prep calls for these conversations I'm about to have with him is, you know, looking back in 2025, we had a podcast and I asked him for predictions and he predicted the rise of agentic AI. And I said, now looking back at 2025, what actually happened and how did your predictions match up? And on the agentic AI front, what he's seeing, and I think we see it too, is there's a rapid increase in adoption.

People are getting off of the starting line now and we weren't there in 2024. 2024, we heard a lot about the board says we need to do AI or I'm being pushed for AI from marketing or whoever, right? Or even IT saying, we're looking at AI to solve problems or to create cost efficiencies. But the conversations were around strategy and policy and governance and, and security. Obviously those conversations still are there, but

It seems like the, the Overton window has moved slightly. so now the conversations are a little bit more about piloting and pilot to scale and things like that. So, and you said something interesting when we had an art prep call for this as well, which was English is the new coding language, right? So maybe.

Yeah, when actually I, as much as I'd love to take credit for that, there's a gentleman, Andre Karpathy, who is, he was a big time AI expert at Tesla and open AI. And, you know, he's been in this, he's been in this since beginning. And he, I think he tweeted it like a few years ago. It might've been 23 where he said something to the effect.

Jared Ruth (34:22.286)

hottest new programming language is English. And then he gave a really great keynote to Y Combinator. was an AI startup group, I think it was earlier this year. And he was just going through software 1.0, how it was sort of computer and code, and this is driving what computers and mainframes and things did. Software 2.0 was sort of taking that.

that code and then creating neural networks and really putting weighting on code and neural networks and how does that all come together right and create something bigger than the code itself. And then he's really saying AI and large language models are really the software 3.0 and what's driving that is conversations, which is crazy because you

All these things we're talking about and what I, you I love about what she said here in 25 and now driving into 26. This is, this is accessible to everybody. Like what shocked me, I think once I got out, um, on my own is how easily it was to build things. So I started, you know, just going, okay, I need to sharpen my tool. My tool belt around, you know, web development and things like that. Well, then all of a sudden, you know, I'm coding pretty advanced stuff for people.

And when I say coding, a lot of it's, you know, just using my language, my voice to code this. But what I've, and no, again, for my coder friends out there, trust me, we've had many conversations about we'll need them and they understand coding much better than I do. But the point is we can go solve these problems. And so while they may have the coding knowledge, I've got the operational and business knowledge to fix this stuff.

and so quickly, you know, way faster than we could have ever created solutions to these problems before I can go solve them on my own. so before I used to search for a SaaS application for, for months, I put a, you know, here's my requirements. got it. So I get all the way down to the end of this. You know, process of looking for a SaaS application only to find out, Hey, you know what? does everything I need.

Jared Ruth (36:42.73)

everything I need except for two things. Guess what? Those two things are probably the two most important things that I need, right? So then I'm back to the drawing board of trying to find a new SaaS application. You know, and so what's been really incredible is going and building something bespoke for myself or my business or for my customer. Where, I mean, look, most of this stuff exists. Personalization around e-commerce has been around forever, you know?

dynamic pricing, you're having even the grocery stores doing it right now. This is all AI driven. You can look at predictive cross selling and retention. This is stuff that's been going on for a very long time. However, it's not uniquely tailored to your business or your industry, especially if you're a smaller medium sized company. So now, with English being the newest coding language, if you will, and you can use

You know platforms like V zero or lovable or some of these others, you know, there's a bunch of them to not only build out your front end from a marketing perspective, but your back end now and tie those together. So now you've got access to great things like fire base or super base or whatever. You can pull all this data in and then start creating these front ends for not only your customers, but for your operations. This stuff just gets crazy. I mean, I.

I think I told you, Shawn, I was telling my son, who's 19 and in college now, said, you're going to grow up in an environment where when you need something, you just spin it up. Like on demand, you're like, hey, I really want an app that does this. I want, you know, and you spin it up and it's, mean, not only are you going to grow up there, it's here right now. Now, is it the best, cleanest code, you know, today? No, it's not. However, it will be.

It will be very, you know, and you'll be able to pull that stuff together. Anyway, long, I get fired up about this stuff. I don't know if you can tell, but this is really exciting times for us to be adopting some of this technology.

Shawn Cordner (38:56.462)

Well, it kind of makes me think of again, in the, the CX space and how you can deflect certain transactional calls to the AI to allow your contact center agents to be focused on more complex calls, and solving more complex problems. And there's a lot of benefits to that in terms of employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, right? That's a good thing, but it makes me think that businesses might have more scale in, in their

development, right? Because they can deflect low level code writing to the AI, focus the devs that they're paying for the humans on the more complex, challenging or creative solutions that need to be done.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's, that's such a great, you know, scenario for us to be in right now, because then you're optimizing. Again, it goes back to the moments, right? Those are the moments that really matter. If I'm trying to pay my bill or whatever, I don't care. I won't even think about it. Right. I don't, but man, when I'm fired up or I've got an outage and something happened because, you know, I needed to get a hold of emergency services or it was.

daughter's wedding or something else happened. And I couldn't get what I needed in that moment because now it's affecting me as an individual and my reputation or my family or man, then I want to talk to the top tier, you know, engineer, the top tier personal, whoever that is. I need to be able to get direct access to them. And those are the moments that really drive brand, you know, know, when we were talking about brand, you know,

back when we were working on that project together, know, so much of it is emotional, but so much of it is like, you know, you have to own those moments. You have to. It's like, you can do the best brand campaign ever. If you don't own that moment, none of the campaigns are going to make any difference. You know, we don't just, you know, earn brownie points by doing campaigns. We earn those and, you know,

Jared Ruth (41:08.46)

that reputation and that feeling through those moments.

Yeah, I think also leveraging some of marketing's data that we've collected on customers and the market in the AI models can help you anticipate those moments and anticipate what type of interaction that person needs in that moment. Right. mean, just thinking about kind of generational differences in how people adopt technology or use technology. You've got a whole generation right below us that they don't really necessarily want to talk to people and.

You have a generation that's above us that they're not maybe generally speaking as savvy and maybe not as interested in engaging with an AI when they call into a contact center. Right. So there's, we've got demographic data and that demographic data can be leveraged to anticipate how does that person want to have an interaction with us? And, and then you can preemptively create that interaction, create that moment and give them the opportunity to go a different place if needed when they're having an interaction with you. But.

just by virtue of starting the engagement the way that you anticipate they want that engagement to go, you're already meeting their needs and creating a smoother, less friction in their interaction and a better customer experience.

It's so true. I mean, I think about, you know, with our AI voice agents, you know, they can speak in essentially any language, 300 plus languages. So you think about brand and about how you're meeting the customer in their point of need. Well, I mean, one of the most fundamental is my language. Like if I call you and I can't, you know, get answers in my own language, that creates a

Jared Ruth (42:55.082)

attention point right there, right? Where it's like, I'm paying you money. I'm a customer. However, you can't even interface with me in my language. this is where, you know, is chatting with a bot or an agent, AI agent, a great brand play all the time? No, not necessarily. However, if I can interface with an AI agent, whether via voice or via chat, you know, on your website,

In my own language. Man, I mean, that's way better than not being able to interface with anything or anybody at all. Right. So, so I think it's, it's good. And I, I mean, I love this conversation around. This is, this becomes deeply personal. Right. So, so while some people, you know, man, maybe it's generational. I want to talk to somebody versus, Hey, I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't care.

Or maybe it's a language barrier. Maybe it's something else, you know, beyond, you know, also these life moments. Like it's cool to get a happy birthday email from, you know, service provider. But, you know, these are all, there's other moments that are really critical too in our lives that, you know, that AI can help us just remember those and then reach out and do something.

you know, really fantastic for people when they're in those moments. so yeah, I think, you know, we're just scratching the surface. It's like we are, we are like, you know, just at the beginning stages of this. And I think where I'm most excited about this going is us being able to not just chat with a large language model and say, Hey, you know, use it like a search engine.

But it's when we really start to create. I know we talked about this too, Shawn, that, you know, this is really going to come down to creators versus consumers. And as long as we are driving the creation and we're building things, I think we're on the winning side of that equation. Right? The more as, as companies we just consume and we don't, aren't thinking about how do we create, how do we build, how do we renew these experiences for ourselves and for our customers.

Jared Ruth (45:13.87)

if you're not on that side of the equation, then I think, I think you're in trouble, honestly. And, so I think that conversation becomes pretty simple. Like, are you a company that's constantly creating? Are you a company that's consuming and expecting, you know, people to just come and buy from you because you happen to be the best today? I don't know. It's a, it's going to be interesting to see where this place, how this plays out, you know, over the next couple of years.

Yeah. And leveraging AI to, to code your own custom applications, I think is another step towards democratization of leveraging data and these more sophisticated use cases, right? Like from a marketing perspective, at least something like predictive analytics is expensive, right? I remember I worked on a project and this is probably 10 years ago.

And I worked on a project and we wanted to tie into a predictive analytics platform. And the license costs for that was like $200,000 in a decade ago. Right. And that doesn't include all of the costs for the developers to do the integration and to write the, you know, customize the code and things. Right. So that's out of reach for a lot of organizations, but now you might be able to do that yourself in house and have a platform that works for your needs and gives you those kinds of capabilities.

for a lot less cost and that makes it accessible to smaller businesses.

That's exactly right. just bringing it back to brand, I worked with some very, very large brand agencies, as you know, and seven figures for brand studies and things like that. And when you really look at what they're working or what they're doing, yes, there's some great expertise there. so I'm not, again, not trying to discount what they do, anything like

Jared Ruth (47:16.174)

However, a lot of it is research driven. A lot of it is, hey, I'm going to reach out to stakeholders, both employees, customers, leadership, former customers, all these things and say, hey, what really drove your relationship with this brand? What's your feeling? Well, a lot of that now can be automated through, I went and built, this has been probably six, seven months ago, but built a brand app.

that basically does all this for you, right? And it goes and collects information, it goes and emails people, brings it back, analyzes it, pulls it all together. And, you know, it didn't take me very long to build that app, right? And so it's something that democratizing is perfect, perfect word for it. Because, you know, I'm not a, you know,

massive brand agency out of Chicago or New York. I'm, you know, I have a very, very small, you know, agency in Southern California. And yet I can build a tool that can, you know, do all this automatically on my own for, for companies. And so it, it just, brings it all home. makes it more achievable. And, and this is all the same stuff that small companies need.

They just don't have the resources and specifically the financial backing to be able to pull some of this stuff off. But ultimately it's not necessarily that these larger companies are doing anything that is far outside of what you can do on your own. It's just they have the resources and the people that know how to do it.

percent, which leads me to a question that I wanted to ask you and it's, it's going to sound like stoner talk a little bit, but can AI actually be creative? Right? So I took a note, my working definition, this is not from AI. This is not from, Merriam-Webster dictionary. This is my definition of, of creativity.

Shawn Cordner (49:26.834)

is the ability to apply knowledge from disparate domains and synthesize them into new novel ideas. Okay. So to argue against a

love the Joe Rogan podcast by the way. Just kidding.

Yeah, I wish I

We're on this rock, just around the flaming sun. Yeah, no, that's cool. I like it. I like that.

I have the haircut, but, so, you know, so to argue against creativity in AI, feel like all it's ever doing is repurposing, repatch, gaging, recombining things that already exist. Right. Is it ever really synthesizing something completely new? it capable of doing that? What do you think?

Jared Ruth (50:16.297)

today...

I don't think so. think, I feel like it is basically taking a whole bunch of data, crunching it and repurposing it in a way that maybe makes it simpler or maybe more poignant for the audience. However, think one of the things I would

I would maybe challenge on that question is do humans, are humans truly creative? I think it was Mark Twain said there's really nothing new, nothing's ever really a new idea, it's just a regurgitation of an old idea.

famous line being all art is derivative, right?

Right. Yeah. Good point. So, so, and, and plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, right? You know, so I, I wonder, you know, it's a great question, but I wonder as, as humans, if, know, even if, if we truly create, I think to an extent there is, I mean, I look at certain, certain people and I'm like, I don't know how you could derive that from a series of other incidents. It's just brilliance.

Jared Ruth (51:42.318)

I don't know, but I do feel like AI just does it so quickly is what was shocked. mean, I remember, you know, thinking for a very long time, man, I would love to get access to some of these AI models to really, I mean, this goes back to IBM Watson, you know, 10 years, maybe 15 years ago.

thinking about how cool it would be to be able to interface with IBM Watson and really just see how it processes thought,

And so when, when OpenAI released, I think it was what November 22, something like that, um, when they first released the prompt, uh, or their ability to, to, to interface with that prompt. And it was just shocking to see that how quickly it would, it would, you know, would answer, but also, um, go beyond your simple answers. So, so I don't know. I think, uh, I guess my.

My short answer is no, I don't think it can today. I do think with AGI and some of the other things, it starts to connect these dots. I don't know. I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it comes up with new ideas or the creative side of things.

I guess it's worth asking too. When is pure creativity that important?

Shawn Cordner (53:17.772)

If it can approximate creativity close enough, does it matter really?

Well, I mean, who's the judge of, you know, creativity, right? Right. Yeah.

But you know, in order to ensure my job for the next decade, I'm going to argue that it's critical that a human being be part of the creative process.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, we're all in that boat, right? I think, you know, as I watch, you know, some of these, these layoffs occurring and whatnot, and, know, candidly, some of my very good friends, have been impacted. you know, I do, I do worry about that. And, you know, I think some of the, some of the heads of thought leadership on AI, and I'm sure like you'll be talking to one here soon.

It is an interesting debate around how do we give humans, as AI does take over some of these things, how do we continue to have purpose? What is the purpose before it was building, creating something? My hope is that our purpose as humans...

Jared Ruth (54:35.148)

becomes more about human interaction and real connection and real moments than about having meetings or sitting in front of PowerPoint or doing, mean, kind of come full circle to where I started here. I'm hopeful that when we start looking at how AI is taking care of these, you

blocking, tackling, doing all that stuff. Fun, you know, we can really start connecting. It means that we go to, you know, our kids sporting events more. It means that we do have time to grab lunch together. It means that we have, you know, the opportunity to really connect so that when I walk past you in the hallway and I say, Hey, you know, Shawn, how's your day? And you great. How's yours? Great. Cool. You know, we move on. It's like, no, really man. Like how is your day?

How are you doing? and so I think that the real power here, if it's done correctly, it actually gives us more purpose as humans and gives us more connection as humans. And that becomes the real value and the brand. And so for some people that sounds amazing for others. That's kind of scary. It's a, it's, it's a scary sort of terrifying thing. but I think that, you know, in my ideal scenario,

That's really what AI paves the way to is giving us the ability to be more creative, know, build things on demand and then have that time to reconnect with humans.

It's a beautifully optimistic sentiment and I share that same hope,

Shawn Cordner (56:24.45)

Technology throughout the years has always come with the promise of taking some of the load off of human beings. so if you go back to the 40s and 50s and with industrialization and technology starting to help workers be more productive and produce more than just a person without industrial means behind them, that really started to ramp up.

A time where people thought that by now we'd be working 10 hours a week. And knowledge would be taking the best of it. Right. But we're working more now than ever. And so I don't know, it just seems like part of the human condition that, or maybe it's a Western thing. I really don't know, like a cultural thing, but, it seems like anytime we get something that allows us to be more productive, we use it for the means of creating more things and not.

creating more time necessarily. and something else that you made me think of is it's, it's a little scary, but there is a loneliness epidemic right now.

Big time.

They, you science has found that loneliness is as big of a killer of people as smoking cigarettes. And so you're starting to see that, Jen Z is using AI primarily for companionship. And which I think is good in the sense that they're seeking companionship in a vacuum of loneliness. Right. But,

Jared Ruth (57:53.208)

Yeah, I've seen that.

Shawn Cordner (58:04.694)

It's not real connection and we're social creatures and we really need that human connection, when you loneliness is not having connection when you want it. A lot of people will say, I don't need people and they're really good. And that's fine. That's not loneliness. If you're someone that is introverted, you keep to yourself, but if you're someone that is craving that connection and you can't get it, that's loneliness. so, I do hope that it can create.

the opportunity for us to have more human connection. But what I also hope is that it doesn't become a shortcut to optimizing human connection,

which, know, candidly, the double-edged sword, you know, is what I'm actually more worried about happening. You know, I see this, you know, got, you know, AI integrated in my car now and everything else, you know, it gives you that opportunity to create, you know, your best friend in a virtual space, your virtual, you know, AI best friend.

And, you know, I think that that's very dangerous. You know, having said that, you know, there's also scenarios where I think it does make sense because you feel like you can tell this virtual, you know, Asian anything. You know, but I think that, you know, I often hear people say, you know, especially as it relates to, you know, our work, you know, AI is not going to take your job as somebody using AI will.

Right. And I hear it all the time and I got to tell you, I don't agree with it because I think that most of the people using AI, depending on how you're using it, it's actually going to become more of a problem for you than it's going to be. It's going to help you. And the reason I say that is because, you know, in fact, I'm trying to remember there's, there's a guy who said, you know, the, biggest task in

Jared Ruth (01:00:11.2)

in the next five years or your biggest charter in the next five years is not to become a slave to AI, to not have it write your papers for you, do your work for you. You have to use AI as a tool. You have to use it at, hey, I'm your boss. I'm, you know, guiding you and you're helping me go faster. You're helping me create. And there was a person recently who said, in fact, I even

I stopped saying to AI, tell me your opinion. Tell me what you think. You are the expert. You are this, you're that. And he said, and I shifted that not only from the AI's perspective, but from my own of saying, now talk to me about, you you actually don't exist, right? AI, there is no you in AI. It's not like this is a person who's sitting there going,

Yeah, this is a computer and you say, so here's what I need from a perspective of this IPC from Shawn at Amplix. I need to know what is this person thinking, this, this, this. So you're giving it, you're telling it as persona, you know, and this is part of prompting, right? don't think prompting has come such a long way. You no longer have to be like, you are a, you know, executive at a marketing agency. No, you just say, look.

I need to know what this group is thinking. I need to know what this person is thinking. I don't really care what you're thinking because you're not, you are a computer, you know? So I think that helps also us, you know, keep it like this is a relationship between, you know, a machine and a human. This is not a human to human relationship, right? And so I think that is important to think about as you interface.

with AI, it's just another tool and a very powerful tool at that. But, but I think there will be a problem with people mistaking that for a human relationship by all means.

Shawn Cordner (01:02:21.27)

I totally agree, but a second problem in the scenario that you just described is with most tools, you need competency to be able to use that tool effectively. And with AI, you don't necessarily, cause it's, it's built to be very approachable and easy to use and, to be flattering to you. Right. So overly right. And, I think that.

really?

Shawn Cordner (01:02:50.816)

If you don't know enough about the subject that you're asking AI about, it's very easy to get misled or to fall for a hallucination or to not understand exactly the context. And, you know, there's this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect where you have this illusion of, of competency. You're so incompetent about something that you don't even know how incompetent you are. So ignorant or uneducated about a topic that you

You don't even realize what you don't know. Right. It's that famous thing. There's, there's no knowns, none known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Right. And, and if you're just using, chat, GBT or whatever AI model about a topic that you don't really know anything about, and you've got no grounding or context could tell you anything and you totally fall for it. And, that's scary. You're already seeing some scenarios where.

It's cited case law and that's ended up in, in court proceedings and a competent judge realized that that wasn't a thing that it was referencing. Right. So there it's, it's something that I think people have to be very cautious about how they use it as a tool because it's incredibly powerful, but, it's like using a supercar or a hyper car that's high horsepower, rear wheel drive, a Bugatti, Chiron, 1800 horsepower rear wheel drive.

and not using the launch controller, the traction control. You're spinning out, man. You're gonna hit a tree. There's no question, right? You need that guardrail of traction control to help you use that tool in the way that you wanna use it.

Yeah, that's a great analogy. Yeah, because again, I know so many times where I'll be interfacing with a model. It's interesting. It's not like, know, chat GPT or Gemini or Croc or, you know, it's not like one of them is always right. In fact, they're always wrong. And so you'll be asking them about something that, you know, is a little bit more technical.

Jared Ruth (01:05:02.886)

And then I'll say something and spit it out as fact. it's like, no, that's, it's absolutely unequivocally incorrect. And I always love the response on that because it's, it's like, yeah, you know what? You're right. It's wrong. Here's the right.

that yeah.

Jared Ruth (01:05:20.558)

I love the response on that because, know, without fail, it's not like, let me check that. maybe, maybe, here's the nuanced version of why I said it's like, no, you're right. I'm wrong. Here you go. Here's the real answer. So yeah, it's got a long way to go. And that's why we got to be very careful about just unleashing it on, you know, our customers and saying, you know,

Yeah, go at it. I mean, and that's why we train the knowledge base, you know, that there's a lot of stuff around there where, you know, you can prevent, prevent that from happening. But, but for sure it's, it's a thing.

Yeah, I think in an enterprise setting, you've got a lot more control over the inputs that it's getting and that, and the integrity of the data that you're training it on. something like chat GPT and just kind of the, the open internet is, know, if, if enough people say it on the internet, it sounds true to chat GPT, know? So, it's not necessarily checking references as it goes. which is scary for all of us.

It sure is. Well, it's getting better. but yeah, I mean, even in those circles, who's to say what is accurate? What is the truth? And you know, we've all, we've all seen that, you know, come full front center over the last few years. So, so yeah, it's, it's, it's exciting. And I think the biggest thing though is, you know, stay on the side of leveraging it to create, stay on the side of building things.

get, you know, interact with not just with the large language model, start building apps, start building, you know, solutions and, know, I'm not even saying for you, for your business or, Hey, you know, just if you need something, you know, at home, for instance, or you're trying to coordinate or, or, or take some data that you have and, and, and do some fun things. like, you would be shocked.

Jared Ruth (01:07:29.934)

I always talk to people and say, you used vZero or any of these other platforms? And they're like, I don't know. I said, you would, you would be absolutely shocked just by typing in a few prompts, what you could develop in, very little time. Um, and I think that's one of the most exciting things about where we're going next is this, you know, what Carpathi said is just English is the new, you know, programming language.

It's going to change and revolutionize everything. And in fact, actually it was interesting. Just said it the other day, I think it was maybe a few weeks ago, but he just said the same thing. He said, you know, English is a new programming language. So this is becoming more and more of a, you know, a drum beat in the industry as far as being able to do your own development. And again, that I just want to preface this, I know I'll have some people that say, you know, that, you know,

It can't code like a real coder. You're absolutely right. 100 % would never argue that. And that's why I think in order to fully, and actually, Carpathi says this, he says, you know, yes, English can code for you, but you, in order to really unleash software 3.0, you really have to understand 2.0 and 1.0. You know, your fundamentals in C++ and

Python and other things, you know, are really critical because to your point, Shawn, you can easily go out and buy a Bugatti and you'll crash the Bugatti into a tree just like you will. So when you're out there developing apps, you know, you're not just going to go develop an app in, in V zero and then deploy it in an enterprise environment. You know, this is stuff that I think, you know, you

You start small, start with baby steps. You code something and then you go back and you look at the code and you say, okay, this is interesting. You know, this is using JavaScript and you react and other thing, you know, and so, so you start to understand, you almost reverse engineer it, right? Okay, how did this build this? Why did it build it this way? And actually the cool thing is AI will tell you, they'll say, I built it this way because this is what, this is considered the best practice.

Jared Ruth (01:09:52.488)

And then you just turn your learning on hyperdrive. I mean, it's really amazing. It's really cool.

It's, it's, it's 26 is going to be. I mean, it's just going to be an explosive year for this kind of tech. Um, I mean, just put it in hyperdrive, man. We're going.

Yeah. Yeah. that's what I mean about competence, right? Is it's the famous thing about jazz. The key part of jazz is improvisation, but you can't improvise in jazz until you know how to play jazz, right? You have to learn the standards. You have to learn how the music works before you can start to go off script. Yes. Yeah.

Great analogy.

Good one to end it on then. Jared Ruth, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Jared Ruth (01:10:47.48)

So ripcurrentagency.com is our website and you can find us online there. also on, have LinkedIn if you want to look me up there, Jared Ruth, just like it's spelled. So I love to engage with people, you know, even in discussions or projects or anything like that. But yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity, Shawn, and look forward to working with you.

team at Amplix over the next year.

Me too. Great to see you. Good talk. Thanks.

Same. Take care.