Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

 Is The World Ready For Artificial Intelligence In The C-Suite With Alan Gold

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 377

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! This episode delves into the evolving landscape of AI in the marketing realm, featuring our distinguished guest, Alan Gold, a seasoned fractional CMO with extensive experience in leveraging AI for marketing strategy enhancement.

Alan Gold shares his insights into the transformative shift within the CMO space, driven by AI. He explores the utilization of AI as a thought partner, aiding in the consolidation of creative ideas, and emphasizes its role in expediting research and data analysis. Alan discusses the challenges marketers face in maintaining originality as AI adoption becomes widespread and warns against the pitfalls of homogenized content.

Notable Quotes:

  • - "AI serves as a thought starter, but creativity and strategy must lead." - [Alan Gold]
  • - "When everything starts to sound the same, differentiation becomes paramount." - [Jonathan Green]
  • - "AI offers tools for efficiency, but the essence of marketing lies in human creativity." - [Alan Gold]
  • - "If your opening gambit is deception, that's a problem." - [Jonathan Green]

Alan highlights the importance of strategic AI implementation to solve specific marketing problems, rather than adopting it due to industry pressure. He stresses the necessity of preserving human interaction where it matters and the potential for AI to support, but not replace, the need for genuine customer engagement.

Connect with Alan Gold:

For those seeking to understand how AI is reshaping the marketing landscape and wish to gain insights from an industry expert navigating this transition, this episode is essential listening!

Connect with Jonathan Green

Is the world ready for artificial intelligence in the C-Suite? Let's find out today's amazing special guest, Alan Gold. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated T talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction aio. The trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation at fraction A IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth. Seamless transition to ai ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio o help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. Now Alan, I'm excited to have you here because you are a fractional CMO and you have a lot of experience in that space. And let's just start with the bang, like what's really what happening and the shift in the CMO space, the fractional CMO space, and how AI is changing things and why people should be so excited. That's a big question. I think for me, as a fractional CMO, if I start to break down all of the activities that are so time consuming for both myself and staff, I think that's really where the problem comes in. I, I've always followed the edict of ham's razor, start simple, and get things more complex as time goes by. And I suppose that's true for software development as well, right? With Agile methodology, but to me, when you think about the tasks that take up the most amount of time a lot of it is thinking through issues. A lot of it is research. A lot of it is trying to correlate several different ideas together. And often, especially at a staff level, it. Figure out how to pull those things together. Sometimes you lead a little bit of a jumpstart. So for me personally, I tend to use AI as a thought partner, so to speak. If I've got a general sense of what needs to be done from my experience but I've really tried to figure out whether or not this is applicable to the market I'm in. I'll rif back and forth with ai, which is a little weird, I have to admit. But it sometimes comes back with things that at least lets me play, and from my teams I see the same thing sometimes, especially with content development, it's really tough to be a content developer on a marketing team because you've got generally a narrow range of things you need to talk about. It's your product, it's your services, it's your industry. But you have to make it fresh once, twice, sometimes three times a week in order to support SEO in order to support the sales teams. So often it's good to work with AI and use that as thought starters. Now there's a lot of argument around whether or not using AI for content development is a bit of a heat. And I'm an old school English major and I don't like the idea of, I don't like the idea of, basically cribbing and let somebody else do the work. But at the same time, if you're looking for a new angle on a topic, if and that's no different than looking for new strategy direction of using AI as a start point is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It saves time and it lets you think about. How to put your touch and your creativity on the topics. So generally, I think it's a really valuable set of tools and the last point I'll make is it's great for capturing data that would've otherwise taken you ever to find, and one of the things that, a lot of people, criticize the use of a AI for is using it as a real, a soup up Google. But you know what? If you're looking for stats, if you are looking for research, think about the gigantic volume of information that we have at our fingertip. And it's almost impossible to get through all of that and separate good from bad nonsense, from nonsense, from foolishness and come up with the real stuff. So I think it's a great starting point as long as you don't take it all literally. So long answer to. A fundamental question. Yeah. I think it leads to something really important, which I wonder about, especially in marketing, which is that whenever there's something new, the first person there gets an advantage, but then eventually everyone's using it and you all, everything starts to sound the same. We sometimes, like memories get merged. I was actually watching a, an article this week and a video and they talking about how Ed McMahon was the publisher's clearinghouse guy, but he wasn't. He was from a different one, and it's every, I was like, oh my gosh. That's how I remember it too. And because, and it's like what happens is when everything, when things are too similar. We merge them in our heads. And I start to wonder if at first, AI is a big advantage of marketing, but it becomes a race to the bottom where everyone starts to sounding exactly like each other. Every AI video looks like every other AI video, and it's if you're following the exact template. You start to get less and less bang for your buck, you start to have less original thought, especially because AI is trained on, ai is trained on ai, is trained on ai. It's almost if you're all using the exact same data set in the DA data training, there's not gonna be any original ideas. At a certain point, you're start gonna see marketing all merge. And we've seen this before when I was a kid, I think it, they used to say oh, if you see a billboard seven times, you'll remember it. Then it became 13 that like the number keeps going higher and higher. It's oh, now it's a thousand touches. And then you'll remember, it's so many touches and we, as we get flooded or overstimulated, you have to find new ways to break through the noise. So what do you envision as the future and what will the shift be when suddenly AI is everywhere. Another really good question if I limit it to marketing first. I think that's all, separation from competition, separation from everyone else has always been the goal since the invention of marketing. However long ago that was, I guess back in ancient Rome, they found it in Pompeii, they found advertisements to take out food. Literally who knew right? 2000 years ago that they were doing that. But I think that's always been a marketing problem, hasn't it? Everyone jumps on whatever concept there is whatever story there is. I can remember cloud computing, which doesn't seem like it was all that long ago. And suddenly everyone was a cloud computing company. Everyone had cloud in their tag. And and it was agile and then suddenly everyone is agile, and so I don't think it's, I don't think that it is that different. I think that in some ways underscores the fact that creativity and human thought and, and strategy is always going to lead the front, and AI tools are going to be. The way that you could spend more time thinking about strategy, thinking about differentiation rather than putting it into your products, having it in all of your taglines, having it run your website. Those are just tools. An example, I'm old enough to remember when calculators first started showing up in classes, and I can remember the uproar over the fact that this is gonna make kids stupid. This is gonna take away fundamental skills, blah, blah, blah, blah. And guess what? It didn't, right? There are other things making kids stupid, we'll skip that for another podcast. But it wasn't the calculators. It gave them more time to work out word problems. It gave them more time to be creative. And I think that when a tool becomes ubiquitous, you just have to, you have to apply creativity to find differentiation any way you can. And that's, that's always going to be the, and so I don't think AI takes it away. I think AI challenges, whether it's a CMO or product development person or a founder trying to make a pitch for the next investment, it's gonna force them to think more creatively and rather than a race to the bottom, I think it's gonna I would argue that it's a race to homogeneity as opposed to, purely a race to the bottom. And I think that's gonna put pressure on people. Who have a marginally good idea, either be able to uplevel that idea or leave the space, and that's gonna clear the space for people who have a much more genuine native or new idea for the market. There's been some recent research coming out that like most companies that have met AI aren't seeing an ROI boost or aren't seeing return on investment. And my thoughts on that are that the promise of AI is much bigger than it could possibly be. So push a button and everything happens and it's like magic and I wish that were true. There's a huge gap between what they say in the marketing and what you actually experience. And then I think there's an issue with implementation where. We're chasing what everyone else is doing when you go, we have to have a AI why 'cause everyone else has it and we. Rush without strategy. And so we grab tools and you say why'd you pick this tool And go, it seems really cool. It seems really popular. They offered me a great deal. And it's what problems are it gonna solve? It's we bought it. Now let's find the problem for it. We're going reverse and I wonder if, what are your thoughts?'cause that's what I think is causing the low return on investment in the initial phase of AI or the initial phase of these tools. But what are you seeing in the world of marketing and kind of in your world? Sure. And I think that's a hundred percent true, in fact, in the shameless flood department. I've just written an article for LinkedIn on that very top. I, and I think that's true. I think that the, Look Gartner and Forrester all have their versions of hype cycles that talk about the, everybody rushes to mixed metaphor alert that side of the boat. Everyone gets all excited about it and they, they put it in. Why? Because everybody else is doing it. They feel like if they don't, they're gonna be left. But, and I think that's a lot of what we're seeing right now, that people are trying to stuff it in without necessarily understanding the complexities of implementation and how it's going to solve problems. For example, I'm seeing I do a lot of work in the healthcare space and while there's been a lot of talk. Pro and con about using AI for diagnostic work. And some things come to mind right away, right? Have an ai, take a look at a a CT scan or an x-ray and, diagnose something that a radiologist might not have seen. But you don't, but you don't have the expertise or the experience in ai. But what you can do is highlight a spot for a radiologist to look at and determine whether that's an artifact or not. But there are other places where AI can be applied really effectively for places where they, things bogg down in intake, for example. And while this isn't strictly speaking about marketing, it speaks to the issue I think, pretty well. Two weeks ago I had a doctor's appointment, nothing special. And I got, I, I got an email and said, please click here, fill out here online.. You've probably had the same experience. You fill the whole thing out, medications, what's ailing you, history, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you go into then you go into the office. I check in, he hands me a clipboard, and I'm filling out exactly the same information, right? Then I get brought into the exam room and a medical assistant, or a PA or a med tech comes in and they sit in front of the computer and they ask me the same questions for the third time. Right now, that's staff, that's time, that's effort. So the doctor comes rushing in and starts asking me some other questions because they haven't had time to look at any of this. And, I get five minutes and they're gonna rush off to the next patient. Now this was just a routine thing, but if you think about that and generalize that to any number of things that we do in in our day-to-day life. Those are legitimate ways in which AI can do intake, it can do summarization, it can, it can pull things together, think about meeting notes. Think about how AI has helped Zoom meetings, how it's helped teams, meetings, any kind of video conference and everyone gets the same set of meetings. So I think that there were applications if you work backwards from the problem, and I think why we have difficulty. In seeing an ROI on AI right now is the same for any other new technology that was applied because it was cool, not because it solved the problem. And I think that will start to, and that's where the trough of disillusionment comes in. If I'm remembering Gartner's pipe cycle probably. And that's where people are gonna say, we don't need it for all these things. Let's actually go look for a problem to solve. And see how AI can fit in and, and we're ways away from that yet because this is still experimental. I still ask multiple ais the same question and get lots of different answers. And sometimes because weird I ask AI to critique and other AI's results and sometimes it's, it's interesting to see what comes back both in terms of style and data. Yeah, I just wanna highlight that's one of the most advanced ways to use AI right now is to get one AI to write a prompt for another one or to get them to cue each other. So whenever I hear people say that, I always wanna take a moment to highlight it 'cause it's such a use case we're missing because I think about the riddle when they're like, one door always lies and one always tells the truth. Where you get one to talk about the other one and then you figure out what would he say? Yeah. And that's the riddle with ai is that, it's not as bad as we worry and it's not as good as we wish it was. It's somewhere in between and we are caught up in, I need to use it. But there's also, the thing I think about a lot is there's a learning curve with any new tool, with a new software, and I remember. All these different phases. Like I remember when in the nineties when they were like, if you know how to send an email, that's a really cool bonus when you apply for a job. Like they were like, that's a cool bonus. And then it became Microsoft and then it became internet. Now, can you imagine if someone applies for a job? Yeah, I don't know how to send an email. It's become like an expectation. So we're in that phase where we're starting to move from. AI is like a nice to have to like. They want you to have basic skills or something. And every different platform is different and there's so many tools coming out constantly. How you know you're in hi tech because just a new AI software every five minutes, that it's very easy for people to feel overwhelmed. And it's which tools do I need? What basics do I need? What's the baseline? And I think that's where people get. Very lost right now because we're not really sure. We haven't decided what the standard is what the standard level of technical ability is. And I, when I look at some of the shifts, it's like, what is the most exciting is also the least useful, like AI video, exciting. And useless. Nobody is responding to it. And I know, I talk to a lot of clients, they, oh, we wanna do AI phone sales. I'm like, a recent study came out that was like only 78% of people hang up on AI phone calls. So it's yeah, the other 22 didn't figure it out. But if your opening gambit is deception, right? If like your first step of your marketing plan is deception, like that's a problem. And I worry about that because I think there's gonna be that backlash. And I think that we sometimes see these really big. Market shift as the add-on effect, like when music has become a commodity, right? You can have Spotify and you pay a flat fee. You can have every song as opposed to when I was a kid buying vinyl or CDs and it you buy, it was a really big decision. It was like your budget for the month was one cd. Yeah. And what happened? Now everyone goes to concerts. More and more live events have become where it happens. We see a shift and I wonder if we're gonna start to see. More of a shift from large scale scaling, selling, like via the internet and via this two smaller scale where it's like we go back to the mall because we want to talk to a person and we wanna see a thing and know that it's on ai.'cause there's something about being sold to by an AI that doesn't feel right. And maybe we'll eventually shift to that, but that's one of the thoughts that I have. It's a marketing campaign designed by AI is cool unless people find out. It's every once in a while there's a movie that people go, we think AI wrote the script, and you just watch the tickets go down. You're like and it's like the kiss of death. So I wonder about that as it's like it's this double-edged sword, which can be really useful as long as no knows you're using it. Because then they feel oh, this isn't a real ad. This is like a trick. I think we kind of associate trick with ai. In some cases. It is like a fake phone call. That's a trick. Yeah, that's, that, and that's a really, I think that's a really important thought that you brought forward on this is, and I think that's, again, in, in my experience, that's the early adopter phase of every technology that we've dealt with. Think about chatbot and websites. Think about when especially with, let's say your cable. There's nothing more frustrating or even for tech support or even your bank. Everybody has a chat bot, right? An AI chatbot, and you type in, a smart person. Somebody who's used to AI will use just enough key words to try to trigger it, to give you a response. If you don't know if you're just sitting there, I can't get into my account. I have a problem with this, and it comes up with three, three choices and those choices, none of which match what your problem is. You get really frustrated and, you do the old school equivalent of hanging up and, you try to find an 800 number and then you get caught in a call tree forever and ever. I think that I think that it's part of a larger cultural. Shift. You read a lot about Gen Zers and the things that they like that is so different from millennials. And even, and and even Gen Xers, who created them. That there, there is on one hand there's a real gap in human connection and that's causing a great increase in loneliness because they spend so much. But I think. At the same time, I think, we're, we're human beings. We crave interaction at some level. And I think that, companies who are using AI as a shortcut for human interactive activities, I think are hopefully gonna realize that it doesn't work, that it's a bad use case. And if they don't, I think they're gonna be taken outta the food chain because it's going to take a while. Before anybody wants to have an interaction with an AI that of any kind of consequence. And I think that's gonna be one of the challenges that at least in this transition phase, look, everybody thinks AI is gonna be HAL from 2001 or it's gonna be iRobot or not iRobot. I'm sorry. Yes. iRobot from Isaac Asman. That it's going to be these androids that are gonna be walking and talking and serving, and then there's gonna be a revolution and they're gonna take over the world. That we're a really long way away from truly independent thinking. This highly complex processing going, but to put them in situations where. You and I would, if we were on in a sales situation, we'd be watching body language, we'd be listening to pauses in what people are saying. We'd be hearing euphemisms that would give us either buying or turn down prompts. And then we'd make adjustments. You can't get that with an AI tool. And in its worst case, we all know. One of the one of the I'm sorry, the ai tools that you went off on misogynist, neo-Nazi tirade. You can push ais into a rabbit hole and then they're only as good as all the data that's been poured into them. And so I, I think that it's, as you point out, a double-edged sword, but I think it's also. A double-edged sword for companies who are employing them in situations where at 30,000 foot level it makes sense to do it. 15,000 feet, not so sure. And then when you get down to the ground, to your point, 78% of people know that the talking to a chat bot and the other 22% didn't, that's why they didn't hang up. And you get that with people too. I think it's really a matter of market adjustment. That needs to take place before anything else. And I think we'll get there, it's gonna be painful for the people who are trying to use the tool for things that they shouldn't. Yeah. I see this like shift we're going through, which is like more and more comments, like more and more of social media is like bots talking to bots and like more and more post about, it's like I engage less and less with content. Like I engage so little with content. If I turn on the video and it's like AI generated, it's like I'm not interested. And there's one AI YouTube channel I follow, which breaks down a TV series. It'll take seven series, and they edit it really well, and it's a really good script. I'm like, okay. I know it's an AI voice, but it's actually really well done because it's like a show I've never heard of. Would never watch. I understand this whole show in 18 minutes, and I listen to that before I go to sleep. Every, it knocks me right out. It's like ju, it's a little bit interesting, but not interesting enough to keep you awake. But other than, and that's so there is always that edge use case where someone uses it well, but I see so much desire to use it in the wrong ways. And we're I do think about like exactly the larger culture shift, which is more and more we're gonna crave authenticity. It's like this idea that we're gonna shift to a world where everyone's married to a robot. It's like exciting, but it's also mathematically impossible. There's only so many rare earth minerals in the world. There's literally not enough metal to make that many robots, and people forget that. Like we barely have enough batteries for cars. We don't have enough batteries for everyone to have a robot in their house, like right out the gate. It's just a pure math issue, which, yeah, and it's also like this idea that you can replace human connection with a pseudo connection. That it doesn't seem to work. Like it doesn't seem to be the same. Like when you have a robot, at least I'm married to a human, married to a human woman and I never know what she's gonna say. Never she just sent me a message like right before a call told you, I would've never guessed if you'd give me 50 guesses. None of would've been, and it was there's always stuff like that. And I think that. When you have a robot or an ai, it doesn't do that. It will never disagree with you. It will never push that humanness the surprise ness, and it's like that's what's really missing. I think that maybe that is even when you talk about the homo homogeneity of advertising or marketing, that's what kind of happens is that when every ad looks the same, you have to get a lot more out there. It's like I, from looking, if you showed me like a cup. With 50 different brands of soda in it. I can't tell they're all brown. It's true. From look, and I think, they do taste tests and most people can't tell from that either. And it's that's right. That's the issue is that when it looks the same, it starts to become, you have to find some other way to be noticeable and we start to see more and more of those things. And I think that. My hope is, of course, it leads to more authenticity. We start to do more buying in person or more wanting to talk to person or more wanting to make sure it was me person, like there's just some. Desire we have, like whether it's made in America or handmade or like home recipe. Like I see restaurants all the time. That say like home something. I'm like, you're a restaurant. It's definitely not homemade. Like it's, you are literally the opposite of homemade. It's definitely not that, but they still use that language because. It's so powerful and effective. There's some desire we have to support our local community or support local crafts people or support local businesses. There is that element, and we're in that period now where a lot of companies fake that and create that pseudo element. Where it's been fought by large corporation. They don't want anyone to know. And I'm just starting to see that there's this shift where we now have the ability to research and find out things very quickly. Which didn't used to exist. Now first it was Google. Now it's ai. Now it's voice ai. You can find out, like I went and looked at a car one time, I can't remember what brand it was, and the guy said this won the JD Power Associates Award this year. This is early 2000. I went home and looked online and it was like gotten worse. Car of the year. Yeah, like that was the award. It was like unbelievable. I was like, you didn't think I was gonna look? Now you would not even try that 'cause you're gonna get caught right up the gate. Yeah. So I think that it almost forces us on authenticity. And that's what I hope. I dunno if I'm right, but we always see these market shifts and that's the thing, every time there's a new technology, whether it's calculators or whether it's graphing calculators, or whether it's GPS and then all these technologies like we think it's gonna dramatically change the world, not really the world before GPS and the world after GPS, not that different. People still get lost. People still get there. People still read math, like it's not that different. So I hope that we can see that we're in an exciting time, but it's not that different now. This has been amazing, Alan, I really appreciate your time. For people who are interested in you, I know you do some amazing fractional stuff. Where can they find you online and where can they see some of these articles that you've been writing? Oh, sure. You can you can find me on LinkedIn and it's www.linkedin.com. Slash Alan E Gold and and I can, you can find me as well at alan.gold at cxo com. Always happy to talk to people about AI and the right way to use it. Perfect. Thank you so much for raising your time. I'll put all of your connection information in the show notes and below the video if you're watching the video right now. Thank you so much for being here for an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificial intelligence pod.com. Slash calculator, use our AI revenue calculator to discover the potential impact AI can have on your bottom line. It's quick, easy, and might just change the way. Think about your business while you're there. Catch up on past episodes. 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