Predicting how AI is changing the future of marketing

Here’s a question that pretty much every marketer is pondering (and maybe losing some sleep over): What does the future hold for marketing in a world of AI tools?

You don’t need to polish your crystal ball, drop some tea leaves into a cup, or power up the flux capacitor in your DeLorean to find out. (Although that last one would be awesome.) To look into the future of AI marketing, all you gotta do is open up your podcast player and listen to the second episode of Unprompted, where we ask the experts to predict how this new tech will transform our world over the coming weeks, months, and years.

In this episode, hosts Pete Housley and Garrett Hughes chat with two guests about what’s to come in today’s rapidly-changing, what-the-heck-am-I-supposed-to-do-now world of digital marketing:

• Molly St. Louis is the Head of Marketing at Dealtale, an organization that dives into the science behind revenue generation and how marketers can use cutting-edge technology to, y’know, market better.
• Jess Petrella, Unbounce’s very own Director of Product Marketing and undisputed in-house AI expert, has been living and breathing (and prompting) AI every single day, and boy does she have thoughts to share.

Through a lively and insight-filled conversation, this episode explores burning questions like:

Check out the episode to get answers to those questions and much more, including whether marketers will need to figure out how to create content that AI likes (would you like some extra metadata sprinkled on that?) and how the key to making your brand stand out in a crowded, AI-dominated marketplace just might be summed up in three simple words: be more human. 

Scroll down to read through the transcript, as well as links to some of the stuff mentioned in the episode.

Episode 2: What If?

[00:00:00] Pete: Hey marketers. Welcome to Unprompted, a podcast about AI marketing and you. I’m Pete Housley, Chief Marketing Officer at Unbounce. Unbounce is the AI-powered landing page builder with smart features that drive superior conversion rates. We like to say at Unbounce that AI plus CRO equals conversion intelligence, our version of how we’re helping marketers to drive revenue today. 

My co-host is Garrett. Garrett is our content lead. And among other things, Garrett is a CRO specialist, a content specialist, an incredible communicator, and really understands the art of persuasive communications. Garrett, how are you and what is on your mind these days?

[00:01:23] Garrett: Thanks for the introduction, Pete. What is on my mind these days? Would it be catering if I said AI? 

[00:01:29] Pete: AI is the talk of the town. 

[00:01:32] Garrett: Absolutely. 

[00:01:33] Pete: So, Garrett, there is a tsunami of information about AI. I’m spending 30 to 40 minutes a day just in my newsfeeds. What are you doing to keep ahead of the information?

[00:01:52] Garrett: I don’t know that you can stay ahead of it, right? The pace with which AI is evolving is just, it’s staggering. I feel like whenever I discover something new about AI and how it’s influencing marketing, I look at the date that the article was published and it was two weeks ago, and it’s not even relevant anymore. You know what I mean? So certainly it’s challenging to stay on top of just this wave of AI news and development. 

[00:02:21] Pete: Couldn’t agree more. And with that in mind, on today’s episode, we’re calling it What If. We’re gonna explore the potential future of AI marketing and bring in a few experts today to look at their crystal balls, would’ve happened if creators exclude their work in image and text search? Or what if open AI becomes closed AI, we no longer have access to it. We’ll explore a few topics. 

[00:02:59] Garrett: I feel like I’d like to throw a caveat in here, Pete, given the pace of change in AI right now, it’s really hard to predict what’s gonna happen a year from now, six months, a month, tomorrow. So I think that we probably need to give our guest experts a little bit of leeway in terms of their answers. We’re not gonna rub their faces in it a week from now when whatever they’ve predicted is totally off base. 

[00:03:25] Pete: Well, Garrett, we have picked the biggest and the brightest too to be our guests today, so we’ll let the audience decide. But speaking of that, the news is just so abundantly filled with topics of AI, and even in the last few days or a week, the headlines about ChatGPT inventor going to Congress, warning them on the AI controls that are needed on AI’s potential to manipulate views. Very, very frightening. 

And at the same time, the AI marketing news continues to move at a really fast pace. I was super excited to see that Meta announced this week AI-powered tools to streamline ad processes, so text variation automatically creating multi variants supported by image creation to support the variants, all supported by cropping and sizing to do the same. So a marketer’s toolkit is just going to be so much broader. 

Shameless plug of course for Unbounce is that our Smart Builder product does exactly those same things that the Meta product will do for their social ads. So hopefully we are riding a good trend and being competitive in nature. Garrett, I was mesmerized by a piece of content you sent me the other day, and I think it’s so relevant to our topic about “what if” today, can you tell us a little bit about ChaosGPT? 

[00:05:09] Garrett: I would honestly love to tell you about ChaosGPT. At this stage, we’re all familiar with ChatGPT, right? It’s an application built by OpenAI on top of their GPT language processing model and the way ChatGPT works, it’s an interface. You go in, say “ChatGPT tell me how to build a marketing campaign for this soup.” And ChatGPT, based on that prompt, the language model is trained on the entirety of the internet based on what it knows about marketing and what it knows about soup. It’ll give you a pretty good idea of how to go about marketing that soup of yours. 

In many ways, AutoGPT is the next logical step of ChatGPT. It was created by a developer named Toran Bruce Richards, and effectively what AutoGPT does, it’s built on top of GPT as well, the same language model as ChatGPT, but AutoGPT is able to prompt itself effectively. So rather than saying, “tell me how to market this soup,” you might say, “go market this soup.” And what AutoGPT will do is say, okay, what are the most popular flavors of soup? Who is the target demographic for soup? If I’m gonna be doing a marketing campaign, I’m gonna need ad copy, I’m gonna need a landing page. And what AutoGPT does is essentially create a to-do list for itself. It’ll start knocking through these tasks one by one independently. So it’s an autonomous agent that you can assign a task and it will do its best to complete it on its own. 

ChaosGPT is AutoGPT pre-programmed with just one goal: destroying humanity. So you can actually go and watch the first 25 minutes of ChaosGPT attempting to complete this task. There’s a video on YouTube. 

It’s very funny because ChaosGPT takes this task seriously, says, okay, if I’m going to destroy humanity, I’m gonna need some big weapons. You know, so ChaosGPT starts Googling and looking for ways to destroy humanity with the modern weapon, right? It discovers nuclear weapons and it says, great, these are gonna be super helpful. 

ChaosGPT decides that it could use a little bit of help. So it starts to recruit its own AI agents or attempt to recruit. And it’s very funny, you can see it interfacing with other AI agents where it’s effectively like, come on, people are kind of a mess. They’re not great for the world. Why don’t you help me destroy them? And you can see these other AI agents be like, I don’t know about this, ChaosGPT, seems like a bad idea. So some of those ethical safeguards come into play there. 

So it’s funny, right? You’re watching ChaosGPT ineptly try to figure out how to destroy humanity and it’s destined to fail. It’s this narrow AI, it’s built on top of GPT, a language model. ChaosGPT is effectively pretending to try to destroy the world. It doesn’t even know what that means, let alone have the capability to do it. But what’s eerie about it is this soulless persistence where it just keeps going and going and going and trying and failing, but it doesn’t stop. And I think that that relentlessness in AI is super valuable when it’s put to positive aims, right? Marketing soup, great. It’ll complete that task to the best of its abilities. It is concerning to think about what a nefarious actor could do with an AI that’s programmed to do something not so nice. You know, it would relentlessly pursue that goal. I think it’s super interesting. 

[00:08:43] Pete: As I was watching the video, it was scarily weird how it was learning and documenting its findings and storing it to file as it was gathering information on how to build the most powerful bombs in the world and destroy the world. And so anyways, that of course, was hyperbole and it was funny, but it makes the point on what if things really start to go sideways in the world of AI? AI doesn’t get tired and it doesn’t mind rewriting its work a second and a third time to get optimized. 

[00:09:20] Garrett: I know that you love that you can criticize the outputs of AI without hurting its feelings. Can’t say the same for me. 

[00:09:27] Pete: I would never try to hurt your feelings. All right, let’s move on to the core part of our program today. I want to segue and introduce a couple of special guests. First of all, we have Molly St. Louis, who is the Head of Marketing at Dealtale, a revenue science company for marketers. Dealtale is a next-generation platform for driving breakthrough revenue opportunities across marketing sales and product teams. Also, a fun fact about Molly is that she was a contributing writer to Adweek, which I think all marketers and advertisers look to as a universal source of truth. Molly, how are you today? And maybe give us one fun fact about AI marketing and you.

[00:10:27] Molly: Well, I am doing fantastic today and it’s great to see you guys, but after that talk about ChaosGPT, I think I’m gonna be up all night tonight, but my fun fact is that I used to write about AI, yes, for Adweek, and now it is my life. I feel like I sort of wrote it into existence because it’s my job now to market the thing that will probably ultimately destroy me.

[00:10:51] Pete: Molly, one of the really interesting things I saw about Dealtale is that there’s a ChatGPT-like interface bolted onto your data, which allows marketers to do queries and structured data tables, just really with conversational style language. And from my standpoint, I really like my marketers to be self-serve at data. And so this feels like fairly game-changing technology. Can you tell us a little bit about how that AI tool applies to your customer journey mapping, tool sets and so on. Super interested about this area.

[00:11:34] Molly: Thank you so much. Yeah. Super proud of our product team. They’ve really knocked it out of the park. But yeah, we do deep customer journey analytics, you know, so we’re able to map the whole B2B customer journey from the time a customer visits you, and we’re able to track them while they are still anonymous. And then when they become known, we backfill their information so that we know their entire customer journey from beginning to end, even if it took a year for them to fill out, uh, a form. 

And so what this ChatGPT layer does is it allows marketers to go in and ask just any question that they want. But the lucky thing is, is if you come from concept marketing or something where your background may be not so technical, you can just ask the question. You don’t have to know how to build queries or filter or anything like that.

[00:12:25] Pete: Super exciting. That was super interesting. I want to introduce my next guest. Delighted to have our own Jess Petrella with us today. Jess is our Director of Product Marketing here at Unbounce, and she works within the product organization and has been developing AI products for marketers over the past three years. And Jess is undisputedly our in-house resident AI expert. So Jess, how are you today? And tell us a little fun fact about AI marketing and you.

[00:12:59] Jess: Hello. Hi, Pete and Garrett. A fun fact about me and marketing, AI marketing, I use AI every single day. I use ChatGPT, Notion AI, almost every single day. It’s baked into my day-to-day workflow. It’s a coworker, it’s a collaborator. I’ve been loving it ever since we had the ability to have this technology.

[00:13:20] Garrett: You’re not just Unbounce’s resident AI expert. You’re just an expert broadly in AI, and you’re applying it in a way that helps product marketers use AI as well. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

[00:13:32] Jess: Sure. Yes. So I built on top of Notion’s AI system, template system for product marketers. This is a set of templates, a couple hundred prompts. They’ve been rigorously tested for product marketing specific use cases, so with a template system, I can analyze a competitor’s website, pull out their differentiator, so I don’t have to sit there and spend, you know, X amount of minutes or sometimes hours going through their source material. I can create a customer interview script in just a few minutes and then use my own expertise to go in there, edit it, get it, you know, fine tuned so that it’s gonna gimme back the responses I get. So, yeah, just something that I’m super curious about how different niches and different groups of folks will use AI. Also really passionate about bringing AI products to market, so I thought why not, you know, have a first hand in doing that myself, outside of the amazing work that we do over here at Unbounce.

[00:14:32] Pete: Well, Jess, you’re clearly ahead of the curve on the adoption and the understanding of AI. Personally, I made a commitment to myself about three months ago that I was gonna go on an AI journey, and I now am. Also using AI tools six to eight times a day and really been looking at the prompts, the inputs, the outputs, the many, many use cases. And that also predicated our desire to do a podcast about AI marketing. But I’m finding it phenomenally exciting and interesting to be learning some of these new tool sets. With all that in mind, Garrett, why don’t you set us up for our questions for our panelists today, and let’s get into it. 

[00:15:34] Garrett: So the premise of this episode is all around making predictions about how AI is going to change marketing, is changing marketing, and when we let folks know around the office that this was gonna be our predictions episode, found that there were lots of questions about how things might change as a result of AI development in marketing. What we’re gonna do is I’m going to present a scenario for the group here, a what if scenario, and we can talk to the best of our ability at this particular moment about how things might shake out in the coming weeks, months, years. 

So this first one is all around how AI is changing search and SEO. We’ve seen in the news recently that Microsoft has integrated GPT into its Bing search engine. Just very recently, Google announced that they’re gonna be implementing Bard and providing AI results in their search results. The what if scenario here is: What if search engine results are totally replaced by AI chatbots? 

[00:16:49] Pete: Jess, how about you in terms of SEO, content marketing and what AI could do if it takes things over?

[00:16:59] Jess: Yeah, so I feel like I have to tread lightly here cause I’m talking to Garrett, who is our content marketing expert, and we want him to keep his job. And we know that he is very good at what he does, and that should never go away. And really the prediction is that it doesn’t, right. There is an absolute reality here where, you know, it’s in our front doorstep. Google is making active changes to their search functionality, and it will incorporate not only just, you know, search results, but a summary of content that comes up when you search for a certain question or certain query a certain prompt. 

So that’s the reality, is that it will have an long-term effect on search the way that they’re implementing it. We have to think through like, this is Google. This is a line of business. This is a massive billion dollar revenue stream for them. They’re not gonna make drastic changes that then make drastic changes to the marketers’ funnel yet. Until perhaps they find that way to monetize, you know, AI responses as part of the search, you know, function that y’all perform today. 

So if we’re thinking about the what if scenario, yes. Like the Garretts, the content writers of the world, the SEO specialists, there is a realm where you will then have to think about your content as, this is uncomfortable, but source material for AI, and that’s a weird position to be in, right? Who is AI? What is this thing that needs to use your material to then bring it into the responses, not only just the like search results as part of its job and as part of the functionality that Google, et cetera are baking in. So there’s a definite reality that this is going to become important for SEO content specialists to take into account. Your content will become source material. How? You know, that’s an algorithm we have not been able to tap into just yet, but there’s a lot of really interesting perspectives on this as well. This can be really beneficial if you are, you know, part of the cited source for material that the AI demonstrates that gives you a lot of, you know, forefront power in being the number one answer, the number one response.

[00:19:18] Pete: You’ve nailed it, and as content marketers, we hope our organic results, you know, index at the top of the page, and as paid marketers, of course, we buy those positions for our key non-branded terms. The question that I have is that you said it, if Google or Microsoft decides to monetize this, will there be paid placements in the non-branded responses in chat answers? And I think that’s really, really interesting territory I would like to believe as content marketers, the role of content driving SEO, linking to your core messages across oceans of content will still be relevant going forward.

[00:20:04] Garrett: I can see a future in which rather than, I think, to your point, Jess, rather than creating content that Google likes in its current algorithm, I mean, there are things that we do as content creators right now to improve our chances of ranking on Google. I wonder if in the future, rather than attempting to meet the requirements of Google as it is, we start to build content that AI likes. What that looks like, I don’t know exactly. My concern as a consumer of content is that if the content that we’re creating is about appealing to the machine rather than appealing to our target audience, what do we lose there as marketers?

[00:20:49] Jess: Yeah, and it takes away the element of choice for the consumer as well, right? Like we’re used to being able to choose even though we’re influenced. So what to choose based on ads or ranking. It does take that a little bit out of the hand of the consumer, but I think it’s a channel that marketers will find a way to hack and Google’s probably gonna create a way to do it cuz they want you to.

[00:21:12] Pete: As a result of all marketing teams relying on the same tools, all brands marketing efforts could start to look and feel the same. What if that actually starts to happen?

[00:21:32] Molly: I think that’s what’s keeping marketers in a job. I mean, we all know that sometimes people, you know, copycat one another and things inherently. At least start looking the same anyway, but the people that are at the top of their game, the ad writers, you know, the content marketers, the Garretts of the world, basically the people that know how to hook you by being human, by being relatable. And you know, at Dealtale, we do a lot of video campaigns and we use all of our own people. We very rarely use actors, and that is to show that we are human beings figuring it out. Just like the rest of you. And one of the things that we found is that people really relate to that. And so I think that humans will never go away in that respect.

[00:22:17] Pete: Great. Jess, how about you? What if, as a result of all marketing teams relying on the same tools, marketing efforts, start to look and feel the same?

[00:22:26] Jess: I would agree with Molly on that. I think there’s going to be a very hard line where their human creativity is a must and there’s no way around it. And there is going to be areas that can be automated by AI. And the question I kind of have for the rest of the group is, when was the last time you were scrolling social media and you saw an ad that blew your mind? That connected to you, right? There’s areas where it just doesn’t, it’s just the words, that value prop, that tagline or the brand recognition that gets you to click on it. Maybe their copy really like hit a pain point and you clicked on that ad, and that’s the function of it, right? So there’s areas where all ads feeling kind of homogenous is not the end of the world. They already kind of do. 

But if we’re talking about a Super Bowl ad, an Unbounce, for example, is running a Super Bowl ad. We’re not running that through ChatGPT. That is something that will require a great deal of creative instinct, the great deal of creative insight into what it would mean to connect a certain narrative and a certain sentiment to the human on the other side of the screen, right? There’s a craft to it, there’s an art to it that’s not going anywhere. We have to be like really logical about that. But things that require fine tune optimization, that’s where AI is gonna be absolutely necessary. And it’s not gonna matter if it looks the same as the next one, you know? At least that’s my point of view on it.

[00:23:57] Garrett: I think both of you have sort of touched on this in your answers is that from a creative perspective, when everything starts to look the same, that’s also an opportunity for creatives to break the mold. Right. I think back to when we were doing the Unbounce rebrand a few years ago, and all of the other software companies in our space were following this illustrative trend, like lots of vibrant colors and little cartoony people. We said no, we’re gonna do something different. 

And I think similar to that, with AI, as content starts to feel samey, you start to see brands doing a lot of the same stuff. That’s an opportunity for human creatives to step in and stand out. So obviously AI is incredibly powerful at analyzing huge amounts of data to make predictions, and as we browse online already, we get super targeted ads based on our online behavior. What if AI advances to a level where it can accurately anticipate the exact things that each of us individually on a one-to-one level want in that moment, or even want next?

[00:25:13] Molly: I think that that is amazing and you know, there’s a creepy and a cool factor to those kinds of things. We just did a survey and we found that, you know, people definitely think that it’s creepy, but they still think it’s cool at the same time, so they don’t mind the, I don’t know, you’re in my head, AI, so I think it’s an amazing discovery tool in that respect, yeah.

[00:25:35] Pete: Jess, how about you?

[00:25:36] Jess: Yeah, we, well, we do kind of see that today with personalization software, right? Like we take audience behavioral data. We can kind of based on patterns, similar geography or you know, firmographic, psychographic, time of date that you’re online or, you know, clicking a button, we can kind of start to predict what might be your next move. So Amazon, you know, over a decade ago, kind of did that in their own platform. If you were looking at, you know, baby diapers, they’d recommend, baby socks. Right. And that’s kind of, you know, in the same realm of this, this is not unheard of. It’s, you know, something that we can’t see.

[00:26:22] Pete: Well, and Netflix and Spotify doing the exact, the same thing. If you like this, you’ll like this. And they under, they understand that. So the question is just whether that gets creepily specific as we go forward and whether customers find this, you know, convenient, how do they know me or creepy? Why do they know me?

[00:26:44] Molly: It’s also there to help market, I know on the B2B side, you know, we do a lot with causality at Dealtale. And one of the things that it helps is that, you know, say you get just an influx of, you know, demo requests. We’re working on it to where you can understand which of your customers are a sure bet. You know, that are definitely gonna take your product no matter what you do. The ones that are persuadable and the ones that are just playing around so that if you have a limited sales team, you can focus right on the ones that are persuadable, so that your resources go to to them. That’s the way that I think that it plays out a little bit different than suggestions, product suggestions and things like that.

[00:27:25] Garrett: So some of the most powerful brands and experiences that we have are really about the human touch, whether it’s a great customer service experience or, uh, something funny that Wendy’s Twitter posted. What if we get to a point where all brand interactions online are powered by AI As marketers, how do we maintain that human touch?

[00:27:57] Molly: It’s going to take effort. I mean, we’ve gotta like stay human. We’ve gotta talk to people. I know that I’m, you know, on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, but like, pick up the phone and talk to people. Talk to your customers, talk to your neighbors, because the way that we speak also evolves. We pick up different vernacular for what we think is funny based on what’s happening on TikTok, whether we like it or not. You know, if our kids say it, we end up saying it ourselves. There are certain things that you just have to live in the world to know, and that’s a thing that we can add to AI. If you use AI as as your base, but we do have to make an effort to not be in our phones all the time and remain in the world and be human so that we can write for humans.

[00:28:44] Garrett: I’m envisioning a world where something like AutoGPT, hopefully not ChaosGPT, brands can use that to handle their online interactions. Wonder if there’s a future in which brands could effectively become like AI talking to itself. I’m thinking about the fast food Twitter wars between Wendy’s and Burger King and what, like, is there a world in which that’s just AI bots bickering about hamburgers and essentially putting people on the sidelines.

[00:29:17] Jess: Yeah, it’s a whole world of entertainment that we’ve not tapped into, but I think it’s, it’s important to think about like humans. And in this case, marketers have a choice in the matter, right? AI’s not going to force their hand and be like, Hey, I’m now doing the marketing and you’re not. Right. We have a full choice in the matter of when we deploy marketing with AI and when we don’t. 

So I think there’s a nightmare scenario that, me as a consumer, I’m going through the internet and I’m, you know, experiencing websites I normally experience or I’m shopping online and, you know, URLs that I typically shop on and I’m just constantly bombarded by AI chatbots and I can start to like, you know, pick out when it’s AI or when it’s a human and then I lose that experiential thing that is lovely about the internet where it’s not perfect and it’s a little odd and human interactions across the world with, you know, customer support can be kind of like fun if you make it fun, right? 

So it’s like, it’s an interesting world where it can go that way. We are humans and have a choice in the matter. So it might be, going back to your earlier point, Garrett, I think we have an opportunity that’s like a standout opportunity, a differentiation opportunity. Everyone might be going in that direction. Some organizations might not. But again, is it mundane and is it simple? Like am I like asking the chatbot for if they have a size of shoe that I’m looking for, then that’s fine if a chatbot gets back to me as long as it’s accurate. So it’s very like time and a place from that perspective at least.

[00:30:57] Pete: I so agree with that. In my mind, if we move to this high tech plus high touch world that would be ideal so that we can use our, you know, investment in technology to do that kind of self-serve deflection that you’re talking about. Do you have size nine and a half, you know, in stock? And yet then use the investments in the human capital to really provide a really great interaction and who knows whether that’s naive in terms of companies cutting budgets and driving profitability. But I would like to think of a high tech, high touch world going forward.

[00:31:40] Jess: For sure. And the other side of the point is like not everything you encounter online is like exceptional, right? You’ve already encountered AI copy, you’ve already encountered that AI blog post. You’ve already probably chatted with an AI chatbot and weren’t really sure if it was human or not. And that’s kind of okay cause it’s like your bar isn’t too high on a lot of those interactions or a lot of those experiences. So it is like, if it goes in that direction, is it really that detrimental to the world you experience through like online tech interactions? So I think it’s gonna be a lot of like give or take to Pete’s point.

[00:32:19] Pete: So you knew this question was coming. We’ve already seen that AI tools can exponentially increase the efficiency of an individual marketer. Something like AutoGPT where AI is prompting itself to identify and complete tasks on its own could theoretically, dramatically increase that efficiency. Again, what if AI gets to a point where it can functionally replace the abilities of a modern marketing team?

[00:32:51] Jess: So, Garrett, you mentioned efficiency in that question. I think that’s really the important piece here is that AI will do a much better job at like a certain list of things that a marketer does today. One of those things is, you know, optimizing a landing page for conversion, running basic AB testing, testing different headlines at something we know really well at Unbounce, and AI supports that very efficiently. That’s something that a marketer can take a step back and not have that control over, and that’s gonna be okay. 

So is it gonna take your job? In doing that, not likely, because you still need to be present. You still need to prompt the AI. You still need to assess results in the same way that if you had a coworker and you were, you know, delegating your task to, you’d still have to be there to ensure that it gets done. To make sure it was done efficiently and that the results was as you need it to be. 

But the question kind of back to the marketer is, what does that afford you to do, if not that any longer? And in the world where there is some, you know, mundane tasks that are taken off your plate, does that mean a marketer’s replaced? No. But does that mean a marketer then can be what a marketer wants to be, which is creative and competitive? And extend their abilities past the, you know, busy work of pushing documents around and testing and optimizing. Like there’s just a realm of possibility that if we take tasks off our plate, what else can we do? So that’s probably an optimist’s point of view. I think we’re trying to like dig into also the other side of it. So I’m wondering if anyone has a more doomsday point of view when it comes to that.

[00:34:39] Pete: I have a realistic expression, and that is marketers who are not using AI will be replaced with marketers who are using AI, right? So we all need to understand the tool sets, how that makes us more efficient and more effective as marketers, and have a command on those tools, and hopefully it’s going to make us more efficient, make us smarter. And give us time to reflect and think and leverage that craft of advertising that we talked about in the first place. Maybe that’s also an optimistic point of view, but my advice to all marketers in the audience is study AI, learn the tools, and practice the tools. 

[00:35:35] Garrett: Did you want to get one in here, Molly?

[00:35:38] Molly: Yeah. Okay. So I have two. The first one is my hopeful prediction, which is that AI will actually give us a better work-life balance. You know, we hear a lot about, we can do a lot more if we’re set free to be creative, but we are also in a culture of burnout. You know, as marketers, some of us work 10 to 12 hours a day and you know, if that was halved and we had more time for our families, or if it was fueling the four day work week, that would be tremendous because then we could come back to our jobs and be more creative because we wouldn’t be so burnt out all the time. 

The doomsday one, which I probably should have started with so I don’t end with it, but you see two camps of marketers. You see the ones that just wanna do better. They use AI, they’ve adopted it, they’re excited by new tools. And then you see other ones that are like, you know what, I’m not trying to be the best. I just wanna do my job and go home. And you know, they wanna do the nine to five and they might not wanna learn new tools. And those people might lose their jobs and they might need to find another line of work. Whereas the ones that really are passionate and wanna be here will rise to the top. The problem is, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to folks that either don’t have the skills to adopt technology or that simply don’t want to.

[00:36:59] Pete: All right. We are deep into the AI wave that is this tsunami of tools and media and fear and potential regulation and so on. Based on everything, you know, as an AI marketer and as a popular culture follower because we’re marketers. What is the one thought you would leave us today about AI marketing? And I’ll turn the mic to Jess P.

[00:37:35] Jess: I would say, take it day by day. A lot of information. Try a tool, new one. There’s many at your fingertips. Go to Product Hunt, search AI, test them out, bring it into your organization. Talk to your fellow marketers about it, and just start to understand how this fits into your day-to-day work. So get in there, get curious. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. It’s some concerning, but it’s all something that’s worth learning, so just get in there and have fun with it.

[00:38:11] Pete: So what I heard here was one day at a time, one tool at a time. Love that. So, for the writers out there, maybe you should dabble in art direction using AI to see if you could actually design a page for the designers out there. Maybe you should dabble in writing and try to enhance your own skill sets using some of the copywriting tools such as Smart Copy or Jasper, or of course ChatGPT, but I do love that. All right. 

So thank you so much to Jess and Molly and Garrett for a very engaging conversation about “what if” on some different scenarios on where AI marketing or AI could actually take this world. And while we talked about some hyperbole of situations where either AI is destroying the world, or robots are replacing marketers, I think it made the point that AI is here and it’s an important part of our culture and our business tools, and we all need to learn the AI tools, apply the AI tools and be better for them. So thank you so much for a great chat today and I wish you all a great day.