#14: Turning AI Threats Into Wins: Brand Misinformation & Implementation Pitfalls

Businesses are finding that AI hallucinations can lead to disinformation about their services. One brand responded creatively when ChatGPT made up a feature they didn’t actually offer. From navigating AI mishaps to fielding PR disasters, Grace and Peter explore how unexpected business challenges can lead to growth opportunities. They also dive into the growing issue of scam job applications generated by AI, the difficulties businesses face with secure AI implementation, and the rising trend towards custom AI solutions. 

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Chapters

00:00 – Welcome & Episode Overview

01:30 – Soundslice’s creative response to AI misinformation

03:45 – Brand Adaptation: Lessons from Domino’s Pizza

05:20 – AI Hallucinations & Why You Should Monitor Your Brand Mentions in AI Tools

06:30 – AI Job App Scam: Bots & Deepfakes

07:30 – The Real Problem with AI Implementation

09:10 – Consistency: The Biggest Barrier to Effective AI

10:30 – Why Small, Purpose-Built AI Tools Work Best

11:20 – AI Subscription Trends: Free vs. Paid Tools

12:00 – The Overload of AI Tools & Integration Challenges 

Sources 

“ChatGPT made up a product feature out of thin air, so this company created it” by Benj Edwards for Ars Technica

“Why Some Companies Are Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions” by Aaron Holmes for The Information

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Grace (00:11.784)

(00:01):
you
Peter (00:16.386)
Welcome to Accelerated Velocity, the podcast that helps you move faster, smarter, and more strategically in the rapidly evolving world of AI. We'll break down the latest AI news and innovations and explore how they impact your marketing, sales, and business growth. We'll dive into practical use cases, unpack new tools, and cut through the noise so you and your team can adapt with confidence. I'm Grace Mathews, Director of Content at InboundAV.
a business development agency and HubSpot Solutions partner dedicated to driving sustainable business growth. Each week, I'll be here with Peter Malick, our CEO and founder. Join us as we make sense of what's changing and what to do about it. Hi, everyone. This is Grace back for another episode of Accelerated Velocity. And I'm here with Peter. How are you today, Peter?
Great grace. It's been a wild week.
That is true. And today we're going to talk about, think, a positive topic to end out a crazy week. And that is turning potential struggles or threats into opportunities. So we're going to start with a story about a company who got creative after a chachi beauty hallucination kind of threatened the reputation of their brand. Do you want to?
Launch into this one, Peter, I know you have some thoughts on this one.
Grace (01:43.438)
Okay, yeah, I love this story and I love it because it's something close to my heart. I'm a guitarist. This is about importing ASCII Tablature, which is a guitar notation system, into a product that was specifically focused on sheet music. Now ASCII Tablature is something that's totally different. And according to the company that incorporating that into their product was at the bottom, the very bottom of their list.
which is understandable in a lot of ways. But what happened was that they kept getting inquiries about this, you the ASCII Tablature feature isn't working. And they started to do some search and they started to search about themselves on ChatGPT and ChatGPT returned the major feature that this company had, which was the ability to import ASCII Tablature into the platform, which was absolutely fiction.
Absolutely fiction. So they were faced with a dilemma and they thought about just putting a big disclaimer, we don't do this, but opted for the other route, which was to build it, to build it and have it. And so I'm really entertained by the story because Chat GPT by basically misreporting on the company's features presented a challenge to the company.
that ended up in the company incorporating that feature and it's helped them. I just love that story.
Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting parts about this is the way that they were able to put a positive spin on something that was initially making their brand potentially look bad or like they were kind of like underserving their customers into, know, I don't, I'm not a guitar player, but seeing this story, I almost have more respect for Soundslice because of this, because you can see that journey of meeting customer expectations.
Peter (03:45.464)
The other thing that I think this is a good reminder about is to see what different platforms like ChatGBT or other AI platforms are saying about your brand because they do hallucinate.
Yeah, no, and we've had that experience right here. The company name is InboundAV. AV usually stands for audio video. And in our case, it stands for accelerated velocity. But there are actually, I've seen LLM results saying that we're audio video integrators, which couldn't be farther from the truth. We happen to have expertise in that domain, but.
It's not what we do in any way, or form. And I agree. mean, this is like SoundSlice incorporated and viewed it as an opportunity. And basically we're saying like, yeah, we don't do that, but we're gonna do it. And they did it, which, you know, we were discussing it kind of in some ways reminds us of the transformation that dominoes underwent, like I think over 15 years ago right now.
And basically at the time, their pizza tasted like cardboard. There's this little controversy over that fact. And they actually came out and owned it. Hey, our piece tastes like cardboard, but here's what we're doing. You know, and we want to buy you a pizza. And so I think in that way, they turned the fact that their company was absolute mess, putting out garbage product into an opportunity that's, that's ended up in growing the company past.
where they'd been before they went down.
Peter (05:24.876)
Yeah, and similarly, they've become notorious for having pretty fun and funny advertisements and stuff like that. So I think that's a great example, Peter, of like, it doesn't have to be AI related, but in marketing and in brand voice and customer success in general, right, finding those opportunities to flip the script when that needs to happen, to pivot as a way to kind of stay dynamic and also exceed expectations.

(00:22):
Yeah, I totally agree. I think we're going to see a lot more of this as we go on the experience that SoundSlice had. This is a little bit tangential, but I was reading this morning that there's a big problem where a really decent percentage of job applicants are bots. They're deep fakes. And the article is saying it's mostly coming from North Korea at the moment, but I'm sure North Korea is not going to be the only source. So big companies are actually hiring
people who are not people, they're bots, potentially exposing themselves to data threats. And so it's just so many, we've talked about this before, there are so many unexpected unknowns that have come up through this lightning speed development of AI. just really, it suggests that a lot of caution should be taken at every step.
And that actually leads me into our second topic for the day, which is the struggle of AI implementation and how to nail AI implementation correctly. There's widespread support for AI amongst most people in the corporate world right now, but a lot of companies are struggling with implementation and that issue of getting an influx of low quality.
AI applications or on the other side, companies using AI to process job applications is a great example of that. How do you implement those tools in the right way where they are actually helping your organization and helping the individuals within your organization?
Grace (07:30.222)
Yeah, I totally agree. It's kind of this weird dynamic is that somebody who's in, for instance, HR has this brilliant idea of we're going to screen all of our applicants using AI. And I want you to feel about it. And I personally am not a fan of AI screening human beings and messing with their lives because of an algorithm. But nevertheless, it's happening. But at the same time,
There's always a flip side to this. So as soon as these things have come out and become quote, let's quote, useful to companies, that there are actors out there who are trying to exploit them. It's the most natural thing in the world, especially in this internet age that we have lived in for a quarter of a century now, or actually a little bit more. It's incredible. And so for each innovation, there is a way to
exploit that innovation and it's just really a wild and fast, it's the wild west. It's the gold rush and it's the wild west. It's wild.
So Peter, I have a question for you. You you work in business development, working with companies to improve operations and processes with their tech stack to distill it into very simple terms. What do you see right now are the most common barriers to that successful AI implementation? What makes the difference between implementing AI tools in a way that can harm an organization versus doing it in a way
that actually puts people on the road to success.
Grace (09:11.118)
So I think that the biggest challenge right now is consistency. Because we've seen stuff we've discussed over the last few podcasts, we've seen chat GPT and other LLMs hallucinate. And this is something that's fairly new and hallucinate wildly. So we've been seeing that. so with that, taking that as a given, it's very, very difficult to build something that's going to take LLM results, which may be accurate.
or right now there's a problem with them being wildly inaccurate and incorporate that into something where a company, especially a big company can confidently use without other systems in place to monitor that use, which is something I'm sure is happening. But nevertheless, the bottom line is we're in a very challenging position here as far as actually being able to implement stuff. And that's kind of why we've sort of chosen, we've discussed before,
for HubSpot users, we've been building a HubSpot app that will do specific things to help you with prospecting for leads. And so it's very, very narrow and our results so far have been really positive. And so we're sort of taking the attitude of like at this point in time, do something simple that's useful where people can rely on the data that's coming.
Yeah, I think it's interesting that you bring that up, Peter, because just in the past month or so, the market is seeing a lot of shifts in different businesses' preferences towards paid subscriptions to certain LLM models versus specific agents versus custom-built AI solutions and free tools. So this month actually was the first month since the rise of ChatGPT.
that there was a slight downturn in chat GPT paid subscriptions since the paid option has been out. It's a very slight downturn, but some AI experts are suggesting that this could be an indication that people are searching for more free tools or even for more custom built solutions as that becomes more of a reality or more of an option.
Grace (11:28.362)
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And then I think another big factor is that Google is once again the elephant in the room. So any business that has a Google business account where you have the Google suite of products has access to Notebook LM, Gemini, Google Gems, a whole range of really powerful AI products. And it's included in the subscription that they raise the subscription price by a few dollars a month.
but, and there's no choice, you got them. You got them or you're unsubscribed. So in that context, if those products are returning information that is good quality as ChatGPT is, why pay for ChatGPT?
Peter (12:16.928)
Exactly. I completely agree with you. Why, I mean, it goes back to that single source of truth is like, why would you want to be using different tools across different websites and platforms when you can have it all integrated? And so many people are on Google suites.

(00:43):
I know, I mean, that is actually driving me crazy right now. Obviously we use HubSpot as a single source of truth, but it doesn't do everything. And we use ClickUp for project management. ClickUp has their own AI they want to sell you. HubSpot has Breeze Intelligence. There's a cost associated with it and on and on and on. And so to be having to deal with a half a dozen or a dozen different somewhat useful AIs,
in order to maximize the use of your tech stack. It's it's crazy making.
So Peter, I have one more question for you before we leave. When was the last time you had Domino's? Because I know you are a fan of Domino's Pizza yourself.
I hate the Domino's and to be perfectly honest with you, I had never had Domino's since 2009 is when they did their transition and I had never hit Domino's until a year and a half ago. And it's not fantastic pizza, but it's good pizza and it's okay. It's enjoyable. And so yeah, it took me a while. It took me a while because I had such a bad taste in my mouth. It's like, how could this possibly be good? But yeah.
Grace (13:45.088)
It's definitely been a transformation.
Yeah, I don't mind when Domino's is around if it's you know at a party or something. I'm always I'm always happy. Exactly All right. Well, I think this was a great discussion today Peter and we'll be back next week with more news and updates from the AI business development world
world. Awesome. See you next week.
Thanks for listening to Accelerated Velocity. A link to our website, newsletter, and all that other good stuff can be found down in the show notes. If you like what you heard, we'd appreciate a five-star review. And make sure to subscribe for weekly episodes on the latest in AI for Business.