Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's pretty amazing to be one hundred year old radio station,
(00:02):
but we wanted to talk about something much more modern
than the origins of KOA stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
We're still sort of figuring it out right now.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Joining us for what I think is going to be
a fascinating conversation and maybe something that you'll have in
mind as you go through your daily life for a while.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Scott Brinker is editor of Chief.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Martech chief m art tec seventeen year running blog on
marketing technology management website Martech.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Maar t e c h dot org.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And I had seen one kind of short article about
AI and then this morning Scott sent me this really
substantial one hundred and thirty seven page report that his
organization has put out about marketing technology and the state
of his company in the state of the industry right now,
and there is a lot to talk about. So Scott,
(00:56):
welcome to KOA. It's good to have you here. Yeah,
great to be here with you. So I just got
your report this morning, so I've been kind of working
my way through it a little bit during the show
as I've had time and this so just so you know,
I'm a huge nerd.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So this thing that just jumped out at me.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Is Moore's law versus what you call Martex law. Can
you please explain this because this looks like a very
interesting organizational theorem.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah, sure, all right.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Well, War's law has been around for like decades, and
it's basically the computing power doubles every two years or so.
I think everybody feels it's not just.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Raw computing power, like tech in general, it kind of
feels like it is always.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Expanding on an exponential rate, like it's always a run.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
To just keep up with all of this.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Okay, we got that, But then at the same time,
we know change is hard.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Like we as human beings, we tend not to.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Change an exponential rate, and then when we're organizations of
humans in a business, we definitely do not change at
an exponential rate.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
And so if you take.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Those two curves like this exponential growth and technology acceleration
and then the slower i'd say logarithmic curve of like
how organizations change, and you put those two against each other,
you're like, well, wait a second, the gap between these
keeps expanding. And I think that's what a lot of
people are feeling right now with all things AI.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So to the extent that these trends are more or
less permanent. What you're suggesting is that not all, but
on average businesses will fall constantly further and further behind
the technology that's available to them. Is that overstated? I mean,
mathematically that's what would follow. On the other hand, at
(02:48):
some point, businesses who do that will be out of business,
and businesses who maybe have a better understanding of the
newer technology to begin with will start up and kind
of change the appage at a given moment.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Definitely, you'd like zero writing in on it.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
I mean, what business do you know today that doesn't
feel like they're behind in all of this change? And
I think this is one of the things you have
to recognize, Like when you talk about like, Okay, how
do you deal with that situation of technology changing exponentially
organizations not changing that right? Well, one of the things
is organizations just can't embrace all the changes happening at
(03:27):
the same time.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
They have to pick their battles. They have to pick
the ones that are most relevant to.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Their specific business, their specific customers and focus on getting
those really right and be okay that there's going to
be other changes off on the side and they're the
adjacent that aren't necessarily as relevant to what they need
to do.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Right now, Okay, I want to focus with you a
little bit or more than a little bit, on AI,
because it's fascinating. It's utterly transformative. It's you know it
in a sense, it's pendent on the Internet. But even so,
I think it has the potential to be at least
(04:05):
as transformative as the Internet, which is a hard thing
to say because the Internet changed everything a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
But this is going to be a big deal.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
And so oftentimes we talk about AI in lots of
different ways, but I haven't spent very much time talking
about how AI might be used to sell you stuff.
And this is kind of your world. I don't want
to be too narrow. You can talk a little more
about how you're thinking about AI in the context of
your industry. But how is AI going to change marketing
(04:33):
or how is it already?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah? Why do people?
Speaker 4 (04:36):
I think people do recognize that, just like the Internet,
this is one of those sort of large changes that
is going to disrupt a lot of the ways in
which we do business. The thing is, for the Internet,
as transformative of the change as that was, it actually
took about ten years to really play out. It wasn't
(04:57):
really until like round two thousand and three to two
thousand and five that we started to see like, oh, okay, yeah,
this is the new way we actually do business, and
it became a little less novel and a little bit
more of just how we work in our lives. The
thing about AI that's really fascinating is it's arguably at
least as large of a change in the impact that
(05:18):
can have on business and what people do personally, but
the speed at which it seems to be evolving and
getting adopted is much much faster than what we saw
with the Internet.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So kind of a little bit in unprecedented territory.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
I think with marketing, there's a number of ways that
it's changing, you know, So I'll give you two. You know,
one is sort of behind the scenes, you know, how
does marketing produce the things it does? How does it
produce content? How does it produce web pages? How does
it engage in email campaigns with their customers?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
A lot of that work was very manual work.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
That took a lot of production time to bring to life,
and one of the first use cases we've seen for
a lot of these new generative AI tools is their
ability to help accelerate creating content, not just like you know,
like text content, you know, like helping with video content
and you know, editing podcasts and you know.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
All these sorts of things.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
And depending on how people have adopted it, this could
be like a two x, three x five x impact.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
On the productivity of what marketing can create. The other
example would be.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
The sort of stuff that we see interfacing with customers
and so, you know, in digital marketing, for like my goodness,
twenty five years, we sort of relied on Google. Right,
we type in a search for something we want, you know,
there's a list of the blue lengths and maybe some ads,
and we click through and then we figure out what
we want on the different websites. Marketers spend a lot
(06:44):
of time optimizing their businesses to make sure they showed
up in the proper places in Google. Well, now with
all of these AI assistants, you know, Chat, GPT or
cloud or Gemini even like now that's sort of AI summaries,
you know, coming out Google Search, people are no longer
getting links to websites that they go off and read.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They just asked the questions of what they want to
the AI assistant. The AI assistant does all the research behind.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
The scenes, gives them an answer, they can query it
back and forth, you know, have a dialogue, and they
never actually show up on the marketer's website, well at
least until much.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Further down the road when they're actually ready to purchase.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
So this is a whole way of like changing the
way we think about how do we find and engage
with people in this new environment.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Well, I wonder about that in terms of.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
How much damage will that do to websites that require
traffic that was primarily coming from search ins is especially
Google because it's so dominant before.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Is the is the rise of AI going.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
To destroy lots of online websites or just somehow change
how they're going to have to acquire customers? And if so,
how will they if there's not going to be a
link to them.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
This is a very legitimate concern, and so like if
you're in the business of selling something through your website,
people are already trying to figure out like, Okay.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
We know what we used to do to show up
in Google, what do we have to do to make
show up?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Make sure we show up in the proper way in
these AI assistants, and that field is very young, it's
very emerging.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
People are trying to figure that out.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
But there's also a lot of websites where they weren't
even really selling something, right. It was something about, you know,
a vehicle to produce you know content, you know, perhaps
influencing thought leadership, and there are people are genuinely concerned
that Well, wait a second. If the AI engine sort
of reads myself and then it just packages it up
and it serves it directly to people, then if I
(08:46):
was like supporting my site with say advertising or sponsorships, yeah,
I'm starting to lose traffic.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And so this is to get two down in the weeds.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
But there's a company called cloud Flare, you know, that
acts as kind of like ay of how things get
routed through the Internet. And they actually last month announced
like a way to block AI engines from like reading
your content unless the AI engine.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Was willing to like pay you for access to your content.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
So will this'd be a new model by which content
is supported on the web very early days.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, We're talking with Scott Brinker, editor of Chief Martech
seventeen year running blog now about marketing technology management. The
website is martech dot org m ar t ecch dot org.
And that and his new report, one hundred and thirty
seven page report is up on my website right now
at Rosskominsky dot com. And just to kind of hone in,
(09:43):
and then I'll switch gears for a second. But let's say,
let's say you and I each like to write about
our favorite bourbons.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Okay, I don't know if you like bourbon, but I do, and.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We'll turn it down.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, So you and I each like to write about
our favorite bourbons. And we've spent some time making websites,
and you and I have each made a website where
we make a few bucks.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Maybe it's not.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Our living full lea, but we hope it will be
one day selling advertisements to high end bourbon companies or
local liquor stores that sell the best high end bourbons.
And people come to our websites because they want to
read my tasting notes and they and they want to
read your tasting notes.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And now somebody goes on the search.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Machine and says, tell me some things about the best
tasting bourbons, and then the AI says, well, Scott Brinker
thinks this one is really good. And says has Aromas
of Carmel and Almonds, and Ross Kaminsky says that one's
not as good, but this one is really great. And meanwhile,
these people have gotten our thoughts and not come to
(10:49):
our site and we're not and now our advertisers are
not getting any benefit, and now all the financial gain
we might have had from our website is gone. So,
I mean, that's what you were already talking about. I'm
just kind of making it a specific example.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Yeah, it's a terrific example, and as the exact scenario
that people are concerned about right now.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
You know, even if it doesn't completely eliminate the.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Traffic, because you know, these AI engines generally are pretty
good about like providing attribution of where they saw certain things,
and so people who read it and are really really
interested then might still come to your side and maybe
they sign up for your newsletter, but it's not going
to be the level of traffic that we had when
like everything that came through Google was at best just
(11:34):
a pointer to then like have people go to your
website and really consume that. And so that again, that's
one of the reasons why that cloud Flare company is
trying to make a move to say, okay, if you're
going to destroy the ads supported commercial side of how
content was created, you know for the past twenty five
years on the web, there needs to.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Be another model.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
There needs to be some other way to economically compensate
these creators for what they're doing. And they're proposing being
the toll gate to the AI engines to say, like
you can set for your Bourgon site.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
You can say, like, okay, AI engine you.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
Can crawl my site, but every time you crawl it,
you have to pay me twenty bucks. And maybe I don't,
you know, write as well about Bourgen as you do.
So I'm like, hey, AI engines, if you crawl my website,
you can crawl it for ten dollars I crawl or
something like that. But basically the creators of this content,
Cloud Flair would like to give them the option to
(12:31):
basically set a charge for these AI engines. Will this
model actually take hold, I don't know, but it's because
of the fact that the ad supported model is under
serious threat in this environment that people are trying.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
To figure out like, okay, what do we do instead?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, so you don't know this, but I'm president of
the Bad analogy club, and I'm going to give you
one right now. So, and this is a very common,
well understood thing in nature.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Imagine you have.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
A bumper year of rain that grows lots of trees
and grass where the where the deer live, and the deer.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Is there are lots and lots of there's.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Lots of food, so they have lots of babies and
they eat everything. And the next year is a bad
year and there isn't enough food and lots of deer die.
And uh, that's what this is, right ai. AI is
the deer and all the websites is the grass, and
and the by destroying the grass and the plants, by
(13:33):
not essentially not letting it get more get the advertising money, essentially,
the deer are gonna kill themselves without even knowing it, unless,
as you say, they change the model. You can just
do a quick response to that, and then I want
to get to a couple of listener questions for you.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Yeah, I think that's that's a fair analogy. And again,
you know, I don't want to overhype it. And this
is still a thing that's in transition, but that is
the exact concern that some many content creators have, and
you're right, it's a feedback loop because ultimately those AI
engines need those content creators.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
A listener asks what about AI sales agents?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And I've noted in recent days, recent weeks, and I
sort of hate to say it, but the quality of
an AI sales agent on a phone. Oh like, I
called well three s XM today today and this female voice,
my name is Harmony, I'm your AI assistant. They actually
(14:33):
do a much better job than they did a year ago,
if they even existed.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
They do a much better job than they did six
months ago.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And what should we think about AI sales agents?
Speaker 4 (14:46):
Yeah, well, I mean certainly sales customer service in particular
have been a lot of improvement here over this past year,
partly because these agents they're taking advantage of these generatord
a engines that are very good conversationally. And then companies
are also getting better on the back end of hooking
(15:07):
these things up to you their knowledge base, the history
of support tickets, you know, all the information about common
questions that come up in sales. And so as a result,
these AI agents, whether it's for sales or customer service,
are actually getting very good. I think as long as
you know. My caveats to this are always, first of all,
just always make it clear that it's an AI agent
(15:27):
and not a human.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Don't play any games with that.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
And the second is, if someone who's running into an
issue where they don't feel the area or resolution through
the AI engine, make it AI agent. Just make it
very easy for them to like, no, I actually do
need to connect to a human on this. I think
if you do that too, it can be a win
win for everyone because, let's face sure, nobody really likes
waiting on hold for a limited number of humans to
(15:51):
get to their call in twenty minutes. If you can
get it self served right away with an AI agent, like, yeah,
that's actually a better experience.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I will say, hey, I have stayed on with AI
agents more in the past few months than in the
past than before that, because they do get it done
and they are they're they're they're good, they're better. Will
a listener question, will AI keep me from being advertised
to as much?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Oh? Well, that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
So one of the reasons people, I mean, there are
many reasons people enjoy working with like Chat, GPT or
Claude or Gemini, is the AI assistance partly because boy,
you can just ask really detailed questions on a dialogue.
You're getting very good answers without having to click a
bunch of layings that go off and hunt things in
different websites. But you know, part of that is right
(16:45):
now today, most of those AI agents aren't really advertising supported.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
You know, many of them, you know.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Charge subscriptions if you really want to use the service,
you know, on a regular basis, you know it's twenty
dollars a month or whatnot. Some of them are looking
at possibly making money by essentially using affiliate links, so like,
oh well, if you do decide to purchase through us,
you know we'll get a.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Share that revenue. But right now, the experience, the user interface.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Doesn't have a lot of advertising, and people appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
So when it gets rid of some of the noise
and focuses on the meat.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
Will it's say that way, Well, we don't know, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I mean I think Look, I used to say this
about Facebook all the time, and it's not to pick
on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And just as a as a business model, if.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Somebody is offering you something that is valuable and costs
money to produce to supply, and they're not charging you
for it.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Then you're not the customer.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
You're the product that's being sold, right, And if the
advertising model is kind of going away, then you're going
to have to become the customer instead of the product.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
And the only way I shouldn't say the only way.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Who knows how this is going to evolve, but one
way that it could evolve is people being willing to
pay one or two or five or ten dollars a
month for access to their AI engine. And if enough
tens of millions of people do it, then these companies
will make money.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Got just a couple.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Seconds left, Scott, if you want to wrap it up, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
No, I think you're absolutely right. This is a really
exciting time, you know. I mean, nobody knows exactly how
all this is going to play out, but we know
the world is changing around us.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
And whether you're on the marketing.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Side or just as a customer and a consumer leaning
into this and discovering what lies ahead.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
It's an adventure.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Scott, you are a tremendous guest.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I'll definitely have you back on the show if you're willing, knowledgeable, enthusiastic,
really good.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
I'm glad I had you on.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Scott, Brinker is editor of Chief Martech, this seventeen year
running blog now on marketing technology management, the website m
a R techmartech dot org, and all of that is
linked on my blog, along with his new big report
on this stuff that we were talking about. If you
go to Rossciminsky dot com you can find all the links.
(18:59):
Scott Brinker, th thanks so much for making time, especially
on short notice. I only invited you yesterday and you
made it work. It was a great conversation. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Thanks for having me, Ross, have a great day.
It's pretty amazing to be one hundred year old radio station,
(00:02):
but we wanted to talk about something much more modern
than the origins of KOA stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
We're still sort of figuring it out right now.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Joining us for what I think is going to be
a fascinating conversation and maybe something that you'll have in
mind as you go through your daily life for a while.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Scott Brinker is editor of Chief.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Martech chief m art tec seventeen year running blog on
marketing technology management website Martech.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Maar t e c h dot org.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
And I had seen one kind of short article about
AI and then this morning Scott sent me this really
substantial one hundred and thirty seven page report that his
organization has put out about marketing technology and the state
of his company in the state of the industry right now,
and there is a lot to talk about. So Scott,
(00:56):
welcome to KOA. It's good to have you here. Yeah,
great to be here with you. So I just got
your report this morning, so I've been kind of working
my way through it a little bit during the show
as I've had time and this so just so you know,
I'm a huge nerd.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So this thing that just jumped out at me.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Is Moore's law versus what you call Martex law. Can
you please explain this because this looks like a very
interesting organizational theorem.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah, sure, all right.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
Well, War's law has been around for like decades, and
it's basically the computing power doubles every two years or so.
I think everybody feels it's not just.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Raw computing power, like tech in general, it kind of
feels like it is always.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Expanding on an exponential rate, like it's always a run.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
To just keep up with all of this.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Okay, we got that, But then at the same time,
we know change is hard.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Like we as human beings, we tend not to.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Change an exponential rate, and then when we're organizations of
humans in a business, we definitely do not change at
an exponential rate.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
And so if you take.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Those two curves like this exponential growth and technology acceleration
and then the slower i'd say logarithmic curve of like
how organizations change, and you put those two against each other,
you're like, well, wait a second, the gap between these
keeps expanding. And I think that's what a lot of
people are feeling right now with all things AI.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So to the extent that these trends are more or
less permanent. What you're suggesting is that not all, but
on average businesses will fall constantly further and further behind
the technology that's available to them. Is that overstated? I mean,
mathematically that's what would follow. On the other hand, at
(02:48):
some point, businesses who do that will be out of business,
and businesses who maybe have a better understanding of the
newer technology to begin with will start up and kind
of change the appage at a given moment.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
Definitely, you'd like zero writing in on it.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
I mean, what business do you know today that doesn't
feel like they're behind in all of this change? And
I think this is one of the things you have
to recognize, Like when you talk about like, Okay, how
do you deal with that situation of technology changing exponentially
organizations not changing that right? Well, one of the things
is organizations just can't embrace all the changes happening at
(03:27):
the same time.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
They have to pick their battles. They have to pick
the ones that are most relevant to.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
Their specific business, their specific customers and focus on getting
those really right and be okay that there's going to
be other changes off on the side and they're the
adjacent that aren't necessarily as relevant to what they need
to do.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Right now, Okay, I want to focus with you a
little bit or more than a little bit, on AI,
because it's fascinating. It's utterly transformative. It's you know it
in a sense, it's pendent on the Internet. But even so,
I think it has the potential to be at least
(04:05):
as transformative as the Internet, which is a hard thing
to say because the Internet changed everything a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
But this is going to be a big deal.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
And so oftentimes we talk about AI in lots of
different ways, but I haven't spent very much time talking
about how AI might be used to sell you stuff.
And this is kind of your world. I don't want
to be too narrow. You can talk a little more
about how you're thinking about AI in the context of
your industry. But how is AI going to change marketing
(04:33):
or how is it already?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah? Why do people?
Speaker 4 (04:36):
I think people do recognize that, just like the Internet,
this is one of those sort of large changes that
is going to disrupt a lot of the ways in
which we do business. The thing is, for the Internet,
as transformative of the change as that was, it actually
took about ten years to really play out. It wasn't
(04:57):
really until like round two thousand and three to two
thousand and five that we started to see like, oh, okay, yeah,
this is the new way we actually do business, and
it became a little less novel and a little bit
more of just how we work in our lives. The
thing about AI that's really fascinating is it's arguably at
least as large of a change in the impact that
(05:18):
can have on business and what people do personally, but
the speed at which it seems to be evolving and
getting adopted is much much faster than what we saw
with the Internet.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
So kind of a little bit in unprecedented territory.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
I think with marketing, there's a number of ways that
it's changing, you know, So I'll give you two. You know,
one is sort of behind the scenes, you know, how
does marketing produce the things it does? How does it
produce content? How does it produce web pages? How does
it engage in email campaigns with their customers?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
A lot of that work was very manual work.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
That took a lot of production time to bring to life,
and one of the first use cases we've seen for
a lot of these new generative AI tools is their
ability to help accelerate creating content, not just like you know,
like text content, you know, like helping with video content
and you know, editing podcasts and you know.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
All these sorts of things.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
And depending on how people have adopted it, this could
be like a two x, three x five x impact.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
On the productivity of what marketing can create. The other
example would be.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
The sort of stuff that we see interfacing with customers
and so, you know, in digital marketing, for like my goodness,
twenty five years, we sort of relied on Google. Right,
we type in a search for something we want, you know,
there's a list of the blue lengths and maybe some ads,
and we click through and then we figure out what
we want on the different websites. Marketers spend a lot
(06:44):
of time optimizing their businesses to make sure they showed
up in the proper places in Google. Well, now with
all of these AI assistants, you know, Chat, GPT or
cloud or Gemini even like now that's sort of AI summaries,
you know, coming out Google Search, people are no longer
getting links to websites that they go off and read.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They just asked the questions of what they want to
the AI assistant. The AI assistant does all the research behind.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
The scenes, gives them an answer, they can query it
back and forth, you know, have a dialogue, and they
never actually show up on the marketer's website, well at
least until much.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Further down the road when they're actually ready to purchase.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
So this is a whole way of like changing the
way we think about how do we find and engage
with people in this new environment.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Well, I wonder about that in terms of.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
How much damage will that do to websites that require
traffic that was primarily coming from search ins is especially
Google because it's so dominant before.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Is the is the rise of AI going.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
To destroy lots of online websites or just somehow change
how they're going to have to acquire customers? And if so,
how will they if there's not going to be a
link to them.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
This is a very legitimate concern, and so like if
you're in the business of selling something through your website,
people are already trying to figure out like, Okay.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
We know what we used to do to show up
in Google, what do we have to do to make
show up?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Make sure we show up in the proper way in
these AI assistants, and that field is very young, it's
very emerging.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
People are trying to figure that out.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
But there's also a lot of websites where they weren't
even really selling something, right. It was something about, you know,
a vehicle to produce you know content, you know, perhaps
influencing thought leadership, and there are people are genuinely concerned
that Well, wait a second. If the AI engine sort
of reads myself and then it just packages it up
and it serves it directly to people, then if I
(08:46):
was like supporting my site with say advertising or sponsorships, yeah,
I'm starting to lose traffic.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And so this is to get two down in the weeds.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
But there's a company called cloud Flare, you know, that
acts as kind of like ay of how things get
routed through the Internet. And they actually last month announced
like a way to block AI engines from like reading
your content unless the AI engine.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Was willing to like pay you for access to your content.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
So will this'd be a new model by which content
is supported on the web very early days.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, We're talking with Scott Brinker, editor of Chief Martech
seventeen year running blog now about marketing technology management. The
website is martech dot org m ar t ecch dot org.
And that and his new report, one hundred and thirty
seven page report is up on my website right now
at Rosskominsky dot com. And just to kind of hone in,
(09:43):
and then I'll switch gears for a second. But let's say,
let's say you and I each like to write about
our favorite bourbons.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Okay, I don't know if you like bourbon, but I do, and.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
We'll turn it down.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, So you and I each like to write about
our favorite bourbons. And we've spent some time making websites,
and you and I have each made a website where
we make a few bucks.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Maybe it's not.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Our living full lea, but we hope it will be
one day selling advertisements to high end bourbon companies or
local liquor stores that sell the best high end bourbons.
And people come to our websites because they want to
read my tasting notes and they and they want to
read your tasting notes.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
And now somebody goes on the search.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Machine and says, tell me some things about the best
tasting bourbons, and then the AI says, well, Scott Brinker
thinks this one is really good. And says has Aromas
of Carmel and Almonds, and Ross Kaminsky says that one's
not as good, but this one is really great. And meanwhile,
these people have gotten our thoughts and not come to
(10:49):
our site and we're not and now our advertisers are
not getting any benefit, and now all the financial gain
we might have had from our website is gone. So,
I mean, that's what you were already talking about. I'm
just kind of making it a specific example.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Yeah, it's a terrific example, and as the exact scenario
that people are concerned about right now.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
You know, even if it doesn't completely eliminate the.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Traffic, because you know, these AI engines generally are pretty
good about like providing attribution of where they saw certain things,
and so people who read it and are really really
interested then might still come to your side and maybe
they sign up for your newsletter, but it's not going
to be the level of traffic that we had when
like everything that came through Google was at best just
(11:34):
a pointer to then like have people go to your
website and really consume that. And so that again, that's
one of the reasons why that cloud Flare company is
trying to make a move to say, okay, if you're
going to destroy the ads supported commercial side of how
content was created, you know for the past twenty five
years on the web, there needs to.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Be another model.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
There needs to be some other way to economically compensate
these creators for what they're doing. And they're proposing being
the toll gate to the AI engines to say, like
you can set for your Bourgon site.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
You can say, like, okay, AI engine you.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
Can crawl my site, but every time you crawl it,
you have to pay me twenty bucks. And maybe I don't,
you know, write as well about Bourgen as you do.
So I'm like, hey, AI engines, if you crawl my website,
you can crawl it for ten dollars I crawl or
something like that. But basically the creators of this content,
Cloud Flair would like to give them the option to
(12:31):
basically set a charge for these AI engines. Will this
model actually take hold, I don't know, but it's because
of the fact that the ad supported model is under
serious threat in this environment that people are trying.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
To figure out like, okay, what do we do instead?
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, so you don't know this, but I'm president of
the Bad analogy club, and I'm going to give you
one right now. So, and this is a very common,
well understood thing in nature.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Imagine you have.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
A bumper year of rain that grows lots of trees
and grass where the where the deer live, and the deer.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Is there are lots and lots of there's.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Lots of food, so they have lots of babies and
they eat everything. And the next year is a bad
year and there isn't enough food and lots of deer die.
And uh, that's what this is, right ai. AI is
the deer and all the websites is the grass, and
and the by destroying the grass and the plants, by
(13:33):
not essentially not letting it get more get the advertising money, essentially,
the deer are gonna kill themselves without even knowing it, unless,
as you say, they change the model. You can just
do a quick response to that, and then I want
to get to a couple of listener questions for you.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Yeah, I think that's that's a fair analogy. And again,
you know, I don't want to overhype it. And this
is still a thing that's in transition, but that is
the exact concern that some many content creators have, and
you're right, it's a feedback loop because ultimately those AI
engines need those content creators.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
A listener asks what about AI sales agents?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And I've noted in recent days, recent weeks, and I
sort of hate to say it, but the quality of
an AI sales agent on a phone. Oh like, I
called well three s XM today today and this female voice,
my name is Harmony, I'm your AI assistant. They actually
(14:33):
do a much better job than they did a year ago,
if they even existed.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
They do a much better job than they did six
months ago.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And what should we think about AI sales agents?
Speaker 4 (14:46):
Yeah, well, I mean certainly sales customer service in particular
have been a lot of improvement here over this past year,
partly because these agents they're taking advantage of these generatord
a engines that are very good conversationally. And then companies
are also getting better on the back end of hooking
(15:07):
these things up to you their knowledge base, the history
of support tickets, you know, all the information about common
questions that come up in sales. And so as a result,
these AI agents, whether it's for sales or customer service,
are actually getting very good. I think as long as
you know. My caveats to this are always, first of all,
just always make it clear that it's an AI agent
(15:27):
and not a human.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Don't play any games with that.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
And the second is, if someone who's running into an
issue where they don't feel the area or resolution through
the AI engine, make it AI agent. Just make it
very easy for them to like, no, I actually do
need to connect to a human on this. I think
if you do that too, it can be a win
win for everyone because, let's face sure, nobody really likes
waiting on hold for a limited number of humans to
(15:51):
get to their call in twenty minutes. If you can
get it self served right away with an AI agent, like, yeah,
that's actually a better experience.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
I will say, hey, I have stayed on with AI
agents more in the past few months than in the
past than before that, because they do get it done
and they are they're they're they're good, they're better. Will
a listener question, will AI keep me from being advertised
to as much?
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Oh? Well, that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
So one of the reasons people, I mean, there are
many reasons people enjoy working with like Chat, GPT or
Claude or Gemini, is the AI assistance partly because boy,
you can just ask really detailed questions on a dialogue.
You're getting very good answers without having to click a
bunch of layings that go off and hunt things in
different websites. But you know, part of that is right
(16:45):
now today, most of those AI agents aren't really advertising supported.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
You know, many of them, you know.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Charge subscriptions if you really want to use the service,
you know, on a regular basis, you know it's twenty
dollars a month or whatnot. Some of them are looking
at possibly making money by essentially using affiliate links, so like,
oh well, if you do decide to purchase through us,
you know we'll get a.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Share that revenue. But right now, the experience, the user interface.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Doesn't have a lot of advertising, and people appreciate that.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
So when it gets rid of some of the noise
and focuses on the meat.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
Will it's say that way, Well, we don't know, yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
I mean I think Look, I used to say this
about Facebook all the time, and it's not to pick
on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And just as a as a business model, if.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Somebody is offering you something that is valuable and costs
money to produce to supply, and they're not charging you
for it.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Then you're not the customer.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
You're the product that's being sold, right, And if the
advertising model is kind of going away, then you're going
to have to become the customer instead of the product.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
And the only way I shouldn't say the only way.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Who knows how this is going to evolve, but one
way that it could evolve is people being willing to
pay one or two or five or ten dollars a
month for access to their AI engine. And if enough
tens of millions of people do it, then these companies
will make money.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Got just a couple.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Seconds left, Scott, if you want to wrap it up, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:11):
No, I think you're absolutely right. This is a really
exciting time, you know. I mean, nobody knows exactly how
all this is going to play out, but we know
the world is changing around us.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
And whether you're on the marketing.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Side or just as a customer and a consumer leaning
into this and discovering what lies ahead.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
It's an adventure.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Scott, you are a tremendous guest.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I'll definitely have you back on the show if you're willing, knowledgeable, enthusiastic,
really good.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
I'm glad I had you on.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Scott, Brinker is editor of Chief Martech, this seventeen year
running blog now on marketing technology management, the website m
a R techmartech dot org, and all of that is
linked on my blog, along with his new big report
on this stuff that we were talking about. If you
go to Rossciminsky dot com you can find all the links.
(18:59):
Scott Brinker, th thanks so much for making time, especially
on short notice. I only invited you yesterday and you
made it work. It was a great conversation. Appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Thanks for having me, Ross, have a great day.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.