Episode 518: You Have 18 Months: The AI Marketing Reckoning Nobody's Ready For

Opening And Why AI Worries Marketers

And then on top of that, of course, the non-marketers of the world have a point of view that you no longer need humans because AI can just do the marketing for you. And we all know that that's that out there.

Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Dynamics Corner. What does AI have anything to do with your marketing? What you should do? I'm your co-host, Chris.

And this is Brad. This episode was recorded on April 24th, 2026. Chris, Chris, Chris. AI is all over the place. And we had a wonderful discussion today with someone who understands how you can incorporate AI into your marketing strategies and your marketing plans. With us today, we had the opportunity to speak with Lisa Cole. How are you doing?

I'm well, how are you?

Good, good. All things considered, you know, the nice weather is coming and uh the world's moving fast, and I'm trying to slow down, so I don't know where that leaves me.

Yeah, yeah. All the above here, for sure.

Yeah, it's um I was thinking before we were about to speak about how much has changed since the last time we spoke in the world. If you think about that, it's um you know, everyone's talking about AI, everyone's talking about how they can improve efficiency within the organization. And using AI doesn't necessarily mean a lot of people have the feeling that it's coding only, but it's really not coding. Really, you can gain some organizational and operational efficiencies from it as well. And it's almost like the conversations that we plan to have, we almost just have to start having because if we sleep what was relevant a month ago is irrelevant today. I would even say sometimes it's a week.

Yeah, I think with as it relates to all things, AI's impact on the world week by week. Anytime I think that I have a uh a real sense of how things are evolved, and you can kind of settle into something, another model comes out, a new capability emerges, someone figures out how to apply AI in a new and innovative way, thinking about things like your second brain, and let's use Obsidian, a note-taker, to turn out, uh, give you context and in a way that feels less cumbersome and friction. Like you don't need to be an engineer to figure that out. It's it's mind-blowing.

It's definitely shorter and shorter. Uh, I know like uh new content every week is relevant for the week. I do believe that it's getting shorter than that. Because I mean, I would say 72 hours is where I think is where it's only relevant up to 72 hours. Anything more than that, it's like people moved on.

Yeah. I think the only thing that uh having those conversations, even though a week from now, a month from now it's outdated, it's that you are consistently putting out a point of view and staying on top of it. And in time they realize, okay, so this is a human that's making a significant investment to stay on top of what is happening and how it's evolving and the implications of that. And I don't have a lot of time to figure out how that human is doing it, so I'm just gonna follow that person. Even if what they might have just published yesterday is no longer relevant tomorrow, I'm still gonna stay listening to Brad because Brad is paying attention and I don't have enough time to take all of these sources and distill it on a regular basis. I'll let him do it and then I'll just stay in touch with him.

Meet Lisa Cole And The Stakes

Yes, that's it's it's a good way to go. I think I've come to accept it's more understanding of concept and capability than the how, because the how is what's changing. But I think some of these concepts and capabilities are they're progressing, but it's within the same uh framework or method. I I could talk about this uh all day long, but before we get more into that, would you mind telling everyone a little bit about yourself, please?

Sure. I'm Lisa Cole. I'm currently the chief marketing and AI officer here at 2x. 2x is a global B2B go-to-market subscription services provider. We basically work with B2B Enterprises Scale. Um, their go-to-market impact without skyrocketing costs or headcount. Um, you could argue that I'm the marketer for marketers, right? So I my favorite part of my role right now uh is a couple things, but I'm basically helping people like me that have been dealing with challenges I've been dealing with over the last 25 years. Um now, having said that, the reason why I'm so excited about and also somewhat hesitant about this phase that we're in, um, is because AI is kind of rewriting marketing on two fronts, right? It's it's changing how we are researching and evaluating solutions and how we are making decisions and everything that we buy, whether it's I just bought a$300 bird feeder that has an AI camera so I could see which birds are coming in through a car or a$200,000 tech platform. Uh I'm now using AI to surface potential solutions and then even helping me understand how to take all the information I'm finding and rationalize it down so I can make a decision faster. That's changing how marketing, like that's quite literally changing how marketing sales, how companies are kind of meeting the buyers where they're at now. It's dramatically increased the surface area that we're we have to cover and be findable and chosen in. We also it's not just the surface area, all these different watering holes and answer engines. It's now humans and machines I have to worry about. So it's I can't even just put a point of view out there in such a way that I I'm confident that the human I'm trying to influence a decision, that they can find me, that they can understand what we're saying, and that they'll choose me. I know I have to think about agents finding my content, understanding what I'm saying, and then still choose me of all the things. And then on top of that, of course, the non-marketers of the world have a point of view that you no longer need humans because AI can just do the marketing for you. Well, we all know that out there, you still need humans, but they the work that the humans are doing anywhere in the go-to-market function of any company, that work is gonna change. How we get that work done is gonna change. Um, so I kind of sit at the intersection of that and I love it, honestly.

That is there's so much to that, and I'm honest when I say someone asked me this morning, and it it's relevant to something you had just mentioned. How can I be seen? Yeah, these are the questions because now even when you look for I I think, like you had mentioned, the method that buyers find products is different. Many, many years ago, when I was a child, you would see a commercial on television. And that commercial on television, or you'd see a newspaper ad or a magazine ad and go, oh, I that's interesting. I'd like that.

Yeah.

AI Visibility Means Being Everywhere

Fast forward to today, I can type something in a search bar on any one of the browsers, and I get an AI summary. I no longer just a short period of time ago, it used to be here of all of the web pages that match that. Now it's an AI summary which consists of bits and pieces from many different sources. So I can see how marketing has changed, and how can someone who has a product adapt and have a better position in this type of world?

Well, I don't know that you can adapt and be findable and understandable and chosen be seen in all of these watering holes, unless you also use AI to do this at scale. Like you quite literally have the disruption you're feeling as it relates to being seen by AI answer engines and humans in all the different places. The scale is now so much that um you actually do need to be smart about how you use AI to uh produce the or deliver the experiences that are needed to be seen at scale. Like the resources have never been sufficient, anyways, right? I've never met in 25 years, I've never met a marketer that would say that they had the resources that were um consistent with the expectations the organization had for what it was that marketing was doing. It was never, it was never even. We never had the resources. Well, now, on top of uh the increased expectations, and they are getting higher every day, there's now a belief that we could do it with fewer resources because of AI. Um, so that gap is.

I think that's everywhere. They think that oh everywhere.

Whether you it doesn't matter what function you're in, but it's it's especially true in go-to-market teams, marketing and sales. Um so um one of the things that we have learned from an AI visibility, like how do I make sure that we are seen, knowing that these answer engines are aggregating data from multiple sources, um, there isn't a magic bullet. The answer is you quite literally need to be everywhere all at once. And to do that, you need AI to take the core big rock asset, the human-produced point of view, thinking, you know, um guidance, and be able to replicate or repurpose that in such a way that it's findable in all of the watering holes where the humans and machines are looking.

Wow, you make that sound so easy. Um I need to do is no, I'm I'm being a little sarcastic. It is intimidating because as you had mentioned, we no longer can create a website, for example, or another brochure in a magazine. If anyone even reads magazines, I know the publishing's going down. I mean, there's so many different areas.

Yeah.

Like you do need to be everywhere at once, I believe, because people come in from all different avenues.

Yeah.

And what are some what I'm finding in this whole journey is everyone has the same questions. How do I start? Everyone's saying uh in the context of what we just talked about, you have to be everywhere.

Yeah.

But how do you get to be everywhere?

Brain Gravity And The New Buying Journey

Yeah. Um, about a year and a half ago, I published a book called Brain Gravity. Um, and the catalyst for that was I was um, there were lots of research studies that had come out that had documented how the buying journey, like how our buying journey had changed. And the the scary like takeaway from these, I think there were three different independent research studies, it basically said um that we are doing the majority of our research now anonymously. Um, but before we were willing to talk to a human being in any way, we had formed a finalist list, about 85% of the time. And once we talked to a human being, um, and I'm assuming sales rep in the context of companies that sell to other companies, we had a, we went into that conversation with the finalist list, and like 90 something percent of the time we picked the first choice on our finalist list that was locked before I talked to the human. So statistically, if you weren't on that finalist list, your odds of even getting onto that list after they've started the conversation, you know, with sales was like slim to none. But your odds of winning, even if you were on the finalist list, if you weren't in the poll position, you weren't getting it. So that is go back to the original question like how do you make sure you're on that list? Yeah. Um, and the rabbit hole I went down was I was trying to figure out how are all these startups stealing market share from industry leading, trusted brands that dominated for decades. And the one thing they all had in common was that the founders were putting out, they were building in public and putting out a lot of smart and helpful content. It was almost like they were giving all the value for free in podcasts, in YouTube channels, on LinkedIn, in shorts, in their posts, quite literally being humans and giving away their secret sauce for free. And effectively, us as humans, we were finding that stuff and consuming it. Like for me, I will binge listen to podcasts for five hours while I'm folding laundry on a Saturday afternoon. By the time I get done with that binge listening and I'm I'm ready to make a decision, I get on a call with them. I feel like I know them. They could sell me anything and I'm gonna buy it because I already know they know how to solve my problems.

Yes, so that never do that. That's key.

Where before it wasn't they would just call, hey, what can you do? How do you do? It's when they talk with you, they pretty much already know what you can do. And by you putting out that free content, and it's not just free content, it's free, meaningful content, right? That will help them solve their problem because it validates you. That's important because I think some organizations, some industry, uh not organized industries, excuse me, some organizations and individuals that I've spoken with, they get into that. I don't want to share the information because I don't want to give away my secrets. And from what you're saying and your experience of what you've uh the rabbit hole that you've gone down, that hurts you in today's age.

Well, it'll hold you back. Corporations that that think that that secret sauce, that's their IP and they can't give it away, they're gonna lock it behind the forms, and they've got to lock it and maybe even charge for it. That's the reason why they're losing share to these uh startup, AI native startups that are building in public and they're giving away the stuff for free. They are being disrupted. Um, so the back to the comment I made about brand gravity, um, the notion of that, most of our research and evaluation now is happening online. So the theory is you need to build up enough digital mass online that'll be findable and understandable by both humans and machines. And if you have that digital mass, that your your grass and your brand, there'll be such strong gravity that it pulls the buyer into your orbit and it keeps them there until they are ready to make a decision. You're not forcing them there, but you put enough value out that that gravity gets so strong that they want to stay with you until they're ready to make a decision. And the only way you do that is with digital mass. Now, the good thing is that AI, while it's also changing the way people are buying, and that feels disruptive, AI could be used to do that, to build that digital mass at scale. So if you have an original thought, if you have that secret sauce that you can put out in the world, you know, you could record an hour-long podcast, you can record an hour-long uh video, YouTube video, you can put out a series of blog posts on LinkedIn, there's just a number of assets. You can take that and use AI to repurpose it in dozens of other assets and make sure that those other assets are found and understood in different locations. And that's that I think that's the doing it at scale.

So I see. So it goes back to everyone thinks AI can do everything. AI in marketing can have help because you can create your content. There's different types of marketing. Uh we're talking uh presentation type content in this form. It's not so daunting to create the the content any longer because you can sit and speak freely for an hour, which you would do, yeah, and then use AI to help you dissect or pull apart that content and distribute it on many different channels. And that's how you can get found.

And that's how you get found and understood.

Avoid Generic AI Content On LinkedIn

Great. What about I I use LinkedIn, it's the only social platform that I use now, and yeah, I'll leave my thoughts on that as the changes of uh LinkedIn as time, but I see more and more content being produced on AI by AI, excuse me, on LinkedIn, where it's a platform that originally I use it for sharing like business discussions, business uh knowledge. Yeah, and many do use it for marketing to talk about their businesses. And I wonder sometimes how effective that is now if we use AI to create this content and push out this content. Is there a strategy for doing so where you don't get lost in that noise? Is there certain things to do? I I see AI uh AI speak, I see AI images, I see a lot of things that I don't know if I feel the same personally about a product or a person if it just has that look to it.

Yeah, well, it does need to be compelling and differentiated, it needs to be different than what other people are saying, can't be generic. Um, it does need to um and and we can talk about ways you can use AI to scale that presence, but it still needs to be a compelling point of view. It needs to be something that not everyone is saying, it needs to have some sort of value, right? It can't just be generic that any AI answer engine or chat bot can answer. There's got to be some like interesting angle that gets applied to it, some value that the human that is the expert kind of incorporates into it. So if it's the same thing everyone's talking about and it's no more um, you know, sophisticated or there's no additional depth than what a you know chat GPT might answer with, it's it's gotta be slop. If it includes, and then of course, there's also the checklist of all the things that are indicative of it being written entirely by AI. Um, but there are ways to humanize that output. It still starts with the thought, though. It still starts with the compelling point of view. Um, the things that are working on LinkedIn, uh genuinely where people are really making it a point to follow, they're making it a point to save. LinkedIn's algorithm is heavily influenced by the number of saves of a post. And the things that are driving what people are saving is it checks all those boxes. It's valuable. It's something there's a depth to it that they can't get necessarily off of asking a question in ChatGPT and just getting that list. Um, there's a lot of substance, a lot of detail, so much detail that they're afraid to lose the thing. Like, all right, I'm gonna save this, I'm gonna come back to it because there's more than the 2500 characters that LinkedIn might could be carousels, it could be infographics, a lot of value is given away in that thing. Um, that's what works. That, and it's also gotta be coming from a human and not a corporate page. We have reached the point now where people genuinely only trust other people, and only if those other people are giving away their secret sauce. Um, and so that's what's working. Um, so I think we're seeing um there's uh an explosion of um agencies that are focused on only on LinkedIn, and the primary strategy is their yeah, it's great. You as a company want to improve your followership and engagement on LinkedIn. The way to do that within your company, I want to talk to your subject matter experts and I want to amplify their voices, and then by design, their brand is going to transfer to your company. That's the entire premise of this new emerging uh agency landscape is that because if there's a recognition that we're kind of done with with corporate brands.

I think that's uh fits to what you're saying earlier is for them to hear it to hear from someone in the organization rather than a corporate page. I don't ever me for myself, I don't interact with anything that a corporate page would post. I'd rather hear it from uh someone a leader in that organization that I can build trust that hey they're just like me. I want to interact with them. Uh they fit exactly what I'm looking for. It it just it's much easier to to do that. Especially for your small company or small business to be able to just share from a leadership standpoint because it's like they're seeing they're they're expressing the vision of the organization rather than a sales pitch. Like we're all we we just get tired of that. Like I don't want to hear a sales pitch. I want to know what he sees or she sees in this the company that they're running.

Yeah the only the only when I think about corporate pages um you know I like to know when there's an acquisition or a merger right I would expect to kind of stay on top it's almost like a news fee like truly a news update something's happening with the company but I still want to see the CEO's point of view of what's happening or the head of product's point of view of the merger between two companies or I want to know the you know the the the marketer's point of view of a rebrand or a product that's been launched right I want the human point of view. I don't know that corporate pages were ever really something that we all waited to you know consume. I think we're just we're with so much noise now now we are much better at saying you know what no really I'm not I people buy from people I'm gonna focus on the people within those organizations and I'm gonna trust them. Now if they point me to something the corporate page has said maybe it's a hey this is the new feature set that we just launched you know like Claude Anthropic I mean just every week it's a new thing that they're shipping somebody in the org that I'm following I love their point of view I'll click through to the the the thing that maybe the corporate page put out about the newest release of Claude Design or something. And that's probably the pull through um whereas before I think maybe we were somewhat under the delusion that um people bought from companies I think now people realize that people buy from people within those companies and that's where the trust is that's the relationship that matters.

They follow as well like if someone like I've noticed where someone leaves an organization they move to another they they want to follow okay what are they working on next I want to be part of that I want to be involved or I want to maybe do business with that person because they did so well. So it they do it's like that personal brand of of that individual um it's it's more important than ever because that I mean you know unless you are a founder you know you stick to the same organization same company but for people that are C-suite or you know vice president level they want to follow that person.

Yeah yeah you know the great thing about and this is I think maybe the best opportunity for those um industry leading large enterprise companies it no better time than right now for the go-to-market leaders let's say the marketing leaders to bring forward a business case that shows that this is in fact true it's time let me amplify the voices of our employees versus let me continue to try to run uphill against um it's a losing battle right like instead of me trying to intensify put out more posts from the corporate page let me now use my resources let's work together to find who are the smart and helpful people in this organization that you know candidly would resonate with our target audience and let me put them on blast let me just focus my resources on amplifying their voices and we have to trust that if we care for those employees they'll want to stay with us right yeah that's I I it's it's interesting yes it's it's hard and yeah it's humanizing now I think in the world what you're what I'm picking up from the conversation that you're saying and we're having is oh geez uh I can't even speak today I'm picking up from the conversation that we are having yeah we're in an age of the human factor in the buying cycle so from the marketing point of view it's not only the concrete hard product that we have it's the human aspect of the product that could be the people behind the product that could be how you have human interaction with the product to make your your life more pleasant with what product it is and having uh humans it's I've been saying for a long time and I it's I sit here listening to to um your words relationships are what going to matter the most going forward in a world where everything is fake. And I don't want to say fake in the sense that it's not true but everything is generated automatically and the effort behind it is no longer what it used to be. It used to be if you had to create an infographic that you would spend a lot of time with you'd have an artist or somebody who knew graphic design tell them what you want they'd lay it out they'd have to understand now I can say here's a transcript of my podcast yeah create an infograph for me.

So I think it's I think you got it there Brad for the relationship component I think if you if we go back to how Brad and I put this podcast together we wanted to have a platform for people that are behind the products and services in our dynamic space. So it was very important for us to kind of uh create a platform for that. But there there's always still that struggle where Lisa you had mentioned that you want to amplify the voices within your organization that could influence people that maybe um that follows them or someone that can relate to them. But you do have organizations where they would discourage that because you're right they wait well what if they want to leave because they're exposing and they're gonna get poached and stuff like that. But I think that's a a terrible approach of like not amplifying because if you champion your people say put some content out there they're gonna know where you work right they're gonna look at your profile and say oh you know Brad works there I want to and it's like he knows what he's talking about. Oh I can't believe they're working on these amazing things that fits what I'm looking for that's how you you you reach that human aspect of course you use your AI to kind of amplify more of those voices but it's such an interesting time right now where you still have organizations like no like don't put out you if you need to put something out put it under the corporate thing and then put your name at the bottom no give them a channel to do that.

The other way around yeah yes my first MO role was for a global management consultancy and one of the things I remember bringing forward this idea of a visible expert program. This is a large global management consultancy we had hundreds but I'll just go with this 150 or so managing directors that truly were an expert in solving real business challenges for healthcare higher ed uh digital transformation initiatives for companies 150 people that many of them had written books they had their own frameworks they I mean they really were trusted advisors for people like them in in their in their field and my first pass at this was I want to we have this sad little page on our website that has the names and you could click on the names of the people and send them a web form right you want to talk to this person. No bios, no real information not a collection of their thinking their white papers like none of that thing. So the business pitch was I think our billable rates and the utilization rate will dramatically increase if you let me start talking about these experts. Let me actually amplify them and their voices um and initially there were there were some leaders in the C-suite that were like well we're worried about poaching it was like well to be clear if we treat them right and we amplify their voices and we strengthen their personal brand they're going to want to stay with the company because they they recognize how much you value them and and I ended up going out and getting there was a company called Hinge University that had done research on what happens when a company invests in personal brand of their people how that transfers and how it impacts the organizations they work with use that data and and by the way the big piece that came from it if you were intentional in increasing the awareness of that person within the network they had five levels that they had defined and those levels would increase give you a premium of billable hours and it would dramatically increase the the profitability of the firm like it was one of those things. I brought that data they let me do that and we completely redesigned the website so every one of our experts almost had their own microsite it was them their experiences uh their speaking engagements their books their articles it was almost like an entire experience around it um fast forward that company is now uh worth well over it's certainly over a billion in revenue and I dramatic increase in growth through the pandemic at a time where people are thinking consultancies would be under pressure they really leaned in and I think they really did an excellent job of executing against that over the last decade. They were kind of ahead um now we're seeing how AI native companies doing this are seal like quite literally stealing market share from these organizations that had that no the corporate brand we only invest in the corporate brand like we're afraid to invest in personal brands. So I think by design the disruption is just so like it's undeniable. There isn't a you know an industry leading organization out there that's not feeling pressure of AI native startups coming in and stealing their lunch from them. Yeah I think this is going to be the the the thing that will differentiate those that will continue to have a lasting or durable brand and survive this next phase and those that will give it up to these these rapidly growing AI native startups.

We're talking about the brand and you mentioned consultancy so you have the brand of the individual in the consultancy what about organizations that are product based?

Yeah the same is true and actually I think this is probably more true than ever right you know organizations could be developing 10 years ago they would develop a product they put it out there they might iterate on it but the there was the barrier to entry for the competitors was just so high to catch up with the sales force as an example. Now there are real startups that can replicate fairly sophisticated platforms using AI and the thing that's going to be the competitive moat it really is going to be those that are actually building those capabilities, bringing it to market, them actually sharing the smart and helpful content that like that's going to be the competitive mode not necessarily the ability to you know produce and bring a product to market. It's gonna be the how you that the guidance that you give along with that product to solve real business like real challenges that's gonna be the competitive mode. AI is going to be the great neutralizer here.

It seems to be it it really changes or has changed the way that content's consumed and content is produced and it's all forms. And I've had conversations with marketing teams some s will say AI can't do it. Yeah it's I think you have this in any industry or brand or group or department. And I think some of it is fear-based or unknown you know not really knowing and understanding the tool just saying ah it's not helpful I can't do anything with it. So it's it's important it sounds to adopt the use of the technology but be pointed and effective with how you put out the information that you want about your product.

Yeah.

And we took we talked about you talked about websites for a little bit before. I mean I think there was many years where a website was you know you put together a certain way you put together a brand for search as what is the importance of that now or is it more of how you um well what types of content you put on it.

Websites in general um will look wildly different in a year than they do today of what they did in the past. And I think the biggest influence on that is that um increasingly we're going to continue to use AI agents or answer engines to do our research for us. And so increasingly this is going to be machines that are going to be the the consumers of the websites um now there's a crosswalk between where we're currently at and where we will eventually get to um but I would imagine that um you know that navigating that crosswalk basically means you're not really gonna have heavily branded sites anymore. You're gonna have it it's you have to make it easy for the person to get the answer to their question as fast as possible. And so the user interface will probably dramatically simple and be more of a a conversation whether that's a chat conversation or quite literally a video avatar that of somebody that you're talking to to get the answers to your questions. But increasingly between that and the human's tolerance for having to dig through a large hierarchy of multiple pages to get their answers to their questions just like we kind of lost our tolerance for sea of blue links those things are going away I don't you know the big hero image unless it's just a backdrop to a chat that I can actually get the answer I could care less right it's already starting to to change. Yeah that's interesting the design of the website needs to be findable and understood by agents and that's going to drive um a significant shift with how the website is set up how the content is formatted um yeah we're see and we're already starting to see that right that even um I was on a CMO call just before this and one of the CMOs had added a very simple feature to her website which was um I think it was something like ask the AI and it was like the ability to just completely not have to deal with any of the navigation and get to answering the question. But there was also a capability that it basically was for AI models, you know, information here it was almost like it was set up for the agents to get its version of your site that was free of all the stuff that the humans needed. That's an example of two additions she made to a website and saw a dramatic increase in conversion rate was the most important. It wasn't really traffic it was about those that actually wanted to talk to them. Two simple things where if you go to the website and you think wow they're actually giving an agent the ability to choose its own adventure while also enabling the human to not have to go through 10 pages. That's crazy. And that's now imagine what that will look like in a year from now.

I think we'll regress back to 1990 when we just had text websites with very little graphics that just had text it's what's history repeats itself I keep saying over and over again if you look at technology but I think we will get back to that point where you you I think you hit the key point now because even using these AI chat tools pick any one of the the platforms that are available you do have conversations saying I'm looking for this okay what about this? Yeah oh does it do this so I think having that information so that's again something helpful with anybody looking to market their product services I guess that's the only thing you can market as product and services.

So I also recognize that each one of these chatbots are somewhat biased by where it's getting its data from um and so from its training data. So I now know okay I'm gonna go to Perplexy I'm gonna ask that question and I'm gonna send it off and do my research and then I'm actually going to go to Mana SAI which has been my favorite tool for a year um and I will have it go off and come back with the answers to my questions. And neither of which do I have to really intervene there are agents that are running in a terminal and they just go out and do all the research for you and distill it and then I can ask a couple more questions. But the last thing I'm doing is a typical blue link search and even once I get to a point where I have an answer I will have it go do all the research on the website and come back to me with the data points I need to know including links to any assets I should read, right? Like oh this white paper is on this topic. It's um just think about the website that's needed to support that. And maybe I'm a little ahead because I kind of lean pretty hard into leveraging AI but I don't think I'm that far ahead. Like I think a year from now the adoption of AI will obviously continue to grow. It's already quarter over quarter the adoption is accelerating faster than the internet did that was the most recent article I saw the other day.

I believe I saw that too I think well you can't you can't like you can't go a step without you can't go one step without hearing something about AI but you hit on something with that just thinking about human behavior of yourself and sometimes if you have a product it's the human behavior of your audience that you're looking to sell to right I am like you I set something off go through and do research even to the point where give me the names and contact information of the people that I need to talk with versus just like you said versus spending the time to scroll in I love to read books which is what what got us talking about I do want to talk about your your new book as well too I can sit and read books but now when I'm on the internet and web pages I can't sit and read through a lot of text I just need to know what I'm looking I have questions already that I want answered. It's no longer I'm reading to see if they answer my question I show up somewhere saying here are my questions give me the answers if you pass great if you fail great I I keep moving. So it's uh I think that's an important part of someone marketing that again take a look at human behavior as it's progressing and as you had mentioned not everybody is in that phase yet but that group is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and right yeah and now I don't even type I'm sorry to say whisper flow is my friends I even around me train like look there not going to be any spaces between my sentences I'm sorry like I I now dictate everything it is yeah it's how we've progressed so it's the same thing with doing the research so this is it's good that's it's it's important to see about the acceleration and the adoption of AI in the marketing space. Yeah and some things that organizations can consider marketing departments can consider as they're putting together their strategy for marketing their products and services because the traditional ways of you're going to find me sitting over here in the corner I think are gone.

Fixing A Broken Marketing Operating Model

Yeah I agree. Well some of them are there right as humans we're still going to crave I think you said it earlier was that we're still going to crave like experiences with other humans. So there are our like old school things that us marketers were doing like a decade ago where we really leaned in experiences at events that were for small intimate settings you know of our target audience those like community we've we're witnessing the rise of you know communities built around either this role or these challenges that people were trying to solve for those we are seeing that at the same time we're also seeing people use AI To research and evaluate potential solutions. And that's the challenge for marketers. If you are a marketer in a mid-market or an enterprise company now, you now actually have to care about delivering both the human experiences and having the resources, that's very resource intense, as well as thinking about how AI is kind of changing how we research and evaluate potential vendors and solutions. I need both. And what's not going to work now, what this does is it breaks this operating model that go to market leaders of these mid-market enterprises. Startups are very different. They can operate with a different velocity. The challenge is if you're in a company that has any sort of size at all, mid-market enterprise, maybe you have a marketing team of 50 people, you are likely operating in an operating model that is now broken. Like you quite literally do not have the resources needed to address all of this. You should just use the AI, and you might even be in a situation where they're telling you to reduce the number of roles in your team. But as marketers, we actually know you still need the human. Now the humans doing different work, right? So if you are producing or editing videos, maybe you're not going to take the next two weeks to edit a video like this down. Maybe you're using descript or Gling or a video editing tool to be able to edit and repurpose it in an hour or two, whatever that might be. But you still actually kind of need the human to do that body work and know what good looks like before it gets published on a channel. If you know that to be true, you're going to have to get good at two things. Figuring out how and when to use outsourcing in whatever form that looks like. It could be a specialist agency that only does LinkedIn thought leadership as an example. It could be offshore resources for execution. It could be, let's say, a brand agency. If you're going to kind of think about brand repositioning, they're all forms, freelancers, freelancer platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. There's a lot of options. You're going to have to start making some choices between asking for more headcount and figuring out what levers you that exist to you. And then secondly, you can't wait on accelerating your adoption of AI. You can't outsource the thinking. You can't let your team figure it out. Like if you are not leaning in heavily to figuring out highest impact, lowest effort ways to apply AI, you're in trouble. Somebody else is going to do it for you. And I'm a big believer, don't let things don't let don't get until like you're on a burning platform to make a change. Like before the thing is smoking, do something about it.

Make the change before it's too late because when it's too late, it's too late. It's hard to change the platform when it's burning.

Yeah. You don't want it look anytime. Look, nobody wants doing anything while you're on fire is hard. So why like why why wait until that moment? And doing anything when you're under duress or because somebody else has made the decision for you also sucks. Like both of those things are not fun. So you do have some time. I think you have nine to eighteen months to really actually get a handle of this and accelerate it, like make your own decisions. I don't think you have much more than 18 months to figure that out, though.

I have to write this down. We have to see and follow up because I like to say a lot of things. No, it's and I'm not saying it to challenge you or not, but with the rate of progression of how things have changed, and I've had conversations with many, and that's what happens is we I don't want to say predict the future, but it's it's almost like the interesting to see does that come true in a sense. But I agree with you because now with AI with the acceleration, I'm curious to see if that horizon shortens. That's all. I agree with you from what you're saying, from what I see. If you you're not too late yet, a lot of people are worried about being too late to adopt AI. And we'll I just want to have a few more questions on this for you. But if you wait much longer, it it gets you might be a little too late, and it's then you start panicking. And this all may seem overwhelming to individuals that may not have the technical um background or the technical ability at this point to do this because AI is uh technology or they may not even understand it so much because it's such a vast ocean of technologies encompassed in the word AI. I mean, if you look at AI, what is AI and break down the technologies in it?

Yeah.

If you could give a couple pointers for those that need to start their journey, where can they go to get started on this journey? Not necessarily saying, okay, well, you have to go here or you could like you could use this or do that. Like, what are some things they can think of and where they can get some more information or f feel uh a way to strategize to start their journey?

How To Start Using AI Today

Well, okay. So I'll let me there's a lot in there, you know.

I speak a lot.

If you are as an individual, as just for your own adoption, if you are just quite literally pick one of the models, Chat GPT, Gemini, look, if you're on Axe like grok, whatever that might be, like um at Copilot, if you're kind of forced into the Microsoft Copilot, like just pick one and ask it how you can use it for your own personal use cases and tell it to ask you a series of questions to get to better know you so it can make a suggestion of where to get started. Like the model will quite literally tell you this is how you can use me in a way that will feel valuable to you. If you just that's simple. That's that's as a person. Now, if you are a leader and you are working in an organization and you're under pressure to accelerate the adoption of AI, what is not working is giving everyone tools and letting random acts of AI happen. Like you're gonna wake up one day, you're gonna find out skyrocketing subscription and token costs. AI will be everywhere, but impact will be nowhere. So don't like don't do that. The thing where to start there is to be intentional about okay, well, what is the role of AI here? Is it productivity? Is it meant to accelerate the growth of the business? Like get a North Star and then from there figure out, okay, well, based on my organization, uh, what technology makes the most sense and just one frontier model, like figure out which one you want to place your bet on. And it's it's okay, they leapfrog each other every other month. So just pick one and get your team going. And the smartest thing to do from there is to map your use cases. And this is where some leaders get in trouble because they've over time got further and further away from how the business gets done day-to-day. So if you're a CMO and you haven't sent the email in a decade, you may not know that it's 21 steps to get from an idea out the door. You actually have to understand what are the core workflows and then identify, map those workflows and those tasks against a simple quadrant. High impact, low impact, high effort, low effort, and run at as fast as you can the high impact, low effort use cases right away. And that'll get you at least the feeling of momentum you'll have. And a good example of this could be if you're in marketing, everyone knows how uh bad data undermines campaign performance. Everyone knows that uh records that I might send to sales, call them leads, missing all the needed data for them to effectively pursue those leads, enrich the records. Use AI to do that. High impact. That supports pipeline creation or accelerates like the closing of deals. That's that's where I would start. Um, fun fact a way to hack the whole thing, and this is regardless of who you work with, so I'll try not to turn this into a sales pitch. If you're responsible for a team and you're not really quite sure where to start, sometimes you can make a decision to outsource some sort of body of work and just outsource it to an AI forward partner, somebody that's already figured out how to use AI in the use case that you decide to outsource it on. And then you can report to the board, we are using AI, we're using it for campaign production. It looks like this. And instead of taking 92 days to get into market with a campaign, now it's two weeks. They don't need to know that you outsource campaign execution to deliver that result. They just know that you're using AI to accelerate campaign speed to market.

And they care about most of the times, they care about the results. It's not always the how. It's if you produce and it's successful, a lot of times no one's going to question what did you do to make us successful? Don't do that. Yeah. They'll usually give you a little praise and ask not for uh um negative feedback, but ask because they want to know what works and maybe apply it elsewhere as well.

When you think about leaders, those leaders that um I one thing most people fail to recognize is that um, believe it or not, C Suite, the board, the investors, they don't actually care how you got it done, especially if you got it done for less costs and got it done faster. They quite literally don't care that instead of uh using 57 in in-house resources, you you you actually outsource some portion of your work to get it done fast. No, you delivered impact. That's what they care about. You might have given the company a competitive advantage because you outmaneuvered around this this emerging market opportunity. You're not going to be let go because of that. You're gonna be let go if you're in there talking about how you do all the things. And we kept all of it in-house and we kept all of our humans busy. Like that's not gonna work.

The Limitless CMO Frameworks

Yes, it's it's the output that is important. No, thank you. That's some some great insights. But also, uh, what what started some of this is you also have a new book. Well, it's several months old now, uh, since we first spoke about it. It's the um Limitless CMO. Yes, I wanted to bring up the limitless CMO and you thank you for sending that copy. I appreciate it. Uh, what is that book about?

Well, it's written for B2B marketing leaders. Um, and the really at this point in time, it's to meant to help those B2B marketing leaders transform marketing from this wildly overworked, underappreciated, uh, order taking function into becoming the market-making function for the organizations. Um, that's a big thing. And the book is basically a collection of practical frameworks that could shift you out of really being that order-taking function that you know is responsible for creative production to being this growth-driving engine. Uh, but the three levers are how to run marketing like a business, like a professional services business. That breaks the company's feeling like you're you exist to take orders from product and sales and everyone else in the building. The second is how to leverage strategic outsourcing like IT, like finance, like the other functions have kind of mastered over the last two decades and all the options, pros and cons, and how to think about building a partner ecosystem so that they work together with your in-house team. And the third is how to accelerate your adoption of AI. And the the premise here is that marketing usually is um burdened by all these limits that if you use those three, you can free yourself of all your limits, become limitless.

Where To Connect And Final Thanks

So the limitless CMO. Well Lisa, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. I really do appreciate it. Really do appreciate your time. Uh anytime you spend the anytime you spend with someone, it's uh time you spent not doing something else, it's time that you don't get back. Uh time is truly the currency of life, in my opinion. So I really do appreciate and value that. I do think I'll have to put a note to follow up with you uh check back in. Yes, maybe about a year. Well, well, you said nine to eighteen months, I believe. So or 12 to 18 months. So we'll check back in with about a year or so just to see where we are in the world, because I uh will be interested to see where web pages are, where marketing strategies lie, and uh all the other things we talked about. If anyone would like to get in contact with you to talk more about how AI can help in the from the marketing uh perspective, or learn more about some of the books that you had created, what's the best way to get in contact to you?

If you are looking to get in contact with me directly, lisa cole.ai, and this is if you're personally looking for advice, uh, or LinkedIn, Lisa Cole01. Um, if you are a B2B marketing leader and you're wrestling with the all these challenges we've talked about and you're looking for help, that's www.2x.com. So human, individual, my books are all listed on Lisa Cole.ai. If you're looking for help, figure out how to accelerate your adoption of AI andor keep up with these unreasonable expectations, 2x.com.

Great. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you. I'm really inspired and I learned uh so much from this conversation. Uh, thank you again. I look forward to talking with you guys.

This is a great opportunity for having me.

Ciao, ciao.

Take care.

Take care. Thank you, Chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair. And thank you to our guests for participating.

Thank you, Brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlife.com. That is D V-L-P-R-L-I-F-E.com, and you can interact with them via Twitter, D V L P R L I F E. You can also find me at mattalino.io, m-a-t-a-l-in-o.io, and my Twitter handle is mattalino16. And see you can see those links down below in the show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care.