The AI Stack: Tools, Tactics, and Team Adoption

Transcription – The AI Stack: Tools, Tactics, and Team Adoption

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Welcome to the Proof Point Podcast, where we decode digital success one click at a time. We share key takeaways fueled by data and insights that your team can implement today to drive growth. Now, let’s get started.

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This is Stacie Porter Bilger, your host for the Proof Point Podcast, where I feature B2B and B2C businesses and thought leaders sharing marketing, data tactics, sales strategies, and leadership insights that kickstart your growth in this rapidly changing digital space. This podcast is brought to you by Proof Digital. Proof Digital is a strategic and creative performance marketing agency.

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We partner with companies to create data-fueled marketing sales funnels and overall growth strategies. Visit proofdigital.com to learn more. Before I get started, I want to give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Jeremy Wise.

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He introduced me to our guest today. Jeremy is with Rise25, and he is a speaker and leader in the podcasting world, working with entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, and just folks who are trying to build relationships to drive growth. A shout out to Jeremy.

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Appreciate the introduction. Our guest today is Nicole Donnelly. Nicole is the founder of AI Smart Ventures and a leading voice in helping businesses harness AI to simplify their systems, sharpen their marketing, and unlock growth.

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She’s known for breaking down complex technology into practical strategies that entrepreneurs and teams can actually use right away. Through her speaking, consulting, and training, Nicole is helping redefine what it means to lead and scale in the age of AI. A global AI speaker, entrepreneur, who’s transforming businesses by using AI.

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Hi, Nicole. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me here, Stacie. Awesome. Well, you know, to get going, you know, what’s your path? What’s your story? I mean, how did you get here? I mean, we’re both, you know, we’re not too young, so we don’t remember before AI in the workforce. So, I know you’re an entrepreneur, so tell me a little bit about you.

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Yeah. I want to let you know where I started. I studied history, German, and photography in school. Awesome. Good liberal arts. Yes. Good liberal arts background. Yes. And I did photography and graphic design after school. But really what I wanted to do, so when I finished university, I started snowboarding full-time. I moved to Park City, Utah, and I was on the Park City snowboard team. And so, I became a professional snowboarder.

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I’m a little jealous about that. I mean, I’m a former athlete, but you played, you were a professional snowboarder? Yeah. Yeah, I did big air, border cross, half pipe, slope style, because back in the day you kind of did them all, but like at a higher competition, it was mostly border cross and big air for me at the big ones like X Games.

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And it was such a fun time. In the off-season one year, I got knocked up, and then I had a baby. My baby had diaper rash really bad, so I cut off my snowboard socks, pulled them up over her knees, and they made these cute little baby leg warmers.

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And I sold over 200 pairs of these homemade leg warmers, over 100 pairs in two weeks. And then in three years, we were in 85 countries. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So, you were a professional snowboarder, a risk taker, I mean, obviously, a born entrepreneur because of the risk-taking.

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And then launch a product, and so, I mean, oh my gosh, what a ride. Yes. And as a kid, I was always selling things, like even in elementary school, selling the electrical wire to make the bracelets in fifth grade.

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And, you know, I always had some sort of hustle going on. I had a food truck when I was 16 outside of events, and I’d go to Sam’s Club and buy all the stuff and stock them up, and I’m behind the counter just like working and selling nachos and hot dogs and stuff. You know, I was always entrepreneurial, but I didn’t ever think of it as a thing.

(4:12 – 4:19) 

Like this isn’t something you do. You know, it was just like I needed to get some money, so I would go figure something out to do it. And then, you know, transitioning from snowboarding to motherhood was a really big one.

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And that was probably the scariest. And then into business, that was kind of, it wasn’t as scary. I felt like I was on a mission to make parents’ lives better.

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And then after that, so in Baby Legs was the first company, I was really good at systems and process and being efficient. We were able to work from home in 2007, because we had a server closet, people would VPN in, and people could take those big desk phones home and answer calls at home. And so we were ahead from a tech perspective back then.

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And when I sold my company to one in New York, I realized this. I realized how efficient we are, how good our systems were. And so then I realized kind of what my magic was in the situation.

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And my magic was in that operational efficiency, but then also in marketing and the emotional connection with the customer and the brand. And so that’s the area, that’s why I started a marketing agency next. And in the marketing agency, it’s all about those points of emotional connection.

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And so then we called it systems of care, because we were creating systems of care for employees, for customers, and we want everybody to feel cared about in our ecosystem. And then we were able to start adding AI to our systems of care in 2015. Oh, wow. Okay. Yes. And then we were able to add some more in 2019, 2020, when Jasper was around.

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That was when I pretty much started playing with. Yeah. It was crazy at the time, but now what it can do, it’s just like, it’s just not even…No, it’s insane what it can do now.

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And so we’ve been a Jasper customer since then. And we’ve tried to get off of it. We’ve done tests, but Jasper always tests better than anything else. And we keep that idea of operational efficiency and using AI, adopting all these tools. We used OpenAI before ChatGPT was around and Dolly before ChatGPT was around. And we played with it.

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We didn’t really integrate it into our operations. But then once ChatGPT dropped, MidJourney dropped, we kind of switched gears. We kept the marketing things going on in the background, but we started teaching humans how to use AI at the beginning of 2023.

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And back then we wanted to do AI consulting to help companies implement it operationally, but they were not ready. They weren’t ready until Q4 last year. That’s when we saw a real shift. Yeah, yeah. No, there’s no question about it. I mean, there’s still not…A lot of them aren’t ready, but now they understand and they see the implementation around them.

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And they’ve seen some practical examples. And so that probably has sped up on your end, the actual implementation. Yes, it has because the requests, you know, as a marketer, we’re always testing messaging, right? And what resonates with people and the requests for AI strategy and AI consulting in Q4 really started coming in.

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So we’re doing custom training, AI consulting, AI strategies, and then the AI SEO aspect. And somebody said, well, I don’t think of you as an SEO expert, AI SEO. I was like, I’ve been doing SEO for 20 years, and maybe it’s just not what I talk about.

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But in my first company, I learned about it hands-on from experts because we took our website that was doing $20,000 a month, did the full website redesign with good SEO, and our sales increased from $20,000 a month to $220,000 a month. That’s fun. In 30 days.

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Oh, my. Well, did you have some supply chain issues on that? No, we had products, and it sustained over $200,000 a month after that because we had such good SEO and owned the keyword. So for me, it was a really visceral experience learning SEO, and I equate it to massive amounts of money consistently.

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And so when people don’t think it’s important, I have a hard time with that. So we have a lot. Also, that’s where the conversation has been going to that side of it, too, is AI SEO and how to really SEO your properties. Yeah. I mean, I kind of became addicted to SEO once I understood it. I mean, this was a couple of decades actually ago.

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Yeah. And it is crazy. I mean, I call it dotting I’s and crossing T’s. I mean, it’s just knowing the details. I mean, you’ve got to let Google know what the product is, what it does, make sure you dot I’s and cross T’s and cross things. And there’s a little bit different of GEO.

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We’ll talk a little bit about that. There’s some there’s some different tactics that you need to kind of align. But it’s it’s very I mean, again, being very specific on how you structure a page, all the on page metadata, all those things are so vital.

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Yeah. And the part that so as social media has progressed, as SEO has progressed, the thing that has been consistent is it gets more complicated and more extensive. And back when we were starting out, we saw the birth of Facebook for business and then came Instagram and then came all these other platforms. And now you have to have a presence in multiple places because I looks at your site and it looks at off site. And off site is where you get your credibility that your site is what it says it is and does what it says it does. And so the off site credibility is really important.

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And that layer is that. It could be really time consuming. And now we’re we’re really good at the content production part of it and use a lot of A.I. for it. And we are struggling with the manual part of it because you still have to upload something to Instagram. Yes, you could use these posting tools and we do for some socials. But to get to win in the algorithm of Instagram, you need to natively post and it’s the natively posting that takes the most time.

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So it’s like these it the time was all in content production and now it’s all in posting, which is funny. You know, like just manual posting. Yeah. Which is actually kind of an interesting point, because in our old days of SEO and that change was linking. Right. And then it got early on.

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People try to do trick it with bad links and then that didn’t work anymore. And back to this is this authentic, you know, content on on sites that have authority. So but it’s interesting that you talk about that, you know, whatever is, you know, Hootsuite or others.

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Those don’t aren’t quite as effective. They’re not. And, you know, with all of these bots and the autonomous agents, they can do posting on your behalf and that. And. It’s still it’s still not the same because you can’t put all the little details and all the little places that you need to. Not not yet.

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I think we’re getting there with some of those on device like Claude co-work that you could use on your phone. Because you have to natively post on your phone from TikTok and to TikTok and Instagram to get the best the best play in the algorithm. Because, you know, there’s like two reasons you do it. There’s the algorithm you want to be discovered. And there’s the AI that’s going to discover you in a different way. And so if you don’t care about the algorithm and you’re just doing it for AI, go ahead and post the other way.

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Except there are certain things you just can’t edit pre posting. Yeah, it’s and it’s and it’s back to the, you know, Dionysian graffiti of letting these algorithms find you in the way you want them to find you. And it can be tedious. But do you want to win? And I think where the piece is, I think small and medium sized companies might be able to to do this bigger than some of the bigger guys. So, yeah, that’s where I’m so passionate about telling people about it. All the like smaller business owners, because we have this arbitrage moment where the small businesses can produce this content in the way that the AI needs it.

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And so you can get ahead of the big guys for a moment, at least. And a moment is like six months. It might be a year. It might be 18 months, might be two years. It depends on the industry. But we have this opportunity to get ahead. And because I scrapes the Internet every so often, then we’re in that trained information, not not just web search. So that gives you a buffer of time before. If, let’s say, you’re you’re doing your SEO and then a few months later, your competition is doing their SEO.

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And let’s say I has just done an ingestion of the Internet. So now you’re in the database. And so now this guy is still a few months away from being ingested to. Right. So there’s you know, there’s this window that you get of opportunity. And I don’t think a lot of people are running at it as fast and as hard as we are. But it feels it feels like it because so many people I’m in this conversation with. I got a fire hose, man. I got a fire hose.

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We’re building various things, too, and automations for our company. You are I’m sure you are, too, you know, building solutions. Speaking of the way we do business. But the truth, though, back to your authentic posting, it’s still content is still king. And, you know, the and making it human and make it real. And so that’s still that’s still going to win, I think.

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So anyway, it is. So what what are you. What are you seeing as far as industry where it’s going to impact industries more than others. Do you have some thoughts on that? Well, OK, there’s for me, there’s three categories of AI. Yeah. Right now there’s a SEO. Yep. Which is impacting retail heavily, heavily right now. Yes.

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Yes. Any seller on any platform is being impacted by the search. Right. Ability. Right. And there’s some platforms, too, that have are more negative. I think I mean, I like Wix, for example, is not a good. It’s terrible. So, I mean, there’s some folks that need to know that.

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So anyway. Yeah. And so there’s that SEO. I think it will impact some industries more than others and faster than others. I don’t know many people in manufacturing that care too much about that. And unless they are the direct sellers of the things that they manufacture, they don’t care as much.

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Yeah. And I’ve had those conversations with the business owners. It’s like, well, you could slightly invest in this and you’ll be way ahead of your competition, you know, just by fixing a few little things like matching phone number on your Web site and your Google business.

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You know, there’s so many little things, right? Name, address, phone number. Let’s make them all the same. Nap. Yeah, exactly. Nap and eat. We do we do those acronyms pretty well. That’s exactly right. Yeah. So I think for some industries, that part that this section over here is going to be really important and impactful for their business. And then you have the generative AI, the hands on applied AI that somebody is sitting at their computer and using. They are typing something in. They’re getting some result.

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And then we have and that will impact. So like marketing agencies. Yep. Yep. All agencies were having conversations with a lot of agencies right now and showing them how we automate and AI things and choose to be human in some particular place. Yes. Yeah. Because we want to make sure that our magic is amplified. And not lose what our particular magic is, and every agency has their own magic.

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And so we don’t want to lose it when we’re doing automation. And, you know, we want to make sure that that that human magic or maybe it’s an AI and automation magic, but we want to make sure to maintain that. So the people sitting at the computer asking for outputs, and that’s a lot of admin and, you know, the knowledge workers.

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They have those would be different industries that would be impacted by that type of AI. And then you have the AI. Which in the last six weeks has taken off like crazy is that autonomous AI, the workflows, the agents, all of that. It’s. It is this crazy, crazy moment that we’re having right now, which almost feels like 2023 when all the tools were coming out fast and furious. I mean, we’re almost up to 50,000 different AI tools for different tasks.

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But now where AI is and can be autonomous is it can sit on a device. It can sit on your desktop, your computer, like a physical computer, your phone. It can be in the cloud, too, and you can have every just kind of normal technology, connect with each other and do things. And it’s almost to the point where a non-technical person can really build stuff out. It’s still if you’re non-technical, you can also get in big trouble because of the lack of security protocols or the leaks in security. But I see it as like the bot agent side, the generative side, and then the SEO side.

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And so, like, on the bot agent side, that’s going into a lot of industries across the board right now. And so I don’t know. This is the beginning of the race. I don’t know how that one’s going to pan out and which industries are going to be using it the most. And on the generative side, this is people who are using Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini for just chatting every day. And Claude has released some stats on that on which industries are adopting the most.

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And the ones I’d say company by company, we still don’t see really good usage data. So it means that all the humans in the company are not adopting it and using it from the applied generative side of things. And so there’s really big opportunity there in training teams how to use it and ensuring that there is adoption and implementation.

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That’s an area that we specialize in. And then writing the instructions for all of these agents that you want autonomous or semi-autonomous. Because you have to be good at prompting, which is that generative side, to be good at telling the agents or, you know, telling the AI exactly what you want it to do when you’re taking information from one place to the next.

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And so the ability to write really, really good instructions, or in Claude it’s called skills, you know, like there’s different names and different platforms, but those instructions and that capability is really, really important. So as far as industries, I think retail on the AI SEO side of things is huge because even the big stores have been losing traffic. The big platforms have been losing traffic.

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And we have seen that, like we saw it at Christmastime, because when people are going to ChatGPT, ChatGPT have a friend who named their Sam, and they’re having conversations with Sam all the time. And if Sam says, this is a great present to buy for somebody, then you trust Sam more than you trust a Google search. And so the conversion rate from AI search results is much higher.

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And we saw a really big impact in retail this last Q4 because of that change in relationship. I can’t imagine what Q4 this year is going to be like. I mean, as rapidly as it’s changing, because Sam knows your friend better than Google. I mean, it knows, I mean, knows you inside and out, knows your preferences, scary as that might be, but that’s the truth. So I can definitely, the retail side, e-commerce sites, they really need to get ahead of this or they’ll lose the game. Yeah.

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And just a little freebie for anybody who’s listening right now and wants to AI SEO, this trend that we’ve seen in the last week is search for prices on things in service companies. There are these opportunities, and I don’t know if I should tell you because we’re trying to leverage this. We’ll let you leverage it.

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We’ll take this clip and let you go take it out there. Go ahead. Well, I think there’s a huge opportunity when it comes to listing pricing because we see massive search volume for the price of XYZ service, and people don’t have it listed on their website. And so then AI gives random, like, here’s an average this or that, but it doesn’t give businesses. And so if you put a pricing page up on your business, even if you’re service and you would never usually do that, you can put a range or something. You could get found in search a lot easier.

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We’ve done some pricing pages to experiment with this, but we’ve seen this just in the last week. And I imagine this is a trend we’ll continue to see until everybody has pricing pages on their website. Right. Now, that’s a really good point because, I mean, one, I mean, that’s a very common thing. People will search for that. So that’s a good trend.

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Not a lot of people are hesitant to give a pricing page, but you can put a range. You can have a pricing page. You can do a range. A lot of people in our line of business will put ranges. I don’t have a pricing page, but maybe I might do that now. Maybe you’ll be inspired.

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I don’t know. I’m inspired to do a pricing page. You know, we have talked a lot about, you know, over the last couple of years, AI theory. But now it’s time to get into practical implementation. I mean, do you have some examples that you can think through where some companies you work with that might be helpful to spur some ideas for folks? That’s hard, I know. Yeah, I’m just trying to think of what I can disclose.

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Oh, that’s a really good point. That’s a really good point. Yeah, so I would share what we are doing more than what our clients are doing because they have an edge over their competitors right now. Even if I tell you the industry, you know. Yeah, that’s fair. But I mean, one thing is getting good at generative, getting good at all the basic generative things that you can do on your computer.

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Most people don’t use Copilot in their spreadsheets. They don’t use Gemini, you know, the little gem that you see up there. They’re not using it in their spreadsheets on there. If you can get good at these really basic functions, it makes a huge difference because for me, when I first discovered I could do spreadsheets with AI back in 2023, I was sitting in front of the computer and I just thought, oh, I don’t want to do this spreadsheet. I hate spreadsheets. You’re a liberal arts major, right? I’m just kidding you.

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Yeah, my sister loves spreadsheets, by the way. She’s very good at formulas. That side of the brain. Okay, gotcha. But for me, it’s just painful. And so I think there’s the mentality of the AI first thinking like, okay, can AI do this for me? And so then I start having a conversation with AI.

(25:06 – 25:26) 

20 minutes later, I had a spreadsheet that was an annual marketing budget for a client and I sent it off to him. And I was so hesitant to send it off because it didn’t take me three hours like it normally would. It took me 20 minutes, you know? And so I think for those little things that we’re sitting in front of our computer, we have to do this work.

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And if we start to think how can AI do this for me, that will make a really big difference for every person sitting in front of a computer like you and me that have to. And then we start thinking bigger about can AI do this for me? So a little thing, my assistant, I said, hey, can you put this agenda? I was going to speak at an AI event in Turkey. And I wanted an agenda with all the speakers in it in my calendar.

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So I said, hey, can you put this in my calendar? Well, she doesn’t want to enter every individual session for two days. You know, it’s a lot of information. So she tested, she dropped it into Gemini over in Google, and it’s attached to my account.

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It populated my calendar with all those times with all those speakers. Wow. And so it was something that saved her a lot of time. And we learned, hey, it can integrate with your calendar and do these. So now if I want to do a meeting and invite you to a meeting, I can actually just tell Gemini we could be here together and I could be having the voice on my phone and say, you know, I want to schedule a follow-up meeting with Stacie on this day, add a Zoom invite to it, and put it in the calendar, and it would. That is awesome.

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Yeah, I mean, it can do this. I mean, if you have something, just do it. Just try it. Yes, yeah. And then I had this other problem with pulling information from my email. I needed bills, right? I needed to pay bills twice a month. And so I want a spreadsheet. I want the date that it’s due, the bill, did I pay it or not, the link to the payment. And so I just asked Gemini, I said, hey, can you do these things, these parameters, and it did it.

(27:17 – 27:35) 

Yeah. And I had a spreadsheet of my payables, and so now I just say, okay, run again. And it runs and I get my payables. And this is the most basic, simple way to do it. I could have something complicated connected to this, that, and the other thing, but I can also just ask Gemini to do it because it’s connected and integrated. So we try the dumbest prompts first and see how it does.

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And then if we need to make it more complicated or we want to build something out, we do, but we’ll try on our team. It’s kind of our practice is we do the dumbest prompt because most people will do the dumbest prompt and we want to see how it works. And so I just started with, hey, can you do this thing for me? And if it does, fantastic.

(28:01 – 28:16) 

If not, I know I need my instructions to be better, which often happens too, but sometimes dumb prompts work really well too. When you’re doing just those generative conversations and then playing with tasks. So you can ask Gemini to run something once a week.

(28:19 – 28:42) 

You could ask ChatGPT to run something once a week. I’m sure you can do it in Claude. We are on Google Workspace, so we do a lot of stuff in Gemini. And we can’t connect. Yeah, we have Claude Cowork now, of course. Claude I’m playing with a lot more these days. I’ve downloaded it into a separate computer and we’re building stuff. This is just the play. Yes, we are too.

(28:46 – 29:15) 

We built a whole shipping plug-in for an e-commerce site that they had a contract with another company that was not – it was not working. And so we did kind of a 24-hour thing and rebuilt it with Claude in a day. And the client’s extremely happy, but I mean it’s crazy. It is. Last week. And that’s where – so we’ll go to Gemini because it’s connected to our workspace and we’ll see if we can do it there.

(29:16 – 29:34) 

And if we can’t do it there, then we’ll go over to Claude and connect some systems together to get the result that we want. So one of the things all B2Bs have to do is proposals. Yes. I mean, yes. So I’m kind of curious about this one. This is yes.

(29:35 – 30:08) 

Yes. So we have to have templates, examples of proposals for different services. And being in AI, it changes. It changes so much. We need to be able to have that information in something like a Google folder where we can just update it easily because with Claude, when you’re building it, it’s on your account only in co-work. It’s not persistent across the organization yet, which is frustrating and temporary, we believe.

(30:12 – 30:29) 

And so this is where we go back and forth. We’re like, okay, can we do this stuff all in Gemini? Do we need Claude co-work for it? And we want to figure it out in Claude co-work because we have clients using it too. But we take information from Read AI, which is the meeting note taker, having a conversation with somebody, and I say, Stacie, I’ll get back to you with a proposal on that.

(30:32 – 30:47) 

Then Read, that’s the trigger when I say I’ll get back to you with a proposal. Then Claude sees that in the read notes, and then we have things in Claude Skills, but it can assemble items. So it assembles the examples of proposals.

(30:50 – 31:25) 

It assembles our meeting notes. Sometimes there’s an email or documents that it has to assemble to, and then it will spit out a proposal. And I have it send it to me first so that I can review it just to make sure the context is right.

(31:12 – 31:25) 

Yesterday I did this. So it was right to a point, and then it had the prior client’s name in the last paragraph of the proposal. And it would have had Stacie throughout the proposal, and then the very last was wrong.

(31:32 – 31:43) 

And so this is why we still need human in the loop because it didn’t replace that. It didn’t put Stacie’s name in that spot that it should have been, and the rest of it was good except for that one thing. And so I’m really glad I looked at it and didn’t let it just auto send because it could auto send too.

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You have to have human in the loop across the board most of the time on everything. Yeah, if it’s going out the door, yeah. But it was only one. It didn’t make too many errors though, did it? No, it just made the one error. So I was really happy to see that. And now we are making our proposals easier to digest for AI too.

(32:15 – 32:37) 

Yeah, that’s something we have to do yet. We haven’t done that yet, but we need to. Yeah. And we keep changing things and adding things because AI keeps changing and adding. And I know my ops person is frustrated that we can’t just have a menu list of items. But when we’re doing custom training for clients, they might need custom training on Claude or Copilot, and it’s going to look different for somebody on Microsoft and Copilot.

(32:41 – 32:55) 

The training section and what we deliver will look different than the training section for a Claude session or a Gemini session. So there are some things. It’s like, okay, I guess we have to make varied templates. We need three templates. Right. And then a Jasper training will look different because we do that too.

(32:58 – 33:15) 

Okay. And so then we need four templates and, you know, how many do we want and what’s the generic one? Yeah, so we are rethinking our whole workflows now because of the new capabilities of AI. Yeah.

(33:16 – 33:44) 

I mean, workflows, talk about workflows, because really, I mean, that’s where you should start. I mean, what are your workflows? Where’s your bottlenecks? Those are opportunities. Oftentimes we were looking at our own but also helping our clients to think through those pieces.

(33:33 – 34:02) 

So I’m sure you have a pretty big process when you’re doing some of your coaching and consulting with businesses around workflows. Yes, we do. We have a normal process that we take them through where we make the details of a workflow. And we have a custom GPT and a custom gem because now you can share those publicly, which is very exciting. But we have a workflow and SOP creator. Okay.

(34:03 – 34:47) 

And the workflow and SOP creator has been used. Let’s see. I’m looking it up right now. But we have it open to the public on GPT and on Google Gemini. And on chat GPT, it’s been used for more than 700 conversations. Wow. And it has a 4.7 rating. But we use it so much, like for our clients and for ourselves internally, because if we want to build a workflow that it helps us to define all the steps, we can also take transcripts from a meeting with a client and drop it into there and help it to clarify the workflow. And then find the questions that we didn’t get answers to.

(34:51 – 35:11) 

So in order to scope these custom builds that are over here in that third category, we have to know the tools that someone’s using. And a lot of times they’re in the midst of changing tools or we suggest tools for them because we can’t build a proper scope unless we know how many things it needs to connect to. And then some companies will come in and it has to connect to 12 things and there are all these different names.

(35:17 – 35:45) 

And then for each of the connections, it has to have instructions. So then you need the SOP for each one of those. And this custom gem, custom GPT helps with that. I put a link so that you can include that too if you want. I’ll do. Yeah. It’s super, super helpful. And it also has RACI and RAPID integrated into it. So RACI and RAPID are both the communication aspect of a workflow.

(35:49 – 36:03) 

And so it helps you determine who on your team or what role on your team needs to receive the information at what point. Because like I was just talking about with this proposal, there’s somebody else on the team that writes. We have other people that write proposals too.

(36:05 – 36:36) 

And so then we may just, you know, it might stop off to them and we have a location for the stop off. And the stop off notification may be in Slack. That’s where I usually like to get it. And if it’s for somebody else, it might be in a different place for them. I like to get mine in Slack. And so we’ve got Slack integrated into a lot of the workflows that we use.

(36:30 – 36:55) 

Now, that makes a whole lot of sense. A lot of companies use Slack more and more too. I mean, I’m in too many Slacks though, but it’s okay. Yeah. Well, and a lot of people say, well, how do you keep up to date on all the AI things? And how do you know the AI updates for the tools that you’re using? And I think this fits into it because this is one of our workflows, like it’s part of one of our workflows. We have an RSS feed in Slack.

(36:58 – 37:11) 

And you could do this in other Google team chats and stuff, but we use Slack for this. And we have an RSS feed and we entered all the tools that we use. So then we see all the updates on all the tools that we use in that channel.

(37:17 – 37:36) 

And we encourage every company to set that up because all of the tools that you’re using, well, most, I mean, some are archaic and don’t integrate AI, but most of them are doing new AI things inside. And so we don’t want to recommend a huge tech stack if your tool can already do it. And so then if you can keep track of the updates on the tools that you’re using, it’s really helpful.

(37:42 – 37:54) 

So like there were four notifications this morning when I went to look at the RSS feed. And if you think about that, it could be like four core updates to tools that we use every day that would make a difference. And sometimes it doesn’t matter.

(37:57 – 38:18)

Sometimes it does. But at least I know when Canva got layers this last week. Yeah. Canva layers was huge. And Claude just had an announcement. Google Gemini just had three announcements. That was three of the four today. That’s a really good idea. We like to, in our strategies, also give a communication strategy.

(38:23 – 38:41) 

So communication as in learning about tools from outside world, learning about tools and tasks from each other, and collaborative time or time given to employees to learn AI. And we encourage it together. So our team gets together for an hour every week to share what we’ve been doing.

(38:48 – 38:57)

 And sometimes more like this week if needed, because this week there were just so many things, so many things that came out that were cool that they’re experimenting with. Yeah. And we were talking this morning with our team this morning.

(39:00 – 39:27) 

It’s like, okay, maybe Friday afternoons is a good time to kind of have some fun. Because it’s hard to keep up. My team is using something different almost every week with it. And then how do you put that into SOPs and systems versus is that a one-off kind of idea? Yeah. Because since we’re Google, we also, Google has labs, and labs has releases. And so we want to stay on top of what’s happening over in labs because they are doing some visual stuff.

(39:33 – 39:55) 

So from the marketing perspective, that side of things, we are keeping an eye on Google because they did purchase some companies in our space. And we think that they’re going to be building something that’s really great for content production. Like they have Pumeli that’s in labs right now.

(39:51 – 40:24) 

I was just checking that out this week. Yeah. And we think that they are going to be using their intelligence hopefully. So, okay, this was on the Jasper roadmap for two years. And we got to beta, and it was an integration with Google Analytics. And so if you can integrate your content with analytics, and you can see what’s doing well and what’s not doing well, you can also have your competitors in there so you can have it mock up stuff that is like the competitors, things that are doing well, and then automatically produce it and even post it for you.

(40:29 – 40:53) 

We like to have it stop off and have a human review and things like that. Yeah. But think about this time saved with that. Oh, my gosh. Yes. And look at the analytics and see what’s doing well. So you have this closed loop. And then Jasper was supposed to serve up your content for you. Like, hey, here’s everything you need for the next month or next week or whatever. And be proactive in producing content. And nothing is doing that full circle right now. So now that we have co-work, we’re trying to build that out.

(40:56 – 41:13) 

But then it has to live on one device. And, you know, it’s a whole thing that we’re, we think that, well, Google has the ability because of all of the, you know, the data that they have and the tools they have the ability to. So we’re watching to see who does that sort of thing first.

(41:16 – 41:27) 

I think it will make a really big difference from, you know, for marketing departments. Right. I mean, everybody kind of, you know, always asks, which ones are you using? I mean, to be truthful, because of, I mean, Google’s got a head start with all the data pieces that they really do.

(41:31 – 41:58) 

I think Claude has really come in strong the last couple of months. I felt pretty good about that. I mean, I know ChatGPT I was kind of the Kleenex because it was kind of the start. But, you know, they put a lot of investment. But I’ve been really impressed by Gemini and Claude as of late. But that’s just me. Same. Gemini at first when it came out was terrible. Yeah. It was not great. No. And now it’s really good.

(42:00 – 42:22) 

And also, it does much better with ingestion than ChatGPT. And so for those that don’t know, there are some of these words. You know what it means to ingest food, right? Take it in your mouth, eat it, whatever. My stomach knows what it is. It’s ingested. When data is ingested, then AI, if it’s fully ingested, AI reads everything, every line, and it understands every line.

(42:25 – 42:42) 

And what we see is there are these context windows that are really big, but you put that amount of information in there, and you know by your outputs that AI did not read it all. It did not ingest all of it. And Gemini does a much better job at ingestion of large amounts of data than any of the other platforms do.

(42:44 – 42:55) 

So if you have to do data analysis, for me, it’s like Gemini hands down wins. It’s the best at ingesting large amounts of data, which makes sense for the platform and the tool and for history. I mean, predictive analytics too.

(42:57 – 43:25) 

I mean, all those things that are coming out. And like you said, I mean, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Search Council, pulling all that data, so it totally makes a lot of sense. It’s speeding up our process of decision making, like you were talking about either.

(43:11 – 43:46) 

I mean, what’s content should you be developing based on your competitors? I mean, you can get that within seconds, and it sounds like you’ve got it set up to write it. I mean, we do. We actually use Notebook LM.

(43:28 – 43:46) 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. We use Notebook LM because it pulls in from all these sources that we specify, and then we have it write up a little plan and what the content should be. And we can, so we also do content for different audiences, slightly different, not too different for us.

(43:49 – 44:03) 

Our clients, we have one client that has like two specific audiences. And yes, you can set some of this up in Jasper, but it’s not as web informed as Notebook LM. And Notebook LM, there’s probably, gosh like 30 different places it pulls information from.

(44:06 – 44:26) 

And so we can set up like all of those competitors, however many you want, really. You can set up those, and you can set up, so we have it also, we’ve got one for YouTube, and it goes to YouTube current best practices on the YouTube website, and it pulls that as well. So, you know, it mixes all of that information to inform our YouTube strategy around different types of content.

(44:32 – 45:04) 

So we’ve been experimenting a lot with that. We do it for Pinterest too. We have a Notebook LM for that, because Pinterest is really effective from an AI SEO perspective.It’s always been good for SEO, but add that GEO layer, and it’s still really, really good. Even if you’re B2B. Yeah, I think people forget about Pinterest, but it really can be really powerful, especially if you’re in the e-commerce space or, I mean, it’s just going to have a lot of powerful, like you said, from a GEO standpoint. It does. You definitely don’t even have to be an e-com. You can be in whatever B2B.

(45:07 – 45:37) 

We get so much traffic from the Pinterest pins. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. I mean, again, it’s one of those things people might forget about, but actually I’ve seen a little bit more,  and we’re going to look into it a little bit more, because we haven’t always used it from a B2B standpoint, but I think based on what I’m hearing, it needs to be used a lot more. Yeah, because when AI is recommending a brand or something like that, it wants videos. So YouTube is a no-brainer, but a lot of companies have a hard time producing consistent video content.

(45:41 – 45:57) 

And, you know, if you use AI, not hard to do, but there’s a perceived barrier to entry there. And it also likes to give you images, so at least have really good SEO pins, because then it can recommend it, because it’s not based on the domain authority of your website. It’s based on the domain authority of Pinterest.

(46:00 – 46:12) 

Pinterest’s domain authority will be most small businesses. Like, I don’t know any small businesses that have domain authorities even close to that, because theirs is, you know, 98, 99, whatever. Right, and then small businesses are 15, 20.

(46:16 – 46:38) 

If you’re lucky. If you’re lucky. That’s exactly right. If you’re lucky. Yeah, we used to be able to get them up to 40, but, I mean, it’s so competitive now. It is. Even with sites that have been around for a long time, if you have a 40, I mean, that’s pretty good. I mean, that’s really killing it, really. Yeah. Unless you’re Amazon or Pinterest. Yes, exactly. Or Coca-Cola, they have a big one, the high one.

(46:41 – 47:03) 

And so then you, for even B2B, you can borrow Pinterest’s domain authority, put your SEO stuff on there, and so then it’s like you have pages on a high authority site. And then it can link back to your website, and as long as it’s all appropriate stuff on your website that matches the pins, like, then you have this content that will bubble up sooner than the content on your website. Yeah.

(47:03 – 47:31) 

How do you keep up with this? I mean, I try. I mean, I’m keeping up. I’m running a company. You’re running a company. We’re addicted to this stuff a bit. So how do you keep up? I have it fed to me. I have it fed to me in that RSS feed. I also have it fed to me because, well, there’s the WhatsApp groups that I’m in, the Facebook groups that I’m in, and so I can choose what to participate in there and read through a lot. And then we produce a newsletter.

(47:33 – 47:55)

I sign my name to it, but it is pulled in from AI, and it’s based on parameters of the kind of content that I would want to put out, and it uses my voice. So I have a newsletter that gets given to me, and I go through and edit it, and so then I get informed about all the things when I’m putting my newsletter out. So you could have AI put a newsletter together for you.

(47:59 – 48:22) 

You could have Gemini or ChatGPT do this. You just give it the parameters. Even in ChatGPT, so we’ll do the basic bitch of AI, if you’re on ChatGPT, you can say, hey, I want to get the latest AI news on these tools, like the latest updates from these tools, the latest, I like medical AI updates because they’re interesting for me, and I like them from MIT Labs, so that’s one of my sources.

(48:27 – 48:45) 

And so you can list your sources. Say I want the latest updates, especially AI-related, from these sources once a week, and then you’ll get a little alert that’s like, hey, your thing is ready, and you can have it served up to you once a week on the things that you’re interested in. And it’s just amazing.

(48:46 – 49:02) 

That’s awesome.  Okay, so I have some homework for myself here to actually make sure I’m feeding it to myself a little bit more. This is kind of, even though this is a little bit different, but this is like hyper-personalization for you and leveraging it.

(49:04 – 49:31) 

You’ve done some things, I’m sure, where you’re using that personalization for marketing efforts, so where you’re getting, I mean, email being an example, where you can hyper-focus on personalization. You were talking about your email for yourself, but I’m sure you’re improving open rates and conversion, you know, click-through rates by hyper-personalization leveraging AI. I know you’re good at this.

(49:33 – 49:48) 

Well, it’s a messy topic, too, because so many companies are doing it now. There are all these like hyper-personalized emails for cold email outreach, and they do work. And there are some stats that we found, like if you can keep it less than 60 characters, it actually does better than the long ones.

(49:53 – 50:20) 

And with hyper-personalized, they tend to pull in from different sources, and they’re like, mention this and mention that, mention the other thing, which is kind of better a little later. But if you just do a short opener, that tends to perform better. And from B2B perspective, oh gosh, it depends by industry and type of business and their customer, what we can expect on open rates and click-through rates and that sort of thing.

(50:23 – 50:55) 

And I have conversations with the providers of these all the time because we use several of them. And like with one of our clients, we tested on four different providers and we can never get better than one in a thousand. Okay. And then there are some, and most people will say it’s one in a hundred to two in a hundred, even four in a hundred. But this particular service provider provides something so specialized for a particular time in a business’s need. They don’t need it every day.

(50:57 – 51:13) 

That you have, we don’t expect more than that. It’s a really specific need. And so while we do get plenty of leads, we have to send a lot more emails in order to get the people that fit in that moment of time in their business history where they need this thing.

(51:17 – 51:55) 

It’s not like marketing services or even cold email marketing services or AI services or anything. So every industry and business is slightly different in the results. And if you talk to enough of these companies, they can give you the stats on what they see. And most likely just go with one of them and see some people, some of the companies, you need to make sure that they know what they’re doing and they’re doing the proper warmup on it. And ask them what their max amount of sends per month is and ask them how they set it up because they should never be sending anything through your CRM system. It should always live outside of it.

(51:57 – 52:29) 

And some, it needs to be like a Gmail and Outlook combination. And they need to tell you like, we’ll do 10 Outlook accounts and 10 Gmail accounts and we’ll send 30 emails a day. And that lets us send 300 a week because we’re doing an Outlook and a Gmail and we won’t send more than that.

(52:15 – 52:40) 

And so then we can only send, what, 1200 in a month. And then if it’s a match, that’s fine. Like one company that we talked to, hey only send up to 2500 in a month and they only do local. Okay, yeah. And another one, they charge a high monthly fee. They send, they’ll work your way up till you’re sending hundreds of thousands a month.

(52:43 – 53:06) 

And yeah. And then they will also take the calls and contact the people and they use email, they use text message and they use phone calls. And then only when they can do a call book an appointment for you, then you’ll get charged for that one because you’re paying at a higher monthly fee for all of that to be done for you.

(53:10 – 53:41) 

And so that the high touch one is fantastic and they send the most leads for that client right now. And they are really verified, they’re high quality, hot leads. And some people don’t build out any of that. And as soon as they get a response from somebody, it’s off to you and you need to handle it. They won’t, they don’t call, they don’t text, they don’t book appointments. And so it’s that from the very basic and it’s important now, I was having a conversation with somebody about this from an AI SEO provider.

(53:44 – 53:57) 

I said, well, they just wanted an individual and not an agency. And I said, well, do you know how to vet that individual? And he said, no, I don’t. So I was like, well, here’s my deck on AI SEO, GEO slash AIO.

(54:01 – 54:22) 

Whatever we’re calling it. We’re calling it this week. Yeah. And I said, this person should be familiar with all of this stuff, you know? And if they’re not, yeah. Yeah, I was like, drop this deck into AI, have it give you the questions to ask the person and then, you know, drop your transcript in to verify they answered them correctly. So because, you know, he didn’t know.

(54:25 – 54:49) 

And if you don’t know about email marketing, they can trash your primary domain if they don’t know what they’re doing. Oh, you’ll be blacklisted. Yeah. Totally, totally. Anyway. So a couple more questions here.

(54:38 – 54:49)

One is, you know, adoption, when you’re working, you know, challenge with AI adoption, what do you, I mean, I think, I mean, we both know you’re either on board or you’re going to be left behind. Yeah. That’s just the way it is.

(54:52 – 55:12) 

Are you, what’s the biggest challenge there, you think? Right now, leaders, I’m talking to you, you need to give your people time. You need to give them time together, learning together. Whether you’re teaching them or you bring someone like us to come in and teach them, they need 10 hours of organized time where they’re learning.

(55:16 – 55:43) 

And this has been shown consistently for the last few years. You only need about 10 hours. So we have a 10 hour class that we teach too. And when your people are in a place learning together, then they also need a time or place to share their ideas. And then you can have, you will have this flywheel of learning and experimenting that will stay beyond an engagement with a company like us because we’re not there. We don’t want to be there forever.

(55:44 – 55:58) 

We just want to get it rolling. And, you know, when you can get it rolling that way where everyone’s learning together and we’ll do whole companies, you know, a thousand people, 20 people, whatever. And everybody’s on the same page from security, privacy.

(56:02 – 56:19) 

Then the people who are really scared and concerned, the longest it took anybody was that 10 hours where in the last session we have the person, you know, feeling comfortable. Some people are fine in one or two sessions, but some people take the whole 10 to actually feel comfortable with it. And that’s why we try to shrink our class.

(56:22 – 56:45) 

And then it just proves to, when we test it, it needs to be 10 because it takes that time consistently over 10 weeks, that period of time for people to emotionally be okay with it. And also like ingest those skills and practice those skills. And then you’re helping to facilitate conversations between coworkers.

(56:46 – 57:00) 

So whether you do it or you hire somebody to come in and do it, there are those coworker conversations too. So we hold labs to go with our classes and you have one hour in class, one hour in labs. And in labs for us, people can bring whatever issues, whatever things they’re working on.

(57:02 – 57:17) 

And if no one from class has a thing, we bring our actual work to it and what we’re experimenting on. And we run it like it’s just our own team and we show you, hey, look, this is something that Victoria is doing right now. And even from that, people get inspired and they think about how they could use it more.

(57:19 – 57:39) 

But it’s that constant and consistent reinforcement over time that makes the biggest with adoption. The studies from Stanford, Harvard, Microsoft, they all show that. And the result is you have a happier workforce. Yes. Joy has been a factor that Microsoft has been paying attention to. You have a happier workforce.

(57:40 – 58:04) 

They’re able to, like you’ve just up-skilled everybody so they feel smarter, they feel more empowered and then you’re not met with resistance when there’s new things coming at you, which there will be with AI. Inevitably, there will be. Yeah.

(57:57 – 58:31) 

No, that’s really…And let’s think about the hours saved with those 10 hours. I mean, it’s crazy. I’m kidding. The amount of time…And they feel empowered, like you said. One last question. What’s the final…This is Proof Point podcast. Do you want to leave with our listeners? Well, Proof Point. I mean, if you want some proof, we do surveys in every class. The average amount of time that people say they save on the tedious tasks they don’t like to do is 50% of their time by the time they’re done with those 10 hours.

(58:34 – 59:03) 

And somebody might be at 25 because they have a physical job and they’re out in the field. But even 25%, if you could give your team back one day a week, what would you do with that time and ask them what they would do with that time? Yep. One free day a week. What would you do? I mean, help scale their company even more, faster. I mean, it’s just amazing. Nicole, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

(59:06 – 59:33) 

We’ve learned a heck of a lot. I hope to stay in contact with you and we’ll keep on learning in this fire hose that we’re in. Right now. So we’ve been talking to Nicole Donnelly, founder of AI Smart Ventures. Thank you for being on the Proofpoint podcast. Thank you, Stacie. It was my pleasure. And thanks, Jeremy, for the intro. Yeah. Thanks for listening to the Proof Point podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.