Ep 32 - AI Developments and Future Implications: Google I/O, ChatGPT 4o, and More
Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!
Ep 32 - AI Developments and Future Implications: Google I/O, ChatGPT 4o, and More Podcast and Video Transcript
[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]
Dave Dougherty: All right, welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. We just started talking and realized we needed to hit record, so we're gonna redo what we fell into because it's we found it quite interesting. And there's a play between one catching up Ruthie with what happened. This week, there were a lot of announcements with AI this week, even though well, I should say this week we're recording.
It'll be different from when you're, you're hearing it. And then so kind of what's, what's new, what's coming. And then Alex was forced to sit through some corporate trainings on where the rest of the world is with AI. So I think it'll be a good discussion back and forth of New and exciting and reality.
So yeah, we're all here and I'll just launch it.
OpenAI's Latest Innovations: Voice, Interruption, and Mobile Integration
Dave Dougherty: So I. I watched the open AI announcement on Monday. What was that? The 15th of May when they did their four Oh announcement. Which if you haven't watched it. It was an interesting juxtaposition to the way that we're used to seeing tech companies announce things.
It was very low key. It had a very shared co working space vibe, even though everybody was a chat GPT employee and they were overly excited about it. Mundane updates, but good for them. It was fun to watch. But the things that they did announce, if you haven't haven't seen it were really interesting in terms of being able to do voice.
As well as interrupting the output while it's doing it. So that if it's going a certain way that you don't like, or it missed the point you can tell it to stop and, and change it and, you know, adapt real time, which is really cool. But then also through your mobile phone, you can show what you're working on a whiteboard and have it comment on that.
Or, you know, give me the data that's here. What would you, you know help me figure out this linear linear equation? And it will read it. It'll tell you what it, what it sees. And then. Do the rest of your prompt, which is very cool. The desktop version of that, you can, you can share your screen from however amount of time you want, and it will read what's on your screen and then comment on what it's seeing and you, then you can query whatever it is you're looking at.
So if you're reading a particularly dense article or, you know a really busy marketing graph that we're all subjected to quite frequently, you can that could be very useful, you know, especially if, depending on what time of day you see that, that chart, you can just tell me what I'm looking at. And you know, you can at least, you can at least get there a little bit.
So that was all very cool.
Google IO's AI Announcements: Real-world Applications and Concerns
Dave Dougherty: That was Monday, Tuesday was Google IO and they announced a lot of the same with, you know, being able to walk around and. Have have the A. I. Assistant tell you, you know, what's this code doing on this computer screen? Or what part of the impressive thing was they looked at?
They showed out the office window and said, What? Where am I? And I said, It looks like you're in King's cross. Like it could tell from the rooftops that it was in King's cross London. And then as this woman walked through the office with, you know, the, the phone going on she walked around this set of desks, did a bunch of other queries and then said, Hey, do you remember where I put my glasses?
And I said, yeah, it's over on the desk by the apple. She walked over and it had tracked everything that was in that video, remembered it so that she could query what was there, which is very cool. But also If you do anything with internal information security, holy God, is that a problem? So that, you know, that's all very cool and very very new.
The Evolution of Search: Google's New AI Capabilities
Dave Dougherty: But then the, the big thing was the AI overview announcement. And I thought it was very interesting as someone with a MBA and communications the way they chose to frame it, all the announcements was very much Google in the era of AI or in the Gemini era. Right. So it's no longer what we're used to.
It is now this new point in time that is separate from what was before. And their big catchphrase was let Google do the Googling for you, which is interesting. So they talked a lot about being able to do voice and video and you know, other kinds of queries. They're adding reasoning. And planning to the results.
So you can, the example that they showed was like I just moved to Chicago, show me all of the yoga studios within a mile and a half of this location that has these reviews or whatever. And it pulled. And it can show you the best places, the, the routes, like how much, how far away they are so that the planning a family trip even is its own like special thing that they have now where you can input a bunch of things and change things around to say, you know what?
My family likes to sleep in. So let's not do the, the walking tour. On Saturday, do it Sunday. And they go, okay, great. You hear these times. Do you want to book that out?
Implications for SEO and Digital Marketing in the AI Era
Dave Dougherty: So it was, it was very cool from a traditional SEO standpoint, though, the queries that people will start putting in are going to be very long and almost impossible to target because they, you know, if it is multi step reasoning, And
you have to know your customer so well that it will play to a certain type of organization. So the funny thing, and then I'll stop talking was after the conference, I did what almost every other marketer does, which is, you know, You don't attend anything unless you post about it on, you know, LinkedIn or whatever.
Right. So I, I grabbed a link to the blog and I just said, Hey, one of the things I like about search is that it's constantly evolving and it's constantly challenging you to, to up your game and, and think more strategically and understand things in a more deep level. So this is very cool, but, If you don't have your digital operations around like, and set up properly, you're already late, you know, like for the multi step reasoning example that they had, it was.
Name, address, phone number. It was the local reviews. It was your website and all of the additional markup that is needed for all of these optional extras in, in the SERP that are all going to be. Playing into those types of results. So if you want to be able to show up, you need to be as close to digitally perfect as you possibly can be.
And yeah, cause it's, it's, it's going to rely on a larger amount of data and knowledge about you as an organization, how trustworthy you are and all of the things that you offer in order to, you know, serve up the I want to do a yoga studio and grab a smoothie between these hours in this neighborhood, you know.
So it's all very cool and very new. So we're going to be thinking through it live real time. So thoughts, problems, questions, those concerns.
Exploring the Potential and Pitfalls of AI in the Workplace
Ruthi Corcoran: I'll talk about Google and then I've got notes on GPT. Or, oh, I don't know if that's the correct phrasing yet. We'll have to learn that over time. You're fine. Okay, so first of all, Google though, I know you're not late.
Like, it's just that they're building off of the same information architecture, right? Right. The infrastructure of the information from which Google in particular, maybe other LLMs are pulling, is still the same. And so at least for the time being, providing that information in a structured way is a fundamentally different sort of interaction that you're having.
It's just that instead of you clicking this time, open now, take out, yada, yada, yada, you're just waiting for you and then it's going to be more reasoning. Man, given the state of paid search, just junk in our ads right now, I'm not filled with a ton of confidence. Like, I really hope Google comes through, but at the moment, I just get frustrated using it all the time because all you get are ads and then you scroll, maybe you get one or two organic results that may or may not be helpful, and then just more of the exact same ads.
And so if Google could use its awesome new powers or perhaps refresh its existing powers to provide better results, paid or otherwise, I'd be a happy camper. Like, that would just make me a much happier Google user. The maps and AI thing, that's cool. I mean, when you say, like, oh, I knew you were in King's Cross, London, I couldn't help but think, but Google Maps is a thing.
So maybe it just looked at where they were on the map and, like, maybe it knew from the rooftops. Maybe it also has connected those two technologies, which in and of itself is also quite powerful. And I'm going to have to think about the the space memory. Idea that you tossed out. I don't have any knee jerk like here's what I think that could do, but I'm sure that, you know, if I noodle on it for a little bit, I can come up with some things.
I don't know any thoughts on Google. Otherwise, I'll I'll jump over to GPT
Alex Pokorny: 1 was just I was pulling up this stat because I was curious. If it's changed, that has in 2007, Google reported that it was 25 percent of searches were unique. And now in 20, well, in February of 2022, it was 15 percent of searches for unique.
So we're dropping our uniqueness over time. I don't know, just, it was just one. Maybe old school reaction was the advent of mobile phones kind of killed off the bar trivia conversation. And that used to be the phrase that Googlers would use when they were talking about all the weird queries that they would get was basically it's like, I don't know how tall is Chuck Norris compared to, you know, somebody else.
And it's like random stuff like that. And it's like these weird little conversations that turn into these very unusual queries. Right. And that was kind of the bar trivia thing, but it was also. Mobile phones kind of killed off also kind of like the barb yes thing because you could fact check anybody who was coming up with some ridiculous story or like, no, I heard it was this and that kind of thing.
And you're like, let me take out my phone and figure it out. AI is like the next generation of that. Where we have now these very complete answers coming back instead of just a, like, I asked for this quick little snippet of data and I got only this snippet of data that I got. It didn't give me any of the additional information that could have been around that or perspective or anything like that with it too.
So I don't know. I'm just thinking this from like a culture and personality standpoint, the more we interrupt data sources with the expectation that those data sources are going to be perfect, especially if we're practicing our verbal Mannerisms this way, not great. We definitely need to understand the limits of AI and the expectations there versus how we're going to be treating, for instance, our fellow coworkers and interns and anybody else who might be a subject matter expert, but you know, won't have the answer immediately.
And they will have to say. I'll have to get back to you and that still should be a good answer.
Ruthi Corcoran: That's a really good point. Like there are going to be a large number of unintended consequences that come out of the emergence of this technology. I think the death bar trivia is one of them, but I think what you just articulated, Alex, this is another good one, which is the expectations of people as they're seeking information changed drastically with this technology around.
And I, they are, are sort of need to have instant answers seems, seems like an important one.
Dave Dougherty: The other piece of it too, is, you know, if you look at co pilot or. Google Workspaces and there are some cool things with Google Workspace that they announced as well, but that's, I'll push that aside for right now.
Managers are not well known for guessing timelines very well. Right. So like, give me this presentation in two days. Well, okay. I can hit that timeline if I'm using the generative AI to, you know, take my word outline into a PowerPoint. But if your manager is aware of that technology and your access to that technology, now all of a sudden, yeah, you have two hours to give me this presentation?
No, no. So it's, yeah, it's going to be interesting. And the other thing that they made a really big deal about was how now available to everybody will be a 1 million token context window, which is a lot. You know, they, they're like to be funny, you know, as, as funny as Google is capable of being, they're like, that's 96 cheesecake factory menus.
I mean, okay, well, those are really large menus. But it's also, I mean, talk about lowest common denominator, like, most inoffensive restaurant ever. So the other thing is you'll be able to upload so many documents and like so many papers, so many eBooks, so many whatever's to then create as a reference your outline for things like that could be really cool if you are using it justly and appropriately. You know, but as people with SEO backgrounds, you know, there's a whole reason there's a white hat black hat debate.
We know there's gonna be, you know, the black hat uses of all these things, too. I worry about the depth of thought. You know, like if I can just take an ebook and say, okay, give me the five points out of this thing, that's not all that different than just reading the executive summary and calling it good.
But if you actually spend time with something and think through it, you will have a better understanding of the implications of it, a better understanding of what it is they were researching, you know, while you're doing it. Now, that's not to say that every ebook is worth reading most, I would say most aren't, but yeah, there's a, there's a depth of thought there that I, I worry about.
Ruthi Corcoran: I will say for Google, this is true of GPTs, but those things that you just articulated. Those are the, the makeup of my fantastic onboarding GPT plan. That's it. We want to upload the things so that other people can ask their questions and quickly get answers. So maybe the value isn't so much on, I upload my entire repository of work so that I can reference it.
It's I upload my repository of work so that somebody else can reference it and easily be able to find the things that they need. To answer their questions so that the manager doesn't need you to create the PowerPoint presentation. They've just asked the question and gotten the answer that much faster.
Dave Dougherty: So this is yet another reason for you to go back and watch the recording because in the workspace demo that they did, they are now for people who are willing to give up that amount of data, you can create an AI teammate. And that AI teammate will attend the meetings will. Look at all of the documents that are made available to it as, as the teammate, you write his job description and you tell it what tasks to do.
And it just runs in the background so that instead of sending the, you know, slack or teams message to your coworker about the project status update, you can say, you know, Google Teammate what you know, did so and so agree to keep this project running or was it killed in the last meeting? And it will say based on the transcript.
Here's what they agreed on at this meeting and then you can say great make a make a presentation for it and all of that Is wonderful because, you know, how many presentations have you wasted entire weeks on just for the, you know, 20 minutes you get to talk about it and then you've done nothing like literally nothing other than a deck, you know so I'm excited to move past that, but that will be that particular feature has some interesting implications for the way teams work, the amount of, you know, People you need on said team.
You know, I, I sent it to one of my project manager friends and said, well, there goes the business analyst and the project manager, because, you know, if you're able to automate actions in your project management tool, which is sort of an easy next step, I think, in the development roadmap yeah, you just won't need that.
You just won't need that. So, which is great because I hate project management tickets. I hate writing them so much. Just let me do it. I told you I would do it. I'll do it. But I know that's not how the world works. Yeah.
Ruthi Corcoran: I mean, the optimistic take, and then I'll pass it over to Alex. Cause I feel like this is a really good segue.
But the optimistic take is this cuts out the, the sort of busy work. Work so that we can focus on getting things done and doing the cool stuff and working together. I do have a couple of question marks around you know, what does this do for the entry level position? What does this do for the intern for whom?
Sometimes those tasks are the way that you get. Familiar with just all the mechanics of everything that's going around. Like, it's something that's very straightforward. You can do it. Doesn't take a lot of a lot of in depth knowledge of the organization or the things that you're doing in order to just be able to start doing something and learning.
So that. That role shifts perhaps with this but on your advice, I will go watch it and perhaps we can discuss it more in an upcoming episode. But I do want to pass it over to Alex because I feel like his, he might have some levity to the situation of how long is it really going to take though.
Alex Pokorny: That's an excellent question.
Microsoft Copilot: A New Frontier in AI-Assisted Work
Alex Pokorny: So yeah, I was using Microsoft Copilot and using it in a work capacity. Pros and cons. I mean, there's across the board and kind of what it's capable of doing. What it is is really is open AI over a year ago. They were promising about an enterprise version that would not be used. The data would not be used to train its overall model.
Instead, it would be internal. It would be looking at your own files and whatever you've allowed it to have access to. And that is Microsoft Copilot. They call you the pilot of. The thing, by the way, as a user or a pilot, that little cheesiness, it's a nice fallacy of control there. I know it covered back to the Google land at Google.
Yeah. I mean, especially from the advertising standpoint, Google has gotten really, really annoying. Being an advertiser, they've gotten really annoying, but how pushy they are about just tell us an overall objective and we'll spend your money for you. Which, yeah, no conflict of interest there. No, no bias.
Goodness. But anyways, back to Copilot. Copilot is pretty cool with certain give abilities. So if you're recording a meeting on Teams, you can ask it for a recap. And if you join the meeting half an hour late, it will give you a recap of this is what happened. This person said this. And from what I've seen, accurate.
Had not It works for actually really, really well you can ask and believe and give you a notification like 10 minutes before the end of the meeting saying, Hey, ask copilot for the action items, you have 10 minutes meeting last three meetings. So you can click that and it's a, like, shortcut prompt and I'll run back through the transcript and tell you kind of what the next steps were and who promised, but for meetings, especially when there's a ton of teams doing a ton of different updates and you're just kind of going one next, next, next, next, next one.
Super helpful. Especially if you're trying to review past ones, very helpful. And then it gets to internal policies on how long do you keep your old videos? How many of these videos are you storing? Because that's a lot of mostly server space. I mean, you're starting to hit some limits in some other ways too, of what's realistic and then internal.
Kind of OneDrive searching. Not bad. It kind of is a little bit better than what the internal search already is in OneDrive and across your shared kind of files and team files. Outlook was cool. I did. If you prompt correctly, I mean, and I'm sure this will improve with time as well. I asked to look through my sent box and say, what actions have I promised recently?
And. It gave me a good list. It then as I tried to ask, I was like, okay, what about older emails? So I looked at like the last week and immediately it started going through the wrong folders, pulling up randomly in newsletters and I don't know, other kinds of junk. So, I mean, still some work in progress there as well.
And then from a training standpoint, Microsoft is trying to come up with use case based training to try to push this. So meant for executives, meant for sales, meant for marketing. And the marketing one I attended was honestly pointless. It's like, you can ask it for a business case on how toy sales are going, and then you can ask it more questions about that.
It's like, it's, it's not a marketing specific use case. And. Definitely some missteps on what it couldn't, couldn't do there. I mean, they could have pushed everything from Microsoft ads to talking about like improved copy for, you know, a flyer. If you want to go old school, I mean, not really even relevant to the day, but you can still go for that.
Or you could have it come up with different designs because it is pulling in Dolly. And then it is pulling in some other systems too. So, probably with the credit based system, some of the limitations there too. Also got to imagine these licenses are not cheap. My company's doing a pilot program, so we've got a set number of licenses for a pilot and we'll go from there.
Ruthi Corcoran: I will say that. I am excited about the meeting summary. So I'm on vacation this week. I've been literally gardening all week, which is why I haven't been paying attention to any news and why Dave has to update me and everything. It's been fantastic. It's wonderful. Tan going in the whole 9 yards, but when I come back from vacation, I've got copilot there to tell me.
Here's what you missed. I'm very excited to see how it does. Of course, I'm not going to rely on it completely. And I'm sure it'll have gaps, but I think that'll be a really cool. Second use case, I would say the 1st use case I've found so far is that 1 drive piece. I've had a lot more success with it than sounds like Alex has where I've asked different questions of like, hey, when did we talk about this random thing?
That was probably in a deck or I use the notes app in windows. I know I'm really old school. It does great with those. It can find everything and then summarize the random notes. I had taken from a meeting 2 years ago in in response and then give me the source of my own document or the document of a teammate.
So that's been. Quite helpful. One thing that I haven't gotten to work and I don't know if it's a limitation of how we've set up our file structure or if it's copilot is it doesn't yet integrate one note, which is where a lot of our our files are kept. In addition, once the integration was something like Jira confluence is available or Figma.
Exploring the Impact of AI on Corporate Training and Tools
Ruthi Corcoran: That's going to tear the roof off of it because all of a sudden you've got access to everything you or your team or other teams have created and you can get those quick responses. So I'm pretty optimistic about that. But one thing that Alex mentioned about those trainings, it's like, you know, he said it himself, these are things we were testing out with GPT a year ago.
And And now they're starting to train the rest of the world on it, which gives you a sense of here's perhaps the the level of knowledge and the level of use of perhaps the more average corporate user of these different tools. I don't think they're doing it to give the sort of dummy version. Just for fun.
I think that's. a realistic assessment of where they think most people are with these tools, which, you know, gives me a little pause when I think about sort of Dave's forward looking projections. And it's like, well, there is a little bit of a lag when it comes to the rest of the world on these things.
Dave Dougherty: Absolutely. So a couple of things on, on that.
Adobe's Roadshow Insights and the Evolution of Design Tools
Dave Dougherty: So yesterday Adobe is doing their little roadshow thing where they're touring around the country showcasing some of their stuff. And It was a good excuse to get out of the home office and, and, you know, be wined and dined because why not? But it was, I was saying to Ruthie before we hit record, it was really interesting because they were showcasing Adobe express for enterprise.
And if you, you know, Adobe express. Has just been, you know, on my introduction to it was on, on the iPad and on the iPhone as more of a consumer play around, whatever. And so, you know, from my side stuff for, for this podcast I am really deep in the canvas universe and what they were showcasing and the features they were so excited about.
I was like. I've been doing that for five years on Canva. It, you know, and so like, you can resize your designs. Yeah, that's great. It's an amazing feature because you design once and then you just, you know, fiddle a little bit and boom, you have your YouTube and Insta and TikTok and whatever else. They did have some really cool features that would be worth looking into and playing around with.
So, you know, Like we've discussed before, I think I'll, I'll probably go experiment just to see what's, what's out and available. But it, to your point, Ruthie, it was a good reminder of, you know, The three of us tend to be, you know, bleeding edge people like we want to find what's out there. What's new.
How do we adapt this or do we ignore it? And sitting and talking with some other people and some other major organizations in the Twin Cities area was Was very interesting because it was not at all what I expected to hear. What, you know, what people are using, how they're doing it.
The Competitive Edge of Google's Data in AI Development
Dave Dougherty: So yeah, it'll be interesting to see the adoption curve on this again, I think with Google and the amount of data that Google has available to it, one of the big takeaways, like watching, watching the chat GPT.
Nearly after the the IO announcements, it was very clear that all of the extra data that Google has available to it, enable it to do all of these other things. And that's going to be something that GPT is just an open AI is really going to have to contend with. Because you know, if you're only relying on.
Available sources or licensing for your training or synthetic data for your training, that's going to be very limiting very quickly. But if you can get AI to people via the Google app, the free, even the free version of it, now you have all of the new data, the new queries, the new use cases that people are using on their phone, on their tablets via a method they already have.
So I don't have to go download a desktop version of open AI or create an open AI account. I have my Google account. I sign up for, you know, Gemini and can query it really easily. That is a massive competitive advantage, I think, for Google, you know, and the fact that they invented the transformer. So, right, like that, that certainly helps.
Ruthi Corcoran: I think taking that and running with it, and then maybe say, going to GPT for a sec, having the platform and sort of the established user base, who's already working in a certain way is huge for Google.
Meta's Potential in Leveraging AI for Social Media Platforms
Ruthi Corcoran: I think that's going to be perhaps even more of a one up for meta, which I haven't played around with anything that they've done yet, or even paid attention.
But I know that in the background, they've secretly got a very, very strong LLM. And so I'm curious to see how they are going to utilize that within Instagram and Facebook because as you mentioned like people don't have to, they were already there, like now all of a sudden they can just use it in a place they're already going, which could perhaps even be more of a big deal for Meta than it is for Google.
That is baseless speculation, but we can come back in a year and see how accurate that is.
Dave Dougherty: Well, yeah.
The Open Source Debate: Google vs. Meta's AI Strategies
Dave Dougherty: And the one thing to call out too, but between the Google and the meta example, meta is exclusively an open source design. Their LLAMA models are open source. I have very strong opinions on open source things which will be, Something for a different episode where Google is very much the, the walled garden.
And it, that was one of the things that I was definitely thinking about in watching these announcements was, okay, Microsoft has the co pilot piece and it's very much a Microsoft software thing. It has a lot of promise and then the execution of it is junk until about five years later, they finally figure out what they promise.
And Yeah, like having that collection of users and people who already use your software or your hardware really is just going to create these. I am a Google user. I am a Microsoft user even more so than we already have today. And I mean, we talked about this in previous episodes with like the cloud computing piece, right?
Like, Yeah, for the larger companies that are going to be experimenting with a I well, it's much easier to experiment with whoever your cloud provider is and what they're offering because it's already been through, you know, I T security. You don't have to try to get, you know too much more additional budget because it's somebody you already have a service agreement with.
So
Amazon's AI Innovations and the Future of Online Shopping
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, yeah, throwing out the other big company Amazon. Mm hmm. I really seen too much from them it seems like they're definitely going on the Server side. I mean AWS isn't a big chunk of Amazon's revenue I was thinking about that Rufus tool that I was playing around with. I think it was about a week ago or something like that I was asking Rufus how to fall in love And how to find the perfect mate and what the meaning of life was, which if you're not familiar, if you aren't, you're
Dave Dougherty: married.
Alex Pokorny: I wanted to see if it would show up my 40, a little geekery there. I was trying to get it to basically give that answer. But if you go on Amazon app, scroll down to basically where the reviews are, and you can basically ask a question. And what that used to be was basically a very small internal search that would just go through the reviews and you would keyword pick.
And then say, here's some people who said similar things, you know, become more question and answer sort of experience there based only off of the reviews for that one given product. That's been replaced with Rufus, which is their name for their AI. You can ask it what its name is and it'll tell you what its name is and what the limitations are.
You also will not talk about Amazon's ethical practices. There's a number of things that we'll not talk about. I was just having a lot of fun playing around with this thing. But you can ask it whatever question you want. So I was looking at, I think it was like a shelving for a garage or something like that.
And I asked her what the meaning of life was and started talking about and like, Philosophy and we started getting into like, it has no,
Ruthi Corcoran: I
Alex Pokorny: know it was obviously like an LLM that was trained across all of Amazon's data, but also and more to try to create that, you know, verbal appearance, which also means you can query the rest of its data source data set too, which was just pretty funny.
I don't know. I am surprised though that again, talking about this, like the next step piece, the tech is there.
Ruthi Corcoran: Yes.
Alex Pokorny: So I could ask Rufus instead at the very beginning of my Amazon journey of saying, Hey, this is what I'm trying to accomplish. What's the product that best fits that, but it isn't there still internal search still ranking results.
Still the best seller, best, you know, by now kind of button top, the same setup basically, because imagine AB testing and how much work has gone into what they currently have and they know it works and it's profitable. How much do they want to rock the boat by basically introducing this? Intuit are on top of it.
I mean, this is like a very, very small, weird. I mean, actually Rufus has been out for over a year and I never noticed it. And I shop on Amazon probably too much. And I go through reviews all the time, but I never noticed it this entire period of time. So it's kind of there, but it's not really, you know, prominent.
Ruthi Corcoran: What are the numerous implications to having Rufus start spitting out here's the best product for X, right? The whole Amazon's a marketplace, right? And how do you allow Rufus to sort of represent all your different vendors rather than signaling on a couple of few? And let's say those couple of few become Rufus's favorites.
Do they even have the infrastructure for supporting? The deluge of people who are now all of a sudden going to be ordering from them. Right. There are some real world implications to what Rufus does, and maybe they've sort of quietly hit him because they're not right. They're sort of in testing. Maybe they're not ready.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and if Rufus favors, Amazon basics. Over, you know, that's some real lawsuit problems. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, the, so what of it too is like the tech, your points very, very well hitting home for me, which is the, so what the, if the techs there, you have to retrain everybody, how to use your platform, right?
Right. And that's one of the things with the the implications for search marketing, I think is interesting to think about because for, I mean, for some people's entire lives, you go, this is Google, this is how you search for something. It has a very specific cadence, right. With new restaurants near me.
Alex, to your point with one of the previous episodes we've recorded, like that is not a natural way of asking something that is not a natural way of typing something speaking something. So now that, you know, you can do so much more with with voice search, with with image searching or there, there's a, there's a lot of implications there.
And I've gotten a lot of, you know, Benefit of just taking a breath and going, I wonder if I can do this with AI. Because there is so much in the day to day that you can absolutely automate through things like Okay,
Ruthi Corcoran: I have been attempting to segway into chat TPT this whole time, and the reason I want to segway is because I think one of the things you said is so cool, Dave!
Like, I still have to think about this mobile whiteboard situation. I think I'm going to have some Several, several use cases for that, for sure. Big fan of whiteboarding, but one of the things I'm really excited about is what you talked about with the screen sharing. And I think this is one of the differentiators that they're, they're sort of playing into.
They don't necessarily have the Google, the Amazon, the Facebook platform that people are already glued into. Although I suspect open AI has a decent user base at this point. But one of the things that's so cool about that is now all of a sudden you've got an AI who's coming along for the ride with you.
They can see, see quotes, what you're seeing and you can talk to it. And so I can imagine so many cool use cases. First one that came to mind when you originally said this was accessibility. The poor people who have to use the internet and use screen readers have such a hard time, you know, even if we try to optimize our websites for screen readers, it's still just ultimately it's optimized for people who can see the site.
So the idea that you can have sort of an AI assistance there to describe what's on the scene in real language with voice and all the images and what's relevant and what's not, that I think is going to be Cool thing for a lot of people. And then the other thing that came to mind is boy, some of the things that open AI and these other elements are capable of, you could be say, reading one of those long form articles, or you could be reading a book and you could be discussing and talking to your AI as you're reading something.
through. You could feed the other works that a given author has done. So you can see, okay, where is this pulling from? Has he, have they talked about this elsewhere? Has she looked at this? Has she talked about this? What are the other articles? I think that in terms of delving deep and sort of being able to explore a step further than you can do currently with search and references, this has a lot of potential and I'm very excited about it.
Dave Dougherty: One of the interesting cases for me. Recently was earnings calls. God, those, those can be so dry and awful, you know? But so I, I, I am a big fan of doing competitive analysis and I do that a lot. Even when I'm not asked to, I still want to see what the competition is doing. So instead of doing what I normally do, which is a very involved process I just, I went ahead to Gemini and I said, tell me about their recent performance.
What did they, what were the takeaways from the recent earnings calls? And it's just pop up and it started reading it to me. Like I didn't even have to read the output because it automatically started, you know, talking to me. That was really cool because right away I just saved an hour. I, I have a general idea of what's going on and then I can.
Look at the stock articles that are written by like Reuters or Bloomberg or anybody else to see is this kind of true what the LLM popped out and it was, it was very nice. It was very quick and to your point about accessibility, that was one of my thoughts. At the Adobe presentation, because like, even, even just if you took color blindness, for example how often are you in meetings with people where they're like, Oh, we're going to do this yellow and like, please don't, or here's this like really neon green and you're like, stop, please just stop.
Like that, I mean, that's a real thing. So to be able to lay over or have a. Have a tool built into your design thing to be able to toggle on and off, you know, colorblind filters like that. That's pretty cool because now all of a sudden that's just an extra step that is fairly easy to do with, you know, a push button in order to make it more accessible for everybody else and get the approvals that you need more quickly, even if you're not a super, you know, amazing wizard of design, like you can still move a picture around and think about it.
Ruthi Corcoran: Check out I think it's accessible. io. We can toss it in the chat with the real one. But it allows, it's a little widget that you can toss on your website that allows people to change your website based off of their needs. So if they need larger text, if they need more contrast in the imagery.
And it, it allows the user to do what they want in a really cool way. That sounds a lot like some of the things you were describing.
Dave Dougherty: That's cool. Alexi, we're looking like you had some thoughts. Is that an interesting one? I was just
The Role of Content in Marketing and AI's Influence
Alex Pokorny: working through a local search thing recently and local search, you know, Google maps on the rest of their systems are always kind of fascinating because there's a white spark producers.
I think it was David men who originally did it, but it's called the local search ecosystem. If you ever look for the thing, it's. All the years and how it kind of has passed through the many years. It's really cool because you can see Google maps, for instance, pulls data from these four sources and those four sources pull their data from these sources.
So how does basically one listing of one company get it on all these different sites? Well, it's because they. Buy and share there. And there's data aggregators out there as well that you can't submit to, but they pull in data from other sources as well. You know, all that kind of stuff gets shared around.
And the other thought was there's a really cool YouTube channel that I've got to just binging like crazy, but it's a guy who does very quick shorts on different restaurants, food trucks, you name it in the New York city area. And it's a lot. It's the most of it's focused around basically who these people are a little bit of the story behind them and like, you know, the, the main dish that they produce and it's been really cool.
And these kind of pieces all are kind of fitting together. And the idea of how marketing works today is very, very different. Because of new products, new locations, new sources, new product introductions, the amount of content and citations and sources and video and photo and text that you're going to need to make your restaurant work, to make your new product on Amazon work, to make your new product in anywhere, anything, new business location, whatever, work, has to be accompanied by a massive amount of content.
very much. And I'm sure the platforms will pull in some of that. I mean, Google has gotten really good about like their maps listing saying like, here's how to take photos. You need to have three photos. You know, it's like starting to have requirements basically kind of pushed upon it to make sure that people are providing that content that's necessary.
But thinking about the random, I mean, New to the city, maybe new to the country, individual who's trying to put together a food truck, like, unless people are walking around with your example of the glasses and the Apple sort of systems that are actually going to track and, you know, find these locations and read the menus, it's going to be really tough to break into those markets.
Same way we were talking about Rufus in terms of 0 reviews. And you're brand new and you're great at making a really in innovative product, but you suck at writing copy and you just put in the bare minimum for the description, right? You're sunk not because of your quality of product, but because of the amount of content.
Ruthi Corcoran: I'm going to give you the flip side of that because I think that there's a that's a two sided coin because I think you've identified a really important one, especially where it's like content in some ways matters as much as the quality of the product, which is kind of a bummer in one case. I think the positive side of that is if you're a new entry into the market, you've got a way in which you can join the market.
Like you can get over the barrier to entry by having content. And so that's kind of cool too, because there's a, there's a route in which you can enter a market that could be saturated or, you know, maybe you are a, you're a small restaurant, maybe you're a small farm. And you are not necessarily within the confines of the city.
You've got a way of accessing the people in the city, even though maybe you're 30 minutes out. And that's kind of cool, too, of that increases your entry to market in a way that perhaps you couldn't do with with.
Dave Dougherty: Well, I think it depends on what you're trying to sell as well, because we've seen this a lot lately where if you take advantage of the user generated content, more so than just your own, Right? Like think of the apple orchards that create the Instagrammable, you know, backdrop for you to, you know, go with, with their branding and, you know, sit on the hay bale with, you know, this, and you have your family photo and you can create those experiences or those those opportunities for people to do that.
Right. Or the and a lot of the small businesses that I've gone to recently, there's that the QR code right next to the, The pay terminal for leave a review, and they have a bunch of those things around their location for you to be able to do that. So yeah, there's a lot of different ways to get into it, even if you're not the one generating it.
But Alex, I think you're right. If you don't know about the copywriting piece for your product Yeah, you're just not, you're not going to be able to rank because you don't have it a keyword optimized, you don't have it at the proper length, the whatever, whatever, or if they offer a product description helper tool via AI, well, then great, you have just met.
The same low floor as everyone else that's trying to sell it, which may be exactly what you need and be just fine. But
Alex Pokorny: I think to be honest, this might be saving grace for marketers in the age of AI.
The Unchanging Nature of Marketing in the Age of AI
Alex Pokorny: The game hasn't changed, to be honest, I mean, let's say pre internet, the big thing was the digital divide of getting a website up, which is to be honest, content and marketing.
And then after that, we're talking about like, there's the economy of links, which ranked people higher and lower. So there is, you know, reaching out to different organizations, if you're doing it a legitimate way or buying them, if you're doing the illegitimate way, either way. They're there. Then we have the economy of reviews, trying to push for extra reviews on your Yelp listing to get your restaurant up or buying a bunch of crap ones off of Fiverr to get your Amazon listing up.
I mean, however it works out for you. I mean, again, this is kind of like, this is the game. I was just thinking about the ebook point. And Amazon recently dropped the number of eBooks you can submit to per day is down to three because it used to be like 10 or 12 a day, which you mentioned the quality of content that was being produced is not great, but massive amount of content.
There was a few rather small scale authors who I'm reading their eBooks recently. And at the end of the book, they say, please join my Facebook community. These Reddit. Channels that are of the genres that I get posted on there whenever I don't have a new book because I'm in this very niche genre Follow this newsletter so that I can let you know when these books are coming out You can pre order the next one off of amazon already I mean, there's That's the game.
That's the marketing game. Like they're an author. Do they really want to be doing social media posts? Probably not. They want to probably be writing their book, but that's the game of in a new world now. Like how did they get, you know, online and ebook sales way? Well, they got to do it that way.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And I think too, to your point, what, what has changed? It's the way in which we do things. Sure. What hasn't changed is. Anybody who has something to say and is able to say it. In a, in a venue that is trusted and has reach will prevail. Right. Like I was thinking of, so I'm a, I'm a fan of the prof G podcast.
And I listened to, I'm not like a religious listen listener, but I enjoy it when I choose to listen to it. And he recently did a that was not your typical Ted talk. So it was a lot of fun. And then, but he talked about how there was this huge spike in downloads on his podcast. Like, well, yeah, you have the ecosystem set up and then you went and you did your Ted event and then people who saw you at the Ted event, then the next night you were on the Bill Maher podcast.
Show so your exposure to these audiences on these, you know, bigger platforms Is absolutely what's driving the interest, you know It's really that getting the exposure to a wide variety of people. None of that has changed. That's classic that's classic pr You know so I think that what's, what might be dying, which is what some of the digital marketers or SEOs that are really scared about is you can't just passively launch something and then hope success hits you.
You have to go after it, right?
Ruthi Corcoran: All of Alex's tactics are just that they're just tactics,
Dave Dougherty: right?
Ruthi Corcoran: So yeah, your tactic that you've specialized in might be going away. True story.
Alex Pokorny: I was actually wondering that with, we, we mentioned PowerPoint a few times during this, is that still going to be a thing? Like, I don't know, just think about, like, these summaries and synopsis of information, different way that people like to learn, I mean, some audio text, visual, however they want to, maybe it'll just get better.
Maybe it'll just become, it's, you know, the next envisioned version of it. I don't know.
Dave Dougherty: Well, Amazon is a no PowerPoint company and that seems to be working out for them. Yeah, I think it'll, I think it'll just change. It was chain.
Concluding Thoughts on AI's Role in Future Technologies
Dave Dougherty: Clearly these are fun ideas to think about and talk about and mull over.
We, we will see how they actually impact how we move, move forward on this. Let us know your experiences with these things, any knee jerk reactions to the, the presentations that happened. And we will see you in the next. Episode of enterprising minds, please like subscribe and share. That does help us a lot and lets us know what you enjoy and what you'd like to see more of.
So rating reviews and all that stuff, and we'll see you next time. Thanks.
