The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Welcome to The Charleston Marketing Podcast, the podcast that dives deep into the world of marketing, with a specific focus on the vibrant city of Charleston. Join us as we explore the strategies, trends, and success stories that shape the marketing landscape in this historic and captivating coastal city.
Each episode of The Charleston Marketing Podcast brings you exclusive interviews with local marketing experts, industry thought leaders and Charleston entrepreneurs who have harnessed the power of effective marketing in the Lowcountry and beyond. From strategic communication, social media, PR, digital strategy and everything in between, we uncover valuable insights and actionable tips for our listeners.
The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Zach Giglio's Guide to AI Empowerment for SMB's
Explore the intersection of entrepreneurship and AI with Zach Giglio and get an insider's look at Zach's accolade-winning leap from communications to AI marketing mastery. Discover how our stories converge on the common ground of innovation and the transformative potential of artificial intelligence for businesses of all sizes.
Artificial intelligence isn't reserved for the tech elite; it's a tool that's making waves across the business landscape, and this episode peels back the layers of its mystique. Learn how AI is not a job stealer but a powerful collaborator, enhancing how we work and compete in the market. We share our personal experiences and provide a roadmap of resources for the AI-curious, from free online courses to newsletters, dispelling the notion that AI literacy is out of reach for the everyday entrepreneur.
Finally, our conversation takes a practical turn, offering SMB's a toolkit to leverage AI's prowess without the coding headaches. With discussions on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Canva, we demonstrate how AI can streamline marketing and design efforts. We also tackle the ethical considerations and the importance of transparency in AI utilization, all while giving you a glimpse of an upcoming Summerville event that promises to arm SMBs with actionable AI insights. Join us for this episode where business meets the future, narrated by the voices at the forefront of the AI revolution.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
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Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association, broadcasting from our home base at Charleston Radio Group. Thanks to CRG, we're able to talk to the movers and shakers of Charleston, from economy to art, from hospitality to tech and everything in between. These leaders have made a home here in the Lowcountry. They live here, they work here, they make change here. Why?
Speaker 2:Let's talk about it. Hello and welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing System, where we have the conversations with the who's who of the marketing in our great city of Charleston. We're recording here at the Charleston Radio Group Studios. Say what's up to our boy, jerry Fields. Good for the beats. And thanks to all of our sponsors. Oh, speaking of sponsors, I am wearing a Fatty's Brew hat. If anybody wants to send me any merch, I'll definitely wear it. Anyhow, I'm Mike Compton, president of Roomba Advertising, goroombocom, an agency that helps you find the soul of your brand, and I'm your CAMA Director of Membership Experience. We have two special guests in the studio today Margaret Stipa, who is our Chapter President and owner of everything. Owner of the world. Like what do you do again, margaret?
Speaker 3:I really appreciated the bio that you typed up for me so I'm going to go ahead and read that. Hello, I am Margaret, an international woman of mystery who does all things with honor, thoughtfulness and grace. It's true. Thank you, mike. To expand on that, I am the owner of Carolina Creative Marketing, based here in Charleston. I manage a wine portfolio. I have an Airbnb downtown, so if any listeners are looking for some short-term rentals, hit me up, and I am, of course, your Charleston AMA president.
Speaker 2:She just said that she would give the Charleston AMA discounts to her Airbnb.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we'll have to create a promo code If you make a review in the comments section. I like it, let's do it. How about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a great guest in the house today. You want to talk about it?
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I'm excited to introduce Zach Giglio today. You want to talk about it? Absolutely, I'm excited to introduce Zach Giglio. Zach Giglio is the CEO of GCM, an award-winning agency that shows organizations how to leverage cutting-edge AI technology to become more efficient and profitable. He is certified by the Wharton School of Business and AI Strategy for Business and is a faculty member on AI at the US Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Organization Management. Welcome to the show, zach, and thank you for your time.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Was it a long drive, Zach?
Speaker 4:It was 36 minutes. It should have been 34, but I missed a turn.
Speaker 2:Where did you land in Charleston?
Speaker 4:Where did I land? Where did you?
Speaker 2:land. You're probably not from here, so I'm asking.
Speaker 4:No, I'm not. My two kids are my two-year-old and my four-year-old are from here. So, I'm from Long Island, New York, and we live in Somerville Somerville, yeah which we really love.
Speaker 2:Somerville is really cool the downtown. Does anybody else feel like this? The downtown reminds me of the Back to the Future set when he was back in the future, trying to get back to his modern day. That's funny, like the clock tower and the in the yeah, yeah, no, look at it next time. Your little downtown. So that's really good, it is the cutest no, it's great.
Speaker 4:it was in a Bud Light commercial in the Super Bowl, uh, not too long ago, where it was like, um, any town, pennsylvania, or Seltzer town it was for like Bud Light Seltzer and they filmed that in Somerville, yeah and yeah, and they said it was Pennsylvania. I don't know why, but yeah, somerville is great. We love it. We did a lot of research of where we wanted to live and all that and have really fallen in love with the community, the people. It's really growing, there's a great vibe there and we also won Small Business in 2023 in Somerville.
Speaker 2:Which company did it? Gcm Nice, Congrats man.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you, I was really proud and I was really excited about it. And then when we were there and heard all the other nominees, I got a lot of imposter syndrome, thinking we must have tricked them, because it was really incredible what's going on in Somerville. It actually has the second highest amount of entrepreneurs in the state. What in the state what? Yeah, who's got the first? I don't know. I don't know, maybe I'm not sure. I just know we have, we have second. I don't know, I don't even know what's third.
Speaker 2:Hey, you're not first, you're last zach.
Speaker 4:Well, that's true you know what that's? That's very true. That's very true, uh speaking of first.
Speaker 2:No, I don't want to get there yet because you're first in ai right now. You're like leading the, I think, but we're going to hold off on that real quick. I want to know a little bit more about you. Did you go to school for marketing? You said you grew up in Long Island.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I grew up in Long Island. I went to Sacred Heart University, which is in Connecticut, which is about half of Long Island, went there it felt like, and I studied political science and English and really loved it. I started my career after being overseas for a little bit in Washington DC using kind of using that political science degree and so I have more of a comms and marketing background. Got a job at Edelman First. I started at a public affairs firm in DC then got a job at Edelman, which is the largest PR firm in the world, worked for them in DC and then in Johannesburg and then kind of started doing my own stuff and fell in love with AI and everything changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everything. The listeners don't know this, but Emma's here.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes, emma's always here, but she actually is really here.
Speaker 3:Who is Emma for our listeners?
Speaker 2:who don't know.
Speaker 4:So so Emma, now Giglio is my wife and my business partner. So GCM. Actually she's very kind to say that we co-founded GCM, but actually Emma founded GCM and she founded it in Long Island, in a village of Babylon, where she literally walked up and down to Main Street businesses, knocked on their door and said I think you could be doing a better job with social media and I can help you. She literally walked into one business it's a true story. Now he's a good friend. I love it that she had never met the owner. She said it's like ridiculous that you did this. She said is the owner here? They said yes, one second. They got the owner. She pitched him and walked out with the client Stop, I've never. I mean so you, you know you have a very successful agency. You have a very successful agency. Like you know how grueling the pitch process is, how hard it is to get a client. She literally I was like just go knock. You know we're like how are we going to?
Speaker 2:she's like go knock on doors can pull that off with the accent and the whole. Thing. She's very lovely by the way, that doesn't hurt, congratulations. So you've got two young boys.
Speaker 4:Yeah, a two-year-old and a four-year-old.
Speaker 2:Oh jeez, you're in it.
Speaker 4:They're nuts. Yeah, they're from Somerville. They're summer villains. They're wonderful. They're really really great.
Speaker 2:Are they walking into toy toy stores and saying, hey, I need a toy, come on. And then leaving with it? You know I mean like, yeah, they need a lot of stuff like mommy just walks into a place and says this is what's happening well they.
Speaker 4:They usually tell mommy what they need and they usually tell me they need mommy oh well, there you go, yeah so it's easy for me. I only have one thing to get them, and emma has everything else to get them what was that one thing there exactly, emma?
Speaker 2:oh hey, it's like Where's mom, good point, where's mom, that went right over my head.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's it. She's the answer to everything, but they're wonderful, super cute, really proud to be growing our family and our business in this part of the world. We've kind of lived around a little bit and we always kind of got the itch after like two years and have not gotten the itch at all. In fact, we regularly drive around and just say we made a good choice. We just love being here and the people here are great. There's a lot going on here. It is enough to keep you busy and enough not to, which is also a good thing.
Speaker 2:I was wondering what keeps you here, and I think you just covered that a little bit. But what else kind of keeps you here? Is it good business? Are you finding where you?
Speaker 4:So that's starting to be more of a case. So, like you know, when we were doing our consulting and and the more of the marketing of gcm, our clients were like never really here. So our clients were always like these larger companies based in chicago, new york, out west stuff like that, yep um, which was like really cool because it's fun to go travel and do all this stuff, but then, at the same time, like we like being connected with our community. So I said sit on the board of a nonprofit, we're involved in the chambers, we're involved in Low Country, local First. Emma's involved in Postpartum Support Charleston. She started a support group in Somerville, though only one of its kind for a certain thing, and so we really love it.
Speaker 4:And we weren't involved, though, with our business and we kind of felt that was missing, and so we've been kind of allowed to, or empowered to, really refocus where we're trying to serve businesses, and really do believe that Somerville and the Charleston area we have an opportunity to plant a flag in the ground, not to jump too far ahead, and be the place in the country where AI and small business unite for something really, really powerful, and I think that we have the opportunity to kind of punch above our weight and to create an environment whether it's through economic development councils, chambers of commerce, private enterprise, government just create an environment where small businesses can get the tools and medium-sized businesses get the tools they need to kind of punch above their weight and do a little bit more and we can become that place, because it's not anywhere else, it just doesn't exist in the country country, and I'm excited that maybe we can do that yeah, uh, we're watching it firsthand artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:What do you? What is that I mean? What are you talking about right now? So do you know what artificial intelligence is I mean I've been under a rock well, should we?
Speaker 4:try like a round table of like trying to define it I think you're the pro great point. Oh, that's a good point well, because, well, I mean, the thing is is it is really difficult. So if you had 100 artificial intelligence experts in the room and you asked them what is artificial intelligence, you'll get 100 answers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I bet.
Speaker 4:But it kind of is grounded in some similar principles, which is artificial intelligence is really just computer modeling, computer program that can accomplish tasks without human intervention and it can try and do it, when it does it well, in a way that you cannot distinguish from a computer or a human, and that's actually the origination of artificial intelligence. It's the, the turing test. Um, yeah, that's yeah, I'm slamming on the table like you think I'd learn not to do that, but I kid, that's like my like I love the enthusiasm you haven't heard, so um using his hands, folks, yeah, using my hands.
Speaker 4:I feel emphatic about alan turing. So alan turing created a um deterring test and basically it was can if a computer can produce an output and a human cannot distinguish whether or not that was created by a human or a computer, it passes the turing test. And that was like the ceiling of artificial intelligence. And then, a few years after that, they had this. These four really smart people had a meeting in Dartmouth and they called it artificial intelligence and actually they said this is a terrible name for what we're trying to describe. But the whole point of that that meeting was not to define it or name it, it was just to kind of get something moving. And so they left it.
Speaker 2:And now everybody criticizes the name artificial intelligence, but the name, the people who came up with it, they don't like it either. We're all kind of in this situation, and that was circa 50s.
Speaker 4:That was in the 50s, yeah, so technically ai ai has been around for a while yes, yes, technically, the idea of it and some of maybe the earlier applications have been around since like the 50s or 60s.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this isn't just some new thing that's coming out of nowhere, that people are. And then the other thing is I just want to get this out of the way. It's not taking our jobs. Talk about that because people are scared of it right. Do you get that when you go to your, your talks?
Speaker 4:people like yeah, yes and in fact some people, which is just kind of like. This seems a little contradictory to me, but a lot of people will say I don't want to use artificial intelligence because I'm afraid it will replace me. Right, and I would say whether or not you are using it has nothing to do with whether or not it will replace you. So, in the in the longer, in the longer run, like I like to think, I'm an ai realist. Not like a evangelist or a pessimist, I just think I'm like I try to be realistic about all of this. In the long term, it will 100 place jobs that we see today. In the nearer term, it is more likely that somebody who knows how to use ai will replace people who do not know how to use AI, and that's the more near-term thing. What we can think about, though, is there likely is going to be some pain in this shift, but if you think about back in 1900, I don't have these numbers right, but something like 80-something percent of America's workforce was on the farm- Right.
Speaker 4:And then they introduced the tractor.
Speaker 4:And now as we sit here today, 2% of America's workforce works on the tractor, and now as we sit here today, 2% of America's workforce works on the farm. Now I don't think we're all really that upset about the tractor, but there was a lot of pain when that happened. There was a massive societal shift. There was a whole retooling, a whole reskilling. The good thing that, then it makes me more hopeful about artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence especially on a level where everybody's using it actually is best used by people who have domain expertise. So if you know your profession, your trade, your skill, then you'll be able to use artificial intelligence in a way that most people couldn't. So, for instance, I always use this analogy so do you know Bobby Flay or Jose Andres? Sure, now, I think I'm a pretty decent cook. When I was in high school and college I at restaurants, um, at home I cook a lot, especially for emma, when and whatever she wants that she, she usually gets um, I'm pretty good at it, but what being smart?
Speaker 4:well, I'm pretty cooking, making emma whatever she wants, yes, um but if you were to put me and jose andres in the same kitchen, with the same tools and the same ingredients, and you ask us to make the same thing, the outcomes would be wildly different. And that's because these skilled, trained chefs know how to ask the right questions, they know how to cook, they know how to problem solve when something starts going wrong. They know what texture should feel like, what colors should feel like all these things that make it up where I don't have that understanding, so I can't use the tools in the way that they can. That's the same thing with AI.
Speaker 4:So I like to think that there's also going to be some of this where jobs in our current roles are going to be augmented and supported for us to be able to do more. I do think the workforce will become more distributed, so we're not going to have maybe as many larger employers, because people will be able to do a lot more on their own or in smaller teams and they'll be able to kind of go and branch out and accomplish things that they want to accomplish. So there's going to be this seismic shift, but next two, three, four, five years, it's more likely someone who knows how to use ai will replace you if you don't the tractor example brilliant that's david freeberg, that's not mine, oh all right, all right.
Speaker 4:Shout out to david, I have to um margaret.
Speaker 2:How's it going over there?
Speaker 3:great, I'm learning a lot. I know right. Do you have any questions for zach? A ton of questions, uh, let's. I don't even know where to begin uh, so let's start.
Speaker 2:Well, how about, where do you learn? Ai like, because you were saying constantly learning. So, marg, I just stepped in, I'm sorry, yeah, yeah, let's start there.
Speaker 4:So, um, people say like, what's the one blog, what's the one book, what's the one article, and and and I don't really think for us anyway and I'm looking at Emma to make sure that I'm not crazy but there isn't one thing, right, it's. So we, we spent a lot of time trying to find information, taking courses, taking certifications and just kind of start there, and so some of the ones off the top of my head that are really nice is Amazon has free courses on AI like 50, that teach you how to do prompt engineering. What is AI, what is machine learning? How does this stuff apply? And they're pretty good.
Speaker 2:Free.
Speaker 4:Free. Well, at least they were free. I don't know if they still are.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 4:A lot like LinkedIn released a bunch of free courses that now they charge for, but their introduction to AI is actually really good. That's actually the best introduction to AI course that I've taken and I'm taking a bunch.
Speaker 2:And it's Amazon.
Speaker 4:Well, this one is LinkedIn, but Amazon also has a lot of really good ones. Google has some good ones Copy AI, which, although I shouldn't mention it because I don't think it's public yet
Speaker 4:but they have a good content. Engineering one yeah, they're cool, they're nice to work with. So there's a lot of that. And then there's some really good articles out there. Microsoft has a really great article called the Right Way to AI and it's about how do you think, whether you're a big business or a small business, how do you think about applying AI into your business in a practical way. What are, like, the five steps you should take? I think it's five. That's really good. And then there's people that I follow on, like Twitter and LinkedIn and stuff like that.
Speaker 4:Probably the best person that is really deep, like really one of the modern architects of AI, is called Andrew Ng. Ng is his last name. He has a good TED talk from a couple years ago. He's the person who, I think, does the best job of taking really complex topics and speaking about it plainly that I can understand it. I don't have a tech background, so I need that to happen for me. He's really really good and then just also following what the bigger companies are doing, what they're saying.
Speaker 4:So obviously that's Amazon, google, microsoft. Also, perplexity is really doing a lot of really interesting stuff and they have rolled out a really good model and also just really smart the way they think about AI. So that's how I do it. But for other people, I mean, we also really learned. We put together a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn called AI and Business Weekly, and we put it together because it didn't exist. We just wanted someone to put together, like this newsletter of like what is the news that's happening in AI this week that I can use, not like is the Terminator real or what is Amazon and Google doing? Like what they're doing doesn't apply to my business. So so we put that together and I think that's that's pretty helpful.
Speaker 3:So what was it that sparked your interest in starting to take these courses and wanting to teach people about AI?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean that's a really good question. I don't know. I don't know. I mean ChaiGPD came out. Em and I, you know we worked together. We sat at the same table, so ChaiGPD came out Em and I you know we worked together. We sat at the same table At GCM, at GCM, and we just started using it and we, like, looked at each other. And I don't even know if we said words, but like, we both just looked at each other and we're like everything's changed.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you're sitting there at the table.
Speaker 4:You're an award-winning marketing company we didn't know exactly at that moment, but we wanted to be a part of it. I don't so I don't really know. I don't really know what it was. I just felt that there was, there was something about this, and so we set out on this path to start learning and we took every webinar and course and attended everything we could do. We'd look for conferences, we read white papers and all this stuff, and there's a really good white paper I can share with Andrew McAfee and I think it's Eric Bjornsson, who. They found this really cool thing called Work Helix, which is not applicable to SMBs.
Speaker 4:But there's my tangent for the moment. And we became really frustrated, actually, when we started trying to learn because everything was like in two categories One sorry one I'm punching the table again. It was really like philosophical will ai take over the world? Um, and, by the way, fun fact, terminator came out in 84 and in the movie it says something like um, they said this is a you know ai robot or whatever from the future and you can destroy people and all that. And it said, well, those things don't exist. And they said, well, it will in 40 years. And we're sitting here in 2024. I don't think it's going to happen anyway.
Speaker 2:That's just kind of like a fun thing.
Speaker 4:So it's either like really philosophical or it was like very much for, like, big enterprise companies. How do you use all of your like big data and all this stuff? I mean like so I'm certified by the Wharton School of Business, as you kindly mentioned, and it's really really good. At the end, though, it's like now that you know all this stuff about AI and machine learning and deep learning and neural networks and all this stuff, how do you apply this in your business? Step one hire two data scientists, and I'm like you've got to be kidding me.
Speaker 4:I don't know any business that can hire two data scientists as a first step for implementing AI. Yeah Right, not even like. You used AI and you make all this money and now you want to do more. That's your first step. And so we were very frustrated and we said there's nothing, just for the average business. And what we see now, especially with the data, is that AI helps under-resourced businesses way more than it helps the big guys.
Speaker 4:Way more, it sure does To a level of like two to three times. And so we were like well, if no one else is doing this, we need to learn enough about it so that we can do it. Because we just believe that it was important. And we do believe very strongly that this is like a once in a lifetime opportunity to level the playing field between megacorporations and the rest of us and I like megacorporations. We buy from Amazon and all that stuff, but not to get too philosophical.
Speaker 4:But the American economy is better when we're more resilient. And how do we become more resilient? It's more participatory. And how is that possible? Well, that means that all these companies from anywhere in the country, no matter how big they are or where they are located, should have all the tools and resources to be able to take a great idea, bring it to market and change people's lives. So that's where we kind of really feel mission-driven about this and actually ties back to when Emma was knocking on doors in Babylon, because she felt that small businesses could get a lot more out of the technology that was available at that moment.
Speaker 2:That's a hell of a blog post, right there Knocking on doors in Babylon, and so now your niche is helping small to medium-sized businesses utilize AI.
Speaker 3:Is that correct?
Speaker 4:Exactly, so basically what we do. Can I say what we do why?
Speaker 4:wouldn't you say what we do? Well, I love saying what we do. So basically, if you look at, like, what the big companies are doing like the IBMs of the world and stuff like that they'll go into a big company. They'll take all their fancy data that they've been piling up for the past 20, 30, 50 years or whatever, and they'll build proprietary AI models to help serve internal and external purposes and they'll charge you $10 million and it'll take five years. What they do is basically what we've tried to do, but for everybody else. So we go into a business. We gather business intelligence from them.
Speaker 4:So we want to know not like, how good are you at AI? I mean, we do want to know that. But if you had another employee, what would you have them do? Where do you get the highest ROI for the time that you spend? What task always falls off your to-do list, but you know that it's really important to get done All these kinds of things, because the way we think about AI and the way that people who are smarter than us think about it is AI is a task master. So we're trying to identify what tasks in a business's current workflows are right for AI intervention to either automate it, make it more efficient, like all this stuff, and then we put together an off-the-shelf, basically like custom AI toolkit, no coding. These things are available without having to do any type of like tech stuff.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And like a two-day training, and we'll train the team, we'll train a team. This is how you use AI. This is how you use the tools that we think will make the most sense for your business. And then in day two, we're actually doing existing workflows with these businesses, but we're showing them how to integrate AI into it and we're trying to get them to do things so that they can see the value that they can get the buy-in originally and then they can build on it. And then we walk with them for like four weeks after to make sure they're kind of up and running and all that stuff. And so that's our bread and butter. I mean, we do speaking. We also have some stuff you know. After that we can be like you're a fractional chief implementation officer, but that's basically how we believe we're going to be able to help the most businesses get used out of this technology so do you just excuse me, I don't know, do you have?
Speaker 2:so you must just have like a belt, like a tool belt of different ai resources yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4:So we spend a lot of time on product demos and so you're pretty much and linkedin messaging founders who, by the way, are really kind and usually respond. No kink, like it's amazing you're.
Speaker 2:Now. You're the ambassador of all of these other AI companies using their gear, but you learned how to use it Right. When I say gear, I mean software.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you're learning how to implement it. So you go into a business, you ask all those questions and then you're like, okay, this one and this one might work for you. That's exactly right, and then this is how you do it. Yeah, and so if we get hit by a bus, you still know how to do this stuff.
Speaker 4:You know the foundational principles. Yes, you know, this stuff moves quickly. So, what's true and good and really works now might be slightly different in the next three months, two months, but the foundational principles that we're trying to impart, that we've learned that have some staying power. You should know that by the time we're done with you and then if we again move to Mars or something in the next six years, you're fine, You're off and running.
Speaker 4:You know how to start, not only how to use this stuff today but, to ride that wave so that you can continue to use it and gain advantages tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Can I help the business plan a little bit? A little additional thought here.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're figuring this out as we go.
Speaker 2:Can you get paid from those AI platforms? Yes, ooh, I like that You've already thought that you've already run down that road.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So some of them some are so, even like the big ones that like only serve mega corporations they'll still get on the phone with you and they'll figure out a way. They'll be like, look, we can't do it like this, but if you ever get this, then you know, give us a call. I mean, there's this one, this like like work helix, just like to to shot them out just because of how kind and wonderful they are. These are some of the smartest people in the ai space on the planet who have, who have unveiled this really incredible dashboard that essentially takes public information and breaks down each role that they either have in their business or that they're going to hire for into tasks and then has a formula that shows what their exposure level is to AI and how much money they can save, how much more money they can make by integrating AI in all these really smart ways.
Speaker 4:The day that they were launching with Andrew Ng was on their launch webinar the CEO got on the phone with me on a call. I reached out to him randomly like an hour before, not because I'm anything, just because these are like really interested people who want to help get this stuff out into people's hand Copy AI. I speak to them every month, not because I'm anything special, just because they're really interested in helping people and they sell to big businesses. But they love how SMBs are using their tool and how we're helping them do that. So I mean Jasper too like Jasper is a great marketing, really great like full stack marketing AI tool, and so like they're, they're willing to get on the phone with you and figure out ways, because this is the generative part of this. The stuff that happened when ChatGPT launched is still so new that I think everybody's just trying to figure this out.
Speaker 2:And these guys are just so happy that people are calling them up and asking him questions. I mean I they've been in the closet for how many years, like with all this great data and all this information that they want to get out there, and now it's finally.
Speaker 4:He has a big appetite for it. Yeah, no, that's a good point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Ah.
Speaker 4:I try.
Speaker 2:Um, what about SMBs, which is small to medium businesses? I had to Google that. Thank you very much. What would you say to them? How do they start? What's a good best practice on how to get an SMB to get on the AI train?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a good question because a lot of times when people hear AI, they think it just takes technological know-how to start using these tools.
Speaker 2:For everybody's head. Too hard, too complicated, Right.
Speaker 4:And there is like the more technical expertise that you can gain inside of these tools. They become more and more useful. But you really don't need that. You just have to know your own business. You just have to know your own role, and so that really the best thing to do is to look at stuff you're already doing. People really run into a roadblock is when they're like this tool is so powerful, it's amazing I'm going to do all these things that I believe I should be doing but that I haven't done before. That's not where you start. That is where hopefully you get to, but that's not where you start. So you look at what am I doing on a day-to-day basis, that if I had a junior employee or even just another person on my team, I would love for them to just run this and do this and they would need very little information or know-how or maturity of the market.
Speaker 4:Those are the areas. So spot like one, two, three of those areas that are really accomplishable but have some meaning in your workflow, and then start figuring out ways, start using AI to augment that, to maybe automate some of that process. And the way you can think about using AI is as if you're talking to an employee or a team member and you're giving them the brief, the instructions, the goals, the audience, the purpose of what you're trying to do and having AI kind of help you out with that. And once you so, you're probably going to have in your business a couple of champions, a couple of people who are like we are using AI already. They're kind of like BYO AI, you know, bring your own AI to work. They people who are like we are using ai already. They're kind of like byo ai, you know, bring your own ai to work. They're using ai already and they want their business, but their business isn't really doing anything.
Speaker 4:Short, tangent, fun fact short a real minority of businesses in the country or have invested in ai. So most haven't done it. So if you are even listening to this, you're already ahead of the game. Number two congratulations right-.
Speaker 2:Congratulations Right. Yeah, well, thanks for doing it, for putting it on.
Speaker 4:The second thing is of the minority of businesses who have invested in AI. A minority of those businesses have actually invested in training. So they're just kind of like putting these tools into their stacks and being like here, here's AI, go use it. They're not saying this is how we do it as an organization, here's our policies, here's really good use cases that make sense for us, not for some other business, for our business. And so if you're able to get these champions to do these small tasks first, now you're starting to display very easily value to the rest of the business.
Speaker 4:Everybody else is going to want to dive in. Then you start building on those tasks and one task leads to something else and you start doing more and more. So start small, do it in areas of your expertise, like the Jose Andres example. Don't go outside of your expertise. If you don't know marketing, you won't know what a good blog article looks like. You won't know what a good social media post looks like. You won't know how to troubleshoot all that stuff. So stay in your own area, use it for something small and then grow from there.
Speaker 3:When we were outside earlier, you would use the term prompt engineering, which I think is so important because, like you said, you can invest all this time and money into different apps and software, but if you don't know how to utilize it efficiently, then it's just a waste of time and money.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a really good point. So I mean there is definitely a ceiling that we see where a lot of people are like oh, I use ChaiGPT, I'm already using it, and then we kind of work with them and we engage with them and we see, and we see that they're not really using some of those techniques and so their ceiling with the tool is a little bit lower than it would be if they were able to kind of use some of these tools. So that is a really important thing. But again, a lot of these tools are free. You don really important thing.
Speaker 4:But again, like, a lot of these tools are free, like you don't need to be a master at prompt engineering to get started, um, and you can just start using it. And prompt engineering is kind of a funny thing. Like I don't know if you saw the um daily show segment with john stewart on ai, no, so it's really good, really really good, really interesting. Half of it was wrong, oh, and, and one part that was wrong is he said, which is funny, but he said prompt engineering, oh, it's like vice president of question asking Right.
Speaker 4:Like that's funny. It's not true, though, that just how you structure your prompts, the way you use capitalization, the way you use bullets, the way you provide examples, the way you use context, all this stuff will drastically determine the output of the model.
Speaker 2:No, kidding, prompt engineering. So if I'm an SMB and I want to get into it and I have these, I'm going to call you. Okay, I got that. Yeah. But if I you know I'm not there yet, I'm going to call you. Okay, I got that. Yeah. But if I, you know I'm not there yet, I'm not there yet. Do I just go ahead and Google these tasks and artificial intelligence? How do you find?
Speaker 3:these. Yeah, I think a lot of people are familiar with ChatGPT, to get just to name one. But then it's kind of like where do you go from there? What?
Speaker 4:would you recommend as kind of the next step into AI? Yeah, that's a good question. So chat GPT the free version is good. The pro version is $20 a month or something and like I don't know if I spend a better $20 a month. Gemini is Google's. Free version is fine.
Speaker 4:Claude, which is from Anthropic, which Amazon bought. Claude was supposed to be like for the people and then Amazon bought it, which is fine, no problem. But Claude is really really good and their free models are good. Perplexity is great. So Perplexity is trying to replace Google and for me it basically has. I even perplexed myself the other day and it was really cool. It does sound weird and it had pictures of me and talked about our business and all these things, said that we won an award. It was really cool. So they're trying to replace Google. We use it a lot for research. Meta, which is Facebook. Basically they dropped their open source, which means that anybody can kind of see the coding, take it and build on top of it without having to pay anything. They're basically doing that because they kind of missed the boat with ChatGPT to monetize their foundational model. But Meta AI is really great and then we use Copy AI a lot. If anybody wants to use it. I do have a 40% discount code for the first year.
Speaker 4:And so then it ends up being like 200 something bucks for the whole year. You get five licenses. It incorporates multiple models like ChatGPT, and Claude is in it, so you don't have to know which one is the best at the moment, and it can scale workflows like crazy. So if I'm going to write a really specific sales email not to somebody who owns a marketing agency, but to Mike- it will just, from your LinkedIn URL, look at all this information, tailor our sales message directly to you.
Speaker 4:Now, if I have an Excel sheet of 100 LinkedIn URLs, I can upload that Excel sheet and write 100 of those in about 5 minutes. Come on, and they're pretty darn good. We used to spend like 60% of our time trying to fix them and make them better. Now it's like 10%. I mean, they're getting so good and, of course, I guess we're better at prompting also, so that's really good.
Speaker 4:And then, jasper, they kind of were like meddling about a bit and they revamped and there's like a full stack marketing platform. You can put into it like your brand guidelines, your client brand guidelines, your tone and voice, all these books, and when it starts producing, it'll do it in that vein, like in that tone and voice. You can very easily switch for outputs between one and the other and the way that it it briefs you, so like, let you start by saying like I want to write a blog article, and it'll be like okay, and it'll start prompting you to give it information that it believes it needs. So you don't have to start thinking about how to structure your entire prompts like teaching you a prompt engineer.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that's exactly right, yeah right, it's, it's really smart.
Speaker 4:So, so those are good and and, like, I'm pretty sure all of these have free versions. Of course, the paid versions are better than the other, but, um, so, just try them out, pick one. And. And the other thing, too, is like you don't even need to know exactly how to do all this, so, like, just open up chat, gpt, it's free and say I am this, I do this, this is my business, here's my um, my business. Like uh url. I'm looking for ways to incorporate. This is my business. Here's my business URL.
Speaker 4:I'm looking for ways to incorporate AI into my business, oh dear what questions do you have for me so you can help me figure out what do I do?
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 4:And then go from there. I'm going to do that when I get back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for our marketing listeners. Do you have which? We're the American Marketing. Association, so I'm sure we have a lot. What would you?
Speaker 4:say are probably the top three AI platforms that you think all marketers should be looking into? I think definitely Jasper, especially if I think about a lot of the larger marketing clients who are really handling multi-channel marketing campaigns, ads, all this stuff and multiple clients having to really differentiate between the different brands, tones and voices and like all this stuff and multiple clients having to like really differentiate between the different brands, tones and voices, and things like that. Jasper is just like it's like by marketers for marketers. It's really solid Copy. Ai can do a lot of what Jasper can do, but can do that workflow scaling, so like, let's say, you have a workflow, and by workflow I literally just mean like prompts that could take you from task to task to accomplish something complete. That's that's what I love it yeah, um.
Speaker 4:So if you have like a workflow that you've identified to help you produce a blog post or a linkedin post or a memo or an email whatever, and you have like some kind of excel sheet where you can replicate that for like 100 different use cases, copy I will scale that for you and help you do that in no time. It's truly incredible. So those are the two that really work. And then you're going to need some design. So Canva has a really nice AI tool built inside of it.
Speaker 4:Now, especially if you're resizing for multiple channels and stuff like that, it can do magic fills. So if you have an image, it'll help fill the rest of it so you can get the right dimensions and it'll look right. It can do natural language editing so you can just like select a part of the image and then say, like you know, add a sunrise there or whatever, without having to like do any kind of fancy editing. So, like canva is really good for. Like for the design side, adobe just released, I think, called firefly, like their canva competitor now adobe is competing with canva which is kind of funny.
Speaker 4:Um, and so those are definitely the ones that I would that are like really serious, like like functional beasts when it comes to like marketing work yeah, our listeners are, you know, a lot of solopreneurs, small marketing agencies some decent sized agencies.
Speaker 2:I mean, you've seen the market here. You've been here for five and a half years. You said, um, and and you, you started out as a marketing agency and and you've kind of pivoted over the past. What years?
Speaker 4:you said 15 months yeah, about a year and a half yeah year and a half you've pivoted just solely.
Speaker 2:What now?
Speaker 4:yeah, so basically we still are doing some marketing and comms for some of our existing relationships, but our company now is the training, the AI training.
Speaker 2:AI training.
Speaker 4:Where we go in, we figure out the ins and outs of a business the best we can. We train them how to use AI, we support them post-implementation as much as they want and get them up and running, and all the stats are out there. You're saving 25% of time, you're doing 12% more tasks and you're increasing your quality of work by 40%. Small businesses, according to the US Chamber of Commerce. They say they're saving 13 hours a week per employee.
Speaker 2:Nice Per employee. I mean, like what business doesn't want to do this?
Speaker 4:So it's really incredible, Like the numbers are there and just in our personal experience we've seen it. I mean we're working with businesses here, Mount Pleasant, we're working with stuff, you know, people in Somerville, we're working people kind of outside of here, Hilton Head area and New York and Arizona and stuff like that Midwest, but it's everywhere. I mean what we see is astonishing. I mean, at the end of these, it's just such a gratifying feeling at the end of these things.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's so new man, I mean, you're at the forefront of this. I don't know. Revolution of sorts, right, this information technology revolution that you're constantly learning, I bet, right, I mean, every week do you do like, do you guys have like a podcast that you like? Yeah, like a podcast that you that like? Yeah, this is the podcast other than the american marketing association. I was gonna say it's definitely this one charleston marketing podcast, but yeah, um, is there? Is there a resource that you go to to learn, like on a weekly? Because I just feel like it's developing?
Speaker 4:you know, to be certified is cool, but you probably have to recertify every other month yes, to be certified is good, and especially like in such a like young market type of thing, like you know, it shows that you have some level of credibility.
Speaker 2:You studied some things and did some.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and you passed. You kind of know what you're doing at this point at least. But you're right, If you don't stay on top of it every week, you can begin to fall behind. It is a very intentional effort.
Speaker 2:I think that's also just, if I can say the value that we add is that we do that.
Speaker 4:I was going to say every week, you don't have to, we'll just come and tell you Um, but as far as like a podcast, like I'm trying to find one, like I live into a bunch there's it's. It's mostly that like some podcasts are like really good cause they have a certain guest but not like every week.
Speaker 2:is that good? Okay, that's like the best prompt engineer that you can. No, emma, can you think of one?
Speaker 4:No, I mean honestly, it's like really frustrating. Well, let's become one then. Well, that's why we exist now.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 4:I don't feel like there is one Again, like as far as like a big, big time thought leader who can just like break this stuff down. Um, andrew ing is is definitely one of my favorites, um, I mean. And then like again, these companies like are putting out some really interesting stuff. But like as far as the first podcast, there's like a lot most of the podcasts like they're interviewing the, someone from nvidia, or they're interviewing someone from google, and like I find it very interesting but it's not translate.
Speaker 3:And that's why your niche is so amazing is you're focusing on that gap you have. As you mentioned, you have a lot of companies focused on these huge corporations for AI, but I think that's so neat that your niche is focusing on what small to medium-sized businesses need.
Speaker 4:I really believe it's there. We try to find people who are doing it and we can't just because we want to learn from them. We try to find conferences about this stuff that's for SMBs. We can't because we want to go and attend and learn and stuff like that. So it's not there.
Speaker 4:I mean, I think we're still pretty early, I mean even just like in our engagements. Like you know, when we started doing this AI stuff, everybody saw us as like marketing and we started telling people, hey, like we're actually doing this ai stuff and even like really good contacts who believe we were smart people like, oh, that's nice, you know. Like they would kind of smile yeah, that's good. Now we're getting like inboxed, like people are like, hey, like can you come talk to us about ai? Or hey, can you do this? Like even in just a year? It's like transforming. But people are just starting. Still, as we sit today, by far the large majority of small and medium-sized businesses are not using AI and especially not in any sort of strategic way, which is that gap that we want to fill. I mean, we're even going to put on this I believe it'll be the only in the nation as far as we can tell AI conference just for SMBs, and it'll be in September of this year in Somerville.
Speaker 4:So, it's just non-existent. It's just really hard. I mean, follow GCM? I don't know. Follow GCM. Our weekly newsletter is good. We have talked about doing our own podcast and doing stuff like that, but with this kind of podcast, I mean we're not going to be able to beat this thing. So we'll just come on here whenever you have us.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's. You're more than welcome. Come back anytime.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:There are so many topics to cover in AI. I know we had an event a couple months ago just covering the basics of AI and the ethics behind it and everything, and Mike and I have talked about it before. There are just so many topics you can cover. It's just endless.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it is. I mean the presentations that we're giving. I mean I'm going to the Technical College of the Low Country in September and giving a presentation on like how AI is changing the workforce and what universities can do to start bringing on the skills that are necessary to meet that. I mean we gave a course on like how AI or a presentation how AI is advancing scams and how do you defend that, oh good Lord, to how do you use?
Speaker 4:AI in marketing to how do you use AI in sales and admin and what are the policy and guidelines and ethics around it. There's so many topics and I think, as this goes on, there'll be more and more people who will find those niches to really help shine light on those things.
Speaker 3:We'll have to get you guys out to one of our AMA events to come speak soon. I hear they're great.
Speaker 2:Somebody lied to you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but people, is that right? I mean marketers, you know. But yeah, I mean I've heard from a lot of people that, oh, you got to go to these events.
Speaker 2:They're really cool and like the people are great, you know which is what we've come to learn. We're trying to grow the community here with folks like you.
Speaker 4:And that's why we don't need to be doing marketing. There's already tons of really good marketing here.
Speaker 2:So many good marketing agencies and advertising agencies and solopreneurs.
Speaker 4:And it's great and we can all kind of work together in a way.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, a lot of us are competitors and this and that, but at the end of the day, everybody kind of has their own niche and we can really work off each other.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's like the breweries here, right, like I mean, how many breweries do we have? I feel like it kind of makes us a destination for it and people, you know they have that like bus that takes you to all, like it's free.
Speaker 2:I got the hat on that bus, yeah right.
Speaker 4:So so like, yes, like to your point like they're in competition, but actually the sum of their parts is creating something a little bit greater, together as a community right.
Speaker 2:I don't think we're going to end the episode right there. I mean, I don't, don't want to, but that was exactly what we're looking for. That was the soundbite. I need to write that one down, zach. Good job.
Speaker 3:Do we have time for one more question? We've got time. We've got all the time in the world, but go ahead, margaret what do you have? What would you say listeners should look out for in terms of what will be evolving in AI? What's kind of what do you see? What can you forecast over the next couple months to years?
Speaker 4:So I think there's two things. We'll see how much it's applicable to like a small medium business depends on how it rolls out but one of them is this idea of a genetic AI, which is essentially these like highly specialized models that will begin and then iterate and then complete a task without you having to go in the middle of it. So it'll like actually like you can watch it ask itself questions and then answer them and then improve and then bring add new ideas to like this to-do list. It's really like, really amazing.
Speaker 4:I mean, think about it simply as going on like gemini, which is google's model, and saying like, book me flights to tucson, uh, at the end of may, for two people and I I need to have an aisle seat, and uh, it'll be like okay, and then it goes boom, boom, boom, boom, does all this, and it'll be like well, actually there's not really any things, it's going to be this much money or whatever, and it just starts like accomplishing all this stuff. Or, like you know, I proposed to Emma in Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town and our anniversary is coming up Can you create a trip, book us flights, get us hotel rooms and make sure we get into Kirstenbosch Garden on December 28th.
Speaker 2:Wow, that was good Nope. Ooh, wow, that was good Nope.
Speaker 4:No 29th was when I proposed All right.
Speaker 2:Well, that's okay. Okay, you're forgiven.
Speaker 4:So that's called agentic AI. It's like accomplishing these really specialized tasks, and then what we're going to have layered on top of it, so we don't have to engage with each agent, is a general purpose technology chat, gpt, general purpose technology engaging with all these agents to kind of help you put all this together. So that's one way where this is going which actually makes sense, because they're running out of data to train these models on. So we might think the whole world has all this data and it's really really good, but actually they're running out and what they're talking about is actually creating synthetic data, which is fake data to train models on. But that's a little bit kind of like incest, yeah, and so you can get real big problems with that, but that's how. That's how desperate they're they're starting to become because they're really scared that they're going to run out of data. And so the way that you can get around that is you take more specialized data. That you know is true, cause like, very true, specialized, high quality data in shorter quantities is much better than like, okay, data in larger quantities. So that would make sense if you're creating agentic AI, that you would have more specialized data sets because we're not running out of that.
Speaker 4:The other thing that's really interesting is what Apple's doing. So Apple realized they lost this big foundational model race. But they have phones in everyone's hand and what they're creating is something called Realm. It's like regenerative reference as a language model. That's not right. But it's like regenerative reference as a language model.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's not right but it's something like that, we can Google it.
Speaker 4:And basically what it does is it runs a small version of our AI model on your phone. So it's not running in the cloud like ChatGPT, it runs on your phone. Ah, and what it can do. So it's kind of like what Siri was supposed to be, but like actually, and so what it can do is like it will see what is on your screen and you can just give it commands like that, so, like so. For instance, you don't have to like so if I'm like texting with Emma and I have that open and I'm and I just I just say like, book us, um, you know a reservation for two tonight at uh, at Husk, It'll know that I'm speaking with Emma. It'll see, or or like, um, if I'm speaking with Emma, It'll see, or like. If I'm on a local boutique website and they have all these dresses that I want to buy for Emma, I'll be like buy the second one, Stuff like that, where it's actually referencing what is happening in real time on your phone.
Speaker 4:That can become really, really useful, and the other applications that can be built on top of it can become really useful. So those are the two things that are pretty interesting, but I'm interested to see what they do when they run out of data. That's why you see crazy stuff happening, where ChatGPT created a crawler to go and crawl YouTube videos, create transcripts and then train its model, which is illegal. Why didn't Google, when they found out about it, sue ChatGPT? Because Google did the same thing and they knew it, whoa all right so google is it?
Speaker 4:the chat gpt was like we'll do this, they'll find out, they're not going to get mad at us, because then we'll say you did it too, and on youtube you, as a youtube creator, own that, not google. So they really don't have a right to go in and scrape all your stuff. But those bastards, but they did it and uh. So that's how they're starting to get like real, real scared about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well everything you know, I like to use my, my superpowers for good. You know what I mean. A lot of people like to use their superpowers for bad, and it's just, it's always going to happen, right. So the things are going to be scary, but we'll just get through it and good will come out.
Speaker 4:The end Right through it and good will come out.
Speaker 2:The end right, we always prevail I don't know.
Speaker 4:I mean, it's also why we want high participation in the economy is so we don't have just a few people doing this, because at the end of the day they're going to be like okay, fine, we'll take away Google and no one will want that Okay fine, we'll take away Microsoft and ChatGPT.
Speaker 4:No one will want that. So if those are our only options, we're kind of beholden to it, we kind of get away with it. So if we have more participants in this economy, in this AI industry and all that stuff, we have more choice and it keeps everybody in check a little bit more. So that's why small and medium-sized businesses need to use this stuff.
Speaker 2:That's holding, keeping it in check. I think that's probably the next thing that needs to happen, like we need to focus on how regulatory you know regulations and and things like that need to. I would imagine step up, for example, when you, when you buy digital media on a certain platform like meta, that they won't let you say certain things, or do certain things, or that type of thing, you know so I'm, you know, for and against regular regulations and we need some rules. Yeah, you know, and I feel like ai is not there yet with the rules, is it?
Speaker 4:I mean it's, it's a wild, wild west it's a bit wild and what concerns me a little bit is that the people who are advising the government and you have to say like do people in the government really know about ai?
Speaker 4:and that's not a knock at the government. It's just like it's a highly specialized field not the level that we're talking about that smbs can use it, but the architects of this stuff is very specialized. I mean, you're talking about things that even the one that's building it don't understand at a hundred percent level. I mean, they understand most of it, but they don't even understand a hundred percent of what they're building and how it works. So it's a really complicated thing. So, like, does the government really understand this stuff in a way that they can regulate it? No, and they know that. So they have this task force that they put together. Yeah, but who's on it? Right, all the big guys yeah and so what happens with that?
Speaker 4:that makes me nervous. Hopefully they're all in there with these really great um ideas and benefit of society, you know hopefully but they might not be.
Speaker 4:They might, they might put this little wall, pull up the ladder and say, okay, we'll take it from here. There's gonna be a few of us now. We're gonna make it a little too difficult for all these other players to kind of enter the market, and that's what we really do not want to have, because then they'll call all our stuff and we won't say anything because we're gonna need the tech. Just like you can't take my phone away from me, like if they were. Like we're spying on you every day, everything you're doing, I'll put tape over the camera, you're not gonna take my phone away right it's too important to our our way of life now turn off
Speaker 2:yeah she's always listening, so we'll see. No, it is in your iphone is too, yeah I have on hey siri on your iphone yes, listening always, I always turn it off. That's, that's right, that's right, because I mean, and that's ai too right, um, when you see those ads on your, on your, feed and and were like.
Speaker 4:I was just talking about that.
Speaker 2:Well, artificial intelligence picked up on that, so you were engaging with it without even knowing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I mean artificial is also in the ad space. It does some really cool stuff Like it can. It can pair recommended like products that make no sense to like the average human, but they're like. Well, we know that A lot of people are buying things like this. It can also immediately render things right in front of you in real time, so it can send you a sales email. Let's say I don't know who makes clothes? Does anybody make clothes, patagonia? Thank you, patagonia. Patagonia sends you an email, wants to sell you some clothes.
Speaker 2:Depending on where you are, what time of day, what the weather is, that will what needs, what image needs to be rendered and sale needs to be rendered at top the moment you open it. I've seen that. I've seen that the weather was bad and I saw an article or an ad on an umbrella or a rain jacket or something, because the weather was bad here now we're all gonna get fed patagonia ads because all of our phones in here are listening.
Speaker 4:Stop listening, yeah so I mean this is really cool. I mean, and think about that kind of technology can be a game changer for an SMB Right now only like the big people have the opportunity to use that tech. But like what if, like the boutiques here and the other clothing companies here in Charleston and Somerville had the opportunity?
Speaker 2:to do that. Okay, so boutique XYZ let's say I'm a clothing company, since we're talking about Patagonia they go and they call you up and they say, hey, we know we need some help, we want to go this route. We just don't know what. And they don't know the trick of ask AI to how to use AI. So what do you say? You say what are the tasks that are?
Speaker 4:Yeah it's a good question, but I mean so that trick about asking AI how to use AI is like an okay starter, so you wouldn't even know what to tell AI to get it to analyze your business well enough to identify what all the areas in your business AI can intervene in. So it's a good start, but by no means is like are you going to even know. Again, jose Andres, you have to know how to ask the right question and how to improve, like improve the tool so they just need to call you then.
Speaker 4:I mean, that's just the only way yeah, I mean, for sure they need to call us, but um, but, but I really think what they do is just start with one task. Don't think about them, just start with the task, just like, just be like. You know, I'm constantly having to create captions for the new clothes that come in. I'm taking pictures and I got to think of 100 new captions every time I get 100 new pieces of clothes in there. No, you don't really have to do that. What you can do is upload links to those photos, upload them to like a copy ai thing and have it generate 100 of those captions at once, based on whatever other type of parameters you want to put in there to guide it gosh, you've been doing this for a little bit, then how did you just come up with that like that so quickly?
Speaker 4:tuesday, good lord, that was awesome andrew ing, the guy I'm a big fan of, said when people ask me how a business can use ai, it's like asking me how a business can use electricity right, there's just so many, it just depends on what the business is, what it wants to accomplish and things like that, but also, uh, emma worked for a couple boutiques, so I do have a little bit of oh cheater, I didn't know that, listener, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:I promise, um my gosh, this is just like a value add here, people. Margaret, what else you got? You're the smart one of the group here.
Speaker 3:Ask another good question anything that knew it in terms of ethics for somebody getting started with ai. Just bring this up, because we did have a great coffee talk, uh, and they discussed the ethics of AI in terms of copy and pasting. What information you're being given? What advice would you give listeners about the ethics?
Speaker 4:It's a really good question and I would say that there are smarter people in the world who don't share my view, so just take this with a grain of salt. So last year, people were scared to tell their customers or clients that they were using AI. This year, people are lying that they use AI even when they're not, because they know that it's something that they should be saying that they're doing. When you use AI, we don't think you need to disclose that you're using it. We just do because we are proud of it and we think that it helps us and we think it makes us look smart. But you can and you can have a statement on your website and you can create language that you share with your client. If you're handling their sensitive information that's a different story then you probably want to tell them in what ways you are using their information in AI, in what ways you will not use their information in AI. So that's one thing.
Speaker 4:The other thing is people really worry about plagiarism. Yeah, it's almost impossible for AI to plagiarize. It just doesn't happen. There's some times where there's sometimes where, like I'm like this must be plagiarized. I'm just copy and paste it into like Google or something like that and it's not there. Also, tools like Jasper have plagiarism checker in there. You know, don't trust it a hundred percent, but it's probably pretty good. But you know you really shouldn't be just pasting something that AI generates without making it your own anyway. So you really shouldn't run into this issue. But let's say it's like so good, it's really good, and you don't check it, which you should, but you don't check it and you publish it, and then someone sues you. They say that that's my work here. I can show you that this is my work that you've just plagiarized.
Speaker 4:Microsoft, amazon and Google have all said, and they all have a policy, that they will indemnify their users from such lawsuits, from such lawsuits, which means that if, mike, you get sued because you used the language that I've used before in a blog article or something, I sue you and you use Gemini, google will take that lawsuit on for you. Bring it on, zach. Fine, because they don't want people being scared to use their product. They want people using it and so they think it's worth it, and also, the amount of times that it actually plagiarizes is almost none. Now, as far as copywriting and all this stuff, that's a little bit of a different story, but that's how. So we tell people we're using it. We think it's smart. We figure out a way that if there's sensitive information what we don't we have a policy about it and we tell people about that and we don't really worry about plagiarizing because we prompt the model really heavily and we edit the outputs.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 3:I do think I agree there should be no fear in being transparent that you are utilizing AI, because, if anything, it just shows your clients and those around you that you are educated in the market of AI and you're utilizing it to the best of your ability and using it more so as a tool, not just a solution, using it as a tool to leverage your business. And I think transparency I agree with you, I think that's key.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think it's smart. I don't think ethically it means that you need to, but I agree with you. I think it is smart and I promise that if your clients aren't asking you to use AI in their work now, they will be Soon they will be asking. And if you don't use like if you're sending a proposal and one agency says we use AI in all these really smart ways, another agency doesn't mention it that agency who's saying they're using AI will have the leg up.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 4:I mean maybe not today, but very soon. So I think it's nothing but a value add. I mean it's nothing but a value add. I mean it's like we have an accountant who does a great job with our taxes and he doesn't disclose to us that he used a calculator when he was doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know like okay, Another good example Great Tractors and calculators. I love it. I love it. We're using AI for the descriptions and the titles of these podcasts Booyah.
Speaker 3:And to be transparent, I actually did prompt chat GPT to come up with a list of questions to ask an expert in AI for this podcast.
Speaker 4:That's amazing. I'm not actually here. This is AI.
Speaker 3:Oh boy Sorry.
Speaker 2:All right Well with that, we're going to bid you adieu, Margaret. Do you have any other questions? Any final comments?
Speaker 3:I know you mentioned you have your conference, or you have an event in Somerville. You said that'll be this summer. And how can people you know?
Speaker 4:get a hold of you yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. So it's going to be in September. It'll be in Somerville. It'll be one of a kind AI for SMBs. It'll be two days. We'll have sessions that people can actually take the information and use immediately. We're not going to have people on stage saying what if you could do this, what if we did that? And asking more questions than they're answering. We're only going to answer questions for people and it's going to be a lot of fun. We already have some ideas about an commitments, quite honestly, which is really exciting, and we're working with some local organizations as well in the.
Speaker 4:Tri-County area Booyah AMA In the Tri-County area. To make this really, really wonderful and to show people we are going to bring in like maybe one or two speakers, speakers, but to show people you don't need to leave this area to find the ai expertise that you need to grow your business yes, it's here, it's all here, I already know that it's all here, and so we're going to show people that and I bet, if it's not this year but soon, people will fly in for this yes, it'll be the only one of its kind, so that'll be in september.
Speaker 4:I'm also giving a tedx talk in november 9th and in hilton head, which would be really cool, about AI. I'm not going to give away too much, but it'll be not really business oriented, more society oriented, about the call to action that I believe we all have in this new world that we're living in, so that should be pretty fun.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 3:And how can people find you LinkedIn, Instagram Do?
Speaker 2:you want to announce your handles.
Speaker 3:That way, people can find you easily.
Speaker 4:Giglio. That's not that hard Giglio. That's not that hard Giglio. No, I mean, we Americanized it a few generations later. It used to be Giglio. But so, yeah, we're on LinkedIn. Whoisgcmcom is our website, gcm. Whoisgcm is a LinkedIn thing. My is LinkedIncom ZachGiglioAI. I also have a speaker website which is ZachGiglio AI and that's Z-A-C-H-G-I-G-L-I-Oai, and you can see some of my past speaking stuff and topics that we frequently talk about and things like that. I really encourage you to subscribe to the AI newsletter AI in Business Weekly newsletter on LinkedIn. Tell us what you like about it and tell us what you want to see more of so we can continue to make it better.
Speaker 4:I think that's a good thing and I abide by the AI vibe of if you reach out, I will answer. People in really big places who've raised tons of money have done that to me and I will 100% do that to anybody who reaches out.
Speaker 2:Were we good, prompt engineers today Prompting the Zach Aglio. Ai, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:I think so. Very well structured, used examples. You made it your own, used tone and voice, you improved the outputs. Oh Right, see yeah.
Speaker 2:Very good. You're too dang smart, Zach. Thank you so much for dropping all of this knowledge on AI to us and our listeners. I'd also like to thank our sponsors, the Charleston Radio Group, Crogwell's Wild and the Charleston American Marketing Association. If you're interested in sponsoring or being a guest on our show, feel free to reach out to me at mike at charlestonamaorg. Huh, we did that. That happens.
Speaker 4:This is great, Really really great conversation.
Speaker 2:Good question, Margaret you did fantastic too by the way.
Speaker 3:Thank you, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, el Presidente, until next time, charleston, thanks.
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