Liz Moorehead
Oh, wow! What a surprise! A bunch of marketers have, once again, gotten together to talk about the influence and impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on inbound marketing! Something completely new and different, am I right? Of course, not. However, what excites me about this week's AI conversation on HubHeroes is that it's the conversation I've been dying to have and I believe most are avoiding.
🔎 Related: How to use AI for inbound marketing (examples + best practices)
For context, earlier this month, HubSpot announced an exciting new post narration tool (with an AI voice) that's now available in BETA for the HubSpot Marketing Hub and the HubSpot CMS Hub:
Once your narration has been generated, you can tweak it and even choose the voice:
If I were a betting woman, I'd say we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what HubSpot will be rolling out, in terms of AI tools, across all of its different hubs. However, as exciting as all of this is, the guys and I knew it was time for us to "slow down to speed up" with how we think and talk about AI in our inbound programs.
Because all of us are starting to observe more people than ever say the following:
"Well, that content is clearly AI generated, so that's not going to help us."
That's right, cupcakes. Our audiences are becoming more adept than ever at sniffing out the "acceptable" AI-generated content we're shoveling out the door, and they're not buying it.
🔎 Related: A thought-provoking AI fireside chat with George B. Thomas
So, this week, the whole gang is back in action to dig into the AI conversation we should all be having within our organizations. Where are most organizations — even the most well meaning — going wrong with AI? And when we say AI will allow us to do "more," what is this "more" we speak of?
Pull up a chair, folks, because this is the one episode you don't want to miss, as it kicks off a series of AI-related episodes of the HubHeroes podcast. And your journey begins here.
What We Talked About
- What are some of the most common bad habits and expressions of AI we're seeing out in the wild?
- Why are so many marketers and organizations struggling to get AI right?
- Are most marketers and business leaders even aware they're publishing bad content? Or do they genuinely believe what they're publishing is good?
- What are the questions leaders and marketers need to be asking themselves before they go full-steam-ahead with AI tools?
- When we hear leaders say, "AI will help us do MORE," how do we feel about that? What is this "more" they speak of? Do they even know? And what should that "more" be?
- What are the essential mindsets inbounders need to possess whenever they get near their AI tools?
And so much more ...
Additional Resources
- AI website agents and is Google in trouble?
- How to use AI for marketing (examples + best practices)
- AI, ChatGPT, and the future of inbound marketing (HubHeroes podcast)
- What Jorge Learned: Owner's mentality, content UX, and the truth about ChatGPT
- Your unforgettable, completely unhinged #INBOUND23 recap (HubHeroes podcast)
- A thought-provoking AI fireside chat with George B. Thomas (HubHeroes podcast)
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] George B. Thomas: You know what really sucks is when you hit that music to like go for the episode. And you realize, Oh man, I don't have any beverage sitting in front of me. I don't have any water or coffee
[00:00:15] Liz Moorehead: Oh no, no.
[00:00:17] Max Cohen: Now I'm f ing realizing that, George.
[00:00:19] George B. Thomas: God.
That's because we just got off of a client meeting.
[00:00:23] Liz Moorehead: suck it losers.
[00:00:24] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Oh, look at that. You see now I feel bad. Actually. I might have, I might have one beverage left in my refrigerator. Anyway, Liz, what, what, what are we doing here today?
[00:00:35] Liz Moorehead: Zooming in on, wow. For those who join us live, we're getting an extreme clip. Wow. That was really, that was violently upsetting,
[00:00:43] George B. Thomas: if you've never gone to the community, like if you've never gone to community. hub heroes, um, you might want to do that just for the sheer fact that you could actually see Max Cohen's tonsils. That's all.
[00:00:56] Max Cohen: Oh god,
you had to
[00:00:58] Liz Moorehead: to go with your oral health. Way to go with your oral health. You know what helps drive subscribes guys? Talking about oral health and Max's tonsils. Max.
[00:01:08] George B. Thomas: Look, we
[00:01:08] Liz Moorehead: you're hydrated. Oh,
[00:01:10] George B. Thomas: Holy crap.
[00:01:11] Liz Moorehead: you're right, George. It is an exciting topic for today's episode. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes, where clearly I am in control and definitely haven't lost control of this podcast whatsoever. I am your host, Liz Moorhead, joined by Max Cohen, George B. Thomas. It's going to be a very.
Exciting and interesting episode. In fact, this is the first episode in a series of topics around artificial
[00:01:38] George B. Thomas: Go figure.
[00:01:40] Max Cohen: Artificial intelligence.
[00:01:42] George B. Thomas: Oh,
[00:01:42] Liz Moorehead: soundboard thing for that, Max?
[00:01:44] George B. Thomas: I could have swore you
would have had Yo quiero taco bell!
[00:01:50] Max Cohen: It's just the Taco Bell gone. That's all I have.
[00:01:53] Liz Moorehead: I mean, if that's the best kind of automation you've got, I'm here for it I'm here for taco automation.
[00:02:00] George B. Thomas: Yeah, see, we'll boil that son of a Anyway, moving on.
[00:02:06] Liz Moorehead: Oh my gosh. All right, gentlemen, are you hydrated? Because clearly, do you need nap?
Do you need a hug? Do you need Jesus? How are we
[00:02:12] George B. Thomas: Oh, I need George just whipped out a probiotic yogurt drink. So I hope that's refreshing for you, buddy.
[00:02:18] Liz Moorehead: I didn't know Jamie Lee Curtis was joining us today.
[00:02:21] Max Cohen: Mmm. Gut health.
[00:02:22] Liz Moorehead: Got to have those cultures, got to have those gut cultures.
[00:02:25] Max Cohen: Mmm. I'm feeling so cultured right now.
[00:02:27] Liz Moorehead: I think it's because we've all forgotten how to be together because for so many weeks, either I've been out or Devin's been out or Max has been out. We're, we've forgotten how to human, which is probably why we're doing a robot focused episode.
So start things off. There, we have some new features that HubSpot has rolled out that are AI powered, having to do with generated audio players of content. And George is very excited. He's dancing about it. How excited are you,
[00:02:57] George B. Thomas: Oh, man, when I saw it, I needed a minute. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. I'll tell the whole story if we actually get into it here in a bit, but I'm excited.
[00:03:07] Liz Moorehead: No, get into the story because here's the conversation that we're going to be talking about today. So inbounders, if you were still listening, if you have gotten through Max's tonsils, our hydration shortage and everything else that's been going on and you are still with us, there are a lot of exciting opportunities within HubSpot to use AI to make your inbound more effective.
Thank you. Appreciate it. More scalable, reach more people, be more efficient at your job. However,
before you start playing with all the
toys, we need to talk about some of the rules because George, you and I were having a conversation earlier
this week, actually, I think it was in our last episode where you and I were talking about AI and we were talking about some of the evergreen
principles of inbound.
And one of the things that you and I talked about was your favorite word, And that
is humans. Can you give us one good humans for us,
[00:03:55] George B. Thomas: Oh yeah, it's all about the
SHUMANS.
[00:03:59] Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah, that was,
[00:04:01] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I'm just saying. BONG!
[00:04:03] Max Cohen: stuff.
[00:04:03] Liz Moorehead: oh my God. But one of the things you and I talked about is we're starting to hear people say more and more, well, that was clearly written by AI. Like, that's not really going to be of any use for us. So we are going to touch a bit on some of the new tools that we have at our disposal.
And cause George, I want you to tell that story. You are so excited, but we also are having a discussion today about the mindsets you need to go into. With these AI tools
that you can't just grab them. You can't just smash generate forever and
say, look, I did it. My job is done. There's so
much more to using these tools in a way that is smart.
So, George, take us on a journey.
Tell us your exciting
[00:04:44] George B. Thomas: Yeah. So, so first of all, it does come down to the humans. And one of the things that I've been doing on the George B. Thomas website, and it's been a process, by the
way, um, we would literally write the articles and
then we would take the articles and we would put them in natural reader.
And then from natural reader, that would let us use an AI voice that we could actually then generate an MP3 file.
And we would take that MP3 file over to transistor. fm, which would then give us a player. And we would swing back to the website and we would put the player on there. So if the human wanted to read the human could read, but if the human wanted to listen, The human could listen to it because many of us try to like listen and educate while we're doing other things.
That's what makes podcasts so fascinating. But the idea of turning every article into a potential podcast ish episode for your readers slash listeners at this point was something that I I'm bullish on. As a matter of fact, I would love to envision a day where. I go to a blog article page and it's actually the text, a video and audio of it.
So no matter how I am or who I am, as far as a learner, I'm able to get that information in the way that I like to learn, right? So that's a, that's a big piece of this. So this is why I got excited. I had a conversation several months ago. With a person who works at HubSpot and I explained that exact situation that I just explained to you guys and explained to the listeners and viewers of like this and this and I get this to get that to put it over here.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's
freaking time consuming. But here's the thing that I
love the humans that are going to come to the site enough to apply the time to make that happen.
So all of a sudden I'm sitting there, I'm minding my own business and I see this update
come through and it's a
beta and it's around post narration.
And it's where inside of HubSpot without needing to go to
transistor FM, without needing to go to natural reader without need nothing, I don't
have to do
anything
extra. I can literally hit a button and I
can generate, uh, the audio version,
[00:07:01] George B. Thomas: pick a voice and actually pick a speed at which I want it to play back.
And then I can post it to my website. Here's what's cool. The very next day after that update, the theme that I use,
the person is so on it that they updated the code. That you had to have like a little bit of a code nerdiness to understand how to do it. They went ahead and added it to the theme almost immediately.
And so now all of a sudden you could go to every page and you could have an audio player. And here's the funny part. I immediately emailed this human and I said, um, man, is it ever going to be possible that we would actually be able to have our own AI voice print to do this? And now I didn't get a yes or a no, but I did get this.
I haven't forgotten the conversation we had where you said it'd be great if it would be my own voice. So I was like, Oh, this is dope. I can actually provide a better experience. To my readers slash listeners slash humans, and I can enable them to educate in the way that they like to educate. That's why this is so important.
[00:08:06] Liz Moorehead: So here's what I love about what is happening right now, George. You and the reason why I wanted you to tell this story, not only to give our listeners a heads up on some of the stuff that's coming down the pipeline with HubSpot AI, but also to I think what you just showcased is the excitement a lot of people experience when they see these tools.
They're like, Oh my gosh, so much room for activities. So many possibilities. Everybody gets really freaking pumped And excited. and this is where I want to take a sharp right turn in our future. Conversation, right? Because the whole point of today's conversation is we have this excitement. How do we direct that excitement in a productive way in a way that doesn't create the worst possible case scenarios with AI? So Devin, I actually want to start with you on this question and then we'll get to George and Max out in the wild.
What are some of the Worst examples you have seen of AI in practice with companies.
The things that make
you go, uh,
Georgia max. What about you guys? What do you
see in the wild? I'd love to get some specific examples.
[00:09:09] Max Cohen: I just hate, I hate seeing the, just the wave of, the wave of tools that are just kind of, you know, trying to fool people into thinking like, Oh, if you can't write content, just auto generate all of it. And it's going to be great for search
engine optimization. And like, they're literally lying to people.
Um, which is, I think, you know, unfortunate that,
There's a lot of people out there that just hear AI and you know,
it's the, it's the brand new buzzword and people just kind of freak out and don't know enough to be like, Oh yeah, sure. And then they just do it. So it's like, I don't know. I think there's a lot of, uh, companies taking advantage of, you know, how hot AI is in the world right now and bastardizing it into a billion different products that, you know, are just going to fail in a year or two when, you know, all the search engines continue.
They're already doing it, but like continue to crack down on. Crappy AI generated trash content. So it just, I, it's, it really annoys me seeing it.
[00:10:03] George B. Thomas: it's interesting because I'm going to go the exact opposite way. Um, the thing that I see in the wild that is interesting to me is, um, numerous humans who are just blatantly, um, refusing to actually even be part of the conversation. just, nope, it's a flash in the pan, it's like everybody's hyping it up,
it's because SAS companies want to do X, Y, Z, the robots are coming, the world is
ending, um, it's just going to spit out crap, so why should I even
try? And
um, That's what's freaking me out a little
bit because there is, there is, a set of,
uh, employees, marketers,
sales reps, uh, humans that are actually going to embrace, learn, iterate, uh, do what Devin said, add humanity, empathy, thought leadership,
the, the juice, the, spice that can go on top of, if you have the right mindset around what's happening right now,
That does take it over the top.
And then there's gonna be this set
that doesn't. And I, and I honestly worry about
the set that is ignoring it right now. That is refusing to at least learn and
play. And, And, have a curious mindset. And, and have this idea of maybe I
do need to
pivot. And, and see if it can do some things. Thanks. Not everything.
It shouldn't be the end all be all, right? Like Devin said, copy and paste. No, but what could it be to help you be a better version of yourself? Faster version of yourself? How do you take what we are
having? Uh, not having, but that we're going through right now.
And I literally, I am aging myself, but I look at this and I go, man, there, there was back in the day was the 6 million man.
I have the potential to be the 6 million marketer because we now have the technology,
[00:12:01] Liz Moorehead: So it's interesting in hearing all of your answers, but here's where my brain is going to quote you for a second, George. Cause I think we've all had those instances where we see something like Devin said, right? And it's like, uh, huh. Look, look at that robot puke right on the screen. Look at that in the shape of a sentence.
Isn't that delightful? Right.
[00:12:20] George B. Thomas: but, but wait, but wait, people have been ishing on the screen since they started content marketing.
[00:12:27] Liz Moorehead: so here's, so this is getting to my point. Do we have a situation where we have a bunch of marketers actively know they are publishing robot puke, which is now what
I'm calling this. We're officially calling like unvarnished. I don't care what this says content from AI. That's robot puke. Okay. Do they,
are they, doing this knowingly
or do they not think about content in the, way that they
should or do they
actually think it's good? Devin, talk to us.
[00:13:00] Devyn Bellamy: They don't know any better. the, the, the, they don't know how to do it for real. And they think if they just go out and shout into the ether loud enough, that people will come in. It's the same kind of people that buy lists. They think, you know, law of averages. If I talk to enough people, then I will make money off of someone and people that are just posting content for content.
They're living off of like 2006, uh, SEO, where they think if they just have enough words out there, they'll exist. But it's like. Dude,
[00:13:34] Max Cohen: It, and oftentimes I think it's like, I don't even put this, like, if you're, if you're someone who's just generating a bunch of, you know, trash AI robot puke or whatever we're calling it, right. You were either misinformed by someone else. Or you really don't care about the content you're putting out there.
Or you were
duped by somebody thinking that this cool new
AI tool is going to
help you do all sorts of SEO. And you don't know what any of that means. You just hear AI and SEO and content and go.
Oh, this is how I should be doing it, right? Um, you know, so it's just
- I don't know. It's a it's to me. It's lazy one, right?
But it's also like, you just don't really care about the stuff that you're putting out there
to like, I can understand how AI can assist in the content generation procedure,
right? Like, for example, when, you know, HubSpot first had some of
its AI generation tools. It wasn't writing you a whole article. It was helping you craft an outline.
And for someone who's bad at creating content, that's a helpful
thing. Cause it's like, I don't know how I'm going to plan out this whole thing. I wasn't necessarily
great at writing the five paragraph essays back in school or whatever. But if I can have something that just helps me kind of suggest some thoughts on how I might write about a topic, and then I can fill in the blanks because it's provided me some structure and some guidance, that's really helpful.
That's
great. But when it's just like easy button, what do you want to write about?
Hey guys. Hey, leadership. Look, I wrote all this blog content and then you go, Oh, I used AI to generate it and they go, wow, you're so smart. You know how to use AI. And then
that's as far as the conversation goes,
[00:15:08] George B. Thomas: they're
not saying that.
[00:15:09] Max Cohen: No, I'm saying the people who aren't taking this seriously or understand it, or I'm misinformed about it.
Like that can happen.
[00:15:16] George B. Thomas: are you going to be okay?
[00:15:17] Liz Moorehead: I have pulled my mic off the stand for anybody who cannot see us right now. So I, I have a, I'm having a moment. So I agree with you, however, I want to advocate for our listeners a minute for a moment because I think, you know, even I throwing out the term robot puke, right? It, we're, we're being, we're acting as if people are doing this from a place that is either.
Actively deceptive or intentionally lazy and I think of it more like it may, that may be true in
some cases, but I want to advocate for the
moment for
the in house content marketer or in particular, the agency content creator who is being billable houred. To death by where they are working and I can envision
something like this where they know internally what the best practices are.
They know that they need to show up like a human and then they get in those moments where they're
like, shit, I have a deadline. They hit that roadblock, they hit that whatever, they hit that moment.
And they're just like, you know what,
I can use the HubSpot content thing and it'll generate an extra paragraph and it'll get me out of this very stressful situation that I'm in right now.
Because I think what happens is it's less about an overall malignant attitude toward content in some cases, and more like a death by paper cut. Like, this one slice of cheesecake won't kill me. But then Two hours later, if the whole cheesecake is gone, my dude, you have eaten entire cheesecake. Like it's the, I think it's sometimes that, that's,
uh, that is definitely not based on a true story, but you know, I think it comes down to these little micro
moments where it can bail someone out. Of a tough situation, particularly if they are content marketers who are not set up for success in terms of the appropriate amount of time to get the
work
[00:17:05] George B. Thomas: See,
[00:17:06] Max Cohen: And that's but that's totally different than what I was saying. What I
[00:17:09] Liz Moorehead: no, that's what I'm
[00:17:09] Max Cohen: people who are pressing generate entire blog.
Boom. Good. I'm an SEO expert. Move on. Not the people who are using it
in the ways that it's like it's truly helpful or I just need a little bit of help here or this
and that.
Like, I think that's different. Like, I'm
[00:17:24] Liz Moorehead: I
[00:17:24] Max Cohen: out the folks who are just like, Oh, yeah, no. And it's more
so the
folks that are convincing people that like, Oh, dude, it's so easy. Now you literally it'll write the blog post for you. Boom. Send it out. That's different than like, I need a paragraph here or like have some
structure here or I'm under a gun.
So I need a little bit of help. Right. I'm calling out the folks who are like, Not using
it in the way to kind of, cause you're good. What you just laid out
- assisting in the content generation process, not not over skirting it not like
completely not being involved with it and hitting the easy button.
I think that's way different than
what you just
[00:17:59] George B. Thomas: So,
[00:18:00] Liz Moorehead: Max, you and I are violently, you and I are violently agreeing. So what I was trying to say is
that in addition to that, I think another reason why we end up in a situation with bad AI.
is because of well intentioned people.
I think there's the ill intentioned piece. There's the laziness piece, but then there are the circumstances in which
somebody tries to bail themselves out, but they still end up taking a shortcut. George, I'm watching you go through
all five stages of
grief right now on my screen. Talk to me about your
fee fees, bud. Bring them
[00:18:27] George B. Thomas: yeah, I I just think that there's a couple things that I I want to throw out here First of all, there's been douchebag humans since the beginning of time and there have been people who are gonna try to find the easy way out
Since the beginning of time and you know If you do what is easy in life, life will be hard.
If you do what's hard in life
life will be easy. Fundamental principle that you need to pay attention to. The problem is people are looking
at whether it's well intentioned or they're just being a douche bag. Either way, they're looking at it as the easy button. What I'm saying
is that we have to re look at, rethink and re imagine when we say AI, what we actually mean.
And I am so glad that this is what I've submitted. To talk about an inbound and I am praying with all that is holy,
that the inbound gods will for a 10th time, ask me to come back and I'll
be able to have this conversation because what we should be thinking about here is what are the things that I'm not good at and what are the things that take the most time.
And we should be thinking about our content in maybe even a completely different way, because when I start out
- this process, I know that a lot of time is boiled into research. Of course, I also know that I'm coming from a place of thought
leadership. So thought leadership is already going to
be an element. I want to
do some
additional research. Then I can get AI to help with that. I also know that I look at whatever it
gives me is it's Plato. I need to build with what it gives
me, what I
actually want it to be. So I'm literally sitting here, like ripping things out, adding
things in, asking it to say things different ways.
Typing in, my own little piece
of it. and, and
and it becomes
this thing of like, listen, I had, I told somebody the other day, like at the end of the day, the most powerful thing for me about
AI is it types a hell of a lot faster than
I do. So if I can give it the right
research, if I can give it my voice, if I can start with a video interview of me talking and getting people to answer
questions in the way that we've actually answered them in a good human way, listen, another principle, ladies and gentlemen of life.
Garbage in garbage
out. If you feed it, good shit, good shit's going to come back
at you. And it's not going to
be this, Ooh, that sounds like it might be robotic. That might be robotic puke on the screen. No, because we didn't
start with the robot.
We started with the content that you created, the transcripts, the research, the dot leadership, and just asked it to
be a
typist for us. Like we're thinking about this wrong.
[00:21:05] Liz Moorehead: I
[00:21:05] Max Cohen: Well, I agree with that. I agree with everything you're
[00:21:08] George B. Thomas: Well, I hope
[00:21:09] Max Cohen: I'm,
I'm advocating against the folks who
aren't, like literally you just talked about all this original content creation that you're
doing, right, and you're having AI help you kind of turn it into these new things and
create this additional stuff from it.
I'm simply advocating against the person who's just hitting
the generate blog post with no
[00:21:30] George B. Thomas: my thing is, why are we even worried about that person? Why are we
[00:21:34] Max Cohen: No, because because I don't want that person to Shit up for themselves by be creating a ton of content that's going to take
them in the search ratings I'm literally looking at Google Search Central right now, and
it literally says Using AI to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking and search results is a violation of our spam
policies.
If you go search SEO AI content, there are a billion and a half companies out
there just selling products that are like here is the AI
blog post easy button. And think And like, duping all these people into thinking like, Hey, if you guys thought content creation
was hard before, you can now literally just hit a button and generate
content.
It's going to be good for your SEO. And
we're taking advantage of people who don't understand what any of
that means and just think they need to do it,
right? And then we're taking money as they actively do something that's like destroying their
website and their
authority online. That's when I'm mad. I'm not saying AI is bad.
I'm just
saying those companies should,
like, people need to wake up and just think a little bit
harder,
right? And you just can't be doing that stuff. That's the only stuff that I don't like.
[00:22:43] George B. Thomas: I don't
I don't disagree with you, by the way.
If,
[00:22:46] Liz Moorehead: we agree with
[00:22:47] George B. Thomas: if I
[00:22:47] Max Cohen: Okay, good, good, good, good.
Because I feel like people thinking I'm disagreeing with what you guys are saying, and I'm not. I'm like, I'm hyper
focusing.
I'm hyper focusing on some shit I really don't like that I don't like to see, because that's what we
started
[00:22:58] George B. Thomas: well, that's the that that's the thing. If
I could go set fire, I'd go
set
fire to whatever. I don't disagree with you. What I'm
saying is I would much rather spend time and I'm not talking about
this podcast.
I'm just talking about in
general in my life moving
forward. I would rather spend more time?
than pointing
the
finger and whipping people who are just blatantly doing it
wrong because they're not
doing this
themselves, the service of actually educating themselves to a deep enough, uh, ability to make a smart decision.
I would much rather like teach people how to do it right, to think
about it right, to leverage it in the ways that we can. That would make their life easier
because they have put in the work. They do have the understanding. Uh, they, they are a thought leader. They're using it for those things. Um, but they're able to get a maximum output, not maybe in speed, but in the size and richness and value that they can, like, that's what I want to lean in and put my, my passion and my time into is like, let's help people make really Really, really, really good stuff moving forward.
[00:24:09] Devyn Bellamy: I'm taking it all in. my thing is, um, I love the idea of focusing on bad actors
enough, just enough to let the bad actors who aren't aware of their bad actors know that they are
in fact, bad actors. And so educating people on things that they might not understand,
noise the hell out of the rest of the
world.
Um, it's the, you'd be surprised how, how many people are just genuinely ignorant thinking, Oh, this is what I need to do to get in the door. And it's like, they're not realizing that they're positioning themselves further away from the door by doing that. You're not, you're not hacking anything. You're not, you know, finding a shortcut or some secret to success. All you're doing is polluting the internet and flagging yourself as. An SEO pariah. So, uh, to that extent, yes, I will inform people on. Worst practices, you can call them, but at the same time, uh, like George says, I am all for. helping people find new and creative ways to leverage tools. For instance, those of you who use chat GPT or chat spot or something along those lines, look up the rice framework.
R I C C E the rice framework is a really great, uh, prompt
[00:25:30] Liz Moorehead: is taking notes.
[00:25:31] Devyn Bellamy: uh, tool that you can use. Yeah, it's, it's a really great tool that you can use in order to build out a very thorough prompts that gets AI kicking exactly out what you need. It also helps you organize your thought. And So that's the kind of information that I'd love for us to spend, you know, more time on when we're talking about AI and educating people and letting them know how they can achieve the best versions of themselves leveraging, uh, advanced
[00:26:02] Liz Moorehead: this is, where this conversation gets really interesting because I wanted to let the melee, the back and forth go for a bit
here because it highlights, I think the exact problem that a lot of our listeners are going through. On the one hand, there are the best practices that George is talking about.
And on the other hand, they're also
getting enticed by very shiny. Solutions like Max is talking about. Then there are just the marketers that I'm just trying to do my job. This is a complex problem. Why are we seeing robot puke on the internet? There isn't a single reason. It could be
one of these reasons.
It could be a few of these reasons. It could be all of them. We don't. We don't know, right?
Well, we do know. We
don't know. It depends. Um, but what I would like to get into now are some of these mindsets that should be guiding how these
organizations are leveraging AI. Because one of the things that immediately jumps to my mind, George, George, Max, and Devin, I'm sure you've all
heard this. When I hear business owners talk about the promise of AI in terms of their marketing and their content, it quote, enables them to do more. More of what? Because in most cases, you probably aren't getting content right to begin with. So what is the more of that people think they're going to be able to do?
Or should people even be doing more or should they be focusing on something else? There is this pursuit of this nebulous more that I do
not quite understand.
[00:27:28] Devyn Bellamy: I, I, yeah, I have thoughts. Um, so the nebulous more
is an excellent way of putting it, and it can lead to a completely different conversation about, uh, falling down
rabbit holes. Um, but at the end of the day, it boils down to inefficient
time management. And people are trying to cut time from wherever they can cut time
from. And for a lot of people, myself included, content generation is a very
time consuming thing. Uh, and even if it isn't always a time consuming thing, it always feels. Like a time consuming thing because it's not something I love doing. Um, I, I, I get no enjoyment out of it. And in time, both flies and crawls simultaneously when I'm doing it.
It's just not my thing. I'm sorry, Liz. But, um. If I were to devote more time to leveraging AI to help me pull, no Sleem, I, will not take it back. Uh, leveraging AI, um, to help me, uh, create an outline, uh, to get me going in a direction that I can uh, take and create my own and then boom more time. And then what do I do with that more time?
All the other things that I feel like I don't have enough time for. Um, and again, leading down to that rabbit hole, then we start talking about, are you a workaholic or are you trying to achieve work life balance? But that's, that's
[00:28:52] Max Cohen: I can come in with a little bit of a positive take here, uh, to
juxtapose some of my negative ones are, um, I think like, I, I can't, while I can't speak for what CEOs say when they say, Oh, we could do more with content, I mean, or, you know, more because of AI, I mean, I can think of like a
pretty good example, example, you can do more with
the original content you create because of some pretty cool tools out there.
For example, I mean, we played around with the tool a little while ago. I can't remember what it was called, but
like,
It was able to take one of my YouTube videos
and then split it into a whole bunch of
shorts, write a whole bunch of social posts, promoting it, take the whole transcript and turn it into like a blog post Right.
from the actual content that I actually
created.
Right. I think that's a really cool way to say like,
Hey. Here's something that
you built. You focused on the way
that you know that you can create content best. I can't write blog posts, right? Like I, I can't
sit down and just like write something. I can make a banging video
though, right? I can make a video.
I can produce that content in the way
that's like comfortable to me. Right. And then I can have something take that medium where I know I best express myself and then do all the stuff that
I'm not really good at, right. Chopping it up into something else, writing like social posts to promote
it, like creating written content, or
even just like a transcription from it or something like that.
That's cool to me. That's like doing more with that original stuff that you actually create is kind of like what George was talking about
earlier. Right. So I can see that as like a
pretty. You know, sweet use case for it from like the content
side of things.
[00:30:16] Liz Moorehead: I hope everybody's strapped in
because George has been pacing.
George, do you have something to share with the class?
[00:30:23] George B. Thomas: no,
[00:30:30] Liz Moorehead: I'm just disappointed and angry.
Like,
[00:30:32] George B. Thomas: but it's not, it's not about that. It's I'm literally over here spinning in my head.
Am I fundamentally broken? Like, am I not
like other humans? And let me explain. Let me, let me, let me just explain because the, the, by the way, the
conversation is around the word more. And so I hear Max talk and I'm like, Max, I hear you, brother.
As a
matter of
fact, two years ago, that was me. I'm the
video guy. I'd like to make videos. Um, that's the, that's my love language is creating videos,
except. With doing research and building on a process and leveraging AI
in the way
that I have been, um, it allows me to do more and believe more about myself. And actually, I love creating written content because the reason I hated it before is I thought I needed an editor. I thought I needed a creative genius. I thought I needed All of these pieces that I've actually been able to piece together to get the spark of an idea and
make sure that it doesn't end up going out on the internet looking like complete. So, when I think about more, it's, it's
allowing me to do more than I once was comfortable with the other thing. When I think about. More is I'm not necessarily saying more content, but more meaning better taking the time that I do have to make the content better than I am creating, whether it's fresh content or optimizing the content that I already have, but I can leverage that.
For it to be more, more robust, Liz, you know, I've been literally working on content that we're going to drop here in the near future when we launched the new, uh, sidekick strategies website. And this content is literally more, it is more of anything than I've probably ever created before in my life. And I'm loving that process, but also here's the other thing that I, I'm struggling with how to actually communicate this.
When I think about the word more, it's giving ourselves the ability to actually care more, um, create more and put more love on those that are actually going to come to our site and digest those things because nobody out there has more time. And it's funny the way my brain will work is because I'll literally find like eight disparate pieces of information around the same concept and go, well, why can't it all just live together here?
And instead of people having to try to piece the puzzle together, I'm literally giving them the streamlined version of these eight pieces of content in this one area. Therefore giving them more day, more time back in their day, because we're creating something of more value. And like, when I hear that word more, that's where my brain actually goes.
[00:33:21] Liz Moorehead: so this is where I think you bring up a very good point. And that's why I wanted to talk about this is that when people are saying this will enable me to do more, well, more of what? You need to define what that more is. And I love where you went with that, George, about being more helpful. I think of it, I am able to serve more.
I am able to extend the reach of genuine helpfulness more.
[00:33:46] George B. Thomas: let's take this completely out of the HubSpot space for a second. When I look at what we're doing, and once we get some time back in our day and there's a site launched and the world figures out what just happened and where we're moving forward. I go to beyond your default, and I think about all the podcast episodes we've done and all the written content that come could come out of that, and all the video scripts that could come out of that, and the course that could come out of that.
And if you start to like line these things up, you're quickly like, geez, I need to like clone myself. Well. If you're building assistance and you put the measures in to make sure that they're the assistance and not the end all be all, you might actually be able to do that. And so it makes me excited to think about being able to have this content or these products or these things that would never be able to live in the world.
Because they are rooted in a place of this will help somebody fundamentally be a good human or on the side that we're on right now. This will fundamentally help somebody be better at HubSpot help somebody be better at their job. And I think that's the thing is like. If you're coming at, whether it be inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, or AI in your everyday workload, if you're coming at it from the place where you're trying to be generally a good human who provides more value, and can put it in a way that it actually comes out and isn't robot puke, then why not?
Why? Like, anyway, I'll get off my soapbox.
[00:35:27] Liz Moorehead: George, do you care about this issue?
[00:35:30] George B. Thomas: I really do. I really, I really, I really, really do. I Ah.
[00:35:36] Liz Moorehead: Max, what were you going to say, bud?
[00:35:38] Max Cohen: I was gonna say, I think there's this whole other wonderful conversation for us to have outside of just AI content stuff, right? And maybe we're covering this on a different episode.
[00:35:49] Liz Moorehead: us on a journey, bud. Where are we going?
[00:35:51] Max Cohen: was gonna say, like, I You know, I've been, um, admittedly, very slow on the uptake for the AI stuff. Like, my, my, my most intense interactions with AI have been when my kids want a bedtime story
where they just kind of make up the premise and OpenAI writes it for them. Or if Eliza wants to see what a combination
of, like, a dragon donkey looks like, and I do it in
DALI, and it's some of the funniest, you know,
stuff ever. Um, But like, as I start to kind of see what
AI is doing to
really just kind of change the experience that people have just working in the CRM, right?
It's, that is, that is stuff that like really, really excites me. Like, I'm, I literally just searched AI in like the product updates. And I'm seeing stuff like the AI assistant call summaries, the AI assistant, the
content writer in playbooks, which is
super interesting because like, that's like, you don't need to worry about SEO there.
Right. Um, you
know, the, the stuff that they're doing with forecasting, right. Where it's like using your deal data to help you kind of like
forecast sales, things like that. I've, I was talking to this, this guy, uh, Nico, the fact I'm going to butcher his last
name, but Nico the fakest. Yeah. Nico the fakest.
I just wanted to be confident when I do it right.
And dude, this guy has literally built like a custom GPT
that is like writing
custom coded workflow actions for
people, right? Like
imagine the day that workflow, like
that AI works its way into workflows a lot more than it already have.
I already know. It can help you write your description, which is beautiful cause no one writes workflow descriptions, right?
And finally, now you don't have an excuse, right? But like imagine a day
where there is the. AI workflow action, where you literally just say, I want this workflow action to do x, y, z,
and
it could just do it
instead of like
custom coding it. Right? That is going to be insane. Right? And let's be honest, we're probably not that far away from that being a reality.
Right? Um, you know, so or something like that, right? Or like, even when we can say, Hey, build me a workflow that does x, y, z, and just,
it just does it. Like that is going to be bananas, right? And something that I absolutely love finally happened to you guys have heard me complain about it for so long is chat.
Spot is making its way
into the HubSpot interface. Which is going to be wild, especially when Chatspot can look at the thing you're working
on and take the thing you're working on into context for whatever prompts you give it, right? It's like, hey, look at this contact record. Take a look at the, you know, uh, conversations we've had so far.
What should be my next best step? Tell me, right? Tell me what to tell me
what what I should do versus like just doing something for me, right?
Like that I think is going to fundamentally change the way we think about working with CRMs and doing stuff in building Shit in HubSpot right beyond just the content
[00:39:03] George B. Thomas: There's a whole episode
[00:39:04] Max Cohen: That is gonna be
[00:39:06] George B. Thomas: there's a whole episode around all the things that you can do in HubSpot. Like
there's, that's a whole nother episode without a doubt.
[00:39:13] Liz Moorehead: Well, that's why we're doing this as a series, but Max, to your point, what you just said, all of the excitement. That's why, even though we did have to say, George, not quite yet, hold on. We're not starting the AI series with all of the products.
We'll get to them. There's a reason
[00:39:29] George B. Thomas: didn't like
[00:39:29] Liz Moorehead: There's a reason why I know
[00:39:31] George B. Thomas: didn't like it.
[00:39:32] Liz Moorehead: Mr.
[00:39:32] Max Cohen: Oh God
[00:39:33] Liz Moorehead: We love it. George, how do you feel about
waiting? Tell me more.
[00:39:37] George B. Thomas: I don't like it.
[00:39:41] Liz Moorehead: But this brings me to my last
question. Because, George, you're not
going to have to wait
for too much longer, right? Starting
next week, we're going to start getting into some of this really fun product
stuff. I think we all
heard and
saw, if you were joining us live, how Max started lighting up at all of the different possibilities, right?
And that's hopefully how our listeners are going to feel
as we continue to go through this AI series. They're going to get excited. at the possibilities. They're going to start defining more in the correct ways. They're going to start
seeing ways
they can, expand and scale And make more of what's possible actually possible.
But before they do that if each of you could leave them with like, As we go through this journey together and you get excited, never lose sight of blank. What would that blank be,
[00:40:31] Max Cohen: Don't stop believin
[00:40:33] George B. Thomas: Oh, good
[00:40:34] Max Cohen: Oh, sorry,
[00:40:36] Liz Moorehead: Steve Perry called. He said, stop.
[00:40:39] Max Cohen: hold on, hold on before we go there. I just had like, I just, I have to get this out of my
brain, um, cause it's in my brain and I want to get it out of my
brain.
Like we all know what it's like HubSpot mortal portal, not mortal,
a
[00:40:51] Liz Moorehead: HubSpot Mortal Kombat.
And
[00:40:54] Max Cohen: And you're about to do.
Mortal Kombat with a, with a, you know, a HubSpot portal you're stepping into that, let's say, uh,
You know, for lack of a better word, the driver was drunk in it before,
right? Um, But just imagine a day where you're stepping into that portal for the first time because you got to go fix everything that's wrong And you're starting to get familiar with it.
What if you could just bring up ChatSpot and just be like, hey, ChatSpot,
Tell me what's wrong with this portal, right?
[00:41:20] Liz Moorehead: starts crying.
[00:41:21] George B. Thomas: audit. Yeah.
[00:41:23] Max Cohen: chess. Chess. Thank God you're here. Right. But like, you know, chat spot, like, obviously, like
that chat spot can be trained on, you know, a ton of content
around HubSpot best
practices.
It can be trained on everything it sees in the knowledge base, it can
be trained on all the HubSpot Academy content, right? Like, imagine, If the portal can tell you what it needs. Right? Like,
[00:41:45] George B. Thomas: the, the only problem with that though,
Is the fact that it can tell you what HubSpot default portals need. it!
will not be able to tell you the custom
solutions that people have created or
provided in their portal, which by the way, I think the next show
that we should create should be portal combat, like that should
[00:42:05] Max Cohen: Well, I mean,
[00:42:06] George B. Thomas: that should be the, anyway,
[00:42:08] Max Cohen: on. Hold on. Hold
- But like, can't they train it Against content that will give it that
context? Right? Can't it? I don't know! Dylan Selberg! The chat spot people! Right? They, I'm sure they can figure Are you telling me that like, They can't say, Hey, chat spot, uh, go take a look at all the HubSpot portals.
Look at all the stuff that's written in it from there. You can probably figure out what industry it's being used in, right? Here are some metrics of what like success looks like and can it figure it out? I don't know. I
think larger learning language models could figure that out. If given the right material to
kind of learn what best practices would be in certain industries, but also George, I agree with
you.
And that's why it has a good human
[00:42:49] Liz Moorehead: Those were the magic words. That's all he needed. Did you see how quickly came off his mic? He's like, Oh, he
agrees with me. Oh, okay.
[00:42:55] Max Cohen: but, but no, no, I, I, I
I'm just, I'm just pushing back on the idea that we wouldn't have the data to give best practices around like industry specific stuff, like I'm sure.
You can, because there's a lot of people out there that create content about industry best practices, right?
There's a lot of stuff you see in a portal and you
could say, these portals are manufacturing portals because of, I don't know, whatever way they, they, I don't know how long or large language models work, like, but I'm sure there's ways that it can do it. Right. Cause there is plenty of. Good example content out there be it the form of analyzing a portal that it knows it's in certain industries or whatever That it could do something like that one day.
I don't
[00:43:36] Liz Moorehead: George do not engage. Do not engage, everyone step away, everyone,
[00:43:40] Max Cohen: me George
[00:43:41] Liz Moorehead: everyone step away
from their mics because this is exactly what I was talking about, which is
the whole point of this conversation is we
could easily get way too far into the weeds, which
we are doing on the rest of the series. But I want
to end today's conversation with that point of before everybody gets excited, before everybody starts ripping these tools apart, figuring out what we can do with them, what is the one thing they need to keep in mind?
- Devin,
why don't we start with you? Also, I love how Chad is like, Max, drive us to safety. Max is
driving us off the highway. He has taken us
off a cliff. A really fun cliff with lots of really cool side tangents, but still.
[00:44:19] Devyn Bellamy: Where is the
[00:44:22] Liz Moorehead: I don't That's part of the problem, I don't think he was using the
[00:44:25] Devyn Bellamy: I knew it!
[00:44:26] Liz Moorehead: ha ha
[00:44:27] Max Cohen: I didn't I didn't take my
stratera
[00:44:29] Devyn Bellamy: And it's back.
[00:44:33] Liz Moorehead: Well, that
Okay. Oh, good. And there's George.
[00:44:41] Devyn Bellamy: I'm sorry, Liz, the question one more
time.
[00:44:45] George B. Thomas: What's your hashtag one
thing?
[00:44:48] Liz Moorehead: What's the one thing someone needs to keep in mind as they're going through this series? Because as Max and George have showcased beautifully, and I'm not saying that sarcastically, it is very easy to get carried away and excited about these tools without keeping these best
practices in mind. So what's that one thing you want our
listeners to
keep in mind as they go on
this
journey with us?
[00:45:07] Devyn Bellamy: Think about your problems. Uh, don't come at it. Look at the tool and let's figure out how we can use it. That's where tools go to die. What you need to do is identify a problem and then see how AI can fit into your solution or whether or not updating your workflow entirely. To incorporate it might be an option, but what you don't want to do is start looking at all the different tools.
Uh, what will end up happening is the tool you were looking for will no longer exist, or it will be something completely different, maybe owned by someone else, or it will just cost a whole hell of a lot more than it used to, but what you should do is start looking at your. Your workflow, look at the challenges you face, and then look at how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to help, uh,
[00:45:58] Liz Moorehead: you know what I love,
Devin, how you started with like, you got to think about your problems. I'm like, how was
it? Hugged enough as a child? Like, damn. George, how about you?
[00:46:05] Devyn Bellamy: And I can help with that too,
[00:46:06] Liz Moorehead: God. Okay. Uh,
wow.
[00:46:09] Devyn Bellamy: AI therapists.
[00:46:10] Max Cohen: therapy, let's go.
[00:46:12] George B. Thomas: no,
no,
[00:46:12] Liz Moorehead: No.
[00:46:13] George B. Thomas: Anyway.
[00:46:14] Max Cohen: send a link to my
[00:46:15] Liz Moorehead: Let's put my complexes into a
data set. That sounds smart. George.
[00:46:19] George B. Thomas: Well, as being one of the co hosts of the
Beyond Your Default podcast, no, we probably do
not want to do that with you or I into a large model. Anyway, um, not why we're here. Um,
it's funny because there's like a bazillion things rattling around in
my brain that I would want to talk about, but I think I'm going to drill it down to the simple, don't
lose the fact that this is all about communication.
Um,
how you choose to
communicate with your AI
assistant. In, in other words, how do you communicate with the humans
right now that are helping you get stuff done in your organization, or are you like most that we run into and they're afraid of actually having
a conversation with
humans, like, the way that you communicate with
it.
Is going to be the way that it communicates back that you need. And all of this should be in an effort so that you can communicate what you're trying to communicate with the
world. So like, if you think about communication principles. And start to apply communication principles into the workflow that we're talking about around AI, AI
tools, um, then all of a
sudden we're going to start to get somewhere real interesting. So it's about communication.
[00:47:32] Liz Moorehead: Max, light of my life. What's your one thing? Oh no.
Why are we giggling? Oh no. Oh no.
[00:47:40] Max Cohen: I
don't know, I'd say don't be like me, someone who has avoided the AI stuff and developed a very jaded
opinion around it,
like I have, because
as you can tell, my, you know, my whole thing is I saw people struggling with content
creation and I was like, man, if people got really, really good at this and actually gave a shit about the content they were creating, they could do some really cool stuff.
But now someone came along with an easy button, and now I'm really mad about it, and it makes me not look into all the other cool things AI
can do, right, because I have such a, I'm just letting the past sort of dictate my curiosity around something that's really neat, because I'm only looking at it from a really negative
angle.
Don't be like me, right? It's
cool. Just, you know, sit back, relax, have a 7up, and let your mind get blown by some cool
stuff. You know? It's okay. AI is not going
to kill us. I don't know. It might, but it's probably not going to kill us. And if we do, we'll go through a really super cool, like battle with robots.
And that'll be like a pretty chill way to go out. You know what I
[00:48:42] Liz Moorehead: you make me a promise? Max. Will you never stop being our show's guest? Chaos Gremlin, I love you so much.
never, my favorite part is like if your answer starts with a giggle or my favorite is when you start smiling 30 seconds before you start speaking. I'm like, oh yay or oh no, or both at the same time.
[00:49:01] George B. Thomas: going to be an edit or a clip. We're never really sure. But it's one of the two.
[00:49:07] Max Cohen: Edit article.
[00:49:10] Liz Moorehead: My,
[00:49:11] Max Cohen: him, John. Tell him to bring out the whole ocean. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:49:14] Liz Moorehead: my, my one thing. Is define your more because whether you're talking about automation or AI or anything else, it reminds me of this conversation I had with a client a few years ago, and he said, you know, that's kind of the thing about automation. If the core of what you're doing is shit, all you're doing is scaling your capacity for shit.
And so if you're not very, yeah, so if you're not clear on what your more is, if you are not clear on the why behind what you're doing, if George and I were sitting there talking about being more helpful, being more of service, and that was not resonating with you, you need to sit down and define. What your more is that I think is one of the most important things, gentlemen, how are we all feeling after today's engaging conversation?
[00:50:00] Max Cohen: I feel artificially intelligent.
[00:50:03] George B. Thomas: yeah. Um, I'm, I'm ready to dive deeper.
[00:50:06] Max Cohen: Thank you, Devin.
[00:50:07] George B. Thomas: can't wait to get to the original and the original plus version of this conversation. Um, To really help
[00:50:16] Liz Moorehead: Well, George, you're going to have to wait another week. You're going to have to wait another
[00:50:20] George B. Thomas: or I could just do it by myself to nobody. And then I just, but that's no fun.
[00:50:27] Liz Moorehead: We're done.
[00:50:28] George B. Thomas: Are we done?
[00:50:29] Liz Moorehead: I don't know. Are we ever
[00:50:31] George B. Thomas: the perfect episode for a fricking AI poem, but you know what?
[00:50:36] Max Cohen: Oh
[00:50:36] George B. Thomas: Screw it.
