From Doubt to Confidence: Embracing AI in Business

Reading Time: 26 minutes

Are you feeling left behind in the AI revolution sweeping across industries? Imagine confidently leveraging AI to transform your business operations, outpace your competition, and future-proof your career. Sounds enticing, right? But for many of us, the thought of integrating AI feels like navigating a labyrinth of potential pitfalls and wasted resources.

You’re not alone. Countless business owners and professionals are paralyzed by fears of AI complexity, concerns about job security, and doubts about its real-world value. These anxieties aren’t just holding you back – they’re actively pushing you behind the curve in an increasingly AI-driven world.

But what if I told you that embracing AI doesn’t have to be a daunting challenge? What if there was a way to transform those doubts into your competitive advantage?

Today, we’re going to flip the script on AI anxiety and show you how to harness its power to revolutionize your business and career, regardless of your industry or technical background.

Joining us today is Emily Baillie, a digital marketing and AI trainer, speaker, and professor with over 15 years of industry experience. Recognized as a “Top Artificial Intelligence Voice” on LinkedIn and a member of the Canadian Marketing Association, Emily works with organizations across Canada to leverage marketing technology effectively. As a part-time professor at McMaster University, she advocates for a human-first approach to AI, focusing on complementing rather than replacing human talent. Emily’s unique perspective and extensive experience make her the ideal guest to help us understand and overcome common AI resistance in business.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Emily Baillie about:

✨ Actionable Strategies for AI Adoption – Practical steps to integrate AI into your business operations without disruption.

✨ Overcoming AI Anxiety – Techniques to build confidence in using AI tools and interpreting their outputs.

✨ Future-Proofing Your Business and Career – Insights on developing AI skills and strategies that will be crucial in the coming years.

Learn more about Emily Baillie

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

From Doubt to Confidence – Embracing AI in Business with Emily Baillie

[00:00:00] Emily Baillie: AI is a tool to enhance productivity and not to replace humans. My approach to AI is to use it to help people do what they’re already doing, only be a little bit more productive and optimize their time. Using AI to help automate repetitive tasks, allows people to get where they’re already going in a faster and more productive sense.

It allows teams to focus on that higher level creative work while getting some help with things like customer service inquiries, generating ideas for marketing campaigns, good uses of AI that don’t put anyone’s job at risk. Now, that said, folks do need to embrace AI, they do need to learn it at least a little bit, and I promise it’s not as scary as some folks think.

[00:00:59] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode will break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

But are you feeling left behind in this AI revolution that’s sweeping across industries? Imagine confidently leveraging AI to transform your business operations, outpace your competition and future proof. That might sound enticing, right? But for many of us, the thought of integrating AI feels like navigating a labyrinth of potential pitfalls and wasted resources.

You’re not alone. Countless business owners and professionals are paralyzed by fears of AI complexity, concerns about job security, and doubts about its real world value. These anxieties aren’t just holding you back. They’re actively pushing you behind the curve into the future. An increasingly AI driven world.

But what if I told you that embracing AI doesn’t have to be a daunting challenge? What if there was a way to transform those doubts? Into your competitive advantage. Today, we’re going to flip the script on AI anxiety and show you how to harness its power to revolutionize your business and career, regardless of your industry or technical background.

Joining us today is Emily Baillie, a digital marketer and AI trainer, speaker and professor with over 15 years of industry experience recognized as a top artificial intelligence voice on LinkedIn and a member of the Canadian marketing association, Emily works with organizations across Canada to leverage Marketing technology effectively as a part time professor at McMaster university.

She advocates for a human first approached AI focusing on complimenting rather than replacing human talent. Emily’s unique perspective and extensive experience make her the ideal guest to help us understand and overcome AI resistance in business. Hey, Emily, welcome to the show.

[00:03:30] Emily Baillie: Thank you so much, Mike.

Thank you for having me. Pleased to be here.

[00:03:34] Mike Allton: So excited to dive in. But first, could you just share what inspired you to focus on helping businesses, global businesses overcome their resistance to AI?[00:03:44] Emily Baillie: Absolutely. I’ve seen firsthand how transformative Transformative AI can be for small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and big corporations.

And many businesses and folks in the industry, marketers and entrepreneurs as well, sometimes hesitate due to the fear or misunderstanding of what AI is and how it works. I wanted to bridge that gap and show them the real practical benefits that AI can offer. I also believe that our future in at least the marketing industry will be powered by AI.

So I want to help folks prepare for that, navigate their careers with success, and build their brands and businesses in a sustainable way.

[00:04:34] Mike Allton: Love that mission. Thank you for sharing that. Now you mentioned transformative. Could you share an example, a success story, maybe where AI has had that kind of transformative impact on a company’s operations or their bottom line even?[00:04:48] Emily Baillie: Absolutely. Well, folks here in Canada where I’m based and I’m sure in the U S and other countries as well. Are being expected to do a lot more and sometimes with less, I find people’s schedules are more hectic than ever. They’re trying to be as productive as possible and optimize their time. I worked with an organization which was a real estate company and they were getting a lot of customer inquiries.

Those customer inquiries are precious of course, but that was taking up a lot of their staff’s same types of queries over and over again. What they were able to do was to integrate an AI chat bot tool. To free up their team’s time. So they could automate the responses to some of those initial inquiries.

Craft responses that are personalized and. And appropriate to the customer and what they’re looking for. And this reduced. their response time by 80%. This helped to free up their team’s time, boost their sales conversion significantly, but more importantly, giving them the time and space to focus on those higher level tasks.

Those in person meetings, those, you know, those showings, those deals, those. Pieces of the role and the company that require that human to human interaction. So in a sense, they were able to you know, boost their, their revenues because they were able to focus on those higher value tasks and get AI to handle those lower I don’t want to say lower value, but those more frequent and more often needed customer inquiries.

Thanks.

[00:06:36] Mike Allton: Yeah, that is such a great example. And folks, our previous episode, we did a whole deep dive into AI chatbots with Kelly Noble Mirabella. So I’ll share a link to that episode in the show notes. But I’m wondering, Emily, was there a particular tool that they used for building those chatbots?[00:06:52] Emily Baillie: Yeah, they use the Zapier tool.

They use the Zapier tripod and had good success with that. Yeah,

[00:06:58] Mike Allton: very cool I’ll to take a look at that. I haven’t really played with Zapier too much I’ll to do that. But let’s let’s more let’s go back to kind of the whole premise of the show, right? We’re talking to folks who may not be comfortable yet Using AI, maybe they don’t have a lot of authorization or support from their company.

Maybe they’re afraid for their job and they’re kind of taking that, that perspective. Well, if I, if I don’t look at it, I don’t talk about it. I don’t touch it. Maybe it won’t actually impact me, but of course we know that’s not true. So how do you typically address that fear of job displacement when you’re talking about AI to entire organizations?

[00:07:35] Emily Baillie: I emphasize that AI is a tool to enhance. Productivity, and not to replace humans. There certainly is that fear that, you know, the robots are going to take our jobs. Or if my company realizes that they can get AI to do some of the work that I’m doing, does that make me less valuable? These are concerns that I hear often and you hear them as well, Mike.

So my approach to AI is to to use it to help people do what they’re already doing only be a little bit more productive and optimize their time. So using AI to help automate or, or speed up repetitive tasks allows people to kind of get where they’re already going in a faster and more productive sense.

It allows teams also to focus on that higher level creative work. While getting some help with things like, you know, customer service inquiries, generating ideas for marketing campaigns perhaps generating some copy that they can then print. finesse with their staff and, and use in their marketing materials, maybe some outlines for presentations, things like that are good uses of AI that don’t put anyone’s job at risk.

Now that said, folks do need to embrace AI. They do need to learn it at least a little bit. And I promise it’s not as scary as some folks think. Many folks who attend my workshops and training sessions are new to artificial intelligence and during the session We work together on a task. We’ll open up chat GPT for example and use it to complete a task and Folks are often surprised by how easy it is to get started and they realize it’s not as scary as one may think can actually help them do their work faster.

And they can use it as sort of an assistant.

[00:09:41] Mike Allton: Yeah. In fact, you know, we’re recording this in September, just a couple of months ago, Microsoft came out with their, AI assistant, right? That was supposed to kind of sit next to us and be ever present in the, you know, Microsoft family of apps and they called it co pilot, which I thought was just brilliant marketing and branding because by labeling it a co pilot, we’re defining it as it’s not the pilot.

It’s not going to take over flying the plane. It’s going to sit next to you and help you fly the plane. But I want to get your take on something, Emily, because I recently posted to LinkedIn. There was a collaborative article talking about. This very topic, people who are scared for their jobs. And I said something to the effect of the fact is some jobs will go away with the advent of AI technology, because it’s not a explicit tool like Canva or HubSpot.

It’s a layer of technology like electricity or the internet that’s going to be. Infused in every aspect of society. And just like we no longer have gas lamp street lighters, who are walking the streets of our cities at night. Cause we don’t use gas for that purpose anymore. And we don’t have stables throughout our downtowns because people aren’t using their horses to get to and from.

There are some jobs, I think that will end up being eliminated by AI technology. Do you agree with that sentiment?

[00:11:04] Emily Baillie: I do. I think some jobs over time will sort of fall away or be displaced by AI. And, and I’m not afraid to say that because I think people need to know and they need to be prepared. It’s not going to happen tonight.

It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but this is something that folks should be aware of and adapt to. Certainly AI will create new opportunities and exciting new roles and folks who are. trained in AI are in the best possible position. So I emphasize that with my students. I emphasize that with my clients.

The best thing you can do is start learning AI and, and pay attention to the developments in the industry. Pay attention to the new tools and features as they come out and work that into your schedule. I know some people feel overwhelmed by the pace of change, but the best thing they can do to prepare for an AI driven future is to bit by bit learn and become more comfortable and more familiar with these tools.

[00:12:11] Mike Allton: Fantastic sentiment. I totally agree. And if we’re talking about overwhelm, let’s specifically talk to the leaders of some of these organizations. The business leaders that you’re talking to or that I’m working with, you know, CEOs, owners and so on. They’re feeling overwhelmed. They’re feeling like AI is complex.

They’re potentially feeling like AI is expensive and it’s yet another project and that sort of thing. What is your advice for folks who are in those kinds of situations?

[00:12:38] Emily Baillie: It’s a great question, and I’m glad we’re speaking about the reality of what’s going on out there in the marketplace. I recommend folks like that start small.

So identify one area of the business or the organization where AI can streamline a process. You could start perhaps with a pilot. Implementation seems daunting focus on implementing one AI tool for one particular task. And if you break it down, those gradual steps can make the process feel a little bit more manageable.

It also gives staff or employees time to adapt and upskill. So you don’t want to overwhelm staff who are new to AI. With super high expectations. Like they need to master this tool, you know, instantly, they may need some support, they may need some training and our leaders and our business owners and our CMOs out there need training and support as well.

So. So don’t be afraid to seek out a course or a workshop or LinkedIn can be a great resource as well. Podcasts like this are amazing for learning and keep educating yourself with an open mind. You can also remember that everyone is still learning about AI. This is the early phase of this revolutionary technology.

So it’s okay to not have all the answers. If you start small, test and grow. iterate measure the results, assess whether AI helped with that particular task or, or help to get more productivity in your business, then that’s a good indicator that you’re on the right track. Also keeping in mind that AI requires some upfront work.

It’s not sort of like a, a. If you have a switch that you turn on and AI does the work for you, you have to train the tool as well. So don’t be discouraged if you use AI for something and initially you’re not too overwhelmed or impressed with the results. It may be the case that the AI tool itself needs a bit of training, it needs more background information and that’s something that folks can spend some time on.

And we recommend they do that to get the best possible outputs from their AI tools.

[00:15:05] Mike Allton: That’s great advice and a great reminder too, that we do need to spend the time up front in, in training the AI or training ourselves or both to make sure that the output we’re getting is what we actually expected. Do you have any other suggestions though for businesses who really want to limit that initial time and investment and make sure that doesn’t get out of hand?

Any other guardrails that you might recommend?

[00:15:29] Emily Baillie: I would say do your research on the types of tools and find the right tool for you. So it does take a, you know, a little bit of research, but you can ask your other folks in your industry. You can inquire with partner organizations, what tools they are using and identify the right tool for the right job.

That way you’re not wasting time, implementing an AI tool. Realizing it’s not quite the right fit and then having to implement another one. And then when you’re actually setting it up, then things are going to go a little bit smoother because you have the customization that you need to really get the job done.

[00:16:09] Mike Allton: Having the right tool is so important. In fact, several of our guests in previous shows have talked about the need to think about what you want to accomplish first and take AI out of the equation completely initially and make sure that you even need AI because you might not. There might be a perfectly non AI valid tool.

That’s great for that solution, and that’s all you need to do. But think about those repetitive tasks. Think about those things that you want to accomplish. very much. In your business first and then work backwards from there, folks, we’re talking with Emily Baillie about the concerns and the anxieties many of us face with regard to AI.

And in a moment, we’re going to get into some details on how businesses can get started. But first let me share with you the tool that I’m using and recommending every day to help keep my AI usage effective and affordable. This episode of AI in Marketing: Unpacked is brought to you by Magai, your gateway to making generative AI incredibly simple and fast.

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With your audience. Don’t just market, market smarter with Magai. Tap the link in the show notes. So Emily, I do want to get into some implementation steps, but before we do that, I think a couple of things we want to cover first, the first of which is misconceptions. I think we should dispel some of those.

You know, what have you seen in terms of misconceptions about what AI can do for businesses? Maybe ones that you’re encountering frequently with your clients that you work with.

[00:18:22] Emily Baillie: A big misconception is that AI is only for tech companies. In reality, businesses in any industry can benefit from this and from automating tasks to improving customer experiences or helping to create social media content.

Many different industries and many different verticals can benefit from AI. You don’t need to have a technical background to get started in AI. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and business owners from So many different industries that have been so excited by the possibilities that AI can bring to their business.

Another myth is that AI delivers perfect results. And I think folks who have not had a lot of experience with AI sometimes see things out there online and they think, well, you know, that was generated by AI. AI did all of that. And that may be the case. Certainly we’re seeing more AI generated content on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram and so on.

But there’s this myth out there that. AI just does it all for you, and it’s sort of like the click of a button, and AI just does it. AI systems are very powerful, and can be very powerful, but they can also make mistakes, or produce outcomes that are not what you want. as high quality as a human might do.

AI requires iteration. It requires the user to iterate and go back and forth with the AI tool and and work with it to create those, those, those, I know top marketers who tell me they iterate on a single prompt up to 12 times before they’re happy with the final outcome. So it’s not sort of a set it and forget it type of thing.

This is something that people put effort into to get those AI generated results. AI cannot operate without human intervention. So yes, you can automate certain tasks like content creation. But you’re not fully farming them out to AI, nor should you. I recommend that AI systems, no matter what they are, no matter what business you’re in, always have human oversight.

Everyone is fact checking what they put out before it reaches the intended audience. And there are opportunities for users to put their human touch on things so that the content that AI generates doesn’t sound like it’s been created by a robot. It’s high quality and using AI to act as an assistant in the process.

Creating content is the recommended path rather than getting A. I. To do the whole darn thing for you. So I think people who are new to A. I. Will learn quickly that A. I. Requires some iteration, and it doesn’t always get it perfectly correct each time. But there’s an opportunity to work with the tool and iterate to get that really excellent outcome in the end.

[00:21:39] Mike Allton: You’re absolutely right about journey of AI and the need to have human involvement. One of the really cool things that’s happening today. And again, I said, we’re recording this in September. We don’t typically talk a lot about news in this particular show. But in this week’s episode of the artificial intelligence show with Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput, they were specifically talking about open AI’s roadmap and how we’re on basically level of one of artificial intelligence and their perspectives.

And once we get to like level two and level three, then we start to get into a scenario where. AI exists at a system level. We have agents who are basically artificial intelligence and they’re able to interact with each other. And one of the key differentiators between that level and where we’re at today is that those agents will have been trained to be flawless.

They will begin to be able to self check and understand when they’re doing something wrong or when they’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. And it was a fascinating conversation, this podcast episode. About how they’re having to train those models differently than what they do today. Today they just feed them information and the A.

I learns through probability what probably should happen next in any kind of sequence of conversations. But now they’re training it to do mathematics, which today’s models can’t do. Strangely, if people think about how powerful they are, they can’t do math because they don’t know how to do the work. They only know how to look up an answer or create or hallucinate an answer to your point.

But that’s that is changing. Very, very soon that we’ll be able to rely on our AI agents to execute actions flawlessly. Doesn’t mean we need to take humans out of the scenario. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But it’s really fascinating, I think, where we’re going, but to your point today, we can’t always trust AI to come up with the right answer.

So how do you build trust in AI systems and their outputs, particularly when you’ve got skeptical team members or clients?

[00:23:32] Emily Baillie: I focus on transparency. So first, explaining how AI systems work, testing it on small tasks first, a pilot project is, is a great place to start a small task when you’re not feeling the pressure of a deadline and, and assessing those results.

Success with small tasks will breed confidence in the organization. And sometimes AI users are the best advocates to their colleagues. They’ll get really amazing results from the AI systems that they are already using and their enthusiasm. They can share with their colleagues, with others in their industry and people can learn from one another.

So, so training is. important support in the workplace is important. And for employees and larger organizations, I think it’s important for them to know that their bosses are on board. There’s a lot of folks out there right now who are using AI sort of off the side of their desk. Their boss may know that they’re using AI.

Their boss may not know that they’re using AI. Heck, their boss, might not care as long as they’re meeting their deadlines and creating, you know, good quality work. Building trust sometimes can come from the leadership within an organization. So if someone at the top is sort of saying, okay, we are going to embrace new technologies in this organization and here are the guardrails.

You know, here are the the policies for AI use in this organization. We encourage folks to use AI for, you know, certain things and tell the staff what those things are. And then also let them know there are things perhaps that Folks should not be using a I for and there are precautions and privacy and ethical considerations that employees need to be aware of as well.

So I think the culture of innovation in an organization is super important as as we move forward with more a I adoption across all industries. And sometimes those leaders can really set the tone for the other folks within the organization that can help to build trust that can help to overcome any skepticism or hesitation that folks may have and offering support to them if they have questions or concerns that they feel comfortable raising those or expressing them can really help folks to get on board and embrace this amazing new technology.

[00:26:17] Mike Allton: I had to laugh when you were talking about employees using a I with or without their bosses, knowledge or even consent because I’ve not only seen that I’ve been in that situation. It’s it’s not a great place to be because you kind of want that organizational support and awareness. And there’s so many other reasons why organizations should be paying attention to where AI is going and how it’s going to impact the company, not just the individual employees, but the entire company industry.

But I want to go back to something you touched on earlier. You talked about pilot program for businesses, and you know, we’ve been talking about overcoming objections and anxieties and how to start. Could you walk us through kind of a sample AI implementation process that is particularly good for like a small business or even a startup?

[00:27:02] Emily Baillie: Absolutely. So I find folks tend to start with using AI for social media. So social media is a big job. Anyone who’s been a social media manager or worked in an agency knows that managing multiple platforms, adapting content to various different platforms and fueling those social channels on a continuous basis, can be very time consuming.

Now, I’m not here to say you should get AI to do all of your social media content for you. That’s not the place to start. However, you can use AI tools such as chat GPT such as Jasper, such as Claude to help you start to generate some new. Social media content that’s going to resonate with your unique audience.

So how do you get started in doing that? Well, first you’ve identified the task. The task here is start helping to create new social media content, let’s say for Instagram as an example. So what we’re going to do next is we’re going to select a AI tool. By the way, a lot of folks in my ecosystem here in Canada are still using chat GPT.

First and foremost tools like Jasper are paid and they are a little bit more specialized and good for higher volume marketing. But certainly if you’re new to AI, So, what you’ll then do is integrate this AI tool into your workflow by starting with a project asking the tool in a clearly written prompt to generate some ideas perhaps for your social media content, for your Instagram.

And you’re going to need to give the tool some background information on what your brand is, what the brand voice is like. Is it conversational? Is it educational? Is it serious? Is it humorous? Give the tool some, some clear instructions on how to craft content or craft ideas for you. And then you’re going to assign So you’re going to see what Chad GPT or Jasper gives you in terms of ideas, in terms of drafts, and you’re going to iterate on those.

So go back and forth, have a conversation with the tool and let it know what you like, what you don’t like, and ask for more details or changes. From there, you’re going to get closer and closer to an end product that you can actually use. You’re also going to keep in mind that you’re still putting the human touch on this.

You’re not going to necessarily copy paste it and put it out there on social, but rather you’re going to make sure that. You have that human oversight that your brand voice is captured accurately. And the content is high enough quality to put a positive face on your brand. So that’s really sort of the first step to getting going.

It’s quite simple, really. And once you’ve done a little bit of this, you’re starting to integrate that AI generated content or AI generated ideas into your workflow, publishing some of that content, you want to monitor and make adjustments. So you’re going to monitor the engagement, monitor the analytics.

on your social media tools such as Instagram and track the performance. How well is that a I generated content doing versus the non a I generated content? Is it performing better? Is it performing worse? These are very important indicators to keep your eye on and make adjustments as As you go forward.

So going forward after that, you’re going to make any adjustments necessary to ensure that AI is enhancing your social media presence without sacrifice any quality. And once that sort of workflow is running smoothly, or you’re feeling more confident about it, you can So you can scale up, you can adapt your Instagram content, for example, for say LinkedIn by running it through the same tool and, and adjusting your prompt.

And then you can also explore additional AI tools in future that may help to optimize Other areas of social media management. So perhaps analytics, predictive analytics or further content creation. So identifying the task, selecting the tool giving the tool, your prompt and iterating on that prompt and then monitoring performance and adjusting as needed.

[00:31:58] Mike Allton: Emily, that was fantastic. Folks, go back and listen to that segment a couple more times so you can really understand exactly what Emily’s trying to teach you with that and using an Instagram social strategy as an example, and I love that you mentioned Jasper. It’s a fantastic tool. I’ve interviewed Jessica Hreha from the Jasper team as part of an AI panel that we did over the summer, and she is Fabulous, particularly her views on, on how businesses need to adopt a mindset and philosophy towards AI.

She calls it her AI council. So I’ll throw some links into the show notes so you can learn more about that. But, you know, we’re talking about Jasper, talk about the various large language models and we are there any other applications AI applications that you find particularly valuable for businesses today, or if there’s nothing else that you’ve mentioned, maybe share your preference between ChatGPT versus Claude or, or Meta.

ai or Gemini. How are you viewing those different large language models?

[00:32:54] Emily Baillie: I’m having good results with Claude at the moment, and I think it’s great for ideation and for content creation. So ChatGPT 4. 0 is excellent, but Clode adds a little bit something extra I find when it comes to marketing materials.

So that’s definitely a recommended one for me. I use Grammarly for spell checking and rewording and editing. And I find that the plugin that works in Google Chrome is excellent. It works in emails, it works on LinkedIn, it works in anything I’m drafting at any stage throughout the day. Very quick, very convenient.

Otter. ai is a meeting transcription meeting assistant AI tool that a lot of small businesses and nonprofit organizations are starting to embrace. Fireflies is another one and Zoom has a built in AI tool as well. They all work in a similar function, but what people are using these for is recording the meetings, creating a transcript from those meetings.

And then generating a to do list after the meeting. So you don’t need to be, you know, necessarily taking notes during meetings. Everything that everyone says is captured with their consent. Of course. It’s important to make sure everyone is comfortable with that. But that can be super helpful to some folks and it also improves accessibility.

So I had a call just yesterday with a gentleman who asked if he could use an A. I transcription tool on our call. I said, Sure, no problem. He said he has a D. H. D. And it really, really helps him to stay organized and focused during his many, many meetings. So I’ve heard a lot of good responses from small business owners and nonprofits who used to have to have someone taking notes or they would be so busy.

They would almost forget what was agreed on in some earlier calls. These AI transcription, Tools, I think can be pretty fantastic for some. And another one I wanted to mention for video creation and editing, Mike, you know how important video is in marketing these days is runway, a really cool app that folks can get creative with and create or edit videos that are suitable for social media marketing.

So there’s a few to check out, many, many more. But those are some of my favorites.

[00:35:25] Mike Allton: Fantastic suggestions. In fact, I couldn’t agree more on the meeting note taker. I’m now leading a couple of squads at Agorapulse, where I work full time, many of you know, and meeting with these squads every single week.

So it’s two meetings a week, and they need to be fully transparent. The whole company wants to know what’s going on. going on with these squads and with these meetings. So now I’m not furiously taking notes. I’ve got the note taker. I get an email summary. As soon as the meeting’s over, I can pop that into the online shared meeting agenda and then anybody at any time can go look and see, you know, what did Mike’s content training squad talk about?

Last week, it’s all there is very seamless. So thanks for sharing those. Now, my last question, Emily, is kind of a fun one and almost a tongue in cheek one, because I’m going to ask you to look ahead years and it’s next to impossible, the AI industry and technology to really think years in advance, but how do you see the business landscape changing in the near future due to AI?

[00:36:23] Emily Baillie: I love this question, and thank you for asking it. I think that organizations in the future might have sort of like a staff person, and it’s not going to be a person. Organizations will have a tool that they rely on that includes a custom AI tool. So if you think of it like right now, a lot of folks are using these large language models that a lot of other organizations are also using in the future, I can see an organization having their own chatbot that their staff use.

And. are expected to use and that meet their specific needs for the business. So I can see that coming. We already have custom GPTs that, you know, organizations like Canva and AllTrails have and Kayak has one too, the travel company. But I could see in the future Instead of us, you know, inputting all our business information into a large language model that many other folks are using, we have our own sort of more secure LLM for internal use.

I think that AI adoption in the next few years will absolutely continue across many, many industries. Certainly marketing is at the forefront in terms of adoption. More and more interactions, I think, will become automated, and more folks will realize the power of AI to generate content, help with marketing campaigns, and craft efficient, personalized communications that reach the right person at the right time.

More and more AI powered tools will become available. integrated into non AI tools. So your example of, of co pilot, like you mentioned, if you are a Microsoft office user, which many folks are in larger organizations, well, you will notice, or you may have already noticed more and more AI powered features kind of creeping into that sphere.

Same with folks who use Canva, a design software tool that’s very popular for social media content more and more AI features cropping up and finding their way into those non AI powered platforms. I can also see at the same time, Mike, a little bit of a, perhaps resistance to AI generated content. Now you and I work in this space, your listeners are active in this space.

So sometimes you can kind of notice when content on social media is generated by AI. Sometimes the language that’s being used is typical of AI, certain catchphrases, certain cliches, let’s call it. Send to appear sometimes over and over again, and those air dead giveaways that folks are using a I and perhaps not iterating enough on their particular task so authenticity, I think, will become more important as folks notice more AI generated content in the online world, there will be perhaps a movement where people might really want to preserve that human to human touch that authenticity. So I think brands will They will monitor how well their AI generated campaigns are doing and they will assess whether that’s working for them.

Is that resonating with their consumers or not? And what adjustments do they need to make? I’m not necessarily predicting a backlash against AI generated content, but I know that some brands such as Dove, the the beauty soap company have said, we will not use AI in our advertising campaigns. And this is very smart because their brand represents authenticity and body positivity and so on.

So if they’re using AI and people notice that can spark some distrust. So I think brands are smart, marketers are smart, and we’ll continue to monitor this space and test and see how well these AI campaigns are working. And we’ll see more AI tools. enter the marketplace that will do more impressive things as the technology advances.

But at the end of the day, all businesses will want to make sure that what they’re doing is truly working and truly resonating with their customers. So it’s a really cool space to watch. I can’t wait for the future of all this. There are lots of questions that still remain, but certainly the future for folks who are educated in AI or willing to learn AI

[00:41:14] Mike Allton: Love that assessment, Emily, and I really found fascinating your points about developing our own internal, you know, AI, you know, bots or language models at Agorapulse

also, one of those two squads that I talked about is a squad where we’re building a repository for our sales team of all of our best customer stories and comparison pieces of content and ebooks and things that, A sales rep would need, but we have so many of those pieces of content at Agorapulse, things we’ve been creating for years, they can’t possibly learn them all and keep them all at the tip of their tongue, but they could go to Slack and they could ask the AI, do we have any stories about a customer who switched from this product to that product or whatever?

And had that surfaced for them. So for those of you who aren’t quite following what we’re talking about the when we talk about like open a eyes, chat, GPT or Google’s Gemini. These are large language models that have been trained on just immense amounts of information. But you can have smaller version of those that have just enough training to understand speech and communication.

But the data that they would draw answers from you provide them. To your point, Emily, it could be, you know, business information, customer support articles and so on. An analogy might be, I don’t know if this is a good analogy or not, but an analogy might be your water supply in your home. You could tap into the municipal water supply or you could dig your own well and septic system and have your own contained water supply that’s disconnected from everybody else’s and there can’t be any intermingling of them.

Folks, if you’re listening, let me know if you think that’s a horrible analogy or not. But Emily, you’ve been absolutely amazing. And this has been such a great and important interview for folks who want to learn more about you, follow you, connect with you, where can they go?

[00:42:55] Emily Baillie: You can find me on LinkedIn.

I’m at Emily Baillie, and you can also visit me online at compasscontent. ca. Thanks so much.

[00:43:05] Mike Allton: Terrific. Thank you, Emily. And that’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends, your next step. If you’re new to this AI journey and want to start using it throughout your business, particularly in marketing is to grab my free book, the AI marketing primer, a comprehensive guide for marketers.

The book aims to demystify the world of artificial intelligence in marketing. And this guide is designed. Not just to introduce you to the foundational concepts of AI, but to provide you with actual strategies and insights that can be directly applied to your marketing initiatives, whether you’re looking to refine customer segmentation, automate repetitive tasks, or create dynamic and personalized content at scale, understanding AI is a critical step towards achieving these goals as we’ve been talking about throughout this entire episode.

You can grab that free book at the social media at. com slash. AI primer or in the link below until next time, welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in marketing unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies.

You enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review. We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have. Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing.

Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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