Generative AI And Its Impact On Your Role In Marketing

Reading Time: 19 minutes

A panel of experts discussing various ways for businesses to use generative AI in their daily workflows.

AI isn’t scary, anyone can do it, and they should walk away with at least one practical action item they can implement today.

What follows is a panel discussion I hosted and moderated for Agorapulse during the Social Pulse Summit: Retail Edition in March of 2024.

Panelists Discussing Generative AI In Marketing

Mike Allton, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Agorapulse
Dustin W. Stout, Founder of Magai
Kate Bradley Chernis, Founder of Lately.ai
Anne Cheng, Founder of Supercharge Lab

Watch the Panel on AI

Full Transcript

Panel on Generative AI And Its Impact On Your Role In Retail Marketing

[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Hello folks, and welcome to our panel on generative AI and its impact on your role in retail marketing. I’m your host, your moderator today, Mike Alton, and I’m joined by an incredible group of AI experts and SaaS founders whom I’ll introduce in a moment. Now, while this discussion was pre recorded, please feel free to drop your questions in the chat and we’ll be monitoring them live and jump into the chat and respond.

Now. Let’s get to this panel. I’m joined today by Dustin W. Stout, founder of Magi, Kate Bradley Chernis, CEO of Lately, and Anne Chang, CEO of Supercharged Lab. Each of you just take a minute to share and introduce a little bit more about yourself personally, starting with you, Anne.

[00:00:40] Anne Cheng: Hey everybody, I’m Anne. I’m the CEO of Supercharged Lab.

Did a whole lot of studying and had a lot of professional PHD from finance to science to psychology. So Good to be here.

[00:00:57] Mike Allton: Awesome. Awesome. Dustin.[00:01:00] Dustin W. Stout: Yeah, I’m Dustin founder of Magai, the all in one AI platform for real people doing real work in the real world. Sold that from Jay Baer, actually derivative of his amazing podcast.

But I’m the actor turned digital marketing professional because in Hollywood it is. Hard to act when you’re not a celebrity. So I decided to own my own businesses found that I loved creating digital products that make people’s lives easier and more enjoyable. And I continue to do that to this day and I’m very blessed to be.

Here at home joining you lovely folks today to talk about a

[00:01:37] Mike Allton: fantastic. Thanks Dustin[00:01:38] Dustin W. Stout: and Kate[00:01:39] Kate Bradley Chernis: Hey everybody nice to see of course all of you Mike and Dustin and all of you guys who are joining us I’m Kate Bradley Chernis. I’m the co founder and CEO of lately dot AI and We are able to learn any brand or individual voice and then generate content targeted to your unique audience among You the many other things we do, but that’s the short short version.

Dustin, I think we know this about each other, but we have something in common, kind of, which is that I used to be a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM Satellite Radio.

[00:02:13] Dustin W. Stout: Oh, nice.[00:02:14] Kate Bradley Chernis: And so like that, you know, you know, It’s funny because when COVID happened, like suddenly everyone was talking to no one in the ether, you know, and I was like, Oh my God, I’m still doing this job.

Like, how, how is that, you know, being on stage and, and all that kind of stuff. So but what’s interesting is, and we’ll talk about this later is, and this is what I love about growing older. Is that you have the wisdom to see how all of your paths like have led you here and connected and what I learned about the theater of the mind and radio actually translates to how lately works now.

So it’s kind of crazy how all this stuff, you know, connects.

[00:02:56] Mike Allton: We’re going to get existential stuff, right? We’re going to, we’re going to stick with you because I want you, I want each of you to share a little bit more about your solution. You know, so share more with more about lately and specifically how it intersects AI retail marketing, social media.

We’re talking to social media managers and community managers here for the most part, attending the summit today. Tell us more about lately from that perspective.

[00:03:21] Kate Bradley Chernis: Yeah. So thanks, Mike. When, when you connect your social channels to lately, what we do is we instantly study all of the analytics from those channels, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.

And we’re looking for patterns and two specific kinds of patterns. The first is when you write content well on social media, what makes it do so well? What’s the DNA of it? What are the words, the ideas, the phrases, the sentence structures, even the composition? Is it a link in some text? Is it video and text, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah. And then the second pattern we’re looking at is when your unique target audience engages with your content, why, what makes them click like common and share. So once I have that pattern, the AI starts to learn on its own all the time, and it’s referencing best practices and all the data that we’ve amassed over the last 10 years.

And then we are able to generate content Based on what we’ve learned about you so that it’s super in your voice and then targeting that exact audience so we do this all through a social media management platform that can Integrate with others and or you can do it through us like all that kind of stuff

[00:04:26] Mike Allton: Very cool.

All right, and an what can you share more with us?

[00:04:30] Anne Cheng: Yeah, for sure. So we just launched Sigmund AI 2. 0, which is a updated version of it. I love how Kate said, you know, we’re all obsessed with saving time, but not making money. And the truth is a lot of us are just trying to beat the algorithms that of the powers that be.

What Sigmund now does is that it gives the powers that be that feedback loop and basically puts you. Ahead of your competitors only because your competitors are trying to beat Google and Facebook and all the, all that jazz, but really nobody’s just telling Google and Facebook what’s working and what’s not.

So if you keep telling Google and Facebook what’s working and what’s not, basically you kind of get ahead. That’s how the algorithm works right now. It’s called value based bidding. So Sigma AI is still the same thing. It’s still does end to end operating of your digital marketing agency for small agency owners or scale up agency owners just does it easier, better, faster with a lot more analytics.

[00:05:34] Mike Allton: I love that you referenced the futility of trying to beat the algorithm. I mean, it’s just too many people are watching the audience thinking, yeah, I’m tired of pushing that hill that rock up that hill. Right. Dustin, share more with us about Magi.[00:05:49] Dustin W. Stout: Yes. So Magai is the all in one AI platform to help real people get work done.

So the, the great thing about the time that we live in right now is it’s so exciting, right? Chat GPT came out and completely changed the world. And then Claude came out and kind of started the arms race of, of AI, so to speak. And now we’ve got Google Bard, which has now become Gemini and Gemini is evolving into something else.

And then we’ve got these other companies all racing to become the best AI company that there is. And so what Magai has effectively solved for a lot of people, a lot of professionals is It’s not sustainable to sort of play this game of, Oh, let’s go use chat GPT. Cause they just came out with this feature and, Oh, wait, Claude just came out with some other feature.

Let’s go try that one over here. Oh no. Now Google Gemini is even better. So we’ve got to, and you end up having this, this game of running from one app, one tool to another, having to relearn all the things that you need. Having 15 different subscriptions. You need an image generator over here. This other image generator, this video, Magai solves all of that headache by putting all of the world’s best AI tools, chat, GPT, Claude, Bard Gemini Leonardo AI, stable diffusion, text to video, all of it in one beautiful interface under one subscription for your entire team.

So effectively saving you from having to spend a thousand dollars on all these different tools. And instead having one unified subscription and a unified interface with things like folders. different workspaces for different clients or different projects to keep things organized, searchable, findable, all so that you don’t have to play this back and forth game of changing your standard operating procedures every time a new app comes out with a new feature.

Every AI tool in one beautiful interface.

[00:07:40] Mike Allton: Fantastic. So now folks, you know who it is I’m talking to, you know, the solutions that they’re coming from. A lot of that will be interwoven into the rest of this conversation. But now let’s get into some of the details about, you know, AI in this intersection with AI and social media marketing.

We’re in this, so we’re seeing this all the time, but a lot of the folks that are watching us today, their job is to maintain their presence on social media as a brand, and they’re trying to keep up with. The platforms and the algorithms that we already referenced. And they’re kind of struggling to figure out what’s going on with AI.

What should I be doing? What should I not be doing? So that’s what we want to address today. So I’m going to start, we’re going to go back to you, Dustin. I’m going to start with you. What do you think the number one challenge might be for retail social media managers today that AI can help with?

[00:08:29] Dustin W. Stout: Well, I mean, retail social media managers have a really challenging job. And I think to sum it up into two, one particular struggle is difficult because there are many social media managers. I was one for many, many years. I worked for a plethora of different brands and businesses and clients.

And I know that the struggle is real, like having to prove KPIs, having to generate content constantly and trying to switch. If you’re working with multiple clients, you have to kind of switch creative sides of your brain and take on one brand voice and take on another. So there’s a lot of challenges.

And I think the one thing that AI above all things Insanely good at is becoming a supplement to your own creativity. Now I’ll paint a picture for you. So I ran a marketing agency since 2012 is about when I started freelancing as a social media consultant and ended up working for a number of other agencies, a subcontractor worked with everything from Got plumbers, lawyers retail companies product companies, SAS hosting companies, resorts.

I worked for women’s rejuvenation clinics. Some of the audience knows what that means. But the hardest thing for me was. I only had so much energy in a day. I only had so much creativity in a day. Now, I, I believe we’re all insanely creative. Like this creative energy that we have is given to us from our creator and it is unending, but we, our bodies, our minds, they fatigue, they, they get tired and we get burnt out.

And so for me, the struggle was constantly, how do I give my best creativity to every one of my clients? Or if you’re working for a business, how do I give my best creativity every single day, trying to generate massive amounts of content to get as much reach as possible. And so I think AI really helps with that.

You know, it’s the supplemental creativity that saves you from burning yourself out on trying to come up with a thousand different ideas every single week. And you know, a lot of how I built Magi was for that purpose of. You know, content creator needs to generate ideas. And not only do they need to generate ideas, but they need to organize them.

They need their team to come in and contribute. And so I think AI is a lifesaver for the people who are in the creative seats, trying to generate social media content on a daily basis. And it can really save you from burning out like like I had time after time. Right, right. Completely agree. Kate,

[00:11:10] Mike Allton: what would you add?[00:11:11] Kate Bradley Chernis: Well, one of the challenges that we see, honestly, is sort of, I’m going to call it a laziness, and I’ve been there too but this sort of expectation or a misalignment of the expectation of what AI does so people really just want to push that button and have it do everything for them and not do a darn thing, and we’re not there.

The two, there’s a symbiotic relationship really between humans and AI at this point, meaning that a human must analyze and course correct what comes out because there’s no way for the AI to get it right all the time, right? One of the things that we’ve been working on. On lately is that we plugged in a continuous performance learning loop so that we’re always able to reference your analytics to the content we create, right?

So there’s the connection there as opposed to pulling it out of thin air. But there’s this there’s still this like, Oh, I’m just going to pull it out of thin air and like, let it rip. And we see customers doing that all the time. Like we’re watching them online. I can see what they produce. And I’m like, You, why did you let the AI do that for you?

I can see that’s a non sequitur. For example, you have to go in and make a change that the AI learns don’t start the sentence with and for example, right? And when you’re able to sort of take that, Ownership of it, you get infinitely better results. And we, the thing that Ann was referencing was right before we pushed record today, I had said, you know, we see this constant conflict between saving time.

So, which is really important. Dustin just mentioned, it’s a lifesaver. It is a lifesaver as all technology has come to be right. And one way or the other, it’s really helping people get that jumping point together. The fear of the blank page is gone. But once you. Get that out. Your next objective has to be.

Okay, well, saving time is great. Thanks so much. But what am I going to do with this? What’s the effect? And we find a conflict between the social media managers, the people on the ground and their bosses. These guys want to save time. Those guys, girls, whoever they want to save money. They want to make money.

[00:13:18] Mike Allton: Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. And you’re spot on about the need to review the output that’s coming from A. I. And make money. Corrections. You got to do that. It’s, it’s, it’s, you probably didn’t see me when I was over here clapping. Yeah, I could see that underneath the, my, my, my friend and colleague, Katie Richman, she preaches to treat the AI like an intern who’s gonna, you know, maybe do great work for you, but they need to be trained and they need to be monitored and they need to be coached.

Then you just can’t hire an intern, expect them to go off and do an amazing job on their own. That wouldn’t be realistic. We’ll be able to treat AI the same way. And what would you add to that point?

[00:13:56] Anne Cheng: You know, I think sometimes we think that AI can do a lot of things. And then there is the other side of the spectrum where everybody says, Oh, AI is your intern and can do no shit.

I think there is a nuanced view that I would take. There are a lot of advanced AI solutions that are out there. And in retail, I think the biggest problem is there are so many SKUs. There are so many products. Every day I am looking at some of my clients and you know, they’re getting rejection notices from their ads managers and stuff like that.

It’s like, there’s a problem with your product. That’s a problem with your campaign. And it’s one product out of. 200, 000 products, which has a problem and the whole campaign goes down. And so I think a lot of times there are a lot of intelligent workflows. There are a lot of AI solutions, advanced AI solutions that can do the work for you.

And we’re not leveraging them because we don’t know that there are these tools out there or we. Think that you soon you still need a human being to do everything so I think that there needs to be a balanced approach, right? Yes that you know newer tools where You know the new models that as they get to know you they need to be trained obviously, but there are A lot of solutions, once they have, you know, come up to speed, there’ll be your best intern ever.

There’ll be your best employee ever. So I think we, we all need to learn how to use the solutions instead of just saying, Oh my God, it’s so stupid.

[00:15:38] Kate Bradley Chernis: I[00:15:38] Mike Allton: love, go ahead Kate. I’m[00:15:39] Kate Bradley Chernis: sorry. I was just going to say one of the things that we found in is that in our research of, you know, how to get the client to work with the models and train it and get it up to speed. I was, I found like a, A real pushback against that. And so I was reading this article talking about how across the globe, there’s a skills vacuum of analytics.

Specifically, human beings have lost the ability to just analyze and identify problems because there’s been a huge push in the last few decades of show me a solution. Don’t bring me a problem. Right? So even high school students, for example, they know they can use Google to find information and answers, but they don’t know what query to type in.

[00:16:24] Anne Cheng: I think that’s a lack of intellectual curiosity as an epidemic level, you know, it’s, it’s crazy. People don’t think anymore, right?[00:16:32] Kate Bradley Chernis: Yes. We just grunt out emojis.[00:16:39] Mike Allton: That’s so true. And I loved, and that you mentioned the fact that there are so many new tools out that we don’t even. I mean, it feels like every single day there’s a new function or a capability out there that’s simply stunning, but there’s so much so help us filter through the noise. What can folks do today, whether it’s with your solution or in general, that we might not have seen, but should absolutely be aware of in utilizing and I’ll let you take the first stab at that.[00:17:07] Anne Cheng: Can I just reference Kate and say that we just need to start thinking I think the biggest problem that we’re having is that the people are not thinking so if you ask me, what’s the biggest tool you have it’s between your two years. Just yeah start there and and and things will flow google Is your best friends, right?

Just start with your brain and use Google. I’m sorry to say, say that. But other than that, I think you know, there are a lot of intelligent workflow solutions out there. Including, you know, Sigmund, including Zapier including the amazing solutions that are referenced here. These are amazing solutions, which.

You just need to have a little bit of patience, a little bit of heart and a little bit of mind to, to, to actually try using it and be present. That’s it.

[00:18:00] Kate Bradley Chernis: You know, and that’s something that’s so interesting to us. We’ve had this experience a few times now of a CIO coming to us with this total open mindset, and we’re able to land those sales the quickest as opposed to when we’re talking to a CMO or even a CRO.

But the, it’s just amazing to me. Marketing seems to be behind overall there. having a hard time changing in general, as we all know, like it’s always silo city, but here we are again, and they’re caught in the loop and the other people around them are sort of pushing, you know, I see you nodding your head, Dustin.

So you’ve probably had this experience too, but like, you know, come on marketing, get it together. Right.

[00:18:44] Anne Cheng: I think that there’s, there’s a threat, right. They perceive it as a threat and there’s a lot of fear, which is bubbling to the surface. So. You know, I remember the first time I went into a, an agency and I presented my solution and they were horrified and they said, Holy shit, you don’t need us anymore.

And I went well, are you sure?

[00:19:09] Kate Bradley Chernis: I mean, they don’t, they’re not valued themselves because they’re not valuing what you said. Like what’s between your ears, you know here, I want to share this, this story real quick with you guys that hopefully the audience will understand. It’s, it’s one of my favorite metaphors.

So. Betty Crocker in the States. They make all kinds of bakery related things and they launched cake in a box, right? So everybody has had that in college or wherever else I like Devil’s food cake is my favorite at the time. It was only add water So that’s all you had to do and the housewives who were the target audience Thought this is totally weird.

Like I didn’t bake anything and they had no ownership in the, in the product. And so Betty Crocker removed the powdered eggs and their tagline became just add an egg and the sales skyrocketed because the humans felt some ownership in the quote technology. Right. So that’s one of the things I like to share a lot with the people who have that fear that you pointed out.

And on how. That this symbiotic relationship is really powerful and can be a win win win if everybody kind of participates and like puts their, puts their skin in the game, you might say.

[00:20:22] Mike Allton: Fascinating. Fascinating. Dustin, what do you think?[00:20:27] Dustin W. Stout: You know, I think there’s, A lot of challenges that marketing teams in particular, those in retail, like I said earlier, they have a lot of problems.

The KPIs in particular, trying to prove to their bosses or managers that what they’re doing is improving the bottom line. And I think the real, the real, the reason that there’s. This feeling that, that the industry as a whole is kind of behind and, or, or not moving as quickly as they should into this new field is like, and said, there’s this fear of, Oh no, I’m obsolete or I’m going to be obsolete.

I can’t adopt this new technology or this new way of doing things because maybe it will replace me or. You know, there’s a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, a lot of insecurity that is, I think, holding people back from just embracing the technology full force like they could. And, you know, the, the, the thing I keep telling people and you, you’ve, I, I didn’t invent this phrase.

It’s been said probably ad nauseum at this point, but AI is not going to replace you anytime soon. Somebody using AI is going to replace you. And so I think the faster that Anybody in professional capacity embraces AI and starts to really play with and understand the, the capabilities and the potential for again, supplementing their creative skills or supplementing their current skills.

I think everybody on here has expressed in some way, like the AI isn’t quite as good as some people think it is. And the minute a social media manager has a generate. Some, you know, social media content. You’ll find out real quick. If you have any skill in the realm of social media, AI is not nearly as good as you, so it always takes that layer of a human expert.

To oversee, to edit, to be the editor in chief, so to speak. So I don’t know. I think it’s just a matter of, you know, dropping our insecurities, dropping the fear and realizing this is, this is a paradigm shift in our society and our culture and everything is going to be affected and those who adapt faster.

Are going to have the advantage. They’re going to have the most job security. They’re going to have the most success in the future because they get on top of it early. And really the only way to get on top of that trend is to just start using the tools. There’s a lot of them out there. It’s a lot of really cool ones.

I would just start exploring as much as I can. Find that, you know, free time to really just play because most of us, I think, remember when Google came on the scene, we remember a time before Google, right? We had phone books, we had directories, and like, he’s calling us old, right? I’ll age myself. I’m the only one in this room that remembers that.

Okay. No, no, let me tell you about it. It took a while to realize like, Oh, wait, I could just Google that. It took some behavioral changes and behavioral change is one of the hardest things and longest things to change in human beings because we’re creatures of habit, we get used to certain things, but it’s going to take some time.

How did we learn how to Google things? We just started Googling things. At first it was, you know, Googling funny video, Charlie bit my finger, right? And, and that was it, that was what we Googled, but soon we realized, Oh, I can look up this. Business address or, oh, I can do math in the Google search. Oh, I can find stuff that I would normally find in a library.

It took some time, but what did it take actually Googling stuff. And so in the same way, the more we use AI, the more we interact with these chatbots, the more we play with the image generators. The more we realize we can use them for, the more we unlock in a cognitive capacity of how to utilize these tools.

[00:24:31] Kate Bradley Chernis: I’m sure, by the way, Ann and Dustin, you’ve seen this with your customers. But one of my favorite things is to see the way that they use lately in ways that we haven’t imagined. And it happens all the time, right? Oh, yeah.[00:24:43] Dustin W. Stout: Yeah. Oh, man, I’ve got stories about magic. Oh, I could talk for an hour about things.

Customers blow my mind with how they. Learn, figure out how to use AI. I mean, Find me in a back corner or in an alley somewhere or a bar. I’ll tell you the story about the the director, how, who used it on his his script.

[00:25:04] Kate Bradley Chernis: Yeah. It’s so we’ll[00:25:05] Dustin W. Stout: have to get back to that for sure.[00:25:07] Mike Allton: It’s so[00:25:08] Kate Bradley Chernis: cool. It’s are we, we, it’s definitely informed like how we’ve altered the product or how we’ve like altered our, our product roadmap roadmap when we’ve seen that kind of stuff.

And. It doesn’t take very long. You can see one or two people start to do the same thing. And then you’re like, Oh, my God. All right, let’s move it, you know, in that direction more. But those are the people who you’re talking about the change makers who are embracing it. They’re leading the pathway. And you know, I wish we could, you know, Figure out how to target more of them, obviously, and use AI to do that.

Probably should be on my wish list of things to do, you know?

[00:25:42] Mike Allton: Well, in the, just a few minutes that we have left, I want you to each give the social media managers and community managers that are watching today, one piece of actionable advice in like 30 seconds or less, just, you know, what was your one big tip for them?

And Dustin, I’ll let you go first.

[00:25:59] Dustin W. Stout: Oh, man. Um, so one of the things that is really hard, if you’re working for businesses in social media, and maybe you have. Multiple different clients, or maybe you’re you just have different audiences that you’re speaking to for the brand. Maybe you have several different personas.

I’m speaking to those social media managers right now who are have multiple sort of voices that they have to create content under that. For me as a writer, one of the hardest things to do was. Right in a voice that was not my own and be consistent at it. So one of the things that AI is exceptionally good at is you feeding it the brand voice and being as detailed as you can and having the AI generate content in that voice.

And I think that’s probably something Kate has spent a lot of time on with lately. Something that I focused on a lot at Magi giving the user the ability to create these AI personas that could then take on, take your brand voice instructions for client or the business that you work for and saving it to the AI so that when you do have it produce something for you, that it will produce it in such a way that it needs to be.

minimal editing. So for the most part, AI generates pretty generic stuff. And a lot of times you can tell, Oh, that was AI generated. But if you’ve taken the time to craft a brand voice and instruct the AI to speak in that brand voice, if you do a really good job at it, the, the editing time is actually pretty minimal.

In other words. So do that. That’s a good tip.

[00:27:34] Kate Bradley Chernis: Yeah. I mean, what you put in is what you get out exactly. I mean, like if you’re. If you’re not willing to put the effort on the front side, as Dustin pointed out, and we see that all the time. Again, I’ll say, like, what I want people, what I want people to start doing is, you know, Change their mindset, move it from save time to make money.

You know, one of the things that I had done as a precursor to lately was I got Walmart, 130 percent ROI year over year for three years doing what is now the prototype of, for what we, we built it lately. And even them, I had to add all kinds of spreadsheets and PowerPoints, but to show them how what we were doing was actually making more money.

And then this light bulb, you know, went off. And I think like. When people sort of embrace that, then, then you get a race, right? It’s not about just getting the job done and going home in eight hours. If you’re able to perform better work, you know, then you’re moving up in the ladder. So I think perhaps expect more of yourself would be my advice.

[00:28:36] Mike Allton: Awesome. Awesome. And,[00:28:37] Anne Cheng: Do or do not, there is no try. Famous last words.[00:28:45] Mike Allton: Love it. Love it. Thank you. So folks, we are just about out of time, but I want to give each of you a chance to just share quickly where folks can learn about your solution and connect with you if they want to do so. And, and I’ll give you first dibs at that.[00:28:57] Anne Cheng: SuperchargedLab is our handle across all social media.

So superchargedlab. com or whatever you want.

[00:29:05] Dustin W. Stout: Terrific. Dustin? Magai is at m a g a i. co, magai. co. And I’m at Dustin W. Stout on all the social things.[00:29:16] Kate Bradley Chernis: Awesome. So yeah, lately. ai is obviously us, but get me on LinkedIn and say that you met me with Mike Alton. That’d be great. I’m at Kate Bradley Churnis on LinkedIn and I’m very friendly, promise.[00:29:28] Mike Allton: I can vouch for that. Kate’s awesome. Thank you so much everyone for watching. Thank you panelists. This has been fantastic. I hope all of you watching got as much out of this as I did. I will see you in the next section.

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