Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
And welcome back to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're joined by Ayo Abbas, and we're going to be talking about how marketeers are using AI. Welcome, Ayo.
Ayo
Hello. How are you both doing?
Esther
Doing very well.
Melanie
Very good.
Esther
This fine Monday morning. Don't we just love Mondays?
Ayo
Mondays are not great, ever, are they, really?
Esther
They are because you can start with the podcast. So that's why we came along to brighten up everyone's Monday morning.
Ayo
Fantastic. I like that.
Esther
So AI, hot topic. Loads of people talking about it, loads of people on two sides of the fences. You either love it or you hate it. What side are marketeers generally on?
Ayo
Well, interestingly, a lot of people are using it, but they're not necessarily telling people they're using it, which I found was quite interesting. That was one of the most interesting points. So I did a survey in June where I went out and I got, I think, 71 marketers to respond to a survey, which is only seven or eight questions, of which you did it as well, didn't you, Esther?
Esther
I did.
Ayo
Just asking, How are you using AI? It was basically the gist of it. And I think one of the things that fascinated me was that 87% of the sample were using it, but then it was like there's an extra 5% who were like, I plan to use it. So most people were using it in some way, shape, or form. But then actually, when I said, Are you happy to be quoted or do you want to be anonymous? Actually, it was almost fifty-fifty. So that, for me, I was like, People are using it. Not sure if they should be saying they're using it, but they are. So for me, you know what I mean? It's really interesting. But the thing for me was that a A huge majority of people are using it in some way, shape, or form. So yeah.
Esther
I can't remember what I said.
Ayo
Were you a... Please don't say anything.
Esther
I'm sure I said, quote me. Ayo.
Ayo
I think you did, actually. No, I was going for the use cases, and I think your name did come up as one of those. So, yeah.
Esther
Yes. No, I do like using AI. What about you, Melanie? What would you have said?
Melanie
I am a bit of a purist when it comes to blog writing, but I I love it for ideation. It certainly gives me content ideas all day long, especially when I'm dealing with any mentoring clients or any new customers or anything like that. So, yeah, I quite happily say, yes, I do use AI, and I, in fact, encourage people who come into the office to use it as well, because if you don't, you'll be left behind.
Esther
Exactly.
Ayo
Yes. I mean, that was a fascinating part. I think the other thing that I was expecting for the survey was that people be using it for content creation. That's what everyone always talks about, right? You go on LinkedIn, it's all copy, copy. It's about copy, it's about copy.
Esther
The M-.
Ayo
The M-Dash, we all talk about it. I know a certain word to elevate, accelerate, all that.
Melanie
Delve.
Ayo
Delve, deep dive. We all know all those buzzwords. But what was interesting was actually the biggest use case was research. So I don't know if that's just because my friends are all people who respond to that, obviously highly intellectual, but actually... But it was more a case of how do we... They were using it to find information and facts before they started doing a piece of work, which actually is a good use of AI. So yeah, for me, that's the stuff where I'm like, this is just really interesting. So, yeah, research. And then after that, it was an even split between strategy and planning, content and socials, productivity and admin, which is that whole taking the grunt work away. So, yeah, it was an even split after that. But, yeah, research actually came out top, which surprised me as well.
Esther
I think what's surprising about that is that a lot of the time we do question whether what AI throws at us is fact. So the fact that a lot of people are using it for research, I would almost go and double check those sources because it is something that even now, I'm still a Googler. I will still go into... I love my ChatGPT, whatever format that you use it in. Mine's called Monica. But it gives me Claude and it gives me ChatGPT. It's got all these different versions in the one platform. But I will still go to Google and I'll still tell my kids, just Google whatever. They said to me, How long will it take you to get from point A to point B? You have Google Maps on your phone just as well as I do. I mean, just go and Google it. But Google even brings you up in the top searches, now their AI answers.
Ayo
Which aren't always correct.
Esther
No, but it does have the hyperlinks, though, to the information, apparently. I've never clicked on a hyperlink in that. But that's the thing. How can we be sure that the research done through AI is fact?
Ayo
I think there are a couple of things you can do. I know that I do is I would say, Where did you source this from? You can ask it and it will tell you. That's one way. Or if you're using a tool like Perplexity, it will list the sources. And one of the things that did come from the survey was that concern of the hallucinations, the inaccuracies, and general lying. So it's true, right? Some people were like, yeah, they said this about me, and it's so not true. So I think that whole thing around that was a concern. But I think what you can do is put in your safeguards, I need to check this information and not take it as fact. I guess it's doing your due diligence like you would have any tool, right? And if it was a marketing assistant who was your junior, you would go back and check stuff. You weren't going to sit there and go, oh, yeah, everything's going to be 100% because it's not... It's a starter for 10, isn't it? I think that's what a lot of people are using as a starter for 10. They don't want to start from a blank page, which makes sense.
Melanie
See, I think also you can find whatever you're researching, whether you're using books, newspapers, or AI, or actually going through to the links in particular, a bias. And you can find a bias, for whatever you're researching. I'm married to a market researcher who's got a psychology degree and talks about bias all the flipping time. It's actually a very boring conversation.
Ayo
Are you biased against that, though?
Melanie
But I do get his point. And at the end of the day, we can all find something that will suit our personal bias, no matter where we stand on something.
Ayo
Yeah.
Esther
Yeah. Yeah, I actually saw a TikTok recently from a farmer here in Northern Ireland. You have my farmer here in Northern Ireland.
Ayo
Is this what you do?
Esther
I do. I'm-.
Melanie
A farmer's daughter.
Esther
I'm a farmers daughter.
Ayo
Rather than you are like, farm TikTok.
Esther
Farm? I am. I'm on Farm Talk all the time. Got to support them. Farmers, no farmers, no food.
Ayo
I agree with that.
Esther
This guy was testing out. He has a science degree. Before becoming a farmer, he went off and got his degree and everything and all about carbon footprint and the carbon cycle of animals and stuff. Anyway, I digress. But he played ChatGPT and Grok against each other and got two completely different answers.
Ayo
Wow.
Esther
But he was also saying that in... I think it was the Grok. He really liked Grok for some reason. But in Grok, he was saying you can have a conspiracist and you you can have a scientist and you can have all these different variations of the AI model. And obviously, like you were saying about the bias, that will then give you, depending on how you see the world, if you're a conspiracist and you ask a conspiracist AI model, what the question is, it's going to give you what you want to hear. Whereas if you're a scientist and ask a conspiracist, it's going to be complete opposite, usually. In that science says this, but actually...
Ayo
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Melanie
So is that the personas that you can see in models like Magai as well, Ayo? Because in Magai, you can have multiple personas. You can have a marketing intern, you can have a business consultant. You have all these-.
Ayo
I've not heard of that. No, I've not seen that.
Melanie
No? M-A-G-A-I. It was actually Phil Mershon who put me in sorry, Mike Alton put me in touch with Magai in the first place. It's got these built-in personas. It costs a little bit more than ChatGPT, we assume, because of these built-in personas. And it's really quite revelatory because it comes in with all this input, again, bias. But it's got all this input in there in the first place, and then you just go and put in your own input, putting in your own brand persona, and then it just continues from there.
Ayo
But that's quite important, though, isn't it? Especially when you look at the news cycle and stuff now, you wonder, and you're like, actually, if you go down a certain rabbit hole, it's only going to show you stuff that's similar to your beliefs, right? And that's exactly what it is, isn't it? And if you're trying to sell to somebody, their feed or what they see and how they take it will be dependent on what else they're being fed. And it's like, it is, you're right, bias is a massive thing. But yeah, AI isn't it.
Melanie
That's why all social media feeds are now being fed by interest rather than anything else. So it's interest-led content more than anything else that is making your For You Page.
Ayo
Which is a concern, because that just means you're going to get a very, very narrow lens, aren't you?
Esther
Yep. That is the issue. Now, all of your 87% of marketeers who said that they're using AI, do their clients know they're using AI?
Ayo
I don't know. That wasn't one of my questions. They There's certain things where I'm assuming that some of the people asking, which I think is 44%, whatever, them are asking for saying, don't quote me, I think it's because they're not necessarily declaring that they're using it. And some of the moments when you actually start to look at it. It's a bit, I'm doing it for this, blah, blah, blah, not sure I should share. I think there's still hesitancy. I don't think people know how to pitch it or how it's going to be received.
Esther
Yeah. But I think it's like Melanie said, if you're not using AI, then you're falling behind. We did a podcast episode recently about which social media platforms you should use. And if we were still trained on my space and Bebo, we'd be out of work by now.
Ayo
Even now, like years ago. Exactly.
Esther
Exactly. But you have to move with the times. You have to keep up. So where do you see AI taking marketing and marketeers?
Ayo
I mean, it's interesting. I did an interview actually this week, and one talking about AI, and it was interesting that they were saying, We're still in the infancy of AI and the speed at which it's changing. I think for marketers, our role is going to change. I think we're going to be curating outputs from it and things like that and developing strategy. But I think a lot of our grunt work and stuff that takes time but isn't necessarily appreciated, I do think it's going to take it away. It or not, might not be doing those captions anymore. I hate captions. But they're important. Captions, you can get it to sit there and do all your alt text, SquareSpace the other day I was on it and it's like, We've now got a new AI tool in SquareSpace, and it can do all your... You've got a hundred and something missing alt text. We can do that for you. I'm like, this is mad.
It can, it literally popped up.
Esther
Wow. But, okay, I wasn't going to ask about extra costs and stuff for that, too, because some people... Ai is making marketers more efficient.
Ayo
But are you passing that on?
Esther
Exactly.
Ayo
But this is it, isn't it? Ai is going to change how everybody works and how the world works, not just marketers.
Esther
Yeah. Because we were at a conference. Yeah. Melanie and I were at a conference and this was brought up from on the stage and we actually looked at each other and went, really? So apparently this guy was saying that because you're using AI, you should be charging less and you should be working less hours. So therefore, being more productive and all this here. But at the end of the day, you're just inputting it into AI and you still have to review it. Even once AI spits out whatever it is, you still have to take the time to review it and through it. So are you actually, with it being in its infancy, is it actually saving you any time?
Ayo
That is such a question. Is it? Yeah, because you're right, there has to be a quality control in there. And if you just have to look at LinkedIn to see that there's so much bad stuff coming out from AI that's AI generated, where people are clearly not even reading anything and just go, yeah, great. It shows. And I think there's so much... Another thing that came up was that whole concern around brand reputation and damage, right? So putting out rubbish. And yeah, you're right. It's like, but that time thing of... So it takes you less time Or supposedly less time. At some point, once you've trained it, it may well take less time. Do you pass it on to clients? Is that you? Or do you spend more time on their strategy? I don't know. I think there's going to be new models, isn't there? And new service offerings and new... It might be a case that you build a custom GPT and actually you train it in the way that you want it and then customers pay you for access to it because it's the best model they're in. I don't know. I don't see going to change.
Melanie
Yeah, no, I do see your point, but I do think that there is this dilemma that certainly smaller businesses are facing now. If you don't embrace AI like your competitors have, you don't get anything done. You don't get your copy, you don't get suggested methods on how to approach a supplier, you don't get any of these things done. And you slowly disappear into obscurity. And there is also the assumption that everybody out there knows how to write a blog and how to do the copy on a website, and they don't.
Ayo
They really don't.
Melanie
They don't. And so some people are dyslexic. There's these tools that are now available to everybody. And the fact that you were talking about the alt text there, the amount of time that could save somebody. And if you're working by yourself on your own, you could spend days doing that and not speaking to clients. So I don't see it as a crime to use AI. I don't. On a personal note, I'm a bit of a purist about the old blogs, but it doesn't mean I don't look at it as a formatting idea and how many images should I use and what images should I use for this copy? I've done that before. Because I can't think of everything all the time, certainly, especially a time shortage that everybody has these days. I also have a family and friends and things I want to do and not just be entirely consumed by my job all the time. So I'm sorry if I'm admitting it publicly here, but I use AI and it saves me an enormous amount of time and it helps me get introductions to people I'd never have the opportunity to It gives me access to supply contracts or events I would never have heard of. Discount codes, discount codes.
Ayo
I've not tried that. What do you do?
Melanie
Oh, hell, yeah. It's a very good one for discount codes.
Ayo
What's your prompt? Sorry. I've never heard this one.
Melanie
We'll talk about it off recording. There's all sorts of things that you can use it for, and I don't think we should feel ashamed about using this tool.
Ayo
Yeah. But I guess what people are worried about, though, isn't it? It's that thing of they'll be looked down upon, or it might reduce how people are respecting them. It's a weird... Yeah, it feels a bit like shame. It's weird. It feels a bit like shame. But I do think you're absolutely right, though. There's so many things that can speed up for us. In the use cases, some of the stuff that people shared, there was someone She works for an architecture firm. She's one of my friends based in South Africa. And she was saying, We've managed to be... They use Excel and a custom GPT. And then they can now create all their personalized CVs for different sectors for 150 people really quickly. And that's amazing for bidding, right? So you do a bid for a client, We need a residential CV, right? Here's the whole CV. Can you pull out all the... That's amazing. And that's just data, isn't it? It's crunching data and knowing how to structure it, right? So I think for stuff like that, you Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Or for my podcast, I uploaded a number of transcripts, show notes, all of that stuff. Then I created a Custom GPT project on Claude. And that means that now when I have my new episode that's coming out on Friday, I download my transcript and then upload that into the project. And then it gives me a first draft of my show notes, of my posts, of my Thread, of the key quotes. And then I work from that. Just a title, which sometimes Actually, the last episode had a better title than I had.
Esther
I know. Yeah. And it's wonderful that it does make you think or rethink some of the things that you think are good titles or good quotes or good posts to put out. And they're like, because we take this episode that's recorded on video and I turn them into shorts and it will give me a ranking on the platform that I use. It gives me a ranking of just how well some shorts will be received compared to others. So it's from zero to 100. I haven't made it to 100 yet, so it must be our content more than anything. But there have been some that are 94 or an 89. And for me, as human eyes, the difference between an 89 and a 79 isn't that big as far as I can see. But I've tested it. I've put them out. I've edited them, taken out the umms and the spaces and the gaps and stuff because people have a short attention span and need to get through the short as quickly as possible. And I've thrown them up on YouTube and the ones that they've coded me as being 89 or higher have done better than the ones at even 82.
Ayo
That's fascinating.
Esther
That's really strange. So I'm like, are you guys talking to each other? Or is YouTube and this app talking to each other that they're in cahoots about this? I don't know how AIs communicate with each other. That's above my pay grade. But what I was going to ask you about, Ayo, is you said 87% of marketeers are using it. Five % said that they will start to use it.
Ayo
Then we had-.
Esther
What about the other.
Ayo
So, yeah. So we had 87 are using it. Sorry, six % planning too soon. No, which is seven %. So it's 87, six % 7 %. No.
Esther
They're just not going to-.
Ayo
There are people that are anti-AI. I would never touch it with my dark pole. I'm against it for some of the reasons, just stuff like sustainability. Other things were around copyright and those type of issues. It's great stuff. I refuse to use it. So there were people on that, I guess, values that it's not for me.
Esther
I wonder if they talk to Siri or Alexa. Dara said her name.
Melanie
Oh, you said it.
Esther
No, there's one in the room. There's one in the room.
Ayo
It's in everything.
Esther
Because even my TV, my Sky TV, I can ask it to show me whatever program that I want to see. I remember the days where I had to get up and change the channel by myself, push the button on the TV. Now I don't even have to be in the same room. I mean, who doesn't want to use that?
Ayo
But then there is also that probably people don't realize the amount of things that AI is actually in now.
Melanie
No, they don't.
Ayo
And I think, I'm sure that some of these people have I said, actually use Grammarly, don't you? They'll be like, yes, I do. Grammarly has got AI in it, it's based on it. I think people aren't necessarily aware of the amount of things that have got this technology in it and have done even way before ChatGPT, so therefore they are there going, I don't want to use it, but it's like, actually, you already are. You might not realize it. So yeah.
Esther
I'd love to see their face when you tell them.
Ayo
A beautiful report, released. Yes, that would be the thing.
Melanie
Ayo, I've got a question. Is this the only survey that you're going to be creating, or is it going to be a follow-up survey that's going to be applied to the information you've generated so far?
Ayo
Well, do you know what? There are a few questions I didn't ask that I wish I did. So for example, a lot of people were saying... So most people were using Claude, so at that 87 %, the big majority one was Claude. Not Claude, sorry, ChatGPT, which was what we'd expect, so massively, that's what everyone was using. But then you had a third of those people were then also using Claude. So people are using two tools, the two main tools, and then little smatterings of other things. But I wish I asked, which ones do you pay for? Because that is quite an interesting thing, because then you go... Because, for example, for me, I pay for Claude because I think it writes better content, and that's more of what I use it for, to refine my content and things, whereas I use the free version of ChatGPT. So I think that's one question. Do you know what? I think it might be something I repeat in some way, shape, or form every year just because AI is moving so fast. I reckon the landscape will change, how people are using it will change, all of that. I find it fascinating.
Melanie
Cool.
Esther
I don't find it interesting.
Melanie
You're a nerd.
Ayo
Do you know what? I can't even deny that.
Esther
Go on, Ayo. Tell us what you do in your real life when you're not making these surveys. How can people get in touch with you?
Ayo
Well, I I'm a nerd. Lots of people have called me that. I am what I term a built environment marketing consultant. So I actually work with people who design the world around us, architects, engineers, designers, a lot of highly geeky people. So I talk about concrete bricks, how they make stuff stand up. So yeah, I am a nerd. So yeah, I do the marketing. I love content. I love content creation, podcasting, and all the stuff that you guys love as well. But yeah, that's what I do. So marketing strategy, content campaigns.
Melanie
And where can they reach you? Where's the best place to reach you?
Ayo
Best place to reach me is actually on LinkedIn. So if you head to Ayo Abbas, which is A-Y-O-A-B-B-A-S, you can find me there. Actually, if they And then when they get the survey, they can also get that as well, which is at, at abbasmarketing.com/ai-report. So that will be there and you can get a copy of it.
Melanie
An our AI will be doing the show notes.
Ayo
Fantastic.
Esther
It will.
Ayo
So you need to double check the spelling of my name. Always goes wrong.
Melanie
Yes. Who spells it there, so it might pick up, who knows?
Esther
Spells mine wrong as well.
Ayo
It does mine all the time.
Esther
300 episodes now.
Melanie
My business is STUMP for some reason. It's not STOMP, it's STUMP.
Esther
I always fix it, but sometimes my intern that's doing the corrections don't.
Ayo
You're like, oh, yeah. Thank you.
Melanie
We shall have words. Okay, well, thank you so much, Ayo, for speaking to us today about your survey. Do let us know if you're going to be doing another one. And for the gentle listener, do you have any questions that you think she should add to her survey? Give us some feedback and we'll pass it on to Ayo. Well, that's all the time we have for, for now, but we'll be back again next week with another podcast. Have a great week. Bye.
Esther
Bye.
Ayo
Bye.
Thank you. I really enjoyed that. I am a geek. Yes.
Esther
I love the fact that you're embracing that you're thinking this.
Ayo
Oh my God. Everyone's like, Yeah, no, that's nothing new to me at all.
Melanie
Do you know, if anybody was listening, if we just started recording earlier on, they would never have known just how absolutely nuts you are before we started recording. You were so sensible throughout that. I was almost disappointed.
Esther
She held it in well.
Ayo
Yeah. I know. I have read up on this. I have been writing this before. It's still proper. But yeah, people are always like, you are like, yeah.
