The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

AI Revolution in Marketing with Kevin Surace

• MatthewBertram.com

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Kevin Surace, known as the father of virtual assistants, shares his insights on how AI is revolutionizing marketing and business operations. We discuss the democratization of content creation, the transformation of search, and why companies refusing to embrace AI are heading toward extinction.

• AI is making marketers 10-100x more productive by enabling rapid content creation and analysis.
• Content that previously took weeks can now be generated in minutes with equal or better quality.
• The future of SEO is uncertain as AI assistants increasingly answer queries directly without sending users to websites.
• People who use AI tools for everything are gaining massive advantages over those who are only "playing" with the technology.
• Corporate policies banning AI use are equivalent to companies refusing to use the internet in the 1990s.
• Creative professionals need to evolve from content creators to strategic partners who guide and refine AI outputs.
• Marketing agencies must position themselves as "robot overlords" rather than doers to remain relevant.
• The best implementation strategy is to start with tools like Microsoft Copilot before advancing to more sophisticated applications.
• Successful AI adopters use these tools for every aspect of their workflow, not just occasional specialized tasks.

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Guest Contact Information:
https://www.kevinsurace.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksurace/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 


Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 


Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.


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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Hi, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. As everybody's been asking about AI and LLMs and where the future's going, I thought it'd be great to bring on one of the forefront experts in the field on it, I think. Kevin, how many keynotes do you do a year? Something like 50 or 60 keynotes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, between 40 and 50 typically. I just got off a plane from another keynote.

Speaker 2:

So we are lucky to have Kevin Serais right? It's Kevin Serais, and he has been in Applied AI. He's been known as, like, the father of chatbots. Is that right, father?

Speaker 1:

of the virtual assistant. I invented the darn thing and it was almost 30 years ago, and so Siri and Alexa and all of that had to license all of that original technology to continue to survive.

Speaker 2:

Well, I just feel honored to have you here and I have some questions. Like I said that, I had some LLMs help me create because I thought it was appropriate, but I just want to open it up to you of what's most topical right now. What are you looking at? What are you talking about?

Speaker 1:

to just kind of set the table for everyone Well, look in the AI space, and especially if you're in marketing and maybe you're in marketing if you're listening to this podcast. When I talk to marketing people, you have everyone from I don't really use it, I don't believe in it all the way to. I'm doing everything with it, okay, and it broadly meaning Gen AI, and that could be multimodal. It could be analysis of papers or documents, analysis of spreadsheets, analysis of performance, analysis of ROI and CAC and LTV and things like that Certainly, creation of content. But I would open with this right, if you are not the expert, the expert in doing everything you can in your job not playing, but doing well then someone else will be the expert and you will be gone, because the people using this technology, including me. I use Gen AI for every single thing, right. So I ideate, I create content, I modify the content, I analyze all kinds of documents, right, and I'm easily 10 times more productive than I was 10 years ago and actually critically thinking more.

Speaker 2:

I mean, the multimodal component is fascinating because you can upload documents, you can take pictures of stuff, it can help analyze that and now it remembers, like your previous conversation, so it's building that kind of body of knowledge. We actually have an AI that answers our phone. So we did end up kind of switching over to that. I kind of felt like if the big agencies or the big marketing companies like, let's say, google and Meta and stuff like that, you can't get anybody on the phone unless you like know somebody, I was like, well, why can't everybody else do it too? Right, and so so we implemented that probably a year and a half ago, and it was really quite effective of capturing the right information, qualifying the people, passing it off to the right department, and we had to, we had to work on a little bit to kind of polish it for people that, and we had to. Hey, we're an AI, right, like, and and that's changing Some people are wanting to talk to AIs more than humans.

Speaker 2:

So I don't know what. What are you? What are you most concerned about? Like, I know, as we were talking in the pre-interview, there are certain industries that are a little slower to adopt. There's people that I'm talking to in other industries that are using it as a play thing, like, hey, I made a little video with my kids, I made some images, pictures. But, like you said, marketing and there's another industry that I'm not going to name that is really risk-taking, on the cutting edge and seems to drive everything forward, and so I'm seeing, from an AI governance even standpoint from corporations, marketing's leading the charge. I mean, is that something you're seeing?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, here's the thing. Look, when you look at this era of Gen AI, a lot of what it does is generate content. It does a lot of other things finance and other things but it easily generates content. So an example I'm in the tech industry and if I wanted someone outside to write a blog post for me, I would hire that person and it might be $500 to $1,500, and it might take a week or so and they'd write my next blog post and I go, that's it for that week. I'd do it again next week, and do it again next week, right, and we'd go back and forth, et cetera. Well, today, if I really want to write a blog post, I start thinking about writing all 52 blog posts for the year today. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And I can ask a modern model. First of all, go review my entire website. From that entire website, generate 52 possible topics for my blog post. Then I start going to each one and say now, generate a thousand words for each one that align with other things we're already saying on the website, but promote what we're trying to say without being too commercial, et cetera, et cetera. So I can set those bounds. So, basically, at the end of that I've got 52 blog posts and I have that in under an hour, maybe 30 minutes, and then after that I'm going to spend the rest of the day editing those, cleaning them up, throwing a few out, replacing them, et cetera.

Speaker 1:

By the end of the day I've done blog posts for a year. I didn't hire anyone. I'm done in a day. That is at least a thousand X improvement over any other way we've ever done this. A thousand X, that is market changing. That is a complete change and anyone can do what I said. You know, with just a few hours of experience of understanding how to ask for what you want and get it right. We've never seen that kind of democratization of content generation, good or bad. You actually don't need 10,000 hours of marketing knowledge to actually execute that plan, edit those things and have them ready to go out. You know, probably a junior person could do that. They could do a pretty good job at it.

Speaker 2:

So that was, I think, one of the reasons why Google added to the kind of framework of EAT expertise, authority and trust. They've added from the expertise to experience, like having experienced that layer, and they've kind of brought back authorship of like who's saying it right as a lawyer, a doctor, or is it me or is it you? Like it's going to weight those things differently. I also think like the next layer is what I'm more concerned about and where I'm focusing my time is Now the ideation and the cleanup phase. Like I've seen some workflows where it can continue to ideate that you can, you know, upload different documents.

Speaker 2:

It can pull in Right, I do it all the time.

Speaker 1:

Here's five documents I've already written. Combine them, clean it up and cut it to a thousand words. Boom. You know not that I can't do it, but why would I? I wouldn't do a better job than it can. And, by the way, it's an english major phd, right, I'm not right. It learned literally a trillion english phrases.

Speaker 2:

I think it's pretty good at it yeah, well, I'm looking at like so the agent, like so, with these questions that I got and we'll have to get to some of these because I think they're pretty good I put in your website and I said go call the website, summarize the website, give me some questions, that would be helpful. And it broke it apart into some great categories and it referenced what we said. Said that agent um, you can now use automation attachments to attach it to wordpress and say, okay, those blogs that you wrote, go, ideate it. Maybe there's a human, uh, person, checking it in the middle, like a subject matter expert checking it. Okay, okay it. And then that agent continues to work autonomously to go post it on the website based upon a workflow for the next 52 weeks for the next 52 weeks.

Speaker 2:

Like, or you're like, um, you know, and now I'm seeing you know the spam get out of control of people putting these things on autopilot and going. I want to blog a day about all these topics, on all these like it, like what? What are the? The rate of content creation? Uh, google can't even keep up with. It is like unindexing stuff and and we need so much compute powder to do it. Like, are there bigger issues when you look at it at a higher level, of things that you're seeing from a trend?

Speaker 1:

well? Well, certainly so. So, so let's just, first of all, we've been through this already and I'm going to use the podcast as an example. Okay, it used to be 20 years ago. There were, I don't know, 20 or 30 radio broadcasts that mattered on a national basis. Maybe there were 10, there weren't many, right? But if you wanted to broadcast and be heard nationally, you had to get on a national radio network or build a radio network, right, an independent radio network, and have a syndicated, and people did that. So, like I said, maybe there's a dozen, maybe there's two dozen, it wasn't many.

Speaker 1:

In the last decade, as podcasting became practical and very inexpensive like for a couple hundred bucks, I've got everything I want and it sounds good, and it looks good and everything else. We have approximately 45 million podcasters. We've democratized the ability to broadcast. Now, there's a long tail on that. The vast majority of them have probably less than 100, you know watchers or listeners a week. And then there's the Mr Beast. You know that's making 65 million a year, right? So we democratized access to create this content and push it out.

Speaker 1:

Now, that didn't destroy anything. Didn't destroy anything. In fact, it allowed us to create these niches that literally only a hundred people listen to a week, but it's your most. You think it's very important what that person is saying, or their guests or or whatever it is. It's fascinating. So we have been through this. We've like seen this happen, you could argue. But we did that with video and YouTube. Before YouTube, you know, there was no ability to share your videos basically anything with anyone. Now there are millions of videos uploaded every day. Every single day Doesn't overload anything. Google's built the servers to handle it, right, and they're indexed and they're, uh, closed captioned and everything else. It's fascinating, right? So we've seen this happen before. So now we're generating an immense amount of marketing content. That's mostly ai generated, right, because it's just so good and so dead internet theory is?

Speaker 2:

I've kind of gone back to that.

Speaker 1:

I don't know I know, you know that's dead because all of it is just ai talking to AI and no humans care. But? But that would be like saying the dead podcast theory. But it isn't really right. There are 45 million podcasts and someone's listening to virtually all of them. Some at the very far tail it's just their family listens, right, but nevertheless, that's what it is. And the same with YouTube. I mean you could say it's the dead video theory.

Speaker 1:

There's a ton of YouTube videos that have only been watched two times I mean probably millions, maybe hundreds of millions and then there's some that have been watched hundreds of millions of times. So you democratize the ability to create this content. It creates a long tail, but nothing seems to blow up. We get used to it as humans and we go interesting. Now youtube is starting to see and we're going to see a lot more over the next two years as this technology advances lots and lots of ai generated videos.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, well, what I like about that is it's still, in general, the thought of the human. That is, I came up with a topic, a subject, maybe a script, maybe an idea, maybe whatever, and I generated a short or long or whatever long form video or whatever it is. I came up with a topic a subject, maybe a script, maybe an idea, maybe whatever and I generated a short or long or whatever long form video, or whatever it is, and I'm now using tools that allow me to look as good as Hollywood. I couldn't do that before. Right, I could look as good as an iPhone, which is incredibly good, by the way but I couldn't look like Hollywood. I couldn't do those effects. Well, now I can. I can have a rhinoceros run on the moon if I want. There's no problem to do that.

Speaker 1:

Hollywood's been doing that for 25 years with CGI, but now everyone can do it with AI or soon, and so we'll have a proliferation of that. But still, you know, if you think about it, there's a human behind it somewhere. So, yes, we're generating a blog post today. So, yes, we're generating a blog post today. And people used to generate a blog post today. It was really hard. You had to go around the company and find the next person to write something and line it all up and manage it, and now I can really just have AI do it, and I have to come up with some ideas, but they've come off my own website, so it's fine.

Speaker 2:

So, kevin, on the early adopter curve, which I think we're kind of like in that like general adoption is kind of starting to happen, the people that are pushing the edge like so, like music, like you're heavily involved in music AI in music. I remember there was a guy that I don't know if it was art or music or something, but he basically won the award and then came out and said it was all AI generated Right, and even in podcasts you got the notebook LM Right. You can upload a document and have two ais talk and eventually, that's right, that's I do it.

Speaker 1:

By the way, I use it all the time. By the way, that is, use of notebook lm real quickly to generate a podcast is amazing for companies. Let me tell you why. I can take our latest press release that no one's going to read and create a 15 minute podcast that everyone can listen to on the way to work, and they will.

Speaker 1:

I know I use this as an example all the time, so it looks like a toy. And then you go actually this is quite valuable and in fact I can put out other content. That way, I can take our own press releases from any company and say you might want to listen to it as a podcast instead, and these two people talk about it and they interact and the whole thing's written, you know, scripted by AI, off of only the data that was in that, in that press release.

Speaker 2:

So, kevin, where do marketing agencies and marketers? Because that's mainly who listens, and I know you, you have a company out there that does like uh it, it checks code and and you know you're you're. I want you to speak to some of that, cause we have a lot of web developers that listen to this call. A lot of agencies listen to this call. What do they need to be doing to prepare to continue to keep pace with the changes that are happening? Because if it's democratized and everybody's more productive, it just raises the bar right, it does.

Speaker 1:

That's right. We talk about this a little bit in that when you use Gen AI, you use it not to play and not to toy, but you use it as part of your workflow all the time, and it could be with agents or non-agent, it doesn't really matter. What happens is we're multiplying your brain by 10 or 20 or 100x. So all of a sudden, we've amplified your brain. It's your brain, you kicked it off. It doesn't actually do anything by itself. Even agentic doesn't do it by itself. You've set it up. You set it up, you program it. You say go execute these things and it's on my command and I can turn you off tomorrow, right, so we've multiplied your brain, we've amplified your brain, and and and so this is really critical, because if we've amplified Matt's brain and I'm competing with Matt and I refuse to use this stuff Matt is now a hundred times more productive than I am, and the clients will begin to expect that. Because that's what happens the clients, the clients begin to expect that the agencies use the state of the art, whatever it is right, whatever the state of the art is at that time, and and so, look, there was a time when the internet didn't exist, but marketing agencies did exist.

Speaker 1:

We go back to mad men. We can go before mad men, right, I see the mad men post. Yeah, so the fact of the matter is we've been marketing for a long time. We've been marketing before there were newspapers, right, I mean this is incredible. And as new technology come, look when the internet hit, if you were a market agency that said, well, we don't do that internet stuff, you know, we still just do print ads. Well, eventually your business dried up, just went away, right, so, this isn't new.

Speaker 1:

So if you're not, you know, Jenny, I's been with us a couple of years, two and a half years. If you are not at the forefront of that, it's okay. Your clients will find someone who is.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's true, like I I think I I just got back from a future of SEO conference and the stuff that I'm like no, that's possible. You know there's a lot of kind of roadblocks and how to figure it out and what's the right. You know what's the right LLM to do it. But I mean they're they're about three months, four months ahead of where I want to be and I look at that going. I got to catch up Like it's only three or four months, but that's. I mean that that's a that's so much time, like that's so much time in this world of how everything's progressing.

Speaker 2:

I mean Google just rolled out all this stuff with youtube and I mean they can make, like you were talking about, the videos that hollywood can make you can make that for 40 bucks, like you can make scenes for 40 bucks, like you can make, uh, commercials, that are 15 000 commercials for you know, 100 bucks and I I've, I've, uh I.

Speaker 1:

I demonstrate some of the some commercials that have already been made fully with ai and these are for very large companies who easily would have spent a million or more on that commercial. Not 15K, they would have spent a million on the commercial.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Probably 20 million placements right, or 50 million or 100 million and they were able to make it for substantially less than that. Now, they could have made it for $40, but they hired a team anyone. They probably spent a hundred grand on it instead of a million. But the point is no question, you are going to see Hollywood grade commercials shot with no cameras, no sound, no lighting, no actors, no actors. I thought it was interesting when SAG was on strike last year and they demanded that they have AI in their contract.

Speaker 1:

So if someone uses their likeness, they get paid. And I'm going, guys, you've already missed the boat. We're not going to use any of your likeness. With all due respect, there will be films in the future and commercials and everything else that are made strictly with AI characters. And then people say to me no, no, me, no, no, we won't want to watch those. Really, you want to talk about Shrek they're already.

Speaker 2:

Well, they're already watching them, like the influencers online, and and some of these yes, people, like some of them, claim that, oh, I'm a human, but half of them are not human and you can't tell the difference no like you, can not tell the difference cannot tell the difference that the, the technology has come along so far and so fast.

Speaker 1:

You cannot tell the difference and it's game changing and I think it's great. I mean, look, it's here right Train left the station.

Speaker 1:

Now you brought up one thing is the future of SEO. Let's talk about that, because I think the market is in quite a turmoil for the moment. The turmoil is this Every day, day, more people are using ai to make the recommendations for them, whether it's a local restaurant, a local dry cleaner or a car to buy or whatever. It is right. We have spent 30 years understanding seo and and yes, I know that the google algorithms change and we reverse engineer them we try to figure it out. You know we've all been through this right, but we understood about backlinks. We understood about how you're chatted up on other websites. We understood about building all of these other sites so that you're referenced on the sites Like this is the tradition of what we do. All of a sudden, you know the chat GPT isn't recommending you as the best dry cleaner in town and there is no algorithm that changes that, either quickly or easily. That's true.

Speaker 1:

What do you do with that? So we're going to figure it out, but but the whole idea of jumping to websites may be gone. People may not do much at websites. They may take the recommendations of the AI and just execute on that.

Speaker 2:

So Kev, that's actually Google like two weeks ago just launched like all this new stuff and it's pushing it towards what you talked about YouTube and like agentic AI and and really the the the customer journey is is like I don't want to go do all the research, I don't want to click on all the websites, like just do it all for on all the websites.

Speaker 2:

Just do it all for me, aggregate it, tell me what I should do, give me okay ChatGPT like six links, and it's going to be different based upon the whole conversation. What that knows about you, that's right. It's very, very personalized.

Speaker 1:

Matt, it's already part of Google search now, because they have let AI answer the search for you the overview. Search the traditional search and more and more people are choosing the AI search because, did you remember? Well, you remember it's still today. I've got to be on the first page of the Google search, right? I got to be on Google results. I got to be on the first page. Got to be on the first page. Now it doesn't matter if you're top on the first page. There is no page.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, ai answered the question. Well, you know, on the buying cycle, they're going to go head to head against amazon now because, well, right, everything's happening on youtube or everything's. And I think the ai overviews are like slowing down the llms or trying to slow down the lms to go to a new platform. But I'm seeing a lot of people switch over that don't even go back to google unless they're going to buy. Now, right, they, they're doing all the research and ideation, uh, in the LLM. And then then they're like okay, let me go verify some stuff, let me just look at the website and make the purchase. Traffic's been cut in half, actually by 60% on average across the board. And the buy cycle uh, google's just saying just buy it now with us, like you don't even have to leave Google, right, you don't have to leave YouTube. Like it's very disruptive to a lot of people.

Speaker 1:

Especially to you who's in this marketing game, and you go. Everything I've learned over 30 years doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 2:

And that's why I'm bringing people like you on to help make sense of all this and people that are listening. I mean, we've been doing this podcast for 12 years and the rate of change, like I have this graph I'm about to do a webinar to talk about some of this stuff but there's a standard deviation change to 2024 over the last 15 years, of all the changes that were kind of like one a year, like that pace sped up. All the changes that were kind of like one a year, like like that that pace sped up. And then from 2024 to 2025, it's like three standard deviations higher of all the changes in their testing stuff, like daily and like everything's going crazy, and even like traffic is a big metric. That's not a metric anymore. It's like and almost when you get into the top positions or you get into the AI overviews, people also ask your traffic disappears because people are getting their answer on Google. They don't have to go to your website for it. So it actually is like inverse. It's really interesting.

Speaker 2:

I just did a post about that on LinkedIn is revenues up, impressions are up, traffic's down, like it's. It's wild and, and so I'm trying to make sense of all where, where this is going from a futurist standpoint, like where's the puck going to? Like what are the things that we need to be doing? I know you have some certifications on your site Like what do people need to be thinking about to prepare for this? Because marketing is going to be is being affected first. Right.

Speaker 1:

Again, we went through this change when the internet came and all of a sudden it was brand new. There was this entire new realm that everyone in marketing had to learn, that knew nothing about it the year before, yeah, and and and. We went from yellow pages and phone books and libraries and and print ads and all of that to just doing searches on Google or Ping or Yahoo at the time and a few others right, unbelievable, unbelievable change. We did get through that change, but from that change created entire new capabilities in marketing agencies. Yep.

Speaker 1:

And you've honed it and honed it, and honed it, and now we're going through as big of a change, probably faster. Faster because this technology LLMs is built already upon smartphones and internet, which already exist. So we're riding this third wave, but it's riding on top of the other waves, right, and that's why you went from zero to 500 million users or so on ChatGPT, in, or two Um, and in fact, llms is the fastest growing new category in the history of humans. So what?

Speaker 2:

how do you like? This is something I know that you talk about in your talks like what was that confluence point of things coming together in kind of the AI space for this to just go vertical?

Speaker 1:

right, oh sure, easy, easy to talk about that. So, so, first of all, deep learning. We solved deep learning in 2012. We could do relatively deep, a few layers deep before that, but in 2012, because of the, the algorithms and the math and cloud, google published a seminal paper that said actually, we can go as deep as we want now unlimited depths. So that means, instead of learning 10 words, 100 words or phrases or 1,000 phrases, you could learn unlimited phrases and you could build a neural net out of that. Right, that was seminal, seminal paper and it was put out there for the world to understand.

Speaker 1:

Well, by 2017, google again had a great idea. They said you know, translating English to French sucks when you do it word by word, because the French sentence is mangled right because of the pronouns and the nouns and the verbs and they're all out of order for what a French sentence should be structured like versus an English sentence. So what would happen if we learned the phrase and then we translated phrase by phrase? That's a transformer model. They published that document in 2017. All right, that's eight years ago. And out of that document, people said I wonder if, instead of translating and, by the way, that's when OpenAI was founded.

Speaker 1:

I wonder if, instead of translating and, by the way, that's when OpenAI was founded, based on the transformer I wonder if, instead of translating, we just learned basically the whole English language and then you could basically ask a question. Instead of translating, we'd come back in English, but we would pose the answer aligned with your query, right? And so OpenAI had ChatGPT 1, 1.0, 1.5. I was using it like on 2.0 or something, and finally, at 3.5, they felt this is ready for human consumption. At that point they had grown to over a trillion or so tokens, or we could say sentences, right or phrases, and and so at that point it kind of had gobbled all of the English language you could possibly gobble from the web. Whether it should have or not is a whole other conversation copyrights, this and that, but you know it. It learned from everything we humans published and all of a sudden, people, instead of people who code in python talking to ai, anyone could talk to ai in english, in their language actually.

Speaker 2:

But in my code.

Speaker 1:

All right, well, yes, but you could just talk to it and it talks back in english right yeah, you can vibe code also, but forget vibe coding, you just talk to it.

Speaker 1:

So all of a sudden people, for the first time ever, could really talk to computers. Now, actually, actually, when I invented the virtual assistant in the late 90s, that was really the very first time that people could truly talk in English to these things. But at this point, now you could talk and ask it anything. Then you could only ask it 5,000 different things. Now you could ask it millions of different things, right? So that's a turning point. And once you did that, everybody said this is useful. Now I can ask it anything. Is there a God, do you love me? Or who had the hit record in 1976, that? So all of a sudden it can answer anything because it's read everything. It doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction, although a lot of that is getting sorted out with kind of supervised learning posts. So there are thousands of people trying to overseas make sure that these things are answering correctly. And so you know we had a lot of hallucinations early on. We have a lot less now.

Speaker 1:

But, that was the turning point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they're citing the sources. It's definitely getting bigger. What do you think that next revolution, if you were to guess, going to look like? So, like all the internet businesses were created, like it seems like um, uh, like learning, like education's going to be quite affected. I feel like um, like it a therapist maybe, like talking it to, like understand what's going on with people, like are people choosing to talk to bots? Or like even like a LLM, like listen to bots talk over humans? Or like where do you see that evolution happening? Where that maybe the, the intersection comes, or the integration between humans? All right, let's talk about.

Speaker 1:

Let's just pick on education first, cause you mentioned education. We talked about psychologists, but let's talk about education. So I'm on the board of RIT, rochester Institute of technology. We've got 20,000 students this is a very hot topic for the last two years which is, you know, here's, here's my take on it. And when I tell the professors, assume that your students are using this for everything, period, full stop. If you don't assume that I, what are you doing teaching? Right, they're, they're using it for everything. And so how do we still teach kids, um, critical thinking skills and and other skills, right? But uh, in the, in this era? Well, you know, there was a time that we gave up teaching kids too much of long division, because once the calculator came and excel came, nobody's ever going to ask you to do long division at work, are they ever? In fact, if you're doing long division with a, a paper and pencil, I might terminate you that was my.

Speaker 2:

That was my argument, kevin. In school I was like, if I can do this with a calculator, I'm never going to do it, not so, so why can't? I use a calculator on this test. I thought it was ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

Right, right, because no one's going to pay you to not use the calculator.

Speaker 2:

All right.

Speaker 1:

And this is so. So now, when we, when we look at kids in university, right, and I've got, you know, I've got professors that say, well, I want them to handwrite the paper and do this and do that, and what's the purpose? We're supposed to be preparing kids for the workforce. You know what? You know who's going to get hired? Okay, there's two kids that come out of college this year. One comes out and says yeah, I've heard about ChatGPT, but I didn't use it. I was told I shouldn't use it. I played with it a little bit. You know, I don't know it well, but I can learn it, okay, nice. Next kid comes in and says all right, I'll be honest with you, I used it for everything. I uploaded documents, I analyzed documents, I edited stuff, I right every, every assignment. I did that way and I crushed it. Not only that, I learned how to edit it afterwards through other models or use three different models to fool the ai sensors yeah, yeah, the originality.

Speaker 2:

I'm about to have someone on that has a plagiarism ticker on.

Speaker 1:

I can tell you it gets very hard to detect, right? So let me finish. The point is who gets hired? Well, the second one, the second one, the one who knows how to use the latest technology gets hired all the time. It's always been that way. Period, when the wheel came out, those who put wheels on a cart won over those who wouldn't use the wheel. This is how it works okay.

Speaker 2:

So I have a specific question from an enterprise client that we're actually dealing with. Okay, we have a, a company that got bought by another company and there's all these corporate layers and a lot of, uh, red tape. I'm not going to mention the company, but they're, you know, a publicly traded fortune, probably 100 company. It came down that no content can be generated at all with AI, and they were pushing back on blogs that were actually human written, but they were saying, oh, this is like 10% AI and and we were like, no, a human wrote this and we we had to keep working it in, like jigsawing the words to try to get um less content. And like I'm I'm actually dealing with this client still today and they've eased off a little bit, but it's. It's this corporate policy from like governance coming down, saying we want it all human written. This is all AI. Like if you were talking to a major corporation that was presenting this as policy, what would you say to them? Kevin, you're dead. That's like yeah, dead.

Speaker 1:

Dead, that's like saying we are in 1995, we will not use the internet for evaluating our competition, what? Or for marketing what I mean. And, by the way, some companies probably did that For a while. Some, you know, a lot of companies said you can't bring your own device, you can't, you know I mean all these rules. Well, in the end, the train left the station, right, you have to assume that your competitor is using the heck out of it. And I just said that you can multiply your brain by 100x by leveraging these tools the right way, by 100x. Okay, so if your competitor is multiplying what they're doing by 100x, and in fact, this large corporation, I'll tell you it's going to be some startup that comes up and goes, this old kludgy thing. We're going to crush them and they will fly by them. And we've seen this happen over and over again. We saw it happen in the early days of the internet and then we saw it happen with mobile phones that that was kind of my, my take on.

Speaker 2:

I was like I need to talk to whoever's pushing this policy to either get this changed or we might need to like look at who their competitor is going to be, like one of the challengers, because it just doesn't even make any sense. Like these policies are not making any sense, and I would think with like co-pilot and and a lot of people on like Microsoft software, they would be a lot more in tune with the direction of the market.

Speaker 1:

Well, you know, in every new technology there are those who crossed the chasm earlier rather than later. There's the early adopters. There are and they're going to be out front, and then there's real laggards. That just will not change. But I can tell you, we've seen this story before and the companies that did not embrace the internet died. Okay, sears, yeah, sears was the number one mail order catalog in the world since 1900 until the internet came. Amazon happened. Now, sears had the mailing infrastructure, had the shipping infrastructure, had the warehouses, didn't embrace the internet till very late. They eventually sort of got on for a little bit. By then Amazon won. It was over, over. It was over walmart, almost lost, but they turned it around and got really heavy into walmartcom, put a ton of money, came back gonna do fine, right. But people did ignore the internet and every, every commerce company, every retailer who ignored the internet died kmart, sears, others. Right, dad, jc penny, I mean dad. So so we've seen this story died Kmart, sears, others, right, dad, jcpenney, I mean dad. So we've seen this story before your company.

Speaker 1:

Who is doing this now? And I don't know who they are, right, they're just excuse me because they're probably watching it. They're just stupid, like it's just stupid, right? Your competitor listen to me, look at me your competitor is using LLMs and they are going to blow you away in everything they write. It's going to be better writing faster, writing more poignant. I mean, you could take this stuff and say I want you to design a blog post that convinces anyone that comes here that they've got to look at the following three things to consider us. And that blog post is going to be written and you read it and you go. I could not have written it this well, couldn't have done it.

Speaker 2:

See, kevin said it, I didn't say it. There's a short right there. We're going to reuse that. I think that a lot of people need to hear that. I think a lot of people are fighting the change. I even had a content manager that worked for me that, like I don't want to go this way, I wanted to and I go. Well, we're on two different trains and going in two different directions, you know, and um it, it was unfortunate.

Speaker 2:

So what? Where do you think, like if you were to break it down, if you were to like get down into, maybe the metadata and like cluster it into the things that are going to take off the fastest? I? I'm seeing it in the graphic side and the video side. I'm seeing it on the content side. I'm seeing people build it all the way into their workflows agents replacing certain like automations, like where, where do people need to be preparing, in your eyes, from a marketing standpoint, like what's going to change the fastest? What are like?

Speaker 2:

I think, like you said, the brain, like, like your thought, like you, knowing what good looks like is like one of the most important things, but then you can amplify it in every which way from from what? The machine learning and the LLMs can do Um and so you should be leveraging it every way possible. So, like, what is that going to look like? Or like, are there certain certifications? Like I've asked chat, what are the certifications that I need to go get? Like, what would you recommend? Like, where would you need to learn? But inside this knowledge base there, there are still so many different sections of things that you can learn, like where should people focus?

Speaker 1:

or how should people look at it. So the models started to be at the beginning. We're good at generating text and have gotten only better. So we're two and a half years in, if you're not generating all your text or at least having it rewritten by an LLM. You're crazy. So often I will write because it's just sort of in my mind. I'll write out 600's, just sort of in my mind. You know, I'll write out 600,000 words or something and then I'll submit it to say GBD 4.0 and say rewrite this in a more powerful way that attracts customers better, something like that.

Speaker 1:

And, frankly, what I get back is phenomenal and I'll still may do some edits, but it's really really good. It's just better prose than I'm capable of. Now see, a lot of marketing. People are not capable of saying that sentence. It's better prose than I could possibly write. They can't say it because they don't feel that. Right, this is true with illustrators also.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we are all using Gen AI to generate illustrations, using Gen AI to generate illustrations, photos, et cetera. Today, I use it for everything. My keynote presentations that are, you know, easily have hundreds and hundreds of images and photos and things. They're all AI generated. Today, you would not know the difference. Even my headshots people say I'd like a headshot. I said, well, I have 200. How do you have 200? Well, ai generated 200 of them and they all look exactly like me and they were generated just from a handful of photographs, but I'm in different poses and I'm sideways and it's unbelievable, right, it's unbelievable. I didn't need a photographer for that. And they're all outstanding.

Speaker 1:

Outstanding Out of the 200, I think there were five. I said, eh, don't like them, but it was amazing, right? So now you look at illustrations and I talk to illustrators all the time and say, well, it just can't do as good as I can, okay, but in 30 seconds or a minute I can have six different illustrations. That would have taken an illustrator days or weeks to do the same thing and we would have had an early sketch. It would have gone back and forth and it would have gone back and forth and it would have gone back color in it and blah, blah, blah. Whether they're using adobe, illustrator or photoshop or whatever they were using to do it by hand or whatever the case is, I don't, I don't need to do that. So even if an actual illustrator could somehow do a more interesting or better job, they can't do it in 30 seconds right.

Speaker 1:

Or for the cause, and so that doesn't say there's not a job for an illustrator. But if I'm an illustrator I am going to use the latest tools, and when Adobe Illustrator showed up, there were people who said I'm still going to use a pencil and crayons and other things. But eventually most people got on Illustrator and said I guess that's the tool we're going to use, so we're not really going to be doing much by hand anymore. We're going to do it all on the computer. Now we've got the next generation that, based on your knowledge and experience, will generate it for you.

Speaker 1:

Great illustrators have an eye that I don't have. See, I can get stuff out of GBD 4.0, and I think it's great, and someone with the right marketing eye or the right illustration eye will look at it and go the colors are all wrong for what you're trying to achieve. I don't know. I shouldn't design curtains, right. I don't do that Right. So that's now the illustrator becomes very strategic and a strategic partner to you. It isn't about the drawing. They're going to go and generate 300 of these things and then they're going to pick the best ones and they're going to come back and you're going to go. That's better than anything I could have done so, kevin, what I'm hearing is two things.

Speaker 2:

Um, one is your ego is getting in the way, potentially absolutely like. So there's a lot of people that are very good and they're like I'm this good, but you know, if you look at human intelligence, these ais are just way over her head, and getting better is one. And then the second thing is you just said that something very subtly that I've started to see A strategic partner. You're shifting into a role of a partner, or an advisor, or someone that has this knowledge on how to best apply it right.

Speaker 2:

Because everybody has the same toolkit now, but the craftsman can utilize it in different ways and articulate it and knows what they're looking for Of course, because they have an eye for the art that I don't have, or else I would have gone into that field.

Speaker 1:

So, if you're an illustrator that used to get $1,500 in illustration, you may still get $1,500, but you are going to generate probably all of them via AI, but very, very complex prompting that would be more complex than I would know how to do right, and leveraging the knowledge you have in the field, the knowledge you have of colors and layout and what you're trying to achieve, and all of that.

Speaker 1:

I will pay for that. But what I won't pay for is an illustrator who illustrates it in the old way and comes back and gives me two choices and they may or may not be good, but why would I pay for that? I can go to someone who can be much more broad and much faster. Now maybe the price for illustration drops from $1,500 to $400 or $300, but here's the thing, and obviously it's free online, but here's the thing that allows the illustrator also put out three or four or five times more content than they ever did. Yes, they have to find more customers and yes, they have to do more, but there's still business there, right, there'll be money spent. It's not about the money. For me, it's about the speed and the opportunity.

Speaker 2:

So the relationship is changing into more of a partner of either. I can do it Do you think it's going to be more people building internal teams with advisors, or do you think people are going to outsource it or the split's going to just be the same?

Speaker 1:

Look, the split will be what the split will be, but the people that I want to hire have to be robot overlords, not doers. I don't want doers, I can't afford it, it doesn't make any sense and it takes too long. So look at it this way I can use Illustrator, but I'm not really an illustrator. So the stuff that I create in there you can tell it's by an amateur, so I shouldn't do it right. It's not that I can't do it, so okay, I can also use a multimodal and generate all kinds of things. You will be able to tell not that the quality of the illustration or the photo is bad. You'll be able to tell that what I generated probably doesn't fit really well with the document, that it's in right. Why I'm not actually an illustrator, I'm not an artist, it's not what I do.

Speaker 1:

So this is true with blog posts. A great marketeer is going to use Gen AI and generate all these blog posts, but then they're going to go in and edit and tweak and fix and address and you're going to tell a professional worked with this. Right, it's just a different level than someone pushed a button and stuck it out there. Okay, podcasts you can tell when it's a real professional and I've been on a lot of podcasts right, and there's great podcast hosts. There's good podcast hosts. There's some that are horrific. I don't know how I got on the darn thing right, but I'm good at you know I'm good about it I don't and and but, but.

Speaker 1:

I mean, it's the same thing, right? There's really great ones. They're good at it, they're great communicators. There's others, and you've seen them. You know who put that person on a podcast? They shouldn't be there.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so so I have all these questions here and we're, we're, we're running close to lightning round. Yeah, um, and I I actually before we do that, because it might even be better served for anyone listening to just open it up for you to share anything that we didn't cover that you think would be valuable to talk about, and maybe even talk about some of the things you're doing and how you see those businesses applying AI to level up.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I've done is I trained my own clone and it's a video, two-way video clone. So if you go to my website, kevinsracecom, you go to the bottom. It says talk to Kevin's clone. You can do a chat, you can do an audio or you can do literally a video. It looks like it is me, it's me and it's a clone of me, and I trained it on all of my writings, right, and all my podcasts. So it's actually pretty darn good. So you can just ask it questions and it's like it's virtual Kevin, which is pretty interesting, and the answers are quite aligned with what I would actually say.

Speaker 2:

So, kevin, I'm going to do a follow-up to this podcast, where I'm going to go ask your, your, your bot, these questions, and then I'll add it to this. I think it'd be hilarious, so, and I'm sure it'll be accurate as well. So that's really cool. What, what are yeah, what are some other stuff that you're doing? This is great.

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm working on a cybersecurity company called token ring. Um, it really addresses 90% of the ransomware problem by tying, uh, uh, everything you log into to your fingerprint and it's in a ring form or in a few other form factors, and it's proximity, so the fingerprint has to be in proximity to the laptop that you're on logging in. It's really fun. Another AI company where we use AI to find all of the bugs in software. Basically, it's very, very cool. And it's at the UX levels end-to-end testing, what's called regression testing. So there's that. And obviously's at the UX levels end to end testing, what's called regression testing. So there there, so there's that, and obviously I'm speaking in.

Speaker 1:

The one thing about speaking I'll say is when you say I've got this big client and they're a fortune, you know, whatever. That's who I speak for, right, that's who I speak. When I'm at there, I just just, you know, got just got done speaking to a multi-billion dollar corporation with like 40 divisions and they had all their leadership there and no one was using anything in AI. Few people were playing with it, right, and my message was okay, guys, this train left the station. You're, you're now in the caboose, but don't be run over by the darn train Right.

Speaker 2:

What do you think that those companies are looking at implementing where like in what's you know what divisions of the company like where?

Speaker 1:

do you?

Speaker 2:

think the applications happening the fastest.

Speaker 1:

First thing that gets in large companies that gets rolled out is is usually a co-pilot by Microsoft, because it's safe, it's efficient, it's easy, you know what the price per user is, and and and. Then they, and then they start training people to say, any document that you're doing should be assisted with Copilot. Now, obviously that's not the most advanced thing in the world, but it's a great place to start. When you've got thousands of employees right, you're trying to regulate this and be safe and et cetera. And you've got Copilot for coding. You've got Copilot for Word, excel and PowerPoint. Now you can't do the more fancy things like a GPT-4-0 can do. So I do a lot of document analysis, like.

Speaker 1:

I uploaded an annual report that was 150 pages. I said tell me what's working well at the company and what isn't working well at the company. Boom and boom. I would have had to read 150 pages to find that and figure it out and look at the numbers. I just have the answer. I'm going into a meeting. That's amazing, right, and save, save me three or four hours of trying to get through that document. I no longer have to get through it. Read it for me and gave me the cliff notes. Okay, that's brilliant.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, investing I'm seeing investing in like trading and stuff like that. Like the analysis that these things can do are pretty incredible. It's just interesting, too, because I've asked it about some crypto based things and it will like give me different answers and I'm like, well, why did you give me that and then why did it change? And so, as I continue to learn about how they're structured, it helps me understand what the output's gonna be. You know, let's like wrap up here and, and you know what would be one, if there was one thing that I think you kind of mentioned it, and if you want to rephrase it, that that that's fine too. But, like, what is one thing that you feel is a unknown secret of internet marketing when, when utilizing these LLMs, or what do people need to be thinking about it doing most?

Speaker 1:

well, you know, the overarching thing is something I I kind of quote yoda here and I say play, not do, stop playing, because I talked to more marketing people. Well, I played with a little bit and I did one blog post partially, and I said you, you've missed the entire whole thing here. Everything you do must be informed by okay, and so, even if you're not ready to have it, generate everything, just use it as an ideator, right? Um, how might I approach this? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. What are 10 things I should think about when boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right, and, yes, you're professional, you probably knew six of them. The other four you didn't think of. You couldn't have right. And and how do I be? What are some ways I can beat this competitor at boom, boom, boom, boom, boom? What are some ways I can have my company show up in your llm versus these other companies? It will tell you. It's not a secret. It will tell you so. When you not a secret, it will tell you so when you think of it that way you go.

Speaker 1:

Why would I do anything with just my brain? I've got my brain plus this thing. It's my brain on steroids, right? That's the big lesson. Stop playing around, stop doing occasional things. Do everything, every email, every text. I get an email from a customer I'm really unhappy about. I feed it into for me GBD 4.0. I say I really want to save this customer. How might I respond in email? And what it comes back with is brilliant.

Speaker 1:

I mean, the pros is brilliant, right, it's like a psychiatrist that understands my customer, and so I may take some of it or not take some of it. By the way, I got this email from my spouse this morning. She's really mad at how should I respond? Trust me, you are disconnected from your frontal lobe. It is not. It is fully connected. Oh, you know you're angry and go how dare, no, no, no, no, no's. If you now you can tell it. Also, I'd like a response that saves my marriage, or I want a response that ends my marriage.

Speaker 2:

It will write that I think that's a great way to end, kevin. Thank you so much. What's the best way for someone to find out more about what you're doing?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, kevin's racecom, you can fill out a form there. Learn more, you can. My LinkedIn is there. I do answer my DMS, et cetera.

Speaker 2:

All right, I will put all that in the show notes for you. That listening. Last name is S U R a C E Kevin. Thank you so much for coming on until the next time. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.

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