Generative AI Tools for B2B Productivity 

 

Drew Neisser: Hey, it’s Drew. And I’m guessing that as a podcast listener, you will also enjoy audiobooks. Well in that case, did you know the audio version of Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands, was recently ranked the number one new B2B audio book by Book Authority. Kind of cool, right? Anyway, you can find my book on Audible or your favorite audio book platform.

And speaking of audio before we get into today’s show, I do want to do a shout out to the professionals that Share Your Genius. We started working with them several months ago to make this show even better, and have been blown away by their strategic and executional prowess. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want to turbocharge your current show, be sure to talk to Rachel Downey at shareyourgenius.com and tell her Drew sent you.

Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew Neisser: Hello, Renegade Marketers Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite the top rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing obsessed individuals. Alrighty folks, you’re about to listen to a Bonus Huddle, a specially curated Huddle that we run once a month with experts sharing their insights into the topics that are most important to our CMO community, we call them Huddlers.

The expert at this particular Huddle was Kathy McPhillips, the Chief Growth Officer at the Marketing AI Institute. She joined us to discuss how marketers can get more out of generative AI, it was really an interesting conversation. By the way, the Marketing AI Institute’s conference MAICON is July 26 to 28th in Cleveland, Ohio, and we have a discount code for Huddlers. So message me on LinkedIn or email support at CMOhuddles.com if you need it, and I hope to see you there. Okay, let’s get to it.

Hello Huddlers, and welcome to another Bonus Huddle in our series on how CMOs can use AI tools to improve productivity across their operations. Today’s special guest is Cathy McPhillips, the Chief Growth Officer at the Marketing AI Institute, whose stated mission is to make AI approachable, actionable, and accessible to marketing leaders around the world. So that’s what we’re doing today, approachable, actionable, and accessible. Before joining the Marketing AI Institute two years ago, Kathy spent nine years at the Content Marketing Institute, which not coincidentally, is based in Cleveland, Ohio. So hello, Cathy, and welcome.

Cathy McPhillips: Thank you. Thank you.

Drew Neisser: And so how are you and where are you this fine day? Let me guess, Cleveland.

Cathy McPhillips: I am in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio. The sun is shining. It’s a gorgeous day.

Drew Neisser: I couldn’t help but notice you went to Ohio University, which you properly pointed out is not to be confused with Ohio State, god forbid. But I’m guessing you’re a native who never left for too long. Is that right?

Cathy McPhillips: Yeah, I realized that people in Ohio don’t go very far, at least on my side of Cleveland. So yes, I’ve been here my whole life except for those four years in beautiful Athens, Ohio.

Drew Neisser: All right. And can you answer this question, why the Buckeye State?

Cathy McPhillips: So there’s a prevalence of Buckeye trees in Ohio. Buckeye is supposed to look like the eye of a male deer, early American Indians decided that or said that’s what it looks like. Ohio State Buckeyes are the Ohio State Buckeyes because allegedly carrying one brings good luck.

Drew Neisser: There you go. All right, we are looking for good luck in today’s conversation. So perfect. So I’m just curious just today in the course of your morning or then and maybe you can include yesterday. How many AI tools do you think you used?

Cathy McPhillips: Probably five or six?

Drew Neisser: Okay, let’s go through them.

Cathy McPhillips: So I worked on a blog post. I used while I’m writing my blog post.

Drew Neisser: What tool did you use for your blog post?

Cathy McPhillips: Just Grammarly to just kind of be my companion while I’m writing.

Drew Neisser: Okay.

Cathy McPhillips: I was doing some social for our podcast and I use ChatGPT or GPT4. We just finished an hour ago our intro to AI for marketers course and I needed to edit that video. And I used Descript.

Drew Neisser: Okay, so interesting to me that for the blog, you’re just using Grammarly you didn’t necessarily—why not go into ChatGPT and have it create an outline? Or was it just, what was the choice there?

Cathy McPhillips: It just depends. I’m writing something—AI is replacing some of the things I’m doing. It’s speeding up some of the things I’m doing. And there are some things I really truly love doing. And some of those things are conceptualization, ideation, writing from my heart, and AI is not going to replace that. And I think it’s important for marketers to realize that there are some things AI can help with, it’s okay to say no, but just knowing that it’s an it’s an educated no, I think is important.

Drew Neisser: Okay and knowing, so you need to have enough familiarity to say, “Yeah, I really should use this for this point of time,” but you just want to write a blog post, go for it. Okay. So and then for the social, that you were saying, for the social, related to podcast, that was a prompt to create the social post?

Cathy McPhillips: Basically, here was the excerpt from the podcast that I want to do some social shares around it. Can you put this into 155 characters for me, leaving the room to put a link in.

Drew Neisser: And how many generations did you need to do to get—using the tool—did you need to do to get it where you wanted it?

Cathy McPhillips: It taken me weeks, every time I get better and better at it, you know, the first time I’m like, “can you give me social for this?” And it was fine. And then I add in criteria, “Use emojis less. And don’t leave me placeholder for Link include. Twitter handles include hashtags, make it persuasive copy.” Things that I’ve learned to better better craft that prompt. So the result is what I’m looking for. And then even silly things like I say, “Can you write me six tweets?” And it will number the tweets, and I move it into upload those that into social, I have to go through and remove all the numbers. So now I say I don’t need these numbered. So you just learned to be smarter with it.

Drew Neisser: And then when you want to take a leap forward in terms of how to use, say, a ChatGPT—because I mean, it seems like it keeps getting better, and there are more and more tricks and so forth—who’s your go to? How do you make sure that you’re staying up on just that specific one? And I know, I told the folks that we weren’t going to be talking about generative AI, but I know it’s on everybody’s mind. So just how do you keep your sauce sharp, so to speak?

Cathy McPhillips: Yeah. How can you not talk about it right now? I think obviously, our team has a bunch of resources. And Paul and Mike on our team are constantly learning and talking and sharing content. So I’m doing that. So right now, I think instead of going to AI experts, I am going to a lot of marketers, and CMOs and marketing practitioners who are trying these things, because we’re the ones doing the stuff and learning and everyone that says they’re an AI expert. I’d rather trust the marketing experts who know the problems they’re trying to solve. So I’m going to a lot of the people that I followed from my years at CMI, and people I’ve met over the past couple of years.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. Okay, now that we’re even further into this, and a lot of these CMOs are obviously in CMO Huddles, and they’re here to continue to figure it out. One thing that struck me is one CMO said to their team, “Just go play.” And I found that to be a problematic instruction because if you just go play and you say to a writer, go play on ChatGPT, they’ll come back with garbage and say, “Oh, this is garbage.” Because they don’t know about prompt crafting. So how do you make sure—what is a good way for CMOs to make sure that their team members are actually using these tools in a way that they’re gonna get some productivity out of it?

Cathy McPhillips: I think I will look at it two ways. One, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s the use case that you are looking at, that you know that you are spending time on? Or that’s today. What am I working on today that maybe something could assist with? So find a problem and find a tool that can help you solve that problem. And another thing is, is just figuring out what do you spend a lot of time doing? What is something maybe that AI could help you streamline? So like you said, don’t go in and just say, “Oh, yeah, just go try something and play with it.” Come back to me with something you’re trying to do. And let’s figure out a way that an AI tool can help you and then come back to me with the results.

Drew Neisser: And interestingly, one of the things that I was wondering about is whether or not teams are going to have expert prompt crafters. And I saw Matt Heinz post after he had spoken to you at a coffee talk. And the consensus was no everybody has to learn at least the basics now, is that your feeling?

Cathy McPhillips: Definitely. Especially as marketing leaders, we can’t teach our teams how to do these things, if we can’t do them ourselves. To a degree. I know, there are subject matter experts in various parts of our teams, but you really need to understand it and the people, it’s not like we can go to a product engineer on our team and say, “Here’s what we’re trying to do.” We’re the ones that know what we’re trying to do. And it’s hard to relay that to somebody else. Let’s just go do it. So I think prompt engineering is going to be an important role from an IT and data perspective, but I don’t think from a content creation standpoint. We’re all going to be prompt engineers.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, it’s sort of like we’ve learned to use Word, we’ve learned to use PowerPoint, we know how to use these tools. A lot of these things are going to come that way. But there are so many of them. And we’ll talk about some of them.

But let’s get into a specific use case that you and I talked about that I thought was really cool, because of the extraordinary amount of time that you saved. You mentioned, your podcast, and how all the content related to it, how you I don’t know cut out 18 hours of the process, which is huge, matter. 20. If, in fact, that math is right. Can we go through the stages—specifically where each component, what tools you’re using, and we’ll go through them one by one.

Cathy McPhillips: Sure. So I started off by going into my Google Doc, we use Google for across our company, and I just did step by step, every single thing I’m doing from opening up Canva to make images for the podcasts I’m putting the links in and it was three pages of just all the technical little tiny things I’m doing. And then I went back in and I said, “Where can AI assist me along the way?” So doing things like, removing background images for Canva, for our podcast cover. So on our podcast in YouTube, there’s a picture of Mike and there’s a picture of Paul in our office wearing a suit, Mike is wearing a t shirt standing against a brick wall. I needed to remove those two backgrounds so those two look—I don’t need them look like they’re in the same place, I just don’t want them looking like they’re out of place. So Canva, removing background images, if you didn’t know, that’s AI, that’s AI. So I know there are many other tools, Adobe has it and Photoshop, I mean, all these different tools have this capability. But that is artificial intelligence. And then so Paul and Mike record on Zoom. And when I download the files from Zoom, I am then able to pull them into Descript, which you mentioned, we talked about earlier, and Descript is able to transcribe it for me. And that’s artificial intelligence. And when I’m in Descript, the script is able to identify Paul’s voice versus Mike’s voice. And that’s good for me for a number of reasons. When I’m getting into some social shares and other things and pull quotes and things. It’s great for me to be able to identify, find them along the way, or for readers reading the transcript versus watching the video listening to the audio. It’s nice for them to be following along and know who’s speaking. So AI helping me identify is important.

Drew Neisser: So let me stop for a second. Okay, so Descript is a tool that you’re using for editing, for sound fixing, for how many different things are you using that tool for?

Cathy McPhillips: A lot. So it was interesting. When I first started at the Institute, we were working on our webinars. So it’s a similar process for webinars to a degree. And I asked Paul, “Who gets these webinars produced and on our website and sends out the emails and everything.” And he said “You.” It was like, I don’t know how to do that. So for me Descript is not only a time saver, but it fills a knowledge gap for me, which is great. So the next step is once it’s transcribed, I want to go through and I want to edit at the beginning of the podcast or whatever I’m producing. Mike and Paul are chit chatting, how was your day? Are we getting started? Is this episode 49? Are you ready to go? And all of that I need to then edit out. Very basic editing task. For those of you who are editors, I am not. But in Descript, you are able to go and highlight the words that you don’t want included in the video and you hit backspace or hit delete. And it clips the video. It filled a knowledge gap. I didn’t know how to do that. So now I don’t need to go pay someone to do that. And I’ll circle back to that point in a second.

Drew Neisser: Can you do a master—let’s say the transcript pulls up “ums” and “ahhs” and non words, can you master edit those or do you have to go through them one by one find and delete?

Cathy McPhillips: You can do a search and replace, from from a transcription standpoint. And you can go through and you can it will shorten word gaps for you. And it will remove filler words. I’ve noticed though, for us when I removed the filler words, the transcription—or the video rather and the audio—sounds very choppy.

Drew Neisser: Okay. Important. Yeah. So that’s where you would need a professional perhaps.

Cathy McPhillips: So I have tested some ways in that right. And for us, the amount of “ums” is pretty nominal compared to what it sounds like after I do it. So I have chosen not to do that.

Drew Neisser: And you mentioned, and I just want to go back to this, that you have two people on the show two different locations, two different mic things. And so the sound is a little bit different.

Cathy McPhillips: Yes, yes.

Drew Neisser: Does Descript help with that as well?

Cathy McPhillips: It does. There’s a sound feature in there where you can toggle on it’s called Studio Sound. And so Paul is usually in his basement home office recording, Mike’s usually here in the office. They both have the same mics that does help a little bit. But just by the nature of being in different places, they do sound different. So studio sound is able to remove background noise. It’s able to level out the voices and everything. So it’s pretty remarkable and again, probably to a trained audio professional or video professional, they can see what I’m doing wrong. But for the needs of what we’re trying to do, it works. Right. So my point about that was, Paul asked me a few weeks ago, he’s like, “I need a speaker reel.” In this new world of AI, he’s been getting speaking requests five times a day. I’m also a part time agent. I didn’t know that was gonna happen, but it’s become a fun thing. And he said, “I need this new speaker real can you do that?” And I said, “Absolutely not. That is something for professional.” So we still do need the people and the partners to do the big things. But some of this day to day stuff, these tools are able to assist us with.

Drew Neisser: Okay, we’ve got, let’s say an edited podcast, sort of video slash podcast. What else are we talking about now? Because there’s a lot I know, Melissa our producer for CMO Huddles Studio and Renegade Marketers Unite. And we added up I think it was 28 or 29 steps all in for our process.There’s a lot in there. Keep going in terms of the things that you’re using beyond and maybe there’s more out of Descript or some other things.

Cathy McPhillips: There are a couple other things I’m doing within Descript because our podcast the format is we cover three news stories, so that I’m able to go in and duplicate the video, create that shorter snippet of 10 to 15 minutes of covering one topic. Descript is able to help me with that, it’s not as necessarily AI except for the video clipping where I’m cutting the text. But then, once I get those files exported, I also have a page of show notes. So I’m using ChatGPT, and Jasper to help me synthesize some of that copy, where I’m taking that section and then I’m writing a blog post for topic one, topic two, and topic three. I’m able to do those separately.

Drew Neisser: And why do you need both Jasper and ChatGPT for that?

Cathy McPhillips: You really don’t, I think it’s just become a process that I like. And I also like the different outputs. So for the show notes for to take the whole entire podcast for it to put it into a few paragraphs of here’s the broader overarching, here’s what happened today. I think it’s just personal preference. There are hundreds of generative AI tools right now. And honestly, the one I like the most is copy.ai because the one I used first. And I just know the interface, I know the UX, I know how to use it. And when I try something else, it kind of get a similar output but I’ve learned I have spent so much time in copy.ai, that’s the one I like to use. So I think it’s just a matter of preference.

Drew Neisser: So help me here because we had Nicole Leffer here, you know Nicole, and I had thought, Oh, this is gonna be great, I’m going to record it, I’m going to use otter to make the transcript, I’m going to then take that transcript, throw into ChatGPT, it’s going to create a neat little summary. And I’ll be able to say look at that we did a show on AI and we produced it. And I couldn’t make it work. And I also realized that I could write a summary better and faster, that would be relevant to CMOs, then whatever complications trying to solve the problem, but I know I did something wrong or 10 things wrong. How are you getting there?

Cathy McPhillips: Well, I think a couple of things. One, I think some AI tools make you realize the value of humans. And it makes you realize that we are needed more than we know. But I think a lot of it is did you just cut and paste it in and say can you summarize this for me? So you know, just working on how you’re getting that prompt to work. One of the things I learned from Nicole is asking the tool, “I’m trying to do this, what kind of questions should you be asking me that I can give you so I can give you more information so that you can then use the tool better?” How can you make the tool smarter to help you give you what you need?

Drew Neisser: Yeah, she mentioned that when we talked and I didn’t think of that step. But that would have made a lot of sense, get the tool to help you figure out what you’re trying to do.

Cathy McPhillips: One of the other examples I had was, so I also use Writer, they’ve got this amazing recaps feature, where I could upload an audio file and it will give me key takeaways. So I tried that for the podcast, I uploaded the audio file. And it gave me four takeaways it defaults to four takeaways. So gave me two takeaways on topic one, two on topic two, and zero on topic three. And my first reaction was okay, I’ll just go figure out topic three, and I’ll edit the post and I was like, wait a minute, I can do this better. So I ended up taking my new videos—the three separate videos—and I uploaded the first one, got the takeaways, uploaded second one got the takeaway. So then I was like, okay, AI has trained me to do this the right way. So I put in the first one and I got it and so then I combined all those to create my longer post or to create a separate post. So it’s just a matter of figuring out how to use these tools the right way. And oftentimes I think that’s when people are like, “Oh, AI is not for me, I’m better than the technology.” It gives us an opportunity to become better at what we’re trying to do with the output we’re trying to get from these tools.

Drew Neisser: Can you give some examples of how to get the tool—and I guess we’ll stay with ChatGPT for a moment—to tell you what you need to do. I’m thinking about the weekly recaps that we do for Huddles, and those are really important. And there’s a context to it. Because every week, they need to be different. And sometimes in a conversation, one CMO may say the same thing as another a week later. So I don’t know how to get the tool to write the recap. In a way, here’s an hour long transcript.

Cathy McPhillips: Yeah, and I mentioned this to you off camera before we started that I am more in your shoes in this group’s shoes of being the marketing leader and the growth officer for our company than I am an AI connoisseur or expert by any stretch. So I’m learning as I’m going. So all of these are just me using these tools in new and different ways. And sure, I have a little bit of an inside scoop on some of these things, just because of the nature of our business. I was working on a strategy for a local Chamber of Commerce. And I said, I’m going out to this group, I want to talk about certain topics that would be relevant to these businesses. It’s small business, it’s midsize, its enterprise, how can I craft this presentation, to best suit this organization? And then I asked ChatGPT, what kind of information would you like me to tell you about this group, so you can better help me craft an outline? And it gave me questions like, how many people will be there in total? And it was interesting, the questions they were throwing back at me, I was like, I wouldn’t have thought of that. So it is just trying to have this conversation with this tool.

Drew Neisser: Have a conversation with the tool.

Cathy McPhillips: It is interesting how you could ask it a question, and it gives you a response and output. And you’re like, oh, gosh, I did that wrong, I need to do it over. Don’t do it over, just expand on your question, because it still knows what you asked the first time.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, that was one of the things that Nicole talked a lot about is don’t rewrite the copy down below, rewrite the prompt and keep getting better and keep getting better. So all right, let’s keep going. Because I know that as part of this podcast, you also need to pull a lot more content and a lot of different content out of that.

Cathy McPhillips: One of the things when I use Writer, so Writer has the recaps feature, there’s another tool called gloss.ai that I’ve been tinkering with a strategy on why I’m tinkering with it. And what it’s able to do is it’s able to take a video or an audio file, and it goes through and it analyzes what it thinks is the key takeaways. So it can pull a 32 second clip, a 15 second clip, perfect for social because we want to always be distributing our content, amplifying our content, repurposing—all these things that we marketers are trying to do. And gloss.ai is able to create those snippets for you automatically. And then what blew my mind was okay, say there was a sentence where it started off a little bit—it was a great snippet, but you really wanted the sentence before it because that put it in context, you could just take the little cursor, pull up the sentence before, and it would reclip the video. Which was like, oh my gosh, that’s like hours of my life. So it was just very, very cool the way it could do that. And you could also upload your brand colors, and it could upload your logo, upload your brand guidelines, and it could learn about your brand. And the way you keep editing these videos. It could do things like, if you and I are talking about books, and we’re talking about this great book we’re reading and it was about trees and all this sort of thing. We’re listening to this audio file, then the AI could go in and it could take clipart and it could put clipart in based on the words that we’re saying. And then it puts it into this big storyboard like format, where if you’re like, “Okay, I don’t really like that actually have an image from something I’d rather use.” You can then go in and replace it. But it gives you this really cool starting point. So that’s something we’ve been looking at too.

Drew Neisser: Amazing. And you’ve now done this enough times, are you confident—and maybe it doesn’t matter—but if you went through the transcript, you would find the 10s, right, zero out of 10. The best quotes the best sort of things. How good has this tool been in terms of, is it good enough? Or is it amazing? In terms of just the clip part of this, because I know that for our podcast when we’re doing our clips, we want to make sure they’re really good because you don’t want to waste anybody’s time.

Cathy McPhillips: Absolutely. I think the nice thing about marketing today—this is gonna make me show my age—but when I first started marketing it was, let’s be on national TV. And how many of TRPs can we buy to be on national TV and you go and you spend a boatload of money on your TV spots, and you spend days in the studio, and then you book it, and you can’t cancel it, and you spend 10s of 1000s of dollars on something. And now it’s like it’s a social post. It’s a short video. Let’s just see. Let’s just see if we’re getting the same results we were getting with this versus spending an extra half hour, hour, whatever the case may be to see is it converting? Is it still resonating? Is it giving us what we need. Absolutely, let’s do this for a while and see if this is working for us. And again, if it’s not, we’re like, “Okay, well, let’s change X, Y, and Z next week.”

Drew Neisser: Certainly social content is, in many ways, disposable. I still think, and this is the challenge that marketers particularly in this community face is, they’re selling to enterprise, they’re selling to really smart people who are discerning. And as they’re trying to build credibility and when they create their content, if it’s not really good, if it’s not really worthwhile, they just wasted someone’s time. This is the interesting part of this challenge is that there’s this flood of content that AI is generating. And again, in social it may not matter, but I’m thinking longer form content? I bet it does.

Cathy McPhillips: Yeah, and I think like anything, humans have a tendency to just ruin some things. And so I think there are going to be folks that just trying to take the shortcuts, and try to take the output as AI gives it to them and just run with it and just think that they’re going to be okay. Really, we need to be strategic, we need to use the humans in the ways that we are just better at it than computers. So it still is very, very important to have that human oversight in everything that we’re doing.

Drew Neisser: Yes, thus the famous lawyer who put in a brief—you have heard that story, right? The lawyer put in the brief and ChatGPT made up three cases out of nowhere. This gentleman will be lucky if he’s not disbarred. All right back. Was there anything else, so you talked about eliminating 18 out of 20 hours, so is there anything else in the podcast production process that we should know about? Because we’ve talked about the audio, the video, the blog posts, the social posts, anything else? Or we’ll move on to the next one.

Cathy McPhillips: I think that was most of it. And interestingly Paul, and I had our intro to AI class a couple hours ago. And we one of the things we talked about is AI saved me 18 hours to do all these things. The more I thought about it, I wouldn’t be doing half of those things. If it wasn’t for AI, I don’t have 20 hours in my week to be producing one episode of a podcast and all the things that go with it. The podcast, absolutely. But all the iterations, all the repurposing all the other things, they just actually wouldn’t have gotten done. So that’s a really important thing for us, that we keep in mind.

Drew Neisser: It’s about productivity, it really is about productivity. Okay. So we also talked about how it’s reshaped how you’re marketing your conference, and by the way that we can talk about the conference. Now you have a conference in Cleveland, at the end of July, you want to talk a little bit about that?

Cathy McPhillips: Sure. It’s MAICON, which is the Marketing AI Conference. And this is our fourth annual event. And I’m so excited for this year, we’ve already exceeded last year’s registration. I’m just so excited. So we’re bringing in leaders from all over the country to talk about what is the now of AI, what’s the future of AI. I’m more excited, actually, with our breakout speakers, who are going in and saying, “Here’s my story, I had this problem. Here’s the tool I used, here’s the process we went through, here’s the team members that were involved. And here were the results.” Because those are the stories that we leave with, I can actually do that. And that’s so important to be able to see that and visualize what our peers are doing. And then we’re just going to have some fun, as we all know, we missed each other. And it’s nice to get back together in person. So that’s always one of my most favorite parts. And I’m growing the community in our Slack group. And just being able to meet people I’ve talked to for two years that I’ve never had a chance to meet is pretty exciting.

Drew Neisser: Awesome. We’re happy to announce it. For members of the CMO Huddles community, you have provided a discount code. I’m hoping to be able to make it to Cleveland, I’m excited. And having attended an AI conference in New York, it’s early days of the internet. It’s so damn exciting. And there’s so many things that are happening right now, I gotta imagine that this is going to be kind of a big deal. So talk about the marketing of it and how you use tools to help you with the marketing of it.

Cathy McPhillips: Sure. So one of my least favorite things to do is to write promotional copy. So what I did was I used copy.ai, I had to write 100 word description—that was their prompt—give me 100 word description of your product. In my case, it’s the event, put in the URL. So it took me a while to craft that prompt. It actually took me a couple times because I kept saying no, that’s not right. So when I got the prompt that I was happy with, entered the URL and said I would like persuasive copy. There’s a drop down of friendly, persuasive, whatever else there is. And then I hit enter and I just got pages and pages and pages of copy, short form, long form. And I would say as a whole it was good. None of it did I use verbatim. Some of it was horrible. Some of it said the event was in San Francisco.

Drew Neisser: Perfect.

Cathy McPhillips: Right? So human oversight, human in the loop, it’s very important. So I went through there and I made some edits to some things. So I would pull one that I’m like, “Okay, I like the sound of this, but let me fix the city. Let me add a hashtag, let me do whatever to to some of these things. Here’s some email copy, let me just tweak this a little bit.” So none of it, like I said, I went through everything and gave it really hard edit. And it gave me content for well over a month. That was very lovely. And it saved me a lot of time. So the other thing I liked, aside from the time savings is it spoke about the event in words that I wouldn’t have used. And even when I tried to sound different, I always still sound like me. So it was just interesting, what came out, I was like, “Huh, I wonder if that angle, that approach, those words that the AI generated, would resonate more with my audience than what I was doing?” So I’ve been running A/B tests with our social posts with our email copy, edited by me, which one is performing better? So if the AI is performing better? Well, heck, I’m gonna save the time and have this help me. If my copy is resonating better, then what can I be doing to prompt the AI tool better to then help me again. So I’m not stopping. If mine is better, let’s not stop right there. Let’s figure out okay, we gotta to keep working on this, so I can get better at prompting the machine to help me.

Drew Neisser: Do you have any hints right now as to which is doing better?

Cathy McPhillips: Actually the AI generated—and I don’t know, part of it might be just the volume, that there is just so much more that it’s able to give me—but yeah, I think the AI stuff is a little bit better. And I’ve been doing this now, this is my third conference with the Institute. It’s been interesting to watch those numbers. The same thing with A/B testing subject lines of emails.

Drew Neisser: Do you have a voice prompt—we talked about this with Nicole—where you’ve created a brand voice prompt that would always go into your programs or brand voice? Do you have that? Are you using that as a part of your approach?

Cathy McPhillips: Not yet. However, I actually just wrote some copy the other day, and I put it into ChatGPT. And I said, “Rewrite this email, and Paul Roetzer’s voice, our CEO.” And it did, and it sounded like him. I was like, Oh, my gosh. So then I did the same thing. I said, “Write this in Joe Politcy’s voice, my former CEO. Write it in Anne Haley’s voice.” And it did and I was like, how do these machines know this stuff? And it was the same message, but completely different tones. And it was fascinating.

Drew Neisser: That’s so funny. One of my first experiments was with ChatGPT in the free version was, write this in the voice of Jerry Seinfeld, and the response came back. “Hey, it’s Jerry Seinfeld. Hahaha.” Then nothing, like no humor. So obviously, that was a poorly crafted prompt, or it was really early days of ChatGPT.

Cathy McPhillips: I was gonna say, or it was early in the technology. So if you’ve tried it and you didn’t like it at its first pass. That was six months ago, I bet it’s a lot different today. So go back to some of those tools you’re trying or go with the tools that you are using, find out if there’s an AI component you’re not even taking advantage of.

Drew Neisser: And I realized that I would say, what do I need to tell you in order to write in a complete 500 words in the voice of Jerry Seinfeld versus just introducing yourself? Right, and maybe it’ll give me a different prompt?

Cathy McPhillips: Absolutely.

Drew Neisser: Okay. All right. So there we go. We’re back to that early question.  So the question is, I don’t know, when will the ChatGPT database be updated? Because now it’s still based on 2021.

Cathy McPhillips: So, as I mentioned, a few minutes ago, I’m a marketer. I am not an AI expert. But my understanding is that it was trained on data through 2021, a certain data set through 2021. Not all data, just certain data, and what we are inputting what we are asking what it is learning from all of us using the tool, that’s how it’s constantly being updated. So it is being trained on us now.

Drew Neisser: And of course, if you don’t want it to train on you, you can turn that off, as we learned in an earlier session.

So just switching gears for a second, and we haven’t covered this and we’re trying to do a dedicated Bonus Huddle on design and image creation. Have you played with Dolly or Midjourney?

Cathy McPhillips: I have I played with Dolly, Midjourney, Runway.ml with Selltra is a great one for advertising. Those are the ones that I’ve used.

Drew Neisser: Okay, and are you finding you’re actually able to use it to create a few out of blog posts if you wanted an image that would match it? Is that working for you?

Cathy McPhillips: It is I think it’s better for me than stock photos. So I think that’s filled a need that I just don’t want to go pull the same image someone else has used and you see the same. You’re doing a blog post about ideas for AI, and oh look a light bulb. Everyone’s doing that. So how can I be prompting some of these design tools to help me with a new image, so blog posts are great. I’ve used it a lot on presentations because I’ve been speaking a lot more so I’ve been using it a lot to generate images from my presentations. I’ve been using it for some email images and things like that.

Drew Neisser: what’s the learning curve for Dolly or Midjourney? Or the others?

Cathy McPhillips: It’s just learning how to prompt it the right way. And I think they’re getting better, like, Runway is getting really, really good. But I think that Dolly and Runway, from my experience, still makes humans look like aliens. Like they haven’t mastered faces. And I know we talked about Brian Fanzo. Brian Fanzo has mastered Midjourney. I think if you know how to prompt these tools the right way to do faces, you can. That’s not how I spend my day. So I just haven’t been doing that. But I think again, it’s just how to craft.

Drew Neisser: All right. So we will definitely need a tutorial on that. And before that, I have to get in there and play with it more because I went into Midjourney and just was lost. It’s like, help! And I think the same thing happened when I went into Dolly, it was a little intimidating.

So for Huddlers, we will find a basic guide to those that we can all watch before we do our next Bonus Huddle on that. One of the things that I think is interesting is the pace at which these tools are coming out. And I noticed today that there’s a website called “There’sAnAIForThat.com.” And so part of this mind shift in terms of productivity is thinking about what else can is out there that we can do. And have you been to that site? I haven’t, I just discovered the site like 10 minutes before we talked. Have you been there?

Cathy McPhillips: I have not.

Drew Neisser: Okay. Well, there’s another one called Futurepedia.io, which is compiling these, you’ve been there?

Cathy McPhillips: I have.

Drew Neisser: And talk a little bit about that.

Cathy McPhillips: I think it’s just here’s my use case. I’m on social media, I’m analytics, I’m in sales, what are some tools that can help me? I think it’s a very good way to keep up on what tools are out there. But you know, from a tool standpoint, I’m not going out to look for any new tools necessarily, unless I have a new problem I’m trying to solve. I just don’t want to jump to the new hot thing just because everyone else is or it’s getting a lot of promotion or something.

Drew Neisser: Okay, but what about press releases? There’s some cool things coming out for that, that I’m excited about. Because that’s one of the most tedious processes in marketing. 25 revisions, blah, blah, blah, they go out and most of the time, it’s just to get a link. Have you tried anything in that area?

Cathy McPhillips: I actually am on the board of a few nonprofits. And I did try it for our last quarterly press release. It was okay.

Drew Neisser: Okay. What are we talking about hyperwrite or easy prep?

Cathy McPhillips: I use hyperwrite actually.

Drew Neisser: Okay.

Cathy McPhillips: I’m a big fan of hyperwrite. But again, I’m not a PR expert. So what was I doing wrong?

Drew Neisser: Okay. At this other AI conference that I went to, there was, I think it was called Easy Newswire, which will not only will help you write it, but will distribute it for you, which is another step taken out of the system, and it will do it quite cost effectively. I’m intrigued by the idea of having meetings. So everybody has meetings and somebody there has to write a recap of that meeting internally or so forth. Have you used any tools just for that alone? Because again, think about it. We have an hour long meeting, somebody has to go back and say what are the next steps and follow up on all of that, is something that an AI can solve?

Cathy McPhillips: Well, I actually was interviewed a few weeks ago for a local ad agency doing an ebook on AI. So they talked to me. And this poor young woman was like 24 years old, and was handed his job of project managing this ebook. So she’s writing things down. And I’m like, do you want me to record this? And I’ll send you the video and the transcript when I’m done. And she was like, yes. So I think in that instance, she has my quotes properly, she can actually listen and engage and ask me the right questions, and not just sit there and read off of her bulleted list of things he’s supposed to ask me. So it became a very much more natural, engaging conversation. For meetings themselves, you know, my team, the four or five of us were together having a meeting, we have not tried that. But I know there are lots of tools that can do that.

Drew Neisser: Yeah. Here’s a question from the audience, with all these tools coming up at what point are they going to all be just squeezed into Salesforce and Adobe and Outlook and all the other things that we use every day?

Cathy McPhillips: I don’t know if anyone watched Microsoft’s last release on all of the things they’re doing within their suite of products. It’s crazy. It was one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen. They did such a nice job. They did such a nice job explaining, here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s how you do it. And it was same thing as soon as it was done, I walked into Paul’s office and I said “This is going to change everything, how are these other tools gonna keep up?” So I think you know, they need to find their niche, they need to find what their unique—like all of us—what their USP is. I think some of them are just going to get eaten up. Some of them are going to be acquired by these big companies. And I think that’s probably the hope of many of them.

Drew Neisser: Yeah, I’m sure.

Cathy McPhillips: Maybe Microsoft will buy me. But yes, I think it’s going to be all these tools are coming out, and then it’s going to come back to, it’s going to be a select group. But yeah, that’ll be a while, because we’re trying to figure this out.

Drew Neisser: Yeah. And hopefully, the innovators will keep innovating, because you know what, let’s face it, nobody is necessarily happy with all of the things that Word does, or how it does it. And it would be nice to have some fresh way of rethinking these things. And so hopefully, some new companies will emerge that will actually do it better. And maybe replace some and disrupt the big guys, that would be awesome. All right. So let’s attempt to wrap this up. And for CMOs, who are getting their feet wet, trying to get their teams excited about using some of these tools. It’s not a wild goose chase, but they wanted increased productivity.

Let’s talk about two do’s and one don’t for CMOs when it comes to deploying AI tools, or generative AI tools.

Cathy McPhillips: I would say to do is, let your team have a little bit of freedom, guarded freedom, just like why are you doing what you’re doing. And let’s figure out a problem you have and go do this. If you’re in regulated industries, if you’re in FinTech, if you’re in healthcare, obviously, be careful with what you’re doing. Otherwise, give them a little bit of leeway just to go out there and find something and create and come back to because we talk about next gen marketers in our business. These next gen marketers are the ones that are going to be out there, doing this. And next gen doesn’t mean they’re 25. Next gen means they’re interested in what the future of marketing is and the future of business is. So,  allowing these people to do these things. So I think that’s a big do.

I think a big don’t is, don’t be irresponsible. It’s very easy to go down this path of, this is easy, this is fast. This technology I don’t know a whole lot about but it seems like it’s a good thing and not really going in to see how they’re using your data, how they’re using all this information, and are they someone you really want to partner with? Because like I said before, that there are just some bad eggs out there. And we want to make sure that we’re doing this right. There are more good people, there are more good marketers, than there are bad. And we just need to be the ones that are stewarding this and making sure that it’s being done, right.

Drew Neisser: I love that.

Cathy McPhillips: I’ll do two don’ts and a do. Don’t sit on this. You know, there’s some very, very simple ways that you can use this to save a lot of time. But when I go back to the example of copy.ai, helping me with my MAICON copy, I estimated I saved four hours. I scheduled four hours of customer phone calls, I purposely scheduled those phone calls saying I am not going to waste this time, by going down some rabbit hole with something else, I’m going to use this in a methodical way that computers won’t be able to do for me. And it was great. I got blog content for a month I connected with people, they were so interested, they were so happy just to give them 15 minutes to talk about things they were looking for. And it was just nice. And that’s what this is all about.

Drew Neisser: Okay, have you seen or created any guidelines for marketing teams? Because you talked about in your don’t, you talked about how there has to be some boundaries here. You have to protect data, if you’re using images that you don’t have licenses for there’s a risk of copyright infringement. Are there any guidelines that you’ve seen out there that we should be sharing with the community?

We are tracking that down if we haven’t already and shared it in the link. Yeah, I think this is another interesting thing. We did a show recently CMO Huddle Studio show where three marketing to marketers were talking about their AI iteration. One of them happened to be a governance tool that helped to govern and make sure that folks using their platform were in fact monitoring AI usage in a proper way. But there’s no doubt going to be a flood of now with AI. I don’t know if you have any opinion on that but it’s gonna be like fluoride in toothpaste in a second. And I’m just wondering, we listed off 20 tools in less than 50 minutes today.

Cathy McPhillips: Let’s see Melissa is googling skills. We have a responsible AI manifesto on our website, and both wired.com as well as the city of Boston have created generative AI policies. And I think those three examples are really helpful as a guide and a starting point. And even Wired part of their guidelines is, we are not going to do this, we are going to do this, if you’re a customer. So it’s interesting the way they approach it. With a little huge asterisk at the bottom. This is going to change. As we learn more we’re going to keep iterating our policies and it’s going to keep changing. Our responsible AI manifesto, city of Boston generative AI policy, and Wired’s generative AI policy.

Right. I think at some point, I don’t know what’s five to 10 years from now, whatever that number is, AI technology is going to be technology, everything is going to go down a path.

Drew Neisser: So in that sense, it’s inevitable. And therefore, in many ways, it’s not—let’s say you’re in a software business—it’s not if you’re gonna have AI, it’s just when.

Cathy McPhillips: I don’t know. I think so. Yeah.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. Very, very interesting. All right, Cathy McPhilips, thank you so much for joining us, a really interesting conversation. So thank you, Cathy. Thank you so much.

 If you’re a B2B CMO, and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring and daring CMOs at CMO huddles.com

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!