Try AI – Part Deux

09/08/23 • 40 min

Where are you on your AI adoption curve and where is your company on their AI maturity curve? In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Content Creator Banafshe Salehi review a bunch of cool and innovative AI tools with the help of guest Saba El-Hilo, Unbounce’s SVP of Data and Engineering. They’re reprising the most popular episode to date - Try AI - but this time looking at specialized AI tools for marketers. What tools will the team actually be adopting? Which are over-hyped? And is the AI boom already on its way out? We’ll find out on this episode of Unprompted.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Unbounce Content Creator and Copywriter Banafshe Salehi. Banafshe has more than seven years of experience in content and brand from B2C to agencies and SaaS. She is a creative strategist, working on conceptualizing marketing campaigns, white papers, multimedia projects, and more.This episode also features Unbounce’s SVP of Data and Engineering, Saba El-Hilo. Saba’s career includes more than 10 years of experience building top performing and innovative products. She has deep experience working with Big Data, ML technologies and building web applications and services.

Key Quotes

*”We all know these models tend to hallucinate. They can return inaccurate data. There's a whole lot of privacy and data challenges. So the tech is so new, and we're seeing big players like Google and Microsoft build their entire suites and incorporate their entire suites on top of this tech. It's like building a car while driving it.” - Saba El Hilo

*”These AI tools are time saving to free you up for the other stuff. So when there's a mechanical task or a repetitive task, it’s amazing. Like, you do your inputs and, and the info is at your fingertips. And now you can act strategically and proactively without having to do that repetitive task.” - Pete Housley

*”I had a moment of being a bit hopeless towards creative career paths. But I think now that I've played around with more specialized AI tools, I think there is a lot of value to having a person who is specialized use those specialized tools. They are not that easy to pick up. They need investment, they need time put into them. And I think they open up a lot of avenues for content creators like myself.” - Banafshe Salehi

Time Stamps

[2:15] Introducing co-host Banafshe Salehi, Content Creator at Unbounce

[3:28] AI in the News: SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike

[6:59] AI in the News: McKinsey’s State of AI in 2023 Report

[9:22] Is the AI boom on its way out?

[11:10] Let’s try new, specialized AI tools

[12:15] Welcome back Saba El-Hilo, SVP of Data & Engineering at Unbounce

[15:19] What are the rules to the team’s tool review?

[16:39] ThoughtSpot

[19:42] Acrolinx

[22:40] MadKudu

[26:21] Optimove

[29:26] Surfer SEO

[32:13] Brand24

[34:39] Crayon

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley, CMO at Unbounce

Banafshe Salehi, Content Creator at Unbounce

Saba El-Hilo, SVP of Data and Engineering at Unbounce

Learn more about Unbounce

Check out the tools we reviewed!

Learn more about Unbounce

This podcast is brought to you by Unbounce.

Most AI marketing tools are... kinda the same. That’s because they’re built on the same, generic machine learning models—and they get you generic results in your marketing.

Unbounce is different. It’s trained on data from billions of conversions, which means it gives you content and recommendations proven to get you more leads, sales, and signups.

If you’re a marketer (or just someone doing marketing), you need Unbounce. You can build beautiful, high-converting landing pages for your ads and emails, plus get AI copywriting and conversion optimization tools—all powered by more than a decade of marketing data.

Get the most conversions with Unbounce. Learn more at unbounce.com/unprompted.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Key Quotes

Time Stamps

[2:15] Introducing co-host Banafshe Salehi, Content Creator at Unbounce

[3:28] AI in the News: SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike

[6:59] AI in the News: McKinsey’s State of AI in 2023 Report

[9:22] Is the AI boom on its way out?

[11:10] Let’s try new, specialized AI tools

[12:15] Welcome back Saba El-Hilo, SVP of Data & Engineering at Unbounce

[15:19] What are the rules to the team’s tool review?

[16:39] ThoughtSpot

[19:42] Acrolinx

[22:40] MadKudu

[26:21] Optimove

[29:26] Surfer SEO

[32:13] Brand24

[34:39] Crayon

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley, CMO at Unbounce

Banafshe Salehi, Content Creator at Unbounce

Saba El-Hilo, SVP of Data and Engineering at Unbounce

Learn more about Unbounce

Check out the tools we reviewed!

Learn more about Unbounce

This podcast is brought to you by Unbounce.

Most AI marketing tools are... kinda the same. That’s because they’re built on the same, generic machine learning models—and they get you generic results in your marketing.

Unbounce is different. It’s trained on data from billions of conversions, which means it gives you content and recommendations proven to get you more leads, sales, and signups.

Get the most conversions with Unbounce. Learn more at unbounce.com/unprompted.

Previous Episode

AI on Trial

There are lots of concerns with the development of AI—but do the negatives outweigh the benefits? In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Senior Creative Director James Thomson play judge with special guest Aaron Kwittken, Founder and CEO of PRophet. Together, they talk about all things AI ethics. Should agencies disclose that they use AI? Should they be paid based on time and materials or value of work? Can the government regulate AI? Tune in to this episode of Unprompted to learn about how you should - and shouldn’t - navigate the use of AI in the marketing world today.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Senior Creative Director at Unbounce, James Thomson. This episode also features Founder and CEO of PRophet, Aaron Kwittken. Aaron is a highly acclaimed industry leader, serial entrepreneur and seasoned corporate affairs and integrated communications strategist with more than 30 years in the PR industry. He is also CEO of the Comms Tech Unit for the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, a suite of AI SaaS solutions for PR, social media, and content creators. Aaron founded KWT Global in late 2005 (f/k/a Kwittken), a highly acclaimed global PR and brand strategy consultancy which was acquired by KWT Global and where he currently serves as Chairman. Aaron has received numerous honors and awards for his work and industry leadership from the likes of ICCO, Cannes LIONS, PR Week, The Drum and PRovoke Media, having recently been named a PRovoke 2021 Innovator 25 and to PR Week's 2022 Dashboard 25 for his comms-tech leadership and industry innovation.

Key Quotes

*”When I ran my agency day-to-day, I'd be like, ‘Can I hire someone who can get me 60, 70% of the way there?’ Right now, we're there [with AI.] We're at 60, 70%. And then the human has to come over the top to finish it, to make it better, to give it the values, judgment, and emotion that AI does not have.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”Humans still need to come up with the idea. Creativity rests with us. It's really more so figuring out who else is gonna be interested in that idea or that concept.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”The beauty of it to me is we might hire fewer people on the bottom, but they're going to have much better roles. They're going to stay longer. We're going to be able to upskill them. And instead of having less people, we're going to have people doing higher value things, potentially changing the compensation scheme as well. We agencies should not be paid for time and materials. We should be paid based on the value that we bring.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”ChatGPT is a toy. PRophet is a tool. And I tell folks, ‘If you want to play around with ChatGPT on your own, great. Do not put anything corporate or any work related stuff in ChatGPT, because you don't own that. In the same way that if you use Google Sheets and you don't have an SLA in place, you're giving up all of your information.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”AI is not biased. Humans are biased. And humans build algorithms that then power AI. AI isn’t really AI, it's really human intelligence. So AI is only going to be as biased as the humans who built it. So then you need to have countermeasures and algorithms that then search for and identify biases inside of each platform, which takes time and it takes investment.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”You can't wait on the government. Put it this way: The government has had no control over social media platforms and that's caused all sorts of mayhem, despair, and death in the world. And we can go on and on about how reckless Facebook, Instagram, TikTok have been. The government has had no control over that. What makes us think that the government can control AI? There's no way. We have to do it ourselves.” - Aaron Kwittken

Time Stamps

[1:44] Introducing James Thomson, Senior Creative Director at Unbounce

[6:00] AI in the news: Does Hillary Clinton endorse Ron DeSantis? [Hint: Deepfake]

[9:10] WormGPT and FraudGPT enable phishing attempts

[13:05] What is bias in AI marketing?

[15:53] AI goes on Trial

[16:25] Introducing guest Aaron Kwittken, Founder & CEO at PRophet

[21:03] How does PRophet apply AI to PR?

[23:47] Does PRophet generate ideas? Or do humans need to?

[24:42] Who should be using PRophet?

[30:15] Could AI replace the PR employee?

[35:35] How will AI affect the PR industry going forward?

[41:30] How does PRophet deal with security, privacy and bias when using AI?

[45:13] Who will regulate ethical use of AI?

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley, CMO at Unbounce

James Thomson, Senior Creative Director at Unbounce

Next Episode

2024 AI Marketing Playbook

Do you have an AI playbook? In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Director of Product Marketing and in-house AI expert Jess Petrella are giving you your AI playbook for the year ahead. To do that, they’re tapping into the genius of Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at the Marketing AI Institute. Together, they share use cases for AI marketing, advise on the best AI-powered marketing tools, and give five steps to launching your company on its very own AI journey. Tune in to find out more on this episode of Unprompted.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Unbounce Director of Product Marketing, Jess Petrella. Jess has worked in SaaS for over 10 years and in that time has brought dozens of innovative products to market. She is focused keenly on driving business growth through effective go-to-market strategies and product positioning.

Over the past few years, Jess has positioned herself at the intersection between AI and marketing, having developed strategies that have informed how Unbounce has brought our own innovative AI-powered tools to market. Outside of Unbounce she’s the creator of “AI for Product Marketers”, an advanced Notion AI template system containing practical, useful, and inspired templates made just for product marketers.

Jess has written for a number of publications, including a piece in the B2B marketer on AIs impact on SEO, conversion and the marketing funnel, appropriately titled “The Search Armageddon”. Earlier this year, Jess joined a panel of experts to discuss current and future applications of AI in marketing and Business at Lead Gen World 2023 in San Diego. You can also see her live on stage at SaaS North in her own home town of Ottawa this coming November.

Key Quotes

*”98 percent of all marketers we surveyed said they're personally using AI in some way. Now, here's the bad news, though: 78 percent of people say their employers have zero internal AI education or training. So we've reached peak interest and excitement about AI, but there's a massive gap in the practical tools people have internally at their organizations to actually learn what this stuff is, how to use it in their careers and their roles, and how to get the most out of it.” - Mike Kaput on the 2023 State of Marketing AI Report from the Marketing AI Institute

*”All the things humans do really well, I guarantee you, AI will do them at some point if it can't already. The ability to create, to think, to understand, to reason, these are capabilities that may not be at a human level in AI systems today, but they're absolutely on a trajectory to do those things pretty well. All the things that humans value and get paid for is probably stuff that AI will be able to help or do very soon.” - Mike Kaput

*”If I look at my average day, six to 12 months ago, none of these tools were in it and helping me do the things I'm doing. It's really been a pretty profound sea change.” - Mike Kaput

*”AI in some form or another has been around for 60, 70 years in one sense or another. So people don't realize a lot of things went into the last several decades to get us to this current moment. It feels like it's coming out of nowhere because they weren't paying attention to all the other factors that were building beneath the surface. “ - Mike Kaput

*”A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, what tools should I use? What technology should we adopt?’ That's a huge question and really important. More important, though, is what happens if you succeed? Like we're talking about tools that give you double and triple, digit performance gains or productivity gains. That's amazing. But the first question you're going to get from a lot of your staff is, ‘What happens to me? What happens to my role? There's a huge amount of change management involved in these tools. So you're going to have to start planning for how this is going to change jobs.” - Mike Kaput

Time Stamps

[0:12] Introducing “Marketing” AI

[4:54] Meet Mess Petrella, Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce

[11:38] Here’s your AI playbook

[12:08] Welcome to our guest, Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at Marketing AI Institute

[15:36] How can the Marketing AI Institute help me as a marketer?

[17:09] What has Mike’s team learned about AI in 2023 so far?

[19:35] What’s the average AI adoption rate among marketers currently?

[21:50] What are the top 5 AI use cases in marketing?

[28:06] What AI-powered marketing tools would Mike recommend?

[33:05] Where are marketers on their AI adoption or maturity curve?

[36:03] What is Mike’s 5-step AI playbook? And how can marketing teams get further along on their maturity curve?