AI automates routine marketing work, not creative judgment

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 13:16

   they've done a great job to maintain that I want to get your take to how AI is changing the game for marketing. Because I, a little bit before coming into media, now being a host, I was in developer relations, which especially for a really technical product, it's like that hybrid role between like a forward deployed engineer and also a bit of marketing. And what I found is like things I would do with like technical docs or writing because of AI kind of became obsolete.

2. 13:41

   You now have agents that go and find what software to use and then recommend things on your behalf instead of having that brand awareness amongst people and developers. How are you navigating that? I think for me, AI has definitely changed a lot of my day-to-day workflows. To your point, right? Like creating a lot of documents or kind of getting to like an MVP happens much faster. And I really appreciate that.

3. 14:06

   I also enjoy using it for monitoring like things like social media and things like that. that like basically I think about it of like what is the day-to-day that I don't necessarily it's not high leverage for me to be doing and how can I automate that with AI there are things that I think AI still is not the best at when it comes to marketing we see a lot of slop copy on the timeline in general and it's like one of my pet peeves and so actually with all my agents I've like trained them to not use like quote-unquote LLM speech but I think you know there's still some work to do there when it comes to marketing. I also think a lot of the like creative ideation is something that's still very human. I tested this out actually a little bit with my tweets because I was like, oh, can AI be funny? Yeah, can AI be funny? Can it like read

4. 14:55

   through my tweets? Can it write a banger? Yeah, exactly. Like, can it make a banger meme? And it's really cringe. I know, I figured. So I think that that kind of like creativity will remain innately human. At least I hope so. Like that's something that I have so much fun with. And so I don't think that that is something that's being automated away, but definitely it's transforming how marketing organizations are operating as well. In my team at Vercel, you know, it's not historically traditional that marketing organizations are shipping PRs on a daily basis. That was something that, you know, by the time I left, my whole team was doing.

5. 15:30

   I know I was talking to the COO saying everyone is doing shipping PRs and building agents for agent apps for whatever they're doing like the head of people ops is doing that and yeah and it's the same at factory like actually that's been a huge observation for me is like how much everybody on the team is totally dogfooding the product and they're using it um to kind of streamline a lot of their workflows we just had um our head of finance post a long tweet about how he uses it for the finance org and he's like one of the top users of the company which you think would mostly be engineers.

6. 15:59

   So. It's really, really cool to see. That's fun. I love companies that dog food their own products. But what is the role of a brand now in this agent-first world?