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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey there, Mike Stelzner. Before we get started with today's podcast, picture this. While your peers are struggling with basic chat GPT prompts, you're the marketer everyone turns to for AI solutions. You're automating tasks that used to take hours, creating stunning visuals in minutes and analyzing data like a pro. This, my friends, is not a fantasy. It's exactly what's happening to marketers. It's in the AI Business society. When you join the AI Business Society, you get monthly live training from leading experts, real world examples you can implement immediately, and a community of innovators pushing the AI boundaries. Don't let this moment pass you by. Visit Social Media Examiner.com AI and start your AI transformation today. Before we get on to today's show, here is something that might surprise you. Every marketer using AI is at one of four distinct readiness levels. Here's what's scary. Most marketers, they have no idea which level they're actually at. While you're wondering what AI skill to tackle next, your competition is already a couple steps ahead of you. Because they have a clear roadmap, they know exactly what to focus on because they understand the their AI readiness level. The difference they took our free AI readiness assessment. It doesn't just tell you where you stand. It gives you a personalized 30 day plan designed specifically for your level. Stop guessing, Start progressing. Find your AI readiness level in just a few minutes by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com aiassessment again. Socialmediaexaminer.com aisassessment pause this podcast. Take the assessment right now.
- [01:52]
Amanda Cole
Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [02:04]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. Hey, just a quick note. We have started publishing high quality ChatGPT tutorials on our YouTube channel dedicated to this show. So if you just go to YouTube.com iexaminer you will see these really high quality productions that we've been putting together that are all around ChatGPT. They're typically like 8 to 12 minutes long and they might be super valuable for you. All right, onto today's podcast. Here's the deal. I bet you, you or someone you know is extremely concerned about how AI is going to impact their job or how AI is going to impact their business, if you own a small business. And today, what we're going to explore is reinventing work. We're going to explore how AI is literally transforming everything. And we're going to unravel how we need to think about this, how we need to process this, and we're also going to set some awareness of what's coming. So if you've been operating from a position of this isn't a big deal, or you've been operating from a position of the world's ending, both of those positions are going to be very valuable today. And even if you're well aware of how AI is going to change the way you work, I feel strongly you're still going to find value in today's episode. Today I will be interviewing Amanda Cole. She is a chief marketing officer at a software company. And we're going to kind of unravel this in a lot of detail. And I think you're going to find it absolutely fascinating and also mentally stimulating. Let's transition over to this week's interview.
- [04:01]
Amanda Cole
With Amanda Cole, helping you simplify your AI journey.
- [04:07]
Michael Stelzner
Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Amanda Cole. If you don't know who Amanda is, she is an AI marketing strategist. She's chief marketing officer at Bloom Reach, an agentic platform for personalizing every step of the customer's journey. Amanda, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
- [04:27]
Amanda Cole
Doing well. Thanks for having me.
- [04:28]
Michael Stelzner
I'm excited you're here. Today, Amanda and I are going to explore how AI is transforming the way we work and what it means for the future of business. Now, I'd love to start before we get into all that with your story. How did you get into AI?
- [04:41]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I would say I have failed my way into this position for sure. Going way, way back. I had kids at a very young age and therefore was not able to actually go to college. And so I had the opportunity to work for at the time, what was an agency that gave me some flexibility to be home with my kids and also work for this agency that did nonprofit solicitation. And I learned a ton about control packages. So you get a mailer to solicit a Christmas donation or something along those lines, and then we would test other packages against that. What. What is going to be the thing that helps drive more donations. And so I had my foray into, into ab testing, so to speak, to really drive charitable donations and, and got to learn and experience what, what marketing is. And then shortly after that, we saw the advent of CMS. WordPress came out, was a big thing. Google Ads started to really takeover and digital marketing was born. HubSpot came out with inbound marketing. And so we got to see what happened when you actually created content that resonated with an audience. And in the early days of creating SEO friendly content and landing pages and gated content and all of those things. And that has slowly morphed into now we want to make content free and accessible and available because that's how you attract and build an audience. That's how you gain and build credibility online. And then when you think about what's happened with AI and agents and that transformation, it really has been all about how you optimize for non human interfaces. How do you actually think about what we would call potentially long tail keywords user generated content. UGC is another thing that we see evolving. And so it's just been kind of this continual evolution of the maturation of the digital ecosystem and landscape. And I've had the opportunity to be doing this in B2B tech through my entire career. And I do think B2B tech, B2B SaaS or software as a service is usually on the front lines of what's really happening in the tech space because our markets are a lot smaller than B2C companies. And so we have to be a little bit more innovative and using digital technologies in order to attract our audience. And so I've been very fortunate to do that.
- [06:55]
Michael Stelzner
Tell me a little bit about like the AI moment for you. Did it happen while you were at bloomreach or was it before bloomreach just a little bit of that experience for from your perspective?
- [07:03]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I mean AI has kind of been a dirty word for a long time because tech companies would say we use AI to do this and it would be a black box and you wouldn't understand it and sometimes the decisions would come out and you'd have no way to influence it. And so AI wasn't really something that we as marketers were super excited to talk about. But when you look at what happened for me where I would say my religious experience with AI happens, particularly generative AI post ChatGPT. So we all saw how LLMs and natural language was going to evolve and conversational capabilities, we're going to change some of how we do work. But when I was in a meeting with a vendor and we were talking about a very specific use case and I said, well, all of the data and all of the information that I had to give you to deliver this outcome is actually, and it was actually to write an email is the same data that I would need to actually create a handoff document for a sales rep. So once a deal is closed to the implementation team, can you do that? And within, I gave him a template and within 5 minutes, using the exact same data, the exact same infrastructure to write an email, the tool was able to complete a handover document. So that was when I would say my religious experience with AI happened because I realized that the limitations of the workflows and the technologies and the systems that we created to date in the SaaS ecosystem no longer mattered. I no longer needed this structure in order to communicate with a computer. And so it felt very freeing that all of a sudden, as a non super technical person, I, I'd be able to do some very technical things because of this technology.
- [08:31]
Michael Stelzner
So tell us about the company you work for.
- [08:33]
Amanda Cole
Yeah. So Blimp Reach is, as you mentioned, is an agentic platform for personalization. Agentic is a new term, but essentially it does mean in our world the orchestration of lots of different agents. And so we use. Agents are pieces of technology that act autonomously and make decisions and then actually even execute. So it's beyond just AI, it's actual decisioning and execution without human involvement. And there needs to be some orchestration of that. If you think about just an email campaign, you need a design agent, you need a content agent, you need a journey agent, you need an optimization agent. And then somebody's got to tell all of those agents what to do. And that is the agentic platform, the orchestration of lots of different agents to deliver personalized experiences for your customers.
- [09:18]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool. So we're not here today necessarily to talk about agentic AI, but we are here to talk about how AI, including agent AI is going to alter really the way we do work. And the theme here today is to explore how AI is really changing how we work and really what it's going to mean for the future. So for the marketers listening and for the small business owners that are listening, how can AI transform their work? Why should they pay attention, really, I guess, is the main question. Like if they are able to grasp some of the things we're talking about today and they're able to implement some of the, you know, concepts we're going to be talking about today, what's the upside for this for marketers, outside of marketers?
- [09:59]
Amanda Cole
Let's start with small business owners. I actually think small business owners are going to have a better advantage because when you think about Respectfully, the lack of system structure because it's just small teams, you don't need all that system and structure that you don't need to reinvent. You actually can kind of leapfrog people who have had systems and structure for a really long time and leverage AI to, to help you move faster and further. If you think about from a marketing perspective, pmax, which is the performance max, the Google Ads capabilities, what you can do utilizing their AI functionality in order to address a specific audience. With content creation and ad creation that Google is allowing you to do, there are other things like content creation, like website updates, even product catalog management. If you're on the E Comm side that AI is going to allow you to do faster. And if you're a small business and you don't have an infrastructure of people, you don't have merchandisers and marketers and things who need to reinvent the way that they work, you'll be able to leverage this technology to move very fast in a way that larger companies are going to struggle with. From a marketing perspective, this really is changing everything that we do. The specialization that has grown up in marketing because of the tools and systems that you've needed to know in order to do your job, like a blog system for creating content or an email marketing system or an SMS marketing system, those constraints are no longer necessary and so it really becomes about focusing on the objective. And so if you've tied your value to I know how to use this tool or this piece of tech instead of I know how to deliver a business outcome, I think the transition for you will be more difficult. But again, what I'm super excited about with these tools is that AI is allowing us to get closer to the end objective which is developing and creating great experiences and relationships with our customers.
- [11:46]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, when we were prepping you were telling me about this is kind of a period of reinvention and this has some real advantages for women, if you want to talk about that a little bit.
- [11:54]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I think that I, I think that this is tricky for women actually because I think we already are dealing with so many challenges. I think that, that I shared on, on my LinkedIn a study that was done that shows that women deal with twice as much non work related work. So all the stuff we have to do at home, caring for children, pets, food, cleaning, whatever, we have twice as much to do in the home as we do at work. And when you think about how male dominated technology already is and how quickly technology is moving, I think it's actually an opportunity for women especially to take hold of this. But it is really difficult because that time that you're using that you already struggle to dedicate to yourself, you need to use to educate yourself. You need to be investing in these tools and in AI and what's happening. CHAT GPT just did an incredible launch of what you're going to be able to do with agents. They've done an integration with Shopify where you can actually complete purchases inside of ChatGPT. So the time is now for especially women to get overly invested in this because otherwise I do think we can get out innovated.
- [12:56]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so let's dig into. You mentioned systems and structure a little bit and let's really unravel, like what do we need to rethink about our systems and our structure? Because so many of us listening right now have kind of done things a certain way and it sounds like it's time for us to revisit that. What do you want to say about that?
- [13:17]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, totally. I mean, if we, I think a lot of us are seeing this now that our site traffic is declining. And when we think about the search experience, or really, let's say, the discovery experience, what's been incredible about Google for a very long time is it's cataloged a database of information. We learned how to structure keywords in order to get responses. And then it was really up to us to go through the responses, the 10 page listings, and try to understand which of those listings answered our question. But that entire paradigm has shifted because now I can ask a question and I can get context for the response. So, for example, I have very curly hair, which you can't tell right now, but I have very curly hair. And so I might ask for advice on helping me find a very moisturizing shampoo and conditioner. If I type that search into Google, I would get a list of people who paid for those keywords and then people who probably have some content related to those keywords. But I would have to go and figure out for myself which is the best response with ChatGPT. Now I get the answers and why. I also get told what products not to use because it likely is not a good fit based on customer reviews. And so a lot of the discovery is changing from the individual consumer and into now what we would say is an agent, the chatbot agent. We're calling this disintermediation. So you are no longer owning that search experience, how you tell that story and the way that you brand it and how much you pay for the Keywords is being disrupted by what's happening on the consumer experience side. And so what we have the opportunity to do is start to really think about how do we create value, how do we build great relationships, how do we connect with our customers? If you could think about it in a world in which websites didn't exist, where we have agents communicating with consumer agents who are doing the information gathering and the shopping and building experiences, how do we really then, in that moment create brands that build connections and relationships? And I think that that is what we really need to be thinking about as we think about our tools and our tech and the way that we connect with customers.
- [15:22]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, there's a lot to unravel here. So you mentioned earlier briefly that specialists earlier are not necessarily going to be, I don't know, as valuable. And in this new AI world because you don't need to go to a specialist when you can go to a, a very large LLM that has all the answers that you need. And I also want to re explore this website thing, you know, what we need to be thinking about there a little bit. But is it true that the idea of being a specialist is now kind of going out the window?
- [15:52]
Amanda Cole
I mean, I certainly think so. When you think about, let's go back to email marketing. The reason why email marketing exists as a specialty is because there are a set of tools and systems and processes that you need to know and understand incredibly well. Email optimization is different from SMS optimization, it's different from website optimization. But the reality is that AI is going to know and understand how to optimize better than a human will. In many instances. There are still very human elements to how do I tell a great story, what products are taking off, what does our business need from an inventory or profitability perspective? And so there's going to be insights that you have as a human, but those insights are not necessarily specific to email. You no longer really have to understand how to use an email system in order to get AI to send an email. You can conversationally say, I've got an increase in people leaving my website, I want to figure out how to keep people on my website. Agents are going to be able to do myriad of things. They will be able to send emails, they'll be able to add a web layer at exit, they'll be able to trigger an sms. And you won't need specialists to be able to think through strategies for each of those things because AI will be able to do that for you.
- [17:01]
Michael Stelzner
Interesting. So does this mean that if we were to Be a specialist. Maybe our specialty should be how to understand how to leverage these AI tools right now. Right? Because those who understand how to use AI tools because there is a range of expertise, right? Like, you still have to like train the model, for lack of better words, on how it is, you want it to output stuff for you. Right. Cause like, you can get great responses, you can get horrible responses. So if we want to start rethinking our roles, would your advice be to understand, maybe take your world expertise, your domain expertise, and then layer on AI expertise so that you can outperform someone else who has access to the same AI expertise? Is that kind of what we're. I don't know. Help me process this a little bit.
- [17:51]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I think we're at a really interesting point where technology is evolving and innovating faster than anything we've ever seen. And so what technology can technically do is way ahead of what humans are ready for it to do. And that's the humans who do the work as well as the humans who receive what's created by agents or by AI. And so I think that the period that we're in right now, I have, I have three kids in college and I have a ton of concern about them and their lives. They're 20, 21 and 22 years old and so they're very much getting ready to enter the workforce. But what we absolutely know, as you just said, is somebody who knows enough about what the output should be to properly prompt AI is going to be significantly better than someone who just knows how to use AI, because AI does require so much training and coaching. And so what, what I believe will be true is that particularly the, the new generation coming into the workforce, which is going to have their own set of challenges. But if that generation compare with the expert generation, and we can almost think of the incoming generation as the AI forward or the AI native users paired with the experts who can really help them prompt and guide and train AI in order to provide accurate outputs. I think we'll see some very good intergenerational collaboration that will hopefully make teams quite a bit better. And there's also this need for us to break down the silos of teams. In the example that I gave you for marketing, there's web, email and sms. Those typically sit in different teams or different people. I think we'll need to see more coming together of those resources which, which gives you the opportunity to learn different roles, different capabilities, so that you're also expanding your own knowledge set. As we go into an AI driven.
- [19:32]
Michael Stelzner
Future I get a chance because of this show in particular to kind of be in front of crowds and small groups and stuff and talk about AI. And one of the things I keep telling people is the best way to use AI is to take the thing that you're actually really gifted at and make yourself better as a result of AI. Because what you know how to do if you're really gifted at something is to discern good from great. Right? And if now all of a sudden you can deliver great consistently, because it's really hard to deliver great consistently no matter how crafted and refined you are, all of a sudden this allows you to go from great to outstanding potentially, where everybody else is just going from mediocre to good and I feel give you a real competitive edge. That's just one way of thinking about it. I want to hear your thoughts about this website stuff, but first I want to share the no website. I feel like right now AI is doing a lot of web searching for us and I kind of feel like websites are going to matter, but they're going to matter perhaps more to the AI than the humans. Because you want your website to be queried by the AI. I don't know what, what's your thoughts on this? A little bit.
- [20:43]
Amanda Cole
I was having a conversation with a founder of another tech company about a week ago and it was. We got into this very philosophical debate about the purpose of the Internet. If you think about the value exchange of the Internet, it has been if I create content, I will be discovered and if I create really good content, I have a higher likelihood of being discovered. Well, when you no longer own that discovery process because it's now you're creating content for an agent and that agent is really in control of how you show up and in what priority order. And obviously we haven't seen ads come into the equation yet, but I'm confident they will. What value is in it for the creator at that point if they really don't have any ability to control or influence how an agent would recommend them? So I think what we are seeing, what we know with with agents is that reviews, user reviews, product reviews, customer reviews and user generated content on sites like Quora and Reddit are very important feedback loops for these agents. And so I think it becomes about a focus less on brand initiated content creation and really on activating customers to be advocates and speak on our behalf. We as marketers know that that's always where the most opportunity comes from. But it's been fairly hard for us to control and build programs around and I think that will become an even bigger part of, let's call it the digital experience when you're interacting and engaging with agents. Well.
- [22:06]
Michael Stelzner
And another thought is that most humans today at least are going to use AI to do research but not make the final call on complex purchases. So there still is this human decision layer that has to happen, especially in B2B where you're going to have to go in a firm by looking at the website on the recommendations. So there it's less. Now the website is less of a discovery mechanism and more of a sales closing mechanism. I kind of feel like. Right, because once presumably they found you through AI recommendations because of your tool or your company or your local business or whatever, then they go to your website to like confirm with their own eyes that this is something that they're of interest in. And that probably might matter for some businesses that don't have the kind of business where there would naturally be reviews, you know, out there because maybe they're not like a local business or experience based business or something like that. We were talking about content marketing and context marketing. Maybe you can just unravel that a little bit too. Or have you already unraveled that and maybe I just put the label on what we've been talking about?
- [23:11]
Amanda Cole
Well, no, I think it's a. I think it's an important distinction. So content marketing has always been I'm going to create content that is optimized for searches and hopefully it helps me show up when people are looking for an answer to a problem. When you think about context, then it doesn't really matter what the question is. I need to reassemble the parts and pieces of my content in order to answer that question in real time. And I think we're seeing that that is going to be. That is currently the expectation of consumers. I think that's why we see such big adoption for ChatGPT. I have to do less work. I don't type in a set of keywords and get some set of responses that I have to sort through. I now am provided a significant amount of context on the thing that I search for and why you're giving me the answers and the responses that you are. So if you go back to our earlier conversation about there not being websites, imagine a world in which there is no website at all. I ask Chat GPT a question. It says, hopefully Bloom reaches the great agentic platform for personalization for you. As you said, my behavior is to click to go learn more about it and instead of interacting with a pre constructed website and a navigation that sets Instead, I'm able to build my own experience by describing what it is that I'm looking for in the problem that I'm trying to solve. And bloomreach is able to build a digital or site experience for me with that context in mind that's specific and unique to me.
- [24:35]
Michael Stelzner
What if I told you while your marketing peers are still fumbling with basic AI prompts, you could become the AI expert your entire company depends on? That's exactly what's happening inside the AI Business society. Our members aren't just using AI, they're mastering it. They're automating repetitive tasks, creating professional videos in mere minutes, and making data driven decisions that leave everyone on their team completely amazed. Most marketers are barely scratching the surface of what AI can do for them while they're stuck creating mediocre content. You could be leaping so far ahead that people look at you as if you're from the future. Here's how we make that happen. First, you get monthly live training from leading AI experts who actually use these tools in real marketing situations. Secondly, there is a incredible community of innovative marketers who are pushing the AI boundaries every day that you have access to. Third, we have multiple meetups per month where you get a chance to interact with your peers and ask questions from our experts. As member Lisa Kanda said, quote, the quality of training offered is the best I've experienced and from an organization that I can trust. Here's the truth. The marketing landscape is changing very quickly. Don't get left behind while others race ahead. Visit social mediaexaminer.com AI and become the AI Enhanced Marketer your company or your clients need. Future you will. Thank you. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI to learn more. All right, we're going to pop into what the near future is going to look like when it comes to AI and work. But just a couple things that want to unravel here just a little bit. A lot of people are probably freaking out listening to what we're talking about right now.
- [26:16]
Amanda Cole
Oh, I hope not.
- [26:17]
Michael Stelzner
Because I mean, if you think about it, everything we've been working so hard to do for a long time, especially those of us that are creative or creators, is potentially all fueling AI. And we're not necessarily the ones that are like getting the referral from all that content. And I feel as if it's still important to use content to understand that AI is not the 100% thing. There's still people that go to YouTube and want to watch videos. And as a result of it, you probably should have your content on there because right now you're not getting instant random videos created showing you how to do things. It's mostly just text and images. I also think there are people that like to listen to podcasts and. And I know that that's still a great example for people to nurture an audience and demonstrate expertise and do what you and I are doing, Amanda, which is uniquely human. Right. I also think there's an advantage to have in person experiences. I feel like those will only become more valuable as people crave kind of the pre Internet stuff. I feel like the younger generation is going to demand more of that kind of stuff. So I see that as an opportunity. And I also think that gated content like a newsletter is also very valuable. The idea that you're opting into some exclusive content experience. I just want to know what your thoughts are on some of that stuff.
- [27:42]
Amanda Cole
I think human validation is super important. I think there was an article, I cannot remember it might have been in the New Yorker that was talking about the value of an art piece when they said it was created by AI versus saying that a human had actually created it. So there is something very important to us as humans about interacting with and connecting with each other. From a human perspective, I think all of us, I would imagine if you asked us if I can get a product and I know that it's benefiting other humans, is that more important to me than just getting a product as cheaply as possible, regardless of whether or not it benefits humans? I would imagine in many cases we. We want there to be some ecosystem benefit to humanity. So I do think that that will continue to be very important. The validation of that is what I think we're in this really weird stage. I think people still don't know if an email was written by AI. Voice is getting incredible. The ability. There are AI podcasts that are generated from written content and turned into podcast formats. Video. I have a video of myself that is not me. But that could fool someone, even someone who knows me well, into thinking it is me. It sounds like me, it moves like me. It has my face. I think we're. We're in this really weird period where we have all this cool new stuff and we aren't exactly sure yet how we feel about it as a society. But I think we will work through it and we'll build. Will build those rules around what. What is okay and acceptable and what isn't okay.
- [29:02]
Michael Stelzner
So let's accept the fact that as we record this in late July of 2025, AI is here. It's not going away. It's only going to become more integrated into our work and into our lives. So let's kind of like step into the future just a little bit. The near Future, the next 12 to 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about what AI and work is going to look like as we continue this radical transformation that we're in the midst of right now.
- [29:29]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I think we're going to find ourselves really balancing with what is, what is right, what is the right thing to do. I'm responsible for growing my business, but I'm also responsible for training and mentoring my team. So how do I hold both of those things and make the right decisions? I think there's also a lot of tech to try. And in an AI world, we're seeing a ton of POCs and trials and people being willing to say, just turn this on and then six to eight weeks, we can deliver results for you. So I think we're already seeing some exhaustion of tools and it will take us some time to work through that. It's happening so fast. I think that's what's incredible. What, what would have taken five to 10 years historically is happening in weeks than months now. So I think it's. A lot of people are, are pretty exhausted by the amount of things that they're hearing. So I think we'll, we'll need to get through that test and trial period of what's actually going to work and deliver business outcomes for us. And then I think there is going to be a resetting of roles and responsibilities and org structures. And I don't think anybody has that playbook yet. But I do think we'll start to see more of this agent and human org structure mix. And so we'll all need to really wrestle with and figure out what is the right thing for us to do as a business. Does it mean that we want to commit to growth or is it an efficiency savings? What do we really want from each other as businesses in society? And I think that will be some of the things that we really challenge each other to work through. Over the next 12 to 18 months in marketing, I think we need to be even more focused on human connections. Like you said in person. Events I think will be huge. I think validating the humanity and humans behind the companies that we work for are important and then also celebrating the customers and the outcomes that we're delivering for humans on the other end of the products and services that we create will be very important.
- [31:10]
Michael Stelzner
When we were prepping for this, you kind of used the phrase wild, wild West. And when I think of wild, wild west, I think of cowboys rushing in and taking over, or I think of people staking claims on gold mines before anybody else gets out there a little bit. Talk to me a little bit about, like, if we know it's going to be even more wild, wild west, how can we prepare for this a little bit? Does agility matter?
- [31:32]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And wild wild west, I immediately thought of the song. But yes, I think that is the right analogy. I think there's not a lot of paths. There's not a clear process. It's kind of everybody grabbing for what they can grab for. And there is, I think, a belief that there will be some gold mine opportunities. We certainly see some companies having crazy valuations, which is not unheard of. We've seen this story before where companies get crazy high valuations and then the market kind of settles and we start to figure out what real life is going to look like. But we, we definitely are in those very early, early stages of the AI boom, for sure. And so I think I have to keep reminding myself to stay calm, to be my. Ultimately, my. My job is not to find the coolest AI. My job is to deliver growth for bloomreach, and I think that's marketing's job is to help deliver growth for the company. If you're a small business, your job is to. To grow and to connect with the community and to create great relationships with customers. And so if we stay focused on that objective, but we stay open and agile to the fact that the way that we do that is going to completely change. I think it gives us the right priority focus, which is our customer and growing, but also the flexibility to try new things and try it in different ways than we have done it before, practically.
- [32:46]
Michael Stelzner
How do you go about doing that? Because I think the word overwhelm is probably going through a lot of people's minds right now. Like, do you have any tips on, like, how in the world do you actually prepare yourself mentally for this?
- [32:55]
Amanda Cole
The first thing. My husband is a therapist, so I think that his advice, the first thing would be to just accept that you're overwhelmed, accept that it is overwhelming. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with you. If you are feeling overwhelmed. Once you kind of have settled with that, say, okay, what's the best step forward? What's the biggest problem that I'M trying to solve and be very focused on solving that problem. For example, if you have lots of returns, maybe that's a use case that you could start looking into AI. How can I handle return management all the way from not just receiving the returns themselves, but the customer service inquiry, the product selection at the beginning of the process, like really break down what are all the components that go into the challenge that I have with returns and apply AI across the entire system and get people in your company who are excited about using it to chew on this problem and to start investigating it. Make sure that the thing that you're focused on is something that's going to change a business outcome. It's actually going to help you grow profitability or improve profitability or grow, grow your revenue. Or maybe it's going to be create a better customer experience. But make sure you have a really clear objective that you're trying to solve with the AI solutions. And again, I think allow yourself to fail a lot. I think one thing I say about marketing is that 80% of the job is failing and failing fast. That is very startup world as well. So I think allowing the thing that you tried to not deter you from continuing to try other things when it doesn't work, because the chances are it won't work.
- [34:25]
Michael Stelzner
I love that. Okay, we're going to get into AI agents, but let's like help people wrap their brain around like the realities of what's going to come with agents. Obviously your business is betting that agents are going to be a big deal. Talk to me kind of about the pros and cons because most people today are not impacted by agents unless they're developers. Developers are the ones that are getting laid off right now because AI coding agents are ridiculously good. Customer service people might be facing this as well, especially to the market marketing tribe out there, marketing community, like what do they need to be prepared for from the agent threat, for lack of better words, when it comes to their work. Pros and cons, I mean positives and negatives, right?
- [35:06]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, sure. I mean I remember when email marketing really wasn't a big thing yet. It was kind of easy to send a whole bunch of emails and there wasn't a big system or process to it. And you would connect to an ESP and send lots and lots of emails, but it was still very, you've got mail days. And then we started to see email marketing systems and marketing automation systems come out and, and then at some point it was like, this is the death of email. And so I Think we've lived through this over and over again. We saw this transition happen when WordPress came out with the first kind of open CMS where it was like, oh, developers aren't going to have jobs. And so we have to accept that as a society we have adapted to the advancements in technology and we've figured out how to use these advancements in technology to continue to proliferate human value through work. That said, it is moving so fast that I think our imaginations are not able to re innovate our jobs and what we do as fast as technology is re innovating our jobs and what we do. And so that's why I think it's so important that we connect back to the value that we provide. And if I were to say that the value that I provide to bloomreach is that I create marketing systems that deliver or create pipeline for the sales team, then I would be very scared about my job. And I do think that a lot of that digital marketing will be automated by agents. But if I'm able to connect to the fact that the value that I bring to bloomreach is actually that I understand our customer incredibly well. I'm meeting with our customers and our partners on a regular basis and I'm figuring out how we create value and deliver value to our customers and partners in a uniquely human way. Sitting in a conference room with a cup of coffee, talking about our kids and then talking about the business objectives of of a customer. And then I use that information and knowledge to train the agent systems that will execute our digital marketing and our campaigns. As you said earlier, we can be great all the time. And so I think that it's really a reframing for ourselves of where do I create value in the company and move beyond thinking that your value is tied to a system or to a process or to or to a smallish metric and really rethink what your value is to the company and to the ecosystem that you're in.
- [37:19]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. This has been a really fascinating dialogue so far and we're not done yet folks. We're going to talk about AI agents specifically for marketing. So first of all, let's just explore like what in the world you feel like they can do right now for marketing because most marketers are not using AI agents. Like, let's just talk about like, like the upside of like maybe your tool, I don't know, does your tool have marketing AI agents or is it kind of open you can make with it? So talk to us a little bit about like, let's zoom in on what, because especially for the smaller businesses, this could be very exciting dialogue. Right. Because maybe they don't have the budget to go out and hire a bunch of experts and AI agents are a really economical alternative. So let's like unravel a little bit about what AI agents with the upside deposit. Let's talk about some example use cases, maybe even of how it could help you or maybe how it's even helping you, Amanda, in the work that you're doing.
- [38:08]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll talk through what we're using agents for. On the B2B marketing side. I will not talk about the Bloom Reach product. So one of the things that we do with an AI agent is when someone responds to, let's say it's okay.
- [38:21]
Michael Stelzner
To talk about your product. Go ahead. You know, we keep going.
- [38:24]
Amanda Cole
We use an agent when someone submits a form to research the company, research the individual, make sure that they're an ICP fit. And then it also, if they are not an ICP fit, responds to them immediately within a few minutes to give them some classification about who a good fit customer is. For Bloom Reach, it gives them some pricing details and asks if they would like to schedule a call. That's all done without humans being involved. So that's an example of some account research.
- [38:49]
Michael Stelzner
I want to slow down a little bit on that one. Fascinating. So basically what I'm hearing you say is when somebody fills out a form on your website and they're providing answers to some very basic questions that you're asking, you have an agent that effectively sits between the form fill and the ultimate sales database or whatever. Right. And it's analyzing very quickly on the fly and then generating a customized email response.
- [39:15]
Amanda Cole
That's right.
- [39:15]
Michael Stelzner
Not just a generic one. Like talk to me a little bit about that.
- [39:18]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, not. Not a generic one. And actually the only thing that we're asking for, for on the form is first name, last name and email. So there's no additional information. Oh, so they're taking the agent is taking the email address and it's making some, which LLMs are very good at making some context based assumptions of what company that person likely works for and then making a determination about whether or not that company is a good ICP fit company for us. If they are not an ICP fit company, it drafts a custom email to that individual and gives them some additional detail about who our ICP fit is and what our pricing is. And then it gives them the opportunity to say, would you still like to book a meeting knowing this. And if they do, they can, they can book. If it identifies that they are an ICP fit company. It does allow them to book a meeting right away.
- [40:02]
Michael Stelzner
So that means they can actually do it right there in, for lack of better words, the form or the chatbot. You don't even need to send an email. Is that correct? Or do you do it over email?
- [40:11]
Amanda Cole
Yep. We could also do it in chatbot. And this I would say is probably the most widely used use case at the moment, I think in B2B marketing for sure. I think there are quite a few of us who have taken this approach.
- [40:22]
Michael Stelzner
Approach, yeah. So which approach? The using of a chatbot.
- [40:25]
Amanda Cole
The use of an agent to actually do some intelligence and then. And trigger an automated response without human involvement.
- [40:31]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, you got some other examples that you're doing that you were about to talk about.
- [40:35]
Amanda Cole
In that example, the tool that we're using is called Qualified and they have a, what they call an SDR agent. And in another example, we use a tool called Copy AI and Copy AI actually does content creation. But the other thing that they're actually using agents to do is do account research. So we're able to say, here we have 34,000 target accounts, here are the 34,000 target accounts that we have. Will you go research their industry, who the buying group is at this company? And will you research the tech stack that they're using? And then will you please compile a page that details why they should use bloomreach as an example and the technology that we could replace for them in their current tech stack. And Copy AI agents actually do the research and they do the technology assessment. They do the solution architecture of how that tech stack that they have could be replaced by Bloom Reach, and then they write the content and compile the page and publish it. So there's a collection of agents that we have created with Copy AI that actually deliver our account based pages.
- [41:38]
Michael Stelzner
When you say publish it, can you clarify what you mean by that?
- [41:41]
Amanda Cole
They publish a live URL.
- [41:43]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so but it's doing research and it's publishing. Is this not going to a sales team like help me maybe? I got lost a little bit in the story there?
- [41:50]
Amanda Cole
Yeah. The research is used to write the content that peers up on the landing page that gets published live. So it would be like, you know, bloomreach.com backslash and then company name of the company that we researched.
- [42:01]
Michael Stelzner
And why would you do something like this? Is this help me understand? Because I think maybe I misunderstood what you're doing. But what I loved about what I heard you say is like, hey, this using copy, you can go out there and you can find prospects that might be ideally matched and you're publishing them kind of, for lack of better words, as a blog post. But why can't you just deliver that to some other system? Why would you publish it as a blog post? Maybe I'm missing the connection on that last part.
- [42:26]
Amanda Cole
Yeah, it's not really published as a blog post. It's more published. Let's call it a custom website for that company. So rather than them coming to just bloomreach.com and seeing our generic content and our generic case studies. Oh, they have a page that's specific to them with case studies specific to them that tells them specifically the kind of tech that they're using that we could replace, that gives them videos and.
- [42:47]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, and you use this in your outreach is what you're saying, right?
- [42:51]
Amanda Cole
Exactly right, Yep.
- [42:52]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, fascinating. Like we've, like, we put together a custom little something for you right here. And is the outreach done by that other system you were talking about that qualified?
- [43:04]
Amanda Cole
We have a home built outbound campaign program that we use and NAN is our integration workflow and then we have another series of tools. But we do write. We use the research that was done to write emails and identify contacts and then actually trigger and send emails. Yes.
- [43:20]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, well go ahead and tell everybody what the heck you do because they're all very curious. What is Bloom Reach? Like? Explain what it is, if you don't mind.
- [43:27]
Amanda Cole
So Bloom Reach is an agentic platform for personalization. So the example that I just walked through was B2B. How we do B2B marketing. When you think about on the B2C marketing side, we see less than 5% of B2C marketers actually send highly personalized emails. And the reason is you have a lot of shit to do. We have a lot of stuff to do. And you have. Personalization can be very difficult. And you're not always super technical to actually pull in the elements of personalization. Sometimes your data is also super messy. So when you think about what bloomreach is able to deliver with agents, we're able to do all of that. We're able to make sure that your data is clean, that your segments are correct. We're able to apply personalization based on the individual customer record. So every email that you send is unique to the individual customer record. We build the emails, we write the content, and then we also create the journey. We create, we orchestrate the whether email, sms, web personalization, whatever those things are that you need to deliver that, that personalized experience for an individual customer. And we do this all with agents and then our agent orchestration layer.
- [44:27]
Michael Stelzner
Very cool. Okay, we both have kids who are kind of college age and what do you want to say to parents of maybe teenagers right now who are going to be sending their kids off to college? You have any thoughts on what the next generation needs to be really thinking about here?
- [44:44]
Amanda Cole
I think I would, I would. I told my kids is stay in school for as long as you can while we're figuring this out. No, but I do think the reality is that's another area that we need to figure out is how to bring entry level work back in a meaningful way. I think in a good way it's being disrupted. I think entry level work kind of became we're going to give the grunt work that aren't real jobs that we don't really need in the company to a bunch of people who aren't paid a ton to see if they can earn an opportunity for a real job at our company. And that doesn't necessarily help us train a super capable workforce, but it certainly is at least the agreement in tech today when most of that work will be able to be done by AI. We are going to have to figure out how to bring in entry level work and I think we can do it in a way where we make entry level positions significantly more valuable actually offering training and maybe potentially multiple different departments. But I do think we're going to need to pair what I would tell my kids to be very AI fluent or AI native because you're going to be able to bring a skill set and as long as you're open minded enough to learn from people with expertise, you'll be able to flourish with your AI capabilities matched with the expertise of someone who's just me in a certain area. And I think if we're able to figure out how to bring that combination together in business, businesses will be better for it.
- [46:01]
Michael Stelzner
Amanda Cole, this has been a fascinating dialogue. If people want to connect with you on the socials, where do you want to send them and if they want to check out your company, where should they go?
- [46:11]
Amanda Cole
You can go to bloomreach.com b l o o m r e a c-h.com and you can find me on LinkedIn. I would love to love to connect with you and chat.
- [46:21]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you Amanda.
- [46:22]
Amanda Cole
Thanks Michael.
- [46:23]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything thing, we took all the notes for you over atsocial mediaexaminer.com a66 and don't forget to check out our new YouTube videos I mentioned at the top of the show. By visiting YouTube.com iexaminer you'll be able to tell that those videos look a little bit different because they're going to be a lot shorter. I think you're going to find them absolutely fascinating and then also let your friends know about this show. We absolutely could use more people listening to to the show. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful. The AI Explored Podcast is a production.
- [47:10]
Amanda Cole
Of Social Media Examiner.
- [47:15]
Michael Stelzner
Just a quick reminder before you go. If you're ready to become indispensable in the age of AI, the AI Business Society is your solution. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting social mediaexaminer.com AI I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.