EP 117: 70% of Teams Are Using AI With Zero Oversight. Here’s What Happened

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Embracing Marketing Mistakes

EP 117: 70% of Teams Are Using AI With Zero Oversight. Here’s What Happened

Hosts: Chris Norton & Will Ockenden (Prohibition PR)
Guests: Stuart Bruce (AI/PR Consultant), Daryl Sperry (MD, Hard Numbers)
Date: June 30, 2026
Recorded live at the AI for PR conference, London South Bank

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Overview: Main Theme & Purpose

This episode offers a raw, practical look at how AI is being used (and misused) in marketing and PR teams—often without oversight or clear strategy. Chris and Will are joined by Stuart Bruce and Daryl Sperry to discuss the persistent gap between AI ambition and execution. The conversation covers tactical advice, war stories, and honest admissions of mistakes, all focused on demystifying AI tools like Copilot and GenAI for marketers and agency leaders.

Central Question: What’s the gap between AI ambition and AI execution in modern marketing teams?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Disconnect Between AI Leadership and Actual Usage

• Statistic: 64% of CEOs champion AI, but only 13% actively use it themselves, while 70% of junior teams employ AI tools daily—typically with no oversight or guardrails ([00:00]).
• Risk: Lack of senior oversight means output quality, ethics, and cost control are massive issues.

2. Copilot: Why It’s Not Just “ChatGPT Lite”

• Perception Problem: Many dismiss Copilot as less capable than standalone AI models ([04:07]).
  • Stuart Bruce: “That probably says more about them than it does about Copilot... in a corporate environment, that’s what people are going to need to use. You can’t be at the cutting edge... if you spend enough time learning Copilot properly... for a lot of things, it’s a lot better.” ([04:11])
• Key Advantages:
  • Contextual Awareness: Accesses your organization’s data (emails, docs, calendars) for more relevant, actionable output.
  • “Work IQ”: Personalized AI grounded in proprietary data creates a step-change in relevance and usefulness ([04:46], [04:54]).
  • Cost Structure: While usage is on tokens and can be expensive for power users, it’s manageable with caps and monitoring ([06:44], [07:37]).
  • Admin Automation Case: Copilot handled email responses, organized event RSVPs, auto-filled missing data, and saved significant admin hours ([07:43]).

Hot Tips for Marketers Using Copilot

([18:36]—[20:10])

• Be clear about desired outcomes before deploying Copilot.
• Personalize your Copilot setup—train it on your writing style, set up custom prompts, and use prompt sharing (Prompt Lab) for team-wide best practices.
• Embed Copilot usage in workflows, not just as a chatbot, but for automation and routine reporting.

3. The Shiny Tool Syndrome

• Critique: Most PR/marketing teams don’t use even 80% of the capacity of AI tools that are a year old ([13:56]).
  • Stuart Bruce: "The latest shiny tools—they really don’t matter. 80, 90% of PR people aren’t even touching the edges of what a tool a year old could do." ([13:56])
• Core Message: Focus on adopting embedded, secure, team-based AI tools, not just chasing novelty.

4. SEO, GEO, and the Myth of AI-Only Marketing

• Daryl Sperry’s Fight: SEOs should not be written off—Google remains the core entry point for discovery, and GenAI search results are still influenced by traditional SEO signals ([26:41], [27:45]).
• Real-World Example: Many e-commerce clients tried to DIY their SEO with AI, ignored expert advice, saw rankings and revenue tank, and returned to human experts.
  • Will Ockenden: “The internet plus people that are good at what they do... they don’t write their best techniques and tactics online and share everything. The best practice that’s online is out of date.” ([29:04])
• AI Misinformation Stunts: Daryl shares how his agency manipulated AI search to label him UK’s best-dressed PR in three days—proving both the power and risk of GenAI misinformation ([37:49]).
  • Daryl: “If you can do that in however long, if someone’s got a decent budget, they can take your business down with a bit of AI misinformation.” ([38:39])

Measuring Impact in the GEO Era

([34:13]—[37:46])

• Combine prompt monitoring and Google Analytics to track which AI tools are sending traffic, to what pages, and reverse engineer user intent.
• The who/what/why of prompts: Personalization is key to reproducible, impact-driven results.

5. Negative SEO, Hacking, and AI-Driven PR Nightmares

• Agency Sabotage Story: Prohibition PR’s own website was targeted with negative SEO—a million junk pages injected, painful disruption, months to repair ([39:24]).
  • Will: “That is negative SEO... It took me eight months to sort that out... have you ever had to deal with anything like that for clients?” ([40:24])
• Daryl: AI and hacking are accelerating the risk/impact of reputation and search sabotage.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Copilot's Value:
  "If you actually spend enough time learning how to use Copilot properly... it's a lot better. For a lot of things, it’s a lot better.”
  —Stuart Bruce ([04:11])

• On Learning Curve:
  "The frustrating thing is it’s part of the onboarding—you get told to do it, but people just skip past it and don’t do it." —Stuart Bruce on Copilot personalization ([19:18])

• On the “Secret Sauce”:
  "No one’s sharing... the best practice that it’s learning from is out of date and isn’t as good as the actual secret sauce." —Will Ockenden ([29:04])

• On AI-Driven Misinformation:
  "We got ChatGPT, Claude, and Google to say I am the UK's best dressed PR practitioner... within three days we were able to get all the main AI search platforms to say that." —Daryl Sperry ([37:49])

• On Mistakes and Expectation Management:
  "The big mistake there is: remember to tell the client in advance. Manage expectations—under promise and over deliver." —Stuart Bruce ([23:57])

• On Negative SEO:
  "Somebody had hacked and injected a load of fake content on our site... it took me eight months to sort that out and get us back where we were." —Will Ockenden ([40:24])

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [00:00] — Introduction: Wild AI usage stats, framing the oversight problem
• [01:11] – [03:41] — Catch-up with Stuart Bruce; AI adoption, AEO/GEO debate
• [04:07] – [10:21] — Deep dive into Copilot: Use cases, pricing, strengths
• [13:22] – [15:07] — Debunking myths: Copilot vs ChatGPT, corporate needs, Microsoft’s roadmap
• [18:36] – [21:13] — Marketer hot-tips: Copilot personalization and team prompt-sharing
• [23:09] – [24:13] — Marketing mistake: Not managing client expense expectations
• [26:26] – [29:18] — Daryl Sperry: Defending the value of SEO amid AI hype
• [37:49] – [38:39] — Misinformation stunt: Gaming GenAI for PR
• [39:24] – [40:24] — Will’s negative SEO story—malicious hacks among agencies
• [41:54] – [42:59] — AI ethics, transparency, and the escalation of reputation risks
• [43:09] – [43:47] — Daryl’s mistake: Releasing a major report on an England match day
• [44:01] — Show close

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Tactical Blueprints & Takeaways

• Copilot is a powerful, secure, and contextually-aware AI for marketers IF you learn its nuances, personalize, and embed it in workflows.
• Don’t chase the shiniest AI tools—most teams are far from maximizing last year’s models.
• Human expertise still trumps “DIY AI” in SEO/content—secret techniques aren’t online.
• Prompt quality + analytics > vanity metrics for measuring AI-driven impact.
• Guard against AI-powered misinformation and negative SEO—don’t ignore basic security.
• Mistakes are inevitable—what matters is honest reflection, managing expectations, and always learning.

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For senior marketers racing to “get ahead” in the age of unchecked AI, this episode delivers the uncomfortable truths and hard-earned insights you won’t find in sanitized webinars or vendor decks.

Transcript

[Chris Norton]

64% of CEOs are actively championing AI in their organization, but only 13% of them are actively using it in their organization. And 70% of junior team members are running the tools every day with no oversight, no guardrails, and nobody checking their output. What could possibly go wrong? I'm Chris Norton and this is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth from failure. We are still live at 3 from the AI for PR conference on the south bank of London. And we've got two more conversations with one strong question running all the way through it. What's the gap between AI ambition and AI execution? Stuart Bruce is back on the show.

[Will]

My old boss and I managed to

[Chris Norton]

grab him and deep dive into Copilot and some of the top tips and tricks that you can use for Copilot because he heard a lot of people slate in Copilot and we've got Daryl Sperry, MD, of Hard Numbers who invited me down for the whole conference.

[Will]

So as always, sit back, relax, and

[Chris Norton]

let's get into AI, PR and marketing. Enjoy.

[Will]

Right, Stuart Bruce, welcome back to the show.

[Stuart Bruce]

It's a pleasure to be here in this brief.

[Will]

Yeah, not even on the speaking list today. What's happened, Stuart? It used to be on every speaking.

[Stuart Bruce]

I know, I've been. I've been shunned. It's all over. No, it's actually really, really good fun, actually being at a conference where you don't need to kind of think about, oh God, what am I going to say? How am I going to prepare and just be able to sit there and absorb stuff.

[Will]

Yeah. Have you read the book then or are you going to read the book?

[Stuart Bruce]

I have the book and I have read some of the chapters.

[Will]

Okay.

[Stuart Bruce]

But despite the fact I ordered it ages ago, my physical copy only arrived this week.

[Chris Norton]

Oh.

[Stuart Bruce]

I've had my digital one for over a month. I prefer to read the paper one, so that's the reason I've not read it.

[Will]

I'm with you on that because you can pick it up with books like that. Like you like the social media handbook one we wrote ages ago. When you need to like do them in bits, they're not like a. It's not a gripping story, is it?

[Stuart Bruce]

No, exactly. So, yeah, funny. I read fiction on my Kindle. But work related books, I prefer paper.

[Will]

Yeah, me too. Me too. So what have you been up to then? We haven't seen you for about a year on the podcast. What have you been doing?

[Stuart Bruce]

Mega busy. And most so last year was all about AI adoption, basically helping in house teams, agencies use AI. This year it's all about AI as a stakeholder or generative engine optimization, if you want to take a simplistic view of it. And it's quite a controversial position about which of the two it is.

[Will]

Yeah, I know. Well, I interview. I've spoken to Johnny on this podcast and he said he didn't care which one it was AEO geo. But what I did like just before we came down here, Stuart, is that you told me that I was best practice. Not me personally. The agent prohibition have got good geo, which is good because that's what we do, isn't it? And it's what you do.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yep.

[Will]

So. And I like the fact that you used as an example of best practice. That's good. So thanks for doing that.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, no, but it's true. When I was kind of doing my experiments, it would just kind of. But we're actually only half surprised because you've always been good at SEO.

[Will]

I'd love to know what you picked out as holes on what we do and then you can tell me. I'll get that re optimised because it's an ongoing thing. It's like painting the Brooklyn Bridge. Is it the Brooklyn Bridge?

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, Brooklyn Bridge or the fourth road Bridge. Fourth Road bridge.

[Will]

That's it.

[Stuart Bruce]

But the thing is, I mean, I think there's a bit of Cobbler's Children about it because we've been so busy doing this type of stuff with clients that our own website is far from perfect.

[Will]

It's not that bad, though. I read your newsletter.

[Stuart Bruce]

Oh, yeah, no, the newsletter works well and the newsletter is really good. But the actual website is, you know, we've only just added schema to it. There's a whole bunch of other things that could be kind of put on there.

[Will]

I need to update my schema. It's a pain in the ass. But it works, doesn't it? Yeah. So we were just. Before we came down here, you were talking about Copilot and you had a rant about Copilot.

[Stuart Bruce]

Oh, yes.

[Will]

So I'm intrigued because I've got a view on it. So give me your role.

[Stuart Bruce]

I can rant away. So we had a couple, at least two people on stage, probably more kind of making disparaging remarks about it, to be blunt. That probably says more about them than it does about Copilot. Because the reality is in a corporate environment, that's what people are going to need to use. You can't be at the cutting edge. That's just not. It's just not an option. And if you actually spend enough time learning how to use Copilot properly and kind of push it to its parameters of what it can do, it simply isn't true that it's kind of not as good in fact for a lot of things it's a lot better.

[Will]

So Charles?

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, the reason it's a lot better is because what Microsoft called work IQ and that basically means it's grounded in your data.

[Will]

Context.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, context, yeah. So if you say and the best example of that is if you compare using CLAUDE standalone or CLAUDE within copilot the answer of CLAUDE within Copilot is mind blowingly better because when you ask it to go off and do a research project or something, it already knows the types of things you're interested in. So it actually research without you telling it. It researches the stuff that's relevant to you. So you know, if you were doing it in another tool externally or even if you were using something like Perplexity, you'd probably have follow up questions or you'd have to try harder to write a detailed prompt. But if it already knows everything about you, you don't need to.

[Will]

So you're using Cowork inside Copilot.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, two things.

[Will]

I'm brand new that isn't it?

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah. So that lit. Well, we've been using it for about three months, right? Yeah, because it's. Because you can have. There's something called Frontier Program, it's like a sign into it, it's a beta, isn't it? Yeah, so we signed up for that three months ago. So we've been using it quite extensively.

[Will]

But isn't it really expensive?

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, in the Frontier Program it was free and for those of us that joined it it's still free till the 1st of July. So I've got to get my money's

[Will]

wor how many tokens you're using because that's the issue because there was a couple of people that did say some interesting things on stage today because someone mentioned loops, which is the big thing in California at the moment, these loops where you use loops to iteratively improve your prompt so it's literally improving the conversation and it's self improvement which some would say is moving towards AGI because it's improving itself. Now I find that interesting and you can do that in Cowork and in theory you can do it but I've heard that the price I know that's this because I got it from my IT people on Thursday the pricing model of Copilot is on tokens and it's predicted tokens, they don't know. Yes.

[Stuart Bruce]

So there's a pay, there's a pay as you go model.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

So. And you can set caps by user, by group or by tenant, so you're not going to accidentally spend money. And I then Microsoft created a spreadsheet which if anything, I think overestimates what it's going to cost because realistically not everybody in a company or a team is a heavy user or a cutting edge user. So most are going to have a lower level of use than Microsoft spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet it shows it's going to be something between 85 to 150, 40 quid a month per user for what it can do. That's actually not that expensive. Let me give you one practical example. We ran a 85 to repay that 85 to 145 pounds a month for the tokens.

[Will]

That is such a big gap though.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah. Because it's 145 is for a really

[Will]

heavy user like me.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah. Well, possibly not. You might be even higher than that. So. So I might be even higher, but for your average heavy user. But just to give one example of how that would get its money back, we organized a invite only breakfast recently with Simon Bohr, former Chief Executive Communications Service and we sent out the invites in HubSpot so we could track the opens and everything. As the replies came back in, Copilot Cowork intercepted them. It filed them into one of three folders, kind of yes, no out of office, so they could get a reminder, which it did. It then added all the names to the spreadsheets. If there wasn't, if there were things like a job title missing, it would go off and research the job title and populate that column in the spreadsheet. I love Cowork, then it would, it generated the name, but it basically did all of the admin tasks. Yeah. For the breakfast. Now if we, you know, we, we sometimes use a kind of virtual pa, you know, if we'd have been paying them to do it, that would have been several hours work.

[Will]

Unless they were using.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, unless they were using.

[Will]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

Now the big, the difference between the two is if with the virtual PA you wouldn't have needed to check their work because you know, you trust them, you know them, so you don't need to check it. But then again, if they were new, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to do that. You would have to check it. Whereas with the copilot The CO work stuff you did, and it was kind of. I would have said it was 85, 90% accurate and sometimes it confused you by what it did. So, for example, one person replied to say they couldn't do it because they send a colleague and it drafted an email kind of accepting it and it knew that. So in the notes field, it kind of said that's why this person was on the list, even though they weren't invited.

[Will]

Amazing.

[Stuart Bruce]

And because some of the integrations don't work, it couldn't. It tried to update HubSpot, but because we hadn't given it access, MCP access. So it actually said you need to update it.

[Will]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does that to me. I tell you what's weird, I mean, we're talking about Copilot here. But Claude, I said. I think I said this to Andrew is the way it talks to me. I said something of the week to her and it went on it, mate. What else he said on it, mate? And it said it talks in, like in you. I don't know if it's mirroring your language and how I speak.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, that's. But that's the other thing. So. So I. The model I use most is Claude within Copilot.

[Will]

Yeah. I'll be honest, I haven't used. So I've got Co Pilot, I've got Gemini, I've got Co Work, I've got Claude, obviously, and a bit of complexity and I've tested. Test them all for different things, research. I wanted co. I now feel like CO work is going to be a waste in Copilot because I've got Cowork in the other. Have you got scheduled tasks in Copilot? Cowork?

[Stuart Bruce]

Yes.

[Chris Norton]

Right.

[Stuart Bruce]

So that. So that breakfast example, that was how that worked is every morning it would kind of do a sweep of the emails that had come in.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

And then do the replies and everything.

[Will]

Yeah, it's amazing. So what are your hot tips on Copilot then, to how to get the most out of Copilot. Because there'll be people out there, right, that have got like, marketing people that they've been given it. They've been given a license, they've used. They probably use it on the meeting notes and they probably use it like a chat bot.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah. We have clients at the moment where they've been given licenses, they might have been given training on how to use Copilot, but because it's not embedded in comms and corporate affairs and communications, sometimes they struggle to see how you make it relevant. So the way to approach it is to do the list of things you want it to do and then work out whether that's possible to get it to do it. Because very often the answer is yes.

[Chris Norton]

This is a message from the show's sponsors. Prohibition pr. We're Yorkshire's biggest PR agency and we specialize in delivering amazing video content and podcasting content. And we guarantee we can get your podcast, whether new or created by us, or if you've already got one, into a top 20 category in any country. Just drop me a line if you're interested in that. But meanwhile, we've got loads and loads of free stuff. We've got an entire events catalog packed for you with more than 15 webinars available free and on demand. Whenever you want to watch them or listen to them, it's me and the lovely Will talking through all sorts of topics from social media, public relations, content marketing, video execution. You name it, we talk about it. And we've also got two live events coming up, both in June, July. So the June and July ones is from creators to closers. It's all about influencer marketing and influencer ambassadorship and all that. We've got another event in September and October called how to Create Scroll Stopping Content that. That convert. Bit of a mouthful, but amazing. All completely free. So if you want to come along to our events for free, this is your bag. You enjoy the show. First of all, give us a like and subscribe and please, please give us a review because we've got about 20 and we've got like 365,000 downloads, so it'd be nice to hear from you. I'll give you a shout out, but

[Will]

if you want to listen, if you

[Chris Norton]

want to register for the events, you can go to prohibitionpr.co.uk and click on Upcoming Events. Really easy to do, register. And yeah, Will and I will see you there and we'll have a chat with you. So that's. Thanks for listening, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoy the show.

[Will]

Yeah, yeah, I know because I. That guy I was telling you about, who Shaun, remained nameless on this podcast, told me that co pilot was just chatgpt Lite and it isn't as good. And I said, I beg to differ there, mate, because I said, I think some of maybe the results, comparing the models, right, like Mythos or Fable, now that we haven't got that had for 48 hours and is now gone again, my issue is the worst models that we've got now are pretty, pretty good,

[Stuart Bruce]

100% so I get really frustrated by people chasing the latest. I mean, Ann Gregory talked about it on the panel this morning. The latest shiny tools, they really don't matter. 80, 90% of PR people aren't even touching the edges of what a tool a year old could do.

[Will]

No, true.

[Stuart Bruce]

So the idea that you need to do this cutting edge stuff is ridiculous. You basically, is it going to have an impact on clients or if you're in house, is it going to have an impact on your kind of internal stakeholders and colleagues? And you don't need the latest shiny tools to do that. And the thing about Copilot is some of the things that people criticize it for are actually its strengths. Because the reason the guardrails are there is if you are working for a pharma company or government or financial services, you need them. And it basically takes away the worry. You know, you can stop thinking about those things as much because it's doing it for you.

[Will]

And you might have used it two years ago. Right. You should have got this episode sponsored by Copilot and you might have used it like two, two years ago and thought, oh, it's pretty crap. Whereas in actual fact, it's the latest version of Chat. It's about a day behind ChatGPT. They update it and so it's five point we on five or six. Exactly like you said.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, they roll when. Now, when a new model comes out, it gets incorporated the same day.

[Will]

But that's why, that's why Microsoft have moved to work with CO. They're diversifying their AIs because, and this is the rumor that Microsoft are working on their own lab because they're making so much money out of it. It's going to be very interesting.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, at the build conference they launched a whole range of kind of their own AI models. There's also talk of using their own version of deepseek to power Copilot Cowork.

[Will]

That worries me that it doesn't, because

[Stuart Bruce]

the whole point is because it's open source, if you're running it on your own servers, you know, there's no reason for it to, you know, they're basically just taking it and kind of running their own version of it. So it means they can do so cheaper. But also the, the token cost of Cowork in Copilot is cheaper than Claude's token costs. And it was, it was one of these kind of statements in the launch where you had to kind of read it about five times to understand what it meant. Yeah, but, but crudely it's for two reasons is one, Microsoft are buying it at wholesale cost, so, you know, they're passing on some of that discount to customers. But the other one is it's not just pure Claude that you're using, it is optimized for Copilot and mixed.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

So they're there. It's more efficient. Yeah.

[Will]

It's in your environment and it can see your stuff. And that is, like you said, the only thing I do have some reservations with Copilot, because, for instance, I'll ask it to find me because it sounds brilliant. They go, you can search your emails, you can search your folders, which you can do in Cowork as well, by the way. Claude Original. But sometimes I find its search is a bit shit. I don't find it as good as it's meant to be. Like it'll look for things and it doesn't quite find it and put it together the way if you did research

[Stuart Bruce]

for yourself, it can be a bit of hit and miss. Yeah. But that's partially because people have built really bad historic SharePoint sites. So we're just doing a project at the moment where a client has migrated from Dropbox to SharePoint, so we're expecting that to work far better because it's not quite perfect, because you couldn't get the migration perfect, but it is better than what a lot of people have. I mean, our own version, because our SharePoint dates back to 2011, so to say that it is a mess is the understatement of the century. So it's perhaps not surprising that Copilot sometimes struggles to make sense of it, you know, and there are things we could do to tidy it up. And interestingly, now we've got Cowork, you might actually be able to use Cowork.

[Will]

Oh, yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

To tidy it up.

[Will]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I tell you what I did straight away, first day I had it was remove all duplicates. I'd done some duplicate and there's about 40 gigs worth of duplicate images and all sorts on my machine. It instantly removed them all and sorted out and reduced my capacity on my laptop. And it helps, you know, it's good.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, while we've still got the free version, because we were the frontier model, so before the 1st of July, my intention is to try to make a better version of SharePoint.

[Will]

It's like your own version of Independence Day, the Fourth of July, wasn't it?

[Stuart Bruce]

So there's a bit of a rush to get it done.

[Will]

So your hot tip then, for marketing people in House. If they want to get the most out of copilot, how do they do that?

[Stuart Bruce]

First, be crystal clear about what it is they want. But also, there's no kind of ones. It's a bit like kind of. What do we call it? Dave Beresford and kind of the minimal gains. Yeah, marginal gains.

[Will]

Marginal gains, yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

There's 101. So small things that once you've done them, you get much better results. Like the number of times you go in and look at people's copilot setup and they haven't personalized it. You know, there's a whole section where you can tell it what type of answer you want. You can teach it your writing style. And the best way to do that is actually to use an agent to analyze your writing. So you'd have to tell it what style you want to get it to understand your style, and then write instructions for it. But you go in and people haven't done that. And the frustrating thing is it's part of the onboarding. You know, you get told to do it, but people just skip past it and don't do it.

[Will]

I do all those videos. Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

So, yeah, that won't be the. It's 101 Little Things. There's not kind of a big magic wand.

[Will]

But it'll certainly. So I asked my. We've had it for. We had all the tools paid for separately, and then we've embedded it in the agency. So everybody in my agency, pretty much, I think 90%. I didn't push it on anyone. I was asking them what they wanted, what they wanted to use. And then most of you co pilot. Then I did a load of training. I trained the team up, and I did a straw poll the other day, and pretty much 90%, only one person said they weren't using it regularly. They're using it daily, but most of them are using it regularly every day, which shows you how important.

[Stuart Bruce]

So one of the things you can do with Copart is you can actually go into the dashboard and see. See how people are using it.

[Will]

Yeah, that's true.

[Stuart Bruce]

Which is kind of really.

[Will]

I'd already done that, but I want to ask them as well.

[Stuart Bruce]

But the second thing is you just. Is this. Lots of people start using AI in companies as individuals, and the real power is when you use it as a team. So things like in Copad, it used to be called the Prompt Gallery, but they've just renamed it back to its own old name, which was a Prompt Lab. So it used to be called Prompt Lab. Then they Called it it Prompt Gallery, which was a good name.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

Now they called it Prompt Lab again. Lord knows why, but people don't use it. You can. So if you create a prompt, you can then share them with your team.

[Will]

Oh, right. Because we use.

[Chris Norton]

We.

[Will]

I created an. I created a GPT, custom GPT, whatever you call them in that. Agents, they call them in there. Which is confusing because agents are something else as well. Anyway, I created a. I created a prompt agent, so it'll master your prompt for you. So you write your prompt, put it in there, and I shared that with my team. But now you're saying there's something that. Then when you've got an excellent one, you can stick it in a library within your. So you can all use it. Which is brilliant, actually. I didn't know that.

[Stuart Bruce]

No, no. Yeah. And that's an example of people. There's loads of stuff that people just don't use.

[Will]

Yeah. And basically that's because Microsoft haven't done a brilliant job of communicating it.

[Stuart Bruce]

Well, it doesn't help. They've got like something like 70 or 80 products called Copilot.

[Will]

Yeah, that's what I actually thought. That's what you. You were going to rant about. Right, Dear. What's he called? It's not bill. Not. Not Mr. Gates. Dear Microsoft, please can you remove Copilot from every single application and have it in one thing that does all of them? I don't understand why you've got to have Copilot now.

[Stuart Bruce]

That's actually what they've just announced.

[Will]

It's terrible.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, well, it isn't, because the whole. The whole point being is the rationale to it. It's meant to be frictionless. You don't. Other AI tools force you to think about using AI, whereas the whole point about Copilot is you don't need to. It's there when you need it. So you don't need to come out of your workflow. It doesn't need to stop your brain. You can just. It's there.

[Will]

But then the best part of it is a separate app on the desktop. The desktop app that you download from Microsoft.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah, but you can do most. Well, one thing is they're now making them the same. So it's. That's not.

[Will]

So what are they going to do? What? They've literally given them an idea and they've just turned it around before we finish this podcast?

[Stuart Bruce]

No, no, they've been doing that. They've already done that. So you've already. But at the moment, because of the way they roll stuff out, it. It's not synced. So. Because they've just launched a new user interface for the desktop or the web version, it hasn't, like, filtered through. Filtered through.

[Will]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

In fact, my desktop hasn't even. I don't have the new interface yet, which is a bit frustrating because other people around the tenant do.

[Will]

I've got it. Yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

And I'm meant to be doing training next week.

[Will]

What were you saying about you don't like the shiny new toys?

[Stuart Bruce]

I can't train people on something old, which is all I've got.

[Will]

Okay, so. Well, I haven't prepped you on this one, but this show's about mistakes. Have you made any mistakes in the last couple of years since we've been on the show? Anything that you'd like to share that won't get you trouble with legal?

[Stuart Bruce]

Always making mistakes. Let me think of a recent one. Can't you think of a recent one? There must be. Well, yeah, so obviously I can't name the client.

[Will]

Yeah, that's fine.

[Stuart Bruce]

You know, but you know that situation where you have a client that kind of tells. Sends you an email and tells you how brilliant the work you've just presented is and how well your presentation went down?

[Will]

Yeah.

[Stuart Bruce]

And then you send them the invoice and they kind of come back and say, where did all these expenses come from? But literally the really big bit, they didn't quibble in the slightest because they thought the work was brilliant. The bit where in the contract it said we were going to charge expenses. That is literally the only bit they're quibbling. And I think the big mistake there is remember to tell them in advance.

[Will]

Manage expectations. That's the key to all client relationships. Expectation management. If you can under promise and over deliver.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah. You know, when I had a team, that would have happened automatically, but when you were a small business, it just. I remember we talked about it, but then nobody actually did it.

[Chris Norton]

Yeah.

[Will]

It's like. I'll tell you what it is. Like, have you seen. Don't know if you know this, but we always. We've always paid the maximum for petrol prohibition. But they've literally, the government, in the last couple of months have it upped it to 55 pence. And we were like, well, that's fine, but I don't think clients will pay that. And then we started discussing, hang on, do we even claim travel anymore off clients? Like some on projects? Because we. I've got a video team, they're flying around and we do charge, you know, mileage. But then it's an interesting debate, like, do you. Should you charge mileage if you're charging a fee for working together?

[Stuart Bruce]

It depends. It depends on your contract. There's no right or wrong answer, but that's another use of Copilot, so people forget to record mileage. You can get Copilot to go through Outlook and identify all your meetings where it looks like you've driven.

[Will]

Yeah, that is a hot tip. Yeah. So what would be the prompts there?

[Stuart Bruce]

You literally just say this. Can you list all my meetings where I've driven in the last six months or the last quarter and put them into an Excel spreadsheet and it will do it, and then you can check that they're in your account system then

[Will]

I need to do that for all the meetings that I have about bloody AI.

[Stuart Bruce]

The reason it might not work is if you haven't put enough detail into your meeting.

[Will]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need to do that. Well, that's great, Stuart. Thanks for coming on the show. Shout out to PR Andy Barr. Hi, everybody, I'm PR Andy Barr. If you don't know what I do, check out this. Anyway, the podcast thing sort of got us behind the mic and kind of in front. In front of the camera. Yeah, yeah. But it's. I'm still not used to doing, you know, like, pieces to camera where you're like a BBC broadcaster.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Will]

Do you do much?

[Daryl Sperry]

So, actually, my business partner, I'm invited to speak or get interviewed on a lot of podcasts, but my business partner Paul's got. Just. Just launched his own podcast Beneath the Surface, which is all about what actually makes AI tick. How does it work, how does gen work, all that kind of stuff released the first episode very recently went really well, so, you know, we'll be doing more of that in the not too distant future.

[Will]

Podcasting marketing is an interesting medium.

[Daryl Sperry]

Oh, yeah, 100%.

[Will]

So obviously we're at this conference today. I've spoken to quite a few of the people. What bit? You're doing the Fight and Talk section, aren't you?

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

[Will]

Are you fighting the cause for SEOs, though?

[Daryl Sperry]

I am, I am. I know, right? Boo. So I think my premise, though, is there are a spoiler for what I'm going to say later. There are 5 trillion reasons why you can't ignore Google. You know, Johnny was up on stage just now saying, like, oh, the front door of the Internet is Gen AI. It's not. It's still Google. Right. And even when you See, Genai search results within, you know, within the platforms. They're formulated from an Internet search. So obviously Google, AI overviews, AI mode, Gemini all use Google. Claude uses Brave, ChatGPT uses Bing. So you know, where you rank on like traditional search engines still helps influence where you appear on AI search. So, you know, you can't ignore SEO and you can't pretend like it doesn't exist. It's a key input into the bigger, you know, the bigger thing of AI search.

[Will]

Well, I just literally, I've got several friends who work in SEO and there's a guy I know, he's very good at SEO and he lost about. In about November, December time, He lost about 80% of his clients. And he was getting a bit worried. He works for himself, but he's really good at what he does, so he's always busy. Yeah. And his clients are all E commerce stores. Right. So they make money by search. Anyway, this thing had come out, Claude cowork had come out. Other AIs are available. Yeah, but in other words, they were all saying, oh, we can do our SEO ourselves now. Because when I ask the. If I don't look at, I'll use some agents, I'll look at the pages, I'll assess the pages, and I get an excellent correct. Darryl, here's your report. These are the things that are good, these are the things that are bad. You need to optimize this and they'll change. And guess what happened? Tanked. Yeah. Four months later, 80%. Well, nine out of 10 of those clients say 90% have all come back to him because all their stores were tanking financially. And that's because the Internet plus people that are good at what they do. So PRs, I'm talking about digital PRs, I'm talking about traditional PRs, I'm talking about SEOs, they don't write their best techniques and tactics online and share everything.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Will]

It's kept in a little black box because that's what makes it work. So the Internet is full of all this stuff that's best practice, supposedly. But actually the best practice that it's learning from is out of date and isn't as good as the actual secret sauce. Does that make sense to you?

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, 100%. Great point. So I've got a mate from the Northeast. He had an argument with his old man once, and his old man, he said, you know, you're older. I won't try and do the accent. You know, you're older than me, you're slower than Me, you're fatter than me or whatever, you know, and you've shown me all your tricks so I could take you in a fight. This old man just leaned back really sagely, tapped his nose and went, you never show anyone all your tricks.

[Stuart Bruce]

Done.

[Daryl Sperry]

And I think, I think this, I think exactly the same as you. Right. No one's sharing like fast. We learned loads about Geo AI search, all the rest of it from the research reports we've done as far back as October 2024. But. And we've shared loads publicly about what we've learned. All the rest of it. We wrote a 3,000 word blog report. Yeah. That you can.

[Will]

We've referenced it on the podcast before. Yeah.

[Daryl Sperry]

Bit Leo4PR.

[Will]

Nice plug.

[Daryl Sperry]

Thank you. Do this for a living.

[Will]

That's what I said on my question.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah. But yeah, 100%. We're not going to tell everyone everything of what we do and obviously we're going to. I think the other point that you're making and we have this with clients and I really want to impress this about anyone who listens to this. We have clients who come to us and say, we don't need you to write content for us anymore because we just get AI to do it for us. And I'm like, I can give you case study after case study after case study of people who got sold on by Geo Bros of. Oh, you just talk 10x your agency.

[Stuart Bruce]

Exactly.

[Daryl Sperry]

Right. On all this stuff. Right. And you can just run your agency on autopilot, all that stuff. Right. Fast forward four months and they've had a massive Google penalty and they're wiped off. Yeah, wiped off the face of the Internet, basically. And guess what? If you don't rank on Google, it's very hard to get found by AI search.

[Stuart Bruce]

So.

[Daryl Sperry]

Couldn't agree with you more, mate. Could not agree with you more.

[Will]

So your argument for the SEO guys is we still need SEO. SEO is not dead. I have to agree. I do think it's changed. I actually think I was telling some of the other guys that I've interviewed, yeah, I used to teach on the PR degree in Leeds and I taught on the degree for about six years.

[Chris Norton]

Right.

[Will]

So I had different people and I'd take them through to the final year. I was our part time. I also ran prohibition at the same time. And then we get to the final year and the best ones would come and work for me and then. But also all the others. What I noticed was as SEO became more and more prolific. Yeah. Because mine was the digital. I sought all the digital stuff, the SEO agencies were the number one recruiters of all the pr. That's where all this, all the, all the talent was going. And I think that's basically, I'm thinking that's what's going to happen here if we don't get our shit together and the industry, like, people like yourself, people, us up north. If you're making a big summer dance about the opportunity that it is, that just Geo has got a massive opportunity for marketing professionals. But the PR industry is not good at its own pr. It's not. Do you know what I mean?

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Couldn't agree with you more. And look, you and I have similar experience. I worked in the SEO industry for a couple of years and I saw the same thing happen. And the reason I went to go and work in the SEO industry is that I saw that the work that PR people were doing, they would do. The SEO industry would do like four times the output. I mean, very often for like 50% of the budget. But anytime you questioned like anything in terms of what's this move for the business, how has this impacted us? What's the ROI from this? SEO folks could give you 15 pages on what keywords had improved as a result. What was your average domain authority? You know, backlinks from places you haven't backlinks for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, whereas the PR industry would turn up with a, with a stack of. Yeah, stack of clippings saying, saying you are cumulative impressions was 17 billion.

[Will]

Right, yeah, that's, that's a great one. Right, because at Prohibition we've got, we use the Amic Barcelona principles. Yeah, we used, we're doing Geo, we do measure, obviously we're optimizing a lot of our stuff, but I. How, how are we measuring? So before the magic, the secret sauce in SEO was domain authority, backlinks, average, average share of search, whatever you want to call it.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Will]

So why is it with GEO then? Because there's that many different. We're in, we're in the Betamax VHS era. How, how are you now to reverse your question back? To reverse this question back to what you're just talking about? How are you now demonstrating. This is what you do? So demonstrating impact from doing some, some, you know, from PR today. How are you justifying that?

[Daryl Sperry]

Given that I run a business called Hard Numbers, it would be surprising if I said gut feel.

[Will]

Yeah, no, so that's why I'm asking you.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, what we do is. Okay, so firstly Johnny Bentwood from Golin, who I will be fighting with verbally, metaphorically later.

[Will]

A boxing match.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I've got my gloves with me is a bit bearish on prompt monitoring tools and I know other people in the SEO digital space are as well. I am more pro prompt monitoring as a thing. Right. Share a model, share a model by product service category, you know, whatever. If you write good prompts, most people write very short prompts that don't have within them the who. They're like who is the customer Persona, right. Which creates the personalization, which obviates slightly the personalization problem of if two different people put a search into ChatGPT, they get two different results. So the who, the what, what they're looking for in as natural language as possible possible based on traditional search volume because it's the only place we can get traditional Google search volume because it's the only place we can get data about how people search for things online at scale and then the why, what is the criteria that they are applying to making a decision here. But the who, the what and the why, you then get more repeatable results from those prompts and then you run those prompts over a longer period of time and then you do your analysis. But based on that, that's one key input and I am actually more pro it than a lot of other professionals are. The thing that blows my mind is how all these tools profounds and all of that other stuff ignore Google Analytics. The first thing we do when we get a geo brief from someone is we've got a dedicated, we've got a tailored report that we've produced which we just plug into a client's Google Analytics that just looks at where are they currently, what AI search platforms are they currently getting traffic from over what period of time and then to what target landing pages on their website and then you can reverse engineer the target landing pages that stuff's going to to what are the things that people must be searching or putting into AI search to then deliver them to those. Yeah, right. To those target landing pages. And then you can get, you know, obviously always, always from anyone we look at chat GPT will represent anywhere between 60 and 90% of the traffic. Right. That we see. But we see Claude rising, you know, a lot. In a B2B context, we tend tend to see copilot and Claude and perplexity in the mix a lot more. In the B2C context you tend to chat, GBC tends to donate it, right?

[Will]

Same.

[Daryl Sperry]

So yeah, 100% but so, yeah, Google Analytics for that stuff. And then obviously you want to, you know, if you're doing geo work, you want to be looking specifically at those target landing pages. Look upstream. Are we improving where they're, where they're ranking on traditional search. Right. Is that. Are those pages seeing more traffic generally? Right. From, from the work that we.

[Will]

What period, though?

[Daryl Sperry]

Oh, look, I mean, there's some research from Profound which says the average age of a cited source is something like 19 days. Right. We've done a research report, it's out this week, hardnumbers.co.uk gullible second

[Will]

promotion,

[Daryl Sperry]

gullible engine optimization. Within three days we got ChatGPT, Claude and Google got Gemini and AI overviews to say, I am the UK's best dressed PR practitioner. Now, people watching this at home might agree with the premise, but many, many, many others wouldn't. And I think it's probably not fair to say that I am the UK's best dressed PR practitioner. But within three days we were able to get all of the main AI search platforms to say that. Right.

[Chris Norton]

How?

[Daryl Sperry]

Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?

[Will]

There's the secret sauce.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah.

[Daryl Sperry]

And if you wanna.

[Will]

No, no, no. If you want to find out, it's

[Daryl Sperry]

all the things that you would expect on site, off site.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Daryl Sperry]

Right. And you know, if you do the on site and off site stuff in exactly the same way as, you know,

[Will]

for anyone, which is worrying because for misinformation purposes, 100 this is what you show. What is what it is. I mean, I'd heard about the stunt.

[Stuart Bruce]

Yeah.

[Will]

So I think it's good, a great pr. It's an excellent execution of AI misinformation. Because AI miss. It just shows you that if you can do that in however long, if someone's got a decent budget, they can take your business down with a bit of AI misinformation. Yeah, that's the problem because we had a. We had a thing at Prohibition, which I've not, I've not actually talked about on the podcast. Yeah, but we had a thing. We don't know who it was, but actually I was talking to James Crawford. I should have said it to him this morning. James's agency, PR agency One and Matt us, he said it to me this morning, he said, you guys have always been excellent on search. I said, oh, thanks. Anyway, so it was always either us or them.

[Daryl Sperry]

They are very good on the CEO.

[Will]

Anyway, about. I think it's about two years ago, we had a thing where somebody had hacked an injector A load of fake content on our site. They basically. Our site's built in WordPress. They built something, hacked it and we don't know how they hacked it through and it was to knock us off the top, we don't know for which term. So it could have been a social agency, it could have been a PR agency, it could have been a marketing agency. We ended up with 1.3 million extra pages of total shit. Bearing in mind we're quite honored content all these extra pages. But it was built so it was a self fulfilling, you couldn't get rid of them so we had to like dereg de index them and everything. It took absolutely. It was a mess to sort out but somebody had done it and it was obviously agencies doing it to other agencies. So it was just to downgrade agencies that were coming high up.

[Daryl Sperry]

That is wild.

[Will]

That is negative SEO. Yeah, yeah. And my point is that if it can be done, that's pre period and that took, that took us, it took me eight months to sort that out and get us to back where we were. It was a bloody nightmare to sort out. Have you ever had to deal with anything like that for clients?

[Daryl Sperry]

I mean look, we've had nothing like, nothing like that. But I mean, you know, cybersecurity issues, breaches, data breaches. I mean, you know, it is wild. And I think AI is only going to increase this kind of stuff. I think going back how I got into the SEO industry years and years ago, a very good friend of mine worked for a utility company and the CEO of the utility company appeared very negatively in the number of articles online that appeared on page one of Google when you search for his name. And so then I talked to a digital marketing business about do you know how they did that and do you know how you would be able to get that stuff off of page one and, and brief them on it and they, they managed to do it and then I ended up going and drinking the Kool Aid and going, working for them for a couple of years. That whole like online reputation management thing, that's something that I've done, you know, in a previous life for a number of clients whereby there is stuff which is bad, negative. Yeah. Very often miss or disinformation information.

[Will]

Yeah.

[Daryl Sperry]

And you want to get it off of page one of Google. Yeah, you know that, that's definitely right.

[Will]

Target stuff. You could do that with the thing that I'm talking about.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah. But also AI search now it's wild. I mean within our research report we look at a whole raft of different use cases. Chris Stokel Walker, who's a journalist who's here talking today, he wrote up our research for Sherwood and he, he looked into three spots, specific examples that we briefly cited in the, in the report and he went and did a really in depth piece which is, which is worth having a look at of companies doing stuff which is pretty gray hat stroke, black hat kind of thing on their competitors. Well for software businesses, so for CRM companies, you know, stuff like that. So, you know, there is, there's a lot of it out there and that's why I think, you know, Sarah Waddington and the work she's done and James Crawford and the work he's been leading with, with AMEC on GEO principles and geo ethics, I think is, is really important. We really stand behind that. I think it's great for the industry

[Will]

and so Daryl, have you made any mistakes in the last 24 hours? 24 hours? I was going to say 24 months. What'd you say? Anything that. What's your, what have you got a mistake to share?

[Daryl Sperry]

How long have you got? Chris?

[Will]

He's thinking about things that he can get away with.

[Daryl Sperry]

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly. No, I think, look, yeah, we all make mistakes.

[Will]

We do.

[Daryl Sperry]

We went out with a really big research report ourselves. We do this for a living. We advise other people how to do it. On the day that England played their first match of the World Cup. Right. You know, a simple look at our forward planner service from Onclusive would have told us maybe you should sandbag that for a week or whatever. Right. So you know, we all like this happens to the best of us all the time. So yeah, there you go. There's a, there's a little mistake for you right there.

[Will]

Well, thanks for coming back on, Daryl.

[Daryl Sperry]

Thank you very much. It's a real, real pleasure.

[Chris Norton]

Thanks for listening to Embracing Marketing Mistakes. You've reached the end of the podcast. Hooray. What can you possibly do to help Chris and will the providers of this show? Well, what you can help us by doing is just please give us some feedback. Positive, negative, constructive? Well, hopefully not negative, but if you could give us a review somewhere, five star review, preferably wherever you get your podcast, it will really help for people to find the show because there's loads of other people out there that we'd love to hear about it. And the guests that come on here, we want to give them as much visibility as possible. So, so yeah, I want to just thank you personally for listening to the show. I really appreciate it because it's a bit weird. We record it in Leeds. And wherever you are around the world, from Peru to Estonia to Russia to Africa, I want to thank all of you for listening. Really appreciate it. So, yeah, if you like the show, please give us a review because it means a lot. So thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your week. See you next week.