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Marketing Trends
Why Big Tech Is Spending Millions to Partner with Smart AI Startups
01:09:56
What if the next big wave in marketing isn’t about targeting people at all—but impressing their AI agents instead?
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- [00:00]
Stephanie Postols
How do you think about search of the future? Like how should brands be showing up to be having their results show up in these LLMs?
- [00:08]
Abhay Parasnis
That's a multi trillion dollar question. There are all these kind of reports that have what I refer to as these watermelon metrics. They all look green from the outside, but they actually are red on the inside. And lots of teams just run their business by staring at these green circles that look great, but it's not translating into improved nps. You're going to have to rethink what measurement. Even with things like brand, with things like content, how do I even measure the efficacy of my marketing? Those who figure out how to leverage AI for what it's good at to do massive scale, massive personalization, but then layer on top of that, that extremely human touch element that is going to be the ultimate secret sauce for what future CMOs are going to have to crack. These massive platform companies like Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, they are investing billions of hundreds of billions of dollars in in infrastructure, laying out global platforms. They need interesting applications. I am actually even big believer now that our only way to win in AI is by going jointly with these partners. If you truly believe that it's a 10 trillion plus opportunity and if they think you can help them win big, they will partner.
- [01:21]
Stephanie Postols
How do you view the future of agencies and this kind of work that's happening in minutes that used to take months. Hey there and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends. This is your host as always, Stephanie Postols. And I'm joined by my producer, Rose. Rose, how's it going?
- [01:41]
Rose
It's going good. I. We just got off an interview with a very, very cool person and I was. My page right now is just full of notes. There's not really much room to write anything more on this page.
- [01:55]
Stephanie Postols
Yes, this episode. I loved it. So we just got to speak with Abe Parasnis. And so Abe is the CEO and founder of a company called Typeface. He's the former CTO and Chief Product officer at Adobe and he also worked at Oracle, Microsoft, IBM. I mean this guy's worked at some of the biggest tech companies out there and now he's building this amazing marketing company. And so, man, I was. I heard so many takes in this interview that I have not heard from other CMOs. Like you said, your notes are full. My brain is full with ideas of what he talked about.
- [02:27]
Rose
This wasn't an interview that was mostly theory. It was a lot of practical examples of what's happening in the marketing space right now. We Talked a lot about partnerships too, which was very interesting. Haven't heard a whole lot of people talk about the future of partnerships and how AI will impact how enterprises and startups can partner together.
- [02:48]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I mean, this is definitely a very different concept that I haven't heard on the show so far. I think he said that a large portion of his revenue at this point, a lot of his marketing efforts and revenue is coming from this partnership model that he has, which to me that was mind blowing because I haven't really heard, you know, throughout a lot of these interviews, I haven't heard partnerships touched on in the way that he talked about it and why the future of growth and where the future of many of your leads could come from is from having partnerships with very large behemoths and. And why partnering is really the way to get all revenue to rise for all of these companies. And so that was super unique. It even has me thinking, like, what can we do with partnerships now?
- [03:28]
Rose
Honestly, all over LinkedIn you hear people talking about search all the time. And for me personally, I come away from certain conversations or reading certain things online about search still not feeling like I have a very clear understanding of what the future holds. And I know nobody can say for certain, but the way that he articulated the future of search felt clearer to me about how LLMs are going to be impacting the way or even AI agent to AI agent and what, what the future holds with AI agents representing individual consumers and businesses both buying and selling to each other. I think that is. It's so fun, honestly, to talk to people like Abhay about that kind of stuff because it's easy to get in your head and be negative about the future of AI. But I walked away feeling way more hopeful and more ambitious.
- [04:22]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, yeah. I know his view on the world of AI agents and how as a brand you need to show up so that you can be chosen by these AI agents as they're going out there and searching and looking for the best product. I mean, that was super interesting. Very fascinating to think, how do I get chosen by an AI agent? How does my agent show up to the other agents who are on the Internet and. And it's a very new space that we're in here. And so hearing his perspectives of how you need to stand out as a brand. Yeah, it was definitely mind blowing.
- [04:52]
Rose
Yeah. And how to stay current as a cmo, as any kind of marketing leader, what your role should look like, what should be in house versus not, and how you can best collaborate with other C suite Leaders was very interesting.
- [05:05]
Stephanie Postols
All right, and with that, let's get into the interview with Abe Parasnis. AB Abhay, welcome to Marketing Trends.
- [05:11]
Abhay Parasnis
Hey Stephanie, great to be here.
- [05:12]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I'm super excited to have you. I was just quickly hopping over to your LinkedIn. I was like, let me just look into his background before we get on the mic. I was like, whoa. He's worked at some of the biggest tech companies, Microsoft, Oracle. You were the CTO and the Chief Product Officer at Adobe. And so I would just love to hear a little bit about your background before we jump into what you're up to now.
- [05:31]
Abhay Parasnis
First of all, great to be here. Thanks for having me. I think as you said, I have kind of, I guess I'm going to date myself a little bit, but I've been in software business for over 25 years. Have kind of interestingly just played out that we have been on both ends of the spectrum. As you noted, I've been in some of the fortunate enough to be in some of the biggest companies, software companies, world class companies like Microsoft, Adobe. I did a brief stint at Oracle and then I have kind of been at the other end of the spectrum, starting really early in a small company, startups, couple of startups along the way. And obviously Typeface is the most pure form of startup because I started it from scratch. And so having a fun ride. I mean, the one thing maybe across, if there's any common thread across all of those, Stephanie, is have been really fortunate enough to be kind of in some ways at the right place, right time, as some big inflections happened, whether it was kind of the web shift, then there was a cloud shift which was both at Microsoft where I was fortunate enough to work at Azure, and then Adobe's cloud shift, obviously, and then mobile shift and then I guess I'm sure we'll talk a lot about today, arguably the biggest shift of all, kind of the AI shift now is kind of the next inflection point. So that's probably the being at the place where there was a big change happening is probably the biggest common thread across both those big and small companies.
- [06:49]
Stephanie Postols
So I'd love to hear about what you're up to now at Typeface. I mean, where did the vision come from and at what point were you like, I need to start this company right now?
- [06:56]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. In fact, interestingly, just last week we completed formally three years. I incorporated the company on May 23. So we are kind of doing this at a particularly interesting time. And I was on a plane back from east coast and was just thinking about what the last three years have been. As I'm sure you know you talk to so many people in marketing and obviously just broadly in the industry, but honestly, three years really feels like 10, 10 or 20 in terms of just the pace of change, the excitement. And so even to answer your question, looking back, it now feels so long ago. But the reality is in some things are still exactly the same. Except maybe my excitement level is even higher today than it was back then, which is at Adobe. I was fortunate enough, it's a world class organization, they serve some of the biggest companies on the creative side as well as kind of the enterprise applications marketing side. And, and over the years, as I was fortunate enough to work with some of the best brands in the world, one of the common themes I was hearing again and again is that they have been able to transform their marketing in particular, which is your forte. I'm sure we'll talk about. They've been able to transform the data side of their marketing, all the analytics, all the insights, how do they understand their customers? That has gone through a profound transformation over the last decade. But even with all that insight, even with all that understanding of their customers, they were all saying the same thing, that hey, when it comes to engaging our customers in a meaningful personalized fashion by putting the right content in front of them at the right time, on the right channel, we have so many channels now as a brand, not just our website or mobile app, we have social media, we have E commerce, we have so many touch points that the content that's needed and to personalize all that content so that every customer doesn't get the same blast of the email for a product that you've already bought two years ago, we have all experienced that. And so this notion of truly personalizing the stories we tell as brands to customers was the holy grail even after a couple of decades. And so that was the genesis of Typeface in many ways. The reason it's even named Typeface is when the original printing press was invented, everyone was seeing all the books printed for first 50 to 100 years in the same font. And until typefaces were invented to personalize different kinds of books, to have different fonts, different illustrations, different styles, and then everyone could experience content in a highly personalized fashion. And so we started typeface with that vision, which is can we personalize content at scale so that every brand can reach their customers and in a deeply personalized storytelling fashion?
- [09:42]
Stephanie Postols
I love that. I mean, it's funny because when I look at the space we're in, and maybe I just talked to too many people, I was thinking this already, like, it's happening. But then when you look at these big companies who are sending out newsletters and even direct mail, and I'm like, why are you sending this to me? I would never buy this. Why are you trying to advertise this to me during a workday? Right now? I cannot go and hop over and watch a reality TV show or whatever it might be. And it's crazy because it feels like the world is moving so fast, the technologies are moving so fast, but actually so many companies have still not done this yet. So it seems like an amazing opportunity to be playing in the space that you are in.
- [10:19]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah. No, I mean, and especially when we talk, even now, there's so much noise and hype around AI. But when you actually talk to customers, like biggest brands, I mean, you would be surprised. These are some of the leading brands around the planet. And the basic challenges they have, even when they understand their customer. It's exactly like you said, one of our customers, large grocery chain. They have so much understanding of their customers because every week the customer walks into one of their thousands of stores. They know what they buy, they know what their typical income profile is, all that data. Yet at Thanksgiving, they're sending all of them the exact same buy turkey at this discount kind of email, even if they know this customer is a vegetarian customer or this customer typically only buys seafood. And so they all have so much data and understanding, yet they can't meaningfully engage. And I think that's the holy grail opportunity that I do think AI finally opens up, which is, can you tell these stories in such meaningful way, but at massive scale?
- [11:20]
Stephanie Postols
Are there companies who probably have like, a higher ability to benefit from this trend because they've been collecting so much data versus ones who maybe have data that is not very clean or have actually not been collecting data on their customers and are trying to catch up. Like, who really can benefit most from this?
- [11:37]
Abhay Parasnis
It's a great question. And I know as you, I'm sure here, just broadly in AI, but certainly within marketing, there is this whole debate around, is data really the asset? Like, can you actually use data, whether it's to train the models or whether it's to actually use data to kind of personalize these models? I actually do think AI is kind of unique in the moment we find ourselves in, where the deep IP is not necessarily in just the algorithmic kind of code or automation. I Mean in some ways, last two, three decades of computing has been about cheaper, faster, better. Can I do computing and calculations at a faster, faster rate and cheaper? I think that still matters and I think it will continue. But I think now truly unlocking the deep understanding you have in the data and then actually even the word data, Stephanie is a little bit overused because sometimes data may convey a little bit more like traditional databases and kind of relational databases. I actually think what's going to happen and what's exciting is the notion of brand, which is this ephemeral thing that has been there in marketing. Everyone says, like when you have a world class brand, people say that is your best asset. But nobody has been able to actually codify what this brand is. And one of the thing that AI is finally doing is translating this ephemeral notion of a brand into a actual data set that these AI models can then codify. I mean, one example, I was one of the with a large CMO yesterday and what she was saying, they're a global company operating 100 plus countries and every marketer they hire in any one of their countries, she has a challenge. How do they make sure that marketer who just joined knows exactly what the brand stands for, that when they write a marketing copy or when they write a social media post. And so she was excited that one of the things we have built for them is the notion of a brand agent. It's an AI agent that deeply learns what those ephemeral attributes of your brand are. And so that's a very different kind of data. It's not like some purchase data or sales data. It's actually extremely creative, ephemeral. What words do you use for your brand? What words do you avoid? What visuals work, what's even the color scheme in what season does your brand actually resonate with? It's all that kind of data that I think becomes extremely valuable for companies that can harness that.
- [14:04]
Stephanie Postols
So when it comes to that kind of example, because I could see a lot of company, like a lot of CMOs thinking about this right now because there was this big underinvestment in brand and now everyone's like, oh, I forgot about my brand. I got to get back out there and start investing again. But what data are you using to pull all that information? Is, is it internal data that we should be thinking about? Is it actually scraping how you've already shown up on the Internet?
- [14:27]
Abhay Parasnis
I hope we'll cover this a little bit in detail as we talk more. I do think there is another aspect of this AI Change one is the whole change management, which we'll talk about kind of how companies have to go through. But I think the safety, governance, the quality and the legality of the data that you actually own versus you don't own, and how you actually train. Now in our case, we are fortunate because of the kind of clients we serve. These are Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 100 companies. We actually don't go scrape a bunch of data and just kind of run their campaigns. It's actually highly curated data that they own. It's their brand, it's their brand guidelines. I mean, the reality, Stephanie, and you know this, you talk to so many CMOs in your community, they have hundreds if not thousands and thousands of pages of brand books and brand guidelines and they have performance data of all their email campaigns or web campaigns that were successful or failed. They just don't know how to find all that data and they don't know how to codify that data so that the next campaign they run is actually extremely meaningful. And so what we do is we go to a company, say, tell us every piece of data you have from your web channel, your email channel, your analytics, your social campaigns, your Google Analytics or whatever you use. But it has to be their data. It's kind of first party data, if you will. Now if they have licensed some other third party data sets and they legally have rights to use it, that's fine too. But we really ask the customer to give us a kind of what we call a golden data set that's kind of their data set. And then we train the typeface, platform and agents to learn every intricacy about their brand. And in fact, it's a kind of an aha moment when we first show them that we ingest all these documents, PowerPoints, PDFs, their website, social posts on Instagram or TikTok Reels. And then out comes what the AI agent understood as the brand attributes. And when the marketing team sees that, there are two kind of reactions. One, they are just completely blown away, which is for the first time, they are almost seeing kind of their brand in physical manifestation. They have never seen brand represented like that. But then, by the way, sometimes it is a shock, like, oh, is our content and campaign we are running really conveying these attributes? Because that is not what we want our brand to stand for. And so it's kind of both the positive reaction, but sometimes also actually a surprise that, oh, we have been running campaigns that actually are not true to what our brand should stand for.
- [17:01]
Stephanie Postols
Wow. So then, I mean, this Makes me think about how marketers are going to be interacting with. I mean, back in the day, agencies would be the ones who would come in and create a whole. Here's your, your new brand or here's how you're showing up. And we're going to work for three months to go and look at all these things and here's your PDF and we're going to pull it up for you and present it. And now having an AI agent do it in probably not very long minutes of just like quickly pulling something together and showing it to you. I mean, how do you view the future of agencies and this kind of work that's happening in minutes? That used to take months.
- [17:38]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, I mean, this step, I mean, first of all, I don't know how much time we have. This could itself be a long conversation, but I want to keep it. And this could be one of the. I mean, Stephanie, I would love for you and your community to hear obviously their perspective. I know there are probably polarizing views on this kind of the role of agencies or future of agencies. Look, first I would start by saying agencies around the globe have some incredible talent. They have over the years learned exactly a lot of the things we have been talking about. How to decipher this ephemeral thing about a brand and how to kind of represent that in the next campaign. The only problem is it's in the heads of few of their creatives. And if you happen to actually work with the right person, I'm sure you have seen this, if you get the right team assigned to your campaign within the same agency, it turns out differently than maybe the same agency, but a different project team works on it. And that's, that's the reality where that knowledge is so captured in the heads of some of these teams and people. But more importantly, even if they are the world's best creative, they have learned your brand over a decade or two decades. The speed with which they can produce high quality content and campaigns is just fundamentally limited by their bandwidth and their capability, no matter how good they are. And in a world maybe 20, 30, 40 years ago when there was only print, or maybe it was print plus TV or maybe it was print plus TV plus stretch to now Google Ads and web. But today's day and age, as you know it, is so many different platforms, so many different channels, so many physical, digital, web, social ads, e commerce. But more importantly, the expectation isn't that it's going to take us three months to come up with a creative brief, then go back and forth Then align, then do a campaign. Literally some of our customers, one of the largest beverage makers on the planet, actually they are the largest. They basically literally said one of their challenges is for their hero campaigns like super bowl or Oscars. They can plan six months out, they can do the whole process because those are multimillion dollar campaigns and they will always do those. But they said rest of their marketing calendar now throughout the world is so fast paced that so many of their marketing responses have to be 24 to 48 hour responses. And so you can't really have this linear agency process. So my as potentially controversial as it may sound, I actually think agencies there are going to be two kinds of agencies. I think in the future. There are agencies that truly recognize that there is a step function change in productivity, in speed, in economics, that the days of pure labor arbitrage where you just basically charge a bunch of fixed dollar contracts and customers don't have any visibility into how to value what you do. I actually think those days are over. I think that we can debate whether it's too years from now, four years from now, or a year from now, I'm not so or starting today. But I think it's inevitable because the economic benefit companies see and by the way every CMO CEO I talk to already see this. They may not know how to go from where they are today to this future immediately, but it is irreversible and inevitable that the days of very high margin, low speed, kind of a labor arbitrage based agency creative model I think is done Though I think there is still a unique value and role for agencies that truly figure out how to harness the power of these AI agents and AI systems and take some of their best creatives and in fact layer them on top of these AI platforms and essentially do a 10x100x more impactful delivery to your brand. I think the speed and quality of output that is amplified by that human creative last mile element. But the bulk of the heavy lifting is done by these AI systems. And so I think if you look ahead, I think a new breed of agencies are going to come into existence. In fact I know a lot of people just say all the agencies are going to die. Actually my prediction is yes, that probably will happen, but five years out we would probably be shocked at how many brand new AI native agencies have been created and they won't be thousands and thousands of people that are just doing this kind of manual labor based creative marketing, but they would be high value, high impact creative work done by humans and then Massive scale enabled by these AI systems.
- [22:19]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I also feel like this world of marketing is going to continue getting more technical because you do need to understand what these AI agents are doing and how they're. Let's just say if they're creating thousands of campaigns to quickly experiment and test and personalize and then bring back the results and then change the channels that they're focused on, like, I mean, that's a lot that's going into all these movements that are happening. So it does feel like technical skills in this area are going to be very desirable, especially in the marketing space and how to stand out as a marketer, if you understand how you're creating these and what they're doing and why.
- [22:56]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, I completely agree. Now, that said, Stephanie, I do think it's also a mistake sometimes a lot of tech companies in the Valley make, which is just because the technology is powerful. First of all, you can't expect every marketer on the planet to overnight become a prompt engineer. I mean, they're not going to become prompt engineers. That's not their job. That's not what their core skills are. So I would say on one hand, it is up to platform and application builders like Typeface to really bridge the world of AI. I think as powerful as these AI agents and systems are, the power of user experience to make it more and more natural. I mean, one of the things I think ChatGPT has really nailed is, is not just the power of the underlying GPD models, but to actually package it in an experience that feels so natural. And by the way, same with Google search when it happened, or same with iPhone interface. So I do think the holy grail of these inflection points is incredible. Step function change in technology, but packaged up with a extremely innovative natural user interface. And I know that sounds like pretty obvious statement, but I think for marketers, I do think the first generation of these solutions are just putting a prompt box and expecting marketers to write lots of complex prompts and kind of like they're not going to do that. I think they may do it for a day or two just to kind of try it out. So the application builders like Typeface. One of the things I'm very proud of is the team has built a couple of really exciting things. We have a thing called magic prompt. And what it does, it learns from the marketer's brand, what each marketer's personal kind of stylistic attributes are by how they write blogs or how they write copy. And it essentially lets a marketer, just write 2, 3, 4 words of whatever is in their mind and our system will go figure out how to write the most elaborate, most complex prompt that the underlying AI engine understands.
- [24:52]
Stephanie Postols
That's cool.
- [24:53]
Abhay Parasnis
We expect AI to learn who you are, Stephanie, not for you to learn what GPD4O versus GPD Mini is. That's not what your mission in life should be. And so that's one thing. But you are correct that there is a big change management coming ahead for marketers because even as these tools become more powerful and that agency piece we were talking about, as a lot of this work comes in house, they are going to have to figure out how roles evolve. Like what is the job of an email marketer today is maybe they work with an outsourced email agency, they give them a creative brief, that agency takes two, three months, writes a copy, they probably send one or two copies. And your job as a marketer maybe is to read the two versions, pick one, ask the agency to pick the winner and kind of go run or run a B test and actually do kind of selection and then go after that. Well, now it's going to change because now you as a marketer will have to do all audience selection, all the personalization. Now AI will do it for you. But the creative aspect of, hey, what stories should I tell? Different demographics within my customer base. That's not what an agency should be doing for you. That's your brand, that's you. And so I do think one of the biggest challenges, Stephanie, as I work with some of the biggest brands our team team works with the technology is the easy piece. In some ways it is improving, it will continue to improve. We companies like Typeface and many others will keep pushing the limits, but the change management that the companies have to go through is actually going to be the harder piece and it's going to be gut wrenching because not everyone is interested or capable of completely reinventing their Skill set after 10, 15 years in a job and suddenly tomorrow morning somebody tells you, oh, you got to start doing email marketing completely differently or run social campaigns completely differently. And so I think you're right. Those who do it, by the way, they will become extremely marketable in their skills because that skill is now going to be so sought after as this wave progresses.
- [26:59]
Stephanie Postols
So I mean, when it comes to this change management piece, because I mean, you've worked at these very large companies, I'm sure you know how probably difficult it can be to, you know, get a, a team, much less a company on board with being Curious in these new spaces and trying things out and having the space to experiment and fail and just completely just staying curious in a space that's changing so rapidly like this. I mean, I don't even ask people to predict two years from now. I'm like, what do you think about next month? Like where are we heading in this AI space? So how do you get your team on board with this? How do you think about that within your company or these larger companies to upskill in a way that's positive and exciting?
- [27:38]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, that's, I mean that's a great question. And in some ways if you ask me, I mean sometimes when I do these kind of discussions, people say, hey, who is your competitor? Who do you worry about the most? And is it the incumbent that you are kind of whether it's agency or whether it's some big software company or is it the next five startups that kind of are also kind of coming after similar vision or space? And yes, we compete with kind of those in different ways. I actually think this change management piece is the biggest competitor because the opportunity is so massive. I don't think this is going to be one winner take on no matter how great typeface is or any other product is or whatever. I think it's driving that change in complex organizations first, if you ask me today, the single biggest predictor of customers we work with, whether they are going to be really successful in getting big ROI with AI with solutions like typeface or they are going to fail after the initial pilot. There are many factors, but the single biggest predictor is the C level in almost all these companies right now is extremely excited. They are chomping at the bit they want to do. AI sometimes they don't even know what that means, but they want to actually go after this shift. But if they don't have the internal operational rigor and they don't have the champions at the operational practitioner level, oftentimes what we are finding is the C level signs a deal or even brings a solution in. But then the practitioner level is either fighting these solutions because they don't know how to integrate that into their day to day life and their day to day workflow, or they truly, genuinely are scared that hey, if I adopt this solution in a year or two, is this just going to get so good at what it does that either half of my team will no longer be needed. And I think both are very valid concerns. And I don't think Silicon Valley can just brush it off saying oh well, those jobs will go away, new jobs will come in. I think that will happen. But to an average individual who is at the receiving end of that, they're not going to just easily walk into that kind of a change management journey. So I would say that's Stephanie. My biggest challenge right now is not the rate of improvement of AI models or will the cost come down or all the legal frameworks or policies come in place. All those are problems to be solved. But they will get solved. It's every single industry. I mean, I'll give you one data point just to illustrate the scale we are not talking about. I mean the worldwide software industry is few hundred billion dollars after 30, 40 years of PC, then web, then smartphones, cloud, etc. But the labor industry is 10 trillion plus even more than that. And so what's actually going to happen for the first time is that software is no longer actually limited to the purview of automation. It literally is going to touch 10 trillion plus dollars of economic output and change job definitions, industries, workflows at that scale. And so I would say that's the biggest thing. I mean, you said how do we deal with it in our company? That's a little bit easy for us because in some ways, as a company that was built from the ground up to be kind of AI first and we are, our job is to actually deliver these tools. But even then, it's funny you said that because me and my leadership team constantly worry that as we grow as a company, we don't want to become kind of complex in our own business, that the breakthrough solutions that are coming. I mean, one of the things my chief Product officer was just telling me last week that he's actually going to put a mandate around the level of AI tools we are using in our own engineering and product development. And I think we use a lot already, as you can imagine, just kind of being in this space. But we are going to have to keep pushing the Baha ourselves to the next level if we want to be that AI native organization of the future.
- [31:37]
Stephanie Postols
So when you say a mandate like that, do you mean that you're requiring your employees to play with these tools or a mandate as in you can't bring too many new tools into the company? Because.
- [31:48]
Abhay Parasnis
No, no, I think it's actually, first of all, everyone is excited. I mean, I think people want to play with these tools. It's not like, I mean most people are not everyone maybe, but they want to play with these tools. What I meant by first of all, mandate as in use more, not use less. In Our case.
- [32:02]
Stephanie Postols
That's what I thought. Which one to confirm?
- [32:04]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, yeah, no, use more. But use more in the sense that we have to use these to be way more productive, way more faster, way more nimble in how quickly can we respond. So it's not just like hey, try 20 demos of 20 tools, whether it's cursor, windsurf, whatever, GitHub, copilot that people are willingly doing, especially in our space because they want to be on the cutting edge, but actually tying it to the ROI and impact, and maybe that's the last piece of the change management is AI will not succeed no matter how promising it is and how much hype it has and how much excitement it has if these applications and solutions can't directly tie very quickly to either top line revenue growth or tangible savings and ideally both. Because I don't think the days of just saying AI copilot will make you more productive, but trust us, you are more productive. We can't measure how. I don't think that's going to work. I think increasingly CEOs, CROs, CMOs, we do see our customers saying if you show me this is how much you will improve my email, click through rate and improve the conversion of the funnel. Yes. Then I can see a direct dollar roi. And I don't mind actually investing, which I actually think is a good shift for AI solutions to go through because there's just too much noise, too much hype. So that change management coupled with real ROI that you can point to, I would say are the two biggest shifts ahead in the next 12, 24 months, if not longer.
- [33:37]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I mean it's interesting some of the conversations I'm in, half the people say like half of these CMOs, they've been too focused on numbers these past couple years. I mean too tied to metrics that are kind of leading the company the wrong way because they forgot about investing in brand, investing in a longer term vision and keeping an eye on just a three to five year goal versus just how do I make sure I get lots of leads and prove my value as a marketer and show, oh look, here they are. Even if many of them don't convert or even if you have a, a buying cycle that's 400 days long. A lot of these B2B companies have. So how do you think about balancing these two in this space we're in of yes to metrics. I can show you ROI quickly and thinking about how do I invest in brand and a longer term vision too.
- [34:27]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, that's a Great question. And as you know, there's all this kind of, There was all. There has always been this joke that a lot of marketers kind of, they have so much data, all the analytics and they can kind of have dashboard after dashboard. Yet if you ask a simple question about, tell me exactly what your customer journey looks like, where a different customer go through in spite of all that investment and CDP and analytics and AB testing and that's kind of, I would say as an industry there is a bit of ownership, I would say more than bit of ownership on the technology side over the last couple of decades in Martech, where there are thousands and thousands of tools that companies have bought and brought and deployed, yet they don't really have that much better capability to engage their customers meaningfully. I mean, yes, they are keeping up. So to your point, it would be a mistake to just brute force and say, oh, I'm just going to generate 50 more reports of AI. And kind of, by the way, there is this kind of a fun phrase and it's not limited to marketing. So I don't want to be overly harsh to the CMO community that I know, but there are all these kind of reports that have what I refer to as these watermelon metrics. They all look green from the outside, but they actually are red on the inside. They're really unhealthy about your real business. And lots of teams just run their business by staring at these green circles that look great, but it's not translating into improved NPS or improved customer journey or improved customer satisfaction. And so to your point, with things like brand, with things like content, you're going to have to rethink what measurement even means because it's not just, oh, I'll just measure the standard three metrics and if they are trending positively, because as I said, brand is a very ephemeral thing, at least has been so far. And I think that's an exciting area, Stephanie, to your audience. There's probably some interesting startups that are being built or will be built, which is, if you look at typeface, we are more on the content creation, personalization end. But what is the world of measurement in this new world of AI platforms where attributes of brand are now more codified and attributes of these campaigns where I'm like not running a simple a B test, but I'm going to run 100,000 variants, how do I even measure the efficacy of my marketing? I think it's probably a brand new area for innovation.
- [36:53]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I agree. I mean, and they say Even like in the, especially in the B2B space, the buyer already has their mind made up by the time they're looking for a tool. And it's because of the work that you've probably been doing on brand. Because at this point, I mean, a lot of these technologies are becoming, let's just say democratized. Like I think about cybersecurity, you go to a cybersecurity conference and they all look the same and they all use the same buzzwords and they're probably pretty much the same, like maybe a little bit better here and there. But if you end up choosing one, it's probably based off, oh, I've seen that brand, I've heard of it. They've been around, they've been talked about by people I respect. And that's when you make that buying decision because you've already heard of them. And so that's why I think, yeah, thinking about how do you measure brand? How do you look at all the content you're putting out there? How do you see the performance? Is it resonating? It's going to be more important than ever because a lot of these technology companies are kind of converging with some of the capabilities they have access to.
- [37:45]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, just give me maybe to give you a little bit of a teaser of where we are going at typeface, but also where industry is going in that same vein of what you were just talking about. One of the things that our customers are pushing us and telling us exactly like you said, where once they figure out that brand can be codified with these brand agents and I can understand attributes, then they realize I can do this scaled campaign creation where I can do way more emails, way more kind of, but not way more emails than just blast the same email, but personalize and run different channels, different campaigns. Once they realize the conclusion, then they come to is exactly what you said, which is, oh, if I now have my brand codified and if I can run all these campaigns at a far faster speed and personalize micro audiences now I need a way to measure in very granular way what's working and what's not and to if I'm going to measure 100,000 variations of the email, I can't have somebody manually reading Excel or dashboards or tableau reports or whatever. I need the same AI system to become a closed loop performance agent. And so one of the things we are working on is can you do that holy grail of last mile closed loop, which is as you are running this significant number of campaigns, significant number of on brand touch points. Can you build a closed loop AI performance agent that's going to analyze and measure in real time all these micro interactions, what's working, what's not? Because no, again no amount of human beings at agencies they can analyze maybe three or four Google campaigns a month but if I Suddenly start running 10,000 like there is no chance they can analyze that in a meaningful way and in time. And so I do think this closing the loop is one of the things Stephanie, every CMO we are working with is saying if you can get us to a point where these AI agents are creating this closed loop marketing content funnel and our creatives and our marketers are really doing the high value job of curating, inspecting the most high value interactions but they are not in the flow of minute staring at every cell on Excel and analyzing the click through rate like that should just happen automatically and let them focus on the high value brand interaction. So I do think that's where you will see us going which is the last mile closed loop AI agents that just complete the loop back all the way from creative to measurement.
- [40:19]
Stephanie Postols
Yep, I think you just coined that term. I mean it was a term coined when I was back at Google where we always talked about last mile but I think you just coined it for marketing now. So.
- [40:28]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, it's exciting. Well you, you have the platform and community so I'm sure you can drive more awareness.
- [40:33]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, yeah, I definitely am. I would love to hear something that I've had a lot of conversations around. I don't feel like I've gotten a ton of good concrete answers yet is around the world of search and SEO and I mean especially in the space that you're in around personalized content and personalized marketing. How do you think about search of the future? Like how should brands be showing up to be having their results show up in these LLMs and making sure that they are on top and they have enough content out there to actually be fed into these models and found. What's your view on that?
- [41:08]
Abhay Parasnis
I mean that's a multi trillion dollar question for a lot of companies fighting it out. I should say full disclosure, I was one of the early angel investors, one of the first ones in Perplexity which is one of the search by innovators in this space. So just wanted to make sure and I think very highly of them, they're doing some amazing innovative work. But more broadly I do think this is a fascinating question Stephanie, and we do see it a little bit in our business. But as you know, we are not in the consumer search space. We are more on the brand side, how we help brands adapt to this evolving landscape. So maybe I'll give you a two part answer. Parts that seem obvious and clear to me that are going to happen and then parts that are complete unknown right.
- [41:52]
Stephanie Postols
Now, at least to me, I'm here for it.
- [41:54]
Abhay Parasnis
Yes, I think parts that seem pretty obvious and clear that there are going to be some natural progressions of kind of the standard world of SEO is going to have. It's already breaking. I mean it was already breaking even with the cookie less. And then now here comes along these answer engines and now people talk about answer engine optimization or really embedding in content. So I think there is sort of going to be natural evolutions both of technology and business models where the traditional kind of the 10 blue links and just kind of bombarding links and then expect the user to bounce from link to link. I think that world is going to go because people are going to want more synthesized content. And then in some ways it's not exact analogy, but I think what Amazon did many years ago where if you look at their recommendations, they figured out how to actually serve you the most relevant recommendation right in the product pages that you are looking at. And in a way, even though it was an ad, I as a user found it extremely valuable because over time it knew my preferences, it knew my buying habits and essentially it was serving contextually the right products for me at the right moment. And so I would say there is an evolution that's going to happen. Whether people right now are calling answering optimization or embedding, commerce or travel or the big categories will just get included increasingly in these kind of deep research or kind of the answer engineering results. I think that's obvious. And I think either the big players like Google or the upstarts like perplexity and OpenAI will kind of push the limits, see what models work. That is obvious. And then somebody will invent or multiple people will invent the commercial and unit equivalent for that world. And I think we'll go through that intense battle and I think that's easy to figure out. What's not so easy to predict in my mind, which is as these agent based systems become more and more automated and increasingly we can rely on these agents to just do all the research on our behalf and sir was the most synthesized kind of form of insight or piece of information. I think in a way you can think about maybe five years from now, maybe even sooner than that if Today you do 10 Google searches, it is highly conceivable that nine out of those 10, you will never ever even see those searches. An agent will do it on your behalf, will synthesize the most relevant nuggets, and you will probably only see one small piece of insight where you never even saw those nine searches. And so then I think you're going to have to evolve SEO or even answer engine to kind of almost agent engine optimization, where these brands are going to have to optimize themselves for these agents. Like, how do you look appealing to? I know it sounds a little bit Terminator like, but I don't. And it's not. But I do think it's going to be these massive communities of agents collaborating, cooperating, and then brands are going to have to figure out how to actually cut through these swarms of agents to get their brand inside, in front of the user, through the agents. And so I think in some ways people used to complain Google was the gatekeeper or Apple App Store was the gatekeeper in the web and mobile era. I actually think these autonomous agents are going to become the modern day gatekeepers for brands to have to get through.
- [45:32]
Stephanie Postols
Yes, yes, yes. Oh my gosh, I just had a whole visual of how to woo an AI agent and how to get them into your space and hi, pick me. I mean, I think at least my view on this too because I totally agree, like the world will soon be agents to agents. I mean, I was even thinking this when I was using the operator model the other day of ChatGPT and I was like watching it do all these searches and I was like, go, just find me Kendrick Lamar tickets within a few hours drive of Austin under this price point within the next six months. And I was watching what it was doing and that's when I also had this realization of, oh, there's going to be agents on the other side bidding on this. Yeah. And feeding it. And I don't even know what website you're going to. I actually don't even care as long as it's a good result. And so when it comes to giving me stuff I care about, I think that's where having amazing content is going to be necessary. And lots of good Q and A and thought leadership and different kinds of content, especially in this B2B space. Like how do you stand out so that you have a bunch of different formats for these agents to choose from where it's very clear you are the best answer or you have the best answer for what this person's looking for.
- [46:38]
Abhay Parasnis
And I couldn't agree more. I think you said it much better. I know there will always be people and companies and models. They'll figure out like people figure out how to do SEO hacking and they'll figure out how to hack these agents. And yes, that will happen at global scale when you have such a massive opportunity. But the real secret in my mind, and I know it's a little bit potentially self serving to what we do, but if you as a brand have amazing content, an amazing way to engage your customers, you can imagine these agents as they go find the right information. If the value of your content is fresh, it stands on its own merits. It actually is purpose built for the right audiences, it is reinforcing the attributes that the customer may be interested in looking for then. In fact, in a world of AI, you no longer are at the mercy of two or three corporate gatekeepers, but you have these billions of agents where they are really dispassionately going to just pick the pieces of content that actually they think matches the best insight or the best attribute to whatever you as a user want. And so I do think ultimately the real holy grail for brands to adapt to this world is start creating a institutional capability to create extremely high quality, high volume at scale content very rapidly. I mean, I think that is the real holy grail because I don't know how these agents are going to evolve and how agent to agent swarms are going to work. But what I do know is if that is a currency you hold, then your brand will find a way to cut through, through those stories and through that piece of content.
- [48:16]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I agree. The other thing I've been thinking about too, in this world where everyone's going to be wrapped up in trying to figure this out, I think offline things are going to be more important than ever. Events and showing up in the real world and being able to play in spaces that you can compete in differently. I mean, I think the value of relationships these days is so undervalued and getting face to face with people and building a relationship. So, so no matter what company you're working with or what you're doing, you've got this network of people that kind of got lost for a while and I think people forgot, hi, we're humans, we need to all hang out and talk to each other and build relationships and do cool things together. And so I think that'll be a big currency of the future too, is shifting back to like real world things. As the agent thing gets figured out as well, of course.
- [48:58]
Abhay Parasnis
You know, it's funny you said that, Stephanie. Just as a minor digression in my personal life, I'm a big mechanical watch, kind of. I love mechanical watches.
- [49:09]
Stephanie Postols
Are you wearing one?
- [49:11]
Abhay Parasnis
Yes.
- [49:12]
Stephanie Postols
Let me see.
- [49:13]
Abhay Parasnis
It's a langa Zuna. But I would say the intricacy of somebody creating a mechanical kind of a watch, the handcrafting, the physicality of getting the movement right and the art and craft, obviously it's completely kind of idiotic from a commercial sense because in the day and age where everyone carries one iPhone or you have a clock, every device around the room probably has 10 clocks, so you don't need it. But I think the inherent value of going back to these physical experiences, when you said it, it reminded me, by the way, and in case you are not, I'm sure you don't track that one. The mechanical watches are suddenly on a massive resurgence which is exact opposite of what people predicted when Apple watch and iPhone happened. Because people value the physical experiences even more in a world surrounded by billions of similar looking watches. And so to your point, as these agent based marketing systems and even as you cut through content, the physical events and kind of the reality of creating experiences, I do think we are going to see a pendulum swing back to the analogy in many ways. And those who figure out how to leverage AI for what it's good at to do massive scale, massive personalization, but then layer on top of that that extremely human touch element through physical events, communities, bring people together, I think that is going to be the ultimate secret sauce for what future CMOs are going to have to crack.
- [50:47]
Stephanie Postols
So the one thing that I would love to hear your take on is around the future of partnerships which I don't actually get to talk a lot about on marketing trends, but I know when we talked yesterday you mentioned how, you know the future of tech companies that will succeed are the ones who get to also partner with the amazing giants like the sales forces of the world. And I'd love to hear your perspective, especially from maybe like a marketing perspective because this is in the world of marketing partnerships oftentimes falls inside of that. Like how do you think about this and how to really get a leg up in this space so that you can maybe hold onto the successful ones and be a part of everyone winning.
- [51:27]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, I love that. I'm glad you kind of, as you know, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. It's something we have done, we try to kind of, it's a core strategy from day one of typeface. As you know, when we started the company early on, we were fortunate enough to partner deeply with Microsoft and Google and then Salesforce early on. And we are working with these three giants in the enterprise kind of space, on the forefront of AI in their own respective ways. And again, like the agency topical earlier, there's a little bit of a controversy or maybe debate around oh, should startups even bother trying to partner with the big guys? They are complicated companies, it will never work and you should not waste your time trying to kind of make that work. We are 100% convinced that the way this AI kind of shift is going to play out, first of all, it's so massive and big as we have been talking about, that no single company, and certainly not startups, can go take on the entire stack or the entire challenge. So then you have to figure out what is your core competency, where are you going to play in the stack to deliver value to the customer. But then where should you really go? Partner with others who are bringing their own competency, their own unique IP strength, whether it's product, technology, distribution. And so AI, I think Stephanie is different. Unlike maybe the previous shift where there was a little bit of a fear, I think it was a little bit of a zero sum game that startups really have to compete by making the incumbents irrelevant or fight the incumbents and that's the only way you're going to win business. I actually think with AI, what we are seeing is exact opposite. At least our experience is these massive platform companies like Microsoft, Google OpenAI, they are investing billions of hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure laying out global platforms. They need interesting applications to light up these platforms. And yes, they have their own applications, they have Office, they have Google Workspace, so they will do that, but they don't have all the applications. And certainly in the marketing domain, what we realized is they were very keen and eager to say, hey, if you work with us deeply, adopt our technology platform that lets us showcase the power of Microsoft's AI platform or OpenAI's models or in case of Google, Google Gemini. We are very close early partners with both. They get very excited because it starts showing the power of their platforms in applications to end users. So first it is truly a win win where I don't think it's a zero sum game. Now yes, you still have to navigate these complex organizations. They have their own politics, their organizations, their sales structures and that takes a lot of effort. So I don't want to trivialize it, but if you figure it out they are actually extremely motivated right now to pull companies like Typeface into their customer base, their channel, their distribution. Same with Salesforce. I mean, they have been an incredible partner. They continue to be an incredible partner where they have a very broad suite of applications. But they early on made a bet that Typeface represents best in class content engine to integrate with their marketing cloud suite. And so we are now, I think we are the only one, but we are deeply integrated inside their product and their sales teams routinely introduce us to customers, they bring us into their customers and business, and then we jointly demonstrate how Typeface plus Salesforce can completely reimagine your workflow. So I think this is kind of the other side of that agency dialogue where in some ways these big platform companies are also going after that hundreds of billions of dollars of agency spend because they now see that as a category that can move to software from services. And so if you find the right partners, if you create the right win win kind of integrations on product and go to market, we are actually seeing that be one of our biggest tailwinds. Now, we don't disclose exact numbers externally as a private company, but what I would tell you is a, a very large majority of our marketing leads come from doing joint programs and events with these three partners. They bring us in and now we still have to do our part, we have to go execute it. But some of the biggest enterprise wins we have had in the last few years have been with the help of these partners. So it's been extremely valuable and I'm actually even big believer now that our only way to win in AI is by going jointly with these partners. Because as a small company, we'll never have the distribution, the reach, the awareness that these giants have in the market.
- [56:14]
Stephanie Postols
I love this perspective and I think it's something that most marketers don't put enough focus on. I mean, like I said when we talked about this the other day, I'm like, I haven't heard a lot of people talking about this. And I do think it's because of this startup era. I mean, you know, I was in the Bay Area, we were in the Bay Area. Like, you don't want to work with these big guys. They're just going to come and take your IP and then you're going to get acquired by them and then there goes your company culture. And like this has been ingrained into a lot of people, people's mind, at least in the Bay Area. That's all for a while. Yeah. And so it's a Nice mindset shift to think about. How do you partner with companies that make sense? And I mean I'm part of this. I don't know if you've heard of Dan Sullivan. I'm in his entrepreneurship group and he has a whole thing around how do you find partners but also even competitors that you can also work with. And there's so much white space in that market of like, can we get to a collaboration space where it used to feel like competition and like, let's collaborate instead?
- [57:10]
Abhay Parasnis
By the way, and I, to be clear, I don't mean you should be naive. I mean these big companies are going to compete. They are going to want, as soon as they think it's a massive enough opportunity, they will come up. I mean, as I said, for a decade I was at Microsoft, I've been on the other side and so I have no illusions. But I do think in a shift as big as AI, there's so much like if you truly believe that it's a 10 trillion plus opportunity, then they are going to go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of the biggest opportunity. And if they think you can help them win big, they will partner. And I think they are partnering at least. So I agree with you. I think companies who figure out how to do it, it's not easy. But this does feel like a little bit of a different, like, oh, in the Valley it is fashionable. Like any incumbent, it is kind of, you should really be wary, you should kind of trash them every single like. And I think, and maybe it's because at Typeface we have a lot of people who were kind of on the other side for a while. Maybe we have a slightly different view. But one last thing I'll say because a lot of your audience is cmo. One other reason why we are doing this, by the way, these partnerships, it's not just because it's good for our business, which it is. But one other thing, I hear from a lot of CMOs and even CIOs and CTOs that especially in marketing, they really have fatigue of thousands and thousands of point solution. Because marketing, unlike some other functions like in finance, there are two or three ERP vendors and people may hate they have to work with, but it is a consolidated market. Whereas in marketing it is so many point solutions and thousands and thousands of solutions and every marketer wants to bring their next favorite tool into the company and then before you know it, the CIO CTO on one side has a governance nightmare on their hand. Like I don't even know how Many tools my team is using where the data is leaking, whether it's efficient or not. And the CMO doesn't have any end to end visibility as you and I were talking about. And so I think one other reason why we are doing this partnership play is to provide a more integrated platform vision of these capabilities versus going into a brand and a CMO and saying, oh, you know what, you are going to have to spend next five years buying 50 different AI tools and stitching them before you see any results. I don't think most companies want to do that.
- [59:36]
Stephanie Postols
Yep. No, I agree. So this, I mean, brings up an interesting point too. I mean, you were a CTO and now you've got this amazing marketing company. How do you view these worlds coming together? Like how do you think about talking with your CMO or showing a CMO how to talk to a CTO or CIO so that they can collaborate in a way that marketing can move forward and move quickly without breaking the entire tech stack?
- [60:00]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, no, I mean this is the other fascinating topic. I know you and I have talked a little bit about this, but I think, I do think one of the other interesting shift that AI is going to cause in a lot of companies, I don't know if it's going to cause it in every company. I think it, eventually it will, is the functional lines are going to become way more blurred because the knowledge base that these AI systems can kind of truly look across is going to start enabling decision making and strategy definition. And you were kind of already seeing this where the line between what is a product to how you market that product to how you drive sales, whether you call it growth, hacking, PLG or whatever the buzzword is, I think you are already starting to see, even pre AI, a little bit of what is the definition of your product is your website landing page, your product or even the Google query that somebody types in and the experience they get and the commerce experience that likes of Stripe have completely nailed all that is your product, I mean, how you experience. And so I think the line between what a CTO or a CPO kind of quote unquote is responsible for versus what a CMO is responsible for, versus what a CRO. I actually think one of the fascinating things that's going to happen with AI is it's going to collapse now. I don't think accountabilities will go away. But the true customer journey, if it really does become that connected and if these AI agents can truly automate across customer service to marketing, to sales, to product Then a CMO will have to be far more integrated with CTO and vice versa or a CRO and cmo. I mean by the way, even in our own company we just recently hired two amazing leaders, a CRO and cmo. And if I see right now they are more often in the same meetings discussing their entire strategy together because you can't really do your digital demand gen and your campaigns and your content separate from your sales programs and sales activation. And so I think one thing I'm excited about and if I could be kind of hopefully not presumptuous but to say anything to your CMO community, I think CMOs are going to have to actually view their role in a far more expensive fashion. I don't think. I mean I know there was a time where CMO is dead or the CMO role is going away was kind of the thing 10 years ago. I actually think it's going to be the reverse where brand and standing out in the world of these automated agents, what we are talking about becomes more paramount. CMO is almost going to have to play a far more active role upstream in product and downstream in sales and customer success because the brand is going to become more and more of a product that lives everywhere. And it's not just the image you put on your website or a post you do on Instagram. Brand is every single interaction across every single touchpoint.
- [63:06]
Stephanie Postols
Yep. No, I 100% agree. I mean it also it feels like there's going to be a roll up which I think you're kind of saying where you know previously you would have your chief brand officer and your head of customer success and, and I feel like many of those things are rolling up under the CMO and CRO. To me those roles kind of can be mixed sometimes and I don't know how, how I think about who does what with that. But it seems like there are many of these are going to go underneath the CMO because they're the ones who are going to be controlling a lot of these pieces of like how is our brand showing up, how are our customers feeling? Are the support tickets taken care of? All of that seems like it's going to be under one role and whether.
- [63:44]
Abhay Parasnis
The title will be called CMO or like each company we call it differently. And again this is another form of change management because at C level the politics and ownership, I mean it's not going to happen easily but we are actually seeing the good news. Stephanie, back to some of our biggest customers, we see they're already like one of Our largest telecom customers, they now have a new C level role where the cmo, the brand and the growth all report into this one person now.
- [64:12]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah.
- [64:12]
Abhay Parasnis
And so that's kind of starting to happen.
- [64:14]
Stephanie Postols
Yep. I love it. We do a section where it's relevant or not relevant. You just say you know what you think about it. All right, are you ready?
- [64:22]
Abhay Parasnis
Yes.
- [64:23]
Stephanie Postols
Okay. Resumes, not relevant. Banner ads, relevant. AB testing, not relevant. Standing desks, relevant. LinkedIn thought leadership, relevant. The fake zoom backgrounds, not relevant. Corporate swag.
- [64:46]
Abhay Parasnis
Relevant.
- [64:48]
Stephanie Postols
A personal newsletter, relevant. Work from home, next.
- [64:56]
Abhay Parasnis
In between, mostly not relevant.
- [64:59]
Stephanie Postols
Okay. Do you have your people mostly in an office? Yeah.
- [65:02]
Abhay Parasnis
We are big believers in kind of being in office, but people do need and have flexibility. That's why I was a little bit. But yeah, for me personally, the chemistry and being in the back to your thing, kind of being together gives so much energy. As much as I love this dialogue on video, but in person is amazing.
- [65:19]
Stephanie Postols
Always next time you're going to be here right next to me.
- [65:21]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, we would love to do that.
- [65:23]
Stephanie Postols
All right, last one.
- [65:24]
Abhay Parasnis
Pickleball, relevant.
- [65:27]
Stephanie Postols
Do you play?
- [65:27]
Abhay Parasnis
Because I'm disclosing my age, probably bias.
- [65:30]
Stephanie Postols
I play. I love pickleball. It's a big thing here.
- [65:33]
Abhay Parasnis
I love it. Yeah, I love it.
- [65:34]
Stephanie Postols
You do? All right, we have to get you to Austin. We can have a match.
- [65:37]
Abhay Parasnis
Yeah, I would love to do that.
- [65:39]
Rose
Can I ask a quick question just like from my producer perspective?
- [65:44]
Stephanie Postols
Yes, yes. We've got Abe. Get him.
- [65:47]
Rose
And it's actually, it's a question for both of you. I'd love to hear both of your perspectives on it, but as I was listening to you talk about AI agents and agents representing both individual consumer and businesses in both buying and selling, would that lead to a super pragmatic shopping experience where digital content marketing is either going to be obsolete or it doesn't really need to be clever or creative because you're not appealing to human emotion anymore. Like, how do you see digital content marketing changing if it's just AI agent to AI agent?
- [66:18]
Abhay Parasnis
That is a fascinating question and I'm sure actually this is kind of one of those. A little bit like Stephanie's earlier question around search. I think there can be very many valid answers right now and I don't think anyone can prove until it plays out. My personal view, and maybe you can say it's a little bit of a wishful view I have of how agents are going to evolve, is that it would be a very boring and dry world if it just became very emotionless. Dry pragmatic agent to agent conducting transactions and commerce and not having a super emotional kind of storytelling component. Sometimes both functionally relevant to stand out, but sometimes even just for the craft of it. Like we as humans do value those. It's like enjoying an amazing movie or a song. You couldn't really distill its value. Like, does a song have to be really four minutes to like? But it is. And so I think I actually know it's the brands that will stand out, will figure out even in the world of this deeply automated fabric of agent to agent, how to break through and convey deeply, deeply emotional experiences and drive that as your value. So I hope it doesn't go down the path you are describing, but I can see why that's a valid outcome. Also. Stephanie, what's your take? You talk to a lot of people.
- [67:49]
Stephanie Postols
Yeah, I mean, I would see a place where, let's just say a personal consumer agent where I'm like, go out there and do things. For me, I would be having an agent having my values and my humor and the things that I like. And so it probably would only be choosing other things based off of that because I don't think it's just going to be, yes, robotic, go find this. It's like, no, like, this is my style at this point. You've probably got a lot of information on me. I'm voicing into ChatGPT or whatever it might be all the time. So, you know, the things that I look for and care about and how I would filter it myself if I were going out there and searching the Internet. And so I think I would see them being a little bit humanified, like feels like a human interaction because it's built off of the human behind it. And so that's my optimistic view of. Yeah. And why you need to show up as a brand. Also like showing up.
- [68:39]
Abhay Parasnis
I think maybe Rose, as Stephanie was saying the other thing I realized, first of all, I love that I would say maybe Rose. The only thing I would say is it also depends on what category and what the context is. If it's a highly utilitarian kind of a shopping transactional experience, like buying an airline ticket or something, you really don't need that deep emotional connection or it's a very basic price and timing and complex. I think those will probably go down the path that you are describing. And I actually don't think that's a bad thing. I don't need United sending me a lot of emotional emails about kind of how to engage with them. But then if it's buying an engagement ring for my fiance or there are it's going to be different things, I would say in life context. So. But I hope it doesn't go down and become very mundane, monotonous, agent to agent and takes out the fun out of it.
- [69:34]
Stephanie Postols
We won't let that happen, Abhay.
- [69:36]
Abhay Parasnis
I hope so. You will certainly do your part.
- [69:39]
Stephanie Postols
I will do my part. I will tell everyone. Don't.
- [69:41]
Abhay Parasnis
I hope we do ours.
- [69:43]
Stephanie Postols
We are human, so we get to have fun, human experiences here.
- [69:45]
Abhay Parasnis
Exactly.
- [69:46]
Stephanie Postols
Well, Abhay, that was such a fun interview. Thanks for coming on Marketing Trends. We'll definitely have to have you back for round two in the future. So. Yeah, thanks for joining.
- [69:53]
Abhay Parasnis
We'd love to.