← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
How Agentic AI Will Transform Sales & Marketing
00:17:18
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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Benjamin Shapiro
From advertising to software.
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Daniel Sachs
As a service to data, across all.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate.
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Daniel Sachs
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
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Podcast Announcer
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss agentic AI. Joining us is Daniel Sachs, who is the co founder and CEO of Landbase, whose proprietary suite of specialized large language and action models are trained to orchestrate sales and marketing workflows, helping businesses automate, unify and optimize go to market processes all in one place. And today Daniel and I are going to discuss how agentic AI will transform marketing.
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Current Podcast Host
But before we get to today's interview, I want to tell you about what I'm listening to. Ever wanted to sit down to a candid conversation with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands? The current podcast is your chance. On the current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising. And they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@www.thecurrent.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, here's my conversation with Daniel Sacks, the co founder and CEO of Landbase. Daniel, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
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Daniel Sachs
Great to be here.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Benjamin, excited to have you on the show and excited to talk about the topic of the year, probably the topic of the decade. We're going into artificial intelligence and its impact on marketing, but you specifically have a focus on agentic AI. So I want to start off with a segment that we call Explain it to Me. So explain what agentic AI is like. I'm a fifth grader.
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Daniel Sachs
Many of us are familiar with large language models that generate Content and you chat and interact with it in natural language. The impact has been mind blowing. In my view, agentic AI is going to be that much more impactful because it's not just about chatting, it's about your software working for you so you can reclaim your day and do more of what you love. In simple terms, agentic AI is software that takes action based on data. So therefore, activities that you may have done in the past, manual repetitive processes across many different software tools can be automated with your approval.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So if I'm in fifth grade, what I'm getting from you is agentic AI is a machine that just does stuff for you, right? As opposed to your traditional AI. Like you got prompted and then it gives a response. But this like can do more complex stuff. Am I right?
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Daniel Sachs
Yes. And large language models really are designed to understand natural language. But agentic AI can be built on transformer models or models that can act on things. So my belief is that every different vertical will have a specialized model that will help for better performance. You might have a model for biotech or radiology. What land base is focused on is a go to market model that can help businesses generate leads by predicting outcomes. So just like there's large language models, we have a large action model that we've trained, which is a series of models that are designed to understand and execute go to market campaigns that are going to generate leads for businesses.
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Benjamin Shapiro
You know, my fifth grade brain got really excited when you said Transformers. So I kind of want to understand what that is. I understand what a large language model is, right. And most of the time we're using it in some sort of a chat feature. When you say the transformer part, what does that mean?
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Daniel Sachs
One of the cool things that came out of the AI evolution is this paper, a research paper from researchers at Google called attention is all you need. And it was a concept of how to train AI in a new way. And that laid the foundation for large language models and companies like OpenAI. But a lot of the basis for that was this concept of a transformer, which is the type of model that's been designed. Some people refer them as foundational models or applied models, but that's the technology that enables these next generation of AI.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It seems like with Transformers and agentic AI, the idea is not just if I give you a prompt, you go and you take all the data that's in your large language model and try to answer the question. It is this notion of thinking and taking separate actions. Okay, hey, do me a favor, go figure out My go to market. Okay. First I'm gonna analyze what market you are in. Then I'm going to look at the competitors, their packaging and pricing. Then I'm going to think about where you can differentiate your product. And now that I think about how you're different, I can come up with a customer segment and then I can tailor the outreach to those customers. Right. Agentic AI is I've done five different steps to get an outcome and then take an action, as opposed to just displaying information back to you based on the information you're giving. Am I thinking about that the right way?
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Daniel Sachs
You use the term prompting, and in my view, people are used to prompting software or telling software what to do, whether it's chatting with it or whether it's moving your cursor to click on a button. And in the future, I think we won't have to prompt our software, but our software will prompt us. So there may be an action or a signal that the AI can identify based on something that happens online. Maybe someone visits your website, maybe someone fills out a form. Maybe there's an activity in the industry that's going to trigger something and your AI will actually alert you. We'll frame it in a way that you can easily act on it. So think of it as simple as just saying yes, no, or maybe, and you can take that action instantly. I think it's going to speed the pace of business in a dramatic way, because no longer do we have to debate, decide, understand, collaborate. We can have our AI telling us exactly what's going on based on data. We can have full approval, control and agency if we want to approve that action or not. But it allows us to clearly be empowered and ready to drive actions to your point that are going to result in predictable outcomes.
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Benjamin Shapiro
As a fifth grader, my dad hasn't let me watch the Terminator yet, but I did get to watch Iron Man. And what it sounds like agentic AI is sort of like Jarvis, the little machine that's whispering in Iron Man's ear, telling him all the things that he should be looking out for and doing, as opposed to a prompt LED type of artificial intelligence experience like we have right now. The good news is it's not Terminators raining down from the sky trying to kill us all. So I'm really excited because as a fifth grader, I still get some nightmares.
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Daniel Sachs
So I have, like, a majorly optimistic view on the world, and it is easy to take the Iron man approach or the Terminator approach, and you could see both being very possible. But I think with the advent of AI you could say, okay, it's going to take our jobs or we're going to be connected to neuralink and just, you know, no longer ourselves. Or there may be all these challenges with climate and pollution. However, if you take the optimistic side, I think this next generation of AI can free us up to reclaim our day and do more of what we love and be in person and be more human and connect again with nature. Because a lot of the manual repetitive tasks or a lot of the soul sucking elements of just being glued to your screen are going to go away and are going to be replaced by us being able to interact the way we have over many, many hundreds of years or thousands of years, which is in person and in nature. And I think with that free time we can free ourselves up to think about some of the world's bigger challenges and drive innovation and harness machine intelligence to just create transformative outcomes.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I spend a lot of time on the playground with my buddies throwing a ball around and I see my parents walking around with their phones in front of their faces all the time, no matter where they go. And they're not talking to other people around there because they're also immersed in the technology and they get distracted. And it sounds like what you're saying is that this notion of agentic AI, not only only at work but in regular life, will help us move away from the screen and get to engage a little bit more and be a little bit more human. Ironically, it might take the machines to help us get back to being human. That said, I want to get back to our go to market and an agentic AI conversation. Let's move on to our next segment which we call buy or sell. Are you buying or selling? That marketers will be out of a job because agentic AI will do what they can do today.
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Daniel Sachs
I think the creative elements of marketing are going to be more important than ever. And understanding the specific niche of your buyer positioning is going to be more important than ever. And the human interaction of marketing is going to be more important than ever. That being said, a lot of the manual repetitive tasks that marketers take today can definitely be optimized. And I think in order for marketers to be able to keep pace, they are going to have to evolve to adopt quick, best in class technology. Because I do think that the human brain can only drive some level of performance, but it's going to be capped. But if you could harness top human performance with machine intelligence, you could have far better data driven outcomes. One of the things that I think is going to be a durable value for marketers is that one of the challenges with AI is it brings us very closer back to the meme. If you notice, if you're like chatting with AI, it's always going to kind of bring you with the best practice. So if you say something like, how should I position my restaurant? Or if you ask a large language model, what do you think about this marketing trait? It's actually going to just take the collective knowledge and wisdom of everything they know and mix it all together so we actually all become more similar. The messaging becomes less differentiated. That's a big challenge. So I think the key in building brands in the future is how do you fiercely differentiate? How do you push the boundaries of creativity and risk? And I think that marketers need to be equipped to do that on behalf of their customers as well. And it's going to be more difficult than ever because everyone wants to revert back to the mean. And that's what the AI models are going to tell us. So the best marketers, in my belief, are going to deeply understand the pains of their customers and be able to focus in a niche and be able to identify, okay, if you're the seventh restaurant in Palo Alto that serves Japanese food, what's different about you and how do we push for that differentiation?
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Benjamin Shapiro
I'm going to make you answer the question, are you buying or selling that? Marketers are going to be out of the job because artificial intelligence can do some of the common tasks that they rely on to be functional.
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Daniel Sachs
I'm going to buy marketers all day, but I'll sell marketers that aren't empowered by AI.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Right, good.
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Daniel Sachs
That's great.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Thank you. There is some segmentation in this. I kind of think about it from software engineering in a similar fashion. The most creative, intelligent software engineers that are thinking about the database structure and the flow of data and how they're writing their code and what the purpose is and what they're trying to solve, and they could build these large, complex ecosystems, that's still a valuable skill. Functionally tapping out the code letter by letter with your fingers is a commodity. So if you are just somebody who's there that has to be fed what they're building, what they're doing, and you're just operationalizing it, you probably have some problems. If you're a marketer who is not thinking strategically about how to reach your customers and what are their problems and how can you solve them and how can you add value, but you're Purely just the operational, like, let me get this email campaign up and out because somebody told me I need to do it. You can be replaced. The strategists, the people that are actually thinking about the function and art form of marketing are always going to have a role. The people that are just tapping the buttons and sort of being operators, they're in trouble.
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Daniel Sachs
Yes, I'm along with that.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, good. All right, let's move on to our next segment. I want to ask you, this is a crystal ball. Look at your crystal ball and tell me what do you see from marketers in 10 years as agentic AI develops?
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Daniel Sachs
So I think that there's sometimes a misstet expectation around timelines. So we're in the early innings of AI agents and agentic AI. And what I've seen from decades in technology is that legacy stays alone for many, many years. So I think that some of the core old school offline skill sets that marketers have had are going to be very, very durable. But if I were to project 10 years out, I do think a lot of go to market can become much more autonomous. So what that means is machine intelligence will bring data to the forefront to frame decisions and ways to make business owners be able to do that far easier. So the role of a marketer will shift. And funny enough, I think the role of the marketer will go back to what it probably was 20, 30 years ago, which is much more creative strategy. Campaigns, brands and a lot of the elements that have evolved in the last 15 years of performance marketing and toggling between HubSpot and Marketo and all these different things. Like, I think that's actually what's going to go away. So what we're going to see is automation of the roles that you should just live in. Many different fragments of software, doing a lot of manual repetitive processes across siloed teams. And we're going to go back actually to a world of marketing that probably was what it was like more like 30 years ago, where you're thinking, how do we creatively bring a campaign to market across radio and tv? How do we have a live event that really connects and evokes some emotion? I think that's the kind of stuff that marketers are going to be working on.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I love that and I hope you're right. It's interesting. We've gone through these phases in marketing. I always refer to it as the Mad Men era of marketing, where it was about sitting around in Eames chairs drinking a bourbon cocktail, thinking about what the slogan you wanted on Your billboard or what was going to be said in your radio ad.
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Current Podcast Host
Right.
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Benjamin Shapiro
We can all pretend to be Don Draper back in the day and that was what was considered marketing.
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Daniel Sachs
Well, you gave me the crystal ball and I do think that we're going to go back to something much more creative. But maybe instead of whiskey, it will be with champagne, my drink of choice.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Maybe you were looking at the crystal ball the wrong way and you were looking into the past. But we were all about creative strategy because the channels we were relying on were print, radio, maybe some television and newspapers. Then we got into the Internet era and functionally it was so much more operationally complex that we went into the like. It doesn't really matter what I'm saying, it just matters how much I can get in front of somebody. And if I can put the right combination of campaigns together, I just get this massive impression burst. And it was just about getting in front of people and staying in front of them. That really became valuable and we deprioritized the creative piece. Now it seems like we might be able to have the best of both worlds. You can get in front of people and stay in front of them, but that's more of an operational tactic that the artificial intelligence. So really the differentiator is going back to that original creative part. So in 10 years are we just going to be sitting around looking at billboards that are popping in front of us, in front of our like AI meta Apple glasses and that's how marketing is going to be delivered.
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Daniel Sachs
Well, I can share something really interesting. So we train this go to market model with 40 million campaigns. It has context to 175 million business contacts, 22 million businesses, ratings and reviews, the context of the public Internet, a lot of private data. So just think of this as like the AI engine for go to market. And that way we're able to tap the model to understand what campaigns are performing, what are not, what's trending. And you won't believe it, but the most differentiated campaigns that we've seen these days are offline channels, in person, door to door, literally. Old school phone calls, events, billboards, those are the ones that are hitting and making a difference. What we find is a lot of the repeatable digital channels, whether that be cold email ads, they're an important warning channel. So to drive awareness and to touch someone, because you need to hit someone many, many times for them to be familiar with your brand and then engage with you. But the differentiated channels today are actually the old school channels.
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Benjamin Shapiro
And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Daniel Sacks, the co founder and CEO of Landbase. If you'd like to get in touch with Daniel, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company's website, which is landbase.com A special thanks.
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Current Podcast Host
To the Current Podcast for sponsoring today's interview. If you're looking for candid conversations with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, then give the Current Podcast a listen. On the Current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to The Current at www.thecurrent or anywhere you get your podcasts today.
- [17:21]
Benjamin Shapiro
Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our newsletter and you can even apply to be the next guest speaker on the Martech Podcast. Of course you can reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod. On Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. You can contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjshaf B E N J S H A P. Also, we're doing a lot of work on YouTube, so if you want to follow these conversations or get some short form snippets, you can go onto YouTube.com and look for Martech Podcast. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year, so hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
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Podcast Announcer
Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit Iheareverything.