← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
AI Revolution in Marketing with Kevin Surace
00:52:07
Loading summary
Transcript174 lines
- [00:03]
Kevin Serrace
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies.
- [00:09]
Matt Bertram
Top marketers use to crush the competition.
- [00:12]
Kevin Serrace
Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started.
- [00:17]
Matt Bertram
Hi, welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. As everybody's been asking about AI and LLMs and where the future's going, I thought it'd be great to bring on what one of the forefront experts in the field on it, I think. Kevin, how many keynotes do you do a year or something? Like 50 or 60 keynotes?
- [00:40]
Kevin Serrace
Yeah, yeah, between 40 and 50. Typically. I just got off a plane from.
- [00:44]
Matt Bertram
Another keynote, so we are lucky to have Kevin Serrace. Right, It's Kevin Serrace and he has been in applied AI. He's been known as like the father of chatbots. Is that right?
- [00:59]
Kevin Serrace
Like father, the virtual assistant. I invented the darn thing and it was almost 30 years ago and so Siri and Alexa and all of that had a license, all of that original technology to continue to survive.
- [01:12]
Matt Bertram
Well, I just feel honored to have you here and I have some questions. Like I said that I had some LLMs help me create because I thought it was appropriate, but I just want to open it up to you of like what's most topical right now. What are you looking at? What, what are you talking about? To just kind of set the table for everyone.
- [01:31]
Kevin Serrace
Well, look in the AI space and especially if you're in marketing and maybe you're in marketing if you're listening to this podcast. You know, when I talk to marketing people, you have everyone from I don't really use it, I don't believe in it all the way to I'm doing everything with it. Okay. And it broadly meaning gen AI, and that could be multimodal, it could be analysis of, of, of papers or documents, analysis of spreadsheets, analysis of performance, analysis of ROI and CAC and LTV and things like that. Certainly creation of content. But, but I would open with this, right? If you are not the expert, the expert in doing everything you can in your job, not playing, but doing well, then someone else will be the expert and you will be gone. Because the people using this technology, including me, I use, I use gen AI for every single thing, right? So I ideate, I create content, I modify the content, I analyze all kinds of documents, right? And I'm easily 10 times more productive than I was 10 years ago. And actually critically thinking more.
- [02:49]
Matt Bertram
I mean the multimodal component is fascinating because you can upload documents, you can take Pictures of stuff, it can help analyze that. And now it remembers like your previous conversation. So it's building that kind of body of knowledge. We actually have an AI that answers our phone. So we, we, we did end up kind of switching over to that. I kind of felt like if the big agencies or the big marketing companies, like let's say Google and Meta and stuff like that, you can't get anybody on the phone unless you like know somebody. I was like, well, why can't everybody else do it too? Right? And so, so we implemented that probably a year and a half ago and it was really quite effective of capturing the right information, qualifying the people, passing it off to the right department. And we had to, we had to work on a little bit to kind of polish it for people. That, and, and we had a, hey, we're an AI, Right, Right. Like, and, and that's changing. Some people are wanting to talk to AIs more than humans. So I, I don't know what, what are you, what are you most concerned about? Like, I know as we were talking in the pre interview, there's certain industries that are a little slower to adopt. There's people that I'm talking to in other industries that are using it as a plaything. Like hey, I made a little video with my kids, I made some images, pictures. But like, like you said, marketing. And there's another industry that I'm not going to name that is really risk taking on the cutting edge and seems to drive everything forward. And so I'm seeing from a governance even standpoint, from corporations, marketing's leading the charge. I mean, is that something you're seeing?
- [04:29]
Kevin Serrace
Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Look, when you, when you look at this era of Gen AI, a lot of what it does is generate content, does a lot of other things, finance and other things, but it easily generates content. So an example, I'm in the tech industry and if I wanted someone outside to write a blog post for me, I would hire that person and it might be 500 to 1500 dollars and it might take a week or so and they'd write my next blog post and I go, that's it for that weekend. I'd do it again next week and do it again next week.
- [05:03]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [05:03]
Kevin Serrace
And we go back and forth, etc. Well, today if I really want to write a blog post, I start thinking about writing all 52 blog posts for the year today.
- [05:14]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [05:15]
Kevin Serrace
And I can ask a modern model, first of all, go review my entire website. From that Entire website, generate 52 possible topics for my blog post. Then I start going to each one and say now generate a thousand words for each one that align with other things we're already saying on the website, but promote what we're trying to say without being too commercial, etc, etc, so I can set those bounds. So basically at the end of that I've got 52 blog posts and I'm gonna, and I have that in under an hour, maybe 30 minutes. And then after that I'm gonna spend the rest of the day editing those, cleaning them up, throwing a few out, replacing them, etc by the end of the day I've done blog posts for a year. I didn't hire anyone. I'm done in a day that is at least a thousand x improvement over any other way we've ever done this. A thousand X. That is market changing that. That is a complete change. And anyone can do what I said, you know, with just a few hours of experience of understanding how to ask for what you want and get it right. We've never seen that kind of democratization of content generation, good or bad. You actually don't need 10,000 hours of marketing knowledge to actually execute that plan, edit those things and have them ready to go out. You know, probably a junior person could do that pretty good job at it.
- [06:43]
Matt Bertram
So that was, I think one of the reasons why Google added to the kind of framework of eat expertise, authority and trust. They've added from the expertise to experience, like having experience that layer and they've kind of brought back authorship of like who's saying it right? As a, a lawyer, a doctor, or is it me or is it you? Like it's going to weight those things differently. I also think that the next layer is what I'm more concerned about and where I'm focusing my time is now the ideation and the cleanup phase. Like I've seen some workflows where it can continue to ideate that you can, you know, upload different documents. It can, right?
- [07:21]
Kevin Serrace
I do it all the time here, here's five documents I've already written. Combine them, clean it up and cut it to a thousand words. Boom. You know, not that I can't do it, but why would I? I wouldn't do a better job than it can. And by the way, it's an English major, PhD, right? I'm not.
- [07:38]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [07:38]
Kevin Serrace
It learned literally a trillion English phrases. I think it's pretty good at it.
- [07:44]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, well, I'm looking at like so the agent, like so with these questions that I got and we'll have to get to some of these, because I think they're pretty good. I, I put in your website and I said, go call the website, summarize the website, give me some questions. That would be helpful. And it broke it apart into some great categories and it referenced what we said. That agent, you can now use automation attachments to attach it to WordPress and say, okay, those blogs that you wrote, go ideate it. Maybe there's a human person checking it in the middle, like a subject matter expert checking it. Okay, okay, it. And, and then that agent continues to work autonomously to go post it on the website based upon a workflow for.
- [08:24]
Kevin Serrace
The next 52 weeks.
- [08:25]
Matt Bertram
For the next 52 weeks. Like, or you're like, you know, and now I'm seeing, you know, the spam get out of control of people putting these things on autopilot and going, I want to blog a day about all these topics on all these. Like, it, like, what, what are the, the rate of content creation. Google can't even keep up with it, and it's like unannouncing stuff. And, and we need so much compute powder to do it. Like, are there bigger issues when you look at it at a higher level of things that you're seeing from a trend standpoint?
- [08:55]
Kevin Serrace
Well, well, certainly. So, so, so let's just. First of all, we've been through this already, and I'm going to use the podcast as an example. Okay. It used to be 20 years ago, there were, I don't know, 20 or 30 radio broadcasts that mattered on a national basis. Maybe there were 10. There weren't many.
- [09:13]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [09:13]
Kevin Serrace
But yeah, but if you wanted to broadcast and be heard nationally, you had to get on a radio network or build a radio network, right? An independent radio network and have a syndicated. And people did that. So like I said, maybe there's a dozen, maybe there's two dozen. It wasn't many. In the last decade, as podcasting became practical and very inexpensive, like for a couple hundred bucks, I've got everything I want, and it sounds good and it looks good, and, and everything else, we have approximately 45 million podcasters. We've democratized the ability to broadcast. Now there's a long tail on that. The vast majority of them have probably less than 100, you know, watchers or listeners a week. And then there's the Mr. Beast, you know, that's making 65 million a year.
- [09:55]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [09:56]
Kevin Serrace
So we democratized access to create this content and push it out. Now, that didn't destroy anything. Didn't destroy anything. In fact, it allowed Us to create these niches that literally only 100 people listen to a week. But it's your most, you think it's very important what that person is saying or their guests or, or whatever it is. It's fascinating. So we have been through this, we've like seen this happen. You could argue, but we did that with video and YouTube. Before YouTube, you know, there was, there was no ability to share your videos, basically any, anything with anyone. Now there are millions of videos uploaded every day. Every single day. Doesn't overload anything. Google's built the servers to handle it.
- [10:40]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [10:42]
Kevin Serrace
And they're indexed and they're closed captioned and everything else. It's fascinating. Right. So we've seen this happen before. So now we're generating an immense amount of marketing content that's mostly AI generated.
- [10:53]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [10:54]
Kevin Serrace
Because it's just so good and so dead.
- [10:56]
Matt Bertram
Internet theory is. I've kind of gone back to that. I don't know. I know that it's dead because all.
- [11:03]
Kevin Serrace
Of it is just AI talking to AI and no humans care. But, but that would be like saying the dead podcast theory, but it isn't really.
- [11:11]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [11:11]
Kevin Serrace
There are 45 million podcasts and someone's listening to virtually all of them, some at the very far tail. It's just their family listens.
- [11:18]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [11:18]
Kevin Serrace
But nevertheless that that's what it is. And, and, and the same with YouTube. I mean you could say it's the dead video theory. There's a ton of YouTube videos that have only been watched two times. I mean probably millions, million, maybe hundreds of millions. And then there's some that have been watched hundreds of millions of times. So you democratize the ability to create this content, it creates a long tail, but nothing seems to blow up. We get used to it as humans and we go, interesting. Now YouTube is starting to see, and we're going to see a lot more over the next two years as this technology advances. Lots and lots of AI generated videos.
- [11:54]
Matt Bertram
Oh yeah.
- [11:54]
Kevin Serrace
Well, what I like about that is it's still in general the thought of the human, that is. I came up with a topic, a subject, maybe a script, maybe an idea, maybe whatever. And I generated a short or long or whatever long form video or whatever it is. And I'm now using tools that allow me to look as good as Hollywood. I couldn't do that before, right? I could look as good as an iPhone, which is incredibly good, by the way. But I couldn't look like Hollywood. I couldn't do those effects. Well, now I can, I can have a rhinoceros run on the moon if I want. Right. There's no problem to do that. Hollywood's been doing that for 25 years with CGI, but now everyone can do it with AI or soon. And so we'll have a proliferation of that. But still, you know, if you think about it, there's a human behind it somewhere. So, yes, we're generating a blog post today. And people used to generate a blog post today. It was really hard. You had to go around the company and find the next person to write something and line it all up and manage it. And now I could really just have AI do it. And I have to come up with some ideas, but they've come off my own website, so it's fine.
- [12:58]
Matt Bertram
So. So Kevin, on like the early adopter curve, which I think we're kind of like, in that, like general adoption is kind of starting to happen. The people that are pushing the edge, like, so like music, like you're, you're heavily involved in music. AI in music. I remember there was a guy that, I don't know if it was art or music or something, but he basically won the award and then came out and said it was all AI generated, right?
- [13:20]
Kevin Serrace
Yes.
- [13:20]
Matt Bertram
And, and even in podcasts, you got the notebook lm right. You can upload a document and have two AIs talk and eventually. That's right, that's.
- [13:28]
Kevin Serrace
I do it by the way. I use it all the time. By the way. That is use of Notebook LM real quickly to generate a podcast is amazing for companies. Let me tell you why. I can take our latest press release that no one's going to read and create a 15 minute podcast that everyone can listen to on the way to work. And they will.
- [13:46]
Matt Bertram
I know.
- [13:46]
Kevin Serrace
I use this as an example all the time. So it looks like a toy and then you go, actually, this is quite valuable. And in fact, I can put out other content that way. I can take our own press releases from any company and say you might want to listen to it as a podcast instead. And these two people talk about it and they interact and the whole thing's written, you know, scripted by AI off of only the data that was in that. In that press release.
- [14:09]
Matt Bertram
So, Kevin, where do marketing agencies and marketers? Because that's mainly who listens. And I know you, you have a company out there that does like, it checks code and you know, you're. I want you to speak to some of that because we have a lot of web developers that listen to this call, a lot of agencies listen to this Call. What do they need to be doing to prepare to, to continue to keep pace with the changes that are happening? Because if, if it's democratized and everybody's more productive, it just raises the bar, right?
- [14:41]
Kevin Serrace
That's right. We talk about this a little bit in that when you use Gen AI, you use it not to play and not to toy and not, but you use it as part of your workflow all the time. And it could be with agents or non agent, it doesn't really matter.
- [14:57]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [14:57]
Kevin Serrace
What happens is we're multiplying your brain by 10 or 20 or 100x. Right? So all of a sudden we've amplified your, it's your brain, you kicked it off. It doesn't actually do anything by itself. Even Agent Agenic doesn't do it by itself. You set it up. You set it up, you program. You said go execute these things and it's on my command and I can turn you off tomorrow.
- [15:17]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [15:19]
Kevin Serrace
So we've multiplied your brain, We've amplified your brain. And so this is really critical because if we've amplified Matt's brain and I'm competing with Matt and I refuse to use this stuff, Matt is now a hundred times more productive than I am. And the clients will begin to expect that because that's what happens. The kinds the clients begin to expect that the agencies use the state of the art, whatever it is, right? Whatever the state of the art is at that time. And, and so look, there was a time when the Internet didn't exist, but marketing agencies did exist. We go back to Mad Men. We can go before Mad Men. Right? I see the Mad Men post.
- [15:59]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, yeah.
- [16:00]
Kevin Serrace
So the fact of the matter is we've been marketing for a long time. We've been marketing before there were newspapers.
- [16:05]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [16:06]
Kevin Serrace
I mean this is incredible. And as new technology come, look, when the Internet hit, if you were a market agency that said, well, we don't do that Internet stuff, you know, we still just do print ads. Well, eventually your business dried up, just went away.
- [16:21]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [16:22]
Kevin Serrace
So this isn't new. So if you're not, you know, Jenny I has been with us a couple of years, two and a half years. If you are not at the forefront of that, it's okay. Your clients will find someone who is.
- [16:33]
Matt Bertram
Yes, that's true. Like I, I think I, I just got back from a future of SEO conference and the stuff that I'm like know that's possible. You know, there's a lot of kind of roadblocks and how to figure it out and what's the right, you know, what's the right LLM to do it. But I mean they're, they're about three months, four months ahead of where I want to be. And I look at that going, I gotta catch up. Like it's only three or four months. But that's, I mean that, that's a, that's so much time. Like, that's so much time in this world of how everything's progressing. I mean, Google just rolled out all this stuff with YouTube. And I mean, they can make, like you were talking about the videos that Hollywood can make. You can make that for 40 bucks. Like you can make scenes for 40 bucks. Like you can make commercials that are $15,000 commercials for, you know, a hundred bucks.
- [17:24]
Kevin Serrace
And I've, I've, I, I demonstrate some of the, some commercials that have already been made fully with AI and these are for very large companies who easily would have spent a million or more on that commercial. Not 15K. They would have spent a million on the commercial.
- [17:39]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:40]
Kevin Serrace
Probably 20 million placements, right? So, or 50 million or 100 million. So, and, and, and they were able to make it, you know, for substantially less than that. Now they could have made it for $40, but they hired a team, anyone, they probably spent 100 grand on instead of a million. But the point is, no question you are going to see Hollywood grade commercials shot with no cameras, no sound, no lighting, no actors. No actors. I thought it was interesting when SAG was, was on strike last year and they demanded that they have AI in their contract. So if someone uses their likeness, they get paid. And I'm going, guys, you've already missed the boat. We're not going to use any of your likeness. With all due respect, there will be films in the future and commercials and everything else that are made strictly with AI characters. And then people say to me, no, no, we won't want to watch those. Really? You want to talk about Shrek?
- [18:35]
Matt Bertram
They're already, well, they're already watching them like the influencers online. And, and some of these people, like some of them claim that, oh, I'm a human, but half of them are not human. And you can't tell the difference. No, like you cannot tell the difference.
- [18:48]
Kevin Serrace
Cannot tell the difference. The technology has come along so far and so fast, you cannot tell the difference. And it's game changing and I think it's great. I mean, look, it's here, right? Train left the station. Now you brought up one thing, is the future of SEO. Let's talk about that. Because I think the market is in quite a turmoil for the moment. Yeah, the turmoil is this. Every day more people are using AI to make the recommendations for them, whether it's a local restaurant, a local dry cleaner or a car to buy or whatever it is.
- [19:21]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [19:22]
Kevin Serrace
We have spent 30 years understanding SEO and, and yes, I know that the Google algorithms change and we reverse engineer and we try to figure it out. You know, we've all been through this, right? But we understood about backlinks, we understood about how you're chatted up on other websites, we understood about building all of these other sites so that you're referenced on the sites. And like this is the, this is the tradition of what we do. All of a sudden, you know, the chat GPT isn't recommending you as the best dry cleaner in town. And there is no algorithm that changes that either quickly or easily.
- [19:58]
Matt Bertram
That's true.
- [19:59]
Kevin Serrace
What do you do with that? So we're going to figure it out. But, but the whole idea of jumping to websites may be gone. People may not do much at websites. They may take the recommendations of the AI and just execute on that.
- [20:13]
Matt Bertram
So Kevin, that's actually google like 2 weeks ago just launched like all this new stuff and it's pushing it towards what you talked about, YouTube and agentic AI. And really the customer journey is like, I don't want to go do all the research, I don't want to click on all the websites. That's right, just do it all for me, aggregate it. Tell me what I should do. Give me, okay, chat GBT like six links like and, and it's going to be different based upon the whole conversation, what that knows about you. Like, it's very, very personalized and it's all.
- [20:45]
Kevin Serrace
Matt, it's already part of Google search now because they have let AI answer the search for you, the overview search. And more and more people are choosing the AI search because. Do you remember. Well, you remember it's still today, I've got to be on the first page of the Google search, right? I got to be on Google, Google results. I got to be on the first page. Got to be on the first page. Now it doesn't matter if you're top on the first page. There is no page. Yeah, AI answered the question.
- [21:10]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, on the buying cycle they're going to go head to head against Amazon now because, well, right, everything's happening on YouTube or everything's. And I think the AI overviews are like slowing down the LLMs or trying to slow down the LLMs to go to a new platform. But I'm seeing a lot of people switch over that don't even go back to Google unless they're going to buy now, right? They're doing all the research and ideation in the LLM and then, then they're like, okay, let me go verify some stuff. Let me just look at the website and make the purchase. Traffic's been cut in half, actually by 60% on average across the board. And the buy cycle. Google's just saying, just buy it now with us. Like, you don't even have to leave Google, right? You don't have to leave YouTube. Like, it's very disruptive to, to a lot of people, especially to you who's.
- [22:00]
Kevin Serrace
In this marketing game. And you go, everything I've learned over 30 years doesn't work any.
- [22:06]
Matt Bertram
And that's why I'm bringing people like you on to help make sense of all this and people that are listening. I mean, we've been doing this podcast for 12 years and the rate of change, like I have this graph, I'm about to do a webinar to talk about some of this stuff, but there's a standard deviation change to 2024 over the last 15 years of all the changes that were kind of like one a year, like that pace sped up and then from 2024 to 2025 it's like three standard deviations higher of all the changes in their testing stuff, like daily and like everything's going crazy. And even like traffic is a big metric that's not a metric anymore. It's like. And almost when you get into the top positions or you get into the AI overviews, people also ask. Your traffic disappears because people are getting their answer on Google. They don't have to go to your website for it.
- [22:57]
Kevin Serrace
That's right.
- [22:57]
Matt Bertram
So it actually is like inverse. It's really interesting. I just did a post about that on, on LinkedIn. Is revenues up, Impressions are up, traffic's down. Like it's, it's wild. And, and so I'm trying to make sense of all where, where this is going from a futurist standpoint. Like, where's the puck going to? Like, what are the things that we need to be doing? I know you have some certifications on your site, like, what do people need to be thinking about to prepare for this? Because marketing is going to be, is being affected first, right?
- [23:30]
Kevin Serrace
Again, we went through this change when the Internet came and all of a sudden it was brand new. There was this entire new realm that everyone in marketing had to learn that knew nothing about it the year before.
- [23:41]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [23:42]
Kevin Serrace
And. And we went from yellow pages and phone books and libraries and print ads and all of that to just doing searches on Google or Ping or Yahoo at the time and a few others.
- [23:55]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [23:56]
Kevin Serrace
Unbelievable, unbelievable change. We did get through that change, but from that change created entire new capabilities and marketing agencies.
- [24:04]
Matt Bertram
Yep.
- [24:05]
Kevin Serrace
And you've honed it and honed it and honed it, and now we're going through as big of a change, probably faster. Faster, because this technology, LLMs, is built already upon smartphones and Internet, which already exist. So we're riding this third wave, but it's riding on top of the other waves.
- [24:24]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [24:24]
Kevin Serrace
And that's why you went from 0 to 500 million users or so on, on ChatGPT in, you know, in a week or two. And in fact, LLMs is the fastest growing new category in the history of humans, period.
- [24:41]
Matt Bertram
How do you like. This is something I know that you talk about in your talks. Like, what was that confluence point of things coming together in kind of the AI space for this to just go vertical? Right, sure.
- [24:54]
Kevin Serrace
Easy, easy to talk about that. So, so first of all, deep learning, we solved deep learning in 2012. We could do relatively deep, a few layers deep before that. But in 2012, because of the, the algorithms and the math and, and cloud, Google published a seminal paper that said, actually we can go as deep as we want now, unlimited depths. So that means Instead of learning 10 words, 100 words or phrases or a thousand phrases, you could learn unlimited phrases and you could build a neural net out of that.
- [25:27]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [25:28]
Kevin Serrace
That was seminal, seminal, seminal paper. And it was put out there for the world to understand. Well, by 2017, Google again had a great idea. They said, you know, translating English to French sucks when you do it word by word because the French sentence is mangled.
- [25:46]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [25:46]
Kevin Serrace
Because of, of the pronouns and the nouns and the verbs, and they're all out of order for what a French sentence should be structured like versus an English sentence. So what would happen if we learned the phrase and then we translated phrase by phrase? That's a transformer model. They published that document in 2017. All right, that's eight years ago. And out of that document, people said, I wonder if instead of translating, by the way, that's when OpenAI was founded, based on the transformer. I wonder if instead of translating, we just learned basically the whole English language and then you could basically ask a question. Instead of translating, we'd come back in English, but we would oppose the answer aligned with your Query.
- [26:27]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [26:29]
Kevin Serrace
And so OpenAI had chat GPT 1.1.0, 1.5. I, I was using it like on 2.0 or something. And finally it 3.5 they felt this is ready for human consumption. At that point they had grown to over a trillion or so tokens. Or we could say sentences, right? Or, or, or, or phrases. And, and so at that point it kind of had gobbled all of the English language it could pro. Possibly gobble from the web. Whether it should have or not is a whole other conversation copyrights this and that. But you know, it, it learned from everything we humans published. And all of a sudden people, instead of people who code in Python talking to AI, anyone could talk to AI in English in their language actually.
- [27:17]
Matt Bertram
But vibe code, right?
- [27:19]
Kevin Serrace
Well yes, but you could just talk to it and it talks back in English, right? Yeah, you can Vibe code also, but forget vibe coding, you just talk to it. So all of a sudden people for the first time ever could really talk to computers. Now actually when I invented the virtual assistant in the late 90s, that was really the very first time that people could truly talk in English to these things. But at this point now you could talk and ask it anything. Then you could only ask it 5,000 different things. Now you could ask it millions of different things, right? So, so that's a turning point. And once you did that, everybody said this is useful. Now I can ask it anything. Is there a God? You know, do you love me? You know, or you know who had the, the hit record in 1976?
- [28:00]
Unknown Speaker
That.
- [28:01]
Kevin Serrace
Right? So all of a sudden it can answer anything because it's read everything. It doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction. Although a lot of that is getting sorted out with kind of supervised learning post. So, so there are thousands of people trying to overseas make sure that these things are answering correctly. And so you know, we had a lot of hallucinations early on, we have a lot less now. But, but that was the turning point.
- [28:24]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, they, they're citing the sources. It's, it's, it's definitely getting bigger. What do you think that that next revolution, if you were to guess, is going to look like? So like all the Internet businesses were created. Like it seems like like learning like education is going to be quite affected. I feel like, like it a therapist maybe like talking it to like understand what's going on with people. Like are people choosing to talk to bots or like even like a LLM, like listen to bots talk over humans or like where do you see that Evolution happening, where that maybe the intersection comes, or the integration between humans.
- [29:08]
Kevin Serrace
All right, let's talk about. Yeah, let's just pick on education first, because you mentioned education. We talked about psychologists, but let's talk about education. So I'm on the board of RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology. We've got 20,000 students. This is a very hot topic for the last two years, which is, you know, here's. Here's my take on it. And when I tell the professors, assume that your students are using this for everything, period, full stop. If you don't assume that I. What are you doing teaching?
- [29:35]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [29:35]
Kevin Serrace
They're. They're using it for everything. And so how do we still teach kids critical thinking skills and other skills.
- [29:44]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [29:45]
Kevin Serrace
But in the, in this era. Well, you know, there was a time that we gave up teaching kids too much of long division because once the calculator came and Excel came, nobody's ever going to ask you to do long division at work. Are they ever? Fact. If you're doing long division with a paper and pencil, I might terminate. You say, that was my.
- [30:06]
Matt Bertram
That was my argument, Kevin. In school, I was like, if I can do this with a calculator, I'm never going to do it. Not so can I use a calculator on this test? I thought it was ridiculous.
- [30:13]
Unknown Speaker
Right, right.
- [30:14]
Kevin Serrace
Because no one's going to pay you to not use the calculus.
- [30:17]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [30:17]
Kevin Serrace
All right. And this is so. So now when we. When we look at kids in university, right? And I've got, you know, I've got professors that say, well, I want them to handwrite the paper and do this and do that, and what's the purpose? They will. We're supposed to be preparing kids for the workforce. You know what? You know who's going to get hired? Okay. There's two kids that come out of college this year. One comes out and says, yeah, I've heard about Chat GPT, but I didn't use it. I wasn't told. I was told I shouldn't use it. I played with it a little bit, but, you know, I don't know it well, but I can learn it. Okay, nice. Next kid comes in and says, all right, I'll be honest with you. I used it for everything. I uploaded documents, I analyzed documents, I edited stuff.
- [30:56]
Matt Bertram
Right.
- [30:57]
Kevin Serrace
Every. Every assignment I did that way, and I crushed it. Not only that, I learned how to edit it afterwards through other models or use three different models to fool the AI sense.
- [31:08]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. The originality. I'm about to have someone on that that has A plagiarism tech or on.
- [31:14]
Kevin Serrace
Like I can tell you, it gets, it gets very hard to detect.
- [31:19]
Unknown Speaker
Right, so.
- [31:19]
Kevin Serrace
But let me finish. The point is who gets hired? Well, the second one, the second one, the one who knows how to use the latest technology gets hired all the time. It's always been that way, period, full stop. When the wheel came out, those who put wheels on a cart won over those who wouldn't use the wheel. This is how it works.
- [31:38]
Matt Bertram
Okay, so I have a specific question from an enterprise client that we're actually dealing with. Okay. We have a company that got bought by another company and there's all these corporate layers and a lot of red tape. I'm not going to mention the company, but they're, you know, a publicly traded fortune, probably 100 company. It came down that no content can be generated at all with AI and they were pushing back on blogs that were actually human written but they were saying all this is like 10% AI and, and we were like no, a human wrote this and we, we had to keep working it and like jigsawing the words to try to get less content. And like I'm, I'm actually dealing with this client still today and they've eased off a little bit. But it's, it's this corporate policy from like governance coming down saying we want it all human retin. This is all AI. Like if you were talking to a major corporation that was presenting this as policy, what would you say to them?
- [32:43]
Kevin Serrace
Kevin, you're dead.
- [32:45]
Matt Bertram
That's like. Yeah, dead dead.
- [32:47]
Kevin Serrace
It's so that's like saying we are in 1995. We will not use the Internet for evaluating our competition. What. Or for marketing. What? I, I mean, and by the way, some companies probably did that for a while. Some, you know, a lot of companies said you can't bring your own device. You can't. You. I mean all these rules. Well, in the end the train left the station, right? You have to assume that your competitor is using the heck out of it. And I just said that you can multiply your brain by 100x by leveraging these tools the right way by a hundred x.
- [33:20]
Unknown Speaker
Okay?
- [33:21]
Kevin Serrace
So if your competitor is multiplying what they're doing by 100x and in fact this large corporation, I'll tell you, it's going to be some startup that comes up and goes this old kludgy thing. We're going to crush them and they will fly by them. And we've seen this happen over and over again. We saw it happen in the early days of the Internet and then we saw it happen with mobile phones.
- [33:42]
Matt Bertram
That was kind of my, my take on. I was like, I need to talk to whoever's pushing this policy to either get this changed or we might need to like, look at who their competitor is going to be, like one of the challengers. Because it just doesn't even make any sense. Like these policies are not making any sense. And I would think with like Copilot and a lot of people on like Microsoft software, they would be a lot more in tune with the direction of the market.
- [34:10]
Kevin Serrace
Well, you know, in every new technology there are those who cross the chasm earlier rather than later. There's the early adopters. There are. And they're going to be out front. And then there's real laggards that just will not change. But I can tell you we've seen this story before and the companies that did not embrace the Internet died. Okay? Sears.
- [34:37]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [34:38]
Kevin Serrace
Sears was the number one mail order catalog in the world since 1900 until the Internet came. Amazon happened. Now, Sears had the mailing infrastructure, had the shipping infrastructure, had the warehouses. Didn't embrace the Internet till very late. They eventually sort of got on for a little bit. By then, Amazon won. It was over. It was over. Walmart almost lost, but they turned it around and got really heavy into walmart.com put a ton of money, came back, gonna do fine, right? But people did ignore the Internet. And every, every commerce company, every retailer who ignored the Internet died. Kmart, Sears, others. Right? Dead. J.C. penney. I'm dead. So. So we've seen this story before. Your company, who is doing this now, And I don't know who they are, right? They're just. Excuse me. Because they're probably watching it. They're just stupid. Like, it's just stupid, right? Your competitor. Listen to me, look at me. Your competitor is using LLMs and they are going to blow you away in everything they write. It's going to be better writing faster, writing more poignant. I mean, you could take this stuff and say, I want you to design a blog post that convinces anyone that comes here that they've got to look at the following three things to consider us. And that blog post is going to be written and you read it and you go, I could not have written it this well. Couldn't have done it.
- [35:59]
Matt Bertram
See, Kevin said it, I didn't say it. There's a short right there. We're going to reuse that. I think that a lot of people need to hear that. I think a lot of people are fighting the change. I, I even had a content manager that worked for me that like I, I don't want to go this way. I want to do. And I go, well we're, we're on two different trains and going two different directions, you know, and it, it was unfortunate. So what, where do you think? Like if you were to break it down, if you were to like get down into maybe the metadata and like cluster it into the things that are going to take off the fastest? I, I'm seeing it in the graphics side and the video side. I'm seeing it on the content side. I'm seeing people build it all the way into their workflows, agents replacing certain like automations. Like where, where do people need to be preparing in your eyes from a marketing standpoint? Like what's going to change the fastest? What are like I think like you said the brain, like, like your thought. Like you knowing what good looks like is like one of the most important things. But then you can amplify it in every which way from, from what the machine learning the LLMs can do. And so you should be leveraging in every way possible. So like what is that going to look like? Or like are there certain certifications? Like I've asked Chat gbt, what are the certifications that I need to go get? Like, what would you recommend? Like where would you need to learn? But inside this knowledge base there, there's still so many different sections of things that you can learn. Like where should people focus or how should.
- [37:42]
Kevin Serrace
So, so, so the model started to be at the beginning. We're good at generating text and have gotten only better. Yeah, okay, so we're two and a half years in. If you're not, if you're not generating all your text or at least having it rewritten by an LLM, you're crazy. So often I will write because it's just sort of in my mind. You know, I'll write out 600,000 words or something and then I'll submit it to say GPT4O and say rewrite this in a more powerful way that attracts customers better, something like that. And frankly what I get back is phenomenal and I'll still may do some edits, but it's really, really good. It's just better pros than I'm capable of. And I'm now see a lot of marketing people are not capable of saying that sentence. It's better prose than I could possibly write. They can't say it because they don't feel that right this is true with illustrators also. Okay, so we are all using Geni to generate illustrations, photos, etc today. I use it for everything. My keynote presentations that are, you know, easily have hundreds and hundreds of images and photos and things. They're all AI generated today. You would not know the difference. Even my headshots, people say, I'd like a headshot. I said, Well, I have 200. How do you have 200? Well, AI generated 200 of them and they all look exactly like me and they were generated just from a handful of photographs, but I'm in different poses and I'm sideways and it's unbelievable, right? It's unbelievable. I didn't need a photographer for that. And they're all outstanding, outstanding. Out of the 200, I think there were five. I said, yeah, don't like them, but it was amazing.
- [39:18]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [39:18]
Kevin Serrace
So now you look at illustrations and I talk to illustrators all the time and say, well, it just can't do as good as I can. Okay, but, but in 30 seconds or a minute, I can have six different illustrations. That would have taken an illustrator days or weeks to do the same thing. And we would have had an early sketch, it would have gone back and forth and they would have gone back color in it and blah, blah, blah. Whether they're using Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever they're using to do it by hand or whatever the case is, I don't, I don't need to do that. So even if an actual Illustrator could somehow do a more interesting or better job, they can't do it in 30 seconds.
- [40:00]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [40:01]
Kevin Serrace
For the cause. And so that doesn't say there's not a job for an Illustrator, but if I'm an Illustrator, I am going to use the latest tech tools. And when Adobe Illustrator showed up, there were people who said, I'm still going to use a pencil and crayons and, you know, other things. But eventually most people got on Illustrator and said, I guess that's the tool we're going to use. So we're not really going to be doing much by hand anymore. We're going to do it all on the computer. Now we've got the next generation that, based on your knowledge and experience, will generate it for you. Great illustrators have an eye that I don't have. See, I can get stuff out of GPT4O and I think it's great. And someone with the right marketing eye or the right illustration, I will look at it and go, the colors are all wrong for what you're trying to achieve. I don't know. I, I shouldn't design curtains.
- [40:48]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [40:48]
Kevin Serrace
I don't do that.
- [40:49]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [40:50]
Kevin Serrace
So that's. Now the illustrator becomes very strategic and a strategic partner to you. It isn't about the drawing. They're going to go and generate 300 of these things and then they're going to pick the best ones. They're going to come back, you're going to go, that's better than anything I could have done.
- [41:04]
Matt Bertram
So, Kevin, what I'm hearing is two things. One is your ego is getting in the way potentially. Absolutely. Like, so there's a lot of people that are very good and they're like, I'm this good. But you know, if you look at human intelligence, these AIs are just way over our head and getting better is one. And then the second thing is you just said that something very subtly that I, that I've started to see a strategic partner. You're, you're shifting into a role of a, of, of a partner or an advisor or, or someone that has this knowledge on how to best apply it. Right, because everybody has the same toolkit now, but, but the craftsman can, can utilize it in different ways and articulate it and know.
- [41:48]
Kevin Serrace
Because they have a, they have an eye for the art that I don't have, or else I would have gone into that field. So if you're an illustrator that used to get fifteen hundred dollars in illustration, you may still get fifteen hundred dollars, but you are going to generate probably all of them via AI. But very, very complex prompting. That would be more complex than I would know how to do.
- [42:08]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [42:08]
Kevin Serrace
And leveraging the knowledge you have in the field, the knowledge you have of colors and layout and what you're trying to achieve and all of that, I will pay for that. But what I won't pay for is an illustrator who illustrates it in the old way and, and comes back and gives me two choices. And they may or may not be good. But why would I pay for that? I can go to someone who can be much more broad and much faster. Now, maybe the price for illustration drops from $1500 to $400 or $300. But here's the thing, and obviously it's free online, but here's the thing that allows the illustrator also put out three or four or five times more content than they ever did. Yes, they have to find more customers and yes, they have to do more. But, but, but there's still business there, right there. There'll be money spent. It's not about the money for me. It's about the speed and the. And the opportunity.
- [43:01]
Matt Bertram
So the relationship is changing into more of a partner of either I can do it. Like, do you think it's going to be more people building internal teams with advisors, or do you think people are going to outsource it? Or the split's going to just be the same.
- [43:17]
Kevin Serrace
Look, the split will be with. The split will be. But. But the people that I want to hire have to be robot overlords, not doers. I don't want doers. I can't afford it. It doesn't make any sense and it takes too long. So look at it this way. I can use Illustrator, but I'm not really an illustrator. So the stuff that I create in there, you can tell it's by an amateur. So I shouldn't do it.
- [43:38]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [43:38]
Kevin Serrace
It's not that I can't do it, but. So, okay. I can also use a multimodal and generate all kinds of things. You will be able to tell, not that the quality of the illustration of the photo is bad, you'll be able to tell that what I generated probably doesn't fit really well with the document that it's in.
- [43:56]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [43:57]
Kevin Serrace
Why? I'm not actually an illustrator. I'm not an artist. It's not what I do. So this is true with blog posts. A great marketeer is going to use Gen AI and generate all these blog posts, but then they're going to go in and edit and tweak and fix and address and you're going to tell a professional worked with this.
- [44:17]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [44:17]
Kevin Serrace
It's just a different level than someone pushed a button and stuck it out there. Okay. Podcast, you can tell when it's a real professional. And I've been a lot of podcasts.
- [44:26]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [44:26]
Kevin Serrace
And there's great podcast hosts. There's good podcast hosts. There's some that are horrific. I, I don't know how I got on the darn thing.
- [44:33]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [44:33]
Kevin Serrace
But I, I'm good at, you know, I'm good about it. I don't care.
- [44:36]
Matt Bertram
Right.
- [44:36]
Kevin Serrace
I'm helping everyone where I can. And, and, but, but I mean, it's the same thing, right? There's really great ones. They're good at it. They're great communicators. There's others. And you've seen them. You know, who put that person on a podcast? They shouldn't be there.
- [44:51]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. So. So I have all these questions here, and we're, we're. We're running close to lightning round. Yeah. And I, I actually, before we do that, because it might even be better served for, for anyone listening to just open it up for you to share anything that we didn't cover that you think would be valuable to talk about and maybe even talk about some of the things you're doing and how you see those businesses applying AI to, you know, level up.
- [45:18]
Kevin Serrace
One of the things I've done is I trained my own clone and it's a video, two way video clone. So if you go to my website, Kevin's race.com, you go to the bottom says talk to Kevin's clone. You can do a chat, you can do an audio or you can do literally a video. It looks like that looks like it is me. It's, it's me and it's a clone of me. And I trained it on all of my writings.
- [45:38]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [45:38]
Kevin Serrace
And all my podcasts. So it's actually pretty darn good. So you just ask it questions and it's like it's Virtual Kevin, which is pretty interesting and the answers are quite aligned with what I would actually say.
- [45:51]
Matt Bertram
So Kevin, I'm going to do a follow up to this podcast where I'm going to go ask your, your, your bot these questions and then I'll add it to this. I think it'll be hilarious. So. Yeah, and I'm sure it'll be accurate as well. So that's really cool. What, what are, yeah, what are some other stuff that you're doing? This is great.
- [46:07]
Kevin Serrace
Well, yeah, I'm working on a cybersecurity company called Token Ring. It really addresses 90% of the ransomware problem by tying everything you log into to your fingerprint and it's in a, in a ring form or in a few other form factors. And, and it's proximity. So the fingerprint has to be in proximity to the laptop that you're on logging it. It's really fun. Another AI company where we use AI to find all of the bugs in software. Basically it's very, very cool. And it's at the UX levels end to end testing, what's called regression testing. So there, so there's that and obviously I'm speaking and the one thing about speaking, I'll say is when you say I've got this big client and they're a fortune, you know, whatever. That's who I speak for.
- [46:51]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [46:51]
Kevin Serrace
That's who I speak when I'm out there. I just, just, you know, got, just got done speaking to a multi billion dollar corporation with like 40 divisions and they had all their leadership there and no one was using anything in AI a Few people were playing with it, right. And my message was, okay guys, this train left the station. You're, you're now in the caboose, but don't be run over by the darn train.
- [47:14]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [47:15]
Matt Bertram
What do you think that those companies are, are looking at implementing where like, and what's, you know, what divisions of the company, like, where do you think the application's happening the fastest?
- [47:25]
Kevin Serrace
First thing that gets, in large companies that gets rolled out is usually Copilot by Microsoft because it's safe, it's efficient, it's easy, you know what the price per user is. And then they start training people to say any document that you're doing should be assisted with copilot. Now obviously that's not the most advanced thing in the world, but it's a great place to start when you've got thousands of employees.
- [47:50]
Unknown Speaker
Right.
- [47:50]
Kevin Serrace
You're trying to regulate this and be Safe and, and etc. And you got Copilot for coding, you've got Copilot for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now you can't do the more fancy things like a GPT4O can do. So I do a lot of document analysis. Like I uploaded a, an annual report. There was 150 pages. I said, tell me what's working well at the company and what isn't working well at the company. Boom and boom. I don't, I would have had to read 150 pages to find that and figure it out and look at the numbers. I just have the answer. I'm going into a meeting. That's amazing, right? It saved me three or four hours of trying to get through that document. I no longer have to get through it. Read it for me and gave me the Cliff Notes. Okay, that's brilliant.
- [48:33]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. Investing, I'm seeing investing and like trading and stuff like that. Like the analysis that these things can do are pretty incredible. It's just interesting too because I've asked it about some crypto based things and, and it will like give me different answers and I'm like, well why did you give me that? And then why did it change? And so as I continue to learn about how they're structured, it helps me understand what the output's going to be. You know, let's, let's like wrap up here and you know what would be one? If there was one thing that I think you kind of mentioned it and if you want to rephrase it, that's fine too. But like what is one thing that you feel is a unknown secret of Internet marketing when when utilizing these alarms or what do people need to be thinking about or doing most?
- [49:23]
Kevin Serrace
Well, you know, the overarching thing is something I kind of quote Yoda here and I say play, not do. Stop playing. Because I talk to more marketing people. Well, I played with a little bit and I did one blog post partially, and I said, you, you've missed the entire whole thing here. Everything you do must be informed by. Okay. And so even if you're not ready to have it generate everything, just use it as an ideator.
- [49:51]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [49:52]
Kevin Serrace
How might I approach this? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. What are 10 things I should think about when boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
- [49:59]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [49:59]
Kevin Serrace
And yes, you're professional. You probably knew six of them. The other four you didn't think of you. You couldn't have.
- [50:05]
Unknown Speaker
Right?
- [50:06]
Kevin Serrace
And how do I be. What are some ways I can beat this competitor at boom, boom, boom, boom, boom? What are some ways I can have my company show up in your LLM versus these other companies? It will tell you. It's not a secret. It will tell you. So when you think of it that way, you go, why would I do anything with just my brain? I've got my brain, plus this thing. It's my brain on steroids, right? That's. That's the big lesson. Stop playing around. Stop doing occasional things. Do everything. Every email. Every text, right? I get an email from a customer I'm really unhappy about. I feed it into for me, GPT4. Oh. I say, I really want to save this customer. How might I respond in email? And what it comes back with is brilliant. I mean, the prose is brilliant, right? It's like a psychiatrist that understands my customer. And so I may take some of it or not take some of it. By the way, I got this email from my spouse this morning. She's really mad at. How should I respond? Trust me, you are disconnected from your frontal lobe. It is not. It is fully connected. All. You know, you're angry and go, how dare. No, no, it's. If you. Now you can tell it. Also, I'd like a response that saves my marriage or I want a response that ends my marriage. It will write that.
- [51:28]
Matt Bertram
I think that's a great way to end, Kev. Thank you so much. What's the best way for someone to find out more about what you're doing? Yeah, yeah.
- [51:37]
Kevin Serrace
Kevin's Race dot com. You can fill out a form there. Learn more. You can. My LinkedIn is there. I do answer my DMs, etc.
- [51:45]
Matt Bertram
All right, I will put all that in the show notes for you that listening last name is S u r A C E. Kevin. Thank you so much for coming on. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.