ChatGPT Agent and the Future of Digital Marketing

Summary

The Digital Marketing Podcast: ChatGPT Agent and the Future of Digital Marketing

Hosts: Ciaran Rogers, Daniel Rowles, and Louise Crossley
Release Date: August 3, 2025
Producer: Target Internet
Website: TargetInternet.com

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Introduction

In the August 3, 2025 episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, hosts Ciaran Rogers and Daniel Rowles delve into the transformative impact of AI agents, particularly focusing on ChatGPT Agents, on the landscape of digital marketing. This episode explores the definition, evolution, practical applications, security concerns, and future implications of agent-based AI in marketing.

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Defining AI Agents and Their Evolution

Time Stamp: [00:20] – [08:09]

Daniel Rowles initiates the discussion by defining agentic AI as systems that employ sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. He traces the evolution of AI agents from the early capabilities of ChatGPT and Google Gemini's deep research modes to the more advanced functionalities introduced with recent updates.

“Agent-based AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex multi-step problems.” – Daniel Rowles [00:31]

Rowles highlights significant milestones, such as the introduction of deep research modes and the ability of AI to interact with web browsers and manipulate documents. The recent release of ChatGPT Agent represents a game changer by combining these capabilities, allowing AI to autonomously complete tasks like researching content, creating posts, and even interacting with external tools like Canva.

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Practical Applications in Marketing

Time Stamp: [08:09] – [16:45]

The hosts discuss various practical applications of ChatGPT Agents in digital marketing. Rowles shares personal experiences testing the ChatGPT Agent’s ability to handle tasks such as logging into LinkedIn, analyzing posts, and generating carousel content via Canva. These applications demonstrate the agent's potential to automate repetitive and administrative tasks, thereby enhancing efficiency and allowing marketers to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors.

“I can now get this to do things I could never do before, like log into my LinkedIn and analyze all of my posts.” – Daniel Rowles [08:14]

Rowles emphasizes the transformative potential of AI agents, suggesting that they can replace significant portions of a marketing executive’s role. However, he also cautions about the risks, such as security vulnerabilities and the need for human oversight to ensure accuracy and reliability.

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Security and Ethical Concerns

Time Stamp: [16:45] – [24:47]

Security emerges as a critical concern in the deployment of AI agents. Rowles and Rogers discuss the potential risks associated with granting AI agents access to sensitive accounts and systems. Rowles points out that while AI agents can perform complex tasks, they also require secure handling of login credentials and the necessity of two-factor authentication to mitigate unauthorized access.

“That's why you want two-factor authentication switched on with ChatGPT and stuff like that now as well.” – Daniel Rowles [13:30]

The conversation further explores the ethical implications, such as the disintermediation of brands when AI agents choose where to purchase products based on user preferences, potentially sidelining retailers who do not permit AI access. This shift could disrupt established business models and alter the dynamics of consumer-brand interactions.

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Impact on Jobs and the Workforce

Time Stamp: [24:47] – [27:01]

The discussion transitions to the broader impact of AI agents on employment, particularly within junior marketing roles. Rowles anticipates a significant reduction in the need for entry-level positions as AI agents can efficiently handle many tasks traditionally performed by humans. This shift raises concerns about the talent pipeline, diversity of thought, and organizational culture.

“If it can replace 80% of what a marketing exec does, do you think people are going to still keep recruiting?” – Daniel Rowles [15:33]

Rowles urges organizations to adopt a culture of continuous learning and agility to navigate these changes. He emphasizes the importance of strategic planning to balance short-term efficiencies with long-term organizational health, ensuring that the workforce remains adaptable and resilient in the face of technological advancements.

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Future Implications and Strategic Planning

Time Stamp: [27:01] – [25:12]

Looking ahead, the hosts discuss the necessity for businesses to integrate AI agent technology thoughtfully. Rowles advocates for leveraging AI to enhance productivity while maintaining human oversight to preserve the quality and authenticity of marketing efforts. He also touches on the environmental impact of AI, arguing that its carbon footprint should be considered in the broader context of digital activities.

“Creating an organization that is agile enough to change quickly is essential.” – Daniel Rowles [22:33]

The conversation underscores the need for strategic foresight, urging marketers to experiment with AI agents responsibly. By testing, refining prompts, and understanding the limitations of current AI technologies, organizations can harness the benefits of AI while mitigating potential risks.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with actionable insights for marketers looking to integrate AI agents into their workflows. Rowles and Rogers highlight the importance of critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and effective prompting to maximize the potential of AI agents. They also stress the significance of maintaining human elements in customer interactions to preserve brand integrity and trust.

“What makes our brand human, that's the stuff that's really important still.” – Ciaran Rogers [26:30]

The hosts encourage listeners to engage with AI agents proactively, explore their capabilities, and stay informed about ongoing developments to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving digital marketing landscape.

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Resources and Further Learning:
For more information, follow the podcast at TargetInternet.com/podcast. Members can join a half-day masterclass on effective use of AI agents and access monthly update sessions through the newsletter subscription at TargetInternet.com/newsletter.

Transcript

[Kieran Rogers]

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Kieran Rogers.

[Daniel Rolls]

And I'm Daniel Rolls.

[Kieran Rogers]

And today, Daniel, we are discussing AI agents.

[Daniel Rolls]

Okay, so let's just define what an AI agent is, talk about the evolution, and then talk about why we're here, this very specific period.

[Kieran Rogers]

Why are we here? Why so profound?

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah, well, it's going to get a bit profound in this one actually. So definition of agentic AI or an agent based AI is it uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex multi step problems. Okay, so this started when ChatGPT and Google Gemini released deep research modes. I mean, it started way before that, but that's what's kind of brought it to everyone. So deep research mode, if you're not familiar, you go in, in ChatGPT, for example, you've got your little plus button as you have in Gemini, and you could set deep research mode. You'd give it a task maybe to do some research and it would go off and ask you a series of questions, what target market are we talking about? What's the time period you're interested in, et cetera, et cetera. And then it would go off and complete a task for you autonomously. Now the thing is that's not quick. It might take 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes to go off and do that thing. But that was their first kind of move into agent based AI. Then what you also had was ChatGPT were building this thing called operator and Operator was the ability of ChatGPT to use a browser, not to search in a browser, but to, you know, log into a website, to go through to fill forms and all those kind of things. What's happened, and we've just done a news episode on this is the chat GPT released their agent. So chatGPT agent and chatGPT agent suddenly takes deep research, the ability to use a browser to manipulate documents, and gives you this new thing that can go off and do stuff for you. It is a game changer now, I should say. I got myself into trouble with this, so I got hold of this a bit earlier. So it's been, by the time this comes out, it would have been out for about 10 days. ChatGPT agent and I got hold of it really early on and I started playing with it and I started creating lots of test cases and I tested the heck out of it and I then went, what about, I want you to research content, create content, log in to my profile on LinkedIn and post it. How about you go into all to my LinkedIn posts and I want you to analyze all them and tell me what content I should do in the future. How about I use the Canva connector in ChatGPT. If you're not familiar, there are lots of connectors in ChatGPT now that can connect to external tools. And I was able to connect it to my canva account and I could do this through the agent either I could get it to log in to my canva account, take a load of content it had created and create a load of carousel posts for me and then take those carousel posts and put them into LinkedIn.

[Kieran Rogers]

What could possibly go wrong?

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, it didn't. The thing was, nothing went wrong. It did it really, really good job. But there was a risk. Right now, what I should say with all of this AI agent stuff, there are human intervention points. So for example, when it goes to my canva account, it doesn't know my password so I have to take over. So I click the button, I take over the browser for a moment, I put my password and my username in and it logs in and it carries on my behalf. So let's just take a step back from that. How this LinkedIn post got me into trouble was that I said, this is game changing technology. I reckon I can replace a marketing exec with seven decent prompts. Okay. And what I went on to say was that means you have huge cost savings. You won't, you know, these agents don't need holidays, they don't want bonus pay, their dogs don't get sick and all this kind of stuff. And then I did add, which is the people, the bit that no one seemed to read was that you'll also have no talent pipeline because you won't have any junior people anymore. You're going to have no diversity of thinking organization, you won't have any young people potentially, you won't have a working culture. And that's going to have quite a big impact on businesses. What do you think businesses will do about this now? Classic social media. Nobody read the bottom bit. See that? I was being a little bit facetious about it.

[Kieran Rogers]

You had them all, you have them all that we don't need, we don't need.

[Daniel Rolls]

Market these people. Yeah, and my favorite one was that comment said, you clearly didn't really test this and that is like, you know, my professional integrity was called out to quite a large extent. But anyway, I. What I normally do when I get angry about a social media post is I refused to respond to it until the next day. And I've normally calmed down by the next day.

[Kieran Rogers]

Always wise away from the edge.

[Daniel Rolls]

Very politely pointed out to everyone that actually I wasn't saying it was 100%, but let's get so, okay, there's a couple of things to pick out there. First of all, I can now get this to do things I could never do before, like log into my LinkedIn and analyze all of my posts. I don't have to export it first, so there's phenomenally useful things to do. I can get it to log in and post social media stuff for me. Is that a good idea? Probably not. It's kind of risky, but I can get it to log in and buy something for me. So I don't think we're very far away from the first legal case of saying ChatGPT spent all my money and I told it not to. So, which is, yeah, there are lots of safety features in place. But my point is this is game changing because this is the first iteration and we know how quickly stuff's moving. In six months this will be radically better than it is now because it's learning. Okay. And therefore you will be able to very simply say, okay, what do I do every day? What does my marketing exec do every day? Let's turn that into a really good step by step prompt. Go to this website, do this thing, download this, go here, do that, and then just take my role and break it down into that series of tasks and I can automate those. Now, we've had robotic process automation for a while, but it falls over because of the fact that actually, you know, when the website changes, it can no longer handle it. Well, actually now the AI can kind of overcome that. The first time you use, by the way, ChatGPT agent and you sit there watching it, browsing your website and telling you what it's doing. Oh, that didn't work. I'm going to try this. Oh no, that didn't work. I'm going to this. It's quite a mind blowing experience. I thought, I felt it was like I really. You feel like you experience something very new. It feels very science fiction the first time you kind of do it as well.

[Kieran Rogers]

We were chatting on text, weren't we, last week. Have you tried it? I'm like, no. And you were like, well, have you.

[Daniel Rolls]

Got access to it?

[Kieran Rogers]

I'm like, I don't know. And I went in and looked. I've become a bit obsessed with this. But it's the little icon that they shoved in there kind of looks like a little Robo paw print. That's how I'm seeing it. A wonky mushroom.

[Daniel Rolls]

Wonky mushroom. I'm sure that wasn't their intent from a design perspective.

[Kieran Rogers]

No, I know it's. Well, I think what they're trying to. The icons, trying to like illustrate the point that it can open a web browser and click and explore. That's what it looked right to me. But it does look like a bit like a square foot, like paw print to me. Like if K9 had paws.

[Daniel Rolls]

To me it's just a screen with a pointer clicking on it. But okay, is it.

[Kieran Rogers]

That's a paw. It's a paw. You can see it. It's a paw.

[Daniel Rolls]

Right.

[Kieran Rogers]

If you, if you agree with me.

[Daniel Rolls]

Right. In a pointer and some like little dashes that, that are showing movement, I think. But anyway, it's kind of exciting.

[Kieran Rogers]

What is clever about it is when they put the word agent on it, it sounds really cool. But is this really that different from Gemini's Deep Research?

[Daniel Rolls]

It is wildly different because Deep research can go off and do things. It can look at things and read things, but this can actually fill forms in, navigate through a website. You know, it's not just reading the text of the page, it can interact with the page. So if we go beyond just using a web browser, I mean that's the main functionality. It can use a web browser now like a human can. But also if you give it like used to be you'd give it a spreadsheet, it would analyze it and then it would give you some sort of output. Well, now you can give it a spreadsheet and it can put the answers in the spreadsheet. So it's got the ability to utilize things that it. We'll put it in the show notes. Right. Targetintech.com forward slash podcast. The functionality it has at the moment. But the point being is that before I could look stuff up, I couldn't actually interactively do things.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

But now I can go to a logged in website, I can say to it, go and find me a recipe for this many people that this many dietary requirements and then log in to my Tesco account and buy that stuff for me. And it's able to go through and do that and if it doesn't got a particular product in stock, make some alternative options for me and there'll be human points I have to help it log in. I have to say yes, the purchase and things like that. But the. What's really interesting is all the marketing videos they created. They gave the agent a task and then they shut their laptop and walked away. And there was a very big push in the marketing. And then what happens with ChatGPT is you get a notification on your mobile device when that task is finished.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

So it's like. It's doing stuff for you, it is your agent, it's going off and completing tasks for you. So. And you're absolutely right, it is deep research mode combined with the ability to use a browser and some other stuff as well. So it's got more tools, it's got more tools at its disposable and therefore it's just able to choose which tools it's using.

[Kieran Rogers]

It's quite fun to watch it while it works massively. And actually I could see it was at one, I think I'm. I shared this in a previous episode, but I bought a laptop using the agent feature within ChatGPT and actually at one point I could see it was writing a whole bunch of code to compare some of the data that it scraped and sourced and do something clever with it. But you have to watch it happens quite quickly.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, let me give you another example. This is amazing. Yeah. That it. Basically I asked, I gave it an image and I'd done this three months ago and it was an image of a. With 99 dog faces on one picture. And I said, how many dogs in the picture? And three months went, sorry, I can't answer it, I can't work it out, it's too confusing. This time it went, right, I'll go through and I will use an algorithm for facial recognition. And then it's. It doesn't work because the facial recognition is set up for human faces. But what I'm going to do is quickly write some code that uses it just to count the number of eyes, because I know the dogs have got two eyes and it counts the number of eyes and it got the answer right. So essentially what we got is something now that has a number of tools. It can do web scraping, like looking stuff off the web. It can go to its large language model, it can write code, it can use a web browser and it's using those tools to make a decision. What's the best way of solving this problem?

[Kieran Rogers]

Now, it's not game changer for Summer Fates when you need to know how many jelly beans are in the kilner jar.

[Daniel Rolls]

So, you know, the ability to do things quickly, effectively, in a more creative way is certainly there. What's interesting is that this replaces tasks that we do every day. Now, it's not that I'm interacting with it backwards and forwards. It's like, right, go and do this and it'll go off and do it. And I get back the outcome is what I need it to be. It's not giving me something I can then do something with. It's actually doing the thing for me in many cases.

[Kieran Rogers]

So my experience for this is yes, and it gives some very impressive results, but you sure as hell have to double check and sense check what it's done or you're gonna get egg on your face pretty quick. And I only know that because I've produced some truly wonderful things using this that I'm very proud of. But I know I'm very fortunate. I work with somebody who really, their head is totally in detail and you make any claim and they'll double check it all like. Cause that's how they, that's how their brain's wired. And it's brilliant because actually it means you're forced to sense check stuff. Like, I've trodden on that landmine too many times and I'm not having that. Kieran, did you absolutely check this? Like, remember when we were first playing around with ChatGPT and it was given, we were asking it for latest news in SEO and it was giving us all sorts of absolute rubbish. This is a few years back. Right. But you know, I still think that that element is there, especially when you're playing around with different models you've not used before and you have to sort of sense check it and work out where are the boundaries, what's it good at and what isn't it. So that was going to be my question to you, like, if people are wanting to test this out, what sort of things would you recommend people? Because no, if you haven't used it before, you're definitely going to want to play with this. What would you recommend, Daniel, People do?

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, this. That's a really good question because it leads us into the prompting piece, which is that I think a lot of people use this first of all, when, oh, it's all right, but it's not great because like they did like a one line prompt. Go to my LinkedIn, tell me what my best posts are. Okay, so it'll go. But are your best posts the ones that got the most engagement? Are the ones that drove your desired outcomes? Are they ones that got the most views? You know, you haven't really defined what best means, but it will be able to log into your LinkedIn and then it will go to each of your posts and it will try and get the stats from the download them for you and it'll. So actually that's the kind of thing you can get it to do that's I would try out with those kind of get it to do something. You have to log in to do something. So to a social media profile, to a shopping website, to you know, something like go to Amazon to buy you something, whatever it might be.

[Kieran Rogers]

So I haven't gone that far with it. But how do you, how do you do that? You give it the login details within the prompt.

[Daniel Rolls]

No. So you just give it, you say go to this website and do this thing and then when it gets there it will, it will open up its browser and it will get to the login page and go, okay, well I think I need you to log in and it will give you a button to take over. And then you take over its browser, you put your login details and then you hand the browser back and at that point it then does it. But it will remember that's what you've got to be careful of. So now it knows my login for LinkedIn and if I ask it to go LinkedIn again, it's able to repeat that step. So. And depending on which tool you're using.

[Kieran Rogers]

That's kind of terrifying because as far as I'm aware we don't have two factor authentication on our large language learning model logins.

[Daniel Rolls]

No. So what would happen is that's why you want two factor authentication switch on everything.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

Because you can switch it on with ChatGPT and stuff like that now as well.

[Kieran Rogers]

Yeah.

[Daniel Rolls]

So you can have two factor. Because what you want it on ChatGPT and you want it on all of your tools. Because then if someone, if you accidentally are doing something with your agent or if you know somebody's accessing your agent, you want the security of knowing on your mobile device. Oh, that's not me. I don't want them to log in. So yeah, security becomes even more important before there are some mess ups with this. But what I'd say is that I would look at what you do every day in your day to day role and I would think about which of those tasks are repeatable and which of those tasks are purely admin. Right. As opposed to creative thinking. So I know when we create this podcast there's a number of steps I go through. I take the podcast, I put it into descript, I edit it in descript. That is not something I'm getting an agent to do because there's loads of nuance and subtlety. And what's that? Then I'm going to go through and I'm going to create the show notes that go onto the website. Well, actually, I can get AI to do that because I've trained AI to go through, take the transcription, pull up the key points, structure it in a certain way, find any links, put those up. So actually that's a step I go through. Then from that I've got to log into my website, I've got to put that onto a web page, create the page, fill in all the standard bits. I've got to then go through into Libsyn and publish it in Libsync. There's a lot of stuff in there that I can get the agent to do for me automatically, but it's so business critical, there's some bits I'm not going to do, I'm not going to let it publish it to Libsyn without double checking it and all those kind of things as well. It's not 100% at the moment. It will do a task, get a little bit confused sometimes and then just kind of stop because it's not. It's got a bit concerned about what's going on, what have you as well. But this will iterate and this will change. Now, the important thing from this is that one, this is going to help you be more effective and efficient. So that's great. Hopefully it gives you more time to focus on the creative, the strategic, the critical lateral thinking, whatever it might be. But what I know it's going to mean is that as this gets more advanced, what's going to happen to junior roles?

[Kieran Rogers]

Right.

[Daniel Rolls]

I was being a little bit facetious. Right. You know, it will replace a marketing exec, but if it can replace 80 of what a marketing exec does, do you think people are going to still going to keep recruiting and everyone's going? Yeah, because you know, you need a talent pipeline. You do, but you will know what companies are like, big companies about efficiency. Already there was a report in the Times when I had show notes. You can see I'm not making this up. Junior roles across the UK and this is. There's a global pitch that goes with it as well. 60% drop in recruitment for a couple of reasons. One, because the stuff that's going in the economy, but also because the fact they're going, well, actually, I might be able to get an agent, I might be able to get AI to do this. Do I need that role at the moment? Where do I need to focus my efforts? So people are just taking a bit of a step back. It's not necessarily replacing them, but it is making people think about recruitment. Take this six months down the road, this will radically change. And actually a lot of the stuff that we've got junior roles doing we'll be able to do and be able to do with these agentic tools really easily. So it's a game changer for the workplace and it's going to change all of our roles. It is going to replace. I've been preaching for ages, oh, it's not going to replace roles and you know, it's only certain roles it replace. It's mostly it's going to change roles. I think this is going to replace lots of things that people are doing.

[Kieran Rogers]

I just. You've just got me thinking about the security of this though, right? Like here we've got a back door which could, any, anybody in your team could be hooking it up to all your business critical systems, giving it logins and actually the. That's outside of your organization. You don't even know they're using this tech. I bet there's a lot of you out there that are in that instance and you won't even know like how. And that's a, that's a hacker's best dream right there. That's actually quite hard for IT teams to even manage.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, let's talk about something with that then, because I had a really interesting conversation with a very senior person in a large retail organization and it's a great conversation because they said, look, what they're concerned about is at the moment I want to go and buy something and I'm going to go to the retailer website and I'm going to. Because I trust them, I like them, product quality is great, all that kind of stuff. I'm going to go there and I'm going to buy that stuff instead. Now I go to my agent and say, go and buy me this thing. Go and find me the best one of this based on user ratings and then buy me if it's less than £10, whatever. It's deciding which retailer it goes to. So suddenly there's disintermediation in terms of like, you know, we had this thing where, oh, I could go directly to the retailer or I could go to Amazon and the retailer is trying to get you to come directly to them and some people are going to Amazon. Well, now there's a whole nother tier where the AI is deciding where you shop from.

[Kieran Rogers]

Well, it's more nuanced than that because Actually, what I found when it was doing research, it was unable to get information from certain websites because they were structured to prevent agentic bots from accessing this.

[Daniel Rolls]

Then they're not part of the conversation suddenly.

[Kieran Rogers]

I know, right? But then that means the data's skewed 100 and you're not necessarily getting the best results. But you don't know that because it's all happening under the hood and you've closed your laptop, gone off to make a coffee, right?

[Daniel Rolls]

So you've got two big issues already. You've got the security issue where you know if someone in your organization has connected their Agent and their ChatGPT or their Google Gemini to their OneDrive and to their SharePoint and to their Outlook and to their Gmail and they've given it logins for the different platforms they use. That's a way in to lots of different things. There's a huge security implication. So suddenly these agents are deciding which websites that they use. So this is a huge thing as well. And then the third thing that we were thinking about, which is a real strategic game changer, is at the moment certain brands have huge data assets, right? So if you've been coming to my website for a long time, like Amazon for example, knows what I like, what I don't like, what I'm likely to buy, what I'm not liked by, and that's a closely guarded secret because they use that to, to target things at you. Now an agent that I allow to log into Amazon is not allowed to take that data and put it into their large language model. I'm not suggesting that. But what they do learn over a period of time is what I like and what I don't like, what within my Amazon account. And for me, that agent is able to give me personalization across a whole range of websites based on my behavior across a whole range of websites. So actually now like Amazon gives me good personalization to, it might be a good reason to go there. Well, actually if my agent learns loads and loads about me over time, it can personalize stuff about me across a whole range of websites. And suddenly that data that Amazon have got isn't valuable to them anymore. Because yes, they can personalize, but I can personalize via my agent as well. So there's this whole thing of like is do these people that have lots of data about us have really good value unless they do with the large language models like it? Yes, they would, but sooner or later they're not going to need it because what's going to happen is that they'll learn all that stuff themselves and it will become irrelevant. So suddenly the AI agents and AI platforms have a big security portals. There's a huge level of risk that goes with that. They're actually learning more about us in one place without really needing to use cookies and all that kind of stuff that was limiting people like Google previously and actually they're taking kind of commercial organizations out of the conversation unless they choose to put them in the conversation. So if for example, I am sort of a rogue AI company and everyone's using my platform and I decide I don't like that brand, I'm never going to recommend anyone goes to their website and therefore I could hit their commercial revenues. And that's been the same with Google for a long time. Remember in that Google can decide what showed up in the search rankings and didn't. And I've had lots of legal cases about have had to prove they're as unbiased as possible. It's the algorithm and so on as well. Yeah. So these are really big conversations that have come about really quickly and then on top of that is the impact on jobs.

[Kieran Rogers]

The problem is these conversations are happening post event, not before.

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah.

[Kieran Rogers]

You know what I was saying in the other episode about, you know, wisdom, thinking about the implications of what you do before you do it and mapping that out a bit, you know, and I just see this all the time. It's just a race to beat the competition. And what I think is really interesting is that even the organizations that report on this are struggling to keep up. So, you know, I've been looking at some of the reports and data on this and people like McKinsey and all the major US banks are reporting on this. But the pace of change is so fast. A lot of the information that's going to the decision makers is way out of date. We're waiting on the next iteration of chat GPT and there'll be no news or evidence of what it's going to do or how it works. And then it happens and then it changes everything and it's massively ahead of any legislative curve.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, can I give you the only solution to this then? You've got a couple of theories in this. One is regulation. The problem is the regulators can't move as fast as the technologies. That's not going to happen. You'd have to have universal global agreement. That's not going to happen.

[Kieran Rogers]

No.

[Daniel Rolls]

So the only opportunity really have here is one that we've spoken about in digital transformation for a long Time, which is the organization that is the most agile, wins. And I'd come back to the thing I've been saying for a while, which is that you don't need to know everything. You need to know a bit more than your competitors. And that's why podcasts, you know, live learning sessions, a learning culture. Now, I would say I'm on a training company, okay? But the point being is, unless you embed a culture of learning at your organization, you're going to have a problem. So iterative, always learning, always learning, always trying, testing. But creating organization that is agile enough to change quickly. And the bigger and more complex your organization is, the harder it is to do that. But that's the same of all your competitors. If they're all large and complex. Where it becomes tricky is if you've got competitors that are smaller and agile, more nimble than you, they will take advantage of this. So I think that we're going to see the destruction of large organizations quicker than we will smaller ones, which has been the case for a long time anyway. But those large organizations also have the clout to go off and try and invest in this and so on as well. The thing I'd also bring you to is as we trust everything less and less because everything is deep, fake, and everything is, you know, is it an agent? Is it real, whatever. That leaning into our humanity thing that I've come to a few times before, which, like, what makes our brand human, that's the stuff that's really important still. Let's really kind of focus on that. I would think about that. So I wouldn't panic about it, but I would be highly concerned. And I would just say, what is it that I can adopt from this that's going to be useful? What don't I want to adopt? But just looking at the fact that it will really change the market and actually, I think we're in it for a period of disruption in the fact that we will come to adjust to these things and kind of learn what we want and what we don't want. But in the interim, stuff's going to happen that isn't been planned. We are going to stop recruiting junior roles, potentially not we, but, you know, a number of organizations will. Some people will go through ruthless efficiency and they'll cut loads of roles and then we'll go, well, what happens when you haven't got a talent pipeline? What happens when you haven't got a diversity of thinking in your organization? What impact does that have in the long term of the organization? So I think it's making sure our short term thinking and our long term thinking are actually married up a little bit and trying to do some strategic planning.

[Kieran Rogers]

There's a danger in all of this. I had a conversation with my bank and I was frustrated. A PayPal payment hadn't been made and PayPal was telling me it had been made and the bank's telling me it's not. I'm like, how do I sort this out? So I was having a chat, conversation with my bank and I said, look, this is a situation. Can you do anything to help me with it? I just casually mentioned in the chat, yeah, I'm a bit stressed about this.

[Daniel Rolls]

Because I want to get it sorted.

[Kieran Rogers]

So I'm. And suddenly the person that I thought I was speaking to clearly is an AI agent because it starts going off on one about, you know, do you need to talk about the stress? Like, in a way, it was just unnatural. It's just unnatural. And you just think, gosh, how many of, how much of that's going on? No one's looking at it. How much damage is that being done? Can I actually even speaking to her? So they've driven efficiency there, for sure.

[Daniel Rolls]

And they were giving, but they've damaged their brand.

[Kieran Rogers]

But they've damaged their brand. And I think that's a good argument for actual people. I've had it for a long time with, you know, customer service. It's just nothing like being given great human customer service. And I think if you slash and burn too quickly there, you will reap the negative awards for sure. You know, there's no reason why a machine should be able to outperform an actual human and a task like that. But I know everybody, every company seems to be vying that as a real ripe piece of use for this technology. Some of the voice AI now is incredibly good.

[Daniel Rolls]

Well, you just look at 11 labs at the moment. They've got the new voices where you can go, say it sarcastically, whisper it and things like that. It's epically good.

[Kieran Rogers]

You can hear the breath, right?

[Daniel Rolls]

Yeah.

[Kieran Rogers]

Which is like so, so, so much better. But is it as good actually? Where does this position you? Is there a, A, an advantage within the marketplace of actually having real people that genuinely care?

[Daniel Rolls]

There is, there is. And let's come to that a little bit. I'm getting lots of people saying to me in a lot of my students, a lot of people that listen to the podcast saying, I'm really worried about this. I'm, you know, I'm a junior marketer. How am I going to get a foothold in my career.

[Kieran Rogers]

It's the first thing anybody does when you show them agentic AI is they start testing it to see could this replace me? The fear. The fear is there in life. And when they realize actually no, it can't because they're a bit more senior or a bit more strategic, then they relax. But that is short term thinking, in my opinion.

[Daniel Rolls]

So what I've been saying to students and people out there are kind of studying marketing, get into this. It's not a bad career to get into. Don't panic from the point of view that we're getting this technology first. But what you need to be really good at doing is critical thinking, problem solving. You need some strategy frameworks, you need the cause of. So those fundamentals of business, fundamentals of marketing become really important. The ability to prompt really effectively. And I, everywhere I go still a really good approach to prompting is really rare still. You know, that whole piece had to. And we will do an upcoming episode on some prompting techniques and good prompts and so on as well, just to give you some deeper tips on that. But I think that critical thinking, problem solving, understanding, you know, the economics of how the world works, these are kind of core skills. And it's always been interesting to me that marketers don't really understand economics and actually they really should because they're going to see how does their organization fit into the broader world, how does that fit? So there's those kind of core business skills I think really important. So we will do a follow up episode on, you know, what skills are important in the marketplace right now. But I do think that organizations need to be looking at what they want to do this in the short term, but what will be the long term implications of doing that? And unless we're able to do that, we're going to cause ourselves lots of problems. And also like with any of this stuff on the surface, the shiny like, oh, it can do this, it can do that, test it, refine it. Now one tip with AI agents, get it to do something, see where it goes wrong. Rewrite your prompt, start it again. Okay, remember, every conversation in an AI is in a context window, meaning it's remembering what you've said before in that conversation. So very often when you have a conversation, it goes off at a tangent, it gets it wrong, learn from it, improve your prompt, start the conversation again. Okay, so kind of go through that process. The other question I've been having is that as these things are more and more powerful, they are using More and more processing power. And actually there is a carbon impact of using this stuff as well, which there is. And if you do a very simple AI prompt, you know it's using a certain amount of carbon. If you do a really complex prompt, it's going to use more carbon as well. But what I would say about all of that is that, and I have a big debate about this, a really interesting organization recently is that yes, that does use more carbon. And if you're just sitting there willy nilly playing with it, you're just using it for the same time. You sitting on Netflix for eight hours at the weekend and watching Netflix will obliterate that in terms the amount of carbon you're using. Right. And I've got a chart and I will put the chart into the show notes in terms of like what does a Google search use? What does an AI query use? What does watching TikTok videos for three hours a day use? What does streaming Netflix use? That video streaming is off the charts comparison. So I think that we've been a little bit unfair in honing in on AI and saying oh it uses loads of card, we shouldn't be doing this now. There are environmental impacts, there are data centers that are needed. That's using huge amounts of water, there is environmental damage. I'm not denying that, but I think it needs to be a conversation that's held in context as well. If this is something that's of interest to you, please message it and we'll do an episode on it. Because I've got a ton of research we've been using for a couple of clients recently. So short term, amazing. Long term, what's the impact going to be? If you haven't played with the AI agent in ChatGPT, go and do it. It's going to blow your mind a little bit as well. Think about how it's going to impact your organization. We have got a half day masterclass for Target Internet members coming up on effective use of agents. So if you're not a member, get signed up for that. Also we've got an update session for our newsletter subscribers and members. So target Internet.com forward/newsletter. You've got those one hour update sessions every month with me and they're a lot of fun. We get a really big audience. Everyone's coming together for those a lot. So it's a lot of fun as well. So go off and have a play with it. We'll do another session soon. But there's a lot to think about and a lot to think about how it's going to impact your organization, your role, and the future of marketing. For more episodes Resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet. Com Podcast.