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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Guide to AI Agents
00:26:30
In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, Ciaran and Daniel explore the next evolutionary leap in artificial intelligencs - Agentic AI. As tools like ChatGPT and Gemini become more capable, we can go beyond content generation and enter an era...
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- [00:00]
Kieran Rogers
Welcome back to the digital marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Kieran Rogers.
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Daniel Rolls
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
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Kieran Rogers
And today we have an introduction to agentic AI.
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Daniel Rolls
Yeah, you're sounding more and more like Michael Caine when you introduce yourself.
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Kieran Rogers
I had a Michael Caine image in my head when I said that.
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Daniel Rolls
Slow down. My name is Michael Caine. Anyway, so we are going to talk about agentic AI and my feeling on this is this is the next stage in this kind of evolution of AI tools. So we got these generative AI tools and we were able to write stuff first of all. And then it got a bit smarter and we're generating images and that got a bit smarter and basically they can do some stuff but not, not everything that's that useful. Suddenly we're leaping into some new stuff. So that's what I want to talk about.
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Kieran Rogers
I just love the name. It, it sounds like some sort of gut supplement, like I'm gonna get a dose of happy bacteria.
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Daniel Rolls
Have you had your agentic AI agents then from now on, if that. Would that work better?
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Kieran Rogers
Oh, I get it now. Oh, I see. I always see what you did there. I just thought it's a new fancy schmancy word. I was gonna start dropping it into conversation without really knowing what it means. No, no harm could come from that.
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Daniel Rolls
Right, well, I'm glad this podcast is serving to educate you, Kieran. That's useful. It's really supposed to be at the audience, but you always, always.
- [01:28]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
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Daniel Rolls
So the idea and the kind of definition of these is agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex multi step problems. So it's the idea that you go off and set a task and it will investigate and work out what steps are required to complete that task. And you can do it to some extent already. So the deep reasoning versions of Google Gemini and of ChatGPT already already do this. And I think actually it's worth this point because with ChatGPT it has got really confusing with all the different versions of the large language model. So we had, you know, version 2344 omni, which is 4.0 and so on. And what a little, little thing to understand is that when you see like 4o though afterwards sounds for omni, but actually when you see the o before the numbers like oh3 and oh4 mini are the currently the new ones. What these ones are really about is deep reasoning. So they're slower but they're able to go off and deeply reason into a problem as well, so the idea is that O3 and 04 mini can do advanced reasoning, multi step solutions and image analysis. So they're really good. Now all of a sudden, if you try them out, you give it an image and analyze what's going on inside the image and it can do a really good job of that, whereas it wasn't very good at it before. So I did a quick test. Grab a picture from a fridge online full of food, upload that picture, say, have a look at what's in my fridge, and come up with a healthy, healthy recipe for three people. And it worked out what was in the fridge and it came up with a really relevant recipe based on those foods. So it can do some interesting kind of things. But where they're going with this is that ChatGPT are building operator. Operator is a version of ChatGPT that can use a web browser. So not that it can just search for things, but it can go into maybe a travel website and book you a flight, it can go in and post things into your LinkedIn, all those kind of things. So if you suddenly think about what we've got at the moment is something that can create content, but it can't really do much with it. But with this you would be able to give it multi step tasks that involve interacting with other services, other websites, posting things potentially as well. So Operator has been rolled out in the US to pro users and it will be rolling out around the rest of the world. But what really differentiates, and this is what I found. Interesting, interesting and why it was a real wake up moment for me, is where these tools can access other platforms. So yes, we can already do a web search. They're starting to be able to use a browser within ChatGPT operator, but I've been using one that basically has access to the command line. So what it's able to do is to control a server and it's a sandbox server so that it can't necessarily do any damage to anything else that you've kind of got going on. But that means that it can go in, it can write code and it can deploy that code. So at the moment, if you get ChatGPT to write some code, it'll give you some code, whether it's HTML or Python or something else, and you have to take that, create a file and deploy it somewhere else. ChatGPT will give you a preview of HTML so you can see roughly what something would kind of lay out and look like. But for example, if I say to ChatGPT, go and create me an interactive infographic of the Google algorithm updates timeline aimed at marketers. Create it in JavaScript. It's going to give me the code, but it's not going to be able to deploy it. And then even further on, if I say go and grab the style sheets from this particular website and base it on this brand, it's not really able to do that particularly effectively. However, I've been playing with a tool called Manus and if you got our last newsletter, what you would have seen in that newsletter was an invite to a live session which was about updates about all this kind of stuff that we're doing literally going out on tomorrow afternoon. So by the time this comes out, it would have been, it would have been out already. If you're a Target Internet member, they're all recorded. So target Internet.com you can go in, log into your membership and you can see the session recording. But what it then had in the newsletter was here is this interactive infographic created on our branding and here's the tool that we use to create it. And what was amazing was that I pointed it at the website, it grabbed all the colors, all the brand identity, the fonts, all those kind of things. So it basically just took the style sheets and it created this incredibly interactive JavaScript based infographic that allowed you to filter by year, to filter by topic, it gave you a timeline of the changes in the algorithm, all that kind of stuff. So it did some deep research into the topic and then was able to create something that was interactive but based on my target audience and then deploy that as a JavaScript, HTML and CSS file. And I could then take that and I could embed that into my website as well. Now the difficult stage actually, interestingly, was then saying if I want to upload JavaScript onto my content management system, my content management system is going to fall over with security errors because it doesn't want you to be able to deploy that stuff. So we had to do some work in the back end and a big shout out to Brad, our developer, because he did an amazing job of basically allow us to build these kind of micro sites within our website and then it's showing up in an iframe, but then getting Google to look within that iframe, so it works from an SEO point of view. So if you want to know more about that, then just let's get in contact targetinternet.com podcast you can reach out and I'll explain. That whole process is a bit techy and not of interest to Most people. But what was amazing to me was to say, okay, if suddenly I can create things like interactive tools. So one of the things that I've just started creating and I'm, I'm demoing in this, this session tomorrow is Digital Marketing Simulator. So for my students and for people that are learning about digital marketing, how about if you could go in and say, right, here's all the different channels you could be using. You've got this budget, here's your objective. How much budget would you put into each of these channels and which bit is of these channels would use? And then run a simulation, Go, here's your results. What would you do differently? And then do it as a bit of a kind of competition and a simulation that would have taken weeks and weeks, if not months to create with a developer normally did it in a couple of hours, just kind of going through ideas and guiding it. So when people talk about vibe coding, there's the idea of your coding but using these AI tools. And it was up until literally a couple of weeks ago, a fairly complex process bringing a number of tools together, setting up a server, being able to deploy your stuff to that serve all the security stuff that went with it. Tools like Manus are suddenly doing all of that stuff for you. Now, Manus is interesting because it uses Deep seq, which was that Chinese model that came out and really shook up the AI world. And what it allows you to do, it's got access to a browser, it's got a sandbox server, so it can access the command line, it can code, it can create websites, it can create interactive jobs, get HTML, give it some code. So for example, you give it an Excel spreadsheet full of data, and it will turn that into an interactive website. So you can just put all your data online as a, as an interactive report and those kind of things. So the thing I wanted to come to with all this is, okay, keep an eye on this. Go and take a look at Manus. We if you sign up for the newsletter, targetinternet.com newsletter, we've got loads of examples that we're putting out from this stuff as well. But this is going to be even more a radical change for marketing teams and marketing departments. So at the moment, what's happening is that, you know, content writing, image creation, social media, post creation, we're starting to use these tools, maybe email content, we're starting two these tools. But suddenly, if you can create really interactive stuff, deep reports, that's actually really useful. Do you need the same skill set on Your team that you've got, do you need as many people as you've got? What skills should a marketer be focusing on in order to take advantage of this stuff and not kind of be left behind? So my initial thinking is, okay, right, culture of learning is essential because you need to be staying on top of this stuff to make sure that you know what the tools are capable of doing, and you're getting competitive advantage by using them first. But actually from a call that I was having with a podcast interviewer gearing up for next week, is that the more this stuff gets advanced, the more you need to go back to basics, which is you need to understand your audience. Who's your target Persona? What is it they want? What's actually going to resonate with them? What's a good user experience look like? And therefore, are we using these tools to create something that's valuable and useful, or are we just using them for the sake of creating more stuff and just pumping out volume and it's not really achieving what we want?
- [10:02]
Kieran Rogers
See, I think we're making the classic mistake that innovators have always made, that I'd never forget an interview we did looking at, like, the history of innovation. We'll have to put a link to it in the show notes, but one of the things I learned there was that, you know, when they developed steam engines, they decided that they. Well, they didn't want to trash all the wooden cogs and water wheels and stuff that they have. So let's use the steam engine to pump more water into the water wheel. And then when they invented electricity, it took them quite a while to work out that the.
- [10:38]
Daniel Rolls
To distribute it.
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Kieran Rogers
Yeah, well, the switch didn't need to be right by the light source like it does with a gas lamp. And so, you know, we still have those bedside lamps that's still a hangover from that, where the switch is on the actual stem of the light bulb. Like, it took them 40, 50 years for somebody to work out. So you can put the switch anywhere. It's a circuit. It doesn't have to be right at the light source. And it's like, it's the classic thing. So I think when you look at how we're using AI, this is a little bit of an epiphany I had today, because what I'm finding is AI has freed me up so much that actually, I'm beginning to take a step back and go, do you know what? Why are we using it to just churn out the same stuff that we were doing before? That we're making that same mistake. So challenge to everybody, really take a step back and look at what you're actually doing. Because the epiphany I had was no, no, no, no, no, no. This frees us all up to do way, way better. You know, we could actually have, you know, a proper integrated calendar with multiple different channels. You know, same idea, but let's have a video, let's do some audio, let's do some interviews with experts in the area. Like actually we could use this time that's freeing up to be so, so much more creative with what we're doing. And I think that's where it's sort of going wrong. You know, we're still just in treading the treadmill, right. We're like hamsters running faster in the wheel when actually there's a Ferrari sat outside.
- [12:05]
Daniel Rolls
Well, it's kind of like the Google algorithm, right. We've been working to the Google what do we need to do to get to number one in Google for such a long time? And actually it's like if we just focused on the user that would have been all right. I mean the epiphany piece to me was that suddenly I created an interactive piece of content that I wouldn't be able to create before. I would have had to, you know, get the, get our developers involved, take them off what they're doing, get a graphic designer involved, take them and actually didn't need any of that. I was able to create something interactive that was actually really I found useful. And I was like, wow, this is, this is phenomenal. And I think that there's a, there's a great opportunity for suddenly doing much deeper levels of research, coming up with new insights, graphing and charting things that haven't been graphed and charted before in an easier way and so on.
- [12:46]
Kieran Rogers
So one caveat with that. So I was playing around with the deep research side of things and I did this really, I asked it, I just thought I'll see what deep research would do. And my gosh, it gave me a five page wall of words.
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Daniel Rolls
Yeah.
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Kieran Rogers
And do you know what I found myself doing? Feeding that back to the AI, going could you.
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Daniel Rolls
Yeah, this is the risk.
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Kieran Rogers
Because it's, because it's too, it was just too much. It's like no one's going to ever read that.
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Daniel Rolls
But this is where I found that the, the instructions and why the agentic. The more agent based stuff is really important because it's multi step. What you can say is instead of giving it an instruction, say this Is what I want the outcome, I want a solution to this problem and it will then go off and do the research and then it will give you a solution in some way. Like I'd like an interactive tool that solves this problem and it would then go, okay, it will come up with an original way of doing it. So it's getting it to use the research to output something. So the idea of saying, I'd like you to go off and research this topic and then I would like you to build a summary of that and to chart it and make a visual, interactive visual tool that people can ingest that information really, really easily and suddenly it's oh, okay, that, that would be great. Because it's exactly the same thing. If you, if you get. There's loads of research out there, but we haven't got the time to read 50 page documents. Half the time we just won't bother. But actually if you give me a beautiful image referenced representation of that that's interactive and is a much more user friendly experience that's quite unique. So things like, okay, build some reviews of these particular pieces of software, but build the reviews from different users perspective from a student from a B2B marketer, B2C marketer, and it will go off and take those different views and maybe build you a table that summarizes that and so on. So I think what you've just said is really resonated with me is like, actually let's not use these tools for doing what we were doing already. Yeah, let's imagine what new things that we could do that were better than what we were doing before.
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Kieran Rogers
Don't, don't be the idiot with the steam engine pumping more water into your wooden wheel. Just don't do it. You know who you are. Stop it.
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Daniel Rolls
Well, it's me. It was me until last week. And I think it's all of us.
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Kieran Rogers
Right? I've done. Hey, I've been doing it too. But at some point you sort of take a step back the. I got excited again. Yeah, like my eyes, it's like, whoa. No, no, no. I suppose I went through this a little bit when we. You've discovered the script and I discovered that I didn't have to. Yeah, didn't have to spend hours editing out um's nerves anymore. I'm like, but that's what I do. I was quite a bit upset at first, but actually that was a bit of a revelation actually. I can be doing other stuff. I don't need to do this anymore. That's brilliant. That is brilliant.
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Daniel Rolls
I think that's it. So what we're doing, because obviously Target Internet members, every month we do these half day masterclass and we do these one hour update sessions. But the one hour update sessions are available for everyone if you're on the newsletter. So targetinternet.com forward/newsletter get signed up. We are going to do a live agent AI session. So I'm going to go through and just demonstrate Manus and we might use some other tools as well to build some live interactive elements and just to show you how effective it can be. And also some of the pitfalls and some of the things it's not so great at as well. So get signed up to the newsletter and you can come and join us on that and ask questions and kind of interact on that stuff as well. But I think that those marketers that aren't taking advantage of these tools now are just going to fall behind very, very quickly. Because if you're just doing the same stuff of pumping out the same old content, it just kind of gets to the point of where it always already was, which is as much or muchness. And if you do average content, you might as well not do it. So actually now take the video, audio, elements, interactive tools, written stuff that I just create something that's actually useful for your audience. And I think it is always go step back. Who's your target audience? What do they want? What's their intent? What is their problem? And if you're solving that problem, then that's when that content's going to be useful.
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Kieran Rogers
It's. It's a real challenge though, isn't it, to make the time to do this. Like, you know, when you're hard at it and you've got deadlines to hit and you know, you're in the morass that is your working week. Like what? I mean, where would you pitch it, Daniel? Where would you say, like percentage split? Like how much of your time is going into, into learning and updates? Yeah, because I think that would be a good, like a good rule of thumb on this. So people got an idea of, well, you know, am I, am I running at this hard enough? Because you have to be realistic. You can't.
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Daniel Rolls
Just to give you a quick example before I get into what I do, I mean, the thing is that with Target Internet, for years we had this reams and reams. We've got hundreds of e learning modules, hundreds of podcasts, hundreds of videos, and it's all there as a library and it's updated constantly. That's great if you want to dip into it to answer a particular problem. If you want to create a culture of learning, it's very hard to regiment yourself to go in and do that stuff. So then we built certificates so you can work your way through those. That's great. But actually the big turning point for our users and for us as a business really was when we started doing those half day master classes and the one hour sessions. Because what it meant is that it's in your diary and if something's diarized, you tend to do it because you have to be somewhere at a particular time.
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Kieran Rogers
Meetings happen. Yeah, it's a radical idea. Let's make them really useful and learn things. Yeah.
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Daniel Rolls
And I think this is it. And suddenly the community started building because people started coming together on a regular basis, getting to know each other so that I think you have to diarize it. And that's. For me, what's kind of worked is that my, my routine now is that I will get up in the morning, I get up early now and I take my dogs out. Ready? That takes about an hour. And so I've done a bit of exercise in the morning, my brain's going, and I will sit down and I will basically study and read and learn new stuff for an hour. So it's an hour four days a week. Pretty much it's about four hours a week. But for me, that time of day works. Could be any time of day for different people, could be a big block. If it works for you on a Sunday or something or whatever. Weekday in the evening. But what that meant for me is that I'm going through and making notes of things that I want to try out. But what I then try and do is say, right, how can I apply this to my work? So, oh man, this is really exciting. What could we build for Target or. That looks interesting. Let's bake that into a podcast. So basically diarizing some time to learn and then applying it by a project for my work and the combination of the two. And it doesn't have to be your work work, it could actually be, you know, for family stuff or, you know, I'm going to create some sort of interactive family calendar and then we can all go in there and we can put in, or we've got an interactive shopping list for the family, whatever it is. But you could, you can find some sort of useful project in your life that brings it to life a little bit. And that means that I've kind of built a culture of learning for myself. That, that kind of works. I mean, you're always coming to me with new tools and ideas and things. Where does that come from? How do you. Is it a process that is structured or is it just happening because you're curious?
- [19:24]
Kieran Rogers
I'm relentlessly curious. I get distracted quite easily. My superpower actually has turned out because actually you pick up all sorts of things. I just like to glean new things. My brain demands it of me, really, I suppose. And it's a big, like a fun thing, I suppose. I found if I don't do that, then I can't help people. And that makes me sad. So I'm constantly on the lookout for, oh, new, new shiny tools. How could we use it? What might that do? How might that. How might that look?
- [19:57]
Daniel Rolls
So it's interesting. Different motivations. Your motivations is to help people. That's why you want to learn things. My motivation is to not look like an idiot. Because when I'm standing on stage and someone says, what'd you think of XYZ AI? And I'm like, I've never heard of it. Oh, dear. They're like, oh, dear, he doesn't see stuff.
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Kieran Rogers
I'm very practiced at being an idiot. That's another one of my quid, if you speak to my family. But, yeah, no, that doesn't bother me so much.
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Daniel Rolls
It's.
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Kieran Rogers
It's the. It's the journey and then it's the outcomes from that and that. I suppose I've just been doing that for years and years and years now.
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Daniel Rolls
It's just always been part of my job to try and help people here. Right. So therefore, you stay curious and go, oh, that would be an interesting thing to talk about.
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Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
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Daniel Rolls
So it's just trying to work out how you bake that into your day by day as well.
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Kieran Rogers
Yeah, I think so. I think. I think the thing I would say, though, is that where everybody's gonna bring the edge and up their A game is, you know, your ability to pick and choose, your ability to curate, your ability to tie all this together. Because actually, it doesn't matter how good this, you know, agentic stuff gets, you still need a maestro. You know, you still need the conductor that's bringing all these, you know, different, different units of your orchestra together. Otherwise it's just going to sound like a cacophony of noise. And I think, you know, if I'm honest to look at what's going on at the moment, I've seen there's a.
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Daniel Rolls
Lot of that just definitely.
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Kieran Rogers
Way, way, way worse. And Actually, you know, bringing that together and having the quality of thought. I had a meeting today with a writer and it got me really excited because some of the people that I have worked with on the writing front, I've just not been there with the ideas and so they've moved on and I've got like, I'm looking for someone else to work with. And I had this meeting with the writer and he was like on fire with ideas, like excited about the subject. And he thought of a dozen things in about three or four minutes that had never occurred to me. And it's now, this is exciting because actually this is where, you know, the human element and your expertise, you sat there worried about, well, where do I fit into all of this? You know, these tools need somebody to pull it all together to make beautiful music. And actually there's still a great art in that. And knowing what tools can we use or which people can we go to and how do we pull together this team? So I think you're right. I think the teams that we're going to have around us have potentially quite a different skill set. But you're going to need brain power to knit this stuff all together and produce something good with it. That's what's going to give you the edge.
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Daniel Rolls
Yeah, and I think it's that whole thing of what used to be. The problem is I've got an idea, but then I've got to go and find a developer, I've got to find a graphic designer. I need someone that can process the data and do the security on the server. And actually a lot of that is disappearing, which means, actually it's the creativity that becomes really important. But also we've been talking about this T shaped people for such a long time, which is like broad set of problem solving skills. The top of the T and then the deep line of the T, which is your deep level of knowledge. Those problem solvers will become ever more important because people are now doing jobs where it's not been done before. As in, I come to you and go, what should I do with Manus? And it's like, well, no one knows. No one's. It's all new. So let's try out and let's see what's possible. What's he good at? What is he not good at? And I find that really exciting because you're, you're currently pushing the boundaries of what's possible. But it means that we need those people that bring that, that creative element, but also the structured creative approach and the ability Then to join that up to what our target audiences want becomes really important. So I go back to this whole thing of lean into our humanity. It's like the more everything is AI, the more that human aspect that is curating it, that is the conductor, as you put it, is important.
- [23:36]
Kieran Rogers
So this writer said to me something really like gobsmackingly brilliant. He said, oh, I don't really use AI. I've not really got into that. I'm like, that is awesome. And that is why you've just had half a dozen brilliant ideas. Because you know what, the rest of the world are all going out there going, what should I write about? And it's trotting out the same old stuff like, and it's not joining new dots together, particularly because it, because it's not so good at doing that. Like it follows what's been done naturally.
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Daniel Rolls
That's the way it's developed, is that.
- [24:05]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a large language model. It's sucked in lots of content. And that's, that's the exciting thing. And this, this is what I suppose I want to share with the audience. You need people around you that aren't just complete slaves to this technology. You know, we, we still need great artists, great writers, great poets, because actually they bring to it something that kind of. I suppose it does, it just brings in that element of humanity, that element of, of realness, that element of actually that's really original, that's really great.
- [24:38]
Daniel Rolls
We only need to look at Sora, which is ChatGPT's image and video platform, to look at the wildly creative stuff that people are doing. I mean, there's a lot of wacky stuff, but yeah, there's a lot of really, really clever stuff. And I think actually from an art point of view view, it's allowing people to create incredible art. Now there's lots of discussion in the art world about, you know, is it generating stuff that's based on other people's artworks, what the fairness of that? And I'm completely in line with that. But I would say, actually I think this is a new art form and I think that it's enabling people to be artistic that perhaps weren't able to do so before. So my thinking on this, start looking into these agent based AIs or agentic AI and have a play around with things like Manus. There'll be more and more of them. Manus technically is. Lots of people say it's nothing really new because it's just tying together a number of different technologies there. But Actually, that's where the power is, is bringing these technologies together. ChatGPT are doing loads of work on this. One of the things I would look at, it's on the OpenAI website. They have their news section. It's probably the most useful thing you can read in terms of understanding the different models, because we've got a new model and this is why it's good and this is what it's particularly useful for. So it's a great resource for doing those kind of things as well. So what we'd like to hear is what you have developed with some of these tools as well. So as ever, Targetinter.com podcast you'll find everything in the show notes, but also it's where you can reach out to us and let us know what you've built. And if it's good, you want us to promote it, we'll promote it and get people to kind of give you some feedback.
- [25:58]
Kieran Rogers
And if on the off chance you are developing a new probiotic yogurt, get in touch because I've got a dozen ideas that aren't going anywhere because I got hold completely at the wrong end of the stick.
- [26:07]
Daniel Rolls
And yeah, we're gonna have to trademark a different name for that one, I'm afraid. Can't be called a gentic AI. Right, everyone, thank you so much for listening to Digital Marketing Podcast. We'll see you again very soon. For more episodes, Resour to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com podcast.