Episode 2: Generative AI and Persado’s Role in the Ecosystem

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Alex Olesen: Welcome to Motivation AI Matters Podcast. I’m really excited to be joined by this episode’s guest, Paul Roetzer.

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Alex Olesen: Paul is the founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute.

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Alex Olesen: Paul, great to have you. It’s great to be here; looking forward to the conversation. We’ve had plenty of offline conversations over the years, but for a chance to think, we get to do it for a podcast, so it should be fun.

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Alex Olesen: I know I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. We’ve been talking about appearing on a podcast together for a couple of months. We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations about…

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Alex Olesen: …Generative AI. You’ve been a long-time friend of Persado, and I figured we’d make it official and bring you on the podcast and talk about your point of view…

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Alex Olesen: …on the industry and your background.

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Alex Olesen: …and I think that’s a great place to get started, so could you share with us a little bit about your background? How did you arrive at where you are today?

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Paul Roetzer: From the college days, I guess, because I came out of journalism school. So, I think the first thing people need to know about me is I’m actually a liberal arts major. I’m a writer by trade. my wife is a painting major and history major, so like…

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Paul Roetzer: …I come at this from an angle of…I have a deep respect for the arts and the human ability to create. So I am not a Machine Learning Engineer or Data Scientist, or, you know, an AI Researcher in a traditional sense.

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Paul Roetzer: I started working in a marketing agency and eventually founded my own in 2005…

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Paul Roetzer: ..and that we became Hubspot’s first partner in 2007, which really threw me into the marketing technology space and the emergence of mobile. You know, iPhone, social media. Everything was sort of bubbling up at that time…

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Paul Roetzer: ..and then in 2011, I just developed a curiosity about artificial intelligence, and started trying to understand what IBM Watson was, and how it worked, and how it won on Jeopardy. And so I spent a couple of years just researching AI and…

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Paul Roetzer: …wrote about it a little bit in my second book in 2014 with some theories about how it could be applied to marketing…

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Paul Roetzer: …and then I started just doing all the public speaking about it. People started asking me to come and give talks on that topic, and…

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Paul Roetzer: …then, in 2016, we turned that sort of interest and curiosity into the Marketing AI Institute and just started publishing a couple of times a week what we were learning and…

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Paul Roetzer: …interviews we were doing and companies we were following like Persado. You know, the companies that in the early days of AI in the mid-teens we’re actually like doing some interesting things with machine learning and natural language processing.

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Paul Roetzer: And yeah, and so then I sold my agency in 2021 to focus on the Marketing AI Institute, and that’s what I do today. We’re a media event and education company that runs conferences, online courses, and publishes a bunch of content. And…

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Paul Roetzer: …I have a podcast. So…

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Paul Roetzer: …yeah, just so. I wouldn’t say I fell into it. It’s been like a 12-year run to end up where we are today. But Chat GPT certainly accelerated the interest in what we’re doing, and I think just overall awareness about artificial intelligence.

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely. You know, we at Persado also have a lot of people who say they fell into artificial intelligence and fast. In fact, our prior guest, Lisa Spira, oversees our Content Intelligence team.

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Alex Olesen: She is a linguistics expert by trade, and did not have formal education on machine learning. And I think that affords her a very unique perspective, being able to work with our technology.

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Alex Olesen: And I would say the same thing about you. So, taking your background in writing and even your wife’s passion for art, this must be a very…

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Alex Olesen: …interesting time for you to observe…

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Alex Olesen: …this wave of Generative AI technology being able to author its own content using a series of prompts. In your own words, what is Generative AI, and what are some of the most useful applications that you’ve seen of Generative AI so far?

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Paul Roetzer: Yeah. We think of Generative AI’s ability for the machine to create something from a prompt, so…

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Paul Roetzer: …language is an obvious one, the ability for it to write things. But you also have image generation, video generation, audio generation, you know, music or the AI Drake thing, you know. A few weeks back or a month or two ago. It’s able to generate audio, and then code is the other one. But those are the kind of the five major things now that it’s going to keep expanding, and there’s other things like synthetic data…But in terms of, you know, most business and marketing people…

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Paul Roetzer: …those are the categories that you’re gonna be really be thinking about. And so the use cases are basically anywhere where those things exist, anywhere where you’re creating content. So if you’re in sales and you know, sales, emails and proposals. If you’re in marketing, you know, marketing emails, landing pages, website copy ads, social copy…

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Paul Roetzer: …these are all things that AI can assist. And again, like Persado’s, been doing stuff like this for years. Where your custom, training these things, these capabilities, based on, you know, brands and data. So it’s not new, but Chat GPT sort of…

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Paul Roetzer: …the Generative AI term for it emerged in 2022, and then Chat GPT Just brought it to everyone, like, I think. What was it like 100 million users in January or something?

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Paul Roetzer: So that was really what changed, as there were some breakthroughs in the capabilities. But it was really just the mass access and adoption of the technology that brought us to where we are.

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Alex Olesen: Yeah, I agree there. There have been some precursor technologies to what we now…

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Alex Olesen: …commonly referred to as Generative AI, we’ll get to Persado in a bit, but we do pride ourselves on having a decade-long track record of…

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Alex Olesen: …humans…

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Alex Olesen: …inserting a certain prompt about the audience they’re trying to reach the emotion that they’re trying to convey.

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Alex Olesen: And then Persado, using statistical analysis and machine learning, now we refer to as Motivation AI, in order to optimize language that an audience will see based on the audience’s historical Internet behavior and their interaction with the brand over time.

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Alex Olesen: What others? And this can be outside of marketing? But what other enterprise use cases and applications have you seen in the past few months that are really interesting or even slightly controversial?

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Paul Roetzer: Yeah, I mean, I do think that most organizations we’re talking to are trying to solve for the language model side, because it does touch every function of business. So, anywhere where words are created, such as marketing, sales, service, operations, HR, finance, legal, It’s going to affect…

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Paul Roetzer: …all of it, all knowledge work, basically so I would say, a lot of organizations are just trying to get a grasp of what exactly this technology is, and what are they going to do now? We’ve seen really interesting examples like, actually, I just saw one yesterday…Wendy’s is putting like…

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Paul Roetzer: …a chat interface basically at the drive-through that’s powered by language model, or, you know, like it’s trained on like the acronyms people use for the food. And so I think you’re gonna start seeing a lot of these higher profile examples…

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Paul Roetzer: …where people are going to start interacting with these AI agents.

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Paul Roetzer: …and it’s going to become second nature, you know, having to think about it. But for right now I think a lot of corporations are really racing to figure out what to do on the language side. And do they need to train their own models? And where’s the data come from? And so that’s what a lot of our conversations are centering around right now.

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Alex Olesen: I agree. It’s a very interesting…

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Alex Olesen: …time to be working in the Enterprise space. We are having conversations daily with our clients around…

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Alex Olesen: …how to integrate Persado with other Generative AI capabilities…

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Alex Olesen: …even more long-term conversations around job displacement, new career creation…

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Alex Olesen: …and outside the scope of the work that we do at Persado. But a really interesting observation that I’m seeing…

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Alex Olesen: …in the news and in the market, is what are the implications for education and job readiness in the next decade. So I really do believe, and it sounds like…

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Alex Olesen: …in your experience, you’re seeing something very similar…

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Alex Olesen: …that this wave of Generative AI technology has very disruptive capabilities to accelerate time to market…

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Alex Olesen: …amortize R&D expenses, but also produce very fresh new content for marketers and for other lines of business.

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Yeah, we’re definitely seeing it at the University level. I’ve had quite a number of conversations with different universities, and everyone is screaming. I even just hired like I’ve talked with high schools. I’ve even talked with primary school like principals and heads of…

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Paul Roetzer: …districts that just don’t know what to do like. They don’t understand the tech, and they have teachers. They, they may know, are using it, or maybe they don’t. They have students that they’re not sure if they’re using or if they should encourage them to use it.

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Paul Roetzer: So it is very disruptive, and it is the challenge we still have to teach critical thinking like we can’t have students coming through any little school. My kids are in fifth and fourth grade, and I’m very cautious about how to show them how to use the technology. And I’m very much teaching it more like a calculator at this point.

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Paul Roetzer: They’re exposed to the technology, and they know it exists. I’m sure. Their friends, you know, are aware of it. But we’re using it as a tool to, like, check our work and try creative alternatives to what they’re doing…

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Paul Roetzer: …and then I’ll actually want them to analyze what the machine outputs. And then, in a perfect world. You’re actually having them critically analyze how that output, maybe, is different. And what did it do? Maybe better than we did? And what can we learn from it?

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Paul Roetzer: So I do think there is a very important conversation to be had about education. It’s moving slowly.

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Paul Roetzer: I’m guessing a lot of leaders of schools are going to spend the summer trying to figure this out. It kind of got thrown at them like in December, and…

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Paul Roetzer: …in the middle of the school year. You’ve got to, all of a sudden, try and figure out how to transform education. That’s a big ask for these people. So I think you’re gonna have a summer where there’s gonna be a lot of work probably done around this space going into next school year…

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Alex Olesen: …you know. I completely agree, and the implications for how students interact with AI…

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Alex Olesen: …has a lot of crossover with how employees and workers will interact with AI.

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Alex Olesen: So I want to pivot back to the work that you’re doing. I know that you recently launched a series titled “Piloting AI for marketers.”…

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Alex Olesen: …now without giving away the series in its entirety. What would you say are three key points or takeaways that professional marketers should know…

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Alex Olesen: …to understand and optimize how they’re using artificial intelligence?

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Paul Roetzer: Yeah, I mean, it starts with a base-level understanding of what it is and how it works. So, to me, all of this is anything you do has to be premised on that. You have an understanding of what it is, and you can explain it at a, you know, confidently explain it to your peers or to your leaders in the organization. So you have to invest what’s needed to do it. Now you can get that pretty quickly like we do an intro day, I for marketers class. The last one we just did had over 1,300 people registered for it…

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Paul Roetzer: …and that is like 30 min of me explaining the fundamentals and then doing Q&A for 30 min. That could be enough like that can give you enough of what you need.

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Paul Roetzer: Then from there, you can start getting into, okay, how do I actually identify a use case and prioritize those use cases to pick them?

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Paul Roetzer: And then, once I have my used cases. Maybe it’s an eye-writing tool, a social media tool, or an analytics tool, or an advertising tool. Then how do I actually go find the right vendors to do this? How do I assess those vendors? So, understanding of the technology, identification, and prioritization of use cases, and then…

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Paul Roetzer: …knowing how to, like, really evaluate these vendors is critical.

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Alex Olesen: That makes sense, and…

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Alex Olesen: …really resonates with me, and a lot of conversations that I have with our clients on a pretty regular basis.

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Alex Olesen: One of the most common topics that we’ve come across in the last decade, and certainly more common now, is the idea of building technology versus buying it.

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Alex Olesen: And I think the recent surge of interest in Generative AI, specifically Chat GPT, has put some wind in the sails of the build versus buy argument…

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Alex Olesen: …and…

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Alex Olesen: …the accessibility to creating code, pseudo-code…

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Alex Olesen: …functionality a lot more quickly than has been available to R&D teams and marketers. I think it really placed a lot more emphasis on homegrown technology versus your point.

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Paul Roetzer: Selecting the right vendor, you know.

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Alex Olesen: Taking a step back from that just in general. How do you think Generative AI is going to disrupt…

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Alex Olesen: …business models within the enterprise?

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Paul Roetzer: So, I think what’s gonna happen is…

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Paul Roetzer: …we’re seeing…

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…in the past, you had to go seek these tools out. You had to go find third-party applications that were smarter versions of what you were using or new kinds of technologies that enabled you to do things.

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Paul Roetzer: What’s about to happen in 2023 is it’s just going to be infused into all your core tech platforms. So, if you use a box for knowledge management storage, they have an AI box. Now, you can just have a conversation with your knowledge base, like whatever you’re looking for, and you know, query you have. Slack is going to have Einstein GPT…

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Paul Roetzer: …baked into it. Hubspot has a chat spot, Salesforce as well as Einstein. Google Workspace is going to have language models baked in Microsoft 365 co-pilot all this year.

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Paul Roetzer: So if you think about any industry…

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Paul Roetzer: …and the fact that all of your workers, including administrative staff, like everyone, is going to have access to Generative tools baked right into the platforms they’re already using…

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Paul Roetzer: …and they have no idea what those technologies are, nor how to use them, or how to change their processes based on them. And it’s just going to be like flipping a switch. And all of a sudden, everybody’s got these capabilities…

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Paul Roetzer: …that that on its own is insanely disruptive.

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Paul Roetzer: Then you take it and say, okay, well smart entrepreneurs could look at this technology and say…

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Paul Roetzer: …this whole industry is backward and slow and inefficient. What if I just go find a couple of people, we just build a smarter version of this company.

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Paul Roetzer: I think you’re gonna see a lot of that in different industries, too. There are some industries that are just ripe for disruption. They are…

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Paul Roetzer: …slow and inefficient by design, because that’s how they make money, and not to get like too specific, but law firms like they profit from inefficiency…

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Paul Roetzer: …and that is just not going to cut it in the age of AI. So I just feel like there are some industries that…

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Paul Roetzer: …it’s very obvious. What’s about to happen? They don’t want it to happen, and they’re going to resist it and pretend like it’s not going to happen, but it’s coming, and it’s because it’s just going to be infused into everything we do, whether we seek it out or not. I think that’s the major change. 

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Alex Olesen: I agree, and the two axes that we…

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Alex Olesen: …talk about when we’re discussing the economics of Generative AI with executives, with our clients are efficiency and efficacy. 

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Paul Roetzer: So efficacy. You know, how do you…

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Alex Olesen: …improve the performance of an existing process or system, and then efficiency? How do you…

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Paul Roetzer: produce something more quickly, you know…

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Alex Olesen: with less of an impact on your bottom line? And I think, specifically to service industries, law firms are a great example where the unit of measure is the billable hour.

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Alex Olesen: The more they work, the more they get paid. A solution like Chat GPT, or something to be released…

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Alex Olesen: …can really threaten the business model like that where not only are the documents being prepared sharper than what may exist today, but they’re being produced…

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Alex Olesen: …in fewer available hours.

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Alex Olesen: Just one example, I am sure, in the coming years you’ll see this type of technology proliferate into even very advanced use cases like a pharmaceutical laboratory to be able to run synthetic experiments, accelerate…

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Alex Olesen: …R&D cycles for medication…

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Alex Olesen: …which on one hand, can replace the humans who are working in those labs, on the other hand, has tremendous upside…

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Alex Olesen: …to be able to deliver.

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Alex Olesen: You know, very highly needed medicine out into the market.

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Paul Roetzer: There will be trade-offs. No doubt…

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Alex Olesen: …there definitely will be trade-offs. So let’s talk about that a little bit.

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Alex Olesen: What do you believe the barriers to entry are for companies to invest in this type of technology?

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Alex Olesen: …and then quick, follow on after that…

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Alex Olesen: …If companies don’t invest in this technology, do they risk being left behind?

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Paul Roetzer: Yeah, I mean to answer the second question. First, my thesis is that the future of all businesses without AI is obsolete. So either AI native built smarter from the ground up, AI emergent you evolve to infuse AI across the organization, or you just become irrelevant…

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Paul Roetzer: …and depending on the industry, that irrelevancy could take years. If you’re a Saas company, it could be months or days like it. How quickly it happens is going to be based on what kind of industry you’re in and how quickly adoption is happening.

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Paul Roetzer: Now the barriers, the first one that comes to mind to me is this is a complex buying environment.

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Paul Roetzer: There are literally thousands of Generative AI tools. And you just go. If you just focus on language or image, generation or vision like…

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Paul Roetzer: …it. It’s really hard

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Paul Roetzer: …to know who the players are. And so you’re now, especially in larger corporations. You’re likely starting with the known trusted entities. You’re going to go work with organizations who have a proven track record of working with larger enterprises…

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Paul Roetzer: …because they understand the dynamics of a business well beyond just your need for smarter technology.

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Paul Roetzer: So…

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Paul Roetzer: …I think that for a lot of organizations, it can be very hard to figure this out, because the tech is evolving so quickly, and the second piece that I think a lot about is the lack of talent that understands this stuff.

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Paul Roetzer: So if you look around your group in your company, or you know, even at, you know, higher level. Go find somebody who can explain to you like what a language model is, or…

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Paul Roetzer: ….how generally it works like they don’t exist like they, they’re very hard to find. So you’re talking about, like, upscaling a workforce potentially hiring. But what do you hire like? I don’t know, like they’re not coming out of universities trained on this stuff yet. So…

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Paul Roetzer: …it’s all-new, and I think that’s the big. The talent gap is probably in it gonna end up being…

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Paul Roetzer: …the biggest barrier is the other one that comes to mind. I know you all work with highly regulated industries. There are some industries that aren’t going to be allowed to do this stuff like in the near term, like you, you’re gonna have governance, or regulations or laws that prevent you from benefiting from all the things that’s capable of…

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Paul Roetzer: …for different reasons within your industry. And so that’s a reality, too.

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Alex Olesen: I think this opens up a lot of…

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Alex Olesen: …philosophical questions around how humans and AI interact. One of the things we haven’t touched on, which I think is fascinating is, who does the intellectual property belong to? Brought up a great example about Drake and the weekend song, which has been bouncing around, Spotify and SoundCloud, a couple of other streaming platforms…

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Alex Olesen: …just using that as a hypothetical. Who owns that IP? If someone…

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Alex Olesen: …generated that using one of these, you know, thousands of AI software. I think…

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Alex Olesen: …the questions that are going to be asked in industry, around regulation and copyright and intellectual property ownership are going to be new, and I think that it’s a totally green field…

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Alex Olesen: …opportunity, and I agree with you. I think it’s AI or obsolescence.

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Paul Roetzer: Yep.

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Paul Roetzer: So, on the ownership front that, I mean the latest guidance from the copyright offices.

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Paul Roetzer: In the case of Drake, no one owns it. So there, the copyright office, on March 16th, 2023, issued updated guidance. That said, a prompt is not considered human authorship, and only a human is on a copyright.

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Paul Roetzer: So, if it’s images, videos, text logos, anything you create. If AI created it, you cannot copyright it, and I can steal it and put it on hats and sell it, and like that, that there is no protection. Basically, I always, at this moment, say, talk to your IP attorney like I am not an IP attorney. I have spent lots of money with IP attorneys and learned a few things along the way. But this is not my…you know domain of expertise…

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Paul Roetzer: …but that is the guidance. I’m passing along, I would say, from the copyright offices, do not assume you own it, and if you hire agencies to do work for you. This is a really important one, and you have to work for a higher agreement where the copyright passes to you.

00:21:55.840 –> 00:22:10.080

Paul Roetzer: If that agency unbeknownst to you is using AI to generate these things, then you technically don’t actually own the copyright that you think you own. So it’s an important issue for people to wrap their heads around. And I say, talk to IP attorneys like…

00:22:10.810 –> 00:22:18.030

Alex Olesen: …none of us really like to have to go talk to attorneys, but this one that’s good advice, especially because…

00:22:18.100 –> 00:22:25.640

Alex Olesen: …this technology is being used sometimes without the for lack of a better term. Corporate chain of command being aware…

00:22:25.990 –> 00:22:27.960

Alex Olesen: …and we have seen…

00:22:28.160 –> 00:22:37.090

Alex Olesen: …in especially highly regulated industries, that we work with brands on Chat GPT, for exactly the reason that you’re bringing up, because the…

00:22:37.470 –> 00:22:50.410

Alex Olesen: …the understanding of intellectual property and regulations is so new and so opaque that executives are putting a full stop to using this type of technology for fear of falling into one of these traps.

00:22:50.780 –> 00:22:51.450

Paul Roetzer: Yup.

00:22:51.670 –> 00:22:56.390

Alex Olesen: So, pivoting more to a topic closer to home…

00:22:57.320 –> 00:23:12.570

Alex Olesen: …I know that you’ve worked with Persado for a variety of years. You’ve been a great partner of ours. We, as I mentioned earlier, pride ourselves on having a decade of experience in what is now referred to as the Generative AI industry.

00:23:13.000 –> 00:23:15.560

Alex Olesen: We’ve been taking human prompts…

00:23:16.220 –> 00:23:21.620

Alex Olesen: …personalizing emotions and text based on the intended recipient…

00:23:22.170 –> 00:23:29.590

Alex Olesen: …in as a sub sector of Generative AI, that we refer to now as Motivation AI.

00:23:30.520 –> 00:23:37.890

Alex Olesen: So that’s how we position ourselves differently in your experience. Working with Persado over the past couple of years.

00:23:38.080 –> 00:23:42.440

Alex Olesen: What do you perceive to be our unique differentiator in the marketplace?

00:23:42.840 –> 00:23:53.190

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. So, there’s two things that seem to differentiate companies right now and be defensible in this. The software world and those are data and distribution meaning.

00:23:53.610 –> 00:23:58.990

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, let’s say you have an AI writing tool like they want to use it to write a blog post or whatever…

00:23:59.030 –> 00:24:17.790

Paul Roetzer: …I could use Chat GPT as of November of 2022. I could use, you know, any number of other players. But then Grammarly showed up, and Grammarly has 30 million customers. That’s distribution like you can show up late to the party, and you get a massive audience, and you can introduce a tool, and you can be a winner.

00:24:17.860 –> 00:24:24.530

Paul Roetzer: What Persado has always had is the data, and I mean distribution as well, like a proven customer base. But…

00:24:24.710 –> 00:24:42.080

Paul Roetzer: …the way these tools work is, They make predictions about words based on general knowledge. They go learn the internet, but what they don’t have is performance data. So, when it’s generating things for you, it doesn’t know if what it’s writing actually will work. It just knows that it looks like what it learned from…

00:24:42.170 –> 00:24:51.240

Paul Roetzer: …and those can sound like really good emails. They can look like really big landing pages or blog posts or social shares or ads, or whatever you’re creating…

00:24:51.290 –> 00:24:59.210

Paul Roetzer: the language models, and these, like app companies that are building interfaces on top of them, can look really good and sound really good.

00:24:59.410 –> 00:25:03.200

Paul Roetzer: Are they actually going to perform? They have no idea…

00:25:03.290 –> 00:25:10.690

Paul Roetzer: …they have no performance data to tell them it’s going to perform, and that’s where Persado shines is that’s what it was built on was…

00:25:11.080 –> 00:25:25.170

Paul Roetzer: …performance data like learned performance data, and what words work and what words motivate action, and that is probably like the most valuable asset for Persado is that what you have is data that these other models just don’t have.

00:25:25.810 –> 00:25:29.570

Paul Roetzer: So I would see it, at least from like an outside or objective perspective…

00:25:29.690 –> 00:25:33.640

Alex Olesen: …I think it’s a very important positioning statement.

00:25:33.690 –> 00:25:39.120

Alex Olesen: We do continually train the model on hundreds of millions of digital interactions…

00:25:39.710 –> 00:25:50.330

Alex Olesen: …distribution wise. Our core use case was a couple of years ago. In email we expanded into social SMS, web…

00:25:50.640 –> 00:25:57.580

Alex Olesen: We’re moving even further down the funnel into optimizing shopping cart based on past abandonment behavior.

00:25:57.650 –> 00:26:05.700

Alex Olesen: So, I think our distribution is, you know, to your point, also a very strong competitive position for us as well..

00:26:05.930 –> 00:26:10.420

Alex Olesen: …and you know we’re very excited about where the company is today…

00:26:10.640 –> 00:26:13.400

Alex Olesen: …about where it’s heading. You know we…

00:26:13.780 –> 00:26:20.590

Alex Olesen: …not to give anything away. But you know we are also really looking at the idea of…

00:26:20.920 –> 00:26:32.490

Alex Olesen: …higher level, more abstract prompts that creative teams can use to brainstorm campaigns. So, it’s not necessarily just an input-output. It is more of a dialogue with the machine.

00:27:34.900 –> 00:27:56.950

Alex Olesen: So, Paul, I think that’s great competitive positioning for Persado to build on your answer. Distribution, I think, has been one of the strengths that we focused on building in the last couple of years. If you were to look at Persado five years ago, our primary use case was an email. We’ve since expanded from social to web.

00:27:57.130 –> 00:28:02.660

Alex Olesen: And then we’ve moved even further down the funnel to focus on the shopping cart page and specifically…

00:28:03.210 –> 00:28:15.010

Alex Olesen: ….addressing past abandonment behavior based on demographics based on shopping trends. And we’re not to give anything away but really focused on…

00:28:15.410 –> 00:28:25.860

Alex Olesen: …How do you abstract the idea of an input and an output? So creative teams can effectively brainstorm the types of campaigns and emotions that they want to use…

00:28:25.920 –> 00:28:28.280

Alex Olesen: when interacting with their audience. So…

00:28:28.300 –> 00:28:31.620

Alex Olesen: ..that’s more to come, for sure. But I think…

00:28:31.700 –> 00:28:37.370

Alex Olesen: ..leading the charge and adopting similar trends to the rest of the industry…

00:28:37.520 –> 00:28:46.340

Alex Olesen: …understanding how marketing and data teams can work well together and humans and machines can work alongside each other effectively as well.

00:28:47.030 –> 00:28:50.260

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, I would think that the data alone is…

00:28:50.970 –> 00:28:56.460

Paul Roetzer: …grounds for excitement. I mean, I do think you have what a lot of these companies are going to be looking for…

00:28:56.830 –> 00:28:57.930

Alex Olesen: Absolutely.

00:28:58.110 –> 00:29:05.140

Alex Olesen: So, speaking of the excitement, Paul, thank you again for coming on the podcast. This has been a great conversation.

00:29:05.420 –> 00:29:15.540

Alex Olesen: What does the future of the Marketing AI Institute have in store? And is there anything else that you’re working on that you want to talk about with the audience?

00:29:15.900 –> 00:29:29.190

Paul Roetzer: Yeah. And our big event is the Marketing AI Conference every year. So, it’s July and Cleveland, and this one’s shaping up to be certainly the biggest one yet. It’s already the biggest one yet, I think, in terms of the sales.

00:29:29.260 –> 00:29:42.280

Paul Roetzer: So, we’re seeing a whole new level of interest around that, so really excited about that. And then I think just events overall. We did a For Writers summit in March. We thought we’d get 1,000 people. We have 4,200…

00:29:42.330 –> 00:29:46.720

Paul Roetzer: …so just so much like a groundswell of interest…

00:29:46.780 –> 00:29:58.450

Paul Roetzer: …and we have the AI for Agency summit in the fall, and we’re looking at some other kind of expanding that strategy because it’s just the quick way to get this information to people and help them.

00:29:58.540 –> 00:30:06.770

Paul Roetzer: And then online education. Our piloting AI for Marketer series you mentioned is sort of the core offering at the moment…

00:30:06.910 –> 00:30:19.640

Paul Roetzer: …but we have some pretty cool ideas around some other original series that we’re working on. So, I think there’s just going to be a lot of focus on creating as much value as possible through the events and online education and continuing to expand those areas.

00:30:20.310 –> 00:30:30.260

Alex Olesen: Fantastic. And for those in the audience…What’s the best way to engage you? What’s the best way they should reach out?

00:30:30.260 –> 00:30:47.720

Paul Roetzer: Yeah, marketingaiinstitute.com is where everything’s housed, the book, the courses, the newsletter, the podcast, the blueprints about different industries. You can find it all there, and then personally, I’m very active on Linkedin and Twitter/X. So either of those Linkedin’s, great though, and let me know you heard, you know, on the podcast and…

00:30:47.900 –> 00:30:52.320

Paul Roetzer: …definitely connect. So, those are the two main areas you will kind of connect with me.

00:30:52.780 –> 00:31:05.180

Alex Olesen: Fantastic. Well, Paul, I really appreciate you coming on again for the audiences with Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute and three-time author.

00:31:23.370 –> 00:31:26.650

Paul Roetzer: Thanks a lot, Paul, it is a pleasure.