The AI Revolution: The Rise of Marketing Intelligence

This week on Buffering, we're talking about how the marketing landscape has moved beyond the experimental era of generative AI and how the winners of 2020-6s are not simply chatting with AI, but engineering integrated ecosystems. The game over the past few weeks, I've introduced you into a new AI tool and I think we're both kind of losing sleep over this. I feel like you've ruined my life because now I am legitimately losing sleep because I have nothing but ideas and then as I start creating these ideas, then it keeps me up at night because I'm constantly thinking about little tweaks that I want to make to it. It's driving me insane. So yeah, thank you for ruining my life. I appreciate you. It takes it back to like high school, even college where it's like, you know, you're sitting around with friends and like, you know, it would be a good business idea and like you kind of dream about for a minute and then you move on. Now we're at a point where it's like, you know, it would be a good business idea. You know, it would be a good website app idea and instead of moving on, you have the tools and the resources to execute on that vision now. I haven't even told you this, but I've been, so I've told you about a bunch of the stuff that I've been creating, but my kids were asking me about it the other day because they were like, what are you working on? What are you doing, Dad? Telling my wife about it or something and they overheard the conversation and then my son was like, well, I want to build an app too. And you know, I want to build in my daughter's, I want to build an app as well. So yesterday afternoon, they were telling me about the apps that they want to build. My son actually had a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, it's a very crowded market. His idea was he wants to build an app for chess to teach people to be better chess players. And I was like, well, that's actually a pretty decent idea, but it's a very good one. It is a good one. I felt like, all right, well, that's pretty decent, but I did some research. And apparently it's a very, very crowded marketplace already. So there were some suggestions about how to make it unique, which he wasn't interested in after I started telling him that my daughter just wants to build an app so she can teach her friends to do better cork wheels. That is her app idea. Well, that's equally as important. I actually did. I did start to do some research after she said that idea to see, are there apps that are specifically focused on kids fitness? Because there's lots of fitness apps for adults, but I was curious if there were ones that were gamified for teaching kids fitness. So let's face it, kids are obsessed with screens. It's like, hey, how can we actually get some positive vibes going here by having them do some physical activity around the screen as well? And apparently there are a few, but that's getting to be a little bit more of a crowded marketplace also. Well, two comments on that one is, I feel like with like Gemini live, I don't know if they have a video api, I think they do. There goes my night, but you go into great the video for like Gemini live in and like, right, this cartwheel thing, that kind of thing. So she might be on to something Gabe. I won't touch that idea. I don't own any rights to that one. But I wasn't sure how we were going to monetize that one to be fair, but I did appreciate that she came up with the idea. It was cute. So it's for pennies per day, Gabe, you can learn how to do a better cartwheel. It's Marching 101. But it's funny because I saw a comment on, is actually posting the iOS programming subreddit this weekend. That's what I like to do. I was like, the nerdiest thing you've ever said. And you've said some nerdy things on the podcast, but that might take a day. It's not related to Excel, but it was on the iOS programming subreddit. And like some posts that it was basically like for the love of everything, stop making gym apps or stop making fitness apps because with a lot of these upcoming vibe coders, like the first thing everyone does, like, I'm going to fit this app, like this coaching. That market is like not even like, you know, talking about your kids, you know, you know, app, like the market for that is just insanely crowded. And it goes back to like marketing 101, you know, it's why should I buy your product? What makes you different? What's the differentiator here? And nobody has triggered that out yet. Like I see it on Twitter all the time now. It's like, here's the new UI UX for my new app. It's like a fitness app. It's got like your heartbeat and like your pace. And I'm like, why would I use that app? I've got a hundred of those. I'm like, oh, and already, but that's my rant is if you're going to build an app, you've got to have a cool idea. And hopefully something different or something that doesn't exist in the marketplace. Gabe, I don't know anything about the chess apps, but I do know, I mean, I don't know. But I can't imagine there's very many how to do a cartwheel app. So your kids, I could be great. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I don't think there's many cartwheel apps. So she may be onto something there. But again, I'm not really sure the monetization strategy and how many, you know, five and six year olds are going to be enthusiastic about paying for a how to do a cartwheel app. We'll see. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about the ROI on that kind of app, but on the podcast today, I want to talk a little bit about what we're building with AI between Gabe and I. And then also like, you know, as we talk about what we're doing, think about what you could be doing or, you know, think about how you can be using AI now that these AI tools have evolved to the point they're at today. So I called this kind of like the 2026 reality, but throughout the years, Gabe and I've talked about AI on the podcast app. We talked about, you know, the prompts and, you know, how you can work with tools like chat gpt, Gemini, Cloud, so on, so on. But we've gone to a point where the internet is very saturated with AI noise, AI slop. I'm very tired of reading everyone's AI LinkedIn post. Yes, we can tell. Yes, we know it's AI. Yes, your cringey story is super cringey to all of us. But what you end up is, was that too much of a rant there? Gabe, we'll keep it in, but what you end up with is, I don't think there's anything. I don't think it's possible to do more of a rant on LinkedIn. You're fine. I don't know who's listed to this podcast, but be careful. You end up with a high volume of low effort content and AI has largely enabled this, right? We can produce any content we want now. And I think it goes back to, you know, the early adopter of AI, you know, back years ago, when people were saying, like, oh, we're going to be so far ahead of AI and the early adopter. And I think that's largely evaporated, right? Like, that's, that's not an advantage for your business anymore. So you need to be moving into this era of the, the agentech AI, you know, AI doing things for you autonomously, that human AI collaboration we talked about on the podcast so much. And then of course, as we talk about often, shifting your focus from the prompt and more into the infrastructure and the architecture. And I came up with a pretty good term or use later on the podcast. But that's, that's what I think is happening here in 2026. Yeah, I think that's what I'm talking. And it's, you're right. We moved definitely beyond prompts and, you know, especially simple prompts. If it's a, if you're being lazy and it's a simple prompt, you and all of your competitors can do that exact same prompt. What is making things unique now is the ability to actually create with very detailed and specific prompts and a bit of technological, technological, you know, know how. But there is, there's just so many resources out there to be able to do this in a very, very effective and efficient way where like, I, we're going to tell some of these stories. I think as we go through the podcast today, but I had a situation where I was trying to create something, you know, really struggling with how to create it, ended up on Claude. And within an hour or 90 minutes, I had something mocked, I didn't even say mocked up something created that's going to find. Yeah, it was live. I mean, it was fully live. I'm just saying, you know what? Shoot, let's just tell the story now. So I know we were going to tell some stories today. So this seems like a good opportunity to tell this one. Basically what I was, what I've been trying to do was create a, originally I had this idea, idea for more of like an app that would be, that would be baked into co-pilot that would allow our sales team to have conversations with our customers about transitioning their go-to-market strategy. Zach, even I've talked about this a number of times on the podcast and we've had customers on talking about it, but we've been selling speed and price-based service tiers forever. We really want to get people out of doing that. And what I found is a really good way to help people do that is to visualize what good looks like, what a future could look like with a different go-to-market strategy. So that's what I was trying to build. And I was kind of struggling with this. And then I was like, this is when I jumped kind of into the deep end of the pool with Claude, specifically. Within 90 minutes, I had a fully functional website that I could send out to my colleagues that they could personalize for their conversations with customers and show them their previous strategy and what a new strategy could look like. I was just blown away and floored by the fact that within an hour and a half and for basically $20, I could create this thing that was, I think, extremely beneficial to helping me have me and other folks that I work with, a different type of conversation with a customer and the right conversation with a customer. And that kind of leads into the conversation I wanted to have about the static asset, the template. I don't like templates. You can quickly corner yourself into a situation where you've lost your brand identity, your voice and tone. If you have competition in the market, you could look exactly like them, which just becomes a problem. And I really think that in 2026, the speed at which you turn into a new product, you can sites into marketing action is going to have a direct impact on your competitive health. Health fast can you move as an organization compared to your competitors? And what we're talking about largely today is the marketing angle behind everything, you know, content creation. You know, there's also the like the tech stack, you know, the behind the scenes, you know, orchestration that's happened with AI. That's a whole separate conversation. But static assets, whether it's your website, your landing page, email template, this is all disappearing, you know, we've seen different SaaS applications now, not just cloud, not just codex, not just tools like this. But we've seen these different platforms that are able to create these experiences that are being assembled in real time. I don't have to go out and, you know, necessarily do a Figma mockup, although you can and you can use the I had to create some mockup you need to do. But the time to value on a lot of this has been expedited. Gated the website you created, of course. I told you last week I was working on with some providers and with the FCC broadband map, you can only have like three providers at a time. And I was like, Oh, what do I want to do more than that? And then I thought about that. I was like, what if I want to do more than that? And, you know, within, you know, in that afternoon, running in the background here, I had my own website integrated with Apple Maps that was showing me, you know, data directly from the FCC's database directly from the FCC's map displayed where I could do many providers at a single time without that data, leaving the FCC's, you know, database themselves. So there's applications like that. I've also talked a little bit about just some, you know, web development projects as well. But I think we're also seeing the shift from the manual coding, the drag and drop builders to AI tools that generate that production ready HTML CSS. I've played with, I think it was wix and I was pretty disappointed to be fair. I didn't give it a good prompt to build a website, but it was, it was one of those sites where it was like scrolling through, it was like, Oh, this isn't bad. But then like the more I thought about it, I was like, Oh, this isn't going to work. Anyway, I ended up doing it on my own with a different AI tool. But again, that production ready HTML CSS, not only can you use this on your website, but if you need to spin up a, you know, a single version page, a landing page of sorts, you know, you can use AI to hyper personalize these layouts. There's been use cases where I've done this based off behavior signal. So instead of going and creating, you know, dozens of different website pages spending weeks, you know, doing this, I can essentially outline my plan or my vision and how I want to segment this data. Because in the background, you might have AI, you know, orchestrating the customer journey and how people will see your content, your content. But again, using the AI, apart from your choice, to actually build that content or to have that engine that knows your brands, the voice and tone, your hand colors, your brand assets, things like that. Again, we're not just doing simple prompts into chat GPT. It's saying, Hey, write me an email or build me on a landing page. But again, taking in, you know, the data or, you know, just taking in what you know about your brand, your objective and having, you know, AI help you with that. There's still this human AI, you know, collaboration happening here. And then you as the marketer need to think through what that ultimate strategy looks like cool. You know, I've got six different versions of this hyper personalized landing pages and that for these different personas. How do we action this? How do we segment this? How do we bring this all together? And I think from a website development perspective, whether you're just doing landing pages in that example or building full websites like in like in Gabe's example, you know, the other tweet I see on Twitter often is like, Oh, wake me up when AI can do this kind of design. And like all the comments, all the responses are like, bro, like, yeah, here and like, yeah, this, this content is able to be prousted and be able to be produced in real time today. So I think Gabe, between what you've been doing here over the past few weeks and I've done some different app development to when I've been playing with app developments in high school, the newest thing to me was integrating cloud platforms and solutions into the app. And AI has helped educate me on how to do that to an extent and things like that. But I mean, the time to value on like I said, just the website assets alone that we've talked about is is tremendous. Well, the term you use there hyper personalized and I got all I got all hyped up when you said, and that's that's exactly it. It's it is a way to be hyper personalized in the marketing that you're putting in front of in front of folks. Like you said, with very, you know, specific bespoke landing pages. And to your point about brand guidelines, those sorts of things, yeah, sure, you can upload your PowerPoint that has all your brown guidelines and, you know, all those sorts of colors, all that sort of stuff too. Or you can just copy and paste your website into the, you know, probably fairly detailed prompt that you're writing to say, Hey, I want to build a landing page that looks like this. And good news. AI is going to go out and look at all that information for you and put something together that aligns to the words that you're using on your website, the tone that you're using, all those sorts of things. So, you know, it's it's it's gotten so much easier to do these things. As you said, Zach, it just the time to value piece is huge. Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, you've been playing around with app developments and high school. But what would have taken you a month before maybe two months is probably being condensed to a handful of hours. And so that me on me on YouTube learning from, you know, some random channel. And there's still an extent of that going on. But again, YouTube videos an hour long, you know, yeah, exactly. Well, and even if you run into the other thing that's been really surprising to me as I've, as I've been playing with this more to is, you know, AI is not necessarily going to get everything perfect the first time I've run into bugs. I've run into errors. But as I run into errors, when you can just tell it, Hey, I've got this error. Can you go off and troubleshoot this for me? And it goes off and it's like, Oh, you're right. There's a problem. I figured out what the issue was. And I went ahead and, you know, went ahead and made all these changes and fixed it. That starts to really lean into that time to value piece two, Zach, because I don't know how to troubleshoot code. But I can see that there's an error. And I can, you know, I can be very specific about what that error is. And then, and I prompted a long to go to go fix that problem. Mm hmm. The other place I see this happening is in email marketing. And I, I've got some experience. Again, from some of these apps I've run. But like, when you look at the emails in your inbox, I think Rivians sends very nice emails. I know I talked about them off. We did a whole episode on a single Rivian email. Yeah. And when you look at these emails, you know, I see a lot of customers struggling to navigate Mailchimp or struggling to have that same design eye that I may have a maybe overly critical sometimes. But in Mailchimp, how do we design these emails that look, you know, very professional, clean, polish and not look like they were sent out of a 1099 a month Mailchimp and or, you know, something like that. And, and with Mailchimp, you could bring in, you know, HTML blocks. You could do this in a lot of different platforms, HubSpot as well. And that's one of the things I've done is, you know, I built out these emails. I'll bring in each Gmail boxes to do things that you can't, you know, need to be doing this solution. But of course, HTML is HTML, bring that into the email or you can just have, you know, the AI model of choice, build out that email. And the example I kind of used today, Gabe, with you was, I said, you know, well, hypothetically, if I was going to talk about an example of the podcast, you know, what of buffering had a like a monthly newsletter kind of thing. And what I did is I strategically built out, you know, this big hypothetical plan about a personalized email that talked about the latest episodes, features, you know, the latest episodes, you know, some past highlights, maybe just a little bit of information about who Gabe is, who, who myself is. And then how they can, you know, make sure they never miss the next episode. And within, you know, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, less than a minute ultimately, we had this production ready, you know, email template that understands the buffering brand as Gabe and I built it. Pulled in our logo, I didn't upload that Gabe when I said you that, I didn't upload the logo. It knows our brand colors. Again, how, how we talk, you know, the platforms were on, but it also did this, this cool thing that I didn't ask for a bit. It had like little tags. So like, you know, in the last episode, it said like we talked about, you know, Wi-Fi adoption, subscriber growth, good market strategy. And I thought, oh man, that's a good idea because now, you know, I'm thinking of like as a viewer, if I'm someone who's skimming this email or if I'm having an AI summary of said email, now I know exactly what these different episodes talked about. But Gabe, that's, you know, that was the latest example of we have this, you know, Mailchimp ready template that I have no intentions on using right now, but as an example, we built this out. Again, we proved the concept here. And I didn't have to spend really any time building that. It's, yeah, that template came together really well. And it, like you said, Zach, it looked super professional. It looked, and it was, I'm totally with you on that quick summary of what's going on. So people get an understand, is this an episode that I want to listen to. So I'll pause here for a couple of things. So first of all, I would be curious to know if people would like a buffering newsletter. And if that is something that they would be interested in, send Zach and me Zach and I an email send us a note on LinkedIn. You know, let us know if that's something that you would be interested in. We started going down that path, Zach, a number of months ago, actually, no, I guess it was a couple of years ago, where we were actually using AI to summarize the episodes and then put them into a blog post. And then we were just, you know, I'm not sure if you're interested in this. posting those on, I think it was B-Hive if I remember correctly. And that was okay, but it took a fair amount of work. I liked this because it's much more straightforward, and frankly the AI has come a lot farther since then, where we could have that really quick summary and then links to the actual episode. So if you are interested in having a buffering newsletter or a summary of the episode actually sent to you, let us know if that is something that you would be interested in. The second thing I want to say just around ideas for the future, Zach and I were going back and forth with some other folks at CalX around what we could be doing to frankly make the podcast better, what can we do to bring more people into the conversation? And the idea was thrown around of a mail bag, which we came up with some super nerdy names for Zach. I can't remember, what was yours? Was it packet box? - We went from packet drop to the download, or there's something like that, but we can't really get a good name over the past few hours. - Yeah, there were some good ones for sure. Packet drop was pretty good. Anyway, so regardless of what we name it, I do really love the idea. And Zach and I both really like the idea of getting feedback from you all who are listening to the podcast on what ideas would you like us to discuss? Are there questions that you have? Are there ideas that you'd like us to be discussing more of? It's probably not hot rod or crumble or rivian, Zach. I think we probably talk about all three of those things enough. But same thing, if you have a question, if you have something that you would like to discuss, please send Zach or I a note on LinkedIn, and we're gonna incorporate this into a mail bag going forward. Zach, I know you're working on a, right, you're working on an email aliase as well, so we can make this a bit easier going forward. But for now, if you have something that you're interested in talking about or a question that you have, send it to Zach or I on LinkedIn, just hit us up with a message, and we'll incorporate it into a future episode. I love the idea of making this something that's a little bit more interactive versus, not that I don't love talking to you, Zach, but Zach and I just talking to each other and talking to guests. So anyway, just wanted to caveat both of those things since we were kind of talking about email and newsletters and all of those sorts of things. This is gotta be the first podcast episode where I wasn't the one to bring up hot rod and crumble. But yes, please send Gabe and I message on LinkedIn. We'd be happy to chat with you a little bit, share your feedback and then of course, have that discussion on the podcast as well. - Yeah, absolutely. - Gabe, what else are you working on? Anything fun that we can share on the podcast with AI, with talk about landing pages, email templates? I gotta be honest, the email template one is my favorite because there's nothing worse, in my opinion, as a marketer than getting a really crummy email. It's just not a good reflection of your brand. And now, if you have the ability to have some design assistance while also hyper-personalizing that email, I think that really changes the game. How are you going to stand out from your competition? Well, number one is you've got amazing marketing copy. Or number one is you have this amazing design and so on. But that's all I've got on the email, landing page, and website, friend. - I have a whole, I have a totally different topic that we can discuss here around another project that I've been working on. - You've got a lot of projects, man. - I do, man, I've got a lot of stuff going on. I'm a busy guy. But so, to your point about Excel's, I occupied this up earlier, this is an area where I've been getting a little bit deeper into, you know, using AI to create Excel models, which is something that I hadn't dipped my toe into a ton because for anybody who's listened to the podcast for a while, you know, I'm super nerdy when it comes to Excel. And I'm very good at Excel. Like it's something that I've been doing for a very long time for really 25 years at this point. It's a tool that I use pretty much every day. And, you know, you do anything for, you do anything every day for 25 years, you're gonna get pretty good at it. So I'm pretty handy when it comes to Excel, but I'm also busy and I didn't want to have to rebuild this model. So I had a model that I needed to create. And I went and I gave a very long prompt to AI to create a model for me. And it got me thinking because for a couple of reasons, one, if I were starting out my career now, would I learn how to use Excel the same way that I do now? Like would I, would I be as adept at it if I were just starting my career? And I think the answer to that is probably no. But it also got me thinking about, you know, I think the reason why I was able to give it a very detailed prompt that gave it a very good, that gave me very good output. And a really excellent model at the end of the day was because I'm really good at Excel. So it's that like knowledge plus ability to now do this in a much more efficient way that I think is the unique thing that allows, you know, myself to be really efficient at my job, but because I was able to bring all of that knowledge that I had, it's kind of like what you were talking about with the email stuff, Zach or even the, you know, the mobile app stuff, like you've been doing mobile app development for a while. So AI helped you pour gasoline on that fire. This was the same thing with me with this Excel model because I knew how to use Excel and I knew what I wanted to ask it for. It was able to give me something that was really, really good at the end of the day. We are going to have some insane Excel models by the end of the week, if not sooner, I have a feeling. You turn Gabe loose with AI model of choice. And not an endorsement of any specific AI model, of course, you know, follow your, your, your organization's policies, but I found Claude works very well with Microsoft suite. I, ChatGPT or Codex specifically, again, moving away from ChatGPT, Codex by OpenAI. I've been less than improved on my next one to experiment with is going to be Gemini and then follow that up with Lama. Apparently, Mata still makes AI models. I don't know if you knew that, Gabe, but they're still out there. And then finally, you know, Apple Intelligence and totals, like, no, now that I said it, I was trying to ask Siri last night. I was like, when, when are the Emmys? Because I know they're coming. I was like, when are the Emmys? And Apple Intelligence couldn't even tell me that. It actually took me into ChatGPT, repeated the question. And I was like, okay, I gotta just start it on Gemini. But use the right AI model for what you're trying to build. You know, they're all different. They all do different things very well. Gabe, I feel like every time we talk about AI, we're either using a new tool or I remember like, you know, a year ago, I think I told you that, oh, yeah, I switched off of ChatGPT. Now I'm using Gemini as my daily driver. That's, that's changed again now with tools like Claude and so on. So again, the models maybe, maybe good at certain things. But to the comment, Gabe made, you know, early on in the podcast, is you gotta be careful how you use these things. Because your competitors are probably using the same low-effort prompts that you are. And I do say you are, I think we all have low-effort prompts we do. But, you know, keep in mind if we're doing marketing, if we're creating content, creating these, you know, hyper-personalized experiences, these basic prompts are not going to cut it. The further on you get, you know, with the overall, you know, AI orchestration between the data, your brand, and what you need from AI. That's where you can really start to get dangerous and automate some things. As we're having these conversations, Gabe, the last thing I thought of here was, one of the things I do at the beginning of every month, and I'm sure the noise gave, because it annoys me too, but we update our podcast analytics. So for me, I log into five different websites and I pull data, and then I bother Gabe to update his LinkedIn numbers. Because of course, I don't have access to Gabe LinkedIn. But I was just thinking, man, it would be nice if we had a tool that could orchestrate data from these five different sources and input them into a dashboard or an Excel spreadsheet for all we need. But Gabe, more to come on that. I just had that idea in the podcast, and now it's-- >> Now we're going to have to go do it. >> For sure. >> Yeah. >> That's a great one, for sure. >> Yeah, so the last one here is kind of the roles, talent, and governance around AI here as well. So the prompt engineer, where we alluded to this, about the podcast today, it's transitional phase, right? You know, the market doesn't really value the ability to talk to AI. I think anyone can talk to AI or have that AI conversation. But what it does value is the ability to design the environment, the ability to architect these different solutions. >> I remember to joke, I was going to make just a moment to go Zach, and now I have to say this. It's like you were talking about the, you know, those really simple prompts. And I think my favorite Twitter joke is people doing the like, go and create a competitor to Salesforce, make no mistakes, right? Like, that just makes me laugh every single time. And that's a low value. That's a low value prompt. Obviously, whenever you get out of the end of that, is not going to be beneficial. >> Even like joke aside, that type of thing is so vague. Go build me a one gigabit per second upgrade email. So what? It's just going to be the generic vague AI junk that we see out there today that people are creating. Not to mention it again, but same with the LinkedIn posts. I'll be right to LinkedIn posts talking about blah, blah, blah. I don't want to read about my colleagues on LinkedIn fridge. I really don't, but you know, we don't want to read them, read about them on LinkedIn, lunatics, come on. >> You know that's my favorite stuff. >> That's what I think is the stuff. >> I'm not read it. >> So my favorite. my favorite Twitter memes right now are X memes are like I just built my first app on you know local host 8080 and I'm like okay that's just that's just funny now. And then the other one is I see this one quite often is oh I just built a stripe competitor no more like percent fees and like they're obviously joking kind of thing. I'm like man there's there's so many people out there with ideas that lack substance or you know ideas that lack dare I say knowledge but uh well yeah that's the thing right it's just just because you have a general idea doesn't mean that you can actually go off and create something interesting you have to bring and this is where human and AI the balance works really well when you have the knowledge and the expertise like to use my excel example again because I have really deep knowledge and I have built hundreds if not more models at this point in my life I know how to ask AI very specific questions about how to create a good model if I didn't have that knowledge I would just say create a financial model make no mistakes right like and that that's going to get me something this very generic and is not helpful in any way Gabe GPT I'm telling you the last thing there though again we're going back to the human AI collaboration I think we see this a lot with um agentech AI as well where you have the humans who need to come in set the intent set the strategy the guardrails of what you want your you know AI model to do and how you want it to operate within these limits and then you can have the AI itself execute on those multi-step tasks I just mentioned like the podcast idea that I had for the analytics there's those multi-step tasks that can come in and shift the whole like doing marketing conversation into designing marketing intelligence and that's the phrase I wanted to coin earlier on is like as you think of what we're doing at AI and marketing marketing intelligence not to be confused with Apple intelligence but market intelligence um very very holistic view there and I guess one less thing on the emails here with with this market and intelligence concept for this market intelligence vibe email markers can really shift from sending the messages and doing those drag and drop templates to designing the behavioral triggers behind them you know what's going to drive these campaigns not only what do they look like but again if we can expedite expedite our time into making you know a dozen email templates that align with this broader strategy as opposed to Gabe we see it every day here's my one upgrade email and get a send for the month or whatever you know and all 10,000 subscribers are going to get the same email yikes we need to get that marketing down to what we like to call a segment of one and I've said this before you can't market to Gabe and I you know as as similar as we may be on the podcast but you can't market to us the same way so you can't market to your 10,000 plus subscribers the same way Gabe how many times do I like send you like a picture of what a big provider has mailed me or like sent me on an email and it's just the same piece of content last week yeah every for the past like I don't know how many years it's been the same exact piece of content the price has changed but it's been the same piece of content my neighbors get the same point or the same piece of content and there you know twice my age and it's just it's just chaos because that message isn't going to resonate and now it's just become noise it's just become you know mail I put in my trash can emails I delete social media ads I scroll past but when I do get my attention when I when something does catch my attention online I send it to Gabe I'm like man this is a great piece of marketing like you know it's hyper personalized it totally knows me like the data behind this but that's just me the marketer geeking out over good I love good marketing yeah and just to to top that piece up there Zach you know I was having this conversation in a customer meeting I was in a couple weeks ago and to get this gets to this whole conversation around well is I gonna steal our jobs and you know how is AI gonna change the work that we do well it's it's going to change the work that you do because the expectation is now going to be hyper personalized content and frankly more output if I saw I feel like we keep going back to tweets today because I saw a great one today that basically said something to the effect of if you're not doing 15 to 20% of work more work now than you were a year ago something has gone terribly wrong and you are not taking advantage of all of the tools and resources that are available to you and I was like man that yes agreed I know I am way more efficient now and I'm getting way more higher quality work done than I was previously because of the tools and resources that are available to me this should be the same thing for folks who are actively out there doing marketing to customers as well whereas you may have you know maybe maybe you ran four campaigns a year to your point Zach and there were a little bit more generic previously you might need to be running 40 or 50 going forward and you can't run 40 or 50 campaigns using the exact same process that you did previously it has to be by leveraging agent AI by leveraging the tools and resources that are available to us to make these processes more efficient and again it has to shift you cannot continue to do things the same way but you also can't continue to you can't shift that and do you know do 40 or 50 campaigns using the exact same processes as you use to do four or five if you would have told me I need 50 campaign like marketing campaigns 10 years ago five years ago I'd have been like oh okay like I'm going to be like I would panic and then I'm like okay I'm seeing some some time into this but Gabe you came to me tomorrow as like hey I need 50 marketing campaigns I'd be like I'm on it but since we open this can I got we have to talk about this Gabe because I know you know about this as well but one of the things I've been doing and of course this is you know all powered by engagement cloud and our business insights team but as as they do the different at the NPS surveys and studying the relationship you have with your customers we've been taking that data back and then having that in cloud and then from there you get the behavioral the demographic, psychographic data and of course you know we don't want to use that for generic campaigns we have all these data points we can now use to personalize it so it's become a how it's become a conversation of okay we'll instead of the email campaigns you know one for my detractors one for my promoters one for my passives how can I turn this into 10 email campaigns 20 email campaigns where I have my passive gamers my passive you know work from homeers my gaming detractors my family detractors and I mean I can think of six emails right there that would have you know I guess 90 emails that would have historically been three emails and again we're taking information we know about our customers the data component all of this kind of being orchestrated on the back end with AI and then now communicating them personalizing that content we talk about personalization a lot and I don't think you're going to personalize at scale by hand designing every single one of your emails you can but I hope you hope you have nothing else going on not gonna have a lot of a life if you're if you're trying to do that all by hand it's just not feasible not feasible at all yeah well Gabe let's let's wrap up the podcast here in the future I want to hear more about what you're building and maybe we'll we'll see some of that as well but I think the big thing here is AI efficiency is no longer differentiator that early adopter with AI you know a conversation you had back in 2021 2022 I don't know I don't it's been so long give I can't remember when this kind of AI bubble first began but that's that's your baseline now that's that's not differentiating you and I think there's also the component we talked about today of replacing manual asset development with generative you know UI UX automating the production of landing pages websites different emails as well I'm staying clear of the word template but as you use AI maybe you build you know your own library internally with these AI generated sets that of course align with your brand envision yeah it's good yeah the last thing here is as I mentioned this moving from chatting with AI no more you know late night you know conversations with chat GPT your your AI model of choice but to architecting you know not so much that technical change but that strategic evolution of how you and your business are going to use AI and to learn more about that strategic evolution last week we did a fantastic episode with Bell so I highly encourage everyone to listen to that episode if you missed that as well yeah to go call that was a great episode and talked you know for anybody who missed it really got deep into business transformation Val as a long history and business transformation and we talked about how you know AI is another you know another tool along this path of business transformation but it was really great to hear his expertise and you know hear how he's thinking about how business is going to take advantage of this so great call out on that one's act definitely want to go back and listen to if you missed it yeah well Gabe like I said I'm excited to see what you build next and I can't wait for the next late night text I get from Gabe Gabe's an hour behind me so I might be getting ready for bed and Gabe will have this great idea then I only sleep over it too sorry I'm sorry man I always forget that you're an hour ahead but you also stay up later than I do so it's usually it's usually kind of a wash I was going to say at the end of the day I heard his balance is out it's a write-off but thank you everyone for tuning into buffering today and if you enjoy this episode don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app and to share it with your friends and colleagues and for more insights and updates be sure to connect with Gabe and I on LinkedIn and don't forget to message us with your feedback questions or future 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