Blythe Brumleve:
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Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, the best home for freight agents in the logistics industry. Go show them some love and show them some support, since they have been a day one supporter of this podcast, and so just want to give them a little bit of extra shout out as we start talking about the topic that most people are, frankly, kind of sick of. You can't walk into a conference or a trade show floor without hearing the phrase AI. But if you clicked on this episode and you're listening to this right now, then you probably want to hear about some of the latest research that has been revealed on how marketers in just marketers in general, are using AI, if they're using it at all, and then how maybe we can apply some of that to the logistics industry. Because I don't have to tell any of you that it's been sort of a chaotic start to the year. We are almost six months into this year, and it still feels like we're trying to, you know, get our bearings straight. But anytime there's I'm a firm believer that anytime there is chaos among the industry, that there is opportunity in chaos, so maybe you have a little bit of downtime, maybe you're looking for ways to kind of restructure or figure out your processes. This is going to be the perfect episode for you, because we've got some hard data to go off of, and that is courtesy of what's called the marketing AI Institute. Now if you've never heard of them before, it's basically a company out of Cleveland, Ohio that has been talking about AI and marketing for, I think, the last decade. So not necessarily, you know, kind of, you know, one of these companies that just popped up whenever chat GPT launched, they have been around talking about this topic for a long time, so they've seen a lot of the internal challenges that arise when a company decides, hey, I want to start implementing an AI methodology into our different departments, into our different workflows, they release a weekly episode over on YouTube. It's called The Marketing AI Institute, and they release a weekly episode that is sort of my saving grace when it comes to trying to just keep up with all of the different news cycles, especially around all of these different platforms. What platform to choose, what tool to use, it can become very overwhelming very quickly, and that podcast is my saving grace. It's how I keep my sanity when it comes to just the constant news cycle around AI and implementing large language model workflows into your current tech stack, and it's a lot. But they also, in addition to this, host regular webinars. I knew they do some like corporate training and things like that, but they host an annual AI for writers summit that I've attended. This is my second year in a row attending. It's a virtual summit you can attend in person if you would like. But I'm, you know, I'm just one person, so I can't go to all the conferences. I have to be picky about the conferences that I go to. And I'm sure most of you feel my pain on that, on deciding which ones to go to and which ones not to go to, but they put together all of these resources and all of this research, and they survey hundreds of marketers that are using AI and how they're using it, and so thought it would be fun to kind of have a little like mid year check in on what's working, what's not working, what we're experimenting with, and then what Some of these stats and takeaways that might be helpful to the folks out there trying to figure out along with us, and we can kind of try to figure it out all together. So with all that said, One early stat that I wanted to share with all of you is that only 30% of media companies have integrated AI into their strategy 30% of media companies. That's not even like regular companies, but media companies only 30% and I could argue that media is the place that AI is disrupting the most, because it's so easy to go into chat GPT and ask it to write you 1000 word blog article and it will spit it out in two seconds. It's probably going to be slop. It's probably going to be, you know, kind of like one of those articles in a sea of sameness. But I found that stat really surprising, that only 30% of media companies have have integrated AI into their overall strategy, which I think is a huge missed opportunity, especially when you think about it sites. I think it was Shopify that just a couple of weeks ago, their CEO announced privately through, you know, an email to the everybody that works at the company, but then also publicly on social media, after some people started sharing a screenshot of that email, so he just let everybody know that we. Are now an AI, first company you might remember Shopify as sort of leading the charge with getting rid of recurring meetings on their calendars a couple of years ago, and it led to an enormous amount of productivity gains, and they were able to launch products and features so much quicker because they got rid of the monotony of recurring meetings, and there was a couple of other strategies that that they implemented around, you know, just creating meetings and who should be part of meetings. Thought was super interesting. Go google it. I've written about it before in a LinkedIn newsletter of how you can get some of your time back with meetings that just don't make sense. But now they're doing that. They're leading the charge on AI as well, where they are freezing all hiring, and you are not allowed to have extra budget or hire someone unless you prove that AI cannot do it. And I think that that is sort of a force multiplier, and that the biggest problem with tech adoption is that most people don't want to change what they're doing, and most people with especially within an organization, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's sort of the mindset that they have. And while that can be true using AI, I think about it as a way of gaining more efficiency and being able to do things that maybe you wouldn't have been able to do before like me, I'm not a graphic designer. I know somewhat of graphic designs that I want to create, and I know what's in my head. And now I can use a tool like Chachi PT to get the ideas out of my head and then get it into image generation models, have it create a few images, and then I can use those images as source material to go and hire a designer, and I have a better idea of what I want and what I want them to create and them to tweak, so they can turn around and give me what I want faster, quicker, and hopefully a little bit cheaper. So that is the that's just one strategy of using AI, but Shopify leading the charge in that regard, I think you're going to see a lot of other companies take notice. Duolingo is one that is also making this claim that they're going to be an AI first company, but they did it in a very like poor way, in my opinion, where I think it was just a CEO just decided, hey, we're going to get rid of everybody and just turn it everything, all of our helpful. If you don't know what Duolingo is, it helps you learn a new language, but they're basically going to get rid of all of the people that helped with teaching different languages, and they're just doing going straight to aI don't know if it's going to work for them. I much prefer the Shopify route, where you are constrained to try to think about the processes behind what you do and why you do it, and where different tools can fit in and play a role without adding extra budget to the revenue line or to the expense line, I should say. And so that I much prefer the Shopify route. It is one that I am taking seriously. It's an a very serious approach that I'm taking in all of my businesses, whether it's the podcast, like what you're listening to now, or it's cargo Rex, or it's digital dispatch, you know, we're trying to figure out where it makes sense to have aI take over and not take over, but add an extra element into the mix, where a specified tool a specific tool, which is, I'll get into more of those a little bit later on about you know, the specific tools that we're using and finding value in. But just to rethink some of the processes, why we do them? What's important to revenue, what's important to customer connection and and relationship management, and just, we're just trying to get a little bit better each day, and we're trying not to spend a ton of money doing it, because money's tight and budgets are tight. And I'm sure I'm I'm preaching to the choir here with all of the different, you know, things that we have to think about and things that we have to juggle. So knowing that stat, you're not alone if your company feels like it's very slow to adopt some of these new things and some of these newer ways of thinking. But I am also of the opinion that you know, when you have a little bit of a downtime, it is the moment to think about these kinds of things. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Are we heading in a positive direction? Are there some, you know, parts of a leaky faucet that we could be fixing and we could be addressing so it doesn't become a bigger problem later on down the line? And so that's the approach I'm taking with AI. I'm mostly positive when it comes to this kind of stuff, much to the, I guess, the, I guess the gripes of truck drivers out there, because truck driver shout out to y'all. Y'all do not like most of y'all, I should say, not all of you, but most of you do not like a lot of this tech entering into our space. It is taken over. It feels like every aspect of it, but it's not going away. And I am mostly. Be a tech optimist, and so trying to find ways to make it work within my own companies, and sharing that with you on episodes like this, and hopefully, you know, you can find a few tips that will help you out in your work day as well. Now first, what I wanted to get started with are some of the tools that I have been using, you know, if you see any of our video clips, you know, we have podcast interviews just like this, not interviews, but podcast shows just like this. We also have interviews with guests on in order to speak about their subject matter expertise, and what guests love the most is being able to have clips that they can share with their own audience. And so we use a tool called Opus clips in order to take a YouTube video, whether it's a Dropbox video or a private video that you have, maybe it's a webinar, maybe you spoke at a conference, even note taking apps, things like that. Well, not note taking apps for this particular use case, but Opus is able to take all of those different video sources and be able to intelligently find some of the best moments, and you can kind of play around with the time limit. It doesn't have to be a minute long. It could be up to 10 minutes long. I choose three minutes and under, because I feel like that's kind of a sweet spot for social media clips. And so we use Opus clips for that. We use now grok. I don't grok is based on Twitter slash x if you have a premium account, so you have to pay, like, you know, the 10 bucks a month to Twitter. And if you don't mind doing that, because that's a whole other bucket of worms. I'm not getting into people's feelings about that platform, but grok is really incredible. The deep research available on grok is unlike any other platform that I've experienced. It's actually become vital in our research process when it comes to coming up with research dockets for interview guests in this industry, in the logistics industry, I know it feels like there's a ton of podcasts out there, but I frequently run into occasions where I am not able to find any interviews that a guest has been on, and I'm not able to find anything that they've done, you know, previously, but outside of their LinkedIn profile that I'm able to kind of listen to or or hear their mannerisms, or hear the stories that they're telling. So grok has become an essential part of the research process for a, you know, a interview guest or a complex topic that I don't know much about, hello tariffs, and that has been a really pivotal moment in my AI journey is being able to use, rely and Trust grok more and more. The deep research reports that I can get from grok are incredible, to the point where I can take that deep research and I can bring it over to chat GPT, and I can disseminate even more, and I can re I can ask questions of that research document. I can then put it into a chat what's called a chat GPT project, which is brand specific to this podcast. Everything is logistics. You know, we have a certain tone, we have a certain content that we'd like to cover on this show. And then the guests, and how do they fit into that? How do they fit into the audience, what the audience wants to see? And a chat GPT project, I can upload all of my brand visuals and style guide and tone guides, and, you know, previous episodes, most popular episodes, I can upload all of those files into a chat GPT project, and then I can go over to grok and get a deep research report, plug it into chat gbts project, and then be able to come up with a show plan that is ideal for my audience based on the analytics from you guys. And so the analytics meaning like, how many, how many podcast downloads Did you know a particular episode get? Are certain categories more popular with others, technology and AI, are huge popular categories for us on this show. That's why we're starting to cover more of it. Cargo crime is another big one. Freight agents, obviously, is a huge one. So just being able to use knowing when to use certain tools in certain use cases helps dramatically where to prep for an interview used to take me hours. Now I would say I've cut it down from about six hours to about two hours. I still find it very important to listen to other interviews if it's available that the guest has been on, because it really I just remember it more. I connect with it more. And so by no means as like the grok research or even chat GPT have they replaced that research process for me, but it has made just combing through so much information so much easier, and puts it into a more manageable format, versus having 30 tabs open and. Trying to, you know, come up with clever interview questions, whereas I can have a deep research report, and then I can also have the the guest interviews that I can listen to, and be able to connect the dots myself, and then use a tool like chat GPT to put all of that stuff together and say, What am I missing? This has been the, the biggest unlock for me. So I don't maybe this will be helpful for for some of you folks out there who are, you know, maybe planning some content yourself, but being able to take all of the information that I've gathered and what I'm thinking in my head as kind of like a brain dump, throw it into chat, GPT, and then saying, What am I missing? Poke holes in my own arguments give me another point of view, and that has been hugely successful at being able to find, I guess, checking my own biases and trying to find the different angles that I might have missed in my own research process. So those are some just high level tools that I feel have just, frankly, changed the game for me and how I run my business, and how I make the show, and how I do research for the show. And then to take it a step further, and where I kind of started this entire conversation is, what do you do after you have all of that damn text? What do you do after you have all of this information? How do you put it in a way that's going to make sense for your audience and your audience could be a podcast audience. It could be a meeting that you're leading. It could be it could be a variety of different things. You just want to make yourself look like less of a moron, or maybe not a moron at all. You want to make yourself look like a smart person. So one of the things that I wanted to highlight with this new tool that I discovered, it's called Gemma, G, E, M, M, a, and it's essentially a Microsoft PowerPoint on steroids, where coming back to all of that information that so say, let's use the marketing AI Institute report. They had a full day summit that everyone was allowed to attend. Each Summit, each creator or each speaker within the summit had their own PDF of slides. Was able to download all of them because they had research points in in each one of them. And so I was able to download all of them and load it up into chat GPT, pick out the stats that I liked the most. But then also ask it, what are some other takeaways? What are some other stats that I'm missing from this, that or that I have it noted already, and it was able to pull out several different stats, and I'm like, Oh yeah, that was a good one. That was a good one. Let's cross check it, make sure that everything is is verifiable and everything is good so we can have our proper sources and all that. So you take all that information once you've verified it, and it kind of does all of the legwork for you. The magic happens is when you go to a tool like Gemma, and I'm going to bring up a presentation on the screen right now, if you were just listening, I'm just going to explain it for you, because it's one of those things that it you don't necessarily need to watch this show. You can just listen to it, but it's basically a full deck. That was, if you look at the images, it's obviously created by AI. I didn't do any kind of editing to this presentation because I just wanted y'all to see how good it looks without doing any kind of editing whatsoever. And then just think of how it could look when you put your own spin on it, when you put your own sort of, you know, your brand fonts, colors, things like that. And this is just, I took all of the notes from chatgpt, plugged it into Gemma, and I said, Make me a presentation. And this is the presentation that it came up with. So we have a title page here. We have a couple nice images, and it says, AI for logistics creators, a 2025 game plan, a strategic roadmap for logistics marketers navigating the AI revolution. We'll explore data, insights, legal considerations and practical applications to keep you ahead of the competition. Then, as my adds my name, room for collaboration, but we're going to use this for this show. I'll link to it in the show notes, in case you're on podcast and you want to kind of follow along, but it's absolutely not necessary. Okay, so now that you are able to see the presentation up on the screen, I got a little bit of a better format. We're just going to be using this as, sort of like, background fodder. It's going to be off to be off to the side, and we're going to scroll through it. I just wanted to be able to show you, essentially what this looks like when you can take all of the information that you've prepared, throw it into a presentation, and you can have it like that. And I'm saying it Gemma created. I think it's Gemma severance. Spells the error. Pronounces the name like this, and spells it like this. So I'm hoping I'm pronouncing it right. It could be, yeah, I don't know. Gemma, G, E, M, M, A is the presentation tool that I am using, and this was free, so I have to do that caveat as well. And so obviously, another AI image. But let's get into some of these. Take. Ways here now. Takeaway number one, the AI adoption gap. 70% of agencies, brands and publishers, have not fully integrated AI, despite its obvious benefits, the adoption by role. Let's talk a little bit about that. So agencies, only 40% have adopted AI publishers, 35% brands, 20% which brands? Most logistics companies here? Yeah, most of you, only 20% have adopted AI fully into their company. Then the stack goes on. It says, well, 80% use general AI tools like chat, GPT. Only 45% use custom tools, and then 24% of people use proprietary solutions. So translation for all of those different stats is we are just scratching the surface when it comes to AI adoption. And if you feel me on the the stress I talked about earlier that it just all of it feels so overwhelming. You're not sure what direction to kind of go into, and you feel like you're being pulled in a million different ways. You're not alone. And there's a lots of companies that are out here that are dealing with the same exact set of frustrations and confusion and not exactly sure which way to go. And I think that the takeaway here is that you it's still very early in this AI adoption process. It's still very early for a lot of these tools. And so you don't have to try out all the tools. You don't have to do all the things. You need to be able to define your processes and then figure out where a tool could make sense to implement it and take sort of the Shopify mindset of all right, these are our current processes. I'm not going to buy a tool because I think it counts buying a tool and hiring somebody. I think you should hold off on both of those things until you figure out if the damn tool is actually going to be worth it, if it's actually going to do the thing that it says it's going to do. I can't tell you how many AI agents I have tried to figure out for my own business and just have failed at it. But it's also one of those things where I just don't think for my business that AI agents are there yet to do the things that I needed to do. I do think that it will become a reality, short, you know, very in the near future, but it's one of those things where right now, AI agents for my business just don't make a whole heck of a lot of sense, because of the limited capabilities and the monitoring that has to take place for me to be able to fully utilize these tools. Some of them. It also it takes me so much longer to set up the damn AI agent than it does to just do the thing that I needed to get done. And so I think for marketing, I think for for a lot of, you know, creative angles, it's just not there yet now for, obviously, our own, you know, purposes they we there are other solutions out there that are agent AI, Agent focused, clone ops, I would be remiss if I did not mention them, but they are helping from a call log standpoint, where you don't have to make the annoying track and trace phone calls get load updates, you know, those types of things that you know, a lot of brokers, a lot of folks are making On a regular basis, a lot of drivers as well. Need, you know, updates. That's where, you know, an AI agent can fit much more, I think, much more nicely, versus something like with my business, it just doesn't. I've tried. I want, I want to love AI agents when it comes to marketing. I just don't think it's there yet. But hopefully, you know, in certain use cases, in certain situations, I think that we are, we'll get there sooner rather than later. Especially, we're working on some things for for cargo wrecks that hopefully will have more news on that soon. But there are some use cases there, I just don't think it's a good use case for the podcast right now. So, but we're still early. All of that to say we are still 100% early. So window of opportunity is to is there for folks to lead? Don't wait for your competitors to play catch up. So that's TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE. Takeaway number two, the legal landscape, copyright and AI content because a federal court ruled that AI generated art and content cannot be copyrighted only humans can legally be credited as authors. Prompts don't qualify as creativity under copyright law. So this matters for creators using mid journey dolly or even Chachi PT. So you want to be careful when it comes to some of those images that you are creating. I think it helps with image generation, which we'll get into in a very next takeaway, actually, but it doesn't from a legal perspective. You do not own the rights to that image, to that document, to that. White Paper, if you used AI to create it, the legal RAM, they're not necessarily ramifications, because there haven't been any cases like that yet. There are, you know, several news agencies, or several you know, like New York Times is famously suing OpenAI, who is the owner of chatgpt because they trained their system on their content that is different than you know, using a tool to create content or to create an image and then passing it off as your own, passing it off as if you copyright it, you might have come up with the prompt to make that image, but that does not mean the image now legally belongs to you, where no one else can use it. So that's something to keep in mind. I don't necessarily think it's going to be a huge deal for the majority of marketers out there, because if you think about it, where are you using these image generation tools? You're probably using them for social media posts, email newsletters, blog posts, maybe even some images on a website. I don't think we have used any AI images in our website builds trying to think just off the top of my head, no, not even on, on digital dispatch, not even on, on cargo Rex, which is our most recent, you know, personal site that that we've launched, but we don't have any AI images on there. I hired an illustrator to make you know, if you're on cargo wrecks, and you see a lot of the map drawings that we have on the site, and it's kind of themed around the age of exploration. Hired an illustrator for those and so that's just something to keep in mind the legal liability around some of these things. Let me see if this oh, here we go. Here's more. You know, graphics from the Gemma presentation, as you can see, like look, as you highlight, as you kind of hover over some of these different blocks with these different numbers, it gives you it's very interactive, too. And that just blown away that this was created in like 30 seconds based on my own notes, and I didn't do any kind of editing to this whatsoever, so it's making me want to go back in and tweak it to make it more look look like the everything is logistics brand, so I should, I should probably done that before this. But I just for the sake of showing the audience of what these kinds of tools look like and how it can get you 80% of the way there, I think is very valuable, because then I could be able to theoretically be able to take this, send it off to, you know, a graphic designer and illustrator, and be like, just tweak this to make it look like our brand, and add your own little flair to it. Graphic Designer doesn't necessarily want to be out here making bar graphs, but they would maybe like to add their own special flair to, you know, other parts of this page. So let's move on to, oh, there's a legal landscape graphic which shows a little the hammer that you pound on the desk. That's that image for the podcast listeners, and it talks about the court ruling, the human element and the prompt limitations. And the takeaway advice is, use AI as a co pilot, not the driver. Add your human voice to maintain copyright eligibility. So that's a really, really important takeaway for that next takeaway we kind of hinted at it. It's around images, but chatgpt, their visual tools, have changed the game, and we're seeing and All right, so let me, let me back up recent chatgpt image updates equals huge potential. And this is based on this marketing AI Institute survey. So first step is ad generation is now drag and drop Instagram lever level filters from just a prompt, slides and presentations, visuals are on demand, as we see with this Gemma PowerPoint. Let me see if I can get to the next image too, just in case. There we go. Aha. Okay, so back to the images. Old books can become comic panels, which mass Excel accessibility, which I don't know. I think a lot of book readers out there, and probably comic readers as well, would unite in being very anti using chatgpt visuals for this specific use case, because they don't want their content stolen, which is essentially what happens if you do this. But then they also don't, you know, from a comic perspective, there's lots of visuals, and my husband is a big comic book nerd, so I have to sort of say this, right, he is absolutely against a lot of these AI tools. He will use chatgpt in order to help him, you know, sort of clarify his thoughts and get an extra eye on, you know, certain content that he's creating. But any kind of visuals that he creates is very much he does it himself. He designs them in Canva and uses comics as like inspiration in order to make that different sort of show, promo art. He's also a podcaster, but when it comes to making a comic, you typically will have all of these different the pages or panels, then you'll have writers who write. You know, all the storyline, and then you'll have an illustrator that goes in and creates all of the drawing. And then you have a separate person that does what's called all the coloring. And so, you know, you have different artists that are all playing a role anytime you see one single comic book. So I don't know if that one is going to actually, I don't know if chat GPT is going to help, you know, turn old books into comic panels. But might be interesting to see you might have noticed, you know, Studio Ghibli that sort of art style. Who Studio Ghibli actually hates anything AI art related. So it was kind of interesting that once chatgpt launched this visual tool, that that was the Studio Ghibli art style was what kind of took off across the internet. You all, you know, there was also, like, action figures and things like that, of people kind of making of themselves using this chat GPT visual tool. But you can kind of see a world in the very near future, and I think Google has actually already adopted a lot of AI integrations into their ad placements. But think about it from the lens of creating ads, where, if you are responsible for managing the ad budget, maybe you know, maybe you don't know, but the creative is so important when it comes to creating an ad, the title, the limited text based you're allowed, the graphic that you choose, you, frankly, don't have any idea what is going to resonate with your audience until you throw that ad out there. Now, for the best ad agencies, they will have a handful of graphics that they're going to use, a handful of different headings and subheadings and CTAs and all of that different stuff. They'll have several different versions of that. If you add AI into this, add AI onto this mix, you're I could see a world in the very near future where you don't have a single person that's or maybe it is only one single person that's managing all of that. In reality, most companies are going to go in this. Are going to choose the chat GPT route. They're going to go into their, you know, their Google ads platform, and have aI handle it for them. And so you're going to see highly programmatic ads that are completely created, generated from idea to launch, that are all specifically based on AI. Now Google will probably love this, because they can get more ads, they can get them faster, and then they can kind of make the decision on what to show and what not to show. Think there's probably going to be a little bit of I think you should be watching that a little bit closer if, if I'm monitoring those kinds of different advertisement campaigns, because I want to make sure that, you know, it's not just going to a broad audience, it's going to the right audience. And then hopefully, I could see a world where this is something, where you can refine the audience yourself, and then be able to come up with different images and tags and headlines based on your own customer data, maybe you take meeting notes and things like that and use that terminology we've talked previously. I've actually talked about this for years on how you should have a customer lingo library, where too often in this industry, we get caught up in our own acronyms. We get caught up in our own sort of industry slang, and we forget that we're creating marketing and sales messaging for folks that might not have any idea what those phrases mean. And this is where you know a tool like the you know, the different ad integrations and the different creative assets that could go along for a campaign or a different ad campaign can be utilized and utilized in a way that makes sense to the target audience you're trying to reach, which is ultimately what we're trying to do. So different pair of eyes on text and now also images. So let's go on to the next slide, and let's talk about some of the key stats from enterprise AI adoption. So if you're feeling a little overwhelmed and you're maybe a one person marketer, or you're a founder who's trying to manage it all yourself as well, people are kind of struggling at the enterprise level too. So don't feel so alone. I know that a couple of these stats made me feel a little bit better. So let's go the four key stats from the enterprise AI adoption survey, and that is 88% of employees and 97% of execs say that AI has improved their work, but 72% of companies have hit major obstacles with adoption. Stat I heard recently, separately from from this study, is that for all of the major tech platforms, you're lucky if your users know how to utilize 30% of your platform features, 30% so now just imagine that you take AI and you plug that into the mix where you have people who want to use it, and they're I mainly use it as a replacement to Google search just to be able to get an answer quick. Basically not having to scroll through this awful websites with too many advertisements. There are other obstacles that the enterprise level people are running into as well. So back to the study. It says 41% of millennials and Gen Z are resisting, AI, even sabotaging rollouts, which I think is so fascinating, because, as a side note, we're we're seeing some of the same reaction. So 41% of millennials and Gen Z are resisting AI and sabotaging rollouts. You will see the same thing in warehouses when it comes to robotics and adoption of robotics, where a key part of training. Whenever a warehouse decides that we're going to bring in robotics, you know, we're going to whatever type of robotic, there's lots of different types of robotics. It doesn't necessarily have to be the humanoid, you know, type, you know, creepy level. I don't want to say creepy level, because I could use a robot that does my laundry and maybe, you know, meal preps for me. But as a workplace, these companies have to have training in order to position market, no less, to the employees to look at the robot as their friend, as their companion. They even go as far as to name the robot, to give it a name, so then that way you feel more connected to it. Because there's also plenty of studies out there that will show you know the robots, you know the people who stand on like the side of the road, and they're kind of flipping the signs all around in order to garner attention for whatever business that they, you know, are promoting. But then there's the other side of it, where I've seen some of the wacky inflatable, man, you know, that's holding up a different sign, trying to, not holding up a sign, but a wacky inflatable, I don't know, blow up. Man, that's, you know, kind of on the side of the road, waving his arms all around, kind of like how I'm doing the show, but they are putting those on the side of the road. But then another caveat is that I've seen it where it was a kind of like a mannequin, but they made the arm move from side to side, waving a flag. And then on the mannequin itself, it had a sign, and it took less than 24 hours for that mannequin robot waving a sign to be vandalized. A lot of delivery like residential delivery robots, those pilots have failed because people see these little delivery robots going throughout the neighborhood, and they just want to hurt them. They just want to destroy them, which is very interesting from a psychological perspective. And so that stat, I knew these other things, I knew these other caveats, but 41% of millennials and Gen Z are resisting AI and even sabotaging ROAs. That is a really surprising stat to me, but I could if I think about all of these other angles, where you have to see AI and robotics as a companion. Maybe that could be a lesson at the enterprise level. Is to, you know, look at chat GPT as a friend. Maybe you just need to name it something else. Instead of, you know, regurgitating chat GPT every single time, we have to find side note. We have to find a better way to refer to chat. GBT, it's too much. It's too much. It's too wordy. I need a shorter version. I need something quick like Claude. I hate the name, but it's so much easier to say than chat. GPT, I don't want to have to say the full name every time. So we as a collective society, need to come up with a way to talk about this platform without having to say 17 more words than what we have to Okay. Back to the study that I got a last couple stats here, 35% of employees are paying for better tools out of pocket, which I think is wild, because I've even heard of workers who are secretly using AI and pretending to get their work done faster without telling the boss, so that they won't give them any extra work to do, which is low key smart, if you think about it, because then your boss is like, wow, how are you getting all of this done? It's like, Well, I'm just super smart and I'm super valuable, whatever it takes to keep your position within a company if you're the one wanting to adopt these new tools, I would caution, however, if you are thinking about doing this, that you want to be careful about legality. We just talked about some of the legal issues that are being faced around certain content that's being created and copyright protections or lack thereof. And you also want to think about it from how are you using certain data? For me, where I find the most value is a lot of our meeting notes. So for a lot of our meeting notes, we have them categorized by brand, so we have a certain category of an otter account, so it join auto joins all of my meetings. Yes, and then we have different folders for like everything is logistics. We have a folder for all of our podcast guests, so I can go into otter and I can say, find me that conversation that you know XYZ said about XYZ. But then what has been really helpful is we're developing a chatbot for the digital dispatch website, and so we have taken all of our client calls, all of our lead calls. We've anonymized the data to where we remove all names and company names, but we just all we want from those conversations are the questions being asked, the lingo that they're using, and then have those questions and then be able to pull those into a data source and then use them as the content source for the chat bot on the site. And so the goal with that is that if somebody's going to book a meeting on digital dispatch, then I want to make sure that we're not going to waste each other's time. If you have 200 bucks to spend on a website, I'm not a good fit for you. But if you are trying to spend 200,000 I'm probably also not a good fit for you. I might, I'll do my best, but I'm just being honest. We, you know, we have a small operation over here, where, as you know, probably at the enterprise level, you don't necessarily need a shop. If you're a publicly traded company, you probably wouldn't hire a company like mine. That's just not a, maybe a good fit. You probably have an internal marketing team, an internal development team, so we just want to get better at qualification. And I would hate to waste anybody's time, and I hate my time being wasted. So that's the reasoning for developing that bot. Is to be able to to get that work done quickly and efficiently without having to worry about some of the legal ramifications or legal issues, and so we take those extra steps. But I do think that that note of 35% of employees are paying for better tools out of pocket, that just screams to me, like a lack of communication within the company itself, or maybe a level of frustration I could definitely see where, you know, maybe somebody is using, as, I don't want to name names, but a subpar AI tool, and you found a better one that works for your processes. So if you're willing to pay out of pocket for it, then why not? But you might want to, might want to do some checks to make sure you're not breaking anything, like breaking any company rules, breaking any legal rules, and yeah, and just, you know, I think the next thing on this list is the biggest barriers to adoption they list out at the enterprise level for so the biggest barriers to adoption at the enterprise level is number one, poor tool quality. Number two, misalignment across departments, lack of training and security concerns. And so the kind of takeaway here is that AI adoption isn't just about tools. It's about culture. You want to think about starting small and then figuring out which tools make sense to trial, which tools make sense to pay for, which tools that you still need to have an expert or a subject matter expert be involved in that process, and then from there, you can just start to slowly build it out. The easiest tip I give people is to keep chatgpt open as a tab on your computer, and so anytime you have a question that you want answered, use it in order, instead of like a Google A perfect example is I'm I'm going through some, like, health upgrades right now. Just got some recent blood work. I'm getting you know, news and notes on my different biomarkers. And I'm like, Okay, how can I adjust my diet in the kitchen in order to, you know, address some of these concerns that I have, and so being able to take a photo of my fridge and say, here are my diet and fitness goals. Here's what I got in my fridge. Can you come up with some recipes for me for the week, something like that, that you can use, and that's when it will start really clicking for you to be able to start using it in ways that you never thought were possible. I rarely use Google Now, unless I'm going just to find the website name, like, say, if I even my own, some of my own websites like cargo Rex, like, I know if I just open up new tab, you know, Control T to open up a new tab, and I just write C, then I know that no cargo Rex is going to be the first one that kind of pops up in my Google Auto Fill, just because you know my own user history. But there could be other websites out there that you don't remember the domain name, and it's mainly a pass through channel. I damn sure don't want to be searching through all of these recipe blogs anymore, trying to find the damn recipe instead of getting someone's life story or 30,000 ads that are popping up and covering the entire recipe that I'm trying to see. So that's where Chachi BT has really come in clutch has really come in handy for a lot of you know, those different things. Let's see if we have any more of the graphics on this presentation. So there is, you know, a next graphic that I could talk. About where it's called the next gen AI for creators. And this talks about the different levels of adoption where you can kind of scale your organization. This is kind of just high level information. I'll be honest, this slide is not that valuable, but let's, let's briefly cover it, because they talk about level zero as being all human. That means your entire team is not using any kind of AI adoption. So you are at a level zero. Most of us are at a level one to two, where it's aI assisted, and it's ideal for content creators now level four, which is where a lot of folks, lot of lot of tech bros, think that the industry is headed, which they have a financial interest. And saying this, but level four is fully AI, not really recommended for thought leadership, not really recommended for marketers, because you're in if everybody is going off of the same data, you are just going to be swimming in a sea of sameness, and your thought leadership is how you are going to stand out. I often look to different creators. Chad Olsen comes to mind, CEO of Avril. And if you follow him on LinkedIn, his posts, you could tell that some of them, he just comes up with off the RIP, and people resonate with that kind of stuff, but it's still insightful. There's still a lesson, there's still a takeaway to be had. So I think for stuff like that, absolutely no AI should be involved in that kind of thought leadership. Now, if you wanted to maybe take a post and say, spell check this for me, or format it a little bit better, there's different use cases, and we've discussed a lot of them earlier. There is one more study that I wanted to bring up, and that was from this other call that I was a part of. And it's a company called Air ops, and they are an
Unknown:
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agent, an AI agent company who focuses
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on marketing, but some of their slides that they shared in a recent talk, because I've been trying to wrap my head around, what does SEO look SEO was such a big part of my marketing life for so long, and then I've kind of stopped doing it and just, you know, just doing, like the technical side of SEO, rather than writing, you know, The 3000 word blog articles that don't necessarily work anymore. So I'm doing less of like the 3000 word blog articles, and more of just using SEO in from the technical aspect and from the high intent aspect. If you heard my conversation with Josh Lyles over at sales dash, CRM, great show. Find it on YouTube, but we talked about our different SEO What does SEO strategy even look like in 2025 and beyond? And the Frank answer is nobody, nobody knows, because we don't know how these large language models are treating SEO. We don't know how they're getting their data sources. We don't know how they're sourcing this traffic even to begin with. And so there's a lot of theories around it. They're just following the the search engine models playbook. That's where they scraped all this information to begin with. And so they're using a lot of that already collected data to present it and include maybe some sources in the results. And then there's also, you know, Google's approach to it. If you're using Google search, you've probably noticed the AI overview at the top, which can be helpful in answering some different questions, especially if you're trying to just find an answer super quick, like I needed to find out how to, you know, change the sharing settings on a dropbox folder or a Dropbox account, and I couldn't I tried googling it, it didn't come up with a good answer. I just asked chatgpt, and it gave me the right answer in 10 seconds. So all that to say, I'm trying to figure out SEO. Air Ops is trying to figure out SEO, and they've got some really interesting data that came from their recent webinar that they hosted, and they talk about the four stages of AI adoption for SEO and content teams. I thought y'all might find this helpful, but it talks about content teams are in various stages of using AI today. Each stage comes with its own challenges, processes and next steps. So 32% are in the experimental pilot stage. Then 38% are in the partial integration. 17% are in full integration, and 9% no AI implementation at all when it comes for SEO or content, which that 9% that's That's wild. Even this the full integration of 17% I think is wild too, because, no, I just don't think content is there, yet you still need a human in the mix of your own editorial style and how you want to convey certain points of view. Now, there are certain content types, like FAQ pages or even some website copy. It also, again, depends on the source of where you're getting. Your data for content, there's a night and day difference if you can use anonymized meeting notes and plug it into and say, help me write an FAQ page. That FAQ page is going to be light years better if you can use meeting notes versus just saying, Hey, look at my website and come up with some questions that users might have, which is, you know, maybe a good use case to try as well, but you would probably be best off trying both of those things versus, you know, just not trying it at all, or just relying fully on it. So those two, the 17% of full integration and 9% of no integration is is wild. So I think we're, we're, most of us are at that partial integration phase, which I think is, is where that it probably should. I don't want to say, stay, but partial integration, I think, is that the best bang for your buck when it comes to time management and also not paying for a bunch of tools you're probably not going to use, you know, all of those things that you don't really think about. When you just start thinking about what to adopt and how to adopt it, and you don't the last thing you want to do is go and buy, you know, a million different tools. Okay, so by next slide is five big shifts, reshaping content teams. Number one, AI, is changing how teams work. Kind of duh. Statement. The next one is, quality is the number one concern. Yes, I would agree there. The next one is, teams need new skill sets. Yes, I would agree there. I'm not a graphic designer. I gave that example earlier, but I can get ideas out of my head and into a couple different images, and pick the image that I like the best and then send it off to a graphic designer to make the final image, the one that I'm going to love, and, you know, plaster everywhere. The budgets are also shifting fast. I could definitely see that. And then the last one on this slide is Research and Production remain bottlenecks. I think they should probably try grok in order to get their research up to speed. The next slide on here, it talks about technology implementation. AI isn't just shifting workflows, it's changing how content teams are built, staffed and supported. Our data shows clear trends and how orgs are thinking about headcount, roles and budgets, all in the age of AI. So it kind of goes back to that Shopify point that I mentioned earlier. 80% of teams use AI to draft creation or ideation and the content generation phase. 80% then for SEO optimization. 73% use AI for keyword research and content optimization. Next one is analytics and reporting. 55% employee AI for performance, prediction and analysis for God's sakes, Google fix Google Analytics. If you made Gemini and plugged it into Google Analytics, you would solve a lot of problems in the marketing ecosystem, because GA four is frankly unusable. I have switched over some of my analytics are completely away from Google, because I've just keep waiting for them to figure it out, and they haven't figured it out yet. So the 55% that are using AI for analytics and reporting, what are you doing? I want to know. Send me your tips, because I am struggling in the analytics department to the point where I'm I'm have recently as of this week, as of time of recording, we are creating and readapting our Looker studio reports. Because I just think that it's just Google Analytics is not there, but Looker studio hopefully can solve those problems for me and but we're going to have to take the custom route, because what Google has been giving me in Google Analytics and what it gives my clients is just not something that we can take action on. And I think that's the most frustrating part, is I don't want analytics and reports just for the sake of it, I need to be able to know what to take action on. And so inside Looker studio, we're kind of rethinking how we're presenting our data, so that we can present the data that makes the most sense, that we can take action on. So but again, I'm begging you, Google, figure it out. Figure out Google Analytics. All right. Last one on this, as I'm rounding out my my bitch fest is that workflow automation, 40% have implemented AI driven project management and workflow tools. I think it's kind of a no brainer. You have to figure out what your processes are in order to figure out what you can automate and what you can where you can add AI. So figure out your processes First, figure out what's most important to drive revenue, and then work backwards from there and really detail out every step that's involved in your processes. Okay, next slide what winning teams are doing differently. This comes from the interim CMO of air ops, where she says content teams definitely need to evolve and change. AI is a tool not using it will make content teams uncompetitive, but using it poorly will make content teams unreliable and not credible. The key is to learn to use AI to structure and iterate on content without depending on AI to deliver quality, usable, reliable content on its own. I think that hit. The nail on the head, because using this line of but using it poorly will make content teams unreliable and not credible. You can ruin a lot of years of trust and goodwill if you put out a shit post. And I'm just in a lot of AI slop is just that it's slop. You have to consider where you're how you're prompting these different large language models. The data you're feeding it is it, hopefully it's anonymized, and then hopefully you can create it in a way that it gets you 80% of the way there, and then from there, you can use the human Magic Touch in order to make it really stand out, really spectacular, because otherwise it could be very brand damaging. All right, last couple slides here. AI is also changing team structure. 48% of companies are adding AI specific roles, like prompt and content engineers. Next one is balance automation with editorial and oversight. Technical skills are becoming as important as creative ones. And then last one is, teams are reallocating time and headcount away from execution and towards strategy and analysis. And so there's a very interesting theory around this. Is that, you know, with AI, we wanted it to be the tool that was going to, you know, do your laundry and clean your house and things like that. But it's actually taking away the creative aspect that, you know, the art aspect, the things that we really love as a human species, love doing. And so there, I like this mindset change of reallocating time and headcount away from execution and towards strategy and analysis, I think that's really where you're going to find the most valuable especially for the marketers that kind of have to do it all, or the founders that kind of have to do it all. I've been in both of those buckets, and I can speak very confidently on how much AI has impacted and just given me a second pair of eyes on things. I can't tell you how many times I've started to write an angry email, and I'll just plug it into chat GPT. And I said, make this sound nicer, and it has saved me a few times. Next slide is rethinking metrics for the AI era. We need to really think about this like, what is value brand impressions in a zero click world, if people are getting their information and Google's AI overview, how do you measure success? How do you measure the success of that SEO focused content that you created? If the summary is just going to answer the question, the user doesn't have to click at all, there's also a shift in cost of content, and so I think that that's something that we need to be made aware of too. But I think highly, I think there's going to be a really good blend and a really good mix of the people who can kind of dabble in it all, who could be the conductor of the orchestra, and then utilizing the people that have played an instrument for more than 10 years. And I think that marrying those two different opportunities is really, if you're an organization that can do those two things and you can do them, well, I think the sky is the limit in this sort of next era. Let's talk about, oh, I guess you know, there are a couple more interesting slides here that I will share. Talks about the air ops study. Talks about the most time consuming content processes. 65% say it's research and ideation. 40% say it's outlining in the first drafts. 37% said editing and approvals, which I definitely would cosign there the first 260 5% research and ideation takes up the most time, and then 40% outlining in first drafts, like those are the biggest areas of opportunity for using AI is right staring me right in your face. Next one on the list is 33% struggle with promotion and performance tracking. I hear you on that. My rant on Google Analytics, I'm not going to repeat again. And then next is 26% spend significant time on SEO and optimization. I'm going to have an episode in the future on on SEO. I have some different content experiments that are running right now. I just can't confidently speak on what's working and what isn't working. I like to try different experiments myself before I tell my clients to do them. I'm just not confident in some of these results yet, but I will be sharing some of that insight here in the near future. And then last one on this list is 20. 21% say final delivery can still cause friction for publishing in distribution. I don't really know what that means, so let's just move on. But I think the most surprising one, as far as, like, the most time consuming content processes, research and ideation and outlining and first drafts, where, that's exactly where AI can help, you know, get you your first draft, get you 80% of the way there, and then you go in with a human and you do some of your own. And custom editing, again, depends on the data you are originally feeding it. I highly, highly suggest creating a chat GPT project where you can feed it a bunch of different base files that it can work off of so it knows your tone, it knows your language. It knows the words you like to use, the words you don't like to use. You can use transcripts, you can use meeting notes, brand guidelines, and then previous Analytics, you know, any any type of stuff like that, that you can feed it, you can feed that as a custom project, and then from there, you'll be able to build off of that, and you'll get much better results when it comes to your content creation journey. Last slide here that I want to talk about is, where is the market going. And so this is, according to AI, not AI ops, AR ops, that AI is becoming table stakes. And I definitely agree with that, even though it would kind of contradict the earlier study that we were sharing from marketing AI Institute, where majority of people are not using it at all. I think it's What was that number, 70% that have not implemented AI as a strategy, but air ops believes that AI is table stakes. I would agree with that statement. Their next statement is teams without AI capabilities risk falling behind. Agreed. The next one, early adopters are already seeing scale speed and cost advantages. Sure depends famous marketing answer, and then the last one, it says, where should leaders invest over the next 12 to 18 months? And this was obviously a discussion on the webinar for air ops. And so I'm, you know, can't really reveal what, because I honestly, I forgot what they said. But in my expert opinion, where should leaders invest over the next 12 to 18 months? I would really take a look at what is driving your revenue today, and then backwards engineer how you get to that revenue spot. Is it through case studies? Is it through white papers? Is it through sales calls? Maybe it's a combination of all of those trade show visits, email outreach, cold calling. You could reverse engineer a lot of those different things, but you have to track what's working or what's not working. How did you hear about us? Are you asking that on your high intent lead forms, on your site, when people want to book a meeting, are they telling you exactly where they hear about you where they've heard about your company. That is the most important data point that you could be gathering. I lamented on this for years. It still is the number one data point you should be acquiring, because, as I mentioned earlier, Google is a pass through channel. If you are saying all of our leads come through Google, that's because they don't remember your website URL. They're going to Google, to just google your company, and then to be able to land on that landing page, then they can make the conversion. So what is moving the needle? And that's what you have to figure out. And so if you have the How did you hear about us? Report, establish, and you're collecting that data, start there. Add How did you hear about us? To all of your high intent forms all throughout your website. So your book, a call, your book, a meeting book, a demo, all of those different forms. Ask it, how did you hear about us? Make it a required field, no drop downs, no check boxes. Make it a free text field. So then that way, whatever has impacted that user the most. That's what they're going to put in the box. I've used this client example before, but we have a trucking company that we have been working with for years, and so we implemented this on their driver recruiting forms. And you wouldn't believe the amount of people that said, I saw your truck driving down the road, saw your truck at a rest stop, you would never be able to measure that, and not that, you know, maybe a marketer, maybe a marketer could do something with that kind of information, but what they could do with that kind of information is to make a decision on, maybe I don't need to spend $1,000 a month on, you know, Facebook ads. Maybe we could just park a truck at a rest stop at a high traffic area and then get leads that. I mean, I'm just spitballing here. That's obviously not a very good example. I'm just kind of going off the rim or off the dome here, but that's something to think about. So you have to have, what are your revenue goals? What's driving the revenue? How are you measuring what's actually working, and then detail the processes of what it takes to make a white paper, what it takes to set up an ad campaign, what it takes to schedule a podcast, and then write down all of those steps, the research process, the the gathering the guest photos, social media, links, getting a bio on the person you're talking to, even if it's, you know, an internal podcast, or maybe it's, you know, developing an FAQ page resource for your website. Can I get the meeting notes from different sales calls, and can I anonymize the data in order to come up with the questions that people are asking? And then guess what? All. Of those FAQs turn into content that you can individualize, meaning that you take one question and you have your executive team answer it. You have your executive team write a LinkedIn post about how they answer this frequently asked question when they're on a call. And so just being able to think outside of the box, but using it from a revenue generation standpoint and reverse engineering, that's where you figure out where these different AI tools can play a role, where they make the most sense and where they more importantly, where they don't make sense. You don't want to waste a bunch of time on tools that don't make sense for the goal that you're trying to achieve. And I think that's a really a good place to leave it, because I will link to the marketing AI Institute in the show notes, just to make sure. If you want to check them out, check them out on YouTube as well and be able to sign up for one of their future classes. They have a lot of free events that they put on, and they do them virtually. So highly recommend checking those out as well. You can also check out air ops, if you're interested in some of their SEO and content solutions, I have it. I can't speak for the platform. I haven't actually tried it, but I do like a lot of the content that they are creating, so feel free to check them out. I'll also link to the presentation that was created by Gemma, and then we will put those all in the show notes, just to make it easy for y'all. But until then, that about does it? I did want to also ask if you have any use cases of how you're using AI in your marketing. I would love to hear it and then have a chance to be featured on a future show. So if you want to email me, if you want to DM me on any of the social media platforms of choice, feel free to shoot me over that message and let me know how you're using AI, and hopefully we can include it in future episode, because, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we are running some different content examples and content examples, but experiments. And it's not really a ton of data to share yet, but I will have that in the near future. So thank you guys for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it and that about does it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight, if you liked this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching. Everything is logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode and go jags. You.
