Artificial intelligence is continuing to advance at an exponential pace, mirroring the advent of the internet in some ways. Like the early days of the internet, some businesses are assuming AI is just a fad that’ll fade with time while others are taking full advantage of this emerging technology to reduce costs while improving efficiency.
Ed Morrissey, Partner and Chief Creative Officer of Integrity Web Consulting, joined co-hosts Dave Hartley and Missy Kelly to talk about the latest advances in generative AI and explain why it’s so critical for businesses to take time to explore and embrace AI applications. The trio also took a detour from AI to discuss how a “holacracy” management framework empowers everyone at Ed’s company into a decision-maker, as well as the following topics:
“The most successful strategies to adopt new or innovative technologies, take AI for example, begin with incremental changes.” – Ed Morrissey
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Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing on Spotify, Pandora or Apple Podcasts and let us know what you think by rating and reviewing. Keep up with more Anders insights by visiting our website and following us on social media:
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Artificial intelligence is continuing to advance at an exponential pace, mirroring the advent of the internet in some ways. Like the early days of the internet, some businesses are assuming AI is just a fad that’ll fade with time while others are taking full advantage of this emerging technology to reduce costs while improving efficiency.
Ed Morrissey, Partner and Chief Creative Officer of Integrity Web Consulting, joined co-hosts Dave Hartley and Missy Kelly to talk about the latest advances in generative AI and explain why it’s so critical for businesses to take time to explore and embrace AI applications. The trio also took a detour from AI to discuss how a “holacracy” management framework empowers everyone at Ed’s company into a decision-maker, as well as the following topics:
“The most successful strategies to adopt new or innovative technologies, take AI for example, begin with incremental changes.” – Ed Morrissey
Resources to Count On
Check out these additional resources for more insight into the conversation:
Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing on Spotify, Pandora or Apple Podcasts and let us know what you think by rating and reviewing. Keep up with more Anders insights by visiting our website and following us on social media:
Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter
You're focused on making important decisions to take your company to the next level. But who's counting? We are Counting on trends and insight to move your business forward operationally and strategically, focused on helping executives achieve their highest potential. But who's Counting is a podcast shedding light on and breaking down critical issues and opportunities for businesses Brought to you by Anders, cpas and Advisors.
Speaker 2:So I loved this episode. I could have talked to Ed for hours. In fact, you know, after we stopped recording, we kept him for 10 more minutes continued to talk. What was your favorite part of this?
Speaker 3:So anytime I talk to Ed Morrissey, my mind is somewhat blown because he always, like I know like 80 percent of what he's saying, but then he throws on these extra pieces, and that's what he did in this episode is give examples and talk about specific things. So for me it was the AI related observations that Ed has. Sure, because he different disciplines the things that he focuses on, I found it fascinating and I could yeah, I could go several more hours with him asking him questions about that.
Speaker 2:Agreed. The AI step was really interesting and kind of the big takeaway for me there is that it's just going to be integrated into pretty much everything we do, as opposed to I'm going out to chat to PT now or I'm going out to whatever your AI resource is, I'm going out to you know whatever, whatever your AI resource is, it's just going to be integrated in. I thought it was super fascinating to hear about their organizational structure. I had never heard of a holacracy until this episode and I'm still not a hundred percent sure I know how it works. But maybe that's the magic of it is that you are.
Speaker 2:I mean, the way I think about it is it's radical collaboration where you're on a team and you're just everyone is on the same level, same playing field, and probably what that does is drive ownership, where everyone feels that sense of ownership to get the project done and to get it done well. So I thought that was fascinating. I was just going to say so. We've talked about how the workforce is changing and the way we work is changing, and I think most of the time we're talking about hybrid, remote, that kind of thing. But I wonder if this type of holacracy, or a concept similar will become more common. I think a lot of things started in the technology world that have been adopted by quote non-tech companies, and maybe that's one of them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one of the examples that Ed gives in this episode is a very large enterprise that is trying basically a holacrophy type approach, and so and that was always one of my questions when I heard, when I first heard this from Ed, is how will that scale as you get bigger and bigger and bigger? Won't it be easier for people to get lost in the shuffle? So, anyway, ed and his team have somehow figured out a way to handle that and address that. He talks about that and a bunch of other really interesting things as part of this episode.
Speaker 2:So today we're excited to welcome Ed Morrissey, partner and Chief Creative Officer of Integrity Web Consulting. Ed is an award-winning designer and technologist, as well as an industry expert in applying creative, user-centered development principles to help businesses extend their brands online and better connect with their customers, employees, partners and investors. Having built his last firm to be named one of Adweek's top 10 interactive agencies, ed has developed web-based solutions for a variety of clients, from big brands to small startups. Welcome to the podcast, ed. Hello, great to be here. It's great to see startups. Welcome to the podcast, ed. Hello, great to be here. It's great to see you. So, since you get to deal with businesses of all sizes and you've got some whoppers in your portfolio and I know you work with some startups as well are you seeing any common themes that cross over to like across industries and maybe even size, or are they usually pretty specified?
Speaker 5:Themes just in general, from a technology standpoint, mark, or from an AI standpoint.
Speaker 2:Technology.
Speaker 5:You know, themes occur within industries. Probably you know where startups are doing one thing and enterprises are doing another thing at a different scale are doing one thing and enterprises are doing another thing at a different scale. So the main theme is that technology is everywhere and it's pervasive and it's getting deeper into every aspect of every business, and that the pace of change within technology is absolutely unrelenting, challenging to manage, and so startups, even though they're small and nimble and can make quick changes, they're still struggling with the amount of change that's occurring within the overall industry. Same thing for enterprises that aren't necessarily accustomed to change. You see that a theme is they're starting to realize change is everywhere and they're starting to reorganize themselves to embrace the change.
Speaker 3:So, ed, thank you for being on the show. We appreciate it. So I guess, kind of as a follow up to that, when you think about, like, what are you hearing terms of, or what are your thoughts around, where are companies in their innovation journeys? So our theme for season three is innovation. So when you think about like your clients and they're striving to be innovative, I guess do most organizations you're working with feel like they're at the very early stages. Do they feel fairly accomplished? Are they someone in the middle? Are they frustrated, kind of what are you seeing from your interactions with companies?
Speaker 5:Yeah, most organizations are still very early in adopting advanced technologies and implementing them and changing cultures. They all know they need to, but they have no idea how to. Ok, and a lot of these enterprises you know the large organizations they've been around for decades, centuries some of them, and so they've got some DNA that is maybe not beneficial to changing rapidly. And so what you're seeing is and you've seen this really since the late 90s, when the web first big technology revolution of my career was the introduction of the commercial web Organizations have been trying to innovate since then and you see some kind of common patterns. You'll see a large organization create an innovation team, right. Well, the first thing they'll do is they'll say, hey, organization, innovate, right. Well. Well, the first thing they'll do is they'll say, hey, organization, innovate, let's all innovate, you know, or you know, and nobody knows what to do. They all have their day jobs, right? So then you'll then organizations realizing that wasn't effective. Then they would take their team IT or marketing, or whoever and say, ok, innovate, you innovate, right.
Speaker 5:Well, and really the mistake everyone's making is one they're not defining what innovation is. What is innovation to that specific organization? And I would argue it's completely different between a large organization like Bayer and a four-person startup trying to change the world. Their definition of innovation is different. So you have to first define innovation to figure out how do we know when we've innovated or when we've succeeded. The other big and that's different per organization. The other thing that I highly recommend to all my clients who really do want to innovate is it has to be a bimodal operating team. It can't be a current team that it's layered onto and or a current team that's repurposed. You know innovators are different. The Steve Jobs of the world, you know they think differently, they act differently. They won't work under certain situations. And so having a separate team with a fully defined what is innovation? How do we know when we're going to succeed? Those are two critical aspects across every industry.
Speaker 2:And how do you inspire innovation?
Speaker 5:That's a great question I was going to. Actually. I've had some clients say what is the force that causes someone to innovate? And there's really just a couple of reasons. And really there's one. Some people innovate to make more money or to be cool, or I want to innovate just to innovate. But the real innovation often occurs whenever an organization is threatened with extinction. That's extinction that's really yeah, so you think?
Speaker 2:fear is the thing that inspires innovation more than anything. I think yeah.
Speaker 5:I think fear. It's interesting, absolutely, I get that. Yeah, it's also the most effective, you know. The funny thing is is, you know, if you look at, if you look at like a large or large enterprise and then you look at a startup, you know they both have fear of failure, right, sure, but they're opposite. In an enterprise, if I fail, I'm fired, I'm terminated. There's a culture of not breaking things within large enterprises. Right Within startups and small orgs, they're driven by fear of failure too. If I don't innovate and succeed, I run out of cash. If I don't innovate, I don't get my next round of investors. If I don't do this, I die.
Speaker 2:Right no backup plan.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but the fear in a small organization motivates them to do great things. The fear in a large organization causes them to do great things. The fear in a large organization causes them to do nothing. And I see that and that's pretty common.
Speaker 3:So, ed, you've been around for a while I guess. Have you seen, I guess from your experiences, stories or examples of where innovation efforts have gone really well and kind of some of the characteristics of that. And then also I think we can learn a lot from failures and I guess things that you've seen where you know things went wrong, and I guess advice on how you know business leaders today can maybe avoid some of those problems.
Speaker 5:Yeah, you know AI or any technology. In this case, you know AI specifically. It's not the big bang hey, I invented this new thing. It's hey, I've got a phone and now I put maps on it with geolocation and I have a mapping device. Right, that was an incremental innovation on a smartphone. So so that's where you know, that's where I see a lot of organizations.
Speaker 5:First, when you're, when you're rolling out newer technology, you know you've got to be slower, you've got to be cautious, because you know there are these waves, gartner's waves of innovation, and sometimes they stick, like the web. When the web came out, you know, half of the organizations were like we don't need it. Another half were like let's go right. And then, five years later, everyone was like, okay, this is real, let's go. Conversely, one of the most recent waves of innovation was crypto or Web3. A couple of years back, it started, crashed and it didn't take off right. And so you're seeing enterprises today adopting innovation like AI and some of the newer technology paradigms. They're more pragmatic and they're slower and they're incremental chunks and I see that much more successful than a large organization kind of saying we're going to completely change everything about ourselves in a certain way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I know that one of your passions is building high performing teams, and it certainly seems that that is related to innovation, that there is a correlation between the two, and you've implemented some innovative thinking around how to structure the organization, so tell us about that.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I would say that's probably our kind of. Our core secret to success is our organizational operating model. And so, for those that know, you know we're a consulting firm, so startups and enterprises hire us to implement technology solutions for them. And so and I've been doing this since the web first started in the mid-90s, when the first commercial browser came out, and so I've failed a lot and learned a lot and tried and figured things out what Integrity today operates as. And we have less than 100 employees, so we're not massive, but what we've embraced is it's a formal operating model for organizations called holacracy. Okay, and what holacracy is? It's kind of a neural network of organization structures, if you think of the old way, which is very hierarchical you know the boss, the second boss, the third, you know all the way down to all the people that do the work are 10, 20 steps down in a traditional hierarchy.
Speaker 5:What we've realized? When the smartphones came out and the tablets came out about 12, 13 years ago, we realized that that changed the game substantially, and so what needed to occur were the people doing the work needed to be elevated to interact directly with the decision makers and the client and the environment. Going on. So complete disintermediation of humans between the person that wants the technology solution done and the people that are doing it. And the people that are doing it.
Speaker 5:And the key there is everything has become so complicated that you need at least three to 10 people to implement any technology today. You're going to need engineers, developers, technologists whether they're mobile web, ai, crypto, it doesn't matter. You need UX, user experience designers, ux and UI. You need managers and strategists. So Holacracy what it does is it removes all middlemen and it empowers and it distributes decision making down to every single individual. So it isn't a top down. The president says it's this way, it has to be this way. Way, it has to be this way. We are a bottom-up organization that, in real time, is taking the inputs of the environment, the situation, the market, the client, the technology, the people, the processes and making the best decisions in the real time, at that time.
Speaker 5:And I'll tell you Missy, it's been night and day. The reduction of stress in delivering these types of solutions is much lower. The ability to deliver them quicker, more effectively and more efficiently and higher quality has increased dramatically. Because it's a huge, huge thing. And, interestingly, you're starting to see news reports. I think just last week here in St Louis was I think it was Bayer the North American CEO, came out and said OK, we're going to get rid of a lot of middle level management and we're going to empower the teams into distributed groups of teams to make decisions, to move quicker and to respond in real time with the actual details. And so you're going to. You know, my question was always can a large enterprise operate in this sort of neural network holacracy operating model? Smaller we can, but it'll be really interesting to see as the larger organizations respond to today's you know constantly changing world and need to deliver solutions to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So one question I would have is like how do you manage quality, like quality control, and you know. So you have a new person or a relatively green team, you know. How do you manage that?
Speaker 5:Yeah, two things. The Holacracy model. Again. What it does is that, instead of the project manager owning the delivery of the technology solution and then the developers, designers, marketers, analytics, people, reporting into that person, those people, you know those people all they all have a seat at the table. They're peers, okay, working with the client. So, and that's where that's one key strategy to quality is, if you're, let's say, you're a designer on a team with four developers and the sites or the, you know, the technology is not working as quickly as it needs to, well, the designer can say, hey, this isn't working great, right, because it's not to them. Or the developer could say, well, yeah, the design's not great, and so, you know, a world-class digital experience is technology, it's visual design and then it's like content right, whatever you're wanting to see words, text, images, videos and so we have those. We have leaders, we have those three core experts on every project, working as peers to keep each other honest, to ensure quality.
Speaker 2:Great, and I would imagine, in the hybrid world that we're working in now, that that would work well. You don't have to be in the same office. You can do that virtually pretty easily, it seems.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it works great. I have actually given several kind of consulting presentations on the model because it is. You know, the first thing everyone startups and enterprises need to understand is we're all software development firms, now, right, to a certain degree. We all need high-performing marketing technology teams in our organizations, right, and the other side of that is the top talent you know in Silicon Valley and technology and marketing. You know they have different expectations of work, right, and the Holacracy model feeds their expectations, it empowers them and it's a model that that the best love. In fact, I would say if the best workers ever experienced a holography model, it's hard for them to go anywhere else. That's great yeah.
Speaker 3:So, ed, let's pivot and let's shift to talk about AI and technology. So I know later this week I think you guys are hosting a round table on AI chatbots and I think you're doing that as part of STL Tech Week. So that's great that you're participating in that. I guess give us a sneak peek of kind of what are the key messages that you're going to be talking about as part of that roundtable? And then, are you know, kind of from your perspective, what are the best real world applications of AI? You know kind of chat, your perspective, what are the best real world applications of AI? You know kind of chatbot technology and what do you see from that front?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so yeah, this Friday we're. So one of our one of our progressive slash innovative clients is a nonprofit out of Springfield, missouri, and it's called Fight CRC, which is Fight Colorectal Cancer. Their mission as a nonprofit is to eradicate colon cancer right Through education, early testing, investing in cures, things like that. So they have a lot of you know, proprietary data and it's complex healthcare. You know data and so and people are calling them all the time asking for that information, and so we talked to them and said, hey, why don't we build a custom chat-based conversational AI chatbot that is on your site 24 by 7, 365 days a year, that is trained on only your data, nothing else, just your colorectal cancer data, your data, nothing else, just your colorectal cancer data and some other key messaging or key themes that you want it trained on, so that, again, at any time, anyone could interact with the leading expert on colorectal cancer information. And it was early, right, and going back to the earlier question, you always want to be careful not to be like bleeding edge, too early in introducing technology to clients, because it could be really expensive, you know, but in this case they're leading edge, not bleeding edge, and so we were. You know, openai was there and we were able to train it, train the data, and so we're really proud to show it off on Friday.
Speaker 5:Some of the lessons that we learned were around costs. So the pricing models because right now they're kind of per transaction or per character count is kind of how they charge the backend AI systems. Good news is, like Moore's law, it's decreasing rapidly. The cost has already come down 50% since when we started the project a couple of months ago, and you're going to see the cost to use those platforms continue to go down. Their accuracy and effectiveness continue to go up. So the lessons on that were, although it is leading edge, we picked a solid platform, the leading platform right now OpenAI and it was very effective and relatively easy to interact with OpenAI's backend systems and APIs and so that was a net positive.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest thing, you know. Know there's two kind of big ass. Two other big lessons is just kind of like in the going back to the, the quality uh question is really trying to break it. You know, trying to. You know, because it's you can ask it anything and really like I've got a great story. When I was qa testing it, um, I said hey, chapa, show me a picture of my colon. It replied I'm a single modal AI agent and I can only reply in text. And I said no, you can show me a picture, so show me a picture. And it said, ok, well, here's a picture. And it was a link to an image of a body in the colon. And then I said, hey, that was pretty good, but I know you can draw something for me, so draw it.
Speaker 2:And guess what it did it produced ASCII text image of the colon.
Speaker 5:You're kidding, I was blown away. I was absolutely blown away. But it highlights just the need to test, and you need to test beyond a you know previous compute. You know it was kind of an either or right. Does this link work? Does this return a valid response or a valid page? Right, well, and so testing there was relatively easy, you know. But when you get a system that is conversational and generative and content and intellect, who knows? And so QA is so critical. Thinking off the walls for QA is critical, and then managing going forward too, because machine learning aspect of AI is something that we're going to have to make sure it doesn't learn wrong things or bad things or inaccurate things. So there will be required support and we'll learn more as we go along.
Speaker 2:So a lot of software companies are building AI capabilities, and even other companies that are hiring people like you to help create AI capabilities within their own businesses. So what are the most impressive tools that you've seen that you think leaders should be aware of or try out?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so today's AI is really good at and most of us have, you know, those who have interacted with it. We know chat, gpt, we'll go ask a question and, you know, interact a little bit with it. I would assume most people don't even know what it's doing on the backend. They just think it's kind of Googling I would assume it's good at. Ai is really good at generating images. Now you probably probably played with some of that mid journey and copilot and others. So it's also just really good at at automation. You know, like all technology, it's AI is great at automation. Um, and what it's really good at today is kind of just initial ideation, or, or, or the, you know, the initial creation of a, like a first draft of something, whether it's a blog post or a legal brief or a letter to a customer or you know anything, or a sales script. That it's really really good at the first draft of things.
Speaker 2:And that's really valuable. That's a valuable tool, like sometimes that's the hardest part, right Getting started.
Speaker 5:So it absolutely. Yeah, when you look at you know, if you, you know, just taking a. If I were to say to anyone, hey, go write a page of content about jelly beans, right, you know like it would take any of us quite a while to even just think through what what you know, you know I can go. I can go and say to a conversational AI hey, create a, create a one page blog post on on jelly beans as it relates to the technology, and it'll spit it out, right, and then, and that, so that saves me hours of time, and then I can, just then I can do refinement and editing. So that's what you're. You know, you're seeing a lot of that Like. Here's a great example.
Speaker 5:There was a. There's a new product out there. It's that. That it takes, let's say, you've subscribed to 100 email newsletters, right, and every day you get a newsletter and it's, you know, six, eight, 10 paragraphs of content. Well, there's a new, I think it's called JellyPod. It's an AI that will consume all of those newsletters and automatically create a podcast for you from it.
Speaker 5:Oh wow, All of those newsletters, right, and so you know it's doing two things. It's cliff, noting everything, but then it's creating, you know, oral or verbal output, and that's really cool, that's very cool yeah.
Speaker 2:So what about people that or oh, I'm sorry, no, go ahead. What about people or companies who are fearful of AI because they're either concerned about you know data privacy and security the security issues on the one hand, but also you know what if it's giving inaccurate information and we run with the inaccurate information? So you know, some conservative companies might be really holding back right now due to those things. What would you say to them?
Speaker 5:I mean, I would say that's good, you know, to be careful, be cautious, be pragmatic with any technology, not just AI, but especially AI, because it generates things. But you know, there's a, there's a meme that makes its round everywhere and you can apply it to companies or people or teams. You know, and I'll give the Anders analogy, and.
Speaker 5:I'll give the Anders analogy. Okay, ai will not replace an accounting firm, right, it's just not going to today. But I will tell you an accounting firm whose team embraces AI, knows AI and implements AI in their workflows and their client customer servicing will deplace an Anders right. So they say with developers that AI is not going to replace a developer. A developer who knows how to use AI will replace a developer. Got it so same with designers, with writers, with anybody Lawyers? My brother's a lawyer and I've introduced him to AI a year or so ago. He owns his own small firm and easily a 30% productivity increase across his whole team just from AI implementing document review, consolidation, notes and things like that.
Speaker 3:Sure so, ed. That's just a great example that 30% productivity increase. I think that's a great example of the possibilities of this and those types of things have been hyped in the media and there's been a ton of you know coverage of things like that, but yet I just saw a research study where over three quarters of Americans have not even tried a chat, gpt or an AI tool, and so I guess the question is how can people get started? For folks that are in that camp, that they've heard about it but they just haven't had the time or they're scared, I guess, what would your recommendations be for? How could people get started? How can they start this journey?
Speaker 5:How could people get started? How can they start this journey? You know, really it's just getting out there and playing with those tools because they are free. Today you can go to Copilot, the Microsoft Copilot. You just search Microsoft Copilot and it's a whole web experience that is free for you to interact with and ask questions and dig in and learn how know, learn how to prompt and things like that. There's a lot of you know free online learning as well, coming out of all of the organizations, but the best thing is just go try it.
Speaker 5:I mean, I've introduced, you know, co-pilot AI sort of solutions to lots of my friends and family that are lawyers, that are painters, that are nonprofit owners, and if you just show them one or two or three things you know, searches and prompts and what an AI can produce, they get it. It's pretty easy to get once you play with it one time. But I do think, Dave, you know, the big challenge is so many humans. They don't know the difference between when I go to Google and there's a search box and I ask it a question, and then I go to Copilot or whatever and I ask it a question. Most people don't know the differences that are occurring in the back end Right, and so somehow we're going to, somehow the industry just has to help educate and bring everybody on board to that.
Speaker 2:So what are the differences and how they're working on the backend?
Speaker 5:So the like, the biggest kind of macro here is, I feel, is AI. It's, it's a, it's like a compute platform change. So previous, prior to AI, it was like circuit based computing, right, right, like zeros and ones. It's if the user searches for dog, return these pages. If then, right, okay, okay, yeah, so that's circuit-based computing. That's Googling.
Speaker 5:That's Googling, that's the old way of Googling. Googling is changing, right. Sure, you know, google would go and it would index every single webpage on the web, on the internet, and it would extract keywords and it would rank, you know, the indexes of all of the internet, so that when a user searched for it, it would query the index and it would return the page. What AI is? It's, um, it's a complete platform change from a compute standpoint, because it's it's um, it's, it's more like knowledge, or knowledge-based computing, or insight-based computing. So you have, you have an AI system and you've trained it on, you know, uh, what, what a dog is, right, so that it's able then to connect the dots.
Speaker 5:If I were to say, if I were to search for what is something that chases cats and chews bones, right, it would return dog.
Speaker 5:But I didn't search for dog, I didn't search for a breed of dog, I didn't search for, you know, it just knew that those that those uh knowledge points were associated with the dog, right, so that's the difference. And then and that opens up a massive uh difference a massive opportunity for new compute applications, um, and the other aspect, that's really. That is part of this that helps, and the other aspect that's really that is part of this that helps helps create the illusion of intelligence, is is is real time, right? You know, if any of us were to go to chat GBT and ask a question and it take a day to return an answer, we wouldn't think that was you know, found it and gave it to us. But today, with the new compute platform and non-circuit based computing, we've moved over to GPUs or graphical processing units better at parallel comparison of data, that it gives the illusion that it creates real-time responses, which is also kind of a game changer from a knowledge retrieval standpoint.
Speaker 2:So what about the impact on the marketing strategies and consumer behavior? So MarTech, tell us about that.
Speaker 5:Yeah, well, it's going to be everywhere. It's already started and Google's mission is always to organize the world's data and give its users the best answer as quickly as possible. Users of the Google ecosystem that their changes are coming to search engine optimization, search engine marketing and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5:It could be, and here's a great example Missy is pretty soon like so if you go to shoescom and you look at a pair of shoes and then you go to a different website. You know you'll be retargeted. Display ads potentially of those shoes. Right, because free cookie.
Speaker 2:I guess, and then you buy those shoes.
Speaker 5:So, and then it'll it'll say, hey, she likes these shoes, so here's an ad of those shoes, and show it. And so the marketing team behind that has hundreds and hundreds of images of those shoes, of various shoes, because it depends on which shoe that you're looking at. Well, that marketing references hundreds of shoes. Well, in the very near future, you'll go to that to see the shoes, but then you'll go to another site and the ads will not be linked to. They'll be generated in real time and it might be a picture of you wearing the shoes or it might be a video of you jumping rope with those shoes on. It'll just be generated in real time.
Speaker 5:So there's an old book a long time ago I remember reading in the late nineties, mid 90s. It's called a one-to-one marketing Okay, and it talked about the one-to-one you know, one-to-one marketing capabilities that technology is going to facilitate for us all and you're going to see it in some pretty awesome ways. We all are going to experience it in some pretty awesome ways over the next, you know, 12 to 24 months.
Speaker 2:You're right, the pace of change is incredible.
Speaker 5:It's almost unmanageable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 3:So, ed, that's a great transition to based on time, I think, our last question, which is so. I just heard last week a leading business executive compared AI to the fourth industrial revolution, so referencing things like the steam engine, electricity, computing, the internet. So pretty high praise. So I guess, when you think about that and just what you were talking about, the massive changes that you see coming, I guess from your mind, do you see that measured in months, in years, in decades? I guess, kind of, what's your thinking on? How quickly this is going to be honest, and the reason I ask the question is because I think a lot of business owners, business leaders, are trying to gauge okay, how much should I invest? When do I get serious about this? When do I start dedicating full-time teams to this? So the concept of timing comes into play. So what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think in the next 12 months it'll be overwhelming, because every major Microsoft you know microsoft, adobe, oracle, salesforce they are already starting to roll out ai within their, within their platforms, and we already, all of us, use their platforms already. So you're, so they're going to see it. You know what we're all going to see it it's going to be slow.
Speaker 5:I mean, I mean, it's happening already right, like I can go into on this, on this podcast system, I can change and blur the background. I can change the background to another background, right? That's a level of artificial intelligence, right? That? That is that's in here, and so you're going to start seeing a lot more of that because it's going to be within the platforms we all we already use on a daily basis. But it's coming fast. I'll tell you that the pace of change again again, that's the other thing is with AI is something humans can't comprehend. Is algorithmic scaling, right? It isn't going to be one plus one equals two. It's not going to be a linear improvement. It's that right, it's already done that. If you look at the image quality from version one of like mid-journey or of the AI creating images, to today, I mean it is unbelievable. And, dave, you'll like this.
Speaker 5:Having implemented technology for organizations my whole life, my whole professional career, you know there's only two reasons why companies do.
Speaker 5:One is to make money and then one is to save money, because I've used this in the past to kind of roughly value implementing a technology.
Speaker 5:So let's say that you're a 10,000-person organization, right, and the average employee cost per hour, I think in America, is about $45 right now. That's salary benefits, all that kind of insurance. So if I have a 10,000 person organization and I can introduce technology that saves every you know every team member 15 minutes a month, only 15 minutes a month, right, that saves, you know, 150,000 minutes per month, or 2,000, what at 2,500 hours per month? Or it saves that organization $112,000 per month to implement and automate AI or any technology that would save each employee 15 minutes a month. So that's where you'll see the larger organizations are going to look at it that way. They're going to look at okay, man, how can I save money by automating the most common task request, whatever within our enterprise? Let's do that Versus a startup or an e-commerce saying like Amazon, if you buy at Amazon at all anymore as a user, the user generated ratings at the bottom right have always been something I would look at to see if it's a good product or not.
Speaker 5:Well, if you've noticed now Amazon, above all the user ratings. They have a summary, they have an AI based summary of all the ratings. So now I can just read that one, I can just read that one summary and I can get it all, and it's really cool and it's really accurate, and so that I would. I would it'd be really interesting to see, after um, amazon rolled that out kind of, if there were any kind of improvements in their conversions based upon you know, because again, that's something that would have taken you know. Well, it wouldn't have been possible. It would have taken a human a million years to do that for every main product, right? They did it overnight, right? So Wow?
Speaker 3:So, Ed, we appreciate you visiting with us today. So one of the things that we do at the end of every episode is we do the make it count segment, which is really when you reflect back on what we've talked about over the last half hour or so and you think about okay, if you want people to take one actionable item away from this as it relates to innovation, what would that thing be for you? Based on this conversation, what would you like people to take action on today?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so it kind of a two-part answer. The first point is everyone needs to that lives in this world marketing technology. You know, I've seen several industries adopt this term, this acronym, vuca, v-u-c-a, and everyone says it's the world we're living in now and V-U-C-A stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
Speaker 2:Okay, Wow, I'm so sad just thinking about it. It just made me anxious.
Speaker 5:It is no longer like you know, used to. As a marketer, I could. You know, 40 years ago, gosh, 20 years ago, maybe 30 years ago, I could run, I could produce one TV ad, I could run it one time and I could capture 50% of the market. Right Today it's.
Speaker 5:Everything is just so crazy and changing and uncertain and ambiguous and volatile that the second part of that answer is, david, is every company needs to acknowledge that the new norm and a lot of them are still especially the enterprises are fighting it. And then we need, because of the world we live in, we need to accept that every company should be a high-performing marketing technology software dev company, right. Marketing technology software dev company, right. If the world is going to be crazy, you're going to have to have the team tooling and workflow to capitalize on the crazy. And if you don't, you know you'll. You'll just implode as an organization more than likely, and so it's a, you know. Realize the world's crazy and then, um, think through, um through, and then and then accept that you need to change who you are, more than likely to take advantage of the crazy.
Speaker 2:Wow, it kind of goes back to that fear based inspiration right.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, this has been.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 5:Yeah well, this has been. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say, you know, I someone asked me that question. Uh, earlier this year it was a client that wanted to spend a bunch of money um, building a, like you know, building the digital version of themselves, and they were they were.
Speaker 5:It's actually, it's actually a. It's a really interesting industry. It's a um, it's um, um barrel aging of alcohol, wine primarily. And she had asked me you know, it's a really large endeavor to modernize the whole operations, right, and she's like Ed, in your experience, why would we do this, you know? And I said, well, you'd do it if you're, if your competitor was about to, you know, take over Right and, and. And she was like, yeah, that, and that's that's what we feel is happening.
Speaker 2:And I said yeah, so you know, let's go.
Speaker 5:It's a lot easier to pull a trigger on a big expenditure If you know, if, if, if you, if you're about to die, versus contemplating whether we'll make more money or not. You know, I had another client who, who is awesome, who said it a really cool way. He said I know we have to innovate and we have to change, we have to become a digital version of ourselves and I'll spend a bunch of money. I'd rather die quickly, under my own terms, than die slowly. Wow, he said. Wow yeah.
Speaker 2:And so you know they invested a lot of money, I'm sure. Yes, well, thank you. This has been so fascinating I think I could talk to you, for you know more, more, much more. So thanks again, and we are happy that things are going well for you and we will talk to you soon.
Speaker 5:All right, thank you all. Thanks, ed. All right, bye.
Speaker 4:Thank you for joining the but who's Counting podcast. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing on Spotify or Apple podcasts and let us know what you think by rating and reviewing. Keep up with more Anders CPA's, cpas and advisors' insights by following us on social media through the handles in the show notes. We'll see you next time.