The Revolutionary Impact of AI on Content Creation for Businesses

Prepare to unlock the secret to massive content creation as we sit down with Cody Schneider, the visionary entrepreneur behind Swell AI and Draft Horse AI. Discover how his innovative platforms are helping even the smallest of businesses to produce content at lightning speed, rivaling the heavy hitters in the corporate world. We peel back the layers of AI-generated material, tackling the initial generic output, and dive into strategies that breathe life into it, giving your brand a voice that stands out. Cody's insights are a treasure trove for anyone looking to navigate the evolving landscape of digital trust and content efficiency.

As the AI revolution quietly transforms the business realm, many remain surprisingly in the dark about tools like ChatGPT. We address this gap, predicting AI's inevitable rise to commonality, drawing parallels to past tech adoption waves. By integrating AI, even on a small scale, businesses can gain a competitive advantage that goes beyond simple automation—it's about reshaping the workplace, from efficiency to employee satisfaction. The episode doesn't just highlight AI's potential; it serves as a clarion call for the upcoming AI wave set to revolutionize industry after industry.

Lastly, we talk about the gravity of 'digital gravity'—how creating a strong online presence is akin to building a universe where your content pulls in audiences like planets orbit a star. The key? Volume and consistency. We dissect the art of fine-tuning your digital content strategy by drawing insights from every piece you put out there, much like a slugger perfects his swing. And when it comes to social media, we reveal why regular posting isn't just good practice; it fuels a symbiotic growth engine that feeds both your business and the platforms you're using. Tune in to unearth how to harness the power of AI and content creation to catapult your business into a new orbit.

Follow Cody Schneider:
codyschneider.com 
www.swellai.com
www.drafthorseai.com

Follow @urbuzzworthy on LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter. Get your copy of Buzz's best selling book, The Rule of 26 at www.ruleof26.com.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

AI can replace your copywriter, they said. Ai can write all of your blogs in second shoot. It can write an entire book in a matter of 15 minutes, they said. Is all this hype true? Well, today I hope to find out as I interview Cody Schneider, the co-founder of Swell AI and Draft Horse AI, two AI content creation platforms helping businesses scale content production. With over 10 years of experience in digital marketing, cody has helped launch and scale numerous software startups through data-driven growth tactics. Before his entrepreneurial career, he held marketing leadership roles at health tech unicorn, rupa Health and has worked with a number of Fortune 500 brands. I'm excited to see his take on how AI can help small businesses with content marketing. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Welcome to the show, cody.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Super excited to be here, man.

Speaker 1: 1:06

Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's been a minute since we talked last. You've been super busy. You're Mr AI, content creator extraordinaire. Not one, but two platforms. I bet that keeps you really busy.

Speaker 2: 1:22

Yeah, it's been a minute, but I bet that keeps you really busy. Yeah, it's been a minute.

Speaker 1: 1:25

So, you know, we got to just like hit the nail on the head and I have to ask the question is AI content writing, all it is hyped up to be for small businesses?

Speaker 2: 1:39

Man, I just look at it as like I'm watching these companies output as much content as like a Fortune 500 company and like this is like a mom and pop shop in the middle of nowhere middle America. Like that's kind of the power that exists here. I think, for most people, when they interact with AI content for the first time, though, they're like oh, this sounds super generic and like you can tell right off the bat it's very robotic. So for the majority of people, that's like it's kind of like this, like oh my God, moment, and then like, ah, this is all right, and when you think about it, it makes sense, right, it writes like based off of the average of the like general knowledge of the internet, and the average of the internet is pretty terrible, right, like that's the data that it's trained on.

Speaker 2: 2:20

So when you take it a step further and like what we advocate for and like I'm obsessed with, is like what happens when you give the AI like source material?

Speaker 2: 2:28

So it's like this walled garden that it has to write from. And then also what happens when you basically give it like a brand voice, an AI brand voice or a persona, um, and then combine those two things together, like we see some really interesting outputs happen because there's all this vocabulary that's in that source material. There's, like this brand voice that you've defined how I want the AI to sound, and like that's when we see the magic happening with it. So I'm more obsessed with like can I take a team of five people and turn them, you know, into like the? Basically like it's like a 50 person staff, right, but we are seeing companies where they're like like it's like a 50 person staff, right, but we are seeing companies where they're like yeah, I needed 10 people before and now I just like need the one that was actually doing majority of the work in the first place. So two different ways to look at it.

Speaker 1: 3:12

But yeah, so I'm hearing two things speed, which is a theme through this whole entire season, as we are focused 100% on AI, technologies and marketing, and then two, the averages of knowledge on the internet, which brings me back to copywriting 101, right to the level of your audience, right. And then and it was basically like they use I think it's called hemingwaycom where it's like you got to put it in there and make sure it's not higher You're not writing higher than the fifth grade reading level, totally. So if everybody's been writing at the fifth grade reading level, that means the intelligence of the internet and the quality of writing is at the fifth grade level on average. So if we're asking fifth graders to write, basically because AI is only as good as the content, you forgive it, right, it's a.

Speaker 1: 4:12

Somebody said something about chat GPT, right? The T in in chat GPT is actually for like transfer, transform, transformer, transformer. There you go, thank you. And so we're basically asking a robot to transform fifth grade level on average content into stuff that we would think was better than that Totally, which makes absolutely no sense, right?

Speaker 1: 4:38

Yeah so how are you overcoming that with? Well, let's, let's back up real quick. You have two, two AI content marketing platforms there. Which one is like or both. I don't know for sure which one is like, best for like the small business, small to medium sized business, or either.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:59

So I think for small to medium sized business, like what we're seeing, the larger trends that are happening right now that are affecting their business, like their companies, is two things. So first is that majority of people are starting searches on social rather than going to Google, and that there's kind of this degradation in the trust that exists on Google as a platform for finding a service provider. So a great example of this is if you look at the data around Gen Z in particular, and even like younger millennials, like where are they starting their searches for? You know local restaurants or HVAC company, like we're starting to see these crazy. You know kind of searches occur and it's happening on like Instagram, reels and TikTok and these places where it's typically a creator. That's like giving you know, like basically creating this content and it makes sense when you kind of break it down Like traditionally, like I would go and I would search on Google and I get this like no name, no face, blog.

Speaker 2: 5:57

That's suggesting that company A is the right reason, like you know the right place. I know you know over time that all of the search results that are on page one, especially if it's a high ticket item, are probably an, an affiliate marketer that's trying to sell me this product because it's some type of lead gen and so there's no repercussions if I have a bad experience or a poor service. This is a big deal, in particular, like in the restaurant space or anything that's local. Where would you go? Traditionally, I'd go search Google Maps. Majority of people don't trust any of the reviews anymore. But, in contrast, when you look at that to like social now, like what happens is when you search on social you you know stephanie comes up and she's telling you that these five restaurants in your specific neighborhood are some of the best restaurants to go to. If you go and visit those restaurants and they're terrible, there's suddenly, suddenly social repercussions for her specific trust as an influencer and so because of that, she can't give poor information or just sell you information. It has to provide some type of value, and so we're kind of seeing that larger trend and this is flowing over into B2B as well. The majority of purchasing decisions are starting now.

Speaker 2: 7:11

I read this statistic. It was in the Harvard Business Review. I found it insane that majority of buyers in B2B are starting to feel like they know more than the salesperson when they're having a conversation about the product that they're like looking to buy because they can do so much research around it, right? So when you think about that, it's like, okay, where are they? You know they're looking to social, they're looking for these channels for to get educated on these different options, and it's that same process Like they're, they're this, and this is a larger trend that we're seeing.

Speaker 2: 7:40

So I think when I think about you know it's a small business or a medium sized business, like what they're doing, like my focus is more and more saying, hey, like, how do you do some type of pillar content that you create on a weekly basis? It may just be like you interview your staff or you like talk to like a you know somebody that you're in relationship with video, it film it in this form and then that turns into blog posts, linkedin posts, um, you know clips for your social, the whole gambit of all these different types of media. And it's not this huge, you know, like traditionally it was this huge lift, but now we have these AI tools like layered over the top of it. You can basically sit down for an hour, record this and, within 30 minutes after that recording, have all the content you need for the week and that's like really the opportunity and the power that exists right now. So, anyway, yeah, swell probably fits more into that category.

Speaker 2: 8:34

In all reality, like Draft Horse, which was this company we made that did like bulk SEO article writing. It was writing from the general knowledge of the LLM, so of the AI, and what we see is that like, again, like, because it's writing from the general knowledge, it's very average the outputs that it creates. Now, if you take that same idea of like all right, I'm going to write this AI-generated article, but to give it a concrete example, say I'm trying to write something about best guitars for beginners, I go and I just have the AI write from its general knowledge. In contrast, if I go and I interview five of the top YouTubers that teach guitar on the internet and I have a 30-minute conversation with them about best guitars for beginners.

Speaker 2: 9:19

I take those transcripts, I put that into the initial source text and then I tell the AI okay, now write an article based off of the source text. The output quality you're going to see is at a caliber that's like bar none. And when we break down that idea, this isn't anything new. This has been going on for hundreds of years. If you look at how books are written, it's the same idea, right? What do journalists do? They go and they interview 300 people, they catalog those transcripts, they pull out the core ideas, they build like a book outline and then they go and they write a book. I think for most people, when they think about like, how these tools have been used so far is at this very like, almost like a toy level where it's like, oh, it can like, just, you know, one shot a book.

Speaker 2: 10:04

In reality, that's not what anybody does in the real world. So why are we doing that? Let's use these tools to mimic the processes and the workflows that we already have, rather than just like having it try to do this entire thing for us. I think that's like the aha moment for a lot of business owners. That we see is when they get to that place where they're like oh, you're telling me that I resist. Just taking the processes I'm doing currently and automating or augmenting my team. It's a no brainer, right. It's a cost cutting function like to your business, but simultaneously it makes you more efficient. So your team of five is now functioning like a team of 50, right? And so you see this in the real estate space in particular, like, really like taking off, because it's a lot of paperwork that's happening.

Speaker 1: 10:45

Suddenly oh yeah, synthesizing data, yeah, it's all data.

Speaker 2: 10:48

So sales, it is a huge deal right, because it's like high human touch thing. But if I can automate all the backend, like all of the, you know everything that's happening on the backend for that sales individual so they can focus on that thing that only they can do. I'm just going to create a more efficient company which allows for growth and, you know, just basically increase in bottom line.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Yeah, I definitely see the power of leverage, right, the leverage of time, and time is an indispensable commodity that we, as business owners and entrepreneurs. We actually will waste more time to try to save money though we can always make more money, but we can never make more time. So it's a very interesting dichotomy that we catch ourselves in, especially in the startup years. Right, the first three years, we'll trade a full night's sleep for just a couple extra hours of doing it myself, right, type of thing. And then, as we get more mature, and I think that you hit on the precipice of the new generations coming up, who have only used the internet, only known the internet as the source right, when I grew up, it was the encyclopedia, the internet hadn't been invented yet, right. And so there's this huge shift, and I think there's going to be a huge divide between the Gen X and the rest of the baby boom generations that are still using computers right now, and then the millennial and newer generations, and I think there's going to be a gap right there, because guys like me, we still trust Google. We just know what not to click on. We're just kind of road-wise, if you will, right, like street smart when it comes to Google, we're like, nope, that's clickbait, nope, that's an affiliate link. Now if it says the top 10, I know that's an affiliate, it's boom, and I might end up now I mean you can get 30, um on the top page, right.

Speaker 1: 12:45

But you know, sometimes you got to get all the way down there and find that stuff where I think that the impatience of a younger generation is actually playing into the hands of ai. Ai, ai can help them get there faster, right where I. But there's people who still don't even know. I have a nephew's, 24 years old. I said, hey, have you asked chat GPT about like your career path and what you should? You know, maybe like put in some of your interests and see what they come back with as far as some career options. He's like what's chat GPT 100?

Speaker 2: 13:17

I mean I was 24 years old, I'm like how do you? Not know totally. I mean, yeah, you know I live in this bubble right and I go to a holiday and I talk to my you know redneck uncle that you know he runs a great business but like this is not on his, you know his periphery like it's not on his forefront.

Speaker 2: 13:35

It's not something he's thinking about, I think. With that said, though, like how I always think about technology, is like it starts out in these pockets and then, if it's like a base level technology change, it seeps into everything. Right, and like level technology change, it seeps into everything. We see that with the internet, we see that with social media, we see that with mobile devices. Initially it was just the small subset and then suddenly it takes over the entire market. I think for the majority of people, their first interaction is going to be like one day you wake up and Google has SGE built into it, which is their version of Chat, gpt, right. It's basically going to aggregate this information and like bubble that up to you on the front page Like this like they just, they just launched Gemini, which is exactly that.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Totally and like huge context windows, right, we're like a million tokens like just to give people context of that, Like. That's like imagine a couple novels like in that context window and then you could write a new novel based off of those three novels or those three textbooks, and the quality is not there for all these large, huge token models.

Speaker 2: 14:38

We don't have to go too deep into all of this piece, but I think for a majority of people, the thing to remember with this is this is super early. You're seeing companies that are adopting it, even just for small percentages of their business. Like the thing to remember with this is like this is super early. Like you're seeing companies that are adopting it, even just for small percentages of their business, like start to outperform their competitors with less resources. So, like you know, if you can automate away 20% of your business with one of these tools, like think about the impact that that creates. And that is the bigger thing. That like how do you you know, I always use that analogy Like you're not, you know you're eating an elephant.

Speaker 2: 15:09

You're trying to like automate as much as you can away. But in reality, like if you just do like 2% or 5% or like go and ask your employees what do you hate doing? And they're going to tell you like if they're actually like you know you have trust built with them and they're honest with you and they're to say I hate doing X, y and Z, cool, what of that can we automate away from them? And like suddenly you've made a more efficient business and simultaneously you have employees that are more comfortable, which is like I mean. Turnover is what everybody's fighting right, it's like the average, I think, time span that a person's at a company now is like 18 months. So if you can make their jobs and lives better, like that's how you get stickiness.

Speaker 1: 15:48

Right, yeah, no, I, I totally agree with that. And like, having that X Y Z of you know what your employees hate cause that you know the, the, the stuff that they hate to do is the stuff they're going to put off the most. And some of that stuff's going to be crucial because data, right, like it's usually data driven and that's what AI is the best at. So if you can automate data processing, data synthesis, uh, synthesization, any of that stuff, that's exactly what AI was created to do. That's the element. You know the language, right, that's totally what it's meant. Right, then you have the generative AI. That's just down the road, yeah, just around the corner. If it's not knocking at my front door right now, you know that's gonna blow away this. What we understand is ai right now, like I, I don't. I don't even know that.

Speaker 1: 16:39

I understand the impact that is going to have, because there people are already. You know the people who've been following this for the last 15 years, because AI didn't just happen, like it wasn't like Elon and the guys at OpenAI just decided you know, we should like start an AI thing. You know like what, what is this AI thing? And they just like, in 18 months created it right, and it's been decades in the coming right and where what I'm just just as what I understand in generative AI is going to be like.

Speaker 1: 17:11

So impact it's going to have the same impact as the creation of language among humans. That's how impact, that's how big of a shift it's going to have on the human race and the world around us. And so when we see statistics like only 8% of all small businesses or businesses period in the United States have adopted any form of AI into their processes, the regular processes, and 80% want to, that's a huge gap and they're talking about technically. What we're using now is kind of the old technology that's finally becoming affordable to the layman Totally Right. And now we got this next behemoth coming around the corner. I don't know how that's going to look. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 17:59

Yeah, I think, a bunch of stuff to unpack there. The first thing I want to say is that it's insane to's insane to see the like basic hunger for this within all these companies. So my friend runs an automation agency and I mean he has more work than he could ever want. He's like how do I scale this up, like specifically from an employee side and make like these repeatable processes to implement this? But their whole strategy is this they're like airdrop into a company, they look at their current like workflows and then they automate as much away as they can with like simple tools like Airtable, zapier and ChatGPT, right, and what they can find is like again, they can get rid of 50% of what this company was like paying people to do from a time like just like the amount of time that they that was taking, so they can cut these costs there. So I think that's a piece on the larger side of like where this is all going. I mean every day a new like. I mean it's happening so quickly that I I I'm in the forefront of it. I feel like like we own a company in this space but we still like I'm there's people that are so much deeper in all of these things. I think that, um, like, for me, how I think about it is, I'm going to let my joke is, I'm going to let the engineers go out and do mushrooms in the woods and then, once they come back with all the insights, that's what we're going to basically take, once it's corporate ready. If you try going out and following everything that's happening, there's just so many different threads that are all simultaneously occurring. It's happening. There's just so many different threads that are all simultaneously like occurring. The uh, the bigger thing that I think is something to remember is the pace that that this can move at is like, while it's very flat fast, it's not as fast as people think.

Speaker 2: 19:38

Like you know, there's this conversation about, like the singularity and like the ability for this, like you know, robot to think or whatever we want to thought is like, call it, like this, like brain, like in reality, like we don't even have enough energy on the face of the planet and like enough compute to mimic a human brain at this point, based off of the efficiency that, like we're the levels that we're currently at, so we couldn't even, we couldn't even like create a neuron structure. So, like, when we think about these large language models like how it's really like working. Is you like, basically, are mimicking a portion of like a brain, this digital brain, and it's just these neurons that you can like train to fire against each other and then, from that, like you basically train it to do a specific task right? So, like large language models, while it may feel human at times, like all it's doing is just like mimicry, it's not actually like a nervous system of a human right. So I think, with you know, just to scale that back and down, like there's like things we can do now and there's all these things that we get like are potentially going to happen in the future.

Speaker 2: 20:40

And I mean, from my understanding, like we have friends that work at like open AI and like they have these models that they haven't even released yet, like specifically, like on the video generation side and also on the voice like generation side. Like to the point where it's like, if you have enough audio content of me, like that the inflections are understood, the vocabulary that I use is understood, like all of these things Right, and so they like are scared of releasing this from my understanding, but what we're seeing happen is that like simultaneously, you have these closed companies that are doing this, while you have these like open source companies that are also doing this in parallel. So it feels like it's going to be like all the access to these things is going to be democratized over time. This is only is almost going to be like a base level compute and my big thing for any company out there is as important as Excel is to your business to run your business. That is going to be how important any of these technologies these AI technologies that are starting to seep into business culture.

Speaker 2: 21:40

So I think understanding that and having that perspective is going to make us less nervous with the adoption of this. All right, like it used to be, I'm using ledgers and you know, an abacus for doing my math right for my, my company, and now it's like we have the. And what's crazy to me is there's like still people like I've consulted companies where it's like they don't even use Excel. Right, it's like it's paper and pen. But all of that, I think, over time, is going to evolve. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers the question specifically, but just kind of the things we're seeing on the forefront.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Awesome, so last bit here, when we're talking about we're going to bring this all the way full circle. When we talk about content creation, give me the one thing that we as small business owners because we talked about it here a couple times, or you mentioned a couple times in that you know you can look like a content juggernaut, as just a small, you know two, three person, but is it the quality that's more important or the quantity that it's more important? When we're talking about utilizing AI for our content creation?

Speaker 2: 22:54

Yes to both of those. So I think the like, the bigger problem that I see most companies like run into is they don't do things long enough. So, like, do something that you can do for like two years. Like if you can't do it for two years it's not going to make business impact, like on the content marketing side. So I think that's like the first you know way to frame this and kind of your North star when you're thinking about making any of these decisions. Like if you're going to just run, you know, facebook ads for 15 days or 30 days, it's going to make no impact to your business but, in contrast, if you do that for a longer period, you're going to build.

Speaker 2: 23:31

I describe it as digital gravity. We're trying to build digital mass on the internet with content. The more digital mass we have, the more digital gravity we have. The more digital gravity we have, the more influence we have within our niche or within our sphere, and that creates more inbound for us. Because, as you know, imagine a comet flying by and you're just a spec like it's not going to get pulled into the gravity of that object, but when you're a larger body like you get these you know flybys like to get pulled into your gravity and then that turns into like a touchdown over time which is, you know, revenue generating, like they do, a purchasing decision. So I think that that's the North Star.

Speaker 2: 24:05

When we look at just the data that we're seeing versus quality, versus quantity, all of these platforms are starting to reward creators that are posting on a daily basis, so you have to have volume is basically what it comes down to. The biggest thing. On the quality piece, that I always tell people and I've done early stage growth consulting for software companies for years and I think the process is always the same Just start doing the thing and then look at the data and what's performing best, and then let's just do more of what's performing best and less of what isn't. So, to give that a concrete example, you start a podcast and like I'm doing this right now for a company where it's like they are targeting interior designers, right, and so they're interviewing interior designers we chop that up into clips. Those clips get put on social. We turn that into blog posts, we turn that into a newsletter, we turn that into all of these Twitter threads et cetera, and then we schedule that out across all the platforms. We let those go for like a week.

Speaker 2: 25:09

We look at the previous data and we say, okay, out of all the content that we published X, y and Z, these three pieces of content out of the 20 perform better than all of the other ones. Okay, so what do they have in common? Why do they perform better than all of the other ones? Okay, so why? What do they have in common? Why, why? Why do they perform better? And so then that creates this you know knowledge loop. That happens where it's like oh well, things like this do better. So let's initiate conversations off of our source material Like let's have, let's steer the conversation in that direction to make more of that occur.

Speaker 2: 25:40

And this is like what any good growth model looks like for a company is like I'm doing activities, like campaigns, and then I look at the data and then that influences my learning. And then I'd go back and I improve on that campaign. And this isn't a new idea, but I think when people think about content, they get so hung up on like what should I do? What should I talk about? And in reality, like your audience is going to tell you what they're most receptive to.

Speaker 2: 26:08

So again, say you're like you know your target customer is a local business.

Speaker 2: 26:13

You know, say, you're an HVAC company and you're like trying to sell to.

Speaker 2: 26:16

You know your area in Denver, colorado, like if you just do educational content about like home improvement stuff, and you'll see the type of content that's most likely like to be engaged with and getting the most reach for you, and then that influences the next content that you do and, again, that's just like creates more of this inbound.

Speaker 2: 26:35

So I I don't know if it's like quality is important, but I think it's way more important to get the amount of reps that you need. Like, and just to say it in a different way, if you're playing baseball and you have a batting average of 300, if you only get an at-bat or two at-bats, there's a strong likelihood you won't even get on base, and so, in contrast, the more reps, the more amount of at-bats that you have and this is applying this idea to content the more likely it is you start to understand what your audience like once, and then that helps you make better content in the future. But often what we see is like people will have a viral moment and they won't obsess over why did that happen, or they'll just kind of be like, oh well, why is this different?

Speaker 2: 27:21

Or they don't adjust or change what they're creating the source files to get that output to happen in that viral thing to happen in the future. So, and again, all these social channels they're rewarding companies that are posting on a daily basis. Why so? Why are they rewarding these? Because they're trying to get people to be on platform for as long as possible and have as much attention much of their attention as possible, because they can sell them more ad space. So basically, when you post regularly, that is content that the audience interacts with and it gets impressions, it gets engagements, et cetera, you're fueling that company's revenue, that social media company's to have more revenue, right, and so it's a symbiotic relationship there. You get reach, your business grows, they get more time on site, time on page, and their business grows. So that's kind of the breakdown of how this all works and how we're seeing companies be successful with it.