Podcast With Ashley Gross

How Can AI Transform Your Business Strategy in 2025 with Ashley Gross

Show Notes

Discover how AI can revolutionize your business strategy in 2025! 🌟 In this insightful episode of the Agency Insider Show, Navneet Kaushal sits down with Ashley Gross, a trailblazer in AI implementation and founder of the AI Workforce Alliance, to explore the transformative power of artificial intelligence in reshaping business outcomes.

Curious about how AI can streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and skyrocket your ROI? Wondering if your business is ready to integrate AI or how to align it with your overall strategy? Ashley shares actionable strategies, real-world case studies, and expert tips on harnessing AI tools, agents, and automation to drive growth, improve employee satisfaction, and achieve measurable results. From personalizing customer interactions to optimizing marketing and sales operations, this episode is packed with practical advice you can implement today.

📌 Key questions answered:

• How can AI align with your business goals to drive ROI?
• What are the most effective AI tools for marketing and sales in 2025?
• Will AI replace jobs or enhance the workforce experience?
• How can agencies leverage AI to streamline client processes and enhance efficiency?
• What’s the role of AI agents in revolutionizing everyday business tasks?

Whether you're a seasoned marketer, a digital agency owner, or a business leader looking to stay ahead in the AI-driven era, this episode provides the knowledge and confidence to navigate the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence.

Ready to future-proof your business and make AI work for you? Watch now and transform your strategy for 2025 and beyond!

Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more expert insights and strategies to stay ahead in the competitive agency world. 🚀

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

02:47 - How to Implement AI Strategically?

05:16 - Does AI Replace Humans?

07:30 - Which Areas of Business Benefit Most from AI?

09:10 - AI Implementation for Marketing Agencies

11:45 - What are AI Agents?

14:00 - Understanding AI as a Service

15:51 - 10-Day AI Business Building Framework

18:43 - Must-Have Tools for Starting a Business

22:37 - How to Personalize AI for Your Business?

25:55 - Challenges in Training AI for Brand Identity

27:45 - Successful AI Implementation and Brand Voice

29:08 - Keeping Pace with New AI Developments

31:37 - How to Avoid Saturation in AI Market?

33:18 - Unique Strategies for Positioning in the AI Domain

35:07 - Will People Get Left Behind Without AI?

36:38 - How Can SEO Agencies Leverage AI?

39:53 - Aligning AI with Business Outcomes

41:00 - Future of AI in Marketing and Business

42:21 - Responsible Use of AI

43:39 - Major Breakthroughs in AI

45:18 - Rapid Fire Questions

46:14 - Final Piece of Advice

46:55 - Outro

Transcript

Introduction

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider show I your host navnit kosel and today we have a very special guest joining us she's

0:07 pionering in AI implementation founder of AI workforce alliance and a thought leader in the world of artificial

0:15 [Music] [Applause]

0:21 [Music] intelligence please welcome ashle GR

0:29 ashle great to have you on the show thank you for having me I'm happy to be here yeah before we dive into our main

0:36 topic could you give our listeners a c introduction about yourself and your journey into the world of AI sure I've

0:42 been a marketer for 10 years I discovered AI specifically Jasper AI back in 2020 that was the year I found

0:49 out I was going to be a mom so I had a refreshed perspective on how I was spending my time and I just wanted to be

0:55 more intentional and ultimately I started using AI because I was a marketer we have so many Tools in our

1:01 TCH stack but none of them really make us more efficient or productive and I wanted to tackle the goal of condensing

1:10 my work week from 40 hours to 15 but maintaining the exact same output I was able to do that I talked incessantly

1:18 about all the ways I was doing that as a marketer and in 2022 pre- chat GPT the

1:24 Enterprise that I worked for had me roll out AI to the marketing org and sales org so uh combin bined both Apartments

1:31 were almost or a little bit over 300 people so we didn't really know what the

1:37 large scale AI Roi looked like but I took the same approach that I did with myself and cemented that to both

1:44 organizations and three months into implementing use cases within both marketing and sales we overachieved our

1:50 pipeline which was 90 million and we hit 115 so that was the first time I was able to say okay Ashley as an individual

1:57 user can do all these things with AI but it's scale AI within a business actually

2:02 does translate to more revenue and so after that I didn't look back I started

2:07 my own agency and now I get to work with Enterprises and help them align their businesses and ultimately get better

2:14 work output and the employees get more job satisfaction because they're automating a lot of that busy work so

2:19 they can focus on the strategy and what actually brings them joy and I'm really excited and grateful to be here and I

2:25 can't imagine anything else that I would rather do oh well I I I believe I myself

2:31 love doing things stuff with AI but I always keep on demanding AI is um it's a

2:37 slave for you so you gotta work accordingly you can't just think AI is going to overtake you you're going to

2:42 make it work for you right yes yes so so uh uh let's talk about implementing a uh

How to Implement AI Strategically?

2:50 uh AI strategically uh you have worked with various companies of course to integrate AI into their operations so

2:57 what's your typical approach to ensure AI implementations align with uh

3:02 company's overall strategy sure I think a big part of my strategy is honestly AI

3:07 is not for every company right now you know if you think about a lot of organizations out there maybe they don't

3:12 have the processes written down somewhere and maybe they don't have their organization watered through

3:20 enough that all of the silos are broken down and they have an operational business and I say that that's important

3:26 to know because AI isn't for everyone and it enhan and so if your organization has silos and there's issues and you

3:33 don't really know what's working or not working AI is only going to amplify all that chaos and so my Approach is to one

3:40 make sure that the organizations I work with are actually ready for AI that means that the way that they have their

3:46 org chart structured actually makes sense for the business not the overall

3:51 department and I think the caveat to that also is that not only is leadership

3:58 on board but they're putting resources time allocating kpis and okrs that align

4:05 with AI implementation because if you just hire me to come in and I talk about how great AI is nothing's gonna get done

4:10 it doesn't matter um and also in the same note it doesn't matter how many times your leaders at your organization

4:17 are talking about AI are they using AI do they have a newsletter or a slack or a teams Channel or they're talking about

4:22 what they're doing are they you know paying for their teams to go get training and educated on this so I think

4:29 for for me it's kind of a threefold as to the strategy and how it sticks it's

4:35 one auditing that organization seeing if they're even ready for it and if they are saying here is a road map for how

4:41 we're going to implement AI with executive check-ins along the way with mini goals along the way with

4:48 quantitative and qualitative results along the way um but then also making sure that they're going to Pro provide

4:54 the resources and the education in the time and maintain that consistency and

4:59 tone with what they're telling the rest of the organization and that they themselves are willing to have tough conversations

5:07 and aign on what the biggest business problem is that they need to tackle because that's ultimately where we want to start implementing AI to be

5:14 strategic right so most of the time AI implementation I mean p it's perceived

Does AI Replace Humans?

5:20 that it's going to mean you're going to cut down on the number of Workforce so does that happen with you a lot or no

5:27 not at all not at all if you think about it I think this is a a big lapse in education in the space right now is that

5:34 AI can replace humans well how does AI learn AI has to have something to learn from and learn how to do things it needs

5:42 a process so when you even train you know just an AI agent for example you

5:48 physically have to have your workflow documented to to accomplish one task what are the apps that you use how do

5:54 you look at things how do you perform your research we need a human in order to train that agent and then then right

6:01 back in the same conversation in tone I guess you could say is we also need a human to be checking on the agent

6:07 because it doesn't matter if that initial training is great if you change one naming mechanism one tool is swapped

6:14 out of your Tech stack everything else changes that whole entire workflow changes so no it's not replacing humans

6:20 if anything it's actually making the humans more happy because they don't spend all day long Fielding questions we

6:27 see this at every single organization specially Enterprises there's a couple folks that have huge seniorities right

6:33 they've been with the company for 9 to 10 years what do we do with those employees do we reward them do they get bonuses do they get promotions do we

6:40 give them a special Spotlight in our All Hands calls no what happens instead all

6:46 the new employees and all the employees that have any question go to those senior employees and ask them questions

6:51 so now the senior employees are stuck Fielding this questions 247 all day long and don't have time to do their own jobs

6:58 so if anything it just makes the culture better and we redirect individual

7:05 employees to be more self-sufficient and independent but also we automate the

7:10 things that are making them not be efficient so that they can kind of lift their heads up and say like hey we know

7:16 you have a million questions you don't actually need to do a million things why don't you do one thing really really well that you like and let's try to

7:23 figure out how we can automate the other things that you need to do that might be low risk but higher Roi right

Which Areas of Business Benefit Most from AI?

7:30 okay and now how when you when a business calls you for an AI automation or AI integration into their process how

7:36 do you go about determining which area of business can benefit most from uh AI

7:42 implementation I really like to implement AI Solutions within marketing organizations because I don't have to

7:49 change their mentality marketers by Nature are half creative and half science-based they like to experiment

7:57 and they like to be creative but they also understand that there's formulas and algorithms and once they find

8:03 something that works they should stick with it so I think that from a cultural perspective it's easier to implement AI

8:09 within marketing organizations I don't mind implementing it into the sales organizations but I find that if you

8:17 implement AI into a marketing organization my first step is always to audit their Tex stack which my goal in

8:24 doing that is to get them to realize are you optimizing the tools you already have do you know the tools that you

8:30 already have and are the tools doing what you need them to do so that's

8:35 really the goal I'm trying to get with marketing but there's so many other goals that come out of that conversation

8:40 that are beneficial to everyone else such as um are the processes and the things that you're doing actually moving

8:46 the needle are the informational pieces that you're getting from product actually digestible so that when the

8:52 time you by the time product hands them off to marketing you can actually go do something with them so it identifies

8:58 bottlenecks and bigger processes just by going into marketing and saying like let's look at your Tech stack and see

9:03 what it's doing because then all these other conversations kind of like mind map around it right so so of course have

AI Implementation for Marketing Agencies

9:10 you done any AI implementation for digital marketing agencies a ton

9:16 absolutely okay because that's where we are jumping in of course this is an agency inside of podcast so so how do

9:22 you go about and can you share some uh uh case study or some use case what you have done for agency specifically you

9:29 know you're marketing to a bunch of companies and so if you think about the busy work that could be automated with

9:35 that it's having a unified campaign brief so that it's one campaign brief that you're sending out to a bunch of

9:40 different companies asking the same requirements before you can give them a budget and a timeline right which is

9:48 what you need ultimately for an accurate proposal and it eliminates the back and forth so from the moment that a company

9:53 reaches out to your agency and says like we need XYZ you send them this campaign brief and you say okay until you fill

9:59 this out fully we cannot populate you anything they f it out they fill it out fully this triggers an automation to

10:06 create a project board in ass sauna assign the folks that are in charge of PID ad's creative SEO to go in there and

10:15 say like okay yes we have bandwidth this proposal looks great we can do these timelines within 24 hours that proposal is automated back to that company

10:22 without anyone having to lift a finger by the way and maintaining the communication so that it doesn't create

10:28 silos because your team already is inundated with things and they need to know from top down what the priorities

10:35 are so if you centralize just a campaign brief and a proposal coming into a sauna

10:40 having your leaders sign off on what those timelines and budgets look like and then bringing that back to the

10:46 company that's like 10 conversations in one without the calls without the emails

10:52 um and then add on top of that especially if you're using a sauna they already have ai capabilities where you

10:57 can have ruling conventions built in so as soon as maybe on your activation map

11:03 as soon as you get a campaign brief filled out maybe that first team that looks at it is your creative team well

11:09 internally if you have these AI capabilities built into a sauna and you turn them on and you're optimizing them

11:15 as soon as creative looks at it they can click a button and then it goes to SEO or then it goes to paid ads and so now

11:22 not only are you automating the communication and aligning people over and over and over again on a daily basis

11:29 but you're also continuing to activate a campaign without one person having to go

11:34 run and field you know hey did you have this did you have that where's this asset it's doing it all on its own right

11:43 that's just one example no now we've been hearing 2025 is going to be a year

What are AI Agents?

11:49 of AI agents and uh all that so how does have you been going I mean AI agents

11:56 have you implemented AI agents in digital marketing agencies as well yes I'm a big fan of AI agents only

12:02 because I look at technical debt a lot and there's already so many tools right

12:08 generative AI tools are so fun they're great I love them I think there's a time and place for all these tools but if you

12:13 look at the technical debt of just a marketers Tech stack in general there's a lot that you're not using and

12:19 optimizing in that Tech stack that not a lot of people know like that you you're paying for it right maybe you're on a

12:25 legacy plan and you're paying for it and you don't know you're paying for it right and so I'm a big supporter of

12:30 Agents because I think that if you can take one AI agent and build and connect multiple behaviors that for instance I

12:39 love cantly don't get me wrong but if you build an AI agent for instance where you send me a general interest form you

12:46 fill out my form based on backend variables saying okay he was interested in this conversation he wants me to

12:52 speak on this date at this time then it will populate my calendar schedule and it will say Ashley's available for these

12:58 two times so now I'm having my agent reach out to you to book a time that we have in

13:04 common send you my availability you don't get my full calendar availability you get the first two dates of my

13:09 availability maybe you say no the AI agent says that's fine here's her next two availabilities you book it there's a

13:16 notetaker the notetaker sends you an email after that call and then the following call that we have the week

13:22 later my AI agent is sending you a one hour before the call reminder hey here's everything you talked to Ashley about

13:28 during the last call here's the agenda for this call I didn't have to do that that was one AI agent that replaced

13:34 essentially cly emailing transcribing recording and summarizing that's five

13:40 tools for one AI agent and the maintenance is going to be a lot less

13:47 because AI as a service is something that a lot of people aren't even approaching as a conversation yet but

13:52 maintaining one AI agent with those behaviors is a lot easier than maintaining five apps and paying for

13:58 five applications to do separate things and they don't talk to each other right you mentioned AI as a Services what

Understanding AI as a Service

14:05 exactly for our listeners I mean you said a lot of people are not talking about it so let's talk about it what

14:10 exactly is AIS a Services means so you're going to start building and having people build and deploy AI agents

14:17 for your company let's just let's create a scenario real quick for the listeners so I come into your organization and I

14:24 build you an AI agent that scans your whole entire Google Drive and treats

14:30 your Google drive as a knowledge base and so that any Prospect visiting your

14:35 website at any point in time can chat with this AI agent and ask any questions right like do they cover this in their

14:41 offerings what would the pricing be for this and let's just say you have a new

14:46 employee and they move that knowledge base from your Google drive into a different Google Drive and they don't tell anyone because that's like not

14:52 really a high tax security you know protocol you wouldn't think you're doing anything wrong that AI agent now doesn't

14:59 know where to go because it moved its knowledge base so it stops working so somebody needs to maintain that agent so

15:06 that before it stops working or before it hallucinates and tells your prospects crazy things and flies off the

15:13 handles you need somebody maintaining that AI agent that says hey I see on the

15:18 screen that this AI agent's confused did anybody move XYZ before it ever starts

15:24 to hallucinate or have an issue and by the way you have to catch it in a very specific amount of time before it

15:29 hallucinates and you have to have these mechanisms built to iterate and feedback

15:34 loops so that whoever is building these agents if they're doing it correctly has like a red light green light yellow

15:40 light system so anytime there's an issue it knows how to circulate it and get a human involved immediately depending on

15:46 the priority level that's AI as a service in a nutshell okay now uh I mean

10-Day AI Business Building Framework

15:53 you of course talk about uh leveraging Ai and you talked about 10 days AI business building framework which of

16:00 course is fasinating now what exactly is that and what's the first step you recommend for businesses venturing into

16:07 it sure so my 10day framework is really just taking an audit of in your past

16:12 experiences and your past roles you've done a lot of things and we probably don't give ourselves enough credit for

16:17 all of the experiences that we have because we remember what we've done in the form of titles and if you've ever

16:23 worked for a company your title might have been you know SEO specialist but in reality running paid ads SEO right

16:31 LinkedIn whatever a lot more than your title suffices and so the first day of

16:37 my 10-day framework is essentially to audit what those experiences look like and remind you of what your skill sets are but then also kind of have a nice

16:44 little intentional check-in of what are you not excited about doing and what do you not know how to do because a lot of

16:51 times having a bad business plan is why people fail at creating businesses and so really taking an audit of here are

16:58 the things I know I'm good at and can do and he are the things I might not have experience in or I might not want to do

17:04 let's go find generative AI tools or automations or build an agent that can help me do those things since I don't

17:10 have the luxury of time of stopping what I'm doing to go learn and become a specialist in these fields and build my

17:16 business so it's really just benchmarking and then filling in with AI tools automations or agents and I guess

17:23 to answer your second part my advice for anyone getting into this AI field is you don't need to start a an AI business you

17:30 can start a business using Ai and be insanely successful just because everyone else is incorporating AI into

17:37 their products and features does not mean that you should be or need to be there are way more tools right now that

17:45 have you know co-pilot and beta features built in that one their users did not

17:50 ask for we did not want them they are not helpful they are more distracting and if anything it's actually hindering

17:56 our experience so tools that we used to love all the time have these built-in features that we can't turn off now that

18:03 are actually ruining the experience so they took a perfectly good tool that their users liked and slam some AI onto

18:09 it so that it could have this sticker that says it's Ai and be a part of this moment when in reality it did way more

18:16 bad reputationally for the company than good so if you want to be an AI think

18:22 about like what it is about AI right now that you want and are excited about if you want to actually proceed with

18:27 creating a company or product and service with AI incorporated or just

18:33 maybe take your domain expertise of what you're good at and where you come from and Implement AI solutions to elevate

18:40 and enhance what was already working in there right now for someone with limited

Must-Have Tools for Starting a Business

18:45 resources what are the must have tools or strategies you will to get started I

18:50 love this question I'm so Scrappy still to this day so some of my favorite tools actually are Meo and toggle and neither

18:58 one of those are AI tools Meo specifically the workflow diagram and the flowchart is really really helpful

19:04 because when you start to learn to build automations and AI agents that's what you're doing so if you have that stored

19:11 somewhere that is already going to help you jump 10 feet ahead of everyone else

19:16 and their learning development um and then I would also say toggle because it just makes you more

19:22 intentional about how you're spending your time without creating busy work for you to to figure out how you're spending

19:27 your time so it's just this free little Chrome extension browser that you can be doing anything in any browser tab you

19:33 want you just click Start stop you can label tasks and say I hate doing this I love doing this you can add a

19:39 description and you never have to physically stop what you're doing and go somewhere else it's just a living on every single tab that you have open

19:46 that's really the first part is documenting your workflows getting intentional about where you're spending your time and then from there you know

19:53 there's lots of tools that have been around in the market for a while that are adding a gentic features zappier is

20:00 a great example of one it's not just automations they have chat Bots they have agents so if you've already been

20:06 playing around with tools within your Tech stack perhaps you don't try to find net new tools perhaps you just try to

20:12 play around with the new features and product updates within those tools zap you're being a great example because their Enterprise plan is pretty

20:19 affordable now what about recent to like relevance or make or n it and so have

20:24 you experienced these as well or what do you what is your take on these I think I'm experiencing AI fatigue at this

20:31 point in the last four years I've tested over 200 AI tools so I am am very much

20:37 cutting back I I have tested every single tool that you just named right now for me I I'm a tinkerer by Nature so

20:46 it's hard for me to not tinker and so the way that I keep myself on track is

20:52 the tools that I tinker with need to be Enterprise grade because those are what my clients need there's no sense of me playing with tools for for small

20:58 business owners or solopreneurs if the Enterprises that I'm working for would never allow them so I like to play

21:05 around with tools like blue prism like uip path like Lindy because they have S

21:12 SO2 they have the highest levels of cyber security clearance and that is what my Enterprises are looking for so I

21:18 know that all of my time spend on educating myself and learning and being consistent in practicing are worth the

21:24 investment because that's what my clients are going to need okay and and if you have to advice if somebody has to

21:29 start building AI agents do you have any advice for them start in Meo start

21:35 documenting what you're doing in Meo this often is the hardest part for people because they just instinctively

21:40 do things without realizing what they're doing or having a log of this somewhere so I would say document what you're

21:45 doing in Miro and then take that Miro board you can even use chat GPT to

21:51 assist you so at at a minimum if you wanted to do this as La Fair as possible

21:56 document it mural take a screen shot of that Miro flowchart upload it into chat GPT and say I want to build an agent

22:03 list out the trigger and all the action steps and then use that as a blueprint

22:08 open up an agent Software System and use that as your blueprint for building it

22:13 that's what I would do because at a certain point you can ideate and plan all you want but you just have to rip

22:19 the Band-Aid and start experimenting in a safe way and that's the best way to do it okay I think most of the time people

22:26 think the AI agent is a complicated thing and they don't go out and experiment so exactly agree with you the

22:32 experimenting with AI any AI tool is very very important yes now let's talk a

How to Personalize AI for Your Business?

22:39 little bit about personalizing AI for businesses uh in your experience how

22:44 important is personalization when using AI for Content creation or customer interaction well let's talk about

22:50 personalization for a second because I always like to make this joke we know what good personalization feels like

22:55 it's when you go to the coffee shop and the owner of that coffee shop remembers your order and you're like I'm never leaving and like even if you have a bad

23:02 day and you have to wait 15 minutes for coffee you're like this is my local coffee shop though like I can't you know you feel a loyalty to these these people

23:09 these companies that's what good personalization feels like but what always cracks me up and mystifies me is

23:16 we know what good personalization feels like so when we start to implement this in in content let's say for example

23:23 trying to send out 100 LinkedIn DMS and we're using automation software that claims that it's personalized

23:29 somehow that intimate coffee shop personalization that we know we like

23:34 ends up being for our customers and our clients and our prospects hey Ashley I

23:39 see you're into AI we should connect or my favorite is they'll use

23:45 these automation tools where I know it's a chat GPT API plug and they won't even

23:51 remove the quotation marks so they'll just copy and paste whatever chat PT told them to with the quotation mark

23:56 still in and so it's very important to answer your question but I think that

24:01 the way you go about it is way more important than doing it I would rather someone not send me a DM then send me a

24:08 chat GPT DM that isn't corrected and maybe that's not fair but I do feel that's a lot of how that's a lot of the

24:16 methodology that current users are are feeling is you burn the bridge you burn my trust I don't even know if you're

24:23 human maybe you're an avatar right so there's no coming back from that so I think intentional personalization is

24:29 really the key here and for me it's not writing content I've never liked using

24:35 AI to write content for me it's about the research so I love a waterfall

24:41 enrichment and what that means is whenever clients visit my website on the back end if they fit my ideal customer

24:49 Persona I immediately have an agent start pulling research on them and they don't need to to form fill a thing I am

24:57 just having this waterfall enrichment where it's okay find the company they work for find their title scrape the web

25:03 for any podcast or speaking engagements they've been a part of oh you couldn't find that okay find their LinkedIn

25:09 profile and tell me where they currently live what is a local food that's really personalized to that location where they

25:15 live so waterfall is just like if you can't find this then look for this and then look for this and then look for this so by the time I send my

25:21 personalized DM to them it's hey Ashley I see you live in Maryland have you

25:27 tried the blue crabs at the local Shack Downtown love them I feel great about that I would love to receive that

25:32 message because they did two minutes of research that they didn't even do it was an AI agent and they sent me something

25:39 as opposed to trying to fit in what they were trying to sell within 300

25:44 characters and trying to make it relatable right right right right uh

25:50 that's a very interesting use case of using an a I I'm sure it's an a agent right yes yes that is now now now going

Challenges in Training AI for Brand Identity

25:59 on uh along with this what challenges do businesses face when training AI tools to reflect their brand identity and how

26:07 do you think they can overcome these I think a lot of companies are trying to take shortcuts and just have the AI right for them AI is a good reformat but

26:14 you have to know what you want to say and how you want to say it you have to know in one sentence this is something

26:19 my adviser just continuously iterates and reminds me of on a daily basis

26:25 everyone that works for a company or owns a company you should know who you are selling to what you are selling and

26:32 why you are selling in one sentence one sentence and so I think what companies

26:37 try to do is they try to take shortcuts and try to prompt chbt for example and

26:43 say you know this is the person I want to get pitch them on XYZ and it's it's no what are you selling who are you

26:49 selling it for and why and then reformatting whatever you want to say

26:55 with those questions in mind and the audience in mind and so I think that a

27:00 lot of people don't actually really understand what a brand tone is a brand tone is not an Excel sheet where you're

27:07 saying we don't say any of these words we say these words a brand tone is what are the three pillars of communication

27:14 that you want to convey to the rest of the world how do you want them to know about your products and services and

27:21 what are some themes that you would like to integrate into your messaging and then taking that and brain dumping into

27:27 whatever LL M you want and saying reformat this for LinkedIn for me here's my brand tone and voice

27:34 template okay so so that I agree most of the company thinks that the llm would

27:40 know most of the things so right now uh also can you share an example of a

Successful AI Implementation and Brand Voice

27:46 successful implementation where AI truly match the unique tone of the

27:52 business 100% I have ai agents running a lot of my company and I have one for PR

27:59 for Partnerships for scheduling demos I mean I have them

28:05 for pretty much everything so that I can actually use my human employees um to

28:10 have conversations and be in person and speak and do all those wonderful things so so many success stories I would say

28:16 that my number one like tip and reason why it's so successful though is because

28:22 I put myself through my prospect's own shoes I think that we don't spend enough time setting up these agents for brand

28:29 voice and personalization and then we don't spend nearly enough time iterating once you build an agent you should not be Mass deploying this to everybody you

28:37 should have like three of your emails on a list getting every single email that

28:42 your agent is sending for a period of like two weeks right so that you can actually see oh as a prospect this

28:48 doesn't look good on mobile um this word is hyperlink in a different color these

28:54 little things make a big difference and not enough companies put themselves

28:59 through the view and lens of their prospects and experience the messaging and marketing through their perspective

29:06 okay now one question so what happens when I mean with the advancement of so

Keeping Pace with New AI Developments

29:11 many agents every day something I mean today uh also chg pre-launched operative so how does you change your approach or

29:18 do you incorporate these things immediately or do you wait because a is changing so fast so how do you keep Pace

29:25 with the what is there and in your implementation text right I think how I

29:31 keep track is like I said I'm spending a lot more time with agents it it's it's equally exciting but

29:39 also sad and disparaging because a lot of these AI tools are not going to exist in a year or two they're going to be

29:45 redundant a lot of them already are there's lots and lots of duplicate tools that don't do great jobs and they're

29:51 just they have one shiny feature that's nice um so I spend a lot of my time on

29:56 building agents that are sustainable longterm and reduce my technical stack

30:03 so that I'm not having a bunch of tools that I'm experimenting with my tech ST cost me under

30:10 $300 and that's pretty wild if you think about the clients that I'm working with

30:15 I'm I'm attracting and working with Enterprise clients it takes a lot to get in front of them and get messaging and

30:20 positioning right and I think that just being mindful of are my tools working

30:26 this month what do I need them to perhaps do next month that I want to experiment with can they do that yes or

30:31 no and then being able to adapt and evolve and even if I love tools like I

30:37 love HubSpot love love love HubSpot used it for years but if it stopped doing the things that I needed it to do or I

30:43 started experimenting and it didn't have those technical capabilities I would get rid of it and I would find a tool that

30:49 could do that and I think just having that mentality of like adapt or die essentially is really what it is but at

30:55 the same tone it's not hey you know open ey has a new feature I need to stop what I'm doing and go focus on that it's more

31:01 so can I do that already yeah absolutely I have an AI agent that can work for me

31:07 in my browsers right now and I can watch it do it and it's terrifying and cool and creepy so I don't necessarily need

31:13 that do I want to play around with on the weekend to see the capabilities and test them and and nerd out yeah but I

31:19 don't need it I want it I want to play with it so it kind of gets deprioritized and it loses that

31:25 oversaturated um urgency that a lot of times I think people have or

31:31 feel okay now of course the as you also mentioned AI space is becoming

31:36 increasingly crowded how can businesses avoid falling into the Trap of saturation just like I said keep your

How to Avoid Saturation in AI Market?

31:43 heads down and think about what is the your business has an overall health

31:48 gauge and I think we forget about this especially when we work for other people

31:53 but like just because your Department's doing really really well if the business isn't doing well your job's still not safe it doesn't matter how well you're

31:59 doing at your role in your department I see this happen a lot with marketing and sales marketing teams will say like oh

32:04 well we're bringing in this many leads and sales just isn't closing them and it's like but the business isn't doing

32:10 good so at the end of the day no one's job is safe so what are we doing right now like if you don't have if you don't have a job what's the conversation G to

32:16 look like when you go home we lost our job but we did really good and hit our quotas this month no so go back as a

32:23 department and and think okay what how is the business doing what can we in the marketing in the sales department do to

32:31 contribute a solution to solve the problem that the business is facing and then how do we Implement AI to help us

32:37 solve it faster better more efficient that's how you stay on track and avoid the saturation it's just noise and it's

32:45 meant to be distracting so if you're getting distracted by the next shiny thing you're never going to be able to

32:50 maintain quality output and that's ultimately as a director as a VP as a seite you are in charge and your comp

32:57 compensation is based on output so mirror that yeah because because most of

33:03 the businesses thinks let's jump on the First new tool comes out if for example

33:08 if chat G comes with new I should be the first one implementing it it's like the it's like the first person wins the race

33:14 that's not the case right no not at all all right now uh what are some unique

Unique Strategies for Positioning in the AI Domain

33:20 strategies for positioning a business as a leader in AI domain like you have done

33:27 for a business who is going to implement a I really think that it's just

33:34 about being getting quiet and showing what you're doing so many people you

33:39 know i' I've heard it so many times and I'm sure a lot of the listeners can resonate to this we go to these

33:44 conferences and we listen to these podcasts and we subscribe to these newsletters and all these leaders tell us what we can do with AI and it's like

33:51 but what are you doing with AI what are you doing with AI I want to know what

33:57 you as a leader are doing so that if I'm in an equal position or seat and I want to get the role that you have or I want

34:05 to have that experience or be in those rooms I know what you are doing with AI and I'm getting ideas on how I can use

34:12 it we can talk all day long but at at the end of the day a good leader knows when to plan and when to execute and if

34:19 you never execute you're just a planner you're a glorified planner so stop talking about what you're going to do

34:24 with AI and just start experimenting with it if you're company has a license to open AI or anthropic and that's it or

34:31 just co-pilot put your head down there might be a million things that you cannot do with these tools that you want

34:37 to do start finding what you can do with them and then start building out proof of concepts of what you can do with the

34:43 tools you already have access to to show leadership hey we are working with what

34:49 we have but here's all the things we could be doing if we had these tools they're going to be a lot more

34:55 susceptible to give you the budget and and it give you like the green light to play around with more tools if you show

35:01 them you know how to work with what you already have and optimize it okay now there's another fear where

Will People Get Left Behind Without AI?

35:08 businesses have that if I don't use AI I might get left out or I might get

35:14 obsolete so how do you think is truth when it comes to specifically the online businesses or digital marketing agencies

35:21 people themselves aren't going to get left behind their businesses will we live in a very instant gratification

35:26 culture Tik Tok all these other social media applications if I want a burger I can get on my phone right now and order

35:32 it and it'll be here in 15 minutes that's so weird and so we lose the ability to be patient and wait and a lot

35:40 of people don't even realize that like if you ask somebody hey why did you choose door Dash over GrubHub they would

35:45 probably be like oh I was already logged in it said the wait time was shorter there's no they're not thinking about

35:51 the quality of the service or how many reviews GrubHub has versus door Dash It's who can get here

35:58 faster and what is the ease of use that's where businesses are going to get left behind when it comes to not

36:04 adapting AI because the businesses that are using AI can put one message in

36:10 front of 50 different people in 50 different personalized ways and on different distribution channels whereas

36:15 if you're not using AI you probably can't do that efficiently or effectively that's where you're going to start to

36:21 feel it because if you can't be in front of your audience in the ways that are relevant to them then your competition

36:29 can okay now let's talk one uh scenario where let's say there's an SEO agency

36:35 how do you think an Su agency can pit themselves something related to AI do they need to or how they can position

How Can SEO Agencies Leverage AI?

36:42 themselves when it comes to AI or repition because you know a lot of people talk about if are you not using

36:48 AI so how do you think what is the best way to go about it SEO is like this

36:53 mythical creature where everyone knows it works and it's effective but they have no idea what the heck those people are doing right so when it comes to how

37:01 to position an SEO agency with AI I would 100% try to add to my products and

37:07 service offerings that we will build an AI agent that maintains SEO after we

37:12 leave so there's still hiring your agency to implement AI or I'm Excuse me to implement SEO and you're still going

37:19 to have the executive check-ins audit tell them hey this is what it looked like when we came in this is what it looks like one week two weeks three

37:26 weeks later but then you build build an AI agent because you're already doing the work which is the blueprint for

37:31 building an AI agent so that when you leave that company is now paying you a maintenance fee for maintaining SEO but

37:37 it's actually the agent doing it and then you're just checking on it on the background so it's almost like you as a

37:43 leader and your your best people are going in implementing this building the road maps having these conversations and

37:49 then your interns who watched you build it and know how to build it are maintaining it so that that's not high

37:55 quality work right like that wouldn't be worth your time every single day as a 9 to5 but it would be worth the time to

38:02 check in with your intern to make sure that they're still observing and learning because you wouldn't want to put them in client facing roles but you

38:08 want them to learn and that's the safest lowrisk way for them to learn and for you to continue to make money and not be

38:15 obsolete okay and will The Client not uh say to ask to pay less in this case 100%

38:22 no I don't think that they should because you're still going in there and you're still doing the work the maintenance if you think about it what

38:29 actually happens when you hire an SEO agency is you hire them for a contract they leave things break as soon as that

38:35 agency leaves things start breaking so for the client they're going to spend more money bringing you back in to fix

38:41 things that broke after you left which is no fault of your own right you just they weren't they didn't want to hire

38:46 you to maintain it because they didn't they didn't see the ROI or the use case in it so now it's more expensive to

38:51 bring your agency back to fix the things that they broke um for you it's actually more demand Landing because if they

38:58 would have just paid you to maintain it then these issues wouldn't have happened so now you're having to have the same employees go back and do the work two

39:05 times that they could have just done once and maintained it for less money and as far as like data goes it's even

39:13 more secure if you have a maintenance fee because you have a mapping of what all of this looks like all the meta tags

39:19 all of these things that are working so if at any point in time five years down the road this company wants to take an audit of day one versus day year five

39:27 performance you have all of that it's very very rare in companies that they even have that it's like a health check

39:33 they have no health check to look back on they're just like we're doing great it's like right but what were you doing what did you start at we don't know but

39:39 we're doing great what do you what if you want to get acquired people ask these questions you know if you get to a certain growth stage people want to

39:46 acquire you and they're going to ask you how are you doing what did you do and if you don't know that's a liability right

Aligning AI with Business Outcomes

39:53 right now you often mention the importance of Ali AI with clear business

39:59 outcomes so can you elaborate on how to set these goals effectively sure every

40:04 company that I've worked with has kpis or okrs take those kpis and okrs and

40:11 think about how and where I I love I'll keep going back to Meo take those kpis

40:17 and form them into a mind map so now you see the whole entire or every single department and what kpis visually each

40:24 department is in charge of now now take I don't know add sticky notes whatever

40:30 you want in Meo I like sticky notes so take the sticky notes and start sticky labeling in Meo over top of those kpis

40:36 over top of those departments where AI can strategically help that department accomplish the okr or kpi faster or

40:44 better that's how you strategically Implement Ai and you align the whole entire business and you consistently

40:50 keep it at top of Mind as far as priorities go you always tie it back to kpis and okrs because that's what

40:56 they're hearing over over and over again from leadership okay now uh let's talk a

Future of AI in Marketing and Business

41:02 little bit about the future of AI in marketing in business how do you see AI reshaping marketing strategies let's say

41:08 in the next two to five years I mean it's already reshaping strategies

41:14 because if you have the ability to get more efficient and spend money in more

41:20 strategic ways now a lot of marketing organizations are starting to be more cfol Leed and that doesn't mean that the

41:26 CFOs replacing the CMO by any means but that means that if we're looking at an org chart here's the CFO and the CMO and

41:33 the CFO are in line and they are talking they are direct um correspondents on one

41:40 line and the marketing is flowing through the finances and I think that this is going to be really really great

41:46 and I already see it paying off twofold I think um because the CFO now

41:53 understands like where money is being spent and why and how it's helping the business which is leading to way less I

42:00 would say in-house politics within organizations because there's a clear why for the revenue and there's

42:07 justification and there's alignment on why it's important and I think a lot of times marketers especially CMOS are

42:14 misunderstood a lot of times because nobody knows how much marketing does on a daily basis right okay and uh with

Responsible Use of AI

42:22 concerns around AI ethics and of course privacy how can business uh ensure uh

42:28 responsible use of AI you have to get a policy together there's still an

42:33 astonishing amount of companies that don't have a usage policy you are so naive if you don't think that your employees are using AI just because you

42:40 don't have a usage policy and you are making your job so much harder put out an anonymous report ask your employees

42:47 to fill it out and truly keep it Anonymous for trust and transparency but ask them what llm are you using what are

42:53 you putting into it can you give us an example what resources would help you use this better and then based off of

42:59 those answers and you're not going to like them but you have to suck it up based off those answers form a basic

43:04 usage policy to act as a point of reference so that there is something there and you can constantly iterate but

43:10 you've got to put out a usage policy and ideally you should really be having an Enterprise or at least a teams plan for

43:17 open AI or anthropic or co-pilot available so that way that all your employees are actually maintaining your

43:24 data and it's less of a liability for you yeah I definitely agree because it's it's just people think a $20 chat GPT is

43:31 enough while you can have a team which is much more efficient way as well and of course the data keeps is kept private

43:37 as well right exactly right right right now if you have to predict one major

Major Breakthroughs in AI

43:42 breakr in AI that will redefine Industries what would that be oh one

43:48 breakthrough I don't know if I just have one I would say the amount of low code no code tool

43:57 tools that are hitting the market right now that's going to be pretty wild because we are used to paying software

44:04 developers and an insane amount of money and not really understanding what they're doing and just trying to get

44:10 this one outcome and we think that we're not capable of doing these things ourselves and that's not a Slam against

44:15 software developers they're still going to be insanely useful in so many other places but I think that the low code no

44:21 code tools that are currently in the market and continuing to hit the market are going to be huge breakthroughs because

44:28 non-traditional tech people are going to realize they can do a lot more than they are doing and that's great because if

44:33 they can do their task and then figure out how to do the technical aspects of the other tasks around them that are a

44:39 domino effect of whatever they're doing then they're going to be able to do their work better because they understand after they do their work

44:45 here's where it goes next right after I create the copy and it goes on the landing page here's how fast the landing

44:52 page is now and here's how I can optimize that and maybe if I know that then I can change my strategy on writing

44:58 content and optimizing content images so it works both ways it's like Mass cross

45:04 training and it's only going to make the workforce better right I agree with that

45:10 I mean of course uh with Salesforce also assigning they're not going to hire any developers this year of course that's

45:16 where the world is heading right now off to my favorite part which is rapid fire

Rapid Fire Questions

45:21 question so you answer what comes first in your mind gosh so let's go so

45:26 favorite favorite AI tool you recommend oh anthropic okay that's favorite of too

45:34 the biggest misconception about AI that it's going to replace humans okay one

45:40 thing you wish one thing you wish businesses would is stop doing with AI wishing that an employee in their

45:47 organization would start using AI without any resources communication or

45:52 time okay okay and if AI were a superhero what powers would it have

45:58 flying I don't know that's the first thing that came to my mind that's okay it's rapid fire that's what it's

46:04 supposed to be all right all right Ashley it's been

46:09 an in discussion you're welcome and and before

Final Piece of Advice

46:15 we wrap up what final piece of advice would you give to our listeners who are looking to leverage AI for their

46:20 business there's so much noise out there and there's so many people using AI in so many different ways none of that is

46:26 relevant to you you are so different than anyone else and you have a special set of skills and a special set of

46:31 experiences that truly no one else has so figure out what you are good at figure out if it's what you want to

46:37 continue to be good at and do and then Implement AI for you to either do it better faster smarter that's it keep

46:45 your head down and focus on those things and don't pay attention to the noise because it's just that and avoid the

46:52 shiny objects exactly right right right uh thank you so much for sharing your

Outro

46:57 insights with us today and for our listeners who want to learn more about your work or connect with you where can

47:03 they find you online LinkedIn LinkedIn is the best place to find me okay okay

47:09 and that's a wrap up for today's episode of the agency Insider show uh big thank you to Ashley gross for her valuable

47:16 insights into AI implementation and strategies and of course what to do with AI and what not to do and remember to

47:24 subscribe to our podcast for more Insider knowledge on the latest trends in the agency World until next time this

47:29 is your host n kosel signing off thank you thank you once again Ashley thank you yeah