The Era of AI Agents in Marketing

Joel Horwitz: There's a big like product LED growth. Everyone wants to be like data dog. Everyone wants to be like sneak. Everyone wants to be like Docker. I'm like, oh yeah, we don't need salespeople. Like, we're just going to put our product out there, it's going to be great, it's going to sell itself. You know, we're just going to put all of our money and resources in a product development and we'll never have to deal with sales and marketing people ever again. Thank goodness.

Joel Horwitz: No, it's just not, it's just not real. People buy from people. I really believe that. Joel Horowitz, founder of Neoteric 3D, which stands for digital design and data. I like my coffee black. I like, usually I just like a double espresso where I go, just like me, short and sweet and sometimes a little bitter. And yeah, that's me in a nutshell.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And funny enough, I reference marketing, use cases all the time for AI. And I've got another buddy that I always say is, yeah, my friend in marketing is doing this and he's got quite a complex agentic workflow set up. You are not that friend. But you are also doing agentic workflows.

Joel Horwitz: Yes.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Far beyond having asking ChatGPT to write you a blog post, right?

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, that was basically the, you know, I think of like Jasper and even before the chat GPT, like that was the big thing was like, still is, I would argue. And most people don't want to talk about it because they're like, they don't want to admit that they're probably still doing it.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Creating content with AI and you know, because they're like, oh, it hallucinates and it's not very good. And but from what I've seen, it's gotten a heck of a lot better. Um, you know, and so now people just stop talking about it because they're like, well, there's an arbitrage opportunity where if I don't talk about it, I can keep charging what I've been charging, you know, for creating content. And no one, hopefully no one's the wiser. But what's even more exciting now that also people aren't talking about, maybe they do a little bit. I, I see a few. I just saw a blog post today by Adam Schoenfield who was talking about, yeah, like, you know, the, you know, the original kind of like AI solutions and automations were more like, they do say personalization and it was all about quantity. Like, oh, well, you can, you can generate you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands of cold emails and cold outreach.

Joel Horwitz: And, you know, even if you get 1%, it's still, you know, you know, some, some good leads that can come in and everyone just got spammed. And so that's kind of like what the, you know, what, what people, you know, view as the, as the status quo. Yet it's, it's nice. He actually had a really nice graph. I'll try to pull it up later if I can, but basically he shows, actually. And what I'm seeing is now it's more value creation, it's more like quality. Like you can create much better in my view, like much better, you know, interactions. Not just emails, but interactions.

Joel Horwitz: And I use that word because it's like, it's not just content as we talk, you know, just as you mentioned, it's across the board. And that was, that's always been the marketing, you know, play is like, how do you meet. Meet your target audience where they are with the right content or the right message.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: That that's timely and effective. And so nowadays, I think there's, I mean, within the last few weeks, I feel like it's like always getting better. I would, I would argue, I think my hypothesis is that the types of experiences you can create for people as a marketer now far outweigh what you could do manually, so to speak.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: You know, it's like analog, digital, right. It's like, sure, like you could still, you know, do things analog, but. But I think there's a, There's a tipping point. Not to sound too marketer, but there is a, There is a inflection point happening where. Yeah. Like, the. What you can do in terms of like using agentic AI far surpasses anything else that I've ever seen. It's amazing.

Joel Horwitz: It really is.

Demetrios Brinkmann: All right, well, the obvious next question is give me some concrete ways that you're doing this.

Joel Horwitz: So some concrete ways I think that people are, are leveraging this. And to be honest, it's. I know we talk about agentic AI, but this is also harkens back to the big data era as well, right. Circa 2010s, which I certainly live through. And there's a lot of similarities, a lot of the types of workbooks or workflows that I was building back then using, you know, Hadoop and products like Data Mirror.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Is synonymous. In essence. It's like clay is essentially data mirror, like 3.0, if you ask me. It really is because it still uses that same workbook you know, kind of format which everyone's familiar with. So the concrete example is we're using clay at a number of our clients to essentially create the type of workflow where when we recognize an intent signal, whether that comes from, like, someone who just started a free trial or someone who just within a. Within an account posted a new job opportunity, we can basically get a sense of that person and that account and then use agentic AI to not only craft an outreach kind of sequence, if you will, not just through email and phone calls, but, like, we can create, like, really cool memes, like, with that person's actual image.

Joel Horwitz: Right?

Joel Horwitz: We can create. Use, like, I just. I recorded a founder's voice the other day, so, like, I can use his voice now to basically have like, a personalized message from that founder to a prospect, which I know. I mean, people are gonna see this and hear this, like, oh, it's. That's so, you know, sleazy that you do that. But, you know, I mean, it's. It's. It works and it's.

Joel Horwitz: It's quite effective, you know, and so there's.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Yeah, my big question is, why is that. Or how is that agentic?

Joel Horwitz: Hmm. Yeah, I think the agentic part is where you're using, you know, what you would call, like, AI researchers or AI agents to go out and look for these signals.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Um, and it's quite impressive. Like, there's. There's a whole. There's a whole industry of. Of products out there that, you know, charge a lot to get this type of information. But if you have an agent that you've developed that actually can go out there and essentially do the type of operational research that like, an SDR would do, like a sales development rep would do. So, for example, you know, you can basically write an agent to go and Basically check their LinkedIn profile as you would, as anyone would, like, basically mirror. Like, I literally, like, one of the first things I do when I I onboard a new client is I basically sit, like, shoulder to shoulder to them and.

Joel Horwitz: And basically and map their kind of their workday, right? Like, what do you do when you get up in the morning? And they're like, well, I go, obviously check my emails. But then I go and go on LinkedIn, I'm looking at who came in, like, sign up for a trial or form or contact us, whatever. So basically, I won't take you through the whole spiel. But, you know, I sit down, I go, okay, what. What is this person doing? And then I turn around. I work with our development team. And I say, okay, how do we recreate that with an AI agent to do exactly the same thing so that we can scale them from an individual to, you know, a number of, of agents that can do that for them? I mean, that's basically what it is.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Yeah. And now I guess where I'm trying to see is like, you have someone that shows these strong signals and I really like that where, oh, there's a job posting or there's sign up for a free trial. And potentially what the best action is is having an SDR get them on the phone.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Right away. But that's easier said than done.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And so, so you want to entice them in other ways and you don't want to have that SDR have to spend 10 or 15 minutes creating a meme that may or may not get read. And so how can you create these workflows that are leveraging your creativity of going out there and getting prospects to answer, but that also are not having the workforce have that like, time, intense activity?

Joel Horwitz: I mean, I think that's what's exciting about this, at least as far as I can tell, is that it's, I think there's a lot of, like, people who might make the argument, well, if you can do this with AI agents and you don't really need, you know, a sales development rep or what have you. But that's not what I'm finding at all. Because it's not like these things are, you know, copy and paste. You know, every SDR has their own kind of flavor of how they, you know, style really of how they do things. Sorry for the background noise, I'm on campus. But they have their own, you know, style of doing these things. And so that's really what you're, what you're doing. And so, yeah, like one, when you, when you basically look at a account, and I definitely do think at the account level, right, because, you know, beyond say, like startups where the founder is likely the person that's purchasing, you know, a piece of software, right.

Joel Horwitz: When you get into larger companies, say over a hundred million in ARR, it's usually multiple people who make a buying decision, right? You have to go through multiple kind of by buyer, you know, decision making. And so I think it really is at the account level. And the reality is there just isn't enough time in the day for them to truly understand, like, what's in. What's in that account, you know, going through and reading their, you know, if they're a public company, you know, Their, their filings.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Or if they're a private company going and searching things like Crunchbase or, you know, pitchbook to see kind of like other information, like understanding their competitor. Like, there's a ton of research, right, that goes into it that I think a lot of the agentic AI stuff solves for, which is really exciting. But like you said, there's also the creative part of creating not just like a meme, but also we create entire websites for them.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: So, you know, today, like you said, like, yeah, you're depending on, you know, what the relationship is with that prospect. You know, getting them to a, you know, getting them on a call or asking them for a meeting is probably way, you know, premature.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Realistically, what you're doing is you're trying to surface and trying to educate them to understand how your product or service meets their specific needs. Because the biggest mistake that I see people make in marketing at least is, you know, assuming that there's there, it's like a blank slate. Like there's nothing there already. And oftentimes there's a lot there already. Like people have built their entire, you know, development environments or entire data, you know, environments. And so you have to find a way how you can reasonably, you know, inter integrate yourself into that. And so, you know, we built some incredible personalized websites. We've used Mutiny as a vendor for that.

Joel Horwitz: I did. There's a whole bunch of blog that was written about how we did that at a client called Single Store, which was exciting. We're, we're doing that also creating customized like LinkedIn ads for specific accounts, a specific messaging based on, on what we find. And it works. I mean, I've, it's been, it's been crazy because I've actually seen Target accounts like thumbs up and like LinkedIn ads. I've never seen that before in my, in my time where like the account itself is like giving us a thumbs up for the ad because it's so, you know, on, on topic. Right. It's so on target with like the messaging.

Joel Horwitz: So anyways, it's, it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be a marketer, I would say.

Demetrios Brinkmann: So let's run through a few more of these use cases. I think they're fascinating. I've seen folks on the marketing side who are buying Google AdWords. They will use LLMs to update the AdWords because every once in a while you get certain keywords that go stale or you have to, you have to continuously be checking your AdWords account and making Tweaks and whatnot. And so they'll use LLMs to help them optimize the spend there and just update these stale keywords. Yeah, I've also seen it for keywords with SEO and using a tool like Ahrefs or just a keyword basically.

Joel Horwitz: SEMrush and those.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Yep, exactly. SEMrush. Getting the CSV maybe for certain keywords that you're trying to rank for. And then the LLM can tell you what other keywords you might want to be ranking for and which ones you should really try to optimize for because they seem like they have the best score.

Joel Horwitz: Yep. Yeah. And then there's also negative keywords.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: I mean, you know, I generally how I've seen this work in the anal. I think the analog to digital is a really good kind of construct. The way to think about this that you know, pre post LLM like pre LLM or analog version of this is downloading, you know, the CSV file of all of your keywords for the last 30 days or 90 days, whatever the window is going through and basically, you know, marking the ones, the keywords that are, you know, that are leading to a conversion and the ones that are not leading you that are not. And so those are what are called like negative keywords.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: And so you literally manually go through and like check, make those checks and then re upload, you know, those keywords into your campaign and that's kind of how you would do it. There's also other ways like you can let like Google decide for you. Like just say actually I'm going to have Google optimize, you know, my, my keyword list. But I don't know. But yeah, I think that's a, that's a really cool use case. I expect to see that a lot more. I think what I'm hearing actually even interestingly enough like Google AdWords itself I feel like is, you know, I've been, I don't know if you ever listen to that all in podcast, but there's a lot of conversation about what that, what search looks like in the age of, of LLMs and, and chat GPT. And so now we can actually, I can see like the you know, UTM parameters coming in for a lot of my clients because I'm like a, I'm.

Joel Horwitz: I'm definitely like a pretty firm believer that you have to UTM every link ever. So you know what's going on. And so I can view a lot of the UTMs and I've been noticing more and more like the referral being OpenAI and like some of these. So I think the bigger conversation is how do you SEO for LLMs, like for open, you know, for ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you. What I'm hearing from, you know, people like that are SEO experts. I'm not an SEO expert, but people who are have told me that in general it's following kind of the similar patterns like of getting indexed by search and that sort of thing. But there's still a bit, a little bit of an unknown about how these LLMs are indexing.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Blogs and pages and that. But I definitely see like growth in terms of referral traffic coming from Chat GPT. It's kind of wild to watch that kind of like go up compared to like just Google search.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Yeah, I've heard it called answer engine optimization. So it's like a EO instead of SEO.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, yeah. I'd be curious like, you know, maybe as a follow on, if you had someone, you know that knows those things better. Cause I know you have an extensive network of people who maybe can see behind the scenes with some of these things. I'd be very curious as a marketer to know, to know that because definitely, I mean, shoot, I go, I go to Chat GPT now more than for sure, than Google search to get answers for sure. So yeah, I think that's a, that's a big kind of tectonic shift that's happening in marketing right now.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Well, and the whole conversation is around, okay, our click through rate or basically our page views are lowered, we're getting less traffic sent to us from search, but we're still getting more relevant traffic. And so even though it's less, we're getting relevant traffic because it is again that answer that will link back to you from ChatGPT or Gemini output. And it's like you're eight steps out of ten on your journey.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And you don't need to sift through all this like super top of the funnel crap. That wasn't getting you any actual paying customers. It was just getting your SEO agency a whole lot of coin.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, you, you've tapped into something that is, that's just the, that's just the so called tip of the iceberg. I mean there, there were so many, I would say circa like 2020, 2021, like the last five years. I feel like that, that whole game of top of funnel, you know, marketing has just gotten blown out. Blown out completely. Like I would be very surprised if there's a single CEO or CMO that even like, you know, we used to call it vanity metrics and somehow it got like lost in the shuffle that it's still vanity metrics. And, you know, and what would happen is, is not only would you get, I, I hate to say junk traffic, but you would. I mean, you even get bots and things, right, that would come in and people would pat themselves on the back, but even more so you. They then say, well, but at least they like signed up.

Joel Horwitz: And then you go and look at those signups and they're like all Gmail, Yahoo, QQ.com like, you know, and again, I hate to say garbage signups, but they were. And so one of the things that's actually been kind of a breakthrough with a lot of my clients is in fact using these AI agents to do research on those emails to actually figure out who these people are. And a lot of people don't realize, like, you can actually, I mean, you have to be really careful with PII and all of that, but you can figure out who they are now and you can say, oh, this is actually a competitor that's in there trying to like, get information. And so we, we didn't know that like with a few of our clients and you can kind of put them on a different path, so to speak.

Demetrios Brinkmann: So wait, so how are you doing that? Just by creating workflows that are researching the Gmail addresses and.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, yeah, so you can basically use their. I mean, they give you a couple pieces of information. It's. I think there's a guy who does a lot of the training for Clay. His name is Yaz. And he says, like one of the. Back in my college days, I used to work for UPS to pay my way through school. And when you're stacking, I used to load these containers, like full of boxes and they used to say there's like a cornerstone box.

Joel Horwitz: And like the program was actually called Cornerstone. And so you have to take a box and you start in one corner of the, of the trailer, right? And then you build your wall from there so the boxes don't fall on you when you're, when you're loading. And that's kind of what this is. Like you have a cornerstone piece, which is basically, you know, for now Anyways, is your LinkedIn profile. And so basically you can, you can try to search using these AI agents, their Gmail. And then you can see also based on their, you know, first and last name, if they give that to you. And there's ways, you know, to, to figure out who they could be. And it's not a hundred percent.

Joel Horwitz: I think we get about a, I'd say the industry average right now is about 40, 45% hit rate. So you still don't, there's still a bunch that you don't know. But the bottom line is like we're, we're implementing this idea. Like I don't know, you know, most people have like, you know, MQLs, SQLs, they have lead scoring. Like that whole like domain is completely getting upended by this AI kind of evolution, right? And I call it evolution, not a revolution, because it is, it's evolving.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Why, why is it no more MQLs?

Joel Horwitz: Well, because it's a, it's such a rote, you know, analog model, right? It's like, well they, they clicked on four links or they visited your website and they also attended a webinar and they downloaded a white paper. But you know, that's not really like they're ready to purchase. They could just have a lot of free time on their hands. I don't know.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: I mean like, you know what I mean? Like, and that's probably true. And then the alternative is then you get like a SQL, which is a sales qualified lead, right? And they're going to say, well this is a really good lead because I know a guy who knows a guy and we think that they're really a perfect target for our solution and so on and so forth. But really what you want is an aiql which kind of removes a lot of that subjectivity, I think. I mean there's a new type of subjectivity coming from AI. But you know what it can do is like I said, you have to feed it a bunch of signal, right? Like I said. So job postings, public filings, you know, or like there's the org chart, right? So there's a, there's a website called the Org, you know, dot com. So there's ways to figure out like who's who in the zoo. Like that's a buddy of mine used to say that at IBM all the time.

Joel Horwitz: Which kind of got annoying after a while. But anyways, but it's true. It was like who's who in the zoo and who has the budget and what are they, what's the, what are they willing to pay and do they have a competitor already and what's the relationships like? Because, yeah, like, and I'm sure, you know, like it's, it's a very complex thing to sell, you know, sell enterprise software into a large organization.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Well, one thing that I am trying to wrap my head around is you get all these signals, you get all this data and some of it may be incomplete. And then where are you throwing all of this? Just into a context window and then asking an LLM to say, are they in the buying cycle or not? And then they get a score that gets fed to the sales team or how does that process look of, hey, we got all these signals, this person looks like a green light. We should reach out. Yeah, we automatically reach out with AI and we get something back. And it only gets surfaced when they respond because we've done all these cool memes and this audio generation from the founder, like paint full picture, end to end for me.

Joel Horwitz: Well, we have. So one of the other things that we developed is a unified kind of inbox, right? And so we feed all of the, kind of the outreach, if you will, into kind of a single inbox and anyone can view in the, in the company. And so, you know, when someone replies back, like to one of these, you know, tactics, we can immediately have someone jump in and say, hey, yeah, I saw, you know, that you are interested in such and such or so and so, and we can immediately start that conversation. But yeah, if they hit a certain threshold where, you know, they, they put out a job posting that mentions, you know, for example, like, for one of our clients, they're targeting like MySQL shops because MySQL is known to basically, you know, basically tap out after a certain level of concurrent users, right, for an application. So we're always looking to say, okay, they're trying to do some implementation of MySQL for some sort of SaaS application. So we see that kind of job posting and it kind of mentions some of these things. Then I actually take, like you said, it's within that, within that context window. And then we actually integrate into Slack.

Joel Horwitz: And so we have our own little bot, if you will, within art, because that's where people live nowadays in Slack, as I'm sure you know. And so we have a Slack that actually pings the rep and says, hey, like as a person would, as an SDR would, it says, hey, I noticed, you know, your cover, you know, your, your coverage this area, or you're the ae, the account executive for this account.

Joel Horwitz: Right?

Joel Horwitz: You should know that they just put out this job posting and here's the hiring manager. You should, here's their LinkedIn contact. And by the way, here's some interesting facts you should know about them. They happen to be a marathoner or they like to Paint in their free time or they have kids or what have you. And then you can ask your.

Joel Horwitz: They.

Joel Horwitz: They themselves can also write a really nice note, which increases their odds of. Of acceptance.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And so you're getting that ping. Do you have the capability? Cause I can see this being like the marketer's cursor in a way where you can.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, that's a really good analogy. Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And you can go back to the bot and say, draft me up a. A LinkedIn message that is relevant, like, you know what we're doing and the job post has X amount of crossover.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, I, I think that's a great analogy. I don't think. I think clay is probably the closest thing I've seen, but it's still pretty like, workflowy. You know what I mean? Like, there's still a lot of. I don't think we've really, you know, if someone has a Y combinator or somewhere. Somewhere else wants to talk to me and we want to start it. Start something. Because I don't think there is a cursor for marketing yet.

Joel Horwitz: I do. I do think there should be. I do think there should be a, you know, a way to like, you know, like, you can with replit or. Or cursor.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Just go in there and say, I want to launch a campaign to, you know, cyber security companies. And it'll automatically create, you know, the entire, you know, campaign that includes, you know, ad copy and creative, the messaging, you know, target audience, the landing pages, the white papers, the content based on all that. Like, I'm not aware of anything that exists today. I have to base. I mean, that's why I have an agency. Right. Is because it doesn't exist. And I have to do that essentially manually, but stitch all these things together.

Joel Horwitz: So there's a lot of bespoke solutions that, that touch like what we've all. What we've been talking about. But I feel like I'm more of like a system integrator for marketing today.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Is. Is really what the job is today as a marketer. It's.

Joel Horwitz: You're.

Joel Horwitz: You're a system integrator, period. That's how I see it.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that because I was just talking to a friend, friend, Sean, last week on how if you look at any job, what people are doing in their job is just getting. They want the end result, you want the job to be done type of thinking where you don't buy a drill to drill things. You buy a drill because you want to put A picture up on the wall and so you need to drill a hole in the wall and then, then you can hang that photo. So you want that end result, right? But there's all these steps in between, there's these tasks in between. And maybe some of it is moving data from over here and putting it over here or it is creating something over here. And so all these tasks that you can break out in that whole end to end flow is where you are starting to see now AI play a part in some of these tasks. Whether or not it is helping with the productivity of you're able to spin something up faster or it's just, it can go ahead and do it for you and then you can give it the sign off.

Demetrios Brinkmann: Or sometimes people don't even give it sign off, they just throw out shit.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point. I think there's two points in there that you made that are really important. One is you absolutely need to still sign this stuff off because it's still not 100%. I think I had a, I had a salesperson share with me the other day that we totally got the name wrong of this person for whatever reason. And I was just like the guys, that's not my name and that's not what I do crap. And it happens, right? I mean there's still some margin of error with these things and so it happens. But you know, you basically own it and you say you're right. You know, this was, we, we got too ahead of ourselves and you know, but I think even humans make mistake.

Joel Horwitz: I always think about like the argument against like self driving cars. It's like, oh, there, you know, they, they. There was one accident this year and so we should just cancel the whole program. Like wait a second, like how do, how are humans doing out there with, with the car driving and the, in the marketing situation? Like, I don't think it's a hundred percent either, last I checked. Right. So we have this weird like I thinking that, you know, we should hold AI to this higher standard that we do humans for some reason. And I think that's a little bit misplaced. I'm like, I get it, like we should do better.

Joel Horwitz: But on the other hand we should really be where the second comment that you made about buying the drill, again, I think it's it. You're absolutely right. And, and you know, using that kind of analogy, what's the biggest thing, at least for me when I'm hating hanging a painting, like missing the stud, right? So, so Again, you have to find a signal, because I can, I can build amazing campaigns, but if I, if I miss that stud or if I miss the target, all of that's for naught.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: And so that's why these AI agents are so critical, right, for marketers is because you can spend, I've seen literally, like, people spend millions and tens of millions of dollars on campaigns because they had the wrong messaging or they had the wrong audience, or they had the wrong offering. And, you know, and all of that could have been avoided had there been a bit more research done at the start to really deeply understand the pain of what that prospect is going through. And that's what I think. You know, a lot of marketers just don't have the time to do because they're so focused on, like, doing the tactical stuff.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: So I'm actually like, think there's like a renaissance coming of marketing because we're not going to be, you know, charged with having to spend 90% of our time just like, finangling things and building. We can actually spend more of our time like, really understanding that customer, which is, I think, what marketing is supposed to be doing at the outset.

Demetrios Brinkmann: But anyways, it's just funny that you mentioned, hey, I'm a systems integrator, because it goes back to what my friend Sean was saying, is that we're all going to become architects.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: And we are going to be as good as we are able to architect our system. And so if we can put all these disparate pieces of AI capabilities together and make a cohesive system out of it, then we're going to get so much more lift from that.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, yeah, A hundred percent. And I, I think what, like I said, I think we're really at the early, at the early days of this, but who am I to say? Like, I just, I just have my little purview. I'm sure there are people that are doing amazing things that they don't talk about, you know, because it's probably their ip. But, yeah, I, I would say that it's, it's really quite fun. I mean, that's the other part about this. Like, I remember, like, marketing used to be really fun, like in the 2000s, I guess, like in the age of the Internet and all of that. And then, like, we ran like some amazing campaigns and people had really fun with it and then, like, it got it. It stopped being fun.

Joel Horwitz: Like, I think developers, like, lashed back against marketers. Like, it was like, you know, with pitchforks, like, you know, and going after I was in a, I was at a conference not too long ago and I was sitting in a room. Now I'm trying to remember which one it was, but it was a while back and. Oh, I, I think it was a, it was a Kubernetes Con conference in Chicago. That's where it was. And so these are pretty hardcore developers. And so I was sitting in this like, investor room and I mean, it was just like, I didn't. I almost like wanted to like sneak out of there.

Joel Horwitz: Cause I'm like, they're just like, just bashing marketing. Like, oh, like marketing always gets developers wrong and don't hire them and they're terrible. Like, oh, no, gotta get out of here. But I, I still think that's, there's a little bit of that and I, I get it. Like, I think there's been, you know, times. Look, I lived through the IBM Watson era, quite honestly. Right. So I was, I can tell you, like, there's there was a, A bit of hand waving at that time, quite honestly.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Which has been, I think, is fairly well understood at this point. And, and so, yeah, I get it. Like, you know, marketers are trying to push the envelope and get people excited about a new technology or a new service or a new product and they, they sometimes go too far. And that's something you have to be really, really cautious of.

Demetrios Brinkmann: But going back to this point, I just wanted to close the loop on the cursor for marketers or the Devin or whatever. Insert your favorite code agent for marketers. I think that is something that would be incredible because if you can prompt the whole campaign.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, I mean there's, there already is ways to do that. Like, for example, there is an integration right now between Clay and webflow. I don't think it's a great integration yet. As far as I know, we personally, like at single store, we use Mutiny. So we were actually building these pages on Mutiny that could basically customize. Yeah. Like based on what we knew about the account.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: And so we can speak to, speak to their pain points and use like, we literally update the, like the customer case studies.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Based on the customer that came in.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: You'd want to find a lookalike right. To the customer you're targeting, saying, you know, did you know your competitor is using us to do this? Right. And they go, oh, okay. Like there's always like a, a FOMO there. But yeah, I, I saw some more recently. Someone said that Vibe marketing is a thing already. I mean, I, I feel like it's Happening. I'm just not like, I've been like, so heads down that sometimes you forget to kind of look up and look around like, okay, what, what are other people doing? Because I'm like so in the weeds of building these things.

Joel Horwitz: Like, you know, go into builder mode and then you pause and you, oh no, someone just like fixed this over there. So like, I gotta go like jump on that train now. So, yeah, it's, it's happening, man. I think this, it's good that we're having this conversation because I, it's, it's often interesting to me how I do meet founders, how I do meet very savvy CEOs at, you know, growth companies as well, who aren't really recognizing the, the opportunity that exists like right now, like this second.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: They're still investing like in a lot of these more traditional like, marketing tactics. Like quite honestly, and no offense to any friends of mine out there, but like, like going to these giant trade shows, quite honestly, it's like, I get it. Like, there's a, there's a level of, you know, it's, it's cool that you can like connect with people in real life. I think that's fine. But boy, it's, it's, it's, it's very resource intensive versus like coming in with like more of like a scalpel and like kind of figuring out how to find, you know, how to, how to generate that conversation differently. So, yeah, I think, I think there's definitely going to be, you know, there's definitely going to be a group of people who don't transition fast enough to AI agent marketing, quite honestly, or vibe market, if you want to call it that, versus those who kind of stick with the, with the traditional, you know, approach. And I can already see it, I can see in a couple of places, but I'm convinced that those who jump on the AI stuff sooner than later will likely, likely jump out ahead within the next, you know, few months. I think it's a real thing.

Demetrios Brinkmann: One thing that's fascinating and I'm trying to grapple with in my mind is how we have this whole systems and very much like marketing ops type thing where you are tactical and you're creating very specific and like you said, almost like these sniper type of bullets that are going out. But then you also have the thought leadership in the brand building and the stuff that I think goes a really long way, especially because as you said, 90% of folks that are finding out about you or trying, you probably aren't in the buying Cycle.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: So you want to figure out how to, how you can keep that conversation going with them until they are in the buying cycle and you can become that trusted advisor. And that's where I feel like you cannot use AI in that type of thought leadership per se. Or at least maybe in the way that I'm thinking about it, which would be a podcast, for example, or going to, maybe it's giving talks on stages is also a little bit harder to use. AI in that regard. AI can help you write the talk, AI can help you distribute the podcast or create clips from the podcast. But it's not necessarily like you can use Notebook LM and now you have thought leadership because of your Notebook LM podcast.

Joel Horwitz: Right, Right.

Joel Horwitz: This is what I would say to that. So a hundred percent, I would say 100% that the key to using, you know, AI agents in your, in your workflow and in marketing and frankly in business is, is. And this is why you know, it, it's, it's. It's assistive versus replacement, right? And, and it's because, um, you still need that authenticity, right? There's no replacing it. Like people respond to other people. Like people, you know, are human beings. They're not human doings, right? So they're looking for connection. They're looking for, you know, building relationships.

Joel Horwitz: They want to build trust. And so what I see is that, you know, AI and these agents are just really helping you to distill information. So for example, I'm working with a startup here at Oregon State University where we're filming from today, and they have a really cool computer vision technology that allows you to, you know, measure, monitor and, and manage aquaculture. So if you're, if you're unaware, fish farming or seafood farming is more than half of all of the world's food, food supply. Which is absurd. Like, it's crazy to think about, right? And already 85% of the wild food seafood out there is already basically is, is no longer available. Right? So only like 15% of the world's, you know, can go with wild fish. But they were, you know, we were trying to figure out, they were trying to figure out like doing all these like customer interviews, like what to build and how, how to focus their go to market.

Joel Horwitz: So on the research side again, and so we conducted, and this is where, you know, the AI part came in. A. We were able to use, you know, AI agents to go out and find these types of operations, right? Where they have large enough operations that they could use technology to count fish or count sea Urchins or count, you know, whatever. And so we were able to get in, you know, get conversations with these CEOs or these, you know, these kind of seafood farmers all over the world. Like, that's amazing, right? And so we interviewed them using Microsoft Teams. And so we got the transcripts, right? And we fed those into our, into our AI system and they brought back, like, here are the concepts that you should focus on. And so to your point, like, I don't know, you know, Demetrios, like, when you come up with, you know, who your guests are going to be or other topics you should be talking about, you know, I don't know how you, you know, decide that maybe you're just. You're probably a genius is probably a big part of it.

Joel Horwitz: But also it's like, but how do you, like, take all those conversations you have and synthesize them? Like, now we have gong, and now we have all these other things that can, like, do that for you, but you still need to marry that with other, you know, information, right? About, you know, these macro moves and these other things that are going on.

Joel Horwitz: Right?

Joel Horwitz: And I think that's the part where, you know, these AI agents can help you craft a better, you know, message and think about what you actually should be talking about as a thought leader to your, to your point. Right? So you're always kind of staying on the cutting edge.

Demetrios Brinkmann: That's cool. But again, it doesn't abstract away the actual time in conversations with folks. It is more the originality or the ability to come up with new ideas. You have a sparring partner now that you can call up or spar with at any moment of the day.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a great, you know, what's the famous line like, Steve Jobs says that, you know, computers are basically a bicycle for your mind.

Joel Horwitz: Right?

Joel Horwitz: Yeah. I mean, this is really, this gets to that, right. I think more so than anything. Like, it's, you know, working with these AI agents and, and obviously ChatGPT being, you know, another example that it's, it really is like, it's a, it's an exercise for your mind. Like, you get much deeper insights. I hate to use that word, but you do. You get much deeper insights from working with this stuff than you would. Than you would normally.

Joel Horwitz: So, yeah, I, I think that's. You're, you're totally right. I don't think it's a replacement, though. I've, I've come to realize that, like, I get pretty excited with tech. I'm like, oh yeah, we can just like ramp this up and we can do all AI SDRs and never have to, you know, pay a commission again. We don't need salespeople. No, that's not, that's not true at all. Like, there's a big, like, product LED growth.

Joel Horwitz: Everyone wants to be like Data Dog. Everyone wants to be like sneak or Everyone wants to be like Docker. I'm like, oh yeah, we don't need salespeople. Like, we're just going to put our product out there. It's going to be great. It's going to sell itself. You know, we're just going to put all of our money and resources in a product development and we'll never have to deal with sales and marketing people ever again. Thank goodness.

Joel Horwitz: No, it's just not. It's just not real. People buy from people. I really believe that. You know, and whether they're buying, you know, whether you talk to them or not, they're still, you know, looking up the company's brand and they're still thinking about, you know, who's behind the product.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: And so again, like, like you said, like, if you're not out there, you know, you know, basically nurturing or, or creating your own personal brand as a founder.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: Then yeah, you're. I think your likeliness of seeing that type of growth is gonna be stimmied. I don't think it's gonna be the same.

Demetrios Brinkmann: One thing that I wanted to bring up was that when you think about and you hear this trope, it's almost cliche these days on like, oh, now we're not gonna need humans to do that. And it's very clear to all of us that you still need humans to do stuff. But what is happening that I have been seeing in a few friends reference to me was that you're now looking at when maybe there was traditionally a python developer.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: That would create some kind of a mockup in Streamlit.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: All of a sudden, because of Cursor, they can have three different types of MVPs that are built with react.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah.

Demetrios Brinkmann: You know, it's like you're not now magically freed up with your time.

Joel Horwitz: I think things just accelerate, man. I think they just accelerate. So for example, with this, with this startup, they're called C Stereo, but with this startup, I was like, they, they have a team of, of developers and engineers and you know, they. People spend. They're spending, you know, a good portion of their time on like, I would argue, like, mundane stuff, you know, and So I think, like, what you're describing to me is a lot of the remedial work. And I, you know, I don't mean to be sound like derogatory or anything when I say that. I just mean a lot of the grunt work of like standing up a website and creating like a UI UX for like a dashboard. Like those sorts of things.

Joel Horwitz: Yeah, like, I don't think a lot of people necessarily want to work on those things. And so, for example, I was. We drove out to one of these, you know, kind of design partners, basically like an early customer of our company. I just went in repl.it and I'm like, all right, describe to me, like, what you'd want to see as your dashboard. And I kid you not, like, I'll send you the link. Like, it basically created and unbelievable. And I said, I want it to look like that. I don't know if you've ever heard of that company called FrontPoint, but it's basically like a do it yourself security software company where you go around, you like, put in all the different sensors and anyways, it has cameras and things, whatever.

Joel Horwitz: And so like I said, yeah, look at this UI and make a version of this for like Aquacultures, dude, it spun it up in like less than an hour. It was unbelievable. And the guy's like, oh, yeah, I like this, I don't like this. So we just tweak it and then that gives, you know, the, the engineer is actually something to build too.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: So, yeah, I think, I think with marketing, like, it's, it is, it's like vibe coding. It's vibe marketing. It's. It's lowering the threshold for experimentation, which is something that I've always loved. I love experimenting. And I think that's, if we can experiment more, we tend to be able to find ground truth that much sooner, you know, and, and that's what it's all about. So I think a lot of these, you know, know, breakthroughs are really allowing us, like I said, to spend more time thinking much more deeply than we ever have about these user experiences or these interactions or our messages or even the products that we're building.

Joel Horwitz: Right.

Joel Horwitz: And that's, I think what, that's what excites me probably the most, you know, and.