Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales

Panel: Activating Generative AI in Marketing & Sales

Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives.  In a recent post put out by OpenAI’s head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says “We will figure out new things to do and new things to want…Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.” 

 

Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: “Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change”

 

This all sounds wonderful; it’s used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it’s been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It’s essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?

 

Where we are here in 2025, it’s a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that “many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]” by then. How do we unlock AI’s activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?

 

I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on “Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales” at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada – please get the links to each of them in the shownotes. 

 

The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.

 

I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends. 

 

And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.

 

 



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People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Video of the panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0U9aJ_Mzug&t=1755s

Sam Altman – The Gentle Singularity

Effective Accelerationism

TCC Canada

UCLabs

Lubabah Bakht

Gary Amaral

Jim Cain

Peter MacKinnon

Brett Serjeantson

Causal Artificial Intelligence, with John Thompson

Casual AI with John Thompson

Episode 206

There’s no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI’s do  amazing things.

Extrapolating how far they’ve come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We’re impressed by how clever they sound, and we’re tempted to believe that they’ll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do. 

But according to many AI experts, this isn’t what’s going to happen.  

The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked. 

The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they’re word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it’s usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences.  The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:  

“During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn’t just spouting words.” 

All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn’t be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a “what if”, building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something,  and they would have chained this together with reasoning by  others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what’s written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work.

This doesn’t mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there’s more than one branch of AI – each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn’t just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen  by building a model of something in the real world. That  distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it’s what enables this type of AI to  recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI.

My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA. 

He has written five  books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don’t hear very much about, Causal AI. So let’s go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.

 

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:04:36 Welcome John

00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI

00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for

00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal

00:26:50 PSA

00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling

00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery

00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

John is on LinkedIn

John Thompson has been on Funnel Reboot twice previously:

Episode 136

Episode 181

Causal Diagramming tools:

https://www.dagitty.net/

https://cbdrh.shinyapps.io/daggle/

 



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Components of Causal AI modeling process.

Marketing more efficiently with AI, with Rich Brooks

Rich brooks

Episode 205

 

Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine.  He founded The Agents of Change a weekly podcast that has over 550 episodes. He is a nationally recognized speaker on using digital channels like search, social media and mobile for marketing to your audience. Rich also hosts the Agents of Change conference which takes place October 9th and 10th both virtually and in his hometown of Portland, Maine.

 

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:02:49 welcome Rich

00:08:56 using GPT to make text seo-friendly

00:17:32 blending generative text with your own content

00:22:47 expanding to image & video

00:27:11 PSA

00:27:45 managing projects and events with AI

00:38:36 when to use a human vs aGPT

00:47:52 info on Rich. his podcast & his conference

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

The Agents of Change Conference, Oct 9-10, 2024

Rich’s Podcast – The Agents of Change

Rich on LinkedIn

Rich on Twitter/X



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Building AI out of Data, with Yash Gad

yash gad

Episode 171

AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications – hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them? 

Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors.

Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Yash’s company: https://www.ringersciences.com/about

Yash also founded a consultancy, here’s the Next Practices Group’s site and their social feed.

Yash on Twitter

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Boston Dynamics

Tesla

Episode 117: Marketing Artificial Intelligence, with Paul Roetzer

Marketing Artificial Intelligence

Paul Roetzer graduated with a journalism degree from the E.W. Scripps School at Ohio University and a few years afterwards he founded Ready North (formerly PR 20/20). In 2016 he founded the Marketing AI Institute. The idea for such an organization came from what Paul saw when AI began impacting his agency. He thought the only way marketers like him could work alongside AI would be by better understanding its capabilities. 

Part of their vision of educating marketers is through an annual event, and in 2019 they held their inaugural Marketing AI Conference. MAICON was on pause during lockdowns, but it came back in 2022.

In 2022, He and co-author Mike Kaput published the book we’re talking about, Marketing Artificial Intelligence. The book draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with AI marketers, executives, engineers, and entrepreneurs. He has also authored The Marketing Performance Blueprint (2014) and The Marketing Agency Blueprint (2012). Through his podcast and as a conference speaker, Paul makes AI approachable and actionable for marketers. 

He and his family live in Cleveland, Ohio. 

People, Products and Concepts in the Show: