State of AI, Data Collection Change, and AI-Driven Empathy

Welcome to wake up with AI, the podcast where human powered meets AI assisted. Join your hosts, Chris Carillon, Niko Lofakas, and George b Thomas as we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence. From the latest AI news to cutting edge tools and skill sets, we are here to help business owners, marketers, and everyday individuals unlock their full potential with the power of AI. Let's get started.

Good morning. Happy Thursday, November 7, 2024. It is time to wake up another day with AI here with Niko and George. How are you fellas doing today?

I'm doing great. Doing good.

Got a couple new reports out and some new trending figures, and I'm excited.

Awesome. Let's dive in. I'm feeling good too. What are we reporting on today?

Today, we've got from HubSpot itself, they put out the AI trends guide. And so if you haven't seen this yet, pop online over to HubSpot or just, you know, pop open Google, type HubSpot AI trends, and, it'll pop open. It's the 2024 guide that just dropped. Just looking at this guide, basically doing a a quick rundown. The adoption rate for AI tools within marketing overall, 2022 was at 21%.

Last year, 74%. So we're at nearly 74% among and when we say this, like it's among people, like among marketers marketers that are using the tools. When we say it's not going away, it's not going away. 68% of marketers are saying that AI is actually helping them grow their career, So it's not just that it's helping them save time in their day and and help them with their work overall, but it's actually helping them move forward, move up the chain. 74% of marketers believe that most people are going to be using AI in the workplace by 2030.

Christmas calculation, I think that's likely to be the case next year. That's definitely a, catch up or get left behind stat. The most popular forms so far, most popular tools for AI for marketing is chatbots, the CRM itself, so like AI capabilities within the CRM, AI productivity tools, so things like notebooklm, things like what is that? Notetaker, Zoom AI, or something like Otter AI, some type of additional tool that you're probably using. Visual AI tools.

So if you're doing anything with, like, Google Slides now has an AI capability. If you're doing anything with Canva, it's loaded with AI tools all over the place.

Canva. You gotta throw that one out

there now. Is it gamma? Is that the one that yeah.

Gamma.app. Oh my god. Yes.

Yeah. If you guys haven't seen any of, like, George's presentations, definitely sign up for his next one because you get to see Gamma firsthand, and I gotta say it's a great standalone. There's not enough in Google Slides yet, and I very dislike Canva. So, when I saw it, I was really impressed with it. And for, you know, especially as a standalone, it's it's amazing.

I do prefer standalone AI tools because of the fact that it's as true of AI in a lot of ways as it is with humans. Yeah. A lot of a lot of tools can do multiple things, but the tools that are focused on the one thing do it really, really well because they spend all of their time on the features that make the one thing amazing. 74% of marketing professionals say that AI usage is increasing through their existing tool integrations. So that's basically like, what does that mean?

What does that spell out? It spells out things like freeze. Right? Just spells out the fact that no matter what you're using, no matter what tool you're you're in, you don't even realize it now. Maybe.

Your your Gmail is loaded with AI tools. Go to any text box in Chrome anywhere. Right click. At the top, you're gonna see something that says help me write. An embedded AI tool just in Google Chrome.

It's been there for months. You probably didn't even notice. Again, the numbers are not going down. They're only going up. 57% of marketers feel the actual pressure to start learning AI.

There's 57% that are actually a little bit afraid. They're afraid that they're gonna get passed up. That's over half the field thinks that this is gonna be a big thing and that if they don't get underneath it soon enough, if they don't wake up with AI, not just that it'll pass them up, the verbiage that was used was becoming irrelevant.

Nobody wants that.

It's like hearing your parents say they're disappointed in you.

Oh, god. Don't do that to me. That's a bad thing right there.

I dropped the link to the report in the YouTube chat if you're watching us on YouTube. But I just wanted to share the screen because it's a nice looking landing page. It would be nice if we could get some help from anybody positioning AI tools about the humanity, like, side of this that we keep talking about. Knowing that they're never gonna do that, it makes me feel secure in in our position that we're gonna keep talking about this. But this section specifically, AI is driving career momentum for marketers.

By handing off routine tasks to an AI tool, marketers gain more time in their workdays. How do we say here they fill in that time? More human interaction, more human communication, building relationships, humanity. Here, it says they can use that extra time to focus on tasks that require more strategic thinking or have the potential to drive better business result. Like or humans, humanity, that's the stuff that drives better business.

It creates space to be human, to be human with other humans. That's what we're creating a space for. And if we need to help leaders, you know, that's the part. Like, no. Not more tasks.

Right? That's the part holding us back right now.

And that's the thing is, like, what does it say that number would use? Like, pull that back up because the irony is right there. If you weren't at INBOUND this year, you missed this part. It was the funniest part of INBOUND to me. 1 of the product leads or product developers came out on stage, and his first question to the audience was, how many of you are finding AI useful in your day to day?

Like, how many of you don't find it useful? Raise your hand. I didn't see a single hand go up. Not a single one. And I was sitting in a spot where I could see almost the entire like, everybody that was there with the exception of, like, maybe people hiding behind some pillars.

Then he asked, how many of you aren't even using it with work? There was the tiniest group of people, like, far off that raised their hands. And he circled in, like, just zeroed in on them and was like, yeah. Yeah. See?

So blah blah blah. And just zeroed in on them and was like, yeah. Yeah. See? So blah blah blah.

And it's like, no, man. No. I I don't understand where that's going. So here they're saying, okay. It's gonna help them focus on tasks.

And then right smack dab in the middle, 75% of marketers say they use AI to reduce manual task time. So no. Quite literally, the number one thing they are using it for. If you go into the report, it's 2% above everything else. Reducing task time.

It's the number one thing that I put forward to my clients. The reason that they should be enabling Breeze, the reason that they should be enabling AI features, to reduce that task time. Nobody likes doing it. Sales doesn't like doing it. Marketing doesn't like doing it.

That's why we have automated follow ups. That's why we have all of this automated help desk. It's why we even bother with automation in the first place. And that last sentence, to your point, it it's it's not necessarily backwards. It's just incomplete.

Or have the potential to drive deeper meaning to gain better results. You need deeper meaning in order to drive better results. You can't have better results just because you have AI doing your work for you.

It could be the exact opposite

Yeah.

If you're not doing it right. That's the thing. Everybody, not everybody, but many times we paint this picture of AI perfection. There probably could be an entire show of where AI goes wrong. The stats are great.

And by the way, part of this conversation, I think, is it's less of the stats and what they're showing and more of somebody just writing the wrong copy. Because it probably could be not the word task, but something else, a different word, and we wouldn't even be, like, honing in as deep as it is in that first, like, section. I think the most important piece here is that it does come down to the humanity of it all. It comes down to leveraging these things in the right way. It comes down to, you know, wanting to create great experiences and being curious to what tools and what AI allows you to do faster to create those better experiences for the humans that you're actually trying to engage with and build meaningful deep relationships that, yes, at the end of the day might equal some ROI for the business, but they're definitely gonna equal ROI for your life and for their life.

Yeah. I mean, running down the list, it's realistically, like, the top three things that marketers are using AI for in order are tasks. I don't know how the survey questions looked. So that's another issue, right, is if they were drop down survey questions, you're really killing the purpose. And so here's what's a little weird to me because I've been doing this since last year.

Everything should be right in now. Everything should be right in. You really shouldn't have, like, any, you know, drop downs or anything like that. Why? Have your AI on the back end, Copilot Breeze, should be doing the averaging of the the fill in data.

The language models know how to draw sentiment from written information. So if you have all these write in fields of, like, what makes you feel this way about whatever, it doesn't matter what anybody wrote in there because the model will be able to pull the overall sentiment and give you the segmentations of where that sentiment is.

I hope you realize how blatantly you attack the fundamental marketing principle just now. We have taught for years that you wanna use multiple check boxes and drop down selects because then we can segment for better communication, and we can report because we're collecting better data. Now what you just threw out to this audience is that no. No. No.

No. No. No. See, ladies and gentlemen, that's so 2020, 2021, 20 1989. That's literally what you're throwing out.

And by the way, I don't hate it. I just don't know if the system that we use that is HubSpot is that smart yet. I was testing it actually earlier this morning because I'm doing this thing on ideal client profiles and segmentation and personalization, and I wanted to see, can I go into HubSpot right now and say Copilot, can you please look at all of my data and tell me who the ideal client profiles are that I should be targeting? Unfortunately, it yells at me well, it kindly said, I can't look at all your data, but I can give you some resources. Now when it can look at all my data and it can look at the open text box like you're talking about and it can do the thing that you're aspirationally speaking about, then I think that marketing dramatically changes.

And we can even dive into something that I'll talk about from an AI skill that pays the bills later. But right now, right, hit the brakes. Don't throw away your marketing. Don't throw away your segmentation. Don't throw away your but be prepared for a world where what Nico just said is true and be ready to pivot your strategy to allowing deeper contextual input into the system to make better decisions, do better reporting, have better segmentation, and better communication.

I just had to throw that out there.

It's a super interesting dynamic because as HubSpot explodes in terms of users, and we're here knowing that there are basic principles like segmentation that people still have not adopted and are still having trouble, you know, understanding. So we've got new people coming in. We've got, you know, legacy users that still have not figured it out. Right? The the least we can do right now is start creating the space for this stuff to be happening, and that's where so often we over way overthink and overstrategize the form.

And we don't even give, you know, the people the opportunity to tell us what's on their mind. And that's why I've been super interested in the in the self reported attribution fields that have been becoming popular again in the last few years, and people have been building workflows. So those anybody doing that is in a much better position to leverage, you know, an AI, and they've probably already been testing it, right, in terms of how did you find us, our multiline text required field, and then they build work flows. And it's like, look for the word podcast. Look for the word LinkedIn.

Look for the word, you know, this person, this person, this person. And then they've been bucketing it like that in a workflow. Now to Nikko's point, and anything that I'm seeing where, you know, that the greatest of marketers and the greatest of HubSpot users have developed really great naming conventions and segmentate like, all this stuff. It's like, hey. AI can create your names now.

It's gonna be great for anybody who didn't do that stuff. But until you can let me point to this field, this field, and this field, just like I can at work flows. I'm not gonna use it. So because of that disconnect, I'm not gonna see value because I'm not gonna experiment with the AI yet. So this dynamic of, like, can we learn it?

Can we give it the space to experiment alongside, you know, the other things that we want to keep happening? It's fun for me, of course, as a coaching consultant to help people think through this stuff because even if they ask this question, we're in a better spot than anybody who's not asking. And because there's 2 elements of, do we need to know what's on their mind? It's like, well, yes. So please give them an opportunity to do that.

But then there's the other side of it. It's like, well, I can't report on it like that, or I can't do anything.

But you're able to

You need to figure that out, not just not let them give you the data.

It's always funny to me because, like, anytime somebody presents a problem, I have to solve it. So in terms of, like, CRM can't do it now, I immediately thought to myself, that's cute. So again, like, this is why you need to wake up with AI. HubSpot plus Zapier plus chat gpt equals translated fields. You take your field in HubSpot that has the written in data.

You create a Zap that pulls that field into, Zapier, stores it in a variable, pushes it out to a GPT model. GPT model instructions are to read the value of the field and assign an appropriate industry. You do this enough times. Industry, whatever it is, sentiment let's just say customer sentiment. Give me a value for customer sentiment and supply a value, and that's the thing.

You can have GPT place multiple variables from its output. So you can have it do sentiment Based on that sentiment, you can have it give it a score rating. Based on that score rating, you can have it do something else. And then you the end of the Zap is it pushes that data out to those fields. It helps.

Yeah. See, I see you're cute, and I raise you too. That's cute. Because what you just did is you explained the process that for most mere mortals is almost impossible because they're like zap. They can't even say Zapier.

They say Zapier. And then when they try to connect it to the actual API or the key that they need and they try to watch a YouTube video, they're like, I don't even know how to make this shit work. And because now they can't make it work because they don't have 27 IT technical nerds at their disposal, it's not as easy as you made it sound. You made it sound like you put a piece of scotch tape here and you drag it to this other place here, and all of a sudden the data works and you get this matter. Poof.

No. That's cute. That's cute, Nico. That's not what you get. You get a headache.

You get a, oh my god. I'm stupid. And you go, I I just can't work. Can it just happen in HubSpot, please? See, there's gotta be a level of empathy to the people who are not at the place at where you, I, or Chris, or other nerds are at.

The real humans on the planet. That's cute.

I hear it. I hear it.

No. I'm not kidding.

We need some empathy.

I hear what you're saying, and I'll raise you I've already pulled all of Zapier's data. So I made one in Claude, but thanks to this little poke, I'll go ahead and make a Zapier GPT. I love it. I love it. Zapier plus HubSpot API data, and then that way you guys can

build I

love it. All the Zap that you want.

Yeah. This is why we're here, folks. I think to some of the points you were mentioning earlier, like, just the orchestration of all, like, the human involvement here. Like, the orchestration, the architecture, the design, you can make some really good music with one instrument, but the most beautiful pieces ever created have come from, like, you know, a beautiful pieces ever created have come from, like, you know, a 100 instruments playing together and somebody conducting that, somebody creating that sheet music and designing it all together. The more you can do that with these tools at your disposal using applied tools and then using stand alone stuff like GPT, that is where the most powerful, you know, stuff happens.

So definitely keep that explore mindset. And when we say wake up with AI, we're talking about just because you got Copilot in the sidebar now, doesn't mean all your AI tools are just there for you. We hope them to be at some point. But when you know that there's thousands of different companies at this point developing AI tools, If you're not always out there, it's just like understanding your buyer segments, your audience. Like, there's somebody new every day.

How are they thinking about this? How do we need to serve them? The AI tool for proliferation. At least at this point, there's a convergent at some point where the AI tool to go to, like, start to, you know, consolidate a little bit as as we run out of applications if we ever do. But, yep, the key is, like, exploration, experimentation mindset.

If you can't even get there, like, you're just waiting for somebody else to give it to you, you're you're already behind.

Yeah. There's a couple things I love. 1, Will in the chat saying, can't even say Zapier or Zapier. Which is it? By the way, I did an interview with the person that, like, was one of the heads of of the company, and it is Zapier, like, happier if you did not know.

I just have to put that out to the world because I can't. The other thing is I have to put out to the world because I couldn't let it go because Nico always talks about this word empathy, and and we're running into, like, this idea of we need as humans to have empathy, but wouldn't it be great if there was empathy driven AI interactions? And that's the skill that pays the bill today. I wanna dive into this idea that empathy might seem like a purely human quality, but AI has come a long way. If you've been paying attention to this show, you know that it's always changing day in and day out.

With the right training, AI can interpret emotions, understand tone, and respond in ways that make people feel heard and valued, which is weird because those are core to being empathetic to the humans around us. Imagine AI sensing frustration in a customer message or recognizing excitement in an interaction much like we are excited in the interaction of I'll raise you this and raise you that. That's the power of empathy driven AI. Empathy driven AI is about making technology a bridge for connection. We kinda were alluding to that earlier when we're having this conversation, by the way.

Tools like sentiment analysis can detect when someone's stressed, excited, or curious, and adapting the AI's tone to match those things. Imagine a chatbot that goes beyond canned responses because it can adjust its message to the be reassuring or to be uplifting based on the customer's emotional cues that they're putting into the little box or that they're actually saying because it's voice optimized. If the stress is too high, it escalates the issue to a human because it wants to have that interaction and meaning go to a deeper level. And here's the real value. Empathy driven AI benefits your customers and your team.

AI can provide actionable insights flagging reoccurring frustration after a product update or highlighting key customer concerns in real time. By the way, all of this gets a lot easier when it is text boxes that information is going in instead of drop downs. I'm tying it all together. These insights help you stay ahead improving experiences before issues escalate. So let's just talk about the highlights here.

Leverage empathy driven AI to adapt to real time sentiment. Train AI to adjust its tone whether it's reassuring, enthusiastic, or empathetic. And empathy driven AI gives you a real pulse on customer sentiment helping you improve experiences, improve experiences, improve experiences. That's what we should be doing and build loyalty. That's today's AI skill that pays the bills.

Amen. And when we talk about training brother. When we talk about training AI, like, especially in terms of empathy and the more human the organization because this person cares about this. This person cares about this and this in the organization because this person cares about this. This person cares about this.

This person has these goals. This team has these goals. Leadership says this is important. It does some powerful stuff when you give it all the context, including how other people feel about what is being suggested as change. And that's where I'm excited.

I've been playing with, like, all of the reasons that we found ways to take website projects that could be done inside of 3 months, and it takes 9 to 12 months just because it takes us that long to get everybody in the room and on the same page and speaking the same language. Where can we use AI to just cut out all of those alignment needs when we can show others that AI has an ability to be empathetic to their needs as well? Now we build trust in the AI and all of these interpersonal stuff that get in the way of movement forward and we have trust with AI. Like, it's not being personal. Right?

It has no agenda. Right? It's gonna cut out on so much of the stuff that is holding, you know, organizations back from moving forward.

To the central point that we keep driving home, and I didn't get too much of a chance to get into it. I'll touch on it tomorrow, but all I can say is businesses have gone from spending 23 to 25,000,000,000 in 22. To last year, they spent 2 upwards of $260,000,000,000.

Oh, just a small jump.

Just a small jump. Yeah. Which is why you need to pay attention, you need to stay aware, and you need to wake up with AI.

That's a wrap for this episode of wake up with AI. We hope that you feel a little more inspired, a little more informed, and a whole lot more excited about how AI can augment your life and business. Always remember that this journey is just the beginning and that we are right here with you every step of the way. If you love today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. You can also connect with us on social media to stay updated with all things AI.

Until next time. Stay curious, stay empowered, and wake up with AI.