Video: The AI Marketing Alliance presents: Building an AI-Ready Marketing Team | Duration: 3568s | Summary: The AI Marketing Alliance presents: Building an AI-Ready Marketing Team

Transcript for "The AI Marketing Alliance presents: Building an AI-Ready Marketing Team": Everybody to today's AI Marketing Alliance workshop. My name is Kelly Chang, and I am the head of marketing here at Goldcast. And we are thrilled to have you join us for what promises to be an insightful and engaging session on AI's impact on work marketing and the organizational strategy. But before we dive in, let me quickly go over a couple of housekeeping items to make sure that you get the most out of today's event. So we encourage you to be extremely active and participate in the event, So please do use the chat panel that's on the right hand side to your main stage. Share your thoughts with us or network with other attendees. If you have questions for any of our guest speakers, please do submit those questions in the q and a tab that's also to the to the right of your main stage. We also have prepared some helpful resources that complement today's workshop, and you can find that in the docs tab also to your right. We are recording today's session, and it will be ready for you to rewatch and, rewatch again later this afternoon, and we'll email you as soon as it's ready for you to do that. And for those of you who are interested in connecting 1 on 1 with other participants, feel free to click on the messages tab that's on the right hand side. And from there, you'd be able to scroll through every single person that's currently live in the event, and that's where you can also, send your direct messages as well. This workshop is part of our monthly series specifically tailored for VPs and CMOs at organizations that have over 500 employees, and we're always looking for ways to improve and provide value. So if you have any feedback on today's event or suggestions for future topics, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or Alex Bleeker. Alex, please say hi in the chat. And now I'm super super excited to introduce our guest speaker for today, Dan Slagan. Dan is a CMO at tomorrow. Io, a company recently recognized by Time Magazine as top 100 most disappointed in the world. Hi, Dan. Hi. How are you? And Dan has been selected by Forbes as a top 50 entrepreneurial CMO and brings a wealth of experience for scaling disruptive global functions across various industries, both in public companies, and also ventured private equity backed firms. On today's workshop, Dan's gonna cover a couple of really crucial topics related to AI and the impact of marketing and the organizational structure. We're gonna talk about the cultural shift towards AI, how AI is reshaping department and team structures, the importance of top down AI strategy, leveraging AI to compete against larger organizations, the urgency of AI adoption, and then also creating AI councils for your organization. So welcome, Dan. I'll let you take it away. Alright. Sounds good. Thanks so much, and excited to be here. Let me just make sure we're all good here. Alright. So building an AI ready marketing team. Really excited to kinda go through this talk to you today. I just wanna start off by kinda reminding this audience of how important, you know, you are to your organization. There's been so much talk, you know, recently about, you know, CMO roles getting getting axed and being, you know, not in the boardroom and not in the board calls and meetings and everything, and it's just the opposite in my opinion of of what needs to be happening. I'm in my 5th year here at Tomorrow. Io, and we've grown this company from series a to series e. And it's a full blown collaborative effort, but marketing has been able to play such an impactful role, you know, both here and then at previous roles. I've been in, you know, Wayfair and HubSpot and and Gannett. And, you know, when when done right and when the right relationships are put in place in the right process, marketing can have such a monster impact on on your company and their ability to grow. You know, my career also, I used to run my own start up, which I which I sold a couple years ago, It gave me a really good perspective as to how the CEO thinks about everything, so then I wrote a book as well called Understanding CEOs, Startup CEOs. And, the last thing I'll say before I get going is, if there's a reason you think I look so tired, it's because I have a 4 year old, a 2 year old, and a, 5 month old at home that are keeping me up, most nights. So as Kelly mentioned, the agenda today, we'll go through kinda, 1st and foremost, the success of our marketing team, and I'll kinda get into why, I think we've been so successful and how AI has played a role of that. You'll sort of learn how we did it and definitely share some examples of how you can as well. And throughout the course of the conversation, we'll we'll get into some learnings and and recommendations as well. But, Jotun, any questions, happy to kinda go through any of of of them. Tomorrow, if you don't know us, just real quick, we are the world's, first resilience platform, and what we do is we help businesses and governments be more resilient in the face of weather and climate related challenges. The way we do that is we created something called weather intelligence, which basically we translate a weather forecast for any business, for any use case, any job. So say something like, oh, it's gonna be, you know, raining and and high winds across Orlando on Tuesday. Well, what do I actually do? You know, let's say you're a marketer working in the fast food or retail space and your sales go down when it rains because people don't come into the store. We would just tell you, hey. On Tuesday, run this marketing campaign to make sure you get people in the store because it's gonna rain. And we do that across almost every industry. As far as weather forecasting, we do some cool stuff as well. We actually built our own satellites. We launched them up with SpaceX. We're currently sending 20 more up on SpaceX launches, and we now have satellites, orbiting, around the the Earth. And the last thing is what makes us special is we take those satellites. It's our own proprietary data. We run AI and physical models against them. Then as you just saw, we really translate weather forecast into weather intelligence. So enough about that. Really talk about sort of the the last couple years here and and get into AI. So as I said, I'm in my 5th year at the company, and my first day, was actually at a company called Clambicell because we've since changed the name to tomorrow. And when I came in here, there was almost no marketing done. We were incredibly small company. We're a series a, and it was this concept of us as a really, really small startup versus huge, huge competitors. Think about, you know, IBM. Think about the biggest, you know, weather companies you've heard of in the past. Even now you're starting to see, you know, Google and, you know, Apple. They do weather and NVIDIA does what all these huge companies. And how is this idea of how are we gonna put tomorrow IO on the map, and how are we gonna build out a plan? And it was coming in with minimal, minimal budget, virtually no team, and, you know, no brand, no leads, no product marketing. We really had to build this thing up from from day 1. And so, you know, I think before I joined, I'd I'd either read the book or seen the movie or probably both, but this concept of of Moneyball. And number of times, I felt like, you know, the main character in in this, story is Billy Bean. But it's this concept of, like, if we try and act like the big companies and do what they're doing, we're gonna lose for sure. And it really got me started thinking about how we can think about this concept of, like, return on time and how AI could start to play a role in that. But before AI really got off on the craze that it is now, it was just this concept of, like, how can we think about the best possible return on time and think differently against the other competitors in the space in order to build our brand? And so where AI really came into play for me, you know, everyone kinda has their moment with AI, and this is my moment. This was we were, putting a press release out, and, you know, the night before the press release goes out, we sort of realized, oh, we we need an image for the press release and something to go on the website. And we didn't have time to go to our designer to create something because they were located in a different time zone. And so, you know, we could've gone to Unsplash or some stock footage, and and figure something out, but I think Midjourney had just had just launched. And I went there real quick and I ran a quick couple couple prompts and we got back this image. And this image was one that we ended up using for our blog post. It is a very, very small example, but to me, it was the first time that our team realized how quickly we can use AI to solve for something and move much faster and not need to rely on maybe a previous way of doing things. And that for me was when I was like, oh my gosh. This is where our team needs to go immediately. And this is, again, this is, you know, 2 2 years ago probably. And what really, really stuck out to me was that, you know, selfishly, AI played perfectly into my strengths. I have a lot of weaknesses, but the two things that I do have strength in is the ability to move fast and be creative. And AI unlocks potential across both of those things and really brings together to help teams move in a really, really impressive way. So to me, this combination of speed and creativity really got me excited. And the cool thing is that, you know, AI's speed and capabilities level the playing field so we can compete against any company now. It doesn't matter if you have 5 more people on your marketing team or a 1,000 more people, like, we can compete with you. And from there, it's all about being creative and it's that concept of creativity wins. So we've built a bunch of things over the past couple years in terms of building out our go to market. You know, we from a branding standpoint, as I mentioned, the company used to be called ClimaCell. We changed the name to, Tomorrow IO. We become the category leader in that concept I talked about called weather intelligence. We do 40 global events a year. We've, created our own documentary that we call 6 years to launch. We created, our own annual conference called ClimaCon that started with, you know, a couple hundred people joining and then a 1,000 and then 2,000. We've kept building it and building it and building it year over year. And you can see we've had speakers from, you know, the White House, ABC, Good Morning America, Alex Hahnnel, JetBlue, some really, really great speakers. And we've we've full blown blitzed up the company in terms of PR and putting us on the map. Additionally, on the performance side, we've built traffic on the website, you know, above a 1000000 visits per month. We have a freemium, option as well. While we usually sell to enterprise and government, you can sign up for our free API. You know, we have, I think now we yeah. A 100,000 actually, way more than 50, a 100,000 people using our API. We get about a 1000, sign ups per week organically. We've 10 x the number of leads, targeting, like, the Fortune 1000 level, built out an SMB channel, and we support 3 different sales divisions globally, as as a marketing team. On the product marketing as well, we've built out full, features and functionalities there. We have all the general stuff you'd expect in a weekly product marketing. We have a sales enablement hub that supports 20 different verticals. The nice thing about our product, it's kinda both a blessing and a curse from a marketing standpoint, but, you know, airlines use us, energy companies, professional sports leagues, on demand, technology. Every single industry impacted by weather is leveraging TMRO. IO. We do at least one major customer story, you know, on a monthly basis. We have a customer council. We do strategic partnerships with Google and NVIDIA and a bunch of others. And so there's so much going on, that we've actually built. And the result of all this work, which AI has been hugely beneficial for us, is that we're completely dominating mindshare within our industry. We're, seen as the leader, you know, with the Forrester Wave Reports and all that kind of stuff. I I struggle to think in, media outlets that we haven't been featured in now. We seem to be in a tier 1, outlet all the time. We have stories with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the White House. So that's been really effective. You know, the we we got selected as sort of a top 50 marketing team by Forbes earlier this year. The reason I like to include this is because not because I'm perfect or I'm great as a CMO, but more because AI has allowed us to be here. And if you look at all the other companies that were on that top fifty list, those are all household names that we've heard of for years years years. And while Tomorrow. Io is a very well known company within our space, we're obviously not at the level of, you know, North Face or Amazon, of course. But AI has allowed us to compete with any of these companies and feel really good about our ability to be a a a top marketing team with within the world. And, you know, finally, we're also named a time 100 most influential company earlier this year. So just the ability to win at the largest possible stage, again, in my opinion, all unlocked by this concept of implementing AI from start to finish across your marketing efforts. The cool thing about it is that all this is being done by a team of 4 people, and we have about a 6 figure budget, annually. And so you might be thinking, like, wow. How are you guys doing all that? Which is 4 people. One, we have an amazing group of of folks here, but also our ability to implement AI across the right type of procedures, which I'll get into next. We've not always looked like this, just so you know. We did you know, people ask, like, how did you get here? And we started with that one example that I gave you, and we very, very quickly scaled out. And so that's kinda what we'll we'll get into. But, really, there's sort of, like, 10 things that I wanna talk about. There's a 1,000,000 things that I could have talked about today, but I've really tried to boil it down to, I'll say, like, just 10 things that we focused on or at least as I think across the last couple years, what have been the things that have mattered the most? These are probably the the ones that that come to mind. So first and foremost, as far as implementing AI and scaling it out across your company, you know, this has been something that I partner with my CEO on from day 1. And if my CEO is not gonna be on board and help us push this thing from the top down, there's just no way that I'd be as passionate about AI. Because marketing can do so much with AI, but we also need to integrate and work with other departments. And if they don't feel compelled to integrate or innovate with AI in their own, you know, procedures or the way they go about doing things, then we will not be as successful as marketers. So making sure that our CEO and the marketing team were fully aligned on what we can actually do, the capabilities here, and push out across the entire organization was extremely important. And so AI lives with the CEO. It lives with with the management team. It's something that all of us as a management team are talking about on a weekly basis at our stand ups and our strategy meetings, and we've started to build out what we call little, like, nucleus teams across the company, around, you know, how can we use AI to do x, to increase lead gen, or to improve efficiency, or to reduce costs. And we almost have these little subgroups outside of the management team that go out across the company and try and solve and improve our our our operations. And from there, we get into, you know, really nitty gritty things. Like, within lead gen, how can we use AI within paid or organic or events or offline ads or with branding? And so each one of those little expansion teams has a different AI strategy about it. But it all starts with the CEO. It all starts with the management team and making sure that from the top down, this is something that the company really, really wants to and really feels like they need to be focusing on. 2, and this is something that we struggled with, is is AI an OKR or not? It does it live at the objective level? That was really what we what we wanted to talk about as a company. You know, we we usually have 3 core objectives as a company. And I think, to be honest, once the marketing team a little while ago really started to to move quickly with with AI, the rest of the company started to take take notice. And it quickly got into the management team of, well, should this be a 4th objective that we add? And we ended up deciding after a lot of debate that it was not going to be an objective, but we also felt like it was too important to to, you know, just be a a key result or something like that. So we sort of did a hybrid of where AI lives, and it kinda lives in in both objective and KR. And what we do is we ask our department managers and our team leads to tell us, okay. We have these objectives. We have these key results we need to hit. How are you going to use AI in order to meet your goals? And we wanna see how AI is baked into your plan in the short term, medium term, and long term to make sure that you're thinking about it in in the right way. And if you come back to us and you say, look. AI is not really applicable here or this is where we're going to use it, but here's where we're not going to use it. That's okay. But we just wanna make sure that it's something that's at the forefront across all the different ideas and things we need to do as as a company. I think looking at it through this lens has actually been really, really helpful because it it's always the start of the conversation. And so to us, again, not quite objective, but really living as that hybrid, place for us as a company has has been helpful. Really having a sense of, like, why we're using it and what we're actually solving for has been really important as well. You know, the last couple years have been kinda crazy, with, you know, scale offs and scale downs. You know, every industry, every company is in sort of a different predicament based on what's going on, you know, in the economy or the fundraising world or everything else. But, you know, there's really 3 ways that you would think to use AI or, like, three reasons. You know, one is maybe you're going through headcount reduction and you need to use AI to make sure that you can sort of, you know, do more with less or at least do the same with less or something. You know? 2 is you are growing, but you're not hiring. But, again, you need to improve your numbers. And so how can you use AI to sort of supplement what in the past might have been adding new headcount, but you're not able to do that right now? And then the third option is, alright. We are growing and we are able to hire. And so how are we gonna make sure that AI is baked into our scale up plans? And how do you make sure that as we build the team and bring in more folks that they're coming into a nice system and there's not just a bunch of one off things happening that that we can't really keep track of over time? So making sure that you can first kinda take a step back and say, alright. We know why we're doing this, and let's go from there, has been pretty important for us as well. And we've also really started to build out business cases. And so here's just two examples. You know, 2 different ways that we've thought about using AI, and these numbers are are made up. They're just meant to be sort of an example. But one could be, you know, using AI to save time. You know, we've all talked about AI being this thing that if we can start to automate some of the more menial tasks, we'll free up time to do the more strategic things. And so we've built out internal case studies. Example would be, you know, we run email marketing here at the company. Let's say there's, you know, 9 things that need to happen in order for an email to go out. How many of those things are we able to automate based on AI? And what percentage of total time does that represent? And how much time can we then give back to our team in order for them to do x y z other things? The other way to think about it is specifically, you know, more numerical based on cost savings. So, again, if it's gonna cost, you know, whether it's a vendor or a resource or a software that you're using, x amount because it used to take you this much time or this many credits or whatever. Now that you can start to use AI, you know that you can start to reduce your cost by x, and so there's direct cost savings. You know, we've also run the analysis where we can increase efficiency or we can increase lead gen or we can get more ROI, whatever it might be. But being able to build out some of these case studies and present them at sort of the management level has also been something that sort of helped the marketing team gain the trust of the entire company and the management team around being able to really use AI. I won't quite say at at free will, but within sort of a very fast moving, controlled environment. Next, and I wanna bring, actually, Kelly who's, on the marketing team here to kinda talk about this concept of expecting more with less. And, you know, it's funny. Kelly's been here for a while and has done such an amazing job helping us build out marketing. And when AI came in and we had this concept of doing more with less, you know, it the idea here wasn't, hey, Kelly and the team. I need you all to be, you know, working nights and working weekends and working more hours. It's that's that's not what we're doing here. The idea was how can we start to use AI to really, really change the way that we think and the way that we act and the processes that we put in place to get on a 10 x what we're doing and and punch it up like that. So, Kelly, I hope you're there. I am indeed. Yeah. Awesome. Alright. Sounds good. Kelly is just closing on house, so she's coming from inspection right to here. So thanks for being here, Kelly. But I'll turn it over to you kinda to to talk through how you thought about sort of, you know, life before AI, life life after, and and go from there. Definitely. Yeah. First off, hey, everyone. Thanks so much for having me today. As Dan said, I am Kelly Peters, director of marketing here at tomorrow. Io, and I've been here for, I think, about two and a half years now. So I just wanna first off say that I can, validate everything Dan just said, though it sounds like a ton that you'd never expect for a 4 person marketing team. We actually have achieved. I am not a paid actor or AI simulation, though I hope to be one day. We really have done all of that. And like we're talking about today, I mean, a huge part of it integral to it has been AI. And I've gotten a front row to see to see really the before how we are operating and how we've integrated it in the after. And so, yeah, really excited to pull back the curtain for you all on just one of those processes that we've really found to be transformational for us, on the video production side of things. So before I dive in here and take you through what that was like before and then after AI, I just wanna kind of give a disclaimer that, real life video production is very much still a part of our strategy. And And in fact, if anything, this process that I'm gonna take you through today has allowed us to pour more energy and resources into those really authentic meaty pieces like the documentary that Dan, described. So again, if anything, this is just allowing us to scale and do more of the fuel for our content strategy and the overall marketing machine each day so that we're able to then really get strategic with those bigger video production pieces. So, just a disclaimer for any video people out there in the audience, we definitely are still working with you and now we're excited to do more. So let me take you through though what you're seeing here on the screen. So on the left hand side is the before workflow First off, we were you know hearing from the company someone on the go to market team that they needed a video. So maybe it was for a specific industry we met with them talked to them on a Zoom, I'm furiously taking notes, asking them questions about the pain of the the market we're going after, what the objective for the video is, and then after that, you know, I'm going out and doing my own research on the Internet and maybe talking to our product team to understand know, where we fit, but that you know, all all very manual. After I did that information gathering, I'm going to actually manually write the script, you know, just coming from my brain, tweaking it, going back to those stakeholders, maybe running it by our video guy because he's the expert in this stuff. And then the biggest lift then is actually going ahead and planning the video shoot. So, you know, coordinating schedules, making sure we have a conference room free in the office, maybe even finding another location so it looks really sharp, and then actually going to film. And as we all know, probably if you've been on a film shoot that itself takes takes a bit, unless you are Dan Sliggan and can just do one take, you're probably doing a couple of different takes. You might, you know, pivot during the film day, that all takes time. And then after in post production, you're getting out the umms and likes, you're, you know, making sure it looks exactly like you want, maybe you're going and getting extra B roll at that point even, and then finally, you have the asset and we would go ahead and distribute it and I'd be creating, you know, custom copy per channel for email, like Dan talked about for ads that somewhere video is performing really well for us going in and doing everything manually. So that was like in a really, high level snapshot of what that was like before AI. On the right side is after AI, what this is transformed into. And really it's turbocharged each of those steps that I mentioned, if not, really, like, consume them altogether in a in a time saving way. So we still are doing the information gathering. I'm still talking to those go to market team members, but AI is listening to the transcript along with combining it with data from, like, our CRM, let's say. We use Gong. Also going out using different tools like Copy AI, if you've ever heard of it, and automatically getting research and intel on the topic and pulling that all together for me. So right out of the gate, using AI to just get everything and listen to transcripts. What I'm doing then is plugging that into an existing prompt that I now have that knows our brand, knows our use cases, and I know understands how we like to position ourselves in scripts, pushes that out automatically. I've basically done nothing but press some buttons at that point and usually have a script that's pretty good. I then edit it, and I actually speak to a document. This has been an unlock for me recently. I talk to a document and tell it what I think could be better or worse with the script. I plug that back in, and that saves me some time on editing the script if I need to. Once I have the script, this is the coolest part recently, we now have an Ai Avatar of Dan here. We have named it Aiden I can't take credit for that, but Ai Dan's incredible name just had to mention that. And we use a tool called HeyGen right now. I think there are a bunch of them popping up, but for what it's worth, we really like, Hey, Jen. Plug the script in, and what we get out is Dan standing in our office. It's using footage from a previous shoot. He looks great. The composition of the shot is great, and it's really good. It's him saying the script we just developed. Sometimes there's some strange things, hand gestures, his mouth doesn't match up. So we then use some tools to put, b roll over that. And even those tools are Ai it's you know the mid journeys of the world runway automatically create stuff put that over the the weird parts of Aden. And then that's basically it for the video itself We get that. And then even in the distribution process, that's also powered by AI now. So we're using, native AI now in places like HubSpot if if anyone's tried that yet, Zoom info even has an AI assistant now to pull the lists. So even once we plug it into the funnel, we're using AI. I've tried to quantify a time savings last night. I really thought about it. I'd totally be making it up, but I can just tell you that what you see on the left is literal weeks compared to hours on the right. So that's kind of the nitty gritty process and then here, just because I'm always curious when I hear these things, this is the actual stack that we're using to accomplish all of that. So it's a combo of a few different tools at each of the stages. A couple that I'll point out would be, yeah, copy dotai. That's when we got recently really good for pulling, like, the latest earnings calls and synthesizing information. Claude is, I'd say, one of my best friends now throughout the day, And then HeyGen is the one for the, AI avatars. Midjourney, our designers starting to lean in more to that. And also runway, we can get basically stock footage custom made now. So this is the whole stack. With this will be sent to you again don't worry about like jotting down those tools or reach out if you're curious but they've been really integral for us. And then this quote from Ruth favela she's our Ai marketing manager on the team, I think, really sums this up nicely. You know, it's not that AI is mimicking other tools or trying to replace anyone or anyone thing. It's just enabling us to expand our impact, increase our quality, allow us to focus more on those big strategic pieces like I mentioned, and just really punch above our weight like we're talking about as a team of 4. That's awesome. Yeah. If anyone has questions, please reach out. I love talking about this stuff if you can't tell, and I've probably got over my time. So thanks for having me. No. That was awesome, Kelly. Thanks so much. So that's just one example, as you can kinda see, and I'll get into, you know, all the different areas of marketing where we're plugging it in. But you can just see the type of process that we're setting up specifically within video creation and distribution. And just think about all the different aspects of marketing, where you could plug in that type of of of a process. So we'll come back to that a little bit more. So I wanna keep going in terms of the things that have been really most helpful. One thing is that all the things that Kelly just mentioned, you know, we wouldn't be able to do that stuff without being able to integrate with with other teams. Both from, you know, a go to market standpoint, we're extremely well aligned with our sales team, with our customer team. We don't really operate like a marketing team and a sales team and a customer team. We really operate like a go to market team. And we're focused on missions. We're focused on shared goals and making sure that we have full integration across those teams and a full understanding to make sure that everyone understands how AI can help us. So we are helping educate, you know, the customer team, the sales team on how we're using AI. That process that, you know, Kelly just went through, the sales team is fully aware of that, and it gets them really excited to then come back to us and ask us, hey. We saw this big weather event happened last week, and I'm trying to go after this specific company to get them on a call. Could we figure out something with AI? They're like, oh, great idea. Yeah. We can. And all of a sudden, as Kelly said, it's something that takes weeks has now turned into hours, and we can start to react to real events going on in the world in in real time. The other thing is removing detractors from your process. I think here at tomorrow, especially, you know, early on when we started to build up AI, we had so many people that would, you know, question what we were doing, maybe a little bit skeptical, and just didn't like, you know, change. And we certainly heard all the feedback, and we wanted to make sure we do things in, you know, the right way and ethically and morally. And and, you know, we we certainly have those checks and balances. But at the same time, you know, when you're trying to drive a behavioral change across an organization, you're really focused on, you know, positivity and learning and moving fast. And so, you know, the types of people that initially got started here and were able to be successful were the ones that were more excited about things. And not to say that they weren't thinking about what could go wrong and why and make sure that we recovered, but, really, we're not here you know, we we believe in AI. It's where we're going. If you're not gonna get on that train with us, then it's gonna be a lot harder for you to to be here. And so that was made, exceptionally clear when we really start to to do that push. We also started to use AI, you know, the way that we do go to market. So, again, I talked about integrating teams. We partnered up with our our product team and said, you know, hey. Why don't we build our own weather and climate AI chat that, you know, our customers can use or we can show prospects? And so, you know, on the left here, the the animation that you're seeing is an AI summary, where someone can come in and basically start to chat with AI and ask them and say, you know, hey. I'm thinking about we have a major movie studio that that uses us. They'll do things like, hey. Next summer, I need to film in Europe during these 2 weeks. It definitely cannot rain during the shoot. Where should I be filming? And, you know, you'll have a conversation with with the AI. And so we're helping our customers save time and save money, by being able to do those types of things. We're also helping them be safer and more empowered because, again, they can really interact and, you know, converse with the tool as opposed to only having a software dashboard. They can ask questions, and they can really get a sense of of what's going on specific for their operation. And then within lead gen, you know, we can set up a prospect on our own AI real quick. There's almost a daily PR opportunity or story that we could plug ourselves into based on any weather event that happened in the world recently, we have automatic prompts that just say, this was the most popular weather event yesterday. These are the industries that would have affected. This is the location. This is how weather affected it. This is how tomorrow could have potentially mitigated that risk. That's really, really helpful for any type of of of outreach, for lead gen alerts. You know, Kelly mentioned the earnings calls. We used to listen to that manually. Now we basically just take every single earnings call automatically, plug it into a tool like Cloud or something based off our target lists, and then we parse out which earnings calls mentioned whether and why, who talked about it, what strategic initiative it aligns to. And, again, either same day or next day, we have a full go to market strategy for each one of those leads, whether it's something as simple as just an email campaign coming from a rep or specifically ads that are now targeting all the job titles within that organization based off what was talked about yesterday on the earnings call. Just being able to do that, again, keeping in mind that we're a 4 person team with a 6 figure budget, is incredible, and that allows us to operate like a team that's, you know, a 100 plus people with, you know, tens of 1,000,000 in in in budget. So that's something that just it's really, really cool. The one thing I'll say, because I do think it's getting very popular for every company to build some AI of of their own, is that I think the idea of building an AI, you know, tool, you know, eat your own dog food, go to market, whatever, is gonna sort of become a a commodity a little bit. And so really making sure that you know what makes your AI unique is very important and making that clear. So for us, you know, any weather company in the world could create an AI chat. It's not that hard to do. But ours is the only one that pulls from our specific weather data from our satellites and space and our proprietary data. So we know that the recommendations being given are way more accurate and timely and precise based on the questions being asked. And for us to be able to market that and show that, sure, you can have another weather AI chat, but the answers are gonna be, you know, a fraction of what you're gonna get with ours, and here's why. It's all about our proprietary data. Like, there's a real moat there, and there's real value. And so being able to make sure you understand, you know, if you are using AI in in your go to market or marketing program, why it is unique and what what really differentiates it from anything else in in the market. This is a a really one that I'm excited to talk about. You know, Kelly talked about Ruth, but the concept of assigning an AI pro for your team, for your company, you can even do an AI team as well. But someone that is, to some degree, responsible for staying up to date on all things AI, helping train your employees, educate your customers, Every part of AI at the at the organization to some degree is sort of run through run through Ruth at at some point. And it's an interesting story because the way we hired Ruth was, you know, we had open headcount, and we were planning to hire a content person, sort of a jack of all trades content person. And I was sitting in my management meeting one day, and I heard the sales team say, you know, we're really having this struggle. We need another rep to come in and focus on this industry. And I ended up giving my head count up because I said, you know, the the impact of that person on the sales team is gonna be greater than us hiring a content person. And I went back to the marketing team and told them, hey, guys. We we lost our head count. I gave it up. I gave it up. And everyone was disappointed, myself included, but I sorta said, you know, I just couldn't justify it. And I feel like at the company level, we need to figure out a more impactful position or person that we wanna bring on. And so that's when we really started to put our heads together, and we created this position of an AI marketing pro. Funny enough, you've heard me talk a lot about how much we love PR at this company. We actually got a a national, story put in, I think it's by Axios, that said, tomorrow IO hires, you know, the the world's first AI marketer, which was a pretty fun fun story, and that ended up being being Ruth. But Ruth's job is really to make sure that we know about all things AI. Again, in the early days when we were starting to move AI to some of the other teams, the sales team, the customer team, really helping us with education, even working with our people people and culture team, our finance team. She's been such a nice beacon of of of light and and hope and innovation for everyone to really understand the pros, and and cons, but more importantly, like, how to implement it in in the right way for whatever process that you need to. We also thought about sort of, like, on the AI pro side, do we bring in AI managers? Like, do we change up how, you know, a marketing, team structure could look? You know, you usually have your VP marketing. But in, like, scenario 1, do you put an AI manager kind of over all your different functions to make sure that each function is leveraging AI in the right way? Or in scenario 2, do you sort of keep your general functions reported into your head of marketing, but then you have an AI manager underneath it? We sort of ended up doing neither of these 2. We thought about each one. I feel like we sort of tested each one. We kinda ended up more in, like, a scenario 3 type of a vibe where we have an AI manager in someone like Ruth, or now we have other folks at the company that kinda come in from the side, and they really help horizontally, accelerate what's being worked on or what's being accomplished or trying to be accomplished within a particular tactic, whether it's in marketing, customer, sales, or whatever it might be, and really saying, okay. You guys are trying to go from, you know, point a to point b. Here's how I would potentially think about using AI to do all the things you're trying to do. Here's what I wouldn't do it. Here's where the risks are. But, again, kinda having that horizontal team in to accelerate AI adoption has been really important because, again, as this is a top down focus for us, having someone to then also just help and sort of be a handholder in the early days, is is really exciting for people and and helpful. I think after this, we're also gonna have a a checklist that you all can kinda go through. But having an AI checklist, I sort of call it our checklist checklist manifesto, which if you haven't read the checklist manifesto book, I strongly recommend. It's a great one. But being able to sort of put a checklist in for all the different parts of of marketing or your organization where you're trying to implement AI and being able to look at, alright, you know, what is the task or the process that we're focused on, getting a sense of what's the current state of things, what is the potential for AI once we bring it in, how might that impact performance, What would a implementation plan look like? How could we monitor it? And then how is there any strategic alignment if need across the company? And the 2 that I really like to focus on are, you know, the current process and the implementation plan. Like, think about every single part of your marketing. Think about everything that lives under brand, under lead generation, under product marketing, and there's, you know, a 100 things under each of those different areas that could have an AI process specifically. And making sure that you really understand all the different areas where AI could be helpful and what the implementation plan could look like is something that we focus on. So with email marketing as an example, I know there's more things that need to happen to get an email out, but it's just an example. So here's 9 things. Right? We need to make sure we understand, you know, who we're targeting, what verticals we're in, the personas, the use case. Maybe it's like a about a product release or it's about some news. There it's a whole campaign. We need the content. We need to test. Those are all things that need to be done and in the past would have been done by a human. Once we started to automate our email process with AI, we said, great. Now in green, here's all the things that AI can sort of take over for us, and we can build this once and set it to autopilot. So now we've reduced the number of things that need to happen on email by almost half, and that's great. We can then go apply it to all the different things. But, again, sort of having a checklist on a step by step, this is something that I still don't see most teams being able to do across all the different functions of marketing because it's really hard. And as you're going through your type of checklist, really thinking about, you know, what is the goal? Is it about, you know, well, we have to do more with less, or we're trying to 10 x our results, or we just wanna be more efficient. You know, is this something that the adoption needs to be at top down from the CEO or the CMO? What are the expectations? Is it something that, you know what, we are really enforcing that AI be used for this particular thing, or is it more of a balance? And is the experience something where, you know what, this is something that still needs to be run by a human, or, nope, we can fully turn it over to, like, AI Terminator and just go do your thing. Or it's more of what I like to call, like, a managed AI, where you have a little bit of AI, but also some human oversight, to make sure that, you know, at least in the early days, there's nothing going out that that you that you could miss or something. And then having a grading system as well. This has been something that we've really enjoyed as well. You know? And I put some, like, letters as you can think about it. Like, if you're talking about AI with your team each week, you should be. I'm sure everyone is doing more than that since you're here. But, you know, if you want, like, a letter grade of a c, it's like each week, we're talking about, like, what tools are we using, what's interesting. And then if you want it, like, a grade of a b, actually setting goals and running weekly tests specifically on AI. And then the teams that are, I'd say, getting an a or doing all those things, but also actually automating a good percentage of their marketing tasks based off what they're trying to do. You can set up your grading system however you want, but just the concept of having something in place like this to add a little bit more context to the team each week is something that we've liked. Automating your process with legal and other departments. I like this, this graphic. I don't know if it's actually true, but the idea that, AI is, more accurate than lawyers, is great. I actually probably wouldn't use it because I don't want the lawyers to turn this against me, and I don't I don't wanna know what the percentage of marketing would be. I think we'd be a lot worse. But more important, like, making sure that you kinda have a process in place sort of one time so that you're given given the freedom to run with AI and there's a trust. So making sure that, you know, for anything you're doing that's Power BI AI or you wanna adopt, you know, a new AI tool or vendor or something, making sure you guys cover off on whether things like ownership, privacy data, any ethical concerns we have, how transparent everything is, if legal needs to review, you know, contracts, for a new tool that you would use and any AI audits that you do. Building out this process once is painful, I would say, but it's, it's the right thing to do. And, again, it's sort of it's a one time thing that hopefully over time then allows you to be free and operate without the concern of, oh, do I need to check with the legal or other departments? Am I just gonna screw something up? This has been really helpful just to make sure from an exec level that you feel comfortable with with what your team's able to do. Prompt marketing is one thing that I see a lot of talk about, and I just wanted to highlight it quick because I feel like the current thinking is, you know, something on the left. I'm seeing these articles. I got here's, you know, a 100 of the best marketing prompts. Or if you wanna improve your prompt structure, think about, you know, context and the task you're giving it and instruct it the right way and clarify what you're saying and revise your prompts. And it's, it's fine. That's all good stuff. And that's supposed to then feed all the different things that would go into a campaign. And you think about all the things that AI can help you automate in a campaign, you know, the concept of the campaign, your personas, the value prop, localizing it real time, different languages, whatever it might be. And I feel like, you know, this setup right now is kind of seen as, like, advanced in terms of marketing teams really having an understanding of all these things across all their different areas of marketing. But all this stuff's gonna become a commodity pretty soon. And I feel like again, you heard me talk earlier. It's like AI helps us speed up a lot, and that's great. But then once speed sort of becomes normal for everyone and everyone's at the same speed, then it all goes into creative. And that's where I think the conceptualization of how you use AI is really where the CMOs and the marketing teams that are gonna be the best teams of the future are gonna stand out. And you can slowly start to see that happening, by the way. Goldman released, Goldman Sachs released an article recently where or there was an article about them recently where they said they're starting to look for philosophy majors. And I thought that was such an important thing because this is how I felt when you started to understand how all these tools were working. Like, in a world where everything is equal, it's the people that can conceptualize and really understand what the value points are that are not so obvious. These are the people that are gonna stand out. And so for us, you know, that book on the right, I'm sure everyone on this call has read Ogilvy on Advertising, but I would reread it. I would have your employees reread it and really look for the people that understand the points that the book makes or that the points that the best marketers or branding people or advertising people can really, really start to focus on. Because how you think and how you think about what the most important elements of the campaign are, that's where you're gonna start to see the difference in those who are using AI just to sort of, you know, keep up and do the best practices versus those that are really pushing the limits of AI and standing out and really, really winning, across their industry. The last thing I'd say is, you know, sharing findings, wins, losses, but stay positive. We have, you know, a couple different Slack channels. We've done AI hackathons. We have people working on side projects. We've had people, you know, create children's books with AI, that kind of thing. We haven't done everything right. We have built some horrible, horrible things that we've had to put back in the box, and we've tried to automate things that haven't worked either. But she's staying positive and just trying to remember what life was like 10 years ago for those of us that remember even longer, 5 years ago, 2 years ago, whatever it might be, and where things are going. You know, Kelly talked about, hey, Jen. I remember maybe 6 months ago, we looked at, hey, Jen. We thought this is not it's not there yet. We can't do it. And then we kinda shelved it for a little bit, and we had someone like Ruth, you know, keep keep an eye on it. And that's the great thing about having your AI manager is that Ruth constantly says, oh, you know what? Hey, Jen. Release an update. We should go back and look at that. Or, oh, Clay is this up and coming thing. Or, you know, it's like x 11xai or x11ai is this thing that people are talking about. Like, we feel like we're really early to understanding a lot of these products, and making sure that we have a good understanding of, is this something we should focus on or not? But, again, just making sure that we're doing all this and and really sharing. You know, our goal is we'd love to unleash AI across probably, like, 90% of our marketing, because, ultimately, what we find is, you know, 10% of your marketing is really the great stuff that, you know, is your a plus plus plus campaigns or tactics or things. And I want my team to be able to focus more on that 10% of stuff and to be able to automate the other 90%. That's just stuff that we usually end up doing because we have to. And that's what allowed us has allowed us to really go go big, and focus on on other things. So last thing I'll say is, like, test everything. I talked about, you know, you have a really simple, you know, structure to your marketing team. Maybe you have brand, product mark, performance. But underneath that, there's probably 10, 20, 30 things that you could be testing. When all of these things on this slide are within an AI process, that's when you know, alright. I'm start I'm starting to to to play ball here. And so there is so much to do, but that's what we're doing. We're just picking things off 1 by 1, and we're making sure that there's really a a nice process around it. Keep in mind that everyone is definitely still figuring this out regardless of what you see out there and impact above all else. Really focus on that. And for us, you know, why we're doing what we're doing is, you know, our model is 1. We just know this is such a competitive advantage for us. It's the concept of return on time that I talked about. For us, we wanna be pushing the limits because we feel like if we're just doing the best practices or average, given what an opportunity AI is, it's gonna feel like a failure. So don't be afraid to bet on yourself. Be unique in terms of, you know, you as a leader and your brand. We've done it. We've taken big risks. You know, we've we've partnered very well with the CEO, our management team, and we've established that trust. But being able to take big risks is is a benefit as well. We practice a ton. You know? I don't know for folks out there if you think you or folks on your team are using any type of AI, you know, once a day, 5 times a day, 10 times a day. You know, we're definitely at the upper, upper tier of how often we practice. And the last thing I'll say is the types of people I'm seeing really, really thriving with AI, and this is for any department where you're trying to implement more AI across the team, those that are creative, those that want to create, those that want to own and drive something, and above all else, wanna have a major major impact. Those are the types of people that we're seeing, you know, do really well here. It's the Roos of the world. It's the Kellys of the world. And we're so thankful to have them here, but those are the types of people that are really, really driving, AI for here at at tomorrow. So thank you so much. I think we have time for a couple questions, if we have any, but that is it for today. Yeah. Thanks so much, Dan, for that great session. Kelly Peters, if you wanna join me on stage as well, I think there's some questions for you. Angie, mind stopping sharing your screen so I can start the questions. We have about 12 minutes for questions. Audience if you want to head over to the q and a tab, We'll go through the questions and there's a thumbs up under each question If your question aligns with you know, what other people are curious about give us a thumbs up We're gonna start with the most up voted questions first so the first question is from Cynthia to Dan. Will the slides be shared afterwards? These are good references. They can be. Yeah. Either whatever works for you guys. Either email me at dan@tomorrow.io or, Kelly, you all can send them out whatever works. Yeah. Yeah. No worries. Perfect. To get the, the slides out with, you know, the the recording with everything. Sounds good. Cool. Alright. Some from Celia. I think we actually shared this in the slide, some of the tools that you guys are using. Kelly, any any standout tools that you're you're finding that your team is really, really getting a lot of value off? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I would say this, I think, relates to our next question, that it just a standard LLM, basically. Claude isn't the one that I like to choose, but, you know, GPT, Gemini, whatever it is for you, I'd say if nothing else, that is something you can use across a number of different use cases. Kelly, I think I think the one thing that you've done a really nice job at is figuring out how to use each one for specific things. I feel like you kinda fell in love with Claude because one of the first things you were doing was uploading huge pieces of data or huge pieces of content to it, and its ability to analyze was better than the other elements at at the time. And so that's another way you can think about it. You know, you don't only have to use, you know, GPT or Gemini or Claude. It's like, okay. We feel like Claude is great for, you know, synthesizing an earnings call or something like that. Whereas we might use GPT for, you know, ad creation or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That is a good point. One one note this is just kind of interesting. It's something I I just noticed is, for video specifically, if you have a big transcript, Gemini, for example, has a temperature dial now and it's less likely to hallucinate. So that's been a really big unlock for me recently is upload them to Gemini. It'll give you only the quotes that actually exist. It won't make anything up. So, yeah, that's to Dan's point, one for, the things that it's best at. Yeah. And then the other ones I feel like we're starting to get excited about. I feel like, you know, hey. I feel like HeyGen and Runway are at a place where you can scale with them, or that's how we feel. So I think we're really excited about those 2. And then I'd say we're sort of in the earlier days of something like a Clay or, like, 11 x AI. Those are 2 that we kinda have have our eye on right now. Very cool. Alrighty. Next question from Michael. What kind of qualifications do you look for when searching for an AI marketing manager? I think it's a great idea, but the field is so new, and I would imagine there's a lot of ex not there's not a lot of experience or expertise out there. There's not. So we and Kelly, you can chime in here as well, but we started the search in Boston because that's where our headquarters is. We found some good people. We probably found found some great people. We just didn't find our fit. So we, of course, opened up the search to be, you know, anywhere. We interviewed a bunch of people. You know, Ruth did have experience in AI. I mean, it wasn't a lot because it's still so new, but I feel like she had whatever. If AI had been really, really big for, like, 12 months, that's exactly how long she'd been in it. So I feel like she had, like, the longest tenure in AI even though it was so so small. But more importantly, you know, she came in and really helped us understand how we could apply it at tomorrow and help us put it in the context of the campaigns we were trying to run or the goals that we set, and it just made the most sense. So giving someone a challenge on, you know, here's what we're trying to do. How would you use AI to either change the way we think about things or accelerate what we're already doing and just see what that presentation looks like, see what the depth is, see how unique it is, see what your confidence levels are there. I don't know, Kelly, if you'd add anything about the process. Yeah. I would just add to it. I think where you ended actually, Dan, which is impact above all else. I remember talking to Ruth and more than just the fact that she actually did have some AI experience that we're speaking about, she was so excited about the possibilities. She was, I could tell, very curious about what would be next in the ecosystem. She showed me a little, like, mock up of a sample workflow she had already built using the very early AI tools. And I remember after the interview, she messaged me even and said, I just found out about another one. I could totally see us plugging it in at this point. And I knew, like, she's gonna keep us on the cutting edge where we need to be. So, yeah, just more about, you know, impact above all else. I knew that she was gonna be excited and she certainly has been kept us on the on the edge. Next question from Ashish. How have you specifically used tools for PR apart from content creation? If yes, how? Yep. So on the PR side, you know, you can imagine within the weather industry, things move very, very quickly, and your ability to respond almost in real time, matters a lot. So for instance, I will use AI to create, you know, the first 80% of a PR, of of a press release that we'll write, instantaneously. And then our team quickly moves from having to think about creation just to editing. That's one example. The other would be really trying to scour the web or the globe for the biggest weather impact stories that are happening in the last day or the last week and then help understand, you know, which industries were impacted to help us basically conceptualize what stories could we go be pitching or what are the most talked about stories right now where we could kinda insert ourselves within the the momentum. So it's both either around speeding up our ability to get something out or being more creative in the way that we think about pitching. Great. Next question. Were there any specific tasks or processes where AI implementation failed or didn't meet expectations? How did you pivot or adapt to strategies in those instances? One example and, Kelly, maybe you'll think of 1 too, but, I mean, I think the first time around with HeyGen, we were really excited about it. And this might might have been 6 months ago, 12 months ago, something like that. And then we started testing it in different languages, and then we try and had it to other things, and it just the end product was was terrible. In that instance, we just paused. We just said, you know what? It's not there yet. We're gonna have the team keep an eye on it when we feel like the product's in a better place, and we'll kinda revisit it. But to some degree, we sorta kept, you know, our our existing process that we had of doing video without AI. And that slide you should I showed where, you know, there's, you know, 50 different things you could be automating. We just said, alright. We're gonna keep this one on pause, and we'll move to the next one. You know? And in 6 months, again, we'll come back and and revisit it. Yep. I that's definitely an example I was thinking too. Another way to look at it, I'd say that we've adjusted would be in the way that we use individual tools. So take any of the LLMs. I think initially, we spent a lot of time on trying to tweak the output. You know, it gave me a script and it's not quite right, really spending almost getting to a threshold that wasn't worth the amount of time had we just manually written it. And I think we've pivoted it as a team to realize that the input matters a lot more. If you invest the time on giving it the right prompt or speaking to it in the right way, the output, you won't have to spend as much time, similar to what we're talking about about, you know, whatever AI it is, it's only as good as the data that's going into it. We see it also in the way that we use these tools. Great. Which AI platform do you use for CRM analysis for an output in Excel? So with data analysis. I can start on this one. Most recently, I think GPT has been the best for this. Example use case, we have a lot of platform data about how, different users are alerting on different weather conditions so that we can tell what disruptions are affecting which industries. I find that GPT recently has been really good at analyzing it, and then it also gives it to you in a CSV and can actually start to visualize some of the data. Only caveat there is, of course, just from a security standpoint to be careful of what data you put in it, but that's that's my current take down. I don't know if you have a different one that you you like right now. Nope. Agreement. Awesome. One of our last questions. That's an impressive tech stack, I think referencing one of the slides that you had, and overwhelming. Where would you suggest starting to test the waters? I mean, when we first just started using any LLM, so GPT or Gemini or Claude, and we just used it as wide as possible, so just go apply it to as many different parts of your marketing as you can. That, I think, is where we initially got the most excited, and that's really where we started probably for the first, I don't know, Kelly, couple months, to be honest. And we got a ton of learnings. We made huge efficiency. We're able to get other departments excited about it. And I think going very slow with your tech stack is important. It's kinda like a hockey stick. You know, once we built that initial trust just by using even 1 or 2 tools, that's when we started to get more confidence to go add another and another and another. And, by the way, it gets easier to add more as you spend more time in this. There's certainly a tipping point or a point of diminishing return, but, you know, don't be in a rush to add a certain number of tools. Be in a rush to go solve current processes or current things that you're doing with even just one tool to get any type of learning. Because if you're it sounds like, you know, David, you're probably starting out more earlier with adoption. What you're trying to do here is get your company or your team or your boss or your CEO excited about using AI. So don't overwhelm them. Just say, hey. We just solved this one thing using this one thing, and it was probably free. You can use the free version of of GPT or whatever, and get them excited about that. And then slowly start to expand. And each time you expand and go to the next level, you'll get faster. You'll get more comfortable as a company or as a management team. And that's sort of what what we did. So it wasn't like we said, oh, AI. Let's go buy these 10 things and instantly start to do it. Again, keep in mind, we have a tiny team and an even smaller budget. So, it's a it's it's a tech stack, but it's it's actually pretty pretty tight. It's pretty tightly managed. Awesome. Well, that's all of the questions that we have for today. I wanna take a moment and just thank our guest speakers here, Dan and Kelly, for joining me. Yeah. This is a really great note from Michael. Sat through a lot of AI marketing presentations and turned them off about 5 minutes after. You all nailed this. It's by far the most informative webinar I've been to in years, so thank you so much. I agree. Thank you both so much. I learned a lot. And you know audience if you'd like to reach out to Dan or Kelly, feel free to check them out on the top here under the speakers tab. You can find their LinkedIns. But thanks everybody for hanging on for this past hour. It's been great. We have more workshops coming up and more summit events to attend. And thank you, Dan and Kelly, for spending the hour and sharing your journey at tomorrow. Io with us. Sounds good. Thanks, Scott. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thanks, Chris.