(121) Vibe prompting, AI fluency, and the new rules of go-to-market | Kieran Flanagan - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoT3ZVhwhk

Transcript: (00:00) Everyone really has a PhD level intern that they can work with for free. Prompton is a sink or swim skill. If I have to tell you that Prompton is a skill to learn, I don't think you're the right person to be in the company. I'll give you three great tips. Everyone is talking about using AI, but you've said that, you know, the unlock is really how we work with it. (00:39) Why do you think prompt engineering like the ability to ask the right questions and guide these models will be such a defining skill for the next few years? There is like a 100x difference in your output if you really knew how to prompt the engines in the correct way. Two years ago, Kieran Flanigan made himself a commitment. (00:58) There's just no one that will know more than AI about me if you're a go to market practitioner because no one is going to work as much as me in AI. Since then, he's treated prompting like a craft, spending days perfecting single prompts. That obsession led him to an even bigger insight. (01:17) Prompt engineering, how you ask, and context engineering, what you feed the model, are quickly becoming core skills that every single person will need. In this episode, we break down his personal playbook for upleveling your own AI skills. From vibe prompting to simple habits, and stay to the end for an unexpected creative talent he's been quietly sharpening with and without AI's help, his first reaction when it came up, I can't believe Brian said, "Of all the things Brian could have said about me. (01:38) " All right, let's get into it. Kieran, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to uh to be on the podcast. Yeah, we're excited to have you here. And there are so many different areas that I want to dig in today. So we'll jump right in. (01:56) But a big one is something that if anyone which probably everyone here does follow you on LinkedIn, they've heard you talk about and it's really that everyone is talking about using AI, but you've said that you know the unlock is really how we work with it. Why do you think prompt engineering like the ability to ask the right questions and guide these models will be such a defining skill for companies in the next few years? Yeah, I think prompt engineering is still like the skill to learn. (02:20) I remember when I first started to really obsess about AI, uh really when chatb came out around three years ago and I talked to this really well-known CPO of Fortune 500 company who was building all of their AI technology and he was talking to me about how he had hired engineers who had become better prompt engineers than the ones they had in OpenAI. (02:39) Whether that was true or not was like beside the point because what he was really telling me was there is like a 100x difference in your output putut if you really knew how to prompt the engines in the correct way and that was 3 years ago. We have always kind of thought about prompt engineering which is the ability to kind of like ask the AIS in the right way for the task you want to complete and the outcome you want to get. (03:05) And we've always I've always thought like eventually do you not need that skill, right? because the LLM's become so smart that they can just do the prompts themselves and we can get into that. I think that is not true today but they are certainly great assistants and but for me I I that's stuck in my brain which is wow like if I really learn this skill I'm going to be so much much better than everyone else and I still think that's how I feel about prompt engineering today which it is a like critical skill if you are a technology worker to be able to understand how to work with these models. that the thing I would layer on top of that is there's prompt engineering and there's also context and (03:35) I think context is a really important thing which is how do I provide the right context to the model so it knows enough about what I'm trying to do to give me a really great output. So I think that context which is becoming its own discipline context engineering context plus prompts really give you the skill set you need to be an incredible modern-day knowledge worker. Super interesting. (04:00) I haven't heard a lot of people talk at length about the context side. How would you say those are different skills from each other? Like if any go to market operator, founder, investor is looking to upskill in both of those areas ideally, how do they differ from each other and how should people be approaching them? Yeah, I think prompt engineering is how I craft the ask to the LLM. Now, we could say, well, part of the prompt is to give the the model context. (04:26) So given the model context is giving it the right amount of information to be able to complete the task at the level I need and I think all of these models get much much better when you can give it the right right context and that goes for all of AI uh we're deploying across across our go to market like if you can actually ingest the right context for the model so it really understands what you are trying to do and it really understands what good looks like it can actually produce much much better results but understanding how to give it (04:57) the context is a skill to learn. Like a really simplistic one for kind of most marketers is, you know, you you when I spent time with marketers about a year ago, I was really into is AI a good writer and can AI replicate someone's writing style and can AI produce something that you could just copy and paste and no one would know? And I spent time with a lot of marketers cuz I built a tool at the time to kind of like see if that was true and look to see how they prompted the AI to create content because they were all telling me it's rubbish, it's bad. And you would go to (05:26) them and you would look to see what they were doing and they would say write me a LinkedIn post about how to do lead generation. That's that's their entire prompt. And there's some fundamental things wrong with that prompt. So first of all, you've given it you haven't given it context on what a good post looks like and why that good post is a good post. like you do some analysis. (05:45) You say, "Here's the context. Here's a post that did really well. Here's the context of why it did well. And this is the kind of thing I wanted to replicate." The other interesting thing here, which is like a really interesting little tidbit about prompt, is in that prompt because I say create me a quote unquote LinkedIn post because the LLM has a training set with lots of LinkedIn content. And LinkedIn content is generally not good. (06:07) It's going to create something not that good. And so, you should not say LinkedIn. You should just say like a great post, right? don't give it the platform because it will try to skew towards that platform. But basically, if they had crafted a prompt to give a context of like a post that performed really well, some context on why that post performed really well, and then the other thing just just kind of make that prompt a little longer to say here are some writers that I admire and give the names and are really good. Mimic their style and it would go off and like replicate that style. So, there's like ways that (06:38) you can make it much much better, but a lot of people do lazy prompt them. They just say like, "Create me a post about this thing and 10 points, right?" And that's why you you put garbage into it, you get like really bad results back. And that's what's happening. Yeah. The the context almost matters the most now. (06:56) And I've heard you talk about AI fluency at length and how it's going to be the skill that I mean is is absolutely central for every single go to market person and founder. So when we think about prompting, are there frameworks or mental models that you know you coach people on to use when designing these prompts? Like you just gave a really really great tactical one. We even take a step back. (07:23) How do people begin? Yeah. So I've had a lot of good conversation with founders who are trying to make their team much more AI fluent. And there's kind of I I always tell them do not overengineer this. Plus I'm definitely on the more cutthroat side. So I want to like the maybe the less empathetic side. (07:40) So I basically tell them look there's three things that are going to matter to make your team much more fluent in AI. First one prompting is a skill they need to learn. Second one inspiration is a big part of how people accelerate and expand their usage which means if you have a shared Slack channel you have people who put the things that they're doing that are working on that Slack channel and there's just a stream of things that people are doing. (08:03) That's actually one of the number one ways that people learn within companies how to use this for their own discipline because they can see how other people are using it. And so that's that inspiration part is really really big. And then the third one is like mini hackathons. So hackathons used to be a developer thing we did right when we were for specifically for developers and engineers. (08:20) I was an ex engineer and developer was never very good at hackathons because it was a really bad coder but can now vibe code which is really good. But hackathons now we can all do them like go to market teams can do them. Marketing can build AI workflows. sales can build AI workflows and so these hackathons where people get together and build things in AI is another great learning technique but to come all the way back to the first thing in terms of prompting I think prompting is a sink or swim skill which means if I am a person if I'm your your manager your founder if I have to tell you that prompting is a skill to learn I don't think you're the (08:49) right person to be in the company because there is enough information to tell you that AI is important prompt is how you work with these machines and every there is so much information out there about them. So if you go to OpenAI, they have these cookbooks that tell you how to do prompting per model. If you go to Antropic, they have prompting guides. (09:08) If you go to Gemini, they have prompting guides. There's no excuses, but I can give some tips for people to really accelerate their prompting skills in a quote unquote vibe way, right? Like which is basically the LLM are going to do a lot of this for you and that's the shortcut. (09:26) I don't think people realize that the LLN's if you work with them correctly can actually accelerate your ability to prompt pretty pretty rapidly. I don't know if it's out there already, but I think you just coined Vibe prompting Kieran. I know. And it's actually what's interesting is right, we have Vive Marketing, Vibe, Vibe Marketing, Vibe Coden. We have anyone who hangs around a lot on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn a lot. (09:44) We have Vibe comein, which is basically people are putting their LinkedIn comments in autopilot and having AI do them. the worst use of AI ever. I don't know why people think that's a good use of AI, but VIPrompton yesterday. Yeah, like Viprompton is like as powerful as VIP codin. I think it's like a really incredible way to use LLMs. (10:10) It's really cool because you have an engineering background and you know now you're essentially doing the same same kind of hackathon setups and so forth but in a go to market context and that's a really valuable skill that lends itself to every go to market team. I know we ourselves we had a little hackathon where we outlined essentially every single workflow that AI would be monumental or incremental in and then we rated each ranked each and now we go through workflows where we build out AI and then for each of those and then progressively you know progress them on a maturity curve (10:42) but the importance is doing it regularly so how do you think about how do you think about ROI by obviously we all know it's incredibly valuable but do you think about it as time saved lead quality conversion lift something else well I think if you if you integrate AI across your go to market there's places where it will actually improve your performance and also there's places where it improves your efficiency and so I'll give you a couple of examples if you integrate AI across all of your kind of email workflows so we automate a lot of the prospecting that our sales reps (11:20) And we can because we gather enough data and data data layer the data layer really matters to the performance of your AI use cases. The better the data quality the better the AI outcomes. Sure. And when we integrate AI across all of our workflows and we personalize those emails to the individual because AI does a really great job of that. (11:39) We see continual improvements in conversion rates. So in that way we can measure more and more meetings being booked for the sales reps and less amount of sales reps having to spend their time to do that. Now, there's other ones where we're building AI functionality for sales reps to actually use when they're selling, right? That actually helps them increase deal velocity. It helps them to increase their connect rates. It helps them to do all of these different things. So, imagine you're in our CRM and you have (12:04) an agent that basically can summarize all of your deal details. They can summarize all of your previous interactions. They can provide you great talking points when you're on the call to say, "Hey, these are the talking points you should hit." In that case, what we look at is if the rep use that AI functionality, are we seeing an incremental increase in close one rates? So, we can actually correlate usage to incremental deals once. (12:27) So, again, we can actually have a good number around that. Now, there are other teams where when you integrate AI, it's hard, it's much harder to measure. So, our product marketing team in HubSpot is an incredible team for adopting AI and they use AI in a lot of a lot of interesting ways. (12:47) It's just a harder thing to like say, well, because we're using AI, what exactly is happening? And they're not the only example for the most part, people are using it to be more productive. But how do you measure productivity? What's the metric for productivity? I was before I was in HubSpot, left HubSpot, went to be the CMO GM for self-s serve at Zapier. And Zapier are a company that saved people lots and lots of time. (13:04) And I saw that all the time, which is trying to say, well, you know, how do I actually how do we actually showcase the amount of time we're saving you because we're automating all of your work. It's a much harder thing to to do. One of the ways you can do is look at usage. Are you actually using these AI tools and just measure adoption and usage and believe that it's getting better? But productivity is harder than a kind of binary metric where you can see something good happening in your go to market. (13:28) Yeah. Unless you've got time tracking across every single activity, every single FTE, it's it's a bit more and that's impossible. Yeah. And it's so hard to do that. Quick pause. Are you a B2B marketer running campaigns for target accounts? Then you know the struggle. (13:46) Tedious and manual processes, endless delays to get things live, and sales feeling like you're not doing enough. That's where Mutiny comes in. Mutiny is the fastest place to launch breakthrough campaigns for your target accounts. AI agents research your accounts, build personalized landing pages, and scale everything from LinkedIn ads to sales handoffs in one seamless workflow. (14:04) No more stitching tools together, just smarter, more impactful campaigns powered by real data, so you can launch in days, not weeks. See why teams who use Mutiny generate 3x more account engagement. Book a demo at mutinyhq.com. That's mutin nyhq.com. Also in the show notes. All right, back to it. (14:28) And you mentioned just before this that, you know, AI prompting if people aren't interested in learning about it, it's not a good fit. Now you yourself, I know you've written about the best way to actually learn prompting or learn AI in general, is actually just do get your hands dirty, be building. What about for folks, you know, that are looking to learn overall and and want to get better? Like what would you recommend for people to learn more, to do more, to just overall upscale their AI adoption and prompting skills? Yeah, I'll give you three great tips and I have I have this coming out in a Substack post around V prompting and so (15:02) I can't give you the actual prompts because they are quite long and so I can't just like read them out because people will be bored to tears. We'll pop it up for everyone. Yeah, I can give you generally what I'm doing and so one of the things I'm obsessed about is memory and chatbt. Now Claude has memory. (15:19) I suspect Gemini will have memory if it does not yet. And so memory is incredible. So when we have thought about these LLMs, we were like, hey, how do they have lockin costs? Like how do they have switching costs and why can't you just go from one AI assistant to the other AI assistant and memory is the is the lock in, right? Chachi knows so much about me, my results get better over time. But what's really phenomenal about that is chatbt can be an incredible coach. (15:43) And if you actually prompt chat TBT to basically say from memory from what you know about me look at my role look at how I generally use you for the kind of workflows and use cases and based upon all of that show me how I could prompt better. (16:02) So basically show me some of the use cases that I have used you for prompting and then take that use case and show me a before and after prompt on how you will improve that prompt. So chatbt itself is going to start to coach me on how I can prompt via chatbt by looking at how I prompted in chatbt. It's kind of like inception, right? And it is incredible. Now that works for anything. (16:21) If you ask chatbt how I can just use you better based upon memory, it can give you really great guidance just how I can use chatbt. It can give you new use cases. It can tell you how you can use it much much more deeply. So that's number one is because if you are using chatbt and iPod has memory you can actually ask them if you know how to prompt you can actually ask them to basically guide you on how to improve your prompt with them and it does a really great job. So that's like tip number one is chat as a prompting coach. The second is actually the most (16:51) valuable. I started doing this a long time ago is every model for the most part has a prompt and guide. And so GBT5 has a prompt and guide that basically came out pretty recently. Every model has its own prompt and guide. And so what you would do is you would take the prompt guide and then you would tra take a custom GPT who is built on that prompt guide to be your prompt engineer. (17:22) So I have a prompt engineer that's a custom GPT for every single model that basically looks at the documentation and then provides me with the right prompt based upon whatever output I'm trying to get. So I would say to it, hey, I'm trying to do this task. I want to do it in GPT5. Can you give me the right prompt? And it will give me a perfect prompt because it's trained on that documentation. (17:39) Now the other cool tip there if you want to go one step further is I love perplexity. I use perplexity labs a lot. You can ask perplexity lab to create a quote unquote on board and dock for prompt for each model based upon elite practitioners. Remember that word elite practitioners. It will go look for people who have real domain authority in the space. (18:00) Create an onboarding doc and you can use that to create a custom GPT trained on that on boarding doc for that model. So again you have a prompt engineer in your back pocket. So there two. The third one is you can create if you really know how you can create prompts to do self-evaluation and so you can basically have the different models evaluate a prompt and give you edits and tell you how to get better. (18:25) So that's why it's true via prompt, right? I'm using the LLM as an assistant to get better. Now I'll just end with this. I've been building a software with with a couple of good friends, developers. I I I I basically was an engineer. Wanted to be a coder. Was not a very good coder. had got fell in love with vibe coding because I was like I can build an app myself kind of shipped 30,000 lines of code and then realized but I can't really ship production ready software myself so I've got two developers and I've worked on all of the I've been working on all of the prompts and I would just like when you when you think (18:56) of vibe you need to still do work and so the LLM can give you a first draft but you really need to work hard and diligently on the prompts to improve them right don't ever you can cut and paste and it's a pretty good prompt but if you want Great. You still need to actually edit and improve that prompt yourself. (19:13) I've worked on prompts, single prompts for days on end, like days on end, just trying to perfect this prompt. And so there are some tips that you can get much much better just by using chat, building these custom GBTs, and using the LLM to do self-ealuation. Days to create a prompt. That is incredible. (19:33) Yeah, just like iterate and iterate and iterate. Dsh had a co-founder of HubSpot had this really great line recently that really sticks with me which is the quality of outcomes is based upon the amount of repetition you do for that outcome right it's a those lines are in sync that is how I feel about prompting the quality of a prompt is is pretty much in sync with the amount of repetition you do and I if you repeat repeat a little bit better a little bit better you can get you can iterate your way through like pretty great results which is like most most skilled even (20:02) sports is you brain, right? The degree your repetition, the better skill set that you come out of it with. Now, when you think about prompting and developing these like these quite complex prompts that you're working on, first and foremost, I know for, you know, more of the beginner side at least, and something that I lean on a lot is just asking Chat GBD to create the prompt for me, a little hack rather than doing the myself and then trying to refine it and trying to learn backwards. But when people are progressing and becoming more (20:31) mature to the rate that you are running prompting, what makes a prompt system scalable? Like how do you actually scale your prompt system? Because it sounds like refining these prompts like it's quite timeconuming. How do you actually scale? Yeah, I think I can I can only speak to some of the things that I do. (20:48) There are like great tools now that do a prompt evaluation, prompt version and control, but I use entropics console and open open AI's playground. And so what they are is you can basically go in and create your prompts. They have really cool tools where like I can go in and say, "Hey, here's my first version. (21:11) " And I can click a little button and say optimize and say, "Can you make this better?" And it will provide again suggestions to like make that thing better. And what I really love really is the version and control. So versioning control for a prompt is I have that first version that I did. Now I have a second version that Claude has made much better and I can run both of them and I can see I can give it the kind of inputs and I can see based upon the output how much better it's gotten. (21:36) And so those two two systems have worked really well for me like again just using the OpenAI playground and Tropic console. But there are probably a lot of like more sophisticated systems that allow you to scale your versioning control your kind of prompt evaluation and things like that. I just I just have not like used them. Super interesting. (21:56) And people a lot of time refer to AI now as your co-pilot, right? Or your co-orker or your co-founder. Do you feel like now with AI everyone's disposal, everyone is a manager or working in a team even though they were or are an individual contributor? Has that changed the way that teams are overall structured? Yeah, I I think you have what's interesting is everyone really has a PhD level intern that they can work with, right? Because that's the that's where the OpenAI model is. And so that's kind of bananas like you, you know, you used to hire PhD level interns and you they (22:35) were awesome and now you kind of have one for free and you don't just have a PhD level intern for free. You have as many as you want because I can run multiple prompts all all at the same time across multiple AI assistants. I do think it's a new skill to learn. Like prompting is basically asking asking a smart person to do something for you. (22:54) you know, you have to ask it in certain ways, but there's a lot of people that haven't had to work with anyone before, right? And so, like, just working with people and, you know, giving someone tasks is brand new. And so, everyone has someone now everyone has someone that they're managing and that manage that person they're managing is this AI assistant. (23:18) So, that is like how you can integrate that person into your work and start to really think about well, what is the things that that person can take off me? And it does take some amount of thought to do that. And because of that, where should I spend my time to get more leverage, right? Like where where should I kind of 10x my skill set if AI is able to do a bunch of the things that I used to do because I think this is going to be much more important in the future for me to be a master at. (23:44) And and then I think the other way it changes it is like eventually you will have a team of agents internally. knowledge workers will have teams of agents and I think teams of agents the skill you have to get really good at is how to train those agents right so when you deploy an agent you give it a bunch of context basically onboarding like you onboard it to the task and you tell it how that how what what good is but over time you have to continue to like teach it and tell it how to get better and so this notion of having an AI trainer I think is going to be a role in most companies where that person is really going to help train (24:14) those agents to get better at the task over time and has someone that's going to manage those agents, deploy them, on board them, and improve them over time and maybe maybe eventually give them performance reviews and do all that kind of weird stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Very true. (24:32) Everyone is a manager and I've read that know people can manage personally about six to eight agents at at maximum right now. Whether that's true or not, you know, what's your take? How many agents do you think is possible for one individual to manage themselves now and then what do you think it will progress to in the future? I I think the I think it's as good as the back this so I've it's actually interesting I was talking to someone about what I think sticky use cases are in AI and I think the management platforms for AI assistance is a really sticky use case and so you can imagine (25:02) you have a platform where you can see all of the work that agents are doing you can you can train them within that app you can on board them to new tasks so you like a real management platform for for AI like a version of workday for AI right so depending upon how good that is it will increase the amount of agents that you can actually manage those platforms. They're far and few between. I don't think a lot of them actually actually exist. (25:28) So yeah, I think it I think it's going to be predicated. But the other thing is I was me you know I always mess around with building things. You can have an AI manager who manages agents. I have an app. The app that I'm working on has a manager and that manager is the one giving the other agents tasks not me right. And so eventually it's like well how many are managed by the person and how many are managed by the the actual AI managers themselves. (25:58) Super super interesting and it it will be interesting to see if we see more workday platforms for AI agents emerging. I know we're seeing more like hey Manning Medina's company for monetizing agents and so forth popping up. So there's a whole realm of companies that are either emerging or or going to be that are coming up. Yeah, I I I I'm, you know, try to be a pretty active preceded sestage investor. (26:21) I'm an investor in one that I have like a lot of faith in. So that's that, you know, I I invest in things that I have a ton of faith in and that's a use case I have a ton of faith in. Very cool. And you use you touched on your personal use case for AI in few different aspects. Now you use it also as a chief of staff. (26:39) What are the use cases you'd recommend to anyone for the most impact when somebody's getting started with building AI agents? And of course, that's so context dependent to each individual, but are there overall like synonymous use cases across the board of go to market or founders that you found you recommend to anyone building and wanting to uplevel their AI use case? But yeah, I have a couple of interesting like really quick hacks here. Again, I wrote it by the an AI growth operating model that most people could roll out. (27:09) And there's a couple of things in there. So, one of the easy uses I love it for is if you are running a team. One of the looks I like to have is it's called a moment a momentum deck. And so, it's basically there's just one slide. I all of my all of my operating models are like admin because I want people to work not have to do admin. (27:28) But there's a slide that says basically what did I ship in the past two months and what am I shipping in the next two months? And it's the the thing is structured so every two weeks the same deck is uploaded updated and it's structured in a way where it's easy where it's easy for an AI to pull out information. (27:47) So I can basically upload it to my AI assistant and say okay what have we missed? What didn't we do that we said we were going to do? What are the areas of overlap? One of the things I look at is every team fills out a blocker and if they have a mitigation plan or not and I say well what are the blockers that don't have mitigation plans? So AI is the an ability to like help me keep on top of those things is really good. (28:04) I do a similar one for KPI. So that's a momentum that's that's a momentum look which is basically how quick are we going? Are we doing the things we said we were doing? The other one is the accountability part which is like every month did we hit the deliverable we said we would hit. And again it's a single deck. Every month has a new slide. So it's all in a singular deck. (28:24) And the reason they're in singular decks, just so people know, is one of the frustrating things if you're using chat or claude, is you have to continue to like upload the document every time there's a new update, right? So if I'm if I've got my August update and then I get my September update, I have to re-upload the document because it has the September update if I want to query it. (28:47) Now, if you were creating multiple decks like for each month, they have certain amount of files you can upload. I think it's 20 in Chatic T. It's certain similar in Claude. So you'll just run out of the ability to continue to upload like you upload the June one, you upload the July one. So if you have them in singular decks, it makes it much easier because you can just upload that one deck. (29:04) Um and so that accountability one basically was again it shows did we do what we said we were going to do and it's really good because I can just upload the doc each and every month and then I can run a bunch of prompts to say well what areas are we missing on? What areas are we overperforming on? what what are the best opportunities the team have seen that we should take advantage on? You can query it and it can be really your chief of staff in that way. (29:28) So they're they're two of the like it as a kind of like chief of staff/ project management if you if you structure your updates in in in the right formats that's that's one of my best use cases. I love that use case. Um the other one is if I have a really hard problem to solve it's a great thought partner. Now it's certain model like I have you know all of the models. (29:50) So, I have GH Pro, the GBD5 Pro. I can't even remember what it is. Like $200 a month one. I don't even know what they're called anymore. GBD5 really powerful. I don't know what it's called, but but basically, if I have a hard problem to solve, I give it all of the context about that problem, all of the historical decks, everything that I think is important. And it's a great thought partner. (30:09) And one of the things I ask it to do that's really useful is red team stuff. Show me all of the ways that this is wrong. My thought process is wrong. It it is a counterpoint to way you think is the best use of it. Because what LLM want to do is like reinforce you're great. You're great. Yes, you're right. Because that's who they're they're kind of like tuned to do that. So I force it to tell me I'm not right. (30:27) Be critical. And I that's what I love it for because even in the work setting, we don't really like being critical to each other, right? Like I know we have like radical cander and all these things, but people aren't that good at it. AI is really good at it if you tell it to be. Yeah. A humbling experience, that's for sure. Yeah. (30:47) Yeah. AI as a coach is a real great use case as well because it's not biased. It will just tell you like you're bad, get better. Yeah. The the hard honest always, right? What about overall go to market? You know, this is revolutionizing the way that we operate individually like we've been talking about, but how does that thread itself to the greater go to market system? Meaning how we're actually building and selling and scaling software companies. (31:16) Yeah, I think there's three trends that I think a lot about that are happening that I can give people a quick synopsis of. So, I think we're going to have to build influence, not clicks. I think AI engine optimization is the number one skill to learn. And I think multimodal your your entire website will probably at some point transition to like more of a multimodal experience. And I'll go through each one. (31:34) So, forever we've been trying to like create content to acquire clicks and that's how B2B has worked. 80% of all B2B buyer journeys start in Google. like Google has been the honeypot for how we've acquired demand for our our business. It's estimated, I think in 2027 or 2028, 95% of a buyer's journey in B2B starts within an LLM. (31:54) Uh and and the problem is that all of our clicks are disappearing. But you what you want to do is you still want to influence your buyer. And I think the way you influence your buyer is not through blogging. It's through mediums like this. (32:11) is through what I call personalityled growth which is like I think B2B will look very similar to B TOC where we gravitate towards individuals not brands and all of the channels that are still growing and have great momentum favor the individual not brand podcast newsletter YouTube a lot of the social channels they favor personality not brands it's why some of the best founders if you look at Roy from Cluey what's he really good at personality growth marketing a lot of the founders of AI native startups have real spicy takes, have real thoughts, are like really prevalent across social and people gravitate towards that. So I think your content program looks less like keyword optimization and blogging (32:49) and looks much more like media and creatorled programs. So I think you'll have a collection of creators and that's how you're going to market. The second one is that 80% start in Google, 95% will start in LLMs. AI engine optimization is how you drive visibility in chatbt and these different AI assistants because all of the research is being done in there. (33:15) Now, when you look at the data, someone who's gone through an AI assistant, let's say Chatbt, converts four times higher than if they came through Google's blue links. And people would say, "Wow, that's a good thing." And that is a good thing, right? They're much more qualified. But why are they more qualified? Because they've done all of their research and chat and ignored all your marketing material. (33:31) So, by the time they come to your website, they're qualified. They have a couple of questions. They're ready to buy. But you have to be visible in those assistants. And so you really have to learn the kind of techniques for AI optimization to increase your visibility, share a voice in these AI systems. And the third one is multimodal because they come to your website. (33:51) They're ready for a sales conversation, but most people don't want to do a sales conversation. But these multimodal agents that are able to do voice, do see your screen, do audio, and even sometimes like these kind of digital avatars, I think as they become much much better, we're going to see your website transition to a closing mechanism. (34:09) Right? Today, it's a lot of research like we want to bring our brand to life and tell you why you should buy. We all I've done all that in AI assistance. I want to talk to someone who can answer these final questions, but I don't want it to be a human. So I think these multimodal agents, your website is going to shrink and they're going to you're going to have these multimodal agents that can have real conversations, answer those questions and then you can book time with a rep or decide to buy. (34:34) So those three trends which is creatorled marketing, AI engine optimization, website as a closing mechanism and multimodal agents kind of baked in is the biggest changes I some of the biggest changes I see in the B2B go to market playbook. Those are drastic changes for grow to market. So it be very very exciting to climb ahead. (34:58) It sounds like the website itself your laugh bunk there it shifts more to a kind of bottom of funnel mechanism but everything is onedimensional in the sense like it is still feeding the LLM sometimes depending on know authority and so forth. So it's actually kind of bifrocating the process where it's supporting you top of funnel but then it's actually running the relationship side and on the closing bottom file. (35:17) That's fascinating. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. So like use so what is one way that you can increase your visibility in these AI engines? It it's basically to create lots and lots of niche content because the way we talk to an AI assistant is very different than we were taught to like search in keywords in Google. (35:35) And so we like it's like you and I having a conversation. If we were having a conversation about a software product, we're not doing what we would do in Google, which is like best 10, you know, best SMB software product. Yeah. Right. And so it means you need to create instead of like one page that optimized for three keywords, you need to create a thousand pages around a specific like part of your product. And so you do need a website that can cater to that. But the interesting thing is that's the first example I think maybe not the (35:58) first but one of the key examples of where you're building something specifically for an agent not for the human because the human is not going to consume that content. They don't care about that because they've got their answer from the AI assistant and probably your multimodal agent and we're going to teach I I guarantee this right we are going to teach people not to bother have to not have to read for themselves. People are just going to get lazier. I I like we see it all the time when something gets easier and faster (36:22) the person consumer gets lazier and they expect more. So they're not going to go and do like an hour's research. They're going to just ask chat to tea and then they're going to talk to your agent. But you do need all that content for agents and it's like an interesting example of where we start to do go to market for the human and go to market for the agents because the thing I'm interested in very interested in for B2B and Google released update this week which allowed agents to do payments which I think is really huge because no one no one wakes (36:49) up in the morning says you know what I want to get really good at buying B2B software. I want to go and like really figure out how to be great at being buying BDC B2 software. So why wouldn't we offload that whole procurement process to an agent who can do payments and that way then who am I even marketing to and how do I like for like how do I get the agent to pick me right I think that is a a trick that that's going to be a tricky thing for software vendors to figure out definitely I love the point that you made about go to market for AI agents and go to market for humans (37:21) it'll be interesting to see how that actually happens and whether it's full bifurcation or whether it's integrated did. But one area, you know, on the marketing side, we talked about websites and feeding it. The other side is the creative side. Some argue that AI will erode creative intuition. (37:45) What's your take? I think creativity is I think AI makes creativity more important than ever. I think the way we stand out above the noise is human and creativity. I think people will gravitate towards the reason I think creatorled really works. I've been talking about it for two years. But the reason I think it really is going to accelerate is because people will gravitate towards people because that's who we are. (38:02) Like we're not going to we're going to trust people. We want to hear people's point of view. We don't want to get all of our content from AI. And I think AI is it a a good creative tool? I think it's a great creative assistant. It's not as good as humans at creating genuine creative assets. I think the human the human skill to learn is still like creativity that allows me to stand out above the noise. (38:26) So I actually think it makes that skill set much much more important. Mhm. Yeah. And what about reshaping marketing overall next? You know it's crazy to say two to three years. Beyond that is an even further time frame. But obviously marketers should be learning prompting. (38:50) what other skills should they be learning and what is a marketing team fluent in prompts and AI actually look like you know even one two years down the line from now I think marketing is somewhat unique in terms of a team and that it's a collection of like niche teams right like if you're in a sales team you kind of are a seller and you have the same work and the same career path if you're in the customer success team the customer support team whatever the team is kind of the same work and the career path is the game in marketing. (39:19) You could be in the product marketing team and the brand team or the demand generation team or whatever team and they have a niche skill set and their career path may look a little different. and their team size may look a little different. And so one thing I think AI does is probably force marketing to be less specialized and more generalist because AI can do this specialization because why do we have such breakout of all these niche skills is because of the domain expertise, right? It's really hard to be a great product marketer. Uh you can't it's really hard to be a great brand marketer. It's really hard to be a great (39:49) demand generation marketer. You need a lot of domain knowledge. So it's hard to like do subset like multiple of those roles. But if AI has a bunch of that domain expertise, the marketer is like actually I can be a much more generalist and do more work powered by AI, but I still know a lot about marketing. I have like domain expertise within marketing. (40:06) So I think one of the shifts will be we'll see more generalist teams powered by AI able to do much more. I also think marketing can take on way more of the customer uh journey because marketers are always automation for the most part starts with marketer and so we have these handoff points today that exist because you know we have to hand the person over to the sales or whatever it may be but I think as AI becomes more prevalent it may just be that marketing can do much more of the customer journey because they can integrate AI and AI is doing all of the qualification discovery (40:39) AI is doing a bunch of the work and marketers are like managing the assistance and training the assistants and training the agents to to do that work. Um, I don't know where we end up in two years. I think the thing is it's changing so fast. (40:56) So, what I tell people is the most important marketing skills to have are be curious and be persistent. Curiosity, there's never been a better time to be curious. There's there's never been a more important time to be curious. I think it's the number one skill set, the number one trait to look for because if you're every everything is getting rewritten and for me that's awesome. I think I get really bored when everything is like optimization stuff, twiddling the, you know, twiddling the knobs, just getting a little bit better. It's way better like when you have to rewrite everything and so people who are really (41:21) curious will be able to do that. And coming back to the Darm quote, your quality of outcome will be dictated by your number of reps you put in, which is really the people hate to say this because everyone likes to say, well, like work life balance, it's the grind, right? Like the grind does matter. (41:40) As Darm says, more is more, which means like working hard and grinding it out and learning is going to be a really important skill set to have in this time. Yeah. If you talk to anyone that's, you know, been on the other side of the mountain of climbing and acquiring skills, they probably say the same thing of building company, they say the same thing. (41:59) Now, you look, people emulate and replicate the end outcome, but we should really emulate is the process. And in that process are thousands and thousands and thousands of reps. And now, you know, it's never more important to learn AI, but it's also never more fun. They're more fun to be a curious person. Like this was like the world at your fingertips of you can build, you can create, you can learn. (42:20) It's I think the best time to be a go to market professional, best time to be in tech in general and a burn career. 100%. 100%. I I totally agree. I think it's the best time. It is the it is the number one time because you will it's like every start of every it's where like people make their success their careers right like a lot of my career is made by being one of the first to adopt inbound and then product growth and so people have like these new paradigm shifts they they reset everything and there's a bunch of new winners and I (42:50) think that is why it's so exciting because the new winners are not based upon like your title or any of these different things it's based upon your curiosity your iteration and your ability to like really learn rapidly and and really work hard. Definitely. (43:10) And I'm also really interested to see how we actual funnel evolves. To your point of marketing might take it longer. It might not be a pass off. HubSpot actually spoke to that recently at Inbound, right? Introducing the loop instead of the funnel. Yeah. And just how it's not it's not a linear process anymore. The buying process has evolved. So, that'll be an interesting one to see how it it shapes up. (43:31) Yeah, exactly. And Kieran, now we talked about how you learn around AI and experiment, but are there any favorite books that you have and really shaped your career over the years? Oh, I should probably have a good answer for this. It's been like I've been so engrossed in AI for like two plus years, I forgotten what I even read before. (43:58) I honestly don't have not read much at all other than uh uh worked. I I like I consume a lot of podcasts. I consume a lot of like content, but I have not read a lot of books if I'm being totally honest. Actually, for anyone learning something that is shifting as quickly and rapidly as AI, you have to consume learning from dynamic sources. Yeah. (44:21) Yeah. Like you have to and I think like there's a time to consume and a time to work and I I've really kind of leaned into the time to work. Like I've learned prompting like how have I learned a lot of things around AI? I have a YouTube channel AI. I have a Substack in AI. I'm building product. I have a product coming out in AI. I work in AI every day within HubSpot. (44:40) So like I made a commitment two years ago that there's just no one that will know more than AI about me if you're a go to market practitioner because no one is going to work as much as me in AI. And that was like my that was the only goal I had. I didn't have like any there's no financial or anything. That's that was it. (44:57) Like and so I think there's like times in your career where there's like a good time for consumption where you're really trying to figure out how do I master a new skill and there's just time to act. Um and a lot of the content I consume is like in the moment where I'm trying to figure out problems. Well, it sounds like I mean first of all love that it sounds like you spend a lot of time learning and upskilling around AI. (45:15) Now I have a question very important question for you Karen. There's a little birdie named Pan Haligan gave me a tip off, but you're actually pretty skilled rapper. So, how do you have time to learn the rap skills while learning in high? Uh, I can't believe Brian said of all the things Brian could have said about me. (45:37) Me being a skilled rapper, how do I So, so I am a I I all I all I listen to is hip-hop. I used to hang out like in there used to be like a battle rapping forum where you could battle rap people over text. Now I that doesn't exist anymore. If it did, it would be kind of interesting because chat is a great battle rapper. I would tell you the funnest thing I've ever did on like in in rapping. (45:54) So Fiverr is a really cool platform. You can use it for a lot of things. And me and my bros, my brothers who all enjoy hip-hop, we used to battle rap each other by paying this person who did like Sesame Street puppets. So we would we would create the back the backing track and then we would have the puppet rap and then we would send my brother would send like me the video and then I would respond as a puppet and video. (46:16) So, I've done a lot of weird things around rapping, but yeah, I'm I don't I don't think I'm a a very good rapper, but I'm an aspiring. I have started to like use chat to like relive a lot of my youth fantasies and like one of them was to be a builder, which is which is it's helping me do that. (46:33) And then one of it is to write raps, but at the moment I'm just sending them to my brothers and they're just offensively they're just like offensive things. Incredible. Incredible. Well, we'll see. The worlds are intersecting. AI supporting the rap dream and it's all exactly. Who knows? I could have a I could have a I someone was one of my team was showing me they had a person that they love listening to and they were looking for concerts of his and they were like, "Hey, I just found out there's no concerts cuz this this guy is AI and he's on Spotify. He's like really popular and so who knows like I could (47:02) maybe create a little AI rapper." It did inspire me that I could create a hip-hop like artist and like just put him put that person out there. I mean, I have heard you say actually that voice is one of the underrated utilizations of AI and obviously we probably have them in a different context and we're seeing a lot of technology come out leveraging AI for voice use cases but that's a great use case. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Hen models and these new models, they're just incredible. (47:30) Truly. Truly. I love it. Well, you are, as you said already, one of the the best people to learn AI from. you are committing to apply to actually be like the best most knowledgeable person in AI and already so many people are following your learnings and you're one of the people of helping to shape and disseminate information around AI to people. (47:56) So for anyone if they don't already follow you where can they get in touch and follow you across all your platforms and these will all be in the show notes for everyone. Yeah, I think the number one thing I got asked to do was start a Substack because everyone was like, "Hey, you share so much. Can you just document it in Substack, especially the prompts? Everyone wanted the prompts." And so I started a Substack called the AI journalist. (48:14) I've actually been amazed how well it's gone about 3 months ago. And so that's probably the best place to go because I suspect people want where are the viro prompt vi prompt and prompts you talked about. Where are all these things? They're all in the Substack. So that's where you can go and you can get it. The other one is with my really really good friend Kip. (48:32) We do a podcast where we cover this stuff as well. That's called Marketing Against the Grain. So, they're kind of the two core places. Love it. Those will be in the show notes. I'm a huge fan of both. Highly recommend. Karen, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time and you sharing with everyone. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. Thank you. (48:49) Thanks to everyone for tuning in and we'll see you next week.