Beyond the Hype: AI’s Real Impact on Australian Marketers in 2025

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer Podcast. I'm here today with David Lawrence. Dave, welcome back to the pod.

David Lawrence: Hey, James. Great to be here.

James Lawrence: Mum says hi.

David Lawrence: Dad says Hi.

James Lawrence: Mum and dad are very much together and we maintain good relations with each other and them. So don't be, don't be forward listeners.

We're just over halfway through 2025. AI is everywhere that us as marketers choose to be. Whether that's our LinkedIn feed, it's industry publications at conferences, it's people in our organizations. We. Thought it would be awesome to have an episode where Dave and I chat around what we're seeing around ai.

In terms of our agency roles, I probably spend more time with our clients. I probably spend more time in their marketing environments getting a handle as to their challenges and what they're doing. Dave spends a lot more of his time. With our teams internally, making sure our teams are on top of things, making sure we're bringing [00:01:00] tech into the business that can best solve our clients' needs.

So collectively we get to see into dozens, if not more. I. In-house environments. So I think if you're sitting there in a team of one and, you've got a couple of team members and we're hoping that, I think just chatting around what we're seeing with ai, where's what's real, what's not.

What's working for us, what's not, it might be good for you as in-house marketers to potentially get a sanity check, , as to, how significant the changes are. So Dave, I'll open it up with a question to you, which is, we're halfway through 2025. AI is the buzzword in every boardroom, every marketing team.

Has it lived up to the hype yet? It's a big question to start with, and you have to, you have to answer it in one word or less.

David Lawrence: You can answer it in less than one word. Um, , I think it's actually over deliver. On the promises of last year in core areas of value. I think [00:02:00] on the other hand, it consistently under delivers when it comes to the hype cycle, where when you mention that , it's the phrase in everyone's lips, there's a reason for that.

, There's a lot of, , very wealthy, very clever people who are putting a lot of money and effort into ai. And of course they have to monetize it so. If you're wanting to attract funding for your AI venture or you are wanting to find ways , to make an ID profitable, then you simply have to go big on it.

And that's what we're seeing, at quite unprecedented level. So if you're looking , at a particular tool that's relatively new, a lot of the things that's probably telling you it's gonna do and the problems it's gonna solve. We're all finding, sometimes those things just aren't true at the moment.

It can be quite confusing and disheartening, but when I say that it's overdelivered in other areas, I'm talking about the main large language models that we're using. . Chat, GPT, , Gemini from Google, Claude Perplexity. These models have developed probably at a [00:03:00] faster rate than even many, , of the engineers working inside those organizations expected.

There's been some incredible growth when it comes to deep research and reasoning, usefulness, being able , to get great insight from AI on videos that you're taking in real time, from images, from conversations and prompts. So yeah, some incredible progress actually. It

James Lawrence: does feel that way, doesn't it? We're like most marketers, I remember playing with the tool in 2023 in November.

Percented a really basic prompt, right? Like write a blog article between 500 and 700 words for a digital marketing agency about, , SEO trends in 2024. And then, you know, 10 seconds later I'm like, holy hell, , what's our copy team gonna be doing next year, if at all? , And , then you almost go in this downward kind of trend where it's like, ah, okay.

, It's amazing, but. Doesn't quite nail it. I think now I'm back on the other side of , that cycle. Right. Probably for the last six months. It's like, wow, this, , those saying that it's never gonna be able to write as well as a human, , it's already doing it. , And it's doing a whole bunch of things already where we once said, [00:04:00] yeah, ,

maybe it'll happen in three years. Maybe it'll happen in five. And we've already gotten to the point where it's doing some of those things better than a human ever could. Right.

David Lawrence: Yeah. That's it. And, what that's meaning for marketers in-house or agency, , and all kinds of knowledge workers is trying to figure out where it fits into your own job and your own workflow.

And you mentioned before that I spend a lot of time with the team, and I do, and , we talk a lot about AI and if I had to come up with, , a bunch of words that describe the sentiment of, . Knowledge workers inside Rocket, and I suspect outside of Rocket, I hear all kinds of things. Of course, there's people who are excited about it.

, There's people that are deeply curious and it's blowing 'em away. But I'm also hearing lots about AI anxiety. I hear concerns about people feeling that their job , is not just under threat at some distant point in the future, but under threat , very soon. , And I was definitely.

Probably worried about that stuff a little bit more at the beginning of the year than I am now. I think these massive lifts in the tools abilities have shown how they can make us better [00:05:00] and faster. I also think the natural results of all these incredible tools is that the expectations of all of us to deliver have gone up exponentially, and they'll continue to rise in the real world as people understand what it means.

, And what I'm seeing is a future where we're all working very deeply and very closely with ai. And, the things we would've done as a marketer in the past are simply not good enough. The investments that companies make in marketing may well stay the same, but what they're gonna get for it , is a whole lot more.

So, , I see that human presence with AI tools as being, , more important than I probably thought it was going to be.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's, , it was the year before last, so it was the year before. I, I stated earlier that Chacha, BT kind of popularized and , I was at a conference in Austin, it was in the March or the April of 2023 and.

, The conference had some heavy hitters there. It had Bing's head of search, had a whole bunch of people that had been around in the industry forever. And there was a line which was being, being parroted back [00:06:00] by the conference organizer, which is AI will not replace you, but a person using it will.

And we brought that back into the agency, , at that time, shared it with everyone and. I think we believed it to be true at the time, but I just believe it to be more true now than ever before. And, , we've grown headcount since AI popularized our copy team is bigger than it was. Our design team is bigger than it was.

, We are growing so you could argue Yeah. But if any agency wasn't, would you still be, and , despite , we are obsessed with AI in the agency. We're huge believers. We're all in, but I haven't seen a single job. Be taken by it. And I hear all this noise out there in the marketplace around jobs being shared and things going agentic and whatever else.

And I haven't really seen it. There was a really interesting article in the , economists rather talking about, , all the buzz around AI taking jobs at a basically every data point they can pull together. It's yet to be worn out yet. And I think if you look at the hype cycle. Still not convinced that that [00:07:00] will be the case, but I think we can all agree that if you're gonna put your head in the sand on it, and if you're gonna try to do things the way you used to do it, then you absolutely will be a casualty ride of someone probably with similar skills to you that is moving in an AI direction.

Right?

David Lawrence: Yeah, definitely. , The important thing is that. If you don't have great skills with ai, your job is 100% at risk. , It's starting to be at risk. There's not many employers who are totally clued into this yet, but there are certainly employers who won't be interested in you compared to someone who has the AI tools to be better and faster.

But I've said a few times internally to the team. There's a time coming where clients won't pay us to do digital or creative work for them. If AI or someone using AI can do it better or faster than we can, or both and or both. That's right. , And what that means for us is we can't employ people who can't use AI to make us better, , or faster , it's not. Uh, perspective. It's not an option, it's just [00:08:00] the reality. And I've been around long enough, um, that I, I started off in design just as max were becoming popular. And there was a ton of people back then , who were existing designers and art directors who didn't know how to use a computer, and they thought it would be enough just to get a Mac operator sitting in an agency doing all that silly computer work so they could continue being creative.

And the ones that didn't. Start learning how to use a Mac in their spare time, , simply seeks to be employed. , And this is exactly the same. It's not a tool. , You can declare that it's not right for you and you'll be better than it. , It's a self-limiting position to take.

, I'm actually convinced of that.

James Lawrence: That's right. And like the Sam Altman quote that came out, I think it was probably 12, 14 months ago. AI will take away 95% of marketing jobs very quickly. He got pushed on that and he said, no, no, no. What I meant to say was it'll take 95% of the tasks that marketers used to do.

And then it was quite interesting, like agency, friends, people outside of marketing would say, oh, your agencies are gonna get hammered 'cause all [00:09:00] that stuff can be done. And I said, it's just nonsense. So it doesn't matter if a market is in-house or agency side, fundamentally, depending on the type of client you're working for or the type of business you're working within, different things will get done.

Agency, different things will get done in-house. We're all doing the same work within reason. And AI is, already is Rocket, there's. Hundreds of things that our team are doing every week now that once they would've done in a different way, but now we have AI and we're using that and these tools will be democratized.

All of your competitors will have access to the same tools, and it will be about how do we use these tools to still reach the right person at the right time with the right message most convincingly, right? So that's probably the first big takeaway from today is that's the kind of perspective you need to bring with what AI can do , for you.

David Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. And big picture, I feel like marketing has never been harder than it is at the moment. , It feels every day a little bit more complexity gets introduced into.

The various places that we work, performance seems to get [00:10:00] a little bit harder in digital than it was the year before. That seems to be a constant, it gets harder to track things because, , it's a challenging environment and AI , will not simplify that. AI will make it even more complex. And I, like I mentioned a bit earlier, I think the number of things we all will do as marketers is gonna get really wide, , we'll be doing an awful lot of things and we'll only be able to do them because of ai.

, But, , it's an exciting time. It's gonna help you be competitive , and get right on board.

, And that's probably something that's changed for me a lot over the last 12 to 24 months , is understanding that relationship with humans and AI when it comes to marketing.

James Lawrence: And , what pressures , do you see marketers facing at the moment? Like what are those the big things that marketers are struggling with?

David Lawrence: , You sort of touched on it before, but unrealistic expectations is a huge one. Someone watches a quick little explaining video that shows you how you can do all your persona research in , AI in five seconds and. Realizing that, yeah, AI is fantastic at audience research, [00:11:00] but it's not the whole thing.

So it's that expectation setting, of up in management who don't fully understand the reality at the moment.

That's a really big one in terms of uptake itself. I see one of the biggest challenges being. Breaking habits. So we've all accumulated, depending on how long you've been working for habits, in terms of how we answer questions, how we figure out how to solve problems, and just remembering to start with AI first.

, It sounds like a really simple thing to do, but that's one of the biggest obstacles I found personally, but also with the team, people going about things, the way they've always done it, and just using AI to help with small little steps along the way rather than truly thinking about , how ai, , can solve.

Task or larger problems , for people. I think , that's a really big one

James Lawrence: yeah, in terms of just those first two points, the first one to me is so important, and , in my head. I'm laughing at you and I , with our creative director , in a recent meeting, just talking about, basically we were, I.

Exactly what you were describing, which is like, yeah, but why can't we just AI it and get [00:12:00] that video? And it's , the answer is the technology's not just, it's not quite there yet. Yeah. , And I think we, we take such a balanced approach, generally speaking to what AI can do and what it can't do. But I do empathize tremendously with marketers out there.

Right. Because it's the nature of, every kind of hype cycle or every bubble in history, right? , If you're not buying tulips back in the day or tulip seeds, then you are the fool. And if you're not buying into Bitcoin and we're not gonna go down that rabbit or own, then you are the fool, right?

And it's the same thing. It's if you, I don't think many people have the conviction or the courage to go, yeah, AI is awesome, but. This is where it's deficient or this is where it's weak. So I think that what I see a lot of marketers struggling with is just these expectations being heaped on by sales teams and by, , other executive teams going, well, why can't we do this 10 x?

Why can't we do it a hundred x? And it's like, we can do it, but the outcome's gonna be poor or we actually can't do it at the right level. So kind of hope that by listening to something like this, you are being armed with the information that you're not mad there. There's a lot of stuff [00:13:00] where ai, , probably do you a lot more damage.

Um. Than the alternative.

David Lawrence: , And it's interesting , if you read the AI hype, the stuff from the industry, there's all kinds of jobs that are done automatically by AI now. But when you look at the studies, , of the actual productivity improvements in people using AI versus not using ai, the numbers tend to be single digit percentages, maybe 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% depending on the industry.

But for the vast majority , of research that's being done. You have, an impressive listing, lifting performance and productivity, but it's not a, it's not a, yeah. Run the prompt and walk outta the room, , type situation at the moment.

James Lawrence: Yeah. I , have friends own businesses, talk widely to business leaders.

I could count on one hand the number of jobs that have truly been replaced by technology at this point, and I could count oodles examples of where it's been attempted and it's been rolled back. Mm-hmm. It's just, we're not quite there yet. But I think that second point is so true and you have been [00:14:00] sharing what's working, what's not working, having everyone, , voice prompt. As soon as that technology was available, , and it is, it is hard, right? We all up until two, three years ago, we are all used to doing things in a certain way. But there is this technological change where it's, do you wanna be the person that tried to not do things online 20 years ago?

, 'Cause if that's where you're gonna be with it, you are naturally just gonna fall behind.

David Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. , And in terms of changing those habits, maybe a couple little practical tips will be useful. I know these have worked well internally. , You mentioned voice, it's a game changer.

So one of the things that people really struggle with is creating a prompt that gives the AI enough context, um, and color, I guess, to give you a great outcome and. What we all kind of forgot was that it's actually what we do when we ask questions of each other or brief each other in a real conversation.

So if you use the option in any of your favorite AI tools to create your prompt by voice, you will just naturally create [00:15:00] a longer prompt. You'll explain more about your perspective and the outcome you are wanting. You can ask it to do things like, Hey. Ask me questions until you're 95% sure that the answer you're gonna give me is fantastic.

You can do all these really natural things and you can end up having, a conversation with AI and just that one little tweak. And , you'll start to see the value in using ai. Um, as a colleague, as a really informed, intelligent colleague as opposed to just a place you go to for simple questions a couple of days, a couple of times a day when you're remember to do it.

So that'd be a big tip if someone's struggling to get AI working for them.

James Lawrence: Yeah, massively , whether you're using that in something like chat chip, bt, but then WI ai, which is a , AI. Product that essentially allows you to hit any key, any keyboard, um, shortcut you choose and then it automatically starts recording.

So if you're gonna write an email rather than actually typing it out, it's Dear David, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it tis it up, formats it, ready to go. , Do the same thing Every note I'm ever gonna make, everything I'm gonna put into a CRM into Asana, [00:16:00] always doing it. Voice driven gets written up perfectly.

Would you know, probably halve the amount of time, probably less that I would spend on writing each day. Right.

David Lawrence: Whisper flows may be really envious of executives from the fifties and sixties and seventies who could pick up a Dictaphone and just write a perfect letter. Mm-hmm. Um, I've been using voice for a little while now and I really struggled in the beginning to craft things, using my voice as well as I would typing.

But once you get there, the payoff is massive, , in terms of efficiency. Yeah, I, I love it as well.

James Lawrence: I think it'd be good to discuss. Other practical ways to get the most out of ai. Obviously , the listenership is quite diverse. We've got people whose marketing teams are different.

What they're having to do within their role is quite different. So the application will be different for everyone. But just, . Generally speaking, , , how are they best adopting ai? How they learning to get more out of it?

David Lawrence: Yeah, that's a great question. So the people who doing.

Best in terms of driving themselves with ai. , They've got a curious [00:17:00] mindset, , which , is critical for most things in marketing nowadays. But they also do practical things. They follow people in their favorite socials who are AI experts. . And they get ideas about what's actually working and what's not working from there, I'm a big fan , of AI newsletters.

I've got a couple that I subscribe to, , that are fantastic. It probably one word of warning, it can be quite overwhelming. , Because you are very much signing up for the most part for the AI hype cycle through these newsletters. So choose the sources carefully to balance out your desire. One that

James Lawrence: you, you'd recommend that , takes a bit more of a.

Pragmatic approach.

David Lawrence: Yeah, , there's a whole bunch of different things. , There's , AI with Ali that I found really good in terms , of practical things that are actually working. The newsletters good, but also some masterclasses and webinars that are quite good. There's an organization outta the states called the Marketing AI Institute.

. It's got a marketing, Ben. It summarizes all the news of the day. So again, it can be a little bit overwhelming. Some of the things that it talks about don't end up, , becoming realities , and [00:18:00] that's always a little bit of a risk. Then I'd recommend you find the specialist things that go down paths you're like, if you're interested in AI agents, which , is a really important part of where things are going.

There's , a place called Simple ai, which is, , put together by one of the founders of HubSpot. , And there's some good real world experience there. , I could . Go on forever, but the main thing to do , is to do some research, , and start following people in LinkedIn or elsewhere and get a feel for whether the things they're talking about are of interest to you , and there's great resources.

Whether what you want is some really gritty, practical, prompt library assistance, or whether you're wanting to understand whether technology's going big picture or whether you just want someone to talk about what's working right now, , you'll find people.

Many of these newsletters , and influencers in general, we're not talking about 'em having thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. Their newsletters are literally going to millions of people. , That's where the demand is at compared to the amount of people providing this sort of information.

That's, it's quite something. Mm-hmm.

James Lawrence: That's incredible, isn't it? [00:19:00] And in terms of, . Actual tools, , it's interesting, like at the beginning we were very much testing a whole bunch of different tools in the agency and probably jumped onto a lot of those kind of startups that you've referenced earlier where they explain, a video, talks about how it'll do this incredible thing and you start playing with it.

It falls apart pretty quickly. The guys found pretty quickly that chat VT by OpenAI was the best tool for most. Things. , And then the feeling is more recently that Google probably has responded . Quite aggressively and quite well. Their, , IO conference that was wrapped up about two weeks ago in the States, A huge number.

I think there's a hundred announcements they made at that session. A deep research tool. , The rolling out of AI mode. There's an actual way for people to search in America, some pretty incredible text, video type technology, and I guess a feeling in the market that. The promise that Google had around ai and at the beginning when this all kicked off everyone, all the like real [00:20:00] ai,

experts were like, yeah, but Google has tremendous AI capability and intelligence within that organization. They've had it for two decades. Just you wait, kind of thing. And , Google seemed to stuff up every time it rolled something out. It wouldn't quite deliver. It doesn't feel like it's this, , absolute lay down that open AI will continue to blast through and Google will be, , left behind.

Is that kind of what you.

David Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, of the major players, apple is struggling, , or failing depending on what perspective you take. But I think otherwise, , the people you would expect to be doing well are doing really well in Google's right at the front of that. We've, made the decision we use.

, Google Workspace across the whole company. So we have access to , the paid, , version of Gemini, but we also made the decision to give everyone, a license , for chat, GPT. , And the reason for that was it's really great to use more than one tool. , Different tools are good at different things, and our SEO team just did a really deep dive into all the various tools.

Wasn't just limited to those two, but to , all the LMS out there, , to see what would be best for the sort of things we do in SEO. And they actually [00:21:00] found, that Gemini was better for their needs compared to chat GPT. But for lots of other things, chat, GPT is ahead.

So I would expect that to continue each of the platforms leapfrogging each other. , And it's good to have access to both of them. I'd also say that , it's really hard . To give anyone a suggestion for the tools they should use, because the most effective way to use AI is to look at the tasks that you do, particularly repetitive things, , but also things where there's qualitative benefits of ai.

Figure out what it is you do and which AI can. Help you with it. There's AI being built into almost anything, , out there nowadays. So you really wanna find the tools that are gonna be right for you, and that can take a bit of t trial and error and a bit of research.

One thing I would say hear a lot about security concerns. , Many of them well-founded if you are playing with Gemini. Paid versions of, chat, GPT, , Microsoft's co-pilot. You're in good hands. Your data's being kept, , safely , and being respected

once you start using any of the smaller platforms that have sprung up, . It's [00:22:00] much more the Wild West. A lot of these companies that aren't particularly large haven't gone through really rigorous security checks.

, And a lot of the AI tools require you to open up, a fair few of your settings for them to be able to operate. So , be a little bit careful in a work context about what you sign up to.

James Lawrence: Yeah, it was a interesting case.

I can't remember , the company now, big multinational and their engineer had gone off on a free account and uploaded a patent, and then someone else in the organization , did , a prompt and found the patent was being returned. And it was like, wow, , this is devastating.

David Lawrence: That's really devastating. Yeah, , that's right. And I think if you stick to the big companies. Paid versions, , you'll be absolutely fine. , And that's something that people should do. , And I would say , if you are really keen to get good at AI because you wanna have a job in a few years' time and you're working for someone who won't let you use a AI or won't give you access to paid tools, , then I think you should question whether you're working for the right company for your own self preservation.

I know that probably sounds a little bit harsh, , but. I do a lot of recruitment for Rocket. And . We ask about AI in every single interview, and it's shocks me in, , let's timestamp this in [00:23:00] June, 2025, how many people are coming from companies where there's AI policies that pretty much state we won't be using ai, , or where the only exposure that person's had, is doing the odd.

Prompt to get some ideas for something they were thinking about writing. , And it's not really good enough. So if you are listening to this poll, you're probably interested now. You can improve your skills and seriously make sure you're in an environment that will support your growth. If not, stay there and try to change the environment for the better.

James Lawrence: Yeah. I was listening to a podcast, , overnight coming out of the states and , there's an agency guy and an in-house guy, and that was the first question that his recruitment teams ask of new candidates. Was the first four questions are all around AI adoption usage, to test how thinking is going there.

So can't imagine if you're in an environment where you're not being encouraged, 'cause you're gonna be falling behind, , people in your industry that a hundred percent are adopting. I think with the tool thing, I find it really challenging, and I think one of the benefits of an agency, right?

, You get that perspective of lots of different accounts, lots of different businesses. , You've got that big team around you or a team of 50. We can all learn from each [00:24:00] other. So I really empathize with marketers in a small team. If you're in a team of one, if you're in a team of five, and you're right Dave, like , so much of the hype and these.

Of software that spring up just don't really deliver what they say they're going to deliver. I think , you were the one that introduced me, for the, , whisper flow ai, which is the voice recording thing. And I was like, yeah, how good can it be? And then you start using it and it's like, wow, this is actually revolutionary.

, But for every tool, like that's probably a hundred, , that, don't land , very well. And there is, , a huge amount of investment going into the big tools, right. If you're using Canva, if you're using the Adobe stack, if you're using HubSpot, a lot of the , Google stuff has been very clunky so far.

But , that is changing, right? So I think that is, , a little bit of peace of mind for marketers out there.

David Lawrence: Yeah, I think , that's true. It's a funny space though, based on how Microsoft's copilot works and how Google's integrated Gemini into Google Workspace. I think a lot of platform I. Really struggled to make the tools work well in platform.

And I'm seeing that in lots of these platforms where they're rolling it out. [00:25:00] But I think as time goes on, it'll become more and more effective. But even if you're not able to use embedded AI within platforms at the moment, in the way you want to use it, the benefits you will get from using, . AI as a really smart assistant.

One of the, thought experiments that I really liked the sound of, was what would you do if you had a hundred thousand unpaid interns waiting just outside your door and you had to find something for them to do? , Obviously a pretty silly example, but that truly is what.

AI , is like, , it's so bright, it has incredible knowledge. Increasingly, it's got good reasoning as well. So whether you think it's at the internal level or the junior level, or in some cases at a much higher level than that, , there would be things that you do at the moment that you could absolutely ask a smart person to either do with you or do for you, , or just help you along the way.

Literally turning and asking questions to it through the day, that will make you better . So at the very least, , even if you can't find deep tools that will work for you right now. Becoming masterful at using it as an assistant is really valuable.

James Lawrence: [00:26:00] Yeah, a hundred percent.

It should be the first place where you turn to when you're writing that LinkedIn post or when you're getting the ideation for your content plan or you're wanting it to reason with something or critique something. Definitely the better team members we have in terms of adoption, it's not enough to get the work done using something like chat bt It's then going back into it and saying, Hey, I'm about to deliver this strategy to a client, or I'm about to deliver this organic social calendar.

I. Tell me what's good, but what I care more about and how I can make this better. Or , here's this letter that I've written, email, I've written, how can I make it more impactful? And just using it as this consistent soundboard has, can have such a powerful effect.

David Lawrence: , So a phrase that is increasingly coming up, and I think it's really important people think about it, is AI first. So instead of thinking about. Us all being replaced by ai. Think about how you can become AI first in how you think about things , and there's four ways to think about it and it can be a really useful tool to grade yourself on how you're using AI at the moment.

So at a [00:27:00] basic level, , . Using AI as a micro tasker. So that's where people are starting to go, oh, I'm not gonna Google something. I'm gonna go and check it in chat gpt. Or, how do I do this? Or how would I do that? Or, can you gimme an idea for something? So that's very much just, it's microtasking, it's quick.

, They're usually quite standalone things. It's not very conversational, but. Most people, if they've used ai, that's how they've used it, and it's got some value for that for sure. It's a little bit like, yeah, Googling something or walking around the office and asking someone a single question and then going back to your desk.

So useful, but you're very much at level one. So it's good to be aware of it is , the second stage,, is as a co-pilot. So this is more where you are working with AI to achieve something. So you're getting a little more ai. First, you're about to start off a new project and you'll go straight to AI , tell it what you're doing.

Bit of context about you, bit of context about how you want the AI to behave, and a bit of context about the output. And then you have a conversation that can be really fantastic, but that'll flow through the whole. Project. So it is [00:28:00] kind of a, co-pilot for you. So we're seeing, , a lot of people at Rocket getting into that space.

And increasingly we're seeing clients like that as well. They're sending back challenges to our work because they're clearly working with AI in a similar way. And they're saying, oh, what about this, what about that? And it's fantastic. , It gives us good ideas , and we find that collaborative nature.

With us and AI and our clients and ai, and then us and our clients and a whole lot together is really fantastic. So that's that sort of stage two. Stage three is using it as a delegate, so that's where someone's literally figuring out their complex kind of goal, what they're trying to achieve. They give context to the AI and then they walk away and AI does it for them.

So we're getting into the age AI as an agent or agent ai, which there's massive hype around at the moment, and in some areas it's working quite nicely. In some areas it's breaking quite nicely as well. But there's gonna be real growth in that area. So that's where you start to think about whole chunks of tasks that you do.

And why do you even have to be involved in, can't you send AI off to check something on a, and if something happens. Go off and do the thing that you would've [00:29:00] done had you spotted it manually, and then come back and tell you what happened, what it saw, what it did, and where things are at now. So we're starting to see that in some of our teams.

It's really exciting. , It's gonna allow us to spend more time on more interesting things. So that's stage three. We've got people that are working at that level at. , And that's , a good thing to be striving towards. And then the last one is AI As a team member, and this is what a lot of the AI platforms are talking about, that eventually we'll have teams that are a mix of human and ai and some of these AI will be doing full roles.

, And that's not. Happening anywhere that we're seeing it. So a lot of the hype and a lot of the anxiety is people are saying that's really happening right now. That's not happening in our space, , that we're seeing in a convincing way. But it's an interesting kind of model to keep in your mind. But, , even if that happens for some roles, you've got them as a teammate rather than, , the entire organization that, that human thinking is still important.

James Lawrence: Yeah, and, I haven't seen anything yet that moves me away from saying that AI is a tool for experts. I. Oh yeah. , If you're a great [00:30:00] marketer and you understand how marketing works , AI will step change a lot of the things that you or your team used to do, but you will have a job.

, Same as in health, right? I'm not yet ready for, , my entire diagnosis to go through an AI bot, but geez, I'd love an AI bot to help co-pilot with. A doctor to stress test, , the veracity of the diagnosis that comes back and use that human expertise to make sure that things haven't gone rogue.

Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, it definitely feels at this point that, , it's a tool for experts. And I would hate to have my marketing strategy built and deployed from ai, but you'd be mad to not be using it to help you guide the development of the strategy. Right.

David Lawrence: Yeah, , it's actually a really interesting point.

One of the things I'm finding challenging personally is. Go back to the beginning of the large language models and a lot of the stuff it produced was pretty poor and so it was really easy to flick through it and go, junk, junk, junk, junk. Yeah, this has maybe got something, let's expand on that , or let me go off and write about it.

Whereas now a lot of the options are quite [00:31:00] good, but within those quite good options, there will still be things that, , might be good for someone else, but they're not right for my client. Um. The challenging things I'm finding just cognitively is being able to process so much more information than I used to have to process in far less time.

And the thing that makes that possible is expertise, because instead of looking at three options, it all sound good, but you really have no idea which one's gonna work. An expert can come in and say, look. Here's the three of them and here's the reason why. That one is the best one, and that's the one we're gonna invest more time in, in truly working up and making right for our clients.

So yeah, without the expertise, the infinite number of options that AI will give you, they all start looking very much the same.

James Lawrence: And it is a challenge, I think, even as an expert. We're getting responses in such rapid time. You don't get that ability , to sit and think and contemplate, which I think often is a big part of problem solving.

Right. And everything comes back at you immediately. So not getting, this ability to reflect and kind of think your way through is , an interesting challenge. , and think it's something that marketers probably are concerned about is what is , the macro [00:32:00] impact of, people now turning to chat bt to find the answers to things that they once turned to Google for and

we've done a lot of work on this. , There's a webinar which we put onto , the Rocket website, which we did with, , one of the big trade publications. , We did a podcast, a few weeks back, \ on this particular topic. So if you're sitting in that position where you're like, hang on, my boss is saying he uses chat JBT for everything.

Should I start worrying about how I optimize in a large language model rather than, , in Google, then , it's definitely just worth pushing into one of those resources. And it's interesting, the data is showing that Google is actually still growing. It grew roughly 20%, , year on year, last year worldwide.

, Revenues up, profits up, , search revenue from search is up as well. , So despite the big rise of. , OpenAI and Chat t you're seeing that both are growing. , It's not a zero sum game, but, and there's obviously some huge overlap between the two as well. , if that's something you're interested in, feel free to, to access, , one of those resources as well.

David Lawrence: Actually just on that quickly, that's a tangible example of why marketing is harder than before and why it's getting harder.

, And you and [00:33:00] I are conflicted in this. So as business owners, we don't like it when marketing gets harder because we've gotta spend more money to reach our wonderful audience at the right time and the right place . as marketers and as agency owners, we love it when marketing gets more complex because even though it might seem there's more tools to solve the problem, there's more people using those tools and there's more places you've gotta solve that problem.

So judgment becomes really important. So , there's no doubt things are becoming more splinted and fraction and that will continue. , And that. , Gen AI audience for search is gonna become really important. And obviously already , we can optimize sites to appear in Gen ai, but there'll be paid options there.

Just like Google started off as organic only , and eventually put ads in. All these things will happen. So as marketers, AI is a threat to what you're doing right now, but the outcome of that threat will be more opportunities created for your brands.

James Lawrence: A hundred percent. And In a very simplistic way when large language models AI popularized, it became this, oh, I can just get all my marketing done by the bot.[00:34:00]

It, we have seen over the last 20 years that the more data that we have access to as marketers, the more I'm gonna make every decision based on data data. It's less impactful now than it probably was 15 years ago. In terms of actual funnel attribution, making good decisions, it's more difficult now than ever before.

Privacy is complicated. It, the buyer journey is fragmented. There's a, whole cohort of users that are much less likely to turn to Google than they are to TikTok to find. A provider that is like you. , Bing has always been a pretty small player chat. Your BT growing, how you can rank better chat your BT a bit more connected to being.

The landscape is so fragmented and as these tools get more sophisticated and as they get better, all of your competitors are gonna have them. So the ability for you to get your message in front of your prospect at the right time, , and measurement's hard, , it's much harder now to measure what people are doing and [00:35:00] seeing within.

Platforms like OpenAI is far less clear than what it has been through Google. So yeah, marketing has only got harder. So I almost laugh at the idea that, , a CEO or an MD kind of tapping marketing on the shoulder and going, we're AIing it all. I'll be looking excitedly as to what the outcome of that is in 12 months time.

, And even the idea of agentic checkouts and everything being one click in a open AI before you buy a pair of shoes. Reality , is that most businesses aren't. Not transactional. They're not affiliate. We're talking paths to purchase long biocycle. It's the same old stuff. It's 15, 20, 30, a hundred touch points over many years.

So yeah, marketing is, , getting more and more complex and more fragmented. , Not less.

David Lawrence: That's it. So you gotta start using AI to make it a little bit easier.

James Lawrence: , Dave, any other comments or observations? I think anything that you see that marketers are struggling with, anything that might, , make things a little bit easier.

I. I,

David Lawrence: I think just look after your career. That would be my advice. I know we always needed a bit of advice for the marketer, , but , this is a big inflection [00:36:00] point, , on what's gonna be expected of you as a marketer in the future, and. Employers are still happy to hear vague answers and interviews about how you're using ai, but that won't be the case for much longer, and you are the person that can control that.

So , if your workplace is not approaching AI in the way that we're talking about, , and you think that we're onto something, then I would strongly suggest that you don't put this on your long-term, , to-do list. , You put it on your short-term list and start changing your habits right now, and you'll be surprised by how easy and how effective it is.

James Lawrence: Awesome, Dave. Great conversation. , And yeah, I guess we'll maybe try to get you back on the point in, say six months time to , see if we can get some kind of AI created avatar of you to, , have the whole conversation as the technology, , step changes and everything we said, , in the last 45 minutes proves to be, , incorrect.

David Lawrence: I thought you were a bot for this one. I thought I was the only person.

James Lawrence: Maybe I'm,

David Lawrence: I'll be very happy to come back.

James Lawrence: Thanks Dave.