AI Mindsets for Inbound + Why Most Attempts to Use AI Fail

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Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Actually, I think it was in our last episode where you and I were talking about AI, and we were talking about some of the evergreen principles of inbound. And one of the things that you and I talked about was your favorite word, and that is humans. Can you give us one good humans for us, please?

You are so excited. But we also are having a discussion today about the mindsets you need to go into with these AI tools, That you can't just grab them, you can't just smash generate forever and say, look. I did it. My job is done. There's so much more to using these tools in a way that is smart. So, George, take us on a journey. Tell us your exciting story.

And we would take that m p three file over to transistor.fm, which would then give us a player, and we would swing back to the website, and we would put the player on there. So if the human wanted to read, the human could read. But if the human wanted to listen, the human could listen to it because many of us try to, like, listen and educate while we're doing other things. That's what makes podcast so fascinating. But the idea of turning every article into a potential podcast ish episode for your readers slash listeners at this point was something that I I'm bullish on.

As a matter of fact, I would love to envision a day where I go to a blog article page, and it's actually the text, a video, and audio of it. So no matter how I am or who I am as far as a learner, I'm able to get that information in the way that I like to learn. Right? So that's a that's a big piece of this. So this is why I got excited.

I had a conversation several months ago with a person who works at HubSpot, and I explained that exact situation that I just explained to you guys and explained to the listeners and viewers of, like, this and this, and I get this to get that to put it over here. Ladies and gentlemen, that's freaking time consuming. But here's the thing, that I love the humans that are gonna come to the site enough to apply the time to make that happen. So all of a sudden, I'm sitting there. I'm minding my own business, and I see this update come through.

And it's a beta, and it's around post narration. And it's where inside of HubSpot without needing to go to FM, without needing to go to natural reader, without need nothing. I don't have to do anything extra. I can literally hit a button, and I can generate, the audio version, pick a voice, and actually pick a speed at which I want it to play back, and then I can post it to my website. Here's what's cool.

The very next day after that update, the theme that I use, the person is so on it that they updated the code that you had to have, like, a little bit of a code nerdiness to understand how to do. They went ahead and added it to the theme almost immediately. And so now all of a sudden, you could go to every page and you could have an audio player. And here's the funny part. I immediately emailed this human, and I said, man, is it ever gonna be possible that we would actually be able to have our own AI voice print to do this?

And now I didn't get a yes or a no, but I did get this. I haven't forgotten the conversation we had where you said it'd be great if it would be my own voice. So I was like, oh, this is dope. I can actually provide a better experience to my readers slash listeners slash humans, and I can enable them to educate in the way that they like to educate. That's why this is so important.

so many possibilities. Everybody gets really freaking pumped and excited. And this is where I wanna take a sharp right turn in our conversation. Right? Because the whole point of today's conversation is we have this excitement.

How do we direct that excitement in a productive way, in a way that doesn't create the worst possible case scenarios with AI? Yeah. So, Devin, I actually wanna start with you on this question, and then we'll get to George and Max. Out in the wild, what are some of the worst examples you have seen of AI in practice with companies? The things that make you go, George and Max, what about you guys? What do you see in the wild? I'd love to get some specific examples.

I think there's a lot of, companies taking advantage of, you know, how hot AI is in the world right now and bastardizing into a billion different products that, you know, are just gonna fail in a year or two when, you know, all the search engines continue. They're already doing it, but, like, continue to crack down on crappy AI generated trash content. So it just I it's it really annoys me seeing it.

It's because SaaS companies wanna do x y z. The robots are coming. The world is ending. It's just gonna spit out crap, so why should I even try? And, that's what's freaking me out a little bit because there is there is a set of, employees, marketers, sales reps, humans that are actually going to embrace, learn, iterate, do what Devon said, add humanity, empathy, thought leadership, the the juice, the spice that can go on top of if you have the right mindset around what's happening right now that does take it over the top, and then there's gonna be this set that doesn't.

And I and I honestly worry about the set that is ignoring it right now, that is refusing to at least learn and play and and have a curious mindset and and have this idea of maybe I do need to pivot and and see if it can do some things. Not everything. It shouldn't be the end all be alright. Like Devon said, copy and paste. No.

But what could it be to help you be a better version of yourself, faster version of yourself? How do you take what we are having, not having, but that we're going through right now? And I literally I I am aging myself. But I look at this and I go, man, there there was back in the day, it was the $6,000,000 man. I have the potential to be the $6,000,000 marketer because we now have the technology.

And the people that are just posting content for content, they're living off of, like, 2,006, SEO where they think if they just have enough words out there, they'll exist. But it's like, dude, not

Right? You know, so it's just it I don't know. It's a it's to me, it's lazy, one. Right? But it's also like you just don't really care about the stuff that you're putting out there too.

Like, I can understand how AI can assist in the content generation procedure. Right? Like, for example, when, you know, HubSpot first had some of its AI generation tools, it wasn't writing you a whole article. It was helping you craft an outline. And for someone who's bad at creating content, that's a helpful thing because it's like, I don't know how I'm gonna plan out this whole thing.

I wasn't necessarily great at writing the five paragraph essays back in school or whatever. But if I can have something that just helps me kind of suggest some thoughts on how I might write about a topic, and then I can fill in the blanks because it's provided me some structure and some guidance, that's great. But when it's just like easy button, what do you wanna write about? Hey, guys. Hey, leadership.

Look. I wrote all this blog content. And then you go, oh, I used AI to generate it. And they go, why are you so smart? You know how to use AI? And

We're we're being we're acting as if people are doing this from a place that is either actively deceptive or intentionally lazy. And I think of it more like and it may that may be true in some cases, but I wanna advocate for the moment for the in house content marketer or in particular, the agency content creator who is being billable hour to death by where they are working. And I can envision something like this where they know internally what the best practices are. They know that they need to show up like a human, and then they get in those moments where they're like, shit. I have a deadline.

They hit that roadblock. They hit that whatever. They hit that moment, and they're just like, you know what? I can use the HubSpot content thing, and it'll generate an extra paragraph. And it'll get me out of this very stressful situation that I'm in right now.

Because I think what happens is it's less about an overall malignant attitude toward content in some cases and more like a death by paper cut. Like, this one slice of cheesecake won't kill me, but then two hours later, if the whole cheesecake is gone, my dude, you have eaten an entire cheesecake. Like, it's the I think it's sometimes that done that before. That is definitely not based on a true story. But, you know, I think it comes down to these little micro moments where it can bail someone out of a tough situation, particularly if they are content marketers who are not set up for success in terms of the appropriate amount of time to get the work done.

And it's more so the folks that are convincing people that, like, oh, dude. It's so easy now. You literally it'll write the blog post for you. Boom. Send it out. That's different than, like, I need a paragraph here or, like, have some structure here or I'm under a gun, so I need a little bit of help. Right? I'm calling out the folks who are, like, not using it in the way to kind of because you're what you just laid out is assisting in the content generation process.

Yeah. Talk to me about your Fifys, bud. Bring them forward.

Fundamental principle that you need to pay attention to. The problem is people are looking at whether it's well intentioned or they're just being a douchebag. Either way, they're looking at it as the easy button. What I'm saying is that we have to relook at, rethink, and reimagine when we say AI what we actually mean. And I am so glad that this is what I've submitted to talk about in inbound.

And I am praying with all that is holy that the inbound gods will, for a tenth time, ask me to come back, and I'll be able to have this conversation. Because what we should be thinking about here is what are the things that I'm not good at, and what are the things that take the most time. And we should be thinking about our content in maybe even a completely different way. Because when I start out in this process, I know that a lot of time is boiled into research. Of course, I also know that I'm coming from a place of thought leadership.

So thought leadership is already gonna be an element. I wanna do some additional research, then I can get AI to help with that. I also know that I look at whatever it gives me is it's Play Doh. I need to build with what it gives me what I actually want it to be. So I'm literally sitting here, like, re ripping things out, adding things in, asking it to say things different ways, typing in my own little piece of it, and it and it and it becomes this thing of, like, listen.

I had I told somebody the other day, like, at the end of the day, the most powerful thing for me about AI is it types a hell of a lot faster than I do. So if I can give it the right research, if I can give it my voice, if I can start with a video interview of me talking and getting people to answer questions in the way that we've actually answered them in a good human way, listen, another principle, ladies and gentlemen, of life, garbage in, garbage out. If you feed it good shit, good shit's gonna come back at you, and it's not gonna be this, oh, that sounds like it might be robotic. That might be robotic puke on the screen. No.

Because we didn't start with the robot. We started with the content that you created, the transcripts, the research, the dot leadership, and just ask it to be a typist for us. Like, we're thinking about this wrong.

Right? And then they're we're taking money as they actively do something that's, like, destroying their website and their authority online. That's what I'm mad. I'm not saying AI is bad. I'm just saying those companies should like, people need to wake up and just think a little bit harder. Yes. Right? And and you just can't be doing that stuff. That's the only stuff that I don't like. I don't I don't disagree with you, by the way. Yeah, Max. We agree with you.

I would rather spend more time than pointing the fig finger and whipping people who are just blatantly doing it wrong because they're not doing this themselves the service of actually educating themselves to a deep enough, ability to make a smart decision. I would much rather, like, teach people how to do it right, to think about it right, to leverage it in the ways that would make their life easier because they have put in the work. They do have the understanding. They they are a thought leader. They're using it for those things, but they're able to get a maximum output, not maybe in speed, but in the size and richness and value that they can like, that's what I wanna lean in and put my my passion and my time into is, like, let's help people make really, really, really, really good stuff moving forward.

You're not you're not hacking anything. You're not, you know, finding a shortcut or some secret to success. All you're doing is polluting the Internet and flagging yourself as an SEO pariah. So, to that extent, yes, I I will inform people on worst practices, you can call them. But at the same time, like George says, I am all for helping people find new and creative ways to leverage tools.

For instance, those of you who use ChatGPT or ChatSpot or something along those lines, look up the RICE framework, r I c c e. The RICE framework is a really great,

do my job. This is a complex problem. Why are we seeing robot puke on the Internet? There isn't a single reason. It could be one of these reasons. It could be a few of these reasons. It could be all of them. We don't we don't know. Right? Well, we do know.

We don't know. It depends. But what I would like to get into now are some of these mindsets that should be guiding how these organizations are leveraging AI. Because one of the things that immediately jumps to my mind, George George, Max, and Devin, I'm sure you've all heard this. When I hear business owners talk about the promise of AI in terms of their marketing and their content, it, quote, enables them to do more.

More of what? Because in most cases, you probably aren't getting content right to begin with. So what is the more of that people think they're going to be able to do? Or should people even be doing more, or should they be focusing on something else? There is this pursuit of this nebulous more that I do not quite understand.

And for a lot of people, myself included, content generation is a very time consuming thing. And even if it isn't always a time consuming thing, it always feels like a time consuming thing because it's not something I love doing. I I I get no enjoyment out of it, and and time both flies and crawls simultaneously when I'm doing it. It's just not my thing. I'm sorry, Liz.

But, if I were to devote more time to leveraging AI to help me pull no sleep. I will not take it back. Leveraging AI, to help me, create an outline, to get me going in a direction that I can, take and create my own, and then, boom, more time. And then what do I do with that more time? All the other things that I feel like I don't have enough time for.

And, again, leading out of that rabbit hole, then we start talking about are you a workaholic or you were trying to achieve work life balance. But that's that's

You can do more with the original content you create because of some pretty cool tools out there. For example, I mean, we played played around with the tool a little while ago. Can't remember what it was called. But, like, it was able to take one of my YouTube videos and then split it into a whole bunch of shorts, write a whole bunch of social posts promoting it, take the whole transcript and turn it into, like, a blog post, right, from the actual content that I actually created. Right?

I think that's a really cool way to say, like, hey. Here's something that you built. You focused on the way that you know that you can create content best. I can't write blog posts. Right? Like, I I can't sit down and just, like, write something. I can make a banging video, though. Right? I can make a video. I can produce that content in the way that's, like, comfortable to me.

Right? And then I can have something take that medium where I know I best express myself and then do all the stuff that I'm not really good at. Right? Chopping it up into something else. Writing, like, social posts to promote it, like, creating written content or even just like a transcription from it or something like that.

That's cool. To me, that's like doing more with that original stuff that you actually create. It's kinda like what George was talking about earlier. Right? So I can see that as, like, a pretty, you know, sweet use case for it from, like, the content side of things.

I'd like to make videos. That's the that that's my love language is creating videos, except with doing research and building out a process and leveraging AI in the way that I have been. It allows me to do more and believe more about myself, and, actually, I love creating written content because the reason I hated it before is I thought I needed an editor. I thought I needed, creative genius. I thought I needed all of these pieces that I've actually been able to piece together to get the spark of an idea and make sure that it doesn't end up going out on the Internet looking like complete.

So when I think about more, it's it's allowing me to do more than I once was comfortable with. The other thing when I think about more is I'm not necessarily saying more content, but more meaning better. Taking the time that I do have to make the content better that I am creating, whether it's fresh content or optimizing the content that I already have, but I can leverage that for it to be more more robust. Liz, you know, I've been literally working on content that we're gonna drop here in the near future when we launch the new, sidekick strategies website, and this content is literally more. It is more of anything than I probably ever created before in my life, and I'm loving that process.

But, also, here's the other thing that I I'm struggling with how to actually communicate this. When I think about the word more, it's giving ourselves the ability to actually care more, create more, and and put put more love on those that are actually gonna come to our site and digest those things because nobody out there has more time. And it's funny the way my brain will work is because I'll literally find, like, eight disparate pieces of information around the same concept and go, well, why can't it all just live together here? And instead of people having to try to piece the puzzle together, I'm literally giving them the streamlined version of these eight pieces of content in this one area, therefore, giving them more day more time back in their day because we're creating something of more value. And, like, the when I hear that word more, that's where my brain actually goes.

And if you start to, like, line these things up, you're quickly like, jeez. I need to, like, clone myself. Well, if you're building assistance and you put the measures in to make sure that they're the assistance and not the end all be all, you might actually be able to do that. And so it makes me excited to think about being able to have this content or these products or these things that would never be able to live in the world because they are rooted in a place of this will help somebody fundamentally be a good human. Or on the side that we're on right now, this will fundamentally help somebody be better at HubSpot, help somebody be better at their job.

And I think that's the thing is, like, if you're coming at whether it be inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, or AI in your everyday workload, if you're coming at it from the place where you're trying to be generally a good human who provides more value and can put it in a way that it actually comes out and isn't robot puke, then why not? Why why? Like, anyway, I'll I'll get off my soapbox.

Right? It's that is that's the stuff that, like, really, really excites me. Like, I'm I literally just searched AI and, like, the product updates, and I'm seeing stuff like the AI assistant call summaries, the AI assist the content writer in playbooks, which is super interesting because, like, that's like, you don't need to worry about SEO there. Right? You know, the the stuff that they're doing with forecasting, right, where it's, like, using your deal data to help you kind of, like, forecast sales, things like that.

I've I was talking to this this guy, Nico Lafak I'm I'm gonna butcher his last name, but Nico Lafakas. Yep. Nico Lafakas. I just wanna be confident when I do it. Right?

And, dude, this guy has literally built, like, a custom GPT that is, like, writing custom coded workflow actions for people. Right? Like, imagine the day that workflow like, that AI works its way into workflows a lot more than it already have. I already know it can help you write your description, which is beautiful because no one writes workflow descriptions. Right?

And finally, now you don't have an excuse. Right? But, like, imagine a day where there is the AI workflow action where you literally just say, I want this workflow action to do x y z, and it could just do it instead of, like, custom coding it. Right? That is going to be insane. Right? And let's be honest. We're probably not that far away from that being a reality. Right? You know, so or or something like that.

Right? Or, like, even where we could say, hey. Build me a workflow that does x y z and just it just does it. Like, that is gonna be bananas. Right?

And something that I absolutely love finally happened to you guys have heard me complain about it for so long is chat spot is making its way into the HubSpot interface Yeah. Which is going to be wild, especially when ChatSpot can look at the thing you're working on and take the thing you're working on into context for whatever prompts you give it. Right? It's like, hey. Look at this contact record.

Take a look at the, you know, conversations we've had so far. What should be my next best step? Tell me. Right? Tell me what to tell me what what I should do versus, like, just doing something for me. Right? Like, that I think is going to fundamentally change the way we think about working with CRMs and doing stuff and building shit in HubSpot, right, beyond just the content conversation.

They're gonna start defining more in the correct ways. They're gonna start seeing ways they can expand and scale and make more of what's possible actually possible. But before they do that, if each of you could leave them with, like, as we go through this journey together and you get excited, never lose sight of blank. What would that blank be?

Look at all the stuffs written in it. From there, you could probably figure out what industry it's being used in. Right? Here are some metrics of what, like, success large learning language models could figure that out if given the right material to kinda learn what best practices would be in certain industries. But, also, George, I agree with you. Right? And that's why it has a good human in there. Those were the magic words that's

Because there's a lot of people out there that create content about industry best practices. Right? There's a lot of stuff you see in a portal, and you could say, these portals are manufacturing portals because of, I don't know, whatever way they they I don't know how long or large language models work. Like but I'm sure there's ways that it can do it. Right?

Because there is plenty of good example content out there, be it the form of analyzing a portal that it knows it's in certain industries or whatever, that it could do something like that one day. I don't know.

That's a really cool

What you need to do is identify a problem and then see how AI can fit into your solution or whether or not updating your workflow entirely to incorporate it might be an option. But what you don't wanna do is start looking at all the different tools. What'll end up happening is the tool you were looking for will no longer exist, or it will be something completely different, maybe owned by someone else, or it'll just cost a whole hell of a lot more than it used to. But what you should do is start looking at your your workflow, look at the challenges you face, and then look at how artificial intelligence can be, leveraged to help,

In in other words, how do you communicate with the humans right now that are helping you get stuff done in your organization, or are you like most that we run into and they're afraid of actually having a conversation with humans? Like, the way that you communicate with it is gonna be the way that it communicates back that you need, and all of this should be in an effort so that you can communicate what you're trying to communicate with the world. So, like, if you think about communication principles and start to apply communication principles into the workflow that we're talking about around AI AI tools, then all of a sudden, we're gonna start to get somewhere real interesting. So it's about communication.

And it makes me not look into all the other cool things AI can do. Right? Because I have such a I'm just letting the past sort of dictate my curiosity around something that's really neat because I'm only looking at it from a really negative angle. Don't be like me. Right? It's cool. Just, you know, sit back, relax, have a seven up, and let your mind get blown by some cool stuff. You know? It's okay. AI is not gonna kill us.

I don't know. It might, but it's probably not gonna kill us. And if we do, we'll go through a really super cool, like, battle with robots, and that'll be, like, a pretty chill way to go out.

So if you're not clear on what your more is, if you are not clear on the why behind what you're doing, if George and I were sitting there talking about being more helpful, being more of service, and that was not resonating with you, you need to sit down and define what your more is. That, I think, is one of the most important things. Gentlemen, how are we all feeling after today's engaging conversation?

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