will AI automate 95% of all of the things us marketers do that's a quote that has been attributed to Sam Atman recently I want to break it down in a special episode of marketing against a green we're going to get into what is the number one mistake most marketers are making with AI today we're going to get into the exact quote and what it Sam actually saying what does he mean by it and then we're going to talk about how do I position myself as a marketer to be on the 5% I don't want to
be in the 95% if it's going away I want to be on the 5% that is the show we've got lined up today on marketing against the Green here in plan against CMO over at zapier let's get into Today's [Music] Show all right this is a special solo show this is just me not Kip uh no one else and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a thread that blew up on LinkedIn I posted last week a quote that was attributed to Sam Mountain it talked about the fact that he feels in
the future AI may be able to automate 95% of all of marketing now he didn't specifically say all of marketing and I think some of the people who jumped into the comments maybe uh didn't read it correctly and that's why what I want to do is I want to first of all go into something I've noticed happening a little bit with AI and marketers so on LinkedIn this really kind of blew up it got reposted many times got about a million impressions about 620 comments because it's kind of controversial right there's a lot of marketers
I'm a marketers and we're going to feel some sort of way if someone says Hey like 95% of everything you all can do can be automated in the future but within that comment there was a lot of great debate a lot of great points and what I wanted to do in this short episode is package it up into the number one mistake most marketers are making with AI today break down samman's quote for you all because I think it's a little bit different than what people were answering and then maybe talk about what could be
in the 5% let's theoretically say that is true 95% of all all the things we do today could be done by an AI agent in the future how do we actually position ourselves to be in that 5% now let's get into the number one mistake that I see most marketers making with AI and this became really apparent within the comments of that thread right within those 620 comments or there or there about there was a lot of comment from marketers saying AI is just hype AI is just fabricated AI is just a bunch of tech
Bros running around trying to raise a bunch of PC doll now is it a bunch of people running around trying to raise a lot of capital yes AI has got an incredible amount of capital allocation over the past 12 months if you are one of the people who think that AI is all hype boy are you in trouble all right let me bring the Tweet up right here's a great tweet from darash uh in which he says read the following sentence you are competing with AI U and then you think about that for five seconds
right and I think most people are having this kind of reaction to a quote that says 95% of everything you do can be automated in the future when we read that quote we're saying wow we're competing with this AI this AI thing is going to take our jobs what darash says to do is like reflect in that for five seconds what does that mean to you and there's two ways to really think about that and interpret that is that you are competing against AI or you are competing using AI which of these do you pick
uh if it's one you would be best served by making sure that it's number two right if you are in the bucket of number one you are best served that it's a number two I actually think there's a third bucket I think there's the people who think I'm competing against AI the people who are competing with AI which is actually a smaller number than I would have thought uh which is surprising to me when I read through the comments in that LinkedIn post the amount of people that just don't want to touch AI then there's
the third category which is like we've heard all this before this is a bunch of hype um I'm just not even going to bother with this and I think if you are in the this is all hype and if you are in the bucket of I'm going to compete against Ai and not use it in my Advantage you are in a lot of trouble right AI will 100% automate repeatable tasks that is a guarantee that is a 100% guarantee I make to all of you all to all of our listeners and the reason Kip and
I really want to do this show and we enjoy doing this show is because we want our listeners to be in the third bucket we want our listeners to be in the we're competing with AI because we believe it's a unconventional way to get leverage we believe it's a way to advance our careers make our companies much more successful and be in that fast follower group and when you step back and you if you are if you think this is all hype and you really don't think AI will automate a bunch of tasks and most
of our jobs are made up of some form of tasks right those if you actually break down what you do on a day-to-day basis or on a week- toe basis or on a month-to-month basis you are doing a bunch of repeatable tasks right it's all of the other stuff so when you read that and you're like wow AI is going to automate my job no there is a bunch of things that probably make your job unique dares actually spoke to this in his newsletter uh simple. and that's where the Tweet came from and you know
there's ways that you can make your job unique there's ways that your job unique in terms of you know the way that you work with other humans the way that you have to solve problems the way that you have to strategize what dares said is you're solving problems you're interacting with a group of humans all with their individual human quirks humans have quirks I know I have a lot of quirks you come up with creative ways to make things better over time like those jobs are more defensible now we're going to get into the 5%
because I think that starts to speak to what's in the 5% if 95% could be automated in the third part of this short episode but I want to quickly get into the second part which is actually to dig into the quote what is the quote that kind of blew up in LinkedIn that got all of this really incredible interaction I really enjoyed reading through each and every one of those comments and it was this quote right will so we've talked about the fact the number one mistake I see marketers make really AI is hype AI
is something I'm not going to touch because it won't be here in another year or two uh you're 100% wrong I will and I I'm willing to take any bet you want please you email the show email me if you want to bet against AI I'm willing to give you really great odds and take any bet you want to take right the quote that is an unattributed quote to Sam so it was released in a editorial and it was like he no one has him directly on tape saying it but someone said he was quoted
as saying this in some sort of I don't know behind the scenes event AI will do 95% of what marketers uh use agencies strategist and creative Professionals for today now what people jumped into immediately was 95% of marketin right what s specifically said was what marketers use and I think that's a really important point to make what marketers use they use agencies strategists and creative professionals today right for me the key point in the quote that Sam was saying is what marketers use re why is that's such a key key point the reason that's a
key point because when I read that I read it as Sam is suggesting a single marketer will be much more sufficient because of AI what I see happen in Ai and what we've said on the show many times before and what I have specifically said and actually drives a lot of my investment strategy into seed and preed Stage Company with an AI is I believe vertical AI is where a lot of the disruption is going to come from in this next wave we just saw this incredible app launched by a company called cognition AI um
their CEO Scott woo there were some great uh videos going on with from their CEO sving incredible mat's problems when he was just a teenager but this is being pitched as the very first AI software engineer and the demo is really incredible this AI agent can bugfish can bugfix can write code autonomously this is the Eureka the Utopia for everyone who's in the code in space who's trying to disrupt the code in space is autonomous agents cod in right that they can go in write code fix bugs use reasoning to get to an end product
which means we really will get to the point where code is completely commoditized and all of us will be able to bring our ideas to life through a natural language interface right so we will be able to Pro program uh in code as easy as I'm speaking to you all now so there's examples of this in the law space Harvey is the kind of best known one raised a bunch of Fund in there's there's examples of apps in the medical space there's a really popular app that I've completely gone blind con that helps doctors take
notes so we are seeing this huge increase in vertical Ai and I think vertical AI is where we're going to see a lot of disruption immediately that means is people will be able to do a broader range of roles or a broader range of stuff right so you used to hear should I specialize should I verticalized in something to accelerate my career or should I stay as a generalist and my advice for the most part would have always been you should really be a uh verticalized you should verticalized and have a core skill like what
is the thing you are truly great at and I think what's going to be really interesting is maybe we will start to become if you are just an incredible generalist you are able to work with these AI agents who are trained in vertical tasks you can do much more stuff but and you don't have to know those things but you can be the person kind of organized and strategizing and using them to complete a task or do something that is Meaningful and I think that's what really Sam means is today marketers use a lot of
those Services whether they're agency strategist creatives to be able to get their work done but these AI agents trained in vertical tasks means that marketer can be much more self-sufficient so AI it's not that AI is making marketing less important right I I don't feel threatened by that quote it means what I think is really exciting is marketers can be much more self-sufficient a marketer can do much more a marketer can get their ideas executed into Market in a much more efficient way right a lot of us are stuck trying to bring our ideas to
life because we don't have the skill set in design code in we don't have the skill sets that we need in the tooling and we're kind of like reliant on all these other people and teams to do incredible work and it would be really cool if the people who just have the great great ideas who are incredible at execution have incredible perseverance can actually do things quicker and much more efficiently now does that mean we need less people over time to do the work that we're doing today yes but does it mean that actually more
work might get created potentially yes as well so that's the first part right I wanted to really dig into the actual quote the will a M will will do 95% of what marketers use agencies strategists and creative Professionals for today so let's just dig into each one of those things right I want to talk about agencies right agencies are 100% going to be completely disrupted and marketing a I'm talking about marketing agencies will be completely disrupted by uh AI marketing agencies and service platforms like Fiverr because again what did I say I really believe AI
is going to automate repeatable tasks and when you just look at Fiverr right you can just go to fiverr's website and you can like let's do write in on translation right let's let's just scroll over this now it's not a case of what of these things do I think AI is going to automate it's what of these things do I think AI is not going to automate right these are easy to automate with AI tasks right if their article blog post as long as their informational AI is a really good solution here I will do
a show specifically on Claud 3 Opus because I am really impressed with that AI assistant really good at blog post particularly informational things can it script write yes can it do creative writing that's where it will struggle can it do podcast writing if it does informational educational yes right take any of these proofread and editing it's going to be autonomous agents that can proofread that can write in the same way that we are seeing this in code in where you're verticalized and we've just showed Devon it can create code it can fix the code it
can get to an end product we see the same capabilities in writing like write the post hand off to a different agent proof read edit hand off to a different agent do the second recursive version of that so I think it's going to be able to do a lot of these things right and the same thing will happen to agencies agencies who really help people marketing agencies who help companies scale their marketing efforts through these tasks that can be neatly packaged up and can actually be done by agencies are going to be very very uh
affected by AI AI is probably a better option for most marketers to Out Source their task 2 there's a great quote in the LinkedIn thread from Jason Lin he's the founder of sasar and there's a quote and I it it proves my point but it's also something that I want to make clear that I also see a bunch of people getting wrong or in my opinion are wrong in their points of view right so Jason who's coming on the show in April so I'm excited to Hash this side founder of an incredible conference saster he
said he's is getting 30 a 30 or more Clips a week that he grades at like a minus from an app called Opus clip Opus clip takes long form content video content and we'll actually give you a series of short form videos based on that so we can use them across all of our popular platform short fir video the number one investment hsot releasing the state of marketing report it's the number one investment in that report that all marketers are making for the right reasons I've got a separate post coming why more marketers are making
an investment short Fromm video than SEO right that's a real wow kind of stat po stay tuned for why that's actually happening but short from video is an incredible investment to make but an incredibly competitive one and what Jason says is I'm getting 30 Clips a week uh from this AI app and I grade them at an A minus that's better than what I was getting from the agency which is one or two from the agency they're always late they cost 5K a month and their quality the clients over time that actually does happen in
a lot of agencies where you have your customer and you then start to your quality declines over time because you take on more and more customers you go quantity over quality now if you're a marketing agency and you don't believe that is true it's not true for the best but it's true for a lot of marketing agencies now hopefully Jason doesn't M me push him back on one part of that so I do think that is true right that's a repeatable task he is outsourcing that it's much better unit economics much better efficiency to go
through a AI app and I believe that is the future where we're moving towards now hopefully it doesn't mind me saying this right and he's coming on the show soon I think that we are there in some cases where AI can actually do these repeatable tasks and not there in other cases but early movers are moving ahead with it anyway and I think video is one of those places where I'm still not convinced we're at production level quality right here's the thing with short video it's a competitive space as I said earlier hopspot are going
to release a report soon the state of marketing report and the one of the you know jaw-dropping stats in there is that more marketers are going to invest this year in short fir video than than anything else including search paid which are like the two Staples of what we mostly invest in and that means short fir video is becoming more and more competitive and when you're competing for eyeballs across short from video it's not just with your competitors in in SAS or whatever Market you might be in and they're probably not even doing short fir
video a lot of your competitors because it's still like a in its infancy and a lot of places in B2B not so much b2c but you're competing with like all of the different creators everyone else whoo like competing for this same eyeballs from short video and I would say if they're the you know Jason may think they're a minus and I'm not I would like to to see what videos he's doing and maybe debate that point with him but I suspect they're not a minus if you compare them against all of the other short videos
he's competing he's competing against for those eyeballs I suspect they're like D+ C minus right and this is my point on content my number one point for for AI and content is sure AI can help us a lot but but if the the idea needs to be great and your production level quality for the most part today CU content such a saturated space needs to be much better than you think it is and from what I've seen AI do and I've seen it a lot it is still a good insist assistant to a lot of
content repeatable tasks and it can get you the research it can get you EDI in like descript all of these companies can help you edit things much more quickly but it really can't get you to like the a minus plus production level quality one of the points I continue to emphasize here is we are 16 months into this Evolution right it is a huge mistake to judge the impact of these tools based on the products that are out in the wild today remember I'm sure most of you all do not remember this right like you
know it was before many of our times but the very first search engine was Yahoo's web Index right they literally just wrote a web index and said like here's the websites click on those links it was a pretty rudimentary way to do web indexing right it wasn't nothing special like people back then probably thought this is fine but nothing incredible about it it probably didn't feel like an amazing product or an experience until Google cam they created page rank algorithm they figured out that sites who link to other sites is a good signal of what's
quality and that's one of the ways we will uniform the results and that probably felt over time like aund times better of an experience than the original search engine this is where we are today a lot of the products you are looking at and saying ah AI is in hype I AI is not going to disrupt my agency AI is not going to be able to do the these repeatable tasks to production level quality it's because you are looking at it and thinking that this is the Google era not the Yahoo ERA this is the
Yahoo era right let me just be really clear these are the we are still playing around with a bunch of Yahoo web indexes we are not playing with the Google search experience and so I really want to make sure that you think about it in that way first 16 months this is really where we are what I believe and I said back to Jason is I really think that we see AI pirate agency who adapt and have brand new models in how they integrate AI heavily into their processes and will typically be run by a
small group of incredible marketers right I again I'm not making any uh derog derog statements about AI agencies but a lot of times they can be just run by account managers and those account managers are just doing you know pretty average work they're not like incredible marketers they haven't been in companies before they haven't got their stripes they haven't grown a company or a product before they're just an account manager helping you do kind of average tasks I think AI because it can do those things you can have more bespoke agencies run by incredible marketers
who have a ton of experience and this is one of the examples that came up in that LinkedIn thread I really like this it's a company called Kaa and they are a startup marketing agency um that is has AI deeply integrated into how they work and there is a great comment from the founder going through you know why they're different but this is what I think is going to be the kind of type of agencies we see in the future where we see these kind of AI specialist agencies run by a small group of incredible
marketers with really deep expertise who know how to train the mo train the agents use the agents to actually automate a bunch of customers work so that's on on the agencies on the strategists the majority of the people in the comments this is another I think error people are making you know we started with one of the errors being everyone believes AI is is all hype a lot of people believe that AI can't replicate strategy right this is where human shine this is my special sauce AI can never replicate what I do I'm an incredible
strategist right AI is awful it strategy right like it put it in the corner put it on a pip fire the AI agent it can't replicate what I can do with strategy are you crazy the reason most people think that AI is bad at strategy it's because they themselves and I mean marketing strategy it's because they themselves are not good at marketing strategy right let me say that again the reason that most people think that AI cannot produce a great marketing strategy is because that person themselves cannot produce a great marketing strategy what the AI
is doing is reflecting that person's knowledge in how they can actually create markting strategies so if they're getting back an average strategy because they themselves are very average at how they create a marketing strategy AI really reflects in a lot of CA places the knowledge you have about the thing that you were helping the AI to do there are really three eras of AI that I think we will go through there's the assistant era where the AI is an assistant to us it's like like an intern it's helping us do work there's the AI as
a peer and we're see starting to see that in vertical with things like Devon where the AI is like a peer it can do the job just as good as me and now I can have extensions of myself and a team of AI agents and then AI is a conductor which is really where we want we are trying to get to well a lot of these companies are which is the AI itself is much better than AA job there was a quote released this week or last week that believes that will happen by 2029 where
the AI would be much more intelligent than any other human on the planet which means it's better at doing our job than we are and we hopefully it keeps us around so we can still assist the AI and people keep thinking that their special sauce is I'm a human and I know strategy better than the AI again Claud 3 is really impressive I've been building different strategic things with it this week to try this out again I have no reason I'm not per building anything specific but I am playing with these tools every day I
am in Ireland EU sucks run by a bunch of idiots we canot subscribe to Pro because hey we can't have nice things but even just the free version is really really good uh Kip and I just released an entire podcast to show you us doing this through gbt 4 I would love to do this again with Claude And I think it was released last week where Kip and I build and marke and plan using gp4 don't think your special sauce is building strategy it is not I think for marketers who work with Strate external strategist
today and they Outsource some of that work AI will be able to do that work I'm really believe that creative right we went through agency strategist and creative following Sam's code I think this one is very self self-explanatory we were all shocked when and I this is where I got most shocked with AI is when AI started with creativity it started with design and video first right it actually didn't start like further than the creative stack and blue color jobs it went right for the hard jobs right from the beginning right design coding like all
of these video all of these different things these tools can help a marketer get pretty good content inpr production right today if you are going to say well can marketer can this take 95% of all my creative work I would say no no way you still need a really great designer you still need someone really good at video who can actually use these tools I think you can probably get if you were just sat down as an individual marketer you in a startup you had not many resources you should be using AI tools I think
you can get like C- level content out C+ to C minus depending upon how you good at a Content I believe again talking coming back to what I was saying about Jason if you want to get to the b or a Level side of if you want to get to b or a level grade in then you still need a human to get you there but they're getting much much better right mid Journey just released this incredible Tool uh here's a really great tweet about it it is called character consistency uh feature which basically means
you can prompt mid Journey uh you can use that tag which means keep that character and let me put that character in a bunch of different situations so what people we're struggling with is I have a prompt it has a character I put them in a certain situation let's say I put Kieran in a bare hoodie on a podcast on a Saturday because he's always grinding and then I said use the exact same prompt but now I put Kieran downstairs on the bike the Pelon bike cuz that's where I'm going next it did not it
was not consistent I would be here with my bear jumper look one way and then i' would be on the Pelon bike look another way now it could be because I'm getting two hours of sleep at night I'm a new parent and when I'm on the bike trying to do the bike I'm going to look like death but what you want when you are a designer is consistency of characters and they are doing a lot of incredible updates to make all of that come to life and so I think these tools are getting much much
better the point here is today a marketer can really use AI to do a bunch of creative stuff it can certainly not Outsource 95% of the creative work but it can actually have one creative do much much more work right expands the ability to do much work we all want to be in the 5% right Kip and I entire goal of this podcast is to put you in the 5% regardless of AI disrupting the 95% or not which means put you in the 5% that are most the most important the best marketers on the planet
that's why we started the podcast that's what we care most about we don't we aren't the podcast for the people who just want to do a good blog post or how do I put a paid campaign live or how do I do a bit of field marketing that's not we are not the podcast for you we are the podcast for the people who are like like how do I get to be in the 5% how do I make sure that whenever there's a cool new job out there in the wild they ask me I'm one
of the first names that gets asked whenever there's something great to do in terms of freelancing or they need a marketer to invest in my company how am I the person asked right that's the thing we care about so if you get back to dar's point there's going to be winners the winners are really going to be The Talented marketers the marketers who know the fundamental is the Timeless things that make marketing truly truly exceptional are grinders have perseverance and can use AI tools I think the losers for the most part are going to be
marketers who decide AI is all hype many of the LinkedIn comments all hype and they don't try it until it's too late I I don't think there's ever been a case where the fast followers have such a large Advantage than now with AI because it's moving at such an incredible pace and Laz marketers who use AI to churn out more average content right who are using these tools to just churn out sea- level content for the rest of Eternity and think that that's the best way to compete right the problem is that your sea level
content becomes even less efficient because you have those marketers who are exceptional and a and because they can use AI tools their content is getting exp exponentially better and your content is staying the exact same right you're not taking advantage of these tools to move yourself to to the really really good bucket to move yourself to the 5% bucket AI doesn't give you A+ create creativity right it's not going to give you any kind of real conceptional thinking right now it's not going to give you a provocative point of view it's not going to give
you a spicy take that resonates with your customer it won't make a marketing campaign that helps your customer feel warm and tingly inside because you really got them because you really helped to say the unsaid the thing that they really wanted you to advocate for on their behalf the thing that they really wanted you to say on their behalf it will struggle to put a smile on their face right I it a I just cannot do those things that's where it really matters to be an incredible marketer who really understands their customer who really understands
how to bring their customers pain points to life in a very creative way in a very humorous way in a very provocative way that's why it really matters that you can create marketing campaigns that make people feel some sort of way and the AI can assist in that but I think the AI is always going to struggle to bring that humanness into the marketing that we do and for the most part marketing is trying to connect with other people and to actually provide real value for them right so that's the 5% 5% is really in
there it's the fundamentals the timelessness of the Timeless principles of marketing and again we actually have a show coming up to go through what we really mean by Timeless marketing but it's really understanding the customer their pain points how to bring those things to life in Creative provocative ways humorous ways AI really can't replicate like this goes without saying it can't replicate human connections whether that's through communities I think communities become much more defensible help companies build real modes to burn their brand through the content you release I still have never released anything at production
level or hit live on something that an AI has created for me not even close right have I used AI to do research yes have I used AI to uh pitch me six different variations of a headline yes I've never used a headline that AI is given me um but it's a really great assistant right assistant peer conductor the three errors I think in Ryden is still an assistant part of marketing is always going to be deeply human oriented connecting with very very uh connecting with other humans right there's a good comparison that make to
I Ai and self-driving right self-driving we've been promised that for many years from Elon right so in all of our jobs there's a ton of things that are just complex unless you're a human and you don't know those things until you start automating your job start automating those Tas and that's why I think it's really important to figure out what are the repeatable tasks you do today that you can start automating with AI okay so that that is the three things I really wanted to cover AI is not just hype hype Sam mman I think
is saying that AI is going to be help marketers be more generalists have ai do vertical tasks and be able to do much more work and the 5% I think is really going to be in that Timeless the Timeless principles of marketing the ability to automate a lot of your work using AI so you can spend spend much T more time in those principles and be the things that really work grind and perseverance grind and perseverance building those reps and not getting lazy and just saying well I can do a bunch of things now with
AI so I don't need to put in the time and effort to become better and better at my job each and every day right and we'll get into the Timeless principles in a separate show so let's end with this right one of the scenarios we've seen that happens every time we see technological shifts is computers and automation do more work they help humans shift our attention to be the higher level work right the things that are you know more complex to do what's really interesting about AI is it actually started with that work it started
with creative work it started with the high level work design video coding I love it might not none of those things might be production level in any of those areas maybe code I think code is actually production level you've seen a bunch of companies release data around how much they're using these codeing assistance but I believe it will get there I believe it's going to be incredibly disruptive right but I still believe humans will be able to unlock more potential within themselves by using Ai and to start doing jobs and roles we hadn't even dreamt
of before right how many roles exist today that did not exist 20 years ago a lot right AI is going to help us offload a bunch of the things that we've done today and create brand new work for ourselves that hopefully is more enjoyable I think over time work has become more and more enjoyable because Automation and tools and computers has taken away a a lot of the things we used to not enjoy as a marketer I think AI is going to help us give us the opportunity to redefine our work and have more impact
than we've ever had before had more impact than we've ever had before 95% of marketing being automated is a great thing because we can do much more at least over the last decade automation really starts with marketing right we've talked about this on the show before I believe in the future marketers could own entire customer Journeys they are the team that bring in the new customers and warm them up for sales help close them to become customers and then help do customer marketing to provide customer success teams and support with ways to keep that customer
happy I believe marketers can do that entire customer journey in the future right that 95% maybe we have ai agents doing a bunch of that stuff wow we can actually make the entire customer experience incredible because we are automator at heart that's where it starts in most companies so this is an incredible opportunity for everyone to redefine what marketing is I think we can combine it with the Timeless principles that will never go away of marketing they've been around since Claude Hopkins wrote scientific advertising back in 1923 right like the there's Timeless principles that truly
matter the ability to use these tools to automate work and our incredible obession over customers to create these incredible customer experiences mean it's going to be an incredible time to be a marketer if a bunch of the stuff we do today gets automated away that's a special episode of marketing Against the Grain I will be back with Kip and guest in future episodes hopefully this has been helpful go get your AI game on this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated W
I can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better
