Episode 22: Embracing AI in the C-Suite

00:33
Madison Riddel
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Moves. I'm your host, Madison Riddel, and today I'm joined by perhaps one of our most dynamic guests yet. Think OG. Google Insider meets artificial intelligence. Thought leader meets art collector meets african safari advisor. Listeners, meet Ted Souder thanks for having me. Yes, thank you for joining us. Globally recognized for his pioneering work at Google, spending over 20 years as a key executive, Ted Souder boasts decades of experience in technology and leadership. TED lectures from around the world, from Dubai to Cleveland, on the topics of modern business transformation and entrepreneurial ecosystem building. Today, through his company, wigs holding, he delivers engaging and actionable keynotes, advises governments and businesses, and invests in promising startups, all looking through the lens of artificial intelligence as a tool for driving growth.

01:32
Madison Riddel
I met Ted through our mutual friend Adam Kaufman, who was featured on episode eight of marketing moves. So as always, I want to shout out Adam for being a serial connector and bringing us to both people here in Cleveland and outside of Cleveland, in Ted's case, Chicago. Thank you for traveling in, and clearly his bio is enough to get everyone's ears perked. So if you're driving into the office, multitasking during a workout, heading on business travel, or anywhere in between, please get ready to dial in and take some notes from Ted because I think this is going to be some great content. So again, thank you for joining us, Ted.

02:06
Ted Souder
Well, thanks for having me. Let's see if I can live up to the introduction. It's super kind. And for those of you who are listening, don't fast forward yet. Give at least a couple minutes and we'll see what we can do.

02:16
Madison Riddel
I'm sure they're all hooked. And to be honest, I felt like I had to condense your bio because there's a hundred other things that I could find on your LinkedIn or have learned about you from listening to other podcasts you've been on, and I think your rap sheet is certainly extensive. So thank you again.

02:30
Ted Souder
So I've been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to do a lot of really cool things over the years, and all of it is rooted in one, my curiosity for the world, but also my innate belief that good is going to come from technological innovation and being able to talk to entrepreneurs, business leaders, government leaders, nonprofit, civic, everyone about the opportunities that are in front of us. It's really fun.

02:57
Madison Riddel
I'm sure it is really fun. Where do you feel like that came from for you? Why do you feel like you've always been kind of focused on that technological mindset?

03:05
Ted Souder
Well, my entire career has been in tech, so I went to University of Denver right out of college. I went to the Denver Business Journal, and I was selling advertising in the print publication.

03:15
Madison Riddel
Oh, interesting.

03:15
Ted Souder
I was like 94, 95. And you have to remember that it was around that time when the commercial Internet as we know it today really started to become a thing. So I would be out there working with these businesses on their print ads, and very slowly you could hear them saying, hey, can I put my URL into the ad? And it really started to click that, wow, the Internet is going to be a big opportunity. Print, maybe not so much. Nothing wrong with print, but it just, the growth wasn't going to be there, that technology was. And so I went to a division of AOL called Digital City Denver, and I would roam the streets of Denver walking into businesses and saying, hey, would you like to buy a website?

04:01
Madison Riddel
Wow.

04:02
Ted Souder
And literally they would say, what's a website?

04:05
Madison Riddel
Interesting. I didn't know this part of your story yet.

04:07
Ted Souder
And so I would say it's like an electronic brochure. And that resonated with them. Yes. And so we started out literally bringing businesses online for the first time, and we sold banner ads and websites back then didn't really do anything. So they really were an electronic brochure.

04:24
Madison Riddel
And it's funny you say that because even all these years later where you would think tech is at the forefront of every conversation and it's just ingrained into who most of us are. We still explain to clients banner ads as digital billboards. Those concepts still resonate somehow with folks as we try to educate a little bit more on digital marketing or the digital transformation. Absolutely.

04:45
Ted Souder
And there will always be new opportunities for businesses to advertise or to build a new technology that makes their business more functional, more efficient, whatever the case may be. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of this just kind of comes down to psychology. What gets you excited? What's your purpose at business? And let us help solve for that before anything.

05:10
Madison Riddel
And I think that's marketing at its core, which is the premise of our show marketing moves and obviously, as someone inside of Google for 20 years, I'm sure that you can share a lot of insights into the things that maybe we don't all see from a marketing perspective. But I think at its core, you're right. It's psychology. It's thinking about how consumers want to feel, how you can make them feel, how you want to make them feel as a brand or as a business. And I think tech is the easiest way to support that now and into the future. I want to let the listeners know that. So Ted's in from Chicago. Like I mentioned, he came in to join us for this podcast, which is so exciting, but also, we decided to maximize his time here.

05:45
Madison Riddel
And we're hosting a really intimate event tonight at our office with some executives in Cleveland. And the discussion for today is around artificial intelligence. So I'm hoping that this episode, we can kind of bottle up a lot of what we'll talk about later so that listeners who won't be at our event tonight can take advantage of all the learning and the insights. From your perspective, I want to get into artificial intelligence a lot and how you see it evolving, the modern workplace. But before we do that, I know that people hear Google and their ears are perking and they're wondering about your experience. So can you take us back a little bit? Tell us how you ended up at Google from starting in those days in the print world and what your experience was like, for sure.

06:26
Ted Souder
So I was living in San Francisco at the time with my girlfriend, who's now my wife, Lori. And were living in this shoebox apartment that was about half the size of this beautiful studio. And I had gotten laid off from the company that I was working for. It was called Echo Networks, very similar to Spotify Pandora. It was super early in online music. Unfortunately, it was too early and went out of business. But that was also during the.com bubble burst. And so you would drive by any bar at noon on a Tuesday in San Francisco, and it'd be packed because everybody had been laid off. A lot of people had severance. It was actually kind of a fun time, but also we recognized that we should probably leave San Francisco. And I grew up in Toledo, not too far from here.

07:14
Ted Souder
My family, I had some family members who were living in Chicago, lots of friends. So we drove our Jetta with the U Haul on the back and rolled into Chicago. And I actually knew a lot of people, or a handful of people who worked at Google at the time. And so I reached out to them and said, hey, I know you all are hiring. One of the few businesses hiring at the time, this is early 2001. And they said, yeah, we're interviewing for an account manager role to work with our advertising clients. We're building our account manager teams in San Francisco and in New York. And at the time I was just like, well, I'm not moving back to California. I just came from there and I'm not moving to New York.

07:54
Ted Souder
There was something about pulling up to New York City in a U Haul that just like would keep me up at night. There's no way I can do that. I'm not capable of that. So I wrote a proposal to the leaders of the company and said, here's how you need to approach your account management moving forward if you're going to continue to grow, providing great service to your advertisers. And so the idea was to have account managers in all of your local offices. And at the time there were only four. But having localized account managers, they can work with their local agencies like Vividfront. They can take their clients out to lunch. They know the local community, maybe there's cultural norms and things that they should understand.

08:33
Ted Souder
And if you have localized account management, you can provide a higher level of service that makes sense. Right, right. And so the leaders of the company said at the time, well, that makes sense. Why don't we have you be our first distributed account manager and if it works, great. And if it doesn't, we'll just fire you. And I thought that was a pretty safe bet to take. And now we have, or now they have account managers all over the globe. So I take a little bit of pride that I created the structure for how Google eventually set up their account.

09:04
Madison Riddel
Manager, the original account manager.

09:07
Ted Souder
Yeah. So there were about five of us at the time between San Francisco and New York, and technically it was down in Palo Alto. And I always joke that you could put Google's account management team into a taxi. It was so small back then.

09:20
Madison Riddel
Wow. And so you kind of pioneered that role. And what did that look like in the early days, being the ad account manager?

09:25
Ted Souder
So like many startups, were just kind of making it up as went because you got to remember, back then there were all sorts of great search engines. There was excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, et cetera. The world didn't need another search engine.

09:38
Madison Riddel
Ask Jeeves.

09:39
Ted Souder
Ask Jeeves was there. But Larry and Sergey, the founders, had this once in a lifetime gigantic vision to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And when they said the world's information, they meant it. And so they had this really big vision. They felt that they could organize the information on the web in a better manner, they could write better algorithms, they could pull together really smart people to execute on the vision. And I was super drawn into that, and they were able to bring together a bunch of really smart people to execute on the vision. And there was no playbook for how to do this. And it was also during the.com deflation, as I mentioned. So it was, from an economic standpoint, it was a tough market out there.

10:26
Ted Souder
The ad products that we had at the time were not nearly as dynamic as they are today.

10:30
Madison Riddel
Is this pre-paid search advertising?

10:32
Ted Souder
Yeah. So originally, there were two links at the top of the page. They were sold on a CPM basis, and we had no ad reporting tools, which is crazy. So I worked with a lot of the automakers, just being based in Chicago. So I would go to GM or Ford, and they would want to buy a million impressions or something. And so I would go to this guy named Hao Manchao. We called him HMC, and he managed all of our ad inventory. And so I said, HMC, I need a million impressions on these keywords. And he would price it out for me and it'd be $10 cpm or whatever it was. And that's how we sold.

11:09
Madison Riddel
So you were custom pricing?

11:11
Ted Souder
We were custom pricing based on availability, custom based on how popular the keywords were, so on and so forth. And then it was after that. Then they launched the Adwords program that became the self-serve that really became the revenue juggernaut that Google became.

11:27
Madison Riddel
So at that time, you had to work with an account manager in order to leverage paid search. You couldn't do anything self serve. That's wild to think about when we think about where we're at today. So you stayed with Google for 20 years. How did your role evolve from account manager function early days of paid search CPM basis to 20 years later.

11:46
Ted Souder
So we all do a lot of different roles at Google. Nobody does just one job. And so I started out as an account manager. There was a time where I ran Google's account management organization in the US, which was actually a maternity cover, which was a cool opportunity for me. And working directly with Sheryl Sandberg, who ran the account management organization, got to know her really well, and she's an amazing person. From there, I went and worked on our travel vertical and ran a sales team that worked with all of the biggest travel advertisers at the time in the world. Then from there, I moved to Paris, France, ran a sales and operations team there that worked throughout Europe, the Middle east, northern Africa. Came back from Paris and took over first.

12:30
Ted Souder
I spent about six months doing special projects for Margo Giorgiades, who was our president at the time, created some training programs, etcetera. After that, I took over a retail team, worked with some of the biggest retailers in the world, helping them with their Google experience. And this is, we started out with search, but then we became mobile first, then YouTube and video really became a huge focus. Then AI and automation really started to take off. And now Google is very much an AI first company. So I was working with advertisers throughout all of these different iterations.

13:04
Madison Riddel
What a unique experience.

13:05
Ted Souder
It was wild. It was wild.

13:07
Madison Riddel
So cool.

13:07
Ted Souder
But you also run into challenges that the advertisers and the teams that I ran were on the very high end of advertising at Google. And so we got to use all of the most sophisticated tools. We had opportunities to bring in our senior leadership into meetings, bring our advertisers to Mountain View, etcetera. That was really exciting. We had access to everything. But you're also talking really big numbers, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And so to be able to grow that 20%, 30%, 50% year over year, hitting quota, doing all the things that salespeople do, started to become a real challenge for many of the teams, just kind of like a law of large numbers.

13:49
Ted Souder
So I thought long and hard about how do we continue to grow at the rate that we need to as a company, but to get our advertisers to reallocate dollars from other parts of the organization into advertising, marketing, technology. So I created a program called the Google CFO Forum. And the idea behind the Google CFO forum was we're great friends with the cmos, often great friends with the CEO's chief technology officers, et cetera, their ad agency partners, great friends with them. But we need to influence more dollars. We need access to the board of directors because the things that we are talking about, these are board level discussions. And so I said we need to influence the CFO. CFO's own the budget. CFO's generally have full board exposure. A lot of CFO's move into the CEO role as well.

14:39
Ted Souder
So I created this program called the Google CFO Forum, where we brought together some of the world's most important CFO's, bringing them to Mountain View, two days of content, all of our biggest tech speakers come in marketing thought leadership speakers would come in, give them rides and some self driving cars, which is always really fun. But to get them educated on the importance of digital, the importance of investing in their tech stack, the importance of maybe moving to a cloud environment, etcetera. And I remember one of the biggest CFO's in the world, who I know from Chicago, came to me beforehand and said, Ted, I don't understand why I'm here. Why does Google wanna talk to me, the CFO? And after two days, he came back to me.

15:18
Ted Souder
He's like, now I get it that we need to rethink how we're allocating budget in the company, how we're allocating resources. We need to put this on the board's agenda, because this is clearly the future of how this company is gonna succeed. So a really great experience that continues on to this day after my leaving Google now two years ago, but something that all businesses really need to be thinking about. They historically will allocate x percent of revenue back into their marketing advertising programs. They're giving a certain dollar amount to their tech stack, but tech makes everything kind of one. And so it's about breaking down the silos, it's about rethinking how you're budgeting, it's about working with partners like Vividfront to take advantage of opportunities that didn't exist 612, 1824 months ago. And that's a lot of fun.

16:15
Madison Riddel
And I think, you know, we're having those conversations and dealing with various different stakeholders and organizations like you talked about. Sometimes our clients have an internal CMO, sometimes they don't. They want us to sit in that function. Sometimes we're interfacing with a founder, a CEO, not oftentimes a CFO, to be honest, not somebody who's specifically sitting in that seat. So I know that I'm asking you to take advice from one of the biggest companies in the world and apply it to our small Cleveland agency. But how are you guys facilitating those conferences or two day events to speak to financial folks who probably don't have that creative marketing lens, who don't deeply understand core marketing concepts? How are you teaching them enough to be dangerous and understand why they should invest? Were you just leaning into the numbers and the KPI's?

17:03
Madison Riddel
And why they can easily prove artists prove out ROI from Google initiatives? Or were you educating them further than that? I'm just trying to picture this experience with those financial folks.

17:13
Ted Souder
It's really important to understand their business, which we do. It's important to understand what makes the organization tick, what does the company do? Why do they exist? What's their purpose? Where are they trying to get to? For the CFO in particular, understanding what they care about. If it's a public company, for example, they care about quarterly earnings, they care about Wall street, they care about providing shareholder value, maybe they care about keeping the stock price at a certain level. Like, there's a lot of metrics that makes that individual sleep well at night.

17:52
Madison Riddel
Yeah.

17:53
Ted Souder
So how can we combine our content in our goals with helping them achieve their goals? Because ultimately, if we do a good job, if Vividfront makes their client successful, you'll be successful all the time, right?

18:08
Madison Riddel
This concept can be applied in any industry.

18:10
Ted Souder
So it's really about understanding your customer, understanding the business, understanding the individuals who are making decisions, and solving for that. If you're truly customer centric, then just do that and you will likely end up being in a better place. Now you also have to earn credibility. A company like Google, we have the credibility to be able to send a note and say, hey, come to Mountain View and learn about this and this. I understand that not all businesses are in that situation. So you apply the concept, you apply the idea to your individual situation. And maybe you don't start, right with the CFO because you don't have that relationship or the CFO won't give you an audience or whatever. So you need to kind of manage through, I believe. But it's understanding, just understand what makes people tick and solving for it.

19:01
Madison Riddel
And I think in our own business it's a little bit different. Most of our clients aren't publicly traded, but some of them are startups and they're looking to be acquired and their focus is purely on brand awareness and growth and impressions and just trying to get people to know and understand their brand. And other businesses are in profit mode and they really need to see every single, you know, dollar squeeze from every single click and a road that's growing and growing on every single campaign. So you're right, we're doing that. Without maybe talking about that, we're doing that.

19:32
Ted Souder
I think there's also an opportunity to give customers free education that will have an impact on the business.

19:43
Madison Riddel
Google's fantastic.

19:44
Ted Souder
Yeah. So I travel the world now, speaking to audiences large and small about the opportunities around AI, the importance of supporting your local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it's wild. Every time I always do an informal poll of the audience and I say, how many of you are utilizing even the simplest AI tools right now, for example, show of hands. Without fail, 30 ish percent raise their hand, generally really senior mix of government, business, maybe specific nonprofit types. It's around 30% who are even playing with the tools. And that meshes nicely with price Waterhouse study that came out at the World Economic Forum a couple months ago. Their annual CEO survey, and their survey showed about the same number. Only a third or so of CEO's that they surveyed are using any sort of AI tool, likely a chat GPT kind of generative AI tool.

20:44
Ted Souder
So I think there's a real opportunity to say, okay, business leaders, you might not understand or be playing around with some of these tools today. Let us put on a talk, a symposium, whatever you want to call it, to bring you up to speed about the opportunities, how it might apply to your business, and then give you a chance to get hands on with some of these tools. So make it interesting and actionable. So the idea is they then come away and say, oh, maybe this isn't something that we should be afraid of, or maybe this is something that will have an impact on our business or help us solve for x again, because you know the business, you're positioning it in a way that will get them.

21:20
Madison Riddel
Excited about it, which that fear I definitely want to circle back to at some point today, because I think businesses have to be cultivating this culture of embracing AI and the AI mindset versus fear of job displacement and some of those natural things that come up anytime we're and a big technological boom. So I definitely want to talk about that at some point. But something you said triggered a thought you recently posted on LinkedIn, and thesis was, become part of the AI class, otherwise AI will happen to you. Yes, which I think is super powerful stuff. Can you unpack that a little bit, that concept, and why you think AI will happen to you if you're not embracing it on your own.

22:00
Ted Souder
So I got the AI class from one of the co-founders of section, which is an online learning platform where I lecture a handful of times a year on AI and other topics. And the idea is that people today who are embracing AI are going to be further ahead in future, proofing their career, potentially creating new opportunities for themselves, being a leader in business, to bring that business into the age of AI as opposed to those who do not. And when we talk about job loss, I think it's a little overblown. I'm not entirely sure that the robots are gonna replace us, at least anytime soon. And maybe we get to a point where you and I are replaced by two robots interviewing each other. That might be interesting.

22:44
Madison Riddel
I don't know.

22:44
Ted Souder
Might not be.

22:45
Madison Riddel
Might be.

22:46
Ted Souder
I think what 's gonna happen is we're gonna find out very quickly that people who have repetitive jobs, people who have mundane jobs, people who have maybe dangerous jobs, those are the first types of roles that are going to be replaced by AI, because it probably should. And it can. If we can remove repetition with a technology that can do it faster, more cheaply, more accurately as a superpower sidekick, as opposed to a paid person at a desk, I think that's fine. I think that's, I think that's good for business. I think you're also going to find that people who are mediocre in their role are those that will be replaced by those at an organization who understand AI. So it's not necessarily AI will take your job, it's someone who knows AI is going to take your job.

23:44
Ted Souder
So I think there's going to be a mixture of job loss, and job loss is something that everybody has to take seriously. You never want someone to lose their job. But I do think there is an opportunity for employers and businesses of all sizes to rethink. How do we bring AI and technology into our business in order to make us more efficient, to make us more effective? Maybe there's an opportunity to upskill labor into other opportunities, or maybe people are just ultimately in the wrong role and they will go out and find new opportunities in the marketplace. So I think that there's churn will happen, it always has, and it will continue to do so.

24:22
Ted Souder
But I think that the opportunities around job creation 510, 20 years from now is going to be greater than the job loss that people think that we're going to experience.

24:33
Madison Riddel
And I think my point of view, and kind of our agency's point of view is that for those, everybody has some sort of menial task on their plate, or at least did in every function. Even if you're a CEO, you still have some menial things that you do with running an organization. And I think that's where we're looking for our first pocket. We're not looking, who can we replace? Because they have a mundane menial job. We're looking at, hey, this person's really creative, but they're spending 40% of their time clicking buttons in a task management platform, or they're setting up an email campaign, or they're taking notes in a meeting. How can we use an AI listening tool during meetings to generate notes and follow up emails to clients? So that the people that are most strategic can spend their time being strategic.

25:15
Madison Riddel
Do you agree with that? Do you think that's too pie in the sky aspirational? Everything's going to be easy to implement? Or do you agree with that philosophy of kind of mixing? Take your most strategic folks, reduce their menial plate by 30% to 40%, and then allow them to spend more time on things they're good at.

25:32
Ted Souder
I think that's all brilliant. Think of it this way. I have this great perspective again, because I'm able to spend time in cities all over the world, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul. And that was just in the past couple months. There is a global war for talent. Businesses can't hire smart, motivated workers fast enough. And one of the ways that I believe smart business leaders are going to be winning the war for talent is by upskilling their employees by offering training programs for their employees, by saying, you, Joe, or Jane employee, I'm going to invest in you, and we're going to have a real program that we're going to show progress. You're going to take classes, maybe you get a fun diploma. You graduate, whatever the case may be.

26:21
Ted Souder
So when you're interviewing candidates and I tell people who are interviewing for jobs, I say, one question you, prospective employee needs to ask is, tell me about your employee training program.

26:33
Madison Riddel
Yep. And that's been the question for years. But now it's, how's it going to involve AI and tech?

26:38
Ted Souder
Yes. And so that's a really important question. So I had lunch a couple days ago with a woman I know in Chicago who's a senior leader at a business that you all are very familiar with. And she was telling me how the leadership there is not interested in AI. There's no roadmap there. There's no curiosity there. There's no internal training program.

26:59
Madison Riddel
A public company, it sounds like a.

27:01
Ted Souder
Big, it's a public company. There is no reimbursement for my going to an event, to network, to potentially get new sales leads, that kind of thing. And so when a smart, motivated, prospective employee is looking for a job and they go and interview with this company, I think that company is going to have a harder time hiring because they don't have these types of things in place. They don't have a plan for AI or even baseline technology. They don't have training programs. They don't have the sense that this is what employees want today. So you, as a president of Vivid front, do understand that, and that's why you're able to attract the best and the brightest, say here in Cleveland, and that's why your business is successful.

27:49
Ted Souder
Those businesses that don't do that don't have the up in the right graphs in your meetings when you're looking at performance as you do.

27:59
Madison Riddel
And those are the businesses that maybe 20 years ago, didn't embrace the Internet. This is like the new version of embracing the Internet.

28:07
Ted Souder
That's fair.

28:07
Madison Riddel
Sounds like where you're leading is not only should we be facilitating AI conversations as a culture, but we should be setting up programs and learning and advancement opportunities for our employees. Do you think that either a company of our side or an SMB? Cause that's. Most of our listeners should invest in a role specifically, that's learning AI? Or do you think every role should touch AI? Like, should there be a C suite AI role of I wanna understand and integrate AI in my business? Or do you think it's a little bit more of a long play where we all dip our toe?

28:40
Ted Souder
The terrible answer is, it depends.

28:42
Madison Riddel
Yeah.

28:43
Ted Souder
So it really, if you're a small business around the corner with three employees, it's difficult to hire an AI chief, AI officer or whatever. I think you do need two things. One, you need someone in the business who's gonna be that AI champion, that you can maybe delegate the responsibility of learning how AI can potentially impact the business, or going out to your local tech incubator and finding brilliant entrepreneurs who are working on product services or platforms that you might be able to leverage as you move along your AI journey. That makes sense, and any business can do that. The other thing is, as the business leader, your president, CEO, general manager, owner, mom, pop, whatever the role is, they also need to be utilizing the tools. They also need to be playing around with even the most basic tools.

29:39
Ted Souder
They need to be reading up online about latest advancement in technology. Find your favorite tech magazine, whether it's TechCrunch or whatever the case may be, and just understand what is happening and how it may impact your business. Because if you're delegating AI or just basic tech platforms to somebody in the company, and you as the leader aren't doing it yourself, and you're not embracing that digital mindset yourself, then I think you lose a little bit of credibility.

30:07
Madison Riddel
I agree.

30:07
Ted Souder
And then when Jane or Joe comes back and says, hey, here's what I found, here's what I think we should be doing. If you don't understand it, if you're not intent on moving towards that digital mindset, then it's going to be a harder sell than it really needs to be.

30:22
Madison Riddel
And then they're going to go somewhere that has a leadership team that is embracing it. If there's somebody who wants to learn that.

30:27
Ted Souder
Exactly.

30:28
Madison Riddel
Yeah. Do you think that there's any roles within an organization or anything, tasks within an organization that shouldn't be augmented with AI?

30:38
Ted Souder
That should not be augmented with AI.

30:40
Madison Riddel
Anything you shouldn't use AI for?

30:42
Ted Souder
I find it difficult to replace one one sales with a bot. AI can be a huge accelerator for the salesperson.

30:55
Madison Riddel
Copywriting, copywriting, all that.

30:57
Ted Souder
But even think of this, if you are selling tables, we have this beautiful table in front of us. You can go, you can literally do this afternoon, go into chat, GPT, and say, I sell tables. Here's everything, all the attributes of the table. Here's what it costs to make, here's what it costs to sell. Here's the competition. Here's industry background and information. Put everything about the table and your business into the chatbot, and then say, what objections will my salespeople hear when they're out in the marketplace? Give me ten. Give me 100. Give me 1000. Because, again, it's unlimited opportunity. So the chatbot comes back and says, here's the ten objections your salespeople can expect to hear out in the field. Then you say, give me ways to overcome those objections. That alone is super powerful.

31:49
Madison Riddel
I gotta take a note of this, because I use AI every day, and I lead our sales team. And what this next six months is about, I'm going on maternity leave. So I'm like, how do I prep this team for when I'm not here? And the number one thing for our growing sales force and our organization is how to learn how to respond to objections and think about objections. And I have always felt like that was the hardest thing to train, because the best way to navigate objections is to face them yourself, to hear them, to pitch so many times that you know what the perspective objections are gonna be. But if we can augment that with AI, I hadn't even had that thought, and I use AI every day.

32:26
Ted Souder
So, objection. Handling in sales is the critical skill that will decide whether that salesperson is going to be super successful or just maybe successful. AI can help with that today. But let's take it a step further, then take those objections, take those ways to overcome those objections and say, write me 100 Facebook ads. Yep, write me 100 Google Ads. If you don't use Google's automated programs, or whatever the case may be, write me print ads so you can take all of this information and put it into the chatbot, and it'll be able to do everything for you at scale. That is a super power sidekick that is available this afternoon. Free version, paid version, doesn't matter. Or Google Gemini, or cloud, or all these different chatbots. That's just super basic stuff.

33:15
Ted Souder
And there's nothing that can replace you and me sitting in front of each other, looking each other in the eye, building trust, my solving your problems and then giving you a solution at a fair price. So sales, you can be augmented, you can be more powerful. But I like people out in the field. I want people building those personal relationships that are trust based. And if you do that for a long time, you're going to have a client for life.

33:42
Madison Riddel
I love that. I think that's a super tangible example that pretty much any industry can lean into. If you have a salesforce, which most do. Okay, I want to dovetail into a couple of different directions. So I want to talk a little bit about the investment into AI that a business should anticipate making. Because you're talking about tools like chat, GPT and Gemini that are free and accessible to pretty much anyone. You can download the app on your phone, you can pull it up on your desktop. I'm sure everybody's doing that. And if you're not, you should be doing it. Do you think there are other larger scale investments that companies. Let's use ours as an example. We have around 35 employees. We're around 5 million in annual revenue. What do you think we should be spending on AI?

34:21
Madison Riddel
Or what should we expect to invest? Or should we just be leaning into what's free today? And that's a CFO's problem five years from now to figure out where it fits on the P and L. Poor CFO.

34:33
Ted Souder
I do think that it is worth paying for the supercharged versions of a lot of these chat bots just because they are, from the research that I've come across, that they are better, they are more powerful. And let's just pause for a moment and recognize that the AI we know today is the worst it's ever going to be. So if we can lean in to the best version that's available today, that will make us more comfortable with the tools. It'll teach us how to better prompt creators, because all that matters is what you put into it. And so if we can use these higher end tools, paid versions, get to use them on a daily basis like you're doing. Learn how to prompt better. That's a great place to start.

35:16
Ted Souder
A second place to start is around just embracing a digital mindset that not everybody is bought into this. As I said, only 30% of CEO's are even playing around with these types of tools. So leadership needs to say, I'm going to commit to moving us to being a digital first organization, to embracing these digital tools and platforms, to embracing a digital mindset. I'm going to lead by example. Let's start right there. But on a practical matter, for all businesses, it really comes down to understanding where's the friction within your organization. So before you spend a dollar, go and do an audit of the organization. Talk to literally every person, all 35 people here, and say, what's the friction in your job? What's slowing you down? What's difficult? What's inefficient? What is the reason you're still here at 08:00 at night?

36:10
Ted Souder
Because people shouldn't be at the office till 08:00 at night. If they are, it's probably mean because they're trying to overachieve, which is fine. Or it means that they're working with tools or platforms that are inefficient, or they're doing everything in an excel spreadsheet with too much menial tasks, etcetera. So, sitting down with all 35 people, which is totally doable, and understanding where is the friction in your role, and how do we move you from friction to fluidity. Once you have that audit in place, then you can kind of sort through that, maybe put all of that into a chatbot and say, here's all the friction we found in an organization, our organization. How would you chat, GPT, solve for this, leveraging AI, etcetera, and see what it comes up with.

36:55
Ted Souder
And of course, you have to check, because it's not always correct, we know that. But once you understand the friction in the organization, then you can go out into the marketplace and decide, is it something that we invest in? Is it something that we partner with? Maybe it's a software tool that we actually purchase. If you're more sophisticated, maybe on the high end, maybe it's something you build internally. So you need to understand the problem first and then understand the solution. And I always tell people, and I mentioned earlier, is that there's a great tech hub in every city and town around the world. In Chicago, on the board of 1871, which right before the pandemic was ranked the number one tech hub in the world.

37:40
Ted Souder
And so going and roaming the halls of 1871 and knowing what the entrepreneurs are building, working on what tools and resources they have, because, again, they don't have legacy, they don't have the way of always doing things. So it's great to meet with entrepreneurs because they have a different mindset, plus ego. Yeah, yeah. And so then start to understand, okay, we found that we have this problem that we're trying to solve for. We understand that we don't really have the internal resources to buy this or to build internally. So right now we're at the partner stage. And we found a couple partners in the neighborhood, or maybe across town, or maybe in Chicago or in Dubai or whatever, and let's start there.

38:22
Ted Souder
So really creating a personalized program that helps move you from friction to fluidity, while at the same time don't have unlimited funds. So you have to do what's prudent from a financial and resource perspective.

38:33
Madison Riddel
And I think based on everything you're saying, in my own experience, this should be helmed by leadership. This is a leadership team issue to start solving at the top. Because I want to shout out, our CTO, Joe, did this exact test. We decided a year ago that as an organization, we wanted to be leaning into AI. We didn't want to have fear, we didn't want our culture to have fear, and we wanted to lean in. We run on a mindset or a framework called the Entrepreneurial operating System, eos. And we take quarterly rocks. And one of our quarterly rocks that Joe had was to audit the organization, talk to everybody, figure out the friction in the roles, and find us 1000 hours of efficiencies within our organization throughout the entire year.

39:13
Madison Riddel
Twelve months using AI and some of those things were like using content tools to help us with long form content generation. Some of the things where we built our own ecosystem using a platform called Retool that would automate project managers jobs where they were setting up a Monday.com board and a slack channel, and creating our harvest time tracking system. Things that take 2 hours with every new client automated button click. And it was. I'm not gonna say it's easy. It was a lot of work for Joe. Joe, I don't wanna say that your job is easy, but the auditing process was not hard at 35 people, and maybe it would be at 1000, maybe it would look different at a larger scale organization. But in practice, everything that you're saying has worked for us as a first step.

39:55
Ted Souder
So I'm sure Joe's amazing. Shout out to Joe.

39:57
Madison Riddel
Joe, we love you, Joe.

39:58
Ted Souder
Joe. Let's take some of this off of Joe's plate, right? I think that many businesses, maybe an example being here, equate digital AI, that realm of things with the CTO when actually it's organization wide. As I said in the very beginning of our conversation, technology threads itself through all parts of an organization and so it's really important to break down those silos. And so, great example, I worked with one of the largest retailers in the world for many years, and half of the organization, the tech side digital marketing team, the general marketing team, half or so of the C suite, all in on tech platforms, partnerships, services, they're buying Google Ads and doing things on Facebook and all of that. Amazing, amazing execution, amazing company. You go to the very siloed other side of the company, not bought in tech at all.

41:04
Ted Souder
Don't see the opportunities of how it's going to impact their very traditional silo in the organization. Don't really talk to their tech enabled brethren who's on another floor. And so they're living this very traditional world within one organization. Within one organization. Because that's the way it's always been done. Yes, and that's the kiss of death. So we would talk to them frequently about the importance of breaking down these silos. And if you're a retailer and you're doing things on a digital platform and your branding team is involved and your salespeople are involved, the retail locations they're bought in, you can't be off on your traditional silo because you're an integral part of the business as well. So everybody needs to be responsible for digital, everybody needs to be responsible for technology.

42:04
Ted Souder
So take an aspect of this off of Joe's plate and give it to other, maybe today siloed business leaders within the organization. And you also said that it might be more difficult for a thousand person organization. I don't disagree with that. But at the same time, most organizations are set up in a similar manner. There's product, there's engineering, there's sales, branding, marketing, pr, you know, whatever. Find champions within each of those groups that you can go and get a solid answer of what the friction is.

42:37
Madison Riddel
So don't point to an AI guy, the whole, everyone in the leadership circle.

42:42
Ted Souder
Get everybody involved in this, talk to 1000 people, but you do talk to the eight organizations within the company and you're able to get a pretty good handle on what the situation is. So that if you did talk to 1000 people, you'd get probably the same answer. So there's still a way to gather all of that information.

43:03
Madison Riddel
Definitely. I totally agree from a tools perspective. So we're talking about finding these AI champions within an organization. Offering education, leaning in, figuring out the financial impacts, trying to get the best access you can with your budget. Are there any low hanging fruit tools you think everyone should be using? Or maybe any non popular tools that you're using yourself?

43:25
Ted Souder
Let's get super basic. Do you use Grammarly?

43:28
Madison Riddel
Yes, for a long time. And our former CEO and founder Andrew, I started as his assistant many years ago. That's how I got my start at Vividfront and saw it on my computer and was like, turn that off. You need to make sure you can write without Grammarly. But here we are.

43:44
Ted Souder
I think Grammarly is the greatest thing known to man. Clearly I missed those days in fourth grade when we learned prosper comma usage. I just can't get the comma straight. What it does though, is that it makes my writing, I think, baseline professional. But it's a really simple basic tool that should be loaded onto everybody's computer just to make your writing legible and appropriate. And that to me, is the most low hanging fruit of all. Just make your emails better.

44:20
Madison Riddel
A student could use it.

44:21
Ted Souder
I think the usage of chat, GPT and Gemini and others is completely underrated. That the power of these chat bots and what you can get out of it is extraordinary. But again, you need to know what to put into it.

44:40
Madison Riddel
Focus on the prompting.

44:41
Ted Souder
Yeah, focus on the prompting. So if you take the time to learn how to put together the best prompt possible to get the best result possible, and it's a learning journey, then you're going to be like, how was I living without this?

44:54
Madison Riddel
Yes, that's how I feel.

44:55
Ted Souder
I use it every day, all day long. You use it every day, all day long. I'm struggling to reflect back on a time when we didn't have this.

45:03
Madison Riddel
Yes, I don't even open up Google anymore, which, not to say that to Google Insider, but when I go to my phone to quote unquote, google something, I just open my Chetgbt up and.

45:13
Ted Souder
I ask, and I would imagine Google's very nervous about that.

45:16
Madison Riddel
Yeah, for sure.

45:16
Ted Souder
And they're very smart and they will come up with solutions that they will be able to monetize in the future and they won't impact the search cash machine that it is. They will figure that out and Google will be just fine. But it is a very powerful tool that everybody needs to be using in all aspects of your business. Like I gave the example of sales. So if you don't have this superpower sidekick sitting next to you, which is a chatbot, then you're missing out on even free opportunities to do that. But then there's next generation opportunities too, that when businesses are thinking about how to provide a higher level of customer service on their website, every business should be using a chatbot. It's just as good as an inhuman interaction. First, at least 90% of what people.

46:08
Madison Riddel
Are asking early adopters in e-commerce, the live chat.

46:12
Ted Souder
Absolutely. Yeah, that's super exciting. I think when you're thinking about in the retail industry, how you're able to use UI for product discovery, I mean, AI for product discovery, super great opportunity in healthcare, being able to analyze scans and whatnot. Great low hanging fruit there. So there's a lot of opportunities that businesses aren't even necessarily leveraging at the extent that they should today, but once they will, then they're like, oh, this is great, and it pays off and there's great profit here. And then they build. And by that time, all sorts of new technologies have blossomed. The entrepreneurial ecosystem that is going to blow up around AI everywhere is going to be amazing. And there's going to be so many great products and services created. There's going to be so many new industries, jobs created, entire new industries created.

46:59
Ted Souder
It's going to create enormous wealth, enormous income generation everywhere around the world. It's going to be super exciting. But if you don't know it's there, if you're not working on it, then you're not going to participate.

47:12
Madison Riddel
Goosebumps. Last thing I want to ask you, I think there's a ton of good content here, so I'm really excited for everyone to listen. We haven't talked at all about how toe the line ethically when it comes to personalization. And you touched on what made me think of this was enhancing user experiences with AI for personalization. So for folks that aren't in our world of marketing and technology, when you go to a website and you see that there's content that was tailored just for you've probably already seen this with advertisements. You look at a pair of shoes, those same pair of shoes follow you around the Internet. That's like basic remarketing. We create enhanced experiences using artificial intelligence based on data we know about somebody.

47:54
Madison Riddel
How do you toe that line from creepy and overbearing to offering really engaging experiences with AI, which again, is not a new concept for marketers. We've been dealing with this for decades, figuring out how toe that line between privacy and good experiences. But how do you think AI changes that?

48:12
Ted Souder
It's going to turbocharge the opportunity to have a safer level of privacy no one should be. And it's great that cookies are going away and that whole movement, because people shouldn't be followed around. Like there is an element of privacy that is super important that everybody agrees with. And so I think you're going to find ways to enhance the advertising experience. I'm all for personalization if it's providing value, yes. And I think we will get to the point where advertising will learn more about me, more about my purchases, that once I buy something, then the ad goes away. That would be great. You're going to find opportunities where people will know that I am specifically in the market for something based not just on a search or viewing an ad or I paused on Instagram or whatnot.

49:09
Ted Souder
So I think coming up with a much more personalized experience that is really truly privacy, safe and targeted, I think that's a good thing. I think there's a lot of bad actors out there that will try to manipulate that and to do some nefarious things with AI. I think the whole deepfake scary capability is super scary. There needs to be laws and regulations around that and around AI in general, and that's laws and regulation around it is a good thing. But I think you have to do it not only at the global level, but bringing it down to the national level. You can't have all 50 states having different AI privacy laws. I think that's challenging. You have the amount of dis and misinformation that's out there is going to provide problems.

50:01
Madison Riddel
Yes.

50:01
Ted Souder
And I think we've got to figure out how to label information that is just not accurate. And it's more than a public notice on x. It's disinformation will impact elections. It will have kinetic effects out in cities and war zones and whatnot. So there's a downside for sure. This is all so new that there's a lot for people to discover. My personal belief is good will prevail, but there's gonna be hiccups. And I think if you have governments out there trying to regulate things, put real thought into it, take the time to bring in real experts, do things for the good of humanity, not for a reelection effort or because you're getting lobbied or other personal type reasons. Let's do something that's right for humanity.

51:04
Ted Souder
Let's do something that's right for the world, and let's do it together and fight nefarious actors that want to do bad things. And it's a big ask, but I'm an optimistic person. Likewise, and I think that we can get that done. But this is my belief, and I think a lot of other people believe this as well, that AI and the opportunities that it presents, this is fire and electricity level innovation beyond the first Internet.

51:36
Madison Riddel
We're talking basics of fire and electricity.

51:38
Ted Souder
This will be bigger than the Internet because it's going to open up. And then when you dovetail it with capabilities around quantum computing and all of that, it's going to open up an entire new universe of knowledge and growth and opportunity. And so we need to be responsible with something that's so big and grand in scale.

52:02
Madison Riddel
I agree. That's a great way for us to conclude. I feel so energized by our conversation. I think everyone has a lot to learn from Ted and his experiences. Is there anywhere that they can connect with you listeners if they want to learn a little bit more about AI or hear some of your talks that you're giving?

52:17
Ted Souder
I mean, the best way to do it is just connect with me on LinkedIn. Everything is there on LinkedIn. I have my own website, tedsuder.com, that supports my speaking engagements around the world. But connecting on LinkedIn is a great way to, not only just in a basic way, keep track of connections and such, but I also think LinkedIn is this incredibly powerful learning platform that you follow people who are doing things that are of interest to you, and you learn. You can spend all day on LinkedIn learning about different topics, and they're tailoring.

52:50
Madison Riddel
Their algorithms to give you better content. They have AI involved now. Oh, yeah, and their content. So, agreed on LinkedIn. Last question to wrap us up. I always end with something fun. So again, for those who didn't already hear it, Google Insider for 20 years, what are you using every day if you had to choose one from now until the end of time? Chat, GPT, or Gemini.

53:15
Ted Souder
So I use both. I use them for different things. One, I use them just to kind of play off each other to see how different their answers might be to different queries and things that I'm putting in there. Also, using cloud and others, I think you need to think about what it is you're trying to achieve. Use the different tools and find the one that gives you the most satisfactory answer. I don't have a favorite, personally.

53:45
Madison Riddel
I don't pick favorites like a kid.

53:46
Ted Souder
I don't pick favorites. I also think that, like I said, the AI that we're playing with today is the worst that it's ever going to be. If you and I can circle back in a couple of years and have a follow up conversation and ask this question again. Are we going to be using either of those a few years from now? I don't know.

54:10
Madison Riddel
Well, you're a pioneer of a lot of things. Maybe we'll be using Tet AI and I would buy into that.

54:15
Ted Souder
I think that, no, I think, all joking aside, I think that's real.

54:17
Madison Riddel
Yeah.

54:18
Ted Souder
I believe that we will have some sort of AI sidekick that is fed my information, my writing, my speeches, whatever it is that I do, that you do, that others do that, Joe, the CTO does that. You have your own personalized AI that will solve for X. We don't know today what that necessarily is, but to me that makes perfect sense.

54:45
Madison Riddel
Well, I look forward to a conversation between Madison AI and Ted AI in the next couple of years. Thank you so much.

54:51
Ted Souder
This is super fun. Thank you. Congratulations on the podcast and also this incredible space. It's really inspiring.

54:58
Madison Riddel
Thank you. Thank you for joining us. This was awesome. Appreciate it.

55:00
Lisa Perry
Ted, we hope you enjoyed this episode. Now it's time to start making moves. Head to vividfront.com marketing moves for exclusive marketing materials. Every episode we add more of our greatest insider secrets to help you move towards success. See you next time.