How To Build An AI First Agency With Len Ward

We talk with Lynn Ward about why marketing is shifting from search and retrieve to solve my problem, and why speed is becoming the moat for agencies and clients alike. We break down what AI-first agencies are building right now to protect conversions, reduce bottlenecks, and stay visible as web traffic and SEO change.

• search behavior shifting as ChatGPT and other LLMs absorb intent
• speed as the new moat for agencies and operators
• why agency pricing based on headcount starts to fail
• practical case studies like instant quoting and support automation
• building a data room as the foundation for AI systems
• using AI chatbots to capture real customer questions and drive content
• data governance, privacy, and shadow AI risks inside companies
• how we use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity differently
• lead gen fading while brand building and microinfluencer content rise
• YouTube Shorts as a visibility lever for LLM citations

Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenward

https://commexis.com/

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Transcript

Welcome And The AI Shock

SPEAKER_00 0:02

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host with Matt Bertram. And it's getting real. Okay, so things are changing in the marketing world that is percolating into every component of business, whether it be um HR, whether it be document review, whether it be kind of your internal operations, but your infrastructure layer is changing. We talked about that a little bit last time. So I wanted to bring in somebody that kind of can help continue that conversation forward of what AI first and AI um enabled marketing agencies look like. So I know that there are a lot of agencies out there that are listening. This is your North Star of where you need to go. So I wanted to bring in Lynn Ward, who's been building these systems day in and day out. And Lynn, I just wanted, we were talking a little bit before. I said, hey, let's hit record, let's jump into this. But like let's let's talk about how kind of marketing shifted and kind of the direction you're going with agency work.

From Search To Solve My Problem

SPEAKER_02 1:20

Yeah, great. Well, first off, thanks for having me. Um, so yeah, I mean, we're moving more like we mentioned before. We are all of us in the agency world have got to understand that we are moving away from search and retrieve to solve my problem. It is an absolutely fundamental shift in how you run an agency, how you build an agency going forward, how you hire, how you fire, what you're building, and so forth. Um, right now, traffic is a premium when it comes to a website. I don't think I've talked to one agency owner who's not saying, hey, traffic kind of dropping off a lot of my clients' websites. It's not because you're doing a bad job, it's because one billion users are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. I'm not even getting into Gemini and Claude and the rest of them yet. So the traffic's happening because they don't want to go search on Google. They don't want to start reading through lengthy blog posts and everything else we're doing. They want to arrive at your website and they want you to solve their problem. And I basically put it in a nutshell like this: if they use ChatGPT to find you, how quick that was, do you think they're going to want to go to your website and do time travel back to the horse and buggy world? They don't want to. They want the answer now. So, what we're building even before marketing is we understand that again, traffic is at a premium. So, what can we put on the website, what or on social anywhere that can start solving people's problems right away? Anywhere from AI chatbots, anywhere from custom GPTs, getting business owners to understand notebook LLMs, to kind of build out an audience, to understand what their TAM is, to understand what their ICP is. So it's really going into your client base and saying, look, I understand you're paying us to do lead gen, and I understand that's what our main goal is, but lead gen is rapidly going away. I think we're all seeing that. So what does it look like in the next year or two? I mean, Christ, we could even say what's gonna look like in the next six months. And I think the most important part right now is anybody that's coming to your website, you have to look at that as an asset. And how can we capitalize on that asset? Because it's not churn and burn the way we've all been used to for what, 20-something years. Just get as many people into the website, and then you know how many leads you're gonna get based upon the traffic to the website and so forth. So that's kind of what we've been working on. So we've been kind of looking at marketing bottlenecks, we've been looking at business bottlenecks, we've been looking at customer service bottlenecks. What can we build? What can we vibe code? Um, what can we put on a GPT? Like, what can we do to get the client's information into a repository, a data room, where that data room can be tapped into whatever product you're building and can give the client, the customer, the internal team, the fastest answer possible uh to kind of get to that point, you know, where you can start servicing what you need to service. And in a big, long-winded answer to us speed is your new moat, and the fastest company is going to win in this in this new world.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah, I I feel like the step change that's happening to if you are really utilizing these tools and you're not giving it just lip service is like you you talked about the horse and buggy analogy. The analogy that keeps coming up to me is um when like phones or like the quality of the phone or what what like a VCR, like VCR changes to Blu-ray, or like there's there's like a utilization change. Like if you're building websites a certain way, there's a new way to build them that you just can't go back to once you start building them. And the people that are doing it their own way, that technology doesn't fit with the new technology. So you have to like go over that moat and transition into that component. And if uh gosh, like I'm trying to think of like 4K cameras versus whatever it was called before, but like that technology doesn't always interact really well, and so unless you make that jump and and and really invest in that technology, you're gonna hit a brick wall on certain things. Like you can you can enable certain things, you could do certain things. Like we were we were doing that, like so. We were like, Oh, okay, well, we're gonna still use WordPress and we're gonna still make these things work. And um, as we started getting into it and as we started looking, we're like, we have to reimagine this whole thing, okay, and we're gonna do it completely different. And just to what you were saying, the speed being your new mood is if you're doing it the new way, and there's other people still doing it the own way, every month, every quarter, every year, whatever that's happening, which we can't even predict out a year, um, that mode is like you said, getting widened. And and I think it's I I think the people that are giving lip service to this and the agencies that are really investing it, you're gonna start to see quite a quite a bit of separation. And and once you make the change, it's it's it's hard to go back, frankly.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

I I don't disagree. I mean, to give you an analogy, just because well, because came right to mind when you said it was we all remember when you were going to Netflix and clicking your boxes and the discs were getting sent to you, and then 18 months later you're turning on your TV and the and the and the feeds coming in. So that's the seismic shift you're looking at. And now, why don't you put that on steroids and times it by a million? That that's the shift.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

That you know, I'm glad you brought that up. And sorry I didn't articulate it that well, guys. It's been a really long week. I'm graduating from this Goldman Sachs program, and and like I I got my final pitch, and so I've been all over the place. But what I what I can tell you with that specifically, my mom was one of the first uh employees of Microsoft, okay. And I actually wanted to get into the like Red Box business before it was called Red Box. Uh, and my mom was like, no, it's all gonna be streaming, okay. And the tail on the the old technology is so much longer than she thought or that I saw because there's still red boxes at, you know, a couple pharmacies here and there, but like the use of that is going down and down and down and down. And and I think that that's what's gonna happen with agencies, right? Like there's gonna be this big change over, and then there's gonna be this slow trend that's gonna like the people are still gonna be doing it that way, but it's gonna be harder and harder to operate that business that's in a dying kind of place. So you need to make the U-turn, or not the U-turn, but the left turn or the right turn and start getting on, taking action with some of these things now because like that mode you're gonna either it's gonna either be widened by you or it's gonna be shrunken. But now's still a time to make the leap. But I I think in another six months or a year, like good luck is is kind of where I'm at.

Agency Headcount And Pricing Reset

SPEAKER_02 7:44

Yeah, I I don't think I think if we collectively look at all of ourselves as an agency and we kind of let's just say there's a hundred of us in a room, right? We'll say that's all the agency owners. I think you're gonna be down to about 20 in the next 18 months. And you you made a couple good points. I think the problem agencies are facing right now to kind of talk agency talk is number one, they're way too top-heavy, you have way too many employees. You don't need 25 copywriters, you don't need 25 web designers. I'm not trying to be a jerk because I've been running an agency for 20-something years and I want to keep everybody employed. I am not here to get people, you know, on the firing line. But if you're running an agency, you don't need that anymore. Um, it's just not relevant. So that's number one. Number two, the value that agencies still put in headcount is absolutely blows me away. You know, where it's almost like a thump your chest type thing. Maybe five, 10 years ago, that was a great thing to walk in and you walk into Comexas and see 25 plus employees, it was awesome. You go walk into Madison Ave and go walk into Havas or one of these major shops, great shops, tremendous, and there'll be thousands and thousands of people. You're gonna look foolish in the next two years if you have thousands and thousands of employees in a marketing agency because companies aren't gonna want to pay that overhead. So you pitching this product, and at the end of the day, agencies have to pitch a product, their price is predicated 100% on what their headcount is. So if you have a real high headcount, your prices are higher. Companies are not gonna pay that because they understand the shift has happened. So agencies, I think, that are really slow to the you know the pitch here, and I'll be honest, I run into a lot of them. And and I do have a lot of buddies that are running agencies. I'm like, hey, you got to really, really embrace it. And I get more resistance from not, you know, they're like, well, this isn't gonna change, that's gonna change, and it's it's all changing, you know, and and not only that, but you're looking at we're truly at the intersection of AI and influencer marketing. So this whole Google search world that we've lived in, which was awesome, um, I think that's change. And everybody, every little business has to be a micro influencer and has to understand the AI platforms again, the solve problems. That's where the future of lead gen and business is headed, especially in the agency world. So, yeah, to make your point or to capitalize on your point, the people that are doing lip service and not really embracing this and studying it, they're they're making them, and the ones that are doing this mass hiring, you're making a major mistake.

Data Rooms And Bottleneck Automation

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Yeah, to to speak to that, and this is kind of uh some other podcasts that that have gone on where we get into more heady conversation, but the the the social contract between labor and capital has really changed, and so now it's like capital and compute, right? And so, um, and and that's why we hear all this stuff about uh electricity and what like we're seeing like like 40 million dollar exits, right? Like base 44 sold to Wix, like it was one guy in Israel or whatever. Like, so things things are certainly changing, and people are now bragging. That's what I'm seeing online, is people are not bragging that they're like a one-person agency or this or that. Like, so so I think the there's a sea change that's happening. And if you're operating your business and you're not kind of uh looking up and looking around, you're gonna get left behind. And I I feel like there was this initial wave of people starting to use tools, and then they just kind of go, Oh, I got more productivity, and then they stopped and they're continuing to operate that business. And so, what I'm trying to do on this podcast is continue to push people that you need to keep going, like keep going. It's gonna there's gonna be less people there, and when you have normal conversations in the real world, yeah, it's it's kind of it's kind of like people are looking at you like, what's going on? Because it hasn't affected their jobs yet. It it hit us in marketing first, but I mean it's coming, right? It's coming. I I'm starting to see that that change. So I know people are like, Matt, get to the point. So I'll bring it back. So when when you're running a marketing agency and you were talking about the search and retrieve and then solve my problem, can you go into some kind of case studies of what that solved my problem looks like? How like you're getting requests to do other things outside of maybe just marketing, like that you're coming in, maybe it's customer service, you know, you're tying stuff into the CRM, maybe it's HR. Like, like it, it's it's fanning out of what you can do once you build this infrastructure and you kind of orchestrate some of these agents. Like, can you talk through some of that?

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Yeah. So we we're lucky enough where a lot of our clients do want to talk business with us. Um, they want to kind of look at some infrastructure. They do want to talk about customer service. So it's almost like a given where, you know, lead gen, we're coming in and we're going to be able to generate your leads based upon what's going on. But some of the case studies that we find is, you know, one of the things where AI works well is the bottleneck in closing business, the bottlenecks in getting the proposal out to the person. I can't tell you how many times you look at maybe a contractor and they come, they do an estimate on your house, and you maybe get an estimate back. Well, two weeks later in this day and age, it's it's insane. Um, or you have another B2B service type business that's going out and hey, I'll I'll bring you back a quote. I'm gonna look at these specs. We're able to build platforms right now where salespeople can do quotes on the spot and say, this is what it's gonna be, because we're building a data room database. They don't need to go in and you know put all these specs together and say this is what it's gonna cost. They literally can enter it into an AI chatbot uh or you know, basically a chat bot we build on top of an LLM and it can literally spit back a quote right away. Other bottlenecks we're working on is there are times where in a customer service, there is like, you know, support tickets that they need. And typically you would have to have somebody call you back, or customer service would have to walk you through that, or even have to send somebody out. There's actually a B2B company that does a lot of office, you know, office equipment where they interact with the chat bot and the chatbot will actually solve the problem, work walking the person through it. That eliminates customer service for hours, they can dedicate their time somewhere else. The rep who would go on the road can now go handle something else. So it's identifying what is prolonging your business from getting accomplished, what bottlenecks are you hitting? Is that in closing a deal? Is that customer service? Is that an internal plan you guys are trying to work on? Well, let me gather all this information. I tell people all the time the number one thing you do with a business, especially if you're in the ad world or if you're in the consulting world, build a data room. And that's fancy talk for Dropbox or Google Drive. And if you want to get, you know, real tight, you can go to your IT department and they can really build solid departments or you know, rooms for you. But organize your data, have it all organized in the right way, spend the time this quarter and get it done because every AI tool that you want to use, you simply just plug it into this data room and now it's talking through it. So that's how we look at it.

Shadow AI And Data Privacy Risk

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Yeah. And one of the things you mentioned earlier was like custom GPTs or gems, like you can build for each client a data set that you're using in your your cloud data lake, if you will, right? Of whatever ecosystem you're in. And you could drop these documents in there. You can use the chat bot to recall this data to help you create better tailored data. Um, there's a lot of prompts that you can use from a prompt engineering standpoint, as well as kind of like you're using almost like a rag system, right? To to recall this. And then, like one of the things that we're we're doing for a couple clients, and this is you know something that's like we're not we're not advertising it, but we're we're building LLMs, uh, open source LLMs on their server so that they can recall data where it's not getting processed out of house. So they're protecting their data. So like we're we're starting to look at kind of data governance as as as I think important because these these LLMs, like once this data gets out there, it's you know, it's hard to get it's hard to put back in a box. And we're even seeing um people that know how to use this data, like you know, they they're using it not appropriately, right? So so at a company that we're working with right now, we're calling it like shadow AI, I guess. And so people are using it and they're putting proprietary information into uh the public realm. And and that's not ideal, right? Especially if you have some of this stuff. So you need to understand what Lynn's talking about with kind of quote unquote the data lakes or keeping your stuff internal and making sure that it's all talking to each other inside um like a terms of service where you know what's happening to the data. So I just want to throw that out there because people are moving really fast on stuff and we're seeing stuff break. Um, and so you know, just just be careful of that.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Yeah, you make a I think that's excellent. We've been telling people, matter of fact, I have my son who's in college and he's thinking about making a complete 180 and going to IT school. And I can't, I I'm like, I can't support that enough. Um, I don't think people understand how important IT, you know, and you know, all of that is going to become here. And I know that anthropic just had like you probably saw that.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Yeah, yeah, I posted about that. I was just like, even the biggest company in the world is dealing with these like issues of like, oh, we didn't we didn't set something and then we just we just uh provided all all this research and all this data that yeah is proprietary.

SPEAKER_02 16:33

Yeah, that's it's concerning. So yeah, you know, I so I think it's funny because this the conversation's got to go a little different, but I it's my problem with IT is this. Number one, they are probably more needed now in this world than almost anything, they really are. The second thing is sometimes they're gonna handcuff you so much you're not gonna do your AI advancements are gonna get small. So I think as much as an agency or an industry like us, like marketing, like we had to advance, I think IT has got to understand that they are not gonna be able to control the speed of the car. Typically, IT and security has always been able to control the speed of a car in a business. You no longer can do that. So I think that the IT people are gonna have to lean on AI in their own right to be able to keep up to the speed of what's going on because they could pull you back and hinder your business. But you're making a very, very good point. I think it's something everyone has to understand. Your data, unfortunately, if you don't play this game right, whether you're gonna do it on Snowflake, however you want to build your modes, your data could get out there just by one dumb thing. And if you have an employee uploading your, you know, has to come up with a financial document for the CFO and throws up all their company information of a Fortune 500 company, that's not good. You don't do that into a chat GPT, um, because it will get out there. So you make a good point. It's it's a it's we're in a really real world where the the privacy is a concern.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

So so I want to bring this back to kind of the the path that we were on, but but I just I wanted to highlight that because I was talking to a cybersecurity expert, and basically people were doing stuff at the company, and it triggered a cybersecurity response, which cost the company like 15 grand because people weren't utilizing it internally and it looked like a hack.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

And so, you know, it's just something to be thinking about when you're doing this. And I agree with like speed, but break things and like you know, whatever it is, uh you know what I mean? Like and like uh development in the real world or whatever it is, like uh there's a couple quotes out there that I think that uh is uh a subset culture of startup, right? And I think that there's a difference between startup and like you know, if if you have a legacy business, how do you transform? You go through that digital transformation because I feel like a lot of companies are starting to get through the like, oh, we need to use social media, and now there's this whole new thing of AI and like, oh my gosh, how do we get there? And then they're like run, run, run, run, run. And you know, they don't know what the tech debt that's happening is, and uh they could make some faux pas that could really uh affect their business. So I just wanted to kind of throw that out there in this conversation, but I do a hundred percent agree that we were affected first and and now other businesses are being affected. So we we are kind of the the guided the guides and can provide the guideposts for other companies that are going through this transformation because I mean we got hit with it immediately. Um, so what are the what are the things that you want to make sure to kind of communicate and cover? Let's get back on track with this conversation.

Who Leads AI Inside Companies

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Well, I I think you made a good point though, about I'm asked a lot of times when people somebody will say, Well, who do you, you know, because I I have people say who should we hire internally for AI or what should we do for this? I come back and I do, and I know it's easy for me to say this, and I'm like a really good marketer, a really good marketer whose job was threatened, the existence was threatened, they had to learn AI from the ground up. And by the way, you truly understand AI if you understand business processes. If you truly understand how a business runs, how the finances work, how their products work, and you know that great marketers, they get so involved in a business that they could work for that business after about six months' time because of how much they're learning. So if you have a marketer who truly understands how to harness AI and then understands your business processes, that's probably one of the best people you can hire for this. So, as many AI marketers that are worried about losing their jobs, I tell people embrace AI unlike anything you ever have in your life, because you, the marketers, are the ones that are going to be hired internally and externally to help people navigate this AI world. Because if you're worried about, oh, I think I'm late to the game, late to the game. The best stat I've heard is 5% of companies have done anything in AI outside of use it for a tool for a little bit of marketing, a little bit of emails, and a little bit of writing blog posts. 5%. So it's kind of like what people didn't realize is up until COVID, it was something like 70% of small businesses had websites. There was still 30% that didn't have websites. That's now now of a COVID, everybody had to get it. You remember because you know you had to get online fast. But it's, you know, so there is a huge runway for people who are thinking about getting into AI, want to get involved. Don't think you're late to the game. You're you think you're late to the game because the amount of information we're digesting, social media, and and you're like, oh my God, everybody's doing it. No, your your your feed and algorithm, you think everybody's doing it. But the reality, but as you walk in a room again of 100 people, you maybe have five people that truly understand AI, maybe the way you and I are talking right now, and the rest of them are like, I have no idea what it is, and I'm gonna lose my job. So I really tell people to really lean into it. Don't be afraid of it.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Yeah, we live in a bubble to a certain degree, but if you're in the bubble and you're benchmarking what's happening, it's moving quite fast. But that's where you want to be. You want to be the tip of the spear of what's going on. I would love to hear kind of some case studies of the organize, train, deploy, optimize, and scale kind of framework of like how you've been able to implement that and what that looks like uh for businesses.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Well, I think one of the best things companies can do is add AI chatbots to the Website. I'm coming back to the AI chatbot. You can buy them off the shelf. You could build one on Replit. You could build one on Claude Code. Basically, what this does is it takes the content from your website or a content you put in a data room and it talks to the customers that are coming on your website and it gives them an answer. This is not like your dad's chatbot that you remember where they never give you an answer or a law firm one where they just want to get your exchange information to get a lead. These things, their job is actually to try to solve your problem and answer a question. But from a marketing perspective, I don't think people understand how powerful it is. You know, for years we sat there and we listened to keywords and user intent, right? And we'd say, okay, well, they all landed on this page. This is the basket of keywords they were probably using. That's gone. Now you're actually hearing actual conversations that they're happening with your website. And the best part about it is the minute you have a chatbot on your website, you're never going to have to worry about coming up with a calendar again, a content calendar, because it's literally telling you these are the 25 questions that were asked this month. Five of these questions we couldn't answer because there's nothing on your website but is relevant to your business. So that little thing is the aha moment for marketers and you know, business people, when they see that, they're like, wow. So that's a case study. When I tell people, I'm like, all right, AI's scary, it's big and all of that, but why don't we do this? Let's let's come in in a very easy, affordable way. And we're gonna put an AI chatbot on your website. After 90 days, we're gonna sit back and it's gonna tell you every single thing you know. I say this to every person I hear. I guarantee when I come back in 90 days and sit down in your conference room, you will not say, I cannot believe somebody asked that. I never thought I saw that. I never thought in my life a customer was asking that. It never happens. So they always see it and they're like, oh my god, they and they have a list of questions. They're like, We never thought about that. I'm like, yeah, because you know, this is what AI is doing for you.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

So there's there's two things I want to say that it makes me think back to some old podcasts. First is there was a guy that I uh brought on the podcast that was selling um live uh chatbots, like a live human behind the chatbot. And I was kind of talking similar to what you were saying. And like on the call, he was like, Are you selling AI chatbots? And I was like, No, I just think that that's the future. I think that that's where it's going. So um when you started talking, that that reminded me of it. And so, you know, if anybody uh listens to the podcast, they'll know what I'm talking about, or you can go uh check that out. And then um one of the other things that you said, um, I totally forgot. So we'll just keep on rolling. Um, but no, oh, here's what it was. There was another guy that was doing lead gen sites and uh in kind of really like niche industries, like one was in the mushroom industry, like I guess edible mushrooms and whatever. Um, but but basically from a data mining standpoint, uh the search box as well as could be uh extended to a chat bot, all the questions that you as a business owner get to collect, what people are trying to figure out and find that you don't know that people are asking, gives you a window into um who your target audience is, what's going on in their heads, like where they're at, what questions they're asking. And and a lot of times when we get the data, depending on however you get it, and you look at what the client's asking you to do or what the client thinks is the next step, the data doesn't always align with that. Sometimes, like it gives you confirmation, but sometimes it opens up the discussion, like you said, to to other things. And I think that that's really important to consider. What do you not know about your customer or why do you think that they're buying? Like doing the real data analysis to understand what's happening, that's that was the step change from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Like a lot of times when I talk to people that are running terrestrial radio still or they're running TV ads, like when I'm on like a like a like a multi-functional team and I'm bringing the data component, we a lot of times stay on after and they're like, How is how is it affecting the data on the website when we're running radio ads or we're running TV ads? Because I'm trying to figure out, okay, when you run when you when you bought this flight, like the the brand search went like through the roof, and I can see in the geographic areas where that is, and then you can kind of start to map stuff out, which has been pretty cool uh when you when you're working on those bigger campaigns. But what people I think need to understand is everything you're doing, these LLMs are picking them up, like they're just like a really smart individual. But you push on over here, something affects over here. You do it over here, same thing with search systems, like you do that, like people don't understand everything you do online affects your um your your brand um interpretation, your your how your entities represented, how they're associated with each other. Like, even what you said earlier, you like listed a bunch of different agencies, and then you listed your agency in there. Like you're building, like uh, you know, a a co-citation with those companies, and we're seeing like listicles come out, like every like people don't understand every single thing that you're doing is impacting how you're being perceived uh by these tools. And I think again, here's another crazy prediction. I think everybody's gonna have their own chat bot, or most people are gonna have their own chat bot that really what you're trying to do, and you're gonna have other agents and uh information, you're gonna be trying to sell to that agent so that when that human asks that question, that that personal chat bot uh tells you what you want them to hear. And I think that that's I think that that's ultimately where the whole thing's going is yeah, your predictions.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

You we, yeah, I don't know, you you might have heard me talk or I might have heard you talk, but because I actually said I'm like, This is my prediction, but I might have stole from somebody. But um I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

I'm glad we're talking. It sounds like we're on the same wavelength.

Agent To Agent Marketing And LLM Stack

SPEAKER_02 27:47

Bottom line is we're on the same wavelength. Yeah, I think it's I think the scariest thing for marketers is exactly what you just said. I think we're moving to a world of agent-to-agent marketing where your personal agent is gonna interact with another agent, humans not even gonna have any input whatsoever. You're gonna, it's good, you're counting you're looking at your phone, be like, Oh, there's my calendar for tomorrow or the next day, and I'm gonna I have to go here, I have to go there. It's gonna know what credit cards to use, you know, here's the points. And I did hear this on a podcast a long time ago, but it was kind of like it was kind of like abstract. But the more you look at something like open claw, the more you maybe use agent mode and chat GPT. And like you said, it's funny because now when I because I I operate like I use, I literally right now top my screen, I got clawed, Gemini, and ChatGPT and Notebook LM open. So, but the more I operate in all of them, and if I break up you know all different custom GPTs, you know, that's kind of or gems or however you want to call it projects, it it all comes back to it, knows my entire conversation. I had across every single one of them. So that one being understands Len Ward all the way. So you're right. So at what point are they gonna come out with an apparatus, which apparently Chat GPT is right around the corner having a product that you're gonna walk around with, and that's gonna be interacting with every one of these chatbots out there.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Okay, so you brought something up. I think it's worth talking about because this is something that that I personally do as well. You're working with a bunch of different um uh of the major LLMs, right? So you you you talked about Gemini, you talked about uh Claude, you talked about Chat GPT. How are you using them? I think people would love to hear what you are using different ones for because I certainly have ones I go to for certain things, because like also like the like the memory set, for example, I love chat GBT four and like where it had per uh perpetual memory, um, and I was using it one way, and then well, they turned that off, and now I I like it because if I use Claude, it will it'll try to tie it back to everything that we talked about. And if I just need like a uh like a new thread, I'll start to use chat GPT for this, or I'll use Claude for this, and then we're using Gemini's tied into our whole workflow, and then Manis is like hooked into Facebook. So I'm I'm curious just kind of how you're utilizing the different LLMs, if you don't mind sharing.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

No, that's that's good, great question. So I personally use Chat GPT as my operating system for everything. Um, so I have a myriad of um custom GPTs that are built out in there, so I am pretty much on that daily. That's the or that's your that's your operating system. That's my operating system. Um Gemini, I find to be the smartest. So if I have to go do something, I think Gemini's deep research, I think Notebook LLM, which is a product of theirs, I'll touch on that in a minute because that's a really under you live.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Yeah, yeah, it's it's great. Yeah, it's a great tool.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Um, but so I go to Gemini when I when I look at the Chat GPT answer, that'll come back to me, or maybe it's writing code or something, and I'll bring something over to Gemini and I'll say, go through this. It's funny because Gemini and Chat GPT work very well together. If you actually get those two when you're kind of doing it, so I cross-check a lot of stuff. A lot of times, if I have a quick question and I want to kind of go through something, I go to Gemini. So I'm finding myself using a Gemini, but I'll say this that a lot of people are saying the more I use Claude, the more I go in there and try to touch on things, the more I say to myself, I'm like, Claude is so goddamn advanced, it's unbelievable. I mean, it's almost like Claude is the best version of Gemini and Chat GPT, but strips out all the bullshit. And it's like, what do you want? I'll create it. That's it. You don't have to do this and add agent mode, and I'll do whatever you want me to do. So, but you know, and then there's by the way, there's the other flip side that's an underutilized tool, which is not even notebook, but a lot of people discount perplexity for the quick search. People like that for the search.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

The backlinks, like if you're if you're doing uh backlink research on what where where these LMs are pulling from, I think I I've found that to be the most helpful. And uh, we've been starting to mess around with the perplexity browser comet. Uh yeah, it's good. And so um I'm having a great time. Like, I mean, I know that it's scary, but uh it's scary only if you don't know what's going on. And you know, I think I think that that's what it is. There's we have just so much information that we're processing today, like you know, emails and everything else, and all this stuff is moving so rapidly and it's changing so much, it becomes like overload. And um, I think I think you know, being in marketing or being in digital or being like in that capacity, uh, you have a real advantage to be able to pick this stuff up because I mean, look, the biggest problem I think in marketing is how many different platforms are people still logging into. Like, that is my number one pet peeve. Like, let's stop logging in to all these different platforms, let's use NPCs to like connect everything together and build, like you say, like like the data lake to like reference from a rag standpoint, like let's recall this information from this place. Like, let's not take fractured fragmented fractured data and then put it all together. I I don't know. I just feel like marketers, it the problem is so much in our face that AI solves it and and it's forcing us to do it. And under industries, like, look, my wife's in like construction. I mean, she doesn't want to have anything to do to do with with AI. Um, but but I see opportunities for it, I see advancements. And I mean, I even see the robots walking out, uh, like you know, with Melinda or whatever her name is, Melania. Sorry, Melania. Yeah, yeah. Like, did you see that? Like and like what Elon Musk is talking about. I mean, when that comes around the corner, I think that that's gonna be the wake-up call like COVID of like, hey, you can work from home, you can do stuff remote. Like, I mean, Zoom calls, and I'll just say this. Sorry, I'm on a on a on a just a rant at this point, but I feel like paid ads absolutely like all the models we had when everybody started getting into PPC around COVID, um, threw out like all the models that we had of how we were running ads, and and the market just became too saturated. And at a certain point, like how much juice can you squeeze out of this lemon? Like, like you need to fan out on some of these other platforms. And I think that that's what forced the fan out and the searching, um, and and and really like the ad spin because like Google's oversaturated in certain categories, it just doesn't make sense to run ads. And it's not that whoever's running the ads is uh not good at operating it, it's just the market uh it is flooded. I don't know.

Brand Building As Lead Gen Shrinks

SPEAKER_02 34:24

No, I no, you're saying what I tell people all the time. I, you know, and I I kind of I kind of look at it this way. I am in lockstep with you. I believe the lead gen that we have all been accustomed to and using as of late is is rapidly coming to an end. The the road's coming on. So if you were a business, I say this to a lot of lawyers, I say this to a lot of like service-based people. If your entire business was no money at all going towards a brand except for a little bit of swag and things like that, and everything went towards lead gen, you were going to find yourself in 18 months or less in a world of hurt. It's it doesn't, it's not going to exist the way you know you think. So if you're making all these white papers and creating all these blogs, although again, still works, but it's beginning to draw back and fade. So 20 some years I've been doing SEO. I'm an SEO core at my core, I'm SEO. I tell people all the time, I I don't poo-poo it. I don't, I it's it literally paid my mortgage. It's SEO is what I always did. But I am, I do come out and say, if we're going from search and retrieve to solve my problem, SEO does not live anymore. It's it's going to fade away. So as less and less people go to organic search, more and more people companies are going to see that and they're going to start spending more money on pay-per-click, which is going to make it prohibitively to the point where if less people are coming to Google and more people are advertising, you're going to get to the point where you're like, what are we doing? So all of that's going to change. And the recommendation I tell companies all the time is two things. You got to become a microinfluencer if you whether you want to or not. And number two, take the time right now to pull the investment back from lead gen and start putting the money into building the brand and building your AI, solve my problem for when clients come. You need to do that now. And too many companies are pushing ahead with lead gen and saying, we'll figure it out. And I don't think they understand the train that's coming. It's not a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a train coming.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

When you and I are like so in lockstep, and and you really set me up perfectly. So I'm gonna do a shameless plug for a book I wrote like five or six years ago. It was called Build Your Brand Mania. Okay. And and that was actually the first book I ever wrote as I was getting into the agency world. Um, and and before, like, I mean, SEO was coming together, it was probably 50% of like where my mind share was at the time when I wrote that book. But I wrote that book first because I felt like you had to build your personal brand. This is when like the rise of like Instagram and influencers and all that kind of was happening. But I still think that that book is so relevant today because it's about building who you are as a person, and then it's about building your business. And a lot of those, those, those key factors are still there. And to even bring this conversation back to kind of get back, I guess, on track. We've gone all over the place. It's been fun, Lenny. It's been really fun. I would love to have you back on. Is and and I would love to push it forward a little bit more with with the time that we have left. But you know, Google, and I've said this before, used to be like a librarian. Okay, you would go to the librarian and you would say, Hey, like I need information on XYZ, and it'll be like, Go check this out, check this out, check this out, check this out. Now, what it's doing is you're going to the library and you're like, give me the answer, right? And then so they're they're going, they're researching all the stuff, then they're coming back with you the answer. And you said it. You said, Hey, people are coming to you to doing the search that way, and then when they come to your website, you're still asking them to figure it out and like navigate your website, and uh people's uh attention spans are just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. I think uh Microsoft did a study, and this was I think 2012, that said um our attention span was uh comparable to a goldfish. Yeah, maybe less. Yeah, and and and that that was before TikTok. Okay. So I would be interested to see what that study is now. So I think to your point, from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, like you're getting people to come to your website, a lot less people are coming, they're ready to buy, they're well educated, make it easy for them. And in and you need to be thinking about how people are operating now. If they came to your website through AI search, and you can see that in analytics, you can see where like it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. What are you doing on your website to convert? So I would love to kind of push the conversation forward because you brought that up at the beginning of the podcast, and I think it's so relevant. How are we transforming when someone comes to the website uh from the horse and buggy to like the flying car? If we were wanting to Elon Musk's uh, you know, whatever roaster that's coming, like it's apparently has wings. Uh, I don't know. Yeah, the Jetsons is coming, guys. They promised it to us, and I think it's finally coming.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

So um, so well, back to the chat bot. Uh, the reason I tell companies to use the chat bot is so there's there's two thoughts here. First, that's the future of websites, worrying about navigation and images and where the content's going to be. And and you know, I here's where the video's got to be. And you are gonna, we're already starting to work on the first websites where it's literally just a chatbot. That's it. And it's pulling in the video, it's pulling in the images, it's pulling in the content, it's asking, it's answering the question. They don't want to click around, drop, go from there. So, my advice if you're an agency out there, start thinking about websites way different than you ever have before. The creative, the artistic direction, the copyright, it's all still matters, but now it's gonna get pulled into a live chat or an AI chatbot. That is what websites are gonna look like. And on the flip side of that, websites are gonna have less relevance. You know why? Because ChatGPT just came out and said, we're gonna start showing less links. Gem and I followed up and said the same thing. They're all gonna come out and say the same thing. Why? Because then it will be the operating system of your life. So if you haven't done this before, go to ChatGPT, hit the plus button down below, and you're gonna see apps. Apps is something they had a couple years ago. They took it away, they bought them back. So you're seeing all the major companies with the apps in there. If you haven't interacted with it, go to Expedia, interact with Expedia. You don't ever leave ChatGPT. You can book everything, get everything done right there. That is the future of your website. So your website will be a repository with all of your information. You can do a chatbot and people can kind of go through it and pull the images and videos, and you're gonna be building an app along with it, which is very cheap, very affordable to do, and all that information is gonna be in there. So that, you know, kind of brings me to the question that I think you know everybody wonders is well, what's gonna happen to web traffic and how do we track that stuff? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows what that means. Like, is it per interaction? Like, what did you know? Does the term web traffic actually not mean anything in a couple of years? It might. It really might mean nothing because they're interacting with your apps across these platforms. So I think that's the thing where no world, it's it's almost like you feel like you're part of like a Spanish galleon from the 1700s crossing the water, like we don't know what the hell the next mile is going to be. We can't predict the weather. You and we're just riding it. But I think the people steering the ships, which are marketers, which are really good business consultants, really good leaders, you would hope that their experience gets you over to where you got to be to deliver the quote unquote treasure and get to that point. But I I think that's a scary point right now. Like we can forecast you and I, we can think about stuff, but where we're going to be in 18 months, I don't know. I really don't know.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

So so Google came out at the beginning of the year, they always do, of kind of what they're focused on, and they pivoted to YouTube, which falls in line with um what we talked about about building the brand. They looked like they were also going after, like you said, collapsing the the funnel down where you can buy on Google. So it looked like they were going head to head with Amazon. So it's like Chat GBT is trying to become, you know, Google, Google's trying to become Amazon. Um, also Google was saying, hey, YouTube's really, really important, and we don't have time to like open up that thread. But anybody that that that's listening, uh, I've done a lot of podcasts. I have some great YouTube experts on. Go check that out if you're still interested in hearing more about how to build that brand. I'm gonna have to have Lynn back on. Lynn, is there anything else before I I want you to uh take some time too to share about your company and how people can follow you and uh uh follow your conversation? Is um is there anything about the conversation we've had today that we didn't cover that you thought might be useful to uh add to it before we get out of here?

SPEAKER_02 42:54

I want to go on exactly what you just said about YouTube. And this is something where I've always gone back and forth with Gary Vaynerchuk. There's times I look at him and I think the hustle, I'm like, all right, it's a little ridiculous. And then the other times, as of late, I'm coming back to Gary Vaynerchuk, and I'm like, the some of the stuff he's saying right now is really, really good. And one of the best things he said, and it's a piece of advice I give to people, not my advice, literally stealing this from Gary Vaynerchuk. He got up on a stage and he said, LLMs are reading your YouTube Shorts. They're reading your YouTube Shorts way more than you could possibly think. If you are not taking like this content we have right here, cutting it up on something like Opus Clip and feeding it through YouTube Shorts, you are making a grave mistake. The people who invest in that right now, do this for your clients, do this for yourself. Make them get behind a camera and do it. The YouTube Shorts that is getting digested by all LLMs. In the next six to eight months, the people who have put the effort and time into that, you are going to start seeing them getting cited more and more and more on these LLMs. I know there's a million ways in which you can get in there, and there's a billion different things, but we've already started testing that out and we're saying we're seeing it works.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

So I I think from uh uh the PR news cycle. Standpoint, uh, YouTube falls into that category of like news. So it's one of the things that you can do to kind of drive that conversation and kind of check that box in the algorithm. So YouTube, I and we're seeing that we're seeing a lot of requests of like, hey, can you help us with the podcast or create content? Um, and and you know, I just think that this is where it's going. And people are like, oh my gosh, that's so difficult. Well, it's been difficult. It's it was kind of like a a nice to have, maybe a couple of years ago. I think it's we're moving into almost a need to have. And if you don't do it, it it's just gonna make life more and more difficult. And we're seeing we're seeing that, we're seeing some kind of desperation uh starting to happen for certain businesses that really didn't invest their brands. So I think the biggest takeaway here is well, it's a sea change, it's a a a new discovery, a new future that we're moving into. And like we're looking for the explorers. So uh, you know, if you know anybody that really um likes to explore and see where things are going and is a tech geek, refer the refer out this podcast, let them know about it. Please follow and like um that algorithm really like we were we're we're a podcast that has been on iTunes for 15 something years. And you know, as we moved over to YouTube, like people don't know we're there. Uh people don't listen to YouTube that same way. So we're we're reinventing what we're doing. But um, if you're listening, you like it, please, please give us a like, please give us a follow, really, really help us out. Lynn, how do people get in touch with you? Where are you putting out content? How do people follow kind of your thought process uh these days?

SPEAKER_02 45:35

They can just go to comexis.com, you can fill out a form, you will, you will work with me directly. We are very, very selective, and not to sound like a big shot. We're very selective in who we work with. We have a bandwidth that we hold, um, go from there, but you can always follow me on YouTube, shorts at Comexis, you can follow us on LinkedIn at Comexis. We try to get out as much content as we can, at least a couple times a week. A lot of our podcasts are on there, but any questions, I'm always happy to jump on a call and kind of go through things.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

Awesome. And the last thing I'll say, oh, my voice just uh popped there. So last thing I'll say is I've been trying to change our intro, guys, for a long time. It's on my list, it's very low. If anybody wants to submit uh uh intro, and uh we will look at them and we could select the best one. So appreciate any kind of crowdsource help. We definitely are hiring right now. We are hiring. Um, we need people with certain skill sets, you can check it out online, or you can reach out to us uh directly at ewrdigital.com. But if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet. Well, and AI, I feel like AI is probably the next phase. Um listen to this podcast. Um, listen to this podcast. Uh, reach out to us, leave us a comment. We really appreciate it. Uh Lynn, thanks so much for coming on. Um, we'll we'll get we'll get you back on too to continue the conversation. There's some threads we could open up there. Until the next time, everybody. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.