Disambiguation Podcast AI and Content Marketing - Transcript

Michael: Welcome to the disambiguation podcast, where each week we try to remove some of the confusion around AI and business automation by talking to experts across a broad spectrum of business use cases and the supporting technology. I'm your host, Michael Fauscette. If you're new to the show, we release a new episode every Friday as a podcast on all the major podcast channels on YouTube as a video.

And we also post a transcript on the Arion Research blog in case you want to stop by and read it. In our show today, we're going to take a look at generative AI and its impact on content marketing. So I'm bringing my guest and I'm joined today by Nicole France, who's a director of content and an evangelist at Contentful.

Welcome, Nicole. Thank you, Michael. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background that sort of thing?

Nicole: I'd love to. I am one of those strange people who has never really had a particularly clear career path. As I look back on what I've done so far, exactly, this is why we all seem to find each other, by the way.

But I have over the years gone back and forth. I started my career as an industry analyst covering Technology services. I did that for many years at a small research company that was acquired by Gartner. I spent a good bit of my time at Gartner living and working in Europe. And then I joined the vendor side.

And I've done this a few times throughout my career, gone back and forth between being a practitioner in marketing and strategy. I've always been very focused on customers and customer engagement and. Supporting those long-term relationships, and I suppose that's why it's not any great surprise that I find myself for the last couple of years, plus in this role at Contentful, which is a software company that is focused on managing content. We describe ourselves as a composable content platform. And my job is dual. So I get to do both things at the same time. So on one hand, I lead our content team. And so my job is very much like the job of many of our customers. I'm running a group of people whose primary role and reason for being is to help articulate and interpret what we do in ways that really resonate with the audiences that we're trying to reach and help to convey why what we have to offer is of benefit to them and can help them achieve their business and other objectives. That really is the director of content part of my job.

The evangelist part is actually getting out and talking about it relating my own experience as a practitioner and helping to hopefully elevate the conversation in the industry about what we're trying to do anyway, and how we actually get it done. I have to say I feel tremendously lucky and privileged to have this kind of dual role, to have the team that I get to work with to be part of an organization that has some really incredibly smart and capable people.

This is, as part of what makes the analyst gig so much fun is having a set of colleagues that are endlessly interesting and stimulating to work with. And I get to have that both within Contentful and very much in my interactions with our customers and others in the outside world. So I've got to say it's a pretty sweet gig.

Michael: Yeah, it's an interesting time to be involved in content marketing, content generation, whatever you want to call it. And it has, honestly, it's been for several years one of the real big pushes across marketing is to really build thought leadership. So, I do, and my time at G2, I spend a good bit of time kind of thinking about those sorts of things too. So, it's an interesting area. And after the public introduction of ChatGPT started this kind of Tsunami of Gen AI I thought a lot about this and have been playing around with some tools.

So, I thought it'd be really interesting if we could just go through a little bit of how we think this is impacting content marketing teams, businesses in general and also, the light and the dark, because I like to look at both sides, right? So why don't we start with the, just in general, how do you, what do you, how do you perceive the role of generative AI in the content marketing world? And do you think it's an opportunity or is it more challenge than opportunity?

Nicole: Oh, I think it's a tremendous opportunity. And like a good analyst, I will say that comes with a lot of challenges along the way. It is an opportunity for us to challenge some of our own assumptions and conventional wisdom about the job that we're doing as well as how we do it. And I think that's actually really a very important set of challenges. It is something that gives us an opportunity to experiment with different ways of working, this is a tool and potentially very powerful one. I don't think it is something that will be universally applicable in all aspects of content creation. And I think part of what we're trying to figure out collectively at this point is how and where it's most useful and beneficial and exactly where it does a really good job. And of course that is a mark that is moving very quickly in some cases. Will it continue to move at this rate? I don't know.

Good question. But we're not really going to understand that unless we keep trying it out, unless we keep using it and experimenting with it. But I will say, I think from what I see, and I think this is very true across a range of different technology areas, not just generative AI, is that it's not a magic bullet. It's not a silver bullet that's going to come and do everything we want done. It is something that applied appropriately in the right places is going to make the job of doing these things. Engaging customers creating meaningful relationships, delivering really compelling experiences, even personalization and that's a whole other conversation that we wanted to, if we wanted to find what we really mean by personalization, all of these things, I think, can be positively impacted by this, but it's not like generative AI is just going to go and do it. I really don't believe that. And so the question then becomes, What is it we're actually trying to do, and how is this going to help us at various points along the way to do that more quickly, more effectively, more efficiently, and hopefully with a higher impact?

Michael: I've heard some people call it a force multiplier. And to me, that seems and that's I use it that way myself to get more productivity out of the same amount of time because I can do additional things. It seems to me that if I think of content funnel, it seems like that at the very top of the funnel and I probably have some time. Yeah. Some chafing around the top of funnel content sometimes anyway, but nonetheless, it's an analyst thing, right? But if I if you think about top of funnel, maybe middle of the funnel, it seems like that's a really logical place and probably, more automation to less automation as we move down. And then there's this kind of ai, Something that a GPT engine can do today, at least. That's going to change, I'm sure. But at least today, so is that what you have you seen it that way? Is it more focused around that and increasing productivity in the pieces where you honestly, you want more, right? You want more top of funnel content than you want that deep level analysis anyway, so

Nicole: And it's interesting because I guess part of this comes down to how do you define the funnel? What do you put where? And so, in my world, the very top of funnel stuff is this is what. Really, we look at for thought leadership. What are the big ideas that resonate with people that they might be interested in whether or not they know anything about who we are and what we do. And that's in a sense how we bring new people in because we're articulating a useful, hopefully perspective on something that matters to them. And that's not about selling or pitching the product. That's about starting that initial engagement and hopefully getting to some really deep awareness via these topics that are broader and more meaningful. And I think you're right regardless of where you put that in the funnel, that is the stuff that requires creativity that requires some innovative thinking.

And, you and I have had this conversation in the past, thought leadership is a problematic term for a lot of reasons, but it has to be distinctive, and it has to actually be leading in some way to fit that category in my estimation, at least. And that is not something that is going to be a derivation. And I think when we start talking about use of generative AI, in essence, we are talking about stuff that is, by definition, derivative. Because it's starting from an existing set of source materials. So even creating new and distinct connections. I think is still beyond the scope of what generative AI is likely to be able to do.

How long? That's a good question. But I think this higher order stuff, this higher order reasoning stuff is what I still be very dependent on human thinking and creativity to do now we get, as we get into more, functional operational stuff where they were talking about product descriptions, for example, or good summaries of guidance or other information. Yeah, I think that's a very clear area where generative AI has a lot of application.  

Michael: You redefined that for me, and that's useful because I look at in the context of what we were doing at G2 and at G2, you're really trying to throw a big fishing net out at the top. And at the bottom, you're trying to educate people into the, into depth of thought leadership and analysis. And there's never there's not a sale in there. So that's if you flip that because you're right. Most companies are, in fact, doing the opposite. They're trying to get you in so you can get to the sale. So I have to remember to fix my vocabulary but no, that's good because it is actually, I think you're absolutely, it makes a lot more sense to me if I think of it that way, because the, I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about that building a platform, a commerce platform that automatically generates the descriptions of the products in the catalog and it adapts those culturally to wherever the perspective buyer is from or is looking at it. So that seems like a really logical place because you could just automate most of that and you're fine. So, I some of the criticism, I hear things like it's not It doesn't feel authentic, or there's not an emotional depth that a human could bring or, how do you address that concern that there's, I wrote something not long ago about artificial empathy, and I'm obsessed with the idea.

I'm not actually still sure what it means, but I think it's cool, right? But how does that do you think that's true? How do you get the human touch in the places you need it? And yet, leverage the gen AI tools to help you do more with less,

Nicole: It's interesting because I actually don't think that's a terribly valid criticism.

I think you can get some amazingly, let's call it emotive stuff out of generative AI, depending on what you're asking it to do and the prompts and the boundaries that you're asking it to work within. I don't actually think that's the issue. And it's going back to the comment I made earlier about derivative work. I think it raises some very interesting questions about what we as humans do already. And, let's face it, there are a lot of hacks out there. And not to denigrate a lot of the work that is done around content marketing. A lot of it is not particularly distinctive or new or unique. Some of it is just about having the right thing in the right place at the right time. And I do think generative AI is capable of doing a fair bit of that stuff. I think the concern I have is two fold. One is that we become over reliant on this stuff. And what we're effectively doing is things that are in essence designed for the needs of machines like SEO. This is a big area where a lot of people are focused on generative AI, improving SEO content performance. I personally, and my team will probably, wince as they say this. I have a very strong plank around SEO content, quote unquote, which is anything that we're SEO. we have to wonder why we're actually producing it. What is that point? Because if there's not something meaningful for a human at the other end, I don't really understand what good it does us to be ranking highly on SEO. And I know there are people who would debate me on that and that's probably a separate conversation, but I think there's a risk that we become so reliant on this stuff that we just miss anything that actually raises above the waterline to resonate with people in a meaningful way.

And it's not even about length. It's not about tone. It's about just getting that cut through. And sometimes let's just take email as a as an example. Humans tend to write most of the emails that we get, the stuff that clogs our inboxes. That doesn't necessarily mean it gets any cut through, right? In a sense, if you've got a generative AI tool writing that stuff, does it make a difference? Probably not. However, what I wonder is the degree to which generative AI is actually going to produce the stuff that does stand out, that does get cut through. And that, I admit, I'm a little bit more skeptical of.

The things that resonate with me have some, quirky hook or something that's distinctive, and that's what makes me take a look at it, and I feel like if we're overly focused on performing well against an algorithm, we're actually over time performing less and less well with actual people. So that's one big concern I have. The other is that I think there's a real risk that we lose a sense of balance here because there's a lot of stuff that we just, we need to produce. It's the bread-and-butter stuff. I also feel very strongly that the bread and butter should not be boring. I think there's probably a way of using generative AI to help improve that even. But again, I think this has to be a mix. It's not like you just define hard boundaries of we use AI to do this and not that. I think there's got to be a mix in there of the tool and the human working together to make all of these things better. So, we can use it when we're doing research background stuff, for example, or testing out ideas or formulations, or again, summarizing what we're doing on the bigger thinking stuff, the thought leadership, dare I say it. Likewise, we can't do some of this other stuff without human intervention, even at the small bread and butter scale as well.

Michael: That makes sense to me. And I've wondered and I admit I have the same reaction to some to the SEO only sort of approach to content and I my derogatory term has always been fluffy content because it doesn't if there's no point, if you get a user to come to your site, but for a reason that has nothing to do with what you do, it's just something that you put out there because you knew you'd get them to the site. The odds are they're not going to stay, nor are they going to do anything that you want them to do.

 Nicole:  Are you building a relationship with them as a result of that? Probably not. So then why?

Michael: agreed. And so that, to me, that seems like the point. And I like the idea, and I've done a little bit of work around that too, the idea that human in the loop or the human machine collaboration. And again, I think that'll change over time. I used the Gary Kasparov chess story a few times and in this podcast already, so I shouldn't probably use it with these users and listeners again but still, the idea that, it beat him, he was against it. Then he came over to the dark side and believed human machine collaboration was the way to play chess. And that was great for 15 years until the machines got so good that every time the human got involved, it made them lose. we know it's going to evolve, but today, there, it seems to me that's the most logical way to think of it is a collaborative team that, if you can call it that, I guess you can, that generates that content with specific purpose, which kind of brings me to the second thing you said in there that jumps out to me is That a lot of this is about your capability to build the right prompts to get the right thing. Is that something you've seen? Do you think?

Nicole: Oh, definitely. And we it's something we talk about frequently in my team and beyond, this is a big issue that we across Contentful are looking at because we're trying to anticipate the needs of our customers here who are trying to do stuff a lot, like what my team and I are doing. And we do talk about it. I've definitely been through stuff where, kicking the tires on ChatGPT. I had to do a session description at a conference about AI, interestingly enough. And I put in a bunch of stuff, and I tried to tune it over several different interactions. And honestly, what I got was hilariously close to the kind of path that you and I are both all too familiar with in session descriptions. And I had to laugh because without knowing who the actual speaker was or anything about them it was, presenting the speaker as an expert in AI. And I just had to laugh. I ended up not using anything that came out of it, but it was a really informative and entertaining process.

On the other hand we've actually used it to create some blog posts. And here's where we get to, I think. Some more interesting stuff. And it will be fascinating to see how this plays out over time. But we've used a more specialized tool to take some of the webinar recorded discussions that we have on particular subjects and turn them into blog posts where we're pulling out the essential ingredients of that. And honestly, that dramatically reduces the workload. That's a huge accelerator for us. And it's this idea that we're big proponents of which is leveraging your content and as many different ways as you can. And, understanding that the same ideas in different formats will possibly reach different audiences, but will certainly resonate differently across those different outlets and media.

Michael: that makes sense. For this podcast, I've learned that I produce it in audio only, video and audio. And then I also do transcript and I joke about the transcript, because I thought nobody's going to come and read that. But you'll be surprised the amount of traffic that transcript gets on my blog. So I, people consume information in whatever way is comfortable for them. So that, so you have to accommodate that, I think. And the other thing too, in the prompt writing piece, the frustration, I could never use today, any of the tools I have to just write a whole blog post that I would put up. I just couldn't do it. Even if I fact checked it, I still wouldn't be able to do it because to me, every one of the tools that I've played around with use such flowery language that I would never use, so many superlatives that I've gotten to the point now in the prompts when I write it out, I go no superlatives or reduce the number of superlatives because it's just too much.

Nicole: Yeah, it's interesting. Maybe there's a commentary in there about how we tend to write as humans, given the source material is working with. I don't know. But yeah, it's I do think there's another interesting aspect that, that again, we're talking about and experimenting with, which is not so much using generative AI as the origination or the initial draft, but even coming back and using generative AI to help as an editor, copy editor or editing for tone. And there are a lot of different tools, if you look at writer.ai, Grammarly, just to name two of them, there's more and more interest in actually trying to take the idea of brand guidelines, brand tone of voice, product information and actually using that as source material to help refine and edit what a human is actually writing.

And I do think that there's some really good potential there that we're eager to explore again. Force multiplier. This is the kind of stuff and I'm not trying to get rid of copy editors by any means. We have a great one. Like you can't copy edit every email that a salesperson is sending out, but you probably can use one of these tools to make sure that they're accurately describing a product that they've got the right tone that they, they have some of the essential ingredients that we want to make sure are in any communication to a customer, for example.

Michael: It's like setting brand guardrails, in a way, around some of what you're doing.

Nicole: and it's not there yet, but it's getting there, and it's iterating very quickly.

Michael: Yeah, I find, too, that if I'm, sometimes, you're writing a longer piece, and you're in the middle, and all of a sudden, you just go I know what I want to say and I have no idea how to say it. And if I go to the tool and I go generate a paragraph about whatever, then I'll just pull it back and then I can edit it and play around with it a little bit. And it just gets me restarted. It's like a new starting place that I can use. To me, that's, that helps with the creativity or something.

Nicole: I hear you. And you might outright reject the whole thing, but it yeah, at least they'll react to it, right?

Michael: Yeah, exactly. So one of the things you said in there too, the brand guardrail, I like the idea of it, but I'm also curious about the other side of that. So how do brands ensure that they keep their unique voice and their own brand identity in any sort of auto generated things or even, human and machine collaboration sort of things. How do you keep your brand voice like you want it?

Nicole: That is a much bigger and probably far more philosophical question. I don't think there's one answer to that. And I, it comes down to a combination of being very clear on what that is in the first place. And I have to admit in my experience, I have seen that an awful lot of organizations purport to have this. but really don't. They have it very superficially or in very limited aspects of that articulation. And boy, when you start trying to apply that, especially through a tool, it becomes immediately obvious where those limitations are.

So one is knowing what it is and defining that in enough detail in the first place. The second is actually managing that on an ongoing basis. And again, this is not specifically to do with any sort of generative AI tools just as a matter of course, it requires management. It changes over time. Those types of things that you might be communicating evolve. Questions from your customers change. So, there's always some element of change that is happening. These things are not completely static, and they really shouldn't be. So, managing that is another important part. And the final thing, and this is probably the thing that is the most overlooked of all, is actually making this stuff readily accessible for all the people that need to use it and communicating that to them, there's this assumption that people just will magically look up any reference guide.

And I don't know about you, but I have not found that to be a reflex reaction in most people in most circumstances. So, part of this is actually making this a really integral and intuitive part of the way people work. And that's the thing that I get excited about when we talk about using these tools, because it's about integrating it into the digital work environment and not having it be some ancillary adjunct kind of thing that you have to go and actively incorporate into what you're doing. So, there's an element here. It's not automation per se, but it's, let's call it an integration into the work environment that I think has a huge amount of potential.

Michael: Yeah, that to me that makes a lot of sense from the how I would work and if I think of collaboration between a machine and a human that it just needs to be a natural part of your workflow. So over time, you have to figure out where when it fits, how it fits all those kinds of things. But it's definitely a personal decision on how much and where and how you want to get what you need to get out of it. And still you at the end going, okay, that's what I wanted, or that's not what I wanted at all.

Nicole: Here is where I should probably admit my very strong bias toward an interest in behavioral economics and this idea of nudges. I think this is realistically, this is how you make this part and parcel of operations. It has to be easy. It has to be integrated. It has to be intuitive.

Michael: That makes sense. The other thing I heard underneath your, you talking about brand voices. It sounds to me like you, part of what you're saying too, is have one and make sure you explicitly understand what it is. Okay.

Nicole: Yeah, it's I've talked for many years about the need. generally, for get to the point training. And there are really two steps in that. Number one is have a point. And number two is get to it. And the same is true with brand guidelines, brand tone of voice, you have to be clear on what it is. And also to a certain extent why is it this, but not that? And it's that kind of reasoning that I think is actually important for helping people to buy into it and use it effectively.

And it's also critical as you're talking about evolving this stuff over time, because if there's a reason why, it makes it a lot easier to understand how to adapt to a previously unanticipated situation or scenario. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. And that Maybe that resonates for me. So we mentioned a little bit about personalization in this a little while ago, but I'm going to come back to that because I know that's something that I hear a lot. And also, you've heard my rant about why I don't like journey maps and things aren't dynamic and interactive and whatever. And so, I see in the future this place where Gen AI is a part of the solution to this thing. But do you think that's true? And how would you suggest that content marketers approach that today with the tools that we have available, to help do personalization or I like to think of it more as individualization, frankly, at some scale.

Nicole: It's a great question. I will say that I think this idea of one to one personalization is largely a myth. I just, there are certain situations in which that happens, but for the most part, I think it's an elusive goal that, that is fine to discuss and debate over a nice dinner, for example, but it's probably not very realistic when we come to the real world that we all operate in. I do think there's some good potential here for generative AI to do the kinds of things that are tailoring to the needs of an individual customer. And what I mean by that is if you think about customer service, where honestly, we've been doing this for a very long time, you already begin to see that it's I've got a very specific question. I want a specific answer to my question. And you can begin to see where there might be some applications of this in marketing as well. More broadly talking about personalization, I think it's very misguided to believe that generative AI is just going to solve this problem for us. We have not been able to figure out how to do this effectively so far, and it's not for lack of processing power.

I think it's because we fundamentally failed to understand the scope of interactions and engagement, to your point about journey mapping. Like what map? Do you follow it? I don't. They never send it to me. So, I don't know. Exactly. Exactly. So, it's again, illusory, right? But I think the idea here is we need to get a lot better at understanding and anticipating what the real needs are. And in a lot of cases, this is about fairly straightforward, simple stuff that it is. Is tied directly back to being fairly certain who you're talking to and knowing that past history of all of your interactions with that individual and that exists in any context, B to C, B to B, whatever it might be.

I think that is actually a crucial part. of what we call personalization most of the time. And a lot of that is just presenting the right information and context and interacting with someone in a way that, that reflects an institutional or organizational memory of what that relationship has been like. Can generative AI help in that? Yeah, I think it probably can. In a lot of cases, I think it's not just generative AI. I think a lot of the stuff is about Business rules, good data, like all the stuff that we've been talking about for many years. There's a different aspect of personalization, though, that we don't tend to talk about. And it's a little bit of a tangent, but if you'll indulge me for a minute. I think the flip side of personalization that we don't talk about enough is what actually feels like a very personal connection between an individual and an organization or a brand or a product. And that stuff is a lot less about this kind of one-to-one thing, Oh I've used your first name and I haven't screwed it up.

By the way, I use my middle name. So I always find it funny when like my credit card decides that it's going to call me by my first name. And it's like, how long have I been a customer here? Why did you bother asking me what name I prefer now? Anyway, I digress. But I think the things that genuinely feel personal are really about far more creative thinking and connections in a memorable, perhaps unexpected ways.

This is about, meeting customers where they are. It's about, Ikea, for example, creating online inspiration rooms that feel very much like what happens when you're in the right frame of mind and you go into an Ikea and you follow the customer journey that they have literally mapped out and maybe don't take some of the shortcuts that they have through the store to actually see what is possible.

Like to me, that's an example. It's stuff like. The way Kentucky Fried Chicken has managed to translate Colonel Sanders, who is this unconventional challenger of norms, and interpreted that for the video gaming world. So, this is how you end up with things like the I Love Colonel Sanders virtual dating simulator in steam deck. It's crazy stuff, but it's the kind of thing that makes people feel a very strong and sometimes passionate connection to a brand. Like this is the stuff that really moves people. And that is something we almost never talk about when we talk about quote unquote personalization.

Michael: And to be honest there, too, they did a pretty good job of reinventing the cultural significance of a character that would not have fit in today's world if they hadn't have managed to build. No,

Nicole: And you can go to some of the folks at KFC and have a very long and interesting conversation. I'm sure. How do you take this Southern white guy and turn him into culturally relevant?

Michael: Yeah. Somebody called the colonel that does have a bit of negative connotation. Underneath that too, one of the things you said resonates a lot and that's this idea of contextual and relevant and I've seen this in my behavioral analysis, my buyer behavior studies for years that if it's contextual, if it's relevant to me then I'm interested, but if it's not, I'm not. But unfortunately that's two problems. One is data, because if you don't have the data that says what I'm doing, so you can build context that it's because how do you know what context you need to be in if you don't know what I'm doing? And then secondly, it's a behavioral analysis problem, because what does my behavior mean? And are you going to be right?

Nicole: And this is the problem that I think we encounter all the time. And again, generative AI or not with attempts. fancy attempts at personalization. It's like you're making so many assumptions based on really so little data, especially very little connecting across different interactions.

And over time, right? There's so much opportunity to get it wrong. And the more variables you introduce, i.e., the fancier you try to get, the higher the probability that you're just going to fall flat. And I feel like I say this all the time in different conversations, but we have no way of measuring the extent or the frequency with which we piss off customers by going wrong. They just don't come back and we never know why. So, this is a real thing. It's a, it's an identification and measurement problem. That means is this kind of black hole that we don't know.

Michael: My favorite question on that buyer behavior survey is when do you contact a vendor salesperson? And it's always been in the somewhere between 60 and 70 percent range that tell me they contact the salesperson after they've decided what they're going to buy. Yeah. Yeah, which is a little problematic for your won - loss if you're the one that didn't get selected. Yeah, interesting. So, let's talk, let's shift a little bit because I want to, before we, we're getting short on time, but I, but one of the things that I really wanted to do is let's talk to current content marketers and those people that are going to be content marketers in their future selves.

What do they need to do to prepare for this future of that Clearly is gonna incorporate generative AI as a part of the toolkit of a content marketer. So, what should they be doing? What should they be thinking about?

Nicole: Oh, that's a fantastic question. So many different directions to take that, but it's interesting. We're in the middle still of the writer and actors strike in Hollywood. Yeah. I live in Southern California, so I feel this very viscerally. It was literally a conversation over the weekend. It's interesting to me. And the reason I bring that up because writers in particular are so often undervalued. And I think this is a really important thing to acknowledge to anybody who is in content marketing or considering it. Just having the ability to be a great writer is not enough. Combining the ability to write very effectively and articulately with some subject matter knowledge is already a massive plus. And I think for me that's the minimum requirement. But I think it gets a lot more interesting and important to think about this in broader terms, especially in the context of generative AI, because, and I think about this. Every day in my role as director of content Contentful. It's not just about producing great content.

And it's not just about being able to do that quickly or, effectively and being able to match it to the audiences that you're trying to reach. It's there's a real requirement to have an element of strategic thinking, regardless of what your actual role is in content or content marketing, because The classic problem that I think we still have in marketing is that we're producing way too much stuff and not enough of the right stuff.

So, the only way in my view that you close that gap is by really having a strategic mindset that is thinking constantly about. What you're trying to accomplish with what audiences what matters for them. Why do they care? Why are they going to pay any attention in the first place? And how do you do that most effectively? And that thinking, combined with some subject matter expertise, some ability to really clearly and effectively articulate your messages in a way that resonates with your audiences and generative AI tools, I think is probably an unstoppable combination. But it's that combination of things that I think is what is valuable for businesses and is what ultimately makes you as an individual valuable and marketable also.

Michael: Yeah. Great advice. Thank you. So, we're running out of time and unfortunately, because I could keep this conversation going for a long time, but I suspect, I know we'd start losing listeners at the hour point or so anyway, probably. So, I really appreciate you being here before I let you go, though.

I'm going to hit you with the question I like to end at the end of every one. And that is, do you have somebody you could recommend to the audience? Some, a thought leader, an author, mentor, somebody that you value and that has helped you in your career?

Nicole: Oh, man, that's a long list. That is a very tough one. I'm going to go with some stuff that is top of mind. Based on a lot of the stuff I've been working on lately, and I'm not going to give you just one because I can't be limited to that there are three that I'm going to name you are all kind of part of this world that I find myself very much immersed in one is John Collins at Atlassian. John has been a deep practitioner and all things content his entire career. And he's really spanned everything from writing to content engineering. And some very technical aspects of information architecture and how we use and represent content. He's got some great stuff on LinkedIn. So, check him out. I highly recommend some of his blog posts. We're all encouraging him to write a book. So, we'll see if that ever happens. I'm still prodding him among others. But he's also done a lot of speaking and he's out there in a lot of podcasts and stuff. So, it's worth seeking out his views.

Christina Halverson of brain traffic. I think she's done some tremendous thinking, for sure, but organizing of people around some of these big ideas around content and how we use it, how we think of it, how we work with it, how we organize ourselves to do it more effectively, again, she's literally written a book on this stuff. So, a great person to seek out. The other person who I was talking to earlier today, who is someone who always challenges my thinking is Cruz Saunders at simple ai, and he's among other things, thinking about the structure of content and the operations and organization of how we do it. And honestly, those three folks, if you could get them in a room together, that would be an absolutely amazing conversation to all doing some super interesting stuff.

Michael: Great. Great recommendations. I really appreciate it. So that's all the time we have. Thanks everybody for listening, joining, watching, reading, whatever format you liked.

Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And if you want some more information on AI, you can go to the Arion Research site. There's a research report we published last month on AI adoption is based on a survey done in August. So again, recency is extremely important when you're talking about AI. It's free also. So, you can't really beat free research that's current. Join us next week. cause we're going to take a look at artificial intelligence and the customer experience. I'm Michael Fauscette and this is the disambiguation podcast.