AI in Marketing, Knowledge Agents, and Personalization at Scale

[Music] hey everyone welcome to the next wave podcast I'm Matt wolf I'm here with Nathan LS and today we've got an amazing episode for you and we''ve got Z ozir on the show with us today she's the CMO of ATL SE and we're going to have a fun discussion about how we can actually leverage AI in our marketing today Z I want to ask you how did you go from getting a PhD AI or AI related PhD and then get involved in marketing like how what was that path exactly yeah well first of all thank you very much for hosting me and hello everyone here in the room it's really exciting for me to be back in Boston because I went to school here and it's always a little bit nostalgic to be in the city so it starts from there right I I actually studied engineering and then you know I had a fast track to AI because my first job out of college landed me in the realm of speech recognition and speech synthesis even back then which should I say this 25 years ago speech recognition and speech synthesis was driven by Ai and machine learning and all of that so yeah so that that was my focus area and you know I think how did I make it into marketing I think I had the marketing Gene in in me um you know the the Jack of all trades Jean in me like for for all that time even when I was an engineer and uh resource scientist I would find myself really liking talking about my work as well as doing it uh I was always pitching it to everyone so I I didn't I did start marketing uh at Google is one of the best places you can learn uh marketing is kind of a it did for me what an MBA program would never be able to do so that's how I transitioned into it and since then you know in terms of what rool AI played in my journey I actually didn't have a lot of experiences in terms of AI was a big theme in their transformation companies like paler PA networks and then lastly at last in where I am now CMO yeah so you mentioned 25 years ago you were doing speech synthesis what was the difference between speech synthesis back then and what it's like now well yes really good question so I do have a vivid memory actually of me going into my office when I was doing my you know I was training these speech models essentially as you do for you know for the audience it's like training is a big part of machine learning and I remember starting training and then leaving my office in the evening and then hoping that by the time I come back next morning the training would be complete and I'd be able to play with the models and I believe I'm just going to make a rough guess like I think it would take a fraction of a second right now to run that whole process so uh Things Are so I can tell you things have gotten not just better but fast much faster as well right right so let's let's talk a little bit about Adin you know I bet a lot of people here actually use a lot of alassian products but maybe they don't know the company so give us a bit about what the company does yeah anyone in the audience have newed jir Trello L yeah yeah okay so aasan is a collaboration software company we have a massive mission to basically unlock and unleash the potential of every team in the world and I really love that mission and that's why I'm there so when we look at atas an so when we look at like AI in the context of atasan we are we're constantly questioning you know how can AI be a part of the team how does human AI collaboration look like how can we how how can we position AI in a way it unlocks human potential essentially so that's kind of uh the way we look at things I I know a lot of people right now might see AI as a threat a lot of people are worried about Ai and you know losing their jobs to AI how are we used to Ai and why should marketers care about AI so one of the main reasons we should all care about AI is because we are just inundated like we we're just surrounded by knowledge content information and it's getting increasingly difficult to actually make that knowledge warp for us right like build the context like really just extract what's necessary for us to do our jobs much better so this could be in the form of you know interacting with knowledge I mean the way chat has enabled us to do but also not just in the sort of public domain but more sort of in the context of you know the the data that we interact within the organization every day it could be in the context of ingesting and digesting information like one of the table Stakes features of AI today is summarization for example but I can't tell you how many times I summarize documents on in a given date and at last we we have a very content Rich culture so I receive these long Pages like think about them as documents Confluence Pages full of content and I basically at this point summarize all of them and get the the key points and for all my stakeholders who are watching this sorry yes I don't read the whole whole document I summarize it all but so that's one area the one area is like how can we manage our interactions with knowledge in a way that benefits us and that AI can help a lot there for marketers specifically obviously seeing AI as a creative partner is uh is going to be a key thing in the in the next few years is already a very key element I think the way I look at it here is it's really a partnership as opposed to someone doing like AI all all of a sudden like being the creative entity in the room and were completely eliminated I think the way I look at it is the way it works for me is that I partner with AI as my secret creative agency and then I actually look at the output and I still modify the output and but it gives me a lot more Avenues of creativity to think through that I wouldn't come up with myself essentially so that's the that's the other piece and I think I'd say from a leadership perspective like marketing leaders if we think about that I think AI actually gives a very interesting opens a very interesting door to setting the bar for the content that we put out so when you're creating content normally you're relying on one person's ability to create that content which means their experiences and their their knowledge essentially and that keeps getting better even with that one person but I think with AI as a starting point we were able to leverage the entire organization's history as a starting point and I like that like that as a as a thought of raising the bar in the average content we we kind of uh create and and just to kind of like address your question around AI as a threat versus not right so personally I I think I think of it as something that makes me look much better right um but just to address that maybe from somebody else's perspective we recently had F Fe Lee in our team event right um at aasan and she she obviously got the same types of questions but her response like stayed with me so I I want to share it she said you know human creativity is more profound than what we ourselves give it credit for so the notion being that I mean things will evolve things will change job definitions will change but there will be new ways new jobs and new new ways of doing things but that doesn't mean like the human creativity is is powerful so I think it's I see it AI as a partner more than a threats yeah that's what I always tell people too I feel like humans are capable of so much more than we currently do yeah and AI is just going to enable so many new things to happen weren't possible before yeah and so that's why I'm like a huge techno Optimist and you know yeah AI will bring challenges as well but overall I think it's going to make the world a lot better yeah yeah I think so simman said similar things as well he said things that you know assuming that AI is going to take all of our jobs and humans not aren going to be able to do anything it's not really giving enough credit to humans humans are going to sort of figure it out they're just going to maybe move up the chain a little bit of the things that they focus on that's correct yes yes and they would want to I think do that yeah right right so you you guys over at Lassie and you've done some amazing research and you've done some deep dive surveys can you tell us a little bit about the research that you guys have done over there yeah uh no I'm happy to actually share some uh research points that we internally do so we're very St a Jen company we ask you know customers or prospects like a lot of questions before we build products obviously and we recently asked marketers about 500 marketers across the US several questions around AI adoption use cases Etc so I'm happy to share some of that um information so this was a survey done across the US again I said 500 marketers of different levels leaders leaders managers individual contributors and different sizes of of companies but some key points that um are worth mentioning is that whenever we ask them you know do you use AI regularly 89% said they use AI regularly so that 62% said daily so 62% are daily active AI users what was interesting actually an interesting detail is 95% of leaders so subgroup of responders said they use AI regularly so it's above average like about the 89% so clearly leadership teams marketing leaders are are very much on AI I think it's it also goes to which use cases they use so we did ask them you know what do you use AI for mostly and the top answer was research so it goes back to that knowledge Discovery Point that I made I think they are really asking questions around understanding you know several data points customers competit comp etition Market landscape Etc so there's a lot of research in there the next most popular answer was content creation creating better content and then I like ideation and brainstorming was was the third in fact there was a binary question which I thought was interesting we asked them in a very binary way do you think AI makes you do better work or does AI just make you faster and it was it was probably both in reality but it was split in half 51% said AI makes me do better work and now 49% said uh it makes me faster um back to your question though about AI being a threat or not so we asked them whether you know they think AI whether they have any concerns around AI putting them out of their jobs 79% said no and the rest said yes so it's about one in five people still have that fear amongst the marketing audiences yeah and I know you also sort of asked what are some of the barriers to entry why isn't why aren you or your company using AI right now you know what were some of the reasons people gave for not wanting to use AI yes uh that's a really good question so we did ask them you know what what are some barriers for entry if you're not using Ai and I think the top answer was around essentially yeah the company policies not like necessarily around data privacy and not like allowing them to do that I think there was also leadership guidance was one so we don't have enough guidance as to like what we should use it for was the second one and then I just don't know what to do with it was was the third one gotcha so with all of this data that you've collected all of this research what do we do with it what you know how do how do we apply this information as marketers how do we use this I mean first of all I think it's really important to say yes marketers are embracing AI I mean this data is that's gives me a lot of confidence and they're embracing AI in a way that they're not scared of it they're they're actually thirsty for it from based on what we can tell I think there's a lot of takeaways in terms of leaders leadership around having like our our eyes on the pulse of of what what is being used for and maybe being a little bit more deliberate about doing it scaling some of the successful use cases and and actually like getting entire organizations adopting them just to sort of like because that there's clearly a demand and it's being seen as a barrier so I think that's a that's an interesting takeaway that I had and then also one thing that I didn't mention is that marketers say that the biggest challenges they face in marketing is content the time it takes to create content as well as generic content like they're not very happy with what they're they're outputting so I think there's there's also that was a great takeaway for me is that you know that's the area that to to double down on yeah when most people talk about AI they talk about like all these efficiency gains that you get from using AI what what are the gains you think people get like in terms of uh creative gains they get creativity I mean as we said like that comes back to that whole concept of creative partnership I I think that at this point if I look at it as a couple things obviously content marketing is a big area where our creativity creativity plays a big role I kind of look at it as shortform content long form content and I think in if you're you know if you're like me or a lot of people on my team and you're saying okay I want to find a really catchy title to this presentation I want to write an abstract or I want to just brainstorm on different avenues for uh campaign taglines or or something like that at this point you should just give AI a chance on that stuff right like that's that's I feel like at this point that it will actually really help and it will be a gain in terms of getting to a going through a creative process fast so it's it's there's a little bit of efficiency still in there but also potentially unlocking uh paths neural paths in your mind in terms of in terms of new output uh so that's one the other one that's interesting that we're kind of dabbling with a lot is more sort of like on the product marketing realm is we've got say you want to write like a press release or or blog post right I think to get help from AI there's two things you need there one is you know you need you've got all of this data around your products right across your organization so it's very important to have a way of bringing all of that data and the sources into that creative process um the second thing you need is you need to Define what a good press release is for you and that could be past press releases that you've had but also other companies press releases that you really liked reading you know so it's it's those two things if you put them together together and if you have the ability to actually leverage that data those data sources to Output the next press release you have that's kind of like the next step in in I would say product marketing that's an area where we're actually dabbling in a lot with some of these agent Frameworks that we are actually developing at last year we have a product called Roo it allows us to chat and interact with organizations knowledge base and and data but it also has these expert agent that help us do very specific things so for example the task that I've described to you I would do with my communications com crafter agents and they would kind of like write these things for me it's a good Baseline again the human will always be in the loop it's all about creating effective baselines look I'll be honest if you're not using AI in your marketing chances are you're slowing yourself down AI has helped me find new ways to Market my YouTube channel grow my newsletter and it even helps me with the process of writing my newsletter that's just just another way AI has completely changed the game for me if you're looking to freshen up your marketing tactics HubSpot just dropped a free guide that goes all in on how you can use AI to create a killer marketing plan it goes into the entire process with AI prompts at each step and how you can leverage AI to optimize your marketing strategy if you want it just grab it at the link in the description now back to the show let's talk a little bit more about additional practical use cases for AI you actually showed us some some videos earlier of how you guys are using it at lassan yeah and I would love to show these videos to the audience and maybe you can talk us through what we're seeing yeah so I mean this is back to content generation and content Creation in context so the way we actually do context is when we're creating a document like this one this is a customer case study we let's say in the process we want to say can you help me write a a social post here that is 300 words long or can you help me uh make it punch here we don't have to go and leave our workspace and go to a a kind of a chat bot to do that we actually can do it as we're creating that document and add it to the document on the spot so it can let us like actually mold content in the context and that's a that's a big thing because I feel like we're still trying to figure out the UI of AI and how AI gets like weaved into our workflows and I think more and more we're going to see AI being a bit more fluid in these different workflows if you're in a in a in a document you'll be able to interact with an AI editor this is atlan AI editor but like that's essentially brings more value to be on the spot and being able to lean into AI as you're creating content so that was an example of that another one that um I mentions agents I mean I think of uh taking a step back everybody's like talking about agents these days so taking a step back the way I in my human brain like I I kind of explain agenes say you're you're you you're a meeting with a couple co-workers right and you all of a sudden you know a legal question pops up or an HR question pops up and you kind of flack your or like message your favorite HR person and say can you join us we have some questions right so it's the same with agents like you want to be able to lean into experts agents to bring them into conversations let them help you on the spot in context that's kind of what we're experimenting with with our products at atlastin and as you know with all compies we dog fed our products so that's where this next example that I I shared with you comes from which is my favorite agent it's called a customer 360 agent yeah and we do have a video of this one so if we want to roll this second video clip that we've got this is the agent that they're using here at lassan yeah and and essentially this is like every interaction you want to have around your customers so it say quantitative information like it's asking how many users are do we have in this customer gives you back that information can you give give me like how many products we have in that customer footprint do we have any customer case studies with this customers and what are the benefits they're seeing out of our products so this agent is the expert in our customer base and they know everything about our customers that anyone wants to ask so why is that an important thing to to me this this was this is the most mind-blowing thing to me as a person right why is it important because so many times we're bound to static dashboards that can answer a certain set of questions about any entity including customers right so you you go to a dashboard you can answer the first second third question you have when you have your fourth question you either need to know how to write SQL um to interact with a database or you're going to a data analyst to say can you pull this report for me like how many times have we been through that I had to learn SQL just for that reason so the idea of being able to use natural language to interact with complex databases and be able to pull any data point from them I think is a very very powerful thing for a lot of marketers as well as you know all go to market uh all knowledge workers I'd say so that's the piece that actually gets me really excited um at this point yeah yeah in that video there is you know it kind of moves really quickly but when you ask a question to that bot it looks like it sort of decides where to send that question to so it's not like a a chat GPT where the question is is going and coming back from the same place every time it's actually querying the database and figuring out the best place to go and find the answer to that question that's exactly right it's actually scanning um all sorts of information sources including databases third-party tools third party applications as well as your internal proprietary data and and everything so so I think that that kind of reasoning is really really interesting and important abely Z pretend you have a crystal ball what do you think marketing looks like in 5 years from now okay uh yes so Crystal Ball I'll get too that's they they're really out there so but even in the next few years like there's a couple things I expect to happen as we discussed I think the the AI will become more fluid it'll become more prevalent in the context that we're working as opposed to us like going to AAP bot every single time we need to lean into AI so I think that UI that that interaction will will improve I think we will improve in our ability to ask AI the right questions and and think of like how do we best make use of AI as well so those things are Evolutions that are continuously going to get better in the crystal like the crystal ball for me are a couple things like in an Ideal World I would love to land in a place where every single person that we're marketing to has a a very personalized message you know whatever medium we're delivering that message in and there is a way to actually let AI make on the-fly decisions to make our content more relevant more interesting for for that person so I think this has been a marketing dream for many years but I I do think actually we can realize it in the next five years so that's like one of the the the things that are that I'm excited about I'm also very excited about image and video generation for marketers because I think one of the things that we we love to do is express ourselves visually um in in our in our storytelling visually a little bit better and to be able to accelerate that process in a way that we can um Define and prompt someone to create teaser videos for us very quickly and make them effective that's very exciting to me and I think we're on our path there as well very cool so what do you think marketers should be focused on right now where should their attention be what they should what should they go do after listening to all of this yeah um I would say uh make make a make your interaction with AI a very personal thing so that it can actually really hit the hit the spot for you um I would say you know back to like for me this this whole interaction with understanding customers is a very personal like this is what I love so that's why this is my favorite agent right but what is what is it that you want AI to do probably there's a way to get there today right like you just have to figure it out so for example I have one person uh on my team there's a you know my my kind of leadership team does a weekly roll out to me and then there's one person on my team every Friday she will go and ask Roo our Enterprise chat offering this question what have I done what have I accomplished this week and then Robo kind of goes on everything she's worked on and then brings it back and then that's her rollup to me so that's that's very interesting that's it's a personal the way of way of using AI so figuring out what actually moves the needle for you personally is the is a really good starting point I think what's next for you and atlassian I think what we are actually trying to do is we're in the middle of this uh what I what I explained as trying to figure out how to weave AI into your workflows we have a great event in Barcelona in a couple weeks time it's called the team Barcelona event we're going to make a lot of AI announcements there so I'm very excited to to be there very cool so do you have any uh final pieces of advice for anybody we've got about a minute left here so any any last words that you want to share before we this one up no I mean look I think uh one of the things that I do want to say is that um uh I really think that the partnership element is important to keep in mind I I feel like there is a there's a quite a bright path for us in the future around interacting with AI and and learning and and really 10 Xing uh accelerating learning so one of the things that I didn't mention is when we asked marketers what do you want more from AI like in addition to what you're actually doing right now uh one of the things they said is I want AI to help me with new marketing skills so the the role of AI in in actually tirelessly answering your questions is that you can tirelessly ask AI questions so I think it's a it's a really big asset in the sense of you don't have to be shy about learning new skills and asking questions so that's another element of AI but always consider or think of AI as your partner as opposed to a threat uh would be uh my general advice yeah couldn't agree War well thank you so much zup this has been a fascinating conversation really enjoyed having it with you and we appreciate you joining us on the show today thank you so much for having me thank you [Applause] [Music] my [Music]