Ciaran: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by target internet.com.

My name is Kieran Rogers.

Daniel Rowles: And I'm Daniel Rolls.

Ciaran: And today, Daniel, we are discussing AI agents.

Daniel Rowles: Okay, so let's just define what an AI agent is, talk about the evolution and then talk about why we are here.

This very specific period in time.

Ciaran: Why so profound Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: Well, it's gonna get a bit profound in this one actually.

So, definition of a agen AI or an agent-based AI is it uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex multi-step problems.

Okay?

So this started when chat two BT and Google Gemini.

Release deep research modes.

I mean, it started way before that, but that's what's kind of brought it to everyone.

So deep research mode.

If you're not familiar, you go in, you've in chat, for example.

You've got your little plus button as you have in Gemini, and you could select deep research mode.

You'd give it a task, maybe to do some research and it would go off and ask you a series of questions, alright, what target market are we talking about?

What's the time period you're interested in?

Et cetera, et cetera.

And then it would go off and complete a task for you autonomously.

Now the thing is, that's not quick.

It might take 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes to go off and do that thing, but that was their first kind of move into agent-based ai.

Then what you also had was chatt, BT were building this thing called operator, and operator was the ability of chatt BT to use a browser.

Not to search in a browser, but to, you know, log into a website to go through to fill forms and all those kind of things.

What's happened and we've just done a news episode on this is that chat two.

BT released their agent, so chat two.

BT agent and chat.

Two.

BT agent suddenly takes the research, the ability to use a browser to manipulate documents.

Gives you this new thing that can go off and do stuff for you.

It is a game changer.

Now, I should say I got myself into trouble with this, so I got hold of this a bit earlier, so it's, by the time this comes out, it would've been out for about 10 days chat agent and I got, hold it really early on and I started playing with it and I started creating lots of test cases and I tested the heck out of it.

I then went, look, what about I want you to research content, create content, log into my profile on LinkedIn and post it how I you to go into all my LinkedIn posts, and I want you to analyze all of 'em and tell me what content I should do in the future.

How about I use the Canva connector in Chat two piti, if you're not familiar, there are lots of connectors in chat that can connect to external tools.

And I was able to connect it to my Canva account and I could do this through the agent.

Either I could get it to log in to my Canva account, take a load of content it created, and create a load of carousel posts for me, and then take those carousel posts and put them into LinkedIn and.

Ciaran: What could possibly go wrong?

Daniel Rowles: Well, it didn't, well, the thing was nothing went wrong.

It did it.

It did a really good job.

But there was a risk.

Right.

Now, what I should say, with all of this AI agent stuff, there are human intervention points.

So for example, when it goes to my Canva account, it doesn't own my password, so I have to take over.

So I click the button, I take over the browser for a moment, and I put my password and my username in, and it logs in and it carries on my behalf.

So let's just take a step back from that.

How this LinkedIn post got me into trouble was that I said, this is game changing technology.

I reckon I can replace a marketing exec with seven decent prompts.

Okay.

And my, what I went on to say was that means you'll have huge cost savings.

You won't, you know, these agents don't need holidays.

They don't want bonus pay.

Their dogs don't get sick and all this kinda stuff.

And then I did add, which is the people, the bit that no one seemed to read was that you'll also have no talent pipeline 'cause you won't have any junior people anymore.

You're gonna have no diversity of think in your organization.

You won't have any young people potentially, you won't have a working culture and.

That's gonna have quite a big impact on businesses.

What do you think businesses will do about this now?

Classic social media.

Nobody read the bottom bit to see that I was being a little bit facetious about it and was saying,

Ciaran: You had

Daniel Rowles: yeah,

Ciaran: we don't need,

Daniel Rowles: we don't need market execs anymore.

Yeah.

And my favorite one was that comment said, you clearly didn't really test this.

And it just like, you know, my professional integrity was called out to quite a large extent.

But anyway I, what I normally do when I get angry about a social media post is I refuse to respond to it until the next day, and I've normally calmed down by the next day.

Ciaran: Always

Daniel Rowles: so, so I went through and

Ciaran: edge.

Daniel Rowles: very politely pointed out to everyone that, actually, I wasn't saying it was a hundred percent, but let's, so, okay.

There's a couple of things to pick out there.

First of all.

I can now get this to do things I could never do before, like log into my LinkedIn and analyze all of my posts.

I don't have to export it first.

So there's phenomenally useful things to do.

I can get it to log in and post social media stuff for me.

Is that a good idea?

Probably not.

It's kind of risky.

But I can get it to log in and buy something for me.

So I don't think we're very far away from the first legal case of saying chat PT spent all my money and I told it not to.

So, which is, yeah, there are lots of safety features in place, but my point.

This is game changing because we, this is the first iteration and we know how quickly this stuff's moving.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: In six months, this will be radically better than it is now because it's learning.

Okay.

And therefore you will be able to very simply say, okay, what do I do every day?

What does my marketing exec do every day?

Let's turn that into a really good step-by-step, prompt.

Go to this website, do this thing, download this, go here, do that, and then just take my role and break it down into that series of tasks, and I can automate those.

Now, we've had robotic process automation for a while, but it falls over because of the fact that actually.

You know, when the website changes, it can no longer handle it.

Well, actually now the AI can kind of overcome that.

The first time you use, by the way, chat BT agent and you sit there watching it, browsing your website and telling you what it's doing.

Oh, well that didn't work.

I'm gonna try this.

Oh no, that didn't work.

I'm gonna do this.

It's quite a mind blowing experience.

I thought, I felt it was like, I'd really, you feel like you experienced something very new.

It feels very science fictionally the first time you kind of do it as well.

Ciaran: We, well, we were chatting on text, weren't we last week?

Have you tried it?

I'm like, no.

And you were like, well, have you got access to it?

I'm like, I dunno.

And I went in and looked I've become a bit obsessed with this, but it's the little icon that they shoved in there, kind of looks like a little robo print.

So I'm seeing it.

A wonky mushroom,

Daniel Rowles: Righty muscle.

I'm sure that wasn't their intent from a design perspective.

Ciaran: I know it's, well, I think what they're trying to, like the icons, trying to like illustrate the point that it can open a web browser and click and explore.

Like that's what it

Daniel Rowles: right.

Ciaran: like to me.

But it does look like a bit like a square foot, like paw print to me.

Like if

Daniel Rowles: So to,

Ciaran: pauses

Daniel Rowles: to me it's just a screen with a pointer clicking on it, but Okay.

Ciaran: it's a pore look, it's a paw.

You can sit, it's a pore.

Right?

Daniel Rowles: No,

Ciaran: if you agree with me right in.

Daniel Rowles: it's a screen, a pointer and some like little dashes that, that are showing movement, I think.

But anyway,

Ciaran: it's

Daniel Rowles: let's,

Ciaran: I,

Daniel Rowles: it's.

Ciaran: What's clever about it is when they put the word agent on it, it sounds really cool.

But is this really that different from Gemini's Deep research?

Daniel Rowles: It is wildly different because deep research can go off and do things.

It can look at things and read things, but this can actually fill forms in navigate through a website.

You know, it's not just reading the text of the page.

It can interact with the page.

So if we go beyond just using a web browser, I mean, that's the main functionality.

It can use a web browser now like a human can.

But also if you give it like it used to be, you'd give it a spreadsheet, it would analyze it, and then it would give you some sort of output.

Now you can give it the spreadsheet and it can put the answers in the spreadsheet So it's got the ability to utilize things that it.

We'll put it in the show notes where target.com/podcast, the functionality it has at the moment.

But the point being is that before I could look stuff up, I couldn't actually interactively do things.

Now I can go to a logged in website.

I can say to it, go and find me a recipe for this many people that this many dietary requirements, and then log in to my Tesco account and buy that stuff for me.

And it's able to go through and do that.

And as and if it doesn't got a particular product in stock, makes some alternative options for me.

And there'll be human points.

I have to help it log in.

I have to say yes to purchase and things like that.

But the, what's really interesting is all the marketing videos they created, they gave the agent a task and then they shut their laptop and walked away.

There was a very big push in the marketing and then what happens with chatt PT is you get a notification on your mobile device when that task is finished.

So it's like it's doing stuff for you.

It is your agent, it's going off and completing tasks for you.

So, and it, you're absolutely right, it is deep research mode combined with the ability to use a browser and some other stuff as well.

So it's got more tools, it is got more tools at it's disposable and therefore it's disabled to choose which tools it's using

Ciaran: It's quite fun to watch it while it works.

Daniel Rowles: Massively.

Ciaran: a and actually I could see it was at one, think I'm, I shared this in a previous episode, but I bought a laptop using the, a agent feature with in chat GPT.

And actually at one point I could see it was writing a whole bunch of code to compare some of the data that it scraped and exhausted and do something clever with it.

But you have to watch it.

It happens quite quickly.

Daniel Rowles: Well, lemme give you another example.

This is amazing.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: It basically, I asked, I gave it an image and I'd done this three months ago and it was an image of a, with 99 dog faces on one picture.

And I said, how many dogs in the picture?

And three months going, sorry, I can't answer it.

I can't work it out.

It's too confusing.

This time it went right.

I'll go through and I will use.

An algorithm for facial recognition and then it says, oh, it doesn't work because the facial recognition is set up for human faces.

But what I'm gonna do is quickly write some code that uses it just to count the number of eyes.

'cause I know that dogs have got two eyes and it counts the number of eyes and it got the answer right.

So essentially what we've got is something now that has a number of tools, it can do web scraping, like looking stuff off the web.

It can go to its large language model, it can write code, it can use a web browser.

It's using those tools to make a decision.

What's the best way of solving this problem?

Now it's not.

Ciaran: Game changer for summer fates when you need to know how many jelly beans are in the kilner jar.

Daniel Rowles: So, you know, the ability to do things quickly, effectively, in a more creative way is certainly there.

What's interesting is that this replaces tasks that we do every day now.

It's not that I'm interacting with it backwards and forwards.

It's like, right, go and do this, and it'll go off and do it, and I get back.

The outcome is what I need it to be.

It's not giving me something I can then do something with.

It's actually doing the thing for me in many cases.

Ciaran: So my experience with this is yes, and it gives some very impressive results, you sure as hell have to double check.

Sense, check what it's done, or you're gonna get egg on your face pretty quick.

And I only know that because I've produced some true, truly wonderful things using this, that I'm very proud of.

I know I, I'm very fortunate I work with somebody who really, their head is totally in detail and you make any claim and they'll double check it all.

'cause that's how they, that's how their brain's wired.

And it's brilliant.

'cause actually it means you, you're forced to sense check stuff.

Like I've

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: land mine too many times.

And I'm not having to kirin Did you absolutely check this?

Like, remember when we were first playing around with chat GBT and it was given, we were asking it for latest news in SEO and it was given us all sorts of absolute rubbish.

This is

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: back.

Right?

But you know, I still think that.

That element is there, especially when you're playing around with different models you've not used before and you have to sort of sense check it and work out where are the boundaries, what's it good at and what isn't it.

So that was gonna be my question to you, like if people are wanting to test this out, what

Daniel Rowles: Yeah,

Ciaran: would you recommend people, because I know if you haven't used it before, you're definitely gonna wanna play with this.

What would you recommend Daniel People do?

Daniel Rowles: well this, that's a really good question 'cause it leads us into the prompting piece, which is that I think a lot of people use this first of all and went, oh, it's all right.

But it's not great because like they did like a one line prompt, Go to my LinkedIn.

Tell me what my best posts are.

Okay, so it'll go, but are your best poster ones that got the most engagement are the ones that drove your desired outcomes?

Are they ones that got the most views?

You know, you haven't really defined what best means, But it will be able to log into your LinkedIn and then it will go to each of your posts and it'll try and get the stats from and download them for you and it'll, so actually that's the kind of thing you can get it to do.

That's, I would try it out with those, kind of get it to do something, you have to log in to do something.

So to a social media profile, to a shopping website, to, you know, something like go to Amazon to buy you something, whatever it might be.

Ciaran: so I haven't gone that far with it.

But how did, how do you do that?

Do you give it the login details within the

Daniel Rowles: No.

So you just give it, you say go to this website and do this thing.

And then when it gets there, it will, it'll open up its browser and it will get to the login page and go, okay, well I think I need you to log in and it'll give you a button to take over.

Ciaran: Right.

Daniel Rowles: then you take over its browser, you put your login details, and then you hand the browser back.

And at that point.

Then does it, but it will remember that's what you've gotta be careful of.

So now it knows my login for LinkedIn, and if I ask it to go LinkedIn again, it's able to repeat that step.

So, and depending on which tool you're using, but what,

Ciaran: Terrifying because far as I'm aware, we don't have two factor authentication on our.

Language learning model logins.

Daniel Rowles: no.

So what will happen?

That's why you want two factor authentication.

Switch on everything.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: Because you can switch it on with CHATT P and stuff like that now as well.

Ciaran: Yeah.

Daniel Rowles: So you can have two factor, because what you want it on chatt pt, and you want it on all of your tools because then if someone, if you accidentally are doing something with your agent, or if you know somebody's accessing your agent, you want the security of knowing on your mobile device, oh, that's not me.

I don't want 'em to log in.

So yeah, security becomes even more important before there are some mess up with this.

But what I'd say is that.

I would look at what you do every day in your day-to-day role, and I would think about which of those tasks are repeatable and which of those tasks are purely admin.

Right, as opposed to creative thinking.

So I know when we create this podcast, there's a number of steps I go through.

I take the podcast, I put it into Descrip, I edit it in Descrip.

That is not something I'm gonna get an agent to do because there's loads of nuance and subtlety and what's that?

Then I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna create the.

Show notes that go onto the website.

Well, actually I can get AI to do that 'cause I've trained AI to go through, take the transcription, put out the key points, structure it in a certain way, find any links, put those up.

So actually that's a step I could go through.

Then from that, I've gotta log into my website.

I've gotta put that onto a webpage, create the page, fill in all the standard bits I've gotta then go through into Libsin and publish it in Libsin.

There's a lot of stuff in there.

I can get the agent to do for me automatically, but it's so business critical.

There's some bits I'm not gonna do.

I'm not gonna let it publish it to Libsyn without double checking it and all those kind of things as well.

It's not a hundred percent at the moment.

It will do a task, get a little bit confused sometimes, and then just kinda stop.

Because it's not, it's got a bit concerned about what's going on or what have you as well, but this will iterate and this will change.

Now the important thing from this is that one, this is gonna help you be more effective and efficient.

So that's great.

Hopefully it gives you more time to focus on the creative, the strategic, the critical lateral thinking, whatever it might be.

But what I know it's gonna mean is that as this gets more advanced, what's gonna happen to junior roles?

I was being a little bit facetious, right?

You know, it will replace a marketing exec, but if it can replace 80% of what a marketing exec does, do you think people are gonna still gonna keep recruiting and everyone's going, yeah, 'cause you know you need a talent pipeline.

You do.

But we know what companies that are like big companies about efficiency already.

There's a report in the Times, well ads, show notes.

You can see I'm not making this up.

Junior roles across the uk and this is, there's a global pitch that goes with it as well.

60% drop in recruitment.

For a couple of reasons.

One, 'cause the stuff that's going in the economy, but also because the fact they're going, well actually I might be able to get an agent.

I might be able to get AI to do this.

Do I need that role at the moment?

Where do I need to focus my efforts?

So people are just taking a bit of a step back.

It's not necessarily replacing them, but it is making people think about recruitment.

Take this six months down the road, this will radically change.

Actually a lot of the stuff that we've got junior roles doing, we'll be able to do and be able to do it with these agentic tools really easily.

So it's a game changer for the workplace, and it's gonna change all of our roles.

It is gonna replace, I've been preaching for ages.

Oh, it's not gonna replace roles.

And you know, it's only certain roles it'll replace.

It's mostly, it's gonna change roles.

I think this is gonna replace lots of things that people are doing

Ciaran: I just, you've just got me thinking about the security of this though.

Daniel Rowles: right.

Ciaran: Like here we've got a back door.

Which could any, anybody in your team be hooking it up to all your business critical systems, giving it logins?

And actually the, that's outside of your organization.

You don't even know they're using this tech.

bet there's a lot of you out there that are in that instance, and you won't even know like how, and that's a that's a hacker's best dream right there.

How that's actually quite hard for IT teams to even manage.

Daniel Rowles: Well let's talk about something with that then.

'cause I had a really interesting conversation with a very senior person in a large retail organization and it's a great conversation.

'cause they said, look, what they're concerned about is at the moment I want to go and buy something and I'm gonna go to the retailer website and I'm gonna.

'cause I trust them, I like them.

Product quality's great, all that kinda stuff.

I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna buy that stuff Instead, now I go to my agent and say, go and buy me this thing.

Go and find me the best one of this based on user ratings, and then buy me if it's less than 10 pounds or whatever.

It's deciding which retailer it goes to.

So suddenly there's disintermediation in terms of like.

You know, we had this thing where, oh, I could go directly to the retailer, or I could go to Amazon, and the retailer's trying to get you to come directly to them, and some people are going to Amazon.

Well, now there's a whole nother tier where the AI is deciding where you shop from.

Ciaran: Well, it's more nuance than that.

'cause actually what I found when it was doing research, it was unable to get information from certain websites 'cause they were structured to prevent a gentech bots from accessing the

Daniel Rowles: They're not part of the conversation suddenly.

Ciaran: I know, right?

But then it, the, that means the data's skewed.

Daniel Rowles: Hundred percent.

Ciaran: And you're not necessarily getting the best results, but you don't know that because it's all happening under the hood and you've closed your laptop, gone off to make a coffee.

Daniel Rowles: Right, so, so you've got two big issues already.

You've got the security issue where, you know, if someone in your organization has connected their agent and their chat to BT or their Google Gemini, to their OneDrive and to their SharePoint and to their Outlook and to their Gmail, and they've given it logins for their different platforms they use.

That's a way in to lots of different things.

There's a huge security implication.

So suddenly these agents are deciding which websites that they use.

So this is a huge thing as well.

And then the third thing that we were thinking about, which is a real strategic game changer is at the moment certain brands have huge data assets, right?

So if.

You've been coming to my website for a long time, like Amazon, for example, knows what I like, what I don't like, what I'm likely to buy, what I'm not like to buy.

And that's a closely guided secret 'cause they use that to, to target things at you.

Now an agent that I allow to log into Amazon is not allowed to take that data and put it into their large language model.

I'm not suggesting that, but what they do learn over a period of time is what I like and what I don't like within my Amazon account.

And for me, that agent is able to give me personalization.

Across a whole range of websites based on my behavior across a whole range of websites.

So actually now, like Amazon gives me good personalization to, it might be a good reason to go there.

Well actually, if my agent learns loads and loads about me over time, it can personalize stuff about me a whole, across a whole range of websites.

And suddenly that data that Amazon have got isn't valuable to them anymore because yes, they can personalize, but I can personalize via my agent as well.

So there's this whole thing of like, is.

Do these people that have lots of data about us have really good value?

Well, yes they do.

With the large language models like it, yes they would, but sooner or later they're not gonna need it because what's gonna happen is that they'll learn all that stuff themselves and it'll become irrelevance.

So suddenly the AI agents and AI platforms have a big security portals, so there's a huge level of risk that goes with that.

They're actually learning more about us in one place.

Without really needing to use cookies and all that kind of stuff, that was limiting people like Google previously.

And actually they're taking kind of commercial organizations out of the conversation unless they choose to put 'em in the conversation.

So if, for example, I am sort of a rogue AI company and everyone's using my platform and I decide I don't like that brand, I'm never gonna recommend anyone go to their website and therefore I could hit their commercial revenues.

And that's been the same with Google for a long time.

Remember?

That Google can decide what showed up in the search rankings and didn't, and have had lots of legal cases about, they've had to prove they're as unbiased as possible.

It's the algorithm and so on as well.

Ciaran: Yep.

Daniel Rowles: So these are really big conversations that have come about really quickly.

And then on top of that is the impact on jobs.

Yeah.

Ciaran: The problem is these conversations are happening post-event not before.

Daniel Rowles: Yeah.

Ciaran: You know what I was saying in the other episode about, you know, wisdom Thinking about the implications of what you do before you do it, mapping that out a bit.

You know, and I just see this all the time, it is just a race to beat the competition.

And what I think is really interesting is that even the organizations that report on this are struggling to keep up.

So, you know, I've been looking at some of the reports and data on this and you know, people like McKinsey and all the major US banks are reporting on this, but the pace of changes so fast.

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: information that's going to the decision makers is way out of date.

We're waiting on the next iteration of chat GPT, and there'll be no news or evidence of what it's gonna do or how it works,

Daniel Rowles: And today does it?

Ciaran: and then it changes everything and it's massively ahead of any legislative curve.

Daniel Rowles: Well, can I give you the only solution to this then You've got a couple of theories in this.

One is regulation.

The problem is the regulators can't move as fast as the technologies.

That's not gonna happen.

You'd have to have universal global agreement.

That's not gonna happen.

So the only opportunity you really have here is one that we've spoken about in digital transformation for a long time, which is the organization that is the most agile wins.

And I'd come back to the thing I've been saying for a while, which is that you don't need to know everything.

You need to know a bit more than your competitors.

And that's why.

Podcasts, you know, live learning sessions a learning culture.

Now, I would say I'm in a training company, okay?

But the point being is unless you're in better culture of learning at your organization, you're gonna have a problem.

So iterative, always learning.

Always learning, always trying testing.

Ciaran: Yep.

Daniel Rowles: Creating an organization that is agile enough to change quickly, and the bigger and more complex your organization is, the harder it is to do that.

But that's the same of all your competitors if they're all large and complex.

Where it becomes tricky is if you've got competitors that are smaller and agile, more nimble than you, they will take advantage of this.

So I think that we're gonna see the destruction of large organizations quicker than we will smaller ones, which has been the case for a long time anyway.

But those large organizations also have the clout.

To go off and try and invest in this and so on as well.

The thing I'd also bring you to is as we trust everything less and less, 'cause everything is deep fake and everything is, you know, is it an agent, is it real?

Whatever.

That leaning into our humanity thing that I've come to a few times before, which like, what makes our brand human, that's the stuff that's really important.

Still, let's really kind of focus on that.

I would think about that, so I wouldn't panic about it, but I would be highly concerned.

I would just say, what is it that I can adopt from this that's gonna be useful?

What don't I want to adopt?

But just looking at the fact that it will really change the market, and actually I think we're in it for a period of disruption in the fact that.

We will come to adjust to these things and kind of learn what we want and what we don't want.

But in the interim, stuff's gonna happen that isn't been planned.

We are gonna stop recruiting junior roles.

Potentially not we, but you know, a number of organizations will, some people will go through ruthless efficiency and they'll cut loads of roles and then we'll go, well, what happens when you haven't got a talent pipeline?

What happens when you haven't got a diversity of think in your organization?

What impact does that have in the long term of the organization?

So I think it's making sure our short-term thinking and our long-term thinking are actually married up a little bit and trying to do some strategic planning.

Ciaran: There's a danger in all of this.

I had a conversation with my bank, and I was frustrated a PayPal payment hadn't been made, And PayPal was telling me it had been made.

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: the bank's telling me it's not.

So I'm like, how do I sort this out?

So I was having a chat conversation with my bank and I said, look, this situation, can you do anything to help me with it?

I just casually mentioned in the chat yeah, I'm a bit stressed about this because I wanna get it sorted so I'm, and suddenly the person that I thought I was speaking to clearly is an AI agent.

starts going off on one about, you know, do you need to talk about the stress?

in a way it

Daniel Rowles: Oh, I see.

Right.

Ciaran: right?

It's just unnatural.

And you just think, gosh, how many of, how much of that's going on?

No one's looking at it.

How much damage is that being done?

Because I'm like, I'm not actually even speaking to a, so they've driven efficiency there for sure, and they were

Daniel Rowles: But they've damaged their brand.

Ciaran: but they've damaged their brand.

And I think that's a good argument for actual people.

I've had it for a long time with you know, customer service.

It's, there's nothing like being given great human customer service,

Daniel Rowles: Right.

Ciaran: and I think if you slash and burn too quickly there, you will reap the negative awards for sure.

You know, there, there's no reason why a machine should be able to outperform an actual human and a task like that, but I know everybody, every company seems to be vying that as a real ripe of use for this technology.

Some of the voice AI now is incredibly

Daniel Rowles: Wow.

You just look at 11 labs at the moment.

They've got the new voices where you can go say it, sarcastically, whisper it, and things like that.

It's epically good.

Ciaran: can hear the breath,

Daniel Rowles: Yeah,

Ciaran: Which is like, so, so, so much better.

But is it as good actually?

Where does this position you, is there a a, an advantage within the marketplace of actually having real people that genuinely care?

Daniel Rowles: there is.

There is.

And I let's come to that a little bit.

I'm getting lots of people saying to me, in a lot of my students, a lot of people that listen to the podcast saying, I'm really worried about this.

I'm, you know, I'm a junior marketer.

How am I gonna get a foothold in my career?

Ciaran: It is.

The first thing anybody does when you show them Agen AI is they start testing it to see could this replace me?

Daniel Rowles: Right,

Ciaran: The fear is their lies.

And when they realize, actually, no it can't because they're a bit more senior or a bit more strategic, then they relax.

But that is short term thinking

Daniel Rowles: right.

Ciaran: opinion.

Daniel Rowles: So what I've been saying to.

Students and people like that are kind of study marketing, getting into this, it's not a bad career to get into.

Don't panic from the point of view that we're getting this technology first.

But what you need to be really good at doing is critical thinking, problem solving.

You need some strategy frameworks.

You need the cause of, so those fundamentals of business, fundamentals of marketing become really important.

The ability to prompt really effectively, and I, everywhere I go still.

A really good approach to prompting is really rare still, you know, that whole piece had right, and we will do an upcoming episode on some prompting techniques and good prompts and so on as well, just to give you some deeper tips on that.

But I think that critical thinking, problem solving, understanding, you know, the economics of how the world works, these are kind of core skills and it's always been interesting to me that marketers don't really understand economics.

Actually they really should because they're gonna see how does their organization fit into the broader world?

How does that fit?

So there's those kind of core business skills I think are really important.

So we will do a follow up episode on, you know, what skills are important in the marketplace right now.

But I do think that organizations need to be looking at what they wanna do this in the short term, but what will be the long term implications of doing that?

And unless we're able to do that, we're gonna cause ourselves lots of problems.

And also, like with any of this stuff on the surface, the shiny, like, oh, I can do this, it can do that.

Test it, refine it.

Now, one tip with AI agents, get it to do something.

See where it goes wrong.

Rewrite your prompt.

Start it again.

Okay.

Remember, every conversation in an AI is in a context window, meaning it's remembering what you've said before in that conversation.

Ciaran: Yep.

Daniel Rowles: very often when you have a conversation, it goes off at a tangent.

It gets it wrong.

Learn from it, improve your prompt.

Start the conversation again.

Okay.

So kind of go through that process.

The other question I've been having is that as these things are more and more powerful, they are using more and more processing power.

And actually there is a carbon impact of using this stuff as well, which there is.

And if you do a very simple AI prompt, you know it, it's using a certain amount of carbon.

If you're doing a really complex prompt, it's going to use more carbon as well.

But what I would say about all of that.

Is the, and I have a big debate about this.

It's a really interesting organization recently, is that yes, that does use more carbon and if you're just sitting there willy-nilly playing with it, you're just using it for the same time.

You sitting on Netflix for eight hours at the weekend and watching Netflix will obliterate that in terms of the amount of carbon you're using, right?

And I've got a chart and I will put the chart into the show notes in terms of like, what does a Google search use?

What does an AI query use?

What does watching TikTok videos for three hours a day use?

What does streaming Netflix use?

That video streaming is off the charts comparison.

So I think that we've been a little bit unfair in honing in on AI and saying, oh, it uses load of card.

We shouldn't be doing this now.

There are environmental impacts, there are data centers that are needed that's using huge amounts of water.

There is environmental damage.

I'm not denying that, but I think it needs to be a conversation that's held in context as well.

If this is something that's of interest to you, please message in and we'll do an episode on it, because I've got a ton of research we've been using for a couple of clients recently.

So short term, amazing.

Long term.

What's the impact gonna be?

If you haven't played with the AI agent in Chate, go and do it.

It's gonna blow your mind a little bit as well.

Think about how it's gonna impact your organization.

We have got a half day masterclass for Target internet members coming up on effective use of agents.

So if you're not a member, get signed up for that.

Also, we've got an update session for our newsletter subscribers and members.

So target internet.com/newsletter.

You've got those one hour updates sessions every month with me.

And they're a lot of fun.

We get a really big audience.

Everyone's coming together for those a lot, so it's a lot of fun as well.

So.

Go off and have a play with it.

We'll do another session soon.

But there's a lot to think about and a lot to think about how it's gonna impact your organization, your role, and the future of marketing.

For more episodes, resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to target internet.com/podcast.