AICHE S1Ep3 Aby Varma – Finger on the AI Pulse

Welcome to, I think recording.

Gemini's taking notes, everyone. All the AIs here and

Abby's here. Hello everyone, and welcome to the

AI Curious Human Enthusiast podcast

with me today, Abby Varman, a friend,

fabulous Atlantan, and the guy

riding the wave of the AI future from the

beginning, as far as I can tell, at least,

Abby and I cross paths here in the marketing and

technology community. And he has been and

continues to be an advocate of cross pollinating,

which is so important to me. And more importantly, not just

virtually, but of face to face events, of

interactions with human beings. He's not only

the CEO of Spark Novus, which is an

incredible marketing and technology on the cutting edge

firm here in Atlanta. Sure, he'll share a few words about that,

but he's. He's also founded

Converge X, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's

converging all of the different communities

that meet face to face in and around marketing and

AI. And I'm sure a few other things I might not even be aware of

here in the metro Atlanta community. And I think beyond you probably got some

expansion plans up your sleeve if I know Abby.

So with that, Abby, how about I'll hand the mic over to you just to

make sure I didn't miss anything before we dive into the aich.

No, thank you, Eric, really such a pleasure to be here, man.

Like, I am always so excited to talk to you because

I tell people that if you could really bottle Eric's

energy and sell it, like I'll be like a

billionaire at this point. Right. So I just love your energy. Thank

you very much for having me on your podcast and really looking forward to this

conversation. Outstanding, Abby. And can you share a little bit

more? And thank you. I feed off the same. Yeah, yeah, I'll double down and

say the same to you. You're my Red Bull brother.

But tell us a little bit more, Kenya, about convergex and about

Spark Novus before we dive in. Yeah, absolutely. So a little

bit about Spark Novus. We are essentially a

strategy, enablement and implementation firm when it

comes to artificial intelligence. In marketing, we focus on

marketing, but we service marketing, sales service

departments and organizations, mid market and enterprise

orgs. So that's what we do. And yeah, it's

been kind of a phenomenal run. And

prior to convergex, before I get into convergex, I want to tell you a little

bit about the marketing AI Pulse community. So the Marketing AI Pulse

community was sort of something where we were trying to

curate and find like minded people here in Atlanta. It started

off with just Atlanta. And now, you know, we have, in the last

year, we have a thousand members all over the world. To be

honest, I was surprised we had people from Australia and Ukraine

because we're doing a lot of virtual programming as well, in addition to our quarterly

events here in Atlanta. But that was sort

of my realization where

when I put together marketing AI pause, I realized that AI is going

to seep through pretty much every part of marketing. And this

is going to be kind of a unique opportunity for

a lot of these marketing communities in Atlanta to

come together and learn from each other and

cross pollinate. Like you said in the beginning, right? So

we have the American Marketing Association,

AMA Atlanta. The TAG

has a marketing society, the Technology Association Georgia TAG has a

marketing society here in Atlanta. We have the marketing OPS community, we

have your clay community, we have Pavilion.

So all of these, we have a technical community, we

have a CDP CDA community,

all servicing different parts of marketing.

And it was just. And there's more communities who've sort of expressed interest,

but it was. We put together the idea of convergex

Atlanta and you can learn more about that if you go to convergex Atlanta.com to

your listeners. But essentially it allows

for a, you know, collaboration for all of

these communities to help, you know, cross pollinate members and

making sure that the Atlanta marketing community are true

winners. Right. So a lot of times people are like, oh my gosh, that's going

to be a lot. And I'm like, it is. But I can tell you that,

you know, the creative video community that goes to, you

know, Adobe Events is not going to be going to the community

that is talking about analytics and dashboards because they're

just very different. But it's sort of a, the idea of

convergex is a big enough tent for really all

parts of marketing to come together and kind of learn from each other and cross

pollinate. And there is no membership

dues, there is none of that. It's a very loose collaboration

and it's really encouraging one community

to show up at events for the other community in order to cross

pollinate or initiatives being shared or making

sure the underlying principle of convergent

comes to life in ways that are only limited by your own ideas.

And what is that underlying principle is better together right at the end of the

day. So that's sort of how we came up with it. And

And all of those communities converge. At Marketing AI

Pulse, which is quarterly, I believe we've got Another one coming up on

the 12th, correct? Yes,

absolutely. So marketing AI Pulse again to your listeners.

MarketingAI Pulse.com is coming up February 12th. We do it

quarterly and super excited. This one is going to be

phenomenal. We have some amazing speakers from HubSpot

and Jasper and Citi and Coca Cola. More,

more coming. But really super excited about our first event

leverage the deep and wide and high

up to the tops of the organization's network that

you've built and have built trust with and open those

relationships to the entire community.

It's been amazing the level of folks that I've been able to meet

and the caliber of human beings that you attract. So

thank you for all of that. If you're anywhere near metro Atlanta,

don't miss the opportunity to come to Marketing AI Pulse and join

us. Mark, take off a whole day if you can. Do you have

anything going on that morning? Is there a technical. Yeah, we do.

We actually have, you know, an amazing

GTM session for fractional CMOS that is going to be

led by Sangram Bajray. Right. Like you guys all know,

you've heard of. If you're in the GTM space and you have not

heard of Sangram Bajray, you're living under a rock. But

Sangram Baudres, sort of the co

founder and CEO of GTM Partners, they go to

gdmpartners.com but yeah, we're doing a morning session,

8:30 to 12 hands on where he is going

to help you build a fractional practice and

with a targeted annual revenue of a quarter million dollars. So if you

are a fractional cmo, fractional

GTM professional, this is one you do not

want to miss. Love it. Shout out Sangram. Another

Atlantan, Atlian. There you go. And

lead in gtm. That's awesome, Abby. Well, hey, let's get into this

AI curious thing I know you are. And in fact

a lot of that's what rubbed off on me in the early days of this

thing. So let's start with that AI

curious human enthusiast. What is that anyway? What does it mean

to you, Abby? Yeah, I mean that is such a great

question. I got the AI bug, to be honest.

Pre Covid. So I am through and

through corporate marketing guy. And you know, when I

used to work on the corporate side,

the company I used to work for is a big B2B industrial technology company

listed on the Swedish NASDAQ and we had

a technical guy who was really a machine learning AI Expert. But during

that time, it was sort of a P. It.

It was a R and D sort of initiative because, you know, people hadn't heard

of AI. I'm talking pre Covid, right? So people hadn't heard of AI. It was

more a, you know, hey, this new technology and, you know,

machine learning and AI. And anyway, he and me got along really

well. He was a very technical guy who struggled

with communicating business value of technologies, and

he sort of leaned on me for that, and I coached him for that. And

then he in turn coached me on machine learning and AI. And I was like,

oh, my gosh, my eyes opened up and I was like, this is insane. This

is going to change the landscape. And that

was it. And as weird as it sounds me saying it, I got that bug

just before COVID and I went from a, you know, 80

traveling job to being completely locked in the house like all of us

were. But then I spent all that time just digging into

machine learning and AI and got like, really, to your point,

curious, right? About this is. And this is wild. And the more I

studied, you know, in. In the early part of

my career, I was a little developer. So I have, like, I'm an inner nerd

that I had to satisfy. So I was getting, you know, just

short of actually writing code, I was just getting really into the technical weeds of

it. But I just thought, wow, this is going to change the

face of business. Not just marketing and sales, which is my background,

but really going to change the face of business. So to me, that

is how I got curious. But what does that mean to me is.

I think one is we're at a unique

point where I think your AI curiosity needs

to come with humility. Because I feel that there are a lot

of quote unquote AI experts. And when we talk to

clients and they call us experts, we say, don't call

us experts, but if anybody does, just run from them. Because

to me, you can't be an AI expert for something that is

so new, so powerful, and so unknown, Right?

So to me, I think my sort of mantra is

stay curious about AI, but without it

distracting you from judgment,

people, and outcomes. Those are the

three things that I want to focus on that we don't lose

sight of. And there's a lot of hype out there. And I think

with AI, the people who are truly curious,

I would advise them not to chase the hype and really invest in

learning more about it and leveraging it the correct way, the responsible way,

the strategic way. And that's what that means to me.

I like that, Abby. And so maybe let's

dive into a couple of use cases.

As you know, I like to use this word, administrivia, that AI is here

to get rid of the administra, the stuff we don't want to do

that wastes our time so that we can lean into our given gifting.

And of that you have many. But

what's one piece of administrivia or a couple of

things that maybe you personally or you've been able to help clients

work out of their daily routine

and lean into productivity? Yeah. Oh, my

gosh, Eric, how much time do we have for this episode? I

can't. A ton of things here. But I mean,

honestly, one thing which I'm going to say, which is pretty,

you know, table stakes at this point is just, you know, AI recording meetings.

And that is phenomenal because it makes me

pay attention and not be distracted and really hang on to every word,

you know, a client is saying or somebody on the other side is saying. Right.

Where I'm not really worried about that. Hey, is this being captured or not? Because

then I can really, you know, process,

synthesize, collaborate in real time without the

sort of quote unquote overhead of making notes and

that sort of thing. Right. Like, yeah, and you can be present. Yeah,

exactly. And no, no judgment for people who make

notes, because I still know a lot of people love to make notes, handwritten, typed

up, whatever. But my process, in my process, I feel

that, you know, I am 100% there. So that's a big one.

The second one, which I know is everybody's favorite, not

is expense reports, right? So we do client expense

reports. So take pictures of all these things, put it in. We had

a custom GPT, put it in there, and boom, it sort of spits

out a formatted expense report in the format of the

client, I might add. So it's easy for us to kind of do that.

So we have a custom GPT and a zapier zap for that. And speaking of

that, we have about 200 custom GPTs, from

research to formatting to grammar checks and all

of those things that, you know, and more and many more that we use

day to day. And then, you know, we. We are a

zapier partner, but we. Even for our own use, we use, you know, I don't

know, we have like 50, 75 zaps that we use for just

data orchestration, which I know is topic near and dear to your heart. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I know, right. So we

like, you know, when we do, like I was telling you, the. The note takers

take calls and we take that, you know, we will take the

transcript. We won't take it. It happens

automatically. The transcript goes into,

into a zap, goes into slack and slack

will spit it out and slack back a message to me and saying here are

the takeaways, allows for me to validate that and I'll go back and

forth with slack and once I'm good to go, I'll give it the command in

conversational mode and that sort of converts it into

actionable line items on our project management system, which is Monday.com. so the

whole sort of that to me again is huge because meeting

ends and from the time the meeting ends to the time it shows up on

Monday.com is sort of, you know, like an hour, you

know, so it's pretty incredible. So

a lot of what we are able to accomplish now, I can't

think of it what it would be free AI. I mean you really

need kind of a full time administrator,

administrative assistant or somebody coordinated that person to sort of help

us with all those things, which is not the case right now. So we

have our little AI minions and AI buddies helping us out here.

I think you've coined a new term here, which would be an

administrivia arsenal. That is quite, quite

a treasure trove. Now is that something you primarily use

internally or is that also, is that same

treasure trove that, what did I just call it? Administrivia arsenal,

something that you offer to your clients. So it

started off with us using it internally, you know, because we wanted to

make our life easier and we're, you know, we're not a very big organization,

so what's the best way to sort of do that?

And. But there are definitely elements like we offer

again, we're a zapier partner, so we build workflows and

orchestrations for our clients. We also build custom GPTs for our

clients. So certainly a lot of that learning that we've

accumulated, you know, over the last three years as a result of doing some

of this work, we certainly extend that out to our

customers. And if anything has enriched that process,

and I might add, vice versa, some things that we do for our customers that

we don't do, we're like, ooh, that's a cool thing. Why don't we just do

that and do it for ourselves as well? That's great. That's great. You're really building

a heck of a portfolio. So speaking of

giving, gifting, what has

getting rid of some of this administribia, what have you found that you've had

more time to do in, in your life

and what do you feel like you were, you were made to do? Abby? I

got my opinions. I think I've shared them pretty vocally.

Yeah. Yeah. That's such a great question, Eric. I think

from, from my standpoint, I am a people

person and my background,

I'm almost blessed to have this sort of varied

background, which some of it was planned and some of it

was not. You know, like all of us, everybody's lives, you,

some of that you plan and other things happen to you, which is what you

call, you know, your life. But in the

very early. Yeah, there you go. Right. Very early

part of my career, I was in sales, right. And

I was, I feel like that is the best thing ever. Like, if you

like, there should be a sales draft for marketing people or really all

functions, to be honest, where one year, two years in sales will just

have you appreciate that business so much

more in terms of what does that really mean for people to resonate with your

business? So I was in sales for,

you know, I want to say, four or five years in the early part of

my career. Then, you know, I had a marketing team that, you know,

realized that marketing was my first love and went into marketing and then got into

digital. And this was sort of accidental because I love

going deep and, and like I told you about my inner nerd, I gotten so

deep that I just turned into a web developer. So I did web

development work for like six years, which was,

you know, amazing. And just the, the feeling of creating things with

your hands and that sort of thing was just phenomenal. But then

with digital marketing, you know, as I sort of started moving

up the ranks and started, you know, getting away from coding, but then

went back into my, my first love, marketing. So I felt

like sales, marketing and dev gave me that sort of unique

perspective. And to answer your

question, that has enabled me, I think you said given

gifting is. I like, I feel that I, I

am able to draw clarity

from complexity. Right. That is the way

I think about it. And I feel that, that my kind of

life journey of sales and technology and

marketing really enables me to do that because

I have appreciation for all three sides of the equation.

Right. Love it. You might say you have your

finger on the marketing AI pulse, Abby.

I do. I love it. It's such a

perfect, perfect name for your, for your group and event.

So, okay, how about your recipe for the human AI sandwich,

you and I have had this conversation. Actually, you were

one of the first people I really talked to about this concept that I loved,

human in the loop, but without kind of being the bread,

you know, the human being having the original concept and then having that

human touch before it goes out. And this is kind of my little

soapbox of there needs to be more of that. There's a lot of

the spraying and praying. It's P R A I

N G. Right. And if we just

shoot out AI outputs without that human interaction,

we're kind of missing the boat. Is that something? And I know the

answer to this, but I'd love for you to share with your listeners, like kind

of what's your philosophy in that space on the continuum of,

yeah, human in the loop or this? There's a specific model

that really works and is effective when AI is involved. I

mean, what can I say? Sandwich all the way, baby. Right. Like, to

me, I think I have to thank you for that because I didn't even

realize that, Eric, like, I almost. Your human in the sandwich comment has

sort of seeped into my brain because I find

myself quoting that all the time. Right. I'll

say that on podcasts or blogs or client pitches or

whatever where I'll talk about, oh yeah, you know, the human hand sandwich. And

it resonates really well with people who have been doing

a lot of open sandwiches, I might add. Right? Open faced.

Yes. Open face sandwiches. Like, there's no

one in the loop on one side. So to me, I love, I love your.

You know, we need two slices of bread. The human beings need to be in

both sides of it. So two, to me, that is something that I just

genuinely believe in and that is just the right way to do it. You

gotta, you have to direct. The human is the protagonist

to the storyline. Right. The humans have to direct AI

on, you know, what to do. And people often

combat that saying, oh, with agents. That's not going to be the case. I'm like,

yes, it will be. Sure, it may not be a human trigger per se, but

humans are still defining the goal in the guardrails, you know,

so unless we have like Terminator and whatever the

organization was calling that movie and blanket on the name, but

unless that happens, I think humans are very much in control and you

want to make sure that you were directing AI

strategically and responsibly and you are

validating what is coming out on the other side, which

is your second slice of the sandwich. So no more open

sandwiches, please, for your listeners. So I love it. Genuine believer

in that. Yeah, yeah. You took it up a notch. I love, I love the.

There's too many open faced sandwiches laying around. That's a good one, Abby.

Of course you took it up a notch. It's great. How. Okay, how about

a AI? Aha. Or three? I mean you've been doing this for,

for a minute, right? But I, I can't imagine you're not

still surprised semi, daily with the rate

of technology change and just what some of

these creative human beings are coming up with out there. Can you share a

couple moments maybe that surprise you either delightfully, by the way, or

disastrously? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So

on the, on the delightful side of the house, I'd say that I am

just blown away with whatever

piece of AI technology you may play with. It could be chat GPT or

it could be some really advanced piece of technology and

the productivity gains where it can really compress

hours and weeks and months of work into a

strong starting point. And if you notice

I said starting point because we do need the human AI

sandwich. So intentional choice of words there. But to me that

is just phenomenal. That power,

like a magic wand from Harry Potter. Right, right. Like where you

suddenly wave it and it can do all these things for you. And that is

not, you know, at this point, productivity gains are sort of table stakes and people

kind of disregard it, or not disregard it, but don't appreciate

it as much. But that to me is just phenomenal. And I just see

that, that starting point, two things are happening, things are getting faster or

that starting point is getting better, or both. Right. And so

to me that is like, wow, this is

phenomenal. You know, this is so amazing. And

you know, we are. I'll give you a real life example of some client work

that we're doing with. I'm naming the client where we've taken,

you know, transcripts from

sales calls over the last 18 months. Right.

It's a pretty common use case. But to see it live in action

is phenomenal. You take those transcripts 18 months and then we,

we've done so many things out of it. We've obviously

revamped their content marketing strategy completely,

you know, and

we've developed a sales coaching GPT for

the new salespeople who are coming on there. We've,

we've created a little knowledge base for standard responses

that a salesperson can query. Right. Like in saying that, okay,

based on 18 months of data, this is the standard 10, 15 objections

that people have. How do you handle that? Or these are the type of questions

so almost create a little knowledge repository for the right way

for salespeople to do that. And you know, so that to me would be

impossible, you know, without AI, it would just be a lot of

work. So here's a live example. You can compress all that work

into really, you know, a solid starting point. Again,

it's the salespeople doing it and you. They still need human judgment and we

train them on it and that sort of thing to do that. So that's on

the positive side of the house. On the negative side of the house. What I

am struck by, which is how

confidently AI can deliver

flawed answers. Like, that blows my mind,

right? Like I'm like. And not back down. No,

no, exactly. I'm like, that just. It's like it

reinforces the need for like human review and the fact

that human review is not optional. But it really, like, I

am blown away. I'm like, wow, that was so much confidence with the BS that

that AI just gave you, right? It reminds me

of my 17 year old sometimes. I'm like, wow, this is a lot of BS

without you knowing what you're talking about, right? So I love him.

But, you know, it's. It's one of these things where, you know, that

that confidence is, is scary. And which is

why I sort of advise people, right? Like we work

with CMOs and Chief Revenue officers and that sort of thing,

and they're like, hey, why should we hire Spark News to do some work? And

you know, let's tell them that if. Sure. You want to go to one of

those, you know, Instagram TikTok people who are talking about like 10

ways that this tool is going to change your mind. Absolutely. They are

masters of that tools. Absolutely. But what they don't know is

the discipline of marketing. So in similar fashion, because they are

so confident in the replies that it's giving you, which

is not validated by the human subject matter

expert. That is dangerous, right? Like you don't want, you

know, you don't want this situation where you're like, hey, you know, I am feeling

like this and what pill should I take? I'm like, whoa, yes,

AI is going to give you that. But you don't know if AI is right

or wrong. And that is a dangerous thing for you to do without really talking

to a doctor, right? So, well, and that's where we go from. Yeah,

he human AI sandwich is a great start. But

the capability of a human to

assist a company in orchestrating all

those different AI sources And non AI

to come to an outcome that's informed is

critical, right? Absolutely. And there's a

gifting, there's a level of expertise, there's something

that you just can't AI about all of that. There's a

depth of knowledge and of honestly human experience

that you need an Abby. You don't, you don't need the Internet

guy or gal saying press hard three copies.

Yeah, yeah, you need an Abby for marketing,

you need Eric for gtm. You need a

whoever for whatever human expertise there is. So to me,

I think you need to find the right, right human being. And frankly, it's no

different than, than human beings. You ask me about,

you know, medical opinion about

like, hey, you know, my head's really hurting. Well, sure, I'll give you an

opinion. I'm like, hey, man, look, they just have a Tylenol. You

know, you may be having a brain aneurysm, but me telling you that Tylenol

is going to fix it is wrong. Right? So I think that blows my mind

every single time about how AI just confidently delivers flawed

answers, AKA hallucinations, is

phenomenal to see, but also very important to recognize.

Yeah, well. And so speaking of that, it's a great segue,

especially as a marketing person. Abby,

this phrase that I think is going to become more and more

in the, the front of mind for us human beings is,

are you certified? Are you truly a human being? Far beyond

the little, you know, turn the puzzle piece and do the thing,

but I mean, on LinkedIn, on social media,

on dating sites, a lot of these folks don't exist.

Oh, yeah. Not to mention the folks, the people that are

in our inboxes, curious as

to your thoughts and maybe prescription doc, marketing

doc. As to. With all that

noise, what do you recommend and how do you

possibly help clients break through all of that to be

unmistakably human?

Yes, yes, yes and yes. Like, all of those

things are so essential and there is so much

noise and, you know, AI slop and just fake stuff

that is happening. And, you know, I just had, I just, you know,

over the holidays, I hung out with my parents and I actually had a session

with my parents because, you know, dad's 84, mom's

77, and they're, you know, getting all of these messages which

they believe is real and they're not. I'm like, okay, no, if you

see this little SORA thing on the right, it's not. It's not real. And

forget that. Like, if you see something which is totally

wild and really out there, don't believe it. Basically, we're at a point where you

can't really believe anything you see anymore. Right. Like, it's just

not, it's not a thing anymore. Right. Like, and so

unless it's from trustworthy and authoritative sources.

So I think that's sort of the crux

of what that solution is. You have to be, you have to

be trustworthy. It doesn't mean obviously in person interactions like the events

we go to, that's real. Yes. Any sort of digital

interactions have to come from a trustworthy source.

And you know that, that is that trust. And

this, this word is being sort of bastardized every day. But

authenticity is sort of so essential. But what does that

mean? There's honesty and authenticity, and those are two separate things. So to me,

like, authentic is me giving you my opinion about,

about marketing. That's authentic because that's my background. Like me giving you

opinion giving you an opinion about like, you know, being a

medical advice. I may be honest in my opinion, but that's not

authentic because that's not who I am. Right. So, so that's super

essential. So trust becomes the trust of the source, whether

it's an online publication or who it's coming from, or who's which human

mouth it's coming from. I'll trust your word, Eric, on any all things

GTM over, you know, my

favorite creative person, because I know that that person is not

a GTM person. Right. So that becomes really important.

There's a lot of imposters out there, but those things are just not

sustainable. They'll, you know, they'll sort of, you'll suss that out

pretty quickly. But I think my approach

is sort of twofold when it comes to

staying, like you said, unmistakably human. Right. So one

is making sure that your

judgment and decision making is

anchored in responsibility.

Right. Somebody, you know, one of the Martech

AI Martech vendors, wanted me to write something, a

blog, a joint blog with them, you know, and

it was all about sales enablement, which is involved in the type of stuff that

we do. And of course I have an opinion of how AI can help with

that, but they sort of were trying to get my endorsement about

the technology. And I'm like, sorry, I haven't used it. I don't know, you may

be the best thing ever, but I haven't used it. So no,

I'm not going to even subtly

imply just because we are doing a content piece together that

your technology is phenomenal to me, I think

anchor decisions Based on judgment and

responsibility, you know, so that is super important.

Not speed and those sort of things. And then human

impact, super important. Like really assess what is the,

what's the, what's the human impact of whatever

AI initiative that you were taken on? And don't only

focus on output. Right. Real life

example, developing a content marketing strategy for

the clients and they're like, oh my gosh, we want to blog a day. And

like, that's output. But what is your clients need? Your, you know,

readers need a blogger. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Is

do you really want a situation where you're bombarding your

ICP with a blog a day? And if the answer to that is yes, then

great. If it's going to help your, you know, the human side of it,

please do it. But if it's not noise and you're going to overwhelm them and

you're going to confuse them. No. So I think make sure that don't only

focus on speed and output, focus on responsibility

and judgment and humanity and human beings. Yeah. Well,

and if I may, where you started, Abby, is one of the places

you absolutely excel. And I love how you're on a mission with

convergex and with marketing. AI pulse, getting

together face to face, I think is coming back. We went through this whole

with COVID as you mentioned earlier, getting away from the good old

sales, go out and hit some golf clubs, go to dinner,

go to an event together that is

unmistakably human. You're not going to send a robot to the ball game

or to the golf course or just for a cup of coffee. Right.

And once you've made those human connections, when you shoot

a video, even if it's maybe AI enhanced, you're that human

being, right? Yeah. And so the

connections that you, in my opinion, you

are one of the leaders in leading with human being

and on a mission to get people together

in person, which is coming back. And you're

once again on the front of the wave. Abby. Thanks,

man. No, I appreciate it and I love it. I just love it.

I love the community and you know this, but

our principles, we have like a value system that we've developed

for the community is the three pillars and which is connect, learn and

grow. So the connect is number one intentionally. That is just

the foundation of humanity. And we want the

community to be the forum for connection. We want

technology providers to find users, we want consultants to find gigs, we

want job seekers to find jobs. You know, we want talent seekers to find

people. So I Think that connection is just very, very

essential. I love it. Well, thank you for creating the safe place to

make that happen. And speaking of

knowing the future, let's land there. The future,

is it bright? B R A I, G H D. Right.

Or Skynet I think you were alluding to earlier.

Right. So let's frame it this way. You and I cross paths

again in three to four years. We'll be crossing paths in three to four weeks,

but not that future. A little bit further off. Yes. How do you envision

humans and AI coexisting at work, at

home, locally, globally? I think we have

a very good precedent when it comes to these

sort of foundational technologies

which are sort of tectonic plates of humanity, if you will.

Right. Where it has happened in the past. Right. And we've had

the Internet, we have, we've had like cloud computing, we had

electricity, if you go back and that sort of stuff. And those things have

just been, you know,

humanity shattering or humanity shaking in,

in their impact. And I feel AI is no different. But look at

it like this. You know, you and me are old

enough to where I don't know about you, but I definitely remember a time

without the Internet. Right. Oh boy. Right. So.

So to me, I think. But now it's like it's not.

It's invisible. Electricity is invisible. We don't talk about those things.

Right. So I think there's going to get to be a time, maybe not in

three years, maybe in ten years, who knows? But I think

there's going to be a time as AI maturity

increases, is just going to become invisible and

there's going to be a quote unquote new normal, which is a very

cliche phrase, support me if you're using it. But it's just going to be the

way that, you know, things just get done. It's

just going to be there. And a tool. Exactly. The

focus is, it's an enabler and the focus is going to be back on

humans. Right. You want to make sure that human beings are

going to organize, orchestrate your favorite word. There's going to

be judgment, taste, trust, relationships,

you know, you know, love. Those things are all things

that is. Is going to be uniquely human. And then AI,

it's not that AI is going to go away, but it's just going to be

invisible. Much like the Internet, like you and me are not

talking about right now. We are on a, on a recording right now. And

we're not talking about, wow, look at this cool thing, the Internet. We are connecting

remotely Right. Like it's, it's, you know, or we're

not talking about electricity. Like, hey, you know, what is happening? So those, I feel

AI is going to go that way and

humans are, you know, like I said, are going to shift

towards doing more human things and adding

truly and adding value truly where

they, where they excel. Right. So to me, that is,

that is the future and that's the way I think about it. And I think

the real advantage is going to go to not the early

adopters, but the thoughtful adopters. Right? That's the way.

Yeah. Yeah. And. And they're, they're the ones that be able

to lean into their given gifting. Right. Yes.

I love it. I'm going to steal that term given gifting. Yeah. So

thank you. And I'll tell

you what, Abby, you definitely uncovered yours, and I'm

so grateful for you sharing it with the world.

Any final thoughts? We'll definitely. By the way, folks,

so many things to link to from this conversation, especially

if you're in the metro Atlanta area. But even if not,

Abby's got a lot of this stuff

[email protected].

You got it. And so we'll have links in the show. Notes,

Abby, any final words you'd like to share of wisdom of the future?

Other than the future? I, I love. I'll. I'll sneak this word. The

future of AI plus human beings

is love. There you go. There you go.

I, I think the, the. There's, there's going to be. There could be a Skynet,

but I think there's going to be a human net over and above the Skynet.

So that's my, that's my takeaway. And it'll be a tasty

sandwich at that. There you go. Thanks.

Yeah, yeah, you got, you got. It's not an open face one. We got to

slap that other slide of bread on, folks. All right,

until next time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Abby, for being here and we

hope to see you in the ATL at marketing AI pulse on the

12th. Thanks, everyone. Until next time, stay

curious. Sleigh administrivia, and be the

bread.