speaker-0: Hey everyone, welcome to Chat B2B, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to AI and B2B marketing. I'm your host, Andrew Rau, co-CEO of Intercept. And on this show, we chat with enterprise marketing leaders about what are they piloting and what are they scaling with AI. We explore their learnings and what we can take away in our own organizations. Today's guest is Tammy Tufte. She's a content strategist at BMC Software and also the co-founder of the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange. We dive into the ghost GDP sub stack that moved markets. We talk about why marketers need to think about AI readers, not just human ones. And also what does it take to move from AI experimentation into real workflow transformation for marketing departments? Lots of stuff to dive into. If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This is Shapie2B. Let's get into it. So Tammy, let's start with a quick overview ⁓ for everyone tuning in. Tell us a little bit about BMC. Obviously for those who know, know that you guys are like the biggest in the industry, ⁓ but tell us a little bit about BMC and just your role. Sure.
speaker-1: So by day, I am a content strategist at BMC Software and BMC works with some of the largest organizations in the world. keep their mission critical systems running through software such as Control-M and BMC-A.
speaker-0: Yeah, awesome. And by night, you are also the co-founder of the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
speaker-1: Yes, so I have a passion for our local marketing community. I was the past president of the American Marketing Association Charlotte chapter and had the opportunity with Jessica Rhea to co-found the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange. We saw an opportunity and a need and the marketing community specifically to create a place and this community that is focused on helping other marketers learn AI wherever they are in their adoption journey.
speaker-0: Yeah, amazing. And I know that you're producing a ton of incredible events and content. So I want to dive into that too. Now, before we get into how are you using AI just from a content perspective and just some of the things that you're excited about, I wanted to get your gut reaction on that sort of substack that went viral around ghost GDP. It's like the end of the world where basically the thesis is AI is so good about driving efficiency that every company leans in to maximize profits. And they basically eliminate their customer base because, you know, they automate, automate, automate, you know, people lose their jobs. They don't have wages. They can't buy. And so it's kind of like, you know, the, you know, it all kind of the AI doomsday scenario. So, and that actually moved markets. ⁓ And I just want to get your thoughts on that. kind of take on that when you read it or when you saw it.
speaker-1: So number one, I think it's pretty terrifying that an article based on someone's, you know, make believe memo about what the future should be has the power to move markets. think that's number one. But number two, I see where it obviously resonated with people. I think, you know, as a SaaS company, you know, you have to look at what's happening right now in the markets. I think you have to look at Where is your product positioned? I am biased. think Control-M specifically, we're positioned very well because our tool can help you orchestrate your agents. And that's going to be a need. But I also think if you're the type of SaaS company where maybe you're bolting on features to your core stack, and maybe it's a chat bot, and it's just OK, well, if I can go do it, create my own chat bot for free, through a front-tier model, I'm gonna go do that. So I think it's gonna change the game in that way where I think companies and people are still going to need whatever the core service is of a particular software, but being able to go and create, know, or look to charge more for additional features that if I could go and vibe code it or create something myself for free. they're really going to have to rethink that. And also, I think the pricing model is going to have to change and really reevaluate how products are priced because I'm probably not going to pay a license for an agent. And I think you're going to start looking more at, you know, the credit model and the number of credits you're using. And especially if you've got an agent that can do the work of several roles.
speaker-0: Yes. Do you think we'll ever get to that point where it's like we're just charging by outcome? I mean, it sounds like a very complex thing but like, it's like, hey, you need to achieve this thing and you know, I guess the same way that LLMs instead of maybe charging a SaaS fee, it's like, how many, what capabilities do you need? What outcomes do you need? We're just gonna charge you based on that. Do you see that as a potential?
speaker-1: That's an opportunity for sure. And I think to a certain degree, they're going to kind of figure it out as they go. But they're also, of course, going to figure out how they can monetize as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think you're seeing that with the introduction of advertising and chat GPT. wherever they can monetize, they're going to try to seize that opportunity.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think your point earlier around, you know, if you've got a good SaaS solution, you're probably, you know, going to fall into that Claude killed my startup or Claude killed my company type of thing. But if you've got great software, great solutions, that's, mean, think about just how big your team, how many people are at BMC?
speaker-1: I total about 4,000.
speaker-0: 4,000 and how like the level of effort that goes into securing solutions, testing solutions, all that. Like vibe coding is great because you can move fast. But if this is like for your mission critical workloads, you know, you're going to have bugs. if you're not, if this isn't your core business, it's like, yes, you could, you could vibe code some stuff. But I think there's still absolutely a need for tier one enterprise.
speaker-1: 100 % because you don't want models and something that you vibe coded touching, you know, a fortune 500 bank and their most delicate and most important systems or messing with the scheduling of the planes that are flying. These things have to work and there isn't a room for error. So you have to have software that you can depend on and rely on that delivers all of this for your customers.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And I agree. And obviously, you know, we've seen news from, you know, Meta recently that had a security breach. Wasn't a big one, but it was an agent that had proactively, it was reviewing an employee discussion board and practically gave advice. Yes. People, internal folks took it, created a breach. ⁓ And I think Amazon was down recently too, because, Yeah, exactly. So it's not perfect.
speaker-1: Worms.
speaker-0: I don't think anything's perfect, but you you definitely got to be on your toes. you know, I guess the counter argument to the whole doomsday thing, you look at, I think software engineers and researchers are probably out in front like in terms of impact to labor markets. And then I think the latest that I've seen on this is software engineer job postings are actually up I think 11, 12 % year over year. And so, if software engineers and developers, you're still hiring and yet we are there from an automation perspective like Claude, I think 100 % of its code is written by Claude code. Right. But yet they're still hiring people. I don't know, a positive signal. But what's your thought on that? Do you think that's
speaker-1: think the pressure to innovate is there. And you need to have people that can do the innovation. And your software has to keep up with that. So you can't fully rely on AI to do that. You still have to have humans in the driving seat to get things done and to figure out how can you orchestrate across different groups? How can you change and modify your software and optimize it? for this new AI enabled world. And I think everyone's trying to figure that out. And you need your engineers to do that. You need humans to do that. You can't rely on the robots to do it all.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you gotta be and I've said this before but like you can't blame Bob the agent, like you are accountable for what you do, right? So like the decision-making still needs to sit with humans. ⁓ Let's dive into the content piece because I know you're super passionate about this. ⁓ Where do you see the biggest opportunities for content right now with AI? Like how are you maybe currently using it and what's your take on that?
speaker-1: So. Yes, I think right now definitely rethinking, you know, formats. think the PDF has gone the way of the dodo bird. No more PDFs. So they're not visible. They don't allow the LLMs to crawl and surface your content to the people who are asking the questions. So transitioning to a web first mentality is number one. I think that's the thing that you need to be thinking about as a content marketer. But I also think you need to be thinking about how is your content structured? Do you have the right structure so that you make it easy for the LLMs to crawl and get the information so they can, again, surface that content and not only ensure that your brand is being visible, but is your brand being recommended? ⁓ I think that's key.
speaker-0: Yeah. That's a great point. One, mean, you as barkers, it's like you want to gate everything to be able to get the leads, but that's not how you're going to get, you know, indexed by these LLMs. Talk to me a little bit about that. Like, what are some of the conversations you're having with folks, whether at BMC or as part of the exchange of how do you like you had made a point to me earlier not just to be visible, but to be recommended? How does your, you know, and so how are you thinking about that? How do you potentially tackle that?
speaker-1: So I think the core of that is trust. And we want customers and or prospects. We want people to trust us. We want people to trust our content. So we still have some gating in place, but for the most part in the past year, we've removed all of our gating because we want to be that trusted advisor for our customers, for people searching for information. And the best way to do that is to make your content available. ⁓ We don't need to hide it behind a gate, you know, and yes, does it make it a little bit more difficult? Yes, it does. But on the flip side, I think, especially as we journey into this AI world, trust is that KPI that you need to be focused on. And also, you you need to make sure that the content that you're creating has a really strong point of view. It's differentiated. And that's something that AI can't create. doesn't have any thoughts. It doesn't have any feelings. Like you can only provide that in the content and the story that you're telling. And narrative is still really, really important.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, what is the story, right? Because ultimately you're trying to connect with people and from a decision maker standpoint ⁓ internally, though, how big of a push or what kind of pushback, if any, did you get on that in terms of like, let's drop the gate? Because I'm just playing that out. If you are clients and that would be that would be a problem for many.
speaker-1: It cause some discomfort and I think it still causes discomfort and you have to really, we're trying to evolve. We're trying to change with where AI is headed and I'm really fortunate in that we have a very forward thinking marketing team. But again, it caused a little bit of friction. not going to lie. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was uncomfortable. it's, think once you start doing the education of how these models work, how GEO works, and how you really need to be rethinking how you've frankly done marketing up until now or rethink your content strategy. It makes sense. So I think that's where the education piece comes in and that you need to educate the people and bring people with you as we enter the AI.
speaker-0: Yeah. The old world. Exactly. mean, mean, in, know, instinctively, I think we know, hey, if somebody wants to consume our content, that's a great thing. We should let them and they want to educate themselves on our solutions. But I think it's just this whole construct of marketing, qualify leads, sales, qualify leads, how many contacts. And then a lot of our clients scenarios where it's it's like, you know, vendor funding channel partners, channel partners have to get measured based on how many leads that they got. So, it's like a very short-term metric as opposed to your point around trust. It's like how do you actually build trust and educate people? And there's no like, I think, easier perfect answer to this but how do we think about measuring trust? Because that's a key point. I agree with you. This is about trust. I think my mind goes to like, how do we measure that and I don't know, how do you think about that on the trust piece?
speaker-1: I think, you know, you see it in the other performance metrics that you're looking at. I think it's just trying, it's taking that integrated view to all the performance that you can measure and looking at it through that lens. But I think one thing that I wanted to touch on that you were speaking to earlier is that people really need to make a mindset change. I think that gets underplayed because really how I've done content marketing for the past 15 years, I pretty much need to throw out a lot of that playbook and really rethink how I do content marketing now. Now, yes, best practices still apply. I'll argue that all day long. You still need to have your foundational best practices for content marketing, but how you produce your content and how you're taking into consideration the models. You really have to make a mindset change. And again, not just for the content marketers, for any marketer that does their job, you really need to rethink and go through how do you do your job. And then think through it again with AI. Are you thinking into steps of workflow? Are you thinking in steps of reaching across, you know, again, organizations are siloed. But how can the work that I'm doing
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: ladder up and connect to the people on my demand team and my digital team and make that workflow across all of these teams to get the outcome that you're looking for. And so I think that's the thing I presented to our org last week on just actually from a Mekan recap. And one of the things I really just doubled down on is your mindset needs to change.
speaker-0: Right. Something that we're finding and I don't think anybody's figured this out 100%. We haven't figured this out 100%. Models keep changing generation over generation. But the GEO platform that our technology team built, one of the things that it does is it looks at recommend rate, caution rate, and rejection rate. So recommend rate is obviously yes, you should go with BMC, caution would be oh. you know, is there an alternative in this scenario? And then rejection rate would be, you know, this is why we don't think that is the best solution. And one of the things that we struggled with initially was looking at the existing solutions out there that were like, a lot of them were built for consumer. So, when you looked at the prompts, we're like, well, what prompts are you actually running to get this assessment? It was like 100 % consumer, the way that it was written. So, What we did and the will push the technology team to say, look, we got to go build something because otherwise it's misleading. If we are sharing these insights with our clients, leveraging this platform. So like, we got to go build it. So one of the things that they did was they sat down with ITDMs and BDMs and they interviewed them on how they structure their prompts. Cause they're like, do you even have the right prompt? I was like, okay, so it's a good point. And so went through a whole bunch of scenarios. So they use that as the ground truth. And then they ran, ⁓ when they run a query, they run hundreds of prompts because the insight was when you test it on 15 or 20, you don't have enough data points. like, Andrew, we need to this on hundreds. And then you need to run it across the buying journey too. If a buyer's in an awareness stage versus a consideration stage versus purchase, mean, obviously it's not all linear, but you know, like different buying mindsets. So this whole thing to your point on recommend versus being visible, think is, I don't know, it's such a seed to figure out right now. And I feel like everyone's got a GEO platform, but everybody is sort of really at the surface. And so that's where I'm pushing the team to say, we gotta go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep because ⁓ everyone's got to reckon like insights, but you gotta be right. And that's what we're really looking to figure out. I don't know, I agree with you. The recommend rate is like, how do you crack that?
speaker-1: Right. Well, and I think it's the wild, west right now where we're playing. It's the law. We're playing a long game because just because I create content today doesn't mean it's going to be surfaced tomorrow. And I think it's so important to acknowledge where these where the training data, the models training data cutoffs are. And I have to constantly remind myself about that because I forget. knowing that OK, the models have trained on this data. The cutoff date is here. But I'm thinking the content that I'm creating today, I'm thinking about it being surfaced six months, 12 months from now. So and it's like the good old days of social media. You know, if you were there first, it was glorious. ⁓
speaker-0: Exactly. So, it's actually, so it's interesting, I wanna double click on that one because the training data cutoff is actually a really material point. what we found is that every model behaves a little bit differently. So, for example, perplexity being natively AI powered search, right? That's their thesis. They go out and do online search a lot more often than let's say Claude that would rely a little bit more heavily on its training data. So, again, going back to like, how do you navigate this stuff internally? Because people expect, ⁓ know, GEO, we should improve our ranking and we're going to produce this content and it's got to have an immediate impact. How do you manage that internally when you know that like, it's not going to impact the model today necessarily enough to see that material impact in a month? How do you manage
speaker-1: think we're very fortunate at BMC and this is not sucking up to my leadership, but they're very, they're very AI forward and they're in it. They're getting their hands dirty all the time. Our CMO and our VP of demand. So I think in they're very open. So having that conversation and we've got a really just a very AI forward marketing team at BMC and we're having the conversations. we're talking about what does this look like and what does this mean? And then how do we evolve with the, you know, this constantly changing sea because that's what it feels like, you know? So it's, it's making sure that you're having the conversations and our leadership, they don't just sit off in a little castle and have AI talking points. mean, they're in the models, they're getting their hands dirty. And I think that's really key to help us move faster. Because I can have that conversation with them and say, here's why we need to do this. And they're like, you know what, go do it. And we've got that support and there's no hesitation. It's they recognize that we need to be moving fast. We need to innovate. If I went to Martin, my CMO today, he'd be like, what do you need to make it happen? Go do it. And it is rare. It is rare.
speaker-0: It's that's so rare. mean, for a four thousand person company plus, it's so rare because I find that ⁓ I find that, you know, look, I mean, we're incented to get it right. We aren't incented as a workforce to take risks in a lot of cases. Right. Right. It's like people that get the right outcome get rewarded. The right behavior is not always it. It kind of is the outcome. ⁓ So, I think that is super rare.
speaker-1: Well, I remember copying perfectionists. So, so it used to be like it has to be exactly right. And then the intercept team may say, Tammy, you're still like this. Don't don't kid yourself. But it's so important to just, you know, hey, is this good enough? And then you can always iterate. mean, again, we're not printing things. It's not like I'm investing a ton of money into something that's being printed. I mean, it's digital.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: I can get it out there and then I can change it. And then the models reward that too because they really have a bias towards content recency. So make sure that you're updating and refreshing your content. You know, make sure you're auditing your content and getting rid of really old content because they don't like that. And so they have a bias towards making sure that that content is fresh and it's recent.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah, great point, great practical ⁓ advice on that. So on the note of, well, what do we do differently? I mean, you we've got Watchtower, which is our AI power of research platform. And so ⁓ when we look at B2B marketers, our set now is like, it's over half a million. But one topic that we looked at late last year was how do they expect B2B buying to change in 26? And what do they plan to do differently as a result of that? And a lot of the conversation, I think three quarters, went to we need to produce content specifically for AI. And so there's this conviction that AI becomes this intermediary between the buyer and the customer, right? If the customer is going to hit the LLM to go, ⁓ who's the best software vendor for IT orchestration? They're going to start there. So are you seeing that also at BMC and how are you kind of thinking about that topic? Yeah.
speaker-1: think definitely we're creating content for humans and we're creating content for bots. doubt about it. And so I think having that recognition that we're creating for both of these audiences and they actually consume content differently needs to be at the forefront of your content planning and strategy. That being said, I'll go back and say that your foundational best practices still need to be in play. Are you still telling a great story? Are you solving a customer's pain points, are you addressing the things that them up at night? Like you still need to do that and you still need to make it a frictionless process for them to consume your content. So I think while yes, the world is changing rapidly, we're still not leaving behind what brought us to the dance and being a good storyteller ⁓ matters. you need to still make sure that you're adhering to that. And again, not just scaling generic content just because you can and on the surface it looks good. It needs to actually be good and it needs to have that outcome. Now that being said, again, making sure that you're taking your content out of PDFs, making sure that you're structuring it in the way that the bots like to crawl for information, making sure that you're changing your sentence structure to be more, you know, FAQ focused, you know. Answer, answer based versus messaging based. Yeah. So I think my personal opinion is the people that are still investing the time to create really great content will be rewarded. But the people that are scaling mediocre content, there may be some short term gains that you may get, but it's quickly going to fall by the wayside because again, back to the trust conversation. That trust comes back in there and making sure that you're having a differentiated point of view in the content that you're creating. And if you have conversations happening in Reddit and you're being cited by Gartner, all of this comes together in this recipe to make really great trusted content that LLMs can't recreate.
speaker-0: Yeah, I agree. I actually think a lot of people say, you know, do people need content anymore with AI, et cetera? I think content's even more important because you just nailed it, which is, you know, mediocre content sure becomes cheaper. What becomes more valuable is really good content that helps people navigate their problems, right? And so you're and to your point on like, OK, people that these content farms that are pumping stuff out. give it six months and the model goes, this is crap, you'll probably get penalized, right? Because it's so generic and they're not seeing that impact right now but I agree with you that really good thoughtful content that we now can do arguably faster than we could have done before if we're know, AI enabled but still human led, that is I think there's going to be companies will be rewarded for that to your point.
speaker-1: Yeah. Even though AI, like I want it to augment my critical thinking, I don't want to outsource my critical thinking to AI. And I think it can be a very slippery slope because sometimes, I mean, you want to hit that easy button all day and you need to actually sit through and think through your strategy and build it out and think about what you want to achieve and how you want this content, you know, the story you want to tell. and making sure that you're having these elements included. And it's a process. So don't outsource your critical thinking.
speaker-0: So Tammy, let's talk a little bit about ⁓ organization transformation. You mentioned, obviously, there's a lot of shifts that need to happen. ⁓ There's been discussion about creating a marketing AI transformation function or office, which I think, to me, is an example of everybody's talking about job displacement. That's a new role or a new function that would have never existed otherwise because of AI. What's your thought on that? How do we need to think about org transformation and maybe even thoughts on Do we need marketing AI transformation offices? What needs to change there?
speaker-1: So I have very strong thoughts on org transformation. It's one of my favorite topics. think people, not people, but organizations lead with, you can do all of this. Look what you can do in the tools. And it's amazing. It's awesome. That being said, experimentation is not a strategy. And so how does an organization move from experimentation to scaled outcome. And again, I think that's where that mindset shift comes in. And then also at the end of the day, we're dealing with people and this is change management. It's not sexy. Tools are sexy, but change management or change, probably not sexy. Governance, not sexy. So you need to change the people. And also I personally believe that organizations have obligation to upskill and their people because all we hear are these headlines of, okay, we're getting rid of thousands and thousands of people because of AI, which I would argue, I don't think those organizations have probably figured it out either. It's just an ⁓ excuse. So as an organization today, I think you have to upskill your people, but you got to do it in a way like we got to bring everyone along. And I feel so passionate about that because I've been very intentional in my AI learning journey since 2023. And I don't think I'm doing anything any different than anybody else. I'm still just constantly trying to grow. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm very, I don't consider myself an AI expert.
speaker-0: Who is? know?
speaker-1: Like, but am I more knowledgeable than some? Yes. But I've worked really hard to get here, but no one like don't ask for permission. No one's going to come and serve it up to you on a silver platter. Your organization may not serve it up to you on a silver platter. I think they should, but they probably are not because they have to keep their lights on at the end of the day. And the, the, the task of doing business and getting business done probably trumps the rest. of what needs to happen because again, the rate of change is massive. It's a lot to get your arms around. mean, even like the past eight weeks and what's happening with Claude and it's a lot, I have a list of things. I'm like, I've got so much to read and this constant feeling of feeling like you're behind when I try to make sure, okay, what's one thing I can learn today about AI or what's something that I like some training or something I can read.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: this week that helps my education, helps my knowledge. But we also need to do that and help our colleagues wherever they're at in their journey. And maybe they're, you know, maybe they've been intimidated by AI or maybe they don't like change. Because again, surprise, humans don't like change. And this is a massive amount of change. So, we need to educate people and bring them along in a way to show them
speaker-0: Who does,
speaker-1: that AI augments their abilities and it's not replacing them. Because what we're hearing and you know, it's very loudly over here in the corner is AI is replacing you. And I think we need to show people how they can do their jobs better with AI and not be replaced by AI.
speaker-0: So much to unpack here. Yeah.
speaker-1: I told you I had really strong thoughts and feelings about it.
speaker-0: This is amazing. To the extent that you can share, how should companies be thinking about a playbook for, you know, tackling upskilling, re-skilling strategy? Because I feel that a lot of companies, a lot of HR teams, executive teams, I feel are lost. They're like, where the hell do we even start? Who do we train first? What are the resources? Is there a I know it's not a one size fits all, but are there principles or a bit of a playbook that you can share of just how do you go about finding where to start and what are some of the things we
speaker-1: think there's so many resources out there. I'm very biased. I'm a huge fan of the marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. I think Paul and Mike and Kathy, that whole team, no one does it better than they do. And it's very human led. ⁓ so I would like their learning path, I think is phenomenal. Their free training is fantastic. starting there. But even if you're like, hey, I can't maybe do the marketing AI Institute, LinkedIn has a learning path. So I think there's opportunities, you know, to get that education and that training and bringing into your org. Now, that leads to my next statement, which is you were talking about an AI transformation office. Right. And I think you do need to have, you know, a director of. Marketing AI transformation because transformation doesn't happen by itself And I think you need that that that guide to drive that change and also someone that's looking I Think someone that's looking across functions and even yeah within marketing I think that's one of the keys to unlock is Is that you need to look across functions again? How do how are we chaining agents together? How are we? thinking about AI teammates. But before you get to the AI teammates, you got to think about, ⁓ do we have the foundational best practices? Is our data health order? Have we up skilled our people? Are they prompting well? Because AI slop is a very real thing. And then my favorite ⁓ tip, if you will, you got to allow people the space and the time to think and to innovate and You know, we have a very busy organization. We've got a lot of things we're trying to do. You've got to carve that time out for your team and for your people to have that thinking time, to have that innovation, because it doesn't, again, it doesn't happen by itself. And if you're, again, so busy doing, you know, selling and keeping the lights on and getting work done, you got to allow space to, hey, maybe this person over here has this really great idea to create this agent and it could really impact our marketing team. You got to give them time to through that and to do that.
speaker-0: I one of my favorite quotes is like innovation dies on somebody's corner of their desk, is, know, unless you have dedicated time for it. And I think is that an organization sort of policy thing or do you think that as just like general knowledge workers, we just need to get better too about like, hey, I'm block, I'm scheduling my strategic thinking time, you know what I mean? Like block it off to dedicate to it.
speaker-1: think it's both. think again, I would argue that I haven't done anything any differently than anybody else, but I was very intentional with my time and with my education. And then I attended the first Maycon conference where you and I met. I knew I needed to be there. My organization at that time wasn't paying for me to be there, but I knew I had to be there. I had to be in the room and I had to learn.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-1: what was happening at this conference. And so I figured out a way to make it happen. And that's what I did. And so I think you have personal responsibility and you need to look at your AI journey and what does that mean and what does that look like for you? But then I also think the organization, again, you need to look at it from the top down. And, you know, I think you got to do a benchmark of where's our AI maturity of our org.
speaker-0: Yes.
speaker-1: because I think there's a lot of assumptions and maybe a lot of myths that's happening. You really need to validate that. And I think you need to set a benchmark and then let's say your organization, maybe they're at a 10%. Okay. How do we get them to 20 or maybe 15? So, and what does that look like? And what does that AI roadmap look like to get you from where your benchmark is to further along? So what does that. look like for your organization. It's learning, it's upscaling. I think it's innovating and it's, these are all things that I think frankly are easy to do, but you've got to have organization and structure around it. And again, I think you got to have that person that's going to be thinking about it. Cause again, AI on top of my job. mean, it's like two full-time jobs.
speaker-0: For sure. and I actually, think every organization needs this marketing AI transformation office because you're right, you need to be able to see across silos. You need that dedicated focus because otherwise it doesn't happen. I know this study is a little old now, but Harvard Business Review did. They looked at like 450 organizations that were going through some form of transformation. Largely, they were digital. cross industry and what they learned was that the success rate for these transformations was only 9 % which is pretty shocking. And when they looked at the reasons why there were such high failure rates, surprisingly technology, budget, timing or did not make the top list, they were all human things. understanding the purpose of change and internal politics and training and all these kinds of things. And so, we need to get better about the human stuff if we want this to succeed. This is, yes, this is a, I don't know, form of digital transformation, right? I feel like the term is coming on, but it is really human. It's cultural transformation. It's human transformation that we got to figure out.
speaker-1: Totally agree. Well, and I think, I mean, it's no different than anything else internally. You have to sell it. Like, you have to socialize it and you have to sell it. And you know, I think people are really receptive but you also, again, there's so much that's happening and people, you know, they may be intimidated, they may be scared or they may be really, really AI forward. So, how do you meet all of those needs?
speaker-0: AI has got access to so much of our data, like calendars and emails and Teams messages and so forth. So I actually did sort of a personal project here where I said, hey, to one of my AI agents, I said, you've got access to my calendar, my emails, my teams, obviously through secure MCPs. But I was like, what do I do in a day? What do you tell me? You've got like we you know, I've had a document for about almost a month now and I'm like, what do I do? And it was such a sobering perspective. You know what it actually said to me?
speaker-1: You're meaningful.
speaker-0: Well, that yes, they're like, you're really bad at responding to these folks on email and all this kind of stuff. But before it gave me all that hard truth, it said to me, Andrew, I have everything. I have a really good view. Some of this is going to be uncomfortable. How unfiltered do you want me to be? And I was like, wow. I'm like, you have me there. I'm like, no, I was like, give it to me straight, right? And it's telling me to your point on like, hey, you need to spend more time. even more time on the innovation side. I know you spent a lot of time on innovation, but you know, and it actually reminded me too, they're like where you overreach and for certain individuals, you're actually hindering their growth and development. I'm like, oh wow. this is, it was a, yeah, yeah. So if you want benchmarks and that applies to the organization, right? So it has access to all this data. I bet it could probably do,
speaker-1: That's a tough one.
speaker-0: realistic benchmarks, more accurate benchmarks than what we would do as humans to be like, I think I'm pretty good about this or we're pretty good about that. at the data.
speaker-1: Yes, well again, experimentation, I'd say thoughts and feelings, none of those things are strategies.
speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. I love it. I know you and I share optimism for just like where we're going and you'd even had said to me leading up to this like, this is an exciting time to be in marketing. It's an exciting time to be a marketer. Some days when you read stuff like the ghost GDPs thing that we talked about earlier, you know, it's like, oh, what's happening? But what's your perspective on this? Like how excited or anxious should we be as marketers, guess. It's like, where are you sitting on that?
speaker-1: You and I are both optimists. So I like to look through that lens. I also think over the course of my career, I've always been in small marketing teams. Yeah. And I feel like I was made for the AI moment because I can talk to AI, I can ask it as many questions as I want to ask it and it never gets tired. So where maybe earlier in my career, if you're like, okay Tammy enough, like top of the questions. So It gives me so many, so much opportunity to really, I think, work through my thinking and to really be that thought partner, which I think elevates whatever it is that I'm trying to achieve, you know, during that day. But also, I think there's we've been here in history like this is and while this is a massive amount of transformation, it's happening. But they said the calculator was going to ruin math and Here we are. It was actually my eighth grade teacher that ruined math. wasn't the calculator. So if you look at it through that, think no one really knows exactly where we're going to be and how things are going to change. And I know that one of the things I think about is like, okay, well, if we're all creating all this AI generated content and the models start training on all this generic content and we're all cannibalizing the content, it's a never ending, you know, like cycle, then eventually you're just going to have this really watered down, of content or ocean of content. So I think we don't know exactly how this is all going to play out. I think it needs to tap into, you know, fear and outrage, getting engagement, of course, where optimism, I think, doesn't maybe get as much engagement, which is a little sad. So I think,
speaker-0: Yup.
speaker-1: If you're really willing to be adaptable and flexible and to put that time in and be intentional about your AI journey, I think the sky is the limit. think there's going to be more jobs that we haven't even thought about that haven't even been created yet. And you need to be, you know, I want to be at the forefront of that. I don't want to be waiting for that opportunity. want to stick it out.
speaker-0: ⁓ I really think to your point, it's about mindset, right? Because there's always going to be a subset of folks that will figure it out and probably come through this in a much more advantageous position, right? And I think generally, I think that you reference sort of like, again, different historical moments of labor-saving technologies, right? The calculator, the computer, the ATM. ⁓ in almost every single one of these instances and even Jeffrey Hinton when he talked about radiologists, he's like, we're not going to have any radiologists and yet we have a shortage because the radiologist isn't there to look at scans, it's there to take care of patients. So, it is like maybe the purpose of the job is you know, maybe evolves but largely it's like well, okay, if the tasks this set of tasks gets automated, there's a whole other set of tasks that it frees us up to do different things, right? Because I think it's if we assume that if we do exactly what we do and we don't do anything new, okay, fine, I will buy that, you know, maybe the doomsday scenario happens and like this all goes to crap. But we are always thinking of new ideas as humans. so if we do new things, that's a new value creation that a lot of these arguments don't capture is they're not having the creativity to go well we are we could do this that the other right
speaker-1: Right. think the thing that honestly, I'm not so much worried about myself. ⁓ The thing that keeps me up at night, I worry about our early in career professionals, our college graduates. That's the ones that I worry about. I speak to a ⁓ lot of marketing students at our local colleges. And that's honestly what keeps me up at night because I want to see these early in career professionals, I want to see them succeed. and where I had the opportunity to learn and become a seasoned professional. You know, if AI is taking that opportunity from them, you know, how are they supposed to get to the experience, you know, the level of experience that I have today? What does that look like for them? So I think that's, you know, we need to think about what that looks like. And we know that educational institutions are late to the game as far as providing that AI education and
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: to those students. mean, some may be forward thinking, but you know, they're not providing it. They're telling them, hey, don't use it because you're using it to cheat, you know, say that I'm using it again in a thoughtful, intentional manner and how to augment their abilities. yeah, these kids are going to come out and they're not going to have that people will be like, how AI forward are you or what's your AI experience? know, so.
speaker-0: And do you see students applying to join the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange too? Do you see that segment? Yeah? OK.
speaker-1: We've had students come and usually every semester I speak to marketing students at UNC Charlotte and I've always asked them the same question. Tell me how do you feel about AI? And it's really interesting to see how they feel about it because it kind of divided into two camps. You've got a group of students who don't like AI. They don't like what they see. They don't like It's particularly, I'd say more the creative students who they don't like the art being copyrighted or training on on art. They don't like that at all. And then you've got some that are like, I'm using it for productivity. And so I'm speaking on Tuesday, so I'm kind of curious. It's been a minute since I've spoken to them. So I'm curious to see where they're at now and if it's changing and how they feel about it. But again, it's one of my top questions is how do you feel about this and then how do you think it impacts? where you're going to go after graduation.
speaker-0: I know that a lot of organizations are not hiring folks that are just like new grads. ⁓ But for us actually, for I'd say 10 years, we stopped our co-op intern program and our CTO Francis this year said, ⁓ he joined the organization late last year. He's like, we need to restart that up immediately. And so it was a different perspective that he brought around. you're bringing in folks that are AI native. They don't know anything else other than AI native. Why would we not bring in fresh talent that's got unique perspectives that can solve problems in fresh creative ways that don't have heart blinders on, right? Cause as we build expertise, we kind of look through, you know, specific tunnel. And it's this like power of a beginner's mindset. So, we are actually doubling down on that in many ways. But I think and the thesis made so much sense as Francis kind of like cemented that for us. But I can also see the other side organizations are like, look, we just cut costs, be able to elevate folks that have the expertise and scale. But what's your feeder to that? Like, things move through the system, you know?
speaker-1: Yeah, because eventually, mean, eventually I'll be doing I'll be retired and I'll be doing.
speaker-0: Doing boards with, you know, with a drink in your hand on different boards and yeah.
speaker-1: I'll be doing something much different with my life. you know, the kids need to come up through the system and they need to be able to do even bigger and better things. and how do we do that for them? But I think to your point, they are going to be AI native. And right now, if you're trying to apply AI to your existing processes, The way you need to think about that is you actually need to rethink your process and then figure out where AI plays a role within that process. Not because maybe your current process is broken and then you're just blind AI on top of that. And that's just going to amplify that broken process.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, agreed, agreed. It's an amplification tool, right? Rather than it's going to solve your problems. ⁓ Tammy, this has been amazing chat. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for- Yeah, no, I love- I always love our chats and just thank you for reminding us of the human element in all this and how this is an organizational problem to solve, this not a technology problem to solve.
speaker-1: me. And guess what? Humans are really cool. Yes, we are. very cool.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, yeah, we're cool, we're resilient, we're creative and so, we're all team human. let's figure it out. All right, thanks Tammy.
speaker-1: Exactly. Thank you.
speaker-1: So by day, I am a content strategist at BMC Software and BMC works with some of the largest organizations in the world. keep their mission critical systems running through software such as Control-M and BMC-A.
speaker-0: Yeah, awesome. And by night, you are also the co-founder of the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
speaker-1: Yes, so I have a passion for our local marketing community. I was the past president of the American Marketing Association Charlotte chapter and had the opportunity with Jessica Rhea to co-found the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange. We saw an opportunity and a need and the marketing community specifically to create a place and this community that is focused on helping other marketers learn AI wherever they are in their adoption journey.
speaker-0: Yeah, amazing. And I know that you're producing a ton of incredible events and content. So I want to dive into that too. Now, before we get into how are you using AI just from a content perspective and just some of the things that you're excited about, I wanted to get your gut reaction on that sort of substack that went viral around ghost GDP. It's like the end of the world where basically the thesis is AI is so good about driving efficiency that every company leans in to maximize profits. And they basically eliminate their customer base because, you know, they automate, automate, automate, you know, people lose their jobs. They don't have wages. They can't buy. And so it's kind of like, you know, the, you know, it all kind of the AI doomsday scenario. So, and that actually moved markets. ⁓ And I just want to get your thoughts on that. kind of take on that when you read it or when you saw it.
speaker-1: So number one, I think it's pretty terrifying that an article based on someone's, you know, make believe memo about what the future should be has the power to move markets. think that's number one. But number two, I see where it obviously resonated with people. I think, you know, as a SaaS company, you know, you have to look at what's happening right now in the markets. I think you have to look at Where is your product positioned? I am biased. think Control-M specifically, we're positioned very well because our tool can help you orchestrate your agents. And that's going to be a need. But I also think if you're the type of SaaS company where maybe you're bolting on features to your core stack, and maybe it's a chat bot, and it's just OK, well, if I can go do it, create my own chat bot for free, through a front-tier model, I'm gonna go do that. So I think it's gonna change the game in that way where I think companies and people are still going to need whatever the core service is of a particular software, but being able to go and create, know, or look to charge more for additional features that if I could go and vibe code it or create something myself for free. they're really going to have to rethink that. And also, I think the pricing model is going to have to change and really reevaluate how products are priced because I'm probably not going to pay a license for an agent. And I think you're going to start looking more at, you know, the credit model and the number of credits you're using. And especially if you've got an agent that can do the work of several roles.
speaker-0: Yes. Do you think we'll ever get to that point where it's like we're just charging by outcome? I mean, it sounds like a very complex thing but like, it's like, hey, you need to achieve this thing and you know, I guess the same way that LLMs instead of maybe charging a SaaS fee, it's like, how many, what capabilities do you need? What outcomes do you need? We're just gonna charge you based on that. Do you see that as a potential?
speaker-1: That's an opportunity for sure. And I think to a certain degree, they're going to kind of figure it out as they go. But they're also, of course, going to figure out how they can monetize as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think you're seeing that with the introduction of advertising and chat GPT. wherever they can monetize, they're going to try to seize that opportunity.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think your point earlier around, you know, if you've got a good SaaS solution, you're probably, you know, going to fall into that Claude killed my startup or Claude killed my company type of thing. But if you've got great software, great solutions, that's, mean, think about just how big your team, how many people are at BMC?
speaker-1: I total about 4,000.
speaker-0: 4,000 and how like the level of effort that goes into securing solutions, testing solutions, all that. Like vibe coding is great because you can move fast. But if this is like for your mission critical workloads, you know, you're going to have bugs. if you're not, if this isn't your core business, it's like, yes, you could, you could vibe code some stuff. But I think there's still absolutely a need for tier one enterprise.
speaker-1: 100 % because you don't want models and something that you vibe coded touching, you know, a fortune 500 bank and their most delicate and most important systems or messing with the scheduling of the planes that are flying. These things have to work and there isn't a room for error. So you have to have software that you can depend on and rely on that delivers all of this for your customers.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And I agree. And obviously, you know, we've seen news from, you know, Meta recently that had a security breach. Wasn't a big one, but it was an agent that had proactively, it was reviewing an employee discussion board and practically gave advice. Yes. People, internal folks took it, created a breach. ⁓ And I think Amazon was down recently too, because, Yeah, exactly. So it's not perfect.
speaker-1: Worms.
speaker-0: I don't think anything's perfect, but you you definitely got to be on your toes. you know, I guess the counter argument to the whole doomsday thing, you look at, I think software engineers and researchers are probably out in front like in terms of impact to labor markets. And then I think the latest that I've seen on this is software engineer job postings are actually up I think 11, 12 % year over year. And so, if software engineers and developers, you're still hiring and yet we are there from an automation perspective like Claude, I think 100 % of its code is written by Claude code. Right. But yet they're still hiring people. I don't know, a positive signal. But what's your thought on that? Do you think that's
speaker-1: think the pressure to innovate is there. And you need to have people that can do the innovation. And your software has to keep up with that. So you can't fully rely on AI to do that. You still have to have humans in the driving seat to get things done and to figure out how can you orchestrate across different groups? How can you change and modify your software and optimize it? for this new AI enabled world. And I think everyone's trying to figure that out. And you need your engineers to do that. You need humans to do that. You can't rely on the robots to do it all.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you gotta be and I've said this before but like you can't blame Bob the agent, like you are accountable for what you do, right? So like the decision-making still needs to sit with humans. ⁓ Let's dive into the content piece because I know you're super passionate about this. ⁓ Where do you see the biggest opportunities for content right now with AI? Like how are you maybe currently using it and what's your take on that?
speaker-1: So. Yes, I think right now definitely rethinking, you know, formats. think the PDF has gone the way of the dodo bird. No more PDFs. So they're not visible. They don't allow the LLMs to crawl and surface your content to the people who are asking the questions. So transitioning to a web first mentality is number one. I think that's the thing that you need to be thinking about as a content marketer. But I also think you need to be thinking about how is your content structured? Do you have the right structure so that you make it easy for the LLMs to crawl and get the information so they can, again, surface that content and not only ensure that your brand is being visible, but is your brand being recommended? ⁓ I think that's key.
speaker-0: Yeah. That's a great point. One, mean, you as barkers, it's like you want to gate everything to be able to get the leads, but that's not how you're going to get, you know, indexed by these LLMs. Talk to me a little bit about that. Like, what are some of the conversations you're having with folks, whether at BMC or as part of the exchange of how do you like you had made a point to me earlier not just to be visible, but to be recommended? How does your, you know, and so how are you thinking about that? How do you potentially tackle that?
speaker-1: So I think the core of that is trust. And we want customers and or prospects. We want people to trust us. We want people to trust our content. So we still have some gating in place, but for the most part in the past year, we've removed all of our gating because we want to be that trusted advisor for our customers, for people searching for information. And the best way to do that is to make your content available. ⁓ We don't need to hide it behind a gate, you know, and yes, does it make it a little bit more difficult? Yes, it does. But on the flip side, I think, especially as we journey into this AI world, trust is that KPI that you need to be focused on. And also, you you need to make sure that the content that you're creating has a really strong point of view. It's differentiated. And that's something that AI can't create. doesn't have any thoughts. It doesn't have any feelings. Like you can only provide that in the content and the story that you're telling. And narrative is still really, really important.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, what is the story, right? Because ultimately you're trying to connect with people and from a decision maker standpoint ⁓ internally, though, how big of a push or what kind of pushback, if any, did you get on that in terms of like, let's drop the gate? Because I'm just playing that out. If you are clients and that would be that would be a problem for many.
speaker-1: It cause some discomfort and I think it still causes discomfort and you have to really, we're trying to evolve. We're trying to change with where AI is headed and I'm really fortunate in that we have a very forward thinking marketing team. But again, it caused a little bit of friction. not going to lie. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was uncomfortable. it's, think once you start doing the education of how these models work, how GEO works, and how you really need to be rethinking how you've frankly done marketing up until now or rethink your content strategy. It makes sense. So I think that's where the education piece comes in and that you need to educate the people and bring people with you as we enter the AI.
speaker-0: Yeah. The old world. Exactly. mean, mean, in, know, instinctively, I think we know, hey, if somebody wants to consume our content, that's a great thing. We should let them and they want to educate themselves on our solutions. But I think it's just this whole construct of marketing, qualify leads, sales, qualify leads, how many contacts. And then a lot of our clients scenarios where it's it's like, you know, vendor funding channel partners, channel partners have to get measured based on how many leads that they got. So, it's like a very short-term metric as opposed to your point around trust. It's like how do you actually build trust and educate people? And there's no like, I think, easier perfect answer to this but how do we think about measuring trust? Because that's a key point. I agree with you. This is about trust. I think my mind goes to like, how do we measure that and I don't know, how do you think about that on the trust piece?
speaker-1: I think, you know, you see it in the other performance metrics that you're looking at. I think it's just trying, it's taking that integrated view to all the performance that you can measure and looking at it through that lens. But I think one thing that I wanted to touch on that you were speaking to earlier is that people really need to make a mindset change. I think that gets underplayed because really how I've done content marketing for the past 15 years, I pretty much need to throw out a lot of that playbook and really rethink how I do content marketing now. Now, yes, best practices still apply. I'll argue that all day long. You still need to have your foundational best practices for content marketing, but how you produce your content and how you're taking into consideration the models. You really have to make a mindset change. And again, not just for the content marketers, for any marketer that does their job, you really need to rethink and go through how do you do your job. And then think through it again with AI. Are you thinking into steps of workflow? Are you thinking in steps of reaching across, you know, again, organizations are siloed. But how can the work that I'm doing
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: ladder up and connect to the people on my demand team and my digital team and make that workflow across all of these teams to get the outcome that you're looking for. And so I think that's the thing I presented to our org last week on just actually from a Mekan recap. And one of the things I really just doubled down on is your mindset needs to change.
speaker-0: Right. Something that we're finding and I don't think anybody's figured this out 100%. We haven't figured this out 100%. Models keep changing generation over generation. But the GEO platform that our technology team built, one of the things that it does is it looks at recommend rate, caution rate, and rejection rate. So recommend rate is obviously yes, you should go with BMC, caution would be oh. you know, is there an alternative in this scenario? And then rejection rate would be, you know, this is why we don't think that is the best solution. And one of the things that we struggled with initially was looking at the existing solutions out there that were like, a lot of them were built for consumer. So, when you looked at the prompts, we're like, well, what prompts are you actually running to get this assessment? It was like 100 % consumer, the way that it was written. So, What we did and the will push the technology team to say, look, we got to go build something because otherwise it's misleading. If we are sharing these insights with our clients, leveraging this platform. So like, we got to go build it. So one of the things that they did was they sat down with ITDMs and BDMs and they interviewed them on how they structure their prompts. Cause they're like, do you even have the right prompt? I was like, okay, so it's a good point. And so went through a whole bunch of scenarios. So they use that as the ground truth. And then they ran, ⁓ when they run a query, they run hundreds of prompts because the insight was when you test it on 15 or 20, you don't have enough data points. like, Andrew, we need to this on hundreds. And then you need to run it across the buying journey too. If a buyer's in an awareness stage versus a consideration stage versus purchase, mean, obviously it's not all linear, but you know, like different buying mindsets. So this whole thing to your point on recommend versus being visible, think is, I don't know, it's such a seed to figure out right now. And I feel like everyone's got a GEO platform, but everybody is sort of really at the surface. And so that's where I'm pushing the team to say, we gotta go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep because ⁓ everyone's got to reckon like insights, but you gotta be right. And that's what we're really looking to figure out. I don't know, I agree with you. The recommend rate is like, how do you crack that?
speaker-1: Right. Well, and I think it's the wild, west right now where we're playing. It's the law. We're playing a long game because just because I create content today doesn't mean it's going to be surfaced tomorrow. And I think it's so important to acknowledge where these where the training data, the models training data cutoffs are. And I have to constantly remind myself about that because I forget. knowing that OK, the models have trained on this data. The cutoff date is here. But I'm thinking the content that I'm creating today, I'm thinking about it being surfaced six months, 12 months from now. So and it's like the good old days of social media. You know, if you were there first, it was glorious. ⁓
speaker-0: Exactly. So, it's actually, so it's interesting, I wanna double click on that one because the training data cutoff is actually a really material point. what we found is that every model behaves a little bit differently. So, for example, perplexity being natively AI powered search, right? That's their thesis. They go out and do online search a lot more often than let's say Claude that would rely a little bit more heavily on its training data. So, again, going back to like, how do you navigate this stuff internally? Because people expect, ⁓ know, GEO, we should improve our ranking and we're going to produce this content and it's got to have an immediate impact. How do you manage that internally when you know that like, it's not going to impact the model today necessarily enough to see that material impact in a month? How do you manage
speaker-1: think we're very fortunate at BMC and this is not sucking up to my leadership, but they're very, they're very AI forward and they're in it. They're getting their hands dirty all the time. Our CMO and our VP of demand. So I think in they're very open. So having that conversation and we've got a really just a very AI forward marketing team at BMC and we're having the conversations. we're talking about what does this look like and what does this mean? And then how do we evolve with the, you know, this constantly changing sea because that's what it feels like, you know? So it's, it's making sure that you're having the conversations and our leadership, they don't just sit off in a little castle and have AI talking points. mean, they're in the models, they're getting their hands dirty. And I think that's really key to help us move faster. Because I can have that conversation with them and say, here's why we need to do this. And they're like, you know what, go do it. And we've got that support and there's no hesitation. It's they recognize that we need to be moving fast. We need to innovate. If I went to Martin, my CMO today, he'd be like, what do you need to make it happen? Go do it. And it is rare. It is rare.
speaker-0: It's that's so rare. mean, for a four thousand person company plus, it's so rare because I find that ⁓ I find that, you know, look, I mean, we're incented to get it right. We aren't incented as a workforce to take risks in a lot of cases. Right. Right. It's like people that get the right outcome get rewarded. The right behavior is not always it. It kind of is the outcome. ⁓ So, I think that is super rare.
speaker-1: Well, I remember copying perfectionists. So, so it used to be like it has to be exactly right. And then the intercept team may say, Tammy, you're still like this. Don't don't kid yourself. But it's so important to just, you know, hey, is this good enough? And then you can always iterate. mean, again, we're not printing things. It's not like I'm investing a ton of money into something that's being printed. I mean, it's digital.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
speaker-1: I can get it out there and then I can change it. And then the models reward that too because they really have a bias towards content recency. So make sure that you're updating and refreshing your content. You know, make sure you're auditing your content and getting rid of really old content because they don't like that. And so they have a bias towards making sure that that content is fresh and it's recent.
speaker-0: Right. Yeah, great point, great practical ⁓ advice on that. So on the note of, well, what do we do differently? I mean, you we've got Watchtower, which is our AI power of research platform. And so ⁓ when we look at B2B marketers, our set now is like, it's over half a million. But one topic that we looked at late last year was how do they expect B2B buying to change in 26? And what do they plan to do differently as a result of that? And a lot of the conversation, I think three quarters, went to we need to produce content specifically for AI. And so there's this conviction that AI becomes this intermediary between the buyer and the customer, right? If the customer is going to hit the LLM to go, ⁓ who's the best software vendor for IT orchestration? They're going to start there. So are you seeing that also at BMC and how are you kind of thinking about that topic? Yeah.
speaker-1: think definitely we're creating content for humans and we're creating content for bots. doubt about it. And so I think having that recognition that we're creating for both of these audiences and they actually consume content differently needs to be at the forefront of your content planning and strategy. That being said, I'll go back and say that your foundational best practices still need to be in play. Are you still telling a great story? Are you solving a customer's pain points, are you addressing the things that them up at night? Like you still need to do that and you still need to make it a frictionless process for them to consume your content. So I think while yes, the world is changing rapidly, we're still not leaving behind what brought us to the dance and being a good storyteller ⁓ matters. you need to still make sure that you're adhering to that. And again, not just scaling generic content just because you can and on the surface it looks good. It needs to actually be good and it needs to have that outcome. Now that being said, again, making sure that you're taking your content out of PDFs, making sure that you're structuring it in the way that the bots like to crawl for information, making sure that you're changing your sentence structure to be more, you know, FAQ focused, you know. Answer, answer based versus messaging based. Yeah. So I think my personal opinion is the people that are still investing the time to create really great content will be rewarded. But the people that are scaling mediocre content, there may be some short term gains that you may get, but it's quickly going to fall by the wayside because again, back to the trust conversation. That trust comes back in there and making sure that you're having a differentiated point of view in the content that you're creating. And if you have conversations happening in Reddit and you're being cited by Gartner, all of this comes together in this recipe to make really great trusted content that LLMs can't recreate.
speaker-0: Yeah, I agree. I actually think a lot of people say, you know, do people need content anymore with AI, et cetera? I think content's even more important because you just nailed it, which is, you know, mediocre content sure becomes cheaper. What becomes more valuable is really good content that helps people navigate their problems, right? And so you're and to your point on like, OK, people that these content farms that are pumping stuff out. give it six months and the model goes, this is crap, you'll probably get penalized, right? Because it's so generic and they're not seeing that impact right now but I agree with you that really good thoughtful content that we now can do arguably faster than we could have done before if we're know, AI enabled but still human led, that is I think there's going to be companies will be rewarded for that to your point.
speaker-1: Yeah. Even though AI, like I want it to augment my critical thinking, I don't want to outsource my critical thinking to AI. And I think it can be a very slippery slope because sometimes, I mean, you want to hit that easy button all day and you need to actually sit through and think through your strategy and build it out and think about what you want to achieve and how you want this content, you know, the story you want to tell. and making sure that you're having these elements included. And it's a process. So don't outsource your critical thinking.
speaker-0: So Tammy, let's talk a little bit about ⁓ organization transformation. You mentioned, obviously, there's a lot of shifts that need to happen. ⁓ There's been discussion about creating a marketing AI transformation function or office, which I think, to me, is an example of everybody's talking about job displacement. That's a new role or a new function that would have never existed otherwise because of AI. What's your thought on that? How do we need to think about org transformation and maybe even thoughts on Do we need marketing AI transformation offices? What needs to change there?
speaker-1: So I have very strong thoughts on org transformation. It's one of my favorite topics. think people, not people, but organizations lead with, you can do all of this. Look what you can do in the tools. And it's amazing. It's awesome. That being said, experimentation is not a strategy. And so how does an organization move from experimentation to scaled outcome. And again, I think that's where that mindset shift comes in. And then also at the end of the day, we're dealing with people and this is change management. It's not sexy. Tools are sexy, but change management or change, probably not sexy. Governance, not sexy. So you need to change the people. And also I personally believe that organizations have obligation to upskill and their people because all we hear are these headlines of, okay, we're getting rid of thousands and thousands of people because of AI, which I would argue, I don't think those organizations have probably figured it out either. It's just an ⁓ excuse. So as an organization today, I think you have to upskill your people, but you got to do it in a way like we got to bring everyone along. And I feel so passionate about that because I've been very intentional in my AI learning journey since 2023. And I don't think I'm doing anything any different than anybody else. I'm still just constantly trying to grow. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm very, I don't consider myself an AI expert.
speaker-0: Who is? know?
speaker-1: Like, but am I more knowledgeable than some? Yes. But I've worked really hard to get here, but no one like don't ask for permission. No one's going to come and serve it up to you on a silver platter. Your organization may not serve it up to you on a silver platter. I think they should, but they probably are not because they have to keep their lights on at the end of the day. And the, the, the task of doing business and getting business done probably trumps the rest. of what needs to happen because again, the rate of change is massive. It's a lot to get your arms around. mean, even like the past eight weeks and what's happening with Claude and it's a lot, I have a list of things. I'm like, I've got so much to read and this constant feeling of feeling like you're behind when I try to make sure, okay, what's one thing I can learn today about AI or what's something that I like some training or something I can read.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: this week that helps my education, helps my knowledge. But we also need to do that and help our colleagues wherever they're at in their journey. And maybe they're, you know, maybe they've been intimidated by AI or maybe they don't like change. Because again, surprise, humans don't like change. And this is a massive amount of change. So, we need to educate people and bring them along in a way to show them
speaker-0: Who does,
speaker-1: that AI augments their abilities and it's not replacing them. Because what we're hearing and you know, it's very loudly over here in the corner is AI is replacing you. And I think we need to show people how they can do their jobs better with AI and not be replaced by AI.
speaker-0: So much to unpack here. Yeah.
speaker-1: I told you I had really strong thoughts and feelings about it.
speaker-0: This is amazing. To the extent that you can share, how should companies be thinking about a playbook for, you know, tackling upskilling, re-skilling strategy? Because I feel that a lot of companies, a lot of HR teams, executive teams, I feel are lost. They're like, where the hell do we even start? Who do we train first? What are the resources? Is there a I know it's not a one size fits all, but are there principles or a bit of a playbook that you can share of just how do you go about finding where to start and what are some of the things we
speaker-1: think there's so many resources out there. I'm very biased. I'm a huge fan of the marketing AI Institute and SmarterX. I think Paul and Mike and Kathy, that whole team, no one does it better than they do. And it's very human led. ⁓ so I would like their learning path, I think is phenomenal. Their free training is fantastic. starting there. But even if you're like, hey, I can't maybe do the marketing AI Institute, LinkedIn has a learning path. So I think there's opportunities, you know, to get that education and that training and bringing into your org. Now, that leads to my next statement, which is you were talking about an AI transformation office. Right. And I think you do need to have, you know, a director of. Marketing AI transformation because transformation doesn't happen by itself And I think you need that that that guide to drive that change and also someone that's looking I Think someone that's looking across functions and even yeah within marketing I think that's one of the keys to unlock is Is that you need to look across functions again? How do how are we chaining agents together? How are we? thinking about AI teammates. But before you get to the AI teammates, you got to think about, ⁓ do we have the foundational best practices? Is our data health order? Have we up skilled our people? Are they prompting well? Because AI slop is a very real thing. And then my favorite ⁓ tip, if you will, you got to allow people the space and the time to think and to innovate and You know, we have a very busy organization. We've got a lot of things we're trying to do. You've got to carve that time out for your team and for your people to have that thinking time, to have that innovation, because it doesn't, again, it doesn't happen by itself. And if you're, again, so busy doing, you know, selling and keeping the lights on and getting work done, you got to allow space to, hey, maybe this person over here has this really great idea to create this agent and it could really impact our marketing team. You got to give them time to through that and to do that.
speaker-0: I one of my favorite quotes is like innovation dies on somebody's corner of their desk, is, know, unless you have dedicated time for it. And I think is that an organization sort of policy thing or do you think that as just like general knowledge workers, we just need to get better too about like, hey, I'm block, I'm scheduling my strategic thinking time, you know what I mean? Like block it off to dedicate to it.
speaker-1: think it's both. think again, I would argue that I haven't done anything any differently than anybody else, but I was very intentional with my time and with my education. And then I attended the first Maycon conference where you and I met. I knew I needed to be there. My organization at that time wasn't paying for me to be there, but I knew I had to be there. I had to be in the room and I had to learn.
speaker-0: That's right.
speaker-1: what was happening at this conference. And so I figured out a way to make it happen. And that's what I did. And so I think you have personal responsibility and you need to look at your AI journey and what does that mean and what does that look like for you? But then I also think the organization, again, you need to look at it from the top down. And, you know, I think you got to do a benchmark of where's our AI maturity of our org.
speaker-0: Yes.
speaker-1: because I think there's a lot of assumptions and maybe a lot of myths that's happening. You really need to validate that. And I think you need to set a benchmark and then let's say your organization, maybe they're at a 10%. Okay. How do we get them to 20 or maybe 15? So, and what does that look like? And what does that AI roadmap look like to get you from where your benchmark is to further along? So what does that. look like for your organization. It's learning, it's upscaling. I think it's innovating and it's, these are all things that I think frankly are easy to do, but you've got to have organization and structure around it. And again, I think you got to have that person that's going to be thinking about it. Cause again, AI on top of my job. mean, it's like two full-time jobs.
speaker-0: For sure. and I actually, think every organization needs this marketing AI transformation office because you're right, you need to be able to see across silos. You need that dedicated focus because otherwise it doesn't happen. I know this study is a little old now, but Harvard Business Review did. They looked at like 450 organizations that were going through some form of transformation. Largely, they were digital. cross industry and what they learned was that the success rate for these transformations was only 9 % which is pretty shocking. And when they looked at the reasons why there were such high failure rates, surprisingly technology, budget, timing or did not make the top list, they were all human things. understanding the purpose of change and internal politics and training and all these kinds of things. And so, we need to get better about the human stuff if we want this to succeed. This is, yes, this is a, I don't know, form of digital transformation, right? I feel like the term is coming on, but it is really human. It's cultural transformation. It's human transformation that we got to figure out.
speaker-1: Totally agree. Well, and I think, I mean, it's no different than anything else internally. You have to sell it. Like, you have to socialize it and you have to sell it. And you know, I think people are really receptive but you also, again, there's so much that's happening and people, you know, they may be intimidated, they may be scared or they may be really, really AI forward. So, how do you meet all of those needs?
speaker-0: AI has got access to so much of our data, like calendars and emails and Teams messages and so forth. So I actually did sort of a personal project here where I said, hey, to one of my AI agents, I said, you've got access to my calendar, my emails, my teams, obviously through secure MCPs. But I was like, what do I do in a day? What do you tell me? You've got like we you know, I've had a document for about almost a month now and I'm like, what do I do? And it was such a sobering perspective. You know what it actually said to me?
speaker-1: You're meaningful.
speaker-0: Well, that yes, they're like, you're really bad at responding to these folks on email and all this kind of stuff. But before it gave me all that hard truth, it said to me, Andrew, I have everything. I have a really good view. Some of this is going to be uncomfortable. How unfiltered do you want me to be? And I was like, wow. I'm like, you have me there. I'm like, no, I was like, give it to me straight, right? And it's telling me to your point on like, hey, you need to spend more time. even more time on the innovation side. I know you spent a lot of time on innovation, but you know, and it actually reminded me too, they're like where you overreach and for certain individuals, you're actually hindering their growth and development. I'm like, oh wow. this is, it was a, yeah, yeah. So if you want benchmarks and that applies to the organization, right? So it has access to all this data. I bet it could probably do,
speaker-1: That's a tough one.
speaker-0: realistic benchmarks, more accurate benchmarks than what we would do as humans to be like, I think I'm pretty good about this or we're pretty good about that. at the data.
speaker-1: Yes, well again, experimentation, I'd say thoughts and feelings, none of those things are strategies.
speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. I love it. I know you and I share optimism for just like where we're going and you'd even had said to me leading up to this like, this is an exciting time to be in marketing. It's an exciting time to be a marketer. Some days when you read stuff like the ghost GDPs thing that we talked about earlier, you know, it's like, oh, what's happening? But what's your perspective on this? Like how excited or anxious should we be as marketers, guess. It's like, where are you sitting on that?
speaker-1: You and I are both optimists. So I like to look through that lens. I also think over the course of my career, I've always been in small marketing teams. Yeah. And I feel like I was made for the AI moment because I can talk to AI, I can ask it as many questions as I want to ask it and it never gets tired. So where maybe earlier in my career, if you're like, okay Tammy enough, like top of the questions. So It gives me so many, so much opportunity to really, I think, work through my thinking and to really be that thought partner, which I think elevates whatever it is that I'm trying to achieve, you know, during that day. But also, I think there's we've been here in history like this is and while this is a massive amount of transformation, it's happening. But they said the calculator was going to ruin math and Here we are. It was actually my eighth grade teacher that ruined math. wasn't the calculator. So if you look at it through that, think no one really knows exactly where we're going to be and how things are going to change. And I know that one of the things I think about is like, okay, well, if we're all creating all this AI generated content and the models start training on all this generic content and we're all cannibalizing the content, it's a never ending, you know, like cycle, then eventually you're just going to have this really watered down, of content or ocean of content. So I think we don't know exactly how this is all going to play out. I think it needs to tap into, you know, fear and outrage, getting engagement, of course, where optimism, I think, doesn't maybe get as much engagement, which is a little sad. So I think,
speaker-0: Yup.
speaker-1: If you're really willing to be adaptable and flexible and to put that time in and be intentional about your AI journey, I think the sky is the limit. think there's going to be more jobs that we haven't even thought about that haven't even been created yet. And you need to be, you know, I want to be at the forefront of that. I don't want to be waiting for that opportunity. want to stick it out.
speaker-0: ⁓ I really think to your point, it's about mindset, right? Because there's always going to be a subset of folks that will figure it out and probably come through this in a much more advantageous position, right? And I think generally, I think that you reference sort of like, again, different historical moments of labor-saving technologies, right? The calculator, the computer, the ATM. ⁓ in almost every single one of these instances and even Jeffrey Hinton when he talked about radiologists, he's like, we're not going to have any radiologists and yet we have a shortage because the radiologist isn't there to look at scans, it's there to take care of patients. So, it is like maybe the purpose of the job is you know, maybe evolves but largely it's like well, okay, if the tasks this set of tasks gets automated, there's a whole other set of tasks that it frees us up to do different things, right? Because I think it's if we assume that if we do exactly what we do and we don't do anything new, okay, fine, I will buy that, you know, maybe the doomsday scenario happens and like this all goes to crap. But we are always thinking of new ideas as humans. so if we do new things, that's a new value creation that a lot of these arguments don't capture is they're not having the creativity to go well we are we could do this that the other right
speaker-1: Right. think the thing that honestly, I'm not so much worried about myself. ⁓ The thing that keeps me up at night, I worry about our early in career professionals, our college graduates. That's the ones that I worry about. I speak to a ⁓ lot of marketing students at our local colleges. And that's honestly what keeps me up at night because I want to see these early in career professionals, I want to see them succeed. and where I had the opportunity to learn and become a seasoned professional. You know, if AI is taking that opportunity from them, you know, how are they supposed to get to the experience, you know, the level of experience that I have today? What does that look like for them? So I think that's, you know, we need to think about what that looks like. And we know that educational institutions are late to the game as far as providing that AI education and
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: to those students. mean, some may be forward thinking, but you know, they're not providing it. They're telling them, hey, don't use it because you're using it to cheat, you know, say that I'm using it again in a thoughtful, intentional manner and how to augment their abilities. yeah, these kids are going to come out and they're not going to have that people will be like, how AI forward are you or what's your AI experience? know, so.
speaker-0: And do you see students applying to join the Charlotte Marketing AI Exchange too? Do you see that segment? Yeah? OK.
speaker-1: We've had students come and usually every semester I speak to marketing students at UNC Charlotte and I've always asked them the same question. Tell me how do you feel about AI? And it's really interesting to see how they feel about it because it kind of divided into two camps. You've got a group of students who don't like AI. They don't like what they see. They don't like It's particularly, I'd say more the creative students who they don't like the art being copyrighted or training on on art. They don't like that at all. And then you've got some that are like, I'm using it for productivity. And so I'm speaking on Tuesday, so I'm kind of curious. It's been a minute since I've spoken to them. So I'm curious to see where they're at now and if it's changing and how they feel about it. But again, it's one of my top questions is how do you feel about this and then how do you think it impacts? where you're going to go after graduation.
speaker-0: I know that a lot of organizations are not hiring folks that are just like new grads. ⁓ But for us actually, for I'd say 10 years, we stopped our co-op intern program and our CTO Francis this year said, ⁓ he joined the organization late last year. He's like, we need to restart that up immediately. And so it was a different perspective that he brought around. you're bringing in folks that are AI native. They don't know anything else other than AI native. Why would we not bring in fresh talent that's got unique perspectives that can solve problems in fresh creative ways that don't have heart blinders on, right? Cause as we build expertise, we kind of look through, you know, specific tunnel. And it's this like power of a beginner's mindset. So, we are actually doubling down on that in many ways. But I think and the thesis made so much sense as Francis kind of like cemented that for us. But I can also see the other side organizations are like, look, we just cut costs, be able to elevate folks that have the expertise and scale. But what's your feeder to that? Like, things move through the system, you know?
speaker-1: Yeah, because eventually, mean, eventually I'll be doing I'll be retired and I'll be doing.
speaker-0: Doing boards with, you know, with a drink in your hand on different boards and yeah.
speaker-1: I'll be doing something much different with my life. you know, the kids need to come up through the system and they need to be able to do even bigger and better things. and how do we do that for them? But I think to your point, they are going to be AI native. And right now, if you're trying to apply AI to your existing processes, The way you need to think about that is you actually need to rethink your process and then figure out where AI plays a role within that process. Not because maybe your current process is broken and then you're just blind AI on top of that. And that's just going to amplify that broken process.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, agreed, agreed. It's an amplification tool, right? Rather than it's going to solve your problems. ⁓ Tammy, this has been amazing chat. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for- Yeah, no, I love- I always love our chats and just thank you for reminding us of the human element in all this and how this is an organizational problem to solve, this not a technology problem to solve.
speaker-1: me. And guess what? Humans are really cool. Yes, we are. very cool.
speaker-0: Yes. Yeah, yeah, we're cool, we're resilient, we're creative and so, we're all team human. let's figure it out. All right, thanks Tammy.
speaker-1: Exactly. Thank you.
