is you're really good at using a specific tool or piece of software, you're in trouble because that's going to become irrelevant. So the skills you need are being able to adapt. I think flexibility and comfort working across different areas is the most important skill people need. Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise Architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host. On this episode, AI workflow automation, augmenting marketing teams with Pete Gosling, founder of Gosling Media and Design Tech. Pete, welcome to the show. Very pleased to be here. Thank you. Hey, this is a really hot topic right now, AI, workflow, automation, and everything around all that. But before we get started into that, everyone knows on my show I only have superheroes on the show, and every superhero has a background story. So, Pete, what's your background story? So, yeah, my name is Pete Gosling. I'm an Englishman in New York. I studied traditional animation at university, puppet, you know, stop frame animation. Oh, wow. That takes a lot of patience, Pete. That takes a lot. Yeah. It certainly does. It certainly does. Yeah. So I always loved animation, that art form. And I went into it knowing it was like a dying thing. and it's something that I've been thinking about a lot recently with AI about how 3D model animation got replaced. Toy Story came out just as I was starting university anyway so we'll come back to that but I studied animation and immediately sold out and got into digital marketing and advertising making animated flash banner ads so I told myself it was an animation job and that was enough for me to sleep at night um yeah and in over the last 20 years i've basically been working in um ad tech in one way or another so sometimes in-house sometimes for an agency but in and around um creative and advertising or the infrastructure like i worked at a couple of companies where it's more like the the tech delivering the ad rather than the creative itself so you've seen huge shifts in i mean very you've seen a couple disruptive uh you know yeah uh technologies and so is this one different that we're going through right now the ai one or is it very similar it is but there's definitely like similarities so you know when i first as i say like the animation i i've worked um with traditional animators and they had to sort of reskill that the the the knowledge they have for animation is transferable but they're doing it via a computer rather than you know moving puppets so that that was kind of an interesting one and also when i graduated it was 2004 um so the internet had been around for a while but the the sort of big shift in websites becoming, you know, more mainstream and standard. A lot of the companies were, a lot of the companies I've worked with were struggling to get that sort of website going. It was all kind of hand coded back then. My first job was making, we had Flash, it's an animation software tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I loved it because you could code and design and animate all in one software. But the other big shift was VHS to DVD. So another company I worked at for a short-term contract during like a summer was that they sold educational videos to schools. So their office was just wall-to-wall VHS cassettes that was their inventory. and they were going through the process of getting rid of it all and sending them out as dvds and then yeah a few years later i lost touch of them but i imagined all of that became irrelevant yeah as the video streaming became a thing so it's yeah like the digital or analog to digital across different mediums i've sort of witnessed firsthand and been um touched i've always enjoyed pushing things like video streaming was never really a thing but flash let you do video streaming it was like the first platform that you could really get any kind of quality video on the internet yeah that so you've you've been kind of on the leading edge of things uh this ai revolution though this is something different would you agree i i would yeah so the similarities are it's it's it's like the other changes but it's happening 10 times or 100 times faster so the other ones you could kind of see what's coming and adapt and it was only affecting like one industry or one component at a time like the digital digitization of analog media obviously touched lots of things but that took a long time to happen ai it's like every job in every industry much faster than before i think is the biggest difference but the actual skills that you need or skills you need to nurture kind of are the same i've always been a big proponent of working across different areas so when I was uh you know first 10 years in my career everyone told me that you have to specialize to make the most money so become like really good at after effects or really good at like vector illustration and I always enjoyed working across multiple formats and different platforms and software and experimenting and like now you being a specialist is uh very risky because you get replaced like if you if you're if the value you're bringing to someone to make money is you're really good at using a specific tool or piece of software you're in trouble because that's going to become irrelevant so the skills you need are being able to adapt i think flexibility and comfort working across different areas is the most important skill people need i you know i i agree with you there that that renaissance man the generalist is really having a rise now and being adaptable i i totally see that in my career too yeah i mean it's interesting and i think outside of like you know i'm like content and creative production but just in regular i shouldn't say regular in other jobs i think people benefit from like if your job title is one thing look to like the left and right of your swim lane what are other people doing and try and sort of broaden your impact or knowledge or understanding of a company's needs, I think will make you more hireable or protect your position a lot more. Because what's going to happen is obviously that everyone's trying to sort of reduce their headcount. It's happening already. I've got clients today that are just completely redoing their roadmap and headcount planning And it was going to be the ones that survive lack of a better word are going to have to manage more jurisdiction within their departments using ai almost like delegating it to junior staff so i think a big thing that another big thing people need is delegation is really really hard to do it effectively and if you're going to be working with ai agents across these different tools you're essentially delegating work to the ai and i've been you know i started my agency seven years ago and in my career i work from junior designer designer um art director yeah and you learn from people how to you know manage your team grows team delegate tasks i still find it really hard like today i'm literally a roadblock for a project because i haven't completed a brief for the designer to work on it so you you're going to have people that are put in positions but you're basically a manager from day one like a junior person is going to be expected to use these tools and i always just consider it a delegation so you know it's a leadership piece here it's interesting you brought that up because on the previous podcast that I just recorded right before yours with Elizabeth, she said the same thing. She said one of the key skills in the future will be delegation, the ability to delegate both to fractional workers or to an AI or to, you know, so that's interesting that you both said similar things. So let's talk about your work and what you do for clients. It's all around AI automation and primarily marketing support, correct? Yeah. So I've got kind of two areas. I started the agency seven years ago, very much like a traditional creative agency focused on B2B marketing materials. So supporting marketing activity with the creative assets like the design very quickly pivoted to do full service marketing because that's where the budget actually lies within a company um so basically became a full service marketing agency but then over the last three or four years um the writing's been on the wall at least i've been seeing it and i always tell people i want to put myself out of business rather than someone put me out of business. So I've been very active in terms of building tools and staying on top of all the AI breakthroughs so that I can use those in my day-to-day work, still doing client services, but in a way that's getting more efficient and improving the output. And I can see where it's all heading, right? So there is a kind of existential threat to the business unless I pivot. So, yeah, the last year I've been doing a lot more work with clients on how they can incorporate AI into their workflows, not just on the design side. So marketing mostly, but marketing automation is a thing that's been around for a very long time, but it's still very manual. Like they call it marketing automation, like in HubSpot or Salesforce, you have sequences. But it's still very manual, actually. Yeah. You can actually automate it now. Like the AI can, rather than just a decision tree, the AI can make decisions, right? So you've got to have it done in a certain way and guardrails in place. But it's very exciting what you can do in terms of once you've got the sequence correct, it's amazing. You just have to be diligent with how you piece it together. So Pete, what value then does an organization like yours bring? You're going to train me up on how I do this all myself on AI. Do you move up the value chain? And if so, what is that new value that you're now creating? Yeah, I mean, so today, right now, the workflows are, I'm not training the teams to build them. um it's so every marketing department every company there's there's activities that they wish they could be doing but they don't have the bandwidth to do it so rather than replacing completely something they're doing today um what one example is they produce white papers and in-depth guides and they'll promote them on linkedin and you know they'll they'll set the campaigns around it but ideally you're taking that content breaking it down into infographics email sequences you know like atomization of the content but it takes time and resources to do that so most companies will you know everyone knows that's the best practice but it's just a lot of work to create all those assets so one of the workflows is basically breaking a long form piece of content into two chunks different segments yeah assets basically yeah but then you can also say we want to promote this in manufacturing industry in particular rewrite the elements to be focused on manufacturing or even like to the client level like i'm meeting with acme co rewrite this to be relevant to them so the ai can once that workflow is set up in terms of how to produce those assets you can then inject very specific things throughout it to make them you know the personalization at scale is the goal for marketing i i really like that that approach because i never thought of the marketing workflows as taking you know one piece of content and creating lots of other pieces of or assets from it right um yeah yeah i mean that's beautiful for gen ai right gen ai can do that all day long right yeah yeah it's just what i was saying about you have to be careful with the sequence is just um you do still have to be quite prescriptive in the prompts right otherwise you get generic garbage right so there's a lot of tools there's countless tools out there that will like write you a blog post but they're garbage mostly majority so the sequence that i'm talking about is literally it's probably like five different workflows each has like three to five ai calls in it because it's it's pulling the context like what is the unique piece that this company's their brand voice and their expertise you've got to capture that and inject it into the content um and make sure that the target audience is front of mind so there's a lot of um submitting it to the ai and then getting another ai to critique it and then a third one to to make the edits that the second one recommend so i always think of it like a full marketing department you you have that you have copywriters you have the editors you have the directors i was going to say those are roles that we see in normal marketing departments yeah so what the approach i like is think of just like a really specific use that adds value to what you're doing today because if you try and just replace what you're doing straight away you know things have to still get done in the day-to-day right so i like this idea of it it's almost like a a side channel like a uh special forces versus the full army special forces yeah yeah yeah yeah and then over time you can add in more and more of these And yeah No I really like that approach It makes it so it not so disruptive Not disruptive and internally doesn't cause friction. Yeah. Well, and that's the key thing. Until all of a sudden, those AI bots are doing more and more of the work. And your organization. So this requires an organizational change eventually. Yeah. So it depends on the size of the company as well. So the company I'm doing this for only has, I think, three people on the marketing team. Oh, yeah. Well, they're overwhelmed. But previous companies I worked at, there were 40 people on the marketing team and we were still overwhelmed. Right. There's always more work to be done. So I don't think there's ever a limit to the amount of work that's available. to a business um and so yeah i mean look companies can definitely see this in flow think well why do i need these five people i think that's a very silly approach if you're building a company from scratch yes you should be thinking about ai from the ground up but if you've got people with like institutional knowledge they've got specialist knowledge of the you know the product and the industry if you're giving them ai in the right way that's just a massive TEDx multiplier for them. The mistake most companies are making is they're just giving, here, use CheckGPT or Gemini in your current workflow. That's optimizing something that isn't designed for AI. It's never going to be good. So this reminds me a little bit of in the 90s and early 2000s when we started outsourcing everything to lower economic um you know areas right geographic areas and it was like people are replaceable was the concept but you and i both know that unless i have good delegation skills and the knowledge is transferable then that doesn't work to this day i mean i've used every remote service i had two full-time employees in the philippines for a year uh doing marketing work and i've used a lot of the sort of on-demand freelance platforms and all all roads always lead back to having a core team that understands the business understands the client that that knowledge is is not replaceable unless your product is literally just like punching holes and and it's the same hole every time anything remotely creative you need people that understand the products in the industry because you can't design a good solution to something you know if you're like on the other side of the world and you've never met the client that so that's the same thing with with generative ai then too right i can't just plug them in for anything i still need subject matter experts that context makes such a massive difference like if you do that's interesting and say you know you could have a very specific long prompt saying write about um i don't know printing press history that's top of mind just because of the innovations we've been talking about yeah um but if you if you're just giving it that even if it's a detailed prompt it's still pulling from the entire internet like global knowledge every single piece of knowledge so of course it's going to be generalized and yeah um not good but just sort of attaching a couple of pdfs that are maybe like educational research or so it's something that's more like very specific to what you're looking for like research papers about printing i don't know whatever it might be but if you give it that context it just instantly makes it a hundred times better the output because you're constraining the model um basically with with those documents right you're saying yeah i don't want you to give me all the world knowledge i want it to be about printing presses in northern california where i live right the history of printing the best in northern california yeah yeah it's probably not the best example but um that's why the marketing content works so well because typically companies have tons of content it's just not packaged for marketing like before the company starts you have a business plan you have investor presentations you have all this content there's so much content companies have and then when it comes to the marketing campaign they're like well we don't have content for it you really do is just how you package it so ai is very very good at taking source material and reconstructing it in different ways yeah and packaging it or even organizing it um yeah yeah which yeah i i can imagine i mean i i work at intel and we produce so many white papers every single day right and i can't imagine our marketing team is like overwhelmed so now they reach out and go old school and do personal contacts oh who should i talk to to find out information about this even though we have a huge repository full of yeah content no one can find anything oh my god the amount of duplicate labor in businesses like so the biggest company i've ever worked for i think at 800 people so i've never worked oh my goodness um i'm definitely more on the startup side but but even then like the amount of content that is produced say the ceo's presenting at an event like a corporate event all this work gets put together for the slides like the head of marketing the head of sales like hours and hours the event happens and then that deck is never seen again that that's been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time before AI just so much wasted effort it's not wasted because that event probably led to a big deal being made by sales but that content should live somewhere and be part of the machine that it then spits out stuff relevant in the future yeah I totally agree with you there But so many organizations, both big and small, just don't have a handle on all that. All this data. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard. Is AI helping in that respect at all? Do you see how it can help? I don't think so. I think the problem is people are trying to use AI with existing workflows and processes. like the AI is transformational but it's really the the process management is the key thing for me and that's I think so many AI tools or um projects have failed like that MIT study 95% never made it past pilot yeah it's gotta it's gotta it's gotta make sense it's gotta have buy-in at the right levels um it can't just be top down and it can't just be like someone oh I found this online let's implement it there's got to be a real strategy to it otherwise of course it will fail i mean i've been responsible for rolling out new project management software nothing crazy just changing what from jira to asana and just at every step there's friction right so it's hard to implement something new at a company let alone something like ai where everyone's got strong opinions and no one really knows the right answer so yeah this that's why i like this like splinter sidearm sort of thing where you're just sort of proving out things step by step more like uh agile development cycles than a full like here's ai like you know yeah no no i i see exactly where you going in fact i did a project with the u census bureau and we we oh wow it it nickname was operation chicken coop which has a history behind it because operation chicken coop was um this project that a small group of people were working on on the side that no one could see because we were building it behind a chicken coop idea right and this goes into uh the former cio at the u.s census bureau he grew up in West Virginia. And he goes, if you wanted to build another house on your property that you wanted to rent out to people, you build it behind the chicken coop because no one wanted to look over there and see what you were doing. Right. And then when it was all done, then you tore down the chicken coop and everyone could see it, but it was already there and no one could contest it. So that same concept is what you're saying. Start a little thing on the side. It can run in parallel with other groups it's not disruptive at all you can prove out new process new new tools and all that there and then when it's working now you can flip the switch and move over yeah i love that yeah that's cool and i mean the the clients that i've been doing these with so much of it is just down to nailing the process that like if you really sit down and think about it okay if we wanted to automate a process we've been doing for 10 years no one's ever sat down and actually whiteboarded that out or discussed it it's just kind of evolved as the company's grown and so right yeah the hardest part often for me is getting that process that they want to automate like 10 people involved each of them do their own things their own way this person's out sick i do a slightly different way like so the ai piece yes obviously transformative but the automation like the workflows um and connecting like is the the wealth of information that you can connect together via api number one that's getting easier and easier because ai the model context of mcp yeah MCPI makes huge difference. So I've done, I'm on the creative side, but I'm very tech. I love tinkering with tech. So I've been pulling APIs into, you know, dynamic websites for decades. So it takes work, right, to set up the API call, get the authentication. You've got the slightest mistake in your request and get an error back. Hours and hours and hours of work to, and everyone's API documentation is slightly different. these mcps it's like you just connect to that and then i want you to access uh all of the contacts from germany i mean and it does that has been probably the biggest time saver for me more than the generation of text and things being able to uh interact with apis just via an mcp like a single request is incredible yeah it's huge i totally agree I totally agree. So, Pete, what do you feel are some of the biggest impediments to these adoptions, right? You know, you talked about the MIT study, which is quoted a lot. You're in the trenches. You're in the middle of these things. what do you think are the biggest impediments that you see blocking uh from from true adoption from that poc or that that little you know skunk works that's going on on the side the you know i think that's a big piece of it um getting people to buy in like so i kind of feel like it has to be an outside party because otherwise if it's like a colleague everyone has an opinion especially with ai where there's no playbook um it's new technology you need someone who's really thinking about this stuff and you know people set up teams and labs and things to do it but sitting next to the person that's actually doing the work at that it's got to be like a piece at a time rather than like a big trying to roll out big changes across the board i keep going back to like if i'm a junior even like mid-level or even senior whatever i i'm an employee and you know you're seeing all the news about layoffs you're wary of ai you're probably excited about it in some way but mostly hesitant and don't want to know about it so you put your head in the sand and you're not really staying up to date, which is understandable because the pace of change is so fast. So I think buy-in is one of the hardest, but then there's also, okay, well, which platform do you commit to? Because you can't sign up with all of them. No, you can't. And implement across a corporation. So Gemini, I've actually been really impressed with the latest ones. I've started using Gemini instead of Claude and OpenAI for everything, to be honest. But because like billing and compliance, all that sort of stuff, like Microsoft and Google, they're already in the company, aren't they? So it's much easier to purchase an add-on for Office or Google Apps than implement a new vendor like Anthropic or something. say um yeah like it's it's the put this the people part of the the people is the hardest problem there's a lot of peace but um you got to make sure people are feeling the value of it and not oh i'm just training someone that's going to do my job in the future replace me yeah well because I hate the co-pilot. Sorry. No, go ahead. They're branding it all as co-pilot, Microsoft in particular, but they're all kind of saying it's like your partner. But you all hear those stories where they bring in a junior person, you train them on what you do, and then this person gets fired and the company saves lots of money because the junior person can do it. I think that's what's kind of happening, right? It's like they're giving us all these tools at huge costs that they're losing money because they're getting us to train them how to do what it is we want to do. So I like to think, like, to succeed and sort of get ahead of this, you want to be like the air traffic controller, and then AI are the pilots, and they're kind of semi-autonomous. You're not sat next to the AI in that plane. You've got to be that level above. You're directing. them directing it yeah this idea of a co-pilot i think um if people go down that two thighs you've got to think like no i'm the leader managing a team of ai i like that approach i think that's more sustainable for an individual and also for a company so hey pete this has been great if people want to reach out and learn more from you and your experience or use your services how do they reach out to Pete? So design tech.ai is the best place to go. Okay. Design tech.ai. Pete, again, thanks for coming on the show. This has been very insightful. You're right down in the trenches. You're feeling this every day. And it's great because you mentioned people, process, policy, and technology. And that's what my show is all about. So thank you. Love it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community at patreon.com slash embracing digital, where we share bonus content and you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources at embracingdigital.org. Until next time, keep embracing the digital transformation.
