#231: How Zapier Is Building an AI Marketing Brain

Welcome to AI Transformations

0:00At the moment, I don't feel like learning the next tool or the next thing is where I need the team to go. You've learned what you need to learn at this point. Now, are you going to take it upon yourself to change the way you work or not? Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from the Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived through real AI transformation,

0:33including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today. So join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all as part of our AI Transformations series. Welcome, everyone, to episode 231 of the Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of the Artificial Intelligence Show and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. Now, you might start to understand that today's episode is

1:05a little different than your regularly scheduled programming. This is a special episode in a limited series we're running called AI Transformations, presented by Google Cloud. So in this series, we are spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. In each of these episodes, we'll explore how leaders at some of the world's top companies are actively using AI to transform how their teams, departments, or even entire organizations work. And we're looking at things like what sparked

1:36their transformation, what work looked like before AI, how their journeys unfolded. Sometimes we'll talk about what got messy along the way. And we'll, of course, talk about what results AI is starting to unlock for the business. We're doing all that with a bit of a different format than our typical episodes, which is interviewing these leaders firsthand right here on the show, including the leader here joining me today, Dan Slagan from Zapier. Much more on Dan in just a minute here, but just a little more context into this series before we dive in. We are doing this in partnership with our good

2:10friends at Google Cloud for a simple reason, which is often AI transformation can feel abstract. Everyone's kind of talking about it, but far fewer people are showing what this looks like in practice inside real companies. So the goal of these episodes is hopefully to make AI transformation much more concrete for you. We want you to hear how other leaders are approaching it, what they're learning, and what practical lessons you can apply as you think about AI in your own organization. And if you are a regular podcast listener, don't worry, me and Paul will still be back doing our

2:44regular weekly episode of the show. Paul and Kathy are still doing their AI answers episodes. So nothing here really changes, except you get even more episodes of the artificial intelligence show thanks to this series. So with that, let me get right into this. So today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Enterprise. Businesses of every shape and size are turning to AI. They're learning how to move faster, do more and improve their performance. But you can't just hand your data over to any

3:15platform. You need a trusted partner with years of experience. And that's where Gemini Enterprise comes in. Gemini Enterprise helps you build sophisticated AI agents that can connect with your business data while also keeping it protected by world-class security and governance. So no more compromising between performance and protection. You can go get started with Gemini Enterprise today at cloud.google.com forward slash Gemini dash enterprise. That's cloud.google.com forward slash

Zapier and the Code Red

3:47Gemini dash enterprise. All right, so super excited for today's episode. Today we are talking with Dan Slagan, the Chief Marketing and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Now Zapier, you probably know of, is one of the defining companies in automation. For years, they've been helping businesses connect the apps they use every day and automate repetitive work, all without needing engineers. Now, as AI is changing what software can do, Zapier is building around a bigger idea, AI orchestration, where AI tools,

4:22agents, workflows, models, data, and business apps all work together so AI can actually take action. Dan is here because Zapier's marketing team is living that type of transformation from the inside. We'll talk all about this, but at the end of last year, Dan says his team looked like a normal ahead of the curve marketing team on AI. People had access to the expected tools and they were using them, but by early this year, in 2026, he saw a more important shift coming. Marketers were no longer just going to

4:52be judged by how well they used AI chat tools. They were going to be competing with people who could use AI builder tools like Cursor, Codex, Cloud Code, and Zapier's MCP to build their own apps, dashboards, workflows, and even digital twins. So in February, Dan called a Code Red to get the marketing organization not just AI savvy, but AI native. And since then, Zapier's marketing team has been moving from AI adoption into AI native work. Team members have built and named their own digital twins. They've

5:24started working in builder tools. They've begun creating systems that change how marketing work gets done. We'll even talk about how Zapier has started developing its own AI-powered marketing brain, a shared department-level system meant to centralize the freshest context across Zapier's market, customers, competitors, campaigns, and more. It then gives the team's AI tools and agents the current context they need to help create, plan, and execute work. Dan, welcome to the show. I'd love

5:56to get into it with you. Thanks for being here, for one. Sounds good. Can't wait. So let's start right at the beginning here. At the end of last year, you had kind of mentioned to me when we chatted Zapier's marketing team looked like a normal ahead of the curve marketing team on AI. I'm curious what actually was changing that made you call that Code Red in February of this year.

Moving From Adoption to Builder Tools

6:19The marketing team and everyone at Zapier were quite fortunate in the sense that we pretty much have access to anything in the world of AI. It doesn't matter what tool we want to use, what LM we want to use. Zapier is just an incredible company to allow people to use those tools. So to your point, yeah, end of last year, everyone's using their LM of choice and they're building systems and it looked good. But then you could start to see around, to your point, end of Q4 last year, marketers, non-devs starting to use some of these devs tools for the first time. And at first,

6:51it didn't seem like much. Someone did something on Cloud Code and the reaction was, all right, that's interesting, but probably a one-off. But then you saw another story and another and another. And then you really started to see some interesting use cases and you could very quickly see where this was going to go. And it seemed as though a new type of marketer was being born. And it was something where you couldn't quite tell how big it was going to be, but not something that I wanted the team to miss out on. So Zapier is a 100% fully remote company, but once a year we get together, everyone,

7:23all 900 or so of us. And so we were in Los Angeles together for a week in February. And I had the marketing team together for a three or four hour session and said, we're just going to get into where I think marketing is going and how AI is going to influence it. And I really need you guys to know what's in my head. So I brought in someone from the outside who was already a cursor expert. And this individual had already built their own digital twin, was doing all the things that I thought were interesting, but almost no one on the team was doing. I'd say maybe 5% of the folks on

7:56the marketing team were at this person's level. And so I had that person come in and sort of share the way they thought about AI's impact on marketing. They actually showed their digital twin, how they built it, the markdown files, everything in there. And it was really interesting to watch the team watch the presentation. Because within about five minutes, everyone's eyes had glazed over. And people were starting to look confused, bored, frustrated. And this was probably a 40 minute presentation. And by the end of it, I sort of just asked, all right, who's feeling overwhelmed? And everyone's

8:27hand went up. And my response to them was, this morning, you didn't even know that this person existed. You didn't know that you are potentially interviewing against this person for your next role at Zapier or outside of Zapier. Now how do you feel? And I don't like to do leadership through fear or anything like that. But I think every once in a while, you really need to have some of these aha moments. And for me, this felt like a really big aha moment for the team. We'd been through a couple cycles in the past. You know, I remember the first time mid-journey came out. And then the first time LLMs, you know, really started to make their

9:00advancements. But this felt like, okay, this is something we need to pay attention to. So what we did coming out of that was I told the team, look, we are going to build with you. We are going to help you every step along the way. I gave the team three weeks. And I said, three weeks from now, I need everyone to be up and running on cursor. If you really feel like you need to get on cloud code or codex or whatever it is, fine. And of course, we had one or two outliers. But for the most part, let's get up on cursor. I also assigned five coaches who were internal folks who really were spiking their AI usage that could help with

9:34getting people onboarded. And I said, I'm not going to ask those five people any questions. They're not going to tell me who called, who asked for help, what questions you asked. I don't care. I just need to know in three weeks, everyone's up on cursor. Then after that, we're going to do a two-week build-a-thon. And so everyone on the team got together with folks and they said, what do we want to build? And it was really interesting at the end of the build-a-thon because we had almost three tiers of builders now. You had the tier ones, people just getting started for the first time. They probably built a dashboard. Fine.

10:05Then you had kind of the tier two. Maybe they built a slightly better system or loop or something like that. And then your tier threes, they built a whole software app basically. Like our events team, we do a virtual conference later this year, not our 100 plus speakers. That's all going to be managed now through an app that they built through Cursor and Zapier, which is just wild. So you have three different tiers. And last part I'll say is coming out of that build, then what was really nice about having three tiers is now you know what you can go to each

10:37tier with and give them new challenges to solve so everyone feels like they're winning and advancing because the tier ones, we're never going to be able to compete with the tier threes and so on and so forth. So now we kind of have like three different groups of people and we work with them in different ways to get them to the next level. That's awesome. So it sounds like February or so, beginning of 2026 is kind of this code red. Then rolling out specifically, it sounds like Cursor, which is an agentic coding tool, but used often by non coders to be able to do things like loops, automations,

11:09workflows, agentic work. And it sounds like that was given to basically everyone on the marketing team, regardless of technical background. Everyone on the marketing team, everyone from our product marketers to our brand designers. Yeah. Gotcha. And so those tiers are kind of where people naturally fell into it sounds like in the, in the months after the code red. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I, I will say one of our absolute best AI users on the team right now is someone that works in customer marketing. Oh wow. Okay. Not someone that you would necessarily expect, but this person's a

11:44real leader on the team. It's amazing what they've been able to build. Um, I've seen some really great stuff from the brand brand team. And you know, the flip side of that is I've also seen people in more technical roles that maybe didn't adopt as quickly because they felt like they're already ahead of the curve. So yeah, some of the things were expected, but at the same time, I was pleasantly surprised at some of the people that, that came out of the builder fund. So as everyone is building and racing ahead and learning even more about what's possible, it sounds like maybe talk to me about how you got to

12:15this bigger idea of Zapier's AI powered marketing brain.

Building the Marketing Brain

12:22I feel like we're, I mean, we are moving so fast right now. I know everyone is, but you know, we would do, it's like we would do a product launch in April and you know, in old SaaS world by June, that's usually when your reps are starting to feel really, really confident. You know, they've gone through a couple sales calls, some have worked, some have not, they know what to hit on, they know their greatest hits, they know what to avoid. And now it seems like, man, product launch in April, come June, you're starting to talk about the next thing. And we're seeing that across marketing too, is that we'll,

12:56we'll get really excited about something in January and then February, be able to hop on a completely different trend and run in a different direction. And you know, we're still working under the overall vision of Zapier, but the specifics are changing a lot faster. So I really wanted to have this notion of a shared brain. And we started talking about this in early, early Q1. And there were a couple of really interesting terms that were thrown out. You know, one, one way was we talked about was like lossless marketing. And you know, the example that someone on my team gave was like, if you have

13:27like an old video and you just start making copies of it, I, the ninth copy, it basically becomes completely blurry. And you think about that for anything that marketing does for go to market, you have an initial brief and it goes to the product marketing team and then over to the sales team and maybe the exec team, right? And by the time it gets out into market, it's a, it's a fraction of what it was. And then the truth starts to get shattered across all the different channels that go out. The paid team might do a slightly different version on it. The social team might do a slightly

13:57different version on it. An events team has their own spin. And so you really just start to lose the truth and a shared vision of what the actual brand wants, wants to put forward. And so we put this notion in place of if we could have this marketing brain that everyone's pulling from that at its most basic level always has the most up-to-date goals, the most up-to-date brand guidelines. If we're doing a product launch, everything is coming from the exact same place. And so this notion, it almost breaks down to like three different places. One is that notion of like shared context. So people and agents are pulling from the exact same source of truth.

14:33Two would be those shared stories, which I talked about so that we're all taking the same story out. It doesn't have to be the exact same version every time, but at least it comes from the exact same source of truth. And then the last notion is, okay, you have your context, you have your stories, you essentially have a shared knowledge base. Now you need shared sprints. So that is, you're going to market all those things start to work together. And so that's what we've started to build. We've sort of launched our internal V1 of it. And it's been, it's been really great to see so far.

15:04It's interesting. You didn't ask me this question, but I'm going to answer it. It's like, what's the next thing that you need your team to work on? And I felt like a couple months ago, it was getting more into the agentic tools and learning the cursors and codecs and cloud codes of the world. At the moment, I don't feel like learning the next tool or the next thing is where I need the team to go. I feel like it's changing the way they work to enable this marketing brain and this concept of

15:34lossless marketing to really start to flourish. And so there's a couple of components that get into that, which we can get into, but it's really, okay, you've learned what you need to learn at this point. Now, are you going to take it upon yourself to change the way you work or not? Yeah, I want to spend some time talking about that. Before we get into that, I'm just kind of to chart the steps here. So you had, you know, a fairly tech savvy marketing team using standard AI chat, say call it chat, GPT, Claude, what have you. Then when you call this code red, you bring in someone who has far more experience using things like agentic tools, like cursor, Claude code,

16:10codecs, et cetera, and show them what's possible with agentic work. Then we arm the team with tools like cursor, they start, it sounds like racing ahead, building for their specific roles, for their specific use cases before we get into this brain concept. Do I have that kind of journey right so far? Yeah, that's right. And being able to have a really good connector. So whatever MCP you're choosing to use, obviously using Zapier, right? But being able to connect all the different systems and all the different apps that you're using back to the central brain. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So then we get to this point of the AI powered kind of marketing brain you've got

16:45that you're building. And as you build that, it sounds like now you're focused much more on how to use the brain effectively, like you just said, and how that changes the way you work. And I'm curious if you can maybe start talking to me a little bit about that, because I know there are a few threads here of like, this doesn't just affect how you are talking to an AI tool or what technology you're using. This is a change in how you communicate with the team, how you're sharing knowledge internally, maybe walk me through what is the actual behavior manage or change

17:17in behavior look like for this? Yeah, I think the one that that people find the most interesting

Working in Public

17:23right now is this notion of working in public. Okay. And so in order for the AI brain to be as effective as possible, it needs to have public surface areas that I can pull from. And so at Zapier, like everywhere else, there's parts that a brain can see, and there's parts that it can't. So if I get on a phone call with you one on one, that's not going to make its way into the marketing brain. If I send you a one to one DM Slack, that's private, that's not going to make its way into the brain. So it's this notion of, can we rethink how much we work in public for the benefit of the team?

17:59And it sounds small, but I just went through my own shift here. And it was a pretty wild, probably three month transition. So at Zapier, working in public is critical. And with 900 or almost 1,000 people, fully remote company, we do almost all of our communication Slack. And so how much time or how many, what percentage of your Slacks are posted in a public channel versus one to one DM actually gets measured. And at the exec level, it gets posted in front of the entire company at the end of every single month. So when I joined Zapier, I never measured this,

18:33but just by default, I was about 50-50. But 50% of my Slacks were one to one and 50% were in public. And I saw other people on the team, you know, in the high 80s. And I was like, wow, this is wild. And I sort of gave myself all the excuses. I can't do that because marketing is going through really hard changes that aren't public. Or we're having really difficult conversations with other departments that we need to figure out. And then at some point, the competitive bell went off in my head. And I was like, we're going to make it, we're going to make a change.

19:08So I first, I put a daily tracker in place for me. So every day, I would get updated on what percentage of my Slacks were public versus private. And I had a goal in mind. And secondly, I sort of announced to the team, I said, hey, I'm going to do my best to work in public. If you see me pushing one to one DMs in public, that's why. And so over the course of three months, I went from about 50% private to 4% private. So last month, I was 96% working in public. And I think I was number one on the exec team. I think I was number two in the whole company.

19:43And so that's a huge, huge shift, just doing that. First of all, I still get a lot of one to one DMs from people, right? You have people that saw my announcement, and I had people that fully supported me. And then I had people that were stubborn, or people that just weren't used to that type of change. It's a radical way of changing the way that you work. And so every time I'd get something, I would think, can we push this to public? Or someone asked me for a one to one, I'd say, well, what exactly do you want to talk about? You know, I think you can actually go talk about this in that channel or that kind of thing. And you know, we also had some conversations

20:13that I've never had in public before either, that we were sort of testing what an organization can handle. Talking about if a certain person is good for a role or not, and having that person there talking about it in public. And not everyone's comfortable with that kind of stuff. You could very quickly see what was going to work and what was not going to work. But my overwhelming takeaway was working in public is a lot less scary than it sounds. And it's a lot less big brother-ish than it sounds. And actually, most things can and should live out in public. The last thing I'll say,

20:47sorry, is I was very much against this concept when I joined Zapier. Zapier has a very unique culture, working culture. You guys have probably seen that everything from the AI fluency to everything else. But I did not like, I don't want to change the way I work. And I don't want to work on the open. Like I didn't like it. And now I, it would be tough to go back. That's an incredible, I love the behavioral side of this. I feel like it's so under discussed, like how we are changing, interacting with these machines. So I'm kind of curious, like, I realized there's only so much you can talk about publicly in terms of how this is built,

21:20how it works, but just maybe connect a few dots for me at whatever level you can discuss publicly, like how, so it sounds like Slack information publicly is a key part of the data that feeds into this marketing brain. Maybe kind of just give me a sense of what tools or technologies, I mean, are powering this, what models, is it, how much of it is Zapier native versus other tools? Yeah. So it's living, it's living and breathing in Zapier. We, we announced a beta a couple months ago, but it's living there. But you know, all the tools, all the LM tools are, are powering it.

21:53So, you know, people are using their, um, cursor codex or cloud, whatever that's, that's part of it. The surface areas are, are really important in terms of what we can suck up. So granola notes are really important. Zoom call transcripts. We still use, you know, we use Google docs, we use Coda, um, any of those types of things that it will pull up, but it's really great because then at the end of the week, you know, even for something as simple as me sending out like the what's top of mine for Dan, every, you know, every Friday, which I do, um, it's able to just pull from all of those

22:24sources at once and very quickly surface up what happened this week, what's most important, what worked really well, what's not working well. And then as we start to go public with campaigns, you can start to look at all the different channels and just see, okay, where, where did the brain miss? Where are we, where do we need to improve it? Where did an input get dropped down? Because when we really started to get into the concept at first, it sounded very easy to build. And the person that came up with this notion of losses marketing or generational loss, um, is guy Joe on, on the team. And he is a fairly technical product marketing background and has now moved into a agentic

22:59marketing role for us. Um, but when we first started talking about it with him, this didn't sound so hard. And then you get down to the individual tools that every single person is using the way that every single person works. And you're like, Oh, okay, this is, this is going to be a lot. Um, but you just kind of check it off one person at a time. And each team has their own goals that are loaded into it. And you just, you just start to get the brain working as, as a muscle, like any other new muscle that your team builds. That's awesome. So if I, and you know, again, we don't have to get too in the weeds on it,

23:29but I am curious if I'm your average marketer at Zapier, it sounds like regardless of what tool I'm using, whether it's cursor codex, et cetera, it also, to some degree has a connection to this central marketing brain that is then able to assist me in my use cases and the things I'm building. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. And the idea here is that, you know, every time you want to start a new campaign or something, you don't have to go rewrite the brief. You don't have to go think about, okay, so where are we starting from? What's the latest? It's just, you just have the context and you just go.

24:01That's awesome. Okay. So, you know, as you're talking through this, it strikes me, not only is this a beast to kind of build, but also presumably to maintain, how are you all thinking about making sure it's up to date? Obviously, Slack is auto-pulled in, docs are auto-pulled in, but what about kind of the logic behind it, the goals, the strategy? How are you thinking about all that? We talk a lot about AI and agents, so let me shift over to human for a minute. I am of the full belief that for Zapier, a full, at least one FTE on marketing is totally worth

24:38it. So for the most part, the person, Joe, I mentioned, he owns the maintenance of the brand. And again, he was, you know, someone that has a technical background, product marketing background, understands the company. He's been at Zapier for a really long time. That helps. He just has the natural context over the past couple of years. But none of this would work without the maintenance piece. And I'll also say what worries me is long-term adoption. The cursor code red worked probably more out of fear than inspiration. I don't

25:14love that that was the case, but that's probably what the case was. And maybe some of it was because I was new. I took over as a team lead. People don't want me to think that they're not adopting the thing I want them to adopt. Maybe some of it was people did really get scared about their careers falling behind if they didn't keep up with it. But it was probably more based on that to start. And it ended up with inspiration. The brain, I want people, I want it to be the opposite. I want people to really have the value and say, I couldn't imagine working without this. I love that we have access to this and it helps me go a

25:47lot faster. It is already, and you can already start to see it. Like our brand team was not talking enough to our product marketing team. You would see things where a brand concept might be loosely related to the things going on in product marketing, but the brand team can't keep up with all the conversations product marketing is having with the build organization, the product teams every single day. And so being able to speed that knowledge loop up where when the brand team is starting to think about something, they're very, they can easily see what the latest and greatest is. And they know exactly which teams to go back and ask for, like what inputs they need

26:22to go into the next brand campaign. Like that's already been something that I've seen. There's seemed like there's been a new bridge that's been created between those two teams. That's been pretty exciting. You touched on a couple of things I'd like to dive a little deeper on. First is those benefits. You said, you know, closing knowledge loops faster. What are some other clear impacts you're seeing from both the team adopting more AI builder tools, but also generally the development of the marketing brain?

Managing Slop and AI Outputs

26:48Um, we are constantly looking at new tools to develop and onboard every time we do it. There's always that phase, the early phase. It's like the honeymoon phase of a new tool or something that you're using where you accept things that you probably wouldn't accept once the honeymoon phase is over. Um, and it's, it all sort of comes down to AI slop in some way, shape or form. Um, and when the slop is internal, it's one thing, it's not great, but when it's external, it's a lot worse. Although

27:18we also just put out a company mandate recently on internal AI slop and just holding a new bar for it. Um, because again, we're starting to use more of the tools and you're going to see that stuff break, but it's something we have to pay attention to. Um, but I will say that having those types of agents or tools or vendors pull from a central location has been really, really nice. It has not erased AI slop completely, but it has significantly decreased the amount that I would have seen, you know, six months ago or something like that. So because you have much better access

27:51to highly personalized information contextual to the organization, you're cutting out a lot of the typical generic lazier outputs you might get from these tools otherwise. Exactly. And yes. And it's, it's a couple of ways. One, it has the latest and greatest on what the product vision is and the current thinking around that too. It just has access to so much more context. So for instance, if we're onboarding, you know, a new outreach tool or something like that, and we're going to be sending messages through, you know, certain people in the organization, it can so easily see how that

28:25person talks, how that person writes the voice of that individual as opposed to making up something. Um, and so, yeah, I feel like what's been nice is that the output is more accurate of the people and the message is more accurate of the current state of the product vision. Gotcha. You know, and it's at the point now where, you know, I mean, every morning now when I come in, you know, not only is like my Slack and everything recap, but the emails that came into me, like it, I already have drafts like auto, auto created when I come into the morning,

28:58you know, and I'd find myself having to edit them a lot less. I'm, I'm certainly not, certainly not comfortable having an auto reply, but auto draft is, is getting a lot better. That's incredible to hear those specifics because it sounds almost like you're moving towards this vision where like, I mean, we're talking about a central brain. AI is essentially helping in one way or another run the company, allocate resources, um, prepare you to do your best work every day.

29:29Yeah. And I will say, because I know people are thinking this, all of the stuff that's getting automated and all this stuff's the brain is working. Yeah. I'm so excited for the people that currently do that work to be able to get a level up. And it's not, they're not, I don't want them to go up in this level of like Lala strategy land where they're not doing anything. They're going to be able to move into that really nice magical moment where you run strategy and impact at the same time. And you're still doing stuff. It's the player coach combination. I think those points, those points in your career where you're just like,

30:01oh man, I had it good for those two years. And like, I feel like more of that is going to is that's where I'm starting to be able to see, being able to put people, um, across all different forms of marketing. I'm seeing it with the brand folks and with the demand folks, product marketing. There's just so many things where I'm like, oh, I'm so excited for the next version of your role. That person I talked about earlier who runs our customer marketing, the things that they've been able to build and the way they're operating, it just, it's just fun. And they never would have been able to do it without these types of systems. So you also alluded to some of the challenges

30:34here. I'm curious where you've seen this get a little harder or messier than maybe you would have expected or anticipated. Yeah. A couple of ways. One, people might not like it. It's a new way it is a new way of working. Um, I think Zapier is very much ahead of the curve. I feel like we sort of, we, we, we work in the future in the present. That's kind of the way that the company operates. Um, and so every time one of these new phases comes out, you know, the messaging is, is pretty clear to the whole organization. You may not like the way that work is changing and that that's,

31:08that's okay. Um, at Zapier, that's all right. If, if you, if you don't love it, this doesn't have to be for everyone, but there's definitely been some of that where, you know, behavioral change is hard. People still fall on the old habits that got them to the point in their career that they're at. And so having to manage some of that has, has been big, um, two would just be trying to keep all of it together. I mean, there's so many moving parts. Like when you're trying to build the brain, how do you get it out to the whole team at once? How do you make like monitor who's doing it? Who's not, who's in charge of adoption of someone using it or not using it? How do we think about that?

31:43Who's responsible with the success of that? Is it, you know, the person that built the brain or the each individual team manager? And so having to talk through all those types of scenarios, I feel like all the challenges to me have been much more on how are humans going to work in this new world versus, uh, we couldn't, we couldn't pull and make that technical part work. We couldn't pull content from this source. That stuff's all been, been solvable. Um, it's much more been the

Advice for AI Leaders

32:08organizational stuff. So Dan, as we kind of wrap up our conversation here to that point, you just made, I'm curious for leaders who are listening, who want AI to change how their organizations actually work. You guys are much further ahead than most. Um, what advice would you have for someone who's maybe a few steps or many, many steps behind where you're at today? Wherever you're at, there's a next goal that you're trying to reach. And I think the thing

32:39that hinders you reaching that goal more than anything else is you're worried that the team doesn't have time for it because you have to get that marketing campaign out. You have to hit the pipeline goal this month. You have to get the brand campaign out, whatever it might be. And you feel like if you add another layer of, Hey, I need you guys to also pay attention to this. The team's just going to ignore you or it's going to pull them away. And I felt that a lot, by the way. Um, you have to fight through it. Yeah. Finding the time for this stuff. It's just, it does that come down to an individual commitment or hunger? Is that something you can kind of help

33:14with from the top? I'm always curious about that. I've tried to build the frameworks for the team some more detailed than others. And when I'm asking people to do new things, I've also asked them to work in a different way. And so if I need to give them, you know, a little bit more time to get the deliverable, cause I know they're going to be working in a new way. That's okay. If the deliverable comes in a little bit more raw or it's not perfect, but they were able to build it with a new system, that's okay. I've given people sort of the comfort, not quite to fail, but you know,

33:49often people want this perfectly buttoned up thing that they deliver to you. It's like, you don't have to worry about that. Let's just get going, get the system built and we'll, we'll, we'll get better from there. So I think maybe trying to take some of the pressure off people, um, that it doesn't have to be perfect as they're learning has been helpful as well. That's awesome. Dan, I could talk about this for hours. This is fantastic. We really appreciate you coming on the show and detailing everything for us here. I I've learned a ton already and it feels like not enough time to pick your brain about all this stuff and pick your brain about

34:21the marketing brain, but we really appreciate having you. We appreciate everyone tuning in for this special episode. We're going to do several more of these in partnership with Google Cloud, a big shout out to Google Cloud for being such a great partner and helping us get these transformation stories out in the wild until next time. We'll see you all later. And Dan, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to our AI transformation series from the artificial intelligence show to keep learning, visit smarterx.ai where you'll find on-demand courses,

34:53upcoming classes, and practical resources to guide your AI journey.