70% of SEO Teams Aren't Ready for AI

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70 percent of seo teams haven't been restructured for ai and i don't think it's just a marketing thing most divisions within an organization haven't been restructured for ai to leverage the technology to harness it with seo it's a little bit different because you have two angles one is using the tools to be more efficient and increase output the second is to actually go and optimize for these llms right because we haven't seen too many organizations adapt as well internally.

And a great example of this is I was speaking at a Fortune 100 company, like literally at their offices to CMOs and marketing. And it was about GEO. They had Accenture give a talk. When Accenture gave the talk, they were like, we want to explain to you about GEO.

This stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Imagine when you search on chat GBT, what if your brand showed up for products related to your space? And they were just like, we kind of already know what a lot of this is. We were expecting you to come in with strategies and tactics.

But the reason Accenture gave that talk, and I'm not trying to knock them, is most people don't have the basics even down, right? So it's like, if you don't have the basics down, then...

You know, there's no point in talking about advanced stuff. And I think a lot of organizations are going to go through restructuring. I do believe that is going to cause some layoffs. I also believe that's going to cause for new people to be hired.

But the narrative that companies are pushing right now because of AI or 100x and all this kind of stuff, the reality is most organizations will never get 100x output from their employees. I get the marketing message around it. They just aren't doing that well and they got to figure out how to perform better because they have investors or they're publicly traded and they've raised too much money. So similarly, Neil, I mean, we just kind of talked about hiring here, right?

So I want to talk about why I think now is one of the best times if you're coming out of college to find a job, especially if you hang out on the internet all the time and especially if you play video games.

And here's why I think that's because we just hired a 17 year old Neil and very cracked out. And then we're probably going to hire his friend as well, who's probably only 17 or 18 years old as kind of software engineers because they're pretty cracked on. They're pretty good. Right.

And so this is from the Cloudflare CEO. We received almost a million applicants for 1,100 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI native. They're all builders or sellers, and we expect the majority will get full-time offers.

And so I will also speak for you, Neil. We are always looking to hire amazing people who are very AI-4, just very productive, especially on the intern side, because you learn a lot, and then we help you. You help us grow. We help you grow as well.

So we are both looking for interns. So go to... For us, it's singlegrain.com slash careers. How about you, Neil? What's your career space? Is it mpdigital.com slash careers?

Yeah. I looked at it right now. It's mpdigital.com slash careers. Yeah. So we are actively hiring and we're running through these apprenticeship programs.

So both our companies are hiring. Now, by the way, one more thing on the marketing side. This is like a negative marketing thing. I think for the Cloudflare team,

he shouldn't the cloud first deal shouldn't have said this thing around ai isn't coming for builders or sellers but it's coming from the measures so and what he means by measures are like the the finance people um or you know people that are just kind of uh people managers he calls those kind of the managers i don't think you should be doing this because it's not a good look for your company so i do believe ai is coming from measures but in a different way than he's saying We're seeing an increase in most companies that we work with. AI just pushing hard, hitting up CMOs, CFOs, trying to hack their accounts, get access to data, and do sketchy stuff.

We mainly see it in more... the financial category. For any large company, we're just seeing people trying to get access to CFO emails and stuff like that and just start sending money because they're using AI to personalize emails to other internal teams when they hack to sound just like the CFO and be like, why are money here? And they're doing analysis of where you sent money to in the past and they're just switching up little details and saying like, hey, wired to Hong Kong instead of India or whatever it may be.

Dude, it's kind of similar to when you get those, you get all these invoices. And so the whole idea is that you just send invoices to everyone that works at a company because the AP team will just be like, oh yeah, this looks like it's legit. And you just keep sending it. And then eventually they abuse you or they abuse someone else.

And I think that's billions and billions of dollars in fraud. And we're also seeing a new trend with invoices. People are trying to start sending us invoices with numbers, like crypto accounts, you know? And I'm like, what the heck?

Like actual businesses. So then we had to call and verify and get all the documentation. Like, is this fraud? But yeah, things are changing fast. I want to talk about what I learned from meeting a centibillion dollar Chinese company earlier this week.

But maybe you can talk about your experience in Colombia this week. Like, is there any, are there any learnings from this week? Like anything you want to share? I don't really have any big learnings.

The one that's just like smacks me in the head when I meet people, when I was meeting a lot of people in Colombia, it's like people are paying for the technology and these tools.

And the issue isn't the tools. The issue is people not using what they're paying for. We're seeing the same SaaS problem with AI tools. So in the old SaaS age, you would pay for a tool and you'd just be like, yeah, we're trying to do this and we're trying to roll this out.

And I'm like, so you have a CRM solution that has these features? Have you tried using it for that? Oh, we didn't know that I could actually do it. You're paying for it.

Why are you trying to sign up for a new software that does the same thing for the one that you're already paying for? And the issue is actually how people are using the tools. Same with AI. So in almost every country I go to, in every event, most of these people are working at large organizations.

They all have access to the latest cutting edge tools. And let's face it, they have access to these tools in a better way than Eric and I do because they work for larger publicly traded companies and they have much bigger budgets. And they have access to so many internal resources for training and help and all this kind of stuff.

And what we're finding is they're paying for the technology and they're asking questions. And I'm like, but you're paying for tools that can actually help you with this, like landing pages.

I was at an event that the water purification conference, or not water purification, they deal with water, fire, mold, more than just purification of water, fixing water, or leaks, or plumbing. They pretty much do anything for home remodeling, but it's mainly dealing with fixing issues on the spot.

And a lot of the people at this event were given a high level account for free and they're asking me questions. And I was like, you do know the product that you already use that your parent franchise organization has and pays for.

has these features and you can just get this done right away. And they're like, oh, I didn't know that. And it's just like, just people aren't using the technology that they're given. Quick break for SaaS founders listening.

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Actually, so Neil, this actually dovetails well into the meeting I had with this Chinese company. So everyone knows who this company is. We met with five people from their staff and they want to help on the marketing side. So here's something I learned.

Neil, one thing I'll tell you is that they're very ahead on the AI piece, okay? So this is like everyone in their company uses AI because they're like a Chinese company. Again, 87% of Chinese are pro AI, right?

And then 46% of Americans are pro AI. So when I showed them, Neil, agent that works inside of slack to most americans it blows them away right to me i'm like whatever i've been doing this for the last three four five months or so okay um when i showed them they looked at me like i was a caveman right as as if like what i showed them is like nothing new they look like me like when i was an idiot like um my my my cto used the word the r word and he doesn't really use the r word much So he's like, they look at you like you're our word.

Right. And I was like, yeah, they did. And they're like, they already have their agents that live inside of their, you know, their chat solution. That's one piece.

Okay. Which means they're just on top of it. The second piece is the person I was sitting next to, she's like, oh yeah, I use code X to help me with my stock investments. notice she doesn't say she uses chat gpt or clod she uses codex which is the coding harness from open ai that is also advanced as well right um and then the just everything that we're talking about they're super on on top of it and they're very curious to the things that they're not they don't really understand like aeo i think it just comes down to you know if i had to make it simple because i'm a you know i have a chinese background right i i look at it as

The reason why 87% of them are so pro-AI, it's a mindset thing. It's a curiosity thing. And so I don't think it's anything about age, right? So people like to say, oh, you got to hire young kids.

No, it's not a young kids thing because there's plenty of young people that are very anti-AI, right? You've heard these CEOs get booed at the commencement stages, right? And then I've also met older people that are running circles around the younger people. So I just think this all comes down to a mindset thing.

And the fact that I can meet five people from this company and they're all super AI pilled, it just is, how do you just learn to flip the mindset and show people that this is a very beneficial thing? So that's what I learned.

Dude. Speaking of young people hating, I actually see more young people hating AI than actually older people. And when I meet these younger, and I mainly meet marketers who are younger, right? Because that's the industry that Eric and I are in.

But they're just like, yeah, it's going to screw up my possibilities to work and get a job in the future. I hate this stuff. It was so much easier during my parents' generation. Yeah.

And yes, there are some things that were easier in your parents' generation, just like Eric and I can say the same thing for our parents' generation. But there was many things that were much harder in our parents' generation than, you know, it was for us.

And a lot of our parents struggled in ways we never had to. But... I always tell people, don't hate, embrace. If you hate, you're going to struggle to succeed in today's world.

If you embrace, you're much more likely to do well. And what we find, and again, my interactions are mainly in marketing departments, organizations, at least large ones that are publicly traded,

are figuring out ways to help bring up everyone in their organization and marketing up to speed and making them better. Whether it's training, having speakers come in, whether it's signing up for educational courses and classes, you know, they're bringing people in to make their employees better. This is amazing. You're getting thousands and thousands of dollars of education for Xero and

And this is going to make you do better in your career when you switch jobs or go somewhere else. Like it's priceless. Yeah. And speaking of which, Neil, before I move to the next topic here, I believe that if we're talking about training here, that every company needs to have like a skills academy or I know you ramp, for example, they have a skills dojo.

And what I mean by that is you have a repository of all the processes, all the skills that your team's using to do the work. And that way, you know, when Neil joins a company, let's say he joins the sales team, he gets a repository of all the sales skills. And it's almost like putting the Ironman suit on for, for, for, for sales.

Right. And, and I think if you have something like that, that's going to go a long way. Let me show you an example of, of what we actually put together for our little skills dojo over here. So check this out.

We stole the name from, from ramp and I have, I have like, there's a handful of companies that do this. We even have mutual friends that do this as well. Like multiple ones. Can you see this?

Yeah. Okay. So the whole idea here is that single grain skills dojo. Okay. So you can see, you know, all teams, sales teams, whatever. Let's say you want some for sales.

Okay. So we have a lead dossier pipeline skill. This one will build multi-source account dossiers with enrichment, trigger context, and outreach angles. You know, it'll find, it'll go to HubSpot and find revived deals.

And the cool thing is you can see how many people have downloaded it, how many upvotes there are, uh, People can fork it to make their own version. There can be different users. You can even see there's like a different, like there's like a leaderboard here on how the teams are doing, individuals are doing over here.

So the whole idea here is that, you know, we want to democratize all these skills. It's almost like an app store. And then the whole idea with an app store too is like there might be a lot of poo-poo apps, but the best apps rise to the top. And then you can have this dojo here where it's like sales.

You know, these are all the skills that you have if you join the sales team, right? So I think every company will have something like this to help train their people up because this forces people to follow a process and they can iterate on it if they want to. What we found with this is if you don't push it on people, especially people who have already worked at a company, it is hard to get them to adapt.

So culturally, you need to make the push. And when you bring on new people, you need to indoctrinate them with this in the first day or two or three, pretty much in their first week and really get them onboarded. If you don't, what you'll find is you as a company would have created all this stuff.

You can have a repository for tools, technology, A-B tests, what works, what doesn't, failed experiments, successful experiments. And we do this in marketing a lot on our end. And what we find is there's people who use it But the majority in any organization typically don't.

They could be heavy and hot or hot and heavy on it in the first week or two. But over time, they slow down on the usage. If you don't keep people to continually use it, what you'll find is there'll just be a lot of wastage and inefficiencies. Yep.

And the good news is what I talked about earlier in this podcast, where you have something that can help skillify a lot of things that you're doing, and you have something almost like it's observing what you're doing and helping enhance you. It's almost like an Alfred in the background that's helping enhance you, or Jarvis, Jarvis from Iron Man, right? That will wrap us for today. Hope you enjoyed this, and we will catch you tomorrow.