#92 - A Higher Ed Marketing Leader’s Guide to Implementing AI Across the Organization
w/ Seth Odell
From Kanahoma
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SHOW NOTES
In this conversation, John Azoni and Seth O'Dell discuss the integration of AI in marketing, particularly within the context of a digital marketing agency. They explore the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, emphasizing the importance of understanding its limitations and leveraging it as a tool to enhance creativity and efficiency. Seth shares insights on implementing AI strategies, the tools being used, and the future of AI in content creation, ultimately advocating for a balanced approach to AI adoption in the marketing landscape.
The AI tools that were referenced in the episode are these:
🔧 1. ChatGPT Teams
Used by both your team and Seth’s for research, scriptwriting, and creative ideation.
🔗 https://openai.com/chatgpt/teams
🧠 2. Whispr Flow
Used by Seth for voice-to-text input directly into any field (especially ChatGPT).
🔗 https://wisprflow.ai/
🎥 3. Loom (with AI SOP feature)
Used to record processes and auto-generate standard operating procedures from video.
🔗 https://www.loom.com
📞 4. Fathom
Used to record, transcribe, and summarize meetings, generating notes and follow-up actions.
🔗 https://fathom.video
🎙 5. ElevenLabs
Used to clone voiceover artists for scratch tracks and real VO in marketing videos.
🔗 https://www.elevenlabs.io
🎬 6. Opus Clip
Used for cutting up video content (e.g., podcast clips) into short-form, AI-generated social videos.
🔗 https://www.opus.pro
🖼 7. Adobe Generative Fill (Photoshop)
Used to extend image backgrounds, clean up photos, and add visual elements using AI.
🔗 https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/generative-fill.html
🎞 8. Google Veo
Used for abstract generative video, particularly when reenactments or B-roll are unavailable.
🔗 https://deepmind.google/technologies/veo
🖥 9. Canva Magic Design (AI-powered slides)
Used by you to turn strategy outlines into full AI-generated presentation slides.
🔗 https://www.canva.com/magic-design/
🔑 Key Takeaways
AI is a powerful assistant, not a replacement
It should be used as a “subcontractor” to support human creativity—helping with research, ideation, and repetitive tasks while keeping decision-making and taste in human hands.Adoption starts with leadership and culture
Leaders must actively encourage exploration, experimentation, and knowledge-sharing to create a culture where AI tools are embraced and integrated into workflows.Understanding AI’s limits is as important as leveraging its strengths
Knowing where AI fails is crucial for using it responsibly and effectively. Organizations should focus on learning both the capabilities and shortcomings of the tools they use.AI unlocks efficiency, not just productivity
From speeding up casting, scripting, and reporting to automating standard operating procedures, AI reduces friction—freeing teams to focus on high-value creative work.
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Transcript (done with AI so only about 90% accurate):
00;00;00;09 - 00;00;29;03
John Azoni
All right. I'm joined today by my friend Seth O'Dell. He is the CEO of Can a Homer, a full funnel performance marketing Agency helping Colleges grow enrollment through smart modern strategy. And I saw a post that Seth did recently where he's talking about his team recently went all in on integrating A.I. across across their agency and trying to get away from, you know, just chasing shiny objects, but really getting strategic about what A.I. tools he was incorporating.
00;00;29;03 - 00;00;37;05
John Azoni
So I said, You know what? I have run out of podcasts. Guess this is perfect timing. I need to get someone else on Perfect Boom. Let's get Seth on next week.
00;00;37;21 - 00;00;38;08
Seth Odell
I love it.
00;00;38;13 - 00;00;39;15
John Azoni
So welcome to the show, Seth.
00;00;40;01 - 00;00;43;10
Seth Odell
So thanks so much for having me. Always great to see you and looking forward to the conversation.
00;00;44;03 - 00;01;11;20
John Azoni
Cool. Me too. You know, there's a lot of content about A.I., you know, particularly mine in your world. You know, is is LinkedIn a lot? And I see a lot of, like, posts about, like, m dashes and like, you know, whether you should or shouldn't use chatbots for certain things. And and my hope for this conversation is that we set a lot of that aside because I think just there's like a overwhelming amount of noise about.
00;01;12;08 - 00;01;12;21
Seth Odell
Yeah.
00;01;13;02 - 00;01;21;18
John Azoni
Just AI in general and the same stuff gets talked about I feel like. So I'm excited to talk about some niche, nuanced topics here. So tell me.
00;01;21;19 - 00;01;23;04
Seth Odell
I'm to go wherever you want.
00;01;23;20 - 00;01;39;05
John Azoni
So let's start here. Give me kind of like a lay of the land of, you know, kind of humor where you felt like the problems were coming in that I could solve. Like, like what were the tasks that you were like, okay, let's let's see if we can automate these.
00;01;39;23 - 00;01;56;04
Seth Odell
That sounds great. So I'll start at a high level and just say, I am not an AI evangelist. I am not someone who's just like so bullish on AI and I'm way out front and I have looked at folks like that in the past and felt like it was just like shiny tool syndrome and like sizzle, not steak.
00;01;56;13 - 00;02;12;19
Seth Odell
And at one point I'd almost say I was like A.I.. And I think like, the hardest thing to be is like A.I. pragmatic, which is like, it's easy to be like A.I., and it's easy to say A.I. is going to change everything and all the tools are amazing and catchy, but you can do everyone's job. But like the truth is obviously in the murky middle.
00;02;12;19 - 00;02;29;20
Seth Odell
And so for me, as I was coming into the new calendar year, I was thinking a lot about our business. You can almost a 40 person digital marketing agency outside 40 full time employees. And I always do this like State of the State address, and I set a few key objectives for the year and I realized that we were just really not leveraging A.I. almost at all.
00;02;29;20 - 00;02;49;03
Seth Odell
And I realized that I think I had influenced a lot of that by being a little bit cautious and like looking down on it. And part of the reason this position very much on quality and premium as an agency where a smaller agency, we'd like to think we produce demonstrably better work for people. And so better has been like a core cornerstone own of for us and I historically it's not been better.
00;02;49;03 - 00;03;08;21
Seth Odell
It's been like, yes, I can produce the work, but like much worse and it's really mid. And so I was like that's just not our brand. And so I don't want that. And so and I realized I was like, No one's using it. I really feel like we're maybe a little behind. I'm looking at where the agency is going, the services we're providing, and realizing that like, okay, I think I'm making a mistake as a business owner if I'm not pushing this a little bit harder.
00;03;09;01 - 00;03;20;25
Seth Odell
And so I was looking at that. And at the same time we came through, we did a big team survey in the fall and, you know, folks were feeling burned out and they were feeling like they were a little bit too overworked. And so I was talking to some of my leaders about like, how do we make sure that we can fix that?
00;03;20;25 - 00;03;39;20
Seth Odell
Because this is a separate insight. But the team was saying they were feeling burned out, but we weren't working too many hours and I had really only manage the business to you. Are people working 40 to 42 hours a week? And I didn't appreciate the nuance of burnout. That burnout is like repetitive tasks, uninspired. It's all sorts of like feeling that you have to compress time line.
00;03;39;20 - 00;03;55;23
Seth Odell
You don't have time to be curious. And so the team helped me through understanding like what is burnout in an agency setting. And so I was like, okay, so we want more time, we want less repetitive tasks. We want to be able to be curious and explore. At the same time. I feel like I need to push adoption because I do think we're missing.
00;03;55;27 - 00;04;23;02
Seth Odell
What could be the biggest wave for a business like us in our history is to understand that leverage this and those two things combined was where I came into the calendar year saying like, we need to do a reset on AI. And really all of us understand the tools that are available, understand our workflows, and start to understand like I think the thesis was there are opportunities to leverage AI that will produce equal, if not better caliber of work while reducing the internal input of workload.
00;04;23;12 - 00;04;46;00
Seth Odell
Conceptually meaning we should be able to address at least a component of burnout by helping address, you know, removing some repeatable tasks and the work shouldn't suffer as a result. That was sort of the thesis that we went into, and that's how I started the year. So that just kind of lays it out a little bit as a starting point, if that's helpful for like how I started thinking about doing it, then I'm happy to get into what we actually did to try to like go from there to actual implementation, if that makes sense.
00;04;46;12 - 00;05;13;13
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. What I love about your philosophy with and I totally get like the hesitation and I, there's such a spectrum of like embracing AI or being really hesitant about it, but you put it a separate LinkedIn post about AI being like a subcontractor. And I was like, That's a great word for it, because, you know, in all the pooh poohing of AI, I'm like, Well, would you poo poo me hiring an assistant to do this?
00;05;13;23 - 00;05;17;06
John Azoni
You know, like if I was hiring real human and they did the same thing.
00;05;17;06 - 00;05;18;00
Seth Odell
Yeah, but.
00;05;18;04 - 00;05;20;09
John Azoni
But that's a great way of looking at a subcontractor.
00;05;20;15 - 00;05;36;19
Seth Odell
Yeah, exactly. For me, I think one of the reasons I was unimpressed with AI early was one. Obviously it was early, but the other reason was I was thinking that I was something that you outsource large projects or tasks too. So like of, you know, maybe a client wants a marketing strategy where you can go to chat CBT and say, put a marketing strategy together.
00;05;36;22 - 00;05;56;10
Seth Odell
It's not going to be very good and it's still not very good today. And that's was like the outsource mindset of like, I'm responsible for this, let me give this responsibility to someone else. And the mindset shift for me was thinking that like I need to take a large project, like maybe developing a marketing strategy for a college and I need to break it down to its component parts and into its individual workflows.
00;05;56;17 - 00;06;11;19
Seth Odell
And so one example of that might be, Well, I want to do a competitor scan. And so I want to look at what the competitors are doing. And it's like, okay, well, like one example is I can go to chat CBT and say like, you know, from a regional location perspective, who would you say are the top 5 to 10 competitors for this institution?
00;06;11;19 - 00;06;25;18
Seth Odell
Then I can ask it why and say, Why would you say those institutions, who do you think we missed? And then I'd say, Can you provide me your sources? And it'll say, Well, I looked at this data and here's how I pulled it. And it's like, okay, that was a level of research that might have taken me a half hour on Google to do, and now I have a head start.
00;06;25;18 - 00;06;46;13
Seth Odell
Now, I don't look at it as like, now the competitive research is done, but it's like this like assistant that gets to run ahead of me. And so looking at as a subcontractor, someone who I can part out pieces of the work to, made me start to have a lot more confidence in the quality of the feedback that I got back because I was asking much more specific questions and I am not delegating responsibility for the output.
00;06;46;18 - 00;07;13;04
Seth Odell
And so instead of like I'm still responsible if I'm putting this marketing strategy plan together, but I'm basically I just have this researcher who's ahead of me all the time and allowed me to drill down the prompts that I was asking to be much more tactical. And that's been extremely helpful. And so that's where it's like I and a lot of times I talk about I for me, we'll get into tools, but chat CBT is a large when we're on teams and that's a large one that I use, but it's the reality of it can where so many hats but as a subcontractor, not as an outsourced provider.
00;07;13;04 - 00;07;28;20
Seth Odell
So it's not taking over ownership. It's still my responsibility, but it can just assist me in moving faster through tasks that may have taken me a long time, either because the repetitive or the laborious. Like I have to go online and Google my way through something. And if I'm Googling my way through something that CBT is better than me.
00;07;28;20 - 00;07;46;29
Seth Odell
In many cases, and scouring the internet to distill stuff. And if that is a step of the process that I have in a project, it can handle that step. It just can't handle the whole project. And so that mindset shift of thinking of it like a subcontractor, allowed me to feel much more comfortable with understanding how I can start to insert itself into the work that we're doing, if that makes sense.
00;07;47;20 - 00;08;06;05
John Azoni
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. So that's I mean, that was never more true for me than this morning. One of my tasks for the day was we're working on finalizing a script for a commercial for a university, and something about the last line just wasn't clicking between my director and I. And we did Location Scout. So we're on a four hour drive back and we're trying to solve this problem.
00;08;06;05 - 00;08;22;15
John Azoni
Like, what is this? And so I woke up and I put the script we had so far in a chat but was like, you know, help me come up with this last line. I don't want it to be here's all the cliches that you would predict it to be. Do something else. I want to be kind of cheeky or sort of abstract or whatever, and it gave me some good responses.
00;08;22;15 - 00;08;39;13
John Azoni
And then I kind of went in and like kind of tweaked those and I put the tweet to response back in. I was like, be brutally honest. What do you think about this? And then it was like it gave me this brutally honest critique of it and it gave me some suggestions of what to do instead. So I was like, let me just it let me take one of its suggestions verbatim and say, Be brutally honest.
00;08;39;14 - 00;09;00;05
John Azoni
What do you think about Yeah, think about this. And it critiqued its own thing. So it's like, okay, when you pull back the hood, you are in the driver's seat. Like you have to you have to have the vision and the decision making. You have to know what's good and what's not. You can't just trust like, well, this robot knows more than me because I proved that it doesn't total me.
00;09;00;16 - 00;09;19;08
Seth Odell
Especially in creative like taste is going to be one of the last things that I was able to figure out. And it's like you're still the creative director and the editor in that role. And where it's performing so well for you is that you're really thinking of it as it's an ideation partner. And I'll do something very similar often where it's like, I'm trying to say that this the way, but I don't know, like what are other ways I can say it?
00;09;19;14 - 00;09;34;21
Seth Odell
And sometimes I'll come up with my own solution. But based off of what they said and it's just sort of like this free, extra creative in the room, so you're able to insert this extra person in the car right, who's thinking along with you. And one of the best things that I've done, which it sounds like you did too, is I love long form prompts, so I'll put all that stuff in there.
00;09;34;21 - 00;09;48;11
Seth Odell
It's like, Here's what I need help with. I don't just put it in and say, Give me five options for a new last line. I will ramble. And so like I use a tool called Whisper flow that lets me hold down a button on my keyboard and it translates to voice into text and it drops it anywhere your cursor is on your computer.
00;09;48;16 - 00;10;03;19
Seth Odell
And so I'll go to Chatty Betty and I'll just push down the button and I'll talk for 2 minutes and I'll say, Here's all the things I don't want it to say, and I'm worried it'll sound like this, But, you know, just give me three or four or five options and it takes us, you know, up to three or up to 500 word prompt sometimes together and just dump it with a ton of information.
00;10;03;26 - 00;10;18;23
Seth Odell
And then it's like, okay, like you're not replacing me, but you're making me better. You're thinking faster than me. You're giving the volume of iteration it can give you is faster than we could come up with. And so when you think of it as that, like partner who's assisting you, it's an awesome tool. If you don't say, give me a script.
00;10;18;23 - 00;10;24;29
Seth Odell
Yeah, you're going to get a pretty cheesy generic one back. And so it is so much down to like how you approach it and how you use it, if that makes sense.
00;10;25;16 - 00;10;31;08
John Azoni
Absolutely. All right. So take us to what you guys did. You guys brought in a consultant and then what happened?
00;10;31;14 - 00;10;47;10
Seth Odell
Yeah. So I met a gentleman named Pete Sena, who's awesome and wonderful through an organization called Hampton that I'm in. That's for like founders has about four or 500 agency founders in it. And I met Pete through there and he offers this like two day workshop. And so we brought him in to the agency to do a two day workshop.
00;10;47;10 - 00;11;05;18
Seth Odell
And the way that it was structured, because it's like actually back up a second and say, I looked at a guy in a few different tranches, and the first tranche was just education. Like, I just need to increase awareness of what's possible and what's happening because I think some people were wholly on like not exploring at all while other people are actively using the tool, like in my web team or in other areas.
00;11;05;24 - 00;11;19;06
Seth Odell
And so I focused on education first and then augmentation was sort of second, which is like, how can we just use it to assist us? And so for education is where I brought in Pete, and it was a really great two day experience. He started with, I think it was like a 90 minute agency wide kind of keynote style.
00;11;19;06 - 00;11;34;10
Seth Odell
Talk about here's all the things you can do with AI within the marketing realm. So we really tailored it to our world and marketing and advertising, and he showed a lot of different tools. And it was just it was just like, whoa, this is way farther advanced than we thought. And then for the following day and a half, he did breakouts with each of our service lines.
00;11;34;10 - 00;11;51;13
Seth Odell
So within can a home or we have a, you know, pay team and a CEO team, a web team, an account services team, a creative team, a consulting team, sales. And so he met with each of those different groups and he would talk to them about their workflows. And then in real time, it would be more like a workshop than anything else where he would pull up tools and talk about Show me your work product.
00;11;51;13 - 00;12;11;11
Seth Odell
Can you give me an example of something? And he would show where does he think tools could be inserted to assist? And that was really helpful for people that weren't sure where they could start in the fact that, like there's different solutions for everybody. And while like a larger LLC, which actually pretty is the right answer for a lot of things, when you get into things like video, you know, there's very specific tools that you can leverage in different ways.
00;12;11;11 - 00;12;31;24
Seth Odell
And so that two day experience is really good. And then we kept him on to consult as people started to implement, and that was like this big kickoff event. And then we set up a Slack channel called Chat for in our Can Homa instance, where people are able to start asking questions and sharing what they're doing. And so that that was able to get people excited and people started to share different things that they were doing.
00;12;31;29 - 00;12;48;11
Seth Odell
And so it gave us like a high volume of knowledge sharing around use cases because so many of the use cases are specific to individual units. But I have multiple people in different roles, like I have nine people that all do paid media buying. And it's like, well, if any one of them is finding something that they can leverage, how are we knowledge sharing it across the whole team?
00;12;48;11 - 00;13;04;00
Seth Odell
And so Slack has been the way that we did that and it was very casual. There was no mandate from me at all. It was just, you know, please, I encourage you to explore. And I did get everybody on the team chat CBT teams accounts, which allows you to upload images and files and it gives you a little bit more access.
00;13;04;09 - 00;13;24;08
Seth Odell
It's about 20 bucks a month per user. And that was it. It was really just this keynote kickoff was sort of the like, let's kind of splash some cold water on our face and realize that things are moving faster than we thought. And then it also helped us understand that, like our job and this is really one of the thing I will say is it is not our job to leverage AI or not, but it is our job to understand the limitations of AI.
00;13;24;09 - 00;13;40;20
Seth Odell
And those limitations are changing and shifting as the tech is evolving. And so it means we all sort of have to stay proactive in understanding like what are the outer limits? And so even in the Slack channel, it's like, let's talk about when the AI hallucinates, let's talk about the things we tried that don't work so we can understand like, Oh, this aspect doesn't work at all.
00;13;40;20 - 00;13;55;12
Seth Odell
But over here, this is like an interesting piece. Like we had to update a bunch of different data on a whole bunch of different PDFs, and that was shockingly easy to do in chat. CBT is like, Well, I was going to literally pay a designer to go through all this stuff and make manual edits and and so like that was, that was a massive time timesaver.
00;13;55;13 - 00;14;09;04
Seth Odell
I was like, Oh, we didn't know we could even do that. So we're just helping people realize that, like when you run into a task that you know is going to be highly repetitive and highly laborious, slow down long enough just to see if the tech is available to help us move faster. And when we find those pockets, it's fine.
00;14;09;04 - 00;14;18;18
Seth Odell
And the team like celebrating it and it does feel like, you know, success. So that was really the the first four or five months of the year was focused on that really up until only the last couple of months, if that makes sense.
00;14;19;02 - 00;14;47;27
John Azoni
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's so exciting. And I resonate with said like encouraging everyone. It's not a mandate but encouraging it, giving everyone the space to to play. And I think when people just say like, okay, I, you know, my job right now is to just play around with this. Some of the best discoveries I've had with I have come from that time like I'm just going to take 2 hours and play with this new Google video video generation thing, see if it'll work for this one project I have.
00;14;48;09 - 00;14;53;16
John Azoni
And I just find that that's so important and I think we don't allow ourselves enough time to just play. Yeah, just.
00;14;54;05 - 00;15;09;02
Seth Odell
Like I've actually never thought of that until you just said that. But like, my advice would probably be that you need to think of I like baseball, like if you're hitting 300 and it's working 30% of the time, like you're an All-Star, I'm like, It's supposed to not work. And I do think there was like this frustration early on where it's like, Oh, doesn't work.
00;15;09;02 - 00;15;24;07
Seth Odell
And it's like it's not supposed to always work. And when it doesn't work, you are supposed to do the work yourself, but it's when you're finding the places where it does work. And if you adjust your expectation that the hit rate's going to be lower, suddenly you don't feel bad about otherwise trying a thing and it doesn't work and feeling like, well, I'm not going to try that.
00;15;24;07 - 00;15;36;26
Seth Odell
And it's like the biggest mistake you can make is dismissing as a solution broadly because of a very specific and surgical execution that didn't work. It's not going to work in many cases, but it does work in others. And so that's like a mindset shift, I think, to be open to that.
00;15;37;14 - 00;15;50;00
John Azoni
Yeah. So what are some of the main pillars of tools that you guys have been playing with to solve certain problems? Like what is the stuff that you've implemented or trying to implement that your team's getting excited about?
00;15;50;12 - 00;16;07;28
Seth Odell
Yeah, so chat CBT teams is the biggest that like everyone on the team uses it. I encourage other business owners it like everyone your employees should have that. The ability to upload review files, store projects in an area with alarms that you know not being trained on your data is super important. And so that's the first and biggest is like whether you want to pick chat, CBT or another.
00;16;07;28 - 00;16;30;20
Seth Odell
Like you need to get people using that. And then we've looked for a lot of universal use cases. One of the ones that's been very helpful for people is being able to like, honestly organize and distill like email communication back and forth. Like, you know, we're a business that unfortunately still have email. One of my favorite things to do is to just literally, you know, take a client email and then reply to it with my voice with whisper flow back into chat CBT, and then have it spit it out in a professional tone.
00;16;30;25 - 00;16;46;11
Seth Odell
I don't ask it to rewrite my email. I guess I could write my emails, but let me just talk it out and then like you're going to format it correctly and you're going to make it professional and break out the paragraphs and clean it up so I can focus on the actual intent of the message and like with the content of it itself, not the formatting.
00;16;46;11 - 00;17;08;25
Seth Odell
And for me I found that like formatting and formality was an area of frustration. As a business owner, I don't love sitting down and trying to write this form of communication. I want to tell you asked great questions. I want to give you great answers. And so that's been a simple one. A couple of things I'll say on the chat CBT side specifically is in addition to like looking at our workflows and identifying components where we can insert it, there's also things that we can now do that we couldn't do before.
00;17;09;02 - 00;17;30;17
Seth Odell
And so like a simple one for me is I'm a I'm a business owner. We have 18 college or university partners that can Homa I can't review everybody's weekly reports that would take like literally like 6 hours a week to just review reports. And I have people underneath me who are responsible for that. But what I can do once a week is dump all the weekly reports into chat CBT and say if you were the CEO of this business, what would you see and what would you do?
00;17;30;21 - 00;17;45;27
Seth Odell
And it calls out, Well, you are entering your second month of this downward degradation trend on this channel. And this campaign for this client is like, okay, now you're giving me things that when I'm in my one on ones or I'm in my leadership meetings, I can start to poke and prod. And so I, I use it a little bit like a compass, like help point me in some directions.
00;17;45;27 - 00;18;01;06
Seth Odell
And it's like, well, I would have never been able to read 400 pages of reports, but now suddenly I actually can. And do I think it's 100% accurate? No. Meaning that like it may miss some things, but it's catching things. I will not review in all those every week already. And so it's allowing me to expand the influence of my role in those cases.
00;18;01;21 - 00;18;24;13
Seth Odell
And then beyond that, I'll see a lot of the use case really comes down to the individual service lines in particular. So the Web team uses, I mean, a multitude of different tools to assist with coding and analysis. There's a lot of things we can do with SEO now that we couldn't do before. And to me, what's really interesting on the air Solutions is on one hand you have these enterprise centralized solutions like a chat, CBT, and then there's over 25,000 AI tools out there right now.
00;18;24;20 - 00;18;42;27
Seth Odell
It's really incredible how specific things can get. And so like I use open clips when I post clips to social media, we use that sometimes for videos. Opus Clips is really great. If you're looking for very specific things, you know, if you want to cut up like a multi-camera podcast, I can do that for you and immediately do some of those solutions, which is really interesting.
00;18;43;04 - 00;19;00;13
Seth Odell
And so we have I think at this point I have to pull it up probably 18 or 20 different air subscriptions across the company. Some of them are just exploring like on the video team, we're exploring same thing, Google with their video three and like we're looking at air video and other cases. It's like specific, you know, really I almost view them like, like WordPress plug ins.
00;19;00;13 - 00;19;16;11
Seth Odell
There are like very specific surgical things that do one or two things really well. And so that's down to the service lines. The Web team has their own bucket, the CEO team has their own bucket, and they're looking at different tools and then more for sales and accounts. They're more like myself where I'm using chat shipped 95% of the time as my primary solution.
00;19;16;25 - 00;19;42;25
John Azoni
Yeah, Yeah. So I mean, that's very similar to us like chat. You were super chat CPD heavy and on the video side, you know we are very like we kind of live and die by, by interview transcripts, you know, And so we'll take those transcripts and we will start a thread for the client and have it digest those transcripts so that our team and the client can also pull insights without having to pore over all the transcripts.
00;19;43;02 - 00;20;06;26
John Azoni
And what's great is that you know, it's able to digest those so much faster than we could and pull out like what are some interesting topics if we wanted like some snippets here or whatever. Another thing that I was like super impressed by was it's plagued me my entire life of like going from like word to Google Docs the same thing like you hit enter and then something just screws up and it's like you can't get the bullet point in the right place.
00;20;06;26 - 00;20;24;06
John Azoni
And then there's a one, but then there's like an A, and then it's like it's you can't get it to like, do what you want. I was writing, you know, standard operating procedures or just like, the most fun thing in the world, right? And I was like, I am. I'm just not going to focus on formatting. I'm going to, you know, see what I can outsource this this to.
00;20;24;06 - 00;20;39;05
John Azoni
I'm just going to write the stuff. I put it into chapters. Yep. I was like, Make this really clear, you know, like, here's what I want to say. But like, yeah, bold things, outline things, bullet point things in a way that makes this simple and clear so that someone's not reading through all my jibber jabber.
00;20;39;10 - 00;20;40;04
Seth Odell
Yeah, I mean, it did.
00;20;40;04 - 00;20;41;06
John Azoni
It is great. So perfect.
00;20;41;11 - 00;20;55;26
Seth Odell
Yeah, that's one I do a lot as well. I use loom I for that. So I have an assistant that I onboarded last year and so getting her involved in my workflows, I will if I'm doing a task that I know is repeatable. So we typically call it like a ritual, either a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual ritual.
00;20;56;02 - 00;21;16;01
Seth Odell
I'll pull up loom and I'll record myself doing it, and then Loom has an auto transcript option, but it also can then take your video and your transcript, and it creates a standard operating procedure for you. And it's like, okay, I can just click this and now it formats it all for me and it does it based off of we watched what you did in the video and we listened to what you said and we combine those things and it's like, Oh my gosh, like that would take me time.
00;21;16;01 - 00;21;30;00
Seth Odell
That is the thing that I would be slow doing normally and like, I'm going to sit down for a half hour and put together the standard operating procedure. And now I'm just click a couple of buttons and I'm just reviewing it and it's really good and then I'll give it to my assistant and then she will create her own room when she goes through it and capture whether or not we end any issues.
00;21;30;08 - 00;21;49;02
Seth Odell
That's been really good. Another example on the account side is we use Fathom to record meeting notes. So almost all the meetings we're in, you know, we're auto recording, those were capturing notes. That is amazing because one, it's more thorough than us. So like, we still take our own notes but we don't miss anything, captures the transcript, captures meeting notes, and then can even spit out a recommended recap for a client.
00;21;49;10 - 00;22;04;10
Seth Odell
Now will distill that the account team will put their nuance on it. But it just like you think about like an account director and we're not a large shop so I don't have like an account director and an account manager in every meeting. So an account directors in a meeting trying to guide a conversation with the client and they're supposed to take all the notes.
00;22;04;10 - 00;22;20;02
Seth Odell
So what everybody says, like that's two different jobs. And so they still take notes. But now we have Fathom taking notes and it spits it all out together. And it's just super helpful. And then the other thing on the tool side, like, you know, Adobe does have a lot of great solutions. I will say that a really interesting image fill has been really good.
00;22;20;02 - 00;22;41;18
Seth Odell
Like image creation is okay, like I'm not a huge fan of imagery still, I actually think we're quite close to imagery and video being really, really good. But image film is amazing. Like when I used to go on productions, so we used to back up so far to take the widest shots because we wanted to always be able to crop for those few banner situations where it's like, Well, we need a really, really, really long, really thin banner.
00;22;41;23 - 00;22;56;29
Seth Odell
And it meant that we would have to back way up and create these wides. And then we wanted to push it and switch lenses and, you know, but anybody every time you had a lens change on a set like that's just time. And so now it's like what you're telling me I can get away shooting 80% mediums now for our still photography and I can fill the rest.
00;22;56;29 - 00;23;12;02
Seth Odell
And we still do wides and I don't trust it enough yet. But the fact that we can do image fill in a click literally is solving a time issue on set, which either means we're capturing more better content or on a multi day shoot. Eventually it means we can move faster and maybe save a little bit of time for the client.
00;23;12;11 - 00;23;26;00
Seth Odell
That kind of stuff is having a real impact. I don't think we trusted enough to like trim down our production time yet, but the fact that like we used to shoot all these wides and now we don't was like, oh, like, I guess that's just a thing of production past that like others won't have to do in five or ten years.
00;23;26;00 - 00;23;27;05
Seth Odell
It's really interesting to think about.
00;23;27;19 - 00;23;54;04
John Azoni
Yeah, I love the generative fill in Photoshop. I use it often and like a couple of times it's come in really handy. One was like, when you're on set, I'm sure, you know, like sometimes you don't have the time or the props to get the background just perfect. You're like, I like this side of the frame, but this side's like kind of did, I don't know, working with the school and there is like a fireplace in the shot, but there was nothing in the fireplace, so it's kind of weird.
00;23;54;04 - 00;24;00;05
John Azoni
Like we were like. Like, I wish we had, like, some logs or something like that, but this like, make it purposeful.
00;24;00;16 - 00;24;01;01
Seth Odell
Totally.
00;24;01;14 - 00;24;16;00
John Azoni
So we just went ahead and shot it. And then I dragged a still frame into Photoshop and circled that area and it like it put some logs and logs in there. You could like I could tell it different things. It could be books, it could be candles, it could be whatever, and then just patch that into the video.
00;24;16;00 - 00;24;18;12
John Azoni
I'm like, That's amazing. Like, you can't like it.
00;24;18;18 - 00;24;33;16
Seth Odell
It's so amazing. And to me, it's like, Well, you could have done that before with the designers again. How much time that would have taken, how much money that would have taken. And the reality is, it's like there were manual solutions before for almost all things that AI is doing. They were just so much time and effort that we wouldn't always get to do them.
00;24;33;16 - 00;24;49;25
Seth Odell
So the reality is like how many of those shots would have been a B-plus shot to you or an A-minus shot because the fireplace is empty. Well, now it's like now it's all A-plus shots. And you're able to do that really quickly. I love that. That and that's why I think it's like it is able to elevate the output because it's being applied in really specific use cases.
00;24;49;25 - 00;24;51;11
Seth Odell
So that's a really good example of one.
00;24;51;29 - 00;25;06;13
John Azoni
Yeah. The other one was, you know, we work in a lot of like student alumni stories. And so, you know, we're kind of at the mercy sometimes if there's a specific story element we just have to have a picture for we didn't get the URL for it. Yeah, yeah. We're kind of at the mercy of whatever pictures we can get from the subject.
00;25;06;13 - 00;25;25;29
John Azoni
And one was like kind of framed. Weird. He was like giving a speech and he was at the podium, but he was like, whoever took the picture, like cut his whole shoulder and slide off. And so I took that into Photoshop, you know, expanded that whole right side of the frame. Now he's got an arm and he's standing at the podium and it looks like it's perfectly framed.
00;25;25;29 - 00;25;48;29
John Azoni
And then I was able to print that out and film it, you know, film the picture for a video. I was like, That's so great. I was just like, I'm so excited by that. I was like, I hadn't thought to use image feel to, you know, to influence, like images like that before. But I was like, I'm not limited to now this weird framing or like, sometimes you'll get like you wished you had a horizontal photo and you got a vertical one time.
00;25;49;15 - 00;25;55;17
John Azoni
Yeah, you could, you could expand that. And so all of a sudden now it's a horizontal photo and yeah, filled in the gaps.
00;25;55;24 - 00;25;56;09
Seth Odell
Exactly.
00;25;56;09 - 00;25;57;02
John Azoni
It's amazing.
00;25;57;02 - 00;26;07;09
Seth Odell
Yeah, that's awesome. There's so much there that I think is really exciting and it's like you're not, you're not asking how to go produce all of it. You're just trying to have it come in and be a part of it, which is, I think, really exciting to think about.
00;26;07;09 - 00;26;27;22
John Azoni
Yeah, So let's talk about content creation. So I imagine, I imagine like when it comes to content creation and I don't know if you have specific tools that your video team is working on or like any of your other content, you know, text based, you know, content writers are working on. But like, is there anything that's that's really helped you push like storytelling and content creation That's like a specific example?
00;26;28;03 - 00;26;46;26
Seth Odell
Yeah, So let me think through that. So let me hit you with a couple of tactical examples. First, because there's not like one or two large ones outside of like leveraging chat, CBT as a thought partner in that stuff, I'll say some very specific things on the production storytelling side. One thing we often do in our videos is we'll have voiceover because we produce a lot of streaming ads, a lot of commercials.
00;26;47;05 - 00;27;03;25
Seth Odell
So a simple example is for right now, all of our scratch tracks are cloned voice that we built with 11 labs and we have like male and female voice options and we've used 11 labs to create voice agents, which is really great. I mean, I love Matt, our ACD video, but he'll be first tell you like his scratch reads aren't the best.
00;27;03;25 - 00;27;22;20
Seth Odell
And so you're asking a client to think about what a final spot's going to be like. But this is not the voice over delivery you're going to get. And so already our scratch tracks are better than having our video editor read them and then when a client writes back and says, okay, I want to change a little bit of the script, we can instantly plug it in type and we're right off to the races or we're not pulling the mic out, rerecording anything.
00;27;22;28 - 00;27;39;10
Seth Odell
So we use 11 labs for all of our scratch. We are just in our first client project coming up, going to be using a voiceover for an actual spot that will go to market. It was the first time I couldn't tell the difference. Normally we use voices and voices dot com and we record video artists and that's still going to be the bread and butter for us.
00;27;39;10 - 00;28;08;22
Seth Odell
But it's the first time I was like, Wow, that read is so good that like I didn't realize that it wasn't a real person. And so like, voiceover is a specific piece that's, that's playing a role in storytelling. The other thing for us, we do a lot of testimonial work too, so we have a process called Can a Home, a Casting, where our partners will ask us to source student alumni stories and we'll put a survey out and we'll get on Zoom and we'll interview hundreds of people and we'll distill that, and then we build these bio pages and Google slides with photos of the people and like a bio from them and a pull
00;28;08;22 - 00;28;28;12
Seth Odell
quote we have in I guess you'd call it alpha. It's not quite beta, It's not been a live project yet. We have a tool that is close to fully functional, that takes the Fathom recording and writes the first part of the bio for us and does the pull quotes for us based on the like creative brief that we put in and then connects to Google slides and builds the slide for us.
00;28;28;17 - 00;28;45;24
Seth Odell
And so it's like you do the interview and then it spits out. Now it doesn't have everything there, but it's like there's a level of copy and paste that's while that we still do in our world and it's like, Oh, it literally just took a bunch of pull quote options. It did an initial bio and then the primary writer on the project is able to review that and be like, you know, let me update the bio here.
00;28;45;29 - 00;29;06;06
Seth Odell
Like, let me take the quotes I like and the ones I don't like. It's like, that could be a huge timesaver, which is great because Kinnaman casting is one of the things I actually love the most that we offer. I've been doing casting since 2011, but it's so much work that it's expensive. And so when we tell partners are you want to have us go find 50 or 100 stories, we're going to need like 50 grand and hundreds of hours.
00;29;06;16 - 00;29;24;02
Seth Odell
That's just not feasible for most people. And we're at a place now where it's like, I think I'm going to be able to dramatically reduce the cost of that offering because so much of the time that we're putting into this is now being automated. And that makes me really excited because it's like I want a solution like that for more people finding great stories to tell can be really hard, and I think a lot of us do.
00;29;24;02 - 00;29;39;09
Seth Odell
Instead of telling the same four or five stories all the time because of that. And so that's an example where it's like it's inserting there into storytelling as far as this laborious piece of we're going to go talk to 100 people and then figure out which 20 we want to feature. And it's like, well, it's going to spit out 100 potential slide decks that we can go through.
00;29;39;17 - 00;29;43;02
Seth Odell
I was really surprised that we're close to that actually being a solution for us.
00;29;43;14 - 00;30;00;28
John Azoni
Yeah, the slide decks, it's a huge gap for me because I will spend just hours nitpicking colors and you know, I'm in Canva because I'm just a solo operator, you know, type approach. But I use Canvas. I for the first time the other day is building a slide deck for a video strategy workshop that we're doing for a client.
00;30;00;28 - 00;30;21;19
John Azoni
And I gave it the whole outline. So here's the whole outline. Here's everything you know, we're trying to solve for, you know, give me the slides and boom, it created. I produce eight out of ten out of them combined a bunch of them. But it just made me a template that I was like, oh, of school. Like, I got kind of a theme here because if you just start with a template in Canva, you have to do a lot of work to like undo.
00;30;21;19 - 00;30;41;22
John Azoni
Yeah, the stuff that you don't want. Yeah, in the template. So yeah, that was great. We've also used, you know, tragedy Beauty with casting. We do casting in a smaller scale, which, you know, I've always been so inspired by your casting process. I think that's like I've actually gone back to our episode together where we talked about casting to be like, okay, he helped me solve that problem there.
00;30;42;01 - 00;30;42;16
Seth Odell
I love it.
00;30;43;02 - 00;31;00;13
John Azoni
You know, as we're trying to figure this out. But we've, you know, been able to download transcripts from people submitting a video of themselves. You set up a portal for the client that they email out a link. The person submits a video of themselves telling us something remarkable and some prompts, and then that spits out their video plus a transcript.
00;31;00;13 - 00;31;13;25
John Azoni
And then we can take all those transcripts and put them to and like map the priorities. I'm like, here's the messaging priorities that we want to touch on for the school. Who talks about that and who has the strongest story arc.
00;31;14;08 - 00;31;31;17
Seth Odell
I love that. I love exactly. And that's where it's like, I don't know till you do the work. And if people appreciate if you're like, I need to go back and find someone that really talked about affordability, it's like you're coming through so much. And back in my day, we used to comb through the footage to find that because, I mean, I remember shooting where we wouldn't send out for transcripts cause we had to pay by the minute.
00;31;31;22 - 00;31;46;10
Seth Odell
And then we finally got to a place where we could afford it. So we would do every interview. We'd go out to a transcript company that we'd have to send the files to and would send it back. And even then we're like, Control effing in a PDF from Google Doc and looking for the exact word in like, Well, sometimes people talk about affordability, but they don't use the word affordability.
00;31;46;15 - 00;32;01;22
Seth Odell
They might say scholarship or cost or any number of different things, the ability to do that stuff. And so to me what was so special about that is like that's more research and administrative because then when you find the clip, you're still doing the work, you're still telling the story. But it meant that like this to me is the biggest thing.
00;32;01;22 - 00;32;18;07
Seth Odell
Like you're a creative. And so the question is like if you look at the hours you work, let's just say you work 40 hours in a week. How many of them were you actually creative and how much of it was that kind of admin support? So, well, maybe you really were doing like I think a good creative might be doing 8 to 16 hours of really good creative work a week and the rest of it is all this other stuff.
00;32;18;07 - 00;32;35;25
Seth Odell
And so that's my hope with the team. For us, even at Kent home is like as we're freeing this stuff up, you get to actually do the stuff that fires you up and the stuff that you are uniquely qualified to do, which is that kind of storytelling because you're not doing all the associate producer style work that so many of us have to do to get to the place where we can tell the story.
00;32;36;10 - 00;32;47;28
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. And I'm intrigued also to hear, because you told me you guys are aiming to deliver your first fully produced creative project by the end of the year. What does that look like? What's the is that a video? Is that. Yeah, design or whatever.
00;32;48;00 - 00;33;03;21
Seth Odell
So, so that's been sort of like a benchmark I've put for us because it feels like the caliber of the work is there, especially with Google's video solution. Some of the video it produces is good enough. Now that it can pass and people don't know, certainly not all of it, but I've seen enough from like, okay, like I couldn't tell the difference in that.
00;33;03;25 - 00;33;24;12
Seth Odell
And then we see a lot where we certainly can have this crazy artifacting and people would like, you know, awesome. Yeah, yeah. Weird stuff happening. And so we were looking at in two tranches. The first is we do a lot of paid media so it can home. We manage about 40 million and marketing spend across our partners and we have thousands of ads on like Meta and Instagram live every day as an example across our partners.
00;33;24;20 - 00;33;45;26
Seth Odell
So I'm hoping we're going to be seeing live in-market paid social advertisements within the next 6 to 8 weeks, like we're very close to that. But a lot of times the video is a simple clip with animated text over it. Like this is not a big story and sometimes you're not even seeing a person. And so that's easy because we can really self-select the clip that would be easiest to produce, and that's more of like a proof of concept.
00;33;46;05 - 00;34;09;05
Seth Odell
But I do believe by the end of the calendar year 2035, we'll do full 32nd spots entirely with AI. Now, I don't think we'll do that for many partners and I wouldn't recommend it. I think we need to see campus and we need to see students, but we do have partners that have, you know, low to no budget where the alternative option is recutting that campaign from four or five years ago again, and we've already recut it twice and it's like, well, what else can we do to retell this story?
00;34;09;12 - 00;34;27;27
Seth Odell
And so for those partners, we are looking to produce essentially 32nd spots that are fully AI driven. But we're also to be very clear, we are consulting for that, meaning we're not coming up with the concept and then seeing if we can pull it off with AI. We're going to say if this partner has no budget for us to go do a shoot and they have no material that is recent, that would be good.
00;34;28;06 - 00;34;47;28
Seth Odell
Well then something is better than nothing. And so in that case, what can we concept for a spot that we think can be pulled off from? And so it will be very narrow in that sense. But the hope and expectation is, you know, six, ten, 15, 32nd spots that are entirely generated in market with marketing dollars behind it driving student interest by the end of the calendar year.
00;34;48;17 - 00;35;07;26
John Azoni
That's amazing. And the generative video has been something that I've been waiting for and there's not a lot of use cases for it. I feel like in document, you know, my world is more documentary, less so like advertising spots and like social ads. But when you're telling someone's story, a lot of times there's a part of their story where there's no way you would be able to get B-roll of that on campus.
00;35;07;26 - 00;35;08;13
Seth Odell
Exactly.
00;35;09;00 - 00;35;28;09
John Azoni
Yeah. So they're talking about something that happened at home or, you know, and then, you know, you could go into stock footage, but stock footage is just mostly garbage. Yeah. And you can just immediately tell if it's stock footage. But I have one client where it's one of my main, like non higher ed clients. We do human trafficking survivor stories to raise awareness for human trafficking.
00;35;28;09 - 00;35;59;29
John Azoni
And obviously a lot of their stories involve a lot of past trauma that we're not going to have them reenact it. We don't have the budget to hire actors to reenact. We don't have the budget to hire an animator to animate those. So I have finally, I trained it for the last two years of doing campaigns since general video has become a thing finally gotten Google Vote to since Google has come out to actually take a scene and make it kind of dark and abstract and make it work for reenacting something in a way that's abstract enough where you're not destroying.
00;36;00;02 - 00;36;14;23
John Azoni
We're not trying to like literally like see this whole play by play, but totally you just trying to give the visual vibe of this dark moment that's happening and it's finally there. Like I was just got played around with it a couple of weeks ago. I was like, Okay, I think we can use this year, you know?
00;36;15;16 - 00;36;35;24
Seth Odell
And I think it's like, and then isn't that better than the alternative? Which is either like, you're not going to go out and produce something original and then you're relying on stock or you're showing talking head for even longer than you want to. And I think that's the piece is there's a subset of the population that wants AI to replace everything, either because I think they have a financial upside to that or they're just excited and both are like, okay, that's fine.
00;36;36;01 - 00;36;52;19
Seth Odell
But for us, I think in our world it's like, no, we're just trying to solve problems and those problems can be solved. It it never was either. The problem you just said, right? You mentioned three or four different solutions and like why those aren't going to work. And it's like, okay, well then the alternative is and it's like the alternative is we have less visuals to tell the story or we can plug it in here.
00;36;52;19 - 00;37;13;06
Seth Odell
And that to me is where like there's a practical boots on the ground component to an implementation, which is exact what you describe it, which is like solving the problems that we have. Like for us with cloning a voiceover artist for scratch tracks, it wasn't like we were all excited to clone voiceover artist. It was more just like, Wow, Reading Scratch Tracks is a very time intensive thing and.
00;37;13;06 - 00;37;29;20
Seth Odell
We don't always read them that well, and we're asking a client to like, Yeah, but imagine the person reading. It's a professional. It sounds really good and it's like, Well, it's actually reading better than us and it's faster than us like that to solve our problem. And so that to me is where I'm most excited. But even within an agency world, it's like, well, there's like that's one very specific example.
00;37;29;29 - 00;37;43;10
Seth Odell
And then you're going to have another dozen of those across the video work that you do where, you know, by the end of the next year you might look back a bit, Wow. Like it's solving a whole bunch of little things. And I do think eventually that will coalesce into larger and larger solutions. But, you know, we're not there yet.
00;37;43;10 - 00;37;58;04
Seth Odell
And, you know, I'm not rushing it like I'm not out here looking to like, take pride in using AI over something else and like, fly that banner. We're not trying to be the most advanced agency ever. We're just trying to produce really good work. And when I can help us do that, awesome. You know.
00;37;58;23 - 00;38;27;00
John Azoni
Yeah, I think every organization kind of has to, like, come to this, come up to this new baseline of like, there's no world in which, like, it's not going to be helpful on some level, just some basic chatbot stuff like there's no reason to do everything manually anymore, no matter what you feel about AI. So I think most organizations, higher ed included, just needs to come up to the next rung on the ladder of like, yes, okay, let's just get a basic let's get everyone on a foundational same page about what can be done here.
00;38;27;05 - 00;38;45;20
Seth Odell
Exactly. I mean, I had a partner that's asked me to come speak to their team because of that exact concern, which is like I'm looking at the organization. Some people are early adopters and some people are almost like intentionally abrasive to embracing it at all. And the reality is like, I think the idea of like we can operate without it is long gone and people need to embrace it.
00;38;45;21 - 00;39;05;12
Seth Odell
So even for us it can home. It was like at a minimum, this year I'm going to make sure people are informed and ideally inspired and like education, that's been that first prong and we've moved past that. But any organization, any team of any size, it's like this needs to be the thing that we push. What makes it very hard is the teams are very busy today and it's an inefficient tool to implement.
00;39;05;12 - 00;39;18;25
Seth Odell
Usually if you're actually going to shape it and make sure it's implemented well, which means that it takes more time to implement, to do it faster the next go around. And for a lot of teams, the people doing it are just going to do it the way they've done it because they're they're overworked. They're trying to get these tasks off their plate.
00;39;18;25 - 00;39;49;28
Seth Odell
They're trying to get the work done, which means the implementation disproportionately has to be really a top down supported initiative. And that's important because some of us, myself included, sometimes show our age, you know, where it's like, okay, well, I'm running this organization like I'm not the most tech forward person on the team necessarily, but suddenly, like, I actually view, like, what of my primary jobs that can I'm like, what am I, high five top bullets for my job as a founder and CEO is I enablement because if I don't drive it that aggressively, the rest of the organization won't follow.
00;39;49;28 - 00;40;03;15
Seth Odell
And I think for a lot of teams, leaders are looking for their teams to go figure out how to do it. And it's like, well, unfortunately, like you might be a VP of marketing or enrollment, but like you have to be the one doing this out front in order to get your team collectively inspired enough to ensure they're exploring it fully.
00;40;04;03 - 00;40;20;15
John Azoni
Oh, that's so smart. Yeah. I mean, because we have a lot of, you know, director level VP level people that listen to this, and that's such good advice for them to be the ones leading the charge and saying, Hey, we got to figure this out, rather than just letting everyone kind of like the Wild West of everyone, kind of use their own tools and and things like that.
00;40;20;18 - 00;40;33;02
John Azoni
So if a college, you know, marketing department wanted to start integrating some I taking that next step up to the next rung, you know what steps would you recommend for that VP or for that, you know, CMO level leader Great.
00;40;33;17 - 00;40;54;29
Seth Odell
Great question. First thing for that leader to be to be an early adopter yourself, go out and explore. Second thing would be I would pick one core tool to go in on. I would almost certainly say that CBT is the best place to do that. I highly encourage folks, if you have the budget to get teams accounts, it's 20 bucks a month per employee, but it lets you upload files and creates images and just gives you more access to deeper research solutions.
00;40;55;09 - 00;41;12;22
Seth Odell
And so I highly recommend everybody get team accounts for everybody that they can. I would very much focus on knowledge sharing as one of the early things. If you can afford a, you know, consultant to come in, that's great. If you can't share some videos and kind of come together and have a little bit of a, you know, working lunch or a workshop, I would highly encourage like a Slack channel.
00;41;12;22 - 00;41;31;08
Seth Odell
Like we have some very tactical things. We got everybody chat, CBT teams, account accounts set up. We set up a Slack channel for everyone to share what they're doing with AI. We set up a can of Home A.I. directory where we all track the different tools that we've looked at. So even if we look at a tool and it's not working, we're able to document that and say, Look, I explored this tool at this time and it didn't work.
00;41;31;15 - 00;41;51;19
Seth Odell
So we're sort of like trying to like, pick our way through this world a little bit. And then like we had a team retreat and I had an AI showcase where I just said open called anybody in the organization. If you've been using AI and have interesting things you want to show you all get five minute TED talks and we have like seven or eight people who all got up and some of them were funny and some of them were very tactical and some of them were like really in the weeds, some over 30,000 feet.
00;41;51;26 - 00;42;11;11
Seth Odell
And it was just like, I think showing the organization that this is a priority. You know, it's not a priority that like I didn't set up a mandate to use AI in any specific way or anything. But like what what I want to show you all is that your peers are doing this because I do not believe AI is going to fundamentally replace jobs, but I believe people that use AI really well.
00;42;11;11 - 00;42;29;14
Seth Odell
WILL And what I mean by that is like an editor that understands how to use AI really well in three or four years is going to be able to produce better work faster than an editor that doesn't use it at all. And so that editor will replace an editor who isn't leveraging the tools. And so it's like you don't need to wake up and think your whole job's going to be displaced, but you should be concerned.
00;42;29;14 - 00;42;46;25
Seth Odell
It's very similar to me. It's like when social media came out, like if you're a marketer in 2010, 11, 12, 13 that wasn't fully in on social media, you started to be looked at as a traditional marketer, like you sort of missed this wave. And I only say that for my story because I was at UCLA 2007 to 11 and I was very early adopter on social media.
00;42;47;01 - 00;43;11;14
Seth Odell
And so I all of a sudden got this disproportionate influence within the organization because even though I was young, I knew more about social media marketing than most of my very senior and experienced peers. That's going to play out here. It probably demonstrably larger and more influential. And so it's like, whatever your role is, marketing or enrollment or you're creative, there's going to be someone that does your role today in three or four or five years that understands the landscape of how the tools can be leveraged.
00;43;11;21 - 00;43;37;22
Seth Odell
That can be, you. And that's the most exciting career opportunity. If it's not you, you will face career headwinds. And so I think this like, let's not be scared of that. That's not here today. Let's just explore and let's ideally, you know, leverage the tools available. And then the final one is, if you're a boss, like free up budget as much as possible, one of the things that's been easy money for me to do has been I've done some large initiatives, but for my team, it's this is why I want to sign up for this tool for 20 bucks.
00;43;37;22 - 00;43;45;17
Seth Odell
Done. You got it. This tool for 50 bucks, Skunk. Got it as much as possible. I'm trying to greenlight that. Like, budget will not be the constraint to exploration.
00;43;46;06 - 00;44;03;15
John Azoni
Yeah, that's great. I take that for granted because, you know, as the owner of my company, I'm the one primarily using these tools. I'm just like, yeah, let's sign up. Let's yet. But if you were like in a more bureaucratic system, we're here to get approval for everything. It's going to slow the rate of growth so much and I mean frustrating.
00;44;03;25 - 00;44;20;00
Seth Odell
Just to put it in full transparency. So like I stood up in front of the team in January at our team retreat and I said, like, we are going to become an AI enabled agency is the way I positioned it. We're not going become an agency, but going to be AI enabled, which means we're going to leverage AI and in the places that make the most sense to help us do the best work possible and push the mission forward.
00;44;20;08 - 00;44;35;13
Seth Odell
And I committed to spend $50,000 in 2025 on AI enablement, and it's July 15th. I've already I've already exceeded that with a little crazy, but it's like that was a big number and I didn't need to do that. But as the owner of the business, I can kind of make that call. That's how big of a deal this is to me.
00;44;35;18 - 00;44;48;25
Seth Odell
I'm going to treat it like we're hiring another employee and that's the level of investment we're going to make. And I felt like I needed to do that to the team. So they their mindset shifted from like, Oh, so you mean Greenlight on anything we want to do? And I'm like, Yes, as I can, if nothing else, train on my dollars.
00;44;48;25 - 00;45;05;22
Seth Odell
So even if you go on in your own career in a year or two, like you will be farther advanced than other people and I will have helped you get there. And hopefully everybody stays and we have a great time together. But like if nothing and I think I help people realize, like if nothing else, like I'm going to try to tool you up faster than your competitors or your peers and that should, at a minimum be beneficial to you.
00;45;05;28 - 00;45;10;22
Seth Odell
And ideally, we're going to find a way to leverage the tool so it's beneficial for all of us and we're actually producing better work.
00;45;10;22 - 00;45;17;21
John Azoni
Yeah, I love it, man. Super great conversation and I think that's a great place for us to stop working. People connect with you that have questions.
00;45;18;00 - 00;45;41;10
Seth Odell
Yeah, totally. So I'm on LinkedIn at Seth Odell. That's probably the best place to find me. I'm super active there. I got a weekly newsletter or just go to can a home, economists can Macomb and you can always find me there as well. I just encouraged thanks for having this conversation because I think so often this is tackled by people who are all in or all against and like, I think we're like we're just kind of floating down the river of I figure in this thing out.
00;45;41;10 - 00;45;50;20
Seth Odell
And I think that that is the best place to be. And I would encourage more people to jump in with us and kind of like figure this out together. So hopefully people that did listen through don't feel overwhelmed, but definitely lean in and.
00;45;51;04 - 00;45;52;29
John Azoni
Love it. All right. Thanks for being here, man.
00;45;53;07 - 00;45;54;08
Seth Odell
Yeah. Thanks so much. Love it.
