EMILY HIRSH: “One of the things that I think is the biggest misunderstanding, though, is it doesn't fully, like, take away the job. You still need copywriters, and it is for sure not in a place where it can just spit out great copy first try. What we found is if you can feed it, let's say you have copy you wrote that's really good, ad-copy email, and you want to produce more like that, then it does a pretty good job because you do have to train it a little bit. And you can say, like, let's say you submit it, ‘Hey, write me an email about x, y, z,’ and it comes back. You can go back to it and say, ‘Make that funnier,’ or ‘Make that a softer tone,’ or ‘Add in some humor,’ or whatever you want. You also can say, ‘Here's an email. Write me another one from x, y, z angle.’
“And so it needs to be fed a foundation, which is where the strength and the skills of copywriters still are going to always be there is because the AI is just kind of reproducing. It's not a strategic tool. I mean, it is a strategic tool, but it's not coming up with the strategy; it's not coming up with the angles. It's your job to feed it that, and then how good you do that is how good it produces its output.”
INTRO: I’m Amy Porterfield, ex-corporate girl turned CEO of a multi-seven-figure business. But it wasn't all that long ago that I lacked the confidence, the budget, and the time to focus on growing my small-but-mighty business. Fast forward past many failed attempts and lessons learned, and you'll see the business I have today, one that changes lives and gives me more freedom than I ever thought possible, one that used to only exist as a daydream. I created the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast to give you simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies to help you do the same. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, or one in the making, who's looking to create a business that makes an impact and a life you love, you're in the right place, friend. Let's get started.
AMY PORTERFIELD: I need to tell you about a podcast that I love. It's called Imperfect Action, it's hosted by Steph Taylor, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it's a bite-sized online-marketing podcast for business owners. So Steph is going to answer all of your business-marketing questions and deep dives into all things online marketing, content marketing, social-media marketing, and marketing strategy for business owners. So if you love Online Marketing Made Easy, I think you're going to love Imperfect Action as well. I loved her recent episode about how to turn your audience into paying clients. Uh, yes, please. And she talks about how to use better call to actions, streamline your sales funnel, and so much more. You can listen to Imperfect Action wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to another episode of Online Marketing Made Easy.
I think we can all agree that since late 2022 ChatGPT has been all the hype. Am I right? But the real question is, is the hype really worth it? And can we ignore it as entrepreneurs? Now my take: no, we cannot ignore this. And while you may have mixed feelings about using AI in your business, just like my team did, I think we can all be far more excited than intimidated when we think about using it as an entrepreneur. My team has definitely been playing around with AI. From podcast scripts to ad copy to show-notes copy, we’ve definitely been dabbling.
So consider this your AI ChatGPT 101 training because we are just going to start the conversation here. And if you like this conversation and you want to go deeper and you want to continue the conversation, let me know on Instagram, in my DMs, and say, “Let's do more of that. Let's dive deeper.” So I want you to hit me up on Instagram DMs if you like this episode and you want more. But we're just going to scratch the surface and start the conversation today, which I think is exactly where we need to start.
The exciting thing is that we're only learning more and improving how we use this tool over time. So if we get the conversation started, and we get some tips and tricks on how to use it, how to train our AI to do what we want, who knows where we might lead with this. So I just really want this episode to get you excited to try it out, really get in there and get going, and then see for yourself how you feel about it.
Now, I wanted to bring you a conversation about ChatGPT and using AI in your business. However, I'm no expert in this matter. So I invited an old friend to come on and share her experience. So I want you to help me welcome my guest, Emily Hirsh, who is a repeat guest from 2021, and she runs a marketing agency that has been testing AI since it came out in 2022, especially in relation to marketing. As a side note, I used to use Emily's ad agency, and they did amazing things for my company until I decided to bring an in-house ad rep to my team, so we stopped using an agency. But she was absolutely crushing it, and I just love her team so much.
Now, as for this AI thing, Emily and I know that many of you are probably wondering, how can I use it in my business? What's the future of entrepreneurship with AI? What should I be aware of? Are there any red flags? So that's why I wanted to bring Emily on to share what she's found in her months of testing.
And, also, she's been in the marketing and ads world for many years now, and she's an expert when it comes to all things marketing and strategy, so she has a unique perspective on how this can work inside our businesses. And we're going to dive deep into how you can use AI. She's got lots of examples to share with us and, also, different ways that we are seeing AI being used beyond just churning out copy for us. We're also going to talk about what AI is going to replace and not replace, what it will impact, how it will make life easier, and how to embrace it versus fear it.
This is a much-needed conversation, so I can't wait to dive in. Let's do this.
Well, hey, there, Emily. Welcome back to the show.
EMILY: Yay, thanks for having me.
AMY: I am looking forward to diving into all things AI today. But for those that might not know you yet, tell everybody a little bit about yourself and what you do.
EMILY: Yeah. So I'm the founder of Hirsh Marketing, which is a marketing company that specializes in helping influencers, people with digital products, with developing their marketing strategy, and then actually executing it on paid ads to get traffic into their funnel.
AMY: Your team is really, really good. As I said in the intro, we used to work together before I brought it in full time in-house, and you all are kicking butt over there.
But today we're not necessarily talking about paid ads because I follow you, of course, on social. And one day I saw you talking about AI, and you have a really good understanding of what's going on. And I thought, that's the girl that I want to get to talk about this on my show. So I wanted to talk about this topic for a while. It is a hot topic, and so many people listening, they just don't know enough about it, and they haven't gotten started.
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: So I hope that this episode is the catalyst for them to dive in, play around, see what it can do.
So if you're cool, can we start at the top?
EMILY: Yeah. Let’s do it.
AMY: Okay. So I think the most important question my audience wants to hear is, what is OpenAI, and how can entrepreneurs use it to support them in creating things like video scripts and podcasts and copy and graphics and even SOPs and social media and all of that? So can you walk us through what it is? And then, really, I'm looking for a step by step, exactly how you've done this in your business, like, let's say with copy or whatever.
EMILY: Yeah. So OpenAI is what all these many kinds of software are being built on top of. So basically, anybody can build a software on top of OpenAI, and it uses their AI technology and knowledge. And so the biggest one being ChatGPT, that launch, maybe it was, like, three or four months ago, is built on top of OpenAI. And so that one specifically can do a lot of things. It's kind of like, I guess, a very advanced Google, but then it spits back answers and copy and SOPs to you. So we can talk more deeply about that one because it's probably one of the most advanced ones that there is.
But there’s also a lot of different mini AI platforms. There's one that you can make come to all your meetings, and it will just take notes for you. There's one that you can submit, like, let's say you have a twenty-minute-long video, and it will chop it up into clips, like, within a matter of a minute for you. There's even Descript, which is a common podcast-editing, transcript platform. You can actually replace, let's say you say something wrong in a podcast. You can have it take your voice and replace the word that you want it to say—
AMY: What!?
EMILY: —in there. Yeah. So there's a lot of platforms that are and will continue to come out because of the potential of open AI. So it's impacting marketing a ton, obviously, because of copy and creative podcast content, which I think if you had asked a lot of people five years ago, it was the opposite. People thought, oh, AI’s going to take over kind of like customer-service jobs and those type of things. But it's actually really had a huge impact into the creative world, which there's a lot of opinions around that, and probably fear, too, around that. So we can touch on that, too.
AMY: Talk to me. Let's actually start there a little bit. What is the fear of AI that's coming up for people?
EMILY: You know, obviously, like, copywriters and designers probably feel a little bit threatened, and I think naturally so, when something comes out, and it's like, oh, now it can write “good copy” in seconds where that used to take a day for you to write. So it's big changes. And I think, one, the fear is replacing those people that that's been their craft for a long time.
The second one is there's a lot of people who see AI as kind of like stealing work, right? because the way AI works is you feed it. So you're feeding it copy and prompts and different things, and then it basically takes that and gets stronger because it learns from it. And so it is taking a mixture of what's being fed to it, plus everything that's on the Internet, and, basically, outputting what it outputs. And so there's some people who feel like it's stealing from that.
And so I think naturally with big changes, there's fear. But as we know in marketing and, like, technology is it changes rapidly. And so I feel like we have to lean into how do we work with AI and leverage it. And I have thoughts specifically on copywriters and the people that maybe right now feel the most threatened to actually use it to your advantage, because the reality is it's already here. Like, it's been being worked on for a decade or more, and now it's here. And so we can lean into it, or we can be afraid of it. But in the next two years, it's going to be a non-negotiable that you're using it, in my opinion.
AMY: Ooh. I think you're absolutely right, so I'm glad we're having this conversation.
So, okay. I have so many questions, and we'll get to all of them, but walk me through exactly how you've used it in your business for copy.
EMILY: Yeah. Yeah. So all my copywriters—we have three full-time copywriters—use ChatGPT. And I really pushed it and challenged it in the beginning because what I explained to them is as a CEO in the future, in the soon future, a copywriter who's leveraging AI is actually going to be more valuable to me than a copywriter who's not, because you're going to be more productive. You're going to be able to produce more. So our copywriters use it for ad copy, emails, sales pages, opt-in pages. It's really great for, like, come up with a couple of video ideas or headlines, which are really hard for people to come up with.
One of the things that I think is the biggest misunderstanding, though, is it doesn't fully, like, take away the job. You still need copywriters, and it is for sure not in a place where it can just spit out great copy first try. What we found is if you can feed it, let's say you have copy you wrote that's really good, ad-copy email, and you want to produce more like that, then it does a pretty good job because you do have to train it a little bit. And you can say, like, let's say you submit it, “Hey, write me an email about x, y, z,” and it comes back. You can go back to it and say, “Make that funnier,” or “Make that a softer tone,” or “Add in some humor,” or whatever you want. You also can say, “Here's an email. Write me another one from x, y, z angle.”
And so it needs to be fed a foundation, which is where the strength and the skills of copywriters still are going to always be there is because the AI is just kind of reproducing. It's not a strategic tool. I mean, it is a strategic tool, but it's not coming up with the strategy; it's not coming up with the angles. It's your job to feed it that, and then how good you do that is how good it produces its output.
AMY: I'm catching this conversation with you when I'm very, very new at this. And the one thing I didn't know is that you could actually say, “Write me an email like this one,”—
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: —and I actually copy and paste an email I wrote that did well; I copy and paste it into that search-bar thing?
EMILY: Yep. Yeah, exactly.
AMY: But then what am I asking it to do? “Write me an email like this, but make it about that”?
EMILY: Or you could say, “But change it to be more funny,” or “Add in a story about how Julie had a successful launch,” or something. And it will, you know, put something out that maybe, then, you tweak that a little bit. But it's taking that baseline. Or you could even—I mean, we've even put ad copy that did really well and say, “Write three more versions of ad copy like this that are different.”
AMY: Ooh, that's incredible, right there.
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: Okay. I love all these ideas. I want to flood people today. Any ideas you have of how to use it, as we're sharing and you answering all these questions, throw it in there because I want people to see how much it really can do.
EMILY: Yeah, yeah.
AMY: I think that's awesome. So this idea of training your AI, my understanding, because I played around with it a little bit, is you are creating your own account—so you're in your own account for ChatGPT—and so as you train it, that's your account. It's getting used to you and what you're putting in.
EMILY: Yeah. And it remembers. And then if you do have, let's say you want to write, and let's say you have two businesses or something, and, like, for us, we have multiple clients, you actually can create folders within it for each client or business if you want to train it on multiple voices.
AMY: Wow. Okay, that's really cool as well.
Okay. One of the biggest questions I had when I started playing around with it is that, is it giving everybody the same thing? So if I typed in—I have a student, so I used her as an example—she teaches women over forty how to get better sleep—
EMILY: Mm-hmm.
AMY: —“Write me a blog post about women over forty, how to get better sleep,” if I wrote that and you wrote that in, and we were both brand new too, as we had never trained it or fed it anything, would it give us the same blog post?
EMILY: It doesn't. So I've tried that on two accounts, and so it does give different answers. I've also tried, like, what if you run it through one of those, like, plagiarism tests? And it doesn't; it passes the test. So it's putting out unique things each time.
AMY: Okay. You guys can't see my face, but I am very blown away by that. So I guess my question with that, then, is as people start using AI more and more, how do you think a team can work with it to make sure they aren't just using it in a really generic way? Ask it to write a blog post, it spits one out, and you just post it on your site? I feel like that feels very irresponsible and reckless, so can you help me kind of, how do you use this without making it so generic or cookie cutter?
EMILY: Yeah. So the power in it is, honestly, the questions that you ask it. And it's learning the skill of what you asked it. And so, like, when my copywriters started to first use it, they had the feedback of, like, “This is different than I've ever done before because usually I write the copy.” I'm not, like, training a copywriter or asking those questions. So the best thing is to practice.
And I think that what I've witnessed with people with AI is it is overwhelming because at first, like, it's you go through this cycle. You're like, “Oh my gosh. This is so cool,” and you're on it, like, every day, and it's so exciting. And then you’re like, “Well, it’s actually taking me more time, like, playing around with this than it would if I maybe just did it myself.” And then people kind of stop using it. But I think using it and playing with it and learning what questions to ask it and not being afraid of, like, oh, it might spit out something terrible, or it might spit out something good.
And so how you create it to not be generic is you get it to refine—you either feed it something good that's already yours, or you get it to refine based on what you want. Like, I have a very direct tone. So we will take my copy and then say, “Now make this more direct in the messaging.” You, Amy, have a more softer tone, a lighter tone, so you might take something and then say, “Make this a little lighter, not corporate talk,” or that's something I've actually told it before, because it will spit out a lot of, like, corporate, official language, and so you have to correct it.
So the power and the effectiveness is in the questions you ask it, and that's how you make it really custom. And so it's going through the process of learning what is your voice that you want? Is it lighter? Is it more direct? Is it funny? Is it more professional and corporate sounding? and playing with that to get it to learn your voice.
AMY: Gotcha. Okay. That makes perfect sense.
All right. So my next question for you is, what are some other ways AI is going to impact the marketing industry? Like, what other updates should we be aware of as entrepreneurs?
EMILY: Yeah. So I feel like every business and individual who doesn't start leveraging AI over the next two to five years will be replaced by the people and businesses who are, because the reality is we think right now it could save a copywriter, like, 30 percent of their time. So we're going to have this period of time—my guess is, like, two years, but that's a guess—where copywriting is still kind of the same. You're paying the same for it. People can either use AI or not use AI, and they're still going to be okay. But over time what will happen is all the copywriters who start using AI now are producing more. So then, the cost of copy is going to go down, but they are producing more, so it evens out, right? But if you're somebody who doesn't leverage it, you're going to find yourself really behind from all the copywriters who are.
And so it's the same thing. You know, I look at my business, and when I first found out about AI, I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Like, I didn't sleep for, like, four days of just the impact of it. And, like, I have kids, and I’m like, “This is going to change everything.”
AMY: Yeah.
EMILY: And so I've looked at it and asked myself, like, what is AI going to replace? And I do think we will get to a point where managing your ads can be somewhat managed by AI. Same with copy. So it's looking at, where is it going to go, and how do you stay ahead of that? We can't predict the future, for sure, but we need to start leveraging it to our advantage. And I do think the next couple of years will be, like, a golden age, where the people who do leverage it are way ahead, and they're able to produce more and charge the same until that shift happens, where it's going to be a non-negotiable.
In marketing, though, in my opinion, humans will never be fully replaced because AI can't really do strategy to the level that somebody critically thinking could do, right? It has to be fed. So I'm, in my business, looking at, okay, what is the most important thing that we continue to do with our process? And then, how do we become more efficient using AI? And that's how I have my team look at is from an efficiency standpoint. What AI tools could you use to do your job and use it to leverage to be efficient?
One more thing on that is I also think that it will devalue things like copy, right? And you will, people will—and content, even. People will start to potentially look at content as, like, if you could tell AI to write a book for you, then how are you going to know if a book is AI written or written by somebody? So the value of non-AI-generated content will probably go up because people will want non-AI-generated content, and they will connect with that more. And so having that authentic content, the value will probably go up because AI’s going to devalue everything else that's being produced by AI.
AMY: Whoa. That's kind of deep. And then, there's that big question of, how are people even going to know if it's AI or my eye?
EMILY: Yeah. And then there's also the question of, are they going to maybe prefer AI because it's smarter than—
AMY: Right?
EMILY: —us. Like, we don't know exactly how it will play out. But I do believe that humans can never be replaced by a machine. Like, you need human touch; you need relationships. I also think things like real relationships are going to continue to increase in value, and it always is important in business, but if customer-service reps or even sales reps start getting replaced by AI, I think that that human connection and figuring out how to have that in your business online is going to be really important to still have.
AMY: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I love having these conversations. It's going to be fun, Emily, like, in a year, I'll bring you back—
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: —and we’re going to, like, look at what we looked at here.
Emily, have you ever seen the Today show with Katie Couric and a few others talking about what the Internet is?
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: Have you ever seen that?
EMILY: Yes, yeah.
AMY: Okay. If you guys haven’t seen it, I will try to look for it. The day this episode comes out, I'm going to look for the little clip where they're like, “What is that at sign?”
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: “What does it do? Www?”
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: Like, it was wild how much they did not know and how much it is now part of their life. And so I'm really curious what that's going to look like even a year from now. It's kind of going to be exciting, so I love that we're having this conversation.
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You touched on this a little; I want to go back to it. Let's talk about what we might see most impacted from AI and what definitely will not be replaced. I know you said—and I know you already touched on this—but you were saying you don't think it's going to replace human interaction. And I get that. Talk a little bit about why it's not going to replace strategy or ideation or other things that it won't replace.
EMILY: Yeah. And this is an opinion. Like, there are some people who think, “Oh, I'll be able to type in AI and say, ‘Build me a million-dollar business,’ and it'll spit out a strategy.” I just don't think that it can fully replace human critical thinking, right? because an AI is only as strong as what it's fed, and it's being fed information, and then it's building on that information. Yes, it's going to get really strong, but I think it will always need to have that level of critical thinking, of taking into consideration, “Well, we tried that, and that didn't work,” or “This needs to be customized.” And so I also don't think it will ever fully replace copywriters. I just think the role of a copywriter is going to change, where all copywriters use AI.
So I think right now, like, the biggest impact AI is having is actually on creatives, it's on copywriters, it's on designers. There's AIs that can produce video and produce graphics. There's, obviously, assistants, like note taking. I mean, you can take an email from customer service and literally put it in and say, “Write me a response,” and then it’ll write a pretty great response that saves half the time.
AMY: That's what I was going to ask you. How does it affect—my mind is little around that. My mind doesn't catch on to things as fast as, like, yours does around stuff like this. So I was, like, customer service, sales reps, I don't understand. If you're on a sales call with someone, it's not going to replace that.
EMILY: Well, so, there already exists some AI voices that sound like people.
AMY: Geez.
EMILY: So picture this. You have, let's say you have fifty sales-call recordings because you run a high-ticket program. You feed your AI all of those recordings, and within minutes, it builds an automatic script that, then, the AI voice talks and says. And Google already has this AI that I don't think they've released yet, where it can do that. And so eventually, yeah, sales reps, customer service, could be fully replaced. However, something has to feed it still, right? You still need the original sales calls. You still need the emails that you've responded to and how to respond to things to create it.
And so I think that's relatively far away, like, maybe in the next couple of years. But I do know there's already AI of people who have, like, appointment setters in the DMs and an AI responding. And I mean, it has some ways to go. It's not even near perfect right now, but it's just a matter of refining it until it gets there.
And so for customer service, you can take an email, put it in AI, and say, “Type me a response to this that has an apologetic tone,” or something. And it will at least give you a draft, and then it's easy for you to change it. So that could cut down half the time you’re spending responding to emails.
AMY: Absolutely, absolutely.
EMILY: Yeah. So I think that the roles of all, you know, copywriters, designers, video editors, social-media managers, my entire company, is all going to change to learn how to work with AI. And then there will be new roles that are created.
AMY: I think it's really cool that what you said, where you're making it your mission to figure out how your company can work with AI, because I think there are some people that are listening that won't even touch it, and they're just going to be, like, cover their eyes, cover their ears. “It's not for me. It feels too techie. It feels too artificial,” which is what it is.
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: And so they're going to ignore it; where I think your message is important today: we can't ignore it. It is absolutely like—in my masterclass, where I just touched on it, Bill Gates is, like, it's as important as the Internet was, and it's moving faster than anything he's ever seen.
EMILY: Mm-hmm.
AMY: And I think people like that, we need to pay attention. He knows what the heck he's talking about, and we can't ignore it. So instead of being afraid of it, or maybe this is too foreign or too weird for us, how can maybe it work within our business? And I love that you're doing that. My business absolutely is going to start doing that. So I appreciate you kind of talking about that, because I think it's important.
But I have a few more questions.
EMILY: Yeah.
AMY: Okay, okay. I think a big thing many entrepreneurs might be wondering is, how is AI going to impact their bottom line? So we talked about just touching their business, but now talk about money. Is it going to shake up where they delegate their expenses? And if so, how? Like, what do you have to say about the bottom line?
EMILY: Yeah. So I think initially, the next couple of years, there's going to be an opportunity to kind of lean up your business and improve your margins, because if you think, “Okay. I have a copywriter full time, and they can produce x, y, z, now they can produce 30 percent more.” And again, you can still charge the same or keep things the same in terms of what you're charging, because AI, essentially, can increase efficiency. It can increase capacity, output capacity, of an individual person when used right. And so there will be this, I think, this, like, golden age of, my guess is, like, the next two years, where it is going to take some time that every company and every person is using AI. So in the meantime, if you're using it, you're producing more but able to charge the same.
I have already been able to increase capacity of my copywriters, which, obviously, lessens cost of copywriters. Now, I do think in the next two to five years the cost of copy is going to go down. That is the reality, right? because if people learn, “Oh, I could get AI to produce this for me,” they're not going to pay the same, which copy historically is a very expensive thing to buy because copywriters are so talented. So if you don't lean in now, when it gets to that point that the price of copy goes down or whatever your business and skill set is that you're producing, then you'll be behind because you won’t be able to charge the same, and it could be very damaging for your business. So I think it's looking at now, where is there opportunity for me to create efficiency in my business with AI, which, obviously, improves margins?
Also, for those of you in the audience who are solopreneurs, you know, as you know with marketing, it's, like, constantly overwhelming. I can't write all the blog posts. I can't write all the emails. I can't write all the social posts. This is an opportunity for you now to produce more with less time, which is huge.
AMY: Yes. Absolutely. Totally agree with that.
Tell me this. So what am I missing? So because I'm so new at this and why I wanted to bring you on because you're way more advanced in how you're thinking about all of this, what did we miss? What other pieces of the AI conversation are important that we all should be having?
EMILY: Yeah. I mean, I do think one thing we didn't touch on is the roles I think it might create. And I do see a huge opportunity for companies to actually be hiring AI trainers for their companies. So let's say you want to train an AI to write really good copy. I don't envision CEOs wanting to do that. Like, I personally don't use ChatGPT very much. My team does because they're producing the output. So if you're producing output, you should use ChatGPT, but otherwise, it's really the team. And that's why I don't see ChatGPT fully replacing copywriters, because CEOs are still not going to want to be typing into ChatGPT, and taking emails and putting them in a document, and all those things. So it will create an opportunity of people to train an AI to do the sales calls, for example, to be the customer-service rep, to be the marketing copywriter, to produce the videos and write the scripts. And so you can either mold that into what you're doing potentially, or it is going to create those roles and change all of those roles to be working with AI.
AMY: Ooh, that makes sense. And that's kind of exciting to see some new roles popping up because of this. So I didn't really even think of that angle.
I think overall I loved that you shared that we can't be fearful of it. It's normal in the beginning for some roles to be fearful of it, but how can we work with it? How can we take advantage of it? How can it maybe help our bottom line and streamline some expenses? That all is very exciting. So for someone that's listening and they're just getting started, where the heck do they even go?
EMILY: So I would start with ChatGPT and go there because it's probably the most advanced of them and probably can do the most. And honestly, my advice to people is set aside, like, maybe it's an hour a week or something that is to just play with AI, to just ask the questions. because I think the power comes into asking yourself, “Could I use AI to help me with this? How could I streamline this? How could I create efficiency with this?”
And there's a lot of play that has to happen right now to learn it. And it kind of, you go through that process where it kind of feels inefficient at first because you don't know what you're doing, so you're like, “Okay. I just wasted ten minutes talking to this ChatGPT, and it didn't produce what I wanted. I'm just going to go do it anyways.” And so I'm seeing that the people, even on my team, like, willing to just kind of play with it and test things and almost, like, have fun with it, are getting farther because they're exploring, and they're coming up with new ideas.
From there, you can ask, “Okay. Is there an AI that can do x, y, z,?” and maybe test a few different platforms. I did have my team do that. I said, “I'm challenging all of you to figure out what AI you could do to create more efficiency in your role.” And I feel like that's doing them a good thing because it's making them learn AI before it's essential that they learn it. So I would set aside time to play with it, but I wouldn't have the expectation of, like, “Oh, I never have to write copy again,” or “I never have to create a social-media post,” because I've also seen the flip side if people go really extreme, and then their content and their copy goes really bland, and it's not good. And so you can’t go into it with the expectation that it's going to fully just do everything for you; you'll be disappointed. But focus on that efficiency. How can I work with the AI?
And then, you know, as a business owner, if you're a business owner, it's thinking about the future of, how will this impact my business? And actually, just asking that question, sitting with it, and thinking about it, because we don't know. Like, we can't predict the future. But for me, I look at, okay, well, I think AI could probably start managing ads in the near future. That's obviously a big deal for my company because we manage ads. And so what does that mean? How do I work with it? How do I protect myself? and not coming at it at all from a fear based because we can't control it, and we can only control our actions, and we will always adapt to what comes; but coming at it from more curiosity, excitement. Because it's something new, I do believe it will probably be the biggest thing in our life. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know yet. We’ll watch this in a few years and decide. But coming at it with that curiosity and just taking time right now to be curious, and it's all about the questions you ask.
AMY: Yes, absolutely.
Well, Emily, I'm so glad you popped in here to give us our AI 101. And where can people learn more about you, especially if they want to work with you?
EMILY: Yeah. So my website, Hirsh Marketing, which is H-I-R-S-H, hirshmarketing.com has everything you can find. I've got my podcast, which is the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, which is pretty marketing focused. Sometimes I talk about AI, but marketing focus so you can tune in there. And otherwise, find me on social media.
AMY: Perfect.
Thanks so much, Emily.
EMILY: Thanks for having me.
AMY: All right, my friend. There you have it. The future is coming at us, one hundred miles per hour, and all we can do is embrace it and use it to our advantage. I hope this conversation around AI and ChatGPT has cleared up some questions you may have had, and I hope you get excited to lean into it and at least start experimenting, testing, and as Emily said, play around with it.
I think my most favorite part of this conversation is that Emily really pointed out that you have to experiment, you have to play around with it, and the copywriters on her team that were really embracing it, they are the ones excelling. And for so long, for many years in my business, I'm never an early adopter, I never jump on things quickly, and I kind of stay on the sidelines of new technology and new development to kind of see how they're going to play out. And I feel like we're still so early enough that you could get in there, and you can become incredibly knowledgeable about AI in your industry. And it will give you a competitive advantage. It's still so very early.
Imagine, let's say—I'm just making this up. I always use this example—let's say you are a dog trainer, and you have started to dabble with AI, not just ChatGPT, but other things that AI can do, and you’ve found ways that it can help other dog trainers. So all of a sudden, you start getting interviewed on podcasts and YouTube channels about how you used AI as a dog trainer and how other dog trainers can do the same. You've just opened up new opportunities to get interviewed, for people to talk about you. That's an opportunity happening right now, but you have to jump on it. So it's just kind of another take on that. But who knows? This might be something you become really good at, and people are asking you to jump on their podcast to talk about it as well.
All right. So I want you to jump into my DMs. Let me know if you liked this episode, and do you want to dive deeper? Do we want to explore this more, or you are you, like, “Amy, that's good enough. I got the information I needed. I'm good”? I'm just @amyporterfield on Instagram, so let me know.
All right, my friends. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you same time, same place next week. Bye for now.
