K
Katie Austin
Guest
ICYMI: Scott Snowden catches up with 10 Minute Martech on why AI should unlock creativity, not replace it.
“This is about realizing that you now have a capacity to unlock your own creativity at a pace and with an impact that has never been available before.”
In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Scott Snowden, Partner at Flywheel Strategic, joins host Sara Faatz to explore what AI adoption really looks like for organizations and why investing in the technology is only half the equation.
From the striking gap between investment in AI tools and investment in the people expected to use them, to AI-powered customer service, rapid prototyping and the growing importance of authentic storytelling, Scott argues that marketers shouldn’t be trying to keep pace with every new model or capability. Instead, the opportunity is to use AI to free people up for the creative, meaningful work that makes organizations distinctive.
Scott sees a fundamental tension emerging as businesses race to adopt AI.
Research from Flywheel Strategic’s Digital Momentum Project found that 84% of businesses are investing in AI tools, while only 14% are investing in their workforce. For Scott, those investments should be two sides of the same coin. Giving people access to powerful technology is one thing. Making sure they’re enabled to use it effectively is another.
The same principle applies to marketing.
Scott recalls attending an event where three different speakers used the same statistic after turning to ChatGPT for a compelling proof point. The experience reinforced the risk of allowing AI to flatten the ideas and perspectives that make brands distinctive.
His answer isn’t to use less AI. It’s to use it differently.
Create the original insight. Have the conversation. Develop the point of view. Then use AI to package, amplify and distribute it more effectively. For Scott, the real opportunity is using technology to give marketers more time to do the work that is genuinely meaningful.
Flywheel Strategic’s Digital Momentum Project found that 84% of businesses are investing in AI tools, compared with just 14% investing in their workforce.
Buying tools isn’t enough. Organizations also need to think about whether employees are being coached to use them effectively.
For a destination marketing organization with a lean team, an AI chatbot dramatically reduced the amount of time employees needed to spend staffing live chat.
For Mortgage Professionals of Canada, a similar implementation resulted in a 70% deflection rate across customer service and live chat engagement.
When everyone asks the same AI tools for ideas, marketers risk producing the same insights. The competitive advantage comes from bringing something authentic to the technology first.
Scott doesn’t believe the defining skill for marketers is mastering another piece of the tech stack. As AI becomes increasingly commoditized, storytelling and communication become more important.
Know your audience. Say something valuable. Build genuine relationships. Create a website that intentionally directs people toward useful information. Scott argues that getting those fundamentals right creates the signals modern discovery systems need.
Flywheel Strategic used AI-assisted “vibe coding” to build a working prototype of a financing platform integration in approximately two weeks—a process Scott says would otherwise have taken months just to reach the prototype stage.
In regulated environments, Scott advocates clearly defining AI-built solutions as proofs of concept or MVPs, using them to test adoption before formalizing the technology for enterprise use.
Successful AI projects aren’t about clients blindly trusting an agency or the technology. They’re about agreeing on a path, testing together and building confidence in the solution incrementally.
“Don’t try to keep up with all the latest developments and what is special about each LLM.”
Scott believes marketers are focusing on the wrong race.
The goal isn’t to maintain perfect knowledge of every model, platform or technological development. AI is giving marketers a new capacity to turn ideas into something tangible faster than before. The advantage comes from what they choose to create with that capacity—not how closely they follow every change in the technology itself.
For Scott, that means focusing less on keeping up with AI and more on using it to unlock creativity, experimentation and impact.
Scott doesn’t name a specific list of people or publications he follows during this conversation.
Instead, his perspective consistently returns to a broader source of inspiration: human creativity, communication and experimentation.
His message for marketers is to resist becoming consumed by the rapidly changing AI landscape. Rather than trying to master every new development, focus on telling better stories, understanding your audience, creating authentic content and experimenting with what AI now makes possible.
→ Watch on YouTube
→ Listen on Spotify
→ Find it on Apple Podcasts
Neil Tewari, Co-founder and CEO of Conversion, shares what he’s seeing as marketing teams move from manually managing campaigns to building AI-powered, agentic systems and why the teams getting the most from AI are focused on context, infrastructure and how data moves across their martech stack.
Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Scott’s conversation with Sara.
Sara: I’m Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
Scott: 84% of businesses are investing in the AI tools, and only 14% are investing in their workforce. Using AI from a martech perspective, you’ve got to balance it with that unique value proposition that you’re offering and authentic content.
So from a martech perspective, allowing you to get back to doing the kinds of things that’s actually more meaningful is the opportunity.
Sara: That’s Scott Snowden, partner at Flywheel Strategic. Let’s get started.
Well, Scott, it feels like every conversation in technology eventually comes back to AI changing customer expectations, the future of the martech stack, and you’ve been studying those shifts through the Digital Momentum Project. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and what you’ve learned so far?
Scott: Yeah. Thanks, Sara. The Digital Momentum Project came out of the fact that we were entering some really interesting conversations when we were talking about AI. We were seeing different postures from different people. Some people are really excited about it, leaning into it, wanting to do it as fast as they can, and other people being like, “I just don’t know where to start,” and whatnot.
And so we’re trying to get a real sense of what is that spectrum of readiness and enthusiasm, and to make sure that people, no matter where you are on that spectrum, understand that you’re not alone. And so that project was meant to survey digital experience managers and leaders and try and get a sense of where we’re all landing and how we’re all contending with this together.
Sara: Very interesting. Is there anything that you’ve learned that surprised you or was foundational to changes that you’ve made internally, or are you still… I know you’re still collecting data and analyzing it as you go, but I’m curious to see what you’ve learned so far.
Scott: Well, one of the things that we are using as a proxy for how fast are you embracing this is where are you spending your money?
How are you making your investments in AI? So we asked a question essentially like, where are you investing? And we found a fascinating result. 84% of businesses are investing in the AI tools, and only 14% are investing in their workforce. Now I kinda see that as two sides of the same coin because I’m excited.
I’m like, “Oh, great. We’ve got awesome people. They just need to be enabled with the right tools, and now they have them, and so they can be more productive with them.” But on the flip side, it’s like, are they being enabled properly? Are they being coached? Are they being encouraged? Are they being guided the right way when we’re just throwing these tools at them?
And to be honest, I think we’re seeing a little bit of that, a little bit of both of that. And so my thought there is just make sure you’re being really intentional about the spend and about the investment.
Sara: Really interesting. And, you know, with the way the token economy is changing, do you foresee that number shifting?
I mean, it was for a while, everybody just use AI as much as possible, and people were even being measured by their token usage. And now it’s like, “Well, wait a minute, this might be, maybe it’s not cost-effective for us to leverage AI.” Have you—are you seeing any of that as the data evolves and comes in over time?
Scott: We’re actually seeing a continued uptick in engagement and investment on those kinds of tools. I think that there were maybe those early adopters who wanted to beat their competitors and beat the market and made some early bets on those token budgets, and I think maybe that enthusiasm might be pulling back, but it is still just a fraction of all the companies and all the other folks that have yet to really lean into it.
And so that spend is only going to increase.
Sara: Yeah. Interesting. Well, speaking of early adopters, you have done some really interesting things with AI with some of your clients. I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about some of the cool things that you’ve done. Whether or not you can name names is really up to you, but I think our listeners would be really interested in learning more about some of the projects you’ve worked on.
Scott: A few quick examples. So we work for a destination marketing organization, a tourism outfit. It’s north of Toronto in the region of Barrie. They’ve got this lean team. They’ve got two or three staff that manage their whole entire digital experience. They had a live chat. They had to take turns staffing it six days a week.
And we put in a straightforward AI chatbot there, and it was contextualized, given the RAG information to understand just their own content. And it has completely deflect—not completely, but it’s had a dramatic deflection on the amount of time that those staff have to spend answering those live chat answers.
You can still get to a human if you want to, but now the AI has increased the adoption and the discovery of the information that’s on their website and allowed them to avoid having to work on Saturdays. We’ve done the same thing for another membership-based organization, the Mortgage Professionals of Canada, and they have found a 70% deflection rate in their customer service and their live chat engagement.
Two quick examples. We’ve done some other really sophisticated stuff that’s exciting me—to automate things like responding to an overwhelming number of Google reviews. Those are some really fun, quick proof points.
Sara: Yeah, that’s very cool. If somebody were to come to you today and say flat out, “Hey, I have a mandate for AI,” and maybe some of your clients are, “I don’t know what to do,” how would you coach them to think about AI in their martech stack?
Scott: Well, I’m glad you qualified it at the end there, in their martech stack.
Sara: Yes,
Scott: yeah. So—quick anecdote—you talked about the Digital Momentum Project and some of that research that we were doing. That project came out of the fact that I present and do some of my own events, and last year I was giving some information, I was presenting, and I left the event, and at the end of it, three other people had used the exact same statistic in one of their related conversations because they’d all gone into deep thinking mode and ChatGPT had given them the same awesome proof point for why digital marketing is gonna be so perfect for everybody, and I went, “Oh, no.”
And so we’re really trying to make sure that we can find ways to accelerate our own insights. And so using AI from a martech perspective, you’ve gotta balance it with that unique value proposition that you’re offering and authentic content. So what we’re doing here today, we’re having a live conversation, but then use AI to amplify, to share, to package that up, to help you get more amplification out of it.
I think it’s gonna allow us to do more of this kind of fun stuff, if you’re smart about it. So from a martech perspective, allowing you to get back to doing the kinds of things that’s actually more meaningful is the opportunity.
Sara: Yeah. What one skill set do you think a marketer should have today in the era that we’re living in?
Scott: Communication skills. It’s not a tech stack thing anymore. AI has actually kinda become a very commoditized tool for, for especially on the marketing front. So it’s now about really getting excited about storytelling, and thinking about how that works for the marketing staff.
I was talking to somebody earlier today who was like, “What do I need to know to make sure that my content ends up in the LLM?” And I’m like, “You don’t worry about it. You go back to basics. You tell your story, you get excited, you make sure that you’re sharing it, you make sure that you’re building a good network, you’re genuine, you’re authentic, and it will just naturally find its way into the LLM, because it’s a replacement for those human behaviors.”
Sara: Right. Now, that’s not to say that you don’t believe in SEO, AEO, or GEO, correct? Regardless of your—
Scott: Well…
Sara: acronym. Yeah.
Scott: Good, I believe that those things are emergent.
Sara: Okay.
Scott: And so, sure, you gotta make sure that there’s technical imperatives that you followed, and you got the right tagging, and you’ve got the right—but hey, if you need to speak about what you’re talking about, make sure you know who your audience is, make sure you’re saying something incredible, make sure you’re saying it in the right direction, make sure your website is built in a way that directs them intentionally towards what’s gonna help them.
And guess what, Sara? If you do that, you will have good SEO.
Sara: There you go. I love that.
Scott: Yeah.
Sara: And do you feel that the AEO and GEO follows, or is that a— Yeah. You know, what is your thought on— Even
Scott: more so.
Sara: Yeah. Okay.
Scott: Even more so. AEO in particular is now following those kinds of—I don’t wanna say algorithms, but patterns and signals.
We had to adopt our behavior as humans to figure out the SEO algorithm, and now we’re able to go back to behaviors that are more human.
Sara: Right. Yeah. I love that. And I do love—you and I have talked about, you shared some of the projects that you’ve worked on with some of your clients, and we’ve talked about others.
And I love the creativity. The one thing that I feel you’ve brought to the table in a lot of cases is that curiosity and that fearlessness when it comes to experimentation, and I don’t know if that’s coming directly from Flywheel or if that’s something that your clients are bringing to you, but I think it’s really refreshing, because there have been some really interesting projects.
Have you had one that’s just fun again? Sometimes work becomes, you know, work, but, is there one that you’re like, “Man, this has been a fun thing to work on”?
Scott: Well, we did a really cool thing recently. We stood up a working prototype of a financing platform, which doesn’t sound that fun, but it has to withstand all this rigor, and there’s this technical complexity to integrating with different systems.
But we were trying to showcase how insurance brokers could integrate with this financing platform, and we have all this dense technical documentation. Well, in about two weeks, we stood up a working prototype of an example of a broker’s management system that would do financing applications.
That’s something that would’ve otherwise taken months to just even set up as a prototype. We built it from a blank sheet of paper to a deployed solution in two weeks. Wow. It was so much fun to iterate on that—
Sara: Yeah…
Scott: with that client, yeah.
Sara: That is awesome, and for something like that, too, when you think about that, those industries are very regulated, right? So did you have—how did you get through that part of that’s probably the biggest concern for something like that. Did you guys—how did you approach that?
Scott: Yeah, so it’s important to recognize those boundaries. And those use cases that it’s for, and I do think in something like that, where we’re vibe coding, we were very clear about saying, "What we’re putting together is a working prototype.
This is a proof of concept. This is an MVP. This is something that will allow us to extend it and formalize it later, but we just wanna test the market. We just wanna evaluate adoption." We’ve got a proposal and we’re shaping a project for another client in a very similar fashion. They have this idea, it sounds good, they’re not sure how much it’s gonna get used.
I said, “Well, let’s do 80% of the solution really quickly using an AI vibe coding platform, and when we’re done, if you like it, we can actually hit a button, pull it into Visual Studio, tidy it up, formalize it, structure it more properly, and put a little bit more structure around it so that it’s something that we can maintain inside the enterprise on an ongoing basis.”
Sara: That’s awesome, and what you have to have, though, with that is trust, right? I mean, trust from your clients and trust in the vibe coding that you’re doing, that you know what you’re looking at and reading, right? And how—understanding what the code is actually doing.
Scott: And yes, absolutely.
You’re 100% correct, but it’s also about iterating your way through to that final result. And it’s not about them just having implicit trust in us or implicit trust in the technology. It’s about agreeing together with them on the path at which you’re gonna get there, and you’re gonna build up more and more trust and confidence in the solution, through, back to, again, a more agile approach to this kind of development.
It’s not just software development, but it’s idea development.
Sara: Right. I love that. Okay, one last question for you. Do you have a martech hot take?
Scott: My martech hot take is don’t try to keep up with all the latest developments and what is special about each LLM. This is not about trying to maintain pace with the changes in technology.
This is about realizing that you now have capacity to unlock your own creativity at a pace and with an impact that has never been available before.
Sara: Scott, thank you for your time. It was a pleasure, as always, to talk to you today.
Scott: Sara, appreciate it. Always a pleasure, thanks.
Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in.
Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.
Continue reading...
“This is about realizing that you now have a capacity to unlock your own creativity at a pace and with an impact that has never been available before.”
In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Scott Snowden, Partner at Flywheel Strategic, joins host Sara Faatz to explore what AI adoption really looks like for organizations and why investing in the technology is only half the equation.
From the striking gap between investment in AI tools and investment in the people expected to use them, to AI-powered customer service, rapid prototyping and the growing importance of authentic storytelling, Scott argues that marketers shouldn’t be trying to keep pace with every new model or capability. Instead, the opportunity is to use AI to free people up for the creative, meaningful work that makes organizations distinctive.
Scott’s Big Idea: AI Should Amplify What Makes You Different
Scott sees a fundamental tension emerging as businesses race to adopt AI.
Research from Flywheel Strategic’s Digital Momentum Project found that 84% of businesses are investing in AI tools, while only 14% are investing in their workforce. For Scott, those investments should be two sides of the same coin. Giving people access to powerful technology is one thing. Making sure they’re enabled to use it effectively is another.
The same principle applies to marketing.
Scott recalls attending an event where three different speakers used the same statistic after turning to ChatGPT for a compelling proof point. The experience reinforced the risk of allowing AI to flatten the ideas and perspectives that make brands distinctive.
His answer isn’t to use less AI. It’s to use it differently.
Create the original insight. Have the conversation. Develop the point of view. Then use AI to package, amplify and distribute it more effectively. For Scott, the real opportunity is using technology to give marketers more time to do the work that is genuinely meaningful.
Scott Snowden’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech
1. Businesses Are Investing in AI Faster Than Their People
Flywheel Strategic’s Digital Momentum Project found that 84% of businesses are investing in AI tools, compared with just 14% investing in their workforce.
2. AI Investment Needs to Be Intentional
Buying tools isn’t enough. Organizations also need to think about whether employees are being coached to use them effectively.
3. Simple AI Use Cases Can Deliver Meaningful Results
For a destination marketing organization with a lean team, an AI chatbot dramatically reduced the amount of time employees needed to spend staffing live chat.
4. AI Can Give People Their Time Back
For Mortgage Professionals of Canada, a similar implementation resulted in a 70% deflection rate across customer service and live chat engagement.
5. AI Should Amplify Original Thinking, Not Standardize It
When everyone asks the same AI tools for ideas, marketers risk producing the same insights. The competitive advantage comes from bringing something authentic to the technology first.
6. Communication Is the Skill Marketers Need Most
Scott doesn’t believe the defining skill for marketers is mastering another piece of the tech stack. As AI becomes increasingly commoditized, storytelling and communication become more important.
7. Good Marketing Fundamentals Still Matter for SEO, AEO and GEO
Know your audience. Say something valuable. Build genuine relationships. Create a website that intentionally directs people toward useful information. Scott argues that getting those fundamentals right creates the signals modern discovery systems need.
8. AI Can Compress Months of Prototyping into Weeks
Flywheel Strategic used AI-assisted “vibe coding” to build a working prototype of a financing platform integration in approximately two weeks—a process Scott says would otherwise have taken months just to reach the prototype stage.
9. Prototypes Don’t Need to Pretend to Be Finished Products
In regulated environments, Scott advocates clearly defining AI-built solutions as proofs of concept or MVPs, using them to test adoption before formalizing the technology for enterprise use.
10. Trust Is Built Through Iteration
Successful AI projects aren’t about clients blindly trusting an agency or the technology. They’re about agreeing on a path, testing together and building confidence in the solution incrementally.
Scott’s Martech Hot Take
“Don’t try to keep up with all the latest developments and what is special about each LLM.”
Scott believes marketers are focusing on the wrong race.
The goal isn’t to maintain perfect knowledge of every model, platform or technological development. AI is giving marketers a new capacity to turn ideas into something tangible faster than before. The advantage comes from what they choose to create with that capacity—not how closely they follow every change in the technology itself.
For Scott, that means focusing less on keeping up with AI and more on using it to unlock creativity, experimentation and impact.
Scott’s Inspiration List
Scott doesn’t name a specific list of people or publications he follows during this conversation.
Instead, his perspective consistently returns to a broader source of inspiration: human creativity, communication and experimentation.
His message for marketers is to resist becoming consumed by the rapidly changing AI landscape. Rather than trying to master every new development, focus on telling better stories, understanding your audience, creating authentic content and experimenting with what AI now makes possible.
Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode
→ Watch on YouTube
→ Listen on Spotify
→ Find it on Apple Podcasts
Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series
Neil Tewari, Co-founder and CEO of Conversion, shares what he’s seeing as marketing teams move from manually managing campaigns to building AI-powered, agentic systems and why the teams getting the most from AI are focused on context, infrastructure and how data moves across their martech stack.
Want to Keep Reading?
Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Scott’s conversation with Sara.
Sara: I’m Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. This is 10 Minute Martech.
Scott: 84% of businesses are investing in the AI tools, and only 14% are investing in their workforce. Using AI from a martech perspective, you’ve got to balance it with that unique value proposition that you’re offering and authentic content.
So from a martech perspective, allowing you to get back to doing the kinds of things that’s actually more meaningful is the opportunity.
Sara: That’s Scott Snowden, partner at Flywheel Strategic. Let’s get started.
Well, Scott, it feels like every conversation in technology eventually comes back to AI changing customer expectations, the future of the martech stack, and you’ve been studying those shifts through the Digital Momentum Project. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and what you’ve learned so far?
Scott: Yeah. Thanks, Sara. The Digital Momentum Project came out of the fact that we were entering some really interesting conversations when we were talking about AI. We were seeing different postures from different people. Some people are really excited about it, leaning into it, wanting to do it as fast as they can, and other people being like, “I just don’t know where to start,” and whatnot.
And so we’re trying to get a real sense of what is that spectrum of readiness and enthusiasm, and to make sure that people, no matter where you are on that spectrum, understand that you’re not alone. And so that project was meant to survey digital experience managers and leaders and try and get a sense of where we’re all landing and how we’re all contending with this together.
Sara: Very interesting. Is there anything that you’ve learned that surprised you or was foundational to changes that you’ve made internally, or are you still… I know you’re still collecting data and analyzing it as you go, but I’m curious to see what you’ve learned so far.
Scott: Well, one of the things that we are using as a proxy for how fast are you embracing this is where are you spending your money?
How are you making your investments in AI? So we asked a question essentially like, where are you investing? And we found a fascinating result. 84% of businesses are investing in the AI tools, and only 14% are investing in their workforce. Now I kinda see that as two sides of the same coin because I’m excited.
I’m like, “Oh, great. We’ve got awesome people. They just need to be enabled with the right tools, and now they have them, and so they can be more productive with them.” But on the flip side, it’s like, are they being enabled properly? Are they being coached? Are they being encouraged? Are they being guided the right way when we’re just throwing these tools at them?
And to be honest, I think we’re seeing a little bit of that, a little bit of both of that. And so my thought there is just make sure you’re being really intentional about the spend and about the investment.
Sara: Really interesting. And, you know, with the way the token economy is changing, do you foresee that number shifting?
I mean, it was for a while, everybody just use AI as much as possible, and people were even being measured by their token usage. And now it’s like, “Well, wait a minute, this might be, maybe it’s not cost-effective for us to leverage AI.” Have you—are you seeing any of that as the data evolves and comes in over time?
Scott: We’re actually seeing a continued uptick in engagement and investment on those kinds of tools. I think that there were maybe those early adopters who wanted to beat their competitors and beat the market and made some early bets on those token budgets, and I think maybe that enthusiasm might be pulling back, but it is still just a fraction of all the companies and all the other folks that have yet to really lean into it.
And so that spend is only going to increase.
Sara: Yeah. Interesting. Well, speaking of early adopters, you have done some really interesting things with AI with some of your clients. I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about some of the cool things that you’ve done. Whether or not you can name names is really up to you, but I think our listeners would be really interested in learning more about some of the projects you’ve worked on.
Scott: A few quick examples. So we work for a destination marketing organization, a tourism outfit. It’s north of Toronto in the region of Barrie. They’ve got this lean team. They’ve got two or three staff that manage their whole entire digital experience. They had a live chat. They had to take turns staffing it six days a week.
And we put in a straightforward AI chatbot there, and it was contextualized, given the RAG information to understand just their own content. And it has completely deflect—not completely, but it’s had a dramatic deflection on the amount of time that those staff have to spend answering those live chat answers.
You can still get to a human if you want to, but now the AI has increased the adoption and the discovery of the information that’s on their website and allowed them to avoid having to work on Saturdays. We’ve done the same thing for another membership-based organization, the Mortgage Professionals of Canada, and they have found a 70% deflection rate in their customer service and their live chat engagement.
Two quick examples. We’ve done some other really sophisticated stuff that’s exciting me—to automate things like responding to an overwhelming number of Google reviews. Those are some really fun, quick proof points.
Sara: Yeah, that’s very cool. If somebody were to come to you today and say flat out, “Hey, I have a mandate for AI,” and maybe some of your clients are, “I don’t know what to do,” how would you coach them to think about AI in their martech stack?
Scott: Well, I’m glad you qualified it at the end there, in their martech stack.
Sara: Yes,
Scott: yeah. So—quick anecdote—you talked about the Digital Momentum Project and some of that research that we were doing. That project came out of the fact that I present and do some of my own events, and last year I was giving some information, I was presenting, and I left the event, and at the end of it, three other people had used the exact same statistic in one of their related conversations because they’d all gone into deep thinking mode and ChatGPT had given them the same awesome proof point for why digital marketing is gonna be so perfect for everybody, and I went, “Oh, no.”
And so we’re really trying to make sure that we can find ways to accelerate our own insights. And so using AI from a martech perspective, you’ve gotta balance it with that unique value proposition that you’re offering and authentic content. So what we’re doing here today, we’re having a live conversation, but then use AI to amplify, to share, to package that up, to help you get more amplification out of it.
I think it’s gonna allow us to do more of this kind of fun stuff, if you’re smart about it. So from a martech perspective, allowing you to get back to doing the kinds of things that’s actually more meaningful is the opportunity.
Sara: Yeah. What one skill set do you think a marketer should have today in the era that we’re living in?
Scott: Communication skills. It’s not a tech stack thing anymore. AI has actually kinda become a very commoditized tool for, for especially on the marketing front. So it’s now about really getting excited about storytelling, and thinking about how that works for the marketing staff.
I was talking to somebody earlier today who was like, “What do I need to know to make sure that my content ends up in the LLM?” And I’m like, “You don’t worry about it. You go back to basics. You tell your story, you get excited, you make sure that you’re sharing it, you make sure that you’re building a good network, you’re genuine, you’re authentic, and it will just naturally find its way into the LLM, because it’s a replacement for those human behaviors.”
Sara: Right. Now, that’s not to say that you don’t believe in SEO, AEO, or GEO, correct? Regardless of your—
Scott: Well…
Sara: acronym. Yeah.
Scott: Good, I believe that those things are emergent.
Sara: Okay.
Scott: And so, sure, you gotta make sure that there’s technical imperatives that you followed, and you got the right tagging, and you’ve got the right—but hey, if you need to speak about what you’re talking about, make sure you know who your audience is, make sure you’re saying something incredible, make sure you’re saying it in the right direction, make sure your website is built in a way that directs them intentionally towards what’s gonna help them.
And guess what, Sara? If you do that, you will have good SEO.
Sara: There you go. I love that.
Scott: Yeah.
Sara: And do you feel that the AEO and GEO follows, or is that a— Yeah. You know, what is your thought on— Even
Scott: more so.
Sara: Yeah. Okay.
Scott: Even more so. AEO in particular is now following those kinds of—I don’t wanna say algorithms, but patterns and signals.
We had to adopt our behavior as humans to figure out the SEO algorithm, and now we’re able to go back to behaviors that are more human.
Sara: Right. Yeah. I love that. And I do love—you and I have talked about, you shared some of the projects that you’ve worked on with some of your clients, and we’ve talked about others.
And I love the creativity. The one thing that I feel you’ve brought to the table in a lot of cases is that curiosity and that fearlessness when it comes to experimentation, and I don’t know if that’s coming directly from Flywheel or if that’s something that your clients are bringing to you, but I think it’s really refreshing, because there have been some really interesting projects.
Have you had one that’s just fun again? Sometimes work becomes, you know, work, but, is there one that you’re like, “Man, this has been a fun thing to work on”?
Scott: Well, we did a really cool thing recently. We stood up a working prototype of a financing platform, which doesn’t sound that fun, but it has to withstand all this rigor, and there’s this technical complexity to integrating with different systems.
But we were trying to showcase how insurance brokers could integrate with this financing platform, and we have all this dense technical documentation. Well, in about two weeks, we stood up a working prototype of an example of a broker’s management system that would do financing applications.
That’s something that would’ve otherwise taken months to just even set up as a prototype. We built it from a blank sheet of paper to a deployed solution in two weeks. Wow. It was so much fun to iterate on that—
Sara: Yeah…
Scott: with that client, yeah.
Sara: That is awesome, and for something like that, too, when you think about that, those industries are very regulated, right? So did you have—how did you get through that part of that’s probably the biggest concern for something like that. Did you guys—how did you approach that?
Scott: Yeah, so it’s important to recognize those boundaries. And those use cases that it’s for, and I do think in something like that, where we’re vibe coding, we were very clear about saying, "What we’re putting together is a working prototype.
This is a proof of concept. This is an MVP. This is something that will allow us to extend it and formalize it later, but we just wanna test the market. We just wanna evaluate adoption." We’ve got a proposal and we’re shaping a project for another client in a very similar fashion. They have this idea, it sounds good, they’re not sure how much it’s gonna get used.
I said, “Well, let’s do 80% of the solution really quickly using an AI vibe coding platform, and when we’re done, if you like it, we can actually hit a button, pull it into Visual Studio, tidy it up, formalize it, structure it more properly, and put a little bit more structure around it so that it’s something that we can maintain inside the enterprise on an ongoing basis.”
Sara: That’s awesome, and what you have to have, though, with that is trust, right? I mean, trust from your clients and trust in the vibe coding that you’re doing, that you know what you’re looking at and reading, right? And how—understanding what the code is actually doing.
Scott: And yes, absolutely.
You’re 100% correct, but it’s also about iterating your way through to that final result. And it’s not about them just having implicit trust in us or implicit trust in the technology. It’s about agreeing together with them on the path at which you’re gonna get there, and you’re gonna build up more and more trust and confidence in the solution, through, back to, again, a more agile approach to this kind of development.
It’s not just software development, but it’s idea development.
Sara: Right. I love that. Okay, one last question for you. Do you have a martech hot take?
Scott: My martech hot take is don’t try to keep up with all the latest developments and what is special about each LLM. This is not about trying to maintain pace with the changes in technology.
This is about realizing that you now have capacity to unlock your own creativity at a pace and with an impact that has never been available before.
Sara: Scott, thank you for your time. It was a pleasure, as always, to talk to you today.
Scott: Sara, appreciate it. Always a pleasure, thanks.
Sara: Listeners, thanks for tuning in.
Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.
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