Podcast: Brewing Success with CognitivePath: Navigating the AI hype

Today on The Pipeline Brew podcast, Matt Hummel is joined by Greg Verdino, Founder & Chief Operating Officer of CognitivePath, an AI consulting firm that guides organizations through this new era of artificial intelligence. 

Greg takes us on a journey through the marketing AI landscape, debunking the myth of AI as a miracle worker and framing it instead as a trusty sidekick that elevates your marketing game only if you stick to the fundamentals. From AI’s mimicry potential to the importance of good data, Greg sheds light on how to avoid the AI bubble trap by aligning tech with tactical goals and crafting authentic content that speaks from the soul.

Additionally, Greg and Matt touch on the allure of any shiny new tech tool, and how marketers need to resist the siren call of innovation without intention. It’s all about getting back to basics—knowing your audience and letting AI be the Watson to your Sherlock. Greg shares a few tactical pieces of advice on how to channel AI effectively, harnessing its power for genuine transformation rather than getting caught up in the tech hype.

As always, the conversation wraps up with some personal stories, where Greg shares some stories from his parental life and his experience running the content consultancy, VERDINO, with his partner Amanda. 

Greg Verdino is the author of Never Normal: Uncommon Ideas for Leaders Who Won’t Settle for the Status Quo (2020) and microMARKETING: Get Big Results By Thinking and Acting Small (McGraw-Hill, 2010). And as the co-creator of The Adapt Manifesto, Greg is leading a movement to align leaders around a core set of principles that help organizations reliably and repeatedly adapt to the changing environment in which they operate.

His perspectives have been shaped by 30+ years spent working at the forefront of change. Over the course of this career he has advised hundreds of organizations including more than 50 of the Fortune 500; has served in senior leadership positions at a half-dozen technology start-ups; and has launched innovative products, lines of business, and divisions from within traditional companies. Through his work speaking, writing, and consulting on digital strategy, business transformation, and adaptability he helps leaders build thriving, future-ready companies.

Greg is also the founder of CognitivePath, a strategic AI consultancy that helps organizations harness the transformative power of generative AI to enhance productivity, unleash creativity, improve performance, and create strategic advantage. 

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun yet insightful conversations where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, today I am super excited to be joined by Greg Verdino, Principal Consultant and Founder of Cognitive Path, a management consultancy that guides organizations through the AI era. Greg has seemingly done it all. He’s a former CMO, content creator, agency owner, keynote speaker, fellow podcast host, and an AI expert.

Matt Hummel: I’ve had the pleasure of working with Greg a couple of times throughout my career. And I’m also thankful to call him a friend. Welcome to the show, Greg. How are you doing today? 

Greg Verdino: Hey, Matt, how are you? 

Matt Hummel: I’m doing well. Excellent. Well, thanks for joining. We like to kick off each episode with a little icebreaker just to get the ball rolling.

Matt Hummel: So. What is your go to beverage when you need a little pick me up? Jeez,

Greg Verdino: I feel like these days my go to beverage is water, but it should be a Manhattan. 

Matt Hummel: Even for a pick me up, why not? There you go. Well, I want to jump into some marketing stuff. So, we really can’t talk about marketing today without talking about AI.

Matt Hummel: So, let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way. I’d like to talk about a Forrester quote that I recently saw, that essentially said, AI content is not meeting the needs. And this isn’t terribly surprising, but with marketers facing challenges of increased pipeline targets, but contrasted with less resources, less budget, it’s understandable that marketers would go to an AI tool to create their content.

Matt Hummel: Any thoughts on this conundrum they’re facing?

Greg Verdino: Yeah, I think there’s a number of things. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say or not allowed to say on a family friendly program like this. But I think there have been some unreasonable expectations set around what today’s AI tools, the generative AI tools, are actually capable of delivering.

Greg Verdino: You know, if you believe Sam Altman and all of the Sam Altmans in Silicon Valley, we’ve been given the sense that these are miracle machines, right? That they are capable of totally and fully doing the work of a human worker. And for whatever reason, Silicon Valley has had marketers in their crosshairs, right, you know, rather than solving for climate change or income inequality or some massive issue, they’re solving for content creation.

Greg Verdino: I don’t know why. I don’t know what the logic was, maybe it was an easy win, right? But if you believe all of the rhetoric and all of the hype, these AI tools should be capable of producing market ready content. As somebody who has been a content creator, as you know, for years and years, my wife and I ran a content marketing agency working with B2B technology companies.

Greg Verdino: Content is a complex beast. It’s easy, perhaps to put words on paper. It’s much more difficult to ensure that those words bring real insight, and perspective, point of view, and something new to the market. And AI is effectively not a miracle machine, but a mimicry machine, right? It’s been trained on all of the world’s data, and what that means is at the end of the day, what pure AI content does for the most part is brings to the table sort of a raw average of everything else that’s ever been produced.

Greg Verdino: What it can’t do, of course, is predict what the market might need or bring totally fresh, new, novel ideas to the table. And the part that I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say, and I know you’ve heard me say it before, is my perspective in having worked with these tools has always been, like, if you suck, AI can help you suck less.

Greg Verdino: But it’s not going to make you superhuman. So, as a marketer, you really need to be smart and strategic about how you use these tools. And they are just tools. It’s just like an Excel spreadsheet. But for words, right? And you know, you need to know how to use it. It’s going to be a part of the way you get work done and it will allow you to produce content more efficiently, more effectively, but you need to kind of put it in its right place.

Greg Verdino: It’s the assistant. It’s not the boss.

Matt Hummel: Got it. No, that makes a ton of sense. So, even if you know how to effectively use the GenAI tool, it doesn’t mean you’re going to produce great content.

Greg Verdino: Right. And when I look at the way I’ve used it, and continue to use a tool like a ChatGPT or an Anthropic Cloud, and I use several different tools for different reasons, I’ll use it sometimes for brainstorming ideas.

Greg Verdino: I’ll sometimes use it to help me outline an article or a blog post. I’ll use it to help me tighten or refine a blog post. Find my errors, tell me what’s missing, suggest improvements. Sometimes I’ll use it to take a look at somebody else’s content and critique that content and tell me how to write something better on the same topic.

Greg Verdino: I’ve used it to look for inconsistencies in my style. I’ve used it to write metadata or do article summaries or things like that. I very rarely use it to actually write the post.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And it’s interesting because as much as the world of demand gen is seemingly changing, content still sits at the heart.

Matt Hummel: Nobody’s talking about how content is dead, and with that in mind, with your background in content development, the agency you ran, what do you see as the key to what makes a great piece of content?

Greg Verdino: Sure. I mean, I think there’s a number of things, obviously, and I think at the core, good content is about answering your prospects or customers’ most burning questions, right?

Greg Verdino: If you can serve their information needs better than any of your competitors, Then you’ve, I think, gone a long way toward providing a valuable content asset for that particular audience. So it begins with the customer in mind and understanding their needs and really understanding their needs, not guessing what a customer might need, or a prospect at a certain stage at a certain sales cycle might need, but truly understanding that really being in lockstep with your sales team, having deep insight into your audience and all of that.

Greg Verdino: And I think it’s also really about bringing a unique perspective to the marketplace. Obviously that perspective needs to be relevant to your brand and your business. But there’s enough me to look alike content in the marketplace for most products and services that the world is not looking for another one of those.

Greg Verdino: But if you can truly bring something new to the conversation, I think you have a chance of standing out and breaking through. And then when you bring something new to the conversation, if that something does, as I said before, address some burning need or close an information gap. I think that’s where you have a winning combination.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. I love that. I think a couple of things, one marketers today still struggle talking to customers and it’s the most basic fundamental role of a marketer and yet so many don’t. And you mentioned sales alignment too. That can be a great way, obviously, to hear the voice of the customer. And then two, I think GenAI is probably an opportunity for good marketers and good content to rise above because if 90 percent of marketers are just running something through a GenAI tool, chat, GPT, whatever, you know, it’s a real opportunity for somebody to come alongside and actually produce good, meaningful customer centric content. So I love that.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. And that’s the key. There’s been a fear, or maybe for some people it might feel like a promise, that generative AI is going to commoditize content, right? And that it can make somebody who is not a great content creator become a better content creator. And that’s possible, certainly. If not a better, certainly a faster content creator, right?

Greg Verdino: And I like to think about it like the creative floor has risen because anybody can now write something. The creative ceiling has not come down, right? That makes sense. And I think when you compare the relatively generic, sort of mediocre middle type of generative AI driven content to something that is truly human.

Greg Verdino: Right, and brings real authenticity and smarts to the table in a way that AI can’t today. That’s the content that rises above. So you know, whether that’s content like we’re talking about, white papers, eBooks, emails, et cetera, blog posts, or something like advertising, I think the most creative people continue to rise above.

Matt Hummel: You know, when we think about AI today, especially as marketers, I think we tend to think about gen AI, but your world is AI, and I’m no expert by any means, but it’s my understanding there are different types of AI. Can you kind of walk us through or outline the broader AI industry for us?

Greg Verdino: Yeah, so you’re right in the sense that today when somebody says AI, they typically mean generative AI.

Greg Verdino: But I think broadly, the easiest way to understand it is that there is, you know, traditional AI, which, which, incorporates even there a lot of different technologies, which I can get into if we want to, but traditional AI is effectively predictive AI, and it uses machine learning to process data and unearth patterns and potentially, in the best of all worlds, make predictions.

Greg Verdino: Now, that kind of AI has been in the world for a very long time, and it’s been in our marketing tech stack for a very long time as well, right? So if you think the algorithm that underlies Google search engine, or the algorithms that are at work in a programmatic advertising solution, or as a consumer, the recommendation engine, whether it’s on an Amazon or a Netflix right?

Greg Verdino: These are all driven by machine learning, where these AI systems, these algorithms, these models take data. Massive amount of data and chunk through them and identify patterns that you wouldn’t identify as a human being and allow you then to make decisions, or in some cases, it’ll make decisions for you.

Greg Verdino: What makes generative AI different is it does those things, but it’s been specifically designed to not just process data, but to produce data. And that’s the difference. And for the most part, the data it’s producing is content. In this day and age, although it can be used for coding and some other things as well, but that’s what makes it different.

Greg Verdino: Now at the same time, and I think this is why we’re talking about AI so much right now at this moment in time, or for the past two years, is that we didn’t just get a new form of AI, but we got that new form of AI, generative AI, in a new interface, which was essentially the conversational interface. So before 2022, if you wanted to interact with an AI system of any kind, you pretty much had to be a data scientist.

Greg Verdino: But when ChatGPT came to market, it arrived in the form of, you know, effectively text messaging, right? Which all of us are very comfortable with, right? So it’s been as much an interface as it is an AI innovation.

Matt Hummel: Yeah, that’s so interesting. And you mentioned the data piece around AI. Do you think AI or GenAI or traditional AI, can solve for one of marketers’ greatest challenges, which is bad data?

Greg Verdino: No, it can’t. In fact, it is hobbled by bad data. And that’s been, I think, one of the challenges we’ve seen as we’ve been consulting with different organizations is I feel like maybe the narrative has been that it’s cheap and easy to stand up a GenAI system and start to realize, recognize, and, you know, reap the rewards, because you’ve got the 20 a ChatGPT plus or whatever, right?

Greg Verdino: And the reality is, that if you want to do something serious with AI as a marketer, it’s not just turning up an off the shelf consumer grade product and saying, have at it. That might be a place to start, to dip your pinky toe in or whatever, and start to experiment. But once you get serious about AI and you start to think about what can we really do with this that differentiates the brand, that delivers business results, creates strategic advantage in the marketplace, you really need to start having a serious conversation about data.

Greg Verdino: And what we tend to find as we go into organizations and have that conversation, whether they’re large organizations or small, is they haven’t actually done their data diligence, no matter how much people have spoken about big data. And we’ve been talking about data is the new oil and whatever for the past 10 years plus, right?

Greg Verdino: But nobody’s done anything about it. So as you walk into the organization, their customer journey is not unified. They may have a CRM, but they don’t have a customer data platform. The data is siloed away. Sales owns this, marketing owns that, support owns this, accounting owns another, you know, another set of data.

Greg Verdino: And nobody wants to share. And they’re all in different systems and on different platforms, and they’re not in a data lake or anything like that. That makes it incredibly difficult to build out serious artificial intelligence systems. So whether that means you can’t actually train a generative AI system on your content or your customer preferences or whatever, or, more likely, you can’t build a complex AI system that uses not just GenAI but also traditional AI to do things like, you predict marketing performance before you put a campaign into market, or do something with segmentation, or, provide real business intelligence or whatever.

Greg Verdino: So all of these challenges really limit the effectiveness and even the feasibility of implementing AI.

Matt Hummel: Are you saying the companies you’re talking to is the opportunity afforded to them with what AI can do. Are you seeing companies, the light bulb go off and say, you know what? I get it. I actually now need to go and do the work on my data that I’ve been putting off for all these years.

Greg Verdino: Yeah.

Matt Hummel: Is AI enough of a motivator?

Greg Verdino: I don’t know if it’s AI itself, but it is the promise of what AI, in theory, at least makes possible. I think it’s been almost like a clarion call, where, yes, we’ve heard you for 10 years, but we weren’t quite sure what doing our sort of data strategy and data governance and data unification would achieve for the organization.

Greg Verdino: But now we kind of have a sense of that because we’re all clued into what AI makes possible. So, a lot of organizations, frankly, and this is [00:15:00] good for if you’re willing to take the steps, a lot of organizations, we’re finding are still kind of throwing their hands up a little bit and going, this is going to take too long.

Greg Verdino: It’s going to be too expensive. Our CMO is not even speaking to our CTO, so we can’t possibly get this work done. And then AI gets kind of backburnered. But if you’re willing to, and you know, you have the right culture and the structure and collaboration across the organization, if you’re willing to do the hard work and spend the substantial money of finding your data, And putting the right governance in place today, it’s gonna, I think, pay off in spades over time.

Matt Hummel: It’s interesting, I see parallels to what we were talking about earlier around what makes good content. You have to put in the work, and obviously your data, the level of investment and work required is probably much more significant than putting together a good piece of content. But it all kind of points back to getting back to the basics.

Matt Hummel: It starts with good data, it starts with knowing your customers. And I think marketers today are, you know, so focused on that next shiny object. And today’s shiny object is AI or GenAI. 

Greg Verdino: That’s the challenge. We love shiny objects as marketers, right? It’s AI right now. And right, three years ago, everybody was minting NFTs.

Greg Verdino: And two years ago, we thought we’re going to be living in the metaverse with Legolas Mark Zuckerberg. And, you know, now it’s AI. And we’re seeing a bit of an AI bubble burst as well, both financially. And I think some of the reality is starting to set in. Which is not a bad thing necessarily. It can be a very good thing because you start to settle down and you kind of get away from the hype a little bit, but there may be some next, who knows, quantum computing comes down the path and next thing you know, all the influencers on LinkedIn are quantum computing experts, but it’s important not to get sucked into the shininess of the object and really think strategically.

Greg Verdino: And to your point, and I’ve been saying this for ages. We co-wrote a generative AI playbook for the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA. And [00:17:00] one of the main points we made in the introduction to that playbook was that this is all about the basics. It makes the basics even more important than they’ve been all along.

Greg Verdino: Not that they’ve ever been unimportant, but slapping a layer of AI onto something that is. It’s not built around good insight that isn’t built on the foundation of strong customer understanding. You know, you don’t have a strategy, your brand is weak, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Isn’t going to work, right?

Greg Verdino: You’re just throwing good after bad. So you really need to focus on those marketing basics.

Matt Hummel: That’s really interesting, Greg, and tech is traditionally seen as, it’s not a replacement for strategy, right? It’s intent is an enabler, an accelerator. And I think what you’re saying is AI, Gen AI is really the same thing, right?

Matt Hummel: It’s not going to replace a lack of, or even a bad strategy. It’s similar to traditional tech. It is an enabler and accelerator. Is that fair to say?

Greg Verdino: That’s fair to say. The only thing I would add there is, again, thinking sort of big picture AI, and imagining you have your data house in order, and imagining you’re putting that data to work in an AI system, there are opportunities for AI to play a role in that.

Greg Verdino: I wouldn’t say shaping strategy, but helping the human in charge to think more creatively about strategy, right? You know, where you might be limited as a human being in terms of the amount of information you can accept and process when you’re building strategy out. Whereas AI can, you know, especially a predictive AI system can identify patterns you might have missed, right?

Greg Verdino: So that might give you an opportunity to. Improve your strategic planning process, but it doesn’t replace the strategic planning process. 

Matt Hummel: Cool. You mentioned the whole notion of, is the AI bubble bursting? Can you expand on that? I know there’s been a lot of stuff in the news recently.

Matt Hummel: Is that real? And if so, you know, what does that mean? And should that be a good thing? Should we see that as a good thing as marketers who don’t want our jobs replaced.

Greg Verdino: Yeah. So there’s a couple of narratives I think that are at play right now, so it’s for the past couple of years, the dominant narrative around AI and in particular generative AI has been filled with mostly positive hype.

Greg Verdino: And then there’s been, ironically, for, I think the first time in the history of Silicon Valley, negative hype as part of the PR strategy, right? This whole idea of if you are not first. Or at least fast, you know, your job will be replaced. You’ll become irrelevant. You know, then there’s the whole talk about existential risk and all of that stuff. Silicon Valley has been remarkably good at using even the downsides as hype for this new technology, which is weird.

Greg Verdino: Right. Because you feel like, Oh my God, if, you know, this is going to replace all these jobs and I’m a CEO, I need to replace all my employees. If I’m not first, my competitors will beat me to it. I’m going to lose my competitive advantage. Right. And it’s driven this feeding frenzy. You know, more recently we’ve started to see a more negative narrative, and in some ways it’s a more realistic and reasonable narrative, but what’s happening now is we’ve had two years of organizations investing in AI, in many cases, frankly, over investing in AI or investing in AI in areas and ways that they were not quite ready for, and that takes us back to the data conversation, right?

Greg Verdino: Spend sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on an AI system and then only discover after the fact that you don’t have data to really leverage that system effectively. And then surprise, surprise, you don’t get the benefits you expected. So we are starting to see more organizations recognize that the immediate, I guess, the promise of immediate upside isn’t necessarily paying out or panning out the way they expected it to.

Greg Verdino: And that’s creating, I think, a little bit of sour grapes among buyers, right? There was a recent story about, I don’t remember who the organization was, but it was a CIO at a major organization that canceled their Microsoft AI contract because when they looked at the results the organization was getting, they weren’t nearly, you know, recouping what they were paying for the AI services.

Greg Verdino: And I think we’re seeing more and more of that. That’s not entirely the technology’s fault. Some of it has been driven by the hype. Some of it has been driven by an uneducated buyer. Uh, you know, and some of it has been driven by the reality that a lot of companies have thought of AI as the ends and not the means, right?

Greg Verdino: That whole station about the tool, like we need AI. Why? Because we need AI, you know, which is not the place to start, right? So I don’t know if I want to call it a bubble burst, but we’re certainly seeing a moment of reckoning.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Greg Verdino: And I believe fundamentally that that can be a good thing because all of the dabblers and do littlers who have been messing around with AI and kind of, you know, either been part of the hype cycle or been creating some of the confusion or whatever are going to kind of drift away and they’ll move on to that next shiny object because they’re going to look at their next dime or dollar coming down the road from that.

Greg Verdino: But that the organizations that understand what the long term potential of a technology like AI can produce and who are willing to put in the work and take the time and be rigorous about defining a vision, a strategy, coming up with use cases, prioritizing them, you know, putting them on a roadmap and kind of sticking to their course are going to start to see the kinds of advantages is.

Greg Verdino: That we’ve been told would come. They’re just not coming as quickly as we expected. Um, and those organizations I think will be miles ahead when everybody else then comes back, whatever it is, 12 months, two years, three years down the road, realizing that they can’t sit on the sidelines anymore.

Matt Hummel: Well, for all the marketers out there, I think it’s a bit of a collective sigh of relief on one hand, but on the other hand, to your point, Gen AI, AI isn’t the problem itself.

Matt Hummel: It’s the organizations actually have to understand. And What’s required to get the most out of your AI investment. So makes a ton of sense. Love that. I want to transition to marketers today. So AI is still very real. It’s still very present. How can marketers start to think about leveraging Gen AI beyond just, you know, the ChatGPT?

Matt Hummel: Basic sort of use cases around whether it’s ideation or some, some general content development or theme development. What are your thoughts, whether it’s specific tools, use cases, or even just resources to help sort of get them going?

Greg Verdino: The first thing I would say is you don’t start with the technology.

Greg Verdino: You’ve got to start with the problem. Yeah. I’m saying problem. It could be opportunity, but you know, you’re going to start with the problem. What is it we’re trying to achieve or fix? If you don’t start there, you’re going to end up with technology for the sake of technology, for, you know, a tool in search of a solution, right?

Greg Verdino: So, that’s number one, is if you’re a marketer and you’ve either been experimenting with AI or maybe even you’ve invested in AI in a way that has not achieved the kinds of outcomes you had hoped, The first thing I would do is essentially go back to the drawing board and figure out what are the most fundamental problems we need to fix in our marketing pipeline.

Greg Verdino: And interesting, you know, at that point, you know, then start to think about, you know, kind of almost what would we need to know and what would we need to do in order to fix that problem? Because what we need to know is going to give you a sense of what kind of data do I need? Where did that data come from?

Greg Verdino: What am I looking to extract from that data? Um, and what I do, what I need to do is obviously going to point you towards specific, potentially, solutions. At that point, you have the ability to kind of be, you know, sort of smarter, more strategic about what technologies you bring on board. You know, if I were running a marketing department today, I’d probably be looking at what, you know, what, with that as a foundation, I’d probably be looking at, What AI features and functionalities are already baked into my MarTech stack?

Greg Verdino: Every marketing technology company is integrating at least generative AI, and in some cases both generative and predictive AI, into their solutions. Whether you’re on HubSpot or Salesforce or Marketo, or it doesn’t make a difference, right? You know, they’re integrating tech. AI into the solution in a way that should make it easier for marketers to onboard those technologies rather than adding tools to your stack.

Greg Verdino: So that would be one place I would go. I mean, your best resource should be You know, your existing Martech vendors. Ask them, what are you doing? What’s your roadmap? How does that integrate? How does it work? Is it in my package? Do I have to upgrade? All those simple questions, right? I would, of course, think critically, right?

Greg Verdino: Have a grain of salt, right? Because, of course, they’re not always going to be telling you the truth, and they might not always be the best possible solution for your needs. But I would certainly start there. I would pay more attention to organizations like the analyst firms than I do to the influencers on LinkedIn who were, you know, pawning, you know, NFTs a year and a half ago.

Greg Verdino: Um, and there’s a lot of them, right? What are the analyst firms saying? What do they take seriously? How are they actually evaluating and ranking technologies? At Cognitive Path, we developed an AI maturity model. It can be found on our site. It is free. We spoke to over a hundred AI decision makers across a hundred different organizations and looked for the commonalities and the differences in terms of how organizations are approaching AI, what gets them ahead, what holds them back.

Greg Verdino: And what we found was that, you know, it doesn’t matter the department, but certainly for marketers, In order to succeed in AI, you need to be really good at building a coalition across your organization. From what we’ve seen, anyone who tries to go it alone is at a disadvantage. There’s only so much you can do.

Greg Verdino: And not every organization, the CMO owns the corporate strategy for AI, right? A lot of times it will live in the technology department or it might sit at the CEO’s level or whatever. You want to be part of that conversation.

Matt Hummel: Yeah.

Greg Verdino: And you want to influence the conversation, right? You have a lot to bring to the table as a marketer, customer understanding, not the least of which, but you definitely need to build a coalition across the organization, you know, and that’s important.

Greg Verdino: And a lot of times what we’re finding is the Biggest struggles around successful AI implementation are not the technological ones. It’s easy to buy tech, it’s not quite as easy but doable to build tech. What is hard is making sure the entire executive team is aligned around strategy, that that strategy is clearly communicated to the organization, that you’ve got the right governance in place.

Greg Verdino: Both in terms of what technology solutions you buy, what you build, how you build, but also how your end users use these technologies, so that they’re not making mistakes, putting the business at risk, etc. And then the other factors that kind of come along are also all the human factors, like collaboration, which I’ve already spoken about, but ensuring that your team is educated, and Engaged around how to use AI and understand how the organization intends to use AI because there are a lot of marketers.

Greg Verdino: I heard you say it a couple of times, and it is true in a lot of places, you know, this idea of, is AI going to come and take my job? And in some places, the answer is yes. Klarna, for example, has replaced a lot of people in customer service sales and marketing with AI systems. I don’t know how that’s going for them, but they’ve done it.

Greg Verdino: In many organizations, it’s really about how do we elevate the humans in the business with this tool and technology, right, and that’s a very different mindset and a very different approach, and if your employees are afraid of AI and feel threatened by AI, I can guarantee you their adoption of AI is not going to be nearly what it is if they believe AI is a tool that helps them the most.

Greg Verdino: And augment their ability to get work done.

Matt Hummel: It goes back to strategy. Start with the end in mind. Don’t just jump in and, you know, cause there’s, there’s so much out there and I get emails that bring the latest AI tools to visibility and there must be a hundred new ones entering the market a day, if not more.

Matt Hummel: And so trying to keep up with that. So it goes back to start, start with the problem, start with the opportunity. I think the other thing which you’ve graciously given to our audience is probably a, you know, a tip for any of the MarTech companies out there. You know, from a utilization perspective, reach out to your customers, talk to them about the roadmap, understand their problems and how they can leverage, you know, the, the broader capabilities of their tool and what’s to come.

Matt Hummel: So, super insightful. Well, Greg, I’d like to end every show with a little bit more of a, a personal note. So this is the Pipeline Brew podcast where we like to kind of meet at the intersection of pipeline and people. So you walked us through a ton of great insights on AI. Now I’d like to flip it around a little bit and, and get to know you a little bit more.

Matt Hummel: Obviously not anything that’s going to be too awkward, Greg, because we could certainly go there. I’ve known you for a long time, but at the top of the show, we talked about your kind of go to pick me up drink, which many would contend is, you know, your favorite drink to unwind, but perhaps you have a different drink that you like.

Matt Hummel: So, You like to go to when you’re, when you’re looking to unwind. So any, anything different other than your, your Manhattan?

Greg Verdino: I don’t know what you’re looking for me to say. Diet Mountain Dew or something.

Matt Hummel: Personally, I would think you’d flip those, but to each their own. I have shared some spicy pineapple margaritas with you, Greg.

Greg Verdino: So this is true. This is true. And they were good. They were good.

Matt Hummel: Indeed. All right. Well, moving on. So I know you’re a fellow parent. I’ve had the pleasure of working in virtual environments with you and getting to know your kids over the past years. But any great stories, whether it’s parenting advice or just funny stories you’d want to share about your kids?

Greg Verdino: Oh, geez. I can tell you the latest funny story. So our youngest is nine years old. He just finished third grade. He’s going into fourth. And this is the time when as many people with kids know, kids pick up their first instrument if they’re interested in joining band after the recorder, which is torture for everybody.

Greg Verdino: So he decided he was going to sign up for trumpet and I played trumpet all through school. I was very serious. I played trumpet from third grade all the way through college and even a little bit after. And I still have my student trumpet that I started on when I was a third grader. So I’m like, you know what, instead of renting some random trumpet, I’m going to get this refurbished, clean, make sure it’s in good working order, and as long as it is, this could be his student trumpet, I’ll pass it down to him.

Greg Verdino: So I get the trumpet repaired, it’s all good to go, I tested it, I haven’t played like in 20 years, but I can bleed out a few notes, I made sure that it worked okay and he started summer trumpet lessons at the school. Two weeks ago, a couple of days ago, he comes out and I’m out of the lesson and normally he just, I mean, how was trumpet?

Greg Verdino: Great. So he comes out a couple of days ago, how was trumpet? He goes, when did you buy this trumpet? And I said, oh, I got that when I was your age, trying to build it up. Right. And he goes, so this trumpet is 45 years old, which unfortunately the answer was yes. And I’m like, yes.

Greg Verdino: And he says, well, my teacher says this trumpet is too old and that’s why I’m not as good as the other kids. That is hilarious. It’s not the fact that he’s not practicing between his lessons, it’s my 45 year old trumpet which I then again took out of the case and put the mouthpiece in and tested it. It plays just fine.

Greg Verdino: But I guess maybe there’s a parenting lesson in that as well. I’m not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it’s that sometimes your kids will serve up a big old dish of steam and honesty and you need to figure out what to do with that information.

Matt Hummel: Well, so what, how does the story end? Are you, are you buying him a new trumpet?

Greg Verdino: No, we stick it with the trumpet. Today, he was back to how was trumpet great.

Matt Hummel: It’s like I always say, it’s the biggest problem he knows. So you just, yeah, I like it. I appreciate you stood that, uh, you stood your ground on that. It’s kind of like golf, you know, the golf clubs really make the golfer. I don’t know.

Matt Hummel: I’m not much of a golfer either way. 

Greg Verdino: Nor am I, but I’m assuming that it’s more of the swing than it is the stick.

Matt Hummel: Touche, touche. All right. One last question. I’m going to really put you on the hotspot. So I met you when you were working at the content agency you referenced earlier, which was classically named Verdino, which is very, very familiar, uh, or, or very similar to your last name rather.

Matt Hummel: So you were working though with your wife and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you managed to keep that agency, not just afloat, but successfully running for more than a decade. With Amanda by your side. What is your secret to success for getting, not only, I mean, we could go into marriaging advice here, but how did, how did you run an agency working alongside with your spouse for more than 10 years?

Matt Hummel: Any words of wisdom?

Greg Verdino: So I’ve been thinking about this and now that I have a partner who is not my spouse in my current business, trying to kind of weigh the pros and the cons and the differences and the similarities. And I think a lot of it, ironically, is the same as working with any partner, any kind of peer level colleague in an organization, right?

Greg Verdino: All of the stuff that either works or doesn’t work in a leadership team, uh, will work or not work in a team where it’s a husband and wife pair, right? So that’s the boring stuff, right? That’s like, you know, you know, whatever, you know, clearly defined roles and responsibilities and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Greg Verdino: I think that, you know, beyond that, I mean, definitely there was much more of an emphasis on ensuring balance because you could easily take some client bred catastrophe or hot project or something that’s, you know, weighing on your mind or a struggle you’re having during the work, you know, the workday, and that becomes the dinner conversation, the pillow talk, you wake up thinking about it.

Greg Verdino: Right, so being able to really draw those lines, I think, is, is important, uh, which is important for anybody to avoid burnout and, and all of that, but I think when you’re living with somebody and working with somebody and it’s a post COVID environment when that all happens around the kitchen table, Um, it’s really super important to, to really draw those lines.

Greg Verdino: I think the most important thing obviously is in work as in life, when you’re married to your business partner, the woman is always right. Um, I learned that very quickly, you know, she was a harsh taskmaster. Um, but, uh, you know, if we ever disagreed, she was always right. You know, and I think interestingly, and this is kind of a, I don’t know if it’s a negative, but it’s, uh, maybe a moment of truth in a way is probably more than anything else.

Greg Verdino: The thing that led us to close the agency after 10 plus years wasn’t that we weren’t successful anymore. We were successful. We had good clients who were making money. We were delivering good work, entering awards, you know, whether we won them or not, you know, kind of all the normal stuff agencies..

Greg Verdino: But I think being honest about what your aspirations are for the business and for yourself in your career. Um, because I think one thing that became amply clear as we got into maybe the last year or so of the agency is that she was really looking for more of a social environment, have more co workers, be on the client side and make some more decisions than you can on the agency side, you know, which kind of led her to really kind of have this moment of clarity that she wanted to look at a more traditional job, you know, even though the agency was successful, she had come to a point where she just wanted something different in her career.

Greg Verdino: So being willing and able to have those conversations and understand, you know, like we’re going to have to make some decisions about what the implications are for the agency. And for us, that meant disbanding the agency. And plus I tend to be very restless anyway, when it comes to work. So for me, it was also the right time to do something different.

Greg Verdino: AI was happening and here I am.

Matt Hummel: Well, that’s cool. You guys got to go out on your own terms. So. Congrats. That’s really cool. Well, Greg, this was awesome. Uh, it’s been an amazing conversation. You’ve added a ton of value to our listeners. So I appreciate you coming on our show today. Thank you for having me.

Matt Hummel: Well, thanks again to Greg for joining us on today’s episode of the pipeline brew. I hope you all have enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a comment with your thoughts and make sure you’re subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel and I’ll see you next time.