RealmIQ: SESSIONS with Michael Walker

  In this episode of Realm IQ Sessions, host Curt Doty welcomes Michael Walker, CMO of SmythOS, to discuss Agentic AI, the future of AI-driven productivity, and the impacts on the business landscape. Michael explains SmythOS’s AI orchestration platform, which integrates tools and technologies to create autonomous, task-oriented AI agents, capable of handling customer service, booking arrangements, and CRM management. They delve into how these agents can revolutionize business efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on critical and strategic thinking.

Curt and Michael discuss the need for AI literacy and the disconnect between rapid AI development and company policies. Michael highlights that many businesses are unprepared for AI integration and stresses the importance of educating brands about upcoming changes in AI applications. They also touch on the challenges of AI-driven automation in relation to traditional processes, such as SEO and customer service. Michael predicts that 2025 will be a breakthrough year for Agentic AI, as companies adapt to this transformative technology. The conversation concludes with insights into the potential rebranding of SEO in a world where AI agents drive consumer interaction, and the need for ethical guardrails as AI technology advances.

Key Quotes

Curt Doty: “Let's talk about agentic AI...is that the future of agentic AI, and are these the things that you are offering with your agents?”

Michael Walker: "I think a large part of [the AI revolution] has to do with a vision that doesn’t meet reality...when you take the commercial interests versus those concerns, those concerns get quieter and quieter.”

Curt Doty: "So what do we call it? SEO is not the old model anymore...the old model’s failing. No one’s going there."

Michael Walker: "I would say 2025 is going to be the year of AI agents…don't look to replace anything yet. Just look to augment and supplement what you already have."

Topics Discussed

1. Introduction to Agentic AI and AI agent orchestration

2. Role of AI agents in automating business processes

3. Future of AI in customer service, marketing, and productivity

4. Importance of AI literacy and organizational readiness for AI

5. Changing landscape of SEO with the rise of AI-driven searches

6. Ethical considerations and need for regulations in AGI

7. Speculative future of AGI and public fears

Keywords

Agentic AI, AI Literacy, AI Orchestration, Automation, SmythOS, Future of SEO, AI Policy, AI Education, Autonomous Agents, Digital Transformation, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), AI Guardrails

Tags and Hashtags

#AgenticAI #AIAutomation #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfWork #AIOrchestration #AIInBusiness #AIInnovation #SEORevolution #AIEthics #AIandProductivity #Podcast #RealmIQ

Transcript

Welcome everybody. We are back from our hiatus, and we love talking to AI leaders and AI founders from around the world. This is our podcast, Realm IQ Sessions and I'm founder of RealmIQ, my AI consultancy, and I'm your host, Curt Doty. We want to welcome our guest, Michael Walker, who serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Smith os pioneering firm at the forefront of AI agent orchestration.

Sounds really cool, right?  With a robust background in AI driven marketing and a fervor for groundbreaking innovation, Michael spearheads efforts to reshape how AI is developed and implemented across industries. That is a cool resume, cool background. Michael, welcome. And let's talk about agentic AI. And did I get everything right on your, your intro? 

Yeah, that was a mouthful. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Curt. Yeah, let's dive in.  Well, please tell us what your product is about because I know agentic AI is a hot topic It's one of the latest developments in AI and definitely is feeding the future of what this experience is going to be So if you can elaborate on what is Agentic AI and what are you offering specifically? 

Yeah, of course. So Agentic AI is just a fancy term for Building AI agents that are trained on a particular task or set of tasks that they can carry out and accomplish pretty much, pretty much autonomously. At SmythOS, we've built what we call an AI orchestration platform, so you can bring together any tools you're already using.

Web applications, CRM, CSPs anything with an API essentially and pair that with the power of any large language model. So, in the anthropic model or open AI model, Gemini, you name it and just create really powerful. Singular AI agents or teams of AI agents. And so, bringing all of those tools, technologies and agents together is what's referred to as orchestration.

And that's what we do. It's what we, what we work really hard on.  Okay. Let's talk about that orchestration. So, give me some scenarios. If I were to use one of your agents, what could it do for me?  Yeah, it's limited. Really only by the imagination but let's say something we use pretty regularly is we use HubSpot as our CRM, right?

So, if we're having a conversation with a potential partner or a client, for example, we have a note taker that joins all of our calls. Ours is a company called TLDV. So, we'll take that transcript. And it references all of our past sales conversations and all of our past deal activity inside of HubSpot.

So, it'll go through a process where the agent will say, here's the chances of this deal closing. Here's a recap of the conversations. Here's a deal strategy that we've put together for you. Michael, you need to talk about this and reference this. Don't forget to send over X, Y, and Z. And it'll compile all that information and update the contact and deal activity records inside of HubSpot, just as one example.

So, it saves a tremendous amount of time just on note taking and that sort of thing. But it also uses, like, our previous history of doing deals to help us get better and more refined as we do it. So, it makes even someone like me a half decent salesman sometimes.  Okay. Okay. So let me throw out a scenario of, or a use case on what I, what I hope it's moving towards.

So let's just say I have a relationship with this agent and it kind of knows me, my schedule kind of my voice to help me write blogs, let's say, and It heard in a conversation that I was planning to go to Las Vegas in January  and without even asking it to,  it proactively  planned a trip to Vegas for me on the dates that I had mentioned.

Booked the hotel, booked a dinner booked flights, and then presented with me, to me. Hey, by the way, your, your whole Vegas thing is booked just please confirm, blah de blah.  I hope you like it. Is that, is that the future of agentic AI and are these the things that are you are offering with your agents? 

Yeah, that's exactly it. I think there's probably a step or two in there that may go beyond where we are today. And that's just things like updated payment information. Right. And the ability to get past two factor authentication, right? If you're trying to spend money from a bank institution or something like that.

But yeah, that's exactly it, right? In that example your AI agent is able to use reasoning and inference to say, Hey, Curt's talking about Vegas. Let's, let's get ahead of the curve here and take some of that stress off of this plate.  And then it's able to coordinate with various different technologies.

So, in this case, a booking website or a hotel website. It can check your calendar, I would assume, right? To make sure, hey, let's not overlap with any other trips that are there. So yeah, I, I think you're spot on. And the goal in, in that case, right, is obviously Convenience. It just makes life a lot easier.

So yeah, that's it. Its always convenience is the hook and then you sign your life away and then you don't realize Oh, yeah, by the way, they're in control of your bank account now. So how do you monitor that? Regulate that but it calls some mind A couple of things. So, these let's just say booking.

com who gets a request from essentially a boat or an agent and they're not prepared for, or they haven't anticipated this type of interaction and they offer up the two step ID , identification process. And it can't respond because it's. Can't see, right?  So, what are companies needing to, as you build these agents, what are the receiving companies and services?

What do they need to do to accommodate such crazy transactions that are inevitably going to happen, whether it's six months from now or a year from now. But that convenience you talked about is like, that's exactly what people want. And so how do you deal with the flip side of.  Being in talking with, with bots and not people anymore. 

Yeah, it's a great question. The first thing is just general security and compliance, right? And I think that's going to be, that’s always a conversation, but particularly as we move into the next stage of the growth cycle of AI, that's going to be really, really important. What do you give access to and what don't you give access to?

And that's on kind of both sides of a transaction there, but I think in a more immediate sense just verification protocol, right? Like, Hey, even if, whether it's an agent or just an individual for that manner. When someone comes and they make a transaction or a booking, what have you, how do we verify that the individual wants this to go through?

And you see that all the time, right? That's where the 2FA comes into play or your Google Authenticator or authentication tools. But that verification process, that confirmation process is really important, right? Because the last thing you want to do is, is Cause a situation for your customers where now not only did they have this Negative experience where something or someone booked something they didn't want or need But because you didn't have just a simple verification process before it was finalized now They have to go through your customer service and refund and now you have a negative brand experience with the user right, even if it wasn't your fault per se just because you didn't have those verification steps in place.

So, I think a lot of the early hiccups can be solved there.  Yeah, I believe they can be solved. It's a new way to authenticate, right? Like a direct question. Yeah. Are you a boat or are you representative? Are you authorized? These are all questions. And then , again, I fear like as, Innovators like you with your company, what you're doing how much is education of the brands and services that you want to connect with? 

Do they need to be made aware of this tidal wave of the assault of bots? Happening to them with new reasoning power. They're going to be besieged by it. And are they prepared? Do they even know? Are you educating these, these brands, these companies, these services?  Because I see some friction there that can all be worked out, but it takes time and knowledge and savvy. 

And are these brands savvy enough to realize what's coming at them?  Yeah, it's we take education and, and general AI literacy very, very seriously. And it's one of the very first things that, that we started with, even on the consumer side, right? Which is how do we bring the baseline literacy of everybody around AI up to just enough to be able to understand the concepts?

A lot of people, and you probably see this every day, Curt, a lot of people, when you say AI, they still, it's synonymous with chat GPT. Right now, right? Oh, yeah, I know AI. I use chat GPT all the time but if you tried to speak to them on NLP or about LLMs and What kind of LLMs are better for particular use cases and I mean people just get lost Right and organizations are just made up of people So even if you have these structures and guidelines in place at the end of the day, at least for now it's human beings who are making a lot of these decisions You And so I think if you're going to be in the space of AI, whether it's from a product side or a service side that educational component is, is a must.

I think it's a responsibility that everyone has to take seriously and that we, we try really, really hard to, to do our best in.  Yeah, the misinterpretation of what AI is, what you, with chat GPT was about gen, generative AI, right? AI has been around for actually many decades from machine learning, natural language processing all the way back to the Turing test in 1950.

So which challenge can a computer think?  So, yeah, but here we are two years into almost the anniversary of chat GPT launching and there's still a big gap in AI literacy. There was a, there was a poll last year by CNBC that 75 percent of the global workforce in the study were already playing with chat GPT and generative AI, whether their bosses knew it or not, or whether their company had an AI policy or not. 

And. Only 10 percent of global companies had installed an AI policy, allowing their employees to work with a prescribed set of platforms and guidelines that were described as being safe to play and provide guidelines. So, there’s a big desk disconnect on that adoption curve.

The, the intent of the consumer is there, the interest, the curiosity, the , the passion and fun people are having, right? But the companies are way behind. And these, these are the companies, these are the services that your agents are going to be interacting with. If they haven't figured out what their A.

I. policy or what their A. I. future is, certainly in customer service, then, that's a big impasse for innovation, certainly for agentic A. I. and companies like yours.  Any thoughts on that situation?  Yeah, I think you touched on it a minute ago, which is for a long time, AI has been almost purely academic.

Right? I mean, my first sort of step into the AI world was back around 2014. I was working for a machine learning company. Right. And we kind of we were one of the leaders in predictive marketing. So based on your search history and what locations you lived by and, and it was for a large retail store and what sales they had going on, those were the coupons that you would get, right.

The offers that would get delivered to you via email, or if you walked into the store, you'd get a mobile app notification. But even, even Then, I don't know that the, the business world had much of an idea, you, you had the machine learning engineers in a room, right, and these were extremely intelligent guys who knew what they were doing, but outside of that, it was purely academic.

Then OpenAI releases ChatGPT and, and just released it to the world. There wasn't any time in there for organizations to prepare. And I think that the worst thing you can do in my opinion is basically Put a big red button in the middle of the room with the sign that says don't press this button, right?

That's when you try to tell people. Hey, don't use ai or don't do this for many reasons one is it's an incredible productivity tool, right? Even if you're not well versed in agentic ai or whatever it is But the other option or the other reason is you've been People who are seeing their, their peers and colleagues and friends and family who are constantly evolving in their ability to use these tools.

And so, when you just come in and say, Hey, don't use it without a, a real. Educational reason behind it. Hey, here are the security concerns that come along with this. And this is why we aren't using it. You're just forcing people to go around. Right. And then what you're going to see is people will download data onto their local devices and use it in a personal capacity to help them do the work rather than using it in a secure environment on premises or whatever that may be.

So, yeah, I think it still comes down to the literacy aspect.  Believe it or not, I see that large enterprises are probably worse at this than any other group of business. I mean, SMEs and startups are much farther along in this adoption curve than enterprises are. Oh yeah, no, I believe it. That's where all the innovation is happening.

It's not happening at the corporate level. But they're going to be the ones to implement it. And, and, and upskill their employees, hopefully not lay them off but recognize their brain trust that they have there already, and its 75 percent of that workforce is already playing with it. There you go.

Why would you let let these people go? You need to keep them because again, AI needs to be human centered and run by humans, not autonomously by robots. Now, agentic AI is different because they're kind of independent agents working on your behalf, which is really fascinating. So, speaking of founders and startups and innovation what is going on at OpenAI?

All the founders have left except for Sam Altman. Mira left, she was the CTO, she was the last one.  Why are they leaving? And what does that mean for the future of AI? Not that there aren’t other platforms, but they certainly are the highest valued one besides NVIDIA with their evaluation, but they make chips. 

Yeah, I reckon there's the answer that, that guys like you and I will probably discuss on, on podcasts and then I believe there's probably a whole, a whole other answer that's quite different and behind closed doors. But , I think I think a large part of it has to do with A classic vision doesn't meet reality kind of, kind of stance, right?

And we're opening, I came to market as a we want to empower human beings, and we want to empower everybody and in a safe way. But when you have billions and billions of dollars, From large companies invested. It's hard for that not to become a strictly commercial play very quickly. I mean, there's too many interests.

There's too much on the line. And when you're, you're burning that much cash on a monthly basis it's almost impossible to, to keep a true vision, like they kind of set out. So, I feel that that's one of the reasons. The other one though, is I think that there's an. This isn't any AI company, by the way.

OpenAI just happens to be so big and backed by such powerful people.  You're going to have disagreements on when's the right time to pull the trigger here. And are we ready for that? Is the world ready for that? Are our customers ready for that? And I think you probably see that with Ilya, right? How he goes and, I mean, he just raised a billion or 1.

5 billion at a time.  100 billion valuation for his super safe intelligence.  I think there's, there's definitely something along the lines there where whether it's Sam or whether it's Microsoft or the board in general is pushing for, we need to get here faster. Right? Whether that's AGI or whatever it is.

And I think that I think the people who are really behind the scenes building, and we're in that academic realm, right, who truly understand this, are probably saying, whoa, look, guys, we're, there's a lot of things going on here that the world is just not ready for yet. We don't have the oversight. We don't have the regulations.

We don't have the off switch necessarily, if things start to go in the wrong direction. But again, when you, when you take the commercial interests versus those concerns, and you're talking to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that those concerns find a way to get quieter and quieter.

And so, I, I have a feeling there's, there's something like that going on too.  Yeah, I don't think that OpenAI has removed the guardrails, like Elon Musk erased the guardrails on his social media platform. So, I think there is hope. But it seems crazy that the corporate interest, the investing community, wants AGI so quickly.

When there's so much Cool shit that can happen way before AGI and is happening right now that it's like, let's regulate that and figure that out. And , like Sora hasn't even been released yet. But that was creating waves in the AI video world months ago, and it still hasn't come out.  So, I mean, they're holding it back, right?

But, yeah, Runway is running away. They're kind of eating their lunch. Kling came out. They're eating Runway’s lunch. So, everyone's eating each other's lunch in terms of innovating to beat the next one to be the best whatever. But it's all cool, great. Results that have nothing to do with AGI really, but it's, they're cool features, they're cool tools to use.

And so, I just don't see why we have to rush to AGI. It's predicted three to five years, right? From now. And even Sam Altman confirmed with his super intelligence play again. People are kind of dancing around AGI. They're not really overtly saying AGI. They're saying, Oh no, it's super intelligence.

It's reasoning. It's strawberry. It's all these soft branding terms that.  You're, you're talking about AGI. So why, why beat around the bush other than trying to not scare people that this is really what they're doing. Any thoughts about that whole nomenclature aspect labels people are putting on AGI essentially. 

I think you touched on it at the end. I think a large part of it is the fear aspect, right. Of the general public.  But I mean, think of it like this. This is. This is how I normally kind of address these thoughts when I'm just trying to keep up with what's going on and  there hasn't been enough time over not even two years  for the majority of the general public to really even get up to speed on, again, some of the foundational aspects of artificial intelligence,  let alone to bring in our those actually are.

best and brightest minds on the ethical parameters and the moral parameters and the legal parameters and economic parameters and repercussions. I mean, it would in my personal view, it would be incredibly irresponsible, both as an organization, but just to society. To push for something around AGI so quickly.

And I think that's probably why to the nomenclature, why you won't hear it. Right. Is because I think that once it's, once the words leave your mouth, that's now it's there, it's, it's there forever. We achieved AGI what's going on here. Right. That would be the alarm bells are sounding at that point.  Where Apple comes up with Apple intelligence, get it?

AI, there's another brand. I'm a branding guy. So, I appreciate the thinking around branding and naming products, but  and then there's the confusion of is, Is superintelligence higher than AGI? And it's like, it's all about AGI. Superintelligence is just a term. It's just a made-up term, right?

So that creates more confusion, ? So, this, this communication is creating more confusion because of branding and competition. And it's like, well, what are we going to call our technology?  It's all about AGI so you're, you're, you're better off just calling it lemon versus some some new spin on intelligence.

Cause it just conflates the issue of AI literacy because people don't know what this stuff is.  Yeah, 100%. And I'll just add, I, it goes back to the, I think the original question is what's, what's going on. Look, there's, there's a big difference. between guardrails that are in place versus we have a plan to put those guardrails into place.

And when you're moving at a speed that doesn't facilitate the former and you're just banking on the latter, that’s trouble, right? And you can look at its trouble from a liability standpoint, from an investment standpoint, from a Societal standpoint, and I just think that that's probably where everyone is at the moment, at least everyone OpenAI and Microsoft is. 

We have to have these guardrails in place first. But , and anyone who kind of works in the arena knows, it's.  I won't say impossible, very hard to do that, right? Put guardrails around something that doesn't exist because then you don't know if they are of the right nature in the right capacity or will they actually work.

So, to me it's, yeah, I think it's irresponsible. But also, there's no way people can consider this, right? And I think if AGI is achieved at what that would actually mean to society, I think that all of us within the AI community owe it. To society to be able to have those conversations and make those decisions together, right?

Do we want this? And if we do, when and before we reach it, what do we need to be in place first?  Yeah, slow down motherfucker because this is going to the world's going to change right exactly speaking about  change So there's been a lot of discussion around the AI bubble when is it going to burst and I would say and ask well actually is there more than one bubble and What is the bubble that's going to burst that , I think Wall Street's talking about.

What are your thoughts about the AI bubble?  Yeah, I'm with you. I think there's more than one. The way I see it is the first bubble. We're probably nearing that point now is around what I would say is like general application AI, right? AI without any, any targeted use case or, or desired outcome.

And, and you see that with , even Gen AI tools like OpenAI, right? It's a lot of people can get really excited about it, but then, okay, what does this do for me? past year, like professionally, how do I take it from helping me reword an email to actually turning my revenue into 20 percent increase, right?

Or improving my metrics X percent. So that broad range application of AI is very difficult. , it's when you, when you try to do everything, then you're really nothing for any particular group of people. That's going to be the one. In my view is a lot of companies that are just AI. 

Whatever insert now Exactly that that's going to be you're seeing a ton of investment into it now because  VCs want a portfolio with ai attached to it The people and the companies that take their time to be specific in niche and solve very specific problems Which by the way is how marketing's worked for all of human history, right?

They're going to beat out the general application ai platforms 10 times out of 10 And so I think you're going to see a burst of that kind of bubble for sure You Well, I really appreciate the fact that you don't have AI in your name. I appreciate that.  You probably were smart about it. It's like, there's going to be a thousand companies out there with AI in the name.

So why go, I went the same way with Realm IQ. It's like, it’s a metaphor for smart world, but , there's no AI in it because I can go many different ways after the bubble burst. So Well,  what? I, I wouldn't take too much credit only because before I joined SmythOS full time, I had a, an agency before that for several years and the name of it Was the AI agency.

So, there was there was a period where trying to get ahead of what was to come. But yeah, yeah. No, no AI in the name. It's interesting. I, I have some points of view on that because I, I, I've been an agency guy my whole career, branding and marketing and when AI came out, it was you could do things faster and quicker.

And if you're on the agency side, great, you're doing that faster and quicker and maybe cheaper for your clients affecting your bottom line. But it also might affect the budgets that you get because those clients know that you're an AI agency or AI powered agency, and they'll say, Oh, yeah, you're using that stuff.

And you could do You can do stuff in 20 percent of the time, normal, and it's like, so then why are you still charging me 30, 000 a month as a retainer when you're doing it with less people and quicker? And that's a difficult question, right? Because it's obvious. And you may be experienced it.

I don't know, but again, kind of projecting this race to the bottom of the value of what creatives bring to the table, whether they're using these tools or not. And I have a lot of passion around that because I'm background and I use the tools, but I'm not, I'm not. saying, Oh, I'm an AI first agency. I'm, and I think there's, there's this nomenclature out there where, Oh, build your AI first business.

It's like, well, what are you saying? I mean, you can use these tools and not be AI first.  AI first is a, is a methodology or a roadmap to how to increase adoption of AI in your company. That's an internal mandate, but to use it as an external communication about the position of your product to your agency.

I think AI first falls flat. Do you have any thoughts about that?  Yeah, it's another term I see a lot is AI native, in which I'm not even really sure what that means, to be frank, but yeah I, at least the way I always positioned because I, I was also in the agency space for a little over seven years.

The last two of that was running the AI agency and it was never Hey, we, we are going to do things on our side internally, strictly through AI. And, and the cost savings was never part of my value proposition. The value proposition I put forward is we spend the time understanding this stuff.

So, so you don't have to, right. We'll tell you what's, what's good. What's fluff. What do you need? What do you not need? And then understanding your business, where can we inject it, right? Where it can be a true tool to efficiency, productivity gains revenue optimization. So, it was never about replacing both procedurally and from a human capital standpoint.

It was just about augmenting.  , like, hey, with the same spend you have now, and this is where if you're already paying us 20, 000 a month and without AI, we can get you this, but with it, we can get you this, right? That returns just a little bit higher. So, for the next couple of years, I think 2025 is going to be the year of AI agents.

I think most people are going to really come to understand agentic AI. Start to roll it out across their organizations. Individuals and entrepreneurs will be able to grow much quicker because of it.  But I still don't think it's going to be to a point where you're replacing humans or you're replacing , entire tech stacks or anything of that nature.

It's like with Smith. We fit in between or bring together the tools you're already using to make them even more powerful. It's the same with humans and with teams, the team you already have in the structure and processes that you're already engaged in. We're going to make it that much more powerful, that much more efficient.

So, I think over the next three or four years, that's the name of the game. Both for businesses and individuals’ is don't look to replace anything yet. Just look to augment and supplement what you already have with a tremendously powerful tool or set of tools. I love that explanation.  So, in terms of. 

How can companies implement AI? I'm sure you're talking to them, and this is part of your agency work before, but how now that you have a new product how can companies at an enterprise solution implement what you're offering with Smith OS?  It comes down to need so with every company we work with, we start with kind of AI needs assessment and even like a readiness check, right?

Are you even in a position to really utilize and capitalize on it first and foremost? But it's really about starting with the smaller repetitive things that take A lot more time than people probably think. And this could be data analysis. And then from the analysis thinking about ways to improve and where to move forward and then by augmenting and, and really automating the small repetitive.

Now everyone in an organization is freed up to think more strategically, right? And creatively, and then new ideas are born. So, it's the implementation of new ideas and the, the automation of already existing processes, which is where every business today can get started. Right. And the way I usually position it is like, man, you've probably got so much genius.

in your organization that is not being realized because the people that have these ideas have no clue how to get them from day zero to up and running in the real world. That's the kind of thing that a tool like SmythOS can help, right? Unlock creativity, unlock the genius, and really get moving in a direction that you probably couldn't have prior. 

Yeah, I love that. And also a lot of people talk about unlocking your internal creativity and it's like some people are not creative and there's many aspects of AI that have nothing to do with creativity, right? It's like its business, its data analytics, sales, and that's okay. That AI enables that, and that people are liberated to pursue those noncreative efforts.

That's just me, because I'm a creative, so I recognize the creative possibilities, but there's this whole other business side that is analytical and results oriented, and it has nothing to do with the creativity, like from a marketing agency or ad agency or all that, where whole teams are tasked with specific tasks in the creative process.

So.  That's just me talking. But do you find that too, that maybe people don't want to be creative, but they want to be productive in a way that they're less worried about untapping some creative potential in there when they're not creative at all. They just want to one stay employed, be more productive, be up to date with the technology and help transform their company.

And that may have nothing to do with creative.  Is that a track for people that you talk to?  Oh, of course, of course. I would, I view the idea of creativity a little bit differently than, then I think you may, but in a general sense, yeah, of course. I, I think if you can, if you can step outside of the mundane, which every job has these things, right?

Whether it's data entry or, I mean thinking in the agency world, even sitting down and putting together a proposal, for example. Or doing your CRM hygiene or whatever it may be stepping outside of the mundane in thinking more about the, the bigger picture, which again, every role has that's the starting point.

And it's the starting point for everybody where man, it just causes when you're sitting and you kind of get into a flow state. Right, but if that flow state is spent on taking numbers from spreadsheet A to spreadsheet B, just imagine how much more you could achieve if that was done. Okay, so that, that 45 minutes I was going to spend on transferring data between spreadsheets, now let's think about something different, right, or how to approach this problem differently.

So, I would say you could substitute the word creative with critical thinking, right? Or strategic thought. Any one of those three, I think is required for just about every job that there is. And again, when you can free yourself up from the repetitive, you can focus more on those elements that makes you a better employee, makes organizations stronger.

And I think it just makes work more fulfilling as well. Right.  Right. Yeah. It's thinking outside of the box, right. And then imagining new innovation to transform the business, your department, your role, right? Absolutely. So, yeah, I, yeah, I appreciate you expanding on that because I get frustrated with one there's a lot of creative hacks out there. 

Filling feeds, social feeds with all this, the latest toys. And it's like, they don't realize, okay, it took three cups of water to make that image in chat GPT. It's like, you should really think about why, what, and how you're producing images and for what reason.  And so, if we can all be more purposeful with how we use the technology, we can Control someone some of the damage that this technology is have happens to our environment. 

It's a whole other aspect Right.  Yeah, I would tell you I’m, not a creative type of person I’m a performance marketer if you gave me A blank piece of paper and said create something beautiful, You'd get a stick figure drawing, right? I'm not, I'm not that kind of individual, but I think if you sit in if I have time to say here's a variable or here's a number that we need to grow what are different kinds of AP tests that can be run that I personally, I will consider that kind of a, a mode of creative thinking.

Others may say, Michael, you're, crazy. That's just strategic thinking. But yeah, I think you're right. It is. It's an overplayed tripe and a little bit in the sense that there are the consultants that you and I probably both know who are jumping into the A. I into the A. I bandwagon and using the term creative a little loosely.

I think we've both probably seen that update.  And really, what is an AI expert, right? That's the other adage at It's like an internet expert, right? What's an internet expert? I'm an internet, I'm a digital expert. What does digital mean?  Always been frustrated by that. So, one last topic. So as agentic AI takes off, and you say it'll be the thing in 2025. 

SEO is taking a hit. Google is taking a hit because no one's going to Google anymore to search. They're just saying, well, I like these other platforms. Cause I get such a more meaningful response, right? Not just a bunch of links and sponsored ads.  So that SEO. The house of cards is falling and here you have agents.

So, these agents now are going to be hitting those websites, getting information. So, they're not people. There's no IP address associated with the bot and very, maybe loosely associated with the owner of that agent.  Isn't that further compounding the fact that SEO is not relevant anymore?  I wouldn't go quite that far to say it's not relevant.

What I'll tell you, though, is this is where if I had to break down all the areas that we internally, right, so a company that  helps people build agents, that's our entire existence,  where we spend the most of our own internal AI development time,  That would be  in the top two, if not number one, is around variations of what we call the future of search. 

It's, it's critical because every business, even if you don't have a website, you're engaged in the online search world in some way, shape, or form, right? Whether it's word of mouth via social media that's done online.  negative reviews that that are put on Facebook or whatever it may be, every company has a vested interest in, in search.

That's going to change. I mean, it already is to your question, but, but throughout the next year, it's going to change dramatically, right? I could see a world in six months where.  I don't even ever use Google again. I just asked my handy assistant, whether it's an anthropic model or an open AI model, or someone else that comes into the scene, Hey, I'm looking for a restaurant tonight, can you find me availability between seven and eight?

And we want to get Italian food, right? And I don't even read a review. It just handles it for me. Same thing with a business need. Hey, I'm looking for a solution that helps me AB test my campaigns. Thanks. I need it to be under a thousand bucks a month and we want a monthly contract, and it goes out and does the search So the future of search I think is a very realistic in time sensitive area for businesses to start thinking about agentic ai yeah and search in a new way and the business model of google Is what can and will likely collapse?

That's really what I’m saying is it's it'll be a new model, and I don't even think it should be speaking about branding and names and terms. It's like, it shouldn't even be called SEO anymore. It's something else. I'm not sure what it is, but it's not the old model.  The old models failing. No one's going there.

So, what do we call it? And I think that's a challenge. I think. Any company that solves that, I think, will be very smart and probably handsomely rewarded. I just can't think of it right now.  it's paying me to think about that, so that’s why I'm not thinking about it. We got super creative with it internally and called it AIMO, just AI Marketing Optimization.

How do we optimize what we're doing for when AI starts handling a lot of the, a lot of the search elements for consumers? Just how do we optimize that experience? That's it. And somebody probably a HubSpot or someone will, will brand it soon enough. But that's the, that's the view. And I think when you see, we saw it with, with the internet, now we're seeing it with AI, when people start to really adapt and change their behaviors based on a new technology, that's the sign.

It's time to move, right? It's time to move, shift our focus over to this thing. And that's what happened from newspapers to, to blogs to now. , I guess what we call is SEO or PPC. That's happening right now as we speak with search assistance. So, optimizing for that should be on, on the Q1 2025. 

Plan for every company in the world, in my opinion, I believe it. I believe it. Well, listen, I have really enjoyed our talk and you're a terrific guest and a lot of truth bombs were dropped. And thank you so much. We want to have you back and check in on agentic and see what we can do. What are you doing at that point?

So, thank you, Michael. And we want to thank everyone for listening and watching please follow, subscribe and share our podcast.  And thanks again and have a great day.  Thank you, Curt, so much for having me.