In this episode
Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, joins Greg Kihlström to explain how brand discovery works in an age of AI search — and why treating Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) as merely the next SEO sells it short. Bodnar walks through how Google’s ten blue links are giving way to conversational discovery across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI-powered Google, why AI-referred visitors convert at three to five times the rate of traditional search, how the most-cited sources have shifted to Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and why unified customer data — context — is becoming the durable competitive moat as models themselves commoditize.
Key takeaways
- The ten blue links are going away, and discovery now happens inside the AI conversation. The learning that used to happen on your website now happens in a back-and-forth with AI search across Google, YouTube, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
- AI-referred visitors convert at 3–5x traditional Google search — but there are fewer of them. By the time someone reaches your site after 20 minutes with an AI, they’re ready to buy, because the AI has already done the qualification and expectation-setting.
- AEO is not SEO 2.0 — the overlap is only about 30–40%. Three new terms matter: AI visibility (how present your brand is across relevant prompts), how you’re mentioned, and whether you’re actually cited with a link back.
- 60% of citations in AI search weren’t in Google’s top 20 blue links. AI finds and processes information in fundamentally different ways than traditional search, so old rankings don’t carry over.
- LLMs don’t use PageRank — they assemble a consensus answer, and the top three cited sources are Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn organic posts. If you’re absent from those networks, your AI visibility drops.
- On-site copy has to change to plain, chunked language. A short, simple “What is CRM?” answer now outperforms the long-form SEO page, because LLMs parse content more like humans than like old crawler robots.
- AI search changes hourly, and content can surface within an hour — so teams must go real-time. HubSpot moved to a six-week sprint model and integrated its dedicated AEO team across marketing rather than leaving it siloed the way SEO could be.
- Early movers win big, and HubSpot rode the wave to 10–15x visibility and traffic. LLM traffic became a material lead and customer driver — partly from smart work, partly from being early while there’s less competition.
- Context beats model quality long-term, which makes unified customer data the real moat. Most companies struggling with AI are really struggling with disorganized data; the fix is getting structured and unstructured customer data into one accessible place before layering AI on top.
Chapters
- 01:24 — Cold open: discovery your attribution can’t see
- 03:12 — Kipp’s background, HubSpot, and the Loop book
- 04:21 — SEO vs. AEO: the fundamental difference
- 05:05 — How AI search changed discovery
- 05:50 — Why AI-referred buyers convert 3–5x
- 07:39 — The risk of being invisible in AI search
- 07:55 — New vocabulary: visibility, mentions, citations
- 09:16 — Why 60% of AI citations weren’t in Google’s top 20
- 10:13 — What an AEO team actually does
- 11:37 — Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn as the top cited sources
- 12:53 — HubSpot’s AEO playbook and the six-week sprint
- 16:43 — Results: 10–15x visibility and riding the wave
- 18:25 — Don’t abandon SEO — baseline your AI visibility
- 21:37 — Unified customer data as the real moat
- 24:12 — Building a “taste profile”
- 27:36 — The productivity trap vs. outcome-maxing
- 28:40 — One year out: voice and multimodal
- 29:01 — Staying agile
Why AEO isn’t just the next SEO
Bodnar starts from the structural change: Google’s ten blue links are fundamentally going away, and the model they were built on is breaking. In the old motion you optimized for placement, users clicked through, explored a few pages, and some converted — a highly attributable process that entire businesses were built on. AI upended it. Google moved to an AI search model, people now search across far more surfaces, and customers ask 20-to-40-word questions instead of two-to-four-word keywords. The consequence is that the learning and discovery that used to happen on your website now happen in the conversation with AI — and AEO, in his framing, is only about 30–40% overlapping with SEO, not a rebrand of it.
The new metrics: visibility, mentions, citations
The scorecard changes along with the channel. Bodnar introduces three terms marketers now need: AI visibility (how present your brand is across all the prompts people might ask about your category), how your brand is mentioned (and crucially, whether it’s mentioned the way you want to be perceived), and whether you’re cited with an actual link back. Old-school search cared only about links and traffic; now you have to care whether your message is reaching in-market prospects through the LLMs at all. He underscores the discontinuity with a number: 60% of the citations surfacing in AI search weren’t in the first 20 traditional Google results.
Why Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn now drive AI visibility
Because LLMs don’t have a concept of PageRank, they build a consensus answer by reading widely across the internet — and Bodnar says the three sources they cite most are Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn organic posts. That reorders the playbook: presence on those networks now directly affects whether AI surfaces your brand, so HubSpot runs Reddit AMAs, maintains its own subreddit, and works closely with its YouTube team on descriptions and transcripts. Customer review and rating sites, and even some affiliate content, also carry positive weight. The toolbox is simply broader than the on-site, link-building world of SEO.
How to reorganize the team for real-time AI search
Two things break the old operating model. On-site, content has to become plainer and more chunked so LLMs can lift a clean answer. Off-site, the work spans platforms an SEO specialist never touched. And the tempo is different: where Google results shifted occasionally and a blog might take three to six months to index, AI results change hourly and new content can appear within an hour. HubSpot’s response was to integrate its dedicated AEO team tightly with the rest of marketing — no more working on an island — and adopt a six-week sprint model with time-boxed experiments, because the environment moves faster than ever.
Why context beats model quality
Asked about the deeper moat, Bodnar argues that context is more important than model quality over the long term: models converge and get cheaper, so AI becomes infrastructure, like AWS or Google Cloud, and the value comes from what you put on top of it. For HubSpot that means complete customer context — structured CRM data plus unstructured emails, calls, decks, and PDFs — because more context yields better output than a marginally better model would. He’s blunt that most companies stalling on AI have a data problem, not an AI problem: step one is consolidating your data into one accessible place. Step two is context about how you work — brand, tone, audience, ICP — captured in what the Loop book calls a “taste profile.”
From the productivity trap to outcome-maxing
Bodnar’s closing reframe is about how to use all this. Teams usually start in the “productivity trap” — saving time, which just produces more low-impact work — and only later reach what he calls outcome-maxing: focusing so completely on the outcome and its inputs that productivity becomes a byproduct rather than the goal. He casts the whole shift as a renaissance for marketing rather than an industrial revolution: not automation for its own sake, but a new set of tools that let marketers build things that weren’t possible before, like a great 30-second spot in days instead of months. The lack of value, he insists, is rarely the AI — it’s teams lacking clarity on how they work, their goals, and who their customers are.
FAQ
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and how is it different from SEO? AEO is optimizing for visibility inside AI search engines rather than for placement in Google’s blue links. Bodnar estimates only about 30–40% overlap with SEO, with new priorities like AI visibility, how your brand is mentioned, and whether it’s cited.
Why do AI-referred visitors convert better? Because the AI does the qualification. Someone who spends 20 minutes with an AI arrives ready to buy, converting at three to five times the rate of traditional Google search — though there are fewer such visitors overall.
Which sources do LLMs cite most in AI search? Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn organic posts. Because LLMs assemble a consensus answer rather than using PageRank, presence and participation on those networks strongly influence your brand’s AI visibility.
How should marketing teams reorganize for AI search? Integrate the AEO function across the marketing team rather than siloing it, invest in off-site platforms like Reddit and YouTube, simplify on-site copy, and adopt a faster cadence — HubSpot uses six-week sprints because AI results change hourly.
Why is unified customer data the real competitive moat? Because context beats model quality as models commoditize. Bringing structured and unstructured customer data into one accessible place gives AI far better output, and most companies’ AI struggles are really data-organization problems.
About Kipp Bodnar
As CMO of HubSpot, Kipp leads global marketing strategy to drive awareness and demand across a rapidly evolving product suite. He previously served as VP of Marketing, scaling international teams and overseeing demand gen, strategic partnerships, and social media. He’s also a marketing advisor to several SaaS companies, co-author of The B2B Social Media Book, and a respected speaker and blogger.
Kipp Bodnar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kippbodnar/
Resources
HubSpot website: https://www.hubspot.com/
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Transcript
[00:01:24] Greg Kihlström: What if your most valuable future customers are discovering solutions in a place your current attribution models can’t even see? Agility requires not just adapting to new channels, but completely rethinking how we measure discovery and value when the customer journey starts with a conversation with AI. Today, we’re going to talk about how the shift from keyword-based search to conversational AI is creating a new discipline, answer engine optimization, why your current team structure might be the biggest obstacle to winning in the AI era, and how to reorganize talent and process for this new reality, and the critical role of unified customer data in influencing AI-driven recommendations and why it’s becoming the ultimate competitive advantage. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot. Kipp, welcome to the show.
[00:02:59] Kipp Bodnar: Hey, Greg. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
[00:03:01] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, looking forward to diving in. Definitely a timely topic here. Lots of people thinking about this. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at HubSpot?
[00:03:12] Kipp Bodnar: So for folks who aren’t familiar, I’m Kipp Bodnar. I lead marketing at HubSpot. We build marketing and sales software for businesses, and it is, been a blast. I’ve been a- at HubSpot for quite a long time. I also host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain, and I’m the author of an upcoming book. The, uh, it’s called Loop: Outlearn, Outmarket, Outgrow. Comes out September 22nd. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:35] Greg Kihlström: Nice. Yeah, love it. Yeah, and, uh, definitely recommend, uh, people check out the podcast maybe after they lis- finish listening to this episode, but, um, but definitely recommend it as well. (laughs) Um, so yeah, let’s, let’s dive in here, and I wanna just dive into what I teed up in the intro here. And, you know, lots of people thinking about whether they call it AEO, answer engine optimization, GEO. There’s probably other names for it as well. We love our acronyms, but, uh, so much effort over the years has been spent on search engine optimization, and, uh, there’s lots of infrastructure, uh, at organizations to do that. But simply thinking that AEO or GEO is the next SEO kind of sells it short. Can you talk a little bit about how
[00:04:21] Greg Kihlström: at a strategic level, what’s the fundamental difference between something like SEO and AEO?
[00:04:28] Kipp Bodnar: exactly. So we got here because the 10 blue links of Google are fundamentally going away, right?
[00:04:34] Kipp Bodnar: To just make sure that we’re all on the same page, what used to happen is you used to optimize for your placement on that first list of 10 blue links from Google, and people would come, and they’d click your link if you were one of the top ones, and they’d come to your website.
[00:04:49] Kipp Bodnar: They’d hopefully read some, maybe discover some other pages, and some percentage of those folks would become a customer. And it was awesome. You could, like, highly… it was pretty highly attributable. You were able to capture a lot of intent, and tons of businesses like ours were built on that motion. It was really great.
[00:05:05] Kipp Bodnar: Then AI happened. And the thing we never expected, which was the 10 blue links becoming irrelevant, has happened. And whether you… There’s a couple things that have happened, Greg. One, um, Google has changed search fundamentally and moved to an AI search model. Also, people are searching across more places than ever before: Google, YouTube, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, you know, you name it. There are way more places to search and discover. And all of these mechanisms to search and discover that I would put in the bucket of AI search, right? You’ve got these large language models who are offering recommendations. There’s, there’s so much that has happened that’s different. One, the customers
[00:05:50] Kipp Bodnar: themselves are asking much more detailed questions, right? ‘Cause you can.
[00:05:53] Kipp Bodnar: Instead of typing in a keyword or two, you’re writing sentences. So it’s like from a four… you might have two or four words. Now you’re like 20 or 40 words. You know, so essentially, the detail of what you’re asking has become more detailed, uh, much more in depth, and the response has become much more personal. And I think the big seismic shift here is all of that learning and that discovery that used to happen on your website now happens in this chat back and forth with AI search. And… … at the end of that, the folks who do come to your website, they are ready to go. They have just spent 20 minutes really looking forward, and we have found that, for us, they become customers at three to 5X the rate of traditional Google Search. However, you get less of those people because you’re going through this, this new process
[00:06:39] Kipp Bodnar: where AI is doing a lot of the qualification and expectation-setting. And that is the big shift that is happening and is upon us.
[00:06:47] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, it sounds like the… A- all of the infrastructure that’s been set up from an SEO standpoint, it kind of takes into account that, uh, you, you refer to, the funnel is shortening, right?
[00:07:01] Greg Kihlström: However you wanna look at it is, you know, people show up on your site. Yes, they’re ready to buy, but we lose kind of tracking back from, okay, they first were kind of in that awareness stage, so, you know, and moving, moving through that traditional funnel. What’s the, what’s the risk for… You know, lots of companies, big and small, have, have invested in infrastructure to understand things like that, and now, to your point, again, people are showing up. Uh, there’s, there’s less attribution backwards and, and, and stuff. What, what’s the risk to not adapt to this? And, and, uh, you know, how do you do this quickly? I gue- because time is of the essence.
[00:07:39] Kipp Bodnar: I th- I mean, I think the biggest risk is that you’re invisible on these AI search engines.
[00:07:43] Kipp Bodnar: Uh, there is, there’s overlap between SEO and AEO or GEO, whatever you wanna call it. We call it AEO. Um, but it’s, you know, it’s like 30, 40% overlap. It’s not 100% overlap.
[00:07:55] Kipp Bodnar: A- and, in fact, many, uh… But before I get into that, in the new world of AI search, there’s some new terms that everybody needs to be familiar with. Uh, there’s, first of all, there’s a term called AI visibility, and that’s just how visi- visible your brand is across all of the prompts and questions people might be asking about your business.
[00:08:14] Kipp Bodnar: And then within that, it is, how is your brand mentioned? So that’s, you know, ChatGBT or Gemini or somebody talking about your brand in a response. And then how is your brand cited? And cited is, there’s actually a link back to a piece of content or a product page or some aspect of your website.
[00:08:31] Kipp Bodnar: And what’s interesting is, on the g- old-school search thing, we only cared about the, the links and, and getting traffic back to our site. Now you have to care about the visibility you have, how you… and not just that you’re mentioned, but how are you mentioned? Are you mentioned in the way that you want to be perceived? If somebody’s a prospective customer and they’re in your target market, is your message getting to them through the LLMs? That is a big risk and a huge opportunity that now exists. And, uh, I think the last thing that I would say here that’s, I think, really important to understand is, the metrics have shift, but also how AI gets answers have shifted. Mm, 60% of the citations that show up, so the links that show up in these new AI search engines, were not
[00:09:16] Kipp Bodnar: in the first 20 traditional blue links of Google-
[00:09:21] Kipp Bodnar: … the old results. So they’re finding and processing information in very different ways than traditional SEO.
[00:09:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. So then, from operationalizing this, you know, uh, companies, depending on the size of the company, you know, there could be an organic search team, a paid search team. You know?
[00:09:38] Kipp Bodnar: Sure.
[00:09:39] Greg Kihlström: It, it gets, it gets pretty granular, but, you know, there’s, there’s, let’s just call it, there’s search teams or even sometimes people, you know, one person in an org, depending on, on size. But what does it look like? B- because what you’re saying is, you know, a lot of the SEO stuff was onsite optimization and, you know, some, some related things like that. Because the content is being sourced from a number of different things, this sounds like there’s a lot of other considerations that need to be taken in- into account. Like, what, what does a, what does an AEO team, for lack of a better term-
[00:10:12] Kipp Bodnar: Yeah.
[00:10:12] Greg Kihlström: … look like?
[00:10:13] Kipp Bodnar: So let’s, let’s, let’s give a crash course on, like, what is different and what you, what you have to do.
[00:10:18] Kipp Bodnar: First of all, in traditional search engines, Greg, we were… We had these Google crawler robots that were robots that we were trying to basically meet those robots where they, where they were, right?
[00:10:29] Kipp Bodnar: And now we have, like, these new fancier robots in these LLMs that essentially act much more like humans and parse information like humans, which, one, changes what needs to happen on your own website, right? So if you look at our product pages, for example, you’ll see much plainer language, very simple, very chunked-up, that’s easy if you’re a, a new large-language model going out and looking to find, you know, “What is CRM?” in a couple sentences, right? And before, in the traditional SEO world, you would have had this long, long CRM page, right? Where that is less beneficial in this new world. But you rose, you, you, you brought up a really interesting point, which is like, there’s a whole host of things that are happening outside your website that’s more,
[00:11:14] Kipp Bodnar: more important. And part of it is, in traditional SEO, there was this thing called PageRank. And the more authority a site had, the higher the PageRank, and then subsequently, the higher it would be ranked on the list of the blue links. Now, AI doesn’t have a concept of PageRank. It’s looking for, to basically find the consensus answer by going out and reading a lot of stuff on the internet.
[00:11:37] Kipp Bodnar: And the first thing you n- need to understand is, right now, for these large language models, they have three sites that they cite and use in citations for their responses the most, and that is Reddit, that is YouTube, and that is LinkedIn organic posts.
[00:11:55] Kipp Bodnar: And so the first thing you have to say is, if you’re not really any, uh, participating or visible in those other networks, then that’s going to decrease your visibility in AI search, right? Because they’re, AI is looking at the content conversations on those other networks to basically try to figure out, “Oh, what is actually the, the consensus viewpoint on this product or on this issue that I am trying to answer?” And so, uh, what we’ve done and what we’ve seen a lot of people do is invest much more in all of those platforms, right? Um, and, and especially as it, uh, relates to, like, the core topics that you want to be visible for in AI search. And I think the other thing is, you know… … customer review
[00:12:40] Kipp Bodnar: and rating websites. Uh, even some affiliate marketing has positive impact in AI search. And so it’s just a broader toolbox that if you’re building a team in this new world, that you kinda have to play in.
[00:12:53] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and I, I know you touched on, on some things just then, but y- HubSpot has been very successful in implementing an AEO playbook. I wo- I wonder if you could talk us, maybe talk us through a, maybe a process change your team made or, you know, how has content strategy evolved given some of the things that you just mentioned?
[00:13:13] Kipp Bodnar: So, so if you think about how… the biggest changes we’ve made is like we’ve, we have a, we’re a larger company so we have a dedicated AEO team and they use our HubSpot AEO product. They use lots of other cool products out there to basically get the clearest example of the opportunities, right? You’re, where am I not showing up that I should be, or maybe I’m showing up but not showing up in the way that I want it to be? And what they really had to do is be much more integrated into the rest of the marketing team. With SEO before, you could kinda be on an island and do a few things, and do some link-building and do some, uh, technical content optimization and be in a good place. That’s not really the case anymore. And so, you know, we’re running AMAs on Reddit. We’ve got our own subreddit.
[00:13:58] Kipp Bodnar: You know, you are doing much more holistic things. They’re working closely with our team on YouTube that are making sure that our video descriptions and transcripts and everything are set to also cover and include kind of the core areas of focus that we are trying to be bi- visible for. And more importantly, stuff just changes way more. Google Search results y- they didn’t change that often.
[00:14:25] Kipp Bodnar: You know, like every-
[00:14:25] Greg Kihlström: When they did, it was a momentous occasion or whatever, but yeah. (laughs)
[00:14:28] Kipp Bodnar: Yeah. There was an algorithm update or somebody did-
[00:14:29] Kipp Bodnar: … something really dramatic, but they weren’t changing hourly or daily, right? And these results, one, they change hourly and daily, and the other thing is I- I remember it’s like, “Okay. Well, if I work really hard and I create a blog and I grind it out for three to six months, my, then I’ll get a bunch of this stuff-“
[00:14:48] Kipp Bodnar: “… searched and indexed and everything.” Now it’s like you could make something and get, show up in AI search an hour.
[00:14:53] Kipp Bodnar: Right? So the time to actually appear is much narrower, and so we’re having to operate at a more real-time agile way, like we’ve moved to kind of a six-week sprint operating model where we are really f- trying to time box our work and have clear experiments and outcomes we’re trying to drive just because the world is moving faster than ever.
[00:16:43] Greg Kihlström: To speak to some of the results that you’ve gotten, I mean, a- again, I think you’ve gotten some, some great results from your, your efforts. I’ll, I’ll let you kinda talk us through that, uh, as well, but how do you think about… Certainly, you know, at the end of the day, we’re, our KPIs aren’t gonna change, you know, we want more leads and sales and, and all that kinda stuff.
[00:17:02] Kipp Bodnar: So, so the fir- th- before I even answer that, what I would remind everybody is the most, one of the most important things in marketing is to be in early and, like, catching the wave early and really riding the wave. And you’re on the point right now in the answer engine optimization world where you’re, like, out in the water and should be, should just be jumping on the wave. And normally- … in doing that you get much better results much faster, right, because there’s less competition, it’s newer, um, and the early movers tend to get a lot of advantages. Like, we’ve increased our visibility in traffic, you know, 10X, 15X- … depending on the queries and the prompts. And we’ve been able… Again, we’ve found a lot of that traffic that’s coming back to us. Like, we’ve turned LLM traffic into, like, a material lead and customer driver for us and one that wasn’t off the board. And part of that is like, oh, we did some smart things, which we’ve kinda talked about some of the things we have. Part of it is just, like, there are more people searching on LLMs, right? Like, we’re riding the wave. You know, LLM search is going to be bigger than traditional Google Search in a couple of years if you, if you, if all the adoption math keeps holding. And so we’re just- … riding a high growth wave in addition to doing good work, which is the secret- … in all of this. It’s like, you can do the best work, but you also wanna be going with the market momentum.
[00:18:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, you know, for those, there’s, there’s probably some that are, that are riding that wave and, and sort of-
[00:18:32] Kipp Bodnar: I mean, there’s a couple things. They’re not mutually exclusive things. There are some overlap- … that you get benefits from and I think search and discovery as a channel of marketing is one of the most important things. So I would, I, I, candidly, I wouldn’t give up on traditional SEO. I, but I might deprioritize other aspects of my marketing to make sure I can keep doing that and answer engine optimization just because this is- … the entry path into your brand now. And the other thing I would do is I, I think everybody I talk to, for better or worse, thinks they’re special, right? Like, “My customers aren’t using these tools yet. My business is a little different.” And that may or may not be true, but you should know if it’s true or not. And the way to know that it’s true is, you know, you need to use a tool w- uh, you can use the HubSpot AI tool for free for 30 days and just get a baseline of your visibility in these LLMs, right? Like- … am I visible? Am I showing up? Am I happy with how I’m showing up just based off of all the stuff I’m doing? If so, maybe I could wait a little bit. If I’m not, then maybe I need to prioritize and, and take more action faster.
[00:20:06] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it does, it does feel like, you know, if you, if you asked somebody four years ago, “Is SEO gonna, you know, take a second, a backseat to something else,” uh, or, or, you know, obviously Google is evolving in their, in their approach-
[00:20:21] Greg Kihlström: … and adopting AI search, uh, as a company as well, but it does feel like one of those things where who could’ve, you know, who could’ve predicted (laughs) that, that it would change and, and so quickly, right? So, I mean, I think you could say that for the whole, you know, gen AI phenomenon, right? (laughs)
[00:20:37] Kipp Bodnar: Uh, look, one of the, the posits that I, we make in the, in The Loop book is that marketing has been changed by AI more than any other discipline.
[00:20:46] Kipp Bodnar: And like, it k- when you think about it-
[00:20:48] Kipp Bodnar: … it makes sense. Search, the core channel, massively disrupted. Design, massively disrupted. Copywriting, massively disrupted. Data analysis, coding, all of the things that might just be individual skills in a lot of other functions all come together in marketing and they’ve all been disrupted in a really huge way, and-
[00:21:08] Kipp Bodnar: … I think for the average marketer I talk to, that leads, leaves them feeling overwhelmed ’cause it’s kinda the classic boil-the-ocean problem. If everything’s changed, like, where do I even start?
[00:21:18] Kipp Bodnar: And one of the things I love about answer engine optimization is it does give you, like, a very logical place to start. You’re like, “I want people to find me, and when they find me, I want them to see my brand in the way that, like, I see my brand and intend for them to see my brand.” That seems like a manageable place to start.
[00:21:37] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So I wanna change topics a, a little bit here, but still along the, the lines of how AI has certainly changed marketing, but an- another thing that you’ve talked about is just the, the importance of unified customer data-
[00:21:54] Greg Kihlström: … and just that, uh, you know, that’s the, it’s the real moat not n- n- using standalone AI features. You know, there, there’s lots of great stuff out there, but at the end of the day, um, certainly, I, I know we’ve been talking about first-party data and, and the power of that for years and some of that was driven a little bit by the, you know, pending cookiepocalypse or whatever-
[00:22:15] Kipp Bodnar: (laughs)
[00:22:15] Greg Kihlström: … but, you know, I think in my mind at least, uh, the, the good outcome of that was I think everybody started taking that first-party data a lot more seriously. You know, what’s your perspective on just, uh, th- uh, the importance of that and, and what brands should be doing to build that, that moat?
[00:22:33] Kipp Bodnar: It’s if you, if you think about it, context is more important than model quality long-term. Like models converge, models get cheaper, like AI as a, as a technology is probably a little bit more akin to something like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud where it is this infrastructure that enables infinitely amazing things-
[00:22:56] Kipp Bodnar: … but you need a bunch of other things on that infrastructure to actually d- drive value, and-
[00:23:02] Kipp Bodnar: … probably the largest of which is context. When we say context, like at HubSpot, we think about, like, customer context and how you have, like, the complete customer context, which is emails, phone calls, all your unstructured data, which is PDFs, decks, emails, calls, all your structured data, which is all the data in your CRM, because-
[00:23:21] Kipp Bodnar: … if you have all of that context, the models give you much, much better output. Like, that’s-
[00:23:27] Kipp Bodnar: … what we continue to see, uh, you know, day after day is that the more context you have, better the output than if the model was just way better. Now you’re asking a question like if I was a company, what do I need to do? Um, most companies that I talk to that are struggling getting going with AI is, it’s largely not because of AI, it’s ’cause of their data. They’re trying to get-
[00:23:46] Kipp Bodnar: … their data organized, in one place, and so that’s, step one is make sure that you actually have your customer data or your back office data, wherever you, where- whatever data you need in one, one place and accessible easily across your models, right? Like, we have our Breeze Assistant product in HubSpot and people love that product because it just sits right on top of their customer data and they can just get much better insights than just, like, going to ChatGPT.
[00:24:12] Kipp Bodnar: And so that’s, so that’s, that’s one thing you gotta do. The second thing is, like, you need context about how you work, and so your brand, your tone of voice, your audience, your ICP.
[00:24:23] Kipp Bodnar: Like, one of the things we talk about in The Loop book is the idea of building what we call a taste profile, which is not just, like, here’s my ICP, but it’s, like, what are all the emotional resonance with, uh, of my, of my ICP?
[00:24:36] Kipp Bodnar: What, what are the, what are the things that actually cause them to take action? And then what are the stories that I want my ICP to know and how can I put that all together so that anytime I’m doing something with AI, it has that context and is actually going to create something that my customers actually want?
[00:24:52] Kipp Bodnar: And so I think those are a few things that if you are getting-
[00:24:55] Kipp Bodnar: … started right now that you should think about in terms of, like, getting your context together ’cause it’s going to lead to better and better output over time.
[00:25:02] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, and I think to, to that, that taste profile comment, I mean, I think one of the things I’ve seen is, I think a good outcome of this is brand visibility on, on AI. It’s, it’s forcing brands to actually quantify some of the things that were very, let’s just call it, um, ill-defined.
[00:25:21] Kipp Bodnar: (laughs)
[00:25:21] Greg Kihlström: You know, what, what does luxury mean in, you know, across five different sectors?
[00:25:27] Greg Kihlström: What is, you know, what does comfortable mean? You know, all, all these words that, that again, i- in context, yes, to a human they make sense. But, um, it’s, uh, I, I think it’s forcing brands to really think about what, what’s, not only what’s important to their customers, but what makes them valuable, right?
[00:25:44] Kipp Bodnar: I’m gonna give you a really hot take, that the, the lack of value and lack of adoption when it comes to a new technology like artificial intelligence-
[00:25:51] Kipp Bodnar: … is not because of artificial intelligence. It’s because of the people in teams not having clarity of how they work, the goals they have-
[00:26:00] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. (laughs)
[00:26:01] Kipp Bodnar: … who their customers are.
[00:26:02] Kipp Bodnar: Like, those are actually the hard things. Those are real-
[00:26:04] Greg Kihlström: (laughs)
[00:26:04] Kipp Bodnar: Like, they take real debate, they take real trade-offs, there’s friction and pain in making those choices.
[00:26:10] Kipp Bodnar: But without that, you’re gonna get really bad AI outcomes, right? A- and we talk a little bit in the book about, like, that what we believe this AI revolution is, is a renaissance for marketing, not the Industrial Revolution. Right? The Industrial Revolution is just, like, automation, automation, automation.
[00:26:28] Kipp Bodnar: The renaissance is like, how do you give these craftspeople a new set of tools to build things that weren’t possible before? You know, in ancient Florence-
[00:26:37] Kipp Bodnar: … it was bridges and paintings and sh- cathedrals. Now it’s like, “Oh, I can actually build remarkable campaigns. I can make a great 30-second spot in days instead of months.” And that is, like, very interesting and very remarkable to me.
[00:26:51] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, a- and I think that’s where, where, where I’ve seen… I think step one of, of adopting AI is often, how can I do something quicker or-
[00:27:01] Greg Kihlström: … you know, save some time or whatever. But I mean, to your point, I, and, and I’ll be honest, like, I, you know, I work for large enterprises, but I also run a small… the podcast, you know-
[00:27:11] Kipp Bodnar: Yeah.
[00:27:11] Greg Kihlström: … we, w- y- it’s a small business basically, so I’ve seen it at, at every, at every level at this point. My first goal was, “Yeah, let me get efficient,” but now where I’m seeing the real power is, “What can I, how can I actually make everything way better and, and more effective,” right? So I mean, how do… you know, d- does, does one necessarily come before the next, or, you know, can you, can you have both at the same time?
[00:27:36] Kipp Bodnar: He- h- look, here, here’s what I think happens. I think when you get started with this stuff, you start in, like, the productivity trap. “I’m just gonna save myself a bunch of time.”
[00:27:44] Kipp Bodnar: And what ends up happening is you just end up doing a lot more-
[00:27:48] Kipp Bodnar: … low-impact things-
[00:27:49] Kipp Bodnar: … because you can. Right? And then you’re like, “Well, that’s cool, but also, like, it didn’t get what I expected.” And then so you try to, like, iterate on that, and it isn’t until, I think, you get to, like, first principles and, like, what, what we call, like, outcome maxing. Are you just so laser-focused on the outcome and the inputs to the outcome that all you do in AI is try to drive that outcome and actually don’t care about productivity at all? And productivity is a benefit of how you work to get to that outcome, but it is not, like, the thing that you are actually rationalizing for.
[00:28:22] Kipp Bodnar: And I think that is the place we will all get to.
[00:28:25] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Kipp, thanks so much for joining today. Really appreciate it.
[00:28:29] Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
[00:28:29] Greg Kihlström: Two a- two last questions before we wrap up here.
[00:28:32] Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, sure.
[00:28:32] Greg Kihlström: Uh, first one, uh, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:28:40] Kipp Bodnar: Ooh, I love this question. Um, we would be talking, uh, I think a lot more about voice and the multimedia, multimodal experiences-
[00:28:51] Kipp Bodnar: … that marketers are building.
[00:28:53] Greg Kihlström: Love it, love it. And last question, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:29:01] Kipp Bodnar: Uh, I believe the only way to learn is to make things, and so that’s why I do the podcast, uh, our podcast, Marketing Against the Grain. When you talk to experts a couple times a week and you, like, really dig in with them, like, it forces you to, you know, build the neuroplasticity and rethink some of the preconceived notions that you had in your head, I think.
