Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA Marketing And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at an intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought -provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our guest is Clay Sharman. Clay drives both the creation and innovation behind Kreteo.ai, the first generative insights platform of its kind to help companies leverage anonymous website visitor data to increase consumer behavior understanding and create longer lasting, more personal customer journeys in an increasingly complex, first -party data -driven world. It’s fun to say that fast when we think about our world, an increasingly complex, first -party data -driven world. This includes delivering more useful, more immediately actionable, and unique AI insights that continuously improve over time. Clay has spent the last decade helping to…sell and develop AI and machine learning based solutions to the Air Force and Army and federal security agencies, along with the commercial market. He brings more than 20 years of experience creating marketing plans and refining business development practices through leadership roles to capture and develop proposal development teams in commercial and federal sectors. He’s really been active in growing the business and this work. In addition to his professional bona fides, he has a really diverse creative background that we may dig in a little bit, including being a published author, a filmmaker, and a drummer. Clay, welcome to the podcast.

Clay Sharman 

Bennie, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Bennie

How, you know, it’s, it’s fun that, you know, in other conversations, we always guess how long will it take us to say AI? In this conversation, there’s no guess we’re going to start with the with AI just to begin with. We’re going to what you know, what we’re going to ask an AI expert to describe AI, right? It was just kind of what we should do. But before that, I want to ask, what drew you to

Clay 

Pretty shameless self promotion on my part, isn’t it?

Bennie 

This space of work in terms of thinking about marketing and machine learning, marketing and AI.

Clay 

Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. So I spent a lot of years working in the federal solution space and seeing the gap between legacy systems and available technology. And that’s where I sort of got my first introduction into what would become machine learning and how technology could automate. And so…

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

The draw was, ironically, I did some work several years back for the three letter agencies, helping them build an enterprise intelligence platform that could detect inside threat activity. And so when I looked at the architecture of taking an alias all the way down to an actual identity,

Bennie 

Okay.

Clay 

It resonated with me and I saw some application where I thought, man, you know, there’s a lot of potential kind of commercial, I guess, gravity here that I could explore. And…it didn’t take long once I started looking at what commercial opportunities are out there to discover a lot of the gaps in e -commerce and prospecting and building audiences with very little data to help support the decision. So ultimately it was that gap that sort of drew me in. I just saw an opportunity.

Bennie 

It’s interesting, and I think it’s fair to point out for us how much of what we get excited about or nervous about and energy around AI today really is work that we’ve been working in machine learning, algorithmic learning for a really long time. It’s just in a commercial popular tech space, you know, everyone’s eyes and minds opened up about 18 months ago now when OpenAI dropped Check GPT this is AI. But when you really think about, you know, artificial intelligence and its impact on work and business, the work has been going on for generations.

Clay

Yes, that’s a great point, Bennie. You could tie back to the 70s with modeling. And then by the 90s, they were using terms like artificial intelligence and machine learning conceptually. And they were trying to work through a lot of opportunities to deploy that sort of thing. So yeah, you’re right. We’re probably 15 generations in from a technology standpoint as to where chat GPT was, maybe more.

Bennie

Right.

Right. Now, one of the things that we’ve come to say, and I had a panelist share with me once, and it just stuck to say, to look around that the AI that you use today is the dumbest AI you’ll ever have.

Clay

And talk about it. All I was gonna say is that couldn’t be more apt. That’s exactly right.

Bennie 

And that, yeah, go ahead.

Right. And it’s one of those spaces that, you know, gives us most excitement and curiosity about the future, but also fear of if you’re excited by what you see now or you’re worried about what you see now, what could be in the future? What I’d love to kind of dig in a little bit is that you had the great background of looking at needs, looking at gaps, kind of the entrepreneurial mindset and like, I can apply this to this. How do you move from that to really being all in AI and marketing?

Making that jump, because we’re talking about a lot of work in federal sectors and government and technology, and I know some of my listeners, they’re going, okay, what does it have to do with my brand or my campaign or my website? Really extend that bridge for us on how that work then shows up in really meaningful ways in the marketing work you’re doing.

Clay 

Right.

Right, that’s a great question. I would say that, you know, from the standpoint of, you know, where we sort of saw the…opportunity in the marketing space. First off, I wasn’t ahead obviously of AI and machine learning. Right. I mean, all I was looking at it was from the framework of, I probably had the same misconception about AI as most of us do, which was, is it going to take over, make the decisions for us and, you know, and make us obsolete, which of course that’s, that’s one of the battle cries against it. But where, where we really wanted to focus was on, you know,

Bennie 

Right, right, right. Right.

Clay 

I’m a big believer in automation not for the sake of doing it, but for the sake of taking advantage of the volume of data that we typically don’t have time to get through. So when I apply that logic to website traffic, you don’t have to search long to find out that effectively, statistically, 2% of all web visitors give you usable first -party data.

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Right. Right.

Clay

And it leaves you begging this obvious question of, what about that other 98%? You paid for them to come to your site in some way, shape, or form, whether it was paid media or other campaign channels, and yet they left without taking any action. And so we wanted to see if there was a way that we could apply machine learning to that 98%. And what can we learn?

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm -hmm.

Clay 

And so that was sort of the impetus was what about that other 98% and is there something here that we could leverage and turn into useful data so that brands aren’t just building strategies around 2%. They can apply what they learn about the people that didn’t take action and build strategies around how to improve that side of their brand strategy as well.

Bennie 

Which is really powerfully clear and straightforward, but I know our world is never that. So what was the reaction when you first kind of came to this, aha, with your first set of marketing leaders? Like, I’ve got this solution, I’m gonna use AI, and I’m gonna solve this big problem for you.

Clay 

Right, great, great question. Well, first off, the question was fundamentally and most obviously, well, how do you do that? And so my gag reaction, my joke to that was, hey, I can’t tell you the herbs and spices in the Colonel’s recipe, but I can tell you that, you know, we’ve, it was a lot of work.

Bennie

Right.

Clay 

Getting to the point where we had a confidence around the ability to deliver any kind of insight on an anonymous visitor. And so the initial reaction was skepticism, right? Can it be done? This is something we’ve all been interested in for 25 years and nobody has given us kind of a reasonable solution. And there are a lot of companies out there that lean into the space that we would call identity resolution, but there’s sort of a…

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Right.

Clay 

Point in time where they have to stop and they can no longer go further. And what happens is there’s a gap there and that gap is pretty large when in terms of understanding. And so, you know, we’re still proving out the model, Benny, that we can do what we say. So, you know, I think there’s a healthy skepticism because there’s this idea that what you’re supposing or proposing is awesome.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

But is it real or is it AI science fiction? And so, you know, that’s really been the reaction is, can you really do it?

Bennie

Now, once you’re able to actually work in this concept, one of the things that we had talked about earlier is this space of trust and how trust is something that we as marketers and as leaders and organizations have to earn every day. And it’s probably, I would hazard a guess, it’s not even every day, it’s every point of interaction, right? The space in there. How have you found these new uses of AI.

Clay 

Right, that’s right.

Bennie 

And your thought process into helping to strengthen trust.

Clay

So I have this fundamental belief about trust that says you can’t build any kind of trust unless there’s a foundational relationship underneath it. And so where I think we as marketers went wrong was in relying on third party systems or applications or agencies to do this work for us.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right.

Clay 

To campaign and do the outreach on behalf of us, robbing the brand owners of the ability to get to know the people personally. They were the go -between. They were the intermediary or the liaison. They kept the data and brands got the results. And at the time, it may have made perfect sense because that was the best option.

What we’re finding is that technology today can really supplement this notion of prospect understanding to deliver, you know, real audience insights around who people are as individuals. So we can shift.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

That relationship between the brand directly to the consumer and build it on something that is more like a trusted relationship because the brand now knows that Clay Sharman or Jenny Johnson is a prospect on their website and they can talk to us as individuals and stop thinking of us as simple transactions.

Bennie

Yes, we think about the simple transactions. How are you able to, once you know it’s Clay and Bennie and you have that information, talk a bit about how you’re able to use AI and your predictive models to keep improving.

Clay 

Yeah, I mean, that’s the most fun part about it is that application of intelligence and logic in some sort of outcome that leads to a great conclusion for the brand and a great conclusion for the consumer because there’s better understanding. And so the idea is we shift the model and everybody wins. So now that Clay and Bennie have been identified, the system goes to work kind of looking at, we recognize these two individuals.

Bennie

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

Now how have they interacted with your website? What are they looking at on the site? How are they interacting with content on that website? And then we collect that and we add that in and we start building this profile around.

Bennie

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

Bennie and Clay from a behavioral standpoint, where demographics plays a much smaller role and behavior plays a much more effective role, right? And then because we have the beginning of the journey, we can follow Clay and Bennie through the sales channel tactics. And when they engage with campaigns across any of the sales channels, we pick them back up on the response side of the house. And now we’re able to see how each of them interacted with a campaign or did

Bennie 

Right.

Clay 

Didn’t. And so the AI then builds from that. It says, OK, well, I’ve got this piece of data about Clay, and I’ve got this piece of data about Bennie. Can I build larger audience segments of people who act just like them?

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Clay

And now the models go to work on forecasting predictive analytics based on actual individual behavior that they’ve just grown to scale. So it’s not extrapolating what you and I are doing should work with a hundred other people. It’s actually finding those other hundred who acted just like us to begin with. So it’s a very bottoms up build. And so it really deepens that core foundation of knowledge.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Clay

and the models then have a much higher predictive confidence in outcomes. So that’s where the AI really gets crazy. And then it learns, right? It follows the response rates and then improves as you do successive campaigns across successive channels. So the more we engage, the better the models interact and understand. It’s in that sense, it’s very much a collaborative experience.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Which I think is, you know, really is kind of the promise of this technology and our approaches to the space in there. But I’m going to take a pin in that and we’re going to pivot just a little bit to think about the perils that this may open up. Because I know a lot of our listeners, you know, that that’s kind of I am cautiously excited, right, or or terrified. And, you know, we hear those as language that comes out of our panel discussions and our private DMS that we receive. Can you talk to us more about about this work? And so.

Clay 

Fairness. Sure.

Bennie

I’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know, where are the ethical guardrails that come into to kind of this work, not so much just with your product and solution, but the larger space of AI and marketing tech. Where do you think the guardrail should be?

Clay

So I think that when the browser, kind of the big browsers, decided that third party cookies were no longer a great way to do business, began a little bit of the guardrails to build around. And so that became the framework from which all of us who are in the data collection space had to start working in. And it really shrunk the playing field significantly.

I think first and foremost, brands have an ethical responsibility to kind of commit to the idea that at the core of their business model, it can’t be about revenue, it has to be about relationships. And the fundamental kind of mantra that I would propose is you can’t expect…a consumer to give you something if you’re not willing to meet them at some, you know, kind of distance towards where they are. If the goal is to make them walk to you and do all the work, it’s a very one -sided relationship. And that’s the way it’s always been. And now we’re at a tipping point where we as brand owners, as brand marketers, we actually can walk towards them and personalize things. So, you know, from an ethics standpoint,

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm -hmm.

Clay 

It’s really the commitment, the transparency is a great starting point. You gotta be transparent with them when they come to your site on how you plan to use the data you’re trying to collect. You’ve gotta really give them the option to say, I don’t want you to collect my data. And then you have to adhere to that decision by not contacting them.

Bennie 

Right? Right.

Clay 

And then you have to, you know, exclude third parties from your formulas. You’re not, you know, if there’s not a direct affiliation with the person who came to your site, you shouldn’t reach out to them whatsoever. And you shouldn’t let anybody reach out to them on your behalf if they don’t know who it’s coming from. So I think we have to really get to the point of if this was a personal relationship, you know, how hard would you work to guard it and show that it mattered? And I think brands need to take a little of that thought to say, well, we, we need a little of that in our scale model, but I think transparency is a great way to start the conversation and then the application of sincerity in how you operate, uh, you know, so that it’s visible is a way because all of the things that you’re talking about now, Benny, are the things that would lead to, that concept of trust building, which is ultimately the goal.

Bennie 

It’s so true. And you’re really speaking also to a stewardship that should be a part of our marketing leadership portfolio, right? Because it’s not just that we understand what to and not to do, but often we need to be the gatekeepers and the champions for the rest of our organization. It’s like, you know, because the request, bad requests don’t always start in our department, right? Sometimes bad requests come in and, and we’re looked at to action upon it. And like, no, this is a space in which we’ve made a commitment. We’re blocking the space in there. We have to be good stewards of the relationship, the information, and the data.

Clay 

Yeah, it’s got a matter from the top all the way down. That’s exactly right.

Bennie 

So as you think about AI, since we’re talking about this, what advice would you have directly for marketers who are really looking to take the proverbial bull by the horns here to really jump in with AI with the products that are out there? What advice would you have?

Clay

Well, I think first off, you can’t assume it’s an evil kind of Terminator style AI that’s coming to eradicate us. You also can’t assume that it’s a panacea for…

Bennie 

Right.

Clay 

Strategy building and human thought leadership. You know, the way I see AI is it’s simply an assistant. It’s an amazing research tool. It’s a way to call through volumes of data in a speed that makes you more productive because it can give you the kind of summarized information that allows you to make better decisions on tactics and strategies and adapt more quickly within your own marketing environment. So, you know, I think you have to continue to see it as a tool to be used, not something to be set loose and not something to be controlled. I think you, you know, the right way to do it, the right type of AI platform is definitely always in service of the user to try to make the organization more effective, more efficient for whatever that outcome is, whatever that goal is, presumably to build better relationships with the consumers.

Bennie 

You know, you wrote an opinion piece recently about just this very nexus of marketing and AI. And so I want to share this quote with our audience. So I think it sums up and really leads into our conversation again. Data collection and AI used ethically can be a beacon in this storm, guiding marketers towards a future where understanding their audience doesn’t equate to violating their privacy. Right? And this is a classic, we can have both.

Clay 

Yes.

Bennie 

We can have security, privacy, and that transparency along with the benefits of this unleashed data and understanding.

Clay 

Well, I think, man, you just hit on a very powerful point because 30 years in, really since the birth of Amazon and eBay, e -commerce has been a thing and we’ve all known that data was available. And so, you know, our running joke here is having access to data is definitely not the problem. It’s making the data useful is the challenge.

Bennie 

Right. Right. It’s a challenge.

Clay 

Yeah, so in thinking about, you know, that particular quote, what I was really saying was marketers have an obligation to be responsible and thoughtful in how they campaign and build messaging for their audiences in this more discerning kind of online world where there’s options all around us and there’s a lot of noise. And so if we can’t think through carefully what’s the best way to reach an audience in order to build a relationship with them, you’re gonna have a hard battle because that company next door to you is taking that tact, right?

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right.

Clay 

And we’re seeing that trust is one of those things that is, as you pointed out earlier, Bennie, it’s earned, it’s a long, it’s a process. It’s not something that’s measured in a sales cycle. It’s measured in long -term results, but it’s incredibly fragile. So the loss of ethics, if you’re unethical, you can be yelped right away, instantaneously, right? But conversely,

Bennie 

Right?

Clay 

Trust is on its own very hard to earn and it’s easy to lose. But ethics, the decision to be ethical can be put in place immediately today, right? We all decide we’re gonna be more ethical in how we interact with one another and that can become a new foundational tenant of your corporate culture instantly.

Bennie 

It really can be. And I think it also is harks on this moment when you have these new, rapidly evolving, great area space of new technology and space, locking down your ethical framework is really important because you can end up with a time where your competitor to your left and your right front and back are all doing the wrong things. And you know, you don’t want to be in a space in which, and we’ve heard this in the past with, with executives who said, well, all of my industry is doing this.

Clay 

That’s right. Right, right.

Bennie 

Which doesn’t make it correct, doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it kind of the ethical space in which a profession should strive for. But what other counsel do you have for marketers who may be stuck in that dilemma where they want to do the right thing? They want to establish these ethical frameworks, but they’re getting internal external pressures.

Clay

Right, I mean, so this goes back to that fundamental question of, you know, are you a company that’s in the business? And this is again, I understand the principles of economics and companies can’t exist without revenue. But if your core principle is the pursuit of money, then oftentimes that can be to the exclusion of ethical practices. So those competitors that you referenced to the left and the right.

Bennie 

Right. Mm -hmm.

Clay 

They’re trying to make the biggest splash in the fastest amount of time in order to get in, get out or whatever.

And that’s not an enduring legacy that creates the kind of culture of trust and loyalty that consumers will have. So you’ll have this revolving transient model of prospects coming in, transactions leaving, but you’ll never build that brand trust and loyalty with that model. And so I think for anybody that’s looking to do it the right way, you have to look up at the leadership. Are they setting the mission statement with clarity?

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Clay 

On, we’re committed to doing things the right way, regardless of whether it’s the easy way or not. We both know that the easy way is often the hardest way, I mean, the hardest thing to avoid. But it’s typically the wrong route to take. The harder method is usually the one that yields the best results and long term probably sees the most healthy benefits for an entire organization. So, you know, my counsel would be…like always, the core principles of your company start at the top and flow down and if you feel like you’re in a money grab, you probably are. And so the ethics may not apply as much.

Bennie 

Right.

Well, I’m going to pivot a little bit because I brought us into that really heavy space of ethical guidance and compliance. I’m also a believer that great innovation and insight comes from play. So tell me what’s the most fun you’ve had playing, if you will, with AI the last few years.

Clay 

Right.

Oh, beautiful question. Actually, we’re developing our own little chat bot right this second. And so, you know, training, this is my first experience training a model from the ground up with the intent of giving it some of my personality. So, you know, I’m a father of two girls who are grown women now. Each of them has a shred of my personality.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Hmm.

Clay 

Through our kind of experiences together and I’m trying to remember those type of principles. So for me, the most fun has been literally testing out personality traits of a model to see if it can simulate and I’ll give you a terrible example that I’m sure my wife would roll her eyes at and if she could hear me, she would right now. But for fun,

Bennie 

Okay. Hahaha!

Clay 

You know, I challenged our development team when they said we could put a personality in it. And I said, well, wait a second. Does that mean we could have it think and act a little bit like Sam Jackson from Pulp Fiction? And within minutes later, you know, we were able to give sort of a Sam Jackson -esque request or answer to my request about how should I go about campaigning to emails. And it was very much a Sam Jackson answer.

Bennie 

Hahaha!

It was very much Jules.

Clay 

It was dual right and so I immediately said okay I love it we can’t ever do that but it did give me it did give me a lot of kind of

Bennie 

Hahaha!

Clay 

I mean, fun, you said it right there, it’s play. I get to play with what’s possible. And that’s what’s fun with the core kind of features of AI is that if you’re, it’s in a playground, there’s no doubt about it. It’s a fun space to ask questions of yourself and see what you can stretch the limits of your model to become. And that’s probably the most engaging aspect of AI that…obviously would lead to that, well, where’s the limit? What’s the boundary? You know, it becomes that balance of how much is too much. And that’s certainly that becomes a moral ethical question on its own is, you know, we have to bound it and restrict it to a specific set of knowledge databases. We don’t want to be able to access everything.

So, but it has been a lot of fun to play with, to see building personality into something that started as a string of code to build in a model has been amazing.

Bennie 

Right, and it’s building personality, but at the subtext, it’s still artificial, right? As you said, it’s still, we’re having fun and we’re playing in a space, but it’s still artificial. Extending into more fun, and for our viewers, I can see the back of Clay’s world. So there are all types of drums and hi -hats and everything else that goes into it. You know, let’s venture into that space. Have you had time to think about and explore?

Clay 

That’s it.

Bennie 

What the impact is and continues to be for AI in music. Or it’s not even AI in music, it’s technology and music have always had this rivalry and embrace, right?

Clay

Right? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, in that sense, I’m a bit of a purist and probably a snob when it comes to it, which is gonna sound a little bit, you know, kind of ironic. But I was having this conversation last week and we were talking about the tenets of…letting AI loose on music, letting it loose in literature, letting it loose in film. And so the questions were naturally, what if you let it absorb all of Mozart and then simply asked it, can you write a new Mozart piece? Should you, right?

Bennie 

Right.

Clay 

The same thing with Shakespeare, let it ingest all of Shakespeare, all of his works and then say, what would Shakespeare write about today? And AI could simulate it. And I think it’s only a matter of time before we find out whether somebody is happy about it or not.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Clay 

That a screenplay was AI written and produced. And that maybe the actors weren’t aware of it, but somebody would have said at a studio or a small independent studio would have said, let’s just try it. This is a good screenplay. What does it matter who wrote it? And then that becomes the question, right? That’s the fundamental moral question is.

What is art? Does it only exist if it’s created by a person or is it something that can be simulated by a machine and still represent art? So I’m a purist. I say if the kernel wasn’t in you, it can’t be the same as art. If you tell somebody to do something like somebody else, that’s not the same as being that somebody else. So you’re not Shakespeare if you write like Shakespeare.

Bennie 

Right.

Clay 

Mozart if you don’t, you know, you’re not Mozart if you just play like Mozart. So these are fun questions though and I agree with you and I think there’s no reason not to explore them again as a tool to help your craft but I don’t think they are a craft in and of themselves.

Bennie

Right.

Right, so you’re not gonna get Max Roke’s AI to replace you?

Clay 

No, I cannot. Although, if somebody said Clay slap an avatar, an AI avatar over your face when you play, I’d probably go for it. As long as it was still Neemoo, I’d probably go for it.

Bennie 

Nice. So I’m going to ask this question for you. As you know, you have a big AI badge that you have to wear everywhere you go, which means that you’re going to get asked for assistance, help or security, right? That is the space in there. So you have this badge and we as the audience are asking you the question that you wish we’d ask you the most. What would that question be?

Clay 

So I think the question I would love for them to ask is, is there anything that we could not accomplish with your platform? You know, if we…apply it to our business model. Like, you know, what are the limits? And I would say, you know, don’t look for us to deliver the playbook, the definitive works on how to use Kratio.

Bennie

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Clay 

I think what’s going to be the most exciting is as we get more into the market and become more ubiquitous as a marketing prospect engagement platform, it’s going to be more fun to see how is the industry using it? How have they creatively taken what we’ve given and turned it into something we even didn’t expect? And so I would say that question would be, that would be a fun one for me if people would simply ask, what can’t we do with it? And I’d say, I’m excited to find out what that is.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

Clay 

Would be my answer.

Bennie 

That’s an incredible, I think it’s an incredible way for us to end our conversation together, my friend. It’s been a good one, but I think that opens us up for this conversation of expecting the unexpected, leaning into play, jumping in on the power of new platforms, and being intentional about stewarding it. Right, buddy? Yeah.

Clay 

Awesome.

That’s exactly right. That’s a perfect way of summarizing it. Yeah, this is wonderful. Thanks so much, Bennie. This was great.

Bennie 

Thank you for being here and just being open to allow us to play around with this space in AI. So we’ve got some new things that we’ll explore and we invite you all to explore the work that’s happening with Clay on all fronts on AI. We ask you to come and enjoy some of the resources and conversations that we’ve had at AMA on AMA .org and on this podcast. So once again, thank you all for being here, Clay and my guests.

on this episode of AMA Marketing And. We look forward to talking to you next time.

Clay 

Fantastic.