Jake Edie (00:02)
AI can only train on the information that is online, that is available to it. there is a lot of really important information about what's going on in the industry and the problems that people are having that is not available to AI.
And so as people are
working in industries, we get access to a lot of information that is not available to the AI engines. And that is a huge differentiator because a lot of thought leadership comes from a really detailed understanding of what those problems are and positioning, first explaining those problems, then transitioning into the solution. AI probably has an overly rosy view of how all of these industries work because they're looking at press releases and websites and...
know, podcasts where I'm going to talk about all the great things that my company's doing and not where we stubbed our toe last week.
Ben Ard (01:14)
welcome back to another episode of content amplified. Today I'm joined by Jake. Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Edie (01:19)
Thanks very much. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Ben Ard (01:22)
Yeah, Jake, this is going to be fun, but your background is awesome. Like for someone who found a passion, pursued it and then changed their career. I think this is a fantastic example. So before we dive into the subject today, do you mind sharing a little bit about your background work history and kind of letting the audience get to know you a little bit?
Jake Edie (01:41)
Yeah, absolutely. like a lot of people in my field, which is clean energy, I did not start my career thinking about utilities or electric lines or electricity or anything like that. So I studied economics in college. I spent time working in consulting, a little bit time working in marketing for the Princeton Review, the test preparation company, and worked for a startup software company. But I ultimately got to the point in my career where I really wanted to get a better alignment between what I was spending all my time working on during the day
and things that were personally important to me. And so the area that I chose that was both personally important to me and professionally interesting was clean energy. And this was like 15, 20 years ago, but it was already clear that that was going to be a really dynamic industry. You had this big, massive global problem that you're trying to solve. You have all these new innovative technologies, disruptive business models, and it just looked like a really dynamic industry to get into. But I knew there was a whole lot of stuff I did not know yet at that point.
And so I went back to graduate school and got a degree in environmental science and policy. So I already had the business side and filled out the policy as well as the technology. It's really those three things that are required to make any kind of clean energy technology or project work. And now I've been working in the industry with four different jobs over about 15 years. And I just learned a tremendous amount. I turned into a huge geek about the electric grid whenever I'm
driving around, I'm always looking up and looking at the wires and figuring out how they connect and all that kind of stuff. But what I'm really passionate about is how clean energy integrates into the grid, how it solves problems for the grid, and how the industry works. Because it's a tremendously complex part of the world that most people don't even think twice about. You just plug stuff into the wall and 99.9 % of the time, electricity comes out.
Sometimes it doesn't, you have no idea why. And then it comes back, you a couple hours later and you you're happy it came back. So, so that's really where I've been focused and I've had a mix of, marketing and business development roles and even some more on the technical and project management and commercial operations sides. so kind of a wide variety of, of experiences. And that's been super helpful to my marketing roles is having a real world understanding of how the business works. The problems that.
that customers have and all of those aspects. It's just been super important. I'm sure we'll spend some more time talking about
Ben Ard (04:05)
I love it. And I think this is a perfect example of finding something you're passionate about. Obviously there's all that marketing background, all the opportunities there, but you also want to step further to say, well, let me be an expert in my space so I can really take my marketing efforts to the next level and really find a passionate area. know sometimes like as we join jobs, we'll kind of stay in a certain vein because we become smarter at it, but I'm a huge advocate of finding something you're passionate about.
finding that industry, educating yourself, going down that pathway. fantastic example, great real world success that you're showing here. love it. Jake, what we're going to dive into today, and here's kind of the working title we've got going on, how AI and the attention economy are changing what real thought leadership looks like in B2B. Now there's a lot to dissect there, and I'm really excited for the conversation. So let's start here. How do you define thought leadership?
Jake Edie (04:39)
Awesome.
Ben Ard (04:59)
And how has that definition changed now that AI has kind of come into the scene and taken over everyone's lives just a little bit.
Jake Edie (05:06)
Yeah, for sure. So the way I think about thought leadership, there's really kind of two flavors. Both of them are you start with data analysis or insights. And one version is changing or challenging conventional wisdom. Right. Like, hey, you're thinking about this wrong. The industry is getting this wrong. People here's something you don't the industry doesn't understand about that problem. Right. You kind of tried to change that. But then there's also the just the core education.
So think there's a lot of thought leadership. If you're really deep into an area and most people just don't know that much, there's a lot of value just bringing that forth and explaining, here's how this works. And it's not challenging anything. It's just, it's bringing a lot more understanding and there's so much value in marketing when you're the company that is doing that. because it creates this perception of, wow, they really know what they're talking about. And when I have a problem in that area, I'm going to pick up the phone and call them first.
Ben Ard (06:01)
Love that. Love that. How is AI changing this? I feel like it changes everything. So how does it change thought leadership?
Jake Edie (06:06)
Yeah.
So I think the first change I would think about is it is escalating the importance of thought leadership. So AI is really good at creating mediocre, and even I'd say mediocre good content. I think we've all experienced that. We've all been incredibly impressed at times at AI's ability to synthesize a whole lot, pull from all these different sources, and put together something that is concise and makes sense and is internally consistent.
AI can only train on the information that is online, that is available to it. in certainly in my industry, and I assume in many others, there is a lot of really important information about what's going on in the industry and the problems that people are having that is not available to AI. So for example, in my industry, which is solar and batteries and, and wind generation, companies are very quick to
Frumpet, their successful projects and their ribbon cuttings and the groundbreakings and things like that. But like any industry, not every project goes perfectly. You run into problems, there are delays and things like that. And nobody talks about those publicly. But they do talk about it behind closed doors or casual conversations at trade shows or sales meetings and things like that. And so as people are
working in industries, we get access to a lot of information that is not available to the AI engines. And that is a huge differentiator because a lot of thought leadership comes from a really detailed understanding of what those problems are and positioning, first explaining those problems, then transitioning into the solution. AI probably has an overly rosy view of how all of these industries work because they're looking at press releases and websites and...
know, podcasts where I'm going to talk about all the great things that my company's doing and not where we stubbed our toe last week.
Ben Ard (07:56)
I love that. I think that's so cool. It's all of the information, the context that the AI can't train on that really does separate kind of those two different thought leader, you know, kind of avenues, the AI side or the real human intelligence. So how are you using AI with thought leadership yet bringing in some of these unique perspectives and insights where maybe it didn't get the train on it from the larger kind of, you know, data set.
Jake Edie (08:21)
Yeah, good question.
So we always think about three different stages of marketing. So there's the strategy stage and figuring out what are your goals and what are the things that the market needs to believe about my company in order to make that buying decision. We try to simplify it down to two or three big beliefs. And if our prospects believe these things, they are very likely to buy from us. Then you get into the messaging and the thought leadership campaigns, right? Those are the things that you're going to talk about.
that are going to convince the market that those three things are true. That portion, AI can be a very useful research tool, but it is not creating that strategy. It is not creating those ideas. Maybe at some point in the future, it will be able to, but what's available today, it's simply not doing that. Now, when you get to the third part, which is the tactics of taking these big chunks of thought leadership and
pushing them out into the market in all the different channels. That's where AI can be really great, especially if you are investing in or building something, an AI engine that is very specifically designed for marketing and has been trained on your voice and all the aspects of your solution and your target clients and all those sorts of things. Then AI can very quickly then take that.
that message and turn it into a blog post or a LinkedIn post or a really strong first draft of a white paper, those sorts of things. Of course, you still need human eyes to look over that stuff because sometimes they totally overlook a competitor or name a company that's been out of business for four years or something like that. think we've all run into that. But yeah, when you get a really good piece of thought leadership,
You know, what we always like to do is we like to put it across as many channels as we possibly can and at roughly the same time. it, you know, it's a podcast, it's a webinar, it's a LinkedIn post, it's a white paper that you put up on your website with a form submission to collect leads. You know, it's a conference speaking ⁓ abstract that turns into a conference speaking appearance, right? And AI can support to various varying levels, the execution of all of those different tactics.
and can make you is really a force multiplier, but only after you've come up with those ideas that are really assisted by AI research. But those ideas have to come from people and people that really understand the problems that the customers in the market are having. And AI doesn't have insight into that. And I would also say, think most people already are being able to sniff out AI content pretty well.
And there are visual clues as well as, yeah, structural clues and yeah, too many icons and emojis and things like that. And people are starting to filter it out pretty aggressively. And when you can create content that is obviously the product of someone who really understands what's going on and is going out of their way to educate me and teach me something, that really stands out amidst the clutter of AI generated
Ben Ard (10:57)
dashes.
Jake Edie (11:21)
You know, like I said, mediocre to mediocre good content that's out there.
Ben Ard (11:25)
thousand percent, a hundred percent. Just like we were talking beforehand about how we all have filters on advertising. And I think we're all developing and especially like Gen Z, some of the younger crowd, they are building this innate filter that AI generated content just won't be read. It won't even be perceived. And so I love that you're thinking about that. So to throw you a little bit of a curve ball, when you're talking about utilizing AI in the process, it clearly sounds like
Jake Edie (11:42)
Yeah.
Ben Ard (11:52)
Obviously repurposing is a big part of it, but are you also feeding like raw thought leadership that is, you know, just like raw data from the source, maybe even talking to chat GPT or whatever, and having it create the thought leadership pieces and then repurpose, or is it typically in your business, the thought leader will create something, you know, a presentation, a white paper or whatever by themselves.
Jake Edie (12:03)
So,
Ben Ard (12:16)
And then feed that into the AI engine and have it repurposed from there. You know what I mean? Can you tell the difference? Where does, where does it jump in?
Jake Edie (12:21)
Yeah, yeah,
so it's a little bit of both. So let me explain. So that raw content, that is helpful to, especially if you have a proprietary tool, if you're not just using the commercially available chat GPT or copilot or something like that, right? If you've got something that's really like a brand bot. So that stuff is great for training it. But what we generally do is you start with creating that piece of content, that white paper, that report.
And then that's what you feed in and say, Hey, create five LinkedIn posts from this or write a conference abstract for this topic. That kind of thing, because then you really want, you know, in that, that, in that case, you, don't want AI to start pulling in extraneous stuff from, you know, whether it was some of that raw stuff that doesn't end up in the final product. You don't want it going out and pulling someone else's content. You want it just to base it on.
Ben Ard (12:55)
I love that.
Jake Edie (13:13)
This is the final curated set of ideas and data and analysis and messaging. And this is all I want you to actually put in into the different tactics that we're talking about.
Ben Ard (13:25)
I love that. Yeah, I do think that that is one of the better uses of AI is create something by an actual expert and then let AI kind of go to town on it and create it for the different formats and different purposes. But it originates. It's something I love about the podcast format as well. It's genuine human conversations from people who know and care about their space. I'm grateful to have AI help me turn that into certain other materials, but AI didn't generate.
podcast itself. was actual human thought leadership, which makes a big difference.
Jake Edie (13:56)
Yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt about that.
Ben Ard (13:59)
Love it. Okay, Jake, we're getting close to the end. have one final question. So I'm going to pull up my imaginary crystal ball and I want you to gaze through this crystal ball. Where do you think thought leadership is going in the next few years, especially as AI continues to develop and progress? Like you said, AI is at good to good, like even better-ish. Where do you see thought leadership really going in the future?
Jake Edie (14:25)
I have a couple of thoughts on that. The first one is I think you'll see more thought leadership delivered in ways that have to be in our obviously a live person. So video clips, audio clips, podcasts, webinars, like that is the stuff that is obviously truly authentic. I think the world is moving towards so much more short form content. We talked about it.
that a little bit earlier. So I think you'll just see a lot more of that. I'm very interested to see how much AI gets better at, you know, there are already a lot of ways to really target your audience and how you're delivering messages. But I think there's probably a lot more that can be done. know, some sometimes you have a client that's saying, Hey, I, there are 12 big companies that are my targets. And I want to get to the procurement managers and the procurement directors and those
12 companies. Well, it's really hard to deal with that kind of problem in Google ads today or LinkedIn ads or other ways like that. But you can imagine a world where AI can very quickly like, all right, well, let me figure out how to identify those folks. And I'm going to serve this content. I'm going to serve it at a very high price per impression or price per click. But it is going to be totally narrowed in on this very well
defined and very narrow set of audience members. So I think that'll be super interesting. I wonder if it will replace some of the initial sales calls. So anyway, those are two thoughts of where I think AI could be going.
Ben Ard (15:54)
⁓ I love that.
Yeah, there'll be enough intelligence from the thought leaders in your business that for that outreach, it's almost as if those thought leaders were having actual conversations with individuals and the targeting is super specific. And I think that's really powerful.
Jake Edie (16:11)
Yeah. And as you know, when something pops up in front of you and it is exactly what you're interested in, it breaks through instantly. And so I think AI can help make that match much more than make that content.
Ben Ard (16:18)
Yep.
I love that. That's cool. All right, Jake, we have run out of time. This has been an awesome conversation. I love where your head's at. Again, I love how you approach thought leadership and your use of AI. I think this is super helpful for our audience. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Jake Edie (16:41)
LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. So Jake Eadie, I'm at Renewcom is the name of my agency and would love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn.
Ben Ard (16:50)
Love it. And for anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes on whatever platform you're listening on. We will link directly to LinkedIn right can connect with Jake. Jake again, thanks for the time and all of the expertise and all your insights today.
Jake Edie (17:02)
Thanks so much, Ben. Really appreciated the conversation. Really fun.
