Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of content amplified today. I'm joined by Paul. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Schmidt01:10 — Thanks for having me, Ben. Looking forward to today's conversation.
Benjamin Ard01:13 — Yeah, Paul, I'm excited. We're going to talk about a subject that everyone's talking about, but you have this really cool perspective, unique experience that I'm really excited to bring to the table and to the conversation today. But Paul, before we dive in, let's get to know you a little bit so the audience knows who you are. If you could share your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff, that'd be great.
Paul Schmidt01:34 — Awesome. Yeah, so Paul Schmidt, I'm the VP of AI and Innovation at Smart Bug. Smartbug is one of the few elite HubSpot agency partners in the globe. And really what my role is, is overseeing AI fluency and adoption for our team. It's helping build internal agents and tools that help streamline our agency's process and building out new service offerings. Because as we all see, many clients and companies are trying to get onboarded with various AI tooling and frontier models, and they need a partner for that. So I built help build some of those services for our organization. SmartBug, we're a North American agency partner. do marketing and sales onboarding onto HubSpot. We also do paid media, PR, website builds, everything like that. I've spent the last decade working directly with clients, helping them onboard CRM technology, but also helping them grow their own marketing teams and help them build pipeline via marketing campaigns and many other marketing tactics. But spent most of my career in consulting, in really living in that HubSpot ecosystem. if it touches any of conversation, it touches that, I'm gonna be your go-to guy for those types of things. yeah, looking forward to diving into today's conversation with you then.
Benjamin Ard03:02 — Love it. Well, Paul, you have this cool perspective where not only are you building AI systems and agents and processes for the agency you work with for smart bug, you also get to have that insights for all the groups that you're working with and provide some of those new services, new offerings. What are you seeing right now? Like you're seeing a lot of cool use cases. Where do you feel like some of the biggest opportunities in AI are right now? And what are you kind of seeing in the market in general?
Paul Schmidt03:36 — So, yeah, SmartBug's been around for over a decade and we've worked with over thousand companies and I've really been able to see how companies adopt new technology as new technological ways happen. And really what we're seeing, since Chatubt35 came out and companies started using it, you definitely have a sort of bell curve of how companies are adopting it. So, I mean, you look at early adopter companies and you're to have a few folks like me inside there that are gung-ho about exploring new technology and seeing what the latest and greatest feature that the frontier models are dropping or other systems are dropping. like, so we definitely have companies that are interested in that. And when those types of companies came on board, like those were the types of companies that may have figured out how to use AI on their own to be able to run their own marketing campaigns. some of those companies we work with today and some have just like figured out how they can either automate or they can use AI to handle lion's share of that. And you've got your sort of like chunky middle of the bell curve, which there's a lot of companies that are using like embedded AI technology that comes within tools that they're already using today. For example, in your email automation or your email platform, you probably have some sort of function within when you're creating an email that automatically writes your subject line for you. And like there's plenty of companies that are like already adopting that type of technology. It sort of feels intuitive in terms of the workflow. You just it's just in there, it's embedded and you're using AI for that. And so we have a lot of companies that are just using what technology is right in front of them. And then you have companies that are definitely more on the laggard side of things and that bell curve. And I think these sort of are a little bit more concentrated into industries that are more litigious and have a lot more like.
Paul Schmidt05:29 — governance policy that they have to think through, which should be in finance and in healthcare. And so for those types of companies, the adoption within their AI curve is a lot more slow going. And for them right now, they're just sort of in the early education phase still, where they know what chat GBT is, and they might use it for like basic things like writing an email, but they're really not embedding it. embedding it into their work streams. They're not reinventing work streams with AI agents or anything like that. And so we see companies across the board there. And I think it's important to just look at these companies and their level of maturity. That's kind of how we kind of think about how do we get them from one to a two or a two to a three. That's kind of how we think about looking at helping companies.
Benjamin Ard06:19 — I love that. That's cool. So let's talk through some of that process. He, where you have someone that's at a one, right? You have someone who's like, great. I go into chat GPT or I go into Claude. helps me write content or it's a thought partner. I'm exclusively in the chat side of things. I haven't had it build anything for me necessarily. How did they kind of maybe start to think about the next stage of their journey with AI? Maybe some automations and a couple of things like what would you recommend for them to kind of go to the next step? What are some things for them to start looking into and thinking about?
Paul Schmidt06:58 — We have a list of questions that we use with our clients and then we interview department leaders or department, influential people in each department to understand where are the bottlenecks happening? Where are the most mundane processes happening in your organization that if you could wave a magical wand, we could help speed it up, make it more efficient, help it move faster, help you do twice as much volume, things like that. And so that's really the process for folks that are really like early on in that adoption curve is to like, go do a sort of audit. it across your teams. doesn't need to be super complex. A little 30 minute conversation could really help surface what these specific processes are that they have that slow their team down on a monthly basis. And so I think doing that audit will help you surface, okay, these are the main use cases that if we could either find an AI powered tool to use or reinvent the process, that it will help us move more quickly. And so that's what I'd like to be thinking about is like, for those folks that are just like sort of using chat, sort of copy and pasting an email. Like let's just now go take an audit assessment of what our, what our organization is doing across the board and what these processes look like. I, the other thing I'll say on that is I think it's really important to do this kind of auditing of what these various processes look like. Because if you want to get to like advanced levels of maturity with AI, like you have to have a lot of things, a lot of your processes mapped and understand how these processes like connect to one another. And so I think it gives you good exposure. If you're trying to get to the level, next level of AI maturity. is like start to map those processes. Cause you're going to need a, you're going to need a process for mapping processes in the future, just so you can add AI into more areas.
Benjamin Ard08:37 — Yeah, I love that. Okay. So now I've gone from the chat and I'm starting to look at some of the biggest headaches, the workflow, some of those things. Maybe I'm automating a few of those and I'm getting those off of my plate. Maybe I've started integrating with some MCPs playing around with some of that kind of stuff. Now, where do I go? I mean, are we to agent level yet? Where, where do we start to take the next steps to really get the value out of AI? and start to kind of go further on this journey.
Paul Schmidt09:10 — Yeah, I think of AI adoption in a couple of ways. And I think that if you're in that second level of AI maturity, you're sort of like sprinkling AI is how it kind of how I think about it. So if you're sprinkling AI into your existing processes, maybe you're taking one or two steps out of your existing process and you're incorporating AI into it. And that's beneficial. It can create, you know, a few points of efficiency within that existing process. But going into that next level. We talked about process mapping. It's like some of these processes, like you have to throw them in the garbage and like rethink about how you're doing these, the, the process in general, like in the past, maybe it took you seven different people that to do this 10 step process in a more modern, efficient way that's AI powered. Maybe you only need three people to do that process or one person to do that process. And I think like that's probably more advanced levels of maturity is like reinventing entire work streams. But I think like in like to kind of get back to your question I think that it's never too early to start exploring how you can use agents or custom GPTs or clod scales or things like that start to understand like what are they capable of today and what are they not capable of and I think that's really useful because like You're gonna as you start to build agents and tools you're gonna start building tools that are highly effective at what you're trying to accomplish and then there's gonna be other times where you're building a tool and you just you can't get it to work or it hallucinates half the time and it just, you just can't get it to be consistent and you might give up and you might be like, I'm going to scrap that idea. It's a little bit too complex for AI or like the AI models aren't there yet, but I think it's important to just start getting, getting a feel for like, go build, go build an agent for a business use case or a personal use case to see what the potential is of that, to be able to help solve problems in the future.
Benjamin Ard11:02 — love that. So it almost sounds like, okay, you know, you've graduated from, again, the prompting, the copying and pasting. Now you're getting into skills. Now you're trying out agents. Now you're trying these things, trying to eliminate processes. And, you know, I like the sprinkling analogy. I think that's super cool. You've kind of sprinkled AI in a lot of different areas. And now you're kind of at a point where it feels like, okay, cool. Like I see the potential. But now I kind of realized that I kind of have to rebuild things from the ground up to be fully AI, you know, integrated across the board. It kind of feels like it's all building up to that. What does that phase look like where you kind of like played around with some things, you see some power, and now you're really ready to say, okay, we're going to have to redo process. We're going to have to redo workflows, all of this from the ground up, including AI in the process. What does that look like? How do you get to that next stage? And am I even right in that assessment that you kind of have to go there, see where there's some issues and then go backwards? What does that look like in your opinion?
Paul Schmidt12:07 — Yeah, I think that that kind of depends on the staffing and resources that you have available as an organization, what that is going to look like and who you have as a partner to help you do that or who you hire internally to help you do that. Because some of this stuff is like over the heads of what people that have been stuck with this legacy processes, they're capable of rethinking what that could look like. And so that's why it's good to bring on a partner who is very AI skilled and also as an outsider who doesn't have, you know, sort of that process debt ingrained in their thinking. And so I think that I think that's really useful, like help like find somebody that like can help you think through what that could look like who who doesn't like doesn't have all that process debt already in their mind. I think that's like one thing I think too like
Benjamin Ard12:40 — Yeah.
Paul Schmidt12:56 — I think some of this is just because we're seeing it within companies that are like forced to reinvent their process because they've had a shift in maybe headcount in their organization. Maybe they've restructured and they like they don't have as many people as they once did. And so now it's like, I don't have access to that kind of resource anymore. They're being forced to rethink about and forced to use tools that they may be previously had to use to help reinvent those processes. And instead of them just owning step one of the process now, they step one through three of the process. And so that's, think some companies are just being forced to do it and say, okay, I used to just like take on that part. Now I take on most of the workflow myself with AI agents. And so I think that's, that's part of it. Yeah. And yeah, I think those are, those are a couple of things, Ben, that kind of come to mind is as you're trying to get towards those more mature stages of reinventing process for an organization.
Benjamin Ard13:52 — I love that. And I love the ideas here of kind of working, collaborating, and the concept of sometimes it's out of necessity, where either unfortunately is a reduction of force or you got new responsibilities and you have to figure this out. All of that kind of tribal knowledge is now on your shoulders, things of that nature. I think that's really powerful. Well, Paul, another question I have is... the space like to stay on top of AI is a pretty daunting task because it feels like there's a new feature service offering model, all sorts of stuff, almost every single day as someone who has made it their career to kind of stay on top of that, be informed of it, implement it, try these things. How do you recommend people kind of educate themselves, where they go to learn what they can do to actually feel like maybe they're wrapping their head around it. And it's not just, you know, kind of passing them by without them having any clue of what's going on, any recommended resources or ways that you actually stay on top of industry news and information.
Paul Schmidt15:04 — Yeah, a few different ways I recommend doing it. It's not just like a single way you do it, like read a book or take a course. Like there's plenty of those that are people are selling and hawking on X or wherever. But I think really what's important is like, AI is gonna apply to so many different facets of your life in work and in personal perspective. And I think it's important to surround yourself with a community of people that are talking about those types of use cases that apply to whatever that is. So for a couple very tactical ways that you could approach this for your own organization is like, what is your, if you use Slack or whatever your chat system is, where is the community or the channel there where people are talking about effective AI use cases? And what does that channel look like? tactical use cases frequently in there and are they encouraged to share use cases in there? One of the points of friction that we see is that some people are afraid to share these use cases because they're afraid that they go in and they try some new thing to change a legacy process that they're gonna get in trouble. And I think that organizations really have to figure out how they can break that mentality of that people are encouraged to... test out new ways to do these processes better, quickly, more efficient, whatever it is. And so I think first off is like, find out what that community looks like in your organization. And if there's nothing that exists, then start it. Like start a channel or a place or a group or a meetup that you can get together and share some of these use cases. What we saw early in our organization was that when everybody was added in there, nobody wanted to say anything. Nobody wanted to say how they tried using AI to help change this process, because they were afraid they were going to get in trouble. But when we changed that culture and we encouraged people to say, why don't you try doing it differently this time and try using AI to help solve for that, then they started to like, new use cases started popping up all over the place now.
Paul Schmidt16:56 — In our organization now, which is about 200 people in it, we probably have five different use cases that are getting shared every day now. People are like, I tried it for this thing and it worked really well for this. It didn't work well for this, but so they're sharing learnings. And so I think establishing like a culture of learning is like what organizations need if they really want AI to gain massive adoption. So I think that's the first one. And then obviously there's like lots of subreddits and social media streams that have influencers and all that kind of stuff. I would just be, you know, take some of the things that people say on there with a bit of a grain of salt. Some people are hawking thousand dollar course to like eliminate your marketing team with this course. There's so much of that kind of stuff that you see out there that is a little smoke and Mary for me. So I would just be kind of surround yourself with. like-minded peers and encourage people to share use cases. Those are the things that I encourage people to adopt.
Benjamin Ard17:59 — I love that. And a heavy dose of humility and good community. I love the idea that people feel comfortable saying, Hey, here's what I tried and it did work and didn't work. Often the didn't works are more valuable than the did works and people are afraid to share those because someone may hate here. So stupid. Why in the world did you even try that? You should have known. And the fact that you have such a good culture that you're able to do that and actually coordinate on that front is so cool. I love it. Okay, Paul, this has been incredible. And with these episodes, we like to keep them short and sweet, let people actually get back to their work days, all that fun stuff. But for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Paul Schmidt18:37 — Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. So yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look up Paul Schmidt. I'm pretty easy to find on there. Though there is other Paul Schmitz that are marketers, I'm the Paul Schmitz you should find. You can also track me down at paulschmidt.com or smartbugmedia.com. You can find us there. So yeah, thanks so much again for having me.
Benjamin Ard18:56 — love it. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on, you will see those three links right there. Feel free to connect on that and tell Paul you came from the podcast. That would be awesome. Paul, again, thanks for the time and insights today. Really appreciate it.
Paul Schmidt19:11 — Thanks again.
