The AI Marketer's Playbook

18 | Elevating Business with AI Solutions: Scaling Smarter with Ashley Gross

Audrey Chia, Ashley Gross Season 1 Episode 18

In this episode, Audrey Chia chats with Ashley Gross, a trailblazer in AI-powered business transformation. Hear Ashley’s journey from demand generation marketer to AI consultant, helping organizations achieve massive growth. She explains her human-first approach, multi-agent systems, and the importance of alignment and communication. Perfect for marketers and business leaders ready to embrace AI.

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Speaker:

Hello and welcome back to the AI Marketer's Playbook where we cover actionable frameworks to help you leverage AI in your business. I'm Audrey Chia, your host, and today I have with me Ashley Gross joining us today. Ashley is the founder and CEO of the AI Workforce Alliance, where she delivers AI solutions to actually solve business challenges. Now, before tools like ChatGPT, Ashley was already implementing AI strategies in large organizations. And amazingly, within three months of just rolling out her AI solutions, the organization she was working with managed to surpass their annual sales pipeline goal of 90 million, reaching a whopping 115 million in revenue. And we are so excited to have you with us, Ashley.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Speaker:

It's amazing to hear about your journey and you know, how far you have come, but for listeners who don't know you, tell us more about your background and how did you get into the world of AI?

Speaker 2:

Sure. Yes, I have no business being in this field. I really don't. I've been a marketer for 10 years. Ever since I was 18, I started working for enterprises and From there, I really worked in primarily demand generation. And so I'm very familiar with a marketer's perspective, their workflows, the friction points they run into, nothing, you know, nothing out of the box or new there, but in 2020, that's when I started dabbling in the world of generative AI. And I always like to tell this story because one, it makes me relatable, but two, it shows like there was a real intention. That was the year I found out I was going to be a mom. And you know, as a marketer, we have a million things that we're responsible for. And I knew that I needed to consolidate my workweek from 40 hours to 15, but keep the same exact output and quality that I was able to deliver with a 40 hour workweek. That was really why I started using Jasper AI back in 2020. After I was able to consolidate that work week, I was like, Okay, this is cool, now I have time to actually think about where do I want my career to go in the next three to five years. And from there, I kind of just did this little intentional audit of how I was spending my time, and Back then my career was I want to be a CMO But all of the things I was doing on an everyday basis were a lot of busy work I wasn't getting in front of c suite. I wasn't participating in board meetings or preparing pitches and slide decks So I wasn't getting the experiences I needed to get to where I wanted to be in my career And so then I took this lens of I'm going to start taking all the tasks I don't find joy in and automating them with AI tools, right? And so it kind of, my learning experience evolved from implementing generative AI tools into my marketing tech stack to using automations to tie them together. And then getting into the agentic workflows. But on the back end, really I was just experimenting, right? And I was telling everybody at my enterprise that I worked for what I was doing. Which got me in front of the CMO. And, by the way, like, that is not an easy thing to do. Like, I was incessantly talking about what I was doing with AI to everybody and anyone that would listen. And so she came to me and she was like, hey, you know, you're talking a lot about what you're doing with AI. Do you want to roll it out to our marketing org? And this was pre chat GPT and I said yes. And I took that same exact like human first approach of what out of this marketing organization, like what are the tasks that we have to do every day that you don't like doing? Let's automate those so that no one feels like they're being replaced with AI. They're just being augmented with AI. But more importantly, they're spending their time doing whatever they want to be doing and we're not taking the joyful tasks away from them. And then we tied that to revenue because three months into implementing use cases, we overachieved our pipeline of converted pipeline, mind you, by 25 million. So it was like, yeah, I was like, this is wild. Like I, I love marketing. I love marketers, but to be able to actually align a workforce and use technology to solve problems. And, on the back end, be able to have, you know, a newborn and a career and not have to feel like I need to make the sacrifice. I was like, this is it. This is all I'm doing.

Speaker:

Wow, that is an incredible story. And I think you shared so many like golden takeaways, even in the first few minutes of our conversation. I love how you said about like figuring something out for yourself first, and then because of the need to streamline your processes so that you can have a better work life balance, which is what, again, AI is great for. And I also love how you said, What do you say about AI augmenting our workflows instead of replacing marketers? I think that is a concern that a lot of marketers still have. and

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

you a hard question now. Like, a lot of my copywriter friends have realized that AI has gotten so good that it's replacing or it's able to replace junior and mid level copywriters or even marketers. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love this question because I do feel like we have to have these vulnerable conversations to move the needle on a large scale and get more buy in and adoption with AI. There's no scenario where we don't have these tough conversations. conversations and we can and we can do this because it is a scary time and it is challenging our core beliefs on you know, if we tied our Our expertise and how we feel about ourselves to our career and our careers copywriting. That's pretty traumatizing to see that You know robots are creating copy. I'm not an expert. I add that as a disclaimer because my answer would be I'm personally not using AI to write for me. I am using it to reformat my thoughts in a way that fits whatever audience I'm trying to target. And so, I don't, I don't feel that it is a threat because that's not what I'm using it for. And I think that this goes back to the intention behind it. There's a ton of people using AI for copywriting. Some might be good, some of them you can absolutely tell, you know, and it, it does lose that trust and transparency. And I think that Yes, you know the concern should be there it's warranted but I would more so think about it as well Let's reframe this right like To a certain degree, a lot of people can be good at writing. What is your special skill that you bring to copywriting? Is it ideation? Is it brainstorming? Is it being relatable to audiences and being able to pivot depending on what those are? You have a super set of skills that this robot doesn't have. Dig deep and figure out what that was and is and double down on that. Because you don't need to be using AI the same way other people are using it. You know, that doesn't mean it's the best use case for it.

Speaker:

Definitely. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that they can bring a lot of human value to the table and they can continue to do so while using AI as a companion or a co pilot. And that actually speeds up the process so that it frees up your mind to do higher level strategic stuff like what you said in the beginning, right? And

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

example, AI, organizational level. So let's talk about what you're doing right now, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

how are you helping businesses transform using, you know, the latest tools or like building out workflows for them?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I have a framework that always works for me and I like it because it starts with the problem, which in my opinion is where you always need to start, so I essentially will go into the mid market enterprise clients of mine and I will say, okay, if I had to ask you to identify what is the biggest business problem that your business has this quarter, and let's just say out of three problems I give them, those problems are lack of clean and rich data without relying on third party vendors. Lack of insight into their customers journey and slow sales cycles, right? I give them those three problems and I ask everybody in the C suite board of director founder level to answer that question Two things happen one I'm aligning them because I've never been in a discovery call where everyone's aligned on the same problem So it's like, you know regardless if you take AI out of it Nothing is going to get accomplished if everyone is trying to prioritize the different problems So I align them immediately at the top, but then the second thing I'm doing is getting them to think about okay You We're always given a long list of priorities and we're expected to like kind of pivot those priorities on a week by week basis without communicating what we're doing and how far we've accomplished something. So I'm kind of getting them to understand that the way they've been communicating and the processes that they've put in place, where they're starting to see silos and fragmented pieces, is a lack of communicating. So I'm already trying to kind of get them to unlearn how they've gotten to these strategist roles because the, the further up you work and the more closely you become, you know, a C suite or a director, you get into a more of a strategist and less of a practitioner.

Speaker:

yeah

Speaker 2:

Which is fine, but you just have to understand that you are not the best to be experimenting, right? Like because your role is not programmed for you to experiment. It's it's it's programmed for you to lead And so i'm getting them to realize that one It's okay to communicate and get on the same level as your founders and boards And say like are we still working on this problem? Like, you know, like it's okay You can ask questions and clarify and then from there i'm kind of getting them to to think about this as They don't have all the answers And they really don't have to have all the answers. They just kind of got it into their head that they have to. The good news is, their team does. They just need to talk to their team more. So after they align at the top, I have them say, Okay, out of those three problems, you picked one. Let's go back around the circle and talk about, in your past lives, how have you solved lack of insights into the customer journey, for example. They all have solved this to a certain degree. They know the metrics, the timeline, the resources that they need. Those are those use cases. Those are the proof of concept use cases that we're going to use AI for, because they already know the metrics that they need, the timeline, the resources. And then from there, they just go back to their teams and they say, we need to solve this problem. Here are the ways we can solve these problems out of these ways that we have to solve this problem. What are you all not excited about? Right? Like pick one of these or two of these that you don't, you're not excited about. They don't bring you joy. Now let's assign AI to that, right? Because now we're actually choosing a proof of concept use case that people are not excited about doing, so they're gonna be more excited to try to implement AI to solve this. It's still tying into the impact of the overall business. And most importantly, It's forcing everybody from the top down and bottom up to audit their tech stack and figure out like, is this actually working? Do we like this? Are we married to this? Yes? Great. Let's start adding in those AI pieces of glue to tie it all together. If no, let's evaluate that now because they feel like. Really, aligning everyone pre AI is the only way, in my opinion, to see success, and it's the only way I've gotten all 11 of my clients to have mass adoption quickly and be able to scale past those pilot projects.

Speaker:

I think what you said about alignment is spot on. what you normally see in organizations is Either the ground level, people are excited about AI and management is like, or management is excited. And every on the ground level is like,

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker:

there's a bit of a dissonance. Right. So,

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

if you're able to get, for example, your stakeholders to come together, and I think the interesting thing about what you mentioned was focusing on what they were least excited about, because then the use case for AI is so much stronger, and it almost then helps people to be like, okay, I'm willing to try something because it's going to take away stuff that I don't like to do, not take away stuff that I like to do. And that could also help in that mindset shift, right?

Speaker 2:

Exactly. And there's a lot of asynchronous work that goes on behind the scenes, but it's more so like I lead with that communication and alignment. And then in the background, I'm working with the data science teams and the IT and the regulatory teams and saying, you know, it's not that scary. I understand that this is new and there that is like very fear inducing. But it's the same data play, right? Like it's the same thing that's been at stake with your regular tech stack. So let's take the governance and frameworks you applied to your regular tech stack, where data was still always what you were trying to protect and safe gate, and let's just duplicate that for AI. And then let's evaluate where the fear is, right? Like, instead of trying to create a whole new governance structure, a whole new task force, right? Like you already have these principles and you have. This experience, you just don't think that you do because you haven't applied it to AI yet. And that's really where I get executive leadership bought in because they just tend to have more of like a fear paralysis approach where since they haven't done it, they're like, we need to do a ton of research and then they stifle their own innovation. Whereas like they've dealt with this before, right? Like we've always had to safe gate our data. It's just a new tool and a new way of safe gating it.

Speaker:

And interestingly, from what you've shared, right, I actually see that you are bringing a very valuable skillset to the table. and there's like communication with. even without the use of AI or like even with any new change, right? There needs to be that comms involved Curious to know so in your previous roles were you already, you know coaching and training teams? Was it already part of your own workflows or was it a new skillset that you picked up along the way?

Speaker 2:

These are all new skills I picked up. It's funny because your career path to marketing, you know, in my experience working specifically in enterprises is anywhere from like 10 to 15 upwards of 20 years before you ever make it to CMO level, you know, if, because a lot of the times, I think it gets really difficult as you work your way up from, you know, being an entry level to a junior, then being a people manager and having a team. You, you accumulate the busy work, right? Like you're more responsible for putting out fires and those can hinder you cross collaborating and being confident and comfortable speaking with people that, you know, are in different departments with bigger titles than you. So a lot of this was, you know, very much coming from my perspective of, I don't want to wait 20 years to start having those conversations. And. And it's been really enlightening for me, I think, because there's nothing wrong with being a CMO. I love CMOs dearly. I work with them on a day to day basis. But now that I had the experiences that I needed, I no longer want to be, you know, a CMO. I would much rather have my own company and have fractional, you know, employees come work for me and help companies for 6 to 12 months and then go on to help others. Like, that's what I care more about than being a CMO. At one company and having a title, but I would have never been able to figure that out Had I kept going the way that I was going and trying to pull those experiences in on top of everything else. So I'm very much trying to like lead By what I say and and gain the experiences selfishly that i've wanted the whole time

Speaker:

Amazing. And I think it's a beautiful, like, timing where AI came along at the right window where you have had the opportunity to explore. I think even for myself and other entrepreneurs, AI has unlocked, like, new business models for us, new business ideas, and helped us to really, you know, get that productivity in, right? Cause it's saving us so much time. Like, I would love to know for yourself, right, what are some of your personal experiences Use cases whether it's your own, you know business workflows or for your clients How are you helping them to save time and really increase efficiency at work?

Speaker 2:

So many different ways. I would say me personally, I have to create so much content because I have every channel, right? So YouTube, I think I have like four LinkedIn pages, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, like you get my point. It's a lot. Plus a newsletter, plus those weekly YouTube videos of like the behind the scenes. and it's a lot. And I think for me, I have been able to maintain that trust and transparency and community by not having myself cloned into an avatar to do all of these things. I've just been able to focus on using AI to take like one long-term YouTube video and break it down into like the best optimized channels and links for TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, being able to put one Canva template in to my GPT and have it create 50 different variations of it, right? So. For me that was really probably the biggest call out because I was spending Every sunday I was spending 12 to 15 hours on that one day creating content for the whole week like one week. That's insane And now i'm spending two and a half hours for a whole entire week. So that was my biggest Exciting use case personally because it freed up my time for clients. It's it's so many things I would say it's something as simple as optimizing how they're spending their meetings You So having, you know, the capabilities as they're in their meetings, especially like my C suite folks that have, you know, 40 plus people that they're managing, being able to implement some generative AI solutions that help them utilize those meetings so that, say we're in a meeting right now and I'm like, okay, Audrey, I'm going to sign you in a sauna board and add this and the due date, blah, blah, blah, and I'm just giving this to you in our meeting. I don't have to actually leave the meeting, be distracted, open up a Slack. Okay. And it's automatically creating an asana board on the back end because I told it to in this call It's creating the deadlines. It's creating the due dates. It's sending the email follow up. So like Everything from just being able to optimize what they have to do on a daily basis to feel better and have more of a strategy long term to I would say The biggest one being, you know, implementing AI into chatbots that live on Confluence pages to make regulatory and IT and GTS approvals a lot faster and easier. It's everything and anything in between, right? I don't ever think that it's the same thing across different companies. I have the same framework, but it's different problems. It's different tech stacks. And at the end of the day, it's really just. tying everything together in a way that is good for the business as a whole. So not just like adding tech for the sake of adding tech.

Speaker:

Yeah, amazing that you said that, right? Cause a lot of people use AI or try to use AI for the sake of it. And they're like, let's just try a hundred tools and see which one sticks. But that is maybe not the most effective way to really fully leverage the power of AI.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

said that, right? I think one thing you also mentioned that was interesting to me was, you now have this way of, Going into a company and looking at where are their problem areas and solving it not just in the marketing department, but beyond, right? Having been a marketer yourself, how did you pick up all these new skills that you now have To help companies integrate AI in their business. It must be a lot of new knowledge that you have to have acquired

Speaker 2:

It is, but it's refreshing because I've always been a demand generation manager and so I think that I've learned so much more from May to November even of this year than I have in the rest of my 10 years of being a marketer because I didn't have bias, right? Like when you work for a company, especially when you've been in like, You know demand generation if you've been in a specific department for most of those 10 years You tend to not question the way you think about marketing because you've been trained a certain way your experience is a certain way and marketing is very much like A lot of people do the same things and so if you want to be different You have to do something different and so the second that you take yourself out of that internal bias of like i'm going to do it this way because I was trained this way you see things from a different perspective and so You I think how I've been able to pick up on these different skills is before I ever Get on a discovery call with a client like the moment that they form filled that discovery call I go onto their website I actually take the role of their prospect and whether it's a financial company, right and they have a marketplace and I'm trying to buy something from them, I experience that as one of their prospects so that I can see, oh, you get on their website and it's super buggy or there's so much information, I'm overwhelmed. Whatever it may be, I put myself in that position and that lens and then I just start. and then I start quite literally writing things down on my legal pad, my yellow legal pad. And I'm like, user experience, took me this long to get somebody on the phone, has to book a demo before I can see the ROI of a tool. I just start writing down all these things that I find frustrating and then I look at, okay, from a marketing lens, here's how you solve them. That's really it. I think we just always think we have the greatest products and services and we don't like to question them. And so I just question everything and I always assume it can be better and that's the mentality that I have. I think allows me to be a sponge and absorb so much knowledge.

Speaker:

Definitely, I think even as a copywriter myself, when I work on client projects or develop, yeah, strategic positioning or value proposition, it's always from the role of the prospect of the client, you know, buying, purchasing something, right? And a lot of times, I think many business owners or founders have the bias that they have built a business Beautiful platform, which they have, but because of this view, they sometimes don't see, or they put blinders on certain parts of their processes, which is why having an external consultant or someone with that, you know, a different point of view could help in that process.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

you know, tough conversations with your clients? Cause I'm sure that you really have to drill down to a lot of gaps that they could potentially have in their current flows.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I think, well first, I'm good with boundaries. I'm a mom, so like I'm a natural at kind of saying like, Nope, we're not going to do this, and like explaining it in a way that doesn't frustrate people. So I think that like those skills translate really well into emotional intelligence in business. So I would say, you know, right from the beginning, I'm very, respectful and intentional in my own time. So, and I say this because it does add up to like the bigger picture and the bigger conversation. So if you want to book a discovery call, it's paywalled, right? Like you're going to respect my time. I'm going to respect yours. We're both going to be on time and prepared. Like I set that intention right away so that they, whoever wants to work with me knows, like she means business. If we are going to be asking her questions, like we need to come with like, here's our problems. Here's what we need to accomplish. We're not just going to sit here cause we're paying 250 upwards. And so I already get them to kind of think about, like, are you ready? Because maybe you're not, and that's okay. But if you're not ready, let's not have this conversation yet. Let's go back to the drawing board and perhaps, you know, revisit this later. So like, that's how I start, you know, my relationships off with my clients and then I would say, when it does come time, I always am very intentional again with how I tell them how this is going to work. So, on those calls, right, I'm doing what I just told you I'm doing, I'm getting them to identify a problem, align on that problem, communicate solutions to that problem, and then saying, we're going to create a road map. Because this is not all going to happen at once, this is going to be a crawl, walk, run method. Here's what that implementation roadmap looks like for you, and here are the problems that we're going to identify and diagnose along the way. So I'm telling them, here's the issues, but I'm giving them a timeline of, listen, I know you don't want to talk about this, we're going to talk about it in three months from now. Before they actually see that proposal, so that they're like, understanding. Their product's not perfect, nobody's is. They know what we're going to talk about so it's not a surprise if I say, hey, this website has 10 broken backlinks and it's not, you know, converting. There's no surprise. It's intentional. But I'm also giving them a timeline to say, if you want to go work on that before we evaluate it, you got three months. But just know that this is actually making you lose XYZ. And I always take my feelings out of it and prove ROI. So if I'm going to have a conversation that is particularly tough around their user experience on their website, right? Most of the time, you know, they end up telling me, well our competitor XYZ has this and that's why we have that. And I always have to rephrase this as, but your prospects don't care who your competitors are. They're going onto your website. You're giving them 30 seconds, right, they have 30 seconds to find what they want on your website. And if they can't find it, they're leaving. So it doesn't matter if your competitors have this and they're converting. You are not them. So let's figure out what works well for you. That's kind of like my redirection, if you will. And I always pull in the revenue. Like, I never make it about feelings and personal emotions. I always say, here is the revenue you are losing as a result. Because nobody, nobody argues, right? Because if the business isn't making money, no one has a job at the end of the day. So I pull it out to the big picture.

Speaker:

Yeah. You can't, you can't argue and you bring the numbers in.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

you, when you propose solutions, right? Yeah. Solutions. Do you tie it to certain KPIs that they're going to achieve or certain ROI they're going to get from, from implementing a strategy like that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I always try to work with the OKRs or KPIs that they have assigned. Personally, I hate attribution. I think it's been broken for a very long time and I think that fixating on everything and trying to measure everything makes you lose sight of how the business overall is doing and the health of the business. And that's when the silos start because everyone's just less focused on how the business is doing and how their teams are doing. And this is where, you know, you see these issues bubble up to the top and lead to more friction points on a larger level. But, yeah, I think at the end of the day it's really just, listen, you know, how's the business's overall health? How can we help your department fix that? Let's apply these. And I always like to show them. So during these discovery calls, I'm always screen sharing my own workflow and telling them my own conversion rates. I never ever implement an AI tool that I haven't personally vetted myself or I haven't used myself because then that loses that trust and that authority so I always show them what I'm doing and how it's working on the front end from a user experience and then on the back end.

Speaker:

Awesome. So speaking of which, right, I know you also have your own AI funnel workflow that you show your clients.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

to have a behind the scenes peek into what that looks like for you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so a little context before I screen share. So, the number one thing that I love to show my clients and prospects in general is what a user experience looks like from the moment that they land on your website. Because everyone gets so confused. I would say distracted with trying to put out good content, but they don't own the data, right? Like if you put a linkedin post out you can measure the likes you can measure the titles that are interacting with it But you don't own that data. You can't send them emails. You can't put anything in front of them So I try to get people to rethink how they are owning their prospects data and actually able to segment it further To just like personalize the journey even more and so how I do this Is I start off with my own website I'm an AI consultant. It's a very saturated time, as you know, in this field and lots of AI consultants, products, services feel like they're AI. It shouldn't feel like it's AI. You should be using these tools in the background to make the most relatable experience for your prospects without screaming, we are AI, right? You go on my website, here's the contact page. None of this screams AI, no pop ups, no cookies being weird and distracting.

Speaker:

popping at you right there.

Speaker 2:

None. None at all.

Speaker:

images,

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

a bit questionable in

Speaker 2:

Yes. Yes. None of that is happening. But if you click on chat now, this is when intercom pops up. And like this is when you start to have like those chat feelings. And you'll also notice like you don't actually, when you're on my website, let's just say you quite literally went to the homepage and you scrolled. Usually, you can't gate that, right? You have no way of figuring out who those people are. You might get lucky and be able to see the companies. So what I do for myself and some of my clients is, if they are targeting U. S. based companies, I like to use RB2B. And so again, you're on my website, you don't click on anything. On the back end, I'm using RB2B, and I have set the parameters for my ICP. Basically just, here are the types of companies and folks I want to attract. I have my annual reoccurring revenue, company size, seniority of job titles, department, category, states. And then I have a must match for these filters in order to actually measure it, because I'm paying per lead for this tool. So every single time somebody goes onto my website, I'm able to actually see who they are, have their email, their LinkedIn profile, contact information. Which then triggers an automation to Clay. Why I love Clay, and this is an empty table because I don't want to show you proprietary information, but why I love Clay is they're already coming to this Clay table with their full name, email, company domain, LinkedIn profile. So, without me having to lift a finger, what I'm doing is I'm creating an enrichment and I'm doing a waterfall effect so that it can extract anything that I want. And specifically when I say this, you can set up, Let's just say, so for my current company, right, I need to know what tech stack they're on because I only work with clients if they're on HubSpot, Salesforce, or Marketo. So then I can actually use the tools I would usually use, so Capterra being one of them, or Clearbit, right, and look for this information. So on top of having all the information already, I can choose what more information I need using the tools I've already been using, HG Insights, Zoom Info, Sixth Sense, and, They are all within this one tool of clay, but instead of having separate licenses and having multiple documents and tabs open and copying and pasting, I'm doing it all from this one tool. So then by the time it's already enriched with all the information I need, it's going back to my HubSpot CRM. So that when it's in my CRM, all the fields are already matched. I know all of the information I need about my clients, and then my AI agent actually places them in the email nurture that goes with those enrichments. Thanks. From a user experience, you just go to my site, one minute later you get a connection request from me on LinkedIn, 24 hours later you're getting an email. That's it, that's your user experience. So, so, I, I think it's interesting too because using those tools separately is giving me about an 80 percent conversion.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker 2:

together using an automation and then an AI agent man, you know, manually checking those, it's a 99 percent conversion. And again, no avatars, no voice clones. I'm not sending them like, you know, slimy outreach sequences and LinkedIn DMs. It's just Ashley's everywhere. And I hear that a lot. They're like, you are all over my LinkedIn and I don't know why. It's very intentional. It's like that because I chose to do it that way because that's marketing, you know? Marketers jobs are to get the information in front of the right audience so that when they're ready to buy, you are the first of their, you're at the top of their mind.

Speaker:

Wow. Amazing. I think the interesting thing that stood out to me was your client journey wasn't AI like, but

Speaker 2:

No.

Speaker:

else back end was AI, which then helps you to create this, you know, a beautiful kind of interaction with your client where

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

seamless, right? And they don't even feel like they're talking to a bot,

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

I think is one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of AI companies are making is that it looks beautiful. Very much AI and there isn't a human touch or that sense of trust.

Speaker 2:

Right. No, absolutely. And that's the thing, too, is I feel like people aren't having those conversations. And I get it. You know, security is not the sexiest talk. But at the end of the day, the differentiator really is going to be the trust and the transparency. Sales is human to human. It is never going to be robot to robot. You have to maintain that authority in a trusting way and not Ever make your prospects question whether or not they can trust you with their data, right? The moment that they feel like you're trying to replace yourself with a robot, you lose their trust. So use AI on the back end to make them, to give away the free resources, to get a better idea of who they are and how you can help them, but never jeopardize that trust. And I feel like, yeah, you nailed it. Like this is, this is going to be 2025, right? This is very much going to be the conversation that we're having.

Speaker:

to see what's going to happen in 2025, given all that has already happened in the past two years. And for yourself, what are you most excited about, you know, in the coming year?

Speaker 2:

multi agent systems, a hundred percent. I'm so excited about them. So right now I'm using a multi agent system. So I basically, what that means is I built multiple agents that are talking to each other and running together without me really having to do anything. Now how I maintain human in the loop is every Friday, my AI agents will send me an email, right? They all have names. They'll send me an email and they'll say, here's all your automations. Here's all of your AI tools, here are the issues that came up, here's a weekly report of all the incidences, here's some things you might want to mitigate for risk, and then every Friday I'm spending two to two and a half hours going back and iterating those. But if I were to do all of that on my own, that would take me a week's worth of, you know, work alone just to try and find and debug all of these tools. So I'm really excited about multi agent systems. I think that I get more and more excited the more conversations I have with people because we have to have the vulnerable conversations, make people feel safe, rephrase it instead of, you know, you're going to get left behind to, you're not going to get left behind, the business that you work for probably will. If you're not using these tools in order to get to these conversations. And that's what I'm excited about is because I think a lot more people now are starting to feel a little bit more confident about using these tools so that we can kind of like elevate this conversation to be more, cause it's moving so fast and I get so worried cause I just, I want everyone to understand what is fully capable, but we have to do the hard work and have these hard conversations first.

Speaker:

Definitely. I think actually from what I've noticed, businesses over the past year have evolved slightly. one year ago, a lot of businesses were still on the fence about AI and they were thinking, you know, it could be a fair or they're just waiting for someone else to adopt that technology. Right. But

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

are realizing they have to do start doing something. I think now is actually the perfect time where you're seeing a lot more businesses flip that switch and decide to. really commit and invest their resource, their team members in upskilling and that took a bit of time But I think it's because people suddenly realize that AI is not going anywhere

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

potential To be unlocked with the use of AI Ashley, I would also like to know, like, maybe one other thing, right, beyond AI. You mentioned that you're also a mom, right? How do you manage both, you know, motherhood and running your own business and your agents at the same time? That must be quite a lot of work for

Speaker 2:

You know It's work, but honestly, I don't really think that there's anything is like I don't think balance is a real thing I kind of think it's a myth right because there's no perfect scenario where you are working You know x amount of hours every day and then you get to be like this Magical, you know exciting mom and you feel great about it, right? Like Every day I just strive to Find a way to kind of like bridge those two worlds together But I also think that's what makes my work really meaningful because I was put in a position You know in 2020 where I was being asked to choose between being a mom and having a career and I wasn't willing to make those sacrifices, right? So I figured out how to do the work in less time so that I could have both and and so I think just having a really important why and knowing that every day the work that I'm doing is, you know, providing for my family but also making it possible to be present, that's what I kind of count as balance. You know, am I being present and intentional with my time every day? Do I feel good about, you know, when I go to bed at night? Do I feel good about how my day was spent? That to me is like the balance and I think I just do it all by constantly being aware of how I spend my time, whether or not I'm happy with the time being spent, you know, And being quick to change, right? Like a marketer's as marketers, I think we have to experiment all the time, but like, turn that experimenting inwards because as you grow and mature, your ideas change and your values change. So like, make sure that your work life is bringing you joy because work and personal life, there's no balance. Work is personal. Personal life is work, right? Like it's, it's the same thing. It's just different jobs.

Speaker:

Absolutely. And especially for people who are trying to build their own business, right? You will find that it's a very grey area.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

the beauty of it. So for, for, for example, for moms who are, or people who are considering, you know, motherhood, right? And who are in the same position as you were, you know, sometime back, what would you advise them?

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh.

Speaker:

ha.

Speaker 2:

I would say when it comes to the job that you're doing every day at your desk, start to audit your time. So toggle T O G G L, that's a free extension. All you have to do is click start and stop. You can actually tag the tasks. So even if you start to like intentionally try to figure out where you're spending your time, because a lot of people don't have, you know, a good rap on that, you Start there, and then once you have a high level overview of where that time is being spent, start to make the changes that allow you to have more time to do what you want to do and be present as a mom. I would also say, as a personal note, having, you know, I wish somebody would have told me to like, start having more conversations with myself on like, what motherhood looks like to me. I find that motherhood means different things to different people. And there's almost like this silent Standard for what that means and it needs to be applied to everyone and everything in the same way And it definitely doesn't you know, it adds more pressure. So I very much take this mentality of Unsubscribe, right? Like I'm never gonna have the Pinterest house and the Pinterest life, right? Like today is Thanksgiving. We're not even doing turkey. We're doing chicken.

Speaker:

good

Speaker 2:

so just Thank you. nobody even likes turkey in this house I'm like, why would we do this? but just you know start to like make decisions that feel right for you and start having conversations with your partner that That that are good for your family and your unit Doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. My husband is an amazing stay at home dad. He is the chef. He is, you know, he's cleaning. He's homeschooling our son. And I think that for a lot of homes, you know, that's, that's not an option. But like we made sacrifices to make that possible because that was what was good for us. That was our personal choice. So I just think, dig deep. Think about what you want and what you want your structure to be like. And then forget about the rest of it, you know?

Speaker:

I love that. So I think for anyone who is, you know, this journey and like figuring things out, I think digging deep and finding your why, as well as what motivates you and your value system. And of course, communicating it with your partner or with your family. I think those are

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

on this journey. So

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

things up, Ashley, what are some of your favorite tools? and What is your final tip for someone who is trying to leverage AI for the first time?

Speaker 2:

My favorite tools, so I would say Relevance AI, being a multi agent system, cannot say enough wonderful things about them. that would probably be like my number one favorite tool at the moment because I've been doing so much work into consolidating all these generative AI tools into like one agent instead of having multiple licenses to multiple tools. A couple other tools I think internally for communications read AI for sure because it, it's marketed as a note taker, but honestly, I'm using it way more for communication to better myself to stop saying the filler words. I love saying like an arm and it's horrible. I'm trying to get better at it. But again, the intentionality you only have so many hours in a day. So like my note taker also helps me. Be better at communicating. Tools that are versatile for that I love. And then my final tip for anyone using AI, I would say start with the problem. Vet the vendors that built the tools to solve your problem. ChachDBT is a generalist tool. I know that we love that tool. I use it every day. It doesn't solve every single problem. Find the tools that do solve the problems. Try to ensure that the tools you choose have the tools you need. multiple benefits and serve multiple departments. So that marketing's tech stack is not 30 plus tools and everyone else's are like 10 and then communicate and talk cause it's constant communication and cross collaboration and ideation from different perspectives that help you learn more fast. That's really it.

Speaker:

So start communicating with

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

with your team, with

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker:

and of course with AI, and then you can figure out how to bring it all together. Thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights. Ashley, if people want to find you, how can they reach out?

Speaker 2:

Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I try to respond to every single DM. Unless it's a cold pitch, I do not respond. But, other than that, I am happy to meet everyone and answer questions and get to know all of you.

Speaker:

Awesome. So thank you so much, Ashley, for joining us. It was a pleasure having you on the

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker:

and thank you guys for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast hit the bell for more actionable marketing insights. We will see you next time. Take care.