GABE GOTAY
Welcome to a bonus episode of Promo Perspectives, following up on our discussion of how to use AI tools in your day-to-day marketing and promo business workflows. I’m sitting down with Bille Foreman, VP of Marketing at SAGE, to talk about her experiences using AI and the state of the industry in general. Bille, thanks for sitting down.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, thanks, Gabe. Excited to be here. I’m a big podcast fan but I’ve never been on a podcast before, so this is the first time.
GABE GOTAY
Longtime listener, first-time caller.
BILLE FORMAN
Exactly, exactly.
GABE GOTAY
Well, Bille, off the bat, you just sat through my 30-minute spiel on the live stream. Was there anything that jumped out to you in terms of, “Yeah, that’s how I use AI,” or, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way”?
BILLE FORMAN
I think, um, for the most part, it’s how I use it. I use, I use ChatGPT primarily, um, and you were using Google Gemini, so it was interesting to see how you were using it versus how I would use it. Um, I think one of the things that, um, you spoke about that I could do better is giving more prompts when wanting a response. So how you had copied the text, um, saying, “I work for a software company. The company is called SAGE. Here’s our website. Can you help me with this?” I think that, um, is something that I’m not always doing. Um, that I kind of took away.
GABE GOTAY
What kind of tasks are you typically using AI for in your day-to-day?
BILLE FORMAN
I would say, for the most part, I use it to clean up my text and to generate ideas. So if I write an email and I don’t think it sounds very good, I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it sound better. Um, sometimes if I need something to sound more professional than how I would normally write, I’ll ask it to do that. Um, maybe if it’s, you know, employee reviews are coming up and I’m trying to find better verbiage to use for that that’s more concise because I only have a small box I can use. I can’t really, um, have an unlimited amount of characters for our reviews. Stuff like that.
GABE GOTAY
Tell me about how you use it in your personal life.
BILLE FORMAN
So, similar to how you showed there’s review summaries in SAGE Online, so for, um, all of the reviews that we have for a supplier, it will auto-generate a concise paragraph of text kind of aggregating all of the, all of the reviews and putting them into, you know, a couple of sentences. I use that a lot for Amazon, also. Amazon has it, and I’ve heard mixed reviews on that. Um, some professionals say that they think that the Amazon AI is worthless, but I’ve found it really beneficial. Um, so they’re one of the only online retailers that I’ve seen use it.
Um, and then outside of that, I’ll use it basically anywhere that it’s located in software. I’ll try it and see if it works.
GABE GOTAY
That is like I mentioned that Zoom has added some stuff that, um, well, something I didn’t really dive into but I kind of mentioned at the beginning is, you have to be really cognizant of the security and privacy practices of each of these AI companies when you’re using them. And so, at least here at SAGE, we don’t actually have access to the Zoom AI tool in the way that our thing is set up because our company has made the decision that the way that the privacy settings on that work is it’s not going to work for us. But it is cool to start to see all of these features of AI just baked into these tools that we’re already using without needing to go to a separate thing like Gemini.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, totally. I think it’s, um, one of the great tools of our time to be able to work more efficiently, to be honest. Um, I heard a podcast, if anybody listens to it, it’s called The Hustle Daily Show by HubSpot, and one of their, um, reporters said that AI is like the new organic. So back in the early 2000s, I guess, when everybody was slapping organic on all food products and it was the craziest thing ever, and everyone, um, there was zero regulation behind it at all, and everybody was looking for organic. Um, I think the same thing is going to happen with AI. Everyone’s throwing it on everything right now. Um, sometimes it’s super practical and makes your life more efficient, and sometimes you’re like, “Why did they do this?” Um, so I also think regulation is probably coming at some point to help with AI as well.
GABE GOTAY
Oh, the cutting edge is always ahead of the regulation
BILLE FORMAN
Right, exactly.
GABE GOTAY
I do. And the idea of them just slapping an AI label on everything is interesting, too, because what is, what even is AI? It’s kind of a blanket term. I mean, if we, if you want to get super technical, things like ChatGPT and Gemini are large language models based on machine learning.
BILLE FORMAN
Right, yeah.
GABE GOTAY
That’s not as attractive as AI, but artificial intelligence is a really vague term that has been used in a lot of ways for the past hundred years.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, it really has been. Um, I think it really kind of got a foothold in the early 2010s when, um, you know, Siri launched. So Siri is technically, uh, you know, AI, and that was something that was accessible to everybody because it was on your phone. So everyone got access to it, and then Amazon Alexa came out. And so all of that technology is AI. Um, I think, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI became the juggernaut that they are because it gave people access to see it in action and to play with it and to, um, use it in ways that they never thought that they could. But yeah, AI has been around for a while.
GABE GOTAY
It is interesting bringing up the Siri side of things and like the, the virtual assistants is I think what they used to call them when they came out. And compared to what AI can do now, like the kinds of things that I just showed in my demo, Siri is trash. Like it’s just bad. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying. It’s inconsistent in how it can respond to you. But I don’t know if you’ve seen, um, well, for I’m not an Android user anymore, I’ve been converted, but I know that Gemini has been worked into the mobile applications for Google search in a lot of ways, and I don’t know if you saw Apple’s most recent developer conference and some of the things they announced for Siri, but they are integrating language models into the virtual assistance.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, I think that is going to be so interesting to see how well it works.
I agree with you. Siri is, I’ve always found it to be trash. I’ve just taken it off of my phone altogether. Um, same thing with Amazon Alexa. Not a fan of anybody with accents. My husband has a really thick accent, and Amazon Alexa does not understand him. Um, but what Apple is doing is really cutting edge, I think, and will be really interesting. Um, if it doesn’t work, then it’s going to be a huge egg on their face, and nobody really kind of knows now. So I’m interested to see that.
GABE GOTAY
Yeah, I mean, they’re already kind of fighting the egg on the face with the fact that they’re a little late to market on the whole thing.
BILLE FORMAN
They are, they are. And they, um, they partnered with, uh, OpenAI with it, is that right?
Okay, yeah.
Um, OpenAI. So, and it’s not like them usually. They, they do develop stuff from the ground up in Apple. So I thought that was kind of interesting as well. Um, I guess sometimes they’ll buy companies and then integrate the technology into Apple, but it’s not like them to partner with a company.
GABE GOTAY
No, and I think it shows because they have been hinting for a while, I think just for public perception and stock market, that they were developing their own thing. Uh, and I think this most recent announcement of them using OpenAI shows that that was not true.
BILLE FORMAN
Right, yeah. I agree.
GABE GOTAY
But it is interesting that it’s starting, you know, part of the purpose of my, of the main episode was to show people who are maybe not like the most tech-savvy, at least not more so than they need to be to do their day jobs, that this kind of stuff is ready for them to use now. And hopefully, they took that away and will start using it in their business lives. But I think the rollout of this stuff with Siri is going to be where people really start to utilize it, like the average Joe starts to use AI daily.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, I agree. I do agree with that.
GABE GOTAY
Um, so interesting thought then. Uh, you’re, I mean, you’re the VP of marketing, you’re a supervisor, so there are a lot of people who are concerned about – because it started really with students – I remember the first time I really started hearing about concerns about the use of AI was people concerned that students were not writing essays anymore.
BILLE FORMAN
Yes, yes. That’s kind of fallen by the wayside a little bit because AI just keeps growing at record speed. I mean, I think with everything you’re going to have pluses and minuses. Um, it’s the same thing that we see with social media when it started and social media today. Um, it’s a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and family, but now you have the Surgeon General wanting to put warning labels on social media for children because studies show that it causes mental health issues.
So I think you’re going to see the same thing with AI. Of course, there’s bad actors out there. There are bad actors who call you on the phone. I mean, how long have we had phones? Um, so I think that that’s always going to be there, where there’s going to be bad actors.
There’s always the big debate whether legislation will help or hurt tech companies, so that’s kind of at the forefront a lot of the times. But um, I think if you’re careful and you’re not using it for sensitive information, so I wouldn’t recommend using AI for any type of information that you wouldn’t want other people to see.
For example, there’s an AI out there called Fireflies.ai. It’s integrated with products like Zoom and it will record and transcribe a meeting for you, and it can also make, you know, kind of the cliff notes version of it, and so on and so forth. Um, that is a great AI tool. I would not recommend that for sensitive information, like if Human Resources is having a call about an employee or you’re talking about credit card information or Social Security numbers are shared, because you don’t know where the next hacker is going to land.
So, from an AI standpoint, I think more and more is coming out so fast that um, right now we’re just kind of in that unknown period, but I think it’ll become more clear as we move forward.
GABE GOTAY
And you know, I think it’s an interesting idea of like being careful what you feed it because of proprietary information, like the examples I gave in my webinar were kind of marketing writing tasks, and by that nature, that is messaging that is meant to be public facing. So the thing I was feeding it are things that are public facing, like I fed it the transcript from a webinar that’s publicly available to our customers, right? I fed it that. But I would never feed it a transcription from an internal products meeting or an internal strategy meeting, not just because the content that it writes might include something that doesn’t need to be published, but every single time you’re using these AIs you are helping train the AI, and especially as a software company, I know we’re very cognizant about how our information and where it can go and how it can be shared.
BILLE FORMAN
Yep, absolutely. Security is so important, and um, if you wouldn’t give it to a random person over the phone or a random person at your door, then I wouldn’t recommend putting it into your AI tool because it will learn from that and um, yeah, always a good general rule of thumb.
Oh, one more thing I was going to mention, just because the audience is mostly distributors and suppliers, um, one tool that I’ve been really interested in using lately is Perplexity. So, Perplexity is owned by Nvidia, and that company is getting massive amounts of money right now from investors and is really on the heels of Google Gemini and OpenAI.
One reason why I like it for distributors and suppliers, especially those in sales roles, is you can ask it questions like, if you’re going on a sales call to Niagara Falls, you can say, “What are the top 10 construction companies in Niagara Falls?” or “What are the top 10 promotional products distributors in this area?” and see who those are as potential customers or targets that you might want to hit. Um, so that’s really interesting. It also gives you sources for their content, which is something that I know ChatGPT doesn’t do. Uh, so it will link out to where they found the data. So, somebody in your webinar had asked about using AI for statistics, and I said well, first, ChatGPT, I wouldn’t recommend because it only goes back to June of 2023, and they’re trying to get caught up but they’re not there yet. So, if you ask them who won the Stanley Cup in 2024 on ChatGPT, it doesn’t know.
But if you use Perplexity, it can give you the sources for it so you can check for yourself. I think there is a lot of concern out there that, um, these large language models, I mean, they’re surfing the internet, not everything on the internet is true obviously, but it knows what websites are reputable and which ones aren’t. But that still doesn’t mean it’s always going to get it correct every time. So, if you’re looking for statistics, I would recommend using Perplexity because you can double-check the information quickly to make sure that it is reputable and you can source it in your materials.
So, Perplexity is another one that wasn’t brought up that I think would be useful for distributors and suppliers.
GABE GOTAY
That is, I want to look into that because I did see that question after the webinar was over about using stats, and my answer to that personally would have been that I never ever use AI to gather stats even like I know, uh, because ChatGPT is using OpenAI’s model, they are limited to, like you said, only however recent they have it. Google Gemini is a little less limited in that way because since it’s integrated with Google, it can search Google web actually. Like when you pull it open, it gives you a bunch of suggestion starter prompts, and a lot of them are tied in to the way it integrates with their other products, like “Give me the walking distance between these two locations” or something like that.
But I still would never trust it to get Google stats for me because, like you said, you never know what’s true on the internet, and B, even if the stuff it’s pulling is true, it doesn’t always interpret it correctly.
BILLE FORMANLike, yeah, that’s true too.
GABE GOTAY
Like, I have that starting prompt, like we talked about, where I start all my conversations by copying and pasting who I am, who my company is, da-da-da. I’ve had to fine-tune that to make it really understand because something it would always do with the beginning, that’s a small thing, but it just really shows how inaccurate it can be. Is it would come back and say, “Oh, you work for Sage World.” I don’t, I work for SAGE. But because our domain name, our URL is SAGEworld.com, it’s making a logical jump that our company is called SAGEWorld, so…
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, that’s a good point
GABE GOTAY
…you never – I’m interested in Perplexity and how and where it gathers its data.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. Um, and Nvidia is an interesting company. They’re kind of all over the tech tech space, tech news space right now, just because they have so much monetary, um, motivation right now. It’s crazy. Um, yeah.
GABE GOTAY
I’m not like the most, especially with hardware, technical guy, but Nvidia is it’s interesting to me because another big, obviously discussion over the last 10-20 years, maybe now, uh, has been blockchain.
BILLE FORMAN
And you know what, I’m gonna be honest with everybody, I still don’t understand blockchain.
GABE GOTAY
I don’t understand it enough to claim that I do, and because someone … but something I do understand is that the massive amount of physical computing power it takes to make that happen. And similarly, the mass amount of physical computing power it takes for these AIs to generate their responses, the physical hardware behind that is largely based on Nvidia’s GPU cards. Which …
BILLE FORMAN
Right! So, it’s funny you say that because I just read a story the other day saying that the, the AI and Google searching, so you know, if you do go to Google, you do a search, it’ll bring up an AI-generated answer at the top, the power it takes to generate that can power the entire state of Hawaii. That’s how much power it is. It’s four times as much as what you would need for a regular Google search. It’s insane. It’s insane.
GABE GOTAY
It is, because you really don’t think of digital activity really costing physical resources. Because for the most part, like without the AI, a Google search is a few electrons flowing through a thing, right? Like it’s not a whole bunch of computing power.
BILLE FORMAN
I think it’ll get better. I think that they’ll be able to streamline the technology to where it doesn’t use as much energy, but right now, it is, it is a lot.
GABE GOTAY
Well, and especially with some of, like, the cutting edge, you know, technology that’s on the, you know, the horizon, things like Quantum Computing and all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to absolutely, that, I mean, this whole discussion in five years, it’s going to sound like we were talking from the stone ages.
BILLE FORMAN
I know. That’s crazy, right?
Yeah, it’s moving faster than I think anybody thought it would. And I think that that’s why it’s so scary to some people, because it’s moving at a pace that we haven’t seen technology move before. And that is scary.
It’s scary. And I understand that fear, but I think there’s a lot of advantages to it as well. And I think it’s just going to end up being a part of our daily lives. And you know, in five years from now, we’re not even going to think about it.
GABE GOTAY
All right. Well, unless you’ve got anything you’d like to add, I think that was some great discussion. Thanks for sitting down, Bille.
BILLE FORMAN
Yeah, thanks for having me!