AI Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers

Curt Anderson 00:09
Hey, got there we go. Hey, good morning, good afternoon. Happy. Thursday. Hey, Eric, how are you Stacy Dean is here. We got eight. Lisa’s in the house. Hey, Lisa, how are you happy? Thursday? Eric from fuse, hubs here. John Wilson from Nebraska, MEP, we got Brad Sanders, Janny. Janny is coming to us from TAC the Great Lakes. Tac Carla littles here. We’ve got Diane Byers joining us. So we’re going to get started right away, because for everybody that’s prompt. We want to be mindful of everybody that’s prompt. Hey, art, your, your, your partner in crime, Julie Warner, is joining us here. And okay, alright, how’s everybody doing? Everybody having a good time. Everybody having a good day. So far. Good week. Okay, doing good. Let’s Hey. If we were in person, we would be high fiving, handshaking, hugging, whatever we would be doing since we’re not I encourage you, invite you, welcome you, drop your LinkedIn in the chat box. This is a great opportunity for us all to connect with each other. And with that being said, we’re going to go ahead and get started right away. I’m looking at my screen. We’re going to go across the top. We’re going to go we’re going to start in the East Coast and work our way west. How’s that so my friend Jeanette Stevens Cunningham, how are you? What’s happening?

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 01:22
I’m well, everything is good. Thank you so much for inviting me to talk today. Curt, I really always appreciate being on the show. Really happy to be here. So a little bit about me. I’m the director of marketing and content service delivery for the Virginia MEP. We are called GENEDGE, and so essentially, what my role and responsibility is is to manage the marketing all across the board, you know, just to ensure that we are delivering the right resources and tools to our audience. You know, based off of our content, the events that we have, webinars. I am going to plug an event that we currently have right now. It is the smart manufacturing road show. This event is going to happen on next week, March 27 if you’re in the area, in disbutana at sea cam. So this is a sesame and Gen edge event, and there we will be talking about Smart Manufacturing Technology, things like digitizing manufacturing and education in AI and education in manufacturing. So definitely, if you’re in the area, show up, come out. We are the MEP, and we exist to help manufacturing, innovate, compete and grow manufacturing and the manufacturing supply chain. So thank you for having me. Awesome.

Curt Anderson 02:50
Well, great. Hey, great man. How you going to top that one? Mike, so Alright, Jeanette, thank you and so again, do us a favor. You know, drop your LinkedIn, or just drop a note. I know we have a number of MEPs here represented today, let us know what rep, what? MEP, you’re from. And with that being said, I’m moving up this up up the road to New Jersey. Mike Womack from the New Jersey. MEP, Michael, how are you? Man,

Mike Womack 03:10
awesome. Doing really well. Curt, thank you so much for having us, having me on again, I’m the director of marketing and communications over here at NJ MEP, actually, we were just down in DC for Hill day a couple weeks ago. So it was nice being your spot Jeanette. But yeah, we have been diving into specifically on the topic of AI and automation, machine learning, the past 18 months. It’s, it’s really kind of taken over and and what really kind of got us excited about it was the the real world use case of the tech, right? Fancy stuff always comes out. Cool trends always come out. But when we were working with some of our clients of how they’re utilizing it, and some of our partners and some of my team on how we’re utilizing it to speed us up, it got us super excited. And I have just been an AI nerd for the past year and a half, so super excited to talk about it and really meet some other MEPs that are diving into it. Was really, really cool,

Curt Anderson 04:06
awesome. So we got some MEPs. We got a couple of friends from TAC. We got Jenny and Diane here from the TAC centers, and so awesome. And some wonderful manufacturers different states. Stacy Dean, Stacy, you’re coming. Stacy’s from Alaska, so she’s the earliest. We’ll see how many time zones we’ve got. Damon, I know you’re out in the Pacific Time Zone. So we got multiple time zones going today. So let’s go to our friend at Purdue, great State of Indiana. And they are talking about March Madness here. So we got art, Thomas in the house. Art, how are you, buddy?

04:34
Hey, boiler up.

Art Thomas 04:38
I don’t know. We well. We’ll see how far we get, but thank you Curt for inviting me. I always enjoy first of all just getting with you and chatting, and then any opportunity we have to share and learn is always exciting. My my position here at at Purdue MEP is the director of business development, and we. And my background is all in manufacturing engineering, but we’ve got, you know, we’re really, you know, as Michael kind of mentioned, I’m very excited about the practical applications of AI, some of the ways that we’re using it internally. And then I would I, you know, just in general, we’re really having a lot of success rolling this out to our clients, and so we’ve had, yes, numerous projects, and some pretty decent sized ones as well. So anyway, that’s kind of where we’re at. And excited to be here and and do anything I can to help anyone else and and also learn. So thank you. Curt, appreciate it. Excellent

Curt Anderson 05:50
art. Thank you. I know your partner in crime, Julie Warner, is here today. So Happy Thursday to you, Julie. And again, we’ve got Lori here from the North Dakota, Damon that’s out your way. Uh, your stomping grounds, and so, um, welcome everybody again. Drop your name and or LinkedIn. Let’s get connected here. And so Damon is my co host with the most, if you guys know, on our live show. And so we want to dive into, I’d like to pose a question, and I want to make this interactive. We’ve got a nice, decent crowd here today, and our goal is like, we want to hit where you’re at. Okay, so if you would be so kind, if you want to drop in the chat box, like, let us know where you’re at with AI, are you kind of, like, rookie status, kind of like, just kind of feeling out the lay of the land, pretty new? Are you kind of a more seasoned veteran? You’re looking for some more higher level tips. So I don’t know if we want to say, like, maybe one to one to five. Mike, let’s go one. I like one to five. If you want to say one to five, just kind of let us know where you’re at, because I’m going to kind of really tailor this for you. These guys have a wealth of information. Jeanette, I’m coming to you next. I know that you’re you just recently got certified with AI. So you want to talk a little bit about, let’s say, for our marketing friends out there that are just kind of getting started, what do you talk about the certification that you just earned, and just share some tips and strategies for our new our folks that are new to AI,

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 07:06
absolutely. So I recently received my certification and prompt engineering from Vanderbilt University, and what I’ve learned is that it’s really about so AI is something that you know, as a marketer, you understand ai, ai is a buzzword, and, you know, there’s a lot of branding and marketing behind that term. AI, artificial intelligence, is something that we have all been a part of now for quite some time, you know, at least since you know, the inception of the internet and search. So we’ve all experienced AI. I mean, if you’ve used Alexa, if you’ve used Siri, you know, we’ve been training these AI models for a really long time, and we’ve been interacting with them. What has recently happened is now AI has turned and has moved into the phase of generative AI. And generative AI at our fingertips, you know, meaning that, you know, we now have the ability to be able to communicate with this intelligence and be able to watch it as it scrapes the databases, kind of like the internet does, but be able to compile the information focused on whatever the conversation is that we’re having, and be able to spit that information out back at us and conversate with us based on what it is that we’re asking for. So at the speed of light, it’s able to compile all this information and give us specifically exactly what we need. In looking at all of that, it made me really interested in learning how to properly communicate with the AI system. And so I did take a class, a few courses on prompting. Prompt engineering is really just, you know, being able to train the AI in a way that you’re able to get specifically what it is that you need from it. So through prompting, you can create chat bots yourself. Through prompting, you can create campaign templates. You can it can help you with strategizing for marketing. There are so many things that it can do for the marketers that are out there on the call. What I would say is that, you know, it’s really, really important to get your game plan together, to really think about your AI policy and your SOPs or your standard operating procedures. That’s kind of like the first thing that you want to do. You want to think about what your goals are, why it is you’re using it, and be able to gather your tech stack so all the tools that you’ll be utilizing in order to get to that place. So, you know, in thinking about your CRM processes, think. About your content and your content delivery, thinking about SEO, all of those things can be used and quite easily with AI, once you sit down and you kind of think about what your actual strategy is going to be. So that’s that’s something that I’ve been working on and being able and having certification in prompt engineering has really helped me to get it down to a place where it’s easy for me to kind of get the information that I need.

Curt Anderson 10:32
Excellent, awesome. Thank you, Jeanette, that was great. So again, anybody, I’ve let a few new people. Hey, Damon, we hit a little I always love when we do this, we have five time zones represented today. I think our friend Carla is in Montana, if I’m not mistaken, right? Carla, and I think we had somebody from Lori, from North Dakota, Damon, you’re in the Pacific, and then Stacy up in Alaska. So hey, round of applause for everybody for making those five time zones. I was, I was lovingly accomplished that goal. So Mike, let’s go up the road to you in New Jersey. So first off, kudos to Mike. He’s the one that inspired this little jam session. We have long time friends. We go way back. We got together on a call recently, and we’re like, Hey, we’ve got to do something together. And we started geeking out about AI. Mike, what’s going on with you and the team in New Jersey? You’re the marketing director. What are you doing for AI? What are some tips that you want to share

Mike Womack 11:21
with everybody. So again, AI can get really, really scary. It could be super straightforward when it comes to utilization. I saw someone in the chat, Stacy, you know, you say your AI knowledge is low, but you’re using it for writing and ideas for posts. That’s a great use case for this technology. And if you want to keep on expanding, my my biggest tip for people diving into AI before I start going into what I’ve been using for a little on the you know, over the cliff, is ask it how it can help you. You know, this, this, this natural language learning model, this, this generative AI, it can relatively understand what you’re trying to say. So if you want to see and continue to expand, or if you want to start ask it, where do I start? I don’t know much about AI chat. GPT, you. Everyone’s talking about you, how can I use you to improve my day to day and open it up to questions? Say you’re allowed to ask me questions about myself. And if it’s your day to day in everyday life. Let’s say you’re going on a trip, and you are going to a country or a state you don’t know, and it might give you an example of, oh, you could just use me to create an itinerary based on time. Get us Excel spreadsheet and download it and use that. And then, of course, you could tell it what you do for a living. And if you’re in marketing, if you are a marketing professional in house. What you do for your day to day? Do you develop strategies? Do you create content, one pagers, search engine optimization, or if you deliver marketing services to a client? A lot of MEPs here, so they might understand this. If you’re delivering services to a manufacturer, what type of services do manufacturers might be the be interested in, from the ground floor, small introductions to AI all the way up to advanced use cases. Again, I use it still to help me come up with posts and ideas. And my team, I encourage them, have developed custom GPT so they can go in and say, we’re writing a new post for this publication. You know what’s trending right now, all the way up to I’ve actually used chat GPT to help me write Python scripts to develop our own applications in house, for NJ MEP for communication chains throughout and in communication workflows throughout the company itself. So AI is such a big, broad scope, it can be scary. Where do I start? So just ask it, and then it’ll start winding you up and getting you kind of and getting that ball rolling. And then I can’t really say how much of an important topic Jeanette really nailed, which was prompt engineering, understanding what a prompt is. Again, ask chat GPD what a prompt is. How does it like its prompts developed once you really start getting comfortable with working with this technology, coaching it on how it’s going to help you. That’s when you could start really kind of experimenting with prompts, developing prompt, evolving those prompts that you use often. And my biggest suggestion would be, if something takes you more than five to 10 minutes to develop and make save it. It’s worth your time to save that and revisit it later. Curt, I think we have a question for Ryan. Maybe

Curt Anderson 14:29
we’ve got Ryan from the Buffalo MEP, Ryan, good morning, dude. Good afternoon. Happy Thursday. What do you got, buddy? Hey, so

Speaker 1 14:36
the so, I mean, all of this stuff is just a lot hard to get your head around. But you just said a whole bunch of stuff, the python script in my own, GPT, like, what? What do I what do I need to know that stuff like, what, what it like, how, how like for my, for my own, like, well being or understanding. Like, how much of this do I need to really. Understand the good use out of 00,

Mike Womack 15:04
ask it, I’m barely, uh, you know, understand, barely understand what AI even is chat. GPT, can you help me start? And then it will walk you through. And that’s the best part about these. Like Jeanette nailed. Yeah, Jeanette, if you want to go into the natural language,

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 15:19
and Yeah, over there. So, you know, the other thing is, you really want to sit down and think about what your goals are. So, you know, think about essentially, what it is that you want your GPT to do. And what’s really important is that, and that’s why I touched upon the AI policy portion of this, because we’re talking about to really make this connect between your sales and your marketing and to actually see actionable insights you will you make it to a point where you have to share some of your proprietary information and what that means? What I mean by that is that data really helps to predict a lot of the things that you’re trying to a lot of the goals that you’re trying to reach in your business or in your marketing strategy. And so being able to find the right tools to connect that would help you integrate your current data with the AI is going to better help you create the type of strategies to get the goals that you’re looking for now to your original question for the chat to create your own chat bot. It’s actually pretty simple, like Mike said, you can go to it and you can, you know, prompt it to specifically the type of AI assistant that you would like to create, and it will create that for you. I believe you can do that on the freemium model, and you get better complex tools out of the paid versions. And I think the paid version is like $20 a month, so it does pay to, you know, kind of put that investment in there and play around with it. So to Mike’s point, you definitely want to play around with it. Start with something really small, but you do have that technology at your fingertips. If you don’t have the resources to pay like a consultant, to come in and utilize the tokens that are available on the open AI source to create a more technical chat bot. So I would say, you know, think about what your goals are. Start really small, you know, come up with a specific idea. If you have an AI policy in place and you’re okay with the CUI and the PII and you have all of that implemented, you can start putting in little incremental amounts of data. Start with like your email marketing reports, plug that in there and train the Jeep the GPT on customer insights. You know, email open rates. Tell it specifically what it is you would like for it to do, and ask it how you would be able to create a chat bot that would help you going forward

Mike Womack 18:00
and and real quick. I used a variation of this metaphor yesterday when we all met before, but it’s Ryan. It’s like a hammer, right? You know, I could build a bird house with a hammer, or you could build a house with a hammer. It’s really what you are learning and how you’re utilizing that tool for what you want. It’s not saying a bird house is bad if you wanted a bird house. And then the more you get experience with it, more you learn. And the best part is this hammer can teach you how to use itself.

Curt Anderson 18:30
Great. Great question, Ryan, thank you. Great answer. Jeanette, great question. Michael Damon, anything that you want to add? Yeah,

Damon Pistulka 18:35
I was just going to say for Ryan there and anyone else listening? I mean, it helps with things that you won’t even realize it can help with. And one of them for me was I do a bit of Excel work throughout the week. You want to become an Excel master. Just learn how to ask GPT the right questions. I mean, it knows every single formula, how to use them. It will solve the problems at a level that I can’t even believe the formulas that it gets spits out when you want to do it. As Michael is saying, you know, he’s talking about Python. I don’t live in that world. I live in the the business world of of Excel spreadsheets a lot of the time. And it does incredible things. And Jeanette brought up to PowerPoint presentations, another thing that’s just amazing, of what it can do to for for helping you refine that. And so yeah, it’s just not, it’s not hard solve some real simple problems.

Curt Anderson 19:30
So let’s and I, Ryan and I just had lunch last week. So Ryan, I think this is going to tie in perfect with art. Art. Where are you? There you are, dude. So let’s get art back in the scene. So arts with a Purdue MEP, and on my screen, you’re sitting right next to Lisa, my dear friend, Lisa, who we connected at Steel City steals. Lisa and I were just at the industrial marketing summit together in Austin, Texas. Lisa, great to see you. I got to meet Lisa, wonderful, handsome husband. What a great guy he is. And Lisa at the industrial marketing Summit, it was like heavy. AI, it was and it was just wonderful, very inspiring. But Ryan, with our conversation last week, we’re talking about a lot of market segmentation art. You came in our live show, I think it was back in November, and you blew Damon and I away with like, what you guys are doing at Purdue. I really respect and admire what you guys are doing, but talk a little bit about how you’re using it for market segmentation, how you’re teaching your manufacturers to use it could take? Let’s go there, if you could.

Art Thomas 20:25
Yeah. So first of all, the market segmentation, and this, this probably applies to more people than than just us, is that we are, we do mass emailing, right and and that sometimes with all of the business that we’re doing. So sometimes we’ll have as many as eight or 10 workshops going on in our state at the same time. And now you’re trying to advertise all these workshops, and people are getting the same right? They’re getting all this information that they may or may not want. And so what we’re starting to do is look at the information that we have already in Salesforce and using AI to generate additional data that we can then put with that information to start segmenting what these people are interested in. And this can use, for instance, things from their LinkedIn profile. It can use many other things, but as you build that up, then in Salesforce, Salesforce now has that data, and you could start quickly segmenting based on different fields that that data has been entered into. And so two things happen then is you’re able to target your actual emails to the proper people, and you can target the correct messaging to those people. So we’re doing that with our business development team and really learning how to build up those profiles and be able to start segmenting the other thing that we’re doing internally is that we collect 1000s of handwritten survey or reviews from each of our workshops. Now I know a lot of people out there using QR codes, and we’ve tested a little bit of that, but we find people are more likely to just fill out that sheet of paper that’s laying on the desk than they are to go to the QR code and fill it out, plus, they’re much more likely to give qualitative feedback than trying to type it in on their phone. And so what we’ve done now is is we’re now working on taking that data being able to simply scan it in. It will collect that information off of those handwritten surveys or reviews, and will automatically put that information into Salesforce for that particular contact and that particular individual. So as that information is coming in, we’re building a stronger profile for each contact, which allows us to give them what they really are interested in. For instance, on the bottom of our survey, there’s check boxes that say, what are you interested in, and we have all of our core type deliverables in there. But in the past, it’s been very difficult. Julie and some of the other team members have taken it upon themselves many times to collect that data manually. So we have it. But now with AI, we’re we’re developing a system where it’s going to automatically read that data, push it into Salesforce, and then we, then Salesforce has got the information from there, where it’s it’s very easy to segment and make sure that we’re providing the information and really getting back to them on the topics they’re really interested in, again, without having, you know, small army of data entry people. So internally, that’s kind of some of the things we’ve been doing and, you know, in addition to a lot of things that other people have already talked about, you know, using chat, GPT and that kind of thing to, you know, to help us with a myriad of things on the external side, we’ve, we have had, I think, and this is data that I just pulled out last last week, we’ve, we have about two to right around, let’s say, 150,000 I think now in projects with companies on AI and Those are paid projects. Those are not grant paid, and we have probably another three or 400,000 that is out on quotes. So that is mainly with large with large language models developing that for internal companies. The other thing we’re doing, and we have packed out every one that we’ve done, is we are developing a series. And we’ve done several of the series, or not several series, but several of the modules. But we’re developing a series for each type of position that you would see in a company, meaning, you know, purchasing customer service and and really making it very applicable to them and what they’re doing. Right before this webinar, my one of the things I’m building myself or for to for delivery is, we’re calling it AI, the spreadsheet, the spreadsheet game changer, all right, and going back to a lot of things Damon was talking about. But not only that, how do we get the data into the into the spreadsheets? How do we get it out? How do we genericize website? Oh, spreadsheet. So we’re not risking data getting out on the internet that we don’t want to be out there. How are we? How do we read and link them inside of AI so that we’re not we don’t have to do multiple things. We don’t have to even come back maybe to the spreadsheet itself once we get the data in. So certainly, all the things that Damon talked about, writing your your functionalities and all of that that certainly, programming is pretty much, you know, you basically need to know programming just so you can fix things. But there’s no need to program anything visual. Basic is it’s so simple to do in chat, GPT, just to write your own VB, VBA or Python or whatever it’s, it’s, it’s very easy, but again, bringing that back to a very practical use for the people that are inside organizations right and at different positions. So purchasing, customer service, receiving, accounting, these different positions all have different uses for AI that would be applicable quality for instance, you know, being a quality manager, whatever. So that’s kind of what we’re doing. I mean, that’s pretty broad, and I know it’s a little bit much, but that’s kind of where we’re at, and our the direction we’re going. And we’ve had a lot of success, like I said, with the large learning model or large language model, and with a particular couple modules of training, excellent. So

Curt Anderson 27:29
first off, so any of our friends out there from the MEP network, if you have questions as you know art that’s fantastic. Creating these revenue models, helping manufacturers in Indiana, if this is something that you want to apply to your MEP man, reach out to art. Sure. He’d love to share what they have going on. Jeanette, what do you have next?

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 27:47
Well, that was part of I did want to ask a question, because art and thank you for that you touched on a number of different things. I mean, it sounds like you guys are utilizing predictive analytics and lead scoring based off of the data that you’re currently inputting into the CRM, which is really important. But I wonder, what are you using? Any additional tools to connect your data to the CRM? So for instance, are using Salesforce, AI. Are using like a HubSpot breeze, or are you just specifically taking the data from all of the different points? Because obviously marketing cannot, you know, communicate everything. So you touched on that as well. You know, you need to know what’s happening on the customer facing side, on the sales side, on the you know, marketing content. So with all those data points, are you using, like, a specific connector to get it back into your CRM, or, you know, are you guys just kind of utilizing an LLM, customized LLM that you are, like, working on through, like, a chat GPT, or, like, how are you guys doing that?

Art Thomas 28:58
So right now, the guy who does our sales force is working with big Purdue to get approval to use the AI inside of inside of Salesforce. We are using co pilot, at least on my team. But and as you know, that connects to Salesforce, really not. We haven’t got approval for that to do that. So right now, that’s off. The tool we’re using to get the data from external into Salesforce is called base 64 AI. And so it’s a, you know, it’s a, it’s basically a tool that’s specifically made for reading surveys and for reading input data, and then they have tools then that allow you to map that data to go into Salesforce. So getting data into it is not nearly as restrictive as getting data out of out of it, of course. And. So there’s no real issue with us getting the data into it, but using AI with the actual Salesforce data, we’re, like I said, we’re we’re using different methods to keep names out of that and being able to analyze the data and then bring it back in and be able to to, you know, look at those that specific information. So I don’t know if that’s what you were looking for, or if that

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 30:27
no, it is, it is. I mean, you know what we’re obviously, that’s something that, you know, we’d love to start implementing on our side. But, you know, being able to establish a and help manufacturing businesses with establishing an AI policy first is probably the most important thing, because of the fact that, you know, again, we are talking about PII and, you know, Cui, and it gets a little dicey with that, and I think that’s probably the reason why a lot of companies are nervous In using AI technology. So, yeah, I just wanted to know how, how you guys are kind of working through and around all of those things. Thank you.

Mike Womack 31:10
Real quick. That just reminds me of so we have a couple AI consultants that we do that actually do a lot of the outbound delivery. Because I’m the internal marketing director. I do internal systems. I don’t I go on client calls if they need kind of a more AI savvy support system to sell that service. But with one of our AI consultants, I did an all day training at NJ MEP, and I don’t know if anyone’s seen the movie Anchorman, you know, works 60% of the time every time that funny quote. But AI can do that as well. I mean, it’s more of like 90% of the time. It works every time. But there are these things that AI will do. It’s called, literally, like a hallucination. If it doesn’t have all the data points, it wants to make you feel like you got the answer you wanted, which is a big point of, you know, AI isn’t replacing anyone right now directly. It’s supplementing. It’s adding to that individual. You need that human element to be, that filter, to be that support structure. Are is there that human element in between the AI or the information going in to make sure that it’s not just pulling a bunch of random things together at certain times, and tossing it in there just to be kind of like a filler.

Art Thomas 32:27
Yeah, there’s so a couple things that that. And for you all, some of you already know him, but his name’s Aaron Bailey. I’m sure a lot of you know him and have talked to him. So he’s the one that’s, I kind of introduced the AI to him, and now he’s doing the marrying up to Salesforce. So the point with the input side, it only is going to put in what we feed it. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, he’s putting in a lot of checks so that as it goes through the data, if it finds, you know, hey, you know, there’s a duplicate, like rendering in three times this, or this person is interested in everything, right? It starts scoring those and saying, Okay, do you want to look at this and giving the person that’s doing the input a chance to review that information based on different error type things that that may happen right now, his last report that he had to me was there at about a 90% accuracy rate. And again, that’s really high when you figure that people, it’s doing the handwriting analysis and everything, so you’re looking at email accuracy, phone numbers, all of this pieces of data. So again, is it going to be 100% No, probably not. Is it is 90% better than no data, absolutely, because most of this is not, you know, again, we’re not doing surgeries or anything else, so it’s, you know. Are there going to be some mistakes where the email is wrong? Yeah, but we’re going to learn that really early, right? So, again, so to answer your question, yes, there are some checks and balances that he’s putting into that to get reviewed before it goes in. But I’m sure it won’t be 100% perfect, but we’re hoping to be at 95% Yeah.

Mike Womack 34:15
I mean, if it’s funny, you said 90% because all of the work I’ve done and the way I’ve been utilizing it, that’s where I’ve been landing too. About 90% it hits it the first time, and then, you know, you need to clean it up. And then there might be places in that 90% of data that you want to dig deeper. So you want that person to kind of have that critical thought, to really dive into what it’s being, you know, what’s being seen and shown.

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 34:36
There’s, there’s a way that you can prompt that. So first and I put this in the chat, it’s really important that you know, as you’re developing your SOP for this, that you always have a human that’s checking for accuracy, because you don’t always just want to assume that you know, even if it’s 90% that is correct, you still want to be able to check what the. Output is. But you know, the other thing is that there is a really nice way that you can actually prompt your GPT where, when it does as you’re prompting it, you can ask it to provide recommendations or suggestions based off of whatever it is that you’re prompting it, so that if in fact, it is unsure, it can ask you, and you can then be able you can refine your questions. So prompting is all about refinement and getting to the point where you know it makes exact sense what it is you’re asking, so that you know you get as close to a response, correct response as possible from the GPT. So you ask it, you know, if you can, if, if I’m missing anything, please provide. Ask me questions. And ask me questions in a bullet point. You know, 123, type of sequence. And I’m sorry I got a little distracted. Someone said, I don’t think anyone Stacy says, I don’t think anyone wants to be that lawyer that uses AI Exactly. So accuracy does count, you know. And one of the really cool tricks that you can do is, as you can ask it to, you know, suggest any questions that it may need to get the most correct answer, provide any recommendations and give it to you in a list format so that you can quickly and just with the you know, see what those things are and come up with A response in order to get a more, you know, accurate result. So if you take that step, it will ask you additional questions that way you’re not having to, you know, spin the loop of asking and asking and getting you know, the responses that you don’t want you know. Just say, you know, can you if I’m missing anything, or if you have any additional questions that will help in getting the right answer, let me know and put it in a list format. That’s what I hope that

Mike Womack 37:09
reminds me of two ways that I kind of help pull this or help it pull the strings it needs. I’ll ask it, or before I give it, let’s say I need you to review this piece of content. I need you to take these notes and format it for a proposal. Before I give it the content I want it to work with, I’ll explain what I want its goal to be, position it as you’re a media professional with 30 years experience, blah, blah, blah. And then I’ll say, ask me for the context you need to complete this job to the best of your ability. And then it will start asking that context and start pulling on the strings from me so I know where I may have missed the gap, or what else it could do to help kind of make it even better than what I even originally thought. And then the second way I help, kind of empower it, is have IT grade itself, review this piece of content that I asked you to write, or take a look at this masked email that you put together, or this, this lead analysis that you did, grade yourself on a scale of one to 10. And if you don’t make a seven, try again and rework, if you try that three times and you still can’t get there, ask me for help, and then you’ll see it’s kind of start spinning. Damon was talking about the deep research, but you’ll kind of start seeing it fight with itself and work with itself to to kind of improve, to impress you. So great point. Jeanette, on the on the Ask for you know, the questions that it needs from you, and that list format to keep it clean. So let’s do this.

Curt Anderson 38:36
So Jeanette, we were talking yesterday, we like, hey, you know, sometimes it’s nice to have a little show and tell. So let’s say, for our friends out there, a little bit of brand new. I’m going to show you guys a couple examples just of just kind of fun exercises that our clients have been doing. So as you’re kind of digging in from the marketing side, then Jeanette, I’m going to come right back to you. So for example, let me can you guys see my screen? So let me go. Let me go. Here. Let me go. Alright. So this is phenomenal. So this is a client of ours. She’s in Chicago, and she was very raw marketing. Didn’t really know like that buyer persona, you know, exercise. So what we’ve done is we have this really cool little spreadsheet that we’ve created with our clients, and we, we call it the digital game plan. And so these are folks that have no marketing, typically, Lisa, Lisa from Steel City seals. She knows this very well. I think Diane, you know this very well. So what she did is is, this was phenomenal. She dug in. And we like Brooke, we like breaking down our soul we call them soul mates. Our buyer personas are soul mates, and we break them down. I’m a big baseball fan, so we do singles, doubles, triples, home runs. Singles, doubles, triples, home runs. So what she did was like, hey, this was my single. She’s a tea manufacturer in Chicago. So, this is a Caribbean culture enthusiast. Here’s her double yoga mom. Here’s her triple this is the OG, the premium tea drinker, Greg. And then down here, here’s her home run. This is the corporate buyer, you know, high end that type of thing. So this was she. Absolutely love going through it was a fun exercise. We made it really simple. And what’s cool, like, she’s using AI to make these pictures, these images, and we’re diving in to understand, like, who her ideal buyer is. Now I’m going to fast forward real quick, and then Jeanette, I’m going to come back to you. So this was a client of ours. They’re in Chicago. She was going to try to make it today, but she had a conflict, and she gave we’re showing this off. This is a piece of content that we helped her create. And what we did, they make outdoor power pedestals, and it’s this little heavy duty Made in America. You see them at golf courses. Ritz Hotel is their customer, and so check out this. Just check this thing out. This thing is 50 pages long, and it’s a buyer’s guide. They’re they’ve been around since the 1970s they’re competing with billion dollar companies. They’re about 50 employees Made in USA. But what we did is we took them through an entire process of creating content and with but every piece of content in here. What we did is we interviewed their subject matter experts. We interviewed their sales engineers, their team engineers, everybody on the floor, customer service, sales. So all this information has to be like, like, you’re saying, like, like this can’t be 90% like this has to be 100% accurate, right? And so we took all this information and we used AI and we created and then a couple women on our team created this, and like, they are completely over the moon. So the thing is, we can go as basic as you can, as you want, but the goal is, is, like, how do we make our life easier? So it can be as much as simple as, like, Hey, who are your buyer personas? We also, we do a lot with AIS, like, Hey, what are your keywords? What are people searching for? And I know if I want to come back to you, but Jeanette, just, let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s dive into, like, a little bit of marketing. 101, like Stacy’s here, Lisa, some of our manufacturing marketers, what are some other tips or strategies that they could do just kind of starting out their AI journey.

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 41:53
So, so again, I can’t stress enough. You know, you really want to sit down and you want to think about what your goal is, and from there, you did a wonderful exercise and thinking about who your customer is and the journey that you want the customer to take. So you have the customer, you have the journey you wanted to take. You have the product, you have the service, and you have your goal, your strategy is. Then, you know, how do I get in front of these people, you know, how do I get in front of them? Make it relevant, timely, measurable, you know, add to my KPIs. What do I do now that I have all of this information? Well, the first thing that I would do if I was using AI and if I was, you know, trying to maybe shorten the time that it would take for me to develop this plan is now that you’ve compiled all that information, the next step that you can take with them is one, you know, think about the fact that now we have sge, right? So search has evolved, and we have now search, generative, generative search. So the way we thought about SEO has evolved, and it’s evolving every day. What that means is that now the chatter is that we used to try to reach our customers at the top of the funnel. So we used to do like our social media, and, you know, the the blogs and and you know, the ads and all of those things are still necessary, but where you meet the customer at the journey has changed. And so as a marketer that’s starting out, and, you know, doing my research, thinking about this, and trying to get in front of this customer at a point where they would actually convert, what I would do is I would start to think about the fact that when I reach my customer now going forward, it’s probably more towards that mid to bottom funnel range, and what that being, what that means is that, instead of going into Google, so back in the day, you know, a lot of marketers, and probably still would utilize things like Google Trends to get, you know, a take on what people are thinking about, you know, doing things like long tail keywords and typing stuff in Google and see, you know, kind of getting an idea of what people are thinking about, because it is a little psychological. But now people are, instead of going into Google, they’re going into their gpts and they’re going to their Geminis and their CO pilots, and, you know, their chats, and they’re doing their searches there, so it almost erases the top of the funnel. So if I’ve already, if I already have the information that I need, then I’m going to think about what I have available at my fingertips for free, right? Because I’m just starting this out. I have chat GPT that has now implemented deep research. I think it’s 4.5 and then there’s something else that just came out, which is perplexity AI. And perplexity AI is really all about the deep research. And so now what I’m doing is I’m taking that data. I’m taking what you just created. I’m taking the customer, buyer persona. That I have, and I’m going to plug that into my GPT or into my perplexity, AI, if I have permission to do so. And I am going to then ask it to provide me with deep research on this, this industry or this market that I’m trying to get in front of. I’m going to have it, you know, compile the information. I’m going to tell it, you know, it already knows who my buyer persona is, because you can upload Excel into all of these, these gpts. And I’m going to ask it to provide me with, you know, what are some of the trends? What are the things that people are saying. Social listening is so important. You have things like, you know, Hootsuite now that has social listening across all social platforms, but you can put it into like a perplexity, AI, and you know, see, you know, what are people saying in this market, what are my competitors talking about? And ask it to compile a list, a list of 10 keywords, 10 things that people are saying. Take those 10 things that people are saying, and now I’m a marketer starting out, I am going to test because you always want to hypothesize and test everything that you do, especially when you’re doing it from the beginning. Treat everything like an MVP, which is a minimum viable product, you know, allow yourself the timeframe in your marketing strategy and your plan to test, you know, your idea, and to say, Okay, this is my hypothesis. If I plug this in, if I do perplexity, AI deep research, if it tells me that these 10 things are what the customer is, you know, thinking about the next step is, okay, now create five campaigns. Create five campaign templates that would allow me to get in front of these customers at this time. You know, give me all of that data. Take that and use that as your test, and that’s what I would do. And that honestly, would probably take me about a good 72 hours of deep research and checks and, you know, just kind of training and prompting my AI and kind of narrowing down exactly specifically what it what I needed to do. And once I have that information, me as a human, I can now go in and start developing my email campaign. Start changing my landing pages. If I’m doing marketing, you know, start working on my LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, whatever it is, you know, where I know that folks are going to be. That’s what I would do,

Curt Anderson 47:41
hey, drop the mic. Jeanette, how about let’s give a round of applause for that one that was, that was gold, right there. Jeanette, thank you. Thank you. That was like demon. Let’s just, let’s just absorb that

Damon Pistulka 47:52
one for a minute, right? And I, and I thought it was awesome when it helped me to adjust a beer recipe last week. Yeah, right.

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 47:58
And that’s who, hey, what am I going to make tonight? You know,

Speaker 2 48:03
tonight with what you got the fridge, just there’s already goofy things, it’ll help. I’m going to

Curt Anderson 48:09
come back to you one second, Michael, you dropped a tool in the chat. You wanted to see perplexity.

Mike Womack 48:13
Oh, actually, that’s just following up with Jeanette said, complexity is really where you should start. Now, instead of Google. I hate saying it, but it is much more contextual. It can give you a more direct response, you know, if you’re looking for a recipe or, you know, I made fish tacos the other day, and I was in the store and I was like, what? What’s quick ingredients I need for that went to perplexity, and it kind of walked me through that, you know, even checking on updates with government. It’s just use it. It’s there’s free options for it as a search. If you’re thinking, go to Google. Pause for a second. Go to perplexity, and just you’ll start to see why this tool is more actionable than a Google you don’t have to go to second page. You have to go third page. You don’t have to keep on trying all of these key terms, like like Jeanette was saying, like the the long form keywords, and you’re doing your research, you start with perplexity and talk to it as if you’re trying to get the information you want. Does much more, much better at compiling that for you. Understanding

Curt Anderson 49:15
buyer intent. That’s That was a big theme at the industrial marketing side, understanding buyer intent, and really just answering those questions, like, what are the soul mate questions? What are the challenges, what are the problems that they’re facing, and how can we answer them? So, alright, alright, let’s when you came on the show back in November, we were taught you were talking about doing, like, when we were talking a little bit yesterday, like, customer research, so for our MEP friends, or maybe our manufacturing friends, can you hit on that a little bit on, am I? Am I right in that direction? You remember that conversation we’re talking about like you’re using chats like, dive into like, you know, if I’m at the Purdue MEP and I’m maybe a little light on, hey, we have this great program for powder coating manufacturers. Let’s find the powder coating manufacturers in Indiana, if we’re Steel City steels, our friend Lisa, maybe she’s trying to target like a certain group. Like, talk about that a little bit. How we can use chat to help there, or AI to help out there.

Art Thomas 50:13
Yeah. So in general. So some of you all were around when Rochester technology came out with a program, and they had, they were basically researching for helping, either for to find a way to get find a new product, or maybe finding out where what the market size was for new product, or, yeah, just anything that has to do with market research. And so with AI, you’ve really taken that whole process that was brought out, you know, whatever, 10 years ago, and you’ve simplified it dramatically. So if you’re really looking and you want to help, you can look at, you want to look at the supply chain, right? So you find a company that maybe is your your primary that you know about, right? Maybe they’re a big or small company, and you can start working with AI on either side of that supply chain, right? Start talking about who their suppliers are, or what types of you know. So let’s just say it is a powder coater, right? I want to know, what are the types of supplies that go into a powder coater? What are the what are the supplies they use? What are the things they would normally buy? AI is going to be able to tell you that. Well, now I know who they’re buying from. I can go find those suppliers that supply that. And then on the other side is what kind of companies are using powder coating. Well, in this case, it’s very open, right, very general, but you can still go on the other side, and if you had something a little more specific than powder coating, for instance, let’s say they’re making chain Okay, well, you could go on the one side again and find out what types of suppliers would supply, the types of things that go to a chain manufacturer, and then what are the outputs? Who are the people that are using chain that would be buying this type of chain, whatever that is? And so you’re looking on both sides of the supply chain, and what you’re doing is you’re building a potential market for whatever that product is, because these people on both sides of that supply chain, chain get it, they’re both sorry, but both people on either side of that chain manufacturing are going to be interested, or could be interested in your product, right? And so you can then start seeing, what is the size of this market? What are we what are we trying to do? And so there’s a lot of applications, a to help your clients. Many of the times as small companies, even small and medium manufacturer, even if they know this information and they know how to do it, they don’t have the time they don’t have the experience or the commitment or whatever, and so there’s a, there’s a huge opportunity to really take that process and introduce it to clients right in a way that’s meaningful and allows them to then, because then you can go, you know, when you determine that that kind of that bigger market, Okay, who do we need to go talk to in this market that’s going to give us the best feedback? So you know, maybe you can’t get to the very detail you want simply through building through AI and the different searches, but you can then know exactly who you need to talk to. For instance, let’s just say that you find out there’s certain companies on the customer side of that chain manufacturer. Well, now I can go in and I can find out who the presidents or who the the leadership is from those companies, right? I can look for articles that they’ve written, or I can look for news about that company, right? So again, I’m starting to build this, this, this overall market ability or capacity, whatever you want to call it. But I’m now able to start really, truly understanding, do I want to be in this, this arena with this new product, or do I want to introduce my current product into this new industry?

Curt Anderson 54:15
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely gold. And I know, man, this hour just flew by. We’re coming into time. I know Jeanette, you’ve got a hard stop. I know everybody out here is super busy. Let’s wind down. So first off, any questions out there, please drop them in chat, or I’m going to stick around for a couple minutes. Feel free to take yourself off mute. But before we close out coming to top hour, how about a big round of applause for our panelists, for Jeanette Stevens, for art Thomas, for Michael Womack Damon, thank you for CO hosting here. Appreciate everybody. I want to give a huge, huge thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your busy time, your busy schedule, and join us. I never take that for granted. Never take that lightly. So thank you for joining our jam sessions. That’s why, man and I just do this for. David, I just do that for us, just so we can learn, just so I can, like, just our iron sharpens iron, just so I can hang out with these guys and just get a little bit smarter. So Jeanette, let’s take us home. First off, connect with Jeanette on LinkedIn. She’s with Jen edge, the Virginia MEP. Jeanette, parting thoughts, closing thoughts that you want to share with folks as they go on their AI journey.

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 55:18
Absolutely. I mean, the MEP center is definitely here to help any manufacturers, manufacturers in the supply chain, with any of the resources, tools, questions that you may have, I’m just a click away. You don’t have to be in Virginia to reach out to me if you have any questions, or reach out to anyone at Gen Ed if you have any questions, I did put my LinkedIn in the chat. You can, you know, message me, or you can email me at Jay Cunningham at Gen edge.org if you have any questions, I’d be happy, happy, happy to help. And again, if you’re in the dispute Tanner area, Gen edge and sesame will be doing a smart manufacturing road show that’s going to be on March 27 from eight to 330 and we will have food and refreshments. So thank you again. Curt and Damon, appreciate it.

Curt Anderson 56:12
Jeanette, thank you, Mike. We might have to go on a road show. So my friend, like in New Jersey, we might come down and see Jeanette. So Mike, take us home, my friend. Thank you for sharing your time, your passion, your energy. I’ll tell you, if you guys haven’t had chance to catch these three in person, I’ve had the honor and privilege. They are just as dynamic as they are virtually. They’re even better in person. Mike, parting thoughts that you want to share with folks as we close out. I

Mike Womack 56:33
just wanted to drop my LinkedIn and email in there. If anyone has any questions. I second Jeanette, but it really is the biggest takeaway you could take from this is just use it. Just go out and try it. It’s not scary. There’s ways to get started that is just a quick little sentence into that little chat box. So highly recommend that you all just give it a shot, and then you’ll start really kind of getting excited about it and try it out for different ideas you might have again over here at NJ, MEP, any manufacturer you can always come to the local MEP. You can find that if you just Google it, or perplexity, which MEP is in your local state. And, yeah, please. Thank you so much. Curt, I really appreciate it. Always here for questions. Well,

Curt Anderson 57:15
please connect with Mike on LinkedIn. And Mike, I do have to say, as a millennial, you know, hey, shout out to your mom and dad for raising such amazing, wonderful, fine, young and look how handsome he is, like, let him know, yeah, like, how dressed up he is. But I’ll tell you, we need more. Mike womax, because you’re not going to meet a guy in his 20s comes out of college and is a more fierce advocate for US manufacturing. So Mike, big round of applause. We need more of you for this next gen. I do have

Mike Womack 57:40
some bad news. I hit 30s this year, so don’t tell

Curt Anderson 57:43
anybody, dude, if I look like you, I

Jeanette Stevens – Cunningham 57:47
just Yeah, forever. 29

Curt Anderson 57:49
forever. So art Thomas Purdue University, thank you, art. Appreciate your friendship, your your support, parting thoughts that you want to share with folks as we close out.

Art Thomas 57:59
Just thank you so much for letting me come on and appreciate the time, and thank you everyone for listening. And I always learn a lot. I always learn more than I than I believe, like I share so but I guess my key thing would be I love to chat. I love to learn from so if anybody on here wants to drop an email to me, I put it in there, and again, anything I can do to help, or even if you’ve got something else, another idea, I’d love to hear that as well. So thank you. Appreciate. It excellent. I appreciate

Curt Anderson 58:31
I’ll tell you another huge advocate. What a great career he’s had. He’s been on our live show. Great story about his dad. Man, I love I get so inspired when I think about your dad. That is such a wonderful story. So we’re going to stick around for questions. Want to be mindful coming to top of the hour for folks that have things to get to. So if you have any questions, please stick around. Jeanette, thank you. I know you need to run traveling. Travel safe day. Thank you. Damon, as we stick around for a minute for questions, any parting thoughts that you want to share with folks.

Damon Pistulka 59:01
Well, I mean, just you guys, like Mike said you got to start using it. I mean, just start trying get on, like perplexity. I’m going to dive into that a bit more. I haven’t enough because I was in early chat. As soon as chat GPT came out, I started using it and playing with it, right? Just because I’m a junkie with that kind of stuff. But by using it, you get over and over and over, you get so much better. And just think of new ways to help and and trying them out. And, yeah, just just use it, because there are stuff. It will become one of those things that you put as it always opens when I open a browser. That’s what that’s how important it will be to you. You will go from, oh, I’m in chat, GPT, once in a while, or perplexity, once in a while, until those are staples that open every time my browser opens. Right?

Curt Anderson 59:53
Like, how did, how did we live without this? Right? It’s almost like, you know, I was talking to, I was talking with Melissa Basa from. The Illinois MEP iMac, and we were talking, and I said I made a reference of, like, Well, yeah, that’s like a newspaper. She’s like, a what a newspaper? She has teenage kids. They were somewhere and they saw a newspaper, and the kids didn’t know what the what a newspaper was. I’m like, oh, talk about making us feel old. So any other comments questions? Eric, thank you for being here today. Diane, thank you. See you guys. Any comments questions, Eric, Carla, Stacy, Lori, anybody any questions? And if not we, we will wind down. But I appreciate you guys. Eric, great to see you. It’s been a long time. Thank you for being here today. And Carla, thank you so Diane. Thank you, Diane. What you think? Any comments, any questions, thoughts, anything you want to add? She it now. Now, if you’re not a Philadelphia Eagles fan, you might not want Diane to chat. You know, she’s, she’s, you know, she’s from Philly, so she’s, she’s doing that Super Bowl glow. Do you see the Super Bowl glow? Mike, do you see that I’m not wearing my green? Come on. It was great. Thank you so much. Appreciate you all. Well, thank you, Diane, thanks for being here. So alright, we’ll close out so again. Thank you guys. Thank you art, thank you Mike, and appreciate everybody. We’ll see you guys at very much session. Reach out anytime with questions and just Hey, keep crushing it. Made in USA. Right? US