The Future of Marketing With AI: James Dooley and Alex Drew on AI Visibility, Delegation and the Next Era of Search

James Dooley: The future of marketing with AI. Today I'm joined with Alex Drew. It's going to be an interesting conversation. So let's jump straight in. What do you think the future of marketing is going to be in the artificial intelligence era?

Alex Drew: Well, to be honest, I don't really know, but I'm kind of keeping an eye on how things go. And I think it will be even far beyond agentic, what we call agentic. Because the problem is, the way I see it right now, and this has been something which, again, you've talked a lot about before, is you don't know what you don't know. Now, in order to better understand AI, a good friend recommended start looking into the human neural networks and how we retrieve information from our own brain and from our own memories, which is very, very important to understand, because otherwise you can't get AI. Now, connecting the dots, like how do you come up with new ideas, we discussed in the previous episode, or a business unit, perhaps. All of a sudden, it may seem like you kind of cut the idea while taking a shower, but the truth is, you kind of connected some dots in your brain from different neural networks. Now, and that is within limited boundaries of knowledge, which I have, you have. The AI is trained on any, on all ever-created human knowledge. Now, in theory, it should be able to better connect the dots and come up with new methods. And we've all, all of us are reading the news. All of a sudden, the AI has uncovered. Now, I was talking to my daughter, and all of a sudden, she's telling me, Daddy, do you know that they actually found a way to talk with cats and dogs and actually figure out what they're talking about based on the tonality and how they bark and how they, and that has been done by AI. So the AI has analysed hundreds of hours of dog barking and is able to tell if the dog wants food or wants to go out. So that is like discovery through AI. Now, putting that from a marketing perspective means that we could potentially use AI to come up with things we don't know, just new methods of doing things. And that has always fascinated me because sometimes the bottleneck, we are the bottleneck, we are the constraint. We can't really move things forward because we keep doing what we think works based on our own wrong assumption, in which case I think that a very futuristic way to see marketing is like giving it broad objectives, like get me 1,000 roofing leads in the Manchester area. That's it, and just letting it figure it out. Something I've heard relates to just this state of discovery within AI. Now, I'm not very tech savvy to be able to explain it, but I think this might be the future, where it's like we've literally become obsolete. And I don't know how that future is going to look like, but it's going to be an interesting future.

James Dooley: You mentioned that humans could be the bottleneck. Yeah. And obviously you've got lots of different businesses. Are you trying to train your brain into making certain that you're not being the bottleneck? Like what you do in there with regards to, we're talking about the future of marketing and the biggest bottleneck in there is, one of my main jobs, one of my full-time jobs now is making certain I'm looking at all my different businesses, whether the bottleneck is in the business, I'm looking to fix that bottleneck. But at some point you're saying you're going to be the bottleneck. Yeah. So how do you fix yourself from being the bottleneck?

Alex Drew: Well, I think it's a very difficult question. The way I do it is first of all, that there is a saying by the famous billionaire who passed away, Charlie Munger. He said, the secret to a happy life is having low expectations or lower expectations. If you want to make sure that everything is 100% done at the highest level, you're going to end up doing a lot of things yourself because that is your, perhaps your level. When you bring someone and you delegate, you want to extract yourself from that formula where you're like 80% is perfectly fine. So that's one way to extract yourself so you don't become the bottleneck. The next one would be, you have to trust people and you have to give them the chance to actually do what they do. So otherwise it's not going to work out. And I think from an ideation point of view, like what is my job role in a company, whether I'm a CEO or someone high level, a decision maker, board member, whatever, someone high level, I can't be bothered with this small stuff not because I refuse to do them, but because it's not worth my time and money. I'm jeopardising the growth of the company if I handle content writing in an SEO business. I need to be doing deals for instance, or I need to be working on my vision, right? So from this perspective, I think unless like the CEO or any high level decision maker in a business has three main things to handle. Number one is the vision. Number two is very big partnership and sales that nobody else has the authority to do. And number three is solving the worst problems the company has. Everything else, just delegate and accept at some point some sort of mediocre. In fact, a great business shouldn't work with superstars. A great business should work with people that either are trained, they have experience or you can train. Otherwise you're going to run out of superstars and you'll always be the one who has to replace them, thus become the bottleneck.

James Dooley: And as we're talking about the future of marketing with AI, you mentioned that people could become obsolete. Yeah. Let's just role play that they're not. And let's just role play that humans are going to play a very, very big role in the future of marketing with regards to AI. What advice would you give someone now starting out or wanting to progress their career within marketing, knowing that AI is here, what should they be trying to do to future-proof himself?

Alex Drew: Well, I think starting with at least a very basic awareness, and I've caught some of these ideas that we discuss here, even from Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg said the new Meta ad system will work in a way where you're like, I need 100 leads a month for my business in the central, let's say Manhattan area. Don't tell them where to get the leads or how much to bid and let the AI figure it out. So just the awareness that the AI is capable of doing these things, and there should be someone who at least direct it, I think is a great start. Because if you put yourself in a position, no, I know better, you do not, because you're not trained on all human knowledge, right? So plus, these are very focused, and they can, the best thing I like about AI, and it goes back to trial and error, they do not, they are absolutely, they have zero emotion, first of all, of course, because it's AI, right? When it comes to trial and error. So they will fail, fail, fail, fail, get into the feedback loop, keep improving until they find something that works. And that's why I think that us humans, how many valleys of despair can we go through? How many failures with the exact same level of enthusiasm till we nail something? I think that's why most people fail, because they can't really grind through it, right? AI doesn't care. If you give it enough tokens or enough resources to just grind, it will eventually find something. So I think that people who are just starting out has to have to be aware that this reality is far closer than we think. Where like fully trained AI systems, like in marketing, will be able to solve problems faster with better results than us humans ever could. So now, how do you use those systems? And it comes to selling those systems to businesses. Well, that could be a good headstart. Like, why should you do the work? So with regards to knowing how to use the systems, obviously there's lots of different LLMs out there. You've got like Cloud Code, you've got Cloud Core Work, you've got Codex with ChatGPT, you've got Grok, you've got Perplexity. There's lots of different LLM models.

James Dooley: Is there any models that you're trying to get the team to double down on? Are you still allowing them to decide what they think is the best AI model at present?

Alex Drew: No, not really. I mean, at the corporate level, we kind of decided we're going to use Anthropic products, not because I recommend that, but because we should be speaking the same language. If all of a sudden someone has maxed out tokens, I don't want to jump from ChatGPT to Anthropic to Perplexity because it's a mess. So we said, we're going to use Anthropic. Please start Anthropic, start Claude Core Work, Code. So all the products, install Dispatch, try to figure out how it works, just so that you learn the basic skills as a trade. But I don't think that there's a major difference. Every single product, AI product, LLM product, will have their pros and cons. So for me, it's just speaking the exact same language. That's it, that there is no big difference.

James Dooley: And are you trying to level up the existing team members to be able to, let's say they've not embraced AI yet, so they've not used ChatGPT or they've not used, in your opinion, Anthropic, so they've not used Claude Code. Are you trying to push them to maybe even build a website just so they get used to knowing how to prompt sites or knowing how to work with Claude Code?

Alex Drew: Yeah, definitely. We even have an internal business unit, which is a platform aimed at speeding up the adapting AI within the company. But we ended up building such an art platform, we're thinking of potentially selling it. It's an education platform that is aimed at having the employees of the company faster integrate everything AI into their daily work, but they get rewarded, they get incentivised. So for instance, if you figure out how to automate 10 tasks that you do on a daily basis, you're gonna get something. It could be like, I don't know, a spa certificate or a day off, or I don't know, we're gonna buy you an iPhone or something. It works great. Nevertheless, the thing is, we even have this vision right now. It's called one person, one business unit, or a rephrased version of that is built by one. So basically, there is no excuse. Right now, I think the old corporate structure where you had a marketing department, where you had an IT department, where we had so many people that were responsible for different things, and all of a sudden, you're pushing towards a new product, and the bottleneck is the designer who hasn't delivered. The bottleneck is the pay-per-click guy who hasn't yet launched. Like, all these are becoming obsolete, because all of a sudden, don't you have the basic capability of just vibe coding your designs, or just launching a website, or just telling Claude to apply for a new Cloudflare account and host it on pages so you get the MVP up? So built by one means you don't need all these teams. Maybe you need the opinion of the main designer in the company, but you don't need to wait. Thus, you can launch products much faster, and again, it means failing, you can fail fast, and that is the beauty of it.

James Dooley: So with regards to this, you mentioned, with regards to the future of marketing in the AI era, you mentioned that at times, people can't do stuff as well as you can, and 80% at times is good enough. With regards to, let's say, graphic design, let's say you had a brilliant graphic designer. I know with ChatGPT or DALL-E, absolutely brilliant at image creation, like ChatGPT now is phenomenal with images. Six months ago, it was terrible, but now it's absolutely phenomenal. And if anything, I would say it's better than a majority of graphic designers, but let's just say it was not quite as good as your graphic designer, but it was 20 times faster. And you're wanting speed, and you're looking at the future of AI, and look at the future of marketing in embracing AI. What do you do with a team member that's not willing to embrace AI?

Alex Drew: Well, I mean, there aren't many options, to be honest. They have to, because there is no other way. If we need creatives for a marketing campaign, Foster, I can't just operate at five creatives a day. I need 500 a day, and there are two options. Either they embrace AI, and they know how to engineer those 500 a day, or we have to find someone else. The good part is that most people realise that this pivot they have to make in their career implies embracing AI, and they're doing it. We haven't had really anyone who just opposes AI within the company, like, no, I'm not going to let you.

James Dooley: Do you know what? You know, it's strange you've said that, because I've interviewed quite a lot, and there's a few that, you employ quite a lot of staff, and there's a few that have said, out of like 200 staff, there's been like maybe 10, which is like 5% of people that come back, and it's more the ethics of artificial intelligence and humanity, and it's going to take over, and they've had to do exactly what you've said. They're entrepreneurs. One or two of them actually sat back, went, oh, well, we'll try and work with them, and it's just like, and actually, a couple of months later, I'm like, oh, are those staff doing that, didn't embrace AI? Yeah, they've gone. Why? The KPIs just dropped off. Like, the speed that the other people was doing, and it was like some of the, what they called lazy staff, was actually performing brilliant, because they were loving that they could use AI and integrate AI, because it's doing the heavy lifting for them, but there was some where it wasn't. You've got to embrace it, or you're going to get shown the door, and people don't like hearing that, but it's like, you've got to use the right tools. It's like, you wouldn't go, when the tractors came on farming, you don't go then doing it by hand when you've got the tractors that can do it. It's like, you've got to embrace it, and it's like, it sounds harsh, but,

Alex Drew: well, there is a very interesting influence within others called the TOC, or the Theory of Constraints. It was a very popular management. Matt's practising, he told me, TOC is around 20% of what he does, and it had to do with, in their module of selling within the Theory of Constraints management system, they talk about selling a change within a company. When they teach selling, they do not teach selling something to someone external, like a product or service. How do I sell a change within the company? So I think in most cases, where people are like, we're going to use Anthropic, you have to learn it, they are failing at selling the change and actually persuading people and having people have that buy-in. So it has to be done properly. You have to make an announcement. You have to gather everyone. You have to explain. You have to give example. You have to present case studies. You have to explain that this is better for them, that they're going to be able to do more and focus on the interesting top, not the heavy lifting. So obviously, within large organisations, there's going to be a few sceptics here and there, and this is inevitable. But overall, if you put in some time and energy into actually persuading everyone, you're going to have a much better conversion rate of people actually. And I don't think, even right now, like the biggest companies, like even NVIDIA, they claim that we do not witness the phenomenon of people getting laid off because there is AI. On the contrary, I want one engineer to be able to create as much as 100 other engineers just because they have multiple instances of agents working and doing their job. So that's the thing. And with a designer, the thing is like, we have just, our CTO is the main developer right now. He's like, fuck it, I don't want a team. He built his own AI team where he has like a project manager and has a business analyst and he has a developer and he has a QA, quality assurance guy, and he has like one more role. And each one of those roles can become 100 if necessary. So why would he need to manage people?

James Dooley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the beauty of it. And then with regards to the growth of digital marketing, what advice would you give like to business owners who might be scared and thinking that others are gonna be catching up? So they're pessimistic and being like, oh, as opposed to embracing it, they're worried about competition being able to take over.

Alex Drew: Well, that is the analysis paralysis. It's not worth it. Like you're just gonna be left behind wondering and you're gonna start making less money. And that's it. Embrace it, whatever. And the thing is, we are living in an era right now where it is not recommended to have someone else within your company look into this AI thing and how we can do it. The best success stories I've seen is people at the very top, from owners to CEOs, to C-level, to board members, to founders. They actually start doing it. The way I started is I vibe coded myself the entire Odis marketplace platform, which is not live. We're gonna launch it soon. A completely different type of service. And I did it in 10 days. And I presented it to everyone and I announced it at a company-wide meeting and I called it The Future is Here. Like, guys, if I could do that, and I can't code, like everyone else can do it. And all of a sudden I have my CFO and my CEO and marketing people and strategy guys and CEO and SEO. Everyone started doing more and more and actually investing time because it seems like I'd rather do it myself instead of prompting Claude or whatever. No, invest time and things will then, you're gonna tap into the snowball effect now that you learn the skills and how to actually do it.

James Dooley: And then one last question is to do with the future of search. So the user experience, if the way people might be looking to go and find a local restaurant or go find a local plumber or whatever it is, buy some clothes, obviously there's lots of different reasons why people might search. And majority of the time, 95% of the time, plus people would just go to Google, search it, old school methodology, you have 10 blue links. But it seems to be now search is changing a hell of a lot. What do you see for the future of search of how that might look and the user experience that people might start doing?

Alex Drew: I think websites, and this is not my idea, I have to admit, I caught it somewhere, will end up becoming a destination and more like a source. And the blue links, in my opinion, will transition. And by the way, me, myself, when I Google stuff, I could be reading a book to my daughter and all of a sudden I'm Googling stuff. And I'm like, I'm not even paying attention to the blue links. The AI, obviously, can suffice to answer her question, whatever she may have. So in my opinion, websites will end up being destination, more like sources of information. And instead of like Google telling you, here are the 10 results or the top three results, best we could identify for your query, they will be, here is what we recommend. And having someone like Google recommend has an extra weight to it.

James Dooley: Do you know what, you say that and it works so well. We always talk about cold leads and hot leads and referrals. And we always say part of our sales strategy is, look, when we're generating you these cold web leads, you can't compare these to word of mouth referrals. Word of mouth referrals will literally convert four times better than a cold web lead. Fact, this is across hundreds of industries, word of mouth, they're pretty much pre-sold because a friend or someone's told them, you want to use them, they're the best. And AI is almost exactly the same as word of mouth referral. People are seeing AI recommendation like it's the friend that's gone, yeah, yeah, I use them and they're absolutely brilliant. And it's pretty much nothing to do with a price, it's when can you do it? And the sales team now in our businesses or the businesses that we work with are like, the conversion rate is absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, people that normally works in these businesses that was getting a word of mouth once a month, now via the LLMs, they're getting four or five a day and the like, and the conversion rate is so high. And I believe it's such an under-talked about strategy within SEO, within marketing at present, like people are saying, oh, it's still a small percentage, it's still under 10%. Honestly, the conversion from AI visibility and the conversion from AI recommendations is I'd say it's 10 times bigger than what people are trying to say that it is. Like it's crazy from a conversion standpoint, how much more that's doing. I think trying to get into AI visibility is key.

Alex Drew: Yeah, because at the core of it, they use brand and brand converts well. Brand is the highest converting asset you can have in a business. And they can't recommend like a generic keyword, they have to recommend brand and then they emphasise the brand and add extra weight to it. Now, I have an interesting case study because I have multiple like open call agents connected to my Telegram. I barely log into my Amazon account anymore. Like whenever I need something, like I have one called ShopMac because it runs on my old Mac. So I have ShopMac, I have HealthMac, I have like different assistants. And all of a sudden like I need more creatine for instance. And it just goes to Amazon, it buys me creatine, it handles everything, all the paperwork, it ships it all, I just get the package. I don't even log in, I haven't logged into my Amazon account for quite some time. And yesterday I was looking at all the supplements that I had and I realised they ended up recommending and more than 60% is from a specific provider. I can't tell the provider, basically it's a box of it because it's the exact same thing except better pricing. And that's what AI recommended and like whatever you think is best. So you're right, we will end up going with the word of mouth and recommendation. Now, obviously from a marketing point of view, we have to do our research and make sure is that some sort of influence or is that some sort of manipulated or is that genuine? And I mean, if the product is good, nobody cares, but if the product is shit, then you end up getting in trouble.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's watching this, we hope you like the episode on the future of marketing within AI. Let us know your thoughts. Is there anything that you think me and Alex Drew have missed off? Leave a comment in the comment section and let us know what you think the future of marketing is with artificial intelligence.