Introduction uh hope you’re enjoying Agency Advantage 2025 uh you’ve got about 10 more minutes until our next session which is super exciting we’ve got a panel coming up here in just a few minutes uh but we also have a deadline for the Easter egg hunt and challenge so if you haven’t yet worked on that if uh you’re not exactly sure what to do there’s that link in uh that we’ve shared several times throughout we’ll put it in chat um but if you want to grab that make sure you copy that doc and submit your answers for the agency advantage Easter egg challenge uh that would be amazing so looking forward to announcing the winner for our engagement leaderboard for our Easter egg challenge for all of our games and activities we’ve had throughout the event like our word search so definitely stay tuned until the end of our program after the panel where we’re going to announce all those awesome winners but if you want to submit for the Easter egg you’ve got approximately 10 minutes and 30 seconds so make sure to get those in all right we’ll see you here back in about 10 minutes for our next session keep those chats going if you want to hang out sit tight we’ll be back here very shortly hey Brent just popping in here to again remind people that you know there is there is the Easter egg activity uh Easter Egg Clues & Countdown there are Easter eggs in on various sections of the platform you may see them on the screen you may see them uh on on the on the lobby you may see them in the schedule tab uh so there are multiple areas where we have strategically hidden the the Easter eggs uh and there are approximately 10 minutes left for everyone to fill that document out and email it to the email address given in that document uh yeah so just just popping in here to to remind people that yeah what were those places again just to give those clues just in case people need a one of the plays yeah one of one of the plays maybe you know a background of a host or you know placed either on the table or on the laptop maybe on the mic like like I can’t give any more clues like I don’t want to spoil it for anyone but yeah I I I feel like we’re we’re uh we’re playing like the hot cold game you know like warmer warmer all right so we’ll we’ll see those submissions good luck with that and uh we’ll see you all back here for our next session in just about 9 minutes so get those entries in and we’ll see you back here soon and welcome back good to see everyone here i’ve been loving the chat uh for Oreo the Chief Happiness Officer those of you that are wondering who the heck Oreo is uh over at E2M he’s our chief happiness officer and is also a dog so if that helps to provide some context there but welcome back uh we’ve got an amazing panel kicking off here in just a moment and after our panel we’re going to be announcing all of our winners for all the various contests that we did um over the last couple of days been an awesome couple of days would love to hear feedback on chat how things are going give us some love we’ve got some some great panelists here uh coming up so excited for that um so our panel uh this is on human creativity where should agencies draw Panel Kickoff: Can AI Be Creative? the line um that’s the topic that we’re going to be talking about um kind of like you know AI versus human creativity who’s going to win in the end we’re going to talk about that we’ve got three amazing panelists uh first up we’ve got Kieran Connelly he is an AI strategist and digital transformation expert helping small to medium enterprises implement practical AI solutions for growth marketing automation and competitive advantage kieran welcome to our stage great to be here no thank you excited to join the chat yeah it’s going to be a lively discussion today uh next up we’ve got Aurelio V he’s the CEO of WP Umbrella a big shout out one of our uh sponsor supporters for the Agency Advantage uh 2025 his uh company specializes in WordPress monitoring and management solutions to help agencies and freelancers streamline their workflows um I think he’s got a fantastic product and a fantastic team he’s been doing a amazing job helping agencies that have lots and lots of WordPress websites manage those pesky updates and and and much much more than that uh and then finally we got Mario Pesv joining us he’s the CEO of DERIX and Growth Shuttle investor and enterprise adviser with a focus on scaling businesses and engaging 20,000 executive readers through newsletters and communities mario welcome to the the program brent I’m super pumped up i’m pretty sure that AI cannot replace you so you’re totally safe i I was thinking of like maybe we’d come back from a break and just like my dog would be sitting here and like if I could get her to like you know somehow be like comic relief but but that maybe maybe that’ll be the AI version of Brent next time hit pause and and bring them on the show in the break so definitely make sure you do that so uh so Jent welcome to the to the stage you got three amazing lads here that know uh combined probably more than uh most of the the world in terms of WordPress web and um and agency worlds we’re going to start off here with a nice uh maybe an easy one but uh can AI ever truly be creative or is it just always remixing human ideas how do we define originality and we’ll start off Aurelia why don’t you kick us off here can AI ever be truly creative Panelists Share Views on Originality & Remixing this is a tough one if you understand how LLM are working then AI cannot be creative per se if you allow me to say so but then I mean if you gather up all the creativity of the of the existing creativity of humanity and you remixed everything then you make creativity so I think it’s a very hard question to answer i think AI can be creative and you can be creative without creating something new uh and that’s my that would be my take so you can be creative without necessarily creating something new so it’s always be remixing something in some way all right Mario what’s your take yeah I’m going to kind of double click on on what Aurelio said so ultimately from a technical standpoint I want to be trained or on large data sets but at the same time they’re generative models so they do generate ideas based on the existing data set right so there is certain level of creativity uh this is the reason why they hallucinate that much right they come up with stuff that they don’t have access to right they they are imagining some stuff that does not exist we see that particularly for video generation or image generation uh so there to a certain extent there is creativity however it’s still limited when you get the best advertising expert creative expert PR specialist even you know content marketer or a digital marketer uh they do have that specific twist that’s emotional and uh you know entertaining that understands how when everyone zixs you do Zach and uh this is kind of what makes humans special so in that sense if you’re looking to the top 0.1% humans are always going to win 100% of the time but when you look at the like top 10% there’s definitely some AI that’s going to take uh kind of human creativity to uh to the next level like like there’s almost a threshold of you know when it comes to marketing or agencies like how much of what you do has to be like completely original 100% creative like if I own a you know a law firm in Colorado and we do like estate planning right probably we can argue that that business might not need to have you know the highest potential of human creativity when it comes to their marketing but you know maybe maybe maybe there’s some truth to that maybe there’s not i don’t know uh Kieran what do you uh what do you think can AI be truly creative i I echo exactly what the the gent said so far i see it as a remix remixing engine um in its core and thankfully that’s where human human uh skills or or capabilities come in with our creativity our lived experience uh our culture our history our emotions that probably drive um a lot of the creativity in what we do and that’s definitely just echo that’s where I think we have the edge will it will it get to the point that it can replace human creativity i don’t know i hope not but yeah at the core it’s it’s definitely a remixing engine for us and um that’s where we still as a agency still add the creativity yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s weird i mean I feel like some of my best personally like my best business ideas writing ideas you know sometimes they they they a lot of times they happen outside of the office right maybe I’m on a bike ride or I’m on a walk with my family or I’m sitting on a beach or I’m at a conference sitting in a big room like listening to other people i think what what Landon said in chat there there’s definitely some truth to that right like a lot of human creativity is some form of repurposing right we’ve all kind of have these experiences and like baseline fundamental education but then I I still think that with like the human experience side not our knowledge like not the content but there’s still these sparks that I personally get where you know you just get flooded with this idea you know this thing hits you it’s like the synapses connect and and maybe it is a little bit of a repurposing but sometimes there’s that little bit of newness that I I just haven’t seen AI necessarily get that and and I assume Human Experience vs. Machine Imitation that’s because we get to experience things out in the real world and AI obviously doesn’t get they get a version of that they get our videos they get our photos they get our our text about it but they don’t actually get to see it with their own eyes uh here’s our our second question for our panelists when an agency uses generative AI should they disclose that fact to clients or end users and how might that affect brand trust so do we tell clients that we’re Should Agencies Disclose AI Use? using AI or do we use it in stealth what do you guys think let’s start with Mario on this one well I think the key aspect here is uh first off there are some contradicting beliefs on whether the output is originated or whether it’s copy using copyrighted content whether it’s something that you actually have the authority and right to use right there are existing lawsuits already to open aai to entropic and kind of other companies uh especially the gly images that kind of came up and started generating lots of kind of copyrighted creative content so with that in mind there’s always the risk to publish content online that you don’t necessarily have the full authority or right to do that’s on the one hand the second thing unless that’s fully uh edited and kind of manually controlled and so forth due to hallucinations uh there’s a possibility that you end up quoting the wrong stats or even wrong facts which is certainly a factor you need to consider and with that in mind considering that there’s a lot of time uh spent saved rather by using uh AI uh I would 100% sure and uh you know 100% disclose that AI is being used to speed the processes or optimize the workflow or generate ideas or come up with an outline come up with a hundred suggestions to narrow down and pick up from uh to an extent but yeah definitely disclose uh 10 out of 10 yeah I mean you don’t I’m just trying to think of like I mean AI obviously is a unique tool but like I don’t go to my clients and say like you know on your project I will be using a calculator and spreadsheets to make my job easier i like I wonder if there’ll be a point where it’s just like it’s it’s just assumed that everything is going to have some level of of AI you know touching and assuming that people are using best p practices and stuff um Arielo what do you what do you think uh I mean it’s going to be a very dull run round table because I fully agree again with what Mario said um overall I think whatever you do when you’re an agency you need to be as transparent as possible with your clients because it’s a way to build trust and if you don’t mention that you are using AI because it’s so involved in your current process and that it is so obvious because you are kind of AI advocates everywhere then it’s fine but if you are using AI to your client on the workload you are doing and you are not being transparent load fees I think you you are at risk you are at risk of breaking trust and then losing your clients because in the end it’s like a it’s like a plumber I mean he’s using tool and you are using tool to build websites and that’s it and that’s 2025 and if you’re not using AI Trust, Transparency & Legal Implications and you’re running an agency it’s super strange yeah so so so being transparent about it not like necessarily hiding it um uh but I imagine a lot of clients I mean for a lot of small businesses I’m just thinking about like your mom and pop kind of local businesses I imagine um you know they they might not be that interested in what what is making the sausage so to speak right like they might be a little bit more uh less wanting to to dig into it whereas like enterprise I imagine when we’re talking about data policies and and and intellectual property and um and how that stuff is handled I imagine they might have much stronger views on that uh Kieran what do you think do you have a consensus view here or contrarian yeah oh no no again totally um we would see we would write a lot of content for clients for example and and clients would have when when the AI wave rolled out clients would actually be asking us are you using AI for this and we would have handwritten content and then AI assisted now we actually put it into our proposals and say for example AI assisted and be very transparent so we would have in our terms and conditions on our website we would have it in our proposals this is where we’re using the AI um elements and maybe in a couple of years time we’ll not have to do this because it’ll become part of every aspect of what we do in our business and it’ll not be such a a big thing we are seeing as well based on the EU laws coming in and word of laws where there’s going to be a requirement for companies especially large companies we see it in California as well from next year I think it is so large companies where a large proportion of what they handle with AI has to be publicly made um aware to the the the public so again that that might roll in and and change things too so um but yeah anyway yes 100% the the they’re looking to make like a public disclosure that certain things have been made with AI is kind of the idea Yeah there’s the I was reading that there’s a California AI transparency act uh which should come in from 2026 so um you need to you need to um be publicly making uh it it aware or you know make it a disclosure if there’s a certain percentage of your business being run by AI or it’s influencing it and there’s word or talk about something similar for the EU um so I can see but that’s for it is for large companies so um it’s going to yeah going to be very interesting law the lawmakers are slow in catching up so we’ll see it in a year or two and then we’ll all have to react but definitely for larger companies um there’s going to be requirements coming in interesting i I don’t know maybe I’m like you know too much of an American capitalist and like free speech advocate but I I just don’t see uh um yeah having to disclose that your business is using AI just it seems to me like a um that’s an interesting way that the government is is getting involved it’s good good way to get people to um I don’t know maybe maybe it reminds me of like is it the same of like using hormones and food using AI to write content like are we talking about the same thing here like health blog post on AI I don’t know yeah probably same same principles but yeah yeah yeah what the the the lawmakers need to keep busy isn’t it the politicians but what they do yeah right the the hammer that only sees nails so um so What’s what do we think in terms Ideal Human Involvement in AI Creative Work of uh our ideal level of human involvement um in AI assisted creative work to maintain ethical outcome uh and integrity and it was actually really interesting we’ll get this question up on on the screen team it’s question number three uh but we did our AI uh image contest yesterday and um I’m gonna say like I think I think our audience could have been a little bit more creative in their prompting on this one um because I actually saw like a lot of the submissions looked very similar like people just took our prompt of like imagine an AI you know what agencies are going to look like in 2050 and they just put it into chat GPT and so it was like everybody you know and all these agencies lived in different places they’re all obviously attending our session but like seven of the 10 or 20 or 15 you know images that we got kind of looked almost identical because they everybody took the same prompt and they put it in there now they were technically different images but they just kind of all had the same kind of vibe um and so I feel like it was a like in a way right it like negatively impacted the the creative output like the human didn’t take the time to really think about that that creativity and put some spark in there uh so so uh Mario what do you think what’s the ideal level of human involvement like how involved should humans be in in making uh creative works by agencies and marketers sure i’d break it down into two kind of sub questions if you if you let me do that so the first part is when you use AI how much human involvement should be in there right so I’d say that looking into the fine balance between okay there should be some AI assisted users like research coping out pulling some data crawling using MCPS to like tap into different data sources and stuff definitely automated it’s mundane tasks um that you know you shouldn’t be bothered with but then definitely human assisted on top and people reviewing editing picking kind of cherry picking kind of what’s being used and all that stuff but second to kind of tap into what you said about image creative contest I think that the biggest caveat right now that we see is that lots of people are trying to use AI for activities that they don’t understand very well while the best way to use AI is to kind of empower and kind of power up yourselves or work with other people who can 10x themselves or even 100x themselves what do I mean here if I’m a developer I know very well how to write a brief uh how to scope out you know like how many files I need how to break down and segment modules and functions and stuff if I’m a project manager I know how to scope out a project if I’m a salesperson I know what my deck needs to look like what type of slides but you know if I’m if I’m not a designer how do I tell it hey I need this to be like these gradients and the people the person’s face need to be tied into this and you know the sun falling the shade falling through this angle and all that like there’s so much unique skill set in every single role u you know accumulated over 10,000 plus hours of expertise that trying to mimic that with AI with a simple two sentence prompt is simply impossible so it’s almost like the the the real experts within a discipline they’re going to be able to give a very robust prompt they’re going to be thinking about a myriad of things uh when they they put their their prompt in it kind of begs the question of whether or not those skilled people will exist in three to four years right if they’ve spent the last 10 years building up their design experience and now they’re just becoming prompt experts right like in in five or 10 years will we have that batch of people with that expertise or or will the the shift be more on how to become a prompt expert kind of interesting uh ideas there what uh Aurelia what do you AI as an Enabler or a Mask? think the ideal level of human involvement is um I think AI is mostly an enabler so in the end it depend on your of your level playing field let’s say if you’re very medium very average then AI is going to allow you to produce more medium average content if you’re very creative uh and if you’re talented enough to write good prompt then AI can allows you to do can allow you to do like tremendous things and in the end we shouldn’t see I think AI as a good or bad thing we should just see it as an enabler and that would be that would be my take do you think though it can also kind of mask like the bad if you’re if here like so for some people like if you’re I’ve seen this with uh job applications I mentioned this earlier in the session I used to ask these survey questions right like and it was always specific on their role but I’d usually have three or four questions and and those questions would would it would spread the playing field like really wide because you could see people’s thinking you could see how they organized their thoughts like yeah the grammar tools helped a little bit but the AI tools have just totally decimated that as a tactic right like when I go and get a 100 job applications If I ask a survey I mean 80 to 90% of them you can tell they’re writing with chat GPT and for me as a human it’s really difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when you’re looking at a hundred responses that have been written by a machine that can generate you know the best looking language right i think I I saw an English professor said “Yeah it looks good it’s got the structure but it’s soulless it doesn’t have a soul.” And so you know maybe that’s the thing that we have to look for but I do feel like it’s given people that are you know subpar it’s kind of given them a leg up like there’s there’s kind of a cheap button an easy button uh to do certain a certain level of creative work uh Kieran what do you think in terms of ideal level of human involvement i’d say it depends on the task so again um we’re finding now say content writing um you might you know the might be doing 70 80% of that it could be 20% for human review and um just checking make sure the quality is there coding it might be 10 15% um so again it’s it’s the from the AI side so it’s it’s developing video creation again maybe similar too but that’s going to get interesting now i don’t know if everyone’s seen the the new AI video editor from Dcript very interesting as well and we’re all waiting now with our our um keyboards ready for chatbt5 when it comes out i think it’s meant to be this summer so I think that was the la the latest the latest update we we heard so we’re all waiting for that so um definitely depends on what you’re doing um but I can see it getting less and less as the AIS improve going forward so it’s uh going to get interesting yeah I I saw a post by uh agency influencer our space Jason Swang today he was uh talking about how uh the the big platforms are getting everybody addicted to using the tools and you know they’re going to get so good and we’re going to be so dependent on them and then at some point they’re going to like 10x the prices and we’re all just going to be like you know screwed so maybe maybe five or six will be that that point um Mario I’m gonna throw this question over to you are there creative tasks AI should never touch like emotional storytelling or Are Some Creative Tasks Off-Limits for AI? high stakes brand strategy are there things that you would avoid using AI for or you you’ tell other people to avoid using AI well what we’ve been seeing and kind of one of the main reasons I’m on this panel is uh I’ve made it to 12 events over the past two months and this is more than the entirety of 2022 2023 together right and the reason I do that is there’s so much automated AI content going on that it hurts it literally hurts my eyes right as you said you go through a wave of 100 questions you don’t even know what’s AI what isn’t uh we talked about whether AI needs to be denoted or kind of flagged somewhere actually if you go on next you see automated accounts there’s already a flag for that if you go on LinkedIn and you upload a deli image it also gets flagged as you know AI generated uh there are some flags and kind of you know telltale signs or uh metatags when you copy over content from charg as well so the the world is already trying to delineate AI versus non-AI and with VIP coding And obviously the you know entire AI marketing content generation email generation automated LinkedIn comments and puts and stuff there’s uh it gets even more important to figure out whether you seek something for the use of it or it’s more important who’s building that specific product you know it’s the brand versus feature so within a blue ocean environment meaning there’s a very specific unique custom tool that’s like the the one and only solving a specific problem yeah sure you can you can use the entire playbook like if you’re in a small village there’s only one supermarket everyone subscribed there they’re reading because this is the supermarket you know when it’s open or when it’s closed and all that but you know agencies if you have 10,000 agencies in your country doing the same thing then the more you use AI uh for outbound activities the more painful that’s going to be this is where brand matters the most trust connections relationships one-on- ones warm introductions relationship all of that is kind of the significant piece so moving between blue ocean red ocean if you’re the unicorn in the space the one and only great you can do whatever you want like if you’re the one connects you can post whatever otherwise if you’re in a dense space especially the the agency space you know humans be it yeah so so just in terms of like how much competition if everybody’s using AI you’re just gonna it’s going to all look the same right it’s almost like the like at least for job applications um now that everybody’s using AI they all look like these very polished crisp you know kind of cover letter style you know responses and I’m almost looking for the knot like I’m looking for the one that’s like got the spelling mistakes but you could tell it’s like real thinking you know it’s like the the the wheat’s all there but it’s it might be a little bit unpolished right and and Avoiding Homogenized AI Outputs I’ve even thought about for myself as I write important business emails and things like that if I want to like kind of uh you know kind of illustrate to somebody that I’m I’m not using AI right there’s there’s just certain language that I might write in that I just know that somebody will be like “Oh there’s that’s not AI that’s actually Brent talking to me.” Right versus the nice polished bullets and m dashes and bolding and the emojis that AI makes so easy now um Aurelia what do you what do you think are there some tasks or even just thinking about your team at at WP Umbrella there’s stuff that you have said hey this is off limits for uh for AI within the business um yes uh but just coming back on the hiring people with AI I mean the automatic AI yeah answers issue i’m asking in this kind of screening question did you use AI to write your answers and it’s so funny how many people tell no why it’s you know like they they lie into the screening questions and this is also a good um a good indicator and maybe maybe you should do that you have a a polygraph on the first uh job interview we’ll we’ll hook people up to the the sensors and I can just see you in their in in the room coming in like did you use AI for this no but like circling back to transparency with clients you know like it’s very fine to use AI just admit it and we and we are good to go it’s not like a red line what is a red line is to lie on the fact that you use AI uh and coming back to your question sorry um there are two kind of data that we basically never send into any kind of AI which is like the super sensitive business data we don’t have a lot because we build in public uh but I have many NDA uh going on with many companies and this is the kind of stuff like I I’m super careful because this data is going somewhere uh and data privacy matter and will matter even more I think so on this you have to be very careful and you have so you have also to be very careful about the data is off limit for us uh the that you don’t own such as the data of your clients so for instance We don’t say any uh client related data into AI unless they’re like purely purely purely agnostic and I think this is important uh and it’s also a good way to build trust actually i I mean I I think there’s um I don’t know if there’s like a reckoning coming with how much data or client content i mean I feel like the amount of guard rails for an agency to get access to client systems and client data and client content and and and use AI to augment not just the deliverables but the thinking that goes behind what they’re doing with the business the strategy right i mean there’s just there’s almost no way for the average Handling Sensitive or Client Data with AI business to like know um how much an agency or a contractor or freelancer is is using AI behind the scenes right uh it’s just kind of wild to think about how much uh you know data might be being uploaded to uh to these various platforms on a regular basis uh Kieran what do you think in terms of um creative tasks that AI can touch oh um yeah back to you know you think of emotional stories or or you know culturally s sensitive things again I can imagine like some normally projects you’d work maybe in charity sector uh where it’s it could be highly charged I think that’s where you probably need a person in talking to clients that are maybe very sensitive about things that that’s probably an area that you should just not go um but again I can see AI being helpful in helping with scripts and things like that but um the the core concept and the the ideas that’s probably where I’d keep off limits for most of the Yeah yeah i see this this this note in chat um I’d rather hire the guy that can finesse AI well rather than a designer a writer etc um you know it’s it’s an interesting idea right because but I do feel like there’s something to be said about knowing what is good and what is bad because you get something out of AI and if you don’t have somebody that has the domain expertise for it of knowing like what is good copy like there’s a lot of stuff that might seem like it’s good copy but it actually might not be or something that seems like a good design but it actually might have some some glaring mistakes or issues that might affect performance or something like that so I I I it’s it’s hard to to find that sweet spot of of getting experts versus people that can just seem like experts like at some point um the image I had in my head the other day was you know are we all uh becoming uh the the wizard behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz right like are we all just you know controlling like we’re just building this illusion where it looks like we’re really smart and really talented but we’re really just controlling these AI tools to do it for us then at some point that will um you know we’ll we’ll go beyond our capabilities with that and we’ll we’ll do something that really matters it doesn’t really you know the AI is doing the thinking but it might not be good thinking i don’t know that’s just my my theory so um do you think about which Which Roles Are at Risk in the AI Era? roles are at risk this question of as as agencies adopt AI uh like do you think there are certain roles that are just not going to exist in in 12 months and 18 months what do you guys think what’s your what’s your what’s your uh your call here we’ll start with Mario h um good question i’m not sure if I’m going I’m not sure if I’m willing to put it as roles rather than the entire like intern is definitely going to disappear the way we know it right now uh cuz initially when I when I hear the question I’m thinking okay you know there’s web coding development is going to disappear and I’m saying well it’s not because there’s you know hallucinations and security issues scalability issues yada yada then I’m thinking you know obviously marketing didn’t disappear because we see what sort of crap chroes right um however you want to prompt it it just needs all that human touch and emotional intelligence just uh put it right in so like just cruising through different roles they’re they’re all safe in a sense however whether you need like a virtual assistant to schedule your I don’t know uh Instagram content throughout the month well probably not i mean agents are doing that well enough right now not just tools like I know Buffer or Hoot or like just aentic systems are doing that easily in a myriad of different ways data entry probably not needed so like most of these kind of just standard outsource lowc cost roles are going to disappear as well as juniors that you need to you know spend a hell of a lot of time to train for two years and hope they stay with you in the company afterwards right they just need to raise the bar self skill up and and kind of get to a level where they can assist and operate with faster u so yeah it’s more about the raising the bar for most roles and once again focusing on brand or focusing on trust Right i’d still pay a lot for a secretary that I can trust that’s going to be again trustworthy pick up the phone make decisions on my behalf know me well enough to know like how I feel based on kind of how I look and kind of all those considerations it’s not about the skills it’s about again the human touch or the the context in which uh the human operates just uh fewer people are going to be needed for uh most activities that we need right now yeah I think a couple of thoughts uh kind of pop in my mind but that that trust word right like uh and accountability too right like if if an employee screws up you have like you you can go and and you know there’s some accountability there’s some risk there for an employee working on a project or working on within your business right like they have to do a good job because their job depends on it whereas I feel like if chat screws something up I mean you know I’m not going to go and you know sue some 800 pound gorilla right i can’t I can’t go and and attack Open AI there’s no accountability there right which I think there are certain roles um in the AI’s Impact on Workforce Progression business that might be affected by that and I wonder too if there’s going to be a crisis of talent because you know when I look at our own our own business we’re very hungry for senior team members that can oversee AI production um to to make sure that it’s hitting our standards right it’s But then you go okay well where does senior people come from well they come from mid-level where do mid-level come from well they come from juniors and if we don’t have juniors coming into the marketplace in the next couple of years right giving them those opportunities you know what’s that going to mean for the workforce in the next couple of years um Aurelia what do you think in terms of of roles that might be at risk any any ones come to the top of mind for you um I just like Mario I don’t think a role is going to disappear per se um for instance uh at the moment at WP umbrella we have two employees in the customer support department and I tasked one of them to be implemented AI to be implementing paired on AI and he told me hey man I’m going to implement AI and then you’re going to downsize and I was like no I’m not going to downsize because I will always need one or two person to be accountable for what for what AI is doing and I think it will boost just people productivity and now with like five good person well trained in AI you can do the work that probably 50% were doing two years ago uh this is sick mostly when it comes to development nowadays the productivity of a senior developer is insane uh and so I think the job market is The Future of Junior Roles & Skills Gaps going to be tighten up but I’m not sure that roles are going to disappear entirely and what you said about what’s going to happen to the youth it’s super scary um because our society it’s going way too fast i mean we are already like very in advance I think like the four of us and all agency owners like in our usage area AI and it’s already going too fast for us so how is how is the labor market going to look in four years from now on for young people uh that’s super scary um I mean I mean to be fair probably for our parents’ generation I don’t know if any of our jobs existed uh so like you know I think you know when I ask my kids you know what do you want to be when they grow up right it’s like I want to be a professional gamer i want to be a a streamer you know I’m like what happened to like the doctor and the fireman and the astronaut right but uh you know it does change right uh Kieran any uh any roles you think are going to disappear or may maybe become less relevant in the next few years yeah it’s it’s interesting again I I think what we’re all talking about here is that you know the roles are safe are probably the ones that can control and manage AI the roles that will be responsible for automation the roles are are leading and key parts of our uh business and and looking after the humans uh and probably the roles are talking to our customers and selling at the end there will be AI rolled into all of that definitely the juniors um we there’s a a large tech company here locally to us they would take on 400 junior placements uh students every year this year they haven’t taken on any um and that’s that’s obviously we know why it’s going to be AI is taking that role i’m just wondering we’re talking about juniors now i wonder in two or three years will um the AI move up to take the medium role as well i don’t know it’s going to get very interesting um so yeah everything’s going to change i think every job is going to change we again we were a content marketing agency we’re no longer a content marketing agency uh we’ve had to change that we don’t have content writers anymore with digital strategists so that road and I I see it happening to video i see it happen to website development so it’s going to be Yeah it’s going to get very interesting over the next couple of years but we need to keep moving and um just looking for people that understand AI and bring them into our business and uh keep implementing so getting getting interesting it’ll I think a lot of people with those those junior roles right they might be sweating i just saw in chat uh Nicholas Williams must be a very popular person with uh his uh uh Department of Health here in Florida but they’re they’re currently in process of replacing about 120 humans across uh their state for with AI for health insurance enrollment uh I’m sure that that will make uh Nicholas a popular uh feature uh at the upcoming Christmas party but I I think that’s that’s real right i mean I think people are having to adjust to this i mean probably saw this you know back when cars came out when manufacturing came out when the internet came out you know there were just certain things that uh became a lot less less relevant uh with with that as as time has gone on so um there’s there’s certainly a real impact that’s happening here and and you know we’ll see where it goes over the next few years um getting a little bit tactical as we’re kind of getting getting close to the end of our session here um I’d Guardrails for Responsible AI Use love to hear a couple of best practices or guard rails that agencies should put in place uh to use AI responsibly and if you have specific processes or policies that you’ve implemented in your own companies uh I think that would be amazing to hear from so Mario why don’t you start us off here yeah absolutely and just to to close up the chapter uh to Nicolas’s point uh I I actually have been working in Medicare for the past couple months uh heavily uh and automating is definitely not as easy as it looks like for professional insurance uh licensed agents uh and you know I can dive in but that’s not like a healthcare conversation but it’s uh some things look brighter than they normally look and of course it depends on the people um if it’s a purely admin role just sitting behind a desk well it’s really hard i mean it’s primarily replacing paper with a computer you know it’s not a competitive uh thing to do but uh there’s a lot of power in a human being that actually guides you through the process and explains the pros and cons and feels your emotional state and kind of talks about your grandson or something and like there’s there’s this fine level of detail that’s like the human touch that we were talking to internally even though once again I’d be uh yeah do do connect Nicholas we can chat after uh to your point about guard rails I what what we definitely what we do a lot here is we build our own red teams uh meaning that whenever we use AI we run a counter team trying to challenge it in a myriad of different ways and find holes and loopholes and ask for details and questions uh in many cases we use like three different and pass information from one of them of hey You know there I spotted a couple lies here um can you find them right or um I I lack confidence in in what the other two provided here find the or I don’t believe these details are accurate dive deeper so through inference which is one of the strengths of the deep thinking models there’s a lot that could be uh accomplished by asking further uh one popular framework that I forgot who coined it but the the five W’s you know you need to ask a question five times why is that okay why did you do the next step then why did you decide to do this you know after the fifth why you normally get to the bottom of it uh and and you uncover things that you can’t simply uncover with the first why uh so Red Teaming & Critical Prompting this is a pretty common business technique for 20 years or so uh and we just need to apply the same critical thinking with AI especially uh as we know that how good it is at hallucination yeah I mean there’s definitely I was reading something on on Substack the other day it was like a writer was getting wanting feedback on several different published blog posts and uh the writer shared he said well which which of the posts had you know best represents you know something right and uh and the AI response wrote this beautiful elegant response and then he kept asking questions and talking about it and he started picking up hints that he was like wait a minute it doesn’t I didn’t actually say that like he start the AI was quoting you know quoting his articles or whatever and he finally confronted the AI guy and said “Hey you know what why did you say this i didn’t say this.” And it turned out that the the links that he had shared for his you know five different articles or whatever you know weren’t even accessible by the AI model but the AI model instead of saying “Hey I couldn’t access these links instead the response was what it thought it should respond based on the uh URL slugs of the post and the title of the post.” So it literally was just hallucinating this entire response based on um what was in the URL of the links and inferring what those that content might have been about based on what it already knew about this person but the whole thing was essentially fabricated which uh you know it took a little while it took you know five or 10 prompts before uh they realized like I’m actually you know what the person I’m talking to or the the tool I’m talking to isn’t actually giving me real information which is kind of crazy um so having guardrails to protect against that happening with your clients very important uh missions and objectives uh Aurelia what what do you think in terms of best practices or guardrails what have you guys done at WP Umbrella that has worked really well there are two things I I always do plus one guard rise um the first one is I try to always optimize my use AI to optimize my initial prompt to make sure that I can get the most of it and it’s not going to give me just some random stuff that we see everywhere and this is a very good practice because the better the prompt the better the answer this is one thing and I often ask him when I want to Ownership & Accountability in Content Creation publish content to quote sources which is also a very good thing to do from a SEO point of view because then you have like natural you have like natural external quality backlinks to to your piece of content this is what I always try to do and this what our marketing team is doing and when it come to like to guard race always have someone having the ownership of the content produce and pardon I think you lost me i was saying always having someone who has the ownership and thus the liability of the content produced because then the person will have to review what has been written and to engage his responsibility which is a good way to have some content that have some kind of of quality and I actually fired someone in December because uh he was like a content writer and he was publishing a lot of good stuff on the blog and at one point I went to check one article and I was like “Dude you didn’t even double check what you’ve published goodbye you killed the article.” And I think this is a good practice to have someone accountable for what AI is doing i think I put a uh internally you know we have a writing culture at E2M and so you know using a lot of written documentation and I fully expect team members will utilize especially being a global international company utilize uh writing uh using utilizing AI tools to enhance and enable their writing and make it more clear and concise we specifically say uh if you wouldn’t fully stand behind this paragraph or sentence in front of the leadership team then don’t let it go into your documents unedited right so I think that accountability piece is key that you can’t let team members or employees or contractors or agencies say “Oh you know I we screwed up that was that was the AI that did it.” Right ultimately if you’re the one that’s commanding the tool you have to be willing to stand behind uh your work i think that accountability is really important for agencies that want to raise the bar uh Kieran what do you what do you think yeah just Yeah no sure so we we’ve AI champion so exact same as the team here so we have someone that’s totally responsible for it but we’re actually now rolling in AI Distributing AI Champions Across Teams champions into each department because what we’re finding is we’re having to push a wee bit more than we maybe want to with AI because everyone’s very busy in their day job and we’re having to drive it a we bit we want you know as a agency leader we want AI implementation a little bit faster so um we’re finding if we spoon feed it go through it research it and say “Look here’s what you do.” Um so and and give the the team the tools so basically we would subscribe to a lot of different paid software so they can go and try it safely so the data should be secure it’s commercial agreement and um what we’re finding is these tools are updating so fast we’re going back maybe once a quarter every four four or five months and rechecking it because there’s so many changes and updates so um giving them the tools and time to to test it and change and check it so what else can we implement into the business yeah great i like the you know the the I feel like a lot of businesses have the AI champion and and they’re like the they become the chief bottleneck of AI very quickly because it’s like you know the one poor dude that has to look over AI for a whole organization right so I love hearing distributing that across teams right and also even giving uh giving you know your grassroots team members space to do that right i mean I find that in a services business at least for us you know do you do you focus on client work or do you focus on reskilling and upskilling your team right there’s there’s a a trade-off there and uh and as a business you say “Look we we might need to slow down a little bit in order to go faster we might need to give every team member a little bit of time to to really think about AI and and upskill and reskill their their seats so uh well Investing in Upskilling to Go Faster I think we’re coming to the close of our panel guys this has been uh absolutely fantastic we didn’t get to quite all of the questions uh that we had available today but I I I think the insights the discussion were uh was great um and I’m seeing some seeing some love from Nicholas in chat thank you appreciate it so uh yeah folks at uh Agency Advantage let’s give our panelists some uh some love here today let’s fire up some of those emojis let us know what you thought of the session in chat uh really appreciate you all being here you guys were fantastic for our panel thank you for supporting this year’s event aurelio great to have you here mario Kieran best of luck on your journey with AI you all are doing amazing jobs leading great companies and looking forward to hearing uh more about what you do in the future so thanks again for being here thanks everyone yeah thanks Brent for moderating yeah thank you salah says uh what happened right now is what AI can’t do all right magic four of us feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel safe in our jobs as long as we just keep showing up for panels we’ll be uh we’ll be in the clear uh awesome uh all right folks um we are Closing Thoughts & wrap up close to our close of Agency Advantage 2025 we’re going to be right back we’re going to come back and announce our winners and we’re going to finish strong for this year’s event so if you’re waiting on the edge of your seat to see if you got one of those coveted gift cards or hosting credits uh we’re going to give some shoutouts and accolades here in just a few minutes so stick with us keep that chat warm and engaged and we’ll see you back here in just about one or two minutes