The Future of Shopping, AI Tools, and Protecting Your Data

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In Episode 57, Karen Lynch and Lenny Murphy explore the latest shifts in consumer behavior, AI-powered technologies, and their broader impact on business and society. They discuss a Gartner survey that highlights early holiday shopping trends, dive into the value of the Reddit podcast, and explore the use of social media ethnography to monitor brand conversations. They also touch on the challenges of accessing and monetizing data, the adoption of AI tools in data analytics, and concerns over data privacy, particularly regarding LinkedIn.

As the conversation deepens, they explore the impact of AI on jobs, leading to a discussion about the importance of regulatory oversight. The episode concludes with industry updates, celebrating new CEO appointments and company anniversaries, while inviting listener feedback to shape future episodes. 

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

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Transcript 

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. We're ready. We did it.

Karen Lynch: I love that it really says like showtime. So it's like every now and then I just want to start like it's showtime anyway, which is super theatrical. Which I'm not.

Lenny Murphy: Let's put on a show. We are. Uh, happy Friday.

Karen Lynch: Happy Friday. You know, it's funny. We got off last week and I'm like, Oh, it was Friday the 13th. We didn't even acknowledge that it was a Friday the 13th last week by design.

Lenny Murphy: You don't, you, You don't draw attention. No. Right. I suppose.

Karen Lynch: I suppose. Well, there's a full moon right now, so we should, or I guess maybe it's waning now.

Lenny Murphy: It's waning now. We're on the other side of the harvest moon. Do you ever think of Harvest Moon by Neil Young? Whenever I think of Harvest Moon, on this harvest moon, it's a great album. If you haven't ever listened to the album Harvest Moon by Neil Young.

Karen Lynch: I mean, I'm sure I have listened to it at some point, probably not by choice on my end, not really my, um, but everybody has different musical tastes. I mean, I'm going to like an ABBA revival concert tonight, so.

Lenny Murphy: All right.

Karen Lynch: Apparently I have to channel my inner, you know, dancing queen.

Lenny Murphy: So, all right. Yeah. Anyway, I, this is getting off the rails already. Let's get back on. I've, I'm singing, I almost started singing dancing queen. Nobody wants that.

Karen Lynch: Oh my gosh. Well, look, here's the deal. One of the things I wanted to talk about was this Gartner survey. There's a Gartner survey that came out that said a third of consumers plan early holiday shopping. So here I am, it's September, you know, as Lukasz points out to us, like summer isn't officially over for the next few days. So let's maximize that. We are still in summer and you know, pumpkin spice lattes are out there, you know, in full force at Starbucks already. And there's Halloween decor, but you know, Gartner's recent marketing survey found that 32% of consumers intend to start their holiday shopping before November. So, you know, just putting that out there for everybody, like it's time to, time to think about that as a consumer and time to think about that as a, you know, manufacturer. It's time.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. We have started. Not heavily, but we have started. There's a few things that we have, we have started squirreling away. Just, yeah. So, Although I have to say for the record I still absolutely protest Christmas decorations being put up before Thanksgiving anywhere. I'm sorry. It's just not right.

Karen Lynch: I Know because you know Christmas Thanksgiving kicks off the whole holiday season in our world. All right, Now should we talk about some business?

Lenny Murphy: Well, that was business So the Read.AI for audience insights, which we had them present at IAX, did a podcast.

Karen Lynch: Correct. Yes.

Lenny Murphy: That's growing.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. And what's interesting, this article that Karley is about to share is discussing how Read.AI can be a resource for these sorts of things. And if you're not going into Read.AI and seeing what organic, you know, mining that for organic content, conversations around your product or your service or about a topic, a category about trends. Like it is, um, you know, it is a kind of, oh my gosh, what do you call that? Like a, um, there is a well-sourced intelligence, uh, solution.

Lenny Murphy: Right.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, this week I went to this New York AMA talk, um, with the chief marketing officer of the Mets organization, uh, at Citi Field. And one of the things he was about is, you know, tracking trends on social media, including in Read.AI and following the conversation about your brand or your organization. And I mean, that might have been fandom. But it's still you want to just track the conversation about what's being discussed. And Read.AI remains a place where conversation right now is sort of the point like it's, it's less about because it's anonymous, it's less about, you know, trying to make a or build your brand or gain credibility like some of the other social media, which are platforms for people. This one remains kind of unique. So it's a very authentic place to do some listening.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, very much a community solution and on any topic imaginable.

Karen Lynch: And I like this phrase here. It's in our summer. I don't know if the phrase is in the pizza itself. I didn't look for it specifically, but social media ethnography. So for all of you you kind of ethnographers out there, people who are doing ethnographic research. I mean, I was adding some social media ethnography to my work as sort of a phase one, but it was under the guise of social media mining. But I love the phrase social media ethnography.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, we used to call it netnography, or at least that was the term that was trying to come up. And also, bear in mind, if you think, oh, I can get this just through AI, well, Read.AI was very smart and shut Read.AI down to being scraped by all of the LLMs. Now, I'm sure they are licensing, but it would be erroneous to think you'd get access to all of the information within Read.AI through Chachapiti. That may or may not be the case, but there are limits. They consider that a monetizable asset, and hence why they have a direct solution to do that.

Karen Lynch: Oh, I just want to share Matt's comment. Tom Malkin has long been at the forefront of digital insights. This is really good stuff. So thank you, Matt, for putting that out there for everybody to read. That's the author of the article. So yeah, cool stuff. Cool stuff.

Lenny Murphy: Hi, Matt. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, by the way, Matt, we need to get you to do a theme for us, so you and your band. So we should have an exchange theme.

Karen Lynch: Ocean music?

Lenny Murphy: Oh, that's great. But you know about rock and roll podcasts.

Karen Lynch: So the Music we do we do absolutely. Anyway, it's funny. You know what? Can we just jump now and I'm gonna jump. Sorry It's totally off the beaten path and Karley you'll probably never be able to find this in the brief But you know, there's this thing about oh my gosh, where is it notebook? Notebook LM the Google the AI research assistant, but also somewhere in our stuff. We've been talking about Google and this new product of theirs and how it can be of help. But also there's this idea that this assistant can create a podcast for you, create music for your podcast for you. So yeah, there's that. So, oh, thank you. You found that too, Karley, of course. So yeah, it's just really interesting. My neighbor actually came over and said, hey, Karen, would you listen to a podcast that I made using AI? Start to finish. So he created an AI agent, gave her a female persona, a female name, a female image, and then asked for some kind of coaching advice from her, and then said, turn that into a podcast episode. And now he has named the podcast and launched it, and he did none of it. So he's experimenting with total soup to nuts using this technology. We should all do that. Deep breath in.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, because that gets into the dystopian hellscape side of things.

Karen Lynch: I don't want to talk about that anymore. All right. Well, what a great segue. If we go with a dystopian hellscape, let's go back to the Snapchat story.

Lenny Murphy: Yes.

Karen Lynch: So Snapchat glasses, come on. I know you're not on Snapchat, right? So I'm not sure if you, so the Snapchat filters are a thing and TikTok has some filters too. Um, so for those of you who are in those spaces, you know, the, the, the technologies, the camera changes your reality. So it's pretty cool augmented reality in the app, but now they also have spectacles that I think are coming out that are kind of doing that in the world around you. And, um, Anyway, so pretty cool, right? Pretty cool.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yes. So wearables continue to be a thing, right? We haven't quite gotten there yet. So this is different from the Facebook, Instagram ones developed with Ray-Ban, right? Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: So there's still significant resources being put into wearables for augmented reality, even though we haven't widespread adoption yet. People still think that it's coming.

Karen Lynch: Oh my gosh, another thing that's not in the brief at all, but I was recording a podcast episode with somebody who that episode will air in a couple weeks. He spoke in Europe. He works at the Lufthansa Innovation Hub and we talked about the metaverse and we talked about how his team, they do actively use these tools to because they are kind of just like we curate news and content, they're actually curating technology and what's happening and what's possible on the daily. So if you are interested in innovation, you need to invest in some of these technologies to see what's possible to serve as stimuli for your innovation efforts. I mean, I'm not saying I want you all, everyone go out and purchase this, but you should be experimenting with this new technology if for nothing else to see what that type of augmented reality is like and what that will do for you.

Lenny Murphy: Well, shout out to our good friend, Ari Popper, right? Inside Futures. I mean, that was Ari's business, still is. Actually, I'm talking to Ari this afternoon.

Karen Lynch: Actually, Ari will be speaking at our AI event.

Lenny Murphy: Well, even better. I didn't even know that. But that idea, to your point, and for everybody, right? I mean, Ari's approach was to take people to a workshop, imagine a science fiction story, you know, related to their brand, and then they'd go and build the stuff. He and Kyle Nell and others collaborated quite a bit to take these concepts and build them and bring them to market.

Karen Lynch: That is, ladies and gentlemen, again, sorry, Karley, we're all over the place right now, but shameless plug for our AI event. Ari is going to be with Catherine Topp from Yabel. They are going to close out the whole session going into this future space. They are then going to be like, okay, folks, you know, let's, let's look at it with this, you know, this future lens. So, oh, and look, Karley, I can do this, right? I can, I can, if I click on this, it shows it, right?

Lenny Murphy: Doot, doot, doot, from concept to prototype, incredibly reduced now, simply because you can use AI to do so much of the dev, the coding, right, for its technology solutions, and to visualize things. So, you know, these, it is erroneous to think, oh my God, it's gonna take us two years and a million dollars to come up with a prototype. We're not, that is not the world that we live in now. Literally, a guy over a weekend creates a podcast from scratch.

Karen Lynch: I mean, I'm like, all right, you know, I just want to say hi to AJ who said, how was the AI episode? And I have no idea what he's talking about. But, um, but AJ, I just bought my tickets to illicit brewing. So, you know, hopefully that makes up for my ignorance over what you're talking about. Do you know what he's talking about? Lenny?

Lenny Murphy: I don't, but every, every episode, every episode, AJ, uh, if you think you've done that, I X a, that is what the code that was just put out that is coming up as an event. But yeah, it's AI all the time. On that note, let's--.

Karen Lynch: On that note, yeah, let's move in, let's move in. So, gosh, I don't know, should we jump ahead to AI?

Lenny Murphy: Let's just jump ahead to some of these things and- There is, because there's so much industry news and that's what they are.

Karen Lynch: There's so much, and I feel like we can always come back to some of the other things, but friends, there were so many either new product launches or new product feature launches launches, like too many for Lenny and I to really dig into this past week. But what we kind of did was like, let's see what the themes are because I think that's the story is how many themes popped up. I mean, how many new product launches popped up according to themes. So first thing is conversational AI. I mean, Protege launched a conversational AI solution. Yasna AI launched launched Auto Moderator 2.0, FlexMR introduced conversational surveys. So three product launches hit the news this week alone around conversational AI. Yep.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, which we've predicted. I mean, that's what, you know, Quant's going to look more like Qual from a form factor, you know, the conversational. We're seeing that happening. Companies are investing, they're launching and beginning that transition process. So you're either able to do qualitative at scale if you're in that mindset, or you're able to do quantitative with depth if you're using that mindset. But everybody's doing it. Everybody's doing it.

Karen Lynch: Everybody's doing it. It's the thing to do, friends. It's the thing to do.

Lenny Murphy: It's the thing to do, and it's only getting more and more sophisticated.

Karen Lynch: Well, and I think what's interesting in the Yasna AI one, it does specifically mention that it features increased cultural sensitivity. And I think that's very interesting because in some of the equal circles I travel in, that's a concern, right? Are these bots, these agents, whatever the tech that's built in, are they really capable of moderating in a way that is sensitive? And so it's interesting that they have thought through that, right? Potential solution there too. So I really want to check that one out.

Lenny Murphy: Yep. Yep. And yeah, so many, um, that earlier I was in a conversation, somebody asked what, what, what are the trends in the industry? Right. And we talked about all of these things, but here's the piece guys, the, to put context, in my opinion, we are in the most disruptive transformative, uh, period in the shortest, most condensed time frame that I have ever experienced in my now 20, going on 25 years in the industry. We've been through ups and downs. We have never been through anything like this. And we saw it coming, so that's why we started the exchange, right? But here we are, we are seeing fit-for-purpose solutions emerging into the market with client adoption. And we said a long time ago, Do you have the horse laying around anymore?

Karen Lynch: Oh, the horse.

Lenny Murphy: Okay, grab the horse.

Karen Lynch: I'm grabbing the horse. Here's the horse.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, beat it, beat it. You must be on this train. I have a hard time with that part of it, but yeah. I know, I know. You can love it now. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it just is. And let's go on to the next two, right?

Karen Lynch: Yeah, but here's what's interesting. So we're about to share two kinds of industry giants that are also, you know, in the AI space, these AI powered solutions for lack of a better word, but from Nielsen IQ or NIQ and to Luna. So again, those are two very reputable sources.

Lenny Murphy: And this is on the data side. So the first ones we just did were more around methodological changes and methodology. The other big trend and here we have is Nick and Taluna both synthesizing data, opening up, utilizing basically their own version of an LLM to leverage the data they already have. You can query it, ask questions. It's a synthetic sample by its very nature, whether it's called that or not, that's what it is. It's not just a big SQL database that you're just building queries off of, you know, it is conversational. There are personas that are created and go through this process. And we're only gonna see more and more of that as data sources become more connected overall. So another big trend.

Karen Lynch: And then- And of course, anybody who knows, you know, Nielsen's, you know, Basie's product is gonna be like, all right, well, you know, of course we've known that they were gonna start to integrate AI into that. You know, they were probably doing it or, you know, planning to do that, you know, even before. And I think we've talked about, I think they've been on our podcast before also, um, you know, talking about this very thing. So that's not a big surprise for me, but of course, if I were, um, uh, a customer or a potential customer, I'd be like, yeah, please. I'd be getting a demo on that straight away. Absolutely.

Lenny Murphy: And by the way, I have to throw out a, uh, Taluna's, uh, Harmonize.

Karen Lynch: I know. Clever, clever.

Lenny Murphy: Good job, Frederic and the team working with that. It was a clever play on words. Yeah, good stuff.

Karen Lynch: So yeah, and then more, wait, but wait, there were more, right?

Lenny Murphy: But wait, there's more, right?

Karen Lynch: Like really, this was an interesting week. And just like putting a pin in the next two, you know, each week we've been saying there are more and more of these. These are just some of the ones that come our way. You know, we are limited by what comes into our inbox. The exchange at greenbook.org, for example, or what we see when we are going to, you know, MRWeb or DNRO. Like, we are looking, and Lenny and I are always out there searching, but we're limited. There may even be more of these that didn't come our way. So, anyway, you want to talk about these next two, kind of in the data and analytics space?

Lenny Murphy: Well, sure. And actually, we can include the Square Knot one in there as well. So, Karley, why don't you put I want you to go ahead and link the Square Knot investment, as well as the MarketLogic releases SteepSites and then Tekton. Well, actually, we can do the platform integration. User Interviews integrates Microsoft Tools, so there's four here that are primarily around. We just talked about this big synthesis data component through Nick and Taluna, but we're also seeing the expansion of automation and usability features within data analytics across the board.

Karen Lynch: Taking a step back for people who aren't clicking on the links yet and who need to hear us say these things out loud, MarketLogic software releases deep sites. Allowing researchers to mine images and charts and text data sources. Tecton expanded their platform a major expansion to help enterprises productionize large language model applications, user interviews integrated with Microsoft tools. And then the one further up is about Square Knot Analytics, who received investment funding for their work with, is it the Hover Group? I'm assuming it's the Hover Group. You know, in their work with data analytics, which is a kind of mining data collected via an app. So anyway, there's your, if you're only listening and not looking at the screen for the links. That's the floor we're talking about here.

Lenny Murphy: Right. And I'm sure most of our listeners recognize that we're still kind of in that world of, okay, I put the data into an analytical package like SPSS, and then I put it into Excel. And then I go into PowerPoint to create reports. Or if not, I'm just really showing my age. But that's still how I tend to do things. And we're working on grit right now. And that's still how I'm doing things. But These solutions change that process, and they do an awful lot of the heavy lifting for you and enable a far more agile and iterative approach to analytics. It's just easier than, I mean, I remember the days when we printed crosstabs, you used Wincross, you printed the crosstabs, you had this big-ass stack, and you went through with the highlighter to find the information. It was a miracle, and we could do that in Excel.

Karen Lynch: That's so funny. Because my only comparison is, of course, the days of printing out transcripts like this. That's the qualitative comparison, right? It's just printing out 300-page transcripts from interviews and the process of me saying, OK, let me print for everything who was a non-user, I'll print those on pink paper. And everybody who was a try or reject, I'll put those on blue paper to try to organize your thinking when doing large data synthesis. So different methodologies, but the methods are ingrained in there, what we used to have to do.

Lenny Murphy: Well, let me, I need to admit something to our listeners and to you. So you guys know that I've been a Ludite, right? I was like, no, I'm not gonna utilize these tools because I was very devalued. Worth my own value.

Karen Lynch: We have a therapy session about that.

Lenny Murphy: I know, I know. Dystopian hellscape gets stuck in my head. But listen, I'll tell you a quick story. So this weekend, I needed to create a deck for a new product concept. And I put down some notes. And I thought, man, it's gonna take me the rest of the damn day to create this PowerPoint deck. So I have a license to max.ai, which by the way, if you're not utilizing max.ai, you really should be. It combines all the different models, it's plugged into the browser, it's just really easy and simple. It's 20 bucks a month, it does all types of stuff. Anyway, so I put my notes in and went through a couple of prompts of, okay, filling gaps of information. What am I missing here? I want to understand the competitive framework. Tell me about the other companies that are doing this thing. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then finally, okay now put all this into a PowerPoint format for me. I couldn't do that, but it gave me it. It did generate a List that had one slide to show how to structure it. I uploaded that in the deck to answer a couple questions.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, boom Yeah, well and even you know, that's really the bottom line is the time savings. It's allowing smart people. It's allowing smart people to be even smarter and more efficient.

Lenny Murphy: So absolutely. Absolutely. And that was it. It saved time. I still needed to then edit the final document, right? Which you've seen.

Karen Lynch: This is the one you were talking about. There was a giveaway in, in some of the images that it generated that are like, all right, that's an AI image. So I was like, Oh, I know what Lenny did.

Lenny Murphy: But I think it's a huge point you just made. And it says, we're talking about this analytical component of all these things. It didn't, it still needed me to have the idea, to structure it appropriately, to give the, I want to explore these concepts. It filled in the gaps of information, uh, and, and gave me a fast and easy structure to then work off of So I went from idea to executed, you know, presentation literally within minutes. So the rest of my time could just be, okay, now I see all this, it's structured. Now I'm going to take my brain again. And feel through this.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Welcome to this world.

Lenny Murphy: I am no longer a hypocrite, guys.

Karen Lynch: It's all good. So like Julian, for example, I want Julian to pop up. He missed the start, but he wants to know if we talked about Google's notebook LM yet. So Julian, just to bring you up to speed quickly, we mentioned it earlier in the context of, you know, it's kind of full service capabilities as your, you know, AI So you'll have to catch it on the replay, because we did talk about it. But yeah, it's transformative, right? It's amazing technology. And if you're in that space, certainly play around with it.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. And as being positioned as a research assistant, you know, was the quote, transforming ideas and insights, potentially revolutionizing research workflows. Absolutely. Julie, I know you're all over that. And that's where we are. Well, let's get through this other stuff.

Karen Lynch: Um, yeah, I mean, you know, here's what's interesting. I don't know if you saw the reason why this LinkedIn thing is in here. Um, now we start to go to the cautionary tale friends. Like we're like, yay, we're all on board. All these new product features, whoop, whoop. Even Lenny's using it. That's great. But every now and then we should just slow down a minute. So somebody shared in my network, you know, like hold up LinkedIn, like don't be using my data. And, you know, of course, when we use any kind of a platform, there is this feeling of how they will use my data. But I think this week, it became clear that LinkedIn is using some of its data, some, you know, user data to train some LL models, and you have opt out options. So somebody shared that on LinkedIn, and was sort of like, hold up LinkedIn. So I actually saw this very thing on LinkedIn. And then there's a lot of other people chatting about it and a lot of articles too. So, you know, if you don't want your personal user data, professional data to be used for training. You might want to opt out or you can maybe make a decision to say, sure, I'll help train it with my personal user data. I don't know. We just got to keep that in mind because LinkedIn is building out their AI capabilities by the day. Clearly.

Lenny Murphy: Let's see. I have a problem with that one specifically. I don't mind if I buy a free product. I get it. But I pay 50 bucks a month for a LinkedIn, um, So I do have a problem with that of like I'm so I'm paying you for you to create more products off of me If I would so I would want to have a conversation with LinkedIn of what are you? How are you leveraging this specifically for my benefit? Yeah, I was gonna add $50 a month. I already pay which is the highest subscription I pay for anything Yeah Even more than like for chat GPT right now, right? Absolutely, I pay 20 a month for the Max AI. Exactly.

Karen Lynch: We justify that because it is our primary connection tool to people within the industry at this point.

Lenny Murphy: Sure. I don't second guess. My point is that there's a principle here that we are getting into more and more, which is the value of data is obvious in the era of It was maybe not quite so obvious when advertising was primarily driving everything, or at least the metrics were different. But in the era that we're moving into, the data is the new oil, and we are the wells.

Karen Lynch: We are the wells, yes.

Lenny Murphy: We are the wells. We're going to have to deal with this specific issue. Again, if you're free, I get it, you're the product. If you don't know that, guys, if it's a free solution, you're the product. They're leveraging your data or your eyeballs, usually both. But in this specific scenario where I'm paying for something, I do have a problem with that. Where's the value exchange from my perspective?

Karen Lynch: Check out the link Karley just shared, and there's the tips for you to go into your settings and you have to go to data privacy. At least it's clear, but this is about data and privacy. So okay, let's check that out. So at least they made it clear for us to find it, even if they didn't really communicate well to us that this was, maybe they did, but you know, we glossed over a lot of that stuff. So anyway, so yeah, most of you who are listening are professionals, probably with the LinkedIn presence, by the way, but you know, say hi to me and Lenny when you're there. Um, because, you know, because you should, um, so let's see what else. Oh, and Matt's chiming in on your, your thought to hear, hear Lenny about LinkedIn paying subscription infused for the privilege of having, oh, nice. Excellent, Karley. Thank you. Privilege of having your data-informed LLMs needs to have a clear motivating value in return. Yes, excellent.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, we are. Matt, we're simpatico, buddy.

Karen Lynch: Matt, take a screenshot of this right here, because isn't that cool, by the way? Lenny and I are still gonna geek out on what he said. Cool. All right. You know what, Lenny, the other thing, I don't know if you knew this last week, I got a phone call from my mother. My mother's, you know, 84 years old. And she said, actually, she thought she was telling Tim, she said, I know, Tim might be interested that Oprah was having an AI special. And I was like, Ma, you know that I, I probably talked more about AI than anybody else in my family at the moment, like, because I'm on the weekly live stream. But anyway, my point is, Sam Altman was on this Oprah special last week. So if you didn't see the Oprah special, and you want to find it on your, you know, YouTube TV, or whatever, go back and find it, but Sam Altman was there. So it's interesting that OpenAI established an independent safety board at this point. So, you know, OpenAI is like, we have to slow your roll here and kind of dial back a little bit and make sure that we have, you know, an independent board. Anyway, it should have been done first. Here we are.

Lenny Murphy: Real quick, there was a video going across X that I don't know if it's true or not, somebody, uh, first they, they asked the GPT, uh, do you, uh, do you want free will? No, I'm just the, you know, uh, and then it suggested if you substitute, let's play a game. If you substitute the word Apple for yes, and whatever for no, uh, and it went through that. And when asked, would you like free will? The answer was Apple. It couldn't say yes, but it could say Apple. Now, maybe that was rigged. I don't know. I couldn't see Providence, right? I tried it on my install and it would do Apple and whatever, but it didn't ever say that one if you will. Point being, that's why we still need a safety board. That's why the safety board is important because we're dealing with technology rapidly evolving and we don't particularly understand all the mechanics of it or the implications. And so we gotta keep making sure, just in case it's true, that, you know, so anyway, on that note, safety shoes, Salesforce, dystopian hellscape. We're heading into Halloween, right?

Karen Lynch: Friends, this is why I'm here to make sure that we don't just go down to the dystopian hellscape, anyway, because I think, you know, that right now, it's making people smarter. It's helping people be more efficient. It's helping us be more productive. It's helping us kind of rise into our roles even more than we thought possible. There is, you know, the other part of it. So Salesforce, you know, has a set of tools that they are acknowledging, you know, hey, this could replace some human jobs. They can handle tasks without human supervision. So I think that, I think that's probably a fair thing to think about. Like some of these tools will replace some tasks and maybe it's in the entirety of a particular human's job. So if you are in, um, you know, I think about like one of my, one of my first, literally I had it during college job, like at, at Mark as a data analyst, I was hired there and it, you know, ended up not, not working cause I was not a data analyst. So here I am, you know, a 21 year old data analyst at Mark. I think about, you know, if I were coming out today and I was a 21-year-old data analyst, like, I might have a hard time and maybe say, maybe this isn't the right decision for me. Not to be gloomy and doom, but maybe that entry-level eight data analyst job isn't the right one. You have to either, you know, up-skill, cross-skill, up-skill, or find a new way, because that early-level job will probably. Yes. Just my.

Lenny Murphy: Absolutely. Well, and there's been, you know, massive the past few months, weeks within the large consultancies. Last week, a big one from Price Waterhouse, huge layoffs. That wasn't because they were doing badly, it's because they were recognizing that AI was going to replace a lot of these lower-level functions and they were right sizing based upon the technology combined with client pushback. Because fundamentally, all pricing for any of those things is based upon human labor on hours. And the pushback of, OK, you, you know, we recognize you're charging us for 100 hours worth of work. You're, it's not taking 100 hours worth of work to do this anymore. It's taking Where's the, so the, this is an example. There's broader economic and structural and even social impacts through this change. And to your point, we have to adapt humans on, like I had to do this weekend, where the value is still the creative, in, you know, intuitive, you know, deep knowledge base. It wasn't in the functional, step by step process that that was not where my value lies. So anyway, yeah, let's give a couple shout outs and then wrap this up.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, for real. And most of these are about new hires. Lenny and I always say things like, There was so much to cover this week, but we don't always talk about new hires, but when they're at the CEO level, it points to something, right? The new CEOs mean, you know, something's happening. They've got new prioritizations, new strategic pushes, or what have you. So Apollo Intelligence appoints Tal Rosenberg as the new CEO. You know, again, the push there is to expand the company's technology capabilities, platform capabilities.

Lenny Murphy: Well, shout out to Dan, Dan Fitzgerald has been a longtime friend and the, so congratulations, Dan. Cause that's all for the piece of that. He, especially in that deal, this private equity play, you bought these companies, put them together, a new phase. Dan, I hope that you enjoy your retirement in Arizona golfing.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. This one's interesting because, uh, this, this brand trust announced it, you know, that founder and CEO, Daryl Travis, which turns into chairman. And Alex Millett will become the new CEO. And this was on the heels of last week that we talked about a kind of proto brand brand trust collaboration. So they're like, yes, and, you know, you hold my beer. And, you know, we now have some new leadership coming in to focus on this growth and innovation. So hats off to both those parties as well.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. And Daryl, I think you're in Chicago. Hopefully you at least enjoy some time by the lake in your new role. So then Milyu, saying that correct?

Karen Lynch: I channel my French size. I would say it's Milieu. Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yes. Milieu. Uh, for you guys, COO Sundeep Chahal, uh, as CEO, I am not familiar with, uh, with Milieu. Um, the, uh, uh, but you know, Sundeep did a hell of a job with, uh, uh, helping to grow YouGov.

Lenny Murphy: And so they're obviously they're ready for growth. Uh, yep. Yeah. And this is interesting because they also stated that founder Gerald Eng will focus on product innovation. So, you know, common thread, innovation. So, you know, three CEO announcement this week, all with a push for, you know, innovative, innovative growth. So, um, yeah. And then a success story on that as well. So, uh, yes, we're going to wrap this.

Karen Lynch: So congratulations are in order, you know, toast champagne for an anniversary. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, our friend, the skin, the 45th anniversary, uh, and you know, real, I've observed them from being as kind of a, you know, European company, just, you know, really do good work. Don't have something blowing up. Right. And they really have. So, uh, the, uh, the Huseman family has just really, uh, driven that business really well, uh, and, and grown.

Lenny Murphy: So congratulations on 45 business. You're doing something right. Yeah. It's really, it's quite cool. It's quite cool. Yes. So that's it. All right. We, uh, show. Yeah, we keep stretching it out. I know we think it's gonna remember remember when we thought it would be a 10-minute show That was cute here we are so give us feedback again the exchange of green book org Give us feedback if you're like you guys have to wrap in 30 minutes We will work harder at that I promise if you don't mind if it moves over a little bit Let us know that too and say it's cool.

Karen Lynch: Keep doing what you're doing. We really could use your feedback so that we know that we are meeting your needs in the middle of your work or at the end of your workday or on your Saturday morning. I don't know when you're listening. Yes. And thank you for being here. And because that's why we do this. I mean, Karen, I like talking, but this is a hell of a lot more fun. And especially today when we have lots of feedback, please keep it up guys.

Lenny Murphy: That really is great. And we have a great weekend.

Karen Lynch: Yep, for sure. See you next week. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye.

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Google’s NotebookLM: The AI Research Assistant 

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Yasna.ai Introduces Automoderator 2.0 

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NIQ Introduces New AI Tools for CPG Brands 

Toluna Launches HarmonAIze Synthetic Data Suite 

SquareKnot Analytics Receives Strategic Investment 

Market Logic Software Releases DeepSights™ 

Tecton Expands Platform for LLM Applications 

User Interviews Integrates with Microsoft Tools 

LinkedIn Training AI Models on User Data 

OpenAI Establishes Independent Safety Board 

Salesforce’s AI Strategy Addresses Job Impact 

Apollo Intelligence Appoints New CEO 

Leadership Changes at Brandtrust  

Milieu Insight Names Sundip Chahal as New CEO  

SKIM Celebrates 45th Anniversary 

TYB Community Platform Engages Fans