Advancing Marketing Strategies with AI Marketers Guild’s David Berkowitz

In this episode of Evolving the Enterprise, SnapLogic CMO Dayle Hall speaks with David Berkowitz — founder of the AI Marketers Guild and one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of marketing and artificial intelligence. Known for turning AI hype into practical insight, David shares how marketing fundamentals remain constant even as technology rapidly evolves.

They explore why marketers now need to create for both humans and bots, the dangers of treating humans like algorithms, and how AI can save mental bandwidth for more strategic work. David also dives into community-driven learning, the role of bias in AI-generated content, and emerging opportunities in demand generation.

From practical automation wins to thought-provoking discussions about creativity, ethics, and human connection, this conversation is a guide for marketers navigating AI adoption without losing their edge.

Transcript

Advancing Marketing Strategies with AI Marketers Guild’s David Berkowitz

Dayle Hall:
Hi, and welcome to our latest episode of our podcast, Evolving the Enterprise. I'm sure there's lots of avid followers out there, or not. Maybe it's your first time. But anyway, we dive into the strategies and systems driving transformation in today's enterprises, organizations. I'm your host, Dayle Hall, CMO of SnapLogic.

Today, we have something slightly different. We focus very much in the past around the IT leaders, but I'm very happy today that our guest, David Berkowitz, he's one of the most trusted voices, actually at the intersection of marketing and AI, and has a very strong community. He's actually the founder of the AI Marketers Guild, which is multiple thousands of people like me that are really using AI today in the world of marketing. So it's a great time to be talking to him.

He's got hundreds of published columns, and he's done hundreds of talks around the globe. He has a book coming out, which we'll get to at some point and give him a plug for that. The thing we like about David, one reason we wanted him actually on the podcast, what he's really good at is making sure he can turn the hype around things like AI into practical insight. And as a marketer today, that is exactly what I'm looking for. David, welcome to the show.

David Berkowitz:
Thanks so much for having me, Dayle. Great to be here.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, it's great to have you. So listen, we're going to go into some of the details around using AI in marketing, but just give me a couple of minutes, give me your background. How did you come up with this concept of this community around AI Marketers Guild and how you got to where you are today?

David Berkowitz:
A shorter version of it is that I've had the good fortune of being in a number of roles where I've been able to connect different pieces and different kinds of people, and I've often been a translator. Even when I first started writing columns more than 20 years ago for trade outlets, I'd see some of the people who'd been doing this for a while. I'm like, I'm nowhere near as smart as them. I'm nowhere near as experienced as them. But maybe I can find ways to apply this, bring this down to earth, and have a sense of someone who's actively trying to make sense of this and see what it means for you.

That was true in early days when I was at eMarketer on the research side, and then especially when I cut my teeth on the agency front when I was at 360i that became part of Dentsu later, that I was in this innovation strategy role. I get to talk to start-up founders and VCs, people from a lot of different areas, and often have folks in the room who don't always talk to each other. Later on, starting a community, I was initially at Serial Marketers seven years ago. When I started that one, it wasn't just a place for brands or just a place for agencies or something like that. It was, here are people who are just constantly going at it and want to learn and want to apply this stuff. So it was more of that psychographic than a demographic.

And then a couple of years ago, taking some of what I'd been doing on the community front, some of what I'd been doing on that applied innovation side, and I saw this white space where I didn't see a community for marketers like me who were then trying to make sense of AI and how it affected our jobs. So I was like, why not? There's this great Al Franken book title, Why Not Me? And I think about that maybe more than I should. So then alongside Serial Marketers, AI Marketers Guild was born, and it's just been one more way where I get to learn from so many incredible people and then just try to see what I can do to make sense of it.

Dayle Hall:
That's great. I think marketers are very much like, what I'm hearing a lot on these podcasts, CIOs, CTOs, they are using their community as probably their first port of call to test out ideas, who are you using, how are you solving this problem. I think marketers are the other big group that uses community, don't you think?

David Berkowitz:
I think it is, but it's always self-selecting. I've worked for some really cutting-edge agencies, and it still can be hard to get people away from their spreadsheets and their client emails and a lot of the day-to-day parts of their jobs. Some of it is the people who wind up participating, they're not always the folks I'd expect. But once they're there, once they're active, I do these weekly community calls where I'm bringing in guest speakers on the AI front, and the people who show up to that, you just know they love to learn. They love to hear from each other. So when you find that tribe within a tribe, whether it's in a tribe I've helped curate or one of the many others that I've joined and learned from, it is a kind of magical thing.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. Interesting. You said earlier, just a few minutes ago, around writing columns 20 years ago. I think the whole media landscape has changed so dramatically, and someone like you creating these kinds of communities, where do you feel like this whole, the journalism, the media industry, where are we going with this? Maybe even with AI, but just in general, it feels like there's so much flux right now in the industry.

David Berkowitz:
There's the good, bad, and ugly parts of it. When I was cutting my teeth, trade outlets and more established media were the gatekeepers. So to get in there means like you're in. On the marketing and ad side, if you're writing for MediaPost or AdWeek or AdAge, your audience was their audience, and you were borrowing their credibility. So it was this great value exchange.

Most of that's done. For someone who doesn't have a long speaking and writing history to become a thought leader, it's a very different process right now. Now, the good news is that it's easier than ever to build your own presence and launch your own outlets, use whatever format, it really works for you. If you're a writer or if you like audio or video or whatever you want, you can do what you want, but there's still so much of it is requiring you to build that from scratch, or the other side of it that is so heavy on the pay to play.

People are so used to seeing someone like one of my favorite journalists out there, like Casey Newton, who was so, so smart at building a following while working for more established trades, and then being able to parlay that into doing- his best work actually wound up being when he was out on his own and still is. Some folks like that. Oh, it's great that there were some layoffs at this media company. Yeah, these journalists are better off. No, they're not, because for every Casey Newton, who are the hundred others who I don't read right now?

So it's really tough and it's sad and we need more investment into being able to raise up those voices, and also with some of that rigor. There’s stuff I can mouth off on as a columnist that someone where they're like- let's say editorial standards.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. Look, I think we all see that. I think you're right. The industry is changing. Sometimes it's not changing for the better. I think there is less control. I think that kind of comes into our first topic that we're going to talk about, which is a little bit about AI within marketing and the underlying strategy of how you use it. And I think there's this concept that there's a lot of people out there that feel like, okay, when we automate things and we use AI and there's this growing autonomous agents aspect, if we use those, it will solve all our problems. I think the concept is if you have chaos before, you're still going to have chaos.

I guess my question for you is, what are you seeing around how the marketing teams are at least starting to think about AI? How do they get the most out of it, or is there a process that they go through and not just throw a bunch of tools at it and say, what can we automate? Let's just use so many different things. Where does the marketer start?

David Berkowitz:
Marketers need to start overall with, what's their brand goals? What's their brand voice like? The fundamentals of marketing, I don't think have changed very much. Now, what I think is one of the biggest differences in a conversation I'm having more with clients is there's a lot that goes into trying to fine-tune the ideal customer profile, the hollow ICP. But now, there's a level above that, that I think we need to start looking at. And what is changing dramatically and that I'm talking about way more this year than I was thinking about a year ago, even six months ago is you have two overall audiences right now, humans and bots.

Dayle Hall:
Okay. Touche.

David Berkowitz:
But it's real. I'm not going to flip about it. Humans are much more similar to each other. If you're targeting both investors and enterprise buyers, and maybe there's more of a B2C set, people are still, as crazy as this world is, more similar than different. But so are the bots, like Gemini and ChatGPT and Meta and Grok and all these things. All of them- they might be very different. Only one of them that we know of is comparing themselves to just murderous, fascist genocidists. But the overall rule, as far as how bots operate and what they look for, they're actually way more similar than different for better and worse. So this idea that now we have to bifurcate so much of what we're doing, see what's usable from one and what's usable for the other. And there are times where I'm saying, no human should ever have to read this, but this is really good for a bot. It's a very different kind of conversation.

I think also, there are the good games and the bad games to play. There's a lot of bad games, I'd say, in some of the email and LinkedIn spam that we see and a lot of the laziness that goes on. But I think a lot of that is actually treating humans like bots.

Dayle Hall:
Okay, explain. What do you mean by that?

David Berkowitz:
I mean that when you are then just auto-generating 100,000 messages that are just going out to the widest possible audience, and they all kind of sound the same and it just feels like everything else you've heard before, so this might actually be really smart structured content that is checking all the boxes of what it should be doing. But humans, it's almost like the uncanny valley. You might not even realize at first that this is an AI generator or that it's just off and bad. You just feel something in your bones. No one actually talks like this, and they sure as hell don't talk to me.

Now a bot reading that might actually love it, especially if it's highly structured and produced by another bot. Bots like talking to each other. I know I'm anthropomorphizing here, but to the extent a bot can like something, then that kind of stuff works very well. I think that's where a lot of people are getting tripped up or just trying the wrong tactic for the wrong segment.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, that's so interesting. I'd never thought of- what I liked about what you said is the fundamentals of marketing hasn't changed. We're still looking to try and hit the right audience with the right message, but I hadn't thought of it in terms of, are you writing for humans, or are you writing for the bots? Is that making it harder for marketers? Do we now have more things to do?

David Berkowitz:
It's harder. There are more and more areas where AI can add efficiency. As we're talking today, I just got agent mode on ChatGPT and am excited to see what this can do or where it's going to actually require more work to manage. But I think that there are a lot of these tasks that can be streamlined. Especially, there are a lot of tasks that aren't particularly high value. It's more like just workhorse content.

An example, also literally something I was just doing today, is some of my busy work when I record an episode of something, is put in the transcript. I put the transcript into AI, and then I fine-tune things so I can get a YouTube description, I get a LinkedIn post, I get a Slack post, essentially, five pieces of output that I need. That actually took me a bit to bother setting this up.

But I then created a custom GPT for this task. I created this output, and I actually said to my assistant, can you please give this an extra look because I'm letting you know I automated this, and I want another set of eyes on this. But now, assuming this works, and I think it actually worked pretty well, then I'm almost going to look forward to doing this task because it freed up, not even that much time, it freed up so much mental bandwidth of stuff that I need to do.

Presumably soon, I'll be able to have some agent that is saying, as soon as this segment is done, take the transcript from Zoom or Fireflies. Now go put it into this custom GPT, take this output, put it into a Google Doc, alert Jane that it's ready, and now she can handle her piece, which maybe some pieces that'll be automated, too.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. No, but I like that. But to me, as a marketer or just someone creating content, those are examples of where AI- when we talk about AI is coming for jobs- okay, we're not going to go down that path today. But I understand where it comes from. But I think you talk about the mundane stuff, the thing that takes you so long. You're creating the content. You’re recording the podcast, recording whatever it is, the video output. You've done the work up front. Why then spend four or five hours having to transcribe it? Why rewrite the post? To me, that's exactly the opportunity. But it doesn't mean your intellect, your experience, your knowledge is going to go away.

David Berkowitz:
The thing that I don't think we actually even pay enough attention to is mental bandwidth, because a lot of these tasks, they don't take four or five hours. A lot of them are actually pretty quick. It's just you know that at some point, before you shut down your laptop for the day, if you ever get to do so, you have to do some of these things. And someone is waiting for you to do these things. People are expecting this stuff to be ready and that they have a recording to watch.

People in my microcosm are counting on me for something that might be kind of minor, but it's important to them. And the longer I spend not doing that during the day, the longer it's just taking up other space that I could be now thinking proactively of how to solve a client's need. This is some of that power where I think there's a difference between a time spent and just time dealt with and mental energy.

Dayle Hall:
I think your examples there are probably similar to a lot of people in marketing who are creating content, whether it's product marketing and communications or anything like that. Those are really good examples of where AI, I think, took hold very quickly within the marketers to try it.

If you think about your communities that you've been working with now, and particularly your latest one that's focused on AI, what are you hearing from them? Are they pretty similar to what you've just described in terms of the content side? What else are people looking at in terms of where to start? Are they looking at bigger implications around brand management or demand gen? How are they starting to audit where they are today to see what they can use to help?

David Berkowitz:
Some of it is based on what's taken out most of their time. And I think that we're seeing just more and more useful applications across the spectrum. When something like Microsoft Copilot comes up, for instance, a lot of people don't love using it, except in Excel. Excel users love Copilot. They're gaining some superpowers now. Google Sheets, Google's done a good job incorporating Gemini into some of their suites there. Things that take a lot more steps as compared to what most people are doing in a Word doc, they start appreciating that way more.

I think, right now, what I also look for when trying to figure out what should be the topics that we're covering in the community is just getting a mix of areas that include some that we're not always exposed to. Having Catharine Montgomery, who's got this wonderful firm where she focuses on bias in AI, and areas like this are so important, she's coming on to share the second year of research.

Bias in AI, on one hand, it's okay, does this really affect some of the content marketing I'm doing? Does this affect some of the spreadsheets I'm doing? Some of the stuff is when I talk to people like her, I'm like, oh, wait a second, this is really coming from a very biased perspective. This is assuming that the target audience is an all- male industry, where it might skew male, but it's actually way more diverse than that. And so why is it only using male examples? There are just constant versions of this.

And then when you get into image-related prompts, it becomes way worse. If you have even some of the better image generation apps, create images of VCs, in the US alone, it's just all white male, aged 35. There's this prototype. They're all dressed the exact same way. Yes, it's a male-skewing industry, but there's so many other diverse factors going on, especially where a lot of the backgrounds are and a lot of the age demographics and things like this. Anyway, it's just so important to have some of these different perspectives that you realize, oh, it actually affects my job maybe more than I thought it did.

Dayle Hall:
We've had a couple of other guests that are part of AI ethical groups, some nonprofits. And one of the interesting ones that we had someone that was actually doing was in technology for the mortgage insurance industry. One of the things that I hadn't thought about is bias in AI specifically around things like mortgage approvals and background assessments. There was a lot of concern around there, that if you're from a certain demographic, certain ethnicity, certain location, that you're going to have less favorable terms, let's say. I think that was a good example to me of why bias is important. But yeah, I get your example is true as well in terms of when we're looking at content or images and so on.

I think marketing would definitely- I'm not saying ahead of the curve, but I think they were open and they're always open to test new technologies and try new things, which I think is really interesting. Outside of things like the communications, the content side, one of the things that marketers are absolutely constantly challenged with- I refresh my demand gen dashboard two or three times a day, even though it doesn't change that much, two or three times. But there's this whole concept around marketers are there to raise the brand awareness, but they're also there to drive demand. I think that's one of the areas where I think we're always looking for- if we could just find out more of what works to drive demand, let's just do more of that. Now, it's not that easy. Do you have any examples of people that are using AI specifically for demand, and are they getting a lot of improvements out of that?

David Berkowitz:
I think that we're still just coming out of this stretch where there's a lot of promise. A lot of the applications of it are still some version of spray and pray, but with AI making the spraying and praying more efficient. But we're starting to see some more tools that make a lot of this easier, and some of it's looking at different parts of it. There are some things that are better at personalizing messaging based on some kind of signal. You see someone is attending a certain event, or commented on competitors’ posts. These kinds of inputs, which can be really hard for humans to monitor themselves, if ever, being able to act quickly on signals like that can actually help move the needle. So this idea that as we get over this hump of there just being too much content, too much noise out there, that there is promise for AI to be more helpful.

And even just building on a lot of the work, let's say email marketers have known for a long time of as far as just being able to segment audiences better and being able to personalize messages so that if you're a retailer and you're targeting women, probably don't want to show them a lot of men's clothing. There are a lot of basic things like that. Now, how do you get much richer signals out there?

We're also seeing these things on the data front, where the more kinds of data you can put in one place, the more opportunity you have to see a bigger picture. There's a company that I've seen, Madtech.ai, for instance, that's doing a lot of great work in this space. In that case, they've built a ton of different connectors to different data sources. And that's step one, because a lot of marketers don't even have that or don't even know where to ask. If you're on the social content side, you might not have any CRM data to work with, let alone trying to get any meaningful sales data over to the marketing side of the house.

I've literally sat across from the head of sales, who I would barely talk to today- and some of these I realized in hindsight, like, damn, what a missed opportunity. But I've had to learn that and you have to learn what to look for. So that's maybe the table stakes layer. But then that next layer of just being able to ask questions of this and have it also proactively surface what’s looking like an insight, helping marketers make decisions better, that becomes really powerful.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. Let me ask you a question or a little about using AI in the prompt. There is the rise of prompt engineering. Obviously, within our business, in the tech side, a lot of people are using it for writing code, checking code. We have conversational interfaces, and now actually there's really complex pipelines that a business used to move data was created three years ago by someone who's no longer there. And if you put the prompt in, you can actually get a very simple description of what this thing does. It's almost like the power of using AI is in the prompt, as well as the capabilities of what the AI can actually do. How important do you think understanding the right prompts, from a marketing perspective and this whole concept of prompt engineering for marketing, how important is that for us to understand to make sure we get the most out of it?

David Berkowitz:
I have very mixed feelings on this. The book, I was even debating whether to even put a chapter on prompting in there, and I wound up doing so, but I sum it up at the start in two words, and that's, be curious. Now, if you're asking good questions of what you have, you'll probably wind up getting to some really good results.

Now, some of this, I think, actually does a disservice to good prompt engineering, but where we are shifting, we're not fully there yet, is the memory of all the major LLMs, all the major AI engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, they're all constantly expanding. It's like this expanding universe. It's what's referred to as the context window. All of these major AI engines have ways to connect more and more sources of your information, Google Drive and Box and Dropbox and some other specific applications. We're going to see more and more of HubSpot and Salesforce and all kinds of other sources being plugged into some of these directly.

Once you have more history, more context, more relevant information, especially for a given campaign or a given client or what your given need state is, then you're not going to have to constantly remind ChatGPT or Gemini that your audience is Fortune 500 CTOs. It's going to know all that. It's going to remember, it's going to remind you that, if you wind up going too far outside of that field. Some of it is trying to be aware of where it has enough information, where it doesn't. A very simple version of this is ChatGPT. I love the use of projects. It's just a simple folder system, can upload 20 files to a project, and so it constantly knows to go back to that.

Now, if you have one project, but you're starting different chats in there, then ChatGPT isn't looking across those different chats. If new information comes up outside of that, and then you start another chat, it's still going to have these blind spots, and you're going to feel like you already have this conversation. ChatGPT is not that somewhere else.

Gemini has actually been much more like anti-organization in a way that, just throw it all out there. It's not so shocking built on Google. Google has all the information. Just let us know what you need. We'll find it. We'll remember. So it's just different styles. And I think, over time, though, that will lead to the prompts mattering less than the history mattering more.

There are lots of very specific kinds of outputs where you can often use AI to help you write a better prompt. When I use deep research, for instance, I will sometimes first ask an AI engine, help me write a good prompt for deep research. And then I'll vet this to make sure I'm getting all the right information out of it because it's a little bit higher stakes.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, I get that. From the discussions in the communities, the people you talk to with all these- again, there's multiple technologies, there's an expectation that we can start using AI. We're trying to figure out the right prompts. I think marketers are still embracing it. Are we overwhelmed? Are we struggling to figure out where to focus? Do you hear from the marketers and their CEOs telling why aren't we doing more AI? What's the pulse of the marketers right now?

David Berkowitz:
It's hard to have a pulse when it's more of a personal preference. When I was doing an audit of one agency's team and how a number of them are using AI, the folks who were most reluctant to use AI were those who were closest to the client. They don't want something just coming off as robotic and AI generated and formulaic. And I love that. I think having that pride in one's work is important and it can lead to work that is differentiated.

I think that there's also, with AI, I've never seen such rapid adoption as I have when it comes to AI. I've been through a lot of these waves of search and social and mobile and Internet of Things and Web3 and all these kinds of side smaller ones. I'm so used to- especially marketers who have been around a while and maybe more traditional businesses are like, oh, TikTok, that's something my kid or nephew was using. I don't need to pay attention to that. It might sit on the fence for 5, 10 years. I haven't seen any of that happen with AI.

There are organizational challenges for adoption, for sure, and there are people who are like, maybe I don't want to put all my information into an LLM. To me, that's healthy skepticism. You should wonder, if you put this information in, then who owns the information and then who owns the output that you create with this? Those could be really important questions. So I don't think we should be dismissive of those who are more hesitant to implement some of this either.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. I always talk about marketing as it's art and science. There's obviously the science of the numbers that you're trying to get to. There's the output. There's conversion rates of pipelines and all those kinds of things. But there's also the creative side of it, the psychological side of it. And I've always felt that marketers are, in general, a creative bunch, different skills. You can be creative in marketing operations. You can be creative in brand management, in creative campaigns.

Do you think that with the growth of AI and the adoption, which you talk about, it's one of the most adopted technologies that you can see across this kind of role, is that helping us- is it fueling creativity, or is it almost we're going to get too reliant on that, and that will be the creative outlet, we will just let AI do it? What are you seeing?

David Berkowitz:
There are already some studies coming out that if you lean on AI too much, you remember less about-

Dayle Hall:
I read one. Yeah. I think I saw the same stat recently. I showed my kids the same thing saying, see, you have to do it and then have AI take a look at it. Don't have AI do it. You won't remember anything.

David Berkowitz:
Yeah. This sounds so outdated, but it would be very helpful. I printed out a report that I got from deep research recently. I was sitting on the couch, reading with a pen and paper. My daughter, who is reading her book across from me, and she's like, what are you doing? I explained, this is a really important topic that I'm trying to get smarter about. I told her where it came from. She goes, you have to go and look up the sources. AI makes a lot of stuff up. She's 11 and she knows this. Damn, I'm not doing everything right, but I'm doing something right there.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, no, absolutely.

David Berkowitz:
And it's so important right now. We also think, what are some of those skills? I'd say most of us are going to have a much worse time being able to drive to even familiar places without GPS in our cars. I walk around Manhattan here. Sometimes I feel so proud of myself when I'm not opening Google Maps to find directions to somewhere. I know if this bus or subway or walking is faster. Maybe the subway is going to save me- no, I can put away the damn phone. But I'm probably worse at that than I would have been if I had constant access to maps.

So which of those things, where it's okay, like some basic fact retrieval. Presumably the Internet could help us with a lot of that. We don't have to remember every last fact in our heads either. But how do we interpret this? And I think the thing that we have to watch out for is there is a version of how all this plays out where Disney's Wall-E becomes prophetic.

Dayle Hall:
I used to watch that with my kids, and we reference it all the time with how the civilization may end up.

David Berkowitz:
I think Wall-E is about as close as you can get to some kind of worst-case doomsdays era. It's amazing in a G or maybe PG-rated movie, but wow.

Dayle Hall:
And then way ahead of its time.

David Berkowitz:
Yes.

Dayle Hall:
That was before ChatGPT and all the things going on. Was that 15 years ago now? Maybe 10.

David Berkowitz:
So do any of us really want this? There's some other terrifying versions like Soylent Green, which I also had to watch the other day because I can't get enough of these doomsdays scenarios. But we can see where this goes if we let our guard down. Some of this is going to be marketers and other execs who are trying to take this into their own hands. There's always going to be some subset of folks who are trying to go tame this, make this their own, learn how to manage it. And there are some who are okay with just letting it manage them. I think that's going to be a huge difference maker, but it will be pretty sad for those who are like, you know what, it doesn't matter if these college kids are just generating all the reports on ChatGPT. If ChatGPT can do that, then they could do something else with their time. It's like, how do we go and get beyond that? But there's no way of avoiding that there will be two sides to that.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. This is going to be my follow-up question to that. I have a daughter, too. She's going into her senior year. So now we're looking at colleges, and we need a college tour. My guy, Hector, that was giving us the tour of the college, asks my daughter, what does she want to do? And she's like, my mom and dad are both in business. They're in marketing. Maybe I want to go down that route. And I'm like, oh, why would you want to be in marketing? Do something more important.

But it's interesting for me. If you look at marketers that may be doing business, but they're doing marketing at a college now, and obviously things are changing, for someone like your daughter, who's 11, my daughter who’s 17, if they really did want to get into the area of marketing and you were giving some advice at this point to say, look, if you're really serious about this, here's the things, here's the skills, here's the technology, here's the principles, learn the fundamentals, I agree. But what are the things that you would potentially tell them to get ahead of the competition?

David Berkowitz:
There are a few things. One is try everything. So many of the best technologies right now are free test stuff. Find some passion projects, some Instagram or TikTok accounts that maybe you're not even trying to promote or something. Just give yourself some ways to go and test this stuff, build things, again, even if it's not for anyone else to see. So there's that piece of it.

The other side of it is also the critical thinking piece is going to be so important. Push yourself to just read a novel that maybe you weren't going to read before. Take a few classes. One of the things that I think becomes such a missed opportunity is when you get so focused on your major and you don't realize there are thousands of colleges where there are just so many incredible professors from all walks of life and so many incredible people to learn from, and you're not going to have that opportunity again. And it's almost like college is wasted on the youth in some ways.

And it very well could be some of these things like a random French literature class or something that's going to have no bearing on your job, and that actually makes you a better thinker and a more interesting person. Maybe that leads you to spend a semester in Paris that you wouldn't have otherwise because you were just going to try to get some cool internship in your field and these things that pay dividends. And so it's, yes, test, learn, experiment, connect with folks who have access to the- even an 18-year-old kid has access to the entirety of LinkedIn. If an 18-year-old wound up saying they saw something about my book, they don't even have to have read it, and they wouldn't ask me a question about how fast I'd respond to them, I freaking love that.

And I've seen this with some recent grads to show some of that spunk and all that. If it's one thing where it's just, I want to connect on LinkedIn, I don't know who this person is, but you're telling me you actually read a blog post of mine or you listen to this podcast, and now you want to share something you've done. I will stop what I'm doing because most people aren't like that. So there's so many ways to get ahead and take advantage, in really good ways, of the tools that you have access to that you and I sure didn't have access to.

Dayle Hall:
Amen. Yeah No, that's really interesting. We've been going for a while now, and I don't want to- I think we could have three episodes of this around some of these specific topics. But I think we've covered a good amount of content. I guess our last question as we close this off is really based on your experience, not just with marketers, maybe in your personal life. If you look at what AI is doing for us today and the value it's bringing personally and professionally, if you could use AI, that maybe you're not today, something you're really excited about, what would you use? What would you create to use? And is there something that actually, on the other side of the fence, that says, whatever we do, we cannot automate this? Whatever happens, it just won't work? What are the two?

David Berkowitz:
I'd say they're both related to each other. And with what I can't wait to use AI for is understanding my own network better. As a community builder and just someone who talks to a lot of people and likes humans more than I dislike humans, then I get hit up every day for requests of- today, there's someone asking me about do I know any good mid-level performance marketers. Yesterday, there was a guy whose company I've been advising, and he's trying to get in front of a very specific buyer on the retail side. I usually don't know who I know. I'm connected to a lot of people. Just about everyone I'm connected to on LinkedIn, I've at least had a conversation with. I don't go and just add hundreds of people a day. I don't see any value of that. I have all these thousands of people in my community. They're people who I often have to look up to see if they're even in my community, because I know them from a few other places, and I'm not offended if they're not in there. But there are just so many dots that I could connect.

Also, if I knew this person from what they were doing five years ago, I might not know that they've pivoted and now they've gone from brand marketer to VC. I should really be talking to them for someone who's raising a pre-seed round right now. All of this stuff, and I think we're starting to get there. There are some cool tools like Happenstance.ai. There's Connect The Dots, CTD, some things that are actually helping me start to understand my network better. I can't wait for that to be just really robust and me to be able to ask very deep questions in natural language, and it comes up with the most relevant folks.

Then that flip side of it is then what I don't want to use AI for is that next piece of it. And that is the reconnecting and that human touch. Just today, I was having lunch in Koreatown with someone who's from the Bay Area. It was so wonderful where I can't remember the last time she and I saw each other, I was like, pick it up where we left off. I follow so much of her stuff on Facebook, too. And she's doing some really cool stuff that I wasn't able to get from the opportunity to share on Facebook. All of this then just becomes how do we then find ways to more deeply connect with each other?

Dayle Hall:
Keeping human connection.

David Berkowitz:
Human connection, and also remembering how to have a conversation. I’m in a period of my life where I'm on some dating apps and there are some things where I know that guys are at least probably worse at this than women, but when you get some of these one-word answers back, whether it's business-wise or personally, and it's giving me nothing to work with. And so just how do we relearn the art of conversation?

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. So not going down the WALL-E path where we're all in flying chairs, watching our own TV screen and not-

David Berkowitz:
God, I hope not.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, you and me both. You and me both. Look, it's been a great podcast. We haven't done one with someone like yourself, so this is really unique for us to have. So I appreciate that.

I want to just close withI know you have a book that you have that I'm interested to hear more about. So just for the listeners on the podcast, tell us a little bit about that as we close.

David Berkowitz:
Yeah, sure thing. I released the non-obvious guide to using AI for marketing this March. It's covering some of the topics we discussed, but it's looking at the different phases of marketing, from campaign ideation, to content and creative, to customer relationship management, and a number of these areas, even early on. It's like overcoming objections to using AI in your organization, which I think can be pretty useful and will hold up for quite a while.

Yeah, it was a fun challenge trying to put something in print that will be useful for more than a day or two. Every day I'm reading articles of, which AI model is now the smartest one? They're all a hell of a lot better than they were three months ago, and starting 2026, they're all going to be leaving these ones in the dust. But a lot of the just ideas for how to apply this stuff in some kind of useful way, I think that's going to be more enduring than just whatever the tool du jour is.

Dayle Hall:
That's great. I'm going to order one of those. I don't know if you recommend actually printing out and reading the book or the audio book, but I might get both and give one to my wife and she can have the other one.

David Berkowitz:
Well, I'd be honored. Thank you.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. David, I really appreciate the time. It was great to get the insights. I hope at some point, maybe I'll schedule something with you in, let's say, 12 months’ time when we get into the next season, and we'll see what else has changed in the landscape for marketers and AI.

David Berkowitz:
Can't wait. I look forward to keep tuning into more of your series, and it's just fantastic work. So thanks for having me, Dayle.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks, everyone, for listening and for joining us on this episode. And we'll see you on the next one.