AI Announcer (00:10.808)
This is Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders who've had it with AI hype and want the real deal. Greg's your seasoned go-to guy for scaling sales teams and cracking the Silicon Valley playbook. Clint is a successful startup veteran who turns big ideas into thriving ventures. They cut through the noise to bring you analysis and playbooks on using AI to launch new ideas, scale your business, and stop getting left behind. Now, here are your hosts.
Hey everybody, this is Clint. Welcome to Prompt This. We've got a great show lined up ahead of us today. We've got an interview with somebody that I used to work with at one point in time and have been following along what he's doing with this new company. And he brings out a lot of really, really cool problems that he's setting out to solve with AI. Probably the thing that really stands out the most for me is how, you
And this is Greg.
Clint (01:04.319)
In today's world of artificial intelligence, people are going to Google less and less for learning about products and searching about products, and they're going to chat GPT or copilot or Gemini. And it's really kind of changing the whole mechanics of how marketing organizations make sure that their products get seen front and center.
Yeah, definitely. This guest talks about AI search optimization, and this is the first time we've gone into this conversation. So this is definitely a must listen. You you're going to learn a few things here and be sure to stick around a little bit later on. And he goes into some tools that he uses personally that we've never heard before. So that's near the end. So be sure to stick around for this entire episode.
All right, let's jump into it. Here we go.
Clint (01:57.9)
With us today is Deepak Deolalikar, co-founder of Ziply AI, where he leads strategy for an AI-driven marketing automation and search optimization company. So Deepak and I have known each other for a while. He's a real veteran of the digital transformation space. And the part I really enjoy about him is how he kind of blends his technical curiosity with a historian's lens on innovation.
He does this fantastic job of drawing parallels between today's AI revolution and the early days of the internet, really offering a clear-eyed insight on how technology adoption patterns repeat themselves and what marketers can learn from them. Deepak, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you so much and I am excited to chat with you both.
All right, well, Clint, you've been a CMO a few times now. This show is definitely in your wheelhouse. I've stolen the show the last couple of rounds with the sales guys, but this is all marketing. What do you think about branding in AI? Is it different now?
I think it's harder to be honest. I'd love to hear what Deepak has to say, but I feel like it's harder because everybody is talking about AI this, AI that. AI has been slapped on every single billboard that you can find in Silicon Valley. In fact, the URL for our own podcast is promptthis.ai. Don't you have a similar .ai for Ziply, Deepak? Yeah, we do. What do you think about my thoughts that it's actually harder to stand out?
Deepak Deolalikar (03:34.058)
Yeah, actually, every time I talk to somebody about Ziply, the first question they ask is, how is this different from XYZ? So I kind of know that I have to stand out. And it is becoming harder, because the tools are making it easier to create products very easily. Tools are making it easier to create content very easily. So it's very hard to stand out. And what has not changed in
in biology is our ability to absorb information. Maybe a million years down the road that might change, but the ability to produce content has drastically improved.
No way, I'm gonna have one of those neuro links plugged in and I'm gonna be able to absorb the entire internet in 20 minutes or less.
That's GPT and then it will make decisions for me and I'll...
That's what everybody's telling me. It's as simple as that.
Deepak Deolalikar (04:27.118)
So I think it is harder to stand out and that is where AI can help you become productive. AI cannot help you become creative. So in order to be creative and stand out, you still need the human brain. that's big startups, founders like me who will be creative and standing out in terms of messaging will succeed. And that's a lesson that I'm learning.
as we are launching Zypline.
Yeah, so you you mentioned Ziply, you mentioned founders like yourself. Tell us about Ziply and what it is and describe what you're doing and what you're building there.
Absolutely. Ziply, the best way to describe is we are targeting CMOs in B2B companies, right now tech companies, but B2B and some B2B to C companies. they have a challenge today, CMOs. They have to create content in blogs, social, inbound content, collateral, ebooks. And in order to stand out, they have to actually create more of these.
Because if everybody is doing the same thing, how do you stand out? So, but they don't have the bandwidth or the headcount or the budget to do it. So we are building a platform that connects their, and before I move on, not only do they have to produce content, they have to produce content to optimize for AI now. So when people search on chat GPT, you need to show up, right? Otherwise that's lost pipeline. So how do you create content strategically?
Deepak Deolalikar (06:08.02)
at scale personalized on brand without adding headcount is what Zippee is about.
That's a good description. I like that in there. It does a lot of different things though. you're talking about creating content, you're talking about amplifying content. Aren't there companies that are already... And then you also talked about AI search optimization as well. Aren't there companies that already specialize in those areas?
There are, actually. And then what happens is that you need multiple tools to do multiple aspects of it. So for example, there are tools out there, many tools to do AI search. And I think it's a feature now. It commoditized already. But now, out of that comes recommendations. OK, what are the topics that I need to write about? How do you do that now? Some of these tools do provide it. Most don't.
And then now you have to rely on ChatGPT or Gemini or use another tool. Now you have to write the content in your own voice. So there are tools for that as well. And then you have to amplify that, orchestrate that through social on LinkedIn and Reddit and so on. Now there are social tools for that. But CMOs don't want seven different tools. It's just a burden.
No, we enjoy cut and pasting. It's fun.
Deepak Deolalikar (07:29.558)
you
You guys are starting to sell me on the fact that marketing is really hard.
Yeah, it is hard man, let me tell you.
Somebody actually told me once that if there is an Excel spreadsheet that people are using for something, it's a SAF idea. And I extended that. If there is a cut and paste multiple times of the same thing again and again, that's a SAF idea as well.
Yeah, there you go. Well, that's, you just described the whole creative process for marketing, right? Who you want to target, how well is my brand being heard today? How do I build content that gets people thinking about us, talking about us? How do I push it out there? you can, yeah, all those pieces together. That's pretty cool. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts over the last six months, surprise, surprise.
Deepak Deolalikar (07:58.222)
back in.
Clint (08:21.184)
And one of my favorites has been one that talks a lot about vibe marketing. And it's kind of, it sounded really cool because it talked about all those pieces that you were doing in there. But the kind of the, the, the, the end of the podcast was now go get seven different tools and, and buy an eighth one for like a workflow automation to pull it all together. I want to go learn seven tools and then wire them together with some workflow tool. No, thanks.
And then they require maintenance, management, tweaking. What if some tool can actually do it for them in the background and connect all these dots? See that alignment is actually very important. So you don't want silos of, this is a visibility piece. This is a content creation piece. This is a social media piece. Even today, in many organizations, within the same organization, there are like three separate roles. If I talk to a social media manager, they have absolutely no clue what keywords that they should be writing content for.
vice versa. So connecting those dots become important. And that's actually a very critical component for showing up on AI Search, showing your domain authority, your topical authority across these channels, across these forums that you are known for as a company. connecting that dots is actually very important. And alignment is what we bring into our platform.
You know, I've been hearing this AI search optimization. I've been hearing that a lot and I see it everywhere. You're the perfect person to tell me what does that mean?
In the old days, when you wanted to look for something, best headphone for XYZ, or let's say, in a business context, your best accounting software for SMB, you would Google search, right? And then hope that in the first three, four, or the first page, you will get your answer. Google became extremely good at that. But people who were creating content got even better.
Deepak Deolalikar (10:23.032)
game the system with keywords and links and so on. So you can't really tell whether those first page is actually relevant to you. Now, when ChatGPD came out, ChatGPD started with content and all that. But now it is very good at finding information for you. So what it does is it collects information from various sources and gives you a recommendation, not 10 blue links. So AI Search basically means
people are using chat GPT and Gemini to do their initial search, not on Google search, but on chat GPT search. That's what is called AI search. So now you have to optimize your strategy to be listed there. Because if you are not there, my 95-year-old father actually uses Ask AI for his searches, for any health related. The other day, he was searching for best blood pressure machine for home.
and it came back with sleep.
He's doing a product search that he would have done on Google. Now he's doing a product search on AI, and those blood pressure monitor companies are all hoping that their name comes out on the list, but they don't really know if it will or won't, right?
Exactly. And ChartGPT might recommend only three best products. If you are not in those three, that's last pipeline for you. So 70 % of buyers in B2B, are actually starting their search in AI now in one of these engines.
Clint (11:53.122)
That's a big number. when you say it the way you did, that makes me think that what B2B buyers are leaning more heavily on AI searches than maybe B2C or type buyers?
Yeah, think about it. When you do a Google search, best CRM software, you'll probably get Salesforce and HubSpot. I already know them, but they are so heavily optimized on their content for those keywords that they will show up over there no matter what. Now, you may have a very specific use case. I'm a real estate residential agent or something. I don't want HubSpot or Salesforce. Is there anything specific to me?
You might have to go into page number two or three to find the right answer. So who has the time for that? So Google Search favors those who can invest heavily in SEO and even paid ads.
on.
Chat GPT doesn't work. AI Search doesn't work like that. It looks for authority. It looks for content from various sources. It looks for, there people in Reddit talking about a particular software? Is this connected to their content on their blog or their website? Is that collaborated with some good information on some news article? If it finds all of that, then it says, you know what? This company is probably a good link I should include. And that's when it surfaces that up. It's not really a
Clint (13:15.56)
A lot of people talking about you.
Exactly, you cannot game it anymore.
Right. Marketers need new strategies to be showing.
you can just game it differently. don't know. Don't don't there's a there's a way to game the system isn't there? Kind of what Ziply does is it helps you helps you build audience.
Why is it are not kind of gaming the system. We are telling you that, in my company, whenever a prospect does this kind of a search on AI, I want to make sure that I am listed. Tell me what type of content I should create, and where should I talk about it? Where should I promote this content? So that's what we give. If you do it, then your chances increases. We are not claiming that you will do that. We are just increasing the probability and odds of you showing up by these engines.
Deepak Deolalikar (14:02.988)
And yeah, that's what we do.
Well, we've done a lot of work here at Prompt This to build our audience. It takes a lot of work. It does take a lot of It's hard to find all those different channels to engage on and get content out there. And full disclosure for our audience, Greg and I have started using Ziply ourselves for our own efforts. And it helps get everything teed up. It really does, I gotta tell you.
And thank you so much for that.
So let's dig in a little bit deeper on what you're building and maybe shift gears from the exact tool that you're building with Zippling and more along the lines of how you're building it. mean, it's a different way to build software these days, isn't it? I mean, it's just really, well, you tell me, what are your observations on what's new and different about building software in the AI era?
What's new and different? Definitely speeds have increased quite a bit. You can churn out an MVP in four hours now. I've done it myself for some of the ideas that I had earlier. So that definitely has changed. So the whole concept of validating discovery, experimentation, what's going to work, what resonates with users, that cycle has dramatically shifted. And that's why you're seeing a lot of one-person companies coming up, building these.
Deepak Deolalikar (15:36.07)
different kinds of tools, vertical solutions, and so on. So that definitely has changed a bit in the age of AI. But I think what has not changed is, we solving a real problem? What are the jobs to be done for the customer, for the users? And is there a significant benefit? And that's where I think the industry is right now. Going back to the internet days also, everything was going on the web.
Was it necessary? everything supposed to be net? Grocery shopping was on the net in 1997, but the world was not ready. And after a billion dollars of investment, they were shut down. So a little bit of that will be happening as we speak. But I think over time, what I have seen.
You're predicting some from some first-generation software. This is kind of too early
Yeah, I call it the cats and dogs moments of YouTube, cat videos of YouTube. So when YouTube came out, everybody was posting cat videos. And people thought, how silly is that? Who wants to watch cats? And now YouTube is one of the major, major marketing channels for millions of businesses. So something like that will happen. I don't know what. I can't predict that.
We are going through our first version of cats on YouTube moment right now. Gimmicky, creating your head shots, creating a video. But there are some interesting use cases that I know somebody who...
Clint (17:10.473)
Do you hear that, Greg? He just called some of the things that we've been playing around with his gimmicky. I thought they were fun. Yeah, I hear your point in terms of delivering on the full vision of AI. Creating a new headshot or a video isn't...
I even say.
Greg (17:26.846)
It sounds like just marketing, the whole craft of it is changing and this is going to be changing it. Where do you see a marketer's role going over the next two years?
Well, I don't think the role of the marketeer is actually changing. It's actually becoming even more important to tell the right story, to say why my gimmick or my product actually is going to help you substantially, whether it is helping me make... Why do products exist? They help you make money, they help you save money, they help you save time, productivity, or reduce risk, or improve experience. Those are the five reasons products exist in general, right?
Yeah, there are some other product that gives you self-actualization. Let's not talk about those. But if you can make me money or save me substantial money, then yes, I will listen to it. So telling that part of the story is actually important. The same thing I'm having with Wiclea as well. Am I just an AI feature tool telling them, write this content, press a button? No, that's just feature. What am I really saying? I'm saying that
you can still be relevant in your noisy marketplace, Mr. customer or Miss customer without adding headcount. So I'm letting you do with fewer resources at scale that is on brand so that you don't go into that old world of, I don't have budget, I don't have bandwidth. So that's the problem I'm solving. So every product has to think along those lines. So from that perspective, I would say the marketeers role actually has not changed. It actually is becoming even more pronounced.
Now the next wave will be how do I really transform people's lives, right? And I'm trying to think of an analogy in here. What would be a good analogy? I mean, I can go back to printing press, for example. You know, it changed the way it transformed humanity. Why? Because it created a new access of information to people who did not have. The Bible was printed and people had access to Bible now.
Deepak Deolalikar (19:31.608)
They didn't even have that. They were reliant on the cardinals and the popes to give them that religious knowledge. But now they have the Bible in their homes. So it transformed the whole human experience. There are so many examples like that. What would be the next transformation? I have my theories. My theory is that we have built all our business processes, human processes.
and incrementally improved. So we went from writing to typewriting to word processor to chat GPT. Those are all like incremental improvements. I want to question, do we even need an invoice, for example? Like creating an invoice is a pain, right? We have to send an invoice. Now we have to follow up with the customer. Is there some automation that can do it in the back end automatically?
Blockchain was supposed to solve that wasn't that would blockchain
You guys definitely aren't finance guys. They're crawling.
Another guest maybe. But I think we have to look at, and there are so many other issues, not just in the B2B world.
Clint (20:39.31)
Interesting point there, you're really laying out that a lot of how businesses are organized today is designed to make up for the inefficiencies of people working together. If you can take away those inefficiencies, do you have a completely different org chart, an org chart of the future, if you will? Exactly.
Exactly.
It sounds like, we asked a lot of guests if AI is just going to take over jobs and people are going to lose jobs from what I'm hearing. Sounds like marketing is getting more complex and more complex. And you could be a marketer. You need tools that can make you into three, four, five, 10 X your output. Then you used to just to be relevant.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Deepak Deolalikar (21:37.518)
Yeah, and I think some people, some job might change. there are people are already talking about like FDE, like forward deployed engineers and GTM engineers and so on. I think job categories will change. Some jobs will definitely go away for sure. I can't tell which ones, but and that happened at every innovation. I remember
Every one of these innovation waves that go back through time, everybody was predicting it was the end of civilization, if you will, because jobs were being replaced with automation. Then you end up opening up markets where it's 10 times the number of jobs get created than there were before. How many content creators...
digital, how many marketing content creators were there back in the mid 80s compared to the mid 2020s, right? You know, that's these tools that just made it so easy for for some of your people to get involved. So I very much agree that that we're gonna we're gonna unlock jobs in there. What do you think about that, Greg?
Good.
Yeah, I think.
Greg (22:54.254)
I think it's just, everything's changing so fast. We used to be able to predict at least what things would look like. You know, we'd ask questions, you know, where do you see yourself in five years? I don't think you can actually answer that question. No.
Not even five months now.
Deepak Deolalikar (23:13.614)
Maria, one thing that is different about this innovation is the speed at which AI has evolved. That definitely has changed. I remember in 1994, 1995, actually my first browser was a Mozilla browser. Netscape was just coming out with it. It wasn't even released when I started. And then suddenly there was like a torrent of search engine directories.
browsers, and then eventually they all kind of settle down into two browsers or three browsers. We are seeing the same thing happening again. There's a Comet browser, the Atlas browser, and so on, but eventually the world will settle down to two or three major platforms for different things. You want to make a video? Go here. You want to create content? Go here. Think like that.
Clint (24:06.2)
You know, I've been thinking about everything you're just saying right now and just kind of the whole accelerator factor and, you know, the job enabler and all the pieces in there. just kind of, I don't know, I've always enjoyed hearing your thoughts on this, Deepak. Tell me a bit more about how you see AI working in civilization in the future. Let's go real high level for a minute.
I think there are a lot of problems in human civilization that needs to be solved. Poverty, wars, misery, diseases, treatments. we were hampered by lack of either tools or expertise, bandwidth, data alignment. Think about cancer research, for example. There's so much research happening around the world in different
scientific institutions and medical establishment, but there's no way to like unify them. There is, but it's like cumbersome and difficult. you know, giving that 10x boost to there, maybe we'll find a cure for the next cancer or the next disease and so on. So information asymmetry is a big problem in society today. People who don't have access to information.
I'll give you a recent example. was reading a post. Somebody got a medical bill from the hospital. You know how the medical system is in the US. They actually took a picture of that bill and fed it to ChatGPT and said, look at all the codes and tell me if it was billed correctly. what ChatGPT did was it looked at every code and it says, hey, this is out of code.
Good one.
Deepak Deolalikar (25:57.772)
They should not be billing you this because you are in this medical plan and
$2500 bill came down to like literally $800 bill. Now that is an example of an information asymmetry. Now imagine, expand that to like legal issues.
I got a little lost there. So how is that an example of information asymmetry? It's because...
the patient did not have access to all the legalese on that. They would have just paid that $12,000 if they had not even questioned. But now with AI, they were able to at least question, what is this charged for? Why am I getting billed for this? And the hospital finally agreed to reduce it to like atrociously like $1,000 or something.
was amazing. Yeah, you know, I'm seeing, you know, I know some of it's gimmicky, but, you know, when you look at social media, I see all sorts of little videos, you know, leading to things like that, where, you know, someone will upload a picture maybe of their air conditioner control box and the wiring inside and ask it what's wrong, why doesn't it work? And, chat GPT gives it an answer like the screw is too loose over on the yellow wire.
Greg (27:16.438)
and you would normally have brought someone in that would sell you a brand new air conditioning unit for your whole house. Now, maybe that's facetious, I can see this thing is gonna change a lot, a lot of our societal problems.
Actually, one person took a picture of his room. It was a messy room with things lying around. I said, Chad, GPD, tell me what should I do? Just organize my room. And it actually went item by item. I put this over here, put this over here. I said, you know what?
I needed that when my kids were younger.
Let's build that as a company.
give me a robot that will do it for me, I will pay for that. That's a of transformation of AI that you can do. I'm actually waiting for the demo I saw of somebody washing the dishes and cleaning the dishes. That's something useful. I can go for a hike while the robot takes care of my dishes.
Clint (27:58.882)
Yeah, no.
Greg (28:13.998)
That'd be great. Well, since we're talking about that, let's talk about tools you use. What do you use outside of work, maybe for hobbies and things like that? How do you use AI? Are there any specific tools you use for fun?
When I play around with a lot of tools, in my day-to-day life, mean, apart from the clouds of the world, I use cloud a lot for my content piece of it. I whisper flow quite a bit. I have it on my desktop.
These are new names.
what's that one? Yeah, tell us about that.
It's just you just press a button and you can dictate anything for you dictate anything and it will summarize what you just said. Clean it up.
Greg (28:55.714)
Okay, that one's for me.
struggling with that on my phone. Whisper flow.
Uh-huh. Peace per flow, yeah. That's actually very good. There was actually a very interesting, this is pre-2020. You know how when you go to a dentist office or even to the gym and there's a television, but it's on mute? And let's say they are playing CNN or CNBC. You can't hear it, right? So there was an app called Tunity. And you go into that app and point the phone's camera to the show. It will figure out what show is running.
and start giving you audio. So I thought that's a clever idea. I don't know where it went. So I like these kinds of like tools.
That's great.
Clint (29:33.484)
You
Clint (29:40.908)
I just installed whisper flow on my phone while we're talking. I'm so excited.
That's first time he's done that live.
done that before. You got me super fired up on that one.
Yeah, Notebook LLM is also really good. So I actually created a podcast episode of myself. I just feted my blog post about product management. And it actually created a podcast of two people talking. They were wonderful. I have been playing around with another beta project at Google where you can create your own classical music.
I play Indian classical, I like Western classical, so I've been trying to, I tried mixing up to see an Indian instrument on Mozart's Serenade.
Clint (30:30.126)
with a nice BDM beat in the background. No? No? You're shaking your head no? Okay, no.
So I like tools that help me do things that I could not normally do. don't like, I mean, if it is like, for example, note taking, I mean, it's such a unsolved problem even today. Every tool is just an incremental thing. So I still haven't found anything that helps me with, I have my notebook with like five pages of things to do. I haven't solved the to-do list problem.
Yeah, I've been looking for that solution for a long time.
And there have been so many of them,
There's so many different tools and it's none of them have worked for me either. I'll be good for like a week and then I just forget about it.
Deepak Deolalikar (31:16.526)
Yeah. So those are the, those are my go-to tools at least for now, at the moment. I like gamma as well, but I think it's a little bit of work. But I just need to like, haven't spent too much time on it. G-A-M-M-A dot app.
Gamma
Clint (31:32.27)
Shit, gamma dot, okay, what did they do?
You can make PowerPoint, just tell it a story. Hey, I want to make an investor pitch. These are the things we have to do and it will just create it.
That's another one I have to look at. I've been looking for a- first one. yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you're the first one to say you found something that makes slides that you're that you're happy with
Yeah.
Clint (31:53.966)
Gamma.app, okay.
Where I get stuck with some of these tools is that if I'm not happy with their first output, getting that second output becomes painful. So you have to iterate. The chat apps are relatively easy, but these gamma type of apps, now I have to give it, hey, your slide two is not correct. I want to include this and then slide three is. By the time I get to that point, I'm like, you know what? I'll just do it myself.
Yeah, that's that's what I fall into and I gotta tell you you got more patience than me if you go back for round two if they if they don't nail it in round one, I'm I'm out
Yeah, exactly.
Greg (32:41.484)
All right, it's time for this week's AI challenge. This is the challenge where we have our listeners get their hands on some tools and some exercises to get comfortable using AI in business.
This week's AI challenge is all about learning how to use the Ziply AI tool to measure your brand impact in the different AI search engines out there. Learning about exactly how well your company stands up against the competition and suggestions on how you can improve your discoverability inside of AI.
If you've got an AI story to share with us in business, be sure to go to our website and fill out the contact us form. We'll be in touch and we'll see if we can get you on the podcast.
Clint (33:37.55)
All right, well, great. wanted to thank you, Deepak, on joining us today. That was a great list of applications you just shared with us, and really appreciate you taking the time to tell us what you're doing with Ziply and how you're changing the marketer's lives, but also just sharing all the different insights that you've had along the way. That was very much appreciated. Very cool.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
If someone wants to catch up with you or ask additional questions about Zibly, where can they find you?
You can just go to our website www.zipley.ai and that's Z-I-P-S-P-E-T-E-R-L-Y. You can connect with me on LinkedIn too. I think I'm the only one in the world with the first name and last name. Maybe one more. But yeah, happy to connect.
That's awesome. Thanks Deepak. Appreciate you. And that's another episode of Prompt This.
AI Announcer (34:36.343)
Thanks for joining Clinton Greg today. can find all of the prompt this episodes and more in depth articles at www.promptthis.ai and be sure to click the follow button below. We look forward to having you back.
