All right, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of Turning the Table Podcast.

Just myself, Jim Taylor today.

Unfortunately, Adam Lamb is, was not able to join us, but he will be here

for other episodes in the future.

We've got a really cool conversation to have today with a vocalized.

A really great partner of ours.

So we're gonna talk a lot about what's happening in the marketing

world and generative AI and how those things are all playing together.

We've got Nick Markman today who's gonna join us for some really good conversation

about what's going on in that space.

And he's the guy to talk to if you need to know what's going on with marketing.

So we'll be back in a moment.

We'll bring Nick into the episode and away we.

Welcome to Turning the Table, the Most Progressive Weekly podcast for

today's food and beverage industry, featuring staff centric operating

solutions for restaurants in the hashtag new hospitality culture.

Join Jim Taylor of Benchmark 60 and Adam Lamb as they turn the tables on

the prevailing operating assumptions of running a restaurant in favor

of innovative solutions to our industry's most persistent challenges.

Thanks for joining us.

And now onto the, This episode is made possible by e vocalize.

E VOCALIZE makes complex local digital marketing push button easy for anyone.

Empower your franchises with programs that automatically optimize performance

and program spending across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

All from one, easy to use collaborative marketing platform.

To find out more, go to Turning the table podcast.com/e vocalize.

Hey Nick, how you doing?

I'm doing great, Jim.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, welcome.

We're happy to have you.

I think this doing a sort of a special episode like this on

something that's I don't know.

I, we hear about this generative AI and all these things, like literally

every day right now, people asking us what to do with it, how to use it.

So definitely looking forward to having this conversation

with you, that's for sure.

I think we were talking that the first thing we should get into conversation

about was really just what's going on.

Talk a little bit about the benefits of this whole concept, and can you

talk a little bit about, maybe just to get us going, what's some of

your ideas and your thoughts and experience are on just how generative

AI improves efficiency in business.

Just give us a kickoff in that space.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you're totally right.

There's a lot of noise chatter, whatever you want to call it,

going on with local marketing and generative AI chat, G p t, right?

It's really hot and heavy.

So at a really broad level as we.

General generative ai.

We think about time savings, which can equate to cost savings as well as

increased personalization, increased performance, just better output really.

I think typically we.

To assume there's a trade off between time and quality, right?

The more time you spend on something, the higher quality it's going to be.

Generative AI is really flipping that on its head right where you

can spend dramatically less time and get an output that's better

than if you're spend more time.

So there's a super interesting m i t study done just last month

where they took about 500 college educated professionals and gave.

A writing task where half of that group had chat, g p t, the other half didn't.

And the folks that were using generative ai, they completed the task and I think

it was like 37 percent faster, but got 20% higher grading on that task.

If I were to say, Hey, here's a tool that's gonna save you maybe half

the amount of time, but give you a minimum 20% better improvement, right?

That's, it's a no-brainer to, to use.

So they did it in, they did it way faster.

Just to capture what you're saying there, they did it way faster

and equal or better quality.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

This is really one of the first technologies that we're seeing that

can fundamentally create things.

Long form content, short form content, marketing, writing, whatever

it is, with very little input.

So as long as you.

Generally what you want from an output perspective.

You can get that from tools like generative ai, whether that's in

your marketing, which we'll talk a lot more about today or in

other areas of your business.

So it's a pretty radical change in new technology that has widespread

impacts for how not just restaurants, but businesses large are run, which

is hence why you're hearing it so much in the narrative over the past few.

Yeah.

And so this was one of the conversations we were having earlier about writing

content and that kind of stuff.

Yep.

Can you talk maybe a little bit about how this applies to more

specifically from a local perspective?

Yeah.

I think a lot of the bigger companies right now are

thinking about how they can use.

Generative AI to do their work maybe more in a, from a localized perspective

or smaller there's lots of restaurant operators that are thinking how

do we do this to help our business from a marketing perspective?

Yep.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I think whether you are a franchisee and you're using a lot of marketing

collateral that the franchise is providing you, whether you're a mom and

pop, you're doing it yourself every.

At times can be faced with I call it the blank page problem, right?

You're creating whatever it is, an email campaign, a blog post,

a Facebook ad, and you're needing to start from scratch, right?

And that process of just getting going can take a lot of time.

I like to think about generative AI as being able to, Get everyone maybe

80% of what you need, whether that is your post, your ad or whatnot.

And then allow allowing the human experts that have that local knowledge right, of

some of the areas that these technologies lack, which we'll talk more about.

They aren't gonna know.

Your local market conditions as much, they might not know your

customers as better as you do, although we'll talk more about that.

So the ability to get past that blank page problem to something that

just requires a little bit of human oversight, tweaking things, whether

that's to be more in your brand voice or insert more of that local know.

It's gonna save you a lot of time and then again, just get you a better output.

And then you can spend the rest of the, your time doing other things that might

be more value add to your business.

That's another reason for us out of vocalize where we're so excited

about these technologies is our ideas.

Most of these positions that are using technologies like this your main day.

Job might not be to be a marketer.

So less time you can spend on your marketing activities and the more time

you can spend on more creative strategic thinking for your business, interacting

with your customers it's a win-win.

So

we just, we're talking obviously a lot about the benefits that of things.

So we're gonna dive deeper into some of this stuff, but quickly about the risk.

I think it was actually somebody from your team was the first person that made this

comment to me and now I keep hearing it.

I feel like it's one of those things like you buy a red car and then you

see the red car everywhere you go.

I garbage in garbage.

So can you talk a little bit about just the risks associated with this

and then we'll dive deeper into what what we're talking about?

Yeah, for sure.

I think there's kind of two.

Overarching categories that trickle down into a number of

risk associated with these.

And I like starting with that, the kind of slide you just had up of

making AI your intern not your boss.

There's a lot that these technologies can both be used for today as well as

in the future for automating things.

But because of some of these, We think wri large right now, this sort

of using AI as your assistant or your intern with some supervision is

really the better way to go about it.

The two main kind of problem categories that lead into the risk that I mentioned.

One is they lack a lot of these generative AI systems

take chat G P T, right?

I'll keep using that analogy cuz it's the big one that a lot of folks talk about.

They lack the knowledge and data specific to your domain, right?

They're great at things generally and are trained on a ton of information on

the internet, but they probably don't know your business at a very deep level.

They probably don't know your customers and behaviors and interactions with

your business at a deep level unless you provide them with that data.

So overall they might be doing things very good generally, but

not specifically for your business.

So that's one is the lack of data integration.

And then the second is what we call the hallucination problem.

And you might hear this as well in the narrative around generative ai.

Fundamentally, these technologies can make things up.

They are not databases, they are not search engines.

It is possible that they can create something that is misleading

or contains inaccuracies.

And the challenge with it, More often than not, when they are

inaccurate, it's not glaringly obvious they're subtly incorrect.

So unless you have a very critical eye, again, going back

to the need for supervision or.

Going back to the data problem, unless it's really trained on your

specific data for your business and your customers, that hallucination

problem can be more problematic just cuz it'll happen more frequently.

And hu the human ability to detect when it's being inaccurate can be hard

because it gets so close to what you want and is maybe just missing a few things.

And that can have pretty big ramifications depending on what

it is you're using These.

Great.

And I think the comment that was used that really landed for me in some of

our earlier discussion was unsupervised.

If you let it be unsupervised, is that what sort of what you're talking about

is if you're not checking to see what's happening with the accuracy of

the information or what it's telling you?

Yeah, exactly.

Like a very simple use case, right?

Let's say I want to use chat g p t to write a blog post for me or

to write some copy for my Facebook ad, talking about a upcoming.

For my restaurant, if you're just copy pasting and if you're not looking

at that critically you might be missing some nuance or some accuracy.

That's why, going back to the analogy of making it your intern, not your

boss, I think that's a good framework right now for the majority of activities.

There's some specific domains in marketing that could.

Fully automated and we can talk about those.

We, if you think about it, there's probably not a ton that you would let a.

Intern, just have at it and operate on behalf of your business without some

sort of quick oversight stamp of approval.

Yeah.

From that supervisory level,

so the supervisory, just contin continuing on that concept for a second,

what about the potential regulatory or legal risks associated with that?

Is there anything that people should be thinking about or worried about, or.

Yeah.

Can you tell us a

little bit about that?

There definitely is, and I think it varies depending on your

location, what you're using this for.

But let's just take marketing, you have brand risks.

Again, let's say I'm, for all the franchisors listening,

your brand is everything.

Right?

So if you have individual operators, locations that are going rogue and using

these tools to write content, collateral, and you don't have line of sight into.

You're risking some of that brand adherence or cohesion

which is something that you definitely want to control, okay?

And there gonna be more legal ramifications of truth in advertising.

Some industries or certain use cases have For example, certain targeting

restrictions, things you can and cannot do when it comes to marketing.

And again, going from general specialist approach systems, having

good general knowledge, not always very specific to your domain.

Those are the things that can miss today unless you're training it on your

data or really having your tools that you're using for marketing to be trained

on your data or having human over.

Do you have any examples of a time like a and in any industry

really, cuz I think it's relevant.

Doesn't have to be specific to the restaurant industry that we

spend most of our time in, but.

Do you have any examples of a time when maybe somebody wasn't paying

close enough attention, it impacted the brand or something like that?

Yeah, I'll give you not from restaurants, but another industry that we

work with is real estate and mortgage.

And in, in those categories when it comes to advertising, there's a lot of

restrictions in terms of how, who you can.

And how you can and target users.

You might go to chat G p T and ask it to create a marketing command

for your house that you're selling or a service that you're offering.

It might say, Hey, target folks, ages 35 to 55 of these income

levels and these specific areas.

None of that you can actually do because it's regulated in

terms of those targeting things.

So if you are just using these, or taking bad output as the source

of truth, you might end up putting yourself into some sticky situations.

So again, that might be.

A lower or higher risk to you depending on your specific business,

but overall treating these as your intern not your boss, to start.

Make sense?

Yeah.

I like the way that you word that.

Treat it as your intern, not as your boss.

What are some of the, I don't know, I'm thinking about what are some

of the resources that people need?

Can someone just jump on and start trying to use.

Generative AI for marketing, or is there obviously companies

like you guys are experts at this.

But for someone thinking about how do I get started, is there any a specific

resource or a, something that they need to have or need to learn before they

get going?

Yeah, so that's where we get into a lot of the challenges here.

These systems, PT, for example, are very open.

There's not like an instruction manual that you get, so I think

you're gonna have a sliver of the kind of ing, edge techn within the

space that are gonna figure things out and how to make it work for them.

But that's the minority.

Our perspective is that to really unlock the value of

these things, it's going to come.

Partnerships with technology providers, either the existing tools that you're

using, point of sale, crm, whatever you're using for your marketing suite, they're

going or already these technologies.

And that's really how the average person is gonna best take advantage of these.

Cuz that solves a number of problems.

It solves that.

Data problem that I mentioned.

Using generative AI to create marketing campaigns within the tool already

using for marketing of your business and your customers such that you can

get to that output that requires less oversight or is going to be more accurate.

I like to think it a sand.

Analogy, right?

If you put a in a sandbox with no tools and an instruction

of, Hey, what should you do?

What shouldn't you do?

Versus put 'em in a sandbox with specific tools for them to use, it's

probably the ladder that's gonna a get off faster and then also have

a better relative to the results.

Talking about that, the sandbox analogy.

That's good.

I hear a lot of people talking about automation using ai, right?

And what would your comments or your thoughts be on how to determine

what should I fully automate?

What should I partially automate?

What maybe can I automate at all?

And specifically in terms of the marketing side of things.

Yeah.

So in terms of marketing in particular, I think there's a few areas that

are really good for full automation and that could be with certain

targeting of your programs, right?

AI lends itself to personalization.

Not just in the messages that are sent but also who they're part.

So if you are running programs, like you gotta vocalize to reengage

your customers that are purchased.

Yeah.

Data always coming in terms of who those customers are.

And you can maybe the messaging pages and you have some input

on what the messaging is.

But the, that segmentation customers.

Or targeting against those who might be able to fully automate.

When it comes to that kind of supervisory dynamic, which I think you know,

overall right now is the majority of use cases, anything content generation.

It's typically gonna be good to have that kind of last stamp of approval.

You know what we, for example, we have generative AI that

can write the ad copy for you.

Headline description.

We explicitly.

Just to installation problem and make sure that anything that you're putting out

into the market is on brand and accurate.

So in terms of bigger companies that might have a whole bunch of franchisees

or multiple locations do you recommend that this is something that's centralized?

Is or is there opportunity for franchisees to do this on

their own, in their own markets?

There's so many restaurant companies and other industries.

Have locations across the country.

It's there's so much so many differences in nuances depending on the market.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think both of those centralized and centralized.

I think there's advantages certainly in that kind of centralized to low

kinda national to local approach.

Because if Europe, medium or large franchise right, you really.

All of the data across your locations, transactions, inventory,

promotions and everything, brand guidelines you have that data that

you can partner with the technology provider and individual operators run

programs on behalf of them such that.

Systems are general relevant.

So especially FraNChiS, that level of control where you know that it's

your brand guidelines, it's your database driving all this, still giving

individual locations they want create, that's what they want to create.

That's.

Value for cuz if not, you just don't know what locations are gonna be doing

and that just increases the likelihood of some of the problems that we just

mentioned with false advertis, clarity and cohesion, all of that.

Shifting gears a little bit.

This, you mentioned chat G P two and that's the one

that we hear the most about.

I think right now it just really hit the market or whatever you wanna call

it in the last couple of months, right?

I only started hearing about it a few months ago late in, in 2022.

So it's tough to predict, I think the future of generative ai plus

it's gonna learn and probably do some things on its own, right?

But what do you see the future maybe in the next year or two years?

What is that gonna look like for marketing in terms of generative ai?

Yeah definitely.

And I don't pretend to have a crystal ball here, out here.

I think for experts in the space, the pace of innovation is incredible

and at times overwhelming.

All the more reason I think for, you know restaurant operators and

businesses, I wouldn't worry about trying to keep up with the pulse

of everything that's changing.

You won't be able to realistic.

Cause you're gonna need to rely on your technology providers.

To keep pace on your behalf or if your tools aren't doing that

today, explore other solutions.

Because things are changing literally daily, weekly new stuff is coming out.

So in terms of the next year, things that I think are pretty much guaranteed are.

You're gonna see the proliferation of these systems being integrated natively

in the tools that, that you are using.

And if your tools don't do that, like I mentioned, you're probably

going to want to replace your tools because your competitors that

are using those will get ahead.

Even starting from the really big tech companies, Microsoft, Google, they're

already integrating things like generative writing solutions to Microsoft 365.

Google Docs and you're going to see that proliferate through a lot of other

providers in the marketing space.

New tools will come up entirely that are built kinda AI first.

I think there's use cases and applications or this

stuff that we don't even know.

Yeah.

What that so much of what we talk about with generative AI right now

is really text and imagery based.

But there's a kind of overarching theme of what called multi

opening these applications to video 3d tons of other modalities.

So it's really kind a buckle moment right now given how fast things

are changing, but make sure that.

Tools that you're using, have a perspective and a plan on this.

Ask your partners how they're planning to support you when

it comes to these solutions.

And if you don't have those tools today, now's a great time to, to start booking

because Bill now's still the time.

Potentially we're gonna quickly.

Okay, so I have two kind of follow up questions.

Maybe you can elaborate on.

You keep mentioning the tools thing.

So is first part of the question I guess would be, is assess your tools, the first

thing you would encourage people to do.

And then the second part of that would be if I'm a restaurant company, whether I'm

a big group or just an independent and I've never used any of this stuff yet.

Where do I.

Is it looking at what you're doing, you know that tools.

Yeah, so I definitely think, certainly writ large for everyone,

but especially if you are, say again, like a franchisor that's already either

advertising on behalf of all your locations or giving existing tools to

your partners and locations to run.

Definitely assess and talk to your partners, see what they're doing.

If not right, there's a it's a good time to start evaluating

solutions, as I mentioned, but to your later, or your last question, I

think of like where to get started.

You might make sense to just play around with some of the

existing free tools just to get a.

Of what you can do.

Go to Chad g p t and ask it to write a LinkedIn or a social post.

Do something small that's low risk just to get a feel for it.

But I do think, again, in terms of really unlocking the value for your

business in a way that you need to manage it less because it's using disparate

solutions, you're eventually gonna want this built into things that you

just showed up on, on the board there.

Your CRMs, your marketing.

All of that's where a lot of the power is gonna come both from the performance

perspective, but also saving you time.

Cause if you're not using these right, you're just gonna spend so much

time copying, pasting from one to the other, telling G P t your full context

of everything you're wanting to do.

Yeah, your existing tools should already have that data.

It's just about unlocking them using the power of some of these

technologies in including generative ai.

And so at least out a vocalize that's one thing we're doing in

the marketing space for sure.

The copying and pasting thing.

I think you probably.

For anybody who's actually listening or will listen down the

road, that one probably hits home.

There's probably a lot of people going, yeah, I do too much of that.

And I think, you know what you were just saying, just reminded me of the, this

part of the conversation we were having around just identify which tasks you

can automate and how I think there's, from listening to what you're saying

and from my experience and dealing with just the restaurant industry

in general for a really long time, this is a big opportunity I think.

Yeah.

Absolut.

Okay.

So we always, just in starting to get into some summary here, one of the things

we always want to try to make sure that we do on turning the table is on any

episode, whether it's targeted like this or even more general discussion, we wanna

always try to leave the, we always try to leave the people who are listening

with three takeaways or a couple things that they could really go and do today.

Yeah, so can you, do you have three, or maybe it's more than that, but a

few things that anyone who's listening can go, okay, I can go and start

thinking about doing this today.

Yep.

So I'd say playing off that, that start small.

If you're hesitant or aren't using this today, take one, one task

that you or your team is doing on that content creation space.

And maybe just go to chat g p t and give that a try, right?

Get a feel for how these work.

I think you can learn.

More by playing around with some stuff than worrying about keeping

tabs on the news cycle just because it's information overload.

And then start we already mentioned this as well, but evaluate your tools.

Take a look at what you're using for.

Point of sale crm, your marketing suite and ask your partners what

they're doing in these spaces.

If you don't have tools to use those start having those conversations,

reach out to us on the marketing side we'd love to talk if you to vocalize.

So I think the, those are two, and then the third is not like a I guess

it's not a specific action, but I would, I guess it's a, the sentiment.

Not, don't worry, but it, it's just gonna base, it's gonna be impossible.

I think for especially the smaller businesses to figure

this out by themselves.

Don't worry about the kind of news cycle and feeling like you need to keep up.

With everything that's going on in this space.

Cuz it's already like the speed of this is only going to accelerate

the genie's out of the bottle.

So that's good advice.

Make sure you're arming yourself with the right tools that are doing it for you so

you can get all the advantages without worrying about how to to figure it out.

So it's not to say there's no work involved in that process.

But yeah, it hope, hopefully helps level the playing field a little bit.

Yeah.

So what I heard you saying and just to recap that, I think there's so much for

me too, I mean with all of us, there's so much, like you said, you can't keep up.

Yeah.

And I think there's equal amounts of excitement when it

comes to what's happening with AI and probably some intimidation

and uncertainty and how do I.

Do I spend money on it, do I not?

What do I do?

How do I automate all of, there's a million questions.

You've answered a lot of those today, so appreciate it.

But I guess, so what I heard you say was start small, which

I think is really good advice.

Don't dive in head first right away, maybe assess the tools and then like

you said be realistic and don't be too afraid of what's going on.

Just be realistic about where you're at and what's gonna work.

I think that's all really good advice.

So appreciate the the heads up because I think there's a lot of questions happening

right now, so 100%.

How do, what's the best way there's lots of people that are listening to

this and will continue to listen to this.

Shortly we'll have this transitioned over onto iTunes at Spotify and anywhere

that you can get your podcast so that people can continue to listen to it.

I'm happy to share recordings and that type of thing as well.

But in the case that somebody is saying, okay, I need to do this.

I'm not sure how you've mentioned partners quite a bit and people

are realizing that I need to partner with somebody to help me

vocalizes the potentially in a lot of cases the right way to go.

How do they get

ahold.

Yeah, definitely reach out.

Our website's probably the best way to do that, so www.vocalize.com E V

O C a l i z e for those listening in.

So drop us a line.

We'd love to chat whether you're, again, already using tools

for your marketing and are just interested in what's out there or

whether you're filling a gap, right?

Because again, to that point of getting behind.

If you aren't using tools to better enable your marketing or arm your

franchisees and operators with these sort of solutions, there's going to be.

Pent up demand for them.

Your customers, your operators are gonna demand that for you.

So now's a great time to make sure you don't fall too behind and can

continue to be ahead of the curve and better serve your operators.

And ultimately, at the end of the day, it's the customers that win.

When all of this is done well, when you're better messaged to when.

Feel better engaged as an individual.

Things are personalized.

That creates more loyalty with your business, more engagement

more revenue for your business.

So it's really everyone wins when these things are executing correctly.

Yeah.

And

From from our side of how we spend a lot of time with restaurant groups,

one of the things that we keep hearing.

And this is just resonating with me as I'm listening to you.

One of the things that I keep hearing about is that

customer behavior is changing.

So whether that's number of visits to a restaurant or how

they spend their money, yeah.

Those things are changing and cost of goods is changing dramatically.

So waste is even more impactful than it was before.

Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of restaurant operators out there that are thinking

about either really focusing more on how do I drive more customer traffic?

How do I get people to spend more?

Or how do I sell the product that I don't want to throw in the garbage?

If it the the waste thing becoming more and.

Impactful.

So I just keep thinking and keep hearing from what you're saying,

that there's just so much opportunity to target way more specifically

than maybe just try to drive sales.

It's just it's more about.

Compartmentalization, I think,

Operations and inventory that you have past customer behaviors.

So let's say there is like an inventory item that you have a lot

more of that you really want to push the ability to have kind of.

Look across holistically at all.

Who has ordered those in the past?

Who has responded to this offering, product, ingredients,

whatever they might be.

And then stitch that together.

End with your marketing to say, reengage with these folks.

Cause I need to.

Sell more hamburgers or whatever, as well as go prospect new folks that I

think are likely to be interested in this offering because they resemble

the customers that I'm reengaging.

All of that is possible now using these technologies.

You just need to have the right tools that can do it for you or else you're

gonna completely erode the time savings benefit of this in the first place.

You're trying to stitch everything together yourself.

Makes total.

So I'm gonna bring back up this last slide that we showed again cause I wanna

make sure people have the opportunity to scan the QR code and have access to you.

Yeah.

The vocalize.com right?

Is the best place to go to, to create some contact.

I'm sure there's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of contact information

there, but I I think for anyone in the restaurant space that's listening to us

or this good conversation definitely.

Get in touch.

If you guys are just so specialized in this stuff, right?

And whether it's big companies or small companies and across the US market.

So really really appreciate you spending some time with us and I just think

there's so much here to learn and so much here to, that people are uncertain about.

So you've definitely given us some some good insight and clarity.

I appreciate you joining.

Awesome.

Thanks so much Jim.

I appreciate you.

Hopefully it's helpful.

And yeah, be a part of doing.

Yeah, thanks for coming and like I said, we will have this transitioned

over to iTunes, Spotify, anywhere that you can find a podcast.

So the recording will be there.

Feel free to reach out to us at turning the table if you'd like a

recording or as we said, vocalize can help you get some information too.

And thanks very much for joining us and have a great.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of Turning the Table with

me, Adam Lamb and Jim Taylor.

We're on a mission to change the food and beverage industry for the better by

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Remember, retention is the new Cool y'all.

This podcast was written, directed, and produced by me, Adam Lamb and Jim Taylor.

Turning the table is a production of Realignment Media.