This Is The AI Tool That Will Revolutionize Ecommerce (With Jacob Posel) transcript

Jacob posel is a real person he's not AI or if he is he's the best AI Avatar I've ever seen there's been debate about this on Twitter but DTC Jacob from Common Thread Collective is here to talk about AI this is going to be a great episode if you are like me and you are trying to figure out how to leverage AI in your ad account you need to listen to this Jacob is uh probably one of the three most interesting Minds on this problem maybe the most interesting mind in the e-commerce space because he is building out AI based ad creative tools for common thread Collective as a senior software engineer there that is what his job is to do so he's thinking about how to use AI to build ad creative all the time and therefore it's just way farther than I am uh and than most people are on solving this problem and think about what it really is capable of doing before I say anything more about that let's uh just jump into it so that we can get Jacob talking more and me talking less what's up thank you thank you I mean I don't know if I don't know if I would call myself the top three most interesting person in AI but um I mean I love it I work on it all the time and I love talking about it so I'm I'm happy to be here I'll tell you why I would call you that it's because there are probably of course people at very large uh companies doing um doing this in other places and all of that like I get that right like that it sounds but but you sit at a unique intersection which is this combination of spending all your time building these AI tools with uh with CTC which means that in our space for the kind of person listening to this episode you are you are uniquely interacting with Brands and with um how to leverage these tools for Brands because CTC has made the investment to say we're going to put a full-time person uh on on internally creating tools that we can use to leverage AI it's like it's a they're making a real bet on this and they're involving you in doing it so um yeah uh give people a really so so anyway yeah there's a lot of people working on AI but but I don't know anybody else who's working on AI for brands in the way that you are and therefore um it's uh it's it's a really interesting thing give people a little bit of background so that we can know just like how you got here and how you got doing this uh you know you you you're in Indiana right now but you don't have an Indiana accent uh so so tell people like a little bit of the Jacob puzle story and then that way we can understand a little bit more of where you're coming from and why you started working on this yeah so um I mean my background I am I'm actually South African who moved to Australia um and grew up in Australia I then um ended up in Indiana of all places in the US um and I studied I did a master's degree in data science at IU in Indiana um and that's that's where I got a very traditional background in machine learning and applied statistics um and AI kind of in its infancy uh after doing that I had a very good foundational knowledge of machine learning and AI but this was before the GPT 4wave chat GPT came out so I kind of um I was working as a software engineer um at a company called airhouse which is a fulfillment 4pl um startup uh that's how I got my my first kind of um start in Ecom I was on the Fulfillment Logistics supply chain inventory side and that might still be where some of my heart lies um but that that will be a future thing um but then then the AI wave began and I kind of jumped on it straight away because of my background and because I found it incredibly interesting um and then kind of since then I've gone all in on AI and Ecom in my career um I've built things from like supply chain tracking systems and AI to creative strategy um and that's how I ended up at CTC um I met with Taylor through the Twitter universe um and now I'm full-time there building honestly some really really cool AI tools for them okay so thank you that's very helpful to give people a sense of where you're coming from that so this conversation started because I released an episode uh about a month ago I'll put it in the show notes um about sort of where I'm at with with AI um and and and what I said was in so many words uh that I'm not sure that AI yet can like generate because I believe messaging is the core driver of uh of value creation for ads um I'm not sure AI yet can create great messaging um like a lot of people I've sort of experienced this weird like it's 80% of the way thing uh 80% of the way their thing where I'm going like I just I want it to be able to you know read a bunch of customer reviews and then spit out for me the ad that that excellently communicates what customers are saying to more customers but like once it actually once the tools that I've used actually get to that level um of trying to spit it out it just is like ah not quite there and then by the time I've actually done all that work I maybe would have had more time I maybe like didn't actually save any time um now in the midst of that another thing I said there is that I felt actually sheepish recording the episode I wanted to do it sort of as a live journal entry almost of like where I'm at with it because I think a lot of people are in this place of trying to figure out like we all see the potential but we can't quite figure out um you know how to really leverage it all the way and then the other big point I made I I think that is significant to me is that I'm actually a little nervous about the way AI cuts off the mental work involved at points with generating good ad creative like um the the comparison I made there is like it's sort of like having a math textbook when you are a kid and you have the answers in the back of the book and the point is not actually the right answer the point is to to show your work and I think the showing your work thing is how you learn to do math right it's that you have to figure out how to go from the problem to the solution um and and get the right answers and so uh and so for me what I found is that while AI was actually really useful in some ways by enforcing me to get really clear about what I did and I'm I'm thinking about other ways to use it um to help me clarify my own thinking on things when I would try to go from sort of uh value proposition to add it cut off the sort of mental churning of those middle steps and the mental churning is actually really valuable I think uh that that actually spending that time on it so those are like my big Reflections on it I'm not abandoning it at all I'm still trying to think through how to do it you responded you said you basically in some ways agreed with a lot of that but I don't know there's a few things I just threw out there which of those jumped out to you the most what do I have the most wrong and what am I not thinking about correctly I don't I mean that's I guess one way to do it let me and I won't even say about wrong or right give me your reaction to that basic take on AI yeah okay let's talk about let's talk about those points kind of in order so I mean the experience that you're having is not unique to you and I think it's probably the experience that most people are having with AI right now and it's because of the limitations um in which it's used um so like the actual methodology they're using um to integrate AI into to their workflows and also the tools that they have available to them so let's take your review example so for example yeah I think you're right I think that I'm not sure with the exact methodology that you're using but I'm assuming you're doing some kind of getting the reviews from like your review Source copying them pasting them into Claud chat GPT what one of those chat Bots um and then asking for insights um or value propositions or copy for your ads based on those reviews um and that's probably all you could do right now with chat GPT for example with a chat bot and that's a fine way to do it but I think we can agree everyone can agree that that's not going to get you the results that you need um so something there which immediately jumps out to me is that's not the best way to use AI right now um so let's talk about a methodology that AI is really good at to get the best results so you may have seen that open AI recently released their o01 uh model which was a change to the the gp4 GP those um o models um and it introduce something called Chain of Thought reasoning um directly embedded into the models and what it showed which people have assumed for a while now but this kind of um quantitatively showed it is that if you introduce Chain of Thought reasoning into llms or into AI it produces far better results so what that means is that when you're doing something like review scraping and um cop Cy generation or concept generation you have to structure it in steps that let the AI think that gives it a foundation to Think Through um and that gets the best results so for example at CTC we do something similar to this um but instead of just copying all reviews and then pasting it in in which the AI if it's doing this it's only going to like it's only going to get a summary of the reviews rather than very specific things um we actually go through every single review um under certain um a certain like rating um and positive reviews and stuff like that and we will look at the very specific reason why someone is making the purchase in a psychological framework within that within that review and we'll also create a persona for who is the reviewer in that review and we'll do that across all of the reviews and then we'll feed it into another step in the process um which is analyzing um the reasons people are buying things and what they're buying and who they are and everything like that um so that's like another step in this Chain of Thought that we're going through um and then it will kind of churn through these Concepts and then the next step once we've got the concepts is now to then go into create and copy or whatever like that so you can see how we're able to get a lot more detailed um because we're not using the chatbot we're using the API and you break it out into these foundational chain steps which actually end up producing a lot better more usable results uh when okay so how do I do that like like I mean yeah how do I do that um I mean it's okay it's going to be specific to you so you might not think about concept Generation Um the same way that CTC does for example so you're going to have a a framework in your head or framework that you use to do this manually um and it starts by defining that framework breaking it down into steps and seeing where the reviews start in that process and then unfortunately the answer which people won't like is you need someone who knows how to code who knows who understands how to use an API and who understands how to manipulate data to create that um that system and that function for you to scrape all of that and put into a database so that's where you kind of you need to get to an extra step um to be able to get the full use out of it and that's I mean just a detour for a second that's what you are doing at CTC right is like among other things presumably is sort of um because of your ability to actually be uh I mean basically because you're a software engineer and you could think through um sort of some of those more technical details of it MH you're able to Leverage The Tool much better than I could do you how long do you think you are necessary for that I mean this is just obviously a guess but essentially the truth is right like what many brands should be thinking as they hear this is that I want to go work with CTC so I can get that for myself um because because you know you're building that for them but of course most of us this is the reason I'm asking most of us cannot employ a full-time software engineer to to go out to that layer so um so what I mean how long do you think we are going to be in a world where that is required to to leverage the tool that way well I mean two things so first of all um that is one piece of what I'm building at CTC and but the reason why they need a full-time software engineer is a lot more than than that individual thing that workflow um CTC has we were talking about this before Taylor doesn't go 0 to one he goes Z to 100 and we're building the 100 right now so that's kind of why they required fulltime there um so I don't think that people should dismiss that I don't think that um I think that they would be able to get help from a specialist um for certain things um but how long will they need me in that it's a good question um it's kind of impossible to tell so I think about that in two ways I would say that there's two important elements that I think that I bring to the table um that allow me to provide value to a brand or Agency for example which is that I think I understand e-commerce and I understand the data structure and I understand the intended output and then I also understand the technology and so I can bring those together um it just gets to a point where is the base model like is there going to be a GPT 5 that just understands that in um intersection so much better than I do and maybe that's the case um and maybe at that point then you can get far more without someone like me but um people are slow to adopt technology and like I'm sure you know oh for sure yeah yeah of all the brand owners you know how many of them have the time to sit down and install and adopt a new technology even if it's great even if it's amazing um there's not I think that there's like a bit of an n in businesses where they're unable to adopt new things really quickly um and so I think that there's still value there but I mean the people who are like really honored and um the people who are willing to innovate I think that they will find a huge amount of value very quickly with even without an expert um software engineer yeah it requires a kind of cost investment that you represent for CTC that actually plenty of people could do they just I think are probably either think they have to do it themselves or they're not thinking about that potential way to deploy capital in the business like they just are not thinking about the idea that and I think I mean you're you're uniquely you're hard to find like you know we were joking about this a minute ago but you posted this threat about essentially like arbitraging Australian gambling like DFS I think it was or something like that right anyway like or or whatever it was like essentially daily daily lines like from different uh bookmakers and how you got banned from gambling in Australia for it like that's a pretty clever problem solving mind that is also mathy enough to get there and um and that I think is is not easy to replicate and this is so much of the question for me about about this is like what is the actual applicability of the tool at this point to me versus to CTC because I mean certainly um like you know I have five clients I'm not trying to make it a lot bigger like I'm not going to go try to find you and put it in business I'm just not I'm trying to figure out what is the way that I could use the tool now to do that um so um that's I think that I think is the challenge and that's prob why I'm asking how long it will take like and now now obviously you don't know the answer I recognize that but yeah um let's go backwards a little bit and talk about something that I think is helpful here um that I that I have thought AI has been useful for like the the sorry did you call it chain of logic reasoning or uh Chain of Thought Chain of Thought reasoning okay great MH right um and even a second ago you talked about like okay if you wanted um one of these tools to generate output conceptually uh in a certain way one of the things that I would have to do is to get really clear about what I'm asking it to do and this is like one of the other things I've found with prompt engineering is that like it's really hard to express some of these ideas clearly and I and I talked about this in last episode I did too that I like this about uh about working with these tools actually is that it it really makes the rubber meet the road on like it forces me to go like what am I actually trying to when I write a hook like how clear can I get about what makes a good hook because my sense is and tell me if you think this is right the clearer I can get on what makes a good hook the the better the tool can be leveraged to reproduce it yeah yeah I mean that's that's that's right that's absolutely correct but there's a line you have to balance there I mean and it's the same way that you should think about an employee or someone who you work with it's like yeah you could you could get as specific as possible to tell them how to do um how to do their job and you can turn someone that's ex into someone that's exactly like you um but maybe you want to introduce a little bit of Randomness and a little bit of flexibility there and it's something that I think about too when I'm doing stuff like this it's like do I only want to do it in one specific framework with one specific type of output um which would give me you're you're correct it will give me a lot um more reliable outputs in a certain structure um and then but I also recommend that people are doing that to sometimes introduce a little bit of flexibility and see what the results are because sometimes sometimes the AI is genuinely creative and uh will surprise you in how good the results are I just switched another one of my clients and sent a recommendation to another agency to take all of their clients to do all their meta ads tracking on their brands websites on their Shopify stores via Billy to do uh the best most optimized pixel tracking available in meta ads you should be going to Billy b. the link is in the show notes of course uh to get 100% service side tracking for your meta ads and here is the very clear value proposition you will get the best data from your website back to meta for meta to both both report the most accurately in the dashboard and optimize as best as possible by being fed the most data back from you how do I know that Billy gives you the most data for your pixel setup because I've tested it for many of my Brands almost all of them at this point are on Billy and it's because I've run head-to-head tests Billy against other third-party tracking software Billy against the standard Shopify meta integration and over and over again in the test not only does B win at a head-to-head level of just the same exact campaign set up you get more Rass uh basically in your Billy uh campaigns but at the but on top of that I have compared the event match quality and you see the event match score be higher with Billy than other tools on top of that it is one dollar is1 to start your first month with Billy and on an on in an ongoing way will be the most affordable uh option on the market for server side tracking tools with full conversions API Integrations all those things um for for your meta ads go check it out it actually does a bunch more stuff than that that's really really cool but go to b. to upgrade your meta ads tracking it is what I'm recommending to everybody it's what I'm using across the board it is really really awesome it's also the most affordable tool in the market there's really no reason you shouldn't be using it if meta ads is a place you're spending a lot of money go do it right now I I totally feel that in fact it is one of the things I have liked about using the tool as well is that it will go to places that I don't go in my mind and so I see what you mean like um trying to find some way to to use it for both is um is really good you did talk about though the idea that you would want AI to break down maybe this is the Chain of Thought part uh part of it but Al maybe just as you were talking about the tool in general that you would you'd want me to tr train the AI tell me if I'm using that word wrong um on uh on on my own thinking in a way that would actually get break down things into its component parts a little bit more into the steps a little bit more um Can Can you sort like talk more about that part of the process of working with AI and uh how to think about that yeah yeah definitely so this is a useful exercise for anyone in any business I think which is to take a process take a workflow um break it down into its parts into the key component parts um and figure out what the inputs and the outputs are of those different components like those little different functions that produce your final desired output um and what that's going to do um is number one I think it will help you find inefficiencies um and it will help you see what's very necessary um it will also help you see where AI best fits into those little component parts so there might be one layer that is essential for a human like an obvious one is like presenting presenting an idea to a client or something like that I think we can all agree that we're not at the stage where we want AI presenting anything in the layer is important but maybe maybe creating the deck you actually realize is possible something you can do with AI um and then coming up with the ideas too so I don't know break it down into those component parts and that's how I think about a software problem um and then um figure out the best way that you can tie those together and relate those together um and see where the AI fits in so what you're essentially doing in that is you're figuring out what data do I need for each part um what's the best and cleanest way for me to figure out the inputs and outputs of those different parts um and how can I provide the maximum context to the AI in order to get me my final result so um if we go back to the review example uh if you put everything in just a one process like copy all the reviews pasted in and paste in a predefined prompt that you've decided that you've engineered gets you a good result um you're limiting the ability to give full context to the AI but if you break that down into first I'm going to scrape my reviews then I'm going to come up up with my ideas now you're able to say okay what framework can I give the AI to um think about those reviews can I break them down even more um can I pull in additional information about my brand um and then can I do that all of that and now the actual output of the reviews like it's actual scraping understanding of the reviews is going to be better now that's the input into your next step in the process which is I'm coming up with my copy and now okay can I go a step further and give it examples of previous copy um more inform about the brand and so on and you've taken one step into two steps you're getting a lot more daughter and context into the AI and it's going to give you better results yeah okay that's helpful um do you have tell me I mean tell me more about what you what you are building then like if you take that and take it to the Jacob posal level and the CTC level what are you actually building at CTC that you can talk publicly and and what what is I mean because I guess what that represents whatever the answer to this question represents is your bet on how AI is the most useful right now you know I'm assuming you're thinking about this problem from a cost to impact ratio perspective like what what can make the biggest impact in the least amount of time and how do I balance those things with all the potential things AI could do so where where is it taking you uh what do you what do you think the opportunity is so um what we're working on is the creative strategy system um and I I wouldn't necessarily say that is the highest Roi opportunity compared to like media buying or growth strategy or anything like that yet I would say they're all very comparable um but creative strategy is something that is particularly slow um and we felt like particularly in need of disruption because people are spending a ton of money on their creatives um and they're just not getting the outputs that they need um and it's a system that is kind of ripe for disruption for AI um so what we're doing is there's multiple different levels in the process and that we're building so there's kind of a foundational sorry there's a foundational data layer that um we building for automated concepting uh so or automated briefing so we're calling that the ultimate brief um and what that does is it pulls in multiple different data sources so it gets all of your product skew uh revenue and margin and inventory data um it get scrapes all of your reviews and other demographic data um and it also it will also pull in like your sales to look at marketing moments and everything like that um and what it does is it produces this really nice brief that gives a lot of context around your sorry is it picking between different products like when you say it pulls in all that product level data is it giving some suggestion about about which products you should focus on next like yeah yeah exactly so based on inventory position and margin and probably skew velocity or something like that yeah exactly so you can say business goal so you want to maximize Topline Revenue you want to focus on highest margin or you want to sell something that is um in stock right now inventory so we will be able to kind of pull all that in and we also relate a review to a specific product so the more powerful thing that we can do is we like we can do this full workflow we can say I want to sell something that's my highest margin product um so and then I want to see all the reasons why someone said they were buying that specific product um through my reviews and I want to see the exact Persona that I identified or the exact audience that I identified as the um person who was buying it so I can look at what my product was what my offer is who was buying it and why they're buying it um and all of that to create these briefs and create those Concepts and so then it's going so you set you set the business goal it gives you the product suggestion and when it gives you the product suggestion it gives you the briefs as well like that add briefs yep yep so um when we think about Concepts as like an offer an audience and an angle um it automates that entire process and it can also look in the um the seasonal element of your brand like where you are and this is another reason why AI is um is powerful because it has that intuition so you know around the time of year you're in how that relates related to your previous year's Revenue graph um is there a marketing moment you can take advantage of and how does that relate to your Concepts so okay that's that's really interesting so it's going to then give you the place to start for for all of that is um yeah that's that's very fascinating the what you're describing there is a really good indication to this because like you know I've talked to Taylor play times I've probably done episodes about this he's done episodes about this about how to how to pick which uh product to advertise next and it's it's weighing this combination of yeah of of yeah inventory position I um goals uh yeah value to the yeah and what and and all you're doing there is saying that there is a rubric that's happening in our minds here so why are why why would I try to go think through that rubric with my very um yeah limited capacity and instead have ai go perfectly execute my rubric you know and I'm assuming what will happen there is that you'll end up in some spaces where it will not do exactly what you want it to do and you'll have to figure out where it went wrong and um and sort of keep problem solving that like I I could imagine yeah but yeah yeah that but I mean that's of course GNA happen with humans too and uh and probably at a lower error rate with AI you know yeah I mean and even the volume game kind of evens it out eventually but it's like is can we expect a creative strategist to have um to be considering all of the product sales data and inventory data for every single skew like imagine if you're a complex brand like an apparel brand it's just not fair for people to be considering all of that at once and then also having to consider why people are buying it and who's buying it and then having to do that um having to do that like a hundred times a month like it's it's too much for a human brain to comprehend at scale because that's one brand so now you have to do it across multiple Brands so it's a very difficult thing to do but it's something that's super easy and super Well Suited um to AI so um it's a really it fits in really well and the results are really really cool too man I'm getting so many questions these days about campaign setups and things like that especially when you talk about the ad volume that's possible when you uh do something like what Jacob is talking about in this episode where you're really outputting a huge amount of stuff with tools like Ai and just in general building your ad account for huge volume there is no better place to learn about how to build your ad account with financially driven targets and the best in current ad buying tactics on meta ads then admission from Common Thread Collective and if you go through the link in my show notes to sign up for admission um admiss you will get a free coaching call with their team of real experts if you are tempted right now to email me or to DM me and say Andrew how should I build my setup what I'm going to do is tell you I don't have time to look at your exact setup but I know who does and who can do a great job giving you structured course type content through admission like the very best in um DC growth principles coming flowing down from the mind of Taylor holiday into courses that are structured for you to get exactly what you need out of them um ongoing Community with other operators like you who are trying to get the best out of their growth tactics and are in admission with you and all kinds of uh different Siz businesses including eight figure businesses are in are in that Community like people to really learn from and then coaching for $150 an hour you can get access to uh to ctcs and rible team of media buyers who are deeply experienced in manual bid media buying uh and you actually get the first one of those for free if you sign up for three months of admission or you can get four of them for free if you sign up for a year in advance and there's a 30-day money back guarantee look if you're trying to level up your uh DTC growth game and your meta ads game there's no better solution there's no better solution the best information available and the best help available is available to you through admission um the link for that is in the show notes you got to go through there if you want that free call um or you got to tell that I sent you to get that free call a free coaching call or those four free free coaching calls so go to the link in my show notes go to admission get the help you need what part of that process could I do like could I can't build that I don't think I don't think but what what could I build with the with the tools where they're at now um you could get access you could create a more manual version of this um that you're able to use so you could export your products data from Shopify you wouldn't have to use the API um and you can paste it into whatever bi tool you want to use or Google Sheets for example and you could order it um you you could probably do an element of the review scraping data that we use um I I think that we could come up with Frameworks to make it efficient and work well for you um it wouldn't be entirely it wouldn't be entirely automated and it wouldn't be the same of detail um but if you thought about very specific Frameworks that you want your AI to think about your reviews in um and broke them down into different brok them down more into chunks or bulk and then pasted them in and then got the results and compared those that might be a way that you could more easily um that you could get more value out of your reviews um I would then make sure that you keep the product IDs associated with the reviews because most reviews um data they'll give you that and then you can paste it into chat GPT and ask to join your product sales T um table to your review table so now you've joined those together and you have a relationship there um and you could probably graph that data and get an insight into your um marketing calendar that way too so you could create a semi you yourself with a bit of hard work could create like a semi-automated a little bit more manual version of this um I think it would be the final output which would be hard for you to automate which is automating the process of Concepts and briefs and everything like that H have you um outputed these briefs yet uh We've outputed um specific Concepts uh but there's a whole there's a whole other part of this that we haven't even spoken about which is where a huge amount of my time has gone into which is automating actually creating the ads themselves yeah which might be interesting to talk to so well let's let's do the briefs for a second and then let's go there so um so the are the briefs that you're getting out of this so far good yeah yeah they're good um I think that they are as good as any human could make and a lot more efficient to get there sure um when I hear about this process what it makes me really think is uh I'm not going to go try to build this I'm just going to buy it when you guys produce it at scale I mean I know right now the plan is to probably to keep it I mean I have no idea what the plans for the thing is but um but that it just feels like the actual move here is that there's a Shopify app that plugs into my store grabs all that information for me communicates with my review software directly and then and I just pay you know $70 billion do a month for it because it's so valuable and yeah um that's yeah I'm I'm gonna be I'm be really fascinated if you get there especially if it gets to the level where you're also plugging in AI avatars and stuff like that all the way down to the ad level you know whatever so yeah yeah yeah that's um that's interesting what we're building so what we're building well J Jacob convince me that that's not the way I should think about this why don't I stop all of my AI investment right now keep making things the way I do do as good of a job as possible making things there are and then and then just wait for you or for somebody else to produce this as a public product and for the cost of that to go down over time because there's five competitive versions of it you know yeah I mean I'm not going to convince you that's not the right approach right now um I will say that with the space that I'm in right now is a lot of people forget that someone actually has to be the one responsible for building that someone has to be the person who takes it to the next level um and I think that that's where I am kind of what where I want to be um and that's where CTC is investing to be um if I were to play Devil's Advocate and why it might not get there um is because um the technology may not progress significantly enough into the future where it's able to with no human intervention or with like a in a very automatable way um understand your business and work within the constraints of your business in the way that you wanted to um when you have a human integrating it and someone like a specialist implementing it directly into your business then you know it's going to work really well for you um and that extra investment might make sense to certain people um it might not make sense to certain people people um I'm sure there's going to be a sass version of this eventually um I'm not too interested in being the one that creates the Shopify app version of this because it will go from $500 a month to $10 $10 a month really quickly um yeah but yeah yeah I mean I actually think it'll it'll start at um $3,000 a month or something like that if not more maybe 5,000 right because what you're talking about here is replacing employees right so it's just like yeah that's I think would be extremely expensive at first but over time it would get undercut on the price because what would happen at first is that the market you'd be competing with would be humans and they're expensive and so that would be what people anchored the price to but then eventually there'd be competitors and so then they'll all then the market just it'll increase the supply side on it but yeah but I mean I think I think there's a thing here that's sort of fascinating conversation makes me want to go talk to Taylor about how he's envisioning this because uh yeah um anyway the let's go to the thing you talked about you brought up because I think I think it is topic um because you just talked about saving a lot on Creative strategy costs and time yeah but now you're talking about actually making the odds themselves which is a different area which is all the money that goes into actual creative production costs um so talk to me about what you're doing there and yeah yeah so we haven't spoken about this publicly yet the actual tool that we're building um but I think it's it's cool to it's fun to talk about and it's fine to talk about we've done some demos and some beta testing um so so we are building the AI co-pilot for you to make ads um people you people have been talking a lot about what um coders have right now with cursor and GitHub co-pilot and stuff like that think of what we're building as the creative production version of that so it's embedded directly into the um image editing softwares that people actually use the same way that cursor is like a fork of VSS code for example to the to the software Engineers out there um so for example a plug in in figmo directly into the canva API and what we do is we make it really easy for you to make ads very quickly in s scale so um our you have an AI backend which has scraped your entire brand presence online so your store your Instagram it's got an all your copy all of your different images your brand colors your brand fonts and everything like that um it's then loaded directly into let's just talk about like a figma plugin so you're able to access a figma plugin and the figma you can set up your figma in a way that um you can make bulk changes to all your different ads um that you've previously made so think about like selecting an image and that image goes across all of your different ads and then copy and then then copy the changes made across all of the different ads and so on um and what we've seen is that with this workflow and with this process you are able to create ads very very quickly um reliably and also high quality um so that's like the kind of main so you guys are actually already doing this y yeah yeah great yeah um so the um that's like kind of the main Foundation of it which we've had a lot of success with uh the next part of it the cool part is that um is automating kind of creative production like the actual photography the videography stuff like that um using AI which we've also seen a lot of success with people might be surprised about um but what we're able to do is we're able to take people's products take their brands and train AI models to enhance the current asset library that they have so we do integrate with your Instagram and with your Dropbox and everything like that um but then we can also enhance your image Library by take by making you theoretically infinite images in any location um anything with your product and feed those directly into your ads too yeah yeah that is uh that's that is wild I mean that's interesting like right before we started talking Taylor uh TL we going back and forth I I I had I put on Twitter that in the last 30 days and I actually just recorded an episode about this the last 30 days um my team had created close to 3,500 ads across a portfolio of about five clients um and that's really that's really good for us right that's by far the fastest we've ever made that includes you know that's of course not all 3500 it's not 300 Concepts it's variations and format changes and all that stuff so it's a little inflated but um but you get the idea and um and that is um great for us we've gotten the cost per ad down pretty low I think the quality is pretty high it's working in the ad account we're running through manual bids it works well but I I as I was reflecting on that like what I'm learning from that process is like if we can keep building process to unkink anywhere where there is sort of unnecessary manual labor will really help um and and you know there'll be more leverage and I think I'll be very fascinated to see what the availability of a tool like that is because I think there's just this world where we um yeah where we where we end up being able to massively increase that volume more and therefore my actual next investment the way that I think about where to put my time next is really actually on the quality side in some ways because I think if you can create a figma plug that does that and I can pay for access to it or whatever I actually don't really need to make a bigger investment at this point into the volume side other people are going to make that investment for me and then sell it to me or or or there's going to be some kinds of tools that in I mean a figma at some Point's going to do this kind of thing themselves right they're just going to like introduce you know a way to make it more valuable with their figma co-pilot or whatever um and but so for me it becomes now this like prompting thing like how do I make sure that the outputs that I get are as good as possible so that not only can I increase my output but like the way I was thinking about it is like if I have a 20% hit rate on my ads right now and I have no idea if that's the right number I'm just making that number up okay um if I have a 20% hit rate right now but I can turn that into 25 and I can 5x my output like it is it is a real leverage multiplier and so if I can do both at the same time it's really crazy and I think I'm better positioned to try to sort through um the quality output than the quantity output I think you're better positioned to work on the quantity output and then to make sure that the quality is happening and there's people looking at that you know who spent their whole time their whole life on Creative strategy and stuff like that you know uh but but that's the way that I'm sort of thinking about how those two things will come together and the AI part on my side of things then is to actually use AI to help me with the work of figuring out what makes a quality ad essentially for me to start trying to use the tools to analyze like why did this how to work what did I do here when I wrote this structure of an ad and I do have some like pre-built structures like that you know some formats I have this structure of an ad um how does that make it into and how do I right yeah like I said Hooks and body and whatever section of the ad how do I actually then plug that into the tool that then creates the massive amount of output you know so anyway I I don't know what what you think of that but that's that's my immediate reaction to you telling me that yeah I mean that's why we're not just building the AI tool we're also building the data infrastructure underneath that leads to um that creates the concepts at a better scale and has and that's a do driven decision right it's like yeah you can make thousand ads but are all the products in that In Those ads in stock like are they all actually products you want to be selling like doesn't make sense for your business so that's why that data infrastructure underneath is very important um and then there will be a whole monitoring and review process that goes on too so we know who the angle and who the what the angle was and who the audience was that was intended for that product like how we can monitor and see how does that perform are they performing well to is a certain audience performing well to it I mean responding well to a certain angle like does it make sense should we double down on that or should we explore new things um so yeah I think that what you're saying makes sense but I think the AI can and software itself can get further than um what people might expect as long as and it kind of comes back to the whole the whole point and the whole big picture which is are you giving it access to the data that it needs and the context that it needs to make that decision um and if so then yeah it gets it gets very powerful okay I have a lot of other questions and a lot of other thoughts and we will have to do another followup sometime but but before I do you are spending your life thinking about AI right now and and ads and those kinds of things tell me more or just let me just give you a second is there anything that we didn't cover that you think is really important to say that would be helpful for people anything like that and if not that's okay but I just I just want to make sure you have a chance to take the conversation anywhere you want to take it before we close um I mean how I usually think about these things is that um people need to be playing with it and they need to be seeing they need to see how far they can get uh but I do think a really important message right now is that if you're not getting the result that you want out of it and you don't think that it's useful there's a very good chance that's because you just don't know how to use it properly um and you're just not giving it the data and you're not giving it the context it needs and that's the reason why it's not producing a strong result for you and there's probably I would say in most cases especially even Beyond creative strategy like that's just one element of an e-commerce business where there's a very high Roi implementation that you could use that makes a lot of sense for your business and it's probably worth exploring um and like not to be not to introduce any Foo or anything like that but I I believe that the people who jump on it early and who adopted early will have exponential um will have exponential benefits in the future because they'll be well positioned and set up to adopt new changes um and they'll overtake the competition especially if you're a business that relies very heavily on humans like it's not it's not easy to unwind um or to change a business that relies very heavily on humans like that's a that's a big ship that you have to turn but if you start integrating technology and AI into your business early um and you're well positioned to take advantage of any changes then you'll probably be very well positioned in the future um and I think you'll benefit exponential I from that so if I was someone right now who was running um a business heavier in human human labor like e-commerce or agency or something like that um I would be thinking very deeply and it would be tough of my mind on how I can integrate these things yeah I mean what you just spoke to is exactly what I tried to say in my last podcast episode is I'm almost certain that part of the reason this isn't doing for me all the things that I want is because I'm doing it wrong um and the way I've continued to conceptualize AI is just that it's a tool tools create Lage but they only create as much leverage as as you are good at wielding them right it's like there's a lot of really good quality tools out there for uh let's say woodworking that I can create zero leverage with because I have no idea how to do woodworking you know um and so like I mean I've honestly thought about like a hammer like you watch good construction workers with a hammer and though though a the use of a hammer is I'm much better at pounding a nail with a hammer than than with not having a hammer and better at pounding a nail with a hammer than with like a mason jar right or something like that if I was trying to use something else to create some leverage on it right the hammer works better than that but people who are really like professional construction workers are way better at using hammers than me they pound the nail in in one shot every time they hit it right in the middle of the head and um and so they so it creates way more leverage for them than it does for me and that's the way I've kind of conceptualized this it's just like like I'm just not that good at swinging the hammer yet and I got to get better at it um so anyway thanks for helping me to do that Jak uh in this episode and I'm sure this will be useful to others I'm certain there will be people listening to watching this who will want to follow up with you you should do that DTC jaacob on Twitter I know you've been sharing some stuff that you've been learning and Taylor's been uh promoting some of that as well and what you guys are producing I'm also sure some people are going to hear this and go I need to go work with common thread Collective you're right you should go do that um and they are unparalleled I think in what they are creating in e-commerce space so um if you would like to do that uh follow up with me it's probably the easiest and I'll make an inure of the right person there few different parts of the organization and happy to do that podcast at AJF growth.com happy to make an intro again depending on sort of where your business is at and who you should be talking to and what part of the organization you should go into so um that's that any last things Jacob anything else that you want to say before we sign off here no just thank you thank you for having me on it was a lot of fun I love talking about Ai and I'm happy to talk about AI with anyone in the e-commerce face or Beyond yeah all right my pleasure man thanks again holy cow the future is going to be crazy this is going to be absolutely nuts where this is all going what that conversation with Jacob just opened my eyes to a whole bunch more places that are just not that far away even if you're not getting all the access to it right now yourself like Jacob talked about there's just a lot that can be done uh if you would like to follow up with Jacob do that DTC Jacob on Twitter he's a really um super smart and compelling guy as you as you heard and um loves to hear from people so go do that link for that of course is in the show notes and then you can also reach out to me at Andrew J Ferris don't forget to follow up with my sponsors for this episode including Billy and admission they both awesome and uh and you can reach out to me podcast at a jf.com and find out everything else I'm doing at ajfc don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening I've got more really really good episodes coming up including a whole episode dedicated to International ad buying on meta ads which is something I basically never talked about on this show but I'm going to um bring you a full approach to how to set up International advertising it's going to be really helpful it's Ash Milani from Obi uh so don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss that talk to you next time [Music]