Hello and welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy!

This is the newsletter that demystifies the AI hype and gives you actionable and practical information instead.

This week we look at:

• Researching on autopilot with Zapier Central

• Consultants an early winner in the AI race

• Sprint 4 update - TheLeadMagnet.biz

Now there's lots to crack on with today, so let's make like a whip and flick to it.

-Marshy

Research on autopilot with Zapier Central

I've been a long-time user of Zapier.

It's a tool that acts like duct tape for your software.

You want your email sign-ups to push into your CRM?
​There's a Zap for that.

You want someone to receive a text adddress them by their name and linking them to the new buyer guide they signed up for on a Facebook ad and then send an email to the Sales team?
​Yeah can create a Zap for that too.

You want to get a Slack alert when someone signs up to your newsletter?
​There's a Zap for that and you better believe I do it!

Another way to think about it is a way to do automation without coding.

Anyone with developer knowledge can create scripts/code snippets that do these things too - but takes time/effort/attention that they usually don't have.

Because people with developer knowledge are usually working on harder to solve problems within a business.

Zapier has released a newer tool called Zapier Central.

​

This is a new experimental tool that enables you to create a bot with:

• Behaviours - what to do when a behaviour is triggered, how to process or summarise data, and when to execute a particular task

• Instant action - tasks you've asked the bot to do

• Data sources - sources of information the bot can analyse, summarise, and answer questions on

A long held idea on Marshy's idea shelf is to start using AI to make the newsletter creation process easier for myself.

In theory - I could train an AI to read all my previous newsletters, adopt that style, and then grab news bytes from RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, and my saved articles, and produce a first draft of the newsletter pronto.

The reality today is I do all my sifting, reading, and research manually (and enjoy that process) but wanted to investigate how easy/hard the above would be to execute.

The answer: not very.

The screen opens without much steering, but I was able to work out some things:

I can then message the research bot behaviours, actions, and data sources I want it to do:

I was then able to create a behaviour that fires when emails appear in my Gmail newsletter folder - scan them for AI news, and send me a Slack alert.

I can also test the behaviour to make sure it's doing what I needed.

​

And it sort of does it!

I could ask it to tidy up the formatting and improve its citations, but it seems to be able to skim things and summarise them for me to read in Slack (if I so choose).

I can see this being really useful on things that are quite dense.

For example -

• Set up a Google scholar alert for "biodiversity"

• Send alerts to inbox

• Scan alerts for any mentions of "microplastics"

• Move paper link to research file

The use case I've been fantasising about is moving all my previous written newsletter articles into Airtable, pushing the articles into Webflow with canonical URLs ( like a blog), and then regularly scanning the articles for updated information about the content on the Internet.

Again - this is possible - and would improve my SEO.

But I just get a bit funny about over-teching my writing process.

​

Consultants are an early winner in the AI race

Via New York Times.

Throughout my career the BCGs, McKinseys, and KPMGs of the world have moved in and out of my periphery.

As someone who strategises, reads voraciously, and loves navigating complexity - I see the appeal of a consulting house.

The sell seems to be something along the lines of:

• We are experts at navigating complexity for our clients

• Pay us handsome sums of money to do this for you

• Now we'll find more ways for you to pay us as we become indispensable to you

It's not hard to find expensive flops - like BCG's fees for a COVIDsafe app that never happened.

I also know that navigating government organisations is painful, ambiguous and slow (at best) so there's more to stories like this.

So it's not very surprising that The NY Times (linked above) have shared how these organisations are profiting handsomely from the latest trend (enter generative AI).

The article is filled with a number of case studies, including this one:

​

I've worked on this client - Reckitt sits amongst the world's top 50 FMCGs (think brands you buy at a supermarket).

These brands rely on a hero brand marketing asset (usually a longform video) and then it gets repurposed/recut/localised for all the countries its present in (sometimes over 100).

So I can see how AI can help the often manual processes this entails.

I'm really curious though about what you guys think?

Should consultants be a "winner" here?

What gets me excited about AI is levelling the playing field and giving more people access to technology's capability with approaches they can understand.

Not more of "big company reduced bottom line".

​

Sprint 4 update - TheLeadMagnet.biz

I met Patrick Leddy at a dim sum restaurant while travelling in San Francisco.

Patrick was about to pitch his company Pulsate to some people at Apple the following day for a game-changing deal.

I didn't know that at the time, but we connected when I recommended the Xiao Long Bao as an order (soup dumplings).

We kept in touch and he's gone on to start multiple businesses.

I lead with this because there's something he shared with me over the years that resonates right now.

"You've got to fall in love with the process of solving problems - because there's always problems building a business".

To date here's how I'm doing:

• 470 visitors

• No sign-ups

I updated my landing pages on Monday - and went with an Australian startup founder focus instead of the broader targeting previously.

I've spent about $220 on ads to date.

Each sprint, I've been wrong about the video I think will do best.

FB optimises towards the video that works best, in the first sprint it was the video I shared last week, this week it's the direct ask video opening with "look - here's the deal" that's working best!

I've had an issue with my sign-up page that seems like a back-end problem (Carrd). I'm working through it with them and have turned off ads for now.

The good news is I'm getting more information along the way and need to continue to trust this systematic process - hence the reference to Patrick's words, "fall in love with the process".

​

--

​

That's it this week and great to share with you the news as always.

It's been really rough at home, one of our boys was in hospital and the other has an ear infection so it's been battle stations while Georgie and I grind it out and get through it.

It's times like these I'm grateful for the work I'm able to do, and not beholden to an employer with office attendance obligations.

There's other challenges I have for sure - but they are challenges I choose, and that means I get to be closer and more tuned into my family when it's needed.

​

Have a great week! 👋

-Marshy