AI Forward, Not AI First - with Brian McHale

00:00
Daniel Nestle
Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, I've been in marketing and comms long enough to have a healthy allergy to the word transformation. Every few years, something's going to change everything. Social content marketing. Remember QR codes? They put them on billboards, they did everything with them and on the bottom of swimming pools. Then we all just stopped scanning them for about a decade, and now we can't live without them. So when somebody tells me AI is going to transform their entire business, my first instinct is to reach for the antihistamines. But I keep bumping into something I can't dismiss. Maybe every few decades, one of these actually sticks, you know? And the difference isn't the technology. It's whether someone rebuilds the machine around it or just bolts it on and calls it innovation.

01:00
Daniel Nestle
Which brings me to a guy who bought a struggling traditional agency about two decades ago and turned it into something unrecognizable. Not through hype, through unglamorous work of actually changing how the business runs. His shop now operates eight AI agents for every human employee. Think about that for a second. By the time this comes out in, I don't know, a month or so, it might be 10. They slashed prospect research from 45 minutes to 10 or less. His agency was among the first in the country to earn AI ethics certification. And he did it all from Cincinnati, not Silicon Valley, which, honestly, might be why it works. Now we're going to dig into what it actually looks like when an agency rebuilds itself around AI and what breaks along the way.

01:49
Daniel Nestle
He's the CEO and owner of Brandiance, and he might just cure my transformation allergy. Please welcome to the trending Communicator for the first time, Brian McHale. Brian, how are you?

02:01
Brian McHale
Good, Dan. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

02:02
Daniel Nestle
It's good to see you, man. You know, we talk about this transformation stuff all the time, and, you know, at the time of this recording, and which is not going to be too long before this goes live, I'm seeing everywhere this backslide into. Well, we tried the transformation, and now we have to pull back and we can't do the transformation or we're missing something or went too fast or we let go of all these people because of transformation. But now we're using too much compute and we don't know why. So we got to bring the people back to manage the compute. You know, it's just. It's endless, you know, But I think you have interesting perspectives on this and I'm really interested. You know, I can't wait to get into it.

02:50
Daniel Nestle
And before we do that, let me just give a quick overview, like to. For folks who have never. Obviously, you know, we did the intro, but who've never seen you before. But a lot of my Macon friends, that's the Marketing AI conference that happens every year in beautiful Cleveland. Might know Brian. We actually met at Macon, or actually were at Macon but didn't actually meet in person, but we met because of Macon, which makes us both, I guess, smack dab in the AI bubble. And we've hit it off since then, had a few conversations and this recording was supposed to happen seven times, I think, but we're busy people.

03:35
Brian McHale
That's right.

03:35
Daniel Nestle
And it's just like half Brian's fault. Half my fault. My fault is a bad word. But you know, schedules change. But you've been so generous and, you know, forbearing with the rescheduling. And I want to thank you for finally making it onto the show. So, Brian, it's too much for me. What's going on. How have you been since the last time? We actually. Since Macon. And what's been going on in the world with you, in your world and with Brandian's?

04:01
Brian McHale
Well, been good. We've been busy. And as I guess, hopefully most agencies are, there seems to be a lot of activity going on in the marketing world, whether it's AI related or not. But we've continued down the AI path. We've been growing as a business. As of this recording, we're two weeks into a new office. We outgrew our other space even. You talk about AI and AI agents and maybe you don't need desks anymore, but we do. We're still hiring and bringing people in to do a lot of the things that you referenced that some places may have thought they might not have to do. But we're so, you know, we've got. Got a lot of that cooking, some new clients that have come in. So it's, it's a good time.

04:49
Brian McHale
We're feeling, we're feeling good and I don't say we have all the answers, but I think we're building something that is, is, is somebody likes it because people keep hiring us and wanting to work with us.

05:01
Daniel Nestle
That's the key. Right. People need to want to keep hiring you. Or you can build as much as you want. Nobody wants it.

05:06
Brian McHale
Right.

05:06
Daniel Nestle
You know, but you mentioned that Building. It's a. Building has become a key word in my life since. Since I've, you know, ventured on my own and since I started Lilypath a few. Few months ago. Just transformation. We talked about transformation in the opening, but a different kind of transformation, a personal transformation from going from like, PR and comms manager, leader, executive to advisor to coder. How the heck did that happen? How did I get to be a coder? The trajectory is hard to make sense of. But you said that you've been building and you're growing and you're right in the middle of everything. With AI what can you tell us a little bit more about your business?

06:00
Daniel Nestle
And the reason I want to do that is because, you know, our listeners are a mix of communicators like PR people, lot agency people, and marketers, going from solopreneurs all the way up through corporate types and owners like you, and then just a smattering of just great people who love to hear what's going on in our world. So. So with that in mind, what is brandiance? You know, just quickly, what is. What do you do? So everybody gets anchor.

06:33
Brian McHale
Yeah. So, Brandon, you mentioned I purchased this back in 2008. And if you remember what was happening in 2008, it may not have been a great time to be in an agency. There was a lot going on economically that didn't favor agencies, but it did favor opportunity for buying. So what I bought back then was a very traditional ad agency is the way I would call it.

06:57
Daniel Nestle
And.

07:00
Brian McHale
Largely what we've done over those years is transform ourselves to be what is still a marketing agency. And we still do mostly advertising along with marketing strategy. But we tend to focus in three categories. Retail category, so retail chain brands, those types of things. Restaurant chains as well, and then in the. In the health care area as well. So those are our kind of our three areas that we spend most of our day. And you know, those. There are a lot of similarities between them, even though there might not initially seem like there are.

07:38
Brian McHale
But, you know, the consumerism, the retailization of health care is really why we ended up getting into that, into that space, because we had been doing it so well for true retailers, and there was a whole industry out there that didn't quite know how to connect with consumers, you know, and so we've been able to. To jump into there. And. And like you said, we've been. We've been trying to be as AI forward. I would, I would describe us as AI Forward, not AI first.

08:07
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

08:08
Brian McHale
And I think that gets into some of your comments about what, you know, what agencies may or companies may or may not have done with letting people go and realizing they shouldn't. Humans are at the center of everything we're doing still. Even though AI is an incredible, fabulous tool that's making our humans better at.

08:26
Daniel Nestle
What they're doing, it's relief to hear that. I mean, you know, not a lot of leaders as, you know, kind of get that yet. And it's kind of a great time for the agile and smaller to mid sized, you know, agencies and companies because you can make these, you can decide to be AI forward without having to, you know, okay, how are we going to train 75000 people to be. What does that mean? And you know, it's, it's a little bit of a different ask for like for an Accenture than it is for a brandiance. But that gives you, I think that it's the time of the smaller eating the larger's lunch. You know, like it's gonna continue to happen.

09:09
Brian McHale
Yeah.

09:10
Daniel Nestle
But it's interesting. There's, there was a, something you said just sort of made me think about this like retail versus healthcare because you said that the aspects of retail, you know, I'm paraphrasing but the aspects of retail like healthcare has a lot of similarities with retail and I hadn't really thought about it that way until, you know, until you really mentioned it. But yeah, it's like why do people hate healthcare mostly? Let's put the cost and the red tape aside. It's, it's fundamentally a problem with, it's an expectations gap. Right. It starts with customer service and then the quality of delivery and after, you know, and the nurturing process thereafter. It's like you can map that to a marketing or comms process easily.

10:06
Brian McHale
There is absolutely a funnel there. Right. Because there's so much choice available to many people when it comes to where they choose to engage when they need something, a doctor or a pharmacy or any of those types of things. So yeah, it really is that same consumer funnel that you need to think about. You need to get them at the top and try to get them all the way through. And then you need to try to help the hospital systems as an example, think about internally how they can keep people moving through the process versus hey, I'm going to go get my MRI here and then I'm going to go get my, whatever that I need to do over here. And then I'm. But you know how can they keep them into the system?

10:47
Brian McHale
And, and then conversely, we work with healthcare centers that are not associated with hospital systems. So how do they break in to somebody that's used to just kind of going, you know, with one network? So, you know, there's both ends of the spectrum as you look at it. But that's all the same stuff that you or I would do if were trying to sell hamburgers to somebody. You know, you're trying to make them choose you in a very competitive environment.

11:18
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. The constraints you have to navigate, though, in health and health care are a.

11:22
Brian McHale
Little, a little bit different. Daunting does not come into effect when I'm selling hamburgers. Exactly. Security is not as much of an issue.

11:31
Daniel Nestle
Do you have to maintain separate systems?

11:33
Brian McHale
We have different systems that we have to. Yeah, yeah. That we have to have in place.

11:37
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

11:37
Brian McHale
Because it's, you know, and it's, and in some of those instances, you don't actually have to have them, but you're just sort of smart to have them. And in other instances you have to have them. So it's better to err on, at least our opinion, better to err on the side of caution versus, you know, six months into an engagement saying, oh, right, we should have kept that separate.

11:57
Daniel Nestle
Well, I mean, it's always if you're, if you're building a business and if you are, you know, seeking to acquire clients of any kind, you should always optimize to the highest possible standard.

12:09
Brian McHale
Correct?

12:10
Daniel Nestle
Right. I mean, you know, sometimes it becomes, it becomes quite difficult and unfair. I think when certain regulatory standards hit the market and then it phases out, all the small operators can't afford the, the counsel and advice to make it work. But you know, it's the same thing. You go all the way back to the what we see the prices. Right. When were kids, California emissions. Right. You know, brand new car with California emissions. Who. What's California Emissions? Well, I mean, it's just emissions. Right, right. But, you know, all cars had to be built that standard. Just like now we. When you're building a company, when you're kind of dealing with a client, what are the privacy standards? What are the data protection standards that, you know, we have 50 states, we have 50 different standards.

12:57
Daniel Nestle
You got to go with the most restrictive one, which of course is California. Right. Or gdpr and cover the, COVID all your bases. So maintaining different systems must be a, a fairly big Haul.

13:13
Brian McHale
Yeah, yeah, it is, but it's, it's the right thing to do. And it's just kind of, as you're saying it. You build to that, to that area that, you know, might become an issue and, you know, and you. That way you're not caught short. And. Yeah, I feel like there's something related there to the way that we think about AI too, is, you know, a lot of people say AI is dangerous or they're afraid of it or, you know, and trust me, there's plenty of times that I've been fearful about some of the things I'm seeing happening with AI but it really comes down to the early decision making that you have to have. How am I going to integrate this into my business?

13:56
Brian McHale
And what are the decisions that I'm gonna make early on in order to make this a safe product platform resource for my folks?

14:06
Daniel Nestle
Well, it's interesting. I was gonna kind of hit you right off the bat like, so what are you doing with agents and what are you doing with cowork and stuff? But what you're talking about there, you said the little magic phrases, the right thing to do. Now your agency and your agency have really been at the forefront of ethics. Right. And what was it that I mentioned? You were, you were the first in the country to get AI ethics certification from the Institute for Advertising Ethics.

14:36
Brian McHale
Yeah, were one of the first agencies to do that. And that was important. That was important for us, not only because we felt like it was a nice external signal for people to say, okay, these guys are taking it seriously, and they're an ethical place to work with. But frankly, almost more importantly, it was important for me to help our internal folks because while yes, you can say, hey, they're certified in ethics, so they're, they'd be a great place to work with. I think that what it did is it helped to educate and set guardrails for employees as they're using AI.

15:19
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

15:19
Brian McHale
And, you know, they go through the training, they understand what we mean. There was no Ambigu, you know, And I think ambiguity is probably the biggest problem that people are facing with AI these days, is employees don't know what they're allowed to use or what they're allowed to do or not do, what they're allowed to put in it or not put in it. And so when ambiguity reigns, then you're, you know, you're in a situation where anything I Guess goes and that's when problems start.

15:48
Daniel Nestle
It's interesting. Like I've come across plenty of people in our world at Macon and you know, and then of course across the comms world when I talk to other professionals and you know, communications and PR is like ethics code of ethics is critically important when you talk about journalists and you talk about, you know, representing people properly, representing your brands properly. And it should be the same. It's the same for advertisers, it should be the same for advertising, right? But like, I don't know, I feel like when people start talking about ethics it's like if they're almost accusatory, right? Like oh, are you doing it ethically? Like what? Like oh, you can use AI but you're cheating. So how do you get like when we say ethics it just means it's your anti cheating policy.

16:37
Daniel Nestle
And I feel like it's so, it's so they oversimplify it so much but they also make these really negative assumptions about the people working with AI. And hey, granted, if you're a professor and you have 219 year olds who need a good grade to get to grad school, there's an incentive you got to keep in mind to really be on watch. And I'm not saying that you should like, you know, not trust your students, but that's very different than being in a professional environment where you're serving your clients. You know. So like when people ask you about ethics, like what is or what are the main kind of, you know, the big five bullet points or seven or whatever it is that, that you have to pay attention to use AI ethically and to ethically work with clients with AI.

17:42
Brian McHale
The first word that comes to mind for me is just transparency. Because using AI or not using AI either way is just fine. You'll get work done and you'll probably have a great output either way. But if you're transparent about when you're using AI, you give the client or the brand the opportunity to either raise their hand and say, hey, I have an internal AI policy that doesn't allow me to do this for that reason. And a lot of large companies and even mid size now aren't allowed to use it. So as long as you're transparent about how you're using it and then getting that buy in from the brand I think is great because that leads to brand authenticity. And is authenticity necessarily tied to ethics?

18:31
Brian McHale
Probably not, but I think it certainly is an outcome that if you're being ethical and then you're being authentic to who your brand is, or in our case, we're being authentic to how we like to work and how we like to present ourselves. And authenticity in the AI world. I mean, we see it every day. Sometimes those two, they both start with the letter A, but they're, you know, AI and authenticity, but they're not necessarily always aligned. Yeah. Because there's just so much fake stuff out there. Because you can do it if you want to do it, but if I don't care if somebody creates something that's not real, just tell me that this is AI generated, then I can make an educated decision about whether I care to view it or not view it.

19:16
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. So we got. We got transparency. You know, we've got. Don't do fake things. Right, Right.

19:24
Brian McHale
Yeah.

19:25
Daniel Nestle
I mean, sometimes I think it's as simple as that. And be, you know, authentic to your brand.

19:29
Brian McHale
Yeah.

19:30
Daniel Nestle
Do you have any.

19:30
Brian McHale
But it's also. Sorry, just. But it's also then building. Going back to, you know, the. The getting our. Our people certified in ethics. It was just another way, like I said earlier, for them to have some guardrails.

19:44
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

19:44
Brian McHale
And they know where they can play. And they know if I'm getting near the edge of this. Of this box or if I'm starting to step outside this box, I need to really step back and think about it or go talk to somebody and understand whether I'm allowed to go there or not. Because a lot of times when people make mistakes with AI, it's not because they intended to do something they shouldn't have done. It's because they hadn't thought about it earlier in the process.

20:10
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Maybe that's part of. Maybe that'll roll up into ethics at some point where.

20:16
Brian McHale
Yeah.

20:17
Daniel Nestle
You have a responsibility to think things through Right. Before you even start, you know, a. A project or a prompt or whatever you're doing. I mean, you have, you know, if you're doing it for yourself and you're just experimenting, it's one thing. But.

20:32
Brian McHale
Yeah.

20:33
Daniel Nestle
You know, just like with anything else, I think we're learning, or say the clients of AI are learning, that it's not less work. Right. It's not reducing your work. Because the planning, the understanding, the part of working with AI that makes or breaks the AI session, as it were, or the AI activity is being able to give it that upfront information and instructions and knowledge and resources, what it needs to get the job done. That's on you. Right. And I think that's probably a, an ethical call now. I mean, I know maybe we need to talk to Rebecca Boltzma about it or something. But, but there's a, there's a really strong, I think, tendency for people to just go into AI and just ask a quick question and go from there and let it snowball.

21:40
Daniel Nestle
And you know, they don't realize that they're either headed, they're headed for an incredible discovery or right or disaster. You know, but don't you.

21:50
Brian McHale
One thing you said, just kind of curious if you'd agree with this, but I feel like as leaders that are playing in this AI space or running businesses or creating things like you're doing and building as leaders, our role has moved more upstream when it comes to AI and content. Because as an example, I'll take our own brandiance marketing pre generative AI. My content team would come to me and say, okay Brian, here's the brandiance marketing content that we want to put out. And I would review it and I would give a thumbs up or I would make some edits and then we would move on and something would get published or put out there in some way.

22:39
Brian McHale
Now if we're using AI to generate something, as a leader, I need to be involved much earlier to say, hey, what are the inputs that are allowed to even be used as you're starting to think about generating content? Is these types of prompts or these types of instructions. If it's an agent, this type of data you're allowed to train AI on or not? Because if I don't do that, once content is ready to go out the door, it could include things that should have been caught five steps ago.

23:15
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

23:15
Brian McHale
And it, and, but isn't because people, as you're just saying, can jump in and do a quick prompt and say oh, that sounds pretty good, right? I think I'll use that.

23:24
Daniel Nestle
Well, well, why is it then that the people who are, and to use, just to use the upstream downstream thing, like why is it then that people who are further downstream can't make those calls themselves? I mean I'm almost rhetorically asking this question, but you know, what are your thoughts on that?

23:43
Brian McHale
Like yeah, I think they can make calls. I think though, as leaders, it's incumbent on us to help set. I used, keep using the term guardrails, but to set those guardrails early on, whether it's an AI policy type scenario for the company, whether it's correct training, whether it's, hey, you can use these types of tools, but not those types of tools. You know, maybe it's an enterprise system only or, you know, whatever level of platform you're using. I think as long as the leaders help people understand again the guardrails, then that does allow people to play and people, as you said, lower down the funnel, do more and probably do more faster.

24:31
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, it's on my mind lately because not only because it's one of the things we talk about on the show a little bit is the intersection of expertise and experience with, let's call it capable or AI capability or AI fluency and how we who have certain kinds of domain expertise have to be there in a more present way, certainly in a more kind of detailed way. I think at the outset, you know, we have to almost kitchen sink it. Like.

25:13
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, think of everything that, you know, if you wanted, even if it's something simple like, you know, like creating some written content, you know, who's gonna ask the right questions from the get go and who's gonna know what all the, what the minefields are out there and who's gonna know like all these things that you should put in the upfront and then you can step away and let the AI do its work and let the teams do their work. So, you know, I think we do have a, not only responsibility to do that, but it's also an advantage for us who are experienced in terms of, we're really good with AI because of this. But the question then becomes how do the folks who are downstream become upstream? Like, how do the folks who are downstream gain that wisdom and skill to get.

26:05
Daniel Nestle
And that's a much bigger conversation that we can go on for hours and hours about and never get to a conclusion. But how is, how are you guys dealing with that in your company?

26:14
Brian McHale
I. Training. Yeah, basically a lot of respects and you know it. And, and I'll tell you, gosh, there have been so many fast innovations in AI just even in this calendar year that, and, and frankly some of the stuff that happened with Claude and cowork and all that stuff in, in January, I guess it was January. I know time flies. Those, those have actually, those developments have changed even our thinking on training because the barrier to entry for anybody to do a lot more is low, is much lower than it used to be. And so what we've been trying to do is train more people to be, I'll say, AI operators, if you will. Because what we believe that will allow them to do is to identify places that AI can be integrated into the business or into client work.

27:17
Brian McHale
And so they are then having the ability to make some calls on hey, let's use AI here or don't use AI there. And they may not have had that ability six months ago.

27:29
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

27:30
Brian McHale
But now they're able to see. Okay, I can now see what AI can do. I can see that it's going to be pretty easy and fast to do that. But. And I'm also trained on how to integrate that into process. So that's, those are the kind of the three pegs that we're really trying to think through. And it's, and it's a little more of like I said, an AI operator, AI process type training than maybe what were doing six months ago.

27:58
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I mean there's so much knowledge that's now resting in, you know, the, and the way that they can access and you know, the argument can be made that well, therefore you don't need as much intelligence or as much expertise to use it or. No, you need even more because you know, you still have to be on top of it. You know, like one example, because things change, as you said, and because there's a lot of, I guess we could call it like hyper localized or like situationally unique circumstances that co. Work or anything can't account for. The only you have to be there like in the loop as it were to, to make it work. So like, you know, one of the examples that's been coming up recently is you know, with Claude Cowork, which by the way is like my soul.

29:04
Daniel Nestle
I mean I love Cowork. I mean everything about Claw. I've been a Claude person since you know, I was always on the Claude side rather than the. If there are sides. You know, if it's a Coke and Pepsi thing and Claude is Pepsi, then I've been Pepsi all the way. But, but you know, like every tool has their use. And you should never really think of, of a task from the perspective of the tool. You should think of what tool to use from the perspective of the task if you have the luxury to do that.

29:33
Brian McHale
Agreed.

29:33
Daniel Nestle
But what I was going to say is right like with Cowork, like all of a sudden you have like when it came out, what a few months ago, it was like it's the SaaS killer or whatever. You don't have to need these services. And then you have people who are, you know, a 17 year old kid could build a little business and create contracts and like have the, have like a Claude legal plug in and have their LLC before, you know, no time, blah, blah. Right, right. Well then a ruling comes down from the federal courts that says, oh, you know, anything you do in AI is no longer, you know, is not, does not benefit from a, is not covered by attorney client privilege and you know, granted for like a proposal or something. Not that big a deal, but.

30:19
Daniel Nestle
Right, but it's not only that the contracts that you create like can be torn apart. It's that if you have, you know, a thought or an idea and you put it in there, it's discoverable.

30:34
Brian McHale
Yeah.

30:34
Daniel Nestle
You know, so you can't say, oh, I only heard about it in March, but if it's in your conversation history in January, you're a liar. Right. So like it takes a lot more to understand the nuances of working with the AI and those are going to get more and more complicated. So I don't think it's going to, you know, it's going to necessarily make us dumber or replace the need for the human, but I don't either. Brian Piper calls it the human in the loop sandwich. Right.

31:06
Brian McHale
Okay, I haven't heard that.

31:07
Daniel Nestle
Okay, you need a human at the beginning for sure. Then you let the AI run in the middle and then you put the human at the top. So very simple metaphor, but I know there was a question in there somewhere I was thinking about. You mentioned the Claude cowork and all these developments that have happened and actually like, it's interesting that you said how it's changed the way that you're working or that you're using, that your employees are working. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the like the coworks and the open clause and the agentic things that are now on everybody's desktop if, well, if you want it, if you pay for it. Right. And what that means, because I don't think people really understand agentic. There's 75 different definitions.

31:59
Brian McHale
Right.

31:59
Daniel Nestle
How do you, what do you think of like, how do you define that and how are you guys approaching these tools? And how would you recommend that our listeners approach these different tools? And of course, as long as you're using and which tool you recommend, as long as it's cowork. Thank you. Yeah, that's right.

32:18
Brian McHale
So everything you need the, you need.

32:21
Daniel Nestle
The Little banner at the bottom, anthropic should pay me. Hello?

32:23
Brian McHale
Yeah, exactly. Well, we can work on that for you. You know, I, I think the way we think about agents, we tend to think about them less as one offs and more. And we use the term, and it's not our own term, but we use the term playbooks, you know, where we tend to step back and say one agent typically isn't enough for many of the things that we're thinking about. So we want to build a series of agents that are going to help us do a task or a process where they're kind of firing off of each other and one agent does its work and then the next one kicks in and the third one kicks in, et cetera. And we've been doing that for a while.

33:12
Brian McHale
We haven't changed our philosophy so much around Playbooks because they tend to be the highest value things that we're creating right now. Those are the ones that I see our people continue to move to or use more often. And as you mentioned earlier, we've got about eight AI agents for every person. And we've built a lot of one off AI agents, you know, whether there's a brand, Persona type things or helping us communicate more effectively with a particular brand or client, you know, based on their rules and regulations in the way that we need to send things their way, you know, so those are useful.

33:59
Brian McHale
But what's been interesting to me is I see a lot of those one offs be built and used and then almost lost like they're there and people forget they're there or they, you know, and so that number eight AI agents for every employee, it could be double that for sure. But I don't know, you know, because there could be a lot of different AI and so that gets into just the whole governance piece of it. And that's the, that becomes the scary thing for me as an owner and someone who is allowing employees to use this on behalf. I use the technology on behalf of clients because anybody can build an agent now, whether they love cloud or hate cloud or love OpenAI or.

34:42
Brian McHale
I mean you can just ask AI how to build it and you'll get a pretty good, you'll get a pretty good agent out of it. But for us again, it's more about what are those more detailed and in depth processes that we can pull together to create these playbooks. And a lot of it, like I said, is because I just keep finding these one Offs that. Hey, we built that about two months ago. Is anybody still looking at that or using that? Oh, we forgot we had it. It's not because somebody didn't like using just, you know, the pace of play. And you know, you forget it's there.

35:19
Daniel Nestle
It's like there's an island of misfit toys for agents out there.

35:23
Brian McHale
Yeah. Yeah.

35:24
Daniel Nestle
You know, like, for me, I've always had trouble. Like, I, I didn't know it, but I had difficulty conceptualizing, you know what. When I'm doing something that's identic and when I'm doing something that's not agentic. And then I realized there's a whole bunch of different definitions, and I decided not to think about it anymore. But.

35:41
Brian McHale
Right.

35:41
Daniel Nestle
But it's worth thinking about now because. All right, you said that you're thinking in terms of playbooks, rather like you're creating playbooks or the playbook. Is the. Is. Is playbook synonymous with agent or, like, can you talk about that a little bit more? So it's all definitely.

35:58
Brian McHale
Yeah, sure. So for us, playbook is really just more of a workflow process. Right. A best practice or process. And so what we will do is we'll identify what operationally. I'll use internal as an example, what operationally we can improve or that is redundant or that somebody doesn't like to do. And they would spend a lot of time to try to get rid of having to do that ever again. And so we'll look for those opportunities, and then we'll sit back and say, okay, how can AI help? Or can AI help Or how can it help? And typically, what happens is, in a process, there are going to be multiple steps. And so what we do within a playbook is we will build an agent for each step.

36:44
Brian McHale
And that agent, you know, agent number one will do the research or discovery as an example, and then agent number two will do a different level of discovery, or agent number three will then pull that into a report format or, you know, being very simplistic with it, but those are the. And then those three agents together create a playbook. And someone knows, if I need to do that process, I just need to initiate that. Initiate that playbook by doing whatever the human needs to do to initiate that first agent. And then the rest of the agents know what their jobs are. Once agent one's done, then agent two's done, and agent three, you know, so,.

37:21
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, okay, that's making it clearer for me. I, you know, I started approaching this, like, you know, I need, like, I wanted to improve a system or, you know, get something done easier, find a shortcut or whatever it is. And, and, you know, when I started thinking about agents, you always hear from like, the speakers out there or for like, the. The thought leaders, it's like, oh, you're gonna have something that's gonna be able to do this whole thing for you. So it's like, oh, I'll be able to just tell, like, and. And sometimes you can tell co work or something and say, look, I have this massive thing that needs to get done. Go and do it. So essentially, Cowork is an agent of agents, right?

38:03
Daniel Nestle
But where I started to really hone in a little bit is I started with automation, because I hate automation. Not as a concept, just it's a pain in the neck to do all the times people recommended Zapier or Make or N8N and all that. I'm like, yeah, okay, it can be done, I get it. But I'm, you know, I just couldn't be bothered. And then when. When I started to realize, oh, that's one place where an agent can sort of take over. In many cases where an agent can take over, it's still just as much of a pain in the ass to set it up, honestly, but. But for some reason, it's more enjoyable. But once it's set up, you. You just kind of let it go autonomously and. And it'll do the. Do its thing when it does its thing.

38:54
Daniel Nestle
And the AI part of it is in its expanded ability to make judgment calls here and there, right? And know when to stop or know how to hand off to something. But that's, of course, all in the way that you build it. So start with the simple ones. I have a QC quality control agent running on the back end of my apps, right? That just, you know, that it's all it does. You know, it just sort of kicks in at a certain time and it gives me feedback. It says, this is good, this bad. Oh, no, we got to kick this back. So small thing, that's kind of the first one I created. And then, you know, now I keep thinking of, okay, where else can it go?

39:43
Daniel Nestle
But I feel like most people don't know where to start with it and feel like it's just too much of a leap of, I don't know, leap of cognitive leap. Let's call it that.

39:57
Brian McHale
One thing, one suggestion I have for a lot of times when I talk about agents to people that aren't using AI or a Little nervous about AI or whatever. The question I often get back is, why wouldn't I just put that prompt in every time or I save that prompt.

40:16
Daniel Nestle
That's why.

40:16
Brian McHale
And it's, you know, you can do that if you want to recreate the wheel every time, but what an agent will do is allow you know, through the instructions to kind of know what you want and you tailor it over time. Yeah. And so, yeah, you know, to kind of your question of simple, really simple versus complex. I think an agent can be extremely simple and very valuable. If it's, if you've developed something that will enable you to, you know, save 10 minutes, I'll take 10 minutes over the life of, you know, if you're using it on a very frequent basis.

40:58
Brian McHale
But one of the things I like about agents is the more you use them, you start to be able to fine tune them, change their instructions, make it something that is, I think, a little more valuable just because you're not trying to write a prompt every time and it's easier to engage with. And so I, frankly, I think you probably use it more because you don't have to think about, all right, what was that prompt or copy and paste prompt. You just go to your agent, click it and have it do its thing.

41:27
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I mean, people say, well, but isn't that the same thing as an app or like, kinda, you know, it achieves something for you. Those are just the simple ones though, Rick. Like the way that you can go with this, like look AT cowork or OpenClaw or one of these other things, you give it a task and you see if you're like me and you find it entertaining to watch it like, oh, what's it doing now? You can see so many different. It's engaging so many different processes and different skills. And Claude, it's a skill or it's a plugin and those skills are essentially, they can be agents because they do a task, but it's usually a multifaceted task that requires several inputs and it requires a little bit of thinking and judgment calls or additional capabilities. That's where you start.

42:24
Daniel Nestle
To me, that's kind of the line where you start to get into agentic. Does it accomplish more than one task? You know, is it using additional tools, like without you interfering with it autonomously? Right. And then, okay, that's the baseline and then where do we go from there? You know, like, it's interesting. I'VE been, you know, really focused on Cowork. And, you know, I keep finding new use cases and new things to do with it. I don't find my life easier because of it at all. I find that, okay, now that I have all these, essentially this library of agents at my disposal, that's part of a big agent. Where does that take me? And then, of course, a couple days ago, last week, at the time of this recording, Anthropic goes and does this silly thing and releases Claude Design.

43:26
Daniel Nestle
And I don't know if you've seen Claude Design yet, but I haven't played with it.

43:30
Brian McHale
I've read a lot about it, but haven't.

43:31
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, like, you build your, you know, you can create a really robust brand book, like Brand Design, your brand design. I mean, I'm just scratching the surface of it, I'm sure, but essentially I took a few hours because it takes time. You have to put time in the upfront. And I build out my brand, my design system within cloud design. So, okay, cloud design itself is a big agentic thing. Like you're, you're uploading all this stuff, then the design is talking to itself. You can see what it's doing. Oh, you know, and I have to go and do this. What if I change that? And it's really incredible, and then it gives you the design assets and asks for you to approve them or to, you know, to give more feedback. And you keep tweaking. It's like working with a designer really, but fast.

44:25
Daniel Nestle
And I'm not saying better, just fast. So, you know, I built this design system. I'm trying to redo a particular website right now. So I have this whole Claude Cowork conversation going on, which I started before design. Claude Design was released and, but I never finished it. And I get back to it, I'm like, okay, all right, here we go. So I just said, okay, hey, stop the press. I'm using Claude Design now and I have a design system. It's going to make the rest of this conversation much easier. Right? How should I deliver my design system to you Claude coworkers? And Claude Cowork says, oh, it's easy. Do this, this and this. No problem. It's not, it's not directly connected as far as I know. Right. But, you know, for now. So, yeah, I did that.

45:19
Daniel Nestle
I packaged up my design system in a zip file. Well, I did, I mean, Claude Design did it for me. Download this. Here you go. Here's your css, here's your design system. Here's your whatever, your brand. Brand guideline. Sort of dumped it into my cowork. And I'll be damned. It's a hell of a. It's a heck of a website. It's creating for me. I mean, better. Better than anything that I've seen anybody do. Not because of their talent, but because of the focused brief that I can give the AI. Right. That I can work through the. No, not that. Where you work with a designer, you're like, that's not quite right. Then you've got 12 hours before the next thing happens. Right, but the point is, right, that this whole, like, being in this agentic environment now is becoming the thing.

46:08
Daniel Nestle
And in your case, right, You're. You need to. Your agency needs to, like, absorb what these tools do and then figure out a way to package it not only for yourselves, but for your clients. Right. So. Right. So do you. Are you going crazy with all this or, like, do you find yourself, like, where are you drawing the line and what are your clients asking for? For the most part.

46:30
Brian McHale
You know, it's so interesting. Our clients aren't necessarily asking for anything other than what they've always asked us. And that's better and be faster. And so, you know, in. In. But I have yet to have a brand say to us, you know, please use more AI. I've had brands say, don't use it for these types of things. But. But which is good because I think a fear I have as a, you know, a professional services organization. Right. Is. Is someone coming and saying, I know if you use AI, you can do it faster? Well, yeah, but I can also get a lot of AI slop out of it and, you know, and. And not give you anything that's going to help build your business. So that's the good news, I think, for us. Where do we.

47:17
Brian McHale
Where do we draw the line or how do we think about it? We, like. I'll use the. I'll use the brief as an example. You're just talking about the creative brief and how well you were able to tail. That's another use case for us, for AI agents. I mean, we've built a series, we've built a playbook that generates a better creative brief than we had been doing when it was just us humans. And the reason is that it's an iterative process with AI and it is asking some good questions of our humans as the humans are putting in the input into the credit brief and getting to something that our creative teams are saying, our human creative teams are saying this is better direction or this is more complete.

48:02
Brian McHale
The AI is not allowing us to necessarily skip questions, or at least it doesn't allow us to do that without double checking and asking. And so what we're finding is that there are less shortcuts being taken when we're putting creative briefs together. And in fact, we're actually putting those briefs together in a faster way because it's a fast process and our creative teams are loving it and enjoying it. So, you know, I think, you know, so we're using, much like you are, we're using AI to consolidate our thinking and our input in a better way to set the humans off on a good, you know, a good adventure as they're going through the creative process.

48:44
Brian McHale
And that's not to say they might not be using an AI tool to help them in the creative process, but we're making sure that the humans are being inserted at the, what we believe are the right times of the process, at least for what we're trying to, you know, what we're trying to accomplish.

48:59
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, yeah. Clients get itchy when you start to say, well, I used AI to create this. And it's like, okay, you're. Then you're overcharging me.

49:09
Brian McHale
Right?

49:09
Daniel Nestle
Some people overcharging.

49:10
Brian McHale
Or can I own it or can I, I mean, how much of it? You know, can I trademark, you know, can I copyright? Can I, you know, and so you have all of those conversations that you have to have.

49:19
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

49:20
Brian McHale
With clients, which is why, you know, we have our AI policy, which we share with all of our clients. We always ask any brand we work with, do you have an AI policy? And if they don't, that's okay. But if you do, we want to know it, we want to see it, we want to know what your rules are, because we don't want to break it unknowingly.

49:35
Daniel Nestle
So important like that you just can't jump into something say, you know what, I'm just going to take this over to chat GPT and muck around. I mean, it's more, you know, it's interesting because I, I said that, you know, that clients might say, oh, well, you're doing this faster. So you're. So you should be charging less. Which is anybody who's in our business know, like it's like it's a knife to the.

50:03
Brian McHale
Yeah.

50:04
Daniel Nestle
To the heart. Because like, we, it's not about the hours. It's about the knowledge we. Everybody should understand. Right.

50:09
Brian McHale
The value. Sure.

50:10
Daniel Nestle
About the value pricing.

50:11
Brian McHale
Yeah.

50:11
Daniel Nestle
But what you said is far more interesting, which is, you know, they're coming to you and saying, can I own it? What's the, you know what's the copyright stuff? Which, which is a much more business critical conversation to have. So those are smart clients. Like, those are.

50:29
Brian McHale
Yeah.

50:30
Daniel Nestle
I want people like that to talk to me and I want to be able to say to them, well, yes and right. Yes and no. Or maybe.

50:38
Brian McHale
Yeah, yeah. Because. Because one of my biggest fears would be to give a client something because the way we operate with all of our clients. Right. And they own everything that we do on their behalf. And, and so my biggest fear is giving them something that they love and then they want to go copyrighted or do something trademark. And. And I say, well, you know, you kind of can't do that. Sorry, I'm glad you like it, but you can't own it.

51:03
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

51:03
Brian McHale
What good is that?

51:04
Daniel Nestle
Exactly? I mean, sometimes you can. Sometimes you just have to understand, you have to be aware. And that's a shifting, That's a, that's the goalposts are moving on that field as well. Right. Yeah, it's a. I mean, I still love it, though. I mean, I love being in the middle of all this and sort of even not having answers is, is refreshing because it's maybe the first time that I can remember where, you know, you're talking with a client or an executive or something, and it's like, look, I just don't have answer for you. And they're like, okay. They don't get angry.

51:35
Brian McHale
It's not like, yeah, it's back. It takes me back to like the early Internet days and being in the industry during that time where, you know, everybody. Nobody knew how to think about it. And then the dot comes in, the dot com busts. I mean, you know, all of this stuff was going on and everything was changing quickly, but didn't change as fast as the way it's been changing right now with AI.

51:58
Daniel Nestle
Right. And I mean, that's a whole thing on. In and of itself. Like, we talked about transformation at the beginning and you know, people are jumping like, but we've, and I've said this before on my show, like, how many people or how many companies have still talk about digital transformation in their annual reports or something? Like, probably none now. They've replaced it with, you know, AI. Transformation or whatever, but that never finished like a transformation is supposed to finish, you know, so there's a fundamental flaw in this whole or in this whole idea of transformation because nobody knows what the end looks like. And there are interested parties that don't want it to end as well. Right. There's a whole. There are many industries that are really milking the idea, this whole transformation thing.

52:45
Daniel Nestle
And not that you shouldn't help companies, it's just like it's in their interest to keep transformation conversations going and we hope that they're ethical about it. There's a couple of things like that I wanted to really kind of learn about. Not about branding, it's also about what you're doing with agents, about what you're doing with tools. But let's just look at, as we sort of start to bring this home a little bit, what is keeping you up at night and what is the kind of Runway ahead or the future ahead, as far as, you know, for you and for Brandians?

53:28
Brian McHale
Yeah, I think. I think what's. Big questions, a lot of questions in there, really, when. So I think what's keeping me up at night, specifically as it relates to AI is I used the word governance earlier. It's trying to. To continue to keep a handle on how AI is being used within my organization because I am a big proponent and I want people to use it in the right way, but everybody's got it on their phone, and so it's really hard to regulate all the time what's going on if we're not being clear with what those regulations should be. And so it's just, I'm always thinking, are we telling people what they need to know and to allow them to be able to operate? The other side of it is just the pace of play in technology as it relates to AI.

54:28
Brian McHale
It's, you know, I obviously run a company and do some other things as well. Staying up on AI is darn near impossible, I think, if any. I mean, that's why I love places like you mentioned Macon. And, you know, people that. That's their job is to try to just figure out what the hottest things are and let us know what those are so that we can get them in bits and pieces and try to decide where we want to focus our energy because it's. It's just impossible. One of the things we did that I. I really like to. To try to help people in our organization understand what was going on in AI, but also get their hands dirty because I think it's something that you can talk about it all day long.

55:14
Brian McHale
If you're not in it or using it, you just don't get it.

55:17
Daniel Nestle
That's right.

55:18
Brian McHale
And so we did. We had a year last year where everybody had a bonus goal, a bonus tied to an AI project. And they, you know, we set some parameters and they got to come to their manager and say, here's what I think I could do with AI. And it might have related directly to their job or it could have related to something else that were doing, but they had something outside of their normal workday where they had to use AI and think about something in the business differently. And I saw the greatest, I would say reaction, but also I'll say ROI for the business than. Than I have on anything else that we've done. Because people really started to think differently and use the technology and not be afraid of it because they knew they had to use it and jump in.

56:08
Brian McHale
And so even the people that, at our company that don't love it participated in it. And so those are the types of things that factor into keeping me up at night. It's like, what can I do next to keep people engaged in what we're doing and where the business is going? Because two years from now, I don't think I'm going to have many people working for me that aren't engaged in AI in some way, shape or form. It just. There isn't going to be a position that can avoid it.

56:39
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I kind of agree that's the way it's going. And you know, but I did want, like, what. You fascinated me. You got my attention with the, with this internal bonus program you had. Can you give an example of like one of the things, one of the innovations or one of the kind of process. What did somebody come up with that. That's.

56:58
Brian McHale
Sure. This. There were a lot of them. This was a simple one, was our accounting department. There were, there were certain processes or steps that they hated to do. And so one of the, one of our accounting managers used AI to be able to cut out a few of those things that she hated to do and was able to. She couldn't build it on her own. She wasn't at that level. But she brought it to somebody else who could build it. And, and you know, we got that accomplished. She likely wouldn't have spent the time or thought about that because, you know, it was the process. And this is the way that I'm moving stuff through the business. And it's not broken. It Wasn't. But, you know, she was able to do that.

57:44
Brian McHale
Another one, another one had to do with looking at just managing email. I mean, it seemed, you know, and there was one person at our company that really wanted to try to find how AI could help her manage her email and then potentially roll that out to other people that wanted to, you know, wanted to help with that. And if you think about it, I don't know anybody that thinks they've got a handle fully on their email. Oh, you know, so that was one of those things where, you know, hey, if we can figure this out, there's going to be a great ROI for people.

58:20
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

58:20
Brian McHale
So. Yeah. So just a couple different exams and a lot of them were internal process oriented, but that was okay.

58:26
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. And that the point is, right. That you have people who are thinking differently about what they can do and then they're saying to themselves, what if I could. Or I wonder if I could make this. And then they go to AI and they work it out. Right. It's not like a piece of software where you like typical software where you have to first learn where the, what the commands are, where the buttons are, what's, you know, that's not the way it works. And the more people understand that's not the way it works.

58:52
Brian McHale
Yeah.

58:53
Daniel Nestle
The better your offer can be. Well, it sounds like you are building a culture there. It sounds that, you know, is almost. I would. The word future proof is, is trite and overused.

59:04
Brian McHale
Yeah.

59:05
Daniel Nestle
But at least it's future facing. You know, it's like you're thinking about this and I like the way you said that because like your employees, like you can't see a future where you're, where you hire people or where you have employees who are not at least part of this whole AI system. But you didn't say we're going to reduce staff so that AI could. Right. That's a very, Those are very different things. And people need to understand this.

59:32
Brian McHale
I agree. I mean, you know, we just, as I mentioned earlier, we just moved into larger office space and we can't fill that space yet. And you know, but we're going to continue down the AI road. But I know I'm going to be hiring people as we grow. I, you know, my goal in life is not to have Brandians be me sitting there with 50 agents. You know, that. That sounds terrible. Yeah.

59:56
Daniel Nestle
I mean, you know, it's, it is very interesting. You hear all the Gloom and doom. All the, you know, the layoffs are top of the news. And it's going to, you know, look, it's going to continue to happen. Companies are not structured to deal with AI. They're not structured to deal with the boards that are demanding them to do things.

01:00:13
Brian McHale
You know what? I think some of what's going on there, and this is a complete guess on my part, but particularly the larger companies is they were overstaffed to begin with, you know, and nobody was stepping back and really thinking about process and what I forced them to do because the boards started asking like, what's our process? What's our, and you know, when somebody tells you've got to integrate a new technology in some way, shape or form, you're going to start with kind of the basics, let's flowchart this process and see if technology can help. And I, it's probably something they should have done pre AI anyway. And so I think AI, yes, it's part of what's going on, but I think it's getting a bad rap as to how many layoffs it's creating. You know, by an in and of.

01:01:02
Daniel Nestle
Itself, it's a thing, but not the thing. Right?

01:01:05
Brian McHale
Yeah, yeah.

01:01:06
Daniel Nestle
That's a good way to think about it. I, I, I tend to think you're right. You know, it's like, I think there's the cynic in me says like a lot of companies just waiting for the excuse to trim the fat, you know, but I, you know, the other part of, is the tendency toward overreaction, you know, getting rid of the people, you know, I just talked to in a, in podcast.

01:01:27
Daniel Nestle
I just dropped one of my good friends, Dr. Michael Netzle, who's a neuroscientist and communications expert who talks a lot about the, the neuroscience of the aging brain and not in the sense of dementia or, you know, of sickness or infirmity, more in the sense of for professionals who are, you know, in the sort of later part of their career that, you know, your brain is actually, the reality is that if you're, if you take care of your brain and you know, you make certain choices along the way and by the way, it's never too late to start making these choices, then you're able to deal with the kind of free fall of being without a, a, A, A, a system to hold you up all the time. Like in other words, or you know, uncertainty. Right.

01:02:23
Daniel Nestle
If you do all those things, then what happens is your Capabilities in terms of strategy, in terms of, Of, I guess, like visionary thinking. Get stronger and stronger well into your 60s.

01:02:39
Brian McHale
Okay.

01:02:40
Daniel Nestle
And, you know, the fact that companies lay off people who buy seniority because to save money is a. On the surface, yeah, we're losing institutional knowledge, but actually what they're losing is irreplaceable strategic capability.

01:02:59
Brian McHale
Agreed.

01:03:00
Daniel Nestle
And AI lets us kind of say, okay, fine, you let me go, but I can now, like, if I make the right choices and I'm able to jump in. Well, now I have the things at my fingertips that will actually help me to realize my strategic potential, as, you know, if I have the luxury to do so. But it's. It seems like that's kind of the direction that you go and that your company's taking.

01:03:24
Brian McHale
Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, because the more experience and whether they're 60 years old or whether they're younger, if they have a certain level of experience, you have a better sense of when to insert the human into the AI process. You know, look, where do I need to get involved? Involved? What are the red flags that I need to be looking for in order to, you know, stop or step in? Because if you've, if you don't have that experience and you're just asking a tool to do something or generate some content, it's going to do that just fine. That's what it's designed to do, is generate something. But if you don't know when to say when or when to call a timeout, which frankly, really only comes with experience, then, you know, then you're.

01:04:08
Brian McHale
You're kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that the tool does what you want it to do.

01:04:14
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I love that. If you don't know when to call a timeout. I've been trying to figure out how to phrase a few things and that's going to help me out. I'm going to. I might steal that. Good. Fair warning. Well, look, Brian, there's a lot more we wanted to get into. I know that you're doing some amazing work with synthetic data. I want to tell our people who are listening to. Go check out brandigans.com.

01:04:31
Brian McHale
Great.

01:04:31
Daniel Nestle
Find out more. Pay attention to Brian McHale. Look for Brian on LinkedIn. And you know, there's a lot of Brian McHale's out there, but just look for the one in Cincinnati who runs Brandians, and he's the right one and any place else that people can find you. Brianz.com and again, it'll be spelled properly in the notes.

01:04:49
Brian McHale
Yeah, no, LinkedIn's primarily the best place. Yeah. Yeah. We also have a podcast that's on YouTube and Spotify and Apple and all of that. It's called Go beyond.

01:04:59
Daniel Nestle
So Go Beyond.

01:05:00
Brian McHale
We have fun in that space, too. Yeah.

01:05:02
Daniel Nestle
And are you the host of this, of said podcast?

01:05:03
Brian McHale
I do host that one, yes. Beautiful. Yeah. We couldn't get a better one, so they. So she was fantastic. So. Yeah. Yeah. But that's fun. Yeah, it's. It's a fun thing that we. We started about a year ago, so.

01:05:16
Daniel Nestle
Amazing. Well, look, Brian, it took us like six or seven or eight times to get this right, but we got the timing right. We got together. I would love you to come back on the show at some point in the future. This is a lot of fun. And if I don't see you at Macon, I'm sure I'll see. I'll. I'm sure I'll see you sooner. Like, I feel like we've. We've got a lot to talk about, so everybody out there. Brian McHale, brandians.com check him out. And Brian, thanks so much for being on the show.

01:05:40
Brian McHale
Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. It's been fun.

01:05:44
Daniel Nestle
Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred. It's your call. Have ideas for future guests Want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending communicator,.

01:06:23
Brian McHale
Sam.