One AI capability marketers are consistently overestimating today

Marketers assume AI understands business context automatically. Isaac Ferreira, VP of Growth Systems and AI at Shift Paradigm, explains why that assumption fails without proper training. He breaks down giving off-the-shelf AI tools business-specific context, setting operational constraints, and building governance frameworks before deploying them at scale. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and today I'm joined by Isaac Ferreira, the VP of Growth Systems and AI at Shift Paradigm, a business and growth partner helping organizations modernize their marketing technology, and also a sponsor of the Martech Podcast. Isaac has spent more than 25 years building systems across industries ranging from defense, healthcare, and enterprise technology. And today, he's going to share why marketers need to stop thinking about AI as a set of tools and start treating it as a new way to work. I want to move on to our lightning round, where I'm going to ask you a couple of Martech questions related to this week's topic, which is operationalizing AI. Let's start off, what's the one AI capability marketers are consistently overestimating today?

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  That's kind of what you said. I ask people coming to me all the time, shouldn't AI just be able to do this? The short answer is no. So the capability is understanding context. AI cannot understand context unless it's been trained. An AI tool that is purchased off the shelf has been trained to do that task that you bought it to do. It's been given context in some limited form, and you still have to give a context for your business or for your application or whatever it is that you're building. So the misunderstanding is AI can't just do it. You must give it the tools to be able to do it. And in an enterprise situation, you have to give it the tools, plus the constraints, plus the governance.

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  There was a Sam Altman quote, which was kind of universally panned about six months ago, when people were starting to develop their own agents. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing, something basically along the lines of, yes, raising an agent is hard. Raising a human is hard, too. You should think of them the same way. That's kind of what I'm hearing you say is the off-the-shelf agents that you're buying are great. They have some context. It's like adopting a child. It's still a child. You still have to do the raising and parenting to get it to be the person you want it to be.

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  Yeah, if you take the nature versus nurture method with AI, you're going to have a big problem.

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  Fair. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Isaac Ferreira, VP of Growth Systems and AI at Shift Paradigm. If you'd like to get in touch with Isaac, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile or check out our show notes on martechpod.com. Or you can visit his company's website, which is shiftparadigm.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.