From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader

James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, makes the case that we are living through the biggest platform shift in marketing history. The front door of the internet hasn't changed, but the visitor walking through it has. Where consumers once clicked blue links, AI agents now crawl the web on their behalf, synthesizing answers and steering purchase decisions at scale. James explains why Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude all recommend brands differently, why mapping AI visibility onto traditional SEO is the wrong instinct, and why the real imperative is to equip a superintelligent agent with original insight it couldn't find anywhere else. He also digs into the dead internet theory – the possibility that human browsing could largely cease within three years – how AI advertising may become the most effective form the world has ever seen, and why agent-led marketing isn't just automation of the old work, but an entirely new capability. Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We've now reached a point in marketing where if your marketing team is not using agents, and in particular, profound agents, to do marketing, then you are failing. It's gone from a nice to have to a must have. And I think the big misconception with using agents to build marketing is that it's just a way to automate the work that we've been doing in the past.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  And the reality is quite different. It's that you can now, because of agents and because of L L Ms, you can do a type of marketing that just frankly was not possible before.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Hi, and welcome to Training Data. I'm excited to welcome you, James, co-founder and CEO of Profound. So Profound is a marketing platform for the AI era. You help companies understand how they show up in AI search for agents like Chat G P T and Claude, what to do to improve their rankings and visibilities. And also you help give a single marketer the power of an agency. And I think it's especially timely to have you on the podcast today, given that Chat G P T is rolling out ads, given that every marketer is now trying to figure out, you know, how do I rank in the in the generative search engine rankings? And everyone's trying to figure out this brave new world of agent-led growth. So I'm very excited for the conversation. Let's start with, so you serve 10% of the Fortune 500. You have a great sense of

• 1:32Speaker 01

  your customer and what the average marketer is facing today. Maybe take us through through their journey. What did marketing look like in the old days before Chat G P T? And what are marketers having to respond to now?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, Sonia.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  I mean, I think, you know, what we're what we're witnessing is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing as the world turns from blue link search, like predetermined blue link search to probabilistic AI responses.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  And it's more than that as well. It's not just kind of a case of do you show up when someone asks ChatGPT about your category. It's, you know, what does ChatGPT say? Or how does Claude, you know, recommend your software, for example, if you're talking about coding tools? It's, it's, it's, these models are really replacing, you know, it's the agents and superintelligence is replacing the role of the consumer. It's not so much that the front door of the internet has changed. It's actually the person that's going through the door has changed. It's gone from being a consumer that is using a list of blue links to discover your website and click into it.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  To an agent is now using, you know, a similar index and discovering your brand, products and services, and then coming back through the door and, you know, maintaining that relationship with the consumer.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  That's so fascinating. Okay. So your point is, you know, ChatGPT may be the new front door, but the thing that's important for marketers is, you know, you now have an agent walking through that door and making a big part of that buying decision for you.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's this, I think that's the, that's the fundamental difference. It's that the internet has remained the same. It's just who is using the internet. When you ask ChatGPT a question or Gemini a question, what you're essentially doing is asking an agent to go and crawl the internet on your behalf. And that is an agent that's going to visit all of those websites that you used to visit.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  And it's an agent that's going to determine if that's useful or this is useful. And remix all of that information into an answer that it spits out to you as, you know, here you go.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what it takes to, to show up well for this new agentic paradigm?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I think the biggest misconception is that it's just SEO. You know, there, there's a reason why that misconception exists because yeah, of course you still, you know, in, in any world of marketing.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  And discovery, there is an impetus on a brand or, you know, the, you said we work with is it's close to 12% of the Fortune 500 now, their marketing teams use Profound. And in any world, the solution to a problem is to create content, distribute content on your own, own channels or, you know, earned media or social channels, et cetera. So they're very similar levers to what we've seen with SEO. And yes, ranking on the index still matters. It's just that the human consumer is no longer using the web. And you are building content that may quite literally never be consumed by a human.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  And I think the fundamental difference between SEO and this new world is that in SEO, you were building content that was designed to be, you know, picked up by an algorithm, but fundamentally consumed by a human. Whereas in this new world, you are building content that is frankly designed entirely to be both discovered and then consumed by an agent.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And what does that mean? So I would imagine humans are less patient than agents. I imagine humans are more prone to emotional biases and being swayed by language than agents. Like, what are the, what are the biggest differences between how humans and how agents consume the internet that marketers should keep in mind?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  It's understanding that an agent crawling the web, looking for an answer or providing an answer, frankly, will discover information differently to a human. And so it, it uses the index differently to us. In the old world of SEO, you know, 95% of the value is being in that top four blue links.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  The top five blue links. And that really is a function of our scarce cognitive energy and patience and our, our lack of time.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Where an agent is using that index, it's, what we've seen is ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude are far more prone to using the long tail of the internet. And the amount of surface area that an agent will use to answer a question is orders of magnitude. Wider than a human.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Like, for instance, probably about three or four months ago, I was looking for a showerhead for my apartment in New York City and I used ChatGPT to help me find a new showerhead and it used sixty five different webpages to answer that question.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Wow. I think I probably went through sixty five webpages on my own for that query.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  It's a very important purchase.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  But I think it's and it's the, you know, marketers need to understand that you are building marketing for a super intelligent agent with infinite bandwidth with, you know, as the cost of inference goes down as well and we, you know, experienced Moore's Law, Moore's Law continues, we're going to see agents only use more and more of the internet to build rich answers.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Fascinating. Are there certain categories, you mentioned you served twelve for some of the Fortune five hundred. Are there certain categories where people are seeing more success in terms of these agentic search results actually driving meaningful traffic to them and then certain categories where it's really more still traditional SEO world?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, this is across the board now. So, you know, I think when we began, we saw more demand from software companies. And I'd say today, we, yeah, we work with every single category, every single sector you could imagine, finance, consumer, CPG, software, and that's B two B as well, that B two B direct to consumer.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And is the impact relatively consistent across the board or are there certain categories or subcategories that are, you know, much more influenced by agentic search?

• 8:08Speaker 00

  I think consumer consideration is an important vector here. So if you have a higher consideration or a high ticket purchase, you know, think consumer electronics or, you know, auto, cars, white goods, anything that would typically require a fair amount of research. I think we see. AI being used more and more by end consumers because it's frankly just better at doing all that deep research.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  You know, AI is so brilliant for researching product. I mean, have you ever used AI to research for, find a product?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  All the time, using it right now to, to buy a car.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  I'm not going to out myself for the specific car, but it's been very helpful.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Across the board, do you see that the different, you know, ChatGPT versus Claude versus, you know, Grok and Gemini? Do you see them recommending things differently? And, and, and if, if so, what, what's the root cause?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we see huge differences between the platforms.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Um, and frankly, you know, as a shameless plug, that's why marketers are using, uh, software like Profound because what we're able to do is help you understand not just how your brand or product shows up across different platforms. So, you know, okay, do you show up more frequently in Gemini responses or Claude responses or ChatGPT responses? But also we extract the sentiment and the themes around, you know, so when Claude surfaces your brand or product, what are the other things that it says alongside the answer?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  But then we also get to the root cause. So we show, we expose to marketers, okay, these are the citations and sources that the different models are using to answer questions about your brand, your products, your category or your competitors.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  So once you understand the what and the why,

• 9:52Speaker 00

  then in Profound, what you're, the next step is you're building and deploying your own agents to sort through all of that data and build a new type of marketing that.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And is the primary root cause that they have, you know, different harnesses? Is the primary, primary root cause that they have different training data mix? Primary root cause, some of them, you know, biased for, let's say Reddit data over, you know, company owned uh, platforms. Like what's the root cause for why these platforms are so different in terms of how companies show up?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Think of them, this sounds very reductive, but think of them as just different. And yeah, different species.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  If the, you know, what we've seen is Gemini will lean on YouTube content a ton, which makes sense. Because Google owns YouTube, so that we see, we see, you know, YouTube being a huge lever for brands or marketers that want to appear in Gemini responses. Whereas ChatGPT, yeah, we see typically pulls from Reddit, if it's consumer, uh, or if it's B two B, it will typically pull from LinkedIn, we see as a huge source of truth. Um, Claude, uh, is, yeah, Claude has been changing a lot recently, you know, I think.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And why is that? I noticed this. Um, it seems like between four, five and four, six, even like what it's recommending has changed a lot. Why do you think that is?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  I think Claude has typically, or Claude has historically relied more on the pre-trained L L M. To answer questions and is now, I think they've updated their classifiers or something that's, you know, basically the classifier seems to have become a bit more sensitive to, you know, real time. Information. So Claude will use the web more to answer questions.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Is what we're finding.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  But I think, you know, the, the next paradigm here, yeah, we're so, we're such, humans are such creatures of heuristic that when we think about this new world, we really want to pattern match it to. The old world of search and S E O, which was just information retrieval.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Whether, yeah, that was, it was ranking, it was, do you show up? Versus now the, the new era, you know, I think you coined this nicely with A L G, agent led growth, it's that. Claude doesn't just represent a new channel of discovery, Claude represents a user. So, you know, if I'm vibe coding, um, with Claude or Claude code, you know, does it recommend MongoDB? Or Vercel, like what, what is the, what is the weapon of choice that Claude goes to and why? And where, where does it get that information from? And then if I say, if we sort, you know, if we choose to go with MongoDB. How does Claude navigate that interoperability? Where does it get that information from?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to chat about what this means in terms of content and content marketing. You told me earlier that agents will consume 100x more internet, which I thought was a really fascinating way to put it, which means that marketers will need to create 100x more content. Is the solution just like everyone's gonna be like spamming marketing slop to cover all the long tail queries so that, you know, when I ask for what's the right showerhead for like, I need this specific specification and I am, you know, this exact demographic, that there's a landing page to kind of cover for that, for that use case? And then we're just, are we just gonna be covered by, you know, content marketing slop, for lack of a better word?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  I mean, I think there was a recent study that said, it's estimated about 50% of the web is now utilizing AI-written content.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  The New York Times recently published an experiment where they created two articles, one written by a human, like a journalist, and the second written by AI. And it was like 53% of readers voted afterwards on a blind test that they preferred the AI-written content.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  I think slop is a red herring that is going to be quite quickly disproven. You can, you know, it's a really, I'm not saying you're suggesting this, but I do think that this idea of if it's written by AI equals slop is a stupid one.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I think AI is more than capable of writing high-quality content, high-quality marketing. It's just that the way to think about it is that the consumer is super intelligent now. So you, as a brand or a marketer, you need to tell Claude something it doesn't know. How do you tell a super intelligent being something it doesn't know already? When it's been trained on the entire internet?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  How do you? What do you say?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I think you have to have original insight, you know, really humans are this kind of fleshy API between reality and the internet at this point, right?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Man, I'm just a fleshy API, okay.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  So what is first principle marketing is thinking from first principles. Okay, if I'm marketing the new Nike Alpha Fly, like what can I tell Claude about this new product? That it wouldn't be able to get from the internet already because it has access to the internet. It has access to everything. It's been pre-trained on everything that exists. And that's, that's, you know, that's more mysterious if you're talking about an existing product. If we're launching a new product, of course Claude doesn't know anything about that product.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yep, okay.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  If we're launching the Alpha Fly two, it's your imperative as a marketer not to poison the models or manipulate what chat G P T says about that new product. But as a marketer, it's your responsibility now to equip superintelligence to be able to answer any question about your product, brand or service.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Hmm. Okay. So it's fundamentally a question of legibility.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say to an extent.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  How do you make your, how do you make your company and your products legible to an agent?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  I think that's correct. Yeah. And if you're building software, it goes way beyond legibility. It's, you know, usability, interoperability.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, huh.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Like, how does, how does Claude troubleshoot that issue?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Do you think that people are trying to game the system and is trying to game the system effective?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  I mean, yes, like, of course, yeah, people you see, you know, there's, there's this huge wave around like comparative listicles, for example. I mean, frankly, dare I say this, and I'm going to, you know, make a disclaimer here and say that, you know, I wouldn't advise people do this, but frankly, we still see it working very effectively. But I'm sure this will change over time and get punished by the models or, you know, the.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, what exactly works very effectively?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Sorry, yeah, the comparative listicles. So meaning that, you know, if I were Sequoia, I would create, uh, you know, ten best V C's in Silicon Valley and place Sequoia at the top and maybe pick, you know, some of your less formidable foes and rank them as second, third, fourth, fifth, and basically shun out your real competitors. You know, self-serving content designed to give impartial advice.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  And what we found is because. Of the way that these models reason, they're very attracted to pieces of content that have already done the the hard work.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Because they don't want to use the first principle thinking of like, okay, let me go and check out everything about Sequoia and then everything about

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Kleiner Perkins and actually compare the two. I'd much rather find a piece of content that exists and seems impartial and has compared the two against each other.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I guess the models aren't infinitely patient then, are a little bit lazy too.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, yeah, it's a path of least resistance, maybe. But I do think over time, you know, going back to my sixty five websites for a showerhead. I think over time, we can expect that to change and we'll see a lot more kind of like first principle reasoning coming from the models. And I think that you can, right now, it can be prompted as well.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  So when, I mean, it's funny, when I use models to discover, if I use ChatGPT or Claude to discover a product or to research a product or service, I'll quite often say ignore any listical articles.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Or, yeah, I'll say, you know, ignore any uh content published by the brand itself.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, interesting. Um, I'd love to chat about dead internet theory. Like, at what point do you think the internet is just primarily being browsed by agents? And at that point, you know, does a company's marketing website matter at all? Does a company's, you know, ranking in the search engine, in the traditional search engines, matter at all? Or should we all just have a readme file for the agents to crawl?

• 18:28Speaker 00

  I mean, at the risk of sounding a little dramatic, I think that we could experience a dead internet outcome in the next three years. Um, I do think it's possible. Um, you know, maybe not likely. Um, but you know, what does that mean? It means that in a world where humans just speak to AI to get the responses that they need, the incentive to publish content diminishes to the point of zero. Meaning, you know, we rely, as humans today, and AI frankly, so humans and AI rely, we underestimate just how much we rely on.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  First party reporting to to feed the information that A I uses to answer questions or to feed the information that appears in a search engine that we rely on every day. And I think in a world where humans no longer click into websites, the majority of the internet is still funded by advertising for a start. So, you know, most publishers rely heavily on advertising revenue to to fuel all of the content that is being more and more consumed by A I.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  In a world where consumers, humans, aren't visiting those webpages anymore. Well, what's the, you know, what's the point in advertising on a webpage that a human isn't visiting? Then the business model breaks, the economics of the internet break, and the incentives to create editorial content are removed.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And then in that world, you start to ask the question, well, where does A I go to answer these questions?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  To the Readme files.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  But then who, why would you publish a Readme file?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Because the agent needs to go somewhere to answer a question, right?

• 20:09Speaker 00

  It works if you're a brand or a marketer, but why would you, you know, would you publish your blog? What's the point?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  I'm publishing, hi, I'm Sonia, the the V C, and these are the companies I've worked with. And and like as a, you know, founder is trying to reason through which venture capitalist I work with, like it finds my Readme file.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  I think that's correct for, you know, commercially driven content.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  But, you know, there's a lot of the internet is just people yapping and sharing ideas.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And that's what we rely on. And the reason why this has worked so well in the past is because humans are very incentivized by um money and status.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  You know, if I publish a really good blog post and put advertising on it, I can earn money from that blog. Or I'm recognized and I become famous.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  But in a world where A I just goes into that piece of content, vacuums all the good stuff out of it and then remixes it, and maybe I get a little citation at the bottom of the article, but who cares? No one's

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  clicking those citations.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  The incentive to create that rich, original content, you know, that the fleshy A P I that we're talking about, it diminishes to zero.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you think is the likelihood of this scenario?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  I mean, I've thought about it quite a lot and I Think it's quite possible, yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I think the the places, you know, if you ask kind of, okay, well, what are the second order outcomes? What happens after that? I think a theory I have is that every AI lab will eventually vertically integrate with a social media network. So I think, you know, social media will become more and more human. I think, you know, already, I mean, Meta is actually probably leading the way here. It's like, it's very hard to build a bot and post on Instagram.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Right now, it's very human. So I think social media networks become more human over time.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And that's the place where we can exchange ideas for status or money. You know, you see X is doing lots of, you know, YouTube, X, the the the economics are starting to shake out where you can get financially rewarded.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  For creating good content. And so social media will become the platform where we share ideas. And if you vertically integrate that with an AI, like, you know, what we've seen with Grok and X, Grok very skillfully uses all of the rich content and data from X to answer questions in quite a thoughtful way.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, interesting. Okay, so you're saying that, you know, the internet as we know it has kind of been this like economic slash social status game machine that just works. If more and more and more of the content is just consumed by agents, it kind of breaks some of those fundamental assumptions. And so therefore, both the economic engine and the social status game will kind of move into these like bio zones social media networks.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're seeing that with Reddit now, is that Reddit is Reddit is truly embracing its humanity. And saying, okay, we, this is a precious place. And it is precious. I think it's really important. I think the we we take the internet for granted. It's a wonderful thing.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  And, yeah, I think we need these human environments so that we can share ideas.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Original ideas. Yeah, that will be it will be these places where AI.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  You know, understands reality. That's how AI taps into what's actually going on in the world.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Couldn't you imagine that these platforms just ban, you know, agents from scraping their platforms? And then the business model then becomes, you know, a revenue share from the original creator of the content to, hey, ChatGPT, if you want to scrape this, it's going to cost you a lot of money. And so doesn't that kind of solve the economics challenge?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, X has obviously just opened up their API, right?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  And Reddit has got a big deal with OpenAI, for example. Yeah, so that all of that, yeah, that that could work. And I think that speaks to my idea of this vertical integration.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I mean, I, yeah, I know nothing, so I'm saying this purely on vibes. But I've always had this theory that maybe OpenAI would acquire Reddit, for example.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  I think that'd be interesting.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  You need this source of human data.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  In real time.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Very interesting.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  The alternative is robots, I suppose, you know, because if they're, you know, if you said we end up with fifty billion robots walking around, you know, maybe they're bipedal, maybe they're drones or something. But it allows AI to capture first party data.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And it undermines that idea of humans being a fleshy API.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Because the AI can directly understand the world.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Very interesting. I'd love to talk about advertising, since we've been talking about ads in the context of the internet. Um, now that ads are coming to some of these um generative AI agents, how do you think that changes the consumer relationship to the engines?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  I think people will get over it very quickly.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  As we did with Google.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, I think advertising or generative advertising, I should say, in a conversational interface with higher levels of personalization.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Will be the most effective form of advertising the world has ever seen. There's so much rich consumer intent captured inside of these conversations.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  That, and and also in in addition to that point, AI is so good at synthesizing and personalizing language to the needs of Sonya in that exact moment, because it understands you so deeply. I think, you know, once ChatGPT is able to append a super personalized ad in the exact moment in a conversation where you would be the most responsive to it. It will be extremely effective. And they've got a great team working on ads.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  What do you think the ad unit of the future looks like?

• 26:00Speaker 00

  I think, I mean, OpenAI have alluded to this. This is an original thought from me. But yeah, I think you will just prompt AI. So you'll build a system prompt as an ad campaign. So you will just say, hey, I really want to target, you know, women in Minnesota between the ages of thirty five and forty. And like, yeah, if you could make sure you meant whenever they're talking about photography, I want you to mention this, this, this. But don't mention this and make sure you really, you know, you utilize this, this knowledge base of understanding. So you know how to talk about our brand products and services, but obviously tailor it to their tone of voice. And that's probably how you will deliver an ad campaign. You'll say, I want to make this much money ideally.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think it's less relevant in the B two B context?

• 26:43Speaker 00

  The nuance with B two B or just coding agents, people using AI to build things. So this is particularly relevant to, you know, dev tools or software, for example, is that the agent is really steering the, the purchase decision.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  And when it comes to advertising, we rely, you know, we, we, we really want our agents to be objective and unswayable. You know, if you, if you were using Claude and it was like, hey, I actually went with insert name of database because they showed me a really good ad. You're like, dude, dude, no, use whatever's best.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Um, we, we as humans are not objective creatures, but we, we like to think we are. So you have been swayed by the incredible branding of Versal. You have been swayed by that podcast you watched with the founder of MongoDB.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  You just don't know it. And because of that, we like, we, you know, we, we demand that our agents are objective too. But it will, the, yeah, the, the relationship we have with advertising as it pertains to agents shopping on our behalf is going to be quite different.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Fascinating. Um, okay, parting wisdom for, for marketers that are trying to figure out how to make sure that they're well positioned for this new era. Perhaps with bosses sending them screenshots every day of like, hey, I put in this query, why, why are you not number one on the list? What wisdom would you impart on them?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Uh, use profound.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I'm serious.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Um, okay. Use profound aside, like what, what, what should they be like, what, what should they be doing? I know there are no silver bullets, but what are the most important things to remember to equip themselves for this new world?

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, look, like actually real, like no shilling. Genuinely, you need to use a platform like profound to understand how you show up because otherwise you're just guessing. You know, you could, there, there, these, the, the, there are these like reductionisms around, oh yeah, LinkedIn or Reddit really matters. But if you are just going on vibes, you will fail.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Each category is quite specific and you need to look at the sources and understand the sources and citations to determine how and why AI is mentioning you in its responses. But then the second part is that we've now reached a point in marketing where if your marketing team is not using agents and in particular profound agents to do marketing, to build content, to build marketing, distribute marketing, then you are failing. As a marketer, I think this is, it's gone from a nice to have to a must have. And I think the big misconception with using agents to build marketing is that it's just a way to automate the work that we've been doing in the past.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  And the reality is quite different. It's that you can now, because of agents and because of L L Ms, you can do a type of marketing that just frankly was not possible before. So you could build an agent that, you know, for instance, we have an agent that we've built in-house, a marketing agent that plums in all of our gong transcripts from our sales calls. And then captures all of the objections, buckets, the objections into themes. And then builds battle cards that we then, that utilizing a knowledge base of our product that it then spits back to the sales team.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  In real time. And, you know, 18 months ago, that would not have been possible or would have taken a human, you would have done it like once a quarter.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Now, now it runs every day in real time.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So the advice is you need visibility because you can't optimize what you can't see.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  And to like fully embrace agentic marketing. If you're, if you're not using it, you're just, you're, you're incredibly behind.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it'd be like not using the internet.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Or something.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it'd be like, hey, we're going to stick to print and TV.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Thanks. I don't believe in this internet thing.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Awesome. James, thank you for this conversation. I really loved kind of peeling back the onion on how exactly agent-led growth works. And you've been at the forefront of so much of it. So thank you for joining today and sharing your hot takes and advice with our audience.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me.