Season Finale Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I think authentic real conversations with humans that is trying to serve a purpose for someone else. Um, we're, you know, it's not going to be easy for the next several years running a media company in the world of agents and LLMs, but the human part is still the thing that brings people back.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Welcome to the season two finale of Sell Me This Podcast. Before we get into the episode, I want to say a giant thank you for listening to all of the episodes of this season. We've had some incredible guests, and I'm super excited to welcome Chris Hogg to wrap up our season for a conversation on digital media, authenticity, and what leaders are doing in a new AI era. I hope you enjoy and thanks again for listening. Today I am incredibly honored to wrap up our season uh with Chris Hogg. Chris, I think we've been talking about filming this for probably the better part of a year now.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Yeah, we made the timing finally work. I know.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Thank you for having me. I think you might be our first um, you know, I'm not going to say you came into town for this episode, but maybe that. Yeah, we can we can get creative in our storytelling here. Um so thank you for flying in all the way from Toronto um to film this. Yeah. For for people that don't know who you are, and I feel like that's probably a small one getting smaller group. Um, why don't you introduce yourself? Uh, who are you? Um, what do people know you for?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Sure. So I wear a few hats, but primarily spend um my time running Digital Journal. So it's a Canadian publication that covers the technology space for tech leaders, and we help connect tech to the rest of the C-suite. So uh some of that work is translating, you know, the deep tech and things that are changing business for the rest of a leadership team. Um we work coast to coast across Canada. Uh we are we opened a bureau in Alberta in Calgary um three years ago now and have been growing pretty fast in Western Canada, but cover tech from across the country, and we've been doing it for just shy, uh just over, pardon me, 25 years. So uh an old business.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Old business. And so 25 years, um I

Building A Media Company Like Tech

SPEAKER_01 2:05

imagine the business has evolved a tiny bit um in 25 years. Um has it always been a like a tech publication? Like what what's the the story arc of kind of maybe how you came about to be within J Digital Journal and and how you arrived where you are today?

SPEAKER_00 2:20

It's been a fun journey, a tough journey. Uh anyone who knows the media space, the business model is always changing. And um, so I joined um 23 years ago, the company was fledgling, uh, ran a printed magazine that ran coast to coast covering consumer tech. Um at the time, you know, the internet was new, social media was new. Uh, and so we covered its impact on business. And we small, super small team. My background was in journalism, and I wanted to just I was the geek in the back that loved the tech part of life. And um, we've been, it feels like we've got you know, nine lives of constantly reimagining ourselves. We live in a world where everyone is now managing a constant state of digital transformation, and media was one of the first industries to really, you know, get beaten up, um, have opportunity created, you know, the gambit of it. And so the um couple of sort of chapters, I guess. We started very traditional journalism. Uh, we were a team of three and a half people with no budget. So one of the co-founders was a developer who we decided we were going to build um basically a tech stack that would let us automate a whole bunch of stuff that humans were needed for. This was 23 years ago, 22 years ago. Uh, we did the crazy thing of builting our own content management system. Um, but we needed to be find a way to scale. Um, and we opened up, we were one of the first players in what was then called citizen journalism, um, where just inviting, you know, it could have been the every person, but also a lot of subject matter experts came to us where media didn't really open up at that time. Um, and it was the thing that, you know, we we found our first product market fit, um, ended up scaling and getting thousands of writers from all over the world joining us. So the first chapter, I guess, was um trying to figure out how to scale a media company as a tech company.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

That's super interesting. And I feel like there's a hundred questions that I have just, you know, um, from A to Z there. But if you think about that, you know, idea of the we'll call it the citizen journalism and almost like crowdsourcing some of the content, some of the ideas, some of the thoughts. Was that fairly novel if we think back 23 years ago? Like, you know, I think you had the you know, three or four kind of key journalists that everyone follows. And like, how novel was that approach of saying, okay, well, let's just open this up to the crowd, so to speak.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

It was quite novel. Um, I had one side of the media space. I I was, you know, just coming out of university. I think I was 23 running this thing, trying to figure it all out. And uh, I had if we divided it in two camps, half of the media space thought it was innovative, cool way to scale. Um, we built a footprint that rivaled some of the largest national publications in terms of readership because of it. The other camp thought that I was the uh the be all end-all of journalism, um, which is fair. And I really appreciated a lot of the important factors that, you know, fact-checking and accuracy. And that I'm a schooled journalist, and that's what I wanted to try and bring and try and, you know, revisit the business model of how do we scale something that is responsible and bringing in subject matter experts. And um, we tooled a lot of the publication after social media networks because Facebook was 2005. We launched this in 2006, so it was basically how do you take the social graph and connectivity of um the internet and program a website media experience to be the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

I love it, but to your point, it must be really challenging to then keep up some of the journalistic integrity, the fact-checking, um, because you kind of remove some of those barriers to entry, whether it be spending, I you know, I'm guessing four years, but maybe I'm not quite sure how long journalism school takes. Um it was four years for me.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

And yeah, it was definitely we learned the hard way. Um, like anyone building a product for the first time and trying to build something that can scale. Um, you know, it was very important that stories that were important to get out there weren't locked in um most newsrooms were being overrun by uh, you know, not enough staff, not enough time, not enough budget, still problem today. Uh, so we we tried to responsibly open up um and build tools like us um ways to assign people content, fact-checking and verification, both automated and human curated. And um eventually some of the full openness we pulled back on um just because anyone with an opinion could potentially uh in the at that time in the media, there was there were very famous stories, not from Digital Journal, but of um citizen journalism, you know, rocking stocks and changing opinions that on things that weren't real. So uh it's been growing digital journal from that to where we are today. We ended up uh focusing in more on subject matter experts. So people who were, you know, doctors and lawyers and business leaders and people who had some sort of domain expertise. They might not be a journalist, but they'd have a story to tell. And it was something that was easier to scale responsibly than just letting anyone with an opinion publish.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Right. So you kind of minimize some of the keyboard warriors, yeah, and then just really find a way to give a voice to some of the subject matters experts in their specific fields, yeah, and find a way to amplify them.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

A long-form version of Twitter that didn't have the liability of Twitter at the time. There you go. I still call it Twitter. I can't change it.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

It's okay. I'm I'm in with you. I feel like uh X. Well, there's the Google X as well, I don't think which makes things very confusing.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

So so how has that evolved? So you you make these shifts in um 23 years ago, um, and then it was all smooth sailing from there, I'm assuming.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

Absolutely not. The uh so we a lot of the relationships built, um, we had attention on us because we were a really small young team. Um, we had a lot of head scratching in the media space on how do they keep doing this. Um and we what we found was when you give people a voice in a platform, it was something that so many had never had. Um, again, social was still in its infancy, even as it started to grow. Um, we built partnerships with a lot of organizations who had stories to tell and didn't really know where to tell them or you know, technology. It we picked a category that was interesting because there's never seems to be an end state, uh, a fixed

Citizen Journalism Meets Fact Checking

SPEAKER_00 8:55

state. Um, so a lot of what we've changed to become is uh we have a team of journalists, we've got a network of freelancers, we focus a lot more on Canada today than we used to. We opened up internationally, which gave us opportunity. We still have people in uh Australia, the UK, and uh the Middle East that help us sort of keep our and and the US that keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on in the world, but Canadian focused, and then focusing a lot more, um, not exclusively B2B, but really helping because we ended up connecting with so many business leaders, we would hear a technologist say, I've invented this really cool thing and I don't know how to communicate it to the rest of the business, or a business leader would come to us saying, What is this thing? And we realized we had both sides of the market asking a similar question. And so Digital Journal today is very much about we've got partnerships with big tech organizations, a lot of events. If anyone has seen Digital Journal, it's probably at an event running around doing interviews or capturing panel conversations. And really what we focus on now that gets the highest pickup is connecting the dots. So uh you might have a complex story where a technologist speaking to a technologist, they get it, but a CEO or a CFO might not really speak the language. And so, you know, a rebirth for us in some ways of long-form journalism. Um, really looking at connecting the dots, why does it matter? Put it in context, what's bullshit, what's not. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. You can swear as much as you want on here, yeah. Um, and really uh putting a lens on translation work, a lot of this is more in the last three years or so, uh, especially as we've grown in Alberta, the a lot of really, really great insight is captured behind someone who doesn't necessarily know how to communicate it. It might be an engineer, it could be, you know, a neuroscientist or someone who's got a PhD in AI and microbiology, and they don't speak a language that uh the every person understands. And so we try and unpack innovation for to be accessible to more people.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

I think that's so needed right now, and there's so much noise that is, you know, um, and and I'm sure we'll we'll dive into the AI world in a tiny bit, but but even without AI, there's so much noise, so much change, you know, so many levers that are being pulled that if you're not living in this world all day long, like you know, I don't know how you keep up with it. And even if you do live in this world, I I think you still have a hard time keeping up with it.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Definitely. And the regional, uh, I have found, you know, running a national media company is a is a hard thing. Doing media is hard, doing it nationally is hard because the conversations become regionalized and you know, provinces start to build bench strength around specific kinds of expertise or communities form and bring a life to technology conversations that Vancouver will be different than Calgary, then Montreal, then Ottawa. And so trying to keep our finger on the pulse is not an easy thing.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

And is that nuance correct? Like I I feel like, you know, uh, we're in Calgary here today, but there's such a focus sometimes on these little pockets, and you know, everyone wants to feel like they're special, everyone wants to feel like they're, you know, I don't want to say the next Silicon Valley, but but they're in pursuit of something and kind of bringing everyone together. Do you see that distribution geographically, whether it be you know Vancouver or Calgary or Ebenton? I won't start the Calgary-Ebinton Wars, but like is it that nuanced, or is there a bigger picture emerging that you're seeing?

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Um I think it's I I don't I'm gonna generalize and then offer some nuance for that. On a national front, um a lot of more recently there is a Team Canada spirit, just geopolitically, what's happening? Um there's a lot of effort that's getting aligned to things like uh sovereignty, uh digital sovereignty, compute, AI sovereignty. There are connecting ecosystems a lot of effort um in the AI space. Um just coming off of um recent coverage at different AI events, whether it's the Vector Institute in Toronto, Mila in Montreal, or Amy in Edmonton. Uh so we share common ground on goals to build Canada. And we're seeing you know, large-scale organizations emerge to try and create the connective tissue. Um, the Canadian Council of Innovators, I think, is doing phenomenal work trying to lead a conversation that has regional nuance, but as one country. Um, but then it does break down when you get into a region, uh, there will be some sort of specialization or some sort of high network um muscle that's activated. So the nuance becomes once you get there and trying to connect and understand what's happening locally, you do need to be on the ground. Like even we've learned uh we have a Calgary bureau, we do the trip to Edmonton all the time. We don't yet have a person in Edmonton. Uh they're completely different regions, and there's a three-hour car ride away. Yeah, so there is nuance.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

That that makes a lot of sense. And then if you think about some of those conversations that are unfolding, um, are you seeing different approaches that are being taken with each of the regions, like in that same level of nuance?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Definitely. Um, there are commonalities uh and nuance. Um, some of the I'm gonna try not to slog too much on AI here because I know that everyone is overwhelmed with AI content. We can slog away on AI, but it is it is the flavor of the day that starts to feel different in different regions. And our lens comes a lot through interviews, uh events, and then some of the partnerships we have. Um a lot of the conversation in Alberta is tied to critical infrastructure. We're hearing about AI talked about like the oil and gas industry and energy, and there's lots to be learned from all the mistakes made and a lot of the opportunity created on how do you bring together these disparate pieces um so that it's one holistic view. Uh Alberta seems to really

Translating Tech For The C Suite

SPEAKER_00 14:55

want to own the stack of everything from idea to compute um because it's a really, really big opportunity for the province. There's also Alberta is leaders are separating uh speculation from what's real increasingly. We hear about the data center boom and it takes up a lot of media headlines, but uh when you when you look at what's actually in the pipeline, there's only one project with shovels in the ground. So Alberta seems to be fact-checking a lot and having a really pragmatic, practical look at what's possible. Uh and there's a challenge, I guess, that is happening here, but it exists in other places is uh old a lot of technical debt that sits in places like government, uh, which they're doing great a great job of trying to overcome using AI, but tech debt is a big, big problem where uh you know we sit on petabytes and petabytes of information that is largely unex uh inaccessible or it's on-prem somewhere and you're trying to cloud access. So there's a a desire to move quickly, pragmatically uh in Alberta, but being hindered by the decisions of the past, if we can call it that. Totally. And then how does that differ from some of the other regions? So, in some of the other regions in Ontario, for example, uh, there's a lot more, and this is my opinion, so and it's a bit of a broad stroke. The there's a lot more uh safe deployment, you know, with the big five banks, the regulatory industry, the federal government um acting there. There's again decades of technical debt that's trying to be managed, but a lot of strict frameworks. It's very policy driven. Certainly there are startups and scale-ups building at the speed of entrepreneurship, but a lot of larger organizations um are taking the time to really put frameworks in place to roll out, and that's not different than Alberta, but it's done at a scale just because there's so many central uh headquarters that happen in Toronto, um and federal agencies are really pushing for a sovereign AI push, which every province is trying to figure out their role in. In Quebec, there's a there's a political mandate or a or a cultural mandate to protect IP, um, which we uh there's ambition to do that in other provinces, but it seems to be a lot of the recent conversations we have are uh really trying to protect IP and create opportunity that stays here. Um research based with Mila uh in Montreal, and there's a lot of energy being put into processing data on local devices. So if you know we we live in a world where large hyperscalers are driving AI adoption across most businesses, but looking at opportunities for edge cases where things could be managed on-prem or um increasingly sovereign driven. Um the TELUS built a big AI factory in Ramouski uh as one example. And the the transparency, I think Quebec is leading in one way on transparency around procurement data. Kind of a geeky conversation to have, but a lot of what we see being held up for opportunity is because procurement runs way slower than the rest of the world. And when you're trying to sell to government or sell to a framework as a startup or scale up, uh Quebec does a good job of making things open. Ontario does not.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

That's really interesting. And I think that speed of deployment and that speed of execution is such a um different perspective of the way a lot of this technology procurement or these decisions being made in the past. You know, I was having uh a coffee with someone the other day that that shared the exact same thoughts where you know you have these big POCs, you have these um, you know, very traditional. Okay, we have an idea, we pilot it small, um, we roll it out a little bit larger, and then you know, traditionally, okay, now we kind of do the enterprise-wide deployment, everyone high-fives and celebrates with a cake. And but now by the time you get to the enterprise deployment, the text all changed.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah. And the so on the BC front, what following that, weird things are tripping people up. Uh, we just came off of a conference that was in Vancouver where uh hundreds of CIOs gathered and we're sharing larger scale issues. Um, BC has a there's a a public will to change things quickly, and government is acting on it. Um, I definitely have a government lens these days because it seems to be where a lot of the big moves are happening. Um, but there's a friction between, again, the tech debt and a heavy concentration on trying to fix things for the public sector creates weird blowback. Um, we heard a story of legacy data. Um, so doing POCs and launching at scale. Uh, the um the city of Kelowna was launched a chat bot to help local folks uh engage with the city, and 180,000 citizen queries came through the chat bot. It had been tested, and um the bot hallucinated because of a PDF that was sitting on its own website way deep in uh it was around lifeguards and beaches and what was possible. Um, so we're seeing active, you know, POCs that move to market that become active deployments. Uh and then it's kind of a holy shit moment. We've got a how do you then contain uh a hallucination because of our own data that we've made public?

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yeah, and and it's you know, it's funny, and I'm sure you have practical examples of it within your walls. You know, I have uh, you know, within our our brokers and our consultants, we had one person we were interviewing that made its way into our AI uh internal models, and it took forever to try and get them referenced off like a whole bunch of internal documentation, and it's like all of a sudden we'd hired this person that that didn't quite exist to unpack some of those things without everyone knowing exactly how it works can be quite challenging.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Very much so. And the uh you know, there's we're seeing a lot of um safe deployments where uh test beds become important, uh they've always been in tech, but AI seems to be a different beast where uh technical leaders or IT leaders are really looking at how do we sand, give our teams sandboxes to break break things at a higher rate. Um, you know, the the fail fast mentality is not a new idea, but it seems to be embraced at a larger scale and more traditional environments are now being managed um in that way. And but there's still run runaway stories. I heard uh the uh head of AI at tell us tell a story recently about um one of their team members was vibe coding some stuff that they would deploy later if it worked, but they wanted to try it in a Claude sandbox. And uh they there was a large uh Data set they were working with and it was processing. They spent some time building it, turned it on on a Friday, which I think anyone in IT would know, know that that's not a good idea. It's a faux pas. Um, and within hours, this individual uh said his phone was blowing up because they had uh they'd spent $50,000 in tokens in three hours. And they had this is a scale that a lot of companies won't necessarily face, but um, he said they had to shut it down. They didn't have guardrails in place, so they're they're learning, we're all learning right now and on the fly. And this was the third time that that had happened in less than a year. So to the point of not everyone on the team follows along, it's the governance and guardrails matter, but also like internal sharing of best practice is feels like uh, you know, we could have this conversation in six months and we'll still be learning stuff.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yeah. Well, even the the conversation around kind of prompting versus context engineering. Yeah, you know, I feel like up until probably like

Canada’s AI Story Looks Regional

SPEAKER_01 22:55

two months ago, everyone in their their cat was talking about how do we design the best prompt. It's all about prompt engineering, prompt engineering, prompt engineering. Um, you know, most recently prompt prompting is dead, it is now all about context engineering.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah, and there was a point in time where people were hiring prompt engineers, like that was a job.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Well, no, if we you know, I think probably on this podcast like a year and a bit ago, someone said that was one of the most important jobs of the future. Prompt engineer. And now everything's a gentic. Yeah, and that's yeah, and it's all about what context can you give your agents. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm sure that'll change again in six, probably by the time this episode comes out. But yeah. And and so you you have a really interesting vantage point. Um, you know, not only do you get to attend um and kind of immerse yourself with your team in some of these really um you know energetic, high-profile events, but you also get to spend a one-on-one time with a bunch of leaders that are actively making change right now across this space. Um, you know, so I get really curious like, are there trends that you're seeing from leaders that are doing things really well, and like maybe even some of the things they're not doing well? Like, what are some of the common threads you're seeing across these individuals you're talking to and and how they're actually managing some of this change?

SPEAKER_00 24:07

It's a really good question. Um one of the more surprising to me things that has emerged, um, you know, shadow AI and a leader that has to manage her or his team that's now, you know, self-helping their way through the world. That's not a new thing, but how leaders are responding to shadow AI has been interesting, where the old world of IT would be like that's a disaster waiting to happen. Like it needs to be nailed down. You have to follow these protocols, use these tools. Um, I have heard literally dozens of leaders now uh talk about it as a sign that the business wants change and they're using it, you know, for a technical person or a CIO or a tech leader at a smaller organization. When they need to go to a CEO or a CFO to say, I need more budget or more opportunity to explore, there aren't they can take stories now to the executive team saying, um, I think the some of the latest numbers are that 90% of companies are reporting that their employees are using personal AI at work. Um, whereas that used to be a problem, uh policing it uh was trying to police it became a strategy based on distrust or mistrust. And that's too hard. It's it's a sign, I think. Some one of the takeaways is if people are using IT, if people are bypassing IT to and using AI, it means your approval tool is too slow or your workflow is too hard or your data is too locked up. And so a lot of experimentation is being encouraged, even if the technical leader in a business has no idea what their people are doing.

SPEAKER_01 25:53

So coming back from that CIO conference in in Vancouver, I bumped into one of the gentlemen that was there at the airport. And you know, I I think you know, ironically, I was at Vancouver at the same time and I completely missed it, which I feel really bad about. Um but I think that there's this interesting shift, and I feel like we we've seen probably components of this pattern before, but probably not at the velocity or scale where where there's this desire for a to AI or for IT to lead some of this change. Yep. Um, but the business I think is moving faster than most of IT right now. And so there's this really interesting balance of saying how do we um play a role, how do we protect the estate, how do we make sure we don't do anything crazy that we're gonna have um you know crazy technical debt for later. But also, um, I don't think there's ever been a greater interest from the executives leadership boards to say, you know, almost to uh to a fault by picking the tool rather than this uh problem, how do we get AI in our businesses? And so you mentioned some really interesting things around the you know approval workflows, around you know, making sure that you know those IT teams can really be in service to the organization. Are are there any other comments you have around that shift that's happening, even maybe in terms of some of those power dynamics between those groups?

SPEAKER_00 27:13

We're living in an era where like technology leaders now have a seat at the business table to drive where an organization is going. It's not a new thing this year, but it's ever changing. And a lot of the tech leaders that I speak with now have invested uh their personal upskilling. Where I'm, you know, you you might know your domain, you might know your tech stack expert, but describe how the business makes money and describe how technology could accelerate it. The um uh we're seeing a lot of technology leaders spend time understanding the business more so that they have a seat at the table and can help drive where things go. There's also a very human moment where I think um the job of running a Canadian company today as a tech leader is friggin' hard. And the pressure on leaders is real. Um, the support is thin, it's very lonely. The number of leaders, you know, we hear about a startup CEO trying to grow her business or his business, it's a lonely game. The same thing happens in technology leadership because what if the entire bank goes down because you made a mistake? Or what if the entire supply chain fails because AI hallucinated? The scale and pressure of that is pretty significant. So I think in a weird way, and not always in a good way, the tech acceleration is making us more human because we're thinking we have to think about, and the best organizations are thinking about how do you create a system around your people that they feel supported.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

I I love that. I think that march towards humanity is a good thing, not a bad thing. You know, I've always said the the best thing that came from COVID um was you know the fact that you got to see who everyone was, and you you kind of were able to remove some of those traditional corporate veils, yep, of you know, um, I'm gonna show up in a boardroom with a suit and fancy cufflinks every day to, you know, this is my cat walking across my keyboard, here's my three-year-old running behind me.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Um, and and I think it's started that that march towards the personalization of the people that are in some of these roles. Um, so it's it's actually really nice to hear that the the people side of it actually seems to be coming more to the forefront.

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Well, the ones the people I talk to, you know, we're we've been it I have been to technology events where uh I have seen rooms full of men cry. I've never seen that before in my entire career. Where they there's vulnerable space created to share stories. Um, some of them are not good. We we were uh in the to use the Vancouver example, we heard a story about a technical leader who um was basically on a diet of wine and cheese and crackers because there wasn't time to do anything. He was just so overrun, ended up having a massive heart attack. He lived, thankfully. But the pressure that the environment can create, um, that human side of building the support and creating space and having um human discussions that wouldn't normally happen at tech events or within technical teams, um, and that overlap with you know people in culture or HR and tech, when we start to think about the role of who you're bringing into an organization, having a human and tech experience, they maybe used to be separate and they've converged in the best companies we talk to.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

And so I think this is a really interesting um add-on to the humanity side of it, because I I think that people are more so than ever craving realness. Yes. And so you're you're understatement. Understatement, and I you know, we we promised at the beginning that we'd make our way to the um slog on AI, but like I think there's there's so much noise out there, um, and 99.9% of it is uh made up in BS. I think people are craving that connection, which you're seeing at some of those events. Um is that, you know, without kind of pumping the tires of digital journal too much, like is that one of the reasons you're seeing a lot of success in the ability to tell uh some of these authentic stories in a little bit of a more natural way?

SPEAKER_00 31:21

I think so. Um the connecting the dots thing is important because a lot of you know having a message resonate, and we don't get it right all the time, it's a process of learning in a context and an environment that's changing. There that there definitely is an appetite to help me tell my story. Um we've moved from like in the if you're a company, we've moved marketing drives attention and journalism optimizes for trust. And the world of AI slop, we're seeing now on the B2B side. We talk to a lot of technical vendors, and you know, I'm a geek and read all of the latest studies on how agents change things, but 94% of a B2B buyer uh process now uses an LLM. So before you even have a conversation in the old world, you'd optimize content on a website or you'd be on LinkedIn saying you're great, but most of the time you've been filtered by the time someone reaches out to you. Uh that happened before, but it's happening at a speed and scale that is brand new. And um we live in a world of sameness. I one of the cautions that I offer to the marketing and communications people we work with a lot is LLMs are great. You know, a chat tool that can help you identify your ideas more clearly or patterns are good. But there are people like me and many others who can spot AI slop from a mile away, like quietly happening in real time, and all of the trigger words that uh has created a sea of sameness. I recently came across a study that showed the increase of it's not this, it's that, you know, it's not this we're tackling, it's that we're doing that AI pattern construct. You know, we we beat up the M-dash last year. Now it's just a bunch of words that when I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, I love LinkedIn connected to so many great people, but it you almost could remove the name and look at the structure of it, and everything is AI and the humanity part, or you know, it might be real insight, but we're seeing people tune away their attention the second they can tell that it's AI.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

Well, and when you know, we were having this conversation before the show started

POCs, Hallucinations, And Cost Surprises

SPEAKER_01 33:35

today. It's you know, both of us are fairly active on LinkedIn, and and it's a little bit disheartening too, where you know, you I love seeing what people are up to, I love hearing the the stories of what people are learning and all that. I I don't love the vanilla version of you know, I plugged these three things into Chat GPT, and although it's better, like it's not like before it used to be like the scrolling marquee around when it has like the you know all of the emojis peppered in and like the M-dashes, like it's a little less in your face now, but it's still pretty obvious, and it just doesn't feel real.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

And it's trickled into websites too, you know, the all of a sudden it's easy to do. You can spin out white papers, um, case studies, the things that used to take a lot of time for an organization to put together. Um, the media world could spot it from a mile away. All studies show that agents will now prefer. Um, there was a study done by MuckRack at the end of last year, which is a platform that monitors journalism, and 82% of AI sources come from at the time late 2025, it'll change again, you know, every six months, came from earned media. So we're seeing a revival of getting mentioned in media has a higher agent higher LLM return on investment than if you publish a press release that gets picked up on a syndicated website, or your own website is less likely to get picked up because agents and AI and LLMs are being trained to where we live in a world of trust and recency. Um, I was at a uh there was a company in New York that was that does uh AI, uh, they track LLMs and how many times companies get mentioned. And they found in a study that 50% of mentions of large organizations came on content that was less than 13 months old. So if you have this massive library of case studies that you've built, we now live in a time where trust is earned by an LLM in minutes. Um, and if you don't keep recency up with storytelling, I know that's a bit self-serving to stay, but the LLMs are there looking for information because someone on the other end of the prompt, they're designed for I have to give that person an answer in less than three seconds. I need to go to a trusted source to do it. So AI slop is not gonna get you there.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

And and so how like how are you handling that, right? So you you know, obviously you you put out an enormous amount of content. How does that change your approach to how you're telling stories, how you're um putting out content? Because you know, the I don't know, the desire to have more just will it seem like it just continues to increase, and the volume of stuff that's out there just seems to be increasing and increasing and increasing.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

More is not better, um, for sure. And I don't know that we have it fully figured out, but one of the built-in competitive advantages in this case of a media organization is its freshness uh at scale. Um, we've been around for a while. I used to joke in the world of conventional SEO that we were a vintage that Google loves. Now it's trying, you know, structured data that's organized, that's reported, and um thinking about machines reading the website alongside a human is something that we we you always write for a human, but understanding that you might get picked up by a machine. And then the the competitive, unfair competitive advantage is, and you're doing it here with this kind of conversation. When you have a a dialogue with someone and can capture what they think and feel in this moment in time, an LLM cannot replicate that until it's ingested it into its uh large language model later. It's it's a sea of sameness. And a lot of where we win, we get picked up and found by LLMs. I I hear from people who say, Hey, we saw you because ChatGPT surfaced one of your articles, which is good to see citations sometimes works. Thank you. Um but yeah, the I think authentic real conversations with humans that is trying to serve a purpose for someone else. Um, where you know, it's not going to be easy for the next several years running a media company in the world of agents and LLMs, but the human part is still the thing that brings people back.

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Are are there things you're you know, through your lens that you're seeing that people want more of that doesn't exist right now or there's not a lot of?

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Um a whole bunch of different things. Um, they don't want more of anything, they want really specific answers. So, kind of what we would go to even as we rewire our own habits. We used to go to Google to find a trend on a thing. Now you can go to an LLM and ask for, you know, what is the best running shoe to use in wet weather that's two degrees on average, and you'll get an answer. So long tail what used to be SEO or long tail really specific questions does well. That's why we invest time in events and a lot of interviews. I think there's a resurgence of events because we get to hear things people are doing now with actual case studies. Um, the ROI question around AI is probably one of the most asked things because you know, we're hearing from a board will tell a CEO, you need to deploy AI across the organization and show positive ROI in two years. And they turn to the CIO or the technical leader saying, How do we do that? And they're like, I have ideas. And then the CFO says, How much is that going to cost? I don't know. We haven't tried it yet. Or we've got all these POCs out. And so um, clear stories that are replicable or that I can learn from is where we invest a lot of our time. And it seems to be the content that performs the best because an LLM will show you patterns and case studies, but they're only as recent as whenever they were last trained, or whatever they can find on the internet. And we're seeing if there's less trust in a corporate website and more trust in media, a Canadian problem we have is a lot of great media companies are gated and uh robots text files are they block out agents from scanning. And so we're creating fiefdoms of really good insight. Um, and we toy, you know, we've we've wrestled with the idea a lot for a long time. Like, do we stay open and we have, uh, or do we, you know, go the subscriber route? Um, but there's trade-offs to that.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

So how do you manage the the the IP side of things? Because as you mentioned, like the the paywall and the robots can't crawl it, etc. etc. You know, there's pros and cons, I guess, to having uh kind of citizen journalism. And and I does IP become more of a concern, less of a concern? Like how do you tackle that conversation internally, especially if the the goal is to amplify and tell those stories?

SPEAKER_00 40:28

Yeah, we've gone away from the citizen journalism route, but we have experts that we work with still. And so um

Shadow AI And New Leadership Reality

SPEAKER_00 40:36

digital journal really becomes a or has become a hybrid business where on the outside, when you look at the website, for example, it looks like a media site. There are stories that you know you've authored stuff on digital journal, so have others. And those are your ideas and your stories. Um, or if we're journalistically interviewing someone and we tell their stories, um, that's all part of the uh IP, and we've very deliberately left it open because we want to be scraped by large language models for now. But there's also a lot of business model change. Um, those relationships and and and the footprint that we have, we are we monetize offline where a lot of those relationships, you know, we can do roundtable events or um custom experiences where we can bring together a CIO, a CEO, a startup. And um, a lot of the relationships we create along the way are valuable to other people. So our IP can move offline into creating different kinds of experiences and then the things that we learn. It's interesting, the role of a journalist. It's you know, you in some ways become your brain is an intelligence product where someone wants to know, hey, what's changing? What's happening? Where should I be investing? So um RIP is not just the words on our website, it's how the product of intelligence and insight moves from real world to published version.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

I I really like that that kind of journey of how that information and how that kind of person transcends from the you know the virtual to the in-person to just that more of that connection. I want to wrap up with a question that I I I know you feel really strongly about, which is about the power and idea of storytelling. And so I think that if there was a swear jar, we probably um, you know, but between the two of us have said storytelling a few times uh throughout this conversation. What is it about the power of stories that's going to be so important as we continue down this path um for you know not just digital transformation, but as the world continues to evolve here? That's a big question.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Um for me, it is it's the let's see if I can unpack this onion. Stories are how we interface with the world and each other. Um I meet you once or five times. The stories you tell me are going to be what makes you memorable uh and I think differentiated in this world of sameness. There was this race to create large swaths of content, and everyone looking through an individual lens said, My job just got easier. I can churn out all these blogs now on my site, or my CEO wants me to be able to have all these case studies. And what I don't know that enough people stopped to pump the brakes to look at is everyone else is also doing that. And so storytelling is not creating content, it's finding a way to share an opinion or a view or a perspective that is going to connect with someone else. Um, very old analogy I give all the time is when you go to a cocktail party, if you and I are chatting and I just tell you about how great I am. I have this world class product and this world class team, and you might listen for a few minutes, but if that's all I ever had to say, which is how many businesses communicate to the world, um, you lose your audience. Whereas If I come in and ask you questions and I share my perspective, you're going to walk away having a stronger, more favorable opinion. And so storytelling for me is throughout the entire history of humanity, it's how we pass along that insight to the next generation and it's how we connect with others. And in the world of sameness and AI slop, I think it's going to be one of those who do it well are going to be very much differentiated. Um an interesting anecdote I heard from a senior leader at Lenovo in the States who went to a conference run by one of the big management consulting firms, and they had every session about everything they did, you know, how to deal with large language models, how to scale AI, ROI discussions, anything that a technology leader would want. And the most attended session was on storytelling. It was helping technologists tell better stories because it's they they need to connect, or we and they need to connect with the world. And it's pretty telling to me. And again, I'm at the risk of sounding very self-serving, it's telling to me when there's lineups on how do I do storytelling, um, and that's the thing that fills a room.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

I I love it. Yeah, and I think that um you know I think I know the event you're talking about, and it's it's just I think it's a human connection, right? And I think that people like I want humanity, they want the connection, and and it's one of our most I don't want to say primitive, that probably downsells it, but it's it's just it's built into people. Yeah, and I think in a time when everything gets more and more unreal, they want something they can hold on to.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

Exactly. Yeah, and everywhere you go in life, whether it's at a dinner or a cocktail party or meeting someone in a coffee shop or talking with a colleague, the stories you tell them shapes what they think of you and what they remember about you. So I think it's it literally to me, it's the most powerful force. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

I also have PTSD from you from that exact cocktail party story with the with the person that uh also like casually, and I just mopped the microphone here, but like also like shows off their watch while they're talking

Storytelling As The Last Moat

SPEAKER_01 46:05

to you. Like you've we've all met that person. Yep. Yeah. Um, if you like I've I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. I feel like I could ask you 400 million more questions.

SPEAKER_00 46:14

We're a dangerous combo to have this talk because we both are insatiable insatiably curious.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

How does it feel to be on the other side? So this is unique for you, where you're um, you know, you're you're usually the one asking the questions.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

It's uh, you know, I joked uh on was on my way here that it's it's a little bit like the Spider-Man meme, you know, with pointing. Um, because it's meta when you get a storyteller interviewing a storyteller about storytelling. Yeah um yeah, I I've enjoyed it. There's uh my my opinion the position I have and the fortune I get is I get osmosis. I get to attend events, and you know, you get uh I think I'll steal this from Tyler Chisholm, who's a local here. You get little micro PhDs in a lot of things or masters, um, and you get an opportunity to learn about all the great things. So it's um you and I have had great chats on the work you're doing, and I appreciate the chance to reflect back what I hear because the stories are what drives me.

SPEAKER_01 47:11

Totally. Um, and uh it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show here today. If people want to track you down, if they want to learn more about digital journal, if they want to um send you a uh letter about all the stuff that they love that you're doing, what what's the best way to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_00 47:26

Um if you're pitching stories, digitaljournal.com, uh if you want to reach out and connect, I'm on LinkedIn, is pretty much the only platform I use right now. Um

Where To Find Chris And Wrap

SPEAKER_00 47:35

and we'll see how long that lasts with the AI slot. So reach out like a human.

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Yeah, no AI generated uh quick question.

SPEAKER_00 47:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

Yeah. And it's been a pleasure to have you on the show today. Um, and I hope to have you on soon. And season uh two wrapped up. Thanks, Keith. Awesome, thanks again. If you've made it this far, like and subscribe on YouTube or follow and leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform so you don't miss any future episodes.