#327 AI Workflow Automation Augmenting Marketing Teams

**Pete Gosling** (0:00)
If you're really good at using a specific tool or piece of software, you're in trouble because that's going to become irrelevant. So the skills you need are being able to adapt. I think flexibility and comfort working across different areas is the most important skill people need.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (0:23)
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise Architect, Educator, Author, and most importantly, your host. On this episode, AI Workflow Automation, Augmenting Marketing Teams, with Pete Gosling, Founder of Gosling Media and Design Tech.
Pete, welcome to the show.

**Pete Gosling** (0:58)
I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (1:00)
Hey, this is a really hot topic right now, AI, workflow, automation, and everything around all that. But before we get started into that, everyone knows on my show, I only have superheroes on the show, and every superhero has a background story.
So Pete, what's your background story?

**Pete Gosling** (1:21)
So yeah, my name is Pete Gosling. I'm an Englishman in New York.
I studied traditional animation at university, puppet, you know, stop frame animation. I actually did work experience.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (1:34)
Yeah, I did work experience on the set of Pop the Builder.

**Pete Gosling** (1:38)
Yeah, it certainly does. It certainly does.
Yeah, so I always loved animation in that art form. And I went into it knowing it was like a dying thing. And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot recently with AI about how 3D model animation got replaced. Toy Story came out just as I was starting university anyway. So we'll come back to that. But I studied animation and immediately sold out and got into digital marketing and advertising, making animated Flash banner ads. So I told myself it was an animation job and that was enough for me to sleep at night. Yeah, and then over the last 20 years, I've basically been working in ad tech in one way or another. So sometimes in house, sometimes for an agency, but in and around creative and advertising or the infrastructure. Like I worked at a couple of companies where it's more like the tech delivering the ad rather than the creative itself.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (2:45)
So you've seen huge shifts in, I mean, very, you've seen a couple of disruptions, you know, technologies and so is this one different that we're going to right now, the AI one, or is it very similar?

**Pete Gosling** (3:01)
It is, but there's definitely like similarities. So, you know, when I first, as I said, like the animation, I've worked with traditional animators and they had to sort of re-skill. That the knowledge they have for animation is transferable, but they're doing it via a computer rather than, you know, moving puppets. So that was kind of an interesting one. And also when I graduated, it was 2004
So the internet had been around for a while, but the sort of big shift in websites becoming, you know, more mainstream and standard. A lot of the companies were, a lot of the companies I worked with were struggling to get that sort of website going. It was all kind of hand coded back then. My first job was making, we had Flash. It's an animation software tool.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (3:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Pete Gosling** (4:02)
I loved it because you could code and design and animate all in one software.
But the other big shift was VHS to DVD.
So another company I worked at for a short term contract during like a summer was, that they sold educational videos to schools. So their office was just wall to wall VHS cassettes that was their inventory. And they were going through the process of getting rid of it all and sending them out as DVDs. And then, yeah, a few years later, I lost touch with them, but I imagined all of that became irrelevant. Yeah, as the video streaming became a thing. So it's, yeah, like the digital or analog to digital across different mediums. I've sort of witnessed firsthand and been touched. I've always enjoyed pushing things like video streaming was never really a thing, but Flash let you do video streaming.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (5:07)
Yeah, it did, yeah.

**Pete Gosling** (5:07)
It was like the first platform that you could really get any kind of quality video on the internet.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (5:15)
Yeah, so you've been kind of on the bleeding edge of things. This AI revolution, though, this is something different.
Would you agree?

**Pete Gosling** (5:25)
I would, yeah. So the similarities are...