Ep. 227: How Good Karma Brands Got Serious About AI and Made It Stick

**Ty Bauschek** (0:00)
I always look at it from that perspective of, is it easier to teach our processes to someone who's AI native and AI hungry, or teach somebody who knows our processes how to use AI? And honestly, right now, we're seeing that people who are AI hungry and curious and generalists are actually able to pick up our workflows easier than conversely teaching people how to use AI who are in the workflows every day.

**Mike Kaput** (0:21)
Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived the real AI transformation, including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today. So join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all as part of our AI Transformations Series.
Welcome everyone to Episode 227 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. Now, you may have guessed today's episode is a little different than your regularly scheduled programming. This is one of the episodes we are doing as part of a special limited series we're running called AI Transformations presented by Google Cloud. Now, in this special series, we are actually spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. So in each episode, we're going to explore how leaders at some of the world's most innovative companies are actively using AI to transform how their teams, departments, or entire organizations work. We're going to actually look at what sparked the transformation, what work looked like before AI, how their journeys unfolded, what got messy along the way, and what results AI is starting to unlock for businesses. We are actually going to do that by interviewing those leaders firsthand right here on the show, including a leader I've got here with me today, Ty Bauschek from Good Karma Brands. Much more on Ty in a minute. Now, the reason we're doing this series in partnership with our good friends at Google Cloud is simple. AI transformation can feel pretty abstract. We see everyone talking about it, but far fewer people are showing what it actually looks like in practice inside real companies with real teams facing real constraints. The goal of all these episodes is to make AI transformation much more concrete. We want you to hear how other leaders are approaching it, what they're learning, what they would do differently, and what practical lessons you can apply as you think about AI inside your own organization. And don't worry, if you're a regular podcast listener, me and Paul will still be doing our regular weekly episode of The Artificial Intelligence Show. Paul and Kathy will still be doing their periodic AI answer episodes that they do here and there. So nothing changes except you get more episodes of The Artificial Intelligence Show thanks to this series. Before we dive into today's conversation, today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Enterprise. Now, businesses of every shape and size are turning to AI. They're learning how to move faster, do more and improve their performance. But you cannot just hand your data over to any platform. You need a trusted partner with years of experience. That's where Gemini Enterprise comes in. Gemini Enterprise helps you build sophisticated AI agents that can connect with your business data while also keeping it protected by world-class security and government. So no more compromising between performance and protection. So go get started with Gemini Enterprise today at cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise.
That's cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise.
All right. So let's get into today's episode. So today we are talking with Ty Bauschek, who is the Senior Director of Innovation and Sales Development at Good Karma Brands. Good Karma Brands is a Milwaukee-based sports media marketing company that operates at the intersection of sports, local news, audio, video, digital, and live events. The company has more than 550 employees and works across major sports media brands and markets. That includes places like ESPN Digital, ESPN Radio Network and Podcasts, and local ESPN-affiliated brands in cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Madison, and West Palm Beach. So Ty is here because Good Karma is in the middle of an intense and urgent company-wide AI transformation. So in less than a year, Good Karma has rolled out AI tools broadly across the organization to hundreds of employees. They've invested heavily in AI literacy and started reinventing how work gets done using AI tools. And as a result, the company is actually seeing a 65% daily AI usage rate across the organization. Now, even though it's still early in the transformation, Good Karma is already seeing AI have a meaningful impact on day-to-day operations. For instance, one team member built an internal AI assistant that gets hours of work done in under a minute. Other teams are using AI to automate sales support, follow-ups and operational tasks that together used to take dozens of hours each month. And now Good Karma is taking its next big transformational step with AI. They're creating dedicated innovation specialist roles that are focused full-time on finding manual workflows across the company and using AI to improve or reinvent them and scaling those solutions across the business. Now, Ty, welcome to the show. Really appreciate you being here.