The potential of AI for B2B Marketers - with Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO Marketing AI Institute

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Paul Roetzer, the founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, and also author of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Book published in 2022 We'll be covering three main topics with Paul today, even though we could spend three hours on this. The first topic will be the history of AI and B2B marketing, what I call BC, before ChatGPT, the current state of AI and B2B marketing, how is it being utilized and what's the impact on B2B marketing organizations? Then third, we're going to ask Paul to bring out his crystal ball and talk about the future of AI both for and on B2B marketing and marketers. With that, Paul, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey, becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Paul Roetzer** (1:30)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. I actually started out of journalism school. I started a marketing agency out of journalism school, spent five years there, then started my own agency in 2005 We became HubSpot's first partner and the origin of their partner program in 2007 Then in 2011, I started writing the Marketing Agency Blueprint, which was my first book on how to build a modern marketing agency. That was the year, right around the same time that IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. When I finished the manuscript to my first book, I actually started out of curiosity trying to understand Watson and how it worked, and if there was potential applications to what we were doing in marketing, specifically marketing strategy and budget allocation. I just started spending all of my free time trying to understand artificial intelligence. That led to my second book in 2014, which was the Marketing Performance Blueprint, which was about talent, tech and strategy. In the technology section, there is a very small component that is about artificial intelligence and my theory that we would eventually build an intelligence engine that would intelligent automate marketing strategy. That became the basis for all of my talks. Everyone just basically wanted me to do these talks on AI. We eventually in 2016 created the Marketing AI Institute to continue our research and to start publicly sharing everything we were learning about AI. I figured if there was enough people interested in the topic, we'd eventually turn it into a business. That's what happened in 2019 I spun it off to its own company out of my agency, and we launched our Marketing AI Conference, and eventually our online education platform. I then sold my agency in 2021 and have been dedicated to AI ever since that time, really focused on the AI Institute, which is a media event and education company. It's the simplest way to think about it.

**Ray Rike** (3:22)
Well, one of my first questions was going to be, what was the callous for the Marketing AI Institute? You've already answered that question for me, so let's start with, it's interesting, a good friend of mine, his name is John Elder. He had a digital advertising agency called Heat, and they were the ad agency for EA, Electronic Arts, and did that for about 10 years, and we know how FIFA became such a big hit for them. But he sold that to E&Y, and about two years ago, he started a digital AI ad agency, ahead of its time. So I need to connect you and John someday.

**Paul Roetzer** (3:57)
Yeah, for sure.

**Ray Rike** (3:58)
A little bit about that journey over the last three years, since you sold your agency, you've done nothing but marketing AI Institute since then. Well, I should say nothing. That's been your primary vocation. How has it evolved over the last two to three years? And was ChatGPT with that similar moment? Or were there a lot of innovation going on before that, Paul?

**Paul Roetzer** (4:20)
Yeah. So for me, the inflection point was 2021 spring, two things happened. So one, Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, published a blog post called Moore's Law for Everything.
And he talked about how AI was basically going to come for our ability to think and reason and create. And the things that the average business leader wasn't thinking of at the time, venture capital firms, SaaS leaders, I was talking to them. They weren't realizing what was about to happen. And then the second thing about a month after that, I was reading Genius Makers by Cade Metz, New York Times AI writer. And I had been for all the time I'd started studying AI back in 2011 until that moment. So 10 years, I had this bit of a, what I would call the Fermi Paradox. So, you know, Fermi looked up at the sky long time ago and said, oh my gosh, this vast universe, how is it that we're the only intelligent life out there? And so that was the paradox is like, it seems like life should be everywhere and yet we're it. And I felt that way with AI. I kept looking around for 10 years saying, where's all the AI? Why aren't these companies doing it? Why aren't the SaaS companies building it into their products? And so as I'm reading Genius Makers, I realized why, and basically this breakthrough in 2011 by Jeff Hinton and his team on image recognition sort of accelerated the deep learning movement and you had this land grab for all the talent in the early teens by Microsoft and Google and Amazon and Apple and everybody's trying to go build research labs and Meta and Facebook. And so what I realized in spring of 21 was I had overestimated how quickly AI was going to get infused into all aspects of business, but I had underestimated the total impact it was going to have. So that was in that moment. Literally, I was out for a walk. I came back and I told my wife, I'm selling the agency. Like it was, it was spring break and I was just, I was done. Like I had to now go spend every moment of my life trying to connect the dots on where this was all going. So that was kind of leading up to, but then Chad GPT certainly was the moment for everyone else. It was when everyone else kind of woke up to what was going on. And I can tell that for a fact, because within 14 days, I started getting calls from presidents of universities, leaders of venture capital firms, friends running SaaS companies. Like everyone started calling me saying, oh my God, what do we do? And I thought that they had been doing things and I realized that they actually hadn't. So it was definitely an inflection point for the world, I would say, the business world.