Mailbag Monday: What are your top 3 AI tools?

Katie and Chris answer your marketing, data, and AI questions every Monday.

This week, Natalia asked, “What are your top 3 Al tools, Christopher?”

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AI-generated transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:00
Welcome back to another episode of mailbag Monday where Chris and I are answering all of your questions about marketing, data analytics. Who knows? Maybe it’s a gardening question this week. But shocker, it’s not. Chris this week, Natalia asked, what are your top 3 AI tools? Christopher? So clearly that question is for you, not for me?

Christopher Penn 0:19
It depends, which is the answer was Tuesday. What what do you define as an AI tool?

Katie Robbert 0:27
Well, and so if I had to speculate, I’m guessing that with all of the buzz around generative artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, BB Stable Diffusion, you know, all the platforms that are becoming household names for marketers? I’m guessing that would be the types of tools that they’re asking about. But I think in general, what I would be curious to know, Chris, because you’ve been working with artificial intelligence longer than most. What are the tools that are your go-tos on an everyday basis, and then I would say sort of two parts, what are your everyday tools, and then what are your sort of like fun experimental tools,

Christopher Penn 1:09
they’re almost the same thing, actually. So my, my the single biggest go to tool for the for deploying AI in production, making it useful. And we’re including classical machine learning, this is our studio and the our programming language. Our studio and the our programming language are where 95% of the production work that I do in AI, happens, because it’s a programming language. So stuff like media mix, modeling, attribution modeling, you know, Google Analytics, data processing, auditing instances, all that stuff is done right inside of our, and I could not do my job without it that I mean, thankfully, it’s an open source project. So it’s not like it’s going to vanish overnight. If a company has decided to not offer the product anymore, it would still exist. That’s number one by a substantial margin. And then in the sort of the AI tool realm. The the GPT family of language models is probably my my generative text, tool of choice. And that comes in a variety of flavors. So I do use the web interface ChatGPT A lot. I do also use the API a lot. Trust Insights is rolling out this coming month, our first beta for paying customers of analytics analysis using the GPT models, so that that’s a key tool. On the image generation start side, I use Stable Diffusion. So Stable Diffusion is an open source product that I run inside of Google colab, which, again, is another fantastic tool, Google colab is a sort of a VPS, a virtual private server environment where you pay money to Google for a certain number of hours of compute time every month. And then you can run a tool like Stable Diffusion, and essentially, just do whatever you want with it. Compare that to something like OpenAI as Dali, to where it’s like 15 cents an image. When I’m running Stable Diffusion, sometimes I want to try, like, you know, make 80 different variations of this image that gets expensive, real fast, in a commercial product, but in the group colab I can say, Okay, make 80 images, I’m gonna go get through some real workload, check back right now and see what you came up with.

Katie Robbert 3:25
I think that saw I think, you know, what’s interesting to me is, I mean, I know how you work and so I’m unsurprised by your answers. But I think that people who don’t know you are probably surprised that our studio tops the list, but it is it’s your lifeblood, it’s how you do everything. It’s your default go to so I think that’s a really good, solid, well rounded answer, especially for people who are trying to figure out, you know, we were just looking at, you know, there’s a generative AI on LinkedIn is constantly updating the list of AI tools that are being released. And, you know, There’s well over 100, probably a couple 100 At this point, which is going to make the martec 9000. spill over onto about four pages, because it’s going to be the martech, you know, 10 11,000 pretty soon. So it’s an overwhelming amount of tools. I think someone was asking when we were sharing that list in our free slack group analytics for marketers, which you can get to at Trust Insights today as AI slash analytics for marketers, you know, what are your top 10 tools? And I was like, That’s a great question. I have no idea because each of the tools that are coming out now are just one specific purpose. So it’s like, here’s your AI toolbox. Here’s your hammer. It only hammers nails. Here’s your flathead screwdriver. Here’s your Phillips head screwdriver, but really a lot of us are looking for like, where’s that one cool little multipurpose tool that’s going to do a lot of things so I don’t have to have you know, 10 tools in my stack to accomplish one task. And so that’s it’s a tricky question to answer. So I like that you’re starting with our studio, which is going to do a lot of those things for you.

Christopher Penn 5:11
And here’s the other thing I’ll say on that front, your top three tools or top 10 tools or whatever are going to be the software that you already use, right, Microsoft Office will have Microsoft, copilot, Microsoft, Bing already has Bing plus GPT-4, and Bing image generation, Google Docs, Gmail, or getting Google Home. This morning, Adobe released a new version of Adobe Lightroom that has AI, image augmentation for sharpening blurry and pixelated images, it’s built right into the tool, nice with a lot of the what’s happening with software is this. Any software company that has complex software, and has half a brain is going to be creating AI integrations in their in their software. So the top three tools for every profession, are going to be the tools you already use. If those vendors want to say a business.

Katie Robbert 6:07
I was thinking about it. And I would say even though I wasn’t asked, I’ll try to answer this question, I would say one of the top tools that I use is otter. So Otter.ai, it’s a transcription tool. And for a lot of the work that we do for the type of work that I do for the company, I’m very reliant on it. Knowing that AI is going to be integrated right into the G Suite, that’s going to be my second, probably my first and second is the G Suite. And otter. So those are the two that, you know, I’m the most reliant on and you know, as it gets integrated into the other tools, it’ll be, you know, I already use Google Analytics all the time. And it’ll, you know, throw it in there. Google Analytics already had some level of artificial intelligence built in. in Universal Analytics, you might recall that it had that little insights in the top right hand corner that was powered by artificial intelligence. And so people who say, Well, you know, I need to get it, I need to use it, you’re already using it.

Christopher Penn 7:10
Exactly. If you use Google Maps, you’re using AI, right? If you’re using good Gmail, the spam detection algorithms are all AI based. So it’s, it’s a lot like electricity, it’s everywhere. You just, it just may not be immediately obvious all the time. And nor does it need to be in your face all the time. And the people who are yelling, I use electricity. Like that’s it after a while. That kind of sounds silly. Like, yeah.

Katie Robbert 7:34
It’s funny, because it’s sort of the same thing about having a really good project or account manager, or really good manager is someone that you don’t even know is there. That’s the same thing with artificial intelligence. Like it’s just working in the background doing its job. You shouldn’t have to go looking for it. Like where is it? Like it’s just there, it just keeps things moving forward.

Christopher Penn 7:55
Exactly. If you’ve got a question you want us to answer reach out to us go to trust insights.ai/contact or you can join our free slack group go to trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, where you have over 3000 other marketers are asking answering each other’s questions every single week. And if you want to catch up on past episodes of mailbag Monday, you can find them at our Trust Insights newsletter trust insights.ai/newsletter. Thanks for tuning in. I will talk to you next time.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.