Adam Torres and Sam Michelson discuss AI.
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Show Notes:
How will AI affect your business and brand? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Sam Michelson, Founder & CEO at Five Blocks. Explore the evolution of AI and how it views brands online.
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About Sam Michelson
Sam Michelson is the CEO and founder of Five Blocks. He is a global leader in digital reputation management, consulting for leading businesses and prominent executives around the world.
Over the past 13 years, Sam has built Five Blocks into the premier digital reputation management partner of many leading PR and Public Affairs firms. Aside from the professional relationships, Sam has developed close friendships with many of his partners, and has learned a great deal from them. With a BA in Psychology from Yeshiva University and a Masters in Management from Boston University, Sam has always focused on people. Sam believes that a company’s most important assets are its employees, its partners, and of course, its clients.
Sam enjoys the creative side of technology and business, and is the inventor of two US patents – one in the area of self-tuning knowledge bases and text categorization, and the other in the field of interactive digital advertising.
About Five Blocks
Five Blocks is a digital reputation management firm. They work with premium clients who never leave business choices to chance. Five Blocks help their clients plan and implement a deliberate online presence in Google search, Wikipedia, and, as of recently, in AI-powered search – helping them to take better control of online threats and opportunities. Five Blocks uses big data and proprietary technology to create effective, holistic, and customized strategies.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Sam Michelson and he’s founder and CEO over at five blocks, Sam, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. Good to be here. Now, Sam, did I, is it Michelson or Mickelson? Michelson. Michaelson. I just want to make sure I had that right. Can’t can’t be butchering the name on the first thing out. So man, I’ve been looking forward to this interview. We’re going to talk about how AI views your brand and business and really what it means for your strategy online overall.
But before we get into that, Sam, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So, Sam, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts. That’s our mission. Sam, what mission matters to you?
That’s a great question. Our mission, I would say, is to, is to help empower brands and executives to take control of how they’re seen digitally. Hmm. Love it. Love bringing mission based individuals on the show to share, you know, why they’re doing what they’re doing, how they’re doing and really what, what makes them tick.
So we can all learn from that. So great having you on. And I guess just to get us kicked off here, I see the name founder, CEO, five blocks, like, like how’d all this get started for you? Were you always an entrepreneur? No, not at all. I actually, I actually had no plans to start my own business. I, Working in technology.
It was a product manager, project manager, different tech companies for about 10 years. And and actually in about 2000 and three found myself out of a job. I was, I was in a successful company, but they they downsized. Our whole team and I was looking for what to do. And I had a few kids, I was a little hungry and and, and so I have to find a job in 2003 tech wasn’t the best.
It wasn’t the best time of the. com bubble had burst. There weren’t a lot of jobs and I discovered e commerce. And found out that there was opportunities in opening online store and and really hustling online a little bit in terms of finding products to sell and that, and that led me to, that led me to my first kind of entrepreneurial stint and that was opening stores to sell cellular phones on the internet.
That, so that was, that was the first thing that, that I did online. Wow. What was it like back then for the people that have the dragon drop now, or they’re creating a quick Shopify store? Like what was it like launching a venture back then? I can’t even imagine. Well, the truth is that I was using something called Microsoft Front Page, and it was kind of like, kind of like a rudimentary, it was kind of like Word for creating a website.
So you create each page individually and link them together. It was very, very very, very basic. But at that time, at that time, actually, people people were okay with that. You know, you could build a website that had a few pictures and a couple of links and a little bit of text on it. And in fact in fact, there was something authentic about it.
You would website and you could see it was handcrafted. And then you’d call, you’d call someone or you, you’d email, it’d be their own email address, not like a, you know customer service at Oh, that’s true. Cause this is the early days. That’s what I wanted. Some nostalgia. You’re right. I remember when I’d order something or back then I’d be like, my parents be like, you can’t put a credit card online.
Like, don’t do that. Adam, like they’re going to get our information. That’s back in the day for the young people that are listening, that are like, why would they not worry about a credit card? Right? It was, it was, it was really, and people, and they liked it. You know, it was, it was a transitional time because people were just starting to buy things on the internet and getting comfortable with that.
And it was really good when you’d hit, and specifically there was, there was an advantage to being a small shop online that doesn’t exist now. It would be very difficult, I think, to open open a store online where you’re, you know, I think that the Amazons of the world and some of the other players are, have a big advantage over you because it’s just so, you know, you, you feel comfortable with their, with their customer service and you feel, and so to go to a specialty, I think now to be a successful a website, you have to have that and you’re small, you would need to have the authenticity where, you know, you’re buying from a particular, expert.
You’re, you know, you’re, you’re buying a product from a, from a company that specializes in that product. And the picture of the person of the, of the owner is on the site, you call them up and you can text with them. So that it was like that at the time. And and I loved it. It was, it was, it was really, people would call on the phone, they’d ask us about the phones we were selling.
They would ask us about cellular phones and the plans and and eventually you know, eventually it built up, I started hiring some people and we built a few extra additional stores and but, but the journey, the journey, I thought we’d, you know, I just keep selling cell phones on the internet, my job, but what happened was very quickly it became clear that everybody could be your competitor.
It was so easy to. To set up a webpage that you know, we were competing with lots of people and there was always, there was always someone else who could sell it for a dollar less and then, and then, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a longterm business. So, so where did you go from cell phones then? What was next?
So, so we started doing some consulting again, kind of almost by accident. We were, you know, selling, selling stuff on the internet. And then one day I just was wondering, I wonder what the most expensive keyword on the internet is, you know, if you do paid advertising, what, what click would cost the most.
And it turned out it may be true now as well. It’s always lawyer related those, those, those keywords. And this at the time. The most expensive click on the internet was was mesothelioma asbestos cancer. And it was because people, people who were suffering from, from that condition are looking for, they’re looking for medical help, but they’re also maybe looking for lawyers who can help them get some sort of settlement.
And so I ended up, I ended up kind of researching and figuring out why people were paying so much for that and thinking about whether maybe I could. Help create a website to help to help those people get the information that they were looking for and maybe and I, and I ended up, I ended up kind of finding some really interesting ways to, to get traffic.
At that time, at that time, the ads were all driven by keywords, but there, but if you misspelled any kind of misspelling, so, so you could. You could create misspellings of keywords, target those for ads, and then, and then redirect them to the, to the lawyers or doctors who are looking for those clicks.
So, so it was, it was kind of a a foray into a little bit of consulting, started doing some consulting for a law firm. And and that’s, I think that got me thinking like, oh, I could offer services to other people. I don’t have to just have my own My own online presence. And then, and then the thing that really pushed it to to where I am now is that the cell, the cell phone business I’d created, which was very successful to have occasionally we would get a negative review online or something negative, and we would be like, Oh, what, what’s going on?
We need to make sure that this person is happy. What, how do we solve this problem? And it turned out that sometimes they weren’t really clients. They would be like, you know, a competitor who just posted something about us or someone who thought they bought from us and they didn’t. And so, so we, we realized that you can, you can only go so far, you know, trying to solve a problem after the fact, you know, people aren’t happy trying to, trying to, you know, make them happy and you really need to protect and build reputation to protect your business.
So that realization led us to, well, first trying to, you know, find the right methods to what days was that by the way, just to date it a little bit. Cause you were thinking about brand online pretty early still, like you were talking about brand. We weren’t talking about like brand. I wasn’t talking about it back then.
Brand identity or thinking about like online part of it. What, what, roughly what, what year was that? Roughly around 2009. Yeah, that’s early. That’s right after I was thinking about and I was thinking about the the market at that point, how everything just blew up post 2008. It’s okay. I’m not laughing, but I am.
But oh my gosh, that was something. I was just curious on what time period. Yeah, maybe it was a bit before that. Maybe it may have been 2007. Yeah, but it was probably 2007 ish because it was probably before because after everything blew up, you’re probably thinking of some other things. It was, it was a bit, it wasn’t, you’re right.
It was a bit earlier than that actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Please. Yeah. What happened was that we, once we, once we kind of set our mind on, on, on building up our own reputation so that our own web, so that our own web stores would be more successful. It was so interesting to me that I actually started to lose interest in, in e commerce.
And I just, I got really enthralled with, With digital reputation and realize that there’s so much vulnerability. Our own successful business could be hurt so much just by a bad article or, or a bad review. And it didn’t make, it didn’t make any sense to me. And I started looking at big brands at different individuals and realizing people have so much vulnerability.
In their online presence. If they, most companies, most people are not thinking about how do I bolster my, my appearance online? They’re just thinking, I want to be number one. When you search my website shows up, I’m worried about my social media. Those are all really important things, but. No one’s gonna do business with you or or work with you without googling you and finding out more about you.
And so we need to make sure that you’re you put your best foot forward, you know, you, you, you know, you, if you’re going to an interview, then, you know, you make sure to have a clean shirt on. And so your Google search results, that’s your front office, that’s your, that’s your business card. So so we, we realized that there’s so, there’s so little knowledge and and it’s a little service around that field.
We started, we started just reaching out to PR firms and that we knew who would, you know, from the business and we, and and asking them, you know, is this, is this a need that you or your clients have? And and it just grew organically from there, just helping, helping brands one by one take more control of, of their online presence.
Why do you think, and this is, this always kills me, and I, I like talking to brand guys like you, or even retail, retail, like people that are selling a lot in retail or otherwise, why do you think that people think that others make buying decisions differently than they do? If you’re going to buy something, and the first thing you do is Google it to see if you trust the company and or otherwise, or if you like the brand of this or that, why would you think that the people that are buying your products don’t do the exact same thing?
That’s the question. You know, I think, I think one of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in someone else’s position. We have, we really have a lot of difficulty putting ourselves on the other side of the table and saying, wait, what would I, what would I be looking for? Yeah. And when we do, and I think, and there’s a danger on that side also, when you do that, you say, well, everyone’s going to be just like me.
And that’s not true either. So I think that the difficulty is to figuring out who are the different stakeholders, how are they going to evaluate? And then I think that, I think it comes, I think it takes humility as well. You need to kind of realize that you’re going to probably, you’re going to probably be wrong.
You know, you, you know, like, well, they might be looking at this way. It might, and then, you know, we learned a lot from our clients. We constantly learn. By talking to our partners and our clients themselves and asking them and saying, I say, give me honest feedback. Is this something, you know, is this something that you that is working for you or, or you know, when your searchers are looking for you, what are they telling you?
What are they, what are the conversations that they’re having? Where are they finding, you know, so, so I think, like, information is currency in that, in that sense. I’m just having all the conversations with the, with the different, with, with the people who really know the searchers themselves, the the companies.
Yeah. And so now you’re, you’re a early day brand guy. Like some people, they’ve been paying attention to brand. Some have it and now AI gets thrown into the mix. Like, like what happens now? Yeah. So, so fast forward, we, you know, we spent about about 15 years going from about From maybe six or seven people to where we are now.
We’re about 60 people. We never, that’s amazing. You like starting from, it started with just yourself for a couple of people. Am I wrong on that? Like, yeah, exactly. It was me. It was just me first and never, and no capital. We, you know, the whole thing was a shoe strapped it. Come on, man. Congrats huge achievement.
That’s amazing. It was, it was bootstrapping, but part of it was because I’m risk averse. And I, I just didn’t want, I had seen at the, with the. com bubble that everybody was living on other people’s money. And you just make, you don’t make the right decisions when you’re, when it’s not your money.
I feel like, I feel like I feel like we grew much slower because, because we didn’t have the capital, but we also, when you’re, if you’re if you’re just wanting to drive, you know, you, you want to drive slow because if you make any mistakes, not going to be as they’re not going to be as, as, as influential or, or, or catastrophic.
So, so we were always moving slow. So we, we made a mistake, it would cost us thousands of dollars, but not tens of thousands of dollars. You know, whereas when you’re, when you’re, when you’re, when you’re growing fast and you make the wrong move, you’ve, you’ve, now you’ve put lots of money, you’ve hired people.
And that’s why you see, I think a lot of times young businesses that, that don’t, that don’t survive. So I don’t think You know, you look at the statistics of people, the percentage of people who start, you know, a startup or tech startup and actually succeed past, you know, year three or year five. I think that the reason why those numbers are not very high is because there’s pressure to move quickly because you have, because you’re going to run out of money.
Or your investor wants to see what, when, when their payback is going to come. So we, I didn’t have that pressure since I was the investor. And I was paying the money that we were making. So we grew, we, we grew as much as we could and that meant very slow at first. But anyway, we spent the last about 15 years going getting it up to about 60 people, the whole focus of our business and reputation had all been around Google.
And, and and it’s been, it’s been very successful. We work with a lot of well known. Brands and executives. And, but but there was something missing the whole time, which was that there’s only one search engine, meaning there, you know, as much as, as much as being Yahoo and, and all these other ones that over the years have tried to make a dent.
There was nothing, there was, there was nothing really else going on in terms of search. AI is exciting for that reason. For us, it’s it’s a new paradigm of searching. It’s not another search engine. The generative AI, you know, kind of a chat GPT, Gemini, a co pilot, a perplexity, all these AI ovaries, these, these different engines that are coming on the scene.
They’re super exciting because they’re, they’re new ways to search that actually get you much closer to what you’re looking for very quickly. So it’s so it’s very exciting. I think as a, as a, as a researcher, as a searcher, as a, as a, as a, you know, people who are working in the digital world, this is, this is super, super exciting, so much you can do.
It’s like having an assistant helping you do a bunch of tasks very quickly. And it’s, but it’s also from a reputational perspective. There’s, there’s there’s some challenges because you can, if I search, if I search a brand you know, I search your brand online you know, you’re an ice cream shop and I searched you online, well, your Google results are oftentimes going to be your own website, your social media, maybe some local you’ve done, if you did a fundraiser and it’s all kind of, most people are going to stay on page one of Google.
So as long as anything, nothing has gone terribly wrong, your first page pretty good. And most people are just going to they’re going to, you know, search Bob’s ice cream shop. And that’s, and that’s, you know, that’s pretty much their search experience. Maybe they’ll ask like jobs you know, careers at, or jobs at, or, or they’ll look at, you know, reviews or something, but AI comes along.
It changes the paradigm because. In AI, you don’t write Bob’s you know, ice cream shop. Instead, you, you start saying, what is the best ice cream shop in, in Peoria, Illinois, or, or what, how do I know when I was more of a conversation, right? And I can ask much more complex questions and I can also expect to get a much deeper answer.
I think it changes. What your expectations of the search engine and Google, you expect it to give you some websites that’ll help you get a little closer to what you were looking. You don’t go into Google and say I’m looking for a flight from Phoenix to you know, to Seattle and you know, what’s the best pricing.
What’s the best data like. It’s not. It’s just gonna show you Expedia and you’re gonna go for yourself. But in a I, you know, we’re already getting to the point where you can ask very specific questions and expect to get answers with sources that take you all the way there. And for reputation, that’s gonna be huge.
Like, you know, we work with some universities, for example, and they’re there. The most important thing for them is enrollment. You know, they’re very, very you know, conscious of the fact that they’re, you know, that the students who are choosing schools have all the, have all the, you know, tools at their hands.
So when you’re looking, you’re deciding between a couple of different schools, the ability to use an AI to say, well, which, you know, compare these schools for me on the following criteria, you know, Chat GPT Claude, all these, all these engines will quickly do that. And you need to know if you’re one of these universities how are we, are we, are we considered to be, you know, the top school for, you know, for this particular topic are, are, are, you know, are, are we being presented properly?
Would you say that now that AI is involved, would you say that kind of the stakes for your brand identity have gone up because it, and the reason I think about this, by the way, correct me if I’m off, but I feel like it’s pulling from so many other different sources. So now it’s not just going to be that simple Google result.
It’s like, whether or not you’re even a part of the conversation becomes a little bit more distinct versus once upon a time when it was just the keyword or something else like that. Now it’s a conversation. Pulling from so many different data sources. Am I understanding any of that? Right. Or clarify for me, please.
I think that that’s, that’s correct. I think that that, that when in the, in the world of, in the world of Google, when you search a brand, you almost always get the brand’s website at the top, social media and and for individuals, if you, you have so much more control in, in there is no page two in AI, meaning if you search in fact, dbt you get information and that information could be coming, as you said, from, it really literally could be coming from a hundred different sources.
And, and, and your own website is not necessarily going to be prioritized like it was in Google. So I think that it, that it is it, the, the promise is that if there’s lots about your brand and lots about you as a person, you’ve done many things, they’re going to get woven into the your online reputation.
And that, and the question. We’re asking, but if you if, and the real danger will be for brands and executives who are not who don’t share enough information, who have not been, you know, I, we run into some people like, oh, I’d rather not be online at all. Our business, you know, people were B2B business, people that need to know about us, they’ll, you know, they’ll find us.
And I think that in a world of AI I don’t think you get, you really don’t get to be anonymous at all. You know, if, if people are asking a question about your, you know, your Industry, you want to be in the answer or you won’t be anywhere. If people are asking about you or your brand, you want to make sure that the answers they’re getting are going to be sourced from the right sources.
And so that, that’s going to necessarily mean talk more, share more information. Content is going to be even more important. Wow. That’s so interesting. So we, one of the things we do here is we, we work with a lot of people building their personal brands and we have a personal brand accelerator. And the reason I bring that up is because a lot of really, and people would be surprised, but a lot of really high level executives and entrepreneurs have zero online presence.
And it’s like, and, and because of what you just said, we’re kind of serving ahead of the head of the curve on a lot of that stuff. And we’ve been doing this for a long time, way before AI, but then, but then all of a sudden, what we, what we became was very popular for already having been in that space. And it just started to grow.
And we get these inquiries and it was interesting because it’s like, well, what are we doing some different, like. Advertising, whatever. No, it’s, it’s people like yourself. And then the others that are, that are like all of a sudden not showing up in the conversation and it’s like, well, why, why? Cause you haven’t built a personal brand.
You’re not out there. Nobody knows who you are. And now it’s going to be even more important because especially for executives, like, let’s say even not even entrepreneur side of it, you know, now. What if, if you’re using, going back to what I said about user behavior, if you’re using chat GPT or whatever you’re using to like get your information all day long, then how about the hiring or the headhunter or all of those other people that have your next, you know, C level position, guess what they’re using it to And if you’re not in the conversation where creatures a habit is, is somebody right now, if they have the aptitude and if they’re, and if then it makes sense, are they going to use AI to help them write that email and, and, and, and then they’re going to fix it and edit it and make it their own voice or do what they have to do, or are they going to sit there and start from scratch?
Come on, like if you’re not starting from scratch and you’re doing a certain thing, so are other people. So if you’re leaving yourself out of the conversation. Over time, that’s going to be a problem because now in my opinion, we’re all storefronts. We all, we always talked about being like the media side, like, you know, we’re all our own media outlet, all of that.
But now we’re literally our, our own storefronts looking for our own megaphones just to be part of regular conversations in our industry. So yeah, I think it’s interesting. Sam, I want to jump around a bit here now. So we talked a bit about, you know, obviously your history, how you got started. We talked about some of the things in the early days of brand, how AI is going to affect it.
So what do we do? I know like, like tracking, analyzing, like, like, what do we do? How do we work through this? So our, our our approach for reputation, I think, I think that, well, I’ll start by saying that the main, the regular approach that people have to. Controlling reputation has been, has been largely been trying to game the system.
It sounds like the opposite of what you’re, of what you guys do. You guys are actually helping, helping executives, I think, build their a narrative online that they, that it’s a game. Deliberate make up stuff. We’re giving them who they are. We’re just letting the world know how amazing they are.
That’s all we’re doing. We don’t make stuff up. You’re exactly accurate. Yeah. I think that, and I think that that’s, that’s the right approach. And that’s the, that’s what we, what in our, in our business, we talk about it as like kind of entity optimization. If you’re a brand or a person, I’m figuring out what how to shape it, how to shape your narrative and with built out of all the right digital properties.
So that people get a complete story when they, when they search you. But, you know, the state of the art, unfortunately, for a digital reputation has, has, seems to have always been manipulation. It’s always been like, like Google shows this thing you don’t want. So how do you shove it out of the way? And then people are then in that, unlike what you, what you’re describing, people then create content solely for the purpose of knocking something else out.
It’s not telling a story. It’s it’s running interference with, with Google. And, and that I think that that’s that approach you know, goes completely it’s a bad approach for Google, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s untenable when it comes to to a I, because when it comes when it comes to a I the, the you know, these large language models.
They, when they, when you ask them a question, tell me about this individual or tell me about this brand, or you say, compare this brand to that brand. They, as you said earlier, they draw on a lot of different types of content or sources they will draw on your own website if that’s available.
If you have a website. And it’s, and it and it covers the different you know, the topic it will actually draw from your own website because your website will be jam packed, hopefully with, with good content, it’ll also draw on sources like Wikipedia will draw on on you know, sources like a Bloomberg profiles, crunch base, all different types of of profiles.
If you’re, you know, if it’s a, if you’re. Someone it’s movie related. You’ll be from IMDB. If it’s something that’s private equity related, it’ll be from PE hub. You know, there’s different websites that will for pharmacy company. It’ll come from Fierce Pharma. There’s there’s different sources that will be the main the main ones for different industries.
But what, what what a brand I think has to do in this, in this scenario is exactly what you suggested, which is we need to first know what what the AIs are saying about, so start by going to chat, GPT Gemini you know, perplexity, the different AI engines that people are starting to use and start doing those searches and looking what, when I look up at my brand or I look at my, at the topics or the areas that I want, or me as a brand, person.
What information does the I have? And what you’re looking for is, is it accurate? Is it? You know, is there a vacuum? Meaning that I has no idea who I am or who my brand is. That’s a problem. Do they? Are they? Are they getting confused with someone else? Which is which could be very important to know. Are they?
Is there incorrect information? Early days? You’d look up five blocks. They tell me about five blocks. It would, it would just make up, you know, chat, GPT would go five blocks is a law firm in Los Angeles. It would just make things up now. I think that they’re getting better. And now that the, the, a lot of the AI models are tied into the, into the live web, when they, when they look up a brand or an individual, they kind of check it with reality.
So if you have a, you know, if you have a good corporate website, if you have a Wikipedia, it will, it will check with that. So, so what’s happening is that the, you people are asking questions. The AI model is tapping its own kind of model and then also the live web and starting to put something together.
You need to know what that is for the topics you care about. And then the next step is to figure out where if it if it’s anything that’s either missing. incorrect or negative or made up. Then I think that you need to try to start to like research and figure out why is it doing that? Where is it?
Because it’s a vacuum. Is it a confusion? Is it finding some articles? So there’s some research involved. And the last step is is plotting and planning. How am I going to make sure that the that the different A. I. Models find information about. So it’s it’s really not that different from what the kind of work that you do with with executives in Google or the kind of work we do with with companies as well.
Where it’s planning a deliberate. What do I want people to see about me or about my brand? And then figure out where does all that content need to live? Where should it live in? What format should it be? Mm hmm. How do the, how does the tracking and analytics play a, play a part? Like, how does that piece work?
Like the tracking side? So we, yeah, so, I mean, look, there’s different, you can, you can track. You can track A. I. S. By actually going and doing the searches on your own every day. We have, we’ve actually developed a platform called A. I. Q, which we’re gonna be rolling out soon. It’ll actually, you can, you can define a topic or a few topics around your brand and it will do those searches for you every day and then so I think that we’re, you know, we don’t know of any other tools that are doing that.
I think that I think I assume that there will be others as well. It seems like It’s people are going to really need to know just in the same way that they need to, that people want to know how am I doing Google or, you know, what is you know, what’s happening to me in social media, people, I think are going to hear what is, what are the AI saying about me?
How do I, how am I doing against my competitors? So, you know, I would say this, I would say, I would, people should start, man, I love it. We’re all going to be asking that question. What is the AI saying about me today, Sam? Come on, man. It’s funny. It’s funny. You know, I’ll take it a step further. I would actually say that if you think about influencers, right, you can think about, you know, in every, in every area, there are people who are the most influential.
Certainly when it comes to social media, you have people, if they, if they talk about a product, you know, that product is going to go through the roof. If they, if they, if they are down on a product that that’s gonna be bad for the product the same is true in media, you know, if, if you ever, you know, a, a particular network or a quarter that is talking about a topic or a, or an area that, that can really be influential.
I think that the most influential as we go into, you know, this, the, the, the next six months or a year, I think the most influential influencers are actually going to be a chat GPT. It’s going to be it’s going to be these different Gemini. It’s going to be, you know, lab. Because actually what they think is going to end up impacting all kinds of, if they, if they have, you know, and, and there are things that are, there are, if you start to prod and poke at the AI, they have political opinions, like you can use that, but you see that they tend to lean this way or that way you, if you start asking the questions that are that are even like hot topics in, in in society, the AIs have been trained in certain ways and they will tell you, oh, we don’t agree with that position.
This is you ask it about, about about a hot topic. He will tell you what is right, what is wrong. So I think that starting to understand that AIs have biases and I don’t think that I don’t think that in any way, I don’t actually believe that anyone. You know, got up in the morning and said, I’m going to program in the biases.
But I think the way that you build these models is you train them on vast amounts of data. You’ve trained them on newspapers and magazines and on. And if you train them on things that are slanted in a particular way, then you’re going to get a eyes that are slanted in that same particular way. So and, and, and not all of them are gonna be slanted in the same way.
I’m sure. I’m positive that whatever Elon Musk is you know, the Grock and the different AIs that he’s working on, I’m sure that they’re going to be planted in a way that’s appropriate for Elon Musk, you know, whereas otherwise, otherwise. So I think that We’re getting to a world where actually these huge influential, influential A.
I. S. Are going to start having. And if I mean, although you know, we’re talking about how how A. I. F. X. Search. But you know, if you’re using if you’re using Microsoft Office, you could have co pilot actually inside of their meaning copilot Microsoft is an A. I. That actually will appear within your Microsoft Office.
And I don’t know how far away we are from Writing a, a document and, and writing about a particular company and having the AI say, well, you didn’t mention their lawsuit, you know, or, or referring to fact check what you wrote. And, and, and maybe, maybe biasing, you know, starting to give you bias in a different, or.
People are using AI to help them write. So I ask it, Oh, can you give me the right paragraph about this? Well, whatever, whatever it believes to be true, whether, whether it is objectively true or not, it’s going to start making your emails into your documents, into your PowerPoints. I think that the, I think this is the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, people will use AI for search, but I think that we’re augmenting our thinking with it. It’s, we’re going to start seeing. Through the lens of AI. So not knowing now, now imagine your brand or your individual people out there are going to be, you know, utilizing the internet, writing documents, doing searches about you, about your brand and through AI is that have the wrong idea about you have, you know, are thinking that you’re in a different industry than you’re in, or think that you’re located somewhere else, these are going to be massive you know, challenges I think, and so it behooves us to kind of.
Pay attention and figure out what to do. Well, Sam, let me tell you. First off, this has been so much fun. I knew you were going to bring the knowledge today. I knew you were going to bring a lot of perspective and I knew you’d been a brand guy since before I knew what, you know, how much brand even mattered.
So thank you. Like you dropped so many jewels, so many gems today. That being said what’s next? I mean, what’s next for you? What’s next for the company? What’s next? Yeah. So the, the big, we, we are, we are all in on understanding how AI is impacting brands. And so I think that, I think that the the efforts that we’ve been putting in recently have been toward creating software that that we, that we believe will be really useful.
So we’re hoping to. Launch in the coming months maybe the next month or so software that will allow you or a platform that will allow you to track how your brand is being seen in AI we’d like to go. So we were still going to provide services to brands for their digital reputation, but I think that we’d like to.
Reach a lot more companies and individuals do that at a price point. That’s going to be much more appropriate for maybe small or medium businesses. Whereas until now we’ve, we’ve really been focused much more on, on larger businesses and, and very hands on kind of work. So I think that’s our future.
I think that it’s, I think that as AI develops we’ll continue to develop with it and, and hopefully continue to provide tools for that. So that people can feel empowered and not, we don’t want the AI to run us over. We don’t want Google to run away with our reputation. So we need to harness it. You kind of want to get on the, get on the beast rather than have the beast run you over.
Yeah, I love it. Sam, if somebody wants to follow up and learn more about five blocks, how do they do that? Yeah, just best ways to hit our website fiveblocks. com. We’re also a little bit at pretty active on LinkedIn. You can learn more there and then just drop us a line. Awesome. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can just click on them and head right on over and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re putting out new content, new interviews, and new ideas to hopefully help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe button and Sam, man, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you.