Adam Torres and Tory Gray discuss AI.
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Show Notes:
Is it possible to get your brand to stand out in the age of AI produced content? In this episode, Adam Torres and Tory Gray, Founder and CEO of Gray Dot Co, explore Gray Dot Co and the pros and cons of AI generated content.
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Their team of experts takes the time to listen and learn about your business, your objectives, and your unique competitive landscape. They help break down communication barriers, achieving new levels of operational efficiency with a results-driven approach that evolves with you as you grow and scale.
The Gray Dot Company is a senior-level SEO consultancy specializing in digital strategy and tech solutions grounded in data, analytics, and long-term growth. They work with high growth-brands, established start-ups, and teams large and small.
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 mission matters. com and click on ER guests to apply. All right. So today my guest is Tori gray, and she’s the founder and CEO of gray. co.
Tori, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. All right, Tori. So I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. We’re going to talk about getting your brand to stand out in the age of AI. However, before we get into that, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Tori, we at mission matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Tori, what mission matters to you? Big question and actually a few of them. We care at the end of the day about doing good work for, with good people. And that’s our why here at gray. co. And we really love to support that in terms of our clients, but also in terms of our internal teams.
So we care about diverse teams. We care about part time roles with benefits and good pay and really helping make sure that The F with the future of work and with world is evolving. We are doing right by our team and doing right by our clients. Tori were you always an entrepreneur or like what inspired you to start gray.
com? Oh, that’s a bit of a long winded story. So I’ll give you the summarized view. I was working in tech and startup world, and I really loved it. And I really loved working with teams, but After what, five, six years, I was getting a little burnt out from all the hours and all the pace time, had my daughter and really just couldn’t, couldn’t hack it anymore and wanted to get to spend time with her.
So I went out freelancing and then eventually decided, Hey, I like this. And while I miss teams, I’m kind of good at this. And I like control of my time and schedule and all that jazz. Did you so when you say, so start worlds, were you working with small startups with funded startups? Like, give me a feel for that.
Or was it corporate, corporate America? Like what was the feel there? No, not corporate America very much. So I was based in Denver and Denver, Colorado, and these are, it was. Funded tech relatively early stage. So one of them was just after their series a and the other was just after their series B through to about a year before they got acquired by NBC.
Wow. And so during that, when you made that transition to, from you know, tech startup world and working for these companies to start launching your own venture, I know nothing’s ever that straight path or straight line. Did anything surprise you as you were making that transition? I was really surprised about how much I enjoyed it.
You know, I think you always tell yourself a story about who you are and what your role is. And I did, I was missing in house for the first two years that I was freelancing. Cause I missed that team environment and I missed the depth of the kind of problems that you could solve versus an external consultant, right?
Like you get, you get to go in, you get to dive deep every time. And then After you’ve solved that problem year after year after year, you have to keep going and you have to get more creative and dig deeper to actually move results over time. In a way that I think a lot of agencies don’t necessarily get that opportunity to do because you might be working with a new agency or the internal team owns that.
So I really love that challenge. And I never saw myself. I never pictured myself as an entrepreneur. So I was really surprised at how much I loved it. And I was happily surprised at the money too, frankly. Yeah, you, you and me both. I never, I, we came out with a book. I wrote a book and it came out earlier this last year actually.
And and and in it, I call myself the accidental entrepreneur. Cause I feel like I. I didn’t have this idea or plan that, Oh, I’m going to go be this entrepreneur. Some people have that, by the way, like I interviewed a lot, a lot of people for my, for my longterm listeners and visitors. They know, like some people just have it.
They’re the serial entrepreneurs and this and that for me, I was like, well, I, I guess I became a entrepreneur by accident. That wasn’t the plan. Like, how did your, how did you know? Cause a lot of entrepreneurs. be or accidental, however you want to word it. How did you know that like gray. co and this particular idea was going to be something that wasn’t just an idea, but something that you’d stick with.
And we would be like the one, you know. Yeah, well, I like the accidental framing. My framing for myself is I fell backwards into it, kicking and screaming. I fought it, you know, for the first two years I was applying for, you know, and looking for roles. There weren’t a lot of opportunities. In your interesting roles remote at the time?
Mm-Hmm. You know, this was pre covid before there was a big rise in remote work. Yeah. And I think I mostly fell in love with getting to solve new problems. Mm-Hmm. So, as the CEO, you know, and as I took on team members, I get to figure out and solve new problems all the time. So I was really invigorated by that and I, I love.
Also just problem solving in general. And, and it’s the figuring out process. And I always thought I was gonna be bad at sales, so figuring out how to be better at sales. And I always thought I’d be bad at bookkeeping. And then it turns out, when you’re growing quarter over quarter, it’s your money on the line
That’s actually pretty exciting to keep track of until it’s not exciting and it’s boring. And then hopefully by then you’re doing well enough that you can hire service providers to help you do that. And that was how it worked for me. So it’s been built up over time of repeating the action of, I can figure this out.
I can figure this out. I can change the narrative in my own head about who I am and the story that I tell about what I’m good at. And I, I really just loved that process. And then eventually I took on team members and that really was transformative for me because then it wasn’t just me, because I think entrepreneurship can be lonely.
That’s the cliche and it’s true. Yeah, that, that whole, that whole skill that you have of like getting out of your box or your comfort zone or however we want to word that like, like, how do you do that? Because I feel like so many people struggle, myself included, like we put these labels on ourselves or however we want to say it.
Like, how, how do you continually do that and re really reinvent yourself and like, you’re like, Oh, I’m not good at sales. Well, you know, I, I, now I am, I’m not good at this. Now I am like, how do you do that? I started by figuring out and really defining for myself, you know, I put it on paper. What do I think I’m not good at?
And then I figured out how am I going to solve this? Because if I’m going to do this, if I’m going to make money at this, I’m not going to be good at sales. So how do I solve this? And I determined like, okay, well, here’s the services I’m going to sign up for. I’m going to go minimize the amount of time that I need to do on sales.
So I’m going to like do the right sales with the right teams that mean I get the maximum. I’m going to make sure I let my network know that I’m available so they can come to me. I think I also gave myself some grace in terms of my ability to fail in small ways. So rather than. And I think that I’ve seen this happen with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of women specifically, where they go in and they expect, I don’t know that they have too high expectations of how well it’s going to work out.
And so if they misquote a project and they underbid it, and then they have to service that, right. And they still have to make good on that because that’s what they said they do. And then they feel like they failed and then they don’t want to continue. So I told myself from the beginning, I think that is inevitable.
Cool. That will happen. And guess what? I can take that learning and I can apply it and I can do it a little bit better next time. And so I continue to fail in inventive new ways. And I get better every time. And so that framework of like allowing the failures and expecting that set me up for success. So, so jumping around a little bit here, like brands and working with brands, like what attracts you to doing that?
People and interesting problems. That I think there’s just some really, really wonderful people out there. And we specialize working with in house teams typically. So we’re at our heart, we’re an SEO and data agency and market intelligence as well, but we work with teams. So most agencies, especially in that kind of situation are working with, and they are the marketing department.
They are the SEO department for a brand, but. I, with my background in technical and strategic SEO, you know, it doesn’t make sense to staff for that all the time in house for a lot of roles, unless you’re a big enough e commerce or big enough enterprise client. But having a little bit of this makes a lot of sense.
So I can come in and really support them and grow them through that, help them, help them evolve. So looking at one of the other things that I think is super interesting here. So you’re, you, you have a strong, like tech background, strong SEO background, you go deep, right? So now right now, AI, that’s the topic.
That’s what we’re all talking about. And I was, and I wanted to pick your brain today on, on how you think this plays into really content creation right now, and this craze that’s going on with just pumping out a lot of content. You’re in this day to day. I’m not like, what are you seeing? You know, with the rise of ChatGPT, we have seen exactly that.
Everyone is very, very excited about creating a lot of content with ChatGPT or a competitor. Quantity, quantity. Oh my gosh. It is. And, and I think it’s, it’s frankly, and it’s so interesting, but it’s also a big miss. P. S. So can everyone else. Everyone else can also. That’s the funniest part. I have to laugh at that.
It’s the funniest part. It’s like everybody else can pay 20 and do that too. It’s not a secret. Exactly. And I mean, essentially that’s what it is. So a large language model like a ChachiBT, it’s smart auto complete. It’s like a toddler in your house that can repeat things that like sound surprisingly smart, but they don’t really know what it means.
And so what you’re left with is literally the most common denominator of the thing that the internet is most likely to say. And I don’t know about you, but my experience with the internet is not one that I want the average of the internet to be what represents my company. Yeah. So I, I think, I think they’re right to explore these tools and that is a great use case, but I think there’s currently an over reliance on Scale and focus on that quantity, to your point of let’s just make a bunch and put it out there and then see what happens without much regard to how do we make it special?
How do we like, how do we do normal classic brand marketing work? That is, we have to stand out. We have to be special or why would they choose us over someone else? Can you kind of juxtapose that with also with consumer intelligence? Because one of the things, and I’ll tell you why I’m, I’m, I’m phrasing the question this way, because sometimes what I do like about the idea of all of this AI and everything else is that I think it’s bringing new people to the market that maybe would have never considered or know they needed to do content, they know they need to create and do some things that’s going to push their brand forward, but they’ve been hesitant to, and maybe this is the shiny toy that finally brings them to the market.
So that’s the, why I asked you the question in this way. Can you kind of juxtapose that with what real, you know, consumer intelligence means, especially for those that haven’t gone down that route in the past? Well, I think there’s a big opportunity in terms of consumer intelligence and the way I’m speaking, that is specifically a new version, an online digital version of that.
The classic version is a lot of surveys, a lot of interviews and Taking and collecting that data for really smart insights, but the digital version of that, that I think with AI, people are exploring things a lot more, and they’re a lot more open to new options. And they can also use AI as tools to help analyze this data in ways we haven’t.
necessarily been able to before, but the data sets that we’re looking at when we do digital market intelligence are search data. So what are people looking for on Google, on Bing, on whatever search engine but also social data. So what are people looking for on TikTok, on YouTube? So if there’s still a search element, but then there’s also the normal interactive element of what are you interacting with?
What are you watching? What are you liking? What are you commenting on? What is the sentiment of that comment? So I think there’s a tremendous amount of data out there that people are leveraging right now to really understand. What problems are people having, what are they seeking solutions to, and how can you solve those problems in interesting and meaningful ways through your marketing, through your SEO, through your product roadmap, frankly, of what, where are your competitors having issues?
Where can you fill a gap? Because I can tell you how often people are complaining about brand X versus Y if that company is big enough. That they’re searching for it or that they’re complaining on Reddit. We can count that. We can understand the frustration and maybe you as a business can solve that.
So it’s a lot of, a lot of these AI tools will help us analyze that data as well. So they can help us cluster together concepts. They can help us tag into various buckets of how are people feeling? Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it about this topic or about this topic? Or do we need this feature or that feature?
These tools could be really useful in helping us get to that data. So I know that you work in, in many different areas and niches, but definitely in highly regulated fields, like, you know, FinTech, health tech, like those types of things, any interesting, like just use case scenarios or things, it could be something that you’ve worked on or your company, or just something you saw on the news, like any interesting use cases or applications for this that you’ve seen lately.
It’s interesting because in regulated industries, I think they’re much more hesitant for good reason. To use a lot of the AI tools. And it depends on the tools. So chat, GVT is frankly, one of the ones they’re much more hesitant to use, or it’s completely off limits. So we do work with a FinTech in the government sector.
And that’s just a no go like there is no use that’s against their guidelines and they’re not going to. If we’re talking about in the consumer space, I think there’s a lot more experimentation. So I’m thinking of like the bank rates of the world will Content and with AI and put that out there, you know, maybe there’s human editing.
Maybe there’s various things on the legal side. I, there’s a lot of reservation around what do you share? Because I think it can be easy to accidentally share data. So that’s the Samsung example, right? Like, whoops, I shared proprietary code and now open AI not only has access to that and sort of owns it, but can, can, and does just by the nature of the tool accidentally distributes it.
To other people on the web, whether they want to or not. That’s how LLMs work. They use the inputs to help inform the system overall. So some of that stuff can get out there. So I think a lot of people are building their own in house tools is a trend we’re seeing where they can, yeah, build their own GPTs, their own large language models within an IBM or within your other big corporate, if whatever level of company can afford to create that for themselves.
Yeah. I see a lot of experimentation there too. Yeah. That’s going to be interesting going forward to see all these companies and what they develop and kind of what comes out of that, like longterm, I’m interested to see, but you bring up some good points, especially just kind of the risk. I think we heard about the Google attack recently.
This is 2024 in March. We’re recording, we’re recording this for everybody that just for context, if you’re listening to the playback, the attack recently, like what does some of this implication mean just overall from your vantage point? Well, this is going back to the scale of content creation and chat.
Google is dealing with a lot of spam. So some of this is direct spam, classic spam. And a lot of this is content production at scale. And I think you have to keep in mind that all of this taxes, Google’s resources. So if you Overnight put up 10, 000 articles and your competitor can put up 50 K articles.
And then Joe Schmo down the streets, putting up a hundred K articles that adds up over time that takes process to consume, to understand and figure out what are the results that has a lot of impacts in, in terms of us as a consumer, what’s the quality of search results that we’re getting, this is.
Knows about and is actively working on. There’s a reason there’s so many algorithm updates lately. And if you might see your search results all over the board that’s a lot of why. Cause, cause I think they are, are working on it. And I think we as businesses also have to deal with the repercussions of what does that mean for our traffic?
As Google figures out, how do we deal with. This problem. My biggest advice to our clients today is a lot of just brace for impact because Google’s actively working on it. They’re smart. They obviously have a track record for figuring it out. And there have been other historical rises in spam and Google has overcome that.
So we can be hopeful that in the longterm Google is doing something about it, but. At the same time, there’s also other market forces happening where, say, younger users might be going to a TikTok instead. So it’s also a time, I think, to explore other channels and hedge your bets, which I always recommend.
Just by the fact that we’re an SEO data firm, like, Don’t do only SEO. Don’t do any channel or any two channels. You should always reduce your risk by doing more than one thing and be in more than one place so that things happen. So I know you’re heavy in SEO. Like how does this from your, from your vantage point?
Like how, how does this affect you? People should be thinking about SEO. And I know that’s a big question and there’s always so much we can do it at 20 minute interview, but like how, how should people be thinking about their SEO now, I mean, in the context of the AI question, I think they should be doing a few things, I think they should be exploring these tools.
I think it’s silly to ignore them. And just because I’m not advocating for suddenly sticking up 10, 000 articles on your site overnight. Please don’t do that. Please. You know, it hallucinates. That’s kind of a thing. You don’t want to be putting that content out on your site. You want it to be human fact checked and human reviewed.
But at the same time, I think there are use cases for these tools and they can help them through the process. So maybe if I don’t want to generate, you know, my 5, 000 word articles, maybe I can create the social promo text, or maybe I can create other sorts of smaller bits of content that it can be great at.
I think, so exploring the tools and improving process and speeding things up is a great venue. I think you also need to pick the right tool for the job. So, ChatGPT is a large language model, but there’s other forms of AI. There’s other forms of machine learning, and there’s great ones out there that can do more specific things that you might be looking for as a business.
So, if you’re looking for data analysis, for example, you know, I’ve explored using ChatGPTs, and it’s Not wonderful. There are dedicated tool sets for that. So I think part of it’s finding the right tool for the job. And that means the exhaustive work of, you know, cause there’s so many right now and they’re so interesting and you’ll have to take the time to explore and figure out which ones are for you.
I would focus on those specialized use cases and this process improvements. And then I would. Remember to add value. So chat GPT is going to create, or any of these tools are going to give you insight that are at a baseline. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Okay. Now you had some time savings. Where else can you add value?
Where can you do something that a computer can’t, that it’s going to help your brand and your company and your content speak to your consumers and stand out in a way that means it’s not just this stock that you’re selling. Dang, you know, thing. And then of course, explore all the channels, explore the tech docs, explore the YouTubes the Reddits and get out there.
So, so jumping around a little bit here, it doesn’t, your answer doesn’t have to be AI related. I’m just, just in general, like what excites you right now in terms of, it could be technology, the marketing, the marketplace there, like, like what excites you right now? I’m very excited about the DMI. I’m excited about this technology.
I think this is hugely, vastly under leveraged, and I think it’s been out there for a while. So my example here is the Obama campaign had a lot of access to a lot of data and they spent it doing to, to find out, you know, what are the finite and Specific issues that users in this city are having. And how does that differ from what people are voting for in this city and what’s meaningful for them so that they could have really tailored actionable campaigns and not in a creepy way.
I’m not talking like Cambridge Analytica scandals. Like, I’m going to use that to target you creepily, but if you can understand what the problems are, then maybe we can. Solve that and we can have, you know, we can emphasize the right messaging that we know matters to the people in these communities. And we can emphasize the legislation.
That’s the right legislation in these communities because we know what they’re seeking. So with DMI, we can get very tailored. We can get zip code level data and city level data. We can also get national or international data. You can figure out what users are seeking and use that to inform your business.
And I think that that’s really powerful. And we have a, an amazing example of that happening a long time ago, and yet no one’s really using it today or thinking about the benefit, frankly, of people don’t lie to Google, you know, if you, are you going to answer that survey question? That’s kind of embarrassing, truthfully.
Or are you going to make yourself look a little better? Versus are you going to Google that really embarrassing thing? Because you know, you have the data anonymity, you know, you, you have that anonymous nature of things. Or if you’re on Reddit, you have a username that you can sort of hide behind. So you can be a little bit more straightforward about what you’re actually seeking.
So I think that there’s some honesty there that’s a benefit. I also think it’s scale. So if you’re talking about surveys or interviews, how many people are you talking to? And are they the right people? Versus I can get data from everyone everywhere. And what’s the volume? And what does that mean in terms of your ability to analyze something meaningful?
I think that’s powerful. That is interesting. Well, Tori, I have to say. say, first off, it has been a lot of fun having you on this show today and getting to pick your brain a little bit from what you’re seeing on the day to days. But in the world of A. I, of course, S. E. O. Consumer intelligence. I mean, a lot of things we touched on today.
That being said, I’m sure some of the people watching you’re gonna want to follow up, learn more, connect with your team. How do people connect and follow your journey over at gray dot co. So we have a podcast you can tune into opinionated SEO opinions. It’s available all the normal places, YouTube iTunes, and you can also Google gray.
co or Tory gray, and you can find us at the great company. Fantastic. We love supporting podcasters. What kind of content can they expect on the podcast? Ooh, juicy, fiery opinions and insights, lots of nuance, lots of layers, lots of digging into the, it depends and answering why it depends and what depends on So that you can make it better.
And, and the format just cause I really want people to go check this out. Is it, do you interview people? Is it, are there opinion pieces? Is it a combination? Like what’s the format? Usually we’re interviewing. So it’s me and Sam Torres, my business partner and Begum, our moderator. And we’re often talking to guests about specific subjects and digging into the meat.
Occasionally it’s just the two or three of us chatting about something that we care about. As well, but it’s a lot like this and it is a web series. So you can get it on YouTube and just, you know, watch us work through specifically the nuance of each individual problem and the way that we think about an approach answering and resolving those issues.
What’s your faith? One of your favorite things about being a podcaster. Oh, frankly, it leans into my strengths. I like to talk. I can talk. You know, it’s, it’s show up and chat about things that I’m already passionate about that. I really, really love. And I like that. There’s I like making waves in places filled with men.
So you know, I want to make room for more women and have more women out here doing this and, and doing it in a way that’s meaningful for us and aligns with, you know, the things that we benefit from and the things that we care about. And I want to see a rise in that. So I’m being the change that I want to see right there.
Amazing. The name of the podcast one more time. Again, I really want my audience to go check this out. Opinionated SEO opinions. Fantastic. And so everybody check that out. And if you’re a new visitor or a new listener to mission matters, Hey, don’t forget, you’re already here. Hit that subscribe button. That’s your personal invitation right to you.
And if you are a long term listener and you haven’t left a review yet, Hey, get on that one to leave a review. We sure do appreciate it. Cause we have many more mission based. Business owners, entrepreneurs, executives, experts, you name it. We have them come in on the show. We don’t want you to miss a thing.
Tori, thank you so much. And I’m definitely going to check out your podcast. So thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It’s been awesome
