Episode 102 - Pat Barry

Erik Martinez:Hello and welcome to this episode of The Digital Velocity Podcast. Today, I have Pat Berry on the show again. Pat,

Pat Barry: Thanks for having me, man. I'm always excited to be here.

Erik Martinez: Oh, I'm glad you're back. pat and I are gonna be doing this a lot more frequently, but today we're going to be talking about tools.

Pat Barry: Tools.

Erik Martinez: We're gonna be talking about why you don't have an AI strategy, you have a shopping problem.

Pat Barry: Exactly.

Erik Martinez: The whole idea of what we're trying to do today, is really, talk about some issues that are coming up inside [00:01:00] of marketing teams and businesses in general when it comes to AI tools and adoption.Pat, let's get started, let's dive in.

Pat Barry: All right, I'll make it easy. Go buy all the tools. Every single one, max out the credit card. I'm joking around. I don't think like that.

Erik Martinez: Seriously, man. It was funny 'cause when I was at Macon, the tool sessions were packed and the strategy sessions were empty. They weren't totally empty, but you get my point.

Erik Martinez: But we are inundated with tools that have AI and I think it's hard to separate.

Erik Martinez: So I guess the question for you. Is, should we have a list of centralized tools or have this kind of chaotic, let everybody experiment with anything they want scenario. Where do you stand?

Pat Barry: It is tough right now because there's so many tools out there There's so many startups. What will [00:02:00] survive in the future? typically, you gotta draw a balance. Most clients that come to me start with what tools do we need to buy?

Pat Barry: My reaction is, let's see what you already have, because you might be able to accomplish a lot with what you've already got. Most of them already have people trying stuff on their own. So it's a blend of what are your business goals?

Pat Barry: Start there and then figure out what we have internally. You can't necessarily go, Mildred's built this over here and, Horace is looking at this tool over here. You know, we don't wanna tell 'em. No.

Pat Barry: But at the same time you can't go buy everything. You have to have a budget in mind of what you can afford. Let's see what we got and then figure out are the other tools that people are using, do they serve a specific purpose?

Pat Barry: Do we have tools already that could do the same thing? And we just didn't know about it and they were out experimenting. You don't wanna tell people like, Nope, this is it. But if you already have people out there experimenting, that could be hey, what about this?

Pat Barry: As time goes by, you're just gonna have to nail down an [00:03:00] actual tool stack. And I think a lot of it'll be through your office suite. Either, the most, two most popular Google and Microsoft.

Erik Martinez: I've seen a lot of data and the podcasts that I listen to, enterprise companies. Mandating a tool set. They'll provide their office suite, whether that's Microsoft or Google. Some chat GPT, some of those basics and then it's somewhat depends from there.

Erik Martinez: Above and beyond that, within the platforms that most companies have, they have, AI tools embedded within the platforms they're already using. I think that's your point, right? Evaluate, start looking at some of those things and saying, do those capabilities exist?

Erik Martinez: I know for us, I've got three video recording tools. I don't need three video recording tools. We're not big enough to have three video recording tools.

Erik Martinez: We have two meeting recording tools.Zoom, as an [00:04:00] example, a primary tool we use has evolved its capabilities over the last year or so, and now has some of the capabilities that, we were buying through, a recording tool called Grain.

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Tools are also evolving, so I think there's a balance there. For us, we were starting to look at this and going, oh man, for a small business, all of a sudden I'm spending an extra thousand dollars a month on tools that are duplicating things and we're not using them as efficiently as we could.

Pat Barry: Exactly. I think as things settle down in the next couple years in terms of just tool stacks and what could do what, I still think too, you'll evolve into building your own tools specific to the company, that you use AI to help maintain.

Pat Barry: But your classic situation too of like, Hey, we're spending all this money on these tools. What's the ROI on the tool? Things like video recording tools. used across the entire company. But then you've got, specialized tools like, you know, like a mid [00:05:00] journey.

Pat Barry: Data scientist at heart, I don't need to create fancy imagery for design all the time. I'm probably good using, a quick stock, photo image to be created for a deck or something that I'm presenting. I could do that in Gemini or whatever the base system is.

Pat Barry: But, you're an agency, for example, you've got a creative division. Things like Midjourney, Hicks field, VO, all those types of things. I know VO ISS built into Gemini, but still it's not, you gotta pay for that too. So it's kind of looking at tools for the company versus tools for individual teams as well.

Pat Barry: For a while I used a data science platform called julius.ai, which was Jupiter notebooks with AI baked into it, But who out of a data science team is gonna use something like that? So what's necessary for who to, is another kind of question to ask.

Pat Barry: This tool sprawl can get outta hand really quick. Differentiating between the tools that we all need to use. The email writing systems, the notetakers, the recording systems, Agency life. I would've loved AI that could have filled out my time sheets for me.

Erik Martinez: That is [00:06:00] number one question I hear.

Pat Barry: Do I have to do this? Can I get a guide just to fill in the numbers and write the notes of what I did? That would be wonderful. I think you need to distinguish between, those tools that everybody in the company has to use. Like your, your office productivity type stuff. Versus specialized like, okay, team A is gonna use this only, you know, we only need three, four licenses. This is not a company-wide tool versus, team B needs this other specialized AI agent.

Erik Martinez: Are you suggesting thatorganizations should push that level of decision making down to their teams? Or is that a budgeting issue?

Pat Barry: I think it's both. It depends on the company. I think of agency first because, that's most of my work history. You've got multiple disciplines of different types of people that do different things there. So I think it's a blend.

Pat Barry: What are your needs right now? I remember when I was in agencies, sometimes my team was super busy and other teams weren't, and vice versa. And so I think too, like, What's the [00:07:00] value you'll get out of this tool over time?

Pat Barry: Again, you can measure out and predict the ROI based on how much time it will save you, versus what you don't need and what's not in the budget. I think at some point, again, it's the size of the company too. If you're working for some mega conglomerate, you know, the head of your division, let's say he's got 300 people under him.

Pat Barry: He's gonna have to shove that decision down tohis managers, his directors, you know, whoever it is. He's up here and he is probably thinking, come tell me what you need and I'll tell you who fit the budget. But smaller agencies, smaller companies, like whatever it is, it's probably like sit down with all 50 people.

Pat Barry: Figure out who needs to use these tools? What tools are all of us gonna use together? It would just depend on the actual company size. Now, small company might also operate that way. You might have, one guy at the top who's the CEO, the CFO, and he does three different things, but he needs to hear from his, subordinates or people that report to him that are in the weeds every day.

Pat Barry: I would look at it as pre AI, pre all of this, we still had to buy [00:08:00] tools. In the Data science space, there was always something new coming out. Not to this level that we're seeing now with so much all the time.

Pat Barry: But always something. There's always some vendor calling you like, oh, it does this differently than anything else. Okay. Well, are you an established company? Does it work? Do you have any customer reviews and then what does it cost?

Pat Barry: Do I get a discount? 'cause I'm an early adopter? Do you need to use me as a test case? Is it one of those types of things? Reflecting on how you would buy tools in the past, if you look at AI like that, you'll find the outcomes are somewhat similar.

Pat Barry: But the AI changing so quickly. You gotta do something. But it's like, what? I can't wait. But if I buy something now, it might change in the future.

Pat Barry: Yeah, but I think,the big difference between tools now and even tools three years ago, is that, most teams could do 85% of what they want to do with chat GPT or Gemini or Claude without having to buy [00:09:00] anything extra. So, what's the rationale for buying Jasper or writer for writing? What's the rationale for getting midjourney versus using nano banana that you already got, some access to in a license to. What's the benefit? What was it somebody was just trying to sell me the other day?

Pat Barry: It was,this LinkedIn message from somebody who was trying to sell me. Like, here's your AI based lead generation magic funnel tool. I don't even remember what the name was, but

Pat Barry: You don't have to 'cause you know what, I think they try to sell me the same thing. We must be on the same list, man, because I get a lot of those,

Erik Martinez: So, you know,I'm sitting here and going, okay,if it really, truly saved me time and prove value and, all that, yeah, maybe.

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: But the reality is, I can do a lot with the [00:10:00] existing tools with existing subscriptions to chat GPT or Gemini or Claude.

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And cover almost all my use cases. I know like for me, I need a CRM. That's not something that Chat GT Gemini or Claude Grid solve for me.

Pat Barry: No.

Erik Martinez: You have to start thinking in context. What specific thing is the tool trying to accomplish for you? The existing LLMs today are so powerful that you can do most of your use cases. What are the exceptions where it can't? And does that provide you enough additional value to make it worth buying?

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Right going back to the ROI of the tool is like, does it provide enough additional value, whether that's time savings, additional content output. What is the metric behind success in order to, make a decision?

Erik Martinez: Okay, let's move off of that one [00:11:00] let's talk a little bit about why experimentation without governance backfires?

Pat Barry: Okay.

Erik Martinez: I'll tee this up with saying I was sitting in a conference room talking with a group of people about AI usage in their organization

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: In the room was a mix of people who were just beginning to use AI in their own personal use cases. Other people in the room were using AI in their jobs and doing lots of experimentation, both in their day-to-day work and at home. I said something to them like, in order for your team to start benefiting from AI, you need to start, standardizing and focusing on the actual workflow that you're working on, then figuring out where AI can fit into those things.

Erik Martinez: That means a little less experimentation and a little more concentration on [00:12:00] specific things. One gentleman raised his hand and was, yeah, but experimentation's where we learn. Totally agree and we don't want to kill that, but experimentation for experimentation's sake and experimentation to accomplish a specific purpose are two different things.

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Where do you sit on that one, Pat? Because I don't wanna free reign everybody to just go do it. I've tried that and it doesn't work.

Pat Barry: No, it doesn't. I think if you're on your free time, you wanna go screw around with something who's gonna stop you? Go have fun. But I think you need to think in terms of. I've got this workflow or process or thing in my head, I, believe, could be made easier faster, more efficient, more accurate, with this tool. If you're, evaluating a tool for business purposes, you have to start with that. You can't just go, oh. This is cool. Is that how you're gonna ask your boss to buy you that tool? I just thought this was cool.

Erik Martinez: I do every single day.

Pat Barry: I mean, even for myself, [00:13:00] like running my own small business where it's just me, We chatted about this before the show started. I'm very heavily considering moving away from chat GPT and going with Claude because I just started experimenting with Claude a little bit and for me it's you know, I've downgraded chat GPT to this $20 a month account and I just notice, I just don't use it as much.

Pat Barry: I've got Gemini, I'm a Google Workspace shop. For me personally, it's 20 bucks a month, I can afford it, but why would I pay for that subscription if I'm not using it anymore? Now, for the audience that said, no, I won't cancel chat GPT I need to understand how it works so I can help other people that are using chat GPT. But at the same time, you get to that point of diminishing returns where it's like. Am I just buying the subscription to keep up so I can demonstrate for other folks it's a popular tool. I need to be conscious of that, but what's the value It's driving for my business?

Pat Barry: Now, I can figure out how much I used it estimate it and then figure out all right, I'm paying 20 bucks a month, and which of my clients am I actually using this for? And I could just do math and come up with, I'm [00:14:00] not making much money with this $20 month subscription.

Pat Barry: And I think if you start a lot of new fun toys it's easy to get distracted. You can't really think like that.

Pat Barry: You gotta think through like. I wanna try this tool for this purpose for my company, or for my business, to make my job easier. 'cause I'm working 50 hours a week now and I wanna get that down to 40. All right, can this do that? how does the company benefit? I think it's thinking through that task or series of tasks that you want AI to do. How does that help improve your business, your day? You know, if you work in that 50 hours, all of a sudden you're at 40, your boss isn't gonna be too happy about that. But what other value and benefits can you bring? Maybe you're thinking about other products and strategies you can bring to your clients.

Pat Barry: And so again, the AI helps speed this up, makes this more efficient. How do I fill my time? what's that next thing that I wanted to do? Tools are fun. This period that we're in too is not gonna last forever.

Pat Barry: At some point, it'll probably go on for a couple years, or new things are popping up, the technology's changing, but it'll start to somewhat settle. There'll always be new [00:15:00] things. There was before AI, just how it was. This kind of tool bonanza will start to die down a little bit over time.

Pat Barry: Especially as the giant large companies, they're gonna start buying some of these tools and acquiring them. That's how that stuff works. There'll be less choice with tools moving forward, but I think now is a critical time where figure out what it is and just make sure it ladders up to your business goals.

Erik Martinez: Let me ask you a question.

Pat Barry: Yeah,

Erik Martinez: What music streaming service do you listen to?

Pat Barry: Uh, Apple Music, but we havea family account with my wife, three kids. It ties in iTunes, we can listen to whatever we want to Apple tv, like the arcade thing. So I used to use Pandora before I got married and had kids.

Erik Martinez: I had the same thing, and we're on Spotify because we're on a Spotify family plan.

Pat Barry: Yeah,that's a, that's a great analogy.

Erik Martinez: You know, you got Spotify, Apple Music, you got Amazon Music, you still got Pandora out there. I mean, those are probably the four most known. There are others, but those are the four most known, [00:16:00] and we probably all pick one for a specific reason. Mobile phones are the same type of thing. Why do we pick the phone company that we're on? I switched to, T-Mobile a little over a year ago after 20 years on Verizon.

Pat Barry: It's funny, I just had this conversation with my wife this morning. I've been at AT&T for as long as I can remember. It's expensive. I know it is. Um, customer service is really good. But we're actually thinking about changing now just 'cause I know we can get the same thing cheaper. It's phones.

Erik Martinez: I think the reason I bring that up is some of this is convenience. I have Microsoft Co-pilot, I have Gemini, I have whatever. You and I are buying other extra subscriptions to some things because we know we wanna stay versed inthose tools. How does chat GPT perform against Gemini?

Erik Martinez: I can tell you I run enough experiments on both of them and say, depending on what I'm doing, I can see [00:17:00] differences and I will lean one way or another.

Pat Barry: Totally agree.

Erik Martinez: However, I can also tell you that. Whatever use cases I run on Gemini, I can absolutely run on chat GPT.

Pat Barry: Mm-hmm.

Erik Martinez: I don't think the output is quite as good.

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: In that situation. And I've run the reverse, and I've had the same experience. And I think at this point you can't go wrong with any of the tools. You need to pick a tool and go. Because it's not locking yourself into a CRM.

Pat Barry: No.

Erik Martinez: Once you lock yourself into a CRM, you build a whole bunch of business process and stuff around that.

Erik Martinez: The cool part about these generative tools is that they're not necessarily locked in to one way of doing work. Which is both a strength

Pat Barry: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: And a challenge at the exact same time. I feel like I'm just seeing so much tool sprawl and this [00:18:00] over-reliance on, oh, I need this specialty tool 'cause gonna solve the seven problems. The reality is it's like, taking a sledgehammer to drive a one inch nail into a panel of wood. You don't need that level of force.

Pat Barry: Exactly,

Pat Barry: I'd even think about how people classify tools. The CRM example is fantastic because, the business contract you have to sign with those types of tools is typically multi-year. It's not like, hey, I can go get subscription for $20 a month and if I don't like it, just cancel it. I think the level of tool that you're buying, a CRM is, a whole different beast that thing's gonna have AI in it. So it comes down to what's the use case for the tool? How does this help the business?

Pat Barry: I'll use Claude as an example. I've always had a Claude account but never paid, so always free. I was always using chat GPT, Gemini, and I was into perplexity for a while. That, even to me it was too many. I finally signed up for Claude, the $20 Pro one just two days ago. Set up Claude Cowork on my desktop, and it is quite good.[00:19:00]

Pat Barry: I might move away from chat GPT little bit, but even if it changes again, I can get out of it. I just go cancel. Thinking about that risk of the tool you're signing up for, Is this something I can get out of real quick? Is it truly just, you know, I just want a demo for two weeks, which most of these tools actually let you do for free.

Pat Barry: Make sure you have, how are you gonna experiment? Are you gonna record things? How are you measuring this tool's success? You just get done with stuff. It's like, yeah, I could go faster with this. How do you quantify that for somebody? it's fine if you're the agency owner or the business owner, it's your decision.

Pat Barry: But if you're that manager level that has to ladder that up to somebody to approve, just telling them. Yeah, I can do my job faster. Like. Okay, can you show me some numbers how do I prove that this is more efficient?

Pat Barry: It's one thing if it can output something like a dashboard, a report, whatever it is,faster, that's easy to see, but then it's like, okay, this improved my job, X, Y, Z and freed me up to do A, B, C now. And I thinktools will come and go. A lot of people probably think [00:20:00] like chat, GPT or OpenAI they'll never go out of business. I've begged to differ. I don't think they will anytime soon, but they could very well go out business. Google won't, Microsoft won't. But you're also getting a lot of small players out there that they're startups. I'm all for it. they might fail. There might be one update somewhere along the line that some big company makes that just makes them obsolete.

Pat Barry: So I think you gotta be wary too. How long this tool has been around and how long this company has been around.

Erik Martinez: I'm of the opinion that before you do any tool, you gotta work on the use case. Which means you also need to understand the workflows, where it's gonna be used.

Erik Martinez: I'll also say, I hate free trials. I love them and I hate them. I hate 'em because I never end up, and this is my fault and I realize it, but the two weeks is never enough time.

Erik Martinez: No, but you gotta cut it off somewhere. I know, but, I'm busy. I'm busy, and, being able to spend a few minutes playing with a tool is [00:21:00] not enough time to get over the learning curve to understand can this really help me?

Pat Barry: I time block. So I very intentionally will, you know, Friday afternoons and usually late at night are when I do that type of stuff. It's hard 'cause you're still getting emails that you wanna respond to, but to really properly vet, you gotta focus and figure out all right, I need to sit here for like an hour straight and just get in here, read the, understand the menu, if there is one. What does this thing do?

Pat Barry: It, it is not easy. And I've, again, I've fallen that trap too, where it's like, all right, log into the thing for an hour. I gotta handle this client problem. A week and a half has passed, And then, I got three more days. I better get in there, uh, and figure it out.

Pat Barry: So I think that's a challenge too, how do you do this with, your current day job? Any team I've ever managed in the data space is like, you're gonna have to do stuff outside of work because that's our industry. It changes a lot and you have to be an expert in a lot of different things.

Pat Barry: It's really just taking the time outside of work you're gonna have to do it. A lot of people don't like that. It's [00:22:00] not an everyday thing, set aside a night, chunk of hours on a weekend, like whatever it is, It's just how it is. I think if we were in an industry technology did not evolve as quickly as it does, and it's just gonna get faster and faster, it's not like we're gonna start going backwards.

Pat Barry: It's just the nature of the beast. And you just have to take that time. Again, if you could block off time your day to day do it. I've always been under the impression you gotta put in some time, outside of working hours. that's, dependent on your job. That's how I've always thought and how teams that have worked for me.

Pat Barry: Whether you like it or not, it's not a lot. Maybe an hour or two on a weekend. We're all busy. I got a family and little kids, but you just gotta carve out time. That's how it is.

Erik Martinez: I think that's true for any profession, right? if you wanna stay on top of what's going on. You have to invest additional time, whether that's reading experimenting with a tool all those things. It just never seems to be enough time.

Pat Barry:

Erik Martinez: All right, pat. Well, I think this was a good discussion. Didn't turn out to be [00:23:00] as much of a debate as it needed to be.

Pat Barry: Well, It's tough to debate something like this. Who's gonna, don't let your team experiment. But then how are you running your company? I think it's important that we got the discussion out there. Because there's a million different ways to evaluate tools. It's a weird time.

Pat Barry: If you think through that balance of like, let 'em experiment. If they come up with stuff that is valuable to the business, great. Adopt it if it's within your budget. Sometimes you gotta tell people that's a cool tool but did you know we already had something internally that could do the same thing?

Pat Barry: And it's gonna be the equivalent of. every year you gotta go through a tools audit, like the cost. Do you use it? Do you need it? But pre AI, that was just a normal thing. Do, we need this extra, SaaS tool that's helping us do this analysis faster? Because I think we can do the same thing with a Python script or automate something.

Pat Barry: And so again, that aspect of it isn't new, The AI stuff is so new. People are like, oh my God. what do we do? there's so much out there that it's almost impossible to deal with. But if you [00:24:00] keep your business goals in mind and think through how this tool help me with this task or series of tasks to make my life easier, more efficient, I think you'll be okay.

Erik Martinez: Well, Thanks for coming on again. We'll be doing doing this again in a couple weeks and, I'm probably gonna, debate you more.

Pat Barry: We need to come up with a topic where we butt heads.

Erik Martinez: All right, man. Well thank you so much for your time. That's it for this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Have a fantastic day.

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