Marketing Automation 2.0: Why Agentic AI is a Game-Changer for Small Business

Are you tired of wearing all the marketing hats in your small business? Juggling social media, email campaigns, content creation, and analytics while trying to actually run your business? What if I told you there's a new wave of AI that doesn't just help with tasks - it actually takes control and drives results on its own?

The challenge for small businesses has always been competing with larger companies that have entire marketing departments. Traditional marketing automation helped, but it still required significant human oversight and technical expertise. Small business owners were left either spreading themselves too thin or watching opportunities pass them by.

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But today's guest is here to show us how agentic AI is completely rewriting these rules. Alex Carlson, host of The AI Marketing Navigator podcast and owner of Digital Pop, is at the forefront of this revolution. He's helping small and medium-sized businesses harness the power of autonomous AI to create what he calls an "AI Digital Marketing Department" - giving them enterprise-level marketing capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

Alex is not just talking about these technologies - he's implementing them daily for his clients and sharing his insights through his podcast. His work with tools like Clay.com and Lindy.ai is showing small businesses how they can leverage agentic AI to compete with larger competitors, and his practical approach to AI implementation has helped countless businesses transform their marketing operations.

The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Alex Carlson about:

✨ Autonomous Marketing Evolution - Agentic AI represents the next generation of marketing automation, capable of independent decision-making and execution.

✨ Cost-Effective Scaling - Small businesses can now access enterprise-level marketing capabilities without the traditional overhead of a full marketing department.

✨ Strategic Implementation Path - Success with agentic AI requires a thoughtful approach to tool selection and integration, starting with core marketing functions.

Learn more about Alex Carlson

Connect with Alex Carlson on LinkedIn

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Marketing Automation 2.0: Why Agentic AI is a Game-Changer for Small Business

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Marketing Automation 2.0 - Why Agentic AI is a Game-Changer for Small Business with Alex Carlson

[00:00:00] Alex Carlson: We're close to a point where as a small business you can have 10 or more AI employees for the same cost. It would cost you to have an entry level intern or something like that, doing the same research. You have a handful of PhD level reasoners that they don't stop working. They don't really get tired at this point.

So that utility is the true game changer for small businesses. It's what makes me so excited to be a small business owner myself and to be building a business in this time, and I think it's just an incredible opportunity for sure. I am a hundred percent the same way I, everyone listening probably knows I work full-time for Agorapulse, but this project and my AI consulting and teaching and that sort of stuff, that's a side hustle.

I'm a solopreneur from that perspective, and I wouldn't be where I'm at today if I didn't have this. Team of AI assistants helping me with very specific tasks, and I'm really just talking about generative AI at that point. Not even AI agents, but I've got specific AI chats and custom GPTs and that sort of stuff set up to do very specific things.

[00:00:59] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat, the AI kind. Unlocking power in business, you'll find. Cut through the hype, explore the tech. Every week, new ideas to check.

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Greetings program. Welcome back to AI Marketing unpacked, where I selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, search advertising in all kinds of other areas, additional marketing. I. Oh, and you get to learn, too.

Subscribe to be shown to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come on ahead.

Now, are you tired of wearing all the marketing hats in your small business, juggling social media, email campaigns, content creation, analytics, while trying to actually run your business? What if I told you there's a new wave of AI that it doesn't just help with tests. It actually takes control and drives results on its own. The challenge for small businesses has always been competing with larger companies that have entire marketing departments, traditional marketing, automation, health, but it still requires significant human oversight and technical expertise.

Small business owners were left either spreading themselves too thin or watching opportunities pass them by. But today's guest, it's here to show us how agentic AI is completely rewriting these rules. Alex Carlson, host of the AI Marketing Navigator podcast and owner of Digital Pop is at the forefront of this revolution.

He's helping small and medium sized businesses harness the power of autonomous AI to create he calls an AI digital marketing department, giving them enterprise level marketing capabilities at a fraction of the cost. Hey Alex, welcome to the show.

[00:03:38] Alex Carlson: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Super happy to be here.

[00:03:40] Mike Allton: My pleasure. If you could start with, I think, just some of the basics. We've talked about AI agents, but for those who haven't been caught up yet, what exactly is agentic AI and how does it differ from some of the AI marketing tools that maybe already familiar with.

[00:03:57] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. So when you think about ag agentic AI or an ag agentic AI system, it can basically be defined by its ability to act autonomously and independently, and most importantly, with little to no super vision from a human or intervention from a human. It's gonna be able to plan and execute on multiple sequences of multiple actions and tasks and disparate tools and systems on its own independently without any sort of human input.

Now that defers from our current AI tools in a lot of ways, and our current software tools in general, in a lot of ways, the primary one being, the current tools we, we utilize, rely on constant human input and constant human intervention and supervision and. Things like that. So again, that's gonna be the most basic way that a traditional tool is gonna break away from an agentic AI tool and age agentic system is the human requirements or the human supervision requirements.

[00:04:53] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense. It is very much, people are used to Chat GPT. They put in an input, they get an output. Chat GPT just sits there waiting for you to say something else. In return, you can walk away and never finish the conversation and it's not gonna do anything else. If you, could you walk us through an example, because that's one of the things that we try to do here on this show is share with folks some specific examples of how AI is used in this case, how agen AI in marketing has helped, you maybe transform a specific marketing task in your business.

[00:05:25] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. I'd be happy to. I think I'll share. The story that I tell a lot of people, it's the aha moment. The moment when Agentic AI really clicked for me, and it was when I was using a tool called Clay.com. It's a sales enablement and lead enrichment tool. You can think of it basically as a super smart spreadsheet that has all these capabilities and features that allow you to enrich lead data from.

The internet, the primary feature and capability that is age agentic is what they call their clat cleverly. And it's basically a web scraper that's empowered by these large language models these ChatGPT and Claude Sonnet and those things. And you can direct it very with very high level of detail as to what type of research you wanted to do on these individual prospects.

You can literally ask the Clay or tell the Clay, Hey, please go to Google for me. Search the following keywords along with this person's name, so you can say, please search for this person's name, prospect's name. Search for it with notable achievements or awards or recent news, you can scrape their LinkedIn or their social media profiles for recent posts, and for each individual prospect you're gonna get in incredibly personalized information and research that would've taken, it would've taken me, and this is when it clicked for me.

It's like, wow, this would've taken me, days, to be honest. We were talking about a list of thousands of prospects and the level of detailed research that I was able to do was just incredible. And again, so this is just an early, this is an early version of ag agentic ai too.

The next level of this is I, like you said, I walk away from my computer, I tell my computer, hey. Open up Clay.com. Let's perform our even more vague, I could say. Let's perform our sales enablement and outreach for the day, and it'll know to go open Clay.com. It'll know exactly the type of research that I want to do, and it'll tell the Clayt to do the research.

It's gonna export it, it's gonna open up my CRM and import the context into the CRM, and then it's gonna schedule all the appropriate email campaigns and outreach and d drip sequences. For that information. And I'll be like you said I'll have walked away from my computer and I will be doing something much more fun and much more important with my time.

So that, and that's exactly when I thought like, Hey, this is game changing for any business especially small businesses.

[00:07:32] Mike Allton: And I love this example because it talks to what we can do today and it also hints to what is coming tomorrow. And we don't talk a lot on this show about the latest tools and what just was released because that kind of stuff gets outdated quickly.

And in fact, we're recording this episode in November. You all, you're listening to it in 2025. So things have already progressed from the point where Alex and I are having this conversation. I know it. But what's super interesting to me is that here we are, fall 2024 when we're recording this, and both perplexity and open AI have been coming out announcing with or actually releasing the capability of their tools to control computers.

And that's what's opening the door for this kind of flexibility and capability across multiple apps. 'cause if you can imagine someone like yourself doing what you just said, talking to your computer, telling it, okay, let's do our sales enablement tasks for the day, or Hey, let's do our list cleanup tasks for the day, or whatever it is that you want the computer to be able to do for you.

Now these tools are going to be able to open whatever apps are necessary to complete that task and then go do it for you while you're taking meetings, taking prospects out to lunch, working on a hobby, whatever it is that you're gonna do with your time when you're not happy to do that kind of rote behavior.

And what's super interesting to me, I think, is that some of the stuff you've been talking about, we've had. For a while we've had CRM tools like Nimble that could scrape the web and bring in data and information about contacts that you had in your nimble CRM, but it was always limited to the specific fields that it knew to go and get like the LinkedIn profile or the Facebook page profile or somebody's email address, and you couldn't interact with that data like you can with a conversational, ai, I use another tool called Dux Soup to help me run campaigns with LinkedIn, but it's still very limited and directed. So I think you're right. clay.com is really super interesting. Another tool that I've heard you mention is Lindy, that ai, how do you see these tools really leveling up or being even game changers for small businesses in particular?

[00:09:46] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. Just the sheer utility. In the case where we just talked about myself as a solo operator, I was essentially able to, hire, quote unquote a an extremely capable, to be honest, pH nearly PhD level reasoning. That's the kind of the level of reasoning we're talking about was some of these models today, research assistant that was able to, again, in, in the time that would've taken me hours or days to be honest, or in the cost, it would've cost me to pay an employee, a human employee to do this work.

It was done in, in, in a fraction of the time, minutes in a fraction of the cost. And that savings, that, whether it's in time or capital, is the game changer for small businesses. We're close to a point where now we have. We have multiple agents, we have teams of agents each with its own set of expertise and set of responsibilities, and in core domain, one of them being an operator or a coordinator or an orchestrator.

These are all words that some of these systems from some of these companies are using to describe their early age agentic technology. And you're looking at a point, we're close to a point where as a small business, you can have 10 or more AI employees for the same cost. It would have.

You, it would cost you to have a, an entry level intern or something like that, doing the same research you have. You have a handful of PhD level reasoners that, they don't stop working. They don't really get tired at this point. So, it's that I. That utility is the true game changer for small businesses.

And what's what It's what makes me so excited to be a small business owner myself and to be building a business in this time. And I think it's just an incredible opportunity for sure.

[00:11:18] Mike Allton: I. I, I'm a hundred percent the same way. I, everyone listening probably knows I work full-time for Agorapulse, but this project and my AI consulting and teaching and that sort of stuff, that's a side hustle.

I'm a solopreneur from that perspective, and I wouldn't be half the, where I'm at today if I didn't have this. Team of AI assistants helping me with very specific tasks, and I'm really just talking about, generative AI at that point. Not even AI agents, but I've got specific AI chats and custom GPTs and that sort of stuff set up to do very specific things.

That's what I teach students. Whenever I guest lecture at universities like Emory and Otterbein and so on, I'm teaching them how to go into the market prepared to already have their own team of. AI assistance alongside them because that's what they're gonna be competing with other marketing potential hires as right they're gonna bring their hire.

So I love this concept of teams. We're gonna come back to that in a minute. But first I'd like to talk. For a moment to some of the small business owners and marketers who are listening today who might have concerns or even reservations about implementing Ag agentic ai and how do you address them?

[00:12:29] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. I. First of all, how much time do you have? Because there are several concerns and they're all valid, they're all legitimate. They all are worthy of consideration and, thought, thought and, you need to be deliberate for all of these reasons. When you do implement AI and.

This doesn't go just for agentic AI either. This goes for all AI implementation and rollouts in an enterprise or just even a small business sense. Of course, when you add agentic AI and auto and more autonomy into the equation, it gets even riskier. So, it's the double-edged sword that you face when you have such a capable autonomous agent.

You also have an agent capable of doing some damage as well. But let's just do like a quick rundown of the. The main obstacles, the main reservations or resistance that a business that any business would feel when faced with adopting ai. One is gonna be the cost. How much is it gonna cost to implement this technology?

Is it gonna be worth it? Is it gonna be, is there gonna be a positive ROI for doing this? The other is often the technical complexity. So oftentimes small business owners are wearing multiple hats as you at The Social Media Hat know. And they, tech hat is often not one of those hats.

Tech, tech, entrepreneur. Yeah. Early tech adopter tech savvy can often not be one of those hats. So the technical aspect of the, of implementing AI is often very intimidating too. One of the biggest ones though, especially when you talk about enterprise businesses, and it should therefore be a concern of small businesses as well is the data privacy and the data security.

And that should be, that should not be surprising to hear from any digital marketers listening to this show. It's been the topic of conversation in digital marketing for the last five years as well. It should be. So that is a huge one a huge concern. One of the biggest ones that can be a little surprising though is employee resistance.

I think there's still some. Su, surprising to us, maybe Mike, because we're, I think we're living in a bit of a bubble as digital marketers when it comes to ai. I think there's more an negative sentiment, especially in the workplace than we might realize when it comes to ai, especially when people are afraid of displacement and things like that.

And they're not necessarily the early adopters like we are. So oftentimes employee resistance can be an obstacle you face too. Otherwise it's just gonna be things like quality control, reliability. Customer perception is a really good one. So, how are your customers gonna feel about you implementing AI in your processes?

It needs to be done in a very transparent way. And transparency is something I talk about on my show a lot because of that reason. I. So I think those are probably the most common reasons. We can get into tackling, what I would tell a business that's concerned about those. If you want, I can break down a few of the more important ones maybe.

But those are definitely the core reservations I would say that I had when I started to implement these tools in my business. And I know other business owners do as well.

[00:15:10] Mike Allton: No, that, that makes a lot of sense, particularly your point about employee reservations. I do find that shocking.

We did a whole episode with Corbett Drummey from Lightricks who had partnered with the American Marketing Association to do a survey of how companies were using ai, and they were particularly interested in the disparity between executives and employees, and we shared in that episode that 77% of executives were using AI compared to just 53%

like staff and regular employees. So that study showed that AI adoption at the executive level is light years ahead of the employee level for a lot of the reasons that we're talking about today. But we're talking folks with Alex Carlson about how markers and businesses can leverage a agent Ai.

And I've got several more questions you aren't gonna wanna miss, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.

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So, Alex, I mentioned a moment ago about how I'm teaching marketing students who are about to enter the workforce, that they can create this entire team of AI assistance. And I think we come up with like, I don't know, 12, 14, maybe 15 different AI team members or roles that they could have AI play in their digital marketing team.

And I know this is something that you talk about a lot, this AI digital marketing department. What are some of the key components in your opinion, and how do the different agentic tools, the agentic AI tools work together the way that you're approaching it?

[00:17:31] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. Sure. It's, that's one of the things, it's fluid and it depends, the landscape is early days right now.

And so it's shifting constantly depending on what tools and technologies are available. So I like to break it into three different layers to make it a little easier to digest. The first layer is gonna be that the foundation, the large language models the conversational Chat GBT and conversational ai. AI like Claude and Gemini, and Chat GBT and that's gonna be the core. Especially when you get into the re the human level reasoning and the chain of thought reasoning that the latest versions of these models are doing, that's gonna be the foundation of all of these agentic AI tools.

And then on, you can think of that as the first layer. And then second layer is the platforms and softwares that allow for some agentic capabilities. Things like Lindy.ai, which we talked about or Clay.com with their clat agent do AI is another great one that, that I highly recommend.

From Dharmesh Shah the founder of HubSpot. And that's his Yeah, dive into agentic ai. And really impressive. It's, as far as the user interface goes, it's I think it's a little easier digest than lindy.ai as well, so it's definitely a good starting point, but.

And then you have cases of like Zapier, which now has some pretty incredible integrations with AI as well. When, so when you talk about the ability to automate and you mentioned what, that you're already able to automate a lot of your workflows with what we have currently. So with those first two layers alone, just the large language models and the, some of the tools that are built to use to build agentic workflows. You can offload a really extraordinary amount of your day-to-day tasks and stuff like that. And then beyond that, and this is gonna get easier and more accessible that than what I talk about is the third layer. What I think about is the third layer, which is a little bit of custom development that you can do with these AI coding tools like Cursor or Rept.

If you need, if you have a workflow or a use case that may be agent.ai or lindy.ai or Clay or a com combination of those along with Zapier. If you just can't quite get there, if there's something that's still just. It is a little too human intervention heavy for those tools. Then I would recommend trying to do something custom with either a developer or with yourself.

Using these tools, you can very quickly whip up an interface to that, that taps into these APIs and do something like, upload a video and generate, generate a few thumbnails for me, a few titles, whatever that extra step that you're not quite able to do with these other tools, you can get there with code and with custom code. Now, and I think this kind of goes back to the technical complexity of rolling out. These AI departments, and I think when you start talking about custom code and stuff like that it starts to intimidate people. But I would want to emphasize first, there's so much you can do in those first two layers.

If you're just getting started, you'll be shocked and it'll definitely already have positive ROI before you get into anything custom code. And second, I would advise, if you do feel like you're a little out of depth or, and not in your comfort zone, look for a partner to work with. This is a, an area that that I, myself and my agency, am diving into full force right now as far as being able to save businesses, time and money by implementing these agentic tools and these three layers of agentic AI as it applies to their business.

So, if there's anybody listening who's interested in piloting an a, a, an AI digital marketing department, I'm offering that right now at no cost or no retainer paid to me whatsoever. It's just the cost of the deployment. I truly believe in this and the impact that this can have on businesses, and I wanna bring it to as many businesses as possible.

So, I would highly recommend if you feel like you're outta your comfort zone, whether it's Digital Pop or someone else look for a partner. cause there are definitely people who can help you find the true value for your business in this technology. Absolutely.

[00:21:08] Mike Allton: And that's hugely important, particularly for small business owners or maybe even the marketing professionals that are in the audience listening who have very specific things that they're trying to accomplish each and every week.

Agency owners, for instance, they don't have a lot of time to devote to learning how to code, to learning the different tools but to help them visualize some of the. Some more of the potential here. Could you share just a couple more examples of what somebody could do with lydia.ai or even a agents.ai?

Maybe things that you've done for yourself or for some of the other clients that you've worked with?

[00:21:41] Alex Carlson: Sure. I'll be happy to talk about another example. Take Lindy AI for example. They have some amazing personal assistant. I. Workflows that are built into the system and that can do things like monitor your email inbox and label priorities of emails and do generated responses for you that can of course be approved by you before they take too much control and send out some ridiculous email that you don't want them to talk about.

But I think the personal assistant one was another big one for me, that I just see a lot of value and much like, a lot like that clay.com example. It's something that I can present to someone that shows immediate return an immediate like, oh, I can see how that would free up two hours of my day, all of a sudden.

So with with lindy.ai, that personal assistant use case is a super common one, and that I would highly recommend someone to check out again if they're just getting started or looking for something to show immediate return on investment of time or money. For sure.

[00:22:38] Mike Allton: That, that's a great example. It's the kind of thing that I've been personally looking into. Again, for the obvious reason, I'm a solopreneur with a side hustle on top of a full-time job. Boy could I use a personal assistant, but I don't have the budget to pay somebody too much. So that idea of somebody who can help me with my emails or help me with some of the repetitive marketing tasks that I'm doing. An AI agent seems perfectly suited for that. And I know a lot of these tools to your earlier point, they don't necessarily have a steep learning curve. If folks have been using Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini for a little while, they're familiar enough with ai.

If they've been listening to this show, you've got a base familiarity with Ai you can jump into these other tools and learn them. But if they were to work with you, what is the kind of runway look like? And I know that's gonna depend on the project, are we talking, a couple hours, a couple weeks, months?

What are they thinking about before they have a conversation with you?

[00:23:34] Alex Carlson: Sure, absolutely. And like you said, it is somewhat dependent on the business and the individual business cases. But with those two examples I mentioned we're ta as far as something being rolled out. With, in the early stages, we're talking days and weeks of seeing these agents from Lindy or agent.ai, being able to help with your personal inboxes as a personal assistant with I.

Sales enablement and outreach. And so these are things that can be rolled out very quickly. If you're doing this on your own, there is a little bit of a learning curve, I would say. Especially when you, as you go up in the layers of kind of that the type of agentic technology the learning curve gets a little bit steeper.

But I am, if you were to work with someone with like me or a partner who's familiar with these, the second layer of these tools that are built for ag agentic automations, there is so much that you can get done. Right outta the box that, that you're gonna see immediate return on investment in weeks, if not days.

[00:24:29] Mike Allton: And I love that point because folks who you're listening, if you were to work with someone like Alex or an AI consultant, what we're talking about are projects that can be accomplished a matter of weeks at a very reasonable budget, not six months and five figures like you're working with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

And often it's not about bringing on an assistant who can who can prioritize your emails. That could be the thing that you want to do, but. More often than not, you're going to be looking at your business with the help of a consultant and identifying where are the most pressing areas of your business, where you could use help, where an AI or an AI agent could be applied, because that's where you're gonna see the maximum ROI.

And I think that's a really important thing for people to think about and take a look at. But another question I had for you, Alex, was just what are some of the unexpected benefits or the surprises that you've discovered when you've been implementing Agentic AI for marketing?

[00:25:26] Alex Carlson: Yeah. The. Not necessarily unexpected, but surprising benefit of the time that you gain back to do the truly valuable work of, in my opinion, copywriting, optimizing my website pages, the landing pages the conversion rate optimization that actually turns into deals and leads and contacts, not the checking and getting my email inbox down to zero or researching link LinkedIn page after LinkedIn page for, personal information to do in my outreach. And so just the surprising value of the time that I got back is. Is one of the unexpected benefits that I think will be just hugely impactful to businesses.

And one of the reasons why I wanna bring Ag Agentic AI to small businesses in particular, is I know that how valuable that time is to a solo business owner or a small business owner. And it's just so, so huge and impactful.

[00:26:21] Mike Allton: One of the. Benefits I've often shared through this show because it's very meta, is that I now use AI to prepare for every single one of these episodes along with the four podcasts that I host at Agorapulse.

Each one of these, I used to spend two hours, I. Researching the guest and coming up with questions that were germane to their expertise and the topic they want to talk about. It just, it would just take me forever. And now that I've built some custom GPTs to help me through that process, they go out, they research the guest, they look at the LinkedIn profile To your earlier point, they'll do a bing search and help me craft.

A terrific run of show for each one of these podcasts customized for every show that's now 20 minutes instead of two hours, and that's just with generative ai. So imagine if I could take that to the next level and use Agen AI to look at the guests that I already have scheduled into next quarter. And go ahead and prepare all that documentation for me without me having to direct it each individual time.

'cause I've got all the information in the sheet. I just have a step-by-step custom GPT that asks me to literally copy and paste the data from the sheet into Chat GPT or into Claude and go step by step through that process. Agent AI is gonna be able to do all that for me and further streamline my task.

'cause that's not something I literally have to do. I know that's one of the things that people ask about agentic ai. Are they gonna replace me? Are they gonna replace My role? I don't need me to copy and paste. I just need to do the interview. I need to do the outreach to find guests like yourself and other people that I might talk to on these shows.

And then to actually conduct the interview. And if I don't have to do all that other stuff so much, the better that frees me up to do everything else that's on my lengthy to-do list. So. Absolutely. I'd love how, Alex, if you could take out your crystal ball and just think about looking ahead in the not so distant future.

I know in AI we can't look too far ahead, but what are some of the exciting developments that you see coming to AgTech ai and what gets you most excited then about small business marketing?

[00:28:25] Alex Carlson: Absolutely. This one is, this was, is easy because we have the benefit and the opportunity of living at the beginning of age agentic AI and the wave of age agentic AI that's coming our way.

You have all the tech leaders now in Ai, all, Open Ai, Anthropic, Google, Apple Meta. They're, they've all gotten into this next level of Ai, which is agents, and primarily the way that's manifesting is in. Computer use, which you've mentioned where the AI now has the ability to take action on our devices on.

On individual devices across multiple apps, multiple tools and things like that. And so you have computer use from Anthropic, that's Claude's version of this. You have Microsoft with Co-pilot Vision. That's their version of being able to see your screen and interact with your apps. You have you have Chat GPT Open AI just announced their Operator agent, so they're hopping on the agent train too now.

Apple is allowing developers to to allow Siri to access their apps and to be able to take action in their apps through Apple's API. So it's this next, it's this next level of Ai and we talked about how a portion of the population, and especially when it comes to the workforce, I think I wouldn't call themselves AI adopters yet they haven't really been wooed or they haven't really been impressed yet by ai. And I really believe that ag agentic AI and these agents is the next big mindblower and the next big catalyst for adoption. That's really gonna. Really gonna take, snap people out of it or snap people into it, I guess would be more appropriate as far as what this AI can really accomplish.

So it's those computer use technologies that are really just right around the corner. You already have developers who can access Anthropic's computer use and they're already testing it. So we're the pace of development is just so incredible. Which, I don't have to tell you but that computer agency is.

Is what I am so excited for on behalf of all small businesses especially.

[00:30:17] Mike Allton: What? What's fascinating to me is that over 50 years ago in the mid sixties, a couple guys named Arthur and Stanley had an idea for a story that they started working on, and Arthur C. Clark wrote the book and Stanley Kubrick, I developed the film at the same time, 2001. And in that story was a computer that did all the kinds of things that we're talking about are now finally coming to fruition. A computer that could autonomously monitor systems and give us real time alerts for things that were happening. And you could interact with the computer verbally.

You could play games with it. You could ask it to perform tasks for you. Obviously that story took a dark turn, but that said, that was the functionality that they were envisioning in the late sixties. And here we are now in the mid 2020s and we're finally being able to do that with our computers. So it's not as farfetched as people might imagine because it was part of our imagination and our society and our culture decades ago.

So my last question for you, Alex, I'd love if you could just share some advice for small business owners who want to start incorporating AG agentic AI into their marketing strategy today, what? What should they be doing? Where should they

[00:31:30] Alex Carlson: start? Sure you know this, one of my, one of my least favorite answers on a podcast is it depends, and I hear it so often, so, but this is another area where it's somewhat depends.

If you are someone who has zero experience, if you haven't even opened up chat, GPT or Claude or anything like that's your first step. Familiarize yourself with those large language models, the prompting tools, the generative ai that's gonna give you a sense of what is at the base of this age agentic wave that's coming our way.

They all can help you. And all of those companies now have a large amount of educational resources and documentation as far as prompt engineering goes. Claude itself actually just introduced a feature where it's gonna auto opt or give you the option to auto optimize your prompts and stuff like that.

But beyond that, just YouTube if. Self-education. If you have a little bit more budget and you can invest some capital in your education, there's a ton of good paid education out there too. So I really think the free education that you can find is a great place to start. If you have, if you've been accessing these large language models, if you're like, okay, if.

Alex that don't tell me just open Claude and type something in into Claude and you haven't touched on these automation tools. The next layer of these agentic tools like lindy.ai, agent.ai, clay.com, and there are literally new tools every day popping up that have these agentic capabilities to do certain things here or there.

And that's why we're in this place where you have to plug and play depending on the business and stuff like that. So if that's you, then definitely. Check out, go log into agent.ai. Go check out lindy.ai. They have trial versions. They have really affordable, free freemium, somewhat versions of their software that you can tinker around with.

If that, if you're already there then I would advise maybe trying to take it a step further. Think about that one workflow that agent AI still can't do for you, that Lindy AI still can't do for you. And just ask. Ask Rept, ask Bolt new these co-developer tools. Say, Hey, please build me an app that does this with.

The agent capabilities of this model, and you will be pretty shocked at how close you get there. So depending on where you're at in that journey, there's something you can do Definitely today. Hop on your computer. Either open up the large language model, open up agent.ai. If you haven't heard about that one, lindy.ai.

If you've heard of agent.ai or challenge yourself a little bit and try and make something custom that, that. That gives you a, an agentic tool in your toolbox that is specifically and uniquely helpful to you.

[00:33:57] Mike Allton: That actually really is a good answer because like I said before on this show, AI isn't a tool like Canva where, going into it, what it's generally for and what it can and can't do.

AI is a technology and it's an underlayer to everything else that we're doing, and a agent AI is. Even more complex and powerful and interesting. So you're right, there's a lot of places you can start. Folks. You can obviously start with this podcast. Most of you know I've got an AI marketing primer.

It's linked in the show notes. It's a free ebook that helps you understand, what is the difference between Claude and Chat g, PT, and Gemini. And that's sort of stuff, if that's where you're at. Your journey. A step above that, obviously as you said, Alex is training, and I haven't talked about it a lot on this show, but folks you should know, I do a two day in-person bootcamp, different cities around the world, about every quarter or so. So again, I'll put a link in the show notes. You can check where I'm coming next. I do that with my friend and partner, Chris Carr, who runs a marketing agency out of Philadelphia. These are fantastic opportunities if you're a small business owner or marketing professional, just to immerse yourself for a couple days.

In AI and learning along with a, just a small group of other peers, what you can and can't do. Have some workshop sections and so on. But then the best part I think, is if you've got something very specific that you wanna accomplish with your organization, bring on someone like Alex who can actually help you come alongside, do the programming, do the hard lifting when it comes to, what needs to be done and you can just make sure that your business is reaping the rewards of having something like that in place in your business. That kind of efficiency. Alex, you've been terrific. This has been such a powerful interview. For folks who do wanna know more about you, maybe they wanna reach out and get some of your assistance, where should they go?

[00:35:40] Alex Carlson: Sure. LinkedIn is where I'm at primarily most of the time I'm on I'm there every day. So if you wanna just shoot me a message, you have any questions or just wanna explore this further, you can shoot me a message there at any time. My website, the digital pop.com the AI Marketing Navigator is my daily podcast where we touch on tools, tips, tricks, news, everything, ai.

So I think those three places if you can't find me there then something has gone horribly wrong. But I, so I will be there and and if you wanna get in touch with me, please do. I very much. I'm very much looking forward to the possibilities of AI and digital marketing and agentic a AI in particular.

And yeah, happy to be here, Mike. It was an absolute pleasure, so thank you for having me. Of course.

[00:36:20] Mike Allton: Awesome. Thank you, Alex. That's all the time we got for today, friends, but don't forget, I'll have all of Alex's links in the show notes, including that podcast, which is how Alex and I connected is terrific.

So check that out, and I will see you in our next episode. Welcome to the grid.

That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat Podcast. I hope you've gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with Ai. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit the ai hat.com for more resources and to connect with me.

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