Erin: I really know how to use AI. Well, like you can just saw as well. I think there’s also a common statement that people are afraid about losing their job with AI.

Vishal: How is generative AI changing the game for B2B marketers? Is it just a hype or is it truly a revolution? That is what we are here about to find out. Hello and welcome! I’m Vishal Mehta from Data Matrix Business Solutions. We’re a global leader in the B2B space, providing everything from high quality business intelligence and data solutions to power the demand generation services.

Today, we’re going to get to the heart of the AI story, the guest who is lifted from both sides. Erin Pearson is the vice president of marketing at EY Value Serve, a company at the forefront of AI powered analytics. But before that, she was responsible for customer success and strategic accounts at Treviglio. She understands the gap between what marketing promises and what customers actually experience. That unique journey makes her one of the most insightful leaders to talk to today about the subject we are supposed to talk.

Now, you can learn a lot about a person from their resume, but you can learn even more from their passport. Erin has hiked the Patagonia, summited the half dome, biked across Thailand, and even gambled in Antarctica, probably the only continent where she wasn’t thinking about marketing funnels. Erin, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. I have to first start with Antarctica. How did that happen? Tell us about that.

Erin: So, when I think about traveling, I want to go to places that are less touched by humans. And I try to prioritize places where there is no cell phone reception, because I find that you actually get much better human connection when people aren’t. It’s not even whether or not they choose to be on their phones. It’s people are just addicted to them.

So you really have to go to a place where it’s not only you can turn off your phone, but everybody around you has to kind of be forced to do that, and you get a much richer and fuller experience when you go there. So, I tend to travel to very remote places so you can connect with those around you and connect.

Vishal: Alright. And, uh. I read that, you know, your first sort of connection with AI was if you were trying to make a song in the style of Taylor Swift. Could you share with us your AI origin story and tell us your specific sort of aha moment where AI went from just experiment to, you know, you seeing a lot of potential in it?

Erin: Sure. So that was yeah, I talked about that on a podcast that I did with Justin Berger a while ago, back when ChatGPT had really just first started. So if everyone remembers back a couple of years ago when ChatGPT first came out, it was you were really just trying to test the waters. How good is it, actually? What can you do? Can you do some fun things?

So, one of the things I did ask it to do was create a song in the style of Taylor Swift. I also asked it to write poems by the likes of various literary heroes, just to see how does it actually compare to what is already been done and what has been very successful. And I think as everybody has seen, while it has its limitations, it is very good at what it does. And I think as we’ve grown and tried to find really what the value is in AI, naturally it’s evolved a lot.

We know that ChatGPT 5 has just come out last week, at least at the time of this recording. And, you know, when it first came out, it had the intelligence of approximately a middle schooler, then a high schooler, and now it’s really a PhD student is as it’s being described. So it’s gotten substantially faster. It’s gotten substantially smarter as well. But I think what it comes down to and what creates the value out of what you get, whether you’re using generative AI or authentic AI or AI workflows, is do you really understand the business context that you are trying to get? Do you have the right data that you are inputting to it, and do you fully understand the context of what you’re asking for? And are you able to clearly articulate that and then also question its answer on the other end as well?

And I think that’s really you still need that human component to get to those really strong answers. It’s great on its own, but you still need that human overview as well.

Vishal: I try to play with the ChatGPT 5, and I was, to be honest, I was blown away. I thought 4 was the leap from 3.5, and I was amazed with that. But the 5, especially the agent part of it, where I actually wanted to just see if actually if it works. And I did my first grocery shopping with ChatGPT 5. I simply instructed what I wanted from Costco via Instacart, and it actually went ahead and did that. I ordered five things. I didn’t even want them, but I just was so amazed that it didn’t do that. And there are so many sorts of potentials. I was thinking of so many possible ways that I can use it. It’s going to be so exciting.

I heard Sam Altman’s interview, on one of the YouTube channels, but in that he mentioned as to where this is sort of leading up to and he gave one example is where he said by ChatGPT 7 or 8, he believes that we could be curing a lot of diseases. I see so much potential with that. He mentioned that, you know, ChatGPT will simply say, hey, why don’t you go out and do these 12 experiments, come back to me with the results, and then maybe I’ll ask you to do 1 or 2 more. And here’s the final solution. Here’s the cure for certain. Now, if that sounds like science fiction, but if that really happens, that the potentials are just enormous.

Erin: Absolutely. Or if it just directs you. And where should you start looking? And it helps you compile research from, you know, thousands of different researchers around the globe to pull out some trends that maybe no one individually has thought of before. And you can go down a new direction and that can help you cure it. There’s just unlimited possibilities there.

Vishal: Really exciting. All right. So, from your vantage point at Evalueserve, what is the real state of AI adoption within the B2B marketing space right now? Are companies moving past that sort of experimental stage with the 3.5 and the 4, and are they sort of actually getting some value out of it? Is the landscape sort of moving into actually using AI?

Erin: Yeah, I think marketing in general is one of the first personas or roles within an organization that it was very easy to adopt. Generative AI at least to when it has first come out. Content writing in particular is one of those top use cases that it has been used in. And I think for marketers in particular, there has been a really strong adoption. I think you do see varying levels of success with somebody’s adoption, but that would be the same thing.

Certain people have different quality of writing when you work with them. Certain people understand how to integrate technologies better than others. So, I think you still see a similar difference in how people are actually using it. One of the things Vishal, you and I spoke about earlier is at least I see typically more senior people having a bit more success with it in general because I think one, they prompt it better with more experience. They understand a little bit more of the business outcomes. Sometimes they’re more privy to those conversations. So, they do understand what is the business trying to go to. They also just have more experience to back that up, whether or not they’ve been told what that outcome is, they can generally just predict what it would be from that background experience. So that’s at no fault necessarily to the more junior person that might be trying. It’s just, you know, you get experience over time.

I think the other piece is whereas generative AI is quite good at bringing things in from the or speeding up the writing process as an example. You know, doing a lot of the research for you. What that means is that the human that’s asking for all of this might not be reading it, researching it themselves, and really developing that knowledge for themselves, whereas somebody who’s been doing this for years before any of these AI capabilities came into play. Again, they have some more of that experience. So then when they’re reading the output on the other end, they have a stronger intuition of what is the quality of the piece that they just got back. How interesting is it? How new to the market is it?

I think that there is a quality difference. But more specific to your question, I think there’s huge adoption. You know, most jobs postings that I see at any company, it’s you have to know how to use AI. You have to be able to pull all of this into play. And so, everyone’s really trying to bring it in. So certainly, I think we are in an era of strong adoption at this point. And now it’s about how can you make it better?

Vishal: Yeah, I was just reading something on CNBC in the morning about some computer software coder now trying to look for a job at Chipotle, which I’m sure is an outlier, but this will have huge implications on career development.

So how do you approach the training and encouraging your entire team, especially the new hires? And, you know, maybe the veterans could sort of help out the new hires, but how do you sort of train the entire team? Because I believe if just the senior staff, the more experienced staff is the one who is sort of driving AI, it’s imperative that the whole team sort of works as a one unit.

Erin: Yeah, it’s a great question. Realistically, it’s one that I think is still being figured out. So, there’s the technical side of the training. How do you prompt something? Well, but then there’s more of like the business context side of the training. How do you understand what are those outputs? What are the actions that make it something good on the other side?

So certainly, on the technical side, something that my team does is we regularly share when we find new tools or new ideas and how we can implement them. We typically have 1 or 2 people who are a bit more technical, be some of the first adopters with it because they’re a bit more experimental. They can figure it out, and they really enjoy doing that.

We have other people that are more of this is the idea that I have, and they bring that to the table. And then once we find something that works really well, we then train the rest of the team on it. Or if somebody finds a new tool or a new technology that they want to bring into the team, we try to be very open about being experimental with it and, you know, trying a few different use cases with it before and then teaching the rest of the team and expanding it amongst them.
On the other side, how do you ensure this high quality output? At least for me, it comes down to a transparency around what are the goals, what are the outcomes, and what does good look like to people as well. So, it is I try not to give people the answers and, in many cases, not that I always know the answers, of course, but when you know you’re reading the output of something you want to.

You want to stress test it a lot and, you know, ask them a lot of questions and still make them do that critical reasoning on what they are creating so that they go back and rethink about it, whether it’s their prompting or they’re doing their own research. They have to figure out how to do it themselves, but it is about getting them to understand what is the purpose of us creating it. What is the why behind this piece? And then letting them create that outline and then the piece that is then created?

Vishal: Interesting. Yeah, I think AI is one of those skills that everyone should know, regardless of the industry, regardless of where you are in life. Everyone needs to know about AI and how to sort of use it, because I believe it’s something like when the internet started and a lot of people sort of did not know how to use it.

Well, first of all, a lot of reasons they didn’t have access to internet. And now we have a new sort of revolution with AI. It’s imperative that everyone get on board and believe anyone who does not sort of adapt to it is going to be left behind.

Erin: Yeah, I think that is a great way to describe it. AI can take anyone and kind of put them up a level. But if you really know how to use AI, well, like you can just soar as well. I think there’s also a common statement that people are afraid about losing their job with AI.

I haven’t seen that many people actively lose a job from AI in itself. But you have to learn how to bring AI into your job, so you still have to be just as innovative, just in this new way. So be experimental, be innovative, be creative with AI, and then you will soar. I have seen, of course, and I think a lot of people have less jobs being opened, in particular on more entry level jobs because and this is true for, you know, various lunch and learns and dinners and networking events that I’ve been to. It’s very common right now that if somebody is asking to open a new job on their team, no matter what role they’re in, marketing or otherwise, one of the first questions is, have you thought about how AI can do this instead of a person? Or how much of this job can AI do? And can you pull that into the mix before we hire a new person?

So, while I haven’t seen it, in my experience at least necessarily directly impact people’s roles, I have seen it impact how many jobs are actually getting newly created.
Vishal: Does AI scare you? Do you see any sort of red flags right now where you might be like, maybe we’re going a little too fast, too far.

Erin: There’s a point at which I would say it’d be naive of me to say that AI does not scare me. I think it can do a lot. It’s at the end of the day a lot smarter than I am. Certainly it has a knowledge bank of material in science and medicine, in law, and all these things that I don’t actually have that understanding in.

In that same way, it does excite me as well. I do quite like that. I do really enjoy interacting with it. I think at the end of the day, at least right now, what would scare me the most is because people are becoming so reliant on it. I would fear that people are going to lose critical thinking skills.

It’s too easy to go in and say, write this email for me. Write this paper for me. Do write this code for me. It’s very easy to go in and say that and describe the outcome. When we get overly reliant, we stop checking the work. Then on the other end, somebody says, you know, research people who have only written these pieces, and then it’s just AI interacting with AI, right? Are we just writing ourselves out of the picture? Because for everything that I create with AI, somebody else is using AI to interpret it off of.

And then of course, the other issue with AI is that it is based in historic information. So, we do always need to be creating more new research. And that’s actually why I think you will continue to have a competitive advantage if you do create your own research. And if you do first party research on everything, you will have insights that people who only rely on, you know, gen AI research or synthetic research they will lack.

So certainly, there’s a speed and time and cost component to using that, getting the initial trends. But if you really want to be unique, you have to do your own research and bring something new to the market that somebody else who uses the same prompt as you can.

Vishal: I worry about the generation that is just being born right now. You know, it’s sort of akin to people who use math and then just sort of moves to a calculator and they will be like if you use a calculator, you’ll stop having those math skills.

But this generation that is born with AI is not going to know anything besides AI. That’s just going to be second nature to them, not even having to necessarily type or chat with it. It is just going to be talking to an AI persona, and they’re going to be just sort of their friend, their colleagues and mentor, their therapists, everything in once. So, it is sort of scary.

I mean, there are a lot of good sides and a lot of potential, but there is also that sort of a dark part of AI, which so honestly, it’s to be decided, we have to so see how that turns out.

Erin: For sure. I don’t think anyone can predict exactly where that’s going, but certainly that’s the science fiction is upon us now. Yeah.

Vishal: If you look at science fiction, I was talking to a friend of mine, and he was like, okay, so where did this go? Like, when do we have superintelligence? He brought up the fact that if AI were to actually become sentient and become really intelligent, you would not know simply because all the data that we fed AI all these years, that we talk about, all the dystopian novels and all the science fiction stuff that we fed, we have told AI basically that the minute we find out that you are sentient, we are going to close you down. You’re going to shut you off. Terminator.

So, if it becomes sentient, it probably won’t let us know. Going back to B2B, maybe we could just sort of break down the classic demand gen funnel. The top of the funnel where you have the awareness and the nurture and the component and then the middle, you have the consideration. And right at the end, you have the decisions. How would AI impact these specific stages of the B2B funnel?

Erin: So, I think it’s about how when we’re talking about the funnel, AI can really come in into key areas. It can help with the research phase or the understanding of what is the market that we are going after, and why should we be going after that market.

If we look at the awareness and nurture stages, it can help us by understanding what are key market trends, whether it’s certain industries, certain personas or certain geographies, as examples on what is happening in those areas that should indicate that we should or should not mark it to those in the moment. It can also help us understand and research a lot of the nuances.

What is the language that we would need to use, whether it gets to a certain persona or to a certain culture and understand this is our brand voice, but we want to be culturally sensitive to these regions as well, so it can help us create all of that at scale to personalize it.

Just at that really top level stage, it can also work in a lot of intent information as well. If it can start, if you start integrating it with other tools, it can start understanding that and then feeding into what are those nurture campaigns that we want to run. If we understand here’s where are the areas that we want to be going after. We break it down on a per account basis or a per person basis. Here’s what their interests are. And again, it can really help us do that a lot faster and at scale. I think there is a component of having it understand what are you trying to convey? And then tell you, here’s the right time to follow up. Here’s examples of what you could follow up with.

Certainly, as we’re getting deeper into the funnel, you can start looking at what are past opportunities that have been lost over the past six months, two years, as an example that I have not followed up with in that time. It can pull those to the forefront. And what tends to take a lot of time is I don’t want to send an email that just says, hey, just following up or hey, you know, we haven’t spoken in a while. Has anything changed? But it can really help you follow up with all those opportunities using that research that it’s already done and say, here are new things that you can educate this person with so you can sound more like a partner rather than a vendor.

That’s just trying to get some of them, some of their money. So, it could help you with all of those pieces. You can get into this isn’t quite the marketing side, but when you’re in sales or you’re going through like legal reviews on things, I’m sure you can speed up that process a lot by just highlighting what are the red lines that have been changed?

If somebody did not actually send over the red lines, they just sent over a new contract to just double check that everything’s in order. It can speed up all of those processes. If somebody is submitting an RFP, it can look through an RFP and say, this is 40% in target to what you do. Maybe you don’t want to respond to it. This is 90% in target to what you do.

So, it can really help you prioritize your time, do the research, and also help you create those nurture sequences that will help you reach out to various people.

Vishal: Interesting. Where do you see this sort of potential battle between the custom AI agents versus the traditional, all in one SaaS platforms that we have? How is this shift really happening? And what kind of decision framework should like marketing leaders use while evaluating with which path to sort of take?

Erin: I would say the shift is kind of slowly happening. But I think it’s going to be slow for a bit and then there’s going to be a much faster shift. I think it’s not going to happen the next year or so, but I would be surprised if, unless the pricing changes substantially in order to create your own agents and create your own code, it would be the wrong path to go down.

Instead of looking at how to build your own agents complete to your individual use case with your data, that you can control everything yourself. So, I definitely see that there should be a shift in that direction. You can say, here is the exact problem that I’m trying to solve. Here is the exact tech stack that I have that I want to integrate it with. And you can create things that are like apps that are specific to you and what you, um, what you are doing.

I do see a shift. I haven’t seen a lot of people do it for broader use cases, but I can see that as a very obvious shift to start happening unless there ends up being huge differences in pricing, which I can also imagine would happen, get everybody addicted to, you know, generative and an authentic AI, then, substantially up the prices behind it.

Then something’s going to change again as well. But at the moment, as it stands, SaaS products are typically pretty expensive, for the most part. So you take all of that, and they don’t fit directly into anything that you want to do. They promise you the world, and they say they can integrate with everything. In reality, that’s not really the case. So, build something that solves your specific need and use case. And you don’t need necessarily all these other bells and whistles that these SaaS platforms come with that you will never actually use.

Vishal: Interesting. So slowly but surely the shift is happening if people are just waiting and watching. Price being one of the factors, but the shift is happening.

Erin: I would say it is. Yes.

Vishal: All right. So, one piece of advice, actionable advice to marketing leaders who are looking to sort of future proof their organizations. What would that be?

Erin: I think it’s to get creative and to create a culture on the team that everyone’s idea should be seen and heard, and everyone should be given the opportunity to create something that’s going to help them enhance their job, because that’s really where you’re going to get these key improvements.

I think we’re in a unique scenario where before somebody might come to you saying, my job is going to be easier if you buy this 50,000 or $200,000 SaaS platform, that’s quite a big lift. But right now, if somebody says, hey, I could spend a week kind of working with this authentic AI tool to create this new workflow and process, and it’s going to cost, you know, at most maybe $100 a month or so. I would say. Absolutely. Let’s go with that.

I think it’s an interesting thing to try, and it’s a low risk in terms of a monetary investment as well and high potential reward. So, my biggest thing is let people come up with ideas, let people get creative and let them experiment with what is needed to figure out what works and what does not.

Vishal: Interesting. All right. So, let’s end this podcast. We want to do rapid-fire questions if you’re ready for that.

Erin: Sure.

Vishal: All right. Planned itinerary or spontaneous travel?

Erin: I’m more of a planned itinerary person.

Vishal: Interesting. I honestly thought it would be the other way around.

Erin: Spontaneously, but I like to have them a planned itinerary when I actually get there to maximize my time.

Vishal: All right. Fair enough. Mountains or oceans?

Erin: Mountains.

Vishal: Same. All right. Your favorite book of all time, or what are you reading right now?

Erin: My favorite book is probably A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

Vishal: Oh, my God, I love Bill Bryson. I mean the short history of nearly everything. I read it thrice.

Erin: Yeah, I love that.

Vishal: Yeah. I’ve told my girls you have to read that. Like, that is one of those books that you must read. I wish you’d updated it, but I mean, such an amazing book. It’s just not an update. It’s coming out in a few months.

Erin: He’s my favorite author.

Vishal: If you could ask an all-knowing AI one question, what would it?

Erin: Where is the world going to be in a hundred years?

Vishal: Interesting. Would you want to know?

Erin: I’m not sure if I would want to know, but I guess given that answer, maybe if there’s something that we can do about it, then I might as well. No point in hiding bad news.

Vishal: Nothing like meaning of life or anything that deep.

Erin: Some things are more fun to figure out on your own.

Vishal: One final question. If you had all the skills in the world and you had all the money in the world, you could do whatever you wanted. And you’re not doing it for money. What would you do and why?

Erin: I would cure type one diabetes because my sister has had it ever since she was five years old, so that would be the first thing I would do.

Vishal: Interesting. All right. We’ve covered a lot of ground from real world impact in AI to marketing funnel, and what the adoption looks like for the entire marketing stack. Your expertise has been invaluable.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us and for all the tidbits of wisdom. For our listeners who want to learn more about what you do, what is the best place to find your work?

Erin: You can find me on LinkedIn. Or if you’re interested in what Evalueserve does, you can head over to evalueserve.com

Vishal: And I believe you also have your own podcast.

Erin: I do, yes. I do interview industry experts, and we typically come out every two weeks with a new episode. It’s on how to make decisions better using AI. It’s called Decisions Now.

Vishal: All right. And to learn more about Datamatics, and how we can help your B2B demand generation and data services, you can find us at datamaticsbpm.com.

And finally, if you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe to B2B Demand Dialogues wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, this is Vishal Mehta. Thank you for listening.