Scaling Smarter: Balancing AI Efficiency & Human Creativity

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I’m joined by Shouvik Paul. He’s the COO at Copyleaks, and we are going to be going deep into how AI has really impacted our trust of content that we see and really put a burden on companies to be more transparent in their practices, but also navigate this landscape that can sometimes feel like it’s full of landmines when it comes to knowing what’s real and what’s not. Shouvik, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re excited to get into this conversation.

[00:00:36] Shouvik Paul: Hi Tessa. Thanks so much for having me today.

[00:00:40] Tessa Burg: So before we start, and as I mentioned before the call. You have an impressive background, so tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to Copyleaks.

[00:00:49] Shouvik Paul: Yeah, I appreciate that. Look, uh, I was originally from California, from the Bay area, so I got lucky in the sense that I graduated right during the dot-com phase, like the first, the original, the OG dot-com. And um, we ended up taking this company and selling it. Um, uh, like literally we, we sort of like started like working on it while I was still in school.

[00:01:14] Shouvik Paul: Sold it. It was like a, it was SaaS before we knew it was SaaS got acquired by like a. Uh, casino company. Anyway, point was, that was my first foray into things and I figured out that, oh, that’s, first of all the mistake I made was thinking life was really simple because we were all coming out selling companies thinking, oh, that’s just how life works. And then the dot-com bust happens and you’re going, wow, life is not that easy.

[00:01:40] Shouvik Paul: But then it was in that moment that I actually moved to New York. Joined a, uh, a e-ticketing company. Um, and, uh, before e-ticketing was even a thing we’re talking about like 2003, 2004. Right. And we took that company and, and build it out. And, uh, it’s, it got acquired by the Schubert’s and then got sold as like. If you use TicketsatWork, it, it merged into TicketsatWork, uh, today.

[00:02:10] Shouvik Paul: Um, and then from there, uh, I kind of figured out that maybe I have a formula for B2B SaaS. And that’s really what I focused in on. Thereafter, uh, had a series of actually five other companies that all exited after that.

[00:02:26] Shouvik Paul: The more recent one, uh, which was now five years ago, was a media technology company, uh, called MAZ which, uh, also ended up getting acquired. Um, and that’s how I ended up here at Copyleaks. I try to. You know, and Copyleaks really deals with, uh, authenticating content. Um, as it relates to, you know, it started off with figuring out if this content exists, uh, anywhere else from an IP infringement perspective.

[00:02:56] Shouvik Paul: But more recently it’s been all about authenticating content in the sense of figuring out is this even human or is this AI Right? Uh, and, and you know, the journey’s been good, but I think what’s really exciting is. With all of these experiences, I’ve always felt like I was at the forefront of technology, sort of building things, um, and building things.

[00:03:20] Shouvik Paul: The, the reason I mentioned SaaS is because SaaS is all about scalability, right? It’s, it’s, it’s all about that ARR, right? There’s no service there. There’s, it’s not a one-time revenue. So everything you build and the way you think about things. Has to be scalable and that’s a very, operationally, that’s a very different way of thinking.

[00:03:43] Shouvik Paul: Uh, when you go to the board and you say, I made a couple of million dollars from a one hit wonder where they paid us for a service to go build something ad hoc, they discount that revenue. They don’t even care about that revenue. What they only care about is how much of it’s recurring and to build a business that way.

[00:04:01] Shouvik Paul: Typically, you know, my background’s more about taking a company usually to. Like that C or D series stage, and then either taking it public or, more likely getting acquired out of private equity or strategic acquisition. That, that journey is, is an interesting journey when you’re thinking about it from a SaaS perspective.

[00:04:23] Shouvik Paul: It’s very different than some other perspectives.

[00:04:27] Tessa Burg: I think what’s interesting is we’re talking to a bunch of marketers. You have a background that is in operations and you are engineered for scale. Where in marketing, the big ask is always. We need more new customers. Can you get us new? And they are. A lot of the way you go about doing that can sometimes be one shot.

[00:04:50] Tessa Burg: We made this commercial. That commercial never exists again. We invested a lot in it. It’s got life. It runs somewhere. It’s done. We see if anything happened. A lot of campaigns operate that way. But now with the advent of AI. Marketers are being asked to think about growth, sustainable growth, sustainable scale, and it is this expectation that things should be faster, better, smarter. Not just one off that, you know, the very essence of machine learning is that it is learning.

[00:05:24] Tessa Burg: What are some lessons that you’ve learned in building bus businesses that maybe marketers can start to take into their own approach when they think about how do I build something for scale and growth, rather than how do I build something for this quarter, this moment, this year?

[00:05:42] Shouvik Paul: Yeah, I mean, look, unfortunately we are often graded on this quarter and this year that’s the starting point. So I get it right? I get the pressure of it. Um, I think, you know, coming, coming first, let’s, let’s, let’s start with the big bigger picture stuff, right? So bigger picture, um, you know, you have to think about the recurring revenue ’cause.

[00:06:06] Shouvik Paul: It’s hard work to go find. We all know this, right? It’s hard work to go find a lot of customers, like new customers. That’s always hard. The the CAC on that, the customer acquisition cost is always gonna be really high. If you have the same customer and you get them to spend, they’re already perhaps loyal to your brand.

[00:06:24] Shouvik Paul: Getting them to spend more money is a lot easier than finding someone new. Right? So that’s where the recurring revenue model comes in. By the way, we’ve seen even in recent years. Companies like car companies saying, Hey, it used to be this person’s gonna buy a car. Sure, they’ll say, loyal to the brand, perhaps, but I’m not gonna see them for the next like five to 10 years.

[00:06:45] Shouvik Paul: Right? Is when they’ll come back and buy another car. Now they’re going, same car. I’m gonna add recurring revenue through features that you get, right? Um, you get, you know, in a Tesla, if you want the self-driving feature, you pay extra and it’s a recurring fee there. It’s like an annual fee, right?

[00:07:03] Shouvik Paul: Mercedes, there’s like, you know, an app to unlock your door and blah, blah, blah, but you’re paying a recurring fee on that. So I. Even traditional companies like car companies are saying it’s better to go mine our existing customers. Now, how do you, how do you do that at scale? Well, that’s the tricky part, right?

[00:07:23] Shouvik Paul: Um, up until this moment, we had to really get very creative about how to have the mass reaches. But now with AI, there’s a lot of technology that cuts the speed and time it takes to do that market research. Right. And I think that’s the biggest thing in the past, if you were a small company or a mid-size company, you just didn’t have a big team.

[00:07:47] Shouvik Paul: Right? So then it’s prioritization of tasks. Ultimately that’s what it comes down to. So, yeah, you know what? We might be entering into new market. I gotta go find like who the ICP there is and do some market research. Either you outsource that to do it in-house, you have to have a huge team. All this stuff, right?

[00:08:04] Shouvik Paul: Like it’s the legwork actually that creates that barrier to doing, getting those things done. The biggest advantage and the biggest thing I’ve seen happen, and it’s not just in marketing and other verticals, is, is people who have figured out. How to take advantage of AI. Look, we’re in the AI governance business, so I’ll be the first one to tell you that there are, you have to find responsible usage of AI.

[00:08:31] Shouvik Paul: There’s some like pitfalls to AI, but it’s here to stay. There’s a huge amount of benefit. I’m a huge AI guy, right? I’m, I’m I, I believe the technology, again, believe in the responsible usage in terms of marketers. What that really translates to is there are now. So many tools out there that can do the job of entire teams that you no longer need to hire.

[00:08:55] Shouvik Paul: Now, I know the question often leads to, well, does that mean like my team’s gonna get cut down? And does that mean I’m gonna have to downsize? Absolutely not. It just means you can do more with your existing team than ever before. You can have the productivity. If you have a team of five or 50, you can five x that with the usage of AI.

[00:09:19] Shouvik Paul: Right. You’ll just get more done.

[00:09:22] Tessa Burg: Yeah. I think you hit on a couple of really important things for marketers to take away. One is starting with existing customers and really spending time in that data and. Understanding there’s this intersection be between where your existing customer’s needs and wants are gonna go as they continue to stay with you and the expertise, the soft sort of services that your company has built around that expertise to fulfill those needs and wants.

[00:09:52] Tessa Burg: In a lot of companies and outside of SaaS, I feel like manufacturing companies, especially even in semiconductor, even in tech industries that maybe aren’t SaaS. They underappreciate how much value they’ve built up and the way that they do things and the people that they have there, and how there can be these other like lines of revenue when you pair generative AI specifically with that expertise and really starting to serve your customers in these softer ways that make their experience with you even better.

[00:10:27] Shouvik Paul: Yeah. Also, by the way, mass personalization, it’s not that there wasn’t software doing that, but we can, you can use AI to do that much more intelligently. Everyone understands to be marketed to personalization always works better, right? Like we, we wanna do what we want to hear that sometimes that data’s there.

[00:10:45] Shouvik Paul: It’s not being correlated or factored in, right? Unless, again, you’re using some very, you’re huge company, very, you know, complex systems. My point is. What, what, and we’ve seen this in technology. It used to be only the big companies like IBM have the supercomputers. Now we have the same power in our phone.

[00:11:02] Shouvik Paul: Right. Or in our watches, like we are in that moment with marketers just because you don’t have a huge team. Means nothing anymore. Right? That used to be a thing that used to be a barrier, right? Budget is always gonna be somewhat of a barrier depending on what you’re doing. Uh, can you get less, you know, water bottles and coozies for a conference?

[00:11:22] Shouvik Paul: Yeah. It depends on your budget, right? But like, when it comes to data. Right with correlating data. When it comes to customization, like the planning part, the implementation part, these are all things that have significantly gotten easier to do even presentations. By the way, I’ll, I’ll give you a great example, Tessa.

[00:11:41] Shouvik Paul: I was, um, I. Presenting on this like education market space and I had a graph that basically took me only till the year 2024. Okay, so this is based on real data to 2024 on things that were happening in the education market space. Then there were a bunch of articles that were written and published by others that, that had other data in that article, right?

[00:12:03] Shouvik Paul: What I did was I took my. Took my actual graph, I said factor in these articles and what they’re saying about trends in education and extend this line out based on those articles till the year 2028. Right? Think about the amount of work, effort, energy that would have to go into that. I got that done in like less than two minutes.

[00:12:22] Shouvik Paul: Right. Looked like a great Right, that that’s what I’m talking about. Like you can use it in very. Like interesting ways to accomplish a lot of different things. I think we’re at that stage of just training our mind. To go and do it this way. Right?

[00:12:42] Shouvik Paul: Think about the map. I grew up in a generation where I would ride shotgun with my dad and with a map open, no matter where I went, we went through that MapQuest moment of having to print it out.

[00:12:53] Shouvik Paul: It took us a second to be like, wait, I can just do this on my phone. And when we learn that behavior, it comes like now it’s unimaginable that we would ever like open up a map or whatever, right? It’s a convenience. And it is, and it actually is the convenience. We’re just like not thinking about AI as a convenience right now.

[00:13:10] Tessa Burg: Yep. Oh, I totally agree. And in your example, you set up the value equation. You were open enough to doing work differently. You said, what would make this even better? What? How can I deliver even more value? And instead of stopping at, oh, I’d have to do all these things. You thought, how could I use AI first?

[00:13:28] Tessa Burg: Or what, what would I use this tool? And that comes from being open testing and experimentation of different tools, starting to connect the dots on what’s possible. But I think a lot of people get hung up on the disruption piece and the very people who mistrust content or don’t know what to do about it are also the ones who sometimes that deters them from even starting.

[00:13:53] Tessa Burg: And there are some real. Challenges and issues. If we think about that, where are we seeing, like I do wanna u let’s just say I’m, oh, I’m, I wanna use AI to be more effective, more efficient, more valuable in execution. But how has that had a negative impact on ha on different industries and the way that people perceive content from specific companies or even the news.

[00:14:19] Shouvik Paul: Yeah. So look, um, there is such a thing as over reliance, right? Coming back to my map example, the truth is, these days, because I’m so reliant on GPS, I’ve learned, I’ve unlearned a skill, right? Um, as a matter of fact, most of the times when I’m in a new city, I blindly followed directions. I have no idea if I’m a mountain or a lake, I, I just, it, it is maybe dumber in a certain way, right?

[00:14:45] Shouvik Paul: Um, and we have to be very careful, right? Um, I, I, we have a whole department that deals with the education vertical and there, and I, and I bring this up because this is the same people, these are the same kids who are gonna go into the workforce in the future. We have to be very careful there because. Um, there’s again, a lot of good use for, uh, things like ChatGPT, and education when it comes to data.

[00:15:08] Shouvik Paul: Uh, idea generation. There’s a lot of great use cases, but if the number one use case today is they’re using it to write their papers and complete their assignments now. But that’s gonna, if we follow down that road with ’em, again, it won’t happen over overnight, but in the future, we’re looking at a very bleak future where kids that are coming into the workforce are going to not know how to do critical thinking.

[00:15:32] Shouvik Paul: They’re gonna be one hell of an editor, by the way. ’cause the starting point is edit this document, right? So they’re gonna be great editors, but not when it comes to critical thinking. So it starts there right in the workforce today. Again, from a marketer’s perspective, look, idea generation, it’s great, but if you are actually using AI to write and publish a lot of articles, there’s some, there’s some pitfalls to that.

[00:15:56] Shouvik Paul: Number one, it does turn out, and we’ve done a lot of research on it, we’ve actually built products around detecting if something is AI or not, with over 99.8% accuracy. The reason we’ve been able to do that is AI writes in a certain way. ChatGPT and uh, uh, like Sam Lin never said, I’m gonna build you a tool that that is gonna help you pretend that you wrote it yourself without using AI, he just said, I’m gonna build you an amazing LLM platform, right? So their models are built to provide great data sets. It’s not built to cover your tracks that it’s, it’s it’s AI, right? So it leaves a certain footprint. So my point is, if you are using a lot of AI to publish things, number one, there’s a danger to that because there are certain words that AI cluster of words that’s used a lot more.

[00:16:48] Shouvik Paul: I’ll give you a great example, attune. To these fluctuations, just like a cluster of words. That cluster of words in a million is used 9,843 times more by AI than it is by a human. Okay? My point is, you can, we look for patterns and it turns out that you reuse words. Now why, why that? Why can that be dangerous?

[00:17:11] Shouvik Paul: Number one is, again, overreliance on these things. It’ll, it’ll just, after a while, you’re not thinking anymore. You’re just. Putting out what, you know, garbage and garbage out kind of, kind of thing. Right? Um, the bigger danger is as more and more companies are detecting it, right? Um, a lot of SEO is not being penalized anymore.

[00:17:30] Shouvik Paul: It turns out, like initially when this all happened, the Googles of the world said, if you’re using AI generated content, we’re gonna penalize you in terms of SEO, right? We’re gonna lower your rankings. Turns out you can’t be selling Gemini and ba, you know, uh, Microsoft selling Copilot, say use AI and on the other, on the other hand, penalize for it.

[00:17:51] Shouvik Paul: So they all like backtrack from there. However, we’re finding more and more companies, you know, we’re, we’re evolving into a state where, um, people are questioning, uh, even legally what. Is IP or not? When it comes to ai, AI generated content and the, and we’re at least here in the us the court of law states, again, this may change.

[00:18:18] Shouvik Paul: If it’s AI generated, it’s, you can’t, you can’t, there’s no IP there. Okay, so now imagine you write a great white paper for your organization and the images, the contact, all of that was created by AI. Theoretically, again, I’m sure you can go fight it and it’s all still like wishy-washy, right? The zone we’re in, it’s a little bit of the wild west, but, but theoretically that doesn’t belong to you, like you can’t copyright it.

[00:18:47] Shouvik Paul: Right? We work with a lot of publishers and one of the reasons they use Copyleaks is because they wanna understand how much of that content that is being put out is potentially AI, whether it’s words or even images, again. Right now the law says if, if you publish a cover and that cover was generated by AI, there is no IP there.

[00:19:10] Shouvik Paul: You know, and that’s challenging. Like you can’t copyright it.

[00:19:15] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and I think that’s really important. We talk about that intersection of, Hey, are you addressing this problem that a lot of B2B companies have? Which is, you know, 80% plus turnover, 80% plus disappointment after like a purchase is made in the company itself.

[00:19:31] Tessa Burg: And you can grow and scale a business by focusing on that core and using AI to help. But you can’t go too far because we’re all questioning. What we see, what we read. And as brands, we really have to invest in that quality and transparency. That’s right. Yeah. And not get lost in like this.

[00:19:54] Shouvik Paul: And Tessa, I’ll give you two other reasons why it is, it’s, you need that human in the loop, right?

[00:20:00] Shouvik Paul: The, the problem with this stuff is. Sometimes when there’s over-reliance, you just let it, it’s like, yeah, it worked. We published one article, some white paper that went really well. Let’s keep doing it right. The problem is, as it stands today, again, this may change over time, but as it stands today, AI still hallucinates.

[00:20:17] Shouvik Paul: It makes things up, right? I don’t know if you, if you heard of this case, um, uh, we actually now work with a lot of law firms. Why? Because some lawyer in California walked into a courtroom. He’s been doing this for the last 20 years, right? And he presents this case to the judge. Now, most lawyers don’t do their own work.

[00:20:35] Shouvik Paul: They have like a paralegal or someone working for them. Well, it turns out this paralegal didn’t want to do the work, used ChatGPT, and now the problem with it, it was not that he used Chat-GPT. The problem is Chat-GPT. Um, makes things up. It’s called hallucinations, right? It makes things up when it doesn’t know the answer.

[00:20:54] Shouvik Paul: By the way, why does it do that? It’s because AI was built to please its owner. We’re the owner and it’s been told we all, as owners, we always like an answer. Not having an answer is bad and gimme an answer that I like. Those are the two, two factors. Right Now it’s bias, by the way. Right? But in this case it just said it made up.

[00:21:14] Shouvik Paul: Precedents in court cases that didn’t exist. So this guy goes and presents the case as he’s always done, except he gets called out and now he gets sanctioned, meaning he can’t step inside of a courtroom for the next five years. So think about that. The whole law in law industry suddenly like, wow, that could have happened to us.

[00:21:31] Shouvik Paul: How do we prevent that from happening? They’re now court courtrooms that basically say you sign an affidavit saying everything you’re submitting is not, it’s human, not AI Right. My point is that in that case. It was hallucinations. Now think about it as a marketer, you may be thinking, I’m just writing this thing using AI.

[00:21:48] Shouvik Paul: It worked for me. And the last thing I published. It may make things up and, and it’s known to make things up. Okay. That’s number one. Number two, this is a much bigger problem that we’re seeing. Depending on your content, like generic content, it’s fine, but if your content is more niche, the problem is AI as it stands today, right?

[00:22:10] Shouvik Paul: These LLMs, these generative AI platforms like the ChatGPTs and, and, and, uh, Geminis of the world. They’re not doing, it’s not like they’re going out and doing research, right, Tessa? They’re more like a DJ is the best way to think about it. Like as a DJ, I’m going, I’m creating something new, but it’s a new song.

[00:22:31] Shouvik Paul: But really I’ve taken music from the 1980s and remixed it from something from last year. And you as a listener, you understand that, right? You’re like, oh yeah, I know that song from the eighties. I get, it’s not original. I get that this person’s remixed it and created something new. It’s just like not original.

[00:22:49] Shouvik Paul: That’s what these LLMs are doing today. They’re essentially. Just remixing things. They’re like, oh, let me take a little bit of this from here. A little bit of that from here. Now, the problem with that model is that the more niche the subject gets, right? It turns out, by the way, 60% of everything it’s writing is plagiarized. Okay?

[00:23:08] Tessa Burg: Oh my gosh.

[00:23:08] Shouvik Paul: Outright. Outright. Just that copy paste where it, where it’s 60%, it, it, it’s 60% is when it’s. Niche content, like legal content, scientific content, right? And you think about it, there’s like two papers ever written on some like microbiology study. It’s not gonna know where else to take it from.

[00:23:27] Shouvik Paul: It only has two papers also. We’re, we’re, we’re very quickly, look, there are 400 million weekly users, 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT, right? That’s a week. Put this into perspective. It took TikTok nine months to gain a hundred million users. Alright. Just say, right. Yeah. So, so the usage is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

[00:23:50] Shouvik Paul: And then on top of that, think about this. It’s being, no question that it’s being asked is unique anymore. It’s probably been asked this question about, tell me about US tariffs millions of times at this point, right after the 10th time of answering that question. It’s, it’s either self plagiarizing or it’s outright plagiarizing from somewhere else.

[00:24:12] Shouvik Paul: It’s can’t state original, so whatever you’ve asked it, in all likelihood, it’s already answered and someone’s already published that answer somewhere. By the way, one of the things that we do at Copyleaks when we look for AI detection is, is, is one of our services. Um, we don’t just say, oh, this is like 80% AI.

[00:24:33] Shouvik Paul: We say, this is 80% AI. We’re gonna show you, we call it AI logic. We’re gonna show the logic behind why we’re saying this is AI or not. And, and part of the logic will show those phrases. But then we by, by the way, created a repository. Of all the stuff that AI is writing, right? Again, we were like, yeah, it’s probably written this.

[00:24:51] Shouvik Paul: Then someone’s asked, all likelihood it’s been asked this question. We started creating a huge repository and archive of everything AI has ever written that someone else published on a post. I don’t know, put an email. It doesn’t matter, right? And now what we do is we cross re cross reference against that repository and we say, has this ever shown up somewhere or not?

[00:25:10] Shouvik Paul: And believe it or not. More likely than not, we’re almost, every time something shows up as AI, we find the exact source. We’ll be like, yeah, this was published by CNN in an article. Uh, yeah. And we’ll show it side by side. And then that’s the proof. In other words, right? Who cares if it’s AI or not? It’s been published somewhere before.

[00:25:29] Tessa Burg: So what should marketers do? They’re in the business of being asked to work faster, better, smarter, be transparent, uh, keep human in the loop. But, you know, it’s, it’s high, high stakes to, and I think the other challenging part is when you see the draft come from an LLM, you’re like, oh man, that’s pretty good.

[00:25:54] Tessa Burg: That actually might actually, that’s better than what I was going to do. Yeah. So what was the process for keeping high critical thinking, high originality, and, and staying kind of true to your brand and putting out that valuable content and guidance?

[00:26:11] Shouvik Paul: I think Tessa, human generated content is gonna be a premium in the future.

[00:26:17] Shouvik Paul: So I’ve read some studies, um, by the way, that show that in the next two years, almost 90% of everything on the web is going to be AI generated. And it makes sense, right? Think about it. AI doesn’t sleep. It just, it can create way more content than you, me, entire organizations combined, right? It can constantly put things out there.

[00:26:38] Shouvik Paul: So we’re living in a world where in the future, like think about news companies, like news organizations, right? They’re in a space where it’s like, hey, um, like today I subscribed to the New York Times. If tomorrow I found out that they were using AI, I probably wouldn’t stop subscribing to them, but I probably wouldn’t even pay.

[00:26:58] Shouvik Paul: I would stop paying for it, right? Because as humans, we place a different value on human versus. Machine, at least today, I don’t know, 20 years from now. Who knows? Right? Same thing. If you went to Art gallery and I told you that painting is generated by AI you might appreciate it. You might be like, wow, that’s beautiful.

[00:27:15] Shouvik Paul: Yeah. Would you make a lot of money? Probably not. Right. Same with music. I, I’m sure you’ve seen like. Uh, uh, Spotify’s now being flooded by, um, AI generated bands that don’t actually exist. Well, it turns out that, you know, again, we’ll see more of that, but do I think AI’s generated band is gonna win a Grammy?

[00:27:35] Shouvik Paul: No, because as a human, we place a different value to it. All this is to say, I think it’s important for all of us in this moment as marketers to and, and otherwise. To essentially acknowledge the fact that yes, it is easier to do work this way, but it’s, it’s more scalable to do it this way. But what we are putting out will very quickly look generic in a, like very quickly.

[00:28:00] Shouvik Paul: It becomes very, very generic. And what is gonna stand out is something that is truly human generated. And as a human, we will also get better at recognizing it. Believe it or not, these days I can look. Uh, at AI, like at a piece that was written by AI. And again, because I’m used to hearing certain words in clusters of words, I’m like, yeah, this was AI generated, right?

[00:28:24] Shouvik Paul: Humans will get better, just like, you know, and, and you can make the case like with AI generated images, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s human versus AI, but I just think that. The starting point in the future that we’re going into, the starting point for everything as a human is going to be, is this human or is this AI?

[00:28:44] Shouvik Paul: Because I’m gonna put a different value on it. Right? And it’s important as marketers to keep that in mind. Whether you’re putting a poster out, a marketing piece, people will appreciate when it’s, when it’s AI generated. Now. There’s a benefit to using AI to do their legwork to get there, right? If you’re gonna storyboard a ad campaign, you don’t need to go hire in a whole agency and spend millions of dollars to do that.

[00:29:05] Shouvik Paul: Use. Use Sora, or, or Google has like a great video video platform now that I came up with where you could storyboard an entire ad, right? You can create a whole ad if you want, but you can also storyboard it with spending almost no money on it, right? There are shortcuts that you can take, but I think.

[00:29:23] Shouvik Paul: The originality. There’s again, certain things you need to write a quick one sheet or go for it, right? There’s no harm. But if you’re really putting out pieces that you think are gonna, you know, gain a new customer, change their perspective, I think that still needs to be human generated.

[00:29:38] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. And there are so many opportunities to use it just to get there a little bit faster or even give you a different perspective, ask it to challenge you, but.

[00:29:49] Tessa Burg: It’s so important to keep the critical thinking and the, and the original content creation, because to your point, that’s where value comes from. And ultimately that is what we’re talking about, we’re being charged with is how do we grow and scale because we’re delivering more value because it’s recurring revenue.

[00:30:08] Tessa Burg: They want it so bad, they stay with you for recurring revenue. And I think it’s a really cool moment to use your imagination, creativity as marketers who are close to that customer data and needs, want states to collaborate across the company to come up with what does that mean for us?

[00:30:23] Shouvik Paul: That’s right. And and also by the way, um, loss prevention is something that’s, that’s come up a lot with AI.

[00:30:31] Shouvik Paul: These are new problems that have been coming up. Tessa, like you’ve got, um. We work with a lot of, I mentioned publishers, right? With publishers, it was all about breaking news, right? That that’s been there. Like media companies, it’s all about breaking news. How soon I see something on Twitter, I wanna, I see this image, let’s go do a story about it immediately.

[00:30:52] Shouvik Paul: Now, they can’t trust that image, they can’t trust that video. Is it a deep fake, for example? You know, insurance companies are, are, uh, another type of clientele that we work with all these years. Geico would say, if you got into a car crash, send me a picture of the car. And it’s not that folks couldn’t have photoshopped in the past.

[00:31:10] Shouvik Paul: Now the issue is even my mom can add a dent to a car using her phone and an image on her phone. Right? That’s the thing. It’s just become so easy to do this stuff that they are seeing fraudulent cases go up, right? Again, you’re sitting in the company and you have, as a marketer, a team of copywriters.

[00:31:33] Shouvik Paul: You’re paying the money to write content if all of them are using AI. Look number one, know that if that’s happening, it’s important to understand what your landscape actually looks like internally, and if that’s the case, you have two choices. Basically, if that is true and the quality of what is being put out is high, you can probably save a lot of money.

[00:31:53] Shouvik Paul: About going full AI at that point. Why do you need a whole, uh, group of copywriters? Right? On the other hand, if they are, uh, um, not using any kind of AI, it’s how do you shorten some of the research and scale, uh, that, that cycle to have them create more articles or blog entries or whatever they you’re using them for and helping them do that research and legwork, as you were saying earlier.

[00:32:18] Tessa Burg: Yeah. Well, Sho we are at time, but I, what I loved about this last example is. You also had just hit on that saving money is not always the same as scale. And we hear that so much like, well, what cost can we cut? What cost can we cut? And again, ever you have to go back to that value exchange, that value equation and where AI plays a role in your business should be truly unique to your business and your brand and, and how you go about delivering that value.

[00:32:46] Tessa Burg: Uh, before we get off. Any, because that one was so rich and deep. Any last words or last advice to marketers who are listening to this episode?

[00:32:56] Shouvik Paul: Yeah, look, um, don’t be afraid of ai. Um, think about AI in the sense that like everything you should be doing, if you want to really future proof yourself, AI’s here to stay.

[00:33:08] Shouvik Paul: And again, it’s finding the responsible usage of AI that’s important. But every task that you do, you should see and ask yourself and your team, can we not replace people? Can we replace this task with AI so we can go work on more important things? That’s the question you should be asking.

[00:33:30] Tessa Burg: I love it. Well, thank you so much for being our guest today, and if listeners wanna reach out and find you directly, how can they do that?

[00:33:39] Shouvik Paul: They could do that a couple of different ways. Um, if you’re interested in AI detection for your company, please come to Copyleaks, C-O-P-Y-L-E-A-K s.com. Uh, I also hosted a podcast called The Original Source, uh, where I interview. Um. Sort of industry leaders from variety of industries to really high level talk about how AI is suddenly turning their world upside down or impacting their industry.

[00:34:07] Shouvik Paul: Again, it’s not meant to be technical. It’s like interesting conversations with folks. Um, and uh, if you want to email me directly, my email is show sho@copyleakscom.

[00:34:19] Tessa Burg: Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us and if you wanna hear more episodes of Leader Generation, you can find them at modop.com, modop.com, behind the Van Guardian or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:34:33] Tessa Burg: And definitely check out Sho’s, podcast The Original Source. I got before I interviewed him, listened to it. It was it, they were really good. So this interview for me has been highly intimidating, but I, I made it through. This was great content and really looking forward to connecting. Again,

[00:34:54] Shouvik Paul: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Tessa.

[00:34:56] Shouvik Paul: Appreciate it.