Speaker 1: 0:00Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner, and you're listening to Tech Marketing Rewired, a show where I talk to marketing leaders who are rethinking how growth really happens in tech. In this episode, I sat down with Dennis Bierman. He's the CMO at Agility Recovery and we unpacked something every marketer wrestles with attribution. You know we've got all these tools and all the data, like Salesforce and UTMs and dashboards galore, and somehow you're still asking where did this deal actually come from? Dennis has been in that room more times than he can count. We talked about why attribution often feels more like guesswork than science, why last touch might be the only thing that really matters, and how he's using GPT agents and stacking them to generate leads for real-world events like weather and power outages. You know it's one of those conversations that makes you stop and rethink how much of your data is actually useful. So I'm really excited about this one. Let's get into it.Speaker 1: 0:50

This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Tech Marketing Rewired. I'm your host, kevin Kerner, and I'm really excited to have a good friend with me today, dennis Bierman. Dennis, great for you to join us.

Speaker 2: 1:08

Great Thanks for having me, Kevin. Good to talk to you.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Yeah, yeah, Super psyched. Anytime I get a chance to talk to you is a good thing. Why don't we?

Speaker 2: 1:15

before we get into stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Let's. I know we're going to talk today a lot about you.

Speaker 2: 1:28

Know your experience in, I guess, marketing measurement, which is a big topic a lot of people are interested in right now. But why don't you go ahead and give us a quick overview of your background, because it's impressive? Thanks, kevin. Yeah, I started my career in banking. It kind of came out when Y2K was a thing, so I cut my teeth on some systems work for a couple of years. I went on to become a product manager at a bunch of software companies and spent some good time with product managers and engineers and kind of just learning how to do that job. And that brought me to marketing, kind of accidentally, about midway through my career. So for the past I guess 15 years or so I've just been doing a lot of different marketing experiences, primarily at private equity, backed software startups and primarily B2B marketing.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Yeah, interesting, and now you're CMO at actually a really interesting company, agility Recovery, which is an industry that I have not worked in before for me too.

Speaker 2: 2:26

But it's so funny too. You spend long enough in software and you live that life where there's seven alternatives to your product and it's just a game about saying we're the best at it because and now I'm in a business where there is no peer right these are kind of real world problems. So the big case study for us was last year when the hurricanes kind of whipped through the Carolinas. You know that was a disaster situation. Businesses were knocked out, power, connectivity, everything, buildings, flooding and you know Agility Recovery was able to get in there and get businesses back up and running. You know, in a matter of days and sometimes even hours.

Speaker 2: 3:04

So it's real world stuff. Right, it's real world business services and I'm absolutely thrilled to be working.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Yeah, it's really cool guy it's. For those of you don't know, it's a I call it a disaster recovery services. So it's kind of part technology, part service. And what a mission, though. I mean you show up when people need you.

Speaker 1: 3:29

And I guess, even like from a marketing perspective, you got to show up when you got to have them know, you like, you got to be on the list for this type of stuff, or when they're searching. You got to show up Right Cause it, it, it. People may not look for disaster recovery until it happens, right, that's right.

Speaker 2: 3:38

Yeah, I mean awareness is is the first, is the first ingredient to marketing success, right? They have to know that something like this is out there and our product fits the bill, right? There's just not a lot of business owners that would know how to connect a two kilowatt generator to a building to provide backup power, so it's-.

Speaker 1: 3:56

You'd hope they wouldn't have to. A lot of them are like. I hope I don't ever have to do this.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Absolutely so yeah, it's a critical service and the fact that we can offer it on a membership basis so you don't have to worry about managing all those assets and all that overhead, that's the real value add. You know all different types of owned companies public, private, private equity you know you've had to probably defend the marketing position a lot and of course that's how you measure has changed a ton over the last, let's say, 10 years. So you have this perspective. I thought I'd. One of the things I wanted I know we wanted to dig into was attribution and sort of that whole topic of how do you track the success of any marketing channel or sales channel and there might be some people listening that don't really have the experience. You have an attribution, so why not? Could you just define, from your perspective, just maybe broadly, marketing measurement and the marketing attribution, and then we'll get into some of the challenges that you're seeing now is how, how it's changed yeah, so I'm not an academic at this, I'm a hack, right, I had to learn this on the job.

Speaker 2: 5:07

But, yeah, you know. So you know, the golden rule in marketing is you have to be able to measure it to manage it. So you know, over the years, as digital marketing and the internet has exploded, there's just been this proliferation of tools, data analysis techniques and methods that marketing and businesses have used to figure out hey, how are we getting this business, how are we filling our funnel, where are these leads coming from, and what marketing activities did we do to get these leads and generate this pipeline? So marketing measurement turned into a science called attribution, and attribution sounds like a very scientific term, but you know, the reason that I kind of pitched being on your podcast is because I felt over the years I got this nagging suspicion that it's actually not as scientific as people think it is. I do think it's technology driven and I think it's data driven.

Speaker 2: 6:07

But even recently I was in a discussion with my executive team here at Agility about where did this deal come from. We have all this data, tons and tons of data and records in the database and leads and events and yet we still had to have a discussion about where we thought this deal came from. So it was a very contradictory type of conclusion it was, it was, it was. It was a very contradictory type of conclusion I had, which is you know, all of this data, all these tools, all this technology, and yet we're still having individual human conversations about where did this deal come from? Yeah, so it does. It does seem a little bit odd and I thought that would be a great topic for your podcast.

Speaker 1: 6:44

That's crazy. Yeah, because you would think, with all the propaganda around, oh, these tools are so easy and they can track everything. It's really not. It's really much more complex. Break down for me why you think it's particularly challenging in B2B. Well, let's just talk about B2B, because that's the world we're in. Why is it particularly challenging now, in 2025?

Speaker 2: 7:04

Yeah, great question. So one of the things that's going out there is, you know, the notion of the buyer journey. I think probably everyone who listens to your podcast and has had a career in marketing has dug in and spent some time in the buyer journey, the individual steps that a buyer takes on that path, from awareness, you know, being convinced and being sold and converting into a lead and converting into a book of business. And I think we've, as marketers, we've been taught and almost indoctrinated by our vendors or technology vendors to say you know, you have to track every single event that happens to that lead along the way to becoming a lead. And that starts with anonymous activity in your website. Before they even fill out a form and give you an email address and give you a name, they're on your website and they've been cookied and they're an anonymous visitor with anonymous sessions and we're tracking all those clicks all the way and then at the very end of it, they do something. All the way and then at the very end of it, they do something.

Speaker 2: 8:07

The visitor on your website does something, fills out a form, becomes a lead and maybe becomes a customer, and now you have revenue. And now we start asking ourselves the question how do we get this revenue? So then we do this big look back, right, we look back at tons and tons of data and tons and tons of clicks and tons and tons of events on our website and we start playing the chip trading game. Oh well, that click on that asset was influential and oh, they downloaded that checklist and therefore that contributed to it.

Speaker 2: 8:34

And I just think those are largely internal discussions. I have this nagging suspicion that if you were to go back and actually most of these leads probably don't remember everything they did in your website over the period of months or perhaps even years. But I think, I suspect I have this nagging suspicion that if we were looking at truth rather than just data, we would realize that a lot of this activity on our websites is random, arbitrary and not terribly influential at all. Websites is random, arbitrary and not terribly influential at all, and I do suspect that it can be different for every website visitor, but typically it's one thing or one or two recent things that causes a person to convert into a lead and ultimately seek your products and services.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Who's asking the question of attribution? In your experience, I'm sure it's executive team sales. But what's the catalyst for the question and that question? Where did this come from? Where are you going to defend it?

Speaker 2: 9:34

Yeah. So there are several partners and peers around the business who have interest in this stuff. So you mentioned sales. So certainly your sellers want to know what activities you're doing that's leading to these things becoming leads. And they're asking for a couple of interesting reasons. Number one they obviously want to know you know what piqued the lead's interest, like what, what are the topics, what's the? You know what, what's the, what's the value prop, what's resonating, what should they emulate when they get in touch with that lead? And that's great. The other thing is, sometimes sales has their own biases about what the value prop is, what works, what message resonates with leads in our target markets. So sometimes they actually want to disprove the activities that you're doing in marketing and say no, no, don't do that, do this instead and that will generate more. So sales is one contingent.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Certainly executive leadership and boards a lot of marketing. I think in the last four roles that I've been in, marketing is either the largest or the second largest cost center of the business. So these companies, these investors and these owners and executive teams are dumping tons and tons of resources into marketing and they rightfully want to know, like, what's working, what's not working. Should we do this? Should we stop doing that? So you know that contingency, the, you know the exec team, your board, your ownership, you know they're the ones who are putting their necks on the line and they're you know they're shelling out a lot of money to generate this business and this growth and they have a right to understand what's working, what's not working.

Speaker 2: 11:16

Why do we do this? Why didn't we do that? How do I, how do I evaluate trade-offs in a in a constraint driven world? So certainly there's that. And then, thirdly, you have marketers themselves, right, and, kevin, I don't know if you've ever felt yourself in this type of a situation, but we have to justify our own existence somehow, right. We have to prove to the world that we are valuable, we do have merit, we deserve our seat at the table to determine what goes on in the marketing program. You know those are the three big constituencies when it comes to marketing attribution discussions and their own objectives and goals and biases and prejudices kind of infect a lot of these discussions along the way. I swear to goodness, if I've had it at one shop, I've had it at a dozen. It doesn't change.

Speaker 1: 12:04

Totally. You know it was super interesting. What you just said is, like you would think, attribution. I mean, I know you got to do the defense thing and even as a marketer you know you have these constituencies. But what was interesting is it wasn't. It didn't sound like to you that it was overly helpful to actually figure out what was working and or maybe truthfully, what is working, and maybe you just didn't say that. But when you look at it internally, like in the marketing department, is it helpful at all and in what ways is it helpful? Or maybe it's just at the point where, like, it's really not that helpful anymore. It's more of a feel or a guess if you took all the external factors out of it.

Speaker 2: 12:45

Yeah, I'll tell you what I wish there was a technology out there that could identify signal versus noise in the behavior right Right. Sometimes I feel that only 10% of it is true signal and 90% of that data is a lot of noise. So wouldn't it be great if you had a filter on your analytics package that said filter out the noise? So yeah, if inspiring entrepreneurs out there, tech entrepreneurs, come a with a noise filter platform and I'll be your pilot.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Yeah, that's crazy because there's a whole industry built around attribution like a whole, like there's platforms, it's inside of platforms and now there's AI stuff that's going on to try to figure it out. And as a CMO like a tenured CMO has been in a bunch of places it's super interesting to hear. What I hear you saying is like I don't know if we can trust this stuff. I don't know if it's actually useful data. If you had to pull out a usefulness in it, is there any data that's particularly useful coming out of it and, if so, what do you find most useful?

Speaker 2: 13:44

Certainly the last activity before they convert to a lead, right, I mean, almost always. That's for me, the most reliable thing. And if I was to tell any marketer what to do and what activities to invest in, it's invest in the ones that are directly generating leads. And I do think that there's something to be appreciated about the difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, appreciated about the difference between you know B2B marketing and B2C marketing, right, if you're? If you're Nike, you know, or, or Walmart, or you know Amazon. I mean B2C is a different world because you really I mean you want to know what colors of widgets they're interested in so that you can put that color of a widget offer in front of them for their next product.

Speaker 2: 14:28

Like all of that, all of that attribution data and past data that exists in B2C, I think is far more useful than that stuff would be in a B2B world. So you know, for me, I think, like the answer is always the simplest one or the most elegant one, which is go with what you know, not a hunch, not what you suspect, what you can actually see and prove Right, and that's, for example, this most recent QBR that we were in that involved me going through all of our several hundred inbound MQLs for the quarter and looking at all the click history and when I look at it, just you know, with a perfectly honest, you know, truthful perspective, not seeking an agenda, almost always I can just look at the last activity before conversion. What did they show up at the site for? Where did they fill out the form? What did the page say? That's what worked, it's. It's really that simple.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Are you running MTA now, though? Do you have the ability to run multi-touch?

Speaker 2: 15:28

We are yeah, so we have an interesting situation where we're a 35-year-old business, right? So our business was started as a division of GE 35 years ago and has morphed and adapted and changed over those three decades, so a lot of this attribution information has been built up over the past few years and now I feel like it's a lot of data debt and technical debt that needs to be paid off in order to kind of just get a very clear view of the signal. So, yeah, we're doing. We have multi-touch attribution. Salesforce has multi-touch attribution models baked in.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Interestingly enough, I saw that we're using both first touch and last touch together. You can have both models active in Salesforce and I guess Salesforce will tell you what worked. But you know that and that was another thing that leading up to me reaching out to you about this episode I thought was very interesting. It's like so now we're letting Salesforce tell us where our deals came from, and I suppose that's great if you understand why Salesforce is making the determination that it is, but if you don't, you probably struggle to explain some of this stuff sometimes to your partners around the business around the business.

Speaker 1: 16:53

What about the effect of brand just overarching brand on the ability for someone to be interested in you and interested in you and then to to to get to click on something that comes to you? Can't really measure that as easy, can you? I mean, what's your perspective as a CMO on the importance of brand, and that's might be something that you really can't measure as directly.

Speaker 2: 17:10

Yeah, interesting question. So, gosh, I guess I'm going to confess to being a rogue or renegade marketer, but I've always sought out opportunities where you didn't need a brand to be successful in marketing. Again, coming back to I was a product manager early in the day. Just where my heart is is I want to win on the strength of our product. I want to win on the strength of our value prop and I don't want to win on how far and wide we can spend to get the brand out there. And then, coupled with that, I think a lot of fellow marketers are out there.

Speaker 2: 17:47

Probably a lot of the people you know as well are in niche. You know, in niche verticals, right, where you're targeting very, very discrete segments of the market. Right, you're targeting specific functions of the business HR or finance. You're targeting specific roles in that a risk and compliance person or a facilities ops person, right? So you don't need this massive household brand right to be successful in those spaces, and that's liberating to me. I actually find that to be very liberating. I'm an organizer and a tinkerer by nature. So I, like you know, simplicity is, is is my nirvana and I don't. I want to eliminate as many factors to success as possible. I don't. I don't want to have to incorporate a new factor and a new factor and a new factor all the time. I think that kind of leads to just madness. Right, and I want to be. I'm already an energetic guy. I want to be, be, you know, I want to be calm at work okay, I want to.

Speaker 1: 18:51

I know you're, I know you are about ready to redo some of the properties there, since you're, you know CMO and have taken a look at sort of under the hood of everything, with the website being one of them. How does the measurement, how does this measurement discussion affect how you approach web, especially the web rebuild or redesign or re-messaging? Does it affect? It at all Does it affect your thinking?

Speaker 2: 19:14

Yeah, it does in a couple of very interesting ways too. I think one of the first ways and we were chatting about this in the warm-up session to the shoot here is I'm a privacy guy, so I love privacy minded solutions as much as anyone. But I think if you were to take a poll of global website users, I think universally everyone would conclude that that whole GDPR cookie banner accept all cookies thing is just the biggest pain in the butt in the whole world. I don't know anyone that likes that thing.

Speaker 1: 19:46

Right and we all have.

Speaker 2: 19:48

We're all surfing the web every day and I think, like every one of us, is annoyed by it. I don't know anyone that likes that thing right? I agree, we're all surfing the web every day and I think, like every one of us, is annoyed by it. I don't think anyone thinks that's worth the privacy trade-off or even understands, frankly, what the privacy trade-off is. So how it affects measurement and analytics, is there's an opportunity to deploy privacy-minded analytics? Google's going to hate me for this. Google Analytics is not privacy-minded analytics. It's the opposite of privacy-minded analytics. And if you use Google Analytics on your site, you have to and you do any sort of business in the? U you have to do that GDPR, privacy or cookie disclosure.

Speaker 2: 20:24

So I think you know one of the exciting things that we get to do here is we get to figure out how to be a little bit more user friendly, right, a little bit more privacy friendly, while still getting the basic, normal, effective marketing, attribution and analytics that we expect and that we need to do our jobs. So that's one interesting thing that I get to play around with as part of the site work that we're doing. I think the second thing is, you know this is still very much a niche business that I'm in. So, you know, in terms of re-architecting our message and how we position the solutions and position the products to the world, I think there's an opportunity to do so smartly, right In a very smart kind of common sense, human oriented way, and not let us do this endless hand wringing about should we say this or that, this or that, how about this, how about that?

Speaker 2: 21:19

Right, I think this is a good chance to just get down to basics, back to basics, and say, very, very matter of factly, what is this business about? What do we do for our customers? What is the value of being a member of agility? You know what do you get when you become a member of agility? And just that, that plain spoken value prop. You don't have to be super sophisticated. Use, you know, you know 50 cent words all over your website. Just tell them what you do, tell them why you're in it, tell them why you do it. So I'm excited about this thing because, again, I love the whole. Back to basics, right. Just let's get back to signal and try to eliminate all that noise.

Speaker 1: 22:03

Your. Your comment about the cookie thing is so dead on. I hate this. I wonder if anyone even looks at the dumb thing when you hit the accept or reject. What I try to do is I try to figure out which one I can go like. What can I click the button on faster? Does it? Do I do this one or this one? It doesn't matter to me, but I'm probably the edge case from a privacy perspective. Do you know if there's? Do you know what the workaround is to that? I mean, I did. I didn't know it was tied to ga either. I know you can.

Speaker 2: 22:35

I know we have to build it into our google tag manager?

Speaker 1: 22:36

yeah, but is there? Are there workarounds of not having the cookie?

Speaker 2: 22:40

okay, so simpler not a lawyer, right, not not an attorney. Um, I did use chat gpt this morning, but apparently the explicit cookie banner is a GDPR requirement that affects EU and anyone who is within the scope of EU, so that can be people who are French citizens living in the US, for example. Right, the scope is just massive. I think everyone remembers when GDPR was rolled out how much you know how big of a deal that was.

Speaker 1: 23:09

A lot of companies made a lot of money off it too.

Speaker 2: 23:11

GDPR, you know. But I think number one, you know, agility recovery doesn't, doesn't have a book of business in Europe, we don't deliver our services there. So that that's kind of what started me on. You know, can I just figure out a way to get around? Not get around, but just to not be in scope for GDPR in the first place? So you know. So I think I think you know, figure out where your scope, where your coverage and your scope of GDPR lies, and you know you're probably onto something if you don't seek to get business in Europe. Yeah, that's the starting point. Yeah, that's the starting point.

Speaker 2: 23:47

And then the second thing that I learned in this journey is that a lot of those behavioral analytics that are in scope for GDPR are, you know, is what Google's using. So you know GA is taking. That's what's considered sharing. When you take traffic data from your website and you hand it over to GA, that's considered data sharing. That's in scope for that regulation. So the question I then ask myself is do I need GA? And sure enough, there's actually analytics packages out there that are either local side hosted analytics packages that are single session right and they don't capture all of those non-essential cookies that's, you know so prevalent in in the in the google analytics platform.

Speaker 2: 24:33

So, you know, caution, everyone, like you know, ask the questions you need to ask right. Like you know, bring, bring in your experts. But you know, I I think there is a way forward where, if you just you know, if you want to be, if you want basic analytics that do the trick, that tell you what's working and what's not working on your website, and you can figure out your scope and exposure to some of these things and do it easily. I think you're in a big, you know, you're in a big kind of de-scoping mode of your tech and you can shed all of this, all of this data and tech debt that we have, shed all of this, all of this data and tech debt that we have. You know, we've all joined places where you fire up Google tag manager and you know there's there's 50 or 70 tags set up on your website and I don't think many people know what they even do, right? So that's an argument for just slimming everything down, just focusing on what you need and and eliminating everything that you don't.

Speaker 1: 25:27

Oh, that's fascinating. I never even it, never even entered into my brain not to have tag manager. That's why you're, that's why who you are and who I am, because you would be the guy knowing you to say I wonder if we need this thing. I wonder if there's something else that's so awesome. I am seeing two camps of like tech overhead. It's like it's like either either everyone wants to put the sink, have the single platform they're looking for the single platform that solves everything. They get a HubSpot route and they do everything through HubSpot or you're seeing all these micro solutions, little solutions that talk to each other really easy and, um, I don't know which one's simpler. I mean, I think there's a case we made that going one stack easy, consolidated stack is easy, but then you lose that on the functionality. There's another case to make that if you're keeping your options open with a bunch of different platforms, smaller platforms, let's say, more agile stuff you're not as beholden to any of the technology providers. It's really an interesting time.

Speaker 2: 26:27

Yeah, and I've used both In my last two roles. I've done both of these approaches. One was single stack on HubSpot, which I loved. I think HubSpot does a great job as a single stack right, it's easy, it's intuitive, it's reliable, it works. But then you come into a shop that isn't a HubSpot shop and, rather than do a big HubSpot deployment, you sit there and you look at your tool set and you say what do I need to do? And if you have a contrarian mindset, right, if you just think of, well, what's the other way, what's the other option, and you just keep asking those questions and you keep finding answers, this is okay, this is actually possible. This is exciting. I can do my job with about 25% of the tech stock I thought I needed to be able to do. It's absolutely fascinating.

Speaker 1: 27:12

Yeah, you're the best at that too. You're the master of being like what. Why do we need to do it this way? And you just go off there and usually make it work. Before I let you go, I'm curious because you're a CMO and I'm interested to ask this question what do you think of what's been the benefit of AI in your marketing effort there at Agility, like what? Just give me your general thoughts on how you're using it, with the good and the bad. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 27:36

Yeah, ai, I tell, I tell everyone that you know AI changed our jobs overnight, right? So, beyond the obvious, which is, you know, using AI to kind of like, do a lot of your, your writing, right? It's a large language model, so it's great at writing words. Where I've been using it recently, and where we're getting to with agility, is using a more agentic AI approach for lead gen. So we're building a series of AI GPTs or bots that are going out and doing some website scraping and finding external kind of like macro events and deducing which potential businesses would be exposed to those events and then targeting those businesses based on that conclusion. So, for example, there's a number of websites out there that track weather-related activity. Some of them are commercial, some of them are open-sourced. But if you know that a five-mile radius around a particular town's flooding happened and you can pull that data in by using a GPT web scraper tool and then you can cross-reference that with your database, external data, business data and so on, you're actually in a position to go to affected targets in the market and say, hey, we understand that you just had some catastrophic flooding in your area. Whether or not your business was disrupted isn't now the time you should look into business continuity tools. Or another thing is a popular thing is hey, it looks like over the past 12 months, you know, the area that your business is located in has had a grand total of 27 hours of power outages over the past year. That's extremely effective information if you're targeting businesses to offer them backup power on demand. So these GPTs are starting to talk to each other, right.

Speaker 2: 29:31

One GPT's job is to go find the events out, the weather events out in the world. Another is to associate them with businesses, look those businesses up. And yet a third is to look at that business, the affected business, and what business they're in. Look at the event that happened out in the world and craft an ideal pitch and say you know, here's a pitch because there's just a lot of power outages in your area. Here's a pitch because there was, you know, a hurricane risk and you're in a FEMA flood zone and you know, and you're in a, for example, a pharmaceutical storage business where you can't have more than you know 25 minutes at a time of power outage.

Speaker 2: 30:10

So that kind of use of AI and particularly an agentic approach building purpose-specific GPTs and having them actually talk to each other in order to generate the outcome is truly fascinating stuff. I hope every marketer is looking into this stuff, and the tools are prolific, right? I don't need to mention any of the names, but there's just tons of tools out there. So dig in, go for it. It's exciting stuff. It's going to make your job a lot easier.

Speaker 1: 30:37

Yeah, the whole GPT stacking idea is so cool, I mean that's so, I mean we do it, but I'd never really connected the way you connected it. And then the data platform that you talk about, like connected it and that the um, the data platform that you talk about, like I used to work at heart hanks and we would. We had all these really complex epsilon does this to really complex models that would look at weather and then if there was a weather event, they would go to home depot and say these stores need to show, you know, the umbrella ads or whatever the, whatever the product was. Now you can just do it by just a gpt. That's unbelievable, really good use case.

Speaker 1: 31:11

That's crazy impressive stuff okay, so I wanted to. I want to take you through. This has been awesome. I want to take you through a little thing we do here on tech marketing where this is going to be a little scary for you, but I'm gonna uh. So I go into perplexity. I ask it, I tell it. Hey, here, I I want a. I want to do an ai roulette question with my next podcast guest. I want it to be unexpected and provocative for him at the end of the podcast based on his experience that I load in your LinkedIn profile. So I'm going to hit send here and let's see what it gives me. Okay, just based on your LinkedIn profile. Here's a provocative, unexpected question. If you could implant a single unfiltered AI generated thought into the mind of every executive in your industry, what would it be and what chaos or transformation do you think it would unleash? I guess you can pick your industry. Is it in the marketing industry? Is it in the disaster recovery industry?

Speaker 2: 32:05

That's an interesting so I have to inject a thought into.

Speaker 1: 32:12

Yeah, every executive in your industry. And what would you hope it would? What chaos or transformation do you think it would unleash?

Speaker 2: 32:17

no, I'm going to take the easy way out, because I've I've said this before. I think ai is accelerating this, but I think I think marketers are endangered species and and I would, and I would honestly say like if if a marketer comes to you and says they have the answers, don't trust it. We don't have the answers. We're searching for the truth, just like everyone else, and I think the temptation is that having a lot of data and having a lot of data analytics means that you know the truth. I don't think it does. So, yeah, and for that reason, marketers are an endangered species.

Speaker 1: 32:51

We will not exist in this life form, in another tenor don't like think about all, the, all the stuff and I totally agree with you.

Speaker 1: 33:12

I think jacob bank was on one of the podcasts so far and he was. He had a really good way of putting the perfect marketer in the future at least for the, for the foreseeable future, where we wanted people that had a real tools first mentality. Like they were like thinking, if I'm a mark and you're really good at this, like you're this. Strangely, I don't know, maybe because we have all this context and background, we're like this, but it's someone who, if you give them a problem or solution, the first thing they think about is what is there a tool that can solve this? And with agents and AI and all this technology and stuff getting easier and more accessible, I think that is a. I think that's where things are headed. We need those type of people in marketing, more of those types of people.

Speaker 2: 33:46

Totally agree. Yeah, if there's got to be a tool to solve it, and I think what that means for us as a species, kevin, like doesn't that mean that we're we're going to become more operators of technology, and it's, it's really about the tool selection. So our success will be about the tool selection and not necessarily our understanding of the market or, you know, our mastery of the subject matter. Right, it's really just it's going to be about, you know, are we good operators of the tools?

Speaker 1: 34:14

Yeah, and have a good knowledge set of them, such that we can build a community around you. Know how do you harness this stuff, which will be awesome. And you would be awesome in that community because you know, you know you're. You're a person I go to when I'm trying to broaden my perspective on this stuff, so it's awesome.

Speaker 2: 34:31

Well, Dennis, I really appreciate it. Don't oversell me, all right.

Speaker 1: 34:36

No, you're great. So I wanted people to get a hold of you. How would they get a hold of Agility or you? What's the best way to contact you if they want to talk more about this stuff?

Speaker 2: 34:47

AgilityRecoverycom great website, and also on LinkedIn. We love LinkedIn, sharing great information there Me personally also. On LinkedIn, dennis Bierman easy to find and if you ever need to email me it's just Dennis at DennisBiermancom.

Speaker 1: 34:59

Love it. Dennis, thank you so much. I was so glad you reached out to me and you know we'll do this again as you, as you get more provocative ideas in that head of yours.

Speaker 2: 35:08

Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for having me, and I'll be your guy for anything controversial. I love the controversial topics, of course.

Speaker 1: 35:14

Okay, man, we'll see you.

Speaker 2: 35:15

See you, take care.

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