AI Powered Outcomes on the Open Internet with Amol Waishampayan

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.128) Welcome back to the winner's circle, everybody. I'm here with Amol from Full Throttle AI. This is going to be a great conversation about the future of advertising and how AI is playing a role in that. So Amol welcome to the winner's circle and congratulations on the award. Amol Waishampayan (00:16.098) Thanks for having me and glad to be here. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:19.668) So why don't you just give us, I've been following you for a long time. I've been interested in this space for a long time. I've been in the digital marketing and media space for a long time and following you guys because you've won so many awards. Give us just the brief elevator pitch on Full Throttle and yourself. Amol Waishampayan (00:35.982) For sure. Ultimately, we are aiming to be the easy button for the open internet. And we really specifically focus on mid-market brands, agencies. So we're not looking for the huge agencies, the big, you know, billion dollar brands. really in that mid-market space, which is, often underserved. There hasn't been enough tools and technology, especially in the ad tech space that has been made for SMB and for mid-market. So ultimately our, really our, our main mission is to make ad tech easy. And we do that by. Simplifying the very complex world of ad tech for brands, agencies, we provide a AI enabled intuitive platform and unifies three key things that should be part of every advertising plan. One is audience identification down to household, omni-channel activation, means CTV, display, online video, audio, podcasting, and even direct mail is all part of our omni-channel activation tool. And then we neurotically enable brands and agencies to measure every dollar of media sent through the platform against those audiences across all those tactics to measure those dollars against real outcomes. So I sold this many windows, this many cars, this many solar installations. Here's the gross profit on those. So it's a pretty robust outcome measurement against real media activations against high quality audiences. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (02:03.42) Well, and that's what it's about, right? It's about results. And if you've been in marketing long enough, your CEO has come to you and said, like, you know, we spent a million dollars on that campaign, $50,000, whatever it is, what are the results? And as a marketer, you're like, well, we sent some emails, and we got 14 clicks to the website, and sales said they got one sale, right? For years, we've been doing attribution that way. And then Google came along and gave us some new tools and other ad tech platforms came along. Attribution is really the trick in all of this, isn't it? Like, where did that click come from and how did they get to your site? Amol Waishampayan (02:42.414) I think actually it is and to really further define, think the industry has gone actually in the incorrect direction over the last couple of years and it's natural why it happened, but everything became very click-based attribution, right? So I went to Google, I searched for something, I clicked a paid search ad, at some point maybe I converted. And so paid search gets credit for as much paid search as you're spending. Right. And so often it misses the boat or same with email. Like we sent this many emails, even a direct mail piece. sent these many direct mail pieces. It's a list based activation. So here's how many people out of the list purchased from me. Right. And so that's thinking about like. Marketing went along before digital back in the day, like list based activation. you were able to tell or turn it's been tougher in the digital space. so when you think about CTV. display video, you know, what were the behaviors and exposures that led me to go search on Google, right? And because you couldn't measure that the way that you could measure direct mail or a list-based activation, or you could have measured that in the way that you knew that someone clicked on a Facebook ad or clicked on a Google ad and then fill out a form, you know, on a website. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:04.35) Mm-hmm. Amol Waishampayan (04:05.716) What did the world start doing over the last whatever it's called five, 10 years, we're to put everything into meta slash Facebook and Google because I can measure it. And so when my CEO yells at me that I don't know if I'm seeing results. Well, at least I can point to Google and meta showing some clicks and maybe showing some form conversions. So when's it happening is that everyone starts spending probably too much money on both of those platforms and it becomes a race to the bottom. So it's like. how can I get a cheaper cost per click? And it becomes when you're chasing, when that is your marketing strategy, which I'm oversimplifying maybe, but it becomes the marketing strategy. I just gone for a cheaper cost per click across Google and Meta. Yeah, we do some other stuff. We sprinkle it, but it doesn't really, I'm not really a part of it. Now with tools like Full Throttle AI, you can see the entire marketing journey. you know, getting exposed to CTV and display in a direct mail piece, then clicking on Facebook ads and Google ads, then coming into a store and buying something offline. Right. And so now for the first time, can start to, I would say, no one still has the magic wand, right? But at least you can start to better understand the full journey, what's making an impact. And maybe more importantly, what's not making an impact? What do you need to actually do less? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:25.34) So is that what's broken in kind of that mid market today is just the visibility of it all? Or when you're talking to a new customer, what's the number one problem that they're trying to solve? Amol Waishampayan (05:37.679) I think everyone wants more outcomes and given the economy and given everything happening in the world, every AI mania, right? I think every team in the world, whether you're an agency or you're an advertiser slash brand, or if you're a media company, you're looking to say, how can I do more with less? Because we are in the world of AI. And what ends up happening is that if my marketing strategy is 70, 80 % meta, Facebook, Google, right? Then it's like, well, I feel like when I spend more money there, I'm not getting more outcomes, which makes sense because putting it all in one place and you're just rising the driving the price up for the Facebook click because everyone's doing the same thing, right? It's a bid ultimately. So I think what ends up happening is when we when I talk to agencies and brands, they're like, listen, I just don't I need a better thing about media mix, but I need to have a defensible media mix. I've got to focus on the right audiences. got to see how I'm making an impact. I got to measure in outcomes. And so we enable brands and agencies and media companies that kind of act like agencies often in serving their advertisers to finally bring the full picture together and say, Hey, you know, if I reduce my investment in paid search and paid social, and I put it into something that is really targeted at an audience level. but some of these call it non-clickable media. I can actually see that my paid search and paid social results are going up by spending less money on them, which is like a mind blowing kind of concept. Right, it's totally counterintuitive, but if you think about the opposite, it's just everyone throw money at the same bid and you're just driving up the price. So of course your cost per acquisition is going up. Of course you're not getting incrementality when you spend more money. So these are... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:17.524) Totally counterintuitive. Amol Waishampayan (07:34.009) There's many things that come up in the market, but this is a main one. Agencies do that for their advertisers, advertisers who work with us directly, and they have an internal marketing team. They're facing the same challenges. Agencies, it's even tougher because they had to think about how am I also monetizing my services on top? Or how am I providing really unique proprietary tech on top of my tech stack so I can close a new business faster? I can get more clients. How can I? If I double my revenue, can I keep my head count the same? These are the things that agencies are thinking about when it comes to AI and next generation tools as well. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (08:12.948) Some of the problems I've run into, I know others have, in my career, was two. run into, especially with Google ads, you see results and you're like, okay, I put 25 in and I got 50 out. Great, I'll do that all day long. But then the question is, should I double that or triple that? And you don't know the answer, what that answer is gonna be before you make that investment. And I think a lot of teams are worried about cannibalization on Google is that you're buying ads to be up top when in effect your content that would have been on top there is now second or third. And then Google keeps putting AI results on top of search now. So you wonder where that is. We know ads are coming there too. And then they keep threatening to get rid of the cookie. And so we're really kind of living on that teeter right now. And it seems like that cookie is the biggest limitation that we have. Amol Waishampayan (09:13.998) To a certain degree, think, you know, funny enough, we've been doing this since 2018, actually. So we've been doing it for now a long time. And when we, you know, founded the company and we found some unique developers are working with in the first kind of few months, we made a decision, a little bit of foresight. I would say a little bit of luck as well to say, Hey, I don't know what's going to happen in the next five, 10 years, but let's build this without. being without using cookies, right? So can we have something that is a it can it's not cookie reliant, right? So it can fully persist even if cookies one day disappear and we built it really ahead of time and so when the when the I think the seesaw Will they do it? Well, they don't do it happen those couple of years We were certainly well positioned for growth and it's only drove one of the factors of growth for us last couple of years But I think ultimately what happened still was signal loss, right? And so cookie is just another signal that without when it's with its loss, you it's harder to find the right audiences, activate them, and then measure if that any actual material effect on the business. And, you know, it wasn't just cookies, but like for those that I think Android has it and iPhone has it like the ask app, not to track stuff that they came out and A lot of privacy around that. So now like you had less identifiers being fed in the ecosystem. Luckily, our platform is not subject to any of those signal changes in terms of how we identify households, how we find the right audiences. In a way, everyone is surely subject to some kind of signal loss, but we had a little bit of foresight, a little bit of luck and chose to build a technology that way. It's part of our core set of patents that we did. So we also protected. that technology as well early on in the early 2020. So we received patents and we've been getting a new patent probably every other year as we build out our collection of how we really do everything in one float. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:27.1) And so you guys aren't focusing on the cookies. I think you're focused on a household level kind of identity. that right? Amol Waishampayan (11:33.559) Yeah, exactly. And for many businesses, certainly not every single one in the world, but for many businesses where it's not, hey, I'm going to go to QSR McDonald's, you know, order or order a Whopper. I am, I have an item that is going to take me probably more than a day to think about purchasing or service rather than think about purchasing. And there could be multiple people involved in that decision. It's a bigger ticket item, meaning it's not like 20 bucks, right? It's something that I might could have a little bit of consideration in the right product. you know, where you have those kinds of things, and then when you convert or you purchase a product or a service, often it can be measured at the household level. And that's actually the most accurate way to measure it. So I'll give you an example with buying cars. You could do the same thing for buying a sofa or anything, right? But with a buying a car, you could put it, Russ, in your name, you could put it in a spouse's name, you be buying it for a teenager, put in the teenager's name, you could be using your email, a joint email, you know, relationships that have a joint email. So when you think about, how are you gonna do the, what's the single piece of identifier? That's probably consistent. And funny enough, because there's, a lender typically involved in some shape or form or a shipping address, some shape or form, right? The most accurate piece of information is actually the household. And so most of the ad tech industry has been built on the backs of something called a hashed email, which is cool and it works for certainly many use cases. But for so much of the mid-market and in aggregate is a massive part of the economy. household and measurement that way is actually a much more meaningful way to get material outcomes from your investment. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:34.366) So how are you turning that kind of that first party data into something that's actionable across all of those channels? That seems to be the magic sauce. Amol Waishampayan (13:42.167) Yeah, yeah. And some of it is certainly we have our patent numbers that are published publicly and there's a, there's certainly, will call a scientific rabbit hole to go down to really explain how it works. But essentially we have a proprietary tag that doesn't use cookies. That's one key driver. We have integrations with DMSs, which is kind of like the CRM in the automotive space of transactional data over your. have integrations with home service CRMs, right? So like we have a lot of ways that you can pull in your first party data. We have people that just like using a, I don't know about sphere, it's like a Facebook custom audience and go in and map your columns. You have all of that technology as well. And so you're able to upload attribution data, et cetera. So there's a couple of different ways that we allow advertisers to bring some first party data to the... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (14:21.908) Mm-hmm. Amol Waishampayan (14:39.407) you know, to the game. And then also we are the main source because everyone can do that. Um, is our proprietary tag that's taking real in market signals without using cookies and saying, I'm going to convert those in the households and first party data that you can touch and see and feel. And then it starts feeling real. And it's like, well, you know, I have all these households that are interested. I can see them jumping from an iPhone to a Mac in the house. Or maybe like send it to a spouse in the living room. I don't know. Just make up a situation, right? and it becomes much more actionable. So for a marketer, certainly they're created to set an urgency of like, okay, well, how do I send a direct mail piece, CTV? I want to immerse this household so that when they look to buy, you know, install a new garage next month or this month, whatever, I want to be fully immersed. Every member of that household has to be thinking about our brand, right. And our promotion, whatever it may be. so. It creates urgency there. And then even for marketing teams that need to curry and defend investment from their C-suite, either the CMO or from the CEO or from the CFO. They can also show, hey, here's, I know they're all numbers in the PDF or a dashboard, but these are real people that are shopping. They are in market. They're going to buy from us or our competitors. So do we want them to buy from our competitors? We want them, or do want to convert them? Right. And so it creates, I think, a good canvas for our marketers that are either on the advertiser side or on the agency side, right? To be able to create some urgency and conviction on why an investment is worth it. And then we'll add on to prove it. So that's the ultimate Holy Grail as well. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:27.6) Yeah, I remember I was at a big internet service provider at one point in my career and I remember talking to the guy responsible for kind of residential marketing of internet services. And I said to him, said like, man, I got a lot of mail from you. Like it seems like every two or three days I'm pulling something out of my mailbox that's either direct mail piece from you or it's a coupon in one of the coupon books or something. And I'm seeing ads. And I said, why is that? And he said, cause we know that this decision is going to be made. And we have to basically lay the foundation so that when you make a decision, we're there. And that's got to be about the most inefficient spent you could ever have. And it sounds like you guys are tackling that dead on. If there's no signal, don't spend the money. Amol Waishampayan (17:18.509) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's, your, I would say most profitable audiences, meaning they're, I think they're low hanging fruit. They're in market. they're evidencing behaviors. They're selecting products and services that, based on what your website is showing them. Right. And you can segment and drill down all of those ways and really get really target, you know, the people that want this product line, right. They want the, you know, KitchenAid set of appliances and these types of appliances. You can target them very specifically. If you go to an ad platform, like a Google or something, you're going to able to target that level of granularity. And then measure, they buy the KitchenAid? So some really cool ways you can, when it's first party data that you can touch and see and feel, it also gives you some pretty incredible segmentation opportunities, get really smart about how you're targeting and that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:58.804) No. Amol Waishampayan (18:14.255) becomes fun. mean, we kind of gamify it too, right? So then it becomes, people, hate to say marketers hate marketing, you know, but I do think that that is a thing that has happened just because of how disconnected everything is and how much of a guessing game and how much of a defense it's become. So we kind of make it much more, gamified and much more hands on, right? We have a full self-service platform too, you know, that agencies and brands use. It becomes something that allows them to kind of get back into what made them love marketing in the first place. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (18:49.606) It is fun. It is gamified though. You're always on the hunt, right? We used to be on the hunt for traffic and then clicks and now we're really on intent. So you guys have positioned yourself in this agentic AI category. I think agentic AI is going to be the buzzword for this year, that and chief AI officer as a title. What does that actually mean inside your platform? Amol Waishampayan (19:11.865) Right. Amol Waishampayan (19:16.687) For a couple different ways. we use large language models to better look at what URLs people are looking at and then translating that into intent. So when you think about website visits and URLs, there's so many letters and characters and terms that certainly you can use non-AI to determine with a lot of rule rules basically, if the string contains this word, then it means this. But it's a huge catalog of business rules, right? With AI, you're kind of making a leap on propensity. What product and service are they interested in? How likely are they to buy? How many times have they seen? And so the calculus on coming to a conclusion on some of these things, one, we use AI there, that's a huge way. Then, saying, we have a custom bidder service. So we know if Russ, you know, Russ says as a household ID is being activated, how do we go find all the right devices that we need to link in? So there's some great, I call it our signal graph, audience, you know, signal graph. I mean, everyone says identity graph. think that term's been termed to death. People use it in different ways. But I think if you have a bidder, I think about the bidder like a huge stream. You know, that is flowing. when you put your kind of dip your toe in the stream, you get, get to listen into all kinds of real time. It's like the stock ticker. You get to see all kinds of activation and signals. And so it's a really, again, anytime you have huge amounts of data volume language, you're using all of that and same for outcomes as we're trying to make the leap to say, well, here was the kind of way that we're linking and determining that there was a material effect on outcomes and how are we making those things together? So. Those are the main ways. It's funny because most platforms and you say, well, what's your AI? And they serve up a little chat bot that's in the platform or maybe whether it's a little widget or it's like in the screen, it's like you can type. And we have some of that too, don't get me wrong. can say, build me a plan. Yeah, it is like build me a plan to sell more electric vehicles and we'll go use all of your first party data and segment and bring it in. It'll price it out for you. It's the ad tech easy button, right? So of course AI. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (21:28.584) Great for support. Amol Waishampayan (21:41.657) Does it that way? just feel like everyone's kind of got a version of a, you know, type in a, want to do this and it gives you a plan. And I think that's table stakes now when it comes to agentic. I think the other pieces where you are better connecting dots behind the scenes and it's even though it doesn't, it's not an AI I'm talking to necessarily, but you're using what are large language models to better deduce how systems and data points can be connected to make an impact. That's where I think the real ingenuity leaps of AI are. But again, we have the thing where you type it into and it gives you the plan and you kind of able to move a lot faster when you think about, have an idea to here's a plan and now I can press the button and I'm boom, I'm live from thought to plan to active. And I can be doing that, you know, in 20. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:31.916) How much of the kind of campaign planning and execution can be just automated without even going into that? I imagine you have goals and rules, are your customers kind of setting that easy button and letting it go? Amol Waishampayan (22:48.095) I think there's always, and we recommend a large degree of human intelligence coupled with artificial intelligence. think those that are saying AI and set it and forget it, A, I don't think it's the best strategy. B, I think there is downstream implications. So if you're set it and forget it, how long until you realize there is a true problem, right? To me, that's like how you create a bubble essentially. It's not regulated. There's no human intelligence that's saying, let me at least do a dentist check. I call the dentist checks like, you we go to get your teeth clean. have the hygienist does like 95 % of the work, teeth are clean. Dentist comes in five minutes at the end, pokes around looking good. Everything good, good to go, sends you on your way. And I feel like, you know, the human's role becomes more of the dentist, the hygienist is the AI's role that does all of the heavy lifting. So you can. make better decisions at a higher volume in a faster way. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:50.493) Now, you mentioned earlier that you deal with a lot of the automotive industry. Walk us through maybe a case study in something where that worked really well. And what problem are you solving? How did it come to fruition? Amol Waishampayan (23:56.057) Sure. Amol Waishampayan (24:09.327) For sure. So I think the biggest thing that, um, most, I would say, I want to say all dealers really struggle with is, is similar to what we've talked about. So they need to sell more cars. They need to service more cars and they need to do it at a pace that is better than their surrounding competitors. And it could be the same brand or it could be a competitive brand. So sell and service more cars and do it at a level that is better than your competitors. So you're actually getting market share. Ultimately, that is what every dealer cares about. Doesn't matter what technology and what you're talking about. That's all that matters at the end of the day. And their challenges are often the same, which is 80 % of my budget is paid search and paid social. And when I think about awareness, although that word, has become, what's the word? I think it's become an a word that's not preferred, right? In the industry, because it feels like, well, that's not measurable. I can't measure awareness. How do I know it's actually having an impact? But the truth is, again, if you're a paid search and paid social, it's like, well, how do I get more people to come to the site? And they're only focused on, well, when someone searches, I want to show up to the top. Or if there's some signals in Facebook, I want to be in every other post in my Facebook newsfeed or Instagram newsfeed or TikTok newsfeed or whatever it is. And so what we solved for dealers and dealer groups is, Hey, I want to be able to launch and build campaigns in two minutes. And, know, the three top three use cases that we've been seeing a lot of that are, think, very interesting, at least to me. One is I want to take all my customers who have less than six months left on lease from my DMS. I want to go find other lease conquest customers, meaning those that music, spirit and data. There's a couple of interesting things you can actually extend. So you think about like the first is the small circle. It's my using my own data six months left. Next is a bigger circle on that. Well, what are people like them? You call them lookalikes, you know, other people that are in conquest mode. And I want to specifically target a Hispanic market. So I'm going to target Univision inventory, right. And television, you easy, right. So can I target Univision inventory? and then can I do that? And then can I do that? Amol Waishampayan (26:35.631) In two minutes without, I, can I have all that data in my fingertips, which is essentially what we allow them to do. Finalize the price and what I'm going to spend and the levels and all that good stuff. And then we have real time integrations. So every day you can see how many new leases you're able to sell from that campaign. So that's probably the biggest one. We do one for service where it's like, we've seen them take some never service customers and some defected service customers. I mean, they serve us a bunch of times, but they haven't in like two plus years, for example, right? They take those and they send and they deliver a promotion via CTV display and a direct mail piece, all three, right? And they say, well, how many new ROs was able to bring back from people that kind of left me maybe for the local Pep Boys or whatever, right? So those two are probably, know, if I had to, the interest of time, there's two I wanted to focus on. Like those are some good ways and then you can really slice and dice, you know, go to town. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:35.445) Dealers do love after service. know I've talked to a couple of dealers like that and it's, selling cars are great, but bringing those customers back is really the juice because you're getting them not only to, on that service revenue, but also, they're there at the next time they want a new car. They're seeing new cars, they're interacting with your team. is, I mean, it is a great ecosystem if they can get it right. And when they get it right, it's really, it really is a, it's a great customer experience too. Amol Waishampayan (27:52.001) All right. Amol Waishampayan (28:04.067) Yep, for sure. you start getting into lifetime value and retention of customers staying in brand, or at least the OEM cares about them, a Nissan dealer getting customers to buy more Nissans. But an interesting marketplace, when if you're a dealer group that owns five different stores, close five different brands, you mostly care that they are buying from Russ Auto Group, right? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (28:28.754) Right. Amol Waishampayan (28:29.419) And they're staying kind of in the family that way. So there's some interesting things around lifetime value they can do. can do cross promotion. That's another use case that we've seen is because we bring all the data together in one place. And then, mean, there's a lot of auto has been crazy last couple of years, supply chain tariffs, like a lot going on. There's a lot of consolidation in the industry. There's, you know, store purchases. so lifetime value starts becoming a conversation of like, what's what's the average lifetime value for customers of dealership X? versus dealership Y. so, I mean, you could argue that was always a consideration, but I think the world's forces that are at play today has probably accelerated what that value means in the market. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (29:13.65) Yeah, and these aren't family owned mom and pop businesses anymore. Most of these dealers, they own multiple brands, multiple cities, multiple regions. Amol Waishampayan (29:21.123) Yeah. We work with a couple dealer groups. know, one that is probably about 325 stores. yeah, pretty large. No, no. mean, they're publicly traded. Yeah. So I think there's a lot that can be used when you have the right people that are able to champion it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (29:32.968) That's amazing. That is not a small business. not a giant business. Right. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (29:46.292) So you've been doing this since 2018. What surprised you most about how customers are using the platform today? Amol Waishampayan (29:52.996) I think that's a good question. What has surprised me the most? I think that everyone wants a self-service tool to feel like they can get behind the wheel and drive, right? But that's not what surprised me. We assume that's why we built a self-service tool. I think what surprised me is that I don't think they actually want to be using the self-service tool all that much. I think they just want to feel like they're not getting hoodwinked and it's kind of their ad account. And it's like, they can go in there and they could make changes, but ain't nobody got time for that. So that's where they're going to use an agency or they're going to have a marketing team that's going to do some of the, some, know, build it out and kind of expand it that way. So I think, um, it was surprising and not surprising if that makes sense. Like it was surprising. was like, yeah, makes sense. There's still going to be a bit of either they're going to have a Russ Fordyce 🏆 (30:49.939) No, I get it. Amol Waishampayan (30:54.191) on their side team member or they're gonna use some of our services. It takes two minutes, but sometimes you just, you know, wanna be able to go faster. The other thing I compare it to, have you taken one of those Waymo cars? Very cool, I've taken them, you know, for some people it's very scary because you're in the back, just going up front and you'll be on a highway, if you're going 60 miles per hour, it's like, Russ Fordyce 🏆 (31:08.934) I have not yet, no. Amol Waishampayan (31:22.607) This is crazy, right? And I think of a lot of managed service advertising services the exact same way. It's like, I don't really know if I fully trust it. If there was a Waymo where, and I guess these are just like autopilot cars, right? If you just own a car that autopilot, but if you could just be like, cool, but I could take the Sierra and do what I want at any time, then that's essentially what we're seeing as a big use case. I didn't expect there to be as much of that. as we do have today, it's really a hybrid of, we want, we, it's a self-service, why we're using it, but I kind of want your help to help me do things once in a while. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (32:01.524) Well, you still require some expertise. When I was in telecom, we used to build telecom systems and communication systems, and you would always build the self-service portal so that people can go in and make changes. And I think part of the problem is, A, they're fearful that they're going to mess something up because you're dealing with routing and complex things. And I imagine in your world too, you turn one thing off and it has a pretty dramatic effect to results when you didn't think it might. so having that is sometimes a little bit of you know, a catch-22. When you're thinking about marketing and you guys have really kind of, you know, unified this identity and activation and measurement, how does this change kind of that landscape of advertising and marketing? Amol Waishampayan (32:33.593) Yep, sense. Amol Waishampayan (32:49.921) Yeah, I think it, I think probably everyone is searching for an easier tool. I think AI has, I mean, we've been doing that for, before I think generative AI came to the level of maturity that it is today. But I think everyone's searching for that. So I do think human intelligence will be more important than ever, which is maybe a counter narrative to what you hear in the marketplace. it's just, there's a lot of noise in the marketplace. But I think that as the AI language becomes table stakes for every platform, it's how you use the platform still, Like how you control what you say to it, how you think about the strategy. I think the human intelligence becomes more important than ever. The analogy that I use in It's Imperfect is Google. So people that use Google are not equal. Some people... are great at finding things on Google and knowing how to use Google. And even with AI, right? And some people are not as good and they'll put something in, right? And so I think it's kind of the same thing where yes, the learning curve is much better and you're much smaller barrier to entry if any barrier, right? You can start. But the people that are really good at using any kind of agenda platform, especially in the ad tech space. are gonna be the ones that have the highest amount of strategy, highest amount of, I'll call it human intelligence, which encompasses a couple of different things, right? And so I think, I don't know if that answers your question, I think identity market measure, all gonna happen, audiences activation, attribution, everyone's gonna say they have all these things, everyone's gonna have a version, some will be exaggerating, some will have it, that's the world that we live in. But I think the human intelligence combined with the artificial intelligence will kind of show the winners. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (34:46.152) Well, and you've been dealing with this or you've been building this for a long time now. You've been in this AI market. You've seen this evolution into generative AI. What mistakes are you seeing companies make now as they adopt AI into their marketing? Amol Waishampayan (34:51.225) Yeah. Amol Waishampayan (35:02.753) Yeah, think probably not sense checking things. So I do think people are using AI to come up with drafts of plans, but are they mailing it in, right? Or are they actually applying a layer on top when it comes to marketing teams that I think are either overusing AI in the sense that they're not sense tracking it. there's those that are like, listen, I think it's pretty easy to set up. I think like, if there's a will, there's a way, but there's still the ones that will be like, I'm not going to do that. And so for those that just can't adopt the new stuff, I think those are some mistakes that we're seeing. And then I think the third bucket of mistakes probably is for marketers that are thinking about data, audience, and even for other SaaS platforms. put them all in one bucket. They are looking for, or, you they're looking for platforms that are AI enabled, not AI powered. And I think AI enabled means like, take some, you know, pollen dust AI features and kind of just like sprinkle them throughout the application. Call it AI. Yeah, call it AI, a little widget here and there. Hey, we got AI. Check it off and go. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (36:21.8) make it a little bit better. Amol Waishampayan (36:29.805) And I think AI powered requires a very different architecture. So AI powered means that you have an enclosure, you have an ecosystem, and in that you have guardrails and you have AI agents and you have MCP servers and different models that are kind of working within your space and able to interact with other agents externally. And I think that's, even if you're building that stack at a brand or as an advertiser and thinking about it, there's a lot of infrastructural. misses that people are like, I'm just going to go plug in cloud code or, you I'm going to go plug in open AI or any of these. Right. Um, and I think, uh, later on, they'll be like, Oh, shoot this, that's spiraled out of control. You know, I probably should have thought a little bit better about it. So like most new technologies there, even though this, this one is, is a huge, certainly an ingenuity leap. Um, I think most new technologies are not. revolutionary, they're evolutionary. Revolutionary implies like this is drastic overnight. Everything's different. And while I think the market and the narrative and the noise kind of implies that the truth is that they're evolutionary in the real world, which means that there's an initial hype, you know, and then everything kind of settles to reality. And people think about practical ways that this truly improves the business. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (37:55.508) Well, thank you so much for joining us. have been following Full Throttle for quite a long time. it's been amazing watching you guys evolve with this market and kind of really lead this AI market into the advertising space. As far as I remember, think you were one of the first companies, at least I had heard of, in doing this type of work. So I really congratulate you on all the success. And we're going to be tracking you from here on out. Amol Waishampayan (38:01.411) Yeah. Amol Waishampayan (38:21.231) Yeah, thanks, Russ. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed our discussion and really enjoyed all of our work and partnership with the Business Intelligence Group over the last couple of years. Thanks. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (38:30.952) Thanks again.