Session #9 - What AI Means for Content Teams in 2026

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the last session of 2025. You may notice we are in a different studio today. We are joined by a special guest, Ryan Sargent of ten Speed. Ryan, glad to have you with us. [00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm excited. [00:00:13] Speaker C: I'm the first guest. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. Super excited. We are pretty, pretty stoked about this setup. So we may continue with this moving forward, but either way, great for today and for this conversation. So we're excited to have you. Last week we talked about. Or not last week. Last session we talked about how a lot of different leaders throughout B2B were talking about B2B or, sorry. [00:00:40] Speaker A: 2026 planning. And that was very broad marketing advice. And so today we wanted to now take it a level deeper and really talk about, like, what does content strategy look like in 2026. So how are we adapting? You know, and there's both, like, you know, we've talked a little bit about, like, not a little bit. We've talked a lot about how, like, optimizing for AI search, you know, and so then today, talking a little bit more about, like, the impact that AI tools are having on bandwidth, velocity and just overall content strategy as we're talking kind of going into 2026. So that's the plan for today and we're to, I guess, jump right in. Cool. But, yeah, any piece of that. I mean, we can kind of start with, like, the velocity side of it, but if there's anything kind of more. More broad, Ryan, that you would want to start with, we could go there. [00:01:35] Speaker C: Sure. I think, I think we're going to do a lot of zooming in and out in this conversation because there's, like, it's very hard to separate, like, the highest level implications of some of this tooling from the tactics. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Sure. [00:01:49] Speaker C: And I, I always come back to both my time playing in a wedding band and then one of the best pieces of copywriting I've ever gotten to be a part of. Shout out to Annika. [00:02:00] Speaker C: Quality at scale is nearly impossible. That's why wedding food is so often bad. And I think starting there, with any conversation around AI tooling, like, you have to go into it knowing the quality. [00:02:12] Speaker A: At scale is very difficult. Yeah. Yep. [00:02:15] Speaker C: And all of the conversation around velocity and stuff has to kind of flow from. From that. [00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah. For me, the velocity thing is interesting because it is a function of that, that quality and the tolerance for that. And we have seen, even just in the past year, I think, both, like, with clients with prospects and just like seeing people talk throughout the Internet, like, there's a lot of. [00:02:38] Speaker A: This Paradox. Right. Where like you, you can be really, really stingy on the quality of content, but then throw all of that out the window and be like, look at this amazing thing that AI did. Right. And you're like, if, you know, if you were handed that and knowing it wasn't AI, you would tear it apart and think it was miserable. Like just. So there is a little bit of that, like figuring out, you know, where you find that line of quality and velocity. For sure. [00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah. I think the, the velocity piece is something that all marketers have had to adapt to recently. [00:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:21] Speaker C: I mean I, yeah, don't worry about your EM dashes like, like to zoom all the way back into like tactics as far as possible and we'll come back out. Like that's just not the place where you're gonna, you can win there. You're not going to win big enough to matter anymore. [00:03:38] Speaker A: Yep. [00:03:39] Speaker B: Yeah. I think one thing too about velocity, which is important because I think these tools, AI tools in general have enabled obviously a high velocity. Right. So the like ability to go very fast is now just there. Like if you choose to go that fast, you can. And I think the big thing that we'll probably talk a little bit about more here, and I know you probably have some thoughts on, which is your whole point about scale is that you have to be mindful of that speed. It isn't just mindlessly go fast now that you can. [00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:09] Speaker B: And I think there are a lot of, I don't know, there's a lot of conversations, discussions online about like just producing versus that quality component. [00:04:18] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:20] Speaker C: We've been able to win in the past with speed. If, if you're producing something that your competitors are not. I'm thinking here specifically of like content, then you've got a great shot at winning. Right. You're going to be able to. [00:04:34] Speaker C: Do something there and also win with quality. And there's are two very different ways to differentiate yourself. And there's an argument that you should just zig instead of zag. If everyone in your space is producing a lot of slop, maybe it's time to double down on the quality piece instead of the velocity piece. That doesn't mean you don't use AI and it doesn't mean that you can't create systems and processes to generate something at scale. But there's. I think, I think that's one of the places where don't blindly follow. [00:05:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:06] Speaker C: And the disruption happening in our space right now doesn't, if anything should make you even less likely to Follow. [00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:13] Speaker C: Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. [00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:16] Speaker A: Well, it's also interesting because we kind of already been through the velocity part once already because of like copy AI Jasper and there were brands that just cranks that out and then, you know, ended up, you know, meeting their demise more or less on the results of that. And I think the, the argument now would be, oh well, it's different because you can build a very elaborate workflow, you know, with air ops that has style guides and human checkpoints and all that. And I agree. But I do think that there's still to your point, that, that aspect of like what is the, the quality here? Are you just trying to cast super wide net and that doesn't even get into like what that means for your strategy, what you're optimizing for your topical authority, like any of that stuff that's just purely from like the content creation standpoint. But I do want to, we'll kind of like use this piece to, to flow into the next point around. [00:06:13] Speaker A: Freshness. And so I do think there's that like, like the velocity piece is a factor there as well. Like big time. How, how frequently are you updating content and at what scale is certainly a big part. So maybe it's not even just like we're pushing out a ton of, of AI slop and like publishing a hundred new pieces a month or something, but velocity and what these tools enable you to do versus your competitors. Yeah. Or your competitors do against you in the term in terms of freshness. I think it's a, it's a factor as well. [00:06:46] Speaker C: And. Right. I don't over index on the quality side of the equation either because every in house team I've ever been a part of. I think I sent message to you this week or last week about this. There's always been a backlog. There's always been a topic we haven't been able to address. And the thing that most often is on the backlog is content refreshes. [00:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:04] Speaker C: And so I think there's a reason we've seen so many folks talking about their success with freshness updates. Not only are those more accessible than ever with AI, they're also something that LLMs reward. So now there's like no excuse. You have to go there and you need to go there efficiently. And I think some of the traditional kind of tactics around that are also shifting in terms of how much of the article needs to change. [00:07:34] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:34] Speaker C: Which pieces need to change. You're not trying to signal to Google anymore as much as you're trying or to traditional search. Because Google is an important AI player and I don't. That has also become a mantra of mine, like. [00:07:48] Speaker B: And also forgotten by many. [00:07:49] Speaker C: Yes. [00:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You get saying don't, don't sleep on Google. [00:07:54] Speaker C: I have no reason to believe that Google will lose that AI anything. [00:07:59] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:59] Speaker C: Like they've, they've been, they've been winning at chess and Go and Starcraft for years with AI. So why would they lose at this? [00:08:07] Speaker A: Like. [00:08:10] Speaker C: So that aside, the, the, the refresh cadence I think is a major opportunity for velocity, for trying to solve quality at scale. [00:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:22] Speaker C: Because we can do things tactically to signal to LLMs that freshness has improved without needing to invest in completely reworking every single word of our website. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. I think, yeah. To that point it's really interesting that these tools have enabled. I mean it's almost like, I don't know the best way to put it, but the speed in which you can do the refreshes is nearly like limitless. Right. So before you were from a planning perspective, thinking. And this is where we've run into challenges with, you know, building roadmaps and how we prioritize and, and all that is how often do we do this where now you can like to. Your. What you're getting at is like you can do it and build a workflow to do it near like almost constantly. Which I'm curious about where that lands. [00:09:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:07] Speaker B: Six months a year, 18 months, two years in terms of just like, I don't know how algorithms look at that. And is there almost like too much freshness where they're like you're gaming the system, I think keeping things up to date so often. But there's something interesting there. [00:09:20] Speaker C: If you're obsessed with freshness around your evergreen content. Yeah. You're just giving the system that will certainly still work today and we'll see what happens. [00:09:29] Speaker C: I think that's a piece of this whole AI puzzle though is which work are you doing to be seen as a trusted authority in the brand level, in the training data and which pieces of content are you building to show freshness on less evergreen topics? That's the other piece of the backlog that never got cleared was can we just publish about this? Can we just publish about that? The to do list of stuff that where the juice wasn't worth the squeeze was never ending and now we can produce something not flop, not Shakespeare to cover those use cases. [00:10:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:10:08] Speaker C: And that is the stuff that they're never going to put in the training Data, it's not worth the compute. So we can become the thing that AI cites for that at a. At a higher velocity. [00:10:19] Speaker A: Yep. [00:10:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:10:20] Speaker B: So you. [00:10:21] Speaker A: I think you started to touch on it. One of the things that I wanted to specifically ask was, like. [00:10:27] Speaker A: Around the. The velocity of refreshes and the ability to potentially do that. Like, what does that mean for teams as they're building the content strategy? Because that was, you know, I. I've been on. [00:10:40] Speaker A: Podcasts and did webinar with clear scope and all stuff around, like, content decay and having space in your roadmap each month or each quarter to be able to address decay and to refresh content. So, like, do we. Is that like, ultimately just still part of the roadmap that you're kind of creating that lane, or is it fully automated? Like, kind of just. This is the first day we're having this. [00:11:05] Speaker B: No, I know. [00:11:06] Speaker C: Like, this is an. I mean, we're talking about 10 speeds. H1OKRs here. Like, this is. [00:11:15] Speaker C: I would love to automate it fully. I don't know if the tooling is quite there yet. [00:11:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:21] Speaker C: In part because of variables. And this is where we get into, like, the scale piece of the tactics. What works on Webflow still might not work on WordPress or vice versa. The structure, maybe. Maybe a tool like airops is great at parsing stuff from one website's template to import and not from another one. Okay, so we can go out of step there. Right. We can pull the stuff from the website in a different way and feed it to the AI in a different way. Like, there's solves for all of that. It's how much time and effort are we spending setting up the system and then how much are we getting out of the other end in terms of velocity and volume? So that's the kind of puzzle that the team and I are working to solve today in terms of, you know, getting a tool like Air Ops to produce a brief. It'll produce a brief very fast. [00:12:08] Speaker C: And a place where we've spent a lot of time and effort is getting it to produce very different briefs for very different clients. [00:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:12:14] Speaker C: And. And that. That's an exponential difficulty increase and then fine tuning and all of that stuff. [00:12:19] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. [00:12:20] Speaker B: I think what's interesting about this particular topic is specifically, like, the frequency of refreshes is that that can become a differentiator, I think, for teams in terms of how they approach it, because every business could be different. So, like, you could slice and dice it a bunch of different ways. Maybe there's like, You've referenced like these, you know, evergreen pillar pieces. Like, there's still a reason to create a really big comprehensive piece of content on like your core topics. Right. You could be like, oh, hey, we have five of these. These are our product pillars. They map to these. We can do that every xyz like cadence and that becomes like a really powerful engine for you. But maybe that doesn't necessarily apply to another business who's like, hey, these really long tail pieces that answer specific questions are the things that we need to be addressing on a regular basis because the, the, the space is evolving so quickly that we're working in and the questions are evolving and we're getting a feedback loop from sales. So like, you start thinking about all the possibilities, it becomes quite interesting and powerful and how you can approach it. [00:13:22] Speaker C: Thought leadership authority. Content becomes another pillar of that strategy. Yeah, you need a really clear distribution plan that, whether it's social events, podcasts, whatever, whatever it is. But just as velocity becomes important for these refreshes, I think velocity becomes really important for the thought leadership. Can't agonize over the thought leadership anymore. Number of CEO interviews that do not see a finished piece of content is just growing by the day or six. [00:13:51] Speaker A: Months from one to the next. [00:13:52] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:13:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:54] Speaker C: I think every content marketer should be asking the CEO for a 5 minute voice note once a week. Yeah, yeah, just send me the voice note like, and, and, and I'll, I'll run it past your EA or something. Like I can, we can find a way to set up an approval process here. Like, like, let's solve for that. After you send me the voice note. Send me a voice note. [00:14:12] Speaker A: Yep. [00:14:12] Speaker B: And they want, they want that input too. It can't be both ways. Like, there's, we've encountered the, hey, they have an opinion about the content, but don't touch it. [00:14:19] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:20] Speaker B: But they're super like. But then they put a blocker or stopper on the content because of that. So it's like, why not just be a part of it and then you're going to get closer to what the end result should be and also satisfy their like, needs as a thought leader. [00:14:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:14:33] Speaker A: So one other thing is it, it sounds like from building a strategy standpoint there are still, you mentioned like some of the bigger pillar pieces. There's like some of the larger stuff we'd still do. Consolidating multiple pieces into one. You know, any of that kind of stuff that's still, ultimately, I would kind of still bucket that under freshness. You know, or, or you know, working against the decay or just better alignment. However, that is different than something like having, you know, a workflow or a recipe in Aeromps that is able to go add takeaways or FAQs, you know, or, or, you know, define something like adding that to the post is very different from a freshness standpoint than some of those other bigger things. So it's probably just a matter of defining those for your company and then, and then building it into the strategy accordingly. [00:15:28] Speaker C: Could sum up a couple of the things we've kind of been flirting with here. I think articles should get shorter. I think the, the hub and spoke thing is even more important than it used to be because there's a pillar piece that's designed to drive brand authority, search authority, and then there's these long tail things around it that are, they do not need to be long. And the consolidation work is important there because over and over again we see with clients, they thought they were doing that and what they ended up doing was cannibalizing. [00:15:56] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:56] Speaker C: And so answer one specific question, answer it really well in 600 words, get the piece up. [00:16:02] Speaker A: Yep. [00:16:03] Speaker C: This doesn't, this is not rocket science. Spend all of your time and effort elsewhere. Like that's the thing to recipe. And then as soon as something changes. So we talked about content refreshes a lot and there's gotta be a reason for it too. Something has changed. A competitor's page has changed. [00:16:21] Speaker B: Right. [00:16:21] Speaker C: You have a reason to update to improve the piece in some fundamental way. Perhaps you want to make the language more inclusive. Perhaps you want to address a different ICP because your product has changed. Right. That kind of stuff. So you need, you need a reason to do it. That said, I can almost always find a reason if you want to change a page. Like we can, we can come up with one. [00:16:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, if there's top of funnel like you can have, you might have a bunch of basic questions that are like considered classically top of funnel. [00:16:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:16:48] Speaker B: Do you want to prioritize those? Maybe, I don't know. Those are giving surface and LLMs. I hear you. [00:16:53] Speaker C: And then tactically, I think we've already started discovering the best practices and we can recipe those very easily. Those are the, those are the lowest hanging fruit and. [00:17:04] Speaker C: FAQ's more important than ever. I resisted that for a while. There was a, there was a period where I was like, we're just doing this for the robots. And now it's, we're doing this for the robots. So there's There's a way to, to do that and then the key takeaways thing or like table of contents, something at the top of the piece. [00:17:23] Speaker C: We can get into all of the rigmarole about chunking and windows and all of that. [00:17:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:30] Speaker C: I don't think it takes away from the human UX to put key takeaways at the top. And if it's, if it's not bad for humans and it's helping the robot like and, and you can do it at scale, this, this is worth your time. [00:17:43] Speaker A: Yep. [00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:44] Speaker A: Well that's a perfect segue because the conversation we've, we've only kind of started to have in bits but I think have been eager to have, you know, the three of us discuss more and is becoming a bigger piece. Is that like content for machines and content for humans topic? And so I guess the question I would ask to, to kick that off is do strategies start to become bifurcated in that way where you actually like categorizing it and is that really even possible to have that hard line or is there just too much overlap? [00:18:26] Speaker C: I think yes. I mean the short answer to your question is yes, I will, I will lay it on the line. So. [00:18:33] Speaker C: From a strategy standpoint, I can't stop people from coming to a page that I built for robots and I need to make sure that the experience meets a minimum bar such that. That's not a turn off, is it? [00:18:45] Speaker A: Sorry, yes was to my. I actually asked two questions. Too much overlap or that you think that that is strategies are going to be bifurcated. [00:18:54] Speaker C: I think they will become bifurcated. I think organic growth strategies will need A4 robots and A4 humans. And for me the bifurcation happens at the point of conversion goal. The, the stuff for robots doesn't convert people. Nobody makes a purchase. I mean I've everyday overviews every day. Yeah. I don't make a purchase decision based on an AI overview. [00:19:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:15] Speaker C: For anything from socks to software. And so I need more from the brand to convince me. And that's the content for humans. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:25] Speaker C: So more bottom of funnel, more middle of funnel, more. More value. [00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:30] Speaker C: Ironically we, we've for a long time SEOs have said just build better content. [00:19:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:35] Speaker C: And which as somebody who started in content before I was in SEO always just drove me nuts. I was like but. [00:19:44] Speaker C: If the content's good, I don't need you anymore. Like, like build it and they will come. So, so what a. What a cop out. But the now that value has to be there it, it can't just be better, can't be the vague term. It has to be something that actually helps the person who you're hoping to convince. And that isn't something we can cook up a recipe for in the same way. [00:20:09] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:20:09] Speaker C: And so like that's the other reason I think it's going to be bifurcated is that we're going to be able to disproportionately put human effort and resource into converting humans and then put resources into using robots to help us achieve velocity or the robot half of the equation. [00:20:25] Speaker A: Yep. [00:20:26] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's like we, we know some companies have started doing this, we've started testing this where. [00:20:36] Speaker A: Like people are literally creating content and topic clusters of pages that is purely formatted for an LLM and it is really only findable through the site map. And to your point, you can't, you can't make it no index. Yeah. Because then the LLM is not necessarily going to find it. I mean you can go through and try to tailor which you know, which crawlers do and don't find it. But like it's going to be discoverable and so it can't be. [00:21:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:21:07] Speaker A: Crappy looking or you know, just straight binary or something. You know, like. Yeah, but that, that is ultimately the reality and it is very, very much like that is. I would call that content for machines. And it is that. [00:21:22] Speaker C: You know, just to say it out loud, none of the three of us in any way advocate like black hat SEO tactics here. Like not put white text on your website that gives the LLM instructions. That's awful for so many reasons. Don't do that. [00:21:35] Speaker B: Don't stuff your footer with you know, exact match anchor text links to a bunch of similar pages. [00:21:40] Speaker C: But I think like things like you takeaways that is the equivalent of put the keyword in the H1. [00:21:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:46] Speaker C: And, and so there are we to. In that way. We've already done some of this stuff specifically for robots. [00:21:53] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:54] Speaker C: And yeah, that's. Yeah, that's not changing. [00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And also if you know, we always lead and still believe like and Ryan already said it earlier, like we're focusing on ICP and leading with like our strategy with what we believe the audience and ICP needs from a content perspective that should flow into a bunch of tactics that turn into like this is kind of being designed for making sure that it feeds an LLM or robot versus a human. But it's still rooted in the idea that what you're creating is for the. It should provide some sort of value to the user, ICP and or brand all at the same time. Because you're not going to go create. There's a necessary. Like you might create a cluster and yes, there might be a piece that you create that's like related to that and it enforces and solidifies that theme or topic for you as a brand. But maybe isn't like going to be the like end all, be all to converting that user, but it lifts your brand up because it makes you more of an authority on that specific cluster or topic. [00:22:53] Speaker A: Right. [00:22:54] Speaker B: So it's like it's super nuanced in where the four robots and humans is from a tactical perspective like lies, which is where it gets kind of difficult to prioritize teams. [00:23:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I can give you examples. [00:23:06] Speaker A: Please. [00:23:08] Speaker C: I was thinking of. [00:23:11] Speaker C: I was actually thinking of chess again. There's the very high level, like robot content. Like here are basic chess openings. [00:23:20] Speaker B: Right. [00:23:20] Speaker C: And one of the, one of the other themes that I suspect we'll touch on somewhere in here is the importance of first party data. It's like, right. Chess.com knows about all the chess I've played and they could easily send me content that says, hey, you play this opening three times, here's the, here's how to be better. Or they could go really deep and say, here's an analysis of where you're going wrong. Here's what like here's pattern. Here are patterns we recognize. And then send a personalized piece of content, a video. We recommend this coach over this coach. [00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:01] Speaker C: Right. There's like, that's a major upsell. Like. Yep. Instead of a cheap subscription to just play chess online, I'm, I'm like becoming deeply ingrained in their ecosystem. I'm giving dollars directly to a creator. I'm like, yep. So that would be an example of like the bifurcation. We can use robots to easily create content on something that's been covered a million times before and then double down on creating a personal video for something again based on first party data that's much more complex. [00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. [00:24:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Which again you're doing a great job of just. [00:24:36] Speaker C: You did give me the questions in. [00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah, no, if you memorized all that, that's impressive. [00:24:43] Speaker A: One of the other pieces that we wanted to move into was talking about like automating. So AI plus human versus where to use human bandwidth. Um, and so I think that like how, how do these developments impact the allocation of human bandwidth? And then like whether in house or outsourced to like agencies or freelancers, how do people decide what is best suited for like, certain content types or topics? So I think there's people using. [00:25:15] Speaker A: Air ops for a lot of different stuff, like, yeah, listicles, bottom of funnel content, top of funnel content. Thought leadership, like converting transcripts, repurposing content. Like there's a lot. [00:25:32] Speaker A: So even just thinking again, about someone who's trying to think about their content strategy for, for 2026, like, how do you, how do you decide what goes where? [00:25:43] Speaker C: Um, yeah. [00:25:44] Speaker A: Okay. [00:25:45] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, you go first. [00:25:47] Speaker C: So. [00:25:49] Speaker C: Places where you have deep domain expertise. [00:25:53] Speaker C: You got to pick the right tool for the job. That's probably not where you should outsource. Like, don't. Don't outsource the thing you're already good at. [00:26:00] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:00] Speaker C: Do the thing you're good at. [00:26:01] Speaker A: Yep. [00:26:02] Speaker C: Outsource the thing you're not good at that you know will work. [00:26:05] Speaker C: Because then you're not placing a bet both on the strategy and the execution. You're just saying I need help with execution. And to be clear, that execution might also include strategy. Yeah, not saying just outsource content production. I'm saying I'm talking like very broadly here. Maybe. I'm great at paid ads and I know organic could be powerful for us and I need to outsource that just like 10 speed. [00:26:29] Speaker C: Or even more specifically. [00:26:33] Speaker C: I need help with digital PR because I know that that's an important factor for LLMs and I don't have a database of journalists. So I need to outsource digital PR to fuel my organic strategy. But I actually have a CEO that sends me those voice notes. I don't need help building social posts for my CEO. [00:26:50] Speaker A: Sure. [00:26:50] Speaker C: That's. That would be an example of like, yeah, maybe how to go about making that decision. I also think automation wise. [00:27:01] Speaker C: Figuring out how AI can best serve your exact use case. And so like. [00:27:11] Speaker C: That'S the place where first party data comes in. It's where a tool set comes in. You get to decide and say, I have all of the building blocks to build a great piece of automation here, but not here. And trying to shoehorn something into an AI workflow when you don't have the building blocks, you get out what you put in. And that's one of the things I've seen over and over again with air ops. We keep bringing this up. I feel so lucky that I got to go through a lot of the air ops, like content engineer training stuff earlier this year before or maybe as they were kind of blowing up. [00:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:48] Speaker C: I got to peek under the hood a little bit and More and more it's about the inputs. [00:27:54] Speaker B: Yeah. I, it's interesting because like you take like a case study for example, this is probably, maybe, maybe what you're getting, you're speaking to. But like you can't just go like here's a bunch of information, go build a case study. [00:28:07] Speaker C: Yes. [00:28:07] Speaker B: Right. There's a great example. The building blocks are, there's certain aspects of that that you can use to automate but at the end of the day there's like it's nuanced in how you're going to get to that end result where I think like certain pieces of content can be super 100 ish percent AI but like that it actually like as you move down the traditional quote unquote funnel, it becomes more piecemealed or like very specific that you need to stitch things together in a way that's like going to actually benefit the end product. [00:28:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Which to your point on like execution does involve strategy as well. Like. [00:28:43] Speaker A: Not every conversation or interview of a customer will give you the best inputs to have a good case study. That, that's been true for forever. Yeah. So knowing like you have to have the building blocks but even if your input to those building blocks is bad or it just doesn't fit. Right. So like knowing how to ask the right questions to get the right answers to then go, you know, like there's. [00:29:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:29:08] Speaker A: There's a lot of pieces to that. Yeah. [00:29:10] Speaker C: I even. Well for in parentheses. I think being concise is more important than ever. I think the raw volume of content, the velocity of content. Yeah. If when in doubt, trim words, trim time niche down. Like that's like a separate like how to content. [00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:27] Speaker C: Nugget for me in terms of things like the case study. I actually think some of that decision making on the human side starts even sooner. Why did I choose this customer to interview? Which three questions can I ask that aren't part of my standard script that really get down into the nitty gritty of why this, this customer matters. [00:29:47] Speaker A: Right. [00:29:47] Speaker C: And in a way that convinces people who. Or companies that look like them to, to try our product. Like. [00:29:57] Speaker C: You could ask Chat GPT what those three questions are. [00:30:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:01] Speaker C: But I, I think that your skill as a marketer really comes out when you figure out which three questions those are. Yeah. Like so that piece of the human and then yeah. Feed the transcript. Get, get a first draft of the thing with AI. Do not write that thing from scratch. [00:30:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:30:14] Speaker B: There's certain things you have like there's, it's, it's Comes down to like, should I, like, should you can, you can automate almost anything. You can use AI for almost anything. I've seen great examples. I don't, I don't need to cite anybody but like, of like automating the way that you do source SME or in like creative ways. Right. You can use agents to go do this trigger that you're talking about. [00:30:35] Speaker A: Will. [00:30:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's great. Like, it's amazing. [00:30:39] Speaker A: What is it? Well, what would you as a client paying. [00:30:44] Speaker B: I think it's more proof of concept than anything. And I agree. [00:30:46] Speaker A: That's fair. But like, yes. To, to be a client and be like, oh, I, I'm gonna get a phone call. I get a phone call from an AI. I also saw this in one building. So yes. [00:30:58] Speaker B: And I, I, I also was gonna send it to you and didn't because I was like, I didn't want to go like, go build this. [00:31:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I, I love it as a proof of concept. But that was my immediate thought was like, this feels like there are more ways for it to go wrong than. [00:31:13] Speaker B: Yeah, but I think that that's a good example of like, that's super interesting. You can do that. Is that even the best way to do that? But also to your point, like. [00:31:24] Speaker B: There are a bunch of things that in that workflow that are deciding on which questions to ask which is using the. But like that is not taking into account necessarily what you're saying. The skill of a marketer is that like ask very pointed questions that have to do with the product and et cetera. But like that's different because if we're talking about different content types. Right. Well, I think in the example. Yeah. Was like a very Hyper Geo specific. [00:31:47] Speaker C: Yes. [00:31:47] Speaker B: Content piece that like hypothetically had nothing to do with like a product potential. [00:31:52] Speaker C: It's also coming up with the questions that elicit the response that changes the quality or the value provided by the end result. That's a lot of links in a chain that AI is doing better and better with that kind of reasoning. Yeah. But narrative is still a weak point, I think. Yeah. For, for AI and narrative that both combines intellectual value and emotional response. Like, I think great content probably lives in somewhere in there in that like blend of art and science and all of that and. [00:32:31] Speaker C: All the. Let me circle back. Right. Like what is the AI doing to help people actually convert? And where do you automate and where you spend the human capital and the, the humanity has to happen closer to the conversion than it used to because top of funnel content isn't. Isn't human time anymore. [00:32:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:52] Speaker B: Also one thing worth saying which is related to all of this because I don't know how you guys feel, but the reliance on these tools and building a lot of like your content operations on top of it has some risk to some extent. Not necessarily like an air ops or anything. So I don't want to like call it out like that. But like personally I've noticed a major decrease in quality on ChatGPT over the past like month and I'm not doing anything different. But like the outputs to Gemini. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, but like in. And there's certain tools that are getting the sustaining quality and all that. But like there's a risk potentially. [00:33:26] Speaker A: Right. [00:33:26] Speaker B: And being like, hey, I'm going to automate everything and use AI for all of this when we still don't know the future of how those things are going to change. Because like, I can tell to some extent some of the questions and outputs that answers I'm getting for certain things are likely being informed by tweaks they're making based off of like public perception and feedback. Like, like even just as recently it's become less the M Dash. Right. But then like it's become less agreeable. It's like less. It's actually not stating the like great idea, it's just like here's the thing because it, it's, you know, so I think there's an aspect of that that like future proofing considerations need to be taken into account. There. [00:34:06] Speaker C: Algo updates have been part of our world for a long time and are clearly not going away. [00:34:10] Speaker B: Exactly. It's exactly. It's the AI version, LLM version of algo updates. [00:34:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:14] Speaker B: Which absolutely impacts the quality of results. Sometimes for the worse or sometimes for better. [00:34:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Anything else on the how to allocate bandwidth? You know, like automation versus human bandwidth. Yeah. [00:34:31] Speaker C: For everything we just talked about. At the end of the day, I don't think marketing's first principles have. Have changed. Our, our job to be done at the highest level hasn't changed and therefore like from a strategy standpoint and where do you allocate resources? That probably hasn't changed quite as much either at like the CMO level. Like where are we doubling down on a bet that's worked? Where are we iterating to try to like eek more out of something that's kind of working? And then what big swing are we taking with a disproportionately small amount of the budget to to try to uncover something new or gain traction in a new area. And how do all those things relate to the product? How do all those things relate to business goals? Like, yeah. [00:35:12] Speaker C: That, yeah, that process is still that process. It's, and. [00:35:17] Speaker C: Like you can find the spot where the AI piece overlaps with the double down piece. I mean, pour gas on the fire. [00:35:25] Speaker B: Go, go, go, go. [00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah, and I, I think the, the thing I've said a couple times lately, and we'll say again on that note, is there is an overwhelming. [00:35:37] Speaker A: Focus on all of this as it relates to content creation. This is very much what we've been talking about. There are so many things workflow wise, task management wise. Like all of those things, you could, you could not change how you're creating content at all and literally just still gain, you know, 30, 40% bandwidth and improvement just by using AI in other areas. So I don't think it's entirely just a how do we create the content? But like the content operations overall I think is definitely a really important piece. [00:36:12] Speaker C: Yep. [00:36:13] Speaker A: But with that, I want to move to the last topic. Just make sure we have plenty of time to talk about this. My concern through, through all of this, I felt as though we were getting to a much better place of people understanding that it wasn't, you know, SEO is not just like, we gotta have all the traffic. And we were really starting to orient around business impact and conversions. And now everyone's attention has been flung to discoverability across many, many surfaces. And so my concern is that now marketers, content strategists, advertising, as they're thinking about 2026, planning is going to be just so heavily oriented on discovery, which you cannot, you can't not have it. And I'm not saying that, but not enough focus on what's actually driving conversion. So earlier you mentioned, you know, like some of those pages or you know, things you're doing for machines. The machine isn't going to convert, at least not for quite a while until there's an agent that is making software decisions and stuff for companies. But so let's talk about like, for people who are feeling the pull to be much more heavily oriented on discoverability. You know, how does your content strategy continue to account for what needs to actually drive conversions in 2026? [00:37:44] Speaker C: I feel like you should go first on. [00:37:45] Speaker B: Oh really? I mean, content. I, I, I'm, we're, we're still, I think I can say that, very big believers on the fundamental pieces of content that we know to have high intent and drive conversions. [00:37:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:37:59] Speaker B: Like there's if anything in the, in the now popularity and. Or sorry, growing. Growing. [00:38:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:38:10] Speaker B: Popularity of AI and LLMs and all that. It's even more important and I think that that's like just industry wide kind of becoming more known that being like you know, product, sorry, not only core marketing pages but also like lower funnel pieces that are comparison pieces. Your brand versus another brand, breaking down, pricing, all these things. And then there's tons of things which we talked about on a couple of the recent episodes around getting creative with that type of content. [00:38:37] Speaker B: So that I think is very much still going to be the thing. I'm answering this question, right. What ultimately will drive conversions? [00:38:43] Speaker A: Content type. Yeah. Well, how do you, how do you make sure your strategy is accounting for that? [00:38:47] Speaker B: Yeah, like I think if anything this is the opportunity to double down on those because we have seen through the data that that is actually something that not only continues to drive a really high quality business impact from like just traditional search but like we've gotten signal from LLM referrals that that does too. Even though it is, which I love you can elaborate on is it still a very, very small piece of the pie. But I think if you continue to focus in those areas that's going to be. [00:39:17] Speaker B: Very fruitful and it makes sense. Why wouldn't it? What's going to change there? Like you educating on, you're educating your audience and people who are learning about products or wanting to use a product like you that you break down. If anything I would say, and this is the last thing I'll say, so I don't like to steal all the thunder, this is just is like this is the opportunity and I think I've seen, I'm not trying to crib it from other people but for that content to get as authentic and transparent as possible. Like no marketing speak, like really, really literal around the value and just like no fluff. [00:39:50] Speaker A: Right. [00:39:50] Speaker B: Like shoot people straight. If you don't have the product which we've talked about, that can, that can. Can't cash the check, then you shouldn't be probably creating the piece of content because you're just misleading. But that's the type of stuff, stuff. [00:40:03] Speaker A: That'S going to win. [00:40:03] Speaker B: And I agree. [00:40:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:06] Speaker C: Yeah. I the hope here is that it becomes more and more difficult for products that aren't cutting it to stand out totally. That would be, that would be the hope like as a, as a positive to come out of all this discoverability stuff. [00:40:20] Speaker A: Yes. [00:40:20] Speaker C: And. [00:40:22] Speaker C: The, the maybe like the winner take all nature of some of this AI search stuff. [00:40:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:30] Speaker C: Everybody with a hot take on LinkedIn has an agenda and you need to evaluate that agenda. If someone shows up in your feed saying SEO is dead, what do they stand to gain from SEO being dead? Should be the first question. [00:40:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:41] Speaker C: And, and like, and vice versa. When people say just do SEO, same question. What. What do they stand to gain? So. [00:40:49] Speaker C: I love that we're looking at the data on, on this. [00:40:54] Speaker C: I think pursuing traffic from LLMs is very rapidly going to become a fool's errand. [00:41:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:41:03] Speaker A: Already seen though, like tapering. [00:41:06] Speaker C: It's already starting to taper. And said this yesterday, so I'll just say it again. Sam Altman doesn't make any money when he sends people to your website. Makes money when his robot answers your question. [00:41:15] Speaker B: Right. [00:41:16] Speaker C: So be part of that answer. Like how about that on the website. [00:41:22] Speaker C: But like you can't, you can't expect all the lessons that. [00:41:29] Speaker C: These platforms have learned over the last 20 years. Because I realized I've been on Facebook for 20 years. [00:41:36] Speaker C: Is those lessons filter down like OpenAI has learned about organic reach, which was the thing that we were all talking about more than 10 years ago. So the. [00:41:50] Speaker C: That piece of it more than ever intent is huge traffic, mostly vanity at this point or perhaps a leading indicator I guess if you really want to try to make it happen. So I think all the more reason that being really intentional and I used that word intentionally for the triple header that we want to make sure we're showing up in the answers to the questions that are most likely to be asked. But people who are most important to us. And that goes back to like the marketing first principle thing about like yes, how do we meet people where they're at? How do we make sure that we're in a way that has a great ux, great cx, speaking to their needs at the right time in the right place. And like that hasn't changed that nothing about that is going away. [00:42:43] Speaker B: Yep. [00:42:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's, I think that. [00:42:49] Speaker A: I agree on like the traffic piece which is interesting because you know, you mentioned people saying SEO is dead. [00:42:58] Speaker A: That was very much the narrative at the beginning of 2025, you know, especially Q2. And here we are looking at some of our clients data, you know, across quite a few like organic traffic up year to date. Maybe not a lot, but it is, it's not down 40% and traffic from LLMs up and the net conversions across that up, you know and so I think that like that's, that's certainly a piece of that and there is that added surfaces that I mentioned. But like ultimately I don't think that it's, it's been the doomsday, you know, that a lot of people have talked about. And similarly, like this is. [00:43:45] Speaker A: I think a big part of why we've continued to position much more around organic growth, you know, and just organic marketing being not organic, not being synonymous with SEO, organic being synonymous with non paid. [00:44:01] Speaker B: Yes. [00:44:01] Speaker A: And that's been the evolution that we've seen is that, that social reach matters, the digital PR matters, you know, especially from authority trust building. We talked about on one of the very first 10 speed sessions about how this evolution is just like rooting out people with bad products, but good marketing and it's just going to like serve the folks who can win across the board and you know, do well, have good marketing, well rounded marketing, good positioning, like all these things all I think making a big contribution to that. So that to me is a big part of that. And the conversion aspect I think is something that I hope that teams don't lose sight of because of this emphasis on discoverability. [00:44:50] Speaker C: I realized I didn't necessarily answer your question. [00:44:53] Speaker C: In when I, I think all of, and maybe like all of that put together. [00:45:03] Speaker C: It's. You were asking about like content types. Right. And it's like the, the traffic piece versus the conversion piece. There's two sides to all of these equations too. And that's why there's so many people either choosing the hot take that serves them or equivocating. [00:45:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:18] Speaker C: And it's might just be two yeses. And the example here is your website. I just said Sam Altman doesn't make any money when he sends people to your website. I also believe that your website is more important than ever. [00:45:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:31] Speaker C: Because of the human nature of those conversions. So what content is going to succeed? I think your website's gotta be super on point, concise, easy. I mean mobile accessibility. Yeah, we've been talking about that. Right. How fast does the video load? [00:45:47] Speaker B: Yeah, we talked about this yesterday, remember on about how like just the fundamental, like the house needs to be really sturdy. Yeah, yeah. [00:45:55] Speaker C: And so all of it can be both of those things, right? [00:45:58] Speaker A: Like. Yeah, both. [00:45:59] Speaker C: And more, more of the journey happens off your website and your website's doing as much work as it's ever done. And I think that's true for many content types. [00:46:09] Speaker C: I also am excited to see brands just completely throw out the playbook and try something brand new. Yeah, I, I want to get a coffee table book in the mail. Yeah, I Would. I would never forget that brand if that happened to me tomorrow. [00:46:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I think the, the challenge that we face as marketers in our industry, always and now more than ever, is that shiny object syndrome. It's like we're always trying to figure out, like, this new, you know, crazy creative way to, to target the audience or get the audience and all that, when at the end of the day, the canvas is still the same. It's just that, like, the, like, the. There's more colors available. There's like. Or new brushes available. Like, so that's why I have no problem saying that, like, these things that have worked can still work. It's just in how you craft it now. Like, that changes. [00:46:58] Speaker A: Right. [00:46:58] Speaker B: That's why it's like, okay, be more transparent, be more authentic. [00:47:02] Speaker A: Right. [00:47:02] Speaker B: Whatever that plays into in terms of like, the end product. [00:47:08] Speaker B: Get creative. But, like, still, there is a form, not, I don't want to say formula, but a format. [00:47:14] Speaker A: Right. [00:47:14] Speaker B: That still applies it. No one questions the fundamentals of, like, old school marketing. [00:47:19] Speaker C: Right. [00:47:19] Speaker B: You should have value props and this and that. Like, they're not going, like, what's the new way to do value props? Like, it's just, it's crazy. We operate in a space with SEO and all that and content marketing, where it can't just be that those fundamentals are, Are maybe evergreen to some extent. It's always got to change, and that's. [00:47:39] Speaker A: Not necessarily the case. Yep. [00:47:41] Speaker C: Jobs to be done. [00:47:42] Speaker A: Yes. Right. [00:47:42] Speaker C: The job. The job for marketers have not changed the tools. We do it with the. The. The form has changed. [00:47:49] Speaker A: We're. [00:47:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:47:50] Speaker A: The. [00:47:51] Speaker C: The job itself has not. Not changed. [00:47:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:56] Speaker B: Jobs to be done is a good one to anchor to because that does not. That does not change. And that framework is great. [00:48:02] Speaker A: Yep. Anything else you want to add for someone who's thinking about how the heck to try to build a content strategy? I mean, I, I would add. [00:48:13] Speaker A: Stay nimble. Like, don't, don't try to lock yourself in a room and a whiteboard and, and build a whole year's worth of stuff, because I don't think that's going to end well. So that's still. [00:48:25] Speaker C: The 90 days is right for that. That hasn't changed for me from a planning perspective. Yeah. Less. Less than 90 days of content strategy and you risk not seeing the results and you risk not investing in a lane, essentially enough. But more than 90 days at this point is wild. Things are moving so fast. [00:48:48] Speaker C: I think it's more important than ever to control your experiments like, and we've said things like value authenticity. [00:48:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:48:55] Speaker C: We've. We've maybe touched on a couple weasel words. [00:49:00] Speaker C: So what I would want to add is like super specific, direct stuff. And so controlling your experiments is, I think, more important than ever. When you both doing experiments, saying, this is a thing we've never tried before that I want to try. [00:49:18] Speaker C: Here are two sentences about why I think this will work. I'm spending 5% of the budget on it. Here's how I know. I will know if I'm. If we are successful and I should spend 10% in the next 90 days. [00:49:29] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:30] Speaker C: And you could, you could do that with a podcast. You could do that with like, pick your poison, but do that and accept failure on it, because that is the only way now that, that speaking of Velocity, that is the only way to, to like prove out your ideas. I reread Traction recently and obviously the tactics are. No, I mean, are pretty out of date at this point, but the philosophy of what achieved this level of growth won't. Won't be the channel or method of marketing that gets you to the next level of growth. [00:50:08] Speaker A: Yep. [00:50:08] Speaker C: I think that is absolutely still true. And I think try stuff, test and fail still works. So like, that's a, that's a pretty specific piece of content strategy advice. And then I think along with that being really clear about what those lanes are saying, we're doing X, not Y. And then very, very tactically for content marketers, because things are changing so fast. However much space you had in your roadmap or in your day to day, that was for random ad hoc requests from stakeholders, double it. Like, it's gonna happen. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:42] Speaker C: Some. Somebody's right. Something's gonna happen. Your contractor's gonna disappear on you. Your CFO is gonna make your contractor budget disappear on you. [00:50:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:52] Speaker C: There's gonna be something that someone hears on a podcast that they say is a great idea, and then you're gonna have to go do it. So. [00:50:58] Speaker A: Sure. [00:50:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Double your ad hoc spot. Yeah. And loop in allies across your organization in a different way. Because the things, for example, that I have traditionally gone to the product team for SME, cutting edge tech, all that kind of stuff, more important than ever. So make friends with product, make friends with sales. I think is this is not a matter of, hey, you know, send me the, send me the gong transcript. It's take them out to lunch in in person time and say, what was the worst call you had this week? And get the anecdote about it. Because there's. There's a social post in there, right? Like, totally. [00:51:41] Speaker C: So, yeah, there's some tactical. [00:51:42] Speaker A: Sure. [00:51:42] Speaker C: Like, strategy stuff I think too, where you can draw on some of those, like, hidden gems within your organization. [00:51:49] Speaker A: Yep. [00:51:51] Speaker B: Agree. Yeah, no, I, I, I plus one, all that. I feel like that's a nice way to sum it. I like, though, specifically what you said about, like, the lanes and like, we're not doing this and not doing that because I think that that's something to at least emphasize because we have these conversations all the time, even in sales calls. Like, there's just this, like, kind of FOMO around. We should be doing everything. And like. Oh. Or should, like, what should we be doing? And you know, I think, I think having a good. [00:52:22] Speaker B: Document or at least logic and communicate it internally as to like, hey, we're gonna do this, but like, very specifically what we're not gonna do and why is actually really powerful because otherwise you're just gonna, you're just gonna get that asked as you're gonna get those questions from leadership around, like, if, especially if you're in content, like, why aren't we here? Why aren't we here? Why aren't we here? Why are we focused here? So if you can have that, that's. [00:52:43] Speaker A: A really, I think, really, I think. [00:52:44] Speaker B: Good, Very good people. Yep. [00:52:47] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, this was great. I think we covered a lot and I think there's many, many pieces to the. [00:52:55] Speaker A: The velocity, the freshness, the like, content for machines, content for humans. How do we cover bandwidth, focusing on conversions. A lot of the tactical stuff you just shared, like. [00:53:08] Speaker C: There'S a lot. [00:53:09] Speaker A: And that's just only scratching the surface of what every, you know, marketers dealing with right now. So I hope this helped anyone who listened and worked through that. And as always, we're always happy to chat through what your goals are, what your plans are, see if we might be a fit. So visit 10 Speed IO podcast for more on the 10 Speed Sessions episodes and feel free to reach out to us if you'd like to chat. [00:53:33] Speaker C: Yeah, just bug us on LinkedIn. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Yeah, like LinkedIn too. Yeah, sure. [00:53:36] Speaker C: We had no problem just talking about this. We clearly like talking about this. [00:53:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah. [00:53:41] Speaker B: And look out for our spinoff podcasts. Content from machine means content for humans. [00:53:45] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us, Ryan. This is great. [00:53:50] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks. [00:53:50] Speaker B: Thanks, Brian.