Why Enterprises Need to Care What GenAI Says About Them

Melody Brue:
Hi, thank you for joining us at The Six Five Summit AI Unleashed. Welcome to the Enterprise Needs to Care What Gen AI Says About Them session.

I’m Melody Brue VP and principal analyst at More Insights and Strategy, and I am excited to introduce you to Laura MacDonald, Chief Growth Officer at Hotwire.
Hi Laura, how are you?

Laura MacDonald:
Good, how are you Melody?

Melody Brue:
I’m great. Happy to have you here with us at Summit. Today. We will be talking about Hotwire’s recently launched GAIO.tech.

So, let’s get started with this. So Hotwire recently launched GAIO.tech Gen AI optimization, which to simplify, really is chatbot optimization. And this is a client facing solution that was built for your clients. So first, before we get started with the tech, let’s talk about Hotwire and who your clients are that you built this for.

Laura MacDonald:
Yeah, so Hotwire is a global technology-focused marketing and communications consultancy. So we work with top tech enterprises like Palo Alto Networks, eBay, OpenText, and Kyndryl, to really help them tell the right stories to reach their current and potential customers through key channels like media, analysts like yourself, social channels and so on.

And so we recognize that many of the people that these enterprises now want to reach are using these generative AI tools and chatbots. And so we built this tool to help them start to better understand what these chatbots are saying about them, and actually perhaps even how they could start to show up as well in those spaces so they can start to communicate to their audiences in that right way.

Melody Brue:
Wow, that’s really interesting. So I mean obviously your clients really need to show up in the right places and it’s so interesting to think that a chatbot is one of the places that they need to show up. So how does this tool help them show up there?

Laura MacDonald:
Perfect. So if we take a step back, it’s clear that workers really have embraced generative AI. There was a recent study done by Microsoft and LinkedIn that showed that 75% of knowledge workers are now using AI at work, and that behavior is only going to grow. You heard the news about PWC, now on selling ChatGPT Enterprise, Google’s putting AI search results upfront when you search on Google. And the study also showed that research is one of the key activities that these knowledge workers are using the chatbots for and particularly power users as well.

But currently those kind of AI chatbots, if you use ChatGPT or Perplexity or one of those, they’re a bit of a black box. The companies that we work with and everyone in general, we don’t really have visibility into how are they getting those answers, where are they getting them from and why are certain companies or certain products showing up?

And yet, as we talked about for enterprises, do you think these kind of channels and this kind of behavior is only going to increase? So what we did is we wanted to take a first step and get greater visibility into it, and that’s what GAIO.tech does.

So GAIO stands for generative AI optimization. And so you can sort of think about it like SEO, but instead of for search, it’s for generative AI chatbots. So it’s pulling out the information from those answers that they give, and we could do it for all sorts of chatbots as well.

Melody Brue:
So help break this down because I think there are SEO specialists and now I think people are going to be like, wait, now we have to embrace chatbot optimization as well. So how does this work? Break this down for us?

Laura MacDonald:
So we probably all use them and you go in and ask questions and it responds with the answers. And so what we’ve done with our tool is we’re aggregating large data sets of those answers. So we use the chatbots and SEO data to create a large number of questions, hundreds or thousands of questions that humans would be asking and using those chatbots to solve around specific products or services.

For example, we run one ahead of this session asking around the best cybersecurity providers for businesses. And then from aggregating in that large data set of answers, we’re able to then pull out a few key things. So first off, the key trends coming out of those answers. So say the cybersecurity providers for businesses, we only did a small query just for our trial, but we could see within that the Gen AI chatbots, and this was ChatGPT Enterprise, they were giving answers based on the number of employees, versus saying things like the best cybersecurity provider for an SMB or the best cybersecurity provider for an enterprise. They were saying the best cybersecurity providers for more than 10,000 employees. So that’s really interesting and you could start to think about how you could use that to optimize your content in the future.

The other thing that from our point of view, being a marketing and comms consultancy is really interesting is about where are they sourcing those answers from? And perhaps expectedly right now, because they’ve been used and promoted a lot for a consumer point of view.

Right now, these chatbots, even if you’re asking them around business questions, are really sourcing a lot of those answers from more kind of consumer focused like affiliate sites. And what came up in this one called Security Detectives. I don’t know if anybody knows of them, but that was the most cited source for where the ChatGPT was pulling its answers from. Now that’s probably not a site that we would consider as a valuable site that we want to go and get coverage for our clients or work with on sponsored content.

But if these chatbots are sourcing answers from those sites, then that again becomes interesting for us about where we should go and pitch and place or partner with those kind of media or other sites because of how they’re ranking within the chatbots.

And then last one, again, vendor sites do show up and it was interesting to see which vendor sites did show up and which ones don’t. So then you can go in and look at the content on that site. Why did the chatbot decide to go and pull answers from that vendor site? How could that be something that you take as a business and optimize your websites for as well? So there’s lots of ways that you can suddenly use that information and that data to make it actionable, for you as you think about not just your marketing and comm strategies, but perhaps your business strategies as well.

Melody Brue:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, it really makes sense for so many reasons in terms of where people show up in terms of reputation management, in terms of how to form content, all of that. But from a technology standpoint, I wouldn’t necessarily expect this from a PR firm.

Laura MacDonald:
No, and I think it is interesting, I’ll certainly acknowledge that one. As I said, we do see ourselves as more of a consultancy than a traditional kind of PR firm, although that’s our heritage for sure. But I think for us, it’s all around how do we help our clients solve those business problems. Whether that’s sell more products, improve reputation, help build better and smarter relationships with customers and prospects.

And these generative AI chatbots are going to be a channel, an increasingly important channel for how current and potential customers are discovering what’s happening in the world around them, learning about your sector, your industry, your company, your executives. And so for us it’s really important to help our clients stay ahead of that.

And as I said, GAIO.tech is just a first step. Right now we’re exposing that, making that black box transparent. And it’s a first step, and I’m sure there’ll be ways in the future that there will be developing the product, continuing to optimize. But first it was really important to think about, hey, this is a channel that we know is growing in importance and we’ve got to help our clients better understand, have better visibility, and use those insights to inform, yes, marketing and communication strategies, but ultimately inform how do they most effectively solve some of those business goals they have.

Melody Brue:
Wow, that’s a lot. I mean, I feel like I want to do so many searches now. I can’t wait to use it.

Laura MacDonald:
I know, once you start digging in, it’s fascinating to dig in. And if you go to GAIO.tech, you can see some of the visuals who try to make it really easy for people. And as I said, it’s a first step, but it’s lifting that veil off and it’s so fascinating and the sources it’s pulling from, you’re like, “Why? And I just want to learn more and dig in here.” And I think it’s sort of like the early days of SEO and something, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” And I think we’re there right now, but how quickly people are embracing this technology, it’s great to have a tool that at least keeps us ahead of that, or abreast of that at least.

Melody Brue:
Very cool. Well, I can’t wait to try it out. And for everybody else, go to GAIO.tech, it’s G-A-I-O .tech.

And thank you Laura so much, for joining us. And thank you to everybody for joining us at the Six Five Summit AI Unleashed. We will see you next time.