In the time it will take you to listen to this podcast episode, parts of it might already be out of date. AI is evolving at a breathtaking pace, yet most companies still struggle with adding it to their workflows in ways which will add business value. And this is the uncomfortable truth that few have addressed head-on: if AI can improve your employees’ efficiency and productivity, but you apply it to the wrong tasks, it could be doing more harm than good.

In our new podcast episode, Mammoth Growth CTO Drew Beaupre interviews Ethan Aaron, CEO and Founder of Portable. Ethan and his team at Portable are well on their way to building a platform that can manage integrations with 10,000 other systems. What’s surprising here is not the pace of their growth, but Ethan’s unconventional take on AI. Upon hearing of Portable’s success, most people’s knee-jerk reaction is to suggest AI as a method for automatically building these API calls even more quickly. But Ethan points out something very few other people are talking about: the real test of AI is whether it can add value to the business based upon each of these new integrations. Connecting one app to another just to move data only has limited value, until we can find ways to surface and activate data that can help companies hit their goals.

Ethan’s perspective on AI as it relates to Portable highlights a much larger issue facing every company right now. AI is not the product itself, but simply a tool that can be used to enhance other products by automating tasks and aiding decision-making. If we don’t clarify what types of behavior we need to change to hit our goals, AI won’t help us make better decisions. If we don’t trust the data we’re handing over to AI, or if we’re feeding it inaccurate data, then again, AI won’t help us make better decisions. On its own, AI is not a guarantor of faster, more accurate insights. First, we must understand our business and our data to the best of our ability. Only then can AI deliver on its insane potential.

Right now, AI is an answer in search of a question. But ironically, AI has revealed a universal truth that savvy marketers have known for decades. AI will allow people to build similar products faster than ever before. And that means that if everyone competes on features and price, commoditization is inevitable as we race to the bottom. The only way to avoid being squashed by this trend in the years to come is to focus on your brand. AI can help you build your website faster, produce content more quickly, and shorten development time for your product. But it can’t tell you what your brand should be, or what it could be. As Drew and Aaron point out, that’s up to you. And that’s something that will never be out of date.

Thanks for listening!

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Since 2015, over 850 companies have trusted Mammoth Growth to surpass their marketing, product, and business intelligence goals. We offer consulting, integration, and strategic planning services in the following areas:

- Data Engineering / Governance
- BI Reporting & Dashboarding
- Customer Data Platform (CDP)
- Product & Behavioral Analytics
- Lifecycle / Email Marketing
- Modern Data Pipelines
- Multi-Touch Attribution
- Machine Learning
- A/B Testing

Mammoth Growth has deep expertise in a wide range of tools, including Amplitude, Braze, Heap, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Rudderstack, and Segment.

We’re your Growth Team as a Service.