Why Enterprises Need to Care What GenAI Says About Them | The Six Five Summit

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 Brew VP and principal analyst at more insights and strategy, and I am excited to introduce you to Laura McDonald, chief Growth Officer at Hotwire.

Hi Laura, how are you? Good, how are you? Melody?

I'm Great. Happy to have you here with us at Summit. Um, today we will be talking about Hotwire's recently launched GAO Tech.

So let's get started with this. So Hotwire recently launched gao 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.

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 ndl, to really help them tell the right stories to reach their current and potential customers through key channels like media analysts like yourself, you know, 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 chat bots.

And so we built this tool to help them start to better understand what these chat bots are saying about them and actually perhaps even how they could start to show up as well in those places so they can start to communicate to their audiences in that right way. Wow, that's really interesting. So I mean, obviously your clients really need to show up in the right places and it's, it so interesting to think that a chat bot is one of the places that they need to show up.

So how does this tool help them show up there? 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 and now using AI at work and that behavior's only gonna grow. Heard the news about p WC now on selling kind of chat BT enterprise, Google's putting AI search results, you know, upfront when you search on kind of Google. And the study also showed that research is one of the key activities that the, you know, knowledge workers using that chatbots for, um, particularly power users as well.

But currently those kind of AI chatbots, if you use kind of track BT or perplexity or one of those, they're a bit of a black box. You know, the companies that we work with and, and, and everyone in general, we don't really have visibility into, you know, how are they getting those, you know, answers, where are they getting them from and sort of why are certain companies or certain products showing up And yet, you know, as we talked about for enterprises, kind of, uh, do you think these kind of channels and this kind of behavior is only gonna increase? So what we did is we wanted to, you know, take a first step and get greater visibility into it, and that's what GAO tech does.

So GAO stands for generative AI optimization, and so you can sort of think about it like seo, but instead of for search, it's, you know, for general of 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. So help break this down because I think, you know, there are SEO specialists and now I think people are gonna be like, wait, now we have to embrace chatbot, you know, optimization as well.

So how does this work break this down for us? So we probably all use them and you, you go in and sort of, you know, ask questions and it kind of responds with the answers. And so what we've done with our tool is we're kind of aggregating kind of large kind of data sets of those answers.

So we use the chat bots and SEO kind of data to, to create a, a large number of questions, you know, hundreds or thousands of questions that humans would be asking and using those chat bots to solve around specific products or services. For example, we run one ahead of this, um, session asking around the best sort of cybersecurity providers for businesses. And then from aggregating in that large kind of data set of answers, we're able to then pull out, you know, a few key things.

So first off, the key trends coming outta those answers, so say the cybersecurity providers for businesses, we only did a small query just for a trial, but we could sort of see within that, that the gen i A chat bots, and this was chat GPT 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 sort of optimize your content in the future.

The other thing that, you know, from our point of view being kind of a marketing and comms kind of consultancy is, is really interesting is about where are they sourcing those answers from? And perhaps expectedly right now because it, they've kind of been used and and promoted a lot for a consumer kind of 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 and if anybody knows of them, but that was the most cited source for where the chat BT was pulling its answers from.

Now that's probably not a site that, you know, know, we would consider as, you know, a, a valuable site that we want to, you know, go and get coverage for our clients or kind of work with on sponsored content. But if the, you know, these chat bots are sourcing kind of answers from those kind of sites, then that again becomes kind of interesting for us about where we should go and pitch and place and or partner with those kind of media or other sites because of how they're ranking within the chat bots. 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 because, so then you can go in and, you know, look at the content on that site.

Why did you know the chat bot decide to go and pull answers from that vendor site? How could that, you know, be something that you take as a, as a business and optimize your websites for as well? So there's lots of ways that you can suddenly kind of use that information and that data to, to make it actionable kind of for you as you think about not just your marketing and comm strategies, but perhaps your business strategies as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting and 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, you know, kind of how to get, how to form content, all of that. But from a technology standpoint, I wouldn't necessarily expect this from a PR firm. No, and I think it is interesting, it certainly acknowledge that one, as I said, we do sort of 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 kind of business problems, whether that's, you know, sell more products, improve reputation, build better, smarter relationships with kind of customers and kind of prospects. And these generative AI chatbots are going to be a channel and a an increasingly important channel for how current and potential kind of 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, Gaia tech is just a first step right now. We're sort of, you know, exposing that kind of making that black box transparent and you know, it's a, a first step and I'm sure there'll be, you know, ways in the future that there will be become developing the product, um, continuing to, to optimize.

But first us, it was really important to think about, hey, this is a channel that we know is growing in importance and we've gotta help our clients better understand, have better visibility, and, you know, use those kind of insights, you know, to inform yes, marketing and communication strategies, but ultimately inform how do they most effectively solve some of those business goals they have. Wow, that's a lot. I mean, I feel like I want, I wanna do so many searches now.

I can't wait to use it. I know once you start digging in, it's, it's ing to, to dig in. And if you go to Gaia Tech, you can see some of the visuals who try to make it, you know, really easy for, for people.

And as I said, it's a first step, but it's, it's pulling, it's like lifting that ba off and it's, and it's so fascinating and you know, the sources it's pulling from you, you are like, why? And I just wanna learn more and, and dig in here. And I think it's, its sort of like the early days of SEO and something, oh, I hadn't thought of that.

And I think we're, we're there right now, but how quickly people are embracing, you know, this technology, you know, it's, it's great to have a tool that at least keeps us ahead of that or abreast of that at least. Very cool. Well, I can't wait to try it out.

tech, it's ga io 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.