WinsDay Livestream — Seva Ustinov + Guy Bornstein

Date: 2026-04-01 Format: LinkedIn/YouTube/Instagram livestream Show: WinsDay (hosted by Jessy Lizak, Reviting) Guests: Seva Ustinov (CEO, Plurio AI), Guy Bornstein (CEO, Bornstein Group — branding agency) Language: English YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/XgW1RWQHnXk?si=Tpb_9lozUDASJeEt

Topics: 1. Maintaining brand trust in a world of fake reviews 2. AI-driven marketing automation 3. AI agents for performance marketing 4. Brand resilience in the age of AI

Transcript

0:17 We made it.

0:48 You know who made it.

1:18 Highlevel is a full CRM and marketing platform and I've used some of the best in the SaaS industry.

2:00 And we are live from LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook X. We've got Instagram. Oh, shoot. Got to click that. Go live on Instagram. They always have these extra steps on Instagram. But it's Reviting's Wednesday. Welcome to Wednesday, Revenue Party, people. We have our hot guests and our hot topics. We're gonna get right into it. But, you know, I've got to mention Cherry Assistant first. Um, big shout out to Cherry Assistant. You know, you can't get by and grow a business without delegating. And when you are first getting started, working with a virtual assistant is a great way. So, I'm sure there's some tasks that you have on hand that you shouldn't be doing. you should be delegating. Scan that QR code or if you're listening on podcast later on, go to cherryassistant.com and, you know, talk to them about a VA. Maybe you need a bookkeeper, maybe you need an executive assistant. Um, you know, I've got a producer here behind the screen. Um, but that's what we do here. Maybe there's something else that you need. Um, when you contact Cherry Assistant, let them know that you heard about them through Wednesday for $250 off your first month. And also, I have to tell you about Highlevel. It's $97 a month to get started and you get three accounts for a CRM and marketing automation platform. Um, I mean, these things aren't rocket science anymore. SaaS is not super expensive, but it is so robust. I highly suggest using it. We've white labeled it. So, when businesses work with Reviting, we're able to give them an account. So, we now call it app.reviting.com, which is what our clients know it as, but it's Highlevel under the hood, just white labelled. So, if you're curious about that or you're shopping around, hello, hello on YouTube. Um, and if you're here, let us know you're here. Leave a comment. We want to make this episode for you. Let us know where are you tuning in from. What is interesting in sales and marketing to you? Um, trust is huge. Trust is hard to build. And we're going to be getting into that a little bit on this April Fool's Day. And I'm not fooling around about that. We really do want to hear your comments. Hear your comments. See your comments. Put them in there. Let us know. But um until then, let's bring on our guests. I'm excited to welcome. We've got Seva and G. Thank you so much for joining. Appreciate you being here.

4:17 Thank you for having us.

4:22 Absolutely. Well, let's get right into it. I'm going to put that clock up on the screen or ask Leila to um and if you could fill us in on your full life story from birth to what brought you to now. Before we get into all these sales and marketing topics, we want to really learn the real human you. So, what do you think? G, can you kick us off?

4:43 Sure. So uh my origin story is uh very unique in the sense that uh I never thought that I'm going to be in advertising because uh as I was kind of growing up my dream was to be a journalist and I got to do that uh in Israel where I was born and then serve as a military journalist and then trying to find a way to go to school of communications after having a military reporting experience was very difficult. The country that produces most of the news in the world at any given time didn't have a communication degree like a bachelor's degree. So I wind up coming as a foreign student to the US and uh I was age 21. I wasn't looking uh for staying in college and having the experience of college because I was an adult by then. So I finished my undergrad in two and a half years uh radio television film at Temple University in Philadelphia and uh fast forward got an MBA in telecommunications management which was kind of a one of the first techno MBAs and as was kind of uh graduating with a master's degree from George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia I saw a new economy coming which was kind of the economy of uh flipping itself from having five big companies that are all the employers of the major economic powers to having a lot of small to mid-size companies that need marketing, advertising and marketing support of uh everything from content marketing which they called copywriting at the time uh all the way to uh creating uh brands for companies. And that's really kind of where after working for one year only for a small telecommunication company uh in my area in Washington DC uh I basically said I'm going to start my own agency and my own agency called the Bornstein Group uh started in 1995. Uh I just can't believe it when I even tell that story. But most importantly, I only had $2,000,000 in uh loans via credit card. Uh and that's what started the company. Our tagline was making creativity a science which was basically uh the premise that I had for the company that the way we're going to compete was we're going to go after technology companies and people that felt unappreciated which are now the geniuses the engineers the people that come up with AI cyber security analytics whatever it was so we started as an initial layer and we stayed with B2B and B2G uh marketing And uh as I run the Bornstein Group as a branding agency in the Washington DC area for technology companies, uh the two other things that I did was uh start writing about in form of articles on LinkedIn and only to find out that I need to write kind of a letter if you will to CEOs and to leaders uh of companies that forgot what trust is in the system of uh values as it relates to creating trusted brands and in the past few years since COVID to now uh we have a significant erosion of trust and in my new book uh "Don't Believe the Hype: When Trust is on the Line" I kind of outline a framework that uh CEOs and leaders of companies can actually look and say hey this is the way I can start probing and adjust the model to what I need to do to make sure that we're trusted brand on the outside and we're trusted brand with our employees, with our culture, management, executives, and staff.

8:45 That is so good and so important, too. Culture is important. Well, thank you for that. Um, well, Seva, how about you? We're looking for your full life story from birth to what brought you now to now before we get into all these marketing topics.

8:59 Yeah, sure. So, uh I'm the CEO and founder of Plurio AI but actually like at first I was a computer science student uh won national Olympiad, took second place at Intel Science and Engineering Fair and but at the time developing things was painfully slow. Uh so I decided to go the other way and me and my co-founder and other friends we launched our first business was a marketing agency performance marketing agency mostly and that became surprisingly successful. Uh we've been doing it for 15 years uh scaled to 100 plus full-time employees. Uh traveled the world uh managed millions of dollars in ad spend. Um and that took like 15 years like basically half of my life. Uh after that I got a little bit like bored uh of uh that side of the business and decided to launch um marketing data platform. Like the line of thought was like okay what's the what sits in the core of what we're doing for our customers to help them grow their business using digital channels? That's data and data-driven uh marketing and making the right decisions. So we decided to start to make a data platform. Um we grew that to uh like dozens of uh customers uh almost 100. And I saw that our like marketers, they really look at our dashboards that we provide for hours uh jumping back and forth between dashboards and ad platforms like thinking like what to do next taking actions. So when agentic era came uh we decided to actually build an agent that would do that work for uh marketers. Like why would you manually optimize uh things in ad accounts when you can ask your agents to do all of that for you uh with all the guard rails and safety and uh algorithms you decide. And that would be faster, easier, more efficient and frankly more fun. Uh so currently we're building Plurio as an AI agent for performance marketing for companies spending like hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars uh per months on Google Meta, TikTok and similar channels. And yeah, this is where I am now uh and happy to share more interesting stuff with you.

11:54 Awesome.

11:57 Well, I'm excited to be talking with both of you. This is going to be a great conversation. Obviously, we have some experts with us. So, um let's get into it. So, our first topic is maintaining brand trust in a world of fake reviews. So, later we're going to be talking more about AI and automation and all these tech tools, but it's really important that we remain, you know, trustworthy through all of that. Uh, it's very easy to send messages that are just like, you know, hyper canned, a little too long, not sounding human. Also, fake reviews. Oh, man. We could talk about fake reviews all day. Like, people are paying for reviews out there. There's so many websites. I don't want to call them out, but um, yeah. Could you kick us off on this topic, G? I believe this is yours.

12:45 Sure. So uh as I kind of uh advise uh CEOs and leadership and companies uh as a brand uh strategist uh I found very often that uh there is an erosion of trust that has happened since uh COVID. What COVID did is really kind of disconnected us from the kind of human centric interaction that people have uh whether it's shaking hand or going to a meeting, meeting new people and going down the hall or doing anything in the meeting room where you could see people's reactions, people's emotional intelligence, people's intelligence or no intelligence at all depending on who's in the meeting of course. But when COVID hit and suddenly the only tool that was left was uh kind of video conferencing or like Zoom or Teams or WebEx and you got 10 people or 20 people on the call. Then uh was the introduction of distributed workforce which is still uh the new model of expanding and uh promoting business uh in terms of overhead. Uh something happened and what happened was that uh the messaging that company had which are called a narrative that would go from uh inside the company to outside the company which is called marketing and sales and branding and advertising. Uh suddenly uh what happened is the narrative changed because no longer with the introduction of social media and review sites whether it's a product it's a service or like a G2 exchange or for technology or uh you know Trustpilot site for products in consumer world uh the idea that we own the narrative of our brand is no longer true. We don't own it because whatever we say is now being scrutinized by an outside uh part of the world which we don't control. We don't control what people can say about us in social media or LinkedIn for that matter. Uh we'd like interaction of course but we don't control it. It's freedom of speech globally. And then on top of that, we have a lot of fake reviews. And the fake reviews started as something that was for very kind of low-end products on maybe Amazon or uh Temu or places like that where you're just basically saying five stars for the product that builds credibility. Uh now AI is generating uh scripts for people that all they do is uh creating fake reviews and the summary of it really is that people don't trust anymore anything that they see online. Even when you go to Amazon which is where I host my books uh people don't trust that necessarily what they see is what is true. People are questioning something that they see on social media and because it's a deep fake that is very hard to detect. Uh people don't necessarily trust their management. In fact, there's a statistic from a recent study that was done that shows that 80% of management uh believes that their employees trust them and 90% of employees said that they don't trust their management. So think about company culture, think about values and think about taking that to the outside world where you don't trust it internally and then you take the message to the outside and it basically bounces back to you via bad product reviews and overall degrades your reputation as a company. So it's a really big topic but at the core of it is there's lack of transparency there's a lack of collaboration there's a lack of uh clear uh governance of data within AI and specifically AI agents that are being created obviously in the speed that is needed for the business side but are not necessarily uh stopping and thinking about the ethics the disclosure and the things that really kind of make the difference between being authentic and being fake. So that's really kind of the core issue that comes with how do you basically survive and stay brand resilient in the age of uh AI for a company and I think it's a big challenge and I think that what's happening right now most companies are going through the FOMO stage which is let's invest in AI agents which I'm all for but there's not enough time to consider what are the consequences. And most importantly, what's the brand reputation that you're going to have if you don't proof something that mass-replicates itself a thousand times? So yes, you can send 10,000 emails and get 1500 leads, but there's no quality assurance and there's no subject matter expert that is actually creating the program rather than just coding it. You're automating a mistake. You're not automating a solution.

18:32 Yeah, definitely. And I think it's interesting to talk about fake reviews, too. I would love to hear people in the comments. We've all seen fake reviews. Like, what kind of fake reviews come to mind for you? I mean, people are buying fake reviews everywhere. Like, people are getting paid to do reviews. I get paid. Like, it's like 50 cents a piece every time I review something on TikTok, you know? It's kind of crazy. Um, I could just sit there all day ching ching ching. It's like, um, some are worth more than others. Um or like you know in the B2B world you have uh what's that website G2? I don't know if those are fake reviews.

19:10 Yeah. So like you know the more reviews you have the higher you get ranked. So of course everyone's trying to like get those reviews in there and it's like okay. Um, so yeah, I don't know it that's one thing and that's one reason why I'm really into organic marketing and going live specifically because this is real. We can talk to you in the comments. You got a question, you're watching, there's five of you on YouTube. I don't know how many there are on LinkedIn or Instagram. Um, but like you're here and if you have a question, you can talk to us. We're real human beings and that's trust. But if I put like an overly produced image on LinkedIn and it looks like an ad, people are less likely to look at it, engage with it, um, and then they lose trust with you.

19:56 And then all the other stuff you were talking about like company culture and you know that's a hard one. Um, as hard as you think if you think about what is basically as citizens, we have a constitution in the United States, right? And that's basically, you know, freedom of speech, for example. You can argue how much freedom of speech, but freedom of speech is a value that is part of the culture and part of the framework that we all live under in the United States. So if you think along that line, every company has an ethos, which is kind of the why. Why do we exist? Uh for example, Apple think differently or uh anybody else that basically has that thing. Uh that really kind of should permeate from having the employees uh believe in it, management believe in it, which becomes then your brand promise to the market. And then when you go to market, you have to do promises made, promises kept. And then deal and be interactive through AI, through social media to create a digital footprint for your brand to be resilient because even if you got a bad review on something, but you still have content and strategy and thinking that your company is unique and differentiates itself on its ethos and its cultural values and people on the outside believe that you have values to begin with. That's the difference and that's where authenticity plays the highest role.

21:39 Absolutely. Seva, I'm curious what's your take on all of this?

21:42 Oh, I have a completely opposite take.

21:46 Uh share it please.

21:49 Um like obviously there are some people and companies that have like uh let's call it fake intentions uh that want uh to uh maybe just grow business at any cost. Uh but most of the people they have really good intentions. I believe I truly believe in that. Uh but the problem is making things work. Uh so um think about like how hard it is to organize a picnic with friends or start a small business uh like a cafe or restaurant or something like that and how many things go wrong. Uh now imagine how hard it is to build a larger brand, larger company. And I truly believe that AI agents will only help uh with that because managing like hundreds of employees or running thousands of campaigns uh it's it's hard in itself. Uh but when you're empowered with uh agents uh that's like that becomes a little bit easier a little bit more uh manageable and it will become a step forward to higher authenticity, not less.

23:14 That's a great point. That's a great point.

23:16 Yep. I just wanted to kind of reiterate that you know kind of in the world that we live in Seva as you kind of described you're basically saying uh there are true problems of productivity with good companies that want to achieve something and you're basically kind of accelerating the solution uh to make it uh more effective in the marketplace and as a result those companies will grow if they're doing all the right things. Uh but sometimes uh in reverse when it comes to kind of brand messaging uh you got to think about what is the solution and what is the problem. Sometimes there are problems in search of solutions but sometimes there are solutions in search of problems and a lot of technology many times comes so much ahead in time. Uh which is uh starting an idea and innovating creates basically the issue that like you know the famous adage about no law has ever been legislated about traffic light before somebody died. Nobody put a traffic light in an intersection before people died. Right? I don't want to be that dramatic but uh the point being uh the ideal situation for uh brand resilience and continuing to not have erosion of trust is making sure that what is handed to you even as a partner performance partner uh is to make sure that uh the story and the narrative and whatever the automation — we're not automating the problem and the problem that I say is not the automation. The problem is automating the substance or the content that could be completely wrong and or not vetted or not uh completely uh accurate as it relates to what uh people need. And then when you basically help a company with 50 people or 500 people force multiply to doing 500 times again which is wonderful. The question is are we going to kill the brand of the company if it's a mistake which is not yours. It's the content creators uh fault or uh the company's fault for not doing that. Does that make sense?

25:43 Absolutely. And like I agree with literally everything you said and come to the opposite conclusion.

25:54 Like imagine something bad happens to your brand. Uh and you have um dozen of people, couple of agencies running marketing for your brand. Something bad happened and now you have to change the culture, the processes, the checklists, the safety protocols, the brand review, all of that just to avoid those problems. That's a massive like process in itself. Now think about a moment where like uh eliminating that kind of problem would be like a one evening task just working with your Claude Code adjusting your workflows and safety guidelines uh and guardrails. Yes, there will be mistakes but fixing and building systems that are resilient to those mistakes is so much easier than uh when you don't have those tools.

26:52 I agree with you and it's a terrific point and I think what we're talking about together is kind of that ecosystem that provides the solution but also identifies the problem and it's just basically the sequencing sometimes uh what I see in branding and talking to CEOs of companies is they're not really aware of all that they just say let's put AI because it's faster or because it will produce productivity but not asking the question about what productivity are we going to get that will affect and impact more than just the sales but also maybe uh recruitment and all type of other things should go under what we call a company brand so I agree with you 100%.

27:44 Agree. Awesome. Good stuff. Well let's move into our second topic which is all about AI-driven marketing automation. So, Seva, could you kick us off on this topic?

27:55 Uh, sure. So, basically my whole life I've been in performance marketing basically like since the launch of Google Ads and paid search and then uh display ads and then uh Meta and social ads and all those networks and everything. Um and um for marketers it's uh on the one hand it's a beautiful journey of getting more and more uh tools and inventory and abilities to um like bring their message uh acquire like target right audience uh acquire customers build better business. Um on the other hand it becomes so so frustrating to spend hours per day uh managing those hundreds of thousands of campaigns, adsets, creatives uh like I think everybody — it's a common knowledge that uh running Meta campaigns is a constant like flywheel and pretty struggling process uh where you create uh new ads, new ideas, you launch them and only 5% of them actually become winners. Only 5% of your ads bring like 80-90% of revenue and profits. Uh then uh you have to babysit those campaigns. When you run ads for e-commerce brands or for uh retail brands, it's relatively easy. The automation is there uh and you can just use ad platforms to manage that for you. But when you run ads for applications, consumer subscriptions, um fintech, healthcare, uh any kind of services, uh that becomes a problem because you have delayed conversions, you have long-tail LTV, you look at your uh ad performance uh and you don't know what actually works and what doesn't until you wait for a few days or a few weeks when those leads and trials actually convert. Uh so I literally see marketers spending 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours a day looking at dashboards and changing things uh in uh their um ad campaigns uh manually. Yes, they can do some kind of automation but only on platform data and like that's just not enough. Uh and what I see with our clients, it's like a huge relief uh when you can just ask an agent like hey uh go analyze hundreds of my adsets, hundreds of creatives and suggest what exactly should I do and what is the highest priority. Uh which of those are actually not working and should be killed? Which of those are actually working and should be scaled and ideally scaled faster? Uh which of those start to burn out and what should we do with them and at which point and how we can like reallocate budget in general between channels, between campaigns, between regions, um between uh specific adsets and like brands and companies at scale — they have thousands of them and that becomes a huge problem. Uh so agents can do exactly what you asked it to do uh and bring you the real results. So instead of doing that manually, you can just work with uh the results of this process. If you don't like the process, you just ask an agent to fine-tune it a little bit like, "Hey, you made a mistake here. Next time don't do it, please." Uh it takes time. It's not like a one evening uh thing. It might take like a week, two weeks, a few weeks, but after that it just works almost exactly — pretty consistently like 99% consistently — saving a ton of time, suggesting decisions faster, better, more accurately based on the data. Um and when you get used to that, you can ask an agent to actually create automations. So convert those AI workflows that are 90% 99% accurate but not 100% accurate into actual automation with rules uh to fully automate that without any mistakes using your own logic uh that can be improved over time. Um so basically this process alone uh eliminates like maybe 30% of the most hated part of the work of performance marketers uh while improving efficiency and giving the team superpowers. Uh and what's working today — and I'm not even talking about uh how is it possible to analyze like hundreds of parameters of your creatives and audiences and what's the right combination and match and what should you try next. Analyzing your competitors' hooks, what really captures attention. Uh finding those little gaps uh that don't work and should be — you just cannot do that manually with your own eyes. You don't have enough time and attention. An agent has pretty much infinite attention as long as you know how to run them.

33:51 Yeah, you have to have the skill. Um, so question in the comments, "babysitting campaigns is the perfect way to describe it. Feels like you blink and performance drops." Do you think AI will actually fix this or just add more noise?

34:05 Uh, depending on like your skills. At first it would add everything — efficiency and noise — but over time I think everyone will just uh adapt a little bit. It's just like uh it has the same learning curve as any new technology. Uh so at first you play with it then you make a few mistakes then you get better and then it just works. Uh so when we think about like these early days you might have a criticism like "hey I tried it once and it didn't work." Of course it didn't. Like spend a little bit — have a little bit more trust in that — play with it on minor scale and then once you see it's working then you can expand to all of your campaigns or all of your products, regions, channels, teams.

34:48 Uh so I have a question for you uh for the audience I think very fascinating to hear what you're describing is really kind of an industrial revolution in marketing especially. One of the things that you know I talk about in my book about trust is really kind of the fact that we still need a human being with a heart uh with sentiments and ability to make emotional decisions when it comes to anything and as far as now uh I don't feel or haven't seen — maybe you can share with us uh from your perspective — how do we basically bring that authenticity number one to any kind of uh AI agent uh creation? So it has the human in it even though it's all about the numbers at the end of the day. And then the second part is how do you basically govern it so it actually meets all the expectations of a brand from uh that perspective?

35:58 Great question and like it splits into like separate uh things there. So um on the authenticity and even like the soul behind your ads and creatives and brand uh remember those times or stories about those times when uh like artists painting pictures uh with a brush uh said that like "hey cameras are not real. It's not art. It doesn't have a soul." And then everyone got used to it and really saw that it takes like a fresh perspective and um taste uh to make that art. And then the same happened with digital cameras and now the same — and then the same happened with uh illustrations and any kind of computer design work — and now that happens with AI. Uh the thing is behind even the most sophisticated uh autonomous AI agents there are real humans either on in-house teams or on agency side or on platform side. Uh but somebody you can actually talk to is responsible for what those agents are doing. Uh, so I don't feel like it's going to be um an issue of that scale that everyone is scared of. Uh because ultimately there are real humans with taste, with heart, with soul uh that uh actually make those decisions and adjust those agents that deviates from what is an ideal outcome for a brand.

37:50 So you don't think people are going to be replaced by the robots, huh?

37:56 So you don't think the marketing folks are going to be retired uh in favor by the robots that are doing the same job?

38:05 The job will change but I don't — I think the opposite will happen. Like creating physical products became relatively easy with the platforms and automation and outsourcing all of that. Creating digital products became much much easier at least prototypes and then uh scaling. So there will be so many new products that marketers will have a job for life even with agents 10x-ing their powers.

38:37 Awesome. Well, we're going to be getting into all of that and more after this brief break. We'll be right back.

[AD BREAK — Cherry Assistant, Highlevel, Reviting testimonials]

41:54 Awesome. I love that ad. But let's get right back into these topics because we're talking — maintaining brand resilience in the age of AI. So, G, I'm going to pass it back to you. Can you kick us off?

42:10 Sure. So, um here's the reality. Uh in the new world, uh your brand really depends on your digital footprint outside your company. It's nice to have a website and the website starts with building trust when somebody visits it, but the attention span of people has become so short. Think about YouTube shorts. And when they're looking at your website first, which is your opportunity to tell your narrative and your story, they're looking at signals of trust. And signals of trust could be, for example, uh do you have clients? Do you show off who your clients are? Do you have case studies that talk about what you do? If you can talk about what you do in a case study, do you have user case scenarios? Uh, and then you go to the press room and I can tell you today I went to six different websites uh in technology companies that have their last press release of 2019 uh as part of their brand. Uh how many people are going to trust that in the age where you can get a responsive uh website from another company that basically shows you all those trust signals in place. So I think uh the first uh part of the equation is own it and create uh accountability within your company as a marketer to make sure that you have all these trust signals in place and don't wait for somebody to insult your website uh from the outside. On a golf course where two CEOs are talking about it and there's a story that I heard many times and it's not a legend it actually happened where one CEO meets another CEO on a golf course here in Washington DC area and uh one asks the other you know how many employees does your company have and uh you know the big guy says we've got 6,000 employees and the other company uh CEO says well we have um 20,000 employees and the guys look at each other and say how is it possible — we visited each other's website. And the answer is image and image is not just visuals. Image is words, it's content. The more content that you have to prove that you're an expert in a niche environment, even when the world looks broad, you got to create differentiation and niche on your website and you got to support it by proof points and you have those proof points then you can parlay that into different use of content as you described before uh in the previous segment. What your company does. But the other part is when you go outside, what do you do with the brand and how do you create that resilience is to literally uh continue generating new content assets and promulgate them and distribute them in all the places where decision makers and prospects and your community of interest uh is going to be. I can tell you what not to do. Uh, which is as important. Not sending a signal of trust if you're just putting something on X or Instagram to an audience that is not related to your interest. Uh, you might get three more clicks or three more followers, but that is meaningless in terms of business, especially in business to business where you're looking to people to look at you as the expert. If it's a service, if it's an application, they're looking for a community of users to impress. So, what I always emphasize when you're talking about how to keep your uh brand resilient in this age where you have all these tools, having the tools doesn't mean that you're actually accomplishing the mission. You really got to focus on who's your target audience and then create those content assets and make sure that they exist as proof points on your website on your media if you will that you own but then in the digital footprint where people look like for example LinkedIn for business to business — that's a perfect example of it.

46:32 Yes definitely it is a great example. Um real quick response to that, Seva?

46:40 I mean it makes total sense like um yeah just agree here. Yeah, 100%. It's a lot of work to build that resilience, but uh yeah, thanks for talking us through that. Let's move on real quick because we do only have 10 minutes left on AI agents for performance marketing. So, talk to us about what the agents are doing with performance marketing these days, Seva?

47:09 Yeah. Uh I kind of talked a little bit about that already. Uh like you can send um — I want to reiterate maybe like specific aha moments that really uh convert people from being like skeptics to really loving the technology. Uh the first one — at first I didn't think it would be a thing uh but it turns out it is. So imagine head of performance marketing or head of user acquisition responsible for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in ad spend, managing a team, having like some kind of dashboards built by a marketing operations team. Uh and juggling too many things having calls with the team and with everyone on the team and agency and in the end of the day doing actual research and thinking like what is the next thing? How can we improve performance? How can we make better creatives? How can we uh automate stuff and save time? And if that data that is required for that uh research is not in your dashboard, then you have to like create a task for your team. Wait for a day or a week or a month just to get the data to prove or discard your hypothesis about like something in your uh marketing system. Uh with agents you can just ask a question and get a full research in uh like one or two minutes and you can iterate on that uh many times. Uh, and that feels like — wow, now I have wings. Now I can fly. Now I can do things that I only uh dreamed about. Uh, and now it's in my hands.

49:05 Um, so again, I didn't think it would be a thing, but turns out it is because it's the most interesting and creative part of the work uh of uh media buying teams and user acquisition teams.

49:23 The second layer are those uh workflows. Just send your agent to do the repetitive work you do uh and check the results uh and improve that day by day, week by week until it works exactly as you want it and just forget about that part of work completely or move to the next level of uh management. That saves time, that saves money, that helps you achieve KPIs, uh that helps everyone.

49:56 Uh and then the third layer is uh like real automation. Uh so you can send your agents to explore on your ad accounts and your uh data platform uh numbers. Uh what is exactly the right point to stop uh creatives that are not winners and stop losing money on those? What is the exact right moment to start scaling those? Uh what are the optimization points or things to improve there? And automating that just makes perfect sense for everyone involved in this process. For media buyers, for management, for the business, for consumers, everything just works a little better uh and a little bit more efficient uh with uh those systems and that is possible today. So I'm describing only the things that work today. We can talk about the future but like that's a separate thing.

51:15 I can hear you. The mic is muted.

51:19 Of course. I've got my um coffee mug here. It says "you are on mute." That's not the first time I've done that.

51:27 I want that one. Yes, exactly. I've been known to stay on mute, but yeah. No, thank you for summing all of that up for us. It's really great. Um, I haven't done performance marketing in a hot minute, but there was a time I think in like 2017 I was doing Facebook ads, Google ads. I would — and then I became that marketer. Uh, I was B2B SaaS primarily and I would go into companies and uh shut down all the ads and then watch and see what would happen with the leads and be like, uh, are the leads going to keep coming in? They're like, I didn't know what happened here. Um, that's always my favorite thing to do. That's a good test, you know? Let's make sure the ads are working. But anyways, moving on. I think the final topic — we only have five minutes — so let's talk about the future of sales and marketing with AI automation. Seva, G, both of you? Last five minutes here. Go for it.

52:30 Let me start. Uh so the most painful thing in sales in my experience is the top of the funnel uh when you have a strategy. So for example we're going to target these types of companies of this size from these regions uh with the right people and the process of identifying and qualifying and then reaching them and having a first conversation and moving that forward. Uh and most of the sales people that I know and that I used to employ when we had a sales team uh they spend way too much time doing things that uh they don't even like to do and too little time actually selling which is talking to a person responding to a person being actually in that kind of like a human being selling helping the other uh uh person make a decision. And I think uh agents will again do the same here as in marketing like uh make that process a thousand times faster and a thousand times easier and make people focus on the most interesting parts. And again in that regard what I see now is the tools like Clay. Does everyone know Clay? It's like a crazy tool that allows you to build any kind of pipeline and workflow uh to enrich your leads, score them, qualify them, uh categorize them. And it's just so much more efficient than literally anything I've seen in the past 20 years.

54:09 Now, if you imagine an agent who's smart enough to know what you do, who is your customer, how you sell, how you differentiate, what are your benefits compared to each individual competitors and a hundred of them sometimes. And can combine that with uh tools like Clay. That would be a massive massive game changer. That's what I think is happening right now. Right. So it's not about sending more emails uh being better at being spammy. It's actually about being smarter, being better targeted, being more customized and actually getting into the right conversation with the right person. That's where I see the future of sales within a year.

55:06 And I think on the marketing side we'll see much more actual actions as well. Uh at least it will start from automated budget optimization and campaign actions and then it will go further to creative brief creation and creative production and media planning and then media buying at some point. But I think it starts with uh budget optimization and day-to-day management of campaigns on your behalf with guard rails and rules that you set yourself. And that's what we're working on and that's what we see is already working today.

55:50 Well, I love it. G, any final thoughts?

55:56 Yeah, so, um I think the most important thing for business owners and companies out there uh is to understand the ecosystem. And what I mean by that is uh you know many, many people just come up with the thought of I want an AI agent and I want to be smarter with AI and I want it to produce for me or whatever it is. But there is a whole ecosystem and there's a model in my book that basically talks about the key components that as a CEO, as an owner of a company, you can actually look at and go "hmm is that working or not?" And then plug in AI and then plug in creativity and then plug in a narrative and then make it resilient and then get results. It's like baking a cake. There's a process and the ingredients have to come together. The concept of coming up with an idea for an application or a service and immediately building an agent is like trying to walk before you stand. So you really want to make sure that in terms of the basic communication that you provide you have it all together and then AI is going to be the single most important tool and the most impactful tool to achieve results with the least amount of investment of time and money, especially the time because it's the biggest asset that we all have. And I think Seva's products and solutions are amazing for that.

57:26 Aww, thank you. Thank you.

57:29 Yeah. And, and with that, what did we learn today? What are the takeaways? Uh, brand trust, we talked about it, brand resilience, AI-driven performance marketing, and the future of sales with AI automation. And don't believe the hype, that's G's book. I will be downloading it. Um, G, where do they find you? Where do they find your book and connect with you?

58:00 Sure. So, uh the book is on Amazon. You can go search for Don't Believe the Hype. It's there. You can also find the book by going to dontbelieveai.com. Uh, basically, if you want to learn more about our company, Bornstein Group, go to Bornstein Group, bornsteingroup.com, and you can also follow me on LinkedIn. Uh, that's where I'm most active. My name is Guy Bornstein, and you know, if you search it on LinkedIn you'll find me. And uh would love for people to kind of uh give the book a good review since we talked about reviews. Give me a good one.

58:35 Awesome. Give him a good review. For the people who are listening on the podcast later, B-O-R-N-S-T-E-I-N and then group.com. And Seva, where do they find you?

58:46 Uh, same, LinkedIn and uh also our website plurio.ai. P-L-U-R-I-O dot A-I.

58:56 I love it. We've got our plug. I love it. Uh, before we wrap, a couple of reminders and I want to remind everybody here that we are on X, uh, YouTube. We're on Instagram. I may have or may not have hit the go live button on that one. Uh, we've got, this this show has a lot of channels in it. We're on LinkedIn. So, if you catch this on any channel and the other channels look interesting, you know, check it out. Check out a few different episodes and see what you think. And also, wherever you listen to podcasts, you can listen to this later. So, the audio version will be on all the podcasting platforms. Do me a favor. If this has been useful, leave a five-star review. It really does help the algo and it helps other people discover the content. Uh, and also go check out highlevel.com and cherryassistant.com. Let them know you heard about them through Wednesday, and you'll get $250 off your first month with Cherry and you'll get three accounts for $97 with Highlevel. Reviting.com for going live and growing a real revenue channel. So, thank you, Seva and G, for joining today. We'll see everybody next Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Bye!