You Ask, I Answer: Staying Ahead in AI and MarTech?

In this episode, Buyan asks, uh, what habits do you do on a regular basis that help you learn and stay ahead in the AI and Martech space? So it's a good question. Any kind of progress requires you to be doing two things to build a third thing. Uh and those two things are you need to be learning, which is the academic knowledge, uh, ac acquiring uh information and processing it, understanding what it is that that you're reading. And then two is practice, uh implementing what all the things you're reading so that it's not just theory, uh, you understand how it works, make your own discoveries, uh, and more importantly, discover what doesn't work.

Those two things combined get you uh experience or wisdom, if you like. Um they are required in equal amounts. One of the challenges we see happen a lot is um people who are over-leveraged in one of those two areas. They are spending so much time doing the thing that their knowledge gets stale. Uh, I meet a lot of uh practitioners at uh corporations who are so heads down on getting the job done, getting their to-do lists cleared and stuff that they lose track of what's happening in an industry.

They they don't know that you know this new model came out or this new technique is available or uh this new software has happened because it's just one of those things where they're trying to stay afloat, which I totally get. Um I I had experiences like that in agency life where you're working out 60, 70, 80 hours a week uh just to get things done, just to keep things uh moving along. The academic knowledge without practice um is armchair theory. You can read about something, go, oh well, it could do all these things, um, but you never actually understand how the thing works, so you don't understand the limitations and you may not even understand what it is that you're talking about. When I was in uh graduate school, I remember uh this one class where the professor was talking about uh uh OLAP cubes, uh online app uh application processing.

Like, no, that's not it. Um it's a type of database. And he was talking about the theory of OLAP cubes and and uh transaction processing, and uh had never actually used the technology. So in class one day I said, Okay, well let's just set one up because uh at the time uh Microsoft SQL Server supported that. I said, let's just set one up and we did, and it turns out that most of uh this professor's theories about how OLAP cubes worked didn't hold up because the practical application was very, very different.

Uh and uh he really was not aware of that. Now, in fairness, um it wasn't necessary for his job to do that. Um and the theories themselves I think were starting points for uh people to try to try to figure out how to implement them. But that's why you need that practical application and that academic theory in tandem. You can't have one without the other.

Um and so for what I do to stay current is uh those two things. On the academic theory side, um I put together newsletters. Uh I read a ton in order to do that. Um I have software that helps curate a list of you know the the top things I need to pay attention to in MarTech and marketing data science and AI and as I'm putting together these newsletters and I'm I'm reading through what the machines have have assembled as my reading list I go wow I didn't know that happened or I didn't realize that happened or that this was a thing. It's like 1500 articles a week and just going through this going wow there's a lot that's happening that I was not aware of and as I go through and put together my newsletter I go that's useful that's useful that's useful and go and read those things.

I also belong to a number of communities. I run a Slack community as part of Trust Insights if you go to trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers uh that's the community I run but I'm also in two dozen other Slack communities half a dozen uh Discord communities um I'm subscribed to I can't tell you how many newsletters voluntarily that all bring in new information new academic information to learn hey did you know this thing was happening um I I was reading Alita Solis's uh SEO FOMO uh newsletter the other day and it's like here's how a core web vitals are going to be part of uh ranking down the road okay I need to know that but then the other f side the practice side is doing the thing now a lot of I get a lot of the practice um doing stuff for uh you know clients of trust insights and things but I also you know run my own website my personal website uh Christopher SPEN dot com. I I test a lot of things out on it um because it's a safe place to test it. I'm not gonna you know destroy my my company's revenue if I take down the website but for an hour by accident. Um I do uh just a lot of uh testing in general.

Uh I used to do a live stream show called Saturday Night Data Party, which was more just messing around with stuff, uh playing with things. Um as new models come out, uh or as new pieces of software come out, if I can run them in an environment like Google Co laboratory, run it in there, see what happens. I'm actually got another window open over here. Uh trying to run um a model called Jukebox, which is gonna do generative music uh creation, which is interesting stuff. So it's just picking up things that as you read about them saying, I'm gonna try this.

How does this work? What is it involved? Um, and can I make the thing work and generate the result that's promised result? And you find out really quickly, some things live up to their promises, other things not so much. On a good day, uh you might be able to get them to work on a bad day, uh it just immediate uh and hilarious failure.

So that's the process. The challenge is you have to build time in your schedule for it. You have to make time for professional development. Uh it will in almost every place I've worked, there's been a lot of lip service to professional development, and like maybe an organizational send you to a conference like once a year, but that's it. They will not create the time for you.

So you have to do that, and if you can do that in your working hours, great. Sometimes you have to do it outside your working hours. If you care about your professional development, you will have to make that time outside of work. You'll have to take s time away from something else, like you know, whatever series you're binging on Netflix, in order to give yourself time to research and grow. Um, and that's the hardest part for people.

And people are not willing to make the time for themselves personally, even if it's a benefit to them professionally and and to their careers and to you know their their income, all that stuff. I don't know why. Um doing stuff that is for professional development has just been something I've always been part of uh doing. I think it comes from either whether you whether you like the process of learning or you don't. Um but I think it's a learnable thing.

I don't think it's something you're born with. It's just overcoming um you know perhaps bad experiences in the past. So that's the process. Academic knowledge, practical application, put the two together to get experience, um, and make the time for it. Make the time for it.

Dedicate uh two hours a week, wherever you can find them, to doing that. One hour of reading, one hour of doing. You have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon.

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