Why Your Marketing Dashboard Is Lying to You (And how AI Can Fix It)

Jill [00:00:00] The challenge that we had is we had a lot of junior marketers who didn't really understand how to interpret the data point, and so what does that actually mean to their clients?

Jeff Live data is the evolution, and we're able to do that via talking to your live data environments. Being able to look at hundreds of different metrics that are available inside of any data source all at once.

Intro Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bo Jee Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

Kelly Hey everyone. Kelly McGuire with Bougie Day Digital. Excited to get into today's topic and talk to you today's guest.

Todd Hey, it's Todd. I am fresh off the plane from Germany, so I'm about a nine hour time difference right now in, in [00:01:00] my head. So hopefully, that doesn't impact anything today. and so we've got Jeff and Jill from, I think the last time you were on the show, it was still fusion.

Todd It wasn't fused.

Jill Actually it was Deck Fusion.

Todd It was Deck fusion still. So, all right, so we're a couple of iterations beyond that and now we have landed on the final brand of Fuse. so I, I've got Jill, former ex Googler and Jeff, who's started a bunch of tech companies and exited, done a bunch of cool stuff.

Todd and we're gonna talk about Fuse again today because it's evolved a lot since the last time we talked. So, welcome Jeff and Jill.

Jill Thank you so much for having me back and for having us on your podcast today.

Jeff Yeah, you said that I wasn't allowed to be on the last one, so happy to be on this one.

Todd you're allowed. so I've got some sort of hard hitting technical product [00:02:00] questions to go through today because I think. That's where a lot of people's minds are at right now, including Kelly and i's mind, about how we're gonna be tackling and building, products in our company. that AI will be the underpinning sort of engine to, and just for.

Todd Clarity's sake, is also an investor in f so, we're big fans of the product, but we also are, involved with the company and so, we're hoping it will continue to power what we're doing. so here's the first big question, and I think, Jeff, you're ready to swing a bat at this one. dashboards, are they dead or are they still needed?

Todd And if so. how do these two products play together in, in how you guys see the future shaping up?

Jeff Yeah. our dashboard's dead. No, I don't think dashboards are dead at all. They serve a purpose. I do think that, with AI and with AI technology, there is an [00:03:00] evolution, a major evolution of dashboards that is happening currently.

Jeff Hence our product. And how we are evolving dashboards is probably the right way. That was,shouldn't have said that type of thing, but it came out. but we're not attacking dashboards and I don't think they're dead in any way.

Jeff In fact, we have a form now and inside of our product that allows you to create a dashboard live. I think the problem with dashboards, just as a, I've been a marketer all my life and,I've always needed a data or a tech team in order to do my job. And all the marketers that I've ever managed, I've managed some pretty big teams.

Jeff They've always needed data in tech teams as well, and everybody uses dashboards, whether, I'm assuming I'm allowed to just name products and all of that. So Google, Looker, power bi, Tableau, we name your dashboard. There's so many of them out there. the problem with dashboards isn't the setup, the initial setup, although that is a problem because marketers typically aren't the ones that are setting up the data inside of a dashboard.

Jeff it's, the constant maintenance. It's the fact that, the data that's being ingested inside of a dashboard just breaks [00:04:00] all the time. it ingests via an ETL pipeline. I call them a fragile ETL pipeline, and I think a lot of other people do too, because they break. And then whenever Google Analytics updates their data source, which I mean Google Analytics, I feel like update, everybody knows that.

Jeff You know what, like once a month you get a GA four update, the data that's being ingested. They changed conversion metric to now it's key events. Now all of a sudden the data that's being ingested inside of your dashboard is inaccurate. So you need a data or tech team in order to actually use a dashboard constantly, which means the marketers that are using a dashboard just have to keep spending more and more money on data and tech teams in order to even read a dashboard, let alone tell stories around it.

Jeff And I think that, now with ai, it's just a much simpler way and there's a much simpler solution. Does that answer your question, Todd?

Todd Yeah. Kelly, I'm and Jill, I dunno if you have anything to add to this, but Kelly, I'm curious about the struggles that we have, [00:05:00] and we talk about all the time about answering the question why.

Todd Mm-hmm. Why is a data point? A data point? Yeah. Why?

Jill I was actually gonna to touch on that point. on the agency side, before, coming to start Fuse, the challenge that we had is we had a lot of junior marketers who didn't really understand how to interpret the data point. So what does that actually mean to their clients?

Jill How do they translate that into action and intelligence, behind what's gonna move the needle for their business? It was a really big challenge in terms of how do we action on this data? So like, okay, cool, here's a dashboard, here's a trend, but like, what does it actually mean? That was a really big, challenge that we were facing.

Kelly Yeah, I think that's the big evolution for me right now when we talk about. Dashboards and them not necessarily being dead, but being a more, a bigger opportunity to make better use of them and the way that, that we approach them. So as you were talking, Jeff, I'm thinking about [00:06:00] it, it's funny that you say the why in that Todd.

Kelly 'cause I'm thinking about, well, why does someone want a dashboard historically? Right. And it's a conduit for conveying information. And historically it's only been as good as. People's willingness to really dive in and use it. And that tends to be the roadblock in my experience, is originally it's meant to be, to make it easier to access the information, but they tend to get really complicated.

Kelly And then there's a lot of turnover on things and people, some people really like them, some people don't, and then they sort of always. By the wayside a little bit in my experience, where it's just easier to ask your account manager or your team like, Hey, I want this piece of information. Can you give it to me?

Kelly Versus like, go in, log in, use the filter, find it myself. And that just for whatever reason, the behavior goes in. And I say all that because the interesting thing that I think the AI element introduces, at least in my experience, is the dashboard rather than being the end. Result of showing what you want someone to [00:07:00] see kind of becomes the conduit for exploration.

Kelly and that's the thing for me, that AI has gotten so much better at allowing curious people who take the time and energy to use it right, to explore things they wouldn't have otherwise explored. And so now, instead of it only being able to have prebuilt charts and graphs that tell you the story that I want to tell you.

Kelly It's a conduit for asking semantic questions of what's going on here, how are things trending over the last couple of months? And the ability to kind of mold the dashboard, to visualize the output for that curiosity and that exploration. And if you think of it that way, a dashboard again just becomes that interface of, I know work is being done and money's being spent, and I know data's being produced, that's gonna tell me how it's performing.

Kelly But now I want to interact and ask and explore and be curious. And now this dashboard gives me a way to answer each of my [00:08:00] questions without having to read a paragraph and interpret it. And I think if we start to shift our thinking in that way, it becomes a much stronger conduit and opportunity than it used to be, which is we are just, instead of you asking us a million questions, we're gonna paste it up somewhere.

Kelly You go log in and find it. And we hope you actually do that.

Jeff I love that. And I'll say, something that you said specifically, the, it's a conduit to display information. I think I want to just add a little bit to that. I think a little bit of a problem that, a little bit, a huge problem with dashboards is that there's only a certain amount of data that can go inside the A dashboard.

Jeff So it's actually a conduit to display the same information over and over again. So that means it's not actually telling you the full story, which. Needs to be evolved. That's a big problem with dashboards today because whatever data metrics that you are putting inside of a dashboard is the data that you're looking at, and that's that.

Jeff But we don't realize that there's hundreds of data metrics that you can actually put inside of a dashboard with any different data source. [00:09:00] You can't just put all of that inside of a dashboard. So how can you really tell that full story without all of the different data points that are actually necessary in order to tell it?

Jeff So that's where we think that dashboards need to evolve because, just having a limited amount of metrics is just, it doesn't, it's not enough.

Kelly So that's an interesting point that you bring up there too. Right. and I don't know the solution to this, 'cause I feel like that's maybe another tripping point often for dashboards, which is.

Kelly Striking the balance between simple enough to make it useful and understandable, but complicated enough to really tell you what you need to know. And so when you start to have multiple metrics that are dependent on each other and needing to do overlays or needing to be time-based comparisons of like, okay, I wanna see what my cost per click is, but I want to see it in a year over year comparison, or I need to see it in the seasonality context to understand what I'm just being able to see.

Kelly And so. So what is the balance, right? You can layer on so many things that it just becomes a bunch of noise, [00:10:00] but then you can dumb it down so much that it's not actually valuable. And so again, this is where adding in the AI component helps you not have to know the answers to plot that out properly, but allows you to explore, like I think looking at this in a bar chart in a time series will look good and what might've taken you.

Kelly A day or more to build out. Only to find out, well, I thought that would be the good way to look at it, but it's not very good anymore. Now the systems let you see it really quick and be like, okay, I don't like that. Maybe a line chart would be better, or maybe, two time series would be better. And that ability to rapidly iterate and kind of.

Kelly Test and experiment, I think becomes really powerful and I think it will become a lot more enjoyable for your average end user than right now. It feels like a chore to have to go into a dashboard versus the, it's actually giving me sort of this guided experience to find what I really want to do without me having to know secret codes or remember certain dropdown menus or things like that I think people just [00:11:00] give up on in dashboards right now.

Jeff Yeah, and look, I,so I worked at a number of different brands and I've had my own brands and as you mentioned Todd earlier, I had my last startup did pretty well and got it acquired in, 2018. But after that I went agency side. So I started learning how agencies work and ran campaigns for like so many pictures and Amazon Studios and Lionsgate.

Jeff And, I can't tell you how many brands, whether small or large, we'll always ask for the dashboard. They'll pay for the dashboard too. It

Kelly needs to exist. it is a checkbox and the list.

Jeff Exactly. Exactly. and that's great. And they'll pay for it, which is even better. Right. So that's great. But then they don't log into it and they don't want anything but the analysis around it.

Jeff So they are still necessary. They don't need to go away. They're not dead. They're still around. You still need that. conduit to display the same information over and over again because it's necessary to still display a certain amount of information in a dashboard. There just needs to be an evolution.

Jeff And with AI you can do that with ai. There's context, for example, that represent company context [00:12:00] or world context or, any type of company context or when it comes to, we have a number of clients, for example, that put in like. Quarterly goals that they want to talk, that they want to compare their live data environments to.

Jeff so that, it compares to that, dashboard tools don't necessarily always represent that type of context. and,the AI for BI tools, typically that's just kind of a chatbot on top of whatever data is visible on your chat or in your dashboard. So, we just kind of look at things and we believe that, it's time for an evolution.

Jeff So that's where Fuse comes in.

Todd okay. So I wanna ask a question about, our current state versus our future state. So with us in particular, our current state is we still have a tech stack that uses an ETL tool, that is feeding into Google BigQuery,and all of our data. And so our experimentation with Fuse is that.

Todd That potentially is no longer needed. but that's what powers our dashboard. Yeah. So how do you [00:13:00] sort of sit with both of these? Are we going to be in a state where we sit with both of these products? Like you said, there still might be a need for static dashboards and, static sort of data layers or data views that.

Todd In a dashboard, but that's still built on an ETL and something like Snowflake or BigQuery versus your system just sort of skips all of that, doesn't need it because it's piped right into the API feeds of Meta or Google or, any of the ad channels that, you guys will be, adding to the platform. So I guess the question is that other stuff still needed?

Todd Are we. Gonna be using that to fuel a dashboard or does someday, does the live data side of things start to create its own dashboard?

Jeff It's exactly what it's already doing. and live data represents accuracy. the problem with ETLs or the problem with,even data lakes and, BigQuery and all those tools is that you can't fully [00:14:00] verify.

Jeff And get a hundred percent data accuracy when it comes to how the data is ingested and having to be updated all the time, whether again, the data sources have to get updated or, you change something in your own data accounts themselves, then you have to go and update everything accordingly, via these ZTL data pipelines.

Jeff So it really is all about,live data is the evolution. and we're able to do that via. Talking to your live native, native live data environments. Being able to look at hundreds of different metrics that are available inside of any data source all at once, and the agents knowing exactly which metrics to pull, regardless of the question that you ask.

Jeff And having your full company context in order to answer your question,accurately and quickly. so, that's a little bit about how we look at things.

Todd Challenge. I have a challenge. Question for that then. or this is what I think a counterpoint could be. Clip

Todd So in our case, we use funnel, [00:15:00] great product.

Todd Very widely known. Widely used. and the idea that, you know, that data isn't live so it could be erroneous, is an interesting statement because. For example, we have analysts who go in and structure mathematically, through calculation structure, all that data and funnel, it's stored in Google, BigQuery.

Todd So it's of course, human error is there, it does happen. but once it's built and it, and the data structured, the mathematics in it work consistently. They don't typically break, that often. So. I'm moving from there into what you're saying, which is how AI works. But then the counterpoint to that is what about AI hallucinations?

Todd And one of the things that Kelly sort of scrambles on about at times is the lack of mathematics and savviness within some of the L lms. So if ETLs and Data Lakes [00:16:00] are. at risk for error. And most of that's gonna be human error because it's humans doing a lot of the data entry and the data structure.

Todd and AI has the ability to take over. How do you then deal with the hallucination side and the anxiety and fear that a lot of marketers have today that they don't trust it because. It does hallucinate and

Kelly people bring, I'll bring up a very specific example that just happened. I was just going through and because I bring up this math that AI's not good at math all the time and a lot of people say, well, it's getting better and it's all these things.

Kelly I literally had an incredibly complicated process that I was just going through and I had to add up a table and an allocations list. I got all the way to the end, and my best practice that I always go through is I will have it kind of check its own work, look for errors, redo all of it in there and in the middle.

Kelly I just casually kind of had to go back, check everything and go through it and it just very casually came back of, oh yeah, my, my thing doesn't add up to a hundred percent. It only added up to 90%. I lost the, I lost 10% in the [00:17:00] process. And rather than that being a catastrophic change the whole thing and had to redo it treats it so casual of like, oh yeah, my bad.

Kelly let me just update it and here's the new one. But it's like, if you don't have an entire team of people, if one person doesn't have that. That gut check that, that verification element on it, it can take a hard left turn and it's a butterfly effect where everything is wrong off of one thing in an iterative process.

Kelly And the bigger and bigger you get at that project, the more crazy it becomes on what it could become. So. I dunno, that's just an example of like, I just saw that the other day of something as simple as it didn't add up to a hundred percent and I still can't even figure out how it could so casually drop such a significant number in a relatively straightforward ask.

Jeff Yeah. LMS are notoriously terrible at math. so let me do one thing and it let me do one. There's one step at a time here when it comes to answering that whole thing. 'cause first thing I wanna say is we talk to a lot of marketers and marketing teams a lot, and as we talk to them, it's almost every [00:18:00] single time we talk to them, they'll send, they'll end up saying two words.

Jeff And before I tell you those two words, let me give you the context. we always. How confident are you in the data that's in your dashboard or even, wherever you're looking at data currently, in comparison to just your Google Analytics. When it comes to the one-to-one ratio, do you always feel, do you feel a hundred percent confident that the data that's in your dashboard is one-to-one in comparison to Google Analytics?

Jeff And they'll always say, no, not really, but the two words always are, eh, it's good enough. Jill and I don't believe in good enough, and we don't believe that the good enough is enough. we believe in a hundred percent data accuracy. So now let's talk about how we do that and how we prevent any type of hallucinations and how we represent a hundred percent data accuracy.

Jeff We've built what's called our proprietary semantic intelligence layer, which is just a fancy way of us internally of what we call our glossary. our glossary is a ton of context that we have built inside of our product and trained [00:19:00] inside of our models that represents thousands and thousands of marketing.

Jeff Words, terms, alias words and terms to all of those. and then, questions that marketers ask, thousands of follow-up questions to those questions, and then follow-up questions to those follow-up questions that marketers ask. And then calculations and computations that marketers ask every day that you are typically going to get hallucination on with just type, any type of AI chatbot on top of the dashboard.

Jeff The reason why is because they're not trained specifically like we've trained our models. You can ask things like, what's my C to LTV ratio? Great. It'll represent that answer. And then, what's my cacti LTV ratio now in comparison to last quarter, that'll represent that answer with full 100% accuracy. And what's beautiful about our product is then you can ask.

Jeff How do I scale my business next quarter based off this information? And then it'll go and represent that too. We built our framework to repre to represent three specific, an, the answers to three specific questions that every marketer asks. one being the [00:20:00] what is my data actually saying? And the next is, so what?

Jeff So what does this actually mean for my business? And then the third is, now what? Now what should I do next in order to scale? and regarding the, conversation around the,The math and how LLMs are just notoriously terrible at math. That's why we built specific AI agent calculators to be able to do the math for you and that it's incredibly good at math.

Jeff So, but it's all about context, and that is ai. It's all about the contextual information and the training of the models that will make your product different, and we're proud to represent the differences. between, what Fuse is doing and what a,a tool that might be, that might have been vibe coded and, has some type of VTL, connection like with Tran or something like that just says, Hey, we put, a different data source every week inside of our product.

Jeff Okay, I know what you're doing, type of thing. and can you really trust those types of tools? you could find out for yourself and with us, you can. I know if that was too aggressive, [00:21:00] I apologize. No, it might've been a little too, that's very, yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited and I know the market very well.

Jeff so forgive me if it comes off a little too. a little too,

Todd our show is contrary to popular opinion, so we're supposed to be a little bit debatable here. okay,

Kelly perfect.

Todd I'm gonna go out of order a little bit on my questions 'cause you kept bringing up something in your last.

Todd Commentary, about training the models and one of the things that we are, we as an agency and I'm sure everybody is, 'cause I read about it every day, trying to figure out, is the use of training models with data and the privacy compliance around that. Mm-hmm. JE DE is a ISO 2 7 0 0 1 certified company.

Todd so we've put a lot of time, energy, and effort into data security, data privacy, data compliance. and one of the things that I'm curious if you guys have sort of an updated opinion on, or sort of perspective [00:22:00] on is how is data training and LLM training and privacy compliance sort of meshing together and what you guys are seeing out there?

Jeff have you guys seen the article about Mixpanel and their data breach with open ai?

Todd I think I heard about

Jeff it, but I haven't seen it yet. You know why you haven't heard about it? Because they tried to hide it. Yeah, that's why it came out the day before Thanksgiving. OpenAI put a, it's like a one pager release about mixed panels data that was, leaked.

Jeff here I can even, I have, of course, trying to be prepared here. We'll put it in the show notes and people can read it. What is clear is that companies like Mixedpanel store huge banks of information about people and how they use their apps and are clearly becoming a focus for malicious hackers.

Jeff Mixedpanel certainly has all those certifications as well. Probably more billion, over a billion dollar organization. Now the difference between what we're doing and what all these other tools are doing is we're talking to live data environments and we're not saving your data in servers. So we remove a lot of those compliance hurdles [00:23:00] by not caching data or saving data in servers and talking to live data environments and having our agents talk directly to your live data environments.

Jeff You don't have to worry about hackers coming in and stealing data 'cause there's no data for them to steal. You're talking to live data environments every single time. There is a huge difference between us and others. And why not just small, medium businesses? Get or flocking to our product, which we're super proud of because so many of these AI for BI tools are all like enterprise only.

Jeff Enterprise only. Mm-hmm. Great. We wanna be accessible for all, but enterprise brands are coming to us as well because those compliance hurdles and that red tape that they always have to go through, and the fact that NPA got hacked just like that with OpenAI, they're now coming to us as well. And we have some incredible clients that,really love what we're doing and that's one of the major reasons.

Todd Yeah, it's a scary thing. I'm constantly trying to figure out how we're, approaching that as a company. because we sit on a lot of client advertising data. and in a way we have to be able to use that data to train models to be able [00:24:00] to get into decision tree logic. but. there's risk to all of that.

Todd so the next thing I wanted to bring up was Google's recent announcement about their own ads advisor. Mm-hmm. working with inside of, in this particular case, Google ads environments. And so if that ad advisor, so if I have a director of search and. She or he could just go in there and talk to the ad advisor about their real time live Google Ads data.

Todd Why do I need Fuse to do that? You're not getting

Jill the whole picture,you're only getting one view. And so that, that's the beauty of our product, is that you're getting that complete cross channel visibility into what's going on. And that is something that Google or Meta or anybody else is not gonna be able to provide you.

Jill So that, that's really, that plus our, as Jeff mentioned earlier, our intelligence, kind of our secret sauce programmed in intelligence. That's. Also something [00:25:00] that, that Google doesn't have as well.

Todd Isn't that interesting though that like they would put all the time, energy, and effort to develop that.

Todd And your answer is the answer that I would give, which is, well, that's fine if you're just looking at a single channel in a silo. Sure. I mean, other than maybe the media person that's working in that channel, and maybe it's fine for that, but as a more macro level marketing. Intelligence platform, that's obviously not gonna work because it isn't cross channel, it's not multi-platform, multi-channel, in that aspect.

Todd So I think it's interesting that they would do that, knowing that doesn't answer.

Jeff Yeah, if I may add to the, to what Jill said, 'cause that's exactly right. But yeah, there, there's a reason why there's a Google Analytics one and there's a Google Ads one. It's not one combined, it's separate ones.

Jeff so not to mention, you still have to log in and out. If you're an agency, you still have to log in and out of all those different, the Google Ads accounts or Google Analytics accounts and go from one to the next, in order to even use that. MCP that they built [00:26:00] inside of those tools, with us, you don't have to worry about any of that.

Jeff It's all very safe and secure. It's all via workspaces. You go from one client folder to the next. You can work with all of them, all through our product in a safe, secure, and accurate way. And as Joe mentioned, our. What we call our glossary internally makes it so that you can talk to not just one data source at a time, but multiple.

Jeff And they all know how to talk to each other and they all know which metrics to pull, regardless of the question, no matter how complex it is that you ask. So, if you ask about performance and knows exactly which metrics it has to pull from all of your specific data sources that, relate to performance, and, we'll represent that answer for you.

Jeff Accurately and, then represent the strategy in order to show you how to scale that up.

Todd Yeah. I've got one last question for you both, and then I will, want to move us into, a rapid fire close. So this is not necessarily product related, but I think, since [00:27:00] the last time we spoke, there's been tremendous advancements, with Fuse, not only from product development, but also on the pitch and financial side, the growth of the company and the people that have got involved.

Todd So, as both of you being tech founders, what is one. Sort of major contrarian lesson that you've learned, about being involved in an AI startup in a very crowded space. what would be one lesson we should both,

Jeff we're gonna give you two, so since we're being put on the spot, Jill, why don't you start and I'll finish if that's okay.

Jeff Unless, yeah. Do you wanna give an answer first?

Jill y no. You, I, no, you go ahead. I'm still. You got it. You got

Jeff it. don't be afraid to adjust. We were diffusion first because, we believed that the, that last mile problem was a huge problem. And we wanted to take data with AI and create presentations, for, closing deals, creating audits.

Jeff All of that, pivoted and we were so [00:28:00] grateful that we pivoted. And the reason why we pivoted is because we had users come inside of our product, take a look at it. And you know what they always say? They always, they, they were saying, wow, this is cool. That's not really the answer you want. 'cause that makes it feel like you're just a novel, you're a novelty of a product and that's not something that people really feel sticky or addicted to and that's not the product that you really want.

Jeff but what they did say is, what's really cool about this is the data that I'm able to connect and, I really want to dive further into the intelligence of this data. So that's when we. Broke apart our product. Got rid of the deck side, thankfully, because there's Gammas of the world who are killing it.

Jeff Open ai, they're their update today of, GPT 5.2. It's really just about take a whole bunch of data and create presentations visually. Just so much more beautiful now. It was a great move. We did that in March. it was a hard pivot, but it was a necessary pivot. And,in startups you better pivot fast.

Jeff Because,otherwise, technology these days is just kind of [00:29:00] gonna kind of take over. So, that's my advice. pivot fast. don't worry about what's happening today. try and consider where the future's heading with technology and that's what you should be building.

Jill Yeah. And I agree with all of that.

Jill And I would say also, and I know you guys believe in this philosophy, but just test and learn. I mean, as marketers, don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, roll up your sleeves, test new products like Fuse, There's a lot out there and it can be a little overwhelming, but just pick something to start with.

Jill Test and just keep, learning. there's always learn with, there's so much to learn in marketing. It's an incredibly exciting time to be in marketing right now. It's a lot of change, but but yeah, just having that test and learn mindset I think is, good to have.

Todd we would agree.

Todd We like to get our clients to be brave enough to let us test and learn. Kelly always says a test cannot be a test if it cannot fail, which

Jeff some tests fail. you guys have been [00:30:00] with us from the beginning and you've seen plenty of failures. So also I say, don't be afraid to fail.

Todd I have to go find another deck building solution.

Todd Since you're do that anymore, Which was our initial interest in your product. why We got excited by it. But that's, yeah. There's everything now to do that. yeah. Alright, rapid fire, one word answers from each of you. So I'll ask, I'll say the question, but I need a one word answer, from each of you, and I'll give you a choice.

Todd You just have to spit it out. Jill, how about we do this? Jill, you go first on each one of these. Jeff, you follow? Second. so first one is dashboards obsolete or essential.

Jill Essential.

Jeff let's go. Essential. They're still essential. yeah.

Jill I can't say evolving.

Jeff they're not yet obsolete or, I, there's, they'll always be essential. They just need to be evolved. That's all right. So they're still essential.

Todd One word, Jeff.

Jeff One word.

Todd Sorry. It's hard. That's the hard part.

Todd That's hard

Jeff for me. [00:31:00] I dunno how anyone

Todd can do that. the modern data tech stack. Overrated or underrated?

Jill Underrated,

Jeff it depends how you define modern, but underrated. Okay. Biggest

Todd analytics, villain complexity or noise? complexity. You guys are doing good. You agree? what marketers need more of?

Todd Intuition or data

Jill intuition?

Jeff I mean it, I would say more accurate data. I wouldn't just say data. It's more so it's hard because people don't need more data. They need data. Jeff, we got. but intuition, I think a marketer is a marketer because they have intuition. So I don't know that they need more of that necessarily, in my opinion.

Jeff I've met a lot of marketers. I've known a lot of marketers. I've trained a lot of marketers. And I would say, intuition is typically what we come with. [00:32:00] just inherently, I would, inherently, I would say that the, it's the data complexity that's kind of, needs to be better. Okay. Sorry.

Jeff It's not one word, Todd. I apologize. Yeah. Well, I mean,

Jill if I could counter to that, I think they don't need more data. They already have too much data already. Yeah. it's the, they need to trust their gut a little more if their gut says something is going on in this area, like, dig into that and figure it out.

Jill So that, that's just to clarify. All right. Those intuition over data.

Todd Love it. Okay. Good. It's good if you two disagree every now and then. Yeah. It's if me and Kelly agree on everything all the time, we wouldn't have a company together. AI and marketing today hype or breakthrough?

Jill Oh gosh. I would, I can't say both.

Jill breakthrough?

Jeff Breakthrough, I agree. if you,

Jeff of course it depends on who you're, Yeah. who, well, I know if I asked

Todd Kelly this, he'd say [00:33:00] hype. I it's a hundred percent hype for him.

Jeff Yeah. There's a lot of psychs that are saying the same thing. we know you have to look at the product and you have to really dive in and then you can really see the breakthrough.

Jeff But,there's a lot of noise that is a, certainly a ton of hype. and that makes it harder for real tech like us. It does. It does. So that's why we're, happy to be here and talking to you guys.

Todd if views had one superpower speed or accuracy.

Jill We have both, but, accuracy.

Jeff Accuracy, oh my goodness.

Jeff Love it. Love it. You know what's funny? can I just do it a little anecdote if that's okay? You failed the rapid fire test. I do that's what I do. I'm sorry about that. but we've had so many user interviews even before we built our product and then we end, and then of course we ended up building the product and then.

Jeff We had those same user interviews come in and start testing it, and they became our early adopters and our users, and now we're paying subscribers. and we always ask, how do you feel about the speed? [00:34:00] How did you feel about the speed even before the product was made? How do the speed really something that matters to you typically.

Jeff Then they kind of said yes, and then as the product was being built and they kept using it and kept going in there, they started saying, speed doesn't really matter. We care about the accuracy, and they keep asking them and asking them. Now the product is blazing fast and it's awesome, but. People didn't really care as much about the speed.

Jeff The accuracy is everything, and that's the big thing with AI and the hallucinations and are you gonna get hallucinations or not? That accuracy is key and really the key to our technology more than anything else.

Todd Love it. two more. If you could ban one word in marketing dashboard or attribution dashboard.

Todd Yeah.

Jeff Dashboard attribution is necessary.

Todd It's just, last one. What wins in the long term? Simplicity or sophistication?

Jill Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Todd [00:35:00] Just in general, what wins long term simplicity or sophistication? think of f, think of data, think of all of it. Think of the product.

Todd Is it simplicity or sophistication that wins long term?

Jill I mean, I think the simplicity is the sophistication. So simplicity.

Jeff It's a hundred percent simplicity. and it, you're right, the simplicity is the sophistication, but it is not easy to have something, being, that simple looking, and our product is.

Jeff And,that's, that's what makes it so sophisticated.

Jill I would agree and tot onto that, I mean, people just want something that works. They want it. They wanna know that it's reliable, it's there, it understands the needs and it delivers and yeah,

Jill you shouldn't. That is hard to do.

Jeff You shouldn't have to do a masterclass to know how to use a product.

Jill Exactly.

Jeff I would agree.

Todd alright, well very good. We've come a long way since the last time we spoke. your product is radically different from the last time we spoke. our. Current testing of it [00:36:00] is what we, had hoped we would find in our future.

Todd And so we're excited by it. we're gonna keep being good partners to test and learn, with your product. Kelly, any last commentary for, AI and analytics or Jeff and Jill or anyone listening about AI and analytics with Jeff and Jill?

Kelly No, I mean, for me, I think, all of what we've talked about is really exciting.

Kelly I think. You know when I joked around and I said I would pick hype, I think it's exactly what Jeff said, which is the breakthrough's there. I mean, I sound jaded when I talk about ai, but I think it's because there's. Too much noise and too much over promise and too much hype that's built up around it that drowns out the really great stuff that exists in it.

Kelly But if you can sort through that, if you can kind of be discerning, if you can have the right reasons of what you're looking for and the right tolerance to learn how to use things. The right way. It's funny 'cause it, it bleeds into the other question around simplicity versus sophistication. 'cause my answer would've been [00:37:00] sophistication in the sense that it allows you to do better work versus cheaper and easier.

Kelly And just having the right motivations to it, I think is really important. But yeah, I, I'm really excited about what AI can do and the way that it fuse is looking to use it. is really exciting to me. 'cause I think that's what does create the breakthrough is having a purpose, having a vision for it, and trying to improve things.

Kelly versus just cheaper, faster, easier, flash in the pan type stuff.

Todd Yeah. Well said. Jill, Jeff, thank you. what's, what do you wanna tell listeners? what do they need to go do?

Jill They need to go to our website. Fuse is FU, se is, and come check us out.

Jeff Fuse is your AI data strategist, so come on, take a look.

Jeff even on, even, as you go and log in, if, you'll see a little circle on the bottom right and, you can talk directly to us. And [00:38:00] after 1:00 AM that goes directly to Jill. Please go ahead and chat directly with us and, we're here to help. And, onboarding is incredibly easy, but,we'd love for everybody to try it out and test it out and tell us what they like and what they don't like and how we can make it better for them.

Todd Awesome. Well, we'll probably talk to you again in another few months and see what the next iteration looks like, and the next breakthroughs with the product. So thanks for always sharing wisdom and insights around AI and analytics in your product. I think everybody needs to, I. Be in this level of exploration and testing.

Todd and Fuse is a great product. We'll put everything in the show notes and, have a wonderful holiday break if you get one. As a startup founder, you might not get one, but hope you get one. No,

Jeff thank you. Thank you. Are you guys gonna c ees by the way? Oh, should I not ask that all this was wrapped up? No, that's

Jill a great, actually, we will be at CE Es, so if any years we'll be, we're wanna get in touch, reach out to us.

Jill we're, we'll be there. We'll be on the ground. And

Jeff we have a pretty [00:39:00] major press release coming in mid-January, so we have a lot of news coming, so, Awesome. Thank you for this guys.

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