CHAPTERS
[0:00] All Systems Go podcast is about marketing automation
[1:03] When I first started this podcast, marketing automation was approaching its apex
[8:25] Data is the backbone of not just automation, but AI, right
[10:07] AI, automation and AI are now in tandem
[14:30] Connect is a multi context protocol that lets you connect across multiple platforms
[22:42] Leadership is critical when it comes to deploying AI in your company
———
And we’re back. Finally. Wow, it’s been a while. And where have I been?
Where have I been? So it’s interesting because it’s been quite a journey and many of you that have been following the podcast for a while know that it has traditionally been about marketing automation. And if you’ve been in the space for a while, you’re also, you’ve also seen quite a few people maybe drop off a bit. There’s been a lot of pivot and shifting depending on when you entered in the online business and info space.
It looks totally different now than it did before. And that shift was. Was tough. Tough.
Chris, what, what, what does this have to do with where you’ve been? Well, what happened? Life. Life happened and part of life professionally was identifying what, what do I do, what have I done and what will I do?
Right? And I’m actually thankful in a slowing down of business to give me this time to think wasn’t comfortable, but it was definitely necessary. And when I first started this podcast, it was at a time where marketing automation was approaching its apex. It was mysterious and nobody really knew what it was.
And those who could do it at a high level were at school high, high regard. And if you could communicate exactly what it was, even higher regard. And that’s where my programs and courses came from. And over time, even if you listen to some of the previous episodes, you’ll hear me allude to the change of automation, where it was becoming more native, where platforms were, including automation inside of the platforms.
And it was giving, it was making it easier to access, which was changing. But then AI came and just leveled the playing fields all the way to the ground. You know, 10 year old with a computer could now compete with what was once a professional. No exaggeration, by the way.
And it just kind of left me trying to figure out my direction. And the most important thing that I’ll say in this whole process is it forced me to find my why. It forced me to find my why. And I’ll talk about more of that in episodes to come because I’ve got.
So I want to detail exactly where, where the identification of my why came from. But that’s in another podcast. But essentially, let me be honest and say as a marketer, if it, if the numbers don’t make sense, a lot of times it doesn’t make sense to continue. And I don’t think I ever really understood what numbers for podcasting should and would look like for me.
And a part of me got caught up in comparison, looking at other people’s podcasts and their video views and everything. And I’m like, I’m just doing a fraction of that. Nobody’s listening to me. They won’t miss me when I’m gone.
And you all proved otherwise. You all proved otherwise. I got in my own way. I got in my own head.
I was trying to figure out the next evolution of Chris and Automation Bridge. And in that one, I want to thank you all who have continually downloaded and listened to the episodes, even after you’ve listened to them, and the new people who subscribe since then. Thank you for that. Every time I got an email from my podcast platform, you’ve got 100 downloads this week.
50, 30, whatever. It was just a constant reminder that people still find value. And I just stopped ignoring it every once. I said, you know what?
Let me stop ignoring that there’s still value that I can give, and let me stop comparing myself with others, right? This is my journey, My business is my way. And when I had to step back, because many of you may have to do this same assessment, and I promise we’re going to get into the topic at hand, but many of you have had to have had to do with or will have to do the same thing. And you’re in business for so long, you really have to figure out, okay, you can start a business and you can be profitable without having sharp messaging, without really understanding what your core offering is.
There’s a lot of things that you can be ignorant to and still be profitable. And there comes a time where you have to know in order for you to succeed, you have to know what makes you unique, what makes you special. And for me, that was my journey. I said, man, is it really automation?
What is it? And you kind of see it. If you go back and listen to the first 200 episodes I was emerging on this. But automation, the foundation of automation, is information.
And another way to say information is data. And I realized that automation was a byproduct. Automation was a tool, let me not say byproduct. Automation has always been a tool for me to use to act, store, and activate data.
In essence, you can simplify the description of automation to the movement of data from one platform to another. If we think about it, it’s what I call pushing pixels. You’re just pushing data, ones and zeros, from one place to another. That’s automation without human intervention.
That’s automation. I have Platform A and I Need it to send something to platform B without me. Ding, ding, ding. That’s automation in a sense.
I found that automation really wasn’t the layer that the issue existed on. It existed on the data layer, the ability to accumulate and organize your data in a way where easy activation could be had. And you would see I was doing certain things right. We’re building automations in make N8N and things like that visually to see how your data is moving.
I was teaching about airtable and how to use airtable in a way that made your processes more efficient. And at the end of the day, what was I really saying? How do you store your data and get access to it in a way that makes activating it quick, easy? And that way was through visualization.
And this is where you know talking about airtable interfaces and this is why Zapier N8N and in the make.coms were so appealing, because it was a visual layer of your data or what’s happening that could further help you understand what has happened it. And for those of you in my community, you’ll see how I went through the building of interfaces for airtable and the shortcomings and things of that nature. But when I look back at it, I’m like, hey, I’m a big data guy.
All of my client work are databases of sizes millions and more in the e comm space. I’m not the one that you bring in when you’ve got a thousand leads. I’m the guy you bring in when you’ve got 10 million leads and you want to treat them right. You want to make sure you’re extracting the right behaviors to train you and teach you on exactly what they’re doing.
And when I was able to lean into that for a moment, I’ll be honest with you, it felt like I was abandoning automation. But the reality was I was infusing it. I was about to unlock something about automation that even I was oversimplifying and wasn’t really taking the time to clarify. And that’s what brings us to today’s topic with the new era of automation.
Because AI, when AI first came on the scene, everybody listen again in full transparency. I was, in my mind, I’m not an AI guy. I saw what everybody was doing and I’m just like, it’s a fad, it’ll fade, it will go away. And I, I did feel a bit threatened that AI was going to take over automation.
But at the time, automation had already kind of been fizzling out as I knew it As I previously knew it well, as I started to dabble in AI a little bit, hey, proofread a email here, create a document there, and things started to get interesting the more I used it and I started to know it for myself and, and that’s when it hit me. Everyone, data is the backbone of not just automation, but AI, because AI uses automation to access the data. And the more organized your data is, the more you can expect to get out of AI, right? And that layer between AI and data is automation.
So this new era, this new era of automation, AI has welcomed me into it by me finding my way. And that’s what you’re going to hear more and more about moving forward is this idea of personal software. Now I’ve got an episode coming up after this that will define what personal software is in depth. But just understand that AI, automation and AI are now in tandem.
You are not going to find one without the other. And if you try to, you’re doing things the hardest way possible. I’m going to give you three ways. I’m going to give you three examples to really drive this home.
And they’re what I call the three Cs, the new Cs, the three new Cs of automation. Some of this stuff I’m making up on the fly, everybody, but some of it I’ve got written down. But I’ve been doing this for so long now. And when I say so long, I’m talking tech years.
Tech years are a multiple of dog years. You do something well, one year in tech, that counts for 10 years in any other industry, right? Because of how fast technology moves. And I’ve been doing this underground.
Again, if you’re in my community, you’ve been seeing it live. But I found how, what automation looks like moving forward. And what is that intersection of automation and AI? I wrote an article on LinkedIn years ago actually, and it’s, and it’s on my website, automationbridge.
com but it has this image of a brain with, with muscle, arms. And the brain is AI and I say the arms are automation. So AI does the thinking and the processing and automation is the actual doing. That’s how they work together.
And if I go through this 3C framework, the first one is code code AI, the new era of automation using AI and agents. One aspect of it is coding, right? And it coding is twofold. One you’re in, you’re deploying an agent to write the code for you.
Right. Actually, let’s just stay there because I don’t want to make it complex, but you’re deploying the agent to write the code for you. Code for what? My very first intro into this was using ChatGPT.
By the way, I would never use ChatGPT to do this. I would use Codex or, you know, Claude and something like that. But at the time I didn’t know everyone. I’m just trying to figure out what this AI thing is.
And I developed a WordPress plugin to do a specific function for me. And when it did it and it actually worked, I was like, wow, good job, AI. And this was really vi. That term vibe coding hadn’t really taken off yet.
So here I am getting. I replaced. I replaced a plugin on WordPress. I said, huh.
So I just went deeper and deeper and before you know it, I was writing code for more scripts on my computer to do a thing. What was the thing I was doing? Automate scripts on my computer that would link certain actions between applications together, would allow me to generate things. Let me stop saying things.
One script, what it does is when I highlight the text and I hit a keyboard command, it takes that text, puts it into a text file, and prompts me with how would I like to save it? I type in the name of the file and then it stores it in a particular directory. That automated me loading up text file, going and manually hitting copy and paste, then hitting save as and then selecting the destination. That was one script.
Another script I found would be able to generate a one time scheduling link. I don’t know if you all use calendly or the cal.coms out there, but you can generate a one time scheduling link where after someone uses it, it. It deletes itself.
Right. It’s no longer active. Well, I wrote a script that generates those on the fly with a keyboard command and it copies it to the da, to the. To the clipboard.
So I could just paste it in, whether it’s an email or anywhere else. So I’m starting to run local automation powered by code. That’s why the first C is code and that would eventually evolve into applications, small applications that I would build. Right.
Not getting ahead of myself. That’s the next episode Personal software. Right. So that’s the first C, and the next C is Connect.
What are these Cs? This is how we define automation in the AI and agentic era. So the next C is Connect and you all. I would have never thought there would be a day that I was no longer logging into Zapier, Make.
com or N8N and I say that because I didn’t have anything wrong with either of those platforms, they worked great for me. There was, I had no complaint and I was really finding my flow at N8N. I had it on my, on my own server. I mean I’m paying a fraction of a cost getting everything.
The builder, they’re updating regularly. But AI came along and it said on top as part of coding. Guess what? All of that visual display that you’re doing, dragging and dropping, do you know what’s happening on the back end?
Chris? I’m just creating a JSON file. You’re manually, actually you’re calling it automation, but you’re manually creating a JSON file. We just tricked you into a drag and drop interface that’s creating code on the back end.
What if I told you, you see how you’ve been using an agent to write code? What if I told you an agent can write that JSON for you? You no longer need to drag the webhook action onto a canvas and configure it yourself. Just tell the agent to do it and it can go out and it can actually query the endpoint and come up with the right structure for you.
And now you can connect all of your platforms. Or maybe that was too technical because you’ve got to actually do the prompting of cloud code or codecs to do it. And don’t worry, I’ll talk about cloud code and codecs later. Just follow me for a minute.
Or you can go mcp, right? What is it? Multi context protocol where all the MCP is, is literally replacing what you would be doing in Zapier, you would go into these third party tools and you would select the tool, write the trigger and then when you go to configure it, it has a list of everything that it can do and you would go and build from there. Well, MCP says use natural language and we’ll do that.
So you can MCP a connection into your Gmail and say, hey, go through my Gmail and look for any email about this topic or from this sender and present it to me. And it will go. Because the MCP is a pre configured interface interaction, it will go and say, it’ll look at the MCP definition file for brevity and say do I have act? Do I?
Is that part of my protocol here? Is that part of this connection? Oh yeah, look, read email, I can do that. And then it will go and read email for you.
So now you go into these platforms and you’re looking for MCP connection and you authorize it, give it your credentials and now there’s a list of things that you can do. If it’s klaviyo, you can go and say, hey, what’s my contact count? What’s the highest performing email? You know, but, but you’re at the mercy of the company and what they’ve provided to you in the MCP connector, right?
And this connection is always through an API of some sort. So you’re either programming through code, the interaction of that API via webhooks or direct protocols, or you’re going MCP and an agent is interacting with with the API on your behalf based on what is allowed through that mcp. Going direct like webhook or direct to the API, you’ve got more flexibility and freedom. MCP is more pre configured for you to help you get started faster, right?
And that’s the second C. So we’ve got. The first one is coding, the second one is connecting and then the last C is continuously, it’s doing this continuously. And man, I’m so tempted to jump ahead of myself, but I’ve got.
In the next episode we talk about what an app is and essentially I’ll give you some here. Essentially, I view an app as code being continuously executed on your behalf, code within a container. The container is your process and that code is being continuously executed on your behalf. And you’re provided a UI to tell the code exactly what to do.
Oh, push this button, I want this to happen. Enter this in and this happens. That’s automation. That’s what automation looks like in this new era.
Listen, if you’re still logging in to these platforms, building visual flows, I’m sorry you’re doing it the hard way. These aren’t my rules, everyone. I’m just playing by them and realizing, oh my goodness, that is the slowest way, the hardest way and the longest way. You took the long way home, right?
There’s a straight line and it’s through agentic AI. And that’s how automate, how it uses automation to do, to achieve results at a higher level. And the beauty about it is one of the things that I’m a huge proponent of and you all know this, this is why I use WordPress and I liked Airtable, is controlling your data. There are so many AI tools out here that control your data.
They house it, they own it, and because they make it easy for you to get started, you’re okay with giving it to them. Well, I’m never okay with giving anybody control of my data. And with this Exploration I’ve done to really redefine automation and what it looks like and understand where I fit in the AI and agentic world. It all makes sense to me that if the foundation is data, because again, your code is interacting on your behalf with your data and email is your data, by the way, or it’s interacting directly with the database and it’s presenting the results back to you.
And your ability to organize that database is going to be what determines the quality, the level of quality output that you get from your agent. Right? So it’s all about the data. We need to make sure that we’re owning our data, right?
This is another role of automation, is to make sure that your data is getting to the appropriate destination. Now, some of you are using platforms and you love it. You love it. What I would submit to you is duplication.
There’s not a single platform online that I’m using that I’m not duplicating the database into a database that I own. If right now, any and every platform that I’m using just disappears, my data remains. Can you say that? Can you say that?
And I will submit to you. It’s not popular talk, it’s a bit more technical, but I would submit to you that in this AI and agentic era, if you’re not using AI and automation to protect your data and to put it in owned assets, you’re missing the mark. You really are. And we’ll listen.
I’m not going to leave you all wondering. We’ll talk about it in the episodes to come and I’ll give you examples. But I hope that gives you better context of what to expect from me, the perspective, the approach that I’m taking moving forward and the only way to leverage this, everyone. Again, there’s a episode coming up about this and it may already be out by the time you listen to this.
Just finish listening and go to it. But I want you to know the only way that you can get this done quickly is with leadership. You need to be bringing in leadership into your company that understands not just AI, but understands the deployment cycle and requirements of it. Okay?
This is going to be critical because we are getting inundated with people who have done one thing with AI ever, and they’re on YouTube, they’re on Instagram. Look what I’ve done. And again, you guys, I told you, I’m, I’m, I’m the heavy hitter. You bring me in to a mature company that has millions of, of, of customers, which means you have very mature processes and the risk you run is that the stuff that you’re looking at works for a company that is 1 years old with less than 5 employees.
It doesn’t scale. And we have to be mindful of the security of scaling at scale. Right. There’s ways to protect your data, leverage AI, move lean, and not put yourself at risk.
It’s possible. Everyone, I’m doing it. People aren’t talking about it, but I’m doing it. And because you’re connected with me and the listener of this podcast, you will be able to do it as well.
So I am extremely excited to be back, everyone. I hope you have a better understanding of what automation is. Look what it is now and what it will be going forward for the, for a great portion of the future, if not all of the future, it is going to be. It is going to be fueling and enabling agents.
Automation is more critical now than ever. If there’s things that you’re doing manually and you’re connecting one agent to another or one platform to the next, you are, oh my goodness, you gotta level up. And that’s what this podcast is here for. So I appreciate greatly every single download, every single listener, from the beginning of episode one to episode 201, and now from 202 and beyond.
I promise you this, you will not see me disappear again. That is my promise to you. I’m here to stay and I’m here to guide you through this very technical terrain so that you don’t get lost and that your business continues to see the success that it’s seen and more. That’s my promise to you if you continue to listen.
Thank you again so much. And what do we say, everyone? Until next time I see you all online. Automate responsibly, my friends.
