>> Cole: 0:24

I don't think AI can be looked at like, you know, just a band aid for all your organizational content structure issues. You know, you need to address the root, and I actually just thought of a kind of a semi questionable, analogy here.

>> Virgil: 0:40

Oh, no. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. As always, I am your host, Virgil Carroll, and with me today is

>> Cole: 0:50

Cole from High Monkey. Pleasure to be here, as always.

>> Virgil: 0:55

Yeah, another January winter day. Gonna probably have to go out this afternoon and do some shoveling, I think.

>> Cole: 1:03

Yep. Well, I don't know. It feels like 2025 is flying by already. It feels like just yesterday it was the holiday season.

>> Virgil: 1:12

Yeah. Yeah, that's very true.

>> Cole: 1:15

That's how it goes.

>> Virgil: 1:16

maybe, this might be the point in which I'm almost ready for winter to be over, so I'd actually be okay if it if it flew a little faster, though. Got a few more ski runs to get in, but then winter can just go by the way. And maybe this year we could do something different and actually get a spring.

>> Cole: 1:31

Yeah, honestly, when February comes around, I'm ready for spring at that point, like, it's... I don't know, that's where I'm at with things.

>> Virgil: 1:38

Well, you know, I, asked OpenAI to tell me about when winter was going to be over, and it couldn't do that. And I think that actually might be a little bit compared, or at least part of your topic today I think?

>> Cole: 1:50

Yeah, that might be semi relevant to what we're talking about today. But yeah, I just feel like on the topic of AI, obviously it's the buzz right now. I mean, in my opinion, we can disagree, but I think.

>> Virgil: 2:03

I don't even think buzz describes just how AI is taking over the consciousness of the world of technology and marketing, frankly.

>> Cole: 2:14

Yeah, I mean, let's be real, like, it's not going anywhere. It's going to change the way people, you know, operate with technology and work forever. But it's like, you know, thinking about that anytime, there's a new wave of technology like that, I like to think about, or think about it like, there's always going to be an outlier of people who are ahead of the curve. And with AI, the way I see it is the people who are gonna be ahead of the curve with it aren't gonna be able to, like, cut corners. And you might ask, what do I mean by that? But I think you probably know what I mean. And what would you add to that.

>> Virgil: 2:57

Yeah, well, I mean, I think you bring it up. I mean, and I know you're kind of referencing an article that I shared with you, that I read recently talking, about how, you know. Well, let me back up for a second. So one of the things I always think of, when people talk about artificial intelligence, there's the practical side of actually what it's going to be able to do and the usefulness that it's going to have. And then you have the marketing side and the way marketers kind of push it. And I'm not talking marketers that use it, I'm talking about marketers that are for OpenAI and you know, Copilot and Microsoft and all those different ones, ones in the way they're marketing it, which are basically turn it on, boom, you're gonna go, and it's gonna be super awesome. But in practicality it's not, and you know, is it that the technology isn't there? Well, yeah, but it's also that, you know, the reality is, is that if, you know, say a good fundamental of search is that, you know, if the content, your search is crawling, is garbage, well, then you're going to get garbage search results no matter how good of a search engine you have. Well, it's the same thing with AI, and that was kind of the gist of the article was saying, you know, AI can do a really great job, but now you need to actually think about it. So, so it's referencing schema.org and schema.org has been around for a really long time and it basically is classification types, that you utilize, to classify different types of content, on a web page. And then, you know, when search engines crawl it, it gives it a more meaningful understanding. A lot of that was done from an SEO perspective and it was a big SEO push around it. You know, like if you had a blog post or, or a recipe or something like that, you had a schema type for that and that well defined it and you know, when Google return that it present the results. But the reality is now is what, what this author is kind of saying, and it's very true, is that you need to really be using these, you know, eight hundred plus or eight thousand plus content types to really define content. And one of the biggest reasons the author says that is to use it to help AI figure out what the heck you mean when it's crawling. So there's a certain level of irony there because isn't the way artificial intelligence is marketed in the first place, is it? Oh, it's going to have a deep understanding. It's going to look at your content and it's going to know exactly what it is and you're going to be able to ask it a question. It's going to be able to just give you profound answers. Yet at the same time now, and I've preached this already, especially in the Microsoft 365 world of, it's still not smart enough. And so if you don't have well defined content, it doesn't really understand it. So the entire gist of that article is you need to define your content really, really well and define all the different types to make it actually work well. So the reality is, is there is such a contradiction between what is marketed and what is the reality of artificial intelligence. It's not that artificial intelligence is not a good thing and has some really great practical applications. It's that it's not a silver bullet, which is the way it's marketed. And I think that's one of the biggest things that we're running into right now, in the world of web, especially because a lot of people are starting to look at it and you know, there's like, let it generate your content, let it do this and that kind of stuff and people are having to generate content. They're like, what the hell is this? You know, this wasn't at all what I meant.

>> Cole: 6:27

Yeah, I honestly, I just, I don't think AI can be looked at as like you know, just a band aid for all your organizational, content structure issues. You know, you need to address the root. And I actually just thought of a kind of a semi questionable, analogy here.

>> Virgil: 6:45

Oh no. Well, now you gotta share it.

>> Cole: 6:48

Well, okay, so a lot of people, I mean, this is not like a new thing, but with the complexities of life, you know, they might resort to, let's say, drugs for masking, all their problems and all their, you know, emotions and whatnot and they just kind of hide underneath the drugs and, and let you know that kind of take over for them. Um, well, in the same way you can't turn to AI to, you know, mask, your terrible content structures and terrible data governance.

>> Virgil: 7:21

Very well taken. Very interesting analogy.

>> Cole: 7:25

I just thought, I don't know...

>> Virgil: 7:27

A good point. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I, I've been saying it in the world of search forever. You know, good search can't mask crappy content. Um, and it really is the same and, again, don't get me wrong, there are some really good applications of AI. Like I've seen some of the things that our developers have used and other people have used, like in the coding realm and that kind of stuff. And you know, we obviously use it for things like generating keywords on posts and that kind of stuff. There's some definite usefulness to it because it can look and it can, you know, go through and it can kind of bring it back. But it's like everything. I mean one, you know, people kind of have to use it with a grain of salt and that and it isn't just do it, copy paste and you're good to go. but more so, you're absolutely right. It, you know, to get artificial intelligence to the level of understanding that it can understand every different type of writing style, every different type of piece of information that's being written about and everything else like that, I don't think people really understand how complex it is. It is still fundamentally behind the scenes, a search type system that basically uses really advanced algorithms, knowledge networks, neural links, all this different stuff. But overall it's looking at your content, it's processing your content and then it's doing something with your content. And it, but it's trying to be smarter in the way it does it. But if your content isn't good, it doesn't really matter, from there. So again, this kind of goes back to picking on marketers and the way they do things and that they like to make things very flashy and that kind of stuff. But a lot of times on highly marketed websites, marketing websites, the substance of the content there is very minimal. It's the reason that search fails, it's the reason that artificial intelligence is going to fail in that. And you really have to start to address that and thinking about what people are really going to use your website for or your business application or whatever it is and that if they're going to leverage it somehow through AI, to, to access some piece, if your content isn't thorough enough, isn't understandable enough, it's not going to really do anything.

>> Cole: 9:39

Yeah, I think kind of along those lines, the article which we by the way will link in the show notes, it raises an interesting point of, you know, where, you know, content or search kind of used to be about and it still kind of is, about like the content ranking, like in the search engine. But it was talking about how, you know, as AI search engines get more, you know, relevant in, in this AI age, it's going to be a lot more about how your content structured, like the, how schema can establish how relevant your site content is to a potential AI search. So I think this kind of goes along in this conversation as you know, just making sure you have good, good content, structuring it well, so it can be like relevant in AI search results.

>> Virgil: 10:27

Yeah, it's actually, it's actually an interesting thing when you, when you start talking about schema.org we've used it for a long time on customer websites and in different applications and even on our own website. But the interesting part that I think of from a schema perspective is that a lot of those schemas are not very friendly. Otherwise there's a lot of settings that you have to do and you have to do a lot of things in very specific ways to get them to kind of work the way you want it to. So it's, it's kind of a little bit of a conundrum for organizations because that's not exactly the, the easiest thing to implement. The interesting thing we'll see as AI kind of continues to build is whether we'll see organizations that are kind of these SEO kind of specialist type organizations kind of take this more on as a challenge for themselves and work with their customers to kind of do more around properly defining content. But in the end, I mean you know, starting fundamentally, AI is not the answer. It's a better answer, but it's only going to be as good as your content is. So you always need to be thinking about that. And that really is a gist to this in there. And I know we could probably talk about this for 400 hours and talk about 500 different things and we probably will

>> Cole: 11:41

Over the course of the podcast.

>> Virgil: 11:42

Yeah, right.

>> Cole: 11:43

Why not? It's the buzz.

>> Virgil: 11:45

But from here, if you walk away with one thing from this one, one, it's like it's only going to be as good as your content. And you'll probably hear that as a running kind of theme across a lot of our podcast episodes. But the reality is, is that even though technology has changed, trends have changed and everything else like that, the one thing that hasn't changed is that need. If your content is not good, you're not going to be good.

>> Cole: 12:12

Need context. Context, enhances the content.

>> Virgil: 12:17

Absolutely.

>> Cole: 12:18

And the search and the AI.

>> Virgil: 12:20

Well I think that's at least a good, good start and kind of going down a slippery slope of artificial intelligence now. So I'm sure we'll be bringing that one up again.

>> Cole: 12:28

Indeed. I'm liking the 2025 topics so far, and yep, as always we got a lot more cool topics coming, so stay tuned.

>> Virgil: 12:37

Yep. Thank you all for joining.

>> Cole: 12:39

Thank you.

>> Virgil: 12:44

Just a reminder, we'll be dropping new episodes every two weeks. If you enjoyed the discussion today, we would appreciate it if you hit the like button and leave us a review or comment below. And to listen to past episodes or be notified when future episodes are released, visit our website at www.discussingstupid.com and sign up for our email updates. Not only will we share when each new episode drops, but also we'll be including a ton of good content to help you in discussing stupid in your own organization. Of course, you can also follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or SoundCloud or really any of the other favorite podcast platforms you might use. Thanks again for joining and we'll see you next time.