TikTok's Future, Gen Z Trends, and AI’s Impact on Market Research

Check out the full episode below! Enjoy the Exchange? Don't forget to tune in live Friday at 12 pm EST on the Greenbook LinkedIn and Youtube Channel!

Karen Lynch and Lenny Murphy explore two hot topics that are changing the game for brands and researchers alike: the future of social media and the rise of AI in market research. With TikTok’s future in the U.S. up in the air, we look at how Gen Z relies on social media for news and what brands need to do to adapt if the platform disappears.

They also dive into the growing role of AI, discussing how it’s reshaping market research, helping brands tell better stories, and leveling the playing field within companies. But with the rise of AI, we also touch on the ethical challenges and the hype around AI startups. It's a conversation packed with insights on what’s coming next for both marketing and research.

Many thanks to our producer, Karley Dartouzos. 

Use code EXCHANGE30 to get a 30% discount on your general admission IIEX tickets!

IIEX North America

IIEX APAC

IIEX Europe 

Stay Ahead of the Curve! Subscribe to The Exchange Newsletter on LinkedIn Today! 

Transcript

Karen Lynch: It says it's showtime. There we go. We are live.

Lenny Murphy: Hello, everyone.

Karen Lynch: Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Lenny and I, Lenny, you probably did, I shouldn't speak for you, but had this moment of, oh, and we're doing the exchange tomorrow. When we signed back yesterday morning, we're like, oh, and the exchange, like not only do we have these weird work days of the 2nd and 3rd of January, but also like, and we're going live. Yes. Yes. The articles were posted yesterday in our Slack channel.

Lenny Murphy: Fortunately, I think that the world observed some quiet, you know, in the last, you know, two weeks since we last met, right. So, you know, for the most part, we didn't have a lot of insights into industry happenings, and no massive tech developments. So we can talk about some fun stuff today.

Karen Lynch: We can talk about some fun stuff. Absolutely. Well, well, let's, let's kick it off with your idea. Uh, make it a little, little personal. So fun. Yes. Yes. What, what's your new year's resolution challenge, whatever you want to call it. Here's what's so funny.

Lenny Murphy: So I started doing, um, word of the year and it started, I think it was, I went back and I looked, I mean, I, I have, I have things, I have a whole envelope full of resolutions from past years of all of my people, including, look, now I'm really gonna share. This is not off the beaten path, folks, so indulge me for a minute. Including, you know, in 2014, when my resolution was a cleaner workspace. It was 2014, but like one of my kids, my daughter's, was to be a better sister. In 2014, she was 10, she was 10. So we started tracking these then, so now we've had 10 years or 12 years of tracking resolutions. And at some point I shifted to a singular word instead of a resolution. I think it might've been 2016 when somebody had shared with me a one word bracelet of empathy deep in my qualities. And then each year I choose a different word. And this year my word is choose. And it's going to be, I choose how I show up to work each day. I choose how to manage my priorities. That's a choice every day, kind of when I face my calendar. Personally, I choose my response to things that might be out of my control. So my word for the year is choose. So anyways, that's how I'm going into 2025 with a little bit of deliberate, mindful approach to everything.

Karen Lynch: I like that. And actually it made me think prior to going live, folks, we were talking about the big ice storm of 2025, starting in the southeast in Ohio Valley, which I am primed to get nailed with. And so while you were talking, I thought, well, resilience. Resilience. See, now that's a great word.

Lenny Murphy: Resilience.

Karen Lynch: That's a good word. You know, it's because it comes with flexibility, agility. You know, there's so many kinds of corollaries to that that I think will be absolutely appropriate for this year.

Lenny Murphy: And what I love, Lenny, is that we're doing this and like mental notes, like you've heard those two words, choice and resilience, have made it onto a Post-it note. And maybe at this time in 2020, I'm going to say, how do we be friends?

Karen Lynch: Here we go. I like it. I like to choose. You know, I like the concept of sovereignty, you know, and being a recovery. The idea of serenity as well, right? Which is a choice. You may, I was thinking of the serenity prayer when you were talking about that. So yeah, all of those things are, it'll be fun.

Lenny Murphy: So feel free to like comments when you're reacting to this. If you're reacting live, feel free to comment and share what your words are or your feelings. Feel free to, you know, to build on it because I just think it's fun to say them out loud. It sets them as an intention for the year and professionally. I think a lot of people choose personal, right? We talked about whether you're choosing a personal thing, I want to do, you know, it's to lose weight, it's the dry January, it's the whole 30 or whatever. There's a lot of kinds of health and wellness things that float around there for people personally.

Karen Lynch: But I think professionally, we should be mindful too about how we go into the year. So. I agree 100% with those concepts. They, I mean, I don't have much separation between personal and work to begin with, right?

Lenny Murphy: So those. Some people might choose tooth balance or something. Anyway, so super fun. You know what was also fun? I don't know if you saw this piece that came my way. I shared it yesterday also, but this op-ed piece from the CMO of Zappy, Natalie Kelly, she shared it in the drum. And it was really interesting to me because I love trends, right? We all do. We love trends. But this one, first of all, caught my eye because Zappi, there are people that we pay attention to, good partners of ours, and we mentioned them a lot. But this particular op-ed was about what's going to happen if TikTok goes away in the US, which is kind of a public arena case that we're all paying attention to, or we all should be paying attention to. But I just thought it was a really interesting perspective based on research that Zappi did in this space. So if you're at all interested in Gen Z behaviors around social media, anyway, what you want to see, you know, there's some bullet notes here, but you want to share a little bit about the study and what some of

Karen Lynch: The things we found out, because I thought you would find it interesting too, as somebody who's not TikTok. Not TikTok, but certainly pays attention to social media, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, one, broad implications, which we've hinted at for years, the change in the media landscape, particularly information. Social platforms like TikTok are a go-to source for consumers to find voices they trust, whether it's news or recommendations, product recommendations, et cetera, et cetera. Not a big surprise overall. We've talked before how they're de facto search engines now as well. So huge implications there. So the study was 1,500 consumers. That Gen Z are more likely to use social media as a new source, 51%. Uh, they go into, Oh, interesting. Right.

Lenny Murphy: You know, so there's all these, you know, there's all the people that kind of, of different generations who have their go-to sources and stuff, but yeah, you know, ticker.

Karen Lynch: I mean, is newsfeed aggregation of newsfeeds, social media platforms are useful for that. I have. Re-engaged with X. It always was that way. Hashtags, it's a great way to organize information and have it in one place. I used Hootsuite all the time because I had things that just aggregated so I could follow information from multiple platforms better than going and searching them out.

Lenny Murphy: It's interesting, I put myself, not Gen Z, but having raised some Gen Zers. It says here from the Zappy stuff, almost half of Gen Z users report spending over three hours a day on the app. And I'm not going to lie. I'm good for about one sometimes. If I hit one, then I freak out and I stop myself, but I could do it. And especially when you have that kind of time. And what's interesting for me is I like it for entertainment. Boy, I like golden retrievers. I like recipes. You know, I can go there and search for random things. And I like using it as a search engine. And that's me. And people share things with me that they're like, oh, Karen's going to like these kittens or Karen's going to like these, you know, this, I don't know, this ridiculous, um, I got dancing cats. I have a lot of fun. And every now and then my husband will send something professional. I'll be like, no, no, no. I don't want to talk about professional news. And then I think, gosh, some people are doing it that way. So anyway, it's just interesting. We have to pay attention to this generation and then also explore the what if, what will, what will they do? And I think the study here is like a lot of them. I think I'll get off social media. I don't know that they know what their replacement would be. I don't know what they'll do for a news source or, or staying abreast of industry trends.

Karen Lynch: Maybe they will all find the exchange. Maybe, maybe. And let's step back to those and why are we paying attention? This again, is a media source as a conduit of consumer information and engagement. TikTok for this particular generation, huge. Just like Facebook is for probably the Gen X and boomers, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera, regardless of what your Reddit, blah, blah, depending upon your approach or your particular interest areas. These platforms are important as engagement mechanisms for brands. Advertising has to be optimized for them.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah.

Karen Lynch: Yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Uh, and also, um, the idea that there are certain brands that I will actively kind of search for at Trader Joe's, for example, I'm a trader or shopper. So I love searching for Trader Joe's recipes specifically. So I go onto TikTok and I pull up, what are some, you know, trader juice recipes. There's a, there's, there's a very interesting way of getting a few ingredients at Trader Joe's, you know, it's like a Trader Joe's meal ideas or something. And there is a very active community. Who is focused on that retail establishment, right? So if I'm Trader Joe's, I'm paying attention to that because that's what, I wanna see what my consumers are talking about there. What are they sharing? What are my influencers talking about? So I'm sure that's the case for other grocers too. I just haven't looked at it. I'm sure Whole Foods is there. I'm sure Kroger might be there. Walmart's probably there. We should really just, we should do a deep dive. But I mean, they're there, they're there. It's pretty cool.

Karen Lynch: And the same applies to the other platforms. The issue, just put it, is this idea of being a TikTok, which is because of the algorithm and the manipulation. And this applies to, look, every social platform has an algorithm that is designed to make it addictive, period. It's the way it works, right? So they all are. To your point, I find myself scrolling on, X is really the only thing that I use nowadays. People are like, oh, no, I got to shut down.

Lenny Murphy: Right. And I'm going to turn it off. Yeah. What does this mean? What does this mean for our kind of insights professionals? Like, why would we even linger here? Why? I mean, aside from the fact that it's interesting, we're paying attention to Gen Z and their behaviors. OK, that's kind of a given. We're talking about this platform for brands and what the consequences are there. But what else? Let's kind of, you know, extract another nugget. Like, why do these things matter to an insights professional?

Karen Lynch: Again, the goal of Insights is to tell marketers how to sell more stuff and to the people who will buy that stuff. Fundamentally, it's what we do. So any of these things that impact how a population engages with information and gives them the ability to be exposed to advertising or marketing messages while also collecting data, that's hugely important. And this is interesting if, from the Gen Z standpoint, if they say, you take away my TikTok, I'm just going to go off social media. Well, how the hell are we going to reach them? Right. Right. Because they're not watching regular TV.

Lenny Murphy: They're not watching broadcasts like anybody is.

Karen Lynch: Advertising will radically shift. Right. It creates challenges in how we engage, understand, and activate. Eight, which is the, you know, at the purest level, what, what, uh, the marketing life cycle, uh, how to do that with a very large population that continues to have economic muscle. And, um, we have to pay attention to these things. So, uh, and it's a rapidly changing dynamic, uh, uh, ecosystem of players. We throw in, you know, AI into that as well, um, which we're going to get kind of the agent. Yeah. It's now emerging. Yeah, this stuff's important, guys. And it's going to define, here's my prediction. Now, here's the other time-tested thing. My prediction is, drum roll, please. My son was here. He'd do that. By the way, I have to say, if anybody, totally on his side. So my son is a drummer, and he is 14. And he has now entered his metal phase. Um, which is just near and dear to your heart. You know, it's like, okay, uh, I can hit, you know, Metallica, some of that stuff, some of the stuff he's listening to.

Lenny Murphy: It's like, oh my God, please turn that down.

Karen Lynch: Oh, because modern day metal is not the same. It's just screaming gutturally anyway. So you know yourself, you would have loved it. Maybe, but I don't like it now. And I'll make recommendations, like can you just, how about, this is some old school stuff, right? You know, everybody in metal listens to the Misfits. Can we listen to the Misfits? I'm right there with you, buddy, but anyway. So point, point, prediction. This is the, this year we'll see more disruption and fragmentation of the media ecosystem than we have ever seen before. And it will be driven by a Genetic model. And who will win will be what platform leverages agent AI most effectively to give people choice and control. I think that is the revolution that we will see this year. We'll see who wins. It's going to be an interesting time. And so as marketers, we better pay attention to it. As researchers and supporting marketers, we need to pay attention to it because it's going to be radically changing.

Lenny Murphy: Boy, if I was working on insights on any of the kinds of platforms out there right now, I would really be thinking about that. And hopefully there are researchers out there that are doing that work, understanding what choices people want in platform, how much they want to influence their algorithms, what they want to hide, what they want I mean, I know, again, I'm a fairly heavy social media user, but I get really annoyed when the stuff that starts showing up is like, that's not why I'm here. Like, know what I want, because that's not why I'm here. And I think it'd be really cool to be a researcher, a qualitative researcher in particular, talking to the different generations about what those needs are so that those platforms can win. So stay tuned. Let us know if you're doing that work too. It's super interesting. Write an article about it. Tell us what you can share that's not proprietary.

Karen Lynch: Anyway, Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe, you know, we have, we still have some events in the room for this year.

Lenny Murphy: Right. So seriously, I should look at our agenda, see if, you know, we're, we're pretty much done with our agendas for these events. It's going to be interesting, but, um, I'll probably have to keep like a singular spot for, you know, something that is like late breaking at all of the events. So anyway, yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about this vision, this future of MRX, because there's a quote at the bottom of this article. What was it? I didn't write it down. And it said something like basically what you and I are saying, which is like, this is not really the future. This is really the future now. So we're saying 2029, but actually, so this is the future of MRX, a vision for 2029 from Siva. Civo is a customer intelligence and market research firm. Civo, S-I-V-O, if you're listening and not seeing the article that Karley just shared the link for. So obviously, a lot of these things, AI enhanced storytelling, not really a big surprise to me. I'm like, yes, I think there's people who are using it already. Agent to agent collaboration, obviously, that's something you and I have been talking about. When I say obviously, I don't mean to consent. I mean, Lenny and I have been talking about, yes, these are what we've been talking about, so we see those coming as well. Synthetic personas, synthetic data, yes. Multimodal inputs, which, you know, you could probably talk more methodologically, but isn't that really just about, you know, connecting seemingly disparate data sources and putting them all together and connecting dots and... Well, it's a piece of it.

Karen Lynch: I think it's really the idea in how they're referencing that is allowing, to engage with us in the mode that makes sense for them. So it could be voice only, it could be video, it could be the GUI interface of a survey, but regardless of just allowing consumers to participate in the research process in the way that makes the most sense for them, because we always built it on for efficiency for us, right? That's why the survey was a thing. Because it was an efficient way to collect information. But AI has revolutionized that. And so there is no reason, technically, that we can't allow somebody to speak their responses as well as they... Obviously, it's not true in all cases. There's certainly going to be... The example I was using is conjoint. I can't imagine a non-GUI interface, visual interface conjoint. What a pain in the ass that would be. But in general, for a lot of research, it's allowing people to participate the way they choose to.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, the way they choose to. Yeah. Not just some, you know, the importance of it, not just for accessibility, but also the customer experience, right? And the participant experience. Absolutely. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: You want to continue with the rest of it? I thought it was... Yeah, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: I thought, you know, emotional AI, again, I kind of see that coming too. Like, let's try to, you know, we're using AI, but let's make sure that we're also staying human, but also they mentioned humane AI, which really is about the ethical, and they use the phrase ethical, mindful collaboration. So it's human and humane, right? Or kind of emotional and then also ethical. So those are gonna be two interesting things. And then this last point on our bulleted list, and these weren't the same order of the article. These are the order that I kind of pulled them out things together, but the researchers elevated their role. Now, you and I've also talked a lot about this, that creative strategic visionaries, the importance of a researcher, you know, in this role of strategic partner, informing decisions at a higher level than perhaps they've done before, perhaps before they've been kind of pigeonholed into informing marketers and letting marketers, you know, kind of do what they will with the information, like almost like, here's what we've done for you, now you go forth and conquer. But now the insights professionals are really being expected to have that kind of visionary thinking, that strategic thinking, and be more consultative internally, even than they have been before.

Karen Lynch: Yeah, which we've been talking about for years as an industry, right? The seat at the table. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and so all of this, these things, I pulled this out and said, yep, I agree.

Lenny Murphy: I agree. I agree with all that. And even that last point, let's just hover over that last point of a seat at the table. It's more than that. A seat at the table is actually a passive role of listening and learning from the top down, in my opinion.

Karen Lynch: Sometimes you're sitting there and you're listening, but this is more than that.

Lenny Murphy: This is standing up in that room. Sorry, but I was about to drop an F-bomb for the first time. Start the year out. This is not an appropriate reason to drop an F-bomb. Yeah, we'll have other reasons to drop an F-bomb later on in the year.

Karen Lynch: This will be the year of the F-bomb on the exchange, I'm sure.

Lenny Murphy: This is standing up in that room and speaking, like, you know, basically not just sitting at the table, but actively contributing to the conversations and moving that decision-making forward. So very much active, not passive. Okay. Yes. Yes.

Karen Lynch: And one point that 's interesting about all of this, and it ties into that last the role of the researchers, which is primarily and fundamentally been a process role, you know, for search in terms of a big chunk of the research function was managing process. So technology continues to refine that where it is a less and less of a time burden for us. And it pushes us into that more strategic role, because rather than the project manager role, which unfortunately, a lot of that has been kind of where researchers have been stuck for quite some time. And that's going to change. So, but I would encourage everybody to think through as we talk about these, these changes from a technology standpoint, having someone who understands process and good research and the fundamentals of asking the right questions to get to the right answer to drive the business outcome, and then translating that into applications is still going to be hugely important. We are not there, and we'll get to this in the last little piece here, where we can trust the technology to do everything flawlessly. We never should get to that point. So we still need to be able to check and understand and be able to discern what's good versus what's bad and how to optimize it while focusing more and more on, yes, that seat at the table, that.

Lenny Murphy: Well, let's bump that one up, Karley. Let's talk about the last one. Lenny, you found this piece about a paper from Anthropic about how AI systems don't have safety guarantees just yet, right? So this hallucination is still a risk. And the two links here are, one, to kind of the article that talked about it talks about the paper and then one is to the paper itself, which is a little more technical. But I think we have to be mindful, especially before you and I are about to share some other things, kind of trends that are largely AI related. Like, yes, we and and other experts in AI and that particular technology are still in alignment that it is not perfect yet. We are still in the system. The training still matters tremendously. Mistakes are still happening. You still need validation. I mean, I think this just means like, we are not without guardrails in the future that we are brazing into in 2025.

Karen Lynch: Yeah. Well, I think what was really interesting about this was, Anthropic did a large study on how AI systems will simulate ethical alignment without genuine safety guarantees, and that was the high level. The takeaway was, to your point, how the system was trained. So here's a hypothetical art relevant for our world. We are creating a, we're using synthetic personas, agents, to simulate an early stage focus group on a sensitive topic. Let's call it politics. And if the system, the AI system was trained to not touch certain sensitive topics. Let's call it racism. Okay, but yet we're trying to understand the potential impact of an ad, ad campaign on different racial groups, right? I'm just making sense we go along, right? The AI won't be accurate. It's trained not to where we ask it. So if we try and set up this persona, uh, of what people do, to really share very sensitive, uh, perspectives on things, it won't do it. Right. So, it's not fit for purpose for all things. Um, and we have to understand garbage in garbage out, uh, and how these things are built has real implications for the, how we can use it as a, uh, not a substitute, I don't think we ever get there, but even as a proxy for early stage research. And let's just recognize that, right? So some of the ideas, how we think is, is it going to replace us as a synthetic sample? Do we not have to ask questions? Maybe in some things that'll be the case, but for other things, that's not the case.

Lenny Murphy: So if we really want to understand it doesn't, now we're in danger of rabbit hole thinking here. But the data should almost be weighted. I'm thinking about, in one of the things I had read, this is now going back a year, so I'm not gonna be able to, I'm just gonna paraphrase as best I can. But the idea that, so say it's asking for, you're asking it to create a work of fiction, but the majority majority of what has been inputted has been written by males. There's no weighting in play. Weigh content contributed by females more heavily because we're trying to get to equity and balance, and we instead have this bias. So we're not training the models to weigh certain input more. Weigh the current information heavier than the outdated information, or current frameworks or belief systems more heavily than those that are more archaic. So that's also going to be very interesting. How do those scientists build these LLMs, how do they account for discrepancies and biases from just over time or for inequities? Yeah, that's all. Yeah.

Karen Lynch: And the point of the paper was that you could say, reference these things, weigh this, do whatever, and it'll, oh yeah, sure. But it's not. Sure, I gotcha. Right. Yes. But it is not, in fact, doing that because it is functioning within the constraints that it was built upon. Yeah. Yeah. We're so very early.

Lenny Murphy: Let's get into this analyst piece you found because there is something about guardrails as a service, which I thought was really interesting and I wonder if it's related. So you found this piece, HFS Analyst 2025 Forecasts. So again, it's a great time of year to start forecasting things and thinking about the future. And HFS, which, you know, is just kind of an analyst firm, they're not as big as Gartner, but of the same vein, I think. Did he come out of there, the founder of the organization?

Karen Lynch: I think so, yeah.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So one of the things on this list, some of them may not feel relevant, like, you know, healthcare or quantum and quantum computing, you know, that may be like a step out of our industry, right? But, um, guardrails as a service, AI and algorithm regulation will become a dominant issue. So that is actually something that. If this, I trust this particular analyst's point of view that based on the conversation we're just having, guardrails as a service, that is very interesting. So I like that one.

Karen Lynch: Think of it as validation, right? So go back to the comment that we can't just turn all these things loose. I think that we're, that's a piece of that. We will still need to be validating. Yeah. Which is why I think that AI will replace some low risk things. But for most, for the foreseeable future, anything that's critical and really important to the business, we will be validating, which means we're running things side-by-side or in parallel or sort of a step-based approach because of all these things. That's a good piece of it. I like the other point in there.

Lenny Murphy: And then I do want to talk about what you learned in PitchBook, too. But one of the line items from the HFS predictions, or for I'm sorry, is AI and organizational intelligence. It says, basically, how AI agents will democratize expertise, leveling the playing field between junior and senior roles. That I also found really interesting and relevant to our industry. Think about how much knowledge, institutional knowledge, the Insights team has. For example, AI, which will allow anybody to leverage a level playing field with the insights professionals. So their expertise will be shared across the organization. Junior employees in that department might have the same institutional knowledge that somebody who's more senior will have. So that's interesting. So to me, I see the way through for senior professionals to get, then use your experience for expertise. And you can no longer rest on my institutional knowledge being a value add. But now it has to be what I'm doing with all of that. So anyway, that's the path I went with that.

Karen Lynch: I liked that. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the difference between, so if we go back to the kind of a multi-modal research approach, right, that could be an interviewer. And think about your basic, you know, phone room interviewer versus your senior level, executive level interviewers, right? Will we see, I mean, I got my start in Yeah, there are times that I really want an agent type of solution for some of these interviewers. But yeah, it's just so many different permutations. I do want to point out, though, that the quantum computing thing, actually, because the other element of all this is speed. Just last week, MIT or Harvard successfully, via traditional internet lines, did quantum teleportation. So meaning information went from here to here, like that. So speed, latency, those things, that will continue to impact all of this. So yeah, it sounds like woo-woo and strange, and oh, quantum computing. But the idea of the increased bandwidth for computing power and speed and decrease of latency, talk about speed of business, that's only going to increase.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, they go into supply chain dynamics kind of in both of those spaces, right? So in the healthcare space, and yes, hopefully it will revolutionize, you know, cancer treatment, yes. Supply chain in general, like hopefully, you know, the AI applications in those spaces are ones that we can learn from Like, what does that mean for us? You know, what does that mean for us as insights professionals? So, yeah, I really like that. But for the sake of time, I want to talk about this PitchBook stuff because I think this is important because of the takeaway. So the last article that we'll talk about today is from PitchBook and it's the idea that one in four new startups is an AI company and I'm like that's so fascinating. 20 AI startups account for 22% of first-time VC financing. So you'd think oh that's cool that's the way to go perhaps if you're an entrepreneur but there is a big warning bell that's going off. And excuse me, I'm having a thing, but this mass pivot, right, towards AI, AI, AI is ringing alarm bells for investors concerned that the technology is increasingly being used as a marketing tool to raise capital. And that's when I was like, oh, that's what our audience needs to hear. Don't play around if you can't back up what you're building and why and how and all of that, don't just don't just repackage, you know, chat GPT and say, Hey, we offer this now, be very careful what you're doing, because investors are paying attention to that, because they don't want it just to be marketing, it has to be real and legitimate. Anyway, I love that point. I was so glad to tell this article, and address a real business issue, right?

Karen Lynch: I mean, there's the hype cycle of AI, right? And we've lived through it already. And we're still kind of going through it. But, I think the real key takeaway for that is investors are looking at how this moves the needle to drive business value? And as anything else, who's going to win? Because most of those companies won't exist in a few years. They will either fail, or they'll just be gobbled up by somebody else or whatever. But there's very few, this Darwinian VC ecosystem, that we have, there's very few that will become the next big, big thing.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, and chances are, if you're adding AI features, as you should, because it's table stakes, don't interpret this conversation as never mind, you have to be adding those features. They're table stakes for your organization moving into the future. But if you really want to get some capital investment in what you're doing, you've got to have some proof points and have it not be this AI washing concept.

Karen Lynch: So, which let's see, I'll ask the article, Greenbook article by Billy Howard, from a brand throw on AI washing. I thought that was a great article and a good way to put that in there. So you said it is table stakes, but you know, don't lead with we're an AI company when you're using it for analyzing open ends that doesn't make you an AI company that makes you just anybody else utilizing AI research at the moment.

Lenny Murphy: Right, right, right.

Karen Lynch: You have to do it. But that's the tip of the spear. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. And Billy, also, she spoke at our AI event.

Lenny Murphy: And, you know, so this article, whenever I see a washing, she's the one who kind of introduced me to that concept. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's what's happening. We have to be really careful. So I think that anyway, just kind of puts a package on everything that we've been talking about today, right?

Karen Lynch: Like it does. It does. So, uh, did you decide, uh, Oh, Oh, master of all content. Um, are we going back to weekly?

Lenny Murphy: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Did I not communicate that master of communication also? Right. No, I think we should do weekly. I just can't. I just, I think it's just what makes the most sense for us. Please audience tell us if we're wrong, but, uh, the holiday season has come and gone January doldrums. I mean, I need this every week if nothing else just to talk to you in this way because this is one of my There's always one of my highlights.

Karen Lynch: I just like it. I like what we do. I do too So, excuse me, and I agree I like and hopefully we can get back to under 30 minutes. Yeah I thought for sure today was gonna be our day, but these were deep dive concepts, right? Yeah, I soapbox a little bit here and there which yeah, yeah Yeah, so cool. So we'll see, uh, everybody in you, uh, next Friday, same time. And same time channel. Yep. I'm so glad you went there instead of me, by the way, I'm not even a Batman girlie. So it's not even, but, but in my head, same advertising, right? It became a cultural meme. So that's what we're doing. And, um, no bat wings. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I may have to wear a cowl at some point, but, uh, I just want to see your bet, you know, your best metal gear at some point, because, you know, I was more of a punk guy, right? The, um, the kids were asking for that. We were going through photos and they're asking dad, are there any pictures of you with a Mohawk? 

Lenny Murphy: And thankfully, no. Um, my sister who, who passed away, had all of the pictures, uh, the family pictures like that. There were only two that I knew of in existence of me in full, full punk rock boy, mohawk mode and they're gone. Um, and I can tell you right now, Karley is saying if she could get a picture of us from the eighties, as you can imagine, I have this sort of, you know, very, um, straight, straight hair.

Karen Lynch: And if you can imagine how big I was able to get my hair to go, thanks to, you know, so I had some on Facebook when I had Facebook. I've been, you know, thankfully in recovery of Facebook for the last four years. Um, but the going on five, but the, uh, but there were, cause I had a lot of high school friends. So there were, there were pictures of me just not in full Mohawk mode. I was in goth boy mode, Karley. There were, there were many, uh, we're like, we're talking to Karley as if she's not listening to all of us with a smile on her face. So anyway, anyway, one day we could do that. We can show embarrassing pictures, but that's it for today, I think. Right. Yes, that is it for today. Thank you, everybody. We will see you next week. Happy, happy new year. Happy new year. Let us know about those resolutions or those words or anything else you want to share with us.

Lenny Murphy: [email protected]. Yes. And if you're in the path of this winter storm coming, please stay safe and warm because, yeah, it looks like it'll be a fun first week of January. I think from a weather standpoint. So everybody will be well.

Karen Lynch: All right. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.

Links from the episode:

Losing TikTok could spark Gen Z’s next big movement Nataly Kelly, Zappi 

The Future of MRX: A Vision for 2029 

Alignment faking in large language models 

Alignment faking in large language models 

HFS Analysts’ 2025 Forecasts 

Nearly 1 in 4 new startups is an AI company from Pitchbook 

Stop AI Washing: Using AI as an Ingredient to Deliver Measurable Business Outcomes