How AI Is Evolving Process Optimization | Renaldo Edmondson of Bisk | The Brainiac Blueprint

Today on The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast by Left Brain AI, we sit down with Renaldo Edmondson, Director of Integrated Marketing Strategy at Bisk, to discuss how AI is redefining process optimization in business and higher education.

Renaldo explains how AI isn’t a replacement for good systems - it’s what happens after you’ve mastered them. He breaks down how his team uses AI to scale campaigns, streamline creative testing, and empower marketers to work faster and smarter without sacrificing quality.

From custom GPT workflows and campaign automation to AI-generated creative and comic-style storytelling on LinkedIn, Renaldo explains how his team balances innovation with efficiency in a fast-changing digital landscape.

We also explore adoption challenges in higher education, the mindset shift from resistance to experimentation, and why strong foundations still matter in an AI-first world.

Full transcript below.

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⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

 00:00 | Intro

 02:10 | What Bisk does and Renaldo’s role in integrated marketing

 05:10 | Using custom GPTs for faster creative testing and planning

 07:00 | Balancing scale, automation, and human creativity

 08:15 | Why AI is the next step after strong process design

 14:27 | Automating campaign planning and performance tracking

 18:00 | Building AI agents from scratch using LangGraph

 20:16 | Why context is the key to great prompting

 24:38 | Early adoption challenges and team resistance

 28:21 | The mindset difference between risk-takers and skeptics

 32:00 | Choosing what to automate next

 36:11 | Using AI for SEO and campaign scale

 39:18 | Why cartoon-style AI visuals outperform hyper-real ones

 44:04 | The future of automation, creativity, and human value

 51:27 | Rapid fire questions

🔗 Renaldo Edmondson

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/renaldo/ 

Bisk→ https://www.bisk.com/

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Episode Full Transcript:

Kyle: All right, welcome back everybody to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm Kyle Lambert, founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing. In today's episode, we're going to discuss the process for automating using AI in business and specifically higher education. With that being said, today's Brainiac is Renaldo Edmondson. Welcome to the show, Renaldo.

Renaldo: Thanks for having me, Kyle. That's a great intro. I love intros where people just don't stutter. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All clean. Thanks for having me, my friend.

Kyle: I don't know if you believe this, I still have it written down so I can read it and reference it without stumbling too much. So I appreciate that.

Renaldo: You're welcome. You're welcome.

Kyle: Awesome. So, Renaldo, we obviously worked together five years ago or so when I was the director of marketing at a higher education agency. You were our Facebook guru, kind of helped us out with some different strategies and things. Lots happened since then. We've reconnected and I think there's a lot to talk about. So I'm excited for our conversation here.

Renaldo: Definitely. I was the weirdly welcome consultant. I don't think there's ever a consultant that's welcome. But you guys made me feel so welcome. I kind of felt part of the furniture. And it was an interesting run. We had some really good breakthroughs at a really exciting, interesting time in the world of Facebook. So yeah, it was fun. It was really fun.

Kyle: I agree. A lot of good testing and things like that. So, Renaldo, you are the director of integrated marketing strategy. That's your title at Bisk. Can you tell everybody a little bit more about who you are, what you do at Bisk, all that kind of stuff?

Renaldo: Yeah, of course. Essentially, I'm a consultant at Bisk operating in a lead role via a remote position to really lead the Bisk marketing team. So strategic ways of how to operate efficiently in this modern age, in this modern environment where things are changing so rapidly. You had the big call from Archer, you had the big behemoth Pearsons, the Wileys - many of these companies moved away from the OPM model, the online program management model for your listeners, which is really going in and selling degrees and certificates and building them for a lot of these universities.

Many universities don't have marketing teams. So they come to these OPM agencies to say, "Hey, can you do the build of a degree, put us online, and can you market the degree?" Bisk is the oldest company of that sort of thing. They were the pioneers. They even changed some of the laws in the game because they were killing it so much at the time.

Kyle: You know you're doing something right when laws have to be made for you.

Renaldo: That's right. So Nathan Bisk was really the originator of that. Since then things have changed a lot. Where it was easy or a lot less expensive to buy leads on Google ads, now you'd be lucky if you get degree leads at $150, $140, $120 a pop. That can be a 9% click-through rate and a high quality score for those people who are ninjas in ads. You start realizing that you have to be very creative.

My job at Bisk is to try and figure out how do I make us as creative as possible, of which the segue really is in AI. That's where the difference maker is and how we are using and finding ways to use AI and put people who do good things already in the seat of a Ferrari so they can do it faster and better. I think it's probably a long-winded description of what I kind of do at Bisk.

Kyle: I love that. Obviously, I'm a marketer. So all that hits right at home with me being able to be creative, like you mentioned, to come up with new ideas, maybe do some research that can spark some things. And then, of course, one of the things that I've been loving about it is just having iterations of iterations of ad text that I could just cycle in and out, train up a GPT or something like that, and then it gives me a bunch of options like, "OK, yes, no, yes, no. Let's get these in weekly." It's really superpowered by testing. It's very, very cool.

Renaldo: Big time. And I think it's exciting because finally we can market properly. The biggest problem in an agency is that if you try and achieve scale, it's very difficult to achieve sustainability. To achieve sustainability, you usually have to kind of half-step or hedge or take shortcuts just because you can't do the best thing for all of the different clients that you want to do it for.

If you're really good, if you're decent at systems now and you approach this in a systematic way, you can train to your point, train a custom GPT. That would be a writer. Another one may be your planner. Another one may be your image creator. And you can kind of standardize a sequence of activities that you do for every single client that you represent. And you can kind of get the larger output of things out in the market quickly, get all of your feedback and actually start then just managing and adding bits and bits and bits.

So it's almost like we can actually start marketing properly now rather than having to onboard so much staff and work with so many consultants and bring so many different philosophies in and have so many different skill levels. The skill level's consistent. Everything's consistent. The robots don't make mistakes. So it's an exciting time, really exciting time.

Kyle: It is. And one of the things that has always been super powerful about digital marketing is the data that's available. So to your point, really being able to manage and be able to say, whether it's an incremental change that this led to a 1% increase in click-through rate or it's a larger strategic shift that halved your CPL or something like that, it really does allow you to manage appropriately, kind of mitigate that battle of volume and efficiency sometimes and really just get some good returns. It's been a fun revelation for me.

Renaldo: Yeah. And marketing is testing. I tell my team all the time, you should be even keel all the way. If you get the outcome that you want, your emotions shouldn't be up nor down. If you don't get the outcome that you want, your emotions shouldn't be up nor down because the only guarantee we have in marketing is intelligence.

If we have an approach where we actually are going to get as much intelligence as possible, if the intelligence is favorable, we just learn ways to do it again to get a more favorable outcome. If it's unfavorable, we try and move away from the unfavorable things towards favorability. And I think we're now in that space where we can do that so much better because we have all of these engines and operational infrastructure to do it more effectively.

Kyle: Got to stay dead inside, just like those robots. Amazing. So, Renaldo, before we go completely down this marketing rabbit hole, but as you know, I do like to have all of my guests finish the prompt, "I think AI is." So if you could set that stage for us, that'd be great.

Renaldo: I think AI is the evolution of process optimization.

Kyle: Very cool. Can you expand on that?

Renaldo: Of course. I think people will turn around and say, "Oh, we need to automate" or "Automation is everything." No, I think automation is the progression of good process optimization. I think people are oftentimes asking the wrong question. And that's why a lot of people kind of get their bubble burst when they think they can go into AI and it's going to just solve everything.

The mechanism I would try and establish with this is essentially looking at a function of a business. What's the function? What's the purpose of the function of the business? So your marketing team, what's the function of your marketing team? "Oh, we do demand gen. That's what we do. We try and generate demand. We try and capture that demand and we try and nurture it and we hand it off to a sales team." Brilliant.

So if anybody came in tomorrow and they said, "Hey, what do you do in marketing?" "Oh, we do demand gen." There's enough of an understanding around just those basic pillars that a person would know what to do. So there is a purpose in the function. The next thing then becomes, well, what processes are you applying for you to do demand gen well? "Oh, so to generate demand, we use these three channels and we put these types of creatives and we have these type of categorical structures with the way we approach it."

Brilliant. So now you've got your process. What are you able to automate in your processes? So automate being if-then-else, not adding an AI agent or anything like this. What are consistent routines that if, for example, a price in an ad auction gets too high or a lead cost gets too high, what kind of automation do you do to switch off that campaign? Do you automatically switch it off using rules? Do you manually go and do that? Like how well optimized are you in automation?

Then once you've done that and you do that well - "Hey, we send emails out and this automated email goes out, then, then, then, then, and then" - now you look at, can you now add an agent who does the automation for you? The agent comes in and actually does the thinking part of the automation.

Yes, the automation is send email one, two, and three. The agent is going to choose what to write. The agent is going to choose the time to send it. The agent is going to choose the time of day, the type of reply to do. The agent is going to choose what information they want to pass to you as far as intelligence about whether this worked or didn't work.

What AI is to me, I think AI really is the evolution of strong process optimization. And I think if you've got a pre-existing process that's solid, AI is going to turn it and it's going to put it on steroids.

Kyle: I told you this when we first reconnected, but when we had our alignment call about this, I got so excited about your perspective there because for a little bit there, I would go online and I would see someone posting this 200-node process and it's like, "Respond here and I'll give you the whole thing." And the amount of shares and likes and all this kind of stuff, I was like, do these people think that you could just plug and play and it's done? It drives me crazy seeing this.

Some of that is obviously clickbaity and trying to get people in. But I love that you just take this step-by-step approach. It's like, let me figure out my process, sans AI, what is it that I normally do? And then now where can I put in the right tools and optimize and things like that? So that is 100% in my opinion, the right way to approach it. Can you provide a tangible example? Maybe it's for marketing or maybe it's a review process, whatever it is that you guys have in place. It doesn't have to be 100 percent automation. Just where it's like, "Hey, we have this opportunity. We put it in or we're testing it."

Renaldo: Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a few. I think one right off the bat would really be something called campaign planning. I think it is a thing that gets overlooked because we never have the luxury of time to do it in the world of marketing. Sorry, listeners, if you're not marketers, but I try to use analogies as best possible to simplify.

If you look at any cycle in a marketing cycle, a marketing cycle is really like a presidential campaign. It kind of works that same way. The candidate chooses a segment of people who he wants to say something to or she wants to say something to, to get them to believe something or to see if this thing resonates. That's really the plan piece, which will be your step number one.

They then are going to go and campaign on that trail. They're going to build all of the show, all of the audience, and they're going to promote it. They're going to do whatever they do, but they're going to build essentially that delivery. That's really number two, which is to build the delivery of the campaign that's got to take place and that's going to project that message.

The third one then is then really going to look at, OK, did it work or did it not work? They're going to kind of analyze, "Hey, it resonated with these people, didn't work with these people at all." And then they're probably going to stay inside of that environment and have another day of another presentation or another day of another audience where they're going to be on stage and deliver whatever speech.

Then they're going to take all that learning and take an understanding and say, "What did we learn about the people in this area here? What resonated? What didn't resonate?" And then they're going to go and move to another location on their campaign trail. It becomes a four-step cycle.

Most of the time for us marketers, we'll just do the build. We jump in, we build something and we kind of build and just address an around-about audience of who it may be for. But we don't establish necessarily always who it should be for. Now, campaign planning is a really interesting thing because you can now turn that into an automated routine by using an AI agent.

What I essentially am working on for fully automating - but kind of have in place at the moment - is I have a custom GPT. We're going to go and build a campaign. I'll say, "Hey Chat, give me a campaign for a healthcare management degree for X university." It will write the entire campaign plan following all of the parameters that we've already established. Now you've got your campaign plan. You know who you're speaking to. You know what you're trying to say. You know why you're trying to say it. You know what segments you're trying to reach out to. All of these different things are now there.

That just gets passed automatically to your media team or your paid media team and your asset builders who are going to go and build the assets for that campaign. They go build the assets, that gets out, they put that into market. You measure and optimize and remove what's not working and keep what is working.

And then you have your business intelligence inside of dashboards to show what worked and what didn't work, which informs another campaign where you can now take those visualizations and take all of those insights, put it into your custom GPT and say, "Hey, this is what we learned. Can you produce another campaign to a different segment with that learning?" Now you can produce a new plan and your team can go and execute that.

I'm trying to turn that now into a fully agentic model though. What you essentially should be able to do is each campaign you create should carry some kind of label inside of one of the channels that you're marketing the campaign on. So every campaign really has a name, but it also has a form of some kind of ID. You're making sure the ID of the campaign plan lives inside of the ad campaign name on these channels. And so you now can track how the campaigns are doing.

And now the agent itself analyzes the data and says, "Hey, this one's working well. Hey, campaign writer, write a campaign that says this, this, this based on this learning," and it will produce itself the entire campaign plan. And so then when we then go and initiate that campaign plan, all we need to do is use the campaign ID inside of our ad campaigns. And then the same system will keep cycling, just analyzing how are the campaigns doing and then produce new campaigns for the different clients we serve.

For a company like ours, Kyle, in a modern world where we need to be more nimble, a big part of this is making sure we can scale and work with tons of clients. We can't work with tons of clients if we throw too many human beings at the process. So being able to do these kinds of things using AI agents and using an AI agentic framework - and I'm using LangGraph to be able to do this - it makes it very interesting, very exciting.

Kyle: That is very exciting. You kind of read my mind there. I was going to ask, have you tested different agents and what was the one that you said you're using now?

Renaldo: Yes, I'm using LangGraph. It's weird. I'm coding it. I code it with Windsurf. So I'll use Claude 4.5 now using Windsurf. I'll take that. I've established a core framework, which I call "All Day," which is Orchestrate, Remember, Decide, Action, and something else. Those essentially are five independent agents. So one will observe, one will take the observation and give it to the one that needs to remember and record the information, then pass it to the one that needs to decide what to do, which will be the orchestration agent kind of thing, and then give it to the agent that's going to take an action and then give it to the other agent that's going to deploy.

I've tried to use a vibe coding application to build AI agents rather than just taking something off the shelf, which is a very interesting project because you know and I know you're always trying to look for uncopyable advantages. I think the problem of taking stuff off the shelf at the moment is it's just a copyable advantage. Somebody else is going to take something else off the shelf. Naturally, we're always cutting edge.

We tend to be first movers. But as a first mover, you're trying to always be such a first mover that no one can catch up. So I'm like, hey, if I can do this with actually having my own developer assistant and making sure it does all the code - like I don't write any code and I can prompt it well enough to do that and understand various different insights to give and I can build an agent from it - then that sets the tone and the stage for all of the different types of applications we should be able to build. Long-winded answer of saying I'm building it from scratch using a framework called LangGraph.

Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. OK. So you're building it yourself, but using AI and prompts to build it. I love that. What is your strategy for crafting an effective prompt and then kind of checking that you got the outcome that you're looking for? If you want to get into AI, start with figuring out how to do prompts. That is it. If you're not giving the right prompt, if you're searching on it like you do with Google, you're not going to get the right stuff. So if you could tell us your strategy there, that'd be great.

Renaldo: I wish there was an elaborate one. I'll be really honest with you. It's context. I just think about it like any smart person that's coming in to solve a problem - what's the thing they usually do? They just ask questions. "OK, what kind of problem is it you're trying to solve?" And you tell them something, they're like, "No, give me - OK, that part there, go a little bit deeper." "Yeah, well, I'm finding that the refrigerator keeps buzzing and blah, blah, blah." "Yeah, OK, so when it buzzes, what days of the week did it buzz at last?" "Oh, well, it does it on Monday, Tuesday." "OK, Monday, Tuesday. What time?" That's what a consultant does. That's what really a great mind does.

And AI is just mimicking that. So I thought, hey, if I just give it enough context and I say it's like this, it's like that, the more context you give, the more accurate the response is always going to be. And I feel that's always worked. It's worked brilliantly. It kind of made the relationship between myself and prompt engineers near and very seamless to the point where I've never really had to learn prompt engineering structure. I've always found that I've got exactly what I wanted just because I just give context. I think that's just fundamental to communication.

Kyle: Absolutely. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. OK. So if we take all of that and we marry that to the campaign planning automation that you mentioned, you mentioned that it will kind of see something and then come up with a new plan and ping the creative team. Is this data-based? Is it like, "Oh, we've achieved a CPL, so let's try to mirror that?" Or it's like "The CPL has died off by X percent or CTR is out of" - are you basing this on data?

I know when we talked a lot back in the day, we focused on statistical significance, making sure there was enough impressions and all that kind of stuff. I'm curious, is it just like every two weeks it does this or are you kind of using some of the data or a little bit of both?

Renaldo: Great question. A bit of both. Initially you just want a facility and a tool to be able to write campaigns very quickly when you need to write campaigns, i.e. human in the loop. Then it's like, OK, what happens if I take myself out of the loop? How is it going to interpret what campaigns to create and when? That's all going to be down to us making sure that there is a log of the campaign plans that we have created and they live on one of these advertising channels of which this application plugs into an API. That API will then be able to look at, OK, well, how are the ads doing for the campaign plans that we've written?

And for the ads that are doing well, they're left alone and for the ones that are not necessarily doing that well, maybe new campaigns get written. That's really the modus operandi right where what I want to see and really experiment and understand: how does it interpret what to do based on what it analyzes inside of the marketplace and how much better is it at doing that than us? Because I already know it's faster. I just want to know that. Is it better? And does the lead cost go down and the quality remain? Because the lead cost can go down and the quality can tank. So it's a game.

Does it know how to manage that game well to be able to provide pipeline that's actually valuable to us in the marketing phase, but then, of course, the sales team in their phase as well?

Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. Have you had anything kind of shock you or that's memorable, that stands out? Maybe it's an ad copy strategy that AI came to that you never thought of, or maybe it started to make an audience work that historically wasn't working. Is there anything like that? Like a cool moment, or even a detriment? I don't want to sit here and be like, "AI is the best, just let it go and do its thing." So I'm curious in either direction, if there's anything that stands out like that.

Renaldo: Yeah, crazy stories around it. I think a big one, to be honest, in many ways was adoption. In the beginning, it was really hush-hush. Nobody wanted to know that anyone was using AI and whatever else. I hope you don't get in trouble on this call! Back in '23, ChatGPT had come out and I already saw that, hey, I'm sure you can angle this well enough to be able to write really strong prompts.

But in doing so, you're going to go under the scrutiny because people feel like you're cheating because that's how it is in early adoption with all things. And I think it was really shocking that most people were saying at the time, "Yeah, if you write AI, it can't outdo humans. It can't do this. It can't do that." Kyle, we smoked about two or three or four campaigns just from AI prompting. I love it.

Many of the team members started to use AI methods of writing copy and not needing to go and consult with the copywriting team, which obviously creates an interesting dynamic. It's like, "Yeah, I can just kind of go to market. I've got my strategy. I can put the copy together. I don't need to bother you guys." But people were more like, "Oh no, bother us!" Everyone's busy and it was interesting.

So I think those were some of the biggest shocks in the beginning because I started to realize that we can really change the game and get a different kind of level of scale. I said, "I'm sure these ads will do better than others we've written," and those ads did better than others we've written. So yeah, in a university environment where people academically are not huge fans of that, it's a very interesting experience.

Kyle: That is. And highly regulated industries such as higher education are even more slow to adopt for a variety of reasons. I also think that - this is not supposed to be an insult to these people - but a lot of times when you're working with people in higher education, they believe in themselves. So being able to say, "Oh, this robot can do better than me," like, "No way, no way." So I have to assume it's even slower for the people that you're talking to. If you were saying, "Let's put a chatbot on the website," you're probably inviting the devil into their house or something like that. I have to assume there's even more interesting conversations happening on your end with that.

Renaldo: That's absolutely true. And I think the first point, the first resistance to change is denial. We were moving to Dubai recently and kids - the first thing the kids are like, "No, you're not. No, you're not going to do that." And then when you do, "Oh, my gosh, are you?" That's how that goes. And I think that's put on steroids when it becomes these world-changing, moving objects like artificial intelligence that people are like, "Are you telling me you're going to come for my job?" Whereas I look at it like, "Oh man, you can make my job easier." It's just who you ask.

It's just how optimistic people are about things. Much of it is down to people who have jobs versus people who are entrepreneurs. We think very differently. That's okay. Job people are not necessarily risk-takers. And that's why they are able to build really strong, infrastructurally sound organizations.

Entrepreneurs are risk-takers. And when you see something like that, you're like, "Oh man, this is a wonderful risk to take." Because every risk you take, you almost feel there's no risk because you're going to get feedback that's going to allow you to cheat the game and understand how it works faster than everybody else.

Kyle: Yeah, you're right. You got to have a little bit of risk to get that reward. Are you guys primarily running on Google and Meta still? Or is LinkedIn or is there a spot for TikTok or anything like that?

Renaldo: Kyle, come on, man. Have you ever cracked LinkedIn?

No! Tell me. I've never cracked it. I'm not going to lie. 

Kyle: I've never cracked it. I've cracked it in terms of like white paper downloads. You can get them in the ecosystem type of thing. But in terms of getting a student enrolled or something like that, you definitely need to have a lot more follow-up.

Renaldo: Yeah, direct response, no chance. You're talking about really low touchpoint into the funnel in some way. So LinkedIn has always been this misnomer that we've always been trying to figure out, never really figured it out. I felt like it's a branding play in many ways and at best downloadables. But I think even the downloadables, they're pretty expensive for what they are. TikTok is great. So interesting and exciting because you've got to do it right. TikTok is the platform of world-class content creators.

That's how I see it. And you, with your boring content, going over there talking about monolithic boring things - you've got to make sure you're talking about something interesting and you've got to deliver it in an interesting way. So it's like, do you hire actors? Do you yourself and certain people in your team just become good at just sitting on camera and just chatting on camera all the time? I think that's the most effective way. I don't think it's as effective as hiring actors because it's hard to sustain and it can get really expensive based on the returns that you gain.

But then you've got AI. Do you use Veo and do you use Google Banana and do you try and come up with - OK, we can have some really strong AI avatars, use something like Hedra or HeyGen and put together some really strong avatars and just go that route. Cartoon avatars tend to be better in that sense. People don't like to be tricked with human-looking avatars. But even that, that comes with a content distribution challenge. How much content can you distribute? For OPMs, Kyle, you're working with one university, you're working with tons. And tons of universities have tons of programs and each program deserves a full quality marketing cycle. Can you do all of that for all of this stuff? It's not very easy.

These are the little nuances that people don't understand with why aren't you just doing all of this stuff? And you're like, you don't understand. You can publish one video campaign for two or three different programs. It works two weeks, three weeks, or a month consistently, and then it stops working on one, stopped working on the other one two weeks ago, still working on the third one, and you're like, OK, do you just leave it? Do you repurpose it? Do you change the audience? Do you test new stuff? And if I'm shifting my attention this way, my attention can't be on this way. That's where I think AI changes the game because it can now operate all of that. But you've got to build it. You've got to build the actual foundations that make that work. And it's very difficult. It feels like a Mission Impossible type deal sometimes.

Kyle: Oh, the list just keeps growing and growing. So with that in mind, how do you decide that, "OK, this is the next thing I'm going to automate," whether it's an entire process or just a piece of a process? Do you have - is it by demand? Like, clients keep on mentioning this? Or are you guys measuring hours? "The team spent 10 hours on XYZ last week, so let's get that automated." How do you decide what to do next?

Renaldo: Brilliant question, man. I tend to decide based on having the foundational functional purpose of the division itself. So, OK, we're a demand generation division. We've got to generate demand. Cool. How do we do that? We do that by engaging with people with strong downloadable content, with various different hooks, with an offer that's compelling. We do all of these things. And we build these different types of units for people to be able to engage with. We capture.

We've got to have mechanisms on where we capture, which means we've got to do a lot of retargeting. We've got to do certain direct response marketing that's really in the capture area. And then we've got to nurture. We've got to make sure those people are going through with a high level of interest. So by the time they raise their hand and say, "I want a sales team person to call me," or if the salesperson calls them, it's welcomed.

Now, inside of all of that mesh is lots of different specific routines that need to be done. For example, SEO, right? What do you do? You've got nine clients times five programs. That's not the case for us, maybe more sometimes. But let's say you got nine times clients times five programs. You got 45 programs. You can group the programs together. You say, "Hey, anything that's kind of technology, that means cybersecurity, AI," whatever. You got a message-to-market mismatch. Person that's looking for AI lands on a page and you talk about cybersecurity and AI and technology. Whoever's just talking about AI, they're going to get the engagement. You're not going to get that engagement.

So looking at that, it's like, OK, you got two problems here. You got your landing page development to be able to develop a really strong message-to-market match. Can you create the scale to where you can give each program its due message-to-market fit? Or do you forego that, group the programs and say, "OK, let's use SEO. Let's invest in some SEO to create really, really strong domain authority to try and generate as much traffic to be able to reduce the cost that it's going to cost me in being a little bit more average in my marketing efforts." Because I know if I'm going to have a message-to-market mismatch, I'm going to be paying probably $30, $40, $50 more for that lead because I'm just going to get a lower quality score or I'm going to get a lower click-through rate.

Let's say you go the SEO route. You're now going to do the SEO route for all these different programs, all these different brands. Do you hire someone? It gets pricey because that person wants to work on just one product. So now you're like, OK, I'm going to go seobot.ai. There's a guy I've been following for a while, Paul something. Built a really strong tool that pretty much does all of your SEO distribution. So now you can pretty much - it will analyze your entire site. It will come up with really strong articles. I think it uses GPT-5. GPT-5 is fantastic with being able to interpret what things to write and coming up with the articles. You get a 3,000-word article.

It's a good agent off the shelf, not a thing that's worth building yourself. It gives you maybe 20 articles a month for $99 a month per site, or I think you can get $50 a month for nine articles a month per site. I just look at the numbers and I say, "OK, per site, that's really per brand for us." You can argue nine brands or seven brands, seven times $99 a month, $700. Hey, it will cost me an SEO person $5,000 a month, $6,000 a month, $7,000 a month. Maths make sense. I can get way more scale. That's the route I'm going with. There are growing pains in being able to do that. But again, that's the route. That's literally how I would assess it.

That's how I currently assess it and try and look at what I'm trying to optimize, what I'm trying to automate, and what kind of Ferrari or F1 car I'm trying to put a team member in so they can just move faster.

Kyle: That's very cool. I mean, to your point, if you can justify it via dollars, then there's really no other justification needed. I wanted to ask also about - you mentioned how you're using GPTs a little bit for creative and image creation. Have you seen success? Are you using that for video? Is it more animated type of stuff? I'm curious because I've actually gotten - we use it for some of our images that we post on LinkedIn and things like that. And it's sufficient. It works for sure. But obviously, when you get more complicated and or have stricter brand guidelines, like from a university, I'm curious if you've been able to get it to function for you for the most part.

Renaldo: We are, we have, and we are. I think we're using GPT-5 on a particular campaign for us for a spinoff product we've got called Bisk Amplified. And it's weird. I saw on Instagram once, you know, when GPT for images came out, like that groundbreaking one that came out that changed everything and made all the images look super clean kind of with Sora. I was like, "Wow, this is crazy." And one time I was on Instagram and I saw a really cool post where it was like that cartoonized format and people were just kind of almost like a comic book, almost like a comic strip.

They were just having a conversation talking about the problems of a particular product area and you just flick through and it's just like a comic book flicking through and it's telling a fantastic story. And I said to my social media girl, I was like, "We've got to do this. This would be so good." And so she decided to go down the prompt engineer route. She's been prompting all of that entirely. And now we've got a whole campaign on LinkedIn that's kind of following that same format where it's kind of like this really cool little comic strip. And we repurpose it on LinkedIn, on Twitter, LinkedIn, on Instagram, I think on Facebook as well. And it gets really good engagement. So we do find like - it's just finding the thing that ensures you're not trying to trick people.

I think human beings, we're emotional creatures. So there is like an immediate expectation and an immediate reaction with the way some information is being presented. If I'm seeing something and it looks human, I initially think, "Wait, no." And you feel like you're being kind of tricked. Now, if you're in our space, like you and me, you see that and you ain't got a problem with it because you know it's AI and you can kind of appreciate it. Whereas a person that doesn't think that way doesn't appreciate it that way.

And so I think in those instances, you've got to lean into a cartoonized format because in cartoonized format, everyone knows you're not trying to trick anybody. It is kind of right within line. It makes sense that it is AI and it's actually something that's familiar enough for people to not have an attitude about. And I think it's just that - it's trying to figure out how do you use it in a way that's going to enhance the experience versus taint it.

Kyle: I love that. I forget what the exact numbers are today - I'm just going to make up a number - but it's estimated that the average person sees like 20,000 pieces of content a day. The point that I'm trying to make is all of our content BS meters are so dialed in at this point that it takes a second to be like, "Oh, that is so inauthentic" or "That is fake" or "That is trying to mislead me." You're right. It is instant. And we know right away.

We've done it to ourselves. We've trained ourselves at this point like our own custom GPT to say like "This is fake." It's cool when you can get something different to work. You would never pick a cartoon for higher education, but it's nice that that could work for you. 

Renaldo: It's different.

And I mean, have you seen this new Sora TikTok? I shouldn't even say new when I'm talking on these podcasts because for the most part, by the time someone may listen to this, it's like, "Oh, yeah, that was yesterday's news." 

Kyle: I'm not 100% sure what you're referring to. 

Renaldo: OK. I saw this by accident, serendipity, the other day. Basically there's a TikTok style - which is really a reel style platform. I don't know if it's a platform or I don't know if it's just an experience inside of Sora. But basically, it operates just like TikTok and all of the content, Kyle, is AI slop. So it's all just AI generated. And we're talking about anything and everything. Like Elon Musk walking and messing around in a conversation with Trump or Sam Altman saying this or that, or people who are familiar faces in the celebrity or in the just well-known content space are getting their likeness and everything completely used to do all of these crazy things like jumping off a building, riding crocodiles. It's nuts.

You should have a look when you get it. Because the AI is just doing all the interpretation itself and just coming up with whatever skits it wants to come up with. I don't even think anybody's actually prompting it into it, but I think it's an OpenAI demonstration of the creativity stage right now.

Kyle: That is wild. I'm definitely going to have to look that up. 

Renaldo: It's crazy. Please check it out. It's nuts. 

Kyle: All right. I've got to make a note. I don't want to forget that. That's cool. I do want to jump into kind of a looking ahead part. And I know this is always such a tough question to answer or to take a guess, but I'm curious if you have any guesses for where you think AI is going to go in general or where it's going to go from an automation standpoint or a marketing standpoint, anything that you kind of see coming on the horizon.

Renaldo: OK. I think there's an apocalyptic view, but I don't have the negative - oops, sorry, my camera. Let me just fix my camera, my friend. There's an apocalyptic view of AI right now. I don't share the negative side of the apocalyptic view, but it's an apocalyptic view all the same. And that is I can't see a world right now, Kyle, especially in the West, where it's massive, massive adoption of AI. We're no longer a heavy service culture in the West.

We still serve, but being here now in Dubai, I'm seeing a major service culture where you can get a job and probably have that job for five years and six years and 10 years working in a restaurant and the restaurant's not going anywhere just because there's so many people coming in and out for you to continue serving them. That's not the same in a normal area that's not super premium in the United States. That business might be out of business in two or three years, or the person may have moved on and sold it. It's just not the same.

So I think in the West where we're not heavily relying on services anymore like the way we kind of were, I think where AI adoption is massive, I can't see a world where you don't have most of the types of jobs that you see today. It just doesn't make sense. And I think of it in the sense that - well, look at the sweet spot of where we sit. I can prompt a robot right now to do something and customize a framework or a set of parameters for it to follow. So I've still got use and I need to be in that loop in some ways to get that robot to do that thing over there and to get that robot to work with this one.

These two separately working together, I can still have an excuse to exist and to add value. There's a time - and we're already moving to that time - where they can go right past me and just communicate with each other. So it's like, well, OK, where do I continue finding the value, especially in a brain area?

I think we're in the digital industry which really is a brain industry. You're trying to figure out, "How do I use my mind to make really effective change to be able to create lots of value?" And I think with robots and with AI able to do what it does so much more effectively, and as it starts to communicate with other AI agents to be able to do those things more effectively, I don't see a world where there's a need for much of the types of operational processes that we have today. I think there's always going to be a world where there's a requirement of inspiration to establish why to do something, because that's what we are.

We are conscious beings that establish a reason to exist or a reason to do a thing. But once that reason is established, the doing of the thing - I don't know that they don't do that just so consistently better. You name a thing, I will argue that it does it better in the digital form.

And so then the last piece is physical form. So actually physical robots, which have - which are run or engineered or using GPT or whatever engines or OpenAI engines, LLMs that they're going to be using. What about when they build other robots and when they build other cars or whatever else? I think you or me, if you had a billion dollars or however many billion, that would be naturally where you're trying to get to.

You're trying to make sure things just become more efficient, which is the downside of being a system mind because you can be a little bit cold and a bit robotic in many ways. But we know the best system is a robotic system that makes no mistakes. If there's enough people in the world that think like that - which I think there is - you're naturally going to land on an outcome where AI does everything well and runs everything well. So human beings move into this space where we can just connect with each other a lot more and kind of do things that we can't do today.

I think people have a negative view about this. I think that's too Skynet for me, too Terminator. I think there's no reason for AI to want to remove human beings. It doesn't make sense. It's not a logical thing to do. So they will far more want to re-engineer you and trick you to just be happy or do whatever you do far more than you're likely to end up in this space where they're trying to destroy you or something. I think that's weird. I think human beings will program robots to destroy human beings but yeah, I don't think they're gonna do that themselves.

Kyle: I'm adopting your mindset. I like that. Just living in this utopia where I no longer have to do my dishes or any of that kind of stuff. They're taking care of everything for me and I'm just hanging out with the boys. I like that. 

Renaldo: I just don't know why - I don't know, Kyle. I don't know. Only because that's what I would do, I suppose. And I think, are there people out there who think that way to where they just want things to just be hyper-efficient? Probably. And if that's the case and it makes less mistakes, I think that's in some ways where you're going to end up. But I can see that being in five, ten years, the speed at which we've seen growth. 

Kyle: One of my previous guests answered the AI prompt saying that he thinks AI is exponential. And it's just going to get quicker and quicker. It's compounding on itself. 

Renaldo: I've got to ask you what you think. What about you?

Kyle: I agree with you wholeheartedly. There is a part of me that is a little pessimistic and negative. And I don't want to say Skynetty, but we have proven that there are bad actors that do bad stuff. Unless there's a way to guardrail and prevent that from happening, I feel like there's always going to be someone trying to do that.

The point of that is maybe they would be like, "All right, we do need to take over to save them from themselves" type of thing. I don't know. I try to stay rosy and positive over here, but I couldn't agree with you more that it's - especially if you think about it from a capitalistic mentality, when you can put more efficiency in, which means more dollars and more returns and all that kind of stuff. It's kind of that unstoppable force. 

Renaldo: Agreed. Agreed. Awesome. There we go. So we agree on the left side. I'm on the right side. So we agree. One big brain.

Kyle: Exactly. All right, Renaldo, we're at the five rapid fire question section of the podcast here. So I'm going to jump in quick here. I know you've automated a lot of stuff, but if you could snap your fingers right now and have one kind of large pie-in-the-sky thing automated, what would that be?

Renaldo: Kids education. All day. Private, personal assistant that tailors completely to the child. Trying to do something like this in a moment. Imagine a teacher that never judges you, teacher that understands everything that you do, the way you think, everything, and can lean into all of your gifts. Kids education.

Kyle: It's a beautiful thought. I like that. What is harder, building out a fully automated system or crafting the perfect go-to-market strategy?

Renaldo: Fully automated system because the perfect go-to-market strategy is boring.

Kyle: Fair enough. I like that. I also don't believe in the concept of perfection. So what was the first thing that you did do in Dubai once you got settled in there?

Renaldo: Eat great food. Everything is so international. So we love Chinese food. Love, love, love Chinese food. We've been living in Spain for a long time. Spanish - no disrespect to my Spanish brothers and sisters - but the food is so much blander. It's an acquired taste. And yeah, we've really missed that dynamic taste buds that kind of suit us a bit better.

Kyle: Awesome. Amazing. I forget. Are you a sports guy? Are you a footballer?

Renaldo: Oh, yeah, of course. Not football as in soccer football. Soccer. Yes. I'm not. My dad is. So when people ask me what team I support, I always say Manchester United. I appreciate football, but I don't really follow it. I'm still a basketball guy at heart. Basketball and padel of recent and a martial arts guy. Love UFC, love all of the mixed martial arts scene. 

Kyle: Who's your basketball team? 

Renaldo: It's Steph. It's Steph. Even though they're losing, even though they've not done great, it's Golden State, man. The guy's too special. He's too unique. We all ride greatness, we all do it, but geez, Steph is just - he's special.

He is special. And he does it with a smirk the whole time. 

Kyle: All right. Last one. What are your three most used emojis?

Renaldo: Thumbs up. I use this as thank you. Most people say pray - maybe I use this as thank you. I think it's facepalm or shrug. Which really is me. These are all me and my kind of semi-cocky ways.

Kyle: There you go. We're actually similar. I've got the facepalm and the thumbs up, but I like to do the sunglasses, like the cool guy. It's still cocky, though. You're just looking at what someone said like, "Look at how full of eye rolls."

Renaldo: All of them are full of eye rolls.

Kyle: Incredible. All right. Well, Renaldo, I know we're at time here, but I wanted to just ask, is there anything that we didn't discuss that maybe you're really passionate that you wanted to share or a concept, whatever it may be, that's important to you?

Renaldo: No, no. Always good to connect, Kyle, man. I think this is good. We explored tons of stuff that I really find interesting. It's interesting having the floor to just yap and yap and yap and yap. I haven't done this for so long, I'm finding myself asking people questions more than I'm yapping all the time, even though I always find my way to do it. So, yeah, it's been cool, man. I really enjoyed it.

Kyle: Incredible. Incredible. Yeah, it's been great to reconnect. I appreciate you coming in here and sharing all of your insights. Everybody can find Renaldo Edmondson on LinkedIn. Bisk is Bisk.com. Is there anything anywhere else that you connect that you would want people to find you if they have questions or want to talk or anything?

Renaldo: You got BiskAmplified.com. I am working on something called AddX Engine and AddX Agent. So essentially a marketing team out of a box through something I actually put to Archer many years ago and I was working with Eric on, which was a process and a system that now can be robotized, if you want to call it that. So yeah, I'll be working on that. I actually don't have a domain yet, though. So yeah, for now, follow me on LinkedIn.

Kyle: Awesome. Awesome. Well, Renaldo, thanks again, man. We appreciate you joining the Brainiac Blueprint. If you don't mind, just look at the camera and say, "Stay brilliant, Brainiacs."

Renaldo: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs, forever.

Kyle: Awesome. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. Speak soon, man. Cheers.