Allan Levy with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. CRM and Digital Marketing with GenAI

Allan Levy talks with Jason Barnard about the future of CRM and Digital Marketing with Generative AI.

Allan Levy is an entrepreneur and CEO of Alchemy Worx and LYQ Testing. Alan discusses the integration of ChatGPT in their tool to generate subject lines, which has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns.

Jason Barnard and Allan Levy emphasize the importance of context in AI, noting that ChatGPT’s effectiveness increases with specific details. Allan also highlights AI’s role in creating consistent messaging across platforms and personalizing content.

Jason Barnard and Allan Levy underscores that despite AI’s advancements, human creativity remains crucial for innovation. Discover practical strategies for implementing ChatGPT in your marketing workflows, perfect for business leaders who wants to build smarter marketing systems through strategic AI implementation.

What you’ll learn from Allan Levy

00:00 Allan Levy and Jason Barnard
01:09 Who is Allan Levy According to Jason Barnard’s ChatGPT Search?
01:51 How Does ChatGPT Perceive Jason Barnard?
03:04 What Does Alchemy Worx Do?
05:08 Why is it Important to Use AI Tools Like ChatGPT in Your Marketing Processes?
07:02 How Does Allan Levy See the Use of AI Tools Like ChatGPT Evolving in the Future?
07:17 How Can AI Help Personalize Communication Across Email and Social Media for Individual Users?
08:26 Why Could Personalization Across Multiple Platforms Become Too Invasive?
08:33 How Do E-commerce Sites Retarget Ads on Facebook?
08:55 How Do Marketers Prevent Users From Disabling Tracking Options?
09:34 Why Do Consumers Want Personalization While Fearing Invasive Tracking?
10:51 What Are Some Ways Businesses Can Effectively Adopt Generative AI Despite the Challenges?
11:34 What Prompted Jesse Kirshbaum to Build a Bunch of Filters to Feed Prompts Into ChatGPT?
14:21 What Are Some Other Ways ChatGPT Can Be Used in the CRM and Digital Marketing Space?
16:33 Where Do Humans Come Into Play When Using AI Tools Like ChatGPT?
17:09 Why Don’t Humans Always Need to Make the Final Decision When Using AI?
19:52 How Can Humans Remain Relevant in an AI-Driven World?

This episode was recorded live on video March 25th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://alchemyworx.com/blog/innovation-unleashed/
https://alchemyworx.com/blog/
Allan Levy

Transcript from Allan Levy with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. CRM and Digital Marketing with GenAI

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and becomes our legacy?

[00:00:26] A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody!

[00:00:31] Welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Allan Levy.

[00:00:44] Allan Levy: Well, thank you Jason. Thank you. I can’t sing back at you, but I do appreciate the warm welcome and it’s great being here.

[00:00:52] Jason Barnard: Brilliant, wonderful. I’m really excited to talk about the future of CRM and Digital Marketing, Generative AI, and my first question is going to be, why have you brought CRM and Digital Marketing together? But that’s for after the introductory part, which is your Brand SERP and in this case, your results in ChatGPT.

[00:01:10] Now here I just said, who is Allan Levy? And obviously your name is very popular, and it immediately start thinking well, which one do you mean? And this is a fundamental question that a lot of us have to answer is, there are so many people with my name. How does the machine know which one I’m talking about?

[00:01:27] Some people dominate, as you’ll see, but with a, with a popular name like yours, it’s very difficult. So I then have to add the name your companies, CEO, Alchemy Worx. There! Absolutely gets you. So once we have a little bit of context, and that’s the important thing about AI, which you know is when it has context, it’s very good.

[00:01:47] When it doesn’t have context, it’s generally pretty bad. And then here is, what do you think of Jason Barnard? And it immediately knows who I am and all the other Jason Barnards in the world disappear off the face of the planet because it’s so confident in what it knows about me and confident in my own or my importance in the world that it will immediately just talk about me rather than any of the other 3,000 Jason Barnards in the world.

[00:02:15] I don’t know to what extent it’s important to dominate with your name and AI, but it’s certainly very important to be well understood and that’s what we do at Kalicube.

[00:02:25] Allan Levy: I have something now to aspire to.

[00:02:27] Jason Barnard: Ah, yes, it’s, well, that’s part of what we do at Kalicube is my website, jason barnard.com and my name are the gold standard in controlling how search and AI understand and represent me.

[00:02:40] And that’s what we aim to do for our clients, is get them up to that kind of standard where the machines get it right and they understand and they believe in my credibility. But enough of my sales pitching, I do apologize. We’re talking about the future of CRM and Digital Marketing with Generative AI.

[00:02:56] My first question then, as I said, was why CRM and Digital Marketing together?

[00:03:03] Allan Levy: Okay. So I guess, let me give you a little bit of background on our company and, and you know, what we’re, what we’re about. We’re, we’re an agency that’s focused on, CRM retention, retention marketing. We manage that for about 50 clients actively, from the enterprise side.

[00:03:24] You know, companies like Universal Music Group and, and, and SiriusXM, down to the mid-market size, a handful or, or a bunch of, companies that are a hundred million to a billion dollars in, in, in revenue. We, we are a data first company. So we are a data first, and then we build strategy along the data and we support it with design and creative.

[00:03:47] We, we had a tool for testing subject lines, and we saw that, we apply. We, we saw, we, we’ve been using this tool and, and obviously upgraded the tool multiple times over the course of, over the course of the last six or seven years. Where we can take our existing database of millions of subject lines, a client’s database of the thousands or tens of thousands or of subject lines that we’ve run for them, and specifically run a test of a subject line against historical performance and identify whether or not it will or won’t perform and rank it.

[00:04:36] We layered onto that about 18 months ago, ChatGPT, because what we learned, not just from our tool. But just even, looking externally at all the other tools that are out there for testing subject lines is that while everybody believes the subject line should be tested, they don’t, they don’t often do it no matter how easy it is. Because coming up with the five or six subject lines to test is work, and it’s not a lot of work, but it’s work. And so by layering ChatGPT in, we’ve been able to come up with the recommended subject lines and, and, and then you layer in filters, which ChatGPT 4 allows you to do and, and some other things. And you build intelligence and you can come up with brand voice, you can come up with tone, you can come up with other pieces of the, of it.

[00:05:29] And then you pull that all together and you’re, you’re basically doing your, your pushing out subject lines that are going to generate the most value for an audience, right? Buyer or non buyer, high value buyer, et cetera. So there’s the CRM aspect of it, right? And then the AI aspect of it is, is figuring it out.

[00:05:51] And where do I need Artificial Intelligence where the next leg of this? The next leg of this is there’s not a lot of data. When you start to get really, really grand, right? Where you take, you know, this client X who sells cosmetics, now I want to speak to their customers who bought this group of cosmetic and or, or highly loyal.

[00:06:15] All of a sudden, I’m now down to an audience, even though they may have 3 million people in their database. I’m down to an allegence of 30,000 people and I wanna identify how they’ve looked. I performed over a course, a series of campaigns, and my engagement data is down to 3,000. It’s not enough. I need, I need Artificial Intelligence to take that, crunch it and identify what others, other aspects of it are lookalikes are..

[00:06:43] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. So you’ve in, you’ve integrated ChatGPT already and using it like many people and companies to actually generate the ideas because the blank sheet of paper is traditionally, historically, the hardest thing to do.

[00:06:58] Allan Levy: Yes.

[00:06:59] Jason Barnard: How’s it gonna evolve in the future?

[00:07:02] Allan Levy: I, I want to get it down to the individual level so I can send Jason Barnard and email offer, and ultimately even work with.

[00:07:15] You know, social media, right? So that when I send you something in email, you are looking at your LinkedIn and you’re seeing something that’s consistent with that. And it doesn’t have to be identical. It, it may even be additive, right? I may start the journey in email and can continue the journey in, in social media.

[00:07:35] That’s different than somebody else who is, is in a somewhat similar but not perfect role. If at a minimum I may be address regionality because you’re in Europe and we’re in the us. I may address it by time zone and not send it to you at the end of your day or, or at midnight you are prime because I’m, right?

[00:07:58] So any type of personalization, that can be added in there would, would be able to, you know, I, I’m, I’m, I’m looking that AI can help us with all of these pieces.

[00:08:12] Jason Barnard: Right. And then there’s always been a huge problem of keeping that personalization across multiple platforms from, as you said, LinkedIn to email.

[00:08:19] Allan Levy: Yes.

[00:08:20] Jason Barnard: Where are we going with that? I mean, it, it’s gonna get quite invasive?

[00:08:26] Allan Levy: Is it gonna be invasive you said? Or I, I, I missed it.

[00:08:28] Jason Barnard: Well, I’m gonna be tracked. Super tracked.

[00:08:31] Allan Levy: You are tracked already, right? You, you are tracked today. If you abandon a shopping cart on a, on an e-commerce site, you, you, you’re very likely to see that product in a Facebook ad. So you people already know they’re, they’re tracked. can you turn those tracking off? Absolutely. You know, everybody’s giving you the opportunity that, whether it’s meta or, or Apple, they’re all giving you the opportunity to turn off the tracking. It’s the job of marketers to do a good job of adding a lot of value.

[00:09:03] So that you actually don’t wanna turn off the tracking and you don’t wanna see ads for women’s skirts and you’ve rather, you know, rather, at least if it’s noise, see the noise for things that you’re interested in. It may be single malt scotch or it may be beer or, or, or, or it may be tennis rackets, but it should be something that’s of more interest to you than the things that have no interest to you at all.

[00:09:26] Jason Barnard: Right. I mean, as marketers, we want to track everybody about everything, and as users and buyers, we don’t wanna be tracked. We find that shocking. So there’s always that kind of contradiction between our professional life and our personal life.

[00:09:39] Allan Levy: Do we and or don’t we, I, I, I, I do agree that there are certain people that don’t want to be tracked. But if you go to the same coffee shop every morning, wouldn’t you like them to say, hi, hey Jason, your, here’s your, if it’s a, here’s your latte. No sugar, or do you want to walk in anonymous? And they say, we don’t, we don’t track you, we don’t, we don’t remember anything.

[00:10:05] Tell us what you want, right? And, and, and, and you can give us any name you want that you, you want the personalization.

[00:10:13] Jason Barnard: Sure. Well, and I like, I suppose what I kind of meant is there’s a knee jerk reaction against it, but we all like it at the end of the day.

[00:10:21] Allan Levy: Yes.

[00:10:22] Jason Barnard: Although most of us like it and appreciate it.

[00:10:24] But the, the, the, the next question, moving away from that is adapting Generative AI is actually really very difficult in businesses. We all talk about it and we say we should be adopting it. Look at this and look at that. And then we get, fear of missing out by seeing all our competitors using it.

[00:10:43] Actually getting to the stage where you can and you do use it is super challenging. What, what are some, what are some ways I can do that?

[00:10:51] Allan Levy: Well, the, the great thing about ChatGPT is there’s a certain amount of learning to it. So you can just go into ChatGPT and you know, if it gives you results, you’re not,

[00:11:04] Not comfortable with go back and, and challenge it and say, I’m not comfortable with these results because of this reason or that reason. And, and it will retool the results. So just as a, a late person, you can just go in and do that. We’ve been adapting it by, simply, I don’t, I don’t wanna say simply, but by putting filters on it, right? So my design team, and my copywriters rather than, again, blank sheet of paper, writing a creative brief. What did we do? We went into ChatgPT, we gave it a handful of prompts. Write a creative brief, and here’s, here’s all of my prompts, and therefore it’s spit out a creative brief to me.

[00:11:45] And I said, great. You know what? Let me build a bunch of filters that have all of these prompts in, feed the prompts into ChatGPT, pull back the data in, in a format that my designers can use. and before I’m not optimizing yet, but at least at a minimum, let me fill that blank sheet of paper. Let me, let me write the two paragraphs and have my copywriters edit rather than my copywriters start from scratch.

[00:12:15] And, and so we are finding that chat is very useful in that manner right now. and it’s not that difficult to put those filters so any, any company can start using it. I’ll give you another example.

[00:12:33] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:12:34] Allan Levy: My head of business development received an email back from a client, saying, “Thank you very much for all the effort”.

[00:12:42] You did an analysis for us and you, you gave us pricing and a product pitch and everything else, but we’re not ready to purchase right now, right? We’re not ready to commit right now. He took their email, all of the email strength, his two decks that he had sent them, which had data and analysis and everything else, and said, “How should I reply?”.

[00:13:07] And he just stucked it into ChatGPT, and it fed back to him. A pretty good answer. Now, obviously he’s got to fine tune that answer, but it’s, it’s that opportunity to sit down with an expert that can do the research for you. Look through all of the work you’ve done and say, tell me what you think. It’s, it’s an, it’s an amazing tool.

[00:13:33] And, and I think any, here’s an example of, I don’t want to say anybody, but, you know, didn’t mean my diminished, my, my level of, of expertise that my head of business development has. But, but, but in anybody trying literally do and put it, put their information in and get results.

[00:13:50] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah, no, a hundred percent.

[00:13:52] And I think kind of, you say also, not only just that email thread and the slide deck, but also the other knowledge and the other information that ChatGPT has in the background. I think we often forget about that, the immense amount of data that’s in there, the immense amount of knowledge that it can spit back at you.

[00:14:10] You, you’ve talked about email and you’ve talked about, replying to clients who are using ChatGPT. What, what are the other examples that you got within the CRM Digital Marketing Space?

[00:14:21] Allan Levy: We’re starting to build out. We’re not there yet. We’re starting to build out tools to do the types of analysis that our junior strategy, junior analysts would do, for push in all of the CRM data in to Chat and come back with a report, right? Sales are up in the last three months. Can you tell us what’s driving the increase in sales? So we can come up with a strategy for the rest of the year to continue to benefit from this lift in sales, right? And so, typically that’s what our strategy team does. They look at it, they identify, sales are up because engagement is up, engagement is up because we ran these two or three specific campaigns. We only ran these campaigns twice.

[00:15:22] There’s room to run these campaigns, you know, once a month rather than once every six weeks. That’ll give us a 25 or 30% increase. That’s what our strategists will do, but pulling that base data out is an analyst, but that information can ease. I don’t wanna say easy, can be pulled out by Chat. It’s just data, right?

[00:15:41] It’s just the matter of your best campaign was this. Teach it to understand what that engagement drives revenue and engagement of revenue are tied together. And then teach it to tell you. Now, the strategist may look at it and say, well, those campaigns are driven around specific holidays and there’s only x amounts of specific holidays.

[00:16:01] Even if we strain to say, you know, Martin Luther King Day is holiday as equal to President’s Day. You know, we, but there’s always it, right? So the strategist has to still, there’s never a handing it all over to Chat. Maybe at some point in the future we can continue to train it on some of these pieces, but the strategy still has to look into that.

[00:16:21] And I’ll, I’ll actually answer on the other side of that. You didn’t ask this question, but you know, where do the humans come in? Well, the humans come in.

[00:16:29] Jason Barnard: I was about to ask that. Done! .

[00:16:33] Allan Levy: The humans come in and saying, okay, how about if I do this? Which is totally nobody’s ever done before, right?

[00:16:40] Because Chat can only answer the questions to what’s been done before, right? And so how so the humans come in and saying, I want to challenge you and I wanted to do this, which has never been done before and test that. And so there’s always room for innovation. It’s just got to push us harder and harder to become more creative in our innovation.

[00:17:02] Jason Barnard: Right. So the human always needs to be in the loop. The human always needs to make the final decision or not?

[00:17:09] Allan Levy: No, I don’t think the human always needs to make the final decision. I think if you’re looking for innovation, It’s going to be a number of years before Chat can give you the type of creative innovation out of the box thinking that human beings will come up with. Because some of those ideas are counterintuitive.

[00:17:34] I’ll give you a very simple example, right? Years ago, we had a client that was running a . 20 a, a 30 off sale. So their, their go-to promotion was 30 off sitewide and I came back to them and said, I’d like to run a buy one, get one 50 off sale. And their first response, no, no, we can’t do more than 30 off.

[00:18:05] We, we, we can’t do 50 off. And I said, no, listen closely, it’s buy one for full price and get the second item for 50 off. Which translates down to 25 off.

[00:18:16] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:18:17] Allan Levy: And, and I haven’t tested this in ChatGPT, so I could be wrong and, and I probably will right after this, this, podcast, but, buy one, get one 50 off did better than their 30 off sales.

[00:18:31] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay.

[00:18:32] Allan Levy: Generated more revenue. It was, they, they gave a lesser discount. They get 25 off, but it generated more revenue because it was perceived by the end user as being a higher value. They didn’t go through the computation in their mind. So the logical computation would be 30 off is gonna do better than 25 off.

[00:18:55] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:18:56] Allan Levy: Right. And so I, I, and, and, and whether that is a good example or Chat actually does figure that out. I don’t know. But there are going to be examples like that where human innovation is gonna come up with something that, that the data doesn’t support. Until you do it enough times that it, it be, it starts to live within the data.

[00:19:17] Jason Barnard: Right. And can that bring back to the idea that the lack of logic in human beings works both ways? Both in the way we act and the way we think and the way we decide to do things. So from the perspective of the buyer, they’re saying, well, it’s not a logical decision to go more for the buy, buy one, get one 50% off.

[00:19:38] I really like that idea. I’m wondering how long it’s going to take before humans aren’t needed anymore.

[00:19:46] Allan Levy: I, I think, you know, it’s like anything else. We just have to keep evolving as a race. So we have to become, become smarter and smarter. Right? I, I, you know, there was a job at one point of butter churner, right?

[00:20:00] That, that somebody, the only way you were getting butter was by somebody manually churning the butter, right? And, and there was, there was an ice box and somebody had to deliver ice to the home every, every morning. And, and, and so we could argue to say, well, you’re gonna put all these, all these companies had a business that, that reads the ice and ship it off and deliver it

[00:20:24] or, or the milkman. And, you know, they, I’m, I’m, I’m dating myself because yes, I did have a milkman come and deliver milk. And New York has some sorts of that but, but yes, there’s going to be an evolution, but I, I think as, as a race, we’re just gonna continue evolving and getting smarter and, and, challenging ourselves.

[00:20:48] Jason Barnard: That’s a brilliant way to end the show.

[00:20:50] Thank you so much, Allan. That was delightful. Thank you everyone for watching. You get the after song.. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Allen.

[00:21:03] Allan Levy: Jason, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure.

[00:21:05] Jason Barnard: That was delightful.

[00:21:06] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.