Empowering Teams and Innovating with AI: A Conversation with Eric Bogard

Thank you. Happy to be here and appreciate you having me on here.

Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for the question. I’ve been doing this marketing thing for 20 years now, and to be honest with you, stumbled into it. I recall after graduating, quarterless. I knew I wanted to do something within marketing or PR but I stumbled into ultimately landing on my feet and having a greater sense of ultimately what I wanted to accomplish and do. After the first few roles, settled down, and started to think about, Okay, what does this career arc look like? What makes the most sense here? What do I enjoy? What do I think I’m good at? And ultimately, there were a couple of opportunities where I could have gone down, say, an SEO route or a PR route or different areas of specialization, but made the intentional decision to be more of a generalist, if you will. And so that was a key decision point within my career trajectory. And fast forward to today, what, 15 years or so, I’m still on that path, overseeing marketing here at CopyLeaks. I’d like to empower the team and have a team of specialists that can allow us to build out the vision that we have for the marketing team and grow the organization.

So that, I would say, is, quote, my superpower and the focus here at CopyLeaks.

Yeah. I guess I to give a little bit of a long-winded response there. The company has been around for about eight years, and it started as a plagiarism detection platform, an AI-based plagiarism detection platform. As you kicked it off, you said that CopyLeaks is an AI-based text analysis company, and that is ultimately the root of everything that we do. With that, we were able to then extend significantly beyond just core plagiarism, which is a massive problem that we’re solving for, particularly academia, a lot of EdTech, etc. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, we were able to quickly release AI detection. Again, that’s the core of what we’ve been doing and the reason we were able to deploy that quickly. That was a starting point of the evolution of this brand, quite frankly. We’re moving in the direction of helping institutions, educational institutions, and enterprises, really navigate the ever-changing landscape of Gen AI. We’ve since then, migrated into things like governance so that ChatGPT and Gen AI could be deployed responsibly in the organization. We’re really about when thinking about our mission and our focus is balancing technological advancement with content integrity, transparency, and ethics. That’s ultimately what we’re doing and will continue to do as a brand.

Yeah, absolutely. Again, the release of ChatGPT was just a pivotal moment, I think, for society as a whole. But focusing solely on copy leads. Everything started to change there in terms of the products we in terms of the type of audiences and users that we were attracting who ultimately use our products to solve real-world problems. Just everything changed there. Now that the dust has settled a bit with this whole ChatGPT thing, it’s all about governance and deploying AI responsibly.

Yeah, look, I appreciate that. Thank you. The way that I like to think of SEO, it’s very like a Maslow hierarchy of needs. If you took Psych 101 in college, where you have to do at the very bottom, think of food and safety, right? With SEO, it’s okay, you have to have the right keyword strategy. You have to have, from a technological standpoint, the site is working and operable and things like that. You have a site map. It’s being able to deploy those foundational considerations and then move to the next thing, which is maybe your content strategy, for example, and deploying that. Then maybe the next step is link-building and fine-tuning and things like that. It’s a very cyclical process that we’ve employed. Look, I inherited or we inherited a fairly strong website, but there was a lot that we had to modify, adapt, and change to make it reach its potential. Again, going back to that pivotal moment with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, we released that content, released that page, and it got a lot of attention. A lot of links were coming organically from it, a lot of PR writing about us.

I think part of it, quite frankly, is being at the right place at the right time. Lucky people, often it’s because of the circumstances laid out and what they’re setting forth. I think with us, it’s releasing something so quickly to market and the first solution of its kind.

Absolutely. If you look at Google Trends, for example, for keywords like AI detector, AI content detector, and things like that, It pretty much follows the school year, not surprisingly, for better or for worse, where there are peaks around final time, around the holidays. Here in the States, there’s a massive decline. So that suggests that it’s a student. But the largest that we’ve seen was just a few months ago, right before summer here. So that means that ChatGPT, things of that nature, and these types of solutions that we offer, there’s growing in awareness, and ultimately more and more people are searching for it. Again, being well-positioned, and getting out there quickly has been advantageous for our brand.

That’s right. I would say the biggest challenge, perhaps in 2023, was that we were a bit ahead of the market in terms of awareness around the need for AI governance. We released governance products, and had a lot of conversations, with people reaching out to us at conferences. It required a lot of education at the time. What are the risks associated with ChatGPT and the like? Why do you need a governance solution, et cetera? This year, it’s very different. It appears that the market has caught up that folks are aware of the inherent risks behind Gen AI and the need for solutions in place to avoid leakage and things of that nature. I think right now that the biggest challenge has shifted from being out there early to just building awareness for the brand in this space. We’re well-known in academia. Again, that’s our core lane, less so within the enterprise side. It’s having some focus around these are the key solutions that we offer, the key verticals that align with that, and then deploying awareness and go-to-market strategies and sales strategies to start to build that funnel of awareness for us.

Look, thank you for that, and thank you for the recognition there. Look, I like to take a very human-oriented approach to leading the team. I tend to operate in the what space and let the team decide the how. What I mean by that is the what is, Hey, here’s what we’re looking to achieve, here are our goals, things of that nature. You determine how we’re going to approach that. I’m there to brainstorm and lend my thoughts, but it’s very empowering that type of approach. This is important, just again, with this human-oriented approach to recognize people and celebrate wins no matter how big or small they will be, because then you get a flywheel effect where people are motivated. They’re motivated and have really good results. Because of the results, they’re more motivated, and it’s ensuring that it’s the operating cadence of the team. It’s been successful here. It’s been successful when employed at other places. Spaces. I certainly recommend that approach to anybody else and folks who are listening. You will have a high-impact team following that framework.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say at the end of the day, it’s a product solution, like a framework. You could have the best targeting, and the best ads, but if your messaging and the orientation don’t follow that framework, good luck. I think a lot of our focus is spent on that. I’ll be honest, most of our demand is coming organically. We do have paid channels and things of that nature, but I think it’s having a strong visibility in the search engines, perhaps ChatGPT with their search engine in the not-too-distant future. That’s been our cash cow and primary channel. So I think it’s that. And I think it’s also the This is so like 101. We have a team of SCRs, and I am continually obsessing with them, they’re doing a great job on this front, responding in real-time to folks. There’s a lot of research that’s been deployed around responding bounce rate vis-a-vis an inbound and your success turning it into a deal, close one. And there’s a direct correlation between speed and the likelihood of something too close. So that’s something that we’re continually invested in as well. Nice.

I guess I’m going to attempt to answer that and tell me if I’m on a completely different, wrong track. But I think we do a really good job as an organization, understanding trends, understanding changes that are happening, particularly in AI, which is a crazy fast-moving space. There’s a culture around sharing knowledge. There’s a culture around sharing articles and things like that that encourages people to have these conversations. I think that That is our competitive advantage, being able to move quickly. Five minutes ago, I mentioned how with this whole governance solution, we were early to market. I think that’s a great example of that. We saw the writing on the wall Hey, what can we do to help address this? We release something early, and the market’s finally caught up. I would say that’s our superpower and quite frankly, a major competitive advantage for us vis-a-vis other companies that are in the AI space, whether it’s the detection side, whether it’s the governance side, or a little bit of each.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we’re really big on that. We have a really strong customer success team, obviously several salespeople, and we’re taking all of that feedback and packaging up, not just to the product team, but to everybody, not just leadership, everybody in the organization, to, again, empower that knowledge sharing, empower everybody’s knowledge about what’s happening in AI, and therefore it makes these conversations very organic and easy to have around, Hey, let’s consider this, or, Hey, this isn’t a regular thing that we’re seeing. What can we do here to potentially address or solve this?

Community marketing. Yeah. We do have a large social presence and somebody who’s ultimately responsible for that. I think communities work in progress, but being able to parlay our brand into key conversations around AI, governance, et cetera, is important. Again, particularly as we’re trying to break through and be known for that, super critical and something that we’re throwing a lot of effort, resources, and time against. It’s so early, but I’m confident that this is the right approach for us.

Yeah, it’s different on the consumer side of our business, the self-serve traditional SaaS model, versus the B2B side of our business. For the consumer side, and I can’t get into specific specifics, we do see churn around the end of the school year. A lot of our users are our students. And again, I mentioned how a lot of our users are indeed students. We’re seeing the biggest fall-off around that. We deployed Several strategies and approaches to help tamper that a little bit. So for example, instead of just flat out canceling, we now allow a user to say, Pause their account for three months so that when the semester restarts, hey, copy lease is still available for them. They’re not losing all of their history with us, etc. That’s something relatively new that we deployed, and it certainly has helped with churn. On the B2B side, it is so dramatically low, and I think it’s a testament to two things. One is our CS team, customer success team, and quite frankly, the product. It’s, particularly within academia, best in class, unquestionably. Once an institute sees the platform and understands how it compares with alternatives, it’s, I don’t want to say a no-brainer, but it’s a pretty easy decision, and therefore, there’s retention baked into it.

Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s to understand the problem that it solves and the core markets or personas and/or personas that it addresses. I think one of our challenges is arguably We serve all verticals and a lot of personas. You can’t boil the ocean from both a go-to-market and sell. You just can’t. Our focus, and working with my VPA sales colleague, our focus is to understand what are the verticals that have, say, high total addressable market potential. What are the verticals that exist where we already have clients from that background who are using us to solve that type of problem? What are those verticals where it’s still a real-world solution or problem, rather? Those are the three main tenets that we leverage to say, Okay, these are the verticals and the personas that are tier one, the highest priority. Let’s go after them first, and throw the full weight of the organization behind it. Then maybe you have your tier two that you go after next and things of that nature. Just to give an example, on the AI detection side, we work with review sites. Think like G2, Capterra, et cetera, to ensure that it’s not plagiarized, free of AI content, et cetera.

We already have a client in that space. I think it was yesterday, and I’m not sure if it was a FTC, but it was some government agency that said, Hey, moving forward, you cannot have fake reviews that use AI and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah problem. We have clients in that space. Bingo, let’s go after it. I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that we move quickly here by design. We move quickly there, and now that’s a big focus of ours.

It’s AI. It’s everything’s AI. Look, I’m bullish about its potential, but I’m also a little bit cautious about it. We’ve used it across our team to support numerous different approaches, whether it’s on the content creation side or brainstorming naming schemes. Also, we leverage it for data analysis and things of that nature. What’s become evident to us is two things to be very aware of. One is hallucinations, unquestionably, particularly if it’s analyzing big data sets. I’m dialed in when using it for that because I continually see it making up things, sharing false numbers and false things that the data doesn’t suggest. So definitely something to be aware of. And very related to that, these things need to be babysat. And by these things, the LLMs, you You need to be very specific and declarative around your prompts. Because if you say, Hey, just analyze this Excel, it’s going to go off the rails real quickly. You need to use language like, Hey, analyze this column and take a step-by-step approach to understand how it’s correlated with this and then calculate this. You need to be very prescriptive. Even then, you’re going to run into situations where you’re going to get hallucinations, you’re going to need to recalibrate and redo things.

It can be a It’s a very time-consuming process. A real-world example, we recently did a survey, it’s not even released just yet, asking teachers and students about their usage of AI in the classroom and also their attitudes about it. We’re comparing the two audiences like, who uses it more? What are their attitudes about the future? Teaching, things of that nature. Massive data set. It was about 1,500 people took the survey, with 20 different questions. You see how this grows exponentially. I had the team analyze it themselves, but then leverage ChatGPT. To go through the data set took me about an hour and a half with prompts to get it analyzed in a way that made sense. Because again, it was hallucinating, making things up. It was not following instructions. And so was it worth it in the end? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Absolutely. Yeah, I was just so surprised with some of the outputs of it. It’s, Oh, my God, I need to be careful here.

Yeah. I think it’s going to be what has me excited about the evolution of our brand. If you go on our website, check out our social media, it’s speaking about things like AI content detection, some governance, and some plagiarism. We’re evolving where it’s, again, the notion around balancing technological advancement with content integrity, transparency, and ethics. That is the direction that we’re moving in, not just as a brand, but also as a product offering and what we do. Some of the solutions think like governance. Solution is academic integrity. Another is code integrity and making sure that if you’re using ChatGPT for code purposes, you have an open license to do so. That is ultimately the direction that we’re going to be evolving in the next 3-6 months, I would say.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think is valued in this organization, but me personally, is to always be learning and growing. That’s what I mean by that. Even to the point where it may become a company value of ours to constantly learn and improve. That’s super important, particularly for a brand or a business that’s in this AI space where what we’re talking about today may not be relevant tomorrow, and you need to move quickly there to remain competitive. That’s super important, and I think it sums up CopyLeaks to a certain extent and why it may ultimately end up being one of our core tenets or values, ultimately.

I’m as ready as I can be.

Going back to what we talked about, it’s visibility within these key verticals of ours where Maybe the brand doesn’t have so much awareness. Being able to articulate the problems that we solve, is where the majority of that budget would go.

I would swap with somebody on the engineering and development side to understand how they’re thinking about our product offerings and what’s ultimately under the hood.

This is not something that I did, but somebody here on the leadership team at their prior company, wanted to work badly for a certain company. I forget what it was, a large enterprise brand. They wouldn’t take their calls, wouldn’t take their calls. They had all sorts of ABM targeting them, et cetera. They ultimately bought a billboard space outside the office, specifically for them, and it got their attention and finally started the conversation and ultimately became a close deal. But something like that has me scratching my head. How could we potentially deploy that or does it make sense for us?

Is it for my personal use or CopyLeaks?

None. I hate social media. It’s toxic.

For the brand, it’s a necessary evil. We have a present. But for personal usage, by design, I’m solely on LinkedIn.

Absolutely LinkedIn, just knowing the audience there. For LinkedIn, it’s both on the enterprise side, but also one of the key personas, if you will, are prospective employees. Okay.

I’m curious how frequently you get this, but it’s always like when brushing my teeth. It just comes. I’m not actively thinking about it, and it’s just like an aha moment.

Thank you. Yeah. Likewise. I appreciate the questions.