Automate Marketing with Copilot Agents

00:00:06 Mark Smith
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called How to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, Let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the MVP show. Today, I am joined by Ramon from Valencia, Spain. Ramon, welcome to the show.

00:00:43 Ramón Rautenstrauch
Hello, Mark. Thank you very much for having me today.

00:00:46 Mark Smith
It's great to have you on the show. The first time I heard of the Valencia was because of the America's Cup yacht race. And it had been won here in New Zealand. We were the victors. And the New Zealand team decided to take it to Valencia as to be the next racing regatta location. And that's when that's kind of like I first came into my psyche, Valencia, and my wife and I honeymooned in Barcelona in Spain for our honeymoon. This is like, wow, it's 15 years ago now. And so a long time ago. So I love Spain, as I was saying, just pre-call. At one point, it was the third, the country I'd lived in, in 2017, I lived in Spain more, was the third most visited, as in most nights spent in a country that I'd ever been in, being that I was there for first six weeks for the Camino de Santiago, but then I actually stayed on, my wife and I, and we did two, what are called Vaughan towns. I don't know if you've heard of these, but big in Madrid. And it's where Spanish people learn English by full immersion. Generally, because they're working for international companies, they need to develop their English. So what happens is they take us to a hotel, and in that hotel for a week, we'd spend time one-on-one. And so what happens is that you would have breakfast, lunch, and dinner all together in the hotel. you were never allowed to speak any Spanish whatsoever, and then you were assigned a person for every hour of the day that you had to spend like an hour, maybe an hour and a half with them, and you could only talk in English so that they could practice after all their English lessons, full immersion and English experience. And so When I was on the Camino, somebody told us about it and said, Hey, if you wanna stay on in Spain, why don't you check this out? And so we did one, which was outside Madrid, about an hour and a half outside Madrid. And then, yeah, we got asked to do another one. So it was such an incredible time. So we spent up, I think, almost two, two and a half months in Spain. Yeah, it was awesome. Tell me about food, family, and fun. What did they mean to you in Valencia?

00:03:05 Ramón Rautenstrauch
Is a great country because I'm German actually, but I've been living nearly all my life here in Spain.

00:03:13 Mark Smith
Is that right? Wow. Why? did you go there?

00:03:17 Ramón Rautenstrauch
My parent was sent to Spain to work at the beginning of the 80s and... He was assigned for one year to Valencia. And after the one year, he was offered to stay three more years to be four years working in Valencia. And after the four years, we had to decide what we do, if we return to Germany or we stay in Spain. And the decision was stay in Spain. And that's why 45 years later, I'm still living in Spain and I enjoy it very much. When I finished my studies, I went to Germany to work for one year to see maybe Germany is better than Spain and I prefer Germany as I was only there on holidays all these years, but After one year that I committed to be working in Germany, I decided that the best place to be is Spain and inside Spain, Valencia. Valencia is just at the Mediterranean coast. We have the lovely Paella as food and we have nearly all the year sunny weather. Maybe there are, I think there are only 30 days in the years where we don't have sun.

00:04:45 Mark Smith
That's amazing. Amazing. And you're right on the Mediterranean, right?

00:04:50 Ramón Rautenstrauch
Yes, we are right on the Mediterranean. And what you mentioned before about the America's Cup was one of the turning points of the city where all the people outside Europe discovered that Valencia existed, where Valencia was placed, and that we are a lovely city. Until then, nobody knew where Valencia was because I have all these years working with people all around the world. And I always had to struggle to explain where I was living, that I was living in Spain, and inside Spain I was living in Valencia. And from this point on, this was a really turning point for the city because then we became famous and now everybody knew more or less where we were situated. Then came the Formula One into the city, and that was the second thing that if anybody around the world didn't know Valencia after the Formula One in our city, now everybody knew where we were situated. So from having to explain and try to situate the people that I speak with where Valencia is uh from that on now everybody knows that Valencia is in Spain lovely City and well sunny right at the beach.

00:06:29 Mark Smith
Yeah amazing amazing I just watched the Formula One movie the other day so it's uh it's it's top of mind you know for me with Brad Pitt in it so incredible having that in the city tell Tell me, what have you been working on for the last 12 months? What are you doing in the M365 Copilot space? I know you're in marketing.How is your AI world and marketing world colliding? What does that look like?

00:06:56 Ramón Rautenstrauch
I have been working in the marketing area since '98.So I've been working in the marketing space now for 28 years. And what has happened in the last two, two and a half years in the space is incredible. And Copilot is one of the key factors that have changed our world. Until I discovered generative AI, I always had thought that all our work depended on our our brain and what we could imagine, our creativity, and that there was no other way to generate ideas and to create campaigns and to have new points of view. And then first OpenAI with ChatGPT and later Copilot came to our lives and From one day to another, we had a whole new world of ideas, of creativity that could support us in our daily work. And that, for me, was an incredible discovery. And that's when I started to really go deep into Copilot, because with all the integration of the The files that you have in the cloud and with all the emails co-piloted context, which also is very important when working on marketing for a partner that. The tool that you use has the context of your company and that you don't have to explain every time what you're working on, what you want to do. And the last 12 months, I've been fully into agents to try to automate all the marketing work using Copilot, not to replace me. because right now I think we can't replace the human in the loop with a tool but to assist me and to avoid having to do repetitive tasks that really don't add any value that well before I spent more or less half of the day doing things that didn't add value and now What I'm trying to do is to reduce this to the minimum.

00:09:56 Mark Smith
What are you doing with agents, specifically in the marketing context?

00:10:02 Ramón Rautenstrauch
What I do is I'm working for a partner as a CMO, and in the partner, I try to automate all the campaigns that we create. Until now, we made briefings, then with the briefings, we thought, what actions we would do in order to reach the goals of the campaign. And now I have different agents that put this together for me, that make a proposal of, okay, this is the objective of the campaign and how to achieve these goals. I have an agent that creates everything that has to do with LinkedIn, with all that we publish there. Another agent that creates the ads for Google, so that Google ads are related to what we are doing in LinkedIn. Then another agent that thinks and coordinates webinars that are related to this topic and that can drive new persons with another agent that looks for people in LinkedIn that have not attended our past webinars so that they can be invited to join them and well, And the ultimate goal is to increase the customer count that we have in the, that the partner has.

00:11:45 Mark Smith
So what lessons have you learned from going down this? 'Cause you're really, you're inventing the future way of doing marketing, right? You're creating kind of new possibilities in how you market. What have you learned and what do you realize that you need to kind of spend more time or what doesn't work as well, I suppose, with the process?

00:12:13 Ramón Rautenstrauch
What I have realized in this time is that until I started using all these agents and Copilot to help me running the marketing, is that before I always thought very thoroughly of what to focus on and what to try and how to make a campaign or which assets to use. And now what I do is, okay, let's try new things. Until now, it was very difficult for me to make things different.because I always had to balance the work I had to invest to do different things with the outcome that I would receive. And now I can try to do things differently because I don't have to do all by hand, because I get it done and I can change. Okay, this doesn't work. Then tomorrow I let's try something. different, which until now was quite difficult because, okay, to try something different, I have to set up everything from scratch and now I can implement changes every day. And this is one of the main lessons that this helps us to do different things that we would never have tried without all these tools.

00:13:55 Mark Smith
So where are you building your agents and how do you go about building your agents?

00:14:02 Ramón Rautenstrauch
We have been I have been building the agents in Copilot Studio, but now I'm changing to Microsoft Foundry because because once you get into the agent building, you want to do more things. And in order to do more things, then there are some constraints when using Copilot Studio. And then I decided to give Foundry a try. And when I saw that Foundry was not much more complicated for me than using Copilot Studio, but gave me much more freedom to orchestrate everything and to do workflows between different agents, that was the way to go. I know that I complicated things for me using Foundry instead of Copilot Studio. But one of the things is that I need to try new things to innovate because one of the things I like about my work is, well, not do the same thing always and not do everything using the same patterns, but try new things because I love experimenting, innovating, seeing if I can do it differently because this gives me life and this enjoys me in my work. And that's also one of the points why I started to implement the agents in Foundry and not only in Copilot Studio. My coworker thinks I'm crazy because I should stick to Copilot Studio, which works and which is easy to use, but I prefer experimenting and trying out new things.

00:16:27 Mark Smith
So I used Copilot Studio's predecessor the first day it came out and was publicly available, and I integrated it with a chat button to my website. And this was in the end of 2019. And because my background is in the Power Platform and it was called Power Virtual Agents back in the day before I got rebranded. My personal opinion is Copilot Studio should never have existed or should never exist. It should be M365 Copilot and Foundry. That's, as in, I think it's an interim step that's just not needed. It's a restrictive step. That's not needed in my, that's my personal opinion. And I've got people that disagree, especially the license has been sold with Copilot Studio, but I like that you've gone to Foundry, right?I think that's smart. What was the steps you took when you were learning Foundry to set up your first agent? Was it something that you did in a couple of hours, couple of weeks? How quickly did you get from logging into a Foundry account to getting something that was communicating with you, you were able to give it instruction, and it started doing things on your behalf.

00:17:49 Ramón Rautenstrauch
With Copilot Studio, it took me half an hour. With Foundry, it took me one week.

00:17:54 Mark Smith
One week. Interesting. Interesting.

00:17:57 Ramón Rautenstrauch
Yes, because, well, I had no idea of how Foundry worked. With Copilot Studio, well, it's easier.

00:18:10 Mark Smith
Drag and drop, yeah.

00:18:11 Ramón Rautenstrauch
So you can try things and you can run it and it works or it doesn't work and it helps you to find why it's not working. And with Foundry, it's a new way of thinking and you, well, not a new way of thinking, but you have to think before you do. With compiler, the studio, you can move around and Okay, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But with Foundry, you have to sit down and think. And that's also one of the the the points that I like of Foundry, because I prefer to sit down, think about how I want to do something, which is the outcome I want to to receive, because then I think the output will always be better than Well, I didn't want to say wipe coding, but wipe coding with Copilot Studio. And I totally agree with you that Copilot Studio should not exist, but the customers love it. They don't get to do anything that is worth it with it. But having the tool makes them, I don't know, makes them feel more confident. And then at the end, they return coming to a partner to get everything developed because they see, okay, they can do things, but I can't achieve what I want.

00:20:01 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah. And so they come to the partner to build out the solution. Ramon, it's been very interesting talking to you. I love that you've brought up Foundry in part of your mix. I think it's super important. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights and your stories of Valencia.

00:20:23 Ramón Rautenstrauch
Thank you very much for having me. And I hope you come to Valencia one day to visit me and to visit our lovely city.

00:20:36 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time.