00:00:00 Stephen Wilson Downey:

We see it in digital transformation all the time. People make the mistake of starting with the software. You need to start with the person behind the activity or the process. Map that process and then make your decisions from there. I think people need to remember that AI is a tool. It’s not a silver bullet. It can certainly be an assistant or a co-pilot to watch you creating, but solely relying on AI to create, I think, is a mistake. And I think that’s very evident with Grok as well, where it’s being retrained to see the world in a certain way or a certain light in comparison to the way Gemini and ChatGPT would operate in relation to answering questions. I do think there’s a huge responsibility there and I think in relation to business owners, certainly I think the awareness has been heightened in relation to the capabilities and how it needs to be used. Google has an idea of who you are, what you’re looking for, and it’s moving towards, I think, tailoring the results exactly to what you need. They’ve been trialling in the US in May last year, for example, the product feeds, shopping feeds. For example, if you’re searching for shoes, the search engine will already know your shoe size and it will only show shoes that would fit you. So that’s where it’s going.

00:01:38 Geraldine Hennessy:

So today we welcome CEO of digital agency, Spéire, Stephen Wilson-Downey. So, Stephen, I suppose take us back to the beginning. What was the specific moment or gap in the market that convinced you to launch Spéire here in Cork?

00:01:53 Stephen Wilson Downey:

That’s a great question. So Spéire was my second venture. And initially, I came from a background of food and hospitality. So my first venture was Ready Made Meal. And I was in the early stages of prototyping it. I was a student at the time in MTU and I engaged in the Prize for Innovation and did a pitch and got a little bit of funding. And then I got onto the Student Inc. programme. So while I was studying, it was a great bridge from my professional career as a chef into business. And I suppose that student incubation programme over a period of three months, you know, you’re doing your macro research, your branding, figuring out your segments. But the thing that caught me was it wasn’t how to start off and where to sell. It was what do you do when you need to scale? So when there’s a big demand for you to produce.

00:03:02 Stephen Wilson Downey:

So I was researching the next step, which is essentially outsourcing. And I very quickly realised that I wasn’t able to get it produced in Ireland. I would have had to move further afield. And that would have meant I would have to hire my own space within a facility, set up a production line. And to cut a long story short, after all my calculations, I needed about 1.2 million to get it off the ground. So naturally, it was an idea that I decided to put to bed. But I still had that ambition inside me. So going back, it was always technology and particularly websites and food. But that’s what I had an interest in when I was in transition year. And I found that I kind of gravitated back towards websites when I was doing my Master of Science in marketing practice. And that’s when I met my co-founder, my colleague, Dave, and we put five euro into the Bank of Ireland on campus and we just got started.

00:04:16 Stephen Wilson Downey:

So we both had an ambition. But to answer your question on did we see a gap? Not entirely. We, I suppose we were studying the edge of where marketing is going in combination with what services were in most demand. And our very first job, which we got paid by cheque, was a roll-up banner for a festival in the city centre. So, yeah, I suppose it further spanned from there where we found that we delivered a lot of value to SMEs and we very much valued relationship marketing as our strategy. So we’d invest our time into customers, suppliers and even other operators in our industry as well. Very much adopting and maintaining the mantra of “it’s nice to be nice”. And, yeah, like I’d say around 85 percent of our enquiries are word of mouth. The rest are digital.

00:05:22 Geraldine Hennessy:

1. And it sounds like you’ve kind of always had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit, would I be right to say that?

00:05:29 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, it’s almost hard to stop yourself from spinning out businesses and coming up with new ideas every now and then when you come across a new problem. Like, for example, we had a spin-out project in the area of artificial intelligence back in around 2019, where we spotted an inefficiency in website maintenance. And there was a lot of labour involved in updating, for example, WordPress websites when there’s plugins or elements that don’t talk to one another and the website can’t function unless they do so you’re trying to find the best mix of updates without breaking a website. And sometimes that job can be straightforward for a website and others not so much. So that was the project there where we decided to build an AI model to automate that activity. But again, we came across that challenge, trying to make the commercials work, where we could make the cloud costs affordable for the customer which would pay on a per website basis. And at the same time, Spéire was really, really growing rapidly during the pandemic as well. So yeah, we decided to knuckle down and focus on what’s already growing. And ever since I’ve been reigning myself in in terms of any innovations that will be too much for distraction.

00:06:54 Geraldine Hennessy:

What advantages are there being based in a central location like Horgan’s Quay?

00:07:00 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, I suppose you said it there. Central, like we moved into Spaces, which is a brand operated by Regus. And we found that the advantage of being in there is we’re able to use any of their addresses around the world. They’ve around 900 addresses. So for example, if we fly to Manchester or London, when we’re over and back, we’ve got a place to work and a place to go on a place to meet clients. And it’s great to have that level of access. And we were originally based in a really, really nice unit in Ballincollig but we found that both staff and customers didn’t really like coming out there, even though we have plenty of parking, and people seem to love coming into the city centre. So yeah, we made the difficult decision to move into the city centre, even though you know, it was only 10 minutes down the road from where myself and Dave live. But you have to go where your customers and staff feel their happiest.

00:08:07 Geraldine Hennessy:

Fair enough. And talk about your business now. So you offer various different services to businesses. How has the agency’s, I suppose, focus shifted since you first started? And what drove that evolution? Is it like basically, like you said there, when you change into the city? Is it the customer expectation or what they needed? Is that what drove that evolution?

00:08:31 Stephen Wilson Downey:

In short, yes. I suppose it’s really important for us to keep the finger on the pulse in relation to what challenges are experienced by customers the most and making sure that our services align with them and make sure that we’re in the space that we solve the problem. So yeah, I mean, we were building a lot of websites during COVID. And when people realised that they needed to get online and rapidly from there, then they were figuring out how to monetise their websites, drive more traffic through them and generate a return on marketing investment. And again, our services were operational with that space. I suppose the world we’re in right now, the disruptor that is artificial intelligence, like there’s a few facets to that where people need to figure out how they remain discoverable by large language models. But also, we have done quite a few projects in the space of digital transformation and business process automation. And we’re seeing particularly with SMEs, the problem that websites don’t talk to other systems that aren’t an integral part of their operation. So building that little middleman in between, that’s what we’ve been doing a lot of over the past year. So it is very interesting to see the skill sets and the services that you offer within your business where the demand tends to fluctuate over the passage of time.

00:10:18 Geraldine Hennessy:

Okay, and common advice, I suppose, tells agencies to niche down to succeed. But Spéire has kind of effectively bucked this trend when it comes to your own campaigns and messaging, to avoid focusing on specific services in favour of a broader approach. And how does that strategy work for you?

00:10:36 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, I suppose, seeing as we grew organically in nature and continue to do so, like in terms of our strategy, it is very difficult for us to niche down on a specific industry or segment where our strategy tends to take us is where the demand is. So we would assess the trends in terms of our incoming enquiries, what type of problems they’re experiencing, and match our campaigns accordingly. You might notice that we seldomly post on social media, and reason being, while it is important in terms of a channel for many businesses, we’re in the space of providing solutions to problems. So we’d be very active more so in search engines in terms of our own strategy targeting really, really niche key terms and key questions being asked and making sure that we’re discoverable in the answer. So social becomes secondary to that. But also, what’s king is our existing customers making sure that they’re very well looked after. Word of mouth is huge. And yeah, networking is still a huge part of what we do as well. Business, the very essence of business is working with people and working with one another and collaborating. And I personally believe that if word of mouth is your top channel, you’re doing something right. If it’s the other way around, there might be an issue.

00:12:14 Geraldine Hennessy:

So even though I suppose you’re a digital agency, your strategy is really based on relationship building?

00:12:21 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Correct. And even if you look at the very bedrock of social media, it is all about a lot of brands to be active on social media and similar channels to establish and maintain a relationship with their followers. For example, if they’re a clothing brand or something like that. Yes, that will be quite an integral part of their strategy of their operating in a business to consumer sense. Business to business might vary slightly, which I personally believe is always predominantly based on relationships and trust building as well. You know, when somebody is introduced to you by another customer, the trust tends to already be there.

00:13:14 Geraldine Hennessy:

Okay. And you clearly have a deep passion for digital transformation. Was there a specific moment or experience early in your career that hooked you on the world of online advertising and tech?

00:13:27 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, I suppose there are two facets to that interest. Number one, advertising has always interested me in terms of messaging, but positioning. And I suppose it’s derived from what I learned in setting up a food product, you know, where you need to be, how people view your product on a shelf and things like that. And I was always very interested in positioning. So where the message and the brand needs to be placed in relation to the consumer. And I suppose my interest is more or less within search and large language models and how those algorithms work and figuring out how you as a business and a person can make sure that that message gets filtered through to the right person on the back of how those algorithms are structured.

00:14:25 Stephen Wilson Downey:

So the other facet then with digital transformation is no two businesses are the same and problem solving is always really, really interesting. You don’t know what you’re going to get and always finding a really, really clever value adding efficient solution to solve a problem that makes both your customer happy and your own team happy as well. It’s always brilliant results. You never know what you’re going to get because no two businesses are the same.

00:15:01 Geraldine Hennessy:

And looking back at the last few years, what’s been the biggest surprise for you in how the digital landscape has evolved?

00:15:11 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Definitely last year, Q1 in 2024, we saw a big change with how Google was ranking websites and how advertisements within search on Google had changed. That was huge. Like the behaviours has started to change where people are asking more questions within Google, you know, your searches are a lot longer, but the click-through rates have reduced as well. I’m sure yourself and many listeners would have Googled something saw the overview and left the browsing session. That’s all you needed. So it’s almost started to kind of shift the strategy and into make sure that you’re getting mentioned as a brand along with trying to get traffic into websites and conversion into a lead or sale.

00:16:07 Stephen Wilson Downey:

I suppose that was what prompted me to kind of understand where the trend was going and learning a lot about how large language models would basically crawl through different sources of information and rank their answers, but figuring out, you know, how are you going to be the answer to that question? That was I think that the biggest surprise I had as part of that was the importance of PR. You know, I think previously to that PR as a discipline and a service would have had to compete fiercely with these digital channels as a service. And I think that service has become much more important again because large language models look to the likes of digital news publishers as a really, really credible source of information. So that was a nice surprising trend, but also SEO has become much more important. Again, you know, previously would have been if you have a really well-aligned machine in terms of a Google ad campaign and your search engine optimisation comes secondary to that, that would have been enough in a lot of cases, not every case. But again, it’s flipped everything on its head and it’s still made change. You know, there’s no silver bullet yet and nobody has all the answers to how this is developing. But yeah, it’s certainly been the biggest surprise within past few years.

00:17:46 Geraldine Hennessy:

Okay. And like we’ve all, we’re all used to, I suppose, hearing the term SEO, but GEO then or Generative Engine Optimisation for our listeners hearing this for the first time. How would you simply explain the difference between the two?

00:18:00 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, it’s a new term, but also, you know, there’s another term being used as well, AEO or Answer Engine Optimisation. And the goals of both practices are the exact same. It’s literally getting mentioned by large language models such as Chat GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, all of these different models that somebody would be using. And, you know, SEO is a good foundation and a great bedrock to it, but it is hooking into what you’re doing on social as well that all needs to start aligning along with other areas where you need to be positioning your brand as the answer to a question that’s being asked.

00:18:49 Geraldine Hennessy:

Okay. And so does the concept of SEO keywords still exist in the era of Gen AI?

00:18:59 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yes. Like I think keywords are still an integral part of any good SEO and GEO strategy, but I think context and more conversational type content definitely is taking more precedence. But also it’s, you know, you’re having to do another type of research as well, which is question research. So alongside your keywords, you’re determining what questions are being asked and the context around them as well and making sure that you’re relevant and being positioned as that best possible answer that that large language model could give.

00:19:41 Geraldine Hennessy:

What was the hardest part of transitioning your own mindset from traditional SEO to this new world of GEO?

00:19:53 Stephen Wilson Downey:

It completely derailed my own new website strategy. So even though we were ready to go with a new sitemap, maybe mid Q1, and then this trend and change started to come into effect. And you kind of have to go back to the drawing board and start again, which is effectively what I have done, like a GEO or AEO strategy, like it’s, you’re looking at about an 18 month timeline. So the website and your SEO strategy is the absolute bedrock of that, making sure that you get that right and take your time in doing so. You’re better off starting with the best footing you possibly can and working from there and making sure that you have a website with a content management system that can keep up with those trends. So I do maintain that WordPress is still the best system to go with. But you know, the likes of Webflow and WooCommerce, Shopify, you know, there’s still quite the discoverable alongside Squarespace and Wix, but you certainly have much more control with a WordPress website in terms of schema. I’m not sure of many of your listeners have heard the term schema, but in essence, to simplify the explanation, it’s kind of like applying a label to a web page to tell the crawler what it is. So for example, if your page is a recipe, you’re telling the crawler that it is a recipe to make it easier to measure the relevance and to help it index it properly.

00:21:33 Geraldine Hennessy:

So you mentioned there about kind of some of the fundamentals, but like what are the fundamental things that a business needs to do to get mentioned in answers by a giant of engines like Chat GPT?

00:21:44 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, so it’s a term that I’ve come across called semantic seeding. So essentially, there’s different facets of that. So your website is the best one to begin with. So you do your answer or question research, should I say. “Answer the Public” is a great tool. That’s been bought by Neil Patel. And his tool, UberSuggest, but essentially, Answer the Public has been around a long time. It’s a listening post in relation to what questions are being imported into Google as a browser, that trend is continuing to grow, thanks to Google AI overview. So that’s a great place to start. And then if you open up the large language models, one by one, and but make sure that it’s either in an incognito session, or making sure that personalisation settings are turned off and simply putting in a prompt and asking it, you know, what are the typical questions you are asked if X is looking for X, and then you start to see what answers are coming up in terms of how people are framing their questions. And that gives you clues then on the sources. So you know, you can click into the sources of where this content is being positioned. So that’s the first clue, and alongside with what you need to be at the writing on your website.

00:23:18 Stephen Wilson Downey:

So the way I’d approach it is, alongside your keyword research, assign a keyword and a question to your page. So it needs to rank for the keyword and needs to answer a question. That’s number one. And number two, then is you align your social strategy alongside that your social media. So any post on your channels video is getting at the moment in relation to reach and engagement. If you are uploading captions and transcripts along with your videos that enables you to be more discoverable, that’s what the LLMs are picking up is the transcripts going along with the videos, and particularly on YouTube as well, Perplexity citations, a large volume of Perplexity citations come from YouTube videos.

00:24:09 Stephen Wilson Downey:

There is your sitemap submission as well, making sure that you’re submitting your sitemap into every search engine you possibly could. And this includes the likes of Wayback Machine as well. Then you’re looking at your credibility channels. So Trustpilot is huge. Trustpilot gets hooked in by Chat GPT quite a lot and your maps as well. But also, you know, there’s some good low hanging fruits there apart from Google My Business, which be Apple Business Connect. So making sure that you’re discoverable within the Apple ecosystem.

00:24:44 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Finally, the PR element of it as well, seeing how you can position yourself to be mentioned in PR articles that would be pulled in via the large language models, and also your directories as well. Whatever directory website that you can get yourself into that is credible. That’s all information that’s getting picked up. So typically, you know, defining, you know, your product or service if it’s answering a question or solving a problem, that’s the best place to start and fan your content across then. The thing that’s really important is consistency. Make sure that the message is consistent. And it’s based on experience and authority. So make sure that what you’re doing is original. And that there’s a bit of evidence behind it, particularly if it’s your own primary research as well. So if there’s any studies that you’ve conducted or white papers, they’re all huge signals of trust for large language models.

00:25:52 Geraldine Hennessy:

Okay, lots of tools there and tips. Thanks for that, Stephen. Huge. And can you give an example, I suppose, of in a time you successfully planted a concept for a client so that an AI picked it up?

00:26:05 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, so I can name the type of business, but I can’t name the brand, but it is a Cork-based construction business that does a lot of renovations. And it was quite simple. They were already quite active on their social media channels. And it basically all it required was aligning the messaging from the website right across to all the channels that they’re active on and making sure that they’re on particular directories as well. That will be hooked in. And yeah, they’d be always in the five answers that you’d get when you’re answering certain questions, especially on Chat GPT.

00:26:54 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Google AI overviews is still, we haven’t cracked how Google AI overviews work 100% yet. I haven’t seen anybody else crack it yet, but it is quite volatile and inconsistent. And the only thing I can really attribute that to is possibly the personalisation of the search experience. So Google has an idea of who you are, what you’re looking for, and it’s moving towards, I think, tailoring the results exactly to what you need. Certainly, I know which they’ve been trialling in the US in May last year was, for example, the product feeds, shopping feeds. So for example, if you’re searching for shoes, search engine already know your shoe size and it will only show shoes that would fit you. That’s where it’s going.

00:27:58 Geraldine Hennessy:

That sounds good to me. There’s nothing worse than picking on that shoe and realizing it’s not in your size. I’m telling you. Yeah, yeah, 100%. But everyone can argue, limits the element of discoverability, going outside your usual tastes, are we parting with that potentially as well? So that remains to be seen. Positive and negative to everything, I suppose.

00:28:24 Stephen Wilson Downey:

100%. Yeah. Yeah.

00:28:26 Geraldine Hennessy:

AI moves fast and often breaks things. What has been the biggest challenge for you personally in keeping up with these changes while running a business?

00:28:37 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Great question. I think it’s very tempting to rush into adopting something. And there’s a lot of hype and trend. I suppose trend movement, for lack of a better term, that will come into my head. But I think, you know, I do certainly believe we’re in a bubble at the moment. And it’s making sure that we’re making the right decisions, choosing the right models that would add value for us and the customer. The thing you don’t want to compromise is the quality of your output.

00:29:15 Stephen Wilson Downey:

And we see it in digital transformation all the time. Don’t make the mistake of starting with the software. You need to start with the person behind the activity or the process. Map that process and then make your decisions from there. I think people need to remember that AI is a tool. It’s not a silver bullet. It can certainly be an assistant or a co-pilot to watch you creating, but solely relying on AI to create, I think, is a mistake. I think the general public and your audience can tell the difference between AI generated content versus something that has been made and shared by a person. And I think there’s particularly in marketing, I think a lot of marketers are learning that at the moment.

00:30:11 Stephen Wilson Downey:

And I think there will be other businesses and people that will learn that over the next couple of years, I think. But certainly, I think the change that it has made, it has allowed us to do more volume. I think that’s an important thing to recognise that if it’s simplifying work, you’re probably going to have to do a higher volume of what you do already to maintain the same level of revenue or sales.

00:30:41 Geraldine Hennessy:

So you mentioned there kind of about a common business mistake. When you see businesses trying to adapt to this new era of AI, do you think that’s the most common mistake that you see them making or what, in your opinion, is the most prevalent mistake?

00:30:56 Stephen Wilson Downey:

I think the most prevalent mistake is they rush into it and start using it straight off the bat. And then it’s not necessarily aligning with how a person or a process is operating within a business. So it’s never a mistake to look at automating or making something more efficient. But it is really important to begin with the person that’s doing the job first and determining what is the highest quality output from that activity and making sure that it’s not compromised. You know, is automating something for the sake of doing so going to make the task 10 times harder because you’re correcting? You know, that’s just one symptom of rushing into using a piece of technology straight away.

00:31:49 Geraldine Hennessy:

1. And there’s also that kind of fear that widespread use of Gen AI dehumanises us all and devalues, I suppose, human interaction. How do you balance using these high tech tools while maintaining close client relationships?

00:32:09 Stephen Wilson Downey:

That’s a good question. Like, I suppose I wouldn’t let AI become the barrier of customer interaction. You know, for example, yeah, if you have an AI agent on your website that’s triaging certain things where somebody might be looking for a solution to a really common problem that they don’t really need to talk to someone about. Yeah, that’s something that’s useful. But if you’re actively looking at utilising AI to, I suppose, create a bit of a distance between customer and service delivery, I think that’s a mistake.

00:32:51 Stephen Wilson Downey:

I also think that from a content perspective and even the use of AI for malicious purposes, you know, you see a lot of the bot activity, things like that. I think that, yeah, waters will get muddied. Messaging will get skewed a bit. And I think we’re experiencing it right now, right before, you know, AI was coming to a fore as a trend that information and accuracy and facts have become a bit distorted. And I think, you know, use of large language models and inaccuracies, I think the volume of those will only increase. So I think having a human in the loop is essential for any automated process to be that last line of defence. You know, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of an inaccuracy that’s going to really backfire.

00:33:52 Geraldine Hennessy:

And talking about, say, false information like Gen AI is essentially a very good guesser. And of course, it gets things wrong. What challenges do you face when helping clients correct false information that AI models have generated about their business?

00:34:07 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yeah, luckily, we haven’t come across that problem before. But I think it’s inevitable that it will happen. And so I suppose the way I deal with it and advise our clients if that situation arises is, you know, identify the source, you know, where are they seeing that information, where are their customers seeing that information and where’s it coming from? And then look at your own channels versus what is not owned by you. So, for example, looking at your own website, FAQs to directly address things. Also, you’re even having schema markup on pages as well to add context as to what a certain page is about would help correct to an extent where that page is being discoverable. Your own channels contact the publisher. Every publisher, I think, in good faith wants to make sure that their information is accurate. So I’d be very surprised if a publisher says no, if there’s something incorrect being cited.

00:35:14 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Third party, your Google My Business socials, all that kind of stuff, seeing how you can address the inaccuracy from that angle. So if you’re taking stock of where your sources are, where that information is being surfaced and how you tend to address it. And the thing I would say is positive reinforcement copy, so not defensive kind of copy. So you’re confidently, you know, I suppose fixing the narrative where you’re integrating FAQs into your website, you know, what my company does versus what it doesn’t do a blog post to that effect as well. Or even framing contents like common questions about our service X, Y and Z. So if you’re thinking more to do with producing explainers in line with aiming to get in contact with the channels that you don’t own and to try and correct that information and be patient. You know, it is a bit of a timeline behind it and resubmit your sitemaps as well quite frequently once you’re making these changes. In a nutshell, that’s how I’d go about it. But certainly starting with where it’s coming from and then seeing how you can tailor your own content and changing the conversation, essentially.

00:36:41 Geraldine Hennessy:

OK, give them, I suppose, the specific correct information that makes it hard for them to see the incorrect information.

00:36:48 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Yes. And, you know, the more sources that you could that you have at your disposal that are highly credible, for example, if you are encouraging your customers to post into Trustpilot to support the more accurate information about your business, Trustpilot is getting hooked into Chat GPT quite regularly to ensure that it has that credible seal of approval when it’s providing an answer.

00:37:19 Geraldine Hennessy:

1. And do you think that the tech industry is guilty of overcomplicating AI for the average business owner? And how do we fix that?

00:37:31 Stephen Wilson Downey:

I think in some instances, businesses like mine could overcomplicate in terms of use of jargon and… Probably not helping the situation with making it easier for customers to understand. I think what I see in general is the opposite where they are oversimplifying and pitching as this silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. Like there’s a lot of things out there where it doesn’t need an AI model to solve a problem. It could be a simple API or a web hook, you know, just because it automates something, it doesn’t have to be AI. And I think people can fall into that trap as well. You see it on nearly everything you’re using. AI this, AI that nobody really knows what or doctors… there’s need to have it there in the first place. So I think that’s kind of where we’re at at the moment. You know, I do believe we’re in bubble territory where the use and the value and the hype are all getting the same airtime.

00:38:40 Stephen Wilson Downey:

And I do believe a correction is due on that front. Certainly. I mean, if you compare Google with OpenAI, Google has been around a long time to have their own data centres. OpenAI while they’ve gotten the jump on chat, you know, being first to mark in that sense, they have to build their own data centres. And there’s still loss making. You know, there’s a lot of users that are using it for free. So when they start charging and charging what they’re meant to be charging, are they going to be able to hold onto that market share that remains to be seen?

00:39:12 Geraldine Hennessy:

OK, and are most owners still overwhelmed by the jargon or are they starting to genuinely understand how tools like Chat GPT fit into their daily operations?

00:39:23 Stephen Wilson Downey:

It’s a good question. I think business owners are starting to realise the actual value of its use. So, you know, they’re starting to understand the concept of garbage in garbage out, you know, having to make sure that the information that you’re feeding, whatever model you’re using is really clean and accurate. But also using it for everything, they’re starting to realise that the quality is far less compared to something that they would have done themselves. And they probably would have ended up spending the same amount of time, if not more, having AI in the picture of them out. So, yeah, it does remain to be seen, I think, certainly in terms of learning experience, I think they’re very much made that journey. I think last year and the year before was a lot about the discovery. How is it going to provide value to my business? I think that there is 2026, I think, will be all understanding.

00:40:16 Geraldine Hennessy:

OK, and we often see the more controversial side of the AI in the headlines, for example, like the recent scandal involving Grok or fears around bias and safety. When you’re advising a business, do these controversies make them hesitant to engage?

00:40:41 Stephen Wilson Downey:

No, I don’t think it contributes to a hesitance of use. Definitely a vigilance. I think there’s probably no harm anyway.

00:40:51 Geraldine Hennessy:

Agreed. Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.

00:40:53 Stephen Wilson Downey:

I mean, I think it’s all be it that the Grok scandal was horrendous and awful, but it certainly ripped off the bandaid in relation to the capabilities of AI for abuse rather than use. And I think it’s opened up a lot of people’s eyes in relation to, yeah, the ethics behind it being the operator of the large language model and particularly people building technology in that space as well. They have to be very, very careful and examine all aspects of use, privacy by design, the whole lot. Like AI, as much as everybody makes an effort to make sure that it isn’t biased, it always will be if it’s being told what the truth is. And I think that’s very evident with Grok as well, where it’s being retrained to see the world in a certain way or a certain relation in comparison to the way Gemini and Chat GPT would operate in relation to answering questions. So I do think there is a huge responsibility there. And I think in relation to business owners, certainly, I think the awareness has been heightened in relation to the capabilities and how it needs to be used.

00:42:18 Geraldine Hennessy:

OK, and what is one major opportunity you think local businesses are currently overlooking?

00:42:27 Stephen Wilson Downey:

There are low hanging fruits there in relation to your own rankings. I think Reddit, like Reddit is a really good channel because it’s self-moderated, but Google is hooking it into its search engine results and so is OpenAI. So if you’re respecting the community that’s on the platform and you’re using it to bolster up your own website presence, it can become a really, really good asset to developing your own awareness in relation to people being aware of your brand.

00:43:09 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Trustpilot is huge as well. I think if you haven’t already done so, encourage your customers to leave reviews. I mean, we’re going to be reaching out to our customers as well as part of our website launch to encourage them to leave those signals as well of their experience of our service. I think every agency is different. So some customers fit one agency, other customers fit another. And that’s totally fine. So I think the low hanging fruit there is Reddit and Trustpilot for sure. And add captions and transcripts to your video content as well.

00:43:51 Geraldine Hennessy:

OK, and aside from reading up on GEO, what is the best habit a business owner can adapt to stay resilient in such a fast changing digital world?

00:44:03 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Certainly, unfortunately, people might not like getting in front of the camera. I think that’s becoming more and more important. And yeah, leveraging your website with fullest potential as well. I mean, your website is your 24/7 shop front. So thinking about how the search engines and large language models view your site and just chipping away page by page. And you should see that evergreen strategy come into effect over time. But yeah, it’s certainly if I can boil it down, your website plus video, there’s a lot that could be done there.

00:44:50 Geraldine Hennessy:

Very good. Well, thanks so much, Stephen, for your insights and for chatting to me today on the Cork Creative Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about Stephen and Spéire, you can find links to socials website on corkcreative.ie.

00:45:02 Stephen Wilson Downey:

Thanks very much.