Cubic Promote’s AI test: invoice follow-ups, blogs and ChatGPT
Charles Liu, founder and marketing director of Cubic Promote, describes how the Australian-owned promotional products company supplies branded merchandise, corporate gifts and custom uniforms to businesses and organisations across Australia. This conversation explores AI’s mixed role, from invoice follow-ups and ChatGPT referrals to blog content that needed human editing.
AI has taken on identifying and following up outstanding invoices, while ChatGPT is already appearing as a source of customer referrals. Bulk-generated blogs, however, created extra work when they needed to be revised to meet quality standards.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Funny enough, it all started with a pen sitting on my desk. I noticed another company’s logo on it and thought, hang on, there might be a business in this! Fast forward 20-odd years, and Cubic Promote is now approaching eight figures in revenue. It’s come a long way from that one pen, and I’m pretty grateful for how things have turned out.
What sets us apart? I’d say it’s how quickly we get back to customers. We respond to every enquiry within one hour during business hours. It’s something we’ve worked hard to achieve, and as far as I know, no one else has ever been able to claim the same.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Our business now comes from every channel: from LinkedIn to social media, Facebook to digital advertising, to SEO, to word of mouth, to cold calling, to business development efforts, as well as attending trade shows. If I had a wish I would wish that they would only come from one channel so that we don’t have to do so much work.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We used AI to churn out thousands of blogs, but a fair bit of it ended up being AI slop. Now we’re spending time going back and making the content sound human and meet Google’s quality standards this year. It’s a bit ironic, really. We brought in AI to save time, but it’s also added to our workload.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, we’ve had a fair few customers find us through ChatGPT! We can tell from our enquiry forms because the product links have “gpt” at the end. We’ve even had people ring up and say ChatGPT recommended us. It’s interesting to see more people using AI to find suppliers rather than just Googling them.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
One thing we handed over to AI would be the task of following up on outstanding invoice payments, both in identifying what’s outstanding and in reaching out to the client. If I’m advising someone in our industry for the next 12 months, I would recommend that they bring everything in-house. A lot of the legacy systems from last year are simply not relevant this year. Clear examples would be search engine optimisation. Another would be CRM systems.
Thank you to Charles Liu and the team at Cubic Promote for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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