Billboard Insider’s Dave Westburg was a guest on the Bell Board Podcast last week.  Here’s part of the conversation where Bell Board podcast host Neil Bell and Dave discuss how they are using AI in the out of home business:

Are you using AI to run your business?

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how it could help. Right now…the main impact is on news discovery. I used to rely on a Google news feed — I’d tell Google to send me any story on out of home advertising, Lamar, Outfront, whatever — to track the news. Now every morning I ask Claude: “What were the big out of home stories I should know about?” And it turns up things I otherwise wouldn’t have been aware of, so I can chase those down for Billboard Insider readers.

Second, I’m using it extensively to improve documents. Almost every lease or material agreement my company Circle City Outdoor does, we throw into Claude and ask: “What are the weaknesses of this lease from our perspective as an out of home company owner?” It’s really good. And when you’re in a specific situation, it’s helpful for suggesting language — like, “Give me language that allows me to remove a billboard by cutting it off at grade,” and it gives you that. Or, “Give me language that makes sure this lease works in California and Oregon,” and it produces that. We still need a lawyer to look it over to make sure Claude isn’t hallucinating, but it’s been a great way to work through documents.

I wonder if eventually we could say: “Here are my best billboards — they have these characteristics: traffic flow, location relative to a city center, and so on. Where might there be similar locations in my markets?” That gets into an interesting thing, though: if you do that, you better be operating within a walled garden where the LLM cannot educate itself on your work, because the AI engine is using everything you put into it to improve itself. That means potentially anybody else using that AI could have access to your data. You don’t want to be putting proprietary company data into an AI chat unless you’re running an AI model that’s proprietary to you.

I’ve been using it for legal stuff.  A demand letter or editing a lease… stuff that would be probably a $500 $600 but I think the attorneys are still needed… AI is a tool. It’s a drafting tool, but there’s nothing like an attorney to say, “You don’t want to have this clause in here because I’ve litigated it five times and lost every single time.”

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