Finding the Stoic Marketer’s Sweet Spot Between Humans and AI

AI is the Zeitgeist of our times. It is also the wheel, the abacus, the printing press, it is electricity, and it is the Internet. It is every technological invention throughout history that seemed new and terrifying until it became a useful extension of day-to-day life.

Anyone working in marketing right now could be forgiven for feeling somewhat AI anxious. Daily bombardments of “doomer” headlines in the media about how AI is going to take over humanity hardly ease the existential angst. Nor does the constant fear mongering about AI wiping out the workforce.

The truth is that everyone wants to find their piece of the AI pie and that every extreme narrative should be met with a healthy dose of critical thinking. The open letter signed by Big Tech CEOs earlier this year calling for a six-month pause on AI development to prevent the risk of human extinction (ZDNet) could be seen as a cynical ploy to use regulatory intervention as a means of blocking open-source competition (The Economist).

There is also truth in the fact that AI will impact marketing professionals. In a newly published report by Forrester an estimated 32,000 people working in US advertising agencies and related services companies will lose their jobs to automation by 2030 (Forrester, Agency AI-Powered Workforce Forecast, 2030 (US)).

This is not to say that absolutely every marketing job will be automated, nor that this will happen overnight, but rather that the more specialized skills that can be automated will be, while creative problem-solving roles that need to continually keep adapting to change will still require people. In essence the more generalist a marketing person can make themselves now, and the more they can familiarize themselves with AI technology, the better they will be able to fit in as their roles, and the technology, continue to evolve.

The best way for marketing professionals to face AI fears is to shift into stoicism, and armor up with facts and knowledge. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Malay A. Upadhyay and Pooja Chitnis Upadhyay, the authors of Modern Marketing Using AI and creators of The AI Job Calculator to find out more about how AI will impact marketing, what marketers can do to understand how their roles will be affected, and what steps to take today to prepare and adapt.

Automation is often seen as a threat to job security. What would you say to marketers who are worried about being replaced by AI technologies, and is there anything they should do now to become better prepared?

Malay:

Our society has been scared of every new tool throughout human history - from fire to bicycles to computers. It is natural to feel concerned about something we don't fully understand, but it doesn't have to be that way with AI. In a workplace, AI is most likely to become a way to execute tasks more efficiently, similar to how computers became a tool that we now use to do almost everything. Can we imagine a Marketer who doesn't know how to use a laptop? Any threat to our society from this technology is more likely due to bad actors misusing it. Whether it is to prepare for an evolving workplace or to ensure its responsible usage, what we need is to get better acquainted with AI. That doesn't mean we have to learn to code. After all, the end users, decision makers and investors in this technology are the non-technical business leaders and managers. The trick is to find relevant resources. This is why we authored the book AI for Managers, and created its equivalent certificate course to help professionals understand AI conceptually and in a practically useful way, in a short time.

How can the "The AI Job Calculator" help marketers assess how much of their roles can be automated by AI, and what’s the methodology behind this?

Malay:

The AI Job Risk Calculator is an objective assessment of AI's capabilities to do the tasks involved in any job. No two marketing managers in two different companies have exactly the same set of day-to-day responsibilities and tasks. And it is not entire roles but the tasks involved therein that AI automates. So the threat to any job from AI depends on the number of its tasks that the technology can accomplish without supervision. Instead of standardizing AI's abilities generically by any role, the calculator allows a marketer to assess how much AI can automate the unique requirements of his or her role.

The calculator's uniqueness is in its approach to risk assessment. It looks at four factors that best consolidate and summarize what makes any AI tool similar to humans in its ability. These are intuitiveness, criticality, standardization & predictability. Tasks that involve a greater use of intuition and business-critical decision making and are less standardized or dealing with unpredictable situations are more likely to require human intervention. Over time, as AI's ability to handle these improves, the calculator can be adjusted to reflect that reality.

Over the past decade we've seen a continual shift in advertising towards finding a more human face. Millennial-targeted marketing incorporated highly-polished Instagram influencers, and now Generation Z-targeted marketing has taken it a step further favoring more authentic and relatable user-generated content creators on TikTok. On the one hand younger generations are the first to experiment and gain competencies with AI, but on the other hand they are seeking out more humanity and authenticity, particularly from brands. Are these technological developments and consumer habits at odds with one another, or do you see them converging to reshape the future of marketing?

Pooja:

Marketing will see a convergence before newer variations appear. Consumers don't like to feel they can't trust a brand. So humanity and authenticity will remain of paramount importance, but their definitions will evolve for a generation growing up in this new normal.

We do not consider laptops as any less human and authentic than a paper and pen; we instead see them as a product of humanity that can be used to produce authentic and inauthentic content. Similarly, AI generated content will become commonplace because with AI's ability to produce creative content at speed, organizations and influencers will have no choice but to leverage it to keep their competitive strength. Generative AI is already creating faces, people, voices, images and videos that look very real. So as an example, an advertisement of Salvador Dalí promoting a smartwatch designed in his iconic style will be seen as creative and acceptable, and understood to not be coming from the late Dali himself.

We are currently at an inflection point where the rules are being gradually drawn and redrawn as consumers make better sense of the AI world. The better informed marketers are on how AI works, the better they will be able to outpace consumers and competitors in how they can leverage it.

Check out these useful resources for professionally leveraging AI:

Try the AI Job Calculator to see how much of your job AI can handle

Get better prepared for AI by taking advantage of one of 100 limited-time free access seats on the ‘Artificial Intelligence: Practical Essentials for Management’ course

Get the ‘AI for Managers’ book for a handy reference

About Malay and Pooja