1. The Rise, Risks and Opportunities of AI
The launch of ChatGPT in the autumn of 2022 was widely seen as the dawn of the ‘age of AI’. A UBS study revealed it was the fastest-growing consumer application in history after it racked up 100 million active users by January, just two months after its launch. That same month, it boasted more than 13 million users per day.
Inevitably, a chorus of voices in business, academia and politics predicted a sea-change in how we live and work. AI would transform education. It would pump out best-sellers at a rate of knots. It would cause misinformation to skyrocket. Millions would lose their jobs. As 2024 gathers steam, we find ourselves at something of a hinge moment with many predictions failing to come true. The conversation around AI goes on, as do predictions about its future.
‘I’m not one of those people who thinks AI is going to kill us,’ says Scott Horn, Chief Marketing Officer at ACI Learning, which trains leaders in Audit, Cybersecurity, and Information Technology. ‘But I think it will be an incredible productivity-enhancer. It needs human oversight, but I fed it a number of sales and marketing scenarios and it can be incredibly useful.’
Aline Lemone, Global Marketing Activation and Automation Lead for Digital, F&B and Rail segments at industrial technology provider ABB, agrees. She says that AI might not be perfect, but it’s improving. ‘Even in six months, image-generation has improved rapidly,’ she says. ‘A tool like ChatGPT is a language-learning model. That means it’s taking the data it receives and using it to get better and better all the time. So the possibilities are endless.’ Are there drawbacks? ‘One pitfall is licensing,’ Aline says. ‘There’s legal work to be done there. Another is that it could take something away from those leaving college and coming into business for the first time. When we start out, we build up a lot of our knowledge and experience by doing the kind of tasks that ChatGPT is now capable of doing. We might fail, but when we fail, we learn.’
‘It’s still really new,’ says Omer Wilson, Chief Marketing Officer at Qarbon, whose platform securely transfers data between workflow management and data centre systems. Like Aline, he agrees that both the technology and how it’s being used can improve. Marketers are still finding their way, he says. ‘But ChatGPT has really changed the game,’ he adds, ‘simply by making it easy for anyone to access AI.’ Does it have immediate applications for marketing agencies? ‘It can help with everything, really,’ Omer says. ‘Drafting press releases, drafting blogs, drafting articles, doing market analysis, collating recent research. One point that has been made is that AI won’t disrupt people’s jobs. People plus AI will.’
AI might well be able to take care of marketing tasks lower down in an organisation. But can it perform marketing tasks at the C-suite level? Scott isn’t sure. ‘People like me get hired because companies want bigger pipeline demand generation, a compelling company narrative, and someone to manage, organise and train the team,’ says Scott. ‘I don’t think AI can do any of those things.’
