“We approach the integration of AI with a mixture of excitement and caution,” Kate Seymour, marketing director at CMYK, said recently. She captured I think how many businesses are thinking about AI.
She went on:
“While we recognise the vast potential AI holds for enhancing our own marketing strategies and improving the services we offer our clients, we also acknowledge the importance of preserving the human touch.”
Other major points of caution range from IP issues to brand reputation to confidential data concerns to employee misuse to hallucinations to simply not knowing what’s inside the black box.
Concerns like these led 75% of businesses in a Blackberry study last year to say they had or were considering a ban on Gen AI in the workplace.
Sarwar Faruque, head of development operations at Jollibee, voiced some of the resistance:
“We see the output it generates, but we don’t really understand how it got to the answer.
“There’s this black box…it needs to be demystified. I want to know how it works, how it arrived at its response, and whether this answer is repeatable.
“They need to stop acting like it’s magic when there’s a code running it and there’s science behind it. Help us understand it because we don’t like adopting a technology that we don’t have a solid understanding of.”
And yet the hype machine for AI is in overdrive. The most shocking prediction this month (particularly for anyone working in marketing) came from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman:
“95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost, be handled by AI…
“The AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing. Again, all free, instant, and nearly perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”
No problem? There of course will be problems. There already are. That’s just the nature of adopting any new technology, particularly technology as wide-reaching and consequential at AI.
It’s up to the rest of us to weigh some of these problems against the potential and find the right way forward.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn just over the last or so:
