It’s hard to make sense of the real promise of AI amidst the hype and noise.
In 2023, Google CEO Sundar Pichai famously compared AI to the creation of fire and invention of electricity on an episode of 60 Minutes.
By 2024, the hype cycle around AI gave way to the trough of disillusionment, as many businesses struggled to see the immediate value that matched their expectations (and investment). Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, recently described the tech industry around AI as “90 percent marketing and ten percent reality.”
Evidenza co-founders Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo recently argued in MarketingWeek against this AI disillusionment pendulum swing, saying that the “the bubble isn’t in AI – it’s in AI denial.” It’s not about the potential of the technology; it’s how we navigate the learning curve.
As they put it:
“The amount of leverage that AI creates is proportional to the skill of its player.”
I was struck by this insight:
“Today, marketers are myopically focused on using AI for easy tasks like writing social posts. But if you give AI your easiest jobs, the efficiency gains will be limited. If you give AI your hardest jobs – like segmentation, targeting and positioning – the gains can be revolutionary…
“Most marketers are treating AI like a copywriting assistant instead of a strategic mastermind.”
I also like this assessment from Ellie Graeden, partner at Luminos.Law, in VentureBeat:
“Because AI seems like magic, it’s tempting to assume that deploying any AI application in any setting will create value. That leads organizations to “innovate” by firing off flurries of arrows and drawing bullseyes around the spots where they land. A handful of those arrows really will land in useful places — but the vast majority will yield little value for either businesses or end-users.
“To unlock the enormous potential of AI, we need to draw the bullseyes first, then put all our efforts into hitting them. For some use-cases, that might mean developing solutions that don’t involve AI; in others, it might mean using simpler, smaller, or less sexy AI deployments.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
