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Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud 459)

Line art of a robot outweighing a marketer on a scale to illustrate the idea of whether marketers can keep up with AI

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My friend Mark Schafer just asked a brilliant question on LinkedIn about whether small and mid-sized businesses are destined to fall behind when it comes to AI. It’s a beautiful post and I’d highly encourage you to read it.

Is it impossible for marketers and e-commerce folks to keep up with AI? Is your business doomed to fall behind?

In one way, yes. But, in a more meaningful way, I’m not convinced. Instead, there are a few ways that marketers can keep up—and keep ourselves relevant. And those tips and techniques are at the heart of this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI? (Thinks Out Loud 459) — Headlines and Show Notes

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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: Is It Impossible for Marketers to Keep Up With AI?

Welcome to Thinks Out Loud. I’m Tim Peter.

My friend Mark Schaefer had a powerful post on LinkedIn the other day that asked if we’re keeping up with AI. It’s a fairly short post and I’m going to read the whole thing.

Mark said, “I have a sinking feeling of being left behind. I’m reading about big companies and their AI reinvention and startups being AI first. But here I am as a small business, fully immersed in the smart ideas of AI and using chat GPT as my sidekick every hour of the day. Yet the foundation of my business is Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a WordPress blog/website. This is…” and Mark puts this all in caps, “crude. AI is creating iterative improvements, but I’m not transforming. I am augmenting, not re-imagining.

I sense that as a small business, I don’t have the ability to really lead with AI, except to maybe be a little better at prompts than the next guy. Thoughts?”

Before I get to my main point, I have to give credit to Mark. His authenticity, his vulnerability, and his sheer humanness are models for all of us.

As ever, he’s showing marketers and e-commerce professionals and customer acquisition folks the path forward. But his core question has stuck with me. And I think it’s worth your time for us to talk about how we’re likely going to use AI in the future to improve our marketing customer experience and customer acquisition. And it’s especially important to ask, can we keep up?

This is Thinks Out Loud, episode 459. Let’s dive in.

Mark’s post raises several super interesting questions. As I see it, these are:

  1. Are we being left behind by AI?
  2. How can we find transformational uses for AI? And…
  3. Are small businesses inherently challenged compared with big businesses?

I’m going to take these on one at a time.

First, yes, we are being left behind by AI, at least in part. I discussed this a few weeks ago in an episode called, “What If I’m Wrong About AI and Marketing Jobs?”

My basic thesis was that the infamous line, “AI won’t take your job, smart people who use AI will,” is increasingly wrong. In truth, some smart people will lose their jobs. And it won’t always be to smart people who use AI. It could be to dumb people who use AI. Or to people, smart or dumb, who decide that AI is good enough and a hell of a lot cheaper than continuing to pay smart people. If your job can be replaced by something faster, cheaper, or both, you kinda have to assume that some folks—CEOs, CFOs, et cetera—are absolutely going to use those faster, cheaper solutions at least some of the time. That’s a guarantee.

How many of them? How soon? Well, that’s tough to tell. But you’ve got to take it for granted that that will happen some of the time. And you’ve got to do the work now to prevent it from happening to you.

One way you can do that is by becoming a better user of AI, which starts to get at the second question a little bit. How can we be more transformational in our use of AI?

There’s not an easy answer to this. Part of the reason is that there aren’t that many off-the-shelf products that enable transformational use, especially for smaller businesses. Most of the AI vendors aren’t interested in building traditional products, at least as I understand it. They’re trying to get to an artificial general intelligence, a super intelligence that, if it comes to exist, could end all products and jobs as we know them, to say nothing of, you know, our entire society.

If you think that’s hyperbole, you think that’s absurd, remember that an artificial super intelligence would be the equivalent of inviting a far smarter alien race to share this planet with us. Like we could have little green men show up on the planet who are just way smarter than us. I’m pretty confident our lives would change if that happened and probably dramatically.

Now the jury is out on whether or not it’s likely we’re going to achieve super intelligence. And candidly, I’m not going to spend a lot of time worrying about it.

In our current reality, most of the AI tools we have access to, whether they’re ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Perplexity or some other cool one you’ve found, really just provide support tools for individuals. I don’t want to diminish them. They’re deeply useful. They’re also deeply flawed. And we simply haven’t necessarily seen them be game changers on an enterprise scale yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are some enterprises and startups who doing cool things behind the scenes using AI. Google and Amazon and all of those folks certainly are working to do those kinds of things.

It’s just that most of the implementations that I’ve seen have been largely incremental. Some of them are cool, they’re just not hugely transformational.

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Christopher Penn, who posted an amazing collection of insights about potential transformational uses of AI in his almost timely newsletter the other day. If you care about this topic and you aren’t reading Christopher’s work, you need to change that, immediately. I will link to him in the show notes. I learn from Christopher all the time and I think you will too.

As for the third question, are small businesses inherently challenged? Well, yeah. Sort of by definition.

But I’m not 100% sure that most of us will need to be power users in the way that Christopher Penn and large enterprises might need to.

When Mark put his post on LinkedIn, I replied and what I said was, "I’m reasonably sure that for the most part, people won’t need to get good at using AI. For the same reason, they don’t need to be good at HTTP or how the carburetor in their car works. The details will be abstracted away. They’ll be hidden beneath simpler user experiences, simpler interfaces. Even if we can’t compare AI to Google Search, the vast majority of people never used its Boolean operators or its advanced features. Instead, Google worked to make the product better at understanding what we wanted, or at least they did until they started making it worse, while we simply used it however it worked for us, in whichever way it worked for us.

What we need to do instead is be smart consumers of any product and ask questions like, what are the pros and cons of using these tools for me, for my customers, and for society at large? What are appropriate uses of these tools? When is it not appropriate to use them? How can I minimize the risks that they bring to the table? And how can I put AI to work for the largest number of people to the benefit of the largest number of people? I’m reasonably convinced that that is the most likely scenario, that AI will simply work under the hood for us."

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. First, MIT’s Technology Review had an article this week called, “Here’s Why We Need to Start Thinking of AI as Normal.” And their basic thesis is highly similar to mine. They kind of say that the complicated bits will lie beneath the hood. We just have to be smart users of the tool. We have to be conscious in how we’re using these tools in an effective, appropriate way.

Second, this isn’t just theoretical. We’re seeing AI become more normal every day. The Wall Street Journal had an article recently called, "The Hottest Job Of 2023 Is Already Obsolete." They went on to say,"Prompt engineering, a role aimed at crafting the perfect input to send to a large language model, was poised to become one of the hottest jobs in artificial intelligence. What happened?"

They’re saying AI increasingly doesn’t need specialized knowledge. Actually, they’re not just saying it. All of the decision makers who decide where they want to spend their money on finding the right people to get the most value out of their artificial intelligence investments are also saying it. They’re saying prompt engineers just aren’t necessary any longer. Anyone can use AI and get good results.

I also think there’s a hidden reason that we have to be conscious of here, and that is that I believe that there is a backlash coming around artificial intelligence. I believe that our customers simply will not embrace it as much as we may think they will, at least some of the time. I’m convinced that customers will absolutely want to work with identifiably human companies, at least for some products and services that matter to them.

To use the most obvious example, I cannot picture anyone wanting to use a robot doctor for any serious medical issues, no matter how effective that robot doctor might be. They’re going to want someone they really trust.

You know, I’ve always found it funny when we talk about a site like HealthGRADES, which is the the Yelp or the Google reviews or the TripAdvisor for doctors. And what’s really funny is most of the people who write reviews in HealthGRADES don’t actually know whether or not they’re doctors any good because they’re not qualified to. I certainly can’t. I know that I like my doctor. And if you read the reviews about doctors, they’ll talk about, “I really like my doctor. You know, she does a great job or he does a great job.” But they don’t actually understand whether or not the doctor is fully qualified.

Instead, what we all look for is somebody who we trust. And I think that’s going to be true for many businesses, particularly in high consideration products and high consideration services. I just don’t see that being unusual, just as it’s not unusual today with people’s doctors.

I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m reminded of the Bill Gates quote, we always overestimate the change in the next two years and underestimate the change in the next 10. Given that, I don’t know if this behavior among customers will take six months or six years. I will be shocked if it doesn’t happen in a relatively narrow timeframe though. In other words, I think it could take four years, five years. But I don’t think it’s gonna take 10. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two, because Bill Gates’ two-year window started when ChatGPT first came out.

In any case, I go back to the questions I asked at the end of my reply to Mark’s post when we think about do we have to keep up with AI. I think the questions we need to be asking are

  • What are the pros and cons of using these tools for me, for my customers, and for society at large?
  • What are the appropriate uses?
  • When is it not appropriate to use artificial intelligence?
  • How can I minimize the risks of AI to me, my customers, and society at large?
  • How can I put artificial intelligence at work to benefit the greatest number of people?

If you can come up with good answers for those, I’m really confident that you won’t need to keep up with AI. I am confident that you will not fall behind. Quite the opposite. Your customers will want to work with you more than ever.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too. I’m sure they would love to hear that.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 459, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. I want you to know this show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe. And as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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