Kim recently posed with Tesla’s robot and self-driving car. Apparently totally for free! I guess it does make sense to cozy up to your future overlords.
You’re in a cab and the driver suggests you deviate from the map provided by Google as his colleagues have suggested a better route. Do you agree or get all panicky? In many cases we are likely to trust the faceless AI corporation than the human in front of us.
AI is everywhere
The ads for Apple’s hearing aid function, chatGPT’s oh so helpful voice chat function, Meta’s ability to churn out a beautiful “Good Morning” forward, these are just the cute, soft front-end for steely sharp analytics and engineering. It is very easy to talk to these gizmos and simulate a connection.
All AI is essentially a psychopath – it cannot have empathy, a moral compass, or regret. The semblance of these very human traits is determined by the owner, often at their own discretion. I often write about how businesses cannot have morals, only people can. And morals themselves are determined by your culture – a quick look at the Hofstede model will tell you that it varies drastically across countries.
AI Etiquette
We humans generally first embrace anything that seems to make our life better – for example smoking – and do the research later.
Australia wants to ensure that humans below 16 cannot legally access social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, even while acknowledging that currently it will not be possible to enforce the ban. Having personally experienced the tremendous difficulty in getting objectionable content removed or responding to a hack, I am all for governments intervening to protect their citizens.
When telephones were still a thing there were a whole bunch of rules on how to use it politely. Not so with social. And even less so with AI. Should I tell you if this newsletter was written by AI? Would it matter to you? Coca Cola proudly showcased its AI generated holiday ads, though the ads themselves did not say they were AI generated. Does it matter to you that the company is selling you nostalgia with tools that cannot experience it? Over time the process could become automated to the point of not requiring a human in the loop at all.
Will there be a setting for me to say that I will only watch “organic” ads?!
What about Netflix programming? The point of movies and books is that you live another life and gain empathy for those in that world. But what if those movies are scripted by bots that have only “experienced” life through consuming hundreds of other scripts? Can I pay a premium to watch “organic script movies”? Would I pay more to watch “organic actors” too?
Is a Marketing Team Wipeout Coming?
In Mad Men, Don Draper has an iconic pitch for Kodak. (Not a product placement.) It is based on an intensely human understanding. AI can come up with such scripts. Increasingly it can make them too – with just one or two humans around for decision-making. What happens to the rest of the team? Sure, not everyone has the time to make their own ads, but definitely what required five people to do can now be done by just one. And the skillsets to determine which work is best aligned with business goals are not the same as those required to create it.
As marketing gets ever more individualized, the same number of people will be employed to create commercial content, but the skillsets sought won’t be the same. In fact, I think, for a change, the bias would be towards those with more experience rather than less.
Is B2B finally cool?
The advantage of ecommerce is that more and more people can run a business. Sure these businesses are small, but they are profitable. And there is money to be made selling them compliance, creative, marketing, productivity and HR tools, right? But they are not going to be attracted by what used to work for IBM or Infosys selling to General Motors or Walmart. Nor is consumer marketing going to work. What we need is to use the B2B marketing tool kit but with a cool 2020s wrapper.
In this context I do believe that more startups should read books like mine – B2B is NOT the same as B2C. Otherwise their only option is to be gobbled up by the established B2B firms. For want of marketing the IPO was lost 🙂
Joy, Empathy, Vulnerability, Bravery
My mother made my dresses at home when I was a kid. It was a very creative and participative process. They were truly unique and represented my individuality. She knitted me a sweater with a cat on it to remind me of my long departed pet to take to college. I still have it – one of the big joys after my “health” project was being able to fit into it 🙂 Since then “ready-mades” have ruled my wardrobe and even while preaching individuality they have made me conform. I remember when it was common for teen boys to wear purple jeans and colourful shirts, again lost in the wave of conformity.
Facebook’s success was because it made it easy to share your joys and failures with your friends, and for them to reciprocate. But then we got overwhelmed and our emotions were reduced to a set of standard emojis. When something becomes easy, it also becomes standardized.
I am guilty of reducing my relationships to “thumbs up”. I am now making a conscious effort to do video calls and in person meetings with friends. We humans cannot be put inside a screen. Or a box. Or replicated by AI.
In the past, individualism was expensive. AI can make it accessible. So even as we look for efficiency, let us also look for ways to enable the human potential.
Happy weekend!
