I have slipped on the icy streets of Davos. It never fails to surprise that private enterprise has managed to attract billionaires and heads of state to a tiny village in Switzerland. Where Fortune 100 CEOs are expected to stay in tiny hotels and trudge in the snow to meetings.
I thought it was pretty cool to shake hands (almost) with Sergei Brin, or bump into (almost) Amitabh Bacchan but there’s more to it than that – it is really the most visible gathering of power brokers in the world. And a rather naked recognition that business and politics go hand-in-hand.
I was at the WEF, Davos for a couple of years as part of the contingent from Wipro. Despite the cold, the proximity to money and power is very exciting 🙂 Oh, and the hot chocolate is delicious too. There is even a mall now – which I visited on a recent summer drive through Europe!
Klaus Schwab the founder is a marketing genius no doubt, but sadly, probably the Mad Men flavour of his era was also his downfall as he resigned amidst a flood of sexual harassment allegations.
I digress. For a crash course on geo-politics I strongly suggest you go through the speeches of Mark Carney of Canada and Donald Trump of the USA.
But, the Uh-Oh year
The internet changed everything about business. It happened over a period of about 10 years. And there are still many customers who are not really on the internet, providing a happy camping ground for dinosaurs of the earlier brick and mortar era.
But AI is rapidly seeping into everything. Can you imagine that Bangalore – renowned for the extreme slow pace of its traffic – also used facial recognition technology to manage crowds for New Year? If you use a phone, you’re already using AI without knowing anything about it.
Agentic purchasing is already live along with AI search. That means marketing as we knew it is dead. And yet, given the rapid pace of improvement and adoption, we don’t even know what to plan, train and invest for!
Many, many marketers are going to have to er, retire, unable to keep up with the pace of intense change. For example, SEO is just not the same any more.
This is over and above the marketers whose roles will be displaced by AI eg content creators and editors.
Uh-oh.
What about Imperialism?
I talked briefly about this in my previous newsletter. Now, the contours of this new world order are even more clearly visible. There will be “great powers” and, what Mr Carney optimistically labels as the “middle powers” and of course the “no power powers”.
Where your home country sits will matter a lot for brands and businesses. Obviously supply chains will be impacted. But there is also a shift in consumer sentiment – this will not immediately show up in purchasing preferences.
Strong domestic consumer markets like India may not be as impacted, but even there a lot of products piggy back on soft power which will diminish as hard power takes over.
It is also an opportunity – to rethink an aspirational culture aligned to real world realities. I grew up listening to the BBC World Service to “improve my English”. Nor was it so long ago that in India we subscribed to Soviet Woman magazine, got Russian books in English as school prizes, and there were Russian ballet performances in Chennai….We are once more going to be in a period of such cultural affiliation.
Except that this is the age of AI so everything will be faster and more, more, more.
Uh-oh again.
What can marketers do?
When business is doing well – and for many it is – there is a tendency to tuck our heads in the sand and hope that it will continue to be good. My suggestion is that every now and then we should take a peek and look at the long term in a structured way.
AI makes everything super easy – so maybe just ask it to apply Porter’s Five Forces Model to your particular business with a 5 year horizon, after reading the two speeches I referenced at the beginning of this newsletter.
Keep yourself current on the latest tech. You really have to be able to benefit from AI to stay alive these days in the business world.
And meet humans. The only way to break the echo chamber that unfortunately is the downside of Imperialism meets AI.
Have a great weekend!