while we can talk about the the goal of making this enrich people's lives and
careers there's always going to be a reality that if there's a way to
intelligently automate things that previously required humans they may not
talk about it in public but behind closed doors they're trying to find a
way to become more efficient because if they don't they're competitors sometimes
when we talk about artificial intelligence there can be almost a
paranoia about you know computers taking over everything so do you think there's
any risk of marketers being replaced or really losing jobs at all by machine
learning and artificial intelligence yeah so this is something it's almost
always the first question I get so I've done probably 50 or 60 talks on AI over
the last two years and the audience always wants to know like oh my gosh am
I going to lose my job so would I what I tell people is like no one can look out
five years from now and start truly accurately predicting the impact on jobs
like anybody who claims that they know one where the other is is just guessing
maybe an educated guess but they're just guessing because the technology moves so
fast it's primarily intended to augment our knowledge and capabilities I think
generally speaking we can all agree that that's mostly what it's designed to do
is meant to take very time-intensive data-driven manual tasks and automate
those where we can in the hopes then that marketers will spend more time
being creative being strategic being empathetic considering the emotions and
the implications of the actions we take in theory that's where it's gonna go I I
do worry I think there's a reality that many of the organization's racing ahead
are publicly traded companies that have responsibilities to their shareholders
and while we can talk about the the goal of making this enrich people's lives and
careers there's always going to be a reality that if there's a way to
intelligently automate things that previously required humans they may not
talk about it in the public but behind closed doors they're trying to find a
way to become more efficient because if they don't their competitors will so I
just look at it as its conversation that we have and that we
illuminate because otherwise I think we might get into a place where three to
five to seven years down the road we do see more automation than maybe we wanted
to in the process and we lose some the human side of the brand so I do you guys
think about that I mean do you consider the implications as you're building
things a little bit I mean I think you're right though this is like a very
long scale process and I've heard an analogy and the past may - like
electrification of people being concerned about you know if we don't
have or if we have electric drills or something on the factory floor that that
might actually like replace certain workers but they're going to be so much
more efficient you earlier reference Google Maps it's not preventing people
from figuring out what they're going but man it makes it a lot easier and every
now and then you do get some you know pretty strange
recommendations about making a turn or something that doesn't make sense if
you're very familiar with the route and people are still there to correct and
guide so I think it's going to make people tremendously more efficient but
also like you mentioned for marketers in particular there's a tremendous amount
of creative work that marketers do content creation in and of itself it's
very difficult to automate or even to augment things like tone and style which
can be so so critical to to marketers when they're when they're creating that
content are very hard to fake with new machines and you know I think there's
gonna be roles that that will get replaced people far smarter than us if
done studies out of like the University of Oxford in 2014 did a study on the
computerization of 702 jobs and they were basically trying to predict out how
likely a job was to be completely intelligently automated and
telemarketers I believe was number one on the list and so I actually said that
one time at a talk in New York and a guy like had an existential crisis in the
crowd cuz he was a telemarketer apparently and so the hand went up right
after the talk is like I'm a telemarketer like am ia bad a job and I
was like well you may have you may spend 10 years training the algorithms that
replace what you do I don't know but that's where we're at it's like there's
gonna be things where you and I could sit there like that totally gonna be
intelligent automated like why wouldn't it be like the Machine can do it better
than a human every time so like an example would be
again a really tangible when the Associated Press writes all their
earnings reports using natural language generation a very rudimentary form of AI
and in some cases not really even considered AI anymore but if you give it
structured data the columns and rows and then you've trained it the story to
write give it synonyms get the branching logic the machine can literally write
thousands of them in a second versus a human that would have to sit there and
pull the data and double-check the data and all that so that the writing of
earnings reports was intelligently automated now is it AI you could
probably argue both ways but the reality is it doesn't have to be from you know
if you think about it on a one to five scale a full autonomy it doesn't have to
be a five to disrupt entire career paths and jobs so if your job was to write
earnings reports you don't have a job writing earnings reports anymore
now you may be doing more human interest stories and you may have built a more
fulfilled job like you may do more enjoyable things and be more creative
but if that was all that was there for you to do you're out of a job now and I
think there's a lot of roles in marketing that are like that if your job
is to a/b test landing pages you're not gonna have a job hopefully you find
something else too but like that's not going to be there
you would think media buying won't really exist for humans in the future
like that to me is a really practical thing I've got a million dollars to
spend I've got a thousand places I could spend that money how in the world is a
human gonna figure out the optimal way to do that like I graduated from college
in 2000 there was like five places you could put your money in 2000 goggle was
a year old the iPhone didn't exist we didn't have social media blogging wasn't
really a thing influencer marketing wasn't a thing like there was trade
magazines and I don't know like buy ads send direct mail telemarketing like
there wasn't many places for it so that's the kind of thing where you
look at the complexity of doing that job now
and you think about what make machines excel at and there are definitely jobs
that I could sit here and make a list of 20 of them for you that I don't think in
five years will exist doesn't mean that person would have a career anymore they
just may be doing something other than the thing that a machine can do better
yeah I tend to agree I mean within the broad fields of marketing
and services you know none of those are going to be replaced but overnight but
it's particularly tasks within that field so that could be like lead
qualification or some within sales or parts of keyword research within
marketing or ticket routing within certain psa's things like that that are
fairly redundant and there tends to be a correct answer I think we'll see
intelligently automated analytics is one that I can't wait for it to get better
cuz trying to find insights just take Google Analytics for example or even hub
spots performance data there's so much to analyze and most marketers aren't
analysts by trade like we don't come out of school drilling how to dive into
spreadsheets and run pivot tables and like find insights out of the hundred
things you could extract from last week's performance data which five
matter like that's a really hard thing to scale and so for me like running an
agency I look at it every day it's like well what are the things we are core to
what we do the success we can create for clients that we're not really good at
and it's almost impossible to scale that thing and analyzing analytics is right
at the top of that list so we've actually built a system where it takes
insights we use natural language generation it takes the data it spits
out a report we basically just answer the same ten questions about what
happened on the site top page is entry points top conversion points and we have
the Machine write the narrative so we can literally write 25 client reports by
pushing a button where it used to be five to seven to ten
hours per client per month so we took something we're replacing his job like
nobody lost their jobs because of it but we took an inefficiency create a greater
value for the client and reduced the time we had to spend doing it right that
also probably provides an opportunity to really dig in deeper on any of those
insights that might surface and yeah yeah the human looks at and says that
makes a lot of sense like I wonder why you can dig a little deeper but human
doesn't have to sit there and stare at spreadsheets all day or look at the
analytics date on the graphs and Pharaoh wasn't saying and then try and train
some of strata school to do that like it's just it's not an efficient way to
scale no nobody has complained yet it's the office that they don't have to do
that thing anymore
you