By: Tod Loofbourrow

Is AI driving progress or leading us toward a bleak future?

It depends on who you ask. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winning inventor of the “perceptron”—which gave rise to the modern AI revolution—puts the risk of existential threat to humanity from AI at “10% to 20%.” Others dismiss the risks as unwarranted speculation.

Closer to home, AI is transforming jobs, especially in marketing. Marketing revolves around words, images, data, audiences and insights—exactly where modern AI excels. McKinsey projects a potential $463 billion productivity impact on marketing in the next decade.

Professionals are balancing fear with excitement about how AI may improve their lives. For instance, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) recently secured control over the use of AI in producing scripts and rewriting literary works, settling their strike.

We can’t stop the rapid improvement of AI, but we can harness it.

So, what’s a marketer to do?

The answer is best put by Stanford professor and author Erik Brynjolfsson: Instead of running from the machines, or worrying about competing with the machines, marketers must learn to “race with the machine.”

Modern AI is a foundational technology, likely having a larger impact on our society than the personal computer and the internet. Those prior revolutions taught us that those who run with the machines outperform those who do not. Often, the collaboration of person and machine yields the best results.

For instance, a seminal research paper examining the impact of generative AI assistants in a financial services call center with over 5,000 employees showed a 14% overall improvement in productivity, and a 35% improvement for the bottom fifth of performers. Those with the least experience benefitted the most—an effect we see across business areas. AI speeds time to action, spurs creativity and develops high-performance prospects at scale.

So, how do you collaborate with this alien machine? Understand where the machine excels, and use it as a force multiplier for your work.

Marketers who embrace this technology are improving their productivity and effectiveness by using these tools for brainstorming, writing, editing, audience creation and understanding, and process improvement, multiplying their abilities and productivity. As a Mandalorian might say, “This is the way.”

Here’s how specific marketing roles are evolving and how you can prepare to “run with the machines” rather than against them.

Copywriter

Copywriters are directly in the gunsights of what new large language models (LLMs) do best—articulately write things based on ingestion and modeling of almost everything that has ever been written.

Leave aside the many copyright fights and licensing deals between content owners and the voracious ingestion of their works by the LLM vendors. When the focus is on jobs, the emerging picture is clear. There are now more ways to write than ever before. Hone your unique voice. Have a point of view. But understand that your craft is forever changed by writing assistants more powerful than the spelling and grammar checkers of the past generation.

AI assistants can:

  • Brainstorm ideas and refine concepts.
  • Summarize long books and documents.
  • Explore different writing styles and voices.
  • Tailor content to various audiences.
  • Edit and improve work for clarity and impact.
  • Overcome writer’s block and kickstart creativity.
  • Learn new subjects quickly, guided by your questions.

When you need to learn something new, you have a flawed but effective assistant at your beck and call to help. One Nobel prize winner shared with me that he spends an hour each morning having ChatGPT tutor him on various topics. I’ve delved into 15th-century English history, quantum computing, tequila flavors and advanced AI using this same technique, which has made me both a better writer and a more diverse thinker—and has me tasting a wider variety of tequilas.

When you combine your skills with AI, you’ll stand out. In that same call center study, top performers gained the least from AI assistants because they were already high achievers—so use AI companions to move upward by improving your productivity, range, speed of learning, knowledge and voice.

Designer And Creative Professional

For designers and creatives, your AI assistant can help:

  • Test different concepts in various styles—try pointillist, steampunk or classical renderings of an idea in seconds.
  • Simulate specific camera angles, images and lighting.
  • Generate creative ideas to get the design started.

I have spent decades in AI, but early in my career, I studied architecture and design. Today, I can draw a doodle of a concept or design, paste it into an LLM prompt window and render it in five different designs or architectural styles, with different materials. One analyst described these new tools as working at the level of “a smart, eager college student assistant, except they do the task in seconds instead of in a week.” These “students” await your creative call.

Media Planner And Advertiser

Marketers are tasked with finding good prospects and turning them into customers—a core function of advertising and media. Today’s tools can turn advertising interactive and responsive, using digital advertising as a vehicle for two-way communication. By leveraging responsive two-way advertising and AI tools, you can understand which consumer segments are drawn to different aspects of your products or services—and scale that understanding into tens of millions of target customers.

The latest AI tools excel at building precise, high-performing audiences at scale that brands can use for advertising and marketing. Tailor messages at scale to audiences most likely to respond. Understand the content that improves brand metrics and segment audiences into clusters most likely to be responsive to that content. Use AI to move prospects down the marketing funnel toward action.

At its simplest level, audience AI can take small amounts of the most important data about your prospects and turn it into high-performance audiences.

AI tools offer marketers an opportunity to vault ahead in their careers and improve their writing, creative, design, targeting, prospecting and audience generation.

And don’t wait, because those who get there first usually win.