Wrapping up a bit of a tough week, came down with some kind of bug, but got through it and had a great executive roundtable event on Thursday. Took this weekend to relax and recharge and finally get back in the gym, so I had a great end to the week!
Quote I’m thinking about this weekend
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman said, “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI”. He predicts this will happen with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, which will happen in around 5 years. Whether or not he is right about the timeframe and usefulness of AGI, I think this reinforces the idea that marketers and other knowledge workers need to be evolving to work together with AI to be more effective and efficient. AI may replace some jobs, and a portion of people from other jobs, just like previous technological advances have. But I believe that AI will be a powerful tool for those who embrace it, not a competitor.
What I watched this week
I meant to watch Slumdog Millionaire before my India trip, but I ran out of time, and in the end, I’m super glad I waited until I’d already been there. I think if I had watched it earlier, my view of Mumbai may have been skewed by the extreme nature of how the movie portrays it, which was clearly for storytelling purposes. In the end, I loved the movie and the city. There is certainly far more to Mumbai than the slums and gangsters the movie showed, but honestly, the movie could have been set in many countries around the world. So I don’t think it was meant to show India in a bad light but rather, it served as a vibrant backdrop to a classic story of hardship, love, and redemption.
Most interesting study I saw this weekend
This study by Ispos asked participants how confident they feel the global economy will be in 2024 versus 2023. The striking thing to me, was that the top six countries with the highest confidence were all in Asia. India, Indonesia, and China led the way, each with over 80% percent confidence. Singapore came in at 59%, while the US, UK, and Germany all were below 50%. How much this variance is due to the economic realities in each country, will have to be seen, but it does point to Asia (or at least Asian confidence) being on the rise.
What I’m pondering this weekend
I was incredibly inspired by International Women’s Day on Friday and the multitude of activities and posts I saw celebrating women and driving conversations around equality and empowerment. I’ve always been supportive of DEI initiatives and had many incredible women bosses, leaders, and colleagues throughout my career, but with a young daughter, I’m paying more attention than ever. And it got me thinking, what can men like myself who aren’t hiring for leadership positions (Forbes found that women still only make up 32.2% of senior leadership roles), do to be an ally? Is just treating women as the equals they are, standing up in the face of microaggressions, and calling out misogyny when we see it enough? Or is there more we can do?
What I listened to this weekend
Speaking of diversity, The New York Times podcast The Daily had an episode on Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, which made headlines in February when users found out that it would create inaccurate images by injecting diversity into prompts such as those for “a US senator from the 1800s”, “a 1943 German soldier”, and more. This seems to be because Google had included some additional prompting baked in, which was meant to counteract the problem of underrepresentation. But instead, resulted in inaccurate images being generated. Google had to put guardrails in place which stopped Gemini from generating images for certain types of prompts at all. The two main factors leading to this result were Google’s rush to catch up to OpenAI and Microsoft, and measures to “force” diversity into the results. Seems like a pretty clear microcosm of the question of how much affirmative action is the right amount.
Biggest marketing learning reinforcement of the week
I’ve always preached delivering value over sales pitches at conferences, webinars, and roundtables – and sometimes have had to deal with pushback from some people who want to pitch in front of every audience. There’s a time and a place for that, and it isn’t at top of the funnel events. With many solutions I’ve worked on having sales cycles from 6-12 months, there’s no rush to try to sell, it is far better to deliver valuable content and build up thought leadership and relationships first. This was reinforced when talking to my roundtable provider this week when he shared with me that many of his clients end up presenting a long slide deck or demo, only to be unable to run similar events in the future because people don’t want to sit there and listen to boring sales pitches.
That’s it for this week, I hope you had a great weekend and are looking forward to next week!
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