When it comes to using AI in your business, there are two ways that you need to look at it as a CEO and founder, which will help your team grow your business and help and really serve your customers.
And we’ve got to get this right, because the world is already changing from the dawn of AI and what things have been done with AI and how we do it.
My name is Ant Hodges. I’m the creator here at the CMO Field Notes podcast. I’m actually a fractional CMO myself, and I talk about these stories that I have from my working life, working with clients who are doing between a million and fifty million a year and wanting to seriously scale.
I work with CEOs, founders and CFOs within businesses to connect marketing activity to revenue and really make sure that things are working in the best possible way.
So what I really need everybody to understand who’s listening to this podcast, even if you’re a fractional CMO, is that I am very pro AI, but I’m very pro-human too.
And I feel like there’s this dynamic within many boardrooms that is basically saying, how can we make savings by bringing AI in? And we’ve seen it across the board, with huge companies deciding to reduce resource in their organisations in order to bring AI in and save money. But now are bringing the human back in in many ways.
There are companies now that are re-employing, because what they need is they need the better human judgement to manage AI, rather than just abdicating everything completely to AI. AI can help, but AI is not great at making the best decisions, and that’s where human judgement comes in.
I’m a huge fan of AI in the back office of the business, but put the human in the front office. What I mean by this is the connection that customers have with your brand should be as human as possible.
AI bots on websites that deal with customer service, that deal with enquiries. Get them out of that AI conversation and into a real conversation with a human being as quickly as possible. There may be a triage that the AI bot does initially to kind of work out what they want and stuff, but get them as fast as possible into a human conversation. Don’t just rely on AI to do the job entirely for you.
Consumers are already switching off. Over 50% of consumers who engage with brands today can detect AI, whether it’s the content or the engagement that they’re having. So 50% of consumers can tell, okay? And of those 50%, over 75% then disengage and never engage with that brand ever again. This is a study that Gartner has just released.
And if we model that number, if 50% of consumers can tell when content is AI, or the engagement is with AI, and 75% disengage, we’ve got 37.5%, if not more, of a consumer marketplace that disengages with a brand, simply because it can tell it’s using AI.
You do not want to lose between 30 and 40% of your audience simply because the connection they’re having is with AI.
Put AI in the back office around process, to assist your team with things that are mundane, to be able to programme agents that handle data, that measure things, to help with reporting. But you’ve then got to bring the human judgement in.
So as an example, if you are using AI for processes within an organisation, let’s just take huge amounts of access data for servers, where you’ve got hundreds of employees, maybe thousands of employees around the world, and you want to look at the access data around all of that and the security data.
To be able to have a human go through that kind of data, look at the pitfalls, look at the risks, it could take hundreds of hours. But if you can throw this through an AI that you’ve programmed to look at all of those statistical anomalies, look at the things that the data is saying, that could literally be done in hours instead of hundreds of hours. Just a couple of hours.
But when it spits out the information for you and produces the reports and the tables and the data, you’ve got to check it. And there has to be a human reconciliation with this data. A human judgement based on that data. The data that comes out is not going to be data that can then be presented to a board and said, you know, this is it.
We’ve heard stories of Deloitte in Australia, who produced this whole report and presented it to the Australian government. And literally, they ended up having to refund all of the fees, because all of the citations and all of the statistics in it were completely fabricated, because the whole thing was made up through AI.
Yes, they say that they used AI to help to research and to produce this report, but there was no human check. So Deloitte didn’t have an AI problem. They had a human problem, because there was no human ratifying and bringing human judgement.
As a CEO, founder, CFO, board member, if you’re looking at ways to bring AI into your business, do it from a back office efficiency perspective, but allow humans to make the human judgement and the human call at the end of the day.
So we’ve got to find this balance. We can improve the efficiency of our teams by enabling AI tools in our MarTech stack and in our processes. But fundamentally, what we need to do is make sure that we’ve got the human interaction at that level as well.
So my name’s Ant Hodges, fractional CMO. I would love to be able to speak with you if you’re looking at ways in which to help lead the marketing in your business in a better way. You can do that by heading over to anthodges.com. There’s a WhatsApp button at the top, or you can email me direct: cmo@anthodges.com.
I’d love to have the conversation with you to see what we can do to streamline your MarTech stack, to improve efficiencies within the business, reduce costs, to simplify and to scale.
