It’s been a few months since the last episode of this show, and I wanted to start by telling you why.
Back in June, I recorded an episode about whether a CEO’s decision to use AI was the right one or not. Then the summer arrived, and I made a deliberate choice to step away for a while.
Some of that was for family. We took proper holidays together, and I protected that time on purpose. I’ve spent over 20 years running my own business, and I’ve learnt that work will always be there when you get back. The moments with your family don’t wait for you in the same way.
The rest of that time went on something I’d put off for far too long. I needed to properly understand what AI is doing to marketing.
Everybody is talking about AI right now. Your inbox is full of it, your feed is full of it, and most of the conversations I hear fall into 2 camps. Some people want AI to do everything, and some people want nothing to do with it. I didn’t want to pick a side based on headlines. I wanted to hunker down, use it every day, and see for myself where it helps and where it hurts.
So that’s exactly what I’ve done, and it led to some real repositioning of how we run the business.
Here’s where I eventually landed on all of this. So let me be clear. We are pro-AI. In fact, I’d go further and say that we’re now AI-first. There’s a single rule that sits over everything we build, and it’s quite simple to say. The human stays in the front office, and AI works in the back office.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
The back office is everything your customer never sees. It’s the research before a campaign. It’s pulling the numbers together for a report. It’s drafting, checking, sorting, scheduling and tidying up all of those processes that keep the business running. That’s where AI is brilliant. It saves hours, it doesn’t get tired, and it frees people up for the work that really needs a person involved.
The front office is every moment where a customer meets your brand. It’s the reply to their email. It’s the call where they decide whether to trust you. It’s the moment something goes wrong, and they want to know someone cares. Those moments should stay as human as possible, because that’s where trust gets built.
When a business gets this the wrong way round, you can feel it straight away. You’ve probably had it happen to you. You send a message that matters, and you get something back that sounds polished but empty. It answers the words you wrote and misses the point completely. In that moment, you stop feeling like a customer and start feeling like a ticket number.
The opposite is just as costly. If you refuse to use AI at all, your team ends up buried in work that a machine could be doing in minutes. That’s time they could have spent talking with customers. So the anti-AI position doesn’t protect the human side of your business either. It just quietly starves it instead.
The real work, and this is what took the time, is building the processes so each side does its own job. Where does AI hand over to a person? Who checks whether it’s doing the job correctly? Which conversations should a machine never actually touch? Those answers look very different in every business, and getting them right is a leadership decision more than a technology one.
That’s a big part of what I really want to talk about from now on.
And there’s another change I want to tell you about. CMO Field Notes is now a daily show. Every day there’ll be a short episode, around 5 to 7 minutes, built from what I’m seeing in the businesses I work with. I want to build on real situations, with all the names and business information taken out. I want to talk about situations that have happened, what they taught us, and what you can take into your own business.
During the week, the episodes are going to focus on the nuts and bolts. We’ll talk about teams, processes, structure, customers, culture, reporting, campaigns and all the things a CMO deals with. These are the everyday decisions that quietly decide whether a business grows or fails, and that’s what I want to unpack.
At the weekend, I want it to feel a little bit different. Saturdays and Sundays will be a little more reflective. We’ll talk about pace, rest, and how you handle clients who expect a reply on a Sunday afternoon. And sometimes I’ll share the lessons my faith has taught me about running a business and a life as well.
The summer break taught me something too. Stepping back gave me the space to see things clearly, and I came back with more focus than when I left.
So if you’ve been listening from the start of this podcast, thanks for sticking around and staying subscribed. And if this is your first episode, you’re very welcome here.
Tomorrow, we start the field notes properly, and the first one is about a message that nobody answered.
If you'd like to talk more, email me at cmo@anthodges.com. Subscribe wherever you're listening, and find every past episode at cmofieldnotes.com.
