S5 Episode 18: AI in Marketing - Debunking Myths and Exploring Opportunities with Isabel Perry of DEPT

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Actionable Futurist podcast, a show all about the near-term future, with practical and actionable advice from a range of global experts to help you stay ahead of the curve. Every episode answers the question what's the future on, with voices and opinions that need to be heard. Your host is international keynote speaker and Actionable Futurist, andrew Grill.

Speaker 3: 0:30

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, And so on the podcast. today, I'm going to dive deeper into the intersection of AI with advertising and marketing. To do this, I'm joined by Isabel Perry, who was the VP of Emerging Technology at Pioneering Technology and Marketing Services Company Debt. Welcome, Isabel.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Thank you very much for having me. Andrew Great to be here.

Speaker 3: 0:49

Now, this is a hot topic and I'm talking to a number of experts over the last few months about AI and the intersection with various marketing, advertising ethics, all those sorts of things, But I haven't come across Debt. For those on the podcast who haven't heard of your organization, what does Debt do and what do you do at the company?

Speaker 2: 1:04

Debt is a marketing technology agency. We are 4,000 people around the world. We're in 20 countries across five continents And we are one of the only agencies the only agency which has a true 50-50 split between technology and marketing And that allows us to work across the full digital customer journey, from digital transformation to building products at the core of your business, but also through brand creative and media that brings those products and brands to market. We're also an agency that has pioneering at the center of our spirit. We create first moving digital products, services, campaigns and help brands stay ahead of the competition. We've been evidenced in the fact that we were the Webby's agency of the year and network agent of the year this year and also network of the year last year. We are an agency that's big enough to cope. That's small enough to care. When you work with us, you're almost certainly working with a partner.

Speaker 2: 2:00

There is over 250 people at Debt who own a part of the company And that creates a very specific sort of boutique agency culture, despite the fact that we are now 4,000 people with a huge footprint, and we're also incredibly proud to be both Climate Neutral and a B Corp certified. My role within that is as VP of emerging technology. As we scale, both organically and through M&A, we bring on absolutely incredible specialisms within the company And it's my role to make sure that we are keeping all of those sort of unique individuals but also sort of team level offers connected so that when clients come to us, we have the most sort of competitive and compelling emerging tech offer. This year I've helped to launch DEPT AI, which is our AI practice, along with a couple of colleagues like Bob Briskey and Wes Dunno, and really building out how we can make AI more accessible both to Debtsters but also to our clients through sort of education, through very sort of specific service offerings, and it's a pretty incredible year for emerging technology all in all.

Speaker 3: 3:05

Being AI accessible. I love that phrase because I think things like ChatGPT will probably come onto that have made our job a lot easier. Because if you said a year ago, can you explain how AOA works to an executive audience? It's very difficult without some specific use cases. I have a session next week with 16 executives at a Fortune 100 company and I'm going to get them to do this in pre-work. I'm going to get them to play with ChatGPT with some prompts because I want them to see the power of it And I think when you actually see chat interfaces like ChatGPT allow that very easily, people go oh wow, i did not could do that. So I think emerging technology is huge.

Speaker 3: 3:39

The other reason I'm excited to talk to you is I am a technologist at the heart and I grew up as a marketer. The intersection of those I find really, really fascinating And I've sort of kept both parts alive. Obviously, a marketing-owned business As a futures. I've got to stay up to date with all these technologies. But you have a fascinating career. You started your career in architecture, so how do you go from architecture to end up in emerging technology and agency?

Speaker 2: 4:00

I'm so glad you asked that because I still feel very wedded to the world of architecture.

Speaker 2: 4:05

The short answer is that I was lucky enough to present my architecture portfolio to my first boss in the agency world, who saw parallels between designing buildings and designing websites. But I think that the more interesting thing to say about that is actually that architecture is an incredible training for technology, because you have to be able to have a sort of greater vision, articulate that to a client within very, very specific constraints, but also articulate that in a great level of detail to builders, slash engineers, and so there's very few things in a way that could set you up to work in technology so well. And I also think that there's a discussion in the world of architecture at the moment about the death of the architect, and that is around the fact that the role of an architect is getting more and more narrowed over the course of history. And I think that historically, and probably still today, architects are idealists and they want to affect positive change in the world. And actually I think in today's world, if you really want to do that, you work in technology.

Speaker 3: 5:08

I grew up as an engineer so while we didn't have the creative bent, it was more of the nuts and bolts. Engineers are taught to solve problems from first principles And so when you go into a business environment and someone says, how do we fix this? It literally is have you tried turning on and off again? Have you tried re-seeing the business problem? So I think you're right that you're training. The training I've done. It sets you up well and that intersection then comes together. We might even talk about the role of generative AI in architecture, because it's a very creative tool and wondering whether that will change. But we'll park that for the moment. Emerging technologies is your bag and, as you say, you're sort of wrangling all these different technologies that are coming at us. Maybe you could talk about some of the emerging technology you think will have a significant impact, importantly on society in the next five to ten years and how they might impact us on the way we live and work.

Speaker 2: 5:53

The most important emerging technology this year and probably for the next five years is, of course, generative AI. We're at an inflection point and that's arisen in the last maybe six months because people truly understand it because of chat, gpt, but, more broadly, probably in the last 24 months, is the introduction of large language models or foundational models that are built with transformer architecture. Basically, what that allows anyone to do is to take these pre-trained models like GPT-4 or BARD and to fine tune them with your own data sets to create models that are incredibly powerful for your own business needs, and that basically allows you to skip technological generation because you can be as good as your competitors that were that have been building models for the last 20 years. And that is the game changer, and the impact of it is honestly quite hard to articulate because it's so expensive, because, basically, the power of AI is now in the hands of non-technical people In the world of marketing. I'm thinking about it in six areas at the moment that will impact our ability to predict what will work, our ability to plan things. So, whether or not it's using AI to create personas so that we can interview our consumers to build better products In production, it's having a huge impact and I'm sure we'll come on to talk about that in more detail about the creative process from copywriting to creating 3D models and so on, performance, and that's actually impacting websites and products that we're developing across personalization and, of course, process.

Speaker 2: 7:23

But basically AI is going to be completely transforming the existing businesses and creating entirely new ones. That's definitely interesting, but I think the societal impact will actually come at the intersection of augmented reality and AI the release of apples, mixed reality, augmented reality headsets. That will have a much, much bigger impact than AI on society because really AI is going to impact the world of work. If we suddenly have a technology which takes us off our little mobile phones, which have literally taken away one hand, like it's absolutely mad that we're going around with only one hand available to like you live in, because one of them always have a phone in them, that is going to completely transform society. It will usher in the next customer experience, the next way that we're communicating and interacting online. It will mean that we're able to genuinely interact with virtual objects in the physical world. That will be the biggest impact in the next decade.

Speaker 3: 8:24

Just touching on that. So this is not a Metaverse podcast, but we've kind of we've moved into the Metaverse. I think one of the issues with the friction point in Metaversal and augmented reality adoption is that friction between the technology and the real world. We had a taste with Google Glass a few years ago where there was a limited friction point, but everyone I talked to that's a game and says look, i can't wear a headset for more than a couple of hours and it depends on the type of AR VR that you're playing with. That can make you quite disoriented.

Speaker 3: 8:51

Do you think really, the tipping point will be when that friction is removed? I love that explanation that you've got only got one hand free at the moment, if we've got both hands free, but we can see what's happening in front of us. I, as a futurist, i'm going to a blockchain event at EY later today and I wish I could walk into the room and scan the room and technology could tell me which corner of the room I should move to, because they're the more interesting people, because of what it knows about me and the other delegates there, without me having to put my phone up there. Is it the friction point that really is stopping mass adoption, societal change with these augmented technologies?

Speaker 2: 9:23

The biggest myth about the Metaverse is that it's virtual reality and it just isn't like. I think of the Metaverse as 3D real time social experiences. The most important experience will be the one where it is that virtual overlay on the physical world which some people will augment reality, some people call mixed reality. I love the idea of being able to walk into a conference room and be told where to go. Chatgpt now stores all of your past conversations. You will very quickly end up with your personal ChatGPT. It's conceivable that you'll have that same month, like the first 30 years of your life. You'll have 60 years of your life and actually you'd walk into that conference and it wouldn't just tell you where you should go, to which corner. Say, you've met these five people before. This is what you talked about. this is sort of this is your school friend. He might not recognize that because he haven't seen them for 40 years. And I think it's just going to be absolutely extraordinary when you layer on that AI layer with the sort of image recognition into mixed reality experiences.

Speaker 3: 10:27

Well, i must be an AI robot already, because in my contact system I have about 25,000 contacts I've collected over the years going to all these events. I write notes and so there's a note in there about you that packed me with a podcast today. So if we catch up in a couple of years time, oh, isabelle, you're on my podcast. And it's happened a couple of times that have been quite arresting where someone has said literally do you know who I am? I said yes, we did a joint lecture at TAFE in Sydney on this day and he went how did you know that? Because I wrote it down. But it is the power of recall. I think you're right. So, yeah, i'd love AI to be able to do that for me rather than me writing down all his notes, but that's a whole other story. You mentioned their myths, so what's the biggest myth you've heard about AI?

Speaker 2: 11:02

AI is such a black box to so many people and so hard to comprehend until chat TPP made it feel relatable because it was very good at addressing whatever you asked it. I think there are fewer myths than you would expect about AI. The concept of AI hasn't been dictated by science fiction to the degree that I think maybe the metaverse has. The biggest myth, i think, around AI is that it will replace our jobs in the near future. There is no doubt that it is going to disrupt the specifics of tasks within a given role. I think there are a handful of roles that will be replaced very quickly, for example, at depth.

Speaker 2: 11:43

I do think that sort of the role of the QA, for example, is something that AI will impact relatively quickly. It's a bit of a cliche in our saying this. I think it is true that you won't be replaced by AI, but you probably will be replaced by someone using AI. Those people that learn how to do much better at their jobs through this incredible new array of tools are super employees, and the wonderful thing is that that is possible to anyone who is curious or who is creative and who is thinking with an open mind about how to combine different applications at the moment to create something and to make their imagination a reality.

Speaker 3: 12:22

You talk about curiosity as one of my favourite subjects. In fact, i'm writing a book at the moment called Digitally Curious, so I'm wondering what advice you'd have for people listening to podcasts to stay digitally curious and lean forward and understand all these new technologies.

Speaker 2: 12:35

I think the first thing to do is you should list out your role, what you're trying to achieve, the company that you work in, and ask chat GPT what chat GPT thinks you should do. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I personally find that you have a much broader reach of opinions and voices than you do through online publications. The other thing is that you should be trying at least one tool a week. So I actually love Generative AI, which is a LinkedIn profile on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 13:04

I think you have to understand how it impacts your own process and workflow And I would really strongly recommend finding a partner or someone to work with, mapping out one of your common workflows. So, for example, within depth, we create a lot of content. We've done a number of workshops well, we've mapped out through from taking a brief from a client to cost estimates, to coming up to creating ideas, creating content I'm pushing that to paid media platforms and understanding which parts of that process are the most repetitive and have data sets, and then you know spending time with people that are actually able to automate some of that. You should be curious within your own domain, because that's what you're an expert in.

Speaker 3: 13:53

So check GPT. we've mentioned multiple times, so what's the first thing you asked to GPT?

Speaker 2: 13:58

The first thing I ever asked to GPT was actually to summarize a speech I was giving on whether or not AI would replace people's jobs, because I needed a summary of it for a spiel to introduce the lecture. I'm sure that I'm not alone. In the first conversation I had with chat to keep, it was about AI. What was yours?

Speaker 3: 14:18

I think I asked asked who I was. I want to see what I was in the corpus and it actually said I'd written two books I haven't and one, two awards that I haven't either, which I'm very happy about, but I can't fix it.

Speaker 2: 14:28

Well, there's that saying that, if you want to know how good chat to you as you ask it, something you know a lot about And you know that's when the hallucinations start coming out.

Speaker 3: 14:38

Well, one of the prompts I'm going to be asking my executives for next week is to ask it who it thinks their competitors are, because you could do a Google search, but I think when you actually see it as if it's someone is typing it, that's when the power comes, because, again, they all know all I didn't realize that company was a competitor. What are the three or four things I should ask an executive audience that have never used chat GPT before to really see the power of it?

Speaker 2: 15:00

They should ask it to write a three year company vision or strategy for their industry, perhaps relating to how I will distract their industry, because I think it's quite surprising how strategic that can be. You also probably want them to understand that it's really good at research and at pointing people in the right direction, and so you could say something like what are the recent discoveries in my field? What are their priority initiatives within the company? An example of why this is related to my role is I'm at the moment, overseeing our debt wide global education program. We're going to be running a lot of master classes. We're going to be creating videos of those. We need to be storing those videos somewhere. Allowing people to sign up for sessions, allowing people to give feedback and vote for sessions are important, and we've been thinking about where all of that content is held and where that program is run, and thinking about notion or do we use the sales force one or do we use Google Drive?

Speaker 2: 16:10

Anyway, i just asked to have to be teal us like, and it's certainly four amazing products that Do exactly what we needed it to do when I gave it a set of requirements that I have for running an education program, so I would ask it to write a three year vision or strategy for their specific industry. I would ask it to set very specific requirements for a priority initiative that they're running and see what suggestions chat to you. And then the other thing that I think is so cool and what we do is you can basically say, right, i am in this industry, this is my customer, this is various traits and then interview, chat to be teal us though it's your target customer, and then you get actually like incredible responses back that really make you think about the types of priorities that people genuinely have about your product.

Speaker 3: 17:06

So I want to link it back to advertising and marketing and this is a link here. so actually one of the prompts I'm going to ask my executives because one of the businesses they're involved in is the retailers for DIY brands I'm going to ask them to write some copy for a lawnmower and I want them to see how chat GPT would actually for a particular lawnmower, to see how they would sell it. and so the question I want to ask is where are we seeing generally of AI start to impact? and you alluded to a copywriting and the whole process of marketing and advertising. Where will it enhance that and will it be because we can do multiple versions of copy for different networks, different channels, different personas, even down to one to one? I mean, when I did my MBA, the promise was we'd have one to one marketing, but you can't do copy that's individualized easily unless you scale that. Will we see personalized copy and ads graphics for consumers in the near future?

Speaker 2: 17:55

Short answer is yes, but we are limited by what the paid media platform support you will on own channels. I'm sure CRM is about to be massively turned on its head in that respect and we've got some really, really awesome cases, actually in depth already, where we've been using GPT three for the last three years to build incredible personalization. So, for example, for one beauty retailer who's been working with them for the past six years, three years ago we started introducing GPT three powered personalization for Omni channel comms It would be at your grill. He's bought these two products. we can anticipate that this is the next product.

Speaker 2: 18:35

We will apply that across every single channel and we've drove 485% revenue uplift from email, 292% click through rate uplift from email and 66% row us uplift on social. So Mad results and only going to get more powerful. So, yes, we will see more one to one marketing. The limitation will not be the technology, it will be. Is the team ready to adapt to it as a paid media channels ready to adapt to it? is it worth the investment? because actually you're selling a lawn mower Like there's only three reasons why you'd buy that lawn mower you mentioned that there's some of the roles even with your own company may be disrupted.

Speaker 3: 19:13

should creatives be afraid of generate AI or should they learn to embrace it, and how you seeing the reaction of creatives in your own organization to these new tools?

Speaker 2: 19:21

Of course, i don't think they should be scared of this and I actually think what's been pretty extraordinary is creatives and designers have probably been the fastest adopters of AI within depth, because the applications they use, like Adobe or figure or increasingly stable diffusion of the journey In bed AI into their workflow in a way which no one's left wondering what the impact will be. and just to give you an example at depth, we have already, on live client work, used it for visualizing concepts, writing slogans, identifying insights which might make the creating more interesting, replacing stop imagery, upscaling images, training models, 3d scripting, gaming mechanics, ai generated storyboards, text to audio style transfers, text to video. I think, in general, everyone's incredibly excited and has a huge appetite to learn more. I would love depth to be known as a company where AI was really embedded in the culture of like. why you joined the company? because you had the opportunity to learn from the best in the industry in the generative AI creative space.

Speaker 3: 20:31

Sounds like from the campaign. You mentioned the use of AI. You're the kind of pointy end of where AI can be used in agencies. I'm sure there are some people listening today that are in a more traditional agency and going, oh dear, we need to come up to speed with this. So how are you upscaling your people? is it just your role in emerging tech? you mentioned masterclasses. How does an organization, how does an agency, lift the awareness of AI, then lift the engagement and the use of the tools for best effect?

Speaker 2: 20:57

Well, i can only speak for the way depth has done it, but we've, firstly, we've taken it very seriously. I think we expect that 80% of all of our roles will be in some way disrupted by AI within the next 24 months, and that means you have to take it very seriously. But but that also we don't know what the best use cases of those will be without getting it in the hands of every role. So, for example, we might find that actually, hr is disrupted by this most, and so we are taking education incredibly seriously. We are rolling out six initiatives. One of them is a series of masterclasses My goal is to do at least 50 this year and making sure that we have a masterclass which addresses every single person's role. So, for example, i need to work out what the AI masterclasses that transforms the way we do new business outreach, for example.

Speaker 2: 21:54

Right, not just the obvious, what. How do you choose a model? or how's copilot going to impact developing? And to do that, we have to, and have identified individuals across depth, across the four different crafts we have, so engineering, growth, creative and experience who can really be, i guess, figureheads and leaders within the domain? So, for example, there's this incredible guy called Henry Dahlberg. As he's based in the US, he is really leading the way on what we can do with content creation And he has sort of owned what the creative masterclass schedule looks like initially. The only way to get a grip on quite how impactful this is is to split it up into specific areas that people can own, because otherwise it is totally overwhelming, because it's like that film that won the Oscar everything everywhere all at once. So you have to find people that already know what they're talking about and give them the platform and the task of raising the general level of understanding and awareness.

Speaker 3: 22:56

So something I'm writing about at the moment and speaking to people on podcasts a lot about is ethics and AI, and in fact, this morning I just released a podcast which addresses that subject directly. So what ethical issues have you come across already when it comes to creating content with Genome of AI And what are your concerns about ethical issues positive or negative?

Speaker 2: 23:13

Perhaps to start with, what are my concerns? Commercial companies with the very best intentions will only go so far, and that I think that the answer to this needs to be through regulation, and I think that's evidenced in things like the fact that open AI was originally established as an up for profit. If you look at Elon Musk, he fired the head of AI ethics at Twitter, then wrote a letter saying we needed to pause AI development for six months because we didn't have a grip on where it was going, and then founded an open AI competitor about three weeks later. Big picture industry wide. We have to have government regulation and that has to be multinational effort. For a company like Debt I already mentioned RobiCop I think we take being a good company very seriously.

Speaker 2: 23:59

We're early on in establishing a digital ethics board. We have an AI ethics code of principles that addresses things like what our view is on AI in terms of growth, innovation, and we're also establishing guardrails for the company to follow across the blurred lines of legal ethics and information security, and that addresses people's questions like who owns the creation of AI? Can we profit from it? Do we need to be aware of negative bias built into these AI tools And how can we be aware of it? What are the image rights So? for example, can we use artificial images of celebrities if they're not real photographs? Do we need to pay someone for the use of artificial humans in images? Do we need to disclose when we've used AI to our clients, to public? We surveyed all of the debtsters around what they thought about this. People have also asked questions like if I don't participate in AI, will I be recommended? There's a huge number of ethical questions to be addressed Within depth. We're trying to establish those guardrails.

Speaker 3: 25:03

I think every government around the world is scrambling to find out how to regulate this, and the challenge with any emerging technology is the technology and the disruptors move fast in the regulators. I was interested recently the Competition and Markets Authority, the CMA, here in the UK. They look at competitive issues Are you being anti competitive? And they put a paper out basically saying is AI giving people unfair advantage? And I read that thinking it's a bit like saying years ago, if you didn't have a website, then probably you were disadvantaged with someone that didn't could sell products and services. So how do we help the regulators? I mean, you're in the marketing, advertising industry. You have different industry bodies that represent you. What does a body, does your industry, need to do to help the regulators smooth this? Because the issues you raise there image rights, copyright, using someone else's likeness they're very, very compelling issues And their issues I'm sure you're facing every day as you create campaigns and content. How does the industry need to react to this?

Speaker 2: 25:57

The first thing, just only a point around does it give an employer advantage?

Speaker 2: 26:02

I just like to address that because It's not only is it like having a company with a website, i think actually that's the whole point And I think that's what's most exciting about AI, and there was a study on the impact on chat GPT And this is very much the optimist view of this.

Speaker 2: 26:19

But AI will impact people that have not had the best education and have a bigger impact on what they are able to do. If you look at it really simply, if English isn't your first language and you're working in a company where you're expected to write fluent English, chat GPT has now completely sold that for you And I think that actually AI has given everyone an equal advantage And that's why it's so incredible. But to address the question around regulation I apologize, this is kind of starting the question, but I actually think I'm not best placed to answer that, because it's like asking the people that are pushing at the bracket to rein themselves in, and it's really hard to jump between the mindset of how far do we push this and how far is too far, and I think that you need that healthy friction between the sort of the cynical really prefer how I think are in question, and the people that just want to embrace change.

Speaker 3: 27:19

So what's the campaign you're most proud of where you've been involved, and it's involved some sort of AI technology.

Speaker 2: 27:25

At depth. We offer three things in this space. So we build AI, we run AI and we use AI. And within building AI, the project that I think I'm most proud of from when they're in depth is the project that I mentioned already, which was using personalization to drive incredible results. In terms of running AI, what that really means is we have ML Ops teams who sit within clients companies and actually enable them to fine tune their own models or build their own models from scratch. We work with some of the largest tech companies in the world to do this And, as you can imagine, they are quite confidential and I'll work with them, but it's pretty extraordinary to have helped some of the largest tech companies in the world to align all of their AI model development And in terms of using AI, what we have done here is a lot of the creative technology work we do So.

Speaker 2: 28:20

For example, we have built models that have steered cargo ships into dock. We've built chatbots for Facebook, for business, that reduce customer service requests by 80%. We've reduced the cost of creating assets for just by 400% through automation and now integrating AI into QA, for example, and I think the team that I work most closely with in London has done some really incredible AI work, including driving over 7 billion views from our AR and for ASOS and also driving over a million orders for just eat through AR.

Speaker 3: 28:56

We've talked a lot about AI. You're looking at emerging technology What's over the horizon And you can't mention the word AI, web three, metaverse, NFT or crypto. What's a technology that's emerging that we haven't heard about yet?

Speaker 2: 29:10

So this question just makes me realise to what extent I'm in an echo chamber on those. I think one of the most amazing technological advancements that I've seen recently and most of them are in biotech. What it's worth is the fact that we're now exploring 3D printing organs, So 3D printing lungs specifically. I think there's over 140,000 organ transplants a year globally And that's probably just a fraction of the number of organ transplants that we actually need, And the fact that we're making such incredible headway into growing organs is absolutely extraordinary.

Speaker 3: 29:48

How do you keep up to date with all the latest things that are happening? There's only so many hours in the day. How do you stay up to date with this compelling, fascinating world of emerging technology?

Speaker 2: 29:59

I'm very lucky to work with colleagues who keep me in check. I definitely have collectives that are groups of people, so there's about 500 people in different AI collectives around the company where we have a really healthy debate and culture of sharing inspiration and articles and prototypes. So that's immensely valuable. And we've actually built an AI tool called Depdaly which surveys all of the industry news to send four important updates every day And that was like an early use of AI within the company. And then in terms of where I actually read, so to be honest, i don't have enough sources of news, but there's so much out there that I kind of rely on things I really trust. So news articles like Stratekery. I love Andrew Sthorovitz's content. I really love MIT Technology Review because it has a pretty bleeding edge coverage of the technologies which will impact depth and our industry perhaps in a year or two.

Speaker 3: 30:57

Yeah, shout out to MIT Technology Review. I've been subscribing to that for years and it really is. It's well written. It's the economist of the technology world, I would say.

Speaker 2: 31:04

Yeah, it's absolutely phenomenal And they're doing some really really good coverage on AI and chat GPT, which are great, because chat GPT is obviously, so I just rate that they're covering it, even though it's almost part of culture now.

Speaker 3: 31:20

So if you were someone about to leave school and wanted to look at advertising marketing as a career, i'm sure a few years ago you and I would have given them different advice about those sort of subjects they might want to study or where they should look. What's the advertising marketing intern executive of the future? What skills do they need to come to depth with, and where are you seeing that you're sourcing talent from, and are they AI ready?

Speaker 2: 31:42

I think what AI will do is turn more people into strategists.

Speaker 2: 31:48

If you look at the role of a developer and how that is changing with AI, it is highly likely that developers will code less and act like product managers more over the next few years, because tools like various co-pilots will do the actual programming for developers.

Speaker 2: 32:12

That is probably going to be reflected in a lot of different roles that you might typically find in the technology and marketing agency. So for a creative, actually, you will no longer necessarily need a designer and a creative and a copywriter and a motion designer to work in a small team. You might have one creative who's comfortable using a combination of mid-journey and the next evolution of chat dpt to own the full creative process. And with that in mind, i think that an intern coming into debt or an entry-level role needs to have the ability to think strategically, to be very autonomous, to be curious in investigating and experimenting and also, really importantly, critical thinking, because we are heading into a world where Genetic AI is basically made an abundance of creativity and it's important for individuals to be able to assess what the real value and where the line of truth lies and to be able to think critically about that.

Speaker 3: 33:29

I love talking to my podcast guests because you always make me think and as you were talking there, i was thinking about your answer and I actually wrote down creative thinking as a skill. It sounds like we're going to need more thinkers and less doers, because the doing will be done for us. That's not such a bad thing, because I would like to think that AI will remove the moneyute of some of our roles and we can think more creatively, but that means we're going to have to educate, design, promote, encourage people to think creatively. I would argue that some of the tools we have today remove that because it does it for us.

Speaker 3: 33:59

Suzie Allegrae, who was also on the podcast we need time to think There, was famous I think it was attributed to Steve Jobs who said that if all these websites and social media networks were around 30 years ago, nothing would have been developed because we've all been distracted. I love the link between Suzie's podcast and yours because we need the time and the power to think, because some of the moneyute will be done for us. Maybe that's a good thing. What are you most looking forward to about AI in the next five years?

Speaker 2: 34:24

Studio 10, which is IKEA's mini emerging tech think tank, almost released this brilliant video, which highlighted the fact that we are heading to a period of great abundance of generation, and in times of abundance, new forms of scarcity arise, and their point was that creativity is going to be the most valuable skill set in the next five years. And they do this brilliant parallel with the introduction of the camera in sort of the 1800s, and how? because that could capture reality. It meant that the role of an artist that had basically just become capable of painting in photorealistic detail was completely disrupted and it spawned modern art as we know it, and I think that we will see a similar shift with the introduction of AI, hopefully in the next five years. Maybe it'll take a generation where the role of a creative is turned on its head, because we have those tools at our fingertips and it's impossible to say right now what that will look like.

Speaker 3: 35:33

So exciting times ahead. One of our final questions before we go to the quickfire round What's next for generative AI in the marketing and advertising space?

Speaker 2: 35:41

Generative AI is going to completely disrupt our workflow. I think I've mentioned already so many different ways in which it's changing the creative process, but it's also going to completely disrupt the way that we are building websites and applications and products for consumers to engage on. And that is because, within depth, my colleague, bob Brisky I mentioned already has coined a term semantic linking to define the way we're going to be turning relationships on their heads in the way that we're building these things, because we are no longer building products that are basically linked through keywords or through hyperlinks. We can build maps of understanding. It's going to completely transform the way we're building recommendation engines. It's going to transform the way we're doing search and discovery on websites. It's going to transform the way that we can build content marketing understanding the history of a customer's interactions with a given brand.

Speaker 3: 36:39

So we're almost out of time. We're now to my favorite part of the show, the quickfire round, where we learn a little bit more about our guests. So are you ready? Yes, iphone or Android, iphone Window or aisle Window In the room or in the metaverse In the room.

Speaker 2: 36:52

Sorry, metaverse.

Speaker 3: 36:53

Your biggest hope for this year and next.

Speaker 2: 36:55

This year I hope that depth becomes known for cultivating a industry leading culture for AI education amongst our depthsters, and next year I hope that the Apple headset comes out and transforms the way that we build applications.

Speaker 3: 37:10

I wish that AI could do all of my laundry. The app you use most on your phone.

Speaker 2: 37:15

WhatsApp.

Speaker 3: 37:16

The best piece of advice you've ever received.

Speaker 2: 37:18

People who have incredible attitude and terrible attitude need all the training in the world. People who have incredible attitude and attitude need all the responsibilities in the world. And people with incredible attitude and a terrible attitude a poison ivy And you just have to get rid of them on your team.

Speaker 3: 37:37

What are you reading at the moment?

Speaker 2: 37:38

I've just finished Robert K Massey's Nicholas and Alexandra, which is a book about the last emperor and empress of Russia, and I've just started Miss Pettigrewd's for a day after a chat. GPT recommendation based on other books that I like.

Speaker 3: 37:52

Who should I invite next onto the podcast?

Speaker 2: 37:54

A friend called Marie Yerkovich who is working in biotech on a team set up by Jeffrey von Boltson. I'm looking into the sort of oral dispensation of medicine.

Speaker 3: 38:07

And how do you want to be remembered?

Speaker 2: 38:09

As a really good mum, but also doing things that have never been done before.

Speaker 3: 38:13

So, as this is the actionable futures podcast, what three actionable things should our audience do today when it comes to better understanding the opportunities and threats from AI?

Speaker 2: 38:23

First thing, ask chat GPT the same question with specifics about your role and the company that you work in. Second thing, plot your typical workflows and identify the areas with a lot of data. Or, even better, ask the most technically minded person in your company to spend a week performing all of the different roles within that workflow to work out how they could be automated away, and spend three hours reading about this in a number of sort of example websites that I've already mentioned and choosing one tool a week to try. That applies to something that you do in your role.

Speaker 3: 39:00

Isabel, a fascinating discussion. You've got an amazing role. How can people find out more about you and your work?

Speaker 2: 39:04

Best places to follow me or add me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 3: 39:08

Thanks, isabel, great discussion and thanks so much for your time today.

Speaker 2: 39:10

Thank you so much, Andrew. Really really lovely to chat.

Speaker 1: 39:14

Thank you for listening to the actionable futurist podcast. You can find all of our previous shows at actionablefuturistcom and if you like what you've heard on the show, please consider subscribing via your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. You can find out more about Andrew and how he helps corporates navigate a disruptive digital wealth, with keynote speeches and C-suite workshops delivered in person or virtually at actionablefuturistcom. Until next time, this has been the actionable futurist podcast.