By Francesco Pagano, Senior Partner, Jakala
I am a consultant, so my job is to give advice. I have a piece of advice for you. Buckle up. Stay strong. The world is about to change, completely, and it’s all because of Artificial Intelligence. The world will not be the same anymore. This piece was, actually, massaged by AI. I have been trained by AI on AI. What is the role of a human, when AI can take most of what I do? Consulting can be easily automated. What will be our business, as humans, in the future?
There is hope, as we will see at the end. AI is an old technology. In 1956, in Darmouth, in the USA, the best minds of computer science gathered to create an intelligence that could perform like a human, almost without even noticing that you would be interacting with a machine, which is exactly the so-called Touring Test. Fast forward 70 years, and this technology does everything better than we can. Everything. AI will take our jobs. AI is better than any human being, for sure better than any man.
Two examples, from B2C and B2B.
Content creation. We do content creation for social media, based on Gen AI. What’s different?
- Production costs go down exponentially, as everything is done digitally by a machine. We never went to Cuba, for example, to film giants coconuts falling from the sky into an ocean of tequila. Now we can.
- Content becomes better and better overtime, as AI understands what fans like and want to see more of, and maximizes their enjoyment. This is “upper funnel” made just for you, customized to fans’ characteristics. This is the so-called Marketing of one. Only for you. Progressively becoming better at convincing you and converting you. Does it work, you may ask? Yes, with double digit improvement in impact.
- The people you see are now not real. I don’t pay any more human talent. It’s one of the most expensive things in Marketing production, and now it comes for free.
- I now have a powerful ability to immerse my audience into a world made, for example, of stones, jewels, complications, and so forth. As another example, IWC won the Augille D’Or this year, in Geneva. The watch has over 400 complications. This masterpiece would be impossible to film, in all of its features, without AI. Please, immerse me into a world made of maitrise, details, wheels and movements, which I could not highlight with normal, traditional production.
Retail. Now, let’s move from digital to hybrid, digital & physical marketing. Introducing an AI-powered store assistant. An AI ppowered intelligent assistant provides the store sales assistant with a description of the customer’s history, suggesting actions to personalize the experience itself, based on their characteristics and interests, recommending products from the collection that meet their tastes and needs. AI allows you to query all the knowledge a company has about the client through CRM, folders, internal systems, and receive an automated “meeting preparation script.”
This can be used also for customer service and post sales service, too. Usually customer information sits in people’s whatsapp and mobiles, various files, folders. Plus, different regions have different data lakes. When a sales associate leaves the brand, a whole piece of the database is gone, forever. Not anymore.
E-commerce. In the old days, you would need to pick what you want to shoot – the hero item for the campaign, and you were limited in your choice, human models, pictures and budget. Now you can change your ecommerce and webshop every day, and build a story, pictures and videos, for every piece, thousands of items. This is endless combinations of communication to fans.
- Managers can manage every stage of the creative process within the same platform, without compromising on performance.
- The most advanced technologies are integrated in plug & play mode, ensuring constant access to the best GenAI models. This is updated over the air.
- Each brand can make the platform unique and inimitable by integrating proprietary data and assets and training models to preserve the identity, heritage, and exclusivity of its brand.
- The main features of the platform? Near real-time generation of photos and videos from images or technical files of clothes and models.
And, this is B2B. Imagine when we turn this to B2C, and fans will be able to craft their favorite branded website.
This is only the beginning. Now, is there hope? Is AI going to take our job completely, and decide for us? Yes, it will! But what’s our job, as humans?
Let’s step back and understand now what we do with AI. What we can do with AI.
- It’s never about technology. It’s about new knowledge. The interaction with our consumers, with our fans, is made to sell. To sell more, of course. That’s right. What we need to do, progressively, is to switch from a selling culture to a data culture. The more we know about our fans, the better products we can make, the better service we can provide, the longer is the solidity of our business. We are in the business of products and data. We are in the business of using data, to serve fans, employees, communities and shareholders. These decisions are enabled by AI, not taken by machines.
- It’s never about business. It’s about sharing, making that knowledge social capital. For the first time in history, we can have a personalized dialogue with fans, one to one. For the first time in history, the brand history is intertwined with the history of every single one of our fans. Our job is to create value for everyone, so that fans will be our best ambassadors, our marketing department. AI will help us include them in our branded story. You are going to be surprised by how much fans want to contribute, if you let them. It’s their brand. It was never your Brand, Mr. Kevin Roberts, or Mr. Lovemark.
- It’s never about leading. It’s about challenging, always. Our only job as humans is discontinuity. Our job as humans is to imagine a different future. Like the future that Coco Chanel imagined for women, thanks to her tailleur. The tailluer says something different about women and gives them a uniform for their new role in society, which is not confined to the bedroom and the kitchen. As a human manager, you must find a mission for your Brand. What do you want your Brand to change in the world, in your fans’ lives, and how? AI will help you deploy your mission across all touchpoints, talking to fans one by one.
What’s your business? Just one. As AI will help us do our current job better and better, my wish for all of us, humans, is to be knowledge seekers, social capitalists and challengers. Always.
