Sept. 29, 2023 4:38 PM PT
Every business leader can tell you about the game-changing decisions they have made that were pivotal to the company’s success or failure.
Artificial Intelligence is pushing us to that decision point, presenting us with opportunities to completely rethink our entire way of doing business.
Currently, we see artificial intelligence used in a creative space to fabricate content in the form of words and images to the delight of users. But AI’s prediction capabilities offer a paradigm shift to how we do business. When we decide to seize it.
The decision is ours to make. And make no mistake – indecision is a decision.
Where to start? Perhaps in how we consider AI. At its core, artificial intelligence is human judgment encoded together with prediction machines. It has the ability to comprehend beyond the limits of a single human brain, examining huge swaths of data and seeing patterns in many dimensions all at once to enable a prediction of what is likely to happen next.
ChatGPT uses prediction machines for language, ones that can predict sequences of words we’d expect to see. The innovation of ChatGPT is not just the intelligence itself – stock traders were early adopters of prediction: quantitative trading has been going on for decades, resulting in massive wealth growth for quantitative hedge funds. In this case, trading strategies were based on forecasting the future and clever sources of data that gave unique advantages to those that discovered it, for example data inputs such as price and volume identified trading opportunities when paired with information from satellite maps detailing shipping supply of fossil fuels, grains, automobiles and more indicating the arrival of commodities and goods around major ports of commerce.
What makes ChatGPT, Midjourney and other artificial intelligence prediction machines different is their accessibility. Prediction is becoming more accessible, less expensive, and more ubiquitous. And that is why the time for a rethink is here.
The complete shift in how marketers view AI isn’t in content creation – that’s merely a tweak within the existing business model.
Business models in marketing, advertising and related technology are significantly and rapidly evolving. Many agencies and consultancies have built their business around human hours. AI significantly reduces the hours and energy it takes to produce and consequently lowers the price we pay for it. Economic theory dictates that the market sees prices go down, quality go up, and output increase. This, in turn, forces business revenue models tied to human labor to rethink how it operates and captures value for its proprietary AI enabled differentiators. But this is not merely about using AI to tweak an existing process.
Innovation isn’t just about using the next best technology to do the same old stuff. It’s about changing the entire way something is produced or even better produces something never considered possible leading to entirely new businesses. Electricity decentralized the factory, led to scalable production lines that made automobiles, aircraft, and marine shipping ubiquitous making way for the likes of Ford, FedEx or Maersk.
If you open a good business text defining marketing, it talks about all the things that we do to bring a particular product or service to potential buyers in the marketplace. Say that out loud, what we typically think of as marketing starts to sound more like a supply chain. Those ideas aren’t too separate. Yes there is a supply chain, but that supply chain exists in the construct of marketing. There isn’t a supply chain without the value proposition.
Then there are things that you’re doing all along the way to achieve that delivery of product or service to individual consumption. And that’s the domain in which we can think about AI making better and altogether new things.
Artificial Intelligence enables marketers to deliver better products and services faster at a lower cost. That’s what the most valuable businesses do in today’s market. Cheap predictions deliver the data needed to achieve this type of innovation and lead to better outcomes. This is because artificial intelligence taps into creation beyond human limits, in fact it’s like the unification of a limitless set of brains. Consider again seeing patterns in huge swaths of data – quickly, and in real time, for negligible costs.
Great marketing uses artificial intelligence to predict and deliver what customers value, with large and complex models that recognize the individual demand of each customer in their moments of demand.
On the other hand, opportunities in business performance and company value are driven by how we reorganize around new possibilities, just like the entrepreneurs that realized the bigger opportunities electricity unlocks. AI is not merely a tool to help create outputs – it offers massive opportunities for the decentralization and the optimization of marketing.
We need to consider how business should organize around AI, enabling new technologies, workflows and user experiences, and I expect AI can help us achieve that in ways that offer environmental sustainability and equitable human opportunity. The best Marketers and entrepreneurs, will make companies more valuable with innovative business models and operations while they simultaneously incorporate sustainability and human equality goals with limitless AI.
It’s a watershed moment for business leaders to make an impact on the earth, its well being, and human prosperity.
-Michael Cohen, Global Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Plus Company
macohen.net
