At Fifth Ring we’ve been speaking with dozens of marketing leaders over the past couple of weeks, and AI always comes up. From HubSpot Gold Partner workshops, The Drum Predictions and our own Predictive Revenue events in Houston and Singapore, everyone seems interested, threatened, excited by and bored of AI in equal measure.
There is an AI trap that I suspect many leaders are currently circling, if not falling into already.
Mention AI or GPT and people think about dropping a prompt into a chat window and seeing a written response, or a generated image.
The trap? Assuming that this will continue to be the way our people use AI. Because it won’t be. It will disappear as quickly as fidget spinners did. Any day now. I promise.
AI will take two primary forms in the next wave, neither of them looking much like a chat window.
The first will be largely invisible – simply improved functionality within the tools we already know. It will look like a new menu item in Illustrator that performs an optimisation on your layers. It will be a new button in PowerPoint that checks your presentation against brand guidelines and fixes formatting infringements, or enforces corporate messaging rules automatically.
AI behind the scenes. Presented as a useful integrated part of the tool.
The second will have a face, just like a colleague in Teams. A friendly avatar that we get to know, and trust. It will be an agent that we train, rather than prompt. It will fulfil a role, rather than complete a task. It will be always on. And will in many ways turn the world on its head and ‘prompt’ it’s human colleague (you) to act on its behalf. Bridging the gap back to the real world. It will probably have a name. Like Bob, or Lars.
Neither of these will be called AI. They’ll be features, agents, and assistants.
If you commit too early and too hard to an AI strategy of “make sure our people are great at using ChatGPT” you will burn a lot of time, money, and energy getting really good at a short-lived technology.
Think of it like training your people to operate a fax machine, when you could be training them to write a compelling message. Which of those is still useful to you in the age of email and Teams?
Focus on the underlying technology, principles and opportunity. Reconsider how you work in the age of AI. Challenge your teams to harness the real potential of AI, not just to learn a few prompting tricks in ChatGPT that churn out some emails.
