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What is the likely impact of AI and GenAI in particular on jobs, especially in Europe? Two recent reports on the topic, one in the UK and another one in France shed light on this question. According to the French report, such impact could amount to 5%. Yet another case for precision vs accuracy. That figure seems counter-intuitive when so many self-proclaimed AI gurus, especially on LinkedIn, are hailing the GenAI “revolution“. Besides, the authors of the UK report don’t agree at all with that. As ChatGPT would have it, let’s “delve” into those reports and find out more.

Our own empirical analysis suggests a positive effect of AI on employment in companies that adopt AI, because AI replaces tasks, not jobs. In 19 out of 20 jobs, there are tasks that AI cannot perform. Jobs that can be directly replaced by AI would therefore represent only 5% of jobs in a country like France. What’s more, the generalisation of AI will spur job creations, in new occupations as in old ones. To sum it all up, some industries or geographies could experience net job losses, therefore requiring Government support, but this does not mean that AI will have an overarching negative effect on national employment in France.

French Commission on Artificial Intelligence report, March 2024 – p. 41

I often talk to young students from all areas about the impact of GenAI on jobs and careers. I often sense a bit of reticence and even anxiety in them at a time when young adults are still asking themselves many questions about the future and aren’t necessarily clearly determined about what they want to do in the future. Beyond that, the current state of hype around GenAI further blurs these students’ vision by making them feel the weight of an uncertainty that is already difficult for some to stomach.

Almost 40 percent of global employment is exposed to AI, with advanced economies at greater risk but also better poised to exploit AI benefits than emerging market and developing economies. In advanced economies, about 60 percent of jobs are exposed to AI, due to prevalence of cognitive-task-oriented jobs. A new measure of potential AI complementarity suggests that, of these, about half may be negatively affected by AI, while the rest could benefit from enhanced productivity through AI integration.

IMF 2024 report on AI and the impact on employment and the future of work

The British government has also published a report on this subject. Its more task-oriented approach is a little more nuanced, but still fairly unappealing.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are likely to have a profound and widespread effect on the UK economy and society, though the precise nature and speed of this effect is uncertain. It has been estimated that 10-30% of jobs are automatable with AI having the potential to increase productivity and create new high-value jobs in the UK.

Gov.uk report on the impact of AI on jobs, Nov 2023

It’s worthy of note, however, that the authors are resorting a great deal to the conditional tense. This undoubtedly urges us to interpret these results with caution.

The French report is much more nuanced and refers to a large number of interesting studies, starting with the one by Antonin Bergeaud (an economist and professor at the Paris H. E. C. School of Management), from which I extracted an important schematic.

The approach of the French report makes a clear distinction between GenAI and AI, and even automation in the broad sense (i.e. aimed at the manufacturing industry). It’s a distinction that seems crucial to me, given the many misconceptions linked to the measuring of the impact of AI. Which AI? Generative AI? Machine Learning, deep learning, neural networks? Or even just plain good old IT, unless we are mentioning robotisation, automated supply chains…

In short, AI is everything and everything is AI. That seems to me a silver bullet for generating panic among the general public and especially young students who are trying to find their way in the future.

The French report is therefore more precise than the others I’ve read, in that it makes a clear distinction between GenAI and the others. It is also focusing on tasks rather than jobs. This approach has also been that of the British government.

This approach using the exposure of tasks, vs jobs, to GenAI makes it possible to estimate aggregate effects at the level of the economy as a whole, and to allow comparisons between countries. However, it has several limitations. Here are the two main ones. On the one hand, it is a static approach: the studies are based on existing tasks and therefore do not take account those tasks that could be created as a result of the development of AI […] On the other hand, it is based on an estimate of the probability of different tasks being replaced by AI (see above diagram).

In short, even if you think it’s a better approach, thinking of the impact of AI in terms of tasks isn’t really possible. It’s like painting a picture of a landscape from the window of your intercity train at 100 miles per hour. On top of that the painter has left his glasses at home and is therefore making assumptions about whether he should add cows, or sheep, in the meadow in his painting.

[…] overall, the deployment of AI in the economy should have a positive effect on the number of jobs. Catastrophic predictions about the end of work are no more credible than similar predictions made in the past. Especially as even the task-based approach represents the upper limit for the impact of AI. Indeed, it makes the assumption that it is profitable to automate all the tasks that can be automated. But this assumption is far from being true today. The diminishing cost of AI systems and the possibility of distributing the same AI system to a very large number of users will be key factors in determining the impact of GenAI on tasks and jobs.

Antonin Bergeaud

In conclusion, if the result is not negative, it must be positive, even if it is undoubtedly just as difficult to prove as the opposite.

As for the 5% figure announced in the French report (see the quote above), I suppose it should be taken as an order of magnitude. There is a nuance added to the report in that respect. The authors mention that these 5% may vary from one occupation to another. What I take from this is that for the vast majority of occupations, this figure of 5%, is probably not to be taken at face value. Some occupations will not be affected by artificial intelligence at all, especially generative artificial intelligence. This doesn’t come as a shock to us. It takes us back to our work on jobs in 2030, where we already showed the prevalence of non-automatable occupations (surface technicians and others) in the most sought-after professions.

Occupations that are apparently easy to automate, such as bookkeeping, for example (if we fail to take its more consultancy-like aspects into account) have been on the chopping block for years. But despite the doomsday predictions, including our own, it has to be said today that the jobs of chartered accountants remain among the most in demand.

Yet all the technology is available to automate both bean counters’ tasks and data transmission. Nowadays, almost all invoices are dematerialised even though they are only unstructured PDF files. And yet most of the work of accountants remains manual whether we like it or not. Whether it’s ticking boxes between reconciliation systems or copying figures into a general ledger. The change lies mainly in the declining technical nature of the job.

Ditto for banking. Experts have been naming banks dinosaurs for years. Here again, we have to make amends. And yet there have been many restructurings, and they didn’t wait for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its clones. But here’s the thing: changes don’t happen overnight. Besides innovation in organisations isn’t governed by wizardry but resistance to change.

Finally, let’s return to an occupation that was in the top left-hand corner of Antonin Bergeaud’s schematic. I mean that of secretaries. An occupation that has already been largely transformed since the 1990s. It has also been steadily declining to the point of disappearance at least in the United States (they only amount to a fraction of European employees now, i.e. a small proportion of 19% of all jobs). And yet, the impact of artificial intelligence between the 1980s and the year 2000 was bound to be close to zero. I should know, I was in charge of an AI project in those days. In that same period, though, I witnessed and even played an active role in the boom of the deployment of IT in businesses.

We therefore need to get back to these forecasts with a critical look. Starting with those of the IMF. And this report by the French Committee on Artificial Intelligence deserves credit for playing down the most hairy-fairy statistics on this subject.

In conclusion, after reading all these reports, the future isn’t any more predictable than it was before that. We might even venture to say that we are even more confused. Admittedly, as the authors of the French report point out, we are already seeing, and will continue to see, employees that are made redundant in professions where business models are already being jeopardised by ICTs, such as journalism.

But is this sufficient for us to reckon that what we are going through today is a “revolution” in terms of employment? There are no indications on this. All we could surmise is that a minority of jobs will be hit — be it 5%, less or more.

Time will tell whether this figure or that of the International Monetary Fund was the right one, but I’m inclined to believe that the ballpark figure quoted by the French Artificial Intelligence Commission is closer to reality.

Finally, to end on an intellectual note, let’s quote Vaclav Smil in his book Numbers don’t lie.

Being realistic about innovation

Modern societies are obsessed with innovation.

We are to believe that innovation will open every conceivable door: to life expectancies far beyond 100 years, to the merging of human and machine consciousness, to essentially free solar energy.

This uncritical genuflection before the altar of innovation is wrong on two counts: It ignores those big, fundamental quests that have failed after spending huge sums on research.

And it has little to say about why we so often stick to an inferior practice even when we know there’s a superior course of action.

Vaclav Smil, Numbers don’t lie

It’s this last sentence that I think is important. All forecasting exercises start from an assumption: that which state that when a technology improves our lives, it’s bound to be implemented.

It may seem like a no-brainer at first glance. What I have learned in the field throughout my career, however, is that when a solution is better, especially when it is better, resistance to change is all the greater. And it’s rarely the most obvious and cost-effective solutions that win. Especially because human decisions are seldom rational.

Thus, assuming that generative AI is without contest a boon to productivity gains, a theory I’m not at all sure I buy into, it would be wrong to believe that the mere fact that it exists guarantees its rapid and universal implementation.

Here again, time will be of the essence.

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Thomas Deneux is the founder of Learning Robots whose aim is to help pupils, students and businesses to learn AI, with the help of home-made self-driving gizmos. These little machines on two wheels are more serious than you’d think. They are all about the teaching of advanced computing. Thomas described his philosophy to me during this interview conducted at the heart of the Neuroscience Institute of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research). In essence, a no-nonsense approach to teaching and learning AI. 

We’re overwhelmed with social media posts and news about AI. Often, pundits will tell you that you need to know how to use ChatGPT and make prompts. That’s all very well, but we must free ourselves from the tech giants who build these models.

At Learning robots, we want to spark vocations among people who are interested in finding out how it works and want to use AI better.

What is artificial intelligence anyway? AI gave birth to these fantastic tools and programs. Yet, at the same time many people are scared. Our aim, with these user-trained robots, is to make AI accessible and friendly.

In our introductory activities, the user drives a robot as if it were a remote-controlled car. But behind this robot is an AI that will record all the necessary data. Next, the robot takes over from the user in autopilot mode and drives around the circuit.

Then we organise a race between the robots that have become autonomous in this way, and users may therefore observe that not all of them will perform equally well. It’s natural because performance depends on the quality of the training.

The aim is to make people understand that AI machines do not become “intelligent” out of the blue.

Behind AI, there are humans who have gathered data. And AI will only be as good as its data.

Today’s AI is still at the stage where it reproduces patterns. It’s a mere “stochastic parrot“.

In the early days of AI, there were expert systems, which worked with ever more sophisticated knowledge bases. Then we realised that rather than predicting all the potential situations, we could simply feed the AI with samples based on existing data sets and implement self-learning algorithms.

With large language models (LLMs), humongous quantities of text have become available. So much so that AI has become capable of generating text by itself. But the principle is the same: the basis is those samples provided by humans.

With AlphaAI, everything is very simple. A sensor will tell the machine what to do, for example turn left when there is light on the left. Or turn right when there is light on the right-hand side. This helps users understand the basics. After that, it’s just a matter of scaling up to more advanced AI.

When you interact with a Large Language Model (LLM), you are essentially producing text, even though you could also generate images, music, videos, etc.

Robotics is the future of AI

But what I see emerging is that the future of AI is about robotics. The Figure start-up has just raised $675 million and has signed agreements with OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia to develop humanoid robots. It’s flavour of the month. Our role is not to enter this competition, however.

Our vocation is educational. We want everyone to be able to get to grips with these technologies.

Our aim is to enable people to train their own AI, so that they can easily develop their own ideas, such as home automation projects for instance. And also make AI accessible to SMEs. Our development plans could evolve in the future to move away from teaching and training, towards a plug and play solution for introducing AI and automation into the business world.

I’m a technophile, yet I’m not at all a techno enthusiast. I think there are some really pertinent questions being asked. And that’s why I think we need to focus on training and education.

We need to keep as many people as possible informed, to debunk all the myths about AI.

Let me tell you about an anecdote.

We work with a well-known luxury goods company in Paris, France, for whom we run autonomous robot races. Their employees train their robots for the race. The first feedback from learners on these training courses is: “I’ve realised how much AI is fun!”

It’s true that digital tools also have their downsides, such as creating addictions. But if you get to grips with them, you can achieve great results.

We need to evangelise about AI adoption, there are so many exciting potential applications for it.

I’m involved in a number of AI think tanks and I’ve realised that what the general public expects from researchers is to be told what the future will be. In fact, it’s very hard to predict the future. Innovation is about trial and error. Sometimes its adoption is faster than we think, at other times it’s not.

Always the unexpected happens.

I think so. We’re already seeing it in the home construction business. Tomorrow, it’s very likely that AIs will be performing a certain number of tasks. However, I hope there will still be room for humans’ creative skills.

For instance, manmade products are highly valued by consumers these days. Mass-producing widgets is easy. But creating something unique is more rewarding.

There will always be room for human creativity.

I think so. Some people are depressed because they think they are going to be dominated by AI. But look at self-driving cars: they were supposed to be ubiquitous by 2010, and it didn’t happen.

But we shouldn’t be wearing our rose-coloured spectacles either.

Both citizens and politicians need to get to grips with the issues related to AI. As far as I am concerned, I remain optimistic about what can be achieved with these tools.

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Walking down the roads of strategic thinking for professional networking or business building, most of us would agree to name LinkedIn as a well-built pathway to tread on. What’s better than understanding the dynamics of LinkedIn as a professional networking platform from someone who trains consultants and is an expert regarding that platform. Daniel Alfon from Tel Aviv wrote the book entitled, “How to Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success“. For most of us in the B2B marketing or consulting space, it’s a great read on what LinkedIn has become and where it’s going. I interviewed Daniel to find out about the future of LinkedIn, and of business networking at large.

LinkedIn is what you want it to be for your business. If you’re a hypergrowth company and all, you’re interested in is finding talent, then you should focus on sharing jobs and ensuring that your existing employees are using their network to tap into candidates. If you are a content publisher or a marketer, then you should focus on the networking aspect of it.

The strength of LinkedIn simply comes from deciding what you would like to leverage the platform for.

This simple, straightforward question is one that a lot of LinkedIn users do not ask themselves. What is your top marketing priority: recruiting, publishing or getting more views? Or, do you need referrals?

It could be that you went there almost exclusively for publishing content, but now you could use it for networking. If your marketing department is producing high-quality content, then leveraging LinkedIn to get more exposure for it is a great idea. It requires some coordination, and it can’t be top down.

One way to look at it is at the top of the funnel. Transactions would not happen on LinkedIn. However, it could be the platform where more people are made aware of your solution via a webinar or a demo. Then, they get in touch or something else happens outside of LinkedIn.

You want people to find your solution, and within seconds understand that it is something interesting.

When I look at your profile and I see that we have a number of mutual connections, then what I think about those people will affect and influence the way I think of you. If I think highly of them, even if I don’t ask them about that at all, then something of some of the stardust would actually be above your head.

Lately, while I was doing a training session for KPMG, I had mentioned three key points which I think could be relevant. When an employee of your firm shares or likes or comments, there are three dimensions to it. One, he is about the way others perceive that action. Let’s say that we are connected, and I see that you like some content. In many cases, ‘liking’ is perceived to be the lowest trust characteristic of your engagement. It doesn’t mean that you even read it. It could simply be that you like the person who published that content.

Sharing is more valuable in the eyes of many people. But if an employee is doing it, then I would encourage her to not just share, but add something of her own. This could be a sentence with an explanation of why it’s so compelling or interesting or why you disagree with the author’s claim.

So if you decide to share someone else’s content, then that means you think highly of it. It makes sense to take a few more seconds and add your own perspective. Now, it becomes more genuine and interesting for the reader.

The third is the algorithm. Since it is the darkest secret of LinkedIn which it never shares, we are only left with the other two elements. Some inside information says that LinkedIn doesn’t think highly of shares because it considers it as duplicating content, not marketing. Re-shared published content by employees may get limited additional views, whereas if you only liked it or commented about it, LinkedIn will show it to more people.

Let’s say we have an employee who is happy only re-sharing stuff, and does nothing else. Then even in the eyes of the algorithm, it’s not worth showing to five hundred extra people. We would be better leveraging the actions that people are organically willing to do rather than trying to chase the algorithm. It is going to change anyway in the next few days or weeks.

[Visionary Marketing] David Hughes, who has a huge following on LinkedIn, posted something on LinkedIn about what he calls pollution polls. There are polls everywhere. Are we going to have to send polls all the time or are they going to change again? Tell us what does that mean?

It’s so nicely introduced that at one point people are going to be fed up with 99% of the polls. We may have already reached that point.

Let’s focus on being interesting for our B2B customers and audiences. Before we pull the trigger of a poll, we should ask ourselves, why are we sharing this? There could be a number of reasons for it.

Try and suggest a simple flowchart before sharing the poll. Is this content with the question so compelling that many of your connections will feel intrigued to go and see the answer in the vote? I am afraid that most people and content creators will not find it easy to produce such content on a daily or even weekly basis. So, one interesting poll a month or a quarter would give you more engagement than five polls every week.

[VM] People like us put in all our efforts and create a 70-page white paper. But when we post it on LinkedIn, we can’t get a certain number of views unless we insert a poll. When experts are striving, what is your million dollar advice to the average consultant out there?

Let me try and give you a number of nuggets and maybe all of them together will form the million dollar answer. What you should post on LinkedIn is something reverse engineered. In other words, find a quote, highlight an image and you do something that’s more the user-friendly.

People are not necessarily going to consume the content as it is seventy pages. When you try out what I have suggested, you will see that half a dozen interesting quotes or figures or something else is going to fetch a lot more responses and engagement than say, page 43 in the white paper.

When you share a snack piece of content, the idea is not for people to consume it on LinkedIn, but for more people to discover the content itself. Let me suggest two other ways. The initial thought that all of us have is to go to LinkedIn home page and share our fresh content. But when you’ve spent so much time creating it, then there’s another place to house it.

If it is evergreen content, then it could be part made part of your profile – the consultant’s profile. This would ascertain that everyone who would visit your profile shall see that PDF or the cover of that PDF. That alone in the long run, will help you gain more downloads or views than trying to share it across the board. Lastly, if we don’t want to rely on our connections only, then there’s another feature LinkedIn offers: LinkedIn groups.

For every consultant or prospect you are connected with, there could be dozens of other interesting prospects you are not going to connect with, but who could consume that content. Here’s when groups come in handy. Use your profile and your staff’s to highlight evergreen content. Not next week’s webinar, but something that you’ve worked hard for. That could be a way to gain a lot of exposure.

The second idea would be to make sure that everyone in your team is sharing it. That too, should be done at different times.

Should an average consultant or salesperson, who doesn’t work in a team necessarily, go back to networking and square zero and start building a network or a community?

Yes, he should. One can try adopting LinkedIn creative mode, even though that has some problems, or have a connection strategy. Many people don’t have a connection strategy, they merely react. When you send them an invitation, they accept it or not by thinking about it in the short term. Because now I am doing this, so I would accept the invitation. But if six months ago I was into something else, I wouldn’t have.

It’s important to get back to the networking aspect of things. Networking is far more important than LinkedIn in my eyes.

LinkedIn is a formidable and powerful tool for sure. There is no silver bullet, though, no shortcut to run your networking. There’s no way anyone has found on LinkedIn or outside of LinkedIn to make it automated, easy, free and successful. The question about how an average person can differentiate his post from ten thousand other blogs was there before LinkedIn.

So what makes their blog special in the first place? Finding that special niche would mean that the consultant only focuses on maybe one percent of his audience and still be able to make a living.

Everyone should think of themselves as at least a nano-influencer in their specific niche

[VM] So networking is the real issue for an average consultant. He has to realise that one needs to grow a community before he starts selling stuff. You spot an invitation on LinkedIn, and then the person tries to sell stuff immediately afterwards.

Consultants who are able to help or educate their audience are in a better position than others who don’t

I don’t think one should have a LinkedIn personality per se. After all, our personality in real life exists. LinkedIn can, however, reflect the better aspects of one’s professional identity.

But as the saying goes, you can’t fool everyone all the time. In other words, if your LinkedIn personality is all shining bright and people who meet you in a Zoom call or in person think you’re a jerk, then what wins is real life because they will tell everyone about it. When I see that you and I share a mutual connection, then both of us can actually reach out to him and ask pertinent questions about the other person.

If he tells me that I should speak to you, and if I trust him, then even if you LinkedIn profile is nowhere near good, I would still do it. I’m not interested in your LinkedIn presence. I’m interested in you or your business. This information can influence the way people think about you. Eventually, it dictates if they wish to do business with your company or not.

On this note, if I want to wrap up in a few words, at the end of the day, what matters is not how you master LinkedIn. What matters is how good a human being you are. For those of our readers who would like to read more about LinkedIn and succeeding in their business through it, can get their copy of Daniel’s book from Amazon. Happy networking!

The post Networking and Growing Your B2B Business with LinkedIn appeared first on Marketing and Innovation.

What are the most outstanding new features of LinkedIn in 2024? Reid Hoffmann’s professional network was created almost 21 years ago (in May 2003) and acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Visionary Marketing invited Bruno Fridlansky to talk about this platform, of which he is an expert. Together we were able to answer a few basic questions about using the tool and review some of its latest features. It’s worth noting that Bruno isn’t ecstatic about most of them.

We’ve been using LinkedIn professionally for 20 years, a tiny bit less than the age of the application, which will celebrate its 21st birthday in May 2024. Nevertheless, this gives us a lot of hindsight on the use of the leading business-to-business application, which over time has managed to do away with all its competitors.

As a key player in this sector, LinkedIn is a flourishing platform with annual revenues of more than $15 billion. What is particularly remarkable is the rapid growth in recent years of this turnover, which has even almost doubled since 2020.

A business volume that, compared to Microsoft’s total revenues is still small (around 7% of the Redmond firm’s $211 billion), but substantial in the world of social networks, even with a very business-to-business positioning. To give you an idea, it’s just over 10% of Meta’s turnover in 2023, but around 5 times as much as the advertising revenue generated by X in this period.

But beyond these staggering figures, there are a number of questions to be asked.

First of all, there’s the recurring interrogation about “reach”. Many users are wondering how and when their publications will be seen and by whom…

LinkedIn is rich but its reach is poor

A question that is increasingly hard to answer. So much so that the platform seems to be playing a game of cat and mouse with its content creators.

Recently, a large number of the latter has opted for content creation techniques favoured by B2C influencers. Selfies flourished but have been heavily criticised on the B2B network. This trend seems to have been halted, Bruno Fridlansky confirms. Some of us continue to complain that many self-focused publications are still populating their feeds, however. Perhaps the measures put in place by LinkedIn are not being deployed in the same way or at the same time for all users, which seems to be customary according to Bruno.

But that’s not the most important philosophical question: what is a tool made for, and ultimately, in this platform economy, are these social tools at our disposal, or have we become their slaves? Bruno’s answer to this question struck me as particularly apt:

It’s a platform that was originally made available to us but now we are the ones feeding the beast.

Beyond these considerations, most readers are interested in the tool’s new features. No matter how hard we try, repeating over and over again that a tool is just a tool, we might as well bite the bullet. Hence our review with Bruno of the various LinkedIn features that have been added to the tool recently.

LinkedIn added a feature some time ago, a bell icon, that you can activate if you don’t want to miss anything posted by someone you follow. But things aren’t quite as simple as that. First of all, try and click on your 25,000 followers’ bells! Good luck with it. But that’s not all.

The bell doesn’t always work as planned. It’s just supposed to send a notification about a publication. And I’ve seen comments that, when you exceed 20 or 25 bell activations, it grinds to a halt.

The bell won’t solve our reach issue it seems.

Recently, LinkedIn introduced user verification via third party to its users. Bruno, as well as yours truly, has a verified account. This feature, according to Bruno, has not been fully deployed across Europe.

To validate one’s account, one has to enrol with an American-based service that certifies one’s identity. This entity is based outside our European countries. Above all it is vulnerable, like all technological activities, to cyber attacks that could make our confidential information and personal identities visible. It should be noted that this observation applies, and perhaps even more so, to European-based identify verification services such as the Gov.UK ID check app or France Connect + in France and other European equivalents. Just because these services are based in the UK or Europe is no guarantee that they will ever be targeted.

Maybe we could have thought about that before getting our accounts validated. Clicking before thinking is never a good idea and we all fell for it. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to wonder how a cybercriminal could use our identities and steal them to commit a crime.

If I had to do it again, I’m not sure I would. Especially as it is not certain that this functionality will be maintained given the extreme volatility of LinkedIn’s features overtime. However, if the platform decided to link the ability to add contacts to one’s network with this certification (to avoid fake accounts), this would change the overall picture. Nevertheless, one should be able to choose one’s provider and switch to Gov.UK or France connect + or whatever tool promoted by one’s country’s government.

Another feature discussed with Bruno was the ability to reply to collaborative or supposedly collaborative articles. Bruno was very critical of this feature. The questions posed by LinkedIn, which are pushed to users in order to make them believe they could be granted a hypothetical “expert” badge and status, are in fact produced with generative AI.

Bruno even pointed out that some of these questions sometimes missed the point, and especially the rules for using the service. Asking, for example, “How do you ‘scrape’ data from LinkedIn?”

This expert status, while relative, is only temporary, Bruno explains. In short, it’s best to avoid wasting your time. This exercise involves providing content to the platform free of charge and becoming a slave to the social platform, for the benefit of an algorithm. It’s likely that no one will read your publications, which even you will find hard to recover. (Bruno provided a tip to explain how to recover them by logging out, but it was a trifle complicated…)

If I don’t recover the content, I produce so that it is at least visible on my profile, what’s the purpose? At the end of the day, if a subject uncovered in a collaborative article appeals to you, take up the question and deal with it in a post on your profile independently of the “collaborative” article.

A feature not yet deployed in all languages (for instance, it’s not available to French-speaking audiences as we are writing these lines), is the possibility of writing articles or correcting them rather, using artificial intelligence in LinkedIn. Bruno doesn’t see much point in it.

In his opinion, there are enough text-generating AIs here and there to allow you to compose a post without having to resort to a wonky feature inside LinkedIn. But Bruno went on.

If it’s a question of using AI to write something that you will copy and paste into a publication, I consider that to be shooting yourself in the foot. Assuming that the AI makes you a superb publication based on a prompt, what’s going to happen the day we meet in real life?

As a result, you had better waste five minutes of your precious time, so you avoid looking silly later on.

A new feature offered by LinkedIn, is the ability to react to a publication, directly using suggestions offered by artificial intelligence: “Very good comment!”, “I fully agree with you”… Etc. Here again, Bruno’s reaction is rather lukewarm, if not downright negative.

It’s a downward spiral. I agree that LinkedIn members sometimes need encouragement to speak up and post comments, but providing such ready-made answers is bad. It reminds me of “LinkedIn pods at their worst”.

The ability to write newsletters directly in LinkedIn has been available for a few years. It has had its ups and downs, with the platform bringing it forward, then withdrawing it, then putting it back, and so on. A rather erratic practice of innovation, yet not unusual when it comes to Internet giants.

This is an interesting feature, but Bruno advises us to use it in copy-paste mode. Our own content should always remain ours, he added.

It should be considered as ancillary content, and your newsletter should not be based on LinkedIn. They decide at will whether your content should be shown or hidden. Yet this content is yours, the benefit should be too. It should be up to us to decide who we want to show it to.

Insofar as the platform decides and has the right of life and death over our publications, it’s about time content creators took back control of their work.

This newsletter feature on LinkedIn is interesting. However, if we put all our eggs into one basket, the day LinkedIn decides that everything has to be paid for, how will we manage?

This isn’t a new feature as such, but the question regularly arises as to whether putting a video in a LinkedIn post improves its visibility or reduces it. Unfortunately, there is no absolute answer to this question. But Bruno’s makes perfect sense.

Are videos a plus or minus on LinkedIn? I republished a video recently and it “hit the bull’s-eye” compared to other publications. And yet I’ve often been told that you shouldn’t republish a post! Was it the video that gave the post more impact? I think it’s mainly the message you’re putting across that counts, the quality of your content and who you’re addressing.

It doesn’t matter what content mode you use. What’s important is that you have an important message to get across. Interesting and enriching content. Here’s Bruno’s conclusion.

Let’s make videos and see how our audience reacts. Let’s do carousels otherwise. And if we want to do text, let’s do text! The idea is to get a message across to our fellow human beings, rather than wondering whether a particular format will clinch it better than another. At the end of the day, what does “reach” mean? Is it about our customers? The people we find interesting, those who will read our stuff, watch our videos, read our content or our carousels? And anyway, the algorithm keeps changing. Native video posting used to do the job, and later it didn’t because the algorithm had changed. At one point surveys were a big thing and LinkedIn was pushing them. We then had surveys about this and that and the other. Most were completely inane. I created one that made no sense just for fun. And it ended up being a big hit! Then it stopped working. The algorithm had changed again. In my mind, you have to use a humane tone of voice then favour one format over all else and stick with it.

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What if hiring luxury venues during the 2024 Olympics were a good opportunity for brands, even small ones?  The Olympic Games are only six months away from now and I was wondering how much of an opportunity it was for brands and which ones. To find out I invited Tanya Bencheva, the CEO and founder of Native Spaces, to share her reflections on that subject. Little did I imagine, when I first contacted Tanya, that there were so many options for smaller brands. It’s certainly up for grabs and our readers should definitely give it a thought. 

Tanya Bencheva. It’s certainly a very exciting event. I really hope for everybody and for the world that it’s going to be as big as we expect it to be because we are all in need of a reminder of the values brought together by the 2024 Olympic Games.

It would be a no-brainer not to use that event to get more visibility.

Now how big it will be, I couldn’t say precisely but there are a lot of expectations and buzz. What we know for sure is that a lot of property owners are increasingly coming to us to try and monetise their buildings and venues via this big happening.

There are many, reasons for this. There will be millions of people from all over the world and with a high level of income who will be staying in Paris during the Olympic Games. Hence it’s an excellent opportunity for visibility. On top of that, these people will share content with their communities, and that adds other millions of viewers to the lot. And then obviously the games are televised, therefore generating more listeners. So it’s an incredible possibility to build brand awareness. And beyond that, engagement.

I think it’s a no-brainer.

I think they can all benefit in different ways. That’s a unique opportunity to advertise internationally. Established brands can bring together their fans, they will already be in town for the Olympics, so they can increase customer engagement.

There are particular sectors that would be more prone to profit from this visibility, though. Anything that has to do with sports and also maybe apparel and consumer brands. But that being said, the Olympic Games are about much more than just sport. It’s a huge event that is based on positive values that any marque may want to be associated with. So, I think any label may try to find creative ways to align itself with the Olympic spirit.

You could! There are always creative ways to grab the public’s attention. The Paris Olympic Games have a special focus on sustainability. This could trigger an idea for you, but you’d have to do that with authenticity, though. If you don’t live and breathe such values, it would be more difficult to align your brand with them.

Of course not! B2B companies can also resort to these kinds of events not only for visibility but mostly to show special attention to their larger clients. For instance, inviting key customers to join them in their private lounges. They can invite them to outstanding locations overlooking some of the sports venues or lavish apartments overlooking the river Seine. Or inviting their clients to watch the opening ceremony in a specially branded environment.

You don’t need to spend billions to engage your, audiences because there are many creative ways to build personalised experiences.

Younger people feel more comfortable in small groups and very niche communities. And brands are more and more inclined to acknowledge this. Intimate spaces, remarkable spaces for those events or experiences that will suit smaller groups. That requires preparation and the greater the surprise, the more unique the experience, the bigger the impact.

I would select a venue whose authenticity is suited to my brand values. Is my brand very digital or experiential? What is my audience like? I would choose the venue that reflects the personality of my audience. So it might be a homey place if this is a small brand where the community spirit is very important, or something completely out of the ordinary. For example, a brand like Jacquemus that will set up events in vast natural spaces.

The buzz created before, during and after the event also enables the brand to extend its visibility.

It’s not always a good idea to throw a lot of money at exceptional venues overlooking the Eiffel Tower. There are other ways and means.

I think one doesn’t quite realise how much hybrid events have become. By the way, we don’t call them hybrid events anymore. Businesses have realised that, in essence, the audience for an event is bound to be hybrid.

I think one doesn’t quite realise how much hybrid events have become.

Hybrid events are no longer the same, though. In the beginning, we were trying to push the same content in the same format to our online audiences, for example, streaming conferences. That really didn’t resonate well with our audiences. Online audiences will consume content differently. They are different people, they belong to different segments from those that will be present on location.

Maybe both populations were mixed during those Covid years because they had no choice but to be online. But those audiences’ expectations are very different now. Often, those who attend online are those who wouldn’t have been there in person. So you need to think about them in a different manner.

We have also witnessed a significant change in event management platforms. It’s incredible what you can do online nowadays and how you can deliver that hybrid content. Besides, even those people who are physically there are experiencing a hybrid event. They are attending the event on location and are connected at the same time. They are engaging with brands and other users on their phones. It’s an omnichannel experience.

Recently I was attending a big tech conference for start-ups and investors in Helsinki. They did an amazing job of bringing the virtual and physical worlds together. Delegates were able to organise their meetings on the fly with the app wherever they were and on location. Meeting places were geolocated with the app and so on. Digital really was instrumental in making such a big event more successful.

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Just like the Trojan war, the AI “revolution” will not take place*. Today’s topic is the inevitable generative AI. This is the perfect opportunity for us to discuss what a technological revolution is or isn’t. Here are our thoughts, and we might as well warn you that we are putting our trotters in the trough in a very counter-intuitive way. Admittedly, we’re taking a bit of a risk here, but keeping up with the Joneses isn’t a valid option for Visionary Marketers. As we know the subject well from having trained and certified a thousand students, we are also well aware of the limitations of GenAI tools.

“Generative AI” has been buzzword of the year in 2023 for better or worse. I have wanted to dig somewhat deeper, though. So, what is and isn’t a technological ‘revolution,’ and is AI one of them? That is the question. A few days ago, I came across a LinkedIn post that argued, through a widely shared video, that “nothing was like ever before.” It showed a large crowd filming the 2023 fireworks on the Champs-Élysées with their mobile phones.

In addition to the ubiquitous mobile screens, there were giant LCD displays on the sides and the Arc de Triomphe itself was turned into a mammoth screen. Similar pictures could have been taken in London, New York or Ulan Bator. In a nutshell, what’s new in 2024 is that everyone owns a screen.

It’s laughable in more than many ways. It reminds me of my 2013 presentations on social media. I was already showing the same photo (above, taken from an NBC broadcast), which was supposed to prove a change in society.

Enough of that, let’s get back to our main topic, i.e., generative AI. The 2023 obligatory buzzword has undoubtedly been “revolution” as in “GenAI is a technological revolution.”

This term is ambiguous, though. As Merriam Webster state, a revolution’s first meaning is that of a planet turning on itself, a kind of standstill in fact. A revolution’s first meaning is “back to square zero.” In other words, as Alphonse Karr would have it, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” On the other hand, it’s a term so widely used in innovation that it’s almost embarrassing.

1 (a) 1 Revolution the action by a celestial body of going round in an orbit or elliptical course. also: apparent movement of such a body round the earth [Merriam-Webster]

Try to play down this ‘revolution’ business and people will mock you. It has happened to me. However, one should wonder what, in our daily lives, is bound to change so radically in the coming years.

Firstly, fear is everywhere, but is it justified? Should we consider AI is a ‘revolution’ merely because we fear we might lose our jobs. What are the facts that substantiate that feeling?

Secondly, uncertainty, or rather a feeling of uncertainty is ubiquitous. One hears of a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world as if it were new. Yet, the concept was coined in 1987. I also wonder what the people of the late 18th century or the first industrial revolution might have thought of that.

These feelings are shared by many, as this recent anecdote shows.

Some time ago I hosted a webinar on the subject of AI-assisted development. It’s a fairly technical subject and certainly not revolutionary. It reminds me of my Unisys days 40 years ago and the Xerox CASE systems. Right after that event, I received a number of phone calls and messages from people who were experts in certain areas of IT, but who were panicking when thinking of this Sci-Fi-like, “dehumanised” view of our future.

But beyond these irrational fears, is what we are experiencing today really a “revolution”? In the sense that everything is changing radically.

I don’t think anyone in 2021 understands anything about innovation, an observation that was already made by Scott Berkun over 10 years ago, and which, in my opinion, remains entirely valid. So much the better, as it gives us work to do for many years to come, this is reassuring. After all, not everything is bound to disappear.

Over the last few months, as I’ve been delving into the subject of AI and generative AI, I came across a programme on France Culture (Science Chrono, 21 October 2023 in French) in which Antoine Beauchamp described the first attempts to generate text using artificial intelligence. It wasn’t in 2023, nor 2010, but… 1956! Granted, the texts it produced were gibberish. Those written by the surrealists too.

The buried figure exterminates the terrible dreams, the abysses and the solitary reapers are never a fierce anvil, crumpling with difficulty an ordinary sickle with the gleam, a blood mutilates the false twilight by a fertile sword.

Computer-generated text based on the lexicon of Victor Hugo – 1956

The generation of text, and poetry in particular, was one of the first playgrounds for artificial intelligence and mathematicians. Not all that revolutionary. What’s more, the presenter pointed out that the human brain is designed in such a way that when confronted with an incomprehensible text, it adapts to try and make sense of it. We certainly do the same when looking at the results delivered by ChatGPT and its competitors.

Many artists of past centuries have experimented with methods similar to the stochastic approaches of generative AI. These include Stéphane Mallarmé, whose texts are often hermetic, the precursors of the surrealists, Georges Perec, the other members of the Oulipo (literally, the “opener of potential literature), and their master Raymond Queneau (also a mathematician, his books were sometimes the result of what might be described as algorithms, as in the case of the skin of dreams aka loin de Rueil – 1944) and, of course, the surrealists with their infamous “exquisite corpses” (a century ago).

Generative artificial intelligence has been so successful in the eyes of the general public since the end of 2022 (and longer as far as we are concerned), it would be silly not to admit that this is a technological breakthrough for computing. No one could buy into that. But is it a mere step forward or a “revolution”?

I’m leaning towards the step forward, even if it’s hard to substantiate this conclusion with facts. Readers versed in French are kindly advised to get to grips with Philosopher, Mathematician and IT expert Daniel Andler’s book, “Intelligence artificielle, intelligence humaine, la double énigme (Nrf, 2023).” Here is an excerpt.

But what kind of enigma is it? Here is what I think: the target of AI is an artificial intelligence that is on par with human intelligence. But this target never seems to get any closer, even though AI is constantly progressing. Here are the two explanations I propose to solve this enigma. […] The first is that the pursuit of an artificial intelligence endowed with human intelligence is pointless: according to the conception of intelligence that I defend, intelligence in the human sense can only be attached to a human being. Artificial intelligence, in whatever form and at whatever level of development, is designed to solve problems, which is only a secondary task for human intelligence. The second conclusion concerns the efforts that AI is devoting, with a tenfold increase in energy, to designing ever more intelligent systems, that is, in its view, ever closer to human intelligence. It also aims to give these systems as much autonomy as possible, and ultimately total autonomy. This dual objective is incoherent, dangerous and pointless.

We will only truly understand the changes brought about by these technologies in a few years’ time, and with the benefit of hindsight. In the meantime, untimely enthusiasm about technological ‘revolutions’ should be taken with a pinch of salt.

We are told that white-collar jobs, and mostly copywriters and even developers will disappear. Time will tell. I have my doubts. Jobs disappear and are replaced all the time anyway. There is nothing new in that.

Of course, ChatGPT and its clones know how to produce mathematically plausible texts. But will we be seeing the Booker Prize awarded to Bard, BingAI or ChatGPT in five or ten years’ time? I doubt it very much. On the contrary, some authors will make fun of these machines, hijack them and use them as creative material. This will last for a while, and then we’ll move on to something else.

Recently, I was looking back on more than a year and a half of using generative AI to create images for this website. I realised that my own perception of the pictures that were generated was evolving over time. Initially, rather like children, we played with these tools (Midjourney and others) in an irrational way. We started producing images all over the place.

Many users are still doing that today. LinkedIn is awash with these plastic images made by AI. Half-scary, half-demonstrative, they come in garish, stereotypical colours and are instantly recognisable by anyone with even the slightest training.

What used to be a game has become boring. Repetition even triggers fierce reactions from readers. Over time, you learn to abstain from using AI. I’m at this stage now. You then use this tool as one of the sources for producing images, mixed with stock photos and also more personal images, and to avoid using them systematically.

Of course, this won’t stop billions of users producing these gaudy, horrific images. But a more reasoned use of the machine can free us from these atrocities, and by rediscovering our technical skills and mixing several tools, we can find true creativity (combining, tearing apart, recombining, etc.).

All this to say that the ‘revolution’ will not take place, or rather that it will take place, but certainly not to the extent that we imagine today, and provided we wait (10, 15 or 20 years) and live long enough to witness the impact and true use of these platforms. Such impact will be undeniable for some uses — like picture generation — and much more debatable for others, in particular the generation of stochastic texts.

I know that some people will be disgruntled and will dismiss my predictions. Most of them will. Year after year Internet and social media pundits predict new technical revolutions. Our History of technology books are full of the stories depicting these failed technological upheavals.

I apologise for this, sincerely. But I’m not going to indulge in this exercise, which makes no sense whatsoever. I realise; however, that truth is less spectacular than fiction. People love their own dreams, this is precisely one of the things what will make humans better than machines.

In the meantime, I’m willing to bet that the digital word of the year 2024 won’t be “generative AI.”

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How can a responsible marketer survive when the world around us is crumbling? Or at least when experts are telling you that it is. Three years to the day, the French association of marketers Adetem asked Visionary Marketing to join its CSR responsible marketing initiative, and naturally we welcomed the opportunity. That almost seemed natural to us. However, things aren’t that simple and many questions remain. Here are our thoughts on the subject even though there are more questions than answers. Our underlying goal is to encourage marketers (and salespeople) to question and reflect on their practices and how they should behave professionally at a time when society as a whole is torn on these issues, particularly environmental ones. It seems to us more suitable than developing an ideological pitch and demanding that facts match reality.

This survival guide for depressed responsible marketers was written for some reason. Let me tell you an anecdote

One day, I met a colleague and friend who is a digital marketing expert. He was deeply concerned by recent developments in climate change (not to be confused with global warming). His wife had just given birth to a baby and he was devastated by “the world we would be leaving behind to our children”. I sensed that he was about to snap, so I reassured him and advised him to take the edge off. His eco-anxiety (the word hadn’t been invented back then) was probably not going to do much good, and even less so for his child, who would probably be in need of trust, encouragement and a positive outlook.

And yet, six or seven years later, I’m reminded of this anecdote as a COP28 conference, led by an oil tycoon and carrying the hopes of many, has just drawn to a close. Same old song and dance, the following IPCC get-together will take place in Azerbaijan and will be led by an ex-marketeer from the oil industry! Worse still, I learned recently that one of the flagship organisations that gave birth to the IPCC was also founded and run by a Canadian oil investor (check Maurice Strong’s bio).

To this one could add many other depressing events or books (from Vaclav Smil to James Hansen and Antoine Bueno [Fr] through to Jean-Baptiste Fressoz [Fr]). All that shows we might well hit the wall of climate change soon. French Energy expert Fressoz states, there is no such thing as energy transitions for instance. Smil had highlighted the energy transition issue as early as 2010. To top it all, there is no such thing as “peak oil”. Two mining experts from France, warned us about the surfeit of oil reserves on the planet [Fr]. There is no dearth of oil sorry, we’re in for trouble for very much longer I’m afraid.

Worse still, there was this talk we gave in Tunisia. While around a hundred marketers flocked to the workshops dedicated to AI, digital marketing or agility in product marketing, the breakout session dedicated to responsible marketing was attended by two participants, one of which was a student.

We could add to the list. There are many examples of irresponsible marketers and salespeople, such as door-to-door sellers who try to take advantage of the elderly by getting them to sign contracts when they don’t even realise it (real-life experience), or phone spammers, email or LinkedIn scammers. All those people are determined to make you like hellish. Laws and regulations are piling up but to no avail. Complaints and technical devices aimed at protecting you don’t seem to have that much of an effect either. Marketing and sales professionals have always been familiar with these fishy practices. Those who behave in this way are a disgrace to our profession and, sadly, they are often held up as an example of ‘success’. Think about growth hackers for instance. Nauseating.

All this leads sincere responsible marketers to ask many questions at a time when societal and environmental issues can no longer be ignored.

Am I setting an example? How can I contribute to improving things? Above all, how can I avoid working to make them worse than they already are? Is a responsible marketing framework sufficient? Should I sell or ask people not to buy any more or rather, not so much? Fight against Primark, Shein and Temu? And if so, how can I do so when the basics of sales and marketing are advocating the opposite? Will I, as a responsible marketer who sells less, be promoted or demoted? Answering these questions is probably not that simple. But we may still surmise, perhaps rightfully, that making efforts, however small, is better than doing nothing.

But let’s return to the anecdote I quoted above. Should a responsible marketer – or one on the way to becoming one – despair?

Should she be overwhelmed by this seemingly unattainable goal? Must she fight greenwashing and illusory transitions? Should she avoid working with unethical companies, those from the coal, oil, tobacco and alcohol and spirits sectors, those promoting addictive substances or contributing to the destruction of natural resources, that resort to modern slavery, that sell you nitrites or make you drink plastic waste, eat pesticides or contribute to the growth of green algae to the point of suffocating the beautiful shores of Brittany…? The list is almost endless, and it’s getting longer every day.

The responsible marketer, however, has no right to be depressed.

Such is my survival guide. It’s very weak, I readily admit to it. But at the same time it will allow you to live better and at peace with yourself. It will also enable us to try and improve things as we best can. No more, no less. It’s easier when you are a content marketer than a marketer for the Royal Dutch-Shell company, though, I’m aware of these limitations. There aren’t many chances of result either, I know that too.

On the environmental front, the situation seems, if not hopeless, at least quite serious. So let’s hope, with Smil that there is no guarantee that this will be the end of the world and that humans are incapable of predicting the future. Both statements are probably both right.

Assuming Smil is right, whatever good practices responsible marketers have put in place will always be a means to change the world for the better. We can live with that.

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Will marketers survive the content shock in the age of AI? The Omnes Education Group launched a cross-organisational programme in English called “Content creation in the age of AI” to help its students better understand GenAI. Close to 1,000 students will be certified in this program by early February 2024. As part of the program, Visionary Marketing interviewed Mark Schaefer, one of the world’s most renowned marketing bloggers, to gain insights on how marketers should approach the new content shock caused by AI. Schaefer’s answers were thought-provoking and valuable for both established and aspiring content creators.

Understanding GenAI in 2024 is a must, regardless of the fact that you like it or not. By that I not only mean how it works, but how it must be used, when it must and must not be used, what its limitations are, and the societal questions its implementation raise.

My stance on this is very straightforward:

What one gets to grips with (rationally), one never fears nor idealises

I am convinced that merely banning the usage of GenAI, as I see it done in many US universities now, isn’t a good idea. For one, it will not stop students from wielding those tools. There is always a workaround. Besides, it will not help them develop a critical eye towards technology and its — inevitable — limitations.

For this reason, the Omnes Education Group, one of the largest in Europe, launched a very ambitious cross organisational programme in English for all its students. I was very lucky to work with them on that project. I wasn’t alone. Bénédicte, Julie and Fanny are part of an amazing team with whom I really enjoyed working.

At the end of the process, in early February 2024, close to 1,000 students will be certified within this “Content creation in the age of AI” programme.

Given the subject, it made perfect sense for me to interview one of the world’s best marketing bloggers, Mark Schaefer, whose work has inspired us at Visionary Marketing for the past ten years at least. I interviewed Mark as part of this lecture, so that he could tell us how marketers should tackle this new content shock.

As always, his answers were thought-provoking. They are a lesson for all established and would-be content creators who want to know the way ahead.

This exchange is one of many that we recorded for our students and cannot be disclosed. The school representatives were kind enough to let me publish Mark’s interview publicly, though. This is a condensed version of our exchange.

“The thesis behind the content shock article is that, in an economic system, a natural system, or a human system, if there’s too much of something, there has to be an adjustment.”

This is true of water, snow, pollution, heat… and there are no reasons why content creation wouldn’t be following that rule either, Mark explained.

“You’re going to have a flood and you will need to adjust,” he went on. “This pattern repeats in every channel where there’s a need for content. When a new channel becomes popular, the amount of content in the channel goes up, up, up, up, up. And so, it becomes an arms race. And it’s a never-ending competition.”

As always, Mark is hitting the nail on the head. All content creators have been through this before. Those who published monthly in the 1990s, started publishing weekly 10 years later, then daily and finally, several times a day. The “Publish or perish” adage has never been so true. And so it goes with social platforms too. Publishing once a month on LinkedIn isn’t going to make you very popular. After a while, one can wonder whether publishing ever more content still makes sense.

“And you only have two choices,” Mark went on. “You must create better and better content. And there’s a price to that. Or you must promote it better and better and there’s a cost to that too.”

This is something that happens with every social media channel, old and new. “Now we have threads and everybody — in the States — says, ‘go on threads! It’s easy to find an audience.’” But it never lasts for long. By the time the platform has become popular and everyone has migrated to it, it has become a lot more difficult to find one’s audience.

This is “a repeating pattern”, Mark explains.

Thus, “how does generative AI impact content creation?” Things, as usual, aren’t black or white.

Let’s start with the positive side, increased creativity, and productivity. Mark comes up with an anecdote about that: “I have a friend who is, by her own admission, a terrible writer. Enters ChatGPT. She says, ‘Now, I can blog every day. I might even be able to write a book.’ That’s wonderful! ChatGPT to writing is like a calculator to math. It makes everyone a competent writer, that’s wonderful.”

On the other hand, flooding the market with a lot of new content may not be such a good idea. “It makes the whole content shock problem a lot more severe,” Mark added. “There are a lot of unethical (black hat) things going on. The system can’t survive in the long term.”

Taken at face value, all this doesn’t bode well for content marketing. Yet, there is another way of looking at it and Mark remains, overall, rather optimistic. I think he is right. A large system like the Internet will almost always purge itself automatically. If the content is poor, users will leave eventually and that will force platforms and search engines to clean up their act.

Indeed, Mark thinks that things will improve over time. “Those people will end up being penalised and they will go away and eventually, the system will work itself out. I’m not so much worried about the short term.

I think we need to stay focused on doing good work, doing exceptional work.”

Mark, as the author of the best-selling opus “Known,” believes that “only our personal brands will save us. Being known and beloved will enable us to earn our own audiences,” he added.

This reminds me of my advice in this PushEngage webinar about GenAI in 2020. Since bad content will be plentiful, those in search of valuable information will have to focus on recognised, trustworthy sources. Not just mainstream media, but bloggers, renowned professionals, and influencers. People they can trust.

For those who have worked on their reputation, Mark says, there is no real issue with the excess of content.

In fact, the sheer volume of content produced has no impact.

“Let’s say we are a blogger trying to compete in a world where there are millions of other blog posts. Whether it’s 1 million or 1 billion, doesn’t really matter. Regardless, we will have to earn our way. And as you have suggested, a lot of this AI generated content isn’t very good. Yet, it’s going to get better. I think the most significant thing about generative content is not really the threat it provides now, but the threat it provides tomorrow because it’s getting so much better so fast.

I think that in the next 18 months, we will be able to create a full-motion picture from our room, our kitchen table, with almost no money. And that’s why a lot of the writers and actors were on strike in Hollywood.”

To wrap up this interview, Mark told us an anecdote. “When ChatGPT was introduced, I immediately went to a friend of mine, Shelly Palmer, who is a very well-known technology analyst in America. I asked him what he thought of it. He said, ‘it’s terrifying. I’ve asked this thing to create a blog post in the voice of Shelly Palmer. And it did a magnificent job in five seconds. I’m 80% replaced.’”

Once again, on the face of it, one could think that this is the end of content marketing. Mostly on technology topics that are so well covered on the Internet.

“But let’s look at it more closely,” Mark concluded. “What is the 20% made of? What will not be replaced?”

The answer to this question is simpler than you think. “Shelly is known, he is trusted,” Mark explains, “he is beloved. And that is something that ChatGPT can never take away from him.”

It is clear, from what Mark and Shelly expressed, that the students who want to thrive tomorrow will have to up their game significantly. Let’s hope that this education programme and certificate by Omnes will help them achieve this very goal.

The Omnes Education Group team developed this beautiful and inspiring trailer based on my introductory text for this programme. It was sent to all students within the group to inform them and encourage them to enrol. Click the button to discover the Omnes Education Group.

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According to a recent Forrester report (How Generative AI Will Transform CRM), GenAI may have significant and beneficial impacts on Customer Relationship Management systems and practices. The real question is, however, how effective GenAI could be when it comes to handling various customer-facing tasks? And how easily could it adapt to specific CX applications? Forrester’s analysts surmise that using massive bodies of data and large language models (LLMs), one could achieve better interactions with customers, therefore elevating customer experiences, and contributing to growth. That is to say, as long as certain conditions are met. Besides, when mentioning GenAI and CRM, the analyst group warns that ChatGPT might not be the ideal solution. 

In this report entitled How Generative AI Will Transform CRM, a group of Forrester analysts discusses how CRM could use GenAI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to provide quicker responses to customer inquiries. Therefore improving response time and overall CX. By analyzing data from customer interactions, including emails, meeting transcripts, and phone conversations, GenAI could apply its ability to surface, summarize, and interpret key consumer insights. This would enhance CRM’s strategic importance by providing more complete data sets and streamlining  processes.

Implementing GenAI could possibly change the way CRM agents and sellers engage with customers through CRM systems, the analysts contend. In this manner, CRM agents would have more time on their hands for the more creative and strategic parts of their tasks. Thus, increasing CRM’s strategic footprint could make marketers more innovative. In addition, sellers would also be able to address buyers’ requests for information more accurately. The bottom line is that all that would lead to more customer satisfaction and better Customer Relationship Management, Forrester’s analysts assert. In other words, GenAI would not threaten CX, it could well enhance it.

GenAI Will Revolutionize CRM, Not Erode It

According to the analyst group, Generative AI’s role is to reshape and elevate customer experiences. Extracting crucial information from Customer Relationship Management records. Providing real-time news feeds, assisting users to prepare for meetings and making effective decisions increasing customers’ trust. By understanding customers’ preferences, companies could therefore create unique experiences across different touch points, from website interactions to targeted marketing campaigns, leading to a more positive customer journey. 

AI algorithms can assess leads based on different criteria, making the sales process easier. They can analyze past customer actions to predict future movements. Helping businesses be ready for customer needs and desires. One key application is in chatbots and virtual assistants, the analysts describe, where generative AI can understand and respond to a wide range of user inputs, providing more humanlike interactions and creating a more engaging and satisfying experience for customers.

That being said, Forrester provides a useful comparison table of various LLM models and deliver recommendations accordingly. Thus, while advocating GenAI inclusion within CRM systems and processes, the analyst group also draws our attention to the fact that GenAI isn’t limited to ChatGPT.

As a matter of fact, one should take notice of the risks associated with the use of GenAI and take Forrester’s recommendations into consideration.

A significant concern is the potential for bias in the content, as it may unintentionally learn and replicate biases present in the training data. This could lead to a negative impact on customer perception and ruin a company’s reputation. As a result, one should address biases in training data and potential copyright violations.

The best way to do that is for businesses to assess AI foundations, prepare data, and adopt a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure accuracy, completeness, and ethical considerations in the content produced by Generative AI, the analysts advise.

Organizations looking to implement Generative AI need to make sure they have a data center of excellence. In essence this is no different from any other information system implementation. One could even add that AI, rather than obliterating data quality issues, is making data integrity even more pivotal. 

LLMs need to be prepared on CRM data properly to improve the accuracy of analysis and responses to customers. The data needs to comply with privacy regulations. And its history has to be auditable so that it can be tracked in case of issues. The tracking and monitoring of the content automatically generated is a must-have, the analyst group suggests in their report. Ongoing monitoring and regular updates are therefore needed to evolve customer preferences and ensure the system’s accuracy. 

We suspect that this will have a substantial impact on the amount of effort put in place in these processes and systems implementation. What will be the outcome on actual productivity gains remain to be seen. Such productivity gains may also depend on the level of knowledge of the CRM agents or sellers concerned. Whereas a beginner might find a copilot to be helpful when it comes to providing faster and more accurate responses, a seasoned CRM agent may be able to deliver better and faster information to her clients due to her field experience that makes cross and double-checking redundant.

In conclusion, GenAI could indeed help organizations navigate the complexities of customer relations in a world where customers are ever more demanding and impatient. Yet, many doubts and risks are paving this way and businesses should tread this new ground carefully while taking into account all ethical, privacy, and communication challenges.

Businesses that want to successfully integrate GenAI within CRM should mitigate such risks deftly and promptly.

This report “How Generative AI Will Transform CRM” was written by Forrester‘s analysts Kate Leggett and Rowan Curran with contributions from Linda Ivy-Rosser, Zeid Khater, Seth Marrs, Christina McAllister, Katie Linford, Hannah Murphy. 

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What are the applications of geographic information systems? Following our discussion with Catherine Crook, we asked Floyd Bull to answer that question for us.

During college, I saw geographic information systems as an opportunity that would lead to jobs after my studies. Throughout the first years, I began seeing all the applications that can be used and fell in love with GIS. 

My favorite part as a GIS analyst is working with different teams and with our customers. Each time they come to us with a project, there are different aspects to it. Each market requires critical thinking. This leads to what I love the most about geographic informational systems, which is how they impact your everyday lives. It is amazing how they can be applied to everything even when it is not expected.

There is a spatial component to the majority of our lives.

I worked for the city of Kirkland in Washington State. Their planning department wanted to know how the shadows on the interurban trail would be affected if they were to increase the heights of buildings. The trail is a walking and biking path through the city, which they hold very dear to them. I performed a shade analysis to see how much shade would go onto the trail during the year. In my report, I provided the city council with a full analysis and a YouTube video showing them hour-by-hour where the shade would be along the path. With this, they were able to see the impact of raising the buildings by ten feet and make a decision based on that analysis.

In video games, there is a spatial component too, since characters are moving along a given path. This is the case with games such as League of Legends, which is a MOBA – Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. With this application, you can see the optimal build while playing as well as see what others are using to counter your build.

Since climate change is a major problem impacting us all, one could use geographic information systems to help solve it. A lot of people getting into GIS work on the rise of seawater and how it can affect different areas. Sometimes people think of GIS as paper maps – we’ve moved past that. That was 90s GIS. Now we can do geographic information systems where we’re adding a Z-coordinate to it. We are looking at it in 3D, not just down on a map.

Mobile applications use real-time data to feed applications and show end users what’s going on. This makes it possible for maps to update instantly. I see it going in a data science route – looking at the data more and analyzing it. We as GIS analysts can get very much into the weeds of data – end users don’t care as much as we do about the nitty-gritty. But we can use geographic information systems to tell them a story that they can ingest in a much easier way. It has an impact on how we see climate change, hiking, golf, video games, baseball, or any other application. 

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