Are leaders underestimating the impact of generative AI?
What's your view on the AI Revolution? How is AI making you better at your job? How is it supercharging your thinking? How is it enabling you to create better ideas?
Jon joined industry peers to share their views with Nicola Kemp at Creativebrief to discuss if we're underestimating the impact of generative AI...
(A 4-minute read with a chai latte)
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
The words of futurist Roy Amara have successfully stood the test of time, capturing the almost universal knee-jerk human response to new technology and innovation.
Amara’s Law carries an added weight when viewed through the lens of the unintended human cost of social media. As an industry grapples with the unintended consequences of social media on young people’s mental health, it is perhaps understandable that the moral cost of Artificial Intelligence has dominated the industry agenda.
Yet while it is increasingly apparent that social media is this generation's smoking, AI has perhaps been accused of stealing your job, before you have even had a chance to open your mind to its possibilities. With this in mind, we asked industry leaders if the industry is at risk of underestimating the impact of generative AI on the creative industries?’
JON WILLIAMS - CEO The Liberty Guild
There are finally signs that agencies are accepting that AI is happening and they’re putting money behind it - £300m at Publicis and £250m at WPP. That’s great. The bitcoin’s finally dropped. We’re over the nay-saying. But now what?
Writing haiku on ChatGPT is one thing but the challenge leaders have is to operationalise AI so that it works for the business. I don't mean automating your contribution to content obesity and ramping production up to machine speed at the pointy end of it all, or the impact on business intelligence and data science at the top end of the organisation. That’s happening anyway. I mean how does it augment you? As a person. In your day job. Anyone helping you there? And I don't mean Adobe Firefly in the studio.
At the moment AI is a thing that gets us all to go faster. Or cheaper. But I don't see enough of better. How does it get us to better ideas? How does it help our thinking? Not our doing. Anyone? It’s funny, AI works so well with systems. But most creative agencies are kidding themselves if they think they're properly systemised. They run on superstitions, totems and rituals, bits of process cobbled together from many old-school sources. Inefficiency glued together with a splash of ‘culture’. That’s damn hard to augment. So the challenge comes down to the individual. As ever.
So I don't think it’s that leaders don't get it. They do. I just think it's really hard to do at a deep enough level to make a difference. Must try harder.
Read the views of the other industry peers here.
