The Great Marketing Delusion
As I am wrapping up the final edits to this book, OpenAI has made a new announcement: their first AI agent is Operator.
This is not new technology, but it should be more widely distributed than Claude's Computer use or the open-source alternatives.
More people will prompt chatGPT to do tasks for them, potentially waiting hours instead of minutes to finish them π
Six years ago, I sat in an IBM marketing squad. We needed six specialists to send a single email campaign:
- A product marketer for messaging
- A copywriter for the words
- A designer for the look
- A data analyst for segmentation
- A marketing automation expert for the tech
- A campaign manager to orchestrate it all
It used to take six people a few weeks just to send an email.
Today, I can set up an AI agent that does all of that in under a day. But that's not even the interesting part.
This isnβt just about doing the same thing faster - itβs about rethinking the entire system.
Back in 2021, Sam Altman made the prediction that knowledge work will be most impacted by AI.
We've been telling ourselves a story about marketing. A story about specialists and expertise and years of experience.
But what if that story was wrong?
What if specialization was just a way to hide from the truth? The truth is that most marketing work isn't about expertise β it's about execution.
ο»ΏHere's what the tech leaders are saying:ο»Ώ
Marc Benioff (Salesforce) thinks developers will be replaced.
Sundar Pichai (Google) believes AI is more profound than electricity.
Jeff Bezos says that AI is impacting every industry horizontally.
Here's my take:
In five years, nobody will hire marketers anymore. At least not specialists.
Let's board the AI hype train.
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