Marketing Leadership: Driving AI Adoption & Growth

Hello and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation brought to you by Mo Op. Today I am in my kitchen and it’s because I needed some coffee. This is another big subject about the role of AI and machine learning in marketing. A question that came after our last episode was what is my role as a marketer in starting, initiating and managing AI projects?

So in our first episode, we talked about you can get started by testing tools for your yourself. If you start to realize where the benefits are that you know AI tools can give you as a marketer, these superpowers, it helps you also champion the narrative that we are not looking to replace. We’re looking to enhance, build and really do more with less. So that might mean things get sped up. It might mean you might not have to hire a junior or someone who does manual work.

Does that eliminate jobs? Yes, it does, but it also opens up other avenues and other types of jobs. But what is critical and the people who are going to get these new types of jobs is because they are learning and practicing the skills. They are learning these apps early. They are testing and they are doing something that machines can’t do, which is thinking about how do I creatively solve the problem? And that is the role of the marketer in any AI, machine learning project.

It is most important that the people on the business side are very clear on the overall business’s vision and mission and then where those challenges and blockers exist that are holding us back from really living that vision and meeting our business objectives. So when we prioritize these challenges and blockers and look at how do we address these today from a business perspective, how do our competitors address these today and what could we be doing better or different that’s in line with our vision?

If you are a marketer, and you are able to have a solid platform to communicate out what the opportunity is, if we leverage AI and machine learning to address these blockers and issues that are currently holding us back from living our vision, you are the key to success for that project. One, making it through, getting executive buy-in and having a true impact.

I started my career as a developer and then later on was in product management. And something I learned the hard way is no matter how awesome the software is, the tool, how exact and accurate the model is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make it to the light of day. No one buys it, no one pays attention unless there is some amazing person on the front end who knows how to sell based on value, get buy-in and lead change. And that is where marketers come in.

We are very good at having high sense of empathy for our clients. And if you are an internal person and you’re managing up, you have a high sense of empathy for what your boss and what senior leaders are gonna say yes to. That’s where you need to start. Not only that, but being on the development side, I really appreciated when the direction and how I was gonna be measured, what does success look like? What does done look like to you was clear from the business owner. And I think a lot of business owners underestimate the amount of time it takes to get there.

So I would say, if you are a marketer, and you want to be a part and play a valuable role in a machine learning, AI project, then really dig into the business aspect of it and get detailed, get dirty. What do you need to clean up in order to align to that vision? And that will result in clear priority for the project. It will help the developers and the data scientists select the right features for the model. It will help them tune the model appropriately because they’ll understand how they’re being measured. They’ll understand the outcomes and why these results help drive growth and scale for the business.

And this sounds very obvious, and I focus on why so much, and Simon Sinek’s book “The Power of Why” applies just as much to machine learning and AI as it does to really anything to do with business and vision building and management. So I hope that helps.

Think about how you can create your own process and platform around owning what is the path forward and what challenge and obstacles are we solving with this AI machine learning project? And trust me, everyone on the dev team and the data scientists will love you ’cause you’re speaking their language at that point. That makes their lives so much easier.

If you want to listen to more episodes of Leader Generation, go ahead and check us out on LinkedIn. You can search Leader Generation podcast and you can find us on all of the major podcast channels.

If you are getting excited, scared, or just curious about the role AI and machine learning will play in marketing, then you should definitely come to the MAICON conference. It is on July 26th through the 28th in Cleveland, Ohio. And I will be there. A bunch of other amazing marketing professionals from both tech companies and big brands will be there to talk about, you know, how do we come together and make AI and machine learning work for us in the right way.

Last year I went, great presentations, amazing keynotes. If anything, you’ll walk away inspired and feeling more confident about your role as a leader and marketer in your organization. So visit marketingaiinstitute.com or if you google MAICON, M-A-I-C-O-N, it’ll pop up and you can register there. You can use the code Leader Gen 100 for $100 off the price and hope to see you there.