By Jasmin Bedir, CEO, Innocean
I tried to disconnect from reading about anything marketing related over the holidays, as I’m sure most of us attempted to, but the latest ‘AI everything’ trend made it rather difficult.
Every tech platform seems to be shoehorning in some form of AI feature, and there are a myriad of new gadgets that are in one form or another AI-enabled. Returning to work my inbox is overflowing with SaaS vendors pushing varying tools that all promise me productivity growth – it’s seemingly an opportune moment for tech sales. And I don’t blame them. The majority of decision makers in businesses are overwhelmed with the sheer scale and impact of AI entering our world and it’s easy to get completely lost in the woods.
Before blindly adding more tools and platforms, we should consider automation for the sake of automation and value creation versus destruction.
Technology to fix siloed operations has in my opinion, not worked ever. It’s never the panacea you think it will be. Yet, it’s tempting to jump on it, because this is how we simply get ahead of the game, no? And we can proudly announce that we’re utilising new AI tools that will make us look progressive and part of the future. Management no doubt will applaud.
I believe this has the risk to be a major organisational blindspot, as it can lead to IT/software bloat that will prove hard to rein in. And it takes the focus away from the bigger picture of what will have a long term and positive impact on productivity and success of the business – and that is an organisation-wide Large Language Model (LLM) that an organisation can own, because really what you use and apply from one AI-enabled third party platform stack is essentially locked up in someone else’s LLM and of no value to your own bottom-line.
Of course, this requires more internal resources both in human and technology form, and is not as quick as purchasing someone else’s platform, but this is the path we have decided to take.
While we’re on the topic of shiny new objects – Midjourney V6 has truly blown my mind. The pace of improvement is something else, really. No matter what your job title is in this industry, go and have a play instead of buying new third party tools. It’s more fun, too!
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: Limitations of AI in an advertising agency
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Top Image: Jasmin Bedir