Five Ways Your Boss is Screwing Up Your Future
Contagious editorial director, Alex Jenkins, on why your manager might be more of a threat to your career than AI
For the last six months, I’ve been all round the world giving talks about the impact of AI on creativity — specifically on its increasing proficiency at generating and evaluating creative work.
What’s been most notable has been witnessing the range of reactions from people — from excitement, through shock to downright denial and anger.
Unsurprising, given that it’s pretty provocative stuff. After all, some of the companies we’ve been covering at Contagious claim to be better than humans at what they’re doing — for example Persado promising that its AI system for generating marketing copy ‘outperforms man-made messages 100% of the time’.
We’ve been tracking the rise of AI and its implications for brands for seven years on Contagious I/O, so we’ve become a little immune to its shock value.
But watching marketers react to it as they hear about some of these technologies for the first time is a reminder of just how genuinely disruptive (and I use that word with caution) they are.
AI is forcing creatives to confront the existential question ‘Am I as a human no longer unique?’
And then ‘Is AI going to make me redundant?’
In broad terms, the reactions break down across age groups:
Early career: Wow! That stuff you were talking about was cool.
Mid career: That tech was scary, but what were the names of the companies you mentioned again?
Late career: Shut up, AI could never do what I do.
Again, understandable. But what I’ve seen is that there’s a troubling misalignment of interests between the younger and the older ends of the industry.
If you’re on the more junior end of the spectrum, here are five ways your boss is about to screw up your future:
1. NOT MY PROBLEM. ‘I’m counting the days until I leave the industry and don’t want to embrace a technology that I don’t understand and undermines my expertise’
2. CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIER. ‘I don’t even accept the potential of this technology’
3. IVORY TOWER SYNDROME. ‘Let this tech take on the lower-level marketing that I don’t care about. It’s not my high-level job at risk’
4. LIP-SERVICER. ‘Didn’t we let you tinker with an algorithm last year? Now how are those banner ads coming along?’
5. PETRIFICATION. ‘This is terrifying! But I don’t know what to do so, hey ho, back to work everyone’
Last week, I was on a panel at The IPA talking about this subject with Dave Bedwood, creative partner at CHI & Partners in London. His advice was for creatives to bring this type of tech in and play with it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t really know how it works –your ignorance can be an advantage. As a creative, it means you don’t know what the rules are you’re meant to be conforming to.
I totally agree. My concern — and it should be yours too — is that the people with the budgets and authority to bring this tech into their departments simply aren’t doing that. In fact, I’ve heard stories from start-up founders of how creative directors have almost physically thrown them out of their offices for demoing what their systems are capable of.
Earlier this year at Cannes Lions, I was on stage with Christopher Follett, SapientRazorfish’s ECD of cognitive experiences, who predicted that we would see an ‘arms race’ among creatives as they skilled up in this technology.
The same sentiment was echoed last week by HootSuite founder Ryan Holmes, who told CNBC ‘In the same way that nuclear [fission] was a game-changer and nuclear weaponry was a game-changer, the actors that harness AI first are going to have an immense amount of power’.
If I were you, I would take a long hard look at where you’re currently working and ask yourself ‘Are we even in this race? And if not, who here is going get to us in it?’
If your answers are ‘No’ and ‘No-one’, I would be worried. Creative AI is a small part of the present but likely to be a larger part of the future. You need to be at the forefront of that, not bringing up the rear.
The reason is because the digital economy favours a monopoly:
- one dominant player in search
- one dominant player in social
- one dominant player in information
- one dominant player in maps
- one dominant player in music streaming
- one dominant player in ecommerce, and so on…
If your organisation has no ambition to even be a player — let alone a dominant one –that should be significantly more troubling to you than AI itself.
Alex Jenkins is editorial director at Contagious
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