The convergence of marketing and strategy
An oldie (2021) but goodie from Roger Martin: marketing and strategy are about grokking your company, its customers, and its competitors — and positioning for success given that understanding. They’ve been separate disciplines for historical reasons, but those reasons are going away. My take: with AI the question isn’t, “What can we make?” but “What should we make?” That’s a strategic question; marketing (and product?) provide answers. Helping orgs decide what they should make is where Greg Petroff and I are increasingly focusing.
Brand as software
Q: How do you manage a brand in a world where AI exists? A: differently. Specifically, you must think of brand as more of an adaptive (and proactive) system: “software that carries a company’s point of view, its values, its constraints and design decisions, into the work itself.” Distributing a static brand document won’t cut it; you need to architect adaptive systems that enable agents to actively instantiate the brand.
Misleading metaphors
Melanie Mitchell unpacks the OpenAI/HuggingFace security incident to highlight how bad metaphors lead to bad decision-making. In this case, the bad metaphor is a phrase plastered all over the media: “rogue AI”. The HuggingFace incident didn’t entail an AI going rogue; thinking it did leads us to misunderstand the risks. The lesson: be wary of common media framings; dig in to really understand the issues.
Transformation as learning journey
This is a time of change for many organizations. How is yours going about it? If it’s happening top-down, toward fixed outcomes, it’ll likely fail. Instead, define an attainable (yet challenging) vision of the future, and design opportunities for adjustment and learning. (HBR gift link.)
AI and education
An example of how to go about it: MIT appointed a committee to investigate the impact of AI in education — and suggest how the institution should adapt to take advantage of its possibilities while avoiding the risks. Seems a good model for organizations grappling with this change. Has yours convened a group to evaluate approaches to AI? Have they shared their findings? Is the org doing anything differently as a result?