New technologies will always cause anxiety, but big name marketers from Delta, eos, and Pfizer aren’t scared of AI. In fact, they’re embracing it “aggressively”.
“I don’t think that anyone’s concerned. They are just not sure how to engage and how to play and when it’s okay and when it’s not okay,” Alicia Tillman, Delta Airlines’ CMO said on stage at SXSW Austin, at a panel on rebranding the role of the CMO.
“There’s a lot of unknown in how to engage with AI. As leaders, it’s really our job to create that safe space. Encouraging change on encouraging increasing that is important.”
CMO at eos, Soyoung Kang, agreed that, “This level of disruption will always create a certain level of anxiety. We control the vision within in our teams in order to move people towards this place. Particularly when you talk about its role.”
The panel’s final member, Pfizer global CMO Drew Panayiotou, added that he is a strong advocate for AI. He sees it as a pathway to liberate the company’s marketing campaigns.
“You need to help the marketing team to not get paralysed by having so much data in our campaigns. We will run campaigns and have many versions of that campaign out there, it’s great that we can do personalisation, and fire up the timeline by using AI.
“’I’m pushing AI aggressively inside of the walls of Pfizer.”
Tillman’s marketing team at Delta is also using AI: “We’ve been using it a lot to do rapid iteration on product design which has been hugely helpful for our design team to free up their time to do more higher order thinking, more conceptual things. They don’t have to be placed in the guts of just doing colour palette of iteration and things like that. AI is just the next industrial revolution, it’s not going to obsolete us unless we let it.”
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