Humans of Martech 69: How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
What’s up folks. This is part 2 of our deep dive into AI impacts on marketing jobs.
In our last episode we introduced the topic and covered how fast AI could replace marketing jobs and what the transition might look like. It's not like our jobs are gonna vanish overnight, but the shift is happening faster than many of us realize. AI's no longer just a loosely backed buzzword; it's doing things today that we used to think were impossible. So, as marketers, we've gotta take this tech seriously.
Next up,
2. Staying informed and keeping up with changes (today)
3. Practical ways marketers can adapt for the AI-driven economy
4. Find the top AI marketing tools and filter out the noise
Outline
Here are some of the topics for this second episode:
- Staying informed, who to follow, courses to check out
- In person events and networking
- Exploring new sources of income
Here’s today’s main takeaway:
- The impact of AI on the job market is difficult to predict in 5 years let alone 10. The only way to future proof your career and position yourself to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy is by staying informed and developing new skills.
- We’re going to double down on some of these in today’s episode.
Commentary/question on shiny object syndrome vs being an early adopter.
- As a marketer, it’s our job to stay modern - it’s true of any job, but marketing is on the next level
- We self propel change and create our own reasons to change things up.
- We suffer a bit from herd mentality as well – I think we tend to rush the new trend, be it TikTok or ChatGPT and choose saturation instead of consideration
- I don’t think the value of being an early adopter is being “first;” rather, it’s giving yourself time to immerse yourself and begin to master the topic
- To learn a topic, you simply can’t read 5 blog posts and master it; I firmly believe you need to get hands-on experience
Shiny object - Try to make a buck, dispose of poor performer, invest in top performers; easily distracted by next object
Early adopter - thoughtful approach to seeing new technology as part of wider trend; has playbook or process for learning and evaluating new tech,
How marketers can stay informed and become AI fluent
Staying up-to-date on the latest developments in AI and AGI is probably the top thing you can do as a marketer. Understanding capabilities as they are released or even pre-released. This allows you to get a leg up on others and see the potential impact on your company, industry and even job market as a whole.
My goals would be to understand how AI works, its potential, and limitations. Most marketers don’t have a great grasp on this at all. Invest in learning about AI, ML, deep learning, and related tech. Ultimately try to arm yourself with knowledge to position yourself as a marketing expert in leveraging AI tools to drive revenue.
I think you and are very similar in our approach to this: learn from smart people, and then jump in and experiment and get hands-on experience. Phil, your research process is always fire: who are the smart people you’re learning from?
People and blogs to follow
There’s waaay smarter people that are tracking this stuff. Not all of these have a marketing lens but they often cover marketing aspects. These are my favorite folks to follow.
We’ll have links to all of their twitter accounts and their newsletters or podcasts in our show notes.
Ed Gil
Ed is an awesome follow on Twitter, he’s an investor and advisor in some of the most well known tech companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe and others. He worked at Google and Twitter after his company Mixer Labs was acquired. Aside from AI he’s highly in touch with everything tech and startups. He doesn’t post super often but he has a solid blog and he’s the co-host of No Priors podcast that features long form chats with the leading engineers, researchers and founders in AI.
Ben Tossell (tuh-sell)
https://twitter.com/bentossell
Ben’s the Founder and CEO of Makerpad, one of the top sites to learn and work on no-code tools. He currently works at Zapier, focusing on AI after they acquired Makerpad last year. Before that he led Community at Product Hunt and later AngelList when they acquired Product Hunt in 2016. He runs one of the most popular AI newsletters called Ben’s Bites, it’s easily been my favorite daily way to stay up-to-date with the latest AI happenings.
Sarah Guo
https://twitter.com/saranormous
Sarah’s a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an early-stage VC firm specialized in AI startups. She made waves in SF during her time at Greylock, a top VC firm in the Valley, where she became their youngest general partner. She’s the other co-host of No Priors podcast alongside Ed Gil. She has an extensive network, and her close association with Andrew Ng (ing), the co-founder and leader of Google Brain, persuaded her that a "deep learning revolution was coming".
Natasha Mascarenhas
Natasha is a senior tech reporter at TechCrunch covering startups and AI and is the co-host of the Equity podcast. She wrote a super interesting article that summarized the discussions that took place during the Cerebral Valley Summit earlier this month.
Ben Parr
Ben Parr is a seasoned tech industry analyst, he’s a journalist, author, investor, founder, and operator. Known for being Editor at Mashable and journalist at CNET, he’s also the co-founder of Octane AI, developing AI products for ecommerce.
His long time column The Social Analyst covers the intersection of technology, particularly AI, and its effect on society. He’s highly entertaining on Twitter and doesn’t shy away from predictions and hot takes like recently when he pleaded that people stop saying GPT-4 can’t replace their jobs, he says “Yes, it can. It's only a matter of time”. So obviously on the AI enthusiast train.
Shawn @swyx Wang