AI has made it easier than ever to produce content, launch campaigns, and optimize performance at scale. But has it actually made marketing better?
In this episode of GTM Innovators, Kyle James sits down with Joey Lai, B2B Marketing Director at Mastercard, for a candid and deeply thoughtful conversation about what’s being lost as AI tools become embedded in everyday marketing work.
Drawing on her experience across fast-growing startups and large enterprise organizations, Joey argues that while AI accelerates output, it often erodes the critical thinking, creativity, and human insight that separate average marketing from great marketing. Together, they explore why optimization has become easier, originality has become rarer, and why the next generation of marketers faces a very real risk of outsourcing their thinking along with their tasks.
This conversation goes beyond AI hype to examine:
- Why more content does not mean better marketing
- How critical thinking and judgment are becoming true competitive advantages
- The unintended consequences of relying on AI too early in a marketer’s career
- Why human connection, curiosity, and hard thinking still matter more than speed
- How leaders can develop teams that use AI as a tool, not a crutch
If you’re a GTM leader, marketer, or builder navigating the AI era, this episode challenges a simple assumption: just because marketing is easier to execute doesn’t mean it’s easier to do well.
Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:
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Transcript:
00:00:00 Kyle James
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of GTM Innovators by 3Sixty Insights.
00:00:13 Kyle James
Today, we’re going to dive into something that is, I think, really, really important and perhaps overlooked in all of the talk about AI that we’re having right now and how it’s affecting marketing today.
00:00:24 Kyle James
How do we build and retain critical thinking in this modern world?
00:00:28 Kyle James
It’s something that with all the AI hype, we’re all excited about, and we’re not always thinking about, well, we still need to be on our game and know what great looks like and think about progressiveness in ourselves and leveling up.
00:00:40 Kyle James
And here on this conversation to help me dive into this, I’ve got Joey Lay, a B2B marketing director at MasterCard.
00:00:48 Kyle James
who’s got past experience in fast food startups, enterprise brands.
00:00:52 Kyle James
Joey, welcome to the call or welcome to the podcast.
00:00:55 Kyle James
So Joey, let’s kind of dive into some of this, right?
00:00:58 Kyle James
Like you have been at a lot of organizations, the whole range of size from startups to large organizations, looking at marketing, helping with marketing.
00:01:08 Kyle James
Talk about, like, how have you seen this evolve over time with your background and what you’re seeing today with how AI is changing things and how, the challenges that we’ve been talking about before we hit record, but how people may be slacking off or not being critical thinking about what they’re doing and how they go about their work.
00:01:27 Joey Lai
I think it’s no surprise that every marketer has been talking about AI and every industry, every function is talking about AI and how that’s evolving.
00:01:36 Joey Lai
I think what’s been really interesting is the previous company that I was working for was a very AI-first organization and was really leading the transformation of how AI was going to change the way that we work.
00:01:49 Joey Lai
working in the HR tech industry as well, like there’s a lot of, future work discussion.
00:01:55 Joey Lai
And there’s nothing that feels more disruptive than this AI talk that has been happening, both from an organisational structure perspective, but also the way that we can talk about jobs and tasks within a job in itself.
00:02:09 Joey Lai
And so like when I think about that from a marketing lens is AI has also, you know, had lots of benefits in the way that we can do marketing.
00:02:18 Joey Lai
and do more marketing, in fact.
00:02:21 Joey Lai
But I think what that has resulted in, my opinion, is more bad marketing or just very mediocre marketing, because there’s a lot of AI is enabling a more volume game.
00:02:34 Joey Lai
It’s like high production or high volume of production and not necessarily high quality of production, because we’ve missed the opportunity to take that time to build in
00:02:47 Joey Lai
that thinking, to create that discipline, and also like the talent to enable the AI or enable us, our teams, to actually think critically and create just good marketing.
00:03:02 Kyle James
So that’s interesting, because what I hear you say, and correct me if I’m wrong, is like, great, with an LLM, we can produce more content.
00:03:11 Kyle James
But what we’re not necessarily doing being able to produce more content is that gives us more time to think about what is the great thing that we want to say with this content instead of just like producing more slop as, you know, the AI slop term everybody’s using.
00:03:25 Kyle James
Is that kind of how you’re thinking about this?
00:03:27 Joey Lai
Yeah, And I think like that’s a very top of mind news case for me because of sort of the role that I’m in at the
00:03:34 Joey Lai
currently, but also just like what I’ve literally before I jumped onto this podcast, but I’ve been working on is very much our content strategy and our content plan.
00:03:44 Joey Lai
I appreciate there’s loads of different use cases of AI across marketing, but I think the heart of it is exactly the same, right?
00:03:51 Joey Lai
Like where we’re so focused on optimizing for production and optimizing for output that we forget that
00:04:00 Joey Lai
rubbish in, rubbish out.
00:04:02 Joey Lai
And that’s the same with any tool that we’ve ever used in our lives, right?
00:04:05 Joey Lai
Like, and that’s the same as like, as good as your prompt might be, is have you got that differentiated message?
00:04:14 Joey Lai
Have you got the thinking?
00:04:16 Joey Lai
Have you got that creative thought process in line?
00:04:20 Joey Lai
And I think one of the things that I try and get, you know, I do more and my team to do more is really around like, what is that
00:04:29 Joey Lai
human insight or what is that like sort that challenge or that we talk about pain points and we’d put it onto a beautiful slide deck and talk all about those things, but it’s like, okay, outside of that slide deck and those 10 words that we’ve articulated that pain point, it’s like, what is the why behind, you know, whoever we’re trying to target that we’re trying to get them to change?
00:04:55 Joey Lai
Like, what is it that they’re really trying to
00:05:00 Joey Lai
initiate or create impact within their organisation.
00:05:06 Joey Lai
And it’s not about, oh, they want to increase revenue.
00:05:09 Joey Lai
Obviously, like every organisation wants to increase revenue, but as individuals, as a human being who’s a buyer at the end of the day, so like a lot of my background is in B2B, but you know, I started my marketing career in B2C, which is sort of why I think it’s really important for us
00:05:26 Joey Lai
to borrow from B2C, which has such a strong like foundation around like, what’s the consumer insight that we’re trying to influence here?
00:05:33 Joey Lai
And I think in the same way, like in the B2B world, like that consumer insight is the same because we’re selling to an individual, we’re selling to a person.
00:05:40 Joey Lai
Now, I’m going to leave a Gentic, you know, to the side for the time being, because eventually we might not be selling, like we’re not selling to humans, we’re selling to agents.
00:05:49 Joey Lai
But in the essence of that, it’s like,
00:05:52 Joey Lai
that person, what is it that they’re, what is it they’re trying to achieve?
00:05:56 Joey Lai
And quite often it’s like, there’s something, it’s something really simple.
00:06:01 Joey Lai
It is often like, whether it’s them trying to look good in front of their boss, they’re trying to get that promotion or like, I mean, those are quite poor examples, but like,
00:06:13 Joey Lai
Coming back to like, what is that human insight that we’re trying to connect to and create?
00:06:19 Joey Lai
Because that’s going to make an impact when we then write the brief to our agency or we sit down and think about the creative outlet of this.
00:06:30 Kyle James
How about an example, right?
00:06:31 Kyle James
Like, let’s kind of give, you kind of lead into some bad examples, but I would love, is there a good example or even a great example of something that y’all are maybe working on at MasterCard now of kind of like, what does this greatness look like that, you know, how can it work together with kind of the AI, but also it needs this human elements and how that human elements were actually able to take it over the edge, whether it’s thinking about the pain or thinking about the whatever.
00:06:56 Joey Lai
Yeah, I usually think one of the best examples that I’ve seen in my.
00:07:00 Joey Lai
at the moment is the example of Claude.
00:07:01 Joey Lai
And the irony is like Claude in itself is an AI first company.
00:07:07 Joey Lai
And their marketing campaign is, so before their most recent agency was what you would expect from every AI company.
00:07:16 Joey Lai
It was all about how does AI optimize business goals and business objectives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like your bog standard approach.
00:07:28 Joey Lai
They recently brought out a campaign, was it called Thinking?
00:07:33 Joey Lai
And it was, it went gangbusters.
00:07:36 Joey Lai
They created a cap that just had the word, was it thinking?
00:07:40 Joey Lai
Hold on, give me two seconds.
00:07:41 Joey Lai
I did get that right.
00:07:42 Joey Lai
Have you seen that Claude campaign?
00:07:45 Kyle James
Yeah, I’ve seen some of the billboards even of it.
00:07:47 Kyle James
They’ve got some, and it’s interesting too that like, to kind of counteract, like you’ve probably seen some of the OpenAI ones too, and people are like, what?
00:07:57 Kyle James
Like it almost is, it’s interesting juxtaposition between the two because the OpenAI one is like doing all these things, but it’s like, wait a minute, but you’re taking all this stuff from me.
00:08:07 Kyle James
The way it’s kind of positioned, you know what I’m talking about?
00:08:10 Kyle James
The reaction to it has been very, very different.
00:08:13 Joey Lai
Yeah.
00:08:14 Joey Lai
I’ve not seen the OpenAI ones.
00:08:15 Joey Lai
I’ll have to look that up in a minute.
00:08:17 Kyle James
And I think a lot of people too are like, well, you’re taking all of this and this is maybe side banter, but maybe it leads into something interesting that
00:08:23 Kyle James
you’re taking all of this outside funding, and why are you spending it on marketing instead of converting the 98% of free consumers that you have now into paying consumers?
00:08:33 Kyle James
Like, why do you need more top of the funnel?
00:08:35 Kyle James
You’ve already got hundreds of millions of users.
00:08:37 Joey Lai
Yeah, that’s such a good point.
00:08:39 Joey Lai
That is such a good point.
00:08:40 Joey Lai
I mean, there’s a lot of questions to be asked about ChatGPT at the moment, but that’s a side point.
00:08:47 Kyle James
Well, so
00:08:48 Kyle James
Bringing it back in a little bit, right?
00:08:50 Kyle James
We talked previously kind of about a lot of what you do in kind of the ABM space, the account-based marketing space, even using kind of the term silver bullet and how it’s kind of fading into, like we just need to do good marketing, right?
00:09:02 Kyle James
I’d love you to expand upon that a little bit and kind of how you’re thinking about that element.
00:09:07 Joey Lai
So I think with ABM, like what was it probably about like 5, 10 years ago, it was sort of the new shiny toy of marketing and it was all about
00:09:16 Joey Lai
sales and marketing alignment, making sure we have strong account plans.
00:09:19 Joey Lai
And you’re like, yeah, this all sounds like really good principles for us to operate around.
00:09:27 Joey Lai
And a lot of organizations were like, great, let me change my field marketers into ABMs or let me create a new ABM role.
00:09:36 Joey Lai
And what I think that did was sort of create a focus
00:09:41 Joey Lai
for these people to be like, okay, we need to make sure that sales and marketing is aligned, which is the forever challenge of every marketer and every sales team.
00:09:50 Joey Lai
But what I think if we go back to what it fundamentally distills into is having a clear understanding of what your target prospect and what your target market is looking for and ensuring that you’re gathering all the information and all the intel that it has to offer.
00:10:10 Joey Lai
And I think that is really cool.
00:10:11 Joey Lai
Like today, we have incredible tools at our disposal as marketers, more than we’ve ever had.
00:10:19 Joey Lai
And every salesperson has even more tools to their access.
00:10:22 Joey Lai
And the intent, sort of insight and knowledge that we’re going to gather and garner is great, both from AI and, you know, all the other tech players that have been in market for quite a while.
00:10:37 Joey Lai
But what
00:10:40 Joey Lai
is still fundamental to, and I think the challenge that we have sometimes is we can over-index on, oh, this person’s at an awareness stage, therefore we just give them like more awareness and some consideration content until they’ve like moved into the consideration stage according to some arbitrary, it’s not arbitrary, but
00:11:04 Joey Lai
somewhat arbitrary scoring mechanism that we identify and said.
00:11:07 Kyle James
Do you think a little bit, or do you ever think that we’ve got to a point with all the data that we have now, that it’s information overload, analysis, paralysis, and because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we didn’t have all this data about who our target, who our TAM was,
00:11:25 Kyle James
who our target persona was.
00:11:26 Kyle James
We didn’t know all the details about them.
00:11:28 Kyle James
So we were just out there telling good stories and putting out good content.
00:11:31 Kyle James
And now we’ve over-indexed towards the data.
00:11:34 Kyle James
And part of it is we just need to get out there and tell good stories and make sure the value proposition is out there of what we do.
00:11:41 Kyle James
And here’s the pain we solve.
00:11:43 Kyle James
Are you interested in that?
00:11:45 Kyle James
Does that solve, does that fix for you or not?
00:11:48 Kyle James
Right?
00:11:48 Kyle James
Do you think some of that is kind of in the equation here?
00:11:51 Joey Lai
I mean, it absolutely does.
00:11:52 Joey Lai
There’s definitely
00:11:54 Joey Lai
like a information overload in terms of A, how much can I trust the information that I’ve given that’s been served to me?
00:12:04 Joey Lai
Again, data is great and important, but data is only going to tell you the story that you want to tell, right?
00:12:13 Joey Lai
Like you’re looking, your hypothesis is informing the sorts of information and the sorts of data points that you’re trying to get out of it.
00:12:21 Joey Lai
And so there’s
00:12:24 Joey Lai
when you over index on just looking at data and looking at, we use whatever intent platform you use, whether it’s Six Sense or Wombora or whomever else that you’re using, if you over index on just awareness, consideration, decision, I think you do lose that ability to tell like that more cohesive story.
00:12:51 Joey Lai
I think what the challenge is, the classic, stat that, every marketer would have heard is, that you’re wasting 50% of your budget.
00:13:02 Joey Lai
You just don’t know where.
00:13:04 Joey Lai
And so as a result of that, there’s such a hyper focus on ROI.
00:13:09 Joey Lai
Okay, where is it that I’m wasting my 50%?
00:13:12 Joey Lai
How do I optimize?
00:13:13 Joey Lai
How do I, you know, maximize the ROI of my budget, which is super important and obviously critical for us is
00:13:21 Joey Lai
we need to report back to the business, the impact.
00:13:24 Joey Lai
But I think when we do that, you sometimes do lose, like, at least in my past roles, you become so channel focused and so channel siloed that you’re like, oh, my LinkedIn, I need to optimize that because
00:13:39 Joey Lai
currently my click-through rate is lower or my cost per lead is quite high.
00:13:44 Joey Lai
Therefore, I need to like drop spend or like even tighten my audience or expand, whatever strategy you want to use when you come to optimization.
00:13:54 Joey Lai
But then it’s really hard to connect that with, oh, my LinkedIn cost is higher because I stopped doing all my display advertising and therefore brand awareness is really low.
00:14:05 Joey Lai
And therefore, obviously all my lead Gen.
00:14:07 Joey Lai
components are a lot higher.
00:14:09 Joey Lai
That correlation is often lag is a lagging indicator.
00:14:15 Joey Lai
And also it’s really hard to like go back to the business and say, hey, like I’m spending X amount on display.
00:14:23 Joey Lai
It’s giving me, you know, millions of impressions.
00:14:26 Joey Lai
The click through rate is relatively lower.
00:14:30 Joey Lai
the challenge that we’re all facing as marketers is website traffic is down.
00:14:34 Joey Lai
So then you’re almost like, even with display, you can’t, you know, in the past we’d be able to directly correlate that to, oh, we’ve seen a spike in website traffic.
00:14:42 Joey Lai
Today, that’s not going to be the case.
00:14:45 Joey Lai
So how do you continue to like convince the business that display or that sort of brand awareness activity is important in order for you to do lead Gen.
00:14:56 Joey Lai
Or in the same way, like our content syndication costs are
00:15:00 Joey Lai
like lead conversion in content syndication is quite poor.
00:15:04 Joey Lai
But actually, that correlates to our lack of investment over here in our e monitor program.
00:15:10 Joey Lai
So I think it’s really the challenge of like making the connections between the different channels, and telling that bigger story of the data points across the channels, and the impact that that’s having to the business.
00:15:24 Joey Lai
And secondary to that, I think is ultimately like,
00:15:29 Joey Lai
What we’re forgetting when we’re measuring an outcome is like, how do you measure the impact of brand and brand building?
00:15:37 Joey Lai
Like measuring impact of brand is because we’ve all got KPIs on a clear like brand uplift surveys that we can use, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:46 Joey Lai
But when you’re building brand, again, those are lagging indicators, like building a brand.
00:15:52 Joey Lai
It’s much more nebulous.
00:15:53 Joey Lai
Yeah, exactly.
00:15:54 Joey Lai
It could take a year, it could take two, it could take three.
00:15:58 Joey Lai
And so it’s having that commitment of the business to go, I’m still going to continue to build brand while I like optimize for the sort of the marketing budget and the ROI of those dollars.
00:16:13 Kyle James
And I wonder too, right, like I’m sitting here thinking, is your optimizing those paid campaigns, right?
00:16:18 Kyle James
Like LLMs can help you come up with 10 different variations of this title that we could measure click-throughs on.
00:16:24 Kyle James
And great, but you get diminishing returns there, right?
00:16:28 Kyle James
And I think to your point, Rap in this big picture, like critically thinking, how does this actually helping our overall goal?
00:16:37 Kyle James
Yes, it’s optimizing, it’s optimizing, optimizing these little things, but it’s pennies on the dollar in the big picture, right?
00:16:42 Kyle James
And because we’ve got these tools that make that piece easier, are we leaning more into that?
00:16:47 Kyle James
And maybe we shouldn’t be because
00:16:49 Kyle James
Is it really moving the needle in any meaningful way, right.
00:16:52 Joey Lai
That’s such a good point.
00:16:54 Joey Lai
It’s like, it feels easy, like we’re human beings, we go the path of least resistance.
00:16:58 Joey Lai
Like that’s easy.
00:16:59 Joey Lai
I can make 10 ad variations and do AB testing in a sequence order and go, oh, out of these, this is the strongest messaging.
00:17:07 Joey Lai
Whereas I could be spending more time in like coming up with truly like a creative concept and.
00:17:18 Kyle James
Yeah.
00:17:20 Joey Lai
And I think that’s what it, I love that word, something novel.
00:17:23 Joey Lai
I think we’ve lost that a lot in
00:17:28 Joey Lai
in the mass production of marketing and also like in a world of AI where we go, oh, let me just put a prompt into ChatGPT.
00:17:36 Joey Lai
Again, like ChatGPT or any AI is recreating ideas.
00:17:40 Joey Lai
They’re not really generating new ideas, are they?
00:17:43 Joey Lai
Like they’re absorbing and taking all that information that’s already exists in the world.
00:17:47 Joey Lai
Like where do new ideas…
00:17:49 Kyle James
Something that already existed.
00:17:50 Kyle James
Yeah.
00:17:51 Joey Lai
Exactly.
00:17:52 Joey Lai
It’s like, where do these new ideas come from?
00:17:54 Joey Lai
It comes from me sitting here and having a conversation with you, Kyle.
00:17:58 Joey Lai
It comes from me going out to, going for a walk and being inspired by, I don’t know, the river that like flutters into the water and goes, I don’t know, listens or whatever that might be, like going to a museum or having a conversation with my sales team because they’ve had, they’ve just come out of a strategic conversation with my prospects.
00:18:21 Joey Lai
And there’s a nugget that goes, oh, this is actually the problem that they’re solving for.
00:18:26 Joey Lai
This is the actual use case that they’re going for.
00:18:29 Kyle James
But Joey, it’s so easy just to go to Claude or ChatGPT and say, hey, here’s my campaign.
00:18:37 Kyle James
Come up with 10, give me 10 new alternatives of this brand
00:18:42 Kyle James
outline that I can use and test and workflows for each of them.
00:18:46 Kyle James
Boom, done, plug it in.
00:18:47 Kyle James
It’s so easy to do that.
00:18:48 Kyle James
Why would I not want to do more of that?
00:18:51 Joey Lai
May, I hear you.
00:18:52 Joey Lai
I’ve definitely, I mean, I’m tempted sometimes.
00:18:55 Joey Lai
Absolutely.
00:18:56 Joey Lai
I’m sitting here going, this could take me 10 minutes with Copilot and I’ll put it on a slide and it would look pretty good.
00:19:05 Joey Lai
It would look pretty impressive.
00:19:07 Joey Lai
I totally agree with you.
00:19:08 Joey Lai
It’s so, tempting.
00:19:10 Joey Lai
And especially like I’ve recently moved jobs and it’s really tempting for me to be like, oh, I don’t need to read anything.
00:19:18 Joey Lai
I don’t need to read anything about the industry.
00:19:20 Joey Lai
I don’t need to read all our white papers.
00:19:22 Joey Lai
I’ll just read a little bit and then the rest of it, I’ll just feed it into AI so that they can start storing it and they start creating a bank.
00:19:32 Joey Lai
And that temptation is definitely there.
00:19:35 Joey Lai
But what I know as someone who’s worked, in marketing for such a long time is the power of my marketing and my ability to create good marketing comes from me actually digesting that information, me absorbing it, me having those conversations internally, listening to every single podcast there can be about whatever industry that I’m stepping into and becoming a pseudo expert of that.
00:20:04 Joey Lai
It’s
00:20:05 Joey Lai
it’s important for me to look at what other companies are doing directly within my competitive set, but also outside of my competitive set and then also outside of my industry.
00:20:17 Joey Lai
And so that is one thing that like, if I, that I really want to be challenging marketers and challenging really all of us to do more of is like, don’t take that path of least resistance.
00:20:34 Joey Lai
Especially when it comes to absorbing and what feels like in the moment, an unnecessary learning process is actually so important for you to
00:20:51 Joey Lai
be able to even spark those connections in the 1st place.
00:20:54 Kyle James
Well, you got me thinking of like a famous quote, Robert F.
00:21:00 Kyle James
Kennedy said, 1960s, we want to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, right?
00:21:07 Kyle James
Like, and I’m thinking about this as like, we’ve got decades of our career of scars on our back as we had to learn things and figure stuff out.
00:21:14 Kyle James
And
00:21:16 Kyle James
We thrive because of the challenge of figuring that out.
00:21:20 Kyle James
And I think what we’re seeing, what we’re worried about is like, well, if you pick a 22, 23-year-old fresh out of college and give them these tools that gives them good enough, they are never going to know what fulfillment means because they’ve never discovered anything great and novel and interesting, right?
00:21:35 Kyle James
Like that’s kind of the concerted fear I have with a lot of this stuff is they’re never challenged anymore because they never have to go through
00:21:44 Kyle James
years of just like failure and stumbling and asking the questions and going back to the drawing board and figuring out because everything is given to him as good enough.
00:21:53 Joey Lai
Absolutely.
00:21:54 Joey Lai
And as a mother, as someone who is also hiring for new talent, who is looking at training my team and like building their skills, that is one of my biggest fears.
00:22:05 Joey Lai
And I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges of the marketing discipline in the next 5 to 10 years.
00:22:11 Joey Lai
It’s the type of talent
00:22:13 Joey Lai
and their ability to think critically as they come into the organisation and therefore make an impact.
00:22:20 Joey Lai
And let me give you an example of this.
00:22:23 Joey Lai
I’ve recently been hiring for a new senior analyst role.
00:22:26 Joey Lai
So relatively junior, we’re looking for like three to five, maybe a couple of years of marketing or general experience.
00:22:34 Joey Lai
And I gave them a live case study.
00:22:37 Joey Lai
And I asked them, if you’re going to use
00:22:40 Joey Lai
ChatGPT or any AI, send me the transcript so I can see what you’re inputting into it and understand sort of your knowledge there.
00:22:48 Joey Lai
One of the candidates, what she presented to me was clearly literal copy and paste from ChatGPT.
00:22:56 Joey Lai
I don’t mind that, that’s fine.
00:22:58 Joey Lai
She presented it and it was like, it wasn’t a strong presentation and so obviously she didn’t progress.
00:23:04 Joey Lai
It was a, it was a fine, it was a campaign plan.
00:23:06 Joey Lai
And I was like, it’s fine.
00:23:07 Joey Lai
It looks like a typical campaign plan you would expect.
00:23:11 Joey Lai
When I looked at her ChatGPT prompts, not only did she just like literally put in the briefs into ChatGPT with no additional thinking, so like low effort whatsoever, is the output of her ChatGPT.
00:23:25 Joey Lai
She just, she excluded the bits of information that I would have said, that’s the money, like that’s the, that’s the rationale, that’s the good bit.
00:23:33 Joey Lai
And you took that out.
00:23:34 Joey Lai
You presented to me not only a ChatGPT version, but a crap ChatGPT version.
00:23:40 Joey Lai
And it’s like that just, I was quite surprised in terms of how did you get this so wrong?
00:23:48 Joey Lai
The task wasn’t hard.
00:23:50 Joey Lai
And it just, it was a bit alarming to me to think that like, I don’t think that’s an isolated case.
00:23:58 Joey Lai
I think that is going to be a reflection of
00:24:02 Joey Lai
quite a lot of the talent that’s coming through is because they’ve never been, they’ve not had to be challenged in their critical thinking.
00:24:09 Joey Lai
They also don’t know what good looks like because they don’t have those years of training and any training that they have has come from ChatGPT.
00:24:18 Joey Lai
And so they’re just like, oh, this sounds good.
00:24:20 Joey Lai
It’s like if it’s from ChatGPT, it must be right.
00:24:24 Joey Lai
Yeah.
00:24:25 Joey Lai
And, you know, research in itself also shows like, you know, students who use
00:24:31 Joey Lai
AI to assist with their essay writing, even in just a short period of three months of using AI, have lost their ability to think critically and solve problems compared to the control group who weren’t able to use AI.
00:24:50 Joey Lai
And so even from an educational standpoint, we’re already seeing that bleed through.
00:24:54 Joey Lai
And so once they enter into the workplace,
00:24:57 Joey Lai
As leaders, I think we have a responsibility to help train them in a way that is going to help them think critically.
00:25:05 Joey Lai
And part of that thinking critically will be in conjunction with AI.
00:25:09 Joey Lai
Absolutely.
00:25:10 Joey Lai
But so much of it is those soft skills.
00:25:14 Joey Lai
It’s those critical thinking skills.
00:25:16 Joey Lai
It’s the ability to challenge.
00:25:17 Joey Lai
It’s the ability to look at something and go, that’s a bad creative and that’s a good creative.
00:25:23 Joey Lai
And this is why.
00:25:24 Kyle James
And why, yeah.
00:25:26 Kyle James
So talk about that, right?
00:25:27 Kyle James
And let me even correct myself for a second.
00:25:29 Kyle James
That’s John F.
00:25:30 Kyle James
Kennedy.
00:25:30 Kyle James
I know that.
00:25:31 Kyle James
I don’t know why I said Robert F.
00:25:32 Kyle James
Kennedy said that quote, but that’s been eating me apart.
00:25:35 Kyle James
Like, why did I get that wrong?
00:25:38 Kyle James
Maybe I hallucinated a little bit.
00:25:40 Kyle James
But anyway, like, going into kind of
00:25:44 Kyle James
what are you doing internally and working with your teams and your junior people to build that critical thinking?
00:25:49 Kyle James
Like, do you have exercises or tasks or habits that you’re helping people create to make sure that they’re building that critical thinking and not outsourcing it or not skipping it altogether?
00:26:01 Joey Lai
I think it’s really hard.
00:26:03 Joey Lai
I’m not I’m not going to lie.
00:26:04 Joey Lai
Like, what’s hard is top down and also, you know, bottom up.
00:26:11 Joey Lai
There’s such a big push to use AI.
00:26:13 Joey Lai
And we’re thinking about what projects and what processes and what things and how can we inject AI across everything, which is important and absolutely we should.
00:26:23 Joey Lai
And so when you have that pressure from top down and then when it is really easy for team members to do it, then naturally, it’s just hard.
00:26:40 Joey Lai
But one thing that we did recently was actually just going back to basic whiteboarding.
00:26:47 Joey Lai
And I remember we used to, we used to run whiteboarding events and programs with our partners because it was like, shut down your laptops.
00:26:56 Joey Lai
Let’s not do anything, but let’s connect with each other and spark ideas.
00:27:00 Joey Lai
We had to do this virtually because we’re a global team.
00:27:02 Joey Lai
But that was like it was 4 hours where we had a couple of problem statements.
00:27:07 Joey Lai
We bucketed them to three groups.
00:27:08 Joey Lai
We split up into brainstorming sessions and problem solved in old school fashioned way of, okay, what are your ideas?
00:27:15 Joey Lai
And obviously we use Copilot to keep out, do our minutes and tasks and actions and take a record, which was great because then it meant everyone could focus on actually doing the whiteboard session.
00:27:27 Joey Lai
Yeah.
00:27:28 Joey Lai
And the ideas that came from that and sort of the connectivity that enabled in terms of teams that typically don’t talk to each other, we have newer members like myself, we’re able to engage with a wider variety, like a wider part of the team.
00:27:44 Joey Lai
That sort of interaction was incredibly helpful.
00:27:47 Joey Lai
And the outputs of that in terms of changes that we were going to make was super relevant, super actionable.
00:27:58 Joey Lai
And what we expect is to be super impactful to the business.
00:28:04 Joey Lai
Could someone have sat there and asked AI to go, how can I optimize my creative process?
00:28:09 Joey Lai
How can I optimize our procedures?
00:28:12 Joey Lai
How can I optimize team collaboration?
00:28:15 Joey Lai
I’m sure they would have come up with a list.
00:28:16 Joey Lai
But what that whiteboarding session did as well was create buy-in.
00:28:21 Joey Lai
That like, oh, these are all our ideas that we can stand behind.
00:28:26 Joey Lai
And therefore, when we implement this new process, I’m not going to be like, oh, I can’t be bothered.
00:28:31 Joey Lai
I’m going to be like, no, we agreed as a team, this is what we’re going to do.
00:28:34 Joey Lai
Therefore, I’m going to follow the process.
00:28:36 Kyle James
There’s extra investment there in it.
00:28:38 Kyle James
And I imagine from a team perspective, that’s probably also built culture too, right?
00:28:43 Joey Lai
Yeah, absolutely.
00:28:45 Kyle James
Yeah, I mean, and so you kind of alluded to it, what are some of the right ways that we can kind of
00:28:51 Kyle James
leverage AI to do this, right?
00:28:53 Kyle James
Like clearly it can be kind of that secretary, right?
00:28:56 Kyle James
And free us up for more time to have relationship building, collaboration with individuals and be kind of the like note taker so we’re not worried about scribbling something down.
00:29:06 Kyle James
But like what else?
00:29:07 Kyle James
Like how else are you thinking that it can be a healthy partnership between kind of the AI and the humans, if you will?
00:29:14 Joey Lai
I wish I had an answer for this, but I genuinely don’t.
00:29:19 Joey Lai
And the reason being is I’m sort of in this philosophical battle for myself.
00:29:24 Joey Lai
It’s like, do I even want to use AI at all?
00:29:28 Joey Lai
And that’s really hard for someone who works in the tech industry, who works for organizations that both past and present, and I’m sure in the future as well, who’s like, business direction is to use AI.
00:29:41 Joey Lai
That’s where the growth opportunity is going to be.
00:29:44 Joey Lai
But
00:29:45 Joey Lai
I, find it really hard just to even think about how we would use it.
00:29:51 Kyle James
I guarantee you’re not alone too.
00:29:53 Kyle James
There’s a lot of people that I taught, I mean, yes, there’s a lot of excitement, but there’s a lot of people that are very, you know, guarded and like, you know, this is not human, this is not natural, this is like, this is taking away that spark, right?
00:30:07 Joey Lai
Yeah, I think, and I think that’s what it, for me, it really like jars with my,
00:30:13 Joey Lai
like my personal beliefs and what I think is important in life.
00:30:18 Joey Lai
And as a marketer, what I think is important is building brands, building connections.
00:30:23 Joey Lai
And, this argument that you can build connections with agents is BS, and I’m going to call it BS.
00:30:33 Joey Lai
But like, you know, having said all of those things, obviously I do use elements of AI in our work.
00:30:41 Joey Lai
And
00:30:42 Joey Lai
I think one of the coolest things that I’ve, I’m really excited to look into utilizing it is AI in market research.
00:30:53 Joey Lai
So one of our agency partners, our media agency and creative agency partners has created their sort of AI model that is essentially meant to be mimicking a panel of whichever persona that you would be looking for.
00:31:11 Joey Lai
And in the past, we would have obviously gone out and spent 100, 200K on market research and gone out and done quant and qual and tested all our advertising and messaging and all of that fun stuff.
00:31:29 Joey Lai
And that would have taken us at least two or three months to go from brief to actual output.
00:31:36 Joey Lai
Whereas AI is able to do that
00:31:39 Joey Lai
Immediately, we’re able to get that sort of live feedback and information.
00:31:47 Kyle James
Run a simulation, essentially, a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot faster.
00:31:51 Joey Lai
Yeah, and I think it’s the faster part.
00:31:54 Joey Lai
It might not necessarily be cheaper, to be honest, because let’s be true, our agencies and our businesses are trying to make money.
00:32:01 Joey Lai
If they’re going to lose money doing market research, they’re going to gain it somewhere else.
00:32:06 Joey Lai
But it’s definitely faster.
00:32:10 Joey Lai
And sometimes I think, it does enable us to move quickly.
00:32:14 Joey Lai
And I think that is what has been powerful about AI.
00:32:16 Joey Lai
It has enabled us to move quickly when we’re like, okay, we need this ad to go out the door now, or we need this deliverable out now.
00:32:25 Joey Lai
How can we get more content that is SEO optimized?
00:32:31 Joey Lai
So sorry, search optimized as well as AEO.
00:32:35 Joey Lai
Like,
00:32:36 Joey Lai
sometimes that is a boiling game.
00:32:37 Joey Lai
So that has been really beneficial.
00:32:42 Joey Lai
So yeah, like that’s what I would say is quite an interesting area that I’m keen to see how we would continue to utilize that in the marketing discipline.
00:32:53 Joey Lai
I think the other thing that has been interesting is while the intent aspect,
00:33:02 Joey Lai
as has been part of ABM.
00:33:04 Joey Lai
I do think that some of the tools, some of these enterprise tools that have AI embedded in them is better.
00:33:13 Joey Lai
And therefore, we are able to know a lot more about our prospect or prospective customer.
00:33:23 Joey Lai
And that is going to help us create better marketing in the future.
00:33:28 Kyle James
Talk to me like, how do you see this stuff playing out in the next, let’s see.
00:33:32 Kyle James
gosh, it’s hard to even see any links in the future.
00:33:35 Kyle James
18 months, do you even dare go two, three, four, five years out?
00:33:39 Kyle James
Like, how do you see that coming?
00:33:41 Kyle James
And what sort of advice or tips do you have for like young marketers coming up and how to thrive in this new world?
00:33:52 Joey Lai
I’ll answer the second-half of that question because I honestly have no idea how this is going to play out and what
00:33:59 Joey Lai
I want it to play out is probably not going to be the reality, which is let’s abandon AI and do something better with our time and resources.
00:34:08 Joey Lai
But that’s not going to happen.
00:34:10 Joey Lai
No, unfortunately not.
00:34:13 Joey Lai
But I think in terms of what, you know, thinking about that next generation of marketers and what is really going to make them stand out is how are you thinking about building brand and building connections
00:34:28 Joey Lai
And I use that term building brand quite loosely, because I’m not saying that we all become brand marketers, is within every function, whether it’s you’re in lead or demand Gen.
00:34:42 Joey Lai
or you’re in digital or you’re in website, is what is the, how do you continuously build back that brand equity that is going to make you stand out?
00:34:53 Joey Lai
And even for you as a marketer, like what is your brand that you’re going to stand for?
00:34:59 Joey Lai
And how is that going to translate in the types of organisations that you choose to work with or work for?
00:35:09 Joey Lai
But the connections piece, which is what brand is really about, like brand isn’t just a logo.
00:35:15 Joey Lai
It’s not just about the colours that you use or whatever.
00:35:19 Joey Lai
It’s really about the connections
00:35:22 Joey Lai
that you’re having with your target market or your consumer.
00:35:27 Joey Lai
And in the same way as marketers, like how are you building connections based within the organisation?
00:35:35 Joey Lai
How are you building connections with the data that you’re presented with?
00:35:38 Joey Lai
How are you building connections with the people around you?
00:35:42 Joey Lai
How are you building connections through the content you’re creating?
00:35:46 Joey Lai
How are you building connections in the channels that you’re choosing and the ad
00:35:51 Joey Lai
copy that you’re putting out there.
00:35:54 Joey Lai
Because I think in a world driven by AI and tech and agents is coming back to the core of who we are as people is like, we are humans that want connection and hunger for it.
00:36:15 Joey Lai
And so what that means is like, if you’re making connections with
00:36:20 Joey Lai
colleagues, you’re not only learning from them, they’re going to want to work with you.
00:36:25 Joey Lai
Half your job as a marketer, as any employer is you want to be the person that people want to work with you.
00:36:33 Joey Lai
And therefore they’re going to go that extra mile to help you achieve whatever goal you’re able to achieve.
00:36:39 Joey Lai
It doesn’t matter whether you’re the smartest person or you have the best AI tool or not.
00:36:44 Joey Lai
It is your ability to connect with others.
00:36:47 Kyle James
Yeah.
00:36:48 Kyle James
Okay.
00:36:48 Kyle James
So what I’m hearing you say then, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is like the relationships are still everything.
00:36:57 Kyle James
And maybe, this is maybe me taking a leap here a little bit.
00:37:02 Kyle James
If these tools can start doing more and more of the busy work, maybe they become even more important.
00:37:06 Kyle James
So you should be spending more time investing in those relationships, building those relationships, because that’s what
00:37:12 Kyle James
A, will get you further ahead, but also make you feel fulfilled.
00:37:17 Kyle James
Is that right?
00:37:18 Joey Lai
Yeah, I think that’s a fair summary.
00:37:21 Joey Lai
I think it’d be interesting to see whether this whole idea of like AI is going to take our jobs will realize my, maybe my selfish hope is that it won’t, because obviously I want to be employed in the next 5 to 10 years of my life.
00:37:39 Joey Lai
But at the same time, is
00:37:42 Joey Lai
I think what organizations will realize is, yeah, you can get agents and robots to do stuff, but similar to brand, like what is your company culture that you’re trying to create?
00:37:55 Joey Lai
And culture is, again, so hard to measure, but culture is so connected to your ability to succeed as a company.
00:38:05 Joey Lai
And because it is about how do you problem solve?
00:38:08 Joey Lai
How do you create new
00:38:11 Joey Lai
truly new innovation.
00:38:13 Joey Lai
And without that culture of connection, you’re not going to succeed.
00:38:18 Joey Lai
And unfortunately, what is going to require is organizations to fail.
00:38:24 Joey Lai
but for others to realize that is the case.
00:38:27 Kyle James
It’s that connective tissue that gets everybody on the boat rowing in the same direction, right?
00:38:34 Joey Lai
Exactly, yeah.
00:38:35 Joey Lai
Rallied around that idea, rallied around like that problem that you’re trying to solve for and actually solving for it, not just creating more busy work.
00:38:45 Kyle James
Yeah, awesome.
00:38:46 Kyle James
Well, Joey, as we kind of wrap up, any final thoughts or anything that you want to kind of leave people with?
00:38:51 Kyle James
I know this is a challenging thing to talk about.
00:38:55 Kyle James
we’re talking about these tools that are, getting into kind of like some of the things that make us human and make us feel fulfilled and thrive.
00:39:04 Kyle James
And yes, everybody’s concerned about what does this mean for my job and role?
00:39:08 Kyle James
So it’s, it is a touchy thing to talk about, but I think it’s also really important we have these conversations.
00:39:14 Kyle James
So
00:39:15 Kyle James
As we kind of wrap up here, any kind of final thoughts that you want to leave people with or closing kind of things to really latch on to?
00:39:22 Joey Lai
I think the main thing is like, the next time you reach for Copilot or AI or ChatGPT, it’s just taking a minute to go, do I really need that?
00:39:34 Joey Lai
Or can I think about that myself and get to that solution?
00:39:39 Joey Lai
Because quite often, it’s not going to take you that much longer to do it.
00:39:45 Joey Lai
And what you forget is that time that you spent, whether it’s drafting that e-mail or, building out your marketing campaign or thinking about that ad copy that you’re creating, the more you do it, the better you’re going to become.
00:40:04 Joey Lai
And the more you rely on AI, the worse you’re going to become.
00:40:08 Joey Lai
So every time you reach out and
00:40:12 Joey Lai
want to use it, just give yourself a second to think, do I need it right now in this instance?
00:40:17 Joey Lai
Can I do it myself?
00:40:20 Joey Lai
And sometimes you will go, yeah, I do really need it because it’s urgent and I need to spit that out.
00:40:26 Joey Lai
Or, no, actually, I’m going to sit here and allow myself two hours of deep thinking work and work through what that campaign strategy is going to look like.
00:40:36 Joey Lai
And you will find that over time, the output that you’re able to create is going to be so much better.
00:40:41 Kyle James
I love that.
00:40:42 Kyle James
It’s kind of the whole, if you don’t work out, you become fat and lazy.
00:40:47 Kyle James
Your brain’s the same way, right?
00:40:48 Kyle James
That’s what I’m here for.
00:40:49 Kyle James
Your brain is the absolute same way.
00:40:51 Kyle James
If you’re not challenging it, you’re not strengthening that muscle.
00:40:54 Kyle James
You’re not leveling up.
00:40:56 Joey Lai
Yeah.
00:40:56 Joey Lai
exactly.
00:40:57 Kyle James
Awesome.
00:40:58 Kyle James
Joey, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
00:41:01 Kyle James
I know, like I said, this is a tough thing, but it’s something we all need to be talking about and thinking instead of just blindly indulging on these tools because they ultimately will make you dumber if you are too dependent on them.
00:41:15 Kyle James
So how you think about them, how you take advantage of them are super important.
00:41:18 Kyle James
And if you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more of this, please like, subscribe, leave comments, leave feedback.
00:41:24 Kyle James
And until next time,
00:41:27 Kyle James
Have a wonderful day, and we’ll see you next time here on GTM Innovators.
00:41:32 Kyle James
Thanks, everybody.