An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434)

Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Consumers are adopting AI at a remarkable pace, as fast as they adopted computers and the internet. And we’re only starting to see how that might shape our businesses in the longer term. Part of the problem is that it’s not always easy to know which customers are using artificial intelligence and how they’re using it.

One way to think about it though is to look at how a single individual uses AI, not as a representative sample, but to get a clearer picture of some of the possibilities of AI use. For instance, what does a day in the (AI) life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant look like? How are your customers using artificial intelligence in their day-to-day lives? And what does that mean for your business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

An AI Day in the Life of Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI PDF link
• The Value of AI in Today’s Classrooms
• Scaling: The State of Play in AI – by Ethan Mollick
• Creative and Strategic Capabilities of Generative AI:Evidence from Large-Scale Experiments PDF link
• Quote by Steve Jobs: “I think one of the things that really separates…”
• Will Marketers Bet that Google Wins the AI Economy? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 433)
• Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 432)
• Stop Outsourcing Your Sales & Marketing to Gatekeepers Like Google (Thinks Out Loud Episode 257)
• AI Won’t Steal Your Job: Smart People Who Put AI to Work Will (Thinks Out Loud Episode 208)
• Revisiting the Digital Transformation of You: The Skills You Need to Compete (Thinks Out Loud)
• Revisiting Google Big AI Problem (Thinks Out Loud)
• How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428)

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

• A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you.
• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
  • Customer Focus
  • Strategy
  • Technology
  • Operations
  • Culture
  • Data

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Running time: 27m 08s

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Transcript: An AI Day in the Life of Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 434 of The Big Show. And I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

I want to start by talking about the fact that artificial intelligence adoption among your customers is crazy fast. I’m going to tell you how fast in just a moment. There’s new research from Alexander Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Adam Blandon of Vanderbilt University, and David j Deming of Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research that found in August of 2024.

So just last month, 39% of the US population age 18 to 64 used generative ai. More than 24% of workers used it at least once a week. At least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and nearly one in nine used it every workday. The paper went on to say, and this is a quote, Historical data on usage and mass market product launches suggest that U.

S. adoption of generative AI has been faster than adoption of the personal computer and the Internet. So that’s really very, very fast. I mean, quicker than the personal computer, quicker than the Internet. One last point that they made in their paper that I found fascinating is this. They said that generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home.

And I’m going to come back to why I think that is a huge deal before we wrap up here. No matter how you slice it, a good chunk of your customers use AI every day. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about some ways that some people are using it. For me, the simplest way is to talk about how I use AI in my daily life as a marketing digital strategy consultant, I want to be very transparent.

This is not a representative sample, not by any stretch. I am obviously a bit of an early adopter. It’s likely that many of your customers will be a bit further behind the curve and some undoubtedly will be a bit ahead of the curve, particularly in specific areas. Think of this, though, as an ethnographic study, a little tiny ethnographic slice of life from the perspective of an early adopter.

I’d also recommend that if you’re not already, Start talking with customers to see how they’re using AI in your day to life, in their day to day life, and see how that lines up with what I’m going to say. First, I see it as part of my job to understand these tools so I can better help my client. Unlike consultants and plenty of other folks who think that AI will steal their jobs, I think I’m doing a disservice to my clients if I’m not using AI.

I think we as a company are doing a disservice to our clients if we’re not using AI. How can we reasonably advise clients about These tools and how their customers will use these tools if we’re not using them ourselves. Again, we always have to remember, we’re not the customer. We want to back this up with real research, but we want to have a good sense of how you can use these tools in practice.

I’ve long said, That AI won’t take your job, but that smart people who do use AI will. I’ve recently updated to say that some dumb people using AI can take your job too. There is a lot of research that shows that lower skilled folks get the biggest gains from using AI. I sometimes think of artificial intelligence like a ladder.

Tall people don’t need ladders as often as short people do. And they might only need to go up a step or two to reach what they want. Shorter people might have to go to the top of the ladder to reach what they need. And they might, as a consequence, be more shaky, less confident. They also have more to lose if they fall.

But the ladder still helps them reach it. And it makes them more capable than they would be if they didn’t have a ladder. Right? AI brings the average up by making the least skilled people more competitive with people who have greater experience and greater expertise. You do have to remember that you have to have at least a little bit of experience and a little bit of expertise to know whether these tools are actually working for you.

Ladders aren’t very helpful at all. www. larryweaver. com and might be actively dangerous if you try to stand on the very top step or if you try to use them without a proper foundation to rest them on. You’re very likely to fall and hurt yourself. As long as you have some qualifications though, using AI well offers a significant benefit.

It makes you better at what you do. So, let’s talk for a minute about some of the tools that I’m using. I use Google Gemini, both the standalone application called Gemini Advanced, and in Google Docs, mostly. I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode.

I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode. I’m going to give you a quick example of how I use it at work. The action button for those who don’t have an iPhone or don’t have a recent iPhone lets you just press a single button to open up an app.

I haven’t opened up ChatGPT’s voice mode. So I’m going to do this. I’m going to give it a prompt and let it answer the question. Full disclosure, this is a live demo, so I’m going to grade its output after it finishes and see if it’s any good. Okay, so this is real world scenario. Microsoft I’m pressing the action button, and now I’m asking my question.

I’m giving it my prompt. Imagine that you’re a skilled marketing professional with years of experience in the hospitality industry. What are some key elements of a marketing plan for a 100 room, city center, independent hotel to drive more direct revenue? Drawing on your hospitality marketing expertise, you’d want to focus on a few crucial elements to drive direct revenue for a 100 room, independent hotel in a city center.

Start by enhancing your online presence with a user friendly website. and a strong SEO strategy to capture those looking for accommodations in your area. Then, leverage social media and content marketing to showcase your unique selling points. Like local experiences or special packages. Also consider a direct booking incentive program to encourage guests to book through your website rather than third party platforms.

Finally, don’t forget to utilize data analytics to continually refine your marketing strategies based on what drives the most direct bookings. So it just gave that answer and I think that was okay. I don’t think it was the best answer I’ve ever heard. But it was solid in terms of at a high level.

There’s nothing that you can criticize about that answer. Obviously it’s lacking in detail, though obviously I could continue the conversation to get a deeper dive and more insights that it provides. It doesn’t scare me as a consultant. I didn’t listen to that and go, wow, this is going to take my job away.

If that’s all I’m offering my clients, if that’s all my company is offering our clients, we need to do a better job. But it certainly wasn’t a terrible place to start. Nothing that it said was untrue. I’d also point out that that was a live response. That was not a question I’d asked it before. It was not something that I rehearsed with ChatGPT.

That’s literally the answer it gave. So, you know, I’ll give it a solid B, right? B In terms of other tools, we also use MidJourney for image creation. I just started testing a tool called Beautiful. ai for making presentations. I haven’t yet used it for a real presentation, but I’m testing to see whether or not I could, and I’ll have more on this in a moment.

Those are the primary tools that I use, and those are the primary tools that I know my team uses. Obviously, I’m leaving out things like any of the AI capabilities within Google Ads, or Google’s AI overviews in Search, and that’s it. Or things like that. These are the primary tools we’re using on a day to day that we deliberately use AI.

How am I using AI? Well, a bunch of different things. One is brainstorming. When I’ve got something I’m testing out an idea, I might sit and have a chat with ChatGPT, or I might, you know, pop some ideas into Gemini to kind of refine my thinking a bit. Use it a lot for note taking, though there are some legal considerations to be aware of there.

Depending on the clients you’re working with, so you’ve got to be conscious of that reality. I use it for summarizing documents. Again, you’ve got to be careful there. But generally speaking, that’s a pretty common use we have around here. I use it for transcribing text a lot. The transcription of this podcast every week is pretty much mostly done with AI.

We’ll do a spot edit afterwards, but we more or less take it the way the AI provides it. I will use it for editing support. So, for example, I will often run outlines of either speeches or presentations or full writing through ChatGPT or Gemini to get their critique on my thinking, you know, where are there gaps in the thinking, where are there logical connections that could be stronger.

We use it a lot for image creation. The images on these podcasts and other places, such as LinkedIn, are often created using MidJourney. The team is using social is using AI for drafting social media posts, so a lot of the LinkedIn posts that you’ll see for the company, at least the initial draft came from AI, though it’s again frequently edited after the fact.

There’s some, we’re using it for some very high level market research. I, I kind of dig this marketing research and competitive analysis GPT plug in that my friend N. Saint Ong just turned me on to. It’s far from perfect. But it’s a solid tool to do some additional legwork when evaluating new clients and evaluating their competitors.

It saves us time and certainly cuts down on the number of Google searches we’re doing. And I mentioned Beautiful. ai, which is an AI powered presentation tool. This is not something I’m using day to day. This is something that I’m testing right now. I also think it’s a really interesting tool to think about where we might be going.

You give Beautiful. ai a prompt, and it creates an entire slide deck, in my experience, somewhere between about 10 and 15 slides, typically, that you can then edit. You can also have it create individual slides from the specific prompts you give it while you’re working through the deck. As its name suggests, many of its templates and its slides are genuinely quite beautiful.

They’re really very lovely. It also changes layouts and adds elements to individual slides more easily and with less pain in the rear than any presentation tool I have ever used. I have long complained about how challenging it can be for Non designers, like me, do add elements to slides in PowerPoint, Google Slides, and to a lesser extent, but still true, Apple’s Keynote, without royally screwing up the layout.

It’s, it’s a huge problem that I run into. You know, on a regular basis, it’s not the biggest problem in the world, it just comes up so frequently that it’s really annoying, nobody has come up with a better response before now. Beautiful AI does that part really well. So I’ve been using it for a little over a week, week and a half, couple weeks, mostly on dummy presentations, not real things, but when I’m working out, you know, the beginnings of a presentation.

And so far, I think it’s a pretty solid outlining tool. The general outline for the slide decks that it produce produces are not bad. They’re a little generic, but they’re not a bad starting point. I also would use some of its individual slides without hesitation in presentations to clients or during speak engagements.

I certainly wouldn’t use the whole deck as it creates it. But for a single slide or two, it could be a really useful tool. Full disclosure, for one test presentation, it generated a single slide that solely highlighted William Gibson’s quote, The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Long time listeners probably recognize that quote since I use it a lot. And I feel seen. Clearly I need to up my quote game soon. Smart people who use AI indeed, right? Here’s what I don’t like about the tool. It’s, it’s, it’s a solid tool, but here’s what I don’t like about it. First, as I mentioned, I thought that the outline it produced, the outlines it’s producing are very generic.

Much as what we’re seeing with AI tools, just like we saw with the ChatGPT example I gave a moment ago, it didn’t do a bad job. There just wasn’t anything special about it. There wasn’t anything that made me sit up and go, Wow, that’s something I couldn’t possibly have come up with on my own with just a little bit of work.

Even the Gibson quote that I trot out less frequently these days. is simply because it’s become a bit hackneyed. So, I would say a lot of the work it produced was solid, okay, a little generic, and leaning towards hackneyed. I’d expect similar quality work from a smart, relatively junior employee, or a particularly sharp, recent college graduate.

Not A plus work, I’d grade it as a C plus or B minus. And its outlines might make for decent starting points that you could then upgrade with a little bit of effort. I’d also use, again as I mentioned, some of its individual slides without hesitation. They were solid, they were really, really good. It provides a decent foundation that you can build off of and significantly improve upon.

One thing I do like to note is, of course, it was much faster. It produced these outputs in minutes as opposed to waiting, you know, days from our recent college graduate or relatively junior employee. That obviously opens up the risk that we’re going to hurt learning opportunities for those folks. So what I might encourage those people to do in an organization is use it, but then improve it.

How do you make it better? How do you get a better result than what it gave you out of the gate? One other last point that I want to make is I now also want PowerPoint and Google Slides, and for that matter, Word and Google Docs. To adopt its intelligent formatting tools. As I’ve noted in other episodes, in other writing, we judge the experiences we receive against the best experiences we have everywhere.

If office suites don’t add features to work more like the way beautiful AI handles adding elements to a slide, I could easily see myself switching down the road just for the improved formatting assistance. Remember, customer experience is queen. Thinks Out Loud. This experience, though, also demonstrates why I still think we haven’t had our true AI moment, and this is the big point about what we, what it means for AI in the day of the life of your customers and of me.

Improved document formatting is very nice. But it’s not a game changer. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have its killer app yet. Killer apps, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are applications that make some other general purpose tool a must have. The classic example is when software publishers introduced spreadsheets to the public back in the 70s and 80s.

Prior to that, there simply wasn’t a big need for most people to own a computer. When spreadsheets came around, though, suddenly, almost everyone could see why they’d want a computer. Spreadsheets made computers useful for the average user and drove demand for the category as a whole. Mobile phones had a similar situation with cameras and app stores and social media.

Before that, a mobile phone was just a phone you could carry with you. Certainly a nice convenience, particularly for people who traveled a lot. Not something you couldn’t live without. Give people the ability to take pictures at any time, anywhere, and through social media, a way to share those photos with friends and families.

To include the people that matter to their lives in moments, regardless of whether those moments were everyday or extraordinary. And suddenly, everyone wanted a mobile phone. We haven’t yet seen that for AI. And as a result, we haven’t yet seen everything that AI can and will do in our lives. To that end, I want to go back to the paper from Bick, Blandin, and Deming about AI adoption.

Despite its fast adoption curve, most people haven’t used AI. 39 percent of the U. S. population 18 to 64 using generative AI, and more than 24 percent of workers using it at least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and 1 in 9 using it every day. Means that 61 percent of the population has not used generative AI, at least so far as they’re aware.

That 76 percent of workers didn’t use it once during the week prior to being surveyed. And that 89 percent of people don’t use it every day. So, for as fast as its adoption has been, most people still aren’t using it all that much, again, at least so far as they know. And I think this is the reason why.

Remember the last line of the excerpt that I talked to you about at the beginning of this episode? They said, Generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home. Generative AI is still, even a couple years in, a general purpose technology.

It’s more akin to mobile or social or the internet broadly, or computers, than it is to an iPhone or Instagram or Excel. It’s not the end tool in and of itself, it’s the platform that those tools will be built on top of. Steve Jobs once called the Mac a bicycle for our minds. What he meant was that the computer made us able to think faster, to get to the places we wanted to go more quickly.

And it expanded our ability to go places that would have been too hard or taken too long to reach. Kind of like a ladder does. But the ladder and the bicycle analogy only go so far. Dope pun intended. AI is more than a ladder, it’s more than a bicycle for our minds, it might be a motorcycle for our minds, or it might be a car, a rocket, a spaceship, or some other conveyance that we haven’t even thought up yet.

Even the metaphor is framed by what came before. What I think is going to be truly interesting is when someone moves AI from a general purpose To a specific purpose technology, when they introduce the killer app that makes us all want to use artificial intelligence in our lives every day. The same way that we use social and mobile and the internet and computers.

I don’t think it’s going to be prettier slides, no matter how useful that may be, that’s going to drive that change. We still haven’t seen the driver of that change. And I think we have a little bit of time to go before we get there. As you saw in my conversation with ChatGPT using voice mode, AI agents that I can have a conversation with, that our customers can have a conversation with, and set them off to do tasks in the background, Could easily be that killer app.

I suspect it’s the most likely scenario. We just have to have, you know, time will tell, since there aren’t any true AI agents yet in the wild that work in practice. What we’re seeing now are mostly proof of concept, or mostly some demos. We haven’t seen the real world of agents yet. I can’t wait to see what those look like when we do.

What I will say is that the day in the life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant is likely to be a very different place. And I think that’s going to be true for you, and for your customers, and for society as a whole. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we have a long way to go. But I will tell you, I think when it happens, it will happen fast, just as we’ve seen with adoption overall.

And I, for one, can’t wait to see what it looks like.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 434.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

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