Katie King discusses the Future of AI in Marketing with Charlotte Kemp

I am Charlotte Kemp, your futures alchemist with Future Facets. This is an exploration of different scenarios of our shared created futures. Welcome, this is Charlotte Kemp, and I am joined today with Katie King. Katie is a speaker, an author, and someone who really delves into the whole question about artificial intelligence in her work, and particularly in marketing. And Katie is based in London, and she's just written a book called AI in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge. Katie, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Katie, all right, so we've got a really interesting book here. Tell us, you know, why did you write this particular book? Who is it aimed for? What are you trying to talk to people about in terms of artificial intelligence?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Charlotte. So I'm 52 and I have been in marketing for 30 years. I've been in digital marketing for 10 years. And in the last few years, every man and his wife claims to be a digital marketing expert. So in that 10 years of being avant-garde, everyone's caught up. And so putting myself out of my comfort zone about 3 years ago, got involved with AI. If I'm completely honest, it was about really future-proofing myself so that I will be current for another 10 years. But as I delve more into it, I realized how fascinating it is and how marketing is one of the key job functions, or industries if you like, it's both, that is kind of leading the way in AI. So got involved in AI and started writing this book about a year ago, which is now just published a month ago. And so in true marketing style, it's aimed at marketing professionals as a niche, but given transformation, it's as relevant to sales and HR and customer service as it is to marketing.

Alright, so you come from a marketing background, so obviously that's, that's the direction you've gone in. I spoke at a digital marketing conference 2 days ago, just as coincidence, and what was interesting in the room, we had the whole range of, you know, very, very young millennials, probably, you know, touching on the Gen Zs, all the way up to our older generations, and everyone there is nodding. They're all talking about AI. They're all talking about digital things, but it's at a very much a surface level. Like, they're not quite sure that they've got the terminology. They know how to throw the words around, but they don't quite know what to do with it. So how do you help people? Maybe how does your book really give people that direction in terms of, you know, what is AI's impact on marketing? What does it actually look like?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And so again, just to set the record straight, I am not— I don't have a PhD in cognitive science. I'm not a technologist, although I've been in marketing for tech for 30 years. My book is a management and a business and a marketing book. And so therefore I had to go out to the market and gain evidence and facts and case studies. So my book is a collection of case studies from all over the world. In all different industry sectors about actual real examples of how it's being used in marketing. And not just haha, you know, hype and paranoia, but case studies of failures and of successes. So it looks, for example, at how if you are doing market research for your marketing, how you could use a tool like Curiously. If you're doing email marketing, you could be talking to Conversica. So I feature about 15 different tech disruptors who have AI-embedded tools for marketing, all different kinds of content creation, email marketing, predictive analytics, and so on, plus the established vendors, plus the brands, policymakers, and so on. So the book is a great start. Constantly learning, you know, listening to what Gartner and MIT and great podcasts like yours and what's happening in the press day to day. That would be my advice.

Yeah, well, that was going to lead to my next question. When somebody wants to explore this, maybe they've been in marketing for a while and just like you, they're deciding that they need to really step up. They need to, you know, change their skill set to remain relevant. And then they're faced with all of these new terminologies, new platforms, new tools, and they don't know where to start. You know, how do you give them that encouragement? How do they work out where they are in kind of like maybe the span of experience that different people have? How do they get started? How do they, you know, navigate this minefield?

Absolutely. There's a couple of aspects to this individually, personally, as a marketing professional. All of us, whatever our age, if we've just come out of university, what we studied for the last 3 years— and my daughter's studying it in the UK at the moment— what we've studied in our courses could become outdated quite quickly, but equally if you're 40 or 50, your 20, 30 years of experience might not seem quite so current. So personally, as marketing professionals, we all owe it to ourselves to stay up to speed. But when we're then looking about— looking at how an organization adopts it, let's say you are heading up marketing for a company, the speed at which you adopt it And the way in which you go about adopting it obviously depends on where that company wants to be in its market. And if you think of Gartner laggards and innovators, or what the company's strategic business goals are— international growth, margins, exits, whatever it might be— the speed at which everyone goes and adopts it, you know, is dependent on the answer to those. So I think company-wide, or whether you're in an agency or in-house versus you personally needing really to be, to kind of be up to speed, are kind of two different things because not every company wants to be an innovator. And some companies are quite happy to sit back and wait for a few years until all of their competitors have, you know, have actually applied something and until you've learned from the mistakes of others. So it kind of is not quite as straightforward as saying Open up your bag, buy some AI training, jump on the bandwagon. You know, and the truth is, it is a little bit early in some instances.

Yes. And scary for a lot of people. You know, there is that desire to be up to date, to learn new skills and techniques. But then also, like you say, the concern that maybe the user adoption isn't there, maybe it hasn't been tested. What are the potential data breaches that we haven't thought about? And the minute people hear about any of the digital marketing scandals or where things go wrong, then certain people want to pull back from that and not explore it.

You're absolutely right.

How safe is AI? I know in your book you've got this one segment where you're talking about the kind of myths versus the facts of artificial intelligence. I mean, we watch the movies on TV and we get caught up in the fearmongering very often of what AI can be. So, maybe you want to just set our minds minds at ease? You know, how do we kind of wrestle with what AI means for us in the future?

Absolutely, and they're really good questions. And so I quote Max Tegmark, who is an incredible professor at MIT who wrote the book Life 3.0, and in the book I have his screens with regard to myth-busting, you know, as you just pointed out. So, you know, he talks about the hype and the scaremongering, and the truth is nobody really knows. You know, whether we end up getting true artificial general intelligence and sentient machines, to an extent, goes hand in hand with neuroscience and our ability to really crack how does the human brain work. And that could be 25 years away, that could be 50 years away, that could be never. But we have had AI now for around about 50 years. And yes, it's safe. You know, it is safe, and we're in what we're describing as an AI summer now. And we are— it's viable today because you've got incredible data that's come from 10 years of smartphones, and you've got the processing power. So it's not to be feared. I refer to it more as— as do PwC and some various high-profile analysts— as augmented intelligence rather than artificial, which scares everybody off, which is HAL and Terminator. And I sometimes wonder why the late Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk go about that scaremongering. I think they do it to force the key people to get around the table and start getting some regulation. But because it's AI and machine learning are on the peak of the inflated expectation in that Gartner hype cycle, Then you are going to get the paranoia and you are going to get the hype because we don't yet have enough of the plateau of productivity, which are the examples of real case studies of benefit. What we've got are lots of early adopters, loads of commercial tech companies, startups with lots of funding who've got these, you know, these products. So there's still a lot of due diligence needed. I'll stop there because I could just carry on. I mean, we could kind of then go into the big ethical debate of, you know, ethics and so on, which maybe we'll come on to in a moment.

Yeah, well, okay, now that actually brings me to— because I see from your LinkedIn profile that you're part of this all-party parliamentary group on artificial intelligence based obviously in London, in the UK. Maybe can you tell us about that? I mean, what is the aim of this All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence. It sounds like such a mouthful.

It's amazing, isn't it? So, I mean, the UK, like the US, like China, wants to be ahead of the game, wants to be one of the key players. Dubai and the Middle East, United Arab Emirates are similar. There's kind of a handful of countries that really— and probably Russia too— that really are wanting to kind of be high profile with regard to it. So the UK has put a lot of money into the training and is quite ahead of the curve with regard to briefing MPs and making sure that, you know, bodies within different industries, trade bodies and so on, understand how to regulate. And so I'm one of 5 or 6 different groups, different task forces, which are made up of people from industry, academia, analysts, and so on. And the job is exactly that, to advise pull in advisors, get advice, and consider how do we safely, commercially viably adopt AI in enterprise. So that's our work, and that's just begun. So that, you know, we're only a few meetings in, but the House of Lords Select Committee for a number of years has been working with people like PwC and bringing in experts to give advice, you know, because frankly politicians up until a year or two ago didn't really have a clue. You know, they pull in advisors to do that. So, and that's a really important point because I think AI could be one of those game-changing technologies under the banner of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which could and should reshape geopolitics because we all globally need to collaborate in order to ensure AI is safe for the future of humanity.

I love talking to somebody who uses the same words as me.

Over a glass of wine, don't we? Yes.

And, you know, part of this is really important, is that we do have to have these conversations. You know, occasionally we encounter somebody that has thought these things through, so they have a measure of personal assurance about what is coming. But for a lot of people, when they're dealing with the future, that they're so busy kind of running their element in their company, running their own business, whatever it is. They're trying to actually execute their function. And now we're saying that on top of that, you have to manage change, you have to anticipate the future, and hey, you have to consider AI as well. So for a lot of people, it's that the necessity is there to first of all learn a language and dispel those myths and work out what is reality, and then find a way to have a conversation so that they can start to get their minds around the opportunities, consider the threats without being overwhelmed and terrified by them, and then actually find ways to respond to those potential threats so that we can actually create some good— like you're saying— some good policy and strategy going forward. So I think this is a great, great initiative.

Absolutely, thank you. And you're right, you know, like I said, the book is a book about marketing, but it's a book about management. And in it there is a scorecard which looks at all those points you raised The culture, the mindset, the C-suite buy-in to this. But we're not expecting, you know, the people on the board to be experts in this in the same way that they're not experts in many of the tasks that their organization does. They either buy it in from an agency or from a consultant, or they hire in the right people. But AI is a bit like the place where web design was 15 years ago. AI at the moment, everyone thinks everyone needs to know about AI, but you don't understand how your app on your phone functions and gives you your banking. You don't need to know. And so in time, AI will get consumed into the software and we won't really worry about it. It will just be another feature, whether it's through Google or Amazon or some new player. We won't worry about the tech behind it. We'll just worry about what it can do for us. So actually, you know, we should be more interested in how machine learning, robotic process automation, and this family of technologies can help us achieve, you know, basically be a solution to various problems that customers have and do so profitably. And the doing so profitably really is because the AI can do things in minutes and hours that we humans take days and weeks and months to do.

So, to address the question that people normally have, that kind of knee-jerk fear, if the AI is coming, the automation, the robots are coming, my job is gone. What is left for humans after we automate and become more efficient with some of these other technologies?

Great question, and the answer is all about timing. So, I don't believe that in the next 2 to 5— 2 or 3 years that whole-scale jobs are eradicated in marketing. I think what we're looking at— just think of digital, just think of social media. You know, years ago my team wrote, you know, lots and lots of detailed articles and we were paid by clients to do that. Today we actually use automation tools and, you know, things like HubSpot and Hootsuite and scheduling tools. We've got at our disposal lots and lots of automated tools that do the things that we used to do manually, and I think the same will happen with AI. AI digital assistants and AI chatbots and AI for content creation will change the nature of many, many tasks that we as marketing professionals do. Now jump forward 5+ years. If you believe, and I do, it's a very credible source, what Oxford University and Yale University and others are saying, that within 40+ years AI could do everything a human can do, then that becomes a very real question. But our job, and, you know, our as in all of us in our businesses, in our societies, in our families, we need to have our voice heard. And we need to be saying we don't want that to happen. We want to preserve humanity. And so I think that's where regulation and caps and tax— taxing and all kinds of things come into play. I don't think that will happen. I mean, what might happen is that the 5-day week goes down to a 3-day week and, you know, we become more human and we're not on a constant treadmill of being defined by working. And so actually AI could augment us as human beings. And we're not talking of robots versus humans, we're talking about automation doing the dirty, dull, and dangerous tasks that we are then freed up to do. As per previous revolutions.

That's very true. There's so much capacity for creativity and critical thinking and other skill sets that we very often put aside to perform functions that could be better done by machines or automation of some kind. So there's a potential if we have the agility, possibly of our thinking, or the ability to reskill ourselves, To adapt to that, to find new ways of operating. I like the concept that, you know, the automation or the AI takes certain tasks away from us but doesn't necessarily take our entire job function away. It's not like, you know, automation comes and gets our salary or anything like that. But it's taking away the tasks, which leaves us with redefining what is the value we're actually bringing. And that's going to be a difficult thing for a lot of people to articulate.

Yes.

But I think once Yes, it's going to be really, really valuable.

And you're right, and it will be uncomfortable. And therefore, you know, people of my age, you've got to really put yourself out of that comfort zone. And I've been doing that all through my career, but often— again, I'm being maybe a bit contentious here— but often over a certain age, we stop always wanting to innovate and put ourselves out of our comfort zone. We get a bit, you know, staid with that, and we're not— we can't do that anymore. But the AI, if you think of what the World Economic Forum are advising in terms of, you know, skill sets, we need to think about what makes us human— our empathy, our complex problem solving, you know, our creativity, our compassion, our humanity. You know, they become the pieces that are, how do we add value? How do we become strategic? How do we, for example, BT now you know, is using AI to stop all of the white noise of the thousands of operators in the call center. The AI is being trained by the best call center operatives, and that's handling multiple calls of a routine nature so that the more complex ones where someone really does need some value-add can be dealt with in time, and you're not kept hanging on for an hour. And you're getting actually a more personalized service because the AI is able to do some of that grunt work. So in the book, I talk about that paradox of personalization, that actually with augmented intelligence, we become more human.

Yeah, I love that concept, and I've heard it explained a couple of different, uh, in different examples, you know, um, exactly as you're saying, that, that the the majority of the very simple ordinary queries can be dealt with, leaving just the complex ones. And I think it comes down to what the customer or the user is really needing. They have a problem, they want it solved. I don't care whether a bot solves my problem or a human, but I just want it addressed. And all of our frustration and anger and reaction against a company or against the situation happens when it's not resolved. So it doesn't matter whether it's a human dropping the ball or an AI who doesn't yet have that experience. We just want a solution to that particular problem. And the more that we can distill out those complicated, difficult, unusual, unique queries for a human to actually apply some insight to, I think we're all for that. Augmented intelligence sounds like a very good idea.

Yeah, very good summary. Very good summary.

Very cool. I think about this a lot because I play with Siri on my iPhone, and I'm always testing out to see what she can or cannot do. But my favorite was just the other day, I'm driving, and I wanted her to open up WhatsApp and send a WhatsApp message for me. So I said, Siri, and she says, hello, Charlotte. I said, can you send— can you open WhatsApp? She goes, not while you're driving, Charlotte. And it was the The attitude of this AI telling me when I can or cannot use my applications, I was not impressed. I thought it was my boss on the other end of the phone. Yeah, the whole, the whole, not right now, Charlotte, not while you're driving.

That's brilliant. All right, there are some tech disruptors in my book who have, you know, the AI for email assistance, you know, and so you would, as a team, you'd come into work in the morning and while you were sleeping and getting ready and commuting into work, the AI— and you give her a name, or him a name— he would be doing a lot of that work. And you'd come in in the morning and he or she will have sent you an email with all the updates, all the things that typically you'd come in the morning and spend an hour or 2 doing. It's done it for you, and it becomes a member of the team. So it's not all robots around the office.

Yes.

It's just programs, you know, through these apps, etc., that have some AI built into them, predictive analytics, etc., that can do a lot of that number crunching and data work for you. So I'm all for it. You know, I know there are issues to crack. I know we need to safeguard jobs and think about society and inequality and so on. But, you know, I'm all for at least exploring how it can help us.

Yeah, no, I agree with you. And that's why we have to have these conversations. So then, Katie, tell us what it is that you do for companies and when you keynote and you're addressing audiences. What kind of conversations are you having with those people or with those companies? How do you help them?

Yes, so these kind of conversations. So in terms of services, I'm helping people as a management consultant of actually applying this, understanding the way that they adapt, understanding the vendors and the tools. So I actually have a consultancy around that. I have the speaking, so like you, you know, speaking at conferences and running workshops and so on. and training. So I regularly in London, in the Middle East, all over the world run webinars, half-day, one-day, two-day. So, you know, my services fall into those sorts of areas, and it's exactly these kinds of debates linked to HR, linked to marketing and sales and customer service, but also operationally. You know, how is the job of a CTO going to morph with the role of a chief marketing officer who now is asking for budget for all these incredible tools that used to be the domain of the IT department. How do you restructure your organization to cope with these technologies? How do you ensure you don't waste hundreds of thousands of pounds before you've actually done a proof of concept? And so on and so on. So it's those kinds of issues and challenges that we address, and opportunities.

Very exciting work. All right, Katie, we're about to wrap up. Just before I ask you to share, you know, your website and things like that, maybe Do you have any kind of parting comments or ideas that you'd like to share?

So it's really like you, it's to say to people, you know, don't be frightened. There's a lot of vaporware out there, and there aren't— you know, when you've read this book, when you've listened to some of the work of PwC and others, and listened to great podcasts like yours, you know, you can get up to speed very quickly. Don't be frightened off by thinking, you know, we're not expecting you in marketing and business and management Nobody needs to have a PhD in data science. Those people are there for their function. We're there for a different function. So don't be frightened. Get up to speed quickly. There's a lot of free resources out there. Don't be put off. It's actually quite fun and you don't need to be super technical.

Oh, that's a relief for a lot of people. Good. All right, Katie, so tell us about your website and how can people get hold of your book?

So I have www.aiinmarketing.com. You can find my book, and you kindly mentioned it at the beginning, so Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, published by Kogan Page. Put that into Google, you'll find it on Amazon, on Kogan Page. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at Katie King Zoudikas, and you can find me on LinkedIn. Again, just Katie King Zoudikas search and you'll find me on LinkedIn, and on Twitter I am Katie E King. And I am a big networker and collaborator, and I love connecting with people all over the world. So I'm not one of these that, you know, stops people. I pretty much connect with everybody, and I'm, you know, I believe in collaboration. So everyone's got some value, and, you know, I'd love to connect with people.

Great. And you connected with me on LinkedIn, and the minute I saw your profile, I thought I really wanted to talk with you. So thank you for that. Okay, so you mentioned—

great.

We just have to finish with the zodiac, as you told me before we started recording. What, what does zoodiacus mean?

Just educate us. Yes, so zoodiacus is an— and I love the game Baldadash, and there's a program on the UK, it used to be called Baldadash and Piffle. They're old words, and I found zoodiacus in an old Phrynistry of English words. It appears in Henry James novels, and where today you use an exclamation mark, they used to use the word zoodiacus in the novel instead of an exclamation mark. So it means to exclaim or vocalize. And in my agency Zoodicas, we are about giving people a voice, which is what marketing and PR does. So yeah, there you go, learnt a new word. Great.

Katie King, thank you very much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for featuring me. Bye-bye.

Please explore more on the website futuresalchemist.com or charlottekemp.co.za.