Bicycles for the mind

Artificial intelligence is overhyped, misunderstood, and underestimated.

This is an extract from last week's IMTW.

Paid subscribers had this week's issue delivered straight to their inboxes this morning. Join them >

Issue № 107 | London, Sunday 15 September 2024

Read on to learn why:

① The value of AI is to increase human capabilities not replace them.

② The dangers of AI centre on loss of trust.

③ Post-2008 capital requirement rules are being watered down worldwide.

④ Digital assets can’t go mainstream without digital money to match.

⑤ CMOs need to be savvy businesspeople and superb marketers.

⑥ CEOs have fewer and fewer reasons to contemplate M&As.

⑦ Communication is invaluable.

What's new

“People can’t tell our chatbots are robots”, claimed a financial adviser this week, according to Citywire.

In short:

• “Speaking at Citywire’s North Retreat last week, Robert Morse, senior partner at The Private Office, said his firm’s marketing team has begun using AI-driven chatbots to speak to prospective clients. ‘Apparently, people cannot tell that they’re not human,’ he said. ‘The technology is advancing incredibly quickly’.”
• “Matthew Sinclair, a director at Durham-based Wealth of Advice, said his firm has built a system using Microsoft BackOffice to track appointments and client log-ins among other things. ‘We are certainly using those tools,’ he said.
• “Jacqui Davidson-Slack, director of Cheshire-based Premier Wealth Solutions, uses AI for transcribing client meetings, ‘saving us a tremendous amount of time and effort. In the future, [it] might replace some of the paraplanning duties we are using at the moment,’ she said. Despite AI’s benefits, Davidson-Slack is concerned about its possible dangers and said she has had clients who have asked to transfer money after seeing deepfake scam videos.”

Why it matters

To be charitable to the interviewees here, some of their views are…ill-judged. They sound like they’re prioritising appearing au fait with the latest hype over considering what’s actually best for their firms. Whether people can tell they’re interacting with a machine or not is hardly the point, pulling the wool over your clients’ eyes is never good business. Software that tracks appointments and client log-ins, although useful, hardly qualifies as an application of artificial intelligence. Davidson-Slack is the only leader here who hints that she understands both the value of AI and its dangers.

① The value of AI, like any tool, is to increase human capabilities, enabling individuals to accomplish more with less effort. Steve Jobs understood this about computers, labelling them ‘bicycles for the mind’. In a now-famous 1990 interview, Jobs related an article that he had read as a child, that compared the efficiency of different animals' movements over distance.

"The condor won, came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else, and humans came in about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human on the bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me, that we humans are tool builders, and that weakened fashioned tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities."

AI appears to be the latest and perhaps most dramatic manifestation of this phenomenon. But - hugely impressive though the technology is - we can’t get carried away with the wonder of it. Remembering it’s a tool and continuously questioning how and why to use that tool are key. Because like any powerful tool, it’s also inherently dangerous.

② The dangers of AI centre on loss of trust. When anything can be faked with ease using the computer we all carry around in our pockets, how can we know what’s real anymore? (It’s a danger so serious that the state of California is preparing to regulate it with a bill known as SB 1047.) When it comes to financial services, there is every indication that clients are comfortable taking advice from a machine - but be transparent about what they’re interacting with.

From a marketing perspective, by making it vastly easier and faster to produce content of all kinds, AI has transomed the content marketing landscape. Mediocre marketers are panicking. Savvy ones know this is an opportunity to differentiate their content in a sea of AI-sameness.

What to do about it

Take action

Make sure you ignore the hype, understand the possibilities, and apply them judiciously. Be:

1. Inquisitive - Keep up-to-date on AI, learn what it can do, think it about how it can be applied to your business. When iOS 18 hits our devices next week, even your grandmother will start to become familiar with its abilities. InMarketing’s AI page is a good place to start.
2. Exhaustive - Audit your marketing function. Leave no stone unturned. Where are the areas in which riding a bicycle makes more sense than walking?
3. Acurate - Resist the urge to introduce a new layer in your martech stack and tell your board or a journalist it’s AI. Not all useful software is.
4. Pragmatic - Introduce AI in your business if - and only if - it’s going to be valuable. Will it increase your revenues, lower your costs, or mitigate risk? Anything else is an ill-judged distraction.

Hell, you could even ask AI to provide help with your strategic planning.

Get help

InMarketing is a dynamic repository of help for senior leadership teams in finance or technology who want to drive growth. Browse others’ ideas, find tactical support, or leverage marketing advisory.

More...

To learn why:

③ Post-2008 capital requirement rules are being watered down worldwide.

④ Digital assets can’t go mainstream without digital money to match.

⑤ CMOs need to be savvy businesspeople and superb marketers.

⑥ CEOs have fewer and fewer reasons to contemplate M&As.

⑦ Communication is invaluable.

Visit InMarketing This Week for the rest of this issue >

About

Written for senior leadership teams in finance and technology, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact you - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday at six to give you a head start on the week. Read extracts?here, or subscribe to?have each full issue delivered straight to your inbox, before it's available anywhere else.