Can your company use AI to become a thought leader?

An AI primer for B2B marketers??

Every time I’ve started to write this paper, I’ve ended up with my brain doing endless circles trying to work out how to have this discussion. There’s just so much to get your head around when it comes to where AI is taking the world.?

If we went back in time and someone asked you to explain why the wheel is such a big deal (say a week after it was invented and you’d just seen version 1.0) or someone asked you to explain what’s up with this ‘fire’ thing someone heard about when visiting the neighbour’s cave, I think you’d find yourself in the same pickle.??

AI is just such a big thing. I’ll explain why shortly, and it might not be why you think.?

The natural response when trying to explain first-to-world BIG things to others is to skip the pitch about how it came to be and why it’s important, and to just start showing off all the LITTLE things it can do. That’s because we have to demonstrate the relevance of this new-to-world tool in the context of what people already know. For example, showing how a wheel can be used to transport heavy items more easily (in the form of a wheelbarrow) helped people understand it.??

These show-and-learn moments continued until the world at large inherently understood the power of the wheel, found a billion uses for this breakthrough technology and we evolved as a species in ways that reflected how that tool was harnessed.??

Right now, most of us marketing professionals and business leaders are at the ‘wheels are so cool’ phase of our thinking and trying to extend that thinking into how to make the most of wheels. Some of us might be a little ahead because we’ve immersed ourselves in the world of wheels (I need to get off this metaphor) but, for the most part, even the more advanced thinkers are still thinking small.?

We have to think small initially. AI is just so different to anything we’ve encountered before in terms of the speed and size of its impact. It is literally becoming more powerful, sophisticated and omnipresent every single minute of every single day.??

We’ve already been sucked into the threshing machine; some of us just don’t know it yet.?

Previous powerful technologies like the internet or mobile phones primarily amplified and improved an existing thing we did as humans. They didn’t fundamentally change our relationship with knowledge. We could just do more of what we already knew how to do, faster and better.??(I concede I've simplified the Internet - but I think my core argument stands).

But now we’re inside the AI looking glass. And it’s weirder than we all imagined.?

Why???

Well, I imagine you’re reading this because you’ve got a generative AI licence from OpenAI or similar and you’ve been putting it through its paces. When clients or peers start talking about how AI can be used, I’m hearing a lot of tactical use cases based on what others have shown them.??

That is, for example, they’ve seen someone use a GPT to write a bunch of LinkedIn posts, so know they know about that capability and can mimic it. Or, they’ve seen it write Excel macros, or program in Python at incredible speed, or be a customer service chatbot, or provide real-time analysis of video meetings, or they’ve used it to query large data sets to find insights.??

The more use cases we see, the more things we can try for ourselves and build our understanding.?

Unfortunately, investigating what AI can do is like arriving at the world’s biggest, constantly changing buffet with a very small teaspoon as your only eating implement. There are millions of use cases, from the banal to the sublime, and we’re unlikely to ever hear about most of them.?

In those examples I just listed, each use case is so different. We’re used to single-purpose software doing a limited bunch of things within some tight parameters. Word processing, using a cash machine, playing a game on our phone, running our business finances.??

AI is something other than single purpose software and, until we get our heads around how to personally interface and engage with AI, we’ll be limited in what we can get AI to do for us.??

I think that means that we have to stop trying to build the ultimate personal catalogue of AI point solutions or prompts we’ve tried and start thinking about it as a powerful companion that offers advice and experience when we want an inorganic mental uplift to solve the same problems we’ve always had to solve in business. How do we do things faster, cheaper, better? How do we create value for our customers in way that differentiates us from our competitors and is sustainable??

The fact is, AI (in all its forms), is learning to do a lot of things we thought humans would always do best. In fact, it’s doing things humans will never be able to physically do. For example, analyse thousands of documents in a flash and highlight common themes or discover new knowledge, and then add that new knowledge to its own self-training data sets.?

It can see patterns in large data sets that we simply can’t recognise because we can’t comprehend the data set.??

But AI can do so much more than what most of us have been exposed to in our own experimentation or from the AI crash courses we’ve attended.?

Even the teams building and training these models aren’t quite sure of what all those things are.??

Yes AI, as Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta says in episode #416 of the Lex Fridman podcast, AI does not have the capacity to understand the world, interface with the physical world, remember and retrieve memories, reason, or plan ahead.?But that’s probably a good thing because once that happens, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump to some existential human moments.?

And that brings us to the marketing question this paper was supposed to answer. Can you use AI to make your business a thought leader??

Yes and no.??

Let’s start with what AI can do.??

It can write, and it’s improving all the time. Some of the content will be weird, off topic, off message or factually incorrect. But, if you make sure a real-life editor is working the prompts and refining the output, you’ll get a good outcome. It’s why we maintain our team of flesh-and-blood writers and editors. They generate, then amplify using AI (when needed) and edit like you wouldn’t believe to make sure accuracy, voice and tone are all on point. But you can’t beat AI for volume.?

AI can also generate images. You can prompt whatever you can imagine and get an image library. AI can generate imagery at scale, and you get better results if you’re actually a designer and know how to prompt correctly to get predictable, commercial-grade outcomes. Again, this is why we have a team of human designers who manage our AI interactions tightly to get images of a professional, usable standard.?

AI can also slice and dice existing content into smaller pieces fit for use with social channels, or reimagine it into fresh content, and it can do a thousand other things to support the production and dissemination of thought-leadership content.?

And it’s only just getting started on that front.?

What AI can’t do.??

It can’t work out what you want, why you want it or the motivation behind the people you’re directing it at.??

AI also can’t work out the relationship between what you just asked and what you’re likely to ask next. You could ask it to predict what you want to know next based on what it just told you, but it’s not going to volunteer that, and accuracy will be variable. Because, well, who knows why humans think the things we do and the order of how we think about things. AI deals with existing data and infers only from that.??

The challenge with using AI to make your firm (or you specifically) a thought leader is that you need to tell it what to tell you. Even with AI, something can’t come from nothing.?

You know what brilliant, thought leader humans are good at? Having original thoughts which map to a human context and are rooted in human history and reflect a possible human future. They are leading thoughts, and they start in your mind with questions like ‘I wonder …’ or ‘Imagine if …’.?

Once you’ve had a brilliant epiphany, you can then use AI to help examine, illustrate and communicate your seminal thoughts. It will probably do it very well actually, if you put in the time to build high-quality prompts and flow the outputs into other downstream AI apps that can amplify your voice. Again, use flesh-and-blood editors and designers to keep the AI on track, but AI is a terrific amplifier and low-cost producer.?

However, the breakthrough thinker/AI gap right now is very real, and it’s the main reason why AI can’t just make you a thought leader or cure cancer or stop human conflict. It’s a tool that predicts a response based on what you asked it, it's not a sentient, self-directed organism. Not yet anyway.??

Keep in mind there are two parts to being a thought leader, as described in a model I created several years ago now. Those two things are authority and recognition.?

Authority comes from artefacts. Artefacts are the tangible evidence that you are an (or the) expert and respected in your domain. Recognition comes from exposure.??

AI can describe authority and recognition, but it doesn’t know what they mean. And, in the rarified world of B2B marketing, it definitely doesn’t get what you’re trying to do holistically.?

In summary, AI can’t generate the seminal, original thoughts you need to become a thought leader, but it can be an invaluable assistant in helping you build on your original thinking and amplifying that ad finitum.?

A closing thought.?

The big assumption is that there is a human at the end of the information consumption food chain. We in business and marketing can use AI to communicate in a way that is hyper-personal and limitless for all intents and purposes.?

As a result, the targeted buyers (in a commercial setting) will be unable to resist our AI-augmented marketing charms and be compelled to commence the buying process.??

Except.?

Except that AI is increasingly to be found on the buy side of the sales equation, analysing, filtering, and ignoring (or forwarding) the information that it has been instructed to look for.?

The technology analyst firms are starting to track the rise of this category now.?

I’m going to a write a separate paper on this, because I don’t think there’s enough focus on this yet in marketing and sales circles.??

I literally heard a sales trainer explaining in an instructional sales video that B2B salespeople should start getting comfortable with selling virtually. Yeah … I think that ship may have sailed. They should be worried about not having a human to talk to full stop.??

And, in this scenario, thought leadership is going to become a very delicate flower to cultivate indeed. We’re some way off this reality, but it’s absolutely coming. See how many AI agents attend the next webinar you’re on vs real people. ?

*note: No AI was used to generate this content - certified 100% human