Generative AI shouldn’t reduce your startup’s marketing headcount

I spend most of my days speaking to and dealing with chief advertising officers of startups and younger firms, and several other report rising rigidity within the C-suite over the potential of generative AI.

Many CEOs suppose advertising headcount will be reduce as automated instruments permit leaner groups to perform extra. Remarkably, these top-job leaders are considering even broader cuts, with a latest survey indicating that 49% of CEOs imagine most or all of their very own jobs needs to be automated or changed by AI.

However the majority of CMOs I work with see it in a different way: 81% of the entrepreneurs Norwest surveyed in April 2023 indicated they don’t have any plans to cut back staff dimension as a consequence of gen AI, with 22% of these saying they plan so as to add headcount based mostly on the assumption that gen AI will make advertising groups extra productive.

Gen AI shouldn’t be a fast repair, a minimum of not but. It’s too early to know what works, what doesn’t, and the way gen AI purposes will evolve. None of us will be positive what the potential influence will likely be on key issues similar to worker morale and retention, copyright, bias amplification, and information privateness.

My recommendation to CEOs: Earlier than making any staffing choices, companion together with your CMO to conduct targeted and measurable trials of generative AI instruments. Then apply the teachings discovered to form each your org design and advertising methods.

Listed here are 4 concrete steps to optimize your funding in gen AI and drive constructive enterprise outcomes.

1. Ask your CMO to supply periodic briefings on generative AI use circumstances

The start line for any dialogue is an evaluation of how gen AI is already being utilized by the advertising staff. You is perhaps stunned how extensively it has been adopted: content material manufacturing, company and product messaging, org design, picture technology, presentation slides, assembly summaries, and extra. Over time, you’ll be able to establish traits and productiveness positive factors to find out which duties the advertising staff ought to retain and which will be allotted to gen AI to release workers for extra strategic work.

Execution of this process will be so simple as making a spreadsheet. I’ve developed a system for monitoring gen AI use circumstances at our portfolio firms that advertising leaders contribute to as a shared “database.”  It gathers date-marked inputs on the instruments getting used, finest and worst use circumstances, question hacks, and different issues. I exploit it to share classes discovered amongst colleagues and CMOs at portfolio firms. And it may well simply be used inside a single group.

My advice is to ascertain a month-to-month or quarterly schedule for updates. The know-how is evolving too rapidly for a one-and-done dialog. The CMO’s experiences ought to reply questions similar to: