How to explain my conversion to AI? It was clearly the intelligent choice

I was adamantly sceptical of AI and viewed it as another shiny, distracting tool for marketers. But a chance encounter at my local cafe resulted in my damascene conversion to the technology. Here’s why.

Giuseppe Porcelli, chairman and group chief executive of Lakeba and non-executive director, Mark Ritson

Marketers are magpies. The latest shiny thing is immediately and impossibly attractive to them. And if, like me, you’ve worked in the discipline for a long time it becomes impossible not to see the same story playing out repeatedly.

The latest technological toy arrives, it distracts a huge army of marketers from their actual challenges, then evaporates into the ether only for a new distraction to form and take its place.

It’s important to take account of the huge opportunity costs of this obsession with new, unproven and usually irrelevant tech. The marketing profession isn’t very consistent. We have some very good marketers in this country. But we also have a lot of bad ones who fail at the fundamentals.

It’s not just that marketers love tech distractions, it’s that they really cannot afford to lose focus on the real challenges. Like strategy. Targeting. Pricing. And all the other more mundane prerequisites that should be occupying marketers.

I call these shiny distractions the “pornography of change”. And they have been a constant fixture of marketing for a decade or more.

Once upon a time marketing was going to be changed dramatically by QR codes. Then it was 3D printing. The internet of things. Then voice operated e-commerce was going to kill everything from brands to traditional retailing. Suddenly it was all about VR headsets. Then Clubhouse. Then NFTs, especially ones with monkeys on them. Last year it was the metaverse.

And this is the year of AI – artificial intelligence. The sudden emergence of ChatGPT ushered in the customary explosion of marketing interest. Shiny, shiny. Every conference panel session celebrated it. Every marketer included it in their plans for 2024. LinkedIn lit up with the possibilities. And we were surrounded by hundreds of “AI experts” whose existence spurred the same question each time: what were these people doing before November 2022?

Whenever someone asked me about AI I delivered this same, cynical message. One Saturday at my local cafe, for example, when a younger and more optimistic colleague cornered me in the sunshine and asked for my take on AI, I went in with both barrels. He nodded sagely and left with a cappuccino and a suitably adjusted mindset.

Job done, I thought. But from the corner of the cafe a quiet, accented voice called out to me. “Hey!” the voice said. “That’s bullshit!”. I turned to find a middle aged, tanned man in reflective sunglasses sipping on a mocha. “Not AI,” he explained. “You. What you just said. That’s bullshit”.

“Excuse me?” I replied. And with a gesture to ask permission, the man left his table and joined mine. What followed was a heated, multi-beverage debate about AI.

Giuseppe, my new sparring partner, pulled apart many of my arguments. I spent 25 years of my life teaching at various universities which means I am now afflicted with “professor’s disease” a serious complaint in which middle-aged sufferers opine on everything with total certainty and an absolute inability to listen to anyone else’s perspective.

But Giuseppe was insistent. Persuasive. Knowledgeable. Experienced. The next time I saw him at the cafe I made a beeline straight to his table and we continued our discussion. Gradually, over many coffees and many hours, I started to change my mind. Yes, marketers are magpies. And yes, they have lost their collective minds over an array of relatively pointless tools in the past. But that doesn’t mean AI is just another distraction. Or that the AI revolution that we keep hearing about is just marketing hot air.

Of course, Giuseppe was not just some random mocha lover who happened to live on my street and enjoy an argument. He was Giuseppe Porcelli, the founder and CEO of Lakeba Group. It’s a company that has not only spawned a series of AI solutions, it employs them successfully at large Australian and global clients to great effect.

Every Australian has struggled with identity verification, for example. You can only get so far with digital applications before you need to physically submit all kinds of 20th century evidence of your existence using 19th century modes of delivery. We scramble for passports and drivers licences and birth certificates while accepting that it will take time to get things approved.

Through DoxAI, one of Lakeba’s businesses, a company can verify anyone’s identity legally in seconds. Using your phone’s camera and an extensive AI analysis anyone can prove they are who they are to anyone else.

Documents can be verified in seconds. Processes can be sped up. Hundreds of employees can be moved to less mundane tasks as the protracted business of documenting proof is reduced to a few efficient seconds.

And I became a convert. I came to see that AI is not bullshit. I am. And such has been my damascene conversion I recently became a non-executive director at Lakeba. Giuseppe made me an offer I could not refuse. And who better to help customers get over their cynicism for AI solutions, than someone who once held the same position?

It’s clear now that companies like Lakeba and the general emergence of AI are going to not only change business but life in general. It’s easy to get carried away and start banging on about flying cars and spaceships, but a genuine AI revolution is beginning to occur.

Systems are speeding up. Analyses are being done in seconds, not hours. Content is being created by machine that may well exceed that created by man. Synthetic data derived from AI appears to be just as accurate as laborious surveys of actual human beings. It will take time for the true impact to become clear. But the implications already appear astonishing.

So, make sure you don’t badmouth AI any time soon. It won’t just be Giuseppe shouting “bullshit” from the corner of the cafe.

Mark Ritson is a branding expert and former marketing professor.