Balancing the Algorithm: How AI Is Reshaping Marketing

Curiosity and creativity is driven by exposure, by options, by the least restrained possibilities, and Gen AI unleashes that. So if you allow it to be shorthanded to, can't Gen AI just write that for you? It's an incredible disservice to the technology and the potential of it being applied to a function as important to growth and brand and the strategy of any given company as marketing is. Hello and welcome back to Where AI Works, conversations at the intersection of AI and industry brought to you by Wharton and sponsored by Accenture. I'm your host, Karthik Khuzanagar, I'm a professor at the Wharton School, and my work focuses on AI and business transformation. This is our goal to cut through the noise and deliver actionable insights for business leaders, by combining cutting edge research with real-world case studies. Things are changing fast, so without further ado, let's dive in. I'm getting the same question a lot, now it is. Should we be scared of AI? When we're talking about trust, it means so many things and it's a whole world that everybody will have a different interpretation of it. One of the challenges that we have is that the space is moving incredibly quickly. On this episode, I'm excited to explore how global brands are harnessing AI and also what it takes to take large teams along on that journey. Multiple studies have shown that AI dramatically improves human productivity. These studies range from settings like software to sales, consulting, customer support, professional writing and many more. Now while we have that evidence at the individual level, hard evidence on return to AI investments at the organizational level, haven't yet emerged. And I think that's because there's a difference between a few individuals adopting and seeing their returns on that versus large complex organizations. Because you've got to manage cultural change, re-skilling, upskilling, strategic prioritization, lots of issues here. To help us think through the challenges and the opportunities around AI, it's my great pleasure to welcome Jill Kramer. Jill is the chief marketing and communications officer at Accenture. Jill, welcome to the podcast. Hello, Kartik. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for our conversation. Likewise, super excited to have you here. I guess even before I get to the topic of returns from AI and how are you managing AI-driven change at Accenture, I'm really curious about what's been your relationship with technology. So my personal technology journey is one of avoidance and fear that turned to a deep unwavering love. I would love to tell you that I was fearless, that I was first in line with my hand up saying let's do this, specifically with the most recent wave with Jedi and speed at which it's moving. I did start this thinking, wow, like is this an existential crisis? And I made the decision and I was very transparent about it with the full marketing and communications team at Accenture that I desperately wanted to be in the driver's seat. And the only way you can do that is by getting really close, getting very hands on, deeply understanding, and taking some risks on behalf of yourself, your company, your brand, your team. So that's where I went over to the love side. And it is something that I truly believe now is invigorating, exciting, drives more creativity than I ever could have imagined. Yeah, that's great to hear. And in fact, later in the conversation, I'd love to explore how you have undertaken that journey. But before I get into that, perhaps where I want to start off is maybe at the organizational level before we get into like the marketing team and then you individually. Accenture has been talking about being early and aggressive with transforming its business around AI. So help us understand what progress is Accenture made in that AI transformation journey. And where is it currently positioned relative to others in the market? The journey for us is really, the journey we've taken with previous technologies, really, which is understanding each wave of technology and the impact it can have on work and workers. And in this particular wave, one thing that was evident very early in the process with Gen AI was that if you apply it to existing work, existing processes, you would see incremental improvement. But if you said, I want to look at the work in a zero-based way now that I know that this technology exists, how would I do it given these new circumstances? And that is something we have done across the board with every function that helps run this corporation. We have looked at rethink the work now that you know that Gen AI exists because one of the things you learn when you embrace technology like this is those areas of overlaps and adjacency. There's magic in reimagining those handoffs, those shared services, those processes from legal to HR to operations to marketing to sales. So it's something that has to be done intentionally. It's something that has to be done with a clean sheet of paper, you have to rethink in re-invent. And it's something that has to be done very collaboratively across all of the functions that run the enterprise. Let's go from Accenture as an organization to your marketing organization. There are many things under your purview which AI could touch upon and does indeed impact an influence today, whether it's advertising, content, digital marketing, social media, corporate communications, AI's applications in all of those areas. I'm curious for you what have been the first few areas that you have brought AI into. And why have you picked these specific applications or use cases for AI? So I'm actually going to tell you a quick recap of the chapter that preceded our application of Gen AI. And that is when you run a marketing function at a large multinational company, you have projects being asked from every part of the organization, lines of business, geographies, you name it, you have requests. A lot of marketing organizations execute those requests, yes, in service of a business strategy, a brand strategy, a marketing strategy. But you don't necessarily know every project that's going on at any one moment. And you can't necessarily reconcile, prioritize. So I wanted to be able to say at any point in time, how many events have we done this year? Which are the most successful? How many pieces of content have we put in the market? How many new pieces of content have I put on our website? What's performing the most? So the first thing we did, unknowing about the Gen AI movement that was about to happen, we really got our act together in terms of knowing the work that happens in marketing, using free Gen AI AI. So regular AI to create algorithms and prioritize and sort work in a very simple but strategic and intentional fashion. We also brought all of our data together. Because if I wanted to look at the work across the function, I had to look at the KPIs. That meant that when Gen AI started ramping up, we were able to be pretty confident about which we were going to adopt first. So that brings me back to where you began with your question. Some of the first things we did was we had really done a very rigorous reinvention of our internal communications. We had created a very highly personalized approach to communicating with the then 700,000 or so people of Accenture. So one of the first things we did was we applied AI to our writing. So that as we were highly personalizing, we could use Gen AI to quickly version. Similarly, we did it with content. Not the entire content supply chain, but the content versioning. We did that very quickly. So here's the long form report using Gen AI to assist in the medium size and the short size, the quick synops that would appear on the website, the quick synops that might appear on our app. What really changed was when we decided that we were going to go all the way to agentech AI. When you do that, you have to go all the way back to your process reinvention and say that if I looked at the steps in the marketing process and I knew I had an agent or agents who could do work simultaneously with me, going to parallel work streams instead of everything having to be so linear and sequential, how might I design the work? We ramped that up this past September and we now have a thousand marketers all onboarded using agents in their daily work. For our listeners who are not as familiar with the Gen AI and where it's headed, I think the way to think about it is that a lot of AI systems today can get individual tasks done. Agent-based systems are systems that can function autonomously. They can communicate with each other. They can interact with the outside world, get information from there. They can transact and so once you start to build agentech systems, you're not talking about automation of individual tasks. You're talking about automation of full workflows where an agent-based system can go fetch information from a some other place, maybe interact with a vendor or a partner, negotiate with them, complete full task. That's an interesting direction that AI is headed and it's great to hear that you're talking about some of these implementation of agentech systems. We'll come back to that in a moment. But coming back to what you are saying with this journey from starting with AI for writing and then for image-based content to other workflow products and now to agentech systems, are you seeing any results in terms of costs or business agility or what are you seeing in terms of what it's doing for the business or for your org? What we're tracking very specifically is speed-to-market and we're tracking reduction of steps taken in a given process across the function but also within sub-functions, then there's two waves of KPIs that I'm tracking. One is the prioritization of the work, which is Genai assisted because the way we're processing our reports and our measurement, it allows us to make better decisions, which has led to like 50% content reduction. Using Genai, it allows me to now do what we call good morning Accenture, which is a highly personalized multi-channel way of greeting each person within Accenture and letting them know what they need to know and what they need to do for that day in order to be productive, focused, etc. On the flip side, when you look at the longer flow processes, we're seeing about a 35% reduction in steps taken within the application of the agentic workflows and as much as 30 to 50% increase in speed-to-market. Wow, those are very impressive numbers. I'm sure an organization of Accenture scale, many of these systems are often built in-house but at the same time, there's probably tons of AI products that you're consuming. One of the questions I have for you, which is something I keep hearing from a lot of CMOs and in fact across different functions but certainly from CMOs as well, is that there's so many different vendors out there and so when you're bombarded with so many tools to potentially use or pilot, how do you approach the decision of which tools to prioritize? How do you pilot them and there's possibly IT approvals and AI committees that need to approve things that slows things down? So how do you stay nimble within your marketing org where you can experiment, try new tools but at the same time be compliant within the organization's broader mandates and restrictions about what AI is allowed, what's not allowed and things like that? You bring up so many important things and points but you bring me back to my driver's seat decision. There are so many solutions. They're exciting. People want to get their hands on them. And so I've got to be in the driver's seat for myself and for my team on this because people were adopting solutions, bringing them forward. We can use this over here. This is now embedded in this solution we already use and it felt like a beautiful kind of chaos but I realized that it was going to vary. We'd just gone through all the the work to get our tech stack cleaned up, our data cleaned up, our processes cleaned up. So it was like how do we bring our people with us, use everything that they're understanding. I recently had another CMO saying to me, the people in your marketing organization and or your customers are going to start using these tools, whether you sanction them and intentionally do them or not. And that's a very, very true statement. And we made pretty bold decisions like giving access to writer.ai to every marketer. We could have done a much smaller group. We could have trialed but we said, you know what? We didn't want people to feel left behind. And then in other cases, we said, this is going to be the landscape. So we created a leader on my team who was going to oversee all the Genai ideas, let all those beautiful ideas bloom, bring them back to our team and our IT advisors because no CMO should be doing this without, right? Your IT advisor. They're your best friend. Yep. The other thing about these AI systems is that they are designed to be more modular. You know, like whether it's the ability to switch between LLM models, whether it's the ability to click in new modules of agent types or support with out of the box solutions, there's an agility and a flexibility. If you design your approach to AI and Genai in the right way, my advice is set up a system where your people are bringing you their best ideas, but you do have a formal way to assess pilot and scale. You must change the work. Yeah. Because if you don't change the work, the scale and the actual benefit from going to scale won't be there. And then the last one is that you need to have your IT department with you. Just like we wouldn't want anybody coming up with their own brand tagline. So you have to merge the craft and what is exciting about the technology for the craft of marketing communications with the expertise of technology experts who can say, here's how you build this and don't worry because it's modular. It's agile and you're going to want that flexibility to evolve as you go forward. I want to move the conversation from the technology to the people because a lot of this is really a story of people, how comfortable they are with, how empowered they feel with these technologies and so on. I'm curious how big is your marketing arc? Jill, how many people are we talking about? We're at about 17, 1800 people. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's a lot of people you're sort of bringing into the AI journey. I feel like when it comes to an arc with as many people, you're going to have some people who are maybe early adopters who are jumping in, trying things out. And then they're going to be people who feel threatened by this with my previous AI startup. You know, I had these conversations with the C suite about the products. And I remember one conversation in particular where one of the C suite leader was talking about how this tool that we had could potentially be threatening for people in their arc. And specifically, he kind of said that, you know, I don't see our employees using this at all. And the reality was we had several dozen of the employees already using the free version of the tool. And then we had to walk them through, hey, listen, you know, your employees are actually further ahead than you think they are. So tell me a little bit about both sides of this coin, one being there are many instances where the employees are ahead of where the leadership thinks they are. And then there are also instances or individuals who are feeling very threatened and feeling left behind because the pace of change is so fast. How has it played out in your arc both in terms of people feeling threatened but also empowering people who are moving faster? Very similar. I mean, a lot of people were proactively coming to us saying, yeah, I've been using this tool on the side and look at how much faster it helps me do this brief and look at how much more information I was able to collect or look at how quickly I I did these and you want to embrace those things, but also make sure you within your responsibly a guideline. Because everything legally sanctioned on the flip side, I always talk about marketing is a very generous function, right? You give your ideas, your words, your perspective on imagery to internal and external clients, right? To form marketing materials. But a lot of people think they are marketers, right? Oh, I would have written the headline this way or I should have done this this way. So when you end up with the technology, you now says, oh, it can write the headline. It can do the image. It was a really natural reaction to protect the craft, to protect the function and not allow it to be unintentionally devalued by saying anybody or anything could do this craft that we all love so dearly. So my take on this is and I was I was very clear with my journey with the team was that a good marketer is a curious marketer. If you watch someone write a brief, they will spend as much time as you will give them researching competitors, looking back at everything we have done and not done. What was the best thing we ever did? What was the biggest failure? Same thing with creatives. They want to write rewrite. I mean, how many times have you had to say to a creative team, okay, it's time to put the pen down. We got to go produce this. They want to find every image they can. When you think about Gen AI through that lens, these agents where using help you go out and get every bit of analysis, competitive intel, activation schema that you could possibly think of. If you're using it as a creative, the ability to seek images, to change parameters, to look at the same thing 10 different ways is now at your fingertips. So I think that's the biggest thing is curiosity and creativity is driven by exposure, by options, by the least restrained possibilities. And Gen AI unleashes that on behalf of the human, on behalf of the craft. It's an incredible disservice to the technology and the potential of it being applied to a function as important to growth and brand and, you know, the strategy of any given company as marketing is. Yeah, I'm going to remember that statement you said, which is curiosity and creativity are fueled by having options, having this information and so on and AI enabling that. So that's great. Walk us through the upskilling and re-skilling process, you know, 1800 people who you're now trying to train on new systems, new tools like writer.air, new ways to approach work, where you're giving up part of what is core to your craft to an AI system and focusing on other pieces where you can add unique and differentiated value as a human creative. What does that re-skilling process mean like? So there's a couple of things that are absolutely core to it. The first one is the concept of creating cohorts. When you are bringing a large team along on a very new journey, don't try to do it all at once. Don't try to spread yourself, your ability to be attentive, to deeply train and to listen to people by trying to do it all in one fell swoop. So we've created cohorts for every wave of transformation. Each cohort takes the next one with them. They create a bigger community of people who can listen, who can help, who can energize and who can address problems. The second thing is communication. Very often as a leader, you're already sold. Yep. And you know all of the reasons in your head. It's very easy to quickly think, well, I've already told them this. They know this. They know the why. You have to say it over and over and over again. And you have to gather regularly to listen, to communicate progress, communicate advancements, be incredibly transparent, and take every question that comes your way. And the only way that that changes the culture is by repetition. And by people realizing they truly can ask any question that they want to or need to. And then the last one are use cases. When the first two things go well, the use cases that are created by your people will be better than the ones you ever imagined. Mark my words. That's where the curiosity and the creativity is on steroids. So you need to find a way to bring those use cases back because that's the very essence of change management. Right. Makes sense. So Jill, we've talked about the employee side of things. No, employees are part of the journey, but so are customers. And one of the interesting things is customer behavior is changing. So for example, many of us are no longer just going to search engines and searching and finding our answers. We're going to LLMs and finding answers, including what should I buy or what are the best brands for, you know, whatever the the uses. So how do you think about that? And in particular, how does the marketing are prepared for and keep up in a world where customers are embracing AI and making decisions informed by AI? This is a case where I think it is similar to previous waves of technology. When customers were going to digital, if you decided not to understand that, you would get left behind. When search became a big component, if you were not intelligently constructing your content in your digital experiences for search results, you would get left behind. It's very similar. So, you know, one of the beautiful things about Gen AI is, for example, when you are creating something or writing something, you ask it for a summary. And it makes you realize, oh, the points I thought I was making, I actually obscured. And some points were taken away as top level and I meant them to be second or third level. If you're like us be to be professional services and you're creating long form content, what's the first thing a person's going to do? Now that they have these tools that they're disposal, they're going to create summaries, they're going to merge documents, they're going to go across and look for the best. So how do you create the experience that's going to do that for them and with them? It's just like anything else, you recognize a new condition and you create for it. Jill, my last question for you is where we started this conversation. You talked about how you started from a place of fear and over time, it's been one where you feel like you're in the driver's seat in control and loving it. Tell us how that change happened and in particular, what advice do you have for other marketing leaders that are facing this change and are perhaps a little behind in that journey and facing some of those fears themselves? It has to do with human nature and how you overcome fear and misperceptions in anything and that is through proximity, through exposure, through empathy, and through a desire to learn. I will give this single piece of advice, Kartik, and that is be hands-on with this technology. It is not the same as previous waves where someone else created a digital environment and we just had to put the content into it. You need to know this intimately and deeply and that comes from being very close and very hands-on. That's great advice. I mean, that's what I discuss with my students as well that you have to get into the black box, you have to use it, you have to touch it, feel it, and you can't really poke at it from a distance. It's a lot less scary and a lot more exciting when you do that. Jill, we've covered a lot of good ground here today. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for sharing your insights here on where AI works. Thank you. I've enjoyed every minute of it. One interesting takeaway for me is about how we need to approach AI not with a lens of fear but with a lens of curiosity. And her point about how curiosity and creativity are both fuelled when we approach AI with that lens. The other interesting takeaway for me is Jill's framework of cohorts, communication, and use cases. When you're trying to pull off change in large organizations, doing so in stages with cohorts makes it more achievable, realistic. At the same time, creating use cases, communicating that, celebrating them helps bring people forward. And I think that's a very practical, easy to implement framework for our leaders today. That's all for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please follow us so you don't miss an episode and be sure to tune in next time when I sit down with David Droga, the founder of Add Agency Droga 5 and CEO of Accenture Song, which is Accenture's Creative Agency. We'll be discussing AI's transformative impact on the creative industry. This has been Where AI Works brought to you by Wharton and sponsored by Accenture. I'm Karthik Osanagar. Bye for now.